Gerald W. McFarland

Yes, the first significant snow hit yesterday.  Not much really--maybe six inches--but a sign of things to come.  Very cold weather--zero tonight--also a trend.  A long way to go to April showers!  Stay tuned for updates.

Yes, the season has returned in Western Massachusetts when maple leaves turn yellow or red and blow in a golden wind when they fall off.  The picture shown here is a New Mexican version of those colors.  It's the time when cars loaded with so-called "leaf-peepers" with some regularity.

   Inside the house, most of our time goes to reading books.  Gerry is a member of three book clubs.  The selections other members have proposed include TRACKS by Louise Erdrich, set in western Virginia in the Civil War period, FROZEN RIVER, Ariel Lawhon's novel about a widwife in rural Maine late in the eighteenth century, and KAIROS, by Jenny Erpenbeck that features a tawdry love affair between a young woman (19 to 20 years old) and a married man in his fifties.  Some background on East and West Germany before the Berlin Wall came down in the late 1980s serves as the historical context of their affair.  Dorothy, meanwhile, is half way through Tom Wolfe's A MAN IN FULL--700 pages, but engrossingly written so she's thoroughly enjoying it.

    Now we turn to autumn activities: harvesting the last green beans (the only crop we planted this year), beginning to bring in the frost-vulnerable potted plants that spent the summer outdoors, their moment in the sun, and taking down window air conditioners and putting up storm windows in their place.

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED THAT THE LAST PREVIOUS BLOG ENTRY (SINCE DELETED) WAS FROM FEBRUARY.  NOW IT'S AUGUST. 

WHAT HAPPENED?  JUST A BRIEF REPORT HERE:  IT'S BEEN ONE THING AFTER THE OTHER ON THE HEALTH FRONT.

THE THREE BIG INCIDENTS: GERRY WAS HOSPITALIZED WITH DOUBLE PNEUMONIA AND COMPLICATIONS, THEN HE'D BARELY GOTTEN HOME AND MOSTLY RECOVERED WHEN HE WAS DIAGNOSED WITH MULTI-MYELOMA AND STARTED A YEAR-LONG THERAPY, WHICH IS NOW ENTERING ITS THIRD MONTH.  SO FAR, SO GOOD. BUT TWO MONTHS AGO OUR 92-YEAR-OLD HOUSEMATE WILLIE FELL AND BROKE HER HIP.  AFTER HIP-REPLACEMENT SURGERY, SHE'S HOME AND DOING REHAB.  WE JOKE THAT OUR HOME IS "REHAB CITY."

ON THE AMUSING SIDE, A WILD HEN TURKEY HAS ADOPTED US AND SHOWS UP TO BE FED TWICE A DAY. 

Every year towards the end of April our backyard magnolia tree (pictured here) attempts to bloom.  The chief reason why it doesn't always succeed is that we often get hit with with an early spring frost, which nips the flowers in the bud, leaving them shriveled and brown.  Happily, that hasn't happened now for several springs in a row.

Forty years ago we excavated the place where theis magnolia used to be located in order to construct the large addition that serves as Willie's apartment.  At that point, the magnolia was no more than five feet tall and not doing well at all.  In fact, since it was late winter the tree's limbs were still bare.  It wasn't clear that it was still alive.   But we asked the contractor to scoop it up in a front loader and move it to its present location.  We didn't have much faith that it would survive.

Why Francis's Tree?  Our cat at the time was named Francis.  The evening after the tree had been moved, he strolled out to the excavation site past the magnolia's old location.  When he came to the top of a dirt pile, he saw the magnolia ahead, perhaps thirty feet from where it had been that morning.  He stopped in his tracks and stared at the tree.  Then he looked over his shoulder to where it had been and then turned back to look at it where it was now.  What to call the look on his face?  Puzzlement (trees don't move, do they?) or astonishment that the magnolia had obviously moved.  It was a great moment in McFarland family lore.

February in these parts (Western Massachusetts) brings certain things both outdoors and indoors.  Outdoors, as pictured here, buckets go up on maple trees to collect sap that will be boiled down to make maple syrup.  Why February?  Because that's when sap rises in the trees.  An ideal cycle goes like this: Daytime temperatures in the thirties and forties draws the sap upward; nighttime temperatures below freezing forces the sap back down the tree. This process isn't completely regular.  Some days aren't warm enough; some nights not cold enough, but you get the idea.  This is one of the first signs of spring.  What about indoors?  Ladybugs show up inside the house, probably having spent the winter hiding in our many plants, but who knows for sure.  Since they tend to cluster on windows, it's probably the stronger light of February days that draws them out.  And what about the local human residents?  Willie is making an excellent recovery from her cataract surgery; Dorothy, though still challenged by nerve damage to her left hip and leg, manages to walk without a cane or walker for upwards of eight hundred feet.  Gerry?  He's writing his first blog of 2024!

Okay. This title is perhaps too dramatic, almost embarrassingly so.  But for almost a year--October 7, 2022 to September 25, 2023--I had to wear a catheter to deal with a prostate condition.  An operation to correct the situation had to be delayed again and again. Believe me, having to wear catheters through that period was no fun. Then I finally had the operation.  Catheter free at last!  What a huge relief! 

     Now on to other news: Dorothy and I are both now in our mid-eighties.  I had my eighty-fifth birthday last week.  I'm still finding it hard to believe.  Other than normal daily activities--house maintenance, yard work (raking up leaves is a big deal in November), shopping, and the rest--we've been trying to downsize.  No, we're not planning to move out of our house, but stuff--loads and loads of stuff--has accumulated in closets and drawers during the fifty-eight years we've lived here.  Sorting through all that stuff and figuring out what to do with it takes time.  Expect more news (hopefully, it'll be progress reports) in future blogs.

Yes, it's been a while since I posted to this blog.  What happened was that I spent a lot of time on the way to the hospital by ambulance (four times, all for different causes), in the hospital, and in recovery from health problems.  Out of the four causes, three are pretty much resolved.  The remaining one will probably require surgery.  Stay tuned.  But at least today I finally felt up to doing some posting.  A picture and more information will follow, God willing, in due time.

My friend Les Patlove died in August.  He was the sort of man to whom the saying "salt of the earth" applies. Les and I met nearly thirty years ago as members of a small rural Buddhist outpost, Valley Zendo, in Charlemont, Massachusetts.  We bonded through our shared experience of doing long meditation retreats (sesshins) at the Zendo. Starring at a wall for fourteen hours a day was not the easiest way to get to know someone, but through the steadiness and determination that Les displayed I became certain that he would be a good friend, and he was. Les brought many special qualities to our sangha (Zendo community): His strong commitment to the practice was an example that inspired all of us. His knowledge of carpentry and construction helped keep the Zendo property in good shape. And whenever, as is inevitable in community life, challenges arose, he always had well-considered, wise advice to share. In addition to all that, he was a talented musician and a loving husband.  He will be sorely missed.

In Nov. 2021, just as winter was about to set in, we learned that our old (1962) septic tank was failing. We rushed to replace it, starting the process with a "perc" test of the soil that had to be done before the ground froze and hiring an engineer to design a new system that would meet the exacting standards required today. For those of you whose houses are hooked up to a town or city sewer line, the urgent need we had to replace our own disposal system for sewage and waste water may not be immediately obvious.  But a total failure of our private system would mean that sewage would back up into the house.  Ugh!  So early this year we went through the fairly complicated process of getting the town Board of Health to okay our plans.  Then we were fortunate to find a local (Leverett, MA) company to do the installation: L&F Construction.  In July they showed up with a huge backhoe, lots of pipe for the leach field, and many truckloads of sand, gravel, and topsoil.  A separate company delivered a 2000-gallon concrete septic tank.  Lots of truck and excavator noise for five days!  But the end result, a level  grass surface 60 by 60 feet square, looks great.

My dear friend Milton Cantor died in March, a little more than a month from his ninety-seventh birthday.  Milton was one of his generation's finest historians of American legal issues, the author of three major books and the editor of seven more.  His most important books were The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900-1975 (1978) and The First Amendment Under Fire: American Radicals, Congress and the Courts (2017).  He taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for forty years (1963-2002).

Beyond these and many other stellar professional accomplishments, Milton is best remembered for his exceptional capacity for friendship.  For more than two decades, he drew together a group of six friends for luncheon conversations every four to six weeks at a local restaurant in Amherst.  As someone fortunate enough to participate in those gatherings, I treasure the memory of the wide-ranging discussions we had of history, politics, and literature and, above all, the laughs that accompanied this good fellowship.  Milton was a rare spirit who will be much missed.