Delighted and Dismayed

Delightful and dismaying things are happening.

Starting with delightful, the same day I posted “Plastic Bags,” a gift bag appeared at the door. It was from my friend and neighbor Laurie and it contained a “Plastic Bag and Bottle Dryer.”

Oh, this is great! Now I have a place to dry smaller freezer and storage bags that I use again and again until they spring leaks. Laurie is a plastic bag saver, too, and she has one of these in her kitchen. She said she had purchased my dryer some time ago and was waiting for the right occasion to give it to me. When she read “Plastic Bags,” she thought the time was right.

Then I heard on the evening news that Apple will build a $100 million manufacturing plant in the United States. Oh, boy, that made me so happy. I worry a lot about people who lost jobs to outsourcing and I’ve been down on Apple because all their devices are made in China. Now American workers would be making them. A little research, though, left me disappointed. In the new plant robots will make Macintosh computers! The only jobs for American workers will be the health care of robots. So that was dismaying, although I already knew that new manufacturing plants employ far more robots than human beings.

More encouraging, though, is an article in the December issue of the Atlantic, titled “The Insourcing Boom.” Most of the article is about General Electric, which is moving more and more of its manufacturing back to its Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, after many years of off-shore production. Several trends account for this reversal, including the cost of shipping, rising Chinese wages, and the natural gas boom that makes running a factory in the United States more affordable. The bottom line is more jobs for unemployed Americans.

Another delight was using the last of the late Thanksgiving turkey in soup. We were growing tired of left-overs, but this soup tastes nothing like a left-over. In addition to turkey and turkey broth, I used onions, celery, carrots, turnips, kale and the almost pesto I make and freeze every summer. (Almost pesto is fresh basil, garlic and olive oil whirled in the food processor.)

All in all, things are looking good and I’m grateful.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer

Plastic Bags

I grew up without them. I can’t remember when they began to appear, but my first recollection of them is when bread wrappers changed from waxed paper to plastic. My mother saved and reused them. She washed them along with the dishes and hung them by clothespins to dry on a metal kitchen towel rack. She also acquired plastic bowl covers that were circular and elasticized.

If still alive my mother would be 101. I wonder what she would think of we way we freely use and discard plastic. All packaging today is made of plastic, sometimes in combination with paper. It seems so unnecessary and wasteful of resources. Many things that don’t need to be packaged come in plastic packaging anyway.

My mother lives on in me in many ways, one of which is an appreciative respect for plastic. My children, I believe, think I’m a bit dotty about saving plastic bags to use over and over again. I can’t help it. There’s good justification in my case because I produce so much food from scratch and because we harvest vegetables from our garden. The bags are excellent storage solutions.

So, when you walk into my house, one of the first things you see is a plastic bag hanging by a magnet from the refrigerator door. In this case, the bag is accompanied by a rubber glove that fell in the dishwater and got wet inside. If I had a towel rack like Mother’s I would use that.

I also have a couple of plastic bowl covers, but they are hard to find now. Instead, I use the plastic caps made for beauty shop use. I bought a package of them at the beauty supply store. I use them over and over until the elastic goes limp from exhaustion.

Of course I can’t save and reuse all the plastic that comes into our house. We recycle almost all of it, but I’m always on the lookout for a sturdy plastic bag that doesn’t have printing on it.

Thanks, Mom. I know you would also want me to say that when the petroleum runs out, plastic bags will be only a memory.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer

Negative Thoughts

Every few years I re-read all of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo novels. Ostensibly these are mysteries of the police procedural variety, but the Navajo Tribal Police procedures are informed by Navajo philosophy and are therefore different from, say, the LAPD.

Hillerman’s descriptions of landscape and atmosphere evoke memories of times I’ve spent in New Mexico. His plots are intricate and the characters are believable and consistent. But what draws me back to these books is the Navajo outlook on life.

The traditional Navajo strives for hozjo, which is a state of harmony, peace and balance. The Navajo sees the interconnectedness of all things. The Navajo is respectful of others and the Earth.

Currently I am reading The Fallen Man. In this story Lieutenant Jim Chee tries to avoid negative thoughts. Hillerman explains:

        

         The Navajo culture … had taught him the power of words and of thought. Western metaphysicians might argue that  language and imagination are products of reality. But in their own migrations out of Mongolia and over the icy Bering Strait, the Navajos brought with them a much older Asian philosophy. Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual’s reality.

How easy it is to allow oneself to slip into negative thought! A perceived slight can fill one’s consciousness and whisk one away from present reality.

Yesterday I woke up with a painful ankle and painful thumb. As I was reading the above passage I remembered that the night before I had been obsessively miffed over a trivial matter. Ah, ha! Pain is the price we pay for negative thought.

This morning my thumb is back to normal and my ankle is much improved. I hope I’ve learned the Navajo’s lesson.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer

Seeing Things Differently

It’s odd how different people see things so differently. Take my leaf pin, for example. This being another warm December day, I wore just a jacket to town. The leaf pin happened to be on the jacket, so I left it there, even though it was too far out on the jacket's shoulder.

Among other errands I had an appointment with an ENT. I parked my car and was walking toward the building when a woman walking out stopped me. “Wait!” she said, “There’s something on your jacket, a leaf.”

She reached out to brush it away, but immediately realized that it was pinned down. She apologized and walked on.

When I saw the young physician’s assistant, he said, “Just a moment. There’s a leaf on your jacket.”

He brushed at it, then said, “Oh, it’s a button.”

This did not surprise me. I’ve had prior experience with leaf discomfort. One glorious October I visited Nancy and her family in Colorado. She and I went to Cleo’s school one afternoon to watch the children parade in their Halloween costumes.

We had to park some distance from the school and enjoyed a walk along the residential neighborhood sidewalk. The sky was blue beyond belief. The street was lined with maple trees covered with leaves of pure gold. Golden leaves slowly wafted down, drifting on lawns and sidewalk.

One falling leaf landed on my sweater shoulder and stuck. I thought it beautiful and hoped it would stay put. As we walked along three different women stopped me to say, “There’s a leaf on your shoulder.”

Many people are not comfortable with a real fallen leaf on someone’s clothing. But I see it differently.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer

I Pinned My Hopes on El Nino

At some point in the miserable, hot, dry late summer I heard a news report that NOAA was predicting the return of El Nino, a warming of Pacific water that somehow brings rain to Kansas and other inner-continent states. 

We’ve been in a La Nina phase for almost two years now. La Nina is a bitch who tries to turn Kansas into a desert, so I was happy to hear that El Nino would be returning, bringing an end to our drought. I pinned my hopes on El Nino.

This morning Dennis said that “Kansas rain” was falling. We now consider a sheen of moisture that condenses on the concrete driveway and stone walkways to be Kansas rain. The sheen then evaporates.

I assured Dennis that El Nino was coming to save the day. But then I thought, “Shouldn’t he be here by now?” so I checked the Internet. Whoops! NOAA has canceled its El Nino prediction. Instead we will have neither El Nino or La Nina, but  “La Nada,” the nothing. I’m not joking; that’s what it’s called.

I’m disappointed and will not pin my hopes on a NOAA prediction again. El Nino is a tease, if you ask me.

But, hey, isn’t it odd that both our east and west coasts are being flooded with water from the sky while our continent’s inner core is drying up and could soon become a desert? Oh, what changes that would bring to our so-called civilization! 

If only I hadn't read about geology, which reminded me that our inner continent was once an inland sea, teeming with creatures whose skeletons are preserved as fossils in the stone wall that separates our back yard from the woods. 

All is change.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer

A Late Thanksgiving

We are experiencing a prolonged drought. Eastern Kansas is 15 to 19 inches short of rainfall for the year. What’s more, our temperatures are much warmer than normal. Today it’s 69º. Tomorrow, the same.

I haven’t been writing about this because I can’t bear to. Watching Ken Burn’s Dust Bowl documentary, which ran on PBS last week, didn’t improve my outlook one bit. The great Dust Bowl drought lasted ten years. Ours has been only one or two so far, but I saw what could happen.

So I’m not writing about the drought. Instead, Dennis and I are making a late Thanksgiving dinner. We didn’t host the holiday dinner this year, but that meant we didn’t have any leftovers. We always enjoy the leftovers even more than the actual dinner. How nice it is to pull turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce and all the rest out of the refrigerator for a post-holiday meal!

The 11-pound turkey is roasting, cranberry sauce is cooling, a sweet potato is baking and I’ve just mixed the dressing, which is my very favorite part of the meal. I’ve always made dressing just the way my mother did. There’s no recipe; it’s made by instinct and experience.

Today it started with stale whole wheat bread. I keep a plastic bag in the freezer and as homemade bread goes stale I break it in chunks and freeze it. Today I hauled that bag out and dumped the contents into a big mixing bowl.

I also had four biscuits left over from breakfast and crumbled them into the mixing bowl with the stale bread. A few slices of fresh bread, cubed, brought the bread content to an acceptable level.

Next I went to the basement and pulled a couple of onions from the braid that hangs from a nail. The homegrown onions are almost gone, which is fine because they're beginning to sprout. I chopped them, some shallots (which last well into the spring) and celery stalks and leaves, then slowly sautéd them in butter until they were soft.

A generous amount of rubbed sage and parsley fresh from the garden topped off the ingredients.

Finally I added some broth from the giblets and enough chicken broth to moisten all the bread. Now, the dressing is baking in a buttered 9”-square baking dish alongside the turkey. It will be crispy on the top, sides and bottom but still moist in the center. Just right to be topped with gravy.

Aromas have my mouth watering and I can hardly wait to sit down to eat. Drought or no drought, we have a lot to be thankful for, especially with a second Thanksgiving dinner on the table. And if you think there will be a photo of the finished dressing, forget it. I'm ready to eat.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer

The Advantage of Dying Young

Michael Soft stopped by to visit after supper last evening. He was wearing a long face and launched right into what was bothering him.

An old friend, Tim, who is Michael’s junior by several years, is in the hospital with stage four cancer. Tim lives alone and has no health insurance. He hasn't seen a doctor for many years. A friend who stopped by to see Tim three weeks ago found him sitting helpless, unable to walk or care for himself. The friend took Tim to the hospital, where he has been ever since, receiving radiation treatments.

“People who live alone at the end of life...” Michael began, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

Then, in an abrupt change of mood, Michael quipped, “If you die young lots of people will come to your funeral but you won’t have to go to theirs.” With that, Michael took his leave.

The great thing about a visit from Michael is that no matter how dire the topic of conversation he always makes me laugh. Laughter is our saving grace.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer