My Life In the Season of Big Zucchini

It's been a big zucchini summer here at this household. Not big as in numerous zucchini, big as in BIG zucchini. The big fat green zeppelins that happen when you don't pick your vegetable patch on the regular, so that all the squash get seedy, tough, and outrageously over-sized. 

I like summer squash. I like the advantage of growing it in your own garden, so you can pick them when they are small, young, and tender. Sauteed in butter and herbs, they are a fast, easy, tasty side dish to all the grilling going on during the season. I like them on the grill too, and as a substitute for noodles in lasagna. 

But these giant squash? Yech. Don't tell me to shred and put them in cake or sweet bread, because zucchini is a savory food only for this girl. Desserts with green vegetables in them? No, thank you. Yes, I have tried them, and I think y'all have gone straight crazy. 

Up until this summer, I've considered it a sign of failure, a sign of even (Lutherans all gasp in judgement) laziness, that I keep missing, and then picking, these big green brutes instead of the tender little lovelies that we prefer to eat. I dutifully go out into the yard with my wire basket, peek under the giant umbrella leaves, and -- "Dang it. Again?!"

At the beginning of the summer I took all of this zucchini-picking failure quite seriously. If I'm going to go to the trouble and expense of gardening, I want to do it well. There is a small window (just shy of three months) where I can supply most of my family's fresh produce needs; I want to optimize that. Coming from a family that has experienced poverty, I hate wasting food. Large zucchini seemed to represent a lot of things to me: poor resource management, inattention, waste, and even ingratitude to the processes of Nature which provide for us. 

But zucchini is a distinct season of the summer. We watch it come along in expectation in early May, when the earth finally warms up enough in Iowa to germinate squash seeds, and in June, while the plants spread out their giant leaves and start to bloom. Come July and August, there are pyramids of squash crowding kitchen counters. The reason for all the jokes about summer squash stuffed in mailboxes, left on neighbors' doorsteps, piled on break-room tables at work is because we know that they are prolific. Sometimes too prolific. We balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. So, so much. And while we are grateful, we are also tasked with it. Peeling it, slicing it, sauteeing it, roasting it, pickling it, tossing it into omelettes, soups, quiches, pasta-- even if we love summer squash, we know it takes up space in our lives, requires work, and sometimes, is just too, too much. 

This summer, big zucchini do not represent laziness, or ingratitude, or even inept gardening. They do, however, still represent overabundance-- a distinct season in our lives. In the last several months our household has seen multiple major appliance failures, major house repair, a car vs. deer accident (property damage only, thank God), and storm damage. We've done several home improvement projects, and have several more that are needed or that we are considering. We have a grandchild we are over the moon for, and love to help care for him and nurture him. We have aging parents who sometimes need support. We are gone multiple weekends in a row, honoring milestones like a son's entrance into pharmacy school, or another son's move into his first home. We have welcomed home a son-in-law who was deployed in the National Guard. We have visited a sister in Georgia, paddled the Boundary Waters with a blended family of menfolk, gone fishing. We survived a school year complicated by the pandemic and are about to embark on a senior year of high school that is looking much the same. We are navigating menopause. We lost an extended family member unexpectedly. We're looking ahead at college enrollments, helping autism spectrum children find their way in the adult world, and empty nesting.

All of these things are piled up on our metaphorical kitchen counter, and we need to process all of it. Slice and dice, cut out the bad parts where we can, create our own recipe out of these ingredients we've been handed, simmer, chew, swallow, and digest. All that growing, celebrating, repairing, nurturing, grieving, planning, sharing of time with people we love, closing one chapter, opening others. A great deal of it is joyous work, and for that we are grateful. A great deal of it is work-work. Labor and grief and frustration and exhaustion and loss and expense and time. So, we balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. It is also so, so much. 

We are in a season of life where things are coming at us fast and thick, both the gifts and the trials. Big zucchini aren't our ideal, but can be expected when we'd rather take care of a grandbaby, or help an adult kid move boxes. They can be expected while we sort through trenching a new water main to our house. They can be expected when we neglect garden work in favor of ceremonies, milestones, funerals, jobs, and much needed rest. 

For that reason, I will make of big zucchini what I can. Some days, that will mean preparing, seasoning, and cooking those parts we like, and enjoying the results. Some times it will mean sharing our overabundance with others that can make better use of big squash than we can in the moment. Some days, it means I will send that big ol' squash sailing over the compost fence and into the pile, so that it can feed some vegetable garden of the future, in another season, where life will assuredly be different than it is now. 

Things I have been doing: 

Enjoying this, this, and this recipe as a way to use up those big zucchini. When I don't, you know, compost them out of sheer lack of time to do anything with them. 

Not reading. But looking at The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain sitting on my end table, and deciding it's a better book for cooler and cozier fall nights. 

Painting buckets of primer and paint on the walls of a basement craft room that we are working on. I'm looking forward to having a permanent home for my sewing machine. 

Nest

I had the photo and the title of this post knocking about my head for weeks while the global pandemic barged full force into our lives in the U.S. "Nest" evokes home, rest, familial love, nurture, and shelter-- all comforting notions that were crushed like an eggshell this month.

I've been doing my real world day job since March 18 from this desk in the front room/library.  I've always had this set-up, and throughout my adult working life I've been able to work from home, sometimes as a necessity (sick kids, weather cancellations) and sometimes as a sanity saving measure (bullpen newsrooms are not known for their calm and quiet atmosphere). When I freelanced, it was my only office.

But this is different. This is not "I'm working from home because I don't have my shit together as single mom," which, if I am honest, is exactly the reason why I worked from home in the past. It was just me, struggling to get through a day, a week, a month in which my deadlines at work coincided all too neatly with migraines (mine), ear infections (the kids), and a complete lack of clean socks (everybody).

Now, it's no longer one of the few luxuries afforded two-bit freelancers; it's required by the situation, required by this all-obliterating concern, the global pandemic.

I work in communications for a government entity, and so I've been marinating in the grim details of the coronavirus pandemic well before it was officially named one. Just that, the details and communicating them, are draining, let alone confronting it as a patient or a health care provider. Terror, even in its mildest forms, is exhausting.


It's no longer just me doing work from home while I sort out my personal chaos; now work is living at my place while the world sorts out its chaos. I realize that if this is the only way in which I'm inconvenienced by the situation, I'm lucky indeed. But it took me a while to recognize the distinction, and the way it affected me. I couldn't understand why overnight I seemed to be unable to move from my end of the sofa for hours on end, why I seemed to stub my toe on doorways I've traversed for nearly a decade, why I seemed so utterly disoriented in my own space. I have been wanting to sleep all the time. I want doors closed. I want to eat warm, buttery carbohydrates and drink slightly more wine than is rationally good for me. I want, for god's sake, a warm blanket to hug at all times, like an insecure child.

The difference between the comfort I take in domestic life and the outside world has always been distinct in my mind, a firmly defined "in-here" versus the whole wide "out-there." Like many middle class Americans, I've had the privilege of a breezy, put-a-bird-on-it brand of domesticity, subject to new toss pillows, arty pretensions, and a fresh coat of paint when I get bored. And while I still think aesthetics are important, they aren't the whole, true story of our homes.

I think of that cardinal's nest I photographed a few springs ago. Domestic life is a nebulous one, made up the bits and pieces that we find emotional value in and collect around ourselves; much like a bird assembles sticks, tufts of grass, bits of leaves, and shed animal fur into a soft inner lining to cushion her eggs. Feathering the nest is a comfortable metaphor, but incomplete, made for softer times than these.

The fragile bowl of bare flesh that is a nest of young hatchlings is just as much "out there" under the wide world's sky as it is a snug scoop of "in here." Ornithologists estimate that the mortality rate of baby songbirds is one in three. They drown, freeze, fall, or are consumed by disease and predators. Their survival to adulthood is achieved through a delicate, infinite number of interconnected factors-- eons of evolution, the weather, the availability of food that season, the experience of the mating pair, the healthy balance of the local ecosystem. How young birds come to exist at all is either a miraculous accident or an accidental miracle.

It's how all nests exist, really. That's how a bat virus in a Chinese city we've never even heard of can be the reason all our fragilities are exposed-- as a species, as a society, as a body politic. That's how I bake bread and tend seedling cauliflowers and wear running pants while the days run together. I am experiencing both at once, a miraculous accident and an accidental miracle. I feel just as vulnerable and blind as any baby bird, and yet, here is this nest, looking and feeling for all the world like it always has.

I don't know what to make of it, yet, or whether it makes my nest less valuable, or more so. I like to think more valuable, just because I now know it to be less safe than I ever imagined. How does that make any sense?

I am back.

Or rather, I never left.

I've always been here, but for a while there life took me so swiftly down the road, both in good ways and hard ways, that it was difficult for me to stop and reflect, and blogging fell way down the priority list.

The blog became somewhat of a conundrum. I missed it terribly; but the more I missed it, the more I worried about starting again. Fearing what I want has always been a good way for me to prolong a decision to the point of agony (and that's why I'm such fun at parties).

So. I'm sliding back into blogging with this post. Just like that, no ta-DAH! Because I don't really have much ta-DAH! in me even on the best days. But leaving this blog for so long has meant ignoring some promises that I made to people in my life, and to myself, and it's time for me to own up on the scared part so I can just maybe have the what-I-want part.

Still, to mark the occasion, I've done a few things. I've made the blog a little cleaner looking, less cluttered, and in colors I like. I designed a new header, and it's a symbolic change. I've always mentally thought of the title of this blog "On the Doorstep" as meaning the front door. The entrance. The threshold.

But my priorities in life have shifted to being about the other doorstep-- the one at the back of the house, where we really live, where the people we really love come and go. So the photo is of my backyard patio and screen porch doorstep. A deliberately not-perfect photo-- there are cans of bug spray in the window and a stack of plastic plant pots that need to be put away. Because perfect is the enemy of good, and I'd really like to concentrate more on the good than the perfect here. Here the string lights work their twinkly magic over the table that Tom build for our family, and I over-indulge my taste for potted plants and random bits of old stuff.

I will have a number of wobbly posts until I have found my stride again. I haven't quite decided whether I will try to catch reader up in what I've been up to since my last post, or whether I'll just go on from here, or whether I'll leap around like a badly written TV series. I will undoubtedly have more amateurish photos, non-regular posting schedules, and ideas that don't quite hang together. But I hope it makes for good reading, just the same. It's good to be back.

In My Kitchen

My kitchen.

Lately, it is the only place I want to be.

It almost never looks like this, though. That photo up top is an older one, "showing the house for the blog" clean, and well, we definitely don't live like that. Ever. 

It often looks more like this, when I'm in the throes of some manic baking (that's a thing, here.)

Women aren't supposed to cook the way I do, any more. We aren't supposed to have the time. I don't either. And yet, I still shove little bits and pieces of my schedule aside, put in some prep hours on Sundays, cook two meals on a free night to have a hot meal on the busy one, anything I can do to elbow other priorities out of the way so that I can cook.

I don't always want to. I cook regularly for five, all with different tastes and preferences, some of them finicky. Some (most) days I come home tired from work, and I get out of patience for everyone's delicate sensibilities when it comes to casseroles and vegetables and whatever else. Fine. Eat a sandwich for all I care. There's a local breakfast cafe that has its cheeky motto painted on the wall: "Just like home, you can't always get what you want." True that. There's not a lot of romance to the day in, day out aspect of cooking.

When the entire crew visits, which is my kids plus Tom's kids (eight of them), I cook for armies-- grandparents and significant others and friends. We budge around the edges of rooms crowded by expanded tables and cook extra potatoes in big pots and take out the trash, hourly it seems.

The kitchen is not only hard-used, it's showing it. When we moved into this house I had installed new Formica counters and a stainless steel sink on the early 70s-era birch cabinets, refinished those, and painted. I never got to the floor, which is fake vinyl parquet, with broken corners and permanently ground-in dirt.

There's almost always flour  spilled on it; it's ugly and dirty and mopping seems to make no difference.

The dishwasher keeps chugging along, but it is more than 10 years old and I fear every day might be its last. The refrigerator drawers make me cuss.

But I want to be here. In my kitchen. Even when it's a mess, even when it's just hot dogs, even when it's crammed to bursting with people and pots, even when I think for the billionth time that those janky casement windows are going to be the reason we freeze (winter) or roast (summer).

Why do I want to be here? It's too easy to simply say I like to cook, because there's more to it than that. There's something more essential going on. I know this because especially now, with the world gone mad and work gone dull and schedule so full, I find myself, every weekend, up in my own kitchen, scrubbing the counters and making grocery lists, chopping vegetables and inventing bread recipes.

Cherry-almond bread. It wasn't a failure, but the experiment needs further research.

Some of it is in the genetics. The women who raised me cooked because they had to, but also to sustain family labor, to celebrate milestones and endure griefs, to show love. I know there are dietary experts out there who decry the use of food as way to show love, but I feel they are dead wrong, feel it so strongly that it's probably worth an entirely separate piece of journal writing.

There's an old relationship self-help book called the Five Love Languages, and it names "acts of devotion" as one of those languages. Cooking and baking are my act of devotion. That's why, when people ask me "why are you going to that much trouble?" when I've dirtied every bowl in the house making a particularly difficult cake recipe, or decide that homemade tomato soup really is better than canned, I blink at them. The word "trouble" never entered my mind while I was doing it. It is why, even though I am an introvert and am sometimes overwhelmed by a packed household, I will gladly plan meals for as many as 15-20 people at a time, populate my kitchen with volunteer (or not so volunteer) potato peelers and dish washers, and siblings being silly. I may be on the sofa with a cup of coffee and a book the next day, restoring my introvert equilibrium. But I will never regret the act of devotion inherent in those meals, those cakes, those occasions.

It's not just the cooking, either. Acts of devotion have taken a lot of forms in this room.

Like flirting with the resident handyman as he passes in and out, working on his own acts.

And represented in items from others, like this pie plate from my sister and quilted runner made by my mother. I love all the warm colors.

 Celebrations of all sorts:

Ben and Joe are 14 now. That was fast, wasn't it? They still like as much candy and frosting on the cake as I can manage, though.

Spending time together, doing whatever:

Let me introduce you to Eli, Tom's son, who was teaching himself how to knit two Thanksgivings ago.

I'll also freely admit to some pretty low-rent drinking in this kitchen. Maybe not an act of devotion exactly, but there it is, part of the mix. Some of the best times I've ever had with friends have been drinking at my kitchen table with a bowl of chips in the middle, card game optional.

That goes for the refrigerator magnets of questionable humor, as well. We have questionable humor in this house as a general rule, though, and it gets us through a lot of days where the acts of devotion are harder to manage with grace.

It's been a trite turn of phrase forever that the kitchen is the heart of the home. I think it's probably actually the hands, because I keep returning to the idea of those acts of devotion. Those acts. Just like the cooking and baking, it must be practiced daily to keep getting better at it--not just the glory and pride of serving up some beautiful thing to others, but also the time, the preparation, the work, the attention to detail, the correction of errors, the cleaning up of the daily living of life afterwards. There must be rhythm, ritual, regularity, and maintenance. Sometimes there are messes to clean up. It can't be done any other way than getting your hands on it, and getting to work.

I seem to need that part of my kitchen right now, and it's why I want to so fully inhabit it. I've got things I need to get my hands on. I can start, at least, with making dinner for the people I love. What comes next, I'll learn by practicing daily. 

A Short Note to Certain Women Concerned About the State of my Underpants

A short note to certain women concerned about the state of my underpants--

It's been brought to my attention often in recent months by women both near to me and from afar on the internets that I need to "just get over it, and put on your big girl panties."

I just wanted to let everyone know that yes, I do have big girl panties. Several pairs, as a matter of fact.

I got my very first pair of junior big girl panties (very like a training bra, I suppose) for having divorced parents and growing up in a low-income single-parent family.

I'd estimate that I graduated to my first full on, total ass-coverage big girl panties when I was still a teenager, paying my way through college one part-time job paycheck at a time in exchange for a full load of university classes.

Over my lifetime, I've collected quite a few big girl panties in the drawer, and at middle age I can claim I've been wearing many of them longer than some of you have even walked this earth. Paying bills and cleaning up the messes. Jobs with long hours, low pay, and bad bosses. Mortgage payments. Taxes. Motherhood. Babies who were born. Babies who died before they were born. C-section scars. Post-partum depression. Children with disabilities. Divorce. Deaths of people I loved with my whole heart. Stuff that isn't even anybody's business.

Some of those panties fell to the bottom of the drawer and I don't have to wear' em much anymore. That's a good thing. Some of them just keep coming to the top of the pile, because, well, sometimes you gotta wear 'em till you wear 'em out. Some of these old worn out knickers I'm even proud of, because I know they mean I survived something worthwhile.

So given the fact I have so many, how in the fruit of anyone's loom did anybody think I'd leave the house without any on?

I didn't.

Now, I'm not talking about my underwear in a public place like a blog post just to show off. And definitely not to complain. Because I believe my entire collection of big girl panties is nothing special. My point is that we as women, all women, have 'em, because nobody's ass escapes living a life. I'd guess that my collection of big girl panties looks a lot like many other women's, but I also know that a lot of women's big girl panty wardrobes are different. Some have a lot more pairs, for one thing, and some of those underpants are definitely a lot more uncomfortable or even painful to wear than what I've had to deal with. Some women have big girl panties we wouldn't even guess they own, but they've got 'em, shoved down in a corner of the drawer where they won't be seen if anyone goes snooping. Every woman has big girl panties they bought all on their own, on purpose or by mistake, and they've had a few (or many) given to them that they had to put on whether they liked it or not. Not a single one of us escapes having a drawer of big girl panties, whether they came to us by choice or by chance.

So when approximately a million or so women (and a whole lotta men too) all over the country take the trouble and time out of their busy underwear-folding schedule--WHATEVER kind of underwear that happens to be--to exercise their First Amendment rights "peaceably to assemble, and petition the government for redress of grievances" (That's the foundation garment called the Constitution, y'all), you're gonna tell them it's time to put their big girl panties on? Well bless your heart and thanks for caring. How in the hell did you think they all got dressed that morning? Same as I did. Same as you did. Same as we all did. Big girl panties first. Which is why labeling another woman's experience as childish, at that event or at any other time, just in order to feel validated about the contents of your own and different pile of personal laundry, is very little girl itself. Very grade school pee-pee pants, indeed.

It should go without saying that my big girl panties have been on, sturdy, and hitched way up, this whole time, before anyone decided to make it their business. Unless it's really hot outside, and I'm just out lounging on the back patio. Then I'm probably going commando and drinking bourbon. Which maybe some folks should try sometime, instead of being all uptight about the state of someone else's underwear drawer that they've never seen anyhow.

Good day, ladies.

A Note to the Republic, for which I Stand.

“The world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.” 

― Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet

I hardly know where to begin, even with Madeleine's very good quote considered. Because I've spent the last six weeks trying to decide if this blog should stand as a refuge from every ugly thing that's happened since the national election, or not. Refuge is a necessary thing when bad news seems to permeate an increasingly out-of-control world. We need to be able to get distance to think, gather strength, comfort ourselves with the familiar and the routine. When does it become escapism, willful ignoring, closing the door on those civic duties to which we are called, and to fellow citizens who need our voices? I do not know. I only know that increasingly, the answer to those questions may become very, very important. So while this blog has been a personal narrative about me and my home life, I couldn't pretend that the last months of our national discourse hasn't had me deeply worried. I would like this place to be as it always has, and if that's a refuge to me or others, that's a good thing. But I also don't want it to be a bubble. Because bubbles are fragile, and I refuse to be that. So here I am, struggling through this post as I've struggled through the last months of this politically grim year.

Right now, I am operating from these two positions.

1. I am repossessing patriot as a word that defines me, because I am. I am a patriot. I love my country, and I believe in the ideals towards which we have been imperfectly and at times violently struggling for well over two centuries. I believe that at all times, that means criticizing the hell out of it--where it's failed, where the people who claim to lead it have failed, when its citizens are failing to hold its government accountable. Everyone from Thomas Jefferson two hundred years ago down to the anonymous protester on the street corner yesterday has this right and responsibility. To the people who have said to me in the past months "if you don't like it, you can just leave....": Fuck no, I'm not leaving. My people have been in various ways always here (native peoples), since 1749 (Irish Protestants escaping religious violence in Belfast), or here since the 1880s (Germans living in the Ukraine, fleeing Russian oppression). My family members fought wars on this soil and abroad to defend this country's ideals. I am not going. I am not going to be quiet. 

2. I'm going to continue to love the people I love. Only I'm gonna do it louder. My circle of family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors includes people who don't think like me, believe like me, vote like me, or look like me. I think that's pretty well the whole point. This country has never, ever, in its entire history, been just one story about one kind of people who are exactly alike. That this republic is constructed of millions of individual stories, that they can encompass a broad range of human experience and thought, and still come together under one ideal, "We the People"-- is not just our struggle (and it has been) but it has also been our triumph when we get it right. And we do, often enough, get it right. That is worth fighting for. Right now, loving (in all the ways we define it) the people who are not just like me may not be only an act of love. It will be an act of solidarity. It will be an act of protection. It will be at times an act of civil protest. So I'm going to love. Out loud. Hard.

Stay and speak. Love loudly. That's what I have right now. I hope it is enough. I hope it is enough for all of us. 

Postcard from Galena, Illinois

I'm weirdly untraveled in the area of the Midwest where I grew up--Iowa and surrounding states. My childhood experience didn't include much travel at all, and then I lived elsewhere--Seattle and Detroit--for most of my adult life. So in many ways I'm more familiar with the Pacific Northwest and Michigan than the place that's supposed to be home. 

Like I said. Weird. But also, I've discovered, a fun and unique perspective. I get to be a tourist and make discoveries in a place that has already long been home to me. Best of both worlds. 

Tom and I had planned a long summer weekend trip away months before July, but I'd set aside the vacation days and almost completely forgot about it. And then my aunt passed away, and I just didn't have any enthusiasm for anything for awhile. I didn't realize that we'd forgotten to make reservations until the week before. 

Oops. Since Galena, Illinois is a huge tourist destination, that was nearly a deal-breaking oversight. I lucked out with a room at a local B&B, though, and it turned out to be a happy accident. It was uncharacteristic of my usual over-planning self, though. 

To me the best part of vacation is not the destination so much as it is just being pried away from my usual routines and obligations. I need that, because I get too attached to them. And even though I'm as big of a homebody as anyone, sometimes I just want to get gone, you know? Besides, if I never get outside my own city limits and never hit the highways, I miss stuff like this: 

Yep. That's a plastic life-sized skeleton torso (with eyeballs) mounted to the back of a semi-cab. I have no idea. Mascot? Warning? Joke?

Galena, Illinois is a river town that used to be a major steamboat port before the railroad expanded west, and now has a large downtown historic district, boutiques, restaurants, B&Bs, wineries....in other words, a touristy tourist trap tricked out in Victorian-era gingerbread trim. 

Which I don't mind if you see it for what it is, eyes open. Also, tourist trap or not, I'm a huge history geek. It doesn't matter where I go, I'm gonna pry some history lesson out of it. And Galena's are pretty good as history lessons go. It includes a former home of a U.S. President, Ulysses S. Grant. 

I'm a reader of presidential biography, I'm always keenly interested in visiting presidential historic sites, and this one was one I honestly didn't know about. Grant lived in many states over his lifetime, and this home in Galena was gifted to him by the community after he became a civilian again, post-Civil War. His family lived in it for only a very short time before he became President, and afterwards returned only rarely. 

I liked Grant's taste in chairs. The green velvet armchair was so beloved it traveled with him on tours. 

The day we toured the Grant home was broiling hot and humid, the house was only open on guided tours, timed every 15 minutes, and packed full every group. I was annoyed that we were pushed along, and annoyed at having to look at everything over the shoulders of other tour group members. I'm arrogant enough to not want to be one of the unwashed masses, and unwilling to admit that I'm just as unwashed as the next person. Sigh. Also, I just don't like crowds. 

We took a selfie while we waited for our turn at the guided tour. We bought hats in downtown Galena because it was so hot. Our children were not amused by this development as shared on social media. We, however, thought we were stinkin' adorable. 

One of the saving graces of the downtown area on this hot weekend was Galena Brewing Company. 

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the restaurants and bars in the area. They were high-priced, mediocre mostly, and getting away with it because, well, lots of tourists packed in a small town with few choices. 

If the eats weren't the best, I could have easily spent an entire afternoon photographing all the architectural interest.

There is a lovely city park on the Galena River, named after their presidential citizen. 

With a restored Victorian fountain....

And a pedestrian bridge over the river to the downtown area. 

The historic neighborhoods were intensely pretty

Our B&B ended up being a perfect choice, even if it was last minute. I had a serious case of garden envy. 

The breakfasts there were large and excellent, and made up a great deal for the less-than-great restaurant situation elsewhere. (Readers can find the B&B's website here.)

Did any of my readers and friends take get-away weekends this summer? Where? What are some favorite places in your area? 

July

Photo by Dyan Millsaps Shirley. All rights reserved. 

In July, Karen, my aunt and godmother, died.

The cemetery in July is blindingly hot and bright, with sunshine reflecting off white curtains of swift wind-driven clouds, and off Missouri farm hillsides so rustling and vibrant with growth they sigh and gleam like the flanks of living animals.

The day we laid her to rest was just like that. The heat and light were brutal, especially when grief-- the collective grief of husband and daughters and grandchildren, sisters and cousins, friends and townspeople-- made us all wan and weak in the face of our loss.

Even so I could not think, if such a cruel thing had to be endured, that it could happen at any other time of the year. Karen was a farmer and the wife of a farmer. She loved the land and all good green growing things. She was at her happiest then, it always seemed, and it was then that she was in her element. In that sense it was a blessing we were able to say our goodbyes to her with that high and handsome land all around, in the fullness of the summer season.

She had two daughters and eight nieces and nephews, and she had a heart big enough to mother us all. She spent so much of her life in July and other months too, welcoming us up the gravel driveway to the farm, cooking and baking for us, sending us to the hen house, helping us find the new kittens, picking hay out of our hair, making us wash our dirty bare feet at the back door hose, scolding us, patting our backs, making dresses for our dances and quilts for our beds. It was only right that we all made it back for her one more time, and we did. I wish we'd done it more often in recent years, but we made the big mistake of growing up, and the intricacies of our own adult lives carried us down that gravel road, but not back. I suppose this is what grief is mostly made up of. Regret.

She had the elegant shoulders of a slender 1930s movie star, but she wore plaid short-sleeved shirts and jeans and sneakers and perpetually carried enamel pans, full of vegetables for dinner that night or cherries for canning or kitchen scraps for the hogs. Her garden was eternally enormous, and with every passing year more and more flowers--cleome and cosmos and sunflowers--budged in with the asparagus and tomatoes and beans. It grew a little wilder too, with the neat rows of the past run a little ragged and butterflies, barn swallows, and martins skimming the air. It wasn't a competition in her mind, though. Earthy potatoes and full-blown roses both held equal glory in her worldview.

Because Aunt Karen never passed up a moment to notice. Beauty. Creation. Good things. She pointed out bluebird nests, or strawberry blossoms, or wildflowers under the oak trees in the pasture, or a new baby calf, or the dark gloss of healthy midsummer corn. "Just look at that. Look at that. Isn't that pretty?" Being with her was a near constant invitation to notice the fine things contained in the everyday. It didn't ever occur to me that my whole life she was gently teaching me the most important lesson of all. Not that tired concept of "gratitude", which speaks so much of obligation; but the vocabulary of an open heart, words that we could all use more of in our increasingly cynical world. Wonder. Fascination. Joy.

I have always loved gardening--thanks, of course, to her-- and now it has become my solace in grieving her. I feel near her there, digging in the dirt. I thought of her days after her death, when my dirty fingers patted neatly-petaled globes of zinnias. I thought of her weeks later, when I filled up the bird bath. I thought of her in August, when I was stooped head and shoulders into the tomato patch, filling the giant stainless steel mixing bowl with them. I think of her every time a hummingbird flits too close, bravery inversely proportional to emerald size. Now bees and butterflies swarm the asters in October, and still I'm thinking of her.

But thinking of my aunt only carries me so far. Even the stories I could tell others, and I could tell plenty, will bear fainter and fainter witness as the years pass from this sad July. In the end, I think the only way to really honor the aunt I miss so much is to absorb parts of her, sink the good I knew of her into the marrow of my bones, so that those things I loved about her become an actual part of me. And for her, to honor her, I'm going to touch the shoulder of the person next to me when I see a pink sunset, a fat bumblebee, a sparkly stream, and invite them the way Aunt Karen did, to see with an open heart. Just look. Look at that. 

Return to April

I'm going to take liberties with the timeline, and toss the blog back to April. You can do that in blogger world. I wish you could do that in real life, too. Just a little, now and then.

I've had a lot of emotional adjustments to make this summer. Some were very good, and some were bad, and some were in between. But while I'm trying to make sense of them enough to write about them (and I need to write about them), I felt like April was a good, safe place on the calendar to visit.

In April, Tom and I went to Missouri to see my Dad. My sister Dyan came up from Atlanta, and we made a long weekend of it in the Ozarks.

This is the view from my Dad's place, which we call "The Hill." I wish this was a painting.

The Ozark hills in April are made up of tree bark and green mists and blue sky, mostly. But it also has dozens of tiny wonders you'll miss if you fail to pay attention. You need to get up close and personal with an Ozark spring to really know it like you should.

New oak leaves are as rosy and beautiful as any spring flower.

And mayflower is hidden under its own great green silk umbrella:

Blue-eyed grass. It should be the name of an Emmylou Harris album, shouldn't it? 

We visited Wilson's Creek National Battlefield. Ancestors fought in this battle (you can learn more here). We keep returning, partly because my Dad's a military history buff, partly because we ran a race as a family here (read about it here), and partly because it's just one of the most indescribably pretty pieces of land in southern Missouri--rolling hills and winding creek, oak savannah and tallgrass prairie. Below is the Ray farmstead. It is sobering to realize so many men sacrificed their lives in a place so beautiful, on a hot day in August 1861. 

Dad and Tom are in the photo, two of the men I love the most in this world. They met for the first time that weekend. They got on well. (Whew.) Then again, I sensed they would. Some things fall into place like they were meant to happen all along. 

I have a fascination for stone fireplaces. I'm not sure why, but I always come home with photos of them. 

The furnishings in the Ray farmstead museum are so simple it feels serene. 

Local volunteers and museum docents are dedicated to bringing history to life here. This gentleman told us about life on the battlefield for a Union soldier. 

I was fascinated by the design, angles, light and shadow of this split rail fence.

And the bark of this chestnut tree:

And sunlight filtered through sassafras leaves.

Sassafras light. Those are two words I've been playing with since I took that picture, bouncing around in my head. What do they mean? I don't know. Still, I like the sound of them, paired with the memory of that April weekend. It's a good alternative title for spring in the Ozarks. 

Housiversary Five

It seems millennia ago that I signed the papers on this place. But on June 10, 2011, this house, which I like to call Ruth (after its first owner) became mine. And I suppose I became hers, too.

We needed each other. She'd suffered about 20 years of neglect from former owners,  and was about to be relegated to a rental property when I scooped her off the market. As for me, I was about a year and a half post-divorce, only just past the Crazy with Emotion, Anger, and Remorse Stage. It was time to move on. It was time to start a new life in earnest. My four boys and I moved in with a lot of second-hand furniture, cleaning and paint supplies, and carpet-cutters.

It's probably pretty telling that I'm writing this post a day later than the actual housiversary, I'm taking periodic breaks to help my love maneuver drywall sheets up the stairs to the attic bonus room we're working on, I've got to make a trip to the hardware store before it closes tonight, and I'm thinking I need to get a fresh paint brush for the next project.

Meaning, I'm still in the thick of it. It's not giving me much time for reflection, no matter how much I'd like to write a post pondering the significance of this place to me, how it's sheltered my children, worked itself into the very marrow of my bones, how it's even framed the course of my new relationship. It's all been very much about love, but also self-doubt, hard work, bills, and taking out the trash again and again. Somewhere in there a relationship happened, but instead of with a person it is with a home and garden that seem to mean more to me with each passing year, despite the struggle. That makes it sound like a marriage. It sort of is.

Because it's the five-year mark and we've had some real whopper projects lately, I've been taking some time to look back so that I can fully appreciate what we've accomplished. It's easy to feel lost in the incremental gains and forget that they add up to something.

Before:

After:

Before:

After: 

Before: 

After (but not done): 

Before (or during) : 

After:

Before:

After: 

2011: 

2016: 

2017? Beyond? I can't wait to see what happens.