The World Turned Downside Upside

 

The World Turned Downside Upside 

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I’m not saying winter is over and done. I’m not that presumptuous.

However, it surely does feel like spring has bumped winter off the edge.

Why, when we’ve only sailed through mid-January, am I waking up to mornings fifteen and twenty degrees warmer than at Christmas?

Why are some of the Jacaranda trees beginning to flower? Those trees bloom in April and May   through June. Purple flowers pop out like moles in a newly laid lawn. This tree, then that tree, then the one over yonder. But never in January. Any leaflets still clinging are falling fast.

Why is my Avocado tree, the newly planted Haas, in full flower?

Why is my Mango tree strutting in all itsl blooming glory? I tried to tell it, “Not now, you silly fool. Frost may still attack.” I swear, the Mango tree yawned and another cluster of flowers fanned out.  

I’ve lived in this lush garden country long enough to know to plant my garden buckets in February. I’m harvesting lettuce, zucchini and, of course, the perpetual tomatoes daily. Would anybody like some fresh tomatoes? We’ve planted a third of my buckets and are readying the soil for the remainder. 

And the flowers? Flowers are always. I mean, they do rest. They alternate blooming and resting all year long.

Did you know that the mother-in-law’s tongue plant sends up a tall spike with a cluster of flowers at the end? Did you know that all the houseplants that we Montanans struggle to keep alive and green, in moderate pots on a coffee table, down here in this garden, grow hugely, in the open, often planted by birds and flower unashamedly?

I have to hack back my herbs frequently, with gusto, and throw away the cuttings. I had to quit drying them. After using only fresh plants these several years, the dried herbs remind me of floor sweepings, just as tasty.

Are you bragging or complaining, you might ask. I’m not sure. I’m still learning this country and the country keeps changing. I’ll answer your question when I know the answer. Meanwhile, can you see me looking baffled and shrugging my shoulders?

Know what scares me though? Remember how when I first moved here, there were a dozen or so potted plants around the house? I began visiting Vivero Centro with great frequency, returning home with more pots and more plants. One day I counted and I had well over one hundred different plants in lovely clay pots. I think I was the vivero’s best customer. I had to make myself stop cold turkey, you know, white knuckle it.

It’s like a disease, right? When I began my bucket garden, it was with the thought of growing lettuce and tomatoes, maybe peppers and zucchini. Four buckets, or, maybe six, or even eight.

And just like the clay pots, buckets seemed to breed and proliferate. Next thing you know, I couldn’t remember what I’d planted in this or that bucket? Beets? Carrots? I had to wait for the little bitty shoots to give me a clue. Oh, yes, that which looks like grass. It’s baby spinach. Ah, isn’t it cute? See, what I mean?

Then I bought three baby baths for those plants that didn’t like hanging over the edge of a tall bucket. They wanted to sprawl horizontally, so what was I to do?

Then I bought a few medium trash cans and some oil barrels cut in half, for those which want just a bit more depth.

And just like that, my bucket garden grew out of hand. I’ll try to keep it tamed this year. Otherwise, I might as well plow up the rest of the yard and have a real garden.

A real garden is a lot of work. Real gardens are sweat and heartache. Buckets are fun. I don’t want a working garden. I want fun.

Is winter really over? The next few days will tell that story. Nothing in my garden seems to be behaving. 

What’s that you ask? How many buckets and designated vegetable containers do I have? I don’t know. I’m afraid to count them.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

January 20, 2022

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Gardening With Squirrel

Gardening With Squirrel

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            Can you believe it? My third spring in Etzatlan? And, my third year fighting with a squirrel.

            Truth to tell, there might be more than one, but the one I see seems to have the same face and the same cheeky attitude. My first year, when the surround of my casita was all dirt, she burrowed beneath the east corner to build a nest for birthing babies.

            Squirrels are cute. Cute when they are “over there”. When underfoot, I tend to view her as a rodent with longer hair. Imagine a nest of rodents making comfort under MY house, making more tunnels, more nests, and, more rodents.

            In the interest of rodent control, ant control, scorpion control and cock roach control, I paved a concrete patio surround. Mama Squirrel holds a grudge. She frequently stands outside my screen door and chitter-chatters an uncomplimentary attack on my character.

            Last year, after attempting to burrow beneath my patio, she settled in at the neighbor’s.

            This year, to further irritate me, Squirrel planted corn. She’s not lazy. She prefers my well-maintained pot farm for her plantings. By “pot farm”, I mean that on and about my wrap-around patio, I’ve filled a hundred flower pots, and counting, all sizes.

Grain is easy to come by. A huge facility for grinding and storing corn sits three or four blocks to the west; corn fields to the east and north. Squirrel fills her cheeks with kernels, high-tails it to my garden, digs a hole, and spits the seeds and covers them up.

I suspect my flower pots are “storage facilities”. In a normal dry season, when she needs food, Squirrel digs up the kernels and carries them to her family.

However, I thwart her carefully laid plots when, with hose and sprinklers, I make a year-round artificial rainy season. Kernels sprout and begin to grow. She might plant forty or fifty kernels in one hole. So the tender baby stalks create a miniature thicket.

By now Squirrel has forgotten which pots she’s planted. And . . .  that Mean Woman, who won’t let her nest under the house, digs the perfectly tender, juicy, lovely shoots of baby corn stalks out of the pots and, horrors, throws them in the garden trash.

If she’s paying attention, Squirrel will have noticed another rival for her corn stash. Yesterday while having a one-sided conversation with an iguana on the half wall, separating my patio from the yard on the south side, I noticed a disturbance in my basil pot. My basil grows like a miniature tree. But I’d recently pruned it. Otherwise, I might not have noticed the disturbance.

In digging out the squirrel’s stash of corn, the iguana had uprooted half the basil pot—dirt slung far and wide. It looked like a hound had been burying a bone. No wonder he looked so sheepish sitting on the wall eye-balling me while I blathered on. The corn shoots must be delicious to have diverted Iggy from his usual diet of my hibiscus, canna lilies and roses.

Everything must eat. The rabbits, a pair, thus far, prefer amaryllis. They like my yard. Perhaps I’m more tolerant of rabbits simply because they don’t dig holes. They also eat oxalis. Oxalis, whatever its virtues, is, in my garden, a noxious weed with a network of roots like a fishnet. I’ve surrendered to its abundance. I no longer attempt to weed it. Impossible. Rabbits, welcome to oxalis heaven.

Today I found another stash of corn, hidden in a patch of oxalis surrounding some of my amaryllis.  I can either uproot the corn plot or leave it for the iguana, the rabbits or the squirrel. I give up.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

March 1, 2018

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Tequila Lifts Her Skirts

Tequila Lifts Her Skirts

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            Sunshine! After a solid week of all-day, all-night rain, the sun shines. Tropical Storm Lidia whooshed unrelenting rainclouds our way before veering off with a huff into the Pacific, energy dissipated.

We nestle in a mountain valley dominated by Volcan de Tequila, or Tequillan, “the place where they cut”. Volcan de Tequila has been inactive for 220,000 years but once spewed obsidian throughout an extensive area.  People have mined obsidian here since ancient times.

            Since she no longer threatens to erupt in temper, blue agave plants, the main ingredient in the Mexican drink, tequila, cover her magical gentle slopes.

            After a week of modestly hiding her feet in thick clouds, today Volcan de Tequila lifted her skirts. She coquettishly hides her face behind a white-cloud fan. We turn our own faces toward her, with ancient veneration.

            I take a break from chores to sit on my patio and breathe in the rain-cleaned air. I cannot get complacent about the quality of light. Colors appear deeper. I’m more acquainted with the washed colors of the sun-drenched plains. I marvel at this phenomenon, difficult to describe.

            The greens are greener. The red of the red geranium petal is more intensely red. It is as though the light shines onto and through, penetrating every leaf, every petal. The common yellow butterfly is more yellow. Nothing looks drab. Every color is “in-your-face”, shouting for attention. These are not prairie wildflowers, hiding behind gray-green leaves, afraid of sunburn. I know; I just anthropomorphized plant-life but that comes close to how I feel.

            My sheets hang on the line, wafting in the breeze. I keep an eye on the eastern horizon, birthplace of afternoon rain clouds. (There is balance to this strange nature; if I leave my clothing too long on the line, bright blouses will sun-fade to shadows of former color.) I unpin laundry as soon as it is dry. Showers spring overhead in minutes. If clothes get wet, oh well, they’ll dry again.

            I’m reminded of a strange practice I grew up thinking important. We used to line-dry the laundry, bring it indoors, sprinkle each item with water, roll it burrito-shaped and place in a basket to await ironing. We ironed the damp clothing dry! Does anyone else remember this quaint practice? Does anyone remember ironing? Why did we do that? Why did we quit?

            While I check if my laundry is dry, I see a new iguana has taken residency in my drain pipe by the clothesline. Nobody I ask remembers why the useless drain pipe to nowhere was installed or what purpose it fulfilled. I found last year’s iguana, old and gray, dead behind a brick wall several months ago. This new iguana is darker, younger than the grandfather I first met. The old man tolerated me with a cold eye and turned his head, unmoving. The youngster scurries into the crook of the pipe, unsure of my intentions.

            A crop of new-born iguanas scurries among my plants, crosses the patio, suns on the wall, gorges on hibiscus and canna lily flowers. If all lived to maturity, I’d need to declare open season. I’ve not seen proof, but I imagine the young creatures are food for birds, especially the ever-present vultures.

            I see another crop of leaf-cutter ants, carrying bits of hibiscus flower to their storage center. No mercy; I add ant poison to my two-page-long garden list.

 Just when I think my garden has reached ultimate perfection, I notice that the ice plant flanking my front door needs to be repotted; the lavender has exceeded its use-by-date.

I plan to huck out the rock-garden surrounding the stump and roots of a once dangerous pine. I’ll enrich the soil, discard some original plants, especially a creeping vine, too vigorous for the small space. I’ll add moss roses.

My “five-dead-trees” have black leaf. A trip to Centro Vivero to consult with David heads my list. I’ll replace oregano and basil, decimated by the ants.  This time I’ll put them in pots, along with the rest of my herbs. That means I’ll buy more pots though I said I wouldn’t after I shamed myself by counting 97 pots around my patio.

My list is long. But where would I be without the pleasures of my garden, constant attention though it requires. The sun still shines. My sheets are dry. Drain-pipe Iguana poked his head out of the pipe and gave me the stink-eye but didn’t scurry back underground. Volcan de Tequila winks shamelessly in the distance.  I see a whole world of wonder when I choose to look.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 7, 2017

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Where the Grass is Greener

It always looks greener and lusher and higher on the other side of the fence.
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Where the Grass is Greener

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“This morning I outwitted the robins and picked a bowl of strawberries for breakfast.” I giggled. “I sliced each juicy ruby globe, sprinkled them lightly with sugar, poured on a drizzle of heavy cream and holding each bite on my tongue before swallowing, I savored every morsel.” My listeners groaned with envy.



We six women, whose strongest bond is our shared experience of growing up in Harlem , were nattering about our yards and gardens. Depending on where we lived, we grumbled over the late spring, the over-abundant rain, the prolific weeds or the overwhelming heat.



Montana Karen, our master gardener from Floweree, said her strawberries were still green. Ellie, who divides her time between Turlock and Pleasanton in California , raises flowers but buys her luscious strawberries year-round from local market stands. Denise in Laurier, Washington and Cheryl in Tillamook, Oregon both garden but neither raises strawberries. England Karen gardens in pots on a tiled patio in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire . Unlike our mothers and grandmothers who gardened from duty, we garden from love.



“How I miss having a garden with flower beds and vegetables lined up in rows,” mourned England Karen, formerly from Hardin where she taught school for twenty-five years. “I had lilac bushes from my Dad’s lilacs in Harlem and a round rose garden in the back yard. When I moved to England I didn’t mind selling the house but I hated selling the yard.”



“I feel the same way. I could let my house go, but the dirt is in my soul,” I said. The girls laughed. Ellie replied, “Sondra, you won’t move. You have such a passion for your home. You’re where you are supposed to be.”



“That may be,” I replied. “But it took me a while to love this place. I’ll never forget the day my family moved here from the rolling hills of the Ohio River country in southern Indiana . We left on April Fools Day. I was ten years old, a week away from eleven. The spring flowers were blooming, daffys and tulips and violets and lilacs. The air was balmy.



“On April third we drove into Harlem . Remember how the road used to come straight through town from the east? The highway was the only paved street. The first building I saw was the squat old potato cellar, half buried in the ground, snow piled to the eaves. Rotten snow, blasted with dirt by the ever-present wind lay brown and ugly in every corner. People on the streets in their parkas with hoods, black rubber boots and fleece-lined mitts huddled against the wind.



“Every surface was rimed with ice, piled with snow or wind-scoured down to rock. The Milk River creaked and cracked as it broke up, shooting blocks of ice twenty feet into the air. I was terrified. In school, I thought my classmates loud, rough and bold. When summer finally came I was new blood for the mosquitoes. I hated this place. I thought I had landed in a Siberian gulag. I catalogued every flaw, made continuous comparisons to the wonderland I had left behind. Every night I cried myself to sleep.”



“So what broke the evil spell?” asked Denise.



“Our second summer, the day after school was out, Dad sent my sister, Grandma and me, back to Indiana for a vacation. He thought we’d be gone a couple weeks. However, we didn’t return until the day before school started. It was a long summer for my Dad.



“The funny thing though, it was like getting a new pair of glasses. Our old house was gone, torn down by the young couple who had bought the place, leveled the fields, filled in the sinkhole in the woods and built a brick house up the hill where our barn used to be. The air was so humid, I felt like I was breathing underwater. My grade school crush, Dickie Knear, had erupted in pimples. My girlfriends were glad to see me, but they all had moved on with their lives. The old brick school building in Elizabeth stood empty, abandoned for the new modern consolidated school out in the country. Nothing looked the way I remembered it.



“When I returned, I had grown into a new perspective. I was happy to be back. I was excited to start school the next day. I was eager to be with my friends. Montana was my home and it was beautiful.”



“It’s a good thing we are not the grass is greener on the other side of the fence people,” said Cheryl. “It sounds like we are all blooming where we are planted and planted where we are blooming.”



Several times a day I tour my yard, talk encouragingly to my new rosebush, lament that the late frost ravaged what would have been my first crop of sand cherries, cheer on the currants. I stoop to pluck a tender thistle. I check the potatoes emerging through the heavy mulch. I smile out loud, proud of the work I’ve done, dazzled by the beauty. Home.



Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

June 30, 2011
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Think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?

Think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?

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In an old vaudeville country rube routine the straight man says, “Think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?” The top banana replies, “Not if it’s in cans!” Now, doesn’t that make you want to slap your knees and hoot and howl.



On the east side of my garden cabin, between the raspberries and the neighbor’s caragana shrubs, my Dad planted rhubarb. Those who grow rhubarb know that for the average family, one plant will provide all the rhubarb one healthy family can be forced to consume. My Dad liked to garden. Years ago he planted five varieties of rhubarb, whose succulent crisp stalks run from deep red, through shades of pink to light green.



So I have rhubarb, glorious rhubarb, abundant rhubarb, too much rhubarb. I considered taking out all but two clumps, a green and a red, although one plant is more than sufficient for my needs. However, I know that it is never possible to eradicate every vestige of root. Just a smidgeon of hardy root will cower, hidden in the ground until next year, when it will miraculously shoot forth into an entire new plant. Rhubarb originated in China , caravanned through Europe and sailed to North America by boat. I am firmly convinced, that in seeking to reconnect to its roots, my rhubarb has delved through the center of the earth and emerged somewhere on the other side of the globe, where a Chinese family reaps the bounty from my sister plants.



Every year in early spring I await my first taste of crisp, tart, mouth-watering rhubarb, chop, chop, into the crust and out of the oven, beautiful bubbling pie. When I was a child we called it “pie plant”. My grandparents used it for its restorative medicinal properties. The leaves are poisonous but so sour there is little danger you or I would eat them. We canned finely chopped stalks in quart jars and lined the cellar with ruby-fruit in a row. In my garden, rhubarb is the first fruit of the year, the first harvest. I gently grip the long stalk low to the ground, pull it from its casing, and whack off the giant green leaf. It falls to the ground where I leave it to decompose.



The more I harvest, the more the mother-plant produces. Nothing seems to daunt rhubarb, neither freeze nor snow nor rain nor drought. It dies back with the first hard frost, then springs forth to yield from early May through late September. This happens to be a great year for rhubarb. One day the tender shoots poked through the snow and then, overnight it seemed, stalks shot up past my knees, with leaves the size of elephant ears. Every morning I bring an armload of rhubarb into my kitchen. I make rhubarb pies, pineapple-rhubarb sauce to dribble over ice cream and cinnamon-rhubarb sauce to serve with waffles. I mix it with other fruits, dried, frozen and fresh, cranberries, raisins, strawberries, peaches, apples, oranges and mangoes, for pies and jams. I strain the juice for jelly. Out of my oven rolls a procession of pies, cakes, tarts, cobblers, crumbles, scones and bar cookies.



I have invented recipes for rhubarb salsa, chutney, pickles and relish. I hide it in soups. I chop it fine and roll it into dough for cinnamon rolls. Rhubarb is especially toothsome served with venison or pork. (I’ve been told rhubarb makes a fine wine but I would probably produce a batch of vinegar, though that might not be a bad thing.) This year I have thrust bundles of rhubarb on friends, neighbors and passing strangers. Like the desperate zucchini grower, I have developed a certain gleam in my eye.



Yesterday’s hail storm shredded my tallest rhubarb leaves and dimpled many of the stalks. I’m afraid the damaged spots will turn soft and those stalks will spoil, so I’ll harvest them this morning. I’ll chop it and bag it and stash it in the freezer for winter treats. In another week or two, I’ll stroll out to the rhubarb patch and find another crop of tall, juicy stalks, hankering to be made into pies.



Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

June 16, 2011
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What is that woman up to now?

Blooming in the desert.

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What is that woman up to now?
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A few weeks ago in Billings , at a municipal officials workshop, while eating lunch and eavesdropping on a conversation between the mayor of Malta and the mayor of Saco , I heard her ask him about his hay mulch garden. I overheard the words “no weeds”. I quit eavesdropping and scooted into the conversation. “Tell me everything you know,” I said. And that is how Howard Pippin, mayor of Saco , became my garden mentor.



When I moved back to Montana after twenty five years in the Pacific Northwest, I bought my Dad’s house on the edge of Harlem . My Dad had moved to town but never had given up farming. He created a perfect lawn and a garden which fed half the neighborhood. But by the time I could settle into my new home, the lawn and the garden had endured some years of neglect. In this country it doesn’t take long for weeds to dominate. The first couple years I hired a man to mow the lawn, by that time more weeds than grass. In all innocence I planted a garden and condemned myself to hours bent over pulling weeds and hauling hoses.



By fall I was ready to give up gardening altogether. My back ached. Every muscle screamed. My scraggly garden yield was not worth it. And I also felt conflicted about both lawn and garden. In this semi-arid country I do not think it is right to use water to grow grass which you must water, then mow, then water, and then mow ad infinitum. I appreciate the beauty of a lawn but I cringe at the use of water. No other semi-desert cultures grow lawns. The People, native to this land, did not peer out of the teepee in the morning, stretch, yawn, and say, “Think I’ll mow the grass today.”



So, I hauled in bark chips and covered the entire lawn. It was magical. No more grass to mow. No more nasty weeds to yank up. My water bill plummeted. In the former lawn I planted shrubs, trees and flowers galore. My yard is on the way to becoming a path-lined paradise. Every third year I have to put down more bark because the wind blows in new soil and then deposits more weed seeds. But meanwhile, there are few weeds to pull and I need only water the shrubs and flowers.



Once I had eliminated my lawn, I turned my attention to the garden area. I covered it with straw in the fall and then tilled it in the spring. I was dismayed. My newly enriched soil now grew an even more bountiful crop of weeds. So I planted a cover crop of barley to crowd them out. My barley crop was beautiful, but how do you harvest barley in a garden bed? So I tilled the barley under leaving a dismally bare garden patch, except for weeds which still needed to be hacked out. But my fruit trees and shrubs were filling out and being fruitful.



That’s why Howard’s words about his weed-free garden fell on my ears like rain following drought. He told me I could cover my entire garden area with old rotten hay. It would create a nutricious mulch. I could then plant directly into the mulch and never again have to plow, hoe, cultivate, weed, water or spray. I could garden with little labor. No weeds.



Howard’s mentor, Ruth Stout, wrote a witty book “for the aging, the busy and the indolent” (the shoe fits my foot) called “Gardening Without Work”. I immediately ordered a copy. Next week I will drive to Saco to visit Howard. I want to see with my own eyes how he uses Ruth Stout’s methods to garden in our dry land.



Meanwhile, yesterday a neighbor farmer, Karl Humphreys, angled his tractor down my alley and lifted a bale of spoiled hay over the fence into my yard. With the help of a couple friends I soon had potatoes and onions planted and covered with a deep mulch of loose moldy hay in a portion of my garden. I don’t expect a large yield this year. I don’t want large. I want a few good things without battling weeds. Today I planted the next section with a variety of seeds and covered them with more mulch.



When I started my experiments with a bark chip lawn, it caused a bit of talk and some outright criticism. Folks wondered, “What is that woman up to?” Now my neighbors stop me in the post office or on the street and say, “I like what you are doing.” “I can finally see what you are trying to create with your yard. I wish I could do that.” And “Your yard is like a house of many rooms, each one different. It’s so beautiful.”



The hay mulch in my garden may not look like much right now, but just wait until fall when I can reach down through it and pull up potatoes and onions and carrots for dinner.



Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

June 2, 2011

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The Day of the Rhubarb

Whoo-hoo
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The Day of the Rhubarb


Thursday morning early the phone rang. It was a friend in Helena . “How you doing,” he asked.

“I’m feeling discouraged,” I replied. “And I have no good reason to feel discouraged. I just returned from Great Falls and a Leadership Training. I met good people, heard great stories, returned home loaded with ideas. I should be having a ‘Whoo-hoo’ day. How are you?”

“Well, I’m feeling discouraged myself.”

“You’re no help. Don’t you know you’re not allowed to be discouraged the same day I am!” We laughed. “Guess I’ll have to dig into my tool box.”

I go to my tool box when I need to tweak my thinking or change my actions. Some of my tools, such as my gratitude list and self-pity expunger, are battered and scarred from use and others are rusty and need sharpening. Meditation is a good tool. So is Call a Friend. I had already used that one and true, it did perk me up a bit. I poked around in my tools. Ah, ha. My iron. Hey, it’s my tool box. Ironing works for me. It’s a form of meditation. And I happen to have a pile of fresh laundry waiting.

Then as the long weekend approached, I looked at my flip-chart ‘to-do’ list. I write my list large, complete with stick-figure illustrations. My “to-do’ list was long. It included work, meetings, theatre, and play. I looked outside. The sun was shining. The sky was cloudless. The weeds were growing. Everything on my list was important. But nothing was urgent.

On Friday I bought plants from the nursery in Havre. I was born with my fingers in the dirt. Dirt makes me happy. The plants loudly lobbied to go into the ground. I agreed with the plants. I dedicated the weekend to grubbing in the yard, the garden, and my multitude of pots. Already I felt better.

Yesterday was a good day. I worked outside for an hour, then inside for an hour, alternating gardening with house chores and re-reading a favorite novel, W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe”. Who could not be happy!

This morning I woke up early. Showered, made my morning cup of coffee, watched the sun rise golden through my living room. My room faces north, but when the sun rises, it shoots rays through my wall of windows in a magical golden haze. I sip coffee, grinning like an idiot.

I look in my “tool-box” and decide to bake bread. Baking bread makes me happy. I knead the dough and set it to rise in the big blue pan. I go out to the garden, hook up the hose and water my pots of petunias and geraniums. I grub out a few weeds. Another day free of mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and black flies. “Whoo-hoo!” I dig up a few more weeds. I run inside and punch down the bread dough. It rises quickly on this warm, muggy, humid morning. I read another chapter of “Shoeless Joe”. I go back outside and scatter the birds while I grub out yet more weeds from my never-ending supply. I plant a lilac. I discover that the three decorative plums that winter-killed are not dead. They have new growth suckering up around the main stem. I trim the brittle barren sticks, glad I had waited to pull them out. I go back into the kitchen and shape the dough into loaves and rolls.

Back outdoors, I check my rhubarb. I love rhubarb. My Dad, whose place I bought and where I now live, also loved rhubarb. He planted five bunches. One rhubarb plant makes a year of rhubarb pies. What was he thinking! The stalks are beautiful, tender, aromatic. There are enough mature stalks to make two pies.

I have an idea. I know another man who loves rhubarb. He and my Dad were friends. Now and then he phones just to check on me, to make sure I am okay. I chuckle while I pluck the prettiest stalks, leaving the elephant ear leaves intact. I anticipate the surprise on his face while I drive out to his place. “Here’s a bouquet for you.” He is delighted. We discuss the huge yard and garden where my Dad spent every spare moment. I decline coffee. My bread will be ready for the oven when I return home.

The yeasty smell of baking bread permeates the house and creeps out into the yard. Bees dance around me, sing songs of pollen and honey-flowers. I plant two new bunches of sweet basil in my herb garden. I pinch the rosemary just for the aroma. I feel filled up with flowers and bees and robins and gold finches and raspberry canes and strawberry plants and all things good.

The sky begins to cloud up, the wind blows stronger. I straighten my back, turn and look into the eyes of a robin nested in the poplar. The finches flitter around, landing here and there, helter-skelter, unafraid. The bread is cooling on the counter. I close the doors and windows when the wind comes up in earnest. The sky darkens. Clouds roll black and pregnant with rain. I hurry out to the rhubarb patch and pull out enough for another pie.

I chop rhubarb, roll out pie dough, put the pie in the oven and finish reading my book. I stand in the open doorway watching the rain pelt blessings onto our world. It is a beautiful day. A juicy rhubarb pie cools on the kitchen counter. I breathe deeply of wet earth and warm pie. “Whoo-hoo!”
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The Food Chain

Four and twenty songbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing. Makes sense to me. Have you ever heard blackbirds "sing"?

The Food Chain
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Last year I planted an herb garden, just a small plot. In the fall I mulched it heavily with leaves. Winter was harsh. I worried over which herbs would survive and which might winterkill. Spring arrived and the chives poked their heads like glory into the warming sunlight. Chives are tough. And grow fast. I was harvesting chives while the mint, sage, oregano, parsley and thyme were still in baby stage. I re-planted tender sweet basil. It must be an annual in this country. I watered and weeded faithfully. I added a rosemary bush. My herb patch was looking good.

Grasshoppers are such little things. The variety that came to my house looked like adolescent punk-hoppers, kind of cute with body jewelry and fake tattoos. These definitely were not the giant WWII bombers of the insect world. They bopped in one morning, a well disciplined cloud, and landed in my yard. The teeny buggers danced in formation, pincer jaws wide open, over to my herb garden and proceeded to decimate it with a million bites, one herb at a time. They chomped my English thyme down to bare-naked stalks. They attacked my French oregano before infiltrating the parsley. Clippers in hand, I rushed to rescue what was left of my sweet basil while the hoppers sweetened their breath on the spearmint. They despised the chives. Found sage barely tolerable but ate it anyway. Rosemary, fortunately, repulsed them. They sampled flowers and devoured their favorites. My yard was a banquet table.

From the first retreat of winter a wealth of birds, fat, healthy birds, took up residence in my yard. Robins and finches and sparrows and doves, vireos and warblers and larks and grackles. I didn’t feed them. Correction: I didn’t fill bird feeders with avian snack foods. I didn’t have to. First my strawberries disappeared. The plundering birds left me six puny berries. Then they went fishing. Long, juicy earthworms lurked beneath layers of mulch in my yard. Bird heaven. I found it especially fun to watch a robin grasp an earthworm, pull with all its might, half the worm anchored in the ground, until finally the worm lets go with a plop. The robin lands on its sitter, fat wriggly worm dangling from its beak. That show was worth the admission ticket of a few strawberries. When the currants began to ripen, I checked them daily, hovered around them, waited until the optimum day for harvest, and went, berry bucket in hand, only to find every bush stripped. I pictured four-and-twenty song birds, baked in a pie. Next year I will net my berry bushes.

Meanwhile, back at the grasshoppers’ buffet, a multiplication of birds flew in. Storm troopers. These newcomers joined the already fruit-fattened yard birds in a round ‘em up, smorgasbord feast of crunchy critters. For several days birds of all sizes and shapes and colors scurried along the ground, gobbling up hoppers. The birds were too fat to fly. They lounged around and picked their beaks and gossiped, then waddled back for dessert.

For several months before the grasshopper invasion, two colossal cats had hung out in my yard. Every morning they patrolled beneath my cabin, keeping mice and shrews and snakes away. These were not feral cats. They belonged to someone in the neighborhood. They were well-fed, well-groomed kings of their castles. I have not seen a mouse since they began standing watch. They stalked birds and butterflies and bees but without success. I figured those cats were walking the beat, keeping the birds safe.

That all changed when the overweight songbirds, sated with hoppers, could barely lift off the ground. My patrol cats, feathers fluttering from their mouths, called for reinforcements. Enter the feline SWAT team. I have no idea where they came from, but eight humongous cats swaggered into my yard, pounced on the birds which ate the grasshoppers which ate my herbs. My backyard bird population returned to normal.

Not so the cats. Every morning the full regiment of cats musters in my yard. This morning they brought along new recruits, three cute gangly trainee kittens. They patrolled the cabin for mice, the yard for birds, and basked beneath the lilies in the sun. In the evening the cats pranced, tails aloft, back to their respective homes for kibbles and cream. But they will be back tomorrow. The good news is that my basil and oregano have sprouted new leaves, so I’ll harvest a second cutting. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme are making a comeback like the promise of new love. The grasshoppers are gone. The wary birds perch in the trees. It seems the cats take seriously their day job as guard-cats. But I don’t need thirteen cats hanging around my two-cat yard.

Sondra Ashton
Havre Daily News: Home Again
December 10, 2009