How I Celebrate Memorial Day

Time for a quick trip down memory lane. Two years ago, I decided to tear out the lawn and terrace a hill so I could have some garden space. Here's what it looked like last year at this time:



I should remind readers that while building said wall, we dug up a four-foot-wide section of porch steps, thrown in as fill. (There's a whole entry on it-- go check it out!) On my birthday last year, the young men from both Morgantown wards descended on my yard en masse and finished the wall. Medical issues prevented me from actually prepping the soil and getting the garden ready.

But not this year! Here's what the final project looks like:


Hurray! I have a little garden! Actually, a fairly decent-sized garden. It's my first "grown-up" garden, not planted in pots on a deck. I've grown tomatoes every year, but they've never actually had ground space until now. When I was a little girl and it was time to plant the garden, I always begged Dad to plant some flowers. He always said no, arguing that the garden was for vegetables. Now I have both. The top row is dahlias, snapdragons, and a lavender plant (English, not French, unfortunately-- I would have preferred French but couldn't find any).

Bottom row: tomatoes are the star! I went to the farmers market and hit up the heirloom tomato people for some seedlings. I intended to only plant two plants, and I stood there debating: red tomatoes or purple tomatoes? I saw a green zebra seedling, and I LOVE those, so I had to get one. That made the second deliberation even harder. The vendor helpfully pointed out that I could get FOUR plants for $20. That's when I saw the black cherry tomato seedling and thought, "Hey, I have room for all of them!" So, the final tomato count: one Cherokee purple, one super Sioux (red), one green zebra, and one black cherry. What filled out the vegetable row? Two basil plants, a row of bush beans, a row of beets, and an oregano plant.

Here's what I realized as I was digging ditches around my new little tomato plants: planting tomatoes is what I did with Dad every single spring. I know the rest of the family was involved with the garden, but when I think of Dad, I think of tomato plants. I don't remember helping him prep the soil, and after how much work I went through this week hauling wheelbarrow loads of clay OUT of my garden area so I could mix in manure, peat, and top soil (400 pounds worth), I have-- besides better abdominal muscles-- a new-found respect for my dad's love of gardening. Somewhere along the fifteenth wheelbarrow load of clay, I wiped my face and thought, "Why am I doing this? Are tomatoes worth it?" I thought about President Spencer W. Kimball's counsel to plant gardens. I thought about Adam being told to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. What is it about gardens that's so important?

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, tomato gardens are about remembering my dad. Yes, I'm getting tomatoes that I love to eat. I'm also learning to work really hard and really consistently for those tomatoes. If I want tomatoes in August, I have to water those little seedlings every day now. Most of all, though, I think about my dad and how happy working in the garden made him. How happy he was when he brought in buckets full of tomatoes and then made a batch of homemade French dressing. We would slice up a whole plateful of tomatoes and eat them until we were stuffed. When Dad retired and he and Mom moved into their dream house, they didn't have a big garden area, but they had enough space for tomato plants: 15 tomato plants. For two people. I think Dad would approve of my tomato seedling choices. I'd like to think that if he'd been with me at the farmers market yesterday morning, he would have whispered, "Why not get one of each? You've got room."

So maybe I'm too far away from Dad's grave to go visit for Memorial Day. I'm okay with that. I can water my tomatoes and remember him just fine right here.

graduation . . . a year later

Yesterday was graduation. I got home after the requisite photo session with new grads and thought about how sick I was (unknowingly at the time) last year. Then I thought, "Huh, I wonder if you can tell from last year's graduation pictures?" Other than that I'm generally not photogenic, what do you think? Here's last year:




And here's this year:

Maybe I'm just creating something that's not there, but I can see a difference in skin tone. Or maybe I just THINK I can.

It's scary to me that I could be so, so anemic and have no idea. How can your body get used to something like that? Anyhow, this is just a post to mark almost a year of the return of health! I feel GREAT!! Running the Decker's Creek Half Marathon on June 5th, and hopefully this year I won't win the caboose award. Yay!

Springtime in West Virginia: Ramps Festival!

When I had a West Virginia-themed housewarming party three years ago, one friend brought me two gifts. One I recognized: a little vase of lillies of the valley. The other I didn't recognize: it looked like a cross between oversized green onions and leeks. That was my first encounter with a West Virginia native food: ramps. Here's what my friend said: "When you eat these (handing me the ramps), you'll want these to balance out the smell (handing me the lillies of the valley)." She also cautioned me to have windows open when I cooked the ramps.

So then I dug out my Joy of Cooking reference book to find out more about ramps. Here's what it said: "These and the strong field garlic . . . in your lawn are not recommended by us although we frequently see them praised by others."

Apparently, people either love or hate ramps. People who hate them talk of ramps seeping through your pores and stinking up rooms for days at a time. People who love them talk about how ramps are part of their childhood memories of West Virginia. My take is that the people who say they hate ramps are really saying they hate anything that could be linked to a hillbilly image.

Today was the annual ramps festival in Mt. Morris, PA. Some friends and I piled in the car to check it out. I'd eaten ramps before, and I kinda liked them, and I'm all about a small town festival. We wandered around the various booths, looking for some kind of sampler plate, when we saw this sign:



Bingo! I mean, who wouldn't want to eat food cooked by Walter the Ramp Chef? (I'm pretty sure the sign meant to say "horseradish" rather than "horserash." I don't want to know what "horserash" might be.) So we stepped up for our ramps platters, after a brief photo op:

You can tell which one is Walter, right? So what do ramps look like? You can kind of tell from this picture, although the ramps are in some kind of bacon/sausage shish kabob dealie (which I think ended up in the beans on the sampler plate):

Here's what the actual sampler plate looked like. From left to right, top to bottom: baked beans with ramps and some kind of sausage, a ramps roll with ramps butter, a ramps chocolate chip cookie (I know, sounds gross-- but it really didn't taste bad), a deviled egg, a pickled egg (pickled in ramps vinegar), some kind of French toast dish with ramps gravy, and a ramps potato pancake.

The verdict? Most of the food was pretty good. I didn't try the ramps mints (honestly, isn't that an oxymoron?), but my friend did. I didn't buy any ramps for home cooking, nor did I buy a ramps cookbook, but it was kind of fun to be part of the festivities. We went home pretty early because my friends' kids were cold and tired.

And as soon as we got in the car, one of my friends passed out gum. So, um, maybe you don't want to sit next to me tomorrow morning in church.

Back to the bathroom remodel

When we last left our intrepid house owner, she had unwisely decided to tackle an outdoor project and an indoor bathroom model in the same spring. The bathroom project got set aside for a while, but now it's BACK!! So after a few elbow grease sessions scraping off ugly wallpaper (pictured in a previous entry), here's where the project stood:

Hurray! No more ugly wallpaper! Next, paint. In this case, Coral Gable Biltmore Mediterranean Caramel. I guess for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, you have to have a fancy name. I just tell people, "It looks like cinnamon":

My original plan for the floor/ugly linoleum was to simply put new linoleum on top. Then I had a conversation with a friend, who asked, "How hard is it really going to be to get that linoleum up? What's underneath it?" I decided to find out. Here's what I found:

Score! More red oak, just like in the rest of the house. I started having dreams of beautifully refinished wood bathroom floors. Then I pulled up the rest of the linoleum by the toilet and found this:

Hmm. Not so pretty. A friend said I could sand the black sticky stuff off, but as I continued to pull up linoleum, I decided that no matter how much I tried to sand, it just wasn't going to look as good as the hallway wood just on the other side of the bathroom door frame. Here's how everything looked post-linoleum removal:

I'm going to tile. Anyone feel like helping? It's my spring break project-- along with removing a half-way torn-off gutter, rehanging a gate, and carpenter bee-proofing one last part of the balcony off my bedroom. Woo . . .

Snowmageddon!

This is a video that a former student of mine made yesterday. He's in Maryland, so at a slightly higher altitude, but we got comparable amounts of snow. I really wish I'd been playing like this instead of just shoveling yesterday . . .

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVD5FyXt_yE

Enjoy!

Stupid Groundhog.

February 5, 2010-- 4:30 AM. The phone rings. School (and therefore seminary) has been canceled. There's no snow yet, but it's supposed to hit. And it when it hits, it's gonna be BAD.
4:45 AM. I happily go back to bed after making phone calls to seminary students, anticipating lots of snow when I wake up in a couple of hours.
6:30 AM. I wake up disappointed. I go running.
10 AM. It starts rain/slushing. I hurry to finish errands before the storm hits.
4 PM. Still raining, although apparently it's snowing in parts of town.
Bedtime. It's finally snowing! Yay!

I wake up the next morning, February 6th, to this:


This is the view from my west-facing front window. Isn't it pretty? I have a driveway somewhere down in that mess, though, so I decide to shovel it out.


February snow is HEAVY!! At least I have power and heat, unlike some Morgantown residents. Note to self: be grateful for trees planted far from power lines. Here's the half-way point in the morning shoveling, about 45 minutes into the job:

Let me just point out here that while my driveway LOOKS flat, it isn't at the bottom near the street. Let me also point out that the neighbor had plowed the street. I'm grateful for that, but he created a berm of that nasty, heavy, bouldery kind of snow that I had to clear away. After an hour and a half (note that the snow is still falling this whole time), my driveway looked like this:

Better, but I knew there'd be more shoveling later. Those are my footprints back from the street to my garage to put the shovel away and go in the house.

But at least the snow is pretty! I tried to clear some snow off some weighed-down branches (didn't work so well), and in the process I found that tree branches had created a little snow fort. I tried to get a picture, but it didn't work out so well. Here's a picture off my back deck instead:

I feel very grateful. The snow is beautiful, and I had the strength to shovel it out of the way. I don't have to drive anywhere until Monday (church has already been canceled). I have heat and power, and I have ice cream to eat while looking out the window at the snow. I have an awesome sledding hill in my backyard. (No sled, though. Gotta work on that.)

Now can I start hibernating?

Okay, if I have to go, at least I have my toy

Thursday afternoon was the day for the cats' regular vet check-up and shots. I hate getting them in their carrier. I can usually take one sleepy cat off-guard and get her in the carrier. The problem is that there are TWO cats, and the chances of BOTH cats being sleepy and in separate rooms (and therefore not realizing what I'm up to) are pretty slim. Add that to the fact that the cat carrier is usually stored in an upstairs closet and only comes out when it's time for a little road trip.

So this year I thought I'd be tricky. I got the carrier out two days early and set it on the floor in the living room. I was hoping that the cats would think it would be a new place to play. Tuesday night after work, I walked into the room and saw Alice hiding inside it. Yes!

Wednesday night, I walked into the living room and saw this:



Even better! The cats only put their favorite toy in places where they've been sleeping. So, I figured Thursday's vet trip would be a piece of cake. Okay, so it wasn't, but at least while the cats were stressed out in the vet's office, they had their favorite toy.

So, as usual, this got me thinking in terms of analogies. Did having the toy there make the trip to the vet any easier? Short of either cat learning to talk, I don't think I'll ever know. It was kind of a safety item, though-- something that reminded them that life could be okay eventually.

What are my safety items? Or my safety routines? What do I do to establish normalcy when life is scary or stressful? When I was packing up my house in Iowa to move here, I slept in a sleeping bag on a foam eggshell mattress for a couple of nights after my bed got loaded in the moving truck. It wasn't ideal, but it was my bed. I put it in the same spot my bed used to be (roughly), and the cats slept on the exact corner they always sleep on when the bed's there. I took a picture because I thought it was funny. (Sorry, no electronic version of the picture, and I can't figure out my scanner.)

Now it's got me thinking about how much I want my life to be regular and predictable and what I do to make it feel that way. I think we all crave routines. I think I crave them even more because I don't have some of the routines I used to always rely on. Dinner time, for example, happens much later than I would like because I teach evening classes. Teaching seminary requires me to sleep less than I would like. I have a feeling that if I were in the middle of a tornado aftermath, with my house in shambles around me, I would still be trying to find some kind of routine-- maybe I would be stacking remants of books together or trying to set up furniture fragments and items sort of where they used to be.

What would be my comfort item in the carrier? Chocolate? Nah, too easy and predictable. Scriptures? Well, yeah. My favorite pillow? The throw I always use for naps?

What are YOUR comfort items?