Rural Dreams

People

People I've met: the Mary Kay Magyar and the Dead Head Dentist.

Two nights ago, we went to Home Depot for plumbing supplies. It seems that our house doesn't have a working outdoor spigot. Home Depot is a bit north of here in East Greenbush, a suburb of Albany. Aidan and I stood around while Steve puzzled over the boxes of elbows and Ts. From a distance, I caught the familiar sound of Hungarian being spoken by an old lady. Or maybe it was English with a Hungarian accent.

When she came down our aisle, looking for something, I asked her if she was Hungarian. We had a short conversation. She asked me where my realtives were. I didn't bother explaining that they are mostly dead, but rather said that they were in Sarasota. Ah yes, she has a friend in Sarasota that she visits. I was tempted to ask her if it was Anna Sandor, my Grandmother's old friend who seems to know hundreds of people, but then realized how silly that was. I don't think she was Anna's type anyway, she gave me her card which identified her as a Mary Kay lady.

She asked me if I would be interested in joining the Hungarian Club. It's in Schenectady and most of the members now don't speak Hungarian. I politely said that perhaps I would, though I can't imagine doing such a thing. I found myself remembering later that my grandmother never seemed particularly devoted to Hungary and certainly didn't have any affection for Hungarians just because they were from the same country as she. This woman was an Eva, she was probably in her eighties, with a stern voice and a businesslike manner. The man who was shopping with her, probably her son, seemed like he might have been just barely tolerating her. As the woman left, she sized me up and said something like, yes, you have a nice face. I've been wondering ever since if she was observing at how Hungarian I looked, how Jewish I looked, or how I would look with a little make-up on.

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I went to the dentist yesterday for the first time since I was a teenager. I had a terrible headache that lasted for about a week at the beginning of May and I thought it was my wisdom teeth telling me that they couldn't wait any longer. I made an appointment with a holistic dentist in Hillsdale. I'd never been to him, but someone had recommended him when we first moved to the barn. I might have dental therough Medicaid (still don't know if I have Medicaid yet) and I wanted to know if I could have my wisdom teeth taken out by a Medicaid dentist, or if it may be a sensitive procedure like a root canal is which perhaps should not be trusted with a Medicaid dentist.

When I made the appointment, I was told that it would be with a different dentist. The original dentist was retiring and someone else was buying his practice. When I walked in yesterday, new dentist and his hygenist were working on someone. The Allman Brothers were playing softly on a box and there was a poster of Dennis Kucinich at the counter that said "Fear Ends - Hope Begins". I sat down to read a magazine from the NRDC and soon the dentist came out to greet me. He was a round man with a long ponytail and big sweet cow eyes. He had the kind of soft, gentle voice and manner that made me wonder as I was yelling at another driver on the way home if he ever yells at other drivers, or if he just says, "well, okay friend" and stays out of their way. His hygenist took a ton of x-rays and I waited while he finished up a root canal. It turns out I only have one teeny tiny cavity, besides some small ones in my wisdom teeth. My favorite moment is when he started to talk about my wisdom teeth. He explains that the top ones are through, but they have cavities and there's no room for them. Bottom right is impacted but not too bad, but bottom left - deep breath - "is like - freaky impacted." How can I not love the dentist who says "freaky impacted"?

It may be a totally unfair assessment, but I can't help wondering if he became a dentist for the laughing gas.

Delicious

Here's some baby for all the baby lovers out there. I always say that Will is dee-licious and I am going to eat him up and then Aidan plays the super hero and rescues him. The only problem is that Aidan has developed an appetite for baby of his own and has bit Will twice. The first time it happened, Aidan was talking to Will and rocking him in his car seat. He came running toward me and said he didn't know what happened, didn't know why Will was screaming his head off. I only knew because he left tooth marks. The second time was much more minor, but I suspect that Aidan really was trying to figure out the difference between play baby munching and real baby munching.

Click below for optimal deliciousness.

Few Posts

I've been frustrated with my lack of writing, but it is becoming more feasible as Will gets older. I was hunting through old blog entries looking for a picture the other day and it struck me that I had more of a zest for life when we were living in the barn. I was trying to think of what was so satisfying for me then. I was doing yoga regularly and writing in this blog regularly. I was also, at some stages, quilting and sewing. I realize that I can't expect to be doing those kinds of things with a new baby, especially with a husband who is out of town for two months straight, but it's got me thinking about what makes me happy. Of course, the baby and Aidan make me happy, but I think I have to be actively creating. Nursing only counts for that a little bit.

We have a big flat patch of sunny grass at the back of our property that faces the mobile home park. I've decided to make a big cut flower garden, with mostly sunflowers. They might afford us a little privacy back there and maybe I could sell them.

I mentioned my idea to my farmer friends who are going to help me till the soil there. They instructed me to put down newspaper with grass clippings over it to kill the grass and soften the soil for tilling. I got two contractor bags full of grass clippings and laid it out on newspapers with Aidan around 5:00 the other night. It's right along the drive to the mobile homes and there was SO much traffic on the road. It's very slow, there are speed bumps, but the whole park was watching us as they came home from work. I don't like having such a public home. Wes ran off a short ways while we were back there. He's been VERY good lately, but he just isn't used to us hanging out back there and it probably wasn't perfectly clear what his boundaries were to him. He disappeared for a few minutes and then came running back like he was in trouble. I gave him a little growl so he knew that he had done something wrong, but soon the manager from the mobile home park pulled into my driveway. It seemed he had yelled at one of his tennants about having an unleashed dog, but it was not the tennants dog, it was Wes, so then I was responsible for him making an ass of himself. He was very civilized about it, I apologized briefly, but didn't make a big fuss. I was on the ground with a baby and a four year old, a bunch of newspapers and grass clippings on a windy day. He finally said, "what are you doing?" I might have been making a pyramid of coffee cups or balancing a broom on my head, the way that he asked. "Making a flower bed."

The farmer friends came over that afternoon and I consulted with them about the size of it. They thought I wanted a nice civilized row of flowers. "What if I do, say, this much space?" I asked, gesturing toward the bulk of the flat patch. "You'd be crazy", one of them said flatly.

Well, this is all a bit embarassing to me. I mean, they run a nursery and a farm and a landscaping business on the side and one of them went to Cornell for horticulture. I didn't discuss it with them anymore. I'm just going to lay down my newspaper and grass clippings and make my flower bed as big as I want to. I think I need something crazy and big and colorful and impractical and outrageous. The other asked me why I'm doing this. It's partially for a privacy screen, but I guess more to satisfy my need to plant something. And a little row of sunflowers just ain't going to cut it.

So that's my big project for right now. I'm doing a tiny bit of web stuff - my design for our playgroup finally got posted after almost a year and I'm designing something for our farmer friends.

Steve is finally coming home today. He's been gone for about two months. We've seen him some weekends, but these last couple of weeks I just gave up on driving down there all the time. It will be so good to have him home, but I expect it will take a few days for us to all sync up together again.

I was having a really hard time with Aidan for a while there, but something shifted and it's better now. We had one big blowout night that was awful. I don't know if he shifted or I did or both, but I laid in bed that night thinking that that was not the kind of parent that I wanted to be - that I didn't want our lives too be filled with that kind of drama. I'm not exactly sure how we've been avoiding it, but we have.

Will is the most amazing baby. He is enormous. I can't fit anything smaller than 12mo over the length of him. And FAT! I don't think that Aidan was so fat. I keep looking at the depth of his belly button, which stuck out a little when he was born so that I thought it might be herniated. He is smiley and vocal and always has his tongue sticking out a little with his big smile. He coos and ahhs and will have a little baby gibberish conversation with you.

I'm out of memory on my hard drive so I've been reluctant to try to put any more pictures on it, so I haven't been taking many. I'll try to get that cleared up and post some. It will be easier with Steve here.

The Shit Truck

Our first spring here, Steve came home from work one day and asked me if I'd ever seen the shit truck. He told me that it is a truck that sprays a kind of liquid concentrated manure on the fields and the smell is unbelievable. Soon after that I bore witness to a shit truck spraying a field at a distance. I wouldn't have believed it if Steve hadn't told me about it first. The smell is the olfactory equivalent of someone running their fingernails across a chalk board, but worse. A hundred times worse. No - a thousand times worse.

I encountered it a couple more times that season. I'd find myself thinking about it the way you would think about some horror - like what it feels like to be burned alive, or have your eyeballs pulled out. I wondered what people who lived near a shit field did when the shit truck came around. Did they get any warning? Did they go stay in a hotel or with a relative who didn't bear the same misfortune of living in the shit truck's path? Imagine buying a house near a shit field. You'd have no way of knowing what you were in for untill it happened. I guarantee that realators don't tell you about it. Someone was complaining to me that the realators don't mention the freight and passenger trains that run right through the middle of Chatham to prospective homebuyers. I'd take ten trains over one day of the shit truck.

My interest in the shit truck crystalized one day when my brother was visiting from L.A. and we got caught behind one on a winding county road. I couldn't pass it for all the curves in the road and it moved slowly, the way a dump truck or a cement mixer might. Now I had a witness from the outside world and my brother, an aspiring screenwriter, vowed to put the shit truck in a movie. It belongs in something dark and twisted like Requiem for a Dream.

I had a lot of questions about the shit truck. If it's cow manure, why does it smell so vile? I've driven past dairy farms in the summer, and they do indeed stink, but it's a different kind of smell, it's earthy and more natural. I don't want to romanticize dairy farms - especially the more "modern" factory farm kind, the cows pretty much stay in a barn and eat grain, so their shit stays there too and it is pretty foul, but it's a conceivable smell. The shit truck smell is inconceivable, concocted by some evil mastermind bent on destroying the world.

I ask people around here about it all the time, approaching it with some modesty, the way you might initiate a conversation about yeast infections or a sexual problem. I am amazed that many people don't seem to know what I am talking about. How is it that I've only lived here a couple of years and I've encountered this thing several times and some people have lived here their whole lives and never smelled it? I asked my friend Melinda, lifetime resident and novice farmer. She insisted it was the factory farmed manure from dairy farms, but didn't really know what I was talking about, having never seen the shit truck. Is it an apparition reserved just for my family?

I hit the information jackpot the other day when I asked my friend, Donna, who is an environmental engineer. The contents of the shit truck is sewage sludge, made famous when the federal government got involved in certifying organic food. They wanted sewage sludge to be an acceptable ingredient in organic food production. People who eat organic food, who pay extra money for it, didn't like that very much. Donna had been involved in a proposal to construct wetlands as a sort of a natural sewage treatment system, but the way that the laws in New York State were written, there was not enough financial incentive.

Sewage sludge is the solids that get pulled out of people's septic tanks and municipal waste facilities. It can either be sent to a treatment plant or spread on fields as fertilizer. I wondered if the farmers pay for it as fertilizer or if the septic companies pay the farmers for providing disposal of it. Donna didn't know. What's amazing to me is that it is a serious environmental issue that directly affects this rural area, and so few people know any thing about it.

I've read about what nasty things septic tanks are, but encountering the shit truck really clarifys that. In this area, health official have resisted approval of composting toilets, for fear that they might not be safe, so it is hugely ironic that sewage sludge is sprayed in open fields here.

There is a huge disconnect in our modern, sophisticated society between our lives and the waste that our lives produces. Since we moved here, I have valued the effort that we have to put into garbage disposal. Garbage has to be driven to the dump and paid for by the bag. This causes you to be tremendously sensitive to how much waste you produce. When we first moved here, we didn't have a compost pile and we weren't aware of the extensive paper recycling that was available. Once we began fully recycling and composting, our contribution to the landfill shrunk by more than half. We also became more sensitive to the packaging that came with anything that we bought. I now try to dispose of bulky packaging at the store where I bought the item.

I can't help but think that if everyone had to deal with garbage in this way, that we would produce much less of it. Consumers would demand less packaging and second hand goods would be a popular alternative to new products. We often talk about encouragement of a less consumer driven lifestyle as an ecological or financial choice, but it might just be a matter of making people deal more intimately with their own garbage and making it harder to just throw things away.

There is a similar, perhaps deeper disconnect with our sewage. Part of what makes sewage sludge so toxic is all of the chemicals that we pour down our drains. If people had to experience the results of this more directly - the way that all of the households in the communities that are subject to the shit truck do, perhaps people would opt for safer alternatives to the products that they are using. The way things are now, most people suffer no direct consequenses from these kinds of choices, so it's no wonder that change is so hard.

Besides making our sewage less toxic, there are alternative ways to deal with it. Composting toilets could be encouraged rather than shunned and constructed wetlands could be studied and financed. And everyone should know about the shit trucks. It wish I could include a link to a smell file so you could smell for yourself. I guess you wouldn't download something like that. You'd never visit my webpage again.

Brain, Child

I found this great magazine that I am getting myself for Mother's Day. They have a deal where if you get 4 or more subscriptions, they are $14 each. So, who's in?

Here's an excerpt from an article entitled Violins Against Children where the author discusses the trials of her daughter's Suzuki Violin practice:

You would like this magazine - I know you would. Paypal me your name/address and $14 and you can be in my magazine club. c col lins at loud joy dot com. No spaces. Happy Mother's Day.

Just the Three of Us

Steve has been working on Long Island for a few weeks now - and still has a couple of weeks to go. It is very very hard. I keep thinking about single parents or people whose spouses are deployed in Iraq. I don't quite have the support system for this - though I have lots of friends. One of them took Aidan for much of the day yesterday on the fly because Will woke up with a fever and I wanted to take him to the doctor. The break was lovely, but it didn't prevent our regular dinner time blow out.

I can't quite figure out if it's him or me. I know that I am not as rational as I could be. I am also expecting more of him as he gets older and he's not quite up to my expectations. I'm struggling to understand which of us is being unreasonable. I don't like to be commanding and dictatorial - I prefer to present him with options and consequences. This has always worked really well for us in the past, but something has changed - he's gotten older, we had this really strange time that we lived at grandma's house, he's become a big brother. This feels like adolecence to me, except I can't imagine that adolescence is this insane and unreasonable. Maybe I shouldn't tempt fate by saying that.

Will is fine - I just wanted the doctor to listen to his lungs because he's been congested in his chest for a couple of weeks. She thought he sounded good. I wondered what had made him get a fever.

I have hay fever every year for the month of May and sometime in the middle of the day yesterday it kicked in hard. I don't usually take anything for it because I've been breastfeeding for years and because I just don't like to take things. By the time I spoke to Steve last night during our nightly "free nights and weekends" chat, I was sure I was going to have to take something to preserve my sanity. I lay in bed last night wondering why it had gotten so bad so quickly and why my head hurt - not a typical symptom for me. Then it hit me - I have a cold, and probably that's what Will has too. Tricky nasty cold, showing up in the beginning of May like that.

Steve is coming home for two days tonight. It will be great to see him.