This is Red Iceberg. It wintered over as a seedling in the plastic garden tunnel, and erupted into life once the warm sun hit it. I transplanted several frost-blasted lettuce seedlings into a newly prepared bed containing soil amendments and my secret proprietary blend of organic fertilizer. Then I watered regularly. A crisp green heart is forming, surrounded by these lavish bronze leaves.

Most gardeners of my acquaintance have preferences–certain plants they really like to grow. I confess that lettuce is one of mine. I love garden catalogs that feature pages of lettuce varieties. I read about them all, heirlooms and new cultivars. Some do best during cool weather, and others adapt to hot weather without bolting. Some have wacky names like “Flashy Trout’s Back” and others have plain names like “Green Salad Bowl”. Some lettuces form heads, others stay leafy. Compared to store-bought lettuce, homegrown actually tastes like something. The Red Iceberg is nothing like that anemic stuff from the supermarket. It has crisp texture and a noticeable flavor. Why would you not grow lettuce? Spring and summer are the perfect time for salads.

Knowing that I would write about my fondness for lettuce, I did some research. Lettuce was known in antiquity, originating in the Near East. The Romans served it at the beginning of a meal to stimulate the appetite. The Egyptians associated lettuce with male fertility since the plant grows upright and exudes a milky liquid. (You can Google the history of lettuce yourself if you don’t believe me.) Lettuce traveled northward into Europe and evolved into French and Italian varieties, German and Dutch and English. Lettuce migrated to North America along with settlers from these countries. My parents always planted a row of red leaf lettuce, and my mom would make a warm dressing from bacon and cider vinegar that was poured over the fresh leaves, slightly wilting them. You had to eat this right away. I think it is a recipe from our German heritage.

I stagger plantings of lettuce through the season until it is too hot for it to germinate. When there is a surplus, I give bags of washed lettuce leaves to friends. I wallow in salads of green, red, bronze and speckled all summer long, first with crunchy radishes and later with ripe tomatoes and tender cucumbers. Lettuce is loaded with vitamins and minerals. I would grow it year round if I could. Instead, I sow a late planting, knowing that some will get started, freeze, then take off again in early spring. Now, it even seeds itself around the garden and I find volunteer lettuces everywhere. It pleases me to move them around and nurture them until they are ready to eat.

Right now I am awash in beautiful lettuce, with more to come.

Warming and melting…creeks are high and turbid, warblers send bright notes into the unfurling leaves. The forest is coming to life in sound and light.

Spring has been slow to arrive this year, which makes winter feel all the longer. To alleviate impatience and cabin fever, a person has to go looking for spring.

I followed a convoluted route along backroads of the Kittitas Valley to the foothills. These roads make their way past farms and ranches and pastures and fields and housing developments, crossing swollen creeks and irrigation ditches. Horses and mules are still shaggy with rough winter coats, standing with their backsides toward the wind. A few deer look up from nibbling on fresh green grass. When I park and open the truck door, the sound of rushing water fills the air as Naneum Creek bustles past with its load of snowmelt. My nose catches a faint whiff of honey from the cottonwood leaves unfurling along the stream. I cross on a culvert and start climbing. The flowers appear right away, sagebrush buttercups and Lithophragma sp., the prairie star. The soil is moist and lichens on the basalt outcrops are fluffed up from recent rain. I hear the distant call of a meadowlark, and the quiet soft whistle of a bluebird. Insects blur the air in front of my face, startling me. It’s been months since I waved a bug away. I’m completely hooked now,and compelled to keep climbing the hill to see what else is blooming. I want to greet all my flower friends.

The desire to go walking to look at wildflowers goes back to childhood. By this point in my life, it has taken on the feel of a ritual. Something I must do or feel incomplete. Perhaps it all started with my grandmothers. Both of them lived near patches of forest in western Washington. I have distinct memories of walking with both of them, being shown flowers and introduced to them by name. Soon I knew to look for skunk cabbage and trilliums around Easter time. After being cooped up all winter, trapped in the house, the classroom and school bus by days of cold pelting rain, now there were times when it was possible to go out in coat and rubber boots. It was still cold and damp but the woods were different. Green shoots appeared on the forest floor amid the tangles of salal and blackberry briars. Everything uncurled, unfurled, untwisted, emerged from the wet earth. Birds sang. As I grew older, I made the pilgrimage by myself. Silently I would say hello to johnny jump-up’s cheerful yellow face and the gracious form of pink spring beauty. When I went to work in the woods as a young woman, I kept doing this. When I moved to a dry place in the rainshadow of the Cascades, I transferred my spring ritual to the shrub steppe.

Now I have the best of both worlds. I can start my flower visits in the low dry country almost as soon as the snow melts. As spring progresses, I follow the blossoms through the yellow pine woods until it is June and the snow is melting in the conifer forests on the mountain slopes. There I will find my old friend trillium, and the calypso orchid that my Gramma Mueller called lady slipper. To her it was a rare and precious creature, to be carefully revered. Now I know of places where they turn the ground under the cedars pink with their exotic flowers. No matter how many times I see them, I still feel that little twinge of magic in my chest. A goodly chunk of my heart is rooted in childhood wonder, carried for years like a flame that refuses to be stomped out.

I am not finished with my walk. I keep climbing up the hill above Naneum Creek. Here are clumps of ferny foliage that will produce the bright yellow disks of Hooker’s balsamroot, the spreading stems of big-headed clover, strange reddish fuzz with the beginnings of prairie smoke buds. Mats of creeping phlox, already beginning to show a few flowers. Larkspur leaves. At last I find what I truly long for–a patch of lithosol lavishly scattered with coyote tears. There are so many that they turn the hills golden. Under the stiff sage, the sagebrush violet blooms. I hunker down for a close look at the blue-green lobed leaves, the two-tone purple flowers with the whiskery stripes leading to the center. I smile. Hello, violets. Hello.

Inside of me, things fall into place. The yearly ritual has been observed. It is not what is blooming, but who. As I grow older, I find my point of view shifting away from an objective world toward a more animistic and perhaps native perspective. My world is populated with a lot of whats, but also a lot of whos. The life forms around me are characters and I have grown familiar with many of them. It helps to have learned their names, but it’s not necessary. The feeling of connection and belonging are necessary.

Spring really is underway. There are more hellos to say–I am looking forward to the return of the thrushes.

The book is Wabi Sabi: The Art of Everyday Life by Diane Durston. This morning I opened it at random as I sometimes do, and this is what I read– “I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for body and mind.” Albert Einstein said that. On the opposite page is a quote from the Dalai Lama–“If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. And finally, there is intense delight in abandoning faulty states of mind and in cultivating helpful ones in meditation.”

Wow. And then during my morning internet reading session came the news that today is the International Day of Happiness. I had no idea there was such a thing. It’s already a good day, being the vernal equinox and my birthday–the one day of the year when I feel I can be most self-indulgent. To contemplate happiness on top of that makes for a potent combination.

If I have a philosophy of life, it would have to be described as wabi-sabi. It’s an untranslatable Japanese term, an aesthetic notion that evolved with the tea ceremony. It has come to refer to that which is imperfect and unfinished, maybe tarnished with age and a little melancholy, like the sound of geese flying over in the autumn. Wabi-sabi prefers the natural and organic, so anything that is made by human hands should reflect the natural world. Wabi-sabi has time; it is the opposite of hurrying. Wabi-sabi pays attention to the small and insignificant. Wabi-sabi does not differentiate between the material and the spiritual. This approach is a source of contentment as I go about my life. The secret to happiness was revealed to me in a flash of insight a couple years ago when I realized that all I had to do was abandon faulty states of mind. I could be happy simply by making up my mind that I am happy.

There are plenty of things in the world to be unhappy about. Ignorance, greed and injustice are not reasons to rejoice. However, enough snow has melted to reveal snowdrops. I am happy to see them. They remind me of my gramma, who urged me to dig a clump of the bulbs from her garden. A sad poignancy rises in my chest to remember her–she was one of my greatest friends and teachers. But I also remember the unassuming simplicity of her life and her generosity, and I aspire to live the same way. So I cherish the snowdrops. It is spring and I have everything I need.

These are immigrants. The photo was taken around 1888 at a new house built in a German community near Puyallup, Washington. The young boy with his hand on his father’s arm was the father of my grandfather.

They came from a place called Stöckse, Neidersachsen which is in the northwest corner of Germany near the border with the Netherlands. My great-great grandfather was a forester for a Saxon baron and cared for the trees on a large estate. Because of this, he was recruited to work on for a German sugar company in Hawaii (then a sovereign kingdom). They were looking to improve sugar cane production with irrigation, and the idea was that trees would hold the water from the rain and release it slowly. The family made the decision to move. The fact that boys could be conscripted into the army at age 14 certainly was a consideration. With three sons, it was likely that some or all of them would be cannon fodder in Kaiser Wilhelm’s wars. Also, the story goes, an old aunt advised them that they would never have anything in Germany so they might as well leave. They could also never have anything in Hawaii since haoles couldn’t own land, but the west coast of the United States was not far away. There was hope of building a new life there.

So in 1881, several German families departed Hamburg on the small barkentine Ceder to sail halfway around the world to Kauai. My great-grandfather was six months old, and his diapers were washed in salt water for many weeks. The passage around Cape Horn was rough, and the Pacific Ocean is wide and empty. By the time the people disembarked at Lihue, Kauai, they were weak from lack of food and water and perhaps loss of hope.

The family of Friederich Mueller stayed seven years. They helped build a small community on a hill adjacent to the cane fields and a Lutheran church reminiscent of the ones they had left in Saxony. Then the eldest son was sent to Washington Territory to buy land and build a house. When this was done, the rest of the family came. They became naturalized citizens of the United States. A strong German community existed into the early 20th century, where people spoke their language, attended their church, kept their customs, intermarried, and slowly wove their lives into the fabric of America.

When World War One broke out, there was deep distrust of Germans. Slurs and vandalism were directed at German Americans. Some were suspected of being spies and collaborators. I can imagine that the immigrants wanted to mind their own business and get on with their lives in a new land–after all, that’s why they came here. But they were reviled anyway. Same thing happened during World War Two. When the government came for my great-grandfather, he was shocked to learn that he was not a naturalized citizen, having come when he was so young. He immediately applied for citizenship and it was granted. My Grampa said that it was one of the proudest days of his father’s life, when he officially became an American.

There are millions of family stories like this in our country if you go back far enough and look. And there has been plenty of reviling of immigrants, and discrimination. No Irish Need Apply. No Jews. No Catholics. Yellow Peril. Some immigrants came here unwillingly and were put to work for masters who thought they were less than human. For every American immigrant success story, there is also one about cruelty and misunderstanding. There is a slur for every race, every nationality.

I am writing this because I have trouble swallowing hypocrisy. America for Americans? And who are the Americans? Perhaps they are the ones who were here first, even though anthropologists tell us that they also emigrated here. Do you have to be descended from the families that crossed on the Mayflower? Fought in the Revolutionary or Civil wars? Or perhaps those who fled famine in Ireland or pogroms in Europe? Do you have to be white? All of us come from families that came to this continent from another place, with the hope of creating a better life, living in a world where children can grow up to be whatever they want, where there is freedom of worship and freedom from oppression.

History is a lens, which can be clear or distorted. We can look at history to identify patterns and pitfalls, with the hope that we can avoid repeating mistakes and injustices. The stories we tell ourselves as a nation can help or harm. These days I hear a lot of harm coming from the mouths of people who should know better, and from the people who listen to them and hear what they want to hear. I see mistakes and injustices repeating.

Looking at my German heritage is humbling. I cannot imagine having to submit to the aristocracy, or have no hope of bettering myself. I cannot imagine months on a cold wet ship or stumbling out onto a tropical island feeling a hell of a long way from home. I cannot imagine being called horrible names because of who I am. While I may long to know more about the German culture that produced me, I understand the need to assimilate and get along. I understand the part of me that was taught to be German–hard-working, stubborn, sober, competent with my hands, connected to the land. I also understand the part of me that is American, that longs to be different from what I’ve always thought of as a narrow point of view. I’ve always been curious about other countries and cultures. The sameness of being a white person in a white community, of growing up on meat and potatoes, of a Protestant work ethic–boring! For me, entry into other cultures is through food. When I was young, I thought tacos were exotic. Spaghetti was Italian food. I never had Chinese food till I was a teenager. I loved all of it! Curiosity about food leads to an interest in the culture that creates it, the history, the language, the arts. Now I live in a place where I can find Mexican food cooked by Mexicans, and delicious aromatic Thai dishes cooked by an Asian woman. The internet brings me recipes from around the world, and one of my favorite winter soups comes from a traditional African dish. While potatoes, sauerkraut and sausage is still my German comfort food, I will never go back to straight meat and potatoes.

I find that I am unable to revile immigrants. I find nothing to fear from them. A woman I know left Cambodia as a child. When the family was running from the Khmer Rouge, she remembers hunting for frogs to eat. Or having nothing to eat at all. I have always had enough to eat–why would I deny that to anyone based on our differences? Under our skin, we are all human. And that is the thing about the United States–even though we are told stories about scarcity, they are not true. There is great wealth here, in spite of the uneven distribution and incredible waste. We can afford to be generous and open to other human beings.

Spaghetti is American food. Hummus and naan and sushi are too. I want to hear more helpful stories.

We snowmobiled 9 or 10 miles. I was in the lead and came around the corner to see the spire of Cathedral Peak gleaming in the midday sun. It wasn’t till later, on the way back, that I turned and snapped this photo. By then the sun had dropped toward the ridge and a thin layer of cloud filtered the brightness.

One of my favorite places to be is this wide glacial valley near the Cascade crest. The Cle Elum River is slow here, meandering through flat meadows fringed with dark firs and spruces. I’ve seen this place in the drizzling rain, in the hot sun through wave after wave of whining mosquitoes, in the brief colorful autumn of deep shadows and bugling elk. And in winter, when the trees appear to be brushed in ink against the pale meadows and flat sky. Today we ate lunch on the porch of the old cabin, basking in the warmth. I remarked on the silence, savoring the absence of any human clamor. Those moments must be treasured.

I’ve been thinking a lot about clarity these days, observing those rare times when the cold winter air snaps away any fuzziness. The sky and mountains seem to be especially clear and light, and the air seems to contain more oxygen. Lately the valley bottoms have been socked in with a dank penetrating fog, the kind of cold air that sinks and persists for days. It can be a week or two before I see the ridge on the other side of town. There is a blurry heavy feel to every day life, and the world outside the fog feels far away. Everything is obfuscated.

Like many people, I’ve been working through a procession of emotions and thoughts since the election in November. I’ve been shocked, despairing, unsettled, disbelieving, outraged, and occasionally amused into raucous laughter. American politics have been fraught with tension since the beginning of the republic, and the more I read of history, the more I believe it so. Tension between the interests of the individual and the greater good. Tension between the kinds of economy we could have. Tension between Puritans and the wild west. Tension between our values and those of other ideologies. I am a child of the Cold War and the protests of the 60s and 70s. I have witnessed turbulent times as well as relative peace and plenty. I understand that those in power will lie and prevaricate in order to stay in power, whether they believe their own lies or not. After September 11, 2001 the lies coalesced into a semi-cohesive version of reality. I remember laughing with my friends that “facts don’t matter”. Some people will insist that the earth is flat, that the Iraquis had weapons of mass destruction, that rape can be “legitimate”, that climate change can’t exist. It was easy to ridicule such ideas.

I’m not laughing any more. “Alternate facts” is another way of obfuscating, blurring, lying, creating a delusional reality. Besides obscuring the view of the big picture, settled fog has a way of stagnating the air and making it impossible for pollutants to escape. Pretty soon the air itself is toxic. It takes a major shift in the weather, a big storm to shove the fog and bad air out of the valleys. Then clarity returns for awhile.

In the meantime, we all need days like today. Days when we climb up out of the fog and emerge into brilliant light and clear air. Days when we can see, when it’s so quiet we can hear ourselves think, and when we can connect with a truth bigger than our own ruckus.

May you find clarity where you are.

The problem with not posting for a long time is that the writer gets out of the habit of posting. The next blog entry is somewhat further down the list of priorities, and not as prominent in the tangle of things to pay attention to. I think about writing, but usually when I am doing something else. I believe that is called procrastination.

Anyway, the year has turned. It has never made sense to me to start a new year in the middle of winter. I am resigned to an arbitrary calendar, where days and months are made to fit into boxes. For me, the year really begins in spring, when living things wake up from winter’s rest. My sense of time runs along with the seasons.

I never make New Year’s resolutions. Such great ideas lose their luster after a couple of weeks, and the whole business falls through the cracks of life. Why set myself up for failure? If I feel the need to make changes, it’s often because something in my life feels out of whack. And I want to be in whack, in balance. Balance is a moving target, attained only to be knocked off kilter again. It helps me to think of balance as asymmetrical, rather than a relationship between two equal parts. This is a visual art analogy. One focal point may be balanced by several smaller elements elsewhere in the composition. The important thing is to keep the eye moving throughout the whole. It’s about the flow, rather than about the subject matter. For example, my day job is the weighty element in my life right now. Most of my waking hours are spent navigating through the shifting tasks and relationships associated with managing the field operations of a winter recreation program. This weight is balanced by little things like seeing the bright stars in the predawn sky, watching narcissi and hyacinth bulbs grow on a windowsill, preparing small tasty meals for myself, sleeping warm and well through the long nights after being in the cold outdoors. The activity and stillness in my days flows along in a seasonal rhythm. Home is for nesting and hibernation in January. I’ll consider being ambitious when the days are longer.

It is -6 degrees and snowing this night, dry sparkling crystals falling from the black of outer space. The world outside is quiet for the moment. Savor it. And Happy New Year.