her able hands

You know, I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed with the garden and yard work right now. Something is making quick work of eating the foliage on so many plants — both in the woods and in the vegetable beds. There are these red beetles all over things like my spinach, the loose strife, rudbeckia, the entire patch of thyme. They suck the juice out of the leaves, making tiny brown spots that cause the leaves to turn into brown lace and die. Can I find a photo of these things on the internet anywhere? No. Am I too lazy to go out there and take some pictures? Yes.

I’m taking a break right now in the air conditioned house (yes, we broke down and turned it on yesterday afternoon when the interior temperature reached 86º). We need to install a whole house fan in the attic. But first I need to finish preparing the new garden bed so I can get the rest of my tomatoes and peppers planted.

It’s so hot out there right now. I had to come inside and change out of my jeans and into a skirt so I could catch a draft up my legs while I shoveled six wheelbarrows of manure and moved it to dump into the new bed. Now I’m going back out to rototill it one more time. Did I mention how hot it is? And muggy? And how the air is full of yellow pollen?

I think I’ll wander around with the camera for a bit, first, so I can show you what I’ve been up to in between massive bouts of whinging.

xo!

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Every inch of my body now hurts. I spent yesterday in non-stop physical labor digging holes to plant the fruit trees — one hole needed the help of a spud bar (a long, heavy, metal pole with a spike on the end that you lift up and slam down into the bottom of the hole to loosen the clay). I squatted and bent forward to plant tomatoes, cilantro, more lettuce starts and some Roma beans. I cut another area of the lawn with the rototiller on the south side of the house where I’ll plant more tomatoes, peppers, beans and summer squash. The tiller pulled up several giant rocks and my muscles experienced a shaking like they’ve never had before in the process.

Arugula is starting to throw flowers, so I’ll pull the rest of it tonight for a salad and re-seed the spot with some mesclun mix. The yard-long beans are poking up, as are the cocozelle zucchini, green-tint pattypan, and yellow crookneck. Just two patches remain un-planted in the bed behind the deck — about six square feet each. I’m thinking I’ll pop some bush bean seed in there.

Tonight I need to rake the sod out of the new bed, dump a dozen wheelbarrows full of manure into it and till it one more time. I still need to prune back the two pears and the pie cherry tree, too, and decide what method of espalier I want to do with the pears. They’ll become a living screen for our front porch.

The beds next door await and I’m torn. I have a bag of onion starts, as well as some onion and leek starts that should all go over there. Plus I haven’t seeded any beets yet, and I was also thinking rutebegas and turnips. But there’s something in the soil that’s gnawing on my root crops and making them look horrific. So I’m tempted to not plant anything over there except for some clover cover crop and just work on increasing the soil fertility. Maybe I’ll do that with half of the beds. I already have garlic, potatoes and peas planted in 2.5 of them.

Hey, does anybody know if it’s too late to put in strawberry plants? I had intended to start a bed, and just kind of spaced it out this spring. I’ve never grown them before, but if I’m going to start producing my own fruit, it seems kind of silly to not have a strawberry patch.

OK. Time to wake the kids and head off into our Monday. Here’s to not letting it eat me alive.

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I’m reevaluating everything. All of the assumptions I had made about what direction my life should take this year are just vaporizing in the heat of uncertainty. Or maybe it’s the fact that I suddenly have too many possibilities. Or maybe it’s that when it comes down to it, I’m just afraid to commit to anything new. I really don’t know how to operate outside of the paradigm we’ve set up here with the two mortgages and the need for a second steady paycheck.

Plus, I don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up anymore. There was a brief time in my youth when I thought figure skater and I’d brave the early morning cold at Sturdevant’s Pond so I could fall on my ass without the whole neighborhood watching. Then ballet, but dudes, I’m way too tall for that and I’ve been told by more than one person that my dancing style leans more towards the White Snake and a chrome pole than toe shoes and severe hairdos.

For forever I thought writer. And then I thought farmer. And then I tried both (sort of) and was no longer so sure. Or at least not so sure I wanted to do either of those things full-time. And then I developed the motto: when in doubt, bake cupcakes. Oh, how I love to bake cupcakes. To watch delight dance across someone’s face as they take a bite into a towering swirl of fresh buttercream atop a dense, moist, buttery cake.

Here’s something silly and completely without transition. Remember how I decided to build big garden beds down along the driveway because the yard there gets good sun? Well, that idea seemed a whole lot more practical back in the winter when I was gazing at the yard through a window from the comfort of my couch, than it does now that I’ve had a half ton of rotted horse manure dumped in a pile and the grass has grown up a foot tall through the layer of sheet mulch leaves from the fall (that we clearly did not pile on deeply enough). And guess what? It’s a lot of work to drag lasagna bed materials down there. I know I said I wasn’t going to go that route — that I would buy top soil, but guess what else? My four year-old G4 tower died. Like ten minutes after I crowed to someone about how I haven’t had any real issues with it at all besides the fan noise (which turned out to be my fault for never once opening it up and cleaning it with canned air).

So yeah, the computer went kaput. No power. A new power supply costs 3x what ebay tells me the computer itself is worth. So I bought a laptop and will just use that G4 hard drive in an enclosure for backup. So laptop, yay! No topsoil, boo. Where the hell are my priorities anyway?

And now I’m thinking it’s too bloody complicated having the gardens so far away from the house without real irrigation set up. The hoses, oh, the hoses. Do I really want to have to wrangle that many hoses all summer? So I’m going to use that manure to work into the soil I rototill along the crest of the grade on the northeast side of the house, in front of the big perennial bed. Then I’ll do the same on the south side. I don’t know what the hell to do with the mess I made down by the driveway, though. I could still make that the orchard. What else can I plant in shallow lasagna beds that won’t need constant watering? Besides my body after I hang myself in frustration?

Bleh. The act of spending 8 hours a day, 5 days a week sitting at the same desk, staring into the same computer screen, listening to (and contributing to) the same old story, is making me physically, psychically, and spiritually ill. My neck has been out for about two months, but particularly bad the past couple of weeks. I feel like I’m turning into an old woman all of a sudden. And frankly, I have no desire to go from this desk job to another one just for a change of scenery. But I don’t know if I want to spend my time in a restaurant either. So it’s a good thing that’s moving very slowly right now. I have a couple of cupcake gigs lined up — one in June, one in July. Cupcakes aren’t exactly going to pay the second mortgage though.

All day I curse the clock and the rules that say I must keep my fanny warming that chair whether my work is completed or not. Lately it’s been non-stop busy, but I can think of many times when my work was done and I itched to get home and take care of the other things that are just as pressing (if not more so). I get it that I’m going to have to walk away and that I may have to do it into something risky and uncertain. But I have to because staying is making me sick.

I was home all day yesterday with Lila who has some whackadoo springtime virus that’s taking the whole bloody school down with fever, aches and sore throat and diarrhea. Yes. That. But the Lilac bushes are all in bloom, so opened windows are keeping the house smelling like an English garden. Thanks be to the Maude. During the day I fielded many emails from work copyediting several projects, proofed PDFs — basically did my job. I also washed and hung out to dry two loads of laundry, kept the sick girl company, wrote for a bit, sorted papers, tidied some cluttered areas, talked to my sister on a day not the weekend, planted some lettuce starts and felt accomplished.

Hells yes, I could get used to that.

So, you know…back to the drawing board.

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We all landed at home around 5:30 Monday night and hit the lawns running (with mowers and wheelbarrows and for me, a pocket full of tissues). Chris knocked down the grass at our house with the ride-on and got so caught up in it that he forgot to go to his guitar lesson. Oops. Tyler used the push mower with the bagger attachment to cut the grass next door at Chris’ mother’s house. I had him fill the wheelbarrow, and I layered in loads of leaves that I raked out of the ivy beds at the edge of the woods. Oh, lordy the leaves were much too thick in there — suffocating the ivy and blanching the hosta shoots all the way to the tips, pure white. The whole edge line looks like a gourmet endive patch (if you ignore the rotting leaves and oh, crap, poison ivy that’s taking over).

I had to focus on the small acts of completion over and over again even though my attention kept wandering outward to the bigger picture. My mother in-law joined us in the back and I felt so overwhelmed with the need for care that is racing forward in her as her short-term memory simply disappears. I keep having the thought that I need to be here every day so I can help her with the property, but she could also pay for a lawn service (easily). I get the impression that she just doesn’t believe in paying someone to do work that family should do. Regardless of the fact that all of the members of her family work full-time and also have children and properties of their own to care for…and she doesn’t come out and say that, but she also doesn’t take action. It’s a generational thing maybe. I’m trying not to judge it. I mean, miles in her shoes and all that. I was raised in the time when the service industry blasted off, and while we rarely hire outside help because we’re DIY freaks, I also see it as a reasonable answer when we just can’t manage it on our own. We may have to call someone in for her, before the property falls into that defeated decline of decay and disrepair that happens when left unattended. It needs way more than mowing and we can barely handle that these days.

Anyway, so I took those wheelbarrow loads over to the lasagna bed I’m building along the back of the deck. It’s about 4 feet deep and now after last night’s work, about 16″ high. I’ll add some manure and then next week when we mow again, will do some more layers of grass and leaves to bring it up to 2 feet. I have one giant bale of peat moss left from last year, so will do a nice layer of that in between.

Each trip back for another load, she showed me a thick piece of glass she picked out of one of the garden beds (the soil is loaded with glass back there because 50+ years ago, it was used to dump trash. She showed me that piece of glass ten times as if it was a new discovery. I’m really worried that things are going to slide downhill with her faster and faster. I’m upset with myself when I feel the thread of resentment tightening around my heart. How can I let that go? I don’t know how to rise above my own needs to meet these massive needs of a woman I don’t have a very close relationship with and who only opens minimally to her grandchildren. To do it gracefully feels a herculean task. I blew it, but hard, when I helped her after the shoulder surgery. Just didn’t handle the intimacy at all well and let my annoyance at the brothers come out with sarcastic comments about sponge baths and well…it’s a damned good thing I didn’t want to be a nurse. I’m still so ashamed that I said what I said, so much so that I won’t repeat it here. I’m even more ashamed that I meant it. That I didn’t feel good about helping, that it felt like a burden and brought up tremendous fear in me. Jeesh. Being human means carrying such a huge load of bullshit around with you everywhere you go, you know?

I keep imagining the future and it’s me having to go daily to hand her the pills she takes and watching her swallow them — morning and evening. Right now she’s taking everything in the morning, and some are supposed to be nighttime only because they make you drowsy. I don’t want to be that person. I want her sons to step up and handle that (which they will, it’s just my imagination running willy-nilly because I feel overwhelmed and tapped out and helpless around the situation). Probably exacerbated by the fact that I don’t have much of a relationship with her or with any of Chris’ siblings. I resent that we don’t live close to my mother who is an involved grandparent and misses her grandchildren so much that I know it’s a constant ache for her (as it is for me). That I don’t get to raise my children with my sister and her sweet family nearby. That all feels so unfair on so many levels.

So I build garden beds and plant food to feed my family and try to stay in the moment. It’s so easy to project myself into some nightmare future. Not so easy to send myself out into a future that’s clear and bright and filled with meaningful work and intimate connections in the community. Not without seeing the difficulties. When did I become so negative? I think it settled into me more deeply when Chris’ dad got so sick and I was working so much and it felt like everything fell apart. And another whole year has gone by and we’re not much farther ahead and in some ways have slid back more than we even realized.

But I will NOT complain about working full-time. Especially in light of the fact that I am seriously contemplating changing to an even more full-time position in a restaurant. Oh, there is so much to reconcile in my mind. As I hauled loads to the garden bed and spread the materials out in thick layers, I weighed the pros and cons in my mind yet again. It would be amazing to be working to create a business model that builds relationships with local suppliers and brings wholesome foods to the community. Feeding people is one of my very favorite things in the world to do with my time. Could I actually make a viable living doing so?

Also, I love seeing the downtown improving and think our idea will add to the integrity and sustainability of the downtown businesses. Maybe help balance out the ridiculous number of tattoo parlors? I have always wanted to learn how to do a business plan, so I’m diving in right now and doing just that, so we have something on paper to work with as we talk to the venture capitalists and to property owners who are involved in the Main St. initiative.

Oh my Maude, the hours. I know the hours are going to be ungodly. I know this. Yet I’m drawn to it. I keep coming back to a very calm yes, again and again. I have not felt a strong no at all as I’ve explored the ideas, just questions of doubt arise and I write them down and look for practical responses. Can I work 80 hour weeks? No. How can I make sure that does not happen? Close Sunday and Monday, do only lunch and dinner, find good, solid help (we already have several people who are interested who we know have terrific work ethics and are flexible).

Here’s an interesting thing: Cheril went to a meeting at the University about connecting the KSU students with the Downtown Main St., building work relationships with kids in a way that will make them want to stay here in Kent after they finish school. There were a lot of great ideas on the table and it gives me hope that we could find good, reliable employees. The program will be set up so that it’s part of their degree and they will have to work with an adviser and will be screened for responsibility and reliability. Interesting things happening in town. If this is my home, which it apparently is, then I’d like to be more involved.

Meanwhile, I’m watching my neighbor go from 0 to 150 on his sandwich shop in just a couple of days. He got the keys last Monday and already has most of his distributors lined up, has the menu and logo nearly finished, lined Cheril and I up for cookies and cupcakes, and is working on line processes. He plans to open the doors to his sandwich shop on June 1 and I’m not going to be at all surprised to see it happen. Granted, it’s a turnkey operation for a sandwich shop, so he’s ahead of the game with equipment and setups. But it’s good to see this all in action, to see that he’s a guy who gets things done.

My work with the grass clippings sent me into sinus hell over the next couple of days and I stayed home from work yesterday so I could do the Neti Pot every hour, warm salt water washes through the sinus are beyond bizarre, but it seems to have worked. I broke a massive sweaty fever last night and this morning can breathe through my nose a good 50% better. During the day I did take care of a few tasks around here like trimming out the double-seedlings in my lettuce starts and feeding everything with liquid kelp fertilizer. Then I moved Lila’s play kitchen into the alcove in the living room where the piano used to sit (it’s in the dining room now) to make space for an extra table for cupcake making. In a few weeks I’m going to be a baking maniac. Hope my oven holds up for a few months — it’s been acting a little wonky and is 12 years old. If we have to replace it, I’m going to sacrifice a cabinet and put in something wider.

I have a giant leap I will need to make soon — whether into the abyss of the unknown life of a restaurant manger, or into a financially risky venture working from home. The latter feels less and less enticing the more I plot and plan this other possibility. Every day more is revealed and I let myself float along in the tugging current of this river of life. I can hear the rapids up ahead and my habit is to want to start to swim the other way, but I’ve done that too many times. I’m ready to see where life is truly leading me now so I’m just going to relax into it and let it carry me. I’m tired of fighting.

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My burst of wild productivity last week came to a screeching halt mid-week when I started to feel the effects of the insanely productive pollen-makers in the area. My throat got scratchy and my head filled up with a puffy, thick cloud of green-smelling vapor. I went from thinking Oh, joyous spring, how I love you and your winter-rescuing ways! — to — Oh, spring! Kiss my ass and die you poison-generating bastard of the earth! Within two days it moved into my chest and has settled there with a deep, barking cough and a garbagy, green expectorating that has me thinking maybe a visit to the Dr. is in order.

Meanwhile, the potatoes wait impatiently on the piano bench.

Maybe tonight after work. I tried yesterday but just walking around the yard left me wheezing like an 85 year-old asthmatic. We went down to the old house to deal with a few things and I brought along my digging fork so I could raid the garlic patch that I knew would have re-seeded after my shoddy harvests the last two years. There wasn’t quite as much as I thought there’d be, but the grass has grown up around it pretty thick, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

While there, I also dug up the 3 beautiful ferns that Debra let me gank from her gorgeous property a few years ago. I had stuck them in a terrible spot in the northeast corner of the garden and they were knee-deep in standing water, but the fiddleheads are breaking the surface of the root clump. I’m hopeful they’ll be thrilled to find a new home in our little wood lot here in Kent with its shady, rich soil and plenty of other shade-loving plants around to talk to. Yes. I think they talk to one another. What of it?

We’ll probably head down again next weekend to take care of a few more things in preparation of either the sale or the rent-to-own situation that’s hopefully imminent. Two offers on the table, and we’re just weighing the loss (either way we end up eating a large chunk of change and having to float a loan to finish paying the mortgage on a house we don’t live in, good times!)

So next weekend I’ll dig up some more perennials out of the front bed, and some more comfrey which has taken over the little back kitchen garden. I also saw some Dame’s Rocket that I’d like to move over here, and I think I’d like to populate the edge line of the woods with some wild garlic mustard, which for some reason doesn’t seem to grow here. It makes great spring greens for salad and soup, and I hear it’s a nice pesto, too.

I’ll also make another stop at the farm stand, where I bought 5 lbs. of freshly picked asparagus yesterday. Oh my. Just look at this.

They had a massive shallow pan with at least 100, 1 lb. bunches standing in an inch of water. It had just been picked that morning and the cuts on the bottom where they had snapped them off were still raw. I couldn’t believe they were selling it for $2.99 a bunch. The smaller farm stand closer to me had them last year for $5 a bunch. I’m definitely going back to buy more, but will enjoy the hell out of the 5 lbs. I bought for this week, starting with green garlic linguini with Romano cheese and grilled asparagus for supper.

It smelled like heaven (or Little Italy) in my house and even out in the yard while the garlic simmered in butter. You can sort of see the last hunk of local Amish butter in the background there sitting on the wax paper. I’d already used close to an entire stick, but then figured why bother saving back just a couple of tablespoons of the last of the 2 lb. roll? I threw it into the pan and cackled as my arteries hardened just watching it melt. Hello, Paula Deen!

Excellent spring meal. And bonus, there’s leftovers so guess what I’m having for lunch?

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