Author: Margaret Bendet (Page 5 of 6)

I’m Margaret Bendet. I left a journalism career to live in a spiritual community and, after several decades, left that community to become, once again, a professional writer. That’s the nature of my re-entry. The question is, how to do it gracefully. How to return while remembering where I’ve been and why I was there.

As Life Unravels

September 2, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Whidbey artist Pam Winstanley does amazing work with silk.

Prayer flags, made by a friend, have been fluttering their good will and compassion in my backyard for a month now. I love the idea that these silk flags, vibrant but fragile, are doing their best for the universe in the short time they’ll be here. They’re a daily reminder that my life, too, is impermanent.

Earlier today at a happy hour celebration, I watched a woman in her early sixties sit before the candle on her birthday crème brulee and wonder aloud what to wish for. “There’s nothing more that I want,” she said. “I have so much joy in my life. I just want it all to remain as it is.” This is, of course, a wish we’ve all had at times, one that is never granted.

Life moves on, and it’s for the best. Frayed silk, sun-bleached color—dissolution has its own stark beauty and a reason for being.

This week, I learned a valuable lesson from a physical infirmity that is practically synonymous with aging. There had been intermittent pain in my right foot. I thought perhaps I’d strained it in the warrior pose, but the pain reoccurred over the course of weeks, was worse in the mornings, and was sometimes acute. I went to a doctor and told him, “I think I may have arthritis.”

“At your age?” he said. “Of course, you have arthritis. Sooner or later everyone has arthritis.” He told me to continue the exercise, especially in the morning, and to ice the foot afterward—excellent suggestions—and then he offered me a prescription for a pain medication.

I didn’t want a drug—the pain wasn’t that bad!—but then he gave me some sample pain pills, which were free and an insurance I could carry in my back pocket.

This was all good, but there was little change in the state of my foot.

A couple of weeks later, I received some clues about dealing with osteoarthritis that I wouldn’t hear from a doctor, and which now seem to be working.

The first was from a friend who asked how much I weigh, divided it by two, and told me that was the number of ounces of water I need to be drinking every day. “Clean water,” she said. “No chlorine. Filter it if you have to. Go to a health store and get the drops you put into water to make it alkaline.”

This woman, whom I hadn’t seen in decades, was in my face about water. “You take a vow,” she said. “You promise me—and I want you to call me in two weeks and let me know you’re doing it.”

So, I retrieved my plastic water filter from the back of a cupboard, bought the drops, increased my daily intake of water by about three hundred percent—and within a week of my drinking seventy ounces of water a day, my right foot became noticeably better. There was less pain.

The second clue came while I was on an outing to the Seattle Art Museum with a couple of colleagues from work. I’d brought along a bar of premium European dark chocolate, in case we needed a snack. Then I remembered that one of the women no longer eats chocolate. “It’s her right toe,” the other woman said. “She gets pain in her right toe whenever she eats chocolate.”

Her toe? Why would chocolate have anything to do with her toe? But the toe is so close to the foot, and then the woman herself explained that it was her arthritis that was being inflamed by the chocolate. Arthritis… foot…

I said, “I’m going to try it!” I fished that candy bar out of my purse and handed it to the only person present who still ate chocolate.

That was a week ago. I let go of chocolate and, within a couple of days, my foot felt almost normal. Most of the pain is gone, most of the time.

Many people will tell you that dark chocolate is good for you, and indeed it may be, if what you eat in a day is no bigger than the size of a Hershey’s kiss. I was doing one or two lines of chocolate from those three-and-half-ounce bars, both after lunch and after dinner. I ate lots of fresh, green, organic vegies, but I also ate lots of chocolate—not such a healthy diet.

Of course, I don’t know that stopping chocolate and increasing water is what’s healing my foot, but I’ll keep up this new regime for the time being. Right now, I’m not even tempted to do otherwise.

And I’m actually grateful for the arthritis. I’m taking much better care of myself than I was only a couple of weeks ago.

My point is that the unraveling that happens in our lives may not come in a way we would have chosen. No sane person making a birthday wish says, “What I really want is pain.” But when pain comes, it brings us gifts—that we receive, I think, as long as we keep flying our colors as best we can.

A Visitor

August 25, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

It was a Sunday morning. I’d slept in, meditated, and gone into the kitchen to make chai—when I had the feeling I was being watched. At the sliding screen door stood a large grey tomcat. I walked over and he sat, looking up at me. I sat. I opened the door a crack, put my hand out, and he arched his head under my fingers, encouraging me to pet him, which I did.

I have adopted a number of cats in my life, and this cat was lovely; this cat had a presence. I, however, currently have a commitment to a toy poodle, and Chou Chou is no friend to cats. So, even while I stroked this feline visitor, I was thinking, I can’t take you in!

Fortunately, the cat wore a collar and a tag with a phone number on each side—not a local number, I noticed. I called one and got an office answering machine; I called the other and got voicemail.

A minute later, the dog came tearing out of the bedroom, barking in fury at this invasion, and the cat fled. Then my phone rang.

“Did you just call my cell phone?” a woman asked. I told her about the cat.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Where do you live?” It turned out that this woman, Janice Martinez, and her partner, Michael Greenfield, had been docked at the Langley marina the week before. Kitty had jumped off their sailboat the previous Sunday. “He’d never done that before,” she said.

They spent days looking for the cat—met the local vet, who tried to help; met the owner of Music for the Eyes, who said that if Kitty showed up, he would fly him home to British Columbia. Because, in time, Kitty’s owners had to move on.

“We’re on Orcas Island now,” Janice said, “but we’ll come back for him.”

I was explaining that the cat had run off again, when I spotted him sitting under the front of my neighbor’s car.

“Put him in your bathroom,” Janice told me. “It’s just for today. We’ll be there.” But it took me a few minutes to get together clothes and a piece of smoked salmon, and by that time Kitty had disappeared again.

When you’re looking for a grey cat, the world is vast and dangerous place, full of hidden nooks and deadly predators.

I had to leave a cat behind once myself. Turning a beloved pet into a stray because you cannot find him and you cannot spend more time looking for him and you don’t know what else to do but go on—it’s an agony.

I felt the pain all over again that day: searching my neighbors’ yards for that grey cat; calling his owners; leaving the message that I hadn’t been able to catch Kitty; that he was, once again, MIA.

I was going to the Langley Shakespeare Festival that afternoon and was due at a friend’s house at 4:15. Just before 4:00, Chou Chou and I, coming back from a walk, saw a large grey cat on the driveway. The dog started barking again, tearing up the drive—and, of course, chasing the cat away. I could hardly blame Chou Chou. He hadn’t been looking for Kitty; he hadn’t missed that cat at all!

But it gave me hope… and five minutes later, I got call on my cell phone. It was Janice. “We’re here,” she said. “We’re in Langley. Where do you live?”

Even knowing I didn’t have their cat, these amazing people had spent the entire day to come back for him! From Orcas, they’d sailed their boat to Anacortes, rented a car, and driven down the length of Whidbey Island in the hopes of finding Kitty—a North American shorthair they had adopted as a rescue cat and loved. A cat they loved.

Kitty, back on his sailboat

I still had to go out, but I left Janice and Michael in my apartment—I would trust my life to people who went to these lengths for their cat! I told them I’d just seen Kitty; he couldn’t be far away.

And he wasn’t. This story has a happy ending. After an hour, they found Kitty, sitting in Island Church’s children’s play area, just over my back fence.

When I got home that night, I found a note that began, “We Found Him!” Janice went on to say that she thought Kitty had sensed “the energy” of my home. A meditator herself, she recognized certain signs of meditation in my apartment.

Later, when she sent the photo, she wrote that it was nice to read about Kitty’s adventure from my perspective, but what she and Michael most want to know is the cat’s story. What did he do in his week “living on the lam”? Because now that they’re home, it’s clear that Kitty has developed a bit of an attitude and a new taste for romping in the garden and woods. It’s probably the liberating effect of life on Whidbey Island but, whatever the cause, it’s brought permanent improvement to the cat’s life. Janice said, “I can’t imagine restricting him to a boat again.”

Coming Together

August 11, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Photos by Kathy Rothschild: The thumbnail is the bride's mother.

Photos by Kathy Rothschild: The thumbnail is the bridal couple.

You can’t always figure out why two particular people bond. Often they don’t know themselves. Last weekend I went to the wedding of two truly beautiful young people, who married at the bride’s parents’ home in a garden the bride, a professional landscaper, had designed and her mother and father—working hard—put in with their own hands: six-foot stands of sunflowers and double tiger lilies waving in the breeze, a humungous climbing monkshood, and masses of dahlias.

Rather than having a religious functionary take them through ceremonial vows, these two young people passed out flutes of champagne and, standing in the midst of seventy-five family and friends, spoke about their love for each other. They’d both grown up on Whidbey Island and hadn’t liked each other much in high school. “He had an air about him,” the bride remembered, “an annoying way of brushing the hair out of his face…”

They went to the same college; they found common ground; she cut his hair. One summer he went on an ill-advised bicycle tour through Nevada and while he waited for the air to cool each day, they talked on the phone—for hours. She wrote in her diary about how one day she’d like to have a life partner and “wouldn’t it be funny” if it ended up being him? Later, she wrote down the date when she knew she loved him.

And the bridegroom talked about how this strong young woman keeps his compass pointed in right direction and how, if he gets off kilter—as he has before and must suspect at some point in his life he might once again—he knows he’ll fight to stay close to her steadying influence.

It was a Whidbey Island event: pot luck appetizers and salads fresh from backyard gardens and the farmers’ markets, a whole pig roasted in a European-style imu, paella prepared by the mother of the bride in a huge pan over an outdoor fire, and a table laden with wedding cakes—some bought at the last minute by one of the guests when it seemed like there might not be enough.

It was such an auspicious beginning—how better to step into marriage than by stating, clearly and in your own words, your love for this person! And it shouldn’t end there.

I had been working in the library that day; a man spent the shank of the afternoon in the leather-bound chair in the library’s back room reading The Brothers Karamazov because he couldn’t be at home with his wife. She needed the space to grieve their daughter’s death from cancer. “She needs space from me,” he admitted. He said that he was Vietnam vet, on medication, someone who never “got over” what happened in the war. “It’s not easy to kill people,” he said, and later he added, “…but it was harder on my wife. They give awards to the soldiers for being in battle. They should give awards to our wives for what they put up with. They should have a parade for the spouses.”

“Tell her that,” I told him. “Take your wife out to dinner tonight and tell her that.” A few days later, he said with a smile that he had done just that.

In our culture, we’re so ready to express our negativities, so eager to tell people what we think they’ve done wrong. Sometimes that’s important, but what we need more of, I feel, is the kind of truth-telling that expresses our love.

That’s the way to honor the bonds we form with each other, whatever the circumstance, whatever our reasons may have been for coming together.

The father of the bride is about to take a formal wedding portrait.

The Naked Lady Parties

August 4, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

My haul from the last Clothing Swap

They’re usually called Clothing Swaps, but a friend referred to them as the Naked Lady Parties—and once I’d heard that name, I couldn’t think of them by any other. Of course, nobody actually goes around in the buff, but these get-togethers do involve a number of women, most in their skivvies, and all of them trying on their friends’ cast-off clothing. It’s so much fun—and everyone finds something they love. I always do.

I’m wearing one of them right now—a sleeveless cotton print pullover that’s perfect for summer, that goes with two pairs of my short pants, and that, for one reason or another, I never would have paid my own money for. But it was free!

The way these parties work is that you put aside the clothes you’re no longer wearing, and when an invitation goes out, you take those clothes with you and add them to everyone else’s in a big pile in the center of the room. Then everyone starts “shopping” and trying on.

There is always some kind of food at these parties, along with wine, juice, or coffee, depending on the time of day. But the main thing that’s happening is the new-to-you clothing.

Certainly, I bring home some things from Naked Lady Parties that I don’t end up wearing—or wearing more than once—but who cares! I can take those pieces to the next party or, in the meantime, donate them to one of the extremely popular Whidbey Island second-hand stores: Senior Thrift, WAIF, and Good Cheer.

The custom is that unclaimed garments from the Naked Lady Parties go to Good Cheer, where the proceeds from all sales support the Good Cheer Food Bank and Garden, providing nutrition to the local people who feel they need it. (I say feel because there is no requirement to prove your need for this assistance; it’s on offer to a self-selecting clientele.)

And many, many local people who don’t need to wear second-hand clothing do so. There is a sort of reverse snobbism at work on Whidbey. Compliment a woman on something she’s wearing, and at least half the time, she’ll say, “I found it at Good Cheer”—and be quite obviously proud of the fact that she is reusing something discarded (green living!), demonstrating her lack of vanity, and employing her financial resources to the best possible advantage.

It’s SO Whidbey!

The Blackberries Are Coming On!

July 29, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

It’s time to celebrate blackberries! It was blackberry season when I arrived on Whidbey Island. A friend showed me a culvert cache in her neighborhood where I picked a plump berry half the size of my thumb and popped it into my mouth: juicy and sweet and warm from the sun. Within a few minutes we filled a recycled plastic container with berries and, after dinner, we ate them on ice cream.

Later, I scattered blackberries over cereal and pancakes and grilled salmon; I baked them in cobblers and muffins; I boiled them down into syrups and jams . . .

These nutritious berries—high in fiber and vitamin C—are a boon to anyone who eats on a budget, and arriving on Whidbey, I considered them a personal welcome gift from the universe, my new universe. On Whidbey blackberries are, really, everywhere: on vacant lots, between driveways, beside the highway, lining neighborhood streets, climbing walls, growing up through the middle of other bushes, hugging not the shoreline perhaps but the thin, sandy soil that’s just one step away. The bushes grow thick and tall; they’re tenacious, wickedly prickly, and absolutely aggressive—a bit like our own weedy species, I think, except that humankind doesn’t come to fruit so easily and predictably between early August and the autumn rains.

As with friends, I found it’s important to pick the right berries, the truly ripe ones. Blackberries come to maturation on individual time frames, meaning that two plump berries growing on the same twig so close together that they touch can be at varying stages of ripeness: one sweetly succulent and the other mouth-puckering. The early warning sign is this: if a berry is ready to be picked, it comes off the bush with just the slightest prompting from the picker.

When a blackberry offers any resistance at all, it’s not ready; move on to another berry. This means you can pick the best berries, the ripest berries, without crushing them. It took me a while to master this light touch, and so the first year my fingertips were stained dark purple throughout the season.

The blackberry’s prickles—often incorrectly called thorns because they are capable of ripping denim and drawing blood—have provided me many other valuable lessons. One of the more obvious is the importance of appropriate attire: old clothes, long sleeves, covered shoes. Because opportunities for berrying can come up unexpectedly, I began carrying the right clothes and some plastic containers in the trunk of my car.

But dressing right isn’t the whole story in dealing with blackberry prickles, and also with the huge spiders that take refuge in those prickles. That’s right: huge spiders. You never want to thrust your hand into a blackberry bush. You need to see beyond the berry the question; you need to take in the berry’s immediate environment. Otherwise you may receive a nasty surprise.

What you cannot help but notice in picking blackberries is that the best berries are just out of your reach. This will be true even if you are tall, as I am, or if you expand your reach, as many do, by bringing along a step-ladder, a long-handled fork (to pull branches down) or a even a plank (to lay across the front of the bush and allow you access to the inner branches). I don’t do any of this because I’ve found that no matter what I do, always, just beyond my fingertips are gigantic berries, tantalizingly fat berries, berries that are heavy with sweet juice.

There is only one solution here: Get over it. That’s life, isn’t it!

And my life is so much sweeter, I’ve found, when I allow myself to be satisfied with the glorious berries that are within my reach.

Dollars and Sense

July 22, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

So many people send me opportunities to make and save money. I have to remind myself: what’s great in life has no price tag, but nothing—no thing—is ever free. Like the message I received from the credit union that holds the loan on my car. They’ll give me $150 if I refinance my loan. It sounds good. I’m sure they’d lower my monthly payments. But what would they charge me in added interest over the course of the loan? Much more than $150!

Recently I had an intriguing offer from the car company as well. They’re offering to take my 2011 model on trade for a 2014 model—with no money down and no change in the monthly payments. Of course, I would end up making those monthly payments for a lot longer. If I did this every few years, I could pay them forever.

And invitations to change my insurance come almost daily. Everyone knows about insurance companies. They’re lovely to deal with while you’re signing up or sending them money. When, however, an event in your life might require them to send you money, the honeymoon is over. That’s when you find out the true nature of your relationship—have you aligned yourself with a company you can trust or with the corporate equivalent of Bluebeard?

When I made my recent life transition and was in the market for medical insurance for the first time ever—I’d always had an employer-based plan—I did something truly foolish. A friend told me that if I joined this particular organization, the group would provide me with medical insurance, and because of the large numbers involved, the price would be half the market rate.

I called and talked with a representative, a charming woman who told me she’d signed up for this insurance herself—and weren’t we both clever for finding insurance so inexpensively! I loved that insurance—until I fell, broke my left arm, took an ambulance to the nearest hospital for an X-ray, and learned that I needed surgery.

The medical drama was over in about six weeks; my negotiations, machinations, frustrations, and, ultimately, condemnations involving the insurance company went on for years

Initially, there were issues about the medical procedure itself: the insurance would cover my surgeon and the surgical facility but not the anesthesiologist employed by that facility. (They had the anesthesiologist’s name but at another address. “They have to match perfectly what’s on our list,” a polite voice on the telephone told me: “both the name and the address.”) The insurance would pay for a pin to be put into my elbow but not the medical apparatus the surgeon recommended.

I did have the surgery I needed and, yes, I was anesthetized. Then I dealt with the insurance company.

I would have a clear, focused, friendly conversation on the phone with one of the company’s representatives, a woman named, say, Shawnee. I would take careful notes, fax Shawnee the paperwork she said she needed, and feel that everything was taken care of. Nothing would happen. Months later, I would call and be told that Shawnee no longer worked at the company, no one there had a record of my fax—and I needed to send them certain paperwork before anything could happen at their end. I went through this a couple of times, and then by chance heard the company’s personnel listed in a voicemail recording: one of the names was Shawnee. How many Shawnees could there be?

It was two years after the original accident that the company sent the final payment: $500 for the ambulance—a fee I had long since paid myself. In that time, the company had changed its name twice and, more importantly, I had changed my insurance.

Now, I sign up only with an insurance company recommended by a friend—a friend who has collected from that very company. I figure it’s common sense. And when I hear complaints about Obamacare, I remember what medical insurance was like for me before the passage of the Affordable Healthcare Act.

Four-Legged Friend

July 15, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

I was once a cat person. Cats are lovely, graceful, and independent; they can be affectionate but they can also be demanding or aloof. Like many people I know, cats are provisional friends. Then I was given a cat-sized dog, and I learned that a dog is always your friend. I have never been greeted with such exuberance as I am by this dog—and it happens every time I come home.

Maybe I’ve been gone for just an hour. Chou Chou has already forgotten that when I left he was crushed he couldn’t go out with me.

Maybe I’ve been gone for six hours. Still, he isn’t despondent or distressed or reproachful; he is enraptured. As I step across the threshold, Chou Chou runs over and dances up and down, leaping into the air with a big smile, until I pick him up and hug him. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t enjoy being greeted this way by a person. From a toy poodle, it’s wonderful.

Chou Chou is a family legacy. He was my mother’s last pet; when she died, Chou Chou went to my brother; and when my brother died, the dog came to me. I offered to take him with some trepidation. I knew that having a dog would change my life in certain ways—but I could never have guessed precisely how. I see snack-packs in an entirely new light; I’m indifferent to bones under my coffee table; I have a new tolerance for barking; and more…

WALKS:I used to go for walks a few times a week. When I moved to Whidbey Island, I favored a particular beach where, at low tide, I looked for shells, which, for a while, I was painting. Once Chou Chou arrived, the walks became once or twice daily, and it was soon apparent where he prefers walking: on grass, under shade, in places where he doesn’t have to wear the despised leash. (Would you want to wear a leash?) The ideal place has turned out to be the Langley Cemetery. It would never have been my own choice, but there is plenty of room for Chou Chou to roam free, and I get to contemplate the ephemeral nature of life.

EAGLES: Whidbey has a thriving population of bald-headed eagles, and when I first moved here, I considered any sighting of this regal bird to be an auspicious omen. On my walks with a toy poodle I still look for eagles, but now they mean death from the sky! Chou Chou weighs 8½ pounds, just under the carrying weight for a full-grown eagle.

The threat is real. Circling eagles have flown away once I picked up the dog. Possibly they thought Chou Chou was going to be my lunch. One day I saw an eagle watching us from a nearby branch, and I picked up Chou Chou and looked up at the bird. As he flew off, he gave a screech that registered somewhere between annoyance and anger. A friend described an abandoned aerie he found: it was littered with tiny collars—like little trophies!

When I admired these birds of prey, I did know they hunted small mammals. But sharing my life with a small mammal has made me look at this from a personal perspective—and has given me a new relationship with birds of prey.

OTHER DOGS: I also have a new relationship with other dogs. Now that I’m acquainted with one dog—and appreciate his discerning sniff, his never-ending quest for more food, his splendid loyalty—I have a greater affection for any dog. It’s as if I were seeing dogs through Chou Chou’s eyes. As a cat person, I saw dogs as being of various sizes and weights and breeds. Now every dog is a dog—and might be a four-legged friend.

It’s SO Whidbey

July 8, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Whidbey Island is a softer place than many, a place where people don’t dress up much and might have a real conversation with someone they don’t know if they see that person, say, at a farmer’s market (there are five in the summer) or in one of the local libraries (five all year round).

A friend visited me from New York, and the story he took home from Whidbey was how we bought eggs from an untended farm stand and put our money in a wooden box with a slot. “That would never happen in New York,” he said. “That box would be gone. The eggs would be gone.”

What he didn’t realize is that this was an upscale farm stand, with a refrigerator and a locked cash box. My favorite place to buy eggs—because I know they’re truly fresh and from hens with names—is out of an ice chest that sometimes appears next to a field near my house, and these people put out just an envelope for the money.

My sister-in-law visited from Arkansas, and the story she took home was how at a local bistro she heard a guy at the bar giving a girl the farewell, “Good luck with the chickens.”

“You don’t hear that all the time,” my sister-in-law said. “It’s new for a pickup line.”

It’s just SO Whidbey.

There’s a sweet man who walks around the town of Langley quite a bit. A few years ago he was in an accident or had an illness that affected his brain, and now what he wants to do is to talk with people—tell everyone he meets how dazzling their smile is, how absolutely perfect the color of their eyes. Some find this disconcerting. I did at first. Then I saw that this man, who has no hidden motive, nothing to gain, is an apt expression of this gracious place.

I lived on an island in my twenties, and it occurred to me then that people move to islands not for the sake of money or power but because they want a certain kind of life: a slower pace, a more comfortable environment, a more resonant focus. Slower, more comfortable, and more resonant than what? Than what’s happening in the world outside that island—on the Mainland, Out There, in America, whatever people on that particular island happen to call the rest of the world. In my experience islands are worlds unto themselves.

Whidbey Island is teeming with artists and writers and musicians and singers and knitters and jewelry makers. This may not be what puts food on their tables, but just about everyone here is involved in some form of creative expression. In South Whidbey, which is the side of the island I live on, there are four community theater groups, one for children and one that does Shakespeare—for free! “We make much more money by passing the hat,” the founder and organizer of the Island Shakespeare Festival said.

It’s an expression of the better part of human nature—and it’s SO Whidbey.

The Mint Revelations

July 1, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

When I planted my first garden and before anything else began to take hold, I had a pot of flourishing mint. Mint is easy to grow—so easy I’d been warned not to plant it in the ground. Mint can take over, I was told; with a small garden, you wouldn’t have room for anything else.

So, I had this huge pot of mint, and for years I hardly used it. Now and then I’d garnish a plate with a sprig of mint or cut a bit up in a fruit salad. Then a friend served a Thai shrimp salad in which whole mint and basil leaves were mixed with the other greens and liberally doused with a hot sauce—delicious! I started putting mint leaves (and basil, when I have it) into all of my green salads, and it’s been consistently wonderful. Even without the hot sauce.

Recently, I came across The Extraordinary Cookbook, in which gastronaut (his word) Stefan Gates suggests making tea with fresh herbs from the garden. How obvious is that! For me, it was another revelation. I’d never liked herbal tea, and why would I? Most packaged teas are dried, crushed leaves that were shrouded in paper envelopes who knows how many years ago. Fresh mint tea, I found, is something else altogether.

I cut off a huge handful—both hands, cupped—of fresh mint sprigs, packed them loosely into a teapot, filled it with boiling water, and let the brew steep for ten minutes. Unbelievable, the flavor of that tea. I love fresh mint tea.

Now we come to another dimension, so if all you’re interested in is cooking tips, read no further. A friend from Hawaii called, and I told her about my “discovery” of fresh mint tea. She suggested that the next time I cut mint, I try something: “Ask the plant if it’s okay for you to take its leaves. Then wait to hear its answer.” This woman—whom I met when we were both newspaper reporters in Honolulu—studied for a number of years with a training school for psychic healing, and she sometimes comes up with a subtle perspective I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.

But why not? The next time I wanted to make fresh mint tea, I squatted in front of the potted mint and mentally asked the plant, Would it be all right with you if I took some of your leaves to make tea?

Everything was quiet, and the answer, when it came a moment later, was wordless. I felt a whoosh of sweet energy inside. It seemed as if the mint actually wanted to offer its leaves. And, of course, feeling that made the fresh mint tea even more exquisite.

The End of a Plague

June 24, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Tent Caterpillar photo by http://ramblingartists.blogspot.com/ used by permission.

Tent Caterpillar. Photo by Rambling Artists used with permission.

A plague is what it felt like, though there were no human casualties that I know of—just flowers and fruits and many, many leaves. It’s the annual tent caterpillar invasion in the Pacific Northwest.

About a month ago, I was walking down the street to visit a friend and noticed a large, furry caterpillar near me on the pavement, walking—well, moving—in the opposite direction. A fellow traveler, I thought.

That was before I knew. That was before I noticed that thousands upon thousands of these ravenous insects had established residence in my own backyard, living in the branches of the cherry and apple trees, decimating this year’s crop. To be specific, this year my two apple trees will bear two pieces of fruit.

What do you do when faced with a plague? What is the conscious response?

First, I tried to get to know this caterpillar and learned, through research, that it has some lovely social habits. Tent caterpillars live in colonies. Each colony constructs a gauzy silk tent, large enough to hold many generations. The caterpillars situate these cocoons on the high branches of various kinds of deciduous trees, choosing, whenever possible, the side that gets morning sunlight. The idea is warmth. On chilly spring mornings the air inside these protective tents can be up to be 50F degrees warmer than outside. Once the day has warmed, the caterpillar leaves home to forage—that is, to eat… and eat… and eat.

Even knowing more about the caterpillars, still I wanted to kill them. I suppose if there had been just one tent in my yard, I would have been happy to share the leaves. But there were so many tents. I spent a few hours cutting down all I could reach and then—happily a renter—called my landlord and asked if he would come with his truck and take these (some 25) nests away. “There were thousands of caterpillars,” he said later, awe in his voice.

And that wasn’t the end of it. More arrived in the yard, built new nests, and these, when I could reach them, I cut down, burning them one by one over a candle on my front walk. It’s personal, burning something alive. I started out saying, “May you go to a better life.” But after a while, I knew I didn’t mean it; my goal was that the caterpillars leave this life.

Finally, I heard about a “biologically safe” insecticide: something that makes the caterpillars unable to eat but doesn’t affect birds that may eat the caterpillars—not many do—and doesn’t affect people who eat the leaves. It’s dicey, I know, but I was losing a battle for my own backyard.

And, of course, they weren’t in just my yard. They were all over the island. These are forest tent caterpillars, and Whidbey is a forested island. The local folk wisdom is that the caterpillars live in seven-year cycles. “One year it was so bad,” my landlord said, “that coming over on the ferry, I saw that the hillsides were brown—the caterpillars had eaten everything.” After a year like that, the understanding is, there will be very few caterpillars on the year following. I guess there’s nothing left to eat.

They’re on the wane now; caterpillars eat only new leaves so the season is actually over. This was a bad year, everyone acknowledges, but there are those who say that 2015 is going to be worse.

If that’s the case, I may be ready to explore another ploy I discovered in my research: tent caterpillar wine.
You know the old saying: when you’re given lemons…