Fall Days Make for a Perfect Pepper

The temperature fell last night. It's fall officially. J will work late tonight to close out the fiscal year. My mother's birthday follows, and then mine and J's the week after. Leaves are spotting the ground, which is damp, and the grass is thinning. Two pumpkins are on the porch and as is the custom at my house, their fall orange flare will clash with the pots that hold the springtime purple and pink blooms that I can't bear to pitch.

On Sunday, with minutes to spare before a darkening sky brought another deluge, I raced to mow the lawn. The clumps of wet grass are still out on the sidewalk. I can't possibly find enough time to clean everything up before an autumn gust blows in more detritus.

It's the way of fall. I mourn the passing of summer, but I love the coming of cool days. My jeans fit loosely after a summer of exercise and my arms long for the warmth of a soft sweatshirt. Everything is in order with the girls back in their school routine. Early morning coffee, fast departure, dog is walked, house locked up for the day. No deviations, no late night teen parties. Chaos over.

In the garden, the parsley is plentiful, the peppers are turning a deep red and a burnt yellow, a thin growth of arugula is coming in from the seed that I threw down about ten days ago. There's a sweet bush of lavender that anchors one corner of the farmer box balanced by the thick bunch of chives at the other corner.

I've stored up some grass to salt the next pile of leafy compost. And the compost from last fall is wormy, warm and black.

It's time to stop blogging and blast off to work. That is the routine of fall. The Putterer

Now I Want Chickens

Meet Caley, my dog. She is not a farm animal and she has no job to do other than to sit artfully around the house as if Diego Velazquez might happen by. Caley would be most annoyed if I were to follow through on this morning's vaguery--to buy backyard chickens, though they would certainly upstage her productivity.

But just the other day, J and I were driving home on a nearby street, when he suddenly lurched his head around and exclaimed that he'd just seen a flock of chickens in someone's yard. He was incredulous; suggesting that it must be a recent immigrant family that brought them in. I informed him, however, that raising chickens was the new, best thing in gardening. Fresh eggs; ready, steady fertilizer; and even something to throw in a pot, if for some reason you couldn't walk the few blocks to Whole Foods. We pondered the idea together and considered turning around to go gawk at the menagerie, but we had to hurry home.

This morning, I got up earlier than I really should and settled in with my New Yorker and found Susan Orlean (I have a secret crush on her only because I just wish that by now in my career I was as famous a writer as she is). And of course, she's one-upped me again, because she's moved to the country and bought chickens. And the chickens are lending her a special credibility in the arena of gardening elite and domestic goddess. "When one of my hens laid my first home-grown egg," she writes, "I was as proud as if I had been attending my daughter's bat mitzvah." I know this emotion. I've shared it many times. When my first tomato ripened. When my mixture of grass and leaves and kitchen waste turned to black compost gold. When my eggplant plant (is that what you call it?) delivered. This is the ecstasy the domestic goddess achieves when her efforts bear fruit.

So calculating my latest vaguery. . .That would include purchase and upkeep of a chicken coop ($1,000, because everything costs $1,000 to begin with); nurturing and care of said chickens (do you walk them on a leash?); veterinarian bills (rabies shots?); neighbor complaints (attorney fees?); J's protestations (divorce attorney?), and of course, Caley's feelings (the elite Cavalier King Charles Spaniel's bark is pitched at an ear-drum-shattering spike). . . my first egg would likely be costly.

The truth of the matter is that Orlean, because she's such a great writer and observer of life and culture, nailed it right were it hurts. Pegged me with this provocative observance, that chickens seem to go "hand-in-glove with the post-feminist reclamation of other farmwife domestic arts--knitting, canning, quilting. . . . newly appreciated as a declaration of self-sufficiency, a celebration of handiwork."

My hero is a cynic. True scorn for the post-feminist working/wife/mother/hand-maiden still to male dominance. Us girls, clinging to the hope that we might have stepped up and out of our domestic roles and always hoping to briefly touch on Orlean-like fame. Oh, if only, we just had 37 more hours in the day to do it all, and raise chickens, too. The Putterer

September Hurries By

September arrived and left me in its wake. September is a hurry month. Everything comes in a crush in September. We arrive back from an August vacation. There's a pile of things to do at work. The pile of dirty laundry is insurmountable. There's a pile of bills and paperwork on my desk. School starts. There's shopping to be done. The dog needs a bath. Softball starts up again. Before long, any wisp of a vacation calm is lost. This year, though, I've kind of whipped the final days of September into shape. I took a pick axe to those piles and chiseled them down to size. It's a Saturday morning and I'm luxuriating in the weekend possibilities as if time and errands have no meaning. It's a cool, fresh morning and in a moment, I have to rush away to take P to softball practice. But for this iota of a moment, I have all the time in the world and I'm filling it with ideas of things I'd most like to do outside in the garden. Arugula. I want to plant some arugula and see if I can't squeak out a few more weeks of growth out there. I want to weed. I usually hate that. But something deep in my soul is fostering a need to bring order to chaos. I am born to putter. The Putterer

I'm Back!

My dear blog, you have languished far too long and I am so sorry to neglect you. I have been away from home and hearth as is the August tradition in Washington. We ventured out to see the world. But in order to leave, I had to accomplish double the work in half the time so that my absence wouldn't be noticed. Thus, the week away was equivalent to four. Because of course, when I came back I had to redouble efforts to make up for the lost time away! And, as I have over the past two days achieved the high status of Domestic Goddess Priestess, having done ten loads of laundry, the shopping, the cooking, the sorting of mail and papers, the doctors' appointments, the dog grooming, the moving of furniture and the dusting of dust bunnies, I am ready now to putter in the garden. Tomorrow, Labor Day, is the much anticipated return. I won't be gardening, however, I'll be cleaning up--pulling weeds, whacking back, mowing and otherwise clearing detritus. It's a mess.

But then again it really isn't. It's a natural paradise where seed and soil and rain have crafted a devil-may-care landscape and I must say, it's still quite lovely. Tonight, as I write this a gentle rain is falling, certain to make the soil more manageable and my mosquito friends all the more plentiful.

So, where was I? In the photo above, I have trained my binoculars into the meadow that is located adjacent to the Wawona Hotel, built between 1876 and 1918, in Yosemite National Park. The day we hiked the meadow, a four-mile loop around its perimeter, we took our time and breathed deeply of the peculiar scents. I could have sworn I was picking up the acrid smell of an artichoke after it had been boiled to a delectable appetizer. Not really a pleasant aroma, but something kind of almost addictive, like the scent of rubber cement.

I wanted desperately to know the names of all the delicate plants in the field. And I carried with me reference cards that identified the wild flowers, the trees and the birds, but naturally none of the designated wild flowers on the card were in bloom at the moment I was traipsing through the meadow. So I could only admire and not catalog. The trip was so beautiful and restorative. We also hiked among the giant sequoias in the Mariposa Grove on an exhausting climb that began at the lofty elevation of 5,000 feet and ascended on a gentle switch back trail to 6,100 feet. The thin air truly taxed us and we unfortunately had to descend without seeing the entire trial. But nothing topped the day that we climbed the steep mist trail (no mist in August, thankfully, it would have made the trail treacherously slippery) to the crest of Vernal Falls. There were some 160 steps carved into the side of the granite cliff and we stepped up endlessly, over, and over, and over again, panting and sweating and worrying that we might not ever reach the top. We rented bikes in the Valley and pedaled our way around the entire eight-mile bike loop, stopping to admire whatever caught our interest. At one point, the girls and I parked the bikes and plunged into the cool mountain spring-fed Merced River. Feeling reckless, I let myself sink so that my head was completely submerged. The water was so chill that the hairs on my head and skin seemed as if they would all drop from their follicles. I emerged breathless and thrilled. Incredibly, the hot sun instantly warmed and dried me. We also traveled the distance of the park on Rt 120, the winding high-country, west-east road, and slipped out of the far eastern park entrance for a quick trip to the toxic salty, but exquisitely beautiful, Mono Lake. And on our way there, we sampled the delicious fish tacos served at, of all places, the Lee Vining Mobile Gas Station.

Once back home, I hastily did the wash and repacked for two other short trips, one to Chicago and the other to Columbus, Ohio. Now, just as I l was once looking forward to all our summertime travel adventures, I relish staying here, happy to putter. The Putterer

Peaches

I am thrilled to welcome a "follower" to my blog. And no less, a distinguished and appropriately named visitor than my new friend, Peaches.

In my garden, I have a lovely little peach tree, a dwarf that I bought several years ago after researching a story for the magazine about orchards and fruit. I was amused then to learn that the reason early settlers grew apple tree orchards (and thus the huge popularity of Johnny Apple Seed) was because they were making an alcoholic mash, a hard cider, to wash down and abet their daily trials and tribulations. Of which, they had many, since they couldn't run off to Whole Foods for sushi if they didn't feel like cooking.

My peach tree, which grows just about two and a half feet tall, delivered the first year that I planted it. Its stout, little branches heroically supported two enormous peaches at the end of the growing season. I picked one before it was ripe, because we were going on vacation, and left the other on the branch. I put the fruit in the car and we packed off to Rhode Island. That peach got toasty warm on the back deck. And in the parking lot before boarding the ferry to Block Island, the four of us each took bites, passing the fruit around. It was deliriously delicious. I can't ever remember a peach that tasted so good, not before or ever since.

When we got home, the other peach had ripened and some back yard critter thief had taken more than enough bites that we couldn't have any ourselves.

The next year was the year that the gypsy moths invaded. An army of them marched up the peach tree's slender trunk. Their soft, clingy bodies made everyone shudder with horror, and the usual live- and let-live principles of a mindful gardener were abandoned. Over the fence the neighbors discussed and planned the coming apocalypse for the invaders. But by the time, we got down to reading the label about the horrific chemicals and toxins that we were aiming to set loose into our backyard havens, the gypsy moth mass had defoliated my peach tree.

No peaches came that year.

And fortunately, we neighbors came to our senses and we abandoned our plans to permethiate with pesticide our gardens. The gypsy moths naturally met their demise in the beaks of a host of hungry birds, and nature's natural boom and bust came and went. But still the next year, the remaining few warriors of the gypsy moth contingent ascended the peach tree and once again rendered it fruitless.

This year, its tiny peaches dropped early. I don't know why or what offended it. Perhaps it was storing up energy to fend off the expected assault. But for whatever the reason, my peach tree, though peachless, is looking ever so robust. And the gardener, ever hopeful, looks to next year. So welcome Peaches to my blog. The Putterer

P.S. The picture above is a dahlia and has nothing to do with peaches. It is just a fabulous photo masterfully created by my daughter, P, and taken just a week or so ago in my garden.

A Bumblebee Bumbles into My Ear

Nothing gives me greater pleasure than welcoming the visitors that come to my garden. Perhaps they aren't even visitors, a few might be calling this place home. Witness the bumblebee that my daughter P photographed as it sipped nectar from one of my Phlox Veronicas. I've had many bumblebees this summer. They arrived in early spring and multiplied in late April when the azaleas bloomed. One even gently whispered to me in my ear one day. I was sitting in my chair completely relaxed. Enough so that if a bumblebee should happen to fly into my ear that I wouldn't even flinch. The one that did just for a fleeting second tickled and tumbled around there in a manner so gentle I felt he'd come by to thank me for making him such a lovely place to find his daily feast.

This weekend, I finally had the time to do the yard work after three weeks of neglect. I mowed and clipped and weed-wacked until my wacker ran itself out of plastic string. The heat started to build and I just couldn't get to the back yard garden. But there it all looks relatively fine. I stopped in there yesterday morning before work and watered and yanked out a few weeds. We've started harvesting our tomatoes. The first one came last week. And I've since pulled about half a dozen more. They are absolutely delicious and fortunately did not suffer this horrible tomato blight that is plaguing the Northeast. The garden that I planted close to Cherie's yard is making a fine first-year attempt, but I bet by its second season, it will do the job that I planted it to do. The mosquitoes, little ornery guys, are in full force. Five of them to a leg. It's quite annoying. The little sweet peppers have grown so large, that they pulled the entire plant over. And sadly, the lettuce that I planted two weeks ago refused to come in. It must have known that we still had hot, nasty days to come. I'll plant another row in a week or so. The Putterer

My Lovely Ladies

Everyone knows that nurturing a garden is far easier than nurturing children, or children that are clamoring to be adults, anyway. Put a plant in soil and usually it will just grow. There are no subtleties, no nuances, few worries and almost certain success for both the gardener and the plant.

Children, on the other hand, on first blush, seem easy. They are sweet and beautiful to look at. They love you unconditionally. But then over time, complexities evolve. Keeping them safe. Guiding them to do right and make healthy choices. Protecting them from overzealous teachers and other authoritarians. Letting out the leash only to have to reel it back in. Being their friend and then abruptly turning authority figure and jailer. Hypocrisy. Anger. Frustration. Betrayal. Conflict. Disappointment.

And yet incredibly, none of it matters in the main. The sweet smile, the one you've recognized since the moment you first held them, melts your soul. The fierce love that you have for them cripples any attempt to remain angry. There's no flower in the world to compete.

Maybe instead, I can find some parental wisdom to draw upon in the soil. There, perhaps, in the dirt is the grit, the determination and all the micro-ingredients for the infinite worries and precautions that it takes to master the art and science of planting a child on this earth.