It’s that time of year

Written by karen on June 7th, 2018

The monsoons are our favorite time of year here.

When we first moved here, we were told that there used to be an “early monsoon” and a “late monsoon,” but in the ten years we’ve been here, there has only been a late monsoon, typically beginning around July 4 and lasting for a variable number of weeks.

It’s been a hotter than usual spring, and two days ago, afternoon clouds gathered, and we got an (unforecast) downpour. Then yesterday, we had the same. I was driving between Bisbee and Douglas, and the rain was so torrential that I had to pull over. Brad said there was rain at home too. There’s always a debate about the real start of monsoons, but I feel like they’ve started. Could this be the “early monsoon”?!?! I guess we’ll see.

Unfortunately, monsoons also bring lots of lightning. And dry lightning means fire.

Yesterday, there was a fire on the mountains behind our house.

The memory of the really big fire here a few years ago is still fresh in everyone’s mind, and so the fire crews were out super fast to try to prevent this from spreading. Big planes dropped loads of red flame retardant.

The forest service also sent several crews of hotshots. By the time it was getting dark, the fire was greatly diminished.

At night, you could see a bunch of fire spots blazing, but it wasn’t out of control. By morning, it was mostly contained. There are still a couple fire crews today, but it seems like things are fine now.

We are hoping for more rain and less lightning and wind as the monsoons ramp up.

 

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Spring garden

Written by karen on May 28th, 2018

Here is the garden map so far this year.

We succeeded again in having lettuce growing all year round, and for the first time, we also had garlic throughout the year. We are still finishing last year’s crop as we harvested the first bed this year. The scapes were great this year, and we made a very delicious pesto and also pickled some.

The fencing has really worked out well, so we are trying a few favorites that we’d given up on in the past couple years like sweet potatoes.

And as the garden is getting more predictable, we are also growing some flowers.

 

 

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Gourd art

Written by karen on May 11th, 2018

Last year, I grew some bushel basket gourds with the hopes of making them into drums. The gourds didn’t really get big enough for drums (I’ll try again this year), but I thought I’d use them to practice in the meantime.

I got a bunch of books from the library to get inspirations for what I might make and to learn the techniques. It’s quite a process.

First, the gourds need to dry outside for several months. They go from being very heavy to being quite light as they dry.

This is what the gourds looked like when they were done drying. Those black spots are yucky mold.

The next step is to soak them in hot soapy water overnight. You have to weight them down so they don’t float up.

Then you scrub the outside of the outside of the gourds with a metal scouring pad to get all the skin and mold off. When I got done and dried them out again, they looked like this:

Next I cut open the gourds. Depending on what I was going to make with them I either used a hand keyhole saw or drilled a hole in the top with a hole saw. This is that the insides looked like.

I scraped and separated the seeds to save for this year’s growing. Then I scraped out the other dry stuff out and sanded the inside to get it smooth. Then came the fun part, finishing. I stained the outsides with some soy-based wood stain.

For one of the gourds, which would have a visible interior, I decoupaged the inside. I used tea bag envelopes and tags, since I was making a tea holder.

To finish the outsides, I used acrylic paints and then varnished thewhole thing.

Here’s the end product. The one of the left is a tea candle holder.

Given that this is the first time I’ve done anything like this, I am happy with the end results. I have several more “practice” gourds and am looking forward to experimenting more with these.

 

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The people we know

Written by karen on March 11th, 2018

I just got off the phone with our 83-year-old neighbor, who has been for some time back home in Wisconsin. We talk on the phone regularly, and it’s always a pleasure to hear from him. He is one of the sharpest, most thoughtful people I know, and I am lucky to count him as a good friend.

Back when we first came here, if you’d had told me that I’d be such good friends with this person, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s been one of the surprises of living in a small rural community.

While there are things about living here that drive me crazy (it’s almost impossible to have privacy…I’ve heard stories about myself repeated back through the grapevine until they are nearly unrecognizable, and as one distant friend said recently “our public lives intersect with our social and economic ones in ways that in cities you can have different spheres. There are not many ‘anonymous days’ in rural communities.”), there are other things that are delightful.

One of them is the riches I have found in unexpected people like our neighbor. It makes me think that I might make more of an effort to connect with diverse* people if I ever lived in a city again.

 

* While I often lament the lack of “diversity” here, I am coming to understand that diversity can mean different things. While we sadly lack racial or ethnic diversity, we do have a collection of folks that span a crazy spectrum of political ideologies, backgrounds, and ages.

 

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Spring

Written by karen on March 11th, 2018

It looks like it’s going to be a great year for favas. There’s nothing like fresh favas; they’re not at all like the dried beans. They taste like pure green freshness.

A seed meeting yesterday gave me extra motivation to spend time in the garden today.

Here’s what’s growing now: lettuce, spinach, tat soi, arugula, garlic, onions, and of course, fava beans.

 

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Take a hike

Written by karen on February 4th, 2018

Yesterday, we took a 16.5 mile hike from our doorstep back through Horseshoe Canyon, then to the south and back out of the mountains through Jackwood Canyon.

Strangely, though it is so close, we’ve never been through Jackwood Canyon. I suspect that the gate into it from 80 is usually locked but I need to verify this. At any rate, it was a very beautiful hike.

You might remember that we did another long “from our house” hike in preparation for the Grand Canyon. That one ended up being mostly off trail (there supposedly was a trail but it was so seldom used as to be gone) and was very difficult as a result. Looking the maps, you never really know whether a trail will be there or not, and our area is remote enough that many trails have disappeared over the years. This time though we were pleasantly surprised to have a good trail for the entire trip. Much nicer!

We started off from our house and went back into Horseshoe Canyon, a hike we’ve done many times. About 7 miles from our house (5 miles into the canyon), there is an old homestead house. About a half mile past that, there is a branch of the trail/road that goes to the south. This goes to Jackwood Canyon.

Much of the hike followed an old forest service road. While most of it would not be passable even with 4 wheel drive, it was perfect for hiking. The trail/road went south through some beautiful grasslands. It wove behind the mountains and eventually cut through a pass, so there wasn’t even a huge climb.

lunch

We almost made it the whole way without seeing a soul, but about three miles from the end, we were approached by a pickup driven by an old cowboy. He stopped, and we said hi. He started out with a look of deep suspicion on his face (the normal expression here when regarding “strangers”). As we told him where we hiked and where he lived, his expression changed to looking as though he thought we were a bit crazy. Eventually, by the end of our conversation, he had a slight smile and seemed to think we were ok. He proclaimed us “quite fit” and wished us well.

We finished the hike in Apache, where we’d left a car. That’s about 6 miles on Highway 80 to Sunrise.

Oh, and there were lots of cows in Horseshoe.

Here’s a map of the hike.

 

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2017 in books

Written by karen on January 8th, 2018

As I usually post each year, below is a list of the books I read in 2017.

The books are listed in the order I read them with my favorites in bold.

I had a goal to read 50 books for the year, but I cut myself some slack on that for a couple reasons. First, Brad and I both did Nanowrimo in November, which took a chunk of time. In addition, toward the end of the year, I started the Red Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson (thanks to MA); these are fairly big books, and I opted for finishing that instead of cramming in a few shorter reads at year end.

  1. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  2. The Oral History Workshop by Cynthia Hart with Lisa Samson
  3. The Tree Bride by by Bharati Mukherjee
  4. We Are Stories edited by Margarita Ramirez Loya and her students
  5. Epitaph for a Peach by David Mas Masumoto
  6. Revival by Stephen King
  7. Adnan’s Story by Rabia Chaudry
  8. Heirlooms by David Masumoto
  9. Sowing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka
  10. Start Where You Are by Pema Chödrön
  11. Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben
  12. The Innocent Man by John Grisham
  13. One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
  14. The Nix by Nathan Hill
  15. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  16. The Chamber by John Grisham
  17. The Education of Dixie Dupree by Donna Everhart
  18. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
  19. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
  20. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
  21. So Big by Edna Ferber
  22. Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer
  23. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
  24. Public Library by Ali Smith
  25. Four Seasons in Five Senses by David Mas Masumoto
  26. Desert Sanctuary by Hank Messick
  27. Rebel Mother by Peter Andreas
  28. The Yellow Envelope by Kim Dinan
  29. Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow
  30. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
  31. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
  32. The Postman by David Brin
  33. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  34. The Man in the High Castle by Philip Dick
  35. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  36. Ten Years on the Line by Mike Ligon
  37. Assignment Eternity by Robert Heinlein
  38. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
  39. Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
  40. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
  41. Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  42. India Calling by Anand Giridharadas

What were your favorite reads this year?

As always, I’m on GoodReads. If you’re there, let’s connect!

 

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First freeze

Written by karen on November 20th, 2017

This is the annual recording of our first freeze of the year.

It was 27 degrees when I went to work this morning. Brrr…

We’re hoping for a year of minimal cold and snow this year. (Last year was the first year since we’ve lived here that we had no snow at our house. I didn’t miss it.)

 

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Free Book Boxes

Written by karen on October 16th, 2017

I am often looking for opportunities to get involved in positive community building work, and this year has been more a challenge than ever.

A project that I’m now spending a fair amount of time on is the Free Book Box project, sponsored by the Cochise County Library District. This was funded by a grant that I wrote and am now implementing. It involves putting 10 boxes around the more rural parts of the country where there aren’t public libraries to provide free books to people. (You may have heard of Little Free Libraries. This is similar except that our boxes are MUCH larger. Also we aren’t necessarily emphasizing returns or donations, though both are welcome.)

The books include adult as well as juvenile titles, in a variety of genres and in English and Spanish. The boxes are mostly outside and will all have 24/7 access.

One part of the project I’ve really enjoyed is working with community partners to host the boxes and with local artists to paint them.

It’s also been fun to procure the books. We’re getting them from a variety of sources, with some being donated and others being purchased. A great source for books has been various Friends of the Library groups, who operate used book stores.

Our first boxes are being installed this week. I’ll be interested to see what challenges and opportunities pop up along the way.

So far, this project has been very well received and a very positive experience. And it’s books — you can’t go wrong with that.

 

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The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Written by karen on August 13th, 2017

Monsoons have been going strong for about a month now. The garden is now in a state at which I’m afraid to walk around it. The rains have led to waist-high grass and beds with viney crops growing a foot or more every day and weeds that are impossible to keep up with.

Along with the crazy plant growth, this time of year brings an explosion of bugs. As in my youth, I am bug-bitten and riddled with allergies, but still love the monsoons.

This morning, I went into the greenhouse to find about 20 of these caterpillars on one plant. There were none yesterday. Are they good or bad? I don’t know (but have since determined that they are eastern swallowtail butterfly larva and are not harmful but are partial to dill, which perhaps they mistook my parsley for…now that I think about it, I may know just the butterfly that laid these eggs. It was stuck in the greenhouse one night, and I freed it the next morning.). I didn’t want to kill them if they weren’t harmful, but didn’t want to leave them to continue to multiply, so decided to cut the plant (it was an herb going to seed anyway) and heave it over the fence.

 

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