Happy Halloween Oct. 31: spooky Dansville

When we moved to the farm in 2003 we didn't know about a certain local spooky story.



We had heard the true story of the Burning Bed, revealed to the world in a non-fiction book by Faith McNulty, and then made into a 1984 TV movie with Farrah Fawcett about Francine Hughes, the abused wife who set fire to her house in 1977, killing her husband, and getting away with it by "reason of insanity." I don't think she was insane, and I guess I'm glad she got away with it. I had seen the movie back in '84, but when we bought the farm I had to be reminded we were going to be living in the same town where the Burning Bed happened.

Well, one day after moving to the farm, I was browsing books at Schuler's, and there was a book of haunted stories from Michigan. Intrigued, I picked it up and leafed through, finding one from Dansville! The story goes like this (found here):

The Witch of Seven Gables Lane

"The adventurers who tread the back lane called Seven Gables near Dansville in Ingham County still sniff the air to see if they can smell the acrid, burning flesh of the witch who supposedly lived there in years past. . . .

. . . As the legend goes, local marauders locked the woman into her house, which was then set on fire. She perished in the flames, but the stories say she remains to wreak vengeance on those who still dare to venture near her property. . . .

. . . The place became such a teen mecca that a fence was erected to keep snoopers out of the area. The effort proved fruitless as thrill seekers still found their way back to the deceased woman's old place. But they didn't get away scot-free. It was said that the ghost would scream at trespassers and that the scream meant instant doom to its hearers if the premises weren't cleared immediately."

Every day on my country ride to town where I work, I used to drive by Seven Gables Road. It gave me the creeps, let me tell you, just seeing that name "Seven Gables" and remembering the story of that poor woman wreaking vengeance on anyone who goes near her property. But one day I worked up the courage to drive down Seven Gables Road and see if anything would happen. It is a very lonely, quiet dirt road with a few houses near the main road, but soon becomes abandoned and then a dead end. I parked my little Aveo and got out slowly with my camera. I looked across the fence where the house had been, toward the dead tree and cloud in the photo I took, above. Suddenly through the whispering wind someone yelled in the distance! It was a man's voice, not a woman's, but what did that matter! Heart thumping, I jumped in the car, turned it around and made dust fly as I tore back to the main road. I take a different route to work most of the time now, not that I'm afraid or anything. I just like driving through town.

One last eerie thing: Yesterday when I bravely changed my route to work again so I could stop and snap a photo of the Seven Gables Road sign, below, I was angling for a shot and suddenly there in the frame was "my tree" - the tree in my profile picture. I never noticed that it sits right at the foot of Seven Gables Road. You know I quickly scrambled back into my car this time too, my heart thumping again. Oh, and you know about The House of the Seven Gables too, right? Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel about a house haunted by witches and spirits? I mean, how much more spookiness do you want?

(I carved the two jack-o-lanterns in the photos, above, a couple years ago. I used to love carving different things every year when the kids were growing up. I remember doing Carebears one year. Unfortunately, my wrists are too weak to carve through that thick, hard pumpkin flesh now. Plus, we don't have kids at home any more, boohoo - BOO! hoo.)

first Collage-o-holic meeting

left: my mom; bottom: my brothers John and Bennett at the Acropolis; right: my grandma's illustration in World Book encyclopedia; middle: old books of my dad's and a French clock I bought Don in Paris

My name is Ruth, and I'm a collage-o-holic.

I'm a normal person, really. I never realized this could happen to me. I am learning not to be in denial about it. Please help me. That's why I'm here.

I was looking for a little fun. I had seen a nice collage at someone else's blog as a header, so I Googled collage software, and found Picasa's site. I've downloaded Picasa before, and got rid of it without realizing its seductive pleasures. I should have left well enough alone.

After downloading the free software, I made my first collage, the one on my header. I was pleased. And then my friends started telling me they liked it, and that made it even more fun.

I decided I could have a different collage header for each season. So I pulled in my favorite winter photos to start creating the next one. Five sample winter collages later, I began to think what other collages I could make. That's when I made this one, of old photos and things.

My arm and wrist are killing me from so much mouse clicking. My arm is about to fall off actually. Yet I go on. My husband doesn't recognize me without the glow of the laptop on my face. We eat American cheese sandwiches, un-grilled. My mind is ever filled with new combinations. I don't read, I don't care about who wins the election. I cancelled dinner with friends this evening to make collages.

Don and the roosters finally had an intervention with me. Bob the Crèvecœur rooster attacked me, and I kicked back, my clog flying and missing him completely. They made me come to this meeting.

(By the way, if anyone is interested, here is the 12 Step Program for making a collage:

1. Download Picasa
2. Let it load all the photos from your computer
3. Organize photos into an album you want to draw from for the collage. Add more photos than you'll need since you have to play with them to see which look best together. I found it easier to organize an album into a file first in My Documents.
4. Find that album in Picasa, which will show you thumbnails of all the photos on the right.
5. Click on the little collage icon at the top to start a collage (next to Play - oh so exciting!). It will select all the photos in the album.
6. Now, Select All at the top, highlighting all the photos.
7. Click on Remove, sending the photos to the left side in a tab called "Clips."
8. Now click on the "Settings" tab and see the various patterns, grid spacing, layouts, etc., choose what you wish. You can change this any time, so don't worry.
9. Go back to "Clips" and start choosing photos and adding them to the work area on the right by clicking "Add." You can select and remove them any time.
10. You can go back and adjust your settings any time, and shuffle the photos until the arrangement pleases you. You'll notice that it tends to crop the photos in unpleasing ways at times, so just re-shuffle.
11. In "Settings" you can choose grid spacing, which creates borders around each photo, at whatever width you want, and you can choose any color you want! Wow!
12. Play with it until you love it, then click on "Create Collage" in the lower left, and voila! You have a collage of your favorite photos.)

first awakening

Detroit's skyline from Windsor, Ontario (yeah, I know it isn't perfect with this post, but I don't have my own photo of Chicago or NYC at night)

When I was a young girl I was highly romantic. After watching movies I would act out the role of lead actress in front of the dresser mirror in my bedroom.

I didn't think the small Michigan town where I grew up was worthy of romance. My fantasies were in cities like Chicago or New York. In old movies I watched, everyone was rich, so city life took place in vast, glamorous apartments or penthouses, with skyline views through floor-to-ceiling walls of glass. Men wore tuxedoes and women wore evening gowns, even at home. And when they went out to clubs, the men wrapped mink coats around the women's shoulders.

Since my mom was from metro New York City, I also fantasized about her life before marrying my dad, the Baptist preacher, and wished she had played piano in a black satin dress at Carnegie instead of in a polyester dress at the Baptist church.

So when my oldest sister got married and lived in "Chicago" (it was really Skokie) in "an apartment" (I had never seen an apartment except in movies), you know what I was thinking: She had been transformed from an ordinary sister who wore simple straight skirts and cat-eye glasses, into Rita Hayworth (redhead, like my sister) in an evening gown; their apartment had a big, shiny, black grand piano, and there was a wall of easy-gliding drapes that opened with the push of a button looking out onto a fabulous Chicago skyline. And guess what, we were going to visit!

Well, after the five-hour drive, after Chicago skyscrapers and giant red neon Magikist lips, and on into the bland northern suburb of Skokie, when we walked up the short stairway and through the door to the modest, neat apartment with tweed furniture and four-foot windows with short insulating curtains looking out at a blonde brick neighborhood, as a shy nine-year-old you know I didn't give voice to my inner scream, "WHERE IS THE GRAND PIANO, WHERE ARE THE VASES OF ROSES, WHERE IS THE SEA OF TWINKLING CITY LIGHTS, AND WHERE THE HELL IS MY SISTER'S EVENING GOWN!"

the "ruthie method"

Fourteen of us prepped the family cottage for winter Saturday.

We cleaned . . .


. . . repaired . . .


. . . washed windows and replaced the screens on the porch with them . . .




. . . and took in the dock (I wanted you to see how chilly it was for the poor men who had to bare their legs and get into the 40°-something water, that would be around 7° celsius).

So what's the "ruthie method"? That's when you work for 30 minutes, then break for 30 minutes. That's about how it went, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee along the way.

























I wiped down a lot of knick knacks. These Indian paintings were given to my parents by some MSU students back in the day.

Lydia is showing you the tree that got hit by lightning a month or so ago, taking out the television and computer modem. We think the electrity went up the guide wire there up to the power line pole and through the cottage.








In case you didn't already get the idea that I am lazy after describing the "ruthie method" above, I have another confession. My second confession is that up to now I have used the "auto" setting on my DSLR camera for 99% of my photographs. I am determined to learn the manual settings. Rather ignorantly I experimented at the cottage and had my f-stop and shutter speed set wrong, so that most shots were over-exposed and/or blurry.

space

I need it, don't you? Today I am quietly listening.

sumac

Days shorten.
Hours pour out of the cup of light.


Before snow-blue evenings,
before indoor candles remind me
I am born of old centuries


the sumac ignites flames
like pleas
to the abating Sun.


For just a few weeks
it rebels in one last effort
to warm the meadow.


Then it cools its fire
and yields.

Barefoot College

photos from BBC photographic gallery and Barefoot College's web site

You might think a person has to be able to read to go to college. You might assume students need to understand the language of the teacher, or of fellow students, to succeed in school. You might envision that children who herd cattle by day would be too tired to learn how to build water pumps at night. You might just think that a woman who didn't finish primary school could not possibly become an engineer in six months, or teach someone else to become one, and you might be wrong.

When Don and I watched a piece about India's Barefoot College on the PBS Lehrer Report the other night, we sat dumbstruck. (Please, if you have 9 minutes, click on "a piece" in the previous sentence and watch the streaming video.) Maybe you've already heard about it. All notions about illiteracy and education are turned on their head in the 20 Barefoot College field centres around India started by Sanjit "Bunker" Roy.

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Bunker Roy himself was born in what is now West Bengal and schooled at Doon School and St. Stephen's College in Delhi. He has won several awards for Barefoot College, including the Schwab (for social entrepeneurship) and the St. Andrew's Prize (Britain's largest prize for the environment).

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photo of Bunker Roy, right, from Unesco site

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He was influenced by Gandhi's philosophy of sustainable development. Roy said:

There is a mistaken belief that illiteracy is a barrier to the rural poor developing themselves with skills of their own. In other words a rural poor farmer, weaver, potter, leather worker, blacksmith and other artisans, because they have never been through a formal education system are not capable of producing high quality products with a marvelous eye for aesthetics and form. In the rural areas of India today, for instance, there are endless examples of rainwater harvesting structures for drinking water and sanitation still being used today that are hundreds of years old - constructed when there were no architects and engineers.

Bunker Roy started the first Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, in 1972 after the 1966-67 famine killed thousands in Bihar state. Since then his colleges have trained villagers without paper qualifications to install and maintain solar electrical systems, hand pumps and tanks for drinking water. I could not believe my eyes as I watched village women work on intricate solar panels, taking meticulous detailed notes to study the codes and tiny parts, simply by watching their teacher do it and communicate with hand gestures.

Barefoot solar engineers have installed solar photovoltaic (SPV) home lighting systems and fabricated produced solar lanterns across 10 states of India. The results include:

• Solar electrifying 870 schools across the country.
• 3530 solar lanterns manufactured at the College.
• 28 remote and inaccessible villages in Ladakh have 40 Kws of solar panels that provide three hours of light in the bleakest winter to 1530 families.
• In Leh and Kargil districts, solar energy initiatives have saved a total of 97,000 litres of kerosene.
• 392 rural youth including women trained as barefoot solar engineers with absolutely no aid from urban professionals.
• 350 villages and hamlets(clusters) have been covered where a total number of 12000 households have been solar electrified.
• 195,000 litres of kersoene saved, by replacing generators and oil lanterns with solar power.
• All solar panels have been installed, maintained and repaired by the village people without the assistance of any paper qualified engineer.

The college has also instigated vibrant health care centers administering biochemic medicines (developed out of, but different from, homeopathy):

Since 1986, the Barefoot College has been using biochemic medicines. Many village men and women, most of whom have just a primary education, have been trained to administer biochemic medicines. This is fairly easy and does not need advanced academic qualifications. And since biochemic medicines have no side effects, these medicines are also quite safe.

in Tilonia, it is the children’s parliament, an elected body of girls and boys between 10 and 14 years of age that is responsible for making sure that schools are run properly—an ingenious way of giving children a hold on their own lives—and that of their villages.

Women have been empowered to participate in the local economy and infrastructure, and to lead other women.

Women are very active in the college. Here women gather in a village square to raise their voices in protest against cases of rape. Girls heavily outnumber boys in the night schools and many of the engineers trained in the college are women. One of the most successful solar lamps in use in villages in the area was designed by a woman using local material going to waste. Women have been going from village to village to gather support for developmental measures such as building local dams.

I am deeply impressed with Roy and his vision for helping people help themselves, including setting up rain water harvesting systems in many Indian villages. But I am flabergasted - and humbled - by the women, children and men themselves who learn and build the mechanics of these and solar electrical systems, and serve each other in order to strengthen themselves, their families, their communities - and the environment!

the frost is on the pumpkin

pumpkin pie made with molasses


Some folks think all James Taylor songs sound alike. Could be, could be. Much of my musical taste was established as a teen while I did household ironing in the dining room listening to my eight-year-older brother Bennett's albums on the turntable behind me. While ironing my dad's handkerchiefs and t-shirts I listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sing "Suite Judy Blue Eyes." With the pillow cases and table cloths (including the very one in the pie photo, above) I was on to Leon Russell singing "A Song for You", and Dad's boxer shorts got smoothed out to the Beatles White album. To this day, the smell of steaming hot cotton under an iron evokes the warm chords of 1970s folk-rock. Too bad Dad had his dress shirts professionally laundered. Hey, I should have made a deal to launder, iron and starch his shirts, and with what he paid me I could have started my own musical library. I must have worn out my brother's albums, including multiples of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, but Bennett never complained. And I never complained about ironing.

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Whenever the first frost sparkles up the pumpkins, I think of one of my favorite JT tunes:

from James Taylor's "Walking Man" -

. . . Well, the leaves have come to turning
And the goose has gone to fly
And bridges are for burning
So don't you let that yearning
Pass you by

Walking man, walking man walks
Well, any other man stops and talks
But the walking man walks

Well the frost is on the pumpkin
And the hay is in the barn
An pappys come to rambling on
Stumbling around drunk
Down on the farm . . .

Have a listen:

non-toxic wastebaskets

Eee gads, we've been steeping in the toxic waste of the mortgage-backed securities mess - and bailout, which didn't pass in the first round, then passed in the second after some changes. We generous taxpayers came through for our poor, suffering corporate dimbulbs. I hope it will be a better move than many of us feared and will help settle the markets down. (Whispering now . . .) Hey, if anyone sounds as though they understand this mess, don't believe 'em. As Don's economics professor said, no one really knows what affects markets and how to fix them. But don't tell anyone, this is just for you, because I know you can handle the ambiguity and not get freaked out knowing no one really knows what will happen.

Anyway, all that waste presents a good opportunity to show you my little wastebasket collection.

This one is in l'atelier. I picked it up at a yard sale.




This one is very old, and sort of falling apart. I think I bought it at a flea market, for the guest room. If you come for a visit, please don't throw anything into it, I think it would disintegrate. I see it as a sort of faux wastebasket, a wastebasket wannabe, a piece of art posing as a wastebasket. I should probably make a little sign to lean on it: PLEASE DON'T PUT ANYTHING IN ME. You can just throw your kleenex in the sturdy plastic bathroom wastebasket (which I'm not showing off here, as you see).

This one is a treasure because it was my mother's. It sat in her study for as long as I can remember, under her secretary desk. I think it was her mother's before it was hers. I keep it by my dressing table (not on the bentwood chair on the porch where I posed it for a photo). Peter and Lesley can fight over it when I'm gone.

Detail of my mom's wastebasket.

I guess I'm just as guilty as anyone of covering up and prettifying my trash.

I don't know about you, but this is what we do:

• recycle everything that can be recycled around here: plastic containers, newspapers, glass, magazines, junk mail, paper, tin cans
  
• get paper bags at the grocer to use for paper trash that we burn (I hope our little bit of paper burning doesn't hurt the atmosphere too much); goodness! some checkout clerks do not like bagging in paper! Yikes!
  
• give food scraps to the chickens, except what isn't good for them, which we dump in a compost pile (that isn't being dealt with as compost yet; we're lazy so far about that)
• the rest of the unrecyclable, uncompostable garbage goes into old plastic bags from the store; we finally stopped buying garbage bags - what a waste! We hardly have any garbage that goes into the dumpster now.
• Oh, and when I'm gone, I want to take up as little space as possible. I want to be cremated.
  

I've been excited to hear about NYC and LA and their recycling of food scraps for compost for farmers.

Obama on campus Thursday: UPDATE

click image to enlarge

Thursday, Oct. 2, 4:00pm: I'm back from the rally, and it was electrifying! The man can speak and fire up a crowd of thousands of college students. The crowd was projected to be 20,000, but all I know is, it was BIG.

And I just heard that McCain has suspended his campaign in Michigan. What?? He's announcing that he's given up Michigan to Obama? Is that a smart political move? What is happening here?

Hillary was in my small home town last Saturday at a rally for Obama, and tomorrow the man himself will be here on campus at MSU, just a short walk around Circle Drive from my office. I'm planning on taking the student who is here for an appointment at 2 (if she comes!) over to Adams Field to hear him speak. It's supposed to be chilly outdoors, but I think this campus will give him a warm welcome. I know I will! I'll try to post pictures after the fact - at least of the crowd. Michigan is an important swing state in the election. We're expecting several more visits by McCain and Obama in the next month until November 4.