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)!