Friends and Flowers

/ Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

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On my way home from work today, I stopped by a friend’s house to get some Black Eyed Susans.  She and her husband run a bed and breakfast with a spectacular garden in the back.  Iris of every color are blooming, yellow, lavender and white, peach, every shade of purple, and one a combination of colors I have never seen before.  The lavender and white combined in one flower I gave her in the fall of 2012.  They rebloom and spread rather rapidly.  Because of that and the fact that I cannot bear to throw any away, I have them by the barn and here and there.  Some do better than others–a lot of the soil here is either clay or caliche or a combination, not very conducive to anything but the toughest.  She has a rose bush taller than I am which means it must be about 5’6″ or 7″.  Another deep red rose was already blooming.  She gives me flowers and I wait and see how they do or if the deer or bunnies will eat them.

Today’s weather brought perfection, a rare treat of just the right temperature, sunshine, and no wind.  When I arrived, her husband was napping in the garden in a lawn chaise.  He got up, we all walked around the garden, looked in the koi pond, and commented what flowers seemed to flourish more readily than others.  Many flowers which do well in town either die out here in the country only twelve miles away or fail to thrive.  They just sit there and do nothing.  She and I have shared flowers for years, flowers and conversation and wine.  We all decided to sit town and share some wine and cheeses and crackers and visit.  They travel widely and always have tales to tell.  He is from Jordan so we discuss world events.  Part of today’s conversation centered on Boko Haram and the differences between Shia and Sunni.  He is Sunni and I used to be married to a Shiite.  Often we discuss extremism and how it harms everyone, regardless of religion.  None of us understand the hatred some people seem to feel toward others who are different from them either my race or religion or ethnicity or gender.

As soon as I returned home and changed into gardening clothes, I fed Rosie, and planted the Black Eyed Susans with a big dose of water and root stimulator.  Who knows if they will make it.  I will wait and see.  If they do, they will contrast nicely with the purple of the catmint and the white, tiny, native Blackfoot Daisies growing wild among the other plants in my little garden.  What more can a person wish for than spending time with good friends among the flowers.  And a little wine never hurts.

 

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Funeral Dream

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Her mind wanders in the soot filled

dreams when she was eighteen and lost,

tried to commit suicide her first year in

college.  Far from home with a homesick

roommate and people who ate this slimy

looking white stuff –grits–she’d never

heard of or seen.  Crazy people who

thought black peoples’–they called them

colored–only use was playing loud

music to dance to.  Who could adjust to

these southern belles riding horse to

hounds, dancing to music they couldn’t

touch with people they could never love.

In isolation she played piano for hours,

wrote depressing stories no one could read

and swallowed a bottle of bitter.  Changed

her mind, vomited in the infirmary, made

volcanoes in chemistry class, flew around

Washington, D.C. during Kennedy’s

funeral to avoid her own.

Wine tastings and a few favorite things

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Arrived home from work and fed Rosie.  Looked at the dry native grass around my house and decided to water a bit of it even though I loathe wasting water.  Green is probably safer than winter brown.  The recent giant wildfire raised my concerns about the fire danger in this drought.  I cannot remember when it rained and the next ten days show no rain in sight.  As soon as I finish writing this or shortly thereafter, I get to run back to town and join probably 100 plus other people at friends’ house to taste the wine and food brought by Market Street.  These friends run a bed and breakfast with a spectacular garden complete with koi pond and just about every kind of flower you can grow in this area.  It’s cool, nearly froze last night, so I will wear the black turtle neck and slacks I wore to work.  It’s hard to believe that it was just above freezing last night and is supposed to hit 100 next Monday–the desert has now reached here apparently.

Thinking about this leads me to think about some of my favorites, especially when it comes to wine:  zinfandels, especially from Lodi, California.  The moderately priced one I buy most often is OVZ.  It frequently goes on sale here which is even better.  I also like  Seven Deadly Zins–unfortunately I have never seen it on sale.  Basically, I love red wines and almost never drink white.  A moderately priced nice blend is Apothic Red.  Market Street had a super sale so I bought several–ten percent off if you buy six at a time.  The best malbec I ever drank came directly in baggage from Argentina, a present to me from my Argentinian exchange student when he arrived.  You can’t get it here and when his mom tried to ship me some, she was not allowed.

The students at school  kept commenting on my black attire today.  They asked if I was going to a funeral or something.  I laughed.  I like black; I look good in black.  It also shows off my turquoise jewelry.  My most favorite color is orange. Turquoise looks good with it too.  Red and green are ok.  Finally after decades I have learned to like hot pink, but really I am not a pink person–see my poem about Hot Pink Toenails–on an old blog.  It remains one of my blog posts that people look at most–I have no clue why.  The one color I really do not like is blue, especially pale blue. Perhaps tomorrow I will post about favorite books.  I really would like readers to comment about their favorites.  It fascinates me what people perceive and feel about this and that.  Often I am the only person I know who reads what I read.

Off to taste some new wines and maybe find a new favorite.

Apocalyptic Planet-Part Seven: Species Vanish

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

We all know extinction occurs.  Nearly everyone knows different species of dinosaurs at varied times roamed the earth for millennia.  Bones of all sorts of animals and various hominids are dug up off and on.  Scientists study them, determine their age, where and how they lived.  Scientists and sometimes even average persons develop theories about why they went extinct.  Regardless of which theory a person decides is accurate, these ancient extinctions generally took thousands of years. Recent extinctions are different, e.g. carrier pigeons.  Millions existed a couple of hundreds of years ago; now they are gone.  Why?  Humans.

Various causes exist for the extinctions of ancient species.  A major cause is the climate change caused my the changing tilt of the earth’s axis.  These changes occur over thousands and thousands of years.  What is different now?  Let’s take corn.  Native Americans cultivated rainbow colors of corn in small, frequently irrigated fields.  Where is most corn grown now?  Giant fields of GMO corn grow from horizon to horizon in the Midwest.  And if Monsanto had its way, no other corn would continue to exist for long.   Iowa is a good example.  Wherever this corn is grown, native grasses and other native plants totally disappear, in part due to cultivation.  A bigger issue is herbicides–to have clean fields, nothing and I mean nothing but corn must grow there.  A farmer’s expertise as a farmer is measured my just how super clean his fields are.  The only way to get these totally weedless fields is to use herbicides.  Biodiversity is a key to environmental health.  Little biodiversity exists in giant fields of crops like corn and soybeans.  Fertilizers to obtain huge yields wash downstream and in the Midwest eventually end in the Gulf of Mexico and cause giant marine algae blooms which pulls oxygen from the water to create a dead zone where no marine animals or fish can live.

Perhaps readers have heard of the plight of monarch butterflies.  Compared to just ten years ago, the population has dropped dramatically.  What happened to them?  Roundup.  Over 100,000 tons of Roundup and other brands of glyphosate herbicides are annually applied to crops in the US.  What do monarchs eat?  Milkweed.  Since 1999, 58 per cent of the milkweed has disappeared.  Recently, monarchs experienced a 30 per cent reduction in their numbers in one year.  Are we headed toward a mass extinction?  Some scientists think so.  These scientists are not talking about tigers, elephants, and rhinos being killed at an ever increasing rate for their body parts, but rather about the less noticeable extinctions of various plants and less obvious animals like frogs.  And then there is the problem with bees.  Bees are disappearing at an ever increasing rate due to not only diseases but due to herbicides and pesticides.  Without bees to pollinate the giant fields of almonds and various fruits in California, for example, those foods won’t exist.  See a previous post for more discussion on the importance of bees.  So why care about frogs?  Scientists consider frogs and amphibians in general an indicator of the health of an ecosystem.  Certain more tropical species of frogs are especially subject to the effects of climate change and they are disappearing.

Where I live big bluestem, blue grama, buffalo grass, and other native species grew from horizon to horizon.  This is the high plains.  Root systems of some plants grow twelve feet deep.  It has not rained in over a month.  Where the native grass once grew, crops are now grown.  This time of year finds open fields. Without rain, with the recent endless high winds, dust fills the sky.  To safely return home from town Sunday, I had to turn on the car lights to see.  The dryness fuels wildfires.  Earlier this week, over one hundred homes burned down in a wildfire north of Amarillo.  Drought.

Many human inventions are wonderful and make many lives better, but for some of them, I cannot help but wonder at what cost.

 

 

My Happy Mother’s Day

/ Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

 

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Mother’s Day filled my heart.  First, when I awakened in the morning, I made coffee and opened this computer.  When I logged into Facebook, I found this pronouncement from my daughter:

“I’m so thankful to have an amazing, talented, smart, ambitious, honest woman as my mommy.  You made me the person I am today and as I continue to grow, I see things you taught me passing down to my son.  I’m the mom I am today because of the mom you were to me.  I may not always show it or tell you but I love you so much.”  I nearly cried; I am not a crier.

The flowers arrived Saturday from my son who lives twenty hours away if you drive.  Look at these flowers!!  Fantastic.

Then my grandson gave me a handmade card about 5 by 8 inches with this long note some of which follows:

“Happy Mother’s Day.  I know your not my mom but your my mom’s mom so your a mother so happy mother’s day.  Thank you for giving birth to my mom because if you wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t be alive right now so thanks….Thank you for all the things you do for me.  You always watch me.  Your always nice even when I’m mean and you spoil me.  I love you and happy mother’s day. ”  He is ten.

Then today I received a totally unexpected thank you card with a note from a young man who stayed with me a while last spring just before he graduated from college with an A average.  He was experiencing an extremely painful time then.  His hand written note:  “Happy Mother’s Day!  It has been one year since I graduated from college.  I would never have made it without you!  Thank you for the great help in my most difficult time.  You are the small ray of sunshine that really brings me hope!  Thank you!”  I felt overwhelmed.

The bottle in front of the flowers above is Versace perfume–Mother’s Day present from my daughter.

 

 

Mother, Barbara Lewis Duke

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Mom was tiny, tough, and pretty.  She acquired the name Lewis because my grandparents had hoped for a boy and, for reasons I do not know, wanted a child named Lewis.  My grandparents named her younger brother Louis.  The following poem about my mother is one of the prose poems in my new book of poetry, On the Rim of Wonder, published last month by Uno Mundo Press.  Currently you can purchase it from Amazon or if you are in Amarillo, at Hastings on Georgia.  Shortly, it will be available on Kindle and signed copies can be ordered from me.

 

Barbie Doll

 

Barbara Lewis Duke, pretty, petite, blue-eyed and blond, my mother, one

fearless, controlling woman.  Long after Mom’s death, Dad said, “Barbara was

afraid of absolutely no one and nothing”.  They married late:  34 and 38.  He

adored her unconditionally.  She filled my life with horses, music, love,

cornfields, hayrides, books, ambition.  Whatever she felt she had missed,

my sister and I were going to possess:  books, piano lessons, a college education.

Her father, who died long before I was born, loved fancy, fast horses.  So did she.

During my preschool, croupy years, she quieted my hysterical night coughing

with stories of run away horses pulling her in a wagon.  With less than one hundred

pounds and lots of determination, she stopped them, a tiny Barbie Doll flying

across the Missouri River Bottom, strong, willful, free.

 

 

 

 

Solar Power and Utility Companies

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

 

 

 

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Sixteen solar panels reside on the top of my barn.  Inside an inverter transforms them into energy acceptable to the grid.  I net meter.  On a sunny day, and most are, this time of year my system generates 20 Kw per day.  Recently, I was considering getting more panels since my barn roof could accommodate at least twice as many and maybe more.  After reading about what has occurred in a number of other states, I might just wait and see what happens.

The giant utilities have begun a huge campaign against net metering.  In 2013 Xcel, the company here in the Panhandle of Texas, overtly attacked net metering in Colorado.  After the utility commission there received more that 30,000 comments and 200 protesters marched on Xcel’s Denver office, they backed off.  A poll indicated that more than three quarters of the people in Colorado support net metering.  The commission agreed to preserve net metering.  In Hawaii, a state leading the way with solar, the utility is fighting back, refusing to approve new systems.  Why?  One in ten houses there have solar on rooftops and this individually produced electricity is cutting into the Hawaiian Electric Company’s profits.  Arizona citizens can be added to this list.  Solar makes sense in Arizona with something like 95% of days sunny.  For the 2 per cent of the electric utility customers there with solar, it cuts their bills about 70 per cent.  Last summer the utility company launched a campaign against solar growth and net metering.  What they wanted was to charge customers retail rates while paying solar customers wholesale rates and charge them a monthly fee per Kw hour generated which would, of course, in most cases defeat the purpose of having solar in the first place.  They ran ads telling non solar customers that they had to pay more because of the solar generated by individuals with solar.  These ads were run by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an anti-renewable energy non-profit funded largely by the Koch brothers who own immense oil and gas interests.

I meet more and more people who decide to get off the grid partly for the independence and partly to avoid paying these money hungry utility companies.  Here in the Panhandle, electricity remains relatively cheap.  Even with a large all electric house and weather extremes, my electric bills average less than 350 per month.  If I spend a lot of money on more panels and the rules change here in Texas, it might not be worth the cost.  As I write this, I keep asking myself just how much would total independence from the electric company be worth?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Late at night

/ Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

Depending on where you are in the world, this may be the morning–like all my friends in Southeast Asia.  Or even a totally different day.  This commitment to write and then blog daily means that sometimes I may be a little less than perfectly coherent, e.g. now.  Just came home from a dinner party for some of us who are connected in some way or another with the Amarillo Opera.  Tomorrow night Amarillo Opera presents the annual Musica Variada performance featuring local Hispanic opera singers, all of whom are studying music at West Texas A & M University and Trio Ellas from Los Angeles–three young women who play traditional Mexican music, e.g. Mariachi and boleros (though I think actually the original boleros are from Cuba) and lots of other things.  The food, catered by a local Mexican restaurant, was not the typical TexMex food.  We imbibed Spanish wine, ate beef to melt in your mouth–coming from someone who rarely cooks beef, imbibed salad with chorizo in the Spanish style–harder and smokier than what one usually gets here in the Panhandle of Texas (part of El Norte).  And more Spanish wine.

Perhaps out of choice or some other reason I do not know, I am always surrounded, except at work, by people from all over the world.  At dinner I sat with friends from Columbia and Peru and my friends from here.  Across the way were my friends with the exquisite garden.  He is from Jordan.  Another young man with whom I spoke chatted about this and that in Spanish and English.  I ascertained he was Cuban; he confirmed.  I also visited with my friend who spends so much time traveling all over this part of the United States with an energy company that I rarely see her.  Tomorrow night I will go to the opera and wish dancing in the aisles was acceptable behavior.  If you want to hear some wonderful music watch videos of Trio Ellas.  You will be dancing in your house.  I promise.

What do people want?

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

As I looked at my blog statistics a few minutes ago, it dawned on me that apparently few others want what I want in life or care about what I care about.  Either that or most others like me do nor blog or read blogs.  One of my most popular posts over time had been a poem entitled “Hot Pink Toenails”.  My guess is that when individuals search and find this, they are not really looking for a poem about personal identity, the topic of this poem.  Maybe they have a foot fetish or are searching for some new type of nail color or pedicure.  My popular recipe posts I understand.  Who doesn’t want a great recipe for salmon or for tasty vegetarian dishes if you are vegetarian or entertaining vegetarian friends.  But hot pink toenails.  I would not even know what words to put in the search block to pull this up.

Sometimes to see if I can tag better to draw more traffic to my blog, I take a look at what visitors used for search terms.  Lately, “Costa Rica jungle flowers” and “what  did people wear to survive the dust bowl” showed up.  Both these make sense, the latter especially since a mini form of the dust bowl seems to have returned to this area of the country.  Yesterday and today, high winds and blowing dust like brown fog reigned.  It has become rather tiresome and scary, given that we have had no rain in so long I cannot remember when it rained at my house.  Miles of brown grass cover the landscape with the only relief being irrigated wheat fields and lawns.  I do not even want to think about what would happen if someone dropped a cigarette.  With a 45 mile per hour west wind like today, fire fighters would have an exceedingly difficult time.

For those who follow my blog and enjoy my posts about the environment, nature, etc., I won’t stop just because such topics often get fewer viewers.  These are things I passionately care about.  And for all of you who like facts, here are some to add to the fact list:

-80.000 acres of wetlands are lost annually in the US to intensifying coastal storms and sea level rise.

-The forest burn season in the western US has grown 50 per cent longer in the past 40 years.

-The once mighty Colorado River now dries up before it reaches the sea.

-Contrary to popular opinion, carbon emissions from power plants are not regulated.

-Money funneled into efforts to deny global warming and climate change, at least in the US, increasingly follow untraceable avenues.  They use pass through foundations, e.g. Donors Trust.

On a lighter note if you eat salmon and wonder what is safest to eat, here is the latest.  Canned salmon is safe because it is wild caught pink or sockeye salmon from Alaska with high Omega 3s and low mercury.  Most frozen and fresh salmon sold in the US is Atlantic farmed salmon with much higher mercury levels.  Grocery stores and packages indicate the type of salmon and whether wild caught so you can choose.

 

Poverty

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Proofs sent to the library at work–a high school–cannot legally be used on the shelves so they end up in various places.  Somehow I end up where they reside and read them.  My latest, The Boiling Season by Christopher Hebert provides abundant food for hard core thinking.  The setting, a Caribbean island, reeks of political turmoil and the legacy of slavery.  Unless you are totally ignorant of Caribbean history and the various cultures there, it does not take long to figure out the setting is Haiti.  In case you want to read the book, I will give you only a cursory introduction.  The main character grows up in basically what we call here a slum.  His mom dies of malaria when he is quite young and  his dad owns a small store.  He hates it and focuses most of his life on getting out of these circumstances.  He gets a job and a place to live with a senator, meets important people, and eventually discovers an abandoned estate out in the country.  He moves there after it is bought by a wealthy foreign white woman who hires him to restore it.  He absolutely loves the place.  It is an island of beauty and peace in the middle of squalor, poverty, and strife.

The details you can read for yourself.  It’s focus is the dilemma many who grow up poor and want to better themselves face:  if you progress, are you abandoning your roots, to whom do you owe loyalty.  And, indeed, what is progress?  Civil war breaks out and the main character is torn between his desire for peace and a more elegant lifestyle in this beautiful place and the needs of the poverty stricken people who surround it and who at one point work there.  Is he a free person or just a fancier slave for the rich who own the place?  Has he deluded himself into thinking because he worked hard to get where he is that he is better?

Although the book’s setting is a particular place, the theme remains universal.  I think of individuals I personally know who could not cope with success and riches, who felt they must “save” all their relatives and then were left with nothing themselves.  The thinking is this:  if you come into money, you must share it with everyone; to keep it for yourself is morally wrong.  If this is the case, how can the cycle ever break?  This sort of thinking is very difficult for those of use who work hard and save for the future to understand.  We question why we should help them when they hit the bottom.

Yesterday my hard working, single mom, going to graduate school daughter went on a rant about people she knows who get food stamps, Medicaid, etc. while she works and goes to school and gets nothing.  They have fancier cars, better TVs, etc. than she does.  I do understand both viewpoints although I admit I am the frugal without being austere.  I remember a time several years ago when several of my poorer students–I teach at a Title 1 school–wore jeans more expensive than I would ever buy–its jeans.  We got into a discussion about this.  I informed them that all the clothing I had on except for underwear and socks came from a thrift store.  When I take things to the thrift store, I actually shop.  Thrift stores are full of “finds”.  The response of one student was echoed by others, “I would never go into a thrift store.  Someone might see me go in there.”  Because they were poor, they wanted to avoid anyone seeing them do anything they thought might confirm this.

Although fraud exists in programs for the poor, it also exists in high end banking and just about everything.  The solution is to work hard to investigate and prevent it.  I keep wondering what is the solution for the people truly in need?  Do we punish everyone to prevent the fraudulent acts of the few?  And what about the children?  What happens to the dependent young?  Obviously, the world has not found answers.  I wonder if we ever will.