Soggy Synopsis rant#3

The world has been gray for days.  Even when it has not been raining, the sky is rumbly --so many different shades of gray that bode nothing but an unpalatable atmosphere for observing the outdoors. Pools of cold rainwater are accumulating in the unevenness of the yard and give evidence to the lack of expertise or care that the builders had when planning this piece of property.  I look out my kitchen window and see the black skeletal remains of trees silhouetted against a dusky sky that will soon be opaque.  Was it only two days ago the sun and temperatures allowed me some time outside to consider the earthy smells and sights of this piece of land.

Yes. Christmas decorations must come down and a wise woman seizes the day.  January 21, temperature in 50's, the new president has already eased some of the regulations on pollution and the problem of global warming is no more. Presto.  Everything is gonna be all right.  But this is not a political rant only an observation of the things that are.  After all I am quite a polluter, myself.  I have always loved Christmas lights on the house and between artificial light pollution and electrical waste I have done my part to hurt the environment this holiday season.  But all good things must come to an end and the ornamentation must be put away for another year.  I pile strings of lights on the sidewalk, organize wreaths to be stacked away, gather artificial lighted trees into bundles and study the squirming nest of extension cords that look like they belong in the snake pit scene of the first Indiana Jones movie. I am an electrician's worst nightmare.

Taking the stuff down is not really problem,  but putting it away is another story all together.  I have a shed.  It is at the top of my garden.  It matches my house. I know you are thinking "How cute (ich)".
That is where I store all the outdoor decorations. It is a steep trudge.  It takes many trips for this old lady to drag all the crap up to the safety of this shelter.  I have to "gird my loins" (what an archaic expression -- what does it actually mean?) to gather bundle after bundle of stuff and get it up to the shed.  And yet, I sort of love it.  It is the time that I can look at the garden from several different viewpoints and see what's going on.

The garden is strewn with branches.  Some fresh, as I did have some trees taken out this fall due to the emerald borer beetle which has decimated the woodlands around my house.  There are old growth branches that lay in the way of the path to the shed.  They are covered with the palest of green lichen that soften and embrace the black dead branches that cover my pathway.  It is not soft--I have on more than one occasion put my fingers out to touch the vision of furriness that is not real.  It is cold and damp and rough--maybe a little spongey, but not soft and fuzzy as it appears.  It is doing its job; disassembling one nature for another.  There are the effervescent weeds that no matter what the weather, resume their unending task of distracting from the pristine beauty of my systematic plantings.  They know...they know that this plant painting I am trying to achieve isn't right.  Isn't authentic.  It is the hypocritical dream of a gardener, not a nature lover. Sometimes I love my garden, sometimes I feel like I have betrayed it.  For what?  Why do I strive for a picture that is not real?

Occasionally in the evening, in midsummer or early fall, I build a fire in the fire pit that my daughter bought me for Mother's Day.  She appreciates how hard I have worked to make this picture beautiful and will watch as I light candles on the wall, stoke the fire and pour the wine.  It is a romantic setting and she wonders why.  She looks at me with some dismay as I light the fire, put on some soft music and dream of people who are not there.  It is almost a religious experience.  A toast ... to present company and absent friends.  It is almost more than she can bear.  The mosquitoes make their meal from our pink flesh until she cannot stand it any longer and adjourns to the air conditioned interior, but I linger.  I light a cigar...just a little one, but hopefully pungent enough to keep the monsters away and dream--of better days, of days to come,  dreams of peacefulness that have come true, and of a hope that only fools can indulge in.  But those are warm summer nights and this is the unpredictable winter.

My picture perfect garden is not so picture perfect in the winter.  The mulch is blackish,  The day lilies are caramel colored sprays that have wilted.  The Leyland Cypress corner I planted is minus one tree (or will be by spring) due to the appetite of the foraging deer. And the place looks dreary.  There are spots of fresh sawdust where my handyman has cut down tragically dead ash trees.  The emerald borer has had its way with them and they quickly succumbed to the bug wrath.  Probably the 17 year locusts helped in this mass murder but it hard to say right now.  I had marked the dead trees with day-glow orange landscaper's spray paint but Matt waited until now to do the cutting and of course most of the paint has washed away.  One can only hope that he knows an ash tree from a dogwood. Such is the fate of a foolish woman who hires a sweet struggling man with six children and a million demands on his time.  We are all interdependent.  Matt, me, the garden, the plantings and the deer.  Everybody's got to live.

Lee spoke of his uncertainty concerning deer.  I guess they can be aggressive, I know that they can be stubborn.  Many is the time that my dog Max has unnerved them and sent them on their way in the fields across the street.  They bolt and he half strangles himself at the end of his tether as I take him for his daily walks.  It always amazes me that when the deer find their way into my yard Max is silent and it is up to me to open the back door and do my best mad dog imitation.  They were impressed only once or twice and now they watch me make a fool of myself  as they munch .  Very frustrating.

So as I put the rest of the decorations away in the shed, I look at the hoof prints of the deer and could almost feel sorry for the lovely animals that have lost their habitat to this housing development.  I do qualify this sympathy grudgingly as I think of the blood, sweat and cash that has been invested in this fantasy that I call a garden.  I remember planting a vegetable garden at my house on the mountain and waking up to find that the milking cows from the neighboring farm had broken through their fence and had a magnificent midnight repast there among the corn, tomatoes, broccoli and beans that I had planted.  It was devastating.  The city girl and her first veggie garden in shambles.  I am such a head banger. When will I ever learn?

Nature always wins.

#2 Time to settle down

I believe that I am slowly but surely working my way towards understanding how to "do" this on line course.  It has been a dreadful struggle as I am old and completely illiterate about computers, but nontheless, I am making progress.

The place that I am going to be concentrating on is my own yard.  I moved from a "home" six years ago to this new place and attempting to make this place be home has been an uphill struggle.  As is everything!  Do I sound like I am whining?? Probably, sorry!

The "home" that I left was a log home on thirty-five acres.  We had no neighbors, that we could see from our front door.  It was bare-bones and rugged and quite beautiful in its own way but as I planted flowers, or bushes to decorate the home, everything seemed out of place. Not big enough, not strong enough, not anything enough to enhance the stark beauty of the place.  How do you decorate the grand canyon?  Answer:  you don't.

So, when I sold the "homestead" and decided to move closer to civilization  I had a much smaller palette in which to work.  A neighborhood.  I had not lived in a neighborhood for a long time.  I missed the seclusion of the mountain on which I had lived and so I chose a homestead that was surrounded by trees on three sides.  Privacy.   Yes.  And as I look at the damned daffodils that are now trying to peek through the dirt in the middle of January I feel some identification.  What are you doing?  Don't you know that is is January and you are going to freeze your stupid asses off before spring ever arrives?  They answer back, "What are you doing?  Don't you know it is November and you are spinning your wheels?  You don't know the first thing about landscaping or gardening and yet you continually bang your head against a wall.  "

So here we are, me and my garden.  Butting heads. Trying to make something beautiful where it probably it should have been left alone.  Me and the daffy-down -dillies, giving it our best shot.

Rant #1 from Barb

Hi. This is Barb Clutter.

This is my second attempt to post the first discussion.

As per Melanie's suggestion I saved my first entry and believe it or not I do know how to cut and paste but only if I can find the original manuscript.

Consequently I am starting over.  Technology is NOT my friend.

Starting over is nothing new to me as I seem to be perennially starting over.

I am a retired school teacher. I was fortunate enough to be able to retire early due to unfortunate circumstances.  Every cloud has a proverbial silver lining.

When I retired at 55 I attempted lots of crazy full and or part time jobs just to see what was out there.  Some of it was crap and funny fodder for the first writing class I took here at Chatham. Some of it was great.

One of the great jobs I had was working for Riverquest, a nonprofit organization that held one day field trip experiences for schools in the Pittsburgh area on a boat on (of course) the three rivers.  Having married a country boy, this city girl learned grudgingly the ways of nature in a log home on 35 acres and slowly but surely began to love the simplicity and complexity of living in the country and appreciating nature. But working at Riverquest broadened my scope of knowledge and as I guided kids through experiments of water sampling, I learned about plankton, water chemistry, and macro-invertibrates that live in the waters around our town and enjoyed it immensely.  It was a wonderful experience but as non profits are wont to do it had some finanacial difficulties and I left.  The kids who remained needed the job whereas I was not dependent on the meager salary in order to survive.

I come from DC area originally but have lived up here near PGH for 30 years or better.

I taught 7th and 8th grade children the joys of literature for all of that time.  It was not always an easy task, as young men of that age usually have other things on their mind. I always believed as a Reading teacher that students deserved to hear the well written word well read, consequently I read to the little darlings every day.   We did Shane, To Kill a Mockingbird, so many others but one book became a standard for me because it caught the "boys."  Hie to the Hunters by Jesse Stuart is a a beauty of a piece of regional fiction, set in the hills of Kentucky.  There is lots of action:  fightin', huntin', trappin', and spitting. As the school I taught in was in a rural community, I could not have found anything more appropriate for these kids.  But along with this coming of age story of 2 young boys was this amazing description of the hills of Kentucky throughout the seasons.  It is a little known jewel that is out of print but you can still get copies through the Jesse Stuart Foundation, if you are interested.

I am a widow.  I have one daughter, Kate, who graduated from Allegheny College with a degree in English and minor in Classical Studies.   I am sure some of you may know what a highly marketable degree that is, (;-().   But after working in a hospitilization advisory group, and being paid to mostly lie to people and get them through the system, she dumped that job, and moved to Boston with a friend. During the winter of the worst snows in the history of that city, she worked temp jobs at starvation  wages, plugged away and finally got a job that turned into a permanent position.  She is a manager for JLL , a commercial property management company, and she and 2 others run a 42 story office building in the heart of Boston. Who knew ?  This from a girl who wanted to make a career out of Faulkner!  Needless to say I am proud of her and we are best buds.

I have a dog and 2 cats.  They are all monsters but I love them.  I have a house that is now too big for me and I contemplate selling it every time it snows. The yard is going to be my place to write about as I have become a gardener, of sorts, in my dotage.

I am sure you are all bored to tears with my ramblings but that is who I am.  Abstract and Random and proud of it.

Thanks for reading and please God let this go through to you.

Entry #1 1/9/17

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