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...

Real imaginary

I stayed up a little past my bedtime last night to finish an intriguing little novel, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue







about an imaginary painting by the very real artist Vermeer. Susan Vreeland begins in the present day and follows the painting back in time as it passes from person to person, and eventually to its creation sometime before 1675, when Vermeer died. With amazing skill she details the effect of the painting on these people.

And after a bit more research, I see that the artist Jonathan Janson actually painted The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, as it is described in the book, in the style of Vermeer, in connection with a movie that was made of the novel earlier in 2000.



I wonder if, say 300 years from now, people are going to be standing in front of the art works of modern-day artists with such intensity of feeling as we do for the works of the masters who were painting in the 1600s. Will they be making movies and writing novels about our current painters? Does the local video store happen to have that movie on hand? Must find out.

Skeeters...

Rumor has it that mosquitoes get larger and more ferocious the farther one travels north, so that by the time you arrive in Lake Woebegon, in the fine state of Minnesota—where some say the mosquito is the unofficial state bird—the insect might be large enough to carry off a small child.

Fortunately, the mosquitoes here in the lower Midwest are just your common, average-sized variety, unless of course they happen to be carrying West Nile virus, but they still seem pretty ferocious to me, and relentless, and they certainly can still suck blood. I can’t off hand think of anything that will galvanize a person faster than that high-pitched z-z-z-z-z-z-z whine in the vicinity of one’s ear.

I seem to attract them in the early morning as I sit to work at my computer.

That smear of red is what is left from one didn’t live to see another day. I wonder if a CSI person would be able to deduce where that blood on my copyholder came from, and whose blood it is....

At any rate, I have a quarter-sized mosquito bite on my leg and it doesn’t bother me too much as long as I don’t accidentally scratch it.

But what is making my skin crawl just a bit is what Richard found yesterday. To keep the ants out of the cat’s food, we put the bowl inside a larger saucer filled with water.




Richard usually changes the water once a week – it is part of his list of things to do. I assume he changed the water last week, all I know is that when he went to change the water yesterday, he was rather alarmed to see mosquito larvae squirming around in there. The idea that we might be breeding mosquitoes in our house gives me the whillies.

Fe....fi....Pho....fum....

I want some!

Pho that is....

W-A-A-A-H-H-H-H!!!

My niece, Adrie, is dating a young man whose mother is Vietnamese,

and he has introduced her to all this interesting food that is not normally found on the Italian dinner table.

Says my sister

Larry's mom made a huge batch of Vietna\ese egg rolls for our family and Mom and Dad. DELICIOUS! is all I can say

Adrie has been raving about how great Pho for some time now, and I have been curious about it.

While I was busy flying from Orange County to Denver to Dallas to Springfield, my honey was running around Springfield shopping for stuff.

When I finally got off the plane, footsore and very hungry, he says,

Guess what. I found! A Vietnamese restaurant! Would you like to eat there

You're doggone right I would. Absolutely. What was especially nice about that conversation was that we didn’t spend 45 minutes discussing all the different choices and the pros and cons... No paralysis by analysis...

We went. We ate. We loved it. I had my first taste of Pho. And it was soooo good.

That was about a month ago -- almost exactly a month ago. I was doing OK about wanting more.... until I got this e-mail from my sister yesterday.... Now I’ve got Pho on the brain...

Adrie took me out to Westminster to a little Vietnamese restaurant for Pho. She was so excited for me to try it. And I must say it was quite tasty... It was a real cultural experience, because we saw not one white person while dining there. All the people coming and going were Vietnamese, and the strip mall that we were at were little businesses that Vietnamese owned and operated. I felt like I was in another country.

They brought out a plate of bean sprouts, basil, chili peppers, some other leafy vegetables, and limes. The Pho was a flavorful chicken broth with green onions, cilantro, and noodles, and large chunks of white chicken meat. Adrie said what to do is to put the different sauces in the soup - chili, oily looking garlicy stuff, sweeter dark Hoisun or something, and the lime juice, plus the bamboo shoots and basil...

Yeah.... well I have something to say....

I WANT SOME!!!

Often when Richard goes to Springfield I stay home. I won’t be staying home next time he goes, that’s for sure....

Lowering the ears....

When my brothers were little boys, every so often my dad would say “It’s time to get your ears lowered” and he would round them up and sit them down on an old high stool and get out his barbers’ clippers. He’d go buzzing over their heads and a few minutes later they would have a “crew cut” mostly extremely short except for a fringe in front that stuck up in the air and was maintained with goop called "butch wax" that came out of jar.

I guess I am fortunate that my mother was in charge of cutting my hair rather than my dad, except occasionally the results weren't so good. Once, when I was in 4th or 5th grade, I recall a fateful day when she got a little carried away with my bangs just before the school pictures were to be taken. At the time I remember being mortified that they were so short, and forever and ever I am frozen in time with a fringe of 1-inch bangs across my large forehead.

I began cutting our son’s hair when he was a little kid – with scissors. He had a cloud of soft curly blond hair and cutting that off was a hard thing to do. When we moved here I began cutting Richard’s hair as well. After our boy left home, he went through a stage where he liked the “shaved head” look, for some reason, and he bought himself a pair of clippers. I did not think the look suited him very well at all – I thought he looked sort of scary – like a neo-Nazi. Fortunately, he moved on through that stage...



and he let his hair grow again...


and now that he has been moved back home....


I am once again pressed into service as a barber.

A close call

Every evening I place one-third cup of dog food and bits of apple core, other fruit, or ends of tomatoes that we might have eaten during the day on a plate and stick it on the porch. Whoever gets there first, eats. I put the plate so that I can see it from the window by the bed.

Usually, it is an opossum that comes at about 8 p.m. every evening. For several weeks we watched female opossum that came every night swollen like a balloon with babies in her pouch. Many people hate opossums, and I suppose if I were still keeping chickens I might hate them too, but I enjoy watching them.

The opossum is a very neat animal, and it thoroughly washes its face when it is finished.

The raccoons usually show up too...

but they would come even if the dog food wasn’t there because they also like to eat whatever scratch feed or sunflower seeds are leftover from what I have given the birds during the day. Sometimes they don't even wait for the sun to go down....

On occasion, our neighbor’s cat shows up. He is a handsome black and white devil who picks fights with our cat and invariably sends her up a tree. I run him off if I see him.

So, last Sunday night I was sitting in bed getting ready to watch Masterpiece Mystery! when I glanced out the window at the plate of food and saw something black walk up to the dish. Lept off the bed and went charging to the storm door and started to open it to holler at the cat to “get out here,” only I realized as I pushed on the handle that this was most definitely not the neighbor’s cat.

Fortunately for me, seeing that there was only a screen between me and the skunk 3 feet away, it was so startled that it didn't have time to react except to give me a quick look over its shoulder before it scurried off the porch and into the brush.

Last night, at about 1 a.m., the overpowering, nauseating smell of skunk spray came wafting through the open window by the bed. All we can assume is that Flower met Rocky Raccoon and had a disagreement about something. We just hope Flower doesn't make this a habit....

Folks Do Get Born

This oddment from the Ozarks may seem like a rabbit chase. Folks in these here parts know about “chasing rabbits” in ways other than as a clever metaphor to describe how a discussion can wander seriously off topic. Many people here keep beagles to hunt rabbits and most of them end up loosing the beagle because it starts chasing the rabbit and becomes lost. We used to be serenaded regularly by several beagles that came from a neighbor’s house to our field to chase rabbits. At any rate, there are a few rabbit trails here, but they will all end up at the same place, I hope.

In the midst of an orgy of reading Stuart Woods books, Judy gave me this out-of-print book to read.

Marie Campbell provides an interesting glimpse into the past, the 1940s in rural Georgia, a time when there were strict lines between black and white, where in some towns the hospitals refused to treat a black person, where sometimes the only medical care a pregnant black woman received was through clinics run by the county health department staffed by a few doctors and public health nurses. Alongside the nurses were a cadre of elderly, black women – the granny-midwives – who were almost entirely responsible for attending laboring women, poor white as well as black women, and catching their babies.

Campbell remarks “I am so full of stuff to write about that it is fairly running out of my ears.” And write she did. The book, which was published in 1946, tells the stories of some of these granny midwives, who referred to themselves as “Aunt”. Some stories are heartbreaking, some poignant, some funny. These women didn’t just catch babies, of course, they worked hard on their small farms or as servants for white folks.

Says Aunt Jeanie, one of the granny-midwives:

We ain’t discriminating against white folks, but we don’t want them in the same cotton field with us. Not because they’re white, but for a better reason. They spoil all the fun. Can’t no white folks sing while they picking cotton. It’s contrary to their nature.

One of the things talked about in the books is the “gift child”, a common practice in which the granny-midwife would be asked to raise as her own a baby that the mother was not able to raise herself, for whatever reason. It was not a legal adoption.

About 6 days ago now, this rather unhappy looking baby came into the world in the usual way (the rabbit is now emerging from the brambles).

If I were a bit cleverer, I could probably come up with a great bubble quote to stick over her head. At any rate, she is called Phoebe and she is my good friend’s fourth grandchild. I had lunch with Phoebe’s mother and grandmother a few weeks ago when Phoebe was still a very large bulge.

It was something of a coincidence, I guess, that the mention of “gift child” in the book coincided with the birth of this new baby and the name that was chosen for her, because my mom’s mother became a “gift child” and the woman who raised her was named Phoebe.

The story beings sometime around 1894, when Phoebe and Warren McDowell, who had no children of their own, took in a motherless 4-year-old girl named Elsie Coldren and raised her. Elsie became the McDowell’s gift child from a father who could not take care of her or his three other children after his wife died. Elsie’s brothers and sister were scattered to other relatives, but when Elsie’s father later remarried, the children came back to live with him and his new wife, all except Elsie. She was never legally adopted, but she remained with Phoebe and Warren until she fell in love with Walter Dittemore, got married in 1906, began having babies of her own, and eventually my mother came along.

Then, the circle became complete. Warren eventually died, leaving Phoebe all alone when she was still a fairly young woman. She came to live with Elsie and her husband and helped to raise my mother. She lived with Elsie for the rest of her life, until her death in 1957. My mother has told this story many times, and I have never tired of hearing about it (but I suppose you are.. ha!)

The peanut routine

Quite a few people, it seems, have the time and patience to train wild birds to come to their hands for tidbits of food.



Books have been written about it....

And blogs....

and Web sites

My grandfather did this too. Before ill health compelled him to sell his house and move into a mobile home, he went outside everyday at the same time and sat very still in a lawn chair on his driveway with peanuts in his hand. Eventually, the scrub jays could not resist the lure of the peanut and they would land and take the peanuts from his hand. I can remember crowding at the window overlooking the driveway with the other kids to watch this.

My father also feeds peanuts to the scrub jays, but he doesn't sit and wait for them to come.



Every morning he goes out and throws a cup of scratch feed on the ground for the doves and the sparrows. Then he puts 6 peanuts on the top bar of the yard swing for the jays.



My dad is a man of routine, and he does this every day at almost the same time. The birds don't wear pocket watches or keep an eye on the clock on the wall, but I noticed when I was staying with them in July that not a bird was in sight until about 15 minutes before the time he normally goes out. And then there they were. Perched on the wires and the garage roof, waiting. And lurking in the trees are the scrub jays.



They don't come while he puts the peanuts out, but as soon as he turns his back and begins to walk away, the jays --at least two and possibly three --


land on the swing and began to take the peanuts, and fly off with them. And one by one, the peanuts disappear...




And one seems particularly greedy.

Ocean water! Go beachy!!

They tell me that was about the first complete sentence I spoke as a very, very young girl. My dad took us to the beach just about every Saturday during the summer, starting out when I was the only child and continuing on as each new baby joined the family and became old enough to come too.... right on through the birth of my sister, when I was about 9 years old. We’d all pile in the back of the pick-up truck and off we’d head to Hermosa Beach. Not surprisingly, we all love the ocean. Not being near the ocean wasn’t something we thought about when we decided to move 1500 miles away from the beaches of Southern California. I miss the ocean. A lot.

My sister now prefers the lovely beach at Malaga Cove, a strip of white sand that gradually disappears into rocks and tide pools as the cliffs of Palos Verdes intrude more and more into the ocean.

Now, a few days ago I was surprised to see that the Pennsylvania Wild Woman had listed a blog about Palos Verdes. It’s a unique, wild oasis in the megalopolis that is Southern California. Many wealthy people live there, but one doesn’t have to be wealthy to go to the beach at Malaga Cove.

So, finally, I get to spend a few hours at the ocean. Bundled up to keep from getting sunburned, and with a death grip on the umbrella to keep it from blowing away in the stiff breeze coming off the ocean...

The three nieces enjoying the waves. Haaeeeey!!

My sister’s oldest daughter rising like a goddess from the waves, draped in kelp, reminds me of a photo my mom took me at the beach when I was a very little girl sporting a kelp hula skirt my father had made.


Two young men with surfboards and attached to a sail. It looked like great fun.

I didn’t go in the water except up to my knees. I think my days of bouncing around in the surf are over, what with my unstable shoulder and healing pelvic bone, but I did take a walk along the shore and there, caught in the rocks, was this amazing shell. Which leads me to the following question:

Who are you? Who who who who. I really want to know!!

I might have made a good scientist if I had been better at mathematics. I lack the math gene. I am tenacious enough to grab hold of something until I worry it to death or figure it out. But sometimes I do give up, and that is where I am now with this mystery shell I found at the beach.

I have semi-identified the shell I found as a member of the Tegula family in the category of “Tops and Turban” shells in the Audubon Field Guide I borrowed. The shell resembles the pictures in the book, the only problem is that this shell is about 3.5 inches wide and about 3.5 inches tall, and most of the shells in the book are itty bitty things.

I would like to have a name to call it, but I don’t. In the long run, it doesn’t matter. The shell is a wonderful reminder of a very special day. A special gift from the sea