ramblings

This has been a difficult summer. I work year-round — my library is a public one as well as a school one — but summer still always seems like an off-season, a time when you do other projects, when the days last so long that it seems like you have a whole other day in which to do things. But that wasn’t the case for me this summer. Most days it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed, all I could do to get through the day, even with an upped caffeine intake. And then, when I came home, all I ever wanted to do was go to sleep. It was not uncommon for me to come home from work, collapse on the sofa for two hours or more, get up for a bit, and then go back to bed. Some afternoons I’d collapse on the sofa and not wake until two or three in the morning. This was not fun.

I tried any number of fixes — changes in diet, vitamin supplements, more exercise, less exercise — to no avail. In the end, the culprit was not the lack of a drug but too much of one, and once we cut that dose in half, my problems disappared.

I was never much of a summer of a summer person, and I used to welcome the coming of fall, at least until fall started to be the season I got depressed. This year, though, I’ve been happier about fall than I have in over a decade. This is the best time of year here, in many ways: it isn’t too hot, as it sometimes is in the middle of summer. It’s not yet dark out when I get out of work. And, at long last, the Farmers Market in Cody is brimming with produce. At this altitude, produce doesn’t start to show up for real until July, and so when I see people talking about their CSA boxes in May, and watching them eating the fruits of their labor all summer, I get a bit sad. This year it snowed in May and June.

But now there are tomatoes and peppers and greens and beets and onions and corn and green beans and sugar snap peas and cucumbers, and it’s all I can do every Thursday not to buy everything in sight.

Practically everyone I know seems to be playing Farm Town these days. I haven’t ever even really looked at the game, since my general feeling about games on the internet is “dear God, I spend enough time there already” — I mean, I love it, but there are offline things that I love as well, things I sometimes wish I did more of.

I don’t really know what the game involves, although people seem to be constantly on a quest to find someone to harvest for them. It’s been amusing me lately, because while they’ve all been looking for virtual farm workers, I’ve been, with my new-found energy, putting up food and feeding my friends’ menagerie (I even made a little video about it). I would never confuse either of these activities with actual farming, but there’s a great satisfaction to seeing that line of jars on my shelf, and looking forward to opening them many months from now, and thinking about sunlight in darkness.

Count today as the first time I’ve ever been at a church service whereat communion consisted of garlic flatbread from the grocery store and grape-flavored Gatorade. It was, shall we say, not the best combination I have ever tasted, but the Holy Spirit arrives in a variety of forms, and it is up to us to recognize it. Mustard seeds seem rather rare and precious these days. Perhaps if Jesus were around now, he’d be telling us that the kingdom of God is like unto a plastic bottle, BPA and all.

This marks the third summer that St. Andrews Episcopal Church has held an interdenominational service in the park with the Meeteetse Community Church, Western Frontiers, and, nominally at least, St. Theresa’s Catholic Church. For the past two summers, I’ve helped out with the music, which is to say that I’ve been one of the half dozen people standing up at the front and singing.

We music people meet a couple of times in the week before the service to hash out just what hymns we’re going to sing and in what manner we will sing them. It’s always a little bit interesting, because the people from the Community Church play guitars and sing from memory, and we Episcopalians have a piano (and sometimes an organ/accordian) and tend to like to see notes in front of us as we sing. They’re a little bit country, and we’re a little bit. . . Anglican. We sing “Come Thou Font of Every Blessing” in our best English choir boy fashion, and they sing “Shout to the Lord” with a bit of a twang and with improvised harmonies, but somehow it all works out.

We don’t always agree on things within my church, either, and we’ve nearly come to blows in recent weeks on the subject of gay marriage (with the added bonus subject of abortion! I said, “Hey, next week let’s talk about the death penalty!” For the record, I am pro, pro, and anti). Yet you could see us relaxing during the bits of today’s service that used the liturgy and tensing up somewhat during the bits where people said rambling prayers and lifted their hands up and said amen a lot. Familiarity breeds comfort, and though it’s good, I think, to be taken outside that comfort zone a bit, as we were today, it is that very comfort that makes it possible for me to pray each week along side people with whom I do not always see eye to eye.

The scripture read at the service today was one we read back on Trinity Sunday, Romans 8:12-17, which ends

When we cry, “Abba, Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ — if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Being a child of God means a lot of things, and one of them is the work we do in order to be joint heirs not only with Christ, but with one another — even if that means joining in worship in ways that are not always comfortable, even if it means trying to reconcile garlic bread and grape Gatorade with one another in your mouth.

I have a friend here called Dutch. He is maybe in his sixties and is the youngest boy of nineteen children, all with the same parents. His father, at age 108, still visits his mother’s grave every day. She died just a few years ago at age 102.

Dutch was in the Marines, and then he worked as a carpenter and cabinet maker and various other jobs. Nowadays he lives out in the country with his dog Katie, who is named for Katherine Hepburn, and a barn cat who doesn’t have a name. He goes to town on commodities day, and when my friend Jim still lived here, he used to drive Dutch to the VA in Powell pretty regularly. Dutch has had a few heart incidents, and they’ve made him a little panicky. I don’t know who drives him now, if he can’t drive himself, but he has a lot of friends and acquaintances.

Every few months, Dutch invites me over for dinner, which is usually served before 5 p.m. I have also had him over for dinner, although we learned that if he comes here, he has to take Katie to the babysitter’s, because she is terrified of my cat Sam. Once he said to me, after looking around my somewhat unfurnished living room, “Do you want a sofa? I have one you could have!” I said, “Sure, that’d be great,” thinking, oh, next time I’m over there I’ll take a look and make sure it doesn’t have mice in it or what have you. A few days later I answered the phone at the library.

“Laura! It’s Dutch! Your sofa’s in your living room!”

Ummm. . . I thought. “Thank you,” I said. And when I got home, there was indeed a sofa in the middle of my living room. I pushed it over against a wall, put a sheet over it, and the cats and I settled down for a nap. There are worse things than coming home to find new-to-you furniture that has already been installed in your house without you having to do anything about it.

Last Sunday Dutch invited me over for dinner, and when I got there around 4:30 he said would I like a glass of wine, and I said sure. He then began to hunt for a corkscrew. He recently moved from one somewhat dilapidated house to another one, and apparently the corkscrew didn’t move with him. I said not to worry, that I was not insistent about having wine, but he was distressed. “I have an icepick,” he said. “Do you think I could get it out with an icepick?” I wasn’t sure, but watching him poke at the cork with the icepick, I had an idea.

“Do you have a screw?” I said, “and a screwdriver or something, and maybe a pair of pliers?”

Of course all these things were on hand, and so Dutch, under my direction, screwed a long screw into the cork with an electric drill and then, when the screw was solidly in the cork, I held the bottle and Dutch pulled at the head of the screw with some pliers, and lo, the cork came out.

Dinner at Dutch’s means meat, potatoes, vegetables (which are sometimes from his garden and sometimes home pickled and sometimes canned), bread and butter, and pie — and, on this occasion, a glass of wine. And it was all good.

Last January my friends Edie and Deb and I made a plan to ski out to the cabin on the South Fork of the Wood River and spend the night, and in February we actually did it, which is more than I can say for many of the plans I make. Deb took many great pictures, and one of these days I’ll post some of them. The snow was a little bit slushy when we went out — Edie and I skiied and Deb snowshoed, and we each went at our own pace — but the moon that night was beautiful. Edie kept running out and then running back in and saying, “It’s good moon! It’s good moon!” and then we’d go out to look, too. Overnight it snowed, and so we woke up in the morning two miles from the nearest road, with the snow all over everything and no tracks in it at all, and Deb got the woodstove roaring again and I made eggs and coffee and oatmeal for breakfast, and later Edie did the dishes and we packed up our things and skiied and snowshowed back through the snow, which went all the way over our skis.

I didn’t start out to write about this, but it’s where I’ve ended up. Deb died just before Christmas. I don’t think I have quite taken that in yet. 2008 had its good parts, but it was also a year in which far too many people that I knew died far before their time. My godson Phelim; Ashton, the daughter of our superintendent; Deb; and then, New Year’s Eve day, Jim Pusack, a friend who was a last-minute member of my MFA thesis committee.

I hope that 2009 holds fewer such events for me and for any of you who may be reading this.

I lost my father and my grandfather within a few months of each other when I was five years old, and then for a long time nobody I knew died. One does not get such a reprieve forever.

One thing I am thinking about in 2009 is how to go about both mourning and remembering the people I care about who have died. The only useful thing I know about grief is that it does not end, and that it isn’t necessary for it to end. You can be a little bit sad every day for the rest of your life. You don’t have to get over it. This year I’m going to be thinking about how to recognize those little bits of sadness and honor them. (I sort of can’t believe that I just used honor as a verb with feelings as the object, but that’s what this world does to you.)

I first read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway when I was seventeen years old, and I was stunned, simply stunned, by the book. If you don’t know it, it’s the story of one day in the life of a woman in her fifties, but in the course of that day, when she has a big party, she remembers all these other various people and places in her life, and there’s a good bit that has to do with the summer she was eighteen. Until that moment I had no idea that grown ups dwelt in the past as well as in the present and future. I was so used to adolescence being dismissed by grown ups that I figured none of them ever thought about the past. I suppose there are grown ups who don’t, but I am not one of them, nor do I wish to be. The things you remember are, in some ways, all you have. I strive to remember as much as I can.

I am surely the only person in America right now whose goal is to eat more meat. Yes, you heard that right. More meat.

People tend to assume that I am a vegetarian, although I’m not and never have been. But it is true that for many years I ate little poultry and almost no red meat. My reasons were mainly gustatory, as there was little meat that I really liked. Environmental concerns also figured into the habit: Diet for a Small Planet and the More-with-Less Cookbook were around the house when I was a kid, and I read them.

So why the sudden change? I have been very, very tired for several months, and the last time I went to give blood I was a little too anemic. I eat very well and should in theory get plenty of protein from legumes and milk and iron from spinach, but I wondered, since suddenly I started to crave meat more often, if there might not be some crucial animal protein or other nutrient that my body was missing.

The second reason has to do with where I live. We do not grow a lot of produce in Wyoming, especially at 6000 feet. What we mostly grow are animals: things that can eat what passes for grass out here, with a side of sagebrush. I’m not a hunter, so I don’t have a freezer full of elk and venison. But I do have a store where I can buy local meat.

There are, of course, detrimental environmental consequences to raising cows in the arid west. But are they any worse than the consequences of Midwestern feedlot beef pumped full of hormones and fed on corn? And is the carbon footprint of a lamb or cow that came from a ranch within 50 miles of the store really greater than that of the eggplants and peppers and tomatoes that get shipped in from Chile?

I haven’t done the calculations, and so perhaps I’m wrong, but I would guess that it’s about a wash. So last week I made my great-grandmother’s meatballs. Tonight I sat down with a lamb chop, some mashed potatoes and parsnips, and some broccoli. Later this week I’m going to make the dish my mother and I called simply “hamburger-spinach-egg-mushroom.” And after that, perhaps lasagna.

And oh, did I mention? I’m also planting a garden.

I just upgraded this blog from WordPress 1.5 to the current version, which I believe is 2.3.3. Yeah, I missed a few in there. I’m also planning to play around with the theme some, so if you read this from the source rather than via aggregator, you may see some changes.

In other news, on Saturday, for the first time in my life, a candidate I caucused for won. Wyoming Public Radio feels, for some reason, that telling you about its upcoming pledge drive (which, while very short, is unbearably annoying) is more important than telling you, oh, say, news, but happily NPR and the AP come through with the results, even down to the county.

I got to the caucus site about ten minutes before it started (under normal Wyoming circumstances, that would be early) to find a line to get in. I didn’t even have to wait in line at the DMV when I got my Wyoming license; I rarely have to wait in lines at the grocery store. I had a nice time chatting with my fellow registered Democrats, though, and one turned out to be a fellow librarian. The organizers of this caucus had somehow missed the national press attention that Wyoming was getting in the days prior to the caucus, and they had thus booked a room that holds about 25 people. There were about 300 people there, and so they had us crowd around the main floor and the balcony of the floor above.

Where I come from, a caucus means getting a bunch of people in a large room and saying, “Okay, if you’re for the woman, go over there; if you’re for the black dude, go over there.” (And then, because it’s the first caucus in the nation, you get about ten more choices, which as you may imagine is why I have never before caucused for a winner.) In this caucus, we still heard some speeches and endorsements, but then we filled out ballots sort of like this one and deposited them in a cardboard box with a hole cut in it. After that, there may well have been more, but I’ve been ill and so I left to come back home and sleep before my week of Missoula Children’s Theatre (brought to you by the Park County Arts Council, of which I am a proud member) and Thinking Ahead (where I’m going to be talking about Radical Reference).

Although it was exciting to have voted for a winner, I am not really all that excited. There’s enough background about what I think and who I’ve voted for elsewhere on this site. Suffice it to say that, while the candidates whose positions I really admired have long since dropped out, I am trying to see that having either a woman or a person of color as a major party nominee (and, one hopes, as President) is a major symbolic step for this country and the world.

I did not, as a rule, attend athletic events when I was in high school. I went to the cross-town rivals football game my sophomore year, but since I got into the game by pretending to be a member of the opposing team’s art club, I’m not sure that counts. (The art club was painting faces at the game as a fundraiser, and my best friend went to that school.)

Since I moved to Meeteetse, though, I try to go to a few games. As a result, as I frequently tell people, I have gone to more sporting events since I moved here than in the entire thirty prior years of my life combined.

Basketball is my favorite sport to attend (a good thing, since it’s one of the few offered here), probably because it moves quickly and I even sometimes have some notion of what’s going on. I hadn’t been to a game yet this year, though, and I heard that tonight’s game would be a good one.

Games are well-attended here–I’ve only seen larger crowds at funerals. People quickly drop attending concerts and plays once their kids have graduated, but many of them still show up for games. Never having been to games elsewhere, I can’t offer much by way of comparison, although I imagine they are a lot the same–people yelling advice to the players and cursing the refs from the sidelines, teenagers clambering over one another and rearranging themselves according to complicated and esoteric teenage pecking order rules, little kids trying to see the action, parents trying to keep track of their little kids, and so on.
During half time I chatted with my neighbor from down the street, who asked if I’d made the cheese soup yet and said to come knock on his door if I needed a bottle of beer for it. He’s also trying to organize a moonlight ski for next month, but sadly I’ll be in Salt Lake City at a library conference.

The superintendent, one of the old school board members, and a couple of other guys are always standing and leaning against the wall with their arms crossed at these events. I told them at the school concert back in December that I was going to buy them all white t-shirts and packs of cigarettes to roll in their sleeves. “It’d send the wrong message about smoking, but it’d be such a great photo op,” I said. And I suppose the 50s image is appropriate for these small town moments and small town games.

We started out strong but lost by 11 points. There are a few more games to go, though–perhaps I’ll even make it to another.

How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. Luke 13:34 [partial]

I had thought to do a little blogging of the Lenten study we’re doing at my church (which does not have a website–it doesn’t even have a computer) but hadn’t gotten around to beginning. What follows is only marginally related to our actual Lenten study.

The Hermits have of late been considering biology and humanity, sex and gender, topics which lend themselves to diverse pursuits–scientific inquiry, theological reflection, and, of course, the taking of online quizzes.

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, meanwhile, have been considering similar questions, although in a somewhat graver and larger fashion. (Background via Google or the NYT, if you are so fortunate as to have a subscription).

Today I heard the following opinions expressed:

• gays are sinners and should be punished appropriately
• gays are sinners and need to be saved
• gays are children of God just like the rest of us
• gays choose to be gay
• gays have no choice about being gay (and, in an interesting variation, 3/4 of gays have no choice about being gay)
• gays are gay because of a birth defect

Despite my years of regular church attendance, I am the sort of person that Ann Coulter would doubtless describe as a godless liberal (although I usually tell people I’m a communist–why not go all out, I figure?). In the course of my eastern education and upbringing (remember, anything east of Cheyenne is “back east”), I had never heard the last of these before.

I mentioned that I did not think that gay people were defective. The speaker said they were not defective (what with all being God’s children and all), but they were not perfectly formed in God’s image in the same way that people with birth defects are. I said that it seemed to me that since we are all part of God’s creation, God probably intended for us to come in a variety of configurations and sexual orientations and so on and so forth. I’m not sure how that went over.

It has occurred to me lately, though, that when we say that gay people are gay because they can’t help it, because they have no choice in the matter, we are doing them something of a disservice. Saying “you have no choice” is not quite the same as saying “you have a birth defect” (and, I should note, this whole discussion is probably doing an enormous disservice to people who have birth defects, who are also no less human than the rest of us), but it implies that you are to be pitied, that you are, in some way, a less than perfect example of God’s creation–sort of like saying that if you are female, you are somehow less able to relate to God, since in his human incarnation he was male.

Last week in Lenten study our lesson was Luke 13:31-35. I noted at some point that I thought it was either interesting or nice or both (I can’t recollect which adjective I used) that Jesus chose a feminine image in the bit quoted above–the mother hen gathering in her young. I have for years–for as long as I have been thinking about it–believed that humanity encompasses male and female and indeterminate and in-between, heterosexual and homosexual and bisexual, and, in general, more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of. Is there any reason that God should not also encompass all these?

I don’t consider the people whom I listened to today to be intolerant, on the whole. But sometimes it’s very clear to me that I come from a different place. We have a gender neutral restroom at our church, but we don’t call it that, and I don’t know that anyone thinks of it that way. But I may start to think of it as such–to be happy in the knowledge that there’s a place you can go around here where you don’t have to choose a label.

Last month I didn’t have water for a week, and I decided to write something about it for Writers on the Range. Since they don’t seem to want it, I thought I’d post it here. If you find yourself fascinated with my water situation, rather than that of the larger west, you can read more on Vox.

I am happy to report that next weekend, I’m moving to a house, where, I have been told, the pipes never freeze.

——-

“The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual
rainfall drops below twenty inches.” The Conservation District where I
live recently released its figures for 2006: we got a total rainfall
equivalent of 6.71 inches. We are indeed in the West, going into the
eighth year of a drought.

You know that simply from looking around at the brown fields, the low
muddy reservoir, the dust that blows through your screens in the summer.
But I don’t think you really appreciate it–at least I didn’t–until
you have in some personal way gone without.

During a recent cold snap, my pipes froze, and for the past four days I
have had no water in my house but what I have brought into it. I called
my landlady to tell her about the situation and mentioned that I had, as
she suggested, left a couple of taps dripping. “Not dripping,” she
said. “Dripping won’t do it; you’ve got to leave them running.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a good thing I don’t pay for water by the gallon.”

Yes–you heard me right–in a place that got fewer than seven inches of
rain last year, I get all the water I want for $35 a month. Granted,
it’s horrible water, much too alkaline to drink. If you water plants
with it, they shrivel up and die. But you can flush toilets with it,
and shower in it, and wash your dishes in it.

I suppose, though, that my water situation is no more ridiculous than
those of Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, cities that owe their
existence to the water they repurpose from western rivers, many of which
start up here in the Rocky Mountains. We know that the desert is not
made to support such a large human population, and that it is only
through the considerable intervention of human beings in the natural
world, mostly the damming of rivers, that so many are able to live there
(and, for that matter, grow lawns there). Even the biggest proponents
of growth in the desert southwest are beginning to admit that it may
face an end. The Christian Science Monitor reported last month that
the Central Arizona Project has said that current water supplies will
serve the nation’s fastest-growing state through 2030 and projected
water supplies through 2045. After that, according to a CAP planning
analyst, growth will depend on “possibly available supplies” and, after
a certain point, “uncertain supplies.”

It is hard to remember when you stand in the cold rushing waters of a
mountain river, nothing like the slow, meandering rivers of my
Midwestern childhood, that you live in a land of little rain. It is
harder still when there is water there, all you want, when you simply
turn on a tap in your home. But of course the plentitude of water is an
illusion, like the mirages you see on the highway on a particularly
sunny day.

In the past few days, I have been thinking about how much we take water
for granted, and about how much water we take for granted. I’ve been
doing dishes in a sink only a few inches full and flushing my toilet
only once a day. I have not wiped down my counter tops or cleaned my
bathroom sink or mopped the kitchen floor. I haven’t made pasta or soup
for dinner. Yesterday I took up a friend’s offer of a shower, and it
felt positively decadent to let all that water run over me and down into
the drain.

I believed when I first moved here that I was becoming more attuned to
my use of water because I had to haul in all the water I wanted to
drink. It was not until my pipes froze, though, that I realized just
how much water I use that I don’t even think about–washing my fingers
off after I’ve cracked an egg, wetting a sponge to wipe off a counter,
rinsing my toothbrush.

In a few more days the temperature is supposed to rise above freezing,
and the water in my pipes will flow again, and I’ll do loads of laundry
and make spaghetti for dinner, and when the temperature dips down again
I’ll leave my faucets running. And I will think, well, it’s not potable
water anyway, and I don’t pay for it by the gallon, but at the same time
I will wonder about water and waste, about human progress and human
fallibility.