can't phone home

One of the last vestiges of family unity is disappearing - the family phone number. This is a lot more momentous than you might think. First of all, if you have to reach someone's mother, are you sure you want to bother them on the cell phone, when you don't know where they are or what they are doing? Second, cell phone numbers still aren't listed. How do you look someone up when they don't have a home phone? How do you find out where they live?

Even more, this is the era of growing individuation, when we walk around with plugs sticking in our ears, radically distancing us from one another even when we stand just a hair's breadth away, draped in our private cocoons woven in threads of invisible sound. Family phone numbers symbolically kept us together, even if we eat at different times, if our kids listen to their MP3s when driving with us in the car, and text their friends while we are talking to them.

We have lost the iconic family dinner; rarely gather weekly in front of the TV for a favorite family show; certainly don't sit around the hearth and tell stories or read out loud to one another; hardly play together in this generationally-divided world, and long ago lost our family crest with our ancestral coat of arms. We even have ceded common surnames shared by all members of the family, what with women keeping their given names (like me) and blended families bringing different names into one abode.

At least we could all point to the shared home phone number. Everyone who lived in that house could be reached there. To know that the other members of your household possessed that number, too, was a signal that no matter whatever else might divide you, those seven numbers made you an indivisible unit. You belonged to and were responsible for each other.

Believe me, I never thought of this until today, when a friend of mine emailed me to say that she was giving up her house phone number. Everyone in the family would now only be reachable through their personal cell phones. I immediately felt a loss. I enjoyed the serendipity of calling them and speaking to whomever answered the phone. I felt close to all the members. Sometimes I wanted to connect to the family, not an individual. Now when I want to invite the family for dinner, I have to choose whom to call. I have to decide who represents the family. The sense of whole is lost.

If I feel a loss of center for them, do they feel the same loss of center? To me, family phone numbers are powerful symbols. Even when my children are at college, with dorm numbers and cell numbers, our home phone number is their phone number. We are bound by seven digits even when separated by hundreds of miles. My phone number ceases being theirs when they get married, or move out to pursue a career. It is as much a rite-of-passage as getting a driver's license.

Life-changing events severe family connections to the home phone number. When children leave to build homes of their own. When divorce divides a family. That is life as it is meant to be. That is when home numbers change.

My friend will save almost $200 by disconnecting her home phone. It is a trend that has begun and will no doubt continue, much to the symbolic loss of a family center. I doubt we can reverse it. But at least let us mourn the loss of home-ness that it symbolizes. Perhaps we can find a substitute for it (reinvent the family crests?). And maybe in a dashing display, we can use the money we save to pay for one last celebratory family dinner: Chinese, home-delivery.

staying at home VI - front lawns

In the 1750's, when posted in Winchester, VA, George Washington did three things to strengthen the area: built a fort (Fort Loudon), restored a sense of order and hope, and had every household plant hundreds of apple trees.

Today, Winchester, VA boasts that it is the apple capital of the nation, and it hosts an annual, blow-out Apple Festival. All told, the county has 700,000 apple trees, courtesy, no doubt, of our founding father's foresight. (This was a full 40 years before the legendary Johnny Appleseed set forth on his historic crusade.)

I was delighted to hear this as I thought about my paltry but valiant apple "trees" on my front lawn.

This past March, I planted 8 apple seedlings. No more than twigs, some only 1 foot high, the others a towering 2 feet. Lodi, Jonathan and Winesap - a necessary trilogy for proper fertilization, or so I was told. I lost one tree to the voracious nibblings of our large four-footed friends. The others are recuperating from their tops being unceremoniously lopped off by darling deer dentals, so that they lost a full year's worth of growth and are enduring the botanical equivalent of PTSD. After that, I began to spray the trees with Deer Off, an environmentally-friendly, non-toxic repellant (evidently, deer don't like garlic).

Now, the survivors stand, straight if not tall, waving their fistful of leaves as if they were banners arrayed in a tiny parade. It will be years before branches develop, never mind fruit. But I planted the trees for the long haul.

When my family first moved into this Stevenson area in the 1950's, the area around Fort Garrison was all apple orchard. Planted, no doubt, like the trees in Winchester, in an effort to provide the local residents with harvests that could provide nourishment all year round. These orchards were part of the landscape and beauty of the area. When the houses were built, the trees were brought down.

But why, I wondered, couldn't we re-introduce them on our lawns? There is today a cultural conceit that demands that front lawns be pristine, emerald swatches of constant demands. And polllution. The fossil fuel we use to mow the lawns (never mind to transport the man and machine to tend to them); the pesticides and herbicides we use to treat them; the money and time we squander on them, make them not at all the nature-friendly areas we imagine.

There is, in fact, a nascent guerrilla effort to take back the lawn and turn us all into gentlemen farmers. I will confess that neither my lawn - with its lack of full sun, nor myself - with my lack of ability, are good for vegetable gardening. But fruit trees? In the spring they offer luscious fragrance; in the summer, budding promise; in the fall, the fruit of their labors; and in the winter, their gnarled beauty. What is not to like about fruit trees?

So for better or worse, I have joined the ranks of others out there somewhere who are also bucking the manicured front- lawn idolatry of our nation and planting fruit trees there.

It will be five or six years before my "trees" develop sufficiently to bring forth their first harvest. And even then, it will only be with the cooperation of my deer friends.

But I look forward to inviting you all to the first annual Cardin-Reisner Apple Harvest festival, hopefully well before my dotage. And if you too plant now, I would be honored to come and celebrate yours.

hide and secrete?

The on-line version of Scientific American posted this fascinating news item July 14:

Volcanic rocks deep beneath the sea off the coast of California, Oregon and Washington State might prove one of the best places to store the carbon dioxide emissions that are causing global warming, a new study finds. In fact, the very instability that causes earthquakes and eruptions adds an extra layer of protection to keep the CO₂ from ever escaping.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other experts, including the G8 (Group of Eight) leaders of the world's richest nations, have called carbon capture and storage a critical tool in the fight against climate change. In essence, such technology catches the CO₂ and other pollutants emitted when coal or other fossil fuels are burned. It is then compressed into a liquid and, theoretically, pumped deep beneath the surface to be permanently trapped.

Such technologies have been demonstrated on a small scale to enhance the recovery of oil from tapped out fields; pumping down the CO₂ pushes up more of the black gold. But geophysicist David Goldberg of Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., and his colleagues found that pumping such CO₂ into basalt rock beneath the ocean floor might be a better solution.

Specifically, liquid CO₂ is heavier than the water above it at 8,850 feet (2,700 meters) or more under the surface, meaning any leaks would never bubble back into the atmosphere. Further, the CO₂ mixes with the volcanically warmed water below the surface and undergoes chemical reactions within the basalt (the black rock created from rapidly cooling lava) to form carbonate compounds—otherwise known as chalk—effectively locking up the greenhouse gas in mineral form. The 650-foot (200-meter) layer of marine sediment on top of the basalt rock acts as yet another barrier. "You have three superimposed trapping mechanisms to keep your CO₂ below the sea bottom and out of the atmosphere," Goldberg says. "It's insurance on insurance on insurance."

This is a great solution IF we want to keep mining, digging and burning fossil fuels. The question is, do we? Why spend all this money on the excavation of fossil fuels, the degradation of the environment (especially with the extraction of coal) and then the cost of sequestration, all for a time-limited and volume-limited commodity when we could put that creative energy, money and public support behind renewable energies?

Clearly, no one technology is going to be the be-all-and-end-all solution, so sequestration might be one part of the solution. But we have to keep the other renewable options on the table, moving forward and well-funded and publicly supported.

Enjoy this fabulous summer weather!

Staying at Home V - Homespun Salons

(This is the fifth in a series of the art of staying at home)

Part of the art, and joy, of staying home is that it allows us to discover new ways of being.

Travel, of course, does this effortlessly (as long as we don't thwart it by sealing ourselves up in a tourist's cocoon.) It literally takes us out of our daily habits, our ritual ways of being, our programmed schedules, food and daily interactions . That is part of what makes travel so alluring, and so stressful, all at once. The familiar externalities that hold our identity together are missing when we are abroad. Those being shed, we are freer to explore both the world and ourselves.

But the best staying-at-home experiences can do this too. We just have to plan for it. In fact, there is a gift that home exploration offers that traveling denies us. At home, we can experiment and unveil new parts of ourselves while in the midst and presence of our friends and family. If they are part of this remaking and remodeling of ourselves, they can better accept it, understand it, and support it. With them as our partners in growth, we can more readily be accepted as the new kind of friend, neighbor, citizen, self we want to be.

Being at home without the commitments of work or school allows us to alter our patterns and our expected roles in our community. Vacations gift us not only with the time, but also, should we choose to grasp it, the psychic latitude, to experiment with becoming more of the kind of person we want to be. Even if our designs are not inclined toward change, but rather toward expanding, extending, who we already are, staying at home affords us more time to do that.

One grand extravagance we can give ourselves, and our community of friends, is to become the host for the neighborhood's Salon. (see the Wikipedia entry for more information on the nature, history and role of Jewish women in the salons of Europe.)

The salons of Europe over the past 400 years were breeding grounds for the development of culture, thought and an intoxicating mix of guests. They were places where the narrowed boundaries of art, politics, literature and social class were bravely trespassed in the protective company of a gracious host, the salonierre.

How enchanting to host a salon in one's home. Whether with musicians or poets, artists or politicians, or scientists, or best of all, all of them. Everyone benefits: the community, the guests, the host and, if managed well, the environment.

The collateral benefits of attending to the environment send us back to our roots, to the basics of home, community, appreciation of the homespun entertainment, cultivation of our own talents, and a strengthening of our love of place. It is not only the appreciation of local food that caring for the environment and the high price of fuel are teaching us. It is also the appreciation of community, local talents, a sense of belonging to this place. All it takes to make it happen is for us to make it so.

The Art and Soul of Staying at Home IV

Clearly, avoiding travel during these days of pumped up fuel prices is on everyone's mind. I just read about "stay-cations" - places to go when holidaying at home. The zeitgeist is at work again.

I thought about this while listening to a captivating story on NPR about Marta Becket. Marta is 83, a former dancer New York-quality professional dancer who stumbled onto an abandoned theater on the outskirts of Death Valley Junction over 40 years ago. Peering into the darkened theater through a hole in the door, Marta says she felt like she was looking at the other half of herself. This place belonged to her and she belonged to it. She and her husband settled there and got to work rehabilitating this personal Shangri-La.

For forty years Marta has performed on the stage of the theater she named the Armagosa Opera House. Recruiting an audience in such a remote and sparsely populated area was, shall we say, difficult. But no matter who showed up (or didn't), Marta performed.

One of the most engaging aspects of the story is how Marta buoyed herself through the slow, isolated times and created the audience she needed to keep her going. Looking around one day at the bare white walls, Marta determined to paint an appreciative gallery of spellbound spectators. For four years, she populated the walls of the theater with a richly designed and ornately executed Spanish renaissance congregation: a king and queen front and center; courtiers and commoners, lovers and drunkards, priests and nuns. When she finished that, she tackled the ceiling, with cherubs and doves.

I thought about this as I opened my vacuous, monochromatic closet door this morning. Now, while I do not have the skills with which Marta Becket is graced, I do have one valuable commodity - lots of blank doors. What if, during this time of staying at home, I threw my inhibitions to the wind, researched landscapes of the hills of Jerusalem, the Judean desert, Sefad; recreated the interiors of 18th century shtetl homes, and surrounded myself with leaves, trees and spices from the Bible? What if the vacant canvas leading into the closets of my home were transformed into portals of our imagination. Pigment paradise.

I will definitely need some help pursuing this. And I will be grateful to whitewash that can, as a last resort, cover up all my artistic sins. But what an awesome memento of staying at home these magical murals would be.

Staying at Home III - The Trees in my Forest

TWalking back from putting out the trash this beautiful summer morning, I paused more than usual to take a look at my trees. I am getting much better at identifying them through their leaves (although -easy it sounds - I am still struggling a bit). But I wondered if I could identify them by their bark. While there are clear differences with, say, birch trees (that peel), or beech trees (that are smooth), often, bark can look so generic. Still, my tree-identification books assure me it can be done. So every now and then I try.

Today, I paid attention to the stately tulip poplar trees that line my driveway. This tree is native to this area and clearly content to lay down roots and generously populate my woods. That is to say, it is by far the most common tree on my property. When one fell on our house a year or so ago (such is the price we pay to live beneath the protective shade of these modest giants), the tree surgeons told us, in the pauses between the chomping of the chainsaw, that this wood is popular for cabinetry, paneling, siding. You can see why just by looking: when packed together in clusters, they shoot straight up for 100 feet before branching. That's a lot of clean, fine boards.

But what I just noticed today among the specimens that have a bit more space around them, is that their bark shows signs of the tree limbs that grew, and broke off, as the tree aged. Stacked in a line climbing the sides of these trees are faint tracings of arcs, like boarded up gateways of long-ago fairy kingdoms. The mundane, almost bored, familiarity I had been feeling toward my abundance of my American tulip trees transformed into awe at the sight of this cascade of archways.

It reminded me that though we too shed bits of our former selves, they are never fully gone. We carry their tracings as markings upon our souls (and sometimes as scars upon our bodies!), recalling the adventure of our former dreams, or foolishness.

Such is the gift of pausing while Staying at Home. Getting to know (better) the trees and bushes in your yard or neighborhood could be rewarding past-time while you stay at home. Tree and leaf identification books can be found at almost any library. Friends can be an unexpected source of wisdom. So can the internet.

Seeing the variability of the same species can be awesome. When grown in clusters, as we noted, the tulip poplar grows tall and stately with no branches, for almost 100 feet. Yet when standing alone, often as a decorative specimen, its branches can flow down near to the very base. I knew nothing of this until I moved to this house. And even then it has been a slow self-education. (Who knew that the nectar from the flowers of the tulip poplar serve as a major source of honey in the Appalachian area?)

Okay, maybe it is just me. But instead of my trees feeling like strangers, like the neighbors down the block whose names I don't know, the trees are now part of my home. That is a nice reward for staying at home.