The Seasons Go Round and Round

The dogwood is a thing of beauty in the early Spring. Pale green leaves form around a silvery bud on the bare crooked branches, and then suddenly there is the mass of flowers.


They are an especially lovely thing to see in the deep woods, and from a distance it looks like a bit lace dropped into the gloom of the still sleeping forest. Just as people trek to the Northeast to see the Fall colors, local folk are fond of taking drives out into the National Forest in the early Spring to see the dogwood and redbud in bloom.

And then the glory fades, the petals wither and drop off and the leaves continue to grow and the dogwood looks just like any other tree. But as summer fades into fall, the dogwood is one of the first trees to put on its fall clothes...


and the real reason for those lovely flowers appears...



The potential for next generation...



And indeed, the dogwood does reproduce itself quite well, almost as well as the proverbial rabbit. These berries are very attractive to the birds, which eat them and then poop them out; it's part of the plan...the seed requires passage through the bird's gut to remove an outer coating so that it can sprout.

Sweet Repeats

I pay attention to the books other people who write blogs say they are reading. So, when Shouting at Streetlights mentioned that he was reading a book by Nevile Shute, and Marian Keyes mentioned in her blog/newsletter that she was reading something by Michael Connelly, that was "brilliant," I went to the library to track down books by these authors.

I knew that I had read something by Nevil Shute once upon a time, but I wasn't sure which one - probably On the Beach -- so I grabbed the first one with his name on it, which was The Breaking Wave.

Then I wondered around the other side of the stacks and found about 2 feet worth of Michael Connelly novels to choose from. I had never read anything by him. So it took a while figuring out which one to pick.

Right below him was a row of books by Catherine Cookson and my eye lit on a little book called Mrs Flannagan's Trumpet.

I admit I frequently choose books by their titles and covers. It looked interesting, so I got that one too.

And when I got home I looked at the back of the book and saw that I had already read The Breaking Wave, sometime in early 2000 (they stopped writing down dates on the checkout cards when they went to computerized system). And it seems I had also read Mrs. Flannagan's Trumpet, which was due back on Aug 19, 1994.

Blimey. Funny thing is, I so frequently pick books again that I have already read once upon a time that I usually always look at the back cover to see if my number is there before I walk out with it. But then I figured since I didn't remember reading it the first time, I might as well read it again.

And Shouting is right. Neville Shute is a great storyteller and I will have to get more of his.

Hanging Around

I don't know if other writers of blogs do this or not, but I often find I see something that I think might make an interesting topic for a post, and then I take a bunch of pictures, and then something even more interesting happens that I think would make an interesting topic for a post, and I take a bunch of pictures.... and before too long, I have totally forgotten the original thing I wanted to write about.

So yesterday as I was heading out of the house, I noted that once again the storm door had not closed all the way (because the house is crooked, but that's another story) and a lizard had come in off the porch and was sitting on the carpet just inside the door in a patch of sunlight. These five-lined skinks patrol the porch fairly regularly looking for bugs, and because the barrier between outside and inside has become somewhat nebulous over the years, this is not the first time one has come in the house.

Anyway, the lizard reminded me that I had stalked a lizard a few weeks ago....


I happened to see the lizard scurrying along the foundation of the house and it let me get remarkably close.


About 2 seconds after I took this picture, a small grasshopper leaped on the brick right in front of the lizard and was eaten.



Of course I totally missed that shot.






From time to time Richard gets promotional materials from paper companies that make high quality paper for printing works of art (photographs, lithographs, etc) and other uses, and often these are small posters. Most recently came this one in the mail. The cougar's tongue is actually rough. Go ahead, run your finger over the image....



A long time ago, this poster came, and I have it up on the wall where I work.




I love the details in the stucco in addition to the lizard.



Somehow, the concrete blocks of the foundation in my pictures aren't quite as interesting as the stucco in this one.

Chip and Dale

Many folks my age enjoyed watching the antics of Chip and Dale as they tormented Pluto, Donald Duck, and various other Walt Disney characters in the cartoons we watched in the 1950s.

I don't need to go digging through the archives of ancient cartoons to enjoy my very own Chip and Dale (No! not Chippendale!!) show. I get to watch one fairly regularly from the window in front of my computer.

There are at least 2 chipmunks that live somewhere on the north side of the house. Unlike Chip and Dale, they don't have different colored noses or different configurations of teeth, one is a bit lighter across the back and tends to frequent the feeding table.



I call it Dale.

The other one comes most frequently to the post feeder, which is situated about 3 feet from my window.


I call this one Chip.

Most of the time, the chipmunks just vacuum up the seeds until their face are bulging...



and then they speed off to store them someplace.



Once in a while, they actually stop and eat the seeds.


Picking them up one by one in their little paws.

Chipmunks are not very sociable animals, so on the occasions when one happens to venture onto the other one's spot, they fight about it. They chase each other around. It is hilarious. But I guess you have to be here to see it.

The Slime Factor

Okra is one of those vegetables about which people tend to have opinions. I happen to like okra-on occasion and in moderation (and I even like the slime)-which is why I am very pleased to have a freezer in which I can store okra when it is season and parcel it out to myself if I am in the mood. The only way Richard will eat okra is dusted in cornmeal and fried in a hot skillet with oil -- because that is about the only way to cook okra without the oozing slime (cooking okra in liquid seems to make the slime worse) but Richard does not want me to cook with a lot of fat. so I don't.

I was given a nice quantity of okra on Friday, and decided to cook some of it and take it to the pitch in dinner at church on Sunday, which would have ham as the meat. I have two favorite okra recipes, both are from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook, which is a vegetarian cookbook. One of them is West African Groundnut stew, which can be found here and perhaps elsewhere as well, and the other is jambalaya, of which there are probably a jillion versions.

West African Groundnut stew is absolutely delightful (and I think it would taste even better with coconut milk instead of the juice, which I have used anyway) but Richard has opinions about what it reminds him of after it is cooked and in the bowl. I thought jambalaya would taste good with the ham and and might not look quite so much like something that had erupted unexpectedly from the digestive tract. I chopped all of the okra and froze about half of it and the rest I used in the jambayala.

And yes, there was a bit of slime on the cutting board and the knife, but not bad. Just as the jambayala was finished, and I had just started to clean up the mess in the kitchen, Richard shot a squirrel. So, I moved outside on the back porch with the cutting board and the knife and worked on fixing the squirrel so it could go into the crock pot.

Finished with that task, I took bleach solution outside to clean the cutting board and left it to dry while I came back to finish cleaning up the mess in the kitchen. I forgot about the cutting board though, and this morning when Richard brought it in after being outside for 2 nights, it had several meandering slime trails from slugs, which is a heck of a lot harder to get off than okra slime.

And for the record, the jambayala was a hit at the church meal. People ate it. They actually ate it. (this is a major deal or me: I have a history of making things that nobody will eat). And someone actually said "This is good. Can I have the recipe?" You might like it too... and it is good without the okra if you don't have any of that; or if you want to add meat (sausage, shrimp, catfish, ham) you can do that too.

Jambalaya

Stew
3 tbsp olive or vegetable oil
1 cup chopped onions
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 bay leaves
1 cup carrots, sliced diagonally, 1/8 inch thick
1 cup chopped celery
2 cups coarsely chopped red and green bell peppers
2 tsp dried basil (2 tbsp fresh)
1/4 tsp dried thyme
2 cups coarsely chopped tomatoes, fresh or canned
10 ounces frozen whole baby okra, 2 cups fresh whole baby okra (I used 2 cups chopped okra)
3 cups vegetable stock (use juice from canned tomatoes as part)
1/8 tsp ground allspice
1/8 - 1/2 tsp cayenne
salt and pepper to taste

Roux

1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup unbleached white flour

Chop all of the vegetables before starting to cook because you have to do the stew and the roux at the same time, and the roux needs to be stirred almost constantly.

Start the stew in a large stew pot by heating the oil and add the onions, garlic, and bay leaves and sauté, stirring occasionally until the onions are translucent.

Start the roux by heating the vegetable oil in a heavy cast iron skillet. The oil should be hot but not smoking. Whisk in all the flour to form a smooth paste. Lower the heat so the roux gently simmers. Stir almost constantly, stopping only to attend to the stew. The roux will very slowly darken. Cook the roux for 20 - 30 minutes, which is about as long as the stew will take to cook. The roux will turns a nutty brown. Don't let it burn.

Once the onions are translucent, stir in the carrots, celery, bell peppers, basil and thyme. Sauté, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes, okra, stock, and remaining spices. Cover and simmer gently for about 20 minutes until the vegetables are tender.

When the stew vegetables are tender, adjust the seasonings and stir in the roux. Simmer the stew on low heat for about 10 minutes more, taking care not to scorch. Remove the bay leaves before serving.

Remembering...

We lived in the lovely town of Albany, Oregon, until just after our boy turned 4 years old. The city cemetery was about a block away from where we lived, in the downstairs part of a grand old Victorian house that had been converted into two apartments. On days when it wasn't raining or I didn't feel like loading him up on the bike and taking off on an adventure, we often walked there. He wasn't able to read the markers on the graves, of course, but he liked to look at them with me. Each marker had its own story to tell, and some of the stories gave great food for thought and wonderment. What happened in that family that 5 little children all died by the time they were 2 years old?

He enjoys visiting graveyards and looking at the markers even today. I don't make it a habit these days of visiting graveyards. One of the last times I went to a country cemetery carved out of the woods, to watch birds, I became covered in seed ticks. It was an experience I would not care to have again.

Cloudia (I love saying her name... I love the way my mouth feels when it says the c-l-o-u sound) did a very interesting photo essay not too long ago on a cemetery with many Chinese people buried in it. We don't have anything quite that interesting here, at least not in the city cemetery in town. It has rules about what can and can't be put on the grave.

But there are many cemeteries scattered around the countryside, such as the one where I got up close and personal with the ticks. Some are connected with country churches. We have lived here long enough now that I know several people who are buried in the cemetery behind Pine Grove church.




I knew the grandpa that is buried here.

Many of the cemeteries are privately owned, such as this one, which is on the road to the lake.


Most of the people who are buried here are from the Collins clan.

And the families of some of these people apparently did not have money to purchase a fancy marker for the grave. So they made their own markers out of cement.


And embedded bits of glass and unusual stones to make them personal....



and tried to make them pretty...



The homemade markers are not very durable...


and some of the older ones are deteriorating...

Already, some of the marbles are falling out of this marker for Charley Collins, who died in 2007.


Charley must have liked racing cars...

A poem to think on...

In a Disused Graveyard

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill
The graveyard draws the living still
But never any more the dead

The verses in it say and say:
'The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.'

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come
What is it men are shirking from?

It would be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die.
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

--Robert Frost

From: Selected Poems of Robert Frost

Today is one of those days that people remember. They remember what they were doing on September 11. I was busy pushing the broom at the post office and trundling around to mail cases with my trashcan on rollers. Everything came to a halt when the news came over the radio. At first we thought it was a joke announcement. But then we knew better.

I decide to play a bit

One of the problems that self-employed people have to wrestle with is that if we don't work, we don't earn any money. There is no such thing as a paid holiday. So one has to choose.

I chose to play....


Just a bit....


On Labor Day I took a few hours off from my labors to get away from the computer.

Off to Noblett Lake, a small lake that formed behind the dam built on Noblett Creek between 1938 and 1940 by young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).



Noblett Creek is a small river that meanders through Howell and Douglas Counties, and the lake is about 12 miles from our house.

They made a trail along the shoreline from the dam leading to a nice picnic area with tables under the trees


and two pavilions for people to gather under cover if they wish.


There is also a trail that runs the ridge around the lake, which I hiked once many years ago when our boy was young.

I invited Richard to come, but he said it would be too crowded. It wasn't, of course. It was deserted.


See how crowded the parking lot is?

I invited our son to come, and he said yes. He had the day off, but in a very great irony, the company he works for doesn't recognize Labor Day as a paid holiday, so they honor their workers on Labor Day by shutting down and then not paying them for the day off.

Noblett Lake is in the Mark Twain National Forest and so it is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, and they made a major mistake....


A very big mistake...

They planted kudzu along the road leading to the lake.

Displaying one’s wealth

In ancient times - and maybe even today -- women in some parts of the world displayed their wealth in the form coins made into necklaces and other jewelry or sewn as decorations onto the hems of their clothes and other apparel, head coverings and masks.

I have modest tastes in jewelry, which is good because I carry my wealth around in my mouth. Over the years, I have accumulated 7 gold crowns and a porcelain crown (which cost just as much). For us, this mounts up to a fairly hefty chunk of change, even though I realize it may very much be "small change" compared with the work some people have had done in their mouths; one man I worked with spent $25,000 on dental work.

Whoops. Lets amend that to 6 gold crowns and a gaping hole.

I take fanatical care of my teeth, but I have weak teeth. As I was flossing my teeth at 10 p.m. Friday night, one of my gold crowns flew out of my mouth and landed in the trash can, which was empty of anything else, thank goodness.

So, here it is, for everyone to see -- yeah, yeah, I know nobody wants to see it -- about $600 worth of my wealth.




It wasn't only until Saturday morning, after I got back from the drug store with my little kit of do-it-yourself dental glue - knowing after making calls to two local dentists that on Saturday morning of a 4-day holiday weekend there was a snowball's chance in "a very hot place" that I would be sitting in a dental chair - that I got out the magnifying glass and saw, to my dismay, that my crown just hadn't come off.


The crown was firmly attached to a broken chunk of tooth.

Now, great inroads have been made rural areas such as where we live with urgent care clinics that offer medical care after normal doctor hours and on weekends to people who aren't really sick enough for the emergency room, and at a fraction of the cost. But there are no urgent care dental clinics. I was not able to use the dental glue to put the crown back on as a temporary fix. Fortunately, that tooth also had a root canal in addition to the crown. I shudder to think what the last four days would have been like otherwise.

I have horrible nightmares about my teeth falling out. In my case, these dreams do not have some deeper meaning. I am really horrified about having my teeth fall out, I guess because I was told over and over again by my parents when I was young that it was a terrible indictment to neglect one's teeth so that they had to be pulled.

Take care of your teeth!

I was warned on more than one occasion. About 10 years ago I had to have a tooth pulled because it was fractured in so many places it could not be repaired. And even though it was not my fault, and I cried for hours and hours.

I assume early tomorrow the office staff at my dentist will arrive and listen to my frantic message on the phone and that I will get call back.

And friends and neighbors, I have a bad feeling about what he is going to say. A very bad feeling. I am steeling myself for the worst.

Actually, I did do something fun today, which I will write about.... tomorrow.... maybe.

Cultivated... and Wild

In a recent post, that Wild Woman in Pennsylvania posed the question "Cultivated vs wild?" in reference to a lovely picture of some flowers.

Well, how about cultivated and wild?

If you were to head out from our house and take a jog to the right at the swoopy "T" where the frontage road meets the old county road, and toil up the ferocious hill, in about 5 minutes you would arrive at the home Joby and Melissa, who live next to John (who I think is her father). When Joby and Melissa moved into that house a few years back, the house and yard were rather rundown and dumpy and they have gradually transformed it to spectacular, including terraces with several very interesting water features...


and raised flower beds,


and meandering paths.

Together they are part of the Grow Native network in Missouri that is sponsored by the Conservation Department.



The idea is to encourage homeowners to use native plants in landscaping. They both have greenhouses in which they cultivate plants that are native to the Midwest and East, and they sell seeds and potted seedlings to people for their gardens. They call themselves Easy Wildflowers.

I happened to walk by their house last week, and the next day when Richard headed out at the crack of dawn for his morning walk, I suggested he walk the Loop (frontage road to 76, turn right, walk to old county road, turn right, back to the "T"), which would take him by their house, so he too could look at the beautiful flowers in their yard. He did indeed walk the Loop, but when I asked him what did he think of the flowers, he admitted he had totally forgot to turn look at them as he passed by their house.

So I shook my head, heaved a big sigh, and later that day we took a stroll together. And then I decided I needed a few pictures, so I went back with the camera. When I knocked on Joby and Melissa's door to ask permission to photograph their yard, their son answered and told me I had to ask his grandpa if it was OK to take pictures. John arrived in his purple truck as I was knocking on his door. I had no clue who John was until I saw him, but it turns out I have seen him often at the post office because we frequently arrive at the same time to pick up mail from our respective boxes. John was kind enough to give me a tour of the place. And he told me the names of all the beautiful flowers, and I forgot most of them.









And now I know where all of our hummingbirds have gone.... redder pastures.

Multi-booking

I suppose this would be the biblioholoic's word for trying to read more than one book at a time. The husband and I are at the stage of life right now where trying to multi-task does not work very well at all. Both of us frequently will walk into a room intending to do something while thinking of something else we need to and then immediately forget why we are there. At the moment I am multi-booking - trying to juggle several books at once, and not too successfully. It's like being the proverbial kid in a candy shop.

I received a parcel of books from my cousin Richard, who moved from Nevada to Washington, DC, a few years ago. He decided to liberate himself from some of his collection, and he put a lot of thought into the books he decided to give me.... there are links here....


His mother, my father's youngest sister, died of cancer some years ago. Losing a Parent helped him through that event, and he hopes that it will help me now that my own mother is terminally ill with cancer.

He stuck a post-it note "self-evident" on the front of Biblioholism. I showed the book to Judy, and we laughed. I am probably not a true biblioholic - definitely constrained by being rather tight fisted with money when it comes to material possessions. I'm borderline maybe, but not quite over the top.

My cousin and I both adored our Aunt Betty and Uncle Johnny and spent magical hours at their house at the Hastings Natural History Reservation. We've been trading memories about those years. In a mutual commiseration about our dislike of cellular phones and technology in general (neither of us does very well with our respective DVD players), I suddenly remembered our Aunt had a hand-crank phone. So I asked him if he remembered:

I remember Aunt Betty's hand crank phone well.... It was at the end of the long hallway, leading from the bedroom wing to the kitchen. And yes, it was an actual working phone, and it was on a party line. Their ring was two longs and a short, or some such, vs two shorts and a long, And, I believe they had to ask the operator for any calls not on their direct party line.

Lives of the Cell is a book they gave him decades ago, he says. In a note, which I am using as a bookmark to keep my place, he says he had trouble digesting it or getting enjoyment from it and thought I might like it. I do indeed, but I can also understand why he had trouble with it. It is a collection of essays by an amazing writer, with some really odd, and sometimes very profound thoughts. It must be taken in small doses - and thoroughly chewed -- to go down well.

We both enjoy attracting birds to our yards. He fed peanuts to jays when he lived in Nevada, and had already decided to send me the book on Hand-Feeding Backyard Birds when I mentioned it in an earlier post on this blog.

Last year I sent him starts of the two ancient cacti that I have that originally came from our grandfather's garden back in the early 60s. Apparently they have survived the winter. I do fairly well with cactus, probably because they appreciate the "benign neglect" I offer them. However, I have not been very successful over the years in persuading my cacti to bloom. Perhaps after reading Cacti in Color and Cactus and Succulents, I will figure out the secret.

And finally, this book. The Flower Babies' Book...





We both remember as young children seeing this book at Grandma's house...





looking at the pictures, and hearing the poems. Some years ago, the original family heirloom passed from his mother to Aunt Vera, the only surviving Aunt (I have a wonderful relationship with her oldest daughter Teri, my cousin in Hawaii, but that's a topic for another day). He bought this one to give to his mother to replace the original, and now it belongs to me.

I had sort of drifted out of touch with this man who I spent quite a bit of time with when we were kids. Up until the time I was about 10 or 11 or so, they lived within reasonable driving distance of our house and I saw him quite a bit. We shared a love of nature and bugs and all sorts of things. This was during the time when children played with toys like erector sets and Lincoln logs and tinker toys, and I remember doing all those things with him before they packed up and moved 8 hours away. I am so thankful he is back in my life...