MindSpinner

The process by which we find our way through life intrigues me. Life seems a river that, guided by gravities of heart and need, flows around unyielding obstacles and digs its channels in remaining possibilities, winding at various distances from might-have-beens.

Today, while I write, the marmalade kitten (AKA Orange Stripey Dude) bats and leaps at a strand of leftover yarn tied to the doorknob. No, Orange Stripey Dude didn’t go to the animal shelter. Something came up on the afternoon of July 3, and we didn’t make it to the shelter. On July 4, the shelter was closed. This was fateful. Anybody who can resist the charms of Orange Stripey Dude after 48 hours can be suspected of having a flinty heart. His gender has now been confirmed, he’s been proclaimed healthy, and he’s had his first shots. Like the rest of the fur folk, he is a reliable companion - you feed him, you pet him, and he opts to stick around. He isn’t much good at intelligent conversation, no more than Cat the First or the dogs or the bunnies, so thank heaven for NPR and audiobooks, blogs and the Internet. He does have an appalling amount of playful energy, hence homemade cat toys such as leftover yarn strung from doorknobs. (The leftover yarn means I finished crocheting the string bag as of Sunday, which is a good thing, because work started Monday, and I won’t have time anymore to waste on crocheting unneedful things just because I find the task soothing.)

Outside, vegetables grow in the kitchen garden and in eight raised beds. I’m making plans to expand the effort further and to include more herbs. I’ve even ordered seed for a stand of amaranth. In the past year, besides the vegetables, I’ve added three apple trees, a pecan tree, currants and gooseberries, and I’ve investigated permaculture. Someday, when the teenagers are making their way in the world, food from the backyard will replace much of the food from grocery store. I’ve taken a rather involved look at the matter of how food gets to the grocery store to the table this past year and decided that I don’t want to be at the mercy of all possible threats to food security and affordability.

So, I have too many animals and a yard that’s going to look like a microfarm. All this seems random, but it isn’t. It’s all factored into a knowledge that’s sunk into my bones, “I am on my own.” This is different from saying “I have no friends” or “I have no social life,” for I have these in modest measure. I have too many animals partly because they keep me company. My yard will turn into a microfarm partly because that’s one form of security I can manage while my income erodes against the cost of living. And because being outside planting or weeding does me good when nothing else can. (Alas, mowing affords nothing of the same benefits, though it needs doing this very day. If I have to have a lawn, I should have sheep to nibble it. I wouldn’t have to crank a sheep and push it tediously back and forth on a hot day.)

Last night I found myself at a Meijer’s store across the river, about an hour from home. I had some time on my hands, about four hours of it. I had ducked into the store to buy some fine-point pens and to use the restroom. I had no idea where the office supply section was, so I wandered the store for a little while and found myself in the sewing aisle. I looked wistfully at the sewing machines - mine has ceased working after many years’ use - but saw nothing to covet. I know the machine I actually do covet: it’s a professional mechanical Singer sewing machine with metal parts instead of plastic, no fancy electronics, just a sturdy basic machine. It’s not that I plan to do any sewing this summer. If I had money for fabric, I’d make slipcovers for the living room couch and love seat, but that project will have to wait.

Still, I was itching to make something, and when a pretty ball of cotton yarn caught my eye, I wanted the simple repetitiveness of crocheting. I haven’t crocheted anything since I was in college. I don’t know how to knit at all, though I suspect I will try to learn sometime. And I wanted the pretty balls of yarn. I settled on a project depicted on the label - a string bag. Instructions were promised on the reverse side of the label. I don’t need a string bag, to be honest about the matter, and I did not need four little balls of yarn and a needle. But sometimes it is good to make a thing, to do it instead of buy it, partly for the satisfaction in the doing, partly for the ritual, and partly just to remember how such things are done. Everything comes to us so easily in this culture. We hold out a piece of plastic and the thing we want is ours. We acquire things thoughtlessly, own things thoughtlessly, and dispose of them thoughtlessly. We are impoverished because we are no longer connected to the making.

Everything we own has a story. Everything we eat has a story. Sometimes the stories are stories we don’t want to hear, like the story of how the pallid egg came to rest on the breakfast plate, or how handiwork acquired at a desirable price represents hardship. Sometimes the stories are uninspiring, like the story of the plastic mixing bowl on the shelf at Wal-Mart or Target. I find myself less oblivious to the stories of things than I used to be. I feel the need to make a cotton string bag and use it for a very long time, until it falls apart. On impulse, I buy a small handmade bowl from a potter to mix my bread dough in, not a plastic bowl from a big box store. I plant a seed to grow food for the table. I want less, but the things I have - their nature and their origin and their impact - matter more.

So today, needle in and needle out, pattern ignored (who needs all that tiny cryptic print anyway), a string bag grows row by row, all purple, teal, lavender, and maroon, in the quiet of the empty house on a Saturday evening, while the cat sleeps nearby at the foot of the bed.

I consider this week an unusual accomplishment for a complete nobody, especially a nobody of good intent. Though I have not succeeded in helping to save the world, I have managed to get myself accused of being a shill in the employ of the government, a mouthpiece for Julie Geberding of the CDC based on the shocking discovery that we have indeed used some of the very same words in the English language (though to say different things - but that’s beside the point), a front for a nefarious plot to seize a nonexistent throne, the Siamese twin of somebody I’ve never actually met in person who lives about 400 miles from here, and the perpetrator of a cover-up plot reminiscent of Watergate. Just how many nefarious people have you gotten to be this week?

An explanation would be too easy and spoil all the fun. I’ll leave you to puzzle this one out.

Meanwhile Catapult Kid has announced his intent to go active duty after his training instead of going to college first and has requested that his MOS be changed from Intelligence Analyst to Counter-Intelligence Agent - i.e., from “more likely to live” to “most likely to die.” I keep thinking about all the difference a few hanging chads can make and how nice it would be if we had one person one vote instead of an electoral college and what a difference it would make if we would stop teaching impressionable boys the same stupid set of age-old notions about what it is to be a man.

I haven’t been blogging enough to maintain the interest of my limited audience, so it’s more than a little ironic that I’m posting tonight something I wish the whole world would read, just as if the whole world would.

The Department of Health and Human Services has been conducting an experiment, likely a more volatile one than they anticipated.  They have created, at pandemicflu.gov, a Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog open to all but not incredibly well publicized. The blog is “a leadership forum on pandemic preparedness, which brings together highly influential leaders from the business, faith, civic and health care sectors to discuss how best to help Americans become more prepared for a possible influenza pandemic.” Ordinary citizens can choose to respond to blog posts via comments, and these comments, though moderated, have been quite frank, indeed passionate.  The “American public” responding is in fact a rather limited, self-selected group of people who have been following H5N1 closely, AKA the “flubies.” Nedra Weinrich, a social marketing consultant and guest blogger, has summed up what has turned out to be an epic struggle on the part of the flubies to wring from government sufficient truth to save lives in the case of a severe pandemic.  It’s a fascinating struggle. (And yes, I’ve thrown in my two cents.)  Read Weinrich’s blog entry summarizing the action to date and anticipating tomorrow’s big event, the Pandemic Flu Leadership Forum, where policy recommendations will be discussed.

I’m still processing the snake episode. For my children, killing the big snake was some sort of heroic adventure, like slaying a dragon. They’ve even been Sunday-Schooled into associating snakes with evil.

I was appalled at the size of the thing, at the three or four broken places along its length, at the smear of blood and mud on the blade of a machete I bought for whacking overgrown weeds. I can tolerate little snakes, but bigger ones unnerve me to a degree, and cobras, in particular, appall. (Can the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi really effect all this? Or the Habu - Mongoose fight in the sultry tent at the fair in Okinawa?) Whether by instinct or training or both, I have been programmed to fear and out of fear to want to quell the life that animates the snake, for it is not only the form of the snake that inspires fear but the way it moves.

But my visceral reaction to a sizable snake is disturbingly out of sync with how I want to see the world. If Friday’s snake was a rat snake, then there was no reason to see it dead. If it was, on the other hand, somebody’s escaped monocled cobra (a far-fetched possibility), then it was in entirely the wrong place, a neighborhood where children play.

Friday’s snake made two incontrovertible points. We live in a world with snakes, with that which we fear, sometimes reasonably and sometimes unreasonably, and we live in a world where our fears and our instinct to survive can nimbly overtake our judgment and effect destruction.

What is it that appalls me most about the snake - the snake itself or what it discovers in me and in my children? And does not the snake question apply whenever we act out of fear? Is it possible that what we have most to fear is not what frightens us in the first place but instead what we may allow ourselves to become when we feel threatened?