gardening

tiny farm notebook

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Laura M Gibson

Snow’s on its way. I’ve closed up the garden and turned my attention to indoor pursuits. It feels good.

In the last two seasons I’ve learned a few things about tending a tiny farm. It’s a ton of work, for starters, which I knew. But also didn’t. Just as I knew, but also didn’t, how raising a high school senior and keeping a garden bigger than the house would invade writing time.

Still, I’ve managed to harvest some bits of wisdom along the way:

Two roosters fight. Constantly. If you try and give one of your men to a gal pal with more land and a bigger flock, she will lecture you about why you should be made of tougher stuff. Real farmers suck it up. They do what’s necessary.

So, you research what to do.

No one else you know wants, or is allowed to raise, a rooster. If you list your FREE rooster on craigslist, he will be used as cockfighting bait for champion roosters to practice on.

You let your two fellas range in the pasture, hoping nature will decide. The red-tailed hawk that hunts on your land looks hungry for fresh chicken, but the boys are better than you thought at avoiding danger. This is the only activity during which they create an alliance in order to survive.

Weeks pass. Every time you feed the birds, you get assaulted by the big rooster Carson (formerly named Custer), who shows his irritation that you’re near his harem by flying at you sideways with his spurs out.

In the interest of taking care of your own business and being merciful, you have to kill him. Then you explain to your kids how not all living things on our farm are pets.

Even though this is a lie.

Bees sometimes swarm. When your bees flee, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. It’s not like 20,000 kids ran away because you neglected them. This just happens, according to experts who know. If your bees only get as far as the plum tree twenty feet from the hive, and you catch them after watching seven videos on YouTube about how to do it, count that as success! The dog, who tries to “help” and gets stung twenty-seven times, will be okay once the swelling goes down.

Try not to congratulate yourself too much. The next day, your bees will get attacked and killed by someone else’s robbing swarm, and that will be the end of that. Utter colony collapse.

There’s always next year. You have all the equipment now.

Gardens get big. When, in your spring zeal to GROW a GARDEN, you plant three times more tomato, pepper, zucchini, and bean plants than your family can possibly handle, remember to preserve, can, freeze, salsa, red sauce, bruschetta, and chili your way through harvest. Once the shelves and freezer are full, you can SHARE the wealth. It’s important to hear poorly at this time. For example, when friends in August try to tell you they’ve got all the zucchini they can handle, it really IS okay to insist they take more. It’s their civic duty.

Also, you can leave presents on the porch when they’re not home which, let’s face it, is better than a visit from Santa.

Labradors like birds. If a friend’s dog attacks your remaining rooster Willy (formerly named Napoleon), think carefully before you use your home as the infirmary. Chickens really do prefer to be outside. Once the injured fella is inside the house, there’s no helping the way the whole of your living space will smell like a barnyard. Several websites will suggest giving injured chickens Epsom salt baths and syringe-feeding them electrolytes, and you can employ these methods if you want.

However, it will likely make tending Willy’s psychic and physical well-being very heartbreaking. Your friend’s dog gave him a sound thrashing, and his legs are clearly broken.

Try not to be relieved when he dies on his own. You won’t have to subject your children to another round of murder, which, as they keep reminding you, will be the reason they’re in therapy later.

Woodstoves are a hassle. If you have a tantrum about the inefficient woodstove in the living room that leaks and covers the furniture with ash and takes up too much space and MUST COME OUT, and if, then, you watch more YouTube videos about extracting the beast from your world, be careful. These videos are not nearly as entertaining as the ones you watched about bees. You might discover that woodstoves are quite heavy, and awkward to move, and you can’t do it alone. So you enlist your spouse, the foul-mouthed pirate, who helps you while he cusses the thing out the door. When it’s over, he’ll tell you that this activity does NOT qualify as an emergency, and that it would be nice if you could learn the difference between what is acute and what can wait for someone who knows what the hell they’re doing to help you out.

Also, when you remove something attached to the house, you will be left with HOLES in the wall and in the roof. Because you were a Girl Scout, you’ll be able to insulate the holes, and also fashion a piece of tarp to prevent any water from coming in through the roof.

But it will be a sad little Band-Aid of a solution.

Remind yourself not to let too much time pass before you arrange a drywaller and roofer to clean up your mess.

Because critters WILL find this space. Word spreads fast about the easy access your tantrum has created. You’ll likely hear them in the night, scratching and squirreling away food for winter and hiding whatever they’ve found inside the walls.

Fall is windy. You might hear the chimney cap you jammed back into the hole in the roof fly away one night in the wind and land somewhere in the yard. The next day, you’ll climb up there and put it back in place and wonder how a person who’s smart in so many ways could have decided to proceed with home “improvement” in this way.

You will have to get the roof patched. You will.

Kids leave home. If you’ve raised them right. Because hasn’t this been the point all along? To plant the seeds, to build the tools, to foster independence? He’s ready. He’s got the skills to drive his own life, mostly. He’s already making plans, one eye on the door to the what next, and he’s itching to walk through it.

But he’s wistful and tender, too, about his “youth,” as he calls it, which is almost as funny as when he calls himself “a grown man.” Because neither is true today, and both squeeze your heart. The little melon-headed boy who had two speeds: awake and busy with endless questions, or asleep and sweating, breathing too loudly. The young man: articulate, curious, driven.

You hadn’t reckoned on this. The way your boy is a man and still such a child.

Maybe you’re the one who’s not ready.

You’ve got seven months left, and you’ve been telling yourself for a couple of years that you’ll have a party when that boy leaves the house and takes his stubborn opinions, loud music, cloying cologne, disgusting bathroom habits, and bottomless hunger with him.

And you will.

But now, you’re thinking about how quiet it will be without the hum of him, and how much bigger your tiny house will be without the size 11 shoes he dismounts from and leaves in front of the door and the bags of swim gear and books you trip over. You’re thinking about how the leaving, for both of you, is the beginning of the rest of his life disconnected from you but tethered to everything that’s come before.

It’s a lot to process. This joyful sadness.

Categories: chickens, community, family, fiction, gardening, parenting | Tags: chickens, family, gardening, parenting, urban farming | 10 Comments

longing

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

Over the weekend a friend invited me to make quince jam. Quince, I learned, is a “pome” fruit, a cousin of the apple and pear. Some believe it was the quince and not the apple Eve plucked in the garden, the quince and not the “golden apple” at the heart of the Trojan War. Most Colonial gardens had quince trees. Quince fruit is loaded with pectin but labor-intensive to access. As soon as modernity figured out how to manufacture pectin, the virtues of quince fell away, and now it’s rare to find a quince tree growing in backyard gardens. It’s an old story.

While the fruits in a bowl can fragrance a whole room, they’re too tough and sour to eat and need to be cooked.

Every year, in remembrance of her mother, my friend cooks up a batch or two of quince jam using her mother’s handwritten recipe. This method requires more than twenty-four hours– day one you cook down the fruits and strain them through cheesecloth; the next day you boil the juice with sugar until it sheets in the right viscosity. Although quince meat is white, once you process it for jam it blooms first a salmon color, and then the most gorgeous shade of amber.

I was honored at the invite to participate in this autumnal ritual, a tender communion between mother and daughter. At the bottom of the page, faded and water-marked through years of use, her mother had drawn a little heart.

At our house, we try not to gobble up our preserved fruits too quickly. It’s important, in March especially, to have access to a jar of peaches put up during summer’s heat. To remember standing next to the tree and eating the perfect one. We picked it, rubbed the surface gently to stand down the fuzz. Golden and red, neither mealy nor too hard, the juice dripped everywhere.

As it always does, canning strikes me as an activity as much about celebration as it is about longing. We gorge and revel in the fruits of our labors and that of others. And yet there’s palpable yearning in our efforts – all those brilliantly colored jars are sense memories of summers recent and past. We are desperate to preserve these as we steel ourselves for the dark season, for the uncertain future. The inherent hope present in germination, the thrill and sometimes defeat of the growing season, the labor and satisfaction of harvest, the reflection necessary to begin the cycle again as we put up jars and save seeds: These are the elements of stories that resonate.

I’ve had my head lost in writing fiction lately (thus, the radio silence here), so longing has been on my mind more than usual. My characters are a lot pulsing with yearning, desperate in their quest for it; they make messes everywhere, then shamble through the messes they’ve made, hoping, still, they’ll get at least some flint of their desires.

Emily Dickinson, fond of the gardening metaphor, wrote about longing in far fewer words than I’ve used here. I would’ve like to sit down over toast and preserves with Emily. After, we’d walk out to the garden and noodle about a place for a quince tree to live in our tiny orchard.

Longing is like the Seed

That wrestles in the Ground,

Believing if it intercede

It shall at length be found.

The Hour, and the Clime-

Each Circumstance unknown,

What Constancy must be achieved

Before it see the Sun!

*This is supposed to be two stanzas. The first ends after “found,” but I can’t drive the formatting well enough to make it look that way. Apologies to Emily.

Categories: community, fiction, gardening, Uncategorized | Tags: friendship, gardening, writing | Leave a comment

depth perception

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

Deep and sincere thanks to Matthew Limpede and the staff at Carve Magazine, who said yes to including the story “Depth Perception” in their Spring 2014 Premium Edition. I’m in great company in these pages and ever grateful for the chance to be there.

2014_1 spring.png

Categories: fiction, gardening, outdoors, publishing, short story, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: fiction, outdoors, publishing, short story, small towns, writing | 2 Comments

surviving february

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

Over dinner our family sometimes plays the tattoo game. It goes something like this: If you had to get a tattoo, which animal (or fruit or motorized vehicle…) would you choose and where on your body would you put it? The answers are sometimes surprising. Riley always tries to choose a bird no matter the category. John once chose a unicycle for his “motorized” vehicle, and that led to a half hour discussion on locomotion. But anyway, the kids like our strange amusement. It’s a pastime that saves us on days we’d otherwise easily fall into lamenting the ways the world feels terribly broken.

How the world is broken seems more evident in February, when the slant of light has changed, but not enough to signal spring. When it feels like it’s been winter long enough, and yet the storms keep on coming. What’s wanting is diversion enough to distract from another several weeks of slate skies and long underwear.

The other day I found the perfect thing on River Teeth‘s website. You can sign up to get a daily email from them — “28 days of Beautiful Things.” Each day you will receive an excerpt from Michelle Webster-Hein’s essay “Beautiful Things,” originally published in River Teeth in 2013. I was hooked after reading the idea for the project, but what really got me was the gorgeous photo of a beet, a vegetable I uniformly detested in youth but which now I cannot eat enough of.

Golden, Chioggia, Detroit Dark Red. Roasted, pickled, slawed. Nothing beats (ha) growing them. Feeling them release from the soil when they are ready to be harvested. Knowing that under the tough exterior awaits brilliant color, sweet earthy flavor. Fresh beets means eating the greens, too, steamed or sauteed in sesame oil or hidden inside chili or lasagna (don’t tell the kids).

I’m not usually very clever about where I’d put a tattoo — I almost always choose my arm, because it seems like if I’d gone through the journey of permanently inking myself, I’d want to be able to admire the art without having to use a mirror. The kids tell me that’s not the point. Tattoos are meant to be seen by others.

My obsession with body art doesn’t get much past our dinner game. When we play vegetable tattoo, a beet in any of its iterations is always my answer. It’s also the lone answer to another game we play — If you were marooned on a deserted island and could only have one food, what would it be? The beet. Of course. Though I would have trouble deciding which variety.

The miracle of a beet is the topic of “28 Days of Beautiful Things” first beautiful thing.

Today’s excerpt from Webster-Hein is an ode to dust — oddly dear to her, its silty presence on her belongings means she’s spent time doing what she loves instead of housekeeping.

Amen to that.

From River Teeth's website. How could anyone not love this gorgeous vegetable?

From River Teeth’s website. So gorgeous every time…

Categories: gardening, kids, outdoors, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: family, gardening, reading, writing | 2 Comments

gluttony, thy name is arturo

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

On Thanksgiving day, Arturo decided to make his move and get to the nougaty center of seeds inside the acorn squash. He tolerated a few pictures through the glass, so they’re a bit hazy.

Although a gallery of his henchmen, four of them, sat on the fence, drooling in anticipation of finishing what he did not eat, none dared interrupt the Godfather’s meal. Zora couldn’t photobomb the event because she was out on a walk. He sat for almost a half hour and ate more than his body weight.

I still can’t figure out how he crammed that much into his being. He only stopped once to shake his fist and beat his chest at those fellas on the fence. Or maybe they were ladies. It’s hard to say. But there was for sure some kind of exchange that involved threats and cussing, after which the gallery on the fence sat skulking, perhaps plotting their revenge.

Unfortunately, his girth, jewels, and gold chain are mostly hidden.

We were getting along so well, I tried to open the door and join him on the deck. His mouth is closed here, but he had just told me to step the (*&^%$ off. The next step, I’m pretty sure, was to pick up that blue broom handle and beat me. So much for all that nonsense about the hand that feeds.

Arturo seems to have a good handle on what Thanksgiving is all about. After he ate, he waddled off the deck and managed to climb the big oak in the backyard. I can’t imagine he could do anything else but sleep off his binge. This is what he left for the fence-squatters, who gave themselves several minutes before coming down to brave the leftovers without getting their asses kicked.

By the time we finished our own Thanksgiving feast and went out to see what was left, the whole thing was gone. There wasn’t so much as a seed left.

Arturo’s bar is officially closed for this year. He’s going to have to go back to foraging for nuts as nature intended. But it makes me wonder, if he can make such quick work of a little squash, what could he do with something much bigger, like a butternut or turban? Maybe next year I’ll go for broke, leave out a pumpkin the size of Arkansas, and see what kind of tomfoolery will come of that.

Categories: gardening, nature, outdoors | Tags: nature, outdoors | 2 Comments

arturo

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

what yearning looks like

For our dog Zora, spring and fall are full of yearning. Each cusp season, she becomes a quivering, drooling, yowling mass of desire. She desires cats. She desires birds. She desires the mail carrier. But what she desires most is squirrels. Whatever constellation of breeds she’s sprung from has programmed her to believe she will actually win a squirrel. Any day now.

Training for the big day involves a regimen of smearing the glass with her nose to track squirrels in the backyard, whine-singing a song that will lure them to her, hurling herself at the fence they like to traverse, and going in and out twenty times a day to monitor the premises. There are also hours of daintily gumming a stuffed chipmunk she’s had since we got her five years ago. Other toys roughly approximating real animals have died quick deaths in a blaze of stuffing and plastic parts. But Chippy is very precious –she would never fully ingest it. Chippy’s squeaker is broken. Chippy is also missing an eye and part of an ear, and looks a little an object used to foreshadow murder in a bad horror film. It makes me wonder what she’d actually do if she managed to catch the real thing.

Zora spent the first month she came to live with us wearing a muddy track from the mimosa tree to the telephone pole to the gate to the garden in the backyard. We’d just redone the landscaping, which she destroyed. Her sole quest was chasing gray squirrels, especially a pair that came to play every morning about the same time. One day I came home to find the three of them faced off, Zora crouched at the base of the telephone pole, the squirrels immobile, noses touching, fifteen feet up. No one moved for three hours.

At our new house we also have squirrels, red ones, who make their gray cousins seem lazy and stupid.

It wasn’t long after we moved in that we met the new object of desire. Arturo. He’d come calling mid-morning, squatting by the back door while eating a sunflower head from our garden and looking at us through the glass. Which is to say he was very close to the glass. So close he used the window as leverage to extract seeds, never taking his eyes off our lives inside. This, of course, was a thrilling new development for Zora, who could somehow hear him no matter where she was in the house. Arturo would stay an extra beat, watching her smash herself into the glass, frothing at the mouth, just on the other side of his nuts, before he’d scamper off the deck and up into the oak tree.

Although I do often name things when I get the itch (We have a lamp called Celeste, I’m not sure why. My truck’s name is Stella. John’s mountain bike’s name is Jolene, as in please don’t steal my man…), I’ve never named a squirrel before. I don’t know why Arturo is this creature’s name, except that he is VERY distinct. He is easily the largest squirrel I’ve ever seen. I mean, almost the size of a small house cat. Despite his girth, he’s fast enough to still be alive, savvy enough to dodge all my attempts at taking his photo, and very decidedly the boss of this territory.

Arturo still comes calling every day, to the delight and crazed desire of Zora. On the deck we’ve left an acorn squash that fell out of a shopping bag, one he quickly helped himself to, so he’s got extra inducement to make an appearance. He’s clearly getting enough to eat. He’s bigger than ever, even for a squirrel preparing for winter. I’m a little worried about how much more weight he can gain and still get the job of squirreling done.

arturo’s snack bar

Lately, he’s taken to sitting up on the fence near the deck. Other squirrels in Arturo’s posse hang out there too, though not when he’s there. In pairs usually, they run along the fence, making a chittering racket, doing a snake-charmer thing with their tales, dancing squirrel hip-hop with their back feet.

Arturo is always alone. And he never does any hoorahing. He just sits. His posture is much the same as the sunflower seed window squatting, but his safer vantage point gives him extra time to taunt Zora. Seemingly unperturbed, he eats, unblinking, languorously, while Zora throws herself against the fence beneath him, begging him to come down.

From the kitchen window the other day, I watched Arturo sitting on the fence, surveying the yard like some kind of mob boss while he consumed an entire chestnut. It was a long squat, even for Arturo. Maybe he’s got henchmen to deal with the Red-tails and Cooper’s hawks that troll the yards around here. Maybe he thinks he can take out any house cat that crosses him. It’s hard to say.

But he was clearly feeling very comfortable, because hanging down and resting against the fence was his massive nut sack. I had no idea male squirrels could possess such impressive jewels. But they there were, huge and hairy and disproportionate to his frame, on display as if was a rodent porn star.

I’m not going to contact Guinness Book of World Records or anything, though a quick online search tells me I’m not the first to be stunned by squirrel genitalia. Arturo’s junk puts every photo I saw on the interwebs to shame, though. Also, according to Uncle Google, red squirrels are supposed to be smaller than gray squirrels, and they’re more territorial than most species. They store their booty in caches crammed with nuts, called middens, which are usually in the middle of their territory. I’ve seen Arturo win some impressive arboreal battles against smaller squirrels. It seems safe to say that our yard is Midden-landia for him, and if it’s true that he can live up to 10 years or more, Arturo’s here to stay, nut sack and all.

I don’t know how old Arturo is. This season could be his swan song. And it’s not all about love and admiration. Days when I know he’s been mucking in my garden, gleefully digging up garlic bulbs when there’s plenty of food if he’d just climb a damn tree, I’m tempted to get a bb gun. Not that I’d be able to hit him. He’s far too crafty to get taken down by the likes of me.

Still, out of love and respect, Zora and I could help him lose a little weight by both chasing him, maybe help prolong his life. After all, we are in his territory, and until one of his minions can figure out how to arm wrestle him out of it, Arturo’s the boss.

Categories: dogs, fiction, gardening, writing | Tags: dogs, gardening, outdoors, writing | 2 Comments

flown the coop

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Around 7:20 each morning in the yard behind ours, a very vocal hen lays an egg. This hen’s egg-laying aria (a reenactment here) is followed by irritable complaining about the state of things, and then, since I can’t see her, what I can only assume is some active scratching and feeding. Her sisters lay eggs much later in the morning, usually together, making their own duet. To be fair, if I had to expel an object that size every day, I’d have a thing or two to say about it, too.

I’m comforted by these new birds, and by how many folks in our neighborhood have chickens. For now, listening from my yard is as close as I’m going to get to owning birds myself. We’re renting a house. Zora is allowed here, but nothing else. The lease agreement expressly forbids chickens, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, rats, mice, and any sort of reptile. This list is followed by two exclamation points, which seems like a clause written for a bygone willful renter!! Also in the lease is language about how I won’t do any yard maintenance, and that feels almost weirder than no chicken wrangling.

Hopefully, this limboed state of alert is temporary !!

Before we knew we were moving, we’d gotten new chicks, Ameraucana babies – Artemis and Athena, named by Riley. I’d gotten them so we could diversify the flock and have green-blue eggs. We brought them home in March, a cold one this year. Because I was having problems moderating the temperature in their cage in the garage, the goddesses lived inside.

Chickens inside your house is a disgusting business. Sure, Artemis and Athena were cute. Sure, it was entertaining and unnerving watching the dog drool with longing, hanging her head over the side of the galvanized tub, quivering. Sure, waking to the sounds of those little peeps from the breakfast nook (yes, they were near the kitchen, which is really, really disgusting), drinking coffee while listening to them practice being big birds wasn’t a bad way to start the day.

Sure. They were cute and we held them and talked baby talk to them and told them how great their lives on our farm would be. But chickens are filthy. About week three the stink kicked in. They shat in their food, in their water, on each other. They scratched and made dust and filled their water dish with fecaled shavings. Despite our efforts to keep the place clean, the dust from their quarters filtered into the house, as did the relentless scratching sound. Artemis and Athena got older and smellier and the world outside got warmer, so we moved them to the garage to finish being babies before we introduced them to the big girls.

Giving the goddesses away was one of the first things we did when we decided to move. They were high maintenance, they didn’t lay eggs and wouldn’t for several months. I wasn’t so attached I was sentimental yet, so they went to live a few streets over with some friends of ours who’d just started their own chicken operation and had room for a few more.

The big girls – Ginger, Marianne, and Rainer (Mrs. Howell was a man. We swapped her for Rainier)—were a different story. My first bird children, I’d raised them up from babies, trained them to come when I whistled the opening bars of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, benefitted from years of delicious eggs.

Also, I couldn’t get out of my head a scene like something from the Beverly Hillbillies, our truck piled high and the chickens in a wire cage on top of a jalopied heap, their feathers trailing in the wind behind us.

Also, there was that business of the no pets !! in our lease agreement.

It was harder than it would seem to find homes for them, what with their “advanced” age. No one wanted new-to-them chickens who were probably going to stop laying within the year, even if they were gorgeous and tame and cleverly named. In the end, Riley’s soccer coach Brett, who owns land and has twenty or so chickens already, agreed to take them.

We drove the girls out to Brett’s property a few weeks before we left. He was ready for us, a separate cage set up near the main coop.

“I’ll toss them in tonight with the rest of the girls,” he said. “Works every time. They’ll wake up tomorrow and the others will be like, ‘Hey. How’s it going?’ and that will be that.”

Inside a huge chicken run, his birds – five or six breeds altogether—were gathered around cantaloupe and watermelon halves, clucking and gorging themselves. Brett had built the coop, his own design, also large and set up so his kids could easily gather eggs and clean it. The place was like Club Med for chickens.

His four-year-old daughter Shey led me over to the chicken graveyard under a stand of cedars. “This is our pet cemetery,” she said. “Rosy the cat is here, too.” Several rocks brightly painted were scattered on top of the needles there. “Also Blacky, Whitey, and Socks.”

“Cats?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Hamsters.”

She gave me a tour through each stone and what was buried under it, and then skipped off to play with Riley on the tire swing.

We have a pet graveyard at our house where we’d buried a gecko, some goldfish, a dead wren we found on the deck, and a frog Riley found in the mailbox that she petted too much. They’re buried there for closure’s sake, because it mattered to our kids, and because we couldn’t eat any of them.

But chickens are different, I think. Their presence in our lives had been about more than love and nurturing. Having them was symbiotic – I did a good job and they did too. Our house wasn’t a chicken pleasure cruise. When the girls stopped laying, our plan was to harvest them and make soup stock, a reminder for our whole family about not wasting resources and knowing how to do things for ourselves.

Still, I was charmed by Brett’s kids, four girls, who were fully involved in caring for their animals. He never gathered eggs, the two younger ones did that. His elder two did all the feeding and cleaning the coop. The birds also came out to “play.” They sometimes wore doll clothes and went to the front of the property on leashes. Another look inside the coop revealed a chicken-sized rocking chair, filthy with chicken poop, and a window with gingham curtains.

When I asked Brett about it, he shrugged and said, “It’s more a petting zoo than a farm.” He rubbed at his beard and looked over at the girls swinging. “There’s a lot of…uh…estrogen out here. ”

For Brett’s family, I guess that graveyard makes sense. My bird girls will have a nice retirement at his estrogen ranch before they join the others under the cedars. No soup pot for them.

Birdless for now, I guess it makes sense to scratch off the chicken wrangling headline on this blog. I’ll have to live vicariously through my neighbors’ birds and the yards they tend themselves.

Hopefully, it’s only for a little while. !!

Categories: chickens, community, gardening, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: chickens, gardening, parenting, urban farming | 2 Comments

Just the Haircut Stuff

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Riley and I are home alone on a warm Friday afternoon. We’re not very frisky at the end of the week, both of us happy to curl up with a book or a movie. But the weather is so lovely, and the espaliered fruit trees I’ve let grow wild are in need of pruning. We go outside before the day fades and gather our tools.

Clippers in hand, Riley cuts back the dead hydrangea blooms that wintered on the bush. Up on a ladder, I prune the cherries and then the apple trees, throwing the boughs into a pile in the yard. Not too far into our work, as the air cools, we decide what we really need is a fire. Our yard is too small for a proper burn barrel, but we’ve got a portable fire pit, so we haul that out, as well as the pieces of the Christmas tree Owen cut and stacked a few months ago. Riley goes inside to get the matches, and I realize I’m excited it’s just the two of us, about to share an important rite of passage – a girl learning to build a fire. We love our boys, but their presence changes the time.

I’ve just finished reading a book with a daunting title by Dr. Leonard Sax: Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls–Sexual Identity, the Cyberbubble, Obsessions, Environmental Toxins. I don’t feast on a regular diet of self-helpish books, but this one was recommended by a friend, and it was worth the read. Sax’s perspective has made me think even more concertedly about what and how we teach girls on purpose and through example. A girl emerging from girlhood with a sense of who she is and a confidence in that identity makes a perilous journey, and not enough of us are paying attention in the right ways, Sax suggests, especially in a culture that pushes girls to be objectified, consumed, subservient.

How well John and I buffer Riley from being awash in pursuits of pop culture and also guide her toward survival and resistance keeps me up some nights. Most days I think we’re doing okay, even if she does know every stinking lyric to Taylor Swift’s songs. I have to admit, they’re catchy, but they reek of teen angst; it’s disconcerting to catch my daughter, gripping her hairbrush like a microphone, sing-shouting “We are never ever ever getting back together” to herself in the bathroom mirror with just the right amount of venom.

While she’s inside the house, it occurs to me Riley’s nine already. Much older than I was when I learned to make a fire. What am I so busy doing we can’t make time for this? And if I’ve shanked teaching her this elemental skill, what else am I shanking?

But she knows a lot, I discover. She’s been reading The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, and also paying attention. Close attention.

“I’m a good watcher,” she says. She builds a teepee of dried leaves and kindling she’s culled from the wood pile. She chooses a good fire-poking stick from the cherry boughs I’ve hacked. We talk about safety and how to feed a fire. She nods and tells me she’s got it; she knows what to do. I show her how to strike a match, and then hand her the matches and let her begin, enjoying her delight at this responsibility. She’s brought her clippers and found a small saw, and she uses both to manage the size of her fuel. Pulling a chair close to the heat, she’s a serious fire tender, watching the flames with intent. She feeds the fire while I finish pruning, our conversation across the yard meandering and associative. We walk about the stars and planets, what animals we’ll have on our imaginary ranch, how she reached her record of 213 jumps in a row on a pogo stick.

cherry blossoms

Dark falls around us, but we don’t go inside. She wants to know if the green limbs of the cherries and apples will burn, so she conducts an experiment and learns wet boughs kill the fire and the tinder-dry Christmas tree creates a fire so high it makes its own wind. She wonders whether the cuttings will grow if we stick them directly into dirt, so we choose a few to experiment with in that way, and a few others to bring inside and force bloom. “What does that mean?” she asks me.

“It’s a trick,” I say. “The plant is fooled that it’s spring, so it lets the blossoms come out of the buds early.” As I form my answer, it occurs to me we could just as easily be talking about the journey of girls today, and the way culture sexualizes them, tricking them into acting like adults before they know what that means emotionally. The loud metaphor makes me stop for a minute and follow the breadcrumbs. I watch Riley choose stems and put them into an old metal pitcher we use as a vase.

I’m sick at heart at the thought of her forced to bloom out of her magical world by pressure to become a woman too early. Growing up will come for her eventually, and she’ll lose interest in climbing trees and playing her imaginary dragon games, in challenging herself for the next pogo stick record and building seven room forts out of blankets and pillows in the family room. Innocence won’t last, is already leaving, I know, but I send up a please to the trees that Riley’s safe passage into her pre-teens also means she holds onto the person she’s becoming, and not a version of the girl she thinks she ought to be.

We cut red currant and Daphne boughs to bring inside as well, because if a few stems are good, more are better, and we’re talking about how the whole house will be full of spring. Maybe it’s the jasmine-lemon scent of the Daphne that has bloomed already, on its own time, or my penchant for drama fueled by remembering a few of Sax’s less savory anecdotes about girls gone wild, meant to be cautionary tales. Down the Rabbit Hole I go, imagining a version of Riley that trawls the mall and has Bieber Fever, hinges her fashion choices around her five pairs of Ugs and gives up sports for cheerleading. Then there’s a boyfriend who’s too old for her with some gold chains and a red Mustang, and she fails out of school and is having sex in the back of a car, and she has a couple of piercings and maybe there’s some pole dancing, and I’m working myself into a vicious panic and feeling like I need a beer or maybe six, and I know my visions suffer under the pathetic weight of being cliché and cast in a low-budget-made-for-television-glow, and I’m supposed to be good at narrative but I can’t even make a scary-daughter-dystopia that’s interesting.

And how did I get here from being excited about teaching her to build a fire? Which I didn’t do anyway because she already knows how.

Riley finishes her arrangements of cherry boughs in the vase and turns to me. “So. It’s kind of like cheating and being the boss of nature,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to cut too much, though. Just the haircut stuff.”

Clever girl. I’m swimming back to the surface, where I send my B-Rate-Riley production packing and I nod, thinking about a week from now, when all the stems we bring inside will be in full bloom, a reminder of building a fire, and the way my girl knows herself so well already. “Yes,” I say. “Just the haircut stuff is perfect.”

red currant

Categories: books, gardening, girls, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: gardening, girls, parenting, plants, teaching, writing | 1 Comment

Harvest of People

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Each new year I engage in the secret, irrational hope of making resolutions. My good intentions usually last until about March, although each year I hope will be the exception, when I make it all the way to December. Maybe 2013 will be it. I hope so. This year the list looks like it generally does, a collection of rusted resolves from previous years and some new ones too. They’re written on post-its that have already lost their sticky-power; I keep finding them on the floor or attached to the bottoms of my socks. Probably, there should be fewer than ten and I should keep them to myself, but I’m still in the honeymoon period, encouraged by the way sharing them might help them to survive:

practice the Zora way = more wag & less bark
learn to play guitar
run a marathon
do at least 10 minutes of core per day (before you stick your head inside the computer; how hard can it be?)
write
write
finish a draft of a novel
be grateful
be humble
be centered

Now, almost at the end of January, I have resolve still in the tank, though the guitar has been swapped out for a ukulele. I’m awful at it. I watch You-Tube videos to keep myself motivated. Maybe by spring I’ll be able to strum something that sounds like a song.

I’m trying not to spend too much time looking ahead, but it’s dark and cold and gray. Blessedly, the days are getting longer. It’s time to start mapping out the garden, order seeds, and calculate what my soil will grow. With spring in the wings, it’s a little hard to practice living centered in the now, especially when a whole lot of the now, honestly, is pretty painful. Having to explain to my kids why friends lose their jobs, or get cancer, or decide to divorce, what the hell the deal is with Twitter, or why bullies have such power, or why there are all those empty desks in Connecticut, leaves me feeling inadequate to the task. We must learn to rub along with people of all kinds, I say to them. Some relationships are for business, others are toxic and teach you about boundaries and knowing yourself. Some relationships are for friendship, some are for love, some fall away. It’s all part of the deal, I tell them. Our job is to acknowledge that we can’t control other people or their responses to the world, we can only be in charge of ourselves. But they’re kids; they think I’m not hearing them well enough. They want life to be decipherable, literal, with rules they can anticipate and apply.

I try, always, to end these hard conversations with what we are grateful for –the winter wren; books and chocolate; our chickens, who press themselves in a heap against the glass of the slider doors, asking to come inside and be with us when it’s cold; the woods; the tangle of people we hold dear in our lives, for whom we have fierce love. But some days, when the world feels bleak, and when my advice is cold comfort for kids working to make sense of the world, digging for gratitude is damn hard.

Before the new year a poem by Max Coots arrived in the mail from a friend. Max is someone I’d never heard of, but his words — grounded, grateful, funny– made me want to invite him over for dinner or a glass of wine. I asked Uncle Google about him and discovered he died in 2009 after a long, rich life as a Renaissance Man. A Unitarian Universalist minister, a sculptor of gargoyles (this, alone, is enough to make me half fall in love with him), a poet, and a gardener, Reverend Max was the kind of guy who spent his life working to embody my resolutions. Maybe not the ukulele or the ten minutes of core, but it seems to me he was the kind of spirit I aim to be.

Anyway, here’s to Max, to the journey resolutions bring, to sowing seeds — real and metaphoric–with kids, to a garden of friends, and to gratitude:

A HARVEST OF PEOPLE

Max Coots

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For generous friends, with smiles as bright as their blossoms.

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we’ve had them.

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn; and the others as plain as potatoes and as good for you.

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter.

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time.

For young friends, who wind around like tendrils and hold us.

We give thanks for friends now gone, like gardens past that have been

harvested, but who fed us in their times that we might live.

Categories: community, gardening, writing | Tags: friendship, gardening, poetry, writing | 5 Comments

i could be that bird

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

Kathleen Dean Moore’s book, Wild Comfort, is a gorgeous and rich collection of essays. Moore’s writing is lyrical and dense, not the kind of prose you can gobble up in one sitting. I found myself carrying this book with me wherever I went all week, comforted by its presence in my bag, anticipating having ten minutes (more if I could get them) to read a passage. Her pieces are reflections of what we give and take from the natural world; how we grieve and what that means; the ways our culture invites us to fall away from nature in the name of progress and how, still, we find we need the solace of wilderness. To be a naturalist, Moore suggests, is to have a kind of split personality – part grim reality, the byproduct of seeing environment through a scientist’s lens; part heady joy of one whose senses are on full alert.

For my part, I find grim reality is a space I occupy too often. I forget, in my obsession with humanity’s dark underbelly, evident especially in this election season, that there’s so much to be grateful for – the kids I work with in the school garden who’ll try any vegetable I ask them to because they love the space they’ve helped to cultivate, the bumper crop of Jonagold apples bursting from my tiny, espaliered trees. The color amber. How my dog’s feet smell like Fritos.

I could choose to find joy more than I do, focusing less on how the world seems determined to forget history, or how any shopping excursion is proof we really are zombies and don’t know it yet, or how a generator and a crossbow are probably the best tools in preparation for the end-of-days. I could choose to be the bird of Emily Dickinson’s poem, the one singing her heart out through the storm: “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul…” I could be the bird and live a more intentional life with less cynicism. I could be that bird…

In her book, Moore frets about not living an intentional enough life. As an exercise in gratitude, she decided to establish a “happy basket” on her desk, into which she put pieces of paper with notes recording times she felt really happy. Her plan was to document things that brought her joy for a year, and then go through and evaluate the data. Ultimately, she didn’t make it for the year, which I love. One crummy day eight months or so into the project, she tipped out the basket to see what those scraps could tell her – chiefly, that none of the ways the world said she should be happy actually made her happy. Not stuff or success. Ideas, solitude, her kids, and moving in the outdoors delivered joy and grounded her.

Yesterday I was talking to a dear friend on the phone, lamenting the way I am built to be dissatisfied, suggesting I, too, should start a happy basket. She was quiet for a minute, and then said to me, “But that’s what your blog is. You don’t need a basket for your desk.”

Which I guess is true as I look back over my posts.

While we were on the phone, I stood at the window and watched the caramelized colors of autumn in my backyard, the quilt of leaves I would have to rake again before the rain came. There’s one holdout of summer’s gaudy blaze left in the yard, a fuchsia in full bloom. Fuchsia have a reputation for being difficult to grow, temperamental without diligent fertilizing, and prone to dying easily if you don’t baby them. I have utterly neglected this plant, which lives in a planter box on my deck. While everything else around it is closing up shop for winter, this fuchsia is hardy, saucy, showing off with her pendulous bloom, her firecracker bloomers.

I was about to ring off, promising to post a missive worthy of a happy basket if I could dip into the well and find something, when a female Anna’s Hummingbird arrived to my fuchsia, sucking down nectar as fast as she could. Not all of them migrate from our part of the state, I guess, and maybe this one intended to meet some friends in California or Mexico later.

But she stayed for a while, immersed in feeding on each one of those sweet fuchsia globes long enough to allow me a good look at her red-flecked head and peacock-colored wings. Although my friend is thousands of miles away, we saw it together. A gift to witness and to share, a thing I would’ve written on a scrap of paper and put in a basket.