Really Slowing Time

Since last post we have a new baby. With my new charge I am busier than ever but not working so maybe a little writing can happen. And what I am into now is food. Really slow food-- pretty au courant-- yet I am remembering my French exchange mom in the summer of 1984 who spent 2-3 hours a day preparing and cooking lunch for us in her modest kitchen. We ate dishes of celery baked au gratin or maybe biftek and homemade french fries always followed by a frisee salad made from unusually bitter greens and then a cheese plate and a fruit plate. My French sister Valerie and I woke late -- around eleven or noon while our mom was at the marche buying the fresh produce, made ourselves hot chocolate for dipping our pain au chocolat then an hour later returned to the kitchen table for the event of the day: dejeuner, a serious undertaking. I soon learned that if I ate everything I was truly beloved by all. The pace was slow. We slept a lot. From midnight to noon, woke, ate, ate again and then napped with the shutters fast shut against the searing Avignon sun. Dinner was in front of the TV watching dubbed Dallas reruns while eating charcuterie, fresh baguettes and more frise.

Ironically, Valerie chose that summer to take out her teen rebellion as a food war. She resisted everything yummy and homemade. She was working on losing weight off her shapely hips while I gained 10 pounds-- easily lost when I returned home and spent the fall eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wonder bread.

My idea of slow means trying out a cool new recipe for cranberry shelling beans bought fresh and boiled briefly then marinated in olive oil, lemon, garlic, parmesan cheese and basil and mixed with steamed haricot vert. It means taking my toddler to the market, discussing the meal with him in the check out line and then making it with him. Even better our neighbor Ginny brought us stalks of her garden's collards and we prepared them from scratch. Our plum trees produced several gallon tubs of vanilla plum butter that we swapped for apricot jam from our other neighbors. Steve, the artist up the street shares his raspberries strawberries and peaches with us as we stroll by, Pretty cool for gardens the size of a large living room. Needing space--emotional or physical-- I dream of building vertical with fruit trees and bean stalks. It's not going to save the world as some think, but it definitely can make a slow year happily slower-- and it is community to be proud of.

The Bay Now

My son and I head down to the Berkeley Marina every other day because it's how Jacks falls to sleep calmly for a mid-day nap. In the last several months it was always about visiting the boats-- as much for me as the baby because it helps me remember my father and our family sloop. Often the loop around the Berkeley Yacht Club parking lot inspired some needed grief for may dad, especially when on a Friday a stiff wind lifts and heels a J120 and its racing crew as it rounds the marina's breakwater. I like to think also that I'll be able to raise my son in the multi-generational tradition of my Long Island Sound family, sailing big boats, racing and cruising.

Two weeks ago, our little Marina trip down the road was met with the white suits of the clean up crews. The 58,000 gallons of oil from our recent spill had been swept by wind and tide to our coastline, and the marina became the center of the Bay's clean-up effort. Birds we had come to take for granted in the past had become symbols of universal grief and guilt. And this time I cried not for my dad, but for these birds, the most visible and vulnerable to the spill. No one was on the bay: it smelled like oil. The bay was beautiful and empty as long as I kept my car window closed. I told my students the next day that we will be one day as the bay's wildlife is now; actually, we already are, only we aren't breathing liquid oil just living off it surreptitiously. It's telling that the best way to put my son down for a nap is by driving because, after all, he spent far too much time in a car already in his short life, even though our family drives less than 40 miles a week.

Ambivalence

Romantically smug. That's one way I recently described my western love affair with place which is of course as clichéd as it is sentimental. The innocence of romance is always shattered by time and reality. Here's another conversation with the afore-mentioned brother who once lived in San Francisco but moved back east to Connecticut:
Me: It's a good thing you moved when you did. California breaks your heart. So much traffic and pollution.
Eastern brother: no response (only he looked sad and nostalgic on the video conference.)

Maybe it is my dad's death of cancer that he attributed to his time working on the Hoover Dam in the 50's, or the fact that a lead specialist found lead in our garden's soil, a remainder from the time when gas still had lead in it. Or maybe because I live within a mile of a twelve-lane highway, beside the 1 mile section known for among the worst daily traffic jams in the country. Or maybe it's also because I live across the street from coastal redwoods and can see the bay and the Golden Gate a few blocks away. The Golden Gate with its marvelous design eloquently marrying the synthetic and the organic, is too often shaded brown by a necklace of smog that adorns the entire bay and highlights the highways connecting the bay's cities. The dichotomies when they co-habitate break my heart and piss me off.
I live in the flatlands of Berkeley, once wetland, then pasture, then the workers' neighborhoods that rose up next to the over eighty industries developed around the railroad and the bay's ports. Rome lives on top of its classical past and has reclaimed relics to rebuild each new era. Here, we reclaimed relics of the past too. Our history is almost entirely modern: an hundred-fifty year chronicle of fossil fuels with only brief moments of nature's reclamation during the New Deal. Hopefully, Berkley's plans for green industry in West Berkeley will be longer lasting.
Historical link:www.webaic.org/history.html

May

"When green got silly" and "The Kitchen Gardener"

I'm referring here to Lynette Evans column in the today's San Francisco Home and Garden Section. Evans compares eco-bloggers and the new green consumers hot for now popular expensive green items to Marie Antoinette, who had her own "faux peasant village so she and her courtiers could pretend to be peasants without hunger, pestilence and hard labor." Evans goes on to argue that we can't assume easy answers to envionmental crises and that it's more important to use critical thinking than Stella MacCartney's organic shopping bag ($495) when it comes to conscious living. It's a good article even it is just to introduce her colleague's new column "Your Ecological House." I like the way she is stretching the concept of sustainability to its rightful shape: without a consciousness of poverty, pestilence and exploited labor elsewhere, there is nothing sustainable about designer eco-products.

Another notable piece in the same section today:"The Kitchen Gardener" by Anne Raver of the New York Times. She describes how to make a salad garden in a kind of large portable planting box that can be put on wheels or sawhorses. (Directions for the self-watering container can be found at hgic.umd.edu, under online publications, on container vegetable gardening.) A friend and I are contemplating a large educational project called the Edible Truck, a truck that runs on biofuel that holds portable planting boxes filled with edible plants. My dream would be to install a camping stove, a worm and food compost in different compartments of the truck and make it into an art car that visits local schools that don't have edible schoolyards. An even bigger dream (just hatched) is to become a partner in our local Biodiesel Oasis, a woman run cooperative that is the first to sell biodiesel in the East Bay. Then the Edible Truck can live at the Oasis!

american gold finches and hawks

While writing I have been visited. After my father died last August and briefly took on the form of a hummingbird in my mind, I have the uncanny though pathetic fallacy that birds are telling me something. I'm trying hard now, nearly a year later, to see it as a lovely coincidence that amazingly beautiful birds visit me while I'm writing. It makes sense that while I write about plants and birds, and I'm sitting still, I would see something through the window in front of my desk. Today I saw what I think is an american gold finch, the first I have ever seen of whatever it is-- truly bright gold with a touch of black on its wings. Its color set against the green pounced at me like a parrot or a tropical fish reminding me that I am still a tourist having moved between micro-climates in the Bay Area in my ten years here. The question is really who is visiting whom?

My son and husband are in Reno visiting his family, who are struggling with our brother-in-law's newly diagnosed leukemia. I'm home struggling with my newly diagnosed pregnancy. Just talking to Doug on the phone he told me about the hawks living in his mother's backyard. We were up there last weekend and our son Jackson checked out the hawks and immediately gave a pretty good impression of their calls. We thought it was maybe just wishful thinking, but now we know Jacks has that hawk call down. Just now I heard him make the call while talking to Doug. Those hawks are not just "visiting;" Jacks' in direct dialogue with them. The hawks usurped a squirrel's nest high in a tree and seemed to have formed a ring of nests around the house. Last week the hawks were very much with us while we gardened with our three year old nephew, whose parents are both at the hospital full time right now. We planted a giant 100 pound pumpkin, contest-size, to be ready in time for Halloween. Who knows what this summer and fall will be like for our nephew; hopefully, nature will be benevolent. The hawks with their awesome feeding patterns are pretty brutal but magnificent also.

It's wrong to say we are visited by the natural world. Yes, tiny ants, famous in Berkeley, form giant Macy parades in our house whenever a grain of rice is left on the floor. We've decided to coexist with several spiders, about one per room. There's been a lot said already about the forces of life and death mirrored in the plant, insect and animal world. We humans like to separate ourselves from the others and use them as metaphors, and maybe that is why we are stunned, like a bound Gulliver, when we are felled by a disease or morning sickness or worse, death. I know my father found solace in only a few things while fighting prostate cancer: his tomato plants, his family, the hummingbirds at his feeder, New England coastal storms and the sounds of waves. A poem I wrote for his memorial service called "How to prepare for a storm," concluded with the directive: "let yourself belong again." It's ironic how language and thought make us feel apart, yet how language also brings us back.

Bring Back the Natives

Since last writing, I went on the wonderful East Bay Bring Back the Natives Garden Tour and checked out amazing private gardens committed to California native flowers and shrubs. I found my favorite flower in my favorite garden: the hummingbird sage found in a Berkeley garden cultivated by a mom of two pre-schoolers. The hummingbird sage has a deep purple flower that's sticky to touch and smells sweet, almost like a shrub you find in the Sierra nicknamed Mountain Misery because of its sticky resin. (An old boyfriend nicknamed Mountain Man Dan, a former wildlife technician in Yosemite said Mountain Misery got its name from miners who thought the smell reminded them of their wives back home.) Well, the hummingbird sage attracts humming brids of course, likes shade and has what I am beginning to see as an the exotica of the native plant. Natives just don't look like show pieces in the gladiola, impatiens, pansy, peony tradition. Maybe because they haven't been cultivated for market, maybe because they are what landed here and just evolved on their own without targeted human tinkering. I don't want to totally belittled my beloved peonies-- we had a huge bed of over 50 gorgeous multi-colored peonies in my mom's garden growing up in Rochester, New York. But, I like the way natives are mostly drought resistant, they draw local birds and insects and they help us chart recent eco-history. When a good bunch get scorched in the summer or die off in the winter frost maybe they're telling us something.

When we bought our house in 2005, I inherited a garden thoughtfully created using natural gardening techniques and unknowingly let my husband make destroy it this year. I didn't realize I had such a cool garden until I took the Bring Back the Natives tour. In fact, I used to dis it and talk of the plants I inherited as wimp plants that lacked the beauty of a really lush garden. So it was easy for my husband to convince me that we needed more lawn. We pulled up a big rectangle of bricks that served as a small pond the winter of 2006 when winter storms flooded our backhouse the night I went into labor. Last summer, the new dad ripped up the vegetable garden and put in a french drain thus making a foot wide ten foot long underground pipe that sucks water and makes anything planted above it completely compromised. We also lawned over the bed of year-round rainbow chard and made raised beds when we found our soil had left over lead from the residue of the years when gasoline was laced with lead. We craiglisted our recycled concrete stepping stones and bought new commercial granite stones from god knows where and lawned over a path formerly made of the recycled concrete.

Why this confession? Everything our garden had been followed practices of natural gardening techniques: native plants that naturally thrive in the San Franciso Bay Area, control of weeds and water conservation with mulch, water conservation by selecting hardy, local native plants and by removing part or all of your lawn, inclusion of berry bushes and water sources for wildlife. Now we have a lot of lawn for our 14 month old son to roll around in, but he doesn't actually use the lawn. He likes to dig and pick strawberries (ripe or otherwise) and check out the birds and insects that fortunately still visit. Which leads me to wonder: what is with adult men and their lawns? Perhaps the wielding the lawn mower is such a right of passage for boys (and a trick right of passage because dads hype it up just so they can pass off the chore to someone else!) that they never quite get over it. Lawns are necessary thereafter in order to feel like a dad and a property owner. I like our new lawn but I was far more impressed with gardens I visited on the tour that had an amazing diversity of native plants, none of which required regular water and electric lawn mowers. Jacks at one surveys his domain confidently, a sight more interesting than the mower. It consists of eye-level lamb's ear stalks, roses, an immense lavender bush, cabbage plants that draw the cabbage moths, current bushes, idahoe fescue, firecracker and pineapple sage that inspire intimate encounters with hummingbirds and the lemon trees still small enough for Jacks to pull off leaves (which, by the way, we discovered yesterday also smell of lemons.)