Drowned Men's Undershirts

Summer, 1947. My grandparents’ farm, in a valley at the foot of the Pyrenees. In the afternoon, after the siesta, which is necessary because being out in the midday sun is considered suicidal, my parents take me along on their walk. 

First, however, we have to find the sailor hat without which I am not allowed to go outdoors. My mother has a complicated relationship to the sun. On the one hand, she thinks it essential to my proper growth, and after one week in the country I turn as dark as a hazelnut, a process that the entire family encourages and applauds. 

On the other hand, going outside without a hat puts me in immediate danger of catching an insolació (sunstroke), believed to cause malaise, fits, and hallucinations. When my mother warns me against insolació, I imagine the hot yellow sun drilling into my skull, gilding my brain and the inside of my face and my throat all the way down to my stomach, making me glow like a lightbulb. 

The fact that my Mediterranean DNA has provided me from birth with an inch-thick thatch of hair to protect me from the rays of our favorite star does not assuage my mother’s fears. When she finds the white sailor hat, she plops it on top of my curls and leads me out the back door. A couple of semi-feral barn cats, alerted to the possibility of bread crusts by the squeaky hinges, scatter when they see my empty hands. 

My parents’ afternoon walks are of two kinds. The short version takes us along the dirt road from the farm house, past a wheat field, up a gentle slope to the threshing floor and the big hay barn. The long walk leads to the irrigation canal that, first envisioned by the Arabs in the 10^th century and completed in the early years of the 20^th, transformed the valley from a semi-arid wasteland into a paradise of green fields and almond, olive, and fruit orchards. 

The canal’s broad swath of brown water runs placidly between high banks bordered by shade trees. My parents and I walk on the narrow path alongside, my father holding my left hand and my mother my right to prevent me from succumbing to a fit of toddler insanity and diving in. 

We’ve been walking a while, and I’m getting bored. I want to go back to the house. “But we can’t go back now,” my father says. “We’re almost at the weir. Don’t you want to see the waterfall?” Long before we reach it, I can hear the water rushing over the top of the weir wall. I can tell that we are getting closer because my mother tightens her grip on my hand, the way she does in Barcelona when we are about to cross the street. At the fall, my father picks me up so I can see the thrilling sight. 

I am both horrified and fascinated by the noise, which is louder even than the thunderstorms that we watch from the covered terrace of the farmhouse. And I am intrigued by the water, which was a dull sepia in the peaceful stretches, but now gradually pales as it plunges until, at the bottom, it forms a roiling, boiling mass of bright white spume. 

“That’s enough, Lluís,” my mother says. “Get away from there. You’re making me nervous.” My father retreats, and puts me down, repeating the lesson I have heard a thousand times, “You know that you must never, ever go near the water, especially here at the weir.” And this time my mother adds something new: “The waterfall is so dangerous, that even grown men have fallen in and drowned.” 

Grown men drowned in the canal! My mind, ever determined to make sense of the world’s weirdness, seizes on this as the obvious explanation for the white froth churning at the bottom of the fall: it consists of the drowned men’s undershirts. 

My parents take my hands and we turn back towards the house, and my afternoon snack (dinner is at 10 p.m.). In the damp, shadowy kitchen, which smells of drains and potato peels, my grandmother drizzles olive oil onto a thick slice of crusty bread. 

“Where did you go on your walk?” she asks. 

“We went to the canal, all the way to the weir, and I saw the undershirts of the drowned men.” 

“The undershirts of…” she echoes, peering at me closely. 

She hands me the bread, wipes her hands on her apron, and goes to find my mother. “Did the child wear her hat when you took her out this afternoon? I ask because she may have caught an insolació . She said she had seen the undershirts of drowned men….” 

My parents and I on the canal path

Baby Carriage

The vehicle in which I rode as an infant was a kind of horseless barouche, black as a hearse, with a large hood that could be folded back to allow for the beneficial effects of sunshine. Set high on its four wheels, it enabled the adult pushing it to maintain uninterrupted eye contact with the infant contained in its depths. It had excellent suspension—I can still feel its comfortable bounce as my mother wheeled me over the cobbled streets of Barcelona. 

Once I was old enough to sit up, my mother removed the middle portion of the carriage bed, which left two small benches at either end. How I loved those benches! The endless possibility of choice they offered--now the front one! Now the back one!--in a life otherwise ruled entirely by others, made me feel powerful, self-reliant, free. 

I owe my earliest memory to that baby carriage. It is the summer before my first birthday—it has to be summer because in the photo the carriage is parked on a dirt road, and dirt roads belonged to summer. Someone is telling me to be still so that I can have my picture taken, but instead of sitting still I plop my bottom back and forth from one of the little benches to the other. With the big head and black hair of a court dwarf by Velázquez, my eyes squinting in the sun and my tongue poking out of my toothless mouth, I am being disobedient, and bursting at the seams with the sheer gloriousness of me. 

There is no question of the identity of the photographer. My father’s camera is as much an expression of his masculinity as his violin, and it would no more occur to my mother to take a picture than he would be inspired to fry a sardine for my dinner. I also know that my father was the photographer because of the certainty, which has remained intact for three-quarters of a century, that my momentary misbehavior is being watched with smiling benevolence, a quality that I associate with my father rather than my mother, who despite her affection is unswerving in the immediate enforcement of her commands. 

My father, summer-brown in his white polo shirt, the only garment that exposed his hairy forearms. My father, who loved the countryside with the fervent passion of the city-dweller and who, freed from the round of rehearsals and performances, would, during the siesta hour when he could neither practice the violin nor compose at the piano, take my grandparents’ horse and cart for a leisurely ride to the next village, feasting his eyes on the orchards, fields, and hedgerows of my mother’s native landscape. My father, the all-but invisible recorder of my childhood, who would suddenly materialize with his camera, saying, “Quick, go outside! I want to take your picture.” 

And I would stand, more obediently with each passing year, my espadrilles sunk in white summer dust, my skin tanned the color of a hazelnut, and my eyes squeezed tight against the glare of the Mediterranean sun.

 

An Herb For Our Time

Three years ago, on Mother’s Day, I received a terracotta planter filled with annuals in bloom. In the fall, after the first frost, I ripped out the dead plants and stowed the pot in the garage. One January morning, as I got into the car, I noticed a few green shoots peeking out of the pot, stretching with all their might towards the pallid light that seeped through the narrow window of the automatic door. I sympathized with them but didn’t think they had much hope—surely the next cold snap, let alone two more months of darkness, would do them in.

But the little sprouts persevered. Their leggy stems got longer, and a few more leaves appeared, still reaching desperately towards the window. In the spring, when I put it outside, the plant breathed a sigh of relief, plumed its feathers, and filled the pot with new shoots. It celebrated the solstice by bursting into sprays of lavender-colored blooms. The bees and the butterflies found it, and were well pleased.

When a friend told me that the plant was hyssop, I was astonished. Until then, the only mention of hyssop I’d come across was in church, during Mass. “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor” the priest would intone, which the translation in my missal rendered as “Sprinkle me with hyssop, Lord, and I shall be cleansed.” Now the herb used by the Jews for millennia and later adopted by Christianity was growing in my pot, its leaves pungent and anise-scented, its flowers a bonanza to flying things.

My hyssop has survived two winters in the garage. This summer I am treating it with special reverence, watching out for its needs and wants. I have offered it an extra helping of potting soil, and I am alert to the slightest droop of its arrow-shaped leaves, which tend to sag in the heat. But the plant is as grateful as it is demanding. It may look in extremis in the afternoon, but it reacts to my evening drenching with an optimistic, upward thrust of its entire being. It is as resilient as I would like to be.

It's still high summer but, to my apprehensive eye, the days are noticeably shorter. The killing frost is a mere couple of months away.  When that comes, I will stow away the porch chairs and drag the big pot, with its cropped head of hyssop, back into the shadows of the garage--and I will retreat indoors, to the cat, the afghan, and the fireplace.

From all indications the coming winter will be long and dark. Unlike in past years, when I mostly ignored the hibernating hyssop, this time I will keep an anxious eye on it, to see if it is still putting out green shoots, and still stretching towards the light.

Of Uncles And Equines

My favorite uncle, the husband of my grandmother's sister, was that rarity: a schoolmaster who adored kids. Early in our acquaintance we cast each other in roles which we never tired of playing: he as a devil (un dimoni!) and I as his intended victim. He only actually chased me once. After that, he merely had to look at me sideways to send me fleeing with terror and delight down the long dark hallway of my parents' Barcelona apartment. But this was just our urban entertainment. In the summer, we had my grandparents' entire farm for our adventures.

One summer my grandfather got a mother/daughter pair of donkeys to work on the farm. I don't remember the daughter's name, but we named the mother La Reverències ("Curtsies") after her habit of suddenly bending one of her knees.

My uncle one day got permission from my grandfather to take my visiting boy cousins from Barcelona and me to ride the donkeys on the threshing floor in front of the barn, which sat far from the house on a slight rise beyond the vegetable garden and the wheat field. A bare flat space, the threshing floor had been baked granite-hard over the centuries by the sun and the enormous stone rollers that crushed the wheat at harvest time.

My grandfather agreed, with the proviso that my uncle ride with me, to prevent accidents. So while my cousins took turns riding the younger donkey, my uncle and I got on La Reverències. The sun was beating down on our heads, the cicadas were going full blast, and the sky was so clear that I could see the Pyrenees in the distance as we made our way round and round the threshing ground.

The sun, the cicadas, and the slow clip-clop of the donkey's hooves had me in a kind of trance when, out of the blue, La Reverències curtsied and my uncle and I tobogganed neatly over her neck and crashed to the ground. It could not have happened faster if the donkey's neck had been drenched in olive oil. I can still feel the hardness of the ground on landing, and hear the laughter of my cousins as my uncle and I dusted ourselves off, while, nearby, the culprit munched serenely on some tufts of summer-dry grass.

La Reverències, left, and her daughter, right. Between them, my cousins and I, in our summer espadrilles. In the background, the back of the barn. Both my cousins and the donkeys seemed like giants to me. When did they shrink so much?

My other uncle, my mother's youngest sibling, was barely out of his teens when I was a toddler. He lived with my grandparents, rode a big motorcycle, hunted partridge and quail in season, and had curly blondish hair and a small straight nose. In the summer, the sun would turn his face bright red.

One evening, he and I were leading the carthorse from the barn back to the stable, which was across the courtyard from the house, for his dinner of oats and hay. As a special treat, my uncle said that I could ride the horse, on the condition that I hold tightly on to his mane. This was a first for me, and I was thrilled by the motion of the great beast, the smell of horse sweat and the prickly feel of his hair on my bare legs. The sun was going down, a cool breeze had come up, and in the pear trees that bordered the path a nightingale began to sing. Inspired by the bird, my uncle also broke into song: Oh Susana, no llores más por mí/Con mi banjo y mi caballo a Alabama me marché...

Then, perhaps carried away by the beauty of the evening and the prospect of dinner, he gave the horse a friendly slap on the rump. The usually lethargic beast misunderstood and broke into a trot. My uncle ran alongside, looking terrified, and I tried to hold on, but the sudden jolting and the sensation of my seat losing contact with the horse were so disconcerting that I lost my head, let go of the mane, and flew through the air and into the arms of my uncle, who fortunately had excellent eye-hand coordination and whose face, I noticed, had turned beet red.

He set me down, caught the horse, stopped to catch his breath, then squatted to look me in the eye and whispered, "Do not ever tell your parents what just happened."

And this, if my parents read this blog somewhere in the cosmos, is the first they'll hear of it.                                                  
                                                     

A Change Of Tempo

As I write, in the kitchen tomato sauce is bubbling, eggplants are roasting, and bread dough, I hope, is rising.

This is only a fraction of what I should be doing:  making pesto out of kale, and freezing industrial quantities of broccoli, chard, arugula and rhubarb.  It's the time of year when I almost dread going out to the garden to see what is screaming to be picked right now.

And then, of course, I want to write here about it, all of which sometimes leads to mental as well as physical exhaustion.  If I am to survive this season--and I do realize that choosing this moment to start baking bread again is insane, but I found a source of terrific flour that I'll tell you about soon--I am going to have to slow down the pace of my posting.

I could, of course, choose to not harvest, not bake, not walk the dogs, but then what would I write about?

So I hope that you will be more patient than the tomatoes and the eggplants and the peppers and the greens and not dry up on me or turn away in disgust.  My aim is to post regularly, two or three times a week, with illustrations, and in between give the well time to replenish itself.  Writing and drawing here gives shape to my life and joy to my days.  I wouldn't dream of quitting.

Garden Fairies

It's the easiest vegetable to grow, the one that makes it necessary to lock your car in summer so neighbors won't dump their surplus into it. And yet, for the past three summers I've barely been able to grow any zucchini.  This year's plants yielded a single small one--it was tender and delicious--before expiring.

On the other hand, I can grow eggplants like nobody's business.  Right now my six plants are so overloaded they're leaning into each other like drunks coming out of a pub.  I grow the cucumber-shaped Japanese variety, and they're hanging off the branches in grape-like bunches, starting with tiny two-inch ones at the top down to banana-sized ones at the bottom.

Yesterday I picked nine.  I must do something with them right away.  But they are so perfectly purple, shiny and decorative that it seems a pity to slice them and roast them and put them in the freezer.  While I dither about yesterday's harvest, who knows how many more have matured overnight?

Pleased though I am with the eggplants, I still can't understand my bad luck with zucchini.  I have grown it successfully in the past, so why not now? After two years of failures, this summer I planted the zucchini in front of the house, as far as I could get it from the garden.  Different soil, different ambiance, same result:  dead plants.

It must be fate.

Or fairies (same thing--the word "fairy" comes from the Greek for "fate")

It's entertaining and relaxing, since it absolves me of responsibility, to stand back and view the garden as the playground of little folk.  It might explain all sorts of mysteries, such as the amazing resurrection of the arugula, the holes in the bean leaves, and the sunflower that towers like a satellite dish over the tomato bed.

I'm thinking that the powerful and ambitious eggplant fairies, in their quest for supremacy in the garden, have driven out the zucchini folk.  I can't wait to see what happens when they take on the kale.

Bad Day, Good Dogs

I had a bad day yesterday, the result of being overenthusiastic about life in general a couple of days ago.  This is how it is with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome--you're going along thinking you're fine and then forty-eight hours later it hits you--the delayed negative reinforcement known in CFS circles as "payback."

On days like that, when I manage to brush my teeth but not to get out of my pajamas, the dogs are a comfort.  They stay close without making demands, almost as if my inertia were contagious.  This is the time when Wolfie's anaplasmosis turns into an advantage for me, since it keeps him from jumping up and dashing about and wanting to be doing stuff outside.  And the three-hundred years of lapdog breeding which Bisou carries in her DNA cause her, on such days, to want nothing more than to lie next to me or, better still, on top of me.

Nevertheless, I know that despite my dogs' good nature they do need some exercise, so in the afternoon when my mind cleared a bit and I felt a whiff of energy I put on some clothes and called the dogs and took them for a walk up and down the long driveway. 

After two weeks of tropical weather that almost led the people of Vermont to commit mass suicide, the temperatures have turned autumnal, and the land has put on its late-summer look.  On the trees, the chartreuse shades of early spring have been replaced by the deep greens of August. This is also the time of yellow flowers, which begins soon after the solstice with the yellow blooms of St.
John's wort, followed by the yellow stars of black-eyed susans and now the first plumes of goldenrod, which will eventually transform the fields and hedgerows into a sea of yellow.

The cooler temps always give Wolfie a new lease on life and send his anaplasmosis into temporary remission.  He chases Bisou;  he dashes through the grass;  and he carries sticks.  He looks for the biggest stick he can find in the woods and bears it forth triumphantly, head and tail held high, strutting like a drum major.

He holds these sticks in the middle, so that the ends swing around haphazardly and strike whatever is in the way.  We have all learned to jump clear of Wolfie when he's in stick mode.  Yesterday he found an especially good one, as thick as my wrist and almost as long as the width of the driveway.  I was watching him and chortling to myself when he suddenly changed directions and wham! hit me a hard blow on the hip.

Time to limp back home.  I let him carry the stick all the way up the hill, then asked him to give it to me, which he did.  I looked him in the eye, said "leave it!"  and heaved the stick into the field.  He didn't go after it, because he's a good dog who's had a ton of training by a sensible owner, if I say so myself. 

I put Wolfie in the house and squatted down to the job of drying off Bisou.  Unless we are in the middle of a drought, in which case she comes back from walks covered in burrs, every time she goes outside she ends up drenched from head to foot. That's what comes of thinking that the only fun is to be had by tunneling through the five-foot-tall grass. But she too is a good dog, though she's had far less training than Wolfie, and lets me dry her off without complaint.

With two good dogs like mine, there's no such thing as a really bad day.

High Humidity Hair

'Tis the season of hair complaints.  Wavy hair turns curly, curly hair curls tighter, and straight hair does strange things.  Many women hate their hair about now and rate it as a major curse of summer, along with sweat stains, shiny noses and sleepless nights.

Some hide their hair under scarves tied with fancy knots, though that must make them terribly hot, since it prevents body heat from escaping through the scalp.

Others slather on anti-frizz gels and conditioners, which work only as long as the wearer stays in an air-conditioned environment.

My hair is highly responsive to humidity, and I used to think that its unruliness was as good an indication of the level of water vapor in the air as the hygrometer that hangs on our kitchen wall, and which, as I write, reads 48% humidity (and 82F).

It turns out that human hair can function as a hygrometer, and you can learn why this is so and how to make a hygrometer of your very own here:  http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4678953_hair-hygrometer-work.html

In my attempts to deal with summer hair, I have gone the products route, which works for me only if I apply so much that my hair looks as if it has been weighted down with lard.  I haven't tried the headscarf solution because the very thought of it makes me break into (an even worse) sweat.

My proposed solution is to declare a moratorium on summer hair.  After all, who says that frizzy hair is bad?  Why should all women, regardless of their genetic endowment, go around with Asian-straight hair in all weathers?  Frizzy, rebellious hair looks exuberant, energetic and alive, like the tendrils of the bittersweet vine.  It's time to let go of media-induced prejudices and wear our wayward waves and out-of-control curls with pride.

Our crazy summer hair is physical evidence of our inescapable link to Nature. The plant world glories in humidity,  absorbs it, expands, and luxuriates in it.  That's what our hair wants to do, too, and I think we should let it.

Rescuing The Garlic

Please believe me when I say that I am trying hard not to write constantly about the weather.  In my last post, which was about the Pope and women's issues, I don't believe I mentioned the weather once.

But now I have to bring up the weather again, because it is wreaking havoc with farmers and gardeners in this newly-annexed province of Brazil, formerly known as Vermont.

So far it hasn't rained today, and it didn't rain yesterday, but before that we had the wettest, hottest succession of days--nineteen of them--ever recorded in the state.

Plants are dying because the ground is so water-logged that no oxygen can get to their roots.  Farmers cannot cut hay because it has no chance to dry--the grass in our fields is up to my shoulders--and people with livestock are worried about finding enough hay to last the winter.

I thought that my high garden beds would provide good drainage for the vegetables, but I decided to take advantage of a single day of respite from the heat and humidity to check on the garlic crop.  I had never planted garlic before last fall, and the instruction sheet from the ladies who sold me the seed bulbs said not to harvest until mid-July.  But I thought I'd better take a look.

I pulled on one of the stems and, to my dismay, it came off in my hand.  The end where it was supposed to be attached to the head looked like it had sort of dissolved.  I got my shovel and plunged it into the mud and the entire bulb came up...as did a cloud of the most pestilential stench I have ever smelled in a garden.  Next to it, chicken, goat, and probably even pig manure are as nothing.  Rotten garlic is deadly to the nose.

If I wanted to save the crop, I needed to act quickly.  But the ground was so sodden, so clingy and heavy that it took a huge effort to pry out the heads with the shovel.  Fortunately not all the bulbs had rotted, though enough of them had to keep me breathing through my mouth.

An hour later, I had extracted over eighty bulbs.  Some were tiny--they should have stayed in the ground another couple of weeks--but most were a reasonable size.  All were encased in mud.  I left them out overnight and the next day spent a couple of hours brushing off the dirt.

I dearly love a garlic braid.  I'd always found it endearing that people would want to make something decorative out of this most prosaic of vegetables.  And I fantasized that, if I ever managed to grow some garlic, I would make it into a nice fat braid and give it pride of place in my kitchen.

Unfortunately, the only garlic that grows in cold climates is the "hard neck" kind, which means that the stem is too stiff and inflexible to be braided.  So I merely bunched my garlics in groups of ten or so, bound them with twine, and hung them in the shed to dry.  They don't look the least bit decorative, but I hope the flavor will be good.

The way the climate is changing, in another couple of years the winters will be warm enough to grow the soft-neck varieties right here in Vermont.  The snow will be gone, and kudzu will cover the landscape, but at least I'll be able to make garlic braids.

Bluebirds: The Final Chapter

Yesterday, between two thunderstorms, the baby bluebirds left the nest.

For the last couple of days they had been sticking their heads way out of the hole, exactly like cuckoos in a clock.  I tried take a picture, but every time they saw me come out with my camera they dove back inside, like their parents told them to:

There were five eggs in the clutch and I can see four birds clearly in the photo:  three eyes and somebody's back next to the opening.  I want to believe that there is a fifth one in that mass of plumage. The nest box faces west, and how they survived those 90F+ afternoons last week I can't imagine.

For a while I was also worried about the parents, who were bringing in bugs and carrying out poop for hours on end in the heat and the downpours.  And I was worried about the snake that lives in the flower bed beneath the box and had been waiting patiently for the moment of fledging.

But there was no helpless fluttering on the ground for these babies, who are a grayish brown and larger than I expected.  The minute they came out, they flew right across the yard and up into the trees.  Now I hear them calling in unison, in a sound that reminds me of sleigh bells, at the edge of the woods.

The successful rearing of this brood vindicates the father bluebird, who's been banging on our window for two straight summers and about whose mental faculties I had developed serious doubts.  But summer isn't even half over, and soon the bluebird pair will be starting all over again, courting, laying eggs, brooding, and then feeding, feeding, feeding.

I hope that when fall finally comes they'll take off for some island where they can lie in the sun and listen to the waves and have meals of bugs brought to them on a platter.  They deserve a rest.

Mind-Numbing Weather

Like the inhabitants of a castle preparing against an attack, my spouse and I have shut every window, drawn down the shades, opened the basement door, and hefted the room air-conditioner onto one of the upstairs windowsills.  Hot weather is on the way.

It's the weather that I moved to Vermont to escape, the kind of heat and humidity that reduce me to molluscan status.  Every summer the heat gets stronger and stays longer. If and when the kudzu vines and the cave crickets arrive from the lower latitudes, I'm moving north.

Meanwhile, all I want to do is hibernate or rather, estivate ("a state of dormancy or torpor during summer").  This is unfortunate because, now that the ridiculously long spell of cool weather is over, the garden is exploding.

Instead of writing, I should be out there picking kale to make into pesto.  I should be picking and freezing chard, pulling up the bolted lettuces and planting something else in their space.  Straightening the tomato cages that the daily storms have felled. Weeding the front flower beds, the back flower beds, the vegetable beds.   And pruning the four big lilacs before the job gets too big for me to handle.

But these days the only job I like is picking lavender.  In the morning, after the dew has dried but before the sun unleashes its full fury, I go out with my basket and cut the spears where a single cobalt bud has opened.  It hasn't been a good year for lavender, for although the winter was cold there wasn't enough snow cover.  I lost a couple of bushes, and the survivors aren't flowering well.  But I'll take whatever they give me.

I leave the lavender in its basket on the dining room table, where it releases clouds of scent into the humid air.  I should be tying it into bunches and hanging it up to dry, but that seems like a big effort right now.

Instead, I go and sit blankly by the indoor pond and watch the goldfish play in the fountain stream. Don't ask me to lift a finger, express an opinion, or make any sense.  I'm estivating.

Post-Solstice Slump

Counting the days until September...

Summer Better End Soon...

And then I can put my cat o'nine tails down and get back to writing.  The cat o'nine tails is the implement with which I castigate myself for processing vegetables instead of words.  I do this all day long, every day, and it is getting old. 

But what can I do?  There is a loud litany of edible stuff--eggplants, tomatoes, beans, greens, broccoli--in fauve-bright purple, red, orange, and green, right there before my eyes, every hour of every one of these bright-blue, crisp September days  (the optimism and energy of which will be forever tinged with sadness, as with a touch of premature frost).

Unlike ripe vegetables, thoughts and words do not compel me to go do something about them right away.  They are not red, purple, orange or green, but basic, boring black. They can wait...or so it seems.

Everything that I've ever read or been told about writing tells me that this isn't true.  Words can't wait.  Use it or lose it.  Nulla die sine linea--not a day without a line, Horace advised.  How many times have I heard that this, the inability to write every day (or paint, or compose) because of interruptions by children, spouses or gardens, is the reason there aren't more women writers, painters, composers?

But I remember Tasha Tudor, the illustrator and writer and gardener who enacted a 19th century way of life just over the mountain from here until she died recently in her tenth decade.   She used to say that she only painted in the winter, after the garden was done.  I wonder if she felt guilty about that?

But I don't think she felt guilty about anything much.  She raised four children on her own, wrote and illustrated dozens of books, made puppets and put on shows, and once grew a shirt from seed (she planted the flax, harvested it, processed it somehow, and wove it into cloth which she then cut and sewed into a shirt).

So to whom should I listen--Horace or Tasha?  What would you do?

In Flagrante Frogs

Things are heating up in and around our pond.  The frog population is booming and, sensing the coming of fall, the alpha frogs, if there are alphas among amphibians, are mating like mad.

Frog sex is a Zen thing.  The male climbs aboard the much larger female and puts his little arms around as much of her abdomen as he can reach.  She wraps her hands around a couple of dwarf cattail stems, and the lovers float languidly in the water until Bisou comes rushing out the back door and puts an end to the tomfoolery.

This ho-hum interlude, however, is preceded by a much more exciting one:  the battle of the males.  I witnessed this for the first time yesterday while I was roasting eggplants.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw some unusual splashing in the pond and went out to investigate. 

Two medium-size males, green-backed and yellow-bellied, were wrestling among the lily pads.  They had their arms around each other's necks and were tumbling and leaping in and out of the water, blowing up their vocal sacs and croaking non-stop. They looked like little bald, round-bellied men in a bar fight.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the pond, sat the Rubenesque she-frog, impassive as a buddha.  Was she as bored as she looked?  Had she already decided which contender she would take to the cattails?  Was she flattered to be the object of a duel?

I didn't stick around to see who won, just as I didn't stick around to watch the end of the tryst.  I trust that the frogs know what they're about.  Reproduction is hardly their problem:  our pond is brimming over with froglets no bigger than a walnut and pigeon-sized matriarchs.  And all night long their twanging song ("brekekekex-koax-koax," according to Aristophanes) is the background music of my sleep.

In other pond news, after three years of throwing tiny goldfish into the water and watching them instantly disappear, I had given up all hope of ever seeing any of them again.  Then yesterday, when I was least expecting it, two fish, one a good 5" in length, showed up near the surface.  I cannot tell you how thrilling it is to see again something that you thought was gone forever.  The bigger of the two must have survived the winter in the deep end (in Vermont a depth of 3 1/2' supposedly guarantees that the pond won't freeze solid).  The smaller one, a striking orange decorated with black spots, I remember putting in last May.

Encouraged by this development, I promptly bought two more fair-sized goldfish at the pet store.  While I was floating their plastic bags on the pond to let them get accustomed to the water temperature, I saw that the two resident fish had swum up to inspect them.  I cut open the bags, and  now all four of them are hanging out companionably (or perhaps waiting for a chance to kill each other) and looking gorgeous among the lily pads.  Every ten minutes I go out and tell them what good fish they are.

Will they still be there tomorrow, or will they have retreated into the murky depths?  Will the frog wars abate?  Will the lovemaking succeed and the ensuing tadpoles survive to spawn next summer?

I have so little control over any of this.  All I can do is top up the water with the hose if it doesn't rain for a couple of days, and then stand and watch.  I thought that having a little pond would be fun, but I wasn't prepared for the melodrama.

Summer Ironing

It was 96F on our north-facing window the other afternoon as I prepared to go out.  I thought linen would be marginally more tolerable than anything else on my sweaty skin, but my linen shirt had spent the last ten months rolled up in my ironing basket. 

Who irons anymore?

First there was ironing, and misting with spray bottles, and even starching.  Then there was polyester, women's lib, and the putting away of irons.  A return to natural fibers and a brief resurgence of ironing followed after which, as our faces grew as wrinkled as freshly-laundered cotton, my generation put away the iron for good.

Still, even in Vermont, where the soft, wrinkled look is a sign of wisdom and common sense, I couldn't bring myself to show up in completely crumpled linen.

I set up the ironing board--whose unacustomed clatter sent Bisou scuttling under the bed--turned on the ceiling fan, plugged in the iron and turned it on "high."  As a teenager, it had been my job on Saturday afternoons to iron my father's weekly supply of white shirts as well as my own blouses and dresses.  Ironing was more pleasant than my other chores:  cleaner than dusting, quieter than vacuuming, less disgusting than washing dishes.

I had forgotten what hot work ironing was.  Being in a rush, I did not stop to fill the steam reservoir or even spritz the fabric--a false economy of time.  Ironing dry linen, even with a red-hot iron, takes much, much longer than if the fabric is damp.

But in the end I got the shirt ironed, put it on, and got in the car.  And fastened the seat belt across my chest, which instantly undid all my work with the iron.  And then remembered that the fading of ironing as a way of life in the early 60s had coincided with the advent of seat belts in cars, sort of the way panty hose had arrived on the scene shortly after the invention of miniskirts. 

There was a parade in the village, and I was diverted a long way from my route and had to drive much faster (55mph) than I normally do.  Between the seat belt and my sweaty, anxious state, by the time I arrived at the art opening I looked like I was wearing a fine linen accordion.  But there was a woman with hip-long gray dreadlocks, and nobody even blinked at her, or at me.

These July Days

It's been a busy time, and I haven't been posting recently because of:

1.  The Garden.  Every year in midsummer I alternately rejoice and despair.  How can just nine raised beds, 4'x4' each, produce such quantities of organic, practically free, and therefore sacred food?   In the spring, as I push in the seeds or set out the baby plants, I never  anticipate the summer explosion.  And even if I did, I wouldn't want all that chicken-enriched compost, laboriously hauled out by me in the fall and dug in in the spring, to go to waste.

So now I have to deal with the result of my spring enthusiasm.  The kale and chard are the most spectacular, with leaves as big as palm fronds.  The tomatoes, eggplants and peppers are ripening nicely.  The zucchini took a three-day break after its initial output and now is back with a vengeance.  The broccoli is still going strong.  And the three beds of beans, which I planted with my granddaughter V's assistance, are setting fruit.  The more you pick, the more you reap is the paradoxical law of gardens.  And it's true:  I pick and pick and cannot even make a dent in the horn of plenty that is my potager.  And so I wonder, how can there be hunger in this world?  Where is the missing link between earth and table?  Is it time, focus, water, knowledge?  I am grateful for the local food bank which absorbs my plenty, but I wish I could do more.

2.  The Book.  I have, as you may remember, been working on a memoir of my decades with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).  Having finished what is known in the trade as the shitty first draft, I am now struggling with the (to me) equally shitty second draft.  It's a hard balancing act, staying true to the experience of the illness while keeping the reader and myself away from utter despair.  I'm bringing my dogs into the story to help with this, just as they helped me get through the long years.  I'm thinking of adding illustrations, the kind of drawings I did in the early stages of this blog, but wonder if I have the stamina.

3.  The CFS.  This is the big one.  For many years, July has been a difficult month for me.  Even before I was diagnosed, I would always go to a doctor in July, complaining that things weren't right.  The doctors never found anything, which, as we now know, is typical of CFS presentations.  But what is it about July that gets me every time--the solstice, the heat, the tiny shift towards darkness, the alignment of the planets, the blooming of the goldenrod?  Regardless, I find myself careening between pretty good and goddam awful days, missing events I don't want to miss, holding back from projects I'm dying to take on.  It's a shaky thing, life with CFS, never knowing what tomorrow will be like. 

But then, life itself is shaky, and we never really can be sure about tomorrow, so what I'm dealing with is basically the human condition, only more so.

Heat Rash

This is the kind of weather that I dread.  It keeps me plotting and strategizing round the clock on ways to avoid it:  work outside only in the early morning (but then I'm sleepy because it was too hot to fall sleep the night before);  close all windows and shades to keep the heat out (but a dark house is so depressing);  pretend it's the middle of January and forget about gardening (but the beans must be planted, and right away).

And yet here, in the hottest part of the day, it is only 90F.  Compared to most of the nation, this doesn't even qualify as hot, and compared to future summers, it may be barely warm.  It's not so much the heat that's bothering me as the awareness of how summers have gotten so hot so fast, and the thought that we may be heading towards the tipping point that will cause a cascade of further catastrophes.  And that so many people are still denying the reality of global warming.

I suppose that if you live in an air-conditioned house, drive an air-conditioned car, amuse yourself in an air-conditioned mall, and never set foot outdoors from April to November, you can fool yourself into thinking that all is well.  Until, of course, the power goes out, as it has done in large areas of DC.

And that is the single bit of weather-related good news I have heard lately.  One and a half million houses and businesses are without power in the DC area.  I realize that many of those houses and businesses belong to the poor, who already have enough to contend with, and I feel bad about that.  But I'm hoping that maybe some of the global-warming-denying politicians will be left to swelter in their Georgetown row-houses, and they will begin to realize that the climate problem is more than a left-wing delusion.  And maybe do something about it. 

Just the tiniest sign that they're beginning to move in the right direction would make me so happy, I'd gladly stop complaining about the heat.

PVSD (Post Vacation Stress Disorder)

Wolfie and Bisou are exquisitely exhausted after their stay at the Halfling B&B, which is wonderful, since I am exquisitely exhausted after our trip to Montana too. 

My eyes are having to adjust to the contrast in the two landscapes.  In Montana, and especially Yellowstone, everything is vertical and spiky.  The mountains and the pine trees all point to the sky.  In Vermont, while things are not exactly horizontal, the mountains are low and rounded, and so are the trees, which, shrouded in their summer foliage, seem to be without trunks or branches.  The intense green of les verts monts needs some getting used to as well.

While I was gone, the annual June explosion took place around our house.  The chicken shed has disappeared under an avalanche of roses, which need to be deadheaded, as do the peonies and the lavender.  The lilacs need pruning.  The espaliered apricot needs further espaliering.  The rampaging mint and chamomile need to be brought under control.  The suckers growing at the base of the apple trees need to be decapitated.  Wolfie needs to be brushed.  And the broccoli and the chard and the peas and the kale and the zucchini need to be picked and processed and frozen.  The last of the spinach needs to be dealt with and replaced with beans right away, or it will be too late.

And I need to hold a tiny funeral for the three lavender plants that didn't make it through the mild winter because there wasn't enough snow to cover their sensitive Mediterranean feet.

L Is For Longing

These days my longing--and I'm not the only gardener to feel this way--is for a killing frost.  The vegetable garden is in its late-summer, decadent, disheveled, yet curiously productive stage.

The squashes that I managed to save from the squash bugs are curing in the shed.  The vines, with their cargo of killer eggs, nymphs, and adult bugs are returning to the Earth somewhere out in the front field.  Meanwhile the  pumpkin vine, which somehow escaped the bug plague, is succumbing to a different scourge.  This one turns the green leaves first silver, then brown, but doesn't bother the pumpkins.

I have, for the first time in my gardening life, given up on the broccoli.  The thirty-two plants that I bought in a blizzard in March have not stopped to take a breath since I put them in the ground.  I have frozen all the broccoli that my freezer can hold.  I have given away pounds of the stuff.  Now I'm just letting it bloom its heart out, and as soon as I can spare five minutes I'll pull out all the plants and give them to those magicians, the hens, who will transmute them into eggs.

The tomato plants have died of some mysterious disease that killed them from the bottom up.  That has not, however, prevented them from producing quantities of fruit, many of which are still clinging to their parent's cadaver and ripening slowly. 

The beans, which as usual I planted late, are just starting to set fruit, and there is frost in the forecast for later this week.  I know I should leave the beans to meet their fate on their own, but my maternal nature  rebels against letting those tender babies freeze to death.  Since they're in a 4'x4' raised bed, it should only take me a couple of minutes to throw an old shower curtain over them.  And remember to take it off in the morning.  And put it on again at night, and take it off....

The coming frost, unfortunately, will not help where the kale and chard are concerned.  These will continue to haunt me well into November, demanding to be picked and washed and chopped and blanched and disposed of somehow.  Thank heaven for the local food bank, which gives meaning and raison d'etre to the otherwise absurd productivity of my nine 4'x4' beds.

I cannot figure out how so much food can come out of so little space--and no particular thanks to my gardening talents.  All I do is throw the used hen house litter on the beds in the fall, bung in some seeds and transplants in the spring, pull a couple of weeds while the plants are young, and then harvest until my arms give out.

Yesterday I gathered seventeen pounds of veggies for the food bank.  (Wolfie helped by breaking off a number of kale branches for himself and Bisou to munch.)  You think that finished my harvest season?  Alas, I barely made a dent.  I finally had to stop picking because of the mosquitoes, who were bent on storing up my blood for the winter.  As I walked towards the house I could hear behind me the whisper of the kale and chard, growing new leaves.

Summer's Subsiding

Did a couple of garden jobs today that I should have done long ago:  pruning the lilacs and planting beans.  I told myself even as I pushed the seeds into the dirt with my chopstick that there is no way these plants will make it to maturity before frost, but I had just pulled up the pea vines and couldn't bear to leave a garden bed unused.  The beans are the last planting of the 2011 vegetable garden, which is headed for the home stretch.  The squash and pumpkin vines are seemingly taking over the earth, and the white cabbage butterflies are having their way with the broccoli.  I ate the first tomato a couple of days ago:  a single marble-sized gold nugget.   Before I know it it will be apple-picking time.

I realize we're still in July, but summer is definitely on the decline.  Driving down the country roads you can see that the trees and bushes are getting that blowsy, overripe, middle-aged look.  An almost invisible wash of  brownish yellow--the plant world's equivalent of the first gray hairs--has come over the foliage.  The verges are lined with goldenrod and black-eyed susans, both colored the mustard-yellow that succeeds the clear lemon shades of spring.  The poison parsnip flowers, which at their peak look like a yellow version of queen anne's lace, have turned an unequivocal brown.

It doesn't bother me that summer's on the wane.  I dread the prospect of hot, humid weather, and I rejoice that with each passing day we are closer to the coolness of September.  We had a couple of days in the high 90s a while ago, and it felt so miserable that, after resisting for six years, and with the specter of global warming growing more real all the time,  I finally threw in the towel and asked my husband to get an air conditioner for our second-floor bedroom.

Without ever having been turned on, that air conditioner has already made a huge improvement in our quality of life:  as soon as the unit was installed, the weather turned dry and cool, and looks to stay that way for the next ten days.  And after that, it will practically be September.