Osprey in a Christmas tree

December 11, 2013December 11, 2013 / njmyers / 3 Comments

(photo by Gail Jamington)

In those midday hours of too much sun on a tropical island, I drove a few miles up the avenue to Captiva, the next island up from Sanibel, Florida, where I have been beachbumming for a few days. I wasn’t feeling adventurous and this short, solitary vacation is not about food, that is, not food for the body though it is about food for the soul, so I was headed to the Keylime Bistro where I have been before, with my husband. thinking i would do a little shopping and then hopefully get hungry and eat a little lunch. But I found no shops in the place I remembered. I wasn’t even hungry but I was ready to get off the beach for a bit.

I ordered a salad and grilled snapper. As I picked at the unremarkable salad and fish I noticed a tall, skinny island pine across the street hung with large snowflake ornaments, which probably lit up at night. Ah yes, they think they can have Christmas in this tropical place but Christmas requires snow. Snow and cold was happening back home. I wasn’t missing it.

My gaze traveled up the pine and I saw an osprey perched on the bare spike of the tree where a star might have been placed. The big, white-breasted bird, handsomer than any ornament, was busy with something. I soon realized it was tearing apart a fish.

I watched the osprey devour the fish as I devoured my own fish. This wild thing, high above the supersaturated civilization of the island.

I finished my fish first so I ordered a slice of keylime pie, though I wasn’t hungry at all. I ate a few bites and asked for a box for the rest. The osprey continued to work on the fish. Several small birds perched just below, perhaps hoping for dropped morsels. All the osprey let go, however, was one impressive stream of white excrement, which jetted out onto the street. Although the street was lined solidly with human enterprises, no one was passing below at the moment. Fortunately. Though it would have been interesting to see.

Although I spent my entire lunchtime gazing up at the osprey, no one else in the restaurant seemed to be paying any attention to the bird. Perhaps they thought I was just a dotty old lady. Which I may be. Perhaps an osprey eating a fish at the top of a Christmas tree is an unremarkable thing to them. I know some were tourists like me. I remembered seeing one woman on the Sanibel beach earlier. I noticed her pretty gray hair and wondered if I should stop coloring mine. She was at the bistro with her husband and they were taking pictures of each other. If my husband had been there he would have been gazing upwards, like me.

The osprey was still ripping the fish when I climbed into my white rental car and drove sedately back to my cabin. Back to the beach to hang out with the shorebirds–small, medium, and large–and this morning a lone, elusive dolphin. A few humans. Some fishing pelicans. And overhead, ospreys.

Happy holidays.

Love and disappointment

December 3, 2013 / njmyers / 1 Comment

“They drank a bottle of wine and opened another. They were so in love with the world and so disappointed in every aspect of it, that drinking another bottle while they sat at the kitchen table was the most obvious way they could honor it all.” –Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

This blog is my equivalent of opening another bottle. It is what I do to honor it all, the beauty and the disappointment of the world of nature, of humans, and my own internal world. Nothing I do or say or observe is unblemished. There is no simple love, there are no simple answers.

We watched a beautiful documentary last night about a terrible thing. Continue reading →

The pipeline and the prairie

September 5, 2013 / njmyers / 2 Comments

I followed the big digger being hauled down the country road that is the most direct route from the YMCA to our CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm. The combination of yoga and veggie pickup has made Tuesday morning the highlight of the week, but this was the last time I would be picking up vegetables. The truck was going 25 mph but I was in no hurry.

It was a symbolic end to the vegetable season. I was one of only 10 members in Farmer Theri’s CSA this year. Her season has been cut short and she couldn’t plant her back plots at all because they were marked to be dug up to lay the Enbridge replacement pipeline. The diggers have just now churned up her barnyard.

Last haul

The digger was headed for another segment of the pipeline not far away. A dotted line of dirt piles marks the pipeline’s path across Michigan. Somehow I expected the tunneling to start in the west and proceed east, like the oil. Instead, the digging might start anywhere along the line and proceed in either direction. Here it moves mostly east to west but in a broken line. The dots will eventually be connected.

Meanwhile I work on my part of the story. I’m not doing anything heroic like getting arrested for sitting in a company driveway, like my friend Sandra Steingraber did to protest fracking in upstate New York. I am just trying to see that the small grant Enbridge is giving our township for “environmental restoration” gets used appropriately. This is in addition to direct compensation to landowners. It’s pure guilt money and not much: $15,000 for the long scar Enbridge is drawing across the belly of our rural township.

I wrote how the township committee responded enthusiastically to my proposal to do something for my favorite piece of wetland, the rare wet blooming prairie a mile from my house. I tossed that ball into the court of Chickaming Open Lands, the conservation group that manages the prairie. Yesterday the development director called back.

“We talked about it,” she said, “and what we’d like to propose is a boardwalk out into the prairie so people can see it better.”

That was exactly what the township committee had proposed, but I hadn’t mentioned that detail to the Chickaming people. I was elated. Maybe it would be easier than I thought to get a politically conservative township and a liberal conservation group on the same page.

I called the township supervisor and reported the conversation. He seemed pleased but he said, “I was just down at the firehouse. You know, everybody has a project they’d like to get funded.”

Of course. Conversations will go on although our ad hoc committee was supposed to make this decision.

Still, he promised to link up with the conservation group. We’ll see. I’m not taking bets on where this project will stand by the time I get back from Congo in mid-October. But I’m voting for the prairie.

Spending pipeline money

August 21, 2013August 22, 2013 / njmyers / 2 Comments

Dayton Wet Prairie in August

A broadband tower? My husband perked up when I told him that was on the list of possible projects the township was considering funding with the Enbridge pipeline guilt money.

The Enbridge money is a $15,000 grant to the township offered by the company that is plowing through our farms and gardens to update the pipeline that takes Alberta tarsand gook to the east coast and beyond. (Why does the pipeline dip down to the US side of the Great Lakes? Because the Canadians don’t want it.)

The only guideline for spending this tiny grant was that it was supposed to be for “environmental stewardship.” I didn’t see how broadband fit into that but, although I’d gotten myself on the committee to decide how the money should be spent, I hadn’t come up with any real ideas before the committee had its first meeting last evening. I thought I might even support a broadband tower if it came down to that. Better than cemetery improvement, which was another proposal.

I’d tried to get a local conservation group to bring ideas to the table. The group maintains a lovely wet blooming prairie on a dirt road a mile from our house. Wet blooming prairies are relatively rare. And fragile. You don’t want people tramping through, but I love walking the road and seeing the prairie at various times of the year. Now it’s moving into its loveliest stage of gold and purple and white blooms.

Swamp milkweed in the wet prairie

But the conservation people hadn’t followed up on my phone call and email. So I just brought up the prairie at the meeting, saying it was a rare treasure right here in the middle of our rural township that very few people even knew about. The township supervisor said he’d never been by to look at it. But everybody was interested.

The brainstorming session ranged through a welcome sign for Bertrand Township, a new heat-exchange system for the township building, redbud trees along Redbud Trail, a new memorial for the fire station. The idea of a broadband tower was dismissed–not “environmental” enough, even though another township had used their grant for that. Sorry, Vic.

The idea of doing something with/for the wet prairie quickly rose to the top and stayed there. This rural township is politically and socially conservative. I was surprised that my fellow committee members–the Republican township supervisor, his assistant, a financial consultant, and a firefighter–were so enthusiastic about doing something truly “environmental” with the money. I promised to keep pursuing the conservation group for ideas about how we could team up.

The group doesn’t do much in our area–their work is mostly closer to Lake Michigan, where Chicago people have summer homes. I notice from the website that the three staff members all left high-powered jobs in Chicago to move to the tranquil dunes and woods of Southwest Michigan. I guess I should include myself in that category. We ex-Chicago people are not always beloved by the “locals.”

So when I spoke with the group’s outreach director this morning I emphasized how important it was to build good relations with the community and how nice it was to see some “local” enthusiasm for environmental preservation. She agreed. We talked about possibilities. She’ll get back to me.

The pipeline cometh

July 22, 2013 / njmyers / 20 Comments

“Road Work Ahead,” the signs say. They make their first appearance a mile and a half from our house in the woods.

I walk down to take a picture. The “Smile Ear to Ear” is for our nearby farmstand, where sweetcorn is also making a first appearance.

Smile. Be happy. A corridor marked with party flags has been laid out through another neighbor’s strawberry patch.

But this is not about our country roads, which are always in need of repair. It is not about parties or backyard festivities.

A mile farther east, the nature of the “road work,” the activities taking place in our neighbors’ backyards, becomes clearer.

A crane pokes up behind a flowerbed.

A ridge of dirt rises a few yards beyond the shade trees.

A “road” is being carved through cornfields.

The trucks, the heavy equipment, the port-a-potties, and the pipe show up another mile further to the east.

The “road” is for the Enbridge Pipeline, which is being laid to carry oil from the Alberta tarsands to the east coast of the USA.

This is not a new pipeline path. We already have a pipeline under our feet, under our corn and vegetables and horse pastures. That pipeline went in less than 20 years ago. Three years ago it leaked and created the worst spill ever in a body of fresh water, the Kalamazoo River, 50 miles away.

This new set of pipe is supposed to replace the leaky line.

Until it, too, leaks, I guess. Or until the oil or our appetite for it runs out, i.e. not any time soon.

I saw that earlier pipeline being laid back in the late 1990s but I didn’t know–I didn’t think about–what it was. I was not curious. It was one of those big infrastructure things.

But meantime I spent a dozen years working in the environmental movement and I learned to notice such things, to think about what was in front of my eyes as well as hidden under my feet, and why these things are there, and what the consequences are and can be.

Such thinking is inconvenient for the powers that be, economic and political. So they call it road work. They pay a few dollars compensation to people whose backyards and farms and vegetable patches are being torn up and hope they’ll stay calm about it all. Most people do. Most people really need the money.

A notice appears in our township letter: “Bertrand Township is eligible for a $15,000 Enbridge Environmental Stewardship Grant. We are looking for volunteers to participate on an ad hoc committee for how to use these funds.”

I call up and volunteer for the committee. I call up a local conservation organization and tell them to start thinking about a proposal for spending Enbridge guilt money.

It’s a pittance, but hey. We can come up with a party to go with all those party flags. A party for the trees and the toads while we try to remember what is under our feet.

Feeding birds and a marriage

July 15, 2013July 15, 2013 / njmyers / 3 Comments

“The hummingbird feeder looks like it’s empty,” he says.

“Yes it does,” I answer from the front porch. A hummingbird is hovering in front of me, inquiring.

I hear activity in the kitchen, then silence. The hummingbird comes around again. Still no nectar?

I go into the house. He is back at his computer on the dining room table, which is his office when he is at home. (When it’s just the two of us we dine everywhere except in the dining room. On the porch or in front of the TV or, in winter, at the little table in front of the woodstove).

In the kitchen, nectar has been mixed in a glass measuring pitcher. The spoon is still in it. On the countertop stands an open bag of sugar. The drawer from which the spoon was taken is also open. The empty feeder is still hanging from the tree outside the dining room.

I look at the unfinished job and think about my choices. I could finish the job or I could remind (nag) him to finish it. This kind of reminder qualifies as nagging because I do it very, very often.

I bring in the empty feeder and put it in the sink. I wonder, is there a third choice–neither nagging nor finishing the job myself?

Yes there is. Waiting.

And so the hummingbirds and I wait. I write the above. I can’t resist recording this slice of married life that reveals the core of one of those little differences that make life with another person . . . interesting.

He has a way of taking projects in stages, projects that I would do in one fell swoop start to finish. He also has a way of always leaving something undone, like the required flaw in the Amish quilt. (Cleaning drain traps after cleaning up the kitchen is one of those things.) He claims, when queried (nagged), that he intended to finish these things later, I just didn’t give him enough time.

In this case I suppose he wants to give the sugar extra time to dissolve whereas I would just stir it vigorously for a little longer. So I give him the benefit of the doubt but I still doubt.

Now he comes outside, ready for the next stage of the job. “What did you do with the hummingbird feeder?” he asks. He hasn’t noticed that I brought it in.

“It’s in the kitchen sink.”

I wait some more. The hummingbird hasn’t queried in the last few minutes so I look around the corner and see that he has indeed refilled and rehung the feeder.

I stroll through the kitchen. The drawer that was open is closed. The bag of sugar is still open on the countertop. He is at his computer. He looks up. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just writing a blog.”

But he has read my mind. He gets up and closes the bag of sugar, puts it away.

Job done in his good time. No nagging.

Orange and yellow guinea fowl

July 9, 2013 / njmyers / 4 Comments

with Jeanne, fellow cloth connector

I spent last week surrounded by African cloth. It was in an over-air conditioned exhibit hall in Phoenix, where the outside temperatures rose to 118 during the week. One airline worker said when some of our friends arrived, “Welcome to hell.”

Our cloth booth was a heavenly place in what I wouldn’t call hell exactly but it was a sterile, artificial environment. It didn’t help that I was working the booth 11 am to 11 pm with little chance for solitude and no inviting nature nearby. Now that I am home I’m basking on my front porch, even though it is dark and humid and pouring rain. At least it’s natural.

I’m thinking of turning one of those lengths of bright cloth into a tablecloth and napkins for my porch table. It took five days of looking at the hundreds of fabric lengths in our display till I settled on that piece as the one I wanted to take home. Orange and yellow plaid with guinea fowl.

Maybe it was because my eyes got used to all the colors, since I was exposed to them for so long, and so I gradually came to love the brightest one I saw.

Maybe it was because I thought of how my granddaughter would enjoy the strange chickens on the design.

Maybe it was because I thought of how that tablecloth would brighten up my screened-in porch, which is all browns and grays and surrounded by green, green, green.

This is all true but really it was because no one else wanted it. We had two 6-yard lengths of this design and they were among the few pieces that didn’t move at the Mennonite Church USA convention last week. No quilters wanted a yard of it, no shirt makers or skirt makers or pillow coverers were tempted. This design goes with nothing. It is what it is, bold and bright.

This is how Congolese women dress, power to them in their confident beauty. They would consider it a waste to use it on a table. It needs to strut its stuff in the marketplace. But still, it finds its way to my house and that is something.

Our project, the Congo Cloth Connection, is about influencing each other, finding common ground, forming relationships between Mennonites in Congo and the USA. It is secondarily about raising money for projects in Congo. With the donations we’re collecting for this cloth we’re funding scholarships for Congolese Mennonite women studying for the ministry. This is a new thing–the church only recently approved the ordination of women–and it’s the feminist issue among our friends there.

This fall I will carry scholarship money for four women in Kalonda, DR Congo, age 21 to 62, who are fulfilling their dream of becoming pastors. While I dress my table in their cloth, they study the Anabaptist theology of our mutual heritage.

We’re not selling the cloth (hand-carried in suitcases by our traveling friends) online. This is not a long-term, big $ project. It’s just a way of making connections of beauty and joy between a few churches in the Midwest and our growing network of friends in DRC.

Orange and yellow guinea fowl crossing the continents, coming home to roost.

Earth artist

June 21, 2013 / njmyers / 1 Comment

“Wayside Gardens.” “Dianthus Box Pink.” “Witch Hazel. “Fire pit.”

These are the only notes I took on our conversation this morning with Garry Roberson, a local landscaper, because I quickly decided to trust his judgment on just about anything.

Garry is wiry, weathered. He is wearing jeans, a blue shirt with the sleeves cut off, and a straw hat. He talks the fast talk of an enthusiast.

I like everything he says about what he sees and how he works, because it is what my husband and I see, only more, and how we would work on our landscape if we had more time, energy, and skill. He, in turn, is impressed that I know every plant in our five acres of woods and what grows where.

Hiring Garry is like hiring a professional version of ourselves when it comes to enhancing the already beautiful land around our house. We’d like to be that good but we aren’t.

Garry doesn’t start with a design; he starts with what is already there: in our case, a beautiful woods. He talks about trimming away some of what is there to see more of what is there; adding to what is there to show off what is there. He talks about working incrementally, one thing leading to another, suggesting something else. He says he works without making big changes and big messes, always working with nature rather than against it.

He says his goal is to make his work invisible. “You will look at the result and wonder how it could ever have been any different.” He encourages us to take lots of “before” pictures so we’ll see the difference.

Garry worked for our neighbors across the road. Trees screen our view of their house, so I was never aware that landscaping was being done until they put in a lovely pond and waterfall. And Garry’s gradualist approach meant that the transformation wasn’t sudden. We just noticed, after a few years, that their house and surroundings were looking really good. We noticed the “after” without paying attention to the “before.”

A little like my weight loss. Nobody told me I was fat before but some people now say I look good. (I know they are too polite to link “looking good” to weight loss unless I bring it up.)

My goal is not for people to say about our home, “I like what you have done to this place” but, “I like coming here. It’s so beautiful.”

They say that already. As Garry plays with our surroundings they may say it more and more. But we are really doing this for ourselves, in partnership with nature and a nature artist. Garry calls his business Earth Art.

Here are more “before” pictures .

This organic life

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013 / njmyers / 4 Comments

I need to put the hummingbird feeder out. The birds are due any day now or perhaps they’re already here and snubbing us because I haven’t put the feeder out.

This thought arises suddenly and makes me think of the miscellany of my to-do list. It is rich and shapeless, everything wanting to be done at once.

Sitting on the porch, watching the colorful birds of spring (indigo buntings, siren-yellow finches, rose-breasted grosbeaks) and wood ducks looking for a nesting place in our woods—this is high on my spring to-do list. Alas there is no water on our property so it is not prime wood duck real estate but they come looking every year because we have great tree holes. We also have a hawk nest this year so beware, little birdies.

Wood nettle shoots are at their prime. I must go out and snip another bagful. I took a mess of nettles to a church potluck yesterday (steamed briefly, tossed with olive oil, garnished with violets). Every year I introduce more people to this spring delicacy. It takes some faith to bite down on plants that will sting like crazy if you grab them raw but immersion in a hot bath makes them sweet and safe. I don’t like the more common ditch nettles, however. See my post last year on this.

Having dreams is on my weekly agenda. The only preparation I can make for the communal dreaming class I am conducting for nine weeks at church is to have dreams myself, and I don’t have a lot of control over that. As it turns out, I often don’t even bring up my own dreams because other people’s dreams fill the hour. The dreams are rich and amazing and reveal their meanings as we talk about them. I discover again that I am quite good at helping people interpret their dreams. Some shared images appear in our dreams. Speculating about what this means.

I am praying daily for friends of a friend who are being held captive in a foreign land. This requires making time and place for the prayer to be received (that is, knowing what I should pray) and offered. It is not a prayer to be breathed at my desk although I do that, too. I usually go out with the trees, to get their help.

Helper trees

I am thinking through and consulting others about aspects of a partnership between my congregation and a congregation in Kinshasa that I know well from two visits there last year. Especially, how do you address or get around the vast economic differences without opening great cans of worms? I write up a proposal and send it off to a few people for vetting. This is difficult and necessary headwork in a project that is, for the most part, a work of joy and spiritual enrichment.

I am deciding what to do about biking. What would it feel like to give it up? Why did I have a sudden surge of jealousy when Vic asked how I would feel if he decided to buy a new bike (and I didn’t)? On the other hand, why am I enthusiastic about the idea of funding scholarships for Congolese students instead of buying a new bike? Sorting out my own feelings. Sorting out the state of my body as well as my spirit.

I just arranged for an energy healing session to address my recurrent UTIs, which have now become resistant to most antibiotics. This is related to the biking question because I can’t afford to keep having UTIs and biking seems to instigate them sometimes.

And it relates, in turn, to dreams, because I had a dream in which energy healing was being done on an Atlantic beach. I was to take my turn at healing and being healed before even putting a foot in the water. The ocean represents Soul waters for me. Also, the Atlantic links us to Africa, so perhaps it is a reference to my next trip to Congo.

That trip is taking shape and moving up on the to-do list. I may post about that soon.

Maybe my to-do list is not shapeless so much as organic, one thing merging into another and branching into yet others.

Celebrations, shopping, setbacks

April 29, 2013 / njmyers / 1 Comment

Last week was the 44th anniversary of my marriage to the tall, lean, shy cute guy. He is still tall and lean. He is much less shy than he was when we were 24. And he is even cuter. I really lucked out.

We celebrated in Chicago. I went with him for his weekly 3-day work stint and shopped for new clothes while he worked. The way I look at it, his anniversary present to me was the new clothes. Mine to him was looking good in them.

He’s not here right now so I can’t show you how good we both look.

In the evenings we dined out, totally busting out of our vegan gluten-free regime. I did not count Weight Watchers points last week. Consequently my weight rebounded a bit, a minor setback. The pleasure was worth it. I am happy to get back to simple high-veggie, low fat this week.

I’m not complaining but the shopping was hard work. The first day I went to Oak Brook Mall, my old favorite. It was torn up for relandscaping. It was raining. And it was a case of the usual overabundance of bad selections. I have trouble with overchoice, with finding the gem on the rack of garish. Give me a small shop filled with my kind of clothes.

But I dutifully trudged through every department store and every possibly appropriate shop, selecting a few things here and there. The most thrilling purchase? New bras perfectly, professionally fitted! (Too much information? Stop reading, guys.)

At the very end I found the little shop that had my kind of clothes, J. Jill. I didn’t buy much because I was already shopped out. I found the essential black knit dress I’d been looking for to wear under my Congo Cloth jackets, linen crop pants, and a pink linen shirt. Now I know where to go online to look for simple, well-made clothes. Most important, I’ve tried on their sizes.

The second day was more fun. It was sunny. I spent it in my old stomping ground, Oak Park, where we’d lived for nearly 30 years, visiting old shops and new. I didn’t buy all that much–cute shoes at DSW, bargain tees at my familiar Gap. I found a new swimsuit at the Sports Authority where we’ve always shopped. I made a run to Trader Joe’s for tea and wine and to Olive & Well for black current balsamic vinegar. When it comes to shopping I like some predictability.

By the third day I was getting a UT infection from too much rich food and wine and not enough water. That, too, is predictable. This is probably way too much information but it may be of interest to other UTI-prone old ladies who bike: The UTI, which I’d begun treating, got worse after I got out on the bike a few days later for my first ride of the season.

I fought this problem two years ago when I was training for a century. Do I want to have to deal with it again? I’ve been getting ready for a new bike but now I’m having second thoughts. Giving up biking would be a real setback.

Meanwhile, the real celebration is going on in the woods. Spring is busting out all over. I just want to sit and watch.