Crisis of confidence

I've started four blog posts since Oct. 31, and have yet to complete one. I reach a certain pathetic point and say, who cares? And then ordinary life calls me away from the computer.
Years ago when I wrote a weekly newspaper column, I often had the same self-defeating thought but had to forge ahead regardless of everyday demands. There's a lot to be said for deadlines. Dogs resulted, but I occasionally produced something that pleased me. Reading over those columns 25 years later, too many make me cringe. Others make me a proud of what I was once able to think and write. I'm older now. Can I still do it?
My everyday life is focused on gardening and cooking, much of which is linked to my 36-year marriage to PK; keeping fit with yoga and cycling; fulfilling my requirement for heavy backbeat music and vigorous dancing; shepherding my sweet almost-94-year-old mother through her last years; keeping up a part-time writing/editing business; maintaining precious friendships; traveling when possible, and sustaining a supportive role for the Women's Crisis Support Team, a domestic violence non profit in Grants Pass. What comes gasping at the end is artistic expression via blog writing and photography. I also dream of textile art (why else have I saved all those fabric scraps and wine sleeves?)  drawing, painting, and putting together creative projects on behalf of our adorable first grandson, Noah Preston Korbulic, nearly six months old.

That's him. Noah. Most adorable Duck fan ever. 

Our two grown sons, who were once at the dead center of my universe, are still prominent but they have edged into outer orbits with their own so-interesting lives to be followed from afar. Electronic telescopes work. Email, Facebook, blogs, text msgs,  occasional phone conversations, and the too-infrequent in-person visits that always surprise and delight me. Who is this handsome young father, husband, and about-to-be Ph.D? And the extreme athlete adventurer whose current African expedition keeps me awake at night?
The young father will soon learn that his child is not his for long, but belongs to the universe; and the wandering son will know, if he doesn't already, the truth of this Stephen Crane poem:


          A man said to the universe. 

"Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, 

"The fact has not created in me 

A sense of obligation." 

And that brings me back to my universe: the simple little plot of Earth that PK and I temporarily claim as our own. It is 3.5 acres of Rogue Valley bottomland. We live in a modest but much-loved home that we started building 30+ years ago. The soil here is sticky fertile black clay, but through the years we've reclaimed a sizable piece, and with mountains of organic matter, have turned it into sweet friable soil that releases an intoxicating fragrance when turned over, and produces, with much toil and love, food that sustains us. This piece of land is small. But it belongs to us, to PK in one way and to me in another. So let's get to that.

These late-season serranos, jalapenos and assorted others were harvested earlier this month. Peppers are PK's labor of love. I love them too, but am glad he plants the seeds and nurtures the seedlings and weeds, thins, harvests, and makes the pepper flakes and cans the sauces and so much more. 

After having declared the summer harvest over and done several times, last on November 13, I was delighted to discover the world's sweetest cherry tomatoes still ripening in a once-hidden corner of the garden. I picked a berry basket and declared it quits on summer harvest. On Nov. 18th, I ventured  into the rain and wind, and little golden nuggets beckoned again. Unbelievably, there was another basket to pick! See how jewel-like the universe can become when one is focused on an infinitesimal patch of Earth? Well, I guess you had to be there. 

These are the last- harvested round and paste tomatoes, Nov. 8 Many years the garden is inundated by this time.

And these are Roma types that have been ripening inside since early November. 

Tomato removal in progress. So many green ones didn't reach maturity, but we still had the most prolific tomato harvest in memory. All those green ones on the vine will go into the pile in the next picture.

These are spent vegetable plants tossed into a thick row in the field outside the garden. PK will run the tractor/mower over to grind them into mulch. We won't put this stuff back into the garden, however, because we don't want to reintroduce any bugs or diseases.

This is the garden as it looks now, more or less. It's to-bed for the winter. But beneath the white permeable cloth are broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, and cabbage plants. The cold frame has been placed in front of the house, and in late December (when we return from a trip to Costa Rica) we'll plant spinach, lettuce and chard. The elevated rows are heaped with compost (grass clippings, leaves, kitchen waste, manure) that brewed in the trenches all summer. At the right rear, covered with a layer of straw, is next year's garlic crop. Beyond that, tattered prayer flags that need to be replaced. And beyond the garden fence, the future home of bovine and porcine types that PK fancies will join us.
 Nite nite, garden. See ya in February, when I'll be cutting kale, weeding garlic, and planting beets and peas. Unless the uncaring universe plucks me up and sets me down elsewhere. You never know, do you?

Real work and paid work

Since returning from almost a month of vacation in August, I've felt pressured and pushed. Poor me! I have paid-work projects, which I take seriously and try to do my best work in the shortest time. I separate my paid writing/editing work, for which I charge an hourly fee, from my home-and-garden-work, for which I am paid in fresh fruit and veggies, and in the winter, fruitful trips to the freezer and canning cupboard. Also, I like roving the garden with birds flitting about and sunlight glancing off the squash plant leaves and lovely aromas wafting off the roses.

Then I have body-maintenance work, which is the time I must put in to keep my aging self functioning well. This involves bike rides that must be either really hard and uphill, even if brief (35-45 minutes), or more moderate but longer - 30-35 miles. I'm about to get out there for the arduous but lung-and-muscle-building pull up Birdseye Creek Road, my own personal outdoor-workout studio. (In the winter I often walk/trot up this hill.) I also have to go to yoga class twice a week.

Yoga is key to balance, strength, and flexibility. Because of yoga, I can do the splits, remember?  My latest body-maintenance-aging-denial activity is a class called Cardio Sculpt at the Knockout Dance Studio in Grants Pass, which I attend once weekly, and once even stayed the next hour for a Zumba dance class, which, of course, I love. I am the oldest person in Cardio Sculpt by about 20 years. The music is loud and electronic and, of course, I love it. Zumba is more age-friendly and there are several women who may be close to my age, at least in their fifties.

Well, anyway. I'm thinking a lot these days about what I have to do and what I want to do. Let's say that yoga and dancing fall into the later category.

Summer garden's last gasp

It isn't pretty out there in the cold mist of the garden, but since we haven't yet had a hard frost, some summer veggies are holding their ground, mainly tomatoes and zucchinis. Now we know who our friends really are.  But fall/winter gifts are coming, and we look forward to some tasty and nutritious winter salads. The work is winding down!
For now the garden tasks include: processing the remaining tomatoes, about 50 pounds that are now ripening on the  dining room table; making serrano sauce out of the peppers languishing in the back porch,  chopping/freezing the remaining pepper varieties, then cleaning and storing garlic harvested in August and now endangered in the moist damp of the garage. That's it!

Tomatoes and peppers harvested October 27, 2010. Late!

A season-transition harvest photo: the last of the zukes, but fall/winter chard and lettuce are just getting started. 

I'm grateful for all the bounty—which required a lot of hard work—but so happy that harvest is all but ended and we can kick back for several months and pull great food out of the freezer, the pantry, and the winter garden/cold frame and just sit around and read and start thumbing through the spring catalogs. (That "sitting around and reading" part was a big lie, but written with complete faith that someday we will both be able to relax enough to drop into a chair mid-day and read for a couple of hours. How old do we need to be before we're really "retired"?)

Truthfully, I look at the spot where I stand in my kitchen to process the garden and just generally cook, and wonder how many hours, over the past 30 years, I've been anchored in that same corner chopping, measuring, seasoning, tasting, drinking wine, and wondering. Wondering why.

Most of the time I'm in a Zen space. Chop chop, peel peel, sip sip. I enjoy on a primal level the colors, textures, and perfumes of the fresh foods beneath my knife and in my much-esteemed Cuisinart food processor, a treasured work-reducing friend. Lately, since the family is down to the two of us (with occasional extended visits from world-traveling-expedition-kayaking son, Chris, ) I question whether all this food production is necessary. Why can't we just go out to eat? Or buy deli food or something.

But crap. I know that I'm ruined, habituated to fresh food lovingly prepared, and PK is too. So while we can still plant and hoe, harvest and shell, chop and saute, it'll be cooking fresh, and we'll be eating incredibly well. Maybe we'll get over it. But probably not.

October garden bounty

It's unusual for gardeners in Southern Oregon to have summer-like conditions in mid-October that result in August-like harvests. But I'm not complaining! Well, maybe I am. Today I harvested about 100 more pounds of tomatoes, lots of peppers, a few zukes, a handful of eggplants, and enough cukes to make a couple more sour cream cucumber/onion salads. The basil has succumbed to light frost, the corn is long gone, the eggplant now depleted, and the tomatillos never made it to fruition.The winter garden, however, is looking good and we know that lettuce, kale, chard, broccoli, cabbage, and brussel sprouts are in the near future. For now, we'll luxuriate in summer's long harvest.

Jalapenos, red & green, make everything better!

The weather forecast says that winter will arrive Friday (cold rain) and stick around for five days. And it's all downhill from there. So while it lasts, I celebrate the garden's fecundity and the resulting gourmet fare.....every-day amazing feasts.  If you'd like recipes for any of these, I'm happy to accommodate. Just respond in comments or email me at mkorbulic@gmail.com. Spaghetti squash lasagna is especially deluxe.

Spaghetti squash lasagna. Amped-up flavor without pasta.

 Potatoes, zukes, onionx, garlic, and lots of peppers stir-fry.

Here's what the garden looks like these days. A sorry sight, except for the tomatoes ripening beneath dying vines, the frost-protected peppers holding forth and still ripening, and the winter veggies beginning to flourish amidst the mulch.

69 days 8 hours underground - Such a big deal!

The Chilean miners were trapped nearly underground for 69 days 8 hours. To quote a Newsweek online article.

To be sure, some of the potential problems for the men have easy fixes: a 3.19-inch-wide supply line provides them with food, water, and nutritional supplements such as vitamin D, which can replace the nutrients they are not getting from sunlight. But the physical and psychological toll of the darkness is harder to combat.

I do not dispute the horrific nature of being trapped underground in total darkness for any period of time, let alone more than two months. It's terrible. But these guys had a lifeline. They had food and communication with the outside world, and knew that their loved ones were anxiously hovering above.They had hope, and lots of it. They got organized. They were amazing.
And they were foresighted. They pledged to share equally in any and all profits from their ordeal. They realized with was coming.  Movies, books, trips, cash awards. Their entrapment could be the best thing that happened to these guys for surviving a compelling drama.

The media attention? You've seen it non stop. This could-have-been-tragedy became prime-media material because up until the last guy was on-top, one of them could have died in the claustrophobic tube in which they journeyed to the earth's crust, and we would have seen the resulting dead body on live television. It was comparable to when Baby Jessica (1987?) was trapped in the well and international media was brought to its knees in gratitude for a riveting story about which thousands of outlets reported second-by-second.

We all love a good story and we really want the best results, but just like in car races, we would not be averse to carnage, much as we might deny it.

Speaking of carnage, I don't have any pictures, but kids die anonymously every day because they don't have enough to eat, or can't get enough to eat because of cleft palates, or contract preventable diseases such as polio, malaria, or simple dehydration because of diarrhea. Few people pay attention, and the media is mostly absent. It's difficult to connect with these kids because we don't see their faces, except in those compelling ads about cleft palates, and there are so many of them!  I'm not even bringing in the multitudes of suffering adults. To have all these buried-alive miners was just an amazing gift to the media! It was so so easy. It's much harder focusing on silent and mostly invisible suffering.

I'm just going to draw attention to one kid, one rescue. I have her photo but I don't have her permission. So trust me, this is a real story. There was once an Indian baby left at an Indian orphanage when she was just days old because she was disabled.  Her young mother lived on the streets and couldn't possibly cope. So she gave her up.

This little girl wasn't in imminent danger of dying, but of living a low-level existence pretty much without hope. She'd have to leave the orphanage at some point, and then what? Live on the streets as a beggar? Probably. She has cerebral palsy. At the time we (her adoptive mother's friends) were brought into this small drama, she was two years old. She lived mostly in her crib vying with others in the crowded orphanage for a scrap of attention.

Her adoptive mother, a Stanford grad attorney and person of magnificent sensibilities and pretty-much-ignored disabilities, had toured India solo and saw the kids on the streets and in the orphanages and decided she wanted to help. Help just one. As a single person, she applied to adopt  a child with disabilities. Her family's cautionary warnings were shoved aside in favor of her heart's leading. It took two wrenching years. But finally she ended up with this child, by then more than four years old, although her weight was more like she was two, and she couldn't even begin to walk. Her little feet were curled under and her toes were clenched. She spoke not a word of English.

She howled for the first few days she was in her new home in Portland, Oregon. Now it's nearly two years later. She's had surgeries and therapy and walks! Well, she hurtles. But she navigates one way or another and speaks perfect English, and she has a future. Her education is assured. Health care is not an issue. This is a child who was spared from dragging herself around Indian streets in a life of begging. She has a loving extended family. I hope one day she will recognize this.

This hasn't been easy for the adoptive mom or her family, which has been incredibly supportive.
But back to those Chilean miners. Thank God they're safe, and thanks to the amazing technology and will that brought them to safety.

But let's not forget other rescues, those quiet but Herculean efforts which require incredible courage and strength and get little, if any, recognition. I'm pretty sure that if someday this little girl looks at her adoptive mom and says, Thank you, Mom. I love you, it will be better than all the media deals accruing to the miners.