life, the universe, and everything

Titles are so limiting, aren't they?

I was such a grimy child. I could sit outside and play in mud, or dirt, or sand, or a tree, or my little wading pool, for hours on end. I hated baths and was scared of the shower. I mean, I went to school clean, but did as little as possible on my own to make that happen until I was at least ten. 

People thought of me as a tomboy. For awhile, I did, too, but looking back, I realize I never was. I didn't play with dollies much, or Barbies much, though I had both. And I had a little toy kitchen and tea sets and all of it. But they were just accessories to a chaotic life. Neither did I play sports as I was tremendously clumsy, at least, according to everyone around me. I don't remember myself that way. I rode my bike for hours, and could jog for several miles at a time. Latterly, the family bowling gene appeared. Whatever.

As a child, I played with clay, paint, craft sets, crayons, glue, rocks and sticks and leaves and paper and paper and more paper. Yet no one thought of me as artistic or creative in the slightest. 

I'm beginning to wonder if they thought anything interesting about me at all, other than that I was always covered with dirt or something colorful and sticky that was probably also stuck to my carpet. 

I played detective and cowboys and indians. But all girls did, because there weren't exciting girl things to be. We sometimes thought we wanted to be the superhero or the cowboy because he was cool, not because he was a man. I mean, by extension, men got to do the exciting powerful stuff, so that was part of it. It's just—it was the merest breath of a hop for me to want to be Bret Maverick to, well, wanting to be with him. I mean, not that way, that came later. Just there, his, breathing in his awesomeness. 

Tonight as I undressed to shower after putting in 70 leeks, and gosh do I hate planting leeks, yet I love growing leeks, I thought about how I was as dirty as when I was seven. Not really at all, though. It wasn't visible except on my hands. But I'm an adult, and so of course, I felt just miserably but also gloriously dirty from digging and raking and planting today. And of course I love a good strong shower, and emerging clean and new. Yet I can't wait to get out there tomorrow and do it again. I mean, not plant more leeks. Something. Something else I can nurture and grow while playing in the dirt. 

Yes, this is a dull photo of 70 baby leeks. Gardening is tactile. 

This wasn't really about that when I first thought of it...um, unlike other women I know, I haven't thought of myself as a "girl" in many years. And never truly a "tomboy," which, really, is fairly misogynistic if you think about it. Sometimes I think I don't relate to other women very well because they're trying so hard either to be one or not to be one; I am never quite sure about it all. But then, too, in certain ways, women can relate only to each other, and it's important to recognize and cherish that. I do. 

I spent many years watching my children enjoy doing the playing and digging and messing, and so I did very little of it myself. But it's who I am naturally. I chop and mix and bake or shake. I throw paint around. I collect stacks of books. Sometimes I spill things. And I dig in the dirt. But I also like a neat clear space, tidy shelves, organized tools, and clean skin. 

This is me preparing to remove garden grime. I decided that if I shared this fairly terrible photo, every other photo of me that follows it will look very good by comparison. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

I'm continuing to strive to be the best parts of myself; the original ones and the later ones that come with maturity. 

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

It never hurts to think well of yourself, or at least to think well of your possibilities. I really am pretty much who I have always wished to be, just have to do a bit more with it.

Then, too, I am also thinking of Joseph Cotten's perfect, almost over-chiseled lips. The sky is growing dark and my attention turns from the external to the internal. So to speak. 

Rita, girl, you are a mess. But I understand. 

Summer's End

All too briefly, the air was still, warm, a blanket of calm

 

Unlike Damocles, not given to flattery

yet a single hair bears the dagger twisting overhead 

revealing not the perils of power, but of Limbo

or the vain grasp for illusory freedom

 

Now the air is charged, cooling, crawling over my skin like

ants over a pool of spilled honey

 

It never was summer; it was a trick of the mind.

 

the harvest season, part two

Here's a poblano pepper. I gave away 4 last week, and now 4 more will be ready to use by this weekend. I haven't decided what I'll do with them. Before last week, I'd have said this is all I'm getting from the two plants. But after the rain, more blossoms appeared. :-)

This Swiss chard has been a miracle! First, I planted two each in cheap potting soil in pots. They grew, but then they didn't grow more. I cut some, they grew back, but only a little. I transplanted them to this area in the horriblest heat after removing the lettuce, and they stayed inert for several weeks, but I was loathe to remove them. They were at least pretty. Then suddenly, before it even rained, they started growing again, so I cut them, and now they keep coming back, just like regular.

These are also miracle plants. I bought a 6 pack of banana peppers on clearance for a dollar. They'd hardly grown and yet were producing little tiny peppers. I put 2 in the ground, 2 in the pot, and the other 2, well, they didn't make it. The ones in this pot, the peppers didn't grow, so I picked them when they turned red, and that was that. The ones in the ground took forever, but finally started growing, and so far I've gotten 5 nearly-normal sized banana peppers from them. And now suddenly, these 2 are producing again. :-)

 A third "miracle!" This patio tomato plant produced 4 good tomatoes at the end of May and beginning of June. And that was that. It was okay; my Early Girl and Tiny Tom plants went wild and produced tons of good fruit starting in the middle of June. They've slowed down now but there are still quite a few more. But now, after over a month of rest, this thing has produced a couple new tomatoes.

This is lemon verbena. I always have some on a deck or patio where I live. It's hard to keep year round because you have to bring it in at just the right time, but I think I'll succeed with this one. I just cut it back today, and will do it once more in a couple weeks, then leave it out until the nights turn cool. 

I'm going to keep sharing more like this during the harvest season until I decide what sort of theme or plan I might use for a gardening blog. I want it to feel like something you'd want to hug or have tea with and laugh with, you know? 

the harvest season, part one

I decided to break this into two parts since I have a lot to share.

I've been posting my garden photos at Google+ mostly for convenience. But I will share some here today. It has been suggested by three separate people that I start a gardening blog. For serious, you know. I don't claim to be more than a semi-expert amateur gardener; good with what I know, but there's so much I don't know. But I think it might be an appropriate challenge for me to take on, as I begin to think about my "late in life" career, beyond motherhood. Combining writing, gardening, and a bit of cooking (and a bit of philosophy) is a perfect match for me. Of course, there are thousands of blogs like that already, aren't there? So the trick would be some individual appeal in order to stand out from the crowd.

I've never thought of my blog as more than just a fun extension of me and my interests. Sometimes a crowd reads it; sometimes no one does, and I've been largely okay with that over the past 9+ years. But this new endeavor would be something for which I'd want to be taken seriously, even if it isn't all written seriously. So. Food for thought. 

Here are some photos I took today of my deck plants and my sort of "experimental" garden patch. This fall I am going to add several inches of good garden soil to it, because I did that with the one on the other side, and things grew better over there, for the most part. These are pictures taken with my aging phone, and I'm on the computer with which I can't manipulate them well, but if I start a real gardening blog, I'll have to use the regular camera!

Here is my sophisticated water delivery system. It didn't rain for almost three months, so things were dicey here and there, but I tried to do this at least once a week over each area.
And late last month, we did finally get some measurable rainfall, which did some amazing things seen in some of the next photos. They say not to expect rain as a trend, though. 

This is my sweet sad little eggplant plant. I planted it late because eggplants have been frustrating me. And for awhile, it was just too hot to feel like working at this. But I decided to put this one in, and I think it will probably produce two or three useable eggplants. :-)

This is a variety of pepper plants; all but the two poblanos in the back were grown from a mixed seed packet. So far there've been two Purple Beauty bells, a regular California Wonder bell, a Corno DiToro, and I'm not sure about the other two yet. They grew so slowly for so long, I never thought they were going to make it this far. But I coaxed them along, and now they're just lovely things, though smaller than they would be in a normal season. They will probably each yield no more than 6 peppers (the Purple Beauties have already yielded a few each,) but that's all right.

These are the Corno DiToros. They will start turning red in the next week or two. 

These are Rutgers tomatoes starting to ripen. These two tomato plants (the other is a German Johnson,) also grew very slowly. As I said, I think the soil on this side just didn't provide as much good stuff. It's very much all clay, which I worked and added garden soil and peat moss to.
I always like the Rutgers tomatoes; they're firm but still juicy. No, not an "heirloom," like the German Johnson, but a nicely designed tomato for home gardeners; reliable and tasty.

I planted 20 green bean seeds in spring, and only 2 grew! But they have hung in there long past their ordinary life span. I pick a few beans, they grow a few more. For a few weeks when it was extra hot, they almost stopped, but now have picked up again, producing even more than before!
I just planted 28 more seeds in my other vegetable patch; I'll take pictures as some of them start to pop out of the ground.

 Part two

liliales birthday countdown: 2010

In 2010, I got a plot in the community garden. It is like an allotment, if you are familiar with those, in that you have a (20 ft x 20 ft) space with which you can do pretty much whatever you like, as long as you don't use unnatural pest sprays or fertilizers, etc.. But it's unlike an allotment in that you have it for only six months, then they plow it all under and you have to start completely over the following April. Previous gardeners do have first right of refusal, so you can keep the same plot for years, if you like.

I got to the town hall before anyone else to sign up for the newly freed spots, but didn't know how it all worked, so I didn't go inside until a few others had arrived. Still, I got to choose my spot, and it was a great one. 

People thought the way I planned it out was unusual, though I'm not sure why. And anyway, it was a patch that had been well-worked and well-loved, and everything grew beautifully, even artichoke plants. I have lots of posts on here showing off my progress and harvests. And there are some lovely photos of the wild beauty I managed to create—foster?—here.

The garden was 3 miles away, and I didn't much enjoy the drive to and from it; it was the kind of 3 miles that takes 20 minutes, but it was still grand. 

People on Google+ like to talk about being geeks or nerds. This decade, that's the thing to be. I don't label myself anything except maybe "dilettante." But if you know me from G+ you might get a kick out of my 2010 Holodeck update. (The Men of My Holodeck Fantasies; a thing I've been carrying on about for nearly a decade.)

But this is the post I most want you to read. What I see, what I know is there. It's short. And still meaningful to me. 

life and death and flowers and Frank

Earlier I compiled a list of the 20 Frank Sinatra songs I've been listening to most over the past year. It was one year ago this week that I began driving to the Lawrence Township community garden every day to start my plot, knowing I'd be leaving it after 3 months. I listened to these songs on the way there and back, up that old road in that old town, trying to collect joy in reserve for later. 

A year ago minus a couple days, my friend died. I was enriching soil and planting seeds and mourning her loss at the same time. At some point, I was gardening for her, for me. You know? It made a difference. The year before, my first community garden experience was a huge success. Beautiful and bountiful. There are photos on my flickr pages, linked to here. This time I wasn't going to see it finished, and I knew that going in. But I had to get it going anyway. I worked every morning, listening to music through my headphones, willing it all to come to life before I had to leave it behind. creating beauty through loss. Energy transference.

It did get going, of course, but then late July and August saw astounding record rainfalls there, so I suppose it all ended up underwater. I bet the flowers came out all right. 

Here where I am now, a year later, I have more space, more money, more everything I lacked before. But no ancient road to travel, no friend down the block, no sense of the pulling of the ocean tide. 

I still have Frank.

Nothing But The Best

And I have little lettuces and onions and leeks and tomatoes and peppers and lots and lots of flowers, too. 

You have to honor life, and the passing of it, by really using the energy you're given in the best way you can. Feeding the senses, feeding the soul. 

Let's Face The Music And Dance

 

Irises are like good bourbon

A great bourbon is fragrant, decadent, and wholly joyful to experience. Unless you greedily have much too much. Then you wake up thirsty, head crowded, and really don't want to look at a bourbon bottle for a long, long time. I experienced this once about four years ago, and will never do it again. 

Just because you can have a lot of something doesn't mean you should. That's a basic truth in life that irises (and everything in the mint family) haven't grasped, and neither have many people who grow them. These things were about to launch forward into the front yard because no one had thinned the herd in the past few years, and they just kept propagating like the soil whores they are. 

Normally you wait until fall to do this, but after hacking down the day lilies that died off early because of the tremendous Three Week Heat, I was in the mood for more destruction. 

And it's not like they can actually be killed. There are plenty more where all that came from.

I hauled the remains to the back and shoved it all behind the tree line. Maybe an iris forest will appear there next spring. 

 More on gardening plans to follow. 

a tiny garden project

It's been such a crummy week, I don't even. 

But I got to do this little makeover. 

First, there's no true before picture, but there were two bushes that had grown together, with a twisted little shrub stuck into them, near a pretty butterfly bush. So I spent an afternoon digging up the miserable little shrub, and turning the bush wilderness back into two small bushes again. Then the guy I'm doing this for bought three little salvia plants and asked me to put them in, so then it looked like this:

So then I worked on it some more this week between gigundous bouts of rain, and now it looks like this, only better, because these aren't very good pictures at all.

Next there is a little garden I will be finishing at the back of the house. I cleaned it up last year while his wife Lisa, now deceased, watched and chatted with me. But it still needs some work to look prettier and be easier to maintain in the future.