Vicki Lane's Blog, page 520

Pink

*** *** ***
***

Dog Moon

Moonlight floods the room:The scent of all outdoors drifts in. Old Maggie rouses, stiffly paces, Stands beside our bed again.
The full moon calls . She knows thatSomewhere beyond the edge of sight,
Bear and Jack, dead these two years,Course the forever fields of night.
 Outside at last, she pauses on the porch, Black nose tasting the moonlight,Then sets off, hind legs stiff,  A slow determined trot into the night.  Two hours later, she returns,Panting with excitement keen,
Dancing with lunatic joy.  Maggie, where have you been and what have you seen ?
 She keeps her counselbut her eyes are full of moon beamsAnd, replete with full moon madness, The old dog lies down to pleasant dreams.

Harvesting the Hops

Those are hop vines growing up the side of our barn.  Hops are the little cone-like flowers produced by the female plants and they have been a traditional flavoring in beer since the eleventh century.

Nearby Asheville has become known for its micro-breweries and now some area farmers are growing hops to supply them.. Our friend Cory is a micro-micro- micro-brewer -- aka a home brewer -- and he thought he'd like to try his hand at growing his own hops. 
Since, however, he and his wife Kasie live in an apartment in Asheville, they have made use of bits of Justin's garden and our nice tall barn for this endeavor.
The strings the vines grow on can be lowered to make harvest easier. Another traditional use for hops was as a sleeping aid. Using a small pillow filled with dried hops is said to produce drowsiness.
I haven't tried this as drowsiness comes all to naturally to me at the end of the day. Have any of you ever used a hops pillow?

A Peaceful Day

Not much going on... Which suits me fine. . . No bells ringing. . . The birds are twittering . . . Not me. I'm just watching the clouds roll down the sky.

The Day After . . .

Yesterday we remembered the heroes and the losses of 9/11 -- Casualties in United States on 9-11-01 - 2,996 (19 hijackers, 246 hostages on the planes, 2676 civilians, 55 military personnel.)It might be well to look at the rest of the picture -- the aftermath of the terrorist attack. Casualties in Iraq - 900,338 (4,414 US Troops, 30,000 Iraq troops, 318 other troops, the rest {865,606} were Civilians.) Casualties in Afghanistan - 19,629 (1,140 US Troops, 8,587 Afghan troops, 772 other troops, the rest {9,130} were Civilians   So many stories of heroism -- in the Twin Towers, at the Pentagon, and on board the flight where the passengers revolted and crashed the plane rather than let the hijackers complete their deadly mission.But the dark side of the U. S. response needs to be acknowledged -- the rush to judgement, the decision to go to war with Iraq (those elusive weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be, if not a lie, at least willful self delusion.)We have become a country that uses torture( Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, 'extraordinary rendition' -- I feel queasy even typing the words.)We have become a country that arrests people on suspicion and holds them (Guantanamo Bay) without due process. We have resorted to petty jingoism -- remember "Freedom fries" and the accusation that, if anyone disagreed with the juggernaut of war, they didn't love freedom?Our leaders have not attempted to address the reasons behind the tragedy of 9/11 -- resorting to the  nonsensical -"We were attacked by people who hate freedom."We are less free than we were pre 9/11 -- the Patriot Act is one manifestation and, of course, if you've flown anywhere in the past ten years, you know what I'm talking about. Osama bin Laden didn't have the resources to wage war on the USA with military force. He just wanted to do damage -- it's said that he hoped to bankrupt the USA.  Looking at the costs of the two wars and the state of the economy today, one wonders who's ahead in the so-called war on terror.  It makes me think of martial art where one makes use of the opponent's strength, turning it against him to defeat him.How might it have been different?  This very excellent article by Chris Hedges  is well worth reading.

A Moment of Silence...

About That Basket . . .

So this is what I use my grandmother's basket for -- to hold the elements of a little talk I used to do in the lower grades of our local schools, back when I was starting to be known as 'The Quilt Lady."
I'd bring in a bunch of quilts and talk about them and ask the kids about quilts they might have at home.  I'd hand out these pictures of quilt blocks for the kids to identify and color. And I'd tell them a story about Rachel, a little girl who lived in our county about a hundred years ago -- a little girl who wanted to make a quilt for her doll, Grace Greenwood.
I'd show them how Rachel traced around templates and cut out her quilt pieces and sewed them together by hand.
And I'd show them Rachel's doll and the  quilt Rachel made with scraps from her mother and sister's sewing (left unfinished on one edge to show its construction.) By the way, those are my grandmother's sewing scissors in the picture.
But what was the original use of the basket? I hear someone asking.

Well, I believe it was used to hold feathers -- feathers plucked from butchered chicken/ducks/geese and used to fill pillows and bed ticks. 

Here's a LINK to a Shaker feather basket that looks very similar.(Scroll down to number 219.)

Artifact

This basket sat on a cedar chest in my grandparents' bedroom for over fifty years and I never thought of asking where it came from and what it was used for.
It's woven of very thin materials -- ash splits, perhaps, or maybe river cane?
The lid is attached.
The basket is far too fragile to use for heavy things --- what do you think its use was?

To Live Content...

....
"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, to all bravely await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony." This quote from William Henry Channing caught my eye over at Vicki Archer's beautiful blog FRENCH ESSENCE as did the post about her neighbors. 
Not a bad credo to live by, I think. Miss Susie Hutchins certainly agrees.

Pinhook by Janisse Ray

from the publisher's website: "Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative paean to wildness and wilderness restoration with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp.

Pinhook Swamp acts as a vital watershed and wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together Okefenokee, Osceola, and Pinhook form one of the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River. This is one of America's last truly wild places, and Pinhook takes us into its heart.

Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to protect it, spending the night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with the swamp. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there--naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store. In lyrical, down-home prose, she draws together the swamp's need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness and wildness in our own lives and landscapes."
This is such a fine book. Ray looks closely at the smallest things and writes of them like a poet. I highly recommend it.
This lovely book seems to me particularly important just now when, in the name of job creation, we have politicians calling for exploring for oil in the  Everglades, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, easing the regulations against smog, rolling back years of progress toward a less polluted world . . .
Talk about a fragmented land.  Some people think it's laughable to worry about species extinction or air quality or global warming. 
Others of us fear that, if the anti-environmentalists have their way. we'll be on the road to a future that looks like this.  I'm deeply afraid of the direction things are going.  The mindset that decides to deal with global warming by denying it . . . while turning up the air conditioner, thus adding to the problem, is all  too common.
But I'm preaching to the choir, I expect. 
Meanwhile, I'll be looking for more of Janisse Ray's books.