Down Time

Wednesday, I worked in the yard all day. I weeded and planted day lillies, and pruned roses, and raked a trash can full of weeds and cuttings and dumped them, and got sunburned on my forearms and otherwise generally exerted myself from about 9:30 in the morning til after 7 p.m. I also needed to take out my garbage-- the wastebaskets in the kitchen and bathroom and laundry room are all full. I needed to change the bag on the litter box. I've started using the tall kitchen bags now and can go a whole week without having to change bags-- I did "shake down" the "contents" and bought myself another day. But after working in the yard all day, I blew it all off. The pile of clothes on my bedroom floor that I emptied out of my laundry hamper and intended to wash Wednesday night are still there. When I do wash them, probably this evening, I will also have to fold up the sleeping bag liner, set of flannel sheets, and the blanket that I pulled out of the dryer and set on top of it weeks ago, intending to fold them later.

But after working so hard in the yard Wednesday, after I got up Thursday morning to give my eldest cat his morning dose of insulin at 8 a.m. and put down food for everybody, I decided I needed some down time, so I went back to bed and slept til noon.

When I woke up again, I mumbled into the kitchen and got something to drink, and assembled a plate of ingredients for single-cracker sandwiches -- Slices of deli ham cut into fourths, slices of Sargento Muenster cheese cut into fourths, and Kashi Party Crackers, the 7-grain variety -- and brought plate and glass back to the bedroom, put the second pillow on the bed and settled back in to read my complimentary copy of "Scottish Life" magazine.

Single-cracker sandwiches are an art form. First off, you can't assemble the sandwich until just before you eat it. Otherwise, the cracker gets soggy from the ham juice. So you've got your ingredients in three piles on the plate. You select the cracker, lay a slice of ham on top of it, and then lay a slice of cheese on top of the ham, and then you eat it. -- The Kashi Party crackers are nice and thin, crisp and tasty. Those and the Red Oval Farm's Stoned Wheat Thins crackers, Carr's Table Water crackers, La Panzanella croccantini and good kosher matzo are about the only crackers I care for. The other 90% of the "crackers" out there are all "too" -- too salty, too cheesy, too artificially seasoned, too full of ingredients I can't pronounce, or any combination of the above, and "saltines" are too much like too salty but otherwise tasteless library paste. For single cracker sandwiches, my cracker of choice is the Red Oval Stoned Wheat, but I can't find a store here in town that stocks them any more, so I had to go with the Kashi Party crackers -- not a bad second choice.

Eating single cracker sandwiches while reading requires a strict protocol. The food is handled solely with the right hand, and the reading matter is handled solely with the left -- You put the book or magazine down and turn the page with the left hand, then pick it back up and continue reading. One doesn't want to get food stains on the pages.

So, I'm snuggled in the bed, appropriately accoutered with kitties, reading my "Scottish Life" magazine, and mentally drooling over the pictures of gorgeous Scottish scenery and their wonderful buildings and I'm reading "the building was begun in 1104 as a hunting lodge by Duke Somebody of Someplace,. . . " (continued on page 78) and I'm thinking, there is absolutely nothing in this entire town that is even 150 years old except the dirt it's built on -- 800 years ago, there was nothing here but buffalo chips and bald prairie.

I'm reading about walking tours between Forres on the Moray Firth coast and Granton-on-Spey in the Cairngorms (continued on page 75) through heather and trees and along pastures, and over stream beds, where there's deer, and birds, and rabbits and foxes, and there's green everywhere you look. And I'm thinking, yeah. I would walk 16 miles through land that looked like that and breath dirt-free air that smells of heather. Oh, yeah. Just let me off at "Lady Catherine's Halt. . ."

I'm reading about the island of Ulva off the Scottish coast (continued on page 73) that is so small you can walk from one shore of it across to the opposite shore in about an hour and a half. It has a population of 12, no cars, and you can only get to it by an aluminum hulled ferry boat that can't carry anything larger than a 4-wheeler motorcycle. It's got a B&B, a tea room, and broadband access (!), and is positively knee deep in utterly gorgeous scenery. It's also hanging way out into the north Atlantic, flapping in the breeze at about the same latitude as the southern tip of Norway, and/or the boundary between the Northwest Territories of Canada and the lower provinces, and I know I'd freeze my appurtenances off in the wintertime, but that doesn't stop me from wishing I could go there and live in a peat-heated stone house with two-foot thick walls, and never come back.

I'm reading about how the MacGregors have had four and five generations of outstanding bagpipers, --- Duncan MacGregor played for Rob Roy on his deathbed and piped him into the next life, and John MacGregor was Bonnie Prince Charlie's piper at Culloden, and here's the thing about bagpipes: You either really really love them, or you really, really can't stand them. There just isn't a middle ground. I first heard the real thing, albeit recorded, when I was a small child, and I had no clue what it was or where it came from, or anything about it except that I liked it. A lot. I was not sat down and told to listen to it. My dad had a record of the Scots Guards massed pipes, drums and regimental band (the really good stuff), which he bought and was listening to because he liked it and I just happened to hear the bagpipes on it, and was drawn to their music as if by a rope around my heart. Bagpipe music does stuff to me that has to be genetic.

Now I'm not talking about those watered-down Irish thingies -- the ullean pipes, with the bellows and the adenoidal pweedly-dweedly-tweedly-deedly. They're all right in their place, but I'm talking knock-down, drag-out, highland pipes -- the kind you can't play indoors in rooms under a certain size because of their armor-piercing capabilities at short range. The kind you can hear over armies fighting with cannons. Now nobody has actually proved that any of my dad's ancestors came from Scotland, but by the same token, nobody has proved that they didn't. My mom's dad was a Jamison, but she has no idea where his people came from. There's all kinds of "sons of James" out there. You can buy them by the gross on both sides of the Tweed, and the spelling of the name is no guarantee as to country of origin. And I'm lying in the bed, looking at the pictures of the guy standing out in the heather playing 100-year-old, FAMOUS bagpipes with silver chasings on the drones, and thinking, Thom Campbell, wouldn't it be just grand if you could come skirling down from Amarillo right this very now and pipe outside my window for about an hour and a half, without the neighbors lynching both of us.

And I'm reading about the Scots Tongue (continued on page 76) that contains luscious words like "blootered" (drunk ), "ramfoozle" (to confuse or bewilder somebody), "smirr" (a light misty rain-- we don't get those here. Here, it's either raining cats, dogs, mice, and bumblebees, or it isn't.), "hoatching," which means extremely crowded, extremely lively, and "dunt" which means to dent, punch, bump or bestow knighthood on (!), and in my mind's ear, I'm thinking of Sean Biggerstaff , the Glaswegian actor who played Oliver Wood, the quidditch captain, in the first Harry Potter movie, and that accent . . . . Oh, that accent. . . I could listen to an accent like that all day and (especially) all night long. . .

And then the author tosses in a quote from The Burns. . .

"But pleasures are like poppies spread:

You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed;

Or like the snow falls in the river,

A moment white -- then melts forever"

Too right, Bobbie, too right, I think, as I turn the last page. I am definitely going to have to scratch together $22.50 and subscribe to this magazine. I wasn't aware that Karen Matheson has a new album out called "Downriver" that I need to troll Amazon-dot -com for, and while I'm at it, I should see if they have that book by Alistair Moffat about the border reivers . . . So, where's my economic stimulus check, Dubbya? -- Get on the stick and lay half a dozen C's on me, man. I got some serious economic stimulating to do here . . . .

Adventures in Gardening.

I work Saturdays through Tuesdays 9 a.m. to 7 p.m, which means ALL my "weekends" (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) are three-day weekends. MOST agreeable. So yesterday, being Wednesday, I worked in the yard all day, from shortly after I gave my eldest cat his morning shot of insulin at 8 a.m. to nearly 7:30 in the evening.

A long-time family friend is moving next month. Her husband was my brother's orchestra teacher in junior high, and they raised four kids here, and we've known them forever. However, her husband passed away several years ago, and all her kids live someplace else, so she's packing up and moving to Colorado Springs where one of her kids lives. She's in her 80's, and at the time in her life where she needs family close. A couple of months ago she told me that she had "a lot" of day lillies in the "yard" of her duplex and said I could have some if I'd come get them. So yesterday morning, I suited up and trundled over to Francis' place to do the deed. I ended up digging all of them up, taking over half of them for myself, and spacing out the rest of them evenly along her walkway that leads to the alley (they were all wadded together at one end). So I got home with a 2 x 3 box and two paper grocery bags full of day lillies. I planted about half of them in the flower bed in my front yard and planted the rest of them in my rose bed in the back.

My front yard has been a work in progress for about 7 years now. I rent the "B" side of a duplex, and at some point in its checkered history, somebody got the bright idea of turning the approximately 10 x 14 "front" yard of my side into a "rock garden" by putting about half a ton of those (expletives deleted) little white rocks all over it and laid out some abstruse design with about a pallet-full of bricks evidently left over from when they built the duplex. However, they neglected to lay down any plastic weed barrier first, and after about 20 years of total neglect, all those little (expletives deleted) white rocks worked down into the ground and the net effect was a barren waste where nothing would grow but scroungy looking weeds, and not very many of those. The second summer after I moved in, I decided I'd had it. I built the contraption you see on the right side of the picture out of 2 x 4's and wire screen, and began the long drawn out process of sifting all those (expletives deleted) little white rocks out of the dirt. I've done all of it but the approximately 4 x 4 plot just to the left of the sifter. If you think the yard looks bad in this picture, it looks 100% better looking than it did before I started. In the process, and over the years, I thinned and "pollarded" the two crepe myrtle bushes at the top of the picture into two clusters of some nice sized small trees. I need to thin them once more down to four trunks apiece. The mass of green on the left of the pix is a boxwood hedge that was there when I moved in. It was terribly overgrown and full of trash. I thinned, cleaned and trimmed it. In the lower left corner is a honeysuckle vine I planted that desperately needs a trellis. (I'm working on it -- Since that's a northeast corner, it needs to be metal, and round/rounded in shape(feng shui), so I'm thinking rebar and wire. I've already got the wire.)

As for the piles of little white rocks I've been laboriously sifting out of the yard over the course of the last seven years, -- no fear. I've been "repurposing" them. My part of the duplex has no porch. The sidewalk goes along the outside wall right to the door and that's it. So I got eight 18" x 18" cinder block pavers to put beside the door, and put down about two inches of little white rocks underneath them, which raised them to the level of the sidewalk and provides drainage so water falling onto them off the eave of the roof will drain into the little flower bed I put by the door.

At one time, the eave of the house that parallels the sidewalk had a rain gutter on it that drained down a downspout and out into the yard. Apparently there was a problem with the gutter always clogging up with leaves, which some genius solved by taking the gutter down, so now the rain runs right off the roof and falls beside the sidewalk where it would wash away anything that was planted, and puddle up onto the sidewalk. So I dug a trench that was about a foot and a half wide and a foot deep all along the sidewalk , and filled it with more white rocks -- solved the problem rather elegantly, I thought. The rocks break the force of the falling water, the trench gives it plenty of room to collect and allows it to soak gradually into the flower bed beyond. I used some of the ubiquitous bricks to edge the trench, positioning them with the holes in the bricks facing the rocks. The bricks keep the rocks contained, while allowing the water to drain through the holes into the flower bed. The picture above is over two years old. The honeysuckle eventually got so heavy it broke the little wooden trellis I had just made when I took this picture, the flower bed is now twice that size, and I've since moved the birdhouses to the opposite end of the flower bed.

There were already some irises (little yellow ones and dark purple ones) in the back yard left over from the original owners (two sisters who never married) that built the place in the 1970s, and since I love irises, I've bought some of every color they've had at Wal-Mart and planted them in the bed in back with the left over rose bushes. That first summer I planted several rose bushes to fill in the gaps where bushes had died, but that was before I'd lived there long enough to realize the main reason the bushes had died was that it was really too wet and not sunny enough for roses in that particular spot. However, several of the bushes I planted have done all right despite the poor drainage and low sun, and I have been slowly but surely "treeing" all of them -- pruning and shaping them to grow tall -- so they form a layer above the irises. We had a really dry winter this year and I was afraid I wouldn't have any irises this spring, but once-a-week soakings in late February and March did the trick and they bloomed spectacularly.

Irises, like cats, accumulate. I need to relocate a bunch of the yellow ones and some of the purple and white ones to the front bed. They are also perennial. Ditto day lillies, on both counts.

The interesting thing is that different colors of irises bloom at slightly different times. First the yellow ones, then the purple and white ones ("Earl of Essex").
I also have some pure white ones, some pure blue ones (a sort of periwinkle blue with violet tendencies), some peach colored ones, and I planted some "black" ones but so far have not seen a black bloom. I also have pure white ones and smaller, all purple ones in the front as well as in the back .

When it comes to irises, my planting strategy is to get multiple colors, dump all of them into a bucket so as to mix all the different colors together, and then grab one and plant it -- so I never know what color I planted where until they bloom.

Several of the varieties I have are "repeaters." Generally, irises only bloom once a year in the spring. But the "rebloomer" varieties bloom again in the fall. The white ones ("Immortelle") are one of the rebloomers. I am inordinately chuffed by my irises blooming. Hopefully most of the day lillies I transplanted will survive and start blooming later in the summer. That will also be a chuffing experience. I'm really big on perennials. The only annuals I go for are the self-seeding variety, and so far I have not been able to get any of those going. Maximum beauty with minimum maintenance is my goal.

In the front bed, I planted a variety of iris called Chickasaw Sue (at left). I had only a few to bloom last year, but this year most of them have bloomed. I need to move a bunch of the yellow ones up to this front bed.

Along the back fence, there are two big red climbing rose bushes (see below), also probably dating back to the duplex's original owners.

I have been pruning and shaping them by "espaliering" them to the fence. I'm rather proud of the "fence friendly" way I do this. I take some heavy cording, cut off about a 8-10 inch length, double it and secure it with a half hitch around a piece of tree branch about twice the diameter of a pencil. (The neighbors on both sides have big trees, so I have no shortage of dead branches in my yard, whether I want them or not.) Then I go out into the alley and poke the ends of the cording between two fence pickets where I've decided I need a tie, pull them through from the other side and tie them around the rose cane tight enough to hold them securely, but not so tight as to strangle the plant. The piece of branch prevents the cording from pulling through the fence and I can slide the cord up or down between the pickets to get the height I need. Works beautifully. It gets really windy here at times, and those long canes can get whipped around, battering the leaves and occasionally breaking the canes. Tying them to the fence not only solves that problem but gives the branches support so they don't droop over into the yard trying to get some sun. A $4 ball of cording is way cheaper than a large metal trellis, and I can reposition the ties whenever I need to.

As for that white pole looking thing -- When my brother and his late wife moved here from Mississippi, the house they bought had a big cement birdbath out in their side yard. The basin was cracked and wouldn't hold water. They hated it and said I could have it if I'd come get it, so one hot August afternoon, my 80 year old mother and I rolled that sucker over to the curb and hoisted it into the back seat of my trusty Toyota "Crayola" --. I might add that the bird bath comes as two pieces: The plinth piece and the basin piece. But they're both solid concrete, big, and heavy. Very heavy. Especially the plinth. For scale, that's a six foot fence behind it. Fortunately, I have a red "Radio Flyer" wagon. I was able to unload each piece from the Toyota into my wagon by myself so I could schlepp it into the back yard. As I said, the bowl was cracked and wouldn't hold water, so it was really of no use as a bird bath, but I had a plan. I turned it upside down and put the metal sundial plate on it that my friend gave me for my birthday one year. The neat thing is that most people don't realize it's an upside-down bird bath until I tell them. It looks like it was always intended to be a sundial plinth. I refer to it as the Debbie Memorial Sundial in honor of my brother's late wife. So yesterday, I planted the rest of my day lillies along the front edge 0f this bed with a cluster of them around the base of the "sundial."

In the back, over in the far corner of the yard was a rose bush of unknown variety that I thought was completely dead, so I cut it off at the ground and threw it in the Dumpster with all the other dead stuff, and trash when I "cleaned house" that first summer. Turned out only the graft was dead. About two years later, totally out of the blue, it sprouted canes from the root stock that proved to be a variety of pink climbing rose. Both the red and the pink are "heritage" roses -- the kind that will grow wild if they get half a chance, and often do in Appalachia; they have only a double row of petals and a golden center. They're hardy and were once common in "pioneer" communities all over the central and southern U.S., and I happen to think they're lovely. About three years ago, I transplanted some of the pink ones to the bed with the red climbers to fill out that far end of the bed and they're now tall enough that I've started espaliering them to the fence as well.The picture of the red climbing roses is about two years old, taken about two months after I transplanted a couple of canes of the pink climbing roses to the left end of this bed (see above), which in that picture is the little wad of vegetation on the pole on the left side of the picture. They have since been fruitful and multiplied.

Hopefully this year I'll FINALLY get done sifting out all those (expletives deleted) little white rocks and maybe I'll hire somebody to rototill the designated grass area and get some kind of grass going. And over in the southeast corner by the crepe myrtle, where it's really too shady for grass, I might do a little patio thing with pavers where I can put a bird feeder for the cats to watch out the window. A bird feeder has always been in the plans and there will be one. I've got lumber scraps, and some panes of glass I found in the store room. It's just a question of design and build. The cats love to watch the birds, and the birds certainly don't mind being fed, especially in the winter and early spring. If I can come up with an appropriate container(s), I might do some kind of container garden thing. We'll see. . . .

In the meantime, I've got the sifting to finish, a walkway across the front of the house to finish, a bed to edge and plant in front of the boxwoods, and I want to redo the brick border around the bed with the crepe myrtles. And those (expletives deleted ) holly bushes some fool planted all along the carport wall MUST go. I hate them. They're TERRIBLE feng shui -- the spiky leaves just shred the chi all to pieces. They never have any berries and they are pricklier than cactus. They trap trash, and viciously attack me when I try to remove it. I've already bought the poison, I know how to use it, and one of these days, I'm going to commit herbicide, with malice and aforethought.