Buckets with holes

Buckets come as they are, and they do one thing--they hold things. Everything, actually.

In these parts they're generally made of plastic, the residual order of plants that took in the sunshine unfathomably long ago. (Oh, I could give you a number with a lot of zeroes, but let's be honest, none of us beyond the Feynmans and the Einsteins know how big a few hundred million truly is.)

Most of the buckets in my home were likely made in China, because it's cheaper to make them there than here, even with the cost of shipping. I used to work on the docks. I've been in the hold of very big ships. If the ship is big enough, it can carry enough buckets to make shipping costs almost negligible.

But someone making a bucket in China, a long, long away, cannot possibly know why I need this particular bucket today.

But I do. So I modify it.

***

I bottled a bucket's worth of mead today. Eric, who loves my daughter Kerry, keeps a couple of hives in Montclair. He gave me a gallon of honey from his hive. A gallon of honey weighs about 12 pounds,  a gallon of water about 8 pounds. There's a lot of stuff in honey that's not water.

Each pound of honey took over 50,000 miles of bee flight, so my melomel took the better part of a million miles of flight to make. Millions of yeast critters took the honey and converted it into mead--those surviving now sit in my compost pile in the backyard. I said a prayer for them, or maybe I said it for me, but I prayed anyway, because something good happened to me that I did not deserve.

My mead bucket has a 3/4" hole drilled near the bottom, so I can put in a plastic spigot (also made in China) that lets me drain the fermented mead in a controlled fashion.

***

I clam. Every couple of weeks I get enough meat from the mudflats around here to feed Leslie and me for a few days. I pray for the clams, too, as I drop them into scalding water. I have no idea what they  feel, but I know what I do, and praying helps.

My clam bucket has about a hundred tiny holes drilled in the bottom. I used an electric drill.

Beesleys Point Generating Station and Leslie

The power to drill the holes came from Beesley's Point Generating Station a few miles north of here. It burns coal (made from old plants, but not as old as those that made the plastic for my bucket). It also uses old tires, made from rubber plants likely alive in my lifetime.

And yes, I think of these things as I muddle through my day.
I pray a lot.

***

I teach biology. Our desires change all the time, but our needs are the same as they have been for millenia.

Our needs come down to the stuff of plants, of yeast, of love. Most of what we need I'll never understand, but I teach a very human process that gets us closer to understanding the infinite every day.

But, of course, the infinite can never be understood.

So I pray....

A melomel story

My strawberry melomel is near ready for bottling. The yeast are mostly sleeping now, having done what they could with a gallon of honey and a few pounds of strawberries.

Last year's melomel, much of it gone now

The airlock has quieted down. Very little carbon dioxide bubbles out anymore.

The strawberries were not yet strawberries this time last year--as evanescent as my last breath, and made of the same. The honey had yet to be harvested by the honeybees of last summer, all dead now.

We're all of the same stuff, put together into the wonderfully wild beings that bless earth by the grace of the sun, then broken down again, back into pieces to be used again.

Fresh fish in Dublin,no doubt reassembled by now

The sun has returned, the bees a bit wobbly as they waggle out of their hives to gather some of the sugary stuff spun together by plants from our breath, our gasping machines, and an occasional carboy of homebrew.

Our honey is about as local as honey can get, and the strawberries likely came from within a county or two. There's a real good chance that the mead we pour in June will have pieces of us from winters past.

And pieces of those we love who no longer breathe....

Why are blueberries blue?

The dead brittle branches of February now hold hundreds of berries--most still a ghostly green blue. A few have ripened to the dark, deep blue depths of light that remind me of the very young, and the very old, of the transitional cyanosis of a newborn struggling with its new world.

Light is a funny thing--we see what's reflected, not what's absorbed, of course, but the reflected light becomes the object, at least in our minds. That's how we survived through millennia.

That berries change color is obvious. The how, less so, but we got fancy words and molecular structures to dazzle any child who dares ask. Answering the why is the tough one.

***

If a child asks "why are blueberries blue?"--not an unusual kind of question in a science class--how do you answer it?

This is not a trivial point. We live in a culture that defines knowledge as bits of information, and how I approach a child's questions helps shape how she sees the world.

Some possible answers follow, along with my issues with each.


Blueberries are blue because they have anthocyanins....

Unless you are teaching a post-doctoral botany student in grad school, this is like saying blueberries are blue, because they're, well, blue; saying anthocyanin adds nothing to the child's grasp of the universe. If she is satisfied by this answer (and she may well be given the way we teach "science"), she learns that what matters in the classroom are the words that signify the universe, not the universe itself.

The answer isn't wrong, it's just inane. It goes from inane to insane when we promote this as science. It may be cute to hear little ones parrot big sciency words, in the same perverse way it's cute to promote beauty via pageants for 5 year old children, but it's a dangerous pedagogical practice.

Blueberries are blue so we know they're ripe...

No doubt blue blueberries taste a lot better than the less mature green ones, and yes, there's a complicated relationship between seeds ready to germinate and the sweet juices surrounding them tempting animals to eat them. Raccoon scat around here can be loaded with seeds, and some gardeners will swear that blueberry seeds grow best after traveling through a mammal's gut.

If you have the time in class (days or weeks) to digress digest this, to pursue the bioenergetics of sugars and scat, to explore evolution, then this answer can go a long way. If you shorten it to "so we know they're ripe," you've just placed the child in the center of the natural universe, and set back her chances of grasping descent with modification later.

(Language matters--yes, we know they're ripe because the berries are blue, but that is not why the berries are blue, at least from the point of view of science. )

Blueberries are blue because God made them so...

The problems with this answer should be obvious, but these days some folks need it spelled out. Science does not dabble with the supernatural. It has no truck with miracles, either, for a variety of reasons.

Despite the noise from some corners, not all science teachers are godless atheists trying to subvert your child's mind. Atheism requires more faith than I have.

So how do we answer seemingly simple questions in class? Very carefully. Sometimes no answer is better than any answer. If I'm stuck, I'll often probe a bit to grasp what the child is really asking--and many time the child does not know either.

Uncertainty is fine with me--far more damage has been done by folks who know the truth than those of us plodding along the nooks and crannies of the natural world.

I have faith that my blueberries will ripen, and enough biochemistry background to grasp how they will ripen. I'll save pondering the why until the day's end, as I sit on the patio watching the nearly full moon inch up over the maple tree in back, sipping melomel made from last year's blueberry bounty.

The blueberries in the photo now sit in my gut. Yum!