Author: Margaret Bendet (Page 5 of 5)

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.

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…

Re-Entry, a Blog

June 23, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Welcome to this series of observations and musings on a life transition. I lived in a spiritual community for more than three decades. When the time came to make my home elsewhere, I saw the move as a re-entry.

Re-entry means going back. A spacecraft in re-entry has been inhabiting another atmosphere. On such a re-entry, you need to gird yourself against returning to a world that may be your origin but has not lately been your support. How do you make this shift? What must you jettison? What do you need to keep?

For my move, I mailed 90 boxes of things: sheets, towels, photographs, books… Why should I buy them again? Could I even afford to do that?

With the help of friends, I rented a tiny house online, so there was a place to land.

And I drove cross-country in a car bursting with what couldn’t be mailed: suitcases full of clothes, a trunkful of computer equipment, art supplies, the cutting from a night-blooming cereus, a bunch of silk wisteria…

A drive like this demands vigilance. I learned a new attentiveness to the physical world, but step by step. I lost my car keys in Ohio, dropped my Visa card at a Starbucks in Minnesota, left my purse—with my wallet, my money, and all my identification—on a picnic bench in the badlands of North Dakota. I did what I had to, of course.

I had the car towed (courtesy of AAA) to a dealer who made new keys. I canceled my Visa and was grateful that I had another credit card. And the badlands turned out to be not so bad after all. As I was frantically backtracking in search of my purse, a woman called out, “The park ranger has it. I turned it in at the office.”

I was lucky. Without that insurance or the extra card or the kindness of a stranger, I might not have made it to my destination. No re-entry. There are those who do not physically survive re-entry. In this weekly blog I’ll go into some strategies I’ve found—and some I’ve discarded—for maneuvering this new world in which I was suddenly cooking for one, finding health insurance, starting a business, planting a garden, building community…

But physical survival is only part of re-entry. There are other, more significant issues in our lives. As the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town puts it, “We all know that something is eternal…” While we’re involved in the physical realities of housing and feeding and maintaining ourselves, how can we remember the “something way down deep” in us that’s eternal?

For me, the heart of re-entry is remembrance. I work with remembrance every day. While I’m on a spiritual path, it is not this path I write about. There are means of remembrance accessible to every journeyman, and this is what I will focus on.

For instance: at the end of each day, I like to ask myself two questions:

What did I do best today?
What could I have done better?

The answers are often a surprise.