Writing toward the end

John Irving, author of such books as Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp, talks about the process of writing in an interview with the NYT. I’m not that fond of his books but I respect his work. Does that make sense? His willingness to admit the time it takes from the moment he discovers the final sentence of a project and from there the years of effort that bring it to completion – it’s an encouraging reminder that creative work often takes far more time than our culture allows. In fact, slowness, incremental growth, anything that plods along is pretty counter cultural – whether it’s writing, painting, eating, or loving.

Romancing the garden

Last week we took a supper out to the garden for Joe, Becca, and their interns Sarah and Nathan. It was a beautiful day and they’d spent it on their knees transplanting lettuces peppers and fennel. Denis and I drove down a lane along side part of the garden, pulled a card table out of the trunk and set up for a simple meal - my hearty version of taco salad (made with their fresh greens and spinach) country French bread I picked up at a good bakery, butter sun tea and lemon bars. As we mixed the salad into a huge bowl, dumping the warm chile and beans from the Dutch oven, Joe came over a low rise saying he knew we had arrived because he could smell the food. Either he was really hungry, has a keen sense of smell, or the garlic and onions were extra powerful. Maybe all three. They had time for about a twenty minute break and then went back to working until dark.

Nathan and Sarah at the "table."


Denis and I wandered around the beds and through the greenhouses where all was quiet except for the swish of water through the hoses and the evening birdsongs. The sun was low but its light still filtered across benches of cucumber vines rising along strings and staked tomatoes setting small fruits - ripening evidence of weeks of work through the cold months of February, March and April.



Outside, small fields, bordered by fruit trees swathed in grasses, were already filled with curving, orderly rows of young green vegetables. Chard, spinach, peas, all the varieties of lettuce, radishes of many kinds, herbs, fennel. On and on they went, the fields rounding toward the fence where the lama stood on a little hillock staring us down amid chickens who scratched at his feet.

I know on this day only an idiot would miss the beauty and potential bounty of this garden. Even I captured a tiny bit with my camera. But knowing the people who work it, I also know the ache knees and suffering that is bound to our earthly existence. In so many ways, we long for the permanence of everything that is healthy and healing. Until then we weed scratch and water hoping in Christ who will one day restore life to what it was intended to be.

Gone to the dog

Breaking new ground with the team.

We were sad to hear about Joe and Becca’s chickens the other day. The previous week when they returned from their other gardens late in the day and Joe went out to shut in the chickens, (They divide their work between their farm and Joe’s dad’s acreage where the soil is organic and has been farmed in vegetables for years. Most of their own land needs to rest and be organically rebuilt from years of corn and soybean crops that require boatloads of chemicals.) he noticed a neighbor’s dog running away from the yard with a chicken in its mouth. He chased it down and returned it to the owner before knowing the extent of the damage. Back at the chicken house he found carnage. Blood and dead chickens everywhere. A count of the survivors showed the dog must have been on rampage for hours as he killed 95 of the little pre-teen hens. Their babies!! For days they were finding carcasses hidden or buried in the yard. The neighbor’s insurance will cover the cost of the chicks, but not the loss of income that would have come from three years of laying eggs. Here is, “Crooked Beak” one of the survivors. She has learned to eat despite a handicap.


They’ve been using Carla and Kayla to prepare some of the ground to plant potatoes and corn. Joe was very excited about finding a horse-pulled potato planter. (He’s pretty enraptured about all that horse-drawn equipment that’s been rusting for a century in remote pastures around the county.) No surprise that it takes some repair and practice to get it working properly. Recently, Anita, our housemate, was out to the farm for a day to help them plant. While Joe drove up front, she rode on the back of the machine, which with one pass dug a furrow, turned a hopper that dropped a potato, and then covered it with dirt every 18 inches or so. A very pleasing machine. Almost a work of art? She was to make sure the potatoes loaded and dropped at the right intervals. She was to tell Joe when things got jammed up, so at first it was comic and frantic as she kept yelling WHOA, WHOA and the well-trained team kept stopping at her command and getting more confused by the cacophony of voices rising behind them. Joe finally decided Becca and Anita must not talk and laugh so much and Anita must say “Stop” not “Whoa.” Apparently the Amish, from whom the horses were purchased, are pretty much all business as they quietly follow their teams in the field. Who can blame them? This is not a hobby. For Joe and Becca either.

Joe's single bottom horse-drawn plow.

One of Joe’s genius and endearing qualities is how he grasps and warehouses numbers. He knows how much, how long, how far, how many of anything. Thus: 14,000 onion and leeks have been set out in rows. 45 bunches of radish sold by 10 a.m. When I asked him how much potatoes did you plant? he replied, “Well, let’s see, 35 rows at 300 feet each….that’s 1.988 miles of potatoes. Or this: 95 chickens killed out of 172. Down from the original 185, although a few kicked the bucket for other reasons – like eating bits of plastic used to bind hay bales. It was mixed in the straw that originally covered the floor of the barn. They wouldn’t have known except for an autopsy on several that looked healthy one day and keeled over the next. Strings were found wrapped around and warping their little guts. Oww.

Their days are growing longer. Becca might be out in the greenhouse by 6 am with a four gallon spray pack on her back letting the leaf hoppers have it with some kind of “organic” solution. Joe might be out in the field with the girls plowing up more ground for late plantings of corn or cultivating rows of potatoes which are poking through. Often their work lasts until 9 p.m. when the light fades. Just typing that exhausts me. It sure punches a hole in a romantic view of what it takes to run a farm.

You might think, wow, all that great green food right in front of you. Man, think of the salads! How they must eat! Truth is, they’re often too busy to prepare much and might only grab some bread and butter with cheese. That’s where we can occasionally help a little. Last week we took supper out to them.

Becca left some fresh greens, shitake and morel mushrooms, asparagus, and a gallon of jersey milk in her refrigerator for us to add to what we brought. When they arrived home about 7:15, I had made Greek chicken and potatoes; it comes out of the oven browned and crisp when you coat it with olive oil, salt, and oregano. Mmmm. Anita had concocted a wine shitake sauce for the steamed asparagus, and sautéed the morels with mild spices to go atop goat cheese and crackers. I tossed a large green salad with about a million different lettuces and spinach, making a simple balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and honey dressing, and crumbling feta cheese over the top. We had a warm rhubarb crisp with cream skimmed off the top of the milk for dessert. Don’t often get to cook for people who have worked so hard they can afford maybe a hundred times the calories of my body. We all sat around beaming. It made me really happy.

Kayla heads for the barn.

Someone to Watch Over Me*

I was reading this morning in Psalm 71 where David prays for God not to leave him in his old age. In my 20s I thought this was a nice sentiment. Today it feels a bit more relevant having just now arguably made a case for abandonment. Really, sometimes I feel like I should probably be driven to the wilderness and left. And I ain’t going to survive like that TV guy who digs tubers and eats roaches.

It’s been raining steadily all day. Chilly and wet. Not a big deal, just that it adds to the minor key. I went to the Good Food Store. I didn’t notice I was hurrying, but maybe I was. Denis always thinks I’m hurrying and not paying attention to the semi bearing down on me. Came out with two canvas bags loaded, stepped off the curb, twisted my ankle and fell down in a disgraceful heap, wracked a knee and the heel of my hand. They still hurt! Not that I’ve never done this before. But this time I managed to somehow use the other knee to explode a half gallon of milk which, again, somehow, shot up my arm, totally drenching my jacket, my glasses, the side of the car…I knelt there on all fours in a puddle of rain and milk, shocked, then realized I’d also lost a shoe. I put the remaining groceries in the car and finally found it way under a black Jeep parked in the next space. Totally unreachable. Do you know how it feels to, like, dream you’re naked at the public library and then you wake up relieved that it was only a dream? I kept wishing I’d wake up when I had to walk back into the store and ask for help, limping, one shoe missing, dripping with milk, looking, I’m sure, deranged. A sweet young man gallantly got on his hands and knees in the rain and with a stick poked my shoe back out and handed it to me saying, well, at least you didn’t break your leg. Which I maybe coulda done now that… oh well, not to go into that. I guess I did cry a little when I got into the car. At home, Denis was upset and is trying to give me shuffling lessons. Don’t RUN! he says. Don’t even WALK! Just SHUFFLE.

I’ve changed my mind about the wilderness and am asking to be taken out for dinner. Denis loves me a lot, but in the end, I’d say it takes a bigger person to shepherd us through the parking lots.
*I like Willie Nelson's rendition of this song.

Yard News

Yesterday for a second I had a heart attack over what looked like a drowned cocker spaniel floating in the rain barrel. It was just Anita’s sheep fleece soaking in prep for carding and spinning. She’s learning things the books don’t tell you. Apparently the experts leave a few little surprises like if you soak the fleece in cold water for two days, as they suggest, an aroma builds beneath the thin film of lanolin that seals the surface. It reminded me of cleaning the calf pen after three months of bovine elimination and bacterial orgies. But now she has it soaking in my washing machine in a bath of hot water and Dawn detergent so it should improve.

Again this spring, I’m awed by the number of bird species visiting and nesting in the yard. We’ve been on a campaign to control squirrels, (It’s a secret how, but we’ve eliminated 18 so far.) which have no natural predators in the city and, in fact, prey on song birds by destroying their nests and eating the eggs or young. Not that we, in all our wisdom, are able to expressly figure out or balance the environment in our urban existence. But fewer squirrels, plus laying off the weed killer and chemical fertilizers seems to have invited the birds back.

Wrens have moved into the birdhouse that hangs off the back porch and forced me to consider wearing jetway ear protectors. How on earth can something that weighs about an ounce awaken us like thunder from a dead sleep at five am?


A pair of doves are mourning in the pine tree. I assume that’s their happy sound. There are two pairs of robins. One in the crabapple tree and one in the arborvitae. Denis reached up and snapped a pic of their eggs. They squabble over a boundary and surrounding airspace that seems to run up one side of our house and down the other splitting our lot in half. Last night as we ate on the porch I heard a lot of commotion and ran out to police them. They are fighting again as I write. Denis is skeptical about my involvement here.

We have a bunch of English sparrows in the hedge as usual and I don’t much like them, they not only get on my nerves with their repetitive, tuneless chirping, they like to wait around until the robin parents are off doing meal prep, and then they have at the babies, carrying them off to eat them. Seriously. Not much I can do about that either. Although to shut them up, I’ve been known to run at the hedge and bang it with a broom.


The weirdest thing is a pair of mallards that keep returning to our yard as though they haven’t been able to find affordable housing anywhere else. Last night I tried to encourage them to eat polenta and oatmeal from a pan, but after standing in the street to stop traffic and directing dog-walkers to the other side while the couple waddled across, I felt I was making a nuisance of myself and Denis was definitely getting embarrassed. I’ve thought of setting up the kiddie pool. But that would entail more feeding and policing against stray cats, so I don’t think I should get involved.

Morels and Farmer’s Market

Our first Saturday home for the Farmer’s Market Season. It was 41 degrees with a raw wind when we rounded the rows of vendors to see Becca & Joe’s stand. Becca was there with Sarah, their intern. They were bundled up in woolen hats and sweaters. Becca was shivering, and said she wished she’d worn long underwear. Man, it was cold.

We came home with fresh eggs, asparagus, a bundle of early garlic, and a bag of greens. But it was the morels I would have forgone coffee for a week, not eaten chocolate for a month. I hesitated at $24.00 a pound and almost walked away. Then I thought, no. Let’s see what $5.00 would get and as they were weighed out I listened to the conversations around me. One guy, Larry, said he was out turkey hunting this past week and happened on a patch and picked ten pounds. Sold them instantly to a local restaurant. Someone else said, ya, round here they began showing up last Tuesday and may be around another ten days if you’re lucky enough to find ’em or rich enough to buy.

In our age of being able to purchase any food from anywhere anytime it’s rare to not find whatever you fancy. However, morel mushrooms defy domestication and refuse to grow under artificial conditions. Their needs remain a mystery and they show up only when and where they want. Which is partly why no one will ever tell you exactly where they find this treasure, unless you threaten to kill them or kidnap their children.

I appreciate morels for the very reason that they are rare. When I get a few once every other year or so, I could roll in crap like a dog I’m so pleased. We came home this morning and I sautéed the garlic and some fresh asparagus for a cheese omelet. And even though vendors and chefs will suggest adding chopped morels to something like an omelet, or will have you add them to a sauce for meat or some such, I can’t EVER do that. I ALWAYS eat them pure and undefiled. I prepare the mushrooms, which are about as ugly a phallic knock-off as you could imagine, by.. oh, I might as well post it as a recipe...:

Sauteed Morel Mushrooms
Soaking briefly in salted water. This rinses off some of the dirt and brings the insects crawling out of crevices. Drain, pat gently in paper towels.
Cut in half lengthwise.
Make a simple light batter with 1/3 cup flour, 1/3 to 1/2 cup milk, one egg, a little salt and pepper. Whisk together.
Drop morels in batter and very carefully fish out one by one and drop in a fairly hot frying pan sizzling with butter. It only takes about three minutes to brown them lightly on both sides and drain on paper. Should be eaten hot. O man, Paradise!

The only thing about morels in my life that isn’t perfect is Denis -- who hates mushrooms and has nothing good to say about them, and digs them out of every dish that might contain a few, saying if God had intended us to eat “fungus” they’d be called by a different name, (he’s not ALWAYS the logical half of our partnership) LOVES morels. Thus, I don’t get to eat them all myself.

Lay off the garlic-stuffed olives

Sorry, I’ve been away on travels south of home. Not able to post. Today we leave Chattanooga. Hard to leave. Kinda heart-achy. Can’t seem to get enough of Sember, Shaun, and grandchildren.
Denis found this among the calendar events, school papers and pics clipped to the refrigerator and says if I don’t post it, he will. So… from our oldest granddaughter.

Assignment: Descriptive Paragraph.
Directions: Describe a favorite relative.
Grade: 95%
My grandmother is a sweet old lady with snow white hair and blue sea eyes. Even though her breath smells like old smelly garlic her lotion smells like Magnolius and sweet butter. Her clothes are like winter rains. Most days she is quiet as a little white mouse. Her voice is like a Mockingbird singing in the breeze.
- Manessah LaRose