Learning from the Past

        "Against a rising tide of automation and increasing digital complexity, we are becoming further divorced from the very thing that defines us: we are makers, crafters of things."

        So says Alexander Langlands in his excellent book Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. To reconnect with ourselves as makers, Langlands, who is an archeologist, walks back into time. He swings a mattock to break new ground for a garden. He learns to thatch a roof. He grows hedges to replace wire fences. He makes and uses limestone as a building material instead of concrete. Everywhere, he extols the ancient craft over its more modern replacement: baskets over plastic bags, thatched roofs over tin, horse-drawn plows over tractors. Even the bicycle, in Langlands's eyes, "removes us from a natural state." To walk, he says, is more "crafty" (craft being the Old English word for craft but connoting, along with the skill of making, which is what we mean by the word today, power, knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness).

        Alexander Langlands would have understood my forty years of life on the mountain without electricity. Just as he felt that his learning to use a scythe for making hay was a valuable contribution to the general psyche of modern living, so did I feel that my life on the mountain, so intimately connected with nature, was psychically important to our world. Someone has to understand what we lost with modernization.

        When I first moved onto the mountain, I was doing everything by cræft. I built my house with a hammer and bow saw, cutting from my own woods the poles for walls. I spent hours with a drawknife, peeling bark from logs. But I was making concessions from the beginning: it was a chain saw, run by a friend, not my bow saw that cut down the larger poles for the framing.

       Langlands would have approved of my living without a car, though I think he would have preferred me to have a horse and buggy instead of hitchhiking, as I did after walking the half mile to the road when I needed to go to town. When my wheelbarrow broke, I hitchhiked to town to buy a new one. Langlands certainly would have approved of the time I borrowed a burro from a neighbor to haul garden soil up the hill. I loved the burro, but it wasn't really a very suitable way to carry burdens to my house, after all.

        For a very short while I was walking a half mile down the road to do my laundry in the creek. I may have been learning the cræft of beating dirty clothes against a rock, but mainly what I learned was that it was well worth the time, trouble, and lack of cræft to take my clothes to the laundromat.

       One thing I learned from all those years is that life is easier with electricity. But I also learned what Langlands learned by pursuing so many ancient crafts: that with every advance, something is always lost.

        When we accepted electricity, for instance, we lost silence. We hardly know how much noise is in our lives because we shut so much of it out of our hearing. With all the noise of electrical equipment and appliances eliminated in my little house on the mountain, I flowed into a more peaceful life. I lived always with the sounds of nature, especially in my poorly insulated house with its single-pane windows. When I moved into my new house nine years ago (on the same land, still on the mountain), I gained a warmer, easier-to-heat, easier-to-keep-cool house, but my double-pane windows muffle, without entirely shutting out, the whir of crickets, songs of birds, calls of owls, barks of foxes, the wind roaring down the ridge, and the thump of snow falling from trees. Mostly my well insulated house has put me at one remove from the huge and beautiful silence of snowfall in the night.

        At my old house I also knew the darkness of that night. Kerosene lamplight is a soft light that seeps gently into the dark, letting dark curl into corners of the house and letting the stars keep their power. The electric lights in my new house are a hundred times better than the kerosene – cleaner, easier, healthier, brighter – but they jut viciously into the dark, thrusting it outside. It is dark in the house; then suddenly all there is is light. Everything that is is indoors. The outdoors is alien, blacked out. If I want to see outside, I have to turn the light off, let my eyes adjust, gentle my vision, and be one with the night. 

        In the same sort of way, Langlands prefers a scythe, while acknowledging the tractor's superiority in certain ways. He still thinks we should use a scythe, but I don't advocate going back to kerosene light, which is dirty, smelly, and troublesome. I wouldn't want to. But I do know what we lost when we took up electricity instead. And I think it's a good thing to recognize what we lose when we take up something different.

        Langlands would agree.

Walking through Art

     Art makes us see things differently. We see a pond with water lilies through Monet's eyes. An empty bar reminds us of Edward Hopper. A swirl of stars in the sky takes on the expression of Van Gogh. But my experience at the Atlanta Botanical Garden last week was the opposite art experience. Walking through the tulip gardens around the Chihuly sculpture was like walking in a painting.

      The artist of this living painting was as accomplished and talented as any Monet or Picasso because what is art, after all, but an arrangement of color and design? The medium of this unnamed artist working with his unsigned and ephemeral piece of art was not paint but flowers – tulips, to be precise, and his palette was monochromatic orange, one color of tulip stunningly contrasting to and enhancing the blue Chihuly glass sculpture squiggling upward like the splash of a fountain in the center of the tulips. White tulips among the orange ones were like the white sheen on the glass where the sun stroked it. And occasionally among the palette of orange was a dark maroon tulip, an accent, like the dashes of blue and purple on a Van Gogh self-portrait or a chiaroscuro hint in the brown shades of a Rembrandt. Walking through the tulip-and-Chihuly garden was as stunning an art experience as I've ever had.

With this photo you can only look at the art 

experience, but it gives an idea of what it 

would be like to walk in it.

      At another place in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, I came around the bend in the path at the top of a hill and looked through the woods at a tall yellow glass sculpture that at first glance I thought was a tree, reflected in the long narrow pool of water at its base. It was another Chihuly glass sculpture, beautifully situated to emphasize the height and narrowness of the sculpture and the length and narrowness of the pond. When I walked close to it, I saw that the sculpture was made of hollow glass tubes filled with neon gas. At night, the yellow neon twists would be reflected in the pond, surely a breathtaking sight.

     Other parts of the garden displayed living sculptures beyond imagination – beyond my imagination, anyway, but some artist who knows how to sculpt with flowers did imagine it, creating enormous statues of dirt in which to insert annual flowers that would make the statues seem entirely sculpted with flowers. The Earth Goddess was the face and arm of a woman, enormous in execution, rising above a pond with water falling in various levels in front of her. Her expression is calm and serene. Her hair flows with abundance all about her face and shoulders. She is holding up a hand, from which flows a stream of water. I wanted to sit in the palm of that hand, letting the water flow over my back and legs, basking in the peace of the Earth Goddess. It was a beautiful sculpture even in its winter form. I can only imagine what it must look like when she is in full bloom.

      As we walked through the garden we saw similar statues: three life-size camels saddled with what would be a burden of flowers; a dragon, probably life-size; others that I can't remember. They were magnificent even in their blandly dirt-colored form. When they are planted next month, with up to 10,000 labor hours, they will suddenly burst into color and movement. I want to go back and see the garden then.

      But, of course, if I go to the Atlanta Botanical Garden in April, I would miss the orange tulips around the blue Chihuly. The Chihuly would still be there, but, like the Earth Goddess in her winter dress, it would not be in its full glory, just a piece of art slumbering after a joyous flowering. This year, I was witness to that particular joyous and extraordinary flowering of art, the painting with flowers in which I could walk. There's no wonder Architectural Digest cited Atlanta's as one of the eight most beautifully designed botanical gardens in the country.

Jeez!

      I have been traveling with Mike on the East Coast, where we have come to meet each other's families. The first stop was at Mike's brother, Donald, and sister-in-law, Gail,'s house in Annapolis, where we met Mike's family and had a tour of Annapolis by boat. On Sunday, Mike and I went into Washington, DC, for breakfast with some of my family, then rejoined Gail, Don, and Mike's sister, Janet, in Gail and Don's apartment in DC.

      Mike's brother is Donald Kohn, the economist who was until recently vice-chair of the Federal Reserve. Now he serves as consultant for the Bank of England and other banking concerns around the world, including the government of Chile, where he was flying that evening for a conference with a panel of experts about the economic state of affairs of Chile. After he left for the airport, Gail, Janet, Mike, and I talked about wedding plans and were just about to leave for our dinner reservation when the phone rang. It was Don, calling from the airport. He had left his wallet at home. Could Gail bring it to him? He thought she would have time before the plane left.

      I gave Mike a nudge. No use chastising me for forgetting my passport (see the post on May 21, 2018] or losing my keys or doing any one of a number of similar things if even the vice chair of the Federal Reserve ….

      Gail grabbed Don's wallet off the kitchen counter, and the four of us hurried into her car. She was the driver, and though she thought she knew how to get to Dulles airport, I became navigator and called up Google Maps. When Don, waiting anxiously at the airport, called to find out where we were, Janet became the communicator. She told Don that Google said we would be there in 31 minutes. We hoped that would be in time.

      Don sounded a little puzzled but hung up. Shortly he called again, anxiety building, to find out where we were. We said we were just turning onto I-395. "What are you doing om I-395?" he asked, puzzlement mounting.

      "Google says that's the quickest way to get to Dulles," Gail answered from the driver's seat.

      Now Don gave what Gail refers to as the primal scream. "WHAT?! Not Dulles Airport! Reagan Airport!"

      I once saw a blue heron coming in for a landing in a pond in front of me. When he saw me, he made, mid-flight, the fastest turn-around I had ever seen in nature. Gail probably bettered him. Ignoring Siri's patient instructions, she changed wingbeat in an instant and headed in another direction, saying she thought she knew the way to Reagan Airport. Janet was telling Don we were on our way. I was asking Siri for directions to Reagan, in case they were needed. Janet told Don that Google said we were six minutes away. He said to meet him at arrivals, outside United Airlines.

      We drove smoothly to the terminal and pulled up at United Airlines arrivals, where we spotted Don, pacing the sidewalk. He rushed to the car as we drove to the curb. Gail handed the wallet to Mike, our hand-off guy. Don grabbed it, said, "Jeez," and dashed off.

       No "Thank you." No smile of relief. Just, "Jeez!" with a shake of his head.

      Gail, Janet, Mike, and I, with a successful mission behind us, had a good long laugh. Don called shortly to tell us he was at the gate and that the plane was just boarding. He sounded relieved and thanked us, now, for helping him.

       But I keep hearing that "Jeez!" Was that exasperated expression for us because we had been going to the wrong airport? ("Jeez! You almost blew it.") Or for himself for forgetting his wallet in the first place? ("Jeez!" How could I do such a thing?") That "Jeez!" is very familiar to me.

Wedding Plans

      Mike's and my wedding is turning out to be surprisingly traditional, but, after all, why not? It's fun to become a part of those traditions, in spite of my hippy past and unconventional life style (depending on your definition of "conventional," although they are few indeed who would call the way I live "conventional"). Nonetheless, I'm opting for a lot of tradition in my wedding.

      For one thing I want a wedding dress that looks like a wedding dress. I've forgone the long train as impractical for an outdoor wedding. The long veil looked ridiculous on my gray hair, so there'll be no veil, either. But the dress is white (I'm not virginal, but who cares?) and floor-length and beautiful and not the sort of dress I would wear for any other occasion, and I'm very happy with it. I won't describe it further – and I'm certainly not posting a picture – because Mike, the groom-to-be, reads my blog, and we are adhering to the tradition that the groom should not see the bride in her dress until she makes her appearance at the wedding ceremony.

      Mike, whom I know best in hiking clothes, is wearing tails. Oo-la-la.

      Since "lavender" is more or less the theme of the decor, I will carry a bouquet with lavender in it and include lavender in my crown of flowers. The men in the wedding – my brother and a grand-nephew; Mike's brother and a nephew – will wear lavender boutonnieres, and the women – my two sisters and Mike's two daughters – will have corsages. Our combined grandchildren will be our flower children, strewing rose petals before us as we walk up the hill to the wedding platform.

      The wedding will not take place in a church but at a vineyard on the Applegate River, where the emphasis is on the beautiful natural world, cathedral enough for both Mike and me. In fact, there will be nothing religious about the ceremony, neither from Mike's Jewish heritage nor from my Methodist upbringing. This is a wedding for celebrating love, family, and community.

      I will certainly not vow to obey my husband. I will write my own vows to Mike: "This is what I, as your wife, promise you," and he will do the same for me. Because the traditional wedding vows are "I do"s, we thought about turning ours that direction, too: "Mike, do you promise to bring in the firewood and keep me in kindling?" And he says, "I do," and I'm willing to marry him. We ditched this idea before I learned what it was he would have me promise to him.

      The officiant is not a minister but a years-long friend of Mike's.

      There will certainly be an exchange of wedding rings.

      There will be a wedding arch. Mike is building it, and friends will decorate it with flowers.

      There will be a big and delicious wedding cake. Mike's daughter is making it.

      There will certainly be music, not Wagner's Lohengrin, but my son's music on one of his unique sculpture-instruments. Later in the ceremony my guitar teacher, a world-class classical guitarist, will play. After the reception, as tradition would have it, there will be dancing – "dancing till the cows come home," I wanted to say on the invitation but didn't. We have a renowned local band playing – Alice DiMecele, who is a friend of mine, so I'm especially excited to have her play. For our "first dance," Mike and I have chosen Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love." We'll practice a lot before the wedding.

      There will be a dinner reception, not a catered affair, but an organized and elegant pot-luck dinner, based on lasagnas. Wine will flow freely. There will be toasts and, no doubt, roasts. (I know my family.)

      The beautiful invitations, created by my sister Sharon, a professional calligrapher, will go out shortly.

       We hope there will be an old-model "get-away" car, but that detail hasn't been worked out yet. It will take us to a B&B in Medford, already booked, for our "first night" together (yeah, right). After that there will be a honeymoon in the little village of Trinidad on the beautiful northern California coast.

      So we are bending tradition here and there, using it when it suits us, and planning things differently where we want something different. People have warned me about stress. But so far, it has all been a barrel of fun.

Driftwood Was Just the Excuse

      No place in the world could have been more beautiful last week than the northern California coast. The sea was emerald green with a white-froth surf that gentled onto the shore with a soothing, massage-sound-track, underneath-hearing boom. There was nothing violent or seething about it, nothing gray and dark,  or intense and loud. The Pacific Ocean had taken a day off from its hard work.

      Mike and I weren't the only people to take a day off to wander on the sandy beach of Tolowa Dunes State Park that day, but there weren't hordes of people, either, only two or three families, a few other couples, some people with dogs. One man stood in the surf for an hour or more, throwing a fishing line into the ocean and reeling it in again while his wife fixed a lunch well up the beach from the incoming tide. Most people were wandering through scallops of small rocks tossed up by the recent storm, probably hunting for agates, which are not uncommon on these beaches, though to find one is rare enough to elicit a squeal of delight. No one squealed, that we could hear, but everyone seemed content just to be in that gorgeous scene with the excuse of agate-hunting to bring them there.

      It wasn't agates that brought me to the beach that day, dragging a very willing Mike with me, but driftwood for the item on my 75x75 project (75 tasks of 75 repetitions each before my 75th birthday; see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com) that my son had suggested. In his version I would cut 75 small rounds of wood, woodburn a word onto each, and make pendants. In my amendment I would use driftwood.

      When we walked over the dunes – and after we recovered from our first stunned look at the emerald-green ocean – I gave Mike a bag and instructed him what to look for: small pieces of driftwood, smooth enough to write on but big enough for words like "graciousness" and "gratitude." Pieces with interesting color or shape were especially valued – like agates among pretty rocks.

      We wandered through scattered driftwood for an hour, looking for suitable pieces, then reconvened and spread our finds on the sand. We had about 150 pieces. I threw out some as too big or too rough, but I kept most of them, since I couldn't know for sure what would work till I started the project.

      We ate lunch sitting on a log facing that incomparably beautiful ocean, then took a long walk down the long beach, looking towards the mountains of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness white with snow in the distance. Over the dunes, the mountains of the Siskiyou Wilderness rose even closer and were even brighter with snow. The sky was a cloudless blue, the ocean green and white, the mountains purple and white, the wind only a brisk breeze – a perfect day!

      On the way back, we stopped at my favorite swimming hole on the Smith River, just to look, I said, since I had not thought to bring a bathing suit or a towel with me. 

The camera couldn't quite capture that exquisite color, but it came close.

The river was an unbelievable turquoise green, exactly the color of a turquoise ring I used to have. The pull to swim was strong. It's a good thing there were two young men, a birder and a fisher, also on the beach, or I might have been tempted in spite of the cold except that the ferocious current of the river was also a deterrent. I had to content myself with looking and looking and looking at that incredible color.

      At home that night, I spread my driftwood on the floor to dry out and lose, I hoped, its sand. The next day I started wood-burning the words: Gratitude, Hope, Creativity, Rivers, Love. 

20 of the 75 words

I thought of my sister Sharon as I burned "yoga" onto a piece of wood. Of my daughter-in-law as I wrote "Dance." Of my sister Laura as I wrote "Garden." Of my son as I wrote "Rhythm" and a whole lot of other words because the project had been his idea. And of Mike because we had had such a special day collecting driftwood at the Pacific Ocean on one of the most beautiful days the Northern California coast has to offer.

(See thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com, March 7, 2019, for a complete list of the 75 words.)

Hut-to-hut Cross-Country Skiing in Oregon

The First Day

      My friend Holly, and I had noted with relief that two other people had signed up to ski the hut-to-hut Sisters Backcountry cross-country ski trip in the Central Oregon Cascades on the same days we were going. We met Katie and Emily, who had come all the way from Rhode Island for this trip, at Three Creeks Sno-Park, from which we would be shuttled to Dutchman's Flat, on Mt. Bachelor, to begin our trip. We were all glad the others were there. The skiing would be easier with four of us than with two.
      We put on our skis at Dutchman's Flat. The shuttle driver said good-bye and have fun. We took a deep breath, shoved our poles into the snow, and were off on our adventure.
      Almost immediately we were in trouble: ski tracks went up the mountain and, more flatly, ahead. Which way was our route? Knowing we had to gain altitude, we followed the upward tracks, but very quickly Holly and I knew this was too steep for cross-country skiing. Only skiers with skins on their skis could have made these tracks! Later, a close look at the map showed that that route led to the top of Tumalo Mountain. Katie and Emily laughed. "What do we know?" they said. "We thought this was cross-country skiing in Oregon!"

      From there we skied more gradually, and therefore more sensibly, up the mountain (not Tumalo). The snow was deep, the skiing superb, the woods and hills beautiful in their deep snowcoat. 

This picture is actually from the third day, but it shows how beautiful everything was.

We skied for hours, farther and farther from other skiers, deeper and deeper into the wilderness. We took turns breaking trail. We took strenuous herring-bone steps up one hill after another, the last being the steepest, longest, and most exhausting hill I had ever herring-boned up. We side-stepped up other hills. We skied down some difficult slopes that felled everyone but Katie.

The most treacherous downhill, at the end of the first day. I am the closer skier, Emily in front of me.

 As the day wore on, I began to get tired. I fell again. I admitted to being tired. Everyone was tired. When we got to the Happy Valley Nordic Hut (6,489 feet), I sank into a chair with relief. So did everyone else.

Happy Valley Nordic Hut

        Recovery was quick. Soon we were all doing chores – starting the fire in the wood stove, scooping snow into pots to melt for water, laying our sleeping bags on the mattresses in the upper bunks, getting food from the cabinet for our pasta dinner, heating water, setting the table. 

Over dinner we learned a little more about each other: that Emily (27) was a high school science teacher, that Katie (28) was a Physician’s Assistant in an emergency room, that Holly (58), as I already knew, was a certified fiduciary. We played bananagrams, then went to bed early.

      The wind howled all night. Snow fell voluptuously, in sparkling crystals that gleamed in our headlamps when we went to the outhouse during the night.

The Second Day 

       The world was beautiful in its new 12-inch layer of snow. The skiing was superb, beginning with a long downslope with a lapis-lazuli sky to our left, then offering roller-coaster skiing (glide down, glide up, glide down again; glide down, glide up, glide down again), and then a series of switchbacks, zig-zagging turn to turn, turn to turn, up the mountain  At the top we stood on our skis for a few minutes to eat a snack, then pushed off again.

           Our hearts were singing. Everything was so beautiful – 

the various skies, from blue to black to roiling grays; the deep soft snow; the motion of skiing; the forests we skied through; the deep solitude. It was seven or eight gorgeous miles to Lone Wolf Hut (6,451 feet). We arrived in fine spirits and, as before, set to the chores. Dinner that night was rice and beans.

Emily and me. Note the snow melting on the stove.

The Third Day

      Again about a foot of new snow fell overnight.

      I got up early, hoping to start the fire and warm the hut before the others were awake, but Katie was up shortly after me. As I was stoking the fire, she called me to the window, and we watched together as a dark brown mink scooted into view, then leapt away through the snow.

        This day’s ski was mostly downhill, an easy ski for exertion and just as beautiful as the trail on the first two days. The clouds lifted at last to reveal Cascade peaks. We skied through a burned-out forest in which every tree was painted with ice crystals, and the forest, whether close-up as we skied through it or as a panorama at the top of a hill, was utterly beautiful. 

            It was 1:00 when we skied into the Three Creeks Sno-Park, exhilarated and thrilled. It had been a wonderful trip – three days of skiing as the only way to get anywhere; an accomplishment for skill; a challenge for trail-finding; an entrance into an enchanted world of snow and solitude; and a camaraderie of deep, though new, friendships with people who flowed easily into rhythms of work, conversation, and shared physical exertion. We had started the trip as strangers; we had ended as close friends. We hugged each other tightly as we parted.

        “See you next year,” I said to Emily and Katie, and they said, “Yes. We’ll be here.”

At the end of the trail, back at Upper Three Creeks Sno-Park (front to back: Holly, Katie, Emily, me)

A Ring on the Third Finger of the Left Hand

      A diamond, it is said, is a girl's best friend. That's maybe because diamonds are so beautiful but mostly, of course, because of their symbolism.

      Mike didn't do a down-on-the-knees proposal to ask me to marry him; we just gradually started talking about getting married. It seemed a natural step to our growing closeness and fondness for one another. I was just thinking about being married and having a wedding, nothing beyond that, when Mike said something about the ring.

      A ring!? What a wonderful idea. Every engaged woman should have a ring of some kind.

      Wikipedia tells us that a ring has been a symbol of marriage for millennia. Marriage ceremonies among the ancient Egyptians, 3,000 years ago, used rings made of hemp or reeds, although those materials defied the "forever" symbol of the ring, so rings were soon being made of bone, leather, or ivory. The Romans used rings in marriage ceremonies, as did Europeans from ancient to modern times. In colonial America, a prudent and parsimonious Puritan husband-to-be would give his beloved not a frivolous ring but a practical thimble. I'm sure they were beautiful thimbles, but I'm not surprised that the bride-to-be cut off the top of her thimble and wore it as a ring.

      It wasn't a thimble that Mike had in mind. 

      The jeweler for my ring would be my son's best friend from their years together at the Atlanta College of Art, he who had made my son's and daughter-in-law's rings. Mike would participate in designing the ring. I wouldn't know what it would be like, except that Mike would use the diamonds from my mother's engagement ring, which I had inherited. The diamonds and design went off to Dave Giulietti, the jeweler, and the wait began.

      At first I thought maybe I would get the ring for Christmas, but Mike told me Dave was too busy with other orders to finish mine before Christmas. Christmas came and went, and the time dragged on. I began to hint that it would be nice to get the ring enough ahead of the wedding that I would have fun showing it off. 

      I wasn't too surprised, then, that before Mike and I went out for dinner on Valentine's Day, he sat down next to me, said something breezy about really meaning this thing about getting married, and gave me a little square box. In it was a beautiful and unusual engagement ring, with diamonds in a large circle of gold on an intricately engraved band. It throws darts of color with the slightest movement. I am a happy fiancée, and an official one, and I am loving showing off my meaningful diamond ring.