Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A Battle of Wills ….

Okay, I know I’ve been very quiet lately, and for good reason:  I’ve been engaged in a war!  I was going to call this edition “A Battle of Minds,” because, truly, I have been engaged in a war of minds, but when I read all the negative comment running around the net about the brain capacity of my opponent, I decided to be kind to myself and call it a battle of wills.  Either way, it is a battle, one after another, in an ongoing war within my own “sanctum sanctorum,” so to speak, my very own backyard. Okay, so it’s my mother’s backyard, but I’m the one who feeds all the birds, waters the plants and blows all the bird seed off the patio, so I’m planting my flag on it.  Besides, ownership is not the issue here; it’s another set of rights we’re speaking of: the right to feed the birds without interference from outside sources.
I have multiple bird feeders up in the yard, large poles with shepherd’s crooks all over them, each holding different types of feeders for different types of feed for different types of birds.  Yes, the optimal word here is BIRDS!  I mean, it’s my money.  I’m buying the seed; I should be able to say who eats it, right?  Not right!  My friendly neighborhood squirrel and, obviously, his band of accomplices have other ideas. 
I was so pleased the first few weeks of the late spring when the bird feeders were put out there and filled.  Birds were happy, flapping their little wings, singing their melodious little hearts out and eating, as is customary for birds, five times their weight per day in birdseed.  Yeah, that old adage about “she eats like a bird” is really a misnomer!  But then THEY came.  First it was one, then three (I could still name them and keep track of them at that point) and then a whole passel of squirrels.  Now, for those of you who are sticklers for grammar, you may want to point out that a “passel” is not exactly the correct name for a group of squirrels, but in actuality, since squirrels are considered solitary animals, a group name was never given to them, so I hereby announce that I have indeed got a passel of squirrels in my backyard.
Well, I let the first one have its fun for the first couple of days, sitting up on the bird feeder, filling his little face as quickly as he could, but then I decided it was time to make my play.  I had two large-post feeders with multiple mounds situated back there, with one small stick-like hummingbird feeder in between them.  I got out my secret weapon:  Vaseline.  Out I went to “grease” the two large feeders with Vaseline.  What fun it was for the first day or so to watch the squirrels jump up on the feeder pole and slide down, then walk away, shaking their greasy little paws full of Vaseline petroleum jelly.  Really, mom and I laughed and laughed.  Yeah, we don’t get out much.
But on the third day, there she was, Lucy the squirrel, up in one of my prized bird feeders, greedily munching away again.  Mom and I took turns opening the door and stomping out there, probably looking like berserk ape-like creatures to the squirrels, which waited till we got about a foot away from the feeder before they leaped off into the bushes, with their bushy tail disappearing last of all.  They always reminded me of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, and I got almost as much fun watching them do their little acrobatic act as I did in trying to outsmart them.
Needless to say, I went out to the little stick-like hummingbird feeder and gave that a good dose of Vaseline.  That should take care of that, I thought.  And it did … for at least two more days.
Each morning Walter the squirrel would come out and walk around the bottom of the feeders, stopping now and then to ogle them from afar.  At least I though t it was ogling.  Turns out it was a type of reconnoiter, because the next day the squirrel was back in the bird feeder once more. 
That was also the day that mom called me into the kitchen.  “Sandi, come here.  I think this squirrel may be having heat stroke or something.  It’s not moving, and I’ve never seen one act like this before.”  I went out to see Walter lying on his stomach on the patio, still in the sun, with all four of his feet splayed out in front and behind him, just lying there, staring at us through the screen.  Well, I thought, perhaps he needs some water.  I got down my good spaghetti bowl, filled it with water and started out the door.  Whoosh, went the squirrel, quick as ever, with its bushy tail sticking out of the bush the only sign as to where it had disappeared to.  Hmm, for a squirrel dying of heat stroke, it sure was lively.  I put the big bowl of water out there and came back inside.  A few minutes later my friend returned, plopped himself down on his tummy, splayed out his four little legs and cocked his head back and forth as he watched us again through the screen door.  Not one drop of water was touched that day.  Or the next, or the next, or the next.  At which point I brought in my prized, but unappreciated, spaghetti bowl, washed it out and put it back on the shelf.
Subsequently, my little band of madcap friends were found to be climbing the fence nearby, jumping onto a hanging basket of flowers and climbing up the top of the pole (who ever thought I’d have to grease that part) to get to the feeders.  The baskets of flowers were removed and now placed on the patio floor instead of hanging up.
With the flowers gone, the next step was to climb the fence, leap into the air, land on top of the big bird feeder with the rain cover and climb over to the other feeders.  The shaded feeder was put further away from the fence and the top of the poles and other feeders were once again greased with petroleum jelly, along with an extra dose on all of the poles.
The next day the squirrel climbed out on a mimosa branch until it bent over the feeders, then jumped the rest of the way over.  I went out and cut the branch off the tree.
The next day I don’t know how he got into the feeder, but I went to Lowe’s and asked the man working in the aisle with all the food and repellents, “How do I keep squirrels from eating all my bird food?”
“Well,” drawled a passerby, “I’ve always found a 12-gauge shotgun did the trick pretty well.”  The Lowe’s employee stifled a chuckle and said, “Let me go ask someone who is more expert in that than I am,” and disappeared.  He returned a while later with the solution the expert gave him:  A 12-gauge shotgun was the only sure-fire way.
Opposed to that idea, I asked, “How about some of these repellents?”  He then went on to regale me with the anecdote about the time his father-in-law decided to put deer repellent in the backyard to prevent the deer from eating all his flowers and shrubs.  “I’ve never smelled anything so horrible in my life,” he exclaimed.  “And the smell just wouldn’t go away!”  That nixed that idea.
With a heartfelt apology, he left me helpless in the aisle, where I happened upon an idea.  Yes, there it was, a wooden box I could hang on the fence filled with “Critter Food.”  It had a wooden lid that the squirrel could open up to get the food and which shut automatically when he withdrew his little paw.  The food looked yummy, at least by my standards of what appetizing squirrel food should look like:  Dried corn, whole peanuts in the shell and big, fat, giant sunflower seeds!  It even had a picture of a happy squirrel on the front of the package.  Eureka, I cried.  At last a means by which we could coexist, minus the 12-guage shotgun!
I went out in the sweltering heat that evening, took down the hanger my brother had put up years ago for my mom’s one and only bird feeder and which now was festooned with a feeder sock full of thistle food for the goldfinches my mom loved so much.  I dragged out my antiquated 7-pound electric drill and put up the squirrel feeder, filling it to the brim with happy little critter food.  I even put some on the ground so they would figure out where that yumminess came from.  And the result, you ask?
The next morning they were back in the bird feeders.  That’s when I went on line to see just how much intelligence these little critters had.  Do you know that each squirrel buries about 10,000 nuts each year for his winter storehouse?  Not only that, he digs two or three holes per nut, one to deposit his hidden treasure in, and the others are to mislead any other squirrels who might be hiding in the bushes and taking notes from knowing exactly which holecontained the prize.  Then in the autumn an amazing thing happens: the size of the squirrel’s brain grows larger. Why?  Duh, so he can find the stupid nuts!  Apparently he has like a GPS system in his little head so that he can recall where each and every one of those nuts was hidden, and he zigzags all over town finding them and chowing down.  This is very impressive to a girl who can’t keep track of her car keys, or her car for that matter!  Then to top it off, before burying the nuts, the squirrel munches out the germ inside so it won’t sprout and spoil before he gets back to munch down his tasty morsel six months or more later.  Okay, got me beat on the whole GPS in the head thing hands down.
Then I found a couple of videos on You Tube.  You’ve got to check this out because I know you won’t believe me if I tell you:  http://youtu.be/nWU0bfo-bSY.  Made me feel a lot better about losing the battle of wits, never mind the battle of wills.
So, who is winning the battle?  Well, at the moment we are apparently happily coexisting.  The squirrels have found the squirrel feeder and have trained me to keep it full with Critter Food.  The only time any get into the bird feeders is when the squirrel feeder is already occupied by another hungry squirrel.  And remember Walter who spent his afternoon sunning himself on the patio and watching us through the screen?  I’ve decided he thought he was at a zoological park and watching the funny humans locked inside.  He probably named us:  Dumb and Dumber.  Then I’m sure he wondered how intelligent we were as creatures and whether he could train us to do tricks, like keeping him fed.  Well, I showed him!  That feeder is never empty.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

I'm retiring to a pot farm...

Okay, I know my readership (both of you), so I know you skipped right over the “I’m retiring” part and zeroed in on the “to a pot farm” segment.  But don’t call the DEA (or the elders of my local congregation) till you read the rest.
So the time has come to retire.  I would have loved for it to have been two years ago but couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t expect to be able to do it till I turned 70, which is a ways down the road, thank you.  So I guess 64 was a good compromise.  Mom gave up her car, finally, and that was the turning point to needing to pull up stakes and move from the “big city” (Clemmons; actually officially the “Village of Clemmons”) to rural life back in Yadkinville, NC, where I started by Southern journey some 20+ years ago.  Yep, they accepted this transplanted Yankee and her New York City ways (well, actually Bergen County New Jersey, but no one knows where that is, and if you’re a really good spitter, you might be able to hit the GW Bridge from up on the crest of the Rt 17 and Rt 80 junction, so that's close enough to be called a New Yorker when you move away several states), and accepted me into their little community where everyone was related to everyone, except me. 
Now, I know I’ve spoken to you before about Yadkinville, but let me give you the culture shock picture from a girl who used to ride the bus to NYC and then walk all over Manhattan to visit the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza, Time Square, the Metropolitan Museum of  Art, and the garment district, where I bought my wedding gown for $89!
Lodi was a small town (and still is) in the northeastern corner of New Jersey,  (Bergen County), and the southwest corner of that county.  Settled by immigrant Italians, it  owes its name to an Italian city also called Lodi, and a statue of Cristoforo Colombo graced the center of politics downtown all my years there. Most people only know Lodi today because apparently scenes from the HBO show The Sopranos were filmed there. It was known as a mafiosa town when I lived there, and I guess that hasn't changed all too much since the newspaper report of February 2011 concerning  the arrest of a "reputed mob associate from Lodi" once brought us fame  But that's not the Lodi I knew and remember.
 I grew up coming home from school each day to pastina served with melted butter and fresh parmesan cheese.  Hmmmm, the aroma of that is still lingers in my mind and on my taste buds.  Why don't all kitchens smell like that?  And, no, silly, my mom didn’t make it; it was my Italian next-door neighbor Ann Capazzola.  I'm not sure mom even knows today what pastina is.  
Little mom & pop Italian grocery stores were all over the place, and upon opening the door of any one of them, you were pleasantly assaulted by heady aroma of real provolone, Parmigiano, Romano and other imported cheeses.  They hung like great bulbous, golden lanterns suspended over the meat counters, tied up to a railing with twine and sweating in the summer heat.  Along the walls there were always jars of peppers, artichokes, mushrooms and anything else you could preserve in oil, lending color and intrigue to this little  English girl’s imagination.  Garlic hung in great huge bunches, and there was never a crustier Italian bread to be found anywhere.  To this day, there is not a fragrance so enticing to me as the smell of a real Italian grocery store!
I never saw corn grow till I was on my honeymoon, traveling south through the Carolinas, though I know somewhere in NJ they grow bunches of it, but every house in Bergen County, no matter how small a patch of property it was on, had its own little backyard, or front yard,  garden full of fresh tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, basil  and eggplants, at the very least.  It was tomato sauce in the raw (or “red gravy” if you live in Lodi).  Imagine my surprise when I came to Yadkin County in January of 1987 (or thereabouts – you know I have no concept of time) to find that the nearest grocery store with zucchini or eggplant in it (at any time of the year) was 30 miles away.  Oh, we had plenty of collards, and peppers and tomatoes were still garden staples, but my favorite Italian veggies were on the endangered species list here in Yadkin County.  Pinto beans were offered as the most popular vegetable in restaurants, and every time I asked for a cup of tea, I had to make sure I said “hot” or it would come with ice and heavily laden with sugar.  Once I finally got the waitress to realize that a cup of tea was like a cup of coffee, only with hot tea in it, then I had another fight to replace the ever-proffered lemon with milk.  Hard to believe the Brits actually settled this land way, way back.
I had to learn to cook all over again, or at least shop smarter when I got into the bigger grocery stores in Winston.  But I do love those black-eyed peas and sticky grits!  Yummy!
Times have changed and even Yadkinville has become more “cosmopolitan.”  Well, that’s what we like to call it.  I no longer have any problems finding zucchini, though eggplant is still not on the top ten favorites of local veggies to be found here.  Avocados, yuca, green plantains, fresh cilantro and even an occasional boniato can be found now in the local Food Lion.  Hmm, can we say sancocho, and give me a great big bowl or two?
When growing up in Lodi, as most kids in a small town, I couldn’t wait to leave.  Remember that Credence Clearwater Revival song “Lodi”?  They may have been referring to a town in California, but every time John Fogarty wailed, “Oh, Lord, stuck in Lodi again,” I felt his pain.
Funny how we change, isn’t it?  I cannot think now of a better place to have grown up.  We were close to the City for museums and cultural events, but lived in a town that comprises a whopping of 2.4 square miles (and the .4 part was water, and no one lived on that.  Although I’m not sure if that includes the flood water that inundated many houses along the Saddle River each spring.  Nah, I don’t think they count that.)  Everyone knew everyone, which can be good and bad, but mostly good. I’ve lived many different places, most of them NOT city, but not far from one, so here I am again, in Yadkinville, the Lodi of the South.  (Hey, Y’ville friends, that could be a “good thing,” as Martha Stewart says!)  And this time I’m not on my one-acre plot, but my mom’s two-bedroom/one-bath condo. 
So now we get to the pot farm.
For those of you who know about condo living, it’s good if you do not want to do maintenance on the outside of our home or cut grass.  I chose a condo in Clemmons because cutting the grass on my 1 acre in Y’ville would put me in bed for an entire weekend with severe allergies.  Now someone else cuts my grass while I list in air-conditioned comfort, safely enclosed in my filtered air, safe from that wonderful fresh cut grass smell which is so popular you can buy it in candle shops, but which causes me to do thins like stop breathing.  At my mom’s condo, they’ve done away with most of the grass.  When my mom bought hers back around 1980, her front yard was full of plants, she tells me.  I don’t recall, but I’ll take her word for it.  I do remember two dying rhodies in big buckets on either side of her walkway, but that’s as far as my memory goes.  Since that time, however, all plants are gone.  There are a few bushes near the houses themselves, and then the rest of the yard is red porous stone (UGLY!!), except for my friend Beth.  She’s such a rebel!  She has white stone!  Then I noticed a house across the street that has mulch.  No plants, not much space or soil, but at least it’s brown mulch. 
The stones are obviously migratory and must be kept penned in by little red, scallop-edged cinder block-type “decorative ‘stone’ garden edgers,” and I use that term “decorative” loosely.  So now you’ve got red stones penned inbmy red “stone” edgers.  Monochromatic can be a beautiful thing, but not in a garden!  These edgers apparently come in little two-foot sections, which do not lock into each other very well at all, so they give the appearance of a five-year-old’s mouth with missing and loose teeth.  Instead of a straight line delineating the break from parking lot to yard (like you can’t tell where the black pavement ends and the red stone starts, they teeter and totter, weaving this way and that.   Some just flat-out lay down and give up the fight!
Now I’m retired, I want to garden.  I come from a gardening background.  My Aunt Lila could grow anything.  English gardens are spectacular.  They are a dazzling array of colors and heights all jammed into a tiny yard in front of a row house.  Blue delphiniums nodding in the breeze, surrounded by 4-foot high hollyhocks with blooms as big as your fist.  Her flowers were always beautiful to look at, and so typical of an English cottage garden.  And then I was dreaming of veggies again:  real homegrown tomatoes, not the cardboard-tasting stuff from the grocery stores that are advertised as “grown on the vine” and still taste like chalk; basil, zucchini and peppers, oh, my!  But ain’t nothing gonna grow in stones.  You remember the blue grass song Rocky Top?  “Corn won’t grow at all on Rocky Top.  Dirt’s too rocky by far.  That’s why all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar.”  (Those lyrics do run through my mind every time my mother walks by with her water/juice mix in a Mason jar.  I think she’s been Southernized, and not by Paula Dean).  Anyway, if I want to grow anything, it will have to be in pots.
So, I finally get to the point.  I am going to start slowly to introduce decorative pots full of flowers, and then veggies, to that rock-infested, barren landscape upon which we feast our eyes each day.  Little by little I envision adding more and more till there is such a plethora of flowers and fauna that they will not notice that I have removed those stupid ramshackle edging stones.  Then I’ll start actually planting in the ground!  I’ll start from the center, or maybe from the bushes near the house,  and painstakingly work my way out to the edges.  I’ll transplant those courageous little daffodils that struggle each spring to pop through the rocks and semi-permeable black barrier to meander willy-nilly in a drunken line down the center of my mother’s yard.  I’ll introduce big, bold flowering plants, airy ornamental grasses that flow in the breeze, and don’t forget the clematis to trellis up her entryway.  If I have enough stuff growing, they’ll never notice that the center of the rock garden has been replaced by soil and actual growing things.  Inch by inch I’ll make my way to the edge, and by the time someone actually complains that I’ve PLANTED things in dirt and not pots, I’ll be able to truthfully say, “Well, it’s been that way for years.  Why are you complaining now?”
Two condos down from my mom is a beautiful, huge Bradford pear, the only attractive piece of greenery in this red-rock dessert.  It was planted several years ago by the woman who used to live there.  It had become fairly well established by the time the Board of Directors told her that she it had to come down.  “Wh?” she asked.  “Well, all these units are supposed to look alike,” they opined.  “Then I suggest they all palnt their own Bradford pears,” said she, and the tree stayed!  You’ve got to love a woman who stands firmly behind her pear (tree that is)!I’m retiring to a pot farm…..

Okay, I know my readership (all two of you), so I know you skipped right over the “I’m retiring” part and zeroed in on the “to a pot farm” segment.  But don’t call the DEA (or the elders of my congregation) till you read the rest.
So the time has come to retire.  I would have loved for it to have been two years ago but couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t expect to be able to do it till I turned 70, which is a ways down the road, thank you.  So I guess 64 was a good compromise.  Mom gave up her car, finally, and that was the turning point to needing to pull up stakes and move from the “big city” (Clemmons; actually officially the “Village of Clemmons”) to rural life back in Yadkinville, NC, where I started by Southern journey some 20+ years ago.  Yep, they accepted this transplanted Yankee and her New York City ways (well, actually Bergen County New Jersey, but no one knows where that is, and if you’re a really good spitter, you could probably hit the GW Bridge from up on the crest of the Rt 17 and 80 junction), and accepted me into my their little community where everyone was related to everyone, except me. 
Now, I know I’ve spoken to you before about Yadkinville, but let me give you the culture shock picture from a girl who used to ride the bus to NYC and then walk all over Manhattan to visit the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza, Time Square and the garment district, where I bought my wedding gown for $89!
Lodi was a small town (and still is) in the northeastern corner of New Jersey,  (Bergen County), and the southwest corner of that county.  Settled by immigrant Italians, it  owes its name to an Italian city also called Lodi, and a statue of Cristoforo Colombo graced the center of politics downtown all my years there.  I grew up coming home from school each day to pastina served with melted butter and fresh parmesan cheese.  Hmmmm, the aroma of that is still gets my all-time favorite scent of food, and just the thought of it sets my little salivary glands dancing in anticipation.  No, silly, my mom didn’t make it; it was my Italian next-door neighbor Ann Capazzola.  Italian grocery stores were all over the place, and upon opening the door of any one of them, you could count on being drawn in by heavy aroma of real provolone, Parmigiano, Romano and others.  They hung like great bulbous lanterns suspended over the meat counters, tied up to a railing with twine and sweating in the summer heat.  Along the walls there were always jars of peppers, artichokes and anything else you could preserve in oil, lending color and intrigue to this little  English girl’s imagination.  Garlic hung in great huge bunches, and there was never a crustier Italian bread to be found anywhere.  To this day, there is not a fragrance so enticing to me as the smell of a real Italian grocery store!
I never saw corn grow till I was on my honeymoon, traveling south through the Carolinas, though I know somewhere in NJ they grow bunches of it, but every house in Bergen County, no matter how small a patch of property it was on, had its own little backyard, or front yard,  garden full of fresh tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, basil  and eggplants, at the very least.  It was tomato sauce in the raw (or “red gravy” if you live in Lodi).  Imagine my surprise when I came to Yadkin County in January of 1987 (or thereabouts – you know I have no concept of time) to find that the nearest grocery store with zucchini or eggplant in it (at any time of the year) was 30 miles away.  Oh, we had plenty of collards, and peppers and tomatoes were still garden staples, but my favorite Italian veggies were on the endangered species list here in Yadkin County.  Pinto beans were offered as the most popular vegetable in restaurants, and every time I asked for a cup of tea, I had to make sure I said “hot” or it would come with ice and heavily laden with sugar.  Once I finally got the waitress to realize that a cup of tea was like a cup of coffee, only with hot tea in it, then I had another fight to replace the ever-proffered lemon with milk.  Hard to believe the Brits actually settled this land way, way back.
I had to learn to cook all over again, or at least shop smarter when I got into the bigger grocery stores in Winston.  But I do love those black-eyed peas and sticky grits!  Yummy!
Times have changed and even Yadkinville has become more “cosmopolitan.”  Well, that’s what we like to call it.  I no longer have any problems finding zucchini, though eggplant is still not on the top ten favorites of local veggies to be found here.  Avocados, yuca, green plantains, fresh cilantro and even an occasional boniato can be found now in the local Food Lion.  Hmm, can we say sancocho, and give me a great big bowl or two?
When growing up in Lodi, as most kids in a small town, I couldn’t wait to leave.  Remember that Credence Clearwater Revival song “Lodi”?  They may have been referring to a town in California, but every time John Fogarty wailed, “Oh, Lord, stuck in Lodi again,” I felt his pain.
Funny how we change, isn’t it?  I cannot think now of a better place to have grown up.  We were close to the City for museums and cultural events, but lived in a town that comprises a whopping of 2.4 square miles (and the .4 part was water, and no one lived on that.  Although I’m not sure if that includes the flood water that inundated many houses along the Saddle River each spring.  Nah, I don’t think they count that.)  Everyone knew everyone, which can be good and bad, but mostly good. I’ve lived many different places, most of them NOT city, but not far from one, so here I am again, in Yadkinville, the Lodi of the South.  (Hey, Y’ville friends, that could be a “good thing,” as Martha Stewart says!)  And this time I’m not on my one-acre plot, but my mom’s two-bedroom/one-bath condo. 
So now we get to the pot farm.
For those of you who know about condo living, it’s good if you do not want to do maintenance on the outside of our home or cut grass.  I chose a condo in Clemmons because cutting the grass on my 1 acre in Y’ville would put me in bed for an entire weekend with severe allergies.  Now someone else cuts my grass while I list in air-conditioned comfort, safely enclosed in my filtered air, safe from that wonderful fresh cut grass smell which is so popular you can buy it in candle shops, but which causes me to do thins like stop breathing.  At my mom’s condo, they’ve done away with most of the grass.  When my mom bought hers back around 1980, her front yard was full of plants, she tells me.  I don’t recall, but I’ll take her word for it.  I do remember two dying rhodies in big buckets on either side of her walkway, but that’s as far as my memory goes.  Since that time, however, all plants are gone.  There are a few bushes near the houses themselves, and then the rest of the yard is red porous stone (UGLY!!), except for my friend Beth.  She’s such a rebel!  She has white stone!  Then I noticed a house across the street that has mulch.  No plants, not much space or soil, but at least it’s brown mulch. 
The stones are obviously migratory and must be kept penned in by little red, scallop-edged cinder block-type “decorative ‘stone’ garden edgers,” and I use that term “decorative” loosely.  So now you’ve got red stones penned inbmy red “stone” edgers.  Monochromatic can be a beautiful thing, but not in a garden!  These edgers apparently come in little two-foot sections, which do not lock into each other very well at all, so they give the appearance of a five-year-old’s mouth with missing and loose teeth.  Instead of a straight line delineating the break from parking lot to yard (like you can’t tell where the black pavement ends and the red stone starts, they teeter and totter, weaving this way and that.   Some just flat-out lay down and give up the fight!
Now I’m retired, I want to garden.  I come from a gardening background.  My Aunt Lila could grow anything.  English gardens are spectacular.  They are a dazzling array of colors and heights all jammed into a tiny yard in front of a row house.  Blue delphiniums nodding in the breeze, surrounded by 4-foot high hollyhocks with blooms as big as your fist.  Her flowers were always beautiful to look at, and so typical of an English cottage garden.  And then I was dreaming of veggies again:  real homegrown tomatoes, not the cardboard-tasting stuff from the grocery stores that are advertised as “grown on the vine” and still taste like chalk; basil, zucchini and peppers, oh, my!  But ain’t nothing gonna grow in stones.  You remember the blue grass song Rocky Top?  “Corn won’t grow at all on Rocky Top.  Dirt’s too rocky by far.  That’s why all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar.”  (Those lyrics do run through my mind every time my mother walks by with her water/juice mix in a Mason jar.  I think she’s been Southernized, and not by Paula Dean).  Anyway, if I want to grow anything, it will have to be in pots.
So, I finally get to the point.  I am going to start slowly to introduce decorative pots full of flowers, and then veggies, to that rock-infested, barren landscape upon which we feast our eyes each day.  Little by little I envision adding more and more till there is such a plethora of flowers and fauna that they will not notice that I have removed those stupid ramshackle edging stones.  Then I’ll start actually planting in the ground!  I’ll start from the center, or maybe from the bushes near the house,  and painstakingly work my way out to the edges.  I’ll transplant those courageous little daffodils that struggle each spring to pop through the rocks and semi-permeable black barrier to meander willy-nilly in a drunken line down the center of my mother’s yard.  I’ll introduce big, bold flowering plants, airy ornamental grasses that flow in the breeze, and don’t forget the clematis to trellis up her entryway.  If I have enough stuff growing, they’ll never notice that the center of the rock garden has been replaced by soil and actual growing things.  Inch by inch I’ll make my way to the edge, and by the time someone actually complains that I’ve PLANTED things in dirt and not pots, I’ll be able to truthfully say, “Well, it’s been that way for years.  Why are you complaining now?”
Two condos down from my mom is a beautiful, huge Bradford pear, the only attractive piece of greenery in this red-rock dessert.  It was planted several years ago by the woman who used to live there.  It had become fairly well established by the time the Board of Directors told her that she it had to come down.  “Wh?” she asked.  “Well, all these units are supposed to look alike,” they opined.  “Then I suggest they all palnt their own Bradford pears,” said she, and the tree stayed!  You’ve got to love a woman who stands firmly behind her pear (tree that is)!

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Your place or mine...

"The time has come," the Walrus said,     
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."


Don’t know why that piece of poetry from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There happened to come to mind just now, except that Mom and I are thinking of moving in together.  Talk about two opposites, well, we beat everything you’ve ever seen!!!
Mom worries about EVERYTHING!!!  Given any situation, she does not look at the pros and cons, she looks at worst case scenarios!!!  Me, I’m oblivious to anything.  Will it work?  Won’t it work?  What happens if it doesn’t work??  Who care!  Let's just try it.  I’m a bit like Scarlett O’Hara:  I’ll think about that tomorrow.  Or, more precisely, I’ll think about it when it either does or doesn’t work.  She will look at every bad thing that could conceivably occur and then invent some extras just in case we haven’t thought of all of them.
I think her blood has thinned out a lot from the 81 mg aspirin she’s been taking, though I take them too.  Plus, older people don’t seem to feel the heat as much, as can be attested to by all those seniors in Florida.  So Mom is constantly cold.  Her house feels like a furnace.  Me, well, I’m usually hot all the time.  They laugh at work because I’ve got my window open constantly.  Even on snowy days when it’s too bad to go driving to work, or even walking to the mailbox, I’ll sit in my office at home in front of a wide-open window!  “You’re from the North,” my neighbor will call out to me from the parking lot below.  “What gave it away?” I ask.  “Uh, Southerners wouldn’t be sitting in front of an open window on a 30o  day,” he’ll reply with an incredulous sound to his voice.  “But the sun it out,” I’ll resoibd happily.  He shakes his head and walks home.  We have that conversation repeatedly, just about every time it snows, actually.
Today it snowed, and it’s been really, really cold.  Mom said she was wearing just about every piece of clothing she owned.  She had on layer over layer of clothing, topped with a scarf my daughter once knitted, and even went to bed with a hat on her head.  “The temperature in the house says it’s 71,” she commented, “but I’m still cold!”  I my house the thermostat is seldom set above 65, and today I haven’t even gotten dressed because it’s much cooler to sit around in my nightgown with no socks and shoes on.
I like to have everything at hand when I’m working.  That’s why my office is such a mess, I guess.  So all my appliances are sitting right out there on the kitchen counter, ready to use at all times.  Mom has a few appliances on her counter, but even those she unplugs after each use.  So when she’s done making toast, she unplugs the toaster; if you make coffee, you unplug the coffee maker, and so on and so forth.  “Why do you have to unplug everything?” I ask.  “Because they could cause a fire.”  She look s at me like I haven't got a brain in my head.  And then she’ll l;aunch into the tale of the one person whose microwave or curling iron somehow suffered from some internal combustion or something, taking down their whole house in flames.  Never mind the millions of people who have never had that problem; but it COULD happen, so better safe than sorry, is her motto. 
“Why don’t you unplug the stove,” I’ll say sarcastically. “That’s electric and it cooks things too.”  Well, obviously the stove is different, but I haven’t yet figured out how.
Remember that open window I spoke of that I love so much?  Well, I have my bed positioned directly under a window so I can sleep with it open and aim my CPAP-covered nose in that direction.  My mom says that's okay for me, my bedroom is on the second floor, but open windows are not allowed at her house at night where it's all downstairs and anyone could could break in.  Yeah, condos in Yadkinville are notorious for break-ins.  Right.  I had a friend who lived for years on one of the main streets in Yadkinville.  Not only did he NEVEER lock his car doors, he even left his keys in the ignition!  "Aren't you afraid it will get stolen," I asked once.  He smiled condescendingly at me.  "This is Yadkinville," he replied, and that was all the response he felt it was necessary to give.
“There’s nothing on TV,” my mom states, “and I’m bored.”  I, on the other hand, am addicted to TV.  I love to read, write, watch TV, and am seldom, if ever, bored.  Besides, I’ve got a million projects in the house under way.  Not finished, just under way.  Which brings up another problem:  Mom needs to have things done immediately, and I’m a card-carrying member of the procrastinator club.  I misplaced my cell phone today.  Now, I know that’s not an unusual occurrence for me, but today I had good reason.  See, I was on the phone with mom this morning, working on the computer to cancel some insurance for her.  When we finished, I went downstairs to get some food, taking my phone with me.  I was up and down stairs all day doing a variety of things.  When I went to look for my phone, it was …. Well, missing!  Now, since I’d been up and down stairs all day, it too could have been in any of those places.  So that’s where I looked:  Upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs.  I looked everywhere!  Couldn’t find it anywhere!!!  I was so desperate I sent an e-mail to my office and asked them to call me so I could track it down!  Before that occurred, however, a neighbor called.  Thank goodness it wasn't on vibrate!  And there was my phone, sitting in the my daughter’s old unused bathroom.  Well, I never would have looked for it there.  We haven’t used that bathroom since she moved to Arizona.  The water isn’t even turned on to the toilet because of the leak she had when she lived here.  Oh, yeah, I suddenly recall,  That’s why my phone is in there.  I went in this morning to survey all the work that needs to be done and promised myself that I’d finally get around to fixing that toilet TODAY!  Then I went downstairs and started going through cookbooks, then emptying bookcases, then sorting craft items for a future yard sale.  I totally forgot about fixing the toilet.  Yeah, I’m just not the do-it-immediately type person.
I read recently about the difference between convergent and divergent thinkers.  Convergent thinkers sort things out, categorize them, prioritize them, and tackle them one at a time.  Divergent thinkers treat them all with the same priority and work a little on this one, a little on that one, and some on the other, all at the same time.  Guess which thinker I am.  Mom will get focused on one thing and can’t concentrate on anything else till that one thing gets done.  She’ll call with a computer problem and it’s so funny.  I’ll be trying to walk her through it one step at a time and she’ll be following directions, talking at the same time about what happened previously, and missing half of what I’m saying because she’s so fixed on the problem at hand.  “Okay, Mom, now put the cursor there and click on your right mouse button.  Okay?”  “Okay.”  “Now, a window will pop up that says so-and-so, but don’t click on anything yet,” I’ll say.  “Oh, I’ve already clicked on such-and-such!  What do I do now?”  “Well, now you’ve got to get out of there because you weren’t supposed to click on such-and-such.”  And on it goes.   We’re like Laurel and Hardy, with her forging ahead without an idea of what she’s doing and me flapping my tie up and down looking really dumb. 
So now comes the BIG decision:  If we live together, where do we live, your place or mine?  She’s got two bedrooms and one bath; I’ve got two bedrooms, two and a half baths.  She’s got a big kitchen; I’ve got a bigger living room.  She’s got lots of windows; and I have … not!  But most important of all, she’s got one floor; I’ve got two, and the showers, well, they’re all UPSTAIRS!  Hmm, not a good place for a shower when one of the members of the family can barely get around because of her arthritis.  So do we put in a chair lift?  My knee is getting to the point where that’s starting to sound good even to me. 
The ideal situation would be if we could sell both homes and get a one-floor, three bedroom/two bath house.  Yes, that would be ideal.  Except for the 30-year mortgage that would attach to it.  I don’t believe I want to work another 30 years.  Let’s see, I’d be about the age my mom is now.  Of course, if they keep making Social Security retirement age further and further away, I might have to work another 30 years anyway.  Might as well have a house we could both be comfortable in during that time.  Wait, that’s my divergent brain working again, isn’t it?  Now it’s not just a choice between your place or mine; now it’s yours, mine or ours?  Yikes!  I think I’ll table that decision, play some Jimmy Buffet and read the Jabberwocky while I contemplate fixing Becka’s toilet once more, juxtaposed against the decisions to paint now or replace the thermostat with a new-fangled one first, or should I re-do the popcorn ceiling in her bath, or take out the popcorn in mine to match hers, and don’t forget that paint I bought for the kitchen; perhaps I should start tearing off the wallpaper today.  Yeah.  Now that’s a plan I can work with!