Loca-vore update

(Posted by Himanee)

September comes to a close tomorrow. With it, the loca-vore challenge ends technically. Since I was out of state for the first 11 days of September and my husband was immersed in canning peaches and tomatoes, we decided that we would give ourselves two more weeks to try and meet the challenges we set. Nevertheless, with the month coming to a close, I wanted to offer a brief progress report on our efforts, to date.

One of the things that I learned this month is that being a full-on loca-vore is not as easy as it appears. My husband and I already do a lot to eat out of our backyard and to buy the bulk of what we eat from local farmers. But as the month went by I came to realize that there was a lot more that I could do.

I also realized that there were a lot of things about my lifestyle that didn't lend themselves easily to local eating.

For instance, my husband and I both trained this summer for the Adirondack Marathon, which we ran happily and successfully on Sunday, September 22. Happiness and success depended on being able to keep ourselves properly hydrated and fueled with quick energy over the course of the 26.2 mile route. For me, that meant sipping the Powerade (a Gatorade equivalent) beverage offered at the water stations every two miles in order to keep electrolyte levels in my body steady. It also meant downing a packaged "power gel" or "energy shot bloc" every four or five miles. I got the gels at the local EMS shop and they were, according to the package labeling, 90 percent organic and had brown rice syrup and natural fruit extracts as their primary ingredients. But they were manufactured (and I do mean manufactured; after all, they come in foil, vacuum sealed packages) by a national company that markets its product worldwide. I did investigate possible alternatives, but in the end decided that the tried and true sins of corporately-produced replenishers were a safer choice than the dizziness, dehydration, and nausea that I might experience if I ran without such aids.

Another blip in our goals toward goodness turned out to be chocolate. To put it mildly, both my husband and I love it, and see no harm in indulging ourselves with a post-dinner Hershey's Bar or Nestles Crunch. Chocolate can serve as a pain reliever for mild soreness and fatigue, so its consumption can be justified. But trying to find a locally-sourced chocolate bar that's not outrageously expensive can be quite challenging. I did find a somewhat happy resolution tonight, however, while shopping at a new store, Healthy Living, in Wilton, when I picked up a bag of semi-sweet chunks of Callebaut chocolate in the bulk food aisle. The chocolatier is Belgian, but a search of the company's website shows that they engage in fair-trade practices and buy the raw materials used to produce their chocolate from small growers in the regions where cocoa beans and other chocolate-making ingredients grow naturally.

A final "sin" was our binge two nights ago on late-night nachos. I had signed on to volunteer for the Adirondack Ragnar Relay's two-day event, and my shift was from 7 p.m. to about 11 p.m. at a transition point a little north of Lake George. In preparation, we made an early dinner of a mussel stew served with vegetables from our garden and our homemade bread. But by the time I was headed home I was ravenous, and could only think of one word: nachos! We had homemade salsa, and a hunk of cheddar cheese. At least the cheese was Cabot's New York Cheddar. But even if the package of tortilla chips that I picked up on my way home said "Stewart's" -- a local convenience store chain -- the chips themselves were most likely manufactured elsewhere.

On the success side, I discovered that stevia is a wonderful sugar substitute. I used dried stevia leaves to make a pear pie about a week ago and in a blueberry pancake recipe this morning. Both of the recipes called for sugar, which the stevia stood in for wonderfully. I look forward to growing more of it next year, and to getting used to seeing small flecks of green in dishes that require sweeteners.

We also learned that we could make our own butter in our Cuisinart with Battenkill Dairy's wonderful cream. I had made butter in the past with the famed jar-shaking method, but the Cuisinart whirs the cream to butter in about five minutes, and eases the process up considerably. I also learned that a pint of cream will yield more than two cups of butter (which is essentially the equivalent of a box of four sticks), and if I buy the cream directly from the Battenkills at the Saratoga Farmers Market, the price is about 50 cents cheaper.

With two weeks to go, we still have a lot on our list to conquer: building a root cellar (we've been so busy harvesting that we haven't had much of a chance to think of storage, beyond the ground itself which happily remains unfrozen); finding a source for local grain for making bread; and doing a community assessment on the strengths and challenges in our local food systems. We'll do our best to make a dent in these challenges as October approaches.

Longer, slower, cheaper

(Posted by Himanee)

The slide from summer to fall has initiated a round -- slowly -- of fall cleaning. My husband Jim and I ran the Adirondack Marathon in Schroon Lake, NY, on Sunday. We began our round of fall cleaning by moving all the jars of salsa, tomato sauce, tomato paste, catsup, peaches, and various jams that Jim spent the month of August canning into our basement. As we loaded cans, I took a quick inventory:
* tomato paste: 10 jars;
* tomato sauce: 26 jars;
* red salsa: 33 jars;
* green salsa: 4 jars;
* catsup: 22 jars;
* jam: 21 jars;
And there's more to come.

This morning, we woke up to 32 degrees, our third night since September 16 of experiencing overnight frosts. Figuring that the end was near, I harvested the remaining tomatoes from our vines and Jim spent the afternoon transforming the red ones into barbecue sauce. The green ones will become salsa verde (or green salsa), one of our favorite additions to Mexican style pork, chicken, and bean dishes.

As I picked tomatoes, I rejoiced at the sight of geese honking as they flew overhead, our backyard chickens creating a cacophony of clucks as they laid one egg after another, and the glimpse I got this morning of the pear tree in our backyard bearing fruit for the first time since we bought this house in 2011. I felt as if this -- the crisp cold air, the sunny skies, and the "free food" stretching all around me -- was what sustainability meant. It was hard work, with tangible rewards.

The tomatoes are a special pride and joy. For the first time since we started gardening as a way to create our own food, all 160 plants were our own, started from seeds. We sowed three packets of seeds: a hybrid, an heirloom, and a cherry tomato variety. We expected to lose at least half the plants we started to wind, drought, insects and other yard pests. We lost virtually none.

And so we'll eat well through the winter, as the practice of "puttin' up" stretches our harvest through next year.

In the realm of the loca-vore challenge, I experimented tonight with stevia in place of sugar. I picked up a stevia plant at the farmers market this summer, and on the night before our first frost hit, clipped off several of its leafy branches and left them in a sunny spot in my mudroom to dry. To my surprise, the leaves dried fairly and crumbled in my hands this evening as I picked them up. I dropped the crumples into a bowl full of sliced pears and mixed them in well to create a filling for a pear pie. No other sweetening was necessary, though I did replace the requisite cinnamon and nutmeg with a pinch of the garam masala made by my uncle, following my father's family's village recipe.

I also have been making my own butter, and managed to turn the residual buttermilk -- which my father's family referred to as "chaach" -- into a batch of biscuits that also included leftover butternut squash. The biscuits started out as hamburger buns two nights before our marathon, and were breakfast the next day. Today, they formed part of a biscuits and gravy breakfast, and the last few probably will be breakfast tomorrow. Just as the vista of food-producing land seems to connote a sense of sustainability so does my growing ability to make one round of cooking stretch into three or four meals.

Last night we had chicken, slow-cooked in a crockpot. Tonight, we had a rest of the chicken quick-grilled as fajitas. As I made tortillas and the pear pie, I simmered the chicken bones in water. The resulting broth will serve as a base for a seafood paella tomorrow. Because it's very difficult to buy a mixture of seafood for just two people, Jim and I have planned the next three days of meals as a sort of fish fest. Tomorrow, paella's on the menu and will likely feature wild shrimp, mussels, clams, and some sort of locally sourced cod fish (most likely hake) mixed into the rice. The remaining clams will then become a chowder for Thursday, and the mussels a spicy mussel soup on Friday.

Before this year, I thought I would go crazy eating the same food more than one day in a row. I always tried to use up leftovers but often in the crazy pace of life, the leftovers would end up in the trash or compost bin because I hadn't gotten around -- three days later -- to doing chicken dish #2. The easier solution -- and a fresher one, it seems -- is to start with a "big game" meal -- a roasted chicken or a pot roast -- and work down to the small: roast to stir-fry to broth; or slow-cooker dinner to fajitas to broth. The meat stays fresher longer and meals become easier to plan and execute. And, perhaps best of all, the weekly shopping trips to the farmers market end up being less expensive, allowing one to sustain sustainable habits a little longer.

"Local" eating

(Posted by Himanee)


Ten days of September's Loca-Vore Challenge have elapsed, and I have not had the opportunity to eat "local." I have been on the road since August 28, traveling with my parents. I flew to Chicago and traveled from O'Hare to the western suburbs, where I spent the next four days attending my cousin's wedding. Every meal, except for the complimentary breakfast buffets at the hotel where we stayed, featured fully vegetarian yet highly rich and extremely spicy foods. From Chicago, my parents and I drove to Iowa City and Cedar Falls, where we spent the first few days of September traversing the paths they crossed in 1961 as new immigrants to America. We then traveled to their home in Muncie, Indiana, where I've been for the past week. Every meal, except for our Papa Johns Pizza indulgence and our Sunday breakfast at the local IHOP, has featured fully vegetarian, somewhat rich and spicy fare. The past two nights' dinners have been festive, as the season of honoring deities around the fall harvests that culminates with Diwali has begun.

But in this non-local experience, many thoughts about what it means to be sustainable have arisen. One of the great assets of being a part of an immigrant/diaspora community is a sense of understanding about protocol. Meals -- especially during the festive seasons -- are in honor of God, and, as such, are prepared with the freshest, cleanest foods available, which for the members of the predominantly Hindu Indian community in Muncie (as well as the Indian community in Chicago with which my cousin's family interacts) is code for vegetarian. The blend of spices, vegetables, yogurt, ghee, and fresh chilis within each dish often overwhelms my palate, which has grown accustomed to single ingredient dishes in recent years. However, the flavor mingle pleasantly even as my body sweats, and I end the meals feeling full and refreshed.

My parents buy some of their produce at Wal-Mart, despite my admonitions, and because they are my parents and I am a polite person, I eat what they serve me without sermonizing on the corporate giant's exploitative practices. My parents also grow their own tomatoes and chili peppers, and share their bounty with other Indians who in turn provide them with fresh karela (bitter melon), eggplants, and squashes grown in their backyard gardens. Among the seasonings that my mother uses is a blend of garam masala made by my father's family in India. My uncle, who is 84, shared the secret formula with my parents when they last traveled to India in 2009, and my mother three days ago shared it with me. If I can manage to grow some of the spices it contains, I will do so. Otherwise, I feel content knowing that I can carry on a family practice of making garam masala in the village way.

As we ate -- with our fingers, mostly, blending "wet" curries with rice and scooping dry vegetable dishes up with roti -- my parents asked me many questions about the backyard farming that my husband and I have undertaken. Frequently, the topic of milk came up, with my mother asking me if we would ever have any interest in raising a cow. It's fortunate that my husband wasn't with me on this trip because he might have procured a loan from his doting mother-in-law for such an investment. He is trying to convince me that we can raise a cow; I feel that we need more land -- and more of a financial safety net than we have currently -- before we can take such a plunge. (Goat milk, by the way, is not an option for me, for reasons that are too complex to delve into here.)

The topic of milk triggered my father's memories of his family's cow. He was born in 1932 in a village in northern India, between Rajasthan and New Delhi. The family was a large one, and initially quite poor though grew prosperous over time. They kept a cow, which was milked at dawn. The milk was boiled, then consumed at a midday meal and used in cooking throughout the day. My father recalled my grandmother churning some of the milk for butter, which would be stored in a pot, and heating whatever milk was left at the end of the day with a little water. The water would steam and evaporate, leaving a thick cream-top that the family called malai in its wake. That would be the bedtime treat. The residue from that process would be used to make yogurt, and whatever liquid was skimmed off would be given to poorer families in the village as buttermilk. I laughed as I thought about how prized real buttermilk has become today.

What struck me in this discussion was how nothing went to waste. And, tonight, while attending a puja (or worship) at a younger Indian immigrant family's home, it seemed to resonate with how we prayed and prepared to eat. The gathering was multi-generational, with participants ranging from about age 6 to 86. Despite the dressy Indian attire that we donned, the atmosphere was informal. The puja -- which was the stated reason for the gathering -- lasted about 15 minutes. Dinner immediately followed and continued for about an hour. A delivery truck showed up with pizza for the younger kids. As for the adults, some of the main dishes were ordered in from an Indian restaurant that has opened up in Muncie, something that wouldn't have been possible in my children when one could count the total number of Indians and South Asians residing in Muncie on two hands. The sweets, however, were homemade, which surprised and delighted me because so many companies these days offer them via mail order and Indian groceries stock the delicacies, as well. We ate on paper plates, and wiped the curry stains and oils accumulating on our fingers on paper napkins. As we left, it became clear that none of the food was going to waste. Individual-sized zip-lock bags appeared and were filled with channa, kofta kari, aloo sabzi, and the homemade sweets. A single meal fed a community at least two times over.

I place this experience against the context of how I think of being a "loca-vore" when I'm home in New York. It's great to grow your own produce, to can your own tomatoes (as my husband has done diligently these past two weeks), and to feast on eggs your own chickens laid. But against that sense of "own-er-ship" is a price: the work behind growing your own food is clean and honest, but it is labor-intensive. Feeding a community is challenging when a crop goes awry or when ethics about eating in particular ways for certain reasons are not communally understood.

I look forward to coming home tomorrow, and eating fresh from my garden. But as I resume my loca-voring, I would like to continue to consider what it really means to be sustainable.

In case it appears all I write about is poetry, let me say something about food. It has been sneaking lately into my writing, which isn't surprising since eating locally grown food has become increasingly important to me on many levels. Eating locally grown food and growing some of one's own have a lot to do with sustainability and living slowly, and of being intricately connected to nature. Nature is where my poetry grows from - the rivers, mountains and forests of the Adirondacks, Vermont, and sometimes northern Quebec, Iceland or Scotland. So it seems natural that food grown in these places should start appearing in my lines of verse.

I have been growing a few things of my own this summer: tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, eggplant, and lots of herbs. The rest we buy fresh from local farms. Eating something that you know has been picked that morning is a magical and complete sensory experience. The nutrients and flavors are so alive in your body, for a moment you forget where you leave off and the earth begins. You forget you are a separate entity walking around. And of course we are not separate from the earth, or each other; we are made of what it is made, nothing different.  

A recent summer inspired poem:

I've never eaten so well, I've never felt this close.

Heirloom tomatoes, tarragon and thyme 

and cheese from goats I might have met. 

I haven't said enough about gratitude, 
for movement of tongue over cantaloupe seed, 

through blend of sweet cream and mint, 

for olive oil trickling into my throat, a kind of thrice blessing.

Only sun and hands have touched these goods.

And I haven't said enough of time. 

Of the time it took to arrive in this moment, 

not more than a blink, yet it feels

a stretch of eternity - the way it runs rivulets 

of sun full over by skin, lets linger long

the taste of earth's fruits on my tongue.

The ecological philosopher Thomas Berry spoke of communication with the earth as a "renewed communication with other beings and other species." This must be why it inspires so much rich poetry and music. Both have been a part of most ancient and tribal cultures, whose people were intimately connected with nature. There is indeed an immediacy of communication that happens (if one is present) when walking a wooded path, drifting down a river, or biting into a just picked peach or pear.

Berry also spoke about "the spontaneities" and of "wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being." I love his use of the word spontaneities and while this could be experienced in many settings it seems a likely one is immersion in and amongst the elements from which we came, whether they be earth's waters, wind, and forests, or the stardust from above. It is all about our ongoing co-creation with the universe through our unique expressions of ourselves within it. For now, let that be the fresh grown foods of summer and the dance of the elements inside us.

Loca-Vore Challenge

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

In a moment of possible craziness, I signed up for a new monthly challenge. The challenge is the New England Association of Organic Farmers-New York's annual Loca-Vore Challenge, which takes place in the month of September. The goal is "to inspire awareness and action in eating locally and organically," according to the association's web site at https://www.nofany.org/events/locavore-challenge and the challenge includes a range of possible action-steps that one might take.

I first heard about this challenge two years ago when it was in mid-process. I learned of it again last year but was uninterested because it emphasized things like eating at restaurants that get their products from local sources or hosting or attending community dinners. These actions cost money, which I didn't have much of, and the list of actions that one could do for free didn't really seem to include much of anything I wasn't already doing. So I poo-poohed the idea as another yuppie-inspired creation and more or less forgot about it.

This year, I stumbled on the challenge while searching for information about a course that I had heard Adirondack Community College was offering on sustainable farming. I looked a little more closely at the different kinds of things that one could do to participate in the challenge and decided to give it a try.

The same caveats about spending money by eating at restaurants or going to community harvest dinners still apply. If anything, I will have even less disposable income this year than I did in the previous year, and frankly, I don't think making one's self a true "loca-vore" is about spending money.

The idea behind being a loca-vore is to try and obtain as much of your food from locally produced sources as possible. The rather shifty term "organic" gets embedded from time to time into this localism; however, the real goal is to get your milk from the local dairy and your meat from the farmer in the next county, rather than someone on the West Coast (when you're living on the East Coast). The goal, as I understand it, also is to sidestep the national retailers and corporately produced foods.

My husband Jim and I grow about 90 percent of the vegetables we eat, and buy the rest from local farmers. We also buy all of our meat from local farmers, with the exception of an occasional purchase of prosciutto from Roma's, an Italian and Mediterranean deli. We also raise hens, which means we produce our own eggs. We get our milk from a local dairy. However, we do buy cheddar cheese, butter, flour, yeast, oil, soda, beer, nuts, seltzer water, chocolate, granola bars, juices, and fruits such as bananas from the grocery, and because of our rather tight pocketbooks, don't always buy the best-est most organic versions of such products.

So what might this challenge do to help me eat even more locally?

Here is a list of action steps I committed to trying. I will note that this list includes only steps I have not already taken such as committing to buying produce from local farmers.

* Building a makeshift root cellar for storage crops. This is a project that my husband and I have been discussing for a couple of years, so perhaps the challenge will give us the kick in the butt to actually make it happen.

* Using local honey and maple syrup in place of sugar. I've got stevia growing in my garden this year, so I'm adding that natural sweetener to my list.

* Making your own local organic butter, yogurt, or ice cream. I have given up on trying to make ice cream, but I will commit to not buying butter or yogurt -- and making it myself.

* Making your own bread with local organic grain. I have a feeling that I might be priced out of this action step, but I will look into it, at least.

* Doing a community assessment to identify the strengths and obstacles in your local food systems. This project particularly intrigues me.

* Reading books on the NOFA-NY recommended list.

* Sharing the experience via a blog.

I should emphasize that there are a variety of other action steps listed on the NOFA-NY website that also do not entail spending inordinate amounts of money such as experimenting with canning or freezing fresh produce, composting kitchen scraps, or getting involved with grassroots political efforts to promote more availability of locally produced foods. I wanted to choose steps for myself that would challenge me to look at what I was eating and how I was obtaining it a few steps further, so these were the steps I decided to take. I will share the experiences as appropriate via my Moving Your Body and Sustainability blogs. Stay tuned!

I am borrowing a line from the end of  Himanee’s last post:

Perhaps the fall is the time to slow down. To take in the newness, to approach the new calendar slowly as if it is our support and not our penalizer....

This comment resonated well, as I have decided in the past month that my fall was going to be a continuation of my summer in the sense of balance and richness that has come from it. Some work, regular time off, hiking and paddling with friends, some travel, and lots of writing.  I have just returned from several days in northern Vermont spent with friends along the shore of Lake Champlain, and kayaking out to the islands. Life seems naturally slow and idyllic in this part of Vermont. The water and wind are constant soundscapes. There is little chance of moving too fast. The roads don’t allow for it, and the scenery captures much of your attention. The peaks of the Adirondacks drape the far western horizon in changing hues. The Green mountains to the east balance the visual drama.

I have always loved fall, in part for the promise of new experiences, ideas, and learning. In part for the cooler weather. I have worked in higher ed since 1990 so it’s been a constant in my life.  And that will be the case this fall, but I am choosing to decide more consciously this time what those work and learning activities will be, rather than have them all decided for me. I hope to soon have a conference chosen to attend, will be heading to our college’s Adirondack Residency in October, and am in the process of contacting a potential mentor in Vermont to provide feedback and guidance as I put together my new book of poetry, my first full length one. I feel I've written enough poems by now, gotten enough published, and have had enough encouragement to take the next step. It's time.

Putting together a book of poetry is a rich and unique experience. On the advice of a wise poet, I have spent time sifting through my poems, and noting the themes, feelings, settings, and ideas within them. I have found some that I thought were about one thing, such as a particular place, are really more about a relationship. But I also see now how inextricably intertwined place and relationships are for me.  Other poems, such as ones that seemed to focus on a difficult experience, were really about growth and transformation. These poems have shown to me hidden facets of their content, and have revealed new layers of meaning. My poems seem to fall into six different theme areas and I have been letting them sit for a while on a large table in my home to see what they have to say to each other. To see if together they create a larger unifying theme, an important aspect of a book of poetry.  Of many things.

So poetry has been showing me once again, about listening. About being still, quieting one’s thoughts, letting go of one’s (or another's) agenda and becoming attuned to a deeper agenda. One that works at more of a soul level. If our soul is not on board with what we are doing in our lives, things are not going to go well, or at least not for long. I know if I don’t make myself quiet enough, mindful enough, and singularly focused for at least part of each day, I will miss those deeper messages and before long I feel the consequences.

As we watched the late day light descend over Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks, the deeper contours of the mountains emerged, evoking subtle nuances of feeling. This kind of light – it’s a little like being quiet, a little like listening. A little like poetry.

Re-defining our time

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

A Seattle friend observed a few nights ago on Facebook that a sunset at 8 p.m. in May seems unduly late, whereas a sunset at the same time in August seems too early. The remark reminded me of the shortening days of summer that August ushers in, and with those shorter days, the onset of fall.

For educators, fall means a sudden up-step in pace. Course syllabi must be prepared, books must be ordered, classes are ready to start. New students will start to fill classrooms, even if these days so many of those classrooms exist in cyber space. E-mail, which slowed to a gentle trickle in August, will suddenly gush once again like a torrent of water rushing downward over and across boulders to the rapidly filling up pond below.

Or, maybe not.

My college has a twelve-month calendar, which is sort of like code for "no summers off." Prior to my arrival here, the prospect of always being at work would have sounded dismal if it had not been for two completely unrelated sets of circumstances. The first was that I had spent three years as an adjunct faculty member at two colleges, which did have summers off. Summers off for adjuncts, who are essentially contract hires, meant three months of no pay, which translated for me into part-time jobs as a tele-fundraiser, political canvasser, fitness coach, and, one year when I was really broke, a one-day gig as a field worker at a vegetable and fruit farm. It also meant calls to the unemployment office and a brief stint on food stamps. The second circumstance was a chat with a future colleague prior to my campus interview who happened to know my sister. "Someone may have mentioned that we have a twelve-month calendar, here," she said. "The advantage of it is that you get vacation time!"

This year, my vacation time has managed to stretch itself to delicious lengths. Beginning with a surgery in mid-April, I regularly took one or two days off from work a week, strategizing the time off around holidays and Fridays, which informally are regarded as professional development days for faculty. I did this with a few simple goals in mind:

1. I wanted to add a new layer of commitment to my daily writing practice, enhancing my three pages of first-thing-in-the-morning longhand free writing done in the spirit of "anything goes" with an evening gig of writing a minimum of 750 words on topics of a slightly more structured nature.

2. I wanted to be more active in the backyard farming venture that my husband and I had instigated when we moved to New York three years ago.

3. I wanted to kick up my fitness training for triathlons and marathons.

4. And, last but perhaps most significant, I had a book manuscript to revise.

What these goals required me to do was re-articulate some relationships of ideas and antinomies: vacation and work, time on and time off, pleasure and toil. Because I was never really entirely unplugged, I was never really off work. In a sense, then, I was simultaneously on vacation and away from my desk, and present for students and others who needed me almost as much as I would have been during the school year. I had days off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays, and often for purposes of research, ethnography, and conference attendance, I was on the job on the traditional off days of Saturday and Sunday. In the process, work stopped being a job and evolved into pleasure. Toil, too, became something I associated less with poring over a student's assignment or degree plan and more with the healthful and rejuvenating work of growing food. The blurring of concepts resulted in a sort of relaxation that makes me wonder sometimes how a day that began with the rooster's crowing, involved writing on three separate projects, exercise, gardening and cooking, and ended with the late-night hooting of an owl could actually have a beginning and end. Time also blurred from set calibrations into a cyclical force governed by a sort of daily dance between the rhythms of nature and the day's to-do list. The list never was completely accomplished, but more got done than I expected.

        Is there a way to measure accomplishment? Six poems accepted by a writer's festival; one short story accepted by a social media story-writing site; a draft of terms defining hip-hop studies in place; a book manuscript that's 80 percent revised, eight energetic days away from completion. More accomplishments: The creation of five blogs to which I contribute regularly; a triathlon done; a 14-mile run for a marathon done; research trips to Seattle and Washington DC complete; scads of tomatoes, squash, and collards, among other veggies; 400-plus heads of garlic curing in the barn.

Now, the sun sets before 8 p.m. It is dark in our part of the globe by 8:30. In approximately five weeks, the fall equinox will occur, creating first two equal 12-hour chunks of daylight and night and then tipping the balance in favor of night.

I used to dread the loss of daylight because it signaled the onset of winter. Winter meant colder weather, discomfort, and perhaps for me in a symbolic sense, death.

Perhaps I disliked the concept of death in my earlier years because, like many humans, I feared getting old: Losing my faculties, my energy, my ability to run marathons. As a result, I treated fall as a race: Rush to the office, hurry up on the syllabi, caffein-ate myself, and write, read, grade, volunteer for committees, race to the meetings, squeeze in those workouts, and don't forget about yoga as if every day was going to be its last. And, predictably, I got nothing done. The days turned out to be long and short at the same time, and I was so busy running around that I never had time to stop and consider what needed to be done.

The shorter days now make me wonder if we might be able to redefine our understandings of fall. As academics, we see fall as the beginning. A new academic year, new courses, new calendar, new faculty hires, new faces and new possibilities. The newness makes us rush and plunge into life breathlessly; we don't want to be left behind. Perhaps, however, we have it wrong. Perhaps the fall is the time to slow down. To take in the newness, to approach the new calendar slowly as if it is our support and not our penalizer, reminding us of all the deadlines we're missing, the things that could have been done sooner, faster, better.

Maybe it's the time to remember that if we work on a twelve-month calendar, we have advantages. We have a full year of pay and we have vacation days.