Treat Yourself!

I recently read "The Little Red Hen" to my Kindergarten class.  Their immediate response was, "She's mean!"  But then I realized they were only saying what they thought I wanted to hear.  There is another version where the Little Red Hen bakes bread from her organically grown wheat and puts it on-line in a food blog. She shares the experience and waits for the comments to pour in. Or she invites everyone over for a 'bread tasting' and tries to sound surprised at the ecstatic compliments about her bread-making skills. This would mirror my experience of housekeeping to impress, or cooking to please someone else.

I've just finished baking a kale and rosemary quiche.  You could say it was a bit of an experiment, motivated by the last of the kale growing in my waning garden and the desire to pick rosemary.  I haven't tasted it yet, but I'm sure it is good enough to feed me for the rest of the week, along with my rosemary chicken.  I might smother it with my homemade chutney.  I was thinking of making some fresh melon chutney with the sad looking melons softening on the vines, but a gallon of chutney is enough. 
The first time I tried making chutney was when I lived isolated on a Pacific island and couldn't buy the stuff.  I remember my boys begged me not to try again because the smell drove them gagging outside. Since then I have been able to find the jars in specialty Indian shops. This time I made chutney just because I wanted to. I enjoyed peeling and chopping the tomatoes, crushing the garlic and adding the ginger.  And any dish is an excuse for me to pick and chop the fresh herbs from my herb garden. The result was altogether too watery, yet quite tasty.  Not really good enough to give away as a gift, and I don't know anybody who craves tomato chutney either.

My boys are away at college and Jon would prefer a burger with a can of beans. So my experimenting with different recipes is all about what I enjoy.  And I enjoy the growing, harvesting and preparing as much as the tasting.  I am starting to experiment now that the pressure to impress someone else is off my plate. At coffee hour this morning a friend casually remarked that she'd had home-made pizza. I was delighted to find that she made her own crust without a recipe. "I just mix things in with the yeast and flour."  I am only starting to cook like that, since now I am the only one to eat it.  I add mint and nasturtium flowers whenever possible.

 This is new to me: the act of basing choices solely on what I enjoy doing. It is discovering intrinsic motivation, about 50 years too late. I clean up the house and decorate with fresh flowers because that makes me happy.  I grow lavender just because there is nothing better than the scent.  I hunt down mincemeat and make pies that remind me of family and happiness. I have a whole slew of Brazilian recipes that are my comfort food.  They remind me of childhood and simpler times, as well as being tasty.  They are all part of my "me time". 
My most precious "me time" is when I sit down with a glass of wine to write this blog.   And I can scroll through my past memories, photos of beautiful people and places I've been, and feel thankful. The irony behind this is that I started recording my thoughts three years ago during a time when chaos and misery reigned, and I couldn't see the good through the haze of bad.  Now I look back on those years in a different way through the eyes of my blog.

California: Just a Short Flight From the US

My son decides he has enough of Minnesota winter and applies to the 'study abroad' program.  But instead of Europe he opts for the sunny coast of southern California. Well, California is very much like another country, and I jump at the chance to travel with him on his new adventure. We land in LA and spend the next couple of hours in a traffic jam. We are on a six-lane highway going north with so many other cars that it appears more like a parking lot. Where is everyone going?
Sam cranks up the radio in the rental car and gives us a quick run-down on west coast rap music.  Jon and I imagine we are in a movie, crawl past UCLA and the J. Paul Getty Center curling round the hillside above us. The highway divide is planted with banks of bougainvillea that is flowering all at once in magenta and red. But we can't get over the sky.  The brilliant blue expanse with not a cloud lets us know that we are not in Minnesota anymore.

 Our first real stop is Pismo Beach, as Sam is anxious to check out the beach.  We find miles of sand and old-fashioned cafes. There are small motels, camp grounds and trailer parks. This is definitely a holiday destination.  We meet retired people who have come to CA and stayed. There are cyclists doing the pacific highway, and families on RV holidays. It seems like everyone here as come from somewhere else.
We find the same at CalPoly when we unload Sam. There are plenty of foreign exchange students and those transferring. Everyone is looking to live the dream in California.
On the surface it is America, but with a difference. At Target, where we went to buy school supplies, I was surprised to find two whole aisles of wine similar to Europe.  Even Walmart had a pile of beer at its entrance. The Old Navy store looked like an old Mission, and everywhere the parking lots were full.

How the cattle and trees survived, I don't know. One local told us it hadn't rained in 10 years. "Not even in the spring?" we asked.  "What spring? We don't get spring".  The vineyards and fields of kale are all irrigated. But the hills look dry. No wonder there are fires nearby. Everything is different yet familiar. I realize that California is a mixture of all the places I have lived.  It is both dry, hot, beautiful, agricultural and a vacation destination all at once. I feel like I belong somehow, and I can see why others come and never leave.
As we progress through the weekend of sightseeing and campus orientation, I notice that we are the norm. Every other group of three is made up of parents like me with a college age son or daughter. I have never been the norm before.

We are all the same age.  Our children are all healthy intelligent young men or women. They look at us , and we at them, knowing that we are in same place in life, wanting the same things.
I sense my son wants to be off on his own, meeting those his own age. We say goodbye and head to the wineries. Jon is torn. He feels we should be spending these last few minutes with our son.  But instead we leave him with his group and make the most of our short stay in CA.
The next morning we walk down the beach to get some excellent coffee, just the two of us. We see other parents still with their child, wanting to see their child succeed on their own, but reluctant to say goodbye.

A Time to Pluck

Weeding a garden is not the most glamorous of jobs, but it is very satisfying. There is something cathartic about pulling out the ugly, and the activity gives instant gratification. The trouble with weeding is that it requires real work and is quickly undone. This summer weeding became a favorite past time for me, I actually look forward to getting out there! 
In the process of weeding, I discover so much.  While clearing away old growth I find the first shoots of spring pushing up. I mark them and patiently visit the site until them bloom. While pulling a stinging nettle from inside the growth of grape vine I discovered my first wild grapes. Now we are eating wild grape jelly.

The endless and backbreaking weeding of my vegetable garden led to me finding the first green beans to pick, that were hiding under the leaves. That led to a daily harvesting and trying new recipes. We have grown tired of zucchini bread and cucumber pickles.  Now I am starting to find large juicy yellow and red tomatoes  when I go to re-stake the plants after a hard rain.
I am learning much about the plants that grow in my beds, and which must be pulled, and which left to grow.  I ask my mother-in-law for advice and she usually puts me straight.  "If it grows like a weed, it probably is a weed." I am past letting thistles grow under the erroneous thinking that they might be poppies.

I was sure one plant was a type of lily, and let it grow, giving it room and water. When it finally 'flowered' it turned out to be an invasive weed called sedge nut.  I googled it and was told to get rid of it immediately before it took over my lawn!
In my defense, there is much growing in my flower bed that was planted years ago and I have lost track of what was placed where.  And the black-eyed-susans have spread like wild flowers. They bloom later in the summer and I was often in doubt as to what they were until the delicate orange petals finally uncurled.  So my weeding became more of a "Where is Waldo Weed" activity. I literally watched one plant for weeks only to find out it was a common ditch weed when the tiny white flowers finally popped out.

I am slow to get round to weeding for other reasons than not being able to identify the weeds from the garden plants.  I thoroughly enjoy being distracted by the novelty of animal life I find.  Toads and frogs hop out beneath my feet, and I found a nest of baby rabbits ironically hidden inside a cage installed to keep the rabbits from eating the green beans.  I tried not to disturb a large mother spider who built a web in the middle of my lilies.  The butterflies came and never left.  I found out that one cabbage white was responsible for the green grubs eating my brussel sprouts.  I was amazed by the amount and variety of bees and smaller insects tirelessly pollinating eat flower and vegetable.  I would stop to watch them until I forgot which weeds I was supposed to be pulling.  And just lately a pair of hummingbirds have started to make my garden their playground. They fly around me, twirling and darting from flower to flower. They love the mystery canna lilies who have defied the harsh Minnesota winter and continue to bloom where no tropical plant should be.  When I went to remove the sunflowers  past their due date, I found the goldfinches had picked the heads clean of seeds.

Our large apple tree is messy and everyone keeps telling me to cut it down. The first year we lived here I tried to spray the fruit with insecticide, but the tree soon became too large.  We did not want the job of disposing of all the wormy apples come September, but they were in no way edible. This year we had a bumper crop, with the large weight of the apples breaking several of the branches.  We had to trim the tree and I had a look at the fallen fruit. They seemed worm-free so I baked them into a pie. As far as I know, in all its years of producing, never has one apple from the tree been eaten. The pie was delicious and I quickly picked the remaining apples of the broken branches before they were carted off to be eaten by the cows on the farm. We will be eating apple pie and cobbler for months to come! 
I visit my herb garden daily, to gather herbs and weed out everything else.  I did a little research on one persistent leafy plant. It turned out to be St. John's Wort, which I remembered planting from seed 15 years ago. Its flowers are soaked in vodka and the brew used to treat depression. I'm sure it works as a remedy on several levels.

I know that if I wake up with a pain in back, all I need is to walk in the garden and the pain is gone... forgotten.  The contact with nature lifts my spirits as well as providing healthy food for my soul. 
Weeding is like love and discipline.  It nurtures joy and growth, side by side.

Cow Tipper Rescues Boat Flipper

It's Labor Day weekend and I am traveling north with my in-laws to spend some time up at the lake house. Everyone will be there. Cousins in college are traveling from out of state, father-in-law is leaving the farm, and the city cousins are carving out some time between business trips and fall sports meets.  On the road we get a phone call from my niece who has arrived at the lake first and is taking the boat out for its first run.
Over the next hour a series of phone calls from her unfold the drama. The boat dies, in the middle of the lake, and someone has to swim ashore. A stranger with a pontoon boat comes and gives them a tow in to dock. The boat is put up on the trailer to be taken into town.

Everyone is hoping that it is simply out of gas.  It is hard to imagine a family vacation without "Old Blue".  She has been pulling three generations of water skiers and has been known to make little tubers take air.  Every year she needs a little maintenance, but has kept going for over 30 years.
The next phone call was "just to let us know", that there had been an accident and the boat had come off the trailer. I had visions of a boat flying through the air, taking out everything in its path.  We were surprised to find it sitting, relatively unharmed, on the side of the road. The nearest resident had come out to help and they were just deciding what to do next.
Normally this sort of "accident" would send me into a downward spiral of gloom and doom, certain that this is the end... there is no fix.  But I have come to understand that this is not normal.  There are people who simply get on and do whatever needs to be done.

 It wasn't long before another vehicle stopped.  The driver came to help and immediately took charge. They were able to jack up the front of the boat and winch it back on to the trailer.  The whole thing took less than 10 minutes. The boat was rescued even before a neighbor could arrive with his skid-loader.  There wasn't even time to lay blame!
I learned a bit more of our rescuer after noticing his truck was towing an unusual device that I had never seen before. My brother in brother-in-law said, "Oh, that's a cow tipper." A what? Why would you want to tip cows? Apparently they need to be tipped so their hooves can be trimmed. Don't ask me why their hooves need trimming. Only farmers know this stuff! 
And it turns out our boat driver's sister went to college with the good samaritan/hoof trimmer. More surprising was finding out that you need a college degree to be a cow tipper. We thanked him and the various vehicles dispersed as quickly as they had arrived. Old Blue had survived to power through

the water another day.  And as I write this on the deck, I can watch her pulling a skier round the lake.
I am continually impressed with both the Minnesotan "can do" attitude and their kindness to strangers. This is not the first boat accident I have been involved in. Jon and I had to be rescued in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, when our sailboat was grounded on an island beach. And on another voyage we were rescued twice: once by German sailors, and then by Greek fisherman. Each disaster was extremely stressful, and we paid them back as best we could, with whatever we had onboard.

I have also been stranded on the road in Bulgaria and Croatia, and many times as a child in the interior of Brazil. Each time I had the feeling that I was completely on my own, with no one to help me out of the situation. That turned out not to be true as I eventually found some one who took pity on me and then charged me an arm and a leg for parts and their time.
Here I get the feeling everyone is just waiting for an opportunity to help out a neighbor or stranger. Sometimes it is hard to find a stranger, as most people are connected in some way. He was a college roommate, they played ball together, our kids dated, he worked on the farm, her kids rent land from us. And if there isn't a connection, we make one, while pulling together to stay out of trouble.