Awaiting that Sliver of Light

December 13, 2014 at 1:30 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments
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Well, you haven’t heard from me for a while. I owe you an apology, or at least an explanation.

As I wrote in an earlier post, last spring our family–my husband and me, his mother, and by association, his kids and grandkids, went on an illness roller-coaster ride. In April, Keith contracted pneumonia, during the diagnosis of which he was discovered to have a “mass” in his kidney, which turned out to be a malignancy, which was removed in June. Before he had recovered from the surgery, his 92-year-old mother down in Clearwater almost died, but by September Betty was back in her independent living home. We went on vacation. I wrote a blog post about the Synod on the Family.

When we came home, the urologist who did Keith’s surgery called to say he also had an elevated PSA (prostate specific antigen) and would have to have an MRI. Meantime, Keith’s Mom got quite sick again, and before long, was moved from the hospital to a hospice facility. One morning toward the end of October, the doctor called to say that Keith had a “nodule” on his prostate, and would have to have a biopsy. That afternoon, the hospice called to say his mother had died. (Seriously!). So we flew down to Clearwater for Keith to do the funeral. We then ran around gathering the various estate papers–we’re still messing with them–and flew back to New York just in time for the biopsy. Later that week we learned that Keith has prostate cancer; the surgery to remove his prostate is scheduled for early January.

This second cancer episode in six months seems just to be extremely bad luck, not a metastasis of the kidney cancer. And the doctor believes the cancer has not spread beyond the prostate, so once again, we seem to have dodged a bullet. But we are not exactly feeling grateful yet. The whole thing has been just too much.

Years ago, at the height of my feminist activist phase, each December women I knew celebrated the end of the longest dark nights and the beginning of the lengthening of daylight, the winter solstice. Some of them still do. Myself, I never really took to it; seemed kind of romantic, which, if you read this blog very much, you realize I’m not. This year, though, I am waiting eagerly for December 21, for that first new sliver of light that points toward brighter days ahead.

Solstice Hope

December 21, 2013 at 1:09 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments
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Well, for seasonal affective types like me, the winter solstice is something wonderful. I probably won’t really be able to tell that tomorrow is a minute brighter than today was, but the thought of it makes me happy.

Accompanying this oddly situated reminder that winter will come to an end are not one but two hope-inspiring pieces today in the New York Times. The first is by a retired biology professor from the University of Vermont, Bernd Heinrich, narrating his experience of successfully growing American chestnut trees in his 600 acre forest in western Maine. Chestnut trees, we learn, were once thirty percent of the hardwood forests of the eastern U.S. but were almost totally wiped out by a fungal blight a century ago. Within fifty years, an estimated four billion trees had vanished.

But Heinrich planted four chestnut seedlings in 1982, and several of them are now thirty-five feet tall. And their seeds are being “planted” throughout the forest. Heinrich did not have a lot of hope for his four seedlings, but there they are, thirty years later, thriving, and reproducing.

The second article tells of a growing movement to rescue the endangered monarch butterfly. The effort focuses on getting people to plant milkweed seeds on their land, lawns, wherever.  Members of the movement are doing this because milkweed seeds are the monarch caterpillar’s only food, but the number of milkweed plants has declined massively in recent years.

The author admits that there are a number of causes of the decline of the monarch butterfly–drought, extreme weather, illegal logging in Mexico, fungicides, and pesticides, among others. But the greatest threat to the monarch butterfly, we learn, is the serious decline of its milkweed habitat in the Midwest and the Great Plains, where many  monarchs breed. The milkweed decline was precipitated by the federal government’s order in 2007 that gasoline be laced with corn-based ethanol, and their then allowing farmers to take land out of federal conservation reserves to meet the soaring demand for corn. Since then, 17,500 acres of reserves that were previously available for wildlife and wild plants like milkweed have been converted to corn.

But now, a number of groups are growing and distributing milkweed seeds, encouraging people–and by no means only farmers–to plant them. The response has been enthusiastic.

Both articles acknowledge that many problems still face the chestnut tree and the monarch butterfly. The fungus that killed the chestnuts is present on other trees in the Northeast and could wipe them out once more. And the effort to save the monarch butterfly is in a sense more symbolic than substantive; we could win that battle and still lose the larger war against environmental destruction.

But on this shortest day of the year, it cheers me no end to think about those chestnut trees in western Maine, and the possible revival of the monarch butterflies I visited once in southern California–a tiny but real increase in the sunlight as we bundle up for winter.

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