Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
An informal letter of resignation which nobody will ever read. And a general polemical complaint which nobody will ever care about. I’m not a miracle worker. And they want a miracle. No. It’s worse than that. They need, we need, a miracle. We need a spontaneous and very specific genetic mutation. Now. Yesterday. Twenty years… Continue reading Corn Futures
No Friday Thoughts today. I'm working on some complicated poetry and a thus far pretty decent Full Moon Tale for Sunday. Enjoy your Friday!
Dave Pollard tossed out an interesting essay this week. He is in the process of moving — not entirely voluntarily — and musing much on home these last few months. His latest post on his blog, How to Save the World, is a useful list of attributes to look for in a home that will… Continue reading Dave Pollard’s When TSHTF Checklist
Lately, I've been musing on the debate between those who claim that human nature is inherently selfish and those who say that we are oriented to cooperation and care. I am beginning to think that this is artificial, that the drive to name our nature is, in fact, an urge to excuse our actions. It… Continue reading The Wednesday Word: 18 August 2021
It’s planting season! And here you thought it was harvest, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking that. There is very little talk about autumn planting. For that matter, there’s also very little talk of spring harvests. But both are integral to having a food supply all year long. If you don’t have a harvest of… Continue reading Autumn Planting
Nine thousand years. Maybe ten. Maybe fifteen. Five hundred generations. Of humans that is. Nine thousand generations of this. Nine thousand years of fields green with three sisters. The gold of tassels, rust of pods, sun orange and berry red of squash. I feel the breath of my ancestors in these gardens, stirring leaves and… Continue reading 9000 Years (Winifred Mumbles)
Central Vermont is under a heat advisory today. There is also smoke from fires on the opposite side of the continent, though rains are periodically washing it out of the sky. Thus sometimes we don’t have the air quality advisory to go with the heat, though last night I could see no Perseid meteors through… Continue reading Dying Normal
I wanted to write about the joys of getting up early in the morning in mid-August to watch the Perseid meteor shower. It is at its glorious peak right now with at least one blazing meteor every other minute and up to two per minute. This year with a young moon, there is no moonlight… Continue reading Perseids
I began reading Mark Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk this week. This might be another formative book. It is trending in that direction. Bittman is tackling our recently soured relationship to food. I can say from experience that this is a daunting writing project, one that I approach obliquely in most of my writing. So I… Continue reading The Wednesday Word: 11 August 2021
New Mexico chiles This time last week I was marinating in green chile. The skin on my hands has just about recovered. Each year I buy 25 pounds of fresh chile from Hatch. These are a mix of several varieties of New Mexican chiles, which are a kind of large-pod chile with moderately thick flesh… Continue reading New Mexico Chile!
By My Solitary Hearth 