greenstorm | Entries tagged with threshold

I can't think very well right now but I really want to record an experience.

With humans I'll often circle them a bit before they catch my attention and I interact. I think it's a lot of backbrain work, where I pick up on information about them and then eventually decide they're safe and interesting enough to spend my time on.

I grew up in the pacific northwest and was pretty much familiar with all the plants about me with the exception of the ornamental ones, which I picked up quickly as a tour guide at the botanical gardens and as a landscaper (consider those plants part of a friends group, with a formal introduction).

When I moved up north I had the experience, for the first time, of living in a place where I didn't know the ecosystem. I did not know all the plants. I was working in forestry and doing things like ecotyping which required me to learn them, and I learn plant names more easily than doing almost anything, so with a little effort I picked them up. But they weren't family, in a sense. I didn't have a multidimensional understanding of their habitats, related plants and animals, human uses, range of phenotypes, lifecycle, and a kind of bone-deep familiarity with them week-by-week through the year like I did back home.

Even now most of the plants here I'm familiar with in that way are the domestic ones.

This year I think I'm starting to develop that kind of deep relationship with amelanchier -- june or saskatoon or serviceberry, as you like. This is the time of year when it flowers, and even the first year there were whole power cuts full of fluffy white bushes in full bloom that were just so striking and noteworthy. This house came with what I'm fairly sure now is a Smokey cultivar, the one with a milder berry taste but the distinct overtone of almonds. The previous tenant said the sweetest saskatoons were behind the chicken coop.

Last year or the year before (what is time?) I noticed that pretty much every tree on the property, both deciduous and coniferous, have young saskatoon bushes under them. This must be from birds, nibbling, sitting, and then dropping seeds. It really drives home how drought-tolerant these plants are if they can grow, not only right on the south slope of places or on exposed areas, but also right in the middle of those snaky shallow spruce roots that instantly suck up every drop of water.

Someone in Canada with Oak Summit Nursery did some experimental grafting of apples onto saskatoons a couple years ago and it worked and the grafts are still good. It brings the apples into precocious (early) bloom and probably dwarfs them. One of the more interesting permaculture methods is grafting fruit trees onto existing native plants, so for instance on the Islands putting apple trees onto crabapple trunks, high enough to avoid deer and on that established and suited-to-conditions rootstock. Well, saskatoons are hardy far far colder than here, they're drought tolerant, what's not to try? It doesn't hurt that a developmentally disabled vocational school's horticulture class was selling scionwood to raise funds for a pizza party* so I have some apple scionwood around

And then I started poking around more. I learned that the first year the plants grow very slowly, only 4-6", and they don't start leaping until later. There are a bunch of species that seem to hybridize, though I haven't learned the differences between them yet. I haven't sorted out their evolutionary history yet, nor have I grown my own from seed yet, but those will come. My time and thought are, after all, very limited these days. At some point I'll taste different bushes more concertedly.

But I have... a new friend. It's a friend on the landscape, that I can easily see at this time of year when driving, and also that I know in several different spots and shapes in places around town and around my property. It's neat.

*there is nothing about that I don't love with my whole heart. My image of these kids working with plants and getting pizza, and being able to do it in high school, is one I hold as a shield against the darkness of these times

It rained yesterday, and the night before that. It's been a good soaking rain, the kind we rarely get these days. This is the May long weekend and the previous couple long weekends folks have cancelled their quad parties in the bush because it's been so dry that sparks or the heat of the vehicle could start fires (I still do not know what a "poker ride" is, though I have suspicions). This year things may have been cancelled for rain, though we definitely had sunny periods, but the spate of fires that comes immediately after this weekend seems unlikely to materialize.

The ground had been almost too try to till in my clay soil, even a month or two before last frost date. I had been picking away at it, a hundred or two hundred square feet at a time, and had done a first pass on the pig winter field (which needs a better name) and the upper field, and was just starting on the back field that has snowmelt running down over it for weeks when the snow first disappears. This will make my second pass much easier.

I'd got some pre-started brassica greens in the ground, then the other day put out the broccoli and kale, and yesterday planted some peas finally. We're still dipping below zero some nights -- never the nights when it rains -- and there are tiny delicate skims of ice on the water in containers on those mornings if I get out there early enough.

Yesterday before the rain I planted three heartnut and three buartnut by the fence in the back field to see if the juglone they produce (when they're a little bigger) will suppress the aspen from coming across the fence from the neighbour's place.

When Josh was here we drove into Alberta and picked up some excellent hardy plums and apples, which we planted. The apples are leafed out now, they went into the orchard (mostly on siberian rootstock) and the plums look to be following suit shortly.

Those bulbs I planted last fall have been coming up -- no peonies yet, but squill, daffodils, muscari, etc. They aren't so much coming up en masse, as makes sense for the first year, but there's a nice long season of them. A couple test daffodils in the orchard have not yet been eaten by geese, which is excellent news.

Many of the bulbs were planted in little clumps around the baby apple seedlings I put in last fall. Not all of those survived but many did.

I'm hauling my peppers and tomatoes onto the deck everyday for hardening off, and festooning the livingroom with them every night. Yesterday when I brought them in the were wet with rainwater.

I also put some beaked hazel in, and an order of hardy roses from corn hill. I have a bundle of hazelbert waiting to go in as well, but those last dead spruce trees from the winter field were felled right onto the spot I want them to go and apparently chainsawing destroys my body.

Wheelbarrowing in moderation and tilling seem ok for the hour of activity per day though, so I've been doing those, bringing up the chicken compost to the fields. The tiller is so good because it's rear tine so it pulls itself along and I have the handles to lean on as I walk behind. I'm being as kind to it as I know how, checking the fluids regularly, but haven't yet brought myself to change the oil. It's still starting well.

The front yard has been mostly fenced off from the geese, except for a trio who keep getting out, laying an egg in the dog house which Thea then eats or cherishes, and asking to be let back in at the gate. They are keeping my grass down somewhat so that's fine.

I hired the neighbour a couple down to chop up the fallen south fenceline aspens and burn the tops for me. He did an excellent job, was great company, and I now feel more comfortable about the fuel load by my house and more comfortable in the neighbourhood. I need to cover that south bank with compost and chips and plant into it -- I already put two little leaf lindens but want to add some elm, ash, and oak plus a shrub layer of some kind, likely usask cherries and currants. that's the same slope my clove currant is thriving on and my haskaps do well on too, and it gets more heat than anything else in the area. Maybe some wild plum or plum seedlings to?

A semilocal (Edmonton) vocational high school was doing a scionwood sale as a fundraiser so I ordered some sticks of apple and plum. Its in the fridge (I have a (small) seed fridge now given me by a friend) while I figure out rootstocks. A friend locally has a bunch of apple suckers, someone else in a cold climate has been successfully grafting apple onto *wild saskatoons*, someone was having a sale on wild plums, I have some plums that the tops died off and they're just mustang rootstock, plus there's topworking on existing plum trees. So I have some options, I'm just limited to an hour or, if I'm lucky, two, per day.

The whole thing makes me happy but it makes be even more of a recluse because leaving the house takes up two days worth of activity and I would rather be gardening. Pottery is on hold. Disability paperwork is mostly settled. Most other things can wait.

A hundred tomato varieties-ish this year. Normally I would list them out for you (and myself in posterity) but making lists is hard and I'd rather be gardening. There are roughly three categories: "early hardy reds" "fancy trial tomatoes" and "my own crosses in F2 and F3".

Eightyish hot pepper varieties too, spanning all the major species except chinense. I do love those plants, they grow so differently from tomatoes. They'd rather err on the side of dry than wet. They flower and leaf so prettily. A colorado and the mystery athens peppers overwintered in the house and are doing great now too.

I also picked up a kaffir lime for indoors, which makes my house smell truly amazing, and some baby figlets are on order, because um. I guess I'm letting myself do what I want.

Yesterday I planted runner beans, marigolds, nasturtiums, woad, and chickpeas indoors to go out when the seedlings are big enough to make a visible row in the garden (difficulty of a bit weedy garden is that direct seeding plants I'm not intimately familiar with takes a lot of concentration to ID, not that I can;t ID nasturtium and runner beans). Runner beans are supposed to be happier in slightly cooler weather than standard phasesolus and I feel able to provide them support this year.

There are several projects that need doing, fencing and deconstructing excess pig buildings and making a woodshed and putting in some proper gates, but those can all be done later.

I really should take down the hedging cedars right up against my front balcony for fire reasons but I like the screen they provide from the road. The hope is to put a solarium there instead, with some sort of adhesive glass frosted stuff in the road direction, but that's a long ways away.

There's big stuff going on in the world, many people dying and many more deciding that some group or another needs to die. It's abhorrent. It's happening locally and internationally. I read about it more than I want, and I garden because I'd rather be doing that than reading. I can't tell you how lucky I feel to have this garden, better than I ever believed I could have in my whole life, and these cats and dogs and geese ranging around with their own individualities making up a community I can tolerate and that always wants me to be alive. They even take joy in my physical existence, which is so good for my heart.

Writing this feels superficial, but words have power, and so: I wish this for everyone in the world. A safe home, a loving community that feels joy in their existence. Safety. Life. Enough food of the kind that makes them stop sometimes and just say "this is so good". I wish this for everyone. Please.

Today is the first day in a bit I've felt like there could be any good in the world ever again. I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but it seems like it could be possible? This morning was well above freezing, misty out, and Solly came up to me when she saw I was outside. She's grown up so much in the last year and a half, picking up that maremma solemnity and stoicism I never would have imagined from her as a puppy.

I make a point of giving her some pets and ear scritches whenever I see her, so she knows she doesn't have to do anything fancy for attention, and she's stopped jumping. Today she was being good and I had enough self-awareness to notice and get down there with her and give her a ton of love and we just sort of leaned into each other and snuggled for a good long time.

The garden club is having their seed swap March 15, and I think they asked me to start a bunch of seeds for them so I can do a demonstration on separating seedling tomatoes again this year. I should double check that. People realyly like getting to go home with free baby plants, and it's a nice trick to know you can start them all close together and then split them apart a little later, to save space under lights in the beginning.

I still feel like I'm carrying around a huge weight. I hate that the way to reject a dynamic I don't like is to-- ugh, I don't know. Enough about that sort of thing right now.

This weekend Josh comes up. I don't even remember what we were going to do, maybe smoke salmon and something about changing the outside light bulbs that need a ladder? The last few days I haven't been able to keep food in my body or move much so I haven't got the house ready for a visitor. I think the cats peed on something, I have a trial cat litter that was supposed to be natural but smells like porta potty fluid that I need to empty entirely and replace, there are garbage bags of cat litter and cat cans waiting to go to the dump (I wish there was a way to do these cats with less waste but also not too much actual weight, the wet food that keeps them healthy is truly awful for garbage), sheets need to be cleaned, vacuum broke and floors blah blah blah, need to bring more wood in, I don't even know.

It's been a long time since my body was this bad and it's had me thinking about what I really would need to live here, assuming that I can't always pace things (relationship thing and disability police requiring a ton more documentation happened both in the same few days). I probably need a non-wood-burning way of heating the house even in winter, whether that's some sort of electric furnace/heat pump or a gas fireplace downstairs or whatever. Something that doesn't require a couple armloads of wood a day anyhow. Ideally something that if my head is fuzzy I can walk away from and it doesn't damage it. Today I forgot to close the catalyst bypass and the chimney got a lot of flame up it -- it's kept clean enough that it didn't catch fire, and it was nowhere near the heat the catalyst pumps out, but it was a lot of oxygen and flame in a way that would have caught anything that was in there. I smelled the heat and went and closed it up and checked the chimney from the outside, no harm done, but still.

Josh is here for a couple days, which contains a doctor's appointment where I need to get a ton of paperwork done (imagine being able to actually talk about medical stuff with the doctor!) and then next weekend I'm assisting with the wheel throwing class at the pottery studio.

Body aside, which it never is, I'm glad I have committed to more in-studio people-type clay stuff. I need to keep bits of community going. You know where you see people do cool stuff and they think stuff you're doing is cool and you exist in the same space? I'll maybe need to find a place in the building to set up a cot and rest between bits.

My cat was just sleeping beside me and woke up with a cry. He looked around sharply and it took a minute for him to relax and accept pets. It seemed pretty clear he'd woken from a bad dream. I wonder how he processes that?

My poem-a-day is going well. I want energy to plan my garden, but I don't have it. My enthusiasm is admittedly a little dim right now too, though I imagine it'll come back with time. I still haven't done my one-week internet-free pottery retreat I'd planned to do this winter.

Those are things I can look forward to. There are things.

Last month was a bad month. Fear and paperwork. When I write things here I re-live them, and I wasn't quite able to write about them because I wasn't done living them. In many ways I'm not.

It snowed for three days after all that, maybe 18" of snow here: over my boots. My snowblower is in the shop so although I have been doing some shovelling and knocking snow off roofs a feeling of isolation remains. In this case it's soothing, peaceful: I'm insulated from everyone else, though I do keep shovelling the arc of the gate so it can open if I need to get out in an emergency. The roads have been terrible, and this morning the snow turned to rain so I can't imagine it's any better out there.

Shovelling and walking the daily chores in the deep snow are all my body has been able to do. It's such a relief after using myself up emailing to follow up with bizarre information and paperwork structures (to contact benefits, for instance, I call someone who transcribes the call, puts it into a ticket, sends the transcription to me to ok, then the ticket goes to the benefits people, who email me an answer which I can't reply to so if I want to reply I need to call with the ticket number, explain the whole thing to someone, who puts in another ticket...)

Enough of that. My difficulty navigating these systems does give me real fear -- for instance, the system that was supposed to give me stopgap money requires reports every 2 weeks, and I'd been keeping my eye on their online portal, turns out the online portal just keeps saying it's "in review" until I do my first report, there's no way of knowing online if I'm approved or not until after the report is done, so I missed my first several reports, several weeks of money, and had to reapply (which then means I need to go through the weeklong no-money-during-this-period after they process it, and before I get money from them).

Anyhow, I would not be here in my bed with my cats and dim snowy light coming in through the window without friends who just give me money to live. I might be in a shelter, but the shelters are only 12 hours at night, and I think a day or two of that and I would not be able to move anymore, so maybe the hospital? With a foreclosed house and that terrible stabbing feeling of letting down the creatures I love who rely on me.

None of that is why I started writing now, after so long. I started writing because Siri came in this morning and lay on me and fell asleep with my hand under his chin, then sprawled across me. He dreamed and his tail twitched and he growled in his sleep and then settled. He was curled right up against me, as if I was safe for him, and I am?

I pay money to keep hi alive and I do not resent it in the least. Given a choice between feeding him and giving him his meds and say, clothes that fit, or a mattress without holes from laying in it so much, there's no question for me. I've felt bad about or resented people before for requiring money, but not the cats.

My house is gothic arch shaped. It's perfect for winter: the snow either stays on the roof and insulates, or it slides down and covers the basement windows and insulates down there. Things are quieter and more still, muffled by the snow at point of impact and by the rampart of snow around my house.

I've always rejected the idea of money as love because it was too painful for me to think there were ways I was unable to love people, that I just didn't have much money so that would mean I couldn't love folks properly. Like, as they said, if I did love them I'd find a way to get money for that use.

But maybe I can start by thinking of money as community love. It's still too hard to think that I can't do for anyone what has been done for me in an interpersonal love sense. But for community? I can do other things, and not this one thing, and that's maybe ok.

Though realistically I can do basically nothing right now. I can shovel a little snow and eat crackers for dinner and pet some cats. I can write very little and I can't do any pottery, though maybe if paperwork stops then I can. I can't articulate the increasing fragmentation and polarization I'm seeing in meaningful ways.

Some days I can't even find what's beautiful. I was describing my situation to a counselor at one point and she said "oh, I'm glad you have pets" and, yes. This is the thing Siri brought to me: he showed up, he chose me, he comes and snuggles close to me in the morning with full trust, and between him and the others I can always access feeling loved. Humans are so far away these days, I'm grateful to have these other ones closer to me.

And honestly, since my cognition really started to go, and since there's been more distance with Tucker and Josh, I'm not sure where my comfort level is with people at all. I used to do it so easily.

Bits of rain out there, falling on the snow now. Each drop makes the ramparts a little more impassible: I should shovel my way out at least. Or I should properly rest, since yesterday did wipe me out pretty badly.

This piece of writing has no summary, no conclusion, no theme to brush past on my way out the door. It just ends as it began, with cats snoring, and winter light in the window.

Planting trees most days and I have planted roughly 130 apple trees this year over about a month and a half, most underplanted with daffodils and muscari and a couple crocus and various scylla (the crocus and apple trees are tasty so I'm hoping the other, toxic, bulbs will be some discouragement for voles, deer, etc).

The ground has frozen too hard to plant for a span of multiple days twice now-- it just thawed overnight after the most recent one. I've received my last bulbs, including peonies, yesterday. So the next two days I plant flowers, flowers that won't even be pretty for several years, flowers that don't feed anyone, but flowers that mark where people have lived when their houses are long gone.

It's almost time to turn indoors, to dyeing and sewing and pottery, but I do not want to go indoors. I want a sunporch, somewhere with windows, where I can be in the light from outside while I do these things.

Even more I want to taste the fruit of all these baby apples, to see which ones survive my climate (they all have an early hardy parent and a fancy parent, so like Wickson or Centennial or Trailman or somesuch and then something like Rubiyat or Roxbury Russet so nothing is guaranteed).

Winter felt early a couple weeks ago but we've settled generally into a skiff of snow overnight, melting by midafternoon, and I've been planting into that. The transition period will make the final freeze-up easier on me.

I really did never know how much I appreciated seasonality until I moved up here.

It's so neat, laying out the apple trees in rows and curves and aisles and nooks. Threshold is growing bones! I want to see. Three years, five years, I want to see what happens!

I also took my chances on a tiny webstore and got six varieties of sunchoke from a delightful human, several of which flowered for her. They stay on the landscape for a long time and I can't wait to eventually turn to helping them get seed.

You'll know I'm replaced by aliens if I ever get just the minimum diversity of a plant.

Everything in my body hurts.

But.

I've done more than one thing a day the last... two days? And the day before that I also did a thing.

I've needed to get the sides on the greenhouse so I can overwinter the birds in it but I haven't had the ability to piece together scraps to make those sides up -- they need to be wood or hard plastic so the birds can't tear or claw through them, and they need to be windproof. Jigsawing bits I have around is super challenging mentally, so I just... spent money on plywood for the north and probably east sides, which was ultra expensive. Because it's so expensive I decided to pull some leftover half-buckets of fence paint out and paint it before it went on the greenhouse, so I can clean it more easily with the power washer and so it hopefully lasts until the greenhouse rusts out (it's an old pop-up greenhouse Josh and I covered with new plastic using wiggle wire).

Three days ago I cut three sheets of plywood to size and painted one side of four of them, plus dug a rhubarb plant to split it and steal some of the roots for fabric dye.

Yesterday I glazed some pottery and had a video chat with my family over their thanksgiving dinner.

Today I painted the other side of the plywood, went in and loaded the kiln and mentored another clay person on how to run it, then came home and ran the tiller. Now it's raining and I'm so happy I got some ground tilled.

The spot I tilled was alongside the baby apple trees I planted two years ago. The baby asparagus next to them survived the summer under the weeds! Those trees are big enough now that I'm going to plant rhubarb and comfrey between them and the fence, both are plants with big leaves that will reduce weed pressure. Then, as per Steven Edholm's testing, I'll put some daffodil bulbs in under the apple trees to create a "living mulch" (the plants flower in spring, with leaves that suppress weeds, then die back in early summer leaving leaves as a mulch and the weeds in that area way behind). Plus, daffodils are a vole-unfriendly plant so hopefully they'll survive. I'll add a handful of muscari bulbs because that's what you do with daffodils, and a row of garlic bulbils because I have thousands, I didn't cut my scapes this spring.

Then, ahead of that, I'll put in a row of winter rye, a row of favas, and home horseradish. Then another row of this year's baby apple trees interspersed with bulbs and garlic bulbils.

Everything will need to be side/top-dressed with manure/compost.

So, it's very good to have it tilled before it rains! I think that was likely the last dry and snow-free window.

I've also picked some rose hips -- carefully, because it's easy to stand too long to do so -- in the last week. So altogether very good. It's nice to be able to put my energy towards things I enjoy. When I do I realize just how long I was hanging on at work with zero energy at all.

The first tomatoes to ripen outside this year were:

Some hummingbird f2s. These are from Joseph Lofthouse and most are about pea-sized. Genetics are roughly 50% pimpinelifolium, 35% domestic, with some pennellii and some habrochaites. The ones that are ripening are all tiny, and on little, branched plants, mostly in racemes of 6-8. There are two plants with larger fruits that haven't begun ripening yet. I haven't tasted them yet but the fruits are on my counter waiting.

Mission Mountain Sunrise. These plants stay tiny and then just set clusters of fruit. I found one out there ripe before all the others, a gorgeous orange-and-black.

KARMA miracle x sweet cheriette F2. There was a set on my deck that ripened awhile ago, they were pink or orange cherries with a really zippy, lovely flavour like I liked from zesty green. There was also a bright orange grape shaped one in the garden I haven't tasted yet, I bet it'll throw some green babies. Sweet cheriette seems to impart both earliness and a good robust growth up here. Now that I'm sitting here I'm wondering if the ones on the deck were actually zesty green and my memory is failing me, I should check this.

The next ones to ripen will likely be a promiscuous tomato, Ildi, Brad F5, and some of the Mission Mountain Grez as well as some other cheriette crosses.

Corn is slow but it's looking like I'll get something from my morden field crosses and maybe from my sweet corn patch, which is pretty alright.

I harvested a bunch of brassica seed the other day: ethiopian kale (carinata), ultraviolet mustard, and a mix of napa cabbage, pak choi, the aforementioned two, and whatever else was around.

My cinnamon rose is producing hips; I'd like to harvest them and pot them up to hopefully germinate in spring, and do some layering on a couple of my rose branches. Cuisse de nymph did well this year too.

I have some lovely lettuces out there that are unlikely to finalize seed before frost. More interestingly, I have some turnips that are quite small, and densely planted. I'm going to leave them and see if they overwinter through both cold and voles and maybe give me some seed.

Some tomatoes are going to come in for breeding, and I have some F1 seed of zesty green x carbon that just ripened. The other F1s are a zesty green field cross and a taiga x early promiscuous tomato cross.

The dango mugi barley and khorasan grains look like they may ripen nicely, the former more certainly than the latter. The batanka wheat didn't really start up, so maybe it'll overwinter and be a spring wheat? We'll see. The sumire mochi barley only one stalk survived, and this is the second time I've had that happen. It's not happy here I guess.

My apple seedlings need to go in the ground to overwinter, but that means tilling somewhere. After I get the disability forms filled out I'm hoping to do that, but right now the thinking involved in disability stuff is just laying me out in bed.

Luckily I have a rotating selection of cats to help me with that and the show Time Team.

The transparent-type apples are near ripe, and I'm very much looking forward to them. The branches really bend under their weight, until the geese can grab and shake the apples off, but then the branches rebound and leave some for me.

I harvested a very large amount of rhubarb seed, an dI should remember to harvest some sweet ciciley seed.

That's all my mind will do right now, but it's the important stuff anyhow.

It should be an update because a lot of time has gone by.

I should talk about

-Some folks stepped up to support me with $$ and brainpower and it's really really helping
-Still haven't told mom, not that there's much more to tell
-MRI happened, no clear results yet but hasn't been interpreted by a neurologist yet
-MRI staff were amazing with my claustrophobia, they rigged up a mirror so I could see out
-Doctor called Friday night at 7:30pm after the MRI to reassure me that no huge issues were visible "so I could have a relaxing weekend and not worry too much" since it was a big procedure
-Brief evacuation alert from a fire, alert means they can tell you to leave immediately at any time
-Big body crash from prepping for alert
-Body crash from moving 1.5 cord of birch firewood actually was bigger than filling out disability form with help from a friend and restarted real difficulty with stairs
-Kinda restarting pottery as energy permits
-Fun tomato breeding which follows on from last years stuff so I don't need to think or do manual crosses too much
-Looks like it'll be a good fruit crop year for saskatoons and maybe raspberries
-Hot (up to 35C!) during some days but remains cool at night, though it is into the double digits
-Rarely smoky
-Jasper burnt down, and the fires are working on Wells and hundred mile and I think Likely or Horsefly
-Sirocco/Siri the rescue cat is starting to get along with the other cats, except Hazard and especially Little Bear
-Siri super growled at the vet (he growls easily, and at much bigger entities than him) so his bloodwork will get done in a couple weeks when he's drugged but I'm worried because he drinks a lot and has a tender abdomen
-$$ help from friends is letting me very slowly start to set up automatic food and water for the animals, starting with the cats
-A fox has been coming in during the heat of the day when the dogs are asleep and eating chickens
-First set of muscovy babies to survive in awhile has, well, survived
-My darker corns (montana morado and the other one) are doing exceptionally well
-Some gaspe survived the crow attack
-Morden may be showing tassels
-Beans never sprouted
-Chickens ate the hearts out of most of my cabbage
-Starting to plant the ritual circle in the old pig winter pen, laid out with Tucker's help
-Mosquitopocalypse and lots of blackflies too, would help if my doors closed properly
-Air filter in the basement has been very useful
-Oh, Josh helped get the defunct fridge out of the basement bedroom and it's way better down there now
-New fridge in the upstairs pantry really helps for charcuterie storage etc
-Mostly can't think but writing occasional poetry
-Not enough physical ability to d everything I want but able to enjoy things like my past self planting berry bushes (it's a good haskap year)
-New symptom feels like the opposite of bring electrocuted in my legs, not sure how else to describe it

Mostly good, sometimes moody, there's a lot to digest. The not-good comes from not feeling safe; when I feel like I can safely live here and have enough to eat and people will love me anyhow then my mood is pretty ok.

I walked down to the highwayside of my property today to hang a red dress along the highway. I very very rarely go there -- it's a wildlife corridor along the highway, in my mind, and not really for me to mess with. I noticed a bunch of stuff.

For one, there's a lot of water down there. The cattle dugout behind my fence trickles down into the aspen woods, and at the far end of those woods by the highway there's one of these ephemeral ponds. I had to look closely to make sure it wasn't a beaver pond, but of course there's not enough of a stream for it to be beaver. When the glaciers scraped over this land not too long ago, and when the big glacial lake was settling into the Prince George and Stuart Lake areas, a lot of clay-bottomed wetlands were formed. These are basically impermeable shallow basins that fill up with overland flow water, and then dry out by the end of the year if there's no reliable inflow.

There are also a lot of trails. They're obviously animal trails; it's unclear to me how much of the paths through grass, wildflowers, young trees, and larger forest are Solly, how much are large animals, and how much are made by smaller ones. That said, I saw droppings from the young moose, deer droppings, and at the southwest corner of the property many poops from a very large bear. I also mostly didn't have to duck for the paths through smaller trees. So it looks like my wildlife area is doing what it's supposed to and providing habitat, kind of as a tithe for using the rest of the land.

I think they also recently did some culvert work under the highway down there. My highwayside ditch is significantly wetter than I ever remember. We're still in a low-level drought, and the last couple years have been heavy drought, and it really matters seasonally what time I go there as to whether there's water. But still. Lotta water.

I didn't see clear signs of smaller predators like foxes, coyotes, or lynx but I also wasn't really looking. I know foxes hang out at my neighbours. I also see them on the highway or in parking lots every once in awhile.

Anyhow, Solly is doing a fantastic job in the back and she's a very good girl. Now if only she could stop eating her collars. Everyone has a microchip and their vaccines now (I would have assumed everyone who was neutered got a chip but turns out they didn't. That's now remedied) but as the stray cat reminded me it's nice for people to know someone is owned by some sort of clear sign, especially since she's so skinny. She is in fact skinny enough from jumping the fence and running around that I'm going to put her on a puppy or performance food for awhile and see if that helps.

Today was a very active day -- planted several garden rows with corn (gaspe x saskatoon bicolour ears), gold rush beans, batanka wheat, dango mughi barley, zesty green x silvery fir tree F2 tomatoes, some napa kind cabbage starts, and then marker calendula and radishes in with those seeds. I'm just doing a couple rows at a time but I'm working through it. Then there was the walk back to the highway.

So I spent the rest of time splitting love among the cats. I can't imagine how someone can dump an animal that is so openly affectionate. Normally my imagination is pretty good, but my neighbour who's done some cat rescue says this is "the season" and having enough folks do it that there's a season? Ugh.

Now that I'm home, and still on leave from work, I am finally able to sort some of the stuff out I'd intended to get to originally. My capacity is tiny, which is to say I have a couple to a few hours of movement/doing things if they're interspersed with resting per day, one phone call every second day or so whether it's practical/medical or for social, eating several times a day but minimal food-making, and that's mostly it?

So I managed to arrange for someone to pick up the pigs tomorrow, I'm keeping Baby and Hooligan back because they're old and friends. I unloaded the truck, which took 2 days and a furniture dolly (boxes of clay are roughly 40-50lbs and I just couldn't lift them the first couple days). I went in to my specialists appointment and they eventually gave me a bed to lie down on since I couldn't sit as long as I needed to without my head supported.

In February I'd ordered chicks with a friend and we got the reminder email last week, but I somehow thought they were coming next Sunday. Well, yesterday-Sunday she messaged me to ask where at the airport to pick them up. So yesterday I cleaned out the bottom chicken coop (6 wheelbarrows of light bedding) so I can move the silkies over into it so I can put the chicks to brood in the quail house. The quail house bedding is moister, so heavier, and I need to move everyone over at night when they're sleeping, so it'll be a couple days. Meanwhile the babies are brooding downstairs in a giant rubbermaid tub brooder on the sofa. Little Bear is interested but there's lots else going on.

When your memory sucks every day is a surprise.

I also had a talk with my supervisor, who-- you know, I think I need a lot more words to say "it's still bad and I don't get to see my doctor till after the leave is over because Healthcare so I can't really plan at this point"

A friend brought me by soup and bread. Another friend helped me out financially. I feel safe, and I feel like I shouldn't feel safe.

I haven't had capacity to do pottery yet. That's hard. Because I can do only one or two things a day I need to have food lined up and no animal/work/medical stuff, but because I can only do one or two things a day most days contain something I need to do, I can't get it all out of the way to clear my schedule.

My housesitter killed about half my tomato plants by number, and more than that by variety %. I still have maybe 16 flats of peppers and tomatoes, and I started a bunch of squash and leafy greens and re-started some of my precious northern cantaloupe seeds. I'm getting to the point where some of these I don't have backup seeds for, either because they're an F1 or a rare unobtainable variety or whatever. That isn't to say I can't get other seeds and start them next year - it's too late now to start more tomatoes or peppers -- but it's a loss. Turns out the plants started dying after a week and instead of messaging me to ask what to do the housesitter decided to wait till I came back to explain. Who knew what could have been saved in that time?

She also, like every human to enter my house without intimate knowledge and care for me, threw out the "rotten" tomatoes in a bowl on the counter -- my seed tomatoes that the parent plant is now dead, so that line's done -- and I'm pretty sure fed one of my prosciuttos ("moldy cheese") to the pigs to get them in the pen when they got out, and despite very very very careful instructions to take only the meat from the downstairs bedroom freezer (which had frozen and thawed) to lure the pigs in used the gorgeous salmon Josh brought me from the freezer in the carport instead.

A ton of things in my house are unique, irreplaceable, and don't make a lot of sense to people without exposure to the concepts behind them. When people visit and try to be well-meaning (and don't have unique homes of their own) generally irreplaceable or hundreds of dollars worth of stuff gets destroyed. Other people's houses are frequently inexplicable to me but I don't think I destroy stuff like that? I've finally got mom trained, pretty much, and Tucker and Josh understand. But it's frustrating and I think it's yet another reason I wish I had more space-- space to entertain separate from the living space which contains what I do with my time everyday.

Anyhow, that aside we've had good rain on and off, more than we've had in awhile. I'm hardening off my tomatoes. Something on my back deck eats lettuce but all the leafy greens other than lettuce I planted out there before I left are doing well. I have a silkie - looks like a giant white cottonball -- who can somehow hide effectively in an empty field. Little Bear had his first shots, is microchipped, and will shortly be fixed and I have a vet. Every time Little Bear goes to the vet they exclaim "he's such a delightful cat" so who knows what happens back there.

I need to get the wherewithal together to till my garden but we still have some lows in the forecast, even though the actual temps have been turning out very high. With the loss of so many tomatoes I started a sweet corn grex. My southmost garden is now fully planted, more or less, and waits only for a path and little greenhouse. It's woody perennials, needs underplanting with herbacious, but still. Has lots of haskap, hardy cherry, ribes, elderberry, etc and lots of blossoms this year.

Some apple seedlings from last year survived -- I knew my winter would kill some, since those seeds are from california -- and I'd like to catalogue them when I have wherewithal. I sorted through my seeds and put away anything I'm definitely not growing this year (missed the favas window, pulled out individual squash seeds, chose my corn path, put away the tomatoes and peppers, etc) so I only have a single dairy crate of seeds left out that I'll be putting in. The year is shaping up.

Every night Little Bear stalks me up to bed and settles in with me and Whiskey.

Solly has been sleeping in the muddy stream to keep cool, and here I thought she was just getting out.

The goose nests were eaten by the pigs when I was gone, but there might be a couple they missed.

The ambient temperature here varies between 10-27C indoors and 4-25Coutdoors (barring a little frost here and there) and is comfortable open window weather. Somehow n Vancouver a much smaller range was sticky and both too warm and too cold.

I'm not strong enough right now to unscrew the hard-water-encrusted thingers under the sink tap so I may need to hire the job out, annoying when I know exactly what I need to do but less annoying than not having running water in the bathroom sink.

I'm slowly sorting through "what if rest doesn't increase my capacity, it just maintains it, and I'm like this now". So: instead of telling a friend I can go for a walk with them, I would probably invite them over? So: I need to plan my systems much better and more efficiently. So: I need a cart so I'm not using the same wheelbarrow for chicken manure and bringing groceries in from the truck?

Threshold loves me. I love being here. All that, good and bad, and things are ok.

The psychologist I was referred to asked twice if I had things I enjoyed, hobbies, etc. Of course they want to steer me towards depression. The first time I just said yes. The second time I said "Yes, tons of stuff, the best is my tomato breeding program where I'm finally into the F2, so after 3 years of work I get to see the results finally, to see it opening out into a whole bunch of possibility-- and of course we're starting the little pottery studio in town, and there's a garden club" and I think he finally believed me. But it's hard for people to believe, I think.

If you're disabled you're supposed to be dissatisfied, unhappy. If you cure the unhappiness you're supposed to cure the disease, too, especially in "women". I have pain sometimes and a weird lack of function other times, enough that apparently I'm setting my jaw hard to get myself through things and have worn through the disc on both sides, which is what's causing the ear pain? But I'm happy. It's very possible to be in pain and also to be happy. And it's obviously possible to not do everything you want to do and still be happy, because in this near-infinite world how could anyone ever be happy otherwise?

Loving my life, and living in a life I love, has always been my most radical and least-understood act. Even when it's hard and it hurts and it's lonely. Even when it's not safe because of course it's never safe. Even when, even when.

I've been sitting up typing for 40 minutes now. The rain has restarted outside. I need to lie back down. Two cats are sleeping on the foot of the bed. Sometime later I'll go out and clear out another third of the bedding in the quail shed, or maybe do some pottery, or maybe do a run into town for more chick starter. I'll not chain multiple activities together, I'm learning that. And things will, for now, be ok.

Tomato seeds are in for the year, I believe 101 or 102 varieties depending on how you count. Several of them are F2s, which is the first variable generation after a cross. Many of them are up already.

Peppers are potted up, mostly, and the couple that didn't germinate are replanted.

I put a bunch of greens in too, though just a couple of each except sorrel, with the plan to start a bunch more for the farmer's market later on. Doesn't impact me, but I believe some legislation was just changed so it wouldn't be legal for actual stores to buy veggies from me unless I did a bunch of licensing stuff and joined a group of some sort based down south. Not a great look, gotta say, for a gov that mouths words about food security. As always I'm excited at the idea of ethiopian kale.

Potato seeds started, though seed potatoes are not ordered. The snow is mostly off the garden, on a sunny day I could go up and plant favas and poppies and I bet the ground would be thawed enough; it's still mostly freezing hard overnight which makes chores less muddy.

Looks like many of the apple seedlings I planted are still up there -- some are not -- but the geese keep getting into the garden and likely will eat them all if I don't get better fencing sorted asap.

No legumes or corn or squash started yet. I'm thinking about doing a round of sweet corn or popcorn on top of my gaspe, I'm more likely to eat popcorn but people locally like sweet corn so a seed crop might be nice. Anyway, I could offset those by starting them indoors, especially if I'm starting from several different varieties. I'd like to try runner beans this year too, I don't really like figuring out support but they're supposed to do well in cooler weather. Maybe on the deck? I have a nice assortment.

I did plant some mache and pak choi on the deck.

I would like salad season.

I set up some damp boxes and am experimenting with those. I'd like to be able to throw a bunch, carve a bunch, and handle a bunch of objects not necessarily in the demanding timespan that air drying with a bit of plastic over them forces on me. Fingers crossed! The damp boxes are just clear bins, I set cardboard in them for the mugs to sit on and I can spritz those or just dump water in. Now I need to shift some shelving so they can be somewhere convenient and also allow more plant space when the tomatoes get potted up.

Geese are sitting in a lot of cases, I'd been hoping to keep them off the eggs until midmonth so no babies happen while I'm gone in early-mid May. I've managed to keep the ducks off at least. It all means lots of eggs for me, I sent a box of them with Tucker and stored a box in the back of my fridge (goose eggs keep for a really long time) and now it's time to start making and freezing pasta dough. The little food processor I got way back when is putting in some hard labour on pasta dough.

Thea has really bad matting on her pantaloons. It must be uncomfortable because she doesn't want me touching it. I think I can get in on Solly's before it's that bad, and Avallu's are good, but I think I might take Thea in for a professional groom. She gets spectacularly motion sick, but there's a groomer just a couple kms down the road, I might even walk her down there?

In other dog news, Avallu let me clip his nails the other day after I worked up to treats-for-touches for awhile. None of them are running on the road much, so they're definitely needing clipping. Thea is Not Having It, Solly will be worked up to it ok, she's just skeptical. And Solly has showed truly excellent escalation from tiny liplifts, through gentle escalating growls, to a sudden but roomy air-lunge with the cats. I'm very pleased; when she arrived she went right to lunging to indicate her displeasure, and I've been working on letting her know that growling is a good communication tool. This just makes her a safer dog all round. The cats appreciate the heads up too, and are feeling safer knowing when to be around her and when not to be (the not being: when she's eating or getting lots of attention from me. We're working on this latter one a bit).

I realize I'm supposed to be making some dishes for my brother's wedding but I haven't been in to the studio to use those bats for plates recently. Hm.

I also started a "mug of the day" post on instagram, where I'll post something about something I've made. Sometimes it will be a glaze detail, sometimes another thing I'm noticing or thinking about. At work it's something about the mug I bring in to drink out of.

Visit with Tucker was excellent, though I didn't love being away from home. Finally talked with Josh about all the stuff that had been waiting on me having energy, and that was good. It's a place to start.

So: lots of good.

The drop-dead date for having completed all the stuff I haven't been able to do to keep working is this fall, and I'm just not able to do it in time, plus work, plus manage my health stuff. So far as I can tell they allow zero accommodation there, too. So this lovely castle in the air I've built myself rests on that foundation until October, when I'll most likely lose my job because I'll be kicked out of the forestry thing for not finishing it. The forestry thing doesn't allow it all to be done separately, only while working, so that's a no go. I'm glad to have had this, anyhow. Not sure how long I'll be able to hold down any other job, like retail or whatever is available in town, since I'm working from bed a couple days a week right now. So I know there are changes ahead, but I'm happy right now. That counts for something.

This morning I woke up and it was -31C outside, -26C at work. This is really only the third cold spike this winter; it comes after a big day of snow on Sunday and forecast snow this week. I'd taken off work sick for the last couple hours yesterday afternoon, taken several naps, and fed and watered everyone extra. I woke up, filled water in the new downstairs laundry tub, fed and watered everyone again, started up my reliable truck, and drove in to work.

On Sunday I gave a quick workshop to the gardening club on cheap vanduzee-style kratky hydroponics. Folks got to take home lettuce, micro tomato, matchbox pepper, arugula, and tatsoi plants in collars of pool noodle skewered by bbq skewers that held them over jars and a little packet of nutrients. Driving in the highway wasn't ploughed yet, it had about 5" of snow on it. I was impressed, some folks came from the next town over and drove in on that! People were driving reasonably, important when you don't know where the highway is so you need to drive in the middle of it and navigate getting around each other when you meet a car coming the other way. Lots of good chat and met some neighbours, including the one with the oak trees (!) lining her driveway.

After that I went down to the clay studio and spent two hours loading the kiln with glaze tests. I'd had a migraine the week preceeding and making glazes is quiet, can be done from paper rather than a screen, and allows lots of slow and restarting. So I put in several of my own glaze tests, plus some of the big bucket's worth that had been newly mixed at the studio, plus one quick floating blue test for the studio out of alberta slip.

My own tests were chun celadon with minspar; val's turquoise with 3134; oldforge floating base with 10% iron, 3% copper carb, and 1% copper carb; and an ash glaze called "new hagi" from my birch ash. There was also a copper wash in there to pick out carving and see how it goes through those glazes. I also tried a bunch of studio glaze layering including seaweed and bailey's red 2 under the cedar hill white ravenscrag, blue opal and oldforge floating rutile overlap, and some spectacularly splattered tall forms that had used up the remains of bits of glazes people had decanted. Plus other people had bought some glazes and were playing with overlapping. The big kiln was full -- two of my bowls wouldn't fit -- and it will be very very exciting to open. Everyone is excited to see it. It'll be cool today but I don't think anyone with a key will be around, so tomorrow after work will be the opening.

I've been reasonably sick for the last week, basically since the scent issue the Tuesday two weeks ago. I didn't end up going to bed for three days like I probably should have, and ended up carrying symptoms into a true migraine. Funny enough I didn't realize they were migraine symptoms. I seldom get really disabling pain and my normal tell is southwest-patterned chevrons in my right visual field and holes in my left. This time I didn't get those tells, but when I went into the massage therapist she asked a bunch of questions: "pressure on your eyes? photosensitive? short of breath? nauseous? brain fog--" at which point I stopped her and said, "how do you know all this? I don't have all those symptoms now but those are the cluster I get with scent exposure normally" and she said "oh, they're just migraine symptoms". Anyhow, I'm reconsidering my scent reactions now. And I did eventually get a headache because I pushed it, even wearing sunglasses etc.

I had a great visit with Tucker, and a pretty good one with Josh despite being sick and somewhat rushed -- it was a couple days shorter than I expected, which is becoming expected with him. My animals are good and my grain bins are full, my house animals are good and snuggly, I woke up at 3am and stoked the fire and the house stayed nice and warm. My pepper seeds are up, and a couple of my hydroponics tomatoes are forming buds.

As I'm writing I see holes in my visual field that are subtle enough I only really see them when reading. Hm. Never had this linger for two weeks before.

I like it here. I like it here. I like it here. It's my home.

My counselor and I were brainstorming what I'd need to live on if I can't work anymore, and how that might look. I've been feeling that this life, which I love, has an expiry date and maybe so should I in that case. I can't imagine giving up my animals -- my family -- and my ability to grow things. I can't picture just languishing on Mom's or a friend's second bed until my body annoys them into kicking me out.

I could be happy here even if the deterioration continues; emotionally I can handle not being able to think or move much, just lying with my dogs, getting up when I can. As long as I can feed myself and run the house -- paring away the extra animals, if there was a way to get supportive infrastructure and maybe replace wood with fully electric heat, set up a hydrant in the field so I don't need to carry water, fix the road into the back pasture so I don't need to carry feed as far. I'm not sure how I'd do that with less money but it left me with a sense of hope, that maybe it wouldn't need to be November that this life is over, but could be longer.

Either way I'm happy now, and happy to have had this.

I could spend a lot of time being frustrated that more prompt access to the medical system might actually have meant I didn't have to worry about this, that it's possible a couple timely specialist appointments would have meant I'd be perfectly ok right now, but there'll be time to do that if I do in fact lose my job because of it.

I'm still struggling with the idea that I might have to go on disability just to wait for specialists to get back to me, not because I'm irreparably sick but because I just haven't got to that right pill yet, if it exists. I can't imagine shifting my whole outlook to being ok with a lesser and continuously lessening level of functionality for a couple years, then getting used to the idea of going back to work full time after that again. It feels dislocating? Though I've got used to things I can't imagine before, I suppose.

None of this should maybe be as alarming as it sounds, but things are definitely deteriorating and I don't see any reason they should stop unless I can actually manage to get appointments with folks -- my doctor is currently scheduling four months out except there's maybe one to two days per month you can call in to get an appointment, after that her schedule is full and you have to try and hit the window next month. I can call the nurse's line and see what they recommend but just doing this stuff takes basically 80% of the capacity I have, and I can't navigate the system and work at the same time.

-38C on the truck this morning. She started, yay battery blankets, and I ran her for half an hour to prep her for restarting later, so I can go into town at lunch and check the mail. The main room was 19C this morning, impressive for the end of a 10-hour stove run in weather like this. It's the kind of weather where, if you dump a bucket of water on the ground, it makes noises like you've started a fire and it's getting good teeth into the kindling.

I'm so, so grateful for that 6-8" of snow we got right before this. The snow blanket on the house keeps it a good 10C warmer in here.

I fed and watered animals this morning without a hat and it was a mistake. I had to come back in and get one. Working from home so I can bring them water on my breaks because it will 100% freeze. Everyone seems pretty cozy, the chickens fluffed up almost round on their perches and the pigs nearly invisible under the straw. I am very glad to have got that last minute extra straw. I'll use a couple bales to build an extra windblock for the ducks since they say it'll be colder again tonight than previously forecast. Either way the prep I did in -20 is paying off. This is terrible weather to work in, even if it is beautiful.

This is probably the day the interior humidity drops below 10%. Drying clay pots and plants slowed it down a bit, I guess.

There are six animals plus me curled up in the woodstove room right now, and I know Whiskey is right around the corner on the stairs. The dogs are napping after a morning patrol while I fed things; the cats are waiting for breakfast.

I'm tired, and much is in doubt, but this could look like being happy.

Today was the Steven Edholm apple order day. He lives in a much warmer climate than I do in California, but he hand-crosses lots of neat stuff. This is the third year I've ordered apple seeds from him; I don't expect a super high survival rate but I do order carefully from crosses with at least one hardy parent (preferably the mother, though I'm not sure how much difference that makes). Open-pollinated seeds from a hardy parent are cheap, where hand crosses are less cheap but still a very small investment overall. For apples the big investment is land for them to hang out for 5-10 years before they fruit. In most places that's a big ask. Here a place without moose to eat the trees to the ground is a big ask (thank you, dogs).

Anyhow, he focuses on red-fleshed and long-hanging apples. Long-hanging apples don't work here between bears and the fact that they need many months to ripen and super cold temps, but I can peel off the short-season hardy ones and capture some of the flavours he favours: berry, cherry, savory.

Plus this year I have some crabapples from ecos/oikos farm to plant. In general I receive these too late to plant on any given year so they wait for the next year but it's possible this year's edholm ones will arrive by Feb, which means there will be time to rehydrate and cold stratify them before planting and I'll have two years' worth of seeds to plant, maybe 300 babies in all plus the ecos ones.

I cannot possibly describe how hard it is to wait to see which ones survived from last year. Some died in the drought -- they were being watered but they just crisped up anyhow. Some didn't put on any height and just hung out. Some shot up, mostly those with Wickson or Kingston Black as a parent. During the winter some might also drought out despite the snow, and they may become tasty treats for voles. Then I expect some to be cold-killed even though we still haven't gone below -15C or so. Granted, they are covered in snow so they're pretty insulated from snaps, but I have no idea what percentage will make it through. As always I am very curious about this winter's temperatures anyhow, and if it stays above -25C that's a good couple climate zones warmer than normal so then next winter will be another big test.

Parents I'm interested in: Wickson (a hardy, very tasty big crab that grows fast babies), trailman (a super hardy crab), Williams Pride (a just-hardy but very early and tasty apple), Sweet 16 (a descendent of Wickson and a more full-sized, very tasty, and hardy apple), roxbury russet (I adore russets but they don't usually ripen here. I'm planning to drive something like 12 hours one way to get a couple hardy ones, one of these years, but in the meantime investing in seeds crossed with shorter-season varieties seems like a good middle ground), cherry cox (cherry flavour!!), and some apples edholm has created basically with those parents crossed in for good measure.

I'm writing from home. Lately most of my posts have been from work where I have some distance from myself. Today, though, it was dark when I left town and the snow forced low-beam headlights to carve only a small private space on the highway. I travelled here with the electric sound of ceramic clattering gently with every irregularity on the road.

When I got home, in the dark, I unloaded four boxes of my pottery from my truck while animals swirled around inside and out. I also had milk, salad greens, a chainsaw, and winter boots to bring in. You know that feeling of warm light coming out of a home doorway? And walking back and forth, carrying armloads of things, while underfoot everything seeks your attention and love?

I don't know how to describe the next part. At some point I needed to put groceries away, make food, eat, add wood to the woodstove. Solly came indoors and was growling and warning the cats, so I worked on some conditioning by having a joyful cheese party every time she looked at or interacted with the cats. She's very smart and had some rough nervous system stuff recently and I'd unthinkingly gave her some intense "no" for going after a cat yesterday, so she was very guardy around them. We're back to a much better place now but it took lots of attention on my part to jump up and give her a cheese party all the time. Then she woud only drink water from the cat bowl, which is about a cup of water, so I had to keep refilling it so the cats had water whereupon she would drink it again.

I finally gave her a bunch of chicken broth in her own water bowl, which solved that problem, but then Bear decided he would only drink flavoured drinks by tipping over my cups and water bottles. That meant all sorts of things all over the couch, and while I was handling that a full strip of flypaper full of dead flies got tangled in my hair, the cats were asking for dinner, Solly still wanted attention, there was a chainsaw in the middle of the floor and also Solly but she'd also just grabbed one of my winter boots to chew...

And in the midst of that I was unloading my pottery, piece by piece, from the newspaper nests in those four boxes. Here's the thing.

You don't know what pottery will look like until after it's fired. Glazes are not like paints, roughly the same colour as they'll be when done. Glazes are like cake batter, or a kitten's eyes: the final result only comes after you've waited through the necessary rituals. Glazes are red and grey and pale green, almost all of them, and depending on how you applied them they'll turn a huge range of colours. One of our glazes at the studio is green, but sometimes purple, and can be made to turn yellow. That's chemistry.

But also, here's the thing. Pottery, or really three dimensional objects, require attention and time. The glaze on my cups, when it works just right, is different inside and outside and all the way around. When you look into it there are depths, not just patterning but also movement under a translucent surface. The clay itself is textured, from smooth white or dark brown that feels almost manufacturedly smooth under the fingertips to sandy reds that reach out with friction to pull at your skin. There's a balance of weight in the hand. Looking at them is one thing but handling them is quite something else.

But also, they respond to the light. Whatever the light is in the kiln room at the pottery studio it makes everything look terrible. Sunlight is amazing, but even the lights in my house - daylight LEDs, warm white LEDs, or white grow lights - give them a totally different character.

I wanted to take pictures so through the chaos I was unloading them, piece by piece, onto a shelf I'd cleared. Piece by piece, on at a time, I lifted them. I held them. I tried to sort them into categories. The whole time there was this very familiar intensity, the feeling of being internally obliterated by the strength of something I didn't have time to attend to. I fed the dog cheese. I moved cups and wiped the couch. I picked sticky flies out of my hair. I tried to corrall newspaper packing scraps into the chainsaw box. And I felt something.

By the time I finally made dinner and came downstairs I was on autopilot. In hindsight I'm so grateful for a home where I can autopilot through my needs and not be broken out of the habits by roommates etc, sort of ironically the animals don't count. I turned on one low, warm lamp and turned the other lights off. The flames danced in the woodstove. I ate salad and chicken rice and drank water and chai hot chocolate and fended the kitten off my food.

Now I'm done, nursing my hot chocolate in the cup I get to keep because it has a small crack on the inner rim. I made the cup-- it's a tall straight cylinder of dark red clay with fine horizinal textured striations in the middle 2/3. The bottom quarter is raw clay, the next quarter up is dark blue that pools in between the striations, and the half above that is swirling fluid blue with white wavelet patterns and drips moving through it.It's beautiful, and I made it, and I know where my emotion is from.

Last time I made beautiful things was in high school. My art teacher gave me, not just free rein, but support in doing what I wanted. I made beautiful things: paintings of what it felt like to stare into my own eyes, sculptures of what love felt like, bowls on the wheel that engaged my body. I made art that was banned from being shown in public at the school, and art they displayed front and center. I externalized parts of my experience so that people could see and experience with me. I integrated my inner self into the world where it could be seen. People said nice things about it.

That was the last year in high school. Right afterwards, in the summer, we moved to the city from the 4000 square foot house and 5 acres I mostly grew up on. We moved to the city, to a 42' boat where three of us would live. I slept on the folding couch in the livingroom, my brother had the front v-berth, mom had the back room.

We had to get rid of a lot a lot a lot of things to make the move and I packed up my most cherished and important things in one crate and set it beside the car on that last day. I kept it separate, apart from everything, so no mistakes would be made. It contained my art, my american passport, my notebook that was the predecessor to this journal, and my love letters with Kynnin.

It was thrown out.

I haven't made physical art since then. Functional things that are incidentally beautiful, sure, but not--

Sometimes I exist in words and writing. That's when I make poetry.

Sometimes I exist in space. That's when I make physical art. So much can't be communicated any other way.

I didn't do that for so long, and here I am with so many beautiful objects. I didn't trust I could still do that, could still evoke that heart-feeling from materials the earth gave to my hands. I don't know how to handle having those objects, them existing where I can access them, having a home that is mine with then inside.

This has never happened before and I have feelings about it.

And now that I'm safe in the warm barely-lit room with a fireplace and a shell of wood and shingle and outside that snow and dogs and fence protecting me I can almost entertain the idea that I could do this again: make another beautiful thing and another, and keep them or let them flow from me as I choose.

Almost.

It's been so long.

In past years they talked about fire on the landscape. This year the landscape is fire. Small fires that started during the lightning in June and July and didn't have enough people to put them completely out flared up in August and even the beginning of September and their outlines are creeping across the https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map map. No doubt if I circle back to this post in future years that link will be defunct, but right now it's very lively. All the international firefighters have gone home; most are in the southern hemisphere where their skills will be needed, and where our folks will soon go to help. But. Our fires aren't out, we're only getting a sprinkle of rain, and Canadian firefighters are burnt out and demoralized, in part because of the high number of deaths this year. Most years no one dies.

At this point it's likely that both the drought will continue in stage 4 or 5 for a third year (when in fact most of BC hasn't hit level 4 or 5 in the history of the system previously), and that the fires will go underground into the duff, the forest floor which decomposes so slowly up here and the peat in all the wetlands that dot the landscape, and they'll pop up as soon as the snow is gone.

That used to matter to me. The Waste Land still reverberates in my head moment to moment:

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Not that we have cicadas here. But the thing is.

Last week I was hooked up to electrodes for 19 hours. I slept, and then I napped four times, two hours apart. After each nap, after half an hour, someone would rap lightly and then open the door a crack, letting the light in, and say "good morning". I don't think that's happened since I was a child? Then she would ask, "did you sleep? Did you dream?"

I don't know if I slept. I think I did. Isn't the point of sleep that you're unconscious, so you're not aware of it? In November I'll talk to the doctor who will interpret the results, and he'll let me know whether my assessment of whether I slept lines up with whether I actually slept. I'm curious. There were a potential 5 naps, and if I fell asleep in less than 8 minutes in at least two of them, and entered REM sleep within a short time after falling asleep, that's a narcolepsy diagnosis. They sent me home after 4 naps, which I believe to mean they got clear information one way or another, so one more nap would not make a difference to the findings. So either at least two, or zero, met the criteria.

I'm genuinely curious. The whole experience also basically flooded my PDA coping mechanisms for the week: I had to prep the farm, drive in for a certain time, bring a day's worth of food, be confined in a place and kinda forcibly relax myself, then live life in 1.5 hour chunks with those half hour naps in between. I had trouble doing anything else.

The idea of it being or not being narcolepsy isn't stressful. What was stressful was that day there were anti-LGBTQ+ protests across my country, and counter-protestors. Someone I know ended up in the hospital, and it kind of threw off my last nap. Someone threw a rock at her head.

Over the last several days I've learned that two more of my people were injured: one just bruised, from having a full waterbottle thrown at them, and one punched in the face.

There were protestors in my town. I don't know if there were counter-protestors. I was in this room, you see, with electrodes attached.

I might be able to shrug that off, but tomorrow and the next day I've signed up to help present to some high schoolers about the non-stereotypical parts of forestry: how ecosystems are connected, how figurative shit flows downhill and ends up in riparian areas so they're a good litmus test for how the system is doing, how it's important to always monitor so we can make decisions from a place of knowledge. I have a couple fun stories to back it up: how beavers were airdropped into a valley to successfully fireproof it ( https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/environment/2015-01-14/parachuting-beavers-into-idahos-wilderness-yes-it-really-happened ), how willow evolved in waterways to be broken off by floods and then the pieces float down the river and root, colonizing raw soil and turning an environmental liability into a strength. We were going to wade around in a creek, look at the fish, and count insects and talk about abundance vs diversity.

The protests were about keeping talk of people like me out of schools. Letting kids know that folks like me, genderweird and with love for folks outside whatever normative bullshit, that's called pedophelic grooming, child abuse, all that. You probably know the drill by now.

Yeah, if I wore a rainbow shirt to the thing I could maybe help out a kid. But.

I'm partly angry. You don't want me in your schools? Don't expect volunteer labour from me. Don't expect me to support you in maintaining your normal of having kids stay in your community supporting your economic bullshit.

And I'm partly scared. But when I'm scared and angry my power move is to come out loudly and basically say "yeah, are you all talk, or are you going to try and enact consequences"

Which. A coworker just came by and asked how I was, and I explained the above to her, and the organizer of the event walked by, and I said I was basically at the point of wearing a rainbow shirt and introducing myself as "they/them" and coming out at work properly and she was very supportive of both. So. But it's not something that can be taken back.

Anyhow. Last week was a mess, this week is a mess, we're getting overcast skies but bits of drizzling rain.

There were two club meetings this week, simultaneous, the clay and the garden clubs. One was shorter than the other so I flitted back and forth. At the garden club someone who is deeply respected in the community for being from an old family and making paintings went on a multi-minute tirade about how awful my house and yard look, full of "geese and ducks and garbage", and that she was thinking of calling the district on me. It went on long enough that everyone else there was very uncomfortable for quite some time while she was talking, then there was a long silence.. Like, this wasn't a short outburst, it was ignoring very loud "shut up" social cues from everyone else there for those long stretched-out seconds.

I want to do pottery. I want to make beautiful bowls imprinted with goose feathers that say things like "one girl's flight is another lady's garbage" and "the garbage is always greener". I want to do a series of heart-shaped cups with a rainbow of blues on them that say "I exist. I still exist."

I want to make rock-shaped red bowls that cut you when you pick them up that say "there is no water, there is only rock" with tiny hints of glossy blue glaze deep in the cracks.

I want to do this work with the kitten sitting on the back of my neck as I sit at the wheel, as he is wont to do, drawing blood as he gets older and heavier. I want to do this work with my dog sitting behind me on the dog bed and occasionally sighing. I want to go sit with the silly chickenlings, the silkies and showgirls and my chantecler lines, and turn off my mind and watch them peck around.

Instead tomorrow I go down and tell kids that the world is all connected and that as humans we have a responsibility to be involved, to know the consequences of our actions.

That's all.

That's been less than a week. That's all.

Not with the rod

But the way a bird builds a nest
Secure
Creatively brilliant
So that everyone
Wants to come live there

This is how I aspire

Not with the rod

But with duck confit wrapped around the pill
With time, and tasty-smelling treats in the trailer
With slow movements, a step and a breath at a time
With more toys and friends inside the fence than out
With a heated pillow in my favoured spot

I care for them
As I wish to care for myself
My own animal

Not with the rod

With my own nest
Coating my own pills with sugar
Trying for time, and tempting myself with treats
Scattering places to breathe at every turn
Full of friends and toys
And a heating pad in bed

Not with the rod

I husband myself with softness
With a beautiful and creative nest
And with as much security as anyone can offer themselves

I think I'm figuring out that work right now is really emotionally intense.

It's an intense fire season in North America. I'd say historic, but it's actually ahistoric: this is the worst on record by a significant amount for both area and intensity of fires. I've been talking for years about global warming to ecosystem change and now the tactical-level science is coming out: "regeneration failure" (the forest doesn't recover into a forest, or at least not a similarly-functioning ecosystem) is influenced in the short term by the intensity of fires, so if we can keep the intensity of fires low we can keep our forests closer to how they were for a little while longer, until climate change more fully catches up with species range.

I'm never sure that's a great goal, to preserve what was there. On the other hand humans have a terrible track record of deliberately intervening in ecosystems. Our culture is particularly bad: two that came into conversation this morning were "stream cleaning" (straightening a stream and removing all woody debris from it to help salmon populations, turns out that's counterproductive) and national parks (removing indigenous people, preventing indigenous practices, and doing fire suppression all to make a "natural" state which it turns out creates megafires and other large-disturbance issues). On the other hand we cannot pretend we have not and are not intervening in everything -- that's why it's the anthropocene -- and so we have a responsibility to do those interventions in as thoughtful, research-driven, and future-based ways as possible.

We cannot do nothing, that's not in our power, so throwing up our hands and pretending that what we normally do is "nothing" and that anything we haven't done before is overreach is disingenuous. So I think we need to be very active and do deliberate interventions, but carefully and at hopefully non-disastrous scale.

In this context I'm one of a handful of land managers with jurisdiction over one of the larger chunks of actively and structurally/deliberately managed land there is. Canada has a huge proportion of "crown land", land managed by the state. It is of course complicated: there are many players, including indigenous people who are having their rights slowly re-enshrined; settlers who also live on the landscape; government groups of many kinds, including those tasked with increasing carbon, wildlife, firesmarting, biodiversity, recreation, and housing; large and small industry; people who have never been to this area or to the country but who feel strongly about management in different ways; and groups that overlap those categories.

(I am sitting in my chair at the office at work and trying to formula this while the room literally feels like it's spinning around me, I may have to come back to it).

The state's inclination is to move cautiously and to include careful discussion and many stakeholders, possibly now leaning towards finding ways to prioritize indigenous input, and it's a big slow machine. Indigenous inclination is varied, since these are varied groups of people with varied types of governance and varying opinions, much like any group, but culture, power, comfort, and safety play into their motivations. Settlers on the landscape are also varied but tend to fall into two groups: transients and people with deep attachment, though those groups aren't exactly always separate, and many of them value access to the land. Industry has a variety of hands but at heart is driven by shareholder value over the short term, usually quarterly. People who aren't from here quite honestly I'm pretty bitter about some days, but esthetics and simplicity of narrative play into their desires.

My personal, western-educated and paganism-animism-informed preferences don't significantly align with many of those folks pre-discussion. I sit much more in the rewilding and novel ecosystems camp than most typical environmentalists, but I'm also much more cautious and less one-size-fits-all than many of the new tech-based environmentalists or industry. I'm significantly more pro-science than some indigenous groups, and pretty much more pro-humans-on-the-landscape (including indigenous and settlers) than nearly anyone. But I'm also deeply in favour of the kind of education and contact indigenous folks promote. And there's a bunch more I could say there.

But in the end my formal job is to consider perspectives and align with the laws. The laws are somewhat contradictory, for instance now that we've adopted UNDRIP there's active contradiction between typical practice, legislation, and direction from folks with various forms of enshrined and/or functional power. Making anything harder for anyone with power is frowned upon but can be done with care and skill.

It all makes me wish I could still think and write clearly. It might be worth figuring out accommodations for speech-to-text at work if I actually want to dig into this.

But I'm not sure how much I do or can dig into it. I'm more aware of what the next fifty years will look like on the landscape than almost anyone, but it's just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else to live with that knowledge of change. Your personal relationships are very likely to outlive your relationships to the ecosystems you know, though some level of normalizing will help shield you from awareness of that. If there's a set of ecosystem relationships you're attached to, especially the further north you live (warming happens faster at high latitudes, though actual change has some breakpoints around tradewinds, glaciation, and ocean currents) you'll be saying goodbye to them instead of them saying goodbye to you. If you're buried there your ghost will be resting with their ghosts, not in the landscape eternal you might perceive it to be.

And I am a part of the landscape. I don't know that many people have this same sense. I know the Christian separation of animals and humans, the concept of dominion and even stewardship woven into our society, it runs deep. Maybe I lie closer to the indigeonus concept of the land as kin, but also I think of myself, as I think many sciencey people do, as (one of) the land's ways of knowing itself. I am itself, an expression of the land as much as any mountain or tree.

"Climate grief" is a term that gets a lot of press recently, and sure, the fact that things are changing can be a cause for grief. Lots of people are in very legitimate fear and many of us will die for reasons in varying places on the "act of god" to "no social support" spectrum. Those things are important to the human part of me but I'm not sure how much I live in the human part of me.

What I feel is more like jumping out of a plane with a parachute and something between mother and child in my arms. Threshold- it's easy for me, life linked to it as it is, to cradle and comfort and protect and learn to the best of my ability in that situation. But when I'm holding a sort of diffuse whole of the Stuart Nechako forest district, well, that's a lot. Doing it civilly in the full sense of the word, within the constraint of law and in partnership with so many different perspectives from commodity to spiritual ownership, well.

It might have been better to do when I was younger, and believed more in people's shared values, and when I had more energy to change the world.

So operation "can I do a vacation I like?" was successful. Turns out I can.

Operation "returning to my normal life" is a bit more tricky, even assuming I had a normal life to return to. This isn't the sort of "vacation drop" I hear from many people. My home is a theme park, perfect for me. Instead it's that I've come back inspired in several directions and I want to actually focus and get things done.

For example, there's a corner of the compound (the central courtyard space I'm working on slowly enclosing with a ring of buildings) that was thistles and young plum trees and haskaps. Mom flattened cardboard and mulched deeply with cardboard and aspen chips. I'd been thinking of putting the bed swing there, which is why I steered her in that direction, but now: I stopped at the dump and they had a big two-person jacuzzi tub which I snagged, and there's a perfect spot there if I build it out as a hot tub. There's also a perfect set of 4 aspens off the edge of that drop that I could set a platform between and I'd have a nice spot for the shower (it could just drain into the swale) and a net bed. Then there's another two trees perfect for a hammock right there. It's a central, secluded space with shade and drainage, so it makes sense as the hub of some outdoor living infrastructure. Looking into hot water on demand devices at the moment.

I had made noises about having pagany folks up this summer and didn't follow through for various reasons. I'm thinking very seriously about claiming Lughnasadh in 2024 and seeing if anyone actually will come up. It's a wildfire risk and there wouldn't be any way to do bonfires, we'd definitely be in burning bans. It would be warm enough, though. The alternative would be earlier. We could do fires, nights would be cool, and the garden would not yet be producing. I think eating from the garden is important? Solstice seems like the logical time to have a Thing up here in the long days and it might even be before fires if we're lucky, but it feels like it's too important for me to host?

I think Threshold would like solstice...

And then I have a bunch of clay inspiration, so I want to be spending my time doing that, and my garden is at one of the most interesting times right now with all the different tomatoes just on the cusp of ripening, and I still haven't got winter grains in, and something about sewing since I'm running out of comfy non-jean pants, and I have an idea for the pigs, and I need to decide on the other 13 orchard trees, and...

Anyhow.

Sherry kept pointing out that she was "retired" (into her second business, doing pottery, after a previous career) and I had both a dayjob and farm animals so it made sense that she had more time than I did to do fun ceramics things. I'm super envious right now. I want to make poetry bowls and mugs for the people I care about, build places that are fun, create homes, spend time with animals.

Oh well.

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greenstorm

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Page generated Jun. 18th, 2025 05:16 am

Greenstorm's Journal

watching the cycle: leaves to mulch to soil to leaves

Entries tagged with threshold

Plants have always been the best friends

Garden and relationships, with few relationships

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

Growing Bones

"I don't care about your garden; I care about you"

Nearly a month

Predator pressure

(no subject)

(no subject)

You can tell you're a northerner because you stay in the north

While it lasts

Heart of winter

New year, new apples

Womb/Pottery and Chaos

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Husbandry

Ok, but work

Theme Park

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June 2025

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