Author: christinestaffa

My life's journey has taken me from the streets of New York, up the Hudson Valley, to a little goat farm under Vermont's highest mountain.

And the Rumour Spread That I Was Aging Fast

So X has been taking apart the Prius bit by bit, because there is a terrible mouse smell in it. We brought it to the mechanic to see if they could remove the dash and clean the vents, but they told us it wasn’t coming from the vents, so we don’t know what to do. Since in this state it is a total loss and probably a health hazard, I told X he could just rip it apart, take an axe to it if he’d like, and get his frustrations out and maybe solve the problem in the process if we’re lucky.

Today is a stunner of a day – dry, high sixties – and we are going bike&brewing. I’m in the middle of a 2 week vacation. Life’s perfect and yet I’ve had this low level depression. X has too, maybe more than usual. He suggested maybe we should get tested for covid. Then he nixed that idea when I started seriously considering it. I don’t know, the ennui of everything being perfect? The ennui of being 52 and having no more mysteries left to solve? Being old? X says there’s nothing more to look forward to. Just tiny joys. I know that when you get old you have to make sure that you still have goals and things to live for. But nothing you can come up with seems important anymore. Struggling to earn a livelihood and gain a footing in the world, that was important. The sheep & wool fair, I don’t know.

Couldn’t resist that.

Book Corner 2021.38

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

“My God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it.”

That sums it up well. I’ve always been curious to read this one, but I also feared it would be dry nature writing. In fact it is rarely dry and is heavy on philosophizing. Dillard seems to walk through the world in a constant state of astonishment. She will notice a bug seeming slightly askew, and drop to the ground and stare at it for 45 minutes. She is in awe, awe at the profligacy of creation. She also gets herself into a state of high dudgeon over: the seeming waste of life represented by the sheer number of individual creatures who live nasty, brutish, short lives with only a few of their species living to propagate; the amount of general suffering that goes on in the natural world; and the teeming masses of creatures who are parasitic, noxious, or just disgusting.

I don’t find interesting everything that she finds interesting. But I do like philosophy. In addition to the sheer wonder Dillard brings to the table, she also holds forth on what it all means relative to our own place in the universe.

“Thomas Merton wrote, ‘There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.’ There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.”

“I have often noticed that even a few minutes of self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.”

“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?”

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

Popes

The Italians have a saying, I recently learned: “A fat pope follows a thin pope.”

A good sleep night follows a bad sleep night.

A good neck day follows a bad neck day.

A happy day follows an unhappy day.

So if you’re happy, be happy. And if you’re unhappy, be happy, because tomorrow you’ll probably be happy.

The Life You Lead May Be Your Own

Lake Elmore

Even on a drizzly day (yesterday) we manage to pull a great outing out of Vermont including biking, brewing, & beauty.

Imagine there’s a parallel life where you didn’t spit in the tube for ancestry at all. Imagine another where you did but wasn’t able to track anyone down. Imagine another where you tracked people down but nobody answered you. Imagine another where you did not have somebody pushing for you & biodad to meet next week. Imagine another where he refused to come.

Imagine one where he backs out next week. Imagine one where he comes and you hit it off beautifully and you gain a new friend and some great new stories. Imagine one where he comes and you can’t relate to him at all. Imagine one where he comes and he stinks (thanx Sara) or he asks for a kidney (thanx Ruth). Now imagine one where he comes and everything is just kind of middle of the road.

So, this is the parallel life you’re in right now. All the dominoes clicked to have you very close to meeting your sperm donor very soon. Which life will this turn out to be?

Jungle Love

My garden is now an adolescent – pretty much able to take care of itself.

String beans, a row of green & a row of yellow…

Cherry & grape tomatoes, various… I forget what I ordered…

I know it basically looks like a jungle, but that’s the way (uh huh uh huh) I like it (uh huh uh huh).

Book Corner 2021.37

The Yearling

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“You figgered I went back on you. Now there’s a thing ever’ man has got to know. Mebbe you now it a’ready. Twan’t only me… Boy, life goes back on you.”

I was mesmerized. I never wanted it to end.

You become immersed in the world of the Baxter family – Penny (Pa), Ory (Ma), and 12-year-old Jody. They live post-Civil War in the Jacksonville area of Florida on a small clearing where they subsist growing corn, sweet potatoes, cow-peas, and cane sugar; augmented by a dairy cow and plenty of hunting. Their nearest neighbors are their frenemies the Forresters, a rough crowd of four or five grown men with their Ma and Pa. Jody has a special relationship with his Pa; not so much with Ma, who is hardened by having buried too many of her babies. Half the book goes by until the main plot commences – Jody finds Flag, an orphaned fawn he adopts, after having longed for years for some little creature he could care for and call his own. You know how it ends.

These people know their land so intimately, they know their game, their predators, their weather, in a way like I imagine most people today have no idea.

It was absolutely beautiful. I love coming-of-age stories. I’m partial to those with girls, and this is a boy’s book through and through, but it was still about that magical portal between child and grown-up.

“Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ‘Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ’tain’t easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down again. I’ve been uneasy all my life.”

I Love You, My State!

The view from Bent Hill Brewery. This is a great place, but talk about the middle of nowhere – Braintree, VT, way up a dirt road with no commercial activity around for miles. I find that you cannot throw a rock in Vermont without hitting a beautiful place. Every place in the world has at least little pockets of beauty. We have rolling hills and mountains of it. I was drawn to want to try this brewery when I heard about the great variety of styles they have (an appropriate number of IPA’s – maybe 3 out of the dozen offerings, thank you!), and that their taproom menu was fully vegetarian. It is still my preference to eat low on the food chain. However, as I’ve been telling people, I’m finding it harder to do lately – Xopher recently got some blood work results telling him to lower his saturated fat intake, so there goes all the cheese I like to put on things. Dairy fat & refined carbs are usually what make vegetables a meal, and they aren’t as healthy as certain birds and fishies. Finally, it was a lot easier to cook solely vegetarian at home when it was winter – surprised, since it’s summer that offers all the fresh vegetative matter? Well, three reasons: split pea soup; black bean soup; and mushroom barley soup. These were all great go-to veg meals in winter, but I just don’t want to make soup in the summer.

But I digress. Back to beauty. I tried to find an official kind of bike, rec, or rail trail in the vicinity of Braintree to no avail. So I just used a map and found a loop we could do that was 8 miles and didn’t look too hilly. It was in fact too hilly but I am better at hills than I used to be. And it was such a beautiful and peaceful ride, on the Randolph-Braintree border. It’s so amazing to be able to just pull out the gazetteer and make your own journey and trust it will very likely be fabulous. I love you, my state!