"This is leaves... Do you know how to... do this?... I'll show you."

Continuing with today's theme of what to do with leaves....



(Earlier what-to-do-with-leaves post here.)

Are you keeping your leaves and, if so, have you shifted into bullying your neighbors who still put their leaves out to the curb for pickup?

We keep our leaves (and even take in some neighbors' leaves), and Meade has a composting process that takes a form I like to call an art installation. I've shown photographs of the various stages. Here's how it looked 9 days ago:



Anyway, we don't go around shaming the neighbors who dump their leaves at the curb for city pickup, which costs tax money and involves a lot of truck driving that's harmful to the environment, although if they read my blog they might feel a little bad about it.

But this NYT article — "Rake the Leaves? Some Towns Say Mow Them" — ends with an anecdote about a lady who's gone into shaming mode:

In northern Westchester, Fiona Mitchell of Bedford is a mulching convert... And she has become something of a proselytizer for the practice among her neighbors and those in other towns.

“I’m afraid I’m becoming a bit of a mulching police,” she said. “My friends call out, ‘I’m mulching, I’m mulching,’ when I walk by their houses.”

The boldfacing is mine, to explain the tag I'm putting on this post: religion substitutes. That's a tag that frequently goes along with another one of my tags: environmentalism. I once wrote an exam for my Religion and the Constitution class that had a school district arguably violating the Establishment Clause with its environmentalism rituals and recitations.

At the Midday Snow Café...

... the autumn leaves have piled up (submerging the pumpkins of yesterday), and the pre-winter snowflakes bestow glittering promises of what is to come.

Update on the leaf installation at Meadhouse.

I showed you Meade's leaf project 6 days ago. It looked like this:



3 days ago, it looked like this:



The pumpkins — nicely and sharply carved — were picked up by the side of the street down the block. And here's how it looks this morning:



I like the way the pumpkins — with appropriate facial expressions — appear to be drowning in leaves and the unintended and unnoticed inclusion of Zeus.

At the Bare Tree Café...

... you can talk all night.

At the Orange Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.



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Leaf installation at Meadhouse.

A work in progress, I'm told, but looking out the 3rd-floor window this morning, I thought the stages of leaves looked especially pretty.

In other autumn news, here's a flower in full bloom, even now:

At the Golden Café...

... reflect.

At the Autumn Café...

... don't forget to look up. But watch out for the troll:



He might be taking pictures:

"Learn to Love our Natural World." [UPDATED with a list of 9 annoying things.]

Seen yesterday:





Meade points to the signage — orders from The State:


(Click photo to enlarge.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Peter says:

Those photos show a world that's "natural" in the same same sense that downtown Chicago is "natural"- that is, they show the natural world as it's been shaped by humans and their activities for many, many centuries.

The landscapes shown in these photos surely look far different then they would without the presence of humans and the various human activities that have shaped and altered them.

Yes, and the least natural thing is the government imposing signs, and this sign is especially ridiculous, telling people who are already out walking in the nature preserve that they must learn to love nature. Quite apart from the annoying inference that we do not already love nature, I was annoyed by:

1. The presence of any signage infringing on the direct experience.

2. A sign that provides no specific information (such as the names of plants and the history of the restoration).

3. Government seeing our emotions as within its domain of command.

4. The selection of "love" as the specific emotion that should be dictated.

5. Presenting the sublime emotion of "love" as something that is achieved through a process of education.

6. Stimulating an anti-authoritarian impulse that drives me away from love.

7. Stimulating an anti-education impulse that makes me resist learning. (If you want me to learn, give me some information to learn here, not instruction to love.)

8. A subtle state-sponsored atheism.

9. Stimulating a list-making response in me that provokes me to write an item — that last one — that makes me annoying and proud of being so annoying.

Cheesecake, an experiment in communal living, ongoing after 20 years.

"Of the original 11 members, seven are still here... The community has taken on new members, so there are now 13 altogether. No one seems lonely..."

In matters involving the environment, Ms. Otis said, the community is divided into two camps: “Some are Druids, those who don’t want to change anything, and some are foresters, who can cut the brush back. Jill and Gaile are the Druids.”

Gaile Wakeman, a retired pediatric physical therapist who is 76, concurred. “I don’t want a single tree to be cut.... I don’t give on this. You cannot replace a tree that’s been here 300 years.”...

The other thing residents tend to disagree about is money. And as is true elsewhere in the country, Ms. Otis said, “conservatives are those who do not want to spend money, and liberals do.”

But while these distinctions may resemble those between Republicans and Democrats, Ms. Wakeman noted, Cheesecake members lean to the left politically. “We’re all pretty liberal,” she said. “A Tea Party person would never live here.”

The tree farm...

... looks like carpet.

"[T]all trees slip into a sinkhole hidden beneath metallic-sheened swamp water..."

"... like spaghetti noodles surrendering to a pot of boiling water."

There's this one tree. It's really great....

"Government is the same institution that takes over forests to 'protect' them — but then builds logging roads into forests to cut down trees..."

"... that unsubsidized, private roads might never have reached. The forests end up smaller, but people still assume they're safer in government hands than in greedy private hands."

Government is the institution that puts itself in charge of caring for wildlife but recently sent a dozen armed agents into a Wisconsin animal shelter to seize and kill a baby deer named Giggles who was being nursed back to health there, since Giggles wasn't in the right type of approved shelter.

When government screws up, we're supposed to say, "They meant well." When individuals pursuing their own interests screw up, we're supposed to feel ashamed of industrial civilization and let government punish and control us all. If we let it do that, government will do to the economy what it did to Giggles.

"Why We Should Study Cancer Like We Study Ecosystems."

Oncology ≈ ecology.

[R]ather than labeling cancer as a group of mutated cells, as the thinking goes, we should see cancer as a disruption in the balance of a complex microenvironment in the human body. Like a damaging invasive beetle eating its way through forests in Colorado, a novel disease breaking out in populations of wild birds, or loggers mowing down parts of the Amazon rainforest, cancer throws a monkey wrench into an otherwise placid, balanced system.

And once the monkeys get wrenches your entire metaphorest goes into collapse.

The Human Nest.

That's what I've been calling this twig construction that Meade has shaped and reshaped for reasons I don't quite understand:



So I was blown away to see this article in the NYT: "Twigitecture: Building Human Nests."

Whoa! Human nests! I invented the human nest! Or Meade did. Or, hey, Meade, you need to make that human nest into a New York Times Human Nest!

Designed and built by Jayson Fann... the nest, which costs $110 a night, is always booked.

From New Age cocoons and backyard playthings of the rich to public installations made from the wood of hurricane-felled trees to contemporary art objects that you can buy along with your Richters and Oldenburgs, human nests are having a bit of a moment....

But it is not just the appeal of the handmade object — twig and daub as a rebuke to glass and steel...

Oh, here it comes. The anti-prefabbishness snobbishness.

Twigs are twee.

At the Garden Path Café...

... you might find a little support.

At the Horse Chestnut Café...

... you can trot out your crazy ideas.

A prairie walk...

... in Governor Nelson State Park today... with all the euphorbia...



That's Meade... with trekking poles...



... trekking on into the woods...



... where the wild geraniums bloom....