Past Blogs

Soon the stridulation will start. For me, that’s the signal that summer is waning and all summer pleasures should be indulged in post haste.

Stridulation is a fascinating word I came across while doing insect research for one of my science programs. This well-written definition clearly sums up the term:

Stridulation is the act of producing sound, usually by rubbing two body parts together.

The Orthoptera insect family are champion stridulators. Each species; grasshoppers, locusts, crickets and katydids(sometimes called bush crickets), has its distinctive song. Grasshoppers and locusts have a series of small pegs on the inside of their back legs. The pegs are rubbed against the fore wing to produce the call. Crickets and katydids have the pegs on one of the fore wings (tegima), and the other fore wing has a flat structure known as a file. The pegs are dragged across the file as the wings rub together thus producing the song. In simpler terms, these bugs fiddle.

It is almost always the male that is making the racket and the noise is to attract a mate. The orthopterans are all equipped with an ear on each front leg just below the knee assuring that the love songs will be heard.

Bird song fills the air in springtime, but late summer and autumn, especially autumn evenings, are given over to a cacophony of insect arias. As night arrives earlier and the temperature starts to drop, the chorus of crazed males becomes louder and louder. And then, silence. The first frost has arrived.

When I learned about stridulation, I was eager to share it with kids. Fortunately, I was just about to present my insect program at one of my favorite schools. After we did the science stuff, I asked the kids if they would like to stridulate. I can report that those first and second graders did an ingenious and fun filled job of banging, slapping, sliding and rubbing body parts. They were positively strident.
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I recently read a New Yorker article which delved into the topic of why Americans have no time. College professors who study the issue found the causes puzzling. I am puzzled that the obvious wasn’t stated: we all have to do everything for ourselves now, we’re forced to be Jacks and Jills of all trades.

Given time to think for a moment, we could all conjure up countless examples of added jobs that have been foisted on us by three perfect time guzzlers:

• A consumer driven society which demands that we buy and care for tons of junk
• The loss of jobs in the service sector
• The exponential growth of technology

I recently conjured up all the ways my time was being stolen. My list is gargantuan, but three examples will suffice.

I’m from a working class family, but my mother never washed anything but delicate “hand wash”. Milwaukee used to have numerous home laundry services, and they weren’t only for the rich. Every few weeks the laundry van came to our front door and hauled away two bulging sacks of my dad’s work clothes, dirty sheets, towels, throw rugs, handkerchiefs, etc. A few days later the van returned with two gigantic paper-wrapped bundles of sparkling clean and pressed laundry. My mother was seventy when the last home laundry went out of business. With tears in her eyes she asked me,”What am I going to do?” I told her I would show her how to use a washer.

Last week, my husband spent significant time on three consecutive days trying to get an airline credit on two tickets we had been unable to use. Since the airline was already charging us $300 to change the tickets, the lost hours seemed especially grating. On day three the purpose of the runaround became apparent. The price of the flight was increased on day three thus giving the airline $150 additional dollars.

Grocery store checkers used to ask their customers if they would like help taking groceries to their cars. The new question employees ask is, “Wouldn’t you like to use the self check out?” My reply is, “No, thank you, I don’t want you or any other employee to lose their job.”

My husband and I have a sure cure for our lack of time, but it’s a bit draconian. Buy nothing and go nowhere.

Starting with kindergarten, I’ve gone back to school almost every September of my life. I took a few years off to be home with our two young children. But when the youngest marched off to preschool, I went with him. He stayed three years, I stayed nineteen as the art teacher.

The pattern of the traditional September to May school calendar suits me perfectly. I like fresh new beginnings and definitive endings. And I need to be in tune with the seasons, something the elementary classrooms do well.

The children will be greeted with school bulletin boards sporting apples and autumn hued leaves. These will be followed by pumpkins, spiders and owls who will morph into turkeys come November. A flurry of snowflakes and snowmen round out the year. America’s stores, on the other hand, are decorated for Christmas in September. I decidedly prefer to live in the current season.

The start of a new school year is all about expectations. As I wander through store aisles filled with towering stacks of pristine notebooks, crayons, markers and paint boxes, my brain is conjuring up new art projects that will make those materials live up to their promise. Recycling curriculum has never been part of my agenda. Children are artists who look at the world with fresh eyes. I want to help them make their imaginations soar.

School is serious business. When I break open a fresh new pack of drawing paper and pass it out, I remind my students that a tree gave its life for those sheets. Full effort and concentration needs to go into every art project. We should strive to create masterpieces but not be crushed at our failures. “If you mess up, you fix up”, is an important lesson, too.

My wish for this fresh, new school year is that all our children can reach their fullest potentials and that all of our teachers find joy in their profession.

Here’s a quote for today, the first day of the school year:

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

All the marketing people in the world couldn’t do a better job of branding the sunflower than Van Gogh. With brush in hand, he made these humble flowers (and himself) iconic.

Sunflowers are fascinating and often misunderstood plants. The “flower”is tricky. The part that is commonly called the flower is made up of two distinct kinds of florets. Look closely at the sunflower disc to see the tiny disc florets which will form the seeds. The outer ray florets look like yellow petals. Together the two types of florets make up a false flower or inflorescence. This design helps pollinators see the flower and pollinate all the minute central florets. Bees are the main pollinators.

Sunflowers are North American natives that were used by the Indians for food, oil and dye. The wild sunflowers were multi-stemmed with numerous flower heads. Domestication produced the tall, unbranched stalk with a single large head.

Enormous fields of sunflowers are grown for their commercial value. Some varieties produce black seeds which are used for oil and bird food. Birders know that these costly seeds are the ones that attract the greatest number of birds and other wildlife as well. The black seeds have soft outer hulls making the nutritious inner kernels accessible to even tiny beaks. The harder hulled striped seeds are turned into snack foods and a peanut butter substitute called sunbutter. In Germany, the seeds are mixed with rye flour to make a bread with the wonderful name Sonnenblumenkernbrot.

It’s a beloved myth that the flower heads track the sun. The mature flower usually points in a fixed easterly direction. The young buds, however, do display some sun tracking or heliotropism.

Each week we buy fifty pounds of oiled sunflower seeds for our guests at the Tooley Cafe. One spring my husband raked up a wheelbarrow of debris from under the feeders and dumped it over our seventy foot bluff. By August we had an army of sunflower volunteers marching down the cliff and out onto the beach. We have never been able to repeat that serendipitous sunflower happening, but we keep trying.

I will not feel guilty for suggesting that guilt is a women’s problem. I’m not implying that men don’t have problems; guilt is just not a big priority for them.

Women are taught to feel guilt at an early age. We were brought up to be good (choose one: Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Protestant) girls. And we will remain girls if we don’t shed our crippling guilt trips.

Guilt should be reserved for the big stuff, like committing a homicide or stealing from the poor. It should not be felt when we fail to balance the checkbook, use Jiffy Pie Crust mix, omit washing and recycling the peanut butter jar or eat a Snickers Bar.

Lisa Scottoline in her new book, Have a Nice Guilt Trip, suggests that guilt is a great motivator for getting things done. I would counter that guilt is a great way to turn ourselves into outer directed people, and that outer directed people rarely appear to be bubbling over with happiness. I clean my house because beauty and order give me joy, not because some “they” says that cleanliness is next to godliness.

A direct spawn of the guilt trap is our excessive use of the words, “I’m sorry”. Count the number of times we say or hear that phrase in one day. Saying, “I’m sorry I overcooked the peas,” is a ridiculous statement. Save the sorrow for situations involving living beings in pain. I believe the correct word for the peas is “oops”.

After all these years, I’m still making a concerted effort to reverse the guilt training drilled into me by a flock of Notre Dame nuns in the 1950s. And I’m eager to say to any of my female friends, “don’t feel guilty”…….unless, of course, you just robbed a bank.