by jphilo | May 17, 2010 | Daily Life
Life has been worrisome lately, at least in the rhubarb department. Last year, the little bed we planted six springs ago was a wonder to behold. We had waited five years before harvesting more than a few stalks, to let the plants become established. By 2009, they were flourishing, and we harvested a bountiful crop.
But this year, the bed is struggling, even though I have been faithfully caring for my charges. Several times already, I’ve pulled away the promiscuous creepy charlie that wants to crawl into the bed and sleep with anyone it can find. Despite my attention, one rhubarb plant is so small, I don’t dare harvest even one stalk from it.
“Maybe they need fertilizer,” I told Hiram. So a few weeks ago, we bought a bag of manure and carefully followed Mom’s instructions about working it into the ground. I kept meaning to lug the hose out to the patch and water it down, but held out for promised rains which came in fits and starts for several days.
It was enough to make two of the plants perk up, and I harvested enough rhubarb for one pie. In the process, I noticed little orange specks on several lower, outer leaves. Something Mom mentioned during the manure tutorial resonated. “Were they hit with some of the weed killer Hiram used?” she had asked.
Hmmm.
The weekend we spread the manure, Hiram applied weed and feed as part of his Wedding Sanctuary Improvement Program. “Did some of it hit the rhubarb?” I asked after going inside and chopping up my rhubarb.
“I tried to miss it,” Yard Man sheepishly replied.
Sigh.
So I went back out and tried to limit the damage by pulling up all the speckled stalks and saying a prayer over what remained. Since then we’ve had a few more half-hearted showers and one day long deluge of the Noah variety. I spent a good portion of that day peering out the window willing the rhubarb make a flashy comeback, but it didn’t happen. Now, the clouds have cleared, and I’m hoping the sun will work its magic on the rhubarb patch. Strawberry season is almost here, and I’m so hungry for strawberry-rhubarb pie.
Grow little rhubarb patch, grow. Spring won’t be the same without you!
by jphilo | May 13, 2010 | Daily Life
The temperatures turned chilly last weekend. Frost coated the grass Sunday morning, but the cold weather didn’t slow down the critters in our yard. Instead, the bracing air seemed to whip them into a frenzy, and our normally quiet yard was as busy as the pub district on a Friday night.
First, an insecure male cardinal discovered his reflection in the glass of a garage window. For hours, he clucked menacingly at his presumed rival. When he wasn’t doing that, he flew a regular circuit from the ledge to the garage roof, to the chimney top of the barbecue pit to the picnic table to the hedge to the nearest tall tree. He fluffed his feathers and chirped away, trying to claim his territory but every time he flew back to the window ledge, his pesky rival was still staring at him in the glass.
That neck of the woods was the weekend hot spot for other critters, as I discovered when rounding the corner of the garage during my morning walk the same day. A squirrel crouched in a corner created by the hose caddy and garage wall. The next time I passed by, he had one paw on the lowest slat of siding, and his head crammed below it. When he heard me pass by, he hid beneath the hose caddy, but didn’t run away. I moved beyond his line of vision and turned around. His head was under the siding again, and when it finally popped out, he was chewing vigorously on who knows what.
The next morning, when I opened the kitchen door, a movement under one of our spruce trees caught my attention. A woodchuck, low to the ground and trying to look invisible, scurried from the base of one tree to another. Then he aimed for the shed, and with one frantic burst of speed, disappeared behind it. Feeling a bit like the White Witch of Narnia as she scared away the woodland creatures loyal to Aslan, I got in the car and drove to church.
After church, while I put lunch on the table, the no tailed cat strolled past the kitchen window, blinked at me and meowed. “Our yard is crawling with critters,” I told Hiram and proceeded to give him the weekend wildlife rundown. I thought we moved to here to get away from it all. But this weekend, we’ve had absolutely no privacy.”
Hiram looked at me and smiled. “It’s a great place to live, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, it is.”
by jphilo | May 12, 2010 | Daily Life
With two kids getting married, two nieces graduating, a new book to write, and Hiram training for a half-marathon, spring’s been busy. So busy, in fact, it was hard to squeeze Mother’s Day into the mix. But it managed to settle comfortably into the small amount of space available.
The kids couldn’t come home because wedding showers and ceremonies have eaten up weekends and gas money. But they called on Sunday, and the sheer pleasure of talking to the amazing young adults they’ve become and to the wonderful mates they’ve chosen made up for their absence.
Finding time to honor my mother was tricky too, since her granddaughter graduated from college the day before Mother’s Day. She went to UNI with my brother’s family for the ceremony and were too tired for any big doing the next day. So Hiram and I drove down and took her out for pie – except she hadn’t eaten lunch yet so she had a patty melt while Hiram and I ate pie. An odd celebration, but it worked.
Hiram’s mother isn’t with us, but the other day I looked out the kitchen window at the tree we planted in her memory several years ago. Memories of her vibrant, eccentric presence flooded through me, and I shook my head. For the first time, the tree looks more treeish than sapling. Has she really been gone that long?
Our littlest crab apple tree finished blooming last week, the one Hiram and Anne planted for Mother’s Day a few years back. It’s not trying too hard to become a tree, being short to start with and not very ambitious. It’s biggest claim to fame came last year when a flock of spring robins got tipsy eating the fermented fruit still hanging from it’s branches. The tree strained under the weight of the birds, but remained upright. Kind of reminded me of Cindy Brady from the Brady Bunch, the youngest child in a big family determinedly trying to keep up with the bigger kids.
The crab apple tree reminds me of all that’s happened since it became part of our yard – Mom breaking up housekeeping after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the healing and life changes our son has experienced, our self-conscious daughter blossoming into a confident woman, our neurotic daschund moving in with my brother’s family, the birth of my bouncing baby book, my husband becoming a motorcycle dude at age fifty – all those things that squeezed their way into our unsuspecting days and made themselves completely at home.
Kind of like Mother’s Day squeezing its way into the busyness of our lives this year. I’m getting used to it, becoming comfortable with it. This May, I wouldn’t want things any other way.
by jphilo | Apr 19, 2010 | Daily Life
When I walked by my flower beds yesterday, the creeping Charlie had a stranglehold on a favorite clematis. The dandelions winked their yellow eyes. “Two more days, and we’ll blow seeds everywhere,” they taunted
My original plan had been to wait for a good, soaking rain and then attack the weeds. But the five day forecast sad no rain for a few more days, and my flowers didn’t look like they could hold on that long.
So yesterday afternoon, after a quick lunch and before talking myself into a nap, I pulled on the gardening gloves and got busy. Thankfully, Hiram grabbed the wheelbarrow and picked up the weeds as I grubbed them out of the dirt.
The weather was perfect. The ground, however, was uncooperative at best and iron hard at worst. Before long, my shoulders ached. From the protests my leg muscles made, they must have spent winter lounging on the beach in Florida while the rest of me exercised and walked outside in the cold.
The top of Hiram’s bald head got redder by the minute. Every muscle in my body whispered, “It’s Sunday afternoon. Time for a nap. You better quit. You’re too old for this. Give up and go inside.”
But we slaved away, motivated by the need to stay ahead of the gardening this spring and summer, at least until after Anne’s wedding in our yard on July 11.
When I rolled out of bed this morning, the aches and pains weren’t too bad, but they crept up on me during my morning walk. By the time I neared the house, I felt like an old, grouchy mother-in-law and a muttery mother of the bride.
Why did we say Anne could get married under our oak tree??How will we keep up with the yard work until July 11??Why are we such saps??What were we thinking?
What were we thinking?
What were we thinking?
Then the bleeding hearts came into view, one red and one white. Their transient loveliness, nestled in a corner flower bed, spoke blessing and family and home to me.
My shoulders still ached. My legs still screamed their insults.
But I could see my daughter in a white gown, walking on the lawn to meet her sweetheart under the oak tree we planted when she was a little girl. The shady spot spoke blessing and family and home to her and her new husband. That’s what we were thinking when we said yes.
The aches and pains are worth it.
by jphilo | Apr 16, 2010 | Daily Life
Compared to the riot of spring colors outside, the poinsettias in my living room are looking faded and dusty. Really, truly, it’s time to pitch these puppies, but I can’t make myself do it.
All winter (and if you recall, winter was a drawn out affair in these parts) the three poinsettias clustered in front of our picture window were the lone bright spot of color in our house. The blooms lasted for months, and they still don’t look too shabby as long as the three plants stick together. I’ve grown rather attached to them.
With the warm weather, they’re shedding profusely and picking up after them is becoming a bother. It really is time to get rid of them. You’d think that since they were freebies thrust into our arms after a wedding in December, parting with them would be easy.
But no. I inherited the warped economic model of my mother who was raised during the Great Depression. According to that mantle, free stuff – used aluminum foil, grocery bags, cardboard toilet paper, wrapping paper, and paper towel tubes and the like – are immensely valuable. Free food, along with free plants, rank right up there with gold fillings and Carnegie endowments.
So how in the world am I supposed to get rid of three poinsettia plants in perfectly fine shape, especially when admired in the dark, which is still about ten hours? I just can’t do it by myself. What I need is some tough love.
Could someone tell me to pitch poinsettias after four months of hard use, even though there’s a lot of wear left in them? And could you do it soon? I’m tired of cleaning up after the pesky little critters.
by jphilo | Apr 15, 2010 | Daily Life
The weather has been gorgeous for the past few days. I’ve been relishing the sunshine and warmth, though survivor guilt threatens now and then. I feel a few twinges at the thought of my teacher friends trying to make long division interesting enough to keep kids from staring out the window and daydreaming about freedom. But then I hear a cardinal singing in the treetop and see a new tulip blooming in the garden and get over it pretty quick.
From my viewpoint, spring has been mighty cooperative this year. it was in full swing during my trip to Morgantown, West Virginia last week. The daffodils, tulips, rhododendron and forsythia were in full bloom, and one hilltop was swathed in redbud blossoms. I was sure the scenery in Minneapolis would be a letdown since spring had to be weeks away there, but I was wrong. The same flowers were in full bloom there, with fragrant white magnolias ahead of the redbuds.
People in the Twin Cities kept commenting on their early spring, so I steeled myself for the inevitable: the magnolias and redbuds, the rhododendrons, tulips and daffodils would be old news by the time I arrived home, three hours south. Once again, I was wrong.
Spring came late to central Iowa, holding back curtain time until my travels were over. The buds are just now opening on our pink magnolia, and this morning the faintest tinge of purple laced the neighbor’s redbud trees. The rhubarb’s six inches tall, and the asparagus has yet to show its ugly face. The hard winter must have been hard on the bunny population, because very few rabbits have shown their faces, and they haven’t eaten the tulips for lunch this year. Of course, the creeping Charlie and the quack grass aren’t wasting any time getting established, but I’m waiting for a good rain so the dirt is soft and easy for pulling weeds.
For this one week, life’s been about as perfect as it can be. I’m keeping the windows open and letting my eyes wander from the computer screen to the green grass and budding trees outside my window. Who knows when spring will be this cooperative and lovely again? I’m determined not to waste it.
