A Woodturner's Dream

It is a woodturner’s dream down here in Florida. Piles of downed tree trunks and limbs have been hauled to the front of most yards since the hurricane. I have just such a friend in NYS who should really be down here with a truck driving from house to house, picking up the best pieces for future live oak bowls or platters. She would have raw material to last for years.

T is fixing our privacy fence, a key component for staying sane in these close Florida developments. Many fences came down in the high winds, so stacked fence panels also sit at the curb, waiting. I am happy our fence still stands. Sneaking a peak at our neighbors’ backyards this week seems almost indecent. I do NOT want them to see ours! We are on waiting lists for various repairs to roof and pool areas. We slowly wait for civilization to return our teeny part of the world to what passes as normal...for us.

We were lucky. Our neighborhood was only without power for one and a half days. Our daughter’s subdivision was without for nearly 5 days. There are still places in the county (and definitely the state) where households will be without electricity for weeks. T and I still don’t have internet or cable. First world problems…

Our daughter’s family chose to stay in their house during the dark days. They managed in a semi-camp mode with gas grill, candles, flashlights, and bottled water. They charged their phones sitting quietly in their cars, in the driveway. Our grandson, N, received a few Lego kits that kept him busy.

When we got electricity back our 13 year-old granddaughter opted to stay with us for a couple days. It was fun. We made jewelry and ate ice cream. Best of all, we had her all to ourselves for a while. As long as we live, none of us will forget this hurricane or our time together.

The worst hit us between 2 and 4 a.m., early Sunday morning. What a cruel time for a storm to hit! All you can do is lie in the dark, unable to see the direction of the wind or the damage wrought, but hearing it nonetheless. The wind was ferocious, absolutely petrifying in the fullness of terrible, destructive power. Sometimes it sounded like a train was coming straight towards us. We were ready for anything. Now I am tired. 

I think of refugees; how hard their lives must be. They are left with so little. How do their children pass the time? How is their food cooked? When will civilization bring hope and normalcy back to their lives? What IS normal, after you have suffered so much?

Palm trees surrendered some skin and fruit - made for a nice photo, I thought

Down the Chute

In 1949, my parents moved into a house in Northern Indiana with my two older sisters. Mom and Dad were raised during the Great Depression, but reached adulthood during World War II. They grew up hard and they grew up fast. That pretty much explains THEIR generation!

Our house was a teeny, one story, two bedroom, house. A breezeway connected the house to a one car garage. I was born in 1951. When my brother Freddy came along in 1955 the breezeway was converted to a third bedroom for the three girls. There was no dining room, all action took place in the kitchen. The living room was not sacrosanct, the house being too small for a show room. Showy front rooms were for rich people who somehow managed to produce well-mannered children! How did they do that, by the way? We lived loud and large in our living room, with the large wooden TV cabinet serving as focal point. 

Our street was located in a newly constructed housing development filled with identical “starter” homes. Scads of similar neighborhoods were quickly built after WWII to accommodate returning veterans and their families. Everyone on the block was like us; traditional families headed by hard drinking, blue-collar workingmen with religious homemaker wives and lots of sugar charged children, all approximately the same ages. 

The 1950's were a great time to be a child. Since houses were too small for adventure, our mothers made us play outside. A lot. We ran hog wild when we were home from school. No one worried about pedophiles or creepy predators. Our mothers did not shuttle us to extracurricular activities, our "schedules" were wide open. We came and went as we pleased, and the world was our playground.

I am not one of those people who thinks "the old ways" are a superior child raising strategy to today's helicopter parenting, it was just historically different. Benign neglect in our formative years may explain my generation's subsequent hijinks. Our war traumatized parents were so busy drinking, smoking, and trying to approximate normal that they hardly noticed us baby boomers were sentient beings. Little did they know we were plotting to take over the world.

I cannot remember any of the families on the block having more than one car. If the mother needed the car she drove the father back and forth to work, otherwise she stayed home. Protestant kids walked to the nearest school. The Catholic kids took a city bus back and forth en masse. I remember it cost a dime each way.

Our house was heated by a large coal burning furnace located in the basement. It was a big, potbellied, fire-breathing monstrosity. I was convinced it was the Devil. Once a year the coal man would come to the house and drop enough coal down the “chute” into the basement coal bin to get us through the winter. Now THAT was a lively racket! It was exciting for us children when the coal man came. The whole process was loud, dirty, and disruptive of normal routine - all excellent things to a child.

Families did not need a second car because industry came to us. We had an egg man who brought us eggs, a milk man who left dairy products outside the front door, and a bread delivery man. The Fuller Brush man supplied us with interesting things like carbolic salve, my mother’s go-to healing potion. The insurance man came to the house to update policies, and the Avon Lady was often calling with her cute little lipstick samples. I REALLY wanted those but Mom wouldn't share. Once a year a traveling photographer arrived to take family photos in our house. 

We had a mailman and a paperboy. Except for the Avon Lady, all these salespeople were men. The mailman walked from porch to porch carrying a big brown satchel filled with mail. He usually had the same route for years, so families knew their mailman by name. In those days before credit cards, the paperboy stopped by his customer's houses weekly to collect cash payments. It always embarrassed me to answer the knock and find the paper boy staring at me from the other side of the door. Aack, a young boy at the door wanting money! I wouldn’t speak to him and he certainly didn't speak to me. I would yell “Ma, the paper boy is here!” and then leave him standing outside while I made a quick getaway. 

Kid World was a separate society. Adults were weird, except for grandparents who took us to the Dairy Queen for a phosphate or a Dilly Bar. Grandparents were okay. They knew we were sentient and they thought we were cute. 

This house still exists, though quite a bit worse for wear. I often wonder if there is any trace to be found of the original occupants?

What was the first house you can remember living in?

My first home, circa 1958

Seeing and Not Seeing

I love Christmas. I love everything about it except for the rampant materialism. I DO like giving and receiving presents, though. I am not the kind of person who is against giving Christmas presents. I am absolutely, 100% FOR presents.  What I am against is wanton excess - unless, of course, it is displayed on the front of your house for the world to see.

Most of our neighbors started putting up the outside Christmas decorations the weekend after Thanksgiving. I really want to bitch and moan in a self-righteous, disapproving way about how early they get their Christmas on; I certainly feel cranky about that issue. But I think not. Not this time, anyway. I get tired of being self-righteous and judgmental. Today I am going to take a break.

In fact, I love seeing normal, everyday people decorating their houses. We could all benefit from using our imaginations occasionally. I am encouraged when the Average Joe is inspired to spend a few precious hours on his/her day off decorating the house. I think of outside Christmas decorations as legitimate folk art.

I have this wacky idea that most people have a need to express themselves creatively. I first experienced the "public display variety" of self-expression when I was a child, back in the 1950’s. On June 14 (Flag Day) all us neighbor kids would take rolls of red, white, and blue crepe paper and decorate our bikes. I lived in one of those post-WWII housing developments where all the parents were the same age and each house was filled with rambunctious baby booming children. My friends and I would then get on our fabulous patriotic bikes and parade our handiwork around the block in a proud and colorful parade. We were so freakin' cute!

When my mother was in the assisted living home each resident decorated the outside of her or his door with signs, dried flowers, wreaths, and more. Each door was different and decorations changed with the seasons.

The residents clearly wanted us to see their doors. But you know, there is a little bit of Miss Havisham in all of us as we age. At first glance those doors seemed super damn creepy to me! I have an overactive imagination. Crocheted Santas seemed to be staring blankly into my eyes as if trying to steal my soul. Wildly perky dancing reindeer invited me to come hither. And that was just at Christmas. At Easter there were ratty birds nests affixed to some doors. Crazy felt and wire birds challenged me to look deep into their googly eyes. And the signs said things like, "Come In!"

Honestly, it was hard not to look the other way and not see them at all. I made a sincere effort to fight that urge. I could easily have looked at each door with a critical eye and been put off because I was not really looking at the doors with a mind to see them. I was blinded by my fear of aging, my fear of sickness and of death.

What a coward I was. I was only visiting that place. Those old folks were living their final days and facing those fears head on. They were trying to let their light shine in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The least I could do was look at their parade of handiwork.

I tried to enjoy those doors and really "see" what the residents were showing me, because in a real and tangible way they were presenting me with a gift. Being judgmental is unseemly at best. In the context of receiving a gift it is always bad manners.

I was an art student back in the day. I had a professor who tried to teach us there is no such thing as bad art, there is only art you do not understand. He was trying to introduce us to abstraction at the time. Making us rethink our perceptions was a helpful exercise in that context. It challenged us to take a deeper look and get beyond our knee-jerk expectations of what art is "supposed" to be. I am not sure if he was right about there being no bad art, but I liked the sound of it. I still do.

His concept freed me from some youthful conceits and those stubborn literary hang-ups that were keeping me from really "seeing" the purely visual. Art doesn't have to tell a story. It is more than simply illustration. It can stand alone, without context. Once I surrendered to the visual I suddenly started seeing art everywhere. And I was drug free, dammit! Well, most of the time. :)

So…I like nothing better than driving through our usually homogeneous subdivision streets during this time of the year, oohing and aahhing my way down each block. I silently thank each householder for taking the time to entertain me, for wowing me, for strutting their creative stuff.  

Everyone does it differently. Some houses are garish, some are beautiful. Most of these houses shine in living color, others are resplendent in snowy white. A few VERY special ones are ridiculously over-the-top and I would drive ten miles to see one of those - with or without my grandchildren.

Standards and good taste be damned! You may not decorate as I do, but if you choose to decorate your house (or your door...) for the holidays you simply cannot do it wrong in my book. I approve! Go wild! Because if not now, when?"

Not the least bit creepy, right?

Good Grief and the Good Earth

What is this thing they call dirt in Central Florida?  It looks like sand mixed with a little topsoil to me.  You should have seen my face when I first dug up a clump of "grass" only to find salt and pepper underneath trying to pass as dirt.  I was perplexed.

I am spoiled when it comes to soil.  I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's in the Midwestern corn belt.  The dirt was dark and rich and vital. If you stuck a seed in the ground it would never fail to grow. My sweet Mother had a vegetable garden as well as flowers.  Getting things to grow was never a problem for her.  When I was a little girl, I liked to follow her around to see what she was going to do next. She was everything to me back then.  I knew if I stuck close to her, interesting things would happen.

Outside in late spring or early summer, she would sometimes keep me out of her hair by giving me a packet of zinnia seeds to plant. They would most definitely sprout and grow into beautiful flowers.  They were my flowers.  I helped them grow from tiny seeds.  It was magical.  That is probably when I first caught the gardening bug.  Thank you, Ma!

When T and I first moved to upstate New York, we would often go for long drives in the country to compensate for living our lives as worker bees in town.  We could not help but notice the soil when the NYS farmers would till their fields. Those Upstate New York fields were filled with large rocks.  How in the world they manage to plant crops I will never know.  Apparently it is a constant struggle because with freezing and thawing the ground keeps pushing up rocks from the deepest depths of the earth.  If you notice a preponderance of lovely stone walls and fences in NYS it is because each year the farmers have to pull big stones and slabs of rock out of the fields so they can plant seeds. They have to do something with those piles of rocks. Consequently, stone fences are what they used to mark their property lines and field borders.  It must have been especially hard and discouraging work for the early settlers with their simple tools.  Thankfully they stuck with it and figured out how to work that stubborn land. They created beautiful stone fences with the rocks and stones.  The results are unique and amazing, well worth the effort. 

Once we moved out of town and into the country we got serious about perennial gardening.  In addition to removing rocks, we enriched the heavy clay soil on our land.  T was still young back then.  He did some impressive "double digging" for numerous perennial beds. We read gardening books.  We badgered other gardeners with questions. We made mistakes. We figured it out. We changed. We learned.

The first year on that land my Mom came to visit and brought us small, old-fashioned yellow bearded irises she dug out of her own garden.  She also brought us a start from her infamous trumpet vine.  The original plant had been in her father's garden.  She took a cutting from his trumpet vine before he died in 1961 and she kept it alive all those years.  Those were the plants we started with.  

For years we mulched with composted horse manure in order to improve that soil.  Is there anything more comforting than having a mountain of composted horse manure delivered to and dumped on your property?  As I said, we lived in the country.  It was fully composted, so it did not smell. No one ever complained about our manure pile. I figured they wished they had one, too.  Who wouldn't? 

We spent every weekend for 6 weeks each spring shoveling shit into our wheelbarrow and then hauling it all over our land to mulch the flower beds.  Eventually the mountain became a mole hill.  When it was gone, I would plant pumpkin seeds in the good dirt that remained and it became the source for our Halloween pumpkins. 

I am assuming our current HOA will not allow us to have a mountain of composted horse manure delivered to our front yard in this subdivision in Central Florida.  Bummer.  Where would we put it?  In the garage?  Oh, that IS an evil thought.  Please do not let me do that.  Instead, we must buy our composted cow manure in bags, for crying out loud. Like normal people. How did it come to this?

So here we are starting over, not knowing the land nor understanding the soil. Again.

I get up each morning and stroll out through the lanai, peering out of our screened-in "birdcage" to stare at the new plantings in the back yard, imagining they have grown overnight.  I need to get my fat ass out the screen door and commune with those plants!  I need to walk the land, and stop thinking of it as just a small yard.  The Good Earth deserves more respect.  I need to surrender to this sandy soil and figure out what likes to grow in it. 

A friend once gave me a button that said "I don't know where I am going, but I'm on my way!"   It made me smile because it was so true.  I like to think this is me at my best, aching and floundering; slouching towards change much like Yeats' rough beast from Bethlehem. 

Up North I had daylilies of every type and color I could find. The wild ones started blooming in late June.  I thought wild daylilies were the most beautiful wildflower of all; however, now that I have seen Maypops in the wild at Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont, Florida, wild daylilies may have to try harder to get my vote.  Maypops are also called passionflower vine.  The Latin name for Maypops is "Passiflora incarnata!"  I think you get the picture.

Once the wild daylilies were spent Up North, one hybrid variety after another would bloom through the end of August.  I loved my daylilies.  For 9 long months of every cold, gray year I waited for them.  When they poked their way out of the earth and started growing, I was happy.  I miss them like an old friend.  I heard rumors there are varieties that grow in zone 9.  I am not sure if I believe it because I have yet to see a daylily down here. 

The last ones I saw were Stella D'Oro daylilies just starting to bloom at a South Carolina rest stop on our way down to Florida in late March 2014.  I distinctly remember how happy I was to see them!  We were homeless, frazzled, and on the road.  And then I saw them.  I trilled to T: "Oh, the daylilies are starting to bloom here!"  Then I thought, "Oh yeah, WE don't HAVE any daylilies." I got back in the car and we resumed our journey to Central Florida, slouching all the way.

I mourn the loss of my sweet Mother's yellow bearded irises. That is another plant you cannot grow down here.  Now that Mom is gone, I wish I could have brought some with me.  However, I know they would not have survived. Instead, I am planting Louisiana irises in a wet area next to the house.  I think I will like them more than bearded irises anyway.  They have a more elegant shape.  My mother would understand.

I am quite happy to be free of that damned trumpet vine.  I loved my Grandpa, but his legacy plant quickly became a greedy gut, invasive weed that wanted to take over my soul. I was tired of fighting it. 

I actually bought three Stella D'Oro plants last month and put them in the ground.  Not to worry, I enriched the soil. Stella's are small, but they are the mighty workhorses of the daylily world.  If any daylily can make it in Central Florida it will be Stella. 

Unfortunately, it is only late May and my daylilies already seem to be burning up.  I am not used to watering daylilies.  I am more of a "survival of the fittest" gardener.  But I have been watering these.  I am going to give them my all.  If I cannot have a daylily on my land I fear I might have to rethink just about everything I believe to be true and good.  Then again, maybe it is time to rethink everything.  Canna lilies are good.  It is also true that I can grow them here.

Here is a photo of everything I believed to be true and good circa 2013 in Upstate New York:

Here is Ma's old fashioned yellow bearded iris:

Here is a photo from behind the naturalized "drop-gardening" area looking up towards our old garage.  Refer to my Flower Lust post for more about my "drop-gardening" technique.  The house is hidden behind that Crimson King maple tree on the right. If you look real hard you will see my Grandpa's trumpet vine blooming up in front of the brown garage like a small tree.  That garage was great, too.  It had garage doors in front (facing the street) and in back (facing the gardens).  Brilliant design for riding lawnmowers:

 

Below is a better shot of that damn Trumpet Vine.  T built a pergola for it to climb over, but it really wanted to climb up over the roof and embed its sticky suckers under and over the roofing tiles.  It did such damage to the garage.  We had to cut it back, hard, every year; but still it persisted. It was WAY stronger and more determined than we were.  It dropped seeds that grew all over the ground in front of it, and in every garden bed close by.  They always grew and their roots were deep.  Trumpet Vine can serve as an inspiration to us all but in someone else's garden, please.

Joining the Bourgeoisie?

OMG – I find myself watching the neighbors through the blinds in my room.   How did it come to this?  

The neighbor to our right is a middle-aged woman with two teenaged children and a dog.  There might be a husband, but I have never seen him.  She seems very nice.  Of course nearly everyone in the South seems "very nice.”  It is hard for a Northerner like me to discern if she is really nice or just well mannered.  When we first moved in she came over and introduced herself and immediately started telling us the details about other neighbors on the block.  Not all the neighbors, just the white ones.  She did not tell me any information about the tattooed Hispanic guy who drives a Harley.  She did not tell me about the two black families who live on the street.   That raised a bit of a red flag with me.  If you remember from my May 29, 2014 post “Oy Vey, and I Really Mean It!” I am uncomfortable with living in a suburban neighborhood.   I do not want to know the details about my neighbors.   The neighbors on our left are our kind of people – they ignore us and have never even waved or spoken to us.   I am pretty sure they wish we would disappear.  I can relate to that sentiment.

So how did I develop this new spying behavior?   My room, aka office/quiltmaking/grandchild’s playroom, faces the street and during the day I keep the blinds open to let natural light in.   My computer is set up in front of the window, because otherwise the room seems dark and gloomy.  As I work on the computer I keep catching sight of Next Door Lady walking her dog, and going across the street to another neighbor’s house.  Every morning she goes over there around the same time.  You can imagine how intriguing this window on the world is to a retired woman with no friends and time on her hands.  I cannot help but notice.  I cannot help but wonder why is she going there every day?  She lets herself in the house and she always has her dog in tow.  There is another dog that lives across the street.  Maybe she is feeding it?  Next Door Lady never stays in their house long.  If I see Across the Street Family outside I inevitably see Next Door Lady walk over across the street and interact with the family’s dog or pick up their toddler.  Are they close friends, or maybe family?   Does Across the Street Lady like spending so much time with Next Door Lady, or does she cringe when she sees Next Door Lady hightailing it across the street whenever she ventures outside?  I wonder what the story is on the tattooed biker down the street?  Why am I thinking about this stuff?

I might move my computer away from the window.  Life is too short.