The Story of the Roast

July 22, 2018November 16, 2018 / eponine3 / Leave a comment

We all fall into traps. One common trap is the Trap of Must. It’s the one that comes into play when something Must be done this way or Must be said that way or Must happen in this sequence. It could also be called the Trap of Habit. Some habits are not good. Some are. I have a habit of putting coleus in the planter boxes that lead to my front porch. I do this because they always do well there and look really pretty.

The coleus are the ones with the colorful leaves closest to the porch.

coleus

This goat has a habit of sticking his head up over the fence of his enclosure.

Why is he doing this? Because he wants food. His chances are better that someone visiting Yoder’s will come along and give him some if he sticks his head out and lets everyone see those big eyes. Experience has taught him this.

Coco has a habit of coming to you with her one-legged monkey (one-legged because she tore the other leg off), standing there, staring at you and expecting you to know what to do. Play with her. Just play.

Coco and monkey

The habit of play is good, assuming you make it a habit. Mom came with Jerry yesterday and taught me and Kaileena a new game called Phase 10. Sandy joined us even though he is generally very bad at games and habitually avoids them. (He ended up dominating completely!)

In it you have to put your cards together to make runs and sets such as a run of 4 like 2-3-4-5 (and they don’t even have to be the same colors in this game) or a set like three 10s or four 6s. Sometimes you want to make sets and sometimes you want to make runs, and sometimes a combination. The card on top of the discard pile might be just the one you need, but sometimes someone else takes it because it’s their turn or they put a card on top of it, burying it forever from usefulness. This is maddening of course.

Say you are on the “phase” of the game where you have to make one run of four and one set of four. Until you manage to make this, you cannot proceed to the next phase. As happens in games that involve some skill but mostly luck, you sometimes get stuck. Jerry found himself continually able to make a run of three or a run of four, but his cards did not seem to want to make sets. He cracked us all up when he blurted out (clearly without considering the alternate meaning), “I seem to get the runs easily.”

I plant the coleus because they look pretty, the goat stretches his neck in hopes of food, Coco comes with her monkey because she wants to play, and Jerry gets the runs easily!

playing phase 10

The world is complicated and our lives are full. We go about our days and weeks and years on autopilot sometimes. As long as those planter boxes are there, I will automatically think of coleus when the time comes to plant pretty things every spring. That goat will look longingly at every last visitor to Yoder’s: You have food for me, right? Coco will come to you at least three times a day with the monkey (or the fox or the giraffe or whichever toy she has not yet torn to pieces — and fyi, no matter what they are, they are all called monkey, no point confusing the poor dog). Jerry’s runs, even though they were by chance – to say nothing of hilarious – did happen over and over and somehow got me to thinking about habits, which is how I got to this topic.

Every once in a while, it is good to think about why we do what we do. Autopilot has its merits. We do a thing because we’ve always done it. We do a thing a certain way because we’ve always done it that way. We have enough to think about, too much to think about, and being able to do some things without really thinking about them is useful.

But not always. Sometimes we do things blindly with no good reason. We just do them because someone said to do it that way or we always just did. Which brings me to The Story of the Roast.

A woman was preparing dinner one day and her daughter watched her cut the end off the piece of meat before putting it in the roasting pan. The girl said, “Mommy, why do you cut the end off the meat like that?”

The woman said, “I don’t know. My mother always did.”

The next time the woman visited her mother, she said, “Mom, a question for you. Why do you cut the end off the meat when you make a roast?”

The mother said, “I don’t know. My mother always did.”

The next time the woman visited her grandmother, she said, “Grandma, a question for you. Why did you always cut the end off the meat when you made a roast?”

Grandma said, “My pan was too small.”

See? Blind habit. Only the first generation had good reason to cut the end off the piece of meat. Subsequent generations had different pans.

There might be very good reason for all of the things you do. There might not. Just think about it.

Yanking My Way Through the Jungle

July 18, 2018November 16, 2018 / eponine3 / 1 Comment

About three weeks ago my friend Fred came for a visit. I don’t know what you do with your friends but sometimes with mine we end up at Lowe’s. Among other useful things, we bought a three-pack of hot pink garden gloves (for me, not for Fred). The palm side is coated with a waterproof layer of some kind of plastic and the back-of-the-hand side is a stretchy cloth to breathe and flex with your movements. They were shiny and clean, but not for long. This is what they look like today. You can see I used one pair for painting the bench.

The same thing happens to me when I get rubber gloves for cleaning with detergent water. I end up blowing through the right fingertips. At this very moment there are at least three perfectly good left-hand rubber gloves in my cleaning supply cabinet.

I need gloves. My hands would be torn to pieces without them. Last week I found myself yanking my way through this jungle in the back corner of my garden. This is how it looked when I just got started.

In the very back corner there is a wooden box that my boys built years ago as a compost box. Trust me. Guess what I will find hiding next to it when I get there.

When you have a job like this in front of you, there is nothing for it but to Just Do It. Yank, yank, breathe. Yank, yank, breathe. I felt like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner must have when they hacked their way through the Columbian jungle after (one of the times) they got away from the bad guys in Romancing the Stone. At least I’m fairly certain I will not come upon a downed airplane with a rotting corpse inside!

I’m aware it is the middle of July. Had I done this section sooner, it would not be so dense and high. But there was the chicken coop and the viewing deck and the strawberry patch and the bench with my uncle…

You just have to keep going. By this point the wheelbarrow was so full it would hardly hold more. But I was like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel – he had quite forgotten to leave a way out, and I had quite forgotten to make one! There’s a door at the back of the garden. Go through that and you come to Weed Mountain. The size of this mountain stays remarkably the same over time no matter how many weeds you add to it. Rain and decomposition counterbalance the additions.

I had to make a path to the door. One side of the door anyway. One side would serve (best to be expedient here). Those are blackberry and raspberry bushes gone crazy on the left. I’ll get to them another day when I have way thicker gloves. The thorns in those off-shoots are nasty.

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I used my (isn’t it beautiful?) newly created path to get to Weed Mountain, emptied my load, then turned my attention toward the compost box in the corner – look at the next picture and you see it now, don’t you? (I didn’t think so.) Surely though, you can see that I do not get every single weed. A few survive my yanking. I return for a second pass later, and will get most of the stragglers then. We all have a style and I have mine, thank you.

Yank, yank, breathe. Yank, yank, breathe. As I slowly revealed the box, I found a little fellow.

He had had the right idea, and I commend his choice of location along the right side as close to the deer fencing as he could get. No way, he had said to himself, no way is anyone going to find me way back here. Foiled!

That’s the box. I told you it was there. Almost done, just keep going…

The little fellow had been in the shady weeds before I came along, so I moved him into the shadow to the left of the box:

See him back there? It was a good idea I thought, but he didn’t like it. Either that or he was so traumatized by being found and then moved, he had to find a more private place, and of his own choosing. (Damn humans.) I got busy with the next section and didn’t see him again.

Finally the area was decent. I didn’t say perfect. Fred had to tell me several times when he was here that “Perfection is the enemy of good.” I wonder what prompted him to tell me that. It reminds me of a saying I got from Claudia when she was here from Germany in the fall: Zu viel nimmt weg von genug, literally Too much takes away from enough. I.e. leave it alone, it’s enough. When it comes to weeding, you have to know when enough is enough. This is enough, don’t you agree?

Someday I might plant something back here, but in the meantime I’m just going to mulch over it and forget about it.

You already knew that my gloves are shot. And for some reason my fingers are sore. But oh, the jungle is tamed! And you see I also pulled those beetle-eaten Brussels sprouts from the last planter box. It all looks much neater now. Almost civilized.

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And did I mention the bench is finished?

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Water Runs Downstream!

July 18, 2018November 16, 2018 / eponine3 / 2 Comments

Everybody knows that water runs downstream. So why should I get so excited to see it?

A bit of a recap first for those who missed the earlier post on this. Some weeks ago, during a bad rainstorm, I noticed that water was running from the level of my driveway downward. The problem was that it ran all through my chicken coop area. That was fixed with a small retaining wall, plus a berm along the driveway, which did the job of keeping the water away from the chickens. But in the next storm it flowed through the mulch in the area next to the chickens, making a mess of the mulch. Long term, this was not a good plan. In my head I see a woodland garden in this area (someday!), and I can’t have water running willy nilly.

I could see generally where the water had flowed because of how the mulch had been moved – curve here, curve there, according to the lay of the land. I raked it back to the banks of what looked like a natural path for the water to go, and sure enough, in the next rainstorm, the water followed the path. It looked like this:

Those are some beautiful curves, but I wanted to make them more beautiful and feel a bit more certain that the water would go where I wanted it to go. I decided to make a stream bed with rocks following that same path. It was a lot of work finding, hauling and laying the rocks. It took a long time.

I laid down white landscape fabric under the rocks to keep the weeds at bay and dug out the bed somewhat to make it easier for the water to obey.

That’s Fred, who helped me with the first third or so of the total length. You can tell he was thrilled about digging dirt and laying rocks. Who wouldn’t be?! Look what’s coming! Pretty soon it looked like this:

I say pretty soon because in retrospect it seems like it took no time at all. How quickly we forget pain and hardship when there is a favorable outcome! It reminds me of the lady in labor in the room next to mine when I was giving birth for the first time (or maybe the third time or the fourth time, I forget that too). She screamed in pain, let me tell you. There was no question that she was not having a good time, no question that it hurt! Well, I had my baby and she had her baby, and coincidentally she and I were placed in the same recovery room. We were both resting when her phone rang. The person evidently asked how things had gone, and she said, just as cheerfully as anything, “Oh, it wasn’t that bad!” Lady, I thought, it was that bad! I was there!

Yes, we forget. I forget the digging (the hacking at Virginia concrete soil, more like) and the tree roots and the bug bites and the hot sun and the heavy rocks and my aching body at the end of the day. Did I mention the heavy rocks? They are heavier when you put a bunch of them in a bucket and carry them back to the work site, a trek which more often than not included an uphill climb. But no matter. In the end I had a beautiful stream bed. And then, of course, we had a dry spell.

I had to water all the plants in the berm and elsewhere it was so dry, so one day when I had the hose out there I stood at the head of the stream bed and let ‘er rip. It took a good bit of water but it flowed the way it was supposed to. My bed passed a small test, but the real deal would come when the skies opened.

I waited and waited. It poured in the night once or twice but I slept through. Today was my lucky day. The wind kicked up in the late afternoon, the gigantic trees outside my windows started to sway and I heard the first drops fall. This was not a tease of a storm, this was real. It started pouring at about 430pm, I mean pouring! Picture time!

I did remember to put on a hat before running outside, my wide brimmed sun hat, which sort of helped. It was raining so hard I was drenched before I even got to the head of the stream. It took a minute or so for the level of the water to build enough to start flowing over the rocks. I stood there cheering it on… c’mon, you can do it, oh yes, up and over, whoo-hoo, and flow it did! Look at that water flow! It works!

stream bed 1.jpg

That’s water flowing over the rocks! See? Water! A lot of water but mainly where it is supposed to be! Yes!

I know it’s a still photo (wish I knew how to upload the video) but hopefully you get the idea how fast it’s going:

stream bed 3.jpg

I could hardly stop laughing and giggling and whoo-hooing the whole time I was out there (I’m sure the chickens were wondering Who is that kooky human?) – it works! That’s why water running downstream is so exciting! My stream bed did its job! I was soaked through and still laughing when I came back inside. The poor dog, who had scooted out there with me – she never wants to miss anything but I think she regretted this decision – she was drenched too. But she ran all over, found her toy, ran some more, wanted to play. Something really fun is happening, she is thinking, I don’t know what, but something!

Oh, what a beautiful day!

Parallels in the Weed World

July 11, 2018November 16, 2018 / eponine3 / 2 Comments

When I was a kid, my mother used to say she loved gardening because after she got all dirty, she could get all clean. Going from very icky to fresh as a daisy is more thrilling than going from almost fresh to fresh. The same is true for weeding.

Weeding a bed that is overrun (why don’t we call it de-weeding?) has a different, greater level of satisfaction for the weeder once it is decent again. This morning did not turn out to include a train ride to DC and a day with friends as I had hoped, so at 7am I hit the strawberry bed. It was in great need. It was bad.

Do you see strawberry plants in there among those rotten (but thriving!) tall things? See the spikey grass trying to get some sun? This photo doesn’t reveal the half of what was trying to crowd out my precious fruit-bearing plants. The following photo reveals even less, but I am trying to capture the scope of the situation. The strawberry bed is eight 8-foot fencepost-widths long, or about 64 feet.

Before it got too hot, I went to town on the mess. See all that fuzz toward the other end. That’s the really bad part.

While pulling out the Bad, I thought about a few parallels to human life.

The Bad tries to push out the Good. That’s the first thing you notice. I had a lovely strawberry bed earlier this summer which produced lovely strawberries which turned into lovely jam.

The weeds weren’t there then (though now that I think of it I found numerous half-eaten berries out there when I picked them – surely the work of hungry squirrels). Why can’t the weeds just find somewhere else to grow? Why can’t the squirrels eat the gazillion other edible seeds and nuts on this property? Why can’t bad people leave good people alone?

2. The Bad tries to masquerade as the Good, tries to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, tries to fool you as counterfeit among the genuine. The tall, overachiever weeds are obvious, as is the spikey grass, but hidden among the strawberry plants are various weeds trying to look like strawberry plants, trying to infiltrate and blend in – playing their can’t-catch-me game. They think I can’t tell the difference, but pretty doesn’t always win (some of the nasty ones are pretty – does that sound like real life or what?). I’m smarter than that, but they are robust intruders with determined roots that get a foothold in an area by wrapping their strong tentacle-like roots around the (supposed-to-be-there) strawberry roots. I am ruthless. However…

3. You don’t always get all the Bad out. See these horrid little roots?

You can’t get all that. Insidious is the word. The next time they get water from rain or the sprinkler, they will begin to come to life once again, you can bet on it. They keep their agents hidden but ready to pounce at the first opportunity. Sound like anything else in this world?

But someone has to get the bad guys. Whether you are part of crime dramas in real life or you watch them on a screen in your living room, you notice that the detectives and the police have unrelenting obstacles and are perpetually short on time, facts and help. They bumble, they see false clues, they have their own issues that trip them up. Yet they are determined to expose the wrong, get the bad guys and make it right. They keep going. Our military, God bless them, also keep going despite the danger and setbacks. Strong fights strong. What if it didn’t? What if it just said We’ll never obliterate the Bad altogether so why try? But it is also true that…

4. You can’t save all the Good. Some of the good, healthy, wonderful strawberry plants ended up in the wheelbarrow because they were just too entwined with the Bad. In the bigger world, the innocent are often victims for lots of reasons, and you don’t have to look far for examples. Watched The Eichmann Show on Netflix last week – unspeakably horrendous. Follow the news every day and there are always new, sad images. But just because there will be loss, terrible, sorrowful loss sometimes, doesn’t mean you don’t do what you can. The Good has to keep going…

5. Let the exposed part lead you. With some of these weeds, especially where the situation at ground level is rather thick, I start where I can see and work my way down to the base. Then I pull. If you pull too soon, you just break it midway and that’s pointless — the thing will be back in no time. Same for our everyday. Take care of what you can see in front of you as best as you can, and then move on to the next thing. As you make headway, you can see what you couldn’t see before and you have some experience and can do a better job with the next thing. I like how Jordan Peterson puts it: “Clean up your room.” Clean up your own room before you start addressing the ills of the world at large. Do what’s in front of you first. If you can’t get a small thing under control, if you are inept at the small things, what makes you think you can tackle the big things? If you don’t get the weed you can see out of the way, the situation is overwhelming. One thing at a time.

Along the way, surely…

6. You sometimes encounter nice surprises. Some people would say this fellow is a pest and I should relocate him to the woods. I think he’s nice (to say nothing of funny-looking) and I don’t mind him a bit. For the most part my garden plants are in raised beds which he cannot possibly get to. Then again, maybe he is the one who left all the half-eaten (ground-level) strawberries behind!

I went to the garden to weed the strawberry bed. I moved slowly from one end of the bed to the other, mostly on my knees, mostly looking down as the job requires. Sometimes though, you have to stand up to stretch or move to a new space, and then you see things from a different angle, you see the big picture a little better, you see things you didn’t realize were there. Once when I stood up I saw that the lilies had opened! Just yesterday they were still preparing for their grand show. What a nice surprise!

Do stand up and look at things from a different angle sometimes. It’s amazing what another perspective will reveal!

7. Reuse and recycle has all kinds of applications. What did I do with the wheelbarrow full of weeds? Gave it to the chickens! If the chickens could get in my garden (how they would love this!), they would eat a variety of greens – and mostly not the ones I want them to eat of course. But they do love greens. And they are discerning enough to pass by the less desirables. So I gave it all to them, and I expect they quickly found the good stuff, including forfeit strawberry plants, the ones that were growing in the path or too entangled with weeds. And they have something to play around with for a while. Maybe a worm or two got transferred as well. Happy, happy chickens!

When the weeds were mostly out (I say mostly because I am not anal about such things) I went and got the old towels and sheets that would serve as a barrier between the earth and the mulch I planned to put in the path to help prevent future weeds. This was another good re-use because what else am I going to do with all those old things? (And again thank you, Bertie!) I started laying them out and guess what I discovered?

8. There’s a comedian in every bunch! As soon as I laid a towel down, Coco appeared out of nowhere.

What? she says, Is there a problem here? I proceeded to lay out the rest of my cloths and she held her ground, snoozing happily away.

I said to myself, How long will she stay there? How much mulch does it take for her to get the idea to move? You tell me:

Okay, a little more. Don’t let me disturb your beauty sleep.

Fine, then she just moves over to the next bit of soft.

Coming closer, still no concern.

Hey, trying to relax here!

There really is no choice, sweetie pie. You have to move.

Of course she finally did.

9. Sometimes you are the only one who sees the difference. I know that the world is not going to come to an end if I don’t get my strawberry bed weeded. But I’m glad it is, and it’s a far sight better than it was yesterday.

P.S. The tall plants in the foreground are rhubarb. They do belong there.

Woodland Invaders

July 3, 2018November 16, 2018 / eponine3 / Leave a comment

It’s wonderful how a garden is never quite finished. There are always parts you didn’t get to yet, but also, the seasons are always changing and requiring you to pay different kinds of attention to different aspects of your enterprise. In this way, a garden is like your life, like your character, like your friendships. You do what you can, you always see the shortcomings and challenges (if you are honest), and you are always trying to make it better.

My ten acres is mostly untended forest. If a tree falls down in it, the tree stays right there unless I am lucky enough to have a friend volunteer to chainsaw it out of the way. I have waited years for some obstacles to be removed. In the tended acre or so around the house and cottage, I have a few areas of grass, plantings of perennials around a few trees and near entrances, and a large vegetable garden with raised beds and mulched paths surrounded by deer fencing.

A month or so ago I decided that I also wanted a “woodland garden,” in my mind a kind of space that falls somewhere between tended and untended, with lots of perennials and a more natural look.

“Natural” has such an innocuous ring to it. Clearly an overused word. But whether or not putting a planter box in a woodland garden is natural or unnatural, I decided to do it. Bradley had built the box below about ten years ago and it sat on my back deck. The casters were shot but otherwise it was in great shape. Dirty and neglected for sure, but in great shape. A week ago it had nothing in it except weeds because nothing grows very well on that deck – not enough sun. Plus I’ve been busy with a few other things.

I admit it was looking sad. While I am shocked at myself sometimes that I let it (and other things) just sit, the fact is that there are only so many hours in the day. Some things have to wait. Then along came Fred with his power washer, which made an extraordinary difference. (Thank you, Fred!)

Now why would you leave such a nice planter box hiding on the back deck? Of course it had to be moved. Let it shine!

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Moving it was easier said than done. The wood framing alone weighs quite a bit, to say nothing of the dirt inside. However, it doesn’t weigh as much as you might think. I watched a video some years ago about container gardening, and it said that in such a deep container, you could use filler in the bottom half – big empty cans, bubble wrap, even Styrofoam peanuts. We found these things when we dug out some of the dirt.

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Once most of the dirt was out, it was pretty easy to move. We carried it to its new location near the chicken coop in what is going to be the woodland garden (someday all that space will be lovely, believe me!). But of course we had to first prepare the landing pad.

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You can see that those bricks are not even close to level. But it’s easy to find dirt at my place, so we dug and built up the low corners and checked it, and built it up some more, and moved the bricks and finally got it. Voila!

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If you want very cheap flowers at this time of year, make a trip to Lowe’s and look on their reduced rack in the garden section. Some of these were 50 cents. I bought enough to fill it and make it pretty, came home, added Miracle Gro potting soil to the planter box, carefully planted the new flowers, bedded it down with the same mulch I’ve been using everywhere else, gave everything water and called it a day.

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I was quite pleased. Bought the other plant behind it too – this is the “Sizzlin’ Pink Fringe Flower, a.k.a. Loropetalum Sizzlin’Pink.” Moving right along, and don’t you love it when you make something look nice where it didn’t look nice before? Maybe not natural, but nice.

At that point I still had (okay, I always will have) plenty else to do, so other than giving the new plants a daily drink, I switched gears and moved on to, let’s see, was it polyurethaning the cherry frames of the cottage windows that day? Maybe. Or collecting more rocks for the stream bed and adding length little by little?

Five days later, along I came with the hose and was shocked by these green invaders poking up through the mulch. What are they? They were not invited to the party!

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No fair. Where did the little aliens come from? They weren’t in the original dirt or they would have been there when the planter box was on the deck. Could they have been in the potting soil? That’s never happened with store-bought potting soil before. And I’ve used that same mulch in lots of other places and never had sprouts appear.

I suppose it would be boring to just move a planter box and put flowers in it and walk away. And we can’t have boring. So, hello! (You rotten little aliens!) Enjoy your brief visit. You won’t be here long!

Unboring defined

June 27, 2016November 16, 2018 / eponine3 / 3 Comments

I walked out to feed the chickens yesterday morning and ended up with a clearer understanding of my unboring path.

There are now eleven chickens. We lost three when I started to feel sorry for them being cooped up in the coop all the time, nice as the coop is — even (one has to think) from a chicken’s point of view. Oh, let them out, voices said. Let them scratch in the dirt and find bugs and dust themselves in the sun if they want to. Give them The Life of a Chicken to Beat All. But place (any place) has its perils, as we may recall from the last post. I don’t know what got the first three, but let us assume a wandering fox or raccoon got lucky and slept that night on a very full stomach.

The fourth chicken may have met the same end, but I blame her demise on Bridget, my anomaly of a golden retriever. Whoever heard of a golden retriever that was anything but nice? Certainly she is mostly nice, but there are moments when she forgets her breed, when something else in her brain kicks in, and we have to bring her back to the norm, which is to say nice, which is apparently too much to ask on a consistent basis of this old rescue dog who endured in her earlier life only God knows what. Someday I hope I will again have a dog that is unequivocally nice. In the meantime it’s an imperfect world.

Bridget decided a few days after the now-twelve chickens were once more cooped that she wanted the hunk of bread that had been given to them, and pawed and gnawed at a weak area of the fencing and made a hole. How a bird got through that I cannot imagine, but clearly one did.

The now-eleven chickens of mine are the best-fed chickens in town. I bring scrap from the kitchen at work — leftover tomatoes and toast, carrot peels, squash seeds, etc. — and provide a frequent feast. Chickens, like most creatures, are seemingly oblivious to how good they have it, and carry on as if I am the average chicken keeper. As I deliver the pickle bucket full of goodies, they act like it’s run of the mill. Fine. I do not depend on their appreciation. We must just know we do good and keep on doing it regardless.

Ordinarily in the mornings I feed my [ungrateful] flock and put the now-empty bucket into my car and rinse it out when I get to work. But this time I chose to walk to the garden and use the water pump that Bradley and Beth thoughtfully put in the middle. It was a cool morning for late June in Virginia. Rain was in the air. I could not help but take a moment to look around at the various raised beds proliferating. I have to think whether I would describe them as proliferating beautifully or proliferating wildly. Either descriptor will do.

The lettuce catches my eye. Spectacular lettuce! We have been feasting on it for weeks and it just keeps coming. If you have not had lettuce fresh picked from a garden lately, you will have to remember how tender and tasty such lettuce is, though I served a salad to my friend Vernon the other night and his comments focused on the maple dressing instead. I was pleased just the same.

There is not much else in the garden I would call spectacular right now. The sugar snap peas and this planting of spinach are past. The catnip is ridiculously tall but I don’t need it. The cabbage, beets, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant and cukes are on their way. The onions failed. There is one volunteer squash of an unknown variety that has taken over the compost. Whatever it is (and I expect we will soon know), it loves its bed. These leaves might be called spectacular.

The beets need weeding. Some of the weeds have been food for Japanese beetles, some of whom are still munching. As I pull the unwanted plants out, I considered leaving them in. What if, after I remove the obviously favored weeds, the beetles go after the untouched beet greens instead? But the weeds make it a mess and my sense of order triumphs. Out they go, regardless of my not having garden gloves on, because of course I came to the garden not to pull weeds or admire the lettuce or assess the glorious (if wild) results of rain + sun + healthy plants.

This half hour — this sequence of feeding chickens (because I will continue to curry their favor with goodies even if they never acknowledge me) to cleaning buckets (because it was Saturday and I didn’t want them sitting in the shed until Monday) to admiring lettuce (because there is nothing else you could do with that, other than pick and eat it, which came later) to weeding the beet bed (because of my need for ducks in a row) to muddy hands (because of recent rain and my unwillingness to go get gloves) — might strike the reader as a lot of boring tasks and a lot of justifying boring tasks, but in fact this half hour represents a portion of my unboring path.

It occurred to me that I call this site “an unboring path” and presumed that would be self-explanatory, but maybe it isn’t. Using a somewhat unorthodox word, I mean just what you think. I mean the opposite of boring, the opposite of uninteresting (I suppose we could follow the pattern here and say un-uninteresting?), the opposite of dull.

Tasks themselves are of course sometimes boring. Some people find baseball boring, or ironing, or reading technical manuals. I’m not talking about any one thing here as being boring or not. I’m talking about an enjoyable path, a richness, a fullness, a continuously evolving forward movement that you are joyfully and willingly engaged in through task, purpose, circumstance, feeling and decision. An unboring path is interesting, yes, but it’s interesting because you decide to be — wherever you are and as best as you are able — a part of what’s going on, involved. Interesting moments, ideas and experiences happen only sometimes by chance. They are also sought out or, when presented to you, chosen. They can lead to something new or something familiar. What matters is that you embrace your world, using what you have — your brain, your body, your hands, your heart, your time, your surroundings, your circumstances — to get the most out of life. What you have is partly of your choosing and partly not, an ever-unique, ever-evolving combination of factors that you help shape. An unboring path is not about passing time or sitting on the sidelines. It is not about lamenting what you don’t have. It is embracing what you do have and getting in there and doing the best you can with that and enjoying every minute.

I barely began contemplating this idea when a large, stinging-type insect appeared on the screen of my window — on the inside — unsure how and unable (though valiantly trying) to get to the other side of the screen. The word for him is doomed. Soon he was, first by my hand feebly, then by Samuel’s more definitively, dead as a door-nail as they say. Why do we say dead as a door-nail? he asks when the deed is done. What’s a door-nail?

I have slowly acclimated to the ease of using a search engine to answer questions, though I still often forget how easy and handy this is. This time I did not think twice, but instantly googled door-nail. The first benefit of this search came in the form of the passage often associated with this word, the introduction of Marley at the beginning of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

An unboring path includes the unexpected. It’s June, not Christmas, but here you have it, a most famous passage about a door-nail. I am very familiar with it. Our local Shakespeare theater http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com/ performs A Christmas Carol every year, and every year I go there to see it if I can. George C. Scott in the film version is outstanding as well. I have heard this door-nail passage many times, and every time I do, I marvel at it. If you don’t find yourself marveling, read it again, slowly. Marveling will come. This short passage plainly and unexpectedly gives us the mastery of Charles Dickens: his cadence, word choice, imagery, humor. Truly marvelous. Even in June.

An unboring path includes things you didn’t know before. We have now found out that door-nails were/are a specific kind of nail that 1. need to be hit hard on their heads repeatedly to get through the wood and naturally end up “dead,” and 2. were historically longer than the thickness of wood they penetrated and therefore had to be hit from the other side to knock the point into the wood so that there would be nothing sticking out to hurt anyone, rendering the nail permanently lodged in said door and henceforth unable to ever move (even if it were animate in the first place), or to ever be retrieved, or to ever be useful again (on account of its point being bent) even if it were somehow taken out, and therefore in these ways also “dead.”

In the search that produced the door-nail passage, Shakespeare was mentioned as not being the origin of the door-nail idiom, but the Bonus Facts part of the article included several other Shakespeare facts, including this one about his use of un- words.

Shakespeare is, in fact, the first known user of many words that start with un-. He was a fan of the prefix and attached it to words that previously hadn’t used un-. Examples include unhelpful, uneducated, undress, and unreal, plus some 300 other un-words.

After the chickens and after the garden, the stinging insect came unbidden, producing the door-nail question that unleashed Dickens and Shakespeare. I feel quite certain that Shakespeare would approve of “unboring.”

A “recipe” for strawberry jam

June 12, 2016November 16, 2018 / eponine3 / 1 Comment

In the early homeschooling days, someone gave me a bit of advice that can apply to just about anything we do. Take a few minutes, he said, and write down why you are doing it. Make a list of your reasons. Make sure you think it through and make a good solid list. One of these days you will be tearing your hair out and asking (seriously) What was I thinking??!! (i.e. What was I thinking when I thought this was a good idea!?) Post your list where you can see it (so that you know just where it is!) because on those days when you are tearing your hair out, you need to look at your list and let it do its good work. Let it remind you why you decided to do this, whatever it is. Chances are good that your list will bring you back to a good place.

It seemed like a good idea to me, so I made my list. Its title was something like: Why I choose to home school my children. One of the reasons had to do with joy. I very much wanted to keep the joy in learning. If I can find a way to keep it fun, I thought, keep them engaged in the process, keep them hungry to learn something new — then (the hope is) throughout their lives they will always be excited and happy to learn new things. I was homeschooling because I wanted to make sure that my kids became lifelong learners, and one way to do that was to keep it fun. I suspect that John Holt’s Learning All the Time played into this, but there were other factors. I just didn’t want my kids to ever be bored or uninterested or think they had nothing yet to learn in this life. There is always something to learn in this life. Too many people think learning is over when you finish school. Oh, how much they miss!

Therefore, when I meet someone who is hungry to learn something, to explore something, to be challenged by something, I am both impressed and happy. If that someone wants to learn something from me, I’m over the moon. This is one reason I love Millicent. She has thrilled my heart time and again by saying things like “Next time you make a quiche, can I come and make it with you? … Oh, please teach me how to make pizza — can I just do it with you next time?. … How do you do that? Can you teach me?” Millicent has a nursing degree and a law degree, plays the harp, sings like an angel, and makes me think deeply and laugh out loud in all of our conversations, and she is hungry to learn something new. These days Millicent is learning how to ride a horse. I am sure she is doing it with enthusiasm and joy, and I could not be happier for her.

Last week one of my airbnb cottage guests reminded me of Millicent’s spirit and her joy of learning. It was all about jam, strawberry jam. As the berries came ripe during the month of May, I began to see that there were many of them, more than last year. They were gorgeous and bountiful and delicious. Look how beautiful.

strawberries on vine.jpg

I learned last year that these garden-grown berries, untouched by anything except sun and rain and the human hand to pick them, are not like the kind you buy in a store. If you have never picked a strawberry off a vine, it may be hard to imagine the very particular sound they make as they pop off the stem that holds them. To me it is downright musical. The flavor sends you to heaven then, far exceeding any berry on a plastic box. Their being untouched also means they do not last days and days. Freeze them or make jam within a day or they will not be the same.

The first batch looks like and feels like a treasure.

first batch of berries.jpg

A few days later there were enough to make jam. (The stuff laying on top is rhubarb, yet another taste marvel…)

second batch of berries.jpg

My good friend Sandy was game to help me, and together we made a batch, and a week or so later there were this many again, so we made another batch. There might be 15 jars or so total, I didn’t count. But it came out really good.

jars of jam.jpg

At about the same time, my airbnb guests Sara and Scott (of grilled salami fame, two or three posts ago) had invited me to have dinner with them. During my visit with them, they gave me a good sized hunk of some amazing bread they had bought in town, and I took it back to my house later and had some with that lovely strawberry jam on it. Fresh jam on fresh bread — does it get better than this? So I brought them some in a little bowl so they could enjoy it with their own hunk in the morning for breakfast. After they left I found a note in the cottage that told me that had enjoyed it on cheesecake besides. Sara called it incredible. I smiled. That would have been enough for me. They completely endeared themselves to me.

A couple days after they left, I got the following note:

Hi Patricia – Scott and I enjoyed the last of your strawberry jam this morning. We have been milking it – literally! Anyhow, we are just getting strawberries in our neck of the woods and I plan on picking at the orchard nearby this coming week. Would you share your jam recipe? It was superb and just the perfect amount of sugar. Hope all is well with you. We sure do miss the Charlottesville Area.

Kind regards, Sara

Not only were they perfect guests who also invited me to dinner. Not only did they call my jam incredible. Now she wants to make her own! I was thrilled — and worried! I admit it, I am not a good recipe-follower, and here she is asking for a recipe! Having made jam in the past, I knew it is a bit involved, and I had no way to know if Sara had any idea what she was getting into. I had no idea if perhaps it was a fluke that mine came out the way it did, seeing as I was not overly precise about amounts and timing and technique. For example, I am not even really sure how much fruit I used. I just cut up what I had and eyeballed it. How could I possibly give her a recipe? I decided to just tell her what I had done as best as I could which doesn’t look like a recipe to me, but the following is what I told her.

You have to really want to make jam to follow the following.

Hi Sara,

I am so thrilled that you liked the jam that much!! We are really enjoying it too 🙂 As far as the recipe, it is going to sound like a crazy amount of sugar, but every recipe uses a lot. I read five or six recipes in my cookbooks and online (since it had been some years since I made jam) to get an idea of the proportions of fruit to sugar, then cut up the fruit (halved or quartered depending on the size of the berry), which (eyeballing the same amount of water in my pot right now) seems to have been about 3 quarts. I then added a 4lb bag of sugar and 4.7oz Ball Real Fruit pectin (1 container of it) and brought it to a hard boil. It develops foam, which you methodically skim off little by little with a long handled spoon. It continues to make more foam. Just continue skimming it off (a relaxing exercise actually, if you can look at it that way). All the recipes I read said it needs to get to 238 degrees F on your candy thermometer, but we boiled the first batch (not the batch you got, but the one we did the week before) for a long time, half an hour I think, and finally decided that my thermometer had to be faulty because it never got above 220. With your batch, I drew the line at 15 mins (the thermometer was still faulty apparently because it did no better), skimming all the time. Good enough, I said, let’s jar it. Before we jarred it, Sandy mashed it with a potato masher, which broke up the fruit a bit more.

In the meantime, you have a big pot going with boiling water (your canning pot), and you sterilize the jars this way. Have you canned before? If you are not familiar with this process and want to bypass it, I think you can freeze jam too. But the canning is easy, and every canning pot comes with instructions. You sterilize the jars, take them out of the water with tongs (carefully), put the hot jam into the hot jars, wipe the top rim of the glass where the lid will meet it, put the lid on, screw the screw cap on (not too tight) and lower them into the water carefully (again with the special tongs) and boil for 7 mins. Remove from the water and set on the counter; wait for the center each lid to pop down as they cool. This assures you of the seal.

Hopefully I have not in any way discouraged you. I am delighted that anyone would want to make jam! But if you prefer, send me your address and I will simply mail you one of my jars 🙂

The poor young woman, I thought. She has to make sense of that! But if she had thrilled me by asking, she thrilled me more by her response to my “recipe.”

Thank you for this! I have canned before (not jam- and it’s been a few years) but I am sure I can do this. Looks like I will be digging out some of my jars this weekend. And thanks for offering to mail some jam, but I will attempt this work of art. It is a labor of love and one I can appreciate . I will let you know how it turns out.
Kind regards,
Sara

Oh, may the joy we have in learning something new never be squashed!

People hate surprises

May 19, 2016November 17, 2018 / eponine3 / 1 Comment

Brad and Beth decided to move to Seattle in the summer of 2015. Brad had a great opportunity at UW, and I could not blame him for wanting to pursue that. For now, at least, the dream of the family compound was seriously on hold. (And I will continue to think of it as being on hold, thank you very much.) I had never given much thought to any other plan for the cottage and was likely lamenting my new without-them reality when my oldest son Drew said brightly, “Why don’t you try airbnb?” He gave me examples of airbnbs he and Nicole had stayed at recently, telling of the wonderful hosts and the conversations they all had had together. He gave me the boost I needed, then wisely advised: Make sure there are no surprises. Whatever you do, make sure people know what they are getting into regarding those stairs. What he really meant was: Don’t withhold any information that is potentially problematic.

March 2016 (5).JPG

Ah, yes, the very odd staircase that leads to the sleeping area. The cottage is small and the staircase is steep enough that Bradley built the treads with curvy cut-outs so that your knees don’t bump the next step as you ascend and your descending foot easily lands on the next tread. There would be guests who for various reasons could not negotiate these, or would not want to. One of my guests went so far as to call them a “sobriety test,” and people who get up frequently at night might not want to deal with a peculiarity. (I do now keep a bottle of water and two glasses at the bedside for those who get thirsty in the night, but the bathroom is still on the first level. It’s through that white door you see in the photo.) You would not want people to arrive and then find they cannot get to the bed built for two; the option of the first floor trundle with its two single beds may not be appealing. I get that.

Drew said I needed a good picture of those stairs. Several friends who are better at photography than I am offered to come take pictures so that the images on the web site would have a professional look. Their generosity notwithstanding, I was impatient to get the ball rolling once I decided on this venture, and the not-so-terrible camera that lives on my phone did the job, at least initially. I did not realize until months later that the casement windows were open when I took the outdoor photos (and that is the one that is on the airbnb site and on this one – consistency may count for something) but the mission was accomplished, and the first set of images successfully were uploaded. During that photo-taking session, I specifically recall considering the best angle for the photo of the stairs. Let there be no doubt. This is not your run-of-the-mill way to get to an upper floor.

One can only imagine the dedicated, hardworking team at airbnb headquarters, basking in their amazing San Francisco office space, reviewing as-yet-unlisted listings (“Hey, Sara, did you ever see stairs like this?”), which is to say I suspect that invisible team felt the same way about this staircase as Drew did. I did not ask them to position the photo so prominently on my cottage page, but they did. (I can’t think it ended up there randomly.) In any case it is impossible to miss when you open the page and begin to scroll down to read more. The photo’s position is a little like your mom or dad or favorite family friend giving the kind of advice you know is important using a blatant preface: Pay attention now — this is important. The prominence of the image serves plainly as the blatant preface and gently, subtly yet strongly speaks volumes: Make sure you are comfortable with this image. There is no other option for gaining access to the second story.

I love being on hand to welcome my guests. I find ways to finagle my schedule and most of the time am on site when they arrive. Doing the welcome spiel and tailoring it depending on the interest of the guest, time of day and previously expressed circumstances or concerns is one of my favorite parts of this whole gig. For me it involves the meet and greet, the presentation of place and the explanation of must-knows. Part of my spiel is “Right foot first up the stairs.” Starting with your right foot, and having to tell yourself to do so is not hard and possibly adds to the overall charm of the cottage — one more piece that is unexpected and unconventional, but totally works. But I would be subjecting my guests to disappointment and possibly to too big a challenge if I did not tell them ahead of time.

In the grander scheme of life, people do not want to deal with unexpected inconveniences. If something is potentially an inconvenience, or could remotely be construed as an inconvenience, it is best to tell them ahead of time. Whatever is a need-to-know, say it up front. Naturally, individual judgment complicates everything. What bothers me might not bother you. I speak as someone who does not like or eat nuts of any kind. I am not allergic, it is simply beyond me what people see in them, taste in them, like about them. I just don’t get it. (For this reason, I am sorry to tell you nut-lovers, I also do not put nuts in the cookies I bake. You just have to deal with that.)

I also do not watch television except on occasion. Before the cottage was listed on airbnb, a neighbor stayed in it for a few days and suggested that the lack of a TV would be a detriment to potential guests. This was a quandary. The cottage has no ideal place for a television (just look at those pictures in the first post – where would it go anyway?), plus I know for a fact that not everyone feels the way this neighbor does. I myself had been firmly planted in the thanks-but-no-thanks camp regarding television ever since my best undergraduate prof told us that someday we too would watch television just the way our parents did, despite any lofty ideas about having better things to do (“We’ll see about that,” the little voice in my head had said — and thank you very much, Peter Sandman).

On the other hand, maybe some guests would want a TV. Not everyone, after all, had been challenged by Peter. I had input on both sides. Finally it seemed best to go with my gut, but make sure there are no surprises. Leave the cottage aesthetically pleasing (i.e.without the large black screen in the scene) but explain the lack and offer to put a TV in there if someone did want it.

In the country, out here on my gravel road, cable has not come. Stations are limited. But hey, I offered. So far, not a single person has asked me for a TV. Quite a few have thanked me for not having one. We just want to play real board games, they say. We just want to listen to the crickets. We just want to talk to each other. Again I say: Thank you, Peter.

There may not be a TV at the cottage but, assuming you read through the details of my listing, you knew that. It is not a surprise. Whether conveyed through image or words, people want to know what they are getting. This observation is not limited to airbnb. None of the observations I will discuss are limited to airbnb. Parallels are everywhere in this world.

In business, an entire segment of the workforce exists to make sure that the parties involved in any operation or transaction know what they are getting and in fact get it. Words, those squirmy, slippery little buggers that are not always clear no matter how hard we try, comprise the contracts that attempt to clarify the details of our dealings. We had best not promise precision parts if we do not have access to the machinery to make said parts, the labor to build them, the materials specific to the job and the management to pull the order together. We had best not promise confidentiality when members of our team don’t take non-disclosure clauses seriously.

In relationships, we find ourselves annoyed, threatened or worse if vital information is not disclosed in a timely way. We generally don’t want to be with someone who is, in fact, already with someone else. We don’t want to show up for a party with a bottle of wine and having already had a drink or two when our hosts don’t drink at all. We don’t want to find out about an important meeting when, well, you know. Could you — could someone — have told me?

While it’s true that what matters to me may not matter at all to you, the disclosing of certain information will be not only helpful and appreciated, it will keep you from getting into trouble. I don’t want bad reviews any more than I want to sign bad contracts or enter bad relationships. The understanding of “People hate surprises” plays hand in hand with one of the guiding principles of success — preparedness. As an airbnb host, this means be prepared in every way you can think of, and in turn prepare your guests.

One way to do this is to say or present the same thing multiple times in multiple ways including words, image, action or any combination thereof. (Again I thank Peter, who suggested that saying something three times in three different ways would do it.) If you stand too close to me (unless I want you to stand close to me) I can tell you to back up either in spoken words (unlikely since I am not the confrontational type) or I can myself back up (count on it). Backing up increases the distance between us and accomplishes the goal of establishing appropriate space without my having to verbalize my discomfort. If you live with me, I will tell you sooner or later to keep the door at the bottom of the spiral staircase closed (unless of course you are going through it!). This has to do with my lack of affection for the sometimes large arachnids, creepy no matter what their size, that may be living down there and are more likely come up here if that door is open. The nonverbal I have adopted here is a sign on bright pink paper taped to both sides of the door, with the polite imperative: Please close this door (which for the record was pitifully effective with Bradley, who always had better things to do than close a door).

My inability to convey my wish effectively to Bradley should in no way deter anyone from expressing (or trying to express) what’s important in multiple ways. In the case of the cottage stairs there are no fewer than three means of communication. The online text includes a plain description, the web page includes the prominent photograph and my introductory spiel always includes the “right foot first” part. Lack of a TV is plainly stated and plainly visible when you are in the cottage. I don’t bring it up unless the guest does, and usually they say something like “Oh, I’m so glad you don’t have a TV.”

Deception is a bad idea most of the time. The exception that comes to mind is when a friend gets a haircut she is really excited about but which actually looks awful, and you simply say, “You got your hair cut!” with the most genuine smile you can muster, and leave it at that. If you are unable to quickly steer the conversation to other topics, you may be forced to say something along the lines of a compliment, which you know to be untrue. Technically this is deception. I know it’s mild, but still. The best way to avoid trouble is to be straight with people. Present what you have, who you are, what you offer, what’s important to you. To the best of your ability, be clear. Make sure people know what they are getting.

An Unboring Path

gardens

The Story of the Roast

Yanking My Way Through the Jungle

Water Runs Downstream!

Parallels in the Weed World

Woodland Invaders

Unboring defined

A “recipe” for strawberry jam

People hate surprises

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