The entire day I searched for spring but
spring I could not find,
In my straw sandals I tramped among the
mountain peak clouds. Home again, smiling, I finger a sprig of
fragrant plum blossoms;
Spring was right here on these branches
in all of its glory!
Plum Blossom Nun (via the Nebraska Zen Center)
It’s sunny and gorgeous today, and most of my seedlings have gotten their second set of leaves, so out they go for their first day in the cold frame. It’s supposed to be sunny and gorgeous all weekend — the apple trees are leafing out, there are spinach and Italian mustard green seedlings sprouting — the chives and the Chinese garlic chives are up (I thought the garlic chives were a total loss, but the 2nd year they came up beautifully, and now they seem to be self-seeding all over the place). I’ve also got some raddicchio and chicory that overwintered and is now coming back up. It’s been a slow, cold, wet spring, but it looks like it’s finally on the move …
It’s been a grim spring here weather-wise. Cold. Gray. Snowy. Gray.
And yet, it’s been warm enough that these pretty daffodils bloomed. I don’t even remember planting them — they must have been in the batch I bought from one of Nina’s kids as a fundraising thing. At any rate, I was silly enough to plant them right under the dripline from the porch, so they got kind of battered, poor things.
I’m always torn about picking flowers from the garden — where will I enjoy them more? Outside? or inside? But since these had broken stems from the water coming off the roof, the decision was easy. Into the vase they go, and there they sit on the windowsill above the sink where, like the voracious spring birds draining my feeder, they make me happy while I wash my dishes.
Looks like spring’s coming despite the best efforts of winter to hang on.
Well, this is a week I don’t think anyone will be sorry to see end. The creative writing connection to this whole Virginia Tech tragedy really threw me for a loop for a couple of days. I have a couple of advanced degrees in Creative Writing and I spent almost 7 years teaching undergraduate writing. There’s been a lot written this week about the ubiquity of oddball students, and the difficulty of determining who is odd, and who is dangerous. I never had anyone who was seriously disturbed — just the garden-variety stories about beautiful twins who are model/assassins and who wind up skewered on the same spear, or my favorite, the one about the woman who crashed her car because she was distracted by feeling up her own breasts (written by a guy, of course) or the many many stories about breakups and divorces and young people who don’t know what to do next. There were some stellar moments, of course, the pre-med student, a big football-player kind of guy who wrote a lovely sonnet where he took the cliche that the “eyes are the window to the soul” and used the circulatory system as a metaphor. It was lovely. And a surprise to both of us. Or the undergrad at Davis who had spent her early childhood on the glassmaking islands off Venice, and wrote a lovely reminiscence about running through the glassworks with a pack of cousins. But there were always the spooky students. Every semester, a TA got semi-stalked, or in my PhD program we had trouble with someone in the program stalking another member of the workshop. It happens. And you always wonder what to do.
But what can one do when our mental health system makes it nearly impossible to get help for someone who does not think they need it? Anyone who has ever tried to get help for a relative or friend knows that unless someone makes specific and verifiable threats against another or themselves, well, you can’t get them into an inpaitent situation. And since most insurance companies won’t pay for outpatient care, well, we’re all in danger.
As for gun control — it’s a different issue out here in rural America. There are a lot of guns around, and mostly they’re a danger to their owners. We have the highest suicide rate in the country (long winters, social isolation, guns) but not much problem with people shooting other people. There’s a great discussion going on over at Making Light about this issue that pretty much sums up how I feel about the gun thing.
In other news — the bear got away. There have been reports of a bear down on the other end of town, and since the game warden is pretty sure he’s trapped this bear before, it seems that the sight of the trap caused him to move out of the MH’s neighborhood at least. And although the door being bashed was a bummer, the MH got a gorgeous new door on sale, and it looks great. So, all’s well that ends well on that front — the bear is still out there being a wild bear, the MH has a lovely new door, and we had some minor excitement for a couple of days.
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with it’s island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
From Praise, Robert Hass, 1974
After the bear came back a second night, and bashed in the Mighty Hunter’s front door, he called the game warden who brought this impressive culvert trap over and parked it in the back yard. About eight last night we heard clanging noises and went out to watch the warden set the trap and bait it with bacon and raw chicken … there we were, the MH, me, and all the neighbors, watching the game warden and thinking about bears.
So, off to sleep we went, half an ear cocked for bear noises outside. I had bear dreams all night … first the bear drove up in a green Subaru Forester, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat like the bear in Richard Scarry. The bear got out of the car, took off his hat and then, as if it was his job, morphed into an enormous scary bear in the backyard. Sort of like the great big bear that stood up and woofed at me and the dogs two years ago in Suce Creek. A big big dream bear on all fours looking at us and swinging his head back and forth, mad at us for wanting to trap him.
Alas, the bear either moved on to greener birdfeeders, or was wise to the ways of culvert traps, because this morning the trap was still there, door wide open, empty. Let’s hope the bear took the hint and moved along — because as exciting as the prospect of trapping a bear in the backyard might have been, I’d really rather the bear was out there doing what it should be doing — being a wild animal.
The MH called this morning to tell me there was a bear in his neighbor’s yard last night. Looks like it came up the creek from the river, and took out the neighbor’s birdfeeder. He said there wasn’t too much damage, but the sliding glass door is covered in big bear paw prints.
We discussed whether I should take my feeder down — I’ve really come to love my little birdfeeder. It’s right outside the kitchen window and watching the birds is such a pleasure when I’m doing dishes. They’re just ordinary little birds: sparrows and finches and chickadees with the occasional woodpecker or flicker for excitement.
I think I’ll keep it up for a few more days and see what the bear situation in town looks like. The MH lives down by the river, where there’s more wildlife than up here in my part of town. Even in the fall when my apple trees are dumping ripe fruit all over my yard, I’ve never had a bear up this far (although I am only two blocks from Fleishman Creek). I’m in the middle of the block, and a bear would have to come up a long alley to get to my backyard. There’s no sweet little creek to follow. We’ll have to see, I’d hate to lose my feeder, but birdfeeders are a real problem out here in bear country. To a hungry bear, a full birdfeeder is a gift — all that protein and fat — and as the saying goes “a fed bear is a dead bear.” So, time to keep an eye on the situation. If the bears are coming into town, the word will be out, and the feeder may have to come down.
The weather here is still awful, cold, grey, damp and just dreary, but in my basement, spring has begun. This is the system I rigged up a couple of years ago. I kept seeing all these expensive propagation systems in catalogs that I couldn’t afford, so I built my own. I bought a bunch of ten dollar shop light fixtures at the hardware store, some light chain, some s-hooks and the most expensive part of it all was the grow light bulbs. I had the metal shelving — Patrick bought a whole bunch of shelving for his business just before he died, so that wasn’t an issue. Basically, I just hung the lights on the bottom side of the shelves in a standard shelving unit, and we’re off to the races. They can be raised and lowered as needed and I can do as many as five full shelves of flats (although I’m trying to restrain myself this year. I don’t really need or want to plant 24 different tomatoes like I did last year). The other key thing I bought is some heat mats for germination. Since my basement is, well, a basement and is cool, the heat mats are pretty crucial.
So that’s my little seed-starting setup. This is the fourth year I’ve started my vegetables from seed, and it’s starting to feel like one of those things one just does. The vernal equinox rolls around, and it’s time to start the tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. For me, learning to start seeds has been sort of like learning to make a decent loaf of bread. Sure, you can buy seedlings (or pretty good bread, even up here in the hinterlands) but there’s a specific joy in knowing how to do it myself. In not being afraid of yeast, or germination. In paying attention. In looking at the bread dough, or going downstairs every morning to see whether the tomatoes have gotten their second set of leaves. In a world that grows increasingly virtual, it makes me calm to know that I can do something as real as grow my own food.
So, the MH and I have been watching this Imus mess unfold together, which has been interesting since my beloved MH has quite a mouth on him, and is the first to admit that he’s been known to shoot it off inappropriately. But even the MH agrees that Imus was an idiot, especially after yesterday’s press conference by the coach and the team. We’ve spent all winter watching high school basketball together, and those girls are only a year or two older than our girls team (who performed much better than the boys did this year).
They’re just kids those girls, and they were so dignified, and so eloquent about what Imus’s stupid comments cost them. But what I missed, what I was waiting for, was a little fire in the belly. Yes, they’ve suffered damage — but no stupid comments from some radio host can take away their astonishing season unless they let him. I hate the politics of victimhood. Those girls are nobody’s victims. Sure, they were hurt and embarassed and horrified by this incident. Sure, they had their accomplishments denigrated in a particularly sexist and racist way and that is a horrifying thing to confront (there’s a particularly good piece behind the Times firewall on the misogyny that is still ubiquitous in sports).
But the thing is, those girls are still the accomplished athletes who outperformed everyone’s expectations this year. And most of them are only freshman and sophmores. Where was the defiance? Where was the comeback? Where was the attitude? I wanted a little of that out of them yesterday — where was the declaration that if this is what they could accomplish this year, well, just wait until next year? The best comeback for someone stupid like Imus is to come back next year and win the whole thing. Go girls. Get back on the court. Look what you did — and now go shoot for the whole shebang. Tap into your anger and use it for something useful — Show them all. We know you can do it.
Via Bookslut this morning: “You know, I thought that Leslie Bennetts was being a little hysterical when she called the reaction to her book The Feminine Mistake a ‘witch hunt.’ Then I scrolled down to the comments section.”
I was raised by women who got left holding the bag, by a mother and a grandmother who got stuck trying to support children after having believed they’d never be responsible for the financial end of things. It wasn’t pretty (see below on serial financial disaster). I knew, in my bones, from the time I was about ten that if I wanted kids, I was going to have to be prepared to support them and to support myself. I’ve worked since I was fourteen, more often than not at two jobs, and even at that it took me until I was 35 to make more than about 20k a year. I came late to financial security, and it’s by far the biggest thing I’ve accomplished in my life. And so it was always an astonishment to me that so many women I knew were not only willing, but eager, to trade in their professional and financial independence and rely on a husband to support them and their children.
There must be a reason that this subject spurs such over-the-top reactions from women who have chosen to stay home (see the comments linked to above). The vitriol, the hysteria, the insistence that staying home is the only proper sacrifice a woman can make all seem to me to mask a deep anxiety about this subject. People don’t overreact to things that don’t subconsciously bug them. There was a time in my late twenties when my friends who had married young, who had never had a real profession, who had kids young, spent a lot of time telling me how selfish I was for going to graduate school, for not marrying, for insisting that my own life was meaningful. It was a very tiresome period.
I’m not married and I don’t have kids. I’m not thrilled about either of those situations — especially the kid part — but that seems to be the way the chips fell this time around. God knows I’ve certainly spent a lot of my adult life caretaking family members in the most typical feminine ways — and perhaps if I’d wound up with a husband making a lot of money, I too would have been tempted to stay home with the babies. They’re interesting, even when they’re boring, and they’re only little once. But I live in the land where all what ifs are possible — where people die and jobs are lost and where the safety net is thin. I don’t think it’s irresponsible of Leslie Bennetts to remind women that while staying home is an option that might provide a lot of personal pleasure, and it’ll certainly get you plenty of social approval these days, there are real consequences. You will not be able to go back to work and make the kind of money your peers are. You might not be able to get a job at all if you’re older, if you have kids that will get sick and need to be picked up at odd hours and who will make you sort of a pain to employ. Is this right? Should we live in a world where employers support family life? Of course, but we don’t.
If women want to be treated as adults, we must also carry our part of the financial burden. Which doesn’t preclude staying home for a while when the kids are little — day care is expensive, sometimes more than one might make at a crappy job one doesn’t love. But it needs to be a reasoned decision, made by both parents, and there needs to be contingency plans. Life is long, and scary, and unexpected things happen. Seems to me that’s the central message of Bennetts’ book, and the hysterical reaction to her message belies the extent to which we’ve substituted wishful thinking for a realistic assessment of the social cost of dropping out of the professional world.