Gina Harris's Blog, page 10

Spooky Season: Hodgepodge and hereafter

The problem with the hodgepodge part of this post is that there are only two books left: 

Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths by Darren Naish

The Skull by Jon Klassen 

(For quantity, the "hereafter" part will make up for it.)

The Skull is a variation on the story where a traveler needs to spend the night in a haunted house. For younger readers, it's a good bridge between a picture book and a comic book, as well as being spooky but not too scary.

Hunting Monsters is really good, but something that will be hated by its target audience. It turns out that the harder you look at various famous cryptids, the less likely it is that they exist. 

If that doesn't surprise and dismay you (so, if you are more Scully then Mulder), then some of the history and psychology and even zoology can be really interesting. At times the thoroughness borders on pedantic, but overall I was glad that I read it.

(For a story that covers a lot of the same material on the Loch Ness Monster specifically, but with a more believing nature, visit https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-obsessive-life-and-mysterious-death-of-the-fisherman-who-discovered-the-loch-ness-monster?utm_source=pocket_shared.)

Remembering that it took me two years to get to where I could write about this spooky season, it may be foolhardy to predict too much about the next one. I will try anyway.

Sometime around last Halloween (October 2024), teachers of small children were looking at various seasonal but also age-appropriate picture books. One of the coworkers of one of my sisters remembered a book, but not the title.

In it, a girl believes her house may be haunted, but at the end you see shoes sticking out from under a sheet that made you suspect the girl's mother was behind the haunting. Did that sound familiar?

Not at all, but I did try some searches to see if I could figure it out.

While that did not work, I stumbled across another thread that helped someone find Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. I totally remembered reading that! Wait, was that the one with the owl with love in its eyes? No! There are some common threads, but that was The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John. 

In searching for those, there was this list of best middle reader spooky books. It back some fun memories, but did not answer the original question.

Together, they made me really want to explore both picture books and middle reader books with spooky themes.

There are lists (and memories) for the middle reader books, but I wasn't sure how to choose the picture books. There is still a hope that I can find the one that started all this.

If you search the Washington County library system for picture books with the keyword "ghost" there are 272 results. 

When I found that out, I saw that there were also about 27 weeks until Halloween. I could do ten a week.

No, I am not going to read every single one. There are some that are familiar and some that are parts of franchises that I am not really interested in. It will still be a lot.

I am not adding them all to Goodreads. Many of them are fine, and I may pass many of them on to my sister, but I will only be reviewing them in Goodreads if there is something memorably good or bad about them.

So far that is mainly Ghost Cat by Kevan Atteberry, which hit home hard so I made both of my sisters read it and we all felt that one. 

I don't know if it will work for finding that one; that will depend on whether it is in the Washington County library system.

I do know that there will be lots of ghost books coming in and out. 

Boo! 

(There will also be the continuations of the series mentioned in https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html. So if it does take me another two years, that will be why.)

Dire

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. -- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

The articles heralding the return of the dire wolf are already being replaced by articles saying that they aren't really dire wolves, so that is interesting, but not really my issue.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/colossals-de-extincted-dire-wolf-isnt-a-dire-wolf-and-it-has-not-been-de-extincted-experts-say/ar-AA1CBYQB?ocid=BingNewsSerp 

The story did originally make me think of Jurassic Park, and not just as a matter of whether or not someday these cubs will kill someone. 

Yes, I thought about the could/should thing, but there was also something in the first article I read about how they might eventually be helpful with current endangered species. That was treated when Hammond found the scientists less than enthusiastic and said if it had been California condors they would have been fine with it.

No, hold on. This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam.

That particular conversation also mentioned them not knowing enough about the ecosystem. That part might be less of an issue with the dire wolves, who existed much more recently than dinosaurs. It should not be an issue at all for currently endangered species. However, the reasons for them being endangered are generally habitat loss. Poaching and over-hunting played factors, and toxins in the environment that concentrated as they went further up the food chain... those have played roles, but you cannot minimize the importance of habitat loss.

When we got to a situation where the last male white rhino died, that might be a situation where cloning could be beneficial. It being beneficial would still require the issues that led to the sever habitat loss being resolved.

Here's something not from Jurassic Park:

‘Nobody ever saw anything like this before. The first day, 25 September, I saw 10 river dolphin carcasses. That was a shock. Then two days later I saw 70 carcasses along the lake.’ One dolphin, swimming in circles, was in agony and struggling to survive. ‘We didn’t know what to do or how to help it,’ he told me. ‘If you try to rescue an animal that is already hurt, it can die from the extra stress.’

https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear 

That is about Amazon pink dolphins not doing well with the rise in river temperature. Let's say you clone them, where are you going to put them?

That requires a completely different kind of effort. Amazing scientific knowledge can be helpful, but not nearly as necessary as people actually becoming committed to the health of the planet and the value of species, sometimes at the cost of not maximizing profits.

I suspect they don't really care so much about restoring endangered species as they care about doing something cool; that was probably just something they said to sound better. 

What does this give us?

First of all, you have pack animals who don't really have a pack or parent animals to teach them how to behave. 

Apparently the process is really hard on the mother. I imagine that has to do with issues of size and anti-immune responses, and I don't like the thought of that. There may be animal research that has enough of a benefit to be justifiable, but we need to be really careful and ethical about how we treat living things. I can't imagine that those criteria can possibly be met here.

Introducing them into the wild sounds like something that can only go wrong, so what do you do with them?

There will certainly be people who would pay for the exotic pets, imagining themselves as Stark children I suppose. Bound to go badly.

I imagine there will also be people who would pay a lot to hunt them. Gross.

Theme park attraction? That just sounds revolting.

No, it's not the cinematic levels of mayhem that were imagined with an island full of dinosaurs -- I guess we can be grateful for that -- but it still feels wrong.  

Nature loving us

Going back even further than the 2013 ICAF, there was a 1994 movie that captivated me: The Secret of Roan Inish.

Set in Ireland after World War II, war-time evacuation took a family away from their island home. In the process, one of the children was lost. 

During the evacuation the gulls and seals were very upset to have the family leaving; that is why they took Jamie and kept him with them. Of course, there was a selkie ancestor, so the seals are really all kin and Jamie was a "dark one", so more seal-ish.

Okay, that is fiction, and folklore. What struck me at the time was the strong sense of connection to place. The people were tied to the land and the sea in a mutual way that seemed lost for our time and place.

I remember discussing it with a friend. Part of it seemed to be that these were people whose living was more tied to nature. Jamie's family were primarily fishers, so were going out onto the sea all the time, needing to be aware of the weather and changes and how it works. 

You could have similar ties with hunter-gatherer societies, and even farmers, but there are different ways of farming. If you are sowing genetically modified corn that goes straight into High Fructose Corn Syrup, it might be hard to feel connected to that.

(King Corn from 2007 could be relevant here, but that is a very different movie than The Secret of Roan Inish.) 

Here are things that I am thinking about in conjunction with the movie:

There are some plants that do better when harvested, which may include wild populations. This includes sweetgrass, as mentioned in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and camas, as mentioned in the following article:

https://www.vox.com/climate/377249/climate-solutions-traditional-indigenous-foods-water-potato

While selkies themselves are from Celtic and Norse lore, various Native American groups have many stories of people being adopted by or marrying or spending time living with animals, as well as other stories focusing on the relationship between them and plants or animals that are a food source. It would be easy to write them off as folklore, but that would be missing the point: different lifeforms are intimately connected and we need each other.

Some of the recent reading has been about economic changes and the rise of capitalism, where we also see the trend toward urbanization. In some ways, the estrangement from the means of production was really estrangement from nature.

Now, this probably seems like a good launching point for just going off on capitalism. I am not ruling that out.

However, there is a really recent story that is all kinds of wrong, and I think I am going there first.

Connected to nature

This is going to be one of those times where I am going to tell a lot of different stories that may not feel cohesive. You will have to decide for yourself the level of relevance.

Twelve years ago the International Comic Arts Forum held its gathering in Portland. I was able to attend quite a bit. I wrote several posts on it at the time.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/06/international-comic-arts-forum-source.html

While there were people who traveled to be there, Portland has a wealth of local comics creators (largely because of the presence of Dark Horse). One vivid memory that wasn't really about comics was a panel of writers who lived locally but were transplants, talking about coming to the Pacific Northwest.  

I remember someone talking about how beautiful it was, but also the coldness. That was not as a matter of temperature, but that nature doesn't care about you.

I believe a big part of the reason that stuck with me was because other people were nodding along, while I was like, "What are you talking about?"

I didn't contradict anyone there. I am not sure how I would have. It didn't sound right to me, but trying to argue that nature does care about you would also be weird. I don't think I could convey verbally a logical explanation for why I feel that is wrong.

(This is where you will need to figure out relevance and meaning for yourself.)

I will tell you another, kind of similar story.

A former coworker was with her family, and they noticed a flower child type of person literally hugging a tree. 

Her brother went up and hugged the tree too. He asked "Doesn't it have the best energy?" 

The flower child was all in agreement, but it was a funny story for them. I don't believe it was mean-spirited, but the brother was nonetheless teasing the flower child.

I have hugged trees. It's not something I do often, but there have been times when I have felt connection and closeness, and like maybe with that embrace we could share strength.

Now, I would also like to point out that I have never felt I needed to hug multiple trees. With what I know now about how they connect through the ground and canopy, maybe I was onto something.

Okay, I sound hippy-dippy. Well, the more I talk about fighting this administration, the more hippy-dippy I sound; that may just be what it takes.

I don't know why I feel that connection. Sure, we camped and hiked fairly often in my childhood, and a lot of my early jobs were picking berries and weeding and things, but I am not sure that's how it works.

I am currently reading Lost Woods, a collection of lesser-known writings by Rachel Carson.

She always felt that interest in nature, and she expresses her fascination with it beautifully, 

I can say that for me there was always that desire to know what that sound was or what that plant is named, so there was looking and observing and wondering. Maybe that's how the connection was built.

I'm not saying the plants were looking back, but maybe there was just an openness on their end, and if you stepped into that you became part of it. And if we're talking animals...

Here's the other thing I remember from that panel. Back when he was new to the area, one of the members remembered talking to someone who was saying it was pretty good out here, but "every now and then, a woman goes missing."

I think the timing would have put it around the height of the Green River killings. Of course that wasn't the only serial killer to hit the area, and there are women who disappear in less notorious ways all of the time.

I suppose I remember that because there seemed to be a coldness to the way the guy said it that perhaps matched the perceived coldness of nature.

Let me close with this from Carson when she addressed the Sorority of Women Journalists in the spring of 1954: 

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy -- no panacea. But I do believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Book messiness

In case it was not obvious, I am usually reading from multiple lists at a time. While I have been reading for Spooky Season, I have also been reading for Native American Heritage Month.

There have been three NAMH books that could be considered a little spooky, two of which seem to be series.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Now, Moon of the Crusted Snow is the only one that actually has a sequel out (Moon of the Turning Leaves), though Elatsoe has a prequel, and I believe there will be others.

Moon was something I read specifically during this time, because I had seen it described as Native horror and I thought it would fit. 

If I were writing about these books now for real, I would argue that Bad Cree fits the category better, and that Elatsoe does not, despite the presence of ghosts and vampires.

I am not writing about them now because there are different things I want to say about them. Besides, there is one viewpoint from which it might makes sense to treat Bad Cree and Moon of the Crusted Snow with Braiding Sweetgrass

I mention this because I had thought that Native Horror could be the bridge for ending Spooky Season and moving into Native American Heritage Month. It could, except that there are ways in which there is an equally good bridge between Native American Heritage Month and some science reading I have going on.

That seems like it could work too, except part of that relates to the reading associated with Caliban and the Witch. Okay, I already wrote about that, except there are aspects of it that sent me down paths I didn't expect. I had not expected to be looking at any medieval studies, yet there I was.

This is a big part of why I am always behind in my reading, but that isn't just me being easily distracted by potential knowledge.

It is also how much of this knowledge connects to other knowledge. It is the patterns that we are constantly repeating, with not nearly as much variation as you would hope and certainly not the desired learning.

Next Friday I am pretty confident that I will write about the last couple of books that were read for Spooky Season.

After that, well, I could start with Science or things we misunderstand about the past or I might take some time to berate James Comey, though with those last two they might end up escaping the Friday posts and happening as part of the earlier writings in the week.

I will probably not start writing about Native American Heritage Month until I do some of those, but I am not positive. 

There will be more writing about music too, so there's that.

Permaculture

When I wrote about messiness, one reason I had been thinking about the term was an article I had read about how cities did not want to deal with fruit trees, because then you have fruit falling and rotting and it takes more work. Of course, then there is a missed opportunity for a food source. 

In fact, I do remember an Italian prune tree on my way to the bus stop that scattered plums all over the sidewalk each year, where they would turn to fruit leather.

They are a fruit I like a lot, but it didn't feel right to pick them off of someone else's tree before they fell, and it was not desirable to pick them after they fell.

What puts the "perma" in permaculture is that there are members of the system that fill multiple different roles in the cycle so that it can be self-sustaining. That does tend to eliminate waste, but it can be messy.

About the time I went to Outdoor School (many years ago), there was this process going on of moving away from the concept of a food chain to a food web. They were beginning to understand that it wasn't linear.

Having ground cover of native species does mean that there should be local pollinators and probably soil compatibility and maybe that your ground cover acts as a source of food and housing for local fauna.

To get it so that there is food and shelter for the fauna at different stages of life, and something handling the decay so that nutrients are put back in the soil, that becomes more complicated, but at the same time it becomes sustainable. It can continue.

Yes, it produces food -- lots of food -- but not all of the food is for you. Then you have lots of healthy living things around you that contribute as part of the web to the part that is for you. 

It's beautiful, and something that takes place naturally all the time, but something that our interference can make really difficult.

I admit that if you are looking at trying to set that up it can feel overwhelming. You need to start looking at different layers and interactions. What's going on in the roots? It will take time to grow a canopy.

It also shows us a path for healing and making things better.

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read was Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway.

It not only helped me understand some things that I had already observed, but also gave me hope for things I would not have expected, like a permaculture area in Arizona that was always 5 degrees cooler than the rest of the area.

Five degrees may not seem like much, but when we are talking about climate change, we are talking about one or two degree increases overall. If we could expand the area, and if we could heal polluted ground, and strengthen endangered species... there are a lot of things that we can do.

I recommend the book, no matter where you are in having a yard and what to do with it.

And it looks like next week -- instead of starting on one of the six areas I was already looking at -- I am going to go in a completely different direction.

These things  happen. 

Planting native species

Let's say you are still pretty much looking at a ground cover -- maybe with some shrubs and flowers bordering the house -- but you want them to be plants native to your area; what then?

Obviously, it will depend on your area. I will focus on mine, but "area" can also be kind of a loose term.

One potential starting place is PNW Native Plant Exchange:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1723453557818882

Nurseries in your area will almost certainly have some native plants, but they will also be selling them. 

With the exchange you will literally see people saying that something they have is splitting off and they may be giving away or trading. You can also ask questions and get tips, so it can be helpful with knowledge and with a sense of community.

Extension services remain a good source of information. For Washington County in Oregon, that's https://extension.oregonstate.edu/washington. 

Many years ago I became a Master Food Preserver through an extension program. I would team up with a Master Gardener at the Hillsboro Farmer's Market and we would answer questions and distribute information.

I can tell you that the most common question for the Master Gardener was about blossom end rot on tomatoes, which was related to not enough calcium in the soil. The favored solution was egg shells, which I believe gets recommended for roses too, but it was always the tomatoes.

On a possibly related note, the most popular food preservation publication was the one on making salsa.

At the time, I thought I wanted to later go through the Master Gardener Program, as well as two other programs; I would be master of it all!

I did not end up doing that. Programs have changed over the years, mostly for the better. 

That being said, it is possible that there is a program out there that will teach you a lot and that you will love. However, you do not need to become a master to be able to do things.

(And even mastering something... I have never canned fish, and it is not going to happen.)

The point is that there is information out there and people that are interested. If you need a slow learning curve or are ready to plunge right in, there should be options.

There was also a book I enjoyed:

Real Gardens Grow Natives: Design, Plant, & Enjoy A Healthy Northwest Garden by Eileen Stark.

In fact, that book goes a little beyond the ground level, as does the author, who is based in Portland and does landscaping consultations: 

https://realgardensgrownatives.com/?page_id=6376

Regardless, the book describes local plants that would makes sense as part of local ecosystems.  

Messiness

Last week I did not post on Thursday. 

I planned to, but I got busy with school. Besides, the topic was not fitting right.

I am writing about bigger things now, so it takes more time; I have accepted that.

There has still been this feeling that if I can cover something in one week -- so three posts, not counting the Friday post on media or the Saturday and Sunday blogs -- then there is still at least a semblance of order.

It just wasn't going to work. 

For school, I did finish the one course, but then I just started another one. It's going to be that way through the end of the year.

Bless this mess.

As it is, I can incorporate the theme of messiness into my Friday media post. 

It's fitting that it happened on this writing section. As you garden or work with nature or try and impose your will on nature, you will find a fair amount of mess. 

Things are really working out.

I believe the next two posts are going to be about native plants and permaculture, but that next week I will move on. That will probably be to one of six topic areas that I have been thinking about, but it can be hard to say.

There is so much to think about.

If you also feel like a mess, pulled in too many directions and not able to do nearly as much as you would like... hey friend!

Value what you do.

Let's support each other in good ways.

Spooky Season: Witches

While most of the books did not have "witch" in the title, it was still something that came up.

First of all, there was some fiction that was not great. 

The best of those was The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna.

I saw it on a library post for the Shameless Romance Book Club. 

That in itself would tend to put me off, but I decided to go for it. It was at times too cute and I was amazed at how awkward the unnecessary sex scene was, but I didn't hate it; that was a win.

In this world, witches are born and have to learn how to use their power. Fear often gets in the way of connection. I thought the relationships in that area were handled well.

With Spells For Forgetting by Adrienne Young, I believe I saw that someone else read it and was curious about the mystery. That resolution was actually pretty satisfying, except that you have some people who don't seem to be unusually evil doing some pretty twisted things, while other people who should be really motivated just let things go for years. 

I could have liked the book more if the people were more compelling.

The better fiction was The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, from my Daughters list.

I kept getting it confused in my mind with Gallileo's Daughter, also on that list, but about a different heretic.

This is based on the story of Martha Carrier, executed during the Salem Witch Trials and written by one of her actual descendants. While a fictionalized account, it draws from a fascinating family history. 

Relationships are hard here, as is life, but you can appreciate the struggles and the choices.

Then there was a non-fiction book that was not great, but it led me to a book that was amazing:

In Defense of Witches:The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial by Mona Challet

There are good points, but then there are attempts to be cute. Some of it could be the translation. 

The premise of looking at the types of women accused of witchcraft and why was interesting, but another reviewer wrote that all of the good points were in the introduction. Well, the introduction was written by Carmen Maria Machado.

However, in reading In Defense of Witches -- and reading about it -- there kept being references to Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici.

The funny thing about that was that it was already on my larger to-read list. It did come up with the word searches, but since it seemed to be more statistical I was going to hold off on it. The various references convince me otherwise.

There is so much in Federici's writing that is interesting and that points to other things to study.

The title is a reference to Caliban from The Tempest and his mother, whom is referenced in the play, but not seen.

The play was written at a time when slavery was expanding, along with persecution of "witches". That becomes the theme of what was going on in society, largely driven by the rise of capitalism.

That actually led me to yet another book (which wasn't as good), but that kind of becomes something else.

We will get there, but I will take one more week to wrap up Spooky Season. 

Increments

Let's say that at this point you are committed to dumping the lawn, but you can't see your path beyond that.

That's still a good start.

There are many directions you can go, and none of them have to be the final destination.

The suggestion you will probably see the most is creeping red thyme. I see stories about it shared a lot, though I don't think I have ever seen someone who has done it.

I am not against it. It will be lower maintenance than grass, it is more interesting to look at, and it is more fragrant, though there could potentially be objections to that. 

It is better for pollinators, in that you do get blossoms before you cut it down, unlike grass.

It is native to Greenland, Europe, and Turkey, so there is a good chance it would not count as a native plant.

That might mean that it feeds some pollinators in their adult form, but may not be good for the larva or eggs or other parts of the ecosystem. It is still a step forward, but it might not hurt to research native ground covers.

One year I got volunteer clover that just spread. I loved it. It was so much springier to walk on than grass. 

Then the heat dome killed it, and it didn't recover quite right. I planted some white clover, and I have some, but I could not recreate what nature had done on its own.

Regardless, it doesn't hurt to check native ground covers for your area. If all you want to do is go away from a lawn, ground covers is the right category to search.

I remember being confused when I would keep seeing various strawberries coming up as a ground cover; wouldn't they be too squishy? Because I was thinking that if it's a ground cover, you walk across it. Then I visited the Willamette Heritage Center. 

The parking lot is two levels, with a pretty steep grade in between. The soil in between is anchored by strawberry plants. It is a ground cover, but not for walking. 

Think about the desired function for your area.

I am going to give you three more ideas.

If this is a holding place, where you think you will want to do more planting next year, you could consider a green manure. That would allow you to use the time in between to build up nutrients in the soil:

https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-green-manure-1761842

If you like the idea of the creeping thyme, but maybe not that much red, you might want to consider a tapestry lawn. This could be a chance to mix in some native and non-native plants. If there is something you don't like, it's no longer the whole area:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/tapestry-lawns-why-you-need-this-low-maintenance-grass-alternative  

And maybe if you don't like one patch, you replace it with a bush, adding to the complexity.

Maybe it will be a berry bush.

Finally, to get a broader range of ideas, try reading Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn.

There are many contributors for writing, but the artist and architect is Fritz Haeg. 

I promise there will be ideas that would never have occurred to you. Even if they are not for you, it can open your mind to what is possible.

You can find more information at https://www.fritzhaeg.com/edible-estates-book.html.