Comptonia
Sweetfern, Comptonia peregrina, is neither sweet nor a fern. It looks like something the dinosaurs would have walked through, releasing the warmest, spiciest aromas of imagination.
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Hazel Catkin
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
then and now
That was 10 days ago. It was the third snowfall in two weeks.
This is now:
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
with feathers
My birdfeeders have never been busier than in recent months. I haven't totted up how many pounds of feed have been purchased, but I consider the cost to be my Entertainment Budget. And well spent.
This little nuthatch was perfectly still for about two minutes.
Saturday, April 5, 2025
happy new year
I've never felt the year turn on January 1st; always in the Autumn. Possibly a remnant of my way-way-back Celtic ancestry.
But last year, April 4th was such a watershed moment it overshadowed the rest of 2024. And the disruption of ordinary life caught a second wave with the shoulder injury in October.
So when I woke up yesterday and thought "April 4th...that seems like a significant date..." it only took a split second to remember why.
Update: the barn has still not been brought back to original condition, but most of the parts that have been replaced are much better-built than the original. So it's a matter of taking the rough with the smooth. (Oh, a bit of humor there, since the barn is built of roughcut lumber.) The barn served most of it's purpose fairly well through the Winter. Now that it's Sort Of Spring, there is plenty of time for more work to be done on the barn before next Winter.
It's so much harder to get things built or rebuilt when I can do almost none of the work myself these days. I just have to accept that, I suppose.
That last sentence suggests that I have not accepted it, doesn't it? Oh well. Anyway.
Since the 4th of April 2024 was such a dramatic day, I've decided to look at yesterday, April 4th 2025, as a turning of the year. Why not? Happy New Year, blogpals!
I rarely make New Year's Resolutions, and don't need to do so now because since the shoulder injury on October 8th, there has been a great deal of rethinking what I'm doing and how I'm doing it, mostly in small, everyday things. And small changes have been made, so...functional resolutions, one might say.
All that's left to do now is to celebrate!
~~~~~
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
triangle
Today is the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, which left 146 dead. Ultimately, the Triangle fire was a major catalyst for changes in US labor laws.
It's difficult to write about this, not only because it was a heart-hollowing tragedy, but because of the complexity and sheer volume of contemporary accounts. Once I started reading, it was difficult to stop.
A summary from the Cornell website, which was my starting point:
The fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, is one of the worst disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
This incident has had great significance to this day because it highlights the inhumane working conditions to which industrial workers can be subjected. To many, its horrors epitomize the extremes of industrialism.
The tragedy still dwells in the collective memory of the nation and of the international labor movement. The victims of the tragedy are still celebrated as martyrs at the hands of industrial greed.
The anniversary of the Triangle fire is marked with events each year, and this year I signed up for a project organized by Tatter. One hundred and forty-six volunteers each embroidered the name and age of one victim on a piece of white fabric. The individual pieces were then stitched together by other volunteers at Tatter, to be displayed as a banner during the annual commemorative event at the site of the fire.
As suggested by the Tatter organizers, I tried to learn a bit about Yetta Rosenbaum to personalize her embroidered panel. She had been in the US for 3 years and 9 months, so I began with her hometown (in current-day Ukraine) and soon got lost in its very complex history. Moving forward, I found maps and street photographs of the lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, and marked the routes Yetta could have taken to the factory. Did she take a streetcar? Or if the weather was nice, or she needed to economize, did she walk? Did she ever catch a glimpse of the Washington Arch before entering the factory? Was she excited when a movie theatre opened in 1910, right down the street from her home at 308 East Houston?
It's a fine line between feeling sympathy for a person one has never known, and feeling empathy for an imagined version of a person one can never know.
Many bits of documentation I found about Yetta Rosenbaum - even her age (21 or 22) and the spelling of her name - were contradicted by another account. Which is why I'm not including all those bits which would certainly add dimension but possibly with false colors. Does it matter? I'm not a 1911 reporter, repeating gruesome details and selling newspapers. Nor am I participating in the subsequent legal proceedings, presenting information with the sole intent to blame or exonerate. But when I found myself imagining the walk to the factory, I felt I was crossing a line into creating a fictional person, not learning more about the real woman who travelled to America and worked long hours at a factory and who died, tragically and horribly, at a very young age.
In fact, I cannot know much about that real woman.
But at least I can say her name.
~~~~~