Sometimes it seems I take one step forward and slide back two. Here I was hoping to replicate my Cheyenne veggie garden on my Wheatland property. Now something has happened that really sets me back. Someone ran into my Durango 4-wheel drive, an older car I was counting on to get me through snow drifts and muddy roads. The car is totaled, and insurance won't give me much for it. No injuries in either vehicle, thank goodness--but what am I to do, having only my little Toyota Prius left to dri... 
Paper read at EPA Haze Rule Hearing, July 17, 2013, in Cheyenne
Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, July 18, 2013,
In :
Reading Life
With Shimpei at a Sushi bar. Noriko took this pic.
As of February 20, the cows are gone. All of them. Walter says he's "out of the cow business." I know it saddens him, though he doesn't say much about it. As for his younger brother, who had entered the venture with him--who knows? The fact is, neither Walter's pasture nor my wheat field can sustain the herd, and the hay Walt bought in the fall is all eaten up.
When I moved to Wyoming to retire and help look after my granddaughter, I invested my assets in a wheat farm. At the time, it seemed a good thing. Wall Street had acquired a bad name. To grow wheat was a safer bet, surely, than going with a wildly fluctuating stock market? 
This book is made up of three lengthy yet fascinating essays that, along with his own travel, examine the wanderlust of certain writers he admires, past and present. First among them is Alexis Saint-Leger, aka Saint-John Perse, a French diplomat cum poet who in 1921 traveled from Bejing to Ulaanbaatar in what Christopher Merrill deems an "attempt to grasp life in its entirety" and which dovetailed into a book-length poem, Anabasis. Merrill's own 2007 travel take him from Syria to Jordan to I... 
Because I admire Bill McKibben's unflagging devotion to a cause I ponder often, I joined his group, 350.org and organized "Connect the Dots on Climate Impacts Day" on May 5. We had terrific speakers (not shown), though the turnout was disappointing. Nevertheless, I think it was a small good thing. 
What will their future be like? At the end of 2011, CO2 concentrations were roughly 392 ppm, writes Michael Mann. If current trends continue, we will have reached 450 ppm by 2030. This means we will have locked in a warming of the climate that's dangerous far beyond what we have thus far witnessed. Devastating sea level rise, more powerful hurricanes, more widespread drought, and increased weather extremes are the consequences, with terrible impacts on human life and health. We should have s... 
Terry Eagleton may be a Marxist, but he also tries to add to the "God Debate" via critique of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion via his 2009 Reason, Faith, and Revolution. I find the book less
convincing than his 2011 Why Marx Was Right, perhaps because the former
consists of lectures sponsored by the Dwight Herrington Terry Foundation at
Yale University, the express purpose of which is “that the Christian spirit may
be nurtured in the fullest light of the world’s knowledge.” Sometime... 
Considering how often I have pulled up roots to settle in another place, to go on a three-week travel should be no big deal, especially since the places I'll visit are hardly unknown to me--the pictures above are from a visit six years ago to my birthplace, Leipzig. Still, as I am packing to leave for a vacation in Germany, scheduled for March to mitigate altitude-related insomnia, I am hounded by misgivings. As always, the possibility that I might not return cannot be discounted: so many ad... 
"My pleasure," someone said recently when I thanked him for an unexpected kindness. I have reflected on that phrase ever since. For one thing, I'm pretty sure his gesture wasn't an unmitigated joy. Id did cost him something: extra time, a bit of inconvenience. Nevertheless, he answered with the courtesy phrase. 
"I like your essays. You write things that readers want to read," someone in my exercise class said recently about my WTE column. I smiled, remembering how many things I'd written, and attempted to publish, that nobody in the business felt strongly enough about to give me a leg up. An entire manuscript sits on my desktop, ready to go, if things should change. But maybe I learned something from my failures. Maybe I learned to let go of the desire to amount to something in the eyes of family, c... 
Fretting about the future is as useless as bemoaning the past; still, as sentient beings we can't help wonder what the future might bring, just as we can't keep ourselves from considering past acts that we might have handled better. As we age, the future is less important for our own existence--we know where we are headed--as it is for the continued existence of a child or grandchild. What does life have in store for this boy twenty years from now, when he'll be in search of a mate and a job...
It's mid-December and I once again find myself in the East Bay of California. This time of year people wear shorts and shirt-sleeves; they take their children to playgrounds after school even at four PM, which I do with my grandson today. They ride bikes; they stroll through vineyards. Back in Wyoming a storm dumps snow that turns to ice on the sidewalks; here, we enjoy balmy weather. My grandson and I put a pant into the ground before his father and I went to Farmer's Market where even now ... 
Christopher Hitchens, the prolific writer and atheist, died a few days ago--on December 15, 2011, to be exact--from cancer of the esophagus. It must have been an awful way to go and was almost certainly caused by his incessant smoking. To say that I enjoyed reading his writing does not begin to give him credit. He travelled far and wide, often putting himself in harm's way visiting politically dangerous countries so he might report on rogue governments or on US sins committed, for example, i... Conversational Skills and Lack Thereof
Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, December 11, 2011,
In :
Reading Life
I have often thought that a course of “Conversation 101” ought to be offered, not just in high schools or colleges but at youth hostels, senior centers, and in office directional meetings. The lessons would cause participants to look at how they converse with others and to examine what tactics undermine their social exchanges. Many times someone has attempted to talk with me, only to lead the conversation to a dead end. Often I have wanted to ask, “Do you understand what damage your tal...
Recycling has been on my mind since last time my cousin (pictured above with her mother, now deceased) visited from Germany. She commented on what seemed to her an appalling American wastefulness, an obliviousness to the need to conserve resources, as if unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—that resources are finite. Even human-made resources like plastics won’t be with us forever, since plastics are made from petroleum, and there’s only so much recoverable petroleum left in the earth....
It’s windy in Wyoming, particularly this time of year as autumn morphs into winter. Wyoming is my home now, for better or worse. I watch with interest its wind-development. Legislators debate back and forth on wind taxes, but it looks like wind energy is on the march, now that Wyoming transmission likes have become part of a federal program that has put electric transmission projects on the fast track.
My brother Karl, two years younger than I, is twenty years into the grave. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer, which essentially condemned him to dying a slow, torturous death by starvation. The cancer, originating elsewhere in his body, was almost certainly due to his lifelong smoking. In California Karl tried EST, primal scream, self-hypnosis. He could not kick the addiction.
I love my vegetable garden, and I love to share its bounty. 
It's lovely to visit the mountains. But do you want to live there? I thought I did.
Children today, research shows, are less diligent in their schoolwork, less resilient when facing a setback or a failure, and less able to defer gratification than what is needed to thrive. Fewer personal interactions and more electronic distractions make for a more harried existence. I recognize the trend readily enough in my grandchildren: they watch television, play computer games. When I take them on an outing I must ask their parents to impound that iPod, X-Box, PSP, Game Boy or Nintendo...
Men like to build things. Big things, monuments that will leave behind a grand if not grandiose picture of themselves and their group. No matter the time, no matter the culture, the males within a given society love to erect monuments. The urge begins in boyhood and lasts a lifetime. 
A few miles south of Wheatland lies a field I own, acquired a few years ago in part to provide winter grazing for my son’s cow herd. Since then I’ve discovered its wheat production to be marginal; in discussion with my banker it transpired that his father’s field in Montana produces almost twice the number of bushels per acre. Only a smidgen of the income goes in my pocket as revenue; the producer gets the lion’s share, since he does the work of planting and harvesting, not to mentio...Keystone XL Tar-Sands Oil Pipeline: Recipe for Disaster
Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, September 3, 2011,
In :
Reading Life
Saturday Sept. 3, 2011, marks the final sit-in rally after two weeks of civil disobedience, which has been happening in Lafayette Square Park across from the White House. Participants staged protests against TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL tar-sands oil pipeline, which President Obama is set to green-light. The current tally of arrests stands at 1,009 and it includes NASA’s top scientist, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Before he was detained ...
My previous post mentioned Fishman’s detail regarding FIJI. The water is drawn from an aquifer on the north coast of Fiji’s main island and finds its way into more than a million bottles of water a day, bottles that make it by truck, cargo container, some five to seven thousand miles to reach American consumers while more than half the residents of the nation of Fiji do not themselves have safe, reliable drinking water. 
Texas is in the midst of an unprecedented drought: nearly 94% of the state is under “extreme” weather conditions that, climatologists predict, will continue into the next ten months if not longer. At this point, to speak of “drought” may be misleading: what’s happening looks like a shift in rainfall patterns that’s part of climate change and global warming. Most Texans, including the state’s governor, deride the possibility and ignore the warning signs, turning to prayer m...
To the newcomer, Wyoming is the location of a mindless if relentless “Drill, Baby, Drill”(gas and oil) and ”Dig, Baby, Dig” (coal). “Plans in works for 4,200 new gas wells in Wyoming,” proclaims an August 2011 newspaper headline. Yes, that’s four thousand two hundred deep-gas wells. The Nirobrara shale-oil exploration, the upstart from the previous year. is proceeding at a pace. Like deep-well gas extraction, it, too relies on hydraulic fracturing. “1.2 million gallons: App...
ALS constitutes “progressive imprisonment without parole,” wrote Tony Judt in his memoir, discussed in my previously post. Last year Judt succumbed to a variant of the neuro-muscular Lou Gehrig’s disease. Though the sufferer is rendered completely immobile, there is no loss of sensation and, in his case, “there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic pr... Memories of Judt in Light of Abulhaw
Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, July 30, 2011,
In :
Reading Life
Unlike earlier in my life, today I read few fictional stories,
but when I do, I pick books that tend to address real-life exigencies thinly
disguised. Of these, Susan Abulhawa’s novel affected me profoundly. The Scar
of David
When I grew up in postwar Germany, no animals existed in our home. For a short while, when I was eleven, we owned a dog, a nervous, yippy little fellow who was soon gone. My parents claimed he developed rabies and they got someone to kill him. I never believed the rabies story. A few years earlier, soon after my dad's return as prisoner of war from Soviet Russia, my mother raised a few geese, partly for canning the meat, partly for immediate consumption. She nailed their webbed feet onto post...
Energy Production & Consumption, Wyoming and Elsewhere
Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, May 15, 2011,
In :
Reading Life
About Me
| Edith Cook |
| South Of Wheatland In Wyoming |
Though I now live in Wyoming, I make frequent return trips to California with visits to travel club members along the way. At home I play classical guitar, enjoy gardening and cooking, and participate in group yoga. Getting together with family and friends is high on my agenda. I value people who write or make music and love it when my adult children and their offspring play their instruments, sing songs with me, or discuss what they read and write. Such gatherings help me cope with the losses in my life, which have been severe. Next year I hope to visit family in Germany.
|
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