Skywatch Friday: Parking Lot Sunrises

I don't have time for a full-blown blog post here, because I have to go teach about Roman and Byzantine art and design, but I've have had a theme going on my iPhone for some time and I thought it might be time to upload the results.

These are all photos of sunrises taken with an antique 2-megapixel phone camera, either whilst stopped at a light or from a parking lot somewhere. Now that I have two 8 am classes and have to leave by 6:30, I see quite a number of sunrises:

These last two are from this morning. The last one was taken right after the first, but with the sun reflected in the building opposite.

Happy Skywatch Friday, folks. Have a great weekend.

Airing the Laundry

Clairz's response to my last post brought on such a nostalgic wash of memories that I had to get the following down before I could begin to deal with the usual Sunday class-prep chores.

My best-ever laundry story, bits of which may have already been told on this blog, involves mulberries, Cedar Waxwings, and three dozen cloth diapers.

When we first moved to this corner of the globe from New York, my growing family rented a little house in a close-in northern suburb of Dallas in an old development marked by Cape Cod inspired cottages on streets with New Englandish names (ours was on Provincetown Lane). So much for genuine prairie living.

Out of this little house my daughter was born, three months after we moved in. Because I was something of an earth mama (and breast-milk pumping donator to a Red-Cross milk bank, don'tcha know), I eschewed the growing practice of wrapping one's baby's bum in paper and plastic. For the first couple of months I subscribed to a diaper service; after that, it was washed-at-home and dried-in-the-sun cloth diapers--a couple of which I still use as dust cloths. I only ever used disposables when travelling, and since we didn't travel all that much and my kids toilet trained themselves early, I've never had to feel particularly guilty about contributing very many nasty little bundles to landfills.

Our laundry room was just behind the kitchen, but I had to go out into the garage to access it, and I only had my 35 year-old Maytag washer--no dryer. Even when I got one, a couple of years later, I preferred to hang my laundry on an umbrella-type clothesline. In that first house, though, I simply strung line from one tree to another in the back yard. Adjacent to the yard, however was another tree: a purple mulberry. Once or twice a year now I note the coming and going of Cedar Waxwings, mostly because of the experience that summer, thirty years ago when the mulberries fruited later than usual, and I wasn't paying attention. One day, after washing the week's diaper pail contents and stringing them like white flags all over the yard, I went in for a "feed and read" (when I nursed the baby and read to my son). After the children were down for their naps, I went out to check on the diapers.

My flags, alas, had been profusely decorated with purple mulberry-juice colored bird poop. Every last one of them. And the culprits, dozens of them, were still there, chirping and pooping away, all over the diapers. I truly didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In the end, though, I took them all down, re-washed them (with a bit of extra Clorox--because I didn't know any better at the time), and re-hung them after the birds had left for the day, just in time to start supper.

Many years later, when the children were grown and their parents were each well into new lives with new spouses, and after I'd spent several year living a more urban life (in Chicago we had to use a laundromat, but in Dallas I still dried my laundry on the line whenever possible), I ended up in this wonderful old house with a back-porch laundry room that reminds me of the one my grandmother had in her little house next to the Cottonwood power plant in Owens Valley. Even the house in town where she moved after my grandfather died had a washing machine (but never a dryer) on the back porch, handy to the clothesline outside.

I have an energy-efficient gas dryer now, and, alas, tend to use it more often than not. But I try to get bedding, dish towels, cloth napkins (I've never used the paper versions of those, either), and even bluejeans out on the line. I actually enjoy seeing them all strung out from my study window, especially when there's a breeze. Clair's remark about neighborhood objections to sights like these reminds me of why I chose not to live anywhere with a "neighborhood association" or zoning restrictions on laudable objects like clotheslines, chickens, victory gardens in front, and the like. I guess one of the best things about living in an historic district is that they sort of expect people to hang out the wash--or at least they know enough to tolerate it. As long as I don't hang out Beloved Spouse's y-fronts in the front yard, I don't think anyone around here would really complain, anyway.

The irony, of course, is that in this time of economic difficulty and environmental hazard, simpler technologies and old-fashioned practices make increasing sense. I hope that the situation ends up causing enclave-dwellers with restrictive HOA rules to re-think the nature of the communities into which they're gating themselves. Flying knickers on a clothesline actually say better things about a person's ethics than dwelling securely behind iron bars, free from the "taint" of chickens contentedly clucking as they rid the yard of bugs and lay lovely fresh eggs, or the uniquely reassuring smell of laundry dried in the sun.

Image credit: Berthe Morisot, Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry, 1875. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Putting the Recess Back In Recession

Before I begin musing once again about interesting (to me, at least) linguistic phenomena, let me preface my remarks by noting that I am fully aware that the recession has hurt many people, and these may not find much of a silver lining in the current economic situation. The President himself has recently noted that while Americans are losing jobs, the recovery--however promising it might look to some of us--has a long way to go.

That said, I did want to mention some of the more positive events that have been collecting in my pile of tear-sheets from the newspaper, and to muddle around in yet another etymological connection.

We probably all remember that blessed moment in elementary school every day (sometimes twice) called "recess," when we'd all pour out of doors happily to escape our educational imprisonment for twenty minutes of running around screaming, playing on the monkey bars, playing four-square, or jump-rope, or trying to elude the reigning bully. It occurs to me now that all my memories of "recess" are drawn from the single year I spent in a U. S. school, between my father's stints in Japan and Taiwan. All my schooling before and after that occurred in Asia, until I returned home permanently to begin high school--and I don't really remember "recess" as part of my experience overseas.

The only other "recess" story I have involves my son, and the first pre-school he attended at about 4 and a half. Since he could already read, I let the administrators place him in a reading program meant to encourage and build on existing abilities. But when I picked him up after his first day, he announced in no uncertain terms that he hated reading. Oops! It turns out that the school's special program involved keeping kids in from recess to read instead of going out to play.

Now, I don't know whose lame-ass idea that was, but I yanked that kid out that school the very next day, and eventually found a Montessori school out in the country, which turned out to be about the best thing that ever happened to either of my children (my daughter started there at 18 months, at her own insistence). Recess to children in this country is sacrosanct, so if you want to, say, break them from smoking or drinking, insist that they stay in for recess to do it, and the problem is licked.

All silly jokes aside, "recess" was once a good thing. But because it comes from the same root as the dreaded word "recession," I thought that playing around with the innate concepts involved in that root might be illuminating, and suggest reasons for some of the more positive views of the current economic moment that are starting to emerge.

The noun, recess, according to the OED, refers to "the act of retiring for a time from some occupation; a period of cessation from usual work or employment," or "cessation from work, relaxation, leisure." It comes from the Latin resessus (from the verb recidere, to recede, draw back, retire, retreat) which means a going back, a receding, a retreat--or even a place of retreat. The thing about words that always confuses us, however, is that they frequently connote both positive and negative aspects of the same concept. So, while recess to a kid is replete with ideas of fun and games, that's hardly what recession implies in economic terms.

However, I have been noticing an increasing number of efforts to put a positive spin on current conditions. I'm thinking in particular of a photo in the Dallas Morning News a few weeks ago (I can't even hope to find it now) of a guy sitting on his back patio reading the paper, simply because he had started to slow down. His family is eating meals together on a regular basis these days, because they're becoming more conscious of how much money they spend, and aren't eating out as much. Instead of running out to breakfast and shopping afterward, he was relaxing in his back yard on a pleasant Saturday morning.

Another recent article from the local rag (pinched from the New York Times) by Pico Iyer carried the headline, "The Joy of Less." It was originally posted on the Times's new "Happy Days" blog, which carries this description:

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed. Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

Pico Iyer's contribution describes his own, rather spare, life in the outskirts of Kyoto (which I find enviable, to say the least, based on my remote memories of the Japanese countryside, and the simplicity of our life in rural Japan). He notes, however that it's not for everybody:

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

In the papers every week I see evidence that the economic downturn carries, at least in some sense, a positive aspect, and perhaps an optimistic note or two. The local kerfuffle (I do so love this word, and Rachel Maddow didn't use it even once this week, so I will) over city chickens (whether or not they can be sold in Dallas garden shops is the Big Topic lately), the increasing number of backyard and front-yard veggie and herb gardens, the resurgence of various nesting behaviors (among people as well as chickens), the formations of more-or-less accidental communities of like-minded folk: all of these stories and events provide a little hope that we've managed to muster a bit of can-do spirit to replace some of the whining we used to do about how bad things were.

My cranky little newly-repaired heart was warmed this week by a conversation with my daughter, who lives in a converted industrial building in one of the legendary neighborhoods of Dallas: Deep Ellum (or "way down on Elm street"). Although it's being gentrified by rehabbing, a new DartRail station, and new construction, it's still a bit seedy and if I hadn't already planted myself here in the northern 'burbs, I would seriously consider moving there. Her fellow loft-dwellers are a generally friendly lot, and several of the neighbors have gotten together to form a sort of Sunday supper club. My daughter loves to cook, but seldom does because she lives alone (with a Very Large Dog who can't eat people food) and it's not worth the trouble after a long workday. She and the neighbors and their dogs now pool their resources and have become a little family of folks who enjoy one another's company on a regular basis.

I don't mean to sentimentalize the situation, but the economy we knew was completely unsustainable. People were making and buying way too much crap, spending way too much money, and incurring consequent debt. Having to cut back doesn't have to mean establishing a lower standard of living. Different, certainly, but perhaps actually higher, in terms of contentment, happiness, or whatever we want to call the psychological well-being that comes with shedding some of our stressful behaviors and reassessing our values.

The Times is also running a segment in its Economy section called Living With Less: The Human Side of the Global Recession. The conversations attending this coverage and the Happy Days Blog are interesting and informative, so I highly recommend both to anybody who wants to tune in to this aspect of the debate on recession and recovery, and who might want to be thinking about this whole thing as an adult form of recess.

Image credit: Hammock in a Beach House by Raven712 at Wikimedia Commons. In my advancing stage of old-guyness, a hammock is a necessary requirement for recess, even though I don't yet own one.