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.

Longings

The folks at lilypoint.org have included among their other site features a survey about what we’d like to see in Point Roberts that isn’t currently here (doesn’t include ‘Gated Beach Club Development’ as one of the choices, I’m afraid). It’s hard to know what to make of any survey, even those with highly respected methodological designs, but a loose internet survey such as this? Who knows who is responding? Awhile back, some folks from the Point Roberts Community Association were designing a survey which included some similar questions, including (my favorite), ‘Was the survey taker interested in fine dining at Point Roberts?’ I mean, I suppose I’m interested in fine dining anywhere, including in my own dining room, but do I think that Point Roberts in general or the Community Association ought to be responding to that interest (we can scarcely call it a need)? Well hardly. Or that my days would longer or happier if it did?

So I don’t know why those kinds of questions come to peoples’ minds. They seem to me like the questions philosophers pose to college students: ‘If it snows in summer, would it be winter?’ Or, ‘If your mother were a bicycle, could you ride her?” If everyone would like, say, a movie theater in Point Roberts, could we go to the movies? Will everyone being interested in a movie theater’s appearance lead a movie chain to appear here? Or to some otherwise secret entrepreneur among our 1600 residents rising to the occasion of meeting our desires or vague interests? Unlikely.

But more than that, I am somewhat puzzled by the very idea of people even asking the question, ‘What does Point Roberts need?’ I would think that Point Roberts already has what it needs and if it doesn’t, why do people move here? With the expectation that their arrival will occasion the creation of answers to their unmet needs?

I grew up in a small Idaho town and I certainly thought that what it needed was to have me not living there, but I can’t imagine what it could have incorporated that would have made me want to stay. I lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles, which pretty much has everything one could think of, but the one thing it doesn’t have—rain—was not possible, even in the land of a million entrepreneurs per square mile. So, I left for the love of rain and greenery.

Here’s what the lilypoint.org website guys (who are much younger than me and this may be the answer to all my questions) suggest as possible Point Roberts’ current needs:

Pharmacy
Doctor's Office
Restaurants that Deliver (eg; Pizza)
A Bridge to Bellingham
Car & Passenger Ferry to Bellingham
Passenger Only Ferry to Bellingham
Movie Theater
Fast Food Chain
Trader Joe's
Farmer's Market
Sewer System

Alas, they do not offer the survey taker that answer most needed for all surveys: ‘None of the Above.’ The possibility that Point Roberts is fine just as it is, with all its quirks, its strange weather, its staggering limitations, and it’s beautiful location does not seem to be one of the choices.

But maybe this is all, really, just in the nature of humans or of Americans or of Westerners, or of people under the age of 70. Most of the people I know here think Point Roberts is a wonderful place: that’s why they are here. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from thinking about how they could change it to make it a little more like where they came from. But if Point Roberts were an urban metropolis—with Trader Joe’s, fine dining, and movie theaters--would we live in an isolated, peninsular exclave of amazing beauty?

In a Nutshell

This week, it seemed like fall had come early. Since Sunday, it has been grey, very rainy, and unseasonably cold. Everyone with a wood stove is staring at the woodstove grumpily, thinking it is way too early to have to start having a fire. And then, most of us march outdoors to bring in some wood to start a fire because someone in the house keeps talking about how cold it is. But then, this afternoon, the rain and grey and cold disappeared and it was a summer afternoon again. This is life in a nutshell, here, as far as weather goes. Never quite what you expect or have in mind, even when it’s the same every year. Reliably, come April, say, I start to point out that it’s really pretty cold this spring. But that’s always true. This is a place with a long, cold spring. This is not, say, Pennsylvania.

Because it’s the end days of the month, the monthly paper is now in our mailbox, telling us what happened last month. I always think of September as the real beginning of the year because of school starting, even though I haven’t been in school or had anyone in the house who was in school for many a year. The September All Point Bulletin is pretty wonderful this year, looking more forward than backward as it should at the beginning of the year, and--another nutshell--contains what I suspect is a fine compendium of everything we’ll be obsessing about for the next twelve months, when we’re not obsessing about the weather.

Article after article reminds us of what we’re not through arguing about and what we’re just starting to argue about. There’s the cell phone tower that some folks are still fighting against, though they seem to be on the losing end of the fight. And there's the curbside recycling problem which is more of a draw at the moment but looks to have a lot of life left in the dispute. There’s an argument between the Parks Board and the Seniors Group over who gets some money that didn’t get spent for what it was allocated for, a dispute in its very initial phase. We’re revisiting the need to keep boats from chasing the orcas off the coastline of Point Roberts. The Voters’ Association is trying to become an active group again by collecting up-to-the-minute news on all the ‘hot button’ items that all the other groups are already arguing about. And, finally, the Taxpayers’/Property Owners’ Association is re-emerging from its semi-dormant state in order to oppose the fabulous Stanton Northwest ‘Beach Club’ development and its 100+ million dollar houses.

I can hardly wait for fall to start, all things considered. The ‘Beach Club’ development, I suspect, will generate the most energy. One speaker at the Voters’ Association commented that Stanton Northwest’s publicity brochures about this fabulous development indicated that Stanton Northwest doesn’t have a clue about what it’s like to live in Point Roberts. “Picturesque,’ says the brochure; ‘at once, convenient and isolated.’ Convenient to what, I can’t imagine. To the border, I guess.

It's too late to help them with their brochures, but what I’m thinking for a fall and winter plan is this: I get Stanton Northwest to hire me as someone who can meet with their clients to explain to them exactly what it’s like to live in Point Roberts, so that said clients will be able to give genuine informed consent to their million dollar purchases. I’ll start with telling them about the really long, cold spring, and then work up to the September All Point Bulletin. That effort alone ought to be enough to stop the ‘Beach Club’ in its tracks.

No Shame

Two big border revelations this month. First one is that U.S. border agents now are entitled to remove your laptop computer from your hot little hands should you present yourself at the border with said laptop. And they may take it away from you for an indeterminate period of time, and forget about your Constitutional rights, I guess, because if you are presenting yourself to the U.S. border agents, you aren’t actually in the U.S., my friend. Furthermore, the 9th Circuit Appellate Court has agreed that this is a situation in which search does not require a warrant nor reasonable cause nor I guess any cause at all. You can read about this more fully here. Schneier, a security expert, also includes information about how to avoid having information on your laptop when you cross borders.

And the second? Well every border crossing now includes the creation of a permanent record of you making that crossing and your picture is attached to the record. Said record to be preserved by the government for fifteen years. Furthermore, it is not just the information obtained from your passport that is to be part of this record but any other information obtained during a secondary inspection. You can read about this part more fully here. Hard to know exactly who eventually will have access to such information.

The Congress, of course, has not authorized any of this, but then they haven’t yet been given the opportunity, I suppose. Inevitably, this offers enormous possibilities for irritating events here at the Point Roberts border where we make crossings so frequently. If nothing else, all of us Point Roberts’ residents’ back and forths to the laundromat and the thrift store and the grocery store will use up a lot of K’s of storage in the government’s data base, but I suppose we can learn to leave our laptops at home when going to those places. Don't say we weren't warned, because this is exactly what privacy advocates have been worried about with respect to new technologies for the past 30 years or more: that the government would simply have everything about us in its files, to be used for any purposes that it chooses. I know, they keep saying they’re doing it only to protect us from terrorists, but that ruse is getting a little old since they don’t seem to have shown much skill in catching any terrorists. And every day there seems to be some new story about misuse of data base information. I mean, think about all those medical records of celebrities being perused by interested staff at the UCLA Medical Center.

Some commenters have been surprised that Homeland Security has authorized both these significant lurches toward privacy invasion without any official authorization; other have been not surprised by the decision itself, but appalled by the fact that they don’t even bother to keep it a secret. No shame at all any more is the sorry conclusion.

Time Passes and Changes

Today, for the third month in a row, we were wait-listed for the ferry of our choice. It is a very discouraging moment when you find that you are the very first of 30+ cars filled with people not to get to drive on to the ferry, and then you get to watch it steam away without you, filled with some 250 other cars filled with people. Sittin’ on the dock of the bay, indeed.

But we put in our waiting time like grownups: Ed read and slept, I knit on a pair of purple socks and walked around to see the wonders of the ferry parking lot. Two plus hours later, on the next ferry, I continued my walking and came upon a sight of interest. This particular ferry, named The Queen of Surrey, was recently retrofitted or generally dusted and cleaned in some elaborate way by the B.C. Ferry Corporation. In the process, some things changed. The children’s area, which used to feature some playground-style plastic objects, now has a big wall TV that, at least today, was showing a cartoon with orange flowers. Coffee bars have appeared where there were before no coffee bars. And the Queen of Canada, Her Majesty Elizabeth Two has aged 30 years, at least. We have a new Queen Two picture on the ferry. A very different picture from the previous one.

I remember the old picture largely because Queen Two in that picture was so much younger than I know she actually is. She looked middle-aged and attractive, albeit still stodgy. I remember her when we were both children during WW II (Elizabeth and Margaret, the brave little princesses!) , so I know for a fact that she is closer to my age than she is to being middle-aged. I just took it as one of the perks of queendom that you get to look forever young, or at least sort of. So, I was surprised to see that with the Surrey’s cleanup, Queen Two was now looking her age. Stern, of course; no merry twinkle in this Elizabeth’s eye. World-worn, I’d say, though maybe only family-worn.

She was, however, regally dressed. A crown of course, and a necklace of many serious jewels: diamonds, I’d think from the lack of color and size; the Order of Canada prominently placed on the shoulder of a dress of lace with three-quarter length sleeves, slightly flared, and the edges of the sleeves themselves jeweled. She is wearing what appear to be 12-button white (kid?) gloves. Tres elegant! And then, and then, I saw…a fashion statement? The queen was wearing on her left wrist, over her 12-button white (kid?) gloves what appeared to be a watch with a platinum band.

It’s been a long time since I wore a pair of 12-button gloves; say 54 years. But I’m pretty sure that we were taught never to wear a watch on the outside of a long glove. Not ever, not even if you really needed to know the time. And why would Queen Two need to know the time? She has people who tell her the time. She was having her royal photo taken; that’s what time it was. So have standards changed? Have I lost track of what the standards really were? I think not.

I took myself, of course, immediately to the internet to determine glove etiquette. The Gaspar Glove Company enunciates the standards:

• Don’t eat, drink or smoke with gloves on.
• Don’t play cards with gloves on
• Don’t apply makeup with gloves on.
• Don’t wear jewelry over gloves, with the exception of bracelets.
• Don’t make a habit of carrying your gloves—they should be considered an integral part of your costume.
• Don’t wear short gloves to a very gala ball, court presentation or “White Tie” affair at the White House or in honor of a celebrity.

Rule number 4 is the relevant one here and surely a watch isn’t a bracelet, even if the watch has a very platinum watchband.

Well, what have we come to? One woman almost nominated to become President of the United States, and another woman who heads the British Monarchy wearing a watch over her 12-button gloves. Traditions being shattered everywhere I look.