6:15 am
Me: Brendan, time to get up! I’m making you scrambled eggs!
Brendan: mmmpfgh. Umm hmmm.
6:25 am
Me: We’re leaving in 15 minutes!
Brendan: (between bites) What?!
6:45 am
Me: OK, Brendan! Let’s go!
Brendan: (opening the sack I have packed) are there pencils in here?
Me: Trust me, everything’s there, passport, pencils, eraser, calculator, snack, water. Chop chop! Continue reading
Saturday I wrote a post about how I wasn’t aware of what was going on in my body, and how unsettling that felt. So unsettling, in fact, that I wasn’t able to write the post I had been planning for several days, and had to gaze intensely at my navel for a whole weekend instead.
That was probably a good thing, because it gave me some new insight into this post. Navel gazing isn’t all bad. Turns out there’s some pretty interesting stuff in there.
Last fall I translated an article by Daniel Saraga for Reflex Magazine about the gazillions of bacteria we have living on and in our bodies. The title (in English) was “Me, Myself and I – and a million other germs.” It should actually have been “Me, Myself and I – and 100 trillion other germs.” Continue reading
Last day of April. MAYDAY! just about captures my mood, too.
While Kate and William were tying the knot, I was sitting in a doctor’s office getting sucker-punched.
Sucker punch: a blow made without warning, allowing no time for preparation or defense on the part of the recipient. It is usually delivered from close range or from behind.
It wasn’t the doctor who delivered the blow, but the blood pressure cuff attached to my left arm. Very close range, indeed.
Oh, that’s high, the nurse says, shaking her head.
That’s strange, I say. I can’t think of anything more to add.
The doctor comes in and asks me about my foot, which had been hurting since mid-October, when I had made a Cardinal Mistake: I changed brands of running shoes. That was why I was here. For my foot! He asks me to stand, relaxed. How can I stand, relaxed, when number one, I am in my underwear and number two, I have just learned that my blood pressure is abnormally high? I do my best. He looks at my feet and smiles.
Why are you smiling? I ask.
Your right foot is bending outwards. C’est remarquable.
I look down. Sure enough, I’m standing on the outside of my right foot, to avoid the pain in the heel. Glad he finds it amusing.
He doesn’t say anything about my blood pressure. I got the x-rays, got fitted for special insoles, signed up for six sessions of physical therapy. My foot is in good hands. My mental state, however, is not.
On the way home I stop by a pharmacy and test the blood pressure a second time. Same numbers.
I don’t understand, I say. I run 4-5 times a week. I’m not overweight.
Maybe you’re stressed? asks the pharmacist. It can change depending on what you’ve eaten. Did you drink coffee recently?
Who, Me? Stressed? STRESSED? I only have about a million translations piled up that are all due in about five minutes! It’s spring break and I haven’t done yoga in two weeks! My teenage son has gone off to Geneva with a bunch of kids I don’t know! The weeds are taking over my garden at a record rate! Why would I be stressed?
Breathe in. Breathe out. Ommmmm.
At home, instead of writing the riveting blog post about ___ that I’d been planning, I spend the next four hours scouring the net for information on hypertension and entering a mild existential crisis. I call my mom for reassurance.
Dad had high blood pressure, and I do too. It’s genetic. But mine was never that high. That’s not good! You’d better see a doctor! I did. He looked at my foot. My anxiety goes up a notch.
I’ve lived my whole life under the assumption that I’m the walking embodiment of health. My mantra: everything in moderation. But I’ve been sucker punched! My body is something other than I thought it was. There’s stuff going on in there that I didn’t know about. Genetic stuff! I’ll get a handle on it, this is not that serious, but my bubble is burst in a big way. I’m not invincible. I’m not 25 anymore. We’re not in Kansas, Toto!
My advice for the royal couple? Live life to the limit. Piffle protocol. Be young and invincible. Be beautiful and strong. It goes by so fast, and you only get this one shot. Oh, and get a checkup once every couple of years. You might avoid getting sucker-punched in the orthopedist’s office.
“To sleep, perchance to dream- ay, there’s the rub.” – Hamlet, Act III
On April 13 at 2 am, an air traffic controller in Reno, Nevada fell asleep on the job. Repeated contact attempts failed. In late March, another air traffic controller at Reagan National airport in Washington DC had also admitted to sleeping for about 30 minutes while alone on the overnight shift. He, too, could not be roused by telephone. The FAA says this is the fourth time this has happened this year.
In a remarkable feat of serendipitous journalistic timing, the New York Times Magazine published an article April 17 entitled: “How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?” This one should be in the air traffic controller school mandatory reading list.
I’ve always been fascinated by sleep. It’s like junk DNA. Nobody knows exactly why we need it. Without it, we’re in trouble. But how much is not enough? When scientists prevent lab rats from sleeping, the rats die. Depriving people of sleep by forcing them to remain standing for long periods of time is a well-known form of torture. Symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation include weight gain, clumsiness, hallucinations, depression, headaches, irritation and yawning. (No, really? Yawn.)
The longest scientifically verified period of time anyone has intentionally gone without sleep without using stimulants of any kind is 11 days. The record was set by a 17-year old San Diego boy named Randy. The researchers were amazed that after 11 days the kid was able to beat the Stanford scientist at a game of pinball. If pinball was then what online role-playing games are today, then of course the teenager could beat the adult while for all practical purposes asleep! That’s hardly an argument for “unimpaired cognitive function!” More revealing is the hallucination he had on day four that he was Paul Lowe winning the Rose Bowl.
The Guinness Book of World Records has stopped recording voluntary sleep deprivation, fearing that people will hurt themselves. Now that speaks volumes. You can fly in a motorcycle over cars, jump off of cliffs, carry a table with your teeth (with a person sitting on it) or pull a 6,000-pound train with your beard, but don’t deprive yourself of sleep on purpose. You might harm yourself.
Forty supremely unlucky families in the world carry the gene for Fatal Familial Insomnia, an inherited prion disease that strikes its victims around the age of 50. These people literally die from lack of sleep. There is no cure or treatment. Now that’s a true nightmare.
Back to the New York Times article, which is why I started this post in the first place. The air traffic controller was just a coincidence. It’s about research done by David Dinges, a Penn professor who “has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world.” He went to town on this one, depriving dozens of people of sleep over a two-week period, and then carefully monitoring their cognitive performance with a series of annoying tests. One group got four hours, a second group six, and the control group got 8 hours of blissful sleep every night. No coffee or Red Bull was allowed during the study.
Result: Everyone except those in the 8-hour group suffered attention lapses and cognitive declines. I have always thought that six hours a night is “reasonable.” Turns out I was drunk.
“All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.”
Even worse, us six-hour-sleepers are harboring the illusion that we’re doing just fine. No problem! I’m on top of it! Never felt better!
“Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked.”
That could explain some of my writer’s block episodes. Especially those in which I fell asleep on the keyboard. I just needed more sleep! My cognitive capacities were on the skids from an accumulated sleep deficit.
There are some people who can get by on fewer than eight hours a night (they estimate this at about 5% of the population, and this group does not include you but does include the EPFL President) and a few who need more like 9 or 10. You Know Who You Are. And then there are the vampires, who don’t sleep at all. The good ones stay up all night practicing the piano to impress their hot high school sweethearts. The bad ones scour suburban neighborhoods for stray cats and teenagers who’ve broken their curfews. But that’s beyond the scope of this blog.
Americans supposedly get an average of 6.9 hours a night. We’re thus racking up a collective sleep debt of 375 hours every year! Multiply that by the population, and price it at about $8 an hour, and that’s worth $100 billion in lost sleep. Surely this is a national security issue. No wonder our teenagers can’t compete with the Chinese or the Swedes. They’re sleep deprived! Their teachers are sleep deprived! Can someone please form a panel of so-called experts on this and televise it?
There is clearly some crucial cerebral housekeeping going on while we’re out for the count. (That, in itself, is a fascinating subject, worthy of a post.) Ignore it at your peril. The facts are in, people. Do with them what you will.
I think I’ll have a little siesta.
No, not that kind of weed. Sorry, people. This is a gardening post.
Spring has come three weeks early to Switzerland. It’s 24 degrees (that’s 75 to you Americans), everything is bursting into bloom, the birds are singing their heads off at 4 am. The sound of the lawn mower can be heard throughout the land. Unless it’s lunch time or after six pm. Or Sunday. This is Switzerland, after all. There are rules to follow. Continue reading
I missed April Fool’s Day, and I had a good gag to post, so I guess that means I’ll be blogging for at least another year. No! That’s not supposed to be a joke!
It shouldn’t be a problem because I’ve decided I really like this blogging experiment. It’s different than any writing I’ve done before. When I write an article, I try to follow rules like ‘remember the lead sentence of the paragraph is like the engine of a train and all the sentences (cars) that follow have to be going in the same direction,’ and I pepper it with citations for weight and credibility. In an article I would never have written “as catchy as a nosebleed” or used dialog to illustrate a point. I chop out every extraneous word. On the other hand, when I write in my journal I say whatever I want without checking facts or worrying about whose feelings I’m going to hurt. I write pages of stream-of-consciousness blather, punctuated occasionally with commas and periods. Nobody wants to read that, except maybe a shrink. Blogging lies somewhere between the two.
And I like that place. Blogging gives me an opportunity to try to make coherent sentences out of what emerges from my thoughts and reflections. I can explore whatever I want, newsworthy or not. Writing something down in this quasi-permanent (okay, so that’s debatable) and totally public format means taking care with what I say and making sure I have my facts straight – things I would do writing an article – but I still have the freedom to speak my mind and let my own voice come out. I can be irreverent. I can experience the pleasure of writing for its own sake. Naturally I want everyone to like what I write — but I realized somewhere after the tenth post that this is not possible. Or even desirable. And I let it go. Powerful stuff.
I came home yesterday after two weeks in the US. On the flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt, I sat next to a buxom Hungarian woman who was kind enough to share her philosophy of life with me.
“I figure there are idiots in America, idiots in Hungary. Good people in America, good people in Hungary. It’s the same. World is the same everywhere.”
“How’d you come to live in Oceanside?” I ask.
“My husband came home from work one day, said we could live in California, Australia, England, Switzerland, Germany, and I said, okay let’s go to California.”
On Lufthansa, drinks are free. I start with a Campari and soda, something I’ve always wanted to try. The bright red color, like grenadine syrup, intrigues me. My companion takes the better choice, red wine. Then we have more wine with dinner while discussing her career with J.C Penney’s and the Men’s Wearhouse, her move into wedding wear, and her brief stint at Lowe’s during which she gained the expertise and equipment to paint her entire condo. About five years ago her husband died, as did several relatives in Hungary. Now that she’s over the shock, she’s going back to Hungary to deal with all the paperwork. Her twin daughters went to UCSD and are software engineers, and they both have wonderful California boyfriends. Judging from her enthusiastic interaction with the toddler in the seat in front of us, she’s more than ready to become a grandma.
After dinner, she follows my lead as I indulge myself in a Bailey’s on ice. Things are improving, although there are still seven and a half hours to go to Frankfurt. There are no seat-back video monitors and the movie has not yet come on. She fills the time telling me how she got laid off from the Men’s Wearhouse.
“This girl came, to be my boss, she was very younger than me, 24,” she said. “I’m fine with that, no problem. Then she say she has new boyfriend. She’s all excited. He was forty-eight! Can you believe that? He has two children from previous marriage. I told her this is no good.”
“That’s 24 years’ difference!” I calculate quickly. “Not good at all.” Much mutual head-shaking.
“Then she starts to find ways I am not working well. Complains about me. I say, this is not Serbia! You cannot do this kind of thing in America! She has her boss call and tell me I am no longer employee. In America!”
“Idiots everywhere,” I say sympathetically. She agrees. “It’s like I say, idiots in America, idiots in Serbia, good people in America, good people in Serbia. Both.” We nod together, contemplating the global nature of human goodness and idiocy.
When we finally get to Frankfurt, we go our bleary-eyed separate ways, she on to Belgrade, me to Geneva. While waiting in an interminable line for security screening, I meet a Belgian who works for Roche in Basel, where I learn that one kilo of cellphone generates 15 kilos of waste, and one kilo of laptop computer generates 150 kilos of waste! I feel guilty for the cellphone I lost hiking in the Alps last fall. Maybe I should have gone back and searched for it.
Roche has drastically reduced the amount of waste in its manufacturing, he tells me. “Everyone thinks it will cost more, but it doesn’t.” I ask him what Roche is doing about the problem of pharmaceuticals in the water supply. People peeing out all those antibiotics and vitamins and medications that aren’t absorbed by their bodies. Hermaphroditic fish. Frogs with no legs.
He nods knowingly. “The real problem is animal antibiotics,” he says, neatly dodging the question. We contemplate fields full of cowshit running off into streams and rivers, the unabsorbed antibiotic load infiltrating into the world’s water supply, messing with our metabolisms. He admits he travels way too much by airplane, has a terrible carbon footprint. “My wife says she doesn’t know whether she should be unpacking or packing my suitcase.” I refrain from the obvious comeback that he should pack and unpack his own damn suitcase and cut the poor woman a break.
It’s good to be home, to catch the train to Morges, to walk in and find my house clean, fresh flowers on the coffee table, the lawn mowed, the daffodils in full bloom. They must have missed me! I dole out the Jelly Bellies and smile at the subtle details that tell me the house has been inhabited by males – streaks on the countertops, laundry piled up in the basement (although most of it is miraculously clean!), mail piled up near the front door waiting to be opened. A new range of men’s shampoo and shower gel has mysteriously taken up residence in our shower (my husband is a sucker for niche marketing). We’re out of ice cream, but there’s a good stash of beer in the basement.
After a long, deep sleep, punctuated once by a slightly panicked awakening in which I have no idea where I am, I’m up and over jet lag (without the aid of Jelly Bellies) and off for a morning run along the lake with a friend. Life is good!
A few days ago, I wrote a post about smartphones and traffic jams. Pretty soon, thanks to billions of anonymous bits of data flying all over the place, you won’t have to get stuck on the freeway or wait in line at Disneyland ever again. I have since learned that the smartphone stuff was just the tip of the crowdsourcing iceberg. Down below the penguins and their migratory traffic jams, the iceberg is gargantuan. It boggles the mind. We’re like the Titanic, most of us. Blissfully unaware.
Way back in 1999, UC Berkeley started tapping into the unused processing power of home computers all over the world to scan radio waves for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Currently, more than 3 million people are involved in the SETI@home project, doing their little bit to locate aliens. CERN also uses volunteer-based distributed computing to crunch its enormous particle physics data sets, a task that would constipate even the biggest, baddest supercomputer in the world. The rise of the internet has been nirvana-like for people in charge of iterative tasks like these that can be distributed, calculated remotely, and then reassembled into some meaningful form at the other end. All that computer power for free! You don’t have to put an expensive IBM petaflop supercomputer into your project budget, you just have to convince a lot of people (a crowd!) that volunteering the unused processing power on their PCs is a cool thing to do.
I could get my mind around this. The next step should have been obvious to me. But it happened so subtly it didn’t even register. Until my smartphone epiphany, that is.
Computers are great for a lot of things. Give a network of computers a number, an equation, a set of parameters, and they crunch away happily. A symbolic smorgasbord. A banquet of bits. A few more dimensions? Ten thousand more iterations? Not a problem. Computers don’t sleep, have sex, demand respect, drink coffee, or take sick leave. They won’t join a union, have babies or demand yearly pay increases. And when those computers all belong to other people, you don’t even have to pay for it. How great is that?
But unfortunately there are quite a few things computers can’t do very well. They can’t identify faces, emotions, words and images from partial or incomplete samples. They don’t get when something’s funny. They’re unable to recognize and capture beauty in music, art, dance or photography.
The human brain – even the most average, run-of-the-mill, McDonald’s eating, MTV-watching brain – can do things no computer on the planet can do, and all on the power of a 60-watt lightbulb. Such a terrible waste! All those brains out there, operating at a fraction of their potential. All that valuable processing power squandered on mundane tasks like navel gazing and Facebook.
What if you could find a way to connect all those brains, get them to communicate and interact without having to be in physical proximity? Get them to join a global network of some kind? Now that would be a truly formidable source of information processing, a machine that could handle just about any problem. Uh, wait a sec…
And that, my friends, is the essence of crowd-sourcing.
I have seen the future and it is the iceberg.
In case you still don’t get it, here are a few examples.
Wikipedia. The classic. Why hire a bunch of encyclopedia writers when the world is full of experts who will write copy for free? And in case they make mistakes, there are more experts out there to correct their copy for free? Wikipedia is a crowd of know-it-alls. And the information it contains is being constantly refined.
iStockphoto. Why pay a photographer hundreds of dollars for the rights to use a photo when the world is full of excellent amateur photographers who would be ecstatic to sell their shots online for a dollar?
Citizen science. Why pay for those grad students when the world is full of geeks that will do your gruntwork for free? Identifying protein folding patterns was turned into a game called Foldit, in which volunteers outperform computers consistently. In Galaxy Zoo people look at images of outer space and classify the galaxies they see in them. You build up a “reputation” for how accurate you are. Several novel structures have been discovered this way, such as a “weird green thing” (Dave’s description) called Hanny’s Voorwerp. Herbaria@home taps into the British armchair naturalist crowd to document the vast numbers of plant specimens held in the UK’s herbaria. “Documenting large herbarium collections is an extremely labour-intensive task and most museum collections are woefully under-funded.” You get the picture.
Corporate R&D. Why pay for an expensive R&D department if you can avoid it? Companies like Boeing, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and Eli Lilly post their most intractable scientific problems on a website called InnoCentive, which anyone can join for a small fee. The companies (“seekers”) pay anywhere from $10,000 – $100,000 per solution. More than 30% of the problems have reportedly been cracked, “which is 30 percent more than would have been solved using a traditional, in-house approach,” said InnoCentive’s chief scientific officer Jill Panetta. And just think of all the money they’ve saved not having to shell out for health insurance benefits!
CAPTCHA. I like this one the most. Say it aloud. Isn’t it clever? It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Whenever you are asked to type squiggly, hard-to-read words in order to verify that you are a human being and not an evil, webtrolling, spamming bot, you are solving a CAPTCHA. It turns out that a lot of the words in these images are from old documents that have been scanned for archiving. Computers parse the images, turning them into digital text, which takes up a lot less room. But often the computers can’t decipher the images. From the reCAPTCHA website:
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
When you are asked to solve a two-word CAPTCHA like the one in the picture, the first word is already known and the second word is one that a computer hasn’t been able to read. If you get the first one right, then they figure you’ve got the second one right, too. The image is sent out to lots of people to statistically verify that your answer is correct. I bet you didn’t know you were being crowd-sourced when you typed in those words. I sure didn’t.
Combine spam protection with 150,000 hours of free human optical recognition processing per day. That has got to be the ultimate win-win.
Crowdsourcing takes impossible tasks and turns them into games, contests, and time-fillers for millions of under-occupied neocortexes around the world. I once read an article about an eccentric genius who claimed he wanted to build “the game layer on top of the world.” I thought, “huh?” Now I think he might be onto something. Where is it written that we have to spend our waking hours doing things we think are boring and unsatisfying? Life’s a game. Join the crowd.
My brother Dave (who started all this) said, “You could become wealthy if you could figure out how to use crowdsoursing for tranbslation.”
“Or spelling,” I replied.
On a ride into San Francisco one day my brother pulls out his smartphone, hooks it into a cradle on the dashboard. So let’s check out the traffic on Google maps! Up pops the live traffic situation — the freeway is green if it’s smooth sailing, yellow if it’s slow and – 10 points if you can guess the color – if it’s stop-and-go.
How do they figure that out? Does the satellite look down, count the number of cars or their speed, judge the traffic flow, and upload the color? No, Dave tells me, it’s a clever app that takes advantage of the fact that most Californians have two things in common: they have GPS-enabled smartphones and they’re obsessed with avoiding traffic jams. Here’s an explanation of how it works from an official Google blog back in August 2009:
When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.
The daffodils are out this week. Spring is officially here. Never mind the groundhog (probably took one look and said “Okay, bad dream, back to bed.”). When the daffodils bloom it’s time to put the skis away and start buying tulips for the coffee table.
Tip: if you put a penny in the vase, the tulips won’t wilt.
I have a bit of a fraught relationship with the plant world. My mother and my sister are plant fanatics – on family hikes they’d constantly be stopping to identify flowers. If you saw an orchid, the day was made. My sister has since made a fantastic career out of the activity, traipsing around in jungles and deserts and swamps in search of stuff that nobody has named yet and getting it on the books before it’s too late. She’s amazing. We’ll be on a walk somewhere, and she’ll suddenly screech and bend down and dig out some tiny miniscule clump of moss or something and say, “Look! Microlittleus mossiporous! I haven’t seen this since 1986 on my trip to eastern Timbuktu!” while prying the poor little thing’s innards apart and examining them avidly. No, you can’t just walk from point A to point B with these types. The ground is literally covered with distractions.
As a teenager, I wanted nothing to do with this, naturally. I decided that it wasn’t the name of the thing that was important, or how rare it was, but how it made me feel. Why should I appreciate an orchid more than skunk cabbage? Wasn’t that a form of prejudice? Skunk cabbage is elegant! Just because something is rare doesn’t make it better, does it? Why is a pigeon a nuisance and a peregrine falcon a wonder? Both poop on city window ledges. I felt that looking at individual flowers and classing them away into neat categories missed the big picture, somehow. Of course, I probably just wanted to hike without having to stop every ten feet and hear “Oh! Look! Spotted mugwort!” “Umm, I’m not sure. See this leaf? It could be spotted hareweed. We should check. Get the book – right hand pocket –“
Come to think of it, I wonder if my decision to major in philosophy in college might not have originated in this adolescent fulmination against arranging nature into neatly-labeled categories.
Clearly, if there was a family plant-appreciation gene, I didn’t inherit it. There are a few varieties that I manage to keep from killing – they’re the ones labeled “hardy” at the nursery. The poor plant in our study has been dead for at least a year. It stays there, listing gently to one side, a constant reminder to me to water the other, luckier specimens downstairs.
I didn’t compensate for my botanical deficiencies through marriage, either. My husband’s idea of gardening is opening the phone book to “landscaping”. “We need to keep the economy moving, Mary,” he’ll say. He’s one of the only people I know who can make shirking a job look like public service.
When we moved into our house three years ago and had to plan a garden from scratch, I wanted a garden that took care of itself. The landscapers put loads of little baby plants in, promising me they’d cover the ground eventually, and then left. I spent the next two years in an all-out war with the hordes of weeds that invaded my vulnerable little plantings. The first two tons of weeds were kind of rewarding. I’d yank the things out by the roots, pleased with myself for knowing what was a weed and what wasn’t, pile them in the car and haul them out to the village dump. But soon every time I went out the front door I’d see weeds. Everywhere. There is one kind that won’t pull out. It breaks off at the base, leaving the roots to sprout new leaves. It drives me mad. I’ll be going out for a jog, and I won’t get past the driveway. I go back for a trowel, just to get that one weed. Then I see another. Then another. Pretty soon there’s a pile two feet wide on the driveway and I have a killer backache. I have to go in and get a beer and recuperate.
Two years ago, I decided that we needed a vegetable garden. I hired a gardener to pile up a bunch of dirt on a patch of grass, and planted carrots, lettuce, arugula, zucchini, tomatoes, and snowpeas. I bought a cheap compost bin and put it next to the garden. This was good! I was growing food! I could be a gardener. We would have juicy, red tomatoes, fresh lettuce from the garden in the evenings, zucchini, it would all be so healthy and so free. (Even after six years here, I still reel at the prices in the Swiss supermarkets.)
Nobody else showed the least interest in either the garden or the vegetables. When I came home after a visit to the US, the beautiful little cherry tomatoes were rotting on the vines, their poor stems choked with weeds, the snowpeas dessicated and crumbling, the lettuce sporting very unlettucy-looking flower stalks, the leaves all gone leathery and tough. The zucchini was the size of my lower leg.
Oddly enough, I couldn’t bring myself to care that much. I took a picture of Luc holding the gargantuan zucchini and then did damage control. I didn’t reproach them. I honestly think they don’t even see the garden. It just doesn’t register. Last summer I managed to get Brendan to mow the lawn in exchange for money. But for the most part, it’s just me versus the garden.
My neighbor makes it all look so effortless. She has planted her garden without the help of landscapers, bit by bit, as she has been inspired. Tons of amazing flowers bloom all the time. She has raspberries. Rosemary. Sage. It’s all so beautiful. She can go to the nursery and come home with just the right plant, put it in just the right place, and it will thrive. She can be gone for weeks at a time in the summer, and the garden looks just fine. I go to the nursery, wander the aisles, get overwhelmed with the possibilities, unable to picture anything at all in my own garden, leave with a packet of basil seeds (thinking about pesto), go home and curl up on the couch with a book. I leave for three days and weeds the size of baby redwoods sprout on the south-facing slope.
Oscar came today, to do a little spring pruning. I am amazed at how hardy these plants are. We didn’t have much of a winter this year, but we had some good snowfalls in December and many days below freezing. Nonetheless, the parsley is thriving and the lavender along the street is looking like it will survive, even though I pruned it way too late last summer. The garden looks like it might forgive me, once again, for my ignorance and ineptitude.
The daffodils, bless them, come up every year, no matter what I do. They’re the best part of the garden – the miracle of matter from nothing but sunlight and water, the promise of warmth and color and beauty – and most importantly, there’s as yet no indication of the weeds and chaos that will take over the garden (and my psyche) in the weeks to come. Time to gear up for another season of gardening!
The world feels so unstable. The earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, the volcanoes coming to life in Hawaii. Here in Switzerland, someone I barely knew but had hoped to see again soon passed away in the night. How can that happen? Now I will never know her. All that she had not yet said, not yet done, not yet written, will never come to be.
My teenagers are moving into their own lives. I’m racked with doubt. Did I do what needed to be done? I’m standing at the side of the road, watching them head off, full of hope and trepidation. I want to go with them, patch up their problems, organize their backpacks, take inventory of the contents of their hearts. But I can’t. This is their road to take, not mine. Continue reading