Cooperstown’s Board of Trustees approved a plan to raise Ukraine’s flag over the entrance of Village Hall on Main Street and on Friday, March 11, Aliona Yezhova and her son, Joshua Echavarria, a sixth-grader at Cooperstown Central School, joined village officials to thank them for the connection. “We just want to say thank you to everyone in Cooperstown and the region who have been so supportive,” Ms. Yezhova said. Her brother-in-law currently serves in the reserves for Ukraine, stationed in Kyiv. We’ll have a full story and more photos in our next edition, out March 17.
After fighting in Afghanistan for 20 years and spending more than 1.5 trillion dollars and accomplishing nothing but starvation for millions and political instability in the country, the withdrawal was the correct step.
What did the United States learn from this terrible mistake, which cost the American taxpayer $300 million a day for 20 years? It seems that our current government had not learned anything to avoid making the same mistake again in Ukraine.
Let’s stop this warmongering rhetoric in the US. A diplomatic solution to the crisis is of utmost importance at this juncture. Let’s cease the belligerent talk and sit down at the diplomatic table to start talking about the amount of money and the number of innocent lives that could be saved on both sides. Let’s learn from all the past wars. War only brings destruction as revealed by human history.
William Cobbett published his classic on gardening, “The English Gardener,” in 1829. I turn to it often not so much for its gardening advice, but for Cobbett’s often curmudgeonly, sometimes philosophical, comments about certain plants and how to go about dealing with them.
Interestingly, his section on what he describes as “garlick,” is short and to the point; plant it, dig it up when ready and hang it to dry. That’s it.
It is garlic harvesting time here, an early summer routine I always look forward to. I love digging it up or, as is possible at times, pulling it up out of the ground (always making sure to grasp the stem firmly at the bottom – and stopping if it might be a bit recalcitrant). I had cut off the scapes a while ago, some of which Sandy has used to make a delicious pesto. Some are at rest in the compost bin. Once all have been plucked up out of the ground (very muddy these days!) I transport them down to the barn for my favorite part of the ritual: brushing them off a bit, tying them up into bunches of five, an arbitrary number I decided on years ago, and then hanging each bunch from nails placed along the barn rafters.
Cooperstown’s Board of Trustees approved a plan to raise Ukraine’s flag over the entrance of Village Hall on Main Street and on Friday, March 11, Aliona Yezhova and her son, Joshua Echavarria, a sixth-grader at Cooperstown Central School, joined village officials to thank them for the connection. “We just want to say thank you to everyone in Cooperstown and the region who have been so supportive,” Ms. Yezhova said. Her brother-in-law currently serves in the reserves for Ukraine, stationed in Kyiv. We’ll have a full story and more photos in our next edition, out March 17.
