Your right to freeze peach

I have two peach trees (also some pear trees). I don't really do much to maintain them, just mulch and mow around them. I haven't done as much pruning as the official recommendations, but I've come to think those are just superstition. I got an incredible yield this year, the branches bending down to the ground. I had the neighbors come over to pick them, actually two sets of neighbors, and they took all they wanted and I took some for myself and I've still got peaches galore. I'm trying to recruit additional people to give them away to -- maybe it's a way to meet more of the neighbors.

 Anyway, fruit trees are definitely a good investment. Pears need very little attention. I understand it's pretty much impossible to do apples organically, but I've never used any chemicals on my trees and I get some insect-damaged fruit but not enough to really matter. Maybe the bugs just haven't found me yet but so far it's been a pretty free ride.

If you have a yard, you should try it. You can get dwarf varieties that don't take up much space. And they have beautiful blossoms in the spring -- they're just as ornamental as they are edible.

Electricity

 I don't know how much it was national news, but tropical storm Isaias basically wiped out the electrical grid in Connecticut. Many towns were pretty much 100% without power, mine among them. The electric company failed to prepare for the storm, and it took them a solid week to get most customers service restored, and as of this writing, 9 days later, some are still waiting.

I got my power back after almost exactly 7 days. I don't know if I can adequately describe what an ordeal that was. All of us out here get our water from wells, and no electricity means no water. I had stashed a five gallon jerry can with water for toilet flushing etc., and I could refill my potable water bottle at my neighbors' house, who have a generator. But I couldn't bathe, shave, or clean anything. I charged my devices at the neighbors' in the mornings, but only got about an hour use of my computer each day, so I couldn't really work. All I could do at night was read by flashlight. I couldn't irrigate my garden, it's been very dry here, so the garden suffered. (The tropical storm gave us plenty of wind but not much rain.) Yesterday, I had to toss the entire contents of my refrigerator on the compost heap. Some of it, I couldn't even tell what it was.

Now, if you think about it, electricity can't possibly be a necessity, right? I don't know when it first made it out here but probably not until 1920 or so. People managed to cook, eat, defecate, clean and bathe as well as operate their farms and offices. But of course everything was set up to make that possible. They had hand-pumped wells, wood or coal-fired cookstoves, mechanical typewriters, kerosene lamps, outhouses, they ate fresh vegetables from their own or neighbors farms during the harvest season and lived off canned goods, root cellars, and the occasional slaughtered livestock the rest of the year. 

But now it's impossible to live without it. You're forced to adapt eventually -- Puerto Ricans who were without power for the better part of a year after hurricane Maria managed to survive, but  it must have been damn hard. One week was more than enough for me. I'm buying a standby generator, which is expensive, but I can't go through this again. (A small portable generator from Home Depot wouldn't do the job for me because it couldn't operate the well pump, refrigerator and range, let alone give me any additional circuits.) But a lot of people, most actually, can't afford that. So they'll just have to suffer through the next storm.

Testing, 1, 2, 3 . . .

So as part of the plan to ostensibly re-open the university in the fall, the authorities required all faculty who want to show up on campus to get a Covid-19 test. This meant I had to drive in to Providence for that purpose only, and find my way to a location that was nearly isolated from the universe by the pattern of 1-way streets. It was off Thayer St., which is essentially the Main St. of college town with the typical shops and restaurants that cater to students and faculty, so the idea is that ordinarily people would walk there. They had taken over what had been a sandwich shop and the menu board was still visible.

They had four employees there. One was at the front entrance. She checked me in, looked at my official picture ID apparently because of the danger that someone might impersonate me in order to get this test, took my temperature, and handed me a bar coded tag. I then had to take that to a second employee who sat alone at a 15 foot table, whose sole job was to hand me a zip-loc bag containing the swab. I then walked down to the end of the room where a third employee stood to let me know when it was safe to proceed to the test site. Although I was the only person in the entire place, I was made to wait five minutes.

I finally walked down the hall to find a fourth employee who instructed me in how to administer the test myself. It's fairly uncomfortable -- you have to shove this long swab up your nose, much longer than a Q-tip, past the nostrils into the sinus, and twirl it around for 15 second, on both sides. Then she put the swab in a vial, stuck on the bar code, and I left. At that rate, assuming these folks are reasonably well paid, it would cost maybe 50 bucks a test not counting the lab fees and assuming they are paying rent and electricity. On the other hand there's no obvious reason why there were more than two people there.

I actually live in Connecticut, where we are getting 5 stars for our testing effort. However, I would not have been able to get a test in Connecticut because I have no symptoms, and not in a congregate setting such as nursing home or prison, and do not live in a vulnerable urban community. Were I not on the faculty of Brown University, I would need to call my primary care physician, report symptoms, and get a referral. If I did not have a primary care physician I'm not sure what I would be required to do. I got the results in two days, which is considered not bad but were I contagious that would be two days too long. I wasn't actually worried about it because I knew my chances of being infected were infinitesimal.

Still, this gives me a few things to think about regarding privilege (think pro sports also) and the appropriateness and adequacy of our testing regime, even in a state that's been exceptionally successful at squashing the epidemic.

The dying of the light

So, I visited my mother today for the first time in months. She's in a nursing home about an hour away and they shut it down to visitors in March. Then she got sick with Covid-19. We didn't think she'd survive, but she got through it. However, it knocked her down and she can't get up.

Before she was walking (with a walker) freely around the hall, getting herself to the bathroom, dressing herself, feeding herself. Now she can't walk, and I'm not sure she really knew who I am. She's sad but otherwise there's nothing going on. She isn't really aware of the world and can't really have a conversation. The flame is flickering.

This has not always been a part of the human condition. Until maybe the mid 20th Century, nobody survived long in her condition. I get the account of her monthly billings from the insurance company and it's typically many thousands of dollars. Personally, I wouldn't live that way. The trouble is, by the time you get there, you can't make your own choices any more. I don't have the answer.

My mother was a schoolteacher who knew everybody in town, whose students and their parents remembered her and loved her and kept in touch. She had a worthwhile life, until my father's years-long terminal illness that pretty much squeezed the juice of life out of her. But she hung on for the next ten years. Now the end is coming.

The fat of the land

So I've harvested my onions and most of the garlic, and the potatoes. Everything is on the front porch now drying out. I can also pull radishes, and carrots if I want to but I haven't yet because there's still a store-bought one in the fridge. Zucchini, of course. (Do you want some?) Herbs naturally. I'm planting spinach, raab, salad greens and another round of basil in the vacated space. Pears and peaches will come in soon.

So this is just for a hobby and to get some experience and smarts. Next year I'm going big. More root vegetables, winter squash, peppers, multiple varieties of onions and tomatoes. I'm using the deep soil/wide rows method of Ed Smith, and I'll be preparing the beds in the fall. I've even drawn up a plan. Now, if they start making me drive into Providence every day it will be harder, but I think I can deal with that. I'll not work full time if it happens, for the garden and for other reasons. I  think a lot of people will have settled into a new life and decided they like at least some things about it. The culture is going to be very different in many ways, I hope for the better.

Of course it will help to have leadership that is not insane.

Less deep economics

We had a gay couple in the neighborhood -- neighborhood out here being a rather expansive term, they live a mile or so away from me but that puts them in a group of 12 or so households. The past tense is because they sold their house for big bucks and they're moving to Telluride.

That's news because real estate out here was very cheap. Now all of a sudden there's a demand for rural real estate. I lived in Boston for 20 years in a 1,200 square foot condo in a two family house with about 100 square yards of lawn. I sold it for twice what my 17 acres, two bedroom house, and 1,200 square foot barn were worth last time I checked. Now that may be changing. No telling if this will last or how strong the effect will be, but it's something to keep an eye on. It will be good if housing in the cities is more affordable, but not so great if they start doing subdivisions and we get even more destruction of the wilderness and suburban sprawl. So far nobody's building anything here but we'll have to see if it stays that way.

Some deep thinking about economics

Our town only has a few businesses. There's a winery that offers wine tastings, and occasional concerts and other events. A liquor store, a chainsaw shop, an auto repair shop, an acupuncturist, and a seamstress. (There isn't any gender neutral term for that, that I can think of. She is female.) There are also cornfield and hayfields, but the animals they feed are elsewhere; and two farms that grow produce. The young man next door rents a workshop from me where he makes dulcimers and other fine wood objects, and there might be other inconspicuous small enterprises I don't know about.

Anyway, that's just to put me in context. I was at the garage the other day to get some work done on my truck and I noticed that the wrecked vehicles were piling up on the premises. They have a flatbed and they get the call to pick up the wreckage when somebody drives into a tree, which happens much too often. Rand told me there's no market for scrap metal right now; they'd have to pay somebody to take it away.

That got me to thinking. The economic catastrophe associated with the pandemic has sharply reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and likely industrial emissions. There's no market for junk because there are fewer cars being made and sold. Less clothing is sold because people don't need to look sharp for work. (Brooks Brothers declared bankruptcy.) Clothing is actually very resource intensive, there's a large environmental burden to growing cotton and making synthetic fabrics. People not commuting to work and not consuming as much buys us some time for saving the planet.

The problem is, the way we distribute resources throughout the economy, at least to the non-wealthy, is through employment. And in order to employ everybody, we actually need to be wasteful. All that driving to work, eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, gambling in casinos, buying new clothing every few months, manufacturing automobiles -- that's what moves money around and keeps people from starving. And we grow most of our food on 400 acre monocultures using $100,000 tractors and ship it 2,000 miles because that actually makes it a little bit cheaper, although it also means that most of what people eat is junk. But agriculture hardly employs anybody any more.

The fact is that there are plenty of resources to meet everybody's needs comfortably, but the only means we have to get them to people are unnecessary and harmful. Most people's jobs have little or no intrinsic reward, and the harder you have to work and the more onerous the task the less you get paid. Lots of people spend two hours or more every day just commuting to work, which let me tell you is soul destroying. I could range much more broadly with this  -- from music and other entertainment, which used to employ people in every town but with the advent of recording and broadcasting now supports a small number of people, a few of them fabulously wealthy, most just getting by. But in sort, mass production has replaced artisanry.

Capital intensity makes goods cheaper and drives out labor intensive forms of production. But people need fulfilling jobs, and labor intensive production generally causes less environmental damage, promotes local community, and offers more fulfilling work because the tasks are more varied and interesting, require more skill, and provide the satisfaction of making  a tangible product. The logic of capitalism however tends inexorably to more and more capital intensity. The question is how we can achieve a different kind of economic order.

These thought are a bit disorganized, I know. I'm just rambling. But maybe I can sharpen it in due course.