Category Archives: Uncategorized

Eating Locally

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Chris, our oldest son, is the locavore in this picture.
The animal is an organic grass-fed, grass-finished, free-range bull elk
who lived his life about 15 miles from our house.

“Hoffer” harvested this huge animal with a bow and arrow,
a skill which requires great dollops of
strength, stealth, endurance and patience.

This evening, our garage will transform into a butcher shop.
Several hundred pounds of delicious elk roasts, filets, and burger.
Cut, wrapped, marked, frozen.
It’s a family tradition that occurs almost every year.

Butchering an elk and canning applesauce
are the closest I come to living the Little House lifestyle
I adored when I was a suburban girl reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

Into Great Silence

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How patient are you?  When you go to an art museum do you like to stand and absorb the painting, or catch a quick glance and move on?  How you answer that question will likely determine your response to this film.

I’ll admit it took me four attempts before I watched the almost three hours (2:41) of film.  I finally realized I had to be patient and pay attention. I couldn’t iron and watch, or balance my checkbook and watch, or make cookies and watch. I needed to quiet myself. I had to be still. Once I was properly oriented, I loved this movie.

The Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps is considered among the most ascetic of monasteries.  The monks take a vow of silence (with times to talk allowed at limited times and places).  They live a life of solitude among brothers.  Whether or not you believe this is the best way to worship God, there is much to be gained from joining them for the duration of this film.

The documentary has no voice overs, no background music, no artificial lighting.  The cinematography is exquisite in its simplicity and minimalism.  Sunlight on wood, praying in the dark morning, preparing food, repairing a shoe — all display profound beauty.  The extra-long takes allow time to focus. 

Or, the extra-long takes might put you to sleep.  My son’s only comment as he walked by was “Gripping.” 

But as the film ended, my prominent thought was “Be still and know that I am God.”  I was challenged at how little silence I allow in my life.  Media have brought noises to every corner of our daily living.  I enjoy listening to music, sermons, audio books, my family’s conversation.  But I need more time to listen to the quiet.  An occasional season of silence.

If I was teaching the Middle Ages, this movie would be required watching.  As it is, I would really like to see it again with my husband next to me.  I think we will have to wait to snuggle up on a Sunday evening in January…

Cello Connection

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Tomorrow I am playing for a wedding of a young friend of mine.  The bride wanted a string trio sound, but struggled to find string players.  Finally a violin player was found, who in turn found a cellist who had recently moved to a neighboring town 45 miles away.  I fell in love with Virginia, the 85 year old cellist.  She knows most of the repertoire by heart, has a beautiful touch on the cello with none of the prickly pride musicians are known for. 

Making small talk upon introduction, I mentioned that I had played the cello when I was young. 

“And when I got discouraged and wanted to quit the cello, my father would take me out of school, drive me down to Orchestra Hall and I would watch Frank Miller play the cello with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  He was so large – just dwarfed the cello – but his playing thrilled and inspired me to keep on.” 

A smile rippled across Virginia’s face.  “I played with Frank Miller.” 

“Get out!  You lived in Chicago?”

“Near North Side.  We had the same grandmother, musically speaking.”

From the Chicago Tribune on the death of Frank Miller in 1986:

“He was called the greatest living orchestral cellist, and no one who followed Frank Miller’s long and distinguished career in American symphonic music would question the legitimacy of that claim.”

I might become inspired to take up that instrument again.  With a teacher like Virginia…

Re-member

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This was our membership.  Burley called it that.  He loved to call it that. […]  The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given.  There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up.  What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing.  Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come.  In the long, anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished.

The membership includes the dead.  […]

What will be remembered, Andy Catlett, when we are gone?  What will finally become of this lineage of people who have been members one of another?  I don’t know.  And yet their names and their faces, what they did and said, are not gone, are not “the past,” but still are present to me, and I give thanks.

 Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

When we are members of one another, remembering involves re-membering.

When one of us is cut down, it’s as if we have been dis-membered. 

Remember.

Literally, Be mindful again.

My Boy Jack

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Last night my men put a moratorium on sad (WWI) war movies.  Ain’t gonna study war no more!

In the all-or-nothing mentality that marinates in the marrow of all those born with my maiden name, I have had my guys watch a dozen movies on the Great War with me.  (psst – don’t mention it, but there are seven more in my queue – there is a delete button, I guess)  This 2007 BBC movie of a screen play written by David Haig is a top notch movie that will surely make you cry.  There is not a happy ending, my friend.

Daniel Radcliffe plays young John “Jack” Kipling, a young man whose desire to go to war is thwarted by his extreme nearsightedness.  His father uses his influence to get Jack into the Irish Guards. 

The arc of this movie about Rudyard Kipling and his family is similar to the arc in the story of C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands.  A strong speaker with large audiences makes bold, booming declarative statements.  Life intervenes; by the end of story you see a profoundly changed man struggling with his private grief. 

David Haig, who wrote the screenplay and played Kipling, looks uncannily like Rudyard Kipling.  Part of the movie was filmed at Bateman’s, Kiplings estate in Sussex.

I need to learn more about Kipling.  He’s considered controversial these days, especially his poem “The White Man’s Burden.”  His astonishing ability to tell stories is framed well in this movie.  But he was indubitably an British imperialist, a man of his time.  Here is his poem, My Boy Jack. 

My Boy Jack

“HAVE you news of my boy Jack?”
    Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
    Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
    None this tide,
    Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
    Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
    This tide,
    And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
    And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

Roadwork

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Teaching is, by nature, incomplete.  I have always struggled limiting the scope of the subjects I have taught. 

In their last year of home education, I look for gaps in my students’ knowledge and understanding.

More like potholes.

Grand Canyons! 

Ay-yi-yi! 

Quick, bring in the National Guard and let’s fill and tamp those holes!

One of our roadworks is geography.  I had thought we could learn it “organically” through reading books and news magazines.  Sorry, Charlie!  Didn’t happen.  We’ve added two items to our Morning Routine. Oh, how I wish we had started this, say, twelve years ago.

•    Daily Geography Quiz   These are designed to let you know what you don’t know.  A motivated student –or mom– could learn even more if he or she was curious.  I have found that getting a third party, as in a computer, to ask questions is so much more efficient time wise and attitude wise.  We both love taking the quiz, even though we’ve never gotten all ten answers correct.  I can see myself doing this in my seventies.  Stand up, Sudoku, and make room for the Geobee Challenge.

•   Read about one country a day using World Book’s Encyclopedia of People and Places.  When our public library updated their set, the children’s librarian let me know the old set was for sale on the cheap. If your library has these books in the reference section, you could photocopy the page of Country Web Site listings in volume 6 and use the internet to study a country a day.

Ask me about Azerbijan, baby!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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It has been fun to listen to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (read by the authors) while gardening, canning and freezing produce this week.  In this book Kingsolver, her husband Steven Hopp and daughter Camille write about their family project of eating locally grown food for a year.  Only locally grown food.  Do you know what that means?  No bananas.  No lettuce from Mexico in the winter.  Their motivation seems primarily environmental (saving fossil fuels needed to ship food), but they make a good case for the superior quality of local food.

The book was a mixed bag.  Kingsolver writes warmly about their family life and the challenges involved with raising and growing enough food to can and freeze for winter months. This is their gospel and, despite their obvious attempts at a light touch, their message lumbered with sermonizing.  I caught myself groaning when Steven started talking.  Camille, a remarkably articulate college student, reminded me of a Preacher’s Kid who knows all the right answers and earnestly espouses them.  You had to love Lily, the eight year old with a thriving egg business, the only member of the family who didn’t actually write part of the book.

Sticking Points:

•  The section on fixing and eating meals as a family (at the table) was the best defense and best praise of family meals that I can remember.  The Hopp-Kingsolver family is obviously very hospitable and welcoming, with strong generational connectedness.  The descriptions of gatherings and parties made me want to slip in and join the robust fun.  

•  Their rational for discarding vegetarianism and resuming the eating of meat (which they raise and butcher themselves or bought from local farmers) was another excellent argument.  I married into a hunting family and 80% of our meat is wild game, birds, and fish.  I’ve always thought that if you are a meat eater – if you eat an animal that once lived, was killed and butchered – it is inconsistent to object to my husband killing and butchering an elk.  I thought that only vegetarians were consistent with an anti-hunting stance.  Barbara Kingsolver takes it another step.  She asserts that everything we eat was once alive.  Her respectful objections to veganism, in particular, are worth revisiting.

•  Because of this book, I plan to educate myself on heirloom seeds and plants, a term I never before fully understood.  I am persuaded to spend more money to get better quality with heirloom.

•  If you have young children and could only afford one organic food purchase, a pediatrician recommended it be milk.  Growth hormones in cow’s milk are nasty for young bodies.

On a practical note, I was listening late last night to Barbara’s rant against a January newspaper food column on making pesto, a helpful article in the wrong season,  when you’d need to live in the Southern Hemisphere to find fresh basil for making pesto.  I had scooped my own fragrant green pesto into my last half-pint jar and was wondering how to freeze small portions of the rest of my batch.  At that very moment, Kingsolver spoke of the convenience of small baggies of pesto in the freezer.  ~Aha~!  

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was good; but if I had only one book to read about food origins, I would enthusiastically recommend The Omnivore’s Dilemma (book review here).  My next book to read in this category is Michael Pollan’s follow up to Omnivore: In Defense of Food.     

I’m off to the Farmer’s Market!

Simple Pleasures in September

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Photograph taken through the window above my sink

I’ve been doing the dishes by hand lately. 
It gives me an opportunity to breathe,
enjoy the view,
(thank God for my neighbor Shelly and her green thumb)
unravel my thoughts,
and effortlessly clean my fingernails. 

My daughter-in-law suggested I trim back the delphinium
to see if it might bloom again.  It did!
I clicked this picture with the garage open,
giving it the dramatic black background.


Hostas are The Answer for north facing flower beds that get little sun.

Geraniums are great for color.  I always choose red geraniums.
My SIL kept her geraniums alive on a sunny closed-in porch for seven years.

Lupines are more common on the hillside than in a garden.
This is my first year growing them.

Lulus have been my favorite marigold (formally Marigold Lucida) for years.
I love the lacy leaves and small flowers.


Clockwise from the bright red flowers:
Red Celosia, Purple (mind went blank)  Light purple Penstemon, Orange-Yellow Marigolds

Well.  It’s time to update the 100 species challenge.  I think I stall because the perfectionist side of me (the side my husband would like to see applied to the dust bunnies under our bed) does not want to post a flower until I have “all the facts”.  I had this inkling to join the 100 push ups challenge.  When I mentioned it to Curt, he remarked with a splash of dryness, “Right – and you could recite your 100 species while you did your push ups.”  heh heh…

1.  Clematis
2.  Garlic
3.  Delphinium
4.  Daylily
5.  Dianthus
6.  Daisy
7. Lobelia
8. Verbena
9. Cosmos
10. Salvia
11. Diachondra

12. Rose  There are over 100 species of Roses – that would make a nifty ultra-challenge!  I learned that most species are native to … Asia!  Would you have guessed that?

13. Hosta – HA HA! I was sure this name came from the Latin and had something to do with enemy.  Of course, I believe that everything comes from the Latin and tend to make myself obnoxious informing people of Latin roots.  Hosta, however, comes from the Austrian botanist, Nicholas Thomas Host.  Joke’s on me.  Now I wonder about pronunciation.  I’ve always made it rhyme with cost.  Maybe it should rhyme with Costa Rica.
How do you pronounce this plant name?  Long o or short o? 

14.  Geranium – Not from the Latin, but from the Greek!  Commonly called cranesbills (evidently not that common – have you ever heard of them as anything other than geranium?) because the seed head is the same shape as the bill of a crane.  (Personal investigation pending)
The Greek word for crane = geranos.  Isn’t life sweet? We just learned a Greek word to add to our vocabulary.  I’m over the hosta thing.

15.  Lupine – Add this word to the “silent e – but short vowel sound” list (come, done, give, love, captive, minute, comrade and bade come to mind) Wait!  This is about plants!!  The leaves of a lupine are easy to recognize.  They look like palm trees.

16.  Marigold – I usually get all yellow Lulus that look like this.  They are the last flower to die in the fall, only after a hard frost.  I learned that the leaves are eaten as an herb and are a substitute for tarragon.  Am I gutsy enough to substitute them in my Tarragon Chicken recipe? 

That’s enough for today.  Like so many good things, all it takes is time and attention.  But once I jump in, learning a little botany is “the bee’s knees”.

Politics, Just This Once

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I stumbled onto this quote last week from a man for whom I have little admiration.  I’m not making a specific application of the quote, but I couldn’t resist posting it.

“He knows nothing,
and he thinks he knows everything.
That points clearly to a political career.”

  ~  George Bernard Shaw