39 bottles of wine by the road, 39 bottles of wine ...

There's an otherwise scenic country road near my home that holds great appeal for aficionados of cheap wine. And not just any wine, but Arbor Mist. While I've never drank the stuff, I now know this much. It costs around $4 a bottle, rarely shatters on impact and comes in 12 tooty-fruity flavors that eventually all smell like putrid Kool Aid.

Now there's no reason to feel morally superior because your buzz comes from a $20 bottle of Merlot with a genuine cork instead of a screw cap. When times are this hard, there's a legitimate need for some cheap happy. Besides, mix in a little slow dance and Michigan might even achieve positive population growth.

My problem concerns the containers that all that cheap happy comes in. On a walk last Sunday with my wife and two daughters, we picked up 39 empty Arbor Mist bottles -- 39! -- that were scattered along a two-mile stretch of road. We'd brought along two empty trash bags, but they got so heavy and foul-smelling that we had to come back with my car and get them later.

After some initial grousing the kids even made a game of it. They'd chant Ar-bor Mist, Ar-bor Mist, Ar-bor Mist until they found another dead soldier -- about every 200 feet or so. And they kept track of the most popular varieties. Like a truck stop sommelier, my 8-year-old daughter's vocabulary now includes the terms Exotic Fruit and Sangria Zinfandel (which won hands-down). Although I'm afraid the moldy dregs she found inside the bottles may make her swear off fermented beverages forever.

But we also talked about the sad truth behind all this dismal litter. There's likely no romance here, just some lonely soul who's in a deadly hurry to get joylessly inebriated. So it's drink, drive, toss out window and repeat as necessary. I just pray that he keeps one steady hand on the wheel since the road's lined with big, obstinate trees that do not suffer fools gladly. That's the dark side to cheap wine and anyone who makes or sells this stuff must know that.

For the kids, this was also good practice but for reasons that they can't presently fathom. Soon enough they'll have to clean up numerous messes that were not of their own making: trillions in ill-spent government debt; two or three unfinished wars; the occasional oil spill or nuclear catastrophe; and once they're parents, the dank surprises that they'll encounter inside several years' worth of loaded diapers.

After their Dad-mandated community service, the girls were proud and even a bit self-righteous about what we'd accomplished. A little of that's fine by me, though. Because after someone trashes your home ground, they've got no right tell you to put a cork in it.

Dough, Ray, Me: a Home-Baked Solution to Community Bliss

Last week, in my small town of Three Rivers, we watched with pride as our Lady Cats basketball team fought its way to the state championship in Lansing. They lost, but not for want of vocal support. Nearly 2,000 purple-clad fans drove two hours to see the game -- about 25 percent of our population. When the team bus arrived home at 11 p.m. it was faithfully met by a fire truck, police cars and even an RV that led them on a victory lap of downtown.

Even if you don't care much for sports, you've got to appreciate such a generous display of community spirit. I was sad to see it end, and wished the excitement and camaraderie would've lasted a few weeks more. But alas, to everything there's a season.

Or is there? As I thought of other ways that communities can build unity through shared experience, another event came to mind. This one took place in Munising, an unpretentious Upper Peninsula town on the shores of Lake Superior.

It was early afternoon and we'd stopped for a picnic lunch at a lakeside park. While the kids played on the beach, I saw a guy -- let's call him Ray -- loading split chunks of maple into what looked like a wood-fired pizza oven. Except that it was outside.

"So what do you call this thing?" I asked.

"Oh, dis is da community oven," Ray said, with a classic Yooper accent. "I'm firin' it up for my girlfriend so they can bake in it tonight. Gotta keep 'em happy, eh?"

When we came back that night, it wasn't just Ray's girlfriend that he'd made happy. Hundreds of townsfolks had gathered for a free outdoor concert. It was a kaleideocope audience: young parents with kids on blankets, old folks in lawn chairs and walkers, kids on bikes and bikers with beards and black leather jackets. The musician, an acoustic minstrel who'd slept in his van the night before, played enough Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash to keep his eclectic fans happy.

But the singer was no more a hit than the oven was. There it sat, a sturdy beehive of brick as humble and lovable as a plump grandma in her kitchen. From its mouth came forth a procession of blueberry muffins, biscuits, cheesy bread and some incredible little hand-tossed pizzas. Volunteers manned the oven with long-handled paddles and as each batch hit the table it sold out immediately to a swarm of customers. A seductive, fresh-baked fragance hung over the entire evening like a benediction.

The oven was low-tech and low-maintenance -- no electricity, no mess to clean-up. The bakers showed up, rolled out their dough and once it was gone so were they. All proceeds went to charity.

It all reminded me that a community's like a tribe of sorts. Yes, we gather to cheer our young warriors, resplendent in their local colors and totems, as they fight rival tribes on the fields of athletic conquest. It's a healthy outlet for our competitive human bloodlust.

Yet tribes also have an inborn need to celebrate and feast around a common hearth. That's how it was in the Middle Ages when villages often had a shared oven where people could bake bread and rehash gossip in equal measure.

Community ovens have caught on nationwide and I hope we build one in my town. There's a perfect spot by the fire station on a grassy bank that overlooks the river. The firefighters could savor the smell of blueberry muffins as they laid another coat of polish on their big red trucks. And when the baking's done, maybe an escort of Lady Cats could bring them over a plateful.

A Sure Route to Stardom

The March weather has been unseasonably chilly, but last week it finally warmed up enough to enjoy the night sky. You remember the night sky, right? That eternally dark void that looms overhead for much of the long winter? That vast vault of space that we ignore as we rush into the house after work or a trip to the store?

It was my daughter Emily, an antsy eight-year old, who convinced me to go outside and take a look. "Dad," she said, "I saw this robot thing up in the sky. It's really cool, you've got to see it!"

From our front yard, the robot was easy to find. For millennia, it's been known by Greek, Arab and Chinese astronomers as the Great Hunter -- the constellation Orion. I told Emily about the dagger that hangs from Orion's three-starred belt. And about Orion's brightest stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel. I also pointed out Sirius, the dog star that hunts at Orion's feet and Lepus the rabbit, and then I ...

"Yeah," Emily interrupted, a bit unconvinced. "But it still looks like a robot."

And she's right. For that matter, Orion also resembles a football referee with his arms raised to signal a touchdown. But with low-tech stargazing, that's part of the game. The expert answer doesn't have to be your answer. If you think, as I do, that the constellation Auriga looks more like home plate than it does some deity on a chariot, who's to say you're wrong?

Many stargazers don't even use a telescope. I know: the one I got for Christmas a few years back now gathers dust webs in the barn. For beginners, telescopes are actually a barrier because they focus on a narrow point in the sky. You can't learn to identify constellations one star at a time. You've got to scan the whole horizon -- much as a barefoot, goat-herding astronomer would have done on the plains of ancient Arabia.

Our Digital Age knowledge of course helps. You can download a free on-line star chart, and with that, locate dozens of constellations with the naked eye. Just start with an easy constellation like Orion, then stairstep your way to others in that quadrant of the universe.

That's what Emily and I did as we looked north to find the Big Dipper. It was here -- and dads live for such moments -- that she recalled something I'd said a year ago: "Where's the big W -- Cassie-something, the one that's chained to a rock?" We found the W, Cassiopeia, although it's actually her daugher, Andromeda, who's chained nearby. But she'll be detained there for several light years, so Emily's got plenty of time to get her facts straight.

For lay people, the sciences can seem distant and cold-hearted; bound by facts and drained of emotion and humanity. With the stars, we've struck a compromise. Today's astronomers may use the Hubble telescope to discover galaxies, black holes and nebula that go by lifeless labels such as M-42. Yet we still call our beloved constellations by some of the oldest names of all. Long after I'm gone, I hope these legends, writ large on the starry scroll of the sky, will help my daughter find joy and wonder in the night.

Five ways to tell it's winter in a country farm house

The years have a way of making technology lose its luster and bluster. And so do the centuries. When my Michigan farmhouse was built, the latest in on-line hardware was a telegraph key. With that, a hayseed hacker might've tapped out a Morse code missive to the White House -- which was then occupied by President Abraham Lincoln.

We've lived in our two-story brick home for 16 years and have spent more money to renovate the place than we did to buy it. As for the technological upgrades, they've been more third-world than world class. In lieu of gadgets, we've added heat registers; electrical outlets; a flush toilet, clothes closets; and (my favorite) windows that actually open. The upstairs had none of these FDR-era amenities when we moved in.

Even now, in some rooms and corners, it still feels like 1860. There's a certain wilderness within that will not be tamed, no matter how we try to refurbish the house into submission. It's a primal force, an indwelling native spirit that refuses to yield. You feel it whenever the hawkish winter wind keens around the eaves and rattles the 12-pane windows. You see it personified in the tree-trunk floor posts, their bark still on, that stand like petrified sentinels in the cobble stone Michigan basement.

When I was younger, stronger and dumber, I figured to have everything modernized in three, maybe four years, tops. Now I know it's a battle I'll never win -- and perhaps am not meant to. As long as I'm here, I've decided to leave some regions of the house forever wild. Which is to say cold, dark, dirt-floored, unpainted and congenial to over-wintering rodents. From December to late March, that means the outdoors will often be as close as the next room. Although even without a calendar, here's five ways to tell that winter has come to stay:

You can see your breath in the back living room: Officially -- here's the irony -- it wasn't called a living room but a summer kitchen. Meals were cooked there during hot weather, so that the main kitchen's woodstove wouldn't overheat the house. Our summer kitchen was built above a dirt-floored crawl space. I went down there once to insulate and got briefly and terrifyingly stuck between the hand-hewn timber beams and the bare earth. (It struck me then as the kind of dark, forgotten cavity where a serial killer would hide dismembered body parts.) Anyway, we've since made it a comfortable living room and added a cheery, wood-burning fireplace. When it's ablaze, we can raise the temperature to near 70. During the week, when there's no fire, temps hover in the upper 20s. The bright side? It's yet to snow out there and there's virtually no wind chill.

Your propane gas bill is higher than the mortgage payment: OK, I've admitted it publicly, but refuse to disclose more details than that. So please: don't try to sell me on geothermal heat pumps, solar panels, windmills, corn burners, wood pellet burners, methane gas digesters, or -- especially -- outdoor wood-fired boilers like my brother has. There's tradeoffs and complicating factors to all these that make the costs shake out about equally. Suffice to say that you've got to pay through the nose to keep your feet warm in an historic domecile. Living in the past ain't as cheap as it used to be.

The Mouse Drawer has full occupancy: To keep all rodents out of a 19th century farm house, you'd have to encase it in concrete blast walls like those around the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Absent that, and because my three indolent cats could care less, I've become the resident mouser. It's a typical case of asymmetrical warfare. I come armed with my human hubris and conventional American weaponry -- i.e. traps baited with peanut butter (crunchy works better than creamy). And the mice, like militant peasants everywhere, know and own the local terrain. I'm an invading infidel whose been here a mere 15 years. Their kind, thousands of generation's worth, have occupied this porous-walled homeland for 160 years.

I usually trap 6-7 under the kitchen sink, after the cold weather has driven them indoors in the fall. Then after those early victories, a defiant little band retreats to the dreaded Mouse Drawer. It's a narrow rectangle of impregnable high ground just left of the stove, a Khyber Pass where all my attempts at homeland defense meet with futility. We do keep some old utensils there, but my wife considers them accursed and unclean. Trust me: no measure of disinfection could render them touchable. The chilling phrase, "That came from ... the Mouse Drawer?" ends all discussion about the topic.

The storeroom doubles as a refrigerator: This one's more a convenience than a detriment. Don't have enough room to cool a six-pack of beer or few liters of pop? Got a big leftover kettle of soup that's still too hot to set in the refrigerator? Or bags of apples, baskets of summer squash, bundles of sweet onions and clumps of dried dill and basil? Then let winter work for you for a change. Transform (probably too grand a word) your store room/mud room, garage into a walk-in cooler. Yes, you've got to overcome the prudish, bourgeoisie notion that it's unseemly to store edibles next to a volleyball net or rusty tool box. But what's the difference between 35 degrees in a refrigerator and 35 degrees in a mudroom? You think the food cares? Besides, we've had no problems out there with mice; they'd rather stay in the main house where it's warm.

The reign and ruin of the icicle kingdom: As earlier mentioned, old houses leak heat the way press secretaries leak scurrilous news tips. When heat migrates to a cooler surface it surrenders its latent energy to cause condensation. On a glass of iced tea in June, that process raises those delightful beads that trickle down to dampen your drink coaster. On a steel roof in January, it melts the snow to form rivulets of distilled water that drip from the eaves and form icicles. Everyone loves how they look; elegant cylinders of tapered crystalline that refract the clear winter sun like fine quartz. Even the melodious drip, drip, drip can be a meditation on a drowsy Sunday afternoon.

Under the right conditions, I've seen icicles that are six-feet long and as big around as a girl's waist. We grow them that big in the L-shaped crook of our house. And there they hang, homicidal stalactites on the cliffs of doom. Until, at about 1 a.m. on some foggy February night, they crash and boom to earth like calving icebergs in a Norwegian fjord. Startling in the extreme, but not altogether unwelcome. It's simply the Lord's own water music, come to tell the old house that winter has loosened its icy grasp once more.

A New Year in the Garden of Good and Weevil

The term winter gardening sounds like an oxymoron. A garden's usually a dismal sight in winter, with its exburant greens, yellows and reds all withered to fetid brown or funereal grey. It's the cadaver of summer left uninterred.

At least that's how a gardener in southern Michigan feels until the January thaw seeps in. It brings a tantalizing respite, a fool's gold glimpse of spring even if it only lasts a day or two. This year it jumped the gun and showed up on New Year's Eve. By 8 a.m. the next day, the thermometer outside our kitchen window read 42 degrees Fahrenheit -- and would climb to a sunny 53 by day's end.

Most spring-like of all was the wind: fresh, bright, clean and alive with all the unsullied hopes of a new year. It drove away my early winter doldrums, not to mention the scrum line of minor litter (school papers, junk mail/junk food wrappers) that emanate from our van's driveway parking space.

A few bits of trash blew downwind to the garden, which is where I noticed an oasis-like patch of true green. It wasn't a complete surprise. I'd planted a row of turnip and carrot seeds in late August and planned to harvest them by Thanksgiving. It had simply turned too cold, too fast in December for me to do that. Since I neglected to cover them with leaf mulch, I assumed they'd be turned to mush.

Yet with the snow melted, the hearty turnips came eagerly from the soft soil. And what a cheery sight they were: softball-sized globes of firm flesh, with purple flanks and baseball-white undersides. Even so, I'm a recent turnip convert. As root crops, they've got a Russian babushka with chin-whisker image that took me awhile to overcome. Now, I'm hooked. Turnips are a zesty substitute for potatoes when diced for soup and make great "carrot sticks" when sliced lengthwise.

As for the carrots, they were still babies: three inches long, not much bigger around than a fat pencil. But they weren't the bogus "baby carrots" sold in stores. Those are simply big (and tasteless) clunkers that some machine has whittled down to finger size. No, these little fellas were crisp, sweet, tangy -- a delicacy almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

The wind died down later and there was just enough daylight for a late afternoon walk. And, for another incantation of January-thaw mojo. Halfway into my walk, I spotted a rather curious onion by the road, where a snowbank had been. Then another and another until I realized ... they weren't onions. They were flower bulbs. Dozens and dozens of them. Gladiolus, to be precise. I stuffed my windbreaker's pockets until I looked a squirrel with his mouth full of acorns.

It's a mystery that's easily enough explained. There's a gladiolus mail-order house nearby and last summer they farmed a 60-acre field just south of our place. In July, it was awash in a pastel tide of salmon, lavender, raging pink and purple. Then for two weeks in October, an endless convoy of tractors and farm wagons heaped with bulbs rumbled past. Enough excess bounty must have fallen off to turn my garden-variety walk into a cheapskate's treasure hunt.

The next day being Sunday, the church celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany. It's an old Greek word that means manifestation, as in when the gods and godesses made their fearful presence known to mortals. Of course it's presents that we know Epiphany for today, to recall those brought by three Iranian astrologers to a God-child Bethlehem.

Alas that observance has become a forgotten footnote to the cash-register Christmas, which rings in not the holy days but a feast of the marketplace that ends -- instead of begins -- on December 25. By time the seers' dusty camels arrive, we've already stashed our decorations in the attic and hauled the shiny paper to a landfill.

During the priest's homily on Epiphany, my mind wandered (sorry, padre) back to my unexpected gifts from the day before. The carrots, little flowers to be enjoyed at once, orange slivers of instant happiness. The turnips, honest and enduring, could last until real spring if stored in a root cellar or refrigerator. And the gladiolus? The gardening books say my gleaned bulbs won't make it; they should've been dug, dried and stored in a dry place after Halloween.

We'll see. I've seen the pulse of life turn-up where we least expect it. If a dormant garden can still share its gifts in January, why couldn't an orphaned flower bulb find a reason to resurrect in April? Epiphanies aren't just for guys in pointy hats.

The Timeless Appeal of X-C Ski

After 30 years as a cross country skier, I've finally realized why downhill skiing has never appealed to me: it's because hills alone are not enough. For me, downhill skiing offers too much of a good thing. It's like a basketball game that's all slam dunks with no dribbles, passes or rebounds to set up the big plays.

On a good cross country course, hills are never the main attraction. The sights and sounds of nature are the largest draw. You want it quiet enough to hear the five-note song of a chickadee, or the castanet-rustle of oak leaves in the somber winter breeze. And wild enough -- this actually happened yesterday -- to run across a fresh green clump of turkey poop on the trail.

Downhill skiing has an assembly line mentality to it that's harder for me to appreciate. It's essentially a single-minded race to the bottom, where in Sisyphean fashion, a clanking chairlift awaits to forever take you uphill again. It doesn't help that many ski resorts have a synthetically landscaped air that makes them resemble an arctic golf course. Typically, acres of native trees have been shorn away and the terrain reshaped by bulldozers. Flood lights, manmade snow and alpine condo kitsch either completes or desecrates the scene, depending on your point of view.

What prompts this comparison was the cross country ski trip we took yesterday to Love Creek County Park near Berrien Springs, Michigan. My wife and I escorted a Christmas break crowd of six cousins and nieces, two of whom had no previous experience.

We rented the park's first-rate Rossignal ski gear, which was virtually new and ultra-reasonable at $5 for kids and $10 for adults. Beyond that, we had little in the way of outdoorista apparel. I wore my ancient wood-cutter's windbreaker. My neice sported a thrift-store chic wool overcoat that could've come from the trenches of World War I. But we fit in just fine with a crowd whose fashion choices leaned toward sweatshirts and chunky jeans. On a cross country course, the fuddy-duddy earth tone types tend to greatly outnumber their polyester peacock brethren.

Outside the lodge, we geared up under a cerulean blue sky dotted with junco-grey clouds. There was no line and the trail began 20 feet from the buildng. Then we set out for the green and yellow route, as advised by a gregarious park ranger who rightly pegged us for slow movers.

The course lay gentle on the land, little more than a hiking trail with natural snow cover. The path first dropped down to cross a footbridge over Love Creek, then turned into the woods where it hugged the lip of a heavily timbered ravine. It circled a marsh where a goshawk cruised overhead, eager for some careless vole or rabbit to make a fatal, but providential (for the hawk anyway) appearance.

There was little in the way of pulse-throbbing excitement. The meager hills, and you could scarcely call them that, would stir no downhiller's heart. Nothing much seemed extraordinary, save the enormous and venerable sycamore tree that we hugged for a family photo. So why did we all enjoy it so? What kind of dullard would prefer miles and miles of horizontal sameness to the mad-dash, vertical thrill of a high-speed run?

All I can say is give it a chance. Newcomers tend to underestimate the deep, kinetic satisfaction that comes from the kick-pole-glide motion that's the mainstay of cross country skiing. It reminds me of the first time I paddled a kayak. From the first few strokes, it felt almost magically intuitive. And for good reason. A kayak paddle, like a pair of cross country skis, comes encoded with several millennia of accumulated wisdom and design. It works right, and feels right, because the body mechanics were long ago perfected by our ancestors.

When so used, we can reconnect with the ski's original function: not just as a toy for sport, but as a means for transport. It's for this reason, 5,000 years ago, that some primeval genius invented a new tool which would leverage the use of his arms and legs as a way to navigate the snowy landscape. Even today, that's still the raison d'etre for cross country skiing: a walk in the winter woods made easier by the long, skinny flat things that you've strapped to your feet.

Beyond that I love how a cross country ski enterprise can be as seasonal and ephemeral as an Indian hunting camp. Come spring there'll be no signs at Love Creek (except for some little trail ribbons) that anyone on skis ever passed this way. And there'll be no footprints at all of the high-impact, hydrocarbon variety. In an age when even our peaceful past times can denude the earth, it's hard to imagine a better way to cross the country.

Why Christians Don't Know Beans About John the Baptist

Yesterday marked the last Sunday of Advent, and like the Hebrew prophets of antiquity I can hold my tongue no longer. I've got to set the record straight on a Biblical matter that about 97.8 percent of all western Christendom gets wrong. The facts in question have more to do with tree-ology than theology. But that's all the more reason to spill the legumes, as it were.

At issue are the dietary habits of one John the Baptist. His earthly mission, as you may recall, was to proclaim the coming of Jesus Christ. John called for widespread repentance and he baptized believers, including Jesus himself, in the Jordan River.

John's travels often took him into the rocky hills and badlands of the Judean Desert. It was ideal terrain for an itinerant preacher and ascetic who often locked horns with the civil and religious authorities. But it's here that the New Testament's eytomology has faded away like footprints on a windswept wadi. It's this particular verse, Matthew 3:4, that causes the confusion:

"J0hn wore clothing made of camel's hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey."

As a kid growing up in Florida, I couldn't imagine anything more revolting. We had Spanish grasshoppers down there. They were red, yellow and black; monstrous things some four inches long. And you're telling me that John the Baptist dipped these things in honey for breakfast? That disturbed me more than the hairy-legged nun I once saw order a plain McDonald's hamburger (no ketchup, mustard, onions or pickle -- just a heroic helping of self-denial.)

In fact, John the Baptist did not eat insects as the English translation suggests. He almost certainly ate from pods that come from the locust tree. The pods, about a foot-long on honey locusts that grow in North America, contain leguminous (bean-like) seeds. Around the Mediterranean basin, the tree goes by many names: locust, carob, carob bean, sugar pod -- and drumroll, please -- St. John's bread. Apparently, they've known all along.

So these are the "locusts" that John dipped into honey. In arid lands with scant pasture, the high-protein locust beans have long been an important food source for livestock. People can eat them too, although it sounds like they're an acquired taste.

On a family walk two weeks ago, we came upon a nice stand of honey locusts. Given our temperate climate and rich soil, some of these had reached heights of 60-70 feet, much taller than their Palestinian cousins. In summer, their fern-like foliage will cast a shade that's cool, but pleasantly mottled. The honey locust's fine leaves can be easily swept and won't clog storm drains, which makes them popular as urban street trees.

The wild trees we saw, however, had a signature trait that nursery-bred locusts lack: an arsenal of indomitable thorns. We're not talking here about little prickles, as you'd find on a rose bush or raspberry cane. No, the three-inch pig stickers on a wild honey locust are as stout and brutally sharp as a bayonet. There's three by my writing chair and each time I pick one up (like just now!) I manage to poke myself.

So why would such a large tree need such a hostile defense? What's it afraid of? It's got bark as thick as an elm, ash, oak or maple. Shouldn't that be body armor enough? No resident bird, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, possum, or even bear could cause a honey locust harm. Indeed, the honey locust's over-the-top nasty thorns seem more offensive than defensive. They project an aura of gratuitous evil -- something you'd expect more from humanity than an innocent tree.

Could it be that trees need salvation, too? Some process of rebirth or re-creation to amend the flaws of their imperfect, earthbound evolution?

I'll leave that question to someone above my pay grade. For now, I'm content with the seed pods we collected on our walk. They'll over-winter in the barn, and I'll see if I can get seedlings to sprout from them in spring. It seems only right to have a wild honey locust on our property, a thorn among the roses of our benign shade and fruit trees.

Most important, the tree will stand as an alpha to omega remembrance of the gospel story. The tree recalls a wilderness holy man, the herald of a divine king who was born to serve the poor and oppressed. And that king, in his defining moment, would wear a crown of thorns that were as painful, ugly -- and thereby necessary -- as these in my hand.