After Long Silence

The Earth with the Moon and the Milky Way by Wladyslaw T. Benda
Produced to illustrate The Future of Earth by Maurice Maeterlinck

I've been absent from this blog for so long, and so preoccupied by events so complex and all-consuming that I don't even know where to start. But since one of my current adventures in rabbit-holery involves multiple space-related literary, visual, and journalistic media, I couldn't scrounge up an appropriate image from my own photo archives--so I turned to The Public Domain Review, looking for old photographs, paintings, or other illustrations that might evoke my current state of mind. The PDR seldom disappoints, and looking through images in the "Astronomy and Space" section of the image archive search engine I found several evocative candidates. I was quite tempted to use one of the illustrations by Henrique Alvin Corrêa of the 1906 french translation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, for a couple of reasons. One is my recent plunge into Mars-related science fiction (rereading Andy Weir's The Martian, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and related short stories, and beginning the fifth season of For All Mankind). And then there's my current anxiety about the state of the world as we know it.

But it's the all-encompassing import of this last category, coupled with the current flight of Artemis II to the moon, that led me to choose Wladyslaw Benda's evocative image* created for the publication of Maurice Maeterlinck's piece for the March 1918 issue of Cosmopolitan (!). I found a reprint of the essay in a rather wonderful blog called "Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age" by a Canadian chap named Cory Gross. [His last post was in 2023, so I need to look him up, but his blog seems like a Steampunker's dream site. One more rabbit hole!] The date of Maeterlinck's essay is important to the connection with war and its proximity. And the essay itself is particularly apt.

While I'm explaining myself, I should also mention that this post's title comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, which relates not to war but to age, which is more constant even than conflict is in my easily distracted mind these days. But the title's path to this post was less authentic than I make it sound. 

Over the last few months, spent recovering from a repair job on my sternum and raising a puppy acquired way too soon after the death of our beloved Nylah, I've felt guilty about not writing here, hoping that my remaining readers hadn't given me up for dead. And then I turned 78 (last December) and my son turned 50 (last month), and I finally twigged to the fact that tempus is fugiting faster than I'd realized, and decided to get serious about rejoining the blog-o-sphere. 

I actually did write a driblet in January, and have saved the draft, but I kept thinking about the title of a Sherri S. Tepper** science fiction novel called After Long Silence. I got it off the shelf and realized that the story had little to do with where my mind wanted to go, but I did decide to look up her title's source. And there it was: Yeats writing about age and speech and conversation, and this: "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young/We loved each other and were ignorant."

It's not that I think old people are smarter than young people. In fact, most of the young people I know (now in their thirties, forties, and even early fifties) are much smarter than I was at their ages. I used to joke that I didn't become an adult until I hit forty. But now, almost forty years later, I do feel wiser. And so I'll probably spend most of my future blogtime waxing philosophical about how much fun it is to be able to wander around in those rabbit holes*** making connections, remembering old things and discovering newer ones. Because we are, none of us, getting any younger--and some really ignorant and unwise people are making it less likely that we're going to get much older.

Time to get wiser and relish what time there is left. I'll certainly be curtailing my silences from now on.

Notes

*Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian (Flemish, but wrote in French) poet, playwright, essayist--and Nobel Prize laureate (1911, for literature). He wrote a play, The Bluebird (1908), that was translated into English in 1911; I read the kids' version The Blue Bird For Children, which may have been my mother's but is now lost to me. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, however, it's available at the link. 

**I read Tepper's Grass after I'd already become a devotee of Ursula K. Le Guin. At that point my sources for women's perspectives in science fiction broadened significantly. I didn't love everything she wrote, but some of her works are still among my favorites. She died in 2016, and I do miss her.

***If anyone's interested in what a real rabbit "hole" (they're really called "forms") looks like, here is one our puppy Alan found in our garden; we immediately protected the babies and they've since gone off to do adult bunny things. More about that saga next time.

The crown of a baby rabbit's head, framed by two tiny ears,
 is visible just below the top leaf.

A Spring/Summer Travel Saga, Highly Condensed

Lately I've been so distracted by life that I've felt little like chronicling it beyond a scribble or two a week in my reading journal. So the Farm has been evolving into a quarterly effort to get things down for family, friends, and passers-by who might find any of it interesting. It also reminds me to go through the Blogger list of my subscriptions to see what I've missed (since my subs go to the seldom-visited owlfarmer gmail address, rather than my eponymous version). So I'll be spending some of this sweaty afternoon checking back with folks who probably think I've fallen off the planet since my last post.

Our trip west in May was interrupted by an apparent electrical glitch in Porco Rosso, our travel trailer, which gets lassoed into use every year or to to visit the Owens River Valley and points in between here and there. This year's impetus was a family get-together to bury my step-mother's ashes next to my father's in the family plot. She lived a good life, and was nearly 94, so the occasion was celebratory rather than funereal. I got to see a cousin I hadn't seen in about thirty years, and all of my living siblings--and even, in a way, my late brother, who is also buried in the plot, and for whom we had a similar gathering in 2019.

Palo Duro Canyon from the park store overlook.

Resident burro at Homolovi

Deer behind our campsite at Santa Rosa State Park

The trip out began well, with a two-day stay in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, near Amarillo. Because of recent rains, most of the trails were closed, so we've already vowed to return. But the park itself is gorgeous, the campsites pleasant, and has popped up to the top of our Texas state park list. We stayed for a night at Santa Rosa State Park in New Mexico before moving on to Homolovi State Park in Arizona for two nights--which turned into three because we liked it so much--even though Molly decided to go walkabout in the middle of the first night (squeezing out when TBS went out to check on a flapping noise) and scared us half to death. As is her wont, however, she didn't go far and was easily located. 

Some of the amazing variety of ceramic
remnants at Homolovi I and II

Our goal was to avoid RV parks in favor of state parks, Corps of Engineers campgrounds, and dispersed spots on BLM land, but we also wanted to revisit a segment of Route 66 (where we stayed at a campy tourist spot near Seligman, Arizona) and a favorite RV camp in Lone Pine for the two days set aside for family time.

On the day before we were to de-camp and head for our favorite boondocking site in the Valley, however, our freezer and fridge conked out and we had to ditch plans to head north and then eastward into Nevada to visit old family stomping grounds there. We had wanted to visit the Big Smoky Valley, where my great grandfather ran a stagecoach business in the late nineteenth century, and where my grandmother was born and lived before the family moved across the border to California. But this leg of the trip had to be abandoned because we were relying heavily on the stuff stored in the fridge and freezer. Porco has recently been kitted up with electrical appliances, battery backup, and solar capability--which wasn't much help with defunct cold storeage. Winds had also become a problem (again!), so we just gave up and headed southeast and back to Texas via Death Valley. Further adventures included flat tires caused by bad rims on our new Porco tires, and a night in a sleazy Vegas RV dive, further unwanted stays at questionable locations chosen only because they facilitated our quick trip back to Texas. We spent the last night in a Safety Rest Area near Hedley, which we can recommend because 1) it's free and 2) located in a rather lovely area along the road out of the Panhandle. 

By then, of course, the fridge had somehow reset itself and made that part of the problem go away. But without our half-hour stay at the Discount Tire in Vegas, though, we'd undoubtedly have been stranded in the desert somewhere near Belmont, Nevada, population 38. We'll just have to make a more leisurely trip at the next opportunity, knowing what we now know about caravan refrigerator mechanics and tire rims.

The otherwise really cheesy RV park in Las Vegas
provided some interesting views sky-related subjects.

Well, I've spent so much time wrangling photos and trying to compress our short adventure that I'm out of steam, with more to tell. So I'll post this now and hope to get back to the non-travel-related events I intended to include. Perhaps trying to stuff life into too-small containers makes them even more difficult to narrate than simply trying to keep up with things as they happen. Meanwhile I'll take some time to look at what's going on in my particular blogosphere and enjoy what folks have been posting while I haven't been paying attention.

Earth Day 2025: On the cusp of change

An early spring sky in North Texas

It's been so long since I last posted, that it took me several tries just to access this account. My cognitive skills (especially the technology-related ones) take longer and longer to ramp up, so that every effort seems almost Herculean. But I can't remember the last time I didn't post on Earth Day, so it seems like a good time to try and get back into the habit of writing more frequently.

The recent death of my step-mother (who was 93 and had led a pretty admirable life) has prompted a family get-together at the cemetery in Big Pine, California, where most of the ancestral bones and ashes are buried. This means a full-fledged road trip west in Porco Rosso, our little retro-style caravan, giving us a chance to test all the recent earth-friendly(er) modifications The Beloved Spouse has made to it: swapping out the gas hob, oven, furnace, and water heater for solar-supported battery-friendly electric alternatives; a new portable loo that acts as a cassette toilet and rids us of having to use a black tank; substantial upgrade to our solar capacity to keep our Bluetti power stations topped up and the on-board batteries charged. Porco now sports new tires and brakes, which should make towing easier for the new-ish Jeep 4xE we'll be using to haul us all out to the first family gathering on the auld sod we've managed since my brother died in 2019.

Most of the trip will involve staying at state parks and boondocking, which would have been much less feasible without the new solar capability. We'd rather be able to stay at parks and off-grid campgrounds with minimal "amenities," and to reduce our load on park services (which are under duress at the moment due to the vagaries of the federal overseers). And precisely because of the current uncertainties regarding the future of the Republic, it's hard to tell whether or not we'll be able to take another such trip before it's my turn to be gathered around and remembered over beer and pizza.

Uncertainty is a constant source of angst among most of the people I know these days, but it does tend to spark the necessity to enjoy what one has whilst one still has it. So, in the midst of the ongoing Swedish Death Cleaning efforts, we're both finding the time to enjoy the pleasures of our little piece of the planet. We're working on converting most of the formerly lawned areas into a prairie garden, and although we've got a long way to go, we're progressing with the overall design, and have given over a fair amount of the garden to native perennials and naturalized border plants and bulbs. Some years ago, I found a small patch of wild Byzantine gladioli under a Nandina hedge, and the gorgeous fuchsia-colored blooms have since taken over large swaths of the back yard and are creeping around to the front. Although the Nandinas themselves are invasive non-natives from Asia, I'm keeping them for now, but will cut off the berries as soon as they begin forming to keep them from spreading. The berries are reputedly toxic to birds and cats, so I'll go ahead and enjoy the blossoms--but will eliminate the problematic bits.

Our greatest success so far is the large patch Texas primroses that has taken over the area on the north side of the house that I used to reserve for tomatoes. Here are a couple of shots that include both (gladioli and primroses--not tomatoes):

I've been nurturing a couple of tiny stands of blue-eyed grass for years, but if I want more, I'm probably going to have to sow seeds, since they're not nearly aggressive enough for my needs. But I do love them. They pop up amidst the myriad "weeds" we foster instead of turf grass, and we mark them before we mow so as to give them a chance to self-sow. 

Visiting wildlife is always welcome here, and we've created many areas that have fostered rabbits and occasional raccoons and opossums. In recent years we've enjoyed regular visits from northern green anoles, which have all been named "Harry" after the lizard in Death In Paradise. Ours are actually Anolis carolinensis, the males of which can change from green to brown, and back again. The photo may be of a female Harry, since I couldn't see a dewlap, but I loved the perch on top of the rebar designed to help support the potted bougainvillea I like to grow each year next to the greenhouse.  (Click to enlarge if you'd like a clearer view.) In past years I've included some of this Harry's ancestors, and caught a couple of his/her progenitors in flagrante delicto--making more little anoles. If I can find the post, I'll link it here; but that's as bawdy as things get here on the Farm--although a past Earth Day post has featured mating kites. Our newest regular visitor is a chubby opossum, who likes the apple cores and other fruit bits we leave out. We've caught her (we think she's the one who once trotted her babies across the front yard hanging onto her rail) on our back-door camera several times.

Which brings me to the best wildlife event of our year so far: the appearance on April 2 of a pair of Yellow Crowned Night Herons in our yard, engaging in artful mating displays and graceful saunterings across pecan the limbs that create a corridor over our yard to next door. The day was cloudy and rather drear, and their features were difficult to capture on our phones (we didn't expect them to be around for long, so we didn't haul out the real camera; lesson now learned). But searches on Cornell's "All About Birds" site (at the link) and Wikipedia gave us a positive identification, so we sat out watching as they moved from tree to tree. They left for a while, but came back later, just before it started getting dark. We never saw them again, and wondered why they were even here, given their preferred diet of crustaceans and coastal locales for year-round living. But we are within their breeding range, and the neighborhood does provide a number of creeks for crawdads and such. Our recently pruned trees may also have offered them room for showing off their pretty crowns and feathers. Sad to say, neither of us could get clear enough shots to use for illustration purposes, and my video-editing skills are abysmal anyway. So it turned out to be one of those occasions for which we will have to rely on our own visual memories to relive.

Speaking of living: News from old friends indicates that we're still managing to survive the current upheaval of democratic institutions around the country. Of course, we're all white, home-owning, educated pensioners with (for now) stable (if not voluminous) incomes. We don't have tattoos that could get us identified as Venezuelan gang members, and I don't think that any of us speak enough Spanish to get us misidentified as border-hopping immigrants. But even if we don't get sent to a Salvadoran prison for what's left of our lives, and even if our woefully inadequate defense department manages not to get us nuked, the equally under-qualified interior department may well land us with an irreparably damaged ecosystem--one that even acquisition of Canada or Greenland would be unable to ameliorate. In all the years of the Cold War spent hiding under desks and practicing air raid drills, it never occurred to me that we might be undone not by hot-war adversaries (although they're still around), but by our own profoundly ignorant, unimaginative, race-obsessed, and  rapacious (in all of its senses) elected leaders: Not with a bang but some kind of "administrative mistake." 

I can't end this without expressing immense sadness at the loss of Pope Francis. As a practicing Cynic/Skeptic, lapsed Catholic, and secular Jew, I appreciate him more than almost any modern leader  because he truly embodied the values he taught, with grace, humor, philosophical rigor, and true charity. As I mentioned to a dear Catholic friend yesterday, we are all richer for his presence, and poorer for his loss. 

So, Folks, have the best Earth Day and spring you can muster, do what you can to protect the planet from the ravages of stupidity, and maybe together we can help stave off apocalypse--at least for now.

Photo notes: As I looked over previous Earth Day posts, I found that the images I have chosen are  often similar--if not downright repetitive. But we've lived on our little half acre for nearly twenty-five years, and it has become a haven of contentment in a problem-infused world. Taking pleasure in small moments provides some respite from all the turmoil underway, and suggests the possibility of better days--kind of like sunlit clouds emerging after a storm, as they did in the opening shot.