Meditations in January: Exit Summer

One of the most intense summers of my life– the summer of great expectations, sweat, tears, dehydration, many blisters and even more metaphors– ended months ago with our first real freeze, and has erstwhile been buried (off and on) by subsequent snow. We are halfway through January; last summer’s toil, heartbreak, and gifts have long since dwindled and dissolved to shadow– phantom omens (and promises) of what’s coming next summer. It’s been months since I’ve accepted that I can’t drive the truck full of compost over even the shortest muddy expanse of our little acre. Only the volunteer arugula in my graveyard garden persists, haggard but stubbornly green.

In this stark netherland of winter, my hibernating gardener’s heart might feel a bit chilled, a bit bleary, like a reluctantly falling last leaf: weightless, aflutter, completely blind in a frosty night breeze. 

Might, but doesn’t. Momentarily adrift, I am yet carried safely along. Glad spirits– Pollyanna and “The Sound of Music”– accompany me.

Who Goes There?

Glad spirits? This is an outrageous claim. And it won’t be the last. As my daughter Maurya points out, I make all the claims here with way too many metaphors. But last summer I lived so big! Worked so hard! Thirsted and hacked and dreamed and grieved, and now it’s winter, and the only proof that remains of all the former bigness are these ghosts, these whims, this assortment of jumbled metaphors.

So yes, Pollyanna.  Mary Pickford, one of America’s first silver screen sweethearts, played a cute, slapstick Pollyanna in 1920, blithely catching her auntie’s crocheting on her shoe and unraveling it all over the house, but it was the 1960 Disney/Hayley Mills confection — the wide-eyed, innocent, super glad, bow-bedecked, blond Pollyanna– that fused meaning to the name for the ages.

A Home For Pollyanna (At Seventeen)

Pollyanna was also once an ill-conceived nickname of my own– a moniker bestowed in the yeasty give-and-take of a tightly cloistered high school annual staff (I miss them now, wherever they are– those smart, derisive, light-hearted children). 

At the time, I resented the nickname. I couldn’t make sense of it, other than as an embarrassing exaggeration of my naivete and (relatively) good manners.   What did I have in common with the “all-in” Disney character– optimistic, kind, talkative,  “glad”?  While my seventeen-year-old self believed wistfully in optimism, it evaded her, paralyzed as she was by the sound and fury of her adolescent world (not yet aware that clamor usually signifies nothing– it’s the quiet things that matter most).  Literally and metaphorically near-sighted (I mean, seventeen! Who sees well at seventeen?), she was largely blind to the beauty and worth of the souls and experiences she lived amongst.  She wasn’t kind so often as she was nice (not yet knowing the difference)- she certainly wasn’t talkative, except sometimes at home with her sisters.  Rarely was she truly glad.

Let Sleeping Dragons Lie

And deep, deep inside that timid seventeen year old slept a secret dragon.  Keeper of all things snarky: rolling eyes, cat spit, tiny doubt pins with which to prick balloons of contentment.  A caustic, impotent cynic.  When the dragon awoke, her fretting and smoldering only alarmed my teenage self, who never let her out in public (because remember, I was at least nice, if not altogether kind). 

Pretty sure Disney’s Pollyanna didn’t harbor an interior dragon.  There were only two similarities between the glad and intrepid Disney Pollyanna and myself then.  Firstly, blondness.   Which blondness is said to lend certain nuances to the personality whose head is halo’d by it…but these are unproven, inflammatory theories, and should be studied further before we make reckless claims. (Said the blond.)

Secondly, I’m convinced any and all Pollyannas would have loved “The Sound of Music”, as I always have, and always will.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Even watching “The Sound of Music” today, I’m still smitten by the gradual love story happening between Captain Von Trapp and ex-nun Maria: eye twinkles and glances askance. Also delightful to me are the costumes (Maria and Scarlett O’Hara could collaborate on the curtains-to-outfits thing), the songs and dances and clever lines and bits of wisdom (how do you solve a problem like Maria? Just…don’t! And how does one find her dreams? Climb Every Mountain, y’all!). All set against a backdrop of haunting realities:  Nazi suppression– a sentient cancer, morphing into blatant aggression; sixteen-year-old Liesl’s blithe acceptance of seventeen-year-old Rolph’s proclaimed authority.  (Notice that he proclaims his authority rather than actual love before he kisses her… perhaps a subtle comment on Nazi immorality, or at any rate on Idealized Romance: a kiss is never really enough).  

The movie now is as germane, wise, and lovely as ever, with its shadows and burrs lending depth and perspective.  Painful things do this for us, I think.  They provide breathtaking context and contrast to what we might otherwise not notice as beautiful and sweet.

“My Favorite Things”, one of the songs from the musical, is particularly iconic. Nun-turned-governess Maria (who gamely endures first-day-on-the-job initiations such as pocket frogs and pine cone seats) sings it in a gutsy attempt to rally the Von Trapp children during a thunderstorm. “When the dog bites! When the bee stings! When I’m feeling sad.”  Instead of considering the bee’s sting or the dog’s teeth, Maria “simply remembers”  her “favorite things”: girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, snowflakes that cling to her nose and eyelashes. 

 “And then I don’t feel so bad!” she belts, her night-gowned arms flung wide.

The Glad Game

Such a simple answer to life’s problems: focus on gifts and goodness  rather than becoming overwhelmed by the adverse.  And plucky, given the skulking enemy presence in the musical’s plot, and what we know now about the outcomes of  the real-life skulker’s  policies and campaigns.  (Not to mention high school, murmurs the interior dragon.)  Some, including my hidden smoky cynic,  might see “My Favorite Things” as an idealist pipe dream, simplistic platitudes running roughshod over complexity, an escapist’s unwillingness to face and address life’s harsh realities (could be, we’ll see… might be fun, though).  

One way or another, “My Favorite Things”  is essentially a super-glad Pollyanna anthem.  Who (according to her original 1913 author, Eleanor Porter) was born 40 years too early to be a member of  the Von Trapp Pillow-Fight Club, and therefore is really the only missing child in the whole thunderstorm-favorite-things bed-bouncing scene (Liesl can just stay out in the rain, for all I care… consorting with that perfidious masochist Rolph).

Aside: Since after all these decades my inner cynic-dragon seems to be with me to stay, I’m assisting in her rehabilitation– hoping a day job will tame her.  She’s finessing her baking skills, anticipating that one day she will make it onto the Great British Baking Show, where she will… no, no, not tell off Paul Hollywood. No telling off, little dragon. Rather she will attempt to persuade Paul that after a certain point, interpreting the doneness of a bake becomes a dogmatic pursuit, and that he would do well to lighten up a bit, as it were.

So… does that work?  Could Pollyanna and Maria have reckoned well with The Really Tough Things, like plagues and genocide, depression and D-Day?  

And how would my interior dragon fare?  

Reality Has Teeth Too

This summer, my hills were not alive with the sound of music.  My heart was too heavy to sing like a lark that is learning to pray; it had dropped instead like a lead zeppelin at my first real horticultural encounter with our newly claimed dirt.  

In a world beset by incomprehensible tragedy, this comparably minor sort of heart wreck is impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t been dazzled by the potentiality of paradise, who isn’t called by the Good Earth to Till and Sow and Reap in it.  It would be, perhaps, akin to George Ezra actually having to give up his golden grand piano for one made of papier mache, or Mary Cassatt trading precise brush marks in oil for wilder–even frantic– strokes with pastels as she gradually goes blind.  Beethoven with his ear to the floor, his masterpieces thrumming soundlessly against his head.

I imagined myself as Matt Damon in “The Martian”, a marooned astronaut/horticulturist recuperating from interstellar wounds, attempting to grow a crop of potatoes, alone, on Mars.  

Life Is a Chair of Bowlies, Princess

Because: Alkali clay.  This is what I’m dealing with (not to mention an erratic growing season, grasshoppers, and massively entrenched morning glory, which I promise I will mention a million times, for the rest of my life). Our clay is the exact kind one receives– cubed and cool and dense– wrapped in damp canvas in high school art class at the beginning of the sculpture unit.  To be made into bowls and vases and death masks  (our grasshoppers and morning glory would give each sculpture a nice fossil finish).  This may not sound dire to some folk– after all, pottery is nice.  (Mary Engelbreit once said, on a greeting card, that “Life is A Chair of Bowlies”).  Some grasses will grow in clay soil (Matt Damon did coax life from those potatoes on Mars, for awhile anyway). 

But I lack a kiln; besides, I want bowls of cherries, not chairs of bowlies.  And so much more than a mere patch of struggling greensward.  

The Grave Digger

If my last summer were a movie, it would be named, “The Gravedigger”, for all the graves I dug in the clay– so that I could replace it with rich compost that I fetched truckload by truckload from the dump (another Martian strategy: free “compost”).  Large, shallow graves (two feet deep, four feet wide, twelve to fifteen feet long) for my vegetable gardens.  Innumerable deeper pot-graves for shrubs, fruit trees, and perennials.  All the graves filled with compost before I planted them.  

My neighbors thought I was a lunatic, because I was.  One was kind about my lunacy, saying that while he’d never wasted his own time on fruit trees in such clayey alkali soil, he had heard rumors of other’s success (maybe Pollyanna and Matt Damon are growing peach trees down the road). “You’ll just have to baby them, and then replace them every five or ten years”, he said, his eyes sympathetic but not at all encouraging.  

Another neighbor kept telling Frank that she was worried I’d kill myself with all the hard labor.   “Tell her she doesn’t have to get the whole yard in during the first year!” our new friend exclaimed.

And the Rock Picker (Gathers No Moss)

A couple other friends let me pick unwanted rocks out of their fields.  One said, “Yes, please, take as many as you want, but remember– no returns.”  Most everyone around here deeply resents the presence of native rock in their fields, but I– not having much of my own– eagerly collect them.  I use them to edge graveyard gardens, want them to line raised parterres, raised borders.  

Neighbors Clive and Michelle* (*names changed to protect the innocent) even helped me fill my truck with their rocks (they don’t want any back, either).  Clive, a bee-keeper and as manic a DIY-er as myself, deflected potential slings and arrows that yet another alarmed neighbor (we’ll call him Pete) had aimed at my folly. 

 “Who is that woman, picking up rocks at the Smiths?” Pete asked Clive.  

“Does she drive a red Tacoma?” Clive returned Pete’s question with one of his own.  

“Yes, she does!  You know her?  Does she have any idea what she’s doing?  Is she crazy?”  

Here Clive calmly kept the peace.  “It’s ok; she’s all right,” he said.  “Don’t  worry; she’s just using the rock for landscaping.  She’s ok.”  

People do landscape with rocks around here, but everyone favors the really big ones that you pay for a track- or backhoe to put in place.  I’m after the freebies, the ones I can carry by myself.

Mountains To Climb

My best strategy all summer was compost.   I brought home mountains and mountains of compost. But the compost had hot spots in it, I eventually discovered.  Through late spring and early summer, random seedlings and starts in my compost-filled grave-gardens would inexplicably shrivel and die. 

Late frost prevented timely planting; early grasshoppers devoured survivors of the chill and hot spots.  Morning glory erupted everywhere, its network of underground roots unstoppable. I planted many things twice, even thrice and times four.  Out of several packets of nasturtium seed, only one resultant plant was alive and well by the end of summer (nasturtiums are supposed to be so easy to grow).  Any and all darling buds were shaken by the rough winds of May and also June, July, and August.  Which wind twisted and toppled straggling pumpkin and cantaloupe vines upside down, tangling them and tattering their pretty leaves.  It flattened tomato plants and rudely disregarded the deaths of apple and pear and plum trees. My treasured refugee hazelnut bushes gave up the ghost.  Twice. 

Aside: They died.  But then they miraculously lived.  And then they died again.  But still, weeks later, I found them to be not “mostly dead”, but partially–sort of–alive.  Even now, I’m not sure what my moral/ethical response should be, as steward of these fragile, tenuous lives… I read on a Colorado gardening blog that hazels are “never happy” in alkali soil.  Well, neither am I, though  I wholeheartedly yearn for all of us to be happy, wherever we are.  Isn’t it wise, I asked the hazels, to root where we’re planted, to be glad where we stand? This is what Pollyanna did, at least until the moment she fell from her upper story window.

…And Climb…

And so the wind blew, and late frosts pivoted swiftly to searing summer temperatures, but rain it did not, month after month, though we all, suffering from severe drought,  watched and wished and prayed earnestly for rain.  My nephew sent my parents pictures of a nearby wheat field crawling with grasshoppers (my mother was sure they’d eat me). Local feed stores ran out of all forms of grasshopper “control” but the most insidious, which I could not bring myself to use.  Nothing I did, shy of intense and perpetual digging, could stop the morning glory– I eradicated mere square feet of it in the course of one week, only to see it grow back within the next. The irrigation was turned off over a month early away south of us, and smoke from fires in California and further northwest blotted the sky and stung our throats.  My wrists and hands and lower back ached from mountainous shoveling and wheelbarrowing.  

Frank got heat exhaustion, installing a drip irrigation system.  Nora got congested, pulling coccia.  

Both Meisha and Nora, after watching “The Biggest Little Farm” with me, kept reminding me that I, like the biblical Jacob and the untried keepers of the Little Farm, had seven years of this travail yet to endure. (“If only!” my secret smokestack snorted.)

When the Bee Stings

There was an actual bee sting.  It happened in a way Matt the Martian would appreciate: I was alone.  At the dump, shoveling compost into the back of the truck, sweat trickling down every part of me in the still, hot sunlight.  Both alone and indignant–even hurt– that the municipal system kept ghosting me. There was a way, I’d heard, that I could pay the city seven dollars to mechanically scoop compost into my truck.  I just needed to know where to pay, which day and hour  to be there– but no one ever answered my calls, no one was ever in the only office I was aware of, and so I went again and again to shovel compost  into my own truck.  Yes, for free… but at what cost!  Sometimes other customers would show up, and receive instant, convenient scoops from the skidster while I shoveled solitarily.  

But that day I was, as I said, alone.  Alone except for a single hornet, who arrived noticeably upset by my presence.  I have no idea where he came from, or what about me upset him.  He buzzed my head; I swatted him away.  He returned, belligerent, again and again.  In the face of his rising anger, I fled.  Which flight required leaping out of the bed of the truck into the mountain of compost, running through scattered compost into the empty parking lot– all the while swatting at my own head, where the hornet had focused the magnitude of  his buzzing rage– and finally flinging myself into the deserted municipal office just beyond.  

The office was luckily open, but dismal as a scene from the Twilight Zone (or Mars).  I could only hear my own labored breathing and the slight tick of a clock– the front desk chairs were empty; a big screen TV loitered lifeless and dark behind the silent counter.  Sweating and afraid and close to tears, I waited. Minutes crawled to a stop; the universe stood still.  I hoped, as I waited, that if I hid inside long enough, the hornet outside would forget his wrath and move on to other skies. 

Of course he didn’t; I was no sooner back in the truck bed with my shovel than he noiselessly– and from nowhere– descended on my bare head and stung my scalp.  I felt his soft hornet body dissemble when I swept him away.  

That was the final straw.  My heart hurt as much as my throbbing head.  I was completely alone in my pain and dismay and heartbreak– over alkali clay and morning glory and drought and smoke, over grasshoppers and hot spot graveyards and the sting and death of a hornet. 

Over the clean, rational, orderly life I’d left behind– every beautiful, vanished garden that had once been my own, the birthrights I’d traded for chairs of bowlies.

I stood in the back of the truck in the empty parking lot and wept.  For a minute.  But because crying doesn’t fill a truck with compost, and there was that mountain to climb, I began shoveling again, blinking the tears back.  

Mustard and Other Glad Tidings

Just as I was finishing, a van arrived towing a trailer full of green waste.  I noticed the load was almost entirely wild mustard– an annual weed, beautiful in its blooming yellow chartreuseness. Handfuls of smiling young folk spilled out of the van and began unloading the piled weeds.  Two young men noticed me and rushed over to offer their help.  They had name tags; I realized that the wild mustard was probably a missionary service project.  I felt embarrassed; surely they hadn’t seen from a distance that I’d been crying?  Surely I didn’t look so helpless as to warrant service projecting?  Nevertheless  I let them finish loading compost into my truck– about two shovelfuls each.  They smiled and small-talked and glanced at me with both gladness, and concern. 

My invisible cynic dragon labored with steam and smoke– “too little, too late,” she growled, discerning little volcano that she is.  

But  later, almost home,  my entire head on fire from the hornet sting, I was struck by the timing of my rescuing Pollyannas, their offering of help (and company) when I felt most bereft, most isolated.  I was struck by their kindness, their “gladness”, the irony and sweetness of their seemingly too-late rescue.   

Like my hazelnuts, I had died, but  nevertheless lived.

Girls in White Dresses (With Blue Satin Sashes)

A couple weeks later, I was back at the dump, shoveling compost into my truck.  Again I was alone.  Again, it was a hot day.  Again, suddenly, almost out of nowhere, an appearance— this time, a municipal waste employee.  He said, “You shouldn’t be working out here in this heat!”  My heart sank, fearing further reproof and possible dismissal, but then he said, “How much do you want?  A full load?”  He disappeared, returning moments later in a skidster. The magical skidster! With which he scooped two huge buckets of compost into my truck, filling the bed to overflowing in all of thirty seconds.  For free.  

Looking back, I realize that one doesn’t always recognize Pollyanna when she appears out of thin air. 

One day the neighbor’s goat began escaping her tethers and stake-outs.  These escapes became a pattern; she is, after all, a goat, and knows her business.  With every jail-break, she eagerly cleared two ditches and a little road to reach my graveyard gardens.  Miraculously, either Frank or I were always eye-witness to her illicit approaches; we managed each time to catch her just as her lips met a cucumber vine, a cluster of kohlrabi.  

(She quickly developed a crush on Frank, who was always gentle when he re-tethered her, or untangled her from her quagmire of rope and halter.)

This is where I recall finally awaking to the girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, the brown paper packages tied up with strings, the beauty of glad feet on the mountaintops.  Not just in the earlier Pollyanna-esque interventions, but also… Why did the goat cross the road?  Because she wanted my gardens! The vulnerability of my gardens had shifted from alkali clay, wind, shriveled starts, and grasshoppers, to the longings of a goat.

Paradise Found

And why did she want my gardens?  Weren’t they hopeless, a wasteland, a loserly, heat blasted failure?  I was surprised to acknowledge that in fact, they weren’t.  The goat desired my drip-irrigated compost-in-the-clay gardens because despite all odds, the gardens were growing— becoming lush, even.  Somehow in my hustle-bustle wheelbarrowing and mountainous digging, I hadn’t really taken note of the transformation.

There was that cucumber vine the goat kept trying to lip, loaded with yellow blossoms.  And the kohlrabi… I had planted a purple variety from an old seed packet and it was beautiful, the leaves a hazy cool blue edged with lavender.  The kohlrabi swam in swaths of bright-lit chard and red peppers and purple basil. There was miracle and wonder in big-leaved pumpkin and squash vines, finding their way again after being tempest-tossed and wind-swept.  While I lost half my tomatoes early on, still ground cherries crawled, and cherry tomatoes sprawled, all of them loaded with ripening fruit.  Beans that I had planted in desperation (nitrogen fixers that they are) were hung with plump pods, like little curled green bananas.  There were sweet, succulent peas, even in July.  Radishes happened overnight (as they will, but still!).  Surviving strawberries multiplied, and the zucchini outdid its own abundant cliches.  I might have lost most of my nasturtiums, but beets, arugula, sunflowers, and zinnias prevailed.   

I discovered the glory of rose orach leaves, backlit by a bright July morning.  

I had at least as much to celebrate as Matt the Martian, eating a potato on Mars.  

Deflecting the glad goat from their sanctuary,  I saw how all these survivors arrayed my graveyard gardens in the hues, forms, and textures of paradise.  It was magical.  A Favorite Thing, reincarnate.

And oh the tenacity of an apricot tree!  Mine is called a Mormon Apricot (another nickname) after those tough pioneers (also nicknamed, the grittiest of Pollyannas).  I see these trees everywhere in abandoned rock and clay fields, hanging on and even bearing fruit for just one more year, decade, century, despite inevitable drought.

And the wondrous persistence of penstemon, sage, sedge, currants, aronias, sedum, daylilies, catmint, lavender.  I cannot name them all– but like one’s friends, like anyone’s favorite things, I hate to leave any out. 

Windows of Heaven

In August, just as Nora and I piled into the Cooper to visit my parents and their Northwest promise of blueberries, a record deluge began to fall, as if from its own upper story windows.  It was a miracle; my dad in Oregon kept watching the same weather pattern in Utah on the internet as it circled around and around from Logan to St. George, flash flooding communities in the south and settling into sloughs, reservoirs, and rivers in the north.  During the week we were gone, four inches of rain accumulated; our little weather station’s cup flowed over.   

In the month afterward, everything rejoiced, including the weeds, which sprang up everywhere.  Heartened by the surge of even more garden abundance, I redoubled my compost collecting efforts, scratched out weeds,  gathered more unwanted rocks, dug more graves, planted more things (rhubarb, for instance).  Conceded a little to the alkali clay, and installed swaths of tall ornamental grass to guard my borders.  

Beauty in The Eye (Let Sleeping Dragons Bake Tarts)

Still crazy, I didn’t leave myself enough time (or energy)  to adequately harvest or preserve all of the abundance that had so miraculously appeared out of nowhere.  Nor did I leave enough time to read, write, paint, cook, dust shelves, arrange pillows, wrap an easy arm around Nora.  Like my farmer’s tan, I was terribly unbalanced,  always sweaty, always dirty, a mess, a wreck… and yet, I dug and wheelbarrowed daily in paradise, tasted the mellow honeyed funkiness of warm ground cherries with constant surprise, saw pink stained light through rose orach leaves.

When I watched “The Sound of Music” with the girls, I cried, despite the internal dragon (she was making tarts).   Oh, Rolph, so sad you were assimilated.  Oh singing children in the trees, harmonizing voices in the breeze… yes, yes, be glad.  Be super glad, why not.  You’ll need that later.  

Oh gentle nun of the stolen Nazi distributor cap (“Mother, I have sinned”)… how kind your car heisting. 

And when the Von Trapp family set out for freedom over the Alps at last, Climbing Every Mountain with a resilience and moxie that typified an entire generation of stoic Pollyannas, I think of snowflakes and killing frosts, of wool coats and lined boots, and wish I could lend the Von Trapps my favorite shovel and only wheelbarrow and a bowl of ground cherries, to help with the mountain.   Just a couple more Favorite Things for their journey.

Back To Eden With Jethro

My mother kept a book by this title amongst her kitchen recipes.  She gave it to me a few years back when she was purging the randomness of fifty plus years of homemaking–  but it didn’t turn up when I unpacked after our move this last time.  

It was a small, thick book.  Like my mother’s recipe collection, it carried the stains of kitchen wear: dog-eared, yellowed, splotched, some of it missing.  There was a spirit of frontier and pioneering about it– further proof to me that it was an inheritance.  Jethro Kloss, a fellow with a passion for both herbal remedies, and their culture, wrote it. He was also enthusiastic about gardening. 

I think of “Back To Eden” with conflicted nostalgia.  It was around most of my life, not just a relic, but an heirloom of sorts.  Mom searched it when she was at her furthest limit of worry over one of her children’s ailments; if I knew I was the reason she was turning its pages, I felt both a wary hope, and the anxiety of an indictment. It’s both ironic and relieving– also a little disconcerting– that “Back To Eden”  is finally  lost to me now, at my last stop, our edge-of-the-wilderness home.  Where once again, at least for a few seasons, I’m bereft of Eden.

Some passages of the book I read as a child, some as a young mother. Each time, I found Jethro’s archaic (and blunt) voice compelling.  He addressed the vulnerable, corruptible mortal body– her functions and conundrums– with a stern tone; he was terse and authoritative as he enumerated treatments and prescriptions and cautions.  For every possible complaint (even life threatening ones), he advocated a nature/garden-derived treatment; one that seemed to me to exert both practical and moral pressure.   Not remembering particulars now— which herbs for which complaints– I still remember my fascination becoming displaced by the weight of his dogma.  One could not casually peruse, or easily dismiss him– was he apocryphal, or inspired?  There was no joking with Jethro, no friendly middle ground, no casual give-and-take.  No easy escape.

Well, until I lost the book.  That was easy enough.

I’ve Looked at Clouds From Both Sides Now

Searching for any residual influence of “Back To Eden” in cyberspace, I’ve discovered that it is experiencing a bit of a revival.  Amazon sells it; readers embrace Jethro’s prescriptions and techniques.  Most reviews of the book (many by people who recommend it to “preppers”) are positive; one, however, stood out in its contempt.  Just a worthless old hippy book, the reviewer snorted.  I snorted back; my mother hardly thinks of herself as a hippy– though I sometimes think that whether she realizes it or not, she does embrace some hippy notions.  Jethro lived too early to be part of the hippy movement… maybe his critics dismissed him as a bluestocking? Regardless, categorizing and labeling is problematic in so many ways; the least being it clouds the water, obscures all kinds of truth.

Tangent:  One of my daughter’s best friends told her that of all the people he knows, I am the most like a “real” witch.  Praise indeed.  What motivated his comment is the fact that I grow, harvest, and store lavender, plus I cook from my garden (particularly with herbs).  I really don’t mind this perception, but it would be sad (not to mention inaccurate) if this was all anyone ever remembered about me.

I do owe some sort of tribute to Mr. Kloss, who keeps turning up in my periphery.  Aside from (at the very least) my horticultural respect for him (and horticultural respect is a big deal), I recognize that even though I was never entirely comfortable with Jethro’s words, he walked a path that I’m journeying on now.  We are co-travelers.  With him (and the rest of humanity), I keep trying to find my way back to Eden.  

Over The Garden Wall

This is true both metaphorically and literally.   Can we count all the ways we seek Paradise Lost?  Not in a lifetime.  But under the auspices of a blustery April day in the desert, I can count one now: how I keep trying to get back to Eden through gardening.

Gardening is a heavenly strategy.

I’ve written about this before, how I’m always reaching for paradise via another garden.  All the gardens I’ve planted, digged and dunged and pruned and wept (and rejoiced) over, and then abandoned. Four times now, I’ve found myself in the next treeless dirt plot under some version of an agitated spring sky, wondering whether my soil (can I even call it that?– I bear so much angst for alkali clay) can sustain green life. Trying hard not to fear all the possible encroachments: grasshoppers, earwigs, squash bugs, drought– covenants, codes, restrictions, morning glory.  And now deer. 

Not one garden did I leave against my will or under real duress; there’s never been the inexorable glow of cherubim and a flaming sword to sweep me out.  I’ve always more or less chosen to leave– or I should say, we’ve chosen… because I’m talking about co-choice here, a delicately balanced, give-and-take consent, compromise, leap of faith.  Frank and I have consistently partnered up and owned these abandonments together– thinking not in terms of what we were losing (a house and its adjacent garden), but putting our hope in what we would gain (a different house, with a different garden).  Whether we were foolish or wise to leave each time (less than half the gardens we planted survived our leaving), and whether we managed it with grace, really doesn’t matter now, though I’m apt to grieve if I dwell too much on what we left behind.  We departed, and here we are, again.  Longing in our different ways for Eden, stretching for the confidence and courage to create it again.

Ways and Means

Frank favors serenity and low maintenance.  A perfectly flat, seamless greensward appeals to him.  Also, smitten as he is by Technology, he is driven by the imperative to find applications for her in his landscape– or to make her his landscape altogether (he’s tired after all our building and abandoning homes and gardens). He’s requested that a goodly portion of our dirt plot be dedicated entirely to solar panels.  

My dreams tend more to the Great Dixter/Oudolf’s Trentham end of the spectrum– of course impractical, because I’m tired too.  However, gardening is still my thing; like a salmon swimming upriver, I must go on until I die.  Both reasonable and ridiculous ideas flower perennially in my brain, keeping me awake and giddy at night, creating anxiety in my bedfellow, Frankly my Dear. 

But the man loves me!  He loves me enough to work in the alkali dirt with me, risking septic lines and his good character to contour the land. Also the good character of his rig; he’s driven 40 miles per hour all the way home from the landfill with a yard of compost fluttering mutinously in the back of his truck. Often (as in frequently).

(Compost reforms alkali… eventually. It might take a millenium– but you’ve got to start somewhere).

He even lets me lead out in this final approach to Eden, trusting I’ll respect his limits, grateful I’ve bought into the solar panel scheme.  I’m pretty sure we can build a compromise somewhere, between our two extremes.

Of Peace and Swords

This seems to be a common theme as we wander our wildernesses in search of Eden: Conflict–with its corresponding necessities of labor, loss, grief, compromise, adaptation.  Jesus– the author and finisher of all that is good and beautiful– said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword.” In Matthew’s context, Jesus is addressing his apostles, whom he has invited to preach his gospel of love and peace to the world, knowing there will be opposition to and conflict in that work.    

In my context, Jesus, Master Gardener, is telling me that I can attain nothing truly great (including paradise) without encountering and overcoming- transmogrifying- disarming… ah, enduring! some sort of adversary (the irony here is that sometimes, my most difficult adversary is myself).  There is, he tells me, opposition in all things bright and beautiful. 

I have found this to be true. Heartbreak and fatigue are common side effects when I’m in the pursuit of good things (gardening and otherwise).  

Let Me Count the Ways

Through gardening, I’ve learned to consider my sources as I search for horticultural truth and wisdom. For instance: gardening magazines, as pretty and inspirational (and even instructive) as they are, have, on occasion, yanked my chain. Besides offering such impractical ideas as chickens in the garden (there goes everything to chicken scratch!–including the supposedly poisonous rhubarb) and a flowering thyme lawn (so transitory, so much maintenance, so many happy bees underfoot), magazines are inherently mired in a conflict of interest. With their words, they peddle trends and conventions that coalesce with their ads. They address me at least as much as consumer, as a Back To Eden hopeful.

Gardening is rarely as easy or as cute as a magazine is obligated to make it out to be— and that’s ok, as long as one takes its words with a grain of salt.

My best sources for garden wisdom are other experienced gardeners (thank you, Mom and Dad), my own trial and error, and university experiment extensions (wisdom through experiment and experience, a wonderful thing).

Another truth I’ve learned through gardening is that you reap what you sow… and then some.  Miracles happen, with a caveat:  uncover new ground, and weeds will grow first.  There’s this preliminary, necessary fight to overcome noxious-ness before any significant progress with fruit or blooms can happen.

Still, never give up! When a garden is digged and dunged and pruned and wept over (and consistently weeded), it doesn’t just produce what is sown– it magnifies and multiplies the efforts of the gardener in inconceivably abundant ways.  At the outset of all my gardens, I started as many plants (lavender in particular) as I could from seed. Compared to the vast expanses of empty dirt I always had to fill, my scrawny, vulnerable little seedling attempts looked futile.   Not all survived.  But within a couple years, the survivors grew, flowered, and went to seed. Volunteer flowers, tomatoes– even pumpkins sprang up everywhere, filling every available space, surprising and delighting me with their appearances, the happy, incidental accidents, the lovely, unplanned juxtapositions.  I gave lavender starts away. 

There’s such beauty in that, such abundance and generosity– one of my very favorite things about gardening, and one of my favorite metaphors for life.  

Had I a Golden Thread

In this happy conflict, I’ve also learned that inheritances are sacred, powerful things, even the scrappy, dog-eared ones.  Nothing we inherit should be taken for granted; these are gifts we cannot easily recreate. 

I sacrificed relatively little to gain my first garden; it was, rather, an heirloom, as it had once been my mother in law Edna’s Eden, before she gave it over to the renters who preceded us.  When Edna left, it would have been as neat as a pin, but when we finally got it, it was indeed dog-eared and overgrown.  

At first I saw the hordes of irises (becoming hordes is what unrestrained irises do) as a problem to be eradicated. New to gardening, I didn’t know what the sword-leaved, out-of-bloom plants were, but once I’d dug them up, I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of them.  After all, now that I’d expanded my borders (my dreams were as Great Dixter as ever then), there was a lot of empty space to fill, and not much by way of a gardening budget.    I replanted the healthiest in recurring swaths through my newly enlarged borders.  Till the moment they bloomed the next year, I couldn’t have known how precious a surplus of iris could be (currently, the price for one start ranges between $8 to $32– or more.  I had hundreds).  And then, with that first big bloom after they were replanted, I was staggered by their beauty, their flamboyant purpley rhythm an invitation to the dance that brought all the new and old and seemingly irrelevant players together (in perfect harmony, Stevie Wonder would sing). 

To Edna’s timeless foundation of lilacs, irises, Roses of Tea and Roses of Sharon, Burning Bushes, fruit trees, and so on and so forth (I kept discovering more and more treasure as I untangled this inheritance), I added my own prizes:  Bourbon roses (and Bourbon is apt– their fragrances are that intoxicating), stretches of Shirley poppies and nasturtiums encompassed by a low hedge of lavender.  Tomatoes, white pumpkins, and oh, yes, strawberries.  I’m tempted to keep going with the list… I loved it all so much.  Gardening with such an inheritance had landed me in my first paradise. What had at first appeared to be an overgrown liability was in fact an immense wealth.

My appreciation for my mother in law blossomed. 

Paradise Lost

But, paradise lost!  Right?  Isn’t it a prevailing condition of the wildernesses that we live in, that we are forever forgetting/misplacing/disregarding our inheritances?  Frank and I sold that first paradise for the next (our birthright for a bowl of GrapeNuts), but before we did, we cut down a weeping white birch and a silver maple.  The maple, Edna conceded, might threaten the septic lines, yes.  It was technically a weed, yes (I can still feel her hurt).  But the cutting down of the birch was grievous.  Her favorite indulgence, the once-beautiful birch struggled after she left it. It had some sort of malady I should have consulted Jethro about, but also, it cast shade in the front yard. 

I was still enough of a gardening novice (and reading too many magazines) to not completely comprehend or appreciate shade.  Greedy for more flowers, I wanted full sun everywhere– to plant my pretty, pretty flowers in.  Perhaps with time and care, the birch could have regained its former glory, who knows. Ultimately it perished because I wanted more flowers, not because all hope for it was gone. Given that tree now, I would do so much more to save it (since that first garden, I never again have had the luxury of shade from a mature tree). 

Edna has another now in her current front yard, and it is a thing of beauty (proof that inheritances can be found again).

Wear it Out Loud

I ran across a moment on YouTube while I was ruminating about Back to Eden gardening.  The hostess of Roots and Refuge Farm (who has the presence of mind to grow squash up over an arched trellis) conceded to her couple hundred thousand loyal viewers that yes, Roots and Refuge is moving.  They’re selling their impossibly beautiful, productive farm for the next (larger) endeavor. I was a newbie viewer; even I was shocked.  What?  Yes.  They’ll be selling the farm by the end of this year.  She spoke earnestly (while she planted handfuls of baby leeks in a tunnel greenhouse) of why they (she and her version of Frank and children) do what they do on their farm and on their YouTube channel– their desire to invite everyone to the refuge of their garden– to the refuge of gardening in general.  How in moving on, they’re just upping the ante.  That in the coming year, before they walk away from their current paradise, they will finish a barn (because the property needs it) and a perennial garden, and they’ll plant a profuse vegetable garden.  For one last beautiful hurrah.  

Hurrahs and Hallelujahs

One last hurrah.  Mmm, I remember those.   At first my heart fell for her sake.  They couldn’t know, they couldn’t have any real idea, the loss that lay ahead.  You don’t know til you pass through it.  Like us, they are thinking not in terms of what they are losing, but putting their hopes in what they will gain.  In their heads, they think they’re going to take the best of their experiences with them, leave their mistakes behind (they’ve learned to start with good fences, and not let the pigs run wild), and build a Larger Paradise.  Better fences, nicer pigs.

They’ve already mastered squash on a trellis.

“Heavens, don’t.  Just stay and embrace what you have!”  my heart ached for her.  She said things I might have said: that she’d seen miracles, that they’d given her courage to do impossible things, that rooted in her faith is the knowledge that we are all stewards, responsible for what parts of the earth we touch (this precious inheritance).

She said, “I want to know that when I leave my farm, when I hand this farm to someone else to steward, that this property Wears My love Loudly.”  I nearly wept, not because I’m cynical about the chances of her farm surviving her leaving, but because I’m moved by that gesture; I recognize that urge, that wish, that yearning to shout our love– through gardening, mothering, writing,  painting, befriending, inventing, whatever.  But often, I feel as if I’m shouting my love into the wind.  It comes back to me, seemingly impotent: a ghostly wail.

It occurs to me that Jethro, filling his book with what he thought he should fill it with, was doing his best to shout, too.  Doesn’t matter that I couldn’t quite find it in me to altogether embrace the shouting– Jethro was true to what he believed in.

I was musing on this when Jesus came to mind again.  Wasn’t his entire ministry, and isn’t his continual shepherding even now a divine, insistent, perfect manifestation of love?  A most celestial shout, a most profound inheritance?  And yet it falls on all kinds of ground, from the hard-baked stony sterile, to dirt too shallow or overrun with thorns, to a blessed patch of fertile.  He is both “a light which shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” and “the light and life of the world.”  Ultimately he was crucified for sharing his love too loudly.  Do I regard it nearly enough?   Everything in his creation wears it, this love– this divine attempt to draw us all eventually back to his paradise. 

Love is the Point

“He that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me,” my Master Gardener says. He invites me to lift up my voice “as with the sound of a trump, both long and loud…”  in sharing his love.  Come what may; the point is to turn the light on, sow the seeds.  We don’t get to decide if anyone will appreciate– or even notice– that the light is glowing and that the garden is flowering.  “ I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,” Jesus says to the flock that he’s invited to his gospel-of-love-and-peace conflict.  “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”  For his love extends to all, wolves and sheep. What is a wolf but could be a sheep, and what are we if not prone, in moments of hunger, to wolfishness.  

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

It’s nonsensical to lose hope, or to give up, gardening and whatnot.   

In Christ’s invitation, I remember again the miracles, and feel enlivened and enabled by the memories.  Experiments, experience. The one seed that can become so, so many beautiful things, the multiplications and magnifications that come of digging, dunging, pruning, weeping— shouting love as with a trump, both long and loud.

In finding my way back to Eden, love is always the point.

Frost, Mystery, and the Re-Do Blues

We first noticed the sharp scent of onions when we were hanging, for the second time, the glass door in an exterior wall of what would one day be our new home in the country.  Which circumstance (the re-do), as anyone who has ever hung a door knows, is a loaded, fraught event. High stakes, low (plummeting, even) endorphins. Therefore, given the setting, the waft of onion in the frigid night air felt like a snicker from the universe.  Or at least from the hood, which up until the onions suggested themselves, we loved with unabashed abandon. 

(Look at this place, we said to each other.  The best kept secret. Mountains fields sky, river running through it).

We froze nearly to the marrow that night, but the door– now free of some cleverly hidden shipping brackets– ah, at last, the door hung plumb and true, and the onions became inconsequential.  A weird twist of fate that had nothing to do with us; a tardy (or lost) onion harvest on some nearby farm. Anything could happen on a nearby farm.

And anything does.  I can tell you this now.

(Maybe this is a good time to be clear about complaints; we’re not complaining.  We still love the hood. We love it even more now that the house is finished and we’re settled here. It’s just that we’ve been noticing things– acclimating to the eccentricities. Which eccentricities seems worth mentioning).  

Frozen, and Onion Tears

November became December, the temperatures became ever more embittered, the skeletal house took on the meager sinews of plumbing and ventilation, and we began pulling wire through its bones.  Always a tough, monotonous chore, for me anyway. With the falling Fahrenheit, the smell of onions in the frigid night air showed up again and again; it was chronic. With each iteration it became more consistent, pervasive, undeniable. It would start at dark, and become so strong that my eyes would anticipate the peculiar dryness, the arid slow burn of onion tears. 

I thought of my grandmother, who died a few years back.  In her youth and even in her agedness, she was a beauty, and she loved beautiful things, including houses: fixing them up, decorating them (she had porcelain figurines: a shepherdess, Rockwellian children at play). She loved keeping everything– her house, her person, her men– tidy and smelling nice.  And– contrarily-wise — she loved onions.  

At her deathbed, I had tried to sing to her the songs I knew she loved, and had sadly failed.  With her imminent departure as tangible as my own heartbeat, tears had choked my voice into a rasp, a ridiculous croak.  Someone said my grandmother couldn’t hear me unless I shouted, but she still once or twice murmured the familiar melody-lorn words I was reaching for, her splayed fingers trailing the wall next to her bed.  Also: I love you, when I half whispered my own love to her, having given up my attempt at singing.

The onion tears, those cold winter nights that Frank and I pulled wire, never came– a fact that made me sort of doubt myself, my senses and perceptions.  Since onions seemed so out of context for the time of year and day and even place (we could see no falling onion tops in a deserted field, no packing plant backlit by a rising moon, no onion silo– are there onion silos?– standing stark and smoldery against the mountains), we would ask each other if onions were really what we were smelling.  Yes? Right? Do you smell them too?  Of course we smelled them. It was as if a horde of miniature iron chefs crouched between studs, shadows in our unfinished walls, making salsa, their little chef knives flashing through piles of onions. I’ve made salsa; I know. All you can smell are onions.

Frank has a Theory, and Grandpa Makes Hamburgers

“Maybe it’s a CAFO”, Frank said as we climbed wearily into the truck after work at the house late one January night.  Whether this night was before or after our construction loan officer sent an email asking us to explain why we were moving so slow on our project, and when we’d pick up the pace, doesn’t matter.  With arthritis in Frank’s shoulders, bursitis in his elbow, my inadequate height, the snow, the cold, the flu, and our amateur skills, we were moving slow, heartbreakingly slow, but we were also working extremely hard, and freezing solid every bleak night of our lives, with only the ambient onion as witness.  Our souls were heavy and frostbitten.

“Mmm… I don’t think so”, I said, using up the last of my daily quota of contradictions (we get three; that is all).  “We’ve smelled CAFO before. This isn’t it.”

“Yes, but maybe this time, at this CAFO, they’re feeding the cows onions,” Frank said.  I stared at him.  Why on earth would someone feed their cattle onions? What cow in its right mind would eat more than one onion?  Because yes maybe a cow, being hungry, might accidentally eat one.  A cow’s bite is large and possibly undiscerning.  But many onion bites, in quick succession?  Images of doomed, mad cows crowded my tired brain.   

Frank had given his theory considerable thought.  “They feed the cows onions to flavor them,” he said.  “Before they’re slaughtered. So when people cook the beef, they don’t have to season it.  Pre-emptive flavoring.”

(Notice how effortlessly my man slipped from “cows” to “beef”. What big teeth you have, my dear.)

I pictured my grandfather, frying hamburgers in a cast iron pan in Grandma’s kitchen on a Friday night, each hamburger laden with finely minced onion. He would have cut the onions himself; when he cooked, he owned the whole project (he was nearly as proprietary as Grandma). Grandma insisted he cover the pan with a screen to keep the fumes and grease from overwhelming her own domain– not only the kitchen Grandpa stood in, but the entire house– the yard outside, even. She had an aristocratic sense of smell, a soulful pact with cleanliness.

The onions (and garlic; we were all raised on garlic) was a signature flavor– as were the Friday night hamburgers. Complete with root beer, possibly ice cream, and a sense of downright contentment. If we stayed the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s, we would wake in a clean bed; the morning air would smell faintly of clorox, pine-sol, and flowers. If the scent of onions persisted, it obliged my grandmother by cooperating with the florals.

I had no words with which to answer Frank (I’d used up all my contradictions).  Had I been my grandmother, a sharp answer would have been most natural, contradiction rule or no.  But now I could only widen my eyes and remain silent (another rule: no eye rolling, ever… we’ve read “Blink”*; we know better).  

Surely, You’re Joking (No, I’m Not, and Stop Calling Me Shirley)

A few onion peels littered the snow near our Honeybucket**, a day or two after we petitioned the help of a roof soffit contractor.  We were desperate for someone other than ourselves to tackle the roof soffit and fascia. The weather was so cold. We were so tired.

Meeting with this contractor, I felt the sharpness of the universe’s elbow in my ribs. We were chatting in front of the house, the familiar scent hanging between the three of us, the snow aglow in the bright winter light with the occasional onion skin, and we’d asked him (because he told us he was practically our neighbor, just beyond that field and that railroad and that other field over there) if he knew anything about the onion smell.  He did not, he said, with a twinkle. He didn’t appear to think it was a thing to wonder about. But there were the peels, scattered anon, and I actually wondered if we’d been caught in a practical joke. The twinkle seemed a tad suspicious.

Turns out I was right to suspect. Maybe not a practical onion joke, but certainly the wisdom in choosing this particular contractor. He eventually sent a guy out– one nice, otherwise retired guy, a fellow with beautifully waving hair who talked at length about the end of the world and had much to say about toilet paper hoarding. This nice guy only sporadically showed up, and at the weary end of nearly four months, left wavering lines of soffit along the eaves of the house. Also he left his pirate plank– an unbelievably heavy, rotten board that he’d used to create a sort of scaffolding between two ladders. When we installed siding, it would be impossible to match our trim to the pirate’s billowing soffits. We cared, but didn’t have the energy to protest; we simply paid our bill, took the plank to the dump, and moved on.

Of Trucks and Men

The day Frank got the truck stuck in a deep drift on the side of the house (a plight that didn’t last long, as our bishop thankfully happened by and pulled us out quick with a chain and the power of his own truck)— and also, possibly, the day that we re-hung the board part of the board-and-batten (another re-do with more high stakes and plummeting endorphins), I happened to glance over from our siding work to the road as an onion truck passed.  Wait, what? An Onion Truck? Truly? Were those onions, piled high and glowing golden in the dump bed?  

Yes. Yes they were.  

Of course I alerted Frank to this profound development, and we watched together in a sort of frozen awe as the truck shrunk smaller and smaller in our line of sight down the road.  We thought we saw it turn right, yes, there it was, surely, driving up towards the bare mountain in an empty field, do you see it there? We squinted; it was out of view. Destination: entirely unknown.  The relative emptiness of fields and road and mountain were all that was left us.  

Hazards of the Road

Then one morning a couple of weeks or a month or three years later (winter 2019 seemed to go on forever), I drove with my daughter Meisha  out to the house so I could meet with our drywall contractor. Also so that Meisha could have practice driving, because she really needed to learn how—such an irony, by the way, this driving in order to learn– one that by its very nature is rife with its own hazards.  A week later, we would be in a bumper-scuffing accident and a world of tears, simply because she didn’t know how to drive yet, but had driven anyway so that she could learn.

To my knowledge, my grandmother was never in a car accident, although the last few years that she drove, she got lost constantly. Once, trying to find my house, she landed on the other side of the state, somewhere around Midnight.

My dad has a boyhood memory of waking up in the bed of his parent’s pickup (I like to think this happened at Midnight, too) as it careened along the graveled road shoulder during the wee hours of a family trip. In the cab of the truck, his mother (my grandma) was asleep at the wheel. It took Dad and Grandpa (who had also been asleep in the pickup bed) a terrifyingly long minute to wake Grandma, the supposed driver, separated as she was from them by the truck’s thick cab window.

Barry, Dad’s older brother, was also in the truck somewhere, but his position seems nebulous; it changes with each telling of the story, or maybe with the teller. When Dad narrates, his brother is in front with Grandma, sleeping just as soundly as she. But in Barry’s version, he is definitely not asleep– maybe Dad is, but Barry is awake, frantically banging on the cab window with Grandpa.

At any rate, I have no idea how they all survived. But I’m grateful.

I always felt safest when Grandpa drove. But I also remember riding just about everywhere with Grandma.

The Onion Goblins Are Invoked

As Meisha and I pulled up to the house, I noticed more onion peels, littering the snow all over the lot. This was epic coverage; our place is nearly an acre.  Red onion skins, yellow onion skins, onion skins sodden with snow, onion skins fluttering in the humid, cold wind. Present, real…and accompanied by that familiar onion smell.  

Meisha laughed, and declared (as she maneuvered the car through a rut) that we had Onion Goblins.  Like it was this cute thing, a bestowal, a gift of notice from some mischievous, supernatural being.  A Sprite, a Faerie, A Witch Under The Mountain. “And for You, Foolish Ones, You Who Linger and Lollygag Far Too Long, Building Your House of Sticks– For You and No One Else,  I Invoke Onion Goblins.”  

I think of one of my children’s favorite goblins, Dobby. A friend to Harry Potter, darling with over-sized eyes and ears and wrinkles, he finds freedom with an errant sock… and is key to managing some of Harry’s most threatening mischief.

Sometimes life seems more…hmm… hospitable? when one thinks of its complexities in terms of whimsy, mischief, fairytale magic? Or views it from the lens of history, with an eye towards one’s ancestors. Either way. One must sometimes squint, blur the edges, apply the golden glow of the past, the glitter of pixie dust.

Enter Shirley

It was with an actual bestowal, a kind and very real gift, that we learned the truth of the onion goblins.  Our Relief Society president** — I’ll call her Shirley– saw our work lights late one night and stopped by with a steaming loaf of bread.

(I will interject here and tell you that this bread was delicious, that its tenderness, warmth, and timing deeply moved me. Also it is important to note that while Shirley is taller than my grandmother once was, her eyes have the same chocolate immediacy that I remember in Grandma’s).

Frank and I chatted (so grateful for company and the gesture) with tall, brown-eyed Shirley for a minute, and then, because the scent was strong that night (the metaphorical Elephant In The Room), I asked her if she knew anything of the onion mystery.

Of course she did.  Knowing things like this seems to be the province of Relief Society presidents.  Ask them, and they will dispel mysteries– both local and remote– in ways that make the world seem more like the one Norman Rockwell celebrated: friendly, humorous, safe.

She spoke of local sheep ranchers, reminded us that sheep are a big deal out here. Indeed they are: a slow moving herd stopped our framer in his tracks months before, as shepherds herded thousands of sheep up the highway, bringing traffic to a standstill.

Shirley told us furthermore that we aren’t just in sheep territory, we are in the neighborhood of Sheep Greatness, one of the largest sheep ranches in the country. Which obviously means that there’s a really big gathering of sheep nearby. And incidentally, Shirley said, these sheep ranchers feed onions to their sheep.

This is sheep, and onions, on a massive scale.

So it turned out that Frank’s CAFO theory hadn’t been entirely wrong, though we didn’t get a sense that the onions are meant, like the witch’s candy for Hansel,  to fatten up the sheep (maybe they are? I don’t want to know).

For as long as our new brown-eyed friend has lived in the hood (it’s been a long time; she’s happy here), the onion-fed sheep tradition has never varied. Sheep eat onions through the winter, every winter, all winter long.  This year, she said, the smell is particularly strong. Some years you hardly notice it. Regardless, it’s an annual thing, beginning and ending with the cold. Onion trucks drive up to the sheep pastures at the foot of the mountain, dump onions out in neat, shimmery rows, and the sheep nibble and graze and ruminate on onion. I imagine sheep bells tinkling as they chew.

(Perhaps I romanticize.)

Something to Hold Onto

We mentioned the onion skins, and she laughed and said, oh yes, we call that onion dust.  It’s a bit messy… gets stuck to your car, blows into your yard.  But it’s just temporary.  

I imagined onion peels, caught in strings of Christmas lights and on bushes, pasting themselves in delicate, glowing, translucent shreds onto living room windows.  A very natural confetti, a compost-able pixie dust (I believe in compost). In a weird but delightful way, celebratory.

I remember Grandma, her hands on her hips, hollering across a partial mile of undulating park at a dog owner who had neglected to put his dog on a leash.  The park rules were being broken, yes, but the dog cavorted harmlessly, far away from us. The dog owner could only look at her, and I remember both wanting to laugh, and squirming a little with embarrassment.  

Certainly Grandma would have had something to say about onion skins clinging to her shrubbery, and the onion goblin crossing her threshold every winter night with his peculiar fragrance.  Had the Sheep Rancher been a Handsome Man, though, her tone would have softened considerably. She had an eye for beauty; besides (as I keep saying), she actually liked onions.

It was obvious that the onions didn’t offend our new friend.  Neither the dust nor the smell. It was just an aspect– a mere triviality– of her neighborhood, a place she felt at home in, filled with people that she loved and was loyal to.

Knowing the power of narrative (and how seniority works), we took our cues from her.  How could we not, with such warm, delicious bread and friendly conversation? And mountains fields sky and river running through it?  My grandmother would have loved the place, the mountains fields sky. And the river running through it.

Unanswered Petty Questions

I still have unanswered, but mostly petty questions. Is feeding sheep onions a common practice everywhere? Why onions? Why not turnips, cabbages, carrots? Is it about nutrition, opportunity, cost, convenience? Tradition? Fond indulgence towards a herd of pets, a convention perpetuated by endemic largesse?

And how do they stand it?  The sheep (or even the rancher, in his nearby home)?  I imagine thousands of sheep, their hooves caked with inevitable winter mud, their deep-piled, off-white fleeces flecked with it, leaning over the rows of gleaming onions,  warm puffs of sheep breath crystallizing in the frigid air. The first ten thousand incisors meeting innumerable onions, muffled bite-shots fired in unison by massive squads of sheep-teeth. Volatile sprays of onion juice rising up from the no longer gleaming onions, rising and clinging to thick eyelashes, coating glittery sheep-breath with onion oil.  Rising and overwhelming downy nostrils. 

I imagine a sheep rancher’s wife, weathering yet another question about onions from a new neighbor, a visitor in her doorway. I have met, since we’ve settled here, at least one sheep rancher’s wife. She is approachable and kind; she has lovely presence, a keen glance. Does she overcome, again and again, the insistent temptation to roll her eyes? To contradict someone… the visitor, the rancher, the avid sheep, the onion goblin?

Even after having been told, after having looked around and seen for myself, this all– the winter/onions/sheep thing– still seems implausible to me.

What ultimately happens to onion-fed sheep?  I admit I feel conflicted about this. I like to think, with Sam from “Holes”, that the onions have restorative, healing qualities, that with their magic they produce such long-lived sheep and such very fine wool, that the rancher would never consider losing a soul from his flock to a butcher.

It’s hard to imagine the wool wouldn’t have a distinct scent though.

To Everything There Is At Least a Season (If Not Absolutely an Obvious Reason)

Grandma did love onions.  I recall watching, captivated, as she ate one.  She ate it like an apple, biting into it fearlessly with straight teeth; brown eyes sparkling with laughter at our awe.  A little like Snow White taking delicate aim at the fatal apple— except Grandma wasn’t soft like that; she was spunky, showing off; she loved drama– and there was drama in each resounding bite. The onion crackled as she chewed— I could almost feel the crisp juiciness, each layer its own vivid crunch— the cascading crunches a sort of singing that made the onion seem unquestionably delicious and caused my own mouth to water, despite the fact that I knew onions to definitely not be delicious.  Which of course also made me wonder if I didn’t really know onions, and complicated the cautionary elements of Snow White’s misfortunes.

I don’t recall my eyes stinging from Grandma’s onion-eating.  Perhaps I forget— but I think not. My eyes sting and water now, however, when I mince onions for dinner (I admit I almost never make hamburgers; Frank wishes I would). Mascara trails past my jawline; my nose runs. My pan screen, similar to the one Grandma insisted Grandpa use, is more or less ineffectual at blocking fumes. It only marginally mitigates grease spatter.

I also remember that when Grandma hugged us, we inhaled her. The commingled scents of her clean, pretty clothes, the vitamin E on her face, her lotion, her perfume, the hint of onion that danced on her breath and emanated from her glowing skin.  No iteration of Grandma’s onions ever offended us. The sheets and pillowslips of whoever’s bed she slept in would smell of her perfume and soap and vitamins– and ever so slightly of onions– when she left. Ah! To bury our noses in that pillow! And wrap up in those sheets! To own them all, and to sleep there in her enchanted spot, the first few days after she had gone!  This was her parting gift, one that made us long for her return. One that motivated us to volunteer our beds when she arrived the next time.

There aren’t always next times, do-overs, parting gifts. The time we get is just enough, the partings final, at least for now. Perhaps all that remains til the eventual tomorrow are the stories: a hand moving slow across a wall, a ragged bit of song, a passing I love you. Mountains fields sky, the river running through it– and yes. Assuredly this: the eccentricities and magic that bring these things into focus: the incessant onion, the well kept sheep.

The End

Footnotes (or a long PS):

(While once upon a time I had mastered a rudimentary approach to the sort of scholarliness that conjures footnotes, I have long since forgotten any formulas or patterns that would lend academic glamour to this blogginess. Sorry about that. But let us sally forth nevertheless, and not get hung up in technicalities.)

*Blink In this book, Malcolm Gladwell discusses all sorts of things worth thinking about– one is the correlation that researchers have found between outward signs of contempt– say, rolling one’s eyes– and the likelihood of divorce. It’s very high. Which isn’t to say rolling your eyes will ruin your marriage. But contempt certainly will.

**Honeybucket What is this? It is the brand name that our porta-potty supplier uses for their portable bathrooms (sans the bath, and honestly, the room). Where a rose by any other name might still smell as sweet, Honeybuckets are nothing like their name suggests. They are, however, clearly an instance of creative (if not altogether astute) branding.

***Relief Society President In a nutshell… imagine women in your community trying wholeheartedly to care for the folk in it, to enable individual and communal relief. There is power and grace in organized endeavors like this. In this case, the woman voluntarily accepts the assignment to lead out in loving all the people. With or without the assignment/title, countless women the world over fill this role beautifully.

(Editor’s Note)

Blogs are a relatively new genre– and a genre, by the way, that eludes definition. So do its rules and by-laws. I think this elusiveness is lovely, despite the fact that amorphous boundaries tend to make me uncomfortable. Whatever a blog may be, and whatever it should do, the fact is that this particular one has been, once again, neglected. By all appearances, totally abandoned. But here’s the editor, writing a note— which changes the blog plot from one that self-destructively embraces abandonment, to one that merely suffers the irritating hiccups of occasional (sometimes prolonged) neglect. A reader (assuming there are any readers) may be tempted to ask, “What happened?” For why and what-for did the editor’s writings disappear?

Well, I’m the editor, and after some reflection, I can tell you that for the most part, the why’s and what-for’s don’t matter a whole lot. Probably bits of relevant narrative will find their way out as we go; the rest will be left, like all the things we don’t bother (or want) to talk about, in the literary dust-heaps of the ages.

But one question is worth exploring at this moment: Why are we (the editor and her writing) back now?

I’d like for this post to address that question. Which doesn’t mean it will; not everything I wish for works out in the end. I’m just grateful to have a place to start again.

Pack the Anthology, Leave the Fluffy Jiggly Japanese Pancakes

Two of my sisters* and I have recently been recording some of our conversations with each other. It’s Mara Lee’s idea; she wants to publish a podcast from these conversations. What this means, amongst a myriad of other nuanced and layered things, is that our conversations aren’t always natural and spontaneous, aware as we are that we’re being recorded. Sometimes, surrounded by such artificial appendages as microphone/headset, a screen that serves as a mirror, and pre-emptive, imaginary audience judgment, we even get self-conscious, for heavens sake. Which further means, to me anyway, that I’m occasionally tempted to just… leave. Sign out. Excuse myself from the endeavor. But I love my sisters, and share their earnest desire to do good things, and so I stay. Following Mara Lee’s lead, we’ve agreed to talk about truth, about the necessities of connection, of being forgiving, generous, hopeful, grateful. Serious, deep topics… topics I embrace and find comfort in… and yet. When I attempt to speak about them with my sisters, my brain– frustrated by its limits and losses– wanders, and I’m shaken by childish impulses to rattle on about irrelevant things (this will out… anyone who’s read much of this blog may see my lapses into tangents and trivia).

I suppress most of these impulses, but enough find their way into the open air that I worry I’m becoming a liability to the whole podcast endeavor.

To Illustrate The Likelihood That I’m A Liability to the Whole Podcast Endeavor (AKA Fluffy Jiggly Japanese Pancakes)

To illustrate: A travel log of my recent YouTube views. YouTube views– we can agree on this I’m sure– carry all sorts of proof. Not that these topics are necessarily what I burst out with, but certainly they are indicative of the tangents and trivialities that eddy through my mind:

Micarah Tewers making a Valentine’s Dress (exclamation point). In which Micarah, per usual, sews– from her imagination and her hoard, with characteristically flippant/nebulous instructions to her viewers (sans the signature shoulder parrot)– a Regency-Meets-Twiggy mini-dress, in hot pink, with empire waist and yards of ruffles.

Various Parks and Rec clips, especially the one where Ron Swanson advises, on a news cast, that to fix a chewed-up table leg, one should rub a walnut on the scratches, and then adios the terrier that chewed on the table in the first place, because a dog under 50 pounds isn’t a dog, it’s a cat, and cats (according to Ron) are pointless (these links are generally courtesy of my daughter Meisha, who by the way loves cats).

How To Cook That– DEBUNKING (note the all caps) Tasty’s Fluffy Jiggly Japanese Pancake recipe. When my daughter Maurya learned how much I’m yearning for fluffy jiggly cakes lately (since fluffy jiggliness is missing elsewhere in my world?), she found the link for me.

Which leads me to the various Bollywood links another sister (Andrea) shared with me…and I of course watched. I mean, Bollywood! So much color! And mythology! And fluffiness, and jiggling.

I’ve watched how to make Macho Nachos, Breakup Pasta, Crepes, and Kale Chips (via You Suck At Cooking– this has nothing to do with my cooking desires, it’s just evidence of a middle-aged woman’s capacity to find shows her children recommend). I’ve watched John of the Vlog Brothers espouse washing sheets and towels, and hanging art on our walls (he’s hacking life, he says; I felt validated), and I’ve listened to both Vlog Brothers argue either for… or against? I don’t remember now… Existential Thought. And Batman. Either way… Squirrel!

I’ve listened to Brandi Carlisle, Lee Ann Rimes, Sara Ramirez, and Dolly Parton sing (each separately– but can you imagine the choir?) Brandi Carlisle’s “The Story”. Again, again. Every time one of them sings, I cannot sing along. I just cry.

But probably most telling, this Ted Talk: “Dementia is Preventable Through Lifestyle. Start Now.” (I’ve upped the ante on dark greens, avocados, brisk morning walks– and I’m reading more and writing again.)

And so– surely you must see, dearly beloveds: proof. I struggle… maybe not in thinking deep thoughts, but certainly in sustaining them! Their height, breadth, depth– ah, their weight! The responsibility they invoke.

Surely you must see that I have reason to wonder what the heck I’m doing, trying to be wise on a podcast with my deeper-thinking sisters. And by extension– what on earth do I have to say (that matters) on a blog?

But Then This Thing Happened

But then this thing happened. Things. First, my sisters and I continued talking without recording (or talked while pretending we weren’t recording). We explored ideas, shared impressions, listened well to one another. Leah kept insisting that in our search for truth, it was super important to seek to see others clearly, as God sees us. Mara Lee shared clinical (not to mention spiritual) proof of our need for connection. With intermittent floods of gratitude for Leah and Mara Lee’s collective insights and where they lead me, I’m realizing also that none of us feel particularly wise… I’m not the only one who is grappling here. I also realized that there’s beauty in seeking, trying ideas out, stumbling in the trying, talking about it, wondering and reaching and problem solving with people we love. Petitioning grace to attend– it always does, when earnestly invited.

Another seemingly unrelated thing happened: a heightened awareness of widespread trauma– not just of the pandemic, although its effects are indeed staggering. But beyond and amidst– people I love are struggling with cancer, thyroid disease, anxiety, MS, aging, loneliness, departures, arrivals, addiction. A dear friend nearly died (her medical team had to shock her heart three times before it would start up again) before a lifesaving pacemaker could be placed. Another’s brother died very suddenly of cancer. Another couple of friends went through an epic year of depression, another’s father is dying from the effect of diabetes– she is caring for him, and for her daughter who just had a baby. What a mix of joy and sorrow for her! She is, for the moment, in the midst of friends– but there’s been long periods where she’s felt alone.

And it Dawns on Me

I think there’s these lengths of time– whether it’s minutes or years– that we all feel alone. It is the risk of chronic aloneness that prompts me to write again now. I long for conversation, the hand on the arm; I find myself wondering how everyone is doing. I cannot bear the thought of all these my people being alone in their duress. Nor do I wish to be alone, either.

Tangent– two things. Thing One: I’ve seen how naturally and easily love can spring up– and am stunned by the beautiful places it can take us. I may not know you at this moment, theoretical reader, but rest assured, if I had even a small bit of your story, I’m confident I would just-like-that-so-easy fall in love with you; you would be on my list. This is due to the magic of seeing one another more clearly (stories help with that), not any inherent philanthropy on my part. Thing Two: I’m also painfully aware that my blog isn’t going to cure the world’s epic glitches or even assuage an individual grief. But it’s something I can do, a spider’s thread** of an attempt to contribute to our communal web of connectedness.

To April: This One’s For You

The thoughts of one of my beloveds in particular kept nudging at my mind: April, my cousin a few years younger than me. April wrote very kind messages to me years ago, thanking me for writing on my blog. My impression was that she was grateful for the things I’d written, not the clever or cool or polished way I’d written them. She was grateful that someone else had experiences she could relate to; she was grateful for the connection.

Whenever I have seen her since, this is still what I get from her: she’s genuinely grateful for our connection. Not just our genetic heritage– although isn’t having the same grandparents sweet?– but also that our lives have bumped and wrinkled and glimmered in sort of parallel ways. That as fellow travelers through Earth’s tricky atmosphere, we are compadres.

I think–no, I know– I’ve let polish, coolness, and cleverness (fluffy jiggly Japanese pancakes that they are) distract and discourage me, and haven’t just dwelt instead, more generously, on the experiences so many of us share. Or even the ones we don’t— the joy of discovering new things, of enlarged, vicarious memory. All of which connect us. We belong to each other; we need each other. I thrive on your stories, and the likenesses (and differences!) between us… and I need you to know I’m thinking of you; I need to reach out in gestures of comfort and assurance and acceptance to all of us, because I’m moved by what I can assume all of us are going through (life’s intensity rarely lets up)– and I cannot continue doing nothing at all to reinforce our vital connections.

So, April, this one’s for you. I have no wise words, but my random stories are back. I’m hoping one will make you laugh, or okay maybe not laugh but remember something? or at least wonder?— hoping all of them will help you feel not alone.

The End

Foot Notes, Because This is A Blog And I Can Do That

*I am one of six sisters. I also have three brothers, two of whom are living, and two parents. I have a husband and five autonomous children. Also grandparents not in this world anymore, and countless aunties uncles cousins nieces nephews and so forth. Enumerating my folk just feels important to me.

**This references “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman. Mara Lee found it and embraced it as a metaphor for why she wants to gather truth and podcast about it (because she’s cool like that). This metaphor resonates with me whenever I remember the truth that out of small and simple things, great things come to pass:

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated;
Marked how to explore a vacant vast surrounding,
It launched filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, o my soul.
–Walt Whitman

“Be Yourself!  Unless You Can Be a Unicorn…”

Nora found this quote, browsing Amazon for a mousepad.  We had a good laugh.  We didn’t buy the mousepad… I think she picked out something with a cute kitten on it instead.

But obviously, the catchy euphemism made me think– in metaphor, naturally– about becoming.  Growth, the health of the developing psyche, self concept.  All this, and more.  I pondered in particular a petulant predisposition… mayhap a personal (possibly pastoral?) passion pertaining to pitiable pretenses to perfection: Project Unicorn.

(As an avid advocate for alliteration, I admit this agnomen is appalling… but it’s apt, anyway).

“…And Out Floated Eeyore.”

The only noticeable result, so far, of my attempts to become a unicorn (speaking metaphorically, remember), is that along the rough and unlikely road to perfect unicorn-ness, I’m developing pesky little Eyore characteristics.  Since reaching for immediate magical perfection when you’re human and fallible can be sometimes discouraging.   And while there are endearing aspects to Eyore’s quirks, I don’t think we’ll ever see a mousepad that reads, “Be Yourself.  Unless You Can Be Eeyore.”

… That’s probably not true.  You can find just about anything on Amazon.

The trick with being yourself… well, actually, there’s at least as many tricks with being yourself as there are with being a unicorn.  Knowing yourself in the first place is one of the big ones, I think.  Who knows themselves, really?

“Thanks For Noticin’ Me”

Sometimes I wake up in the night, and seeing Frank asleep next to me,  I want to shake him awake too, so I can ask:  Hey, do you know me very well?  Would you mind telling me everything you know?  Because I’m feeling lost on the subject right now.  I’m afraid I’m not quite enough, whatever I am.

Truth be told, I occasionally do ply Frank with these questions.  Like when we’re on road trips– this keeps our conversations fresh, and vibrant.  A couple of decades ago, I asked him: If I were an animal, what would I be?  Hoping of course for something elegant, something grand, something… unicorn-esque.  (This was before unicorns were so trendy. At least my longings and yearnings are consistently avant-garde.)

His reluctant reply:  A quail. 

What?  A quail?  How mundane!  How monotone!  How provincial!  Why a quail, of all things?  If he was going for diminutive and cute (which I assumed he was), why not a kitten, or a dove, or at least a quaint “Feed The Birds” variety of pigeon? 

Well, he said.  You would be a quail because quail appear, when they approach a road overspread with rushing traffic, to be both indecisive, and easily flummoxed (flummoxed isn’t a word Frank would ordinarily use; I’m translating).  Darting first this way towards a ditch, then weaving that way towards an oncoming truck, then fluttering off barely in time to be nicked rather than treaded upon by a tire.   

I’ve never forgotten this.  Which (my not forgetting) could mean that Frank was wrong; that in fact, I’m neither quail, nor pigeon, nor unicorn either.  I’m an elephant.

“It’s Not Much of A Tail, But I’m Sort of Attached to It”

Further Aside: The other day Frank, barely home from work, found a practical use for a newly acquired tool– a six inch composite digital caliper.  He loves (Loves!) proof of man’s engineering genius; apparently, this caliper is along the lines of a Nikola Tesla wonder.  So now at least I know this one very important thing about myself: the exact width of my nose, at my nostrils.  Thirty two millimeters, in case that data is ever important.  I have to say (frankly) that I’m relieved that his perfect nose is slightly wider than mine, at thirty five millimeters.  Although since his head is twice as big as mine, this data may not be particularly flattering to me, in terms of proportion. 

Also, I’m grateful Frank didn’t think to measure nose lengths.  I have no doubt mine would win, head sizes aside.  

“Bouncy or Coffy, It’s All the Same at the Bottom of the River”

Let’s leave Eeyore afloat in the stream, the unicorn adrift in the skies, Frank at work with his caliper… and talk about orchids.  It’s relevant.

In “The Orchid Thief, A True Story of Beauty and Obsession”,  Susan Orlean ruminates on  an intriguing phenomenon: people’s passion for and collection of orchids.  For  several fascinating chapters, Orleans lays out man’s history with the orchid, which reads a bit like “The Jewel of The Nile” meets “Heart of Darkness” and “Dallas”.   There’s mystery, danger, dark jungles, sinister plots, money, fame, murder, espionage, a floating glass palace, a plane crash, suffragette vengeance.

The romantic in me is positively entranced.

After thoroughly convincing us of the fantastical life of orchids (on the grand scale of romance, quail being a 4, and unicorns being maybe a 9, orchids would be… oh, 100 or so), Orlean goes on to illustrate their tenacious hold on evolution– their clever propensity to adapt and change, survive, multiply.  There’s thousands of species and hundreds of thousands of varieties of orchids; new ones are bred in labs or are Happening In Nature Every Day.  Which means that there is no possible way to collect them all, much less classify each of them.  They change and spread (and some disappear) too fast.  Orlean says, “The botanical complexity of orchids and their mutability makes them perhaps the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things… to desire orchids is to have a desire that will never be, can never be, fully requited”.

As a sucker for the unattainable, I get the attraction.

As a wistful middle-aged Eyore/quail/elephant/wanna-be Unicorn navigating the riptide of dreams unrealized, I am all admiration.  If who I am is nebulous anyway, I would just as soon be an orchid, please!

“I’d Say Thistles, But Nobody Listens to Me, Anyway.”

Orchids!  Look at what they can do, where they’ve been, what they’ve become, where they are going!  Colors, form, size… all these traits are endless.  Plus they’re for real, unlike the imaginary unicorn, which even Nora doesn’t believe in anymore (although she will fight to the pain anyone who insists that dragons are fictional).  Many orchids live in the air, roots wrapped around bark on trunks and in the branches of trees– in the most dangerous, exotic, obscure, forgotten places.  Or not… sometimes after hurricanes, wind-swept orchid seeds from far-off climes settle and grow on the dilapidated shed roofs or in the forgotten crevices of rocks in the backwoods of Florida.

They are on every continent.  Some smell like chocolate, or pineapple, or grape Kool Aid.  Some stink.  Some are shaped like king’s slippers, some like lady’s…  some look like butterflies, bees, lady’s bonnets, clamshells, piglet faces… or poodles with the wind blowing their ears back.  Some look like white, feathery, flying monkeys.

“… Just Right, For Not Much of a Donkey”

Maybe my favorite thing about orchids is that they are not defined in their “now”… they are on a continuous journey of further development.  Their possibilities are limitless.  As a race, they have outlived the dinosaurs; individually, they outlive the humans who grow them.  And as a family, they never stop changing.  In their rich, ancient history, in their past and present ability to survive and adapt, their promise of good things to come is everlasting.

They’re picky and clever about when and how they reproduce, sometimes taking a decade to set seed, looking like they are getting nowhere fast while they wait for their moment.  And such a moment!  When all the right factors come together, they seize the opportunity.  Or they make their own opportunities (the pollinating strategies of some orchids! positively mind-blowing).   And then, they are prolific and expansive.  Millions of seeds from one seed pod on one parent plant… carried on breezes, trade winds, hurricanes, feathers… all over the planet.  As Orlean says, the seed from one pod alone could supply enough orchids for an eternity of prom corsages.

Who knows exactly what sorts of orchids those seeds will grow into, but no matter!  Out of small things, great things come to pass.  There is growth, there is abundance; there is variety; there is world travel.

There are lovely surprises.

“Sure is a Cheerful Color.  Guess I’ll Have to Get Used to It.”

I have three ordinary household orchids: two fuschia with deeper magenta spots, one a clear, soft white with hints of yellow and chartreuse.  None of mine are fragrant (so much for a well-calibrated nose).  I’m pretty sure two of them lived at Home Depot for awhile (both were gifts, for which I am grateful every day).  The other I found at a local nursery with rows and rows of arborvitae, juniper, and marigolds crowding around it.

My orchids are not ordinary to me (what, I ask, is ordinary, anyway?).  Their blooms are extravagant and elegant and long lived– one of my fuschia orchids has been blooming since before Halloween…and now in January, I still see new buds swelling further down its stem, as the original blooms continue to hover, weightless, over my sink.  They have funky roots, slender gray-green fingers that lift themselves out of their bark-filled containers, reaching for new continents, breezier promontories.

And my orchids are tough.  They thrive on sporadic watering, kitchen fumes (I cook with lots of garlic), a counter-prowling cat, my children’s varying music, and erstwhile neglect.  I’d like to own half a dozen more of the white ones… maybe of the pink ones, too.  And a few green, and a couple soft, rich, butter yellow…

“Don’t Bustle Me.  Don’t Now-Then Me.”

All of which isn’t to say that being an orchid (metaphor, remember) wouldn’t be trying, even harrowing.  Orchids probably have long let go of the comforting fallacy that they’re in control.  Or that other orchids they admire or are fond of are in control.   Nor do they just sit and let life rush past without putting their stamp on it,  which sort of passiveness is tempting in the way that chocolate and BBC series are tempting.  Surprises are embraced, as prickly as they sometimes are.   Opportunities snatched, even some with moth-dust, or stingers.

Orchids don’t allow fear of heights to squelch their loftiest goals.    Nor do they wait, with Eeyore, for someone cleverer or stronger to pull them out of the river.

Ok, I don’t know that— how orchids ultimately get out of rivers.  Certainly there’s no shame in rescue.  For the sake of this essay, let’s assume orchids just generally avoid falling in.  And if they do fall in, they wind up eventually populating the river’s delta with new and exciting varieties, once they arrive.  Eeyore, take note.  

As an orchid, I would have to accept that I cannot Know Everything Including the Future.  Even after I wrestle the necessary angels and slip-waisted hornets.  Or evade the inevitable Tigger.  I would have to live without fear in a reality where I can never tell for certain  how my circumstances tomorrow– and my best responses to them– will change my world and me in it, though they always will, one way or another.  Even if all I can do is hold my breath as the sky falls (or, I guess, as I bob in the river).

(Increased lung capacity, though… that’s a good thing.)

“Gaiety.  Song-And-Dance.  Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush…”

But!  As an orchid, rather than never measuring up, never being enough, limited always by the conventions and yardsticks of my environment  (or my riddled past), I would simply be… evolving.  On my way, progressing– complex, mutable, adaptable, capable of thriving.  Growth (and flowering!) would always be my thing, perhaps in ways and in the midst of circumstances that surprise even me.  Nebulousness would inevitably work in my favor, rather than against me.

I’d be… (quick heart beat) Evanescent.

I might even– could conceivably– become adept at flinging the best of my creations into the eye of the storm, and see them take root on distant shores.  Only because I’d be unafraid to fling the worst, too.

“Yes.  One of Those Would be Just the Thing.”

When I think of myself this way,  with all of the Orchid’s potentiality, life suddenly feels… mmmm.   Full of hope and promise, wonder and revelation.  Beautiful in exuberant, swinging-on-vines-through-the-jungle sorts of ways.  I see myself strong and lithe in Amazon-bleached khaki, my pockets full of pretty rocks, rare tomato seeds, ancient writ.  In this paradigm, Risk and even Failure mean growth; The Unknown means Possibilities.  Stalemates and Dead Ends are simply occasions to Muster Strength, Gather Resources, Strategize, Morph.

Perched on steep, wind-blown ledges, fluttering white and ghost-like in a steamy Florida swamp…

“Days.  Weeks.  Months.  Who Knows?”

So now I’m thinking this… I may not know quite enough or be strong or capable enough to be entirely myself.  Just yet.  Whatever that is seems to be in constant flux anyway.  But I do know just enough to be a really committed orchid.

Goodnight kittens.  Goodnight mittens.  Goodnight socks, clocks, quail, doves, pigeons, elephant.  And unicorn.  Fare thee well and happy at last, sweet Eeyore.

Hello, Orchid Woman.

(Art featured in this article, except for the selfies and orchid photo: mixed media collage with encaustic by Lynaea.   Frank took the selfies.)

 Zucchini?  You Must Be Joking

There’s a joke going around whose entire premise is that there’s just too much zucchini in the world.  It assumes zucchini’s usefulness and abundance are disproportionate.

I don’t buy into that premise, recognizing meanwhile that my more moderate–ok enthusiastic– stand on zucchini is peculiar, unpopular… maybe even unprincipled.

Taking Counsel Of Your Fears (Today is Not That Day)

I love zucchini.  It is a kind, gentle vegetable… or fruit, depending on who your horticultural heroes are.  Easy and soothing on anxious stomachs, ambidextrous and adaptable in recipes.  During my last month of pregnancy with Ezra, zucchini was almost all I wanted.  And I didn’t know yet then how delicious it is in cake, nor did I have Steph & Seb’s revolutionary zucchini salad recipe.

While I’m well aware that one healthy zucchini plant is probably all my family needs, this spring I planted four.  Just in case one or two succumbed to any kind of insect mayhem, like the tent revival/bra and book burning party the squash bugs threw amongst the Hubbards last year.  For goodness sake.

I’m married to a man who plays with enterprise networks; I totally get the benefits of backup and redundancy.

Therefore, four zucchini plants.

Tangent…

They did show up again this year, by the way, the squash bugs— despite my scattering diced citrus peels like confetti in the borders as an organic deterrent.  This time they appeared on a volunteer pumpkin vine in the middle of the garden. 

One clambered out of the shadows and up on top of a ripening pumpkin as I was watering the garden the other day.  It rubbed its eyes in the bright sunlight and asked me querulously for an aspirin, still shaky from all its rioting and carousing down below.  In answer, I hit it with water from the hose.  Drenched, it rushed back into the pumpkin’s shadow, sounding the alarm for family and friends to take cover.  

I felt absolutely no remorse, and wished the bug and his family bad health to the end of their days.

The thing about this year’s squash bugs is that they don’t seem to be packing their usual viral punch, the infected kiss-of-death vampire bite that topples the entire plant into utter meltdown, leaving unlucky gardeners with a yellow brown mass of wilt within days of the bugs sucking juice from even just a couple of the leaves.  No, this year, thankfully, while the bugs are present and partying in my garden, the virus they often carry with them isn’t.  Some leaves show signs of decline as the bugs suck the life out of them, but the vine itself keeps the faith, sprouting new leaves and new fruit, exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, boldly going where no pumpkin has gone before. 

Of Mice And Men and Rabbit-Whales

But the zucchini… I weeded one hill out  because I’d planted it too close to a tall Ravenna grass and it wasn’t getting enough water.  This weeding was a preventative measure:  I didn’t want the languishing plant to be that one wounded gazelle at the back of the herd, the one that lures the predators in.  The one that ultimately, after being half-devoured, gets left to molder on the savannah while its murderers pursue the cute baby gazelles that have strayed too far from their mamas.

I apologized to the runt zucchini as I pulled it.  It was cruel, this culling of a plant whose intentions were all about fruitfulness and abundance and exploration of the universe, simply because it was on the puny side… but I had to believe it was for the best.

The three remaining zucchini plants became as substantial as shrubs, which was nice, and prolific as rabbit-whales, which was… I feel conflicted about this.  It was amazing (as any rabbit-whale would be).  So amazing… I can see how garden profusion leads naturally to fairy tales about beanstalks and pumpkin carriages/townhouses/dormitories.

This summer’s zucchini abundance was also sobering.  I felt great responsibility for the use and care and dispersement of my miracle produce.

Finally, the abundance was perhaps even a little embarrassing, given the local culture… the jibes and jokes and cliches.

Speaking of…

Here’s the joke, shared by a good neighbor (hi, Mike) who called us (ironically) to share his own zucchini.  A man (let’s say he’s from New Hampshire) visits his friend in Utah.  The Utahan takes the man grocery shopping (it sometimes happens; men do go grocery shopping together).  When they leave the car in the parking lot, the host doesn’t lock his car.  The New Hampshire tenderfoot wonders why his friend doesn’t lock up, and the Utahan replies, Well son, this is Utah.  No need to lock up.  Later the Utahan takes his friend to church.  They’re heading inside, leaving the car in the parking lot, and the Utahan clicks his key to lock the car, and his friend says, wait, I thought we were in Utah?  And his host tells the New Hampshirian that yes, we are in Utah.  If we don’t lock the car at church, it will be full of zucchini when we get back.

Only imagine what might happen at funerals here.

Zucchini Incident Management

My parents visited during the zenith of my zucchini melee, and I shamelessly begged/coerced them to carry some off with them as they meandered south to see more family (my dad looked both perplexed and alarmed when I loaded him up with three- four-five large zucchini).  Once zucchini reaches a certain size, the only thing anyone can think to do with it is make zucchini bread.  One big zucchini can make four-five-six loaves—and not everyone likes zucchini bread.  Literally or metaphorically.

My friend Steph tells me I should pick my zucchini very young, when it’s barely an inch in diameter, tender and succulent and small, and then it won’t get away from me.  Like Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout’s garbage did to her.

I tried this.  All summer, I was pre-emptive in my zucchini picking.  I peered and squinted into the zucchini shrub shadows and picked handfuls of tender succulent squashes still cradled in their infancy, and ate them all mostly by myself (steamed, with olive oil salt and pepper yum).  I did feel a little guilty that at least one of my motives was about zucchini population control, and that I seemed to be on the big bad giant end of a folk story.

Also I felt selfish– my squash feasts are usually solitary affairs.  But there were always the zucchinis that I missed, ones that hid beneath leaves or camouflaged themselves in the tangle of stems.  Ones that within just a few days of my missing them had grown gargantuan and were bulging out beyond the reach of their parent shrub.  Ones that were probably making up their own jokes as they basked in the sun.

Wheat Germ Woman Rides Again

And so this summer I lived the zucchini cliche.  No, I didn’t leave them in people’s cars at church (tempted, though. I did ask Frank to leave some in the nearest foyer for people to take while I was safely off visiting my sister in Montana.  He didn’t.).   I texted a couple of people to offer zucchini, and their responses were kind, but no thank you I have my own to worry about.

So I used it in every way I could think of.

Here is the list:

In salad (thanks again, Seb & Steph).  Paper thin zucchini, lemon, salt, olive oil, cracked pepper.  Probably best with a little fresh grated parmesan too.

As Zoodles (zucchini noodles).  Delicious when they’re mixed 1:1 with normal noodles (rice noodles, even better), and white sauce… or red.  Adaptable to both vegans (hello, Mary) and carnivores (that means you, Frank).

In Tacos.  Shredded or chopped and added to the meat, zucchini absorbs the flavor and extends it further.  So you use less meat, a compromise between the vegans and carnivores.  Delicious regardless.

As the base for curry, pureed in coconut milk.  Zucchini is a natural in green curry, because it’s green.  I recommend making the curry spice blend from scratch with the freshest possible spices and ginger, and using lemon grass.  Also fresh basil.

In morning oatmeal.  Finely minced (the least egregious texture), with cinnamon, raisins, nuts, and honey— it is the breakfast approximation of zucchini bread.  I had it a bit too often; thinking about it now, I feel slightly nauseous.

In chocolate chip cookies.  Not bad.  Not great either… I have a memory of chocolate chip zucchini cookies, made by a roommate in college (hello Jody).  She shared them with the rest of us and we all loved them and bonded over them and honestly couldn’t get enough, but this was not how this summer’s batch turned out for me.  Probably one of those things that memory enhances.  Love the memory, anyway.

In lemon zucchini bread.  Much better last year… how did that happen?  Oh I know, I am a haphazard recipe follower.  So lovely lemon zucchini bread two years in a row is the equivalent of being struck by lightning twice inside a dentist’s office in Boise.  Wednesday, Tuesday.

And then… thinking healthy natural thoughts as we prepared for a camping trip, I made energy balls with zucchini bits in them (never ever again… it’s been over a month and there’s still some left).

Zucchini energy balls? Yes, please!

Finally, I dried zucchini, thin sliced with chives and a sort of salty tomatoey garlicky vinegar painted on, hoping for a veggie chip approximation.  After sampling a handful, I had to wonder… who in their right mind would want to eat them?  (I might eat them, and probably will…but not in my right mind).

Meisha Takes Some Off My Hands

Meisha made zucchini chocolate cake for her own birthday… a big enough batch to produce both a cake (with a Gravity Falls motif, thank you very much Merrin) and a plate of cake pops.  (She had a fan-girl theme going; the pops were meant to be hogwarty/quittitch golden snitches).

Given space in the kitchen, Meisha  turned out to be an over-achiever… well, except for maybe with the snitch frosting.  What the heck, Meish!

And That Chocolate Cake Again

A few days ago, I followed Meisha’s example and made some seriously delicious chocolate zucchini cake.  It has three cups of pureed zucchini in it.  Roughly half a rabbit-whale!  That’s much more than the typical recipe for zucchini bread.  I subbed in coconut oil and butter for the vegetable oil, and forgot the eggs, which turned out to be serendipitous.  The cake was fudgy, almost brownie-like… and with ganache?  Irresistible, intoxicating, addictive.

(It is highly unlikely that I will ever be able to make it exactly the same again, which I think only adds to its charm).

There was no time to take pictures of this marvelous confection/mistake.  No other thoughts besides eating it right away occurred to any of us when we looked at it.  I know that sounds all spooky and mysterious, but actually it’s great news.

Because it is The Answer!  To The Zucchini Question!  Yes, you can use those billions and billions of zucchini!  Make Chocolate Zucchini Ghost Cake with it!  Right now today! Seven-eight-nine-ten dozen batches of it!

billions and billions and billions

The Way We Were—Or, And Then, They Died

It’s September now, and the zucchini shrubs have contracted mildew.  Situated along our back border, their water was supplemented all summer by the neighbor’s sprinklers, which kept them lively and statuesque through July and August’s rising heat.  It appears now that this water gift will be their undoing.  Their decline became noticeable earlier last week, as temps dropped and the first gray-white leaves (which, if you don’t know why they’re white, are actually kind of pretty in a dusty miller/artemisia sort of way) multiplied from a couple to many.  I may have a few rabbit-whales out there yet, but I imagine this week may be my last for baby zucchini feasts.

I’ll miss them, and the crazy way we were together, but I won’t complain.

Next year, I will probably plant four zucchini hills again.

Another Retrospective

A River Runs Through It… Well, Actually A Canal Runs Through It (study #2) by Lynaea Brand
5″ X 7″ Oil on panel

I wrote this piece way back in January.  Feeling mildly disillusioned and angsty, I was sure that I’d never post it.   Rambling, fretful monologue— why would I.  But I rediscovered it just a couple days ago, and remembered how I was feeling in the winter when I wrote it, and though the struggle to find time (and courage) for making art (or writing) still vexes me, my outlook has promising shifts sometimes, and I’m once again grateful for the journey.  In general, anyway.  Which journey is worth recording (I believe this fervently, dearly beloveds– but it isn’t always easy to live what we believe, is it).

I realize I’m developing a tic here:  pieces written in the cold grey dead of winter, published at last in summer’s verdant warmth.  It’s probably a metaphor for something– but we’ll let it live on undisturbed.

Making Art, Winter Blues Notwithstanding

Winter Paperwhites in Her Summer Sky by Lynaea Brand
oil on linen on panel (5″-ish X 12″-ish)

This was in January:

So, I’m making art again.  I wish I could say that it’s going great, that I remembered where I left off and have only improved from there.    But I haven’t.  I’ve given up finding my place and am resolved to learn stuff all over again through trial and error and Google.  Resolved to keep painting,  investing in the theory that tenacity (aka enduring failure) will inevitably lead me to brilliance and marvelousness.  Or something like that.

Afraid to disappoint myself with clumsy renderings of people (my favorite subject), I’ve been painting landscapes.  Little barns and houses and trees.  And pears.  Also a cemetery, which I guess counts as a landscape.  To my chagrin, it wound up looking less Sargent-Monet-Pissarro and more like an unsuccessful Thomas Kinkade knock off.   I found the irony  almost comforting.

Grave Matters, study #1 by Lynaea Brand
oil on board, 5″ X 7″

My daughter Maurya looked at my cemetery and said, “Why don’t you actually on purpose paint it like a Kinkade?  That would be so funny.”  We laughed together, which eased my cemetery sadness for whole minutes.  Later, I found it on Pinterest, a painting done in Kinkade’s idyllic style: sweet cottage in the background,  Darth Vader fishing irrelevantly in the fore (Google “unwanted paintings by David Irvine” to see it– I don’t want to infringe on anyone’s copyright) .

I thought of Margaret Mitchell, perpetually convinced (in her scrupulous avoidance of typewriters and pencils) that someone else was writing her book.  It happens, I guess… especially if we’re not writing (or painting or whatever) anything ourselves.

Smoke Signals From the Far Side

little girl sketch by Lynaea Brand

Today, (still January) I clicked on a drawing tutorial for beginners.  An articulate You-Tuber half my age invited me to draw circles and ellipses for thirty minutes every day to improve my sketching fluency.  He even shared a link to free printouts of circles and ellipses.  To trace, over and over and over again.   Hand-eye coordination, cell memory.   Wax on, wax off.

I sense that there’s practicality and possibly even wisdom in this bright young man’s method (yo-ho-ho, sensei).  Value in repetition, glory in practicing.  But frankly… thirty minutes a day? of circles and ellipses? seems sketchy (pun intended).  Like trusting in a rabbit’s foot, a lucky feather, freckle juice (Porcelana Fade Cream, remember that?  Did it work?  Where has it gotten to, now that it’s relevant?).

Lean on Me (another pear study) by Lynaea Brand
5″X 7″ oil on canvas

Still, I think I’ll try it (drawing circles and ellipses).  Why not.  Then maybe branch out, draw circles and ellipses in the form of fruit.  Using real subjects: Citrus, apples, pears.  Also eggs.  Then I’ll paint representations of fruit and eggs on an archival ground, applying modern color theory, sophisticated lighting, lab-tested oil paint.  Maybe after a while I’ll change it up, dressing my egg and fruit models with little roundish bits of gumdrop for facial features, and then, I’ll draw and paint egg fruit gumdrop people, jewels glowing against Rembrandt-dark backgrounds.  So that by the end of this trial of faith (in what, ten or twelve years?), I will be an adept sculptor/sketcher/painter of anthropomorphized fruit.  The egg head artist.

P.S. (Somewhere, Beyond The Blue)

Shady Spot by Lynaea Brand
8″ X 11″ mixed media/oil on canvas

Post Script today in July:  While I painted more or less doggedly through winter, I didn’t practice circles and ellipses.  I did sometimes sketch people, with hit and miss results.  My discouragement, combined with an avalanche of household distractions, led to a gradual dwindling of focused effort by mid-spring, when I once or thrice played with cold wax, encaustic, and collage.  I’ll be honest– this spattered dabbling was mostly further dithering.  Avoiding the awful but necessary moments (moment after moment after moment) of facing my ineptitude and soldiering through it.  I tell my kids all the time that we can’t learn without trying and failing at least a little (usually a lot)… but in fact, it is so wrenching!   I’m tempted to throw a tantrum.  Middle aged and menopausal and averse to entitlement as I am.

And yet.  Not having painted for weeks now, I looked through my stack of attempts the other day, and was surprised.  Both at the volume– they’d added up to quite a few, and at the quality– I like some, actually.  Inoffensive, companionable, quirky little things.  It made me think… Maybe I never really lost my place.  Maybe I’m just traveling so slow, my progress is imperceptible in the moment, noticeable only from a great, blue distance.

A Small White House Again, study #4-ish by Lynaea Brand
8″ X 11″ oil/mixed media on panel