The "It's A Good Life" Jar

Today is December 27, 2014.  There are four days left until the new year is upon us...and I'm actually remembering to start a project that I saw months ago on Pinterest which really spoke to me:  setting up a jar to collect memories of good times in.

I have picked out a jar.  It's our old cookie jar from when the kids were little.  It's nothing particularly unique - just a pressed glass jar, probably a reproduction, that I picked up many years ago.  With no children in the house and therefore no need/excuse to make cookies and keep them around, the jar has just been stored in the basement for years, gathering dust.

Said cookie jar has now been washed and dried, and it is sitting in the place of honor on a beautiful, new-to-us, carved table that was a special Christmas gift from friends Flip & Shelley.  Our old cookie jar is becoming our new "It's a Good Life" Jar.  Into this jar, I plan to place slips of paper anytime something happens that makes me feel lucky or blessed or particularly happy or just glad to be alive.  Hopefully, Greg will join in too.  On December 31st next year, I (we) will take out all of the slips of paper and have a wonderful record of the good things that 2015 has brought into our lives.

Yes, this is a little touchy-feely, to use Greg's favorite dismissive desciptor for activities or comments that look beyond the reality of day-to-day living, but that's okay.  A little touchy-feely-ness is a good thing, in my book, because remembering to be grateful for the positives in my life has always made me feel better overall.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think it would be a good thing for all of us to make a special point of cultivating gratefulness.  In fact, sometimes I think that one of the reasons Americans are so stressed nowadays is that we, as a whole, aren't very good about realizing how much good is already in our lives.  Yesterday reminded me of this:  the emphasis in the U.S. on December 26th is "After Christmas Sales", and this morning our paper reported that many people were disappointed at those sales yesterday.  Compare that to "Boxing Day" on December 26th in Great Britain.  For years I had heard the term and thought it referred to the sport of boxing, which I was at a loss to connect to Christmas.  Just recently I learned that Boxing Day is actually a day put aside for boxing up your extra stuff - the stuff that you just don't need or use anymore - and giving it away to those who could use it.  Isn't that a wonderful holiday?! What a great way to be thankful for all the new we received the day before from friends and family!  What a great way to focus on the good in our lives and try to pass along some of our wealth to others!

So I'm cultivating a new tradition in my life to celebrate my gratefulness.  For starters, I must say that I'm grateful to Pinterest for the idea!

Jungle on the Prairie

A week ago yesterday, our daughter was married.  In Florida.  Needless to say, we traveled down there, both to help out ahead of time and to attend the wedding.  Rather than hurry back, we decided to stay a few extra days and relax, which was...relaxing.

There was one big problem with this agenda.  After months of almost no rain, it rained here the day after we left and then again several more times while we were gone.  In fact, we received more rain in the 2 weeks we were gone than we'd received since the start of the new year until the day we left.

Not too surprisingly, then, we came home to a jungle - or as close to a jungle as it gets on the Kansas prairie.

Including the driveway, the only area that didn't look overgrown was the buffalo grass!  (Have I told you recently how much I'm coming to enjoy buffalo grass?!)

The vegetable garden looked particularly disastrous - the spinach, lettuce and many of the broccoli and cauliflower plants had bolted and the weeds had literally appeared as if by magic.  Pigweed - which I hadn't even noticed germinating before we left - was over a foot tall.  Crabgrass - which had barely started to germinate - was a 4" tall carpet of green in areas.

So we started working yesterday morning.  Greg put in about 8 hours of weeding and mulching (for the second time this spring) in the vegetable garden.  I put in about 3 hours of vegetable garden weeding, then a couple more hours, off and on, weeding in the flower gardens and lawn.  After he got too tired to weed any more, Greg mowed.

Things are looking a little better, but far from where we want them yet.

Meanwhile, we discovered that we'd had a MAJOR hatch of grasshoppers while we were gone.  There are grasshopper nymphs everywhere.

This little merry band was on one of the older cauliflower leaves....

...while this more mixed assortment was brazenly staking out one of the broccoli plants.

But wait!  One of those isn't a grasshopper!

Good eyes.  It's not a grasshopper, it's a wheel bug nymph.  With a grasshopper meal on its mind!

The wheel bug nymphs are everywhere and, much to my delight, I found a couple of them snacking on baby grasshoppers.

This one was on lamb's quarters in the vegetable garden,...

...while this one was hiding under a Jerusalem artichoke leaf.

Obviously even an army of wheel bugs won't be able to handle the hordes of grasshopper nymphs that we are currently hosting.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that continued wet and cool will help with that problem, but meanwhile the wheel bugs are giving me great pleasure as I notice them skulking throughout the yard.   Terminators, baby!

Thoughts Provoked By Trash

As I walked down the driveway last week, I saw some trash caught along the fenceline.  It irritated me a bit, but it's a part of modern life.  I picked it up, stuck it in my pocket, and headed back inside.

When I fished the trash out to throw it away, though, something made me look at it a little more closely - and for a brief moment I got really mad.  Seriously - have we become so crunched for time (or simply lazy) and so consumerized that it is necessary to buy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches premade and pre-packaged???  Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?  Really?

This rates right up there with buying tap water by the (plastic) bottle, for over $1 each.  Come on, folks, just turn the tap on and fill a bottle up for free!  Save the plastic.  Save money.  Avoid some extra chemicals leaching into your water from the plastic.  Then slap some peanut butter and jelly on 2 slices of bread.  Cut the crust off if you've encouraged your kids to be picky about such things.  I haven't priced it all out, but I can almost guarantee making the sandwiches yourself will be cheaper than buying commercial, pre-made pb & j's.

When we've gotten to the point where we're too busy or stretched too thin to get ourselves a glass of water from the faucet or to make our children a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, we're too busy.  Something's got to give.

It takes 2 people to earn a living these days.  If even 2 people can.  Working 40 hours each, 50 hours each, 60 hours each.  Working hard, because we'd never want to be seen as slackers and because we have no choice.  Performing "internships" for free so that we can get experience, then not getting hired because the next unpaid intern is waiting, anxious to work for "experience."  Working 2 jobs at 35 hours each so that the companies don't have to pay benefits - we're "part-timers" working 70 hours each week but not "worth" health insurance or paid time off or sick leave.  When these horrible hours have their inevitable result and our bodies rebel, we become one of the "slackers", too sick to keep working.  If our health insurance comes from our employer, we're really screwed.  Too sick to work, but no health insurance if we're not working...and no work to get money to pay for health insurance.

We're not machines.  Any of us.  We're human beings, with good points and with faults, with weaknesses and with strengths.  Some of us are kind and some of us aren't.  Some of us naturally work harder than others.  Some of us are smarter than others.  Some of us are more social or less social than others.  Caring - or not.  Artistic - or not.  Creative - or not.  Neat - or not.  One way or another, there's much more to human life and human worth than paid labor.  And it's time for us - all of us - to remember that.  We need to be treated as living humans, to treat each other as worthwhile humans, and to treat ourselves with love and compassion.   We need to take our lives and our world back.  One way...or another.

A Bountiful Harvest of Strawberries

We've been away for about 10 days, visiting our daughter down in Florida.  I spent the week prior to our departure trying frantically to get all the plants in the ground (and I mostly succeeded at that!), then I just chilled out on the trip, enjoying the fruits of other people's labor as I noticed beautifully blooming plants or oohed and aahed over vegetable gardens that we passed.

When we got back home, our gardens had outdone themselves in growing while we were gone.  For better and for worse, the growth spurt included weeds - lots and lots of weeds - so I have a lot to do before I feel  like I have a handle on everything again.  Thankfully our weather is fairly cool, especially compared to the last several years, so I'm not fighting unbearable heat when I'm outside working.

I had assumed that I would be jumping into battle with the weeds as soon as I got home...but our garden had a different plan for me.  Thankfully, we thought to go out and check on the strawberry patch before starting any other projects - and, lo and behold, it was just jam-packed with ripe strawberries.  There were plenty of over-ripe berries, too, but even after throwing those away, we were left with just over 10 pounds of strawberries, seen here ready to go into the kitchen!  (Yes, a lot of the green you see outside of the strawberry bed is composed of weeds, but that's work for another day.)

Getting a closeup shot of the berries allowed me to crop out the weeds and just focus on the mouthwatering goodness of the berries and the plants themselves.

I spent the rest of yesterday figuring out what to do with all these berries (it's the best harvest we've ever had at one time)...and then doing it!

We ended up with a delicious mid-afternoon gorge on freshly made strawberry shortcake, plus 2 trays of individually frozen, sugar dipped whole strawberries and about 8 1/2 cups of strawberry puree.  Mmmm-Mmmm, good! 

NOW I'm ready to start on all that weeding!

Just a Little Collecting....

Plants.  Books.  Bird images.  Art pottery.  Books.  Plants.  Books.

I collect.  Do you?

I love antique stores, plant nurseries (especially for native plants), books, art pieces, family "stuff", birds, garden art, ....  The list, for better or for worse, goes on and on.  I've wondered a bit whether I am in danger of becoming a hoarder, but so far I don't think I've fallen into that well.  I just love certain things.  And lots of some of those certain things!

Enter a book titled Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, written by Maureen Stanton.  When I saw it at an independent bookstore in Somerville, MA, (in June while we were haunting estate sales, garage sales, antique stores, used furniture stores, consignment stores, and Goodwill to outfit our son's new home), I just had to get it.   What a fascinating read!  It's an engrossing combination of personal anecdotes, historical tidbits, plain old facts and lots of gory details about the antiques and collectibles business.





For example, do you know how many items are typically appraised on a single Antiques Roadshow day - out of which approximately 50 will be chosen for inclusion on the TV show?  Well, they generally sell about 7,000 tickets...each ticket holder is allowed to bring in 2 items for appraisal...which means they screen approximately 14,000 items in each 10 hour day.  So, approximately 50 items are chosen out of 14,000 items, more or less.  Sobering odds of having a cool and/or unusual piece worth tons of money!

There were some tidbits for thought in the book, too.  For example, "Antique dealing is all about taking an item out of the wrong setting and placing it in its rightful frame of reference." (p. 22)  That idea resonates with me.  Isn't it better to match an item with someone who appreciates it than to let that item just join the growing piles of discarded trash throughout the world?  I'm simply trying to make sure that I don't consider my home and yard the "right[ful] frame of reference" for too many of those misplaced things!

Or how about these quotes?  Andy Warhol is reported to have written, "Buying is much more American than thinking."  Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Possession is a magical relation; I am these objects which I possess."   W. D. King writes, "Collecting is a way of linking past, present, and future.  Objects from the past get collected in the present to preserve them for the future."  Stanton links these three quotes with an overarching statement, "Assembling a collection suggests a deep engagement with living; objects link people to the continuous chain of life." (p. 26-27)

For me, from the quotes above, collecting comes closest to Sartre's statement:  owning these items I care about somehow seems to expand my possibilities, to remind me of who I am and what I love, and to form an avenue to share my passions and interests with others. 

All that good feeling and possibility from what my husband occasionally calls, "All this crap."  (Only when he's in a snit, though.  At other times he compliments me on how enjoyable our home is.)

Hmmmm.  Maybe it's time for me to find a "Wunderkammer," a piece of furniture developed during the Age of Exploration where people would display all the wonderful bits and pieces they had collected during their travels.  It would corral all my "crap" in one piece of furniture or (in the case of a "Kunstkammer," a room for art objects) in one room.  After all, we can all do with a little more "Wunder" in our lives!

Home Again

On Sunday afternoon, we got back from an 8 day trip out to Boston where we helped our son settle into his new abode and, more specifically, helped him change his new, empty house into a home.  Because he'd downsized a lot over the last few years (to increase his own mobility as he moved from apartment to apartment), he had almost no furniture, so we spent much of the week hitting antique stores, consignment galleries, garage (tag) sales, and estate/moving sales.  By the time we left, I like to think that we had made great strides in creating his new home.

Greg and I have established homes 11 times since we got married almost 36 years ago.  Just in the last year, I've helped both kids establish new homes.  This was the 6th time we've helped our daughter establish a new home and the 4th time we've helped our son establish a new home.  That's a lot of homemaking, any way you slice it.

The process has started me thinking a lot recently about what makes a house or apartment into a "home."

In 1926, H. L. Mencken wrote, "A home is not a mere transient shelter; its essence lies in its permanence, in its capacity for accretion and solidification, in its quality of representing, in all its details, the personalities of the people who live in it."

I like that image of a home representing the personality of the person who lives in it.  It probably explains, too, why so many of the "McMansions" that I go into at estate sales don't seem like homes to me:  the furniture and decorations are all new and shiny and fresh...but there's no personality to them.  No history.  No soul.  People bought a big, fancy house and put big, fancy furniture in it.  When it came time to move on, they left it all behind.  That's not a home.  That's a hotel.

"It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home,
A heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye sometimes have t' roam
Afore ye really 'preciate the things ye lef' behind,
An' hunger fer 'em somehow, with 'em allus on yer mind.
It don't make any differunce how rich ye get t' be,
How much yer chairs an' tables cost, how great yer luxury;
It ain't home t' ye, though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow yer soul is sort o' wrapped round everything."
      - Edgar Albert Guest (1916)

The above is the first stanza of the poem "Home" by Edgar Guest.   The poem (and the poet) have been both beloved and mocked for decades.  Despite the hokey grammar, I find that I resonate with the ideas in the poem, especially with the line, "It ain't home t'ye...Until somehow yer soul is sort o' wrapped round everything."

This sentiment jibes with the feeling I get when we move - a new place doesn't become "home" until we get "our stuff" delivered and start getting it unpacked and put away.  I begin to feel like I'm home when we sleep in our own beds, when we eat at our own kitchen table, and when we can browse our own book shelves to find something interesting to look through.  Maybe that identification of home with the furniture and other items in it is somehow specific to me because I've moved so many times in my life.  Perhaps if I'd grown up in the same house all my life, my concept of home would be more tied to the building or to the land or to the community, rather than to our "stuff." 

T.S. Eliot wrote, "Home is where one starts from."  I would add, "And home is where one feels relaxed and sheltered in returning."  As the old song says, "Be it ever so humble, There's no place like home!"

What makes "home" to you?

Using My Time Wisely

Whenever I've been blogging a lot, I start to feel guilty. You see, most of my blog posts are built upon taking my camera out and walking around the yard slowly to see what catches my eye, photographing whatever something(s) that may be, bringing the pictures back inside and uploading them, then sorting through them, categorizing them, editing them as necessary...and THEN beginning to write.

I'm not a speedy writer. Sometimes I spend as much or more time researching a topic as I do writing about it. Or I'll remember a "perfect" example to illustrate my topic, but have to search back through years of photos to find the one I'm thinking about. I almost always revise each post a couple times, trying to get the words to flow smoothly and to truly get across what I'm intending them to say.

Once I add the photos and publish the blog post, I try to take the time to view it as others will be seeing it, then edit, as necessary.

This all takes time. Time that I'm not using to garden, to do housework, get groceries, plan meals, pay bills, or to do any of the other myriad of tasks that need to be done to keep our home running smoothly. Naturally, if I've been blogging quite a bit, the house and yard start getting a big ragged. And I start feeling a big ragged...and guilty.

Which leads me to my perennial internal question: What is the best way to use my time? The older I get, the more I realize that our time on Earth is limited. Should I be blogging about the wondrous, and the mundane, world of nature? Or should I be keeping my house spotless and the chores done? Should I be taking the time to walk around the yard with the camera? Or should I be making sure that I get the birthday cards out on time, the social obligations are met, the volunteer hours put in? Should I be in a career, hopefully earning lots of money and respect? Or should I be blogging, volunteering, making dinner and doing laundry - none of which put a red cent into our pocketbooks? I wish I was organized enough and efficient enough to do it all...but the sad fact is that I'm not. Something always seems to get dropped, and it always feels like it's an incredibly important something that I shouldn't have lost sight of.

I wish I was as secure in my understanding of this issue as Robert Michael Pyle when he wrote:

"I have never suffered a crisis about what time well spent means for me. I've never regretted a minute spent out-of-doors with my eyes open. Reading a heartfelt novel, story, poem, essay, or letter has never caused me to feel I was injuring eternity, though many Christmas letters, e-mails, newspapers, and magazines are another matter. Dancing is always time well used; so is birdwatching, and listening to the blues in all their various manifestations, from Bach to Brahms to Bartok, Bobby Burns to Bobby Zimmerman to B. B. King. Love, family, friends, and good cats. The night. Walking by day with my butterfly net. Hiking any trail, exploring small roads that may go nowhere. Conversation and meditation make for moments no more squandered than taking a memorable beer in a satisfying setting, whether it be the Free Press Pub in Cambridge or my old chair surrounded by books and warmed by the woodstove at home."
(p. 105-106, Walking the High Ridge: Life As Field Trip)

Everything that Pyle mentions in that list resonates with me (although I'd change the list of favorite music!). But, but, but.....

This quote, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (but actually written by Bessie Anderson Stanley), has often soothed my unease when I start thinking too hard about the roads not taken....

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

I'll probably be pondering choices until the day I die! Meanwhile, the laundry is calling and the paper stacks have been reproducing themselves on the kitchen counter, so I'd better get back to "the real world." Who knows? Maybe inspiration will strike as I fold the socks!

Your Own, Safe, Natural Playground, or Creating Tomorrow's Nature Nostalgia

So, my last post was a nostalgic look at some of the ways I enjoyed the natural world as a child. Which was a fun romp for me, but maybe not so much fun for others. I think that "Guess you had to be there!" may be appropriate.

My point in thinking about those days, though, was to mentally move myself into thinking about how we can adapt the current reality to help today's kids have their own natural adventures.

So, let me start with today's current reality, as I understand it.

1. There is little free access to natural areas for most kids. If there are natural areas nearby, most parents are not comfortable with the kids being there unless there is a trustworthy adult along.

The photo below, actually of a local 5 year old high school "landscape," shows the current "classic" type of landscape available for kids to play in, complete with lots of well manicured lawn and a few young trees, carefully spaced far apart. There's absolutely no place for imaginary adventures nor are there even interesting things to observe.


2. Most families have both parents working to make ends meet. This cuts down significantly on the time that either parent can spend with their kids simply exploring outside, including going to those natural areas. This also means that no one has the time to fiddle extravagantly with a garden. Each weekend the yard care agenda is: mow, blow, and get back inside to the sports on TV as soon as possible.

3. Most yards are relatively barren...and boring: a lawn (see the photo above, because everyone has to have a lawn) which is kept mowed and treated with weed-control chemicals, so the neighbors won't get upset. If the kids are lucky, there's some sort of swing set or play equipment in the backyard. A tree or two is generally planted in the middle of the lawn, but it is pruned quite high up to allow easy mowing of the lawn underneath it. Any shrubs are usually foundation plantings, growing 3 feet or so from the foundation of the house. To add insult to injury, these foundation shrubs are often (prickly) evergreens so that the yard won't look "bare" in winter. Any insect seen, with a few exceptions such as ladybugs or monarch butterflies, is assumed to be a problem and becomes a reason to treat the lawn with insect-control chemicals.

So, given this trio of constraints, what can a parent do to encourage their child to interact with nature on his or her own? (Note: I am aware here that I am talking to/about people who own their own home, complete with a yard...or those who are lucky enough to rent a home where the landlord doesn't mind the tenants working in the yard, as long as they take care of it.)

Our society is what it is, so we need to accept that there are few natural areas where the kids can safely roam without our supervision. Nothing much an individual family can do about #1.

Economic realities are what they are as well, which means time constraints are what they are. BUT, there is a block of time already built in on a weekly basis for lawn mowing.... Could we do something a little different with part of that time? #2 has a small bit of possibility within it.

How we design and plant our yards, #3, has some distinct possibilities for individual change though. It doesn't take much to trigger a child's imagination. Here are a few basic ideas to transform your yard from boring to your own safe, natural playground.


How about converting one back corner of the yard to a shrub bed? The idea is to put in a couple big shrubs or small trees in a pattern that will create a central space, somewhat hidden, to become a secret fort or hideaway. Circles, if big enough, work well, but even 3 shrubs planted about 6-8' apart can be sufficient. I've seen this done very successfully here in Wichita with 'Little King' river birch, and I remember using cubbyholes in the landscape like this throughout my childhood. The trick is to trigger the child's sense of enclosure without completely screening them from Mom & Dad's watchful eyes. The photo above begins to capture the concept if you imagine finding a "secret space" between the big spireas and the side of the garage, although this bed was not designed with children in mind. (My dogs love that secret space, though!) Be careful not to choose prickly shrubs.


Plant a small tree or two (or even a big tree or two) on which you leave low branches, so that it becomes a climbing tree. Or plant a clump of trees to form a magic room. The redbud, pictured above, would be a great climbing tree if it were situated in a more child-friendly setting. Amur maples, too, can be encouraged to have open, child-friendly branching patterns. Black willows are good clambering trees, with fast growth and trunks that often become relatively horizontal with age. A standard apple tree is a classic climbing tree that also has flowers and fruit in season. (Just be sure, if there are junipers or redcedars around, to pick one resistant to cedar-apple rust.) Bradford pear, however, would not work well, as the branching pattern doesn't lend itself to climbing.

This clump of cottonwoods, if it were in a more private backyard setting, could provide hours of imagination-fueled play for kids.... And it's no more problem to mow around this group of trees than to mow around a single tree.


Make a small garden bed where you and your kids can plant a few vegetables and a few flowers. For starters, in this area you can....

...make a teepee of bamboo or straight dead branches, then grow pole beans on each leg of the teepee. If you leave one or two branches out on one side, this becomes a playhouse for the kids to use.

...plant sunflowers - big ones - that the kids can keep track of over the summer. Leave the flower heads on after they finish blooming. The seeds will develop (in cool geometric spacing) and goldfinch will come pick them clean over the winter.

...plant 4 o-clocks. These hardy, colorful flowers produce the coolest little seeds that look like small, black grenades.

Even more classic flower gardens can provide excitement for kids and adults alike. Here is a white lined sphinx moth nectaring at summer phlox blooms just 2 feet from our front porch. Watching a moth like this guy, it's hard to tell him apart from a hummingbird!


Hang birdfeeders and keep them filled with black oil sunflower seed during the winter. Be sure to put them somewhere they can be easily seen from the house, preferably from the kitchen table. Keep binoculars and a guidebook nearby so the kids can learn to look up birds for themselves as they get older, as well as learn to handle binoculars. There are basic 'Birder' binoculars available for about $30 from online sources, so you don't have to be too paranoid about the kids occasionally dropping them.


Throughout your yard, use as few insecticides and herbicides as possible. Let the white clover and henbit and dandelions grow in the (back) lawn. Then, with your kids, watch for butterflies and bees nectaring at the flowers. Examine a dandelion seed head up close for its beautiful design, then huff and puff and blow the seeds away on their little white umbrellas. Show your child how to make a necklace or a crown out of white clover blossoms.

Save a few plastic peanut butter jars that you've washed out and show your kids how to use them to hunt for caterpillars and grasshoppers and fireflies. (Just be sure to teach them "catch & release" habits.) Watching a grasshopper in the jar, they can see its jaws move side to side; with the firefly, they can see what the insect really looks like, then watch its abdomen glow right in front of them. If the kids catch a moth or a butterfly, they can see the long "tongue" rolled up like a New Year's Eve noisemaker...or, as in the photo of the great spangled fritillary below, looking like a straw stuck into a source of nectar or water.


The ideas are endless and, since it's your (safe) backyard, you can let the kids play with no more supervision than normal. While they play, they'll be learning without even realizing it. If you keep your eyes open, you'll be learning too!

Think globally, act locally. By creating little nature sanctuaries in our yards, we can help keep our neighborhoods and towns be healthier and happier...and our world a lot greener.

Compare and Contrast

Two books have recently come into my life that make an interesting pair. I serendipitously read them back to back, which highlighted their interconnectedness.

The first, The Feminine Mystique, is Betty Friedan's classic from the 1960's about "the housewife syndrome." In it, Friedan highlighted the isolation and stagnation that was occurring in the lives of housewives as their husbands and children spent increasing amounts of time away from home and they themselves became little more than tools of consumption for the marketplace. The solution, to Friedan (and to entire generations of women), was to get out of the house, preferably with a career.

The second book, Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes, has just recently been published. Hayes's premise is that the two career family has us chasing our tails, having (or wanting) to purchase more and more to make our lives more efficient and more "meaningful," then needing to work more and/or work harder to make more money to pay for our purchases. This leaves us stressed out and overtired, with no time to enjoy the myriad of expensive things we've bought...or to simply enjoy each other and our homes. With our standard of living based on two salaries, it also leaves us as vulnerable or more vulnerable to economic chaos from unexpected job loss. Her solution is to return the family household to a unit of production, rather than solely of consumption, which requires commitment from all adults in the household and involves building community and interrelatedness. She herself has pursued this path, and she has researched 20 other "radical homemakers" from among the many who replied to her solicitation for guinea pigs when she began writing this book.

I read The Feminine Mystique first. As I worked my way through it, I kept thinking two things to myself: 1) "Why didn't I read this in college or in my 20's? I can so relate to these 1950's housewives! How sad is this that I've been so far behind in understanding what was happening to me?" and 2) "Friedan doesn't address childrearing and caretaking. Who's going to raise the children? Who's going to care for family members, both when they are sick and when they are well? Isn't there more to life than working?"

In the new introduction for her book, written by Betty Friedan in 1997, Friedan herself shares deep concerns over the fact that "two generations later" careers, both male and female, are still based on the model of the 1950's male with a stay-at-home wife to care for the home and children. So both working men and women are getting overworked and stressed out. Meanwhile, women are still getting paid less than 75% of what men earn for the same job, so employers are letting more men go and keeping the "cheaper" women. This is causing increased anger and hostility in men, who blame women in the workplace, rather than their employers, for their loss of money and prestige. Meanwhile, the ultra rich are getting richer and richer and nobody is really paying attention to that. It's much too easy to blame each other.

As I read Radical Homemakers, I kept thinking to myself, "Yes, this is what Greg and I were thinking over the years when we tried to produce some of our own food, keep our wants to a dull roar, and avoid getting too caught up in consumerism!" Hayes keeps in mind the lessons from The Feminine Mystique, warning of the absolute importance of interconnectedness and community building to help stave off the feeling of isolation. To keep radical homemakers mentally growing, she notes the requirement for self-learning that this path requires, since so many of these small-scale production skills are almost lost. She also touches upon the need to pursue personal and community interests, especially after radical homemaker has become comfortable with their productivity level.

As to why I was relating so strongly to "the housewife syndrome"? I think it was because of Greg's and my mobile lifestyle. Moving so often kept us from being able to develop the interconnectedness and sense of deep community that both supports and is a gift of the lifestyle. With Greg's job requiring long hours away from home, it was all too easy for me to get relatively isolated and lonely.

I find the radical homemakers' lifestyle very appealing...at least in theory! I am reminded of Greg's grandparents' life during the Depression in Oklahoma: they spent 10 years on a farm during the Dust Bowl. They were "dirt poor", but they raised 5 children and kept everyone fed and clothed without anyone having a paid job or being responsible to an employer. It was obviously hard work, and they chose to leave the farm when World War II gave them other options (and their children began leaving home), but they survived. In fact, their son doesn't even remember feeling particularly poor during those Depression years - "There were a lot of others worse off than we were."

I do some of the lifestyle already - I garden and can, at least a little. I prefer shopping at local businesses, antique shops and thrift stores to buying from big box stores. I watch little TV and pay even less attention to the ads. At least in part, our cars were chosen for their mileage, and they are far from new. I am not known for keeping up with the fashion industry. :-) There's obviously a lot more I (we) could do, but for now I'm grateful to know there are others who value some of the same things we value.

Serendipity shines again!

Bee Battles, Part Two

So I have these somewhat combative acting but generally sweet-at-heart bees cohabiting our home with us. What's not to like, right?

Well, there's the little issue of the holes that they drill into wood....

Just to be clear, carpenter bees do not eat wood. They eat pollen and nectar, and do an incredible service as native pollinators while they are eating. Carpenter bees do, however, dig their nests, tunnels that are called galleries, into wood.

The females chew these tunnels out of generally soft, unpainted wood. A typical hole is about 1/2" in diameter and is essentially perfectly round. It starts out perpendicular to the grain of the wood for 1-2", then turns 90 degrees to follow the grain of the wood. After the turn, a gallery is usually chewed out to a length of 4-6". (The reason that we inherited the carpenter bees was that the prior owners of our home used cedar for the trim boards and didn't paint it.)

When you think about it, this is a lot of wood chewing for a 1" long bee. Our intrepid female is chewing a tunnel the diameter of her bodythrough solid wood. Her speed averages 1" of tunnel constructed every 6 days, if she's starting from scratch. Not surprisingly, female carpenter bees prefer to reuse old galleries, if they can, rather than have to chew out new ones. I would prefer to reuse old galleries, too, if those were my choices.

Whether it's a new gallery or a refurbished old one, once the gallery is prepared, the female carpenter bee makes a ball of "bee bread," a mix of pollen and regurgitated nectar, which she deposits in the gallery. When the bee bread ball is complete, she lays an egg on top of the ball and then seals off that part of the tunnel with a wall of chewed wood pulp. Each female will make from 6 to 10 of these larval chambers, all in the same gallery, before she dies.

The egg hatches and the larval (baby) carpenter bee commences eating. The bee bread ball provided by his mother is sufficient food for him to complete his growth. He then pupates and finally takes adult form. From egg-laying to adult form is about 7 weeks, depending upon the temperatures. The new adults emerge around the end of August, then hibernate in their natal galleries over the winter. In April they re-emerge, mate, and the cycle starts all over. There is only one generation a year.

A single nest isn't that big a deal, but apparently a nest that's been used year after year after year can be expanded to include multiple tunnels for different females. The eventual length can reach 10'...and now you're definitely talking a structural problem in a building.

So I'm battling myself about what to do. I don't want my house to have structural issues because I've let the carpenter bees continue nesting unchecked...but we've painted the cedar trim now, so no new holes will be constructed. Will leaving the existing galleries really create such a major problem?

Carpenter bees are fantastic native pollinators, and native pollinators are particularly important these days, with all of the problems the honey bees are experiencing. Not to mention that I just love to share my home territory with a wide variety of living creatures.

I don't know. I do know that if I'm going to act, this is the time of year to do it so that I can exclude the bees from our house without chemicals and with minimal numbers of carpenter bees being lost. It's fairly early in the year. The males are still alive and guarding the nest sites, so I think that if I plug the holes thoroughly during the day while the bees are outside, I can force them to find new nesting sites.

My internal battle rages on....

Bee Battles, Part One

If you come up to our front door these days, you are likely to get attacked...or at least to feel like you're getting attacked. When we bought our house 3 years ago, we inherited a couple carpenter bee galleries along with it. One of them is in the trim board around the front door and another is in a nearby porch column under the downspout of the gutter.

What this means for you, the casual visitor to our home at this time of year, is that as you wait for us to answer your ring of the doorbell, you will get dive-bombed by a big, black, noisy bee that looks suspiciously like a bumble bee. Relax. It's just a male carpenter bee mistaking you for something that might threaten his female or his nest.

That still sounds dangerous, you think? Well, the male carpenter bee would certainly like you to think so, but he doesn't (as they say) have the necessary equipment to do more than bluff. Stingers are modified ovipositors, or egg-layers, and thus stingers are the sole jurisdiction of female bees and wasps.

Meanwhile the female carpenter bee is generally a docile animal, intent on cleaning out her nest, reprovisioning it with balls of "bee bread" (a mix of pollen and regurgitated nectar) upon which she has laid a single egg each, and building new walls to protect her developing young. Concensus among sources seems to be that the only real way to get a female carpenter bee to sting is to literally handle her.

So how do you know that you are dealing with a threatening-looking but basically benign carpenter bee and not a well-armed bumble bee?

First of all, bumble bees nest in the ground and do not patrol a territory in the same way that carpenter bees do. The fact that a big bee is patrolling a territory around a wooden structure is, in essence, a dead giveaway about that bee's identity.

Secondly, take a look at the bee's abdomen. Carpenter bees' abdomens are shiny black with little hair on them. Bumble bees' abdomens are very hairy, usually with lots of yellow hair as well as black hair. The photo at the start of this blog is of a carpenter bee. The photo below is a bumble bee.

Same general size. Same general shape. Same general vocal ability. The abdomens, however, are quite different. (Never thought you'd be particularly interested in looking at a bee's abdomen, did you?)

The upshot of all this is that visitors to our home don't have to worry about actual physical damage from the flying guardians of our front porch. Mental damage might be more problematic....

All that said, however, there is another, related battle going on around that same front door, one that may carry casualties of one sort or another. I am battling within myself about whether to let the carpenter bees continue to share our home, or whether it's time to move them on their way. That, though, is another blog entry for another time. I'll keep you posted.

Waste Not, Want Not

I was reading through this spring's issue of OnEarth from the Natural Resource Defense Council over the weekend and came across an environmental topic that rather floored me: food waste.

I know that we (as in Prairiewolf and myself) waste a ridiculous amount of food and I have felt bad about that for years, but I've felt bad in a budgetary sort of way, not in a "what am I doing to the Earth?" sort of way. This article caused an internal shift, though, in how I see this supposedly personal problem of ours.

Some statistics:

The USDA estimates that 30% of all edible food in this country is wasted. Two other recent studies (one from the National Institute of Health and one from the University of Arizona) estimate at least 40% of all edible food is wasted. That's the equivalent of 1400 calories/day/person, or about 2 full meals.

That means that 25% of all freshwater and 4% of all oil consumed in this country is being used to produce food that we simply throw away!

Each year the municipal waste stream in the U.S. contains enough food thrown out by restaurants and homes to feed all of Canada. (And we have starving people in this country?!)

When foood rots, it produces methane, which has 20 times the global warming potency of carbon dioxide. Rotting food, according to the EPA, may be responsible for about 10% of the human-caused methane.

In thinking about all of this, my mind keeps going to a scene in Anne's House of Dreams from the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery. In the scene, Marilla (Anne's stepmother) is looking into Anne's scrap jar to make sure that there's nothing in there that shouldn't be. She's basically grading the new housewife on how well she's doing, because a lack of unnecessarily wasted food was one of the most important signs that a woman knew how to run the house well. When I read this passage, all those years ago, I remember thinking how old-fashioned an idea that was. These statistics, however, make me think that the old fashioned housewives were right. At this point, I'd have to give myself a D for my ability to avoid wasting food (and we simply won't go into my other housekeeping skills at all!).

So I've got a new goal for myself: waste not, want not...and save money and the planet while doing it. Maybe making proper food preparation, use and storage a more "noble" goal will help me put a higher priority on it and thus help me get better about doing it well. As my self-inflicted grade shows, I don't think I could get a lot worse!