Monday, June 23, 2008

Of Goodness and Guilt

A couple of months ago we received an amazing surprise in the mail: a letter from Kodjo, the son of Afoua, my best Togolese friend while I was in the Peace Corps. Gabi and I were both misty-eyed as we read Kodjo's letter, and we were full of pride when he told us that he was attending university in Lome while his younger sister, Adjo, was in high school. The Togolese education system is enormously expensive as well as mercilessly meritocratic ~ exams cull all but the brightest students from entering high school. So for both Adjo and Kodjo to be doing so well says a great deal of good about their intelligence, perseverence and good fortune.

I found a letter that I wrote home on May 26, 1991:

Still it is raining – nearly a “white out” of fog and sheets of water. The acacia trees are thrashing back and forth; the palm about a hundred yards away is all but invisible. A couple of women from the marché are hiding out with Afoua under the eaves, and a goat somewhere is bleating plaintively. It is raining too much for any work to be done. But this also means it’s raining too much for anyone to fight a civil war or revolution. It’s been very quiet politically these last couple of days. It’s raining too much for anything but showers.

Kodjo and Adjo are dancing naked under the sheets of water falling off the roof. They kick and jump and sing at the top of their voices to drown out the roar of the storm. Kodjo shadow-boxes like the Ninja warriors someone saw in an American “B” movie and then told him about. He plants his feet and strikes out his hands while the water all but envelops him. Adjo stomps in the water, head down, blowing water out of her mouth – PWOO! PWOO! – and reaches up to rub her fuzzy head while the water pelts it. Then suddenly the rain stops and the two dash off, streaking through mud puddles and grass to go gather fallen mangoes that the storm knocked off the tree.

I admit that Kodjo's letter sat beside the computer for a few weeks before we wrote back. It's not that I wasn't thinking about my reply, it's not that I didn't want to write him. No. It was the French.

During the three years that I lived in Togo, I learned to speak French with a decent amount of fluency. Actually, perhaps I should have put that in quotes, as in "speak French." As in, the language I cobbled together would have sounded horrifyingly plebeian to anyone born in France. In the former French colony of Togo, I had teachers who tried hard to teach me proper French grammar, pronunciation and speech patterns. But I lived in a small village and worked with people who had little formal education. With them, I either spoke “pidgin” French or I wasn’t understood.

Formal, written French has always been beyond my grasp. I tried to read a few French novels while in country and gave up. It was just too different and difficult, and it made it more difficult to speak with the Togolese around me. I was able to read Kodjo's letter well enough ~ I understood a large enough majority of the words to guess my way through those that I didn't recognize, and so arrive at the general gist of the letter.

However, my written French, even when I was speaking French every day, was awful. Now, for me to write in French is all but impossible.

By the way, Yahoo's Babel Fish is a great tool. Yes, we used it. But like most translating tools, web-based or otherwise, it's also fundamentally ignorant of language. Synonyms, homonyms, colloquialisms, all these tend to get mixed up so that your translated text has the occasional bits of word-salad nonsense. It is particularly entertaining when the proper nouns can be translated as well. Par example: my name translates to "held up" in French. I never knew that until I started writing to Kodjo and translated the letter first from English to French and then back to English. It's odd to me that I lived for three years in a French-speaking country and only learned about the unsavory character of my name last week.

In spite of the difficulty, we wrote back to Kodjo. We translated, checked and rechecked the language and the spelling until we felt pretty sure that we would not completely embarrass ourselves or confuse him with baffling syntax. Then we e-mailed our letter. That's right. Kodjo has an e-mail address. He's not just attending the university, he's computer literate.

From our friend and fellow RPCV Jennie, we know that there are now Internet Cafes in Lome as well as in other major cities in Togo. This is so inconceivable for me, in part because she has also told us that the standard of living in Togo has fallen dramatically since we were there. Roads that had a few pot-holes while we served in Togo are all but impassable now. Even the national highway is down to a single lane in places. The value of the currency (CFA) has fallen dramatically, while AIDS and other maladies have grown more widespread (guinea worm being one of the few exceptions to this). Poverty is acute and government corruption is endemic.

But technological progress has made its inroads, and now there are cell phones and Internet cafes in Togo as in other developing nations. It boggles my mind. I've written about this before, I know, but technological advances can look so schizophrenic when juxtaposed with such profound poverty and a miserable standard of living.

So, back to my original thread: we e-mailed Kodjo, telling him how happy we were to hear from him, how proud we were of him and his sister for still being in school, etc. He wrote us back, enthused about hearing from us. That was good, but his letter was also oozing with the guilt-inducing tendencies of Togolese conversations.

I don't want to get stereotypical here, but different cultures do have certain unique tendencies in the way people express themselves. I think often in the US we tend toward sarcasm and cynicism and shy from heartfelt emotion. Gabi tells me that when wishing a Swiss person happy birthday, a simple card with "have a great day" will not do. One must add in some flowery verbage as well.

And in Togo, I think one of the ways to let someone know "I care about and miss you" is to say how dreadful your life has been without him/her and how you've been bereft over the long silence/absence and no one else cares for or helps him/her the way you did and...

This style of language might not be so troubling except that I do feel guilty about the people and work I left behind in Togo. When I left to come back to the US I made promises that I could not keep, everything from "Yes, I will write you" to "You'll be okay, I know it." I did not keep writing. I lost the language so quickly when I came back to the US, especially since I had very rarely written French when I was living there. I got distracted by grad school, difficulties with my family, and making a life with Gabi in Minnesota. I felt angry and helpless because every letter from Togo came with a guilt-inducing message followed by a plea for money, please send some CFA, no one will help us since you left, we despair every day without you.

The simple truth is that things did get worse for Kodjo and his family after I left. Afoua lost her home after she lost the income I gave her for helping me. She had to leave Agou village and move in with her sister in Lome. She now works for her sister as a domestic servant instead of working for herself. Her health declined, and when Jennie saw her a couple of years ago (in Togo again to do fieldwork for her dissertation), Afoua had an endless litany of woes and maladies.

After I returned to the US, I laid awake nights worrying about Afoua. More specifically, I worried that somehow, in spite of my very real efforts to help, I had done her wrong. I employed her for the three years I lived in Togo, and she provided immeasurable help to me. Not just things like carrying water and washing clothes, but also helping me to navigate the social and cultural norms and customs, to remember names and learn family connections. I truly would not have made it in Peace Corps without her. But I worried that even as she helped me, and I did pay her well, there wouldn't be anything in place for her and her family after I left. She made palm oil, a horrifically demanding job, and during the three years she worked for me she used her money very wisely, I thought, and gradually bought larger and larger pots so that she could make more oil to sell. She was thinking about "after Blandina" (as she called me), and that was good. But she couldn't make enough with the oil to make up for the salary she lost when I left. I suspected this would happen, and I worried about it so much, wondering if I had helped her better her life at all or only helped raise her standard of living temporarily so she'd have farther to fall.

However, she was able to keep Kodjo and Adjo in school, so things were not as bad as they could have been. We are so proud of all of them for this. For these two young people to make it this far in the Togolese education system is just huge. And I do intend to write back to Kodjo, and we'll send some money from time to time. It seems like the least I can do.

Friday, June 20, 2008

The Fruit Season


We’re coming into the time of year that I love: fruit season.

I just came home from grocery shopping, and it was almost an overwhelming experience. The smell of ripe peaches stretched across aisles, pulling me right past the cookies without even a pause for temptation. A beautiful display of melons greeted me as well, half a dozen varieties laid out in neat rows like organic, geometric art.

I came home with a Crenshaw and sliced it up immediately. It’s so sweet and juicy. Lovely beyond reason.

I also brought home gorgeous organic strawberries and avocados. I wanted to bring home peaches and plumicots and nectarines as well, but there’s the small problem of eating all this bounty. I’ll go back for more in a couple days, when I’ve finished the melon and berries.

In the meantime, this feast of fruit made me think of when I was a kid in California. We had apricot and mulberry trees, and I spent many a summer morning and afternoon high in the branches, gobbling up sun warmed, perfectly ripened fruit.

To give the full picture, I must digress. We lived on the desert, so trees were precious. To grow the trees strong and healthy, my parents came up with a solution that sounds “green” now but was merely cost effective and sensible thirty years ago. They redirected water from the washing machine and used it to water the trees. We had a huge, black pvc-type hose that we moved from tree to tree, filling the wide, deep reservoir around every elm, cottonwood and mulberry.

Along with the trees, the wash-water made the grass grow as well, and we had a lovely little glade behind the house that was like an oasis in the desert: speckled with shade from the trees, lush with grass from all that carefully directed water.

And, we had horses. Specifically, I had a pony, at one time two. Peanuts and Goldie are the ones I remember the best.

When the mulberries ripened I would take my pony to the tree, drop the lead so that she could graze on deep grass, and stand on her back so that I could reach the higher branches where the larger, plumper berries waited. By then I’d stripped the bottom branches, and the birds had plundered the outer reaches, so the best berries were those that were sheltered between. Sometimes my best friend Leslie joined me, with her pony, and we feasted until our faces and hands turned purple.

When we moved to Northern Nevada, when I was 15, one of the first things my mom did was plant more mulberry trees. When we spoke last weekend she told me that she expects a bumper crop this year and is looking forward to lots of cobblers and jam.

Now, far away from California and Nevada, Gabi and I have a white mulberry tree in our yard and there’s a sweeter, more familiar purple variety on the empty lot next door. In years past we’ve never gotten much from the purple tree because our nephews and niece, who lived just behind the empty lot, would strip all the berries as soon as they hinted at pink. Perhaps because there were four of them competing for the berries on one small tree, they never waited until the berries were really ripe before picking them. And I, spoiled from growing up on plump, sweet berries so ripe they fell with the light touch of a single finger, never could bring myself to eat many of that tart, pink fruit.

But last year there was a separation and dislocation, and now our kids don’t live next door anymore. This morning I went to check on the tree to see what kind of gifts it would be giving us this year.

And I found that the tree has died. There’s not so much as a single leaf on those grey branches. And definitely no fruit.

Photo credits: I found both these images on Flickr. The lovely shot of a rainbow over Bell Mountain is by Y. Sky atwww.flickr.com/photos/ysky/389806234. And the equally lovely pic of mulberries is at www.flickr.com/photos/25454549@N03/2586274355

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

TheLibrarianIsHere TheLibrarianIsHere


A couple of summers ago, as I drove into Royalton on my way to work, I had the window down and was enjoying the lovely day. I saw two boys riding their bikes along the road, and as I drove past them I heard one of them yell to the other, "The librarian is here the librarian is here!" It came out in one long multisyllabic breath as the boy stood up on the bike, peddling as fast as he could while wearing a huge smile on his face. Half an hour later, when I opened the library for business, the boys were there, eager to sign up for the Summer Reading Program. I can't remember whether they brought their library cards with them. Probably not.

After all this time, it still makes me smile.

Yesterday was the Summer Reading Program kick-off. Our theme this year is "Look What's Cookin' at Your Library," so we're having lots of fun with food oriented programming. Gabi came up (after teaching summer school all morning) to lead a demonstration on using a pizza box to make a solar oven that would melt English-muffin pizzas. My aide staffed the craft table where kids made suncatchers out of paper plates and clear contact paper. And my branch assistant thrilled the kids with her facepainting and story telling skills. I cooked pizza (in a most-definitely-not solar oven) and did the paperwork of signing up 50+ kids. Not a bad turnout for a town of under a thousand.

So, yes, summer is officially here. The reading has begun!

For a great look at (someone else's) pictures of the pizza-box solar oven, click here.

For any parents/teachers/library staff out there, both the pizza-box solar oven and the paper-plate suncatcher are great kids' crafts. The idea for the suncatcher came from our SRP resource guide. Basically, take a dessert-sized paper plate and cut a 3 1/2 to 4 inch circle from the center of the plate. Cut two circles from clear contact paper, making them the same size, about a half-inch larger than the circle in the plate. Put one contact paper circle over the bottom of the plate, so that the sticky side is facing up. Decorate the sticky circle; we gave the kids glitter, confetti, pieces of brightly colored tissue paper and colored feathers. When they've finished decorating, place the second piece of contact paper over the "bowl" of the plate, sealing in all the decorations between the two pieces of contact paper. Punch a hole in the top of the plate, add a ribbon, and you have a suncatcher.



I found the picture above here. It gives you the basic idea, but I have to say that our kids' suncatchers were way more creative and pretty than this one! I wish I had thought to take my camera.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

The economics of beauty


We've finished dividing the front bed and potted up lots of Stella d'Oro daylilies to sell, as well as some of the gorgeous red Asiatic lilies. We also potted up three gallon pots with shoots from the Anabelle hydrangea that was encroaching too far toward one of the rose bushes. A few plants are to be given to friends, and the others we'll try to sell. By trying to sell, I mean simply that we put out a sign that says "Plants for Sale" whenever we're putzing in the yard... it's fairly haphazard and only intermittently effective.

That said, we have managed to sell a few Stellas and Asiatics, so since we had "free money" we went to Fairview Nursery to buy two fancy perennials that I've wanted for quite a while, Brunnera "Looking Glass" and a Siberian iris called "Butter and Sugar".

This is a weird quirk of mine: I'll happily lay out around $30 for each truck load of compost from Mississippi Topsoils, and every year we fork over funds for the tomatoes and peppers, as well as pretty annuals for pots. While I'll happily buy several of these little plants at $2.50 to $3.00 each, the thought of buying one gallon-sized hybrid perennial for $17 makes me shudder, sigh resignedly, and turn away empty-handed.


I've never seen the salvia so big and healthy before...
they are loving all the rain and the cooler days we're having this June.

Instead, over the years I have I purchased biennial campanula, false dragonhead, and other nuisance perennials in pint-containers at end-of-season sales for $2.50 each. Now I rip them from the beds and throw them away as weeds, unwilling to even pot them up to try to sell them for a buck or 50 cents, grumbling as I go that these fairly pretty but generally horrible plants should come with warning labels.

Ten (!!?!) years ago when we began planting the garden beds, we had lots of vision, a seemingly endless supply of lawn waiting to be converted into garden beds, and very little money. Accordingly, we started many of our perennials from seed. Coreopsis, salvia, rudbeckia, blue flax, gallardia... all of these came from seed, and so for the first few years our garden beds looked like neatly tilled soil with pin-pricks of tiny plants.

Around the same time, a neighbor hired a professional landscaper and had beautifully symmetrical beds laid out with lovely, flowering plants from gallon-pots. The beds looked mature from the moment the mulch was put down. We were so envious! However, we knew that we had invested in the soil, and so our tender little seedlings would grow well. They did. It only took a couple of years for the beds to fill in and the flowers to come in profusion. Our beds looked established as well.

And then the deadheading began in earnest both to keep the beds looking neat and pretty and to control the rampant explosion of "volunteers."


I can't remember consciously planting chives in the garden,
yet we have oodles. I deadhead scrupulously to keep
the numbers within reason ~ chives are so hard to weed out.
That said, they're pretty this time of year. That's
blue flax right above the date ~ almost ready to bloom.

We also started our garden with many, many pass-along plants. My mom sent us dozens of fancy bearded iris, of which unfortunately a good portion just weren't cut out for our specific growing conditions. We don't have enough room to devote a whole bed just to iris, so to survive in our garden the plants have to be strong enough to compete for space and sunshine with other perennials. Not all can. Oddly enough, it's the yellow and pink varieties that died out. We have lots of blues and purples left.


"Winner's Circle" is one of the iris from my mom that bloomed for us this year after
an absence of several seasons. It's a very pretty flower and looks great
with the lighter blues and purples of the other perennials blooming right now.

We lost several iris one year when we were plagued with a winter that oscillated between freezing and thawing. Those that did survive the winter were then killed by an unusually wet and cold spring. The rhizomes turned to mush. In frustration, I decided that I needed to augment the beds with something that could stand up better to a wet spring. Daylilies to the rescue. They are bloody hard to kill. And, they are stunning. So for a few years we invested in one then another lovely specimen, showering each with compost and the unlovely, wafting odor of milorganite fertilizer. (It smells like poo... because it is.)

So now, we have huge clumps of daylilies, with a few iris varieties valiantly demanding their place in the sunshine.

But back to the passalongs... We rescued dozens of peonies, roses and other perennials from some friends' garden when they had to move. All of the hybrid tea roses succumbed eventually to the Minnesota winter, but most of the hosta, astilbe and other perennials are still growing happily, as are the peonies. It was these same friends who gave us our first Asiatic lilies... huge, stunning white lilies, others with a gorgeous deep red color, and sprightly little yellow and white stargazers.

Oh, and the orange, species tiger lilies.

I now pull out tiger lilies like weeds. I do try to strip them of their seeds every summer. However, I believe that like the hydra, for every fifty seeds I strip somehow a hundred reach the ground. And every one of them sprouts. They are relentless in their plundering of unlilied garden bed, popping up in the middle of mature plants with astounding tenacity. They're like the tufts of grass you find growing on rocky cliffs in California and Nevada. All each seed needs is a tablespoon full of soil to call its own and it throws down roots, logic be damned.


None of the tiger lilies in this corner were planted here... they just
showed up (as did the milkweed). I actually weeded out several last year,
from this same corner. Yet the few that I left have come back, and after all the
rain we've had this year they are growing like gangbusters..

It's a good thing that the tiger lilies are lovely. Actually, they're more than lovely. They are tall and stately, impressive backdrops to the lush profusion of echinacea, liatris, scabiosa and coreopsis at their feet. And their bloom time is complementary to the daylilies and Asiatics, keeping the color going all summer long...

What am I saying... unlike the biennial campanula, I couldn't eradicate the tiger lilies from my garden if I tried. I am forced to love them. Call it a special form of denial.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Favorite place, favorite team




On Tuesday, we kicked off Gabi's summer vacation with a spontaneous day trip to the Cities. We started with lunch with a friend in Maple Grove, then headed to Chanhassen to spend a couple of hours at the arboretum ~ one of my very favorite places to visit.

We were a little early for the height of the peony bloom, but had perfect timing for the iris.



One of the very fun things about the iris garden at the arboretum is that there are lots of older varieties ~ Dusky Challenger, Beverly Sills, Stepping Out ~ that my mom grows in her garden. These are varieties that I haven't seen in years, and seeing them at the arboretum is like visiting with old friends. I get downright wistful.

It was also fun to see the lady slippers in bloom. The arboretum has a few different varieties (the fancy ladyslippers weren't blooming yet). These are such unique and fascinating flowers. They were blooming both in the wildflower garden and along the bog walk ~ which we enjoyed on Tuesday but I wouldn't recommend it once the mosquitoes are out in full force.



After spending a few hours wandering around the gardens, we drove to Minneapolis to catch a Minnesota Lynx game. Now, I am admittedly one of the least jock-ish people I know. Please don't ask me to name any professional football, hockey, basketball or baseball teams or players. Or anything like standings, rivalries, scores, scandals, etc. It's not just that I don't know these "vital statistics." What is truly dazzling is my utter indifference.

However, I love going to Lynx games. I love the crowd, I like supporting the athletes, and there's something vibrant and thrilling about the WNBA. Also, the women don't play it like a power sport for the star poser. There aren't many slam dunks in the WNBA. Instead, there's finesse and teamwork, and that is so much more interesting. So, my birthday present from Gabi was Lynx tickets. What fun. I am slowly learning a few of the rules as well ~ although my complete bafflement at what does or does not constitute a foul would likely drive a true basketball fan to tears. Unfortunately, the ladies lost. However, it was a great game.

Oh ~ and in the off chance that it matters to any of you ~ they played Connecticut.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Thanks, Jon

First, a caveat:

I do not regularly get my news from The Daily Show.

I do, however, sometimes get a jolt of information about the news from Jon Stewart & co. This happened a couple of days ago when the lead story on TDS was about the nearly complete lack of coverage by the major news networks ~ cable and otherwise ~ regarding the recent report put out by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Evidently, instead of reporting on the administration's exaggerations, omissions and shameless propagandizing in building a case for the Iraq war, the networks and cable news shows chose to run with the sexy kerfuffle over two dykes kissing in a ballpark.

Even my dear Gabi, who listens to NPR all the time, had not heard the news. I had, because I read my news online and somehow had the right combination of news sources plugged into my Google Reader.

So, for those of you who missed this story, here's a couple of choice links:

Senate Finds Pre-War Bush Claims Exaggerated, False
By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jun 5 (IPS) - Claims by U.S. President George W. Bush and other top administration officials before the 2003 invasion of Iraq regarding Baghdad's ties to al Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes were generally not supported by the evidence that the U.S. intelligence community had at the time, according to a major new report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released Thursday.
The Truth About the War (editorial, NY Times, June 6)

A new report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports.

And, just in case the news networks failed in their reporting role vis-a-vis the shenanigans the administration is pulling in Iraq, here's another story that is more than a little noteworthy.

From the British paper, The Independent, US Issues Threat to Iraq's $50bn Foreign Reserves in Military Deal, by Patrick Cockburn, Friday, June 6, 2008

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.


Monday, June 9, 2008

The pretty ladies are back again

Finally, the first of the fancy bearded iris are open.


"Charisma"

They're almost two weeks late this year. However, as though to make up for their tardy arrival they are preparing the best display we've had in a few years. We have buds on plants that haven't bloomed for years ~ long enough that I've lost track of their names. I'll be sending the pics to my mom so that she can identify them for me.



This one has the most intense, gorgeous perfume! And while it's hard to see from the pictures, the beard hooks up instead of laying flat against the fall. The coloration goes from deep blue to tan on the underside of the petals. And the stalk is sturdy and nearly three feet tall. Wow! I have no clue who she is, but she's stunning.

Update: Mom says she's called "Fragrant Lilac." Gorgeous!

Now, if the severe thunderstorms will just bypass St. Cloud for a few weeks, we should have a really lovely show.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

What am I doing here?


It's a question that crops up from time to time:

Why do I spend the time and energy to blog?

Some days, the voice has a tinge of self-pitying doubt. These are days when I look and see that even though my site meter tells me that I've had several visitors in the last week, no one has left me a comment since forever (can you hear the 14 year old?). Do they not care? Is my writing that bad? Should I go hide by head under a blanket and never touch a keyboard again?

Fortunately, those times don't last long.

Other times, such as today, I am inspired to ask this question more intellectually, and then both the accompanying questions and the answers are much more pleasant.

I stumbled across an essay by Meredith Farkas, of Information Wants to Be Free, where she asks a similar question. She's looking at the issue of self-disclosure and social media, and wonders about her motivations when she does disclose personal information about herself. Farkas writes,

I notice that my blog started to get more personal as I started to connect more with real people online. I had a few regular readers and commenters whom I got to know and like, and I wanted to share things with them, both good and bad. Personal and professional, online and real world all seemed to blur together.

She finds herself in the position of knowing a lot about people she's never met in person, and of being completely involved in the dramas going on in their lives, because of reading their blogs. And lots of people know a lot about her, because of reading her blog. Boundaries get blurry. She thinks of them as friends, but does that make sense?

Another question Farkas poses is how much her self-disclosure has to do with ego. Is she telling personal information, for example job search woes, so that someone will leave an encouraging comment?

It's a fair question, and one I pose to myself. Of course it feels good to have someone comment. How great do you feel when a stranger notices and comments on your gorgeous new shoes? Great, you feel great. I think we all want to be noticed, and this only increases when something means a lot to you. If writing ~ blogging ~ is a passion, of course you will want people to appreciate the effort you put into it. The same goes for whatever you blog about. On some level you will want someone to comment on that recipe or picture or bit of unsolicited advice.

But I also think there is more to it than this, and I suspect it's a commonality with many of us who put a lot of care into what we write on our blogs, regardless of the size of our readership or the subjects we write about. The epiphany came to me as I was putting away dishes and thinking about writing this essay. I realized that lately when I'm working in the yard, at the library, puttering away my time on the water, or reading a good book, in part of my mind I am also thinking, "Is there something here that would be worth writing about? Is there something here that is interesting? What am I feeling at this very moment?"

For me, the great thing about blogging is the care I put into what I write, as much as how I write it. In short, I pay more attention to the good things going on around me. It becomes a sort of gratitude exercise or prayer, and consequently I get more out of what I'm doing and experiencing.

I've made a very conscious effort to focus on positives in this blog. Yes, there have been a couple of rants, but even the quest for joy must be done in moderation. And when I do feel a rant coming on, I try to think about it for a while and figure out a way to write about what is bothering me in a way that is thoughtful and constructive.

The key here is that the process of committing my thoughts to the blogosphere makes me pause, take stock, and look at the world around me ~ good and bad, profound and mundane ~ in a way that is more productive than I might otherwise have done. I want to make my blog a place that friends, family and strangers can visit and find something interesting, hopeful, peaceful or thought-provoking. I hope I succeed for those of you who read these words.

What sustains me through the comment droughts and self doubts is that even if no one else read this blog, the process of blogging is good. Somehow, making the blog worth visiting makes me feel the grace and goodness in my life as well. It's more powerful in this way than journaling, because journaling is private and blogging is emphatically not. When I've written a journal, I didn't ask myself, "what would my mother/lover/boss think of this?" because that person would not be reading my words. When I blog, I do think of these people, and a whole lot more, and evaluate how my words might impact them, for better or worse. But I don't think it's the same as self-censorship, because I've discovered that by caring about the impact of my words on others I actually like what I'm writing and thinking better as well.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't love to hear from you, whether we know each other outside of the blogosphere or not. Go ahead, leave a comment. It will make my day.

BTW: the lovely pic up top is from
www.publicdomainpictures.net

Friday, June 6, 2008

Off to see the ... Ouch!

This is not my favorite day every year. Today's the day I get my mammogram done.

Time to tip-toe up to a big machine with two smashing plates that go first up and down and then to the side, my tenderest parts squished miserably in between. It's embarrassing and uncomfortable and I feel bruised for hours after.

So here's my plea: to all you women who might think, "maybe I'll do it next year," please, please, get your mammogram this year.

Seriously. For all the trouble, it's more than worth it. Because we all know someone who's survived breast cancer and someone who has not.

Get it done.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

The nursery in our garden

It's that time of year.

Newly fledged starlings have been hopping around the yard screeching at their parents for food. These little guys, who remind me of Einstein the way their juvenile feathers stick out in a crown over their heads, are noisy, ridiculous, stubborn and oddly endearing. On Sunday I had to get right down next to a particularly petulant little guy to shoo him off the lawn so that we could mow (Gabi was so sad not to have a camera for that one!).

This morning as I went out to water transplants I saw a baby bunny dash into the hostas in the corner bed. They're so cute when they're tiny! The momma looks lean and a little worse for wear (it was a hard winter for everyone), but the baby's adorable.


Somewhere in there lurks the cutest baby bunny.

Then, as I continued on, I found a young mourning dove crouched behind a planter in obvious distress. I caught him and saw immediately that his feathers were matted with pine-tips, the resinous, flaky brown bits that get pushed off the tips of the pine by new growth. So I sat down and took a few moments to clean him up. Then I noticed that he still wasn't looking good, so I inspected further. I found a whole sunflower seed ~ shell and all ~ lodged in the little guy's throat. So I brought him inside and used tweezers to get it out. From the smell of it, he'd been gagging on that seed for a while, poor little fool.


Fuzzy pic, I know, but he wouldn't exactly pose for me.

Now he's in a cat carrier on the back porch with fresh water and chipped sunflower nuts. Fortunately no cat found him, and there is no sign of external injury, so hopefully he'll survive. I just adore the doves that hang out in our yard. They and the chickadees are my favorites.

Update, 6/6/08: The little guy was looking alert when I left for
work yesterday but was dead when I got home. No sign of cat attack,
so I think there was just more wrong on Tuesday than I could see.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Another splendid Sunday

We could not have ordered nicer weather today. It's been sunny, with just a light breeze, and temps up to about 80. Perfect. So, yes, of course we took the kayaks out.



Today we went out on the Mississippi. We put in at Little Rock Lake, near Rice. The lake had a severe algae problem last year, and it looks like it might develop the same stinky problem this year. However, right now it's lovely, with just the occasional green glaze. It's a very populated area, yet full of little hidden coves too shallow for the pontoons and larger boats to get into.



Near the edge of the lake, where it merges with the river, we were exploring a shallow area that will be soon be choked with water lilies. Behind us, just hidden behind cottonwood, pine and willow trees, were several large houses. Someone was playing, of all things, a Sousa march at speaker-breaking volume. Then a train went by, sounding its whistle as it approached a nearby bridge. And a speedboat throttled up somewhere not too distant.

And amidst all this noise, we discovered a patient heron, standing quietly on a log while a couple of red-wing blackbirds busied themselves in the underbrush nearby. Herons are normally very shy, but this one let Gabi drift close enough for a great picture.



This is what I love about exploring the Mississippi as it flows past Sartell, Sauk Rapids and St. Cloud. The river is wide and deep enough for powerful boats to cruise up and down, but then you can also find these shallow, "secret" areas where the big boys can't get to. And in these places, the wild essence of the river remains. There are still unspoiled areas of great beauty, they're just small and infrequent, and you have to pay attention so that you don't miss them.

But, if you do pay attention, the beauty and wildness is there, surprising and remarkable in its tenacious, willful exuberance.