Nail Beds and Rock Gardens

Typically, Mainers talk about how we don't have a real spring.  We have mud season.  When I went to school in the Midwest, one of the greatest shocks was what "spring" looked and felt like- days get balmier, greener- trees and flowers bloomed with abandon.  Before the month of June.  I had read about that sort of spring in storybooks, but did not know it actually existed.  Come to think of it, that was the same way I felt about Iowa, until I started living there.

This year the season has been different.  Around about the time we had two back-to-back 80 degree days in early March, and almost no snow in the months before, most of us started to wonder about the prospects of our mud this year.  For a good crop of mud, you need a couple of things: a lot of water deposits, and soil.  We've got the soil.  Not so much with the water, and the overcast skies that keep it from evaporating.

Due to the dry and warm conditions, people who like digging in dirt (rather than mud) were able to get a jump start.  This is why, for the past month or so, I have been dutifully changing into play clothes from my work cloths, and kneeling at the alter of cultivation.  The house is on five acres, and while it has mature perennials putting a good (if overgrown) face on it to the road, the backside is... quite exposed.

To begin with, I dug up a few very narrow strips of sod on the terrace, so I could get my sweet peas in, well in advance of the projected last frost.  A few weeks later, armed with knowledge of the ground, I busted sod for a proper bed, and amended the soil for slightly pickier plants.  At the same time, I was able to harvest a bumper crop of fasteners.  Screws, nails- if you use it to drive two building materials together, I was reaping it.  This is the glory of bedding plants close to the house, you garner all the materials deemed not worth cleaning up after the last roofing/siding project.  When I went back to plant the first succession of glads and seed the zinnia, I was surprised to find that some more nails had sprouted to the surface- proving they too were enjoying this warm weather.  Weren't we all?

Another side effect of the early warm weather was that Dave caught a chronic case of "When Will The Guy Come To Rototill-itis."  He had long since planted the stakes in the ground in anticipation that they would yield a plot of upturned earth.  Day after day... "I'm seriously starting to get pissed off..."  "I don't know if he's going to come..."  "I'm going to have to call..."  I have seen high school girls staring telepathically at their phone exhibit more patience.

And then one day, at the exact moment the pork shoulder was coming out of the smoker, and the broccoli had steamed to the perfection- the Man in the Kubota  pulled in.  Dave came in with the hunk of meat on a baking sheet and a Xmas morning gleam in his eye, announcing this development.

In that moment I resigned myself to overcooked broccoli, and went outside.

So we watched for the next twenty minutes to half an hour as the machine swept over the virgin plot.  I had spent the day digging a new bed along the south face of the barn, so I could keenly appreciate the machine's efficiency in busting sod- though the spade and I get the win for precision.  We also unearthed a G.I. Joe head, so bonus points there.

Since that day, Dave has retrieved our fencing from his old shop, and while it still lacks a gate, we have secured the rest of the perimeter.  In that time, I unearthed my beloved graph paper, and finally created a conversion factor for my foot and the foot comprised of 12 inches.  THE GLORY OF ARITHMETIC AND GEOMETRY!!!!  What can be more pleasing than putting pencil to graph paper, and realizing your shod foot is approx. .75ft?  Since that evening, I drafted a diagram of beds and rows, simply aching to impose Cartesian order on the plane of our garden plot.

Which is why today I am aching from that imposition.  It turns out, creating geometric order from newly broken ground is slightly more work than imagining it.  And hoes, rakes, and spades are substantially heavier than pencils.  Soil exponentially heavier than paper.  Especially soil with plenty of Densely Clustered Mineral Content (DCMC).  We had been referring to such aberrations as rocks, but the man who did our rototilling pointed out that "real rocks are the ones that go all the way down." 

I also quickly found that the plot did not adhere to the theoretical standards of what it means to be a rectangle.  And, if I wanted to be exacting, I should have been more precise with my conversion factor, perhaps extending it to the the hundred-thousandths place.  Or perhaps used an actual tape measure.  In the end, I fell back on my theater training and improvised.  The result of yesterday's labor is that one quadrant of the garden is properly bedded, and the other three quadrants discernible as quadrants.  I can even still move without undue pain.  At one point I noted that one of the stringy bits connecting my chest to my arm through my armpit had gone a bit funny, but no matter, as it seems to have remained attached.  I switched my hoe-handedness and moved on.

It is spring: the sacrificial field grass burnt to soot has given way to rippling waves of green.  The cherry is in bloom, the apple blossoms on their way.  By summer, an aerial view of our vegetable garden will look like a drawing done by an advanced kindergartner.  Life is good.

 


Update 9/11/13:
Thanks, Google Earth.

The garden last year.  I <3 Big Brother for allowing me to follow up on predictions.

Thoughty Lotto

First:  All Teachers Hate Lunch Duty

No.  Don't throw your carrots.  Or if you do, pick them up.  Can you just at least pick them up like a civilized human being before you exit the cafeteria?  Hey, you guys, I don't care how the napkin ended up on the floor, someone take responsibility and throw it away.  Okay, everybody!  If you are talking to people sitting at your table- you do NOT need to yell.  In fact, yelling increases the probability that the duty teachers will hear the inappropriate things you are saying.  If you must be awful, could you please do it sotto voce? 

My new favorite lunch duty game is to look at the noxious cretins and think to myself "what will be the shining moment of humanity in this child's lifetime?  What is the one greatest thing s/he will do that would move someone to tears?"  Because we all have our shiny moments.  They just seldom occur in a school cafeteria.  And not between the ages of 8-13.

Also, I do a lot of making up new lyrics to Christina Aguilera's song "Beautiful."  In my version, the title is "Dutiful."  And it is all about how these punks can't bring me down.

Second:  I can't remember this one. 


Third:  I have a ridiculous case of pet pride regarding Pepe.  He is not actually very helpful when planting seeds ("No, my hands are not toys, and though I am digging in the dirt, you are not allowed to..."), but he was helpful holding down the measuring tape for Dave yesterday.  And therefore I will post this video:

 



Pepe doesn't make chore time more efficient, but he makes it more fun.

Fourth: I do remember my third thought, but will pass it off as my fourth thought to make me look more thoughtful than I actually am.  It was about the fate of Maine-based business chains, relative to  their presence in the teeming metropolis of Ellsworth.

Mr. Paperback recently went out of business (statewide, not just in Ellsworth), rendering a lot of fine people jobless.  A victim of Amazon and Audible, it just couldn't compete with the changing tides of literary culture.  Bookworms across the state mourn the loss, but we all know that we were 100% responsible for its demise.

On the other side of the coin, Friendly's in Ellsworth went out of business, and has been converted to a Governor's.  Was a bit wonderful to see a national chain go under and be replaced by a local one.  There was much rejoicing by the region- I ate there last night.  It was packed, but service was quick and thoughtful- and it was Governor's.  You know it.  You love it.  I did mourn the loss of the Muskie Burger- and all of the Namesake burgers in general.  All they had was a LePage burger, and as we all know 61% of Mainer's can' stomach that particular dish.   

I used to play a game about Ellsworth when I was in college- it was called "While You Were in Iowa."  I would watch buildings and business come and go, as if by magic. 

Dreams, Memory, and the Way of Lost Things

I have reached the point of chronic exhaustion, where almost anything that passes into my hands, then passes out of my hands, unremarked by me- and is therefore often misplaced.  To date we have a large bottle of cider vinegar living without a cap since my obsessive egg dying last Sunday.  Wine cap, misplaced as soon as I opened it... why yes, it was screw top.  And for the record, just as The Goats Do Roam, so too does that bloody cap.  Passwords for anything related to the internet, except the biggies I check all the time?  Gone.  They melted away when I wasn't paying attention- with a little merry "vwip" noise.  Thank god for the "forgot password?" link, though it would be good if there was a link that said "always."  I am now putting off updating a password I only just updated five days ago. 

On Tuesday, Dave and I spent ten minutes searching for a set of truck keys... that I had just had in my hand... only to find them in Dave's pants pockets.  Neither of us remembered that I had handed them to him.  It was a consolation to me at least, to be in company.

While I am not usually the most attuned to details, the chronic forgetfulness is always worst when I've been under a lot of stress- I'll do things like forget to turn the oven on when cooking things, or to turn it off afterward... shoes?  Forget it.  I end up stumbling about in a constant "I know I had it at some point..."

For the past two weeks I had been fighting with a light at work, that I would swear I would turn off- my dad taught me to turn off lights when not in use!  And then I would look again, and the damned light would be on.  Day after day.  This light is in the dressing room, the furthest switch from my office in the lighting booth- a floor down and a cavernous theater away.  Normally it is the cantankerous costume volunteer, but she's not been using the space since the Wonka strike.  Finally three days ago I broke down and addressed the ghost the students (more on this some other time) think haunt the theater:

"Listen ghost.  I'm fine that you're here.  I am sure you will outlast me.  But could we pretty please work together?  Seriously, if you have to turn on lights behind my back, could you turn on the ones that are closer to my office?"

The ghost wasn't talking.

Yesterday I got in, and I knew for a F-A-C-T (emphasis on the F-ing) I had turned off the light when I'd left the night before.  I crossed the balcony, climbed down the ladder to the stage, opened the door-
and there was a student and an ed tech, working one-to-one.  It was a comfort to see living human faces behind my struggle, and the Ed Tech was pleased (well, sort of pleased) to see who was constantly turning the lights off on him every time he left the room.  With a plea to please, please turn off the lights when he leaves the space, I left the space- and left the lights on.  Only to spend the rest of the day annoyed when he continued to leave the lights on after he'd left.

Still, it was a solid win for my embattled memory.

Which brings me to dreams- Last night was miserable for sleep, to the point where I got out of bed to listen to a book and on-line window shop until I exhausted my eyes with gross consumerism (wallsconce, flush mount, mission style... clear selection, new tab, new store, that's not my Etsy password?  Reset... this is guaranteed to wear me down).  Dave, privy to my shitty sleep, didn't wake me when he went to go fishing today.  This left me open to Oversleeping Dreams.  Not the kind where you dream you oversleep, but the sort of odd, vivid dreams that come with the territory of missing your normal wake-up. 

And I dreamed about my grandmother.  I was with her in the nursing home, and we were talking- and it grew slowly apparent to me, that while she was talking in the bright, and simple way I've become accustomed to, as if she were always reading a picture book to a child-

She wasn't repeating herself.

At all. 

No thirty second loop of short-term memory, no filler syllables sung for the sake of sound.  Sentences.  Sense.  We were conversing.  About death, of course.  I don't recall specifics of the conversation, just the sense of wonder at her cogency- and that when I spoke in return, I was afraid doing so would break the spell.  But we talked, brightly, simply, with no repetition from memory lapses.  This, I remember.