Last night I found myself gnashing my teeth once more over the poisonous political atmosphere in our country, the fury erupting in Haiti, the insanity of our financial situation and other things that go bump in the night, and in the process of sorting it all out, I wrote a note to a friend. What I said sort of popped out and surprised me, but now that I’ve articulated it, I think it makes perfect sense: GRIT needs to take over the world.

Yes, I know. It’s a bold statement, but please, hear me out. Here at GRIT, our values are all about hard work and pleasure in simple things. We’re about community and self-reliance, in just about equal measure. We talk about how to feed ourselves, grow things, build stuff, get along with each other and say a holy “Gee whiz” at the amazing intricacy of the natural world. And that’s just what’s between the pages of our magazine.

Even better is what goes on here behind the scenes. Get this: our staff gets along and works out differences. I know. I know. Amazing. When things get rough, we have conversations and figure out ways to do better.

Now, within the GRIT staff itself, we have the comfort level of somewhat similar backgrounds: We grew up in small towns or on farms, we went to church and were in 4-H, FFA or FHA, had some experience doing chores we didn’t want to and some sense of celebration with our families and communities when the work was done.

But we work for a company with a couple hundred people here under the same roof, and not everyone has that same history. We live in a relatively conservative state, one that the national media would have us believe is intolerant and impossible for anyone who isn’t white, politically conservative and religiously fundamental. Daily, we put the lie to that assumption.

We have white people working here, black people, Hispanic people, Asian people. We have Christians of various flavors—Protestant, with several subdivisions (Baptist, Freewill Baptist, Episcopalian, Church of Christ, Community churches, etc.); Catholic; Jewish; Buddhist and a few employees who might be described as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The staff includes straights, gays and who-the-heck-knows; liberals, conservatives, arch-liberals, arch-conservatives and maybe a few commies or anarchists who just know how to keep their mouths shut (doubtful).

When a long-time employee recently experienced a devastating medical situation and used up all her leave and financial resources, no one asked what church she attended or if she followed a particular political orthodoxy. We just started organizing raffles and potlucks and other opportunities for employees to support her in unofficial ways. Last year, we did the same with another employee who had a baby so premature it was a medical miracle that she survived. Prior to that, another employee’s daughter passed away suddenly, leaving him and his wife with an infant and three older children to support on a custodian’s income. In each case, we rallied ‘round, made up a bunch of food and just started doing what we could to assist them past the rocky parts.

We’re like that here. Quietly, matter-of-factly, without the need for trumpets blaring and news cameras focused on how generous we are. We take care of each other.

We don’t argue about politics, religion or sex in our break room or in our individual work areas – and believe me, for some of us more opinionated types, that occasionally requires restraint. We let each other be, we get along and we get an unbelievable amount of work done. Not only that, we actually like each other.

I think it’s a model the rest of the country would do well to follow. We’re happy to share.

Earlier yesterday, we were hemmed in by a cold, dense fog. Later in the day weather conditions morphed into a storm of little ice pellets that bounced off the frozen grass like popcorn, clicking like tiny fingernails on my window glass. Fearless Editor Hank stopped by my office, and I pointed excitedly out the window.

“I know what that is!”

“What? The sleet?” he asked, peering out into the yuck outside.

“No! It’s grapple … no, wait … not that … it’s … it’s GRAUPEL!”

See? There is an exactly right word for absolutely everything. Graupel isn’t just your garden-variety sleet. It’s that fluffy, pellet-y stuff that forms when freezing fog condenses on a snowflake. The distinction between sleet and graupel, I think, is that graupel is fluffy-looking and sleet is icy. Graupel looks like a hybrid between snow and a ball-bearing.

Call me a wonk; I love these minute distinctions that make one thing not another. One of the ways I know I’m in exactly the right career is the glee I feel when I’ve discovered the precisely right word for something.

I also love that other people care enough about the physical world to create these bodies of distinctions. Somebody was really paying attention when they noticed not only that snowflakes were very different from each other, but that they fit in particular categories.

As I cruised the Internet yesterday, searching for more information on graupel (a surprising body of information can be found, as it turns out), I stumbled upon this post on Ðrawn Association describing the work of Wilson Allen Bentley, a 19-year-old farmer living in Vermont in 1885, who has now become sort of the Patron Saint of Snowflakes. Fascinated by snow crystals, this teenager was the first person to successfully produce a photo of snow or ice crystals. He magnified crystals at 69 to 3,000 times on glass plates, and ultimately verified that every ice crystal actually is unique, growing symmetrically in a 6-sided hexagon around a miniscule nucleus. The shape the snowflake ultimately takes depends on its water content and the temperature.

Those photos by Bentley completely knock me out. Photography was in its infancy when he started experimenting with photographing snowflakes. And he had to invent a new camera to be able to pursue his obsession. But just look at those photos. Simply amazing and awe-inspiring, just because a curious Vermont teenager cared enough to keep at an intellectual pursuit day after day, year after year.

After being inspired by Bentley's photos, check out www.snowcrystals.com to find more snowflake photos and physics as well as links to help you find snow activities (such as "snowflake watching") for children and adults. 

Let’s hear it for slightly fey compulsions, pretty pictures—and also graupel.

I have only had one personal experience with a flood. That was several years ago, just before Thanksgiving dinner, when a plumbing issue covered three rooms of my home in two inches of water, none of it particularly clean. The worst that happened was that Thanksgiving dinner was very late, we were very tired and hungry after the cleanup and the plumber’s bill for making an emergency house call on Thanksgiving Day was not precisely modest. Pain in the Butt Index (PITBI): 6 on a scale of 1 to 10.

For local farmers in Georgia, recent floods have pushed the PITBI completely off the scale.

Can you imagine having absolutely everything you own covered in muck, everything you’ve worked for washed away, your ability to make a living eliminated, and even the land you’ve intended to pass on to your children turned into a clay-laden silt pile? Yeah, me neither. But that’s what small farmers in Georgia are dealing with, and I hope some of our great GRIT community will be able to lend a helping hand, in whatever way they can.

In September, heavy rains combined with already saturated ground created serious flooding in several Georgia counties, and inundated parts of urban Atlanta. Unlike its anemic response immediately after Katrina, this time the Federal Emergency Management Agency appears to be responding quickly to give residents relief to help get their lives back on track. The catch is, FEMA doesn’t cover agricultural operations. Small farmers have been referred to state agencies, but those agencies only provide loans and these farms operate on such slender margins, a loan would sink them as surely as the flood.

By most measures, this group of farmers is doing things right. They are mostly families, growing as organically as possible, selling to local markets and farming in a way that respects the environment and provides nutritious food to their communities. Some operate as Community Supported Agriculture, offering subscriptions to their farms. They belong to their communities, their communities belong to them.

If these were larger agricultural endeavors, they might be able to bear the weight of a loan while they get reestablished. Small farms operate much closer to the bone and these floods have cut very deeply into their ability to survive. Their livestock drowned, their topsoil washed away, their fall crops were destroyed. That’s about as dire as it gets.

Their best hope right now is the fundraising being done by groups such as Slow Food Atlanta. You can read more about their efforts here: http://www.slowfoodatlanta.org/slow_food_atl_news.html

I’m sending a check today and will ask friends involved in local food groups in my area to see what we can do to help out. I hope some of you can do the same – and let us know if you can think of other ways to assist.

And once the crisis has passed, we all need to let our public officials that some provision needs to be made so public relief efforts include the small farmers who raise our food and steward our land.

Funds sent to “Georgia Flooded Farms Relief Fund” will be given directly to local farmers. Here’s the address:

Georgia Flooded Farms Relief Fund
P.O. Box 2641
Smyrna, GA 30081

For the past several years I have been lucky enough to have access to not one, but two really great local bakeries, WheatFields in Lawrence, KS, and Farm To Market Bread Co. in Kansas City, MO. Their bread is everything bread should be – crusty when it’s supposed to be, chewy when that’s called for, and always full of nutrition and flavor.

This rich, satisfying, delicious experience of bread stands in stark contrast to a couple of recent encounters I’ve had with off-the-shelf breads, and the difference is both appalling and sad.

On Saturday, I attended an outdoor art fair and fundraiser for some friends’ church. The art was beautiful and the weather was perfect. When it came time for lunch, I asked careful questions about the hot dogs (Nathan’s All-Beef Kosher dogs, thank you very much) and decided they were OK to be one of my twice-yearly hot dogs (don’t get me started on hot dogs, just Google and get ready to be shocked and disgusted).  I got the dog, and was happy to see that thoughtful, intelligent people had stocked the condiments bar and knew one must have sauerkraut and brown mustard to create a decent dog.

I settled in, took a bite and couldn’t believe my taste buds. What was that in my mouth? There was the yumminess of grilled hot dog, the sharpness of sauerkraut and mustard, but what was that other ickiness?  

It was the bun. It looked like a hot dog bun. It was the color of a hot dog bun, and of the appropriate shape. But as soon as it got to the mouth, any resemblance to bread completely ceased. I don’t even know how to describe it. How do you describe a texture of something completely without texture? Or the flavor of something completely lacking in flavor? It was just … white material taking up space in my mouth.

And as I pondered this alarming “food,” I looked down at the hotdog in my hand, to see the rest of the bun literally dissolving before my very eyes. I’ve never seen a piece of bread surrender so completely and utterly to the moisture in the food it’s supposed to surround. It was like toilet paper, there one minute and dissolved the next.

This morning, to celebrate a co-worker’s birthday, I stopped by the local bagel place. Now, I’ll admit, getting a good bagel in eastern Kansas is not an easy quest in the best of times. But I’ve been to this little deli dozens of times and found the bagels at least somewhat palatable.

This morning, I got back to my office, spread a little shmear on the sesame bagel, took a bite and … patooie! I wanted to spit it out. Again, it was shaped like a bagel, smelled bagel-like and had a relatively bagel-y color. But one taste and I felt as though I had taken a big bite of a stage prop. There was no there there.

I talked with my friend, Cheryl Long, the editor over at Mother Earth News, and she says she thinks it has to do with the quality of the wheat, which is being bred now for more and more quantity with less regard for quality and the amount of protein in the wheat. “How can we get one more bushel out of this harvest?” is more the question than “What quality of wheat are we producing?” (To read more see “Industrial Farming is Giving us Less Nutritious Food.”) Sure enough, I checked my local bakeries’ websites and discovered that at least one (WheatFields) uses heirloom wheat passed down from some of the original white settlers of this area.

I honestly don’t know what else the commercial bakeries are doing that results in such a shoddy excuse for bread. Maybe it’s the quality (or lack thereof) of the yeast, or some additive they include to extend the shelf life of the baked goods. Whatever, they’re producing zombie bread, robbed of its heart and soul, and what I find saddest about the whole situation is that so many of their consumers won’t really know what they’re missing.

When it’s good, nothing is better than wholesome, flavorful fresh bread. When it’s bad, it’s awful.

What about you? Have you noticed a similar loss of quality in the bread you buy? Has this motivated you to start making your own bread? (And if so, do you take care to buy quality flour like King Arthur’s or Bob’s Red Mill? What other flours do you like?)

I think it’s time for a national bread rebellion!

In 2000, my son presented me with one of my favorite Mother’s Day presents ever: A Leatherman Multi-tool. I can’t remember which model it was, only that it had so many blades and points and screwdrivers I felt that I easily could get lost in the woods with it and some twine and survive by my wits alone.

At this time, I was camping and bicycling regularly in the Rocky Mountains. The multi-tool was always with me – in my bike bag or my camping gear crate, and when it wasn’t in one of those places, it was in my purse, though it had started looking pretty gnarly from much use.

Then the September 11th attacks happened. Without even thinking, I started to board a plane and was astonished when airport security said my Leatherman had to go or I couldn’t get on the plane. I put it in a basket with other items that were supposed to be mailed back to their owners, but that was the last I saw of it. Though I did understand the necessity of preventing potentially harmful materials from entering the planes, I was deeply upset by the loss of this truly handy tool.

Late last week, our assistant editor, Caleb Regan, to whom I had told this story some time earlier, came in my office with a very nice surprise. A brand new Leatherman Super Tool 300! I was pleased to a degree most women reserve for diamonds or a trip to the Bahamas.

I’ve just started cycling again and have no camping trips planned yet, but this baby is almost a good enough reason to dust off the tent and check the sleeping bag for rips. Even though it doesn’t have a corkscrew, I’m sure I could come up with some sort of field expediency that would remove cork from bottle. What it DOES have is pliers – needlenose and regular – as well as wire cutters, an electrical crimper, two knife blades (including a serrated blade – always important for slicing that great French bread one schleps on a camping trip), a wood and metal file, a saw, screwdrivers, an awl, ruler, can-opener and wire stripper.

I could start a new civilization with such a tool.

I thought I was doing my cockapoodle pup a favor recently when I took him out for a nice jaunt through the orchard. I had been working long hours lately and hadn’t given him nearly as many walks as I usually do.

Often, during the day when I’ve gone to work, I leave CP outside and he runs around with the guy who works on the farm, helping him check the trees, feed the hens, trim the weeds and generally do useful things that require him to zip from place to place on one of the golf carts from the U-pick operation.

CP has become so finely tuned to the sound of a golf cart now, in fact, that he bolts to the door, certain the cart scrunching over the gravel road means it’s playtime in CPWorld.

So, when I came home late that fateful evening, I jumped in the golf cart and made a quick tour of the orchard. It was a nice evening in late July and the sun was already fairly low in the sky, so I wasn’t particularly worried about the heat. Generally I figure if I, sun-sensitive soul that I am, can stand it, the dog’s OK.

That would be entirely wrong, as I now know. At first, CP galloped enthusiastically beside me. Then I became aware that I couldn’t hear his tags jingle anywhere near me.

Concerned, I headed back toward the house, and as I got close, I heard CP’s labored breathing and saw him gasping for breath with his tongue practically dragging the ground.

Instinct kicked in and I instantly reached for the garden hose, even as I noticed that the insides of his earflaps were bright red and his skin felt scorching. I hosed him down thoroughly and he began breathing a little easier, so I carried him into my house, put several inches of tepid water in the bathtub and just kept pouring the coolish water over him for what felt like half an hour.

I gave him a baby aspirin to help reduce his fever, patted him dry enough to take his rightful place at the foot of my bed, then called my vet, after hours and 30 miles away.

The doctor listened carefully, said it was certainly heat stress and that I had done the right things. It sounded as though the worst was over, and I should call back if his condition seemed to worsen during the night.

I felt so guilty, I told the vet. I thought I was doing the right thing, giving him a good run before bedtime.

“Goofy dog spirit,” Dr. Coles said ruefully. “Some of them will run themselves to death rather than stop having a good time with their people.”

Aww, ma-a-an. Now I really feel bad.

But now I know. Some dogs are more sensitive to heat than others: CP is one of those. Dogs with thick fur have a harder time of it than others: CP is also one of those. Dogs can’t sweat, so they use their tongues to cool down through evaporation. When the weather is too hot, or they exert themselves too much, their evaporation system is overwhelmed and it can get ugly very quickly. CP’s did.

Lucky dogs have people companions who will drop everything, grab the hose and cool them down, then learn their lesson and never, ever do anything that dumb again.

CP has one of those, too.

Summer officially has started in my world now. It isn’t the seven chigger bites judiciously placed where I can’t scratch them at work, though I do have those. Nor is it the sudden spike in my electric bill as I try to refrigerate my way out of July in Kansas. The lightning bugs have been around for a few weeks, and the junebugs already have latched onto my screen door. I’ve heard three “Hot, ain’t-it’s” down at the grocery store, and just today I heard my second, “It’s like a steam bath out there” as I headed out of the drugstore.

Nope, while all those occurrences provide evidence of summer, it wasn’t until last night that I knew for a natural fact that summer truly had arrived: a Bacon, Lettuce & Tomato sandwich with tomatoes fresh from the garden.

Ma-a-an, life doesn’t get a lot sweeter than that. The bacon was from piggies raised right in the neighborhood, the bread was from a bakery 30 miles down the road, the lettuce was … well, it was just lettuce (mine bolted about a month ago), as was the dependable Hellman’s mayo. Put them all together, however, and my taste buds broke out into a robust version of “Roll out those lazy, hazy crazy days of sum-merrrrr…” and did a little jitterbug on my palate.

My neighbors and I had a brief disagreement over whether the tomatoes were the Black Krims or the Cherokee Purples, since we had lost track of what we’d picked (my vote still is on the Krims). We discussed briefly the perfect wine accompaniment for BLTs and agreed that it was chardonnay and a nice malbec, since that’s what was already opened. And then … we dug in.

I instantly was transported a few decades back to my family’s kitchen in rural Oklahoma, where as a child I learned that BLT is an acronym for “Food Fit for Royalty,” despite the mismatched letters. As I ate, I thought for a nanosecond that the mayonnaise I put on this sandwich probably put me several hundred calories over my daily limit. A consideration about maybe not having that second half a sandwich briefly flitted across my brain, but I swatted it down instantly.

This wasn’t a meal, it was a ritual. Realistically speaking, how many more first-BLT-of-summer’s do I have left in me? Even if it’s 30 or more, shouldn’t I give everything I have to the observation of this ancient rite?

Darn tootin’ I should. And, ooh-baby, did I.

And after our sandwiches, Nancy’s dessert sealed the deal on summer: Fresh-off-the-tree  peaches, sliced and covered with a dollop of vanilla ice cream, topped with blackberries the size of kiwi fruit, picked a couple of hours earlier.

Take me now, Lord. I’ve already been to Heaven.