vegetable plants

I got these plants, under lights, in my basement...

Vegetable plants. Honest.

But here's the thing. I have more vegetable plants than my garden needs this year. These will be ready riiight around April 15, which is as early as you (if you're in my area) should consider planting warm-weather vegetables. So. If you need any of the varieties that I have, let me know and I'll arrange to get them to you. They're $1 each, just to keep things simple. Here's what I've got and how many will be available:

All of these varieties can be seen and mused over at Johnny's Seeds.

Tomatoes
Pink Beauty 18
Gold Nugget 25
Sun Cherry 26
San Marzano 8
New Girl 14

Bell Peppers
Orion (green to red) 19
Sunray (green to yellow) 14

Basil
Italian Large Leaf 25

Let me know if any of you need any of these and I'll reserve them for you.

I hope you're having a lovely spring! Best of luck with your gardens.

~Erin~

worse than his bite

I can imagine why man would domesticate dogs. I imagine that, eons ago, man was a cold, hungry, frightened and lonely type of animal. His major concerns were, undoubtedly, staying warm, finding food, and sleeping in safety. I can imagine him watching the other animals to learn any of their tricks that would be useful to him. I bet he even thought, hey, if we could work together, we could get a lot more done than I can do alone, with my lack of fur and fangs and claws.

So, I can clearly see why, upon finding an untended den of helpless wolf cubs, some enterprising Early Man scooped one up and took it home and began the ages-long process of loving and breeding it into a domestic animal. A pet. Now the nights wouldn’t be quite so cold, hunting would be easier, other animals would keep their distance, and man had himself a friend. All this I can imagine and understand. In those days, a dog was truly an asset to the life of man.

But what I cannot imagine, what I spent ALL the wee hours of this morning trying to understand, is why on earth my next-door neighbors needed to obtain a full-grown, apparently full-blooded German Shepherd and chain him to a tree in their backyard. They aren’t using him for his furry body heat. They aren’t using him to hunt, since their hunting is done at the grocery store. Intruders onto their property would soon realize that any intruding they’d like to do is fine as long as they don’t go within the bare dirt circle the dog has worn around his anchoring tree.

All of this, of course, would be none of my business whatsoever, but for two things. First, about once every couple of weeks, the dog breaks loose, wiggles through a little hole in the fence between our properties and comes after my chickens. Not that he’s ever killed or eaten any of them.

This dog’s back is as high as my waist. But he comes bounding into our yard, rips a hole in the chicken coop, and then the poor, stupid, overbred animal stands there with his tongue lolling out because he doesn’t know what to do next. Over the ages, as some kind of cruel joke, we’ve bred out, at least of this dog, the knowledge of what to do with live food. I appreciate the restraint, to be sure, although I do resent having to fix the coop so often, but I shake my head in wonder at the pathos of the entire situation.

And the other point. Last night, for the first time this year, it was hot enough in our bedroom to want to open the window. Which, after kicking the blankets off and tossing for a while first, I did. I stood for a moment near the open window, feeling the cool breeze, listening to the spring frogs and the birds that were (inexplicably) singing at midnight, and went back to my bed.

And then the dog started to bark. Approximately, I would say, every three minutes or so from then until just before dawn, when it apparently got tired and went off to sleep. Of course, you’re wondering now why I didn’t just shut the window. But three minutes is juuust enough for you to slip away into sleep, to think that whatever the dog was barking at is surely gone now, to hear the chirping frogs, then to hear black nothing…and then the dog would bark again. And the bitter, bitter irony of this whole situation is, that they didn’t get a small dog, the kind that I imagine could fill people’s modern-day needs for dogs, whatever they may be, stress relief or companionship, perhaps. A beagle, or a basset hound would fit the bill nicely. No, they went out and got something large. Something LOUD.

And so I sit here this afternoon, watching the hours till bedtime, hazy in the head from lack of decent sleep, and in my mind is an endless loop of wondering, about Early Man, and wolves, and worthless, loud animals chained to backyard trees...

Maybe tonight I’ll turn on the fan.

the real us

No, we are not (yet) just like the flower farm people. Alas. But here's a great picture of the way things are around here...

Do you wonder what he's going to do with the chicken next?

when I grow up...

I want to be just like these people. What with the big blue barn, and endless flower fields, and barefoot children, and the hats, ahh...

footie pajamas

A wedding dress is lovely

for what it represents

of beauty, youth, and hope.

A christening gown, too,

holds new life and faith

in its lacy folds.

But give me

the open door

of a steamy bathroom,

wet footprints,

and footie pajamas.

With a long zipper

to pull up

past chubby thighs

and round potbelly

beneath a butter-soft,

newly washed chin.

Footie pajamas,

and the moment

when sweet wet curls

and pinkest cheeks

leap up

and go dancing away

to sleep.

up. running.

Finally and at last, the Children's Fashion Workshop is up and running. Click on the picture above to peruse the results of 5+ years of work, frustration, creativity, tears, and fun.

A special thanks to my sister Emily, my unfailing design director, and my husband Jess for tech support. And thanks to my model for (sometimes) smiling.

Okay. Go look!

-E-

passing into gray

I stood on the edge of the fields, where corn stubble formed parallel lines reaching to the tree-lined horizon. I pulled my peacoat tighter against the biting breeze, trying to stand on the balls of my feet so that my high heels wouldn’t sink into the sandy soil of what was once my grandparents’ farm. It was January, the fields were empty, and I stood dressed and ready for another funeral.

I saw myself, a careless child, running barefoot down the black soil between rows of corn or cotton in these same fields. I remembered afternoons spent stooped over in the backyard, trying to let cantaloupe or watermelon juice drip on the ground, really only caring about the warm, sweet taste of summer. Every corner of the place held a little memory for me, my grandmother’s fig trees, grandfather’s vegetable garden, the pecan trees planted decades ago by my uncles and my father.

I wondered, then, about the nature of a place. What, really, does a piece of land mean to us? When my grandparents brought their young family here 60 years ago and began to build a home, did they imagine how ingrained this property would become in the legends and the lives of their grandchildren?

Every summer as I grew up, we took a pilgrimage to the farm. There we spent a weekend or more playing with cousins, eating dinners out of massive pots of food, swatting gnats and getting grubby and happy. If we woke up early enough in the morning, we could help Grandaddy cut okra to take to the farmer’s market. If we went into the kitchen before dinner, Grandmamma would teach us how to roll out dumplings. Before long, a place like this becomes a part of a person’s soul.

As I grew older, my life with my family began to become my life with my husband, with my children, and finally my life with a family of my own. My trips to the farm became less frequent, and less filled with the cousins who by now were growing up as well. And soon, my trips to the farm became sudden, and urgent, and unexpected, but not really. My trips to the farm began to be mostly for funerals.

One by one, the people, the threads that bound me to the farm, were dying. My parents live far away now, my siblings and cousins scattered like dandelion seeds, like the cotton that scantily dots the gray fields after the harvesters have come. I know that we have lives of our own, homes and lands that will become the new legends in our families, but somewhere inside, in a part of myself that I don’t really understand, I ache for the loss of a touchstone of my history.

What need have I go to the farm now? What gathering will there be, now that the last link, my beautiful grandmother, has died? My children will not know this place, with its reaching cornfields, abundant garden, and the branches of the old pecan trees, like arms, always comforting, always sheltering us all. They will not see, except in stories, the flowerbeds my grandmother carefully tended, the grapevines and apple trees shaped by my grandfather’s hands. This place will pass, like an internet link you can no longer click on, into gray. Inactive. A quilt made by hands long dead, that we fold and place in the bottom of a cedar chest so we never ruin it.

I am assured that someone I know will keep the farm. That it will always be there for me to visit if I like. But why? There’s no way to go back. What I knew, what I loved, has gone.

I thought of all this as I stood between the cornfield and my grandfather’s vegetable garden, once beautiful and orderly, now filled with gently swaying weeds. My mother came up behind me, my children’s hands in hers. “It’s time to go,” she said, and I turned away from the fields to go to the last funeral before the farm passes into gray.