Posts Tagged ‘privilege’
Just Stuff
When on an expedition having nothing to do with society’s news of the day, one finds things of lesser significance can have a more dramatic impact than they otherwise might. With my mind protected from the gloom of current events during the last few months, I’ve found myself noticing more details about my immediate surroundings during daily walks.
The other day, I noticed some of our trees with an abundance of new shoots sprouting from the lower trunks. My intuition told me the trees were reacting to something, and when I figured out they were all ash trees, I knew what that was. The emerald ash borer is taking a toll on our region, and it seems our turn has come. I learned the new growth is called Epicormic Sprouts, revealing a tree’s effort to survive stress.
In addition, closer inspection revealed birds are chipping away at the outer bark to get at insects beneath. This gives the tree trunks an orange hue that makes them easy to spot from a distance. I was pointing it out to Cyndie yesterday, and we counted a handful of the largest affected ashes. I’ll be watching to see how long it takes them to die.
Meanwhile, we will continue to nurture new growth showing up in our oak, maple, elm, poplar, and spruce & pine tree populations.
This time of year, it is easier to spot the trees that have broken or tipped and are hung up in surrounding branches. The large poplar in this photo is a doozy. That break is probably 10ft(3m) or more up from the ground. I won’t be taking a chainsaw to this challenging widow-maker.
Several trees in the vicinity of that one broke off at a similar height. None of the others got hung up. Must have been an interesting gust of wind to cause that.
A couple of snow flurries ago, our driveway ended up looking rather bovine in appearance.
I gotta tell ya; it’s a lot easier to laugh or be mesmerized by the crazy things I see around me every day while on this expedition of avoiding that which would break my heart and spirit were I to give it a chance. I admit to feeling guilty about having the privilege that enables me to turn away while others must look straight at it all and will be receiving the brunt of abuses underway.
Even as I try to ignore it, there are blips of evidence that get through with hints of difficulties looming for the world.
I’m looking at our stressed forest and laughing at our second snow-starved winter in a row. I’m dreaming of a new shade sail for the horses and marveling over how the four Thoroughbreds are evolving as a herd of rescued former racers and broodmares. Just local stuff must be the focus right now for my fragile mind.
We will be voting with all our might at our upcoming Wisconsin election.
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Less Hot
The weather alerts that keep pinging my phone warn of excessive heat. Sounds ominous. Medium heat would be tolerable, but excessive? Yikes. We better be very careful. Except, the breeze coming off the lake this morning is about as perfect as a person could ask.
The filtered sunlight with dancing shadows of tree leaves projected on the logs of the sunporch wall augment the ambiance of serenity to a wonderful degree.
If I wasn’t inclined to think about how much the horses at home will be sweating today and Asher thrashing against his itchy skin, my life today would be downright heavenly. Comparing my usual grimy activity of constantly groundskeeping 20 rural acres to our getaways north where I laze around luxuriously highlights the significant difference in my experiences.
There is no lack of appreciation for this privilege on my part.
In fact, were I to imagine a time when Cyndie and I no longer chose to live in the situation where we needed to do so much work to maintain Wintervale, I’d gladly lobby to become the caretaker of her family’s property on this lake.
That might be the excessive heat warning talking. Check with me in the midst of a January deep freeze to see if that visualization of a possible future still stands up.
We are enjoying conditions that feel a lot less hot than what the weather app warnings keep beeping about. In today’s blurb by Paul Douglas in the Strib, I see that Saudi Arabia saw a midnight temperature index of 134°F when the dew point was 95.
Hot conditions, like so many other things in this world, are relative, aren’t they?
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For Granted
My perspectives of our surroundings have shifted back in time due to my frequent visits of late to archives of local newspapers published in the 1860s/70s. When I pedal my bike past farms, I find myself thinking about the first family to start clearing that land and how the surroundings must have looked in their eyes.
While having breakfast beside the raging Cannon River last Thursday, I tried to imagine what impression that threatening-looking torrent would have presented to people in a time when there were no bridges.
It occurred to me how much I take for granted the ease with which we traverse rivers now.
Think about immigrants who found life so difficult where they lived that they would cross an ocean with what little they could carry seeking new opportunities. Somehow, they make their way across half the North American Continent to a frontier with little infrastructure and come to a river that looks like this one.
They’d already accomplished heroic feats to make it so far, I marvel over how anyone could maintain sanity in the face of each new challenge.
If I get hungry, I walk to our refrigerator or look in a cupboard for instant gratification. If the weather is bad, I close windows, shut doors, and adjust the comfort level on our thermostat.
For every gripe I come up with about modern life, there are innumerable conveniences I am taking for granted.
My big plans for getting in some hours on my bike and using our trimmers to reclaim our trails from overgrowth yesterday did not come to fruition. As the wind shoved my car all over the road on our way to a brunch date in Edina, I appreciated that I wasn’t trying to push my bike pedals into the gales. We returned home with plenty of time to tackle any morsel of the much-needed trimming.
I opted for a nap in my hammock instead. I’m not convinced my body isn’t still working on clearing out the remnants of viral invaders.
One thing I don’t take for granted is the luxury I enjoy in choosing how and when to work on our never-ending “to-do” list in maintaining our property and when I’d prefer to rest instead.
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Feeling Privileged
Waking to news that a new armed attack has occurred, unprecedented in its scale, between Israel and Palestine is an unsettling start to the day. I cherish every moment that there are no military battles occurring where I live. Logic would reveal that none of us are immune to unrest that can erupt anywhere at any time, but I feel privileged for the decades I’ve lived free of armed conflicts.
There is no comparison to threats to human life but yesterday we came upon a scene of destruction in the labyrinth that shocked us. It’s wild to discover evidence of an incident we hadn’t seen coming.
That tree broke in so many places when it struck the rocks it must have made quite a sound. It surely would have been shocking if we had been nearby when it fell.
Another thing that has me feeling especially privileged is how easily I was able to get flu and COVID-19 booster shots. Last weekend, Cyndie worked the web and found herself an appointment in Red Wing, MN after learning our local clinic did not have stock of the COVID vaccine yet.
Our clinic in River Falls thought they would have more by Thursday or Friday. As I was driving to town yesterday to pick up a battery I had ordered from an auto parts store, I realized I had forgotten to call the clinic. Since it was just down the street from where I was, I decided to just stop and ask in person about the status of their vaccines.
“Yes, we have the vaccines,” the receptionist told me. “Would you like to make an appointment?”
I responded in the affirmative.
“Are you available today?”
Affirmative.
After a minute or two of simple questions and her typing and clicking, she said, “You can take a seat and someone will come for you shortly.”
A few minutes later I had my shots and was back in the lobby for a 15-minute wait to ensure I suffered no allergic reaction.
How come that was so easy? What did I do to earn such royal service? No hoops to jump through, no days of waiting, and no out-of-pocket expenses.
One guess I have is that showing up in person helped to pave the way, but she could have told me any day in the coming week and I would have accepted that.
Whatever it was that contributed to my good luck, I recognize the privilege I enjoy to live where I do and have access to the services readily available to me.
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Our Turn
It arrived with a vengeance yesterday. It is our turn to cope with Earth’s new reality of oppressive heat waves. Tropical dew point temperatures push the high heat to feel ten degrees hotter and land us well into three-digit heat index numbers.
As with every weather extreme, the horses just seem to roll with it. We left fans on high under the overhang and they didn’t expend any more effort than necessary all day long.
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Wearing masks to give their eyes a break from the never-ending harassment from flies, they stayed in the shade where the attack of solar energy was ameliorated by a degree or two. Well, except for Mia. When we showed up to serve their evening feeding, she was out grazing in the back pasture all by herself.
Cyndie decided to walk down and offer Mia a pan in the shade which she promptly accepted. It was uncomfortably hot but not intolerable with pockets of cooler air wafting out from under the shade trees on an occasional breeze.
Asher came out with us and pounced into the woods to force squirrels into hasty retreats to the highest branches above. When horses were tended to, Asher was more than happy to return with us to lie on the cool tile floor of our air-conditioned living space.
I took advantage of avoiding outdoor work by giving in to a delicious afternoon nap in the recliner. What a privileged life we live.
I shudder to comprehend how people in places where this kind of heat lasts for months deal with nights that don’t get cool. We went down to the barn just before sunset to close things up, turn off the fans, and remove fly masks but the heat had barely budged from the peak in the afternoon.
Light was sweating, which wasn’t visible when we fed them earlier. The heat of the day was still accumulating.
Our turn dealing with the blast furnace of this over-heating planet will be mercifully short. After today things will moderate a bit and by Saturday the forecast looks almost chilly in comparison.
The horses give me a sense that they understand this and use that superpower to bolster their impressive art of coping when conditions are just plain miserable.
Our retreat to the geothermally cooled house is a less impressive method of coping, but it is oh. so. effective.
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Admittedly Isolated
I’m home alone with the animals again this weekend and contemplating the incredible peacefulness and beauty that I enjoy the luxury of experiencing here every day. This morning the horses radiated peacefulness under a foggy wet blanket of sound-dampening air. It was Delilah who disrupted things every so often with her random barks of alarm over imagined threats that really don’t deserve to be barked at from my perspective.
As I methodically made my way around the paddocks to scoop up recent manure piles, my mind meandered through so many trials and tribulations that we aren’t facing.
Our country has not been invaded and bombed by a bordering nation that was pretending to be doing our people a favor. Our region has yet to be torched by wildfires or swamped by unprecedented flash flooding. Extremist politicians haven’t maliciously trafficked hapless immigrants to our doorstep. We are not experiencing a shortage of food or potable water. We are not struggling with the debilitations of long-COVID infection.
The much more benign burdens directly impacting me this day include two issues that aren’t happening as swiftly as I wish. I’m wondering if the technician who will splice our fiber optic cable at the base of the utility pole across the street from our driveway works on Saturdays. Nobody showed up by the end of the day yesterday even though the cable to our house was buried last Tuesday.
I’m also anxious to receive a promised bid from our favorite excavating business regarding the landscaping of the slopes on either side of our new driveway. We’ve decided the job is too big to accomplish on our own and will require a truckload of dirt they can provide. It’s been a week since he was here to discuss the issues.
It’s pretty easy for me to preach about having a positive attitude about how great it is to be alive when I reside in a sanctuary of natural beauty and affluent comforts. I am sensitive about boasting too assertively from our admittedly isolated circumstances in the world, but my perspective is coming from having successfully treated a depression that shadowed much of my earlier life.
Our daughter is enduring the stress of knowing a vulnerable adult who walked out of her music school before his father did and has now been missing for days. Our hearts ache for those who are suffering.
I walk through our woods to a soundtrack of calling birds and water droplets coming down from wet tree leaves, the autumn aromas of fallen leaves just beginning to become noticeable. The horses huff a big sigh as I show up to clean the area beneath the overhang and serve up their pans of feed.
What can I do but send the love I experience out into the universe to flow toward all who face difficulties that I struggle to fathom, recognizing the privilege of my isolation.
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Conflicting Thoughts
There’s a battle raging in the available space of my brain between the wonderful goodness all around us and the repeated failings of improvement where the needs are well known. We just heard an update on progress to vaccinate for COVID-19 that lamented the low percentage of the neediest people receiving shots, despite the advanced knowledge that this should be the priority. Even when there is broad public awareness of the need to get the first vaccinations to the communities most impacted by the virus, insufficient effort to make this come about leaves things to play out as usual with the advantage going to people of privilege.
It is a lot easier to talk about what “should” happen than it is to actually enact the changes needed to achieve high ideals.
Sounds a little like the way things always go in our governmental system. Two-party politics for passing legislation advancing the lofty goals of a nation results in a lot of sounding off but very little in the way of bringing lasting positive change. Progress is slow for the poor and disenfranchised citizens of our country.
We have passed the 1-year milestone since the pandemic took over all of our lives and Cyndie and I have thus far dodged illness. Others we know have not been so lucky, including some who are currently suffering symptoms. We are sending love to those of you experiencing the virus first-hand.
News reports announcing crazy-high numbers of small earthquakes in Iceland, combined with several other notable recent quakes around the planet suggest something big is about to go boom. It’s a strange threat to contemplate from our relatively stable geographic landscape.
A strong spring melt is underway at Wintervale and the chickens are thrilled over the ever-expanding “tillable” terrain becoming exposed again.
The south-facing slopes are free of snow but the rest of the forest is still covered like the surfaces of an old-fashioned freezer. Walking the trails is a fascinating demonstration of how much chill emanates from the icy carpet below.
Delilah loves to pause and rub her face in the snow-cone texture. Her head was all wet at the end of a walk yesterday from rolling in the slushy snow.
It’s incredibly calm and soothingly optimistic with the promise of spring unfurling right before our eyes. The animals all seem giddy and I guess that is contagious.
It’s a welcome contrast to the more unsettling thoughts looming.
Here’s to visions of the days ahead when COVID sufferers can come walk our trails, breathe the health of our forest air, and hang out with our chickens for a while.
We’ll send you home with fresh free-range eggs.
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Blasted Grill
For the amount of time I am stuck commuting on Interstate freeways, I should be grateful for the majority of hours I sneak by incident-free. My greatest challenge has been battling fatigue on the drive home in the afternoons. Beyond that, the number of times I have gotten caught in a backup caused by a crash or bad weather in the six years I’ve been commuting from Wisconsin can be counted on one hand.
I’ve rarely even witnessed incidents involving other vehicles occurring around me. I credit much of this good fortune to the off-peak hours I am usually on the road. My early morning departures did lead to a side-impact from a deer that got up close and personal with my driver-side door a year and a half ago, but overall the hazards of early-hours travel are offset by benefits of less actual traffic.
Yesterday morning, my luck ran out in the reduced visibility of early darkness when a pickup truck in front of me ran over a large, flat piece of debris that kicked up into the air so that it slammed into my grill at full freeway speed. In the split second available to consider my situation, I hoped it was mostly harmless light plastic because impact was inevitable.
By the sound it made, I knew it wasn’t light and I was immediately relieved that it had found the grill and not the hood or windshield in front of my face.
There was nowhere convenient to pull over and it was still completely dark outside so I simply continued the drive to work, arriving long after I’d already forgotten the incident had even happened. I walked inside, oblivious.
It wasn’t until I went back outside after the sun had come up, looking for the newspaper that hadn’t been delivered (again), that I suddenly remembered the incident and took time to inspect for damages.
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Aww HECK! The license plate frame (not my real numbers), the grill, and the plastic of the main front cracked and chipped!
On the way home from work, I stopped for a damage estimate and learned the headlight assembly was busted up, too. Do you know how expensive the new-fangled LED headlights that can shine around corners are? This one is almost $900.
I’m glad we saved so much money by fixing the deck ourselves this fall. Some of those savings will now be needed to pay the insurance deductible for auto body repair.
I’m a little ashamed to be whining about such luxury problems. At least I have a new car that will hold value if repairs are maintained. I also have money to afford the expense, even though that is not how I prefer to be spending it. I am able to sacrifice hours from the day-job to deal with the appointment of dropping the car off in 6 weeks and picking up a rental for the 4-days minimum to complete the repairs. I have insurance that includes coverage for rental car expenses.
I am paying attention to being privileged enough that this is what I’m inclined to whine about right now.
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Noticing Privilege
I stumbled upon an article yesterday that gobbled up my attention and hung on to it for much longer than I usually allow most politically charged stories to occupy my mind.
While I was being held prisoner to traffic on Interstate 94 last Thursday, I passed some of the mind-numbing, slow-rolling-brakelights time listening to Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement and a few Senator’s worth of questions and his responses (“responses” because sometimes they weren’t answers).
Some of what he said, and the raw emotion with which he said it, seemed pretty compelling. Having not had the opportunity to hear Christine Blasey Ford’s session, I had nothing to compare to his version of the issue. I figured he had a lock on the needed votes to be confirmed for a lifetime term on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Despite what I figured, my gut and my intuition were providing me with an alternative take.
Methinks he doth protest too much.
Reading Nathan J. Robinson’s very long and excruciatingly thorough Current Affairs exposé, “How We Know Kavanaugh is Lying” was incredibly validating of my suspicions.
One of the reasons this article was so compelling for me is that most of the evidence presented is taken directly from the words I heard spoken live on the radio. When analyzed in the way Kavanaugh’s statements are laid out in the article, his own words seem to sabotage his defense. Combined with how often he avoids answering potentially harmful questions, frequently with bizarre redirecting responses, my first impression of his pretty compelling argument was completely dashed.
I just don’t know how anyone could in good conscience vote to confirm his nomination at this point. However, given the state of this country’s political situation, I won’t be surprised if those intent on furthering their agenda will do anything to get him seated on the nation’s highest court.
Pondering that possibility yesterday riled me up something fierce. How could they?! It would be a travesty! We can’t let this happen!
That was when I received an insight that privilege was framing my outrage. In my moment of upset over the possible injustice of this man being allowed to serve despite the preponderance of likelihood he is not worthy, it occurred to me how often similar injustices have been thrust upon groups of people throughout this country’s history.
Over and over again. So often that they come to expect it. Why would it be any other way? Why would indigenous people of multiple tribal nations ever trust the US government? Why would women be surprised to find out they weren’t being treated equal to men? Why would people of color be surprised to find out voting district boundaries had been gerrymandered to influence election results against their best interests?
If the outcome of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination doesn’t go the way I think it should, I hope I am able to contain my outrage and maintain some dignity, despite the injustice.
Generations of good people have endured far worse for far longer and continued to hold their heads high and carry on with hope for better days.
I’m all for better days. I’m even going to hope for sooner than later.
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Relative Something 