Life

I've spent quite a bit of time in cemeteries recently, so I thought it would be a good contrast to blog about life. In this case, grapevines. Biblically, Christ uses the vine and branches analogy to talk about salvation through Him. I like grapevines because Concord grapes grow native in Massachusetts without being tended. This tree has grapes growing all the way up it's trunk into its branches. I also dislike our local native grapes because they grow too high up in the trees to reach and taste very bitter, and most of the grape is comprised of seed (I, like many others, am spoiled by a history of eating only seedless grapes).
However, I am sure these hearty native plants have good uses. For wine, or jam, or something that involves straining out the seeds and adding lots of sugar. So, I read how to start my own vines (since the current vines are somewhat inaccessible due to their height in the trees). Evidently, all one needs to do is cut out a piece of vine about a the thickness of a pencil and a foot long, and stick it in the ground in the fall. In the spring, it will sprout into its own vine and grow leaves. This method only has a 50% success rate, so you want to try it with twice as many vines as you want to grow. Once you realize that it has successfully started, you leave it for a year or so to establish itself and then transplant the vine to the desired location. So, a year from this spring, I should be able to transplant four little grape vines to somewhere of my choosing. I haven't chosen the spot yet, but I have a year to figure that out, and built my mother an arbor for them to grow on. Definitely a long term, but low maintenance project.
Unfortunately, this whole way of growing new vines doesn't work with Christs analogy, unless you're pluralistic. I however, am not pluralistic, and soundly ascribe to the idea that to live and bear fruit, the branch must be attached to the vine.
As you recall from my blackberry bush writings, as well as this example, it's a good thing that there's a difference between biology and theology.

This is why we document cemeteries!

This lovely Sunday morning I was busy grinding up yet another load of pears to make pear sauce, when a friend of our family, Gail, called the house to talk to Mom. Mom got off the phone and informed me that the cemetery in the Douglas State Forest, one of 24 cemeteries which was covered in the cemetery documentary which I helped with, had been vandalized. Vandalized! This is one of the worst nightmares of all people who protect cemeteries, second only to a cemetery being dug up completely by construction equipment (we've had a few close calls with that in the past). I informed my mother that I had to go see the cemetery and take pictures, and asked if there was a police report. Our friend had already reported it to the police. My mother told me that I could go to the cemetery once some work was done, so I put a bucket worth of pears through the fruit squisher while Mom went to work calling the town Cemetery Committee officials and anyone else whom she found relevant to the event.
When I was done I drove down to the forest and met up with Sue, a resident of the area and fellow open space committee member. From there Sue and I surveyed the damage. Initially it didn't look that bad, stones were still upright and there was no spray paint. However, people had scratched offensive images and stuff onto two of the slate stones, and someone had dug up an area and re-filled it. You can barely make out the depression in the ground, its on the right hand side in front of the stone with the rounded top. All this damage had been done prior to the last few rains, as it was clear that rain had fallen on the fairly fresh dirt. Whoever dug up the area used a shovel. The area had not been dug deep enough to uncover anything, if there even was anything left in the grave to uncover. All I could say to myself was "WHY?"
It was not until I returned home to look at pictures of the cemetery prior to vandalism that I realized some significance of the hole. As you can see in the before picture, there is a square stone in the right hand foreground that reads "Selena" on it, and a smaller stone behind it which is her footstone. It stands in exactly the same area that had been dug up. Selena's headstone has been moved off to the left and back a bit and is now facing the wrong way, but upright. Her footstone is now in front of her headstone and standing upside down (as seen in in the previous picture, to the left of the depression in the ground).
The grave belongs to a girl by the name of Selena Kimball who died in 1822 at the age of 2 months and 20 days, her parents are buried in a different cemetery, likely meaning that the infant died of smallpox victims of smallpox were often buried apart from otherwise healthy dead people because of superstition, and there was a smallpox epidemic in Douglas in the 1820's.
I'm so angry, someone dug up this girl's grave and haphazardly rearranged her stones. But had it not been for older pictures such as this one (there are a few, this one was taken by username Svadilfari on Flickr.com) we would not have known where her stones and grave are supposed to stand. This is one of the reasons it is important to document old cemeteries.

Labor Day; beginning of the harvest.

Today was a good day for work. My father and I continued work in the upstairs insulating the wall/roof. I continued clear-cutting the blackberry patch since it is full of non-blackberry bushes and old canes that no longer produce, once it is clear cut it will only have fruit bearing branches for next year. This is much easier than pruning other types of plants that don't regrow every year. The New Testament of the Bible speaks of judgment day through a parable about a gardener who cuts off branches that do not bear fruit and throwing them into the fire. Blackberries are pruned Old Testament style: the plants are good, over time, the plants become and full of weeds and less fruitful, rather than picking out the bad parts the gardener clear cuts the whole patch and starts over. Good thing I'm not God. There is no salvation for my blackberry patch.
Today we also harvested peaches. The pear harvest is already underway and I have been selling some at the farmers market, and the trees are still laden with fruit. The peach trees were harvested for the first time today, and it's a good thing we got to them. Some branches were so heavily laden with fruit they broke off. We then took the peaches, boiled, pealed, pitted, and put them in jars into the freezer. While the freezer does consume energy, it also saves. One key to sustainability is eating local foods rather than having food shipped from faraway places on fossil fuel powered trucks from mega-farms. But for those of us in the harsh northern climes eating local fruits and veggies is hard in winter.
Therefore, let us do what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did before us, canning and freezing! Though I may seem like an anti-technologist, I do thank God for the invention of the mason jar.