The "Impossible Task" of Bike Repair

A tale of wheels, brake pads, and coney dogs

The Final Kale Harvest

It felt like slaughter.

I stood with one foot on the frost-filmed lawn, one foot on the neck of the kale plant that I was trying to snap in half. My numb fingers clutched the kale’s three-inch-thick stem as I wrestled it, swaying it back and forth, crunching and cracking the veritable trunk that still had enough green in it to resist the end for another few minutes. I paused, out of breath from the struggle, staring once more at the drooping green leaves, frozen solid for the second time this week. It was time to harvest, or they would complete wilt and be useless to eat. And with the final harvest, I had to fell the three-foot-tall trunks as well.

With a determined grunt, I grabbed my pruning shears and forced the sharp edges along the base of the stem, gnawing them back and forth. Green layers stripped away, the exact color of the caterpillars I had massacred a couple months ago to preserve the kale for its final few harvests. The kale plant, a tree of crinkly leaves, shuddered, then snapped and crashed to the ground.

I stood up, dizzy. I felt the ache in my throat, the pressure behind the eyes, the tension in my forehead— those sensations when you want to cry but know that it makes no sense to cry. Except maybe, today, it did. 

The plant had started as a tan speck, a sphere smaller than a poppy seed, cradled in my palm. It was late March, blustery and overcast. I was still struggling with deep depression, feeling like life was futile, like I didn’t matter, like nothing I did had any worth. But it was time to plant the kale, and so I grabbed a jacket and forced myself outside. It wouldn’t take long.

I had dropped the seed— along with one more, just in case— into the shallow indent in my Square Foot Garden. The book recommended 1-2 kale plants per square foot, but the infinitesimal package of life seemed too small to sit by itself, so I had made two indents. I patted the fluffy black soil over the top, tucking them in against the rain and cold. And I waited.

It didn’t take long— I wish I had taken notes to remember how long exactly— before I saw some raggedy new leaves popping up from the earth. This seed had unlocked itself, feasting on the soil’s nutrients, drawing the compost and minerals into itself, eating earth and sun to create something completely new. This smaller-than-a-poppy-seed speck was now the size of my little finger. Magic.

My curly kale, a hybrid, grew into handsome two-foot palm trees; the lacinato, an heirloom, branched out in twisty black-green curls, like a Dr. Seuss plant. Spring crested and broke into high summer. As the kale grew, so did I. My heart healed, my purpose strengthened, my will renewed. 

“Kale will bolt over the summer, so save the seeds and harvest the whole plant.” So my gardening books told me. But every day, as I peeked out at the kale from inside the blessed air conditioning, I saw them standing up to the sun. A bit wilted, but no sign of bolting. Every other day I poured water on the roots, watching the thirsty soil lap it up. And as my other garden plants withered away— carrots dying of heat stroke, peas fading to fragile buckskin-colored husks— my kale endured. 

Summer lasted an eternity, stretching through October into November. My kale kept growing, putting out fresh growth at every whiff of cooler weather. Cabbage butterflies with white wings laid eggs on my plants, and soon an army of caterpillars tried to mow them down. I spent hours picking caterpillars and drowning them, sacrificing their lives that the kale might live. I swatted away grasshoppers and scattered incubating insect eggs with a blast of the hose. The kale, bedraggled, kept unfurling new crinkly leaves from the center of the stem. 

We pretty much skipped fall, and winter dropped on St. Louis like a frosty bomb. I watched the weather forecast; I watched my kale. The hardy leaves laughed at the light frosts, growing brighter green with each icy touch. 

Then came the week with two hard frosts— the ground turned to ice and stayed that way. The kale leaves wilted, then drooped flat against the stems. It was time for the harvest, time to tuck the leaves away in my own freezer for a winter of greens.

Which brought me to today. And I stood, staring at the fallen plant in front of me, still perfectly shaped, still green, and I thought of our journey together. I thought of all the food it had given me, all the smoothies and pasta sauce and salad. It gave me so much, and all I gave it was an occasional drink of water. And now, in the end, I had killed it.

I didn’t cry. I sniffed, and stamped my feet and breathed on my hands to warm them up, and I continued the harvest. The next plant fell, and the next, and the next. Their stumps stuck out of the leaf mulch, naked. I gathered their stalks and leaves into a bale, which I heaved on one shoulder. Sixteen pounds of kale rested on me, ready to be stripped, cut, and put away. I stared at the stumps once more, and briefly considered uprooting them. But that would be too much, too hard to deal with today. I really didn’t want to cry.

Practicers of permaculture choose perennial plants because they describe harvesting annuals as “clear cutting.” Now, I understood what they meant. This wasn’t like the other harvests throughout the year, picking leaves that would soon be renewed— this was a death, the end of a living organism that had eaten, drunk, grown, and turned its face to the sun.

As I hauled the bale into the house, scattering errant leaves on the living room floor, I realized that this didn’t just feel like a slaughter— it was one. For anyone to live, something else must die. It’s ingrained in the fabric of our world. It’s in our soil, our plants, our gut flora. Life can only be sustained by death.

I paused at the door, staring outside to the stumps I had left behind. Slowly and sincerely, I nodded to them. “Thank you,” I whispered, and shut the door.

~~~

Vanilla and Butter, or, The Need for a Food-Buying Intervention

Whenever I go to the grocery store, I always buy certain things. Zach and I go through some staples at an alarming rate, so I always put them on my list, regardless of whether or not I’ve checked the cupboards. Last week, I discovered two bottles of vanilla squirreled away in the back shelf, in addition to the half-empty bottle I already had. Three bottles of vanilla! How silly of me! 

As is my habit, yesterday while grocery shopping I bought a pound of butter (in addition to about thirty pounds of other food which I carried in my backpack from Aldi to my house). What I didn’t notice was that when I threw it in the left-hand corner of the top shelf, behind the milk, it was joining a breeding ground. Later last night, when I was rearranging the refrigerator, Zach asked, “Why did you tell me to buy butter the other day?”

I shrugged. “We go through butter really fast,” I said.

Zach stared hard into the back left-hand corner. Then he began pulling out packets of butter. More and more and more of them.

We ended up with this:

We had six pounds of butter in the fridge.

SIX POUNDS.

(And that’s not even counting the half-pound of clarified butter in the cupboard.)

We fell on the floor, we were laughing so hard. And Zach said, “You need to write a blog about this.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

~~~

Cheap Factory-Made Woolly Bears

On our walk to Pere Marquette last week, Zachary and I saw lots of caterpillars crawling across the roads. For the first twenty or so I stopped and made a little squee and talked about how cute they were, but for the next several dozen I was content to simply look at them. 

The most common caterpillar we saw was the Woolly Bear, a caterpillar which turns into the Isabella Tiger Moth. This is what one looks like as a caterpillar:

And this Wikipedia link will show you the moth they turn into, as well as some crazy facts (they freeze solid during the winter, apparently!).

Farmers’ lore says that you can tell how long the winter is going to be by looking at the band of orange-brown between a wooly bear’s black ends. If it’s narrow, the winter will be harsh. If it’s wide, the winter will be mild.

I, of course, got the prediction backwards, and so spent the entire walk exclaiming what a crazy harsh winter this was going to be! The band was very wide in every caterpillar we saw. Some of the caterpillars had barely a smidgen of black on either end, and others only had a black end on their head. Zach remarked that they look like they had been cut from one long cylinder of striped fuzz.

“There must be a factory where a slicer cuts off the little segments,” Zach said. “But the slicer isn’t very precise, so the caterpillars all look different.”

Within seconds, we had determined that these caterpillars were the result of a cheap factory line (probably made in China), being mass-produced and edging out the good old-fashioned handmade woolly bears. “Why, in my day, our caterpillars were painstakingly handcrafted, not like this cheap factory junk. And they had uniform bands of color, doggonit!”

Have I mentioned that I love autumn, long walks, and my husband?

~~~

A 20-Mile Stroll to Pere Marquette

For months now, Zachary and I have been talking about walking to Pere Marquette State Park. We kept on deciding against it, mostly because we’d need some willing victims to meet us for a picnic out there to justify the walk, and also because the summer weather is not the greatest for a twenty-mile jaunt. But yesterday, with a cloudy autumn sky, a chilly breeze blowing, and my brother and mom interested in a picnic by the river, we found the perfect time.

We left around 9:30 from my parents’ house, which was marginally closer to our destination. After a mile of walking along a busy street and through a strip of fast-food joints and gas stations, we turned to the left, skirted an industrial district, and found ourselves on a wide open country road.

For a couple hours we rambled along the roads by cornfields and farmhouses. We even saw two bald eagles wheeling far overhead, cackling to each other in metallic-sounding chuckles. Eventually we reached the Golden Eagle Ferry, which (for $3 a head), bore us across the Mississippi River to the banks of Calhoun County, Illinois. 

The roads in Calhoun County are narrow, tortuous, and full of steep hills, winding us through forests, along sweeping empty hillsides of harvested barley, and past peach orchards, mansions, trailer homes, and roadside stores that sell sorghum molasses by the quart. Our road took us through a neighborhood on the spine of Calhoun County, where the land fell away on either side, showing us broken woods and farmland to the right, and densely-wooded countryside to the left that obscured the rivers and marched up to the bluffs where Pere Marquette resides. (Unfortunately, I considered it too much work to dig through the backpack for a camera at this point, so I have no photos of that.)

Next our road plunged downward, and within a couple hours we found ourselves walking on the shoulder of a highway that delved through the heart of the Two Rivers Wildlife Preserve, a wetlands habitat reserved for migrating birds. We saw few birds, but  discovered a storm of grasshoppers. When we walked in the grass to avoid getting hit by cars, hundreds of grasshoppers, large and small, bounded out of our way.

Our final road in Calhoun County looped around a neighborhood by the waters of the Illinois River, where all the houses stand on stilts. As Zach and I walked, two friendly dogs ran over to check us out, and we chatted with their owner, a middle-aged woman in a floral print dress, standing on the stairs that led up to her house. She was curious about the backpack, and we told her that we were walking to Pere Marquette from St. Charles. Her response was, “Why?”

We crossed the Brussels Ferry, walked along a shoulder of the busy road for a while, then took to the bike trail that led us to the park. We were now racing my brother and mom, and managed to arrive at the picnic area about five minutes before they did. We laid down on the concrete and let out sighs of relief (in between me incessantly yelling, “Boo-ya!”). The walk, from start to finish, was a bit more than 20 miles.

Christian and Mom arrived with picnic gear in hand, and I limped over to greet them.

“So, we going to do any hiking?” Christian asked.

I looked at Zach. Zach looked at me. We both shrugged.

So we went hiking.

Reading Aloud and The Lay of Leithian

I’ve spent the past few days with my husband, who had four wisdom teeth yanked with just local anesthetic. In between sipping broth, taking prescription narcotics, and feeling dizzy, he somehow found the energy and jaw strength to finish reading me The Lay of Leithian by J.R.R. Tolkien. (Zachary is, in short, fantastic beyond all reason.)

I had forgotten how comforting and exciting it is to have a story read aloud to you. When I read by myself, my eyes skim the page at an almost speed-reading pace, and I have to place a bookmark under the line I’m reading if I want to savor the prose. Reading aloud slows down the story. It lets me take in each word. Since I have a hard time processing things by listening to them (I’m a visual learner), I have to listen intently, focusing all my energy on taking in the meaning and hearing to the flow of the words. It’s a lot more energy-intensive than reading for myself. And a lot more exciting.

If you haven’t read The Lay of Leithian, and you like poetry, I highly recommend finding a copy. (Disclaimer: Tolkien never actually finished the poem, so you’ll have to discover how it ends by reading the chapter about Beren and Luthien in The Silmarillion.) The story follows the tale of Beren, a mortal man, who falls in love with a half-elf, half-angel maiden named Luthien. Their love is strong, but Beren must fulfill a seemingly impossible task to win her hand in marriage: journey to Hell and back and return with a holy stone, a silmaril.

The story, even aside from the incredible prose and spell-binding imagery, has everything good stories have: true love, a noble hero, a beautiful maiden, a forbidden romance, friendship, torture, prophecy, battle, the triumph of beauty, and the sorrow of fate. It’s one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever heard. I’ve already decided I’m going to tell it as a bedtime story to my children someday, especially to my daughters, who need to see that beauty has worth because it springs from goodness, courage, devotion, and strength.

In On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien wrote that before we grow weary of detailed and gritty and lifelike stories, “We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses— and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make.”

In The Lay of Leithian, I looked at green again— and it startled me in the best possible way.

A Conversation, In Which Zachary Fails to Recognize My Genius

Today, while I was making lunch and Zach was working on his computer, this conversation ensued:

ME: Zachary, I just thought of the best name for our baby whenever we have a baby.

ZACH: What’s that?

ME: Rohan! Wouldn’t that be cool?

ZACH: I thought you said it was blasphemy to name someone Rohan.

ME: That was referring to a character in that fantasy novel I saw the other day. You can’t name a fantasy character Rohan. That’s just ridiculous. But it would be a great baby name!

ZACH: I think that would be weird, since it’s a place name.

ME: No, wait! I’ve got it! (Waves hands wildly) I know the perfect name!

ZACH: Okay…

ME: ROHAN SOLO.

ZACH (alternately laughing and wondering who is this person he’s married): …I don’t think that’s a very good idea.

ME: No. You are mistaken. It is in fact the best idea.

The End.

~~~

Travel Stories: And the Moral of the Story Is, Don't Ever Tell People You're a Heavy Sleeper

A few years ago, on an undisclosed trip at an undisclosed location, I was staying with a friend who lived in a house with a few other college girls. They were all very nice and welcoming. They showed me the couch I’d be sleeping on for the next couple days. It was caddy-corner to a love-seat in their living room, and I was happy because the couch was actually long enough to accommodate my height.

“Sorry you’re kind of in the middle of things,” my friend told me.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Seriously, don’t worry about being too loud. I can sleep through pretty much anything.” I assured all her housemates the same thing.

That night, after a lovely day of urban exploring, I laid on the couch, tied a bandana around my eyes, and conked out.

A few hours later, I drifted to the surface when I heard two people talking close by. I was almost going to drift back down into sleep, but then I heard my name and woke up fully. I soon recognized the voices as one of the housemates and her guy friend.

“So how long is she gonna be here?” the guy asked.

“A couple days,” the girl replied. “It’s interesting, she was homeschooled.”

The guy snickered. “I can tell.”

“Be nice!” the girl snapped.

The conversation turned to other things. Feeling vaguely offended and also a little guilty for listening in, I tried to get back to sleep. But it’s hard to fall asleep when two people are sitting three feet away from you having a conversation at normal volume.

Just when I was thinking I ought to ask them to leave, I heard a strange, soft smacking sound. And then another. And another. I froze. Could it be? Oh, crap…

Yup, they were smooching. Pretty passionately, from the sound of it. Three feet away from me. And I had no way to escape.

For several long, agonizing minutes, I tried to figure out what to do. They gave no signs of letting up. Finally, I pretended to wake up— ever so gradually, giving them plenty of time— and I peeked out from under my bandana. They were sitting side by side on the couch, the picture of innocence. “Hi,” I murmured thickly, as if just waking up. 

“Hi,” they said.

I didn’t know what to do. So I just smiled and said, “Goodnight,” and rolled over.

They were quiet for a while, but only a little while.

This lovesick not-quite-a-couple made out until four in the morning. Four in the morning! And all the while I laid on the couch and tried to meditate or think detached thoughts or go to sleep or figure out if there was any way I could possibly get them to stop smooching and leave the living room. 

Finally, the guy left for his dorm room (thank God), and the girl returned to her own room.

Finally alone, I pulled off my blindfold, looked at the time, and groaned. I was going to be trashed tomorrow. And, in the interests of the girl’s anonymity, I wouldn’t even be able to post this miserable and somewhat funny story on my blog!

Years have passed since that day, but I can tell you this: I never, ever told anyone ever again that I was a deep sleeper. That lesson I learned well.

~~~

Enemies, or Lack Thereof

As a kid, I was always upset that I didn’t have any enemies.

Sure, sometimes Eric annoyed me, Christian teased me mercilessly, and Mary got on my nerves, but we were all on the same side. In a crisis, I knew we were fellow soldiers in the great battle against… well, there was the problem. Who could we be against?

There was a neighbor girl we didn’t like, who was rude and made fun of us for being homeschooled. But Mom said to be nice to her, because she came from a messed-up family and was dealing with a lot of pain and hurt. Way to use sympathy to ruin a perfectly good enemy, Mom.

For a while, I was annoyed that our neighbor girls up the street screamed so much. I tried everything I could think of to construe it as an enemy attack, but it never held any water, so I gave up.

Ultimately, I realized there was no one in my life I could abjectly hate. I solved this problem in my usual fashion: I wrote a story. 

In the stories, the heroine and her trusty band of siblings and friends had to fight in self-defense against neighbor kids who literally wanted them dead. They had epic battles in the woods, fighting with sticks and using stealth and strategy. The enemy neighbors made bombs by setting pine cones on fire, and one of them tried to run over the heroine in his parents’ car. They almost killed her brother, leaving him for dead in the woods. But against all odds, the heroine was able to bring about peace in the end. I can’t remember how, but I think that she showed mercy to one of her enemies and used it as a way to proclaim the good news of Jesus.

In telling myself these stories, I discovered something that I didn’t process until years later: as much as I thought I wanted an enemy, I really just wanted everyone to get along in the end. Without the stories, I might not have figured that out.

~~~

Tom Swift

Today, I was sitting in the living room with Zach and some friends when I heard a strange metallic thump in the laundry room. I got up to check if the wash cycle was done, and as I opened the door I heard it again. I assumed it was just the air conditioner making weird noises. 

When I realized that I couldn’t transfer the laundry to the dryer because my back is strained, I asked Zach to take care of it, and returned to the living room.

A second later, Zach rushed back in with a terrified look on his face. “Guys, there’s a—” He paused, holding up his hands like two wide-stretching talons. “—thing in the laundry room!”

We all rushed into the tiny concrete room, wondering what on earth he could mean. I glanced around before I spotted it, lying on the air conditioning unit— a tiny soot-colored bird with ridiculously big wings. “It’s a bird!” I exclaimed.

Zach shivered. “When I saw it splayed out against the wall, I thought it was a giant moth!” 

It was hardly bigger than some moths, with a body as long as my palm and wings about as long as my whole hand. It had a tiny beak, two large black eyes, and a hopeless, rather grumpy expression.

“Get a sheet,” I said, and within a couple minutes I had gently cupped the bird in a sheet and taken him outside. I place him on top of our trash can, still on the sheet, to let him rest. He closed his eyes, wiped the dryer lint off his face, and sat perfectly still, eyes closed, claws clutching the sheet. A few times we wondered if he had died and I had to look closely to see the slight rise and fall of his back.

We discovered he was a chimney swift, and I named him Tom. We sat on the front stoop next to him for a while, but at last decided to leave him alone. I checked on him about an hour later and found him at the base of the trash can. When I tried to pick him up, he flew straight up in the air, fluttered pathetically sideways a few yards, and crash-landed next to the neighbor’s house. I gently picked him up and placed him on the neighbor’s windowsill.

A few minutes later, I checked again and found him gone, but nowhere on the ground. I hope that he is now flying free and eating lots of mosquitoes to make up for his harrowing experience in the laundry room.

A Conspiracy of the Weather and Food Gods

This past Monday, I awoke with a clear purpose in mind: make the food I had promised to bring to the Memorial Day potluck (fruit salad, lettuce salad, and brownies). The only one that required any actual cooking were the brownies, but I still hadn’t bought the ingredients for the salads. No matter. Even though Zach was at work (and therefore had the car), it’s only a five-block trek to Aldi: down the steep hill, through a strip of woods, around the edge of the park by the cemetery, and up another hill to the store. Easy peasy.

After finishing up some other projects, I glanced out the window. The sky looked heavy and gray, but it hadn’t rained yet, so I figured I’d just zip over to the store and back on my bike. I hauled Shep (good name for a bike, yes?) out of the laundry room, hopped on, and zoomed down the hill (incidentally, I’m not in good enough shape to pedal my way back to the top of that hill— I have to walk my bike). Just as I reached the bottom, I felt a couple sharp drops of rain slap against my arms. Not feeling in the mood to turn back now, I pedaled faster. Within 30 seconds, the raindrops escalated into a monsoon, driving cold globs of water into my skin and eyes until it blinded and choked me. 

I skidded to a stop under a tree and caught my breath, yelling, “Well okay then! I won’t go to the store!” The rain immediately subsided. But then I broke my promise to the weather, and that’s when my karma started going all wrong.

Soaked completely through, I biked the remaining distance to the store, spraying up muddy water with each stroke of my pedal. At last I staggered up to the Aldi, shoved a quarter into the slot to release a cart, pulled out the cart, and rammed it toward the door. It wasn’t until then that I noticed the store was dark.

They were closed for Memorial Day.

At that point, I exclaimed, “Duuuuuuh!”, which drew some weird looks from the passersby. Reclaiming my dignity, I returned the cart and sauntered back to my bike, pretending that I was just out for a stroll.

Back at home, I changed out of my sopping clothes and wrote my dear husband a distressed note begging him to pick up some lettuce, strawberries, blueberries, and bananas before he left Walmart for the day. Then, shaking my head, I clomped downstairs to make the brownies. I hummed as I whipped up the batter.

When I opened the preheated oven, a wave of cold air greeted me. The oven was broken. 

Yeah, the food gods had it out for me that day. 

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending: Zach came to my rescue with a bag of produce, and I was able to bake the brownies at the potluck instead of at my house. Still, I guess I learned my lesson about making promises to the weather.

~~~

And the Moral of the Story Is, It Does Hurt to Ask

Do I look pregnant? I submit that
I do not! I need to go eat cake now...

On Thursday, I was shuffling through the dress racks at Salvation Army when a woman with a huge black sunhat entered my aisle. I looked up at her, smiled, and said, “I like your hat!”

“Thanks!” she said brightly, then glanced at the potbelly (aka my “butter tummy”). “So are you due soon?”

My brain had a conniption of indecision, trying to decide whether to teach her a lesson through embarrassment, or tell her a made-up due date. I blurted out a cheerful, “Not yet,” and escaped to the other side of the rack, leaving her to sort out what that might mean.

Suddenly I didn’t feel like trying on dresses anymore. I meandered over to the kitchen goods section and rooted through the utensils. My thoughts went something like this: Hmm, a ladle. We could really use a ladle, for dishing out all those INCREDIBLY NUTRITIOUS SOUPS THAT I MAKE. Oh, and here’s a potato masher so I can make my own mashed potatoes and LIGHTLY AND RESPONSIBLY SALT THEM, and— hey, look! A watermelon baller! Now I can scoop out watermelons easier and make TASTY AND SLIMMING HEALTH MEALS WITH THEM. Right? RIGHT?

And then I speed-walked home and baked a cake.

The End.

~~~