Patricia Damery's Blog

Love, MOB, and Valley Oaks

What do we truly understand about falling in love? Some say it’s like a lightning strike, but to me, it feels less sharp. It’s as if everything melts into a warm, radiant sphere of presence that expands our hearts beyond what we knew. Suddenly, reason, if it remains at all, is infused with an essence beyond time. Any plans we might have held are gone, leaving our legs weak and our solar plexus punched—except when we’re with the Beloved. Then, we vanish for a while, merging with that comforting joy of timelessness. I am certain that when I die, this will be what heaven is like.

I can count on one hand (oh, maybe two!)  the times I’ve fallen in love: the first time I met my college boyfriend, the birth of my sons, the first time I met Bruce as he was walking down the sidewalk in Graton, waving shyly. 

And then there’s the time I first met the Valley Oaks on our ranch. I’ve shared stories of my love affair with oaks before, and I won’t repeat them here. But suffice it to say, when I first encountered the Valley Oaks, I was smitten: the giant 250-year-old oak that sheltered the small pioneer farmhouse where Donald and I lived while building our home up the mountain, the enormous valley oak in the vineyard under which we were married. Then there’s the oak savanna, which knocked me to my knees the first time I entered. I knew this was where I wanted to spend my days. We placed our house using two sentinel oaks standing side by side, overlooking the grasslands of the savanna beyond.

Fruits of Eden: Field Notes: Napa County 1991-2021 was inspired by my efforts to protect that savanna from development. In fact, oaks have inspired much of my writing: the article which started with a phone call from Ramon that the ancient oak near the little house had fallen; the day we found the valley oak we were married beneath, lying strangely horizontal beside the vines; and the valley oak in the savanna that offered its leaves, stems, and roots as a homeopathic remedy to heal me from the stress of a particularly rough, initiatory period. 

When I first learned that the oak savanna might be developed into a vineyard, I fell into a depression. Only by using my writing to give a voice to the trees could I lift myself out of the dark depths of despair. Just when I thought that this fear for the savanna was easing, a new worry arose for the valley oak. But this time, it’s worse. I first became aware of this threat to the trees last year, when I asked Alejandro to trim the lower branches of the valley oak where we held talks and poetry readings during our annual open houses. Rows of lavender fingered out from the shade of the gentle trunk, with the audience sitting in white wooden chairs between the rows. The branches had grown so low that we had to duck to walk underneath. 

Within a week of Alejandro’s trimming, I noticed large brown patches high up. We contacted Bill Pramuk, a local arborist, who diagnosed the disease as Mediterranean Oak Borer (MOB, Xyleborus monographus), a European ambrosia beetle that first appeared in Calistoga in 2019. He showed me brown trails of pests in the cut logs. The small insects farm fungi inside the tree by inoculating the sapwood with it. The fungi then kill the tree. Our best chance to save the tree, he told us, was to remove the infected branches and then chip, bury, or burn the wood. Water the tree to a depth of six inches to reduce stress. And there’s no indication this will work. In fact, according to Sonoma County arborist Matt Banchero, “In high-pest-density areas, every elder oak has died, and the spread of MOB is occurring at an exponential rate. Over 3 million acres of California Oak woodland are at risk.” (upcoming Redwood Needles Sierra Club newsletter.)

And so, we had Alejandro amputate great boughs of infected wood from the top (since the Mediterranean Oak Borer starts at the top and works its way down), and then we had him return and cut again, and then again. The once lovely, graceful tree is now half her size.  Although the lower branches are lush and green, her prognosis remains poor. We are told one option is to wait until the tree wakes from her brief hibernation next spring and inject a pesticide, if the tree survives that long.   All treatments are experimental.

Is this threat to the iconic Valley Oak a result of climate change? Almost certainly. Prolonged droughts stress trees, making them more vulnerable to pests. We can water the trees to their drip line to reduce stress, but will this be enough in the end?

We have acted like an invasive species, removing 99% of Napa County’s valley oaks for agricultural development. Now, an ambrosia beetle might finish the job of destroying the Valley Oak. Bandero urges us to protect and plant acorns from oaks that have resisted the borer. Protecting the valley oak is a process filled with guarded hope and grief. Yes, I will gather and plant acorns and hope they have the resistance to move into the future, but I will also remember the trees I loved and still love on our ranch—the ones that shaded our home, our annual open house events, offered altars for weddings, and that still greet me each morning. Because love bears all things. 

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Wake: Eulogy for a Small Farm

Judy couldn’t remember where the key was—or wouldn’t. She claimed that the leaking roof had made the house unsafe. Our second cousin now owns the family farm, which has belonged to our family since the early to mid-1800s. Our great-grandfather, Thomas Pope, built the house in the 1890s after a good corn crop. His wife, Matilda, and their 12-year-old daughter, Della, died shortly after from the Spanish flu. In the early 1900s, Thomas died of a kidney stone following surgery on the kitchen table, and soon after, their second daughter, my grandmother, moved in. After my grandmother’s death in 1973, my parents moved in. When they passed away in 2004 and 2005, Judy took over, and her adult children lived there on and off until it was clear that no one was going to stay permanently. She sold the house to our cousin Neil. Renters damaged the house significantly. The costs to repair it and bring it up to modern standards became overwhelming. After Neil’s death three years ago, his oldest son inherited the house and warned us that it would soon be bulldozed. This visit was my last.

The Eastlake-style farmhouse is large, as farmhouses were in those days. Gingerbread decorates the front porch. You enter a spacious kitchen that was once filled with a long wooden table, a cookstove, a daybed, and a rocking chair. A pantry off the kitchen leads into what must have been intended as a dining room, with six doors opening into the table-sized room from the stairway, a downstairs bedroom, the front porch, the parlor, and the kitchen. I have only known it as a living room. During my grandparents’ time, the available wall space showcased giant, gold-leaf framed photographs of my great-grandparents: Thomas and Matilda; Rachel, my father’s Welsh maternal grandmother; and her Irish-born husband, Richard. I found them as intimidating as the four upstairs bedrooms, through which the wind whistled and whined, rattling windows that were just inches from the floor. As my late husband Donald once noted, no one had ever moved out of the house. All their possessions remained: baby dresses and wedding nightgowns; contents from desks and sewing baskets; wedding suits and dresses; and locks of hair from those who had passed. The house smelled of generations.

The house sits on two acres of land. My grandmother had two vegetable gardens and another for potatoes. Wide flower beds separated the gardens from the expansive yard. In late spring, Judy and I could pick weed-like bluebells and violets. Sticky-stemmed petunias thrived in her bean and pea rows, and asparagus’ serpent-like heads peeked through mounds of vinca at the edges of the garden. A volunteer white peach tree grew at the border and was prized for its delicate, sweet fruit.

As children, Judy and I raced our bikes along the L-shaped driveway that wound through the orchard, garage, chicken coops, and then to the barn, corn cribs, and sheds. We were told that the summer kitchen off the back porch of the house was built from the wood of Thomas’s old house, which once stood at the north end of the driveway near the old weigh station. The small building smelled of rodents and was filled with boxes and tools; it was only haunted by our imaginations of its purpose: summer cooking.

This compound was paradise for Judy and me, verdant with our family’s history. Now we found ourselves locked out. Judy didn’t want me to enter anyway. She wanted us to remember it as it was, not as the corpse of a house it had become. But I needed to see it, remember it one last time. Thank it for the 130 years of shelter it had provided our family. I needed a kind of viewing, as we did in the Midwest when someone died, one last look at the beloved now barely resembling him or herself.

We walked from window to window, peering into the kitchen and my parents’ old bedroom, which they had moved into after they could no longer climb the stairs to their upstairs bedroom. Gallons of whiskey bottles and trash cluttered the rooms. The gingerbread along the front porch had rotted, and the upstairs windows on the north side of the house were broken and boarded up from the inside.

When did the deterioration begin? Was it when the cattle and sheep were sold off, and eggs and chickens became easier to buy at the grocery store in town? Was it when the old barn burned down and wasn’t replaced? When did the cars start to rust in fields once grazed by sheep, horses, and cattle? Was it when my father aged, piecing together affordable repair solutions? Or was it earlier, after World War II and into the ‘70s, when the world of the small farmer was swallowed whole by corporate interests, and chemicals made weeding and fertilizing easier?

I remind Judy that 200 years ago, none of these buildings were here, and soon, none will be here again, more like the time when tribes of the Illinois Federation occupied it. I say this to try to comfort us. This farm has met the fate of many before it. Since 1950, the number of small farms has decreased by 66% due to increased mechanization, growing productivity, and people like ourselves leaving the farm. The average small farm acreage has doubled, and fewer people are needed to do the work. Animals are now factory-farmed, and the clumps of houses and barns dotting the Midwestern landscape are unnecessary.

We are old, too. In fifteen or twenty years, Judy and I will not be here either. This eternal place turns out to be just as mortal as we are. I am reminded of the drastic changes on Earth, which I never imagined would occur in my lifetime. Shorelines are no longer habitable; fires ravage forests and communities, desiccating areas of Los Angeles and Santa Rosa, California—places that used to feel safe. Unpredictable temperature shifts disrupt seasons. Is mourning this family farm a prelude to something much more significant?

The house looks lonely in the late afternoon sun. Lines from a favorite childhood poem swim through my mind. “Whenever I walk to Suffern, along the Erie track/ I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black/…This house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen panes of glass/… It needs new paint and shingles, and the vines should be trimmed and tied/But what it needs the most of all is some people living inside/.…”

I turn to look at Judy. I’m glad we’re together, perhaps the last of our family to visit. The lines of the poem keep running through my mind. “A house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life/… is the saddest sight, when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet…”

It is late, and we have promises to keep. We return to the car. I take one last picture.

Joyce Kilmore, “The House With Nobody In It.”

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Politics in a Traumatized World: Dystopia and the Creative Imagination, October 18-20, 2024

���If human life is unsustainable as we have become accustomed to living it, it is likely up to survivors���people who have stared into the abyss of catastrophe���to imagine and enact new ways of living.��� ..Robert Jay Lipton, author whose subject has been holocaust, mass violence, and renewal in the 20th and 21st century.

How do we find meaning in the outrageous chaos of the current election year? Does ���mayhem pave the way to the White House���? What is democracy���s future?

Join those who view this season���s chaos as a unique opportunity to broaden our awareness of the cultural issues before us. The 7th consecutive presidential conference, Politics in a Traumatized World: Dystopia and the Creative Imagination, will be held on�� October 18-20, 2024, at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Our esteemed speakers, including Robert Jay Lifton, on The Appeal of Truth; Donald Kalsched, PhD, on Inner and Outer Democracy and the Threat of Authoritarianism; and Andrew Samuels on Good-Enough Leadership: How to Fail Better-It���s Urgent, bring a wealth of unique perspectives and insights. My presentation, Earth over Wealth: Napa Citizens Take on Big Money, will describe our work in Napa County to bolster democracy and to protect the rights of those who have no voice, including our watersheds, forests, and the disenfranchised.

In the last nine years of involvement in political work in Napa County, I have learned that political work can strengthen our ties, not just polarize. Gathering and listening to each other is critical to finding solutions to some of the rapidly burgeoning crises brought on by climate change. It may be the dark gift of these chaotic times.

So please come, either by Zoom or in person. Registration information is here. At times like these, we need each other.��

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Goddess Speed, Norma Churchill!!

Norma Jean Churchill, a cherished member of our family for the past three decades, departed from this world in the early hours of April 10, 2024. At the age of 92, she passed away in the comfort of her own bed, in her home by her beloved Las Gallinas tidal creek, just as she had wished. Her body may have worn out, but her spirit remained strong. On her last afternoon, when my daughter-in-law Melissa woke her, Norma spoke of traveling a long road. She was smiling.

Norma was born in Santa Barbara, CA, in 1932 and grew up surrounded by a large family who remained living presences throughout her long life. Her interest in art brought her north to the San Francisco Art Institute. She privately studied printmaking and painting in oils. Trips to museums in New York, London, and Paris increased her knowledge and pleasure in art.

Throughout her life, Norma worked as a hairdresser in elite salons in San Francisco, but she also wrote and painted her visions. She traveled extensively. Her Little Book of Death journal recorded simple vignettes which she illustrated with whimsical drawings— the dead baby king snake that a crow deposited in her birdbath (she was at war with crows and cats, keeping a baster-like water pistol loaded on her deck to dispense with them.) —the caterpillar she discovered on her parsley, anxiously anticipating its metamorphosis into a swallowtail butterfly until it was unceremoniously eaten by a cowbird; the flowers of her garden she nurtured and then pruned back as they wilted. These stories of death quickly morphed into the cycles of life and the liveliness of Presence— here, right now. Some grew into the articles she had published in a local newspaper, mostly about her reflections on aging: “A Mother’s Final Farewell, All Too Alone.” “A Long Life Brings Many Changes of Seasons.” “A One-cupcake Party to Celebrate Good Times with Long-Gone Friends.” From childhood, she loved newspapers. She wrote a series of (unpublished) articles on her life growing up in Santa Barbara: the day in grammar school when her Japanese classmate was sent to an internment camp, the story of when the West Coast was bombed and she was home alone, the experiences of growing up with a deaf mother.

Norma’s creative journey was a testament to her resilience and passion. At the age of 89, she achieved a significant milestone with the publication of her first book, ‘Journey to Snakewoman: The Visions of Norma Churchill’ (Dancing Raven Press, 2021). This collection of her visions and paintings was a powerful reflection of her deep connection with the earth and her belief in the importance of feminine energy and heart in our relationships with each other and the natural world.

Only a week before Norma’s passing, she spent Easter weekend with our family in Napa, all of us aware this was probably the last of the many weekends and holidays that we had spent together. Our final photo showed Norma, lively even in her fragility, sitting in the Kawasaki Mule beside my son Casey and his wife Melissa, their 13 and 11 year old sons Wesley and Sabien—Norma’s godsons—exuberantly waving from the back of the Mule. “I trust I will go cheerfully into the night,” she wrote in September 2017 in The Little Book of Death, “an energy for life used up to the limit, transferring to the great river psyche endlessly flowing all around us. Home at last, home as last! –to paraphrase MLK.”  She wrote in that journal for over 10 years, ending it with an exclamation in bright colored letters: “The End! Now, onto The Little Book of Life!”

And so she goes on! Goddess speed, our dear Norma Churchill.

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Ode to Kali

This Spring’s beauty has never been greater. I know, for some of us elders, this is how it feels every spring—a green fuse filled with fire of blooming: California buttercup and shooting star and purple cups of Douglas Iris and now spires of lupin, tiny whispers of trillium, and blue-eyed grass. Such delicate, sturdy presences invite calm and quiet. They resonate with the state of consciousness known as goatsong, in which a sacrifice must be made of our passions and cravings for the essence of life. The liveliness and the angst of these times co-inhabit the fresh scent of finished compost become earth. Perhaps the apprehension of goatsong consciousness is why we don’t slow down. The painful experience of incarnation is heart-rending. Nothing gold can stay.

It has been months since I wrote a blog here—months filled with holidays and a primary election which will deliver three women to our Napa County Board of Supervisors to join two incumbent women in January 2025. For the moment, we celebrate. Perhaps for the next few years, we will have a county government governed by a land ethic. Ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote that in a land ethic, humans are citizens of a community of interdependent parts, a community which includes land and water and the atmosphere so important to our survival. This challenges our old attitude of being conquerers of Nature.

Personally, the last months have included a very ill brother and sister and a dear friend now on Hospice. The unimaginable has visited too many times. 

But the last months have also surprised me (and shocked my kids) with a new relationship— a new love—which is at once anciently familiar and temporally disorienting. Such joy I welcome!

Does aging allow a slowing into renewal imbedded with recognition that any cycle of new life includes death and decay? Is this the genesis of Beauty? Her earliest leaf’s a flower/ but only so an hour. Is this our task? holding both at once?

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Sea Change in Napa County?

It has been three weeks now since that day we sat in the Napa County Board of Supervisors (BOS) chamber for the appeal hearing by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) of the Le Colline Vineyard project—the day that the Board of Supervisors crossed a line into a new world for Napa County. The CBD challenged the Planning Department’s permitting of a vineyard in the Ag Watershed Open Space lands. The proposed vineyard was in the headwaters of Conn Creek, the watershed of Lake Hennessey, the primary water source for the City of Napa. The project threatened a contingent beloved Napa County Land Trust site, Linda Falls, cutting mature trees in a bouldered area, threatening silting-in of the creek. The proposal fragmented a significant wildlife corridor and would increase traffic on a quiet, mountainous residential road past a daycare center and elementary school. Over three hundred comment letters begged the BOS to uphold the appeal.

We have had two significant victories for the environment in the last year: Walt Ranch and Mountain Peak Winery. However, both wins for the environment were not the result of our local government considering the changing demands of climate change but rather were business-as-usual decisions by the applicants. The projects, steeped in years of appeals and court battles and resulting required modifications for approval, were probably no longer profitable and thereby abandoned. Still, these lands are saved, the Walt Ranch now in the Napa County Land Trust and the Mountain Peak Winery land up for sale. The bad news? Citizens had to fight our local government at great expense in time and energy to get the projects stopped— and the applicants also lost at significant cost to themselves. This obviously is not the way to govern.

On the day of the Le Colline hearing, the room filled with neighbors to the proposed project and the dozen or so people I have come to know and love over the last decade in this advocacy for the environment. Only two or three of the many commenters advocated for the BOS to deny the appeal. We were instructed to keep our comments to two minutes. Most of us sat in the chamber, the rest in the overflow in the lobby. Someone held out tee shirts “Protect Angwin, Keep Napa Water Safe”. We eyed the Utah applicant and his wife, sitting anxiously in the front, many of us seeing them for the first time. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reporter Edward Booth sat on the side of the room with his photographer. Barry Ebberling from the Napa Valley Register was notably absent, under the weather. He has followed these kinds of proceedings for ten years.

We listened to the Planning Director’s reasoning about why Le Colline Vineyard was permitted. Chair Belia Ramos silenced our gasps and scoffs of disbelief at some of his statements and claims. The CBD attorneys, young and female, made their case. Public comments were finished by noon; only a fraction of us returned for the afternoon proceedings and the vote.

I will tell you I am proud of our two new supervisors, just seated this year. Supervisor Anne Cottrell enumerated ten Conservation Regulations (con regs) in the General Plan, which offer protections from such a project. Supervisor Joelle Gallagher named another four. Neither advocated for negative mitigations for these con regs, as is historically done. Both voted to uphold the appeal, citing climate change and the need to protect our watersheds. Then Alfredo Pedrosa and Ryan Gregory voted, denying the appeal, saying the parcels were zoned in the Ag Watershed, which was considered the highest and best use. If we want to change that, they both held, we need to do it, not by denying an applicant who had done everything right, but by changing the General Plan.

So the vote was two to two when Chair Belia Ramos made her vote. As she explained her reasoning, many of us felt tears come to our eyes. She was going to uphold the appeal! For the first time, the importance of the watershed was being considered in a vote. This is a sea change.

There was the aftermath. The Farm Bureau had its letter ready to decry the vote, saying it was dangerous and threatened Ag. They contacted both papers, sounding their alarm. But for many, their actions only underscored the real danger, which is what the Farm Bureau advocates: business as usual. Several citizens’ Letters to the Editor stated the stakes so well, including Iris Barrie, Paul Moser, and Napa Sierra Club’s Nick Cheranich. The Ag Preserve was formed in 1968 during a time very different from now, when there were far fewer wineries. The Ag Watershed lands were later zoned and protected from wanton development in the 70s. Little were we aware then of the many challenges we are facing now.

If we are going to have a premium winegrowing county in the future, if we are going to have enough water for everyone, the resilience of our environment is our only hope. The apparent old attitude of our county planning department of “make it work” will not serve us as we face the daunting changes already upon us. A recent article in the New York Times chronicles how we have allowed industries, especially agriculture, to gobble up groundwater. The author sounds the alarm for the future: We must change how we farm and use water, or we will run out. Large sections of our country are already at that point.

So, the sea change that this vote heralds is an important one. We no longer can modify our con regs in the General Plan to fit a project’s needs. The highest and best use of our Ag Watershed Open Space lands is watershed. Ag has to be secondary in our watersheds. We need our County Government to protect the environment and our water supply for all of us, not just the few who have the resources to exploit a piece of earth for a fine wine.

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Wild and Feral Harbingers of Hope

While visiting Cologne, Germany, this month, I was surprised to see flocks of wild parrots skimming low over the waters of the Rhine before roosting in the large trees along the river’s edge. Parrots are not native to Germany but are probably descendants of pets that have escaped or been deliberately released, naturalizing in this region for 50 years. Still, I was shocked yet delighted to see them that evening and was reminded of my first encounter with wild parrots years ago in San Francisco on a cold Christmas Eve.

That morning I had just exited Beyond Expectations, a coffee shop near the corner of Spruce and Sacramento Streets, and was stunned to see an evergreen tree filled with green and red parrots. This area, also known as shrink row, is frequented by a range of patients and psychotherapists alike. A man, perhaps psychotic or under the influence, weaved by me as I stood in amazement. The parrots looked like Christmas ornaments, evenly perched over the tall tree. “They come every Christmas Eve,” he informed me.

San Francisco has always been extraordinary to me. I first saw the city in September 1971 as we drove south through Marin County on Highway 101 through what was then called the Waldo Tunnel. My friends and I had arrived in California the day before, driving days from the flat lands of the Midwest. As we exited the tunnel, the curved aperture of the tunnel’s end framed a majestic white city unlike any that I had known before. Chicago, St. Louis, and New York City featured brick buildings, darkened further from industry. But San Francisco, white and pastel, shined across the Bay like a palace emerging from the water.

We were young, in our early 20s, a breed of wild parrot ourselves. We had driven from Illinois, me to grad school in psychology, my friend Peggy wanting a job in the film industry and not realizing just how far north San Francisco is from Hollywood. Rich was along for the ride. He would visit his aunt living on the Peninsula before flying home.

What did we do that day that the magic wrapped around us like a starry wish, each of us full of hope and aspirations? I remember that we rode the cable car, standing on the sideboards, the breeze flapping the gathered skirt of the cotton-print, shirred-waisted dress my mother made. We meandered through Ghirardelli Square, enthralled with jugglers and musicians, with hippies selling their wares on the sidewalks, the air fresh with novelty. We had landed in another world.

I didn’t know it that day, but San Francisco would shape me. Like many West Coast residents, I naturalized in the Bay Area. I finished grad school, discovering the writings of Carl Jung and the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where I attended seminars and training. In time I would enter psychoanalysis, rent an office on Sacramento Street, and become a Jungian psychoanalyst myself.

I am still mesmerized by San Francisco’s beauty. The ocean cools and cleans the air; the steep streets defy the imagination of this Midwesterner, at least. It is a city small enough to know with no place to grow. Yes, it has troubles now. Like the rest of us, San Francisco suffers from the changes of the times: lack of affordable housing, a dying financial district, homelessness, and drug-related crime. But it has survived sobering challenges before. The 1906 earthquake and the ensuing fires destroyed 80% of the city, killing an estimated 3000 people. Within a decade, San Francisco had rebuilt to new fire and earthquake standards.In the 1970s, thousands of gay men flocked to San Francisco’s Castro District to embrace newfound sexual freedom. Unfortunately, within a decade, nearly half of the city’s gay community had been lost to AIDS. Again, this same population’s activism worked for funding and education in getting antiviral drugs, which have stopped the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS from being a death sentence.

So in April of this year, when San Franciscans voted the parrot to be the city’s official animal, they chose right. Like many of us, wild parrots are naturalized immigrants mysterious in origin, now having developed their own breed. From the first time I saw them resting in that tree on a cold winter’s day, I was filled with the openness of question and the inspiration of awe, both so important as we enter new territory.

San Francisco supervisor Aaron Pesky said the parrots (along with the other finalist, the sea lion) are “truly San Francisco characters: ornery, loud and opinionated.” I like that. They know how to express themselves! Are they also harbingers of a warming climate? Probably. Wild—or feral parrots—as more exacting references call them, now are naturalizing on all continents except Antarctica. They bring a great gift to us through their mysterious history and adaptation: they are stimulators of imagination and models of resilience, offering hope that we, too, can survive the rapidly accelerating changes of our planet.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak...

AIDS https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=AIDS_and_San_Francisco’s_Queer_Community

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/articl...

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Mother’s Day Memories: Sweet and Bittersweet

I am reprinting one of my favorite Mother’s Day posts. More and more I realize how much my mother’s and my grandmothers’ influences reach my own grandchildren today and perhaps, one day, their own.

Mother’s Day Memories: Sweet, Bittersweet

Every year Mother’s Day brings two big memories, both when I was a preteen, one sweet, one bittersweet. Both were formative in becoming a mom myself.

The “sweet” one first: My younger sister Judy and I decided to bake our mother a cake to celebrate Mother’s Day. Although not experienced in baking anything more than chocolate chip cookies, we decided to go all out and make a layered chocolate cake. We got a devil’s food cake mix and managed to get through the first steps of mixing the batter and baking it in two round layer cake pans. Did we remember to grease the pans? I am not sure. Nor do I remember why we decided on pea-green icing.  Maybe it was a May theme. All went well enough until we attempted to remove the first cake layer from the pan.  It stuck, and then cracked. No problem, we thought, we’ll just glue it with green icing (we loved icing!) Besides, it wouldn’t show.

However, the second layer didn’t come out of its pan so easily either, and this time, there were several pieces. What to do? Being the enterprising cooks that we were, we pieced the top to the bottom with tooth picks. To our horror, part of the top slid to the side. More toothpicks, these horizontally holding the top layer together. A little more icing, and that was that!

Our mother was delighted! She loved great fun more than she loved cooking, having not learned to even boil an egg before she married our father. Her father warned ours before my parent’s marriage about this.  It is certainly not a skill that she deemed important enough to teach us– but enjoying family was!

A year after the cake, my mother’s mother, our dear grandmother, died four days before Mother’s Day. We were bereft. My mother was in her mid thirties at the time, now with four children, young, I think now. At the visitation, I remember my mother taking my sister’s and my hands and walking to the open casket of my grandmother. I would rather not have been there, but my mother’s grip was insistent. Our grandmother lay in her best suit, cold, and looking very different— dead. But what I remember most of all is the strong grip of my mother. I felt it then: the passing down. She was only mother now. No longer daughter, but mother.

I felt this same passing down many years later when she stayed with me after the birth of my first son, Jesse. I was a nervous mother, and her guidance steadied me. Jesse quieted almost immediately when held by her. She showed me how to bath and diaper him. “Oh, you are just like I was when I had you!” she told me.“Don’t worry! The only important thing is to love him!”

The morning she was going out our door to return to my dad and her work as a teacher, she turned to me. I told her I didn’t want her to go. After a tearful embrace she said, “It is time for the old mother to go and for the new mother to take over.”

That moment was the passing down for me. I fully accepted the mantel of responsibility of parent, as I suspect she had before the casket of my grandmother.

The day after my grandmother was buried was Mother’s Day. My mother took us on a picnic to Fairview Park where she had played as a child and where my father proposed to her.  As we sat at the picnic table, my mother, father and we four kids, I realized that my mother wisely understood the whole family needed a day of simple pleasure. She was stepping beyond the grief of a daughter to fully bear the mantel of mother, a mantel she would pass on to each of us in her own ways in the years to come.

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I am Unmarrying

An addendum to the epilogue of Fruits of Eden: Field Notes Napa Valley 1991-2021 .

I am “unmarrying” — a term different from “widowed.” “Widowed” is a dead end. Un-marrying is a fluid process. Donald and I were married for 27 !/2 years, years we grew together, combining our households, finances, and children, then building a home and learning to work together. To that end, we discovered that we loved to travel, eat out, and that we enjoyed farming together. 

It is hard to overestimate how extensive this growing together goes. The mycelium of love stretched as our children became “our children” and then “our grandchildren” and stretched more as we aged and he developed dementia. As he became more incapacitated, the mother in me was activated. He was on my radar at all times. Where was he? Had he gotten up? What had he eaten? 

I remember the day I took our lunch into the TV room, where he loved to have our noontime meal. I was sure he had come in from his walk on the level path we had made surrounding our home to use with his walker. But he wasn’t in his chair. I went to our bedroom, and he wasn’t there either or in the bathroom. I looked out the windows along the path he traced each morning and then, panic rising, ran outside, following his route. I checked the steep path descending to the greenhouse that I had forbade him to negotiate. He wasn’t there, nor was he sitting on the stone bench by the circular driveway at the basement door. I rushed to the veranda along the western side of our home— and then, I saw him lying in the gravel, apparently resting comfortably, as if in a bed, his walker upset nearby. “I knew you would find me,” he said lightly.

The bonds of trust strengthened those last years of our marriage, bonds that loosen these months, this year, after his death. Now I am free not to worry whether I can continue to care for him at home. I can come home whenever I please or be away from the house for more than an hour. I don’t have to cook, can eat a salad for dinner, something he would never tolerate. On December 11, 2022, exactly one year after his death, I removed my wedding ring and laid it with his larger one on my dresser.  I am not going to identify myself as a widow. I am un-marrying. 

It is not simple. I live in the design of a home we dreamed of together and that he, an architect, built. He told me some years after we moved in that he based the size of the house on my dimensions. I love the house, and I love the structure of my life that our marriage afforded, a structure that is me—and he will always be a part of that. 

It was sad but simple to pack up his clothing and many of his items to give or send away, but it is not simple assimilating what has become me stimulated by him and releasing the rest. It takes time.

My friend Michael called me on March 5 of this year, Donald’s birthday, saying he knew it was a difficult day for me. I felt such gratitude for this acknowledgment. “Grief is like the air,” I told him. “You don’t see it, but it’s always around me.” 

This is what it feels like to unmarry.

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What happened to the old Farm Bureau?

The following was first published as a Letter to the Editor in the Napa Valley Register on March 21, 2023.

Twenty minutes into the Farm Bureau’s membership Zoom session on Groundwater last week, my screen went black, and then a message appeared that the “host,” in this case, the executive director of the Farm Bureau, Ryan Klobas, did not permit me to join.

A call to the Napa County main office revealed that my membership had expired six days earlier. Despite my futile online attempts to renew our decades-old membership, I kept getting the message, “you do not have access to that page.” After consulting with Mr. Klobas, the receptionist would not renew my membership, saying she was not authorized to accept payment. I immediately emailed Mr. Klobas about this issue, but I have not heard back.

Yes, it raised concerns about being blackballed. Was this the Napa County Farm Bureau’s opportunity to get rid of me? In all honesty, I am ambivalent about being a member, although my husband and I have been for decades. I was raised on a small farm in the Midwest. My father was a member of the Farm Bureau. Everyone was.

I am opposed to many of the stances of the Farm Bureau. The American Farm Bureau Federation continues in rhetoric, at least, to support the farmer but with little regard for the impact of farming on climate and the environment, and many would say little regard for the impact of the changing climate on the farmer. The Federation has strong ties to the oil industry.  And although there was a time not that long ago in Napa County when the Farm Bureau was manned by the likes of Volker Eisele and Cio Perez, when our new supervisor Joelle Gallagher was executive director, that has all changed. Some call it a hostile takeover. A segment of the wine industry has eclipsed the so-called farmer aspect, financing the Farm Bureau PAC used to influence local elections.

Of course, what may have also influenced this cut-off is the fact Ryan Klobas and I shared a stage with Mina Kim on KQED some five years ago, an interview, I suspect, that was uncomfortable for him. I described this interview in my just-published book, Fruits of Eden: Field Notes Napa Valley 1991-2021. The Farm Bureau had poured a great deal of money into the narrow defeat of Measure C, a citizen initiative that limited the deforestation in our county. They used misleading information or downright lies about the measure to scare voters away from protections for our watersheds. After the narrow defeat, the County passed the Napa County Water Quality and Tree Protection Ordinance of 2019.

We were asked our opinion of this, me representing those organizations who supported protecting our watersheds and forests, and Ryan Klobas, the Farm Bureau’s stance, which was “educating” the voters about the negative consequences of such a measure. The truth is when a citizen initiative goes to the voters and the measure passes, it is beyond the reach of the powers that be. In a democratic government, the vote returns the power to the voters. Elected officials answer to the voters. In autocratic systems, the powers that be try to stop this power of the vote by misinformation and, sadly, in our national politics, by restricting voting access.

In the case of the Farm Bureau, I am most concerned about how power is being wielded. Yes, I do think that after decades, there should have been some grace period on the renewal of my dues. A part of me says, okay, this saves me almost $300 per year. But I will also add one of the reasons that I have wanted to remain a member is to continue to read the state Farm Bureau weekly newsletter, Ag Alerts, and understand the Farm Bureau’s stance on water rights and on the use of various Ag chemicals. The common ground of hearing what often is a very different stance from my own sometimes helps me have some empathy for the other. That is what is lost when we stop listening to those with different views and power through to get our own way.

Should I try to rejoin? If I do, what are my dues supporting? This is a question I continue to ponder. But I do know that our climate is changing beyond our wildest imaginations. We need to listen to the needs and views of each other, especially those we disagree with, and we need to abandon the way of power and profit over the needs of the environment upon which we all, including farmers, depend.

Addendum: I decided to try again, this time for a new membership (versus renew), and my info was taken. I have no idea yet if this has worked.

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