I am of the old school when the news was the news. Radio, TV, and newspapers told me what’s going on: Who. What. When. Where. And occasionally why. Any good journalism class taught students what constitutes a news story. “Why” was in the article only if it was impossible to understand the rest without a few words of explanation. Gone are the days. Now, I will give this to newspapers: if there are any true journalists left in the world, they’re writing for print. But radio and TV? It is all entertainment and opinion, disguised as news. I don’t care if you watch Fox News or MSNBC (or any of the cable channels inbetween), all are about selling commercials to sponsors and the way you do that is by being entertaining. Trashing the opposing political point of view is done with great outrage and funny lines. And that, in the United States of America in 2010, is entertaining. And it’s what passes for news these days. I haven’t even mentioned blogs. Including this one. Bloggers are in it, too, and you get to the top of the heap in the blogosphere by being just as opinionated as the cable news channels.

If you have any doubt about how you feel, you can count on all of ‘em – radio, newspapers, TV, and blogs, to tell you about the latest survey. Not a day goes by but The American People speak by talking to one poll-taker or another and their views are presented to us as What We Believe, and if you don’t share those ideas then you are clearly off the mark. Sometimes we even learn how many good citizens were queried about their beliefs: a few hundred, a few thousand. But I have never been asked, and I’m tired of being told what the selected folks believe, again disguised as reliable information.

I have just resumed blogging after a little hiatus as I reorganized my life and my closets for fall. But between now and the election, my goal is to blog more often, and to sort out What I Believe. I’ll draw information from all of the folks who I have trashed above (isn’t that the way these days?) And because this is the great new day of non-journalism, I’ll be right up front about the whole thing. This is not news. It is opinion. Come along for the ride!

On a bright day last May, I planted three 20-foot rows of potatoes: Yukon Golds. Some of them were good-sized seed potatoes. I cut those so there’d be an eye in each piece. Others were little baby potatoes, included in the bag passed on to me by my friend who furnishes me with seed potatoes each spring. I do not claim any competence in the garden, so this is not garden advice. In a paragraph or two, you’ll get to my point in writing this.

The potatoes went under the ground, along with seeds for carrots, beans, and lettuce. Everything else popped up within a couple of weeks, thanks to all that nice rain we had. The little bedding plants that I brought home from the nursery flourished, too: broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, and zucchini. Parsley and basil, were planted in pots. It all came right along. But the potatoes? It seemed to me that they took an awfully long time to push up through the ground, and I rejoiced when the little leaves finally came up. I watched in admiration as they flourished: three rows of healthy greenery, going strong. I watched for potato bugs – which were the bane of my existence some years ago. I gave up potatoes for several years. And no bugs appeared this year.

Then a week or two ago, one plant after the other gave up its growth spurt. Leaves went yellow and stems flopped over. Can it be time to harvest already? Well, I guess so. I’ve been digging them up a hill at a time, and I have been rewarded with half a dozen or more in each hill: big fat potatoes, and some smaller ones. It is sheer joy put my hands into the warm, turned-over dirt and bringing out fat potatoes, one after the other.

And now the point of it all (besides great eating). The garden teaches lessons all along the way. First, there’s faith. Put in seeds or chunks of potato and the sun and rain and weeding do the rest. And there’s patience. It took my potatoes awhile to come up. I thought maybe they wouldn’t. But they did, and my patience in waiting (what else was I gonna do?) was rewarded. As the plants flourished, I moved on to admiration of the growing plants, and now there is joy in the garden; the joy of the harvest. And one more: Remember this: great things often lurk under the unlovely.

My gardening ancestors lived off their garden produce all winter long. Much of it was canned on hot August days. Other crops were stored in the root cellar. Carrots were kept fresh as the day they picked them when they were buried in buckets of sand. I learned that from my Uncle Glen. For those folks, the garden was a sheer necessity. But oh, I hope they knew some of the joys as well.

Don’t feel bad, all you other crops.  I appreciate you, too.  But today is the day for singing praise of the potato. And I just did.

I open the August 2 newsweek to a Jeep ad that advises, "Pick a color you’ll like in ten years"  The ad is for the Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the one in the picture is silver, coming through a leafy glade, not unlike my morning woods path.  How did they get that big honker in there anyway?  But the whole point of the ad is that if you pick this make, it’ll last a good ten years or more. I understand that.  My car is ten years old, and have no intention of getting rid of it any time soon.

But it’s about color, I will definitely not pick shining silver for my next car. I do have moments when I think about car colors.  Mostly because I am sometimes a really terrible driver, and my Honda CRV is a bright blue-purple and so identifiable in this town. I think of car color when I pull out in front of another driver when I could have waited.  Or when I pass on a rural road when it’s unwarranted.  Or when I zoom into the far right lane to turn at a quiet city intersection. 

Now, I have accepted the fact with the internet, privacy is dead, dead, dead. But still, I feel like I’m being shadowed when someone says,  "I saw your car at the post office yesterday morning, but I didn’t see you…."  I know of one other vehicle in this town of the same make, model, and color, and if they didn’t have those bumper stickers, I could blame the drivers of that Honda for my indiscretions, and for various sightings. I could say, "Oh, that wasn’t me…."  I personally rejected any kind of bumper stickers years ago. How could any political candidate or worthy cause want to be associated with a bad driver?

I have been thinking that beige, white, and gray, are good colors for cars. Nice anonymous colors.  Thousands of them on the road.  Then, of course, I wouldn’t be able to spot my car in a shopping center or grocery store parking lot.  There’s a lot to be said for shiny blue-purple on a cold winter day, pushing a grocery cart against the wind, grateful not to have to wander around thinking, "I’m sure I parked it right out here…."

A friend recently got a bright red Toyota for her 75th birthday.I admire that.  My husband has a 2005 red Mustang convertible that he drives in the summertime.  When he got it, he was asked, "Is that your middle age crisis car?"  He said, "No, it’s my old-age fun car".  Women in their 50′s are especially intrigued by his car because it brings back memories; I’m not sure exactly what memories. I, an older woman, led a very complacent teenage life. 

So maybe the bright colored car is OK and I should just Get Over It and not fall into musings about anonymous colors for my next car.  And maybe silver woldn’t be so bad after all.  It’d match my hair.

I had a really really bad day of baking last week. Now, I believe in home baking. I always have ingredients on hand: flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder, baking soda, spices, molasses, sour cream, cocoa, raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, coconut.  Well not everything. Not always.  But when I had occasion to bake up a storm for a coffee party/fundraiser for our favorite legislator, I figured that I’d bake a variety of goodies.I could always freeze anything the guests didn’t eat.  In the invitation, we promised Summer Treats. For me, that meant lemonade and decaf coffee and cookies and bars.

Betty Crocker has been my life-long friend. I turned to Betty for cinnamon coffee bars. The page in my BC Cookbook is stiff with spills from from over the years.  It was my favorite recipe from long ago days when the moms on our block in St. Louis Park  got together for morning coffee. Now, there’s an obselete notion– stay-at-home moms getting together to eat, drink, and chat.  Gone are the days. I’ve made those bars hundreds of times. I frosted them while warm — yes, powdered sugar frosting — no recipe.  Maybe I shouldn’t have used that 9×13 pan. Whatever.  They were too thin and kinda gooey, crispy around the edges and sunken in the middle. Definitely not a success, although a bit tasty. Eaten with a fork.

Well, let’s try sour cream cookies.  I make them at Christmastime, rolled out into stars, bells, holly, and Santas.  This flower cookie cutter will work well for a summertime event.  So I mix them up, smooshing everything together with my hand. It doesn’t feel quite right.  I lick a finger.  Oops. No sugar.  Well, add the sugar.  Long past the time it was supposed to be added — after the shortening, eggs, and sour cream, but before the flour. Lots more smooshing. And they worked out OK although I did leave one pan in the oven way too long, resulting in a too-brown-on-the-bottom pan of flowers.

With two near-misses, I decided to make brownies from a mix. I figured I couldn’t fail.  As I added oil, eggs, and water, I recalled that early-on the folks who make baking mixes learned that cooks NEED to add something, even through the magic of kitchen chemistry all they really needed to ask of us was a cup of water. The chocolatey smell wafted through my kitchen as they baked.  And baked.  That old toothpick-in-the-middle-should-come-out-clean routine had me leaving the brownies in the oven way too long. When I finally released them from the hot oven, they were downright crispy. And very difficult to slice.

Deapite all, our guests survived. The cookies and bars didn’t look bad on those pretty round plates.  The milk glass punch bowl I inherited from my mother-in-law, was lovely filled with lemonade – yes, with thin slices of lemon.  And the coffee was OK, even though I thought I made it a bit strong.

But I am thinking that the folks who bake in the middle of the night at our local grocery stores and bakeries do know what they’re doing. After all these years, maybe I should just give it up and pick up my baked goods all nicely wrapped in cellophane. 

Then again, perhaps it was the phase of the moon.  Or my dwindling attention span. Or the oven. Let’s blame it on my oven.  I’m going to have to build up my confidence somehow before I tackle baking again.  Which is fine.  I mostly do it around Christmastime, and that’s a good five months away. And it’s too hot to warm up the oven now, anyway. Summertime! No time to bake!

On a high summer day,  two children build a sand castles on the beach of a northern lake.  At a nearby dock, a clutch of teenagers take turns zooming around the lake on a jetski. And up the hill from the lake, under the tall Norway pines, the older folks sit in a circle in lawn chairs and talk baseball.

Far to the south, in a Minneapolis hotel, another group of 60 and 70-year-olds have jetted in from around the country for a couple of days of sightseeing and meals together. These are all family events. And the tie that binds in each of these groups, large or small, young or old, is that they are cousins.

Cousins are related by accident of birth. Your dad or mom had siblings, and they married (or didn’t) and brought forth children of roughly the same generation, although some families get the age groups pretty scrambled.  And there you are, with cousins.  In some families they number in the dozens. One young person I know has none.  She claims kids from a wider family circle as her cousins. That works.  

The first paragraph above was about my family; the city-gathered folks belong to a friend.  I was impressed to learn of their reunion and that even though none of them live in Minneapolis, that was the city of choice for the get-together this year. Some families, separated by ancient feuds, distance or disinterest, never see one another. So sad. 

There are 20 of us on my dad’s side of the family who call one another cousins. We celebrated Christmases in grandma’s old farm house when we were kids and we still eat chicken and potato salad and  pie at the Fourth of July potluck picnic. Not all of us get to the July 4 picnic. This year, five out of the 20 were there and yes, we were the folks in the lawn chairs, and it was our grandchildren enjoying the joys of being At The Lake. It was that generation inbetween — our own kids — who are mostly likely to lose track of cousins.  It’s a busy time of life, what with work and families, and the tie that binds easily frays. Some do friend one another on Facebook.

I can’t tell you why I have a renewed fondness for my cousins in recent years.  Maybe it’s the mortality thing. Our lives took us in many different directions. We have all encountered joys and bumps in life, and sometimes  we knew of our cousins’ lives only through bits and pieces from other relatives.  We’ve been busy. We’ve lived in cities and towns far from one another. But now, older people,  we share many memories. Yes, we were the kids building sand castles and opening gifts in that crowded farmhouse living room at Christmastime.  Grandma always made mittens. Twenty pairs, one for each of us.  It is a unique relationship, different for every person and every family. 

But today, for just a minute, think of your cousins. Don’t wait for a family wedding or funeral to bring you together.  Send a letter or an email or call on the phone, tweet or text. (I just had to add those last two, to show you I am not totally out of date).  They are special people, your cousins.

Will I hear from mine?  Hmmm.  Hope so.  

We live among folks who really know how to celebrate the Fourth of July. I’m talking about the magnificent Independence Day parade in Debs, Minnesota. Yes, Debs is named after Eugene V. I wish the old socialist could be around to see the way his town observes Independence Day.  While the parade traditionally takes place on July 4, the church-going folks of Debs move it to Saturday when the 4th falls on a Sunday.  So Saturday it was, with over 55 units in the parade, everything from horse-drawn rigs to vintage tractors, whole families dressed in funny clothes, politicians in convertibles and businesses from miles around touting their goods and services. An honor guard and the drum line from Bemidji High School led the whole shebang. The Debs parade lines up along a township road and  crosses the county road.  Pity the uninformed driver who who happens up County Road 5 at 11 AM on parade day!  They’ll have a long wait as the parade goes by. Twice. I’m not sure how the "twice around the block" tradition started, and it may be the only parade in America that indeed goes around twice. And we love every minute of it.

The road into "town" is lined with folks who came early and brought their own lawn chairs. There are kids with bags, eager to scramper out to collect candy thrown their way.  There are guys with beards and cute chicks in shorts  with serious suntans, and wise women who wear straw hats against the sunshine and people who wave and call out to their pals in the parade.  I put quotation marks around "town" because there’s really not much there. I believe the store-restaurant is closed, and the old schoolhouse that was a B and B may well be out of business.  Correct me on all of this, you Alaska Townships folks.

But the parade goes past the stand where the announcer (this year a local pastor) announces each unit, and the crowd applauds as each goes by.  The road continues through a shady glen, and on a hot day there’s blessed relief there for folks in the parade.  It crossed county road 5 again, winds up the hill to the Alaska Town Hall, and down the other side, and there we in the parade wait until the final units go by so that the second time around can begin. I challenge you to find any parade, anyplace, with the pizaaz of the Independence Day Parade in Debs, Minnesota.  It is a memorable event, and I recommend it!   Happy Fourth, everyone!

Our daughter Kathleen downloaded a recent “60 Minutes” onto the IPod that she and her sister bought for me some months ago. I’ve been a reluctant IPod person. On my morning walks, I like to enjoy the woods path, the smells, and the sounds. But this morning I felt obligated to give it a try.

I listened to the 60 Minutes how about cyber terrorism, and the jillions of ways that terrorists could (and do) invade computer systems all over the world. The one that has always scared me the most is the idea that the electric grid in this country – all computer driven — could be taken down. The idea isn’t quite so scary on a warm summer afternoon like this one. But think of—oh, let’s say a cold night in January. Any terrorist with a brain in his (or her) head would surely strike then. And where would we, in our comfy log house on the hill, be then?

Not so comfy. We heat with electricity.  When we built our house, the notion of a wood burning fireplace with its attendant work was not nearly as appealing as the gas fireplace, which we had installed. It needs electricity to pump the heat into the living room. Even if we had a heated-with-wood place to go, we’d have a hard time getting the car out of the garage – electric garage door opener, of course. We could eat cold food for awhile, and huddle under quilts. But it would get pretty miserable pretty fast. And the pump that brings up water for dinking, and to flush the toilets? Electric, too.

As I thought through this nightmare scenario, it brought to mind my Grandma Ida and Grandpa Herman, who homesteaded on a farm south of Bemidji in the early 1900’s. Those two would be far more able to weather an electric-less world than we are. In fact, they did just that, for years and years before Rural Electrification came to the country in 1935.

They burned wood for heat. Grandma cooked on a wood-burning stove. They had a big garden and August and September brought canning, and basement shelves full of beans, peas, carrots, corn, beet pickles, dill pickles, sauerkraut and all the rest. They were all “put up” in the heat of summer, with the boiler rumbling on the wood burning stove. The temperature in that kitchen must have been over 100 a good many days.

The cows in the barn were milked by hand. And oh yes, there was a “path” to the outhouse. I remember that from my childhood Christmases. Our family would come north to Grandpa and Grandma’s house and even into the 1940’s, running water was in the kitchen only.

So Herman and Ida and their gang of kids, which included my dad, made it quite well without electricity. I envy them when the notion of a failure of the electric grid comes to haunt me. But on the flip side, their life expectancy was far shorter. Herman died of a heart attack at age 58, and Ida departed the earth at age 74.

Let us all hope and pray that Our Government and the electric companies know how to prevent the nightmare. And hats off to Herman and Ida and all of their generation. They were amazing people!
 

It’s the height of the rhubarb season at our place. On the morning walk with Sunshine the Big Black Dog, I stop by the garden to do a bit of hoeing and to pull about ten or twelve stalks of rhubarb. I bring them up to the house, and chop almost all of it to go into zip lock bags or yoghurt cartons for the freezer. But the rest – 3 or 4 stalks — get chopped up and go into a sauce pan with some sugar and just a bit of water. I cook it up until the rhubarb is tender. Sometimes I over-sugar and it gets closer to a thin jam. No matter because the destination of this little batch of rhubarb is a breakfast that is close as you can get to dessert but still claiming it’s healthy. And oh, so healthy!

My breakfast begins with a handful of oatmeal into water, in a bowl, and into the microwave for one minute. I take it out and give it a stir. Then I add a couple of tablespoons of rhubarb sauce, maybe more. I top that with several dollops of yoghuart (lemon is best) and – the finishing touch – I grind up 4 or 5 almonds that goes on top of the yoghurt.

As I spoon the oatmeal-rhubarb-yoghert-almond deliciousness into my mouth, I sip at strong coffee, made in my 2-cup French press coffee maker. My husband passes on both the oatmeal mix and the coffee. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. 

I learn that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention – yes, the CDC, our government – has named rhubarb as its Vegetable of the Month. It thrives in cold climates, and originated in Western China, Tibet, Mongolia Siberia, and neighboring areas. Now here’s a great trivia question: what do Beltrami County and Siberia have in common, beside cold winters? Answer: rhubarb. And yes, the cold winters are essential to this crop. And here’s another fascinating fact. In 1542, rhubarb sold for ten times the prices of cinnamon in France and in 1657 rhubarb sold for over twice the price of opium in England. Rhubarb was introduced into the United States at the end of the 18th century. There barely was a US then!

My rhubarb plants – four of them – originated with two different gardeners of my acquaintance, now about 15 years ago, when I started gardening. I am forever grateful to Roger and Martha for their gifts. I think of them as I pull those sour-soon-to-be-sweetened stalks. And I think of them in the cold of winter, when I pull a bag of rhubarb out of the freezer and cook it up for breakfast.

I’m also grateful to Jerry, who told me that if I tear off the leaves as I pull the rhubarb, and put them down around the base of the rhubarb, they destroy the quack grass and other weeds. It works. Thanks to Jerry for that tip. 

I was told years ago to stop picking rhubarb on July 4. Sometimes I sneak by that for a final harvest. But a few years ago, I figured what the heck – I can go on harvesting into August. Wrong. The rhubarb the next year was downright whimpy.

So let us celebrate rhubarb and enjoy every sweet-sour mouthful, and give thanks to the friends who have made this month’s bounty possible.
 

It’s my birthday today.

I’d tell you how many birthdays I’ve celebrated, but you’d hit that cancel button and get out of here, thinking,  "What am I  doing, reading an old lady’s blog.?"  But wait.  I am, from the wisdom of my years, going to impart to you the secret of Staying Young.  There is one simple step.  Make friends and keep in touch with somebody who is — oh, let’s say 20 years older than you are.  If that freaks you out too much, if you’re thinking, "Come on — he/she could be my mother/father", then make it 10 or 15.  Now, the best thing, over which you have no control, but it works best, is that your older friend moves away.  Or moves out of your life: takes another job, or takes up with some activity so that you just don’t see her for — yes, let’s say 20 years.  But you keep in touch.  Letters and the telephone used to be the mediums of choice, but now it’s email.  Better yet, Facebook. I understand that email is almost obselete for your generation. 

But here’s what happens.  Your aging friend moves on.  Five years, ten, twenty, even.  Wrinkles, gray hair, thickening waist, ailments — the whole package.  But in her mind you, my dear, are still the age at which she remembers you.  Forever young.

I know this to be true because when I had my Big Time Job in the Twin Cities, virtually everybody I worked with was younger.  Even the Big Boss, who had founded and nurtured the organization, and still leads it on.  Our ages didn’t make much difference when we worked together. I became a minor boss, with a bunch of those folks working for me, and that was good.  Good for me and I am told, good for them.  Unless they’re a bunch of liars, which I could not believe was true. I was a good boss. 

And they, the folks who worked for me, remain just as I left them, now over 20 years ago. In their 20′s and 30′s, full of hope and promise, which many have fulfilled.  They have honed their skills over the years, and now are at the top of their game, and I take pride in that.  But the inevitable marks of age?  On those young folks?  Not a bit. Not at all.  Not a gray hair in their heads, not a lag in their steps, no conversations about blood pressure and cholesterol, no pictures of grandchildren. They are Forever Young.

So there you are:  take up with somebody older and keep in touch and as they age, you will not age – not in their mind of your friend.  Your youth will endure forever.

Until your pal looses her mind, of course, and then it won’t make any difference.

Okay. thanks for reading.  I’m 74.

A slum in India. A walk through the woods in Grant Valley Township.. The plains of West Fargo, once farmland, now with rows of new town homes and apartments, shining shopping malls and oh yes, road construction.

The maid who lives in poverty, and her upper class employer. Sunshine and me. And all those people, thousands of them, living side by side or on top of one another, in rooms with freshly painted walls and new appliances.

The diversity of human life is too much to take in. I pick up the book I’m reading, “The Space Between Us”, and go to the smelly, noisy, rodent-infested hut where basic human needs are met at the communal bathroom and water tap. And where a grandmother and her pregnant granddaughter live in anger and despair.

I go for a walk with Sunshine the Big Black Dog through the woods on a morning after rain. The pine trees glisten and the only sound is faintly heard, a far-away hum on the county road.

We drive to West Fargo for a medical appointment. I feel like a country girl in the city, negotiating the  freeways, detours, and busy streets, even though I lived most of my life in an urban area larger than this one. The detour takes us by those new buildings. I wonder what it would be like to live in one. In the city, I had neighbors. Close neighbors. But now, in the country, they’re down the road. And out of sight.

On television we see the improvised tent cities where Haitians live after the June earthquake. More poverty. More wretchedness. And the shrimpers in Louisiana whose livelihood has been taken away. With hurricaines yet to come, for both Haiti and the southern coast.

Is this luck of the grace of God, or what? How was I so fortunate to be born into a family where a college education and a job after that, a good marriage and healthy kids were expected? And they all came along. Not without the bad stuff that comes into every life. But think. I could have been born into an extremist Muslim family, and grew up to be shrouded in a burka and give birth to sons whose goal was to strap on explosives and die for the cause. I could have been born a low-caste Indian with a future scrubbing pans in the kitchen of another woman. Or a Haitian woman, giving birth at 15, and dying before 50.

But instead, here I am, walking through the northern woods on a sweet June morning. Nearly 74 years old. A good life. Go figure.