Morning Camp

When you camp out, one of the sweetest activities you have is to build a fire, in the evenings to light the night, in the morning to warm you up after you crawl out of your tent.

Kermit and I get up around five-thirty, mumble around doing what we have to do, and then hit the streets (and/or the river walk) by six, and creep in the northside gate around a quarter to seven or so. On select mornings, Bernie has a stack of kindling in the chiminea ready for ignition on the back patio, and my tea water on simmer at the back of the stove.

I must say that on mornings like today, when the temps are still in the 50s, that morning campfire feels mighty good. The sun comes up and adds to the thawing effect on our old bones, whispering to us that soon there will be no point in a fire, that if we are at all cool at 7am, we should count ourselves lucky.

Yes, I will. But I'm very lucky now, too, to sit and sip tea by the morning camp.

Nitpick Worries

Lots of challenges these days.

Having been officially given ownership of the Piker Press, I find there are a lot of things that ought to be done: revamping of the Forums, a long, cold look at the "Swag" page, a purging of articles that make no sense without the pictures that once accompanied them, back at the very beginning in 2002 and two webhosts ago.

And that's just maintenance. There are submissions to be read, accepted things to edit; there are emails from contributors that need to be answered, and contacts to keep up because I love the authors.

Every contract I mail out costs me at least $1.50; our webhost costs $20/month. Printer cartridges -- well, you know they are not cheap; with no income, every dollar counts, and I wish I had the acumen to make even a teensy profit. But I don't.

Between horse, house, and homelife, and the Piker Press, I don't really have any excess time. (Unless I give up my Sundays and NFL Football, of course, but I think I do need at least one day OFF a week.) That means that the hours for painting, or writing, or the papier mache masks I was poised to do in August ... all fall by the wayside.

I'm not really complaining. It's cool to have all kinds of things to occupy one's time.

It's just ... having no income, and running out of time, daily and in life-span ... why, there's so many things I still wish I could do.

Here in the Central Valley, pansies are winter color. I need to stop clinging to the passing of summer and look forward to the rains of winter. I need to stop worrying about the dollars going out the door and look ahead to a chance to write, paint, draw, create.

Yeah.

Shadows Are Only There Because Light Was There First

Standing in the kitchen this morning, waiting for my rotini to finish cooking, I looked out the back door and saw Bernie sitting on the patio, his legs on one of the footstools I made this past year, his hands gracefully wrapped around his Bible, a blue scrub jay standing in his lap.

The morning was so sweetly quiet, without the thrash of horrid winds or the intrusive blare of lawn equipment. There were the sounds of birds, and of the click and bubble of macaroni salad being prepared for the afternoon meal.

My husband was near at hand, his face glowing with peace, communing with the Word of God and nature.

There is no amount of money that can buy the richness of joy that I felt watching him, knowing he would be here all day, knowing that he wasn't going to have to risk his life and our happiness in that damnable Mad Max melee of his former commute to the Bay Area.

We believe we have the monies available to live comfortably into our 80's without us having to take a crack at re-employment. Probably we have enough to live austerely into our 90's. Wow. Real retirement is really here.

I'm glad he's home for good. There was not a single day in 36 years that I wished he would get his ass off to work and get out of my hair. NOT ONE.

The only darkness that whispers evil in my ear is the voice that says, "What about health insurance? You can't afford much any more ... you are going to die if you don't have health insurance!"

An icy dagger stabs at me. I'm going to die if I don't have health insurance! This is when I realize that against my rational will, against my determination not to become a witless consumer led by the nose by advertising, I have indeed been indoctrinated by this media society to believe that Blue Cross, Health Net, Kaiser Permanente, whatever -- will make me immortal and I won't die.

It's not that I'm against health insurance intellectually; it was a great idea for two barely-twenty-somethings back in the day when health insurance was affordable. But now -- good Lord, the premiums are obscene! One month's health insurance = three months of groceries for the whole family.

In spite of the commercials and the hype, none of those health insurances mean that I won't drop dead in my tracks tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, or five years from now. It's a gambling game, not a guarantee. And if there's one thing that has been a tenet of my whole life, it is that I will never bet on anything but a sure thing.

Here's the sure thing: I am not immortal; I am going to die. I can bet on that.

What do I have to ante up to win that bet? Why, nothing at all.

If that is a darkness in my life, I have to remember the God Who illuminates each day, and Who promises that the life after this one will be even better. I have to remember that this life is practically an illusion of Life.

The shadows must remind me that the Light was there first, and that when all shadows are gone, the Light will still be endless.

The Day in the Kitchen

Before it was barely light, the sound of the wind thrashing the trees in the neighborhood infiltrated my dreams, making me image wild surf and seascapes.

The wind, along with the high pollen count from the citrus, the walnuts, the locust, and the weeds, is hurtful. Without the wind, it would be aggravating, but with the wind -- oh, noes, time to stay indoors.

And so it was an indoor day, a day for the kitchen, which we needed, after all.

Orange season is at its end, so we had bought cheap navel oranges in big bags to grind into juice. That's how the morning began. Bernie got more than two big jars of sweet, rich juice from his market harvest.

Then it was my turn, when I brought home my 40 Super-Jumbo eggs from the egg plant down the road. Super-Jumbo eggs are incredibly large, and can't be automatically processed at the egg-plant. They don't get candled there, and they're too big to go through the auto-wash. So we washed them carefully, all 40 of them, and I candled each with a flashlight to make sure they didn't have any dark streaks in them. (One was revealed to be a big double-yolker, which absolutely astonished Lillian, who had never even heard of such a thing!)

When my eggs were done, Bernie came back on shift to juice lemons from our tree, making lemon juice cubes to give us lemonade all summer long. (Lemons are a winter fruit.)

When the lemons' juice was all put away in ice cube trays, we cut up a large banana squash and cooked it in the pressure cookers. This is for pumpkin pies, a bright and rich-tasting confection. Then it was time for lunch, while the squash/pumpkin cooled.

In the afternoon, I piled the cooked squash into the Cuisinart (I love this technological marvel) and whirred it until it was creamily crushed. In my mother's time, we would put squash/pumpkin into a ricer and hand-grind it into palatability, leaving behind the fibrous bits. With the Cuisinart, the fibrous stuff gets chopped into oblivion, yet still remains as fiber in the mix, thus adding healthy stuff. The harvest was five pies' worth of pumpkin, a real treasure.

It was Real Life. We harvested, we processed, we preserved, all for our own survival, and pleasure.

As I gently washed the eggs, I had a strong sense of the blessing of food. They came directly from the chicken; no machinery was involved. This was REAL food, and we cared for it and prepared it for consumption ourselves.  It was not an automated event, far removed from our refrigerator. It was not a detached event; what I was carefully cleaning was also what would nourish my family, bringing to the task a tenderness, a love.

When I measured the pumpkin into containers for freezing, I had a sense of the future, when the pies made from this effort would bring smiles and good feelings to those who ate them.

I have a strong sense that this is what life is supposed to be about, not about hurrying to make money or meet deadlines, but to attend to the basic stuff of existence, the food, the provision, the love. The society we live in has put those things on a back burner, or a side burner at best. We've lost so much beauty and peace in that.

Retirement has honestly been a bounty of blessings.