In West Virginia, the seasons overlap… winter seeping into summer nights, summer flitting back for a warm afternoon in mid-January. Weather, then, is not the defining element of a season. Instead, we know them by their artificacts. Winter is defined by skeletal, sculptural trees and dried brown grass. Autumn by the return of the scent of woodsmoke to the air and the oft-rhapsodied colors of the dying leaves.
The first artifact of spring is the algae bloom in the creek beds and drainage ditches. Within a few weeks, these will become fetid pools, but when the first snows melt they are bright and fresh-smelling.
Next will come to the spring onions and ramps that spring up seemingly overnight and signal the beginning of the spring planting season. Only frost hardy plants can be put in the ground before mid-May here. No, that isn’t true. Only frost hardy plants SHOULD be put in the ground before mid-May. It’s certainly possible to plan earlier. I’ve ruined many a crop of seedlings by getting cocky and planting them early. Killing frosts can come late in the season, long after the daffodils have bloomed and died back again and the strawberries and lettuces are producing their first crop. Gardening is at least as much an act of faith as it is an act of creation.
Full spring is here when the ground is littered with the shells of bird’s eggs. The shard of light blue from a robin’s nest, or deep blue from an eastern bluebird. White with dark brown speckles for a house sparrow, or lighter brown for a white-breasted nuthatch. There is an egg broken and spilling its golden promise on our porch this morning; I guess it to be the unrealized offspring of the muthatch couple who has set up a nest in our ancient chestnut tree, but am not enough of an ornathologist to know that it is not from the house sparrows who live in the eaves ’round the back of the house. My guess is based more on proximity to the nest than on the egg itself.
It has been cold and rainy the last few days; the threat of frost hangs in the early morning hours when the last of the previous day’s warmth is given up to the air and the real chill sets in, but so far we have been spared. It’s been a good spring for magnolia trees, arugala, and mint. Already my front yard smells like a cup of herbal tea. The lemonbalm has taken over the herb bed, crowding out the spearmint. It’s the new bully on the block… last year, it was the spearmint crowding out the chamomile. I suppose I will intervene; weed out big colonies of lemonbalm to give the other things room to grow. But I am hesitant. There is a beautiful poem, “The Stray” in the April issue of The Sun by Eric Anderson. As I put on my gardening gloves and go out to kill off a good amount of the lemonbalm, I can’t help thinking of the lovely and haunting way it ends. “And yet I can’t/even kill these rodents, and want/to protect them from you,/and also want you/not to starve but will no longer/feed you or let you stay./This, then, is being human./ This, then, is not being God.”
Does anybody else remember that West Virginia used to be a “yellow dog Democrat” state, meaning that we would rather vote for a Democratic candidate who was a yellow dog than a Republican, no matter what his/her qualifications? There was a good reason for this: more than most of the country, the people of West Virginia deal with poverty, disability, and the issues of rural communities. We voted for candidates who stood behind labor, were willing to fight the war on poverty, and supported initiatives to ensure that people living in rural communities had good schools, good roads, and the chance to raise their children to have good lives.
Then, somewhere along the way, we let ourselves be told that those things didn’t matter. That, in fact, the folk who wanted to build roads, improve schools, and care for the elderly and disabled were, in fact, the bad guys. Why? Because somehow we let ourselves be tricked into believing that “Christian” and “Republican” were the same thing. We let ourselves forget that Jesus gave us not The Ten Commandments, but the far more difficult and demanding Sermon on the Mount.
I believe that if you look at the issues, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that Obama is the best candidate for West Virginia. He supports strengthening the supports for persons with disabilities–a key issue in the state with the highest percentage of citizens with disabilities in the entire country! He supports initiatives to ensure rural small business can compete by bringing high speed internet to currently unserved areas, and he supports keeping the market open to these small businesses through net neutrality. He has the best plan for providing health care to everyone–a key need in a state that only a few years ago saw the head of DHHR refuse to answer the legislature’s questions about how their healthcare reforms were impacting West Virginia citizens! On these, and so many more, issues, Obama is clearly the candidate with the best plan West Virginia’s future.
It is time for us to have hope again. That’s not something that comes easy here in West Virginia, where wave after wave of reformers have come and gone without providing much relief from the hard times that seem always to hit us the hardest. But Obama isn’t offering us a hand-out. He’s offering us the tools to carve out our own prosperity, and better lives for our kids. And isn’t that what we all want?
Nothing is more Hill Trashy than a ramp. This sublimely stinky, insanely pungent weed is the hickster’s harbinger of Spring. I grew up believing that it’s illegal in at least one West Virginia county to feed your kids raw ramps and then send them to school because the funk was too much for teachers to bare. This is the sort of thing that I could check, now that we have Google, but it’s also the sort of thing I don’t want to know isn’t true. So take it with a grain of salt. Or better yet, some bacon fat and fried ‘taters.
Doug and Cindy Llewellyn from church were kind enough to give me this big bundle of ramps; the first of several to come. This harvest was just enough for a three-pint batch of Ramp Kimchi–that unholy mixture of the stinkiest food known made by man and the stinkiest one found in nature. (There is actually a line in the employee handbook of one of the last places that I worked forbidding anyone to bring Ramp Kimchi to the office under any circumstances. As the only person in the world who makes this stuff–as far as I know–I feel honored!)
The process of making the kimchi isn’t as difficult as most folk expect. The secret is to replace all of the leeks, scallions, and garlic in your favorite kimchi recipe with ramps and to only use the bulbs and purple stems. The green, leafy parts of the ramp won’t hold up to the process, and you’ll get a mason jar full of black slime. A lesson learned from hard experience. Also, ramp kimchi takes a little longer to sour. I tend to like my kimchi a little “green” and usually let it ferment for only 3-4 days. But the ramps take longer to mellow and blend with the other ingredients, so I usually let the jars sit in the basement pantry for at least six days before refridgerating.
For the next batch of ramps, Cindy has lent me a wonderful cookbook called The Mediterranean Pantry that includes a recipe for green garlic pickles. She reports that the ramps stayed very hot pickled this way, and I’m looking forward to trying it. Usually my ramp pickles, which are made the traditional way with lots of sugar, get mild and a little un-rampy within a month or so, but she reports hers kept for probably a year.
So, thank you Cindy and Doug! At least, from me, the other folk in the house–who don’t eat ramps, want to smell ramps, or understand my obsession with local wild foods–aren’t quite as grateful. BUT I’ve also discovered that making Ramp Kimchi is a great way to drive them out of doors to do yard work!
It’s summer weather today, though there may be snow by Monday. I am thinking a lot about love and nostalgia and seasons passing this morning, which probably means that I shouldn’t have had that second martini last night. A slight hangover is indistinguishable from melancholy.
It was this time last year that I first met Mot. I was still reeling from the attempted rape in the hallway of Friendship Room and my horrified surprise that, rather than rallying around me, the participants became increasingly violent towards me. After the attack, they knew how to keep me from getting my footing again and that meant a kind of freedom for them, I suppose. But what a miracle it was, amid the threats and violence, to suddenly have this kind and sheltering friend. A gentleman, maybe of a kind we won’t see again when his generation is gone. Someone who recited poetry and talked about sitting on the beach in France flirting with the pretty young girls who brought him wine and books in English. Someone who came by on a Sunday to help scrub the floors instead knocking over a coffee cup and leaving the spill for me to find later.
I watched on the news today as a homeless man robbed a young soldier who was having a seizure. Only moment before, the soldier had given this man money from his own pocket. The newscaster said, “I hope everyone realizes this is just an isolated incident. I hope this won’t stop anyone from helping the next homeless person who asks for assistance.” I do, too, but only because you never know whether the person asking is Mot or some street junkie. It’s hard to tell the two apart, and too easy to assume one or the other, depending on your bent.
It’s more than strange to me to know that Mot is afraid of me now, thinks I’m in league with the voices in his head, and that he can’t even tolerate receiving emails from me. Crazy fights hard and it doesn’t fight fair. The sun is out and there is a breeze from the west. All I want to do is hop in the car and head for Texas. But he and the old gray sedan with the tragic blue door aren’t there any more. I don’t know where he is now, and probably never will again. The car was abandoned near an a reservation in Oklahoma, the keys given to a kid at the auto parts store who probably sold it for scrap.
Whatever kind of love this is, it is more constant than I would have imagined, and some days, more so than I can bear.
The problem with praying in English instead of Hebrew is that the words have meaning beyond the sound of them–their rhythm in the cant. Praying in a language one does not speak is a different thing all together.
And so I look back on my most recent post, the one in which I say that the song Dayenu is my favorite prayer, and am a little horrified. To me, this is a prayer sung around the seder table… “Ilu hotsi, hostionu,hotsionu mi Mitzrayim, Hotsionu mi Mitzrayim Da-ye-nu…” It’s the sound of the voices of my family, young and old, frum and gone over to the other side, all together on this one night of the year. It is the sound of thanks and of saying, “No matter what happens to us from here on out, we have been blessed and we will not complain.” Although, of course, we will. Still, it’s a nice thought.
But in writing it all out in English, I am stunned by the actual words of the song. It’s not that I didn’t know them–I did. It’s that, sung in Hebrew, I hadn’t thought of their meaning in decades. Not since I was a little girl in Sunday school, just learning to ask the four questions. “Why is it that on all other nights, we eat herbs of every kind, but tonight we eat only bitter herbs?” I am forced to look beyond the meaning of “it would have been enough” to what, in fact, I am saying would have sufficed to make G-d worthy of my worship.
And there, I am forced to ask myself: is it really enough for me that G-d killed the first born sons of the Egyptians? Does that make Him fit for worship? Or is it not enough, not by a long shot? Don’t I have the right to say, “If You want me to worship You, how about not killing any more infants in my name? In fact, You could lay off the smiting all together, thank you very much. Tell the Angel of Death to pass over every door, not just the ones with a smear of lamb’s blood. Tell him not to come until he’s called by the old, the weary, the ready to die.” Do I really want to take a drop from my own cup of wine in thankfulness that G-d slew babies to secure my freedom from Egypt, or would I rather be a slave unstained by the blood of all those sons of other mothers?
I will thank G-d for parting the sea, and for allowing me to cross on dry land. Dayenu. But must I really thank him also for drowning my oppressors? Can I not instead wish he had simply gentled them back to their own land, changed by having seen a miracle performed and been shown a kindness? Must vengeance and murder really be enough for me? Can I have no hope of peace?
Dayenu is no longer my favorite prayer. My favorite prayer is the silent one I say among my Mennonite brethren as we light the Peace candle and hold in the light all those in our world afflicted by violence. Or maybe it is the gentle, steadfast prayer of the Dalai Lama as he turns away, again and again, from a violent struggle for the freedom of his people. Or maybe it is the prayer you will say for me tonight, afraid for my soul because I have blasphemed. But it is not a prayer thanking G-d for the deaths of infants or the drowning of enemies. Not any more.
Dayenu, a song sung at Passover, is my favorite prayer. There is something tribal about the rituals of the holiday… lifting the matzah to our mouths, opening the door for Elijah, eating the bitter herb… and knowing that around the world other Jews are doing the same. Something that harkens back to thousands of unknowable generations. A thankfulness that transcends all the later times of desperation. We don’t ask at Passover why we were not delivered from the death camps in World War II. We simply remember that we were delivered out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and are thankful. Dayenu. It is enough.
Leaving slavery:
If He had brought us out of Egypt. – Dayenu!
If He had executed justice upon the Egyptians. – Dayenu!
If He had executed justice upon their gods. – Dayenu!
If He had slain their first born. – Dayenu!
If He had given to us their wealth. - Dayenu!
The Miracles:
If He had split the sea for us. – Dayenu!
If He had led us through on dry land. -Dayenu!
If He had drowned our oppressors. – Dayenu!
If He had provided for our needs in the wilderness for 40 years. – Dayenu!
If He had fed us manna. - Dayenu!
The Gifts of Being With God
If He had given us Shabbat. – Dayenu!
If He had led us to Mount Sinai. - Dayenu!
If He had given us the Torah. – Dayenu!
If He had brought us into the Land of Israel. – Dayenu!
He built the Temple for us. – Dayenu!
Here is where I get lost as a new Christian. When Jews pray, we pray in thankfulness for what has already been given. But when Christians pray, they seem often to be beseeching. Asking for more. I can not get used to this.
“Who is like You among the gods, O LORD? Who is like You, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders?” – Exodus 15:11 In this season of Passover, let us remember and be thankful.
I am not normally a fan of being a fan. Even when I joined the caravan following the Grateful Dead from show to show, I was there more for the fun in the parking lot than out of any great sense of devotion to Jerry Garcia. But I find myself to be suddenly a fan of the TV show “Dirt.”
Here is what I love about the show: the real hero, maybe the only good guy, is Don… the schizophrenic photographer. He is also often the most grounded. The only member of the paparazzi to stop taking pictures long enough to save a child in a run away car, the only person human enough to tip off the victim of the latest “she’s so fat” tabloid extravaganza and get her side of the story. It’s lovely. The rest of the show is smart, but it’s really just The Valley of the Dolls in post-modern clothes. (And, it turns out, post-modernity really, really likes to show off it’s ample cleavage.) But the Don character is something else. Something new and wonderful and refreshing. I think he may well be the first well-written character with a mental illness on TV.
I’m about to go and take the GRE in the hope of a Hail Mary entrance into WVU’s MFA program. (I’ve also, I just noticed, casually used up a month’s supply of three-letter acronyms in writing that last sentence.)
Putt has told me to get a good night’s sleep, have a healthy breakfast, and take two sharpened number-two pencils along with me. I think she is, perhaps, the only person less prepared to take the exam than I am. Do they even make pencils any longer? Surely we’ve moved beyond the graphite-on-paper thing. Haven’t we? (Oh, God, I’m so neurotic that now I have to go find two pencils, sharpen them, and put them in my purse. A moment please…)
I used to test better-than-well and, as a result, have been thought better-than-bright by the people who see and take seriously these sorts of things. So here, now, I will at last come clean with the real reason I appear smarter than I really am on standardized tests. When I was a child, my mother was a counseling student. The only one with a kid the right age to take the tests they had to learn to administer. By the time she graduated, I could put the damned blocks together in the right pattern even before being shown the little card.
I’m afraid I’m not smart as a chimpanzee, just well-practiced. But not for the GRE. Today, I suspect, one of my most treasured personal myths will crumble. Because what really sucks is they tell you your score right away.
Now, that’s just wrong. Give me a day or two to come to terms with how badly I’ve done before you spring the news on me that, really, it’s much worse than I thought.
I am not a big fan of blogs that simply repost every viral video that’s out there. This meme has gotten old; hell, it was old by the time The Dancing Baby showed up on Allie McBeal. But this video is different. It’s… beyond my ability to explain. So, without further ado… I present The Leningrad Cowboys and The Red Army Choir performing “Sweet Home Alabama.” I shit you not.
I’m sure she could not sleep with a pea beneath her matress, though mostly I’m sure of this because she also can’t sleep without one. Instead, she is an up-and-down, all night kind of kid. That’s how Princess Sidney rolls. I am charmed at the idea of this “Princess Tea Party,” and pleasantly surprised to hear that fifty little girls all dressed as royalty and pumped full of sugary cupcakes did not devolve into one giant, royal temper trantrum. Instead, my sister reports that the girls had a great time dancing, eating, and prissing around.
I am impressed that someone let them use the good china, rather than paper plates and make-believe. And that Sidney managed to leave her hairclip in through the entire party — princess though she is, she has no truck with tierras or even bows.
I love the pictures of the little girls dancing. Cinderella can kick off both her glass slippers, no need to leave one behind so some Prince Charming can hunt his bride like a door-to-door shoe salesman. No need to play politics for a dance with the most eligeable… this is the fairy-tale without all its baggage, the wearing pretty dresses and drinking pink punch from china cups, unmoored from its narrative arc. No wicked step-mothers, no happily ever afters. Not even Anne Sexton could find a reason to send a white dove in… no ugly step-sisters in need of having their eyes pecked out.
That was a little gruesome, wasn’t it? Not at all in keeping with the tone of the photographs. Damn Anne Sexton for changing forever the way I understand fairytales.
“Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story. “
Posted by sarahemc2 
Posted by sarahemc2 
Posted by sarahemc2 
I’m sure she could not sleep with a pea beneath her matress, though mostly I’m sure of this because she also can’t sleep without one. Instead, she is an up-and-down, all night kind of kid. That’s how Princess Sidney rolls. I am charmed at the idea of this “Princess Tea Party,” and pleasantly surprised to hear that fifty little girls all dressed as royalty and pumped full of sugary cupcakes did not devolve into one giant, royal temper trantrum. Instead, my sister reports that the girls had a great time dancing, eating, and prissing around. 
