In Search of a Good Excuse

In Search of a Good Excuse

So I haven’t written for weeks and you want an explanation.  Writer’s block, perhaps?  No.  It’s actually a new disease called:  “Springtime Paralysis.”  This disease affects mostly mid-life people who do yard work.  It is probably a disease related to:  “Midlife Basketball Psychosis.”  The latter is a disease mostly contracted by men who, while in midlife, still think they should be on a basketball court with the young bucks.  Inevitably, they pull something – like a hamstring – and are sidelined until they come to their senses and realize, “Hey, I think my body is older than my soul and I can’t do this anymore.”  Common denominators in both syndromes are:  chronological age; youthful mentality; no one with common sense to deter or stop them; and opportunity.

Opportunity presents itself in many forms.  My symptoms start to come on in mid-February when the winter lashes its cruelest blows using snow and sleet and grey daytimes against my otherwise cherub-like demeanor.  Then, the petri dish that incubates my restless soul comes in the mailbox:  magazines from every garden supplier known to mankind.  Ones with bulbs and ones with perennials.  Tall grasses.  Short shrubs.   Giant thuja trees. The shade-lovers and the drought-tolerant.  Blasts of vibrant red, glorious yellow, majestic purple, soothing blue – the colors intoxicate me and I begin to feel woozy.  I reach for my pencil to create a Wish List.  Perhaps “Lust List” is more accurate.  If it makes it to the List, it may make it to the Planning Journal that I draft to map-out my garden.

Do not be impressed that I have a Planning Journal for my gardening efforts.  It is strictly a memory aid to help me because inevitably I dig out this year as a “weed,” some great thing I planted last year as an “exotic.” (regarding anything officially labeled “exotic,” please add five-to-ten dollars to estimated costs.) For example, I was given many peony tubers this year from a friend, so I had to map where I planted them lest I start tearing them out next year or mowing them down before they become what they are destined to be.  Do not vote for my sanity by saying:  “Oh, come on now, you would never do that.”  I would.  I’ve done it.  How someone can lose roses, thorns and all, I do not know.  But I am not alone.  I suspect that my lawn guy also has been part of the back-asswards process of mowing down what I put in.  Now I have driveway markers indicating when the young trees or shrubs went in.  It is so much easier now - it cuts down on me grinding my teeth every time he mows the grass.

I would be remiss if I didn’t share the Iris Story at this point.  One fine summer day I came home to find not one, not two, but seven large, black, filled, 30 gallon lawn/trash bags lying in a heap on my side driveway.  Question marks danced around the cartoon of my head.  Did the town crew clean the drainage ditch in front of the neighbor’s house and leave the junk there?  Not a chance.  Did someone drop their lawn cuttings?  Or was it a dead body?  With great reserve I peeled back the corner of the bag and then I recognized many, many iris tubers.   A lightbulb went off in my head:  my friend was having her yard cleaned up…. I called her husband.  He said, “Oh no.  They should’ve gone to the landfill.”  His wife was out of town, so I called her on her cell phone:  “Hey did you have your yard worker leave iris bulbs for me?”  “Yes.”  “How many bags?”  “She was supposed to leave two.  She was thinning them out for me.”

Hoo boy.  When your yard worker doesn’t know the difference between “thinning” and “utterly purging,” you are in for heartache.  I broke the news gently:  “They left seven bags of irises.”  The response wasn’t stunned silence, it was immediate profanity.  And rightly so.  Two days later my friend came to my house and began inspecting the contents of the bags because mysteriously her expensive hostas had disappeared from her home’s landscape as well.  They were not in the bags.  Just a million irises…. Only some of which I proceeded to plant in my valley.  The hostas never turned up.  That summer was the beginning of my body starting to feel chronologically challenged.

Then I did a very dumb thing.  The other morning when I woke up –with plenty to do already on my work list – I felt absolutely compelled to get the statue of the Blessed Mother moved from the far back of the property up into the perennial “garden.”  Well, it’s not truly a perennial garden yet, but I am trying really hard to make it one.  Moving the statue six years ago to its extended location in the far back involved three very strong Protestant young men.  That was my first clue.  Moving it to where it is today involved my 4-wheel drive vehicle and me, myself, and I.  It would serve as an important revelation of my physical capabilities at my prime long ago to, at this point, note that in high school I was “clocked” for the Presidential Physical Fitness Awards doing the flexed-arm-hang for negative three seconds.  That means I have less-than-zero upper arm strength.  Did I lift that statue two weeks ago?  Yes I did.  Do you remember the cartoons where people lift something or pull something and they end up with gorilla arms that hang longer than their whole body length?  Yep.  That’s me today.   You may not be able to physically see what happened to my muscles and tendons but I am putting a dent in the pain reliever bottle to help abate the “mild, yet incessant, discomfort” I am experiencing for two weeks straight.  That maneuver, plus raking and pulling weeds for close to two hours finished me off.  Lesson learned.  Maybe.  I won’t be heroically lifting volkswagens off of innocent victims any time soon.  I’m pretty sure I burned up the reserve of adrenaline with the raking of the garden.

All that being said, it’s been kind of tough to be inspired to write when all I want is a couch with no dogs on it and a hot pack draped over my arms.  <Picture me hoisting gingerale>  Here’s to a great gardening season and blooms all summer long!  It will be worth it. I just know it.

The Life of Martha ....

The most profound statement I ever heard Tim Allen say was this: 

“We found the one woman in the country who actually enjoys cooking and cleaning, and we threw her ass in jail!?”  He was speaking, of course, of Martha Stewart.  Like the woman that the Pharisees “caught in the very act of adultery” and dragged before Christ to be judged (they thought), we realize with very little astuteness that a man also HAD TO BE INVOLVED.  So why not more about the man?  In fact, since that culture considered men higher life forms, why not just punish the man?!  I mean if he was smarter, then he should have been more morally responsible, right?!

I want to admit that despite her detour into the shady world of insider trading and time in Sing-Sing or wherever it was, I really respect Martha Stewart.  I think, I hope, she is an example of “do what you love, the money will follow.”  Meaning, I hope she loves what she is doing because she is doing it so fabulously.  I can barely clean the one house I live in!  And I don’t get paid to tell people how to clean or what to plant when. 

I subscribed to her magazine for a year and then stopped because I just never found enough time to read it cover-to-cover as it deserves.  Even when she was otherwise occupied behind bars, the magazine kept being generated with the same impeccable quality I had come to appreciate.  Quite mysteriously last year, the previously expired subscription re-appeared.  So now I have a bunch of reading to catch up on.  It will be a good vacation or rainy-day-read when I am not cleaning up the debris that the new puppy is making in my house, around my house, and in my life in general.  (A debris that I feel privileged to clean up after because the sun, in fact, does rise and set around that little dog.  Someday the AKC will agree with me… even though he does have a tail.) 

May I please take this opportunity to poke fun at one thing in the magazine, though:  Martha’s schedule.  Initially I counted it a privileged revelation that she let us in on what some pieces of her real life looks like.  It was the same kind of privilege, I reckoned, that was bestowed on me when Ciocci Helen gave me the recipe for her Polish Easter Babka (bread).  Ciocci had not given the recipe to anyone else because I practically promised my first born to her in order to get it.  Then I made the bread and found out what a tremendous amount of work went into it.  I understood why she didn’t just photocopy the recipe and pass it around:  she wanted you to “get it” that it was a thoughtful labor of love that literally took ALL DAY to manufacture. 

That is where the similarity to Martha’s Stewart’s personal schedule dissipates.  I am not sure that Martha is working as hard on her schedule as I am on MINE!  Martha may have two or three great estates worthy of being airlifted and put on a hill in Glocca Moira or Wales, but she also has a support staff to help her out.  Let me run the contrast portrait for your entertainment:  we have been a total flood zone in Central New York for the past month.  Not “flood” like New Orleans.  Just “flood” like- um, let’s go see if we’ve got water in the basement, or if all the sump pumps on the shelf are ready to go just in case.  “Flood” like, do I want to take that country road at night and risk it might not actually still be dry to pass?  “Flood” like, why is there an entire flock of Canada geese standing around in my backyard having breakfast and SWIMMING on my grass?  You get the picture.  So the other day after work, I put on my work jeans and climbed up on a ladder to unplug the top of the corner gutter with a gardening claw.  I did not need Martha’s schedule to remind me to clean the gutter:  I knew it was plugged because the water, instead of draining down, was spurting up over the top.  I just managed to snag a few leaves with the claw.  Water surged up into the 40 degree air, splashing my face, going down the front of my jacket inside-and-out, soaking my jeans and wetting parts of my shirt.  It was too cold to even use profanity.  My job was just to hang onto the ladder until I heard the slosh of the water re-routing itself downward and guzzling through the appropriate pipe.  I am wondering if these are Martha-moments, or her staff gets to do them?

It was curious to me, for instance, that only once in the month did she list:  groom the horses.  Um, I’m no equine genius but I think the horses need a brush-out on a fairly regular basis.  I horseback ride once every decade and expect that when I jump astride the horse, someone else has been putting the time in on a regular basis to groom, ride and train this horse so there are no “negative events” when I go out for a trail ride.  One of my dearest friends had a horse that she was crazy about but kind of got distracted with other things and didn’t see him as often as she had hoped.  He was up there at the farm doing what horses do all day:  eating, hanging around, making piles, winking at the girl horses and living off the land.  We went up to visit him and put him on cross ties in the barn to prepare to groom him.  She walked around front to give him a kiss on the forehead and apparently he held some deep grudge against her for the life of Reilly he was living because he bowed his enormous head downward…. and then rammed it up into her chest.  If that was me, he would have knocked me on my keister.  Has Martha had any of those moments?  Or does she shield us, the innocents, from the raw negatives of her life?

I love her birthday reminders on her schedule.  I have those on mine too.  Except they don’t remind me of anything until after I have failed:  I fail to buy the card.  I fail to mail it on time.  I fail to order the present on Amazon early enough so that it makes it.  I fail to bake the cake the day before because I have a meeting of some sort (church, veterinarian, grocery shop, etc.).  Really, I owe one big THANK YOU to anyone that I am supposed to get a birthday card to because I’ve missed everybody’s birthday, including Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, Bosses’ Day, and all my dogs’ birthdays at least once and no one reams me about it anymore.  I guess I have to have at least one fault, right?

It is easy to see that Martha has got the organization thing down to a science.  Yet, so do I… except I can’t always execute the plan.  She has it written on one particular day in the fall “plant bulbs.”  Where I live, either it rained that day or some other priority of the urgent trumped my original plan.   I have an apple tree that bears apples once every two or three years.  When those apples “come in,” boy, do they ever!  I am making apple butter it seems for two weeks straight with every free moment I have and often late into the night… only to have two of my critics say, “we don’t eat a lot of butter because of our cholesterol.”  I had to educate them that there is NO cholesterol – or butter, for that matter – in apple butter.  Another commented, “this should be less spicy,” to which I replied:  “um, that would be apple SAUCE.  The point of apple butter is to spice up your toast or your roast!”  Bottom line, when the apples come in, there’s not a free second to be popping bulbs into the ground hoping for a spring showing.  You just wait for Spring, and try to trick mother nature by putting the bulbs in as soon as the ground yields enough to let you.  Then you wait.  And you watch for the squirrels.

I am surprised Martha doesn’t write more about “waiting.”  Waiting is an essential part of gardening, cooking, and living off the land.  Even raising dogs – as I do – requires an inordinate amount of time waiting.  One of my dogs made me wait over a year before she was “in season” to breed.  Then the weekend of the puppies’ anticipated births, I thought I would outright perish with all the waiting.  I am a big reader, and was way too stressed to read.  I could just walk around and pace, like expectant fathers used to do in the hospital baby-delivery lounges.  The dog kept going in and out of the house.  Then once outside it seemed she couldn’t do what she wanted to do.  And then I got it.  She thought the pressure meant that she had to eliminate.  She didn’t realize – and neither did I – that the pressure at that very moment would bring forth Puppy #1 on the back lawn … well, it would have, if I didn’t pop his forehead back in and walk her into our cellar quickly and then encourage her to push her firstborn son out into my waiting palms in the warmth of our home.   Yes.  He was worth the wait – and he is the one that we kept.  His official name is:  Prince Valor of Morning Glory Acres.  This year I have to plant the morning glories.  It wasn’t on Martha’s calendar to remind me, so I guess I’m on my own.

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