Dry and bitter

The high yesterday was 90 degrees. Today it hit 94. The forecast for tomorrow anticipates 92, and 95 for the day after.

Living where we live in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, hot often also means humid. The air gets thick, and my normally straight hair starts to look thick and curly. The extra moisture in the air has an effect of softening my normally dry skin, but it also brings out the mosquitoes and saps away both my energy and my appetite.

Fortunately, the high heat of summer in our part of the Adirondack foothills is brief. Usually, by mid- to late August, I'm back to wearing a long-sleeved jersey at night. And during this season of high heat, I have found a way to enjoy home-cooked dinners. The secret passwords are dry and bitter.

Let me explain. If you follow my blogs, you know that my husband and I grow a lot of our own food. The high heat of summer also is the time when much of what is in our gardens begins to blossom into real food. As a result, many of our days are spent outdoors in the sun, pulling weeds, hand-pollinating corn, and planting -- still planting -- seeds for the plants that grow fast and thrive in this kind of summer sun. Toward the end of the day, as the sun starts to head down the western horizon, we harvest, mostly for our night's dinner but also to store for the winter.

Which brings me to roasted and bitter.

Turnips and radishes are very pickable now, as are peas, beets, kale, collards, Swiss chard, and increasingly garlic (of which we'll be doing a mass harvest this weekend). Turnips and radishes are especially good because they come with a bonus: Their rough, sometimes prickly green tops also are quite good to eat. I have begun to think of these green tops as a "throwaway crop", simply because so many people with gardens simply cut off and throw away or compost these greens. I don't blame people for doing this because the greens are a bit of a chore to clean. Turnips and radishes are root veggies, which means that the tops are often dusty with soil. Each turnip and radish also has a pretty hefty handful of leaves, which can make consuming ALL of them a challenge.

So what does this have to do with roasted and bitter? When it's hot, my body starts to crave flavors that I can best describe with those two words. Usually, these are spices that come in the form of a seed such as black mustard, fenugreek, and cumin. However,  also have found that turnip and radish greens also fit this category.

I have an flat Indian-style skillet known as a tawa. It is like a griddle, but it is made of cast iron, which means it needs to be seasoned with oil every so often to keep the iron from oxidizing. What this means is that there's almost always a thin coat of oil on the tawa, which makes it perfect for roasting spices listed above.

About a year ago, I had a thought: If I could roast spices on an almost dry cast-iron pan, I should be able to roast bitter tasting greens, as well. I had just pulled some turnips, so I cut off the greens and washed them very very well. I then drained them in a colander and shook off as much of the excess water as I could. When the greens were about as dry as I could get them to be, I sliced them into thin ribbons and gave them another rinse. I then let them dry further, while I heated the tawa and began roasting the cumin, mustard, and fenugreek. Once the spices began emitting a fragrant odor, I tossed the sliced greens onto the tawa, mixing them into the spices with the help of two wooden spoons.

The greens wilted rapidly, so I didn't cook them for more than 2 minutes. I removed them from the tawa and put them into a serving bowl, making sure to scrap the tawa to get all of the spice essences. The taste of the greens was amazingly heady. Without oil to coat them, flavors that were simultaneously sweet, spicy, and fragrant blended together in a roast that I can only describe as dry and bitter.

We eat bitter these days about three or four times a week. I have found that radish green tops taste as good cooked in this way as turnip greens. Because they cook fast and dry, the clean up is minimal. And, I have found that unlike many other garden grown greens, these ones will not wilt and lose their flavor if you clean them well and leave them in a wire strainer basket or some sort of similar device in the refrigerator's vegetable bins. Eating them eases the heaviness of the humidity and adds much spice to the high heat of summer.

Expectations

Our next door neighbor came over tonight as we were beginning the preparations for our post-9 p.m. dinner. I make note of the fact that it is a post-9 p.m. dinner for reasons that might make sense later.

Our neighbor is a good friend, and our deck, front door, and picnic table under the maple trees are always open to him. So are meals, desserts, seltzer water and beer, though usually he's eaten well before we've even begun to consider what, how, and when we're going to get around to preparing dinner.

Tonight, he brought up a topic that seems to be a recurring theme in many conversations I've had of late: college degrees. A friend and another friend and perhaps another friend all went to college. They're tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and they can't find a job.

"What's the point of a college degree," he asked, his voice rising with a rather odd anger, "if you can't get a job."

My response was probably neither soothing nor satisfying. "The point of a college degree is to learn to be a good thinker, and to be an engaged and active participant in society. It's really not about getting a job."

"That's not what they tell you," he retorted, his voice now in a shout. "Why bother going to college and spending all that money if you're not going to use what you're taught?"

I guess I don't like being shouted at, so even if he didn't mean to direct the comments at me personally, I sort of took them that way, and retorted in turn.

"College doesn't promise you a job," I said. "But if you approach it the right way, you'll use every single skill you picked up in college in every part of your life, at a job or off."

Good and mad, I went on, "College creates choices. It teaches people to think, to be inventive and creative, and to question the world we're living in."

"I'm creative and inventive," he responded. "I didn't need college to teach me that."

The conversation bothers me several hours later. I think one reason it does is because I think my neighbor is right. On one hand, nobody needs college to teach them how to be creative and inventive world survivors. For centuries -- right up to the end of World War II, for the most part -- more than 95 percent of the people on the planet did just fine with their lives and never even gave college a thought.

        Today, things are different. Millions more people think about college, and hundreds of thousands each year actually enroll. Some higher education experts call this development the "massification of higher ed." But there's a difference between starting and finishing. Every college and university in the United States faces a reality of high student attrition. More students drop out or flunk out than succeed.
And, among those who do make it across the graduation stage, immediate job prospects are bleak. As a result, students often are saddled with debt and jobs in the minimum-wage service sector they were trying to escape.

       All of this fuels claims that college is some sort of conspiratorial trick designed to get people to waste time and spend crazy amounts of money with the lure of a new but false future at the end of the graduation rainbow. Voicing these claims is an effort, perhaps, to speak truth to power, with power being equated with those who have degrees and jobs and truth being equated to those who do not. Hence, I am power and my neighbor is truth.

      But I'm not convinced that it's all that clear-cut.

       Those who have bachelor's degrees -- a little more than one-fourth of the adult American population -- statistically do earn more money and occupy a more privileged place in society than the three-quarters who do not. Those with master's degrees and doctorates hold -- or maybe we think we hold -- an even more privileged position. And those of us who have parents and/or grandparents who hold higher educational degrees are said to be in an entirely different class of people, altogether. But these realities do not erase struggle or ensure that the acquisition of a degree leads to a job.

For every well-heeled, elite, hoity-toity holder of a Ph.D., master's or bachelor's degree whom I know, there are dozens of others who struggle to make mortgage payments, work 15 to 18 hour days, and are on perpetual contracts in "temporary" adjunct positions that can be terminated at any point.

Economically, I, too, am in a position of struggle in many ways. But I also am aware of the fact (cognizant is one of the fifty-cent words that I like to use because it speaks, I think, to a more acutely felt understanding of a particular form of knowledge or fact) that the position of struggle is somewhat one of choice.

The 9 p.m. meal becomes relevant here. Dinner is at 9 p.m. because at the height of summer that's when the sun goes down. The heat of the day is prime time to work: whether the work is writing or consulting with students, working in the backyard fields where my husband and I grow much of the food we eat, running errands in town, or doing our daily rounds of exercise. After sunset, after the chickens return to their coop to roost for the night and the garden beds are watered and the vegetables for the night's dinner are picked, we're able to think about dinner and to relax. Following dinner comes time alone: I write and my husband often listens to music. Bedtime is often around midnight because our 1840s-era house -- which we have chosen for my reasons of personal comfort and for our interests in planetary sustainability not to be cooled with a central air conditioning system -- takes several hours to release the heat it has absorbed during the day and isn't cool enough to be comfortable until then. Eight hours of sleep means I don't rise until 7:30 or 8 a.m. My husband rises much earlier when the rooster crows and runs outside to open the door of the chicken coop so the birds can begin their day on their schedule. He usually comes back to sleep as long as he's let them out and fed the cats.

These choices are intrinsic to the learning we both acquired through pursuit of higher educational degrees. My husband doesn't hold a degree, but he has accumulated a pile of college credits through previous work as a nuclear engineer for naval aircraft carriers and coursework at a variety of colleges and universities. He lacks primarily the final credits and the culminating experiences that would declare him a bachelor's level specialist in a particular discipline to hold the piece of paper that would certify him as a college graduate.

Neither of us have jobs that earn us much money, and he, in fact, does not have a job at all, to the extent that a job is defined in terms of receiving a taxed paycheck and a W-2 form at the end of the year. That was a choice we made collectively. A choice that I think both of us would attribute being able to make to the critical consciousness, global awareness, and responsibilities of active citizenship that we learned in the process of doing our degrees.

I spent four years as an 18-22 year old in a bachelor's of journalism program. I was one of the luckier ones who went from college right into jobs in the newspaper industry. Twelve years ago, I put that career on hold to go back to graduate school. I spent three years in a master's program and seven and a half years in a doctoral program. When I finished my doctorate, I realized that I had devoted a quarter of my life to pursuing it. People look at me with a certain level of incredulous disbelief when I tell them that I didn't do it because I always had dreamed of being a professor, that I did it because I was curious about certain histories, politics, and social developments that had influenced contemporary society and wanted to gain a better understanding of them so that I could articulate my own relationship to those issues more justly and effectively. At the same time, I realize that I may not have gone down this life path at all if my father hadn't been a college professor. He was the first child of his village in India to leave the area for high school and ultimately college. His pursuit of higher education helped uplift his family and brought him and many of our relatives to the United States.

Today, most of the students I mentor or teach are much older than I was when I began my bachelor's degree. Some are older than me. Like my neighbor, their lives have been filled with different kinds of work and personal experiences that have made them creative and innovative individuals. I work with them to define the learning they gain through these experiences and help them consider how college coursework might help them deepen their understandings of themselves and their worlds. I do not promise them jobs.

      Considering these factors, I see how I am conditioned to view higher education as valuable and good -- whether the degree or degrees lead to a job in the field or not.  At the same time, I wonder how and why the holding of the degree came to be associated with a guarantee for a job in the field. It seems that learning is a process and practice that is with you for life. It's a culture, perhaps, but not an insurance policy. It lacks guarantees.

Jam

Today marked our first adventure in making jam, and as I was thinking about what to write about tonight, it seemed an appropriate topic.

However, as I typed the word "jam" in the title, another meaning of jam hit me. A concert or show. And then the other meaning, traffic jam.

That got me curious about the actual definition of jam. According to Google, it is quite simply to "squeeze or pack (someone or something) tightly into a specified space."

So, for once, a word used in multiple contexts seems to have a logical, transcendent term.

The word "jam" as in concert or show took me to a video-conference I had this morning with the Hip-Hop Education Think Tank's "Def" committee. And the idea of transcendence in meanings seems to make sense in that context, as well. We are striving to squeeze or pack tightly the meaning of an entire consciousness and cultural way of life into about ten or fifteen definitions. We agreed in our video conference this morning that the terms needed to be able to be transparent and easily understood across all communities and groups of people who find value in hip-hop. In short, no one should have to go to a dictionary to understand what the terms are about.

Now, the making of jam. For us, it was strawberry rhubarb jam -- a freezer jam (which doesn't require pressure canning in a hot-water bath), as well as a standard jam. Afterwards, we used the leftover strawberries to create a strawberry rhubarb pie, and then realized that we still had enough rhubarb to make a rhubarb jam.

But it's not just strawberries and rhubarb. The tightly-packed thing that constitutes jam also requires some water, to soften and tenderize the rhubarb, a product called pectin (which essentially allows the cooked down fruit to congeal) and a fair amount of sweetener: three-quarters of a cup of honey in the case of the strawberry-rhubarb varieties, and a whopping five cups of sugar (for six cups of rhubarb) in the case of the rhubarb-only jam. In years past, that amount of sugar would have been enough to stop me in my tracks. Now, I realize that I probably will eat very little of this jam. Most of it will be appreciated by my sweets-loving husband.

I read Little Women as a youngster, and remember well Meg's ordeal of trying to get her jelly to gel. That late nineteenth century story and the mess in the kitchen that it provoked also deterred me for years from even beginning to believe I should ever try making such a thing. And, indeed, we did not make jelly, merely jam, which turned out to be a surprisingly easy process.

How does it work?

Well, like almost any cooking procedure that involves fresh produce, the biggest task is prepping the fruit. We used our super-whamodyne food processor to chop the rhubarb, but I sliced about six cups of strawberries singlehandedly. Since we ended up making three different kinds of jam and a pie, the slicing was relatively easy since I could do it in shifts.

The second biggest task is probably preparing the jars. If you're going to do it right (and there's a whole lore behind canning that gives you every reason to do it right), you need to sterilize the jars. That means gathering the jars, their metal rings, and their metal tops and boiling them all in a massive pot initially for about 10 minutes, and then letting sit in the pot of water to stay warm. My husband doesn't trust me with any kind of sterilization procedure so I left that thankless task to him.

For us, we faced a third task, which was converting our powdered pectin to liquid form for both of the strawberry-rhubarb jams we ended up making. Not having used pectin before and being indoctrinated by the lore of canning risks referred to earlier, we consulted recipes and canning tips carefully. One word of advice was to not substitute whatever type and amount of pectin the recipe called for with something else. One of our recipes called for liquid pectin and the other for powdered. We found the latter in three different varieties but not the former. Partly by accident, we ended up buying all three (like boxes of jello, pectin is cheap), figuring we could find a different strawberry rhubarb jam recipe, other than the one we had that called for liquid pectin.

We then discovered that you could turn powdered pectin into liquid through a fairly simple process of boiling the powder in a half-cup of water, then adding more water so that the substance came to one cup. We did this, and then realized that one of the three packages of powdered pectin that we purchased was an "instant" variety, useful for freezing but not necessarily for canning. That's why we ended up with one batch of freezer jam.

After these tasks are out of the way, however, the process flows fairly smoothly. You put the rhubarb in a pot with a little bit of water. You bring it to a boil, then simmer it down so it cooks itself tender. Then, in the case of the strawberry jam, you add the strawberries with two tablespoons of lemon juice, and then the 3/4 cup of honey. After the honey has dissolved, you bring the concoction to a boil and stir in the liquid pectin. Give it one minute of a hard boil, then turn off the heat. Start pulling jars out of the big pot in which they've been "sterilizing", dry them out with a clean towel, and ladle in the jam. Leave a quarter-inch at the top, press on a lid and seal with a metal ring. Put the jars back in the water, bring it back to a boil, and let them boil happily for about ten minutes. Remove them from the boiling water with tongs, and let them sit undisturbed for about 24 hours.

We probably spent three hours making 15 jars of jam, plus the pie (which, by the way, is sitting unbaked in the refrigerator overnight because neither of us could bear the idea of looking at either strawberries or rhubarb any more for the day). As mentioned earlier, I am not the world's biggest jam fan. But we began baking our own bread last winter, and in so doing, my husband began eating jam ravenously. We probably spend about $6 on a single jar and go through one jar every two weeks. Do the math and you see that the costs of jam can add up. For this project, we spent about $16 on strawberries (some of which were lunch snacks for me yesterday), $3 on sugar, $10 on pectin, and $24 on a half-gallon of honey. We have leftovers of everything, except the strawberries, and enough jam right at the start to last about six months. And an unbaked pie sitting in the refrigerator.

So, jam. Early summer squeezed into a preservable form to be enjoyed in the cold days of winter.

Summer at Squashville

A quick perusal of Facebook tonight showed friends on summer vacations. Photos of beaches, brunches, weddings, honeymoons, parties, and picnics were in abundance. Just looking at all of those lovely scenes of summer-dom made me start to wonder where my own summer was going.

A day in the office this afternoon yielded a different scenario. Colleagues were harried and stressed, working on projects that couldn't get finished during the regular academic year. Listening to them made me feel a bit guilty because I've been working at home and working out a lot.

So what does summer at Squashville translate to? My husband Jim has a quick and easy answer: digging, planting, and creating topsoil from yard waste and kitchen scraps.

For farmers -- even fledgling farmers like ourselves -- summer is not the best time for vacations because every day off is a day lost in pursuit of creating new food. Creating new food is like an artistic practice. It's lovely, warm and self-fulfilling -- and it needs constant work.

We began planting seeds in February, in seedling pots, old yogurt containers, and plastic cups. Snow blanketed the ground, and the wood-burning stove that provides most of the heat for our home did double-duty keeping both us and the hundreds of seedlings that soon began to sprout comfortably warm. The planting pace quickened in April and May as the snow finally melted and the ground thawed. Already we could see the first signs of a promising harvest when the field where we had sown some 400 cloves of garlic the previous November went from snowy white to fertile brown and then to a hazy green, indicating rows upon rows of garlic plants growing.

The weather turned erratic in May, with nighttime temperatures dropping into the low 30s well after the Farmer's Almanac and USDA hardiness zones suggested the last frost had occurred. This delayed our planting of what are known as the solanaceous crops: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and squashes of all hues, shapes, and sizes. It also slowed the development of our Three Sisters garden, a three-crop planting scheme modeled after indigenous American practices of planting corn, beans, and squashes together.

Then, in June, the soil suddenly heated up. So did the fervor of work. In addition to needing to get the solanaceous crops in the ground, we were suddenly confronted with a burst of spring bounty: kale, collard greens, bok choy, Swiss chard, turnips, beets, peas, and rhubarb. Now, not only were we planting at a crazy pace, but we were harvesting to eat and considering when to pull out the freezer wrap gadget to start storing food for the winter.

And then there's the garlic scapes. These are swirly green shoots that form on the stalks of garlic plants. The scapes eventually sprout seeds that burst and scatter all over the earth, re-seeding the garlic in the process. It's a wonderful thought, with a couple of issues. The first issue is that it's advisable to rotate your crops on an annual basis to balance out the soil and to "trick" certain garden insects from finding their favorite crops. As a result, a bursting of seeds -- while beautiful to contemplate -- means a bed that might have been planned for potatoes in the following year will be overrun with weedy garlic. The second issue is that the scapes deplete energy from the plant, resulting in poorer quality bulbs of garlic. So you want to cut the scapes off. Fortunately, they're tender, fresh, and delicious so cutting off scapes means more pleasure for the palate.

Except when you have 400 of them.

A little bit of back story on the garlic. In the fall of 2011, we planted 50 cloves of garlic, and expected to get about two dozen bulbs. We ended up with about 50 bulbs, essentially a 100 percent success rate. Emboldened by our success and our love for garlic, we decided last summer that we would plant 250 cloves, figuring that we'd get about 200 bulbs, some of which we could donate to the food pantry, some of which we could give to friends and family members as gifts, some of which we could save as seed for the following year, and most of which we would consume. The only problem was that when we consulted with one of the farmers at the Saratoga Farmers Market as to how much "seed garlic" we should order, we couldn't quite nail down an exact amount because seed garlic is not sold by the clove but by the pound. After some head-scratching, the farmer recommended that we order about ten pounds, figuring that if each bulb of garlic contained five or six cloves, we would have about 25 cloves per pound. Her calculation turned out to be wildly off. We ended up with about 75 bulbs, each of which held anywhere from eight to a dozen cloves. We planted as much as we could, gave some to a friend, and ate the rest into early January.

Still, we were sure that we would lose at least 10 to 20 percent of our plants. At last count, we have lost maybe two plants. Not two percent, but two. That means we have a lot of garlic, and garlic scapes to boot.

Since the scapes are fragrant and delicious, I have been cutting them off periodically to use in cooking. But hundreds remain on the plants. Which means tomorrow is Operation Scape. I plan to rise early, enjoy a cup or three of coffee, have a good breakfast and then hit the fields with shears and basket in hand, and cut them all, hopefully before 10 a.m., when I'll need to head into the office for a conference call.

Our rooster crows at 4:55 a.m. My husband jumps out of bed to open the door to the coop and then comes back in to snooze until sunrise. The rooster refuses to stop crowing until he has some evidence that the humans of the household have actually awakened and begun their day. The cats going outside often seems to satisfy the rooster. The day for the humans begins at a leisurely pace and picks up steam as the heat rises. I balance my time between the office, my writing, and the fields; my husband spends most of the day in the fields. Dinner is usually after sunset, which is about 9 p.m. these days. We then have an hour or two of leisure time on the sofa before the eyelids droop to sleep. And, then, as the rooster crows, we start it all over again.

It is not the beach. But the sun shines. It is not a brunch, a picnic, or party. But the food is fresh, abundant, and wholesome. It is not a getaway trip. But overall it is a pretty good life.

185 Days

Today is June 15, which means I have been off alcohol for 19 days in December, 120 days January-April, 31 days in May, and 15 days in May. That adds up to 185 days.

I note the fact that I quit drinking quite often in conversations with friends, acquaintances, family members, and colleagues. Even though I speak of the decision a bit casually, I find myself treading the topic with a little bit of apprehension. I suppose the uncertainty for me stems from a few pointed questions:

* Am I an alcoholic?

* Did I have a drinking problem?

* What would happen if I had a glass of wine?

I honestly do not wish to have a glass of wine, or any other libation, though I do think about wine, beer, and hard liquors like scotch, bourbon, rum, vodka, and gin almost daily. Sometimes I think that it would be enjoyable to have a drink, but then I think about the weirdness that would infuse me and the dryness, the headaches, the difficulty awakening that I would experience again and I thank God for every day that I do not have a drink.

Because, fact is, every morning feels fresh and new. It's rare now that I wake up groggy. And even though I still do seem to have a little bit of difficulty getting myself settled down to sleep, I rarely have trouble falling asleep once I make the decision that I am in bed.

This week during the AP reading, I have maintained my energy all the way through Day 6. I felt alert enough today to work an extra 75 minutes past the reading and probably would have made it to 90 minutes if I hadn't made plans to meet up with someone to talk about flipped classrooms and online learning.

I remember John, an alcoholic, whom I dated in Honolulu. I didn't know until I was fairly emotionally involved that his form of alcoholism was to drink until he passed out. He told me he would go months without having a drink, and then would have seven all at once. His drinking had cost him dearly: a divorce, two DUIs, and probably a lot of lost brain cells. He often drove when he drank, even though he would try not to.

But when he was sober, he said, the clarity was amazing.

Another individual, who had been hooked on drugs (I'm not sure what drugs), was in a sobriety program when I began working with him and his writing. A scowling teenager, he had produced a piece of writing on his personal dreams and aspirations that was original and inventive. He stayed sober through his junior year but lapsed at some time in his senior year before getting sober again. He described sobriety as the most incredible clarifying experience, a time when his creativity felt boundless and his potential seemed endless.

So, clarity, boundless creativity, endless potential.

I feel these things, too, as I wake up at 5 a.m. to read, as I go through a day of encounters with people of various personalities and personal challenges that they often bring to encounters and feel myself able to give them attention and compassion without getting unstrung myself. I feel the power as I read at a high speed, and feel confident that my reading is accurate. I feel the strength of boundless creativity as I run during lunch, and swim after the work day is done. I also notice the difference as I look in the mirror, and see my skin looking fresher, younger, less worn, less tired.

It's my goal to keep it going for at least eighteen more months.

After that, honestly, we'll see.

But what can I do now that I wasn't able to do this time last year?

* Run a 12-minute mile at a relaxed pace.

* Swim 1,000 to 2,000 yards without getting completely winded.

* Bicycle.

There's other non-physical benefits, too. I speak my mind without worrying that I will say something that I might regret later, meaning that I feel a full command of my thoughts and emotions. I do things that seem counter-productive to the overwork culture of twenty-first century corporate America like taking three weeks of vacation to play sports and plant tomatoes, or write poems and short prose pieces on a nightly basis, and know that I deserve it. I get -- probably 28 out of every 30 days of each month -- a full night, eight hours, of sleep.

Describing life as a non-drinker, however, is challenging. Our culture is that of a drinker. Non-drinkers are categorized as deviants, somehow, as threats to a sense of normality. Many find solace in support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. I am afraid to visit Alcoholics Anonymous because I, too, feel threatened by the category of deviancy that AA seems to house: the people who admit themselves to be alcoholics, the people who share their stories of having drinking problems. I fear the stigma that surrounds the woman who attends social functions with a glass of ice tea in her hand, or who sips Perrier from a bottle.

I also worry about the loss of friends, the loss of a social circle that might come with non-drinking.

In short, almost everyone I know drinks. Some of them a little; some of them a lot. All of them seem to have no problem with their intake and behavior. I realize that I once belonged to that group, and I feel awkward when I ask my husband to limit his drinking to beer (which I've never been fond of) and to request that the occasional dinner guest not bring a bottle of wine. At this stage in my life as a non-drinker, I feel that I can be around drinkers, but not much and especially not in my own home. I fear that my ability to move in the circle of friends and new acquaintances in which I once felt extremely comfortable has been severely curtailed.

Still, each morning that I wake up, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the difficult decision I made.

The Wanderer

My sister and her husband recently adopted two young cats from a rescue shelter in their neighborhood east of St. Paul, Minnesota. The cats, Bella and Zaya, were the first new pets they had brought into their lives since the early years of their marriage in 1994. We had the opportunity to meet them near the start of the year when we traveled to the Twin Cities area to visit my husband Jim's parents and my sister, as well.

Zaya got out of the house by accident around April 25, and could not be found. They posted notices in Craigslist and posters around the community. They walked around the neighborhood several times daily calling for her. By Memorial Day, she still had not come home. My sister reported that she was not giving up hope, and the Tuesday after Memorial Day, she text-messaged me with some ecstatic news: "Zaya is home!" She was found about ten miles from their house, and a visit to the vet proclaimed her healthy and unhurt. Her departure had reminded me of the aging cats who had walked out of my life, and hadn't returned. Zaya's reappearance, however, brought to mind a much happier story, that of my cat Pepper, whom I periodically also refer to as "The Wanderer."

This is a long lead up to a story, perhaps because it is late and I'm not quite sure how the story is going to unfold. The reason why I am starting into the story so late is because of Pepper, so I thought perhaps it might be fitting to try to throw down the antics of The Wanderer.

Pepper came into our lives as a kitten, about two or three months old. We adopted her with one of her siblings, a long leggy kitten who often gyrated while jumping, earning the name B-Girl. We thought both were girls until B-Girl revealed himself one night to be a boy. We thought about changing his name, but we had named her/him in honor of the b-girls of hip-hop who exude an extraordinary level of confidence, exuberance, and strength. To change the name simply on the basis of gender ultimately made no sense.

If B-Girl was long and leggy, Pepper was like a typical striped Tabby cat, small, stocky, and sweet. She seemed like the lead kitten of the two we adopted, covering B-Girl with her paws on the first night as they slept in a box I had prepared for them while our two older cats embarked on a bout of feigned disinterest and low-grade growling and teaching B-Girl the next morning how to climb onto the king size bed where the other two cats held court. She also was demure and petite, and her antics provoke elaborate exclamations over her cuteness.

But she had a wild side, as well.

Two days after we got the kittens, I woke up to a repeated, plaintive, squeaky meow. Searching our apartment on Catherine Street for our cats, I discovered her in the building's main hallway outside the front door. Somehow, she had gotten outside the apartment. Somehow, she had spent the night in the hallway. Two weeks later, our two older cats -- Pascha and Salty -- were on the prowl. Pascha was keeping an odd guard on the deck below us while Salty was running up and down a set of rickety wooden stairs that separated our deck from a unit above. A search indoors revealed no Pepper. Mounting the stairs, I saw two golden-brown eyes staring back at me. Recognizing me, Pepper made her way down and safely into the house. Sensing that she was safe, Pascha and Salty also ran back into our apartment.

Moving into a much bigger house on a three-acre lot in a more rural area didn't quench Pepper's curiosity. We closed on the house in mid-February and moved in a few weeks later. Snow still lay thick on the ground, but as soon as it melted, all four cats raced outside under the watchful eyes of Jim.

We thought B-Girl would be the one we'd have to worry about. His gyrating cartwheels and long-legged leaps in our apartment had morphed as he approached adolescence into a persistent meow to go outdoors, As snow fell thick and hard, he would run from window to window and rattle the doorknobs, pestering to go outside. Each morning I had to move my car parked on the street to a new site to avoid getting a ticket. The kittens would race into the hallway as I made my way out, and eventually onto the porch. In the new house, B-Girl wasn't much calmer, but it soon became clear that the real wanderer was not him but Pepper.

As spring lengthened into summer, Pepper's outdoor sojourns stretched into ten-, twelve, fourteen-hour stints. We would find her walking in what we called our garden circle at 10 p.m., completely oblivious to the worry she had caused us. The following year, she would saunter out of the woods well after midnight or just show up on our deck ready to eat and sleep.

Jim worried about her all the time, and sometimes would not allow her to go out after 5 p.m. After I told that he was acting like an overly cautious father, he would let her out and then berate her for coming home late and causing him to fear the worst. I could not convince him that she had no clue what he was trying to tell her, and that she was just acting like a cat. So I tried a different strategy: I told him to create a mood that would make her want to come home. Instead of scolding her for staying out, I said, ask her if she had a good time. Get her to tell you about her walks through the woods, the other animals she encountered, the prey she caught.

For months, the strategy worked. Don't ask me how, but Pepper seemed to enjoy the trade-off. All she had to do was be home by dark.

Today, we spent the bulk of a very hot afternoon planting tomatoes and celebrating the fact that the threat of frost had finally eased. We spotted Pepper periodically strolling through the woods, lounging under lilacs, lazily stretching her paws outward to swat at a moth. She came in around 5 p.m. and went out again an hour later. We headed into town around 7 p.m., figuring we would be back before dark.

We were back right as dusk faded to dark. It was approximately 9 p.m. The other cats were either waiting on the deck or came running as soon as we called them. But Pepper was missing in action.

I put together a quick dinner of rosemary potato fries and chicken fajitas while Jim looked for Pepper. Around 9:45 p.m., he poked his head in the kitchen, his eyes wild with worry.

"She'll be home," I said. "She's just being a cat."

"But it's late," Jim said.

"She's been out much later than this."

"I know, and that's what worries me."

Around 10 p.m., I went out with a flashlight to look for our wayward cat. I heard the frogs who inhabit our neighbor's unused swimming pool chirping and, knowing that this was one of her favorite spots, headed over even though I was sure that Jim had searched there a few hundred times.

"Come on, girlfriend," I called. "It's time to come home. We'll do it all over again tomorrow."

I played my light over the pool and caught two soft eyes. Pepper had just arrived at her perch and was preparing to put her paws in the water to try and reach for the frogs.

"Pepper!" I said.

Looking up, she recognized me. She reluctantly stood up, arched her back and stretched. Waving good-bye to the frogs with her tail, she made her way over to me. She didn't want the experience to end. But perhaps a part of her sensed that there was always going to be a tomorrow to look forward to.

The truly incredible truth

Today's prompt from StoryADay.org leader Julie Duffy was to take a story that could be a piece of one's memoir and turn it into a fictional story. The idea behind this prompt was that memoir is beginning to generate eye rolls among book publishers and agents. It's healthy to write memoir, the common line goes. But it's becoming more difficult to sell. So the answer: why not take real life and fictionalize it? With Kindles and ebooks, fiction is enjoying a much-welcomed rebound. Fiction can sell.

The prompt was one I could disregard, but the remark about eye rolls from publishers and agents got a bit under my skin, sort of like a comment from a successful memoir writer about morning pages, a practice I have maintained for 15 years, being a waste of time. I am capable of writing fiction, but I have come to realize that non-fiction is what I personally enjoy. Why make it up when the truth is so incredible? Just tell it like it is.

Over the past year, I have served as an instructor (or what my college sometimes refers to as "tutor") for several students developing major writings. I have used books on writing practices, examples of personal essay and book-length memoir, and texts on the art and craft of memoir writing to guide the students along. I also have shared personal strategies and my own experiences, as a way of helping them developing a practice that will work for themselves. These endeavors have been enormously fulfilling for me as an assistant professor who is seeking to define her own niche in an increasingly fragmented and dispersed higher educational environment. Taking a leaf from one of my colleagues who is of close to equal rank to me in seniority but considerably older and wiser in the world of lived experiences, I have found myself urging students to write not for the sake of publication but for the sake of the art, craft, and practice of writing itself. My own embrace of writing challenges in April (a poem a day) and in May (a story a day) and perhaps in June (a blog post a day) have been geared as well toward experimentation and innovation in craft.

But what about the world of the market? Is it worth writing just for the sake of writing? Or is that mere practice of writing a waste of time? Should one be marketing one's self as a writer? Should one be submitting work actively? How does one balance the demands of a day job against the passion to write?

And perhaps the clincher question is this: Is one a writer if one writes without regard for the market?

I ponder these questions daily, especially on days when dirty dishes pile up in the sink, workouts get short-changed, and the tasks of the day job end up taking a back seat to something that feels more artful and inspiring, like writing just for the hell of it.

I did have a day job once that involved writing all the time. I eventually left it because I hated the pressure to produce, and to be writing always with readers in mind.  The job was that of a newspaper reporter, and I look back on those years now with a great deal of fondness and appreciation for what I experienced. But I also remember the things I did not like: Not being able to express a personal opinion, suspicion over the use of the pronoun "I", and the fact that it seemed like the job did not offer space for one to write just for fun.

"Take an hour a day," my mother would say. "Write for yourself."

"I don't want to write more," I would whine back. "Writing is work. When I come home, I want to relax."

Years and years later, I have appreciated the subsequent day jobs that I have been blessed to have -- copy editor, adjunct instructor, writer-in-residence, fitness coach, arts fund-raiser, and now faculty/mentor -- because they did and still do allow me the time and space to write just for fun. Without the pressure to produce writing for a paycheck, writing has become for me more personal, more artful, more creative and flexible. More free-flowing, more fun.

Yet, it is still work. Because, in part, one is not a writer if one is not writing to be read. Too many negatives in that sentence. Let me rephrase it in a positive way. One writes to be read. Readers comprise a market. So hence one writes for a market, though the explosion of blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, and do-it-yourself publishing is altering the meaning of market. Words that used to sell now sometimes must pay to be published. In short, from my perspective, writing for the hell of it is not a viable way to earn a living, in and of itself. If it is, I am not in on the secret.

But even as writing might fail to earn you a living, it might earn you a life. Telling your story contributes to the collective consciousness of a society, as poet-turned-memoir writer Judith Barrington put it. Contributing to the collective consciousness is an act of self-actualization, creative fulfillment, community building, political organizing, and ultimately social justice. It is a way of stepping outside the mundane realities of the day to consider the bigger pictures that frame those realities.

My best writing moment today occurred in the onion fields. I was not writing at all. I was knee deep in soil, pulling out tens of thousands of tiny weeds, trying to cleanse the soil of as many unneeded roots as I could so that our red and yellow storage onions, our Walla Walla sweets, our leeks, and our shallots would have more space in the ground beneath me to stretch out, expand, and grow. As I was using my nails and a small hand trowel to loosen the miniature grasses, succulents, and clovers, my mind was on my book manuscript and a conversation within it that occurs between my mother and me. What was the point of that story?  I let my mind sift over that question as my fingers wove in between roots, stems, and soil. Why did it strike the chord that it did? What is its significance in the larger scheme of things?

An answer came. It spoke of what life to me was all about: a quest to understand why racism persists, why differences are tolerate but not embraced, how religious make people feel righteous. It struck me that lots of people have gone on this quest and documented their journeys on a grand, massive societal scale. Fewer have looked at how the quest affects them on an individualized level. Perhaps the quest is too frightening when considered in such a personal way. Perhaps the fear is what makes it unmarketable. Or perhaps it is not that the fear is unmarketable, but that the writer fears the consequences of entering such a market. Could perhaps this be the real reason that memoir doesn't sell? Is it perhaps the reason to write memoir, regardless?