This morning I was thrilled to be able to pick the first patty pan squash from the garden. Look how gorgeous it is. It's going to taste like heaven sliced and sauteed with a little onion. Mmm.
There are about six Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes that turned orange during the 5 days I was busy with reunion and spending time with old friends. I predict that I'll be eating fresh tomatoes by early next week.
While walking around the yard finding the new things for you to see I picked and ate this cluster of four blueberries. I put the first one in my mouth and it exploded with the sweetest, blueberry-est goodness I could imagine. These bushes are definitely getting dug up once the bearing season has past, repotted in bigger pots in their special soilless mixture and sunk back into the ground. I also need to get some pine bark mulch to spread over them. I need
In flower world, two of the stargazer lilies are blooming...
as are the milkweeds...
and the butterfly weed is blooming between the blueberry bushes.
As I drove down Ridge Road toward Joann Fabrics, I spied something surprising--the Sunny Hill Farms corn wagon. The wagon wasn't overflowing with ears of corn like it is in mid-season but there was fresh corn there and I got me some. So I had the (almost) perfect summer supper of fresh corn (which didn't even need butter) and some teriyaki-marinated, grilled chicken breast leftover from Friday night. Man, just as soon as the tomatoes start to ripen my meals will be complete. What could be better than corn, tomatoes, and chicken on the grill?
In bird news, a pair of young Orioles has discovered the jelly so they come to snack every afternoon. They're not as brightly colored as the mature males and skinnier than the mature females. I heard an unfamiliar bird call this afternoon and looked up to be surprised at the young Oriole tweeting away.
The weekly WW newsletter email had two very intriguing recipes for "smoothies" that are really more like ice cream. I made Nice Cream this evening. You freeze a banana, mango, and strawberries, then blend them until creamy with 1/4 cup almond milk and a little vanilla. I have a bag of frozen pineapple, peaches, strawberries, and mango so I just scooped some of that out and whirred it up. I might have to get a better blender. Oh, Santa...
Sometime tomorrow between my session with the trainer, mowing the lawn, and attending the Botanical Garden concert with the family I need to pit this bucket of sour cherries and either freeze them or make them into jam and pie filling. Wanna come over and pit? I bought some cherry salsa too but haven't opened it yet because if I had it'd be gone already.
And finally I have to tell you the saga of my new camera. Remember how excited I was last week when the DSLR camera I ordered to take to Yellowstone arrived in time for me to play with it at the Botanical Garden concert? Well, I took it with me this weekend but forgot the charger and the battery was dead. I plugged it in when I got home yesterday, put the recharged battery in the camera today and nothing happened. So I put the batteries and camera in a bag and went down to Camera Corner to plead for help even thought I had bought the @$#%& thing online. Rick was very nice and hardly berated me at all, told me that the onboard flash was shorting out, draining the battery, and besides it's a European model so it can't be fixed in the States. I did not fling myself to the floor to roll around cursing and flailing, not that I didn't want to, I just calmly asked him to please sell me a different camera. Which he did for $350. Not bad. When I got home I contacted Amazon for instructions on how to return the defective camera and all of its bundle of accessories--extra lenses, slave flash, filters, tripod, bag, cleaning things, remote shutter cables, all manner of stuff, some of which I don't know if I'll ever use--and the lovely Marius told me after a few minutes of consult with the bigwigs that I couldn't return it. Gah! Then he said that I can toss it or keep it and they'd refund my $319 tout suite and they did. Holy chit, Batman! So now I have all of the bundle doodads, 2 camera bodies, 2 lenses, and a whole handful of batteries. I can't say enough about Amazon's Customer Service. Yes, they're a monster retailer that gobbles up little ma and pa stores but if you're marginally polite and patient they come through every time with help, bending over backwards to keep their customers happy.
31 July--Barbara Malcolm, Horizon.
July
It was hot and
steamy already at 8:30 a.m., and I stood in the shade checking what was doing
well, and what wasn’t doing well in my gardens. In
the west-facing bed across the front of the porch, I had planted bright
marigolds. The reds, yellows, and
oranges of the petals looked like flames against the lush foliage and the old
bricks of the foundation.
Not all the flowers and shrubs I had planted
with such high hopes in April and May had thrived. A bunch of them, more than I thought the law
of averages should allow for, hadn’t. I
supposed it was naïve of me to imagine that, just because I’d planned so
carefully, everything would work out the way I wanted it to.
I pulled my crumpled,
soil-stained plans out of the top drawer of my planting dresser on the back
porch and marked the failures with little black crosses. They looked like little graves. I used a
red pencil to circle those not doing as well as I expected, kind of drawing an
emergency-room circle around my horticultural patients. The number of little black crosses and red
circles foretold a trip to the garden center.
And right away.
Sweaty
and dirt-stained from uprooting the failures, I took a shower, making sure my
legs were reasonably stubble-free, and found some fresh shorts and a nice,
button-down shirt to wear.
Drawing a comb
through my wet hair made me glad I’d decided to cut it short. That mare’s tail dripping down my back, and
the hours and aching arms it took to dry it were a thing of the past. Now I could just towel it dry and comb it
into shape. Every day I thanked the
instinct that led me from Mavis’ “house of styles from the ‘70s” to Simpson for
a revolutionary haircut from Nora at Nine. A little blush and a lick of lipstick and I
was ready to go.
Pulling
into the parking lot of the garden center I caught myself looking to see if
Abel’s red pickup was there. I was
surprised to be disappointed when it wasn’t.
Get a grip on yourself, Gail.
Must be menopause—or sunstroke.
Resolved
to be more careful choosing replacement plants for my failures, I lingered at
each display reading the tags detailing sun and moisture preferences. Somewhere along the line it occurred to me to
invest in more perennials for my garden.
They were quite a bit more expensive than annuals and wouldn’t offer the
instant gratification of having a drift of flowers this year, but they’d save
me lots of planting time in the years to come and cut down on future backaches.
Now
that I had made some decisions, I needed a cart to start hauling plants. As I looked around hoping to find one tucked
in a convenient corner, I saw Abel coming toward me, smiling and pushing a
flatbed.
“Gail! It’s good to see you. What can I help you with?”
Surprised
at how happy I was to see him, I tried to keep from grinning and I could feel a
blush flooding my cheeks. “Abel, I didn’t
see your truck.” Wow, Gail, way to play
it cool. “I mean, I didn’t think you
were working today.” That’s a bit
better.
He
chuckled, “Well, it was time for old Bessie to have her check-up so I hitched a
ride to work with Norman.”
“You
call your truck Bessie?”
“Yep. She’s old and ornery and always reminds me of
one of my favorite aunts. Aunt Bessie
kept everybody in line, her eighteen kids, Uncle Jack, the neighbors, the dogs.
“Is
orneriness a family trait?” I asked him with a smile.
“I’ll take the
Fifth, Gail. So what are you doing here
this hot summer day?”
I
pulled out my garden plans. “I’m sorry
to say that a lot of the plants I put in last spring didn’t do very well. A bunch of them have died; they’re the ones
marked in black. And a few are on the
critical list; those are in the red circles.
I’m afraid I might not have paid enough attention to what I put where as
I should have.”
Abel
took the paper and scratched his head.
“What about the ones I helped you plant?”
“Oh,”
I said, with a rueful laugh, “those are doing just fine. I guess I should have taken you up on your
offer to help sooner than I did.”
“I’ll
say you should have.” He looked at my
plans. “You probably planted them too
deep. As usual. What a waste of time and money. Well, a gentleman never says ‘I told you so’
but…”
I
felt like I’d stepped under a cold shower.
“But you’ll make an exception in my case?” I reached to snatch my garden plan back. “That’s nice.” I turned and walked away. As I strode down the rows of picked-over
plants, tears blurred my vision. There I
was, all ready to flirt, and thinking I might be ready to accept his next
invitation and Mr. Horticultural Experience Obnoxious Jerk comes galloping out
of his mouth.
“Aw,
come on, Gail.” He was following me down
the rows of plants. I could see the
heads of the other customers turn to see what was going on. “Can’t you take a little joke?” He caught up to me and put his hand on my
arm. “Here, let me help you pick out
some more plants.”
I whirled
around, intending to blast him with my anger, but found I couldn’t spit out the
words with all those eyes looking at us.
“You hurt me.” I turned and kept
walking toward the car.
“I didn’t mean to. It’s just… I was so glad to see you
today. You look so pretty. Dammit, can’t you give a guy a break?”
I
stopped walking. What did he say? He thinks I look pretty? The plaintive note in his voice extinguished
the last of my anger. “I’m sorry,
Abel. I feel so foolish to have gotten
so angry. Of course you can help
me.” I turned to face him and realized
he had tears in his eyes. “Abel! What is it?”
He
wiped his cheek and said, “Gail, I’ve been trying every way I can think of to
get you to like me and no matter what I do or where I show up, I always seem to
make you mad. What do I have to do to
get you to like me? To talk to me for
more than a minute before you steam off?”
I
felt like I was seeing the real Abel Baker for the first time. “Well, for starters you can help me pick out
some perennials that will survive in these spots, along with a few annuals to
brighten it up this year. Then you can
come over on your next day off and help me plant them. I’d be a fool to refuse free labor from a
professional.” I smiled up into the most
amazing pair of ice-blue eyes I’d ever seen.
Before I could stop myself I blurted, “Have your eyes always been that
color?”
He
threw back his head and laughed. “Yes,
my eyes have always been blue. Let’s go
find you something to plant.”
We
spent the next hour roaming all over the garden center, debating the merits of
sun vs. shade, foliage shapes and shades of green. By the time the flatbed was full I knew I’d
never think of Mr. Abel Baker as an opinionated jerk again.
I
didn’t have to wait for Abel’s next day off and he didn’t have to ask Norman
for a ride home. Abel’s shift was over,
so I took him home with me. After a
quick lunch of cold meatloaf sandwiches, we went out into the yard and planted
and planted and planted. It was nearly
nine o’clock by the time we’d cleaned up, so we ordered a pizza and sat on the
porch to watch the sunset, drinking wine, and eating pizza.
We talked about
art and books. I told him how much our
sunset ritual had meant to Bert and me.
He talked about his marriage too.
I thought Marcella sounded high-maintenance, as the kids say these days,
but I had resolved to be less judgmental so I kept my mouth shut. Abel had obviously loved her. I had forgotten how much I liked sitting on
the porch with a man and just talking.
It was nearly
midnight when I gave him a ride to pick up Bessie.
Allrighty. Even my fingernails are falling asleep. Nighty-night.
--Barbara
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