No rain. At all. Our county is experiencing a moderate to severe drought and those are not words chosen by me. I just have to wonder -- how will this affect my garden? How many of the perennials will I lose?
It is, of course, cooler here -- though this is relative: cooler as compared with Florida. Positively toasty as compared with a typical late October day. A high of 68f (20c) today, and climbing! And of course, we have such mixed feelings about it: yes, nice, so nice to have a very long "early fall." But so weird, too.
(Pretty colors)
Breakfast with Ed. Nasturtiums from the garden. They survived the light frost last week.
We talk about machining. You might wonder -- what do you, Nina, know about machining! And the answer is -- very little. Ed, on the other hand, sees the demise if not total disappearance of higher status machining jobs as the culprit behind the rage that has percolated and finally boiled over in states such as ours. He's a guy who understands machines and has worked in machine design (and therefore with machinists, nearly all of them men) all his adult years. But he tells me he never fully understood their frustration, because he's not one to compare his own level of success to that of others (he always measures his accomplishments against his own past efforts). Status means little to him. Not so to the rest of the world, especially to those who feel its loss. Where nearly everyone seems to be doing better. Where the wife earns more as a health care worker, or a young tech neighbor, who sits by a computer screen all day brings home a larger paycheck. Hence the rage.
But is it productive? He shrugs. People will cut off their nose to spite their face -- one of those sayings my father liked... Trip up others, "blow up the system," because they feel they've been tripped up and knocked down themselves. And it's playing out before us right now. So we talk about this human trait of wanting revenge against the perceived villain, even if that revenge will destroy us all. (For a very good piece describing these trends, and for very good comments to it, you might want to look here.)
And continuing in this merry vein, we talk about grizzly bears. It happens that on the long flight from Florida to Minneapolis, I watched a movie about Grizzly Bear 399 up in Grand Teton National Park. I picked that movie because I'm running out of stuff to watch on longer flights. Too, Grand Teton is the next park on the list of parks I want to visit and so it seemed appropriate. I had no idea that the papers on this very day were flashing the headline that Bear 399 had just been run down by a car. Died the day I watched the movie about her life. So bears were very much on my mind and here, too, you can tie yourself up in knots trying to figure out what to do given the frustrations of those who view grizzlies as a threat (to their livestock, to tourism, for instance), and those who worry about the grizzlies' near extinction.
I write about both these topics because in so many ways Ed and I are removed from the rest of the world, at the farmette here, in south central Wisconsin. We can lose ourselves for days, indeed, months in a very simple pattern of life, with chickens, kids, flowers, trees, where the looming conflict is whether to cut down a limb on a tree that's shading too much of my garden. I step out to travel, he steps out to sail, but we know the essence of our lives lies right here, in the yellow farmhouse, amidst crab apples and maples and the horrible (according to me) honey locust trees. Ocean posts are born here, in this calm world of growing things (plants, children, animals). But we are not blind to the fact that in many ways, this is not the real world. Even without the global conflicts, plagues, famines, there are plenty of threats facing so many. It's good to pause and talk about all that and to feel grateful that we can eventually shut it off and go on with our quiet, beautiful day.
In the afternoon, Snowdrop is here.
Monday is the day I pick her up, feed her, read with her, drop her off at ballet. A bit complicated today because it turns out they are to show up to dance in their own Halloween costumes. Okay....
Monday is also the day I then go grocery shopping, late into the evening, because this is when I have the time for it. And so dinner is late of course. We don't mind. Eventually Ed and I come together on the couch and exhale. A moment, a long moment of total tranquility.
It feels really good to be back.
