Ask Not What You Can Do For Global Warming...

Here it is, October 18 and I'm still hauling in tomatoes. Like, hundreds.

Last weekend, when it was obvious that the first frost was on its way, I went out to glean all of the green tomatoes I could find. I figured that there would be a few that we could set in the window until they ripened. It took me five trips to bring them all in and still there were a bunch on the vines. Not just green ones, but big fat, red ones ready to eat.

It isn't just tomatoes, either. The basil was still alive, and the rosemary looked positively robust. I chopped the basil down to an inch of it's life, and cut the rosemary down to half. The strawberries -- strawberries! -- were producing like they never did this summer. There were six little, tiny berries on the vine, each packing a wallop of flavor. And folks, in Colorado in October, I picked two huge, ripe cantaloupe.

I covered the plants this week to keep the frost from them. I had no time to get to them all week, but this morning I went out to see if everything survived. The basil was touched, but still fragrant, and everything else was still going strong. It took me three trips to bring in the tomatoes and I can't tell you how heartsick I was to find that I'd missed quite a few red ones last Saturday. Those tomatoes had over ripened and were squishy, but then there were others that were perfect, ready to eat off of the vine and perfectly red all the way through.

I've been spending a good part of my Saturday mornings these last few weeks chopping up tomatoes and freezing them for the winter. I dried the rosemary and basil for a few days in the fridge and they, too, went into the freezer. I'm wondering how long I can keep the tomatoes going by just covering them with our old sheets. It's going to be almost 80 today here. I know that we have always had beautiful Indian summers here, but I think the climate crisis is affecting Colorado. Calderoj and I are turning into urban farmers. Our tomato plants might just feed us through the winter.

Urban Wildlife

Yesterday as I was leaving for work I witnessed an extraordinary event. As I slammed shut the front door, I heard the flapping of tremendous wings. When I looked up, I saw a large bird flying away with something white in its talons. It was a hawk, and when I looked toward the green across the street and saw the hundreds of white feathers strewn across the lawn, I knew that the hawk had killed one of the neighborhood pigeons.

The hawk landed on a fence at the end of the block, and dropped the white bird. I walked across the street to the scene of the killing and saw in the middle of that patch of white feathers six feet in diameter, newly spilled, red, red blood.

The hawk stayed on the fence for a long time. It was still there even after I went back inside to report the carnage to Calderoj. I drove by it, stopped, backed up, and attempted to take a picture of it with my phone. But it just stayed there, guarding its prize.

Calderoj reports that a dead, headless pigeon was on the ground next to the fence when he walked by on the way to the bus. Apparently, there was no hawk in sight.

Adam Smith's Invisibility Cloak

The financial crisis is the invisible hand giving us a slap down.

Renowned Social Sciences Magazine Makes Several Literary Allusions

The Economist makes three literary allusions in its September 20th edition. On page 19, in an article on the state of global finance today, can be found two headings taken from Yeats "The Second Coming," "The blood-dimmed tide," and "The centre cannot hold." But the real beauty of these headings is how they tie to the front cover, which is the crisis imagined as a "widening gyre."

Garden

So. Having dropped off a bunch of clothes that I never wear, I was walking out of the consignment shop today and I saw that it was raining. I was so surprised that I thought in French, "La mousson a arrive." For it is 17 July, and it was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and up until then the day had been oppressively hot. But the rain was cool, and in the great, front-range tradition, lasted for about five minutes.

Something about it inspired me, though. On my way to my next errand I remembered that there is a small public garden just next to the amusement park and just off the bike path that goes along the river. I have wanted to have a look at it for a while, but I never made a time, and whenever I am passing by it seems that the garden is closed -- it closes at 5pm each day, a travesty if you ask me. The hours just before the sun goes down are the best times for walking in gardens. I had twenty minutes.

Centennial Gardens was designed and is maintained by the Denver Botanic Gardens. It is laid out in a formal style, and the signs in the park refer to Versailles and to Kensington Gardens. However, the designers have taken care to use native plants or species that do not take up much water. The hedges are made of native fernwood and mountain mahogany. One section is comprised of lavender plants (and, it looks like, bees), and one has huge rose bushes. Instead of cypress, there are juniper.

The gardens are laid out in nine equal squares, with a colonnade stretching down most of the east side of the garden, and bosques of linden on the north and the south sides, respectively. The linden smell wonderful. I walked through the whole garden, then sat underneath the colonnade and enjoyed a rare 5pm breeze.

For the most part I was the only one in the garden. I saw several groups of people stop in and look from the front, but they left quickly, I think to ride the roller coaster. The only other people in the garden were a middle school-aged couple, the girl sitting literally astride the boy, who lay in the grass under the lindens. When I walked by them, they looked at me with huge, sheepish grins. Then, for the rest of the time I was in the garden, they kept looking over toward me, as if I were some figure of authority from whom they were trying to hide their bad behavior. "When is she going to leave?" They looked like they were saying. "It is irritating trying to have to pretend to be doing nothing." Such behavior is archetypal in gardens, I know.

Of Moths and Fashionistas

This past Spring I had a fabric moth problem. One day I just started seeing these tiny moths flying through my closet and I knew what I was up against. A few years ago moths had eaten through most of my cashmere and my response this time was sort of like the Bush administration response to 9/11: total war. I even demonized them. They were not an axis of evil, but they were certainly the Horseman of Pestilence.

I'm against mothballs -- you can't sell them in California because they're that toxic and not just to moths -- so I did everything else I could to make the environment in my home inhospitable to moths. I dry cleaned and laundered everything. I lined every sweater box with cedar and lavender. I encased the vulnerable clothing in plastic. I did this even as J was laughing at my quixotic efforts. Then I encased his jackets in plastic, as well.

It was months before we stopped seeing the little, plain creatures flying through the house the way they do -- like Woodstock on his way to see Snoopy. Each time I saw them I would seethe.

For a long time I couldn't figure out where the infestation was. I finally narrowed it down to the coat closet. However, I have not seen moths in a while.

The other day I was in the coat closet rearranging the towels and blankets when I found a dead fabric moth. The moths themselves do not eat holes in cloth, it is their larvae that cause the damage. The moths do not eat, instead they stay alive just long enough to lay their eggs and then die. Fabric moth larvae can only get adequate nutrition if they live on natural, animal hair-based fabrics like wool, alpaca, and fur itself. This moth laid her eggs on one of our cotton towels. I saw the tiny, glistening eggs not far away from the moth, whose body was so dry that one of her wings was barely attached. The cotton would not give the larvae the kind of food it needed, but she had no other place to lay the eggs -- all of the wool was packed in plastic. If that isn't tragic enough, I knew that the eggs would be destroyed as soon as I put the towel in the wash.

I was staring at a triumph of Darwinian proportions. I had done the things I was put on earth to do -- preserved my home and my ability to produce offspring. I was the fittest.