Squash borers:
Yesterday I checked on my tiny garden. I have 2 squash plants, three, if you count the one that doesn’t count. It's been stunted from its beginnings. I left it as a decoy, hoping the bugs would pick on it because it wasn't big enough to defend itself. Sounds cruel, doesn't it?

 Long ago,waay back in the 70's, my mother gave me a book called Peacock Manure and Marigolds. It was a book about organic gardening. It was the beginning of the end for me. That book took me down the path where I now live. I'm a compulsive gardener. The book told of order, the system, the protective mechanisms of plants and animals, the cycle of the garden and it’s intelligence.
Somewhere I read about squash borers. I’ll never forget the thrill I experienced when I saved my first squash plant from the pernicious attacker. I inspired myself by becoming a plant rescuerer and a squash borer murderer. 

I haven’t grown my own squash in years. In fact, my little house in the city has a yard that’s mostly shade. But for a couple of years I’ve been longing for a few vegetable plants, especially tomatoes. I tried tomatoes in pots and I tried them in a small sunny spot next to my neighbors clematis vines, but nothing happened. I guess I wasn’t serious enough about it. But last fall I had a revelation. I began watching the tilt and pattern of the sunlight in the narrow stretch of hedge that ran beside my house. It was almost full sun. The only problem was that there were 12 foot, 40 year old overgrown hedges claiming that space and I had to make my decision as to whether or not to go to war with them.
Go to war I did. I have a hand saw. One of these days I’m going to have my own chain saw, but for now my hand saw will have to do. Before it got too hot, sawing was my morning garden project. Let me tell you, a lumberjack has to be the strongest person in the world. Sawing is exhausting. But bit by bit I took down these overgrown hedges with trunks like trees that took hours to saw through. I hauled it all to the street and with in a couple of weeks I could see the future garden sight. In the early spring there was only full sun in one small strip, but as the sun’s elliptical path changed to its summer course the patch became an ideal plot for tomatoes, eggplant, squash and peppers.
I check my vegetables every day for enemies. I found one tomato horned worm about a month ago. I took the big green worm off my plant and put it on a fence post hoping some bird might find him delectable.  It worked. I checked back in a few minutes and the worm was no where to be seen and I thought I heard a bird saying "Yummy."
 I hadn’t really checked on the squash plants until yesterday. I guess I was in denial.. I guess I was hoping there weren’t squash borers within Memphis city limits, but I'd noticed the leaves wilting even when I'd just watered so I went out and got down on my knees and looked closely at the base of the plants. There it was. The trail of sawdust the books tell you to look for. The little varmits had bored into almost every single stem of both my plants. It was time to go to the kitchen and get my paring knife. 
I don't know where I read about this type of plant surgery, but it's right up my alley. I don't want to use pesticides in my garden so I'm always looking for ways to keep plants healthy without them.
Step 1. I looked at the base of the squash plants and saw the gooey sawdust like substance that is a dead give away. It's just like the sawdust a drill makes and it's the evidence that the worm had bored through the stem and is getting fat on the juices the squash plant is bringing up from its roots, juices that are supposed to be feeding the leaves and the blooms and ultimately the baby squash plants. I took my knife and cut open the stem right above the borer hole. gotcha! There he was, fat, round, pale, slimy with a sinister black head. Boy, was that bug surprised. I had to kill it. I'll spare you the details.
After I checked each stem and killed about 4 more borers I got a couple of buckets of dirt and reburied the stems and watered the plants.
I checked them again this morning and found two more borers. I think they're ok now.

As I'm getting older I find myself becoming more content with my eccentricity. I don't even call it that, but I'm pretty sure my neighbors do.

I don't even think about it being odd that I wake up every morning and the first thing I do is get my coffee and go to the garden. I stay outside until the heat of the day. Late in the afternoons I'm back outside puttering, digging, planting, dreaming. In all the world it is where I'm most at home, most content, most carefree, here near my dirt listening to my marigolds and wishing I had a peacock to go with it. 

On Sunday afternoon I rested. I'd done two Farmer's Markets in a week. The Downtown Market is exhausting simply because I'm not used to getting up at 4am. I did well. And on Sunday I felt entitled to a long restful day. 

I took a nap but for some reason woke up before I was through napping. I felt disoriented and innervated, (Billy's big word. It means without the energy to move).

I grabbed a book and went out to the front porch to lie on the very uncomfortable wicker couch. The fan whirred and moved the hot afternoon air around making me comfortable enough to want to close my eyes, in spite of the cushion springs occasional jab. 

I put my glasses on the little bench beside me and soon I was in a world of my own until the front door opened. It was Billy. He came out to check on me. He'd been in a world of his own in front of the television set watching the French Open. 

He sat for a minute and we talked. He went back inside and I tried to drift back in to dreamland. To no avail.

And then I thought orange sherbert! I hoisted myself off the couch and began looking for my glasses. There they are! On the rug! OH NO!! Someone has stepped on them!! Again!!!! Just the way they did last Sunday afternoon! What a coincidence!

Only this time instead of one arm of the glasses being broken the big foot got both of them. 

Glasses are a recent development for me. I've been wearing readers for some time, but have had 20/20 vision otherwise. But the last time I had them checked the eye doctor asked what kind of glasses I was wearing. 

"Reading glasses," I told him, "they're 175."

He said, "According to your exam you need 300's."

No wonder my eyes were hurting.

FYI gardening and glasses do not a happy marriage make. Don't get me wrong. I'm very grateful to be able to see. I love the soothing comfort of putting my glasses on and feeling my body relax from the strain of not being able to see. But composting, digging, mulching, building, weed eating, grass cutting, none of those things lend themselves to wearing glasses. For two Monday mornings in a row I've been in my car on the way to LensCrafters to get my glasses replaced. Billy was thrilled, of course.(not)

 Echart Tolle says that in the West relationships are a "spiritual exercise." 

I tried valiantly to convince Billy that he'd been the one who stepped on my glasses. "You must have done it when you came out to check on me." 

I was very convincing, but not convincing enough. He hadn't been anywhere near them. I honestly don't remember stepping on them and I didn't hear the awful crunch sound. Oh well, all done now.

I was just thinking about my Aunt Velma who's 90 years old. Her eyes are better than mine. Speaking of whom:

 

Here's the feverfew in bloom. She gave me a very small plant from her garden back in the early spring. I have a new sunny spot in my front yard. It was all very odd. I wrote a blog piece about the "canopy." That's what I call the shade we have here on my street. I love the beautiful ancient trees, but I'm human. I must find things to complain about, so I wrote about the lack on sun in my front yard and my neighbors growing young oak tree.
That very day I came home from something and saw tree trimmers. They'd removed a huge oak from her back yard and cut lots of branches from the young oak in her front yard, the young oak that was blocking all my sunlight.
Here's a delicate little daisy I got the same day I got the feverfew. The plant had a bud on it when I put it in the ground back in early April. It bloomed a few days later and has been blooming ever since.

This is the seed pod of a poppy. Aunt Velma has poppies in her garden and I think they are so beautiful. They're like upside down ballerinas dancing high above the other flowers, catching every breeze, showing off their lovely soft red skirts. After they bloom she harvests the seed pods and puts them in a zip lock bag. In the fall she sows them again in her garden and is always pleasantly surprised to see who germinates and flourishes.
Poppies hate to be transplanted, but I got this one very early and on a nice cool day. We'll just have to see how things work out. Maybe next year I'll have poppies in my garden.

It's Memorial Day morning. I've gotten up early. Billy is enjoying sleeping late. He told me last night that he was going to treat this day like a holiday by just doing nothing except catching up on reading the paper, maybe working at his desk a little. 

What a week I had! I've finally gotten my permit from the State and now I can officially sell bread at the Farmer's Markets at the Botanic Garden and Downtown. 

This week was a learning experience. Here I am with my lifelong friend Molly Turner. Her grandmother and my grandmother played canasta together a million years ago. Her mother, Mary Anne, and my mother went to high school together. Molly's father, Pop Turner, was in the military and when he brought his family back home to Covington they stayed in the big old two story house where Mary Anne grew up. I always loved that house with the huge front porch on College Street. 

When Molly visited during the summers she and I would play together. 

We reconnected after years of not seeing each other. When she found out that I was starting this business she invited me to lunch and let me know that she would help me any way she could. 

When my permit came through I sent her an email and collected on her promise. She was as good as her word and better. She showed up at my house on Wednesday afternoon at 1:30 to help load things into the car. The Market at the Botanic Gardens starts at 2 pm. Molly and I loaded tables, bread, money box, price list and ten tons of other stuff into the trunk of her mother's car and off she went to set up while I got myself dressed. 

The first day of the season is always a test. We got off to a slow start, but quickly recovered. I went on to sell everything I had except the one box of sticky buns that the little black ants got in to. We gave them to a friend of hers who works at the Gardens after carefully shooing off the ants. 

But the Saturday morning Farmer's Market Downtown is a very different experience from the Botanic Gardens. It's a much bigger operation. I had no idea what to expect. I had friends who'd told me I'd do very well, but that wasn't enough information about how much bread to bake. Not only that but it starts at 7 am which meant I needed to be Downtown, dressed and ready to sell by opening. Makes me tired just to think about it.
I failed.
I was 7:30 getting there. Tamara Jeanes is in the picture. Here she is learning the process of mixing the dough for the whole wheat loaf. I used this black and white picture because that's the way the world looked at 4:30 am.  Tamara is a real trouper. She helped me on Saturday morning. She came by my house at 4 o'clock in the morning and we went over to St. Anne's on Highland to their little commercial kitchen. I'm renting that kitchen because I can't bake at my house because of the health code. They don't seem to want dog hair in the dinner rolls. Go figure.

Tamara and I went straight to the kitchen, but it's so easy to forget things when you move one kitchen to another. I had to haul my mixer, my wheat grinder, honey, oil, sugar, filling for the sticky buns, loaf pans, bread flour, rolling pin, bread pans, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I forgot a couple of essentials and Tamara had to drive back to my house to get them. Time is money when you're baking bread.

All of it should have been taken on Friday night, but, you know what Billy says. "You live. You learn." Except he says it with a heavy New York accent and learn is pronounced "lue' ween." As in: You live. You lue' ween. You have to shrug your shoulders when you say it. But it's a simple but true statement.

 I really just tried to do the best I could and to stay present with what I was doing, and to 

"lue' ween."

The guy next to us at the Farmer's Market Downtown sold essential oils. I'm so glad he's right next to us. I'm looking forward to learning more about oils and how to use them. In the picture above I'm taking a whiff of an essential oil blend that is designed for sleep. I haven't been sleeping well lately so I traded Craig a box of sticky buns for the little jar of sleep oil. I used it last night and it worked. I slept better than I have in a while.
I thought a picture sniffing the bottle was in order. Molly laughs at my jokes. Therefore I shall have to insist that she volunteer every week.

Saturday morning I slept until 11am. That told me my body was needing rest. I'm a morning person. By Saturday night I knew I was heading into a sinus infection. Last year I was in bed for 8 days! 8 DAYS IN THE SPRING!!! I couldn't work in the yard, I couldn't enjoy my flowers or the beautiful warm days of early May. All because of that sinus infection.

I've gone holistic. I was ready for this. I've studied essential oils and what to use when. I put my eucalyptus and my lemon scented tea tree oil in my humidifier and went to the guest room to sleep. 

I stayed in bed all day Sunday. I used grapefruit seed spray for my nose and the Neti pot with salt and soda. I drank apple cider vinegar in water and felt terrible all day long. Until about 5 o'clock. 

Something broke up inside of me. I took a sudden turn for the better. YEAH! I don't have to be sick!!!

I'm still congested a little, but I  know what I'm doing is working. 

Whenever I get sick the minute I start feeling better I immediately think of something strenuous to do so that I can over-do-it and maybe get sick all over again. All these things come into my mind that I didn't do while I was in bed and I think, well, here's an hour of daylight, why don't I go out in the yard and dig, plant, clean up, take the recycle to the curb, walk the dogs and deadhead the pansies and pull a few weeds.

So, that's what I did.

I go out almost every evening at about 6 o'clock to play in my flower bed. I listen to the robins and doves calling to each other from the giant oak tree that looms over my street.

 Last night was different. It had rained Saturday night and most of Sunday. Martha and I had baked bread on Friday until late afternoon and when I got home I was too exhausted to do anything except cook a little supper and watch a movie with Billy.

I'm figuring I lost about 48 hours of observing of light, leaves, shadows, the wind. I guess that explains why I was a little stunned last night when I went out in my front yard. The canopy had returned.

I've been working in the late afternoons in sunlight. All winter I've done a few things here and there in the yard. I put tulips out after Thanksgiving. I raked leaves, mulched. I planted pansies. And since March, since the first inklings of spring, I've gone out to the yard in the evenings and enjoyed the sunlight. What a gentle time, what a gentle light it is and how precious it was to me. The canopy of thick dense leaves that covers my yard had been pulled back, the trees have been naked, and I've allowed myself to enjoy it, to treasure it to bask in it even though I knew darn well what lay ahead.

And last night was the night. It was all over. No more sunlight for my little garden. 

The trees are flapping at me now. There's a cool spring wind blowing this morning and from where I sit the show is spectacular and alive and full of movement and newness. The leaves are back. And they are dancing. The leaves are back and they are dictating to me what will grow in my front yard. The canopy has returned. 

It was only yesterday when the shadows on my street were thin spindly pitiful specimens of shadows. But look! Now they are large and smooth, cool and dark and they will remain with us until November.

I have all these problems. My neighbor has planted an oak tree in her front yard. I can't believe how much the former sapling has grown since we moved in 3 years ago. By next year the tree will loom over the little strip of dirt where I grow basil, chives and marigolds. 

Yesterday morning when the rain was coming down in buckets this same neighbor was out in my front yard, umbrella in hand, bending over to get my New York Times out of a mud puddle. She sloshed to my front porch and tossed it in out of the rain. What a kind gesture! And yet her graceful little oak tree plots evil against my stubby, desperate marigolds.

Things are out of control. The world is doing its thing. Grackles and sparrows are eating my bird seed. My neighbor's oak tree is stealing my sunlight. My face has wrinkles. And I myself am a mere form, and all this work that I do is just like me. It is being born so that it can die. The transmutation of forms, from one form to another; that is all I see.

I went to Covington a couple of weeks ago to do some work in my Aunt Velma's garden. If obsessions can be inherited then I guess that's where I got mine. Her perennial bed was born about 60 years ago.
When I first got interested in gardening, I was in my twenties and I was crazy about growing vegetables. She said, "Melinda, that's exactly how I got started. But watch out for flowers. Once you grow a flower you won't want to grow anything else."
I'll never forget those words. They were so true!
And her flower garden is her passion and has been low these 60 years. Now she's 90 years old and there so much she simply can't do any more.
As I was leaving she spoke. Her brow strained, she peered into the rich composted soil, into her garden, seeing but not  seeing. She said– not to me, not  to anybody–she just said, "When I die and Davie get's this place he'll probably just mow all of this down." She extended her arm out over the beautiful garden, her blood, her sweat, her vision, the journal of her life.
It was as if she spoke to test the waters, to brace herself for the inevitable.

I don't know why, but I guess I got scared. I laughed and said, "The good thing about that is that you won't be here to see it."

And we paused together in silence. A ninety year old gardener has learned the lessons of the garden. The grass withers. The flower fades.

I recently read Eckhart Tolle's book, THE POWER OF NOW. It was a tremendous spiritual experience for me. The now is liberation from the ghosts of the past and freedom from anxiety about the future. Now is all we have.
So now, really now, I am watching the dappling light and shadows dancing outside my window and listening to the deep hollow music of the windchime that hangs at the corner eave. And I accept. I accept. I accept.

 It is what it is.

Grackles, sparrows, and all.

(click here to watch my slide show. that's me singing in the background, my favorite melancholy melody Sao Gan.)

I took these pictures over a period of weeks beginning with that wonderful early March snow. I think they tell the tale of spring unfolding in my neighborhood and in Shelby Forest where Blue and I take our walks.

Last week I took Blue out to Shelby Forest. We took a walk down to Pioneer Spring which is about a mile and a half into the woods. I'm learning to be alone. I'm learning to be silent. I'm learning the wisdom of stillness finally. I love the woods in the early, early spring when only the early early plants are coming up. Nothing compares with the cold beauty of the deep red flower of the trillium. They're so plentiful in the unspoiled woods here in West Tennessee, but wild places are rarer an rarer. 

Blue ran up and down the bluffs. Occasionally I'd lose sight of him, not for long. He watches me the way I watch him. He may be high up on the bluff almost hidden behind a tree, but he hears my steps and senses my direction. It's clear to me that his primary purpose is walking with me, following me, being my companion, and exploring the forest floor and the clear running creek beds are pure ecstasy for him, but they are also secondary. 

It's been a long time since I've written here on my blog. I started to post that I was on a sabbatical of sorts and that I'd be back in a few months, but that didn't happen. So, I have no idea if people have just given up on me, lost interest, figured I'd just run out of things to say. 

But this winter has been the longest winter of my life. That sounds negative, but for me at this stage in my life it's been anything but negative. I'll post the story later in the week, but for now, I feel like spring myself. I was asleep, dormant, but now it's time for another season.

(click the picture to enlarge the image)


Billy and I had agreed we'd get up and go to church this morning, but when the alarm went off an apathy set in, a familiar fog. We'll be Downtown at our church twice in the coming week. Lord, make me holy, but just not right now, not this morning.
We've also been at church several times all ready this week attending functions with the PB. For anyone who might be reading this a PB is a Presiding Bishop. Our Presiding Bishop is Katherine Jeffers Schori who was elected in 2006. She is the first woman to hold the position. She has a Phd in oceanography and is a pilot herself. Her daughter is an Air Force Pilot! She's been here in Memphis this week. It's all been very exciting. She and Obama represent the new world order, an order that gives voice to all people and doesn't dismiss the voice of the poor, the powerless and the disenfranchised. They are the very beginning, I believe, of a new consciousness, a healthier consciousness that may heal the wounds of this earth, this broken planet.

I shook myself out of bed and tried to remember my dream. There was something about Sam as a baby. I held him in my arms and in my dream I experienced all the joy of the moment, the joy of holding my son in my arms. He was such an adorable baby, as most babies are, but Sam had a sweetness as an infant that was unusual; a tenderness that came with a power of observation, curiousity and fascination with the world.All of that came to me in my dream.

And in my dream there was a huge maple tree and the children were playing in it. One morning they went to play in it and it was broken off at the trunk. I knew it was irreplacable; that in their lifetimes I wouldn't be able to give them another tree to play in. I was sad. Later there was another scene that had to do with an abandoned town, an ocean, a mountain, Gertie falling into the water and having to be saved. My goodness! I was a busy bee last night.

I put the coffee water on and opened the back door to let the dogs out. It was so nice and warm that I walked out into the back yard with them.

My eyes are on the ground these days whenever I'm in my yard. I'm ever vigilant for signs of spring, little shoots peeking up through the ground. My tulips are visible and I've removed the little markers I put down last winter, markers to keep me from stepping on them. My wild phlox have buds on them, my clematis is climbing out of the dirt and up the light pole, my lenten roses are in full bloom and the gold mound spirea is full of tiny golden leaf buds waiting to unfurl.

I stood in the yard and listened to the chinking windchime in my neighbor's yard and the robin chattering above me. I was absorbed in the moment when my eye caught sight of something on the ground.

(click the picture to enlarge the image)

It is a gift. I don't know where it came from. The wind woke up early this morning and scoured the treetops looking for seeds that were ready to fly. This brave little volunteer surrendered to the call and swirled through the air on the invisible wing of the morning wind. I have no idea how far away the seed pod's mother tree is. I don't know what kind of tree it might become if I pressed it into the ground, put a few bricks around it and waited until summer to check the shape of the leaves.

The color! chartreuse? lime green? It is the color of alive; the color of life. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. I thought about the biology of it all–how the tree is full of all of this information, how it doesn't think about reproduction, life, death or growing. The tree just is and somehow knows how to cooperate with the wind in the spring to spead her seeds abroad knowing that some will land on the street and get brushed aside by traffic, never to see a bit of soft earth. Most of the seeds will land in yards or parks. They'll land in places that will keep them just far enough away from what they need to germinate that they'll rot and go back to the dust from whence we all came. Ocassionally a little seed pod will find it's way to safety and sprout in a flower bed underneath some azaleas and the owner of the flower bed won't even know the little tree is there until the tree is 2 or 3 feet tall. Then a decision will have to be made. I don't even like to think about it.
Occasionally a seed pod is immortalized in photography as this one was. I wonder how her mother and the wind will feel about that–––