Snivel, Whine, Foiled Again

 

Snivel, Whine, Foiled Again

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I know better. I set myself up to fail. All the signs pointed to early rain. I jumped in with both feet and gleefully shouted to everybody I know, “This year the rains will come early in June. What a wonderful wet year we will have.” Ha.

I know better. Sure, it rains in summer. Late June when we are lucky, July, August, and rains dribble off in September. The rest of the year is bone dry and that is easy and safe to predict. 

If I really wanted to be right, and who doesn’t like being right, I would have shut my mouth until we actually had more than one freak storm. But all the signs pointed to a wet year while the weather hit the wall and turned left.

The cicadas began singing the end of April instead of end of May. The elders in the community lifted their faces, “Ah, the way it used to be.” The black-bellied whistling ducks returned. The yellow rain birds came and built their fanciful, conical nests and planted eggs. The white bedsheet butterflies are here. Iguanas are hitting my yard for a free salad bar, despite Lola’s vigilance. Bugs are trying to get in the house. All the signs of rain imminent.

Every morning as well as late evening, I could stand outside and smell the rain. It had to be raining somewhere. Oh, yeah, Montana. The world turned upside down.

I do know that the only way to safely predict weather is to stand outside and say what one finds at the moment. Today, sunshine, blue skies forever, 105 F in the shade, 98% humidity. And when I go to my computer and check officially, same day after day after day, 105F, tomorrow 106, forever and ever, amen.

I never was a good prognosticator. If I applied for the position of oracle, I’d be turned down flat with laughter. Whatever I were to prophesy, expect the opposite.

Well, nothing to do but accept what I cannot change and deal with the heat and dust as best I can. Lola and I take our morning walk at 6:30. Back at the house, I proceed with morning chores and self-appointed tasks of the day. For example, today, by 10:00 I had the floors mopped and a mango pie in the oven, a rhubarb pie on the counter waiting to bake. As hot as it is, the oven heat won’t make a lick of difference.

A length of gauzy cotton fabric lay spread out on my table, ready to cut for a blouse, but I had to put it away, the red, orange and yellow colors too hot to contemplate.

And so each day goes, active chores done by noon. My afternoons, I revolve from patio to back yard beneath the jacaranda, to the side yard seating area I built last year, following each bit of breeze.

Despite my failures, despite my lousy reputation, I have a new prediction. It will never rain again. Having said that, I’m going to organize a neighborhood picnic. Iguanas welcome.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

Sizzling in June

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End of Year Farm, Weather, Factory and Livestock Reports

 

End of Year Farm, Weather, Factory and Livestock Reports

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Farm Report: Tomatoes are up and everything else is down. More or less.

I’m not sure what it is about tomatoes here but they insist on growing under extreme conditions, such as winter. Well, our winter, not your winter. Still, they astonish me. Remember, my farm is in five-gallon buckets, baby baths, and other assorted strange containers.

I’m really tired of eating tomatoes. My neighbors are glad to relieve me of the excess.

Herbs are year round. Flowers are forever.

But there is no accounting for the avocado tree. Back in summertime when it was supposed to flower, nothing happened. By the end of what would/should have been fruiting season, the mixed-up tree burst into flower. Now it is dropping olive-sized nuggets which will not, cannot grow to maturity.

Speaking of mixed up, my first year in Etzatlan, I planted what I was told when I bought it from a battered pickup truck alongside the road, a cinnamon bush. It isn’t. I’m sure the vendor, watching me carefully, told me what it was. I misunderstood and asked, “Canela?” “Si, si,” he immediately agreed. Whatever it is, it is now 6 years old, a tree and not a bush, and for the first time, is bursting into flower. Like I said, flowers are forever.

Weather Report: Cool in the morning. Turn off heater and open door at 11:00 to let the sunshine in to continue warming the house. By noon, go outside to enjoy the afternoon warmth, gentle breeze (some days), and scent of magnolias. (Flowers are forever.) At 4:30 close the door and at 7:00 turn on the heater for an hour.

So far we’ve had two cold weeks, one in November and one this month. Cloudy all day. No sun. No hot water from my solar water tank. Sponge baths. Layer the sweaters. Pray for sun.

Factory Report: The factory consists of my home sewing machine, a conference table, a bin and a basket of scraps of fabric, and myself, boss and employee. Name of company: Save the Planet One Tree at a Time. Factory motivated by replacing throw-away items with re-usable. Output, this far, coffee filters, napkins, handkerchiefs, mug rugs, pot holders, and cleaning cloths.

Also sachets for my dried lavender. Flowers are forever.

I shut down the factory for Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s festivities. Ghosts of future projects are folded and stacked, waiting for the boss to finish a jigsaw puzzle or two. The factory table is the perfect size, and there is an ancient saying about all work, no play and a grumpy boss.

Next week, the factory will magically reappear and production continue.

Livestock report: Iguanas have become rare sightings. Of course, it is winter. But when the sun belts out shine to push eighty, the lizardish critters should be sunbathing atop the brick walls.

My neighbor’s cats and my Lola The Dog might have more to do with disappearing lizards and iguanas than the weather. Some of the iguanas are sizable but then, you haven’t seen Omar from next door. He’s almost as big as Lola. And Lola is keen to chase any movement in the bushes.

Sightings of lizards minus tails are up.

Happy New Year from Sondra and her trusty sidekick, Lola The Dog

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

End of December, 2021

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In My Next Life . . .

 

In My Next Life . . .

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 We stood side by side on the ditch bank, relaxed, Dad leaning on his irrigation shovel. The July afternoon was quiet, air hardly moving, hot, dry. I was in high school but I can’t remember which year.

A wisp of cloud lifted above the horizon. We stood together, in silence, watched the cloud gather substance. The spring rains had abandoned us that year. Here it was, mid-summer, and the earth gasped for moisture.

We tracked that cloud all the way from the cusp until nearly overhead. Time had no meaning. And we watched that little bit of hope dry up and dissipate above us, turn into nothing, disappear.

Dad looked at me with a half-smile, his eyes full of humor, and kind of shook his head. Then he headed off across the field of sugar beets and river water to shore up a bank across the way. You know, that is one of my favorite memories, that moment of hope, gone, and accepted.

I like weather. I talk about it all the time. Still raining here, by the way. None of the younger people can remember a year so wet. My concrete patio is leaching calcium and lime so I know the water table is right up to there. I don’t worry about flooding but what if my house simply slides off the foundation while the earth turns?

When I was younger I never thought to be a meteorologist. Well, that’s not totally true. Back in the mid-70s I lived in Great Falls. My next door neighbor Bob, formerly a weatherman with the Merchant Marine, was then a meteorologist up on Gore Hill. To maintain certification, he periodically had to take a test. I borrowed his exam book and read every page, fascinated.

I could have done that. In a more perfect world. My world at that time was poverty and survival and I’m afraid I could not have recognized opportunity had it stomped on me.

My problem is that I found too many fascinations. Looking back, my life seems to be divided into chapters. I suspect we all at times have wished we could relive part of our lives differently. But would we?

My life story has a couple ugly chapters. But given how hard-headed I am, I suspect those chapters were necessary. In retrospect, I would not trade them, mostly, I confess, because I can’t.

I control my life just as well as I control the weather, that is, not at all. If I wiped out the ugly chapters, I’d wipe out a lot of beautiful experiences. So best just accept them and move on.

Life. Weather. My own self. We’re all a mish-mash.

My refrigerator quit working. The ice-cream is soup. The repairman is here.

Today was partly sunny after raining from 6:00 last evening through to 8:30 this morning. My lime trees planted in the lower part of my yard show signs of distress from too much water. They might die dead. Clouds are rolling in quickly, setting the stage for tonight’s promised thunder storms.

I’m on the patio, waiting for the news, good or bad, from the repairman. Lola, my hairy mutt, sensing my distress, bounded over and buried her face against my leg, as if to say, “Just bury your fingers in my ruff, yes, behind my ears, over a bit, yes, right there, because I know that always makes you feel better.”  

If there is a next life, I doubt I’ll have any more control than I do with this one. Knowing me, I’ll need some lessons in living, both hard and soft. Best to just pay attention as it unfolds.

After all, it doesn’t get much better than this, watching the clouds gather into piles, knowing they carry moisture, Lola at my feet!

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 7, 2021

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“When The Frost Is On The Pumpkin”

“When The Frost Is On The Pumpkin”

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            “And the fodder’s in the shock.” James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet”. He wrote in dialect and I loved it. I memorized that entire poem in southern Indiana hillbilly style in third grade at Elizabeth. I like to think I was more in love with the season than the poet. No matter where I’ve lived, autumn has been special to me.

            That is, until I got to Mexico. In Mazatlan, on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, with desert a mere short drive inland, where I lived two and a half years, I could barely distinguish one season from another. Summertime brought torrential rains, short lived, usually at night. Summer was green. Winter tended more toward a lesser green with speckles of gray-brown.

            Here in Etzatlan, snugged against the hills in the high Sierra Madre valley near Guadalajara, summer is officially over; the rainy season has drifted away until next June. Corn stalks zoom even higher than elephants’ eyes. By the end of October, men will swarm into corn with machetes and stack the fodder into shocks. Cane reaches upward visibly day by day. Peppers soon will be ready for harvest and shipment all over the world.

            I’ve always been an avid weather watcher; too many Montana years where weather personified is a psychopath which might turn on one in a heartbeat. I’ve lived in many places but Montana is always “home”.

I’ve been in Etzatlan seven months. It’s the beginning of fall and I’m trying my best to find the errant season. Spring, March and April, were hot and dry. That is all messed up! Summer hot and wet with cool nights, ideal. I keep looking for signs of the fall season according to those which I remember best. None have appeared. What I do find baffles me.

            A huge tree at the corner of my garden resembles a floral umbrella, vibrant green leaves patterned with orange trumpet-like bouquets. Plants and bushes which bloomed in the spring are again in bloom, some for the third time. My bottle brush tree is full of red brushes and hummingbirds. How do they do that? Some never stop blooming. Like the lilies. And the roses.

That’s another thing. What are roses doing in this sub-tropical region? Brought here by gringos, no doubt. Yet every vivero (nursery) has a selection of roses. Leaf-cutter ants feast on my roses. These voracious critters form an assembly line and strip a rose bush in minutes. I’ve timed them. Once roses have been reduced to naked stalks, they turn their attention to the young oleander and baby hibiscus I just planted. To stop them I’ve, with requisite guilt, resorted to sprinkling a vile yellow powder while wearing rubber gloves and a face mask. I boil my body afterward.

I’m harvesting my first limes from the baby tree I planted in April. Oranges are forming on my new trees, barely as tall as me. I’ve no idea if they are in season or out of season. What is the season?

Canaries are returning from the north. I’ve seen the first two pairs this week. Ha! There’s another returned bird searching for bugs on my brick wall. He is a variety of woodpecker, the size of a chickadee.

And the “sheets” are back. They weren’t gone long. I call them sheets because this butterfly, the size of a saucer, floats in the air like a bed sheet on the line, gently shifting in the breeze.

Breeze? That’s another difference between here and there. The weather forecast this morning predicted winds from two to four miles per hour. Two to four? Is that measurable? Any self-respecting Montana wind would sneer at such a wimp.

Real winds, when they happen, seem to foretell incoming rain, whipping with intensity for ten or fifteen minutes. Then the wind falls off, raindrops start, the wind moves the clouds on over to the neighbors. I’m just describing what I’ve experienced.

But it is only the end of September. Maybe frost will rime the pumpkin yet. My neighbor told me last year one morning in January the top of his car was covered with frost. Big whoop, right!

I can still recite Riley’s entire poem and if I close my eyes, I can see the changes, smell the season. Birds and butterflies are great. But I’d love to see the gathering of the elk at Slippery Anne. I may have to get a ticket home.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 29, 2016

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