MindSpinner

Emily Dickinson’s poems enchant me over and over because they are enacted on any summer’s day in any garden. A Robin still comes down the walk, an unlucky worm in its beak; bees still plunder blossoms. This particular poem just makes me happy, and so did spending an hour in the garden with the camera, capturing what I otherwise might not look closely enough to see. Both poem and garden bespeak faith in continuity, in life and its rituals that long outlast poets and gardeners.

Bees are Black, with Gilt Surcingles –
Buccaneers of Buzz.
Ride abroad in ostentation
And subsist on Fuzz.

Fuzz ordained — not Fuzz contingent –
Marrows of the Hill.
Jugs — a Universe’s fracture
Could not jar or spill.

I had never eaten a parsnip, nor indeed taken a good look at one until just the other day. As a child, I misspelled the word once a long time ago in a spelling bee down South; the woman who read the word ladeled it out as “paahshnip.” My California-trained ears were then no match for a Georgia drawl. But this past week I was looking into vegetables that, with a little protection, can be grown through the winter, and parsnips are among these. The parsnip was a staple in European diets, I read, before the potato supplanted it. It sounded like a vegetable that needed to be given a second chance. So when I saw parsnips at the grocery store a few afternoons ago in the produce section, I picked out two of the fresher looking ones. Most were a bit rubbery. They looked like long, tan carrots with little root hairs here and there. At home I cut the smaller one up, cooked it with an onion and a bit of sugar, salt, pepper, and basil, and gave it a try. It tasted as if (sugar, onion, and basil aside) one could distill paint thinner from it. Ugh. Little wonder the potato replaced it. I ate all the yummy buttery onion bits off the plate and left the parsnip slices. Then I cut up the second parsnip, collected peelings and cooked bits, and fed the lot to the compost bin. Being able to feed stuff to the compost bin happily disguises waste as investment and assuages parsnip guilt.

I’m trying to conjure a picture book angel in a garden. Probably floating so he won’t get his feet dirty. And what about that white robe? How long would that last? It would catch on the blackberry briars; the hem would get caked with dirt and splattered with mud. The only place to put the angel, if he wanted to sit down, would be on the stone bench next to the water garden (the big pot with two water plants and two gold fish). One would probably offer him lemonade. He’d glow a bit even in broad daylight, drink the lemonade, probably bring tidings of something or other, and then get himself transfigured elsewhere in short order, leaving me to wash the lemonade glass and continue with the weeding.

The Gabriel who appeared yesterday was much more useful. He did not glow like the angels in Sunday School illustrations; picture him Latino instead, dressed in a work shirt, boots, and jeans covered with little shreds of grass. He came on a mighty mower tough enough to fell brush. He reduced Johnson grass as tall as I am, laced with poison ivy grown rampant, to mere stubble. He did this for $30 and, moreover, he’s a neighbor up the street who will repeat this miraculous deed anytime I like. He even offered to mow the rest of the back yard for free, but I have so many little plants he’d have to dodge in the someday shade garden that I thought that too much trouble to ask.

His appearance cheered me up. I was a little down, truth to tell, about the goats and ducks. I checked with City Hall the other day to see what the regulations are concerning the keeping of pygmy goats, ducks, and the like. It turns out that it’s just fine for me to keep them; their pens simply have to be located 100 feet from any neighbor’s property line. Since my lot on the cul de sac is wider at the back than it is the front, I pulled out a copy of the land survey just to check. At the back edge of the property, the lot is 158 feet wide. Darn. Do you know those goats would have eaten my poison ivy and invasive honeysuckle? Never mind. My neighbor is Gabriel, and he rides one heck of a mower.

While I’ve been fulfilling my responsibilities at school this week, the new rose (”Lasting Love”) has begun to bloom. Its scent is as intoxicating as its beauty.

Today my three-wheeled car was towed away for repair, leaving the driveway looking as if it has no purpose at all, unless we’d like to take up roller blading. I feel like a bird that’s had her wings clipped, but we haven’t really suffered. A colleague whose daughter I have transported many a time is giving me rides back and forth to school, and the grocery store is just a half mile or so away. I made a grocery run on foot for the first time this morning. Buying in bulk is now out of the question, and as I toiled homeward with four bags of groceries, I looked a little longingly at the wheel barrows for sale across the street at our neighborhood hardware store. At Kroger, I found myself evaluating purchases by weight and not just cost and desirability, and I left my Light Cran-Grape juice on the shelf. It isn’t so light if you have to carry it along with milk and other goodies.

By tomorrow afternoon, I will have a new wheel to replace the damaged one (damaged by what I do not know, other than the hammer wielded at Wal-Mart). The condition of the tire, once re-inflated, remains to be seen. If that’s also shot, we’ll be stuck for another day. That’s fine, too.

This brief no-wheels interlude has made me think a little harder about what life may be like a year or two down the road, when gas may well be $100 or $200 a barrel. The issue won’t be merely whether I have enough money to fill the tank of a Corolla; it will be whether I can afford the rising cost of everything. I’m gradually trying to ready our yard to grow some of our own food in raised beds and in the kitchen garden which is actually just one big raised bed with stone paths curving through it. This year my garden goals are these:

1. Begin growing vegetables in raised beds: squash, corn, beans, and fingerling potatoes.
2. Protect our grape vines, using Super-Light Insect Barrier fabric sold by Gardens Alive, from the voracious Japanese beetles that consumed every leaf last summer.
3. Harvest our first full crop of peaches. Last year the first peaches appeared but were too badly damaged by insects to be edible. I’m bagging the fruit this year to protect it. I’ve stapled on about 25 brown lunch bags so far after cutting them down so that they are almost square. This is slow and painstaking, though I’ve tried it a couple of different ways, because peaches don’t grown on much of a stem. I’m afraid the bags will blow off in the first storm. (A downpour is testing them right now, but there’s no wind.) I’m also going to try Japanese Apple Bags ($7 per 100), and, for the sake of experimentation, I’m going to fashion my own re-usable bags out of the insect barrier fabric I’m buying to protect the grapes. If the insect barrier fabric is strong enough, those bags would be reusable. I like the idea of the fruit getting light and a bit of air. Time will tell which of the three methods works best.
4. Figure out how to preserve certain foods without refrigeration through the winter (After some research today, I’m theorizing that big coolers can be used to serve as root cellars in my unheated garage.)
5. Adjust the backyard landscaping plan to incorporate disease resistant dwarf apple trees. Given the fact that we have deer, I may end up planting these in the dogs’ fenced play yard. I think I can figure out how to protect the trees from the dogs, who will not be intent on eating the apples, and I do believe the deer will stay out.
6. Start composting.

It’s true that we may end up moving at some point, but if we do, there will be some buyer out there who wants the garden I’m creating, and it will be the garden that sells the house, which itself is otherwise interchangeable with many others in this town, right down to the floorplan. As long as I am here, the garden will be a work in progress.