my nature preserve

 There are few things more titillating than a biodiverse nature preserve with a rippling creek, stones, and enough flora and fauna to bring on a sense of euphoria. One can find respite in a cozy little corner of the world, where solitude will heal the stress of your modern-age merry-go-round lifestyle. Even if that place is...in very own back yard.

And why not? Why frame a nature preserve, a slice of peace in a world gone mad, in the middle of nowhere...when it can be in your own 60 x 80 lot? Beyond the 40 x 60 with your domicile and detached garage, there's plenty of room left over for carving out a wild kingdom. 

Why mow the lawn when your back yard can be a botanist's wet dream, complete with every strange species of flowering and non-flowering plant available from the most bizarre of your local garden centers? Why wax poetic with just wood betony and feverfew? Add a healthy dose of Amazonia, Patagonia, and the far reaches of the globe with a variety of various banana plants, some frilly ferns, and brilliant flowers sure to enliven your neighborhood. 

Be the hit of your block by acquiring worldwide treasures with varieties of heather and gorse, Scottish thistles, and Japanese holly. And if you have enough room, why not add a Redwood in the middle of the back yard? It will give you and your descendants hundreds of years of enjoyment, and a deep sense of historical significance. 

Be sure to add a fringe of rhododendrons, azaleas, and flowering laurel, creating your own natural boundary lines. These will help prevent your wildlife from becoming invasive species in someone else's yard. Species that will provide hours of rapturous entertainment are your goal, so why not add a family of ferrets, a Scottish Terrier, and a fishpond? After a year of drought, you can turn that mini-pond into a very useful compost area to add your stray limbs, leaves, and rotten cantaloupe...all while enjoying the benefits of a government-sanctioned nature preserve.

So why not act while the time is ripe...while the flowers are blooming...while the birds are still singing...and before your Yard Nazis invade your poor pathetic lawn with their unprofessional and unconstitutional regulations your grandfathers would have fought a war over to repeal? Spring is here, and summer is coming on, and you must gather your flora and fauna now...before it is too late. 

second adolescence

you're crushed, like in high school...

sophomore year sitting in the back of class

shorter than anyone else

you lose your attention span

birds fly by the window to where you would go

you...beyond this room, beyond this interlude.

but your history...a senior in Latin class

the last one they ever had there

sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt

the words echoing in a narrow hallway

like a structure for the weary mind

or a recitation of your phone number

your mother made you repeat it 

until that lingering uneasiness left your soul...

you...who wandered aimlessly through adolescence.

you're crushed, like in a dusty old book

sitting alone in the crisp breeze at a picnic table

more silent than anyone else

more alone in this connected world

the children chattering like squirrels playing

you...waiting for the coming ice cream

a second adolescence has descended

and your mind is wandering aimlessly again.

Turkey and Noodles in an Apple Broth

 

There are few culinary disappointments like a turkey and noodle dinner that is about as tasteless as a cardboard box. The trick to making a turkey breast taste wonderful is what you cook it in and what you marry it to. In this case we are going to marry the turkey and noodles with a sweet future, one that will bring you memories even after the meal- the ceremony- is a distant dream. To do that, you will need specific ingredients:

1/2 pound of Inn Maid Noodles (egg noodles, preferably German or eastern European style)

54 ounces of Turkey Broth (2 cans of Walnut Creek Foods Turkey or Chicken Broth)

1 pound of turkey breast (1/4 pound meat per person)

2-3 cups of Simply Apple Juice (an Apple cider is even better). Just make sure it is not a processed, light apple juice which won't do for this

1/4 pound Kerrygold Butter

4 cloves of garlic

Ground peppercorns

Tarragon (1 tablespoon dried, 2 sprigs fresh)

Thyme and Rosemary to taste

Large saucepan, large pot to boil noodles and cook finished meal, large cooking fork to use with the turkey, large spoon for cooking noodles and finished product, serrated knife for cutting turkey breast, butter knife

This recipe serves four people 

In a large saucepan, place the turkey breast, apple juice or cider, ground peppercorns and tarragon. Place a lid on the pan and cook at a low-to-medium heat. Test it to see if it is done by taking a serrated knife and large fork and cutting through the meat to make sure nothing is pink. When the turkey breast appears cooked, set it aside. 

At the same time, or later if you have just one source of flame to cook over, in a large pot heat up your 54 ounces turkey or chicken broth until lightly boiling. Then, add the noodles and the "broth" (formed from the apple juice/cider and turkey cooking) in the saucepan. Cover and cook. Since all flames vary as far as how fast they cook an item, check occasionally. Add the rosemary and cut up cloves of garlic when it looks like the noodles are almost ready. The best thing to do, is to check the taste or appearance of the noodles. If they taste done, turn off the heat. Keep the lid on the pan and let the flavors steep for about 5-10 minutes. 

When the noodles have finished cooking, add thyme to taste if desired. I like to use thyme if it is fresh from my garden. Add the butter or add it in in individual bowls. Serve hot and fresh!

 

When life is kind of clunky

 I've a friend who just broke her elbow. She's getting on in years- into the Silver category. Not aged enough for "Gold," which usually involves a leakage issue, but leakage depends on several things.

Aging leads to a life of being clunky. Gravity seems to be taking more interest in our limbs, often taking pot-shots from our formerly favorite pieces of furniture...

Take the hall tree, for example. They're deadly. Now some of you won't even know what I am talking about, but your hall tree is a wooden or metal instrument standing in your way, or about to fall over and pin you to the floor. I would know, they fall more regularly than vending machines...

....and we know just how deadly they are. Between 2008 and 2021, statistics indicate that 36,600 people went to the emergency room because of an accident related to a vending machine, most from a machine falling over on them. (National Electronic Injury Surveillance System statistics)

But back to the dreaded hall tree. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, 20-30 people die every year from falling furniture. And those are just the most unfortunate. Over 20,000 people are injured, on average, every year in an incident related to furniture. I was one of them back in February, when an industrial-age metal lampstand took my foot (and job) out of commission for weeks. 

While I have searched for answers explaining why my older friends experience an increasingly sense of gravity's revenge, there seems to be no one in the medical profession who can make a positive correlation between a sense of increasing gravity and aging. 

Frankly, I think we are just not there in science, nor medicine. We have no 21st century Newton, expanding our knowledge on the basics of living on a spinning blue planet. An 80's wall philosopher, feeling some angst, postulated it this way...."There is no gravity. The earth sucks."

  

 

Silent Censorship

 Someone working at X tried to label this blog as "spam." 

Have I tried to sell swamp land in Florida to my readers from Singapore, China, and Indonesia? Or, is it someone who thinks free speech is a dangerous thing?

Maybe Elon needs to go back to X to straighten things out and let "Big Balls" and the rest of the crew at DOGE keep up the good work.

makes you wonder....how dangerous is free speech?

The taste of grace

It is a dangerous place to be if we think we are better than everyone else, if we think we have arrived at some spiritual point that we will never slip up, or if we think we belong to Jesus' own denomination and the others are incorrect. Such arrogance will lead those of such thinking straight into Hell. 

While the Bible does call the elect "saints," those who are sanctified through Christ, we have little to do with our being viewed that way. It is our submission to God, through repentance, that puts us into a state where we can be viewed as being "saints." It is The Christ who is the sole one who has made us appear saints in His eyes. You or I cannot work our way into a state of sainthood, of holiness, no matter how hard we try. Who can lead a godly life? Who can be above sin through the length of their lives? Can a monk, who shuts his mouth through a day and night, but may covet a piece of bread, thereby sinning? Or a nun, who denies the flesh, denies her emotions, and lives as if she is following a rote-by-numbers life? Without a close relationship- as the created with the creator, no nun can achieve a Christ-like state of bliss.

There was a time long ago when I read everything I could find written by a peculiar Catholic monk who seemed to have his head on straighter than anyone I had ever known. I was a bookish lad, surrounded by my grandparents' eclectic library, and had been exposed to the Latin Mass, contemporary mass, and several protestant interpretations of Christianity. I poured over Seeds of Contemplation, and "the contemplative life." I plowed through books written for a much more experienced audience, in an effort to find answers to the questions my mind asked late at night. 

But even as I gained answers, more questions came until I found solace in that mystery of mysteries, the actual Bible. No longer content to pursue the way of the monks (including persuading my mother to regularly purchase Monk's Bread that came from a monastery in Vermont), I found the Bible more Irish, in that some of it, you just settled on confirming that what you did not know would be a mystery until you passed beyond the veil to the real alternative to Tir Na N'Og, to eternal life. I learned to accept what might be vaguely Catholic in my answers, as if the deep questions were sometimes too much of "an ecumenical matter."

But coloration...whether denominational, cultural, or existential, faded as I read and studied the actual Bible and gave up concentrating on a particular shade of worldview. There was, within the actual text, a distinct worldview, not quite matching anyone's denominational take, nor a philosophy championed by a particular scholar. The text was the foundation, woven more intricately than a Solzhenitsyn novel, or moody like a Chekhov story, it had such emotion contained in deep, engrossing sentences and paragraphs. 

A student's lifelong search might be to understand the full meaning of "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." It is, in my humble opinion, so deep, I have spent decades searching the depth of that well, while still finding more meaning beyond what I knew previously. And that is one sliver of the sweet cake contained in the New Testament alone. 

It is with a heart knowing I am only one of billions created, whom God has still chosen to love and forgive, that is humbling. How can one be full of pride realizing that truth? Grace, undeserved mercy, is humbling when you know you have not lived up to holiness. 

There is only one holy Creator, and everywhere I look, I see His artwork. In the faces He has created. In the eyes and smiles of strangers. In the world around. And while some is certainly a mystery, I know the taste of grace. It is unmistakable. It is what brings me to my knees. It is what blows away every haughty thought, every haughty answer. It is at the core of a life I hope will please my maker forever. I have not yet passed to a glorified state, that place where we will know eternity and the One we will call Father. But one day...we will know, as we are already known...