I wasn’t sure I was going to the anti-ALEC demonstration. Yesterday, it was a hot and humid 84 degrees and today it was supposed to not get above 40 and rain a lot. Maybe even snow!

But I cannot resist a hearty demonstration, especially if it involves unions. My children have instructions to put “Union Maid” on my tombstone. Seriously.

So Vicki and I bundled up and boogied over to OKC for some fun.

We drove up to the Coca Cola Center and found to our amazement a whole bunch of folks streaming into the building, wearing Firefighters, Teamsters, AFSME, UAW, Steelworkers, IBEW, AFT tee shirts and gear. There were hardhats and boots, and cool signs.

But nobody was smiling. Just streaming silently in.

I should let you know that most Oklahomans are a staid bunch. They get a little creeped out with strangers saying hello. They don’t like to raise their voices. They are a bit challenged when it comes to whoop-dee-doo. You might say they are conservative in their emotional make up.

So I wasn’t surprised when the head of the Firefighters’ union stood up and made a helluva great speech, full of fire and brimstone, and not getting much of a response. Pretty quiet. Except for me and my big mouth shouting out, “Right on!” or “YES!”

Hmmmm. I was beginning to get a little peeved, to tell you the truth. A couple of other guys stood up and gave rabble-rousing speeches, too. Same taciturn reaction.

We finally were told that the march was beginning and we were going to the Cox Convention Center and to please stay on the sidewalk. Folks got into their own union’s group.

And all of a sudden we all came alive.

The day was brisk. And the sky was full of scudding clouds. I have to say it was fuckin’ glorious!

A guy with a megaphone starting chanting. We all chimed in. We entered an underpass under a bridge and our shouts echoed like THUNDER. We were blown away by the power of our voices. We were cheering and smiling and yelling our heads off. As we marched along traffic stopped in every direction. News cameras followed, on and on we went and the longer we marched the more excited and downright happy we got.

Happy? We were delirious!

We finally got to the Convention Center and saw a gigantic blow-up pink pig, as tall as a house, dressed in a top hat and waistcoat, smoking a cigar, with a greedy, smirking look on his greedy corporate face. We gathered near it for some final rabble-rousing and then set off cheering and jeering at the fat cats inside the building who smirked at us.

Heh. Those bastards should have known better. “Shame on YOU!” “ALEC is not OK!” We are the UNION!!! We got wilder and wilder with excitement.

One crazy Teamster guy kept yelling through the glass doors, “Hey, college guy! Hey, college guy! Come out!” He was mad as hell at those smirkers. He wouldn’t stop. Vicki and I laughed and loved him with all our hearts. Vicki finally said to him, “We got your back, man!” and he replied, “Nobody has to have MY back!!”

We all roared!

Everybody was in the finest, highest, most powerful mood when all of a sudden, down that narrow downtown street we heard the unmistakable long, low reverberations of the horn of a gigantic semi. The truck appeared like magic, a huge sign emblazoned on its side, “TEAMSTERS!” and the crowd went absolutely WILD! On the driver’s door was painted “Driver Emeritus”, which gave Vicki a huge thrill. (She used to drive a semi, herself.) And then a second truck came around the corner with its sign and we were whipped into a frenzy of love, excitement, pride, pure unadulterated pride. Everybody was smiling and yelling and singing and joyous.

We marched back to the center, laughing and singing, all bonded as one, and strode powerfully into that large meeting hall which had been transformed magically with two guys singing on stage and the smell of food in the air and tables and chairs all arranged for US, the conquering heroes.

Man. Unions. They make the world go around.

So we went through a mile long line, talking and laughing, got gigantic bratwurst hot dogs with chili and cheese and chips and drinks, sat down at a table full of sanitation workers who we loved and who loved us back. Ate. Yelled. Talked. Laughed.

Until it was time to go.

Vicki and I made the long trip home, under the most beautiful black-gray clouds hanging low in the sky, the light so pretty it would make your heart sing. Our throats were sore, we were tired, and really, really, really happy.

. . . Ohhhh, there once was a union maid, who never was afraid . . .

It is another hot, hot day. The fifty-second day of scorching, hellish heat. Half of the trees in the woods on my thirteen beautiful acres are dead or dying. It looks like autumn out there.

But I am cool in my little housie. I put some water and dogfood out for the dogs on the south deck and return to the cool indoors and lay my generous body on my bed to watch Hardball with Chris Matthews, which is firing along at a goodly clip.

I see, out of the corner of my eye, some kind of movement on the floor at the foot of my bed.

I turn my head to get a better look.

It is a snake. Slithering. That sickening, disgusting, creepy slithering that makes the back of your neck, all the way down your spine rise up in a way that is all about . . . I don’t know what.

I sit there paralyzed. A second’s worth. Then my brain jumps into self-preservation mode.

“Okay,” my brain says. “It isn’t a rattler or a cottonmouth. It’s a garter snake. About five or six inches long.”

It is sliding clumsily over my newly painted concrete floor in a kind of sideways manner.

I hate snakes.

And now there is a snake in my house. It slithers sideways, like a sidewinder, I guess because it can’t get its footing (heh) on the slick, newly painted floor. I jump up off the bed and it instantly makes a beeline toward my wall.

At this point I must tell you about my walls:

You know that my house is one big room inside, except for the bathroom. What you don’t know is that the beautifully stuccoed dry wall throughout that big room has a quarter inch gap at the bottom because I have never gotten around to putting baseboards there. Because I am lazy. And because I really saw no need for baseboards. And because the baseboards that Peewee had given me for free had been lying outside under the red cedars for almost four years, in the weather, and were not in any shape to be used for baseboards anymore. (Thank god.  I told you I was lazy.)

The snake saw its opening and slid across that dry wall until he (she?) found enough of a gap to slither under and disappear.

Oh, my God. There is a snake in my wall.

I hurry to the kitchen and get a spatula and run it under the wall trying to make the snake uncomfortable enough to leave, all the while thinking that I am hurting it, which I don’t want to do no matter how much I hate it. That makes it dart out and then, just as quickly,  back it goes into its hiding place.

Great. Juuuuust great.

I think about what to do if it ever comes out again. I think about it having babies inside my walls. I remember it had a little bump in its body. I think, “It has either eaten something which isn’t yet digested or it is pregnant and has a belly full of baby snakes.”

I am very tense and going through the very creepy thought of dozens of snakes in my walls. But there is nothing I can do about any of it, unless I want to rip all the dry wall off all my walls, so I sit on the bed, watching Chris Matthews, waiting for something to happen. As I sit there I realize I should make some plans just in case it ever comes out again. I go back to the kitchen and get a pair of kitchen tongs, a plastic bowl, and a stiff file folder. The plan is to either trap the snake under the plastic bowl and slide the file folder underneath and carry it outside or pick it up with the tongs. So, tools at the ready, I sit on the bed, waiting.

Well, Chris Matthews has some exciting guests on and before I know it I was beginning to relax and had kind of forgotten about the damn snake when I sense movement on the floor.

It had reappeared.

I move quickly to cover it with the plastic bowl.  (I had trapped at least four frogs that way thispast summer and it had always worked perfectly before.)

But not this time. That little snake knew exactly what I was up to and before I knew it, it was back inside the wall.

Crap!

I sit down on the bed and make myself sort of relax and go back to Chris and company.

Sure enough, the snake reappears. This time, even though I am sure I am not going to be successful because that snake is quick, I get up very slowly, tongs in hand, and move stealthily toward it. And BAM! Grab it with the tongs! I don’t have a good grasp on it and it writhes away but I am not to be defeated and pounce again and this time I get her. I am worried that I am hurting her as she writhes and twists to get away, but I won’t let go. Out onto the deck I go, drop heve and saw that I had hurt her side right where the bulge is, and feel sad and sorry for her. It zips away through the crack in the deck, and that is that.

.

I’ve brought papayas to add to the breakfast. They are regarded with suspicion, as I knew they would be, but what the hell, why not?

Coffee perks.

My brother’s sons, my handsome and brilliant nephews, are there. They are all in various stages of their education—astrophysics and chemistry at Oklahoma University for two of my scientist nephews and probably a major artist for the third.

We are all having a lovely time eating hotcakes and bacon and are jocular and happy until my dear brother says from the kitchen, “Nothing ever changes. It doesn’t make any difference who is elected.”

I am in the other room talking to the boys and their girlfriends when I hear those words come out of his mouth.

In a split second my mind races through what has happened to my brother.

I think back to when the boys and their dad had been Libertarians for years until the Unpleasantness happened. (My brother, a very successful, brilliant, funny attorney, after years of struggle with drug addiction, ended up in jail.)

Before his downfall he had had a fine home in the tony estate woods of Edmond—modern architecture, lots of decks and large windows . Fancy cars and clothes and lots of stuff. Now it is all gone. After three years in the pen he has nothing left, not even his career. He has been struggling to give his boys and himself a home and food on the table.

Then I think back to a conversation we had when he was released from prison and I visited him at the Halfway House he was in as a requirement of his parole. He told me how he had to take a couple of buses daily to his low wage job across town and then again another couple of buses across town to be drug-tested three times a week.

He, in all seriousness and with vehemence, was telling me about how unfair it was for the public transportation system to charge him an extra 50 cents to change buses.

Fifty cents means a lot to a person who is poor. It’s the difference between keeping or losing your job or staying out of jail because you’ve missed your drug test.

Fifty cents.

(Boy. Did I know what he meant. But that’s another story.)

I’m thinking about how the experience changed him from a Libertarian to a Lefty.

And I’m thinking about how maddening it is that he thinks President Obama has not done enough for The People and is just part of a corrupt and unchangeable system.

Sometimes … words fail me. But not for long.

“Thanks a lot!” I yell out to him from the living room.

And then I give him a list of things that have changed because the Democratic Party, the Left, and activists (like me) have made happen.

No more nuclear testing above or below ground. (I got arrested three times for that in Nevada.)

The end of the Vietnam War.

President Johnson’s War on Poverty, fulfilling Kennedy’s dream, left undone when he was assassinated. He wasn’t able to do it in his lifetime because a Republican congress had done the same thing to him that they are now doing to Obama. Social Security!

Medicare!

Civil rights!

Women getting the right to vote!

The environmental movement, slowly and surely, changing the profligate ways of the American people regarding waste and toxins and pollution and resulting in air and water quality legislation that continues to this day.

A health care system for the people (flawed, though it is, thanks to Republican opposition) that Obama managed to get passed by a nervous and recalcitrant Congress. No President had managed to do that since Theodore Roosevelt first proposed it back at the turn of the twentieth century.

The minimum wage. The raising of which is still blocked by Republicans every time it comes up in Congress.

The public transportation bus he was riding because he didn’t have a car!

And now the progressive Occupy movement. Did you know “occupy” comes from early Union actions when they took over factories back in the day? Did you know that it is the term used when Lefty students took over Administration offices on university campuses in the 1960s when they were pushing for peace and free speech? And now it is the official Word of the Year, according to linguist, Geoff Nunberg. I could go on and on and on. You know I could.

It burns me up. All these years of working for a better world disregarded by my brother who is more than smart, pretty much aware of what’s happening in politics, and is a really good person. If my brother is cynical . . .Oh, my God!

It’s Sunday, a couple of weeks later. I am watching a political talk show and listening to some guy from The National Review. He is saying that there is a psychological term, “learned helplessness,” that describes people who opt out of the political process. These are people who don’t want to be bothered by the hard work required to make a difference in the world.

Words of truth from a right-winger, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Little do the cynics know how rewarding, uplifting, and FUN it is to be a part of change. It feels great when the nightly news reports some kind of change in governmental policy or change in mood or conventional wisdom out there in the land that we progressive activists have managed to accomplish.

Last night my daughter called me. She was excited and thrilled with the fact that her foster brother, my foster son, Brad, is one of the leaders at Occupy L.A. and had been part of the negotiating committee between Occupy and The Powers That Be in the City of Los Angeles.

(Yes, we know. There are no leaders at Occupy; but Brad points out that means the movement isn’t leader-less but leader-ful. And he was there for all the negotiations.)

But before Brad had gotten involved in Occupy L.A. he had written to me about being turned off by all political parties. He said they were all the same and nothing would change.

Sound familiar?

Yes, I was angry. As angry as I had been at my brother. If he thought that all political parties were the same, he hadn’t been paying attention. He didn’t know what Obama had been going through. And it wasn’t because Obama was inept or weak or any of the other epithets that had been thrown at him from the Right and—I might angrily add—the Left. It was not the first time a person of courage and intelligence and charisma and goodness had been blocked by folks who had vested interests in things staying the same. I wrote him back and scolded and carried on, to no effect. He wouldn’t budge.

But perhaps he’s gotten a taste of what I’m talking about because last night he told my daughter how he had been on the negotiating committee of Occupy L.A. and had been the driving influence in getting The Powers That Be in Los Angeles to offer the Occupiers a huge plot of land for a garden, 10,000 square feet of office space for $1.00 year, and housing for the homeless on Skid Row. Quite a feat! I was so PROUD of Brad!!

But, guess what? His proposal was voted down by the Occupiers themselves, and then withdrawn by The Powers That Be. The Occupiers would not be satisfied and The Powers That Be couldn’t see any good coming out of a rebuffed offer or, worse, the media saying they were weak.

So, Brad, not so easy, huh? I know that now that you have tasted the excitement and fulfillment of activism, you will not let it go. Just because things didn’t go your way, even though you have been camped out for a long, long time,under their noses and intheir faces, strong and true. . .you lost.

Do not get cynical. Get back on the horse and try again. You will succeed, but not always, every time, on everything.

And when it doesn’t work out and you don’t get what you’re working for, or you do but it’s not quite what the ideal would be, some horse’s ass will say that you are incompetent, or sold out, or some such piece of nonsense.

Keep on truckin’, Brad.

Power to the People!

I saw The Descendants on Christmas Day. It’s set in Hawaii. I realized how deeply geography has affected me. I’m from Hawaii. It’s a huge factor. Not many people I am around grew up there. I find myself to be an oddball.  Place. Setting.

Geography is destiny.

Water

If geography is destiny, then water is life.

I no longer wash my laundry with any kind of soap. Someone said about my experiment that I had finally gone all the way back to beating my clothes on the rocks in the river.

And that’s exactly how I feel.

I feel really pure and good about it.

And my laundry is cleaner and brighter and softer than it’s ever been.

Win-win.

My Body

I’m getting older. I’m 68. My primary care doctor said that I was right at the point where my body would start falling apart. He told me that three years ago.

He was right.

My brain is aging. I often don’t remember why I am walking into the bathroom or up to the sink or to the laundry room. So I’ve given myself tricks for remembering. They are:

Saying the word, out loud (this is important) of the thing I am going into the other room for. This works. I think because when you hear something, a different part of your brain responds than the part that just thinks it. When I just think something I see a picture in my mind, which, for some reason, doesn’t stick in the memory as the audio part does.

It also might be that in my little struggle for the word, I am imprinting that thing somewhere in my brain, within the reach of my memory. I’m thinking that the picture part of my brain doesn’t remember things very well, but the language part does.

This really works.

If I remember to do it.

Food and Drugs

Don’t let The Man invade your body and mess with your health.

I won’t get into how angry I am with pharmaceutical corporations. And I won’t tell you how angry I am with doctors who rely on them, ignore the warnings, and overprescribe those same medications.

But I will tell you what happened to me.

I have been dealing with gastrointestinal stuff. I went to a recommended gastrointestinal doctor who did a look-see down my esophagus because I had intense acid reflux. And since my dear brother had died of esophageal cancer and I had read about Barrett’s syndrome, which is a condition resulting from continual acid reflux sometimes resulting in esophageal cancer, I was concerned.

Sure enough, I had a lot of raw, open injury.

So he put me on Dexilant to give my esophagus time to heal.

I told him that I did not want to be on a proton pump inhibitor forever. I told him I was concerned about side effects.

These are the side effects listed by the FDA on Dexilant:

Blood and Lymphatic System Disorders: autoimmune hemolytic anemia, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura
Ear and Labyrinth Disorders: deafness
Eye Disorders: blurred vision
Gastrointestinal Disorders: oral edema, pancreatitis
General Disorders and Administration Site Conditions: facial edema
Hepatobiliary Disorders: drug-induced hepatitis
Immune System Disorders: anaphylactic shock (requiring emergency intervention), exfoliative dermatitis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, toxic epidermal necrolysis (some fatal)
Metabolism and Nutrition Disorders: hypomagnesemia, hyponatremia
Musculoskeletal System Disorders: bone fracture
Nervous System Disorders: cerebrovascular accident, transient ischemic attack
Renal and Urinary Disorders: acute renal failure
Respiratory, Thoracic and Mediastinal Disorders: pharyngeal edema, throat tightness
Skin and Subcutaneous Tissue Disorders: generalized rash, leucocyto … oh, never mind. There’s a lot more but isn’t it enough to know how bad the side effects are?

But there’s one more side effect I need to include—a diminished immune system. It turns out that the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs is a huge part of our immune system. We kill a whole lot of germs in our stomachs.

Anyway, I took Dexilant for six months. I found I had a lot of difficulty digesting food. Huge bloating. Constipation. And some of the other stuff on the list.

I went for my six month checkup. I told the doctor of my concerns. I asked him how much longer I would be on Dexilant. He told me I would be on it for life.

What the hell??!

So I went home, put my Dexilant away, went on the Internet to see how to control the rebound of acid reflux (which is legendary), put a bottle of Tums in my purse and on my bedside table, discontinued eating meat, started on a low-acid foods diet, and lo and behold, I am Dexilant-free with only a tinge of acid reflux.

And almost every day, no Tums, either.

Ta dah!!

Energy

I think about energy a lot. I make large and small choices with energy being a major part of my decisions. I think about it because of climate change and earthquakes and pollution.

Climate Change: Drought and intense heat, which has never been recorded before, came to Oklahoma this past summer. I watched a third of my forest die. Anyway, I think it’s dead. Oaks were hard hit. And ash. You don’t see stuff like that in the city or the suburbs.

I came to the country to see how the planet was doing. What I found out is that climate change is real.

Earthquakes: Lots of fracking locally. I have felt four good sized temblors since I’ve lived in this house. The talk around here is that fracking is causing it.

If you’re not a part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem, so I drive a 2001 Prius, a hybrid that gets about 45 miles to the gallon. It was used when I bought it, but still expensive. At least to me it was expensive. I felt good when I did it. That little gem gets between 40 and 45 miles per gallon.

And I live in a house I designed to be a passive solar structure. I would have liked to put in solar and geothermal and wind power, but I couldn’t afford it.

The house is like a greenhouse in the winter, unless it’s cloudy. In the summer breezes cool it. Eventually I’ll have grown deciduous trees that will shade it in the summer for additional cooling. When the leaves fall in the winter, the sun will let in the warmth.

I feel pure and good.

Mother Nature. I love her.

Plant Life

Masanobu Fukuoka inspires me. Leave plants alone, he says. Let the strong survive. DON’T WEED. Plant clover. Don’t prune.

Suits me.

To a tee.

Animal Life

I thought I was an equal opportunity appreciator of all animal life and that I could love a bug as completely as a fluffy kitten.

I have been humbled.

I have actually considered pesticides. But I restrained myself. Luckily I am a procrastinator and by the time I actually stood before the insecticide section at Lowe’s, I came to my senses. I use canola oil for plant pests. Works great. And if you look on the label for ingredients in “green” insecticides, guess what is the active ingredient is?

Canola oil.

And bizarre things happen in the country.

My neighbor Shirley tells me she found a dead wild duck in her carport. It was missing its head. She said it had really orange feet.

I have ducks in my pond.

I guess I have one less duck than I used to.

I wonder which dog got it.

Interpersonal Interaction

This year I’ve had some spats and one doozy of a fight.

I won’t go into it but … it was not my fault.

I would tell you if it was.

I think I am a peacenik, commie, green, catholic, atheist, buddhist, existentialist, democrat because, like Joan Baez, I know how violent my emotions sometimes are and I need to get myself to a place that doesn’t let me get into that frame of mind.

I am actually acquiring some wisdom.

Comes with age.

The Planet

I connect most intimately with the planet in the mornings when the sunlight is streaming into my house through all eight of my sliding glass doors—east, south, west. The whole house is full of light.

The sun comes up through the trees in the east in the early morning, then slowly through the whole length of my house through the six sliding glass doors on the south from nine until about two. I watch the shadows move. In the afternoon it comes through the western sliding glass door until it sinks behind the trees.

The prettiest time of the day is about nine o’clock in the morning. The wide stripes of shadow and light lie across the whole house. Every chair, plant, statue throws its shape on the floor. The whole house is like a chiaroscuro Mondrian.

I feel as though I’m in paradise.

Being Alone

Gives me time to think my thoughts. I have conversations with myself.

I also talk to my dogs. We mostly use body language.

I have especially brilliant arguments with people who are not here. Not mean arguments. Just brilliant. I’m finally allowed to say everything I want to say without being interrupted.

Capitalism vs. Communism

The most stable and happiest societies are the ones that have the most equality in civil rights and money.

Capitalism has a problem in that regard. It’s an economic system built on competition so naturally it eventually reaches a point where just a few are at the top of the heap and the rest of us are miserable.

Socialism/Communism is the opposite of competition. It’s about cooperation and equality.

I think we are struggling between those two systems. We are rumbling and tumbling into a new era. The injustice of capitalism, creating bigger and bigger divisions in wealth between the classes, has created its antithesis, communism/socialism. Those two oppositional systems are converging and creating a synthesis.

I can feel the movement toward equality and justice. I see it everywhere. Do you?

And in conclusion . . .

Hau’oli makahiki hou, Dear Readers.

Aloha nui loa.

Aloha.

The day moves gently.

It is perfect. The sounds – birds, leaves rustling, Neil singing – caress me.

The world outside this house is Eden. Glowing green, pulsing yellow, a flash of red, purple peeks out. Light bounces everywhere – off the seed tassels of the grasses, from the fluttering leaves of the cottonwood, from the glassy surface of the pond.

Mother Nature’s Merry Little Breezes are dancing.

It’s a Sunday afternoon here at Chigger Lake.

I eat a pear, juicy and sweet.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Today I shall work in the yard. Or rather, hang out and look at the yard. If the spirit moves me I might move a rock or plant something in the dirt or trim something. But probably not.

I fight with my Puritan Self. It wants to be working and busy and putting things straight. It is powerful and nags. It is aware of what other people say and think and wants to fit in. It has rules and regulations and feels guilt.

Not today, Puritan Self. Today you shall be put away in the back bedroom to simmer and kvetch.

Today my Child Self shall play. She is seven years old. She is lazy. She wanders around looking at stuff. She is interested in everything.

Ohhhh. A hawk just flew so close to the house, I saw its tail feathers in detail. Swoooosh, gone. It’s looking for cats to eat. Hah! Not today, hawk.

I think I’ll cook an artichoke. When I bought it the boy who was bagging my groceries didn’t know what it was. He was mighty suspicious of it.

An artichoke with lemon mayonnaise. Yes. That’ll be nice.

I go out on the deck, under the shade of the cottonwood tree and lie down. I close my eyes and listen to everything. I feel everything. I sense the light and shadow on my eyelids.

I hear a meow and look over and see Rosie the Cat through the screen of the sliding glass door. She’s looking at me and I can tell she wants food. I ignore her. She’s getting fat, losing her waistline. She’ll have to wait until Che the Cat comes out from under the abandoned guinea coop to come in for his supper.

But my reverie has been disturbed and I feel Puritan Self stirring. It’s saying that I must get up and get going and DO SOMETHING, NOW.

So I rouse myself, sit up painfully, look around and see a million things that should be done. At least a million. I have GOT to learn to ignore that Puritan Self before it kills me.

But I get up. Rosie comes outside and follows me. This is uncommon. She loves me more each day since I rescued her from Orval’s house. Four months of living on the lam from the dogs has taught her that I am her very, very, VERY best friend. Ever. And I feed her.

We walk around the outside of the house and I realize that I have to water everything. Just because we had a rainstorm two days ago doesn’t let me off the hook. And of all the outside work I do, watering is the most fruitful and the most gratifying.

Water is life.

So I pull out the long, long hose, turn on the pump water and start on my side “yard”. It is a desolate stretch of red clay with clumps of scraggly clover here and there, sprigs of some kind of grass sparsely dotting the clay, two tenacious apple trees which seem to be making it, although they aren’t the most luscious apple trees I’ve ever seen. I thought I had lost them for sure last year, but here they are, struggling in the clay, with me trying to amend the soil after the fact. There have been some blossoms and will eventually have some fruit. I hope.

Who knows?

I water, water, water everything, including the bare clay and the now defunct fig tree. Something…a deer?…has snapped off every leaf for the two years since I’ve put it in the ground and I guess that has killed it. Or maybe it was our very intense winter this past year.

I water my compost pile, melons spreading, tomatoes popping, sunflowers reaching toward the sun. God knows what else is finding its way out of the ground, but there is a LOT of plant life coming up. The mound itself sits about ten feet from the door of my shed and last year, when the gigantic sunflowers came up, the whole shed was hidden. That mound has to be unbelievably fertile. I’ve thrown eggs shells, coffee grounds, every kind of peeling and seed, leaf and root, you can imagine. When it began to look so horrible that even I couldn’t stand it, I began grinding up all my raw vegetable kitchen waste in my blender, added water and dumped it wherever the spirit told me to.

It’s amazing how much vegetable compost a single person makes in a day.

I dragged my hose back to the pump, turned off the water, unfastened the sprinkler head, dragged it across my driveway to the OTHER hose, fastened it, walked back to the pump, and turned it on.

There are a lot of steps in this watering business when you don’t (or can’t afford) a sprinkling system.

I walked to the east side of the house and started watering. That side of the house has a hill sloping down to the forest and volunteer bermuda grass has begun growing and spreading up the hill. But today it didn’t look all that healthy.

Could it be the gray water from my washing machine is making it sick? I thought gray water was supposed to be good for plants. I don’t use bleach. Is it the boron in the 20 Mule Team Borax? Too much boron? I know plants must have SOME boron.

The boron question. Perplexing.

I watered the lilac bushes and the shrubs and daydreamed about putting in morning glories around my outdoor shower. I have been trying to figure out a way to install some kind of lattice work so the morning glories could climb it and make a pretty screen next to my shower. I seem to not be able to think of anything that doesn’t require digging in that horrible cement-like clay.

Neighbor Jim suggested I get a post hole digger attachment for my drill. I’m thinking that’s my best bet.

I notice clumps of white froth at the bases of clover and wildflower stalks. Caterpillar eggs? Frog eggs?

I realize I’ve got three different kinds of clover growing. This gets me excited. Clover is great for soil. I’ve got clover that grows waist high and has yellow flowers, I’ve got clover that has beautiful leaves and a lovely round white blossom and I’ve got groundcover clover, again with yellow flowers.

Good.

I water the basil and Italian parsley and cherry tomatoes in pots on the deck, and the succulents, too.

I water my huge plumeria, looking elegantly Hawaiian in its pot.

I water all the baby cottonwoods and the cedars and the red and green shrubs. I water the skunk weed, the prettiest yellow flowers ever, I water the tiny purple violets hiding in the tall grass, I water the ash seedlings and the hemlock seedlings, I water the buffalo grass and the willow tree, I water the verbena and the pretty white flowers that look like trumpets, I water the nettles which will have huge gorgeous purple flowers soon, I water the potted junipers and the aloe vera.

All watered.

I turn off the sprinkler head, walk to the water pump, turn off the water, walk back to the house.

I leave the hose stretched across the driveway. “Hah!” Child Self says, impishly.

Rosie follows. Wants to EAT! Angela Davis, the newly spayed neighbor dog whose real name is Princess, stretches herself awake. I pick a couple of ticks off of her. Frontline doesn’t always do the trick. I realize that after two years of ticks I am no longer the least bit squeamish with them. Che the Cat meows at the door and I let him in. I feed the cats and the dog. Diego the Dog will be in later. He probably is rolling in something he thinks is fabulous. Two days ago it was oil. Engine oil. All over his neck and chest.

What the hell is WITH that dog??

And I am here to report that Dawn dishwashing liquid really DOES dispel grease. Diego is my testimonial. If you buy it you can go to their website and they’ll give $1.00 to help wildlife. It is the official wildlife soap. It is used on birds and seals and other living creatures which have been trapped in oil spills.

And now I’m back at my computer, writing this day down for you. The sun is getting lower in the sky. The shadows are beginning to lengthen from west to east. I haven’t done much but I sure am happy.

 Everybody’s fed. Now it’s my turn.

 Artichoke, here I come.

(By Commie Mom, For David Gregory, who asked.)

I wrote this story five years ago.  It is about pouring the concrete foundation for my little environmental steel and glass house here on thirteen beautiful acres in Oklahoma.

I designed the house.  It’s a simple rectangle (the best environmental shape, it turns out) with one huge room except for the bathroom which does have real walls, contrary to what I wrote so long ago.

Peewee built it for me, with my help as gopher and holder of tools.  He can do anything and knows everybody and got deals from folks that made my life easy and sweet.

So here’s the story, folks.

It has rained and rained.  I love every single drop.  Can’t get enough.  It refreshes every cell of my body.  The last forty years without rain in California was like Moses’ trek through the desert.

However…

it slows things down in the ”building the house” department. If it weren’t for the rain, things would pretty much be done. 

Maybe that’s why things (traffic, conversations, lines at the supermarket) are slower here…the weather just makes you slow down. 

So finally, between the tropical storm and Hurricane Henriette’s remaining load of rain, there was a break and enough time between the swiftly scudding black clouds to put up the forms for the concrete foundation and pour the dang thing.

Peewee calls Ted, the concrete guy.  They arrive in the heat of the day.  And I mean heat.  (I have heard many people say that the heat in Oklahoma is the most intense of their lives.)  He and his boys (Steve, Other Steve, and Robert) start putting in the forms for the concrete.  Other Steve looks like my son, Jesse, who died seventeen years ago…I take his picture…he smiles into the camera.

Ted’s the owner-boss.  He’s been doing concrete since he was 8 years old.  One of the Steves beats his number.  He says he was 4 when HE started.  Says the only time his dad ever showed up was when he wanted Steve to help pour concrete.  Robert smokes his cigarette and grins.

Me:  “Ted, what’s the difference between cement and concrete?”

Ted:  “Rocks.”

Me:  “Oh.”

They are good at their jobs.  They drag the lumber for the concrete forms from the pile Peewee had left a few days ago.  They bolster it against their thighs and pound with large hammers.  The force of the hammers slam into their legs.

Within minutes they have hammered three sides of the 20 x 60 rectangle I will eventually have as my home.  They measure several times.  Horizontally, vertically, diagonally.  They level the boards several times.  Then, in the sweltering heat, they climb into Ted’s truck and speed off to their next job.  It’s taken no time at all.  Just like Peewee said.

I don’t know when they’ll be back.  Rain, you know.  It’s never too hot to work, or too humid.  But rain is a different story.  It messes with the concrete.  It makes the trucks slide.  People can adapt but their machinery and stuff can’t. 

People rock.

So the form sits on the ground like a jilted lover.  Waiting for cement.  Rain comes.  Rain goes.  Over the next week it’s never quite clear enough to get the boys back.

But Rowdy and Artie come.  Rowdy is Peewee’s son.  He’s a plumber.  Licensed.  They come EARLY in the morning and lay the plumbing in the house just where I drew it hastily on lined paper several days ago.  I don’t get to see them do their magic.  It’s so early that they don’t want to wake me.  They leave the pipes standing at attention along the north side of the house.  There are fat pipes and capped pipes and thin hoses.  I’ll have a kitchen and bathroom sink, two showers (one in, one outside) a washing machine and a toilet. 

This place is getting downright civilized.

I will have the kitchen sink there against the north wall.   I’ll be able to look out of the window above it while doing my dishes.  There will be a shade garden outside that window, with moss. I’ll collect from the forest around my house.  And ferns, too.  I saw some when I hiked there the other day.  I won’t have any Leverite rocks there, though. 

Leverite rock:  it’s about three hundred pounds, black, kind of flat….and you leave ‘er right there.  Peewee said that.   Heh.  Get it?  Leave ‘er right there.

The bathroom will also be against the north wall.  This provides insulation against north winds.  It will provide mass to gather heat in the winter and will be cool in the summer. 

I want the bathroom to be totally open, but my friends say they won’t come to my house if I do that.  So, maybe bamboo shades, long ones, attached to cross bars and rolled down to serve as walls.  

I am seeing all this in my mind as I look at the smooth sand and the blue and orange and white hoses and pipes sticking out of it.

Another week goes by.  Rain again.  Yes, I still love it.  Even more.

Then Peewee calls. 

“It’ll be tomorrow morning.  8:00.”

I am excited.

Peewee has managed to map things out in his head and by combining this job with that, and doing a double loopdy-loop, has saved me a bunch-o-money. 

(A brief aside…everyone said it would cost more and take longer than expected….it hasn’t cost more.  It’s cost less….Peewee is a genius.  The rain has slowed us down.  But that’s a GOOD thing.)

It’s 8:00.  The boys return.  Steve grabs THREE fishing poles and walks down to the pond.  He has come prepared for the wait of the cement truck.

After a couple of hours a cement truck comes.  It drives down my beautiful driveway to the site.  Steve puts away his poles.  The boys put on their big, yellow rubber boots.  They look like little kids standing there. 

The cement comes out slowly at first.  Just a little.  Like a fat, constipated old man.   Peewee tells me it will come pretty fast now.  And it does.  The boys stand inside the form pushing concrete with long-handled trowels.  They use their feet, too, to push the stuff around.  They sweat.  They never take their eyes from it.  They never lose speed.  It’s hypnotizing, watching them.  The swirl of the chunky gray goo moves in front of their tools, filling every space and low spot. 

Fishing Steve (he loves to fish) pulls a screed.  It’s the hardest job.  It’s also his favorite.  He pushes wide swaths of concrete before him.  The whole form fills. The second truck comes as soon as the first leaves.  More intense pulling and pushing of concrete.  They’ve not stopped for some time. 

Both cement trucks are empty now.

I give the concrete guy a check.  They leave.

I watch the smooth troweling of the “butter” (the slick, watery top coat of concrete).   The boys’ backs are bent, their attention complete.  No one talks.  Now Fishing Steve uses a motorized twirling trowel.  The other guys hand trowel the edges.

It’s time for lunch and Ted gives Robert money to buy us all hamburgers from Sherry Lynn’s restaurant out on Highway 177.  She grinds her chuck fresh every morning. 

We sit under the oak trees next to the pond.  The hamburgers are big and juicy, with everything on them.  We drink Dr. Peppers.  They are more popular here than Coke.

We walk back to the foundation.

It sits like polished glass in its form.  It is gorgeous.  I can see reflections of clouds in it.

An optical illusion has taken place, which the concrete guys and Peewee have witnessed over and over.  The concrete has somehow enlarged the footprint of the house.  It looks twice as big .  I swear.

The foundation has been poured. 

They wash up at my new orange outside pump. 

They light cigarettes, get into the truck, wave, and are gone.

Can I be any happier?

Can I?

I look down at the pile of dog hair, red dirt, bits of dried grass in a neatly swept pile at my feet.

I contemplate it.

Dirt.

It means soil. That’s a good thing.

It means filth. That’s a bad thing.

It is gossip. It is pornography. It is a pejorative when used as an adjective: dirt cheap, dirt farmer, dirt poor, dirty, dirty-minded.

Poor, dear, sweet dirt. It is as important as water and air to our very existence but if you were to say that sad word most people would think of it as something vile.

I think of all this as I look at my little pile of…dirt.

This past month or so I have been thinking about dirt because I am coming closer than I’ve ever been to accepting dirt as, at its best, a miraculous thing and at its worse, something I am learning to live with.

I think about the differences between city dirt and country dirt.

City dirt is filthy. It is not comprised of soil. Instead it is a greasy substance. It’s black and clings to door knobs and turns windows gray. It is comprised of toxins like oil and smoke and chemicals.

I remember my first experience of living in New York City and coming home from work and wiping my nose and seeing that my snot had turned black. I saw black under my fingernails, saw a long black smudge on the inside of my collar where it rubbed against my neck.

Country dirt is not filthy. It is soil which is the product of busy worms and microbes breaking down dead plants through happy and busy digestions. That natural process turns the corpses of plants into the sweet sustenance of the world. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade! Nice job, kids.

Your snot doesn’t change color when you breathe air in the country. Your fingernails get dirty only when you dig in the dirt. Your collar, your shirt, your shoes, your pants, everything you wear, will become the color of the dirt around you because it is everywhere, so you wear it like a garment. Actually, it IS a garment. The dirt becomes incorporated into the fabric.

I think about why we think of dirt as bad.

I remember a “Teachers’ Breakfast” the parents of my school had for us one morning in the auditorium. There were plenty of donuts and coffee and delicious treats. I was standing and talking to the principal about something or other when the donut I was eating somehow fell out of my hand and onto the floor. With no hesitation at all, I bent down and picked it up and continued eating it.

“Donna!” my principal gasped. I just smiled and said, “A little dirt never hurt anyone.”

I remember being at the check out stand at the grocery store. My cloth bags were in a pile at the end of the conveyor belt in front of a frail, very old, woman whose job it was to bag my groceries. She had severe osteoporosis, it looked like, and she was hunched over my bags and said, “I hate these bags. I don’t like to touch them. They make my hands feel dirty. The plastic is much cleaner.”

I replied, “A little dirt never hurt anyone.”

I remember, time after time, going to teacher professional development meetings at grand hotels and going up to the coffee and pastries displayed on large tables in the hallways outside the meeting rooms. There would be stacks of china cups and saucers and stacks of styrofoam cups. I would get my pen out and write, “No Styrofoam!” on a styrofoam cup and leave it next to the stack. (I have given myself the job of Styrofoam Cop as my little gift to the world.)

One time, after I had made my little guerilla art statement on one of those vile things earlier in the morning, I stood behind a nicely dressed, pretty teacher in line at the coffee table and watched her make a face at my “No Styrofoam” cup and pick one up anyway. I said, “Did you know it takes 500,000 years for a styrofoam cup to break down?” She was astounded at my rudeness. But, being the composed person she is, who is almost always is in control and thinks most people are beneath her, looked at me and told me it was none of my business. I told her that it was my business because it was hurting our planet. We exchanged a couple of intense comments and then she rolled her eyes, put the cup back, and took a china cup and saucer.

And stomped away.

I suspect that the reason she (and many others, I might add) choose the styrofoam over the china, is that it has never been touched by human hands.

That means it’s clean.

I think of a science fiction story I read a million years ago. In the story, people had become so germophobic that they no longer touched each other and were completely alone in their hermetically sealed homes and only interacted with each other through holograms.

Imagine a world without touch.

I look at the dog hair in the pile. And remember:

My son came home from junior high one day and told me that his science teacher had them do an experiment to see where most germs were in the classroom. It turned out to be their hair. I guess it traps a lot of stuff because hair has such a large surface area.

Then, some years after that, I read that the first thing students notice about a new teacher is his/her hair. Light, bouncy, shiny hair must subconsciously mean to the observer that the hair is free of germs, microbes, DIRT. And that means it’s safe to touch and smell.

I look at the dog hair again and realize that the worst toxins that could exist on it might be some poison ivy that they may have brushed up against outside in the woods.

I look at the bits of grass in the pile and see the potential for soil.

My little pile of dirt that I had been hating has become something less lethal, more friendly.

I realize that most of my feelings about dirt being a bad thing are from my society. A dirty face on a child usually means the mother isn’t taking good care of their kid. Dirty clothes means the same thing. If a mother was a good mother, that child would be clean, clean, clean!

Then I think of my mother, seeing us kids coming through the back door in the kitchen, covered in dirt. She always was glad to see us dirty. She would say, “Oh, you’re dirty! You must have had a good time!” And then she’d laugh out loud.

I think of my students in the heart of the Inner City, almost all of them in clean, ironed clothes. Even their sneakers are spotless. And I remember how some of them would sob if they got those perfect clothes dirty. Their mothers would be furious, they’d tell me. They would be getting a whuppin’.

I think of how I’ve struggled out here at Chigger Lake, trying to get my house clean. I think of the concrete floor that, no matter how long or how hard or with what I scrub it, doesn’t relinquish the orange-red smudges of dog and cat footprints, smears, and sprays from the dogs of muddy water after their trek through the pond.

I think of the glass in the eight sliding glass doors that have never been washed. I think of the thin layer of dust that falls on everything in the house in a matter of minutes after I’ve dusted. I think of why it’s so important to me to clean the dirt off everything and realize it’s because of what people will think of me.

That’s all it is. It’s fear of being thought of as a dirty, lazy person.

I think of bleach. I think of how I’ve used it for years so my whites would be white and people would think of me as a clean person, which makes me think of Paul teaching me that yellowy-grayish whites can be a badge of honor.

I think of the detergents I used to use, with their chemical poisons, being emptied out of my washer into my land, killing the microbes that make the sweet crust of life on our planet.

I think of the rust (the fungus kind) that’s developed out on all my cottonwood trees. Their leaves are now covered with an orange powder which leads to brown spots which leads to brown leaves which leads to bare branches. I think of how I was tempted to spray them with poison to kill that menace and how I stopped in mid-thought to think in other terms of dealing with it. (Milk, Dear Reader, kills rust on plants.)

I think of how human beings in our culture fear insects, which are considered dirty and scary. The only good insect is a dead insect, most people think. I think of insect bombs and sprays and chemicals. I think of it being on my skin, in my nose, in my lungs, in my blood.

In my hair.

I think of an aquaintance who set off an insect bomb in her baby daughters’ bedroom while she slept, not realizing that it was poisonous to her child and only found out later how dangerous that had been. I think of my apple trees, still struggling in the north yard, but with brand new, bright green leaves, popping up here and there on the thin, long branches. It is the very first time they’ve looked like they’re happy.

It’s because of dirt.

Manure and my special fertilizer, my own urine in a 20 to 1 ratio with water, the recipe from Mother Earth News, to be exact. I’ve put it on the clay around the base of their trunks. Within days, leaves began to pop out on the branches.

Insects are eating the edges of their new leaves. I sprayed a mixture of canola oil and water on the leaves to make them distasteful to insects and as I bent one of the supple branches down to look more closely at the leaves and there, there! I saw nestled in the the green, green leaves, was the most adorable teddy bear of a spider. He looked at me curiously and stayed put. I laughed out loud.

Thanks, kid.

When I decided to move to Oklahoma’s countryside it was because I was faced with not being able to afford to live in California. I built the first house I have ever owned with $48,000 from my California State Teachers Retirement fund.

I built it with every environmental trick in the book that I could afford.

 I moved to Oklahoma because I wanted to be close to nature. I have always, at least since the fourth grade, been committed to sustainability which meant living as lightly on the earth as possible. I wanted, in my golden years, to be part of the interconnectedness of Life, to get back to the basics. I believe that if you are not a part of the solution, then you are a part of the problem.

 * * * * *

My cottonwood tree, the tree that shades almost my whole house halving my electric bill in the summer, the tree I love with a deep and true love because of its dancing leaves and its sheltering of woodpeckers, hummingbirds, blue indigos, and all such creatures, was crispy brown and had only a few leaves left on a single branch. The saga continues.

 * * * * *

I’ve saved a small part of the cottonwood tree so far but not the tiniest sign of life (yet) in the rest of the tree.

I did it by daily deep watering. I have also put two applications of my special urine liquid fertilizer (recipe from Mother Earth News) in the same area. The new leaves are now deep, deep green. They’ve even begun to sprout on one side of the trunk. I have read that the best way to treat infestations of plants of all kinds is to make the plant stronger. Sounds right to me.

However, I found a cottonwood borer today. It’s an insect that looks like someone designed it as a piece of art for a boutique hotel. They are the little guys who cause “scorch” disease in all kinds of trees. They do this by boring into the base of the cottonwood and laying their eggs there, disrupting the xylem, which carries water to all parts of the tree. The tree eventually dies of thirst.

So today I was not charmed by the borer’s pretty self. Instead, I picked it up and dropped it on the deck and stepped on it with my clodhopper shoe. It was amazingly hard to kill. It has a really hard exoskeleton. I had to crunch it several times as hard as I could.

After the crunching I ran to my friend, The Internet, to see if there was a substance I could use to save my tree. I found an insecticide I was briefly tempted to use, a tobacco based poison that kills cottonwood borers. But it kills good insects, too. Like bees. I guess, if it is scorch that’s killing the tree, and not just heat and drought, it’s just gonna have to die. I have depended on it for a huge part of cooling my house without the use of manmade energy. It is a serious matter for me. Financially and morally.

 * * * * *

I think we have been above 100 degrees here at Chigger Lake for 23 straight days, with no end in sight. Climate change, folks. We humans use a whole lot of energy for our modern day lives which warms up our planet. Everybody needs big trees to shade their homes.

 * * * * *

My forest has the following species of trees in it:

Ash, two or three kinds of oak, red bud, wild plum, red cedar, dogwood, elm, and another tree I have yet to identify.

Violets grow in the forest, and moss, and poison ivy, snakes, and ticks, too, lest we think Mother Nature is just some kind of nice old lady. She’s got an edge to her, you know.

One species of oak is dying and redbuds, too. I see their brown leaves here and there in the woods. An old, pretty oak bordering the driveway is almost completely brown. I shake my head hard when I see it as I pass because I can’t stand to think it won’t be there much longer.

The Johnson grass is only a few inches tall compared to the four or five feet tall it got to be in past years. The sage is half its normal height. At the edge of the forest a huge red cedar’s branches are limp. The sunflowers are stunted except for one that always sprouts from my compost heap but even it sags in the hottest part of the day.

But, my goodness! The tree seedlings! They are everywhere! I imagine them grown tall and heady, shading my whole yard all the way down the hill to the pond. They will someday be the canopy for life here.

 * * * * *

I am not going to mow my grass while this drought is going on.

I watched the three (three)mower guys along Killer Highway 177 mowing on both sides of the highway. The grass was already stunted because of the drought but they mowed anyway, kicking up dirt as they went down the road. I am going to keep my grass long and green, especially during this drought. Plants hold water and when they are mowed too much, or dug up, or burned, or whatever, water evaporation from the soil occurs, leading to desertification. Desertification is a relatively new phenomenon on Earth and it is growing very, very fast.

 * * * * *

The drought preoccupies me.

I walked past a Yukon Denali in the parking lot of my grocery store yesterday. Someone had left it running with the air conditioning on. It (and the heat) made me really, really mad. When I went into the store the manager guy, making small talk, asked me how I was. I responded, “Too hot. I’m going crazy from it.”

Then he said something that agitated me even further. He said, “Yeah, but you can’t do anything about it.” With a big smile.

I looked at the cloth bags I had brought to the grocery store and thought about my trusty 2001 Prius and my cottonwood tree and my environmentally friendly house and thought, “What the hell! I have been lugging these bags around since 1989 trying to stop global warming and this guy doesn’t even believe in it. Probably thinks it’s a hoax.”

So I said, “Actually we can do something about it,” and looked him straight in the eye. He looked confused. And thought I was crazy.

 * * * * *

In this hideous heat I have discovered iced coffee again. Lil, my dear second Jewish mother-in-law, introduced me to iced coffee in the 60s in New York City. I hadn’t liked coffee. I drank it black, if at all, in Oklahoma. She was amazed I drank it that way and said I should try it with milk and sugar, “Regulah,” she said, and when I obliged, I fell in love with it. Iced coffee. Regulah. Mmmmmm. And it’s perfect for heat waves. It caffeines you up and cools you off.

 * * * * *

The dogs are so hot they are no longer afraid of the water sprayer and gallop up to get watered down. The mud they’re covered with from lying in it to get cool, slides off them onto the ground.

The hoses have holes in them where Diego and then Abby the Neighbor Dog bit them. They actually make great sprinklers while I’m watering in another part of the “yard,” making a fine mist in four or five places here and there. Affordable sprinkling system!

The tomatoes are almost massacred by the heat, even though I water them deeply every day and even though they have the benefit of being planted on top of the compost pile. Watermelon seeds have sprouted – volunteers – in some straw I spread out when I almost had a vegetable garden. I only got as far as the finely constructed raised bed (thanks, John) and straw on that project. Never could get enough good dirt together to make a real garden. Besides the critters would have eaten everything.

I wish my fairy godmother would bring me a pickup full of bales of hay and dump it in my north yard. Masanobu Fukuoka would be happy. I think of him a lot as I water my plants and watch their withering or sprouting or blooming.

Saw the great blue heron again down by the pond early one morning this week. He comes when things are dry and hot. When he takes off he looks like a pterodactyl. I saw a hawk there the next day. He was looking for fish. I didn’t know what he was until I yelled down the hill to make it move. Then he spread his wings and lifted into the air. This pond, mucky though it is, means life.

I love living here.

 * * * * *

I stumbled across these paragraphs just now when I was looking for photographs of leaves so I could identify one of the tree species in my forest. It is from the Oklahoma Forestry Service. (I love government!)

“According to the southern forest resource assessment, in 1630 Oklahoma had 13.3 million acres of forests with 133 tree species. By the 1930s less than 200,000 acres of virgin forest in eastern Oklahoma remained. The U.S. Forest Service estimates we now have 7.665 million acres of forest-58 % of the original acreage. Forest surveys have shown increases in the forest during the past 20 years due to better management and reforestation.

Elbert Little, Jr., who studied several forest sites in southeast Oklahoma over a 60 year period described the burned out (my italics) and cutover woods he first witnessed in 1929 as ‘almost worthless for any purpose.’ It would be some time, he said, before it was of any value.

Despite early excesses, poor land use and lack of foresight, some exciting stories of forest reclamation are also woven into our history. For example, during the first 10 years our agency was in business an intensive public education campaign was launched. As a result, the percentage of southeastern forests burned annually dropped from 80 percent to three percent.

By the 1980s when Little revisited the area, he reversed his earlier position about the worthlessness of the land. He wrote that he wished he owned some of it. ‘The progress in management of southeastern Oklahoma’s forest lands is far greater than anyone would have predicted a half century ago,’ he wrote. ‘The changes, mostly beneficial, are beyond anyone’s imaginations or dreams.’

The state’s vast pine and oak-pine forests have recovered well and presently support a huge forest industry, wildlife populations and recreation opportunities.

It is important to remember forests change naturally over time-they won’t remain the same unless we manipulate them intentionally. Early French explorers in east central Oklahoma north of Wilburton named the mountains San Bois: treeless. Now they are covered with woodlands.

Large pine trees scattered in tall-grass savannah characterized the virgin forests of southeastern Oklahoma. Quality hardwoods such as walnut and ash were growing in Oklahoma along the west Texas border thousands of years ago. Very large red cedars have been unearthed near Chickasha that are estimated to also be several thousand years old.

Grasslands and the woodlands are in a constant tug of war as they respond to long-term climate changes. Humanity is one part of the equation.”

This is a cautionary tale, a tale of hubris and foolhardiness. It is a tale which illustrates the old maxim, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

This is what happened:

I was walking through my house. It’s one big room because I have always loved loft spaces and their open floor plan and the house was much, much cheaper to build without any inside walls. (I did put walls around the bathroom. My friends refused to come over without them.) You can see everything in the house, everywhere you stand. The walls and ceiling are white. It is big, airy, expansive. A happy house.

I happened to look up and as my eye lit on the area just above the dry wall and below the ceiling, a little three inch space around the perimeter of the house, I noticed…mold.

????!

But. . . but. . .wait a minute. My whole house is steel, glass, vinyl door frames, inorganic insulation, and concrete. I had decided on these particular building materials when I was designing my house because they were inexpensive and no termite and (I thought) no mold could ever live in or on any of it. Mold, I knew, needed organic matter on which to grow. That’s why it grew on wood and old shoes and wet newspapers. That little bit of knowledge was something I had congratulated myself on when I built my house. So how could there be mold? My heart skipped a beat. But no worries. I would look it up on the internet and see what’s what.

So I went online and started reading about mold. That’s when I had my Oh…my…God! moment.

I learned that mold can grow on anything. Anything. Because, ladies and gentlemen, dust is an organic material.

It all came back to me. That’s right! Mr. Bailey, my biology teacher in high school told us that all that dust we see in our houses is mostly human skin! And dust covers everything. Yes. Even in your house, pal.

I continued reading about mold and learned that basements get mold because water leaches through the concrete and there is no air circulation down there and it’s continually damp.

I looked at my concrete floor. I looked up at the perimeter of mold going around the whole house. I then had a vision of mold seeping up from the concrete into the walls until the walls were so crammed so full of mold that it eventually grew straight up the inside of the walls to the ceiling.

I had an “Oh…my…God!” moment.

I felt as though I was standing in the middle of a box full, crammed full, of mold.

Now, I want to clarify something. I am a hardy sort. I chose to live in the country because I wanted to experience the world without too much human intrusion. I even once lived in my house for six days with no heat or light during a blizzard, just to see what it felt like. (I will not do that again, but I do know what it feels like now.) I am not squeamish. Yes, I get emotional over animal deaths, because I love animals. Yes, ticks did bother me until I got used to picking them off the dogs and me, but a person can get used to whatever they’re exposed to. I find insects cute because my mama showed me that they were. I am not afraid of bees or mud daubers or much of any of that. But a heaving mass of mold, growing out of control, coming from the ground up, making my whole house, from concrete slab to metal roof, uninhabitable, was too much to bear.

It was too much to bear because every single nickel I had worked so hard for, saved so long for, planned so diligently for, was all for naught. I was going to be wiped out. I was going to be wiped out because insurance companies do not insure for mold. My insurance guy explicitly told me mold was not covered.

As my mind continued processing all this, I started to think about how I could get rid of the mold because my concrete was on the ground. The clay ground. That held moisture for a long, long time. Would I have to raze the building to the ground? How on earth would I pay for rebuilding. That money was gone.

I thought of Jim, my dear exhusband from a million years ago. We are good friends. (It is amazing what a nice little divorce will do.) He is a retired insurance adjuster. I thought about all the information he would have about this sort of thing. I called him. He said he was going to contact Mike, the guy who bought his business, and get back to me.

So I sat there. Frozen. “Everything gone,” kept racing through my mind.

That’s when I panicked. I saw my homeless old woman self, living out of my car. Yes, I have kids, but I, like my mother, would never want to move in. Not that I don’t love them. I do. Not that I don’t enjoy their company. I LOVE their company. Not that they don’t love me and love my company. But I hate, hate, hate being dependent.

Well, all this craziness would have to wait because I had my weekly story to write for FourStory and sat down at the computer and just poured my heart out. I looked over what I had written and said to myself, “You can’t send this thing in. Jesus Christ, Donna.” I checked my email.

There was an email from Jim! He had forwarded an email from Mike which said to not panic. That toxic mold was rare. That mold had been around people for millions of years and that it’s not as bad as I thought.

I breathed a sigh of semi-relief. I added this as a post script to the end of my story because it kinda tamed down the whole story, and sent it in.

The next day I got a phone call from Jim. I thanked him profusely. He told me to call Andy who has a company that deals with mold. She is the sister of Betsy, the former girlfriend of Jim and the present wife of Duane, Jim’s best friend. (One of the things I love about living in Oklahoma is the connection to everybody that you have when you live in a small town. You really become part of a human community. You are not alone.) I was in good hands! Another wave of relief rolled over me.

Then my mind went to money to pay for all this. I started thinking about reverse mortgages. Then a dear friend told me about home equity lines of credit. This whole thing could be solved. Whew.

I emailed this piece of information to Nathan, our illustrious editor, to be added as a second post script.

My fear started to dissipate. I didn’t feel quite so emotional, crazy, pathetic, stupid. At least people who read the story would know that I was okay and that the problem was handled.

But that was not to be the case. I got some phone calls and some emails telling me that I had scared the pants off of them with the story I had written. I got a great phone call from my dear ex-sister-in-law about getting the house raised so I could lay down a vapor barrier. She had raised her own beach house on Fire Island twice, so she knew what she was talking about. It was a great phone call, full of vivid imagery, with a “can do” attitude. I got couple of scoldings (which I deserved) for scaring some people too much, and lots of sympathy calls. They made their point. I sent them all my apology and decided I would do a much more thorough job of telling the world what I was doing and how it was going by writing this story.

And then I realized that what I had gone through was a real experience for millions of people and the end of the story was quite different for them. They don’t have the luxury of having their problems resolved or mitigated. They will be homeless. Their panic will turn to reality. As a young mother I have been in that position. More than once. I know the panic will turn to action. Every part of the brain will focus on how to deal with the problem. When it happens to you, you have no time for crying in your beer.

I called Andy (remember her? The sister of the girlfriend of the exhusband, etc. etc.) who called her son, Brandon, the mold expert, who came over and took one look at my big room of a house and declared that the mold problem wasn’t a big deal at all. In fact, the whole problem was relegated to the thin strip of steel that ran around the top of the walls around the perimeter of my house. The mold was caused by condensation. And if I used my fans, (which were turning as we spoke because Neighbor Jim came over when I was freaking out about the mold and told me that my house needed air movement to cure mold,) I wouldn’t have a problem.

I nodded. I realized I had not opened my sliding glass doors for a couple of months because it was winter. And I had not turned on the overhead fans because the constant breeze chilled me. But when Neighbor Jim had come over during my freak out, he had switched the little button which changed the air direction from down to up, which Peewee, the man who built my house, had told me about but I forgot, and there was no more blast of cold air coming down on me and additionally the whole house was warmer as the warm air circulated beautifully through out.

Good grief.

And then, then Brandon said the most beautiful thing.

Are you ready?

He said he had never, ever seen mold come up through a concrete slab. Ever.

My heart swelled with joy. I wouldn’t be a homeless bag lady! I was saved! I wouldn’t have to have my house lifted, or be a burden to my children, or move away from Chigger Lake.

I began to remember, back in the mists of time three years ago, that Peewee told me that he ran his blower fan of his heater/air conditioner all the time and consequently he had very little dust in his house. Dust! I could save myself a lot of work and worry by just turning on my fan blower. Jeez.

Then Brandon and I went outside, my feet not touching the ground because I was dancing on air, and looked at the north side of the house which was perpetually wet because it was in the shade all winter and wet clay stays wet as long as it damn well pleases. He said I could either put in a french drain or grade the yard so that all water would run down my western hill.

French drain? Uh oh.

I had told Peewee long ago when we were building the house that I was putting in a french drain around the foundation, thinking (incorrectly) that a french drain was just some gravel that let the water percolate down and away from foundation. He thought I knew what I was talking about. I told him I was going to do it by myself. He left me a huge pile of gravel one day. Free. (I told you he was my hero.) I guess he thought I actually knew what a french drain was. It turns out it’s a large pipe with perforations on it that lets in the rainwater which is whisked away. I had just piled the gravel up against the foundation with no pipe underneath. The ground had settled where I had shoveled wheelbarrowful after wheelbarrowful of gravel on it and this had caused the water to collect in that depression.

But that’s not all. I had started a large compost pile out there, raising the ground level away from the house even more, making more water drain toward the house.

Everything I did turned out to be wrong.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

As Brandon and I stood there looking at that soggy north side of the house, he offered to do the grading, but was leery of dealing with my underground utilities.

Well there was one person who knew right where those utilities were. Peewee. He had put them in. So the next day I called him and told him what was going on and could I hire him to do the grading. He said, “Huh. I graded it when we put the house down. Guess I’ll just do some more.” And then he told me he’d be over to do the grading and that it was no big deal. Would take about fifteen minutes. (He always says it’s no big deal and that it will take about fifteen minutes. I really, really like that about him. It just makes me happy when I hear those words.) And no, positively not, would he charge me. And he would send over a truck load of gravel, free, just pay the driver his fee.

So now, Dear Reader, you are caught up with story. I will call Brandon when I have collected some money and he will come to take care of that little bit of mold and Peewee will do some fancy grading and I’ll keep my fans on and blower going and everything will be hunky dory.

One last thing, though. I mentioned to Peewee during that phone call that there were (perhaps) millions of mud daubers inside my walls. They had been flying in and out from under my eaves for a couple of summers. I thought they were cute and I was happy to provide them with a home. You know, live and let live. Then I remembered reading a piece about a university finding a whole building on campus crammed with honey inside all its walls after decades of bees having taken up residence there.

And Peewee said, “Aw. Just buy some screen or insulation and stuff it in the holes where they went in. Don’t cost nothin’. It always works.”

You gotta love that guy.

As you probably already know by now, I live in Oklahoma, in the country, in a house I built, living on my retirement check and the lovely monthly check I get for writing these stories.

I am not rolling in dough. But then, again, I am not starving, either. I am pretty much your standard human being, in her sixties, who is retired. There are a lot of us. We’re the Baby Boomers.

Ahhh. The Baby Boomers. William Strauss and Neil Howe, experts on generational studies, say everyone born from 1943 to 1960 are Baby Boomers. Their parameters are that you have to be young enough to not remember World War II and old enough to remember the post war American High, which is that period of time when unions thrived, there was a chicken in every pot, our American infrastructure blossomed into a developed highway system, and Ozzie and Harriet were America’s family.

Of course, there was more to that time than that.

In America, nobody loved Baby Boomers more than business did. There were a lot of us and that meant more buyers for the stuff they sold. It is still selling us stuff. It sells us so much stuff that now we control 80% of personal financial assets, are responsible for 50% of discretionary spending, use 77% of prescription drugs, 61% of over the counter drugs and spend 80% of all leisure travel money.

But we are about more than money. We are responsible for a dramatic social change in our world.

For example, most of us have broken with traditional religion. 42% have dropped out totally, 33% have stayed traditional, and 25% came back after many years but to a less traditional version of religion.

There were three, not one, but three, major assassinations of our most beloved leaders of our young adulthood – John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King. Those horrendous events made us peace lovers.

We became more liberal (and all that that implies) than any other generation. We are the Woodstock generation, our war was Viet Nam which we protested, our music is rock and roll (and all that THAT implies.)

We believed in sexual freedom, were part of a psychedelic drug revolution, believed in civil rights and protecting the environment, women’s equality, and did it all through protests in the streets, in the music, in art, in politics.

We were experimental. We believed in justice and freedom and love, not war.

We were Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1966.

We became teachers. We joined the Peace Corps. We believed that material things were not the end-all, be-all of a person’s life. That, in fact, material things corrupted. Material things came between people.

Not every person who was a Baby Boomer believed or felt this way, but as I’ve aged I have seen at least a delicate strain of this philosophy in almost everyone my age, even in the most conservative of us. Somehow, in some way, we were all affected.

I was deeply affected. I was, by virtue of my experience and my personality, a person who, almost in a caricature kind of way, was the personification of a Baby Boomer. I felt my desire for money and all the things it could buy, fall away. The more humble my personal belongings were, the more virtuous I felt. I was definitely outside the majority. I was (and am) guilty of pride about being a person without a lot of stuff. The less I have, the more I feel like Ghandi. Or Mother Teresa. Or Jesus. (But don’t get me wrong. I still want some stuff. I surely do want some arbors over my decks and the concrete floor stained and sealed. There are some limits to my sainthood.)

What replaced all the material stuff was the feeling of community. We were the generation of communal life. Sharing. Living close to the earth was important. Learning how to weave cloth and grow vegetables and make soap were noble and enlightening. The simple life was the good life.

Years went by. The heat and energy of early action began to dissipate. The world turned.

We got older. We started fitting into everyday life. And more years went by. But that sweetness and goodness of the way we felt when we were doing the right thing never left us. It was part of our souls.

For me, personally, my beliefs had resulted in my having a very tiny nest egg in my older years. But it was enough for my purposes because as I got older I began to think about the next phase of my life. I knew I wanted to be in the country. I craved nature. I knew I wanted to try new things and master them. I wanted to learn how to build and fix and create. I thought about weaving and making soap in my retirement. I thought about living on the land and watching nature and being peaceful. I thought hard and made plans about how I could do all this.

As fate would have it, when we Baby Boomers began to retire in 2007 an economic slow down began. At this point in our lives the very foundation on which we were to build our old age looked shaky. Not only were the unions almost gone from private industry but our pensions and retirement funds had been messed with. Some of us lost everything – the loyal workers at Enron, for instance. The word was that Social Security would be in trouble (don’t believe it!) and Medicare in worse trouble.

But all that didn’t really affect me. I was already in a financial situation that was simple, if not downright skimpy. I did have enough, just enough, to move to the country, build an environmental house of my very own, and live out my life, peacefully, weaving and making soap.

And I did it. I got the land. I built the house. I live simply and peacefully. (But so far no weaving or soap-making. That will come. Maybe. This past week I managed, ALL BY MYSELF, to put a new, heavy-duty screen in my sliding door. It was a bitch, but I did it. Hah!)

Nowadays, my most intimate community are my three dogs, Angela Davis, Joe Biden, and the Neighbor Dog Abby. None of them was chosen. All found me. (This makes me smile. How natural is that?)

Never, ever did I think about how important they would be to me. I’ve had dogs and cats and other species over the years. But I always had humans, too. Lots of children, friends, students in my life every day. Now I live alone. I don’t teach school every day. My own children and grandchildren are thousands of miles away. I am slowly building friendships here in Oklahoma but I tend to be a solitary person so I don’t make the effort often to move off my fat ass and go find them.

My dogs are my family, my community, here. I literally don’t think I could make it out here in the country if I didn’t have them. I now know why human beings domesticated dogs millenia ago.

They give me tremendous peace of mind. They watch over my place at night. They keep the snakes and coyotes away. Several times during the night they are up and about, keeping the homestead safe. I love their barking in the distance. They are my guardian angels.

They give me companionship. Imagine living totally alone with no one to talk to or touch or love! They smile at me with love beams. They crave my presence. They wait for me in the dark, at their posts by the door, when I’ve gone to something or other in the human world.

And now I remember Diego, my first dog out here at Chigger Lake. I realize on a deeper level than ever before how much my dogs mean to me because, as the song says, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

When you live in the country you see life and death up close.

This is what happened:

Diego had begun to seem a bit crotchety. He’d whine sometimes when he was lying on the floor. He started having difficulty getting up. He favored one leg or the other when he walked around the house. He slept a lot. He didn’t have his usual happy face on. I thought he had sprained something. I thought there might be something in his foot and searched for it, to no avail. I thought he couldn’t be having hip problems. He was too young – only three! I thought (actually,I wished) he was basically okay.

But he wasn’t.

Finally I could deny it no longer and took him to the vet’s. It was instantly evident to the good doctor that Diego had two bad knees.

Knees? I hadn’t ever thought about dogs having knees.

The doctor told me that he was seeing a flood of dogs who were having knee problems these days. He had no idea why. He told me that injured knees hurt way worse than injured hips. He told me that unless I could afford thousands of dollars to operate on his knees (and it might be hips as well) that I couldn’t expect him to live happily for more than two or three years before the quality of his life would be so poor that it would be a shame to have him endure much more.

He gave me some pills for his pain. He told me to come back in a couple of weeks to see how he was doing.

So I cradled his big, handsome head in my arms and kissed him on his beautiful face. I looked at him and thought about the finite life he had. And to make myself feel better I thought about how happy his life has been. . . full of squirrel chasing, freedom to roam, human friends in the neighborhood, (he is a well-loved dog,) a pond to splash through, a pretty mate as his companion, sleeping next to my bed on his comfy blankets.

Life is good for a dog who lives with a Baby Boomer.

Say “Amen!”