We Are Now Four

We are now four. Which qualifies as a household. (A two-bicycle household.) We are: one organist/crop and soil scientist; Oliver, one ancient fish who’d previously been overtaxing my parents’ welcome (a residual from when I left for college and Mum would take care of him until he probably died 6 months later—6 years later he’s still with us); Otto, Oliver’s live-in cleaning service; and now Hildegard Von Bingen, someone of the feline persuasion from the local shelter.  

Last night was Hildegard’s first night as Mansard roof-mate.

I’m hesitant to become one of those people who rattles everlasting about her pet as if her pet were somehow The Most charismatic or eccentric creature. And if one hasn’t met the star of the story then you just may not quite get it, but wait patiently to glowingly tell your own pet stories.  Pets bring us such comfort and entertainment this way, that we want to share about them. But I’m realizing this is not a unique feeling.

(I only really like hearing Daddy talk about Myra. Because both of them are into the next universe of strange. For instance: my Dad made me a bed that fog-horns and Myra eats...items. “Myra ATE my yoga pants” my Mom stated, in full disgruntlement, and I could only laugh because of the ridiculous nature of those words.)

Hildegard is named after the first female composer (back in those men-dominated days) from 1081. She wrote beautiful chants and poetry. I’d been explaining her origins to my crop and soil science friends, and just about everyone else. Except I met with Awesome Musical Alyce yesterday (the soprano of the “AaaaAAAaahhhh-shit!-Aaaaaaaahhhh!” singing) and I said, “Her name is: Hildegard” and before I could finish Alyce jumped in, “VON BINGEN!!!”  Yes.  

Hildegard is small, in mid-life, rescued as a stray from Trumansburg, and has Tabby-Tortoiseshell markings. This looks like someone painted stripes on her, became disillusioned with that style and went swipe-smear-swipe to smudge them out. She has a tiny spill of orange, a little chest-plate of white, and the rest is that romantic gray mottled fog of an English countryside.

I was groggily lying in bed last night and it was almost surreal to see a cat sitting there regarding me, then pushing her head into my hand. Having a cat in my Mansard Roof is like trying to develop a relationship with someone you don’t even know yet, but doing so in your own previously-determined space.  There’s a few things we need to decide terms on: for instance scratching, and the popcorn popper, and walking in each other’s ways. Right now she is my writing co-pilot, sitting by my feet and looking serene.

She curls back and forth around my hand and head-butts it, occasionally standing like a kangaroo to gain improved leverage.

It’s fascinating to feel what it feels like to not be alone in this Mansard roof, that my movements now influence another creature. She watched me with composed regard as I grated beets and chopped onions last night. Thankfully she did not flatten in abject fear when I fired up the popcorn popper (because that is integral to existence here) but only sat in the hall looking wide-eyed and small. Then she watched me dance. 

"That toy is not enticing but YOU sure are."

Head-butts in action make difficult photographs.

The Stapler

Today at work my boss tasked me with the consequential task of….buying a stapler.

(day in the life of a crop and soil scientist, right)

As Cornell is a large, important, and unwieldy entity, the act of purchasing something using institution or grant money is no straight forward business. But I am authorized to officially deploy lab funds for purchases. So my boss appointed me the stapler (which we did need) as a fairly innocuous purchase to attempt before moving on to more advanced items. 

The purchasing system is a convoluted website with too many links, too many icons, unobvious codes, and hidden tabs. Cornell, as its own veritable planet, has such a large demand for everything that it has special relationships with many suppliers for bulk and discount purchasing, thus the convoluted special purchasing system. 

But, it’s just a stapler, right! No problem.

WELL.

The variety of available stapler breeds was astounding. I scrolled through pages of half strip staplers, full strip staplers, Modern Grip staplers, compact staplers, an antimicrobial stapler (?!?)…. Also one Medical Skin Stapler for $568.  (Hm, maybe I’ll get that number for our cover crops)

I used my executive decision and bought a neon green one.

Then came the actual assigning of funds to the thing: opening links, hitting “submit” and “calculate” hopefully and repeatedly, only to be returned some perplexing error symbol. Finally I got to enter an account number.  And a business purpose. One can’t go buying staplers (or plot flags, or legume inoculant) without proper justification. 

But to justify a stapler?

I got out my best academicese: “Necessary for fastening together informational sheets of paper to promote laboratory organization, drafts to be reviewed by PI, and printed journal articles.”

I wonder how I would have justify the antimicrobial option…

A Dinner Party

I hosted my first dinner party last night.

I've hosted jointly before. But this one was in my Mansard roof, in my kitchen. For my new Cornell lab group and boss.



Perhaps it was not a standard dinner party. It was mostly brassicas. And the justification of this party was a Website Launch Party. Specifically, one of my first tasks as employee was to revamp the website, hosted by wordpress. I got rid of the tall office buildings of text, the stacks of links, unburied the interesting photos lost in the depths and brought them accessible. I bugged my teammates for details about their projects and made little profile pages for each. I learned how to navigate wordpress platform and read countless well-designed blogs about designing blogs well.

(Please visit our site! https://scslabcu.wordpress.com/)

I was wrist-deep in bike grease and crud on the front porch, changing my rear flat, when Professor Boss arrived lugging two potted plants and plenty of beer.  How strange it is to have one's boss out of context like this. And good. So we opened beers with a bike tire lever and talked about things that weren't perennial grains, rolling soybeans, or collecting soil samples. I bumbled around my upside-down bicycle and he remarked how nice it was to have an expansive porch.

Then the rest of my lab group arrived. I am extraordinarily blessed by getting to work with a group of clever, motivated, interested and interesting young people. Their partners are lovely too. Tall Sophia arrived with her big plume of hair, wearing heels and saying she refuses not to not wear heels because of her height. Sweet Mariah told stories of the cats at the humane shelter where she volunteers. We laughed about the brassicas, gossiped a bit about some faculty and local growers, and dreamed of agronomy conferences held in Puerto Rico.

And it was indeed brassica night. "P.S. Remember it's Bring Your Wok To Work Day" I'd reminded my boss in the bottom of a logistics email; I was needing to borrow his wok so I could make Sichuan Pepper cabbage stir fry. Everyone leaned around my kitchen, talking animatedly, beers encased in my strange coozie collection, while I sprinkled and poured ingredients in the wok, making up a cabbage recipe. Professor Boss chopped a kohlrabi (more brassica) and Soil Master Chris had brought a kale-lentil salad (the final brassica).

I felt duly-dinner party-ry because I served my cabbage stir-fry in my cut glass bowl (gift from dear generous Aunt Marge) AND I had enough chairs and plates for everyone. We fit around my estate-sale special table.

It takes me halfway through the meal, however, to remember to offer out yellow cloth napkins (gift from dear Grandma June). Oh well, better late than never.

I noticed later one of those napkins sticking out of Soil Master Chris's back-pocket, exactly like the soil sampling rag that had been back there this morning.

Having them in my Mansard Roof was a pleasure; I'm learning I thoroughly enjoy hosting people. And I got to "play" (i.e., "sound") the organ bed and introduce everyone to Oliver the Fish and his efficient little cleaning service (algae eater). I had Celtic music playing on my Dad's boat-sized ancient boom box and evening sun cascaded into my Mansard. It was lovely.

The First Ride and A Good Sing

Two excellent things happened this weekend. But I should say these were normal happenings, perhaps, but the canvas for them was the weather for the past week: a dungeon of sodden greyness, turbulent wind, shrinking into hopeful spring coats that weren’t nearly warm enough. The skies were monochrome, unceasingly deep blankets under which we were all hidden and morose. Occasionally a maverick cloud might dart uncharacteristically quickly past its role of sun obscuring, and a weak ray of gold would grace us. But then, after 15 seconds, snow would begin on some sort of cruel whim.

And there’s a deeply concerning draught in California. (oh climate change)

But coming back to the local. Today. Today was Spring. Glorious sun leapt me out of bed, permanent sun, sun all day. My quads and lungs and soul have been waiting for this day. Waiting to go bicycling. Bicycling in celebration, not in stoicism. Not a rainy buzz out for eggs or soymilk, but a glorious revel of exploring new places.

Cleaning my chain, pumping my tires: it was like getting ready to go on a date, all eager and anticipating and a little nervous maybe. How would it go? Would I still have it? It had been so long, so long since I’d roared off on two wheels; which shoes do I normally bicycle in? Which shorts fit the best? I had to step back and remember these things.

And then: oh, it was like reconnecting with a love after a long time separate. The previously delicious comfortable things now unexpectedly new and exciting. How my feet fit in the pedals, the balance and grind of standing into the handlebars to climb a hill, the brakes that do squeak, darn it.

I opened the Tompkins County bicycle map and arbitrarily chose to head towards Dryden. A small town separated from Ithaca by fields and trees and shabby houses and hills and streams. I took Whispering Springs Actually-A-Killer-Hill Rd, or something like this, and began to climb. And climb. I down-shifted. I took off my over shirt. Then rolled down my knee socks. Then took those off completely. I was doing something I hadn’t done in ages: I was sweating in the sun. Digging into my long-lost legs. Chipping the crusty layer off my lungs. Suffering and glory all churning together. It was amazing.

And, after rounding many forested turns---believing to finally be at the victorious crest only to thwartingly find there was more---I did reach the highest bit. One of those yellow road signs of a truck riding down a triangle indicated it would be a great descent. And oh my: that descent went on long enough I got to move past the adrenaline of it, to sit with this descent, to be in it for a long delicious time. The unexpectedly long climb was winter, which when I was in it I never believed it to end (must work on Faith), and this descent was the giddy glory of spring.

The descent was so fantastic and jostedly that I noticed an undue amount of clatter happening after I landed. Upon inspection, I realized my bicycle had lost a bit of hardware connecting my back-rack and rear-fender to the frame. Poking tentatively around Dryden, I realized this town failed to have content on a Sunday, and I had to be all clever with a bit of wire scrounged roadside and some electrical tape purchased at Walgreens. But this mending held and I was pleased.

The descent into spring. It took me all the way to that valley.

28 miles. My First Ride of the season. I feel so happy. I have mild sun addiction, perhaps, and when I get a fix life is so much improved. I’ll see how I am once I inventory the legs tomorrow morning.

The other excellent thing was music. The Christian Scientists have a soloist instead of a choir, and as organist my task is to learn their piece and accompany them. This week a soprano. I was expecting some flimsy demanding blonde thing, but this girl, Miss Spunk, was tall like me and indeed a presence. She was young, irreverent and driven, quick sense of humor, fast to laugh; we hit it off immediately. We had just met and were creating music together, like a dance.  Rehearsal Saturday morning, though it was technically “work” I suppose, was really fun.

There was a bit where she got all high and belting and I was playing smooth arpeggios beneath. To hear this striking operatic voice, resonating these wide notes, “aahhh”—rolling up into the registers—“aaaahhh”—all like an aria—“ahhhh”—and here I was accompanying under it!—“aaaaahhhh”—and then: “aahhhh-shit-aahhhh” as she expressed some unwanted musical aberration. I started giggling, then laughing, then had to stop playing. Then in my agile keyboardist grace I flail out and knock over my metal thermos, which is a veritable gong. To have such a crash follow her operatic expletive sent us both into a full train wreck.  We had a blast.

But oh did we do well Sunday morning. I was giving myself chills while she sang.

In Warm Rain

Forgive me as I write about Spring....at least a whiff of Spring. This was from last night.

The world smelled of warm rain, a delicious smell indeed.  One of those smells as important as Grandma’s Cookies. I felt that flutter of spring, the rising of that beautiful thing which is human hope. I was the bike-riding version of a fawn prancing among crocuses.  Only in the dark. And the rain. Coming back across town from the organ church. It was that affirming feeling, maybe there were still piles of filthy snow, maybe the reminder of the weekend’s weather was grimly gruesome. But it was that affirmation that you could remember this feeling, what spring was. Feeling the feeling of the feeling, if not the feeling itself. Like feeling how it felt to be in love, remembering what that felt like, even if you weren’t actually in it. But faith that it—spring, love, whatever—will happen.

This feeling made me want to DO THINGS: bake cookies, host parties, go hiking, ride my bicycle many miles, have guests, go dancing, eat more Thai peanut sauce, adopt a cat. 

And I felt happiness to be in Ithaca….not just resigned or tolerant, but actively happy. Maybe because I was on a bicycle. (You can keep your little hardy northern mouth shut, Sylvia Klassen, but I was too blasted by this terrible winter to ride my bicycle.) And being on a bicycle again, finally, was as delicious as that smell of warm rain.

Today I took the scenic way home from Cornell, curving around the roads in the Plantations, sitting tall and looking delighted and gazing off into the trees. I became duly muddy after some off-roading activities thanks to a slightly disorienting turn, which seemed appropriately fitting.

Spring makes me stupid with glee. I end up grinning at passersby and bum-bumming to myself. Add to this the bliss of relieving release from the world’s tallest basement (my office building), and the extended frisson of flying down THE HILL on bicycle (not just a single hill, either, but it comes in stages, so you have moments of being present before the next ripping descent) at the end of a productive workday and I could quite possibly become airborne by the time I’ve reached downtown.

I reached downtown Wednesday and bought myself a charming little epiphyte tillandsia plant to keep me company in the kitchen.

Otherwise, it’s The Fish And I, living in this Mansard Roof.

I was wearing as many clashing versions of teal and green as my wardrobe would allow (disregarding the neon pants): teal sweater, neon green vest, blue-teal scarf, my sister’s every-color-teal-blue hat. Two clashing colors is unaware; more is intentional. It felt playful and good.

So I came into my apartment after playing that beautiful tracker instrument, just now, remembering with fondness how my organ music was sitting primly in boxes, all organized. Even though some of it was being deployed and was in circulation, left by the organ at the church, not in my prim boxes. 

Then I made a metaphor joke in my head, so nerdy, yet so applicable to my personal circumstances….remembering from Soil Fertility class how soil organic matter has an active fraction and a passive fraction (i.e., not biologically active, aka humus) and how my pipe organ matter was likewise. The books that actively transferred between apartment and church, de-composing (oh dear) and then the books that were not available to soil organisms for consumption.