To Dream the Impossumable Dream

 

            To Dream the Impossumable Dream 

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To jump start a new year and top off my week, we had a puzzling close encounter of the impossumable kind. Lola The Dog chased down an adult opossum. It might have dropped out of the avocado tree. Lola was beside herself with dog joy.

Lola has a good measure of hunter in her parentage. She’s brought me birds and lizards of various shades. But this is a biggie.

She proudly deposited her gift at my feet, tail wagging like ‘copter blades. Good dog. There it lay, dead. I’d never seen an adult ‘possum up close. The strong jaws! The teeth! “Shark” came to mind.

I gingerly picked it up the hairy package with the naked tail and plunked it in the tall blue garbage can and banged down the lid, just in case. 

Later, I heard scrabbling sounds from over that way. Lifted the lid. The dead ‘possum had moved. The beast had been playing possum.

What was I to do? One of the men would surely be by later to help so I turned my attention elsewhere.

I like working jigsaw puzzles. Back in early autumn I ordered four new jigsaw puzzles from the Ordering Place, you know, the one we all use, name starts with “A”. I worked a puzzle Christmas week. Decided New Year’s week to tackle another. Puzzling is not an Olympic Sport to me. I come and go at it in small doses.

However the second puzzle I selected, a rainy day scene in a Parisian flower market, is gray. It’s all gray. Shades and variations of gray. Gray. Rain. Fog. Stone buildings. Eiffel Tower a shadow in the distance. Gray. With soggy flowers huddled in one corner.

Reluctantly, I have to give up my bragging rights about my amazing ability to work puzzles according to gradations of color. I’m good. I like to start with the sky because it is easiest. The corner with the cluster of flowers in pots? Not so easy. But fun. Generally.

When I’m laying out the thousand bits of cardboard, if two are still attached to one another, I separate them. (I don’t cheat at solitaire either.) I want to drag out the fun, milk every drop of satisfaction from arranging tiny chunks of cardboard into a painting.

So I figure maybe a gray puzzle is a good thing, despite the hit to my pride. I mean, that’s what I figured until I spent a day putting together a mere sixteen pieces. If I ever finish, I may take oil paints and give the hazy foggy gray sky some color. That’s where I started, the sky.

And the pieces seem to have only about six shapes. All of them. That means that pieces that seem to fit beautifully, and they do, they fit, are not meant to be locked together.

After tearing hanks of my own hair out in frustration, I went outside and picked tomatoes.

That’s another puzzlement. My bucket garden, the one I figured I put to rest until spring, meaning February. I’ve accepted that I’ll have perpetual tomatoes. I’m not complaining. But I admit I am puzzled.

And puzzled not just by tomatoes. I ate a lot of green beans last summer. They are easy growers. I cleverly moved the buckets next to my clothesline posts so I no longer had to tie the creepers to bamboo sticks. After a while, tired of green beans, I let the beans go brown and harvested dry beans for seed. One day a whole new bean shoot climbed up the pole and suddenly I’m eating green beans again, simply because they are there. Well, what would you do?

And what is this nonsense with the zucchini? In October, in hopes of one more crop, especially since invasive bugs took out my last crop, I planted four seeds. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Suddenly, after two months of lying dormant, poor timing if you ask me, four zucchini plants shot up. Will they? Won’t they? It’s a puzzle. 

Yes, the puzzle. I mathematically deduced that I may finish that hazy and most irritating jigsaw puzzle February 23 at my present number of pieces per day. February, in time to replant my buckets, except for the tomatoes and green beans, which are perpetual.

I may give the rainy-scene puzzle to Lola The Dog to chew on.

My puzzling garden has convinced me that life wants to live.

Ah, yes, life. Fortunately, Leo showed up, took my not-so-dead ‘possum out to a distant corn field and watched it scramble away through the weeds.

Like I said, life wants to live, even when it seems impossumable.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

January 6, 2022

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I Love You—You’re Perfect—Now Change

            I Love You—You’re Perfect—Now Change 

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            The delightful musical comedy by the above name is about people in love. It’s not quite the same thing, but, my perfect love is my garden. Not a month ago, I said to Leo, my garden helper, “I’ve now done everything I want to do with my garden. It is perfect.”

            It is. Truly. Leo rolled his eyes and grinned.

            Last week I met a couple from Seattle at the nearby campground. They wanted to know which house is mine. When I described my location, she said, “Oh, you are the garden.”  That’s how I’m known. I am the garden.

            Then—Bingo! Two unrelated incidents have led me to look at my perfect garden with jaundiced eyes.

            Along my north wall, in a narrow garden area, among canna lilies, oleander and a crowd of bushes and flowers, I planted three flowering trees. In the summer they give me months of purple, pink and white pleasure. And no problems.

In the grass along my south wall, I planted five of the same variety trees. Leaf-cutter ants plague these trees. Overnight, an army of ants stripped an entire tree and proudly marched off holding aloft green canopies twenty times their size. I cannot even count the number of times last year we had to apply the stinky yellow poison. I run ant patrol every morning, as if it is war.

“The trees on the north wall flourish. The trees on the south wall are puny. It’s a constant battle with ants on the south wall. Why?” I asked Leo.

“Ants like the easy road,” Leo said. “It’s hard work to eat the trees crowded in the garden with other flowers. They like the grassy highway.”

“Ah, ha! The solution is simple,” I said, “Let’s dig out that strip of grass where the trees are planted, make a border with bricks and plant flowers and herbs. Plants that will fill the space, like mint. ” So that’s my first project in my perfect garden.

            At the same time the ants were munching every leaf from their first free tree-lunch of the season, Jim, a snowbird from Missouri, found a used hot-tub for me. Yesterday he sent me a picture of my tub, tied upside down over the bed of his pickup.

“It’s old like us,” he told me. It was cheap. Nearly a gift. The owner needed to get rid of it. We hope the electronics will work.

            The logical place to put my new-old tub when it arrives next week, is in a patio area to the south side of my house, where fourteen potted plants flourish. Hibiscus, climbing vines with trumpet flowers of yellow and violet. Large plants in large pots.

            I figure the climbing trumpet-flower vines will easily train on my wrought iron fence in the west corner of my yard. We seldom open that gate and all my large projects are finished. I admit to a twinge of apprehension at blocking my gate. But, everything is in pots. Pots are movable.

I’ll put the four hibiscus, natural showoffs, in front of the climbing vines. Smaller, lower pots I’ll arrange around the hibiscus. Beauty and a bonus: the plants will curtain that back entrance with privacy.

I lay out my tentative plan in front of he-who-does-the-work, Leo. I design. Leo muscles the heavy pots and bags of planting soil. Leo suggested we make a concrete slab instead of placing pots in the grass in front of the gate. It will make it easier to care for the plants and he would not have to move pots to mow.

“Oh.” I don’t mow so I didn’t think of that. See how a simple little project to make a perfect garden “more perfect” grew and grew. Oh, well. My projects for improvement might last the summer. I have Leo only a few hours each week.

In Mexican folklore, the cicadas sing down the rain. When they get wound up they sound like a roomful of table saws with crooked blades. They brought our rainy season early this year. I hear them morning and night. The “bedsheets butterflies” have arrived. Those huge white ethereal wings make me smile. The leaf-cutter ants have decimated their first victim-tree.

My love is perfect. And, I’ll always find reasons for changes.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

May 17, 2018

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Not in My Back Yard

Not in My Back Yard
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I am a reasonably tolerant and lazy gardener. When an unsolicited seed shows up in my back yard, sprouts, shoots, flowers and flourishes, I’m open to letting it stick around. Unless the newcomer is a noxious weed.

My work-free gardening philosophy has evolved over time. My Washington home sat perched on the crest of a hill, surrounded by two acres of dips and doodles, ups and downs, populated by trees, berries, and shrubs galore. Natural landscaping was a breeze. I could spit a seed and grow a tree. I planted. It flourished. No fuss. No muss. No work. Year-round blooms and beauty.

Back to my roots: ‘Welcome to Harlem, Flat Spot of the Nation’. But, hey, here one can grow great sagebrush, spiny cactus and tumbleweeds. The first two years I battled the grass infested weeds. Finally I identified the most invasive pest—Russian thistle. I geared up with heavy leather gauntlets, armed myself with a digger tool, and marched off to battle. Thistle won the battle. In desperation I bought scorch-the-earth poison and a flamethrower and declared all out war. I won the war. For the last couple years, nary a Russian thistle is to be found.

Meanwhile, because I am lazy and cheap, maybe it was during my third year, I replaced the lawn with fifteen cubic yards of bark chips. And, because I am an artist and hungered for balance, I insisted on something vertical to offset the seeming acres of horizontal.

I envisioned trees and shrubs creating islands of vertical interest. I conducted scientific research. I drove around town to see what was still alive on the vacant lots. If it could live with benign neglect, that was my kind of bush.

Lilacs. Lots and lots of lilacs. Every hue of lilac. And apples and plums and choke cherries and June berries and sand cherries and raspberries and rhubarb and currants. I broke open the pottery of gumbo ground and plunged naked sticks with a straggle of bearded root deep into the earth. I only lost two sticks. Each year it gets better. Not only is Spring alive with the sound of lilacs but the fruits of my labor have yielded an orchard jungle.

For finishing touches to my rather four-square piece of property, I needed shapes, circles and amoebas and patches of paisley. What better than flowers! Zero maintenance flowers. Another scientific tootle around town convinced me to keep it simple with iris and tulips, peonies and day lilies, hollyhocks and sunflowers and babies’ breath. So I planted them in great batches of color.

This summer a colony of bachelor buttons popped up in a surprise appearance among the bark chips. Bachelor buttons, while not exotic, are fetching, especially when their little pink and blue and white heads bob and dance in the breeze. How did they get to this one little patch of yard? Not a clue. Never-the-less, come little bachelor buttons, be at home.

Sounds idyllic, does it not? But, oh, must there be a snake in every garden. This particular snake must have sneaked in two by two and immediately began breeding. The snake in my garden is not fauna but flora—Canada thistle. It wasn’t there in April. (I was gone.) I didn’t notice it in May. I was gone (again) in June. By July Canada thistle had grown into a robust weedy family with numerous cousins, twice removed, determined to take over every available inch of unoccupied territory and encroach on the occupied. Canada thistle is not nice. It bites and scratches and fights back.

My options are limited. It is too late for me to resort to poison. Every fruit and flower is flourishing. Apples burden branches to the ground. Berries hang in bursting heavy clusters like grapes. On rainy days I pull on my gloves, set my feet, rip and pluck thistles out of the ground. On dry days, I take my whicker-whacker and chop them down at the ankles. I lay their fallen bodies in mounds of mulch to rot and return to the earth.

Lazy or not, every day I tackle a portion of garden. Yesterday I cleared thistles out of the sand cherries. Today I liberated a plot of lilies. Tomorrow I will pursue the caustic weed in and out, over and under, around and through a stand of sunflowers and, if it isn’t raining, attempt to relocate the strawberry bed.

If I don’t get these buggers under control soon, if I can’t eradicate the Canada thistle by the end of August, I’m going on another trip and ignore it until the snow falls. Rumor is, early winter. Bring it on.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

August 8, 2013___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Gone with the Winds of Worry

Gone with the Winds of Worry

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I’ve been a bit down in the dumps this last week, entertained by garbage mind.  Well, maybe not crouched in the absolute bottom of the pit. More like I stood on the edge of the dump, toes hanging over, wondering if I should just go ahead, jump in and wallow around a bit. Maybe emerge sprinkled with coffee grounds, decorated with potato peels, a rotten cantaloupe shell for a hat.

In the movie, Scarlet O’Hara said, “I’ll think about it tomorrow.” I decided I would think about it today. I generally don’t get too upset when today looks like doom and gloom. I know that in the morning I will have a different outlook. As a friend of mine says, “Tomorrow will be different; maybe not better, but different.” I’ll take different.

These past couple weeks have been filled with sorrow. I lost four friends to death. On top of that six other friends face serious medical problems, hospitalization and surgery. They refuse to worry.  They told me. Without my conscious knowledge, I volunteered to worry for them. I didn’t realize that I’d stepped up to that plate until I was a week into the game. 

Work generally gets me out of any slump. Work is my best medicine. But I found myself toeing the pitcher’s mound in some sort of World Series of Worry. A task I should have knocked out in an hour, took all day. I would pick up a project, set it down and wander out into the yard, seduced by the warm sunshine.

Finally I quit pushing against the river’s flow, tossed worry out the window, crawled out of my gloom. I phoned my ailing friends, told them how much their friendship means to me, how I want to see them home and healthy.  I went to breakfast with Bill and Mary John. I harvested the rest of my tomatoes. They lie scattered across my kitchen table in varied shades of green. I took baskets of garden produce to Peg and Karl. I dug up some of my snow-on-the-mountain, and with a shovel and the hardy plants, drove across town to my cousin’s place and planted them for her.                  

My fruit trees need pruning. I went to my garden shed, found my whicker-whacker and my snipper-snapper, put them in my wheel barrow and set out to trim trees. I wheeled over to my sand cherry. I couldn’t do it. “Maybe next spring,” I whispered. “Let’s see what kind of winter we have.”

I want my lilacs along the fence to spread their branches and fill in the space, so I rolled past them and parked my wheel barrow by the currants. They definitely should be trimmed back. I snipped off two “dead” branches, saw that they weren’t really dead. I heard the bush cry out in pain. I felt awful.  I apologized and decided to wait, to see how the currants wintered. Moved on to the choke-cherries, stood in front of one bush that desperately needs to be shaped.  Stood there five minutes. I couldn’t do it. Gave up, put away my tools.

These bushes have become my friends and right now, I simply cannot chop away at my friends. Winter is coming, bringing with it a long dormancy. Maybe my young bushes will be stronger for another season of full growth. I know that in my imagination I am making up a false connection between my human friends and my fruit-tree friends. No matter.

The next day Shirley, Bev and I drove to Lewistown for lunch, expecting an opulent seafood meal. Never trust the food editor of a rival newspaper. (Rule of thumb: Never order seafood inland. Never order beef on the coast.) We poked around some unique stores on Main Street. On the way home we stopped at Slippery Ann on the CMR Wildlife Refuge to take in the annual gathering of the elk, all the bugling and prancing and sniffing and flirting. It’s like a Saturday night dance at a country western bar. A few hours of elk watching and we had worked up an appetite for dinner. Since we were close, we continued on to Zortman for a burger at the bar.

In jigs and jogs I’ve nudged myself away from the garbage pit of despair. I’ll keep telling my friends I love them, tell them how much I care. My shop work will wait. Today I’ll grab the warm sunshine. Tomorrow I’ll get back to work.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 4, 2012

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