Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Barbering the Jade Plant


Remember Miss Piggy, who never ate anything she couldn’t lift? Although I like the jungly feeling that I get from being dwarfed by my houseplants, I apply Miss P’s standard to them—I won’t keep a plant that I can’t lift.

I have an ancient jade plant that has spent its life putting out one plump, thumb-shaped leaf after another, its stems thickening and lengthening until they draped over the sides of the pot, like an obese sort of ivy. I am a parsimonious waterer, especially of succulents, but over the years I had poured countless gallons of water into that plant, and most of that water was stored in those fat stems, those turgid leaves. The monster was nearly three feet across, and its branches hung so far down that I couldn’t set it on a table, but had to use a plant stand.

Yesterday I moved the jade plant from the bedroom to the sun room.  I had to carry it at arm’s length to avoid breaking off any branches, and by the time we reached our destination my arms were shaking. (Later I asked my spouse to weigh the plant: 25 pounds—heavier than Bisou, even though it was in a light-as-air plastic pot.)

I saw right away that it was taking up too much room, crowding my beloved red and pink cordyline on the right, and the equally beloved giant peace lily on the left. I considered  moving one of the rattan arm chairs out of the room, but there is no space anywhere in the cottage for an extra chair.

There was nothing for it but to prune the jade plant. I got my small pruning shears and a two-gallon bucket and went to work on those overgrown branches. They snapped with a satisfying pop, and I threw them into the bucket. When I was only a third of the way through the pruning, the bucket was full. Leaves and stems flew everywhere as I kept turning the pot, lopping off more branches. Was there no end to this plant?

There was. When the last drooping branch was off, my plant was transformed. Gone was the unkempt Medusa look, the disconsolate stems, the leaves which, despite my conscientious misting, had accumulated layers of dust. Instead, here was a perky, young-looking plant, its every stem pointing optimistically towards the sky. Where leaves and branches had crowded and choked each other, there was now plenty of what painters call negative space, into which the soon-to-come breezes of spring could waft unimpeded. The plant looked and seemed to feel the way I used to look and feel after an excellent haircut.

I gave the jade plant an extra thorough misting and left the room, the pruners still in my hand. Passing by the hall mirror I caught sight of my hair, which drooped down to my collar bones, forlorn, disheveled, and crying out for a trim. I looked down at the pruners ….



Sunday, April 26, 2020

The Wolf's Last Gift


Some years ago, a couple of biologists living in the northern wilds rescued a wolf cub. For the next decade and a half, the man and woman devoted themselves to giving the wolf, a female, the best, most wolfish life possible, and to documenting it.

If, like me, you have entertained fantasies of what it would be like to have a wolf of your own, the documentary that the couple made would nip them in the bud. The inside of their cabin looked like a war zone. Cushions were ripped out and strewn everywhere. The rustic furniture had been chewed to pieces. There were holes in the floor where the wolf had dug.  It’s not that she was in the least aggressive; she was simply…active.

Winter and summer, every single day, the couple hiked endless miles to satisfy their protégée’s compulsion to roam. Whenever they weren’t trudging up and down mountains, they were scavenging for road kill and other sources of meat for the wolf, who flourished under their care. The couple, however, looked more haggard and worn with each passing year.

When the wolf grew old and died, they didn’t bury her. Instead, they carried her body to the top of a nearby hill and laid her on the ground, the way a wild wolf’s remains would have been left. Then they set up a camera nearby and made a stop-action video of the ensuing months.

In late summer and into the fall, as flies and beetles crawled over it, the wolf’s body seemed to flatten and sink slowly into the ground. Scavengers made off with a few bits and pieces, and then the snow came and covered everything.

In the spring, after the snow melted, the carcass had disappeared, and in its place there grew a thick, bright green patch of young grass, in the shape of a wolf.



Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Zero-Sum Game


Remember those stories, from what seems like a century ago, about dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice? I fell for them, even though they were absurd. Why would dolphins want to enter those narrow canals when they have the entire Adriatic to disport themselves in?

But the reason that so many of us fell for the story is that it corroborates the consoling idea that Nature, given half a chance, immediately begins to recover. In fact, many cities are seeing cleaner air as a result of stay-at-home rules. Here in Vermont, with traffic noise drastically reduced, I’ve never heard so much bird song. It’s an anything but silent spring.

While coyotes roam the empty streets of San Francisco and Chicago, around our cottage the foxes are flourishing. Yesterday evening I watched one kill a squirrel right under our bird feeder, and head up the hill to his den across the road. I told myself that his wife and four children would eat a good dinner, but the violence of the killing, although it was over in seconds, stayed with me.

I stood at the sink washing my hands for the umpteenth time and repeating my hand-washing metta: may all beings be safe, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be content, may all beings live with ease. But for whose safety and contentment was I praying, the fox’s or the squirrel’s? I couldn’t have both: if the squirrel is safe, the fox goes hungry; for the fox to live with ease, the squirrel must die. And it doesn’t stop there: when the squirrel eats the acorn, the future oak perishes. When the fox dies, its flesh melts into the earth and feeds the tree.

Everything comes at a cost. The clean air of the city is paid for by the cab drivers with no fares, and by the mountains of packaging materials overflowing the dumps. In factory farms across the country, thousands of pigs are being reprieved, while the workers who would have butchered and processed them at the now-closed Smithfield plant in South Dakota sicken and grow poorer by the day.

Is there no way out of this zero-sum game? Not, I think, as long as there are so many of us on this earth. And even if by some miracle all the visions of Margaret Sanger, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Rachel Carson were to come true at once, death would still be the necessary condition of life.

But to be human means, almost by definition, living with the illusion that we are exempt from the turning of the wheel. In our frantic culture, normal life allows us to maintain that illusion. But in this spring’s eerie silence (except for the birds), distractions are harder to come by.

And so between watching the fox on the prowl, and worrying about the sick and the unemployed, I strive to accustom myself to the image of my flesh dissolving and my molecules gently dispersing for the benefit and nourishment of something or someone. Does this seem morbid and medieval? I don’t think it is. Rather, I suspect that getting comfortable with this vision is where true ease and contentment lie.



Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Leopard on Exhibit


I am one of those sleek, reasonably contented leopards that you see in modern, enlightened zoos.

I am not exactly caged in. My sleeping quarters are warm and comfortable. The outdoor exhibit comprises many acres of woods and fields over which I am free to roam. If I see another animal coming my way, I give it wide berth. We leopards are a solitary species. My range used to be much larger, though. I traveled regularly in search of food, and sometimes even went hundreds of miles to visit other leopards.

Every evening, my keepers leave food outside my door. We must never be in the same space, because I am a danger to them and they to me. But, like I said, I am reasonably contented. I don’t have to worry about poachers setting traps, or hyenas stealing my kills. And now that the public isn’t allowed to visit, I am not bothered by their inane comments about my spots.

I spend a lot of time grooming myself, getting rid of pollen and dead leaves, and hunting for ticks. I take naps. I force myself to chew my food thoroughly, to make mealtimes last longer. Every day I roar over the ether at other leopards I used to know, but their voices break up in the distance, and it’s hard to know what they’re saying. Occasionally I make marks on tree trunks with my claws.

I look at the sky. I smell the earth. I watch the sunset and wait for the keeper who brings the food. Did I say that I am reasonably contented? We leopards are a solitary species.*

*In case you find this confusing: the retirement community where I live has prudently closed the campus. No visitors may come in, no residents may go out.  

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Hair in the Corona Era


If a woman blow-dries her hair and nobody sees her, does she still look good?

What about make-up, deodorant, real clothes instead of pajamas, foundation garments—are they worth the trouble these days? For myself, so far I have answered in the affirmative, mostly because I don’t want to frighten myself every time I pass in front of a mirror. As for the effect of these decisions on my spouse of 50+ years, it would take an extraordinary gesture—such as shaving my head, say—for him to notice. And even then he might be too much of a gentleman to comment.

The advertisers who think they know all there is to know about me have been bombarding me lately with products designed to color gray hair at home. They’ve got the age bit right, and the graying bit, but they don’t know that I don’t color my hair-- so much for their omniscience. It’s not that I have philosophical objections to covering up gray hair, but I have always worried that if I did, and then got sick and was unable to keep after the roots, etc. I would emerge from the ordeal suddenly an old woman, a brutal shock to my friends and family. I would rather accustom them gradually and gently to the ravages of time on my appearance.

Color aside, the hair issue looms greater with each passing day. My layers are growing out, and there are some weird bits at the back of my neck that stick out no matter what I do. It’s time for a haircut, but that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Like many of my generation, for years I went to bed every night with twenty-seven brush rollers in my hair, and to this day I find it impossible to simply ignore the stuff that, virus or no virus, inexorably grows out of my scalp.

I considered shaving my head, but gave up the idea when I remembered Colette’s opinion that, like a ripe fruit, the mature visage benefits from a bit of foliage around it. After researching “dreadlocks for white girls” on Google, I abandoned that possibility because I might be accused of cultural appropriation, plus it looks labor intensive, and requires something called “hair wax.” Besides, judging from the photos, dreads on white people look best if the wearer’s chest and arms are covered in tattoos.

There remains the Buddhist choice: to let go, surrender, practice non-attachment to style and shape, and let my hair grow, in the words of the musical, “down to here, down to there, down to where it stops by itself.” But long hair, if given its freedom, can be an inconvenience and a safety hazard. Already it gets in my mouth when I play the recorder, dips into my soup, and gets tangled in my eyeglasses, hearing aids, and face masks. If it grows long enough, I risk getting it caught in doors or, biblically, in tree branches, like Absalom. Should I ever ride again in a convertible, it might strangle me, like Isadora Duncan’s scarf.

One option remains: braids—worn hanging down the back, schoolgirl-style; rolled into ear muffs, like Princess Leia; or pulled across the top of the head like a tiara. However, all these styles need really long hair. Will the corona era last that long? Who knows? But whenever it finally ends, we will emerge from our caves, dens, eyries, burrows, and lairs and cast our eyes over each other, and know what survival looks like.



Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Chicken Shortage

This spring, hatcheries all across the United States have run out of inventory, and baby chicks are rarer than hens’ teeth. When I heard this news on a rainy afternoon two days ago it brought tears to my eyes. I wasn’t missing the sun, or the company of my fellow humans, or life as it used to be. I was missing my hens.

For years, they were the hub of my backyard ecology. Thanks to them, nothing ever went to waste. “Give it to the hens!” we said about everything from burned toast to apple cores, carrot tops, and curdled milk. And, magnanimously, persistently, the hens turned our refuse into eggs.

But they didn’t just give us eggs. Their nitrogen-rich droppings transformed the spoiled hay that I used for their bedding into the most exquisite of composts, which they turned and chopped and aerated all winter long as they scratched looking for seeds. In the spring, all I had to do was dump the stuff on the garden and (pretty much) watch the veggies grow.

Those hens were my friends. They were Buff Orpingtons--big, cream-colored birds with a placid disposition. They didn’t lay as abundantly as some of the more flighty breeds, but on the other hand they didn’t let Vermont winters get to them. They would rush to greet me when I entered their yard, peering up at me first with one eye and then the other, in that inimitable chicken way. And in the evening, when I went to collect the eggs and close the coop against the fox, the fisher, and the weasel, they would purr sleepily on their roosts. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the handle of the egg basket in my fingers, and hear the cluckings and feather fluffings as the girls settled for the night.

What impelled me, a city child, to keep hens and grow vegetables? I used to think that it had started with the 1974 oil embargo, when the price of everything, from gas to groceries, shot up overnight and it dawned on me that my loved ones and I were at the mercy of world events. I, who had never so much as watered a houseplant, bought a packet of tomato seeds and pushed them one by one into the packed dirt at the side of the house, right under the eaves where, at the first rainstorm, the few seedlings that had sprouted promptly drowned.

I went back to buying tomatoes in the supermarket, oblivious to the fact that the seeds of self-sufficiency had been planted in my head long before, by my mother’s stories.

“During the war [the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39],” she used to tell me, “before your father and I met, he and his family lived in Barcelona and almost died of starvation, because they couldn’t get food in the city. But we, [meaning she and her parents and siblings, who lived in one of those now-rare diversified farms] we  always had food. Even though we were near the front, and there were bombardments and many dangers from retreating soldiers, the chickens kept laying and the rabbits kept having litters. We even had a pig that we slaughtered in the fall. And the garden gave us cabbages and kale in the winter, and melons, eggplants, and tomatoes in the summer. And the trees made olives and almonds, and after a rain we children would go out to hunt for snails….”

This is the lesson I retained: depend on the supermarket for your groceries, and if something really bad happens you’ll go hungry. Grow your own food, and you’ll be o.k. During most of my adult life, therefore, whenever zoning regulations allowed it, I kept chickens.

So I understand where today’s would-be chicken keepers are coming from, but I hope they know what they’re getting into: hens need a coop to shelter in, and a securely-fenced yard in which to sun themselves, and they won’t produce if they’re fed on grass and kitchen waste alone. (Despite my self-sufficiency aspirations, I used to have to supplement my hens’ diet with commercial feed.) What hens don’t need in order to lay eggs is a rooster. In fact, given the male chicken’s libido, if he has fewer than at least fifteen wives to share the burden, he will stress them out with his amorous assaults.

If kept safe and satisfied, a hen will lay eggs for as long as five years, but she will eventually go through menopause. Do these new chick buyers have an exit plan for their aged birds? And when they first bring home those cheeping balls of fluff, do they realize that, absent a mother hen, day-old chicks need a heat lamp to keep them alive and lively? That you have to teach them to drink by dipping their beaks in water? And that they will dive in and promptly drown if that water is more than an inch deep?

If you are one of the lucky souls able to get chickens to cheer you and feed you in this depressing time, I applaud your impulse toward self-sufficiency. I wish you happy birds, overflowing egg baskets, and the illusion of security afforded by the knowledge that, if worst comes to worst, you can always make an omelette. May you and your flock rejoice in each other for years to come. And if you want any advice on poultry, I’ll be glad to oblige.


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