Grandma's Kitchen - Part Two

My grandmother could dress any animal or fowl; racoon, chicken, pheasant, you name it.

Grandpa’s customers supplied her kitchen, too. His lifelong occupation was a 50-yard walk from Grandma’s kitchen to his gas station on busy Minnesota Highway 60. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, folks pulled up to Grandpa’s pumps in need of gas, but with no money. “Well, what have you got?” he’d ask. One day the reply to that question was “a possum.” Grandpa filled the man’s gas tank, took the possum, walked to the kitchen door and handed Grandma the possum. She told me later that a possum is tough to skin. This wasn’t a complaint, just a point of comparison. With every animal she dressed she’d marvel at “the way it was put together,” how it differed from another animal.

I couldn’t enjoy any animal once I had seen how it was put together; she enjoyed it even more.

Maybe it was her training as a nurse in Rochester, Minnesota, at what became the Mayo Clinic. She graduated September 29, 1929, during the depression. Two of her teachers, William and Charlie Mayo, signed her graduation certificate. She had completed a four-year course that half of her classmates found too difficult to finish. On her first day of nurses training an instructor told her that at 90 pounds she would have to “put some weight on.”

She told me she ate crackers with butter and honey all that fall. By Christmas she had added twenty pounds. But most of her life she was 105 pounds of quiet, intellectual curiosity. Her drive was to understand what could be understood. What was futile to understand, like why people behaved the way they did or whom her six children chose to marry, she didn’t waste a moment on.

I once met her younger sister Rachel, and she told me about a quality my grandmother revealed in their childhood near Sentinel Butte, North Dakota. A pack of coyote blocked their route to school one morning. Grandma held Rachel with one hand; with the other she aimed her shiny metal lunch pail directly at the sun. She aimed the reflected light back into the pack, and it spooked and dispersed them. Seventy years later, Rachel was still awestruck by my grandmother’s calm ingenuity.

In her early eighties, Grandma moved her heavy cast iron skillets to the highest shelf. I cautioned her about the move; “I need the strength training,” she said. She also began making wine. She brought out a bottle of her raspberry, black currant, rhubarb or dandelion wine on special occasions. See my blessay “Free Weights.”

At the end of every day, she took all the rugs out of the kitchen, shook them and hung them on the clothesline. She swept the floor and washed it with what remained of her morning water. (See my blessay “Ode to a Broom”)

There was beauty in her kitchen – gingham curtains on the windows. She made time to find beauty everywhere or to create it. In the summer she made bouquets from her garden, often Coral Bells and Shasta Daisies. Grandma lived the Chinese proverb: “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one to buy a hyacinth.” She sought to please herself in her choice of flowers and fabrics. Every few years there were new kitchen curtains and a matching blouse made on her Husgvarna sewing machine that hummed late into the night.

There wasn’t much in the material world that interested her, but she did buy two oil paintings from a local artist. One was a view of Split Rock Lighthouse on the shores of Lake Superior, and the other was a still life of asters.

I miss her. I miss the smell of her kitchen. A smell that cannot be replicated. Oh, I guess the ingredients are all available – the yeasty smell of bread rising, the briny smell of a cucumber on its way to picklehood, fresh flowers, coffee boiling – but the original combination that created it all, that’s gone.

I still marvel at the sheer output from her kitchen – over all those years – output that fed and clothed six children, and a husband. Output that I would never have believed one person capable of, had I not seen it myself. 

But mostly I miss her quiet, calm self-reliance. The purposeful rhythm of her life. The rhythm of another world, the world she created. 

A world I knew I was privileged to witness in Grandma’s kitchen.

Grandma's Kitchen - Part One

An anthropologist studying Eskimos concluded: “A flea couldn’t survive on what an Eskimo wastes.” That anthropologist would have come to the same conclusion if she’d visited my grandmother’s kitchen. Everything that entered her kitchen and garden were put to use, converted to a new use, or returned to its original state.

The butcher’s coarse brown string righted a flagging tomato; small coffee cans became bread pans; and large coffee cans ringed newly planted tomatoes, serving as a barrier to hungry cutworms.

Every scrap that wasn’t a meal, from cucumbers and potato and carrot peels to coffee grounds and eggshells, all ended up in a large covered bucket outside the kitchen door. On her next trip to the garden, the entire contents were soon buried and back at work fertilizing the place they had just vacated.

From garden to kitchen to garden – this was the rhythm of her day.

But not everything returned to the garden. Watermelon rinds became watermelon pickles. Cucumbers became bread and butter pickles, while others surrendered life on the vine to make a comeback as crunchy dill pickles. Apples, raspberries, blackberries, apricots, chokecherries and mulberries starred in butters, jams or pies.

What was ripe and needed to be picked and canned dictated her days. She harvested and packed peas, carrots, corn, tomatoes, zucchini, okra, green beans and beets into sterilized Ball jars. She’d lower them into a boiling water bath to vacuum-seal them for the long Minnesota winter. When she heard the seal of success, the PING of the Ball lid sealed in place, everything went down to the cool, dark root cellar. Once jars were all lined up, I would sit and eye the canned contents, the promise of thousands of happy meals to come. (See my Blessay “Appetite.”)

Water was a precious commodity in her kitchen.

One faucet at the kitchen sink brought water from the cistern. I had no idea what a cistern was until Grandma took me to the root cellar and held me up to see this dark room full of rainwater.

I never saw anyone get so much use out of so little water. In the morning she would fill two large stainless steel bowls that fit her double sink. She used the first bowl to wash the breakfast dishes; the other held the clean rinse water. After lunch she’d reheat the rinse water and wash the lunch dishes. That water lasted all day. Its final use? The garden.

During hot Minnesota summers and droughts, she wasn’t learning to conserve water like her neighbors, she was simply doing what she had always done.

Saturday night was bath night. Sequential bathing worked best: the cleanest went first, and the dirtiest went last. Grandma drew one tub of bath water; you saved the water for the next bather. Who got the first bath? A quick inspection behind the ears helped determine the order.

Winter Lament: Grieving Husband; Snoring Cat

It’s been a hard winter.

I’m not talking about the record days of record cold, the rain followed by falling temperatures, the ice, the struggle to stay erect or the unrelenting wind. No, I am talking about living with a man who outlived a daughter. She died last July, and we both still hear the phone ring and think it’s her. We know it isn’t, but it takes a long time for the mind to accept this fact. How long? We don’t know. While I didn’t need any more experience with grief, I’m getting it. I’ve written about grief before in “The Grieving Garden: This Too Is a Garden,” and “The Absence of Presence.” Now I am watching a man who lives to create, who had that creative focus that leads to flow, become robbed of that focus because of grief.

The world never looks the same after a child dies. As a parent, you’re only as happy as your happiest child.

He’s not striving for happiness exactly, just a respite from the dark. Nature has been our balm for years, but when you cannot get outside for a walk so many days in a row, you stay inside.

That’s where our cat Van Gogh comes in. He isn’t going out either. We used to enjoy watching him nap, silently. But in his heavier state, he eats nonstop and gets no exercise; he snores. Loudly. He has this pouch of fat on his belly that sways when he walks across the room. It takes him about an hour to clean that belly. Yesterday I got on the scale, and I, too, may soon have a pouch of belly fat that sways when I walk across the room. If it weren’t for spandex, I would be straining every piece of clothing I own with my expanding waistline.

On the plus side (which I am on my way to), we don’t have to scramble to get to the grocery store before the next winter storm. We can all live off our fat.

In the evening I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics and eating. If eating were an Olympic sport, I’d be in medal contention. I ate two boxes of crackers while watching Red Gerard compete in slopestyle snowboarding. The announcer said that Red is just 17 and weighs a mere 117 pounds. I used to weigh 117 pounds. Before this winter, that is. Still, I am grateful to be introduced to a sport I never even heard of. Wildly creative one, too. If I were 17 I would like to try that sport. Right now, I settle for aerobic eating.

At night, when I can’t sleep, I have been redesigning my front flower beds; this is done entirely in my head. I transport myself back to summer and survey the plantings. I add; I subtract; I rearrange. Try it.

I’m grateful that my brain can do this. My subconscious is primed with plants, thousands of them.

The past week we have been enveloped in fog. My husband asked: “When was the last time we saw the sun?” I couldn’t remember.

But then I think of those Woodstock Hyacinths I planted last October. I can almost see that deep magenta and smell their sweet scent. And I wait for the fog to lift.

Since You Asked

Since you remarked on seeing me in the same outfit at the last garden lecture, may I explain? I buy beautiful clothes and never wear them. They hang in my closet. Occasionally, I run my fingers over the fabrics and remember how good I looked in them when I tried them on. I’m not going to wear them. Ever.

Why do I do this?

When I was 10 my father’s construction business was doing so well we were able to move from a poorly constructed four-room home on Minnesota’s prairie to a large, solidly built home in Kasota, Minnesota. On the drive to our new home, I saw limestone bluffs rise above the Minnesota River Valley, a jaw-dropping site compared to the miles of flat prairie we’d just left. I saw that limestone everywhere: abutments that supported railroads, the post office in Mankato, banks and schools, including my new school. All were made of limestone – all Kasota stone.

Never heard of Kasota stone? Ever heard of the Philadelphia Museum of Art? Or the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian? That beautiful buff limestone, the color of Cedar Waxwing breasts, which encases those buildings? That’s Kasota Stone.

I’m telling you this because the three-story house we moved to rose from a foundation of Kasota stone. It was built by one of the early partners in the Kasota Quarry, Tyrrell Wilcox. It was a grand home. Long before Kasota stone became popular with architects, I swam in the spring-fed Kasota quarries. I pressed my cheek next to cool slabs of Kasota stone on a hot Minnesota day and pronounced that stone the most beautiful of things. Being Lutheran, I was given to pronouncements, but mainly about Catholics.

That house made me love beautiful things. Things of quality.

But back to that silk jacket hanging in my closet. When I say this house was grand, I mean this: two large verandas roofed in copper, carved oak columns in the entryway, oak paneling in many rooms, a 6-foot marble fireplace in the library, four large bedrooms on the second floor, three small bedrooms on the third floor to house the domestic staff. The bedroom I shared with my sister had two steps up to an outdoor balcony. The top step lifted and was a laundry shoot. Dirty clothes were chucked down to a waiting maid in the laundry room.

That kind of grand. 

One night, my dad didn’t show up for dinner. That was not unusual, but after several nights we worried. After several weeks we cried, and after several months the IRS put a lien on our grand house. You can’t blame the IRS man for wanting to recoup some of the back taxes my dad left behind. The IRS knows the value of a grand thing too.

The IRS had already satisfied some of my father’s debt by taking the other house we owned, next door to ours. My father was doing so well in business that he bought it shortly after we moved to Kasota. The two families, their kids and the rent that enriched our lives were now gone. It was a slightly less grand house, built for Mr. Babcock, another partner in the Kasota Quarry.

My mother, whose resourcefulness is second only to Scarlett O’Hara, ripped down the drapes and fashioned herself a gown, metaphorically. She found and worked two jobs. Five children, little income and no end in sight. I don’t know how she did it, but she hung on to our grand house.

But everything fell apart.

A leaky pipe caused the plaster to fall from the library ceiling. The massive oak front door, its beveled glass kicked in during one of my father’s drunken rages, rotted.

And it broke my heart. All of it. 

I got a job. I gave my mother my paycheck. I babysat my brothers and sister while my mom worked nights. I did what I could. 

Now, I like to open my closet every so often and see those beautiful things, and see that they’re still there. Untouched. Unworn. Preserved in that perfect state of beauty.

So, “no,” I won’t be wearing any of those beautiful clothes that hang in my closet. I’ll be wearing the same thing you see me in today, since you asked. But I’m making some headway. Last week I unwrapped a silk scarf I’ve kept sealed in tissue paper for 28 years. And I wore it.

Breaking Even: One Heel at a Time

A friend of mine (over 55 years old) was helping an elderly neighbor couple (both over 90 years old) trim a tree when he fell. He would have landed on his head, but he got hung up on a branch and spun around on the way down. He landed on his feet, eventually.

I was recounting this to my sister-in-law, a retired physical therapist, and she said, “He must have broken his calcaneus.”

“He broke his left heel and his pride,” I said.

“Calcaneus,” she said again.

“There was nothing calculated about it,” I said.

“Breaking your calcaneus happens only one way,” she said. “Whenever people came to see me for therapy and had broken their calcaneus I’d ask: ‘So did you fall off the roof or out of a tree?’ Their answer was always either ‘roof’ or ‘tree.’ ”

I guess you need both height and speed in order to bust this bone. My friend had both, and so he broke his heel.

The elderly couple paid him $180 for trimming their trees. The elderly woman took him to the emergency room. Guess what the co-pay was?

$180.

My friend’s wife was not happy. She counts on his help, and he’s out of commission for eight weeks because he can’t put any weight on his busted calcaneus. He’s treading lightly. She’s mostly unhappy because she told him not to go up any ladders, ALONE. I guess the calcaneus bone is connected to the ear bone, and he broke that right before he broke his calcaneus.

Which reminds me, a few years ago, an acquaintance broke his foot. (He was also of a certain age.) This seems like more than a pattern; it seems like an epidemic among men of a certain age.

As he showed me the swollen mass, I said; “Geez your foot looks like a Kleenex™ box.” I struggled to see any toes in the swollen mass of stretched, blue skin. His friend, helping him hobble around and holding his crutches, shook a crutch at me and said, “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

“Oh, she’s a writer,” he offered. “She’s just describing what she sees.”

I wanted to tell him thanks for not taking it personally. It really did look like a Kleenex™ box; swollen enough to obscure his toes and with corners, kind of. You don’t forget corners. Not on a foot.

So much for getting smarter with age. I think there comes a time when you have to face the fact that you cannot scale that ladder and clean those gutters, trim that tree, or re-shingle the roof.

Give the work to the young, will you? They need gravity-defying experience, too. Though there’s a limit.

So just one last question for my sister-in-law: “How many women came to you for physical therapy for a broken calcaneus or calcanei or whatever the plural is?

“I never saw one,” she said.

Bluebirds: In the Manner of Charles Bukowski

“There’s a bluebird in my heart, that wants to get out.”

But I only let him out in winter. I keep him chained by nourishing old resentments and calling these endless “to-do lists” a life.

Our “secret pact.”

“It’s enough to make me weep.”

And I do weep: for what is lost, and for what we don’t even know we’ve lost.

And for that bluebird chained to my heart, that bluebird that longs to flit among the purple berries in the blinding winter sunshine.

Yesterday there was a flock of bluebirds on my beautyberry bushes.

Maybe, just maybe, those bushes will draw that bluebird out of my hungry heart.

I linger at the sight: sun on snow, blue feathers, purple berries hurled here and there.

I weep, too, for the beauty of it all.

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” (Dr. Seuss)

I’m a sucker for anything different.

I was setup from the start. When my eccentric mother invented the name Leesa with two e’s I had two choices: either embrace being different or go crazy spelling my name. I did both. “That’s Leesa with two e’s,” I’d tell the woman taking my Christmas order. “Where do the two e’s go?” she’d ask. “Right after the L and right next to each other,” I say, baffled by where else she might put those two e’s and shuddering at the thought of splitting them up.

I’m also a sucker for anything purple.

So, I’m a sucker for the American Beautyberry. Nothing slows weekend walkers faster than my four Beautyberry bushes loaded with deep purple sprays of berries. Yesterday a car pulled over and parked next to these bushes. The woman driver pointed to them, and her male passenger stared at them. After several minutes, I went out to make sure they weren’t lost.

Me: Are you lost?
She: No, we’re admiring that purple bush. It’s so different. What is that?
Me: Callicarpa?
She: Calla what? (Don’t you love Americans? It sounds exotic, so it throws them.)
Me: American Beautyberry.
She: Is that color natural, or did you spray-paint it?
Me: Shucks, I’m plum out of purple spray paint. So, that’s natural.
She: Where are they from?
Me: Asia
She: No, where can I buy one?
Me:  Any nursery.

They draw bluebirds too. Flocks of them.

The first winter, after the first snowfall, they were covered with hungry bluebirds. Sublime sight: sun glistening on snow, blue feathers and purple berries flung everywhere.

Expect something you’d never expect: Bushes laden with purple berries in the garden of the vowel-heavy Leesa – that’s with two e’s. Got that?

An Uncrowded Corner

Every life reaches that time when the house – from the basement to the attic – is crammed with stuff. It seems to coincide with the mind being cluttered with memories and regrets; a romance that fizzled for reasons we never understood. Everything, it seems, conspires to multiply. Even sentences are jammed with multisyllable words, and paragraphs grow complex and longer.

We’re swallowed by stuff. Eventually.

As if to add perfect symmetry to my expanding universe, my waistline expands, too.

The garden is no different.

After years of acquiring, this fall I’ve been pulling, digging, ripping, relocating, and watching the ground open, inch by lovely inch. I’m tackling a corner at a time, lest I become overwhelmed.

And I’ve unearthed some beautiful plants that simply needed breathing room.

Twenty years ago, I started with nothing. No, really, nothing. I saw possibility, and then I got carried away. Hell-bent on reducing lawn, I justified the purchase of plant after plant. Now I’m returning to the bare bones beauty that gives each plant a chance to show its loveliness.

I’m paring things down to the essentials. It’s liberating.

The plants are moving on to other gardens. Saying goodbye isn’t always easy, but seeing the look of wonder on the faces of new gardeners has helped. I feel like a new mother leaving her child for the first time as I explain what this plant needs to be happy. I’ve also relocated a few onto our local green for Sunday walkers to enjoy. “Thank you,” say a group of women visiting from Poughkeepsie. “What beautiful little town you have here,” they add as they head off to our local trail.

Maybe this discipline will inform my writing, too? Perhaps that offending sentence that I struggle to rework, could just get cut? I remind myself that I cannot fall in love with my words. Or that rare plant.

I’m returning to open ground, as I declutter and resurrect one crowded corner at a time.

Subtraction trumps addition.

Then a thought stops me dead in my tracks: Why stop at the garden? Inside there’s a library full of books just looking for a home.

The Absence of Presence

Long after my youngest brother died, I used to imagine that he was living somewhere else. He’d left his old life behind and started over. He left the stress of his work: the hiring, the firing and the grinding hours seven days a week … the whole thing. It was the stress that hastened his death at his desk at age forty.

A few months after he died, I saw a man in the supermarket who looked like him. He walked the way my brother did. I followed him around and watched him walk.

I told this to a friend recently, and she said; "So had you lost your mind?"

She’s never known grief, or engulfing sorrow. The kind of loss that passes all understanding of the known world.

She’s never known what the mind is capable of conjuring up just to mete out the sorrow, slowly, so you can get used to the idea of never seeing the one person you want to see most. How you struggle to understand that the thing you long for, that ride down a country road with that person for just another second, what your heart desires, you will never have again.

She’s never known the sadness of realizing that the person – with his unabashed humor, his uninhibited laugh, his love of small things – will never come again.

No, that friend knows nothing of this. And I cannot tell her about it.

“No, I had not lost my mind,” I said. “I was just learning how to live without him.”

I am still learning how to live without him a decade later.

But it’s getting better.

And like the bulbs I am planting right now, love slumbers on.

Tough Talk Among the Weeds

I’m relaxed and weeding, so I was not ready for what she was about to say.

“Your last piece of writing was not good.”
I offer no response; I just listen.

“Your writing in the past was much better. What’s happened to you?”

Still harder to hear was what came next: “Do you have the creative talent to deliver the kind of writing that gets results for clients? Well, do you?”

Geez, have I slipped that much?

“You know your last direct mail campaign got a forty percent response rate, but you have to increase that number. Can you do that?”

I grab another weed and pull hard because I don’t know how to answer her question. I feel my throat tighten. I’m tired of this daily barrage. I worked until 2 a.m. last night to make a deadline that just kept getting moved up. I’m coming up with creative concepts and writing as fast as I can. I don’t want to argue, but how much more of this can I take?

“And that email you wrote for George Carlin years ago, it broke records for response rates, so you had the talent back then. But do you have the talent now?”

I think to myself: True, I did do that. I miss George Carlin. His piece on “Stuff” still makes me laugh out loud.

I pull some bittersweet out of the bee balm.

I can’t listen to this any longer.

Enough.

I have to stop talking to myself.

Hymn to a Quieter Mind

My husband just said, “You were in the garden all day, and you didn’t talk.”

“So what’s your point?” I ask. “You want me to garden more?”

“It’s just that you try and get me to talk all the time,” he adds. “You talk to friends in the evening; you talk to yourself in the bath. Eight hours in the garden, and you have no need to talk.”

His observation makes me realize how profoundly different I am in the garden. How can I explain to a non-gardener what happens in the garden? How can I describe how different it is than any other activity; and how purpose and time and rhythm and the senses are one? How can I convey the experience of the garden? How can I write this essay with the clarity and succinctness that is mine in the garden, but eludes me at the keyboard?

I’m not the landscape painter in the family, but I think gardening has something in common with painting and nearly every other creative endeavor. It involves a vision; the vision evolves over time — the palette, texture and shape of the plants supply the aesthetic complexity. Then there’s the needs of the plant: the amount of sun, water, drainage and type of soil. So you see just how many things there are to consider. This makes the act of creating a garden challenging.

There’s vision and purpose in the garden.

As I transform the earth to match the vision I hold in my mind, I must also confront what’s right in front of me: There’s a plant that’s outgrown its current location, and a shrub that needs to be moved out of a wet location. My vision and reality come together here. I stand back and take in the pleasing results — results I rarely see outside the garden when working with people.

 I’m challenged and relaxed at the same time.

What I strive for outside the garden comes naturally in the garden: in the singular act of planting or weeding, I live in the moment. There are no electronic interruptions. Mind and body are meant for this. The rhythm is not dictated by manufactured interruptions and deadlines, but simply the needs before me: I see a plant that needs to be sheared; the bird bath needs topping off; and a skunk has dug up a new planting. My mind gets to work on how to skunk proof that area.

This is a form of creative expression that has infinite variety. No two gardens are alike. And like plein air painting, all the senses are employed: the sun on your arms, the smell of the turned earth and life, the call of the catbird, the gulps of fresh air, the taste of mint, the hummingbird hovering over the bee balm.

There is no need for speech.

My mind is focused yet suspended. I’m thinking of everything and nothing. As I feed the soil, this solitary act feeds my subconscious. My mind is a medley of half-formed ideas that become whole. I allow my mind to wander, and my subconscious offers up answers to problems that have vexed me all week: I rewrite some copy that has stumped me; I come to a new understanding of a family member; and I unearth these long forgotten lines from the New England writer Malcolm Cowley:

“I pray simply for this: to walk as humbly on the earth as my mother and father did; to greatly love a few; to love the earth, to be sparing of what it yields, and not leave it poorer for my presence.”

After a day in the garden, I come inside, and my husband has dinner on the table.

Glorious.

Travelling Trees Or the 1,000-mile Garden

 I've lost track of how many properties in Nebraska my mother has planted and tended. When I say planted, I mean this: In the beginning, they were without form. And mom said, “Let there be a garden.” And when she’s done, though she’s never really done, there are windbreaks that go on for miles, hundreds of shrubs, flowers, rock walls, fences, cover for wildlife, nesting and food for birds and pollen for pollinators.

To the flocks of migrating birds that do a flyover, it’s hard not to make a stopover.

And she gardens against great odds: high, endless winds; drought; floods; tornadoes; hail. It's guerilla gardening, and you had better gird your loins before taking on this rugged prairie.

A few years ago, in a rash of April tornadoes, my parent’s acreage was flooded. Nine inches of rain moved all the corn husks from a nearby, upper feedlot and deposited them on their property. Every square inch of ground was covered in corn husks. She and my dad set about cleaning everything up right after the last corn husk settled. They have the perseverance of pioneers – living not too far from Red Cloud, Nebraska, in Willa Cather country.

Her gardens start with the other love of her life: Earl May (the garden nursery, not the man), although she's had many a fling at Wilke’s Nursery, too. It’s one of the last family-owned nurseries in the state. There’s always a nursery along the way to one of her properties, but she’s been known to drive out of her way for a plant sale. By the way, out of the way in Nebraska is a couple of hundred miles.

And then there’s the rock hunting expeditions to Kansas. She likes to travel back to the seas that once covered Kansas. There’s sandstone, but mostly she and my dad bring home limestone (a mere 70-80 million years old), formed in the deepest portions of that old sea bed. And every rock is full of fossils and shells. The same rock that gave earlier pioneers great building materials, and the post rocks that still mark the property lines. Talk about sturdy posts with character.

While my mom may be the brains, my dad brings brawn to the operation. I’ve never seen anyone dig a fence post hole so quickly or expertly. He unloads pickups full of rock. This hard work accounts for the good shape he’s in. He’s rock pressed tons of stone. He helps with the watering. And in drought years, you have to carry a lot of buckets of water to new plantings at the outer reaches of four acres. Oh, and did I mention he’s also in charge of the tree trimming and mowing?

Mom has been crisscrossing Nebraska for years, tending their properties and planting gardens. And for a decade, she managed three properties in Nebraska and commuted to their home in Iowa. She planted a garden in Iowa, too.

If you lived on one of the routes to their many properties, you’d see a lot of trees and shrubbery cruising by.

Imagine sitting on your front porch and seeing a 10-foot tree and a few viburnums tethered to the back of her truck. Every week, whether in a truck or car, plants are always in tow. When she travelled between Nebraska and Iowa, I guess that qualified her as an interstate and intrastate gardener. Her garden stretched for 1,000 miles.

I called her on Arbor Day, and you’ll never guess what she was doing. Yup, she was planting trees… about 50 of them. “Happy Arbor Day,” she said. Fitting words and work right where Arbor Day started. Out there you need windbreaks. The wind rarely stops. Remember in My Ántonia, the young narrator, Jim, described some of the new immigrants nearly losing their minds from the relentless winds. Trust me; I’ve never had a good hair day out there. But boy, clothes on my mom’s clotheslines dry fast. One day her sheets were blowing straight out from the clotheslines.

And on the seventh day, instead of resting, she hit the road, tree in tow, to plant another garden.

And behold, it was good.

Diversions & Distractions: An Odyssey, of Sorts

All epics are the same – a singular quest. Whether it’s a Golden Fleece or Dulcina’s honor, it matters little. There are arduous tests of intellect, strength and cunning. A decade-long journey home doesn’t hurt and insures loads of adventures. Throw in a revelation of a fatal flaw or two, and you’re good to go.

My quest was no different: shade plants that needed little water. I knew it would be hard; that few plants could compete with Maple roots, and I should just settle for mulch. But I had to know if it was possible.

My first stop was to collect my Sancho Panza, Patty. She’s up for anything. We stopped to gather an ample amount of supplies. Patty filled up the gas tank while I loaded up on staples for our daunting journey – chocolate, water and gum. We opened the sunroof, inserted a Dean Martin CD and headed out. We wandered from nursery to nursery with little encouragement from salespeople. But we knew as long as our blood sugar didn’t drop, our courage and civility would be undeterred. 

We succumbed to the smell of fresh bread and took a side trip to a bakery. That naturally lead to an impromptu picnic. Patty was ready to chuck her corporate job and go to work at the first nursery that would take her. It took all of my powers to persuade her to complete our journey.

 I suggested Patty plug her ears with gum as we approached the priciest of the nurseries. I tried to keep her lashed down to the seat with her seatbelt, but the siren call of White Flower Farm lured us into the packed parking lot. Patty was in search of a groundcover. I was in search of shrubs, since I had nothing beneath my trees, except that giant sucking sound of the Maples taking their first crack at all the nutrients.

We started with Patty's quest: groundcover. Discerning gardener that she is, Patty snatched up everything that looked like it would work. She had already unraveled her metaphorical shawl by ripping up everything in her garden.

She was also eyeing several other plants, but they would have blown her budget, so she held off. We were after all at the Neiman Marcus of nurseries. Or, as my husband calls it, "Needless Markup." But Patty wanted to break up the monotony of the low groundcover with some height, which brought us to a variety of Hellebores. We were smitten.

I snagged a few Beauty Berry bushes with their deep purple berry and this claim: low maintenance. Since I am now in the high-maintenance years, what with the hours spent coloring my hair and plucking the unwanted hair that appears everywhere but my head, I figure my plants should be low maintenance, even if I’m not.

Satisfied, we headed home with enough energy left to rail about our own windmills: husbands that ask us to find things for them.

Garden-Variety Crazy

I’m a victim of colliding compulsions. I visit a nursery, I see a new plant and I have to have it. When I get home my German genes kick in, and I wonder where I’m going to put it. How will it fit in my overall design? When I can’t work that out, I do my Scarlet O’Hara: “Oh, I can’t think of that now. …  I'll think of that tomorrow. … Tomorrow’s another day. … ” And I leave rebuilding Tara until tomorrow.

When tomorrow comes, I’m forced to confront my cash-and-carry habit. Why does my garden look like I brought a plant home every day and tried to find a spot for it? Maybe because I brought a plant home every day and tried to find a spot for it. I’ve got one of everything. What happened to the lovely repetition of color and shapes I admire in my friend Marge’s garden? Where’s that analogous color combination I yearned to replicate?

That’s it. My cash-and-carry habit is over. I'm going to sit down and design a bed, calculate the number of plants and put it all on paper, and I won’t buy a single plant that's not on my plan. Period. Got that?

And you know something? This disciplined approach turns out to be more fun than I thought. After I’ve researched the best plants, measured the area and calculated the number of plants, I know how the pros feel as I tuck my plan in my pocket and head to my favorite nursery.

As I pull into the nursery’s parking lot, I see the striking, feathery, nearly black foliage of a new shrub. Its alluring clumps of pink blossoms draw my nose in. Mmmm … lemony. As I get closer, I recognize this plant. My friend Linda planted this by her front door. It grew 6 feet tall by 6 feet wide in a nanosecond. I miss Linda. I'd like to see more of her, but I can't find her front door. She can't even rely on the deer to prune this overgrown plant because it's poisionous. But I can't think about Linda's poor decision now.

I consult my plan, knowing full well that this plant is not on it. I start to sweat. Is it fear of falling off the wagon or just another hot flash? I reach for my cell phone and call Marge, the most disciplined person I know. “Is it on your plan?” is her first question. “Never mind,” she says. “Do you have a pencil on you?” I dig through my purse. “Yes, yes, I have one,” I yell as I hold my violet Revlon eyeliner pencil in the air. Snapping out of my exuberance for a moment, I notice people are staring at my elevated eyeliner and me.

“Now take a deep breath and listen carefully,” Marge says calmly, as if talking a jumper off a high ledge. “Pencil it on your plan. Then buy it.”

Gosh, where would I be without the wisdom of a friend like Marge?

As I head home, rearview mirror chock full of foliage, I realize I had better face my real problem. It’s just crazy to have that violet scribble on my nice, neat garden plan. I'm going to need a better pencil than my violet Revlon eyeliner. Maybe I'll invest in the pencils the professional landscape designers use. I'd better swing by the art store on my way home.

Hamburger Helper

Spring. Every living creature is building, renovating, shedding, mating and eating.  And stuff is disappearing.

I talked to my mother this morning, and she’s missing stuff too. She enjoys an evening meal and a beer on her front porch under her blue-striped awning. Last night, she was doing just that. She went inside to get some mustard, came out and saw a chipmunk helping himself to her hamburger. After he hauled that off, he came back for the pickle.

Yesterday, I was giving our cat Van Gogh a new spring ‘do. I removed about half a pound of fur from his winter coat with his new brush — The FURminator®. The ad says it’s the “deshedding tool for cats that reduces up to 90% of loose hair (how did they measure that?), and prevents dangerous hairballs from developing.”

Van Gogh dropped on the patio like he’s narcoleptic — in the sunniest spot, of course, and rolled from side-to-side to give me ample access to his ample coat. His coat is so thick I had to clean the brush after just four hard drags along his sides. Hair was flying everywhere. Here’s a lesson I learned: never apply lip gloss before brushing your cat; furry lips I don’t need.

Anyway, I removed his hair from the clogged brush and tossed it in the air and let the wind carry it off. He thought this was a new game and chased his hairballs for a while until a minute movement elsewhere caused him to do his own disappearing act.

Other stuff started disappearing last winter. And a hard winter it was.

We had record snowfall and wind. Between the shoveling and the filling of bird feeders and suet holders, well, I could hardly keep up. When I returned from the store with a fresh supply of peanut butter suet, I left the suet cake in the bag outside the back door to run inside and get my scissors to cut through the heavy plastic. I returned just in time to see a fully wrapped suet cake disappearing up a large maple tree. “Gee, sorry the service is so slow,” I yelled.

That evening I found the suet cake wrapper at the bottom of the tree. Hmmmm. What else is up there? It reminded me of a book my granddaughters loved when they were young: Gooseberry Park. The furry protagonist — a squirrel named Stumpy — has a working Timex watch in his nest that glows at night.

Which reminds me; years ago I left a small bag of garbage by the back door overnight. In order to spare the septic system, the bag contained some superabsorbent female products. The next morning the garbage was strewn all over the back patio and picked over. That evening, as I was relaxing on the patio, I looked up and noticed a new Robin’s nest with a string hanging out. That was one superabsorbent nest.

Just now a Tufted Titmouse flew by carrying a tuft of Van Gogh’s fiery orange hair.

The building, renovating, shedding, mating and eating show no sign of letting up.

Hey, where’s my left garden glove?

On Clotheslines - Part 2

I visited my mother in the Midwest recently, and by 7 a.m. she had her clotheslines full of towels and bedding from the weekend’s company. I love a line-dried towel. Forget those expensive exfoliants—a rough, line-dried towel removes dead skin. My mother sings as she hangs clothes: “. . . la da, dee, dee, da da.” A song stored in her subconscious emerges, but not all the words. There’s rhythm at the clothesline. With the warmth of the morning sun comes the smell of success. Who needs aromatherapy when you’ve got a clothesline?

When I moved from Minnesota to Connecticut the first thing I did was string a clothesline between two backyard trees and hung a load of sheets and towels. It eased my homesickness until I got a call from the local zoning enforcement officer informing me that clotheslines were banned in that community. “Banned?” I said, stunned. “Are clean clothes a controlled substance,” I asked.  “No, but they’re unsightly,” he said.  One of my neighbors must have complained. It was probably the neighbor to the east, with the 8-feet high by 2-feet wide stone pillars and gold gate marking the entrance to his home. His name was stenciled in gold on one of the pillars. Now that’s unsightly.

But what if I just ignored the ban and kept my clothesline?

I could see myself in lock-up with the drug dealers, car thieves and a few former governors.

“What are you in for?” the meth dealer asks.

“Laundry,” I say.

Years later when I moved, I looked for a town with clotheslines. And there are many in my neighborhood. My neighbor to the north has one of those clotheslines like you see in Paris—on a pulley. It’s attached to the house right near her back door. She hangs a few shirts, cranks those out, hangs some more, then cranks in more unused clothesline and adds more clothes. The pulley squeaks with each crank. Even though I cannot see her clothesline, the number of squeaks corresponds to the number of loads of laundry. Most mornings she’s squeaky clean by 8:30. Her clothespin bag hangs next to the back door too. One spring she called over the hedge for me to come see the nest a Carolina wren had made in it. She didn’t have the heart to relocate the family, so I loaned her some extra clothespins until she could reclaim her clothespin bag.

When a young family bought her home, I figured the first thing they’d get rid of was the clothesline. But it’s in use—daily. Right now two pairs of little pants, a tiny sweater and four little socks are lined up. And I see a look on the mother’s face, not unlike the one I saw on my grandmother’s face and my mother’s and so many other women as they hung their love on the line. 

On Clotheslines - Part 1

My grandmother hung clothes out on sub-zero days in Minnesota. Fierce prairie winds removed some of the moisture. Then she’d carry in a stack of grandpa’s freeze-dried pants and stand them upright in the corner of the basement. She hung them on the basement clothesline overnight, and by morning, Grandpa was in them. 

My grandmother had two; my mother has one; and I have one. Once, every backyard had a clothesline.

On washday I used to follow my grandmother to her clotheslines. Although I was too short to hang clothes, I was a dutiful clothespin holder. I’d hand her a well-timed clothespin—just as the corners of the sheet came together. I felt so useful. Once the clothes were dry, being close to the ground was an asset. I’d fold the clothes as she dropped them in the clothesbasket. I took a break once, and when I returned I found a lump in one of grandpa’s shirts. And it moved. When I tried to fold it, a dozing cat objected.

Elsie Penner, their neighbor, told my grandmother about her husband Ike’s cataract surgery over the clothesline. While you hung clothes you talked—about remedies for the croup, how to fend off cutworms and the unwelcome advances of the lusty druggist. At the clothesline you always took away news you could use, like the arrival of the Janzen’s baby.

The clothesline was the earliest birth announcement. Diapers and pink bibs flapping in the breeze revealed the arrival of the Janzen’s baby girl long before they got their announcements in the mail. From the number of bibs you could tell that she spit up a lot. Colic was sure to be a topic over the clothesline on the next washday.

There was sustenance among the socks and sheets—a tender trade-off of useful and comforting conversation took place as Minnesota prairie winds dried and stiffened the laundry. There were disasters too—in one flyover a bird full of mulberries could mar the morning’s work.

A rhythmic order and efficiency reigned on washday, which was always on Monday. First, grandma walked the length of the clothesline with a damp rag before she hung anything. Water was a prized commodity, so the whites were washed first, then the colored clothes, then Grandpa’s gas and oil-stained work clothes were washed with Fels Naptha, and lastly, the rugs. This succession ensured you could recycle the water with each load.

White clothes where hung with other whites. Sheets and towels were hung on the outside lines to hide personal items from prying eyes. No self-respecting woman would hang her brassieres or her husband’s underwear on the outside lines for all to see.

It was unthinkable to display your unmentionables. 

Each item didn’t need two clothespins, but shared a clothespin with the item next to it. Now that’s true efficiency. The clothespins were never left out in the elements; only the slovenly left clothespins on the line to produce stains on next Monday’s wash.

If you had plenty of clotheslines, you could hang your clothes taut from clothespin to clothespin. But if the amount of wash exceeded the amount of clothesline, you could let clothes sag at the center. You’d never hang a shirt by its shoulders since that left marks and little bulges that gave the wearer the appearance of growths or protrusions. But there were worse things. If you left your clothes out in the rain—this was announcing your sloth to the world. If you left them out overnight, you were considered just plain nuts. It was like a certificate of insanity, and you steered clear of the homes that had wash out for days.

House Devil & Garden Angel

I’m having a little talk with myself. Make that my two selves.

And it isn’t going well.

House Devil: “Look at this living room. Your dust balls are multi-storied. The kitchen floor is so sticky you left one sock behind when you attempted to walk through it. And what is that film on the bathroom mirror that obscures half your face? Woman, get your house in order.”

Garden Angel: “Dear, forget all that housework. What a glorious day to be in the garden.”

Guess who wins this argument?

Once I’m in the garden, all of that chatter stops. The solitary act of planting, weeding and hoeing calms my clattering mind, and I am focused on a singular act. A meditation to dirt, perfumed by spring flowers and lashings of warm winds as the sun warms my back.

I’m my better self in the garden.

Don’t get me wrong; I do housework. I vacuum and dust in between sighs and looks of longing for the outside world. My house devil is a whiny woman who can build a fortress of resentment if her husband doesn’t pitch in with the housework. Which, thank god, he does.

It’s a common affliction: “house devil & garden angel” syndrome. And I’m a sufferer. So is my husband. Only he suffers more.

When darkness finally drives me inside, I always wish the dust balls wouldn’t scatter when I walk through rooms. I wish I could pry my left sock from that sticky mystery blob. I wish the dishes were done, the beds were made. . .

But mostly I wish for one more day to comingle with the earthworms, leave a little corner of beauty, and tread lightly on this lovely earth.

Bathe in It or Use as a Laxative? In Search of Simplicity

I opened my medicine cabinet and saw the problem.

Eye wash, anti-fungal cream, antacids, acid reflux pills, muscle pain cream, cold sore cream, eczema cream, poison ivy block and scrub, anti-itch cream and three deodorants, including invisible gel deodorant. (Do I even have this one on?)

My bathroom was chock-full of expensive astringents and exfoliators. We even have two kinds of mouthwash — for people with and without braces. My laundry is full of detergents that boost, brighten and lift, and that’s just for the wash, never mind the dryer.

How come with all these products I never seem to have what I need?

My grandmother’s cupboards only had a few products, yet she always had a remedy for our latest catastrophe. Maybe because most of the products in her cupboards did double, triple and even quadruple duty? I went in search of simplicity.

First the laundry.

Every washday my grandmother used to bring out her big yellow bar of Fels Naptha soap. She’d take a knife and shave some of it over grandpa’s oil-stained overalls soaking in the washer. I found it at the supermarket right next to the newer sexier soaps.

And when Grandma met up with poison ivy, Fels Naptha removed the toxic oil from her skin and kept it from spreading. Since the oil could last a year, she washed her garden tools in Fels Naptha soap too.

And Fels Naptha beat “ring around the collar” by about 100 years. Just wet the bar, rub it inside a shirt collar and no more “ring around the collar.” I keep a cheese grater next to my washing machine and shave a bit of Fels Naptha into the grimiest load.

Another of Grandma’s staples on washday was 20 Mule Team® Borax. This naturally occurring mineral, boron, puts newer laundry detergents “all natural” claims to shame. Plus it cleans tile and grout, sinks, pots and pans, refrigerators, ovens, microwaves and stainless steel. It even removes mattress odors. When I say its uses are endless, I’m exaggerating slightly, but not by much.

This single product replaced five products: oven cleaner, grout cleaner, stainless steel polish, deodorizer and that pricey product I used to dry flowers.

Feel free to use it for its original purpose: to boost laundry detergent’s cleansing action.

On to the bathroom.

My grandmother quelled bug bites with witch hazel. This plant-based astringent is so effective as an anti-inflammatory that it shrinks anything swollen, from top to bottom. I’m not going into a lot of detail. Just trust me.

And then there’s Epsom salt.

Soak in it, or use it as a natural laxative? I kid you not. You really can do either. And according to the Epsom Salt Council (yes, there really is an Epsom Salt Council), the natural components of Epsom salt, magnesium and sulfate, claim to “ease stress, improve sleep and concentration, regulate the activity of 325+ enzymes and … ” to name just a few. Wow, the Epsom Salt Council is a thorough bunch. I use Epsom salt as a garden fertilizer. Then I add it to a bath and soak; it’s great for sore muscles.

With fewer products in my cupboards, I still have whatever I need —  whether I get stung by a bee, sprain an ankle or need to remove olive oil from my shirt.

And unlike some newer products, I never have to wonder if these products will work as promised. After 100 years, I know their claims have truly been tested. They all passed my grandmother’s test.

Just one question: What am I going to do with all that extra room in my cupboards?

Answer: Nothing.

Garden Profiling - Part Two

Malcolm has just finished the biweekly trim of the boxwood hedges that border two stone paths. One path leads to a greek-like statue, another ends at a focal point — the fountain. Terraces dotted with topiaries surround the boxwood. There’s the swath of perfect lawn, cut short and edged, like Malcolm’s hair. Malcolm loves to weed, edge and prune in his high-maintenance garden. Like the formal English garden, boundaries are well defined and symmetry rules.

Malcolm’s garden began with a bulk supply of graph paper and months of planning that produced neat stacks of color-coded sketches. Then came the heavy equipment — the backhoes and graders that moved, shaped, graded and re-graded until every natural contour was obliterated. Next a white fence, topped with decorative latticework, was erected to enclose his compound.

Then he searched for plants — some rare, temperamental and expensive varieties.

Early in our friendship I helped Malcolm prepare for a large garden party. He asked me to run to the kitchen and get some cilantro from his spice rack. “Just look in the Cs,” he said. I was confused until I discovered his multi-tiered, fully revolving, electronic spice rack was alphabetized.  (I know I’ve wandered into kitchen profiling, a sub-niche of garden profiling, but it’s an illuminating digression, I believe.)

Malcolm’s color combinations are as refined as he is. The analogous pale blue flowers of bugloss are followed by delphinium’s deep blue — a perfectly planned succession of blue blooms. Every plant relates to each other and to nearby architectural elements. He uses the fence as a backdrop for single “specimen” plants.

This is the garden for clarity and conservative clothing.

Behind the fence, among the orderly hedges, we discuss Malcolm’s recent trip to the Cotswolds, books and the theater, in a logical fashion.  My words are careful and considered.  I find myself saying “precisely” and “ostensibly.” Nothing like the “ya right” and “in your dreams” I let loose in Patty’s garden. 

Malcolm wears a bow tie to a profession that suits a man who owns eight well- sharpened edgers. He found his calling in contract law.

Then there are gardeners who confound, like my friend Barb. While single, she was smitten with wildflowers and made and sold her own soap. When she married a man with money, she quit the soap business and hired a crew of 12 to rip up the fields of wildflowers. Lured by catalogues and magazines chock full of glossy photos of the newest plants and the latest designs, she’s what profilers call an “aspirational gardener” or a “serial sower.” She renovates her garden to reflect the latest fad. Recently, she added a pergola, a scented garden, a cutting garden, an herb garden and what she calls “a water feature.” By the way, that’s a fountain.

But I remind myself that it’s gardeners like Barb who make the work of this profiler so challenging.