Margotlog: Friends with Cancer
We are not supposed to be brought low by our friends' illnesses, or that was the message I received as a kid. Maybe I was simply a hedonistic type, skipping rope and running up and down the enormous block from King Street to Meeting Street along the bulk of what we called "The Old Citadel." This was Charleston, South Carolina in the days before home airconditioning. During the summer, our parents often took us to the movies, within walking distance, since we lived at the King Street end of The Old Citadel, and the movie theaters were maybe five blocks down King Street -- the Gloria Theater being the one I remember most. Glimmering stars shone down from a large replica of dark sky above our heads.
Entering the air-conditioned cool and walking the dark sloping ramp to find seats, we settled in to be transported to other realms, other eras. There was a bio-pic of Chopin, played by a pale though not haggard young man, with a mess of curly, dark hair. Several times the camera focused on his hands traversing the piano keys. Finally, the keys were splashed with red blood. Our mother explained that he had tuberculosis, and was hemmoraghing, or spitting up blood. The music he played even as his blood stained the white keys was so delicious, so rampant with fury and passion that I was completely mesmerized.
After that, for weeks, months, maybe years, my sister and I played at romantic dying in our parents' big bed. She was Violetta from Verdi's "La Traviata." Then I was Mimi from "La Boheme." Snuggling in our mother's fleecy pink bed jacket, we sang lustily as the maid, (aka the healthy sister) brought us glasses of lemonade and a cookie or two to assauge the illness. There was something remarkably lifelike about this play-acting, especially for me. I had periodic bouts with tonsillitus--high fevers and very sore throats, which sent me to bed while penicillin worked its cure.
Dying in almost all 19th-century opera occurs not so much to young men, but to beautiful young women. Sometimes like Mimi, the dying damsel is simply pathetic; other times as with Violetta, her illness is a kind of plague brought on by her all too "free and easy" lifestyle, depriving her of a chance to redeem herself except through dying. I have no doubt that enough beautiful young women died of TB during the 19th century to make these scenarios all too realistic. I also sometimes include the great poet Keats in these remembered scenarios, though my sister and I had never heard of him. But now, his poem "Bright Star/ would I were steadfast as thou art," says so much about the 19th-century's scourge of TB and the need to make it poetic.
Now, the plague is cancer. We live longer, giving those mutations that cause cancer (along with environmental plagues) time to do their horrible work. Right now, I have three friends with cancer, one for the first time. For another, the scourge has recurred. This will be her fourth bout with cancer. And for the third, a man, the cancer occurred perhaps eight years ago, and he has been very lucky to have extremely good care at Boston's Mass General as part of a study, which I believe involves a new concoction of drugs as well as blood transfusions.
I bow my head to their courage. Sometimes after talking to them, I am so subdued that I need to be quiet, drifting up and down stairs, a bit like walking a prayer. Prayer offers up a supplication to the great powers of faith, hope, and charity which the weakness of my soul, and the absolute incomprehensibility of their suffering require that I petition. Now, outside my window, it is a beautiful morning. I am happy to report that many houses along our block no longer use herbicides and pesticides on their lawns. Yes, our climate is warming, but so, perhaps are our hearts, transformed by awareness of how depredations to our environment bring on slow-or-fast moving catastrophe.
This, in itself, is worth a prayer of thanksgiving and for me, at least, a determination to continue to support the work to free our world from cancinogens with which we have polluted our air, water, and soil. In the names of my friends, and of the increased number of birds in my backyard--I offer my sorrow and my attempts to do what I can. Yesterday, I saw for the second time this spring, a humming bird at my sweet water feeder. For their lives, and those of my friends, for myself, my neighbors, my family--I offer up a prayer of muted hope.
Friday, June 23, 2017
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth
Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth
In the midst of a Florence spring, it's easy to be reminded of what price beauty. The trees at the interchange where I crossed from the old city into a quieter more modern area glowed with rich green. The sky every day for a week was blue as Mary's cloak. My one evening alone, walking along an embankment above the Arno, watching the water twine and flow, three mallards took flight. I could have been on a Minnesota lake.
Many of our Minnesota lakes and streams are polluted by chemicals sprayed to engender huge harvests. Many farmers want nothing to do with "buffers" of plants that will absorb and neutralize these chemicals. I can almost hear the argument: "We have big machines that till and harvest. We need all the space we can get." It's the soy and corn, Dummie. And voracious farming practices that want "carpet crops" with no true dirt around the borders, dirt that if left alone, could absorb much of the polluting run-off.
Italians don't talk much about farm pollution. Their brand of "showing off" doesn't mean so much controlling nature, as sashaying with speed or beauty--beauty as a form of parading the human/divine, Venus on her speeding shell, her nakedness a form of glorious identity, her ropes of golden hair another form of pasta. To eat is to be beautiful. To walk arm-in-arm through the family crowds is to carry your soul-food on either side of you.
Yes, I had lovely things to eat, especially at Omero's in a tiny hamlet high above the Arno called Arcetri. Far enough above the city that only a few lights glimmered here and there, but close enough to perceive the tops of hills still catching the sun, and the dells turning blue in the twilight.
I didn't like what the new steward of the Uffizi has done with the paintings. All the Michaelangelos downstairs in dungeon rooms with black walls. (But isn't that to protect the surfaces? No, says my snide friend, not much impressed with curators. It's because "black" is trendy.) I missed associations from years before. No longer does Venus on her half shell speed forward across a gallery toward a Netherlander image of piety, the donors tiny at the bottom. The Netherlanders now have a whole wall to themselves. And they're rather staid and boring, while poor Venus has no one to counteract her insouscient freedom and beauty.
Thank heavens no one has tampered with the wildly inventive Uffizi ceilings--those cornucopia of satyrs, angels, griffins, plinths, vessels--so complex and unpredictable that the neck and brain tire together and return the eyes to the floor.
I ate at least one, sometimes two gelatos a day, with pistachio and lemon or pink as cotton candy atop deep licorice, every combination an experiment, some better than others. I found one museum I'd never visited before, dedicated to Galileo, right behind the Uffizi, and so if you've goofed your entry time, as I did, and have time to kill, it's so easy to climb the stairs as models of the sky change around you, globe after globe after globe. Sky and earth, stars and planets. At the end I was no better informed than before as to what precisely he, the great sky-gazer, discovered or predicted, but I saw many many "mock-ups" of solar systems, a few that almost looked like they belonged to us.
In the midst of a Florence spring, it's easy to be reminded of what price beauty. The trees at the interchange where I crossed from the old city into a quieter more modern area glowed with rich green. The sky every day for a week was blue as Mary's cloak. My one evening alone, walking along an embankment above the Arno, watching the water twine and flow, three mallards took flight. I could have been on a Minnesota lake.
Many of our Minnesota lakes and streams are polluted by chemicals sprayed to engender huge harvests. Many farmers want nothing to do with "buffers" of plants that will absorb and neutralize these chemicals. I can almost hear the argument: "We have big machines that till and harvest. We need all the space we can get." It's the soy and corn, Dummie. And voracious farming practices that want "carpet crops" with no true dirt around the borders, dirt that if left alone, could absorb much of the polluting run-off.
Italians don't talk much about farm pollution. Their brand of "showing off" doesn't mean so much controlling nature, as sashaying with speed or beauty--beauty as a form of parading the human/divine, Venus on her speeding shell, her nakedness a form of glorious identity, her ropes of golden hair another form of pasta. To eat is to be beautiful. To walk arm-in-arm through the family crowds is to carry your soul-food on either side of you.
Yes, I had lovely things to eat, especially at Omero's in a tiny hamlet high above the Arno called Arcetri. Far enough above the city that only a few lights glimmered here and there, but close enough to perceive the tops of hills still catching the sun, and the dells turning blue in the twilight.
I didn't like what the new steward of the Uffizi has done with the paintings. All the Michaelangelos downstairs in dungeon rooms with black walls. (But isn't that to protect the surfaces? No, says my snide friend, not much impressed with curators. It's because "black" is trendy.) I missed associations from years before. No longer does Venus on her half shell speed forward across a gallery toward a Netherlander image of piety, the donors tiny at the bottom. The Netherlanders now have a whole wall to themselves. And they're rather staid and boring, while poor Venus has no one to counteract her insouscient freedom and beauty.
Thank heavens no one has tampered with the wildly inventive Uffizi ceilings--those cornucopia of satyrs, angels, griffins, plinths, vessels--so complex and unpredictable that the neck and brain tire together and return the eyes to the floor.
I ate at least one, sometimes two gelatos a day, with pistachio and lemon or pink as cotton candy atop deep licorice, every combination an experiment, some better than others. I found one museum I'd never visited before, dedicated to Galileo, right behind the Uffizi, and so if you've goofed your entry time, as I did, and have time to kill, it's so easy to climb the stairs as models of the sky change around you, globe after globe after globe. Sky and earth, stars and planets. At the end I was no better informed than before as to what precisely he, the great sky-gazer, discovered or predicted, but I saw many many "mock-ups" of solar systems, a few that almost looked like they belonged to us.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Margotlog: What to Do When the World Upends
Margotlog: What to Do When the World Upends
Over the past few months, I've often felt dazed by disaster, either that in Washington, or close at hand, trying to help our cat Maggie through an uncertain passage that yesterday ended in death. Now that she has been "put down" by a kind and competent home euthenasia service, MN Pets, and we've buried her in the backyard, I find myself thinking about Iris Origo's World War II diary, War in Val d'Orcia. It is probably the best thing she ever published, among a number of other books filled with deep research about ancient or more modern personages. The best because, in her case, the pressure of writing late at night, after bedding down her children and the orphans she and her Italian husband took in from northern Italy, this pressure of catching truth on the fly created a prose that is intensely vivid and at the same time, cleansed of learned citations or long jaunts into the past. She is whispering to us as the pen crosses the page.
Her life at La Foce, the large, neglected property she and her new husband bought in the dry Sienese hills, had already demanded intense effort, to locate and distribute reliable sources of water. To turn what we would call "tenant farmers" toward more modern and productive methods. To rebuild, furnish, and make somewhat more modern the small estate which was crumbling when they first saw it. By the beginning of the war, the Origos had accomplished much. But their first child, a son, had died unexpectedly at age six. Their other two children, daughters, were born as the war tightened its noose around them.
All this is gripping in itself, but it's her calm, rapid accounting that seems the greatest accomplishment. I tell this because with each passing day and each eruption of scandal and shock, I too am feeling shaken. I want to focus on the passing fears, hopes, and efforts of everyday life. Here is my first entry:
* Three streets in my Lex-Ham neighborhood of St. Paul are planted, almost exclusively, with Ash trees. I live on one of them, Laurel Avenue. Every two years over the past decade, my husband and I have paid to have our boulevard Ash treated with a chemical that kills the Ash Borer. Now, with a friend who works for Rainbow Tree Service, I was spending a warm sunny morning going up and down steps, onto porches and stoops, and inserting flyers printed on green paper explaining that without treatment, the Ash trees would die. Then around each boulevard Ash, my friend and I wrapped a green plastic band that explained Ash Borers Kill Ash Trees.
It was one of those calm, blue Minnesota mornings. The sky rose very high and very blue, as blue as Mary's cloak. Quiet and serene, the streets spread around us as calm as the Virgin seated in her protective niche. We worked quietly, our steps audible as I mounted to houses, some quite high off the street. A 100-year-old lilac tree spread its twisting arms across an entire slope.
Finally as I descended from the last houses, I realized that I felt transformed. Under no other circumstance would I have descended these everyday steps from houses high off the street. Under no other circumstance would I have paid homage to trees bordering twelve blocks of neighboring yards.
We live too much on our own "turf." Yes, months of cold and snow don't encourage chatting outdoors with neighbors. But lately, I've found myself talking to dogs. I pause at an alley backyard and pat a small spaniel who has not barked at me at all, but instead stuck his nose through the wide square mesh and licked my hand.
I exit my house and find myself caught up in a short parade of white and brown children. They announce they're looking for their orange cat. Slowly rounding the corner, a lovely young woman with long dark hair and brown-gold skin comes close enough to explain that the children belong to one family. The children help by pointing across the roofs to the far corner of the huge block. There is their house. Caught up in their chatter, and the young woman's easy explanations, I walk with them, promising to keep a lookout for a cat named Charlie. Finally arriving at their house, I recognize it as one that was recently for sale. "I'm the caretaker," the young woman tells me. "I just cleaned all three stories." The children's father works on a rig somewhere far away. All kinds of questions hover just beyond speech. What is amazing is this passle of children, their lovely young woman in charge of them, and the need to find a orange cat.
Over the past few months, I've often felt dazed by disaster, either that in Washington, or close at hand, trying to help our cat Maggie through an uncertain passage that yesterday ended in death. Now that she has been "put down" by a kind and competent home euthenasia service, MN Pets, and we've buried her in the backyard, I find myself thinking about Iris Origo's World War II diary, War in Val d'Orcia. It is probably the best thing she ever published, among a number of other books filled with deep research about ancient or more modern personages. The best because, in her case, the pressure of writing late at night, after bedding down her children and the orphans she and her Italian husband took in from northern Italy, this pressure of catching truth on the fly created a prose that is intensely vivid and at the same time, cleansed of learned citations or long jaunts into the past. She is whispering to us as the pen crosses the page.
Her life at La Foce, the large, neglected property she and her new husband bought in the dry Sienese hills, had already demanded intense effort, to locate and distribute reliable sources of water. To turn what we would call "tenant farmers" toward more modern and productive methods. To rebuild, furnish, and make somewhat more modern the small estate which was crumbling when they first saw it. By the beginning of the war, the Origos had accomplished much. But their first child, a son, had died unexpectedly at age six. Their other two children, daughters, were born as the war tightened its noose around them.
All this is gripping in itself, but it's her calm, rapid accounting that seems the greatest accomplishment. I tell this because with each passing day and each eruption of scandal and shock, I too am feeling shaken. I want to focus on the passing fears, hopes, and efforts of everyday life. Here is my first entry:
* Three streets in my Lex-Ham neighborhood of St. Paul are planted, almost exclusively, with Ash trees. I live on one of them, Laurel Avenue. Every two years over the past decade, my husband and I have paid to have our boulevard Ash treated with a chemical that kills the Ash Borer. Now, with a friend who works for Rainbow Tree Service, I was spending a warm sunny morning going up and down steps, onto porches and stoops, and inserting flyers printed on green paper explaining that without treatment, the Ash trees would die. Then around each boulevard Ash, my friend and I wrapped a green plastic band that explained Ash Borers Kill Ash Trees.
It was one of those calm, blue Minnesota mornings. The sky rose very high and very blue, as blue as Mary's cloak. Quiet and serene, the streets spread around us as calm as the Virgin seated in her protective niche. We worked quietly, our steps audible as I mounted to houses, some quite high off the street. A 100-year-old lilac tree spread its twisting arms across an entire slope.
Finally as I descended from the last houses, I realized that I felt transformed. Under no other circumstance would I have descended these everyday steps from houses high off the street. Under no other circumstance would I have paid homage to trees bordering twelve blocks of neighboring yards.
We live too much on our own "turf." Yes, months of cold and snow don't encourage chatting outdoors with neighbors. But lately, I've found myself talking to dogs. I pause at an alley backyard and pat a small spaniel who has not barked at me at all, but instead stuck his nose through the wide square mesh and licked my hand.
I exit my house and find myself caught up in a short parade of white and brown children. They announce they're looking for their orange cat. Slowly rounding the corner, a lovely young woman with long dark hair and brown-gold skin comes close enough to explain that the children belong to one family. The children help by pointing across the roofs to the far corner of the huge block. There is their house. Caught up in their chatter, and the young woman's easy explanations, I walk with them, promising to keep a lookout for a cat named Charlie. Finally arriving at their house, I recognize it as one that was recently for sale. "I'm the caretaker," the young woman tells me. "I just cleaned all three stories." The children's father works on a rig somewhere far away. All kinds of questions hover just beyond speech. What is amazing is this passle of children, their lovely young woman in charge of them, and the need to find a orange cat.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Margotlog: Maggie-May
Margotlog: Maggie-May, aka Calico Short-Hair
I know, to an outsider, a sick cat is simply a sick cat, a being of lesser importance, a pleasant companion but not one to whom we humans extend equal rights. In my younger days, I might have agreed, holding Archie of the red fur and persistent need to be on the other side of the door, in my lap the afternoon just before Fran took him to the vet for the fatal injection. True, Archie had been diagnosed with something truly malignant, maybe cancer. Yet, what shocks me now is that I sat there, saying a casual good-bye to him, sitting in the sun on our front porch. There was no agony to remember. No angst about losing him. Maybe because what was wrong was either incurable or so costly as to be prohibitive. We buried him in the backyard with his pals Fluffy and Justa. I've forgotten exactly where.
Then we replaced him.
For the past month, I've been in dithery shock. Maggie, after eating more helpings of a new Fancy Feast variety than I could count, suddenly fell off a cliff. Constant watery poop. Lethargy like there would be no tomorrow because she was going to die today. Her face became sunken. She shambled and tilted. She forgot how to drink, how to eat. I wasn't much better, vacillating between pell-mell attempts to entice one kind of food or another into her mouth and a kind of "she'll snap out of it" confidence. She didn't. Snap. Out. Of It.
We took her to the vet. Three months before, she'd weighted 7.5 pounds. Now, she weighed 5.2. She was never a long burly cat, but looking back over reports from the last decade, I found that at one point she'd weighed 13 pounds, heftier than either Tilly or Julia, each at 10. The vet couldn't find much wrong, that initial visit, though palpitating her intestines, the vet found they were bigger and thicker than normal. This could mean either an intestinal "condition" or cancer. That visit I didn't ask the vet to draw blood to test for parisites. Three days later I brought Maggie back for the test. No parasites. But we gave her a "water treatment," meaning I held lethargic Maggie while the vet tech with true kindness and humility administered the subcutaneous fluids. Maggie didn't move. Once at home, she seemed a bit more energetic. She ate a tiny bit more of the presription "kibble" for cats with disgestive troubles.
Another week of dithery fear and hope and effort. In my daze I left a half-full, movie-size container of buttered popcorn on the floor. Maggie ate at it. Her watery poop didn't improve though she had more spunk. We started the water treatment at home. Though normally placid and undemanding, she hissed and yowled. Good thing Fran held her, while I administered the fluids. It dawned on me that popcorn wasn't a good snack for a troubled digestive system. I sent it to the composting. Gradually, Maggie showed more zip. She walked up and down stairs from the second floor where it's warmer, to the first floor. She seemed simply to want to be with us.
Now, she even walks around the house, not a lot, but taking an ambling peregrination. Some days I've been so exhausted, I've forgotten her medication. We had a breaktrough when I realized in my fear about intestinal trouble that I'd stopped giving her the anti-hyper-throid medication. The vet said start it up again, at a slightly lower dose. Within 3 days of having that remedied, she was walking more normally, not tilting or stumbling. Somewhere inside myself, a gong beat: OMG how could it not have occurred to me sooner? Taking her abruptly off such a medication was probably like withdrawing alcohol or a mind-bending drug.
Now I can leave the room where she's resting on the bed, or in Fran's office chair turned toward the sun. I don't always have the electric blanket turned on. But the bond we forged remains strong. She comes to get me if she wants her water glass refilled. I refill it even if it doesn't need it. Then I stand with my hand on her warm back as she begins to drink.
I no longer have a daily period of "blur," when I race up and down stairs, bringing her water, food, patting her, asking her. But I hold my hand on her back while she drinks and eats her special kibble. The sound of her tongue lapping sooths and comforts. Tears came to my eyes. I love her so much. I had forgotten how much, I'd forgotten how we first met. Fran had adopted her when he had to rush back from the North Shore to take a flight for Tennessee where his mother was dying. When he bought cat food at Pet Smart for our other critters, he discovered calico cat Maggie, sitting primly with white paws and a serious plea in her eyes. Her name was "Maryland." He brought her home.
A day later I walked into an empty house, knowing that newcover Maggie was there. Something about my sorrow, my fear that she'd be hiding and I wouldn't find her, my round after round of calling, "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie," came back to me. A bond I'd forgotten had been forged then, a bond of need, fear, and relief. She finally appeared and let me stroke her. She ate the usual way cats at our house eat: from dishes on the floor. She had a drink from a bowl of water. Until now, she'd been the middle cat, somewhat outshone by smart and sassy Julia and skittish but beautiful, green-eyed Tilly.
Oh, Maggie mine. I am so glad you're better. I know we all msut die, but please not now. Please be with us longer, sitting upright and regal, looking at us with green eyes, with your caution and step-by-step climb up the stairs. Be with us, Maggie-Mine, more days through sadness and joy.
I know, to an outsider, a sick cat is simply a sick cat, a being of lesser importance, a pleasant companion but not one to whom we humans extend equal rights. In my younger days, I might have agreed, holding Archie of the red fur and persistent need to be on the other side of the door, in my lap the afternoon just before Fran took him to the vet for the fatal injection. True, Archie had been diagnosed with something truly malignant, maybe cancer. Yet, what shocks me now is that I sat there, saying a casual good-bye to him, sitting in the sun on our front porch. There was no agony to remember. No angst about losing him. Maybe because what was wrong was either incurable or so costly as to be prohibitive. We buried him in the backyard with his pals Fluffy and Justa. I've forgotten exactly where.
Then we replaced him.
For the past month, I've been in dithery shock. Maggie, after eating more helpings of a new Fancy Feast variety than I could count, suddenly fell off a cliff. Constant watery poop. Lethargy like there would be no tomorrow because she was going to die today. Her face became sunken. She shambled and tilted. She forgot how to drink, how to eat. I wasn't much better, vacillating between pell-mell attempts to entice one kind of food or another into her mouth and a kind of "she'll snap out of it" confidence. She didn't. Snap. Out. Of It.
We took her to the vet. Three months before, she'd weighted 7.5 pounds. Now, she weighed 5.2. She was never a long burly cat, but looking back over reports from the last decade, I found that at one point she'd weighed 13 pounds, heftier than either Tilly or Julia, each at 10. The vet couldn't find much wrong, that initial visit, though palpitating her intestines, the vet found they were bigger and thicker than normal. This could mean either an intestinal "condition" or cancer. That visit I didn't ask the vet to draw blood to test for parisites. Three days later I brought Maggie back for the test. No parasites. But we gave her a "water treatment," meaning I held lethargic Maggie while the vet tech with true kindness and humility administered the subcutaneous fluids. Maggie didn't move. Once at home, she seemed a bit more energetic. She ate a tiny bit more of the presription "kibble" for cats with disgestive troubles.
Another week of dithery fear and hope and effort. In my daze I left a half-full, movie-size container of buttered popcorn on the floor. Maggie ate at it. Her watery poop didn't improve though she had more spunk. We started the water treatment at home. Though normally placid and undemanding, she hissed and yowled. Good thing Fran held her, while I administered the fluids. It dawned on me that popcorn wasn't a good snack for a troubled digestive system. I sent it to the composting. Gradually, Maggie showed more zip. She walked up and down stairs from the second floor where it's warmer, to the first floor. She seemed simply to want to be with us.
Now, she even walks around the house, not a lot, but taking an ambling peregrination. Some days I've been so exhausted, I've forgotten her medication. We had a breaktrough when I realized in my fear about intestinal trouble that I'd stopped giving her the anti-hyper-throid medication. The vet said start it up again, at a slightly lower dose. Within 3 days of having that remedied, she was walking more normally, not tilting or stumbling. Somewhere inside myself, a gong beat: OMG how could it not have occurred to me sooner? Taking her abruptly off such a medication was probably like withdrawing alcohol or a mind-bending drug.
Now I can leave the room where she's resting on the bed, or in Fran's office chair turned toward the sun. I don't always have the electric blanket turned on. But the bond we forged remains strong. She comes to get me if she wants her water glass refilled. I refill it even if it doesn't need it. Then I stand with my hand on her warm back as she begins to drink.
I no longer have a daily period of "blur," when I race up and down stairs, bringing her water, food, patting her, asking her. But I hold my hand on her back while she drinks and eats her special kibble. The sound of her tongue lapping sooths and comforts. Tears came to my eyes. I love her so much. I had forgotten how much, I'd forgotten how we first met. Fran had adopted her when he had to rush back from the North Shore to take a flight for Tennessee where his mother was dying. When he bought cat food at Pet Smart for our other critters, he discovered calico cat Maggie, sitting primly with white paws and a serious plea in her eyes. Her name was "Maryland." He brought her home.
A day later I walked into an empty house, knowing that newcover Maggie was there. Something about my sorrow, my fear that she'd be hiding and I wouldn't find her, my round after round of calling, "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie," came back to me. A bond I'd forgotten had been forged then, a bond of need, fear, and relief. She finally appeared and let me stroke her. She ate the usual way cats at our house eat: from dishes on the floor. She had a drink from a bowl of water. Until now, she'd been the middle cat, somewhat outshone by smart and sassy Julia and skittish but beautiful, green-eyed Tilly.
Oh, Maggie mine. I am so glad you're better. I know we all msut die, but please not now. Please be with us longer, sitting upright and regal, looking at us with green eyes, with your caution and step-by-step climb up the stairs. Be with us, Maggie-Mine, more days through sadness and joy.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
All Saint Paul's Ash Trees Gone in Five Years?
All of Saint Paul's Ash Trees Gone in Five Years?
I'm walking our Lex-Ham neighborhood in Saint Paul with my friend and neighbor Leben McCormick. He's a tree-man who works for Rainbow Tree. I'm a tree-lover who over 30 years has planted ten trees on a lot not bitter than a long postage stamp. When you grow up in tree-swamped Charleston, South Carolina, it's hard to be happy with only one boulevard tree.
Leben and I are making a rough tabulation of how many ash trees we have in this neighborhood area, roughly four blocks from Lexington Ave on the east to the Short Line on the west, and six or seven blocks from Summit Avenue on the north to Marshall Avenue on the south. I guess that half the blocks (like mine) are planted almost exclusively with ash trees, some as wide around as two or three of me. This is a scary revelation, though not one I haven't noticed. Just not thought about addressing.
Recently up and down Summit Avenue, threes in the wide medium I so appreciate have begun sporting green plastic rings. Suspecting this wasn't a good sign (you don't live though the elm tree blitz and not recognize the warning signalt). But Leben is somewhat encouraging. The rings are there to alert us to how many ash trees we have. When I finally have the nerve to go read what the rings
say, I find a simple and devastating message: “Ash borers kill trees.” Since the Ash borer
made its way from Asia in 2003, thousands of U.S. communities have lost
“hundreds of millions of Ash trees” (http://www.emeraldashborer.info/). Take a
drive down Beechwood Avenue in Highland to see what a “naked” street looks like
without its crown of green.
Luckily, unlike communities in more southern parts of the
U.S., we in the Twin Cities have experienced a recent severe winter that has
slowed the progress of the borers. Thus, we have an opportunity to protect our
canopy of green and preserve its beautiful, cooling summer shade, beautifying
our neighborhoods and lowering the cost of air-conditioning.
The treatment against the Ash borer is an “injection” of an
insecticide that protects each tree for two to three years. In some cases,
trees already infected can also be treated. Once the borer takes hold, however,
it will eventually kill unprotected trees. It is better to treat the Ash trees
when they are still healthy. At our house, we've been treating
our boulevard Ash for a number of years.
Knowing that the opportunity to protect our Ash trees is
narrowing, Leben has concocted an offer, which at this point will be available to residents in Lex-Ham. But might possibly be extended citywide. The offer include a 10% discount on treatment of ash trees for groups who treat
10 trees, and 20% discounts for those who treat 20 trees. It seems like the
right time to take action while our trees are still healthy.
See also recent article in Pioneer PressBut many many residents will not treat their ash trees. Just as many did not treat their elms. No on the subject of elms, Leben and I identify a recent elm that has been hypridized to have greater resistance to the borer than the American Elm. These trees are about 10 years old, I'm guessing, not at all the lofty shady giants that occasionally still tower over our streets. It's truly an act of charity and neighborliness to treat these big elms. There are a few on my block, and Leben and I find a pair that are almost kissing across the air, so tall as to obscure the sun.
Briefly I consider how these denizens of our lives become neighbors, yes, and even members of our inner lives--of outlooks and inlooks. Of hopes and dreams, beliefs and sanity. I don't want my block to look like a war zone. I want to help protect as many of our neighborly ash trees as I can, with the help of a few friends.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Margotlog: Surviving Trump, Hate, and Rock and Roll
Margotlog: Surviving Trump, Hate, and Rock and Roll
Sometimes when I need a little leavening, I decide that our new president looks a bit like an aging, old-timey rock and roller. Wild hair, upper lip hung over lower, brow furrowed with fury and concentration. Sometimes, when the war he seems intent upon waging on his constituents sends me into an ecstasy of numbness or a spasm of fear, I recall other wars waged on noncombatant populations. I am reading about just such a war, "War in Val d'Orcia" by Iris Origo. An Anglo-American patrician by birth and behavior, the Marchesa Origo became Italian by marriage and sympathy. Buying 2000 acres in a corner of Tuscany, she and her husband turned their skill and fortitute frst to reclaiming wasted land and impoverished Italian tenants in the 1920s and 30s. Then just as they were bringing better management and productivity to these wasted farms, World War II demanded more of them.
Back to Trump: So far, life under Trump has induced numbness, disbelief, ridicule (mostly private), wild hope, and now grief. I am grieving the loss of a leader whose aim is to unite us in hope, who strives to better the lives of our country, while honoring others around the globe, while continuing work to protect and heal a clearly damaged planet. I'm grieving the possibility of a leader who inspires us to better deeds, who urges us to improve the lot of human and natural worlds. I'm grieving the lack of a leader who thinks widely, deeply, quietly, and purposefully. Who does not meet each challenge with an instant Tweet. And now I'm recalling a recent photo of our first Bush president and his wife Barbara, both hospitalized at the same time, now recovering. The photo showed them facing each other in a quiet moment, his chin touching her hair, she smiling up at him, both with inward quietude. I never voted for a Bush, but these people never shocked, dismayed, or terrified me. Partly because theyacted thoughtful, caring, and capable of quiet.
During the intense fighting during World War II, the Origos decided to take in twenty children whose homes near Genoa had been bombed and whose parents either dispersed or killed. It was an exercise in compassion, and a lot of work. The children were traumatized. Some hurt or ill. The Origos hired teachers, established beds and play areas, taught the children to work in small ways on the farm.
What struck me so fully was the contrast between a world gone mad with hate, conflict, destruction and death, and the Origos' daily effort to resist and protect these children, to continue feeding them, supporting their tenant farm families, hiding partisans and other combatants in the woods. Their work was all absorbing, full of incessant demands, challenges, needs. Yet they created sanity. They focused on what they could do and drew others to help them. They did not turn inward in fear or hate. They worked against the worst in humankind by doing the best within the circumstances.
This brings me to one more recognition: the thousands of women who attended the Trump inauguration as protestors were crammed in so close they couldn't march or see much of the ceremony. But as one wrote in today's StarTribune, being there together in such large numbers was enough. Working together, we can overcome dismay, fear, lethargy. If we can't take fire from a president's words, we must take fire from ourselves.
Sometimes when I need a little leavening, I decide that our new president looks a bit like an aging, old-timey rock and roller. Wild hair, upper lip hung over lower, brow furrowed with fury and concentration. Sometimes, when the war he seems intent upon waging on his constituents sends me into an ecstasy of numbness or a spasm of fear, I recall other wars waged on noncombatant populations. I am reading about just such a war, "War in Val d'Orcia" by Iris Origo. An Anglo-American patrician by birth and behavior, the Marchesa Origo became Italian by marriage and sympathy. Buying 2000 acres in a corner of Tuscany, she and her husband turned their skill and fortitute frst to reclaiming wasted land and impoverished Italian tenants in the 1920s and 30s. Then just as they were bringing better management and productivity to these wasted farms, World War II demanded more of them.
Back to Trump: So far, life under Trump has induced numbness, disbelief, ridicule (mostly private), wild hope, and now grief. I am grieving the loss of a leader whose aim is to unite us in hope, who strives to better the lives of our country, while honoring others around the globe, while continuing work to protect and heal a clearly damaged planet. I'm grieving the possibility of a leader who inspires us to better deeds, who urges us to improve the lot of human and natural worlds. I'm grieving the lack of a leader who thinks widely, deeply, quietly, and purposefully. Who does not meet each challenge with an instant Tweet. And now I'm recalling a recent photo of our first Bush president and his wife Barbara, both hospitalized at the same time, now recovering. The photo showed them facing each other in a quiet moment, his chin touching her hair, she smiling up at him, both with inward quietude. I never voted for a Bush, but these people never shocked, dismayed, or terrified me. Partly because theyacted thoughtful, caring, and capable of quiet.
During the intense fighting during World War II, the Origos decided to take in twenty children whose homes near Genoa had been bombed and whose parents either dispersed or killed. It was an exercise in compassion, and a lot of work. The children were traumatized. Some hurt or ill. The Origos hired teachers, established beds and play areas, taught the children to work in small ways on the farm.
What struck me so fully was the contrast between a world gone mad with hate, conflict, destruction and death, and the Origos' daily effort to resist and protect these children, to continue feeding them, supporting their tenant farm families, hiding partisans and other combatants in the woods. Their work was all absorbing, full of incessant demands, challenges, needs. Yet they created sanity. They focused on what they could do and drew others to help them. They did not turn inward in fear or hate. They worked against the worst in humankind by doing the best within the circumstances.
This brings me to one more recognition: the thousands of women who attended the Trump inauguration as protestors were crammed in so close they couldn't march or see much of the ceremony. But as one wrote in today's StarTribune, being there together in such large numbers was enough. Working together, we can overcome dismay, fear, lethargy. If we can't take fire from a president's words, we must take fire from ourselves.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Margotlog: Larger Fields, Smaller Towns: A Minnesota Dilemma
Margotlog: Larger Fields, Smaller Towns: A Minnesota Dilemma
When I first started traveling north, south, east and west as a writer-in-the-schools, the towns I visited in Minnesota were thriving. This was the 1980s, 90s, and into the 2000s. Some towns were larger than others, but even the smaller towns who joined together to form "consolidated schools" had several cafes, a bevy of church steeples pointing toward the sky, a car dealership, a garage and mechanic, a pharmacy, several barbers/hairdressers, grocery stores (not necessarily huge chains), a dress shop, and what we liked to call "A Five and Dime," which of course was ludicrous since hardly anything cost only a nickle or dime anymore.
Often mornings and evenings, farmers who passed the slack winter days drinking coffee "in town," sat around in booths or stools "shooting the bull," while their children trudged past outside on the way to school, or took the orange school bus "over the river and through the woods." I almost always had a room in a motel on the edge of town. Sometimes, even farmers, married to school teachers, knew who I was, a stranger yes, but welcome, someone to stare at as I, too, entered the cafe, walked past in my mukluks and red down coat, and slid into a booth. What I ordered for dinner has left no memory, but I do remember the rumble of masculine voices, and a waitress, in pink or blue uniform, with a tiny apron across her middle, standing at the end of the booth and taking my order. She knew me as "the visiting teacher." When I told her my name, she'd remember it for every one of the five evenings I ate there.
Sometimes in warmer autumn or spring weather, I'd walk to the town cemetery, hearing echoes of the students' names I was teaching in grades 4 - 6 or 7 - 9. Sometimes, I even cruised back roads, pausing to stare at tumble down barns and houses with their windows broken and doors off the hinges. Barns had their high roofs "stove in," but the walls often stood foursquare, full now of pigeons, mice, rabbits, and who knew what else. Maybe a traveler on foot who needed shelter for a free night's rest, slept in the dirty hay, unable to afford a motel room.
Gradually, this rather nice balance between people and land, living inside an economy of modest scale that yet supported quite a few families, often enough to keep a grammer school going in town, this lovely balance collapsed. First came bigger and bigger machines which required consolidation of fields, then came the sell- off of farm land to those few with lots of cash. Finally the more diversified farming of an earlier era disappeared. As far as the eye could see, acre after acre of corn or soy beans stretched to the margins of small streams.
It didn't take long before the towns began to dwindle. The few farm families with the cash to buy out their neighbors, purchased huge machines to plant the 'row" crops margin to margin of larger and larger fields. These families upgraded their farm homes, expanding into fireside "family rooms," or huge kitchen/sitting rooms. For all necessary purchases, they could no longer trade in towns where their parents and grandparents had lived because the towns were drying up. There simply weren't enough people to support a garage and a drug store, several grocery stores and a pharmacy, a beauty parlor, a five and dime, and a bank.
But these families sitting in the midst of their huge acerage, enjoyed driving bigger and bigger trucks to larger farm towns that still retained the retail services necessary to keep them fed, clothed, healthy, and practicing the "old time religion." All the high school students rode school buses, but still in some towns, there weren't enough children to support a modest grammar school. The children had to be bussed farther and farther away.
Grant Herfindahl, retiring from his job as executive director of The Farm Service Agency/U.S. Department of Agriculture, has seen this enormous consolidation take place. "Many crop farmers grow only two commodity crops, corn and soybears" he told a StarTribune writer in early January 2017. "The number of farms has dropped" (with average size expanding from 400 acres to 2,000). "When I began working in Pope County 20 years ago, there were about 115 dairies, and now maybe there're 30 left. And all of those 115 dairies were cumulatively raising about 6,000 cows. Today we've got new dairies(with) 6,000 cows in one dairy. This trend has been happening for a long time." (StarTribune, 1/8/2017 Business, D3).
This trend is creating a silent environmental disaster, on the par, if not the scale, with what Silent Spring described years ago. Because of the enormous size of the fields, and the main crops, corn and soy beans, needing vast amounts of chemicals to keep them bug free and growing, our Minnesota streams and rivers, the ground water that most of us pump for daily use, is being polluted, often to the point of killing fish, and endangering our health. Weedy margins where flowering plants grow, necessary for bees, butterflies, birds, have disappeared. We have a nationwide crisis in pollinaters. Monarch butterflies who depend on milkweed plants are unable to survive.
Equally as appalling are the caving in of small towns, with their diversified economies. Yes, according to Grant Herfindahl, some farmers across Minnesota have found a middle way--keeping a chunk of acerage planted, but also working jobs in towns. But the norm becomes larger and larger farms; fewer and fewer jobs. And, of course, as jobs in towns dry up, those who used to make a modest living are now poor, and on welfare. Rural poverty is one of our state's growing problems. It is not a happy land anymore. The rural core is dying.
There are some solutions: such as requiring all farmers to maintain buffer zones on their fields. Such areas of native plants help pollinaters survive, and also filter run-off of farm chemicals to prevent polluting neighboring streams and rivers. But though crucial, such buffers do very little for people left by the wayside as their towns are dying. We need to encourage relocation of small factories to rural Minnesota. We need to re-educate people who used to work in commerical establishments for jobs in various e-industries. These are some thoughts, but there is enormous resistance among "big" farmers to the environmental changes necessary to curb poisoning our streams, lakes, and rivers. If we don't legislate compliance, we will be overcome just like our pollinators. We will all eventually become victims of this current "Silent Spring."
When I first started traveling north, south, east and west as a writer-in-the-schools, the towns I visited in Minnesota were thriving. This was the 1980s, 90s, and into the 2000s. Some towns were larger than others, but even the smaller towns who joined together to form "consolidated schools" had several cafes, a bevy of church steeples pointing toward the sky, a car dealership, a garage and mechanic, a pharmacy, several barbers/hairdressers, grocery stores (not necessarily huge chains), a dress shop, and what we liked to call "A Five and Dime," which of course was ludicrous since hardly anything cost only a nickle or dime anymore.
Often mornings and evenings, farmers who passed the slack winter days drinking coffee "in town," sat around in booths or stools "shooting the bull," while their children trudged past outside on the way to school, or took the orange school bus "over the river and through the woods." I almost always had a room in a motel on the edge of town. Sometimes, even farmers, married to school teachers, knew who I was, a stranger yes, but welcome, someone to stare at as I, too, entered the cafe, walked past in my mukluks and red down coat, and slid into a booth. What I ordered for dinner has left no memory, but I do remember the rumble of masculine voices, and a waitress, in pink or blue uniform, with a tiny apron across her middle, standing at the end of the booth and taking my order. She knew me as "the visiting teacher." When I told her my name, she'd remember it for every one of the five evenings I ate there.
Sometimes in warmer autumn or spring weather, I'd walk to the town cemetery, hearing echoes of the students' names I was teaching in grades 4 - 6 or 7 - 9. Sometimes, I even cruised back roads, pausing to stare at tumble down barns and houses with their windows broken and doors off the hinges. Barns had their high roofs "stove in," but the walls often stood foursquare, full now of pigeons, mice, rabbits, and who knew what else. Maybe a traveler on foot who needed shelter for a free night's rest, slept in the dirty hay, unable to afford a motel room.
Gradually, this rather nice balance between people and land, living inside an economy of modest scale that yet supported quite a few families, often enough to keep a grammer school going in town, this lovely balance collapsed. First came bigger and bigger machines which required consolidation of fields, then came the sell- off of farm land to those few with lots of cash. Finally the more diversified farming of an earlier era disappeared. As far as the eye could see, acre after acre of corn or soy beans stretched to the margins of small streams.
It didn't take long before the towns began to dwindle. The few farm families with the cash to buy out their neighbors, purchased huge machines to plant the 'row" crops margin to margin of larger and larger fields. These families upgraded their farm homes, expanding into fireside "family rooms," or huge kitchen/sitting rooms. For all necessary purchases, they could no longer trade in towns where their parents and grandparents had lived because the towns were drying up. There simply weren't enough people to support a garage and a drug store, several grocery stores and a pharmacy, a beauty parlor, a five and dime, and a bank.
But these families sitting in the midst of their huge acerage, enjoyed driving bigger and bigger trucks to larger farm towns that still retained the retail services necessary to keep them fed, clothed, healthy, and practicing the "old time religion." All the high school students rode school buses, but still in some towns, there weren't enough children to support a modest grammar school. The children had to be bussed farther and farther away.
Grant Herfindahl, retiring from his job as executive director of The Farm Service Agency/U.S. Department of Agriculture, has seen this enormous consolidation take place. "Many crop farmers grow only two commodity crops, corn and soybears" he told a StarTribune writer in early January 2017. "The number of farms has dropped" (with average size expanding from 400 acres to 2,000). "When I began working in Pope County 20 years ago, there were about 115 dairies, and now maybe there're 30 left. And all of those 115 dairies were cumulatively raising about 6,000 cows. Today we've got new dairies(with) 6,000 cows in one dairy. This trend has been happening for a long time." (StarTribune, 1/8/2017 Business, D3).
This trend is creating a silent environmental disaster, on the par, if not the scale, with what Silent Spring described years ago. Because of the enormous size of the fields, and the main crops, corn and soy beans, needing vast amounts of chemicals to keep them bug free and growing, our Minnesota streams and rivers, the ground water that most of us pump for daily use, is being polluted, often to the point of killing fish, and endangering our health. Weedy margins where flowering plants grow, necessary for bees, butterflies, birds, have disappeared. We have a nationwide crisis in pollinaters. Monarch butterflies who depend on milkweed plants are unable to survive.
Equally as appalling are the caving in of small towns, with their diversified economies. Yes, according to Grant Herfindahl, some farmers across Minnesota have found a middle way--keeping a chunk of acerage planted, but also working jobs in towns. But the norm becomes larger and larger farms; fewer and fewer jobs. And, of course, as jobs in towns dry up, those who used to make a modest living are now poor, and on welfare. Rural poverty is one of our state's growing problems. It is not a happy land anymore. The rural core is dying.
There are some solutions: such as requiring all farmers to maintain buffer zones on their fields. Such areas of native plants help pollinaters survive, and also filter run-off of farm chemicals to prevent polluting neighboring streams and rivers. But though crucial, such buffers do very little for people left by the wayside as their towns are dying. We need to encourage relocation of small factories to rural Minnesota. We need to re-educate people who used to work in commerical establishments for jobs in various e-industries. These are some thoughts, but there is enormous resistance among "big" farmers to the environmental changes necessary to curb poisoning our streams, lakes, and rivers. If we don't legislate compliance, we will be overcome just like our pollinators. We will all eventually become victims of this current "Silent Spring."
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