A Gift by Special Delivery

 

We live in a magical time of consumerism, don’t we? I mean, make a wish—“I’d really like a pair of flannel pajama pants with dogs on them”—and here’s a pair for you in The Big Shopping Warehouse of Rocketman Jeff.

Can you imagine this for someone in the late 1800’s? “Oh no! The paddle on your butter churn broke! It’s gonna take Grandpa a day or so in the barn to make one. Oh, wait—we can order a new paddle. Better yet, let me just order you some Kerrygold butter from Whole Foods. Yeah, the milk comes straight from Irish cows so you know it’s good….”

Ah, it’s lovely, isn’t it? And weirdly, part of the charm is getting that brown box at the door—especially when we didn’t order anything. I love opening my front door to find something a friend or family member has sent. “Hey, kids!” (Of course I mean Maya, Maudie, and Jenny.) “Look what someone sent us! Let’s see what it is!”

Exactly one year ago this month, I received an unexpected gift. But it didn’t come in a brown box, and it wasn’t left on my front door. It definitely came from a friend, though, and it was left in my back yard, more specifically, in the planter. You can see a photo of it here; Nature gifted me with that young cottonwood tree you see at the top of this post.

Quite a beauty, isn’t she? Of course, she didn’t start out that way. She started out like this:

Can you believe it? A tiny seed like that! There are cottonwoods that grow in the nearby ravine (aka “Coyote Gulch”), and they slough off their seeds in the spring breezes like Californians shed sweaters. The air is filled with these floating puffs of seed pods, reminiscent of the Who Horton heard.

One of those puffs blew into my yard, and one single seed—somehow—took root. Sometime in September, when I was weeding that section of the planter, I discovered a tiny baby tree. My first thought was, “Oh, honey, you can’t grow up here. There won’t be enough water, and your roots will eventually wreak havoc on the block wall.” That’s me. Always leading with the pragmatic aspect of my being.

My next response was this: Thank you, Nature, for gifting me with this tree, a place for the little finches to rest in the heat of the day and perhaps even nest one day when the branches are tall enough and strong enough (instead of inside my aluminum patio cover). Thank you for offering a place for Jenny and Maudie to find shade where there was none before. They love to lie up there in the tall grass, but by summer it has dried to a crisp brown in the heat. In seasons ahead, they will have shade. And so will I, on that side of the house.

I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me; cottonwoods spring up quickly and fall down easily and break branches in strong winds and ask me if I care. I don’t. I wanted to worry about all those things, but you know what? I already have so many things to worry about—the health of my aging cat, the health of my aging friends, hell, the health of my beloved country—this one tree can do what it’s going to do. Nature offered it. Nature must care for it. I’ll just stand back and enjoy the benefits.

And maybe, from time to time, I’ll climb up there and give that tree a hug. Because that’s just who I am. Thanks, Nature. I love you!

 

More Garden (and Wildlife) Notes

A week in the life of a back yard gardener:

Monday:
Every night a possum sneaks into my tiny back yard and eats exactly one half of one peach. How do I know? Because I pick up the fallen peaches every day. And every morning there is always one fallen peach--one big, beautiful peach--lying on the ground on the far side of the tree, so carefully incised down to the pit that it looks as if someone with opposable thumbs cut in half with a knife. I have never seen Ms. O. Possum. (I had to do a Google search of "What does possum poop look like?" in order to differentiate between skunk poop and opossum.) I did, however, see one of her young 'uns very early one morning in late spring when I went looking for Purrl. Both were in the planter area. Purrl was sitting sedately on the retaining wall, watching the little critter with wonder and amazement. ("Mom--is that a weird looking cat?") The little joey (yep, that's what they're called) was backed up against the neighbor's fence, growling fiercely.

By the way, "possum" has now become an accepted spelling of "opossum," so you folks my age can stop spelling it like this: 'possum. (Further note: According to the Oxford Dictionary, we are still using the apostrophe for young 'un--because it is a contraction of 'young one'--although most spell check software will then redline the "un." Less stuffy wordsmiths simply use "youngun" as the spelling--though they claim only old folks like myself use that slang term. Hmph.)

Tuesday:
Around midday Monday I noticed a small mantis on the hummingbird feeder outside my kitchen window. I saw it periodically throughout the day, and again first thing Tuesday, hanging out to wish me a good morning. Can you see it?

I wasn't sure how to proceed, as the feeder needed refilling, but I didn't want to disturb whatever she was up to. Apparently the little diva hates paparazzi, though; as soon as I'd taken her photo (with my iPhone, no flash), she exited.

A couple of days later, when I went to fill the feeder again, there were two very tiny--mantises? manti?--hanging out on the plastic "flowers." When I very carefully the feeder, they climbed capably onto the Mexican Bush Sage and proceeded to blend in nicely.

Wednesday:

This actually happened on Tuesday evening. I left Purrl sitting happily on the patio at dusk and walked across the street to ask a neighbor if she needed help loading something into her car. We talked. When I realized it had gotten dark, I hurried back across the street, looking for Purrl in the back yard. No Purrl. I walked into the house through the open patio door to find her hunched over the recently deceased Mr. Rat. Yes, I know, it's another life form that should be honored because-- okay, no, no, no, there are rats living under the house and they're using it for a toilet down there and just, NO. They need to vacate or die. I'm sorry I can't be more Zen about this. Good girl, Purrl-Jam!

But this made me rethink who was eating the fallen peaches. Now I wonder if it wasn't both Ms. Possum and Mr. Rat. Which, during my morning meditation after yoga practice, elicited this imaginary conversation:

Ms. Possum and Mr. Rat are two feet apart in the tall grass under the peach tree at midnight.

Ms. P: This lady is very nice. She leaves these peaches out for us. Also, she didn't let her nasty gray cat eat my Joey a few weeks ago.

(In my mind, the possum sounds very kind and feminine, like a hippie earth-mother or the type of mid-western woman who bakes pies for people in her church.)

Mr. Rat: Oh gawd I've smelled that cat. That thing needs to choke on a chicken bone and die.

(In my mind, the rat sounds like the governor of New Jersey. Don't ask me why.)

Ms. P: Oh dear. That's harsh to say about any living creature. Well, except perhaps for slugs and snakes. But they are delicious! And a girl's gotta eat! Ha ha ha ha!

Mr. Rat: Ha ha ha ha ha! Yeah, lady, I get yer point. Eat all the yard snakes ya want. I don't want 'em comin' down to my resort. We got it all to ourselves down there.

Later that morning, I went out to water and checked beneath the peach tree. For the first time in three weeks, there is no half peach gnawed down to the pit. Such is the circle of life....

After watering, I went out to walk Thomas and heard Mr. and Mrs. Raven calling repeatedly. They're raising two teenagers right now. I feel for them. Although their chicks are almost as big as they are, they still look babyish with their unruly feathers and gangly body parts. The patient couple continues to help them hunt and eat. One day last week, when the temperature was 102, I heard one of the ravens calling repeatedly over the course of twenty minutes or so. I was trying to write, but the loud "SQUAWK!" repeated every ten to fifteen seconds finally drew me away from my desk and outside.

"Raven! What do you want?!?" I called to the rooftops. (By now, I'm not concerned about what my neighbors think of me. I believe I've sufficiently established the odd-reclusive-writer persona.) In answer, one of them (Mr.? Mrs.?) flew down to the street and stood by the gutter, looking my way. Oh. Of course. Water. At that moment, someone's automatic sprinklers clicked on, and run-off began to trickle into the gutter. Suddenly all four Raven family members were in the street, guzzling water.

On Wednesday morning, when I heard Mr. or Mrs. calling, I looked up to see what was amiss this time. Nothing. Mom and Dad were just calling Junior and Junior to breakfast. What was on the menu? A rat, much like the one Purrl caught. When Thomas and I walked up the hill to the corner, I could see the roof of the neighbor's house, the proud parents standing by as one of the juniors tore into the flesh of the lifeless rodent. Again, the circle of life....

Thursday:
One of the recurring themes in Herman Melville's work is the underlying rot, decay and erosion under all things beautiful. (Thus, if you look closely at a rose bush, you'll see the aphids and leaf fungus beneath the blooms.) I see this constantly in the garden. Just look at my beautiful squash plants:

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see a tiny crookneck squash that has formed and now just needs to grow bigger before I can eat it for lunch in a week or so. The squash plants in the photo above the crookneck are zucchini, and while there is a tiny zucchini on one of them, alas, I will probably never get to eat it. All those big broad beautiful leaves are covered with tiny black insects on their undersides which are sucking the life out the plants. Sigh. I worked so hard! I dug out my bottle of Spinosad (a natural insecticide that kills insects in a very fascinating way without harming the other creatures in the garden or the creatures who eat those creatures) and sprayed everything--the zucchini, the crookneck, the tomatoes, the kale and radishes. Arrrgh. Being an organic farmer is hard.

Friday:
I had to call my friend Harry, who has grown practically everything you can grow in his eighty-six years on this planet, to ask him when I will know when the corn is ready to eat.

"Well, when the tassels are brown and dying and it looks like a fat ear of corn," he said.

Oh. Well. Okay.

Saturday:
My son is visiting from San Francisco. If we'd taken a selfie together this time, I would post it here so you could see my giant smile. But we didn't. So here's a photo of Harry (mentioned above) talking to other writers (about writing--but just imagine him telling you everything you ever wanted to know about gardening):

I'm only growing radishes because my son requested them, so I pulled up a big juicy fat spicy one for him and watched him eat it. "It's good" was his less-than-lavish praise of the thing. "Good" was pronounced in a short, clipped manner, the entire sentence pronounced in less than a second without him making any eye contact. Which led me to thinking about how the pronunciation of that word--as he did, with a shrug in his voice, or in this fashion: "It's gooooood!"--can vastly alter the communication of a thought. I think these things because I'm a writer. I truly cannot help myself. I really did spend some time pondering that one word. Good. So that was good.

Sunday:
I had to pull up the zucchini plants and dump them in the green waste barrel today as they were so very full of the little black aphids I wanted to scream and light the plants on fire.

To comfort myself, I harvested two ears of corn and took them into the house immediately to boil and eat. It was tender, sweet, delicious, and worth all the work I put into it. Yum.

The crookneck squash, so far, is surviving. Fingers crossed. The tomatoes look beautiful.

And there is a pair of Roadrunners--the real kind, not the cartoon kind--hanging out in my neighborhood, which makes me very happy.
PLEASE NOTE: Real roadrunners are about the size of a chicken. They are not the size of Wile E. Coyote.

Note: This post was originally scheduled to go up on Sunday, August 13th, 2017, but in the two days before, all hell broke loose in Charlottesville, Virginia, and subsequently my heart spilled out onto the page in the piece that follows this one.

The Trouble with Gardening

Down the street and around the corner from me lives a woman who keeps her front yard in immaculate shape, weeding and trimming and cultivating incessantly, it seems. Not to sound pervy, but if pressed, I could pick her out of a line-up of neighbors based on her backside alone--because that's essentially the view I have of her every time I drive by--bent over, pulling weeds, clipping roses.... I've seen her out there after dark, wearing a headlamp, going after--what? Weeds? Snails? I applaud her. The thing is, I could be her.

That's one of the problems with gardening; once you really invest yourself in it, once you begin to see how things spring up from seeds and then grow and change and mature, once you've pulled a radish out of the ground or a green bean or tomato from the vine and eaten it, you're hooked. Truth be known, my love of eating the things I grow is so intense, I could spend all day every day just working on my garden.

I know what you're thinking: "You're retired now, Kay! If you want to spend all day gardening, you can do that!" It's okay to think that. Just don't say it aloud; you're just enabling me.

Because just as video games are for the teen (or young adult... or old adult) who doesn't want to face the world outside, so is gardening for me. I retreat into it. The trouble is, I have this other job, the one I should be spending four or five... okay, maybe two or three... hours a day engaged in. Which job? This job.

Still....

In the spring, I pulled all the dead sticks out of the slanted planter at the back of my yard and tossed some bags of Miracle Gro onto the hard red clay. (Quick side note on that: I bought six large bags of Miracle Gro Garden Soil from Home Depot. As I opened each one and spread the soil, I discovered empty taco sauce packets, the kind they give you at fast food places, one in each of the six bags. I took a picture and emailed it to Miracle Gro. I did not find the company representative to be as fascinated by this practice as I was.)

Eventually, too late in the season, really, I threw some organic, non-GMO seeds in the ground. Since this year's garden is entirely experimental (because I'm in a new place), I decided to use the "three sisters" template for planting: four corn plants in a square, green beans outside the corn (to vine up the stalks) and squash outside the green beans. I've never done it this way before. And I'll never do it this way again, but hey, it has been fun watching the result.

The corn came up easily (and my neighbors finally became fascinated with what I was doing, climbing around up in the planter every day). After a few weeks, it looked like this:

Then one night we had a windstorm unlike any I have experienced here before. In the morning, the corn looked like this:

Oh no! I'd worked so hard! I called my buddy Harvey (who keeps a much nicer garden in his tiny back yard), and he came to the rescue, helping me pull the stalks back up and support them with stakes and twine. Whew. They kept growing.

Only a few of the many green bean seeds I planted emerged from the soil, and as soon as they did, they were eaten by snails. Sigh....

Meanwhile, the giant sunflowers I'd planted along the back fence (so my sweet neighbor, Jackie, the one with the five Pomeranians, could see them, and so the birds could have the seeds) jumped up out of their seeds and started heading for the sky. Sunflowers don't close up at night, so if I look out my window in the evening or take Thomas out in the middle of the night to pee, these guys are smiling back at me:

They grew taller than the corn. And they are, indeed, "giant."

Finally, the corn began to form ears. But then I noticed something unusual about the silk; it turned purple not long after sprouting:

So of course, I did a Google search of "Why is the corn silk purple?" and discovered that purple corn silk means my soil is sadly lacking in phosphate. Ah well. This was an experiment, after all. Still... I worked so hard! So, added to my gardening notes for next year: Add phosphate to soil along with Miracle Gro. Also check for more taco sauce packets.

The other problem with puttering about the back yard is that it becomes a major distraction for me. As I write this, I am sitting on my patio. I have moved the table so that I have a view of the garden, including the hummingbird and seed feeders. Right now there are six or eight birds on the feeder or below it on the ground--house finches, goldfinches, sparrows. For the past hour, three hummingbirds have been engaged in epic skirmishes, chasing each other from the feeder again and again--and also performing mock strafing missions over the head of Sugar Plum, my tiny tailless black cat who stalks the yard until one of the Pomeranians sees her and barks excitedly, sending her scurrying back to the sanctuary of the house. I could watch these antics play out all day... plus the Phoebes and other insects plucking bugs from the corn stalks and eating them... and the doves who show up to eat the sunflower seeds the other birds knock to the ground... and the mated pair of ravens who stop by to drink from the bird bath about midday. See? It's all too entertaining. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go lock myself in a closet so I can get some writing done.

What Lies Beneath or Why We Should Encourage Girls To Be Whatever They Want To Be

I always think of yard work and gardening as meditative activities, so I rarely grumble when it's time to clear the flowerbeds of weeds. Armed with my shovel, I move forward happily in anticipation of the time it will afford me to work through plot lines for the book I'm writing, or (more treacherous terrain) try to figure out why I haven't been writing lately, or to contemplate my place in the world. It's monotonous work, weeding. But it's good, physical work, and each time I push the spade into the earth, taking care to avoid tree roots and water lines, I am grateful that at sixty I can still do this.

A few days ago, just as I'd begun to tackle a patch of soil near my agapanthus that had become overgrown with stray grass tendrils, I felt the shovel hit something hard. I moved back a bit, then gently pushed the shovel down deep and under, hoping to scoop up what I assumed would be a large rock. What emerged was softball sized. But it certainly wasn't a rock. I had unearthed the shell of a small tortoise.

I'm not squeamish (trust me; I've held freshly delivered human placentas in my bare hands and examined them to make sure everything came out all right), and I love all things reptilian (possibly with the exception of Diamond Back rattlesnakes, which I believe are the spawn of Satan), but I have to confess my stomach did a bit of a turn when I realized what I'd unearthed. After all, it was the body of an animal that had died. So I took a moment to have a quiet meditation over the remains before I began to examine them.

What I discovered was that the body of the tortoise had lain interred long enough to be reduced to a skeleton. As I slowly turned it over, the bottom shell fell away and all the bones sifted down through the dirt into the hollow of the shell. Slowly, carefully, I brushed and sifted away the soil. There was his skull—missing the lower mandible, which I found a few moments later. I recognized the pelvis next, as it was the largest bone. The tiny vertebrae that had once held the tortoise's spinal column in place were a marvel to consider as they rested in my palm.

In those moments of close examination, I was grateful to my college biology teacher who insisted we learn the name of every single bone in the human body. As a young person, I found the exercise tedious. Now I appreciate how well the knowledge has served me over the years. I thought of Annie Dillard and her amazing prose about the biology in her own backyard. And I recalled my first exposure to the writings of anthropologist Ashley Montagu. I was still in junior high (though already a confirmed writer), and I thought how wonderful it would be to spend a lifetime studying the unique zoology of humans and then writing about new discoveries and conclusions that could be drawn from them. Years later, a friend would introduce me to the brilliant illuminations of Loren Eiseley, but by then I'd launched into my college coursework as an English major, and there was no turning back. Still...

If I'd been given direction as a child, if I had not been told repeatedly, "Girls don't... " whenever I leaned toward the boy side, I would not have followed the discipline which seemed practical but has turned out to be a bit static and stuffy, and would instead have followed what always seemed to me to be so dynamic and exciting that it was, perhaps, just beyond the reach of an average tomboy being raised by a single, working class mom.

I have saved my treasure of turtle bones in a large metal tin. Perhaps before I retire I'll come across a student eager to find an engaging science project who will be happy to do the painstaking work of organizing, mounting and identifying this jumble of leftover parts. If I find her, she may have these bones with my blessing.

What Writers Do

(Before)

Considering all the seriousness of my recent posts, I thought it was time for a short bit of levity....

Not long after I moved into my new place in the flatlands, I began to suspect that my neighbor was spying on me.  He smokes, so I would be in the back yard busily working and the scent of cigarette smoke would waft over the block wall that separates our yards.  At first I thought it was coincidence; he seemed to be taking a cigarette break every time I chose to work in the yard.  And then there was the day when I heard someone start to ask him what he was doing--and he shushed her.

Hmmm, I thought, as I dug out shovelful after shovelful of sod for the garden.  Why is he sitting on the other side of the fence eavesdropping on what's going on over here?  I mean, it's got to be boring.  All I'm doing is digging, day after day, trying to get the garden--oh holy moley, that's when it hit me.  From his side of the fence, all he could hear was the shovel going into the ground over and over.  He had to be wondering what the heck his strange new neighbor was up to.

That's when I started talking to Sugar Plum while we were out there.  Now, I could have given my curious neighbor some honest exposition, said things like, "Yep, we've gotta get this sod out of here soon, Sug, so we can get the garden planted by spring."  But my mind went in a different direction.  I'm going to say it's because I'm a writer, and, well, it's what we do.  So the next time I was out there digging and I caught the scent of cigarette smoke, this is what I said (with dramatic pauses, of course, in between shovelfuls):

"Yeah, Sug, Mama has a lot of work to do... but it's like Sheriff Tate said....  There's just some kind of men... you have to shoot... before you can say hello to them... and even then... they're not worth... the bullet it takes to shoot them... Don't you worry... I'll get this all... taken care of...."

Heh heh.

(After)

Retrieving the Gauntlet Thrown

I am removing the sod from a 15' x 15' patch of my back yard, digging up the sod myself, shovelful by shovelful. 

I am doing this so that I can plant a garden.

What I mean is, I am doing this because a foolish man said to me, “You won’t be able to do that.”

As soon as he said that, I knew that I would do it.  Knew that I would be in the back yard with a shovel on as many days as I could spare the time, plunging the sharp new spade into the earth, dancing on top of the blade to make the bite as deep as possible, bringing up the tightly woven clump of grass torn from its tapestry and tossing it as far as I could so the impact would knock off some of the clinging soil.  I knew I would keep at it, back-straining as the work may be, without calling The Grandson over to help (though this would be a project he would love).

Don’t misunderstand me; I like the foolish man who looked me in the eye and said, “You won’t be able to do this.”  He simply needs… a paradigm shift.

And I am writing this blog post today for another foolish man… one I don't like so much... one who criticized my writing earlier this week… the stranger who said, ‘You can’t have a paragraph that’s only one sentence long.  It’s not really a paragraph, is it?’

Is it?