A Day in the Gardens

Gary said this afternoon that he is finally seeing the gardens take shape.  After two rainy days I could get back to work.  Today's task was clearing the rock garden, taking out old leaves and digging up spring weeds.  It meant leaning over and using a lot of muscle yanking out grass and creeping charlie.  I will feel that on my back tonight.  

 
All around me, the sweet scent of the apple tree, the lilac bushes, and the hyacinths, unbelievable in April.  The cardinal has been singing his territorial song, big time. He starts with a long whistle, then short ones. I imitate him, but add one extra short whistle.  He returns with another short whistle.  We've gotten as far as eight short whistles before one of us quits.

Meanwhile, I mentally write my next short story.  It is taking shape in my mind.  There will be three cats in it, so I should take inspiration from Rascal but unfortunately, he has no intention of being my muse.  He slept the afternoon away in his bed at the office window in what looked like the most uncomfortable position possible.

Gary is working on the camper because we plan on heading up north to Boulder Lake as soon as the weatherman can string together three days without rain.

I'll have that short story written by then.

Margaret

I first met Rosalia Gierszewski, a 19th century immigrant from Eastern Europe, in a barn at Kirwee, South Island, New Zealand.  No, she hadn't lived over two hundred years.  She had been re-created by a great-great-great (not sure how many greats) niece, Margaret Copland. I was blown away by Margaret's performance and we became friends forthwith.

Margaret is a re-enactor, bringing New Zealand history to life through her ancestors and historical figures. She carefully researched their lives, wore period costumes, and had their accents down pat..

She usually performed at a hotel in Christchurch for Grand Circle and Elderhostel tourists fresh off cruise ships.  I watched as she wowed them with Sarah Stokes, her great-great-great (not sure how many greats) grandmother, who came to New Zealand from England, giving birth on the long voyage. Other characters were Mabel Howard, the first female member of the legislature, Charlotte, a little girl, Katarzyna Gierszewski, another ancestor, and even a nun.

Then the earthquakes hit Christchurch, destroying much of it, including hotels and the historical buildings.  Tourist bookings fell to almost nothing.  Last week, Margaret had her final booking to talk to a small group of tourists.There will be no more. She has decided to retire.

On May 12, she and her friends are celebrating her retirement by having a sort of wake for all those historical characters. The guests will come in period costumes, but must dress modestly.  No ankles will be shown.  Gentlemen will wear dark arm bands. Salt meat and pease porridge will be served in honor of the Randolph, the ship that brought Sarah to New Zealand.

I've traveled with Margaret from time to time.  I drove her across the United States to performances and festivals, and she drove me around New Zealand for my own performances.  We explored each other's countries and had a joyous time doing so.  We each dream of getting rich so we can do so again but with the world wide recession and earthquakes in New Zealand, there no longer is enough storytelling work to pay our ways.

Every time Gary and I go canoeing, I tell him how much Margaret and her husband Jim would love to be with us. We watch the New Zealand news on the internet.  But will we ever meet again?  I hope so. 

Sunday blues

In the middle of church services, I began feeling dizzy.  I took off my choir robe to cool myself off and recovered enough to play the piano for the anthem and offertory.  I got through the service fine after that.

After church, I came home to Gary's Sunday dinner, delicious as always, but then I went to bed for a three hour nap.  I woke up with a headache and more faintness. Because at my age, you never know about dizziness, I took my blood pressure but it was normal, as was my temperature.  So it wasn't a stroke, wasn't the flu, and probably not a cold.

So what is wrong with me?  Same old thing, my spring ague, an allergy.  We had a lovely rain last night but it stirred up last year's leaves and that brought up mold. I get an attack or two every spring.  Nothing new.

We're going to have rain on and off for the next week, so I can expect more of the same.  I found my allergy tablets, stored away for the past year.  The expiration date shows they are good until 2013, so I will be fine from now on.

Gary took me for a drive in the country once I was feeling better, so the day wasn't a total loss.

Tomorrow, it's back to gardening and writing.

Gardening

With temperatures in the 70s F. and the sun shining, it was time to garden big time, especially since rain is forecast for the next three days.

I cleared two flower plots, one with a pink rose bush on the south side of the house.  I started it from a cutting from a rose bush belonging to my neighbors.  It was initially planted by a previous owner for his wife. When I first moved here thirty years ago, Anna was dying and Frank would follow her three years later. The pink rose was already an old bush so my guess is that it has been blooming for around seventy years.

I noticed today that the both bushes, the first one and mine, have put out "suckers" I intend to transplant to another plot.  At the same time, I will move a yellow rose nearby, one that should grow into a tree.  It's been in a shady area for a few years and hasn't done well there.

Gary brought out the rototiller and got to work on the vegetable garden.  It is cleared and ready to go, so I started some sugar snap peas.   If the rain holds off, we'll pick up onion sets at the hardware store tomorrow and get those going as well.  The rest of the vegetables will have to wait until May when we'll be sure there will be no more frost.

Gary also cleared a section of the terrace strip and laid down some patio blocks.  We'll likely buy some more of those blocks, and fill in the rest of the area with vinca.  I have plenty to dig up in other parts of the yard.  We can't have anything taller than six inches on the terrace strip, so vinca will be perfect.  Even better, it will require no mowing.

Then he cleared the area next to my peony bushes.  He wants to transplant some hostas there.

It was a day of hard work, but I calculate I still have some twenty flower beds to clear.  That will take us to the end of April.  At that point, we'll begin the final weeding and planting, which should be done by Memorial Day.  From then on, the plants will take over so there won't be much to do in the gardens except a little spot weeding, mowing the paths, and perhaps some watering.

Some my think this is a lot of work, but I consider gardening a hobby.  Mowing lawn is work.  That I avoid.

An Outing

Gary had been talking for some time about having an outing with me, but he was sick, then had to go to Illinois.Today he felt better, the day was sunny and we were off.

First was a drive to Appleton to do some errands.  Most important was a stop at Appleton Camping to get some parts for the camper. Lance, in the parts department, showed Gary a top for the camper's sink.  It was slightly damaged so we got it for $2.  We almost never use that sink since we camp in the national forests with no water to fill the tank and no dumping station to empty the sewage, so putting this top on it gives us more cupboard space.

We headed north to see what was going on at the Shiocton marsh at Van Patten Road.   The marsh is still busy with the traffic of migrating birds. We saw pie billed grebes, American widgeons, Canada geese, ring necked ducks, coots, norther shovelers, greater scaup and mallards.  There were dozens of sandhill cranes who don't know that there will soon be a crane hunting season, poor things.

Next we went to the McDonald Road in the Navarino Nature Wildlife Area.  There are huge ponds here and we found more geese, mallards, ring necked ducks, grebes and mallards.  Anemones were blooming in the woods.

The next stop was the Shawano dam. Up to three days ago, the DNR was pulling sturgeon out of the water to tag them.  To their surprise, they hauled out a 240 lb. female who they thought was 125 years old.  She would have been even heavier, but she had already laid her eggs, which they estimated would have been about thirty pounds of caviar.

But today, the sturgeon run is over and all volunteers have gone home.  Only the red horse suckers were there, still trying to gobble up as many sturgeon eggs as they could find.

We were originally scheduled to guard sturgeon on April 15, two days from now and instead we guarded on March 25.  What a strange spring.

As we traveled today, we passed farmhouses with placards that read either "Recall Walker" or "We Stand with Walker".  We have always said that the best time to look for a new house is during an election cycle, because you get a pretty good idea what your neighbors would be like.  I'm pretty sure a rabid Walker supporter would not welcome me as a neighbor.  

*****
Wade Peterson's story,"The Magic Ball" is now at our shared blog, Black Coffee Fiction, http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com

The Seventies

This week, I'm working on a new short story for our blog.  Last week it was "Love and the Sixties."  The next story will be "Love and the Seventies".  Right now I'm in the research stage.

I'm not going to include the Watergate scandal or the Jimmy Carter administration.  Those have very little to do with love.  I think feminism will have a role in the story.  By the 1970's, the war in Vietnam was ending, and the civil rights issue was incorporated into the women's movement.We were singing Helen Reddy's "I am Woman". At the same time, women became more and more stupid on television, a trend that seems to be continuing today.

Computers were getting smaller.  Clothes were getting weirder.  Wife swapping was a new social issue.

Me, I went back to school and got my degree.  I taught high school.  I had a baby. We lived in a trailer house. By the end of the decade, my marriage was coming to an end.  

Through all this there were cats.  There was Kid, Jocasta, Eddy Puss, Big Red, and Mischa.

How all of that will work its way into my story I don't know.  Once the research is done, I start typing and let the characters go where they will, no matter how silly the situations.  The lovely thing about computers is the ease of editing a lot of nonsense and making sense of it.

This short story is bringing back so many memories. The process should be a joy.

Books

I've fallen in love with the Nook.  I take it with me wherever I go in case I can find a few minutes here or there to read yet another book.

I've bought a few e-books, but just as it was with paper books, I read the ones from the library system first because those have a due date.

I've just finished Catherine the Great,a Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie.  I'd read two of Massie's previous books Nicolas and Alexandria about the last of the Romanovs and Peter the Great, who was the first tsar to expand Russia to the Baltic Sea, giving the landlocked country its first access to the oceans of the world.  Catherine went farther and took the Crimea away from the Ottoman Turks, giving Mother Russia access to the Black Sea and beyond to the Mediterranean. Though I've known something about Catherine the Great all these years, this was the first time I read a biography.  I like strong women, and she was one of the strongest.  Great indeed.

Massie is a wonderful biographer so I couldn't put that book down. I've been waking up in the middle of the night to turn on the Nook and keep reading.

Next on my list is American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, and Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, about the Countess of Carnavon who turned her estate into a hospital during WWI.  Because so many of my friends are interested in vampires, I've decided to read the books that started it all, Dracula, by Bram Stoker, and Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice.

As a matter of fact, I have fifteen books lined up, all in one little electronic book.

There's  tee shirt many librarians own that says, "So many books, so little time."  That describes me exactly.

Home Again

Yesterday, I was busy with my friend Norma.

Today, I cleaned, practiced at church, walked a bit, and took a three hour nap. Tomorrow, I thought, I will spend the entire day with writing projects.

Gary called me about 6:00 pm.

"I decided to come home tonight," he said.  It had been too cold and windy to do any work for his aunt in Dixon, Illinois so there was no point in staying.  I could hear him coughing, too.  He still had his cold.

I immediately wondered about staying up to welcome him. I could spend that time writing.

"When will you get here?"

"In ten minutes," he said.  "I'm just going past Krabbe's."  That's a supper club south of Seymour.

Surprise!

So here he is, coughing and sneezing, and getting ready for bed.

Here I am writing my blog.  So much for making plans.

I think I'll get up early tomorrow and work on my novel.

Sheldon Nature Area, Oshkosh

Every so often, my friend Norma comes up from Chicago to visit her mother.  I meet her and off we go for lunch, shopping, walking, and talking.  We had lunch at the Cinders restaurant, shopped at St. Vincent de Paul and Payless (I got another pair of shoes), had dessert at Culvers.

The best part for me is always walking at the Sheldon Nature Area, adjacent to the Oakwood Charter School. It was donated to the Oshkosh school district to use to teach the students about environmental issues.

The trails led us past ponds and brooks and along the way we found marsh marigolds and Virginia bluebells in bloom.

We heard the white-throated sparrow and watched mallards paddling around. As we walked, we talked about what is going on in our lives.  We see each other every few months, but it's always as if we were last together two or three minutes before and were just continuing the conversation.

After our day together, I took Norma to catch her bus to Chicago, knowing that come Memorial Day weekend she'll be back and we'll spend another day together.   

Alone

Other than Rascal, I'm alone in the house.

This morning, Gary and I were up at 5:00 a.m. so that he could leave for Dixon and I could make scalloped potatoes and ham for Easter dinner before going to church. I decided that the best thing to do was cook everything then microwave it after church.   For good measure, I started a loaf of cracked wheat bread in the bread maker.  I cleaned the house a bit and then it was out to the garden to pick tulips, daffodils and cut some sprays of cherry blossoms for the bouquet of the week that goes to a member of the congregation.  I quickly hid plastic eggs containing candy and prizes around the house for Evan and it was time to go.

The church service went as expected, but long. Evan was there with Those People He Lives With. That's what Gary calls Chris and Tisha.  He was part of the flock of children that came up to the altar for the children's sermon and hunted for Easter eggs afterwards. There was a baptism and new members welcomed.

The choir did fine and I think there were eight hymns, which is our idea of a good service.

When we got home, the bread was done and it took only minutes to warm the dinner in the microwave. Evan found the eggs I hid then set the table.  He is getting to be a big helper.

But I'm afraid the lack of sleep finally caught up with me and I had to send my family home so I could crash.

When I woke up three hours later, I was alone, an odd feeling. Though Gary and I are often apart during the camping season, during the winter months, we are always in the house at night and most of the day.  We do so much together.  Now I am alone with an anxious cat who misses the master who spoils him with treats and petting. He is stuck with me and he is not not happy.

Fact is, we both enjoy having these times alone. I am looking forward to having quiet time to write. I am sure he is enjoying his time camping at his aunt's farm.

It works for both of us.