I don't send out greeting cards annually, but this time I decided to do so. Here is a pic I sent with each card. I also requested a photo of myself with Walt's family, since they are set to leave Wyoming in a few months. Two days ago, atWalt's birthday party, we played guitar and sang songs, most of them not Christmasy but the cowboy and bar songs Walt likes. I played a bit of classical guitar in between. I hope we inspired Amanda, who is becoming self-conscious, turning reluctant to sing tho... 
Paper read at EPA Haze Rule Hearing, July 17, 2013, in Cheyenne
Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, July 18, 2013,
In :
Reading Life
A wonderful book.Valuable reading as I prepare for my visit.
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.In Anticipation of Visiting Friends in Japan and China
Posted by Edith Cook on Tuesday, January 29, 2013,
In :
Personal
This 
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? 
At the eve of 2013, wishing you moments of peace and mindfulness. Moments is all we have.
This past week I've had some disturbing news that I haven't digested yet. Hence, no discussion pertaining to the disturbance. Instead, today I am looking back to a visit not long ago with friends near Nuremberg, Germany. They took me on an auto tour to Regensburg, where the pic of the cafe originated that dates to 1686. On the way to Regensburg, we stopped in a small town, Riedenburg in Altmuehltal, which, it happens boasts a well-known museum of gems and minerals. Incredibly, the museum ... 
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... 
"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...
When I visit the editor who prints my essays in his paper, 
What will life be like when Baby Grace is a young woman? 
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 ... 
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....
Today I write in pity and sorrow, for I decided to expand an earlier blog on my brother’s dying, which includes my D-Q experience. I'm determined to shape the piece into a newspaper essay but emotions overwhelm me as a write: pity for Karl, sorrow for the students I was unable to help. There’s also anger, the gut-wrenching fury at an industry that systematically manipulates millions of uninformed consumers. Last not least there’s anger at being powerless to enumerate the injustices th... 
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. 
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...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 ...
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...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
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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