More Small Things

Peppers, peppers, peppers! 

Right now, small things continue to work the best for me in moving through these days. When other matters become too much to work with, I can always turn to small tasks and find focus and satisfaction. 

Here is another handful of small things. 

This year, we have a pepper harvest to beat any prior pepper harvest (and there is more harvest to come). So after picking (not a peck of pickled peppers) peppers, I decided to make onion/pepper relish (hot bath canning only):

Preparing the relish

And done!

More got cut up and put in the freezer:

Cutting!

And ready for the freezer! 

And some ended up on our supper tables, sliced open, cleaned, and filed with mozzarella cheese:

Ready to prep for supper

Yes, they were delicious! 

Our hot weather finally broke (and hoping beyond hope it stays broke), so last evening I thought "Why not bake some cookies?"

So I did:

Getting ready to start mixing

And done!

They too are delicious!

Even the laundry is satisfying:

Socks socks socks

In the evenings, if Warren is working on business or class, I try to spend my time reading (current read is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James) or writing letters. 

I know: Just small tasks. Just little things. But right now, it is these little things that help me make sense of my days. And that is more than enough.

Small Things

Coleslaw! 

It has been a long, hard week and I hit Friday night, when I am writing this out by longhand, with no reserves. Zero, nada, nil. Warren is also worn down from his own hard week.  

Our home life is transitioning again; Warren will be teaching Music Appreciation at our local college, Ohio Wesleyan University, two afternoons a week starting next Thursday. As for me, I am pressed up against a wall all too often, not because of Warren's commitments (which extend far further than the upcoming class), but for lots of reasons, including still recovering from June's hospitalization.

So here I sit, a baseball game playing on Warren's iPad (he's a Cincinnati Reds fan; I am not but I enjoy listening to baseball), and I am telling myself "Focus on small things tonight, April. Small things count too."

I can do that. Here is a small handful of recent small things.

Thursday, I picked one of the three small red cabbages that have managed to grow in the Hej Garden. Well, you don't "pick" cabbages, you break or cut them off their considerable stems. Back in the kitchen, I pulled off all the outer leaves, cut the stem off, then chopped the head into small pieces. I made a quick oil/vinegar/sugar/water mix, poured it over the pieces, and put it in the fridge to marinate for the day. Coleslaw, anyone?

Thursday late afternoon we drove down to Columbus to see the annual silent film of the CAPA Summer Film Series. We'd been down the week before to see "Arsenic and Old Lace" (which I had never seen on stage on on film) and had enjoyed a brownbag supper on the Statehouse lawn, which is directly across from the Ohio Theatre. So we did the same thing this time for the silent: a brownbag supper on a bench by the Statehouse. We ate, we talked, we just sat and enjoyed not being on a tight schedule, not being on call. 

Afterwards, we strolled on the Statehouse grounds. Even though Warren and I enjoy and purposely make stops to see state capitol buildings, I have never been in the Ohio Statehouse or even walked much on its grounds. So Thursday was the first time ever for me to see the large monument to President William McKinley, as well as the various war memorials. (Yes, yes, I am planning on touring the Ohio Statehouse this fall. I mean that.) We then crossed the street to the box office, only to learn that Clark Wilson, the nationally renown theater organist, had fallen ill. As a result, they had pulled the silent and substituted the 1997 "Titanic." Did we want to buy tickets for that? No thanks. So we drove home slowly, congratulated ourselves on making the most of our Statehouse supper (eaten leisurely, outside, and free), and finished our evening at home.

A small evening, by many standards, but a good one. 

Friday itself was particularly hard on larger family fronts. Stressful, demanding, numbing: pick any of those words. Thank goodness I'd had a long overdue call with my friend Katrina to start the day, as well as a planned break midmorning with two neighbors. Independent of me, Warren had his own demands and busy schedule. Because of the family matters, which were expected but not so abruptly (I'm sorry; I am being vague intentionally), I skipped lunch because I needed to talk with my father in person before keeping an appointment downtown that could not be moved. By the time Warren and I reconnected mid-afternoon, I was worn out. He'd had the lightest of lunches; I'd had none. We should eat early then. Okay. We have a gift card to Panera; should we just get takeout? I leaned my head on my hand, too tired to sit up straight.Yeah, that would work. Then I straightened up. No. Rather than drive there, order, drive home, then eat, we had leftovers here from earlier in the week that we could warm up. And don't forget the coleslaw!

"And then let's go out to get ice ream," said Warren. 

"Yes, let's."

Supper was delicious and we didn't have to leave to get it—it was all right there. The coleslaw was superb. Afterwards, we drove the few miles to the Midway Market, our preferred ice cream destination. Warren got a scoop of caramel oatmeal cookie ice cream in a cup; I chose a scoop, also in a cup, of dark chocolate raspberry truffle. 

We sat with our respective choices and savored every single spoonful. Mine may have been the best chocolate ice cream I have ever had, and that is saying a lot. A. Lot. 

It is now late morning on Saturday and between writing these lines last night and finishing them this morning, I ran into two more unexpected obstacles—nothing major, but the second one, which came up this morning, brought me to tears. I looked at Warren: "I just want something to go right." 

And then I thought back to what I wrote above: small things count too. Warren and I took a walk this morning while it was still cool. I got the towels and the sheets washed this morning; the sheets are drying on the basement line, the towels just came out of the dryer and are already back in their respective places. We just went out to a local sweet corn stand and brought back ears to cook and ears to cut the kernels off and ears to share with our neighbors. All small things, and all important in their own small way.

And that is enough. More than enough. 

Vachel Lindsay: Who Knew?

A young Vachel Lindsay

Oh, sure, I know Vachel Lindsay, the American poet, really I do. 

Not.

I mean, I do "know" who Vachel Lindsay is in the American poetry spectrum. But I never really knew the scope of his works and his life and how that was reflected in his works, and little about his personal life other than the fact that he committed suicide by drinking a bottle of lye at the age of 52.

And I knew a very little bit about some of his larger works, which involved a lot of shouting and singing, but I only read them in poetry collections and never heard them read (or, more accurately, performed) out loud. And as I think back, I do not remember ever, ever reading him in high school classes, not even the one on modern (read "late 1800s to maybe mid-1900s") poetry.

So why Vachel Lindsay now?

The Academy of American Poets has a poem-a-day feature; you give them your email, and every day you get a poem in your inbox. Every. Day. On weekdays, the month's Guest Editor selects the themes, the poets, and so on. On weekends, the poems tend to be "oldies but goodies," reaching back into past centuries. On Saturday, August 2, Lindsay's poem, "Meeting Ourselves," was the selection.

I'd never read that poem before. I read it that day, then saw in the bio note that Lindsay was considered a "founder of modern singing poetry."

Modern singing poetry? 

Well, that phrase sent me down the Vachel Lindsay rabbit hole. I learned that as a young man he had made three long distance "tramps" across America (Florida to Kentucky, New York City to Ohio, and Illinois to New Mexico). He would trade his poems for food, for a place to sleep, for a drink from a well. And all along the way, he took in the sights and sounds and songs and stories of America, with two of his most noted larger works, "Congo" and "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" being written and published to acclaim after that third trip.

Who knew? I certainly didn't.

Vachel Lindsay had an international reputation and was in high demand on stage. His appearances were not staid poetry readings, but rousing performances that apparently bordered on a mixture of a revival meeting and stage production. Storyteller Studios made a superb video about Lindsay: his life, his accomplishments, his beliefs in community and progressive goals. The video is worth watching on many levels, but especially to see writer/actor Kevin Purcell speak/sing/shout Lindsay's poetry in a style very much like written accounts of Lindsay captured. 

As I continued tapping into nuggets of Vachel Lindsay, I discovered that he was from Springfield, Illinois and is buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery, which also contains Lincoln's tomb. I mentioned Lindsay to Warren and he said, after thinking a moment, that he remembered we'd stopped at "some writer's grave" when we were there in 2021 and that I had taken photos. I had forgotten but Warren was absolutely right, which is pretty good for a guy who is poetry-adverse.

Indeed we had stopped:

And, as I have seen at other burial sites that people make pilgrimages to, a number of coins were laid on top of his stone to let him know he was not forgotten:

The greatest discovery for me on my Lindsay tramp was finding recordings of him reading his own works at Columbia in 1931. Be still, my heart! The recordings are available through Penn Sound, part of the University of Pennsylvania. I have not listened to most of these recordings yet, but I did immediately listen to him recite "The Moon is the North Wind's Cookie," which I read many times in my childhood.

And no, I had no idea it was a Lindsay poem until I saw it listed at Penn Sound.

In 1962, Theodore Roethke wrote a stunning poem, "Supper With Lindsay," which I have read countless times. In it, Lindsay steps into Roethke's room on a brilliant moonlit night and begins talking about the power of poetry. He refers to William Blake: "Why, Blake, he's dead,—/But come to think of it, they say the same of me." The two men share a meal and then, as the kerosene lamp burns down, Lindsay acknowledges he needs to go. But not without a few final observations:

            ‘Who called me poet of the college yell?

            We need a breed that mixes Blake and me,

            Heroes and bears, and old philosophers—

            John Ransom should be here, and Rene’ Char;

            Paul Bunyan is part Russian. did you know?—

            We're getting closer to it all the time.'

In 2014, I wrote a post about my very belated realization that the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz was a pilgrimage tale. Discovering Vachel Lindsay in a new expansive way is not quite the same, but there is definitely a feeling of "how did I not know this?"

But now I do. 

And an older Lindsay

Reflections on Pickles and Poetry

Of course I still have this book on my shelf! 

Way, way, way back in the day, I purchased (through Scholastic Books, the source of all my school-era books), a slim volume of poetry with the enchanting name of Reflections On a Gift of Watermelon Pickles and Other Modern Verse.

The copyright is 1966; I probably bought it in 1967 or 1968 (when I was in 6th or 7th grade). Looking through it now, as it nears 60 years of age, I smile at what passed for "Modern Verse," both in light of who the book was intended for (young adolescents) and what the poetry choices are. (The times they were a-Changin' even then.)

But the book resurfaced in my mind in recent days not because of poetry, but because of pickles. And reflections on pickles. Not watermelon pickles, but just old-fashioned homemade sweet pickles. 

My grandmother Nelson, who pops up in these pages every now and then, canned everything she could—tomatoes, beans, corn, just to name a few—especially at this time of year as the garden started to hit maximum production. And one of my sharpest memories of her canning still is the sweet pickles she put up every year.

They were delicious. Period. Only once decades later did I taste a homemade sweet pickle that recalled hers. The vendor at the farmers' market selling them never returned, so I could never talk pickles with him. 

Decades later from my grandmother's kitchen, looking at the recent gift of a cucumber, I wondered whether I could find a recipe to make refrigerator sweet pickles. Google complied and there I was, pickling away.

Cutting the cucumber:

Preparing the pickling syrup:

And pouring it over the cucumbers:

After that, I let them set for a day or so in the refrigerator, then tasted them. Ehhh, not quite what I was looking for, but not awful. That night, talking with my Aunt Gail, I told her about my experiment, first telling her how I still missed the sweet pickles that Grandma (her mother) made. Gail chuckled and said, "Mom made a 14-day pickle," which I have since Googled enough to know that is more work than I am willing to invest. 

"These pickles just aren't the right flavor, Gail," I said, explaining that the recipe took only celery seed for its spices, and I thought I would pour off the syrup, add a hefty shake of pickling spices, and reheat it.

Gail agreed immediately, then said she would add some extra sugar to boot. "You often have to do that with sweet pickles, April. Not a lot, but you know what I mean."

And indeed I did. The next day I poured the syrup off, added pickling spices and sugar, and poured the "new" syrup back over the cucumbers. 

The next day, I tried one. Okay, now we're talking.

The pickles are not my grandmother's, but they are close enough to bring back memories, all of them sweet.

I know, they are not watermelon pickles. Truth be told, I have never had watermelon pickles. But these words I am penning now are a result of the gift of a cucumber to be turned into refrigerator sweet pickles.

And that is close enough. 

As for the poetry collection itself, which you can find on Wikipedia, probably the real reason I have carried this book along with me for so long is the poem on the back cover, Eve Merriam's How To Eat A Poem:

Some poems stay fresh forever, pickled or not.

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 9

Potatoes! 

Who knew?

Who knew that, left to its own devices, crabgrass can grow three feet tall?

Saturday I waded into the long neglected Hej Garden to see what, if anything, was salvageable and to take a stab at hacking away the weeds that had been growing, pretty much undisturbed, since early June. 

Note: I was wading not because of water depth but because of the thickness of the weeds. Yes, it was that bad.

Warren, who was working on another cleanup project in our yard, came back after I had been there for a half hour or more to see how it was progressing. I told him that I was running into an issue I did not understand.

"See these tall grasses? When I go to pull them up, their roots are all intertwined and stretch across the ground. I don"t know what this is."

Warren refrained from bursting out laughing. "That's crabgrass. You just haven't seen it like that because we take it out when it is still small."

Oh.

I thought crabgrass was so named because of its squat nature, making it look like a little crab. Maybe it is named for that reason; I'm not Googling it. But know that, left alone, it scuttles (like a crab?) all over an area and digs in for the long haul.

There were two tiny cucumbers. "Tiny" as in put your two thumbs together for thickness and size. There were blossoms on the zucchini, still, but no results. I did pull enough of the crabgrass and other growth away so maybe, maybe there might be one zucchini. Not holding my breath, though. And the three red cabbages, although small, are chugging along.

There was one stunning surprise which made me laugh and then that night call my Aunt Gail. Back in May, I planted a bunch of potato pieces that had sprouted eyes over the winter. The pieces sprouted and plants grew. But the potato plants never blossomed, which made me think they might have been hybrids incapable of regenerating. When Aunt Gail and I talked about this a week or so ago, she suggested I dig them up and see what, if anything, was there.  

Despite the weeds, the potato trench was easy to find as it had soft soil. I stuck my trowel in and...a potato! A TINY potato but a potato! Whoa! I grabbed a tool with more heft than a trowel and uncovered the whole trench.

Potatoes! Enough to make a meal out of them. Not large (but the potatoes I planted were small potatoes) but there they were. I dug every single one out. 

Potatoes are a pain to clean, but I did it Sunday afternoon. Then I chopped them, put them in a pan with some chopped onions, and served them up.

On their way to supper! 

They were delicious. 

After I "brought in" my potato harvest Saturday, I called Gail that night and we laughed and laughed. She said if I wanted to grow potatoes next year, just get seed potatoes from a farm center and I would get better results.

Who knows if I will try again next year? My friend Cindy grows potatoes in a container bag, and that is a possibility. Or maybe I just buy potatoes at the grocery store. 

But for 2025, this was worth every bite.

Leftovers too! 

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 8

Zucchini! 

The bagged zucchini looks great, no? All sliced and headed to the freezer for the winter, it will make some great meals. There is more to be sliced and frozen today. 

The source(s) of this bounty? Our next door neighbors, Adam and Maura, and our local farm market, Millers. Because in our garden, the zucchini crop is zero.

Zero. Nil. Nada. Nothing.

July is almost over, we are past the midpoint of summer, and our gardens are a mixed bag, to put it mildly. We have been back from our trip for over a week now, more than enough time to assess where our gardens are at: what is going well, what has failed, and where do we go from here.

Kitchen garden first. The kitchen garden is the workhorse of the two and has been now for the last three years. Once again, I planted it too densely with (still) too many tomatoes: three standard sized and four cherry plants. One of the non-cherry, the intriguingly named Elberta Peach, grew tall and thick, but does not appear to be capable of bearing blossoms, let along a tomato. The four cherries went wild; despite heavy pruning, they have flourished and spread.

But the tomatoes are not the sole issue in the kitchen garden. The peppers (some 14 plants, one of which got destroyed when I unwittingly stepped on it) are well-spaced and many are producing. But they have competition for space and light. The cosmos, the zinnias, the milkweed, the agastache, and the milkweed took over the back one-third of the garden, crowding the peppers and even challenging the cherry tomatoes. (That challenge seems to be a draw. Those cherry plants are pretty territorial.) 

As an aside, the basil is flourishing and we just had a second harvest and made a second batch of pesto. And the lettuce did well, although it has turned bitter in the summer heat.

Looking ahead to 2026, I am already making mental notes. Do not sow the cosmos in the kitchen garden next spring; try them in the long bed behind the house. Maybe it is time to transplant the agastache; it'll be it's third move since we bought it in 2018. And remove the milkweed. I just cut off all the pods before they flowered. I hate removing insect habitat, but where it is now is just too compact and too dense. Just these moves should give us more room in the kitchen garden to devote to—wait for it—vegetables. 

There is another reason to remove the non-vegetable load on the kitchen garden. In all likelihood, next year we will limit our vegetable garden to just the kitchen garden and I want maximum space for our plants.

For the last several years, we have (with permission, of course), had a second vegetable garden, the Hej Garden, in a corner of our neighbors' yard where our two backyards meet. It is tucked away and, frankly, invisible from our house.  The last three years in the Hej Garden have been hard. Between the 2023 hospitalization, clearing Dad's house in August/September 2024, and my June hospitalization this year (not to mention our vacation), the Hej Garden has been often overlooked, neglected, and left to its own devices. And that doesn't even count the zucchini issues of recent year, including a white leaf problem (no zucchini) one of those years. This year, the zucchini grew and blossomed and did not set a single squash. Not. One. I could blame the weeds (which are thick) but I suspect there is more to it than that.

I started thinking before we went on vacation about whether it is time to abandon that garden and return it to yard. I mentioned it to Warren then and he responded, thinking I was focused on my slow post-hospitalization recovery, that maybe I needed to give myself more time and it would all work out.

I raised the issue again yesterday. To water the Hej Garden, and realize that I am the waterer, I drag a very, very heavy hose all the way across the backyard, where I connect it to a second hose that runs under two large pines and emerges on the other side near the Hej Garden. We have had a lot of heat this summer, so there has been a lot of watering (which I do in the early morning, when it is cool and the world is at peace). As I trudged back and forth (because after I water the Hej Garden, I bring the hose back up the house to water the kitchen garden), I thought of how poorly we have taken care of the Hej Garden, how this is our third year without any zucchini, and on and on. When Warren and I sat down for breakfast, I told him my thoughts, and waited. He was quiet, then nodded. "And we're not getting any younger," he added. 

True that.

There will be a few successes from the Hej Garden, I think: three red cabbages, which seem to be growing and not succumbing to any insects, some red onions. But no zucchini. (The cucumbers failed too, largely due to neglect.) It is time to let it go and I have no problem doing that with open hands.

So that's where our gardens are at this late July date. I hope we get one more basil harvest (and then I will let the basil go to flower). There will be peppers and tomatoes in the coming days and weeks. The bees and other pollinators are all over the agastache and the cosmos. 

And that is enough for now. 

Off the Beaten Path

A bit of our downtown architecture, from a booklet I designed back in 2006

I did something this morning I have not done for years, if ever. I had a 9:30 appointment at my dad's bank. The bank's downtown branch is one block from Dad's apartment, and two blocks from the library, where I had a book to return and one to pick up. My plan was bank, library, and then Dad. 

The bank appointment finished much earlier than I had planned—at 9:40—and the library does not open until 10:00. Add to the picture that I was carrying a bag containing three 6-packs of Glucerna (which Dad keeps stocked in his fridge). Let's just say the bag was not light. Oh, and it was heating up (a heat dome day). 

What to do, what to do?

It made no sense to walk to the library and wait outside; the library faces east and would be in bright sunshine. Instead, I crossed the street, heavily burdened by my bag, and plopped down on a bench on the east side of the our main drag through downtown, with the buildings casting a solid shade at that hour of the morning.  

And then I just sat there. 

I watched birds fly on and off the buildings. I looked at our downtown architecture, mostly post-Civil War Italianate structures, more thoughtfully than I have in many years. Back in 2003–2004, I wrote a series of articles about our downtown architecture for the then locally owned newspaper. Some of those very buildings I had written about were next to me or across the street.  I found myself thinking of both the then and the now as I looked at changes in the local businesses over those decades, as well as the changes to the building themselves. 

And then there was just the act of sitting on a bench in the middle of downtown and not doing anything for some 20 minutes. I wasn't drinking a coffee. I was not texting or scrolling. I didn't even take any notes, because, stunningly, I didn't think I had a pen. I meant to pick one up at the bank, but picked up a bite-size Hershey bar instead. (It turned out I did have a pen, at the bottom of the heavy bag. I found it later.) 

I kept sitting. 

Eventually, the hour turned. I could hear the bells of the Catholic church a few blocks away chiming. I stood up, picked up my bag, and moved on into the rest of my morning. 

Sometimes you step off the beaten path just by sitting. And this morning was one of those times.