News from the Garden

Dear Jackson,

I so much wanted to write you a letter, and I am overdue for my next blog post, so I am killing two birds with one stone.  I hope as a fellow blogger you will understand.

I spent this morning catching Fanny and the Comets (our own rock band) so that I could clean their pond.  I prepared a giant bucket that was part of a shop vac before the vac gave up the ghost, filling it with a couple of smaller buckets of their current pond water so that it was half full.  Fanny and the Comets are as fast as they always were when they had a lot of water to swim in, but as I emptied the pond they had nowhere to go but into the smaller bucket.  They are huge, even bigger than they were last spring.  I emptied each bucket carefully, not wanting to pour our fish on the ground, but I didn’t see Fanny in the murky water and poured her onto the mud.  Before she could flop twice I grabbed her carefully and gently with both hands; she was the first into the shop vac bucket.  I was timidly cautious catching the Comets; they went into the bucket without mishap.

Once the fish were in the big bucket and that bucket was in the shade, I started cleaning the pond.  The poor fish; what a disgusting way to live!.  And yuck, what a job!  The sides of the pond were thickly coated with algae – just imagine thick green slime.  First I took all the stones I could reach out of the pond, then removed the basket with the iris and the ceramic baking pan. After taking the pond liner out of the hole we had dug for it two years ago, I brushed the algae off with a very stiff brush, and kept rinsing with a powerful stream of water.  After an hour of brushing and rinsing, the pond looked clean and I looked filthy and smelled very fishy.  I put the cleaned ceramic pan back in; propped up, it still offered a hiding place.  I put the big slate stepping stone over the east side of the pond instead of the west, figuring that the stone would offer shade and cover from the big black cat that prowls my back yard.  I replaced the iris basket.  Fanny and the Comets swam around eagerly once they were back home.  I fed them and replaced the bird netting over the pond.  Fanny is lumpy again, but a diet of fresh peas should help with that.  I put a wooden chaise-lounge, from Aunty Polly’s last move, over the pond to shade it.  It offers dappled shade.  Eventually a small tree might provide better shade to the fish.

After we had installed the pond a couple of years ago, I moved the table Aunty Polly gave me over to the edge of it.  I hoped the table’s umbrella would shade the pond.  The umbrella gave a little shade in the winter, when we didn’t need it, and offered inadequate shade in the summer.  Wind blew the table and umbrella over onto the fish pond's rim a couple of times.  When the table was by the fish pond the table was an uncomfortable place to sit.  The chairs sank into the dirt if anyone sat on them, and the side of the table next to the fish pond could not be used.  It was past time to move the table and chairs.

A few years ago I had removed a brick patio from the front of the house to put a shady flower garden there; I piled the bricks neatly under the upstairs deck in the back.  I decided today to make a patio in the backyard between the stairs to the studio and the baby apple tree with those bricks. I worked on the patio for several hours.  The internet advises digging a hole, deeper than brick-deep, to make a patio, then leveling the hole, filling it with a shallow layer of sand, leveling that and then carefully placing the bricks.  My bricks are too old and twisted to warrant so much work.  I just mowed the back yard, put down mulch cloth where the patio is to go and started laying the bricks.  After a good start, I discovered that the ground wasn’t as level as I thought.  I’m going to pick up the bricks that are below level, fill the space with sand, level it, and put those bricks back.  I wonder if smoothing the bricks with sandpaper afterwards would help get a more useful surface for Aunty Polly's table and chairs.

The next big project, erecting a four-foot high dog-eared fence between my back yard and the neighbor’s, only awaits the neighbor’s permission. The fence would provide my tenant and the neighbor’s tenants a little privacy.  After that I hope to top the bare bottom of the garden with topsoil and plants.

Last week I spent a couple of afternoons digging holes so that the two-inch high stepping stones that came with the house are level with the ground.  I had tripped over these a number of times before last week.

The back garden is looking better.  It has a clean fish pond, a mowed lawn, a couple of new camellias, a rose bush and a small rhododendron.  I planted broccoli and cauliflower in the raised bed/compost heap by the fishpond, but I think the skunk that lives under my neighbor’s garden shed may have eaten them; the once flourishing plants are just stubs now.  Oh well, it’s a good bed for tomatoes anyway.

The front garden is beautiful now.  The blooming lilacs are generous this year and the dogwood tree is in bloom.  The bluebells and Brunnera bloom bluely in the shade garden, contrasting with the graceful pink arches of bleeding heart, and the peonies have put up their shiny leaves.

 I hope you can come see the fish, the garden, and me soon.

Love,

Grannie

Ant Los Angeles

When I was a child, Los Angeles burgeoned into a geographically large city.  Some wags thought it funny to post home-made signs, ever further out, that said “Los Angeles city limits.”  Eventually, according to the signs, Los Angeles extended from San Diego up to Santa Barbara, and west to San Bernardino.  Once I saw a “Welcome to Los Angeles” sign on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada.

Yesterday Ox and I walked up part of Bear Den Mountain.  On these sorties we pay attention to how we feel; when either feels we have gone halfway to our physical limit, we tell the other person that we are halfway to tired.  We stop then, and turn downhill.  Yesterday we made it all the way up to Ant Los Angeles.

We started walking up this mountain about 35 years ago.  If there were ant mounds then, we didn’t notice them.  Eventually an ant mound appeared, and the next year there were more.  Every year since Ant Los Angeles has grown.

Ant Los Angeles now covers a square acre, maybe acres.  During the warm seasons these are busy cities, with ants scurrying everywhere.  Bears find ant feasts in these mounds – an occasional flat-topped mound tells that story.  Weather pokes holes in the mounds.  The Allegheny mound ants just carry on.

In the winter, except for the occasional sentry, the ants hunker underground.  The ant mounds are roughly dome-shaped; they're the terracotta color of our good Virginia clay; they are one or two feet high and up to a yard in diameter. They are said to extend about four feet underground.

The mound dirt looks friable, and the mounds are always covered with young grasses around the base.  I read that ant mounds are connected with underground tunnels and that the mounds support many queens.  I read that the ants clear the surrounding vegetation by biting plants and injecting formic acid into them.  The clearing allows the sun to warm the mounds to help incubate the larvae.  I imagine that the ants plant the grasses on their mounds to provide some camouflage.

Spring has reached the mountain only in the greening of small, close to the ground, weeds and grasses.  I will know spring has fully come to Bear Den Mountain when Ant Los Angeles' surface becomes again a busy city.

Walking at Dusk

It had been a happy Sunday dinner at my niece’s house.  Her energetic children, Tommy and Abby, just three and five, and my grandson Jackson, nine, played quietly and happily with Tommy and Abby’s puppy and their birthday presents.

I was tired; I had stayed up way too late the night before roasting and carving a turkey breast, washing the turkey roaster, finishing my book.

At dusk Ox asked me to go to the park.  I was reluctant, but I knew that I’d miss it if I didn’t go.  We drove to the upper pond.  The park was sparsely populated; a few people strolled here and there.

We climbed out of Ox’s car into soft, balmy air.  Two high pitches of trills announced that the American toads were mating.  The trills were punctuated with the song of the spring peepers.  A lone black-bird called from the very top of a tall tree.  Frogs roiled the waters by the cattails.  The vigor of the frogs comforts me, it shows the vigor of the pond.

We walked around to the south side of the pond. The other people left the park.  Though the moon had risen, the sky was darker - scuds of cloud blew past the moon.  A few geese flew onto the pond from the west, with quiet low honks.  Ox thought he saw a wake.

“Oh,” I said, “it’s just a goose or a duck.”

“ No,” he said, “It’s a beaver.  I can see the tail.  He’s almost black, darker than beavers we’ve had here before."

I looked again.  It was a beaver, smaller than the last beaver, last seen10 years ago.  He dove.  Five minutes later or so he surfaced about 15 feet to the east.  His wake, a silver V, reminded of all the wakes of all the beavers that lived for a short while in the pond.

The night was darker.  We walked slowly back to the car.  A toad jumped away from my descending foot, visible only in his motion.

Night Drawing Nigh

We went up to the park just before nightfall.

The cool air smelled of rain.  We heard high-pitched spring peepers again - the first of the year.  Cattails showed the barest bits of green, dark against the straw-colored winter stalks.  A flock of Canada geese muttered to each other. As we approached they quietly slid into the pond.  

Ox thought he saw the wake of  a muskrat or beaver.  He went onto the dam to see.  I stood by the cattails and felt the soft clean air, smelled the murky scent of the pond, saw the dusk of the cloudy sky.  I felt that I was, in every molecule, a part of the sky, the pond, the animals and the plants,  I felt a passionate and serene joy that lasted for minutes, for an eternity, before we left for home in the dark.

The Junkyard Car

Jim's eyes gleamed when he said, I’m going to the auto show in Raleigh.”

A passing friend asked him, “What are you going there to see?”

Jim said “I want to see it all”.

I said “When I was a girl, every high school boy scrimped to buy an old junk car; they spent the remaining years of high school fixing it up, making it run, and keeping it running.”

Both men nodded.  The passing friend said, “I got a car from the junkyard; it didn’t even have a body.”

Every boy then wanted a car for some freedom from parental control, some social esteem and something to obsess about.  They also wanted to go places

Nowadays the car’s computer makes life easier for the dealer.  It tells the dealer’s computer what is wrong with the car.  It doesn’t tell the high school boy how to find out what is wrong with the car. 
 

The junker was a great educational tool.  It taught the boy problem solving.  It taught the boy mechanics.  It taught the boy aesthetics.  It taught the boy thrift; he was always saving to buy a wanted or needed part, if only from the junkyard.  It taught the boy how to cooperate; friends were needed to help get the motor back in the car.  It taught the boy how to talk to girls (in those days canny girls knew to be interested in cars).  Today's youth are deprived.

For a little while the computer supplanted the junker.  In the early 90s, when I wanted a computer, I bought two at a UVA property auction; they were very cheap.  Neither one had a hard drive.  I bought two hard drives over the internet and learned how to put hard drives in the computers with internet instructions.  When you’ve got two very cheap computers, you don’t worry about frying one of them.  I kept one computer and gave the other to a friend.  In those days computers were much easier to fix up than junk cars.  You could see where everything plugged in.  My success in putting in hard drives made me fearless.  Plugging odd cards into the motherboard followed hard on the heels of the hard drives.

Computers are now too skinny for anyone's fat fingers to work with anymore. They control everything.  The phone is a computer, The vacuum cleaner is a robot, for goodness sake!  Home systems are run by computers; some houses won’t go without their computers.  The map is computerized.  Computers aren’t for amateurs anymore.

The only thing left for the young person is programming.  Programming teaches logic and It’s loads of fun to make a machine do something that you want it to do.  The problem is that programming is just verbal.  It doesn’t teach a person how to do anything real, anything physical.

It is time to save our youth!  It is time to educate our youth!  It is time to bring back the computerless car.  It is time to open the junkyards to scavengers again.  It is time for popular mechanics to advertise do-it-yourself automobile kits, if popular mechanics still exists.  Bring back the automobile that has no computer!

The Painting

I was 10 when we moved to Redlands.  A few years after the second war my parents built a house on property my father had bought before the war.  Our house in San Bernardino had grown too snug for four growing children.

I first remember the painting over the mantelpiece in the new house.  Our family took a trip to Wyoming; I think the painter gave it to my father then.   The painter was a friend of my father’s – another early skier and Sierra Club member.

The painting had nice enough colors, but the Sierra Nevada mountain was young, rough and jagged.  The San Bernardino mountains viewed from large north living room window were as young, and almost as high, but had more graceful curves and ever changing light and shadows that gave them mystery and mood.  For me there was no contest.  I spent hours of my life in the front yard and in the living room looking at our mountains.  The painting was just another piece of furniture, seen but not perceived.

My father died of a heart attack while walking with friends in his beloved San Bernardino Mountains.  Mother stayed in the Redlands house for a few years, then sold the house and moved to a small condominium in the town below.

I was approaching 40 and nine months pregnant with our second daughter.  My siblings traveled to the old house and helped mother sort things-to-keep from things-to-disperse.  I just gave telephonic support from Washington State.

Eventually large packages came from the old house with a number of things I didn’t really need, including the painting.  In the Surr family siblings who don’t help get big surprises.  I had resumed oil painting at the time and one more painting was low on my list of wants.

Ox and I  moved our family from Washington State to Korea and put almost everything we owned into storage, including the mountain painting.  When we came to Crozet, near Charlottesville, we rented a furnished house for a year while we decided where to settle.  When we bought the house we live in now, we got our things from storage.  While without our lares and penates we had accumulated more stuff; we had to have a large sale to be able to move around in the new house.

The painting, far from having the place of honor it deserved, got hung in the dusty basement.  My own paintings, of lesser merit perhaps, hung everywhere that pictures from Ox’s family didn’t. but were mostly stacked three deep against the walls of the pig room.

We had moved at least every three years during our earlier married life.  Each move sifted out things we didn’t want to take to our next place.  We have lived in this house for almost 35 years with no sifting process.  I nag poor Ox to get rid of clutter; Ox’s mote is so much more obvious than my beam.  I have finally realized that I alone had so much junk that two places couldn’t contain it.

I never before considered finding a good home for the painting; my father had loved it.  I now realize that someone out there could love the painting and display it as it deserves.

An internet search on the painter’s name elicited some facts about him.  He was the official painter on Admiral Byrd’s Arctic expeditions.  He was, as I knew, a skier.  He was, as I didn’t know, a member of the Sierra Club.  I knew he had lived near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but he had painted in the high Sierras, and lived in Los Angeles as well.  The search also showed that several galleries sought paintings by the artist.

I took a poor snapshot with a flash and sent it off to one of them.  They gave me a rough estimate of what they would give for the painting.

An even better fate is in store for the painting. I wrote this blog about the painting, and my brother John wrote me that he'd enjoyed the blog piece and he'd always loved the painting.  His birthday is this month.   He and his wife will gladly display the painting in a worthy place.  He told me that the mountain was painted in the High Sierras from a place called Plummer's meadow.  This birthday present makes me very happy.