The Greenhouse in March

 

  

              In Late March, the greenhouse comes into its own. For months, it’s been quiet—chilly and damp, holding the yard’s plants that cannot tolerate frost or freezing as well as the succulent collection that survives without water for the winter. All of the pots line the high shelves. The grow lights are strung up out of the way from the summer house plants, even though they have long moved back to my classroom. The volunteer spider plant crouches between two pavers, but does not grow. No one goes in or out. The door sticks.

                But March is a busy month in this space. The plant shelf is full to overflowing with starts; the first round grows, is bumped up into four inch pots, and moves out just in time for the tomatoes and summer crops to move onto the heating pads.  Extra starts are tucked in on wire shelves under the windows until they find homes. The lights are lowered and set on timers which I shift as the days grow longer. Last week, the succulents started to bloom so I watered them all and topped them off with compost (a few need homes if you are interested…) I started to root a few scented geraniums as well.  Plants are everywhere.

 

               But, the plants are not the only living things using this space now. The cats have both discovered it. One likes the high shelf over the door—the warmest spot—while the other sprawls on the bricks or the bumpy burlap sack that covers the potting soil. They hunt bugs in the corners. It is warm and light but protected from the wind. If we are home for lunch, we carry the tray out and set it on the planting shelf.  In the late afternoon, Mark and I like to read in the space, cat on lap. The desk is a good place to write—sometimes the internet reaches, sometimes not. It’s ok either way.

                The greenhouse also becomes the space to dry sweaters that need to be washed after a long winter. Bread dough rises better out there. It’s a holding spot for hand tools from the garden. Next week, the garden goddesses in their newly painted finery will survey the yard through the milky windows waiting for assured dry weather to be tucked among the plants for the summer. Soon, we will set up the shower with towels, shampoo, and cucumber scented soap and we will slip outside in the moonlight to bathe.

Early Spring Days

 

 

            It ws a beautiful day yesterday—warm and sunny and dry. Rare in western Oregon in late winter. We did the laundry early, hung it all up outside to dry, and walked up to the Farmer’s Market. By the time we got home, we were both humming Greg Brown’s song:

Love calls like the wild birds-
It's another day
A Spring wind blew my list of
Things to do...away

            “I don’t want to clean the kitchen, even though it is a mess,” I told Mark, who did not want to attack the bathroom, either. So we called it a truce for the house and wandered out into the back yard. There was compost to cut up, beds to toss over to help work the leaves and chicken straw into the soil, trimming to do, and cats to chase around. Mark brought us lunch and tea to the sitting area by the arch covered with honeysuckle, and one cat basked in the hooped bed, warm and dry, while we ate and read for a bit. After lunch, we went to the local nursery, bought a columnar apple, and planted it between two raised beds, bringing the number of fruit trees in the yard up to ten.

             It is that time of year where several hours in the yard does not more the dial very far on tidying up. I will come in, look out the back window and wonder “What did I just do?”  So, as I worked, I reminded myself—this is not a garden, full of flowers in matching pots and cute little signs, with perfectly mulched paths where bantam chickens wander and never eat the kale. It’s really a small farm, a homestead, raising food for the household, populated by people, cats, a rabbit, chickens, and, yes, slugs and aphids. Jays claim their space loudly. Squirrels dig up nuts they hid in October and taunt the cats. We’ve had possums for years, although there are none right now, sadly. It is a workshop, a studio, a living room, a meditation space, and a retreat from the world. It is far from perfect. But, on a sunny day in March, it is our home.

 

The Red Hat

 

                I spent part of Saturday at a meeting to discuss what we can do about the chronically homeless in our community—providers and activists together, with cookies, pizza, and carrot sticks, thinking about what has been tried, what are serious barriers, and how much anyone has left to throw into this effort. Everyone in the room is already at 110%, and the experts working directly with the people on the streets are even higher. Even so, being in the room thinking about how to give face and voice to the people sleeping out in January, moving them from data points to human beings in the eyes of the broader community, was healing. After the meeting, I stood in the parking lot, listening to the new moral dilemma: do we house a person who has been a refugee in the U.S. for many years and who has a criminal record? Doing so many soon put the entire shelter operation and the church sponsoring the mircoshelter in legal jeopardy.  How do we answer this question? More lives are at stake than our own.  Deep sighs…”And on that cheerful note,” we both said simultaneously, “I will see you soon.”

                I wandered home thinking about these huge issues. And there, on my doorstep, was a small box. I took it inside, opened it up, and found a beautifully knit red cap—the design that was used in Norway, during WWII to indicate resistance to the Nazi occupations. It was made by an old student who practiced her knitting skills during class 20 years ago this winter. I put it on and went for a walk. It is warm. It is bright. It is beautiful.

                That evening, it was sitting in the living room next to the gnome I had just finished. An anti-fascist gnome (or person) from Oregon, I thought, would also wear a hand-knit wooly sweater. So I made an anti-fascist gnome, complete with hat and sweater, because, sometimes, as Mrs Who observed in A Wrinkle in Time, “the only way to deal with something deadly serious is to treat it a little lightly.”

Mr Beezhold, the bunny

 

                Mr. Beezhold the Bunny—NOT our friend we named the rabbit after—died on Monday night. He had a good long life in our back yard. He was about a year old when we adopted him from the shelter and he bunned around for eight years with us. He spent his mornings basking in the sun while in his hutch and hopped out on his own when the light shifted. Then, he followed the sun in the winter and the shade in the summer, creating little hidey holes all over the yard. One week, he’d be in the asparagus bed, the next, under the garden bench.  He would sneak into the potato bed and cover himself with the vines or tuck in under the tall tomatoes in August. Sometimes, he would just….disappear. We would look all over the yard twice, poking into all of his preferred spots and….no bunny. Then we would go into the house, look out five minutes later, and there he would be, sunning himself in a garden bed. He could shift into the fifth dimension, we decided. At twilight, we would go out and tuck him into the hutch for the night. For years we could herd him in the right direction and he would just hop up by himself (most of the time. Sometimes he liked a good chase around the hutch). Some nights, he liked a nose rub and being carried to bed. As he grew older this past year, jumping up was harder for him and we boosted him in most nights.

                He was a good bunny. He was tolerant of small children, having his butt washed, and kittens stalking him. He shared space—and crunchies—with the chickens regularly. He loved a good nose rub and to have his dead fur pulled out for him. On Sunday, he hid on us for a couple of hours, tucked in the way back among the wild hyacinth greens. Mark brought him in at dusk and dried him off thoroughly with an old towel. And that was it.  We buried him deep in the garden bed, in one of his favorite corners, and I will plant some broccoli, which was his favorite leaf, over him this spring. We will miss him.

Quiet Clouds

 

                It has been grey and misty weekend—low clouds, occasional rains, sweatshirt and wool hat weather. We have months of this in the Willamette Valley, from November until late May most years, and it feels comforting to walk downtown on Saturday morning in the light mist. Very few people are out; the charms of an extra hot beverage and wooly socks is strong in the small bungalows I pass on my way to the river.  I am on a mission to consider a Depression Glass pitcher I saw in a window last week, otherwise, I, too, would be at home with a book.

                There is not much to do in the gardens this month. I finished pruning a couple of weeks ago. We have planted two fruit trees to replace the ones that reached their end of life two years ago, adding to our little orchard. Last weekend, we bought the wood to repair some garden beds that were rotting and Mark has been working on that after work and on Sunday morning. We moved the coop over a bed. I cleaned out the greenhouse and prepped some planters and washed some signs for repainting. There are some early greens sitting in six-packs on a heating mat, just putting out their first true leaves, but we are in early growing days. The light is too muted by clouds to bring life out of the ground.

    

            Inside, we engage in cozy winter projects. I found one book on knitting gnomes and am working on one with a purple hat and multi colored shawl and another book on British food, which led to a loaf of Bara Brith tea bread. Mark and I rescued a batch of sauerkraut that I had made a month ago—I had miscalculated the amount of salt, basing it on pounds, not kilograms. Too Salty!  I bought a second red cabbage and we chopped it up and mixed it in with the first batch, added more garlic and red pepper but no more salt, and kept it on the top of the fridge for a week or so. It worked! We had kraut melts for lunch (new whole whet sourdough bread, a mound of red cabbage kraut, and chedder cheese melted over all) when we came in from yard work.  We now have A Lot of sauerkraut if anyone wants to try the sandwich.  We watched All Creatures Great and Small last night and remembered walking over the Dales years ago.  

                The larger world swirls around us in news and chaos. On Friday nights I turn off the computer and we take a short break from the fray. We will be back—I have a council packet on the couch beside me—but this weekend, we gave into the lure of quiet clouds.

               

 

Valve Turners

 

                Twenty five years ago, I made a plan to make our house more energy efficient; I even tried to calculate our carbon footprint overall.  We replaced light bulbs, insulated the entire structure, and installed a highly efficient gas furnace and on demand hot water heater. At the time, natural gas was considered the bridge fuel between coal and Renewables. By the time the heaters failed, we would have excellent electric options. Later, we installed enough solar panels to break even over the year.

                That was a long while ago. Last winter, the furnace started to go wonky. We had it worked on, but it was clearly at the end of its life. It took weeks for a part to be shipped in. Rather than wait for it to die (which we knew would happen during a cold snap) we scheduled a new electric heat pump to be installed last summer. The gas bill went way down!  I considered an electric heat pump hot water heater, but, considering how little gas we were actually using, decided to wait.

                This December Mark noticed a puddle of water under the on demand hot water heater. He opened it up and noticed that several spots were leaking, so he called around for an expert opinion. After a close inspector and several trips out to the van for parts, he came upstairs.

 “I think I’ve got it fixed for now,” he told us. “But….”

“How long do we have?”

He hesitated. “A week to a month, I think. If the leak gets worse, open the cabinet so it does not short out. That might buy you some time.” And no, he didn’t install hot water heaters, but he did have opinions on the various options. Heat pumps can be loud and expensive. We don’t use that much hot water, just showers and dishes. Maybe a basic electric tank? I called around and made appointments.  A month later, the gas hot water heater went way and we installed an old fashioned electric hot water heater. No new technology. Nothing fancy.  But the water is hot.

And, with that, the house is off of natural gas completely. We are Valve Turners. And, sometime this month the meter is going away and I can run one long garden bed along the south side of the house. Slow steady progress. More solar panels are coming in a few years.

 

 

Notes, for Robert

 

                Do you remember writing notes in high school?

                I was watching a couple of girls elaborately folding paper on Friday while they waited for the rest of the class to catch up with the work.  One was creating a cootie catcher, the other, a lotus. Either could have been a note, to be passed hand to hand in a crowded corridor between classes. But students don’t write notes any more, even though they are still sitting in the back of math class, daydreaming.

                Notes were the glue of our friendship. Maybe because we went to a regional high school, where it was 45 minute drive between houses. Maybe it was that long distance calls were expensive and we were not allowed to talk on the phone for hours after our parents got the first bill. Maybe we just had more down time in our lives because there was less to distract us, especially during the cold, icy road winter.  The first note you gave to someone marked a new level in your relationship—you were someone they were thinking about when you were not around!

                We wrote about everything and nothing. My friend Barbara had spiky handwriting, drew horses and dragons in the corners of her paper, and continued the Dungeons and Dragons stories we were all considering—early Romtasty, some days. Mark wrote epic poems. Robert, with the nicest, roundest handwriting of all, wrote out Spanish verb conjugations as mini-lessons (he was the only one of us excited about learning another language).  My notes, with the same slanting the wrong way, slightly smudged ants on a log handwriting that earned me a failing penmanship grade in first grade, ranged from complaints about the English teacher to reporting on my most recent reading and the exploration of the heroic journey across novels.

 

                I was thinking about note writing already this weekend when I heard that one of my constant pen pals had died from a heart attack that day.  He was my high school friend, which is a deep, old friendship, even though we have not spoken in years. We were lab partners, dissecting a frog together. We shared English and Social Studies teachers, were in the same clubs, on the same field trips. In the afternoons, we rode home on the bus together, laughing, or, when we were older, borrowed his mother’s car and wandered the mall. We watched Grease three times because he loved Olivia Newton John. And—this is true friendship here-- he called me the day after prom to assure me that I had not missed anything. 

So much, in retrospect, went unsaid, even in those volumes of letters. No one ever said “I am gay” or “my parent drinks too much and they argue all the time” or “I am afraid to grow up because the world is dark right now”.  We had time. We would get there. We were young. And still, we were all haunted by James Taylor’s song, Fire and Rain on those long, cold bus rides, 6:30 in the morning, to pass a note written the night before, before class started at 7:25 AM…

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you, baby
One more time again, now
Thought I'd see you one more time again
There's just a few things coming my way this time around, now
Thought I'd see you, thought I'd see you, fire and rain, now….

Cooking Lessons

 

                We have a very clear delineation of labour in our house—Mark holds the cat, I pill the cat; I hold the rabbit, Mark clears his butt; I prune, Mark processes compost; I cook, Mark washes the dishes. The divisions work well and save considerable argument, until one of us falls ill and takes to the couch. Usually I can fill in for Mark for a couple of days (I know how to do all of his chores but the taxes, and they can wait) but he can’t cook dinner without a lot of fuss, questioning, swearing, and crashing around.

                It is my fault. When we first met, he was not strong on any household skills, although, after a nasty night encounter with cockroaches in Texas, he understood why you needed to wash the dishes every day. I started teaching him how to cook from scratch early on. We talked about how to hold the knife, how to use a whisk with a firm wrist, and how to tell if something was done in the oven. I even made him a cookbook, divided into sections, where I copied recipes from my cookbooks and note cards, so that all of the information was in one place. He made progress. He taught himself how to make hot and sour soup and stewed beef in wine and thought about doing the same thing to some chicken. And then, we stopped.

                He says it was because I expected him to wash the dishes after cooking, rather than trading off the chore. I think it was because he moved into my kitchen and I am kitchen turfy. The truth is somewhere in between. So here we are, thirty years on, and he is not a confident cook. When I am not around, he can rummage in the fridge and cook a couple of eggs, heat up the leftovers, stem or roast some veg. He’s not above the co-op’s salad bar on a busy night. When I broke my arm, he was a decent prep cook, chopping veg and slicing the bread until I could bend my elbow again. He wants to do well, so he asks lots of questions.

                And so here we are. I had a cold last week that took out my brain for about twelve hours which spanned dinner. The options: order out, have Mark make something, which is often loud, or make dinner myself.  Last summer, I canned two dozen jars of tomato sauce just for these nights. Chop an onion, boil the spaghetti, and warm the tomatoes. Dinner. We can talk about cooking lessons later.

 

Pruning, Planning, and Pumpkin

 

This Sunday has been bout the three “p”s of January—pruning, planning, and pumpkin.

Pruning began last week, when I trimmed the laurel hedge hard on either side, enabling the neighbors to climb into their spare car on either side and open the fence gate while also shedding some light on the day lilies on our side of the hedge. Today, I worked on trimming the fig back off of the roof of the house. Then I hauled the branches back to the compost area, where some laurel, the Christmas tree, and some English ivy where waiting for processing. I am working my way counter-clock-wise around the house. Next is the apple and the plum, then the compost laurel and the hazelnut.  

Seed dreaming is also happening. I have my catalogs with pages marked—do I want to try the tomato that climbs 15 feet this year? Can I find the Green Grape tomato seeds again? What about plain petunias? This afternoon, I sorted through the seed tin to see what was left from last year and what needed to be purged. Soon, we will be ordering and planting, so the greenhouse needs a tidy s well.

Finally, there’s the pumpkins that I baked a few nights ago because they were about to rot. I’ve made soup and shepard’s pie with the results and, right now, there is a pumpkin cake for a potluck and pumpkin bread for our breakfasts in the over. And that is all of the pumpkin. There’s not even ny hiding in the back of the freezer.

 

The China Buffet

 

It was just dark when we walked over to the China Buffet last night. The sky was clear and an almost full moon leaned over the trees. Down all of the small, gridded streets of my neighborhood,  colored lights twinkled and shone from roofs and porches and branches—we leave our lights up for a long while in Oregon.  The air was cold and dry and it felt later than it actually was. The streets were quiet. In houses, groups were gathering, knocking on doors with one hand, balancing a platter in the other. New Year’s Eve.

Chinese food for New Years is traditional in my family. My urban cousins, from my father’s side, introduced my family to the concept and it felt very sophisticated, especially in comparison to the dreaded sauerkraut and pork my mother’s family swore by. One New Year’s Eve while I was still in college and home on Break, my mother and I found ourselves without plans for the night (no surprise for me, but very unusual for her.)  We went to the local Chinese restaurant, where you could get pink edged pork strips, and chicken chop suey, and pork fried rice, along with drinks in glasses shaped like the heads of Easter Island. We had just ordered when our neighbors from 15 years before, whom my mother had lost touch with, showed up. They sat down, ordered, and spent the evening remembering the past. We drove home in the cold dark, glimpses of lights in houses along the way, feeling rooted to the place.

A few years later, I lived in Newton, right down the street from the same sort of establishment. The big booths were covered in red “leather” and there was hot mustard along with the soy sauce on the table. We ate there at least twice a month—once, late at night on New Year’s Eve, when we left First Night before the fireworks to come home ahead of the crowds. It was dim, and warm, and welcoming. Home.

New Year’s Eve has always felt a bit melancholy for me. Even when I was young, it was never a great party night. So, because Mark loves a buffet, especially one where he can have two bowls of hot and sour soup, melon, sushi, and something deep fried,  we visit the New China Buffet once a year. It is warm, and bright, and welcoming. And then we walk home, start a fire, and see the old year out.