Summer's Dross

In the 20 some years we’ve lived in our town, it has become a much noisier place.

Nowadays, it feels like the four seasons are snow blower, wood chipper, lawn mower, and leaf blower. Complementing these soloists are a chorus of trash trucks, leaf sucker vehicles, Fedex and Amazon delivery vans, and the 24/7 roar of Md. Route 200, a six-lane toll road to nowhere that opened some 10 years ago that is just a 15 minute walk from our front door. 

Our town has an ancient ordinance, widely ignored, that prohibits power tools before noon on a Sunday and yet the most contentious issue in recent memory has been a proposed bike and walking path that would connect our town to a shopping center less than 1 km away that could only reduce car trips.

But what I wanted to write about today is raking leaves.

Washington Grove is nick named, “The Town Within a Forest” so as you might guess, we have trees. Lots of them. Lots of maples and even more oaks and each one of those trees (except the dead ones) have leaves. Lots of them. In autumn they turn red and orange and yellow. One might call them pretty.

Then they fall off the trees.

In prior years, we had a guy who cleaned them up for us. Last year I made him rake them by hand (yes, I paid him more to do it that way) but we felt so bad watching him struggle with the mountains of leaves that we decided to do it ourselves this year.

Can you imagine a world where the sounds of yard work were hand raked leaves, hand shoveled snow, and manual push mowers snick-snicking away at a languid lawn of deciduous weeds — like mine?

I can but only because I was born into just such a world long ago in the middle of the previous century.

The soothing sound of a rake on leaves. Shreet, shreet, shreet. Like a lullaby.

Each leaf is in itself insubstantial; together they are a formidable force and when wet with rain, they are indomitable.

Raking is slow, meditative, and seemingly never-ending work. Like life. Yet like a life, the raking does end.

Here’s a poem about autumns —natures’s and mine.

Windrows

Sisyphus forsake your stone,

and help me rake these leaves,

for I've an autumn afternoon

and you eternity.

Discarded litter of an oak

I planted in my prime,

we'll sweep into mountains

higher than Zeus has known.

My labor's end is drawing near

gathering summer's dross

for men or gods to burn in piles

or mulch in shallow graves.

Then you and I will drink neat

the remnants of the day

and sip the bourbon twilight

till we rejoin infinity. 

Fired Up

Do you ever make arbitrary rules for yourself?

Here’s one my wife and I have: we are not allowed to turn on the heat before November 1st.

Why?

It’s a mixture of frugality, stoicism, and (delusional) environmental consciousness.

Our home is heated with oil. Nasty, smelly, fossil fuel oil. Once or maybe twice a year, a big truck shows up at our house and ‘the men’ stick a rubber hose into a pipe that leads down to a big tank that sits in our laundry room and pump many liters of heating oil (something like diesel fuel) into the tank. The tank feeds a furnace that burns the oil and sends resulting heated air through vents to warm the house.

Once we do turn it on, we use it sparingly. We keep the house at 17 C (64 F) tops during the day and turn it down to 12 C (55 F) at night.

Until Spring of 2020, we still had the furnace that was installed when the house was built. It was over 40 years old and the first firing every year produced an awful stench that made our eyes water and the cat cry.

The guy from the oil company who inspected it, told us every year we should get a new one. We resisted his sage counsel for more than ten years but finally, we decided that it was time to replace the old system. Frankly, I was afraid that the thing was going to blow up one day or at least fill the house with carbon monoxide while we were asleep (though the furnace rarely comes on when we are asleep since we turn it down so low at night).

Yes, we could have gotten a heat pump or a geothermal system or a solar something but the easiest thing appeared to be to replace the one we had with a newer (more efficient) one.

I am even lazier than I am frugal.

The old system had one of those round, gold-colored Honeywell thermostats with a metal coil that expanded or contracted as the room temperature rose or fell. When the coil had contracted enough it tipped a glob of mercury inside a glass tube which completed a switch that turned on the furnace. It was to the modern thermostat as a rotary phone is to a smart phone. It didn’t work with the new furnace and had to be replaced with a soulless digital thing that needs batteries to operate. Ugh!

Still, that first firing each year still feels like a moment of import and maybe it is just conditioning but I still believe I can catch a whiff of oil stench.

Here is a sonnet I wrote a while back about the annual ritual of firing up the furnace for the first time in the fall.

Furnace

Early and the chill that comes through double

panes and blows about the bedroom can’t be denied.

Frost grins on the sills and chatters on the outside

where frozen November dew kisses bare stubble.

Her feet cross the cold tile of the hall.

She gives the plastic knob a twist;

weary mercury tumbles and completes the switch.

A moment of silence for summer lost -- then all

hell breaks loose. The furnace awakens with thunder

and groans and stretches as spark

ignites a greasy belch, a cough inside its head.

A foul smell as the beast burns off months of slumber.

Belly-fire drinks the ancient carbon of birds and bark,

warming our flimsy lives with bodies of the dead.

Home Here

Normal Monday

Last Monday night was the beginning of the month in the Hebrew calendar known as Heshvan. Heshvan stands alone in the Jewish year as a month with no festivals or annual observances. In other words, its abnormal feature is that it is the only normal month of the year.

Sometimes when I travel and am staying in a hotel, I will switch on Bloomberg Business News in the morning as I am preparing for my day. Last time I did this I was in New York City where Bloomberg is almost always one of the channel selections.

Bloomberg is clearly targeted to people who work in the financial industry — professional traders, brokers and the like. I consider myself more financially literate than the average person, yet frequently I have no idea what they are talking about on the channel.

On this particular morning, the host was obviously very excited about something that was going on in the market but after watching for about 40 minutes, I was unable to determine what it was. The S&P 500 had barely budged 1/2 a percent. Yields on bonds were rising, though not dramatically. Corporate earnings were unremarkable. All the usual indicators of drama seemed, at least to me, largely absent.

At one point the host said, “Good Morning on this Monday, but this is NOT a normal Monday!”

He was right about that. But maybe not for the reason he thought.

2022 — a Year of Chaos — Like the previous 10,000 Years

Last week I heard someone refer to 2022 as chaotic. It hasn’t seemed particularly chaotic to me. I thought back to 2020, which some people couldn’t wait to see end, only to find that much of what they disliked about 2020 continued unabated in 2021, and the things that did end were replaced by other things not to their liking. In a similar vein, those who have investments in the stock market feel that this has been an particularly troubling year, yet a quick glance at historical returns will show that:

• Many, many years have had negative returns and

• this year is isn’t even among the five worst of the last 100.

Still, they yearn for normalcy to return?

I have some bad news: this is as normal as it gets.

We have evolved to see patterns and to zero in on that which doesn’t seem conform to the pattern. But patterns aren’t static. They are constantly changing, and that change captures our attention, asking us to adapt. Since, generally speaking adapting requires effort, we, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, would prefer not to make any change at all at the present time.

At the same time, we long to return to a time that never existed. As jazz musician Ben Sidran puts it, “The past ain’t what it was, the future ain’t what it used to be.” (“I might be wrong” on Picture Him Happy)

We often feel like the world is spiraling toward destruction even though for most of us, most of the time, things are just fine or at least not bad. Much of our discomfort comes from a disconnect between the way things are and the way we would prefer or expect them to be. Sometimes we are able to act to move things closer to the way we’d prefer them to be but very often we can’t. It’s our expectations - not circumstances - that are out of whack.

Since returning home from our summer travels life has been a series of non-stop repairs. When we turned the water back on, the toilet started running and the sink started leaking onto the floor. The car that sat in the driveway for three months has been in for service for an emission light three times. One of the new tires we purchased in Fairbanks developed a sidewall bubble and had to be replaced. The dishwasher died. The new one is sitting in the middle of living room because of problems around installing it. Someone to whom I wrote a check in December deposited the same check a second time, resulting in my bank freezing my account without telling me and my bouncing three payments. Bike tires gone flat. Mice in the flour.

The Miracle of Irritation

None of these things qualifies as a real problem and probably shouldn’t even rise to the level of irritation (though if I am honest, they are irritating). In fact, these challenges are a gift for several reasons.

First, they are a reminder that life is a largely futile process of trying to restore normalcy, which is to say in a state where things are working. At the same time, though the task is futile, nevertheless it is unavoidable. And yes, anything that can be fixed with money is not a problem, just an expense.

Next, once we understand this situation we can choose to see these challenges as our path. More than a decade ago I read a piece in Shambhala Sun magazine (Now Lion’s Roar) titled,” “Five Questions that Help Us Wake Up.” Question Number 2 is “Can I see this as my path?” It is a question to ask yourself in any moment that feels like a struggle or a challenge. Accepting as your path wherever you find yourself is a real moment of awakening.

My Uncle Steve Kohn (of blessed memory) once created a cartoon which took the cliched highway ad, “If you lived here you’d be home now.” and turned it on its head. Sitting in traffic, a man grimacing with frustration glares at a sign which reads, “If you lived now, you’d be home here.” As Sapiens author Yuval Harari said in an interview with Steven Levitt on the People I Mostly Admire podcast, “Perhaps the greatest miracle in the cosmos is that you are a being capable of irritation.”

Finally, since there will never be a normal or perfect or even static state, your best course might be to be happy now.  I recently heard a story (perhaps apocryphal) that when the Dalai Lama was asked what was the happiest moment of his life. He thought for a moment before he replied.

“This moment, I think,” he said.