Fresh Snow Makes Children of Everybody
We woke this morning to a cover of fresh-fallen snow. It won’t last long, I’m afraid, but it makes the heart leap with pleasure. At dawn, William the mule came prancing and snorting to breakfast. His whinny is something between a horse laugh and donkey bray, not quite either one, but something all his own.
As the light came up and I made my way with hay and water buckets, the sheep did a little turn-about dance in the snow, too. It makes us all slightly giddy. Something different has come to the barnyard, and we all celebrate just a little. I do it with my eyes:
In the afternoon I took a walk up Highland Butte, our old volcano. It’s wet along the path, and I didn’t make it as far as I had hoped because the track down the far side is steep. After two quick sit-downs I decided it was the better part of prudence to come on home. It was getting on to four o’clock, and the light fails early at the end of the year. But the woods were beautiful, the walk left me pleasantly breathless, and the snow was just enough to sugar everything.
I came on this patch of Asarum caudatum, wild ginger, on my way up:
Note to self: Go back in the spring and look for the blooms.
Two Little Christmas Gifts to the World
That’s a very grand title up there, for what amount to two little hills of beans. But some projects are just such a great idea, it makes you feel big to have had a little bit to do with them.
This is the XO, the $200 computer produced by One Laptop Per Child (www.laptop.org). It’s the little machine designed for distribution to schools around the world where children have the least chance of getting the kind of education that will bring them into the 21st Century of opportunity and imagination. One in three of the 2 billion children in the developing world doesn’t complete 5th grade schooling. The OLPC website says: Any nation’s most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children’s innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children’s machine designed for “learning learning.”
Six months ago, 50 primary school children in Arahuay, Peru received a shipment of XOs.
In a Dec. 22 (today!) article, “MIT spinoff’s little green laptop a hit in remote Peruvian village” by [Frank Bajak] the Chicago Tribune quotes first-grade teacher Erica Velasco, “Some [of the children] tell me that they don’t want to be like their parents, working in the fields.” She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates — animals without backbones. According to the article, Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer, Kevin, 9, wants to play trumpet, and Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, who recorded her town’s Fiesta de la Virgen.
OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte says 150,000 more laptops will be shipped to other countries early in 2008, including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan through “Give One, Get One,” a U.S.-based promotion ending Dec. 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.
Here’s where we came in. Under this program, Richard and I each bought 2 XO laptops. One (of each pair) goes somewhere in the world, to a child in a school where learning is precious and resources scarce. One (of each pair) comes here. We get to explore them, play with them, learn what we have given to someone someplace else. Then we can, if we want to, donate these two as well, locally or far away.
These little bitty machines are a treat. The keyboard is sized for little hands. The whole thing is about as big as a primary school paper tablet. It’s designed to withstand a 1-meter fall without damage, is hard-drive free, has no fan, is water and dust resistant, and can be charged with a hand crank, a foot treadle, solar panels, or a conventional electrical connection. It runs on Linux, so all the software is open-sourced. It has books, games, and learning activities on board, and it can switch from Latin-based characters to, say, Hindi or Arabic. And, best of all, it’s a wireless internet receiver. Not only can it connect to the internet, it has a mail handler (gmail from Google), and can network with other copies of itself. It has speakers, a microphone, a camera, game controllers, a mouse, 3 USB jacks for attaching peripherals, and a slot for an SD card. And each kid gets one to own. This is some machine!
That was the product review. Here is the pitch: the Give One, Get One program is good until Dec. 31 this year. You can, of course, give to OLPC any time, but under this program, you can bring an XO home to your own neighborhood as well as send one to the world. If you’re at all interested, go to www.laptop.org to check it out.
It has been suggested to me that we ought to be giving our charitable efforts to people in this country, where there are plenty of needy folks, instead of sending it off to foreign people. My answer is, who says foreign people are separate from us? Who says, if we need to see a local benefit from our giving, that we get that return only from local giving? These kids in under-served schools around the world are the first generation of the new century. They will be the leaders of the world one day. No gift to them now could be greater than a tool to learn with. With any luck, they’ll turn out smarter than the leaders of today’s governments.
As it says on the One Laptop Per Child website, “Standing still is a reliable recipe for going backward.”
And by the way, since this is Christmas, let’s consider these words from the Book of John, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another…” Let’s celebrate a little fellowship.
Merry Christmas, world.
Pretty Woman
Saturday I drove out into the cold on a beautiful sunny day. The fields rolled away in damp furrows, the woods sparkled, and I avoided the highway by cutting across farmlands and rivers on the secondary roads. An hour or so later I pulled up in the yard at Bide-a-wee Farm out of Newberg to collect the newest addition to our flock. Jenna is a yearling Jacob ewe with, we presume, her first breeding of lambs inside. Notice I said lambs, plural. Well, we can be hopeful, eh?
See Jenna housed in the back of the little car. In the car! There were several reasons to just put her in the car. The trailer is out in the muddy field right now, and the pick-up requires tire chains to get to it, and was all full of old things going to the recycling place anyway, and dealing with all that seemed a big deal for one little sheep. So I put down a tarp and some cardboard over it, and drove away.
Once she was loaded up, Jenna seemed just fine about it all. Doug put some hay in the back for her, and Karen wished us well as we pulled away. Jenna stood up all the way home. She looked out the windows and talked to me about the matter. Her unmistakable sheepy aroma filled the car. I heard the dropping of little pellets back there, and the aroma became emphatic. I was glad for the tarp and the cardboard. We arrived home, and Jenna was not about to come out of that nice little place.
I wish I’d had my camera in my pocket when I was at Bide-a-wee. It was beautiful, the sea of Jacob sheep and Navajo Churro faces gathered in their barn. All those fleecy bodies bumping together, spots and horns, bleats and farts. I should have walked back to get the camera, and made everyone wait around while I made photos.
Jenna is still a little on the outs in the ewe pen. There is always an Alpha and an Omega in a flock, and the new kid is usually the Omega. This will be a relief to the previous Omega.
Bundled up by the Fire
Even when we are bigger, something about this time of year is magical. These weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas holds different spells for grown-ups than for children, but they enchant us nevertheless. Evenings spent with lamplight falling on a page, seasonal music making its annual emergence from the stacks, an aromatic cup of tea just there… these are the treasures of the foul weather months. If it doesn’t seem there is enough time for all the tasks, there is still enough to linger for a half-hour with old favorites. I know, this is as cloying as those cherry cordial candies my great-uncle used to put out. But we all live with tender pleasures that come to the front now and then.
Books of the season: I have two in particular that I revisit this time of year. Both are short works. I have heard both read by the authors, and it’s impossible for me to read them in my own head without hearing the cadences of those original voices.
Dylan Thomas,
he of the too short career in art, tobacco and alcohol, gave us A Child’s Christmas in Wales, where he, like us, “…can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” If I don’t read it myself this month, I let him do it. Sometimes both.
And I bring out A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, a tale with pecans, penny money, a rat terrier named Queenie, whiskey for fruitcakes, and the ghost of a boy named Buddy. Capote read this work perfectly in his grown-up child voice on a 1959 vinyl recording that is now of great dollar value. I don’t own it. You can listen to it here, however, in an NPR broadcast of This American Life: 255: This American’s Life’s Holiday Gift-Giving Guide. The reading comes at the 21st minute of the broadcast file. You’ll want to have a broadband connection to listen, but you can order a download of the piece for 95 cents or buy it on CD for $13.00. This is a photo of Truman and his “still a child” cousin Sook.
A number of years ago Richard’s young daughter Lucy came to spend Christmas with us, and we pulled out my collection of holiday music records. The budget had kept me a little behind the times with recording technology. I was still listening to thirty-three-and-a-third recordings and some cassettes when Lucy was connected to her CD player. She thought I was stunningly provincial with my black plastic records that required the needle to be set carefully on the rim, and the gentle hiss and puck that sometimes came across the speakers from the nicks and dust in the grooves. I had some medieval music performed on period instruments, some Carillon recordings, and some choral performances. After listening for a while, Lucy opined, “At home we have nice music for Christmas.” Well. I brought out a cassette of John Denver and the Muppets rollicking through some standards like “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and saved my reputation. I still do enjoy listening to those guys. (Miss Piggy indignantly exclaiming: Piggy Pudding!)
I think the message is, you can be too serious about Christmas music. A couple of years ago a friend, younger than I and with a different experience in music, gave me a pair of holiday recordings by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. He asked me if I knew them. I said yes, and then realized I had no idea who they were. It’s a rock orchestra. The titles are familiar. The voices and instruments are… a little different. I made him laugh when I referred them as the Trans-Siberian Train Wreck. But… I like it. Not for all the time, but for some.
And that cup of tea. I get down the box of Lapsang souchong. I start the old record of medieval instrumentalists. I open the small pages of Dylan Thomas, and I hear his Welsh voice again from among the printed words, “One Christmas was so much like another…”
Something for the Holidays
One of the good things about having the farm and woods is going out on a damp afternoon with hand clippers and a couple of empty buckets to get cuttings for wreath making. Some fir, some Scotch Broom, and some Salal from the woods, 45 minutes to an hour among the trees and brambles, a bit of a chill, cold hands, cold feet, and I am back for a cup of tea in the kitchen.
My wreath-making goes back a lot of years. When I first had my own house, in the days when I lived alone, I looked out on my city back yard one winter afternoon and wondered whether the boxwood would keep its bright evergreen color if it were cut for holiday greens. This must have been in the mid-1980’s. I had a big fir tree as well, and the neighbors had a cedar tree. I bought some wire and a store-made frame, and combined it all into a wreath to take to my mother for Sunday dinner. To my alarm, she collapsed into tears at the sight of it. I hadn’t thought it was all that bad. As it turned out the tears were because she remembered her own mother making holiday wreaths from cuttings taken in the woods of Denmark. Well then, I felt it was all right.
I’ve been making a select number of winter wreaths ever since. I was making them when Richard first started coming around to see me. He would call and suggest he come over with some sausages to cook, and I would say, “Fine, but I’m not cleaning house. Things are a shambles here.” When he arrived, I’d be in the middle of a pile of branches and wire on the kitchen floor. If it had been all that important that my house be clean to receive him, we’d never have made it this far. Fortunately, he took it with a glad heart, and ordered a cast bronze sign with the name The Shambles printed across it. The sign hangs outside the new studio building now.
I have made wreaths in the kitchen. I have made them in the rain on the deck. I’ve made them sitting on the front porch. We made them all in a group one Thanksgiving when Richard’s kids and Significant Others all showed up together at our little house, and we turned the kitchen floor into something like a medieval small-holder’s scented, rush-covered floor. I no longer buy store-made wire frames for constructing the wreaths. One year, short on frames, I made my own by twisting small fir branches into a hoop and wiring them together. It worked fine, and the whole thing was suddenly throw-awayable. Before that, folks conscientiously sent the dried-out old wreaths back to me so I could retrieve the frames for reuse.
Return to the present:
Here I am on Thanksgiving Day, making a couple of hostess gift wreaths. It was cold out, but the sun was shining. Good wreathing weather!
I have nothing but respect for people who can make wreaths of holly. I’ve tried. Without gloves, it’s torture. With gloves, it’s torture. I much prefer the combination of needles and smooth leaves that come out of the woods here. The boxwood has been left behind in the city, and I found that Salal, a native of our woods, makes a fine substitute. Gaultheria shallon is a smooth-leaved , leathery plant that grows throughout the northwest, in shady woods and in sun. It can get pretty thick in some places. It makes fine holiday wreaths, though you have to look for this year’s growth of leaves to avoid spotty ones.
Here’s an Advent wreath for you all. Keep your holiday hearts bright.
