Opinion

Whenever I hear sirens, I do a mental check. If none of my family members are driving through town at the moment, I breathe a sigh of relief and forget about it. If it’s probable that a family member is driving through town at that moment, I feel a twinge of anxiety.

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Ask anyone for a life review, and I don’t care if they are eight or eighty. They are going to tell you about the hard times. Somehow we all know that life is not about the easy times. “I ate 100,000 good breakfasts.” “I got good grades in college.” No, our lives are created and characterized by struggle. It’s painful to drop expectations, fail miserably, lean on others, and feel sorrow, anxiety, unrest and uncertainty. We would never go through these times voluntarily. They just come. As Toni Berhnardt says in the book “How to Wake up,” no one gets a pass from those 10,000 sorrows. Life would not be life without it.

First up garlic, I finally have successfully grown my own garlic beds folks! It has been a long time coming. Although roasting or otherwise cooking garlic is delicious and valuable, garlic is most effective when consumed raw. Garlic harvests are just about ready either you are just picking, or they are still drying. I will be making candied garlics and goot paste shortly. I also have dandelions soaking in calendula oil yet, hmmm…. better get on the salve train. Before I jump on that obsession, I must remind those of you that pick wild berries to be on the look out for Highbush Cranberries. I personally make jelly; I know others use the berry in bread or some even use the juice as natural coloring of other concoctions. I did manage to get some chokecherries too for jelly. I froze them and will make jelly a bit later in the fall. Apple trees, anyone else’s trees just loaded. Our oldest tree froze out last year but is so heavy that some branches are on the ground this year. This tree has been here my whole life and I never remember it so loaded with apples. It really is something to look at, and another thing for me to obsess over, because as we have noted I don’t have enough going on. Anyways, it would be a shame if a bear came and mangled the tree.

We were recently visiting family in Michigan, and I saw an interesting front page story in the Detroit News. It was about a guy who is running for state attorney general who told a crowd that he had a secret lab where he would show he could manipulate election equipment to prove that there was election fraud in 2020.

by Eric Enberg We can all see that the steel industry is undergoing tremendous change. The basic oxygen furnace which uses coal is fading away. Direct reduced iron (DRI) is becoming more common. There is also a new technology with only oxygen as the waste product, Molten Oxide Electrolysis or MOE.

I was an avid reader of the “Little House on the Prairie” series when I was a young girl. Forty years later I read it again to my daughters. I acquired a whole new appreciation and wept a fresh batch of tears. Other books that vividly depict the lives of girls and women in earlier times similarly capture my imagination. I even read Jane Austen with a degree of wistfulness, despite the long skirts and tedious conversations. So it is not without some merit that I hear occasional claims from those who love me that I would prefer to live in an earlier time–if not pre-plow, at least pre-internet.

The school year fast approaches. I remember those last days of summer as Labor Day drew near and I knew the freedom of my wanderings was just about over. It was soon to be time for measured days and football practices and a lot less monkey business. Classroom structure was soon to be the norm. I realize now just how much I needed that structure in my life, the structure of learning in a classroom setting, with teachers and coaches who were usually doing their best to guide me in the right direction. I have written before of teachers who had an impact, teachers who still pop up as I recall just how I learned anything at all given my penchant for not following rules whenever I had the chance. And there were hundreds, thousands, millions of kids like me in classrooms every day.