Squirrel Appreciation... 🤔

We don't blog because, well, social media apps. Instagram is where I am (@shelterwood_gardens or @frankmeuschke), although it delivers more grief than blogger, but there is an instant audience. That fact seems to keep many of us long-time bloggers on our phones. I will try to upend that by, at first, reposting and building upon wordy posts from that other platform. This is one from January 21, Squirrel Appreciation Day, 2024.

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The squirrels have had quite a winter so far. Is it the lack of snow or the mast year full of acorns? In winter they often get up after sun up, warm in the sun, before making as few journeys across the land as possible. Not this winter. Daily, up before sunrise, chasing each other, bounding from tree to tree, and remaining active for most of the day. Earlier in winter the larger Fox Squirrels were more abundant, but now the gray dominate. When I leave our place in the woods, it may be the squirrels I’ll miss more than any other wildlife as they animate the yard, living as close to us as possible with only modest interaction between us.

I know this is not the position of many people. There are few posts on this blog more visited than the one about drowning squirrels (not me!). In urban settings squirrels are often considered a pest. They bite each tomato! They nip the rose buds! They destroy my house! Curiously, they do none of those things at our place. Why? They have what they need within the woods here. They treat the house like a big boulder, present but of no interest. I have yet to see them take interest in the vegetable garden, but we also protect it from more interested parties.

Cities are the ultimate walled gardens. Within the city, ideas are cultivated about the value of wildlife, out there, in the wilderness. Yet wildlife, within its walls, is subject to other values. We aim to protect distant wilderness, and the creatures we identify with it, while we struggle with the wilderness within the walls of the garden.

We hold dear the preservation of wilderness. We head out to it for a taste of beauty, clean air, and wildlife. Given over to the experience, it can teach us that the way of wilderness is not aesthetic, is not perfection, is not harmony as we tend to think of it, but that wilderness is the walls torn down.

Happy Squirrel Appreciation Day. 

Electoral Gutter Ball

Much has happened in the last several months, yet all that has become unimportant (temporarily, one hopes) in the face of the re-election of Donald Trump. I've written about this before, here, in 2020, but old posts become buried. Below are a few things those in my physical orbit may have heard me say and, whether of any value to a reader, I wrote them out.

Social Media & News

You might hear about the death of traditional/conventional news media; its impotence in the face of social media's democratization of news delivery. I don't worry much about people ignorantly sharing false news, wrong data, outright lies, conspiracies, superstitions, and the rest -sure it happens quickly at great scale, but it is human nature to repeat falsehoods and has been part of our lives for as long as we could whisper in the ears of our neighbors. 

However, social media used as a powerful tool of disinformation and propaganda at the hands of malignant forces is worrisome. Those powerful, or empowered, who intentionally devise an array of media designed to align power with a social-political world view, who can alter its code to redact information, display AI-generated propaganda, and is easily contrived to appeal to individual identities is a great threat to governing institutions and civil society.

Factual information has been replaced by opinion information (this is my opinion) under the masthead of news journalism. This has been exacerbated by news channeling, whereby we receive information that mirrors our individual perspectives. Traditional news sources have been hollowed out due to mistrust cultivated, from the left and the right, by the accusation that these traditional new organizations are accomplice to power. 

Today the only "true" news is editorialized news that aligns with someone's position on any and all topics. This slippery slope ensures traditional news outlets slide further toward editorial to keep eyes on its revenue-generating ads. Consumers of this editorialized news announce that they are eyes-wide-open critical thinkers who have done their research, when what they really have done is divorce themselves from the responsibility to listen, think critically, and form a complex understanding of complex issues in favor of a marketplace of reassurance.

Disillusionment and Defection

When people do not vote, or worse, defection vote, out of their idealism, I am confounded. As an artist, it is rather clear -I can imagine a perfect circle, yet I cannot draw one. This illustrates, rather simply, how I, a human in a complex social-political reality, differ from the abstract perfection to which I might simultaneously aspire. To wait for the perfect candidate, whose perfection must also ensure winning, or even to wait for a candidate only more closely aligned with a belief system, is to misunderstand politics, but also humanity and its flawed systems. 

Democracy, in its best form, is compromise with parties who want different outcomes. However insufficient this is when it yields results not closely aligned with a set of beliefs, it remains the best system we have to date, over thousands and thousands of years of human civilization, in which human beings have hardly changed. A single vote is the slightest nudge toward the direction aimed for. When people do not vote, it suggests a belief that they will not be affected by a move away from the direction toward which they supposedly aspire. To vote for the candidate who will take us in the opposite, or unknown, direction from which the voter believes we should head in protest against the insufficiency of a candidate, then that voter is reckless, ignorant of the consequences, careless, or self-destructive.

When people say "my vote doesn't count," all I hear is "my vote should be worth a lot more than one vote." If someone does not vote because they do not have a conscious idea of which direction the country ought to move, then there is ignorance, indifference, confusion or laziness. General election information is simplified and everywhere. Ask your mother, your father, your preacher, your cousin, your friend to help out.

Politicians Are Not Mother Theresa, They Are Not Martin Luther King

A political leader is a politician, not a religious leader, a thought leader, a saint or Samaritan. Politicians at the highest level have the awful responsibility to weigh various outcomes, to consider the consequences, political and otherwise, of their choices and compromises. They will make unrighteous decisions where choices must be made, where silence or doing nothing is the worst choice. The political leader will need to make these choices knowing they will be exposed to criticism from factions within their own party and opposing parties salivating as they encircle the tent.

The critic is only required to consider their cause, for which outcomes will not be tested, where the political leader must weigh layers of local, national, and global outcomes when making a choice -one that will be scrutinized, distorted, lambasted, and certainly tested. The critic has little to no responsibility for the consequences of their critique, there will be no one to measure the results of their policy, to hold them to account, to vote them out, to bitterly complain that their failures led to a despicable new political figure.

And that is where we find ourselves in 2024. Fear of threats, real or imagined, seem to be our biggest motivator, whether it's fear of fascism or fear of immigrants or climate change or losing control over your body or crime or losing your job to AI or transgender kids or paying off your debt. Too often I hear about people voting against their interests, but choosing a political leader isn't always a rational decision. The influence machine (i.e. social media/channeled news/regional talk radio) is powerful and repetitive and our local and chosen communities create group think. 

Regardless of local, national and global outcomes, the voter will rationalize their choice with arguments concocted by the media machine. Do not waste your time with retorts to these arguments as you will only become frustrated and maybe even reinforce foolish ideas implanted in their head. After all, anything you might say as a means of argument has been previously constructed as evidence of their righteousness. It's not a free exchange and the outcome is predetermined. 

I feel as if I have wasted too much precious life time on this already, so I will curtail it here.

Cathy Opie's Landscapes

 

I was surprised to see landscape represented in Cathy Opie’s recent work. I often find myself frustrated by artists who’ve taken on landscape later in their career, but if I am honest, this feeling is sometimes nothing more than professional jealousy. Given that, how easy it would be to couch that jeolousy in a negative critique of the work. It seems I can forget that landscape doesn’t belong to me, or anyone, but for a few hundred years, has been a symbolic entity that artists can tap, turn over, reproduce or renounce.

The swamp landscape of Opie's Rhetorical Landscapes

Although Opie says shots are unplanned, or there is little preparation, or it’s all in her head, what materializes is always passed through her razor sharp filter. In her exhibit, Rhetorical Landscapes (2020), she presented photographs of the Okefenokee Swamp adjacent to floor-standing screens displaying animated magazine clippings. Opie frames these swamp photographs in terms of the Trump administration’s undermining of climate goals, rising seas, and its effect on these southeastern U.S. swamps, but there is more to it than that.

Trump’s rhetoric makes great use of the swamp image, commonly understood as a murky waste, dark, mysterious, where dangerous creatures lurk just beneath the surface. In doing so, he leverages the symbolic power of landscape to transport and amplify fear across heterogenious social, geographic and cultural terrain. Taking a cue from the juvenile “Who ever smelt it, dealt it,” in pointing to the swamp, Trump reveals he is the very swamp he’s invoked. That Opie pictures the Okefenokee, as opposed to other, if not equally vast, swamps appears logical given the American electorate’s association, however faulty, of the nation’s malignant inclinations with historically rebellious southern states. In these two ways, Opie’s swamp landscapes function as other landscape images have before —representative, or in service, of a nation’s identity.

This meaning is turned on its head when the swamp continues to be seen as mysterious, misunderstood, and threatening but is also threatened. A landscape that holds this (threatening/threatened) and other dualities (land/sea) suggests the swamp’s metaphorical potential to be representative of queer identity. This interpretation is supported by Rhetorical Landscape’s exhibition design in which the swamp photos are hung on the outer wall, apart from central, free-standing kiosks of animated collage that are representative, and a critique, of American culture at large. I prefer this take over the more academic approach. It’s more intriguing and a refreshing break from the critique of landscape as long-ago exhausted and forever beholden to the capitalist-imperialist enterprise.

One of Opie's blurred landscapes -only a portion of a larger work.

Opie considers her out of focus sunrise/sunset photographs abstract and uses them (and others) to bookend focused photographs of Civil War monuments in southern states. She indicated that the book ending and “splits” shown in her other landscape images refers to division and duality. The blurring in those images may be a way to question the American promise purportedly evoked by 19th century landscape paintings of awe-inducing places like Niagara Falls (Opie also photographed Niagara, blurred). 

 

The full work: blurred landscapes bookend a monument to the rebel cause.

One of Opie's Norway mountain landscapes. Image reproduces color and tonality poorly.

 

More recently, Opie has been photographing mountains in Norway. She intimated this flirt with beauty was tinged with guilt. Beauty, like landscape, is overloaded. Rather than beauty, could this work be about the pleasure inherent to the experience of calming, blue tonalities. Isn’t there room for calm —especially after 4 (just 4?) years of Trump? Whenever we speak of guilty pleasures, there is always a sense that judgement is entirely unfair.

Although described as a critique of the Catholic Church, I found Opie's most recent work “Walls, Windows and Blood” her most abstract and engagingly ambiguous. Most impactful are the "Blood Grids." Not only do they compellingly capture the textures, colors, and light inherent to painting, but by fracturing the original whole, the photographs create incredibly intimate moments with the physical work unlikely to be had in a crowded museum. I can only imagine the pleasure she had in arranging these pieces. Her process reclaims the artistry of, and becomes a spiritual union with, those original artists who had little choice but to serve the power of the Church.

Simultaneously, the modernist grid Opie uses to structure the assemblage of photographs ties the violence of the Catholic Church exacted across the globe to the universalist, global enterprise of aesthetic Modernism.  In a manner homologous to the power of the Church, Modernism has had an unassailable authority over artists and, although not bloody, for some generations, has been an oppressively misanthropic and homogenizing force. Although the grid speaks to the rigidity of Church doctrine, the Church's fetish for flesh and blood undermines the excess of Modernist rationality. Opie's subversive gesture is the simultaneous binding and contrasting of these forces, not quite canceling each out, but rather holding them in a revealing, dynamic tension.

Took Flight

We always say, and I shall repeat, "how fast time goes," or "where does the time go," and all other sentiments on time that age seems to stir within us. This winter, virtually snow-less and, by far, the warmest on record, helped make time ahead seem abundant. With the early onset of spring, the significantly early nursery opener date of April 8th (usually the second week of May), and so much to do and prepare for, time took flight.

The first week of March, warm and sunny, I was fixing and building, restoring and painting. I re-sided all that I could safely reach and the same went for painting, so we emptied our savings to hire out siding replacement and painting on the upper floors. My first project was to detach, dismantle, and dispose of three steps descending from the screened, back porch. New treads, new risers, re-engineered the original, 30 year old stringer attachment and raised a sunken landing made for a more solid exit. Although I re-used the old stringers, paint and new cedar treads made it look almost new. The beginning to a very busy spring to come.

Siding crew finishes what I could not -although I completed the lower part, at right.

With every project there were tangential projects -things we chose to live with that, once something adjacent is restored, look awful if left in a poor state. For our house, this was most often the granite rock and plastic edging. Rocks sank into the soil, ants and plants brought or created soil above the rock, edging warped, sunk or was cut by mowers. It's work anyone would avoid -physical labor of the most tedious kind. Move rocks, wash rocks, remove plants, add soil, replace fabric, dig in new edging, replace rocks, shake off crazed ants, swat mosquitoes.

2020 was a good year to address time-consuming projects -prior steps had no footings.

By late April, I was able to power-wash, repair, paint and install all remaining, under-porch latticework in the front and rear of the house. By mid-May, after years of living without, I constructed, painted, and attached two railings to the new, in 2020, south-side staircase I built to replace the dangerously rotted, completely unsupported old steps. The landing, a mishmash of limestone and concrete paver, was completed last fall and adjacent rock edging was renovated this spring.

 

An old project is finally complete with railings, mishmash landing and edging rehab.

Two major projects remained for June: grading and seeding of a drought-killed lawn (and its edging, of course) that became bare soil and weeds, and building new steps that descend from the north-side deck, rebuilt in 2016, to the vegetable garden. I chose to renovate the front lawn, first, in order to take advantage of coming rain, but it was also the bigger of the two projects. Rain it did, leading me to repeatedly seed, and stalling other outdoor projects. While it rained, I packed boxes, growing ever more frustrated with rain that, not long before, was welcome.

 

The earliest, newly seeded lawn grew in well. The latest, last seeding failed (not seen).

 

A brief dry spell let me repaint trim and paint post and rail of the front porch staircase.

When our realtor, John, stopped in to check on my progress, I watched him uneasily navigate the rickety "temporary" steps we'd been using to descend from the utility room deck to the garden. This convinced me I needed to forget the possibility of letting them go. Still, between rain and other demands, I continued to push off building a replacement.  There simply wasn't enough time.

We used these steps, built decades ago, for 8 years.

My priority had to be, at realtor request, to empty the house of all objects by June 21st. Monday through Thursday, beginning in June, I emptied furniture, packed books, removed art from walls for wrapping, all the while continuing to operate the nursery on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. I spent several days accumulating and organizing objects for a yard sale to be held concurrently with nursery open hours. I hired a helping hand for this, yet, in the end, found it was an entirely fruitless enterprise given the fraction of objects eventually sold. I raked in about five hundred dollars, but I also paid the helper nearly four hundred. Not a good use of time or resources. With the looming deadline for delivering an empty house, I also tried, unsuccessfully, to get an estate sale company to sell off a hundred years of objects. They didn't find our things financially appealing or didn't have the time.

So I made the decision to hire a moving company to carry boxed items and furniture from the attic, second and first floors, as well as the basement into either the studio outbuilding (at the time filled with yard sale items and studio equipment) or a twenty-six foot truck. Anything remaining would be hidden in a closet or cabinet to render the house virtually empty. The items stored in the studio building would potentially be for sale while the truck-bound items would be shipped to a storage unit about one half hour to the west for safe keeping until a move date. Lucky, and quick with a deposit, I was able to secure six guys and a truck for the following Wednesday. The task then became tagging each item "truck" or "shed," and clearing the driveway of any remaining outdoor yard sale items to accept a large truck and organizing the studio to accept the majority of house's contents. That Wednesday, six guys worked eight hours to empty the house of large or heavy objects.

The following day, however briefly, I felt a sense of relief, even freedom. The attic was now empty of large objects, as was the second floor, but there were still many unpacked small items scattered about each floor. Each room generated its own contractor bag or two of trash, so I ordered a second dumpster. The dining room floor became the packing table and I hired a helper to wrap and box. Still, the empty house deadline of June 21 came and went, the listing of the house for sale continued to be kicked down the road and those steps were not built. 

With three thousand plants still in the nursery pen, I opened the nursery on July 4 and following days while continuing to package, hide or empty house contents. The attic was finally empty, as was the second floor -closets excepted. The dining room floor held an abundance of ceramic, art and otherwise fragile objects requiring packing and this occupied most of the remaining days. Although the basement continued to harbor items, I moved to clean it as if it was empty.

In that last week, before the open house showing scheduled for July 13th, at 11am, I was able to purchase materials and begin construction on the long overdue steps. The challenge was building a staircase of equal riser height between two fixed positions while using stock standard stringers -a convenience purchase that ultimately led to inconvenience. Off-the-shelf stringers have a rise of seven inches between steps, so I had to modify the stringers to fit evenly within a total rise of 26.5 inches. 

How is this done? First, divide 26.5 (the height of the deck) by the number of steps (4). The numerical result tells you the measurement (6 & 5/8th inches) of each riser. The problem comes with using off the shelf stringers, as they are always cut to 7 inches, the bottom rise excepted -this is cut to 6 & 3/4 inches. When treads are placed, this adds the thickness of the tread material to the bottom-most riser, so that it resolves to 6 & 3/4 inches plus 1 & 3/4 inches, or 8.5 inches -significantly higher than the 7 inch height of each center riser. 

For the upper-most riser, we measure from the deck surface down to the top of the next tread, below, revealing a riser height of only 5 inches! Wildly different heights between risers is against city code which allows only for a 3/8ths inch difference between steps. This is because differences above this number are potentially unsafe as our body intuits where to place our foot based on the last step taken. 

Three stringers and attached legs create "floating" steps unattached to the deck or sidewalk.

Time being short, I decided to cut the stringers' bottom edges down to about 5 & 1/4 inches to bring the bottom-most riser plus its tread thickness closer to seven inches. In doing this, I automatically extended the upper riser by the amount removed, so that the upper riser height is now closer to 5 & 3/4 inches -still way off from the needed 6 & 5/8ths needed to meet code. Now what? The only option left, aside from starting again with 2x12 boards to create new, custom stringers, is to plane off the necessary thickness from the top tread in order to increase top riser height. Doing so will reduce the 7 inch height of the riser below, so that each would need a bit of planing to stay within the 3/8ths inch code rule.

Time nor weather, however, was on my side. The torrential downpours began on Friday, but picked up on Saturday, lasting past 5pm. I had to hide my things, vacuum, clean, mow the now very wet grass and, still, my steps were not complete. Although treads were cut, they were not all attached, and riser boards (concealing the open space) needed cutting, painting and fastening. The realtor then added an additional appointment for 10am that Sunday, so I lost an hour, and gave up. 

An evening call with a friend help set priorities. Instead of fretting, I spent three hours on Saturday evening, until twilight, moving hundreds of pounds of scrap metal (what, I didn't mention the scrap metal?) scattered outside the studio, in like piles, into my van. With little light left, I decided to do something despised by mower and grass alike -cut the wet grass. There was no way to complete the steps -I would attach the loose treads in the morning and offer a warning for safety.

On Sunday I woke early, as always in a Minnesota summer, to begin hiding my things, remove the two van seats that became my temporary in-house furniture, vacuum, and clean. It was 9:45am and I was preparing to leave, as is required for these showings, when the text came from realtor John that the 10 o'clock had canceled. I answered "Great!" which I do not think he was expecting. "Now I can finish the steps." There was some sun, finally, so I cut the riser planks, painted and leaned them toward the rising sun to hasten drying. At 10:50am, a few minutes shy of the open house, I attached the nearly dry riser planks to the stringers and greeted the realtor. I never did get to plane the treads to come closer to meeting code, but I reasoned to myself that these were only temporary, anyway, and way better than the steps they replaced. 

Completed, although uneven, last set of steps.

I went to the neighbors to spend the next three hours sitting on their porch, had an iced coffee, then a beer, in succession. Waiting out the open house slumped in an Adirondack chair was all I could muster. As 2pm rolled around, I headed back to the homestead. The realtor was on his way out -his job done. No offers, no bites, they like the land, not the house -absolutely what I had anticipated and a hell ton of work ended up feeling anti-climactic.

It is fitting that this staircase, the last of five I've rebuilt, should be the project made a decade, nearly to the day, after the first set of steps I had built for my father in law, Rex, just three months before he died. Rebuilding his home's primary staircase was as much about showing him that things would be in good hands after he was gone as it was about necessity, that it was okay for him to let go. Ten years on, however, it's not only okay, but necessary for us to let go of this house and maybe his wishes, so that Betsy and I can put our lives back into our good hands.