Finally, revenge

It’s been a long time since I’ve pushed a stroller. Yet still I recall with joy the times when my toddler sons would climb into their gray tandem and I’d push them through our suburban neighborhood. Often we’d make a stop at one of the area ponds to toss stale bread to ducks and geese that congregated there; that’s about all the exposure to wildlife a suburbanite gets – ducks, geese, and the occasional errant deer gnawing on local shrubbery.

It was interesting to see how suburban waterfowl set aside innate fear for humans when doing so meant large clumps of soft food would be scattered near their webbed feet. The ducks would get aggressive with one another in pursuit of the bread and, sometimes, the geese would act aggressively toward us. The boys and I learned quickly to keep a safe distance from the geese; unlike the ducks, geese would bite the hands that were feeding them.

This wariness of geese grew within my young sons to become a phobia. Pretty soon, any scary place in the home – the basement, for instance – became scary because it was populated by geese. By the time my boys neared the age of three, they’d convinced themselves there was no going downstairs. Whenever I’d try to get them to go downstairs, they’d stand near the top step and with tears in their eyes, proclaiming: “Geese! Geese!”

I tried to explain how they were just imagining; there weren’t real geese in our basement. But logic was pointless. The geese existed; I just wasn’t seeing them.

One day, I decided I needed to see these geese in order to eradicate them from our home. I grabbed a grocery bag and a boy, and together we headed downstairs. “Show me the geese, because I’m going to throw them away,” I said to my son. He quivered and pointed to an empty spot near the window. “There,” he said. I walked over to the spot, wrapped my arm around air, lifted his imaginary goose, and put it into the bag. “Are there more?” I asked. There were, about six of them, all which I carefully lifted and placed into the bag.

When I’d finished clearing the basement of the imaginary geese, which for weeks had threatened my young sons’ security, I closed up the bag (the empty bag) and walked it out to the trash bin. We never had a goose problem in our house after that but we gained a wonderful story to add to our children’s life narrative.

Now that the boys are adults, they are reminded about the time scary geese inhabited their imaginations (and our house) whenever they see a flock of geese overhead. For years, I thought the act of carrying all the geese to the curb in a brown paper bag was the end of their disdain for geese.

I was wrong. Yesterday, these pictures showed up in my email inbox.

Edelweiss, Edelweiss

Edelweiss is a well-known flowering plant native to the Alpine region of Europe. The flower derives its name from the German words edel, which means noble, and weiß, which means white. (Note: the “w” is pronounced like “v,” thus the plant, phonetically pronounced, sounds like edel-vice). Both the leaves and the flowers of the Edelweiss plant are covered with tiny white hairs. This gives the plant an almost wooly appearance, suitable, I suppose, for thriving in the most inaccessible areas of the high mountain region. Edelweiss is the symbol for mountaineering in Slovenia and widely-regarded as the unofficial flower of Switzerland.

In 1980, grape breeder Elmer Swenson, oftentimes called the Godfather of the Minnesota wine industry, introduced his first cold hearty grape – it is an early-ripening table grape also suitable for winemaking. It makes a sweet, Riesling-style white wine. Swenson named the grape Edelweiss.

While you won’t find an Edelweiss plant growing anywhere near Four Cedars Farms, beginning next Spring, you’ll see Edelweiss grapes growing en masse just beyond our driveway.

We chose Edelweiss as one of two cash-crop varieties because of its use in wine blending, its disease resistance, its hardiness and because it ripens earlier than the other varieties we plan to grow, which will spread the burden of harvesting several tons of grapes over more than one weekend.

The Edelweiss...

Your life story: It's a work in progress

Next month, I’ll be speaking to a group of women business professionals on the topic of preserving life stories. A prerequisite for giving such a presentation is that I provide a bio to be used as an introduction. It was to that task that my attention had turned when it occurred to me that it just might be easier to write my own obituary.

This introductory bio, after all, requires that I position myself as an expert, someone uniquely qualified to expound on a topic such as writing one’s personal story. It’s not that I can’t establish such authority; I can. But the whole process strikes me as about as interesting as drafting a resume, or worse, a budget.

But an obituary bypasses the need to establish credentials and gets to life’s essence; it cuts to the chase. It can and should be all about the story, which when you take away the living, breathing, deadline meeting, sometimes running in circles part of a life, is all we can really leave behind because our assets get divvied up, our bodies decay and the soul has a forwarding address. Sure, an obituary can include a life’s highpoints – its credentials, if that’s how you prefer to define highpoints. But it can do more. A well-written, especially self-written obituary can be our best opportunity to reveal to the world a work-in-progress life as we conceive it to be in our wildest – or most earnest – dreams.

It can also be the best opportunity to reveal such a life to ourselves when we’re too busy or distracted or frustrated to recognize what lies in the land next door – a place we call our potential. Most of us don’t want to think about death and so the thought of writing our own obituary can be distasteful. But it might be a worthwhile exercise in life examination to think about how you'd feel about losing all those things we push off to "someday" should this day brings those hopes to an end.

So give it a try. If your life ended now, right now, your obituary would probably include a line like this: At the time of death, [insert your name here] was … .

Now write your ending. If you don’t like the way your life reads, rewrite it – while you still have the opportunity.

I'm busy, but never too busy to say thank you

Gratefulness is what makes the heart great.

I met a man once who told me he sets a half hour aside each day in order to write thank you notes. His ritual accomplished two things, he said. It allowed the recipients of his cards to understand how they touched him, but more importantly, it forced him to look around him for reasons, beyond the obvious ones, for which to be grateful.

Today, I'm using this post to tell all who stop by today -- I'm thankful you stopped. Please come again.

How did we get here?

I have a colleague who emigrated from Africa in 2006. Our work takes us out of our suburban office on occasion and because he doesn’t know his way around the area yet, I always drive. He’s very eager to get out and see his new hometown; we’ve ventured to downtown Minneapolis, to St. Paul, to Rochester and even to Western Wisconsin.

Yet even this orientation hasn’t been enough to muster in him the courage to explore the area in his own car. In the 13 months since arriving, he’s memorized exactly two routes -- the one from his home to our office and the one from our office to his cousin’s house.

The roads are very confusing, he tells me. “And people drive like maniacs.”

Well, America hasn't cornered the market on maniacal drivers. But our roads can be confusing – especially the way they are labeled. Can anyone explain, for instance, why there are different icons used for identifying county, state and federal roads? Does it really matter to a driver if the county, state or federal government paid for the road? And think about how we, who’ve been traveling roads for a lifetime, refer to certain spans – the Crosstown, for example. Is there a sign anywhere near Hwy. 62 that uses the term “Crosstown?” Finally, how does one explain the interstate highway system to a native of the Third World? And if an “I” before a number indicates a highway is part of the “interstate” system, how do we explain I-394, I-494 and I-694?

I can sympathize with this man. The roads in the city can be very confusing to a newcomer. Worse, they are very congested.

It would have been so much easier for him, I think, if he had settled in the country. Out here, there are only two kinds of roads – paved and gravel. And the distance between maniacs is much greater.

Stepping between seasons in September

Our adventure in gardening ended Saturday thanks to an early killing frost. Of course, the frost didn’t do anything to the weeds that had invaded the space. Yesterday, for the last time this season, I stepped through the garden gate with my ice cream pail and collected what was left – a dozen tomatoes, a few small peppers, a touch of basil and some stems of parsley. Particularly sad was how the frost decimated the vibrant morning glories that just last week had filled the northeast corner of the garden and made for an attractive resting spot for a butterfly.

On a more positive note, the grass seed in the vineyard is beginning to grow. Each morning, the black dirt grows increasingly green and fuzzy. We haven’t had appreciable rain since we seeded, so the germination has occurred solely from the moisture provided by dew. The forecast this week calls for rain, though, which should give the seedlings a boost.

Late Friday, there was a lot of waterfowl activity on the lake. It was too dark to see what was going on across the lake, but I could tell by the movement of water, there were plenty of wings a-flapping.