The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon August 26th, 2009

A number of people have asked me to write about my new herbal adventures more, and I’ve resolved to do so. I haven’t forgotten about writing about the big questions (more to say still on the middle ground between Kingsnorth and Monbiot), but I did want to answer those who have been querying me about teas and tinctures.

For me, the most fascinating part of my whole self-sufficiency project is the plants – don’t get me wrong, I love the skills, I love animals, but I think I like best the project of getting to know plants.  The joy of herbalism is that it requires an intimacy that I really delight in – the more I learn, the better the results, and the more pleasure I take from my garden plants.

When I first started planting culinary and medicinal herbs, I pretty much treated them all the same way  – when I wanted some, or when it was a convenient time for me, I went and cut what I wanted.  But gradually I’ve learned a lot more about harvesting – when and how, and how to make best use of the plants.  Some of this is most important if, like me, you are hoping to sell dried herb, but harvesting at the right time will make anyone’s plants more medicinally active – we all know that there’s a world of taste difference between a green tomato and a red, ripe one dripping from the vine, between a tender, delicate new 6 inch zucchini and a three foot, seedy monster.  Well, herbs also have windows in which they are at their best.

Still, there’s something to be said for the “just go out and pick the herb” strategy – and for most fresh uses, I think this is probably still a good one.  There will be times when you want the most chemically active possible plant, but if your kid has an upset tummy and you have a dill head lying around, there’s really no reason to spend a lot of time wondering if you should have picked it on Friday or should wait until the seeds are fully mature.  By all means, try and harvest at the best possible moment, but don’t make yourself nuts, unless you are trying to sell your herbs.

There’s no real rule of thumb that allows you to completely avoid getting to know the plants themselves more intimately (and after all, this isn’t really something to be avoided), but there are some general principles that can be applied usefully.  Generally speaking, if what you harvest is the flower (say, chamomile or red clover) you want to harvest it just as the flowers open, as close to opening as possible (being pollinated can reduce the medicinal qualities of the flower, as in the case of clover).  If what you harvest is “aerial parts” (say, as in scullcap or feverfew) then you generally (there are some important exceptions to this) want to harvest the top foliage and flowers just as the flowers open.  If what you harvest are the young leaves (like nettle or raspberry leaves), harvest in spring, or keep cutting back or succession planting to ensure a harvest of young leaves.  Seeds (such as milk thistle and burdock are harvested when the seeds are ripe, that is fully dry. Berries and fruits (such as cayenne peppers or elderberries) are harvested when ripe, or just shy of ripe.  Roots (such as dandelion or echinacea) are best harvested in fall after die back, or in very early spring, before heavy growth is put on.  Barks, (like willow or crampbark) are a winter crop - and in fact, I wonder that more northern farmers don’t consider adding a few bark crops to add to their other winter work with wood – cutting firewood, pruning, etc…  

There are some oddities among the herbs – Gingko leaves, for example, are harvested not when young, but when they begin to yellow.  Comfrey is gentler and safer after the first spring flush – the first crop can be cut for compost or animal feed.  Rosemary is more fragrant and active after flowering, rather than during it.  Some roots need several years to develop, others are at their best.  Again, you’ll want to look at recommendations from several books, since people’s opinions vary a lot on this stuff.

What if you want to combine two herbs with different harvesting periods in, say, a tincture?  You have two choices – you can harvest both plants as close to optimally as possible, say, picking the late flowering clover and digging the burdock before frost to create a clover-burdock root combination, or you can double tincture – tincture the clover at its peak, strain, and then fill the jar again with burdock root, and tincture it again.

The two easiest methods of preserving herbs are folk-style tincturing and drying, and that’s all I’m going to talk about in this particular post.  Again, the books you use will have recommendations for how to handle these plants – and I’ll write future posts about creams and oils and other methods.  But for today, we’ll assume you are going to either tincture the herbs or dry them.  You should look to see how the plant works best – as all of us know from culinary herbs, some herbs dry beautifully, some lose their essence. The same is true of tincturing – I’ve heard herbalists say that alcoholic tinctures are the best way to preserve herbs flatly, but some plants have constituents that don’t precipitate out in alcohol – marshmallow, for example, is valuable mostly because of its mucilaginous qualities, but that mucilage is not alcohol soluble, so an alcohol tincture isn’t the best way to preserve it.

Tinctures involve preserving herbs in alcohol, vinegar or glycerin.  Glycerin has the advantage of being sweet and easy to give to children, vinegar something everyone can tolerate, alcohol’s biggest advantage, besides pulling many plant elements out, is that tinctures last forever.  That way, if you are trying to preserve an herb you can’t grow, or don’t expect to have access to forever, tinctures are really valuable.

Either way, take a quart mason jar, and chop the herb parts up finely (for particularly dry or encased parts, like woody roots or hard coated seeds, you may need to grind them up some in a mortar).  Fill the jar to the top, and add alchohol (100 proof vodka is the easiest, although you can also make tinctures in fortified wine, or in a high proof alcohol that you enjoy sipping – no reason you can’t enjoy, say tequila-lemon balm or gin macerated with elderberries – for your health of course ), glycerin or vinegar.  Put the tincture in a cool dark place and shake it daily for a month, or more.  Strain through cheesecloth and press or squeeze out all liquid.  That’s your tincture.  Store in a cool, dark place, clearly labelled with both ingredients and with warnings if necessary.  Glycerin tinctures store 1 year if made from at least 70 percent glycerine and kept very tightly capped (they suck water from the air otherwise), vinegars last 1-2 years at room temperature, alcohol tinctures last indefinitely.

Drying herbs is pretty simple – in a dry climate, you can hang them up in a warm, dry place with good air circulation and no exposure to sun, and just let them dry until crispy.  Unfortunately, at least this summer, this method hasn’t worked at all for me – plants keep absorbing humidity, and turn grey and dull.  A solar dehydrator doesn’t work for this – bright sun is not good for most medicinals.  So this year I’ve found myself using the electric dehydrator much more than I would like.  Generally speaking, you want to dry your plants as quickly as possible – within 1-4 days, and at a temperature between 80 and 100 degrees.  Once they are dry, crumble them into an airtight jar, and put them away from light. 

How do you decide whether to tincture or dry?  For me, it is often a matter of aesthetic pleasure – any herb I enjoy drinking as tea, I might as well dry.  What’s the point, say, of peppermint tincture, when peppermint tea is so delicious?  On the other hand, valerian doesn’t taste that good anyway, so I might as well cover it in cheap vodka .  Also, if you have kids, I find it a lot easier to get them to drink a cup of tea than to swallow anything alcoholic, so either that or glycerin is preferrable.  Books will have good recommendations about whether to tincture or dry, and some of it may depend on what you want to use them for.

The three books I’d really recommend starting with are James Green’s _The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook_, Richo Cech’s _Making Plant Medicine_ and for those growing their own, Tammi Hartung’s _Growing 101 Herbs that Heal_.  It should go without saying, btw, if you are not cultivating these herbs, but wildcrafting them, you are doing so completely ethically – not taking more than a fair share of any stand, encouraging them to expand their range, not harvesting endangered plants. 

Happy harvesting.

 Sharon

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Sharon August 25th, 2009

The recent debate between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth over whether we actually can save the world seems mostly to have degenerated into sound and fury, which is rather a problem, since the larger question of whether climate change is stoppable, whether we can avoid having billions of people die, seems, well rather a good one.

The note that struck me most was Monbiot’s observation that he is “professionally optimistic” – that is, he knows he must continue, “…exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so. I still have some faith in our ability to make rational decisions based on evidence. But it is waning.”  I too spend some considerable time being professionally optimistic, and I admit, I winced in sympathy at this particular construction, because I think there’s nothing harder.

As always, Monbiot puts his finger on the reality of our collective dilemma – the moment you conceed inevitability you close off a set of options.  This is possible in some ways in peak oil – you can say that some of the choices are no longer available to you, and begin to imagine a way to go on.  Depending, however, on how the climate change projections come out, the reality of climate change is very different – there is a very good chance that we will see mass starvation in a radically different climate.  I spent an awful lot of time with the data when writing _A Nation of Farmers_ and the net conclusions of runaway climate change are all bad. When you consider that we are presently facing an intertwined and deeply inextricable food and energy crisis with less than 7 billion people and the remnents of a stable climate, the problem of a wildly varying future climate becomes much more acute.

I find myself then, in greater sympathy with Monbiot than with Kingsnorth – most of the time.  Kingsnorth observes that he detects in Monbiot deep fear – my feeling is that anyone who isn’t scared of our ecological situation doesn’t adequately understand it, or its potential consequences.  Kingsnorth speaks of Greer, who talks of a gradual, steady decline and accuses Monbiot of apocalypticism.  I don’t think that’s the case at all.  While I think that Greer wisely and useful historicizes the process of collapse, and reveals it as something that takes time, there’s a danger to taking a sweeping historical view, one that I call the “poor are always with us” fallacy (note, I am not claiming that John Michael Greer subscribes to this, but quite a number of people who use his analysis do). 

It is not an accident that Greer’s preferred historians (and I like many of them myself) tend to be old school historians of the “big picture” – rather than modern historians who tend to take a narrower perspective or view things through some particular lens.  Both models have their limitations – whether we are talking about how the Irish supposedly created all of human civilization or how Rome Declined, Fell and Turned into a Tourist Trap.  All of this depends, as almost everything does, on how you look at it.  Seen, for example, through a sufficiently sweeping and progessive lens, the decline and fall of Rome was merely a short term bump – after all, the populations were back up again a mere 1700 years later .

Kingsnorth seems to have taken wholeheartedly to Greer’s vision of a gradual decline, and there’s almost certainly a good bit of truth about this vision.  Monbiot, on the other hand, keeps emphasizing the billions dead – and there’s a good bit of truth in that one too.  The problem is the lens through which they are looking.  Because of course, the Greerian story where a young woman born in 1960 begins the journey of collapse while her great-granddaughter finally leaves the broken cities for the countryside is a compelling, and probably accurate one for a certain subset of the population.  But it isn’t all the story – every story has its early victims.  How would we view Greer’s narrative if the story began (and admittedly, this makes it far less interesting an illustration of his larger point ) with a young woman, born in 1960, who begins to see the energy and ecological crisis from her vantage point, and who happens to be living in south Florida when the nearly-inevitable massive hurricane, causing massive loss of life, snuffs out hers and her son’s, thus ending all future discussion of what her grandchildren will see?

For every person who in a multi-generational novel-style narrative got to see the full decline and fall of any collapse, there was at least one who saw collapse occur completely and totally, who thought, during one of the early barbarian sorties that made it to the suburbs, “Oh, crap, things have really gone to…Gaaaaaaahhhh!”  I don’t mean to make mock of other people’s deaths, even when I have invented them for the purpose of killing them off , but I do think it is important to realize that even if the great sweep of history goes the way Greer describes, sweeping history famously fails to fully articulate the general experience of the people who get to be the early victims.  They are generally categorized as the poor, the unfortunate, etc…. and unless there’s some reason to lionize them, their deaths are recorded, 500 years later, with a complete lack of interest except as factual observation.

 Thus, the fact that a million people a year (approximately) are now dying from climate change already gets subsumed into discussions - millions of people die every year from all sorts of things, as noted above, the poor are always with us.  Thus, when a few (or a few tens of thousands or even a million or so) extra of them die, seen through the proper lens (and again, let me articulate, I do not imply that this is Greer’s point, but rather the way that Kingsnorth uses Greer) , it is easy to subsume that into the sweep of history, easy to say “wait, that isn’t collapse, we have a long time before that happens, because, after all, the guy in Cleveland is still arguing about whether climate change exists.”

As I see it, the distinction between Kingsnorth and Monbiot comes down to this – how do we view history?  How do we view those people, mostly poor, mostly ordinary, many of whom didn’t have a very bright future anyway, because they were poor, who are the early victims?  And how many early victims do we permit before we admit that something substantial is going on?  We can say, for example, that Haiti was always, at least in our modern memory, a terrible and corrupt and impoverished place, so that it does not much matter that climate change seems to be upping the infant mortality rates.  A comparatively small number of deaths in New Orleans get our attention, but it is easy to sweep the ordinary people of Bangladesh, losing more and more lives to annual flooding, into the sweep of historic scope.  How many dead before we can say it is a collapse?  Or does it only count when it comes here?

I’ve been rough on Kingsnorth here, because I think he misses two important points.  The first is that even if Global Climate change can’t cause a single overarching thing called the apocalypse, no such thing has ever existed – but that doesn’t mean that it can’t cause a thousand things that look an awful lot like apocali (ok, that’s probably not a word, but it should be )  to the people migrating painfully across continents to find food, or drowning, dying of new diseases and otherwise falling gradually into hell. 

Second, I think he fails to grasp that anthropogenic global warming really may well be a different kettle of fish than the drawdown of our other ecological resources – one of the things worth observing, for example, is the history of abrupt climate change.  We know, for example, that at least a few times in the Earth’s history massive releases of greenhouse gasses have brought about fairly rapid climate change – the shift to the Younger Dryas may have taken as little as a generation.  The Younger Dryas freeze of course lasted 1,300 years, a long, long period of history, but when it flipped over again to a warm period, ice core evidence suggests it could, at most, have lasted a decade, but there is some evidence to suggest that much of the temperature change happened in a year, or even in a season.  With northern temperatures dropping as much as 28 degrees overall, it is hard to imagine a story like the one Greer tells, of a gradual crisis, with a few centuries to do the work of adaptation.

Even if this isn’t the case, climate change lends itself to abrupt events that many people will experience as immediate, catastrophic, and depending on how far down the curve we are, probably an irreparable plunge from one state to another, rather than a gradual decline.  Those folks who lived in Eastern Coastal Scotland 8,000 years ago, when a massive tsunami caused by the melting of methane clathrates in the undersea Storegga, and those in the affected coastal areas of Europe, for example, found that their situation was radically altered – chunks of their land were gone, and the Shetland Islands were pretty much wiped clean of human habitation.  In a society capable of sending the kind of relief that was sent to Asia after the massive tsunami there, such disasters are smaller things, tragic as they are.  Without the helicopters and massive ocean carriers, they are very different events.

But for all that my sympathies are largely with Monbiot on the subject of climate change’s impact, and for all that my fears are personally the same, I do think that Kingsnorth is right about his larger point – there is no hope for Monbiot’s claim that;

“Strange as it seems, a de-fanged, steady-state version of the current settlement might offer the best prospect humankind has ever had of avoiding collapse. For the first time in our history we are well-informed about the extent and causes of our ecological crises, know what should be done to avert them, and have the global means – if only the political will were present – of preventing them. Faced with your alternative – sit back and watch billions die – Liberal Democracy 2.0 looks like a pretty good option.”

This indeed might be a good option, although with its limits, if it were viable.  But it isn’t.  This is not a railing against the injustices of modernity, or an assertion that agrarianism has merits, or anything else – I do some of those things too, but ultimately, my observation is simply this – there is no hope of a de-fanged, steady-state version of our current settlement, and I have to imagine George Monbiot knows this.  We are now banging hard against economic, political and ecological restraints on our ability to create anything like what we have had – we already see the decline of renewable energy investment (barring short term government investments that simply won’t be able to continue on the tax base the UK and the US have to work with) – because the capital isn’t there.  Each resource constraint plays out economically, ecologically, and politically – what we can do is getting smaller every day.

I enormously respect Monbiot’s effort in _Heat_ to come up with a way to continue our basic way of life.  But running the numbers, I don’t think he did – even with 450 ppm as our target, he left out agriculture and other figures, and I don’t think that’s an accident.  The numbers were extremely marginal than – and that was before we knew what we know now.  Even Monbiot has admitted, on this blog, that the very process of a renewable build-out may push us past our tipping point. 

It was particularly difficult last year, when I finally began forcing myself to say and write the words that the science has been leading me to – that there is an excellent chance that it is already too late to remediate our climate crisis, at least in some measure.  I generally prefer to keep my personal reactions mostly private, and the last thing I ever want is to break down in front of an audience who came to hear me do the professional optimism thing, but the first couple of times I stood up in front of a room full of people and talked about our climate change situation as I see it – about the increasing evidence that climate sensitivity is greater than we expected – I cried.  I forced myself to admit to my audience that there is a real chance that we cannot prevent our crossing the critical tipping points.  With practice, I can do this without choking up now, but I still have to force myself to say the words “it may already be too late.”

Why am I saying this here?  And why on earth do I do this to my audience and myself, when hope is so terribly important?  I agree with George Monbiot entirely that we have to live our lives as though it is possible to remediate climate change.  By the time that we know for sure where we stand, it probably will be too late – the only choice is to act as though we can do this, because the price, not just to the people so many are implicitly prepared to write off, but to all of us, is potentially so great. 

But I don’t think the only path to action comes from selling the idea that we can have something like our present, or by not telling people it might be too late.   The problem is that too many people already grasp how close to the cusp we are.  This is dangerous politically – the same people who wanted us to believe for a long time that climate change was really no problem would rather immediately leap to the idea that it is now irremediable, since either way, the economy goes on much as it has been.  But it is even more dangerous to sell ideas that almost certainly are not true – it is true that the idea that we are very close to a climate tipping point is a dangerous thought.  But we have to trust our audiences to grasp the subtle distinction of “may be” because if we are wrong, they will see us as having lied to them, and that has far worse outcomes than telling the truth.

I think it is possible to say “we do not know where we stand, it may well be too late, but we have no choice but to try.”  If nothing else, this language has a history we can invoke – this is precisely the state Britain stood in when the Nazis seemed certain to overrun the country.  And yet, the idea compelled people to act – because the alternatives were worse.  It was not necessary to offer optimism, merely necessity, a sense of urgency and shared crisis. 

In the end, I think Kingsnorth and Monbiot’s final pissing contest distracts from the much more interesting question that they raise – are there any choices between “Death of Billions” and “Let’s just keep on keeping on, even though it almost certainly won’t work?”  I suspect there are, and that will be the subject of my next piece. 

Sharon

• climate , future , monbiot
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Sharon August 24th, 2009

Orlov does it again:

 “I would like to sell you some hunger insurance. Are you insured against hunger? Perhaps you should be! Without this coverage, you may find it impossible to continue to afford feeding yourself and your family. With this coverage, not only will you be assured of continuing to get at least some food, but so will I. In fact, thanks to this plan, I will get to eat very, very well indeed.

The company is in a position to demand lower prices for food from the food providers, and can even pass some of these savings on to you. (But the fine folks in the hunger insurance company do have to eat too, you know.) Of course, the food providers try to make up the difference by charging those without hunger insurance much higher prices, but how can anyone blame them? That’s just market economics. There may also be some food-related benefits, such as lower rental rates on bowls, spoons, napkins and feeding tubes (check the details of your plan).”

Read the whole thing.  You’ll laugh, but nervously.

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Sharon August 24th, 2009

There are, of course, plenty of moments in any life in which one despairs of the hope that really substantial change could be made in our society.  You look around and doing what needs doing seems hopeless.  But then, there are the other moments.

On Friday, we attended Eli’s annual end of school year ceremonies.  Unlike most kids, Eli attends school year round, along with all of the other 60 or so children who are part of his school for kids with autism.  The yearly graduation and celebration of their achievements is held in August, as the summer winds up.

In many ways, this is no different than open parent day at any school. In other ways, it is.  Some of the kids have elaborate academic achievements to show off, some have none at all.  In either case, many of the most important things come in tiny increments – this year, someone’s son learned to say “Hello” without prompting.  This year, someone’s daughter had only half the tantrums of the year before, and no longer cries when someone makes a loud noise.  Someone’s 7 year old finally toilet trained.  A 10 year old learned to converse about something other than trains.  These are the accomplishments that matter most – the ones that get our kids a little closer to being able to live in the world with everyone else.  While Eli did very well academically this year, the big things for us were these – he can put on his own socks.  He can now choose between 3 or 4 items, without having to echo the last one – he can pick the one he wants.  He can color.  He can answer abstract yes or no questions.  For a child with little language and poor self-care skills, these are the essentials, not that he’s able to identify the countries of Europe on a map.

My guess is that if you don’t have a disabled kid in your life, this sound tremendously sad and limited and unfortunate, and the idea of being in a room full of autistic children not very appealing.  And in some measure, that’s probably a normal response to those who have never had close experience with children with disabilities – it is a little scary for those it is alien to, and the idea of being thrilled that your kid can put on his socks seems strange, probably as though we’re secretly grieving for the child that never was, but putting a brave face on it.

And this may well be true for some people. I once read a book about a boy with autism that began with something along the lines of “X’s birthday is the saddest day of the year…” and went to detail why this was so, because on their son’s birthday the author and her husband spent the day mourning the child that might have been.  I admit, I can’t tell you much more about this book, because the whole beginning so disgusted me that I didn’t read it. 

And I don’t think that’s a normative response.  That is, it may seem, if you don’t have a child with a disability in your life as though you would spend your whole life reorienting your compass, grieving what isn’t and faking your way through pride and happiness at the accomplishments – after all, if you hold these kids up to “normal” children, they seem so strange – how could anyone reorient their priorities to be truly happy about their kids being their kids, and truly proud of their accomplishments, not because they are all the kids can do and you need some pride, but because they deserve your pride and appreciation?

I can’t tell you how it happens, but for most people, it does. The idea of spending my time mourning that Eli is Eli, and not something else seems bizarre to me.  I have a beautiful, funny, sweet and healthy kid, who I adore.  He does what he does, and what he can, and his accomplishments are no less natural to appreciate than the accomplishments of Simon.  Simon is bright and funny, but not at all athletically talented, but the idea that I would watch him playing sports and sit there thinking that I wish he was better at it is just as alien as my watching Eli do his things, and wishing he was otherwise.  That’s just not how I, and I think most people, experience our children.  Moreover, it is, I think, mostly impossible to live in this world, where people lose far more important things than assumptions about what a child should be able to do, without being grateful for the child you have.

 Those 60 children were surrounded by hundreds of parents, grandparents and siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins who arrived to celebrate the accomplishments of the kids they love.  As we arrived at the school, the heavens opened up, and as we cheered each class and each child, thunder rolled and tried to overpower us, and failed.  And what is remarkable about this is that watching the people around me, some of whom I know, and some of whom I do not, I saw no ambivalence – perhaps there was some, perhaps someone was putting on a brave face.  But in aggregate, it is impossible to imagine that most of those cheers and that applause that drowned out the storm came with internal hesitance – you simply cannot make that much joy and that much noise and show that much pride and love constrained by a sense of loss.

And that’s what I think makes me hopeful.  The students in that school come from every walk of life and every community.  Their parents and families are well off and educated, and poor and not.  The parents are typical consumers and recent immigrants and weirdos like us.  The parents and families are black and white, asian and hispanic, from everywhere.  Autism is a reality all over the world, and in many communities – there’s no picking and choosing here.  And I have no doubt that every parent, every grandparent and aunt and uncle, every cousin and brother and sister have at some moment thought “why is she this way?”  or “why did it have to be autism?” 

And yet, each of them (or most, at least) has also passed through that moment – accepted the things they don’t get to choose, that children come as children come, and reoriented themselves to find the blessings and delight, the hope for the future and the promise in those children.  They may have asked “why us?”  But then they moved on, accepting that this is their life, the way it is, and that joy comes, not despite the things we do not choose, but as part of them – new joys, new things we never expected.  The grandparents are just as excited when Nita sleeps over, the parents just as happy when their child learns to read, and we change our expectations, adapt our hopes, and they are just as fulfilling as the hopes we had before.

I don’t think I have to paint a picture of the analogy between having a disabled child and knowing that your way of life is about to shift radically.  Most of these parents did not choose their fate, just as we did not fully choose ours.  Most of them expected something else, dreamed of a future that was different.  But instead of writing memoirs wallowing in the grief of disappointment, each grandparent, each parent, each brother, aunt, sister, uncle was able to say “We have Lily, and we’re happy for and because of her.”  There is a time and place for disappointment, and a time and place for moving on, and all of them, or nearly all of them were able to do so.  This bodes well for us.

Asked, most of these parents probably would have said they could not handle a child with autism.  I suspect I would have as well.  And yet, when a child with autism came their way, they were not only able to “handle” it, but to make a life of joy and beauty, and moments of pure happiness and celebration out of that reality.  It can happen to all of us – and almost all of us manage, not just to survive, but to find new ways to be happy and grateful and feel that they got lucky.  Looking at that cross-section of people in the room, it seemed very clear that what they can do, a much larger cross-section of people can also do.  Perhaps not all, but more than many of us credit can move past the loss of something we’d expected, and into the ordinary work of finding joy in your life as it is.

At the end of the celebration, they bring up the children who are graduating.  Some will go on to mainstreaming, some have aged out of the program, or are moving or attending different programs.  This year, one of my son’s classmates, ”David”, who is very much attached to Eli (and Eli to him) aged out.  It was a difficult thing – his parents struggled to find an appropriate placement, and David was very scared at the thought of leaving the school he’d attended for five years – transitions are difficult for these kids, and graduation day was a tough one.

David cried through the first part of the program – you could watch the tears rolling down his cheeks and see what a difficult day this was for him.  For a kid with autism, this could easily result in a tantrum, or simple panic – hundreds of people staring at you and making a lot of noise is a lot of stimulation at the best of times, and this was hardly that.  His teacher had confided she didn’t know if he’d make it when the time came for him to come up and face the crowd as a graduate – that in practice, he had refused to go up, and been panicked by the very thought, even just facing his classmates and teachers, at bringing school to an end so publically.

As the oldest child, and the last one called, we waited, in that hot, noisy, crowded room, with thunder rolling overhead as they called David’s name.  People applauded, and more noise was added.  The aide assigned to him, already crying at the thought of David’s leaving, led him down the aisle to the stage. He was holding her hand and looking scared as he walked, but he climbed up.  He landed on the center stage, facing away from the crowd, with his back to us.  He stood that way for a moment, and the school’s director moved to guide him, to remind him that he was supposed to face us all.  But David didn’t need it.  He took his certificate of graduation from her, and all by himself, he turned around, and smiled radiantly at all of us.  We cheered and applauded, yelled and called his name out loud.  And David took in all the noise, all the people filled with pride and joy, who cheered as you cheer someone who has won the marathon, who has passed his limits and gone on and done more than you thought they could, who has made you dream new dreams and hope for new things.  And David joined in all our joy for him, and  took a bow.

Sharon

• Uncategorized , joy
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Sharon August 24th, 2009

Perhaps the easiest part of my conversion to Judaism was the shift to the New Year beginning in autumn.  Perhaps because I spent so many years in school as both student and teacher, or perhaps because I don’t like hot weather much, but somehow, when the cool breeze of autumn blows in, the world seems entirely new again.  Actually, for me, it isn’t the breezes that bring in autumn, but that last declining week of August, when it is time to begin shifting my way of thinking over to the new schedule and realities.  One spend the Hebrew month of Elul getting ready for the holiday season – and in the Northeast, the whole world is perched on the verge of a massive shift, away from the idea that summer can linger forever, and back into the reality of the coming of winter.

For some people this might be depressing, some kind of Keatian “To Autumn” death and destruction thing, but I like winter, even if it has a measure of harshness.  This morning we woke to a cool breeze and the first night I’ve wanted a quilt for a while, knowing that summer may linger, but it is time to move on.

Fortunately, the produce of summer will linger for a good while – the heat has brought on the tomatoes and peppers and eggplant, and it is time for full scale preserving.  I’m putting up the last of the peaches and blueberries, making pickles like mad, and dehydrating zucchini and squash.  The peppermint is in flower and the early apples are ready – you have to make those into sauce, because they don’t last – or eat them out of hand, but what a pleasure.  The apples, too, are a reminder that summer is on the wane and autumn is icumen on.

We had a busy but delightful week – my favorite part was a picnic with friends that ended with the children brought back to our friends’ home to bathe and hear bedtime stories with them before we headed back to our place. I missed the best moment, where my friend’s five year old daughter took Asher off to be bathed, started his bath, settled him, and then apparently performed a nude interpretive dance for his benefit, in the tub.  At some point, of course, we’ll have to nip this sort of habit , but at five and three, its just plain adorable.

Not much else going on here, except that one of the new chickens has decided she’s an oxpecker and the goats are small rhinos.  She’s a cochin bantam, a tiny 8 week old handful of chicken who was thrown in with my much larger Cuckoo Marans and Rocks, and she’s decided her place is riding on the goat’s back.  They don’t seem to mind, and it does look very African Savanna, or at least as close as it gets out here in rural New York.

We’re starting the countdown to goatbabies – Selene has bagged up (that is, she has milk in her teats) and we’re guessing she’ll come first, since she’s substantially bigger than Maia.  Our best bet is mid-Septemberish, but they were in with a buck for two months, so who knows.  I admit, I can’t wait!

Plant something: Spinach, arugula, peas for pea shoots, lettuces, 3 tiny ginko trees I dug out of someone’s yard into a nursery bed.

Harvest something: Tomatoes, hot peppers, sweet peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash, blueberries, raspberries, beets, carrots, chard, turnips, turnip greens, collards, kale, mustard, peppermint, feverfew, burdock root, green beans, asparagus bean, yarrow, mongolian yarrow, comfrey, eggs, milk.

Preserve something: Pickled cucumbers, made zucchini relish, dehydrated zucchini, canned summer squash casserole, dried herbs, tinctured herbs, made blueberry jam, made raspberry vodka.

Waste Not: Made hay bale cold frames from last year’s hay, let cats into food storage room for a while to make sure that it smells like cat before inevitable attempt by really dumb mice to enter our home in cold weather, decided that the wastage of having bedwetting son wear cloth protectants and soak through nightly, requiring me to wash them and all the bedding, was probably less than one eco-friendly pull up per night.

Want Not: Bought sock and underwear for kids and spouse, two bags of yard saled clothes for Eli to grow into, more tea for storage and shoes (Do other people’s children lose shoes? Simon lost a sandal in a pond and a set of sneakers at camp in the same week.  Eli sheds them constantly.  Asher told me he hid his sneakers – and we’ve yet to find them.  Not to mention the outgrowing!)

Build Community Food Systems: Did a site analysis for a community garden and made the case at a local zoning board. 

Eat the Food: Made pasta with ripe tomatoes, olives and pickled jalapenos in a roasted garlic sauce that was spectacular.  I have no idea what was in it – we just threw random stuff in, but boy was it good.  Also a really nice fava bean salad with chipotles.

How about you?

Sharon

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