Awaiting the New Year

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes at sunset tonight. Rosh Hashanah marks the start of the High Holy Days, eleven days of self-reflection and self-assessment. I noted on Facebook that I was glad for it starting, then added I very much needed it. 

The last two weeks have been raggedy on almost all fronts. Not bad, but raggedy. As I look back at what I have done in the last year and how I can better serve in the year to come, I feel the tattered edges of this week and last pressing down on the months yet to come.

Some mending needs to be done, starting with myself.

I love that we start our New Year in the fall, my favorite season. Outside, the days are starting to mellow. The skies are turning deep October blue. Out in Vancouver, Washington, where my son Ben and his family live, he noted they had rain today and the clearest skies they have had since the conflagrations began. 

The garden is starting to slow down. In a few more weeks, I will be bringing it down for the year. But not yet, for the bees are still working intently, bringing in their own harvest to get through the winter ahead.

One of the last things I did today before turning to this post, after which I will shut down my computer for the next few days, was call a client of our Legal Clinic. She has a complex issue beyond the scope of our volunteers, and I am trying to match her up with another resource. I called to let her know I am still working on the match and that we had not forgotten her. She thanked me for the update. I had waffled whether to make the call at all; it is late on Friday, I'm tired, it could wait. But she needed to hear from us. I updated my Clinic cohort, Mel, on what I had done, adding that call was a good deed and it is good to wrap up the end of the year with a mitzvah.

I'll see you on the other side. 

Waiting

 

"Every replete tree was first a seed that waited." Hope Jahren, Lab Girl 

I love Lab Girl and have read it twice. But this post is not about that book or about Hope Jahren and why I find her an intriguing writer and scientist.

Rather, this post is about waiting.

I had long known that you could get an avocado seed to sprout if you removed the seed coat, poked toothpicks into it, and then suspended the seed over a glass of water, with the lower part of the seed submerged. Even in my college days, when this was popular, the only time I remember seeing that experiment up close was at the house of my first mother-in-law,  who sporadically would try to coax an avocado seed into sprouting. Muriel was not the most patient person in the world and only wished he had a green thumb, so it was not unusual to walk into the kitchen, noticing the avocado seed/tumbler was missing from the sill of the kitchen window, inquire, and be told that she had "pitched the damn thing."

I have never once been tempted to try the toothpick/glass method.

But on the strength of absorbing some of Jahren's philosophy about being and waiting, I looked at an avocado seed differently this summer. Why wouldn't it sprout if it were put in soil and watered? Wasn't that what seeds are programmed to do? (I would help it along by removing the seed coat; unlike chicks, who have to peck their way out of the eggs, seeds are not weakened by being helped.) 

What if I just waited?

My first attempt ended when I got impatient four or five weeks into the experiment and tried to rock the seed a bit in the soil. Crack. I realized I had most likely broken a tap root and on further inspection, it turns out I had.

Lesson #1: Don't be impatient.

My second attempt was cut short when an overreaching chipmunk or squirrel leapt onto the small table on the deck on which the seed in its pot had sat for two or three weeks. I came out one morning to find the pot overturned, the dirt scattered, and the seed on the deck floor, looking gnawed.

Lesson #2: Animals are part of that randomness of whether a seed becomes a tree.

A month ago, I tried one more time, again removing the seed coat, but this time finding a space inside on the overcrowded plant table. Other than watering the seed from time and time, I left it alone.

I waited.

And the seed, true to its internal program, responded. 

Lesson #3: Wait. Wait. Wait.

I realized this weekend that the avocado seed had indeed sprouted. It has sent up a tall stalk with delicate small leaves (or presumably they will be when they unfurl). 

"Each beginning is the end of a waiting," writes Hope Jahren.

And here we are: beginning. 

Observations About August Money: Up Again

Blame it on the maple syrup.

We're not big maple syrup consumers. We only use it on pancakes, and maybe, maybe, I make pancakes once every five or six weeks. 

Maybe.

The large jug of Ohio maple syrup that a good friend gave me for my birthday three or four years ago lasted a long time. But all good things come to an end, and that includes maple syrup. After years of pure maple syrup, I was not going back to "pancake syrup with real maple flavoring." 

One jug of maple syrup: $17.00. 

August in Ohio is when sweet corn hits the market or, in our case, the parking lot. A friend from my high school years (we were in 4-H together almost a half century ago) posted on Facebook two weeks ago that they had just picked 40 dozen ears of sweet corn and would be selling it out of the the truck at a small shopping plaza that morning.

Three dozen ears: $12.00.

Two weeks later, just Monday in fact, she posted that they had just picked the grandchildren's corn. 

Another three dozen ears: another $12.00.

So right there is $41.00 of food purchases which are either extremely seasonal (the corn) or extremely rare (maple syrup). The corn amortized over a year comes to $2.00 a month. The maple syrup, amortized over two years, comes to 71¢ a month. (It's even cheaper over three years!) I can live with that kind of extravagance. 

By the time I add up all the food purchases ($235.60) and add in the household items ($18.06), we spent a whopping $253.66 in August. Some of those food dollars included some larger ticket items (olive oil, coconut oil), which, like the maple syrup, will not need replaced for  several months, but it is what it is. 

For the year, we are averaging $227.81 a month. 

Not what I had hoped for after a low-spend July, but pretty much what I have predicted for Covid-19 shopping. One high month (only one, I hope), one low month, repeat. It is interesting to see what gaps appear at the market. Canned pumpkin is almost nonexistent. So, apparently, are canned beets according to my good friend Margo, but given that I have made zero purchases of canned beets in my life, that one doesn't impact me. Ground cinnamon is hard to find at times. Fruit has stayed high, even summer melons. (I'm hoping the fall apple harvest will help bring down those prices.) On the other hand, there will be LOTS of zucchini and corn to eat all winter long in this household. Looking at my garden, I predict the zucchini will go on merrily until we get a hard frost. 

A few years back, a reader commented, somewhat kindly, somewhat tongue in cheek, that maybe I was a tad obsessed about tracking my food purchases and maybe I just needed to lighten up. Clearly I ignored that advice as I have gone on tracking our purchases ever since. Loooking ahead to 2021, when I will be retiring, not drawing social security right away, and living on a greatly reduced monthly income, watching these food dollars will become critical. So I do not regret the tracking. 

I'm not even making predictions for September...