A TREE is movement that never quite moves. Its roots protruding from the ground, an oak seems as if it is just about to take a step. Its limbs bare of leaves, the tulip poplar reaches and points and gesticulates. A row of old Japanese maples near where I live is effeminate and expressive. It is as if a choreographer had once come by and said, “Okay, girls. Arms up! That’s right. Now wave. Wave as if you were billowing sails!” When the choreographer left, the trees held their billowing sails in place, awaiting his return.

A tree is movement frozen in place, even when its limbs sway in the wind. But that is not all. A tree is wisdom.

I was raised by human beings, but I was also raised by trees: oak mothers and fathers; poplar siblings; maple aunts and hemlock uncles; pine and spruce cousins, plus a host of extended arboreal relatives whom I cannot classify. I consider them family because they have that essential feature of all relatives. There is always the mysterious feeling that they know me.

I was tree-taught and tree-tutored. I have gone to tree school, leaning against the windowsill on winter nights when there was a full moon and the ancient oaks beyond by window were clarified by the light; walking through their blazing hallways as they dropped their leaves on my head in fall; and resting on spring days against their rough and tender bark. They taught me their alphabet. They taught me tree arithmetic and tree geography, tree philosophy and tree history, tree logic and tree literature.  The long and complex story of tree evolution, starting with a single seed, was laid out in detail. Where did the seed come from, I wondered.  “Haven’t you heard?” the trees said. “Haven’t you heard?”

I would have to un-learn some of my human learning. I would have to take things like a tree. Root and limb. Upward and downward at the same time. There comes a point when you cannot argue with a tree, so stubborn and unyielding is tree truth.

When it came time to raise my own children, I knew we would have to leave the city for good.  The suburban development where we live was built about 50 years ago. The woman who sold the land to the builders told them, “You can change everything but the trees. They must stay.”

Society has progressed and gotten smarter.  But I will learn great things as long as there’s a tree nearby. 

Children between the ages of 2 and 5 spend more than four hours a day watching TV and playing video games, according to a New York Times article on the latest surveys by Nielsen. This is the highest figure ever.

Electronic entertainment is the cheapest and easiest way to entertain young children. As neighborhod life declines, families grow smaller, and adults grow busier, the electronic babysitter seems a virtual necessity. What’s wrong with that? The mind of the child is the father of the future. Visual entertainment stunts the imagination. It weakens the will and creates hostility to word and thought.

Grief is like a garden made of rocks and sand. We enter its lonely recesses upon the death of someone we love. We go there day after day to weed and to dig, to pick through the same rocks, to pray for a few drops of rain. The soil is poor and the climate is worse.  It seems nothing will grow.

In a world in which there are few rituals for the dead, no sacred fires burning and few public commemorations, this garden is the only place where our memories can be sustained. After a time, things do grow, but not always to our satisfaction. The dead are always with us. From the lifeless earth, out of rock and regrets, our love for them brings forth new life.

You could have gone to college and become a human resources director.

You could have gotten an MBA too.

You could have refused to sweep or toss the cinders.

You could have tried on another shoe.

O Cinderella, what were you thinking?

As a role model, you just won’t do.

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Housewives and plumbers are natural comrades in arms. They have something very basic in common and that is, they are always and everywhere needed. They address the most fundamental and routine needs of human existence. Civilization cannot function well without them, and yet so rarely acknowledges its dependence upon them. There is something shameful about both the housewife and the plumber because of this dependence. They point to the most trivial of human weaknesses. No day proceeds without clean dishes, swept floors, cooked meals, laundered clothes and unclogged plumbing.

I have a friend who is a plumber. He never goes to social events and limits all casual interaction with anyone but his customers. He lives in perpetual anxiety that harmless interactions with neighbor or friend will lead to requests for his services. I once invited him to our home for dinner and the event was ruined by his suspicion that at any moment we were going to ask for his professional expertise in pipes, drains or septic systems.

So it is with the housewife. People are often eager to create an informal tie with her. She cooks. She cleans. She takes care of young and old. Compared to the average adult today, she seems to possess an eternity of time. She has absolutely nothing to do.

The truth is she has far too much to do. The world is overflowing with need of her services and for the order, tranquility and health these services provide. A neighborhood boy used to show up at our door everyday at 7 a.m. His mother never asked if he could come over before school started. She just assumed because there was a mother at home, her services were there for the taking. The housewife is often veiwed as a de facto employee of the public school and it continually invents the most petty of projects to indenture her.

Of course, the housewife is glad to aid the world. The very best thing about her vocation is that she can meet the spontaneous needs of friend and relative as these needs arise. She can help others without the burdensome scheduling and impersonal interaction that characterizes the commercial world. She is glad to help. The spirit of charity runs thick in her veins. But, the need for the plumber is about as infinite as any basic need in this finite world. So it is with the need for the housewife. She must exercise some discretion. I believe many women have fled to the relative predictability of offices because they could not manage this demand for their time. It’s so much easier to say, “I have to go to work,” than, “No, I can’t do that today.”  This demand would be less pressing  if  the housewife weren’t such a rarity and if more organizations respected her privacy. As it is, she must be like the plumber. She is entitled to her privacy and some leisure. If she’s not cautious, she may be draining pipes night and day.

[See comments below.] 

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A female reader writes about the previous post The Unfaithful Wife:

That was a thought-provoking article. Maybe I’m taking it the wrong way, but it seems like you’re being much harder on women than men. Men have been having and getting away with having affairs for millenniums. And a lot of women have sucked it up and dealt with it, often for the sake of their children. I’m certainly not condoning affairs or divorce but it’s nothing that men haven’t done. Men have discarded their wives, potential wives and children for decades on the altars of sex and excitement.

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I am running myself ragged, dear reader, trying to keep up with the latest lies in our preeminent newspapers. According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, men will have more sex with their wives if they (the men) do more housework. Is this the ultimate form of feminist blackmail, or what? 

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Karen I. writes in response to the previous post about the “amazing” progress women have made since the 1960s:

Born in 1971, I was a member of one of the first generations of children whose mothers routinely left their children to outside care so they could go to work full time. My father had a good, not great, job but one a family could live on and my mother chose to work so they could have more material possessions. When I was small, I used to forget where I was supposed to go after school because caregivers included my grandparents, my mother sometimes, a neighbor, my mother’s workplace (where I would sit quietly for two hours and wait for her to take us home), or an after-school program. My mother sometimes used all these options in one school week, so there was no consistency. Every caregiver, including my mother and grandmother, acted like we were a burden and I remember my poor grandmother lying down in the middle of the day, exhausted from long days of caring (for no pay at all) for the small children of her three successful working daughters’ children.

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Rose responds to the post How to Disown Your Parents, in which I stated, “If desire cannot be trained or modified [in homosexuals], the same is true for heterosexuals and for pedophiles:” 

Friedman does not appreciate the traditional corollaries that accompany his biological determinism. Certainly if men can be born with inherently feminine natures and women with inherently masculine ones, it must follow that women can have inherently feminine natures and men inherently masculine ones. But that would be sexist. This is rather like the leftist contradiction that a male transsexual’s desire to wear a frilly dress and ribbons is congenital and instinctive and to be tolerated (or celebrated) for that reason but a woman’s desire to do the same is merely an arbitrary social construction. Friedman’s essentialism stands in stark contrast to the Foucauldian theories recently condemned at View from the Right. Gay activists and sympathizers tend to bounce back and forth between the two positions depending on which is useful to them at the moment.

Laura’s point about pedophilia is a good one and it is for this reason actually that I think conservatives should on principle refuse to argue about whether homosexuality is genetic. Successfully reformed pedophiles are rare but whether a desire is inborn or not has nothing to do with the moral status of its expression.

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Keith Bardwell, the Louisiana justice of the peace who made national news for refusing to marry an interracial couple, continues to be disarmingly honest in his statements about the incident. His candor and lack of racial animosity have probably made a few people think twice and the story has briefly reopened an ancient theme that is now rarely discussed in public.

“It’s kind of hard to apologize for something that you really and truly feel down in your heart you haven’t done wrong,” Bardwell told a radio reporter over the weekend.  He refused to officiate at a ceremony involving a black man and a white woman.

He said he does not approve of interracial marriage because of its effect on children.

“I’ve had countless numbers of people that was born in that situation, and that they claim that the blacks or the whites didn’t accept the children,” Bardwell told CBS. “And I didn’t want to put the children in that position.”

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If parents reject an adult child for embracing homosexuality, they are guilty of scientific ignorance and should be disowned for their hostility to truth, according to Dr. Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.

In a column  about “toxic” parents in yesterday’s New York Times, Friedman described a patient who was harshly criticized by his family for his homosexuality. Friedman met with the man and his parents to bring about a reconciliation. He wrote:

The session did not go well. The parents insisted that his “lifestyle” was a grave sin, incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs. When I tried to explain that the scientific consensus was that he had no more choice about his sexual orientation than the color of his eyes, they were unmoved. They simply could not accept him as he was.

I was stunned by their implacable hostility and convinced that they were a psychological menace to my patient. As such, I had to do something I have never contemplated before in treatment.

At the next session I suggested that for his psychological well-being he might consider, at least for now, forgoing a relationship with his parents.

Friedman is one of a vast army of psychology professionals who spout this pseudo-scientific bigotry. The major professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Association, virtually command orthodoxy on the subject, untroubled by the fact that homosexuals were capable of essentially changing the color of their eyes in less tolerant times. If a person has no more choice about their sexual desires and behavior than they do about their physical features then how can any sexual act be wrong? These parents could be as easily condemned if they had rejected a daughter for committing adultery or their son for raping a boy. If desire cannot be trained or modified, the same is true for heterosexuals and for pedophiles.

God is in all of nature. Paradise is eternal springs, blooming roses and an unending harvest of apples. Such were the convictions of Saint Dorothy, believed to be the subject of this exquisite painting by the Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo. I like to think of Dorothy as protectress of gardeners, especially as they lay down their spades and pitchforks for winter.

Dorothy lived in the Roman province of Cappodocia, now in Turkey, during the reign of Diocletian. Her story is filled with poetical beauty. According to legend, she was condemned to die after refusing to marry or to renounce her faith. She was said to have declared: “I serve the Son of God, Christ, mine espoused! His dwelling is Paradise; by His side are joys eternal; and in His garden grow celestial fruits and roses that never fade!”

It was winter and, en route to her execution, she was approached by a cynical young lawyer, Theophilus, who derisively asked her to send him some of the roses she had spoken of on joining her bridegroom. To which, she answered, “Thy request, O Theophilus, is granted!”

The young woman was beheaded and, immediately after, an angel appeared to him with a basket of celestial fruit and flowers, saying, “Dorothy sends thee these!”

Gerard Manley Hopkins imagined Theophilus’ response in his poem, St. Dorothea:

You waned into the world of light,
Yet made your market here as well:
My eyes hold yet the rinds and bright
Remainder of a miracle.
O this is bringing! Tears may swarm
While such a wonder’s wet and warm!

Legend has it that Theophilus instantly converted and was executed.

Few have captured the female humanitarian with such devastating precision as Henry James. Here is his description of Miss Birdseye, the Boston lady reformer of his novel The Bostonians. She  lives on, different and yet the same, in cities such as Cambridge, San Francisco, London and Oslo.

She looked as if she had spent her life on platforms, in audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in séances; in her faded face there was a kind of reflection of ugly lecture lamps; with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned toward a pubic speaker, with an effort of respiration in the thick air in which social reforms are usually discussed. She talked continually, in a voice of which the spring seemed broken, like that of an over-worked bell-wire; and when Miss Chancellor explained that she had brought Mr. Ransom because he was so anxious to meet Mrs. Farrinder, she gave the young man a delicate, dirty, democratic little hand, looking at him kindly, as she could not help doing, but without the smallest discrimination as against others who might not have the good fortune (which involved, possibly, an injustice) to be present on such an interesting occasion…. No one had any idea how she lived; whenever money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two classes of the human race. Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage. Read More »

There is no need to worry about the massive erosion of American health due to obesity, as discussed in previous posts. If the proposed Baucus health care bill passes, our legislators will dramatically alter the relationship between citizen and government. We can just hand over our personal affairs to our overseers. For the first time, citizens will be ordered to purchase a specific product, in this case health insurance.

How long before the government gives us menus and tells what to eat each day of the week? Why don’t we just go ahead and shred every last copy of the U.S. Constitution? It’s irrelevant now.

This bill will exacerbate one of the most serious health problems facing Americans: their passivity in the face of their own physical destiny.

By the way, more comments on the obesity issue have been added here.

I hope you will read my article Obesity in America. It’s tempting to think there are public policy solutions to this problem, but the real heart of it lies in both overindulgence and the desire for ease.

Let’s say I became Czar of Health tomorrow and set about banning all pizza and soda, two major factors in  America’s weight problem. The truth is it wouldn’t matter. Instead of pizza and soda, Americans would consume more burritos and lemonade. Twenty-ounce bottles of lemonade would appear in all the vending machines. I could then ban burritos and lemonade, or at least place a very high tax on them. Presto.  Americans would start consuming more lattés and grilled-and-gooey sandwiches. On and on it would go.

America is killing itself slowly and creating a human landscape that is repulsive and obscene.

Gourmet was once a great American magazine about travel and the art of entertaining and cooking. It was literate and restrained, with photographs of exquisitely decorated tables set for meals with no people in sight. These scenes were fantastically suggestive and encompassed everything from intimate aprés-ski parties to large Easter buffets. The travel articles were evocative and well-written; the recipes were flawless.

The magazine was debauched under the reign of former New York Times food writer Ruth Reichl, who turned it into a journal for urban “foodies” with their decadent obsession with chefs and the hottest restaurants. She defaced it with photographs of  smiling models, a  violation of the Gourmet aesthetic which always left something up to the imagination, and filled it with bizarre recipes that called for exotic ingredients in uninviting combinations.

Condé Nast announced on Monday that the 69-year-old magazine would shut down, blaming it on the economy. It had to go. Old bound editions of the magazine will be treasured for years to come.

A female reader writes:

I am a stay-at-home mother of two. I have been a homemaker for ten years now, and the rude questions and comments from outsiders still take me by surprise sometimes, though not the way they used to.

I just wanted to say I love your blog. I read a response you wrote to a young homemaker who was insulted by a friend on Facebook and I so wish I had read that when I was first a homemaker and others were making constant comments about what in the world I was doing. I had some very valid reasons for staying home, but I did not care to share our business with the world so I meekly took the comments and issued few comebacks. I have a college degree I worked hard for, and your observations about what is encouraged in our society are completely correct. I got more affirmation for being a court reporter writing rubbish for the front page of the local rag than I ever did for staying home and taking care of my family. Your advice is fantastic and your observations show keen insight into what homemakers face.

Laura writes:

Thank you very much.

Yes, after a while, I started to think of myself as a sort of suburban Solzhenitsyn, without the beard or the gulag. A middle class housewife who is committed to her vocation is a social dissident whether she likes it or not.

Sarah Palin’s life story is ready to hit the stands soon. Palin’s relatively uneventful life seems thin material for a memoir. Her ghost writers (she surely did not write this book herself) will play up her outdoorsy, frontierswoman persona, as is clear from the cover and title. If she can shoot a moose, she can lead a country. By the way, is that a windbreaker she is wearing? That makes sense. It’s tough-gal chic. I am looking forward to soaking up all the details about Palin’s high school basketball triumphs.