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It’s taken me three days, but the main section of my front flower bed is weeded and, wth a little help from John, mulched.

The roses are blooming and the bird bath is ready for those dirty birds who seem to love it.

The lavender is in full flower.

I’ve crushed cinnamon basil and rubbed it on my skin

in a hopeful attempt to discourage mosqitoes.

At least some of the new milkweed plants are getting ready to bloom.

And I’ve promised myself to take a break from the garden work today and just enjoy the garden.  I hope I can pull it off.

Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation.
It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.
– Karel Capek

Tuesday is CSA pickup day, and this week our fruit share included three bags of cherries,which is quite a lot:

Since the cherries were at their juicy peak, I got out my cherry pitter and spent a few minutes on the front porch, where the mosquitoes seem to be in abeyance. Once they were all stemmed and pitted, some of the cherries went into the freezer. I’m macerating a few in sugar to serve later with yoghurt, but these will need a few days to be finished: pickled with rosemary will be ready in four days, and the bourbon infusion will expand my cocktail repertoire in August.

The cherry season is short, so I look for ways to make it last.

 

 

I’ve been away from home for most of the last three weeks. What I learned at the CAPLAW conference will make me a better board member for Pathway, the community action agency whose board I chair. Three extra days in Portland, exploring the city with my daughter Olivia, were a wonderful bonus. The hurried trip to Chicago, via Detroit but skipping Toledo, was worth it to be close by for the birth of my first grandchild.  After being home long enough to unpack and do a little laundry, I was eager to go back to Chicago where Aloisa is now at home with her parents, Jeff and Johanna, my oldest.  I loved seeing them all and Loi’s Uncle Sam.

And now I’m back. How I spent my day says a little bit about my priorities.

I spent spent a couple of hours on board work for Pathway.  Here are a few reasons that’s important to me.

I made granola:

I  harvested greens and herbs from the garden, even though the mosquito infestation made it impossible to linger.

and I cleaned the porch, which is as close to outside as we want to be right now, and I’ve begun to set up for drinks before dinner.

It’s good to be home.

 

For some time it’s been easy to feel hopeless and powerless about life in this country, or even in this world. I don’t like either feeling.

Thanks to SCOTUS and Aloisa for a good week.

There’s one big thing:  Aloisa Rose Daschbach was born this week.  My first grandchild.

This is such a big thing that I can’t really write about it yet. I held her for a few minutes, but then she was caught up in high-tech health care (a little breathing support, a few tests and monitoring) and I was limited to just touching her. Now the tests are providing reassurance that all is well.  A very strong and determined little girl, Loi successfully removed her air tube and will soon be released, so I’m looking forward to lots more holding and rocking soon.  It looks like I’m not the only one to have that idea:

For the week before Loi was born, I was in Portland (more later) at a conference.   When she surprised us all by coming early, I went directly to Chicago, so I was away from home for 10 days. That’s a long time for me.

Here is one of the little things that is making me happy to be home again:  I’d given up on my fig tree.  I protected it all winter, brought it out in the spring, and tried to believe, but honestly it was just a stick which provided a nice perch for the birds but showed no signs of life.

 

 

But it’s alive!  Some day I will grow figs! 

 

 

 

 

 

Since it’s Father’s Day, I’ve been thinking about my own father and remembering his passion for growing things.  He always had a big garden, and mine is small, but I think we share a similar feeling about digging in the dirt.  That’s been something Jo has enjoyed as well, so I hope we have passed that particular joy on to Aloisa Rose Daschbach.  I look forward to seeing her discover her own passions and joys.

I’ve never really lived on a farm, but I’ve always had a garden.  There have been only two constants in my gardens here on Brookside:  tomatoes and change.  We inherited some wonderful flowering shrubs and annuals, but no matter how much I love my farmers I like to grow something I can eat.  For years we grew tomatoes in the back yard in pots, and then, when our neighbors eliminated some shade-producing bushes between our properties, I finally had enough sun for some raised beds.  Although the old bushes were replaced by even taller trees, those beds were a perfect spot for eggplants, tomatoes, lettuces and herbs.  Then came the deer!  One morning there were tomatoes, one bite out of each one, languishing mysteriously in the path between the beds.  Soon after I looked out the window to see a deer grazing on the plants. The next year we moved our tomato efforts to the front porch, which because of the death-by-lightning of a big old crabapple, now had more sun than the back.  After one year of a healthy harvest on the driveway side, for some reason we tried a different porch section where a heavy crop and a windy summer required us to literally wire the tomato plants to the front of the house.  The next year, following the sun, we put the pots in the center, near the front of the porch and behind the roses.  That’s the year we learned that deer will not only eat roses, they will lean WAAAY over the roses to eat tomatoes.  Each spring, taking into account the height of the dogwood and the reach of the deer, we select the sunniest spot we can find.   This year our four big pots feature tomatoes and basil, and the space in front is filled with pots of eggplant and mint, which (so far) the deer don’t eat.   My hopes are high, but thank goodness for our CSA.

You know how sometimes a word gets stuck in your head, and everything reminds you of it?  Earlier this week I read a garden blog about ephemerals .  Although the term was used very specifically to describe plants that come and go before the trees leaf out, of course in a broader sense everything is ephemeral. I was again reminded of that truth by  one of Gretchen Rubin’s “secrets of adulthood” : The Fun Part Doesn’t Come Later; Now is the fun part.

So this morning we took a little walk in the back yard to appreciate what’s blooming right now, and for me the fun part was the sweet woodruff.  I don’t remember when I bought the first plants or where, but this plant has flourished outside my kitchen door for years.  I’ve always imagined steeping it to make May wine; maybe this year…

The plant when newly gathered has but little odour, but when dried, has a most refreshing scent of new-mown hay, which is retained for years. Gerard tells us: ‘The flowers are of a very sweet smell as is the rest of the herb, which, being made up into garlands or bundles, and hanged up in houses in the heat of summer, doth very well attemper the air, cool and make fresh the place, to the delight and comfort of such as are therein. It is reported to be put into wine, to make a man merry, and to be good for the heart and liver, it prevaileth in wounds, as Cruciata and other vulnerary herbs do.’

 

I spent most of today in the garden, weeding and planting.  Thunbergia for the hummingbirds, both African Sunset and Blushing Susie to climb up the trellises that are topped with terra cotta carried back from Ranch Gordo, that time we went to Napa to admire beans and buy terra cotta.  Really.   Milkweed for the monarchs, both asclepia tuberosa (buterfly weed) and asclepia incarnata (swamp milkweed), in hopes that I can reduce my environmental anxiety and guilt.  And see monarchs.  Lettuce for salads and borage as a companion to the strawberries., which  have escaped their strawberry pot.  Sorrel.  Hyssop.  Plus parsley, sage, thyme, oregano, tarragon, and chervil.  All, I hope, as unattractive to deer as they are attractive to me and the creatures.

The French herbalist Gerard discussed Borage by referring to the ancient Greek naturalist Pliny, who said that the plant ‘maketh a man merry and joyful.’ (Hoffman 1995) Dioscorides, the first century Greek physician, mentioned the use of Borage to ‘comfort the heart, purge melancholy and quiet the lunatic person.’ Both Pliny and Dioscorides believed Borage was the famous nepenthe of Homer, which when steeped in wine brought about forgetfulness.

 

 

 

 

 

On Wednesday morning, we went for a walk at the botanical garden.  This time of year, things are growing and changing there so fast that we try to make it a weekly outing.  It was a perfect morning, and although the 40-minute mile isn’t exactly aerobic the steps still count on the fitbit.  It takes a long time to appreciate it all – to listen to the bird singing from high up in the tree:

to admire the soft colors of the daffodils:

to say hello to the goddess of the garden:

to decide which clump of flowers has the perfect degree of pale purple:

to pass the tree which I think of a the halfway point:

We admired violets that are in our own backyard, too,  but usually unnoticed there:

And at last we arrived at the pond.  Turtles, frogs, tiny fish, and layer upon layer of reflections and surfaces and shallows and depths:

Like so many things these days, this walk produced wildly ranging feelings in me:  gratitude for the garden and the time to walk there.  Anticipation of enjoying it throughout spring and beyond.  Sadness that it’s all so ephemeral.  And guilt that everything in the garden, everything in the whole world, is endangered by human greed and I can’t protect it.  Lately almost every experience and every emotion is accompanied by that guilt, quietly lurking in the background.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the last fifteen years, I’ve had an off-again, on-again relationship with the Great Lakes Consortium, a local non-profit that organizes international exchanges of all kinds.  In 2002, I traveled with GLC as one of a delegation of American women to  Lebanon where, then and now, women were working to gain influence and power in local and national politics.  It was an amazing trip, and I will always be grateful.  Since then, we’ve occasionally hosted GLC participants and always enjoyed the experience.

 

 

Two sisters, both artists, from Tanzania were thrilled with American showers, although the “shower curtain on the inside” part of the experience eluded them.  They were overwhelmed when I took them to a craft store for art supplies and, in return, left us with incredibly colorful, imaginative and vibrant canvases.

Guests from Dagestan were touchingly proud of the food culture of their own country and dismayed by our fast food habits, while they admired at least some of America’s political culture.  Their pictures of a backyard with fruit trees and a kitchen garden made me very jealous.

 

A Russian guest, a restauranteur who was learning about American entrepreneurialism, made us borscht.

 

 

 

 

We’ve enjoyed many celebrations with our international guests, too.  While appreciating our hospitality, they enjoyed  sharing their own local treasures with us.

 

Sometimes language was a problem, but these visits have always left me with good feelings about people around the world I would never have encountered without the GLC.  Although I’ve been less involved lately, last night I went to the welcome party for a group of Eastern European organizers who will be in the country, in a variety of host cities, until June.  Bulgarians, Hungarians, Czechoslovakians… most young, all passionate about changing lives.  There was a silent auction of items and I was the successful bidder on a bottle of local (in Slovakia) herbal bitter liqueur. I’m looking forward to sharing it with friends over wide-ranging discussions around the table.  

If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with him…the people who give you their food give you their heart. Cesar Chavez