The Garden Spider

by Laura Parker Roerden

Every single evening
in her short life
the garden spider spins

a web of concentric
circles. Each anchored
to five

or so holdfasts,

simple spokes
on a wheel,
against which everything hinges.

Around and around she goes,
adding to her work,

bridging the distance from
one holdfast

to another, length by length,

adding depth
and perspective as she telescopes inward,

moving deftly to a center only
the edges can project, filling
in a spiral with detail.

Her strange and perfect offering
completes itself in zigs and zags like a zipper
on a fine golden purse to safely carry expected coin.

By morning the light and dew
create a hall of mirrors,
drawing her prey down

now lit corridors,
the mirage of open
space an enticement to beyond,

but instead a dead end.

A goldfinch flies over the garden
on his way to a field where evening
primrose offers buttercups of nectar

and darts past the spider,
her work a magnificent lit
lamp tilted just so

he can avoid ruining her elaborate
composition. By evening, the spider
dines on her work, now studded

with the jewels of beatles
and papery moths, lying still
in silky sarcophagi.

The spider unwinds
her entire web, ingesting it within

in a feat of impressive completion,

only to begin
again spinning
come dark.

The Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia or “with a bright face” in Latin) goes by several other common names including the writing spider, corn spider, or McKinley spider. They are found in all 48 contiguous states usually in gardens or at the edges of open fields. We commonly see Garden Spiders on squash or tomato plants in the farm’s vegetable garden that abuts a hayfield.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women.

 

Into the Clearing

by Laura Parker Roerden

All day long I had lain in the grass and waited for the sun
to reach the clearing, though it never did come. The dew

from the morning had left my hair damp to the touch;
my heart aching for something I had never expected to miss.

I knew these woods to be vernal wetlands, but I had forgotten
just how much shade can be thrown by the trees that

surround it. Yet all it takes is an unwillingness to thwuck in
the muck, past the skunk cabbages and stinging nettle to

miss out on the thicket of grass, soft like a bed, a cool reprieve
from the summer sun. As a child, this spot had been where I’d

have picnics in the daisies and bluettes, which swayed so low to
the ground as if fighting off sleep. I knew a rock that acted

like a sun dial and pointed at noon to a secret location of lady
slippers–fragile pink moccasins–that I could imagine fairies

wore to silence their footsteps like pine needles buffeted mine.
The edges of the field were where the remnants of a long ago

stone wall had fallen, once marking a pasture or home site, and
later simply held space in a child’s imagination, a canvass

of clouds, whose angle of reflected light told her the time.
The time is late now, so I have to go. In the clearing today

stands a house, built by my brother. He had to go too,
taking his place among the moss in a family cemetery with my

parents, grandparents and great grandparents.
But I visit my brother in the clearing when I can

by taking that walk into the dank, smoldering woods and
listening as birds call out my arrival as if nothing has changed.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd.

 

Cooking With(out) Gas

Best Investments in Sustainability

 

 

 

 

 

by Laura Parker Roerden

What if I told you that there was a cheaper, faster, healthier, safer, less energy intensive, cleaner, and lower carbon footprint way to cook than using an electric or gas stovetop and range? You’d wonder why you never heard of it before, right?

Stephanie Cmar, Top Chef alumna and former chef at Stir of Barbara Lynch Gruppo, demonstrates induction cooking. Photo by Colleen Brannen.

I know I was stunned when recently attending an event put on jointly by Mother’s Out Front and HEET at my dear friend Claire Corcoran’s house to learn about induction cooking, an electromagnet method of cooking that has been around for a decade. My family had just months before bought a new cooktop, but even as long time greenies who have spent the past year buying two electric vehicle cars and converting our house to solar, we did not come across this option in our research. After learning more, I’d say induction cooking definitely meets the criteria for a best investment in sustainability.

Healthier
Numerous studies have linked gas stoves in homes with increased asthma, bronchitis, and wheezing in children. Additionally, if you live in Massachusetts and cook with gas, there is better than  50% chance that you are using fracked gas, which contains health-threatening chemicals used in the fracking process. Pollutants involved in fracking have been linked to pediatric neurological issues, lower birth weights and increased asthma. So by taking a pass on fracked gas, you are keeping your own family from being exposed and are also helping the communities where fracking has had the greatest negative health and environmental impacts.

Cheaper, More Energy Efficient and Safer
When you turn on an induction burner, an electric current runs through the coil, generating a fluctuating magnetic field, but no heat on the burner itself. Then once you set an iron or stainless steel pan on the burner, the magnetic field induces many smaller electric currents in the pan’s metal, creating heat in the pan. Because there is no transfer of heat from the stove to the pan, 95% of every dollar you spend on energy goes right where you want it – in the pan! Gas delivers only 35% to the pan and traditional electric about 56%. Also, once the pan leaves the burner, the burner goes into standby mode, so no electricity is used in between periods of cooking or shifting pans.

Induction cooking is also faster, (2 to 4 minutes faster to bring a 6 quart pan of water to boil). While the speed isn’t life changing, the energy saved does aggregate over a year significantly.

So what do they cost? Currently, Consumer Reports recommends a Kenmore brand range that is $1,000. But you might consider a 2-burner counter top version for $100-200 to test out if induction might work for you. As consumers and commercial vendors discover the benefits of induction, the prices will no doubt come down.

If induction becomes the standard for cooking, the old adage of “touching a hot stove” will no longer make sense: an induction stove burner is only hot if there’s a pan on it. The potential for leaving a stove on is also lessened, which is an additional safety benefit over gas and electric.

Photo by Colleen Brannen.

Lower Carbon Footprint
Here in New England, many of our homes use natural gas. This gas is mostly methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Because a significant amount of that methane leaks into the atmosphere all along the system from where it’s produced to where it’s used, natural gas damages our climate more than coal. You can always green your electricity source, but you can’t green fossil fuel.

Induction stove tops and ranges are slowly becoming the norm in restaurants and professional kitchens, because of all of the benefits. Though it does take some adjustment to new cooking speeds and settings, it’s probably no more difficult to learn than transitioning from gas to electric or vice versa requires.

Cooking by the animated glow of a fire is deeply encoded in our mythology and DNA. I’m quite sure that’s why I have in the past preferred using gas over electric. But lessening our carbon footprint and energy usage can truly help us feel a different warmth inside: that of knowing we walk gently on our bountiful earth.

Salt from the Shaker Recommended Read about fracking:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

Learn more about From the Shaker: Best Investments in Sustainability.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women.

 

 

Stitch by Loving Stitch


by Laura Parker Roerden

My grandmother darned socks.
A good farm wife, she knew
any tear could be mended,
the original wound transformed

into a caesura, a brief pause held by the conductor
to grab our attention, to show us meaning
that hovers uncomfortably in a void.
Or into a sharp, an intentional accident in service

to asserting a consciously uplifting melody.
Nana knew that darning took painstaking
skill, a recovery, of a pattern not usually
perceived by the untrained eye, but seen by those

disciplined enough to lean in and acknowledge the
asymmetry and contradiction of things once whole,
now splintered. That darning takes patience and faith,
word by word. That bridges built across an abyss need

to also be shored up, stitch by loving stitch, until they stand
no longer alone. That it takes a steadfast surrender
to duty and one another since every stitch rises
or falls entirely due to the number

of stitches interdependent with it.
That we must finally take responsibility
for the damage we have wrought and the scars we leave
by sitting and working under the brightest of lights.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd.

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

 

 

A New Morning

auroras-1203289_1920

Love this world like a tent staked into hallowed
ground, one tempered blow of a hammer at a time.

The tent might rise or fall with the wind,
become soaked in the rain, or provide

less warmth than needed at times.
But still there will be moments when

you awake to dew, refracting morning light
in rainbow patterns on its edges, a

kaleidoscope of possibility, an ocean scape
like truth in a gentle breeze, reflected

as new horizons. The patterns of the
treetops animated across the fabric

where shade and light unite as meaning.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd.

 

Cosmology


by Laura Parker Roerden

Something tells me you could chart the path of a heart
the way a peacock raises flowers like too many moons.
I saw our peacock in full bloom today and noticed the eyes

in his feathers expanding like the universe; a quick shudder
of his plume suggesting no boundaries to his aspirations.
The light created a halo of iridescence shimmering, azure colors

in a constant flux across a visible spectrum. I am struck by how
assured we all are in these times,  how quick to flash with knowledge
when stars overhead suggest uncharted territory and a call

to humility. Yes, even as assured beauty can feel like a reasonable answer
to a world of brutality and cynism, something in the peacock’s
showy brilliance suggests a seed of difficult truth unfolding. The risk

that what we love can all too soon and quickly be taken away, makes us pause
and shudder in answer with our own feathers. But perhaps questions unfurling
as Fibonacci have more worth than answers hung proudly like flags on a pole.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd.

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

A Way with Water

by Laura Parker Roerden
I have always thought rocks
uncommonly beautiful,
none the less
when I notice one along the river move:

a long neck
gracefully emerging
from the mottled

grey mound

now pointing towards the river.

It’s only in the refection
in the water that I realize
that what I have before me
is a Great Blue Heron.

No doubt he had seen me

long before I saw him.

Now standing
assuredly
on
one leg;

the heron seems to have

no need for the symmetry
on which we depend. He is stock-still

and completely ignoring me,

as if to underline my irrelevance
to this watery place.

I have come to the riverbank
craving inspiration,
but I feel completely inadequate

watching this master of

motionless patience, who is neither
too assured of his next meal
nor fully sated. He stands

in a space
that seems
to define
the narrow
middle
of peace,

assured a fish
will always rise

and offer itself in a
play of shadow and light capturing
imagination and intuition.

How does
he know
that the long spiny
bones swallowed whole,

once exposed will not harm him,

but rather nourish, as stomach acids
make edges supple?

I will not be present when he later
spits out the undigested
parts of feathers or skull,

now smooth on the forest floor

reflecting bits of moonlight
offering itself to others
as source.

The heron will not look at me;

I offer nothing
to him. So I take
what I have come to find

and leave the river
and its bend behind, thumbing
the silent stone

I have picked up that now weighs
like a promise in my pocket.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd.

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

The Space Between Here and There

by Laura Parker Roerden

The reeds are awakening
in a dawn of haloed light.

Morning has risen
and is lined by low tide
at the edge of the marsh,

where gulls

are already signaling
I am late;

late to the riotous exposure
of mussels and clams and polychaete worms;

late to the stars

that have somehow
squeezed as if through a curtain
and are unfurling in symmetry

and colors
impossible to name.
For just at the moment I understand a hue,

it is gone, lost forever.

The wheel is always turning at this edge of this sea.
Sand is now exposed as sheen in the low light

reflecting gathering clouds.

A herring gull dives toward the sand like an acrobat,
but at the very last
minute, veers skyward

with a green crab in her beak. The crab is no more,

or less than the gull;
the sand and sky holds the moment
as if in a light box.

At the edge of the marsh
water flirts with light
where a piebald brown bird

drags behind a broken wing
like too much baggage. This bird

is scavenging the contents
of a small styrofoam container.

The other gulls gather
and crowd the injured bird out, flying away
with some fries and pieces of bun.

I pick up the container and notice
pieces of styrofoam are missing
where beaks have left

behind tiny
pockmarks.

But the bird is preening
beneath his wings and tail,
as if nothing has happened;

the tide now covering
everything left behind
in a sleight of hand.

The gulls have moved on
and are patrolling above where the

surf breaks. The sun now a flat disk
in a suddenly featureless sky.

It’s as if a dream has rolled in,
where things exposed

are now hidden and those unknown now seen.

I half expect to see the broken bird fly aloft
on gunmetal waves of power and momentum.

©Laura Parker Roerden. All rights reserved.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd.

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

 

Pelagic Water

by Laura Parker Roerden

Go to open ocean, I heard,
as I had spent too much time struggling

on the edges in the surf.
There is only one way to climb

out of the grave of a riptide;
all lifeguards know this.

You must swim parallel in deeper water.
You must give up the safety of heading for shore.

Pelagic water is where you’ll find
your agency. Where the bottom that drops out

beneath you is a relief from striving.
In open water, you no longer orient

to the rocks or sand or sky. You must begin
a long dive within to mark your spot on any chart.

You must give up the idea of destinations and float on your back
to calm a fraught heart, even as you imagine

what lurks beneath might be something bent on harm.
As you breathe, each draw is a deep pull down

to the wave trough of awareness.
This is all.
 You will find an inner landscape has just as many

reference points as land. Only now you will navigate
by memory, by sensation, naming feelings as if

plotting pushpins, with paper giving way with ease.
Yes, this pelagic water is where you’ll find fragments

do not fall like shards of glass or dried flowers
or dust; but instead flutter and fold as one,

revealing shade as merely depth or night
and shape as the other side of dawn.

© Laura Parker Roerden. All rights reserved.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth,

About the Pelagic Zone
The pelagic zone is the part of the open sea or ocean comprising the water column, i.e., all of the sea other than that near the coast or the sea floor. The name is derived from the Greek πέλαγος (pélagos), which might be roughly translated as “sea” but is more accurately translated as “open sea.”

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

 

 

 

The Right Whale

by Laura Parker Roerden

I’ve heard tales of how they once came
close to Cape Cod by the hundreds,
a thick layer of blubber enough to insulate
for cold, yet insufficient against spears.

When dead, they bobbed on the surface
like a cork. Or started to decompose as gases
expanded flesh like a bloated Macy’s
Thanksgiving Parade balloon.

Easy to tie to a hull, methodical sectioning
took place, as furnaces rendered blubber
into oil and smoke snaked from chimneys
as from a pyre, as fog, as stain.

Wives lit lamps with that oil waiting
for husbands, now heroes, to return from
faraway waters with more, until there was none.
Too slow, too buoyant, too close to land,

too numerous: they were the right whales
to kill. Now our children cling to rails
on diesel powered boats on Stellwagen,
simply to get a glimpse. A whale surfaces

to a choir of audible wonderment, followed by
stunned hush. Worthy enough to be named,
naturalists tell us this one whale’s story,
a history with details erased. There is

so much we will not know. Still, we pivot
to look closer; there are too few to take
for granted. They are now the right whales
to tell us about our hearts, about the depths

to which imagination can raise hope
like silt and mix layers of paint
on a palette in new combinations;
a rainbow after a storm. They are the right

whale to remind us: we have been here before.
Though billowy smoke spills behind us,
a calling card of folly, we also hold
science and art and will in our hands.

They are the right whale to teach us how we
entangle ourselves in nooses or in the refuse
of our inabilty to work together. But that we can be
also be struck by potentials to do it differently.

This time—this very pregnant now
in which we are—when the whales have stopped calving,
perhaps they are asking to simply be seen
as the right whale to save.

© Laura Parker Roerden. All rights reserved.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth,

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

About the Right Whale
The North Atlantic Right Whale is the most endangered large whale, with an estimated population of 400. In 2018 there was an unusual mortality event with record numbers found dead from entanglements and ship strikes and a year without calving. Whereas groups of North Atlantic right whales once numbered in the hundreds in feeding grounds, nowadays they usually travel alone or in groups of 2-3 (sometimes up to about 12). In 2019, we are happy to report that 6 new calves have been spotted.  For more information on the right whale and threats to its survival see the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life of the New England Aquarium.