A really good poem turned up in my inbox today - by Mary Oliver

I just discovered Mary Oliver less than two years ago. Turns out she's a Northeast Ohio native, Chagrin Falls if I remember correctly. She writes about Nature, and the spirituality inherent in reverence for Nature, but not about God. I suspect she's a Natural Pantheist.

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer's night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now - whenever
we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade - surely you can't imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can't imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Back home

We drove hard Saturday and Sunday (well, Greg did) and passed on the original plan to spend the night in Bennington, VT, puttering around. By then I was at the end of the two week chemo cycle and feeling pretty ragged around the edges. Well, that's putting it mildly. This is a week earlier than we usually make the Maine trip, and since we came home the more southerly route through Massachusetts, there was almost no leaf color.

The week in Maine went by quickly, but we didn't fill the days with activities or road trips like we usually do. I found that my limit was about two hours on my feet, and one day we went north up the coast to Camden and Belfast, stopping at a few stores along the way. Another day we went into Portland, where I really, really thought I was going to be up for a walking tour. We had taken a self-guided architecture tour when we were there in 2005, and really wanted to do another one of the three tours. Last year we went, but I had a bum knee and wasn't up for the walking. We did walk a little bit, and did a little shopping. Portland is a city that just oozes hipness. I'd love to go and spend a week there poking around all the old buildings that now have funky businesses. Cobblestone streets, and many of the streets look right down on the harbor.

The highlight of the trip was lunch at Benkay sushi restaurant. It would have been worth the drive just for the lunch, so that assuaged my guilt at wimping out on the walking.

Greg had told me when we were planning the trip, and I was dubious about my condition and whether it was worth it, that he would do everything, and boy, he did! He was Mr. Step 'n' Fetch It! No ,matter how many times I asked him to do something, or to get something for me, he was sweet and kind, and never complained. He cooked a couple of pretty good meals, too, in addition to the nights we just boiled lobster and pan fried potatoes. It was a house that was really close to the water, but not so accessible because of the huge rocks along the shore, and every day while I rested Greg went out walking - who knows where. It's a very rural area, so the road is lightly travelled and a good place to wander. I'm sure that he uses this time to clear his head and destress from the trials of caring for me. He makes me feel blessed.


Here's the fish chowder he made. Haddock was locally fresh, cod would be good, too.

Chop up a couple of slices of bacon and an onion, and start these in a pot at a low to medium heat, with the lid on. We had an electric stove there, and it was so hard to manage quick changes of temperature. In the meantime, dice or chunk two or three potatoes and a couple of stalks of celery. When the onions are soft and the bacon has rendered some of its fat, remove the lid to let the steam escape, turn up the heat, and let the onion brown slightly in the bacon fat. Doing this as a separate step adds an extra layer of flavor to the finished soup that you wouldn't get if you just dumped it all in together.

Next, add the potatoes and some liquid to just cover the potatoes. Water will do, clam broth is nice, chicken stock would be ok too. It will only take about a cup and a half, put the lid back on and simmer the potatoes in the liquid until they are mostly cooked, and then add the celery. I like the celery to still have some crunch because it adds texture to counterpoint the creaminess of the potatoes and milk.

Now, add the milk, depending on whether you like it light or rich. Use about 12 - 16 ounces , depending on how much broth is left from cooking the potatoes. It's a pretty inexact science. You can use half and half, but I find that regular whole milk is about right. Heat the milk slowly, you can't bring it to a simmer or it will curdle.

Now the fish, which I forgot to mention you have cut into chunks about an inch. About a pound and a half of fish will do nicely, and put it in the milk as it warms up, so the fish doesn't overcook and the milk doesn't curdle. When it's nice and hot the fish will be cooked. Add salt and pepper to taste (lots of pepper) and float a chunk of butter on top. This will make four servings, more or less. If you have some parsley garnish the top of the soup.

Be careful if you have leftovers that you don't heat it too fast or too hot, or the milk will curdle.

Sunday morning in Maine

We are definitely geographically challenged. We decided to make a pilgrimage to the coast of Maine, as we do every few years. We came last year, with those thoughts in the backs of head "one last time" but then here it is another trip around the sun and Maine is still here, and so am I.....



Nathan and Katie made the fall vacation trip that we always did when the kids were young - September to Nag's Head, N.C. Katie's on maternity leave until early October, and since she's a teacher, this might be a once in a lifetime opportunity for her. They invited us, but we had already planned the trip to Maine for two weeks later. However, I had not rented a house, and when I found one available the week immediately after Nathan's trip to N.C., it seemed the perfectly logical route to come to Maine by way of Nags Head, then spend the night in Maryland at Matthew's and Larisa's to break the trip into two parts and visit even more grandchildren. That's a lot of miles! Greg drove every one of them so far, it's a tradition on vacation, even though I do most of the "around town" driving.



The oral chemo is both a blessing and a curse, I guess, when you're trying to fit in a trip. With IV chemo, you get the dose, hang low for three or four days, and then slowly start climbing out of the hole. With this every day stuff, it's less intense suffering, but spread over the whole two weeks, so just generally feeling crappy all the time. Not really crappy, just enough to not take much interest in doing anything, or having an appetite. Unfortunately, it hasn't affected my weight yet. Last evening we stopped at the grocery store on the way in to get something quick for dinner, so we wouldn't have to go out. Boxed salad, frozen potatoes, couple of lobsters and some steamer clams. The smell of the garlic rosemary potatoes was the end of my appetite. I had to eat to take the chemo with food, so it was bread (very good bread, I might say) and 7-up. Though I did have a few of the clams.



There's such a difference in the quality of the ocean between Nags Head and here. Sometimes the beach at Nags Head is still, this time it was quite windy and rough for the two days we were there. And the Outer Banks, being a barrier island, always gives the sense of the ground moving beneath your feet. It's measurable, of course, from season to season they will have lost so many feet of shoreline, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse has been moved - twice, I believe. The sand shifts and you can't stand in one spot or you sink. Houses we have rented in the past thirty years have fallen into the ocean. I remember the very first time we went to OBX in September, we stayed in a house called the "Beach Baby" that was cheap because it should have been abandoned. At high tide you could step off the back step (it wasn't on stilts) right into the water. It had a room with bunk beds and another room that was a combination kitchen and bedroom, basically a double bed in the corner where you might have put a table. We went in September, the weather was absolutely glorious as it can be only in September or October. But the next week a hurricane hit that area directly and took out most of the beach along that strip, including a lot of the beach road. In the footage shown on national news, there was video of a wave coming up and taking the Beach Baby. I have a confession to make. I stole something from that house, well, I traded. I had taken my own cookware, not knowing what the house provided, but the Beach Baby had a square cast iron frying pan that I really liked, so I traded one of my pans for it. I still have it and use it very often. I felt so guilty for that short period of time before I saw the Beach Baby tumble into the ocean, and for a while after that I had pangs of guilt.



The Maine coast, however, is completely different, being built of huge boulders and very little sand. It's not a beach for walking, unless you're a bit of a mountain goat (I'm not). On the other hand, the air is moist and temperate this time of year and so the vegetation is lush right to the edge of the water. The houses that are for rent are old, old family home places that have been retrofitted with plumbing and sometimes cable tv, and wireless internet (yay!). Many old families live here year round, and you don't get the feeling of transciency that you do in the southern beaches. It all seems very old and solid and New English. But you don't get the rolling, rhythmic surf, either. In that way it's kind of like being beside a great big lake. Except with salt water, and lobsters.

It's chilly here, and it makes me think of the fall chores that we'll have to attend to at home. Greg has pretty much taken over everything except the thinking about them, since I'm on oxygen most of the time. But I can still make lists! The sun room needs just a light cleaning before the plants come back in. I always prune them hard, even though it's the wrong time of year to do it, they grow so much over the summer outside that they have to be cut. And it's the one time I really go against my organic gardening principles. I spray them down with Sevin, let them sit for a few days, and then give them a good bath with the garden hose. I don't want to bring in spider mite and scale, and Sevin is the most reliable way to de-pest everything at once. I'm thinking about getting rid of some plants this fall, so let me know if you want something, maybe you can have it. The sun room is so full that by February I can't see through the plants to the outside very well.

We haven't yet decided what to do about housing for the chickens, so that's the issue that will require the most effort on my part (making a plan). Likewise, there's a pile of mud on the back side of the pond that washes back into the pond when it rains hard - don't want to think about leaving it there all winter long. There's the drainage ditch that I started digging with the backhoe - it has to cross the driveway, not an easy task, and possibly be encased in concrete for that section. I'll do the tractor work and the planning, but not the shovel work, you can be sure! Some time during that time, the leaves will fall and need to be gathered, and that begs the question of what we're doing about changing the gate to the garden, and then we're back to the question of the chicken accommodtions. Oh, my. On the way home from vacation, we'll make a master plan.

Saturday night

Today was a rough day. I always have done this - start the day with a huge list of things I'm going to do, then get about a third way through and run out of time, or energy. We're getting ready to go on a long road trip, so there are lots of loose ends to tie up. Today I started with mowing, and got the front field done, then came in and had a coughing fit that lasted for most of the rest of the day and completely wore me out. I washed three loads of laundry and could only find the energy to fold half a basket load. I'm stressed out because the furniture is dusty and the toilets are scummy and the garden is full of weeds and I'm too exhausted to bend over to pick up a sock. Greg works non-stop and he tells me to just tell him what I want him to do, but there's only so much one man can do. I'm amazed to think that just a couple of years ago I was working in my studio full time and doing art shows on weekends and keeping the yard and the house. My gosh, what would I do if I had children at home?

When we built this house and moved in, in 1995, Justin and Nathan still lived at home, Nathan was half was through his senior year. Greg's mom had brain cancer and was failing, and we had Greg's parents, "Wally" and Judy over for dinner just about every Saturday night. Nathan would be on the way to somewhere, and Justin would be wishing he were, but always we listened to Prairie Home Companion while I cooked and Greg made salads and drinks. Nathan went away to college in fall of 1996, Justin gradually did find some kind of trouble to get into on Saturday nights, but still Wally and Judy came over for dinner every week.

The Gramma (Judy) died, and it was just Wally. Every Saturday night Wally came over and had a martini, and we listened to Prairie Home Companion. Justin got big, became a football jock, and got his drivers license, and would wolf down more groceries in a sitting than you could imagine, and he'd hang out with Wally for a bit, and then go out hound dogging on a Saturday night.

Wally used to sit in the hammock chair on the back porch with his martini and I'd throw the frisbee for the dog to catch, and we'd listen to Prairie Home, and then make dinner. And then one day in 2004 he had a stroke and never came home again. He died this year in January. I can only imagine what it was like for him to be trapped inside his body for those last five years.

Every Saturday night in summer we still sit outside and have our drinks on the back porch, and the hammock swing sits empty. Garrison Keillor had a stroke this week. The summer is at its peak, but dying, and the hummingbirds have mostly flown. I don't have high hopes that I will be here next summer to have drinks with Greg on the back porch. But I'll bet that some of the kids and grandkids will, because it's a great back porch to sit on, and a great hammock swing. But I'll always see Wally there, martini resting on his tummy.



This week Justin and Amanda invited us for dinner and Justin grilled salmon. It was great! We love it with jasmine rice and mango salsa alongside. Here's the salsa recipe: Serves four generously.

2 mangoes, a little underripe, in small cubes
1 red pepper, chopped
1/2 red onion, small chopped or sliced
fresh cilantro, chopped, we like a lot, about a third cup loose

Dump all this chopped stuff in a bowl and then make the dressing:

juice of two limes
about 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
about two tablespoons honey - more or less to taste depending on the ripeness of the mango
salt
chipotle pepper, ground - optional, but we really like the smoky heat with the toasted sesame

Mix this all together, let it sit for a half hour before serving if you have it.

Note that I don't measure so I'm just guessing about measurements here.
This stuff is good! And it's so colorful, with yellow, red, and green.

It's great alongside anything grilled, or spicy, especially pork or chicken.

Cancer update, briefly

Just the news, which isn't much. I finished the first round of Xeloda pretty uneventfully, saw the oncologist today just to check in and make sure I'm up to start a new round. Apparently it's doing something, whether or not it's killing cancer we don't know. It did knock my hemoglobin down as low as it was after six cycles of carpoplatin and taxotere (fondly known as taxoterrible) last year, when I was so exhausted and couldn't breathe. So that's a little worrisome, since this is just the end of round one, but explains the bone-numbing fatigue that is so much a part of cancer treatment. We won't scan to see if it's working until after three rounds, so late October, assuming the treatment hasn't killed me by then. Gallows humor, always in good taste.

I decided to break down and get a disability placard, since we're about to go on a long road trip. So, really mixed feelings about that. I've always been independent and strong, and this whole chronic sick thing is remarkably humbling.

I'm looking forward to going to Maine, but realizing that there won't be any mountain trail hiking or lighthouse climbing this time. Makes me really glad for all the times we did that when we could. We'll be about a mile up the road from where we were last year, in Owl's Head, and the house looks like it's got a great ocean view with a lawn that goes right down to the water. I'm sure we will think of fun things to do that don't require me to do too much walking. We always manage. It will be a new experience to load the car with an oxygen concentrator and portable tanks. I'm awfully lucky that Greg is such a sturdy man to do all that lifting and toting.

Tristan is taking the chickens, pen, house, and all to his tiny lot in Lakewood for the duration. Bless his heart.

Housing for the Girls

A desk should always be in front of a window. I know that in an office it's not conducive to the business environment where you're sitting and working hard, and someone comes to the door and you look up at them and have your important business conversation. Also, in an office you don't want people to have a perfect view over your shoulder to your computer screen, which they would if you were facing the window.

I used to sit at the kitchen counter every day with my laptop. In the morning I'd set it out, and just putter around all day with everything up and running. This is why I get email so quickly, because I have an audible alert, and I'm trained to go check. Last winter, after we had the inauguration party here, I had a foldable 2 X 4 table in the living room, and I set it in front of the french doors that open into the sunroom, which has a wall of windows ten feet tall, and found that it was the perfect place to sit. The sunroom was full of plants then, so I had to look beyond them, but as far as a bright place to spend time in the winter and hatch plans for projects, this was it. Then, in April I decided to get a nice Amish writing desk instead of the cheesy white plastic table, and I found a shop that would build a simple one, in cherry, with a drawer, for surprisingly little money, and it does look much nicer.

This time of year is one of retrospection for me, something about watching the cycle of the season as everything reaches the end of its annual growth. It was in the early, early spring that I had the brainstorm that having chickens would be a great idea - inside the garden fence until time to plant the garden, where they would scratch for grubs from japanese beetles and nasty garden pests. Then outside for the summer where they would free range and give us eggs and eat the mosquito and insect larva.

Sometimes things just work out. One of my "church ladies" has friends that farm, and their kids had been raising hens for 4-H, and they wanted to get rid of some of them. So, not only did I get full-grown laying hens, instead of baby chicks that I would have had to wait five months to get eggs, but they were delivered to my house! Thanks, Arlene and Bruce! We've had eggs all summer, and very few mosquitoes, and they have completely turned last years mountain of leaves into compost. They have done some damage to the more delicate flowers in the gardens, especially the alyssum, but they have done an outstanding job cultivating around the perennials, and the asparagus bed looks better than I have ever seen it this time of year, big and bushy plants and zero weeds, and I'm assuming, well fertilized.

Well, now it's September and there's a list of fall chores and having hens adds a whole new list of things to get ready for a Cleveland winter. We haven't done this before, so we're going to have to make it up as we go along. I think we'll put the girls back inside the garden area, but I think they need a more serious henhouse and they'll need a little heat and some way to keep their water from freezing. So, do we put an addition on the tiny house we have now, which is narrow enough to go through the garden gate? It would have to be something that detaches, so it can come back out of the garden in the spring. Or, do we make a new, wider gate for the garden? This definitely has advantages. The gate is barely wide enough to get a wheelbarrow through, and it would be great to get the lawn tractor inside to dump the leaves that we vacuum up. We have serious leaves in the fall. I'm not kidding. And the chickens have proved that they can make compost happen.

Or....we could turn the tool shed into a chicken house. It's got power to it, which would be a big plus because then we could get one of those nifty chicken water heaters for the sub-freezing weather, and install a light bulb for some heat. But then what would we do with all the tools, the lawn tractor, tiller? How about this -- we could do a Funk family project and start that pole barn that Greg has been wanting. We would just build one side of it, big enough for the tractor to be under cover, and the chickens in the rear. Or better yet, put the lawn tractor and tiller under roof with the red tractor, and turn the existing tool shed into the chicken house. A big advantage to this is that I can see the tool shed / future chicken house from where I sit here, at my lovely cherry writing desk in front of the tall windows of the sunroom, where I sit and hatch my project plans.



How many ways can you have eggs for dinner?

Fried. Scrambled. Boiled.
Deviled. Baked in a casserole.
Egg drop soup. Souffle. Frittata.
Omelets. Pad thai. Fried rice.
Raw, in a chocolate milkshake. Oh, yeah.

When one finds out that their cancer has returned and this time it's terminal, there's a whole lot of time to think. Now, there are benefits to this, I suppose, time to plan, time to change, time to make amends if that's what's called for. But given the choice, most people would not want to know when they're going to die. There was a study done, I forget the numbers, but it seems that most people understand how crazy-making it can be, living on death row, and not having a due date.

When we learned that the cancer was terminal, back in November of 2007, we were sad a lot, me, I cried all the time. Greg's not a crier, but he started drinking more to offset the moisture I was losing in tears. But, we knew we had some time, that this wasn't imminent, so we jumped into projects. I had always wanted a tractor, and one day in March '08, while I was sitting and (probably) crying, I thought, I have a retirement fund that I'm not going to be able to spend on retirement. I'm going to buy a tractor. So, within a week or so, we were the proud owners of a brand new red (RED!) Massey-Ferguson with front end loader and backhoe. Now we're talking! And last summer we built a path through the woods, a loop all the way around, so the whole woods are accessible to the grandkids, as long as they watch out for poison ivey.

And then, one day I started pulling out the compacted clay from the low spot in the back where I always got the lawn mower stuck. It just peeled off in layers. It was easy to see what had happened, once I started disassembling it. The contractor that dug the basement just put the clay from the hole back there and spread it out, with no place for the water to run to. And since it's clay, it won't perk through, it just stays wet until it dries and cracks. I used the front bucket and peeled off layer after layer until I created quite a depression in the ground, and quite a "mountain" to the side of it. There seemed to be much more clay coming out of the hole than the size of the home would indicate, so I started making a pile near the driveway for a present for Nathan. He needed fill dirt. At this point it was obvious that here was going to be a pond, because I've dug a hole that water runs into and doesn't run out of.

So, lightbulb in the head! About fifty feet from this low spot that's filled with stinky, sticky clay and anaerobic decay, is the pipe that we had put in to drain the basement and goes deep underground down to a ravine that leads to the river. But there's a stand pipe that's accessible. I didn't know how to use the backhoe yet, but I figured it out, on possibly the most difficult part of the dig - adjoining this pipe, curving back and away from it, between trees on both sides, keeping an even slope, and having to jump down off the tractor seat with each scoop because the mud was so sticky that it had to be pulled out with a shovel.

Needless to say, working like this, I didn't get so very far, and Greg got home from work. Time for me to put on my most adorable sheepish grin and tell him "the plan I had thunk up". So in fifteen minutes or so he was out, shovel in hand, and we set up the transit and when I dug really too deep he shoveled the mud back in. We got to where the pond was going to be, and we put in the vertical pipe that would be the overflow drain that would set the depth of the water, and we set perforated drain pipe wrapped in landscape cloth, and bedded in gravel, back to the standpipe for the basement drain. That was part one.

When I started writing this today it wasn't to talk about building the pond, it was to talk about fall garden chores. Because it's September 2, and if you've let them, the gardens have gotten really scraggly. Over the weekend I was feeling a mite poorly, Saturday, I guess it was, and I looked out from this great vantage point and there was Greg, looking intent, with MY garden clippers. I have a bit of a "watch out - Mama's got scissors" reputation but Greg had that same slightly fanatical look. He was cleaning up the garden beds, something that always is burdonsome and has been known to be totally left undone in some years. He cut down the peonies, the bleeding heart, the columbine (though I believe they have already dropped seeds), he cut back the monarda and the daisies. He deadheaded the pots on the back porch and the phlox and the black-eyed susans. He pulled weeds. He's made digging thistles his personal mission this year and has made more progress than I ever did.

So when I started to write today I was going to say that I've had plenty of time to worry about things that might be left undone, and one of my biggest worries was the garden maintenance. But Greg has taken charge of the gardens, and that has been a huge gift to me. Thirty-five years ago you wouldn't have guessed that this would be a man who would come to appreciate gardens so well. You just never know, do you?