Civic Matters (and a Little Weather)

Yesterday, it was supposed to be rainy, but the late morning was pretty sunny, with big blue sky and big puffy white cloud.  And it was even pretty warm, relative to November and all that.  I came back from cross the border around 2 p.m. and suggested to Ed that we put the tree sweaters on the first two trees.  (There is about 35 meters of tree sweater currently waiting to be mounted upon the dogwood and maple tree.)  But I had a couple of other things to do, so he went up on the roof to sweep leaves, while I did the dishes.  And then, ten minutes later, it started raining hard.  I went outside and saw that the sky was very dark, overwhelmingly dark, and while I stood there, I saw a flash of lightning, quickly followed by thunder.  Ed came down off the roof, we went indoors, and the rain poured down and the thunder and lightning continued close by for maybe five minutes.  And then, out of the sky, but of course it felt like out of nowhere, big balls of hail started pouring down, quickly covering the porch and all the pathways.  Five minutes maybe, maybe more.  And then for the rest of the day, it was very, very cold outside.  I guess you drop a ton or so of ice in your yard, it chills everything down quite a bit.  A surprising day.  [Another view of how winter is coming at us here.]  [This is Ed's photo, not mine, though.]

Then, today, I went to the library, partly to do my tidying work on the magazine exchange cart.  Sadly, I found five catalogs (as compared to three last Saturday), and probably a dozen pieces of travel literature (clearly not magazines under the definition I’d think we’d be using).  I confiscated the catalogues and some of the travel literature that was clearly just commercial stuff.  But I’m open to ideas of how to communicate to magazine exchangers what we ought to be aiming for in order not to have this become overflowing with stuff that nobody wants.

Finally, this coming Monday, a couple of County Very Important People are coming up to hear us or probably for us to hear them talk about the septic system inspection program.  (Community Center, 7 p.m.)  The town is rife with various rumors about how this program is being conducted, mostly involving favoritism for low-standard inspections by the commercial inspectors.  The County’s failure to set fee standards/ranges makes this an almost inevitable rumor, of course.  Washington doesn’t have car inspections like many states do, so maybe this is how it learns the hard way how to do mandatory inspections.  It does seem like it would be obvious that you’d want to eliminate or at least minimize the obvious conflicts of interest.

The Taxpayers Association has come up with a list of questions that they have sent to the County Councilwoman and County Counsel person in hopes that they will have some answers.  Mark Robbins, who is heading up the TA right now, put together the list from a member discussion last week and I suggested to him that it might be useful to get the questions out to the public ahead of time, as well.  So here they are:

1.  Not enough time given to property owners.  Need blanket extension (not consideration of individual requests.  NB:  The notification by the Health Department was issued in October, a few weeks after most of the many part-time residents had already closed up their summer cottages for the winter.
2.  Annual inspections are too frequent and unnecessarily burdensome.
3.  The inspection  regime is not calibrated to usage or presence of inhabitants.
4.  There  may be conflicts of interest in requiring inspections by private inspectors, some of whom may be contractors with an interest in making repairs or replacing septic systems.  The County employs inspectors for other purposes; why not for septic system?
5.  If the system is to depend on private inspectors, the County should regulate the allowable fee schedule for inspections.
6.  Couldn’t older systems be grandfathered in, at least to some degree related to usage and severity of the deficiency?
7.  Isn’t it way past due to think about innovations that would reduce demand on septic systems, including composting toilets (are these allowed in Whatcom County?) and gray water systems?
8.  County ordinances and health regulations that, if really unavoidable, will require huge capital expenditures by property owners for new, above ground septic systems, ought not to be imposed prior to establishing a fund or mechanism for low interest loans and assistance to people who cannot afford the repairs that will be necessary to remain in their homes.  If there is a real environmental and public health problem, it has developed over decades; so why does it have to be fixed in months?
 9.  What is the experience of other Washington counties in meeting the state mandate on sanitary septic systems?
10. Can the county help Point Roberts (and similar unincorporated communities) to analyze the costs and benefits of endless individual investments in inspections and repairs vs community investment in a sewage and treatment system?

If we got answers/explanations from our visitors on all ten of those, I’d be impressed, but we can at least hope they will come prepared to address our concerns and not just to announce the wisdom of their previous actions.  A good turnout would be helpful.

The Elegiac Season

A month ago, the leaves were just turning yellow—a little late in the season—but now they have made up for lost time by departing quickly and completely, leaving us barren and gray and wet and cold and in November in the Pacific Northwest.  Thinking about times past, wondering why we have to say goodbye so soon.  We sit in the house and look out the window and listen to Casals playing the Bach Suites for Cello, which is music that accommodates but doesn’t drag you down into the melancholy face of fall.  It has other faces, as well, all that scarlet and orange and yellow riotous color, but it doesn’t have them right this minute.

I’ve been trying to become the kind of person who has a lot of horizontal surfaces that are not filled up with stuff.  That is what gray fall does to me.  I’ve spent the day cleaning out file cabinets (all those IRS returns and supporting papers from 1997, for example), desk drawers, just ordinary drawers, trying to clear out enough inside space so that all the objects cluttering the horizontal surfaces will have someplace to go.  I’m not there yet; there’s not even one entirely empty horizontal space in our main room.  But I can hope.

And also I can go to the transfer station to deliver 140 pounds of recyclables of various kinds, much of it the aforementioned paper.  Incidentally, it would be good if we could find something just a little lighter than paper which, when gathered into the thousands of sheets really does get heavy.  I suppose that’s what the computer is supposed to do for us, but we are mostly so afraid of the computer losing its mind with all our paper in it that we keep duplicate information on actual paper.  We’re a wary bunch.

The dump was also gray and wet, but well populated with people bringing in washing machines and multiple garbage cans and countless dark green plastic bags filled with paper and plastic/glass bottles and aluminum cans, all of it with a faint odor of decay.  You come in and they weigh you and you go out and they weigh you again, and then you pay for the difference.  (Maybe restaurants could work that way, too, but payment would be reversed, of course, for increased weight, not for decreased as it is at the dump.)  It’s not the worst system in the world (which leaves considerable room for improvement, of course).  But it does remind me of the fact that I didn’t used to have much experience of the dump because the operators used to pick it up at our houses, and now we take it to, metaphorically, to theirs.

There is still no resolution in sight for this problem.  The company that applied for a new permit has not been selected; the company that used to have the permit has now applied for a new permit.  According to the WUTC internet site, the next meeting on all this is December 10.  And then it will be Christmas, of course, and the New Year, and nothing is going to happen then.  And then it will be 2010.  Maybe in the new year, we can bring ourselves to call off all the disputations and disagreements, can do what a friend referred to as ‘an Emily Litella.'  In the grand old days of Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner regularly inhabited a character named Emily Litella who would complain bitterly about some topic (I particularly remember her rant on ‘Soviet jewelry’) only to have, eventually, someone point out that she had got the whole thing wrong as a result of a simple error.  “Soviet Jewry,” they would say.  And Emily would get a momentarily stunned look and then say, ‘Oh. . . Never mind.’ 

It’s going to take something like that to get progress on the trash front, I’m afraid.  But Gilda Radner died a long time ago, alas, and it's possible we no longer know how to say, 'Never mind.'

Fruit Flies

Now has come the time of gray days and wet days and leaves falling everywhere.  It’s hard to get anything done if I’m in a room with a window because the falling leaves constantly distract me: ‘What was that over there in my peripheral vision?  Oh, another leaf falling.’  Since there are about 3 million leaves fairly close outside the house, this can be more than a little repetitive as each one makes its way groundward, and as it goes, requires me to acknowledge its presence.  If I really need to get something done, I have to keep the curtains closed, which only increases the overall darkness.

Also, it is the twilight time of the apple and pear and plum abundance.  They ripen and fall off the tree, perfect, ready to be eaten; but inside the house there are yet all their siblings that fell off the tree yesterday and the day before, and we just can’t eat them fast enough.  And thus do the fruit flies come to join us in the despairing activity of hovering over the fruit.  I’ve eaten and frozen lots of plums and lots of applesauce, but yet there are plums and apples.  I don’t believe one can freeze pears (or at least can’t imagine the outcome), so the excess just goes bad quickly and is almost wept over.  Perfectly wonderful pears going bad: that can’t be the sign of a well-planned or well-lived life.

The apples are the most likely to be rescued because George and Rose invite us over to a grand apple juicing evening with their beautiful apple press and their excess apples and their hovering fruit flies.  We spent such an evening a couple of weeks ago and came home with six half-gallons of fresh apple juice.  The evening’s full haul was 35 half-gallons, and about half of that went to the food bank.  Of course, we can no more drink up six half-gallons of fresh apple juice than we can consume all those excess pears, but the freezer has a tall shelf that accepts what cannot be drunk immediately.  And all through the dark season to come, we will be slowly allotting  that juice into our eager cups, and remembering October.  And thanking Rose and George.

Birds Say 'Bye!'

This morning, it was far too dangerous to go outside the house.  For reasons not entirely clear to me, the near yard was filled with birds this morning, many kinds, whooshing to and fro so fast that it seemed like you would be impaled on a passing beak if you were out there, put well off your stride by a beating wing.  Pretty exciting stuff.

There is a mountain ash tree outside our kitchen windows, about 15 feet from the house.  Earlier in the week, I noted that it had an excellent crop of berries this year, that they were ripe, and that they had as yet been untouched by the birds who usually clear them out the minute they ripen.  The elderberry tree has already surrendered its crop (usually to cedar waxwings, although I didn’t see them this year), and this morning it was the mountain ash’s turn.

First came a flock of flickers.  Flickers are big birds (about a foot long and with a wingspan of 18-20 inches), and a kind of woodpecker. I don’t recall ever seeing them in a flock before, although the google tells me they migrate in ‘loose flocks.’  This was a small flock, but because they are so big, it seemed like a lot more than 6-8 birds.  When one of them lands on the end of the mountain ash branch where the berries are, the vibration makes all the branches shake and the particular branch can spring up and down a foot or more.  It makes for a lot of commotion in a tree.

And then, right after the flicker flock flew in (How many times do you get to say that?  Not enough.), a big flock of robins came in to work the other side of the tree and then passed five or so minutes while the two brands shook each other out of the tree, with an occasional grab of berries in between the action.  On the ground beneath the tree there suddenly arrived a few juncos and chickadees to pick up the leavings, and then they were joined by a couple of spotted towhees.  From the fir tree behind the mountain ash, a pair of woodpeckers started bouncing up and down.  And then strolled across the deck, in front of them all, a yellow-rumped warbler.

It was like being at the opera.  Dramatic exits and entrances, big actions, and in the background a steady chorus.  The hard news?  We’re finished with the good weather.  They know more about this than meteorologists is my guess.  Time to go south.  Happy that we could send them off with a luscious berry picnic.

Fall Appears

This morning, when we awakened around 8 a.m., the temperature had not yet made it to 10 degrees Centigrade (about 50 degrees Fahrenheit for the non-metric-fluent among us).  We have not seen such a low morning temperature for many, many weeks.  And now, by 5 p.m., it is unusually dark outside because there is a heavy cloud layer and the rain is coming steadily down upon us.  I recognize that sound; I remember that sound; I just haven’t heard that sound for quite a while. 

And so it begins again, that go-round of seasons and of year that, for me, anyway, begins in September, not January.  Did the Romans get it so wrong because they lived farther south?  If the Romans had lived in  Nova Scotia or Maine, would they have thought that anything actually began in January? 

But, in any case, it looks like we are really here at the Fall, even though a few weeks later than usual.  And in Fall, our thoughts turn to warm fires and cozy things.  Which brings me to thoughts of community and why it is that I am so fond of the idea of community.  I mean, I’m pretty much of an introvert and I happily spend most of my days alone, although Ed is of course somewhere nearby.  But I still think that it would be a good thing if people could get together to do well things that need to be done.  Like healthcare, say.  Or like getting the community events sign replaced.  (We’re pretty okay on the latter, but suffering greatly on the former, of course.)  Or maybe like just getting ready for fall--we could help each other get our gardens ready for the winter.

And in light of that, I was told yesterday about “Blitz Day” in my younger daughter’s hometown.  It seems that every year, one of the local churches organizes a day in which they gather up as many volunteers throughout the town as they possibly can gather (including kids), and everybody goes to work on that day to improve the community.  Blitz Day was last week in the mid-size town where she lives in southeastern Missouri.  It’s a small town inthe midst of a rural area with a small-town feel, a kind of southern U.S. feel, a town where you can imagine lots of people rising to the occasion.  And, indeed, she tells me, 1200 people signed up to participate.  They did all kinds of things: my 12-y/o granddaughter helped to seal the asphalt in a playground; my daughter cleaned lawn furniture at a long-term care facility (pointing out along the way that she might think about offering this service to her own lawn furniture).  A good day, a good job, a community thing.  Gladdens my sentimental heart.

So, of course, I got to thinking about what it would mean if Point Roberts had that kind of response to a call for volunteers to serve the community for a day.  Obviously, 1200 people aren’t going to volunteer because we barely have 1200 people, but I’m thinking about how many one could get, and also about exactly what they’d do if you had them.  Then it occurred to me to compare the populations.  So I looked up the population of my daughter’s town and it turned out to be much larger than I expected: 70,000.  If you compared that to Point Roberts, it means that we could expect about 20 volunteers.  Which doesn’t seem so unlikely.  Surely we could do that well.  But what would we do?   The thoughts of fall.

Fruits of Fall

Well, here we are past the beginning of September, at the end of the Labor Day Weekend, and Point Roberts is closing down.  The skies continue in their greyness, although there is little or no rain and the temperatures are quite moderate.  It just doesn't look very encouraging, but it's actually quite pleasant weather. 

I went out for a walk and, in a half hour on the streets, did not see a single moving car.  I did see lots of houses that are closed up; lots of boats brought home to roost; trucks in driveways hitched to third wheels or trailers.  Time to go home.

On one street, there were big tomato plants with ripe tomatoes in even bigger pots, left out at the curb (if there were curbs) like the weekly trash for pickup (if there were a weekly pickup of trash).  My guess is that they are out there as a gift for the passing walker, fruits of fall after the farmers have gone back to their real homes.

Our yard is effulgent with fruit.  I gathered up a box of ripe apples from one of our several apple trees and left it out on the road (where the trash would be picked up, etc.) and within 8 hours the box and its contents were gone.  Must have been people; raccoons would have left the box.  But raccoons wouldn't have eaten the apples because either they don't eat apples or there are far too many apples around for them to bother with those in a box.  We have more apples and plums than we know what to do with, as does pretty much everyone I know.  The pears are scarcer on the ground, as well as on the tree.  Pears seem to be more finicky.  We have at least one ripe fig, and people who never get grapes are reporting bunches on their vines (we have one bunch with about 6 grapes).   And the blueberry bushes, the both of them, are still heavily laden with fruit.

So we are enjoying the fruits of fall; the actual fruits and the indirect fruits of quiet.  Both much to be desired.

Juice!

Early last week, we went over to the houses of a couple of absent friends—one gone for the winter, the other gone for the week—and cleaned up their apple trees (with prior permission, of course) to prepare for the Fall Juice Event. Many years ago, good friends of ours on the Point managed to barter a quilt for a home apple press. It’s not a terribly big machine, as the picture shows, and only the hopper part is electrical--the small motor is there on the left of the flat top. The rest of it operates by hand. We had picked about a 100 pounds of apples for the event, and others had brought as much again. An evening’s worth of diligent work lay ahead with the promise of an excellent product from our efforts.

Our friends got the press 8 years ago or so and they juice on several nights in October and November, every fall. We usually manage to get to at least one of these occasions. There are five or six discrete jobs involved in this process, so it’s good to have at least that many people, although if you have more than that, everyone can take a brief rest now and then. It’s not hard work, but it does involve standing on a concrete floor for three or four hours. The floor leads to a certain need for respite among the older crowd, especially.

On Saturday night, we went over early with apron in tow. It’s a sticky business, this apple juicing. There were five of us working. Here are the six jobs: washer, cutter/culler, plopper, barrel changer, presser, and bottler. The barrel changer can also double as bottler. First the apples are washed in warm water; then they are cleaned up (the bad parts cut out) . Next they are cut into reasonably-sized pieces. Finally they are plopped into the hopper of the machine. (There are pictures here of the process and the workers.) At that point, the serious pressing begins.

I always work as a plopper. This means I take the cut apple pieces and drop them one piece at a time into the hopper. If you get them in the hopper too fast, they will clog and then the whole process gets slowed down as the grinding has to stop to unclog the machinery. I throw them gracefully into the hopper. I like to throw things, generally. However, I don’t get much opportunity to throw in this life because I can’t catch anything. I can’t catch because when an object comes at me, I close my eyes. So I never get to throw because virtually all throwing also requires one to be willing/able to catch. I toss the apple pieces into the hopper with the intent of hitting a particular spot and then they get crunched up, and I never have to catch them because they don’t come back to me.

I don’t know that it’s the best job, but it’s the best one for me. Of course my co-workers may also think it’s the best and may think of me as a terrible plopper-hog. The plopper also has to sense when the small barrel under the machine is almost full of smooshed apples. You can visually check this, but it isn’t easy to see and you don’t want to keep checking because it requires you to get in other people’s way. Once that barrel is full, you turn the motor off, and the barrel is moved forward so that the presser can take over. He turns a handle with a screw mechanism that presses the juice out. The juice flows down into a bucket. The bottler takes the bucket and fills and labels the bottles (ie, date and to whom the juice belongs). The barrel changer is the person who disposes of the apple mass that remains in the small barrel after the juice has been pressed out. This mass is called ‘pomace’ and it can be fed to chickens or composted. The barrel changer replaces the once-again empty mesh bag into the small barrel and puts it back under the hopper. And then you repeat the whole process. (This is beginning to seem like a Wiki-How.)

By 10:30, we were done with many, but not all the apples, and we called it a night. There’ll be another juicing yet to come with different workers, different apples. We made maybe 15 gallons over the course of the evening. Could have been more, but I wasn’t counting. Some of it will go to the P.R. Food Bank, some will go to one of the descendants of the first Icelandic families (who remembers when some of those strange, now wild, old apple trees were planted), some will go to us, some to the press owners, some to people who come around and long for a draft of fresh apple juice. You bring apples, you work the press: you’re guaranteed juice like nothing that comes from a grocery store, not even Whole Foods.

It’s not only different from what stores offer, but it’s also different from itself. Each small lot tastes different than the next one because each lot uses different kinds of apples or has a different mix of apples in it. Some juice is very sweet; some is spicy, some tastes more fruity, some is slightly astringent. We all have little sips, little tasting glasses of each lot, and note that they are different, but we still have no language for the experience. The wonder of apples: we are rendered speechless.

Keeping in Touch

So, how do we do it, when there are so few of us down here over the winter? There are lots of ways. There are events like the Christmas Craft Sale and Community Dinner. Usually those are both in late November or early December, but this year they've been separated into the Craft Sale in mid-November and the Community Dinner in January. It's a lot of work to do these two events (all volunteer efforts) and the decision was made to separate them so it wasn't so much work all at once. The Craft Fair is this Saturday and I donated a quilt to its raffle.

Then there is church every Sunday at the Lutheran Church where people check in on one another. There's the Wacky Walkers, who walk most mornings, even in the winter. The library (open on 3 days of the week) and the grocery store (open every day) are places where we see one another and find out what's up. The grocery store has a coffee bar, as well as a big bulletin board that is particularly worth attending to. Here, you can buy (or sell) a wood stove; rent (or sell) a cabin, a house, a boat, or a car; solicit baby sitting work; or advertise a concert. And most of the local groups, including the quilters, meet monthly throughout the winter. The quilters have a festive pot-luck dinner at Christmas. We had an intense discussion at last week's meeting about whether the husbands should be invited to the dinner this year. The final conclusion was they should come because they help to eat up the too-much food that we always bring and because some of them like to see the work we're doing and because some of them like to see the quilters themselves and don't very often do so. This is the kind of critical issue we are facing, now that the election is over.

The Cafe Cappana is open all winter and there is always someone there drinking coffee, eating lunch or breakfast, or using the computers. The Cappana is the kind of place that every small town has or needs. Lake Wobegon would admire it: good food, familiar staff, local, in every good sense of the word. There is nothing about the Cafe that feels processed or chain-store-like. And you can read the newspapers there, too.

So there are all kinds of ways of staying in touch. In addition, there is the electronic connection. For some years, one of the good citizens of the Point has maintained an email list called 'Point Interface.' People send her notices, ranging from meeting announcements to lost cats and dogs to misplaced electric drills to free furniture and well beyond these. When Ed finished his photos of the Point Roberts coastline, an announcement of their existence went out on Point Interface.

Anybody on the Point can request to be put on the list, and the list, according to its owner, is expanding considerably. For those of us who have kind of given up on the telephone (count me as one of those...remembering that we don't have much cell phone coverage here on the Point), this electronic line is extraordinarily useful. The amount of work involved in screening the items that people ask to have sent out to the list (the owner exercises sole and total discretion about appropriateness) and in keeping the list up to date is considerable, and I am very grateful to the list owner for doing all this. I imagine that someday, everyone on the Point will be on that list and it will become to the monthly newspaper something like what blogs have become to journalism: less hierarchical, less categorized, more spontaneous, in real time. To get on the list? Email your request to point-interface which is to be followed by atpointroberts and then dot net Of course, you do that in the standard email form: i.e., in regular type (not italic) using no spaces and with @ and .

So, through these gray days, we do keep in touch in many ways. We know we aren't the only ones left on the Point, even though it sometimes feels that we might be.

Anyone Here?

The days are short now; by 5:30, it’s effectively dark, and tonight there is an egg-shaped moon rising through the trees to the south-south-east (or something like that: I am direction-challenged). I went out for a longish walk this afternoon, a walk through what surely seemed a very strange landscape. It was darkening, but not yet dark, and it looked very much as if I had wandered into a setting for some Hollywood sci-fi movie, the vision of a town in which everyone had disappeared toward the end of an otherwise pleasant Sunday afternoon. House after house showed no signs of life, no lights of any kind. No cars were advancing or retreating down the roads. Driveways were empty. So inclined, I might have believed that The Rapture had happened, sadly—tragically—leaving me behind, and alone.

But, in fact, it is just Point Roberts as winter closes in on us. It wasn’t a very wintry day, today, but enough for Ed to get the winter lights up. These are not Christmas lights; they are not even decorative lights. They are lights attached to the trunk and branches of a mountain ash tree next to our porch. They turn on each night in order to communicate to anyone who might drive or walk down our street after 4:30 p.m. and until 11 p.m. that there is someone in Point Roberts, alive and well and wishing this/these other persons the best of an otherwise gray season.

After an hour of walking, I had seen one other human being (a man walked out of his door, picked up a big chunk of wood from his woodpile and returned to his fireside), as well as three cars in a row (a party I wasn’t invited to, I guess). There are only 1500 (circa) permanent residents here, but in the late fall, even that number drops as people drift southward. Of our ten quilters, one has gone to Mexico; another is heading soon to Florida, yet another is basking on the Hawaiian beaches for a bit. The folks who inhabit the marina have also headed to sunnier climates.

I don’t have much in the way of longings to be somewhere warmer, but I am always startled by the sense of desertion that arrives with November. And I wonder about the new people who have immigrated to P.R. over the past few years: what must they think when they see us in November? Or, more to the point, don’t see us in November. It is hard to convey the quiet, the stillness, the absence in such a walk. I mean, it’s not as if I were walking in some primal wilderness; I was on paved roads with many houses in view at all times. It’s a long way from living in Los Angeles, and I never feel it so much as during these November late afternoons.

Tidying Up

Why is our work room cluttered and disorganized? Why is our yard not a picturesque scene? Why, now that we are not burdened with the task of getting and not even much burdened with the task of spending, do we not live in a more orderly environment? Why, now that children are not a regular part of our household, are we not living in a haven of orderliness? This is a question that could bear a long winter’s pondering. All the older people I know who do the kind of things I do seem to suffer similarly. Our brains may be as neat as a pin (but just how neat is a pin or a bandbox, either?), but our surroundings lack neatness as well as orderliness.

Garrison Keillor the other day suggested that our yards are always disreputable but that we notice it only in the fall when the leaves comes down and nature’s disarray is combined with our own. Could be. In my yard are plastic gallon milk bottles that I use to gather water in the summer from the rain barrels or from running the taps to get hot water. But there is nothing much to water from October on, yet here are my two dozen jugs, mostly filled with water, standing around without a chore in the world to occupy them and no reasonable place to sit. Leaf rakes are strewn here and there because leaf rakes have a short life span but even when their life span is shortened they still have some use when the leaves are cascading down. A leaf rake that has, e.g., only a 2-foot handle can still be used in small areas. The hoses are still uncoiled as if something was going to be sprinkled in just a few minutes, but the fact is that we are close to turning the outdoor water off for the winter, at which point the hoses will be disconnected entirely and otherwise useless. Nevertheless, they continue to wend their weary ways across the yard.

Indoors, there is more order in the parlor and sitting room and other household rooms; at least there is until you come to the rooms where all the real stuff gets done. In my case, it’s the quilting workshop; in Ed’s, it’s the computer room. Here the Lord of Misrule is a permanent resident, as if I were conducting an endless, medieval Christmas pageant. I’ve tried boxes, I’ve tried shelves, I’ve tried fancy wire shelves with drawers, specialized containers, all of it. I bring in tabletops and within minutes the tabletops are covered with things that really should be in the boxes, shelves, and drawers, but they’re already full. I daresay I’ve tried everything but just throwing it all out, which I cannot do because I might need it some day. Well, given the coming recession, my depression training might just be the right response. I might indeed need it some day, or somebody might need it and there’ll be no more easy getting it because we will not have the spare cash, or the prices will be too high because the Chinese will have stopped working for us at very low wages.

Perhaps the bigger or better question is Why Care? Is this yet one more puritanical inheritance that I could do without? As long as Ed can find the papers and computer parts he needs in the stack of papers and computers and computer parts that cover his floor and tabletops, what does it matter that the floor and tables are not free for tap dancing? As long as mice are not nesting in my boxes and bags and drawers of fabric and thread and wool, what matter is it that I cannot navigate a straight line from one end of the room to the other; I am not, after all, driving through the room.

Well, it matters to some. For example, here is advice number 2 (of 4) from an expert: ‘2. Be Ruthless When Throwing Old Items Out - Don't allow sentiment or desires to hoard to get in the way of clearing things out when you declutter your house. Be ruthless with your cleaning and you will see some amazing results.’ Perhaps so, but I suspect I want sentiment and desires to hoard to be a part of me. The very fact that I want that is what keeps my workroom in the shape it’s in. If I were someone else without those qualities, my world would doubtless be neater. That may be enough of a conclusion for me to cart outdoors another bunch of flattened tin cans which live in an outdoor box for flattened and increasingly rusted tin cans. I've got a project in mind for them, if I just live long enough to get it done. Maybe in the spring, when I’ve tidied the workroom up a bit.

Up, then Down

What a difficult week this has been. Between the endless Palin hysteria (I can scarcely believe that Frank Rich has concluded that this is a right wing conservative ‘Manchurian Candidate’ plot: where is Frank Sinatra when we need him?), the financial meltdown, the ricocheting market, and the beginning of fall—the psychologically dark season—it’s hard to know how—or whether-- to lift one’s head off the pillow in the early morning. Of course, it is somewhat easier up here, whether in the isolated exclave or in British Columbia. In either place, I am free from newspapers and U.S. television, but not, of course, from the falling leaves nor the internet.

Fall always starts in early September up here with a great uplifting feeling: it’s crisp, blue-skied, windy, and beautiful, and that sense of everything beginning again will return. But at the moment, we’re in the other part of fall’s beginning: the part in which the skies turn gray and the temperature rises very little during the day, given the absence of the sun, and the house is cold because you are trying to put off lighting the pilot. This is the first reminder of the coming of seasonal affective disorder. How funny is it that they managed to find a phrase with the acronym SAD? If women who spend long period of times alone with their young children without any support from other adults were deemed to have a psychological disorder, we could call it MAD (motherhood affective disorder); or perhaps young boys who are overexposed to violence could have boyhood affective disorder (yes, BAD). We could go on here with CAD, DAD, FAD, GAD, etc., but we won’t.

The various quilting groups that I belong to are planning their goals for the year, looking at new possibilities for exhibits and community works. In Point Roberts, we need to finish the two quilts we are making for the local library’s walls, pieces that have been too long in the making; in B.C., we are thinking of taking on the challenge of wearable art, a move to the left (or right) from quilting, since wearable art does not need to have the heavy batting and stitched quilting that defines a quilt. In both these groups, it is clearly the fall that is bringing us to reassess where we are and where we are going.

This planning and reassessment task brought by fall may have made the world’s events much more difficult this past week: how do you think about where you are going when disaster seems to be right in front of you. Where you are going seems to be like some kind of crash immediately ahead. Where you are going doesn’t seem to be a question you really want to ask.

Today, the gray skies have turned into rain showers; tomorrow, they will themselves have decided where they’re going and will turn into more serious rain. But I am reminding myself, regularly, that all this, too, will pass and that the day will come when we will be asking whatever happened to Sarah Palin in the same way that we might ask whatever happened to Dan Quayle if we cared enough to ask.

Those whom the Gods would destroy, I remind myself, first they raise high. This is the end of the ‘raise high’ part, I think. The tree leaves, the summer flowers, the long summer nights, Sarah Palin, Wall Street wizards…all on their way down. Good-bye!

Gone So Fast

Today, on the first Sunday after Labor Day, the Point Roberts’ streets are empty: no horses and riders, no walking families, no runners, no cars full of kids going down to the beach. When I drove down to the beach this morning, there was only one car coming the other way up from the beach, and that one was towing a boat away to wherever the boat spends its winter. The Blue Heron (an art and gift gallery which largely caters to tourists) was deserted and the cross-the-street gallery, The Maple Studio, was closed ‘4 birthday' despite the fact that it was a beautiful, sunny, touristy kind of day. I passed four gas stations, and none had at that moment more than one car pumping gas. The plant nursery is closed for the season. At the International Market, there were two check stands working when I came in, but only one when I left, shortly after noon. And that’s where we are: end of summer.

Point Roberts is what in Canada is called cottage country. Most of the maybe 3,000 summer residents (as opposed to the maybe 1600 permanent residents) fit themselves into snug little cottages that usually don’t have or need all-year heating systems. When we bought our 700-square-foot cottage house, it had two bedrooms, neither bigger than 7’x 8’, both accommodating at least two people, and one of them sharing the bed space with a water heater. I imagine there was a makeup bed in the front room, as well, and that six people would have been populating the cottage at some point in the summer.

The ‘cottage’ now has transformed into a house, with only one bedroom and all-weather, propane tank heating, as well as rather more insulation than it used to have. But it still has cottage qualities: a roof without an insulation space; precious little sub-flooring over the bare ground; under-the-house pipes that have to be wrapped and heated in the winter to keep from freezing, and a somewhat limited foundation. But there’s a phone now and an internet connection and double-glass windows to keep the heat in during the winter and double-glass transom windows to keep the heat out during the summer. It doesn't feel or look like a cottage anymore. We are clearly in residence all year round.

Today, it was cool, the kind of cool you don’t get in the summer but that reliably appears around September 1. It’s crisp, smart, accompanied by a clear but pale blue sky. It’s windy too, with the wind coming not steadily as it does in late fall, winter, and early spring, but in short gusts, so that when working outside, I am repeatedly brushed by a cascade of dry leaves careening through the air. The leaves show up suddenly and, in my peripheral vision, it’s as if someone is throwing something at me, over and over again, trying to get my attention. Saying goodbye.

So, Goodbye to the Cottagers for awhile, as well as to the formerly green leaves, and the long summer days. We won't be lonely without them, but we will be aware of their absence. I wish they would be accompanied in their departure by the adolescents (whatever their age) who gun their cars every time they plan to move down the road. Once it gets pretty quiet, I tend to want the perfection of that quiet and it doesn’t co-exist easily with young men in their cars or motorcycles peeling out of their parking spaces. But they too will grow older, will grow up and learn to treat their cars with some respect and their neighbors with the same. Or, if not, they will just grow up and leave.

Those Falling Leaves

‘The falling leaves drift by my window...’ Don’t they just? September is here, the mornings are already cold, and the vine maples have been turning red in the woods for almost a month. ‘Autumn Leaves,’ this most romantic of American songs, however, turns out to be this most romantic of French songs. Words originally written by Jacques Prevert, lyrics by Joseph Kosma (both French), with the English lyrics to the credit of Johnny Mercer. The French lyrics don’t seem to be about autumn, so at least it is the most romantic of American lyrics about the seasons. In any case, when those falling leaves drift by my window, I don’t much think about the sun-burned summer I am leaving or how much I miss you, whoever you happen to be. That is because I am the steward (or the co-steward) of five or six big-leaf maple trees. Also sometimes called ‘dinner-plate maples because the leaves are the size of dinner plates. And they really are. So, if you are the custodian of five or six big leaf maples, you are the owner of bales of autumn leaves. And there is no romance in trying to figure out what to do with them.

This morning, I got up and swept several hundred of them off the deck--remember the phrase 'the size of dinner plates'; by noon, several hundred more had taken their place and we haven’t even begun to deal with the bulk of them; 90% are still on the trees. I raked today’s allotment up just now and stuffed two big garbage bags tightly: today’s autumn leaves. I store them back by the compost, but we are now collecting this year’s leaves and I haven’t yet finished with composting last year’s leaves. This is because there are just too many leaves. Several of the trees are in the woods and those leaves I don’t touch. It is only those on the deck, in the cleared areas around the house, in the near garden beds where autumn’s leaves will not protect the flowers over the winter but will protect the slugs who will then eat the flowers in the spring as they come up, right before I rake the leaves out of the bed. Thus, they have to be raked in the fall.

There is this strange abundance at this time of year. It’s not only the apples and plums, but also maple leaves. And you can add to that hydrangea flowers and dried lunaria pods. Point Roberts seems to be the perfect environment for both of them. The hydrangeas come in all colors and I can change their color by fooling with the soil chemistry or just by planting them somewhere else in the yard. All of the dozen or so hydrangeas in my yard are offspring of one hydrangea; new ones are made by sticking a cut stalk in the ground in August. That’s it.

Lunaria (often called ‘silver dollar plants’) put out these gorgeous seed pods in the fall after providing excellent purple flowers with dark green leaves in the early spring, flowers that provide a wonderful contrast to tulips and daffodils. Each circular, silver pod carries 3 or 4 seeds with twenty to a hundred pods on each stalk. My experience suggests that every single seed will grow into yet another lunaria plant, anxious to provide in alternate years more enormous stalks of silver dollar seed pods and seeds.

People are always talking about developing the economic base of Point Roberts, but the only thing they seem to be able to come up with to achieve this reasonable goal is to build more houses. My suggestion is that we take some of Point Roberts’ absolutely most abundant resources and figure out how to develop them economically instead: apples, plums, dried maple leaves, hydrangea blossoms, and lunaria pods. There may be a few other things like this (starfish? sand dollars?), but we could just start with the obvious ones and work out from there.

Work, Grace, and Raspberries

Today is Labor Day and in honor of it, I decided not to labor in the blog vineyards. Resisting writing the daily blog turns out to be harder than I would think. Mostly, I find I write every day because if I don’t write today—any today that I’m in--then I definitely have to write tomorrow and I don’t have any ideas for tomorrow. Then, I find myself mulling over the possible ideas for today, and here it comes! So, here I was, this morning, having decided not to write, not work in the blog vineyards, indeed, not to work at all today; instead to read novels and eat bon-bons.

Nevertheless, 11 a.m. found me in the yard staring at the mass of 8-foot high raspberry canes, approximately half of which need to be cut down to the ground. The other half will need to be cut 1/3 or so of the way back at the end of October. If I wait too long to do this, I won’t be sure of which ones get cut to the ground and which ones go to waist-level. So, even though it’s Labor Day and I don’t have to work, I do it. This requires me to crawl around inside the raspberry bed (which is about 25 feet long and 10 feet wide) determining which canes fruited this summer, cutting them and then disentangling them from the soon-to-bear second crop.

Take it from me: If you are planning to grow raspberries, stick to the annual kind, not the biennial ones. Like the apple tree, these raspberries came with the house and I can easily imagine the original purchaser thinking, ‘How cool! Raspberries that bear one year in July and the next in October. Get two sets of them and you get two raspberry crops each year.’ Yes, it’s true you do, but the pruning drives me crazy and an October crop of raspberries is not likely to be very rewarding if the temperature rarely gets up to 60 degrees in the preceding month, which is very probable in late September and October.

But, raspberries are the queen of berries, the queen of fruit, in my book, so perhaps it is only appropriate that getting them to table is a chore of some dimension. Actually, they are pretty good about growing themselves. The deer sometimes come by and take a chomp out of the outside plants, but otherwise nothing much seems to be interested in eating them. Mine grow too close together for me to qualify as a good berry husbandry person, but they are also too close together for the birds to get into them, I think. Raspberries demonstrate that where there is hard work somewhere along the way, there are big rewards somewhere along the way. Ah! The kernel of the Puritan Ethic, the essence of Labor Day: in hard work there is grace and in grace there are raspberries, as well as a blog post. Well, something like that.

Fair Warning

Time for the State Fair. Perhaps that’s what we really need in Point Roberts, assuming we need something else. I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion this morning and he was singing the praises not only of the actual Minnesota State Fair but also of his memories of that fair. I wonder if people ever have memories of fairs that they attended as adults? They seem, to me, to always be about being a child in that wonderful maze of events and animals and food. As an adult, I once read an essay by Calvin Trillin that advised me to eat as much as I possibly could when attending a state fair because none of the goods on offer would ever taste as good anywhere else. It was good advice, but not memorable advice, insofar as I don’t remember much of anything I ever ate at a state fair.

Garrison Keillor, however, would have different memories, perhaps. This morning, he was checking out blue ribbon corn relish and plum jam from the canning competition and, memorably, chocolate-covered bacon as well as macaroni and cheese on a stick. I’ve been to fairs in Minnesota and eaten deep fried curds and the like, but never MC on a stick. I’m sorry to have missed that. Not so sorry about the chocolate-covered bacon, though, but if I’d been there I would have tried it.

Still, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever have a fair here. Too small, too hard to get to, no organizing body. Also no animals crossing the border, willy nilly. So we will just have to do with the apple harvest as a stand-in. We have a bunch of apple trees. Pretty much everybody in Point Roberts has a bunch of apple trees. The early Icelandic settlers, I believe, are responsible for many of these apple orchards whose remnants, even now, are ripening on long abandoned properties. Our own apple trees were planted by someone else, not us, not Icelandic folks. They came with the house and without labels. One of them has three or four grafts, producing transparents, which ripen in August; what I think are Jonagolds, which ripen in early September; and a truly undistinguished variety of red delicious, which ripens some other time, or not at all. In addition, there are three other trees whose variety I have no clear ideas about. Two ripen in September—one might be some variety of golden delicious-- and the third in November and none of them is a spectacular apple, though they are certainly pretty enough and adequate for eating, given that they are above all fresh.

The Jonagolds are the really the most exquisite of apples. We missed the transparents--which are very fine cooking apples--this year because they started to ripen just as we left for B.C., so we left them to our neighbors and when we returned that part of the crop was finished. The Jonagolds are stepping up now and, last night, we had the first apple pie of the season. That is truly like going to the state fair and eating gastronomic splendors. We have had the pie both with and without ice cream, and either way it is toothsome, tart, sweet, spicy, crisp and crumbly, even though it is made with slightly under-ripe Jonagolds. They will be riper soon and more pies and tarts and eventually apple sauce will follow.

The first apple pie is the big treat: three or four pies after that, we begin to be inundated with apples and soon we are dumping them into our friends’ cider press, running them through an applesauce press by the bucket, and finally, at the end, when we are having dozens of apples a day, letting them just fall under the tree where they serve as delights for the slugs and sow bugs or are moved over into the compost.

Early fall in Point Roberts belongs to the apples; to be followed, in equal abundance, by plums and pears. What Eden this? No snakes in sight.