Following the Big Duck

My dad did not love school.

He did not love reading (or at least not until my mom had hold of him for many years :>)  He had a curious mind, though, and a way of grabbing hold of baffling ideas and wrestling them through and then turning his conclusions into stories.  Growing up in a homesteading family that burned sagebrush to keep warm and lived in an house dug into the ground, he was schooled to find practical solutions to overwhelming problems, and he believed solutions could be found, step step step.  Sometimes he found those solutions outdoors.  Sometimes in books.

So I grew up watching him learn to inoculate mules against sleeping sickness.  To hold down a grass roof that seemed determined to blow away in a gale and sail down the valley.  To harness waterfall power for a mill that would grind flour for Maji and also bring running water to our house.  To fly a plane.

It wasn’t easy when the Big Duck had something on his mind to be a little duckling paddling along behind, trying to keep up, not sure he even remembered I was there.   But from as far back as I can remember, he was always up to something interesting and engaging, always full of life.

When he came back to Portland, he turned his back yard into a place of berries and fruit trees and compost and habitat long before those things had caught on as good ideas.  I think of him almost every time I have my fingers in the dirt.  I think of him as I find my own path as a grandparent.

But he didn’t always have time or attention for us.  His mind was on the big world a lot of the time–and during those years he lived in Portland, he still traveled (a LOT) and asked questions and told stories all over that big world.

Missing you today, Dad, and thinking about those big old footsteps walking on ahead while I ran to keep up…and mulling all the things that ripple on.  Family connections.  Ethiopia connections.  Stories.

 

 

 

One thing

Do one thing.

It’s a comforting thought, isn’t it?  In The Oregonian article I was reading while keeping my mom company this morning, the one thing was to ditch harmful chemicals used to clean toilet bowls and, instead, sprinkle baking soda in the evening and wake to sparkling white.  Hmmm.

So much to do in my life that feels important.  Reading.  Writing.  Teaching.  Family celebrations.

Volunteering, too.  So many kids who deserve a thinking, active, reading education in Ethiopia–like these kids who gathered around the Ethiopia Reads mobile horse library near Kololo.

It can be overwhelming.

And now so many weeds to pull.

Last week, I had my visit from the volunteer from the Portland Backyard Habitat Certification Program–and I got some surprises.  This one, for example, isn’t invasive.  Oh, it might take over and dig its roots deep deep deep, but it’s not competing with Oregon wildflowers and dominating public spaces.

English ivy is.  My visiting sweeties loved the clip and snip of helping me fill this city compost bin with it (one bin down, hundreds more to go).

Pokeweed is.  Last year, I kept wondering, What is that plant??  This year, after the backyard visit, I dug in to try to dig out its roots.  (This is only the crown.)

Creeping buttercup is.  I only had a small infestation (I think), which I replaced with wood and rocks that I gathered from other places in the yard.

It’ll take years to turn my back yard into a place Lanie could be proud of.  But I can do one thing.  Or two. Or three.  And when one of my sweeties got back home, she sent me a picture of a weed to ask if it was one of the bad ones.

When we do one thing and the kids of the earth see us, who knows what one-two-three things they’ll do, too?

My backyard skin

Are we inexorably drawn to the things we knew deeply and warmly when we were little?

In Maji, Ethiopia, my backyard wasn’t neat or cozy.  It was full of frogs and bugs and plants that we pulled apart and stitched together in our games.  It stretched outward to that path that led to a waterfall, the one my sisters and I ran up and down telling stories abut the curled fern tips we called our water babies.  We were outside all the time.

All too soon, my kids were young gardeners and our back yard had a big vegetable garden that gobbled up hours of spring and summer.

When I moved to Portland, I was less interested in a big vegetable garden than in plant choices that would support the lives of bees and butterflies and birds. I turned a patch of grass in front into ground cover and started looking around the scruffy back yard and trying to identify weeds.  This one, I thought, was a charmer.  That was before it started sending its roots crawling and its seeds flinging everywhere.  Oops!

(I must say I haven’t given up vegetables completely.  I’ve grown tomatoes and lettuce and rhubarb and some champion kale here.  This year it’s flowering–still good to eat.)

Last year, I was a weed dabbler.  This year, I’m obsessed.

In my quest to identify the Big Bad Bully weeds, I found a form on the web and filled it out.  This week, the Columbia Land Trust and Portland Audubon Society will send a volunteer to look at my back yard, help me identify the worst invaders, and come up with a plan for better backyard habitat.

I do already have BETTER backyard habitat than I once did.  But one of the big offenders–ivy–sprawls over the fence between our neighbors and us and climbs the neighbor’s trees.  I’d have to take care of that to even have a Silver Certified Backyard Habitat.  A Gold or Platinum means people have “taken heroic measures to remove invasive weeds, increased stormwater management on-site, and created beautiful habitat for local wildlife.”

(What is this weed??  I’ll find out!)

I am YEARS from silver.  Now I know Lanie was probably years from silver, too, even if I did give her a great yard.  But my outside genes pull me into the back yard almost every day identifying all kinds of weeds–and looking at them in my neighbors’ yards, too.  Alas.

I now know bindweed and toadflax (sigh…I thought it was snapdragon and had welcomed it) and pokeweed (can’t believe we let two specimens get HUGE and grow fat, fleshy roots), and weedy fennel (I proudly asked a master gardener at the farmers’ market what this aromatic herb was) and henbane and chickweed and a bunch of others.

And here’s the hopeful thing.  I spaded up a bunch of crabgrass and other scruff in this spot by the street and planted a few steppables last year.  (Have I said how much I love steppables??)

A year later, it already looks like this.  Friends of Trees also planted that tree, by the way.

The best thing is that I feel like that shirtless kid again, loving the feel of the earth on my skin.

Brave mothers

Long plane trips between continents…learning how to manage life in Addis Ababa and then in the countryside where (at first) water arrived at our house on the backs of donkeys and cooking was done on and in a wood-burning stove…landing on the hot savannah and standing under the wing of an airplane for shade…creeping up the mountain road squashed together in a lumpy, bumpy Jeep…creating school in a bedroom…like all kids, I never questioned the elements of my childhood.  These things were what families did.  They were what MY family did.

It wasn’t until much later, when I was working on my book JANE KURTZ AND YOU, that I even thought to ask my mom how all of those adventures felt to her.

“What was that first trip like?” I asked.  “You’d never even been outside the country before and here you were with a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a one-year-old taking a ship and then airplanes all the way to Ethiopia.”

She said that the airlines gave her a questionnaire to fill out because they wanted to encourage more families to travel.  What did she suggest?  “A bigger size of diaper.”

She handled each adventure with calm practicality–living in a house with a grass roof and a pole in the middle of the living room–having more babies–figuring out how to bake bread with flour milled down the path at the waterfall.  Adventure after adventure.  She wrestled solutions out and never stopped making puns and wry, truthful comments along the way.

But why not?  She grew up in a world of clothes made from feed sacks and unending hard work and poverty.  She left home at fourteen so she could finish high school and eventually go to college.  She always knew life wasn’t going to hand her any smooth, clean solutions to any of her dilemmas.   Her younger sister in this photo looks dreamy.  My mom looks wary–and ready for anything.  Not easily swayed.  Not easily bowled over.

She passed on that tough survivor spirit and gave her children lives of adventure, conversation, laughter, and books.

I’m surrounded these days by more moms making tough, practical choices, including my students in the Vermont College MFA program determined to have artistic lives in the middle of domestic demands or including the moms out there raising money for Ethiopia Reads so that all mothers’ kids will have a shot at education and dreams, including the Ethiopian moms I’ve seen–like this one–determined and hopeful in spite of tough and terrible odds.

Thanks, Mom.  Happy Mother’s Day.

Beauty and the Beast

Home from travels and thinking, again, about weeds.  Ah…weeds.

One of my stops was in Kansas, a visit organized by LeAnn Clark–astounding volunteer for Ethiopia Reads who has gathered and sorted and figured out how to ship about 300,000 gently used children’s books to Ethiopia.  She was impressed with how much more I know about plants and flowers now .  LeAnn and I did two events to raise money for Ethiopia Reads, events centered around my Lanie books.  At one of the stations, kids planted flowers in cups and mugs that LeAnn and I bought at the thrift shop for 10 and 25 cents.  (Local nurseries donated the plants.)

What thralldom…to think about actual seeds and also the reading seeds we’re planting.

Back in Portland, I’ve had a few days to mull my garden again.  Some plants clearly don’t take much patience.

We stuck these azalea bushes in the ground last year, for instance, and did what we could to make the earth acidic and–wowee!  I came home from Kansas this spring to find them turned into princess-ey wonders, fluffing their pink around them.

Some plants take mucho patience.  Last year, my sister Caroline gave me a few transplants from her garden and one looked like…um…a STICK most of the spring and summer season.  I had to put rocks in a circle around it to keep from accidentally stepping on it.

It didn’t go away all rainy winter and now it has buds on it for the first time.

Last spring, I also planted some oooold wildflowers seeds I’d had around for years and wasn’t even sure what the baby plants were going to look like.  I kept asking my sister Cathy, “Do you think that’s a plant or a weed?”  Finally, I was convinced I was seeing feathery teeny plants that were NOT weeds.  But they never flowered.

This year they did!

I even learned from a book LeAnn handed me that they are perennial.  Maybe I’ll have poppies in my garden from now on.

This spring, with the front gardens in pretty awesome shape, I’ve been looking at the back yard for the first time.  A neglected back yard that had dogs running around it before and (thus) some big bare spots.  I’ve read and read about aggressive, noxious, invasive, nuisance weeds–and I finally found a website where I think I’ve signed up with someone from the Audubon Society in Portland to come tell me about my weeds and how to create better habitat in my yard, a la Lanie.

And you know what?  I think Ma Nature did give me ONE good, native weed.

I think this is fringecup, a lot like but NOT garlic mustard, which I believe I can now identify and have been pulling and pulling and pulling.  Yesterday, I transplanted it from this corner spot into my back yard where I hope it will flourish and spread.

In Maji, Ethiopia, I learned to love the smell of earth and weeds and grass–and now I’m coming around to a whole new world of weeds and grass and earth.  Some of this is HARD.  Some is vastly fun.

Stay tuned for whether I think there is ANY hope for a Backyard Habitat Certificate somewhere down the road!

Come on, Mother Nature, give peace a chance

On Saturday, I was honored to speak at a young author’s conference in southern Washington, and was it ever special. These days, it takes almost heroic effort to pull off such things–teachers, parents, kids all choosing to be part of a reading and writing event instead of all the other things tugging at them. On the way home, my sister Cathy and I stopped at Hortlandia. I wanted to look for native Oregon plants. Writing the Lanie books woke me up to what a difference we can make with native plants that support native insects eaten by native birds–and now I have a garden to play with.

Alas and alack, one of the plants I bought shows up on some lists of noxious and maybe even invasive plants, which sent me back to trying to learn more about the weeds in my back yard–like this one.  More and more I realize that the things in my back yard are unwanted.  I’m learning all kinds of new vocabulary from “vigorous” to “pushy” to “thug.”  My weekend reading made me see in a new way that invasive plants are crowding out Oregon native wildflowers and ground cover because they are just so bold and strong and overpowering, and I should be doing my bit to not add to the problem.

Eeek.

I like moss.  I’m happy to live with a lot of things other people call weeds.  I’m having fun playing with the stones I dig out of my dirt.  But a lot of the weeds hanging around my back yard are the really bad ones that will bully other plants around–and now I know I need to learn more about weed identification and weed pulling.

Come on!  Why can’t at least some of the weeds that have invited themselves in be nice native plants that will behave themselves?  Why are ALL of them the bullies?

The only hopeful thought of the day is a metaphorical one.  My friend Ann Porter in ND introduced me to Betty who grew up in Ethiopia without all the coaxing and tending of reading habits that goes on in the United States.  No reading teacher.  No library.  No tutor.  No ELL teacher.  No special stories crafted just for her interests…and yet that seed of reading fell, anyway, and she ended up loving to read…and her reading opened doors for her to eventually get an advanced degree…and now she’s running a marathon so that kids in Ethiopia can have more. books.

This teacher of a new Ethiopia Reads school explained to an interviewer that she has made it a mission to protect young girls from the practice of forced marriage. “Being a woman in this society, you aren’t supposed to speak. Being a teacher, I now have a voice” Girls who are not in school are frequently forced to marry as young as 12 years old. Kololo opened this school year with children as old as 12 years old starting in kindergarten and first grade. “I’m helping the girls by empowering them. If they are educated, they can be heard.”

This week, I’ll fly out to Denver…and from there to Kansas and NYC where Ethiopia Reads volunteers have organized events to help us keep going on our efforts.  I’ll leave the garden and yard weeds behind for a while and think about reading seeds that, thankfully, grow in the strangest places.

Books, life, and waking up to every little detail

Isn’t it fascinating how books and life weave together sometimes?  Over spring break, I visited a museum that had an exhibit about things recovered from an old, old shipwreck.  Including…a rat skeleton!

What a perfect introduction to the next spring break stop, which included reading Adventures of a South Pole Pig to the two most fun little listeners in the world.  If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading it yet, let me give you a preview of coming attractions:  Flora ends up on a ship.  And the ship has…rats.  And Flora has to figure out what to do about them.  Those rats seem really, really real even if the story of Flora is clearly part of someone’s imagination.  And I couldn’t love MORE the experience of reading aloud and the experience of finding real emotions, real geography, real history in a book.

I didn’t grow up anywhere near the ocean.  I didn’t even know about birds like pelicans when I was a kid even though they do live in Ethiopia.  But I did play in the water of Washa Wuha and later Lake Langano.  Kind of like the ocean, right?

Back to Portland now but, hey…Water.  Sand.  Sunsets.  Read alouds.  Kids.  Wowee.