Who Came Before You

My father lost partial hearing
in the middle of the night.
He woke up deaf in one ear,
shaking his head like a swimmer.
Now he has taken to playing solitaire,
and the cards stay on the table like a chess game.
Mother cooks and cleans and dumps thistle seed into the bird feeder
and replaces the battery in her cow cookie jar,
(the mournful moo) so she can catch the sneak.
But it isn’t Dad.

The only memory I have of my maternal grandfather
is him sitting at the table playing solitaire
with a curious knob in his ear,
while we nabbed cookies out of the cookie jar.
I have no memory of his voice, or his laughter or his work,
his coming in from the field, perspiring and flushed,
although I know he did these things . . . before me.

I don’t like my father’s hearing aid,
the way it amplifies background noise
and takes him out of the mix at the dinner table
where he used to drive the conversation,
the way he buries himself in the newspaper and doesn’t
say hello when you come in the back door.
The way the grandchildren I don’t yet have
won’t know him.

The Selling of Deanville Mountain

Can a man own a mountain?
Carve out the center and cart it away
to shopping malls and garden centers?
Can he haul it off to adjacent counties
and bordering states where people
won’t appreciate that their gravel made up a mountain?

This mountain . . . our mountain.
This land . . . our land.
What farceness.
What? I can’t make up a word?
One man can own a mountain and truck it away
in exchange for stuff from malls full of sullen children
who have never climbed a mountain.
One man can disfigure the landscape
and transform the view and there are no words for that.

This mountain was our mountain,
ten o’clock on our compass.
history and barometer and weather maker.
Deanville Mountain and the road that crossed it—
lined with trees tall enough
to support elaborate nests and birds of unblinking eye—
was a place for teenagers to find themselves in the dark.
A place where rumors were invented and secrets uncovered.
Too bad our mountain held such a rich lode.
Too bad about mining and ownership and the rumor
that didn’t travel far enough into the right hands
fast enough. Too bad about the gaping wound and the collapsing side
that I thankfully can’t see from my porch . . . yet
Too bad it was never ours.

My grandfather insisted that the mountain changed our climate.
Storm clouds moved around Deanville Mountain
like storms off the Pacific deflected by rugged coastline.
Rain would fall to the west or skirt the entire bulge
To head out over the lake.
It was a mountain to be reckoned with and perhaps
compensated us beyond our comprehension.
Perhaps we’ll now have more of the rain that a farmer
can never seem to get enough of.
(They’ll tell you all about that in the Central Valley.)
But the mountain isn’t grand anymore.

Humane Blog Award

I was recently nominated to receive the Humane Blog Award by Andrea Cremer over at A Blurred History. Thanks Andrea, for believing me to be worthy of this award.

The Clean Ground

I missed it again—that swift setting of the sun. Once it turns crimson and fat and begins its downward slide, one only has a few minutes to capture the scene. If you’re careful and diligent and don’t let yourself get distracted by the commonplace, you can sit with your feet up on my front porch and watch the sun set to the south of Deanville Mountain (the highest point in the Thumb).

The sky is big and beautiful this evening. I missed the sunset but the residual display is still breathtaking. The winds have died down and the flag hangs limp. I can always hear Dad’s whipping in the wind when I’m down at the garden. It sounds like someone walking across the grass and I look up, tricked once again by the commonplace.

I love our dirt road. Today it was groomed and graded and salted by county workers and tonight we have the grandest road in the country. Smooth and pothole free—the kind of road we loved to ride our bikes on when we were kids. The kind of road that connects you to the cedar swamps of the past . . . the footpaths of those who came before us. I can hear traffic on the pavement a mile away, but no sounds here on Clear Lake Road, except for a few evening birds.

I found a poem I wrote when I lived far away and my father had just completed the farm's transition to organic.

The Clean Ground

When I leave the pavement with a jolt
I leave what I have for what I know,
for the gravel roads of home that run past
tangled fencerows where the only gaps
are where elms once stood;
roads that are graded and groomed by men
in trucks with big blades that rumble
up and down the road. They hang out the window
with tanned arms and inspect their progress.

I cross the ditch which becomes a torrent in spring
and drive past gnarled oaks and lilacs that bloom on old wood
and try to remember why I left.

The pond lies at the lowest point on the farm
with banks of waving cattails.
Two months past summer solstice…
it’s only half full. A new dock straddles dry ground
because the drought persists.
Clouds hurry overhead.
They neither darken nor slow though we watch.

Dust coats the Queen Anne’s lace and Ice Age boulders
that lie scattered along the fence, smooth and broad as shoulders.
Bobolinks flirt with each other and the pheasants have returned,
waving mulberry plumage above the grass like a tease behind a veil.
Pesticides had thinned them rare but now the ground is clean.
There are worse things than drought.

I saw an eagle yesterday.
He was young because his head was dark.
Eagles don’t often crowd the hawks, but there he sat
atop the ageless oak, surveying the dryness.
Because this is a better place than some.

Improving Vocabulary

To improve my vocabulary, I am copying from my dictionary all the relatively short, common words I wouldn't ordinarily think to use, an exercise suggested by John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist. The idea is to make an effort to use them in your writing as if they'd come naturally to you. Sounds easy, right? I'm still in the B's. What's interesting are the number of words in the English language that have more than one meaning, one which is common, and one which is obscure and can add muscle to a simple sentence. A surprising twist, if you will, that would make the sensitive reader pause and take notice. Another suggested exercise is to write an authentic sentence four pages long with no cheating (using colons and semicolons that are really periods). Yes, four pages long. I have not yet attempted that. Maybe while on vacation.... no, it would have to be a retreat.

Strawberry Fields

We picked the first strawberries of the season yesterday. There is nothing like a Michigan strawberry and they're well worth the wait. The memory of our Michigan berries enables me to keep walking past the morbidly huge berries, grotesque and hollow, that show up in grocery stores in April from irrigated desert fields. The reason Michigan and other places in the Upper Midwest grow the best vegetables and fruits in the world is because of our adequate rainfall, warm days and cool nights.

I like to mash them up with a bit of sugar and spoon them over vanilla ice cream for dessert. A dollop of real whip cream on top adds a special touch. If you take the time to whip up some biscuits or shortcake you'll have Michigan's best early summer dessert on your table. Wherever you are, should you see Michigan berries for sale, snap them up. They're worth whatever price you have to pay.

With my garden approaching forty fifty-foot rows on one side of the driveway and nine two-hundred foot rows on the other side, my hands hurt tonight and my legs are crampy. Tomorrow I'm taking a break from the garden to paint and work on my query letter and my ideal agent list, the perfect agent who will guide me to an editor and a publisher and a rewarding writing life.

Three Hail Marys for an agent, and editor, and a rewarding writing life.

Be Creative

I love it that I have followers. I love comments. You make it all worthwhile. It's exhilirating to know that there is someone out there who is reading my modest little posts. And if I can inspire you to venture out on your own creations, well, that's what it's all about. Whether it be a garden, a painting, a poem or short story, learning to knit or quilt . . . go for it! And now it's raining here in Michigan's fat, verdant thumb. And I am surrounded by books and works-in-progress and garden catalogs and family down the road, close but not too close. The lights are on and my laptop is virus free. Stay with me.

Water

I woke this morning to heavy damp fog but the little rain we had during the night was barely enough to knock the dust down. So we wait for rain. And wait and wait. We can water the garden with soaker hoses and give each struggling plant a drink from the can but there is no substitute for rain with the rich nutrients it absorbs from the atmosphere on its fall to earth.

I'm sorry to have been so absent here lately. There are the aforementioned garden duties and the novel and the query letter which, trust me, is harder to write than you'd think. After all, it's just a business letter . . . right? You can only stomach so much conflicting advice and I know there is such a thing as over-shopping the query. You must retain your own voice through it all. But, back to water . . .

There was a recent program on NPR about water wars in California’s Central Valley, the dispute between farmers, environmentalists, and fishermen. The farmers are being cut off with reduced rations or none at all for irrigation in order to keep more water in the river for salmon. Environmentalists are fighting for the salmon and for the life of the delta. The government made mistakes in the past—building aqueducts, irrigation systems and dams and encouraging farmers to expand, growing everything from cotton to almonds. This was a shortsighted vision of limitless water and farming took hold under this false pretense of plenty. Now, with a long draught to contend with and fishermen fighting back, farmers who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on irrigation systems find their pipes dry and are understandably upset. They were duped into believing it possible to farm in the desert and came to think of the river as rightfully theirs. But maybe there are better places to grow cotton and maybe California doesn’t have to produce 90 percent of the world’s almonds.

This whole thing makes me nervous because I know that water will be the oil of the twenty-first century and we have only a precarious hold on our Great Lakes treasure.

Not a Consumer, a Citizen

ASIDES . . .

The Six Million Dollar Man is now doing commercials for rechargeable hearing aids.

Two robin eggs lie broken on the rattan mat in front of my front door.
No, make it three. My robin keeps startling herself at inopportune times, darting out of her nest and dropping eggs. Is it my fault? Did I walk too close to the window in my morning ramble to the coffee pot?

Obama can even do standup. Did you see the recent clip from a charitable foundation dinner? "The Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout," he quipped. "And Rush Limbaugh does not qualify as a troubled asset." Funny stuff. Actually, I think that is a pretty good definition of a troubled asset. His second hundred days will be so successful, he says he'll finish them in seventy-two, "and rest on the seventy-third." But, no, President Obama, I don't think you'll ever lose your cool.

Not once did he mention shopping and spending. I appreciated that. I’m really sick of being told I should be out buying goods I neither need nor want.

I’m not a consumer; I’m a citizen.

Do you think there is a connection between capitalism and overpopulation? And what about the effect the world’s overpopulation is having on the environment? It's been suggested that patriotic Americans should stop at two. Not by me, mind you, but I find it an interesting idea. Implausible, but interesting. After all, this is America where we like to oversize everything.

There is a credit card Bill of Rights awaiting action in the Senate. It has passed the House but must now pass the Senate. President Obama has asked for a bill that stops credit card companies from taking advantage of consumers by the end of the month. We’ll see. If you believe there should be an end to usury and other unfair practices by credit card companies, contact your senator and let him/her know what you think. Or better yet, pay your credit cards off as quickly as possible and throw them away, unless you’re able to pay in full each month and are only using a credit card to acquire frequent flyer miles, etc. But do you ever wonder about the trail you leave by using credit cards? The “consumer” footprint by which you can be tracked and judged without your knowing? For the majority of Americans, however, credit card debt is imprisonment without the jingle jingle of the turnkey.

The full moon woke me in the middle of the night. I was wide awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering what woke me, waiting for whatever did to make another sound, but the house was as quiet as the garden in winter. I wandered out to the living room and the moon was in the window, big and yellow and shining across the wooden floor, and I felt I should go outside and soak up the wisdom of those who planted under the moon. I felt like a moon woman, a women who runs with the wolves, voluptuous and fertile, unable to make a mistake. The lettuce seed would be planted exactly 1/8 of an inch deep. The broccoli would be perfectly spaced and each seed would germinate. My rows would be straight without regard to the hills and valleys that make up the natural contour of the garden. But it was only forty degrees out and I’m not that crazy.

On the same night, my father was restless and up and about. His hearing aid was whistling at him and in trying to tap it into mute mode, he dropped it on the tile floor in the bathroom and it broke. Now he has but one ear until he can buy another.

Onwards and upwards . . .

Memory

Do you believe that robins return to the same location year after year? Last year we had a robin’s nest in an old arborvitae beside the front of the house. We dug the tree out mid-summer because it was scraggly and unsightly. We have yet to replace it with something new, so the front of the house is bare. This morning a robin is building a nest on top of a post tucked in beside a beam under the overhang on the porch roof. The activity is in direct view of my writer’s window, so I shall be able to keep track of her progress. Or is it a he? I know the male helps sit on the eggs. Does he help build the nest as well? I hope this spot offers protection and I’m sorry we took down her tree. My grandma used to shoo the sparrows off her front porch and knock down the pesky bird’s nests. But I think she would like my robin.

I wish I could spend all day exploring serious themes in handsome prose while watching the robins. But I'm in the throes of query letter angst...to lead with a hook or to avoid the hook. Or to hang oneself by the neck from a post with a rope until dead.

Just kidding.

What's Real and What Isn't

Greenhouse update: We added another three-tier shelf to the 6 x 8 house so I could get some of the flats off the ground and my feet inside the door. My tomatoes are 5-6inches tall, attempting to outgrow their pots. Everything is finally coming up; even the slow-germinating peppers are sticking their soggy heads through the soil. The melons are spreading, all pumped up and a lush green, and the red cabbage is a nice rosy color. The brussel sprouts look similar to white cabbage when they first start out. The eggplant is also a little slow, like the peppers, but they are starting to unfurl. On another note, it was 66 degrees when I got up this morning, warmer outside than in, so I’m off to the garden for direct sowing of cold weather crops—radishes, arugula, lettuces, broccoli and onions. The dark horizon promises an afternoon shower so we must not tarry over coffee and unfinished novels. There will be a time for that.

Seven hours later. The promised thunderstorm arrived about 4pm. The winds were so high they blew my new shelf over and dumped the contents of the flats—dirt everywhere and fledgling plants uprooted. Topsy-turvy and who is who? The eggplant and the peppers look alike at this stage of the game. Woe is me. I tried to right them as much as possible. Maybe they’ll right themselves.

So what did you do for Earth Day? I was the stooge for a tree-planting photo op. You’ve seen the staged photos; people huddled around a sapling with shovels stuck strategically in the dirt, as they pose for the camera. The main honchos are in front and put their backs to the shovel as if they'd actually risk getting dirt on their high-heeled shoes. But one must at least pretend to be an arborist on Earth Day.

Smile. Click, click. Smile.

I was bamboozled into just such a fake photo at my airport, me in my uniform providing a backdrop of authenticity for two higher-ups who would never risk breaking a nail in such a manner. Never, never, never. I was duped into being a prop.

The idea was commendable-we at TSA would all chip in money and buy a tree to plant on airport grounds for Earth Day. Who wouldn’t get on board with that? We even got two for the price of one. Who could fault that? The first whiff of trouble drifted my way when I learned they bought ornamental pear trees, in other words “fake” trees, not indigenous-to-Michigan trees. But then the airport doesn’t want messy droppings, fruit, nuts, and leaves, etc. They lean towards evergreens and/or trees with tiny leaves, not big messy maples and real Michigan fruit trees.

But back to the duping. They pulled a group of us off the floor, and anyone who works as a screener for TSA is always ready to get off the floor. We walked outside to the front mall area in short-term parking and there were our trees—90pct planted by airport groundskeepers; only lacking the top 4-5 inches of dirt to be shoveled in and tamped down. Those of us who were actually involved with the idea and the purchase were there but we had to wait for our leader to validate our efforts and grasp the shovel . . . the driving force. Click.

Finished, she dropped the shovel and rushed back inside with her hands outstretched as if up to the elbows in cow manure. As if she'd been digging through the garbage in the slums of Lahore. At the checkpoint she asked for the hand sanitizer.

“Where’s the hand sanitizer? I need hand sanitizer.”

Click, click.

What is a conservative?

This is the most succinct definition I've seen.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Beating a Dead Horse

I found out this weekend that the fifteen-year old kid who was killed by a taser-wielding cop only got what he deserved because he was drunk and running away.

“He shouldn’t have been running away,” explains a fellow police officer to us ignorant civilians. “You can’t run away from a cop. And he was drunk.”

So drunk is right up there with sloth, malfeasance, murder, and rape, and even if you’re scared out of your wits, you better not run. Running is an admission of having done something wrong. And whatever you do, don’t let yourself succumb to the evils of alcohol. We civilians are all weak in our habits, our proclivity for bellying up to the bar, our youthful indiscretions and underage drinking.

This makes two kids killed by cops in the last month in Michigan. Where is the outrage? Our stupor of indifference is deafening. Last fall, a fifteen-year old Italian boy was killed by cops and his countrymen rioted in the streets. People . . . listen up. They were IN THE STREETS!!! FOR A WEEK!

In a different matter, on the opposite side of the state, the following exchange took place in a real court of law.

“Why were you driving drunk in my city?” asks the judge.

“I wasn’t drunk Your Honor,” says the stranger. “I was lost.”

“You got yourself lost on the wrong side of the state.”

“I only had two drinks and I was driving slow because I was in an unfamiliar city and I was lost.”

“What were you doing here, all the way across the state?”

None of your business, Your Honor. Isn’t this a free country? Isn’t freedom to travel a constitutional right?

“I was visiting a friend, Your Honor.”

“How many children do you have?”

What does that have to do with this charge, your honor?

“Why, four boys, Your Honor. One is a policeman.”

“I bet he’s really proud of you . . . pathetic excuse for a father.”

“They’ve all done quite well for themselves, Your Honor.”

“How many different mothers do these four boys have?”

What kind of a fucking question is that you pig?

“One, Sir.”

The judge goes on to tell the stranger that his blood alcohol level was point whatever, whatever (just over the legal limit) and he is putting him on probation for three years and taking his license away for one. Plus he has fines to pay and court costs, etc. etc. Coming down hard because it’s the stranger’s second DUI and this court has zero tolerance for losers, meaning people without money or connections in this Grand city.

In case after case, this judge berated, belittled, and demeaned defendant after defendant. And not once did any of the defense attorneys or court officials call him on it.

Seeds

I started my tomato, pepper and melon seeds last week, days before our April snowstorm, howling winds and six inches of snow. We’d erected a little 6 X 8 greenhouse with a tubular frame on the south side of the house, and I had all my flats inside. On a sunny day, even with cool temperatures, the inside of that tiny greenhouse was hot! And I thought it could hold its own at night with normal April lows. But what to do with such a forecast as this? And lows in the twenties? We were scrambling for solutions.

We hung a troublelight inside with a hundred watt bulb, which by itself will throw off an amazing amount of heat. But I feared that wasn’t enough. Then my husband dug out a little ceramic heater we weren’t using anymore, plugged it into the troublelight, and turned it on medium. We waited for the storm.

The next morning I looked out the bedroom window with trepidation to see if my greenhouse was still there. The plastic sides were dripping with condensation and the only snow on it was a wet layer across the center arch. I went outside, unzipped the door, and ducked inside to check the temperature. It was an OK fifty-five degrees. Not bad, considering the winds were hard out of the north and visibility was nil. Everything else was covered with snow, including the white pine sapling I’d planted the day before.

We have been keeping the heater and light on around the clock, waiting for the temperature outside to return to normal. Yesterday, the sun came back out and the greenhouse got up to ninety degrees. Yikes! We are new at this. We opened the little window for a cooling effect.

And then, the miracle—a tiny green spike unfolded from the dirt, a Brandywine tomato.

This morning the greenhouse is alive with a host of fragile green plants and the sun is shining.

Crime and Punishment

Let me tell you a story. My mother and father married at the end of World War II, like so many of their generation, but unlike many, they left the city life for the family farm. Mother had been raised on her own family farm but moved to the city to be with her city cousins and attend college. Then war broke out. She worked for DeSoto, making B-29s, and Dad joined the Air Force as a mechanic and was stationed in China and India. When the war ended, he could have had a job with Detroit Edison but decided he wanted to farm instead, and they both thought it’d be a better place to bring up the children they hoped to have. They moved into my grandparent’s big house because they planned to have lots of babies, and Grandma and Grandpa bought a place down the road. Dad took up farming and Mother promptly became pregnant. She kept her doctor in Detroit because a young woman can’t change everything in her life at once. You’ve heard the story . . . the race to the hospital . . . water breaking . . . but bear with me. Yes, they waited too long to start on the sixty mile drive, but everyone knows that a first-time mother sometimes miscalculates the speed with which her baby can slide down the birth canal and poke its head out into the world.

My dad has always had a heavy foot; he taught me how to plow through snowdrifts and skid around potholes. He can weave in and out of traffic with one hand on the wheel and point out the St. Louis Arch to you with the other. You will never miss a single sunset or astounding view or the first smudge of the Rocky Mountain foothills on the distant horizon if you’re in his backseat. He won’t let you miss a thing, even if you only want to bury your face in a book. He once had us sitting all day at a lake he’d heard was a stopover for flocks of migrating Canadian geese. We had to be very quiet and sit still and wait . . . all . . . day. They never came, but somehow we didn’t feel like we’d wasted our time. It was okay to sit and look at nature and wait for something to happen. It was okay to daydream. That early memory has stuck with me, even though the geese never came.

But back to his heavy foot . . . mother is about to have my eldest sister and dad is determined that it won’t be in his '45 Chevy, expertly navigating city traffic when a cop pulls him over. Dad quickly explains the situation and the cop says—

“Follow me.”

One of Detroit’s finest turned on his flashers and led them the rest of the way, right to the doorstep of St. Mary's Hospital in downtown Detroit.

Thanks to that policeman, my mother arrived at the hospital in time for her own doctor to deliver my sister minutes later.

I’m thinking of this story because of all the things that have happened recently due to poor judgment on the part of law enforcement officials. Last week there was the sad story about the man who was rushing his dying mother-in-law to a hospital in Texas when a cop pulled him over in the parking lot. He wouldn’t let the man go into the hospital with his wife and mother-in-law. He insisted on writing the guy a ticket. One of the nurses even came out and told the cop that the woman was dying and wouldn’t he please let him come in and see her before she died. He wouldn’t. He had to stubbornly finish writing the son-in-law a speeding ticket.

This morning there was a news story about a man in Florida who was rushing his wife to the hospital because she was about to have a baby. A cop pulled him over and the man explained their situation, and wouldn’t it have been nice if this police officer had said—

“Follow me.”

He doggedly wrote him a ticket for nine miles over the speed limit.

If my dad had been doing his twenty miles over the speed limit in a similar culture of “crime and punishment”, distraught and talking back, they probably would’ve tased him and thrown him in jail, my sister would’ve been delivered on the curb, and our entire family history would have been rewritten. None of us would be where we are now, because this is how lives are ruined, through the overreach and bad judgment of one person in power.

Now some may say they were only protecting the public from speeders. Some would say they saved lives. Maybe so. But this much I know—there is a pervasive mindset in today’s law enforcement and judiciary to follow the rules, to not think outside the box. Independent thinking is neither encouraged nor rewarded. There is no training on how to step back from a situation and weigh the circumstances unique to the matter at hand and take action accordingly. Is it really any different from a combat zone where a good leader squats down and lights up a cigarette and says— “Let’s think this over for a minute.”?

There is enough corruption in police departments around the country to afford every college graduate ample material for their thesis. With the choking economy, there is easy money to be made writing tickets and I have no doubt that cops are under pressure to bring it in, but an even greater problem today is our drug forfeiture laws. With the way the law is written, drugs busts are big business with all property being rewarded to the arresting agency. The wealthier the county, the more corrupt. This is the main reason law enforcement rails against any change to our antiquated drug laws. This is why the Sheriff’s Department has expensive sports cars and SUVs in the county garage; it’s why the Sheriff always drives a new vehicle and has all those toys and can run a high-profile campaign with an eye on the governorship and beyond. This is why they will use all their resources to fight medicinal marijuana.

I will probably never see the day when we can grow hemp again, that wondrous, natural fabric, and I certainly don't expect to ever be able to grow marijuana for medicinal use. I mean . . . can you imagine the paperwork and the record-keeping and the cops poking around your fields and sticking their noses in your harvesting methods and in your granary and your silos? What a nightmare that would be. In spite of the fact that the voters passed a bill overwhelmingly last November (I wrote about this in an earlier post), I expect the guidelines that come out of Lansing will be so convoluted and exasperating few farmers will take it on. I expect the process will make our annual OCIA inspection (our organic certifier) seem simple.

But there are other crops to grow for organic markets if the Senate doesn’t bow to pressure from Dow and Monsanto to regulate small family farmers out of business. But that is another subject.

And my mother? Well, she had her first two babies in Detroit and then found a doctor she could trust closer to home, and there were no more mad rushes to the hospital. My dad has slowed down, but he still loves to get behind the wheel and drive the gravel roads of home where you very seldom see the red and blues.

Why You Shouldn't Call Me

A road, a river, a mountain,
restless desert eddies,
and still more space to navigate;
more than can be gathered.
Beyond the question of what you had
for dinner and if your roses bloom
or stand defeated in the heat,
about what matters, we sometimes fall behind.
Yet I feel you and hear your voice
in strangers that surround me.
When the very silence howls an absence,
like the coyotes that run your foothills,
I hear you.
In this we aren't so far apart.
They say we have them here-
bold in the twilight, hungry and moving.

The Turtle

I saw a turtle today with a head the size of my fist. The ice in the pond is at 90% melt. Only a thin strip remains through the heart of the center, circling up around the dock where it's a few inches thicker (where it was once at its thickest). It was fifty degrees and sunny, so I was taking a walk along the shore, looking for signs of spring, when a loud splash startled me. I swung around, and surfacing ten or so feet out from the widening circle of ripples was a head the size of my fist. First just the head and two eyes bobbed on the surface, and I froze. Then the rest of the body came into view,black and glossy. He was swimming in reptilian fashion, reminding me of a butterfly stroke, heading straight for me, and I watched in amazement. Then he dove and his tail flicked through the air, thin and curled like a possum. The length of that tail surprised me, and the whole thing was like a dream, and I wondered if it really was a turtle. It looked more like a baby Nessie, something spawned in Loch Ness and then lifted into the atmosphere and dropped from the sky by a trickster into our little farm pond in the middle of the Great Lakes basin. He dove and was gone. I waited but he didn’t resurface.

I walked around the rest of the pond, through the narrow inlets and the dead grass, past the birch trees and the small sunken fiberglass boat that someone forgot to beach, listening for another splash, but there was nothing. Life has not yet returned to the pond, the dragonflies and water striders of summer have yet to emerge, and the catfish and bass are deep in the bottom, slowly awakening to the freeing of the pond from its winter ice. The turtle rules the water in March. He has it all to himself.

The Dirty Dozen and the Ides of March

It rained through the night and the wind pummeled our brick house and rattled the windows, and this morning there are standing pools of water in the front yard and the dead grass is beaten down. A section of downspout is in the road and cardboard boxes blown away from somewhere else sit in the yard like tombstones. The woods across the muddy road are black and still. My seed order sits neglected on the table under tax returns and library books. Seeds? Spring, oh spring.

Earth Day is April 22nd. I would encourage everyone to support organic farmers and buy local and in-season fruits and vegetables as much as possible. Secondly, recycle, especially plastic. Bottled water is one of the biggest scams of our day, and the single-use leaching plastic water bottles used by the industry are the bane of our landfills.

So recycle and eat organic. Following are the dirty dozen, foods you should always try to buy organic, either because of their thin skins that offer no protection against the poison sprayed on them by conventional farmers, or the hormones and antibiotics administered to encourage fast growth and prevent disease in crowded feedlots and factory chicken farms.

1. Meat and eggs
2. Milk
3. Coffee – most of the beans we buy are grown in countries that don’t regulate the use of pesticides or chemicals. Look for the USDA Organic label to insure you aren’t buying beans grown with potentially harmful chemicals. Or go a step further and look for the Fair Trade label which insures that your purchase supports farmers who are paid fairly and treated well. And look for the shade-grown varieties. Then you know your coffee is being grown under the canopy of the rainforest, leaving these ancient trees intact.
4. Peaches (delicate skins)
5. Apples
6. Sweet Bell Peppers – they are heavily sprayed and have thin skins that don’t offer much of a barrier.
7. Celery- no protective skin, which makes it impossible to wash off the chemicals used on conventional crops.
8. Strawberries – if you buy strawberries out of season, they’re most likely imported from countries that use less stringent regulations for pesticide use.
9. Leafy Greens – frequent contamination with what are considered the most potent pesticides used on food.
10. Grapes – imported grapes run a much greater risk of contamination than those grown
domestically, and grapes have very thin skins.
11. Potatoes – America’s popular spud ranks high for pesticide residue. It also gets the double whammy of fungicides added to the soil by conventional farmers.
12. Tomatoes – the tomato’s easily punctured skin is no match for chemicals that will eventually permeate it.

Pesticide, Herbicide, Fungicide . . . Suicide.

Why am I Reading Three Books at Once?

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
- Walter Bagehot

Now in all fairness I must say I don’t know who Walter Bagehot is, and my first inclination at reading this quote was to say—What? Have you not been to your local library lately? Who are you and how dare you talk so dismissively about the throes of writing anything! What do you, Walter Bagehot, know?

Then I looked at the current stack of library books competing with my uncompleted income tax returns for attention and wondered . . . why am I reading three books at once?

I started the first novel (highly acclaimed by review) with high expectations but couldn’t get through the laborious, over-written prologue. So I set it aside and started novel # 2 but soon found myself flipping through to the end of chapter one. Now this is death to a writer. To have a reader thumbing through your first chapter? Dear Lord! This is the dreaded sharpie-taken-to-your-manuscript in any respectable writer’s circle! So, how did novel #2 get past a writer’s group and an agent and an editor to become published? With lowered expectations I started novel #3 with its cleaver title and intriguing book jacket copy written to lure me in. I skimmed through the first five pages that every writer knows is paramount to success, waiting to be hooked. But sometimes it takes ten or twenty or even fifty pages to be hooked and I'm a patient reader, so I plodded ahead, only to be introduced to character after character I feared I would care nothing about. In fact, I knew every detail of their predictable lives before each was revealed and cared not a whit for any of it.

And so they sit, on top of my yet-to-be-filed income tax returns as I browse through my own bookshelves for old dog-eared paperbacks and so-called classics which might be nothing more than books written by people who knew things.

So, Walter Bagehot, whoever you are, I offer my apologies.

World Gone Wild

Is the world going crazy? A mentally deranged woman keeps a male chimpanzee (APE) as a "pet" and when he goes berserk and tears her friend's face off, she blames her friend for having a different hairdo? She eats with this animal, shares her wine with him and pops Xanex with him, bathes with him, and sleeps with him and God knows what else she was alluding to doing with him in one of her many bizarre interviews.

Then there is the Octo-Woman. Six children under the age of eight weren’t enough for her. Unmarried, no job, living with her parents who have both now flown the coop, she says she is "blessed" to have eight more babies. Blessed? Babies are not puppies for God's sake. Can you imagine the daily hospital bill alone? Who is going to feed, clothe and take care of these fourteen children? She has a publicist and is hoping for a book deal. What?? Wouldn’t I and the hundreds of other writers supporting themselves with jobs they dislike while they plug away at their computer every chance they get, love a book deal? What an insult. Is she also hoping for a photo exclusive or a movie deal, a tell-all on Oprah or her own reality TV show? Or,as rumor now has it, will she succumb to the million dollar offer to do a porno? Should we be surprised by this? The whole thing was initiated as a publicity stunt, but does anybody care what the nutso’s story is? I’d just like the doctor who implanted eight embryos in a woman her age with her personal and financial situation to be prosecuted and the babies to be given up for adoption to families who aren't out to exploit them.

Then there’s Joe the Plumber who actually does have a book deal if he can get someone to write it for him. He is, after all, busy with his Middle East peace keeping mission and his Capitol Hill policy speeches and his radio talk show blitz. Maybe he can fill in for Rush Limbaugh who fell off the deep end the day after the election, ranting and raving ever since. Can you just envision the man behind the microphone, foaming at the mouth and popping pills, as he spits his hate-filled invective over the airwaves? I have to believe he is on the fringe with his message, so why do so many radio stations carry him? Because he’s a cheap way to fill air space? It’s not that he’s bad for the democrats. He’s bad for America.

How cheap are we? Is there a crazy connection between Simian love and Octo-woman, Joe the Plumber and Limbaugh? Are we not the laughing stock of the world as we fall to our knees and prostitute ourselves for a “story”?