Falling into Rhythms: Noticing

One day I heard an acquaintance say, “If one more person talks to me about ‘seasons of life’, I am going to…(insert desperate reaction here).” Well, this is me, talking about it, but I thought I might give it a slightly different angle. I took her point to be the way I used to feel when I was up to my eyeballs in charming, sticky, little needy children and someone would chirp helpfully, “Enjoy every minute! They grow up so fast.” At that point it might have felt more validating to hear, “Yup, this is intense, but you’ll make it. Let me hold the baby while you (insert desperate action to keep up with toddler here).”

I am looking at rhythms these days. We used to start every school day with read-aloud time. It was the way we did it. That has changed, and I don’t love it, but life is very different now. In this era, one girl gets up early to study, then dashes off to her part time job two mornings a week. The students are mostly self-motivated, and my main responsibility is to make assignments and ensure that they get done. I check work, keep records, and only occasionally read aloud. This morning I read a chapter to Addy to convince her that she really does want to do a book report on this book, and I was reminded that this is a timeless activity. When winter comes, I hope to pick it back up, even if it is just the two of us.

I am typing this while I babysit the pressure canner. Our Giant Eagle had a meat sale, and I decided to can a bunch instead of putting it in the freezer. The recent power outages that our siblings experienced in NC has me thinking it might be prudent to be a bit more prepared. I look at our shaky economy and our divided country, and I wonder how long it will be until it all falls apart. We are here for such a time as this, obviously, because here we are. I’ll make large pots of soup to share when that happens. Actually, I’ll make large pots of soup anyway. I love making soup, simmering the broth, chopping the vegetables, frying the meat, sprinkling the seasonings and tasting, adding more salt until it’s just right. It’s such a wonderfully satisfying way to make a meal.

Speaking of soup, I have a hankering for a large tureen that holds about a gallon. When I looked them up on Amazon, I found the perfect ones, but the price made me step away quietly. Unless I find one at a thrift store, I do not want to have a tureen that cannot be used because it might get broken. Meanwhile I am attempting to make one. The struggle bus is being ridden on a bumpy dirt road, let me tell you. I am not skilled enough to throw large amounts of clay so I threw two sections and connected them in the middle. It developed a bit of a wobble, but I trimmed it into a respectable semblance of a tureen. Then I made two lids to see which style I like best. The one fit perfectly. I know because I set it onto the tureen to check, and then it stuck as if I had glued it there. I called Rita to help me separate the two, an operation that ruined the lid and warped the rim of the bowl. I went ahead and attached handles, just in case it comes out semi-OK. It will likely be a flower pot. Oh well, shake it off and try another day.

Today started out chilly. I wore a bulky chenille sweater for a few hours, but it got too hot so I switched it for a yellow-green one I bought 13 years ago for our family photo. I still feel affection for this sweater and periodically shave off its pills so that I can keep wearing it. I can’t locate the photo with the whole family, but below is our couple’s photo. Not only did we have five babies, we were babies ourselves, even though we were in our thirties. Someday we will look back at this very time in our lives and talk about how young we look. This idea always fills me with cheer.

Recently I switched out the linens and lightweight cottons in my closet for the heavier knits and sweaters. I have a number of short-sleeved sweaters, which are the smartest thing ever, likely the design of a desperate peri-menopausal woman. (It’s tricky, at my age, to know how to dress, because I am sometimes plenty warm. Clears throat meaningfully.)

I planted my garlic last week, at least a hundred bulbs. I want a bigger harvest next year than I had this year. We have been having lingering coughs, and I have been advised repeatedly by people who know that I should ingest garlic fermented in honey. This is not my favorite thing, but I have become desperate enough to try it. The first time I tried to swallow a clove, I thoughtlessly chewed it and nearly choked. Today’s clove got cut into pieces the size of largish pills, and swallowed, which worked much better. I have also made a garlic salve with coconut oil which I slather on at night because that’s when the cough is worse. Have you noticed that when you’re sleep-deprived, it’s hard to ~~deal~~ heal? I have had over three weeks to try different remedies. From this vast platform of experience, I am here to say that the garlic has been more successful for this particular attack of bronchitis than Vicks or cough drops or Mucinex or prescription cough meds from the doc. At this point you might as well stick me in a baking dish and call me Lasagna.

The last fall ritual that marks the end of the garden work for me is digging up the dahlias, hosing them off, dividing the tubers, and storing them for winter. That is not my favorite chore, but I waited for an unseasonably warm day, which made it feel more like a privilege. All that is left to do is mulching the beds for winter. We have been carrying the leaves from our neighbor’s maple tree over to our garden. Bill does not like mess of any kind, so he diligently mows in circles and blows his leaves into piles every day. If we don’t get them picked up that day, he tarps the pile so they don’t blow around. The girls haul them in an old sheet and dump them on the garden. Everybody wins. Well, the girls feel like they get the short end of the stick, but I remind them that for ten minutes of minimal effort, they can bless the socks off an elderly neighbor, and that matters.

We still have hickory and oak leaves sifting down. I don’t like these tough ones for mulch because they don’t break down much over winter. We resort to blowing them to the edge of the woods. There is a long caterpillar of leaves all along the periphery of the lawn.

Recently the rugosa rose has put out a final push of fresh pink blooms amongst the fat orange hips that have already ripened all over the bush. A few honeybees hadn’t gotten the memo that the nectar season is over and were rolling around in the blooms. There is a humongous kale plant in the garden, and I will be able to harvest from that until Christmas. This is the third year for this particular kale. It was only a little stump this spring, but I didn’t pull it out, and sure enough, it revived and thrived. I also have a lovely row of parsley and beside it are carrots in the ground, where they continue to get sweeter and bigger. We like to walk out there and just casually pull a few carrots when we need them. It’s a lot easier than trying to store them, and with the mulch on the garden, they don’t freeze unless it gets super cold.

Gardening is a rhythm that hums in my blood. Right now it is at a minimum, but it is always there, my therapy. All the houseplants are inside, their summer green still glad and strong. I’m happy, and it’s fall, and that is a small miracle.

Last year I asked the Lord to do a work in my heart because I have a history of collapsing a bit when my flowers die and the long dark sets in. This was an exceptionally gorgeous, breathtakingly amazing fall, and I was here for it. This surprised me as much as anyone. All I can say is that God is kind, opened my eyes to the beauty that is this season.

I suppose it’s never too late to develop healthier rhythms. (I just had to tie that little moralizing bow at the end. Bless.)

This Week I Smelled…

roasted chicken, bathed in lemon-butter infused with rosemary, thyme, garlic, all from the garden: a fit birthday meal for the man of the house.

warm, creamy vanilla in the Boston Cream Pie I made for dessert. I cooked the pudding, fragrant and brilliant with egg yolks from my happy hens and milk from cows that get to eat grass all day. Quite compelling.

the sharp nip of newsprint on an bi-monthly newspaper that I subscribed for in Gabe’s name, for his birthday. (What does one get for a man?)

the tea-tree/peppermint shampoo he bought at Sport-clips, our favorite and we’ve been out of it. We would rather buy food than shampoo, if it really comes down to it, but it was a nice splurge.

the Sunday evening popcorn that Addy makes every week, with browned butter and nutritional yeast flakes, pulling me right out of my nap.

the crushed grain of the communion bread and the rich grapes in the cup, reminding me of a body, broken and poured out for me.

the medicinal scent of crushed chamomile, growing in the middle of the rocky path where Addy and I were sauntering in the evening breeze.

the sludgy green swamp at the edge of the trail, where waterbirds stand statuesque, waiting for dinner to swim by.

the woodsy aroma of bracken ferns and rotting leaves, sun-splashed yet cool in the underbrush along the trail that some inspired person reclaimed from the forsaken railroad bed.

the acrid smell of the glaze kiln firing, and the dusty scent of it when I opened the lid, hoping all was well. Not quite all was well, as it rarely is, but most of the pieces were good, which was gratifying after not having done pottery for awhile.

disgusting fish emulsion fertilizer that makes my plants happy and is only slightly less stinky than the comfrey concoction I tried.

earthy cucumbers that we cut up for snacks every day, and the (generic, not Hidden Valley, per insistant request) ranch dressing that some of the people in this house consider a staple food.

line-dried sheets: the scent of the sun and the wind trapped in cotton.

raspberry kefir, tangy and sweet, our favorite flavor.

day lilies, pouring charming spice into the garden the whole day.

grease on the guys’ clothes and hands, as they work on the endless car maintenance around here: brakes and axles and calipers and such.

the card-boardy warehouse scent of boxes of new schoolbooks, unpacked, categorized, and shelved for another day because I cannot put my head in that space just yet.

peanut butter on bananas for a pick-me-up snack.

Downy-scented dryer vent on the breeze as I rode the scooter up the hill to see the sunset.

honeysuckle and freshly cut hay on the same ride, which I liked a lot better.

What did you smell?

Now that April’s here…

…and almost gone, I thought it might be appropriate to send out a bit of an update. It’s a little silly. I pay for this web domain, and I don’t even use it much anymore. I find myself at a loss as to how to close up this sort of chapter, but I do feel like the world has moved along since I started blogging and I am hopelessly out of touch. I asked a computer nerd recently if he has any advice for monetizing a blog, outside of plastering it with ads, and he said no, he doesn’t know any other way. I am thinking about moving to Sub-stack, but that is all. Thinking is a far cry from doing.

Mondays are my days to catch up with the stuff I pushed off for a week. I had to spend some time to find an actual person to cancel my monthly Chat-books subscription today, since the app literally did not have a button to finalize the cancellation. I know this, because I tried to cancel in the end of March and didn’t follow through with the last step, which is one option only, “A team member will credit your account $10 and give you any assistance. Stay subscribed.” That’s a little shifty, I think. Anyway. I wanted to see what the minis are like, and they are cute, but I hardly take 60 photos in a month, and certainly not all worthy of printing into a booklet. I should have done these while the children were little. My best advice is this: if you try Chat-books, don’t bother with captions. They are very time consuming to put into the app, and the photos are much smaller. You can easily use a fine point Sharpie and write your captions on the white margins after you get the booklet.

I had to handle 20 mugs that have been waiting over the weekend, and then I mowed the yard until I got a flat tire. I know how to run an air compressor, but taking out a tube and fixing a leak… not so much. The grass got out of hand with the recent rain, so Olivia finished with the push mower. The girls ate leftovers from the weekend, and I did a bunch of messaging that I have been neglecting. I have caught up with my clerical duties, even posting receipts in the budget. Hallelujah!

So here I am, thinking about April and that Gabe will get back from work tomorrow, after five days, and then we will feast and be merry because he will be home for a week.

I kept feeling an urge to pinch myself while I was mowing. “We made it,” I thought, “all the way through winter. I am actually smelling cut grass and feeling hot sunshine on my face and my feet and my arms where I rolled up my sleeves. We are pale as potato sprouts, but we made it!” Speaking of potato sprouts, we planted our wrinkly leftover potatoes last week. There was a bit of smugness in the air, because for the first time ever I grew a potato crop that lasted longer than the winter. I also planted pea seeds that I saved, and lettuces. I have a lot to learn yet in the seed saving department, but it is a start.

The ornamental trees we planted two years ago are blooming, and so are the tiny fruit trees we set out last spring. (It’s a thing Peights do: plant trees. We planted over 50 at our first property over the course of 18 years. We’re at 25 here, in 4 years, but we also cut down about 10 or 12 trees, so it’s all going to even out.)

I drove past our former orchard a few weeks ago, and was astonished at how big the trees were, how prolific the blooms. The year we moved (2020) was the first that there were going to be apples. So someone else gets to harvest what we planted. That’s the thing about planting a tree. It is very possible that you are planting for others, and that is a compelling reason to plant them, I think.

Who does more tree planting for the next generation than parents? Metaphorically speaking, I have entire food forests that have been planted for me, and I am so grateful.

Last weekend my parents came up and we got to celebrate my dad’s 71st birthday on Sunday. Rachel’s family sneaked in while he was napping that afternoon and surprised him mid-snore. Good times!

The girls are finishing up their last school projects. Rita is earnestly wishing she had not chosen Ghengis Khan and the Mongol Empire for her history report, but here we are, too deep into the research to about-face now. “It’s character building to push through hard things,” I say. She wants character, so what can she say? Addy did final exams today, and we are so close to packing away the textbooks and just rounding out the portfolios with projects. I don’t recall ever getting done in April, but they did not take many holidays, and now it feels really great!

Sometimes I wake at night and can’t fall back asleep. Anybody else have that happen to them? Weird, isn’t it? It seems such an unnecessary problem to have. I keep earbuds on my nightstand, and I set my audiobook timer to 30 minutes. I usually fall asleep before the time is up, unless it is a very riveting listen. Then the next time, I go back about ten minutes and find the spot where I lost consciousness. It’s a two steps forward, one step back situation, but it works. Currently I am listening to Surprised by Joy, (It happens to be an Audible free listen if you have prime membership. You’re welcome.) and have gotten to the teen years of my friend Clive Staples, the era where he lost his faith. I store in my heart these testaments to the grace of God pursuing and wooing his children, and I know that He is still the same God today, full of love and kindness; full of pity, like a father, ready to help every one of us.

Occasionally listening to the audiobook doesn’t appeal to me. I have another prop. I lie in bed and put on the whole armor of God, from the helmet to the shoes, piece by piece. By the time I get to the end, I find that there isn’t much of a crack for the intrusive thoughts of the enemy to get inside my mind.

If the armor feels cumbersome at 3 AM, which is prime time for worst-case-scenarios, have you noticed?.. I visualize the secret place of the Most High, and I creep in and lay my head down in that quiet safety. Jesus never did get to be middle-aged, but I am sure He understands sleeplessness and 3 o’clock in the morning messes that we cannot carry anyway. So He offers rest. Sleep is wonderful, but rest is amazing.

And yes, there is melatonin, but it is faulty. So is chamomile tea, because while it may lull you to sleep at bedtime, it will urgently awaken you a few hours later. It is kind of funny, the more you think about it. As with so many other minor ailments in life, humor just might be the best medicine.

I’ll close with a smattering of photos of the trees and the double tulips that have given me joy this week. Blessings and a happy spring to you!

Noticing

I took my coffee out the door this morning, slipped into my gardening clogs, and watched the sun blaze over the horizon, lighting the clouds with pink and orange. It’s all waking up out there, filled with birdsong, buds ready to burst into leaves, tiny creek rushing to drain the land. Every day I check on the daffodils, urge them to hurry up and open. I feel like I need to plant things, but when I expressed that thought to my husband, he got a kindly, pitying look, “It’s much too early.” Never mind; I will not let the late, rogue frosts we get here freeze my delight in the benevolence of these warm days.

We have a row of milk jugs that we split in half to winter sow some flowers and lettuces. The tops fit over the bottoms full of soil and make mini cold frames. I have never tried this method before, so we shall see. It was easier than rigging up grow lights in a space that isn’t big enough to accommodate all the things I want to grow. I have also decided that the Amish ladies who have greenhouses around here deserve my support when it is safe to plant tomatoes and peppers. It is a lot better to pay them than to babysit plants in our unpredictable spring. One unwise choice to leave them in the sunporch at night instead of bringing them into the living room or basement can kill off weeks of work. To date I have found six greenhouses within twenty minutes of our house. None of them have websites, so it’s a word-of-mouth delight trail we follow, one after the other. I can hardly wait!

The forsythia bush that is clinging to the creek bank is still showing only cracks of color at the buds, but I have been bringing in branches to the warmth and they open right up. We have a steady supply of brilliant yellow blooms in the house. It begins! The fresh cut florals that delight my heart, even if it’s just a few tiny crocuses at first.

There’s a mosquito flying around me, an opportunist who slipped in the door when I left it open while I was making chicken scampi last night. Across the road from our house is a shallow swamp that is a breeding ground for these pests, but it is also a swamp that is alive with spring peepers that trill their hearts out every warm evening.

Every beautiful thing has its price. If you want to enjoy the sunrise, you have to wake up and get out of bed. You place more value on the things you make sacrifices for, and certainly you are more grateful when you wait a long time and then it comes, it is here, you can have it!

Addy and I cleaned the sunporch yesterday. Somehow it is the place that collects everything we don’t know what to do with over the winter. It is like a gigantic utility drawer for excess furniture, recyclable trash, cardboard boxes, and boots. We put the cardboard in the shed for gardening layers, boxed up the donations for Salvation Army, put the boots in bins in the basement (I know, we’ll be getting them out again),and washed the floor. Addy was enthused, “I could live out here!” She’s always the one who loves to rearrange and domesticate wild places.

I noticed that our elderly neighbor was out picking up sticks in her vast yard yesterday, and walked over to chat. She is a spry little octogenarian who wears sparkly lip gloss and plays pickle-ball to stay nimble, but it was a big job, so I sent the girls over to help her. It was the task of a half hour, with them all helping, and she was relieved to have it done. She rewarded them each with a can of ginger ale, after being assured and reassured that their mom won’t mind. Possibly by the time you are in your eighties, you think of teenagers sort of in the same rank as toddlers who might not be able to handle fizzy sugar.

I cleared a space on the desk in the office to write this noticing post this morning. It is in a state of becoming, an exciting state! We planned floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in this room when we bought the house, and last week Gabriel built them. I have been painting and scheming, finally giving this room the love it needs. Hopefully today I can finish it and take care of the piles and boxes on the floor. There are still boxes of books in the attic that we have’t had space to put out, and there is a growing pile of culls.

Addy was helping me with this project, and kept mentioning books she never read. I was appalled! How can you be almost thirteen and never have read Little Women? Or the Little House books? The Wheel on the School? I guess what happened was that about the time she was into Henry and Ribsy the older children were into The Hobbit or The Bronze Bow, and she skipped along with them, leaving a whole delightful section of Elizabeth Enright and Eleanor Estes books unread. I tend to pick our read-alouds for the more advanced listeners, so there we are. She is making up for lost time, and happily, the books are right there at eye level for her.

Gabe took Rita to orthopedics this morning to have them look at her swollen knee. It started acting up during volleyball, so we kind of assumed it’s a minor sports injury. X-rays showed nothing, but the knee remains swollen four months later. We had a child with Lyme disease that manifested in a badly swollen knee years ago, so possibly it’s that. Our doctor mentioned sending her to ortho to have it drained, and I chickened out on the spot. Gabe takes the children to any appointments with the potential to make their mother faint. This is one of those. I do not do needles, tubes, and fluids collecting slowly in clear containers. I have accepted that no matter how sturdy and practical I might be, this is not a mere mind-over-matter situation. I have fainted an embarrassing number of times, including at appointments for my children. How wonderful that my husband loves needles and blood draws!

Well, I have noticed long enough, and it appears that this room will not paint itself. When it is all done, I will show you a picture, and that will be hallelujah!

I hope your day is happy and warm, and contains something precious.

Winterizing

October was a magical month, all but the week I spent either being sick or feebly trying to get strong again. That week did bear some fruit in the list I compiled of Things To Do Before Winter. It was long, detailed, and discouraging, according to my offspring. It also included something really fun that I have been hankering to do ever since we moved.

My view from the chair in the living room included this wall, with outlet covers, of course. I decided the time had come, and my eyes hurt too much to read or watch something, but they were fine for scrolling on Etsy. Gabriel was working, so I sent him screenshots of various wallpapers and we agreed on a whimsical one that was on sale. (Clinched the deal, that did. Have you looked at wallpaper prices since it has come trending back onto the scene? :O)

I admit, my choice was influenced by the colors and patterns that will spark joy in the dark of winter. However, it is just as I envisioned it with the antique sideboard I bought at Salvation Army and cleaned up with much sanding and washing. Comments have been varied and polite: One son walked right past after work and didn’t notice the wallpaper. The other son said it was nice, but might look dated in a few years. My husband and the girls are solid fans, so that’s a win.

I have a few observations about peel and stick wallpaper. I’ve hung murals before, and it wasn’t that bad, but this was a lot trickier. For starters, it was Very Sticky. Removeable, yes, but the first strip had to be pulled off and repositioned a few times to get the edges perfectly straight. It pulled a bit of paint off in the process, therefore we also had a few spots that were no longer sticky. Once that was up, it was easier, but the wall has a slight bulge in the middle, due to a cast iron plumbing pipe that the dry-waller had to bend his work around. The fourth strip was impossible. It matched on the top and on the bottom, but not in the middle where the bulge was, and there is no stretching or repositioning peel and stick. Olivia and I sweated it until we both were hot and bothered and needing chocolate to soothe our feelings of outrage. Unfortunately, the only chocolate in the house was a bent-and-dent store gamble, and it was white and crumbly. We had to soldier on without reinforcement, but we got it done. There were a few small bubbles that we just pricked with a pin and smoothed out. My conclusion: peel and stick is best saved for small spaces. I much prefer working with pasted wallpaper sheets that can be pushed and moved a bit on the wall as I apply it.

Was it worth it? Yes, it was.

The winterizing list included things like “dig the last potatoes”. Check. I had a row that I hilled in the traditional manner of gardeners, and the rest were Ruth Stout’s (tiny little lie alert) “no work” method of mulching. The idea was to see which method produced better/more potatoes. The mulched ones should have gotten more mulch, for sure, which may have produced better results, but the hilled ones were bigger and more plentiful, no question about it. So maybe next year I will try hilling first, then mulch so that we can avoid the weeds that were a problem this year. At any rate, this is the first time I have gotten bushels of potatoes for my efforts and I like the feeling. Do your worst, winter. We are set for carbs to stave off starvation.

Another project was cleaning up the leaves that didn’t fall for a long time due to a late frost. I lived in a shagbark hickory grove as a child, and I Know What I Know about raking leaves. Hickories are not heavy until they get wet. My children did not understand my urgency, but we did shifts with the leaf blower for hours. For days. Our trees are impressive and tall. Some of the leaves were chopped with the lawnmower and went on the garden. Some were blown into the edge of the woods where the multifloras hold them like a rounded caterpillar. Finally we just burned some. We also burned our hickory leaves when I was a child, and it brought back memories of pyrotechnics created with a metal rake dug into the burning pile, the last little smoldering nuts at the end. We finished up the bulk of the leaf cleanup on October 31, and the next day it snowed. Sometimes it feels so good to be right.

The biggest item on the winterizing list is ongoing. I took down the moveable electric chicken fence and scooped up the rich compost with the tractor bucket, spreading it on the garden. Then Gabriel began his work of cutting down the rotting cherry trees that leaned over the chicken yard and the privacy fence. Last year a huge tree fell onto the shop, bashing in the roof where Gregory’s forge is. It split off of a clump of trees and revealed that the entire interior was decayed and full of bugs. There are about five of these trees behind the shop, and they bother us with their air of disaster waiting to happen. One of them leans over the neighbor’s trailer, and we will need professional help with that one. The rest require skill and ingenuity to take down ourselves. Gabe is very good at felling trees, but I get nervous when I am the one asked to position the tractor bucket or tow a rope attached to the tree on one end and the Suburban with the other. It’s simple. No pressure, or anything. Just watch the branches and ease it forward when it starts to fall.

We have a humongous pile of firewood to burn in the fireplace, and a lot still to clean up. This spring we got a small DeWalt chainsaw that runs on a battery, and it is my pet. It cuts small limbs like a breeze and has made it so much easier for me to help with outdoor messes without yanking my shoulder out of the socket to start a saw. I helped cut up the trees, not paying attention to the vines that twined all the way to the top. The trees were covered in grape vines, but with the leaves off, I didn’t notice that some of the vines were hairy and lethal. It has been years since I had such a miserable case of poison ivy. Last night during cell group I had to keep excusing myself to go apply cortisone lotion. The alternative was to sit there and scratch shamelessly, which I couldn’t do.

We did fun things in October, too. We celebrated our twenty-second anniversary with a few days in a sweet cabin in a small town nearby. We have fought for our marriage in many ways over the years, not just fought against the marriage destroyers, but also for the marriage builders. It is possible to be twenty-two years in and enjoy each other more than ever. There have been times when anniversaries were a taking stock and feeling like we’re not getting the mileage out of our relationship that we want to, and the catching up is as painful as it is necessary. If we have learned anything, it is to keep short accounts. Life is just better when you have fun together, that’s what I say.

We celebrated Gregory’s nineteenth birthday and got the glad results of zero seizure activity on his most recent EEG. We surprised Gabriel’s dad for his sixty-fifth birthday and had a short time with loved ones. Alex was here twice on his way to and fro a harvest job in Wisconsin. Like my friend Tina says, “You just need to lay eyes on your adult children every once in a while.” The girls did first quarter exams and finished up their volleyball season. Olivia decided that she wants to learn about sourdough and produced a first loaf that was swoon-worthy. Occasionally we even took off and just soaked in the clear blue air, shuffling the leaves on the trail with our feet.

I did not get the whole house cleaned thoroughly, but that part of the list was a little far-fetched anyway. So, do you get winterizing urges? Or do you get to live somewhere without cold and dark?

I Am Waiting…

…To eat the first ripe tomato in my garden. One that is bigger than a cherry so I can slice it for my sourdough toast. I do not remember ever waiting this long, and if checking on them could produce results, I would have had slices of vine-ripened tomato weeks ago. They are large and green, very green, but apparently we have not had enough hot sunshine yet. Even the dog who loves tomatoes has become impatient. Yesterday she picked an enormous slicer, very green, and brought it guiltily to me.

…For Greg’s car to sell so I don’t have to move it to a different spot in the yard every time we mow. There have been many interested parties, but when they hear that it needs a new exhaust system, they turn sadly away. Or they turn away, sadly.

…For my neighbor to notice that we are perfectly capable of mowing our own grass. He is a good neighbor, especially because he has a personal vendetta against chicken-stealing raccoons, of which there are many in this area. He simply cannot resist mowing a stripe along the front of our lawn as he passes to mow the other neighbor’s lawn, with his deck set much lower than we do. It may be a picayune thing to be bothered about, but it does bother me. It has just occurred to me that Gregory parked his for-sale car on that side of the lane yesterday, straddling the stripe. Maybe we have solved the problem without any hard feelings, because surely he will not attempt to mow around a car…? Stay tuned for further bulletins on this country drama.

…For the guy who said he could come fix our driveway in mid-July. Now that it is mid-August, I am guessing a suitable amount of time has elapsed. I am curious why contractors of services do this? Are they ever early? Is it so that people are duly impressed by how busy they are and extra happy to pay them for the work that they didn’t do in the time they said they would? I just wonder about these things. Would it really be so hard to put a buffer into your calendar so that you can show up when you said you would?

…To use the bagged mulch I bought on clearance and stacked under the sunporch awning. It has an assignment: the borders along the lane, but I can’t use them until the guy who fixes driveways comes.

…For inspiration to braid the garlic that is drying in the shed, and to make more pickles with the accumulation of cucumbers in the fridge. Unlike the tomatoes, the cucumbers are having a heyday of a summer.

…For my probiotics to do all the amazing things that they said they will do. It would also be nice for my body to figure out how it’s going to behave for the rest of my life. Does anybody know how long that wait will be?

…For a slightly slower pace of life where we can pick up our morning read-aloud tradition before we do lessons. When Addy confided in me with shining eyes, “I think this school year is going to be really fun,” she was thinking about extra stories, tea and poetry, and fun supplies from Walmart. She was not thinking so much about getting in some serious progress in the math books in August so that we can travel without math books in September, but here we are.

…For our Walmart to get its act together and stop remodeling and just have things where they are supposed to be so that I can find matches and toilet paper without hunting through half the store. My sympathies are with the elderly gentleman who grumped to me, “They are just doing this on purpose so I have to walk all over the place and see more stuff to buy.”

…For a good place to sell some of my extra chickens, but not the sale barn, because I took five of my prized pullets there, almost old enough to start laying olive-colored eggs. The pullets I babied and hand-raised after their mother got eaten by a raccoon, and I got two bucks apiece for them. It appears they kept half as a fee so that my check in the mail was five dollars. Hilarious.

…For my dahlias to bloom. They are really underachieving this year, and the only reason I can think of is that they are planted closer to the other perennials because I didn’t want them to get destroyed when the driveway gets fixed, only they would have been fine in the normal place. Maybe like the tomatoes, they have not had enough brilliant sunshine in this summer of overcast skies from wildfires and abundant rain. Normally I take in cuttings all through August, but they are only just starting to bud a little bit.

…To taste the blackberry kefir to see if it is as special as the raspberry was.

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In which both the potential glories of dahlias and tomatoes are captured in one photo.

I learned about making “I am waiting” lists in the writing course I took this spring. It is an interesting way to explore what is going on inside. This list happens to be a trivial one of everyday waits. They have their merit; they shape character, as anyone who has waited for their first taste of a vine-ripened tomato knows. They are not like the earnest yearnings/waitings of the soul: for slaves set free, for tears wiped away, for peace on earth, for equality, for all Creation to be redeemed. There are things I am one hundred percent convinced God will do in His time. I keep faith, and I wait.

(Maybe the longer we wait for the desire to be fulfilled, the greater the glory.)

What are you waiting for?

Pinky Purple Days

I sat outside on the deck until the last light faded out of the bits of sky I could see through the towering hickory trees to the west. It was the longest day of the year; there should have been some sort of solemn ceremony as it passed. But the mosquitoes were biting me in the evening chill. I did the prosaic thing and came inside. It is difficult to realize that we are already heading toward the tedium of winter darkness: ugh.

Right now we are in the blessed noonday and it is glorious. This is what we waited for all through the dreary months. The garden is silvery, pink, and purple, with one scarlet Oriental poppy lifting its showy head. The sort of flowers I like to plant are cottage garden flowers, kind of shy and old fashioned, but I cannot resist a poppy, even though it is a bit of a braggart. My neighbor gave me red hot poker roots and I dutifully planted them. They looked so out of their element in my purple coneflower and Russian sage border that I took a dislike to them and tossed them to the chickens.

We are deep into the spindly, ethereal florals, some with scents so cloying you cannot really bring them inside. The bees are not wasting a minute of it, and its a good thing too, because it’s only a matter of days until the Japanese beetles crawl out of the ground to ravage the sweetest blossoms. Rita brought in my favorite sort of bouquet today, and I love how it looks with that white valerian in it, but it is so powerfully scented I will have to banish those.

Our hummingbird feeder broke in storage over the winter, so we decided to plant hummingbird feeders instead. We looked for trumpet-shaped flowers and I have seen hummingbirds at every one of these. It’s the best reason for planting the ubiquitous petunia. I don’t even know what some of these blooms are. They just sort of slid into my wagon at the greenhouse and I didn’t argue with them.

Today I noticed that the first baby yellow tomato was ripe, and I ate it without even showing it to anybody else. I paid a foolish fifteen dollars for a large plant that was blooming already back in the chill of spring because I do weird things like that when I am fed up with cold weather. It would be premature to say that it was worth the money, but if it continues to produce such sweet orbs of tomato-ness, the summer is looking promising.

Last year I bought strawberry plants at the local hardware store and I wish I could remember what they were called so that I could warn you not to bother with them. After all the watering, weeding, mulching, fertilizing the plants, covering them when it frosted, I am picking the weirdest, smooshiest berries I have ever grown. (There aren’t many, because of the late freeze I didn’t see coming.) A day in the fridge leaves them looking so tired and wilted I am not even tempted to eat them. The best way is to stand in the garden and eat them immediately. “If you don’t expect them to be strawberries, they are good,” Rita concluded. I do not quite know how to do that. Shut my eyes? Hold my nose? Because they are perfect, red, seedy, and smell right. It’s a texture thing. This week I showed Little Bee and her brother where the strawberries are and they obliged me by eating them all that day, foraging up and down the row and experiencing no difficulty with unmet expectations.

Speaking of expectations, there is a small fruit stand a few miles west of us, run by an Amish family. On Saturdays they sell donuts and I have seen the sign often, but never happened to pass on a Saturday until last week. I took a look at the donuts and promptly bought a half dozen. They were enormous, glistening things, with hardened glaze drips at the edges, and I could hardly wait to give everybody one when I got home. My first bite revealed a sorry truth: they were obviously fried in rancid lard. I took another bite and weighed the question, “Are these worth the calories?” But surely, so I took another bite. I got some milk, and I ate the donut. Almost it was not worth the disappointment that was every bite, but I had paid for an experience that I was reluctant to give up. In retrospect, I paid for a lesson but it isn’t clear what it is. Maybe it will come to me the next time I am picking the strawberries I don’t like.

This spring I needed a strong new stick teepee for my cucumbers. Gabriel and I started with bigger saplings and screwed them together instead of tying them with twine. It took longer this way, but I hope it holds up. He also made a beautiful new arbor for the hardy kiwi vine after I had started it on my own when he was working. My arbor panels were pitifully lacking in structural integrity. When I asked for help to assemble the lot, he was kind enough to lay aside his work in the shop and spent hours finding some stronger supports. We cut down most of the sycamore saplings down by the creek for this project, and I pulled wild grapevines out of the woods for the finishing touches. I am really liking the homegrown look of these supports.

It’s early days in the garden, but things are flourishing and by the time the dahlias do their thing, it will be full to bursting. Every day I walk around and marvel at what is happening, how the leaves unfurl and buds form, some puffy like marshmallows and some spiky like chestnuts, but all brilliant.

When I was a child I had a startling thought one day, “If God had made everything brown, would we even know it wasn’t pretty?” I can’t say for sure when my lifelong yearning for color started, but I was too little to even know what it was. ( I just knew that I hated my grey double-knit dress that made me feel ugly.)

God walked in the garden too, you know. It’s a great time to lay down my smallness and offer to join my work to His great work. I’ll just keep planting the pink and purple things in my bit of earth.

Straight on to Summer

We have had a beautiful spring that lasted about 11 days, and now we’re smack dab in summer. There hasn’t been any rain for almost 2 weeks, and with temperatures in the ’80s, we’re doing a lot of watering already. I was told by many people that northwestern PA is extremely wet, especially in spring. I did not expect to need drip hoses in my garden or watering cans on the daily for my potted plants. I am very grateful that we have plenty of water in our well and a creek where we can fill buckets for the baby apple trees we planted this spring.

I determined to finish planting every single thing by June 1st. At 6:00 tonight I was staring down the calla lilies my neighbor brought me, and the pink petunias I bought for the hummingbirds, and three packs of parsley, basil, and celery. I asked Rita, “Why did you let me buy this stuff?” I must stay away from greenhouses now, because I have an incurable urge to reach out and pick up plants when I see something new that I would like to try.

Happily I can say that I pushed through and 2 hours later I was watering and cleaning up. The garden is chock full, and the only seeds I didn’t plant were a few sunflowers that I decided we can live without this year. At this point I think I have planted every bit of space, but it remains to be seen what comes up. I can’t quite get used to waiting until after Memorial Day for a frost free date, but I learned my lesson last week when I got up one morning and saw actual ice crystals in my garden. I had to replant most of my tomatoes and peppers that I hadn’t covered because the forecast was a low of 40.

I repotted my house plants that are root bound and put them on the porches for the summertime. I like how it makes the house feel cleared out and the porches feel cozy.

I feel like I can take some deep breaths, just watch things grow, and pick herbs, and put bouquets in the house. It’s my favorite!

Rita has been mothering a baby robin that fell out of a nest very high in the tree. It had a small wound above its wing, and I was afraid it wouldn’t be able to fly. She has been very dedicated, feeding it worms and ground turkey and bits of bread (when she wants to give it a treat) every half hour for a week. Thankfully it sleeps all night, but it wakes up bright and chipper at 6:00 AM, gaping its little beak and begging for breakfast.

Tomorrow this girl turns 14, and she really wanted a parakeet. It has been over a year since hers died, and the pet shop in town didn’t have any when we checked for a replacement. Today when we stopped in, she found the yellow budgie of her dreams. I made a deal: the robin now lives on a low branch in the tree, not in the birdcage in the house. Everybody’s happy: me, the girl, the parakeet, even the robin.

This past week I saw a blurb someone had written about parenting. “My baby is growing so fast, we ought to get a one month leave from work every 6 months just so we can figure out how to parent for the next half year.” I understand what he was saying, but we don’t get to do that. I hate to break it to you, man, but you’re going to have to figure this out on the fly and that’s not all bad. I think about the bright little Amish children I see helping with their parents’ cottage industries, whole lines of them stair stepping. I can see how important they feel because they are helping the family and they know how to do things. It is a different sort of importance from what a child feels when his parents arrange their entire lives around his wishes and hopes. Pardon me, but I know which kind of child I prefer to spend time with.

I am at that stage of parenting where I am praying for grace to cover what I missed when my children were little, even as I continue to rely on grace for wisdom as they grow more independent. It’s all flying by and some day soon I’ll say, “It feels like it was about 11 days and then we hit another season.”

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I want to remember this season, of dependent yet independent children.

I want to remember how the girls sleep in their camper playhouse, or in the sun porch, or in tents, just anywhere is preferable to their bed in this freedom that is warm nights and no school schedule.

I want to remember them sitting at the table having a tea party with friends all proper, then running outside to the woods and cooking crayfish and snake steak over their fire for a snack.

I want to remember how it felt to have a yard sale and there were three cashiers that were not me, and yet they were still cute enough to sell iced tea and brownies.

I want to remember the lists I make for all this energy to be put to good purposes, and then the library runs, the reading breaks, and the easy, restful days because we have been diligent and the laundry is done and the dishes are washed and the floors are clean.

I want to remember and watch and be like Mary and keep things in my heart, and hope all things for them as they grow.

It feels a lot like gardening, and Jesus, please send rain.

These Wonder Full Days

This week the first tulip opened in a patch of bulbs I planted last fall, a brilliant red with oval petals that spread completely flat in the hot sunshine. It looks like a crimson star floating above the bark mulch. I was sure that I planted pink tulips, but surprise! the first one was red.

Our grey world is springing into color, just tinges of it at the beginning, but promises for more all around. The daffodils at the edges of the woods are waving bits of sunshine, and there are twice as many as there were last year. I love that they multiply and naturalize, and critters don’t like them. When you drive the countryside, you can see marks of old homesteads long gone to ruin with saplings grown up in the foundations and drifts of daffodils where some homemaker dropped bulbs beside her doorstep years ago.

Last fall I donated to a kickstarter for a book titled A Little More Beautiful by Sarah Mackenzie. It came in the mail recently, and it is as charming as any illustrated children’s story I have seen. How can I make the world a little more beautiful each day? Hmmm. How about planting a bunch of flowers and sharing them?

I am not a die-hard spring cleaning lady, but I am in the mood to wash all the things in the house and hang them on the line to dry. As I type this, the rugs for the front door are swishing in the washer, and the living room curtains will be next. When the sun shines in such benevolence, I feel that the windows should sparkle and the curtains should be worthy.

Gabriel is using the chain saw and the tractor to clear the briars and trash accumulated in the back yard for many years. The girls are helping to collect the branches for burning, and I overheard a mild protest, “Can’t he pick another mid-life crisis, just anything else?” For some reason our children think ambitious clean-up projects are a sign of middle age, yet we have tackled these sorts of things many times in their lifetimes. Maybe it’s because they are now strong enough to be a real help, and it is sinking in that this is work, not just a bonfire for roasting hotdogs later.

I have been edging the three beds close to the house. The thing I never thought about when I was being so smart and unrolling old hay bales on top of my long rectangular gardens was that there would be miles of edges with grass borders. I don’t hate the job, but it takes a long time to clear the grasses and weeds that creep into the beds. It also requires a tape measure to get the lines straight, and it is my own problem that I cannot bear to look out the window and see a bulging border. I was trying to fix a few problem spots, and asked my husband, who is much better at free-handing this sort of thing, if it looked all right. “It looks perfect,” he said, and quickly escaped before I could request that he fix what was apparently perfect already. (If I could find a good edging material (that isn’t plastic) it would be worth installing. Please speak up if you have any advice for me on this matter.)

It is astonishing how much more motivated I feel when it is warm outside. Our heat is off this week, and the sunshine has been a daily grace. We had friends here for an outdoor supper around the fire with the whine of mosquitoes and the trilling of spring peepers serenading us. We have gone straight from winter to summer, is what it feels like, and nature is kicking up her heels. I don’t mind. I have no doubt that we will still get some hard frosts, but just for now we are basking.

I have a very broody hen that got a bad case of spring fever. She wanted chicks so badly that she just sat in the nesting box day in and day out, even though we took the eggs away from her every day. We moved her to an empty bunny hutch so that her intense longing for motherhood wouldn’t affect the rest of the flock. I found a source of fertilized eggs and stuck a dozen under her so that she can do her setting with some fruit for all her effort. She has four more days to go until they are due to hatch out. I will be so relieved for her, because she hardly eats or drinks anything, just sits and waits and waits. Rita feeds her worms and bugs that she finds, and watches over her solicitously.

With this season there has been an explosion of birdsong. All around they flirt, warble, and spill their sheer joy into the air. There is a phoebe building her mud and moss nest in the corner of the porch awning, a cardinal shaping a pretty twig nest in the lilac bush right outside the window, a robin once more making herself a home in the shrubbery beside our back deck, and there are sparrows in all the bluebird boxes.

I am reminded that God is the Creator of LIFE! New life springing out of barren, frozen wastelands. It is His delight to resurrect what has died, to bring fruit out of the seed that dies. If I would remember the utter faithfulness of His character when I feel panic because something dear to me is dying, it would save me a lot of flapping about. Every year this same truth hits me between the eyes, and I wonder why it is that I forget it every winter.

I made a list of as many hopes, dreams, ambitions, I could think of in my entire life that I have at some point given up, allowed to die. I was thrilled to see how many things He has brought back to life and better than I had hoped for. Not everything. There are seeds that lie buried in the the ground for a very long time. I can’t pretend that I understand God’s timing, but I believe that He knows what to do with the seeds that we bury.

Well, that concludes my springtime homily. I hope it’s a beautiful day where you are.

In which I make a fool of myself

for a good cause.

The farmer who is kind enough to load his old hay on my trailer every spring lives just a mile from our house. He and his wife are the nicest sort of people, down to earth and full of country wisdom. Her voice message ends with a cheerful, “Leave a message… blessings!”

This spring when I made my trip for hay, I asked if I may pay for it, and he said, “No, no, just bring me some produce.” As I was driving past this summer I noticed that they have four times more garden than I do. We’re talking a field with like 96 pepper plants and I think they said 200 tomato plants and everything else you can imagine. So tonight when I was digging my red potatoes I thought, “You know what, I don’t think they have potatoes,” and I called them to check.

The farmer’s wife told me that her family makes her so mad because they don’t want to hill potatoes but she would love to have some fresh ones. She is in a wheelchair and can’t grow them herself. I told her I would bring them right down.

I didn’t have a vehicle because it’s in the garage for inspection and my husband is at work. It’s close enough to walk, but I decided to put my box of red potatoes in the basket of the little yellow moped that Gabriel bought this summer. I puttered down the road in the soft light, and all was mellow and lush. Just before the farmer’s lane the moped sputtered and I thought that I should have checked the gas tank, but I made it and parked it.

There was a considerable amount of racket in the yard because the farmer was doing some power washing and the little grandkids were talking to each other in their outside voices. I picked up my box of potatoes and walked up the hill around their vehicles. The dog saw me first, and then the other dog and the other dog and the other dog also saw me. To be truthful, I am not a dog lover at my core, although I’m not really afraid of them. I took a step back just from innate self-preservation, and bumped my leg against the large rocks bordering a flower bed. The dogs crowded closer, a huge black lab with a tongue the size of bread plate, a yellow nondescript mutt with a tail like a baseball bat, a shifty-eyed spotted one who stayed on the periphery and growled, and a very small terrier with a very large ego. I backed up a little further but there was nowhere to go because I was against those rocks. I completely lost my balance and sat down very gracefully in the flower bed, legs stuck out over the rocks, holding my box of potatoes aloft. Not one of them spilled. It was too bad that the farmer’s wife didn’t see me until I was down, because by then it was no longer graceful. I had four dogs crowding around my lap, and I was giggling helplessly, unable to pull myself up. Feebly waving my hand in front of my face so the black lab would stop licking me, I peddled my legs and let her know that I was okay.

Her two grandsons walked over and tried to call off the dogs while the farmer’s wife hollered at her husband who couldn’t hear a thing because the power washer was loud. The grandsons looked at the woman laughing in their flower bed and didn’t know what to do. One of them tentatively held out his hand, and I gave him the potatoes. They didn’t know I suffer from a condition that causes me to lose all control and giggle helplessly when I am in a ludicrous situation, but once the dogs were out of my lap, I struggled to my feet. I was still chortling, so the farmer’s wife knew that I wasn’t mad. She wheeled herself to a quieter spot in the yard, apologizing profusely all the way, even as the dogs continued to leap around and take stabbing licks at my face while the terrier barked. “What in the world is wrong with you?” she yelled. I have been blessed with a number of friends who have large dogs and they all seem to feel the same helplessness when their dogs don’t listen.

We ended up having a great chat under the shade tree where her family had piled the produce they picked in the garden. I felt a little despair in my heart when I saw the buckets of tomatoes, bushels of cabbages, gallons of cherry tomatoes, a half bushel of green peppers, and so on. I don’t know how she does it in a wheelchair, but she was cheerful about it and she was delighted with that box of red potatoes. The black dog eventually quit trying to lick me and sauntered to the backyard, but the yellow dog kept backing up until his tail was between my legs, whacking me hard as he wagged. It was quite ludicrous enough to send me off in another spasm of laughter, but I controlled myself. The shifty-eyed growler was gone, but the ~~terroris~~t terrier made a tight, barking arc around us every few minutes.

They told me about the neighborhood and how things used to be around here, and what farming is like now, about their family and they wanted to know about mine. Like I said, lovely people.

It was getting a little dark and I needed to moped on home. I prayed a desperate prayer that there would be enough gas in the tank, but this time the answer was no. Of all things, I had to walk back up the hill and there came the dogs! The farmer noticed right away and he was still nice. “Not a problem, happy to give it to you, anytime you need anything just ask.”

He sloshed in a few quarts, but that moped wouldn’t start. The two grandsons stood there and stared again as I vainly pumped the starter pedal, jiggled the choke button, and tried to remember if I was missing something crucial for the starting of a moped. Finally it coughed a bit and then it flooded. I pumped it some more. Nothing. The little boys drew closer in fascination. I got the feeling they were prepared to push it home for me. Finally, blessedly, it purred to life. I said good night and headed home in the twilight. Mission accomplished.

They said next year they will give me more hay and all the barnyard compost I want. I will have to brainstorm something awesome to grow so that I have it to give them in return. I wonder if they like eggplant?