SERENITY SONNET

What shall my mind dwell upon? Gas hit $5.00/gallon today, more than twice what we paid last year, but also it was a beautiful day with breezes of a perfect temperature, neither too hot nor too cold. Perfect weather for hilling potatoes, as the children at my Childcare were in especially good moods.

This is a sonnet of transition from worry to wonder.

Annoying annoyance will not be halted
By pleading reason, for fools have defaulted
On linkage to reason, to joys exalted.
They suck lips of pain with wounds ever salted. 

Like whining Skilsaws that scream all the night
They insist resting is never quite right.
They spoil even moments of simple delight
Like bad teeth that make you flinch as you bite.

I turn to the skies and sigh, "Father, Please!
Send us some peace! Bless us with Your ease.
Like children content in the shade of the trees
Let us feel filled by the hush of a breeze.

What use are minds when their noise will not cease?
Grant us simplicity steeped in Your peace."

WEEDER NEEDER

Running a Childcare makes me especially aware of what every parent is sadly made conscious of: What strikes an older person as beautiful and worth sharing make strike the young as exceedingly disagreeable. And the young may become disagreeable in response. For example, when the parents of the cartoon character Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” take him out to see the pristine beauty of a fresh fall of snow, Calvin doesn’t appreciate it.

At some point I decided it was more enjoyable to garden alone. In 2019 I had my most successful garden ever, simply because I stopped inflicting gardening upon people who have the sane opinion that dirt is dirty. I had more fun, they had more fun, yet at the time of the harvest I had second thoughts, which I go into, in an old, 2019 post:

https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2019/10/07/local-view-lonely-harvest-sonnet/

The long-winded post contained a sonnet which is sneakily revolutionary as it is only 13 lines when they are supposed to have 14.

I wish they were as old-fashioned as I.
Though frost cuts, I heap a heating harvest,
Yet I no longer even bother to try
To get them to sweat, though reaping’s blessed.

Today I hauled a hundred pounds of squash
To my larder. For me that’s four hundred
Meals. But I know they’d, with piggy squeals, quash
All joy from my harvest, whining they’ve bled
And are wounded, because fall’s frost cuts.

Those who don’t plant don’t know why they’re fed.
Their fine complaints are but signs they lack guts.
They think they make sense, while making me groan
For no man likes to reap harvests alone.

To spare you the effort of following my meandering mind down all the rabbit holes of convoluted logic, the post wound up concluding that no man is an island, and I should find a way to avoid gardening alone. It also confessed I saw no foreseeable way of doing so.

This seems especially true of weeding. I like weeding, but many suggests this proves I’ve gone completely bonkers in my old age.

Why do I like it? Perhaps it is because, as you age, the fingers are still nimble, (providing you are spared arthritis), when the rest of you huffs and puffs doing what once was quite ordinary.

I once saw a film showing the pianist Artur Rubinstein at age ninety. Always a bit of an exhibitionist, he allowed the film to begin with him getting out of bed, so ancient and stiff he has trouble getting loose enough to stand up and walk, but then he sits at the piano and loosens up his fingers running through a few scales, and then, with startling swiftness, is able to play flowing rhapsodies of music. Probably it isn’t as good as he could play as a young man of seventy, but still it was utterly amazing, and also proof using your fingers doesn’t make you huff and puff. And weeding is using your fingers. It doesn’t make you huff and puff. Furthermore, if I may be so bold, I am a sort of Artur Rubinstein of weeding.

My problem is I plant too much. If I only planted short rows, it wouldn’t be any challenge, but with his Fraudulency, Biden, seeming out to create a famine, short rows are not long enough. But then, if you plant long rows, you create long rows to weed. And this year I am so serious about planting long rows that the weeds are already springing up while I am still planting the long rows.

This is especially true in the case of carrots. Carrots are good keepers, when winter comes around. Ordinarily I wouldn’t need to plant that many. After all, how many plastic, one-pound bags of carrots does my wife buy at the market for us in the course of a winter? Maybe a pound every two weeks? Even if you call our northern winters 24 weeks long and add another 8 weeks until we can harvest our first carrots next year, that’s only 16 pounds. A double-row of eight feet will do. Easy. (Especially if, God willing, I get some huge, half-pound carrots.) But, if Biden has his way, and we all starve to stop Global Warming, I’ll need some extra, for family and friends and church suppers. Therefore I’m starting with four times what I need; thirty-two feet of double-rowed carrots. (If I have time and space I may add a later crop. But, to start, let us see if the first doesn’t kill me.)

The thing about carrots is that they are tiny seeds that produce the feeblest, hair-like seedlings. Meanwhile the weeds grow boisterously, swiftly twice as high and twice as large. Compare a carrot seeding:

And here are weeds:

And here are carrots and weeds squaring off to do battle.

Actually, they don’t square off like that. The above is actually the edge of the weeded area and the non-weeded area. The carrots are hidden by the weeds, in the non-weeded area. Therefore, you must have fingers like Rubinstein and weed very carefully. After selecting the largest weeds, and pulling them, you start to see the carrots underneath, and can pull the smaller weeds.

If you only planted eight feet of carrots the weeds would never get so far ahead of you, but if your eyes are bigger than your stomach, in a gardener sort of way, this is your plight. The fortunate thing is that, although the carrots are tiny, they have deep tap roots, and only a few get torn up as you uproot the larger weeds. (And that actually thins the carrots, which is a later job. First you must help the carrots survive, before you can even get to the point where you worry about thinning.)

This year has been very dry, so my scarce free time has been usurped by having to do what the clouds should do and do better: Water. It is very important to water the tiny carrots for if they get too dry before their tiny roots shoot downward as tap roots, they just die on you. But even as you save them you are watering the weeds.

Then when it did rain, it was thunder rain, which is somehow loaded with nitrogen by cloud-to-cloud lightning. It is wonderful as it causes all your plants to abruptly leap upwards, but horrible because it has the exact same effect on weeds. The earth which looked so brown and weed-free after rototilling abruptly is lush with a kazillion weeds.

It was obvious I needed help, with so many feet of planted plants all getting weedy at once. My daughter and daughter-in-law have been very helpful, but my daughter is about to get married, and I didn’t live so long by telling women weeding is more important than weddings (even if it is.)

Just about every business in town has a help-wanted sign, so finding help from outside seems unlikely. Therefore, my wife suggested I turn to our Childcare staff. I cringed. I didn’t want to offend them. But, to my astonishment, they responded favorably. (Perhaps controlling weeds is easier than controlling children.)

One thing I never expected was for them to be so gracious, as I instructed them. I expected them to behave as if I was asking them to ingest poison, but instead they behaved as if I was Rubinstein teaching them piano. Even my boring sidetracks (into how this weed is edible and the juice of that weed is good for bug-bites) didn’t cause their eyeball to fall out with boredom, but rather they found me fascinating. (I would say it is the difference between a teenager and an adult, but one was a teenager.) We chattered away and I actually found myself enjoying myself. Then I left them to weed alone, and they worked tirelessly under a blazing sun.

They were slower than me, but more painstaking. I tend to leave the smallest weeds, just attacking the big stuff, but they left the carrot patch utterly weed free, and made great headway down the second patch. I’ve never been so ahead of the weeds, at this point.

And just to show I am not one of those exploitive bosses who sits in some office as others do the work, here is that same row of carrots after I got down on my knees and completed the job. (Please note how I used the pulled weeds as mulch.)

This is only one small skirmish in a larger battle, yet it strikes me strangely as a sort of miracle. The weeding not only got done, but it was fun. The girls actually said they liked it.

I don’t know what I am doing differently. Weeding caused my own children to experience post-traumatic stress and likely will cost them a fortune in therapy, just to recover. But this year my employees behave as if I am doing them a favor. (Maybe I should have paid my kids for feeding them.)

This brings me to the bottom line, grubbier than dirt. How much are these carrots going to cost me? Well, that all depends on the price of carrots next fall. At current prices my carrots are a very bad deal, but, if Biden saves the world from Global Warming by having carrots cost a hundred dollars a pound by November, my little patch will be a gold mine.

GRASSHOPPER HELPS ANT

The “green” agenda of his fraudulency, Biden, is having the consequences which people like me, (people who are dubious [to say the least] about “Global Warming”), have been warning about. We were warning twenty years ago. Ten years ago. Last year.

Basically, we were saying fossil fuels might have a bad side, but they also had a good side. Before we banned them, we should be sure we had a viable alternative, or we would lose the “good side”.

Well, we are losing the “good side”, as Biden does his best to prevent the production of coal, oil and gas. The “good side” was warm houses in winter, cheap fertilizer for our crops, cheap transport of essential goods, mobility of labor at low costs, low costs for the manufacturing of goods, to begin a partial list of benefits, (not mentioning plastics.) Now, with even a small part of that “good side” removed, we are seeing how much more expensive life is.

Is it worth it? At best, using the most biased models, abandoning fossil fuels might decrease the warming of the planet .05 degrees a year. (And there is debate about whether a warmer planet might be a better planet, more like periods of prosperity called “The Medieval Warm Period” and “The Roman Climate Optimum”.)

Now that we are just beginning to feel the pain of Biden’s green agenda, the answer seems to be “this is not worth it.” But, sorry to say, it is too late. Elections have consequences, even if they are rigged, and we now are witnessing the bleep hit the fan. It will get worse before it gets better.

For the trusting individuals who believed Biden was “moderate” I imagine it is a great shock to witness the destruction of the stability Trump had established, and to furthermore realize the destruction reaches levels unseen even in the lifetimes of our great-grandparents. Not that our great-grandparents knew of the modern miracle called “baby formula”; (they used a “wet nurse” instead,) but our great-grandparents never witnessed a government so inept that it manufactured a shortage of wet-nurses. For trusting, suburbanite housewives, (who apparently formed a sold block of Biden voters, women certain Biden was sane,) it is jarring to see he is not.

For trusting people who worked tedious jobs for decades, trusting their pension would mean something, it is a shock to see inflation erode their fixed income. It will be sad if they find it hard to afford heat next winter. It will be sadder if there is no heat to be had, and oil must be rationed.

Me? I lost faith early in life, when it came to authorities, and I had little belief any pension would be worth it. I was certain the bleep would hit the fan decades ago. This freed me from ever needing to stick with a job for the attached pension, for I “knew” the national debt was too high during the time Jimmy Carter was president, and was “certain” the inflation, (which was pretty bad back then), would spiral completely out of control. I was wrong. Some of my friends who had more faith in the system than I did retired at age fifty with fat pensions and have lived comfortable retirements, as I’ve had to go on working, and working, and working.

Now some of those friends, who retired at age fifty, are thinking maybe they need to go back to work at age seventy. That’s how bad the “green energy” inflation is. They look at their bills for lighting their houses and keeping the furnace going, and inflation is 50%. They could handle bills of $500.00, but $1000.00 wreaks their budget, and they consider rejoining the world of a working man. Welcome back.

Me? I’ve gone on working, and working, and working, but never for one boss. I’ve been free. I work for people I like, but, should the rot set in and a boss start to reek, I have always been free to say, “Sorry, Charlie”, and depart. So what if I lost health insurance? I was hale and hearty without it. So what if I lost a potential pension? I was sure the world would never pay the pension when it was due.

Now it seems I was right, after all. Politicians do not respect their elders in the manner scriptures command, and rather look for ways to avoid paying what they promised. Their breaking-of-promises is most ugly when their way of avoiding payments is to exterminate the elderly they promised to pay.

The most obvious and odious example of such filthy behavior was when President Trump made-available hospital ships and convention centers for people stricken with the coronavirus, but Governor Cuomo refused to send the ill to such highly equipped places, and instead sent the ill to ill-equipped old soldier’s homes and senior citizen facilities. This spread the corona virus among the very elders who should have been most protected, and roughly 10,000 died. Yet this in turn saved New York State roughly a billion dollars, because if those elders lived it cost roughly $100,000 per person per year to honor elders. 10,000 dead “saved” a billion. Killing elders may not be honoring them, but modern politicians know little about honor when a billion dollars is involved.

This didn’t surprise me, for, as I stated, I had little trust. I grew up in a rich town and knew how vile and fetid bigwig fat cats can be. I was repelled, and, though my disgust forced me to become downwardly mobile, I discovered the opposite of fetid is the fragrance of freedom. Money was not my master, and the blandishments of insurance and a pension could never seduce me into working for a boss who was not righteous. So what?

So…I lacked insurance and a pension. I’m still working at age 69, and qualify as poor, but I have ten grandchildren, while Bill and Hillary Clinton have zero. (And they are still working, too.)

Considering I’m sixty-nine, some ask me why I don’t apply for social security. Even though I keep working and working and working, friends say I should collect the benefits and then let the government take them back when I pay my taxes. But I find it hard to stomach asking. I have never thought Social Security was secure. I assumed the politicians had itchy fingers and would plunder the funds. The little I knew, investigating Social Security, seemed to affirm my distrust.

When President FDR created Social Security in 1935, he imagined the money collected from workers would go into a fund which the government would care for. The fund would grow, for the hardship of the Great Depression caused the life expectancy of men to sink to 56.6 years, which meant that most men paid into the fund and never collected a cent. They didn’t mind, (much), for Newspapers highlighted the first, prune-faced elders gratefully collecting their Social Security checks, even though they had paid little or nothing into the fund. A working man could feel good he helped elders.

Despite initial subtractions for elders who paid little into the fund, for the most part the fund grew, with more people paying in than collected. The life expectancy of women never surpassed 70 years until 1949, and as recently as 1969 the life expectancy of men was 66.8 years. This meant men collected for less than two years after paying in for forty-five or even fifty years. The fund was bound to grow. Basically, most people who collected in 1969 were widows, stay-at-home Moms who could expect to live to be 74.3 years as their husbands died at 66.8. Social Security was a good deal, a kind deal, a mercy for widows, but a doomed deal, because the fund grew too large.

1969 also marked a huge increase in the amount of people paying into Social Security, as the “Baby Boom” generation began to work, (albeit erratically.) The fund expanded, and politicians felt such an enormous amount of money should be invested wisely, but I think the investments were unwise, for rather than the fund now being more enormous, as it should be after the “Baby Boomers” made payments for a half century, the fund is basically bankrupt. Where did all that money go?

Ask the politicians. It will take a bit of sodium pentothal to get an honest answer.

Basically, to be blunt, they used up the money for bribes. They like to make bribery sound altruistic, “preforming services for constituents”, but, basically, they gave the money to people who had not paid into the fund, and who had no reason to expect benefits. The politicians would always claim they were “helping the poor”, but in truth they were bribing voters to vote for them. And now the money is all gone and the only way to pay the Baby Boomers will be to print money, which causes inflation and makes a Social Security check basically worthless. Where’s the “security” in a check that barely pays for heat and electricity in January, and leaves nothing for food?

I hate to say, “I told you so”, but I told you so. I wish I’d been wrong. In fact, I thought I was wrong, when my friends were retiring twenty years ago with cushy pensions, and I had to keep working and working and working. They had trusted what I didn’t trust, and they were reaping what I didn’t sow. I was the grasshopper, and they were the ants. But now….they face bankruptcy, as I’ve been bankrupt, (or at least hand-to-mouth), all along. Welcome back, fellows! Hope you enjoyed your long vacations, but its time to get back to work.

Just today, besides running my Childcare, I huffed and puffed out in a cold rain in my garden hoeing together thirty hills to plant winter squash in. God willing, each hill will bear three vines and each vine will produce three to ten squashes. Assuming only three per plant, that’s nine squashes per hill, and 30 hills will give me 270 winter squash. Assuming an average weight of 4 pounds, that’s more than half a ton of squash.

I doubt I can eat half a ton of squash next winter. In fact, I’ll have an excess to feed others with. Hopefully they’ll have something to trade in return that I desire, and we can call it “barter”. But if my neighbor is broke, unable to pay for (or find) oil to heat his home, (due to Biden’s policy) and unable to afford squash at the store-with-empty-shelves, because berserk inflation has a squash costing fifty dollars, I’ll not call it “charity”, but “hospitality” to invite him over to my warm wood stove to roast squash seeds on that stove, with some squash soup and squash pie. And hopefully we’ll be able to laugh at the irony of me, an old coot who has no pension, providing for him, an old coot who has one. It is like the grasshopper providing for the ant.

Of course, neighbor will not get off Scot free. He will have to pay a price for my hospitality. Hopefully the cost will not be too much to bear: He will have to listen to me recite some of my poetry, going back sixty years.

Here’s a couple of sonnets from over forty years ago. (1979 or 1980). I think that, despite the fact I was in my twenties when I wrote them, they have aged well. They give me the strange sense that all our lives we’ve sensed the impending crisis. There was just nothing we could do to stop it. Whatever will be will be. My old sonnets are like mouse-squeaks of warning.

THE GRASSHOPPER SONNET

When I was young, I was told a fable
About a grasshopper and one good ant.
The good ant gathered grain for its table.
The grasshopper fiddled the following rant:

"Man can't live on bread alone; all need song,
Yes, all need song. Life, without its tune
Is wrong; yes, utterly hopelessly wrong,
wrong, WRONG!"

                              That grasshopper came to ruin
Or at least that is what the fable states.
I guess that means next spring will be silent
Without the sweet chirping a grasshopper makes.
I guess that means all the ways that I went 
Will lead me to death, while you'll never die.
Either that or else all the old fables can lie.

THE ANT SONNET

The poor ants work while the grasshoppers fiddle.
The ant looks up to the sky with trust.
The ant can't see God stands in the middle.
The ant is shocked by the first locust.
The locusts swarm and the fields are stripped.
The ant's outraged, and it seeks its peers.
Army ants march in tight ranks, grim lipped.
Soon the last locust disappears.
Thus there's no fiddling. Thus there's no grain.
Thus we have nothingness. Thus we're insane.
Thus all our efforts breed flourishing pain.
Thus does humanity go down the drain.
Pray for ecology; then there's a chance
That grasshoppers will get along with the ants.

FOUR SONNETS: THE MIRACLE CALLED MAY

I’m afraid I’m going to be a complete failure, when it comes to aging gracefully. I never seem to learn. Even when I creak out of bed crippled from some foolishness I enacted the day before, and tell myself it serves me right, and that from now on I will act my age, before you know it, I’m tempted into the next foolishness.

I blame it on the kids. They don’t respect the fact I’m an elder and am supposed to be doddering, and instead say, “Let’s go!”

The winter seemed too long. There is no spring 
In my step this spring. I'm feeble and frail 
As the bluebirds return. I spread a wing 
That seems molted. It seems I can't set sail 
And yet...See how I'm sailing! A man's heart 
Can't abide quailing. Though his legs and lungs 
May not set him dancing, his heart will start 
Romancing and singing. Though what is sung's 
In a reedy voice, the listeners weep 
For they hear a warm heart that will persist 
Though flesh stops thumping. No sky is too steep 
Nor wings too molted to ever resist 
The uplift of God's reverse-gravity
Where lead's left behind and the light's set free.

Other old-timers, even older than I am, are also doing a poor job of retiring, and instead seem determined to change the world in their decrepitude with some strange idea called “The Great Reset”. They used to smile teeth and bat eyes and sweet talk about how what they did was “for the children”, but lately they have stopped even pretending. They talk about a mother’s “right to abort”, even after the child is born, which seems like murder to me, and they’ve created a baby-food shortage by closing a major plant over a technicality and dragging their feet about reopening it. They are creating other shortages as well, such as a shortage of heating oil which may chill children next winter, and even shortages of food. None of this seems good “for the children”, but these senile old fossils in Washington never come to me for advice. All I can do is fight in a farmer’s way, which is to fight a food shortage.

You can't have summer's long days without winter's 
Long nights, yet when my wall's calendar strays 
From April to May I wish the splinters  
Of ice to never return. Gone are grays 
And only green is seen. I would hit the brakes;
Stop the calendar if I could. I see  
Why some flee to Florida, but that makes 
The long days shorter. Hot tropic's country 
Has twelve-hour days. They can never know 
Our glut of sunshine; our wild overdose 
Of glee, nor how swiftly gardens will grow 
Given such kindness. I pull the time close 
And beg compassion forever to stay. 
Healing is sweet after overmuch gray.

Something about an old fossil like me taking on the fossils of the Deep State does seem absurd. It is like a very old David with a cane taking on a gigantic, hobbling Goliath. But May is a month of miracles.

I heard the catbird singing and stumbled 
From bed to the coffee pot with my eyes 
Still shut, then glanced at the clock and grumbled. 
It was long before dawn. That bird's sweet cries 
Were to the sinking moon. The other way 
Saw planets rising like a string of pearls. 
First Saturn, then Mars, then, with hints of day, 
Jupiter and Venus. Without gray curls 
Of cirrus or purple scud, the sky was pure 
As was the chorus of fluting thrushes, 
Yet the light brought the catbird a cure 
And it sung its plain "meow." Sky blushes 
But none now hear what my sleepwalking heard: 
A catbird as sweet as a sweet mockingbird. 

It is hard to find farmhands in the demented economy the Deep State has established. Every shop has a “help wanted” sign. What is an old fossil like me to do? I simply ask, and much to my surprise I got an answer. Namely a daughter and daughter in law.

If one is going to refuse to age gracefully, it sure is nice to get a little help! But then, May is a month of miracles.

What could be more Benign than soft white clouds
In May's first relenting of cold east winds,
When leaves peek from buds, and decide not to drowse
Any longer, but set sails of green goldened
That turn the twiggy woods to clouds shadeless:
Canopies of light, as if it was they
And not the sun that shone...and all distress
Is melted, or else fades so far away
It's forgotten, which strangely reminds 
Of what this lost poem began about:
The soft white clouds, or was it what's Benign's?
How can mere kindness make men want to shout?
How can an ounce outweigh so many tons?
That mystery's answer is surely the sun's.

LOCAL VIEW –Fresh Start–

My resolutions are not a solution
So this year I will not make even one,
For in my solutions are a pollution
That make all the salmon turn tail and run
Back up the river to pools of their birth;
They don’t reach the sea and enjoy the sweet mirth
Of billowing blue that covers the earth
And pounds stones to sand, and gives life it’s worth.

So please do not tell me to get into shape.
I resolved to be square, but got pounded.
Like a pebble that waves will not let escape
My God has made me a man well-rounded.

Your sharp points are blunted; I will not vow
For I already am, and will live in the Now.

One of the many reasons it is better to be sixty than twenty is that you get to skip the business of always feeling you should be being better than you were the year before. Instead the process of biological deterioration is setting in, and you are lucky to even be the same as you were the year before.

Don’t get me wrong. Spiritually we should always be striving to correct our mistakes and improve, but, since when has spirituality mattered a hill of beans, in this material world?  And, in material terms, a man can not run as fast at age sixty as he could at age thirty. Therefore, if you value material things and gauge value with a stop watch, a man grows less and less valuable as he ages.  In material terms, there is no reason to honor elders. They belong in the dumpster.

Fortunately the complete banality that rules the minds of communists and economists and many psychiatrists does not rule the work-place, and there are still  some employers who prefer a spy old man of 80 to a young galoot of 25. Why?  Well, for one thing, the old geezer shows up at work on time, whereas lots of young galoots find that very difficult. And so and so forth. Until, despite all materialistic logic, you arrive at a mass of evidence that demonstrates a geezer of 80 is a better worker than a galoot of 25.

How can this be? It defies physical science.

The answer lies outside what most call materialism, and matter, and what matters to the mindless. It involves a thing beyond the brain, called “The Mind.”

A pure materialist will not accept that we are anything other than brains, but we are more than that. We are minds, and when our brains quit and rot we will continue on as minds.

If my brain fails before the rest of my body does, I’ll be afflicted with various forms of senility that make me look stupid, but my spiritual progress will not stop. My mind will still be working, even if it can’t communicate through normal physical channels. It will continue to grow, even if my brain becomes so hapless I only drool.

But, if my brain remains sharp even as the rest of my body fails, I’ll be better able to communicate. Even if I hobble into work at age 80 with a cane, my employer will note I am on time, and do fifty other incidental things better than the young galoot who comes bounding in two hours late, and does fifty other things worse. Therefore, if push comes to shove at that workplace, guess who the employer will lay off?

I am not just talking through my hat. I have seen many examples of old geezers being desired, while young galoots are not, at workplaces.

The point I wish to make is that, in terms of materialism, this is utterly illogical.

The irony is that many think “employers” are the epitome of materialism.  They think employers think of nothing but money.

Maybe some employers are like that, but the simple fact of the matter is that, if employers prefer a physically inferior 80-year-old to a physically superior 25-year-old,  the employer cares about something that isn’t physical and isn’t material.

The conclusion I wish to draw is that, if you are the sort of person inclined to make New Year’s Resolutions, perhaps you should see it is foolish do push-ups and eat kale so you might better resemble a young galoot.

Instead maybe you should vow to do what it takes to resemble a spry old man of 80.

 

 

LOCAL VIEW –Liberalism Redefined–

“Liberal” originally meant “generous”.

Generosity is fine, as long as you are generous with your own money. It is when one starts being generous with my money that I start to steam. And it is when one is generous with my money, and gives it to people I think could be better served by swift kick in the pants, that the steam starts to whistle.

I don’t recommend this, but the best test (of how Liberal a person is) is to yourself be down and out. All your fair-weather-friends flee. Funny thing is: They were so, so Liberal, back when you were buying the beers.

I thank God for the real Liberals, who have really helped me out and who are scarce as hen’s teeth, and almost never advertise how truly Liberal they are, (and who, at times, are Liberal not with money, but with tough love.)

I should confess that I often have been in need of generosity, because money hasn’t been a big priority in my life. I took my retirement early, when I was in my teens and twenties, and now must keep on working, as I witness my more pragmatic friends retire with fat  pensions. True, I lived a life far more interesting life than they did, but now the early and middle parts are over, and what do I have to show for it? (Wisdom, I suppose, but definitely no savings or pension.)

When I was young I justified my sloth by saying I was an artist, and I think I actually was, (though apparently not a very good one).  I worked as little as possible and scribbled as much as I could, and managed this by, (to use a less-than-flattering word), mooching. However I discovered two things. First, when you don’t pay rent you still wind up paying a sort of rent that doesn’t involve money. Second, even the kindest people get fed up with even the nicest moochers. Eventually their generosity shifts from mushy love to tough love. People get tired of a poet looking at clouds and nibbling his pencil’s eraser. Either they show you the unwashed dishes and laundry (which amounts to the non-monetary rent I was talking about), or they show you the door.

I could relate a bunch of episodes describing when I faced this shift in a host’s attitude, but that would become a sidetrack, (though a very funny one.) One of the most amusing aspects of such episodes was how offended I felt, when my hosts revealed they didn’t think much of my art, and preferred that I focus on more more worldly pursuits, such as washing dishes. I was so offended that they almost never needed to throw me out; I’d storm off indignantly seeking someone who appreciated my great art. (In other words, someone new to mooch off.)

Perhaps the most touching (and embarrassing) episode involved a person so kind and so meek they couldn’t throw me out, so they themselves moved out. Abruptly, at age thirty-one, I was responsible for something I amazingly had never faced: “The next month’s rent.”  I had occasionally faced “the next week’s rent” or “my contribution to part of the commune’s rent”, but had never paid a month’s rent in its entirety.

Talk about a crisis!  It was bad enough that I had driven my kind host from his own apartment, but I now had to work a Real Job. I couldn’t drive off and sleep in my tiny car, for it wasn’t functioning just then.

It was right around this time a fellow moocher told me how much money one could make off the generosity of others, simply by asking people for spare change. This was against my psychological make-up. In fact one of the reasons I was in the mess I was in was because I was incredibly shy, and unable to ask for any sort of help, whether it be with getting my “great art” published, or whether it involved asking how to fix my car.

You might think that by age thirty-one I would have learned to be more forceful, but I had a very strange Karma. The times I had steeled my nerve, and huffed and puffed, and dared ask for help, I always seemed to ask the worst people. (That is ten tales for another evening). Rather than learning how to be outgoing, I became not only shy, but very discouraged.

However my situation was so dire that I felt I should once again muster my nerve, and once again huff and puff, and dare ask in a new way I had never tried before:  “Do you have any spare change?”

I headed out onto the streets, and found it was, for me, like asking a very beautiful woman to dance. I just couldn’t do it. I stood on the sidewalk, looking at passing people in a way that likely made them very uncomfortable, and never dared say a word.

How pathetic can a man get? Fortunately I was addicted to cigarettes, and addiction (or ordinary hunger) can supply motivation which pep-talks and self-psychiatry can’t. By the second day I was gasping for a cigarette, making people even more uncomfortable, as they walked by, and I still wasn’t daring to ask them for spare change, but I was getting close to it.

I was telling myself to be a man, and have some guts, and that it was actually spiritual to beg because Sadhus in India had begging bowls. Then I suddenly saw this gruff-looking guy walking, and he looked a lot like an old, gruff friend from my past, and I blurted, “Spare change?”

The fellow wheeled and absolutely exploded. As I recall his words were something along the lines of, “I am so fucking sick of you fucking, lazy assholes who haven’t got the fucking brains to fucking get a job! I can’t fucking walk down the fucking street without your fucking wheedling! I work fucking hard for my fucking spare change! What fucking gives you the fucking right to fucking ask for it? Huh? What gives you the fucking right?”

I wish I’d had the guts to answer honestly, and tell the guy, “I am desperate for cigarettes, so I can go back to looking at clouds and nibbling my eraser,  and avoid getting a Real Job.”  Instead I just backed away and out of the man’s gale of spittle, and whimpered something lamer, and less honest, such as, “I’m just hungry.”

The truth of the matter is that the fellow’s gale of spittle was a great dose of tough love, for I never, ever dared ask anyone for spare change ever again. If he had given me even a penny he would have encouraged me the wrong way. As it was I was forced, (against my will, I’ll admit), to leave off looking at clouds and to get a Real Job. Things didn’t exactly go uphill after that, for the job I got utterly sucked, but my downhill slant was less perpendicular.

I had a lot of work to do and a lot of suffering to experience, before I had any real sense I was heading uphill. Yet I felt strangely cared for by God. After all, what are the odds of getting such a gale of spittle the very first time you ask for spare change? It was fairly obvious to me that I wasn’t suppose to be a spiritual Sadhu with a begging bowl. And, because I had a spiritual steak, and was insanely optimistic, I figured I must be being guided by God to some better place.

I needed to think up some poetic symbol for the uncomfortable situation I was in, and recall remembering my father telling me about his days as a flight surgeon for test pilots. He’d told me that pilots pulling an airplane out of a dive experienced many “G’s”. The “G’s” increased the more they went from perpendicular to horizontal, and and continued even as the nose of the airplane pulled up; the “G’s” only started to decrease as the airplane started to move perpendicularly upwards.

This seemed a good analogy. If you dislike suffering, you can continue to experience weightlessness as you continue your nosedive to certain death. But if you want to pull out of your nosedive, you have to experience the “G’s” of, first, ordinary gravity, and then worse-than-ordinary gravity, and in the end you avoid not only certain death, but get to soar up to the sky. However the important part of the analogy was that the “G’s” continue even after you have started to pull out of the dive and are headed up. This allowed me to walk cheerfully whistling, and to think I must be heading up, even after my one-and-only attempt at pan-handling was a complete failure that left me misted by spittle.

Whoever that fellow was who cussed me out, over thirty years ago, happened to be, I’d like to thank him for his tough love. He probably is an old man now, feeling guilty about how he lost it and cussed out a poor beggar, back when he was much younger. He likely has no idea of what a good thing he did for me, nor that he may even have been a tool of God.

If he had been liberal with mushy love rather than tough love, he just would have encouraged me to be a pan handler. As it was, he encouraged me to be self-reliant, and eventually the father of five.

Now the five kids have grown up to five fine adults, and I’m facing the fact I’m getting older and weaker, and did not do a very good job of squirreling nuts away for the winter of my life. In the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant, I’ve been the happy grasshopper, bounding from job to job, and sometimes to no job at all. I did have to become more serious while raising five kids, but even then I did things, (such as homeschooling), that were irregular. I simply couldn’t bear the drudgery ants endure, going to the same hole day after day to get a stupid pension. Now they vacation in the warmth of Florida, and I face the winter I’ve earned.

As I sit down to do my taxes this year things look fairly bad. I didn’t budget for having a kidney removed. I absolutely hated doing taxes, even when I knew I’d get a refund back, but this year I’ll probably owe money I don’t have, so I absolutely loathe the paperwork even more than usual. In some ways I feel I’m right back where I was at age thirty-one, in a situation where I may have to ask for help.

I noticed some other websites have “tip jars” at the side, and was thinking of putting one on this site. This goes against my nature, and wounds my fat ego, for one thing I’m proud of is that I’ve never “sold out.”  In fact this is just a way of saying my writing has never made me a cent, but I figured it was better to be proud about my lack of success, than to be ashamed.

Also a “tip jar” is a bit like a “begging bowl.” In fact that is what I will call my “tip jar”, if I ever have the guts to institute one over in the margin of this page. But I likely will lack the guts. After all, that fellow who responded to my first attempt at pan-handling might still be around.

Instead I think I’ll avoid looking at my own problems, (and avoid starting my taxes), by sneering at people who have problems even worse than mine. Isn’t that what we usually do?

Because my taxes are due, I think I’ll start with the politicians in Washington DC.

When they just print the money they don’t actually have, to pay their rent, they are like beggars who don’t even have to pan handle, because they can just print what they crave. Will this pull them out of their nose-dive? No. They need some tough love. They need to stand in a gale of spittle, so let me supply some.

What they need is a dose of common sense. We need a Thomas Paine to write a modern “Common Sense,” for the beggars in Washington. To some degree it is happening on the  web, but we need a Thomas Paine to really slam the point home to those poor, begging imbeciles. Otherwise, because they can print money they don’t have, they think they are rich. We need to nudge them with the reality that they are worse than bankrupt.

I can tell you from personal experience that it is no fun to stand in a gale of spittle, but I also tell you it does you good. Ask any recruit who came out of boot camp a better man, and he will tell you that the sergeant’s gale of spittle did him good. It is a side of Liberalism most liberals now deny, thinking it is better to stay in a nose dive and experience no “G’s” at all. In fact to produce a gale of spittle is deemed “politically incorrect”.

Wrong.

There are times love is not mushy and gushy and sweet. There are times we have to be tough. I happen to dislike such times, especially when I have to be tough on myself, but they are a Truth. Liberals need to be generous with Truth. If they deny tough Truth, then they are no longer generous, and are actually no longer Liberals.

The idiots in Washington think they are Liberals because they can print money they do not have. This is not generosity. It is insanity.  Even I eventually figured out you need to face the music. I had to do it at age thirty-one, and I now have to do it again, at age sixty-three.

This brings me back to my own problems  Berating Washington DC didn’t help a bit, but it does feel good to blow off some steam. Likely it would be more constructive to go out and split some wood. Then face the taxes. And after that, face the finances.

In any case, there may be fewer posts on this blog, as I won’t have time to look at clouds and nibble my eraser. I’ll have to dust off that tiresome old mantra, “When the going gets tough the tough get going,” though I never really figured it applied to me. In fact I think my soul was accidentally put in the wrong body, when I was born, and that I was suppose to be a cat.

TAX-TIME CAT SONNET

Now I need no distractions, and yet now
Is when my old, snarled cat comes complaining.
Once again I don’t punch her. I think how
Small is my patience and restraining
Compared to God’s. To Him we’re all mewing cats
With no regard for the ten trillion tasks
That He must do. That’s His concern, and that’s
His crucifixion.

                            My cat only asks
Me,a power which could swiftly stomp her dead,
With faith that I won’t…..so I feed the damn thing
Hoping God doesn’t feel, when I’m the mewer fed,
How I hate that cat. “I’ll work on loving
Later”, I say, but feel my heart stirring,
And when I look down on my cat, she’s purring.

(Photo credit: http://fgacc.com/2014/02/18/send-in-your-pictures/3525859742_bd86e015c22/ )

LOCAL VIEW –THE BALLET OF A BROOK–

It is Friday night, and after the week I’ve been through I’m ready to tell responsibility to go to hell. I figure that is OK, if I have done “responsibility” all week. It is Monday morning that winds you up in trouble, if you tell responsibility to go to hell..

Last week some of my excellent employees were unavailable for work, so I had to step in and cover for them. Considering they had recently covered for me, as I had a kidney removed, I am not about to whine much. But I will whine just a little bit, because being post-operative reminded me of something I’d nearly forgotten: This world doesn’t need me. I can kick back, and everything doesn’t collapse in a heap. I sort of liked kicking back, but last week I abruptly had to stop it.  My first real vacation in fifteen years was over.

Most people seem to need a vacation to recover from a vacation. They have no desire to return to the rat race, because they have fleetingly seen life can be much, much better. The revelation is downright traumatic, which is why they need another vacation. They need to reassess. They need to reevaluate what the hell they are suffering for.

It was different for me, because I was craving to get back to work. When the vacation is enforced, due to an operation, you are itching to get back in the saddle. Then, when you are allowed to again do the most simple things, such as sweep a powder of snow from steps, the joy you feel is all out of proportion to the magnitude of the task. Sweeping of the snow is no earth-shaking deed, yet you feel like singing the Hallelujah Chorus.

Yet I too had no desire to return to the rat race. There is something about calling our labor a “rat race” that demeans life. We are missing the point. We are missing the majesty.

When my wife and I started our Farm-childcare nearly a decade ago we hadn’t read “Last Child In The Woods” by Richard Louv or “Simplicity Parenting” by Kim John Payne. But we knew what they knew. Our society is missing the majesty.

It is bad enough when we turn our own lives into a rat race, but when we turn little children’s lives into rat races it is a bridge too far. It violates the sanctity of of an obvious and simple church called “Childhood.” Yet the most loving people do it.  Childhood is suppose to be a sanctuary, but parents and schoolmarms disturb the peace.

Six hundred toys is not peace; it is hectic. It isn’t loving, nor are ballet lessons after organized sports after classes after classes after classes before yoga sessions about serenity. Yet both parents work two jobs, and send innocents to Farm-childcares like mine from 7:00 AM until 6:00 PM, (most of a child’s waking hours), and suffer all this rat-race toil out of a love for those they abuse.

It is a love that is misguided. I am old, and if I am any sort of guide I need to say, “You should put my Farm-childcare out of business. Do you have any idea how much money you could save if you worked less, drove less, prepared your own food, and raised your own kids?”

My wife is usually the one who deals with our customers. I lack tact. But the fact I stay silent sometimes makes me feel like a Caspar Milquetoast.

Fortunately my wife is as radical as I am, and agrees children are better off being allowed the freedom to be young. If a child wants to spend time by a brook, rather than listening to the insipid prattling of elders about ballet, they may very well learn more about ballet from a brook, and more about beauty from a brook, and certainly receive more healing from a brook than all the king’s doctors and all the king’s psychologists can ever provide.

You complain God is silent, but heed you
The sweet music of a burbling brook?
Maybe you buy the video, and do
Your best to cure insomnia, and look
To screens to see blue waters play, and guide
Your children to bleak deserts waterless:
Sessions and sessions, all puffing your pride
When in fact you are deaf, or even less.

I tell you God’s not silent, but you must go
To an actual brook, and do a thing
Called “sit still”, unwax your ears, and then know
What children know. Dare you try listening?
Who made this rat-race, so sure to depress?
The silence of God gives you more, asking less.

LOCAL VIEW —An Igloo’s Demise—

I haven’t had to document “The worst winter ever” for the past few days, as we’ve had a wonderful spell of spring-like weather. I know better than to be fooled by it, for we get snows into April this far north, and only in May do we call snows (which do occasionally happen) “freakish”.  However just because I am not fooled by it has been no reason to frown. Frowns have been few and far between, on the winter-weary faces I’ve seen.

Smiles are a good thing to see, as this has always been a time of toughness, in New England. One reason for having Lent when it is, is because, back in the day,  food supplies were getting short. One reason for corn beef and cabbage being a traditional Saint Patrick’s Day meal was that corn beef was the only meat left, and cabbage, carrots and potatoes was all that was left in your root cellar.  Then, midst this general poverty, towns would hold their Town Meeting.

It was a smart time to talk about budgets. People were bound to be more frugal and practical when they were basically broke, then they would be midst the bounty of harvest. Also, during harvest, everyone was busy harvesting. In March there tends to be little to do, as the fields are all slush and muck, if they are not snow covered. Planting began in April.

Town Meetings were also a time to meet people you hadn’t seen during the cold, snowy days when it was hard to get out much. Unfortunately we are are more mobile now, and this makes it even less likely to see neighbors, for everyone tends to work miles from their homes and neighbors. It also makes it hard for people to attend Town Meetings, and sadly our town abandoned that wonderful example of democracy in favor of elections, which allow people to rush in and cast votes on topics they know next to nothing about, and haven’t heard discussed from both the Yea and Nay sides.

A major issue our little town faced was whether or not to slash the school budget. Such discussions can get ugly, because on one hand there are the “it’s for the children” arguments, and on the other hand the economy is bad, and people are on the verge of losing their homes, and one may hear “it’s for the senior citizens” arguments, because soaring taxes hit those on fixed incomes especially hard. I agonized over the choice, but in the end voted against slashing the budget, however my vote was in the minority.

Considering how serious the implications are, and how many work at the local schools, it was hard to walk into the voting place without feeling guilty as you passed school children with pickets reading, “Save our drama club” and such things. It didn’t matter that I was voting the way they wanted, for there were other signs taking the other view. It is a sort of gauntlet you have to get through, and even though the ballot is secret I always feel as guilty as hell.

But there were nothing but smiles to be seen, in the sunshine, this year. Fifty degrees!  Do you have any idea how long it has been?

There are times our common sense and intellectual nature is overwhelmed. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it happens, like when a very attractive person smiles at you.

Then you see, out in the Childcare’s playground, that the igloo the children delight in has collapsed into a pile of slushy snow, and you look at the weather map, and you realize that the pile of slushy snow will turn into rock-like ice tomorrow. What sort of playground is that?

There are times our common sense returns with a rush, as it does when an attractive and smiling person walks away, and we realize our wallet is missing.

I need to give myself a good slap in the face, and repeat over and over, “It isn’t May yet. It isn’t May yet.”

 

 

 

LOCAL VIEW —Powder’s End—(Updated twice, with summery)

There is the word “rain” in the forecast. True, the forecast is for 4-6 inches of snow, ending as a glaze of freezing rain before we are clobbered by another cold wave, but it seems I haven’t heard that word “rain” for the longest time. It seems impossible, after the shot of cold we just took.

The core of the cold came in around dawn Friday. Temperatures had been plunging all night with squalls of snow, with the the final flakes flying after midnight and preventing Friday from being a “snow free” day, but by the dawn’s twilight the final clouds were hurrying away, purple buffalo galloping against the stripe of orange on the eastern horizon. Temperatures had dropped to around 5°. and were down to 2° when the brilliant sun peeked over the frozen landscape, and then, despite the brilliant sun, continued down. When I dropped the gang-of-six off at the kindergarten the dashboard thermometer read zero. (My thermometer at home, and a few others on my area, read higher, because a big drift covered the bulb.)

We didn’t even try to get the children outside at our farm-daycare.  Our focus may be the outdoors, but there comes a time to surrender to reality, and with the vicious wind whipping snow like stinging sand, surrender seemed wise. The best the thermometer could achieve, despite sunshine that made you squint, was 14° (-10° Celsius).

Meanwhile all eyes turned to the next storm, to our west.

I had to shovel out the back of my pick-up and hustle off through the cold to pick up some grain and do a few other out of town chores. One involved a visit to a bank I don’t usually use.

I saw a funny incident at that bank. A very old man came doddering in, and a young lady started to hit him with some sort of bureaucratic crap, saying that they had changed their policy and now both he and his wife had to sign a certain check for him to deposit it. It was 9° out with a howling wind and drifting snow, and the old man’s nose was blue despite his extensive scarves, a collar that engulfed his chin, and a furry hat that looked several sizes too large. The young lady was basically telling him to go home through the vicious wind and then come back through the rotten weather a second time. Though the old man’s voice was very reedy and quavering, his eyes got very regal and piercing, and the young lady stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. After looking her up and down, he picked up a pen and wrote his own signature with one hand, and then switched hands and forged his wife’s signature with the other hand. Then he handed her the check, as if daring her to say something. She didn’t dare.

The bank also had a group of young men with checks they’d gotten from people for shoveling roofs. Briefly unemployment  as dipped in this area. One topic I heard discussed was how homeowners have ripped shingles from their roofs, attempting to remove snow with long ice rakes.

I stopped at several places looking for the pucks of calcium chloride you can toss up onto roofs to melt ice-dams. The problem people are having with ice-dams is so serious that everyone was sold out, however an old-timer at a hardware store told me it is cheaper to just buy a big 50 pound bag of calcium chloride, and then, when your wife isn’t looking, you take her nylons and make a tube of calcium chloride, and lay it over the ice-dam at the edge of your roof.

The worst of this arctic shot actually headed south well west of us. Places in Kentucky smashed their all time records, which is all the more noteworthy as it is nearly March. Joe Bastardi, at his blog over at Weatherbell (and some other sites as well), are pointing out that the National Weather Bureau is displaying their political bias, and their eagerness to promote a Global Warming agenda, because they have no problem trumpeting record highs when they occur, but when an all-time-record-low is set they question the thermometers. They disallowed an all-time-record set in Illinois last winter despite the fact the thermometer seemed to work correctly, but couldn’t disallow the new record of -50° set in Maine, when that thermometer was compared to five other thermometers and proved accurate. It will be difficult to ignore the records set in Kentucky because the old records were not broken by a mere degree. They were smashed.

Not that it means the world is getting colder. It means the core of an arctic air-mass was flung south with such speed it didn’t have time to warm up.

Our temperatures dropped below zero again soon after sunset, but by then the core of the cold was past, and winds were already starting to swing around to the southwest. Temperatures dipped to -1.1° ( -18.4° Celsius) before midnight,  but now have crept up to +0.3° as I suffer my usual insomnia at 3:40 AM.

The storm is gathering to our west, with more snow in the current radar shot than appeared in the shot at the start of this post.

href=”https://sunriseswansong.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/20150220b-satsfc.gif”>

I have lots to do to be ready for the next storm, but have to waste half a day taking one of those adult-education courses the State insists Child-care-professionals take. This seems a perfect example of bureaucracy run amuck .  Rather than doing what common sense would have you do, you must fulfill some requirement they dreamed up, because what else have they got to do with their time?

I’ll make the best of it, even though I often know more than my teachers. There is something to be learned from every person you meet, even if it isn’t always what they are teaching. Also I’ve been working so hard, physically, that it may do me some good to just sit for a while.

Unloading feed for my goats in that wind yesterday did make sitting sound awful attractive, especially as the snow is so deep I can’t back my truck very close to the barn.  I’m the one who should be sitting around and dreaming stuff up. I need to write a novel, and make enough money to hire a young fellow to lug grain for me. Of course, I’ve been saying that for nearly fifty years. The whole point of becoming a writer in the first place was to avoid working a real job. However I’m glad that didn’t work out, for what would I have had to write about?

I’ll update about this storms as it happens.

CLASSY CLASS

I was not very happy about having my Saturday stolen, especially having to hurry in the brittle chill of -3.5° daybreak to feed animals and be on the road to the western side of Southern New Hampshire. I like to potter about unhurried on a Saturday. Instead I was being tossed about in a van with my wife and three staff members, because even the more civilized State Highways are starting to be buckled by frost heaves. Furthermore it only got colder. It was below -10° in the low, flat former-farmland that cradles the large town of Keene. As the women in the van cheerfully  chattered I glowered across a landscape that was a queer mix of brilliant blue and brass, as the arctic air gave way to the advance of southern storminess.  The sky was a confusion of high clouds, speaking of warmth far away as the world beneath was frozen solid.

The class was about introducing children to the outdoors. Considering this was the entire premise behind opening our Childcare nearly a decade ago, and considering the crap the State put us through for daring to step outside of the box of institutionalized childcare where children are basically incarcerated in a jail, there is a certain irony in the fact the State now requires I be “educated” about the subject. It was one of those situations where I could say a great deal, however my wife shoots me a certain look that implores that I button my fat lips.

The class was in two parts. We had a class in October where the idea was introduced, and now we were suppose to relay our observations and results, after trying out the amazing idea of allowing children to escape the suffocation of the indoors, and run where the air is fresh and free. I was a bit cynical about what people would say, seeing as how we have had just about the worst weather on record, and childcare-providers were given just about every reason there is to stay indoors.

I was glad I kept my big mouth closed, for it turned out to be very interesting to listen to how amazed the childcare providers were about how positive the experience of allowing the children to play outside was. Duh. But I did not even feel the urge to say “Duh”, because there is something better about people discovering things for themselves than you doing the discovery for them and ramming it down their throats.

One thing I have often seen is that, when a new child comes to our Childcare, they stand around and watch the other children for a bit, before getting drawn into the play. I’d always assumed this was due to shyness, and never considered the fact they might not be used to the outdoors. However as I listened to other childcare providers I heard that the entire group of children stood about, when first faced with the outdoors. In some cases even the staff stood about. It was as if they were all asking, “Now what?” It took a day or two before they even began to run about and enjoy the outdoors. That is how alienated modern society has become from fresh air. However, after only a day or two, a sort of enthusiasm bloomed, and soon parents were remarking that all children would talk about when they got home was how much fun the outdoors was.

This is something my wife and I accepted as a basic premise. Not that we deserve a medal for anything so blatantly obvious, but it nice to see some sort of affirmation: We didn’t invent the Truth; the mystery is why others don’t see it.

Originally the class was suppose to be held outdoors, but the instructor decided against that when she saw the dawn temperature was -15° (-26.1° Celsius) in Keene. However by 10:30 AM temperatures had risen thirty degrees to +15° (-9.4° Celsius). This is still “too cold” for children to be allowed outside at State-run schools, and it was refreshing to hear many state how stupid that ruke was, in a windless calm, for +15° felt warm.

They have had less snow in western New Hampshire, only 30 inches lay in the playground as opposed to 60 inches towards the coast. However the snow was deep enough to limit the children at that particular Childcare, when they went out to play. As I watched, the 30 or so women attending the class (I was the lone male) all got busy making paths and building various shapes, as a “surprise” for the children when they came in on Monday. (My favorite was a circle with an inward-facing bench, built of packed powder, which got dubbed “the hot tub”.

I carefully avoided being helpful. My body is so achy from a week’s worth of work making my own playground child-friendly that I figured I needed a break. Instead I just watched, and was glad I kept my big mouth closed.

YAHOO SNOWFALL

Temperatures rose to 21.7° (-5.7° Celsius) as the day dulled to gray. I was Home by 1:30 PM, ate lunch, and snoozed, and the snow was beginning at 3:00 when I finally got myself going. Temperatures promptly dropped to 21.0°, and then stayed within a degree of that as the day slowly darkened and the snow grew heavier.

I had to drive about a bit taking care of minor bits of business before winding up at the farm removing snow from roofs, and couldn’t help but notice the insanity of the young men. They were fishtailing about the roads recklessly, as I crept along carefully in my old truck. The snow fell in bursts, with a half inch in ten minutes, and then a spell of light snow before the next burst. I passed one field where young men were going wild in snow mobiles, and then at the farm, as I worked in the deepening darkness, I could hear the snowmobiles whining like deranged mosquitoes off in the distance.

I used to really hate the noise, the disruption of the peace, caused by snowmobiles. I prefered the quiet where you can hear the sound flakes make as they land.  Oddly, I found my feelings had changed.

The economy has been so bad I heard few snow mobiles, up until a week ago. Then young men were able to find work shoveling off roofs. Apparently, rather than being wise and putting their money in a jar and saving it, they bought gas for their snow mobiles, and are being foolish.  Why does that make me smile?

The radar showed snow decreasing in a more westerly band, and increasing in a band closer to the coast.

INSOMNIA REPORT

Temperatures have remained level all night, and are at 21.2° at 2:30 AM. The snow seems to be slackening off, and the western edge os approaching. We seem likely to escape with only three inches. Boston continues to have its odd karma, and snow still looks heavy down there.

The extreme cold looks to be hanging back behind a temporarily stationary front back over the Great Lakes. That front will charge south and have us back below zero on Monday night, but it looks like we’ll get a day of rest this Sunday. It might even get above freezing, which will feel like fifty to the frost-bitten populace of New England. Weekend after weekend we’ve had storms, but it looks like this Sunday we’ll at least manage a church service.

The Great Lakes are freezing up, despite the fact the cold has been centered over us and not them, this winter. Last winter they got the extreme cold, yet we are seeing as much ice as last year, (perhaps because the water was colder to begin with.) This is especially noticeable on Lake Ontario, which is closer to the center of this year’s cold, and which has more ice than last year.  Storms and strong winds have torn at the ice and led to decreases, but still the ice cover increases. This does not bode well for a balmy spring.

ANOTHER INSOMNIA REPORT

A very weak wave rippled along the front as it pushed by yesterday morning, giving us a final flurry of snow, before the clouds broke and we got a kindly Sunday.

Even though Boston got heavier snow, it was mixed with enough sleet and freezing rain to reduce amounts to something like an inch and a half. Nonetheless they are nearing an all-time-record for snow-in-a-single-winter, and have completely smashed their record for snow-in-a-single-month, despite the fact February has fewer days. (These records only go back to around 1870, and also I think they didn’t fuss so much measuring a half inch of snow, back in the old days. However they have broken the snow-in-a-single-month record by more than a foot.) Boston Harbor is choked with sea-ice.

There is sea-ice all the way down to inlets in Virginia. I wonder if they include it in the “sea-ice totals”. Maybe not, as I suppose it doesn’t count as “arctic” and they are measuring arctic sea-ice.” But we certainly have been included in the arctic, the past month.

However yesterday was different. It was a brief break. We managed a church service, and I greatly enjoyed getting out of my grubby farmer clothes, even if I was back in them three hours later and back warring with the snow. To some it may seem quaint, rustic and even primitive to congregate and sing 200-year-old songs praising a Creator some doubt exists, but speaking for myself, it was a relief, and a joy.

Then it was back to the battle. I’d say we had 3-4 inches of fluff, very unusual as it came on a south wind, and drifted places (such as porches) that are usually protected from snow. As I cleaned such a porch I had a vivid memory of being a small boy back in the 1950’s, and hearing my mother remark, “This is very unusual. We don’t usually get snow on a south wind.” It gave me the sense we were back to a place we were sixty years ago, in a sixty-year-cycle.

My up-the-hill neighbors are getting a bit desperate, as the oil-delivery-man is a bit of a weeny and will not zoom up their drive like his predecessor did, and turn around in a vast flat area at the top, and instead insists upon creeping up the hill backwards. To be blunt, I am better at backing up than this fellow is, and I am not all that good at it. He veers into snowbanks, and churns the wheels a little, and then gives up in trepidation over the prospect of “getting stuck.” He insisted they widen the drive, so they fought back the snowbanks. Then he insisted they sand the driveway so they sanded it.  Now he apparently is saying the packed powder is too deep, and they must scrape down to the pavement.  (I doubt it will do any good, for even if the pavement was bare and dry, the fellow is pathetic, when it comes to backing-up.) In any case they have now spread hundreds of pounds of salt, which had no effect at first, because salt will not melt snow when temperatures dip below 20 degrees. Then, yesterday, temperatures rose above twenty, and the driveway, which had been paved with a half-foot of packed, squeaky snow it was easy to drive over, turned into six inches of a sort of dry slush, which they were attempting to shovel away. I took off my Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, put on my grubby-farmer-clothes,  and went out to join them. I likely violated commandments involving Sunday being a day-of-rest, but gleaned a few points for loving-my-neighbor.

Having already broken the commandment about resting on Sunday, I headed over to our farm-childcare to snow-blow the entrances and exits and parking area. The roads were wet, for the salt which formerly had no effect was starting to work all over town, and it gave one the sense we were experiencing a thaw. No such luck. Even in the brightest and sunniest part of the afternoon we couldn’t quite break freezing, only achieving 31.6°. (-0.2 Celsius). However the slush that was created needed to be dealt with, as, if you don’t take care of it, it turns to rock when the cold returns. (I think the salt actually drains away as a sort of brine, leaving a slush behind that is salt-free.)

No one seemed to be taking a day-of-rest. Everyone seemed determined to avoid letting the snow get ahead of them. I saw no signs of the April-attitude, which doesn’t bother with clearing up snow because everyone knows the sun will melt it in a day or two. We are not there yet, and there seems to be an unspoken understanding that everyone needs to keep fighting. We can handle 3-4 inches of snow, but it is like treading water. Everyone knows we cannot handle a big storm. There is simply no place to put the snow.

However it does no good to worry about what might not happen. You deal with the cards you are dealt. As I finished snow-blowing, and sudden silence descended, I looked west to where the orange twilight was draining into the sky, and listened, and heard not even the sound of snowflakes falling. There were no snowmobiles roaring weekend joys, for the weekend was over, and mine was the last snow-blower to quit. All I could hear was the silence of a world smothered by snow.

There was no roaring of oncoming arctic air, though that is in the forecast. In fact even now, as I write this insomnia report, temperatures have only dipped to 21.7°. We are still in the lull before the next onslaught of winter.

The map and radar shows a line of light snow, as the arctic air closes in, but the night is still still, and the stillness suggests a song.

This sort of arctic front can bring us unexpected snow, as the sun is high enough to add uplift and turn a flurry into a squall, but it isn’t here yet, and I am content to simply listen to the silence, before the pines again begin roaring.

The moonless night feels draped by pearled moonlight.
The once-cold stars now have twinkling eyes.
Something is happening out of my sight;
Something out of my mind now softens sighs.
Under the drifts of deep drowning snows
A simpleness stirs. It’s nothing fancy.
It’s old. It’s what a mother knows
Before the father knows of pregnancy.
It’s the first stirrings of sap down in roots
Before the first drop plinks in a bucket.
It’s an earthquake, but lawyers in sleek suits
Can’t feel it, or else sense and say, “Fuck it.”
Though forecasts are cold, it’s forecasting mirth.
It’s a silence utterly altering earth.

LOCAL VIEW —A Warm Snow—

I was so stiff and sore Friday afternoon I didn’t stock the porch with firewood. I was hoping that by moaning and limping and looking pitiful I might inspire my middle son to stock the porch for me. However he failed to get the hint, as he has his own reasons for moaning and groaning: Despite amassing huge debts gaining a degree in biology the only work he can find is in a coffee shop. After a day’s work he needs to remember who he is, and heads off into the woods to study the local wildlife, rather than stocking a porch with firewood.

To a degree I expected that, but knew that the snow wasn’t suppose to start until mid-morning yesterday, and figured I could limp out and get it done early. However I confess I half-expected the snow to start early, as the upper air trough was positively tilted and the storm was wasting no time coming north.

Temperatures, which had dipped to the upper teens in the evening, rose into the twenties over night as the clouds rolled in, and by the first light of dawn it was snowing. It was fluffy stuff, and atop the iron ice underneath it was like dry sawdust on a polished floor, and treacherously slippery. As my middle son ate waffles and studied the internet, I dressed in my woolly hat and scarf, and with a deep sigh headed out to work with great care, moving wood by wheelbarrow to the porch, and laboring up the porch’s stairs. Soon I forgot to feel sorry for myself, for it was quite beautiful out, and so warm I didn’t feel a bit chilled in a world that resembled a shaken snow globe.  (One thing I can’t understand is how, when a storm is zooming past, there can be no wind.)

Soon my son came bounding out, hardly dressed for winter at  all, and began rushing to and fro carrying wood by the armload, making me feel a bit old as I wheelbarrowed in slow motion, but also a bit wise as he went flying on the slick ice and crash-landed in a manner that would have put me in a hospital. He hopped right up with a laugh and continued.

It was fairly obvious he had other things to do, and wanted to quit as soon as the pile was knee-deep on the porch. I myself was originally thinking I’d quit when I achieved that minimum, but now that I had companionship I continued, despite the slight look of pain on my son’s face I went for the next load, again and again, and the pile on the porch passed waist-deep and headed towards chest-deep.

Besides hauling we did a bit of splitting, as the fellow who delivered the wood last fall was in such a hurry to keep up with orders he didn’t always spit the logs down to a sensible size. We talked about trees and the grain of wood, and I learned things I didn’t know, as I lack a degree in biology, but also had the satisfaction of answering a question. A song much like a tree frog sounded from the tree tops near us, and my son quirked his head and asked, “What’s that?”  I could answer, “A woodpecker,” though I had to confess I never had figured out if it was a hairy or a downy.

All in all it was fun, to my surprise, and it felt good to go stamping back inside past a porch stacked to neck-level. The snow already seemed to be slacking off, as I pottered on, doing the Saturday chores, and enjoying my first snow tires in years, though I will confess they took all the challenge out of going up hills.

By the time I headed off to feed the goats and chickens and rabbit, and snow-blow the drives and lots at the Childcare, it seemed the snow was done. As I drove I passed many who were just finishing up cleaning off their drives with looks of satisfaction on their faces, but everyone was in for a surprise, as a little following-wave developed and messed up all the neat and tidy jobs with an extra inch. Again the snow-globe was shaken as I worked, in a windless mildness that topped off with temperatures of 29.5° (-1.4° Celsius).

The second wave of snow was already tapering off as the dark descended. All in all we had around four inches of fluff, though it settled some. I feel a bit foolish for dreading the prospect of snow so much, for this has to have been one of the nicest and warmest snows I can remember since I was young, back when all snows were warm.

However even as this snow moves off over Nova Scotia, a little Alberta Clipper is diving south, to the southwest of Lake Superior.

That little clipper is forecast to give us an amazing two feet of powder snow, with winds gusting over 40 mph and temperatures in the teens, this coming Tuesday. I’m not sure I fully believe that forecast, yet, but confess I haven’t learned my lesson, for I am once again cringing at the prospect of snow.