The President's Gall Bladder

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had his gall bladder removed. After the surgery, he returned to the White House and held an informal press conference. When the reporters asked him how the operation went, he hoisted his shirt and showed them the stitches on his sagging middle-aged belly.

LBJ was a brilliant man, a master manipulator, hugely sympathetic, and very vulgar.

This was a famous photo at the time, and it changed the way we view our elected officials. LBJ destroyed a necessary barrier of privacy, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

If you have surgery, why hide the scars?

So, this summer, we were all delighted -- everyone but me -- to learn that President George Bush would be checking into Walter Reed Medical Center for a colonoscopy. All the newspapers proceeded to give full color illustrations of the whole procedure -- How wonderful, we all said -- except for me.

I think, personally, if the press and public had been told that the President had undergone a "routine medical procedure," that was all the information I needed to have.

I am not squeamish. I have worked as a nursing aide in a hospital and I have seen and cleaned up more nasty biological messes than you can imagination. I have been literally up to my elbows in corporal effluvia, and I don't mind at all. It's the truth. It's the job. It's what you do. It's how we take care of each other. But It's also a private matter, done under private circumstances.

Back to the President and the public. I only need to know if he's healthy or not. The rest is private.

I do not salute the courage of Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of presidential candidate Senator John Edwards. She has revealed to the world her battle with breast cancer.

So? I do not know this woman. Our relationship is not personal, and I don't want to know about the intricacies of her lifelong struggle with death. I too face death, and might very well suffer a debilitating disease before I join the graveyard. I pray that the ones who love me stay by my side as it happens.

But I'm not going to make a TV show about it.

Think of the people who are qualified for public office, highly experienced and highly motivated, but they want to keep their private lives private. They don't want to hoist up their shirts to the world like LBJ did.

"Openness" should not be a requirement for public office.

Anyway, it all started in 1965 with LBJ's gall bladder.

Wind Rocks the Ferry

We had quite a wind storm two weeks ago and the wind made it rough for this ferry coming across Puget Sound on the run from Mukilteo to Whidbey Island.

I love that name, Mukilteo, the accent is on the next to last syllables.

Items and Sightems:

* I was st the Skagit Valley Food Co-op this afternoon and all the women there looked beautiful.

* Gem is the LaConner librarian and that's her name. Her name used to be Melody, but she changed it to Gem.

* I had an hour-long discussion with a well-known local architect and Columnist Jim Smith while drinking coffee at the LaConner Produce Market today. This was after I visited the Co-op. Of course I reported to them about the beautiful women at the Co-op, and the architect, to my amazement, said the same thing -- that he had been at the Co-op this morning and had struck up a conversation with a woman of dazzling loveliness.

* This morning I spent 3 hours, in brilliant sunshine, climbing up and down a step ladder whilst trimming the climbing rose that entwines the barn. It's a fine old-fashioned rose with trunks as big as your wrist. It was three large wheelbarrow loads of clipping by the time I took it down to the winter bones. The old girl hadn't been pruned in ten years, so there was a lot of dead wood underneath this year's growth.

Else we would be Angels

My trailer by the barn is too small. It keeps warm inside, but I am only inches away from the cold. The main room is 8 feet by 12 feet -- too small.

It's very cozy and clean inside, with a well-appointed kitchen, and pleasant over head lights, and a nicely upholstered couch. I make coffee in an old-fashioned percolator and I listen to talk radio, using my remote control device to switch from one station to another.

But it's not very stable, being on tires and propped up on trailer jacks -- it rumbles slightly, like jello, when I walk from the couch down the corridor -- 15-feet -- to the bathroom at the far end. I'm wishing I was more rooted to the ground, like in a a cabin that was small but not tiny.

That's what I want. It's good to want things. It's desire that keeps us on earth -- else we would be angels

The Previous Post is Too Rednecky

I thought my previous post with a photo of Hank Williams might be too rednecky. I have a CD of Hank's Greatest Hits, which I enjoy, but than I get tired of that Alabama twang.

I also greatly admire the songs of Leonard Cohen, a Jew from Montreal who practices Buddhism in the mountains near Los Angeles. He might have seen the fires burning near the monastery where he often goes to pray and meditate. Then he would say something profound, such as "Fires burn, and burn again. The mountain is down in ashes."

The fire is real and terrible -- and a complex poetic metaphor as well. Cohen would love to see it, as much as seeing an ant walk across his knee.

And he would never say that Hank Williams music was too rednecky. He would say that he enjoyed listening to it, and that Hank's song have inspired his own work.

I can't help it if I'm still in love with you

"I can't Help it if I'm Still in Love with You" is one of Hank Williams' best songs. I can play it on the guitar and sing it quite well in a meaningful way. Nobody likes the way I play the guitar or the way I sing, so mostly I just pick away at it in my lonesome trailer out by the barn.

Maybe I ought to have my own place, I thought today, instead of doing chores for people in the big house, and maybe I will have my own place in a few years, and my own dog, and my own garden. It'll be just like those old drifters in "Of Mice and Men." except I won't have any rabbits.

I'm reading a book about the author John Cheever, written by his daughter Susan Cheever. It's called "Home Before Dark."

Cheever had little success as a writer until his first novel was published when he was past 50-years-old. Then he made a lot of money and bought a fine house.

But before that, when Susan, the daughter, was growing up, the Cheevers lived in a series of rental houses, and Susan suspected that her father never really wanted to own property. He was happy enough to look at green meadows and dewy dawns wherever he happened to me.

I know about that. I owned my own house a few years ago. Owned it free and clear. Didn't owe the bank a nickel. Had complete Sovereignty over my own small territory. And that was fine, but when my marriage fell apart and I sold the place, I didn't miss it too bad, and I don't feel too lowly about being a caretaker on someone else's farm -- except once in a while I feel a little blue....

but I'm liable to feel a little blue about almost anything.

President Bush arrives on Air Force One -- and California is so Grateful

President flew into California on Air Force One today -- to everyone's immense relief. "We are so grateful that the President has arrived, be cause he'll know what to do," said one exhausted firefighter in the burnt hills of San Diego.

Although some of Bush's critics claim that the President is actually the cause of recent natural disasters, he neverthless brings a lot of experience to the job. "I did it to Baghdad, I did it to New Orleans, and now I'm going to do it to you folks in the Golden State," he said before a bank of microphones at the airport.

Santa Ana wind improves Malibu surfing

I called my sister in Los Angeles this morning. "We are surrounded by tragedy," she said, describing the ring of fire in the hills around Los Angeles and San Diego. "But it's weird too, because the wind isn't blowing here at all in Venice, just a brown haze in the sky from the smoke of the fires."

My sister lives in Venice, near the beach and 8 miles from the nearest fire at Malibu Canyon. The Santa Ana wind blows hot and dry every autumn.The humidity drops to almost zero and the ultra-dry wind makes everyone a little crazy, whether there is a fire or not.

Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena have described one beneficial aspect to this fierce offshore wind. The hot wind comes over the mountains and on to the ocean, and stirs up the water, causing colder, nutrient-rich water to rise to the surface -- it makes more food for the fishes, in other words.

Another good effect of the Santa Ana wind, is that it shapes the waves nicely at Malibu Point, one of the best and most famous surfing spots in Southern California.

During the peak of the wild fires yesterday, I cruised the Internet and tuned into the Surf Cam that is trained on the Malibu Point break. It was fine. There were only a half dozen surfers on the water yesterday, when there would usually be more than 50.

So, wild fire or not, when the surf is up, you gotta go.

I'm not being glib about the massive destruction of these terrible fires. I am just pointing out that surfing is the soul and essence of Southern California culture.

I have spent many delightful hours sitting on the sand at Malibu, watching them ride the waves. And someday, with a little help and a little coaxing, I'll get out there myself.

That's why I checked the Surf Cam at the height of the disaster -- Now I know everything will be all right again.

The surfing photo was taken at Malibu in 1949. They used really big boards back then.

Ideal conditions for a huge fire in Los Angeles

A very wet winter in the Mountains of Los Angeles spurs the growth of abundant wild flowers and grass, and creates basically a huge pile of fuel. Then the following winter has no rain at all and all the fuel gets tinder dry -- just like what happened the past 2 years in LA -- a recipe for disaster, and now it's burning down from Malibu to San Diego.

I love that Southern California region, the beaches and the dusty trails through the brush, and the incredibly expensive homes in Malibu.

It's not really a disaster. It's natural, and the longer any hillside or canyon goes without a fire, then the bigger the fire will be when it comes.

Homes can be rebuilt. Firefighters should not risk their lives to save buildings.

In any event, the winter rains that everyone now prays for will sweep down barren hillsides and block more highways with raving-red-brown mudslides.

And then next spring all the mountains and hills will sprout emerald green again.

The point is -- Los Angeles is not where it is for a reason. There is no practical basis for the existence of that vast metropolis, except for the unceasing ability of the native peoples there to defy and ignore reality.

So, Keep on surfin' -- because the world already came to an end.

Jim Bertolino, re-nouned poet, and Anita Boyle emerging

Jim Bertolino is a re-nouned poet. That is, Bertolino began life as a noun, but took the pose of an adjective as young man. Finding this adjectival status to be somewhat derivative, Bertolino underwent the difficult and not always successful procedure of re-nouning.

I am happy to report that Bertolino is quite happy these days, living as a re-nouned poet, no longer the object of scorn or controversy.

"I am much more myself than I have ever been," he said, last August, whilst sipping a beer in a lawn chair. He was in deep settlement with his living partner, Anita Boyle, both seated in lawn chairs, next to the Frog Pond, which adorns her property, a horse-riven farm on the Mount Baker Road outside of Bellingham. One can't see the big highway from the little frog pond. One can only see, or more often, hear the frogs.

Anita, an emerging poet, parsed that status for me. "You see, Frog Freddy, I had been for many years a merged poet, even, at times, a sub-merged poet. I did not know my own strength. Yet I threw off the shackles that bound me."

I was so glad to hear this about Anita. I too was sipping a beer by the frog-riven pond. She continued, "In Latin, the word emerge comes from the Latin verb ex-mergere, which means to become unjoined, or even to mean becoming unglued. Therefore, and upon researching this, I, like a mayfly on a trout stream, emerged."

With all three lawn chairs established that summer evening, we drank more beer until it became too dark to hear the frogs.

Full Disclosure has little to do with Honesty

I had a dream last night. I was hitchhiking through South Texas and I got arrested -- it was only a night in jail. None the worse for wear, I got on my way the next morning.

In real life, I traveled through Texas in 1967 -- my very first time -- hitchhiking with my college buddy, Mark Mikolas. We went on down to Mexico City and then to Oaxaca -- but we never got arrested in Texas.

I have other places to write about my private concerns, which is why you don't hear about them in this blog. I keep a journal, full of dreams, daily jottings and self pity. The journal is about one yard wide, counting all the volumes over 20 years. I have never re-read it -- too embarrassing, even when I am by myself.

I also belong to an Internet Forum which is semi-private, and it costs me $25 per year to participate in this moderated discussion. This is another outlet for personal concerns. I recommend it highly because I can post something in the nature of private turmoil without the whole world watching.

I am strongly opposed to the confessional writing and the wanton indulgence of self-expression that is so common today. Please remember this -- NO ONE WANTS TO KNOW.

Telling one and all the gritty details of your personal mess has nothing to do with honesty. It's a fake, it's called full disclosure and it's wrong. It is far more the real truth and the real loving kindness to be careful about what you say and careful about who hears it.

Spilling the beans requires no effort and has little to do with the courage of telling the truth.

When the King of Sweden Came to Kansas

Who can for get that wonderful day when King Carl XVI of Sweden came to Lindsborg, Kansas in 1976. That's him on the left receiving a bouquet of flower from a little Kansas girl. And that's him on the right, as he looks today.

King Carl, like me, was born in 1946, and, also like me, he visited Lindsborg, Kansas, but I got there a few months after his trip, and they didn't bring me flowers.

What happened is my International Pickup, truly the worst vehicle I ever owned, broke down on the verge of Lindsborg, and I was forced to a camp ground on the nearby Smoky Hill River.

What could I do? I was broke, I had to get a job. Thankfully, Lindsborg was a wonderfully tidy town founded by Swedish immigrants -- that would explain the King's visit -- so they had a factory to provide employment.

The factory made aluminum windows for the booming housing market in Wichita, 40 miles down the road.

I got a job at that factory, on the assembly line, cutting glass to fit into the window frames. I had to work very fast to keep up with the line. An empty aluminum frame would come by on the belt. I would grab it and place it on a table, I would then grab a pane of glass, place it over the frame, make two quick cuts with a glass cutter, drop the glass into the frame, and then put it back on the moving belt. I broke a lot of glass, but they didn't care as long as I worked really fast.

And it was awful hot, over 100 degrees every day -- that's August in Kansas.

It wasn't any plan of mine to live in Lindsborg but, as I said, my truck broke down, and it wasn't a bad place.

We rented an apartment in the alley in back of a Swedish bakery which smelled like cinnamon.

Those Swedes really know how to take care of themselves. They had a program of complete independence, with graceful amenities and cleanliness -- a four-year liberal arts college, a beautiful park with a summer bandstand, a grand municipal swimming pool, and their own power plant to provide their own electricity.

It was an agricultural center as well, but you would expect that in Kansas. Then there was the factory -- to get those kinds of jobs.

On top of all that, they had removed all the buildings from the Swedish Exhibit at the St Louis World's Fair in 1904.They re-established these historic buildings in a city park, and made it a tourist attraction.

And then the King of Sweden came, to visit all his Swedish-American children.

King Carl went back to Sweden to resume his normal job of handing out the Nobel Prizes. I left Lindsborg a few months later, I got my pickup repaired, I had a little money by then -- I got really tired of working on the assembly line at the aluminum window factory, but it was a good town. At least I had the luck to break down in the right places.

Anahuac, Texas -- a quiet, swampy kind of place

Anahuac is one of the oldest towns in Texas, and one of the few towns to have a Mexican name as opposed to a Spanish name. "Anahuac" was also the name of the ancient Aztec capital.

The people of Anahuac got lucky because progress passed them by a long time ago. You can see the lights of Houston a way on the other side of Trinity Bay, but Anahuac is just a quiet, sleepy town, surrounded by rice fields, and verging on great fishing water in the bays and sloughs.

Bird watchers come to Anahuac from all over America to see the fall and spring migrations. Anybody with sense stays away in the summer because it's awful hot and humid.

I lived there in 1986 for only a few months, but I cherish the memory.

Ron Paul wants the federal gov't. out of health care, Froma Harrop says otherwise

I endorse two inconsistent positions on health care. One, I support Ron Paul for President. He is an obstetrician from Texas, representing a Congressional district in the hot, swampy Gulf Coast region, including the blissful town of Anahuac, where I once lived, in 1986. Be that as it may, he takes a conservative view that the federal gov't. should not get involved with health care because they will do it badly. He says that the more complicated the issue is, the more it needs to be locally decided. Being a strict constitutionalist, Dr. Paul has no objection to state solutions to health care.

I also support columnist Froma Harrop's appeal for universal national health care, as she describes it in the column in the previous post.

I suppose these two views are inconsistent, so what I mean is, one way or the other, let get 'er done.

And no, I don't care what they do in any other country. They can do whatever they want in Canada and in Europe. The solution to American health problems will never be imported, it has to be home-grown and grass roots.

Best on Health Care

Froma Harrop's column in the Seattle Times today is the best I have seen on the necessity of universal health care.

"Really, how did American workers become the last people in any industrialized democracy to be subject to such anxiety about paying for medical care? They already fund the health care of retirees, the poor, the disabled, convicts and government employees, including members of Congress. Their taxes pay for everyone's health care except their own."

Farming in the Skagit Flats

The Skagit River tumbles out of the Cascade Mountains and then creates a broad, fertile delta -- that's where I live, on the Skagit flats -- best farm land in the country, put a broom stick in the ground and it will sprout, dig half way to China and you won't find a rock.

Not all that rosy, we are at ten feet above sea level and surrounded by dikes -- it has flooded here a few times.

But then again, floods go away and leave the soil a bit richer.

In late October the farmers are still out in the fields. The Roozen family is planting tulips, we're talking about hundred of acres of tulips, not your small garden, but on a commercial scale, so they haul out bulbs by the truckload and load them into the planter, and put them in the ground -- The tulips will bloom in glorious color next April.

They're still harvesting potatoes. The potato harvest stretches out over two months because there is no hurry -- Potatoes can sit in the ground all winter and it won't hurt them a bit. This give the potato farmer the luxury of not having to work around the clock to get a crop in -- he can even knock off for bad weather.

The wheat planted last month in our field on Beaver Marsh Road is almost 3 inches tall. It will grow a little bit more and then just sit there all winter -- not growing in the winter, but ready to take off first thing next spring.

They planted wheat across the road from us just last week, so I guess it's not too late for that.

And, I suspect, but need to ask questions in order to confirm -- that the farmers are planting a lot more wheat around here this year. Could be that $9 a bushel price for wheat on the futures market -- more than double what it was last year.

Swinomish Slough

It was flood tide on Swinomish Slough this morning. It's called Swinomish Channel these days because the Army Corps of Engineers keeps it dredged and even large vessels can traverse the channel at low tide.

But I would help the government save money -- don't bother to dredge the channel. In my plan, you leave the channel the way it is and it turns back into a slough, with the tide sloshing in and out twice a day. Large and small vessels make the passage through the channel because it's a sheltered route instead of facing the open water of Rosario Strait, which can be stormy in the winter.

But we don't need to make the large annual expense of keeping it dredged. What you do, instead, if you have a big boat -- and this is a dramatic discovery I am sharing with the world now -- is WAIT FOR HIGH TIDE.

It sounds too simple to be true, but in fact the tide changes as regular as clockwork, and if you come to either entrance to the channel and the tide is low, then by golly, all you gotta do is wait six hours, and the water will rise just like magic.

I'm going to send a telegram today to the Corps of Engineers and fill them in on this new plan.

Genocide?

When I was a small boy, my mother scolded me for shoving food in my mouth. She said, "Don't eat like a starving Armenian." I had no idea who those people were, but now I know. And now I realize that my Mother, born in 1914, grew up with real stories and images of the terribly suffering inflected on the Armenians by the Turks.

When I lived in Boston, I often drove through Watertown, the focus of the New England's Armenian culture. I never studied this group, I only stopped in Watertown to get lamb kebabs on pita bread -- they really know how to cook lamb, and the restaurant was always packed.

Comes now a resolution before Congress to condemn and name the Genocide against the Armenians by the Turkish government. I oppose this resolution for two reasons -- because there is no justice for historic crimes. When the survivors and the perpetrators have both perished, justice is finished and the historic study begins. Even the Jewish Holocaust will soon become history as well. This is my own standard, to only go back so far.

If the Turks are condemned for their crime in 1915 and afterward, then we might go back ten years earlier and condemn the British for their internment of Afrikaaners in the Boer War in South Africa.

This lesser known atrocity marked the invention of the 20th century concentration camp. The British regular army was combating a rag tag band of crafty guerillas, fighting on horseback calvary. The British had the firepower, but the Boers knew the land and hid everywhere.

So the British invented a new tactic. They stopped attacking the Boer irregulars, but instead went to the Boer farms and villages and rounded up all the women and children, many tens of thousands, and herded them into barbed wire enclosures with little food or shelter and poor sanitation. Some 27,000 women and children were said to have died in those camps.

This was not a major crime, by 20th century standards, but do we forget it? No, but when we remember what the British did to the Boers, then we need to go back further and remember what the Boers did to the Zulus, Xhosas and other South African tribes. How far back do we go?

We shall not forget the Armenian Genocide. But we are past the time of justice or apology.

The second reason I oppose the Congressional resolution against the Turks is that we ought to concentrate our energy on opposing the crimes of today. It is important to defend the rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey today. Their lives and their freedom are at risk -- this is where we ought to stand on principle.

If You Build It, They Will Come

In Iowa, where Corn is King, a Midwestern Renaissance is upon us, and it will save the nation.

In the movie, "Field Of Dreams," there was a memorable line, "If you build it, they will come." and there was a haunting image of a baseball diamond carved out of an Iowa cornfield.

The field is still there, located outside of Dubuque, where the movie was filmed. The house in the photo was and still is a private residence, but the family that lives there has continued to welcome hundreds of tourists every year.

I was last in Dubuque in the winter of 1996, one of many trips I have made to that Mississippi River town, where red-brick buildings that pre-date the Civil War still line the waterfront.

Corn is shipped in barge loads, down the river, down to New Orleans, outbound on ships to a hungry world, but it begins here, in Iowa.

What we are seeing today is another beginning, because they are building something new in Iowa, not a Field of Dreams, but 28 corn-fed ethanol plants scattered all over the state.

Here's from the Economist: "YOU might think that the opening of a new ethanol facility in Nevada, Iowa—a town of 6,700 in the centre of the state—would be of interest mainly to the local farmers who supply the corn that the factory turns to car fuel. You would be wrong. Investors in the refinery include the person who delivers fuel to it, a couple of local parts-suppliers for John Deere (a big farm-equipment company) and the local school-bus driver, among 900 or so other small investors. Like many others in the corn belt, the Nevada refinery is seen as a way for the whole rural community to thrive by exploiting America's new craving for ethanol and the corn (maize) that is being used to make it."

Local people own it. Sure, Archer Daniel Midland and other huge agri-businesses own some refineries, but most of them are owned by small farmers and their neighbors.

Corn is at a record price. And people throughout rural Iowa are making some good money now. There is no more deserving group in America.

And if they are smart, they will grow these small towns in a diversified way, first taking the left-over corn mash from the ethanol distillery and using it to feed cattle, then collecting the manure from the cattle feed lots and producing more fuel, and then establishing slaughter facilities for the ripened cattle, and gaining dairy products from the dairy cows also feeding near the corn-fuel plant.

And enough money is flowing into those rural towns right now, that every farmer in the state will be buying a new pickup. But if they are smart, they will make long-term decisions that benefit their communities -- like funding a new public library, or building a swimming pool at the high school, or building parks and sweet meadows for tourists.

Remember that the Corn Belt, that broad band across the middle of America, going from Nebraska, across Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and to Ohio -- coincides with the manufacturing center of our country, and what used to be our most powerful economic generator -- John Deere plants in Iowa, Caterpillar plants in Illinois, and a broad swath of steel mills from Chicago to Pittsburg.

And that is all known now as the Rust Belt, as our economy changed to a service orientation, and the power of this region diminished.

But it rises again, thanks to the mighty power of corn and ethanol. Ethanol, a subsidized and imperfect solution to energy problems, is serving as a catalyst for economic and cultural growth in the Midwest.

For too long this country has been dominated by trendy air-heads from California, entwined with neurotic academics from the Boston-Washington Corridor, and bitterly fought by intransigent, thick-skulled Southerners and all this time, these past 20 and 30 years, the Midwest has remained self-effacing, saying "We're not much," in a courteous tone.

But it's changing now, the climate has changed, the impetus is arising in the center of the country, and the people of the Midwest will now speak up Up, and they will now make more sense, and speak with more truth and more kindness, and more certainty.

This is going to be good. It all begins with Corn, and if they build it in Iowa, the rest of us will come to them, if not in person, then in spirit, with eyes and ears opened, to discuss solutions to America's problems, and the Renaissance in Iowa will save the nation.

Notes on a culture

President: Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is stylish. Afghan men wear cool hats, turbans, cloaks, daggers, and masculine jewelery -- they would put any LA steet rapper to shame. It's definitely the bong.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is also a pretty sharp dresser. We should have never invaded Iraq, and since we did, we should never have let Rumsfeld design the strategy -- but he did look good in a suit.

** Conceptual artist Bobby Vilinksy, featured in a post several days ago, will be hosting a show at his Waltham, Massachusetts studio. It will be a group show in this cooperatively shared space. Waltham, a suburb of Boston, was one of the first industrial cities in America. In the early 19th century textile mills, powered by dams on the Charles River, employed thousands of men and women in Waltham.

The old brick buildings are still there and Vilinsky works in one of them. In a few days, Frog Hospital will post photos of his art, so stay tuned.

** Al Gore jumped in line again. If a Nobel Peace Prize is given to a man who has worked to save and improve the environment, it should have gone to agricultural essayist Wendell Berry. Berry's work -- his written words and his small farm in Kentucky -- form a true and wholesome integrity. In the Jewish prayer book, it says, "Blessed is He who says and does..." --- that's Wendell Berry. Compared to him, Al Gore is just another grandstander.

** However, Al Gore would have made a better President than George Bush. Of course, that's easy to say -- you could pick a name out of the phone book and find a better President than Bush.

** The Salvation of the Nation will come from Iowa. Read all about the "Corn Renaissance" in the next post.

October is the most beautiful month

October is the most beautiful month. The weather is good almost everywhere in the country. You can go camping and sleep well in the crisp air. Frost has killed most of the bugs.

Of the four seasons, autumn is the only with a home -- New England. It was created there. Pictures of pretty leaves -- that's not it. The visual splendor is the lesser joy. It's the air itself that breathes magic. And if you're lucky to be in New England now, I'm happy for you.

It's pretty nice here in the Skagit Valley too, so we can't complain. Even Southern California has been blessed with a rare October rain -- my brother Tom called from Pasadena to say that the grass was growing there.

On Beaver Marsh Road, we are still gathering potatoes left over in the field after the harvester has passed through. I have about 200 pounds in a big pile by the barn. They store better unwashed, I have learned. I clean them up in five-pound batches, making a nice gift for friends.

Gleaning is not just for poor people anymore, because there are literally tons of potatoes out there for anyone who cares to gather them, and the farmers readily give permission for this traditional activity.

I don't give a hoot about global warming, but you might think about all the energy required to grow these potatoes -- come on out and get some spuds and earn your carbon credits.