Monarch butterfly update

     The news just came to my inbox that the monarch butterflies have finally arrived at their roosting site in Mexico!  They are late this year, and still coming in.  According to the citizen-science website Journey North (in this case Journey South!), the numbers are down.  Counts and measurements will happen in December, which will give a real picture of the North American population, since they all roost in this one spot.  To see pictures of their arrival, and the trees where they spend the winter, visit this website and click around: http://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/fall2013/update111413.html#news.  Meanwhile, let's plant butterfly gardens next spring, and start thinking about those "weedy places" that host milkweed as vital nurseries that shouldn't be mowed or bush-hogged until October.  
     May the overwintering monarchs be safe from storms and cold.  May we all be safe from storms and cold.

Divide and Conjure

     Everything was all set.  This was Family Weekend at Meg's new college.  The hotel reservation was made, the housesitter lined up, the tickets to Meg's Friday evening choral concert waiting for us at Will Call, and dinner reservations for five – five! – made at the restaurant she chose. It was picture-perfect.

      Then, in a remarkable week, not only did the Red Sox win the World Series, but Anna's Varsity soccer team beat a higher seeded competitor in the State championship quarter-finals, and they would be playing in the semi-finals for the first time in fifteen years! On Saturday! At 5:00! Right during Meg's second concert two hundred miles away!

      “It's all right Mama, I understand, you should go, I know how much you want to hear Meg sing,” Anna told me. With her permission, I could keep the picture I had been carrying in my heart intact. Meg in a long black dress, singing classical choral music on risers, the rich sounds of men's and women's voices rolling out over the concert hall. And the next night, Meg in a group of twelve women, singing “Bennie and the Jets” a capella, their short skirts and animated faces keeping time before a full house of cheering students and families.

      Except, Anna wouldn't be there.

      “It's ok Mom, you should be there for Anna,” Meg said on the phone. She had played in championship high school games, and she knew how important it was to have her family in the stands. She was giving me permission to imagine a new picture of my weekend, one with Anna's team in their uniforms and cleats, and parents filling aluminum bleachers and wild cheering and watching the scoreboard and being ready for the emotional elation or despondency afterwards. And then coming home with my girl in the front seat next to me, sleeping in the next morning, being there with her. It was a good picture, just different.

       Each of my daughters was ready to divide their sense of wholeness – of the family that roots for them – for the other. Because of them, I began to conjure up a third possibility in which I could spend one day with each. The details filled in, thanks to Bob and Andrew, the house-sitter, team-mates' families, and a Prius. The distance was not so far. I had a new picture in my heart as Friday approached, not of a heart divided in two, but of two wholenesses.

      The way it turned out was that Meg lost her voice over the course of the weekend, and Anna's team lost the game. But it was a great weekend. I think we all would agree.

Attending to Fall

(This is a "raw" write. It is the result of a writing practice I do to explore my inner world; not meant for an audience, it is jagged and honest. Rarely will I share one, but the unapologetic quality seems to fit my morning's view of the coming season, and perhaps it will serve as an invitation to try writing from the place of spirit. An FYI: the mountain that suddenly appears is one we hiked this past weekend – changes in voice or pace often occur with this kind of writing.)

      The shadows in the woods are different these days. It is dappled, porous, and the sound of the air shimmering the leaves that remain rides on the flattening light. Summer's depths of shade and green have thinned. In my memory the foliage of June and July seems succulent – now it is crunchy and kicking along with my footsteps as I walk the dog on the familiar trails across the street.

      My heart starts to thin too in the fall – at least, it feels like it has risen out of the depths of the near-decadent wallowing it does in the sounds and smells and ripeness of full summer. I feel it thinning out in the coming cold, gripping in tension as color fades from the landscape. I am more shut inside, turn inward to tasks to keep my mind off the change, and yet – and yet – there is a knowing that finally when we come to rest in winter, that will be the time of letting go, the time of dreaming. And so this transition could be something else, not so brittle, if I actually turn and attend to it straight on. What if I just go down into the field and lay in the grass, feeling the cold earth beneath, listening to what is, what is – not aching for what was?

      This is the practice then, the practice of being present to the isness of the transition, neither looking behind nor ahead. And might I find that in fact it is not an in-between, it is itself? Yes, yes, my head is telling me I already know this. So what is it? (It is so much easier to find excuses than to do the work.) What is it about fall? OK, gloves off – I don't like the colors: they are too bright, too showy and they have stolen my green. – I don't like to be cold, at all. I loved the heat of the summer. In coldness, I become more lifeless. And just what do I mean by lifeless? It's that thinning again. I am not in my body, I bump into mental and spiritual walls and back out of living to the level of lists.

      Walking, walking up the mountain I begin to warm. Some woods feel good – I imagine these leggy diseased beech trees pillowed in deep snow and think I would like to come snowshoeing here in the whiteness and sunlight of February. Then the old uncut spruce forest, gaping darkness, softness and quiet – I feel the ancientness here, church-like, not a place to settle into, though. Then the krumholz near the summit, the gruff dwarves of the mountains' trees, old but short and gnarled, apprehended by ice and wind over and over, and yet tenacious. And then it is Bob and me standing on the bald rocks, and – exposed to the wind – the layer of sweat near my skin begins to chill. I put on more and more coats, but my instinct is to tighten inward, find shelter, hide. There is no glory in this, no invigoration. And that is just what is, for me. Maybe I don't need to befriend the cold. Maybe just turning and attending to this season will only reveal that indeed, it is not my story, there is no fecundity here, it just is, for awhile, and I will be in it, cold earth below, night-sky clarity above, and be thin.

The Democracy of Pie

       

     Pie crust.

      Just thinking of it makes my mouth water: honey-colored pastry over fruit, deepening just a bit to the ambered edge – always my favorite last bite because of the slight crispiness to it.

      “You're giving away our pie crust recipe?” Andrew is incredulous that I'm writing this post.

      “Why, is it a secret?” I ask back.

      “Well, no, but then everyone will be able to make it,” he says.

      Yup. That's the point. Pies are a democratic species, unpretentious and elegant in their simplicity. A basic dough becomes a container of ripe and savory cooked fruit (I'm leaving out the gooey pies for now). But for some reason, people fear pie-making. Pie-making contests and pie-only bakeries have raised the pie-bar to a level of specialty that seems out of reach. At family dinners or potluck suppers where I often bring a pie, people have said to me “I could never make this.” The truth is, anyone can make a pie, a good pie. And there is no reason to fear the crust.

      This pie crust recipe came to me from my mother. She says that when she used it to make a wild blueberry pie for her beau nearly sixty years ago, it cinched the deal. My father still gets one from her every year on their wedding anniversary.

      I believe in pie. So I'm doing my part to erase the elitism around pie-making by divulging a big secret: this crust is very, very easy to make. And the rest is just fruit, sweetened a little, spiced sometimes, covered and baked.

      One last thought: I'm no super-duper cook. But I believe that good homemade food can glue together families and friendships. Some of the most sacred times we share involve sitting around a table and eating together. Let's do this more often. In fact, let's teach our sons to make – and share – pie. 

     May the smell of warm pie fill your kitchen.

Stir 'n' Roll Pie Crust

Prelude: Make your filling.

1. Sift a bunch of flour into a bowl. (If you don't have a sifter, stir it through a mesh strainer, or spoon it lightly into the bowl to fluff it up.) 

2. Measure 2 cups of the sifted flour into another bowl.

Add ½ tsp salt. Whisk it together to mix.

3. Measure ½ cup vegetable oil (not olive oil) into a 1 cup measuring cup. Add ¼ cup cold milk. Don't stir!

4. Pour liquid into flour all at once.

 

5. Stir with a fork until evenly moistened. (From now on, handle the dough just enough to do the job; a gentle touch keeps it from getting tough.)

6. Form dough into a ball. Cut it roughly in half.

7. Have four sheets of wax paper ready. Place the larger half of the dough (if one is larger) between two sheets. (To keep the bottom sheet from slipping, moisten the counter under it slightly.)

8. Flatten the dough just enough that you can start rolling it into a disk between the two sheets.

 

9. Roll the dough about an inch wider than the pie dish you are using. (The larger the dish, the thinner the crust will be. Start with a smaller pie dish until you are used to working with the dough.)

 
10. Peel off the top sheet of wax paper. Have your pie dish ready, and gently invert the bottom sheet so the dough disk is centered on the plate. Peel the wax paper straight back, easing the dough into the dish. (If the dough breaks, don't worry: use overhanging pieces to mend, or push and seal the dough together.)

11. Roll out the top the same way, but only a little wider than the dish. (It doesn't have to settle into the dish, just lay on top. A little extra gives you room to make a mistake.)
 
12. Fill the pie (you did prepare the pie filling first, right?)

13. Dot the fruit with butter.

14. Lay the top crust over the fruit and peel back the wax paper.



15. Seal the edges by either a) trimming the rim with a knife and then pressing a fork along the edge (it helps to occasionally wet the fork) or 
b) rolling the overhanging dough up onto the rim and pinching and fluting it.

16. Cut vent slits in the top.
 
17. Bake at 400 degrees for about an hour. (Put it in the middle of the oven with a baking sheet on the shelf just below to catch drips. It is done when the crust is no longer pale but mottled golden brown, and the fruit is steaming or bubbling. If the edges are getting too dark, fold a rim of foil over them and continue baking until the rest of the pie is done.)
 
18. Cool the pie. The longer it cools, the more it “sets” (less liquid), and the less chance of burning your mouth.


So here's the condensed version of the recipe I carry around. See how simple it is?

Missing monarchs: love and loss

      My heart stopped when I heard this on the radio recently: “We've been looking for monarchs since the middle of July, but so far, we have yet to see one.” These were the words of a volunteer for the Maine Butterfly Survey.
     In disbelief I listened on: the voice-over said, “Thanks to the work of other citizen scientists across the monarch's range - from Minnesota and Michigan east to New York and northern New England - it's clear that the monarchs are missing."

     The monarchs are missing.

     There is a despair in me that I keep shut behind a door, a despair about the loss of life and beauty and the harmony of balanced ecosystems that results from civilization's narcissism. This news about the monarchs opens that door. Instinctively I look away from the despair, but like seeing in the dark, it becomes even more visible in my peripheral vision. The pain follows me around, and I can't seem to embrace the buddhist teaching that suffering is part of the path. You see, I have been intimate with the monarchs, and I don't want to face their disappearance.

      For years in September I would take Anna and Andrew and Meg out to find a monarch caterpillar, the beautiful green-and-black-and-yellow-striped guys hiding under a milkweed leaf. We would bring one in, set it up in a terrarium complete with its own milkweed in a vase of water, a netting cover for air, and a frisbee or something solid suspended at the top so that, when it was time, the well-fed caterpillar could climb up and begin its transformation. We watched the “J” stage; the completely miraculous creation of its chrysalis; and then we waited and waited as the color of the chrysalis changed from a honeydew green to a black mottled with orange and even gold dots. 
Yes, it was great for the kids – but really I was the one that thrilled to every change. When it was ready, we released the new butterfly into the same milkweed patch it came from, and watched wistfully as it flexed its wings and left us.

      It's September now, and I had to go look for myself. I needed to see if we had any caterpillars (though if I found one, I would not bring it in, not this year). I went to the patch of milkweed below the barn, left untouched on purpose when the fields were mown. I peered under dozens of leaves, looked for little nuggets of dark frass, checked for munched leaves. There were no caterpillars. I shut that widening door of despair as fast as I could, telling myself I would look in other patches I knew about... but I never did.

      Hope is a mysterious thing. It drifts through my psyche like a tenacious butterfly, surprising me like the single monarch I saw a few days later when I was walking our dog through the far end of the same field. There it was. One.

     Two nights ago, I had a dream. I was in a field, and all around me monarch butterflies were taking to the air. I was laughing with delight in my dream, and felt infused with joy. The amazing thing is that I still feel that joy in the cells of my body. It's real.
     I love the monarchs. And my pain comes from loving them and the fear of losing them. But my dream keeps hope alive. My question is the age-old one: is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? Maybe the answer is that it is good to love and then let go when it is time. I don't know. I do know that because of my despair, the joy I still hold from the dream is more luminous; and because of that joy in my cells, the darkness of the despair is lessened. I think for now I just have to hold them both.

To follow the migration of monarch butterflies, look at this Journey North citizen-science website: http://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/News.html.
For ways to help, visit: http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/conservation_action.html

To hear the radio story on Maine Public Broadcasting: http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/5347/ItemId/29765/Default.aspx

Photo credits:

Monarch on aster: By Thompson Greg, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 

Monarch caterpillar: By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Monarch chrysalis: By aussiegall from sydney, Australia (Its Nearly Ready Uploaded by russavia) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Monarchs flying: By Sonia Carolina Madrigal Loyola from Nezahualcoyotl, Estado de México [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Hanging laundry

Dear Meg,

      Did you smell it? That first night in your new dorm room, when you got into the bed and pulled the sheets up around you, did you smell the sunshine? It's just a small thing, but I've been longing to know, kind of like when you send someone a present and wish you were there to see them open it. Maybe it only lasted a second, that smell of fresh air. But it's a strand of warmth and light from our backyard reaching into the ­strange building you now live in; a thread of connection from my seemingly simple life at home to the great expansion of yours at college.
     When you and Andrew and Anna got home from camp late this summer, you dumped out your duffel bags on the back deck and I did all those loads and loads of laundry. The weather was perfect for hanging it out to dry. I love hanging laundry: the slowness of it; the sunshine; hearing the birds and the late summer “ch-ch” of the insects; watching the wind become visible in the ripple of the sheets; feeling the coarseness of the towels. Hanging laundry is an act of optimism. And it's sensual.
     By the time the last loads were folded, we were already getting you packed to leave again. We bought those rough, not-too-expensive sheets in Twin Extra Long for your dorm bed, and two new bath towels. I didn't want them to be strangers. So in the last couple of days that you were home, I washed them too, and hung them out to dry. I have a picture in my mind, Meg, of looking up at my hands pinning them to the line and the bluebird sky beyond. At that moment, it was as if time and distance stretched, and I sensed you climbing into your new dorm bed and smelling the sunshine.

      It's ok if you didn't smell it. Really, this is my story. Hanging the laundry that day, I was happy and I was connected to you. Like tucking a note in your lunchbox, it's my act of giving that is the love. That love is still in there, whether you actually smelled it or not. It doesn't need confirmation. It just is.
     You go, girl. Be brave in your new world. And when you come home, there will be fresh clean sheets on your bed.

Love,  Mom

Catwalks

     This story is the best way I can convey the experiences, inner and outer, of this summer. They didn't literally happen this summer, but kind of...   A little more explanation is at the end.

CATWALKS

      The canoes first appeared as dots, emerging from behind the slim silhouette of an island across Devil’s Bay. At first I wasn’t sure. No one else had seen them yet. Children were jumping off the diving tower; parents were milling on the shore. All around me, there was a thread of adrenaline rippling through the waiting families. But when I shifted my stare just a little, I could see them in my peripheral vision: five canoes on the silver water.

      Of course, from where I was standing on the camp’s dock I couldn’t tell they were wood. But like my daughter, I too had traveled this raw landscape in these timeless boats at the rhythmic pace of a paddle stroke. I had portaged loads over the ancient pathways between lakes. I knew her anticipation of this moment, this victorious return.

      Her canoe trip was coming in after nearly forty days. These girls -- no longer girls but hard-tested young women -- had traveled far to the North. Some of them would be changed physically, from soft to muscular, round to lean, thin to strong. All of them would be changed emotionally. The exuberant whooping they would sing as they closed in on us would be a song of triumph – a band of women bound together through trial, mishap, deep beauty, and intimacy. The moment of return, to “civilization” we had called it, was both glory and despair: we had done it! -- it was over.

       Instinctively my heart tightened. Though I stood on the dock among the families as just another mother, in truth I was out there, on the water, under way.

       ~           ~           ~           ~           ~         ~          ~

      “Air raid!” shouted Heather in the front canoe. In my boat, the two campers and I threw down our paddles, kicked off our boots and jumped over the gunwales into the cool depths of Florence Lake. As my body left the glittering sunlight and sank through the blue, I opened my mouth, drinking in the clean water. This was no boggy “piss pond” between portages. This was a big, deep, clear, rock-lined lake that captured the blue sky in fluid play. I burst through the surface and laughed out loud as the others leaped from their canoes around me. Air raids were the champagne of a canoe tripping day: a mischievous, chaotic, giddy reward. And we had earned it.

      In this glacially carved land, travel is easiest on water. Crossing between lakes is hard. I had lumbered across many miles of portages over the summers as a camper, bearing a canvas Duluth pack with leather shoulder straps and a broad tump band across my sweaty forehead.

      This summer I was a counselor, and I carried the wanigan, a rectangular plywood box as wide as my shoulders. It held difficult-to-pack items like the billy set and the knives, and for the first few days, a couple dozen eggs. Borne by only a tump, it was a certifiable torture device. My campers laughed at my “wanigan wiggle”, a trademark walk the wanigan bearer develops. My hips and legs would deftly zigzag around rocks in the trail while my neck and back remained rigid under the box. Particularly tricky was walking the crude log catwalks over a bog. They required balance and agility. I was good at carrying a wanigan, though a sore was developing in the small of my back where it rubbed.

      An hour before the Florence Lake air raid, we had arrived at a notoriously difficult portage. As usual it was a scramble. We dragged the packs out of the canoes and hoisted them onto the campers’ backs. It was like loading a mule train, except most of the girls looked more like long legged colts. They were anxious, but, tumps adjusted and paddles in hand, they staggered off together, one behind another.

      The portage was long, wet and buggy. Relief would come only at the end, when the trail climbed up over a dry ridge before it came down to the landing at Florence Lake. As I trudged along with the wanigan, lost in the Zen zone that allowed me to ignore the mosquitoes, I looked up to see one of the girls sitting slumped on a rock ahead. It was Heather. Her canvas pack and paddles were on the ground. Everyone knows that on portages you don’t sit down, because it’s even harder to get up – it's best to just keep going. Two-stepping in front of her was a still-loaded girl, urging her onward. Heather just shook her head. As I approached, the dancing girl said, “Well I’m going to get them over with”. She turned and walked on.

      Ahead were catwalks.

      Old pine and birch logs lay paired end-to-end, stretching away from us like a narrow raft over the marshy muskeg.  Catwalks inspired dread.  The girls had all heard stories about someone who fell off and was either stranded like a turtle on her back, or mired up to her hips unable to escape.  Crossing catwalks took self-assurance.  These were the first of this trip, and the sight of them had crumbled the will of the already faltering girl.

     The only way to get Heather across was to splint her weakened spirit to mine.  We got her pack on, and I told her to follow my steps.  Humor helped, and as I mounted the logs with her close behind, I told her to watch my wanigan-wiggle for the infamous marsh-wiggle variation.  Step-by-focused-step we walked log lengths, crossing from fat logs to narrow, some decaying, some partially submerging under our weight.  The mosquitoes clamored around our ears, but we didn't swat at them for fear of losing our balance.  A forward rhythm seemed to help, giving us the momentum to move lightly.  At long last, the mire underneath transitioned to mud, and then finally to dry land.

Heather unlocked her gaze from my feet and looked up: a whooping and hooting started. Three girls had waited for us. Fully loaded with packs and paddles, ignoring their instincts to get to the end, they wanted to cheer on their tripmate and walk the last section together. Heather surged toward them, victorious. The four of them high-fived and set off in unison up the trail, singing. I shifted the wanigan away from my sore spot and followed.

    ~           ~            ~           ~            ~            ~

      I found myself gently massaging the small of my back when a shout went up around me on the dock. The five canoes on Devil's Bay had been sighted. Younger children clambered out of the water to stand dripping, watching. The approaching dots on the water became canoes with flashes on both sides, sunlight reflecting off the blade of each wet paddle dipping in time. We waited.

In numbered minutes, the trip would be over. Each girl-woman would be welcomed back into the throng of parents to resume her role as daughter, and tomorrow she would be driven away in a car. But none of them were the same: the wood, the water, the sweat and their shared stories were in these young women now, and they were beautiful and strong.

Their song rose suddenly across the water. It was a glorious moment. As the crowd on the dock roared, the girls raised their paddles high in the air, in salute, in unison.

      I wrote this story years ago. When Bob and I were checking out canoe tripping camps on Lake Temagami for Meg, my own memories of tripping (with a different camp) emerged, and I couldn't believe I might one day be the parent on the dock when I really still felt like the teenager in the canoe.  Catwalks has come true, and I stood on Wabun's dock this summer and watched Andrew and Anna paddle in with their own sections to a glorious reception.  And Meg paddled in too... as a counselor, leading her campers over the lakes and across the portages of their first canoe trip.
     The details of this story -- place names and locations, tripping style -- are real but not perfectly accurate.  For example, the portage I describe goes into a different lake than Florence, but I love those clear blue waters and there is no better place for an air raid.