The End [of Summer] is Near!

yellow tomatoes and basil

more tomatoes, and jalapenos to stuff

Apparently, Ray and I are prepping for the End Times.

This thought occurs to me as I look over some of the un-done chores on today’s to-do list (lesson-planning and grading are a given on EVERY list, so I never need to write them down):

(1) find space for another 14 quarts of canned tomatoes in the pantry;

butterflies are stocking up, too

(2) inventory and rearrange items in two freezers (one small chest freezer is full to the brim with parrot food and gooseberries), to see if we need a third small freezer for the 50 lbs. of local grass-fed beef we’re picking up this weekend;

(3) roast a bucket of Roma tomatoes and blend them into sauce for the freezer (see #2); and

(4) make this soup before the cauliflower goes bad: http://iowagirleats.com/2012/09/25/bacon-cheddar-cauliflower-chowder-a-low-carb-alternative-to-baked-potato-soup/

Just in time for my first enormous pile of papers to grade, our garden is easing up. The cuke vines are dying back, and the acorn squash is hardening. There are still plenty of tomatoes out there, and today’s high 80’s should help them ripen. I’ve already put up enough pesto and basil cubes (http://www.fatandhappyblog.com/2011/10/basil-cubes-how-to-freeze-fresh-basil.html) to supply the Upper Midwest for the winter, but it keeps coming, so I’ll have to dry some this weekend. I hope to get one more big meal of cream cheese and venison stuffed jalapenos before the peppers are done. And the guy with the amazing grass-fed lamb will be at the farmer’s market tomorrow—what’s a crazy [food] prepper girl to do?

we'll soon be knee-deep in these

roasted veggies to blend into sauce

Except for a brief warm up today, the weather here at the Row has been coolish and damp, in the 60’s. Soybean fields are yellowing, the apples are ripe, and our honey locust tree is a gorgeous disaster of a bajillion pods. These subtle signals trigger obsessive gathering and “putting by” here on the SoDakian tundra, because there’s only one thing prairie folk truly trust, and that’s a full larder. By the time we get our first whiff of autumn—a mixture of late-lingering dew, turned earth from a farmer’s early harvest, smoke from someone’s first wood-stove fire, and a delicious hint of decay—we’re already tacking plastic on the windows. We’re stockpiling canned tomatoes and Colorado peaches, Trader Joe’s mixed nuts, Café Altura Italian Roast beans, crossword puzzles, longjohns, and good toilet paper. We’re hanging the down jackets on the line to air.

It’s survival, plain & simple. These signs of brief, beautiful autumn remind us that we’ve been living in the Happy Bubble since last May. But it can’t last. Winter is just out of sight, waiting, with his pointy little icicle.

pickled whatever's-still-growing

we could live on peaches

Ray & I aren’t prepping to the point where we’re putting up rooftop sniper perches or razor wire, but I WILL rearrange the venison and coffee beans in the freezer today. And we’ll need a few more wool hats and fingerless gloves in the 30-gallon Rubbermaid tub o’ knitted outerwear.  And maybe I’ll haul some wood up to the back porch. But right now, while the low-carb venison chili is simmering in the crockpot, I’ll take a nap. Because if the End Times are coming, I need to rest up.

Garden Rorschach

Shell Woman Garden – bleeding heart and chives – the beauty of sea-women, broken hearts, and spiced tears.

Three Monkeys Garden – columbine, mums, oregano, blanket flower, miniature iris, and a lovely invasive groundcover – fleeting visits, perennial admonition to see, hear, and most of all, speak no evil.

Mary’s Rose Garden – roses – eternal Maiden & Mother, the blessings of thorny passages, safety & sacrifice.

Goldfinch Corner – forsythia, trees – return & rest, shady reunions, emerald eyes/isles.

St. Francis’ Watch – hostas – gracious host, caretaker to all living things. 

Monk’s Retreat – iris, coral bells, dianthus, allium, lily – perennial bed[time] stories light the way to adventure, past & future, understanding, catharsis.

Center Garden – yarrow, hollyhock, lamb’s ears, tulips, sage, clematis, birch tree – wild but centered, all things work from & toward the Center.

Rorshach Garden

I was walking around the yard with the dogs the other day, and I started wondering if yard art is a kind of Rorschach test…is it possible to gain insight into the psyche and emotional makeup of a person by studying their lawn ornaments?

For example, Mom has a garden populated with every kind of fairy statue imaginable, and at night it’s a magical fairyland atwinkle with a dozen or more solar lights. The garden seems a perfect reflection of Mom's light-hearted, mischievously humorous, and optimistic character.

What does it say about Ray and I, I wonder (non-Catholic, non-churchgoing folks), that scattered around Uncannery Row are statues of Mary and St. Francis? What does the goddess figure with seashell breasts suggest? Or the plant hanger with 8 spidery arms and a glow-in-the-dark glass ball on top? Or the cement penguin in the daylilies? Hmmm…

One of our Mary’s, I call her Our Lady of the Spiders, my friend found tossed in a dumpster along a highway. Surely, this is proof of Divine Intervention—someone tossed Mary out along a highway where my friend just happened to be travelling, she just happened to remember my Marian fascination, and my birthday just happened to be around the corner. I especially like this Mary, because she has an unusually crabby face for a holy icon, accentuated by puffy bags under her droopy, tired eyes. She’s plastic, and we’ve stuffed her full of white solar LED lights, so that at night when she glows softly out by the fence, she looks eerily exhausted. Maybe that’s the point—maybe maternal weariness, long-suffering patience, and the sacrifices of love are what draw me to the Marian ideal in the first place.

Hanging on our pyramid-shaped outbuilding are giant concrete sun and moon discs my brother sculpted and gave to my daughter as a wedding present. They’re on loan to us for a while, and they seem to BELONG on the pyramid—a sort of celestial reckoning with our most ancient spiritual and mathematical roots. And if pyramids really do turn out to be communication beacons for extra-terrestrials, well, I’ve got plenty of tomatoes and jalapenos to send home with visitors.

Our Lady of the Water, the seashell woman, sits beside a beautiful mosaic tiled birdbath, both made by an artist friend whose work I have scattered around the yard and in the house. Our Lady of the Water reminds me that whatever we layer on through the years in order to divide & subdivide, sort & separate us from each other, we are all identically elemental underneath—water, air, glass bones & tendon mortar. This helps me to remember that I am my sister’s and my brother’s keeper, which includes even those in the human family I’d sometimes rather not claim as relatives.

St. Francis is a “gimme” at first glance. After all, he’s the saint who communed with animals, and Uncannery Row is one zebra short of being a wildlife sanctuary. But the fascination for me is that St. Francis, according to some religious scholars, was the first “documented” case of someone receiving the stigmata. These are the seven wounds of Christ, which have, the stories go, spontaneously appeared in some pretty unlikely people since the Crucifixion. Padre Pio is the most talked-about example, but there have been many, including several women. I don’t know if these experiences are genuine spiritual phenomena, but I find myself at times extremely moved, sometimes to tears, just thinking about the implications if they are. It’s like the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, when the Misfit, an escaped murderer, says to a grandmother he’s about to kill, that if we knew for sure whether Christ really resurrected, it would change everything. because if Christ didn’t really live, die, and rise from the dead, then all the piety and moral rules mean nothing. If he did, we would all have to drop what we’re doing, give away our stuff, and follow.

Sticking out of the fence around the back patio, there’s an interesting accoutrement we inherited from the former residents. It’s a piece of wood balanced in the fence, grown at one end around a rock, and at the other end around the fence wire. I wonder what this work of art will come to represent about US someday…

Summer Swan Song

Summer’s winding down. Wanda and Debbie’s chicks are getting big (Mitzi’s, hatched later than usual, are still dangerously small for this late in the season), Snowball’s been out in the pasture teaching kitten Snowflake to hunt baby rabbits, Yogi’s 3 months old now and a very naughty toddler, Jada’s busy herding her delinquent canine brother, and the hollyhocks are withering.

Speaking of withering, I worked all week at a workshop to assess freshman writing, and I can tell you, the English language is down on the ground, battered & bleeding, calling out for Mama. Big Brother had better quash this texting and emailing debacle, or soon we’ll all be reduced to grunts and clicks.

Speaking of guttural language, I was out mowing one morning on the rider, when a passel of peacocks fell in formation behind, feasting on cut grass and displaced bugs. Peahens teach their young what to eat (grass, flowers, grains, and occasional insects) by picking at something delicious while making a hollow clicking sound deep in their throats that sounds like hitting a wood block with a rubber mallet. So there I was, twisted Pied Piper, with Ike & Tina, Junior, Ramon, Wanda, Mitzi, Debbie and all seven chicks stringing along. When the engine killed in wet grass by the windmill, the click click clicking hens sounded like a Latin percussion section.

Speaking of hot percussion, I went out last night to hear Ray’s band (he’s the drummer and STILL won’t oil up & wear a torn black muscle shirt when he plays, in spite of my incessant begging), and to dance off some thigh poundage. Vermillion has an odd and wonderful cast of characters, and the oddest among us (myself and practically everyone I know included) come crawling out of the crevices when the band plays. It’s a musical tribal gathering of friends, relatives, enemies, secret lovers, exes, and a small contingent of folks who are mentally floating away from the rest of us, though we try to hold on. Millie had a prefunct (a function before a function) with wine/whine & cheese, then we headed downtown to the bar. Mom showed up, Millie danced in spite of her soon-to-be-replaced knee, Janine said she was only staying an hour then danced all night long, the Wild Girls put the Shindig dancers to shame, and Glenda and I got to sit in and be band chicks on a few songs. And although I adore these occasions, my recovery time from a late night out is getting longer and longer and longer…

Speaking of wild things, our first garden here, which went unplanted last year and was quickly overrun with sunflowers, is lush. We’ve picked asparagus, tomatoes, cukes, dill, four kinds of peppers, fennel, and basil. I’m making kosher dills today (what’s that slice of rye bread in the jar for??), and sometime this week I’ll freeze as much pesto—food of the garden gods—as I can manage. Tomatoes were once called “love apples”; they were also once believed to be poisonous. Anyone who’s had trouble ending a bad relationship can readily see how the two might be connected.

Speaking of endings, we’re back to the melancholy of summer’s farewell. I didn’t get to a number of things on my summer to-do list, like mulching trails out to the meditation tower, rigging up rain barrels, or finding the actual yellow brick road (more a path, really) that someone who knows the house swears is overgrown but still out in the woods on the north side of the property. If the cicadas are telling the truth, a hard freeze is due mid-September. If they’re lying, I’ll try to get to some of these projects before winter—I figure we could all use a little more yellow brick road.

Guilt-Free Knitting

Yogi (on the right) had a play date today with his sister, Oprah, my mom’s new puppy (the puppy mom is a schnauzer, the dad's a poodle--you can see which parent the pups take after). They’re only eight weeks old, but their roughhousing would put my three brothers’ glory days to shame. Yogi and Jada had a sniffathon when we got home then had to play even more, so now the're both conked out dog-skin rugs.

That gave me time to pick cukes, dill, and basil and make a cucumber salad to go with a chicken stewing in the crockpot. Since the dogs are still counting sheep (Jada, anyway), I may even get some knitting in. I’ve been making kitty-eared kids’ hats lately—they’re quick & easy, and I can watch a movie without worrying too much about dropped stitches or reading complicated patterns.

That’s the thing about knitting: it’s really an excuse to relax, unperturbed by the voice in my head that screams “idle hands are the devil’s workshop” if some part of me isn’t moving. Ray was raised Lutheran, and I went to a Catholic girls’ school for a while (both traditions think they’ve got a strangle-hold on guilt), so that would have been plenty to keep me from the sin of sloth. But the nuns’ warnings were just frilly lace added to the sturdy guilt-woven fabric of my being by my grandma, the Presbyterian Pragmatist. She was the Master. “Why honey, if I had to wait for you to get up and help, the mopboard would never get washed.” Wash mopboard? Are you kidding? What IS mopboard?!? Another favorite was, “Won’t the other girls make fun of you dressed like that?” Wow…way to tackle that tricky fifteen-year-old self-esteem building, Gram.

Don’t get me wrong. I adored my Grandma, and while my mom worked two or sometimes three thankless jobs to raise four kids on her own, my Grandma, widowed by then, taught me how to keep a house, cook, garden, and be a strong-willed, outspoken, independent woman. She’s the reason I’m having roast chicken and cucumber salad for dinner. But I gotta tell you, when I sit down to knit in a minute here, you can bet your “Old Rugged Cross” my hands will be a blur.