Just a shout out to the Crawford Volunteer Fire Department: There was a spine jolting lightning strike in the neighborhood this evening. The ‘brave fire laddies’ (as the Colonel used to say) (and lassies, which he never said) were out in several vehicles in no time. I don’t know if there was a fire they put out, but they apparently patrolled the area for the duration of the dry lightning storm.
Our What’s App fire watch group responded to the strike over the next hour with observations from various perspectives. Some could track the patrol vehicles from their vantage points, at least one scouted the woods, one smelled smoke briefly, and I climbed the tower with binoculars. I know at least one person will sleep easier tonight for our community’s vigilance. I’m very grateful.
Sunset beyond the Grand Mesa last week, as smoke began to decrease here.
I’m grateful today that wildfire smoke in my little corner of the world has diminished, but watch with compassion and horror as Canada’s boreal forests burn out of control again this summer in climate chaos exacerbated wildfires, and thick smoke blankets southeastern Canada and the northeastern and mid-Atlantic US. There’s a great graphic in this Guardian article. The good news is that it’s likely to improve by Sunday in time for the World Cup final in New Jersey. Even better, the president told Canada it has to stop!
Sunrise through wildfire smoke beyond the Iwo Jima memorial outside Washington, D.C. That bird!from The Atlantic, Finn Gomez / Getty
“A 2024 study published in Science found that carbon emissions from wildfires had increased by 60 percent in the prior two decades. Fires in boreal forests such as Canada’s were the main reason. Another study, published in Nature, found that Canadian wildfires in 2023, when more than 43 million acres burned, generated more emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but the three most-polluting countries.”
I could do tonglen all day long for just the wildlife alone killed and displaced by these mega-fires. And how do we cope with the grief of losing so much of the natural, wild world to greed-induced climate chaos? Not well, it turns out. In modern western culture, we don’t even know how to mourn the deaths of beloved individuals very well, but even so we do it better than we grieve the death of nature. Our nervous systems weren’t designed (read, ‘evolved’) for the constant stress, duress, and distress that persistent grief over the degradation of our planet stirs in many of us. One Buddhist offers the model of palliative care to help us be with our planetary grief.
A friend shared this creative, low-impact alternative to July 4th fireworks: the photographer and friends used bubble blasters to celebrate–or is this AI? credit@luckyclover.5280
… Some Say in Ice
Meanwhile, the Colorado Sun sheds light on the true consequences across the state of last April’s catastrophic freeze in the North Fork Valley. After some reports recanted original estimates, it turns out the initial impression of 100% fruit loss was accurate. Fruitgrowers and related businesses that rely on harvests and fruit tourism have had to get creative this summer to stay afloat and support just some of their employees. Vendors and distributors across the state who rely on North Fork fruit, roughly 10% of Colorado’s harvest and most of its organic fruit, have also been hard hit.
Most of the fruit trees in the North Fork Valley, like my apricot, survived the freeze and have leafed out beautifully this summer without producing any fruit.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Fire and Ice, Robert Frost
Some people’s worlds have already ended in ICE. Congress failed Americans again by authorizing another $70B last month for DHA, apparently giving ICE license to kill again. Speaking of corruption and perversion, Penzeys is having a great sale right now on all spices beginning with the letters E,P,S,T,E,I,N: the sale code for checkout is FILES. Whatever happened to those files, anyway? As always, action is the antidote to anxiety. If ICE horrifies you, or the Epstein Files upset you, find your local grassroots activists and join them in peaceful protests, get out the vote efforts, and the camaraderie of shared purpose.
I’m grateful for leftovers for lunch all this week, after a delightful fly-by visit last weekend from old dear friends Ed and Gabrielle, globe-trotting, super-computing astrophysicists from Wyoming. They picked up some fresh vegetables from the smoky Ridgway farmers’ market on their way here from New Mexico, and I made big batches of potato salad and three-bean salad. Smoke was light, and Wren gave them each kisses of approval.
Keeping cooking and baking to a minimum this week with continuing temperatures in the mid- to high nineties, I did use the skillet to cook up a mess of garden greens decorated with the second and final green pea harvest–what am I doing wrong? This morning I baked a loaf of sourdough early because I’ve missed having bread. I’m grateful for doing something right.
I’m grateful I can do some little things for some little people to make this hard life in a world in upheaval a little easier. This white-breasted nuthatch figured out a few weeks ago to drink from the ant moat above the hummingbird feeder. Soon I noticed other birds drinking from them as well, scrub jays, house finches, a Bullock’s oriole. Now I fill the ant guards with water more often than I fill the feeders with nectar.
All the grey flames on the map are a gratifying indication that many of the fires of the past weeks are essentially out. Colorado remains the epicenter, and some are horrifically huge. A couple of friends have asked me, “Why don’t you move?” I told that to Garden Buddy, and she replied, “No—-! Where would we go????”My thoughts exactly. Fortunately, after dense smoke for days, the winds shifted late this afternoon and I was able spend a little time in the yarden, and to harvest my blueberry crop.
The yield was a satisfying 200% larger than last year’s. The half that I enjoyed was very sweet and perfectly ripe. Though reluctant at first because it was so tiny she didn’t recognize it as a blueberry, Wren ultimately enjoyed her half.
Kathleen shared this amazing photo she took while cleaning her outside windowsills in Florida. It’s a mama scorpion carrying its live-birthed babies with the adorable name of scorplings. I’ve bookmarked the word to use in Scrabble.
Speaking of adorable, this grebe family is a photo Audubon Society shared on Instagram, and I still can’t get over the faces of those little piggy-backed chicks. Their Pa is feeding one of them a feather, which helps with their digestion.
My digestion was helped over the holiday with a red, white, and blue French toast bowl, using up the heel of the latest sourdough boule.
Some flowers I’ve tried and failed to cultivate several times are enjoying some semblance of success, including these sweetpeas that the Bad Dog boss started from seed and shared with me. May they survive the summer, overwinter well, and climb the fence next year.
Zoom Cooking With Amy on the 4th resulted in one of the most delicious meals ever, a simple caramelized onion pasta. We both used thin spaghetti, and Vidalia onions, which were more teary than I expected, but also sweeter after half an hour simmering on medium heat in olive oil and butter. Once the onions were done, we tossed in chopped garlic for a minute, then the cooked pasta, and alternately stirred in pasta water and grated Parmesan until a glossy sauce came together. The flavor was amazing with an unexpected quality of juiciness. The last of the leftovers held this quality through lunch today.
Even after intense mindfulness practice for more than five years (or maybe because of it) I feel like I’m just now learning to really listen.
A week ago wildfires started in Colorado. Off and on, the mountains to the east are entirely obscured by smoke from the convergence of wind currents blowing through the Gold Mountain fire to the south the Snyder fire northwest on the border with Utah. Grand Mesa to the north is also occasionally invisible, and the sun is a red disk setting.
At times the smoke is mild, reminiscent of a campfire at a site across the campground, only pervasive and persistent, not wafting and shifting. Other times it’s an acrid stench that stuns my lungs. I’m grateful the fires aren’t closer, grateful I’m still safe at home, still breathing.
The Air Quality Index has been fluctuating between the 50s on the best nights to as high as 185. During the day it’s been hovering around 90 give or take a dozen, depending on how the winds have been blowing the previous hour. I wear a dampened mask to go outside and fill bird feeders, shift hoses in the yarden. The poor little birds! Especially the hummingbirds with their tiny lungs and extravagant heartrates.
Unretouched photo of a sagebrush glowing at sunset.Smoke billows a few days ago from the Gold Mountain fire roughly 60 crow miles south of us.
This evening the West Elk mountains are under deep chiarascuro. It changes hour by hour, more or less dense, wind dependent. The good news is that the Snyder fire seems to have stalled at 30,000 acres and is now 95% contained per Watch Duty.
Last night’s moonrise
The bad news is, the Gold Mountain fire just north of Ouray has grown to 25,000 acres in six days. The 2500-acre Willow fire in the mountains above Aspen forced evacuation of an Outward Bound base camp where a friend’s son lives. He remains up in the mountains on an extended backpack with a group of teens and may not even know of the fire. Friends of a friend lost everything the other day in the explosive Aspen Acres fire southwest of Pueblo including their pets, and barely escaped alive. More than 11,000 humans have been displaced from that fire alone as of tonight. Hundreds of structures have burned. Fairgrounds around the state are open to house large animals evacuated from the paths of various wildfires.
Current Watch Duty map, at 9:21 pm MT July 3.
And there are a few more wildfires in Colorado. A week ago, there were none. Multiply every human that’s affected by these fires by pick-a-number, and guess how many other sentient beings have been killed or displaced. Most of these fires will be found to have been started by human activity, whether accidental or malicious. All of them are raging as wildly as they are because of human-caused climate chaos. Tomorrow will likely bring more fires across the region from idiots shooting off fireworks despite fire bans. Climate ignorance pervading the political sphere has only and will only exacerbate the threats to all beings.
And even in the midst of smoke and rage I’m doing my best to calm down and eat well. Here’s a creamy potato-cheddar soup I had for lunch the other day.
I’m furious about human stupidity. I’m grateful for the courageous individuals and teams who do their best to mitigate these disastrous consequences, from the local, state, and federal firefighters on the ground to the fired federal employees who got together to resurrect the Strump-shuttered climate.gov with a new website, climate.us, and everyone in between.
I’m gratified to see the desert willow in full gorgeous bloom just a few years after a freeze so hard I thought it was dead.
I’m grateful once again for Alexandra Petri, who writes about MAHA day at the Great American State Fair, an event which I’ve been only peripherally aware of with my limited intake of current events and what passes for news. I giggled all the way through, from her description of the Screamin’ Freedom energy drink to her interaction with a featured ‘legacy’ speaker who urged her to go topless. If you don’t laugh sometimes you’ll just cry.
Even though Amy and I swore off Instagram recipes, we both can’t stop. The other day I tried the rice-waffle with some leftover rice, mixed with a little rice vinegar and sesame oil. I used too much liquid since I fudged the recipe with only enough rice for one cake. It took forever to crisp up and didn’t hold together well, but it was tasty and fun enough that I’ll try it again with proper proportions. They topped theirs with sushi elements, but I just made an Asian tunafish salad based on this recipe with what I had on hand.
Also doing my best to savor the moments I’m able to be outside. The temperature this fiery week has been lovely, it’s just been too smoky to enjoy it except in small sweet snatches.
And when we can’t be outside, we make the most of being inside.
I’m grateful that the California poppies self-sowed this year and bloom with more vigor than those I bought last year. I’m savoring their remarkably velvet-looking petals, and how much the pollinators love them.
These are the pink snapdragons mentioned in the previous post. Just look at those colors!
I baked the sourdough a little differently yesterday after watching Paul Hollywood demonstrate plaiting dough. I started with the simplest variant, just twisting two strands together. This meant that the loaf wouldn’t fit the round dutch oven, so I baked it on parchment paper on a cookie sheet, and covered with another parchment paper. This allowed the dough to dry out a bit much making a thick dark crust, just a little overdone. Next time I’ll find a lid that fits, or use foil, for the first half of baking.
These two screenshots are from the app Watch Duty, which now covers flood conditions as well as fires. This is a great app! The image above is from yesterday morning around 8 am; below is from this afternoon around 2:30. The pink areas denote Red Flag warnings: high fire danger. The fire icons indicate various sizes and stages of wildfires. The lower house with the blue dot is mine; the one above is my friend Barb’s, and the one in northern Utah is my cousin Robin’s.
The Bee Hive fire southwest of Montrose, roughly 75 miles from here, started yesterday and was holding steady at around 180 acres this afternoon, with lots of air support. See the little purple planes? But note the difference in the maps in just over 24 hours. So many more active fires! I’m grateful for the folks who invented this app, and for the many people who provide information and reports to keep it up to date. I’m grateful to anyone who is willing to call out the drivers of climate chaos, like the fossil fuel industry and the banks that finance these greedy, immoral corporations. Check out this graph from Rainforest Action Network, and this article in The Guardian about the ‘unfathomable’ increase in banks’ support for the industry last year.
Where’s Wren? And, how many pollinators? I was grateful to catch this western tiger swallowtail on the native thistle right outside the front gate, and didn’t notice the native bees until I looked at the pictures tonight. It’s amazing they all came out so clear given how windy it was at the time.
The wind got stronger through the afternoon. I spent as much time as possible outside today, until it was just too hot and windy. Then I came in for a meditation, some work time, and wrapped up the day with our monthly Grateful Gathering. Keeping with the month’s theme, Live Fully Alive, we talked about connections with nature, with people we love, meaningful interactions with strangers (or friends we hadn’t met yet); we heard about a nonagenarian who said life is a blink in cosmic time and a grandmother who said it’s a glance out the window. We held the truth of the phrase “Death is certain, time of death uncertain” as we shared gratitude that one of us had survived surgery after a life-threatening emergency; and we savored Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.”
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean — the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down — who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
~ Mary Oliver
Biko, Wren and I hung out together in the shade under the deck for awhile this afternoon. Later, after the gathering, when it was cool enough, Wren and Topaz and I strolled the Sunset Loop and the Breakfast Loop. The wind was so strong I had to strap my hat, and the atmosphere was hazy. Before we returned home the smoke rolled in. I hurried the last hundred yards, gathered the sheets off the line, closed up the house, and turned the air purifier on high. At bedtime, it’s still smoky out, and I’m grateful it’s cool enough inside to leave the house closed.
By the time we got home from the walk, most of the California poppy petals had blown off, but I got this shot earlier just as they started to fall. The penstemon blossoms are starting to fall also, and were blowing like cherry blossoms as we came inside. Life is a single bloom.
Penstemon palmerieverywhere you look… Another quiet day in the garden, catching up with householder tasks like laundry, dishes, cooking, in between watering, savoring, tending the plants.
How many pollinators? I’m grateful to see such diversity and numbers of pollinators making the most of the abundant garden. Coreopsis is also flourishing this year.
The first ripe strawberry surprised me this evening. I got another surprise last night right before bed. When I turned off the TV I heard rustling in the mud room, big rustling in some packing paper. Wren and I tiptoed over and I shined a flashlight in the corner. In a fraction of the time it will take you to read this, a large furry shape emerged from the paper sending my heart into my mouth as I thought squirrel! but it was only Topaz. Whew! A little on edge, are we? Back to the garden, I finally got the little tomato starts into their permanent beds. I’m grateful they grew so well from seeds Chris n’ Dave sent me, so I’m trying their Florida ‘Mickey maters’ again now that climate chaos has warmed up our growing zone from a low 4 to a solid 5.
I got the carrots thinned just in time, and handed the thicker of the thinnings to Little Wren to munch. But I did save the nearly true carrot one for myself. In the background, a thriving yellow snapdragon that overwintered: First time every any of them have made it through, and a lovely pink one also regrew.
I’m grateful for a restful, nourishing weekend with lots of meditations in nature; an extraordinary dharma talk from Roshi Joan based on her recent essay, Mutual Belonging: Compassion and Social Responsibility; and plenty of time to catch up with myself. I’ve been moving too fast. One health challenge after another, the simple fact of aging, the cascading polycrisis, the ephemeral beauty of this precious place, all coalesce in this urgent sense that my days here are numbered. It felt good to just breathe, a lot, and slowly.
We were overdue for a sunset loop walk, and as we sat on our usual log, our usual curious neighbors made their way over to visit. After a brief hello, they all turned as one and filed away. Shortly after we turned toward home a big cold wind blew in and sent the horses into a gleeful gallop. Let me remember to be grateful every living moment of every day.
There must have been a burst of migration that afternoon last week. I took the empty feeder inside to clean and fill it, and when I came out they mobbed me as I neared the hook, darting at the red base even as I carried it upside down. There was a similar frenzy at both main feeders yesterday, all day and especially in the evening. It had been cold, overcast, and rainy all day with a little burst of hail. With the blossom schedule all screwed up from the couple of exceptional freezes in the last month, and the general upheaval of climate chaos, the ancestral nectar sources for all kinds of pollinators are out of sync with migrations. This is one of the main reasons I commit to feeding hummingbirds. I figure we owe them.
Black-chinned hummingbirds are usually the first to arrive at Mirador, and for years have consistently shown up around April 25. This year they arrived a couple of weeks early. As soon as I heard one I went inside and mixed food with one cup of boiling water and one-quarter cup of white granulated sugar. This is the best approximation we can make for them. Honey, or any other kind of sugar, is NOT HEALTHYfor them. Take my word, or look it up in a reputable bird resource. These are tiny creatures with fast metabolisms who are very susceptible to pathogens. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, my go-to for all bird questions, says this about hummingbird food:
“Food coloring is unnecessary; table sugar is the best choice. Change the water before it grows cloudy or discolored and remember that during hot weather, sugar water ferments rapidly to produce toxic alcohol. During hot spells, change your hummingbird water daily or at most every two days. Your feeders will attract far more hummingbirds if you also grow appropriate flowers attractive to them.”
“The Black-chinned Hummingbird’s tongue has two grooves; nectar moves through these via capillary action, and then the bird retracts the tongue and squeezes the nectar into the mouth. It extends the tongue through the nearly closed bill at a rate of about 13–17 licks per second, and consumes an average of 0.61 milliliters (about one-fiftieth of a fluid ounce) in a single meal. In cold weather, may eat three times its body weight in nectar in one day. They can survive without nectar when insects are plentiful….. At rest, heart beats an average of 480 beats per minute. On cold nights they go into torpor, and the heart rate drops to 45–180 beats per minute. Breathing rate when resting is 245 breaths per minute at 91 degrees Fahrenheit; this rises to 420 breaths per minute when temperature drops to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Torpid hummingbirds breathe sporadically…. A Black-chinned Hummingbird’s eggs are about the size of a coffee bean. The nest, made of plant down and spider and insect silk, expands as the babies grow.”
“A jewel of high mountain meadows, male Broad-tailed Hummingbirds fill the summer air with loud, metallic trills as they fly. They breed at elevations up to 10,500 feet, where nighttime temperatures regularly plunge below freezing. To make it through a cold night, they slow their heart rate and drop their body temperature, entering a state of torpor. As soon as the sun comes up, displaying males show off their rose-magenta throats while performing spectacular dives. After attracting a mate, females raise the young on their own.”
You can hear the male Broad-tailed’s trill amid the buzz of all the wings, and catch a glimpse of their magenta throat feathers. This video is from that frenzied afternoon last week. For the last couple of hours before dark yesterday there were well over a dozen birds at each of the two main feeders. I’m grateful that some of them moved on with a more temperate day today.
So I checked with Dr. David Inouye about my hummer feeder protocol, and was glad to know I’m doing everything right. And maybe more meticulously than is strictly necessary, but I don’t want to take any chances. Here’s what I do:
Keep the feeders sparkling clean! Early in the season I don’t fill them completely, so that the food doesn’t sit around and ferment or grow cloudy. I prefer clear glass feeders with reservoirs that come apart completely so that I can thoroughly clean them with hot water and various sized bottle brushes. David said if you see anything questionable, scrub with a mild bleach solution or a little detergent and rinse thoroughly, and let dry completely before refilling.
Soap can leave a harmful film. Audubon Society recommends soaking feeders with mold or mildew in a vinegar solution. But you should never let them get that far! Even the tiniest bit of visible black on the glass or the portals signifies a potentially deadly threat.
Boil tap water for a couple of minutes.
While it boils, I put ¾ cup white table sugar in a quart mason jar, using a metal canning funnel. Then I fill the jar to the shoulder with boiling water (also via the metal funnel). This results in the right 1:4 sugar water ratio, roughly ¼ cup sugar for each cup of water, and fills the jar.
I stir with a dedicated sterling silver spoon until the sugar has thoroughly dissolved. Silver is said to have antimicrobial properties. It can’t hurt. I don’t wash the spoon with soap but rinse it afterwards in very hot water, and then stand it spoon-side up in a pint mason jar where I also keep the bottle brushes, brush side up.
Let cool completely. If I’m not going to use it the same day, I refrigerate it, but so far this season I’ve been making just enough to fill the feeders daily, a couple of them twice, so I just leave it on the counter with a lid on.
Bring in the empty feeder, rinse all parts thoroughly with very hot tap water, and brush all parts every other day. As summer heats up I may end up brushing every day. Yes, it takes some time, but they’re worth it.
Fill the feeder partly or completely, depending on how fast they’re drinking it, and hang it again.
Make sure the ant traps have water in them. This time of year ants aren’t an issue, but later in the summer they’ll climb up, down, and into the feeders, sometimes even clogging the holes. It’s better for everyone if a few of them drown in water while the rest are deterred by the obstacle.
Sit outside and enjoy!
Repeat as necessary.
I leave the feeders up in autumn until roughly a week goes by without seeing a hummingbird, and even then I keep an empty on hand for awhile and a cup of fresh nectar in the fridge for any stragglers. I also make sure that I have nectar flowers blooming all through the fall. One year in October there was a little tired hummingbird sitting on the stem of an Agastache sipping from a flower.
At the end of the season, I disassemble all the feeders and soak them in a 10% bleach solution for awhile, then rinse with clean water and let them dry completely. Then I box them all up and store them for next year.
Have I forgotten anything?
The cloudy glass at the top of this feeder is simply condensate after the hot water rinse and nectar refill that just happened. Some experts recommend letting the feeders dry completely before refilling, but honestly, even as obsessive as I am, I don’t have time for that!
Wren is very proud of herself after finding Biko so we could bring him in for another cold night.
No AI was used in making this post! Rebecca Solnit wrote recently, “‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.’ ― Hannah Arendt, and people who share AI slop are those ideal subjects. You all have the capacity to not do this. To choose to value the distinction and not to help break it down.”
We’ve several times walked past the juniper where the squirrel was hiding the other day without sight nor sound of it, but I did want to show the context. I held the camera over the hollow where the dead snag comes forward out of the twisted trunk. Amazingly, this tree, hundreds of years old, is still alive.
I’m assured by the Worms that the apricot will probably survive the freeze. It never occurred to me that it would suffer in last weekend’s cold snap, because it was thoroughly leafed out. I called in to As the Worm Turns this evening, and learned that apricot trees all over the valley suffered the same fate. All the leaves are dead. Above, I noticed they were drooping the second day AF (after freeze); below, yesterday, beyond drooping they are drying up, along with the embryonic fruits. Lance and Lulu have never seen this before either. We all moved here roughly thirty years ago plus or minus. An orchardist called in right after I did, and reported that they lost everything, peaches, grapes, you name it. Everyone is optimistic, though, that the trees themselves will survive, and we’ll know more later if they’ll leaf out again this year.
It was time to strain the lilac blossoms from the sugar on Sunday, but they did not want to sieve. They must have been too damp when I mixed them in, and they weren’t pretty so I didn’t want to keep them in with the sugar, so… I brought my science mind in and dumped the whole jar into a pot with half as much water. The blossoms floated to the top, I skimmed them off, and boiled until…
Voila! Lilac syrup! It’s as thick as honey, I could have taken it off sooner, and it is just as sweet as honey, too.
My dear friend and teacher Cindy would have turned my age tomorrow had she not died almost two years ago. She left behind one bereft daughter, some precious friends, and many grateful and grieving students. As I usually do I sublimated my grief about her illness and death until it started to surface late last year. I find myself thinking of her more often, her insights, lessons, and example informing my work and life more consciously than I acknowledged at first. Everyone has their own way of grieving, and even my own is unique to each loss, but in general I tend to close down around it for awhile and then it seeps out over time. I do a lot better with it now than I did twenty years ago during my Decade of Loss during which my mother died.
It’s been 22 years since she lived her last spring. Really, time flies whether you’re having fun or not. Even before she was sick, I cherished this picture of her. It’s an old print that suffered water damage, which I scanned and optimized. She was younger then than I am now. She and her sister and their old high school friend Lucy (with husbands tagging along) had met for a long weekend reunion at some woodsy resort in West Virginia. Here she’s reclining on the bank of a creek with her cocktail, looking as happy and relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. I thought of her as I grieved Cindy this week, and felt compassion for her daughter who was so much younger than I when she lost her mother. All these feelings swirled up as I was reading this article that came in The Atlantic email yesterday, “On Losing a Daughter,” which brought to mind a dear friend whose daughter died just over a year ago, leaving three young children. I can’t imagine a worse grief for a parent, except I can and it’s one reason I chose not to have children. Just in case. Reading of this woman’s singular grief, thinking of my friend who lost her daughter, imagining Cindy’s daughter’s emotions as her mom’s birthday approaches, my own grief for my mother surged. All the grief of mothers and daughters swelled and swirled together in me. And the recognition that this little whirlpool of these particular mothers and daughters is a drop in the bucket of global grief, mothers and daughters just one current in the vast, bottomless ocean of human griefs.
Michael and me as Carmen y Miguel, c. 2000
Anniversaries can be hard, especially birthdays and death days. The grief cascade actually started last week when John’s birthday came around and I thought about him a lot, missing him, missing Boyz Lunch, and feeling for his surviving partner. And then the anniversary of Todd’s death just a year ago came a few days later, and my heart was with his surviving partner. And then out of nowhere came a wave of grief for Michael, who died that same horrible summer of 2020 when Raven, Ojo, Diane, and Auntie also died, and everyone’s world changed with the massive Covid casualties, especially those whose loved ones died of it.
And the grief this week just keeps coming. A dear friend had to euthanize her dear old big dog last week. He had lived a good long life but that is cold comfort in the moment when the utter absence shocks and wracks and keeps on shocking for days, weeks, months. In my awareness of and compassion for her grief, the loss of Stellar the Stardog rocked me again, in gentle waves, much calmer than the tempest that accompanied his passing.
Griefs can’t be compared. But they can crack our hearts open to empathy, compassion, and more love, with time. And they have no timeline other than their own mysterious meandering path, with steep hills of struggle, long lulling valleys, and all terrains in between. I still mourn the sweetest black cat Ojo, and have come to a revised demise: as Paul suggested last fall, it’s far more likely that he was killed by a great horned owl than by a mountain lion. I was reluctant to accept that hypothesis, but given all attendant conditions it does make more sense. It doesn’t help the grief quotient, though.
I worried this morning that I might have lost his sister Topaz. We’d started out the gate for a walk and she was right behind us. I didn’t look back for awhile but it’s not unusual for her to take a shortcut and catch up so I kept walking. Then I heard a shrieking screeching that stopped abruptly. Wren took off in a beeline back toward the house, and I followed with quick steps. She was nowhere to be seen. There was no evidence of foul play, but no sign of her. I stood by the gate and called in all directions, walked back toward the woods and called, nothing. If she were out there she’d have come. It was late in the morning for an owl but not necessarily too late; and there’s that little fox that’s been passing through frequently. The sound could have been a magpie screaming at a cat, a cat screaming at a magpie, a cat screaming at a fox, or a fox simply screaming. Or any number of other options. I was gonna be late for an appointment, so I had to keep moving. Maybe something had scared her and she’d run back to the house. I checked the front door, then the back. Whew! She was lying by the back door as if I were late for her. Whatever happened, it’s one of those rare circumstances where we actually won’t know more later.
There are some animals that trigger grief in me any time I see images of them: polar bears, penguins, elephants, and gorillas among them. This is Fatou, 69, the world’s oldest gorilla in captivity, in the Berlin Zoo, who showed up in The Atlantic’s photos of the week. I can only imagine what kind of grief shemust experience. Probably solastalgia.
But really I think the grief train started while I was reading Against the Machine. It came up in conversation with a dear friend last night who was responding to my post about it. Paul Kingsnorth broke my world view, I told her. That book shattered the last of my illusions, pulled the scales from my eyes, as it were. I’ve been grieving the world I grew up in, and thought we could still maybe save. I’ve been swimming in the grief of solastalgia for weeks, months, years. Earth Day is a great occasion to mention it. Solastalgia is “the experience of chronic trauma, longing, or hopelessness due to negative or distressing changes to the home or ecosystem you are still in due to the impacts of climate change, weather events, fire, or other environmental factors…. With solastalgia, the home you are longing for can’t be returned to—it is there but not the same.” I’m grateful there’s a word for it, and grateful that this feeling is being addressed in Tricycle’s annual online Buddhism and Ecology Summit, which I’ve been participating in this week.
And, in the midst of awareness from within this sea of grief, I am bouyed by profound, uplifting gratitude for the number of people I can call my dear friends. And each day I’m noticing and savoring beauty, moments of joy and laughter, and the company of animals both wild and tame. The ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows: Can I be grateful for all of them? Next post, a story about a black bird…
The lilacs out the window on Friday morning. Note the decals on the kitchen window, iridescent through birds’ eyes, to curb or hopefully prevent window strikes. Overnight it went down to 15℉. As anticipated, this morning the cherry blossoms and nascent fruits look finished for the year. Oh well. The magnificent yellow columbine at the cherry tree base took a hard hit but will likely come back from the center. Everything else in the garden looks stressed or wounded but I’m optimistic that all will survive. I covered them again tonight.
Yesterday was a perfect day for a grilled cheese sandwich: cloudy with blowing snow all morning and bitter wind even after the snow stopped. The high was barely above freezing. Melted dill havarti on rosemary-garlic focaccia with thinly sliced red onion, lettuce, mayo, and a splash of raspberry jam offered tasty comfort at lunchtime. And it was a perfect day to finally bake the orange marmalade brownies I’d been considering for a long time.
I’ve never really liked orange marmalade, and I thought maybe this recipe would make it palatable for me. It was simple to make, and I must say, delicious. But I doubt I’ll be spreading marmalade on toast any time soon.
This day dawned sunny and crisp and then warmed up into the 50s. The brownie went beautifully with my ritual maple-vanilla latté and morning fiction. It felt good to share the bake with my neighbors, so Wren and I made a quick run up the driveway and then around the corner to make deliveries. Not only did I feel good about sharing, but I got to return home with surprise bonus bacon! Which went right into today’s cheese sandwich: lettuce, cheddar, and bacon with mayo, mustard and raspberry jam.
Of all the articles I read online this week, by far the best was this hilarious article on The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America. It provided a wonderful balance to the majority of the other headlines. I’ve been working with Discernment this month, and considering deeply what media I ingest. Why, I wonder, is 90% of the news and entertainment about horrors, when in actual fact, most humans spend most of their time–maybe as much as 90%–doing good, kind, generous things, and simply aspiring to be good, kind, happy people? Media coverage of the species is terribly skewed toward bad behavior, and by over-representing violence, betrayal, destruction, hatred, rage, etc., is invariably influencing the zeitgeist. Too bad. One more good reason to focus on gratitude and living mindfully.
I baked a sourdough focaccia yesterday thinking I would freeze some portions for later. It was delicious even though I forgot to spread it in the pan before going to bed so it overflowed the bowl overnight. I worried that it wouldn’t rise enough in the pan to be soft. It wasn’t perfect but it was perfectly fine.
After today’s cheese sandwich I’ve got enough for three more lunches. I didn’t need to worry about freezing any.
We took a short slow walk yesterday afternoon to check out the early flowers, knowing they might freeze back in the next couple of nights. Did I mention that I thought I heard the first hummingbird a few days ago? I quick went inside to start nectar water on the stove, pulled out the box of feeders and cleaned one with dilute bleach and let it dry while the nectar cooled, and put it out a couple hours later. This morning I saw the first male black-chinned hummingbird at the feeder. Time to get the other feeders ready to go out Saturday morning. I did bring in the one feeder for tonight with the freeze forecast.
Wren checked out the numerous Townsendia scattered along the sides of the trail. I played with Hipsta Impressionist again to see what I could get with its random filter. I especially like the second one, how it smeared a petal like impasto. But I prefer the original unfiltered photo below over all the variations.
Wren had run ahead of me and Topaz and I heard the sharp alarm call of a critter, but I couldn’t find it. She was running back and forth near this tree, and it sounded like the cry came from the canopy. I listened from all angles, as Wren was doing; it sounded high, it sounded low, it sounded even as though it came from another tree. Then there was a buzz to it. We finally narrowed it down to a hollow in the base of the trunk, and Wren seemed determined to tear it apart. I barked at her to leave it, and aimed the camera in but couldn’t tell much, so set it to 5x zoom with flash. Right as I snapped the picture Topaz shot out of nowhere hissing at Wren and startling me. Thankfully Wren cowered instead of attacking. But then they were both obsessed with the trunk and I discerned it was best to hurry us off. Only after I got them both well away from the trunk did I check my hasty image:
Today’s adventure took a different turn. There’s a freeze warning for tonight, and a hard freeze warning for tomorrow night. The garden is so far along I worry I’ll lose a lot. The cherry tree! I’m grateful that I caught some of As the Worm Turns on my drive home from my annual checkup yesterday.
The gardeners were discussing ways to protect fruit trees from freezing. The valley orchards will be at high risk tomorrow night, and I feel for the fruit growers. I wish for all their orchard-warming techniques to succeed. One way they mentioned is to spray foliage with kelp spray, which strengthens cell walls among other things. I didn’t catch the details, but did drive up to the Hitchin’ Post this afternoon to pick up a bottle of FoxFarm Kelp Me Kelp You seaweed plant food. I mixed the kelp with water in my pump sprayer and saturated the cherry tree foliage and pretty much everything else I’m concerned about. If it doesn’t help protect them from the freeze at least they’ll be well fed when they come back.
I spent the entire work day preparing to freeze. It started when I decided to make lilac scones. The second round of lilacs were only half open and I expect to lost most of them tomorrow night. I brought in some more blooms for the vases, and harvested a basketful to make lilac sugar. I couldn’t find the recipe I used some years ago, when I just plucked the flowers off the stems and incorporated them into the dough, so I looked up recipes again. That’s where I learned about lilac sugar and lilac syrup. I’m not sure whose recipe I’ll use for the scones whenever I get around to baking them, but making sugar and syrup I’ll have lilacs preserved for months to come and many uses.
I decided to make the syrup first, but after rinsing, drying, and plucking petals for an hour I didn’t think I had enough for syrup, so I opted for the sugar. It calls for 1 cup lightly packed petals to 1 cup sugar. By the time my packed petals met an equal volume of sugar I realized I had packed them too tightly and probably could have pulled off the two cups for syrup, but by then it was too late. They were all shook up.
I had to add more sugar to achieve an equal ratio. Now the petals steep in the sugar for three days, and I’m supposed to sift them out, but I think I’ll just make a batch of scones including petals first. Then we’ll see what happens with the rest of it. So, the lilacs are prepared to freeze, I’ve done all I can to preserve them.
Then I set about recycling the distilled water bottles from the mechanical room, which I save for just this purpose as I fill the solar batteries through the year. I cut the bottoms off them, and in late afternoon as it clouded up and the temperature dropped, I set them over all the new perennials I’ve planted in the south border and in patio pots.
Then I fluffed old hay over all the garden beds filled with tender pea shoots, strawberry plants, nascent rhubarb, delicate carrot tops, baby kale, flower sprouts, and garlic leaves. I also covered a few areas with an old blanket and black plastic. As I moved through the day I clipped any remaining tulips, jonquils, and the flowers from the new perennials since they’ll freeze Friday night anyway, and gathered them all in a couple of vases. I am now finished preparing to freeze.
