Woman-ing Up For The Challenge

I have been all adrift lately. I have let the laundry get rather out of hand, the man I never thought would be elected was, I lost some sleep, I ate junk that I know poisons me and spent far too much time sitting, I skipped hiking and I fussed a lot about feeling lonely and not being sure I fit in at our church. I went down low. And then, because I am a woman, with capacity to create life and an indomitable spirit, because I can actually handle all of those things, because life is so much grander and deeper and richer than the man who was elected or the laundry....I dug in and looked for reasons to come back up.

The world is insanely beautiful. I believe in the human spirit, the rich spirit of each and every person....of Donald Trump.....of each voter....of working people in The Heartland and wild liberals in The Bay. I think that we become that which we brood over because we are walking prophecies, and I am determined to tell a good story over myself. I think we live in the luckiest time that's ever been historically. I think humility and compassion makes the world so much better than bitterness and overwhelm ever will. I think there is far more deception in politics and media than there is truth, even though each of us wants to be known desperately....even politicians.  I think that fear compacted instead of expressed, recognized and released becomes anger which becomes bitterness which is the great poison of mankind.

I saw a movie tonight, all about Big Ag and seed saving and the incredible power of life that is in all living plants. It was overwhelming and shocking and scary but they wound the conclusion deftly into a hopeful, Everyman's battle that made each home gardener, each heritage seed catalog customer, each lover of nature into a piece of the massive, powerful solution. I love that hopeful ending. I know I am only one woman and only a housewife who frequently feels the cultural weight of dismissal and unimpressed pity because I haven't got titles or jobs or resumes or degrees or any other grand things at all. I have an audacious sense of entitlement for a small town, female nothing. I feel a sacred part of what makes the world work, I feel insurmountable in the face of trouble, I feel charged to be a healer of the sick and broken things, I feel strong, I feel unwilling to back down, I feel able to flex and bend and survive because I am a woman who knows compassion and nurturing and hears the small, pouting child in everyone who just needs love. I feel able to create and draw power from nowhere, and I would rather create than wither.

I am caught between worlds right now. I voted one way, my man voted differently, my parents and siblings are on different shores, my hometown is a world away from this place I live now. I don't belong anywhere. I have my own opinions of course, but no matter what I decide, I know too much AND too little to fit in with any camp. I am some kind of  odd, cultural orphan without a social "home." I can let that unsettle me and make me feel damned if I do and damned if I don't. I can make it feel lonely and hopeless and impossible. I can let it sever my from people and places I love, from things I once thought or even from things I still think....from pieces of who I really am. I let it turn into apathy, immobility and lethargy with a jaded glaze over my eyes. I could let it make me pissed, full of vitriolic poison for all the things I don't understand or things I understand too well. But, I much prefer my eventual path. I think I'm super lucky to be hung in mid-air, in the very messy middle of it all. I can choose compassion and knowledge and hope and connection to all my scattered bits of self and reach and arm across the circle to the people that I love on each side of the divide and be a human conductor of kindness and love when they can not bear to touch each other. I hope that my discomfort will motivate me to keep working for belonging for everyone and if that's what a little awkwardness does its worth it. That's the way I want to live, so may God keep me uncomfortable and able to tap into my own displacement for a good long time.

A Seed Box Murder

I have been trying to put plants into the garden, some starts from the nursery and some seeds (with varied success). I had an unfortunate mishap with my stash of seeds which kind of put a damper on my productivity. I was happily gardening, my seedbox open next to my raised beds and my favorite hand tools all arrayed around them,my fingers muddy and my mind a dusty haze of happiness. Suddenly, I had a Cinderella moment and realized I had gardened away more time than I thought and needed to run madly to pick up my boys from kid's club. I threw the youngest two into the car and cleaned my hands with 5,000,000 wet wipes at various stop lights as I zoomed through town and dusk fell. By the time we were home again, all that was on my mind was corralling all the boys into the house and cleaning and pajama-ing them up for bed, every thought of my interrupted gardening wiped from my mind.

Sadly, it rained that night....it rained cats and dogs. I went dashing out that morning and tore open a few of the sodden packets in the continuing drizzle, trying to shake the damp seeds into the proper places in beds, planting dejectedly and frantically until I had to go running back inside to make breakfast. There was a solid inch of water in the bottom of my seed box and the many remaining packets were floating in a mini lake.

The viburnum hedge between us and the neighbors.

I never cried, and I have been trying to let go of the disappointment and see it as a chance to have a clean slate. I did just tell myself that I was going to try to buy more of my starts instead of starting things from seed as they take more time and often I sacrifice actual plants for my idealism. Still, the loss is real and every time I am in the garden I am fighting a feeling of general discouragement and an air of defeat. I haven't felt brave enough to throw out the seeds yet. I'm just holding onto the mildewed collection for a bit and trying to convince myself to let it go. Maybe once I have all the beds full of real plants I will be able to call it a day and pitch them, or maybe just writing about them is enough moving on and later tonight I will bury them in a shallow grave in the compost pile and chalk one up for minimalism.

Our first black eye. Must be Spring.

In other news, spring is incredible. I can't ever quite believe it is this tremendous and never really believe it will come or be quite so pleasant and delicious and stunning as it really is. The layered scents of viburnum, lilac and iris is enough to make you delirious. The perfume is unbelievable round about dinner time when the yard is softly golden and the sun is streaming in our open dining room windows. Everything you could possibly eat goes with the scent of blooming flowers. I want to linger over every single supper even if the kids are squawking so loudly that A and I can hardly hear ourselves think, or someone has say, brought a toy bow to the table and is shooting other diners with it, or perhaps if someone has begun throwing the peas instead of eating them....hypothetically speaking, of course. Spring makes it all worth it. Dead seed collections, and insane boys, I can hack it all with a floral smelling salts to keep me lively.

Shoes and Autumn Mornings

I got up this morning...actually when my alarm went off...and spent a half an hour alone in the living room, curled up under a blanket, reading my next bookclub assignment. It was so chilly, and I was grouchy/groggy when I first got up which was nothing that a private mug of chai tea couldn't cure. When off-track like I have been the past few days, (missed schedules, dropped self-care, over-tired....etc.)  the best thing ever is just to get back on track....and minimize the emotional self-flagellation and instead tell yourself that falling off the wagon is useful because it teaches you how sweet it really is to ride. Meaning is contexual.

 

This is the best time of year ever in some ways. I love the freshness of the Autumn. The way a day carries all the seasons in rotation inside itself. Wake up to the frosty chill of winter thinking of slippers and baked sweet potatoes but also spend a moment in the middle of the day weeding in the garden with a hot vernal sun baking down on your back. Have your cake and eat it too. Welcome to Fall.

 Ru has been growing a lot over the summer and Baby Pom is finally doing a little growing of his own (record breaking midget that he is!) and today I am off to Target looking for new footwear for them both. Pom will just get a new pair of leather crib shoes, no real soles yet but Ru needs yet another pair of long-suffering casual shoes. His current pair lolls open at the toes when he trips up the sidewalk like some kind of bizarre puppet. Must keep the children in shoes. These sorts of things look bad. Neighbors begin to ask questions.

Green Brain

I have Green-Brain. Its that time of year. There are any number of things sprouting and greening and budding in our sunroom which is very cheerful. This is a good time of year to be one of my houseplants. I'm dreaming of gardens and gardening and yet feeling so cold averse that I want to spend all my time snuggled up indoors. All of that amounts to much more attentive, loving care for the plant members of the household right about now. I am clinging to each little chartreuse leaf and unfolding blossom to tide me over until the warm comes back and until the baby is willing to me wander farther than a foot from him with my pruning shears and my trowel.

Almost every night I am carting the clanging metal compost can outside to our backyard pile and dumping more veggie trimmings and fruit cores. I feel very motivated to grow the heap, thinking about all the earthworms that I hope are churning away in the core of the pile, making me sweet fertilizer for filling up anemic raised beds, and tucking around my sad strawberry plants. Its a good time of year to be anything gardeny that wants my attention. Green leaves, and curling tendrils and produce of all kinds from my own land are what I am dreaming about at night, craving at the library, and turning my camera on whenever I look around for subjects.

Pom is not a fan of plants, unless he can eat them. He puts everything in his mouth and is scooting around backwards making himself angry at the way everything gets father and farther away every time he moves. And he is starting to make stabs at standing and stepping a little with hands to hold. The doctor tells me he is 5th percentile for weight and height but I find it hard to be too concerned, when he's so impossibly round and happy.  He's just a small, plump, happy man.

Some Like It Hot

Two of the tomato plants fell over yesterday. They're getting so top-heavy with fruit in this steamy, blazing weather that the turgid stems can no longer do the job. They've come to depend on a diligent gardener driving in stakes thicker than a broom handle to hold them up. Next thing I need to do is make a trip out to garden with twine to lash them to their masts so they won't fall into the raucous sea of cucumbers below. Those cucumbers of ours are going like gangbusters!

I had to pull the lettuce because it had all bolted up into hopeless towers of bitter leaves but the cucumbers and the watermelons (real watermelons maybe!) and squash of all kinds are taking over the ground in a crawling, spiky, explosively fruitful tangle. Every time I walk into the backyard there are more cucumbers to harvest. I have started a jar of refrigerator pickles and am dizzy keeping up with the munching and the jar stuffing by turns.

The weather is hot but not the blazing 90's it was a week ago where all you do is sit languidly in a dark corner in the house and sweat. We're having solid high 80's temps now and the garden is very happy as long as I water and the mornings and evenings are cool enough to be pleasant walking windows.

The boys and I are even enjoying a little yard play during the day when we feel buzzy or brave. And even Nana had a stroll in the middle of the day today, sauntering off down the block with her phone on a chat with a friend. You can manage to cook but the summer dishes do sound best, just a quick saute, no oven work...and salads...always a few of those on the menu as they sound better and better in this heat.

I think we're off to the beach again tomorrow...maybe we'll go north to Rhode Island or try some other beach we've never been to. We're drifting off into the weekend with dreams of picnic hampers, sand in every crevice, the feel of the surf and the scent of the beach rose swirling through our minds. Be well friends, be well!

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Summer Coming In

We're into the real stuff now....hot nights when we lie on top of our beds listening to the fan whir away without even untucking the sheets, epic salads for dinner served in our big wooden salad bowl, days that stretch out longer than they have any right to be. Real summer.

Mango lemonade with mint

I have a window-box of fresh herbs on the back porch and its getting a lot of use. I drop snipped bits into our dinner salads, and snip them over all our meats and every glass of whatever we're drinking is better with a sprig of mint, right? I love fresh herb season. Next year I have to remember to make sure cilantro and thyme make it in. (Help me remember that, will you?)

Our corn went from this....

To this!

And here come the tassels...the male parts of the plant!

The corn/lawn experiment, in which I planted corn right in our turf grass and then mulched over the top once there were rows of green leaves..... is going well. I have never grown corn. My parents always did when I was growing up, but I've never done it myself. Fun to have the space and the sun. My dad always planted our corn when I was a kid, it was his special garden project, he pounded in stakes with taut string between to be sure of perfectly straight plantings, and then he put in the corn. I remember that we always planted from little paper bags full of seed that we got at the feed-store. Not a feed-store in sight here and I still seem to be managing to pull of my own tiny corn patch! Hooray!

The apples on our apple tree are swelling and starting to show just the barest hint of a blush...still wondering what color they'll end up, how big they'll be and if they'll taste good enough for eating. A few weeks ago I ate a jar of applesauce my aunt made, thinking wistfully that I hoped this fall we'd be eating our own. And apple pies, and dried apple rings and maybe a few apple turnovers for autumn picnics to boot! The boughs are starting to bend downwards with the weight of the fruit which makes me smile.

And the bees are happy about summer. They're buzzing around pollinating our cucumbers and tomatoes, and zooming over the hedge, to yards beyond our range of vision. I have been into the hive a couple of times since introducing the bees to their new digs. They're building beautiful comb and filling it with all kinds of good things, and I am hopeful that they'll find enough fodder in the neighborhood to make sure they are all lardered up for the winter. I have plans to build a small fence, with climbing, flowering vines planted on it, to enclose the area where the hive is, and create a little protected bee yard. We're working on teaching Dee to stay away from the hive but he did recently discover it and is now on closely monitored probation to ensure that he never get out of eye-sight. Time for a little landscaping to solve the problem. I'm thinking a short fence of some kind with honeysuckle on it, and maybe pots of jasmine in the summer to make it really highly scented. Mmmmm!!!! I'd like a barrier like that around my house, wouldn't you?



Closing with this song which is humming in my mind, on perpetual repeat, Sumer Is Icumen In, sometimes also called The Cuckoo Song. Can't remember where I first heard it but I know it was a long time ago and I know rings in my mind merrily and makes me smile. Its a very old song, one of the oldest written songs we have in English, written about 1260 or so....a little ode to "sumer." It says "Summer is a comin' in, loudly sing cuckoo, groweth seed and bloometh meadow and springs the wood anew..." Summer is a pretty timeless affair.

Garden Fever

Am having a major garden day. Time to make spring happen by sheer force of will. I just ordered my raised beds for our vegetable garden. It will be my very biggest veggie section yet and I'm extremely excited. I bought cedar beds from this company. There will be four beds: 3 feet by 5 feet and then a big pole bean teepee in the center of it all. I am imagining an idyllic little hideout for the kids in the middle of the vegetable garden + the perfect vertical support for Kentucky Wonders.  Here's a little sketch of how it will all fall out. 

I am so excited about growing pole beans this year. I usually grow bush beans (nothing wrong with them) but I just found out that pole beans produce supply and demand, for as long as you continue picking the fruit, whereas bush beans put out one big round of beans and call it good. I have a really pretty looking packet of triple color pole beans....gold, green and purple, all mixed in one seed packet. Can't wait to have that first summer dinner of tender pods with a dollop of melting butter.

I also started seeds for the garden this morning. We've got 11 kinds of tomatoes going (I'm not insane, I promise), eggplant, sweet peppers, lettuces, cucumbers, melons and even a couple artichokes just for kicks.

The only big things I'm waiting on are the arrival of the beds, and the removal of five diseased trees along the back border of our property. We've finally decided on a tree service and bargained for the best price we can so now we just need to get a date booked. Once the trees come down I'll be out marking out the paths, assembling beds and filling them up and maybe, maybe we'll finally be getting some nice warm weather. We sure are having a slow, cool spring. Last year at this time we had dandelions in the grass, and the cherries trees were in full bloom. This year we're just starting forsythia season and I haven't even laid down my crabgrass pre-emergent.

In the meantime, I have been watering my flat of seeds, sorting out the ones I'll direct seed instead, collecting cardboard for the bottom of my beds and buying what supplies I need to make it a gangbuster growing season. I've also taken to making long phone calls to my fellow gardener sister, Foxy and talking through my edible garden issues with her.

So far I have discovered the following brilliant ideas:

• You should hand pollinate your corn for better ear development in the small home garden. (Hah! I know the secret to avoiding those puny, underdeveloped ears!)
• Carrots crave steady moisture so you must water faithfully during the three freaking weeks they take to germinate and it helps to put a board over the seeds to keep moisture in the soil...just lift the board daily to peek for signs of green and when the sprouts show, take it off. (I think I tend to dry mine out so, I can't wait to try this) They also want soft soil to make long straight roots instead of gnarled stunted versions and apparently straight manure in the soil will make their roots split.They also love wood ashes so I know which plots will be getting our fireplace leavings! They are a cool weather crop so you can plant them before the frost free date, which I didn't know.
• Potatoes need cool weather too and it's a good idea to start them indoors if your summer goes above 90 degrees F so that they will have enough time to complete their growth cycle before it gets hot. (and yes, that would be our summers) I'm total ran out of the room to go start the organic Yukon Golds that were sprouting in my pantry when I found that out.
• Making crisp homemade pickles means picking cukes when young, soaking them in an ice bath, canning them within 24hrs off the vine and raw packing them in the jars and pouring in boiling brine to cover. (Aha! I hope to conquer the dill pickle and banish the mush this year. )
• Asian eggplants are more tender and thin skinned and contain fewer fibrous seeds than the Italian variety. Eggplants are my most recent discovery...I love how they melt in the mouth when cooked well.
• You can grow scallions in your garden using the chopped off roots from your grocery store purchase. Is that cool, or what?
• Watermelons will set fruit more readily when multiple plants are present. A single hill can support three plants at a time...they'll twine all over each other. The secret is that they are not self-fertile and you'll have much better pollination odds with several plants. So great to know! I also need to make sure I get some black plastic down around those guys as they love all the heat you can muster. A watermelon is ripe when the two small tendrils closest to the melon turn brown and the underside of the melon is a creamy color.
• There are a lot of options out there for supporting tomatoes that will work work better than the traditional and ever-insufficient tomato cage. See the following: Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C. Gonna have to figure something cool out.
• Beets are slow growers, just like carrots. Each beet seed in a packet is actually a cluster of seeds so you need fewer than you think you will when sowing. Beets like to be thinned...they need room to develop that big root.

Related articles

• Garden In Your Supermarket Shopping Basket (survivalfarm.wordpress.com)
• This Year Save Money with Your Edible Garden (mytowncryer.com)
• Methods for Planting Pole Beans (brighthub.com)
• 5 Tips for Starting Seeds Indoors (learnwaystosave.wordpress.com)
• Starting Seeds Indoors (frugalupstate.com)

Books and Birds and Buds

There is a pair of hawks swooping around our block lately. They shriek together while they soar high over the convent next door and in the morning I often watch them preening in the tops of the very tall maples across the street. I stand in tadasana and then swan dive down towards my yoga mat while they shift and ruffle feathers and the wind silently blows their tails in chill flutters. I hope they will decide to nest nearby. I'd love to see a nesting pair of hawks raise their young. I've never seen birds so big so familiarly. And maybe the local feral rabbit count will go down too which could be good for my vegetable garden, eh?

I am slowly getting bits and bobs of the house together. Today I moved some of the rugs and art work around and yesterday I figured out how to hang a mask I wanted to display. It's all stop and go and a painfully slow process but I feel like at least the motion is forward. And I know that soon...I'll be all outdoors minded and it will be all that I can do just to make myself wash the dishes, hang the rest of the house.

View into the sunroom/studio

Ru and I are reading aloud the rest of The Little House books again...we have worked our way through the first two and are beginning the third and A is reading Farmer Boy at night. I am not sure why I use the phrase "work through" the right label is "burned through" or "tore explosively through" or some other wildly manic phraseology. It is all I can do to keep the reading sessions down to an hour at a time. He's so thrilled to listen that he will beg and beg for it continue no matter where I leave off. If only I didn't want to sit there reading all day long myself. Heh. I don't know where he gets it.

The last of our snow, in that little sloping pile behind Dee.

The latest garden plan at the moment is a standard, tree-form wisteria. I was ready to give up the wisteria dream. All garden types say it is absurdly invasive and no matter the heartbreaking beauty of the plant it is evil and it will send four million runners all over your lawn and worm a thousand robust fingers up your gutters and then beginning to tear lustily at your siding.

Promising looking buds on our forsythia!

Yes, but I do love it and I have dreamed of having wisteria for years and years and A says I shouldn't live so safely. Claim a dream. I'm thinking that the grafted tree form varieties I've read about seem safer...less prone to runners and wildly unkempt habits than their vining relatives. How does this one look? The next question is: "Do I have to keep it in a planter in order to survive co-habitation with said plant? I wouldn't put mint in the ground to save my life...am I insane to consider plunking a wisteria down?

Related articles

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