Trail West Dispatch—Sabbath Edition, November 2, 2025

To allow myself some time to regroup, I’m taking a break this week from the usual TWD format and schedule.  This will be a personal newsletter instead of a column on current issues and events Going forward, I hope to observe a similar time away after every six weeks of weekly columns. 

I’m taking a cue from Heather Cox Richardson, who occasionally says something like “I’m too tired to write tonight.  I’ll see you again tomorrow.”  She does not operate on a cycle of “sevens,” to my knowledge—just as I failed to plan to do at the outset of writing the TWD.  One luxury of doing a job without pay is that you’ll get exactly the same amount of remuneration if you work hard or if you relax.

We’ve recently had our first hard freeze, and the rush to salvage all warm season garden crops before it came has required extra effort.  We’re grateful for the bounty, especially of winter squash in some new shapes and sizes and colors—with interesting names:  Green-striped Cushaw, North Georgia Candy Roaster, and Long Island Cheese. 

Mice have sought refuge indoors—too often inside the house—and we’re determined to return to life with only Hiromi and me and occasionally our dog Drover as the only living, breathing occupants.  Fortuitously, we have recently acquired two young cats, Simon loves to polish off whatever mice we bring him from our traps.  Emma turns up her nose at dead mice, but she is enamored with live ones, and plays with them a while before finishing them off.  The cats were named before we got them, courtesy of our granddaughters.

Two mornings a week I get to be a teacher again, with only grandchildren for students.  On December 26 Hiromi is retiring fully from his retirement job at Walmart.  He has worked there parttime for 15 years—long enough to earn a lifetime discount on anything purchased from the store.

For the past several years I have been involved at the Partridge Community Garden.  According to people who track things like this, Partridge is in a food desert, and Center township, which includes Partridge, is the poorest township in the county. All this paints a grim picture of the food insecurity that might be in store for our community if prices increase dramatically, if supply chains are interrupted, or if the economy contracts or collapses—to say nothing of financial supports disappearing (for health care, for example).  I would love to see some resilience baked into our local supply system before catastrophe strikes, and I’ve been leaning farther into helping people learn how to grow food. I dream of incorporating plant medicines into the mix and of working together to preserve food.  This is the kind of “resistance” that I feel good about joining.  People who feel seen and supported where they live are less likely to look to a strongman to save them.  Adequate rainfall during much of the past growing season made gratitude easy.  Seeing green fields instead of brown, and having gardens produce without slavish watering all summer long let our drought-stressed spirits relax a bit.  This is a good feeling.        

–Miriam Iwashige