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. 

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 7

I have been silent on this front for the last several days for the simple reason that we were OUT OF TOWN! "Out of town" as in "visiting our family and friends in the Pacific Northwest." It was a wonderful trip on that front; it was a challenging trip at times for me as I am still recovering from the unexpected June hospitalization. The joy of seeing everyone was well worth those challenges.

We got back late afternoon yesterday and today I went out to see the gardens. Holy smokes! Let's just say that clearly they gamboled about in our absence. 

A longer report will follow in a few days. But I am pleased to share this with you:

Yes, the first tomatoes of the season! And a nice red pepper! 

I know there is more to come. But nothing beats that first bite of tomato after all the waiting! 

At the End of Two

Having just finished the first half of 2025 (!), I am updating our grocery/household spending for the year. While our results were not as spectacular as first quarter, the second quarter came in far better than I had dared hope. 

Second quarter spending for food and common household items: $728.94. $29.23 was spent on household items: a whopping 4% of the overall outlay. Okay, that was a little bit more spent on household items than first quarter, but not by much. 

The food expenditures were higher than first quarter for a number of reasons. We were so frugal in the first quarter that the month of April saw some major restocking. We also had guest artists over in April, and that involves some extra food purchases. Eggs were still staggering high that month; I only bought 1 dozen (@ $4.99), but did buy Bob's Red Mill Egg Replacer, a worthy substitute in baking (2 bags at $4.99 each; 1 bag equals 34 eggs). And yes, April spending included two hams when they went on sale around Easter. 

To my surprise, as I look at May in preparing this, it too included another major restocking. We also had guests coming through and staying with us, always requiring extra purchases. Still, I was a little taken aback at the dollars spent. 

It was the June figures I was braced for: June included my hospitalization and a lot of typical and untypical purchases following, including preparing for guests and, gulp, BUYING DESSERT (for the same guests) instead of making it myself. (Two reasons for that: (1) During our recent heat dome, we avoided cooking or baking anything that required turning on the oven and (2) I did not have (and still lack) the energy to bake. Period.) We also "splurged" on a rotisserie chicken from Kroger for the same two reasons: heat and my continuing lack of capacity. That all being said, June came in at $172.56 for food and household items. 

And let's not forget the continuing rising prices on food. Yes, eggs have come way down and milk has stayed fairly stable, but other items have gone up.

It is what it is. 

The second quarter average monthly expenditure came out to $242.98, almost $100.00 higher than first quarter. For the year, we have spent $1165.04 on groceries, which averages out to $194.17 a month. I have been hoping to hold to $200/month, but realize, the first quarter aside, that may be a tad unrealistic in this uncertain economy. We are only sitting just below that figure because of the first quarter spending of this year. Can we maybe maybe just maybe hit $225.00 a month?

Time will tell! 

Baby Steps

Photo by Maxime Horlaville on Unsplash

I am two weeks home from the hospital today, almost three weeks post-hospitalization. My recovery has been...

Slow.

Steady, but slow. 

We all know the phrase "baby steps." We tell it to a friend when they jump into a new project and get overwhelmed at all there is to learn and do.

"Baby steps," we remind them lest they get discouraged. "Take baby steps." 

I am reminding myself that when I get discouraged about my post-hospitalization recovery.

"Baby steps, April. Baby steps."

Yeah, I'm taking baby steps. Mouse baby steps.

We (the medical "we" and Warren and I) are still trying to sort out what happened (a pancreatic bleed of some sort) and, more important, why. (Who knows?) I have an appointment Monday morning with my brilliant surgeon, Dr. Goslin, who followed me through my BIG medical crisis in 2023, who removed my gallbladder in 2024, and who, along with his associates, followed me through this most recent adventure. I am interested to hear his thoughts on what possibly led to the bleed, where he thinks I am now, and what the future might look like. 

I realize that last thread—what the future might look like—may be a lost cause. "Well, that's all. The crystal has gone dark." (Professor Marvel to Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz, 1939.) 

As for me, I am here. Changed (again), but here. The horrific heat dome seems to have broken. (I. Hate. Heat.) I was out at 6:00 a.m. today watering the gardens, listening to the earliest birds of the day. I penned this post at 8:00 a.m., sitting outside on our front porch, watching wisps of clouds scud by overhead. It is mid-morning now as I type and the day is still blissfully cool.

Warren and I have been ending our evenings sitting outside on our front porch in the late evening, after the sun is off the day and the temperatures cooled a little, watching the firefly show in our front yard. It is a wonderful way to pull the day to a close with each other without electronics, without other tasks demanding attention. Just flickering bits of light: on, off, on, on, off.

I am grateful. Grateful for life, grateful for Warren, grateful for those bits of light.