Spring, Sprang, soon to be Sprung

 

Spring, Sprang, soon to be Sprung

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Please don’t grimace like that, Mrs. Hunter. I’m drunk on spring love and language is ours to play games.

Spring arrives quickly here in Jalisco, the Garden State of Mexico. I declare, we are definitely in the Sprang stage of Spring. Boing. Boing. Boing. What fun it is.

Light opens the sky a little bit earlier. Not much, here closer to the Equator, but a little. And it stays around a little bit longer in the evening before it drops behind the mountains. And the day warms up sooner, stays warm longer. Ah, Spring.

Yesterday while talking with my neighbor Janet, we saw a Crimson Collared Tanager. I looked it up in my handy bird book. We have a vast variety of tanagers and this type is a new-comer in the neighborhood.

Three days ago I saw a butterfly I’d not seen before. It was the deepest, brightest, most pure yellow, large, not as large as a bed-sheet butterfly, but larger than the more common yellow butterflies that are always with us.

This morning I came nose to nose with a dragonfly on my clothesline. She had the sweetest face, like a miniature ET. We stared at each other for an actual two minutes, nose to nose, and she showered me with love. Allow me my notions, illusions, delusions, please. Spring is Sprang. Love is Sprung in the air.

For the last two weeks I’ve been eating zucchini and/or squash blossoms every day from my own garden buckets. By the weekend, I’ll be eating my own tomatoes. Tomatillos, kissing cousins to tomatoes, already are hanging lovely green Japanese lanterns on every vine. The larger ones are filling out nicely.  

I miss my lettuce salads but I had such a good crop, fed me and my neighbors for months, so I let it go to seed. In a week or thereabout, I’ll be able to replant the baby bathtubs, the containers I use for lettuce beds. Lettuce does not require depth.

Janet’s Jacaranda tree, always the first of this tree to show color, is bursting with purple blooms. Mine is still shedding leaves like rain. The trees seem to have jumped the season by a month. But I assume they know their schedule better than I do. Lani’s tree will turn purple next. Then mine. John’s tree is last. The strange things I notice.

Seasons seem so different here, to me. Spring springs sudden out of winter, admittedly a mild season, morphs very quickly into Summer, which I’ll call mid-March to mid-June. The next season is the Rainy, through into October. October and November are autumn. Then December and January round out winter.

Birds are building new nests or repairing winter damage on the old homestead. They have absolutely no morals, billing and cooing shamelessly, especially the partridge doves who act like love birds year-round but go nuts in spring.

I have to be careful when picking zucchini, gathering , pruning or tending flowers of any kind, including tomato blossoms. Bees. Oh, the bees. They are, oh, well, busy as . . . bees. They live their own cliché. Gathering honey. Carrying pollen. Making sure life goes onward, sweetly.

I just returned from my evening walk with Lola. This week a huge bull has moved into the field with the horses, a temporary pasture he uses during Mardi Gras. This animal is huge with great horns and giant lop ears. I know it is Spring. The bull was leaning over the fence, licking the small horse’s face with his great larruping tongue.

The horse would move her head forward for a lick, then back. Then forward, then back. A dance. Love is strange.

Me, I’m having a heart attack, falling in love all over again, with everything I see.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

Plowing through February

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To the tune of, “Will you still love me, when I’m ninety-five!”

 

               To the tune of, “Will you still love me, when I’m ninety-five!” 

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I went to Oconahua to Jane’s birthday celebration for cake and homemade ice-cream. Ninety-five full years. From the stories Jane has told and from stories her daughters told with great glee, that woman was a pistol. She’s still a pop gun.

She lived fully and outrageously, a Registered Nurse, from NCY to Alaska to Washington to Mexico. In what order, I don’t know. There are chapters I’ve not heard.

Jane is Michelle’s daughter and has a casita on Ana and Michelle’s land a short ways from the Big House. Michelle is her primary care-taker. Ana is taking nursing classes, in order to be a better-educated helper.

I enjoyed an enlightening talk with Ana. She explained how Mexican culture doesn’t see anything wrong with senility. It is a natural part of the life cycle and is treated as such. That is refreshing.

The party was a small gathering compared to what Michelle and her sister Susan, in Mexico for the event, had envisioned. They had wanted all of us, everyone who knows Jane, to be there, a catered dinner, a mariachi band, the whole big blow out with fireworks and all things glittery. With all the various plagues in the land, the family chopped the party back at both ends and in the middle.

Meanwhile, back at the Rancho, Josue, checking in at a youthful and invincible thirty-five years old, seems to be trying to foreshorten his days. Picture this: Josue was working at a friend’s hacienda, up six meters (that is about 20‘ high) on a ladder, swinging a paint sprayer attached to the air hose, when the ladder slipped.

When the ladder slipped, gravity took over, the ladder hit the ground, the man came down, broke arm and leg but saved his crown, so he said, barely coherent through the pain, “At least my head is okay.”

“Josue,” I said, “If your head was okay, you would never have been that high on a ladder without a harness, with an air-tool in hand.”

I must explain that when one needs a ladder that tall, here in Mexico, one takes two or more ladders and ties them together end-to-end. Just picture that.

Josue laughed, so we knew that even though he wasn’t ‘okay’, he will be. After surgery and three months recuperation.

Not to be outdone by others’ drama, my bank card quit working. I bank at Bear Paw, now called something else. At first I wasn’t worried. It happens. The bank machine is maybe out of money. Three tries in town later, three weeks, plus a denial in Guadalajara, I figured panic was appropriate.

Finally, I called the bank and after waiting in a long queue, got a voice I’d not heard before. The young man was quite nice, explained that my bank card would never work again. I explained that I live in Mexico and that is my only access to money.

I knew there were changes at the bank because I saw an article in the Havre Daily. I know changes never go smoothly as envisioned in an office somewhere else. The nice young-male voice assured me that he’d issue a new card and new checks to be sent to my daughter at my Montana address, her house.

Bank cards are not allowed to be shipped across the border. So if my daughter receives my card as assured, she will have to then mail it to the next person coming here from the US. Whenever. Do you see all the opportunities for disaster?

Lent is around the corner. I confess that I have not seriously observed Lent in a whole lot of years. However, when in the trenches, one calls on Greater Powers. I’m going on short rations, not from a renewed sense of devotion, but from a severe shortage of pesos.

Which brings me back to Jane’s birthday party, a sweet affair at which we all agreed, none of us really want to live to ninety-five, not unless we can still have all our physical and mental functions. Of course, we also want to die peacefully in our sleep, a dream as likely to happen as me getting my bankcard without a hitch and a hiccup.

We know that Josue will, in a few months, be back up high on a make-shift ladder.

Jane is planning to make ninety-six years.

I’ll let you know how Lent goes for me and if I live to enjoy my own next birthday in April.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

Three weeks into February and warmer

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Confessions

 

            Confessions 

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Some say confession is good for the soul, and growing up Catholic, I’m a believer. Here is something I seldom talk about. First, though, the catalyst.

For the past week, on my sunrise walk with Lola, I’ve been singing. Here is what you need to understand. I don't sing. Ever.

I love music. Songs weave through my days, mostly in my head. Silently. I don’t allow the songs to exit my mouth. Unlike bad words which squeak through frequently and often appropriately. My fear of being caught singing is more than any fear of ugly language.

This fear began at an early age. It started with my Grandma. In her defense, she had no notion of the damage she was doing. “Don’t sing. You are just like your mother.”

My mother left home for the State Hospital when I was four. That was 1949. State Hospitals in any state were not a nice place to be in those days.

I suspect everybody watched me like a hawk, looking for signs. I lived with that fear. My mother never left State Care. A counselor whom I was seeing in the 80s explained to me that if I were like my mother, it would have shown up in early days.

You cannot imagine the freedom, the relief, the right to live given to me by that lovely woman that day.

I have my own problems, of course, my own ways of going do-lally. Most of them quite fun.

Back to singing. Grade school, music class. “Honey, maybe you should just mouth the words,” as the teacher stood me in the back row where I wouldn’t be noticed. I noticed. I also noticed the pretty blonde girls with curly hair and starched store-bought dresses in the front row. I have no defense for that.

High school choir in Church. I was in the choir loft because I was expected to be. Praying that nobody could hear me as I sang as quietly as possible. One day somebody in the congregation told me, “I heard you singing this morning and your voice is so lovely.”

It wasn’t me. It was Janet. Janet really did have a lovely voice. I don’t remember my reply. I remember the shame.

I sang to my babies. Always. Every day. They didn’t mind. We sang together. Until a certain age.

This singing to the sunrise is a strange anomaly. The first three days it was, “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love.” I knew most of the words.

Following mornings brought forth “Let there be peace on earth,” and we all know the words to that catchy tune.

“Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities,” from “Jungle Book” came next. “Forget about your worries and your strife. The bare necessities of life will come to you.” Words of wisdom from a round bear. This song always makes me want to sing. And dance. Following that brown bear’s jiggling bottom through the jungle, picking bananas.

Today was Cat Steven’s “Morning has broken, like the first morning.” I love that song. “Blackbird has spoken . . .”

Nobody is up and about when Lola and I walk the sun up through the trees. Nobody can hear me. Well, Lola, but like my babies, she doesn’t care. She thinks it is normal. I am glad for the songs and for the singing.

I don’t want you to think I have a sudden case of holy-tosis. I’m still the same petty, critical, flawed old woman.

I’m probably a lot like my Mother. I’d like to think so.

In a group situation, should I ever find myself in such, I promise to stand in back and mouth the words.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

How can it be second week of Feb already gone?

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Tomato Soup for the Soul

 

            Tomato Soup for the Soul 

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My Grandma came to live with us when I was four so that my Dad didn’t have to farm me and my sister out to relatives. Grandma was a good cook and taught me the learn-it-by-doing-it method. She told me that she had to bake bread every day raising her own seven children and she didn’t intend to bake another loaf of bread.

Funny, she made bread rolls every Sunday and the pies, cakes, cinnamon rolls, cookies that rolled out of her oven were bountiful and delicious.

There were things Grandma did that I followed without thought. Remembering back, I can see red and white cans of soup lined up in the cupboard. Grandma often made us soup for lunch, straight from the iconic Campbell’s can. I know Grandma fed her own children homemade soup. There wasn’t money to buy canned goods of any kind during the Depression.

What could be more simple? Open the can, dump into a sauce pan, add water for straight tomato or milk for creamy tomato. Heat and eat.

I don’t even like it much. But in a pinch, a quick meal of tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich hits the spot.

In later years, I looked forward to my Dad picking me up at the train station in Havre. We always went straight to the 4-B’s for their homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich.

Three large, perfectly beautiful, perfectly ripe, red, red Roma tomatoes sat on my counter. Some ideas drop out of the sky. This one did not come from my head. “I’ll make tomato soup.”

Because I can, because I don’t have to adhere to a schedule, I have the option to cut no corners. First I gathered onion, garlic, and bell pepper to go with my three lovely red globes.

I roasted the bell pepper over flames to take off the waxy covering and enhance the flavor. I chopped some onion and garlic and put them in a sauce pan with butter. Poured boiling water over the tomatoes and slipped off the skins. Chopped tomatoes and put them in a bowl. Cleaned, seeded and chopped part of the pepper and put it with the onion and garlic to simmer.

Once the onions were translucent I put the tomatoes in the pot, added water to cover, a little chicken consume, one very small piloncillo, the equivalent of a tablespoon of brown sugar, and continued simmering to blend flavors and reduce the whole mess. Outside, I grabbed a handful of cilantro, a generous sprig of oregano, three leaves of marjoram because a little fresh marjoram goes a long way, and a clutch of basil and chopped those leaves and added to the simmering pot. Oh, yes, salt and pepper to taste.

I want to let you know, this takes a lot longer than opening a can. So I went outside to read my book for twenty minutes, a nice little rest break while the flavors blended and simmered. The smells were making me hungry.

Once the liquid had reduced to about half, I let the whole potful cool, read a couple more chapters. Dumped all that into the blender and whizzed it.

In the same pot, now empty, I melted butter and stirred in flour, making a roux. I wanted creamy tomato soup, so I poured in a couple cups of milk. (Water for plain tomato soup.) Once it began to thicken, I added the tomato-veggie-herb mix, added more milk, stirring constantly, until it was the consistency I wanted.

Like I said, this takes longer than opening a can. By now I am drooling. As soon as the soup was hot, I ate a bowlful. Then I ate another bowlful.

But I wasn’t finished yet. No, not done. Next I went around to the neighbors and bragged, “I will never open another can of tomato soup.”

I can’t explain it, but that soup was begging to be made. Sometimes a simple meal is the most satisfying. Mmm-umm. Homemade tomato soup. With bread fresh from the oven.

Why did I not make tomato soup until now? I simply never thought of it. Or was it that tomatoes were so hard to come by in winter-dominated Montana? I remind myself that my tomatoes are field-ripened and not shipped 2500 miles in a refrigerated truck.

 

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

First days of February

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