I love my purple house, but I may love my plants just a little bit more. As with my house, my garden may not appeal to someone with a manicured vision for a landscape. Borage, an annual herb, reseeds when you whisper its name. Because I converse with my plants daily, borage roams all through my yard creating paths that only lasts a few months. I’m constantly pulling out the spent plants to clear the way for a new generation, hence my garden offers an ever changing view and the chance for a surprise find like clippers or coffee mugs. My love of gardening doesn’t stem from hours wandering through the peonies in my grandmother or mothers’ garden. Mine began sixteen years ago when my son, Matthew and I moved into our house, and I began the assault on the ivy and junipers. Two years and three broken shovels later, I began to fill my yard with herbs and flowers and vegetables. My grandmother used to talk about the gardens her mother had when she was a child. By the time I lived close enough to my grandparents to have actual memories; they lived in a mobile home park with a tiny lawn and green shrubbery. Whenever I visited, my grandpa used to let me mow their twelve by seventeen rectangle of green with his push mower. If I stayed for a week, I mowed every other day. When I was ten, I made my grandma a hanging macramé basket out of jute for one of her geraniums. We watched the robins dismantle my masterpiece fiber by fiber. I remember my mom planting a vegetable garden one spring. I helped her search for the harvest of green beans and tomatoes amidst the Bermuda grass. I don’t think we had vegetable gardens after that one failed experiment. When Matthew started grade school, I decided to give garden tours of my yard to his class each year. I’d plan educational activities such as how to make lemon verbena tea and what slime trails around the plants meant. As a thank you, one of the classes painted rocks like lady bugs. Aphids steer clear of my roses with one pound lady bugs on patrol. For the tours, I donned a Lady Godiva wig, wore a long flowery dress and his kindergarten teacher christened me “Mother Earth”. The name stuck. Once, I was walking down the hall at the school, as myself, when two second graders approached me from the opposite direction. A few feet before we passed each other, one girl nudged the other, pointed at me and said, “That’s Mother Earth.” As if she’d let her friend in on a big secret. The notoriety I could not attain when I attended school now found me with celebrity status, albeit as a fictional character. Recently, a woman I know came into the plant nursery where I work. (I know how to feed my addiction.) She told me her son saw me walking to the post office one day and informed her that I was Mother Earth as if he’d let her in on a big secret. I’m sure he doesn’t know my real name, and I think he may be the tail end of the group familiar with my legacy. Even though I don’t give garden tours to eager young hearts any longer, my garden continues to grow and change and evolve as I like to think I do. Oh, sometimes I regress but there’s always another round of borage ready for me to savor and to bring a jolt of enthusiasm and mystery as to where the path will take me next... published 5-17-09 Childhood Diets Fed Their Future Careers My sister, Jenny, used to eat roly poly bugs when she was eight months old. No one tried to stop her. As the oldest of five, one of my responsibilities was to lookout for the younger ones which meant making sure none of them put anything in their mouths they might choke on. Jenny had six teeth and chewed up the sow bugs just fine. I did have one concern though. We were Jewish then and I remember wondering if sow bugs were Kosher. Jenny would crawl to the corner of the family room for her snack. Our house was old and no matter how often these areas were swept and mopped, “stuff” accumulated. The “stuff” in this particular corner happened to be a tasty morsel that looked like raisins. Jenny doesn’t remember her pallet for pill bugs but feels this may explain her love of nature and wilderness excursions. We never went camping when we were kids so this explanation seems plausible. I remember my brother, Joe, bit the head off Fred, one of our pet turtles. We had lots of those little turtles when I was growing up and always named them Fred. Our last Fred died in Texas when we moved from Tennessee to California . We stopped at a service station and an ancient man pumped our gas. Jenny leaned out the car window and said, “Fred died and we stuffed him in the trash can.” The old man must have been used to deaths in Texas and subsequent trash can burials because his only reaction was a toothless smile of condolences. I’m not sure why we never got any more Fred’s. Either they became illegal or my parents were tired of replacing them every six months. We had German shepherds when we were growing up and although none of us ate any part of our dogs, Jenny would teeth on Big Sam’s ear. We followed the tradition of the Fred’s by naming all of our dogs, Sam placing adjectives to delineate who we were talking about: Big Sam, Little Sam, Smart Sam, Female Sam. We could do anything we wanted to our Sam’s and none of them ever minded. My sister, Rachel and I, would brush Big Sam’s teeth with a toilet bowl brush and an entire tube of toothpaste. We’d drag him around the yard as our sled dog and attempt dressing him in our mother’s nightgowns. Sam wasn’t crazy about the lipstick but never growled or snapped at our antics. My mother wasn’t so lucky. I remember Rachel and me jumping on our bed when we were supposed to be falling asleep. Sam, of course was a participant in our festivities. My mom stormed into our room yelling and wielding a hand to spank our butts. Sam bared his sparkling clean teeth in our defense. My mom was shocked and we were self-righteous in the way three and five year-olds are: we taunted our mother by hanging on Sam’s neck, daring her to try and grab us. My mom banished Sam from our bedroom at bedtime. I asked my mom if Rachel or I ever ate anything unusual and alive. She said we were city girls from Chicago and steered clear of creepy crawly things. She did remind me of one more eating story I’d forgotten about. The youngest, Jamie, bit a night crawler in half when he was three and slurped it down. My mom rushed him to the emergency room because she was overprotective. You’d think after five kids, she’d be used to this sort of behavior but he was the baby of the family. My son, Matthew, never ate any bugs although the random parking lot cigarette butt made its way to his mouth every so often. Maybe that’s why he smokes now just like the way Jenny likes the outdoors and Joe’s planning a trip to the Galapagos Islands . published 6-14-09 With Luck, She'll Always Have Hope My son told me when he was seven that he was good at math because it was in his name. “Matthew,” I said, “don’t ever quiz me in public with anything to do with numbers.” Counting back change without the aid of a cash register is my only mathematical accomplishment. My problems with math began in (the) third grade. My class had weekly timed tests on addition. Each week a new number was added. I cruised through unscathed until the eight’s appeared and then…disaster. I couldn’t add 8 + 5 or 6 or 7 and a giant red F landed in my workbook. I ripped out the page and flushed it down the toilet at school. I cheated my way from the nine’s through twelve’s. I had no choice. I couldn’t risk another F and more missing pages. What if the teacher collected my workbook or my parents feigned interest in my school work? Matthew never suffered this particular anxiety. He excelled in math. And because of his math skills, he plays poker and wins. I’m not crazy about the poker lifestyle: vitamin D deficiency, cigarette smoke and the stereotypes I hold of seedy people in back alley card rooms. But Matthew has passion for the game and that’s what I admire. I wish I had that kind of feeling for something in my twenties or thirties or early forties even. I have a passion for plants and words but I’ve never been as focused as Matthew. As a child, he honed in on other activities becoming obsessed with them. Chess. I wasn’t much of an opponent even when he was ten and a computer program replaced me. My self-esteem increased when he grew bored with ‘Chess Master’. He played a variety of video games on Nintendo and Play Station growing up and would eventually beat all the levels of all the games. Now he plays poker. He reads books about poker players, strategies of the game, critiques poker movies and knows the odds of every hand he gets dealt. I can only grasp a fraction of what he explains to me about a particular aspect of the game, but I don’t miss the excitement and zeal behind his words. He hopes to be a professional poker player. A few months ago, we were talking about this hope he said something to me that I think about a lot. He said, “Hope is something that people of very few professions share. Actors, artists, writers and gamblers.” He said these are the only people “who have a chance of turning nothing into a fortune with a small stroke of luck.” We agreed that some skill was needed in his four named professions but after that luck played at least a supporting role. I had this happen to me last week. I applied for a $1000.00 writing Fellowship in January. I sent in the required writing but didn’t win. My writing was not good enough to win the Fellowship but it was good enough to be one of three alternates. I stayed hopeful. I wrote the date on my calendar of when I could be attending the workshop as a Fellow if someone dropped out. Matthew offered his assistance and asked for the names and addresses of the winners. I declined to furnish him that information. Last week, I received an e-mail that one of the winners got a job and couldn’t attend the workshop and one Fellowship was open. Three names were put into a jar and mine was drawn. My writing got me to a certain point but luck and pure luck alone got me the Fellowship I was hoping I’d get. What were the odds? I don’t know. Ask my son. published 7-12-09 Could Gay Boyfriend be 'Binker' grom Childhood? When my younger sister was three, she had an imaginary friend. A real imaginary friend. I felt jealous so I got one too, but mine was pretend and I stole him out of a Winnie-the-Pooh poem. I didn’t even make up a new name for him, “Binker,” exactly like the title of the poem. I can’t remember the name of my sister’s imaginary friend, but I do remember they did everything together. Played dress-up. Had tea parties. Chased the dog around the coffee table. All I did was talk about Binker. I wanted people to know I had a make believe friend. I guess in my psychological development, I had skipped over the make up friend part or maybe I was busy warming up a bottle for my new baby brother. I tried really hard to make Binker into a real imaginary friend but I couldn’t. Imaginary friends have to come naturally or people think you’re making them up. I’m a grown up now and I make up people in my head from time to time but now I’m more original. My girlfriend and I make up imaginary boyfriends. We don’t mention these boyfriends to our real boyfriends. I’m not sure they’d understand. We talk about what our imaginary boyfriends do with their time. What kind of accents they have and how they treat us perfectly. Our imaginary boyfriends aren’t jealous of our real boyfriends and they never question any decision we make. I used to have a gay boyfriend. He didn’t know it of course and could only be my boyfriend in my imagination since in reality, he was gay. I met him when he was with his boyfriend who was later to become my friend’s gay boyfriend. My friend and I used to talk about double dating. I was working in a plant nursery when we first met. He requested a water hyacinth. As I reached into the pond to pull out the plant he said, “You should be in a Monet painting, not working here.” How did he know that’s where I longed to be? Having a gay boyfriend is a lot like having an imaginary friend but you get to see him sometimes. My gay boyfriend said other things to me no straight man ever did. He told me once that every time he saw me it was like a first date. Actually, he told this to someone else who told me. He also told someone else that if there was an inkling of a chance he wasn’t gay; I would be the one to set him on the path to heterosexuality. Now I knew this would never happen because he was gay, but still, I felt kind of happy when I heard this. My gay boyfriend and I had an unexplainable inner connection. I saw him infrequently but when we did run into each other, we spoke on a level below the normal surface of reality. If only he wasn’t gay, I’d reflect after we parted. And then he moved away. Across the country with his boyfriend, and he didn’t even call me to tell me good-bye. I began to think he never really was my gay boyfriend. As if I’d made the whole thing up in my mind the same way I did when my little sister had her imaginary friend. I think maybe I should give Binker a second chance. published 8-9-09 Except the Kitchen Sink: A Pack Rat Confession I’m a recovering packrat. I used to proclaim that being a packrat was a fact I couldn’t change. Reasons for my ‘problem’ varied. My favorite being that I must have been denied things in a past life so I felt the need to accumulate as much as I could in this one. And did I accumulate. I collected ones of things, which may not even fit the definitions of a collection: a loom so I could learn to weave someday, a book on how to make pine needle baskets, a pair bowling shoes because I bowled, sometimes. They were purple. My house is old and built when porches mattered. Unfortunately for a time, my porch took the brunt of my affliction. I once had a three piece Shop Smith spanning the entire left side. When my son, Matthew, was six, he picked up everything he could and barricaded me in the house. Oh, it was cute at first. I stood inside the storm door talking on the phone watching him stack a box fan, two fold-up chairs, a bag of aluminum cans, a shovel, plastic pots and other junk I can only now remember because I took a picture. The items traveled down the steps and onto the path and sidewalk in front of my house. When the door wouldn’t budge, I bolted out the back before he started on the treasures scattered around the yard. My husband at the time was not a good influence. He may have been worse than me. Volkswagen parts half buried in the dirt on the side of the house when we no longer owned any Volkswagens. Assorted nuts and bolts and rusty tools which may just be a guy thing. I don’t know. We’d go to yard sales every weekend and purchase our way to happiness. Or so I thought. Under the guidance of another accumulator, I broke the cycle. I got a divorce and I purged, purged, purged. I rented a dumpster and made a lot of trips to the Salvation Army but not as a buyer. I even got rid of some books if I had duplicates. Matthew said we weren’t going to have anything left. I assured him his bed and dresser would remain if he behaved. I traded the kitchen table for some sewing. The table sat on the porch a week before it traveled across the street. Matthew never asked why he had to walk around the table to open the screen door. But as soon as it was missing, he demanded to now why I gave our table away. Funny how it wasn’t an issue until it left. I felt better getting rid of things I never used and only took up space. The energy of so many objects and their future plans oppressed me. And I don’t think Matthew suffered any long lasting psychological effects. He recently moved out of one of his apartments and posted all of his possessions on Craig’s List for free. He gave away everything to strangers and felt good about it. I’d like to think I set that example. Fighting the pack rat hasn’t been easy though. She’s always just one idea away from a craft I think I’d like to pursue. I still collect anything I can use in my garden but that’s different, sort of. At least I’m not dragging home plastic soccer goals to grow peas on to. And, my porch has been freed. I have a rocker, geraniums, begonias, petunias, wind chimes and two chairs. Okay, if you look in one corner, I have a kitchen sink I plan to install someday. I said it hasn’t been easy. I’m just happy I can relax on my porch and watch the hummingbirds battle without the legs of the rocker getting caught on a stack of magazines I bought for a quarter. published 9-6-09 That was my last official column for the Chico Enterprise Record. So sad, but I will keep writing and put my own columns following a similar format of family stories. Next one to appear in November... |