Notes on Small Things

More time for this?

When our neighbors Mark and Mary go out of town, I feed and check on their cat, Sammie. Mary and I were talking this afternoon and, as they are going out of town later this month and then again in November, I wanted to get those dates on my calendar.

I still use a paper calendar. Two, actually: a large one that I keep on the kitchen table, and a small one (a very small one) that I carry with me. Our events and activities and appointments are color-coded: Warren sky blue, me pink, and joint appointments/events a mild green. I make sure that what goes on one calendar goes on the other.

Mary goggled at my calendar. She asked the obvious: "Why don't you keep your calendar on your phone?" 

"Because I don't want to be tethered to it to any greater degree than I am already."

She laughed, then gaped when I opened my calendar to this month and she saw pink after pink after pink.

"I want less pink on my calendar," I announced. 

Mary got me immediately.

These have been hard, overloaded days—yet, still, whatever. Medical appointments have taken a chunk of days with more to come through next week. So has taking care of things for my dad. like picking up and delivering prescriptions or toothpaste or...yeah. I don't note Dad-types of things on the calendars unless they are an outside appointment. If I did, because I have started using orange for him, my calendar would be a patchwork of orange and pink. Not good.

I am picking up some online continuing legal education credits this month; those are on there. Not on the calendar but a constant: housework, our own local errands, the library.

You get the picture.

As we ate supper out on our deck tonight, I told Warren I was not unhappy, but I am worn out. (Add to that exhaustion our both getting our 25-26 Covid and our Fall 2025 flu vaccines yesterday.)

In short, t.i.r.e.d.

"And I am not making time for things I want to do, like write or take pictures," I said. "Look at that bee in the petunias. I mean that kind of thing." 

Warren came up with a practical observation, as he often does. Had I taken care of the things I absolutely had to get done today? Yes? Then let's get the dishes done (he washes, I dry), and then go write. Or read. Or...you get the idea. 

I just penned these lines out while sitting in our living room, then came upstairs to type them in. Absolutely it feels good.

My friend Katrina recently wrote that she noticed my blog has been focusing on small things, and the comfort that seems to bring me. She encouraged me to continue to keep that focus, as it would help me to get through some of everything going on.

As I finish these lines, I can hear the crickets through the open window and even catch a katydid or two piping up. 

And that is enough for now. 

Skyward

Photo by Samuele Bertoli on Unsplash

Yesterday started very early. I had a 7 a.m. appointment in Columbus with my oncologist, which meant getting up at 5:30 to be on the road by 6:15.  I dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen. Waiting for Warren to come down, I stepped out on our back deck to see how much the temperature had dropped overnight. It was still dark with no hint of sunrise, so I looked up to see if there were any stars visible.

There were stars and there was Orion, hanging in the northeast sky, brilliantly lit. It was my first fall sighting of it.

Orion is my favorite constellation. Robert Frost put Orion in his poem "The Star-splitter," which has been a longtime treasured poem in my mental poetry collection: "You know Orion always comes up sideways..." Orion is one of the very few constellations I can readily identify, which is certainly a part of why it is my favorite. And way back in my misty past, I first saw and had someone identify Orion in a brilliantly dark Wisconsin night sky, seeing it from the outside walk surrounding the telescope dome at Yerkes Observatory. That first view of Orion, of knowing what I was looking at, has stuck with me.

I called Warren outside to see Orion and we both marveled at the sky. Then we went on with our morning.

The time came for Warren to head to class, I walked outside with him to give him a kiss and wave goodbye; both are important to us. When I turned to go back into the house, I noticed a moth resting on the lintel between the storm door and the house door. It must have fluttered on it when we stepped out. I opened the storm door wider: "Go on, little moth. You don't need to be in our house." 

It was then that I noticed that one of the moth's wings was badly damaged, almost as if something had bit a chunk out of it. 

Oh. I figured I would have to pick it up and set it on a bush.

The moth had other ideas. When I bent closer, it fluttered up off the lintel and flew into the front yard, heading towards one of the flower beds. True, it flew in a jagged, erratic fashion, but fly it did. 

That moth made an impression on me. "That's me," I thought. Or rather, I hoped that was me: yes, damaged but still able to move forward. Maybe jagged and erratic at times, but still going.

Orion in the morning and a moth giving me a lesson in flying midday. And all I had to do was look up.

This Year's Gardens: Chapter 10

Zinnia

Blogger friend Sam, who blogs at Sam Squared, recently had a post titled "End of Summer Juggle." I was so tired that when I saw the title, I read it as "End of Summer Jungle," and laughed at myself for mixing my garden thoughts with her summer thoughts.

Our Kitchen Garden IS a jungle. Between the cherry tomatoes gone wild, the cosmos gone wild, the agastache gone wild, and the zinnias gone wild, it is a thicket of stems and branches and bees and butterflies and even an occasional hummingbird. Earlier this week, I waded (the only verb that fits) into the thick of it, garden snips in hand, and cut a lot of tomato stems and branches off. Remember that scene in the movie Hook where one of the Lost Boys keep smoothing out the wrinkles on Peter Pan's face (played brilliantly by the late, great Robin Williams) and then announces, "Oh, there you are, Peter!" That's how I felt after some ten minutes: "Oh, there you are, garden!"

Late yesterday afternoon, Warren was in the dogleg of our backyard, where he had built a large storage shed for his business and for yard equipment like the tiller and mowers. As he and we continue to move into the next phase of our lives, he has been working in the shed to rearrange, cull through, and move various tools and materials. I came out to keep him company and sat there for some time, then announced I was getting my work gloves and be back. Five minutes later, I was taking apart the fence surrounding the Hej Garden. I realized several weeks ago that the time for me to operate this second garden, even though it is "right there," has come and gone. So slowly I unwound the fence and pulled up the support stakes.

Dave, whose yard contains that garden, came out and chatted a few minutes. I told him this was the last year I was gardening here; that Warren would till it later this fall and we'd seed it, but our gardening days were over. He nodded; they had gardened there the first year or two after they bought the house, but, as Dave noted, laughing, "with all of our activities, gardening, though enjoyable, was low on the priority list."

The site formerly known as the Hej Garden. 

So the Hej Garden is down and done. As a final fitting note, just know that the fat, happy groundhog who lives under a large brush pile on Adam and Maura's property just feet away from the north end of the Hej Garden breached the garden fence and ate BOTH of the remaining two red cabbages before I could cut them and make more slaw. 

The fencing that did not stop the groundhog

Even though I have been gardening for years, every year I learn new things about spacing and grouping, and this year was no exception. I am already making notes (both mental and actual) about next year's gardens, both vegetable and flower. The biggest change coming to the Kitchen Garden will be moving the agastache, which has flourished there, to the flower bed down near the pine trees, which we plan on expanding (all perennials). We love the agastache, but it takes up more room each year. Along with moving it out, I will not be sowing the kitchen garden with cosmos, but instead will sow the small bed immediately behind the house. Cosmos are beautiful and bright, but I want the room they take up. And, in a surprise to myself, it turns out that I love zinnias and will seed a row of them along the very back of the kitchen garden, against the outside garage wall. The ones I sowed this year were in a packet sent to my father from the Alzheimer's Association and the results were tall and colorful and made me smile.

As for next year's planting in the Kitchen Garden, I learned that I had been stunting the peppers' growth by having them too crowded and, wait for it, too shaded by the tomatoes all these years. This year, the peppers got the south side of the garden, and except for the two unfortunates closest to the cosmos/tomato jungle, the peppers have been having a pepper party!

Some of the peppers, ready for their closeup 

There should be weeks yet of tomatoes and peppers. The basil is growing beautifully still and while I am leaning towards letting it flower for the bees, I may do one more small harvest to dry the leaves for seasoning. My neighbor Mary was taken aback when I told her my plans to let it flower. "But it gets bitter then!" "But the bees love it," I replied, and I told her how I liked to think of the bees wintering over with their hive smelling like basil. Mary smiled; so that's why I was thinking that! 

Summer is winding down. But the bees and the flowers and the Kitchen Garden are still going strong. I look forward to seeing what the next month brings. 

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. 

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. 

This Year's Gardens: Chaper 6

With my hospitalization last week, I lost some time in the gardens. I am just now catching up, albeit slowly. Warren tended to things while I was unavailable, watering some, weeding more. I spent most of this week regaining lost ground, but yesterday morning I finally took a few tentative steps, literally and figuratively, into our back and looked at the kitchen garden. This morning, I did even more, visiting the Hej garden, doing some weeding in the behind-the-house flower bed, watering all of the gardens. 

I am slow; it is wonderful.

In the Hej garden, the potatoes are flourishing. Several zucchini are making their presence known, as are a few cucumbers. The three red cabbages are just starting to think about forming heads. (Sorry, no photos; it was early and I had no pocket for a phone when I was out watering.)

Earlier this week, while I was still housebound for all practical purposes, Warren appeared in the front hallway and beckoned to me with his finger. "Come look." 

Tomatoes! 

Then, maybe that day, maybe the next, while I was sitting out on the back deck, he called over to me: "You have peppers!"

Peppers! 

Ohio, like many states around us, is predicted to be under a strong heat dome over the next few days, starting today and extending into the week. High heat, oppressive heat. No breaks. The lettuce beds have flourished this year, the best they have been ever, but even if they were shaded (and they are not), they are likely goners. The lettuces hate the heat. So this morning I went out and cut a lot of leaves to get a precious salad or two. I told my dear neighbor Mary to do the same, and she grabbed some for her household too. We talked on the back deck a little bit later and I told her to pick more if (a big "if") the beds hold up. I doubt they will, but at least our two homes will enjoy some salad before the heat wipes it out.

I even managed to grab what are probably the last of the green onions and bring them in for cooking and salads. Not bad for basically giveaway prices! 

For the next several days, assuming the forecast is even close to accurate, my gardening will be pretty much limited to early morning watering. I do not do well in heat even when I am in good shape, and I have no illusions about what kind of shape I am in right now. The gardens will do their thing and grow, especially the peppers, which thrive in hotter weather. 

Life will roll on, despite the heat. 

And so will we. 

Quiet

It is a little after 5 a.m. and I am sitting in our living room, penning these words. My body is still on "hospital time," and I have been awake since about 4 a.m., which is when the nurses came through to get the morning's blood draws. After listening to the soft sounds for an hour or so while Warren slept beside me, I eased out of bed just a few minute ago, got dressed, and came on downstairs.

We had a storm tear through briefly last night, maybe around 8:00. The day had been hot and humid and heavy. Warren had mowed the lawn earlier and was in his shop. I could see the trees in the backyard pitch and toss a little, but nothing too dramatic. Then with a fierce rush, the sky blackened, the wind escalated, and the storm was on. It pounded for maybe ten or so minutes: wind and more wind, rain, lightning, thunder, more rain. 

Compared to what millions in other parts of this country have been going through, this was not that big a deal. We did not lose power. We were not under a flood warning. Tornado sirens did not go off. All the same, it was enough to remind me yet again how powerful nature is.

Afterwards, Warren and I stepped out on our deck. Knowing we might get a storm, he had moved decorative planters to lower levels as a precaution. It made no difference. They still turned over.

The fish broke.

I will check the rain gauge when it gets lighter.

After the storm blew on, it rained gently off and on through the evening and the night. I love the sound of rain. Our windows were open to capture the cool air (we famously do not turn on the house AC unless it is really, really hot, which for Warren means an inside temperature of 83 or so; we might have to renegotiate that limit, given my recovery) and I read into the evening, listening to the soft sounds. I fell asleep listening to the rain, smiling.

After I woke at 4:00, I could hear our various wind chimes that hang in the dogwood tree outside our bedroom window. Not clanging wildly but an occasional soft ting of metal or a beat of bamboo.

As I continue to recover, I remind myself that last week's medical madness was a reminder of life, of precious life, of the fragility of here and now. When friends ask me how I am feeling, I reply "fragile," as in "likely to break at the least puff of air." But as I sit here writing, I think of "fragile" as more like a spiderweb—gossamer, seemingly insubstantial. But look at a spiderweb and marvel: how do such tiny little threads do anything at all? They do amazing things. There is strength in a web, in those threads, as the late, great E.B. White aptly recognized decades ago in writing Charlotte's Web. 

And maybe that's what I feel now, after this latest event. There are strands to repair and new ones to throw down, but I am still here.

The web held.

*****

Later note: It is just before noon as I type this post in. The rain gauge showed we received a half inch of rain.

And my dear husband repaired the fish this morning. He worries about me putting it back outside and running the risk of it breaking again. "But I want it in the gardens," I said. Well, maybe it needs a sturdier location.

 We'll see.