JUST DO IT

            Sorry for the long hiatus. Put it down to changes in attitudes, if not latitudes.

Kathy's messy work space, circa 2011

            For example: yesterday I spent time with my weaving teacher, Kathleen, who I suspect is actually myself in some parallel universe. As usual, aware of how I learn best from words (as opposed to pictures, which is how both she and Tim think), she gave me reams of handouts with terminology; technique diagrams; sample cartoons, or drawings of what you want the weaving to look like that you can pin to the warp threads as a guide; loom, materials, and resource information; and several weaving-related articles, including a short piece on John Mercer of Mercerizing fame. She also loaned me five—count ‘em!—five books to peruse.

Arriving home in an inspired but somewhat brain-overloaded state, I piled the stack of printed materials on top of the other stacks of printed materials on the conveniently located flat surface I call my desk.

Kathy's neat desk, circa today

That teetering heap of paper assaulted my eyes this morning, so I decided something must be done about it. I sat down to make a list of how to organize the mess when it occurred to me: don’t plan to do it, just do it. So I did. My weaving stuff is now divided among five folders—Articles, Cartoons & Designs; Techniques & Terms; Tools & Resources; and Warps & Wefts—collected in an uber-folder. The rest of the stacks got doled out either to existing folders (Election, Letters, Down-the-Hall Filing, etc.), or found their way into new ones, or were actually cleared away with  a few phone calls. Now the desktop is clear except for the poetry collection I’m preparing for submission to a contest, neatly contained in a manila envelope.

I just did it.

A half-bushel of apples, transformed

It’s the same with my unabated canning illness. In early October, Tim and I took off five days to visit The Cousins in Maryland, who took us to the Berkeley Springs, West-By-God-Virginia, Apple Butter Festival. Naturally, I came home with a half-bushel (25 pounds) of apples. Adding to the bounty the following Wednesday, I scored a respectable bundle of cucumbers and a couple of pounds of okra for pickling at Wilmington’s Poplar Grove Farmers Market. The enormity of what I’d done hit me as I recovered over a cheese-and-tomato sandwich from my Saturday morning stint of weeding-for-hire. Produce covered every inch of counterspace.

            Instead of looking the other way and burying myself in the Saturday Sudoku, I put water and jars in the canner and got to work. By six o’clock, nine pints of bread-and-butter pickles, four pints of pickled okra, and a single pint of pickled peppers straight out of the front yard (to use up the rest of the vinegar solution) cooled on top of the chest freezer. Tackled the apples the next day. Peeled, cored, quartered, boiled, and strained 64 apples, ending up with about three gallons of applesauce, apple pie filling and apple butter.

I just did it.

After finishing my raglan-sleeve sweater, I started knitting Tim a vest, hoping the third try would prove the Goldilocks moment: the first one I made him was too short, the second one waaay too big all over. (We both could fit in it. At the same time.) With a decent fit in mind, I knitted and measured against his back; ripped out, reknitted, remeasured; ripped a little bit more, remeasured. At bedtime last night, only five rows remained for the the back, so I sat up and finished it.

Raglan-sleeve sweater, completed

Tim's vest back, 

completed AND right size

I just did it.

Then I remembered I hadn’t posted a blog entry in over two weeks. Today,  after clearing up the desk disaster and making those phone calls, I sat down at the computer and started to type. This is what resulted.

It may not be much, but at least I did it.

More garden-themed posts will begin flowing soon—the paper mountain hid lots of post-it-noted ideas that made their ways into the appropriate notebook this morning. All I have to do is write them out. And get pictures, of course. But I’m guessing the present little bagatelle will buy me another week or so.

There’s a lot to be said for just doing stuff, no matter what the stuff is.

Thanks for just dropping by.   

                                                                        Kathy

PICKLES AND APPLESAUCE

Pickles & applesauce

            With the blessing of his cardiologist, ten days ago Tim stopped taking an extremely toxic medication meant to control his afibrillation: now, for the first time in over a year, he feels, well, well. As a result assuming responsibility of his own health (nobody knows a body like its owner), Fitzgeralds Gardening put in its first full work-week since July.

            We labored for 15 hours over 5 days pruning, weeding, bagging debris, dumping debris, edging beds and mulching one of our regulars’ property. Doesn’t sound particularly taxing, but I suggest most of you probably could not achieve the same manicured results in as little time. For two geezers straddling 60 it was a triumphant (if exhausting) re-entry to the world of gardening-for-hire.

            In addition to the regular job, I’ve contracted to weed a friend's overgrown spread for two hours every Saturday morning with the aim of independently financing my various money-pit hobbies—weaving (lessons, yarns, looms, books), knitting (needles, lots and lots and lots of yarns, books), canning (canning pots, jars, lids, specialized utensils, all the local produce I can find, books), and reading (more books). Most of the writing I do—blog, newsletter columns, the poetry collection I’m whipping into shape—only eats up time, which, as the 1% knows full well, is money. Except in my case, apparently.

            With the advent of our return to gainful activity, however, my above-mentioned hobbies threaten to overwhelm me. I cancelled my weaving lesson last week because I hadn’t done my homework. (“Did the dog eat it?” teased Kathleen, my teacher.) I have three little projects in the works on two looms at the moment, one incomplete, two not even started.

Work not in progress

Work in progress

Almost there!

Meanwhile, on the knitting front, my first-ever raglan-sleeve sweater project lacks only two-thirds of a sleeve, neckline detailing, and blocking. The nearness of the finish line is a goad to my flesh. Plus, on our most recent visit to the yarn shop, I got wool for a new sweater for Tim because I love to start new projects and I’m an idiot.  

Out in the garden, I pulled out most of the remaining looper-and-pickleworm-devastated melons (will try again next spring) and sowed lettuces, onions, rutabagas and turnips in the Grow-Bags. What’s hilarious about that is almost every bag has at least one potato sprout that I carefully hilled and planted around. The rest of the yard I continue to ignore.

Hope springs...

The former melon patch

         

            On our way to work Monday, Tim and I stopped by Oak Island’s farmers market, where we cleaned out two stalls’ remaining pickling cucumbers and apples, and picked up some persimmons and three cool-looking yellow zucchini for good measure. Tuesday morning, Tim had his actinic keratoses drug-trial check-up in Wilmington, so we took advantage of proximity to Whole Foods and Carolina Farmin’ stores to buy even more cukes and apples. Arriving home at 2 o’clock, we set about making pickles and applesauce.

Eleven pints of

bread-&-butter pickles

            Working together on projects reveals new and fascinating things about your partner. Tim, for example, is a champion apple-peeler, a fact that had heretofore escaped my notice. He skinned 14 pounds of apples faster than I could core and quarter them. Absolutely amazing. And he’s also a whiz at packing jars with cucumber slices and strips. (“I watched a Mister Rogers once where he visited a pickle factory, and the ladies there really crammed them in,” he explained as I gazed at him with wonder and watery eyes over a saucepan of gently boiling vinegar and spices.)

 Eight pints of applesauce, 

minus the quart jar 

we already opened

            In a little over three hours, we reduced 23 pounds of produce to 24 pints of preserves. It was at this point, obviously in some sort of fugue state, I volunteered—hold on to your hats—to cook dinner. No, really, I did. I whipped up one of my two specialties (the other one is baked ziti), a shepherds pie made with North Carolina-raised grass-fed beef from the Greenlands Farm Store on Midway Road and sweet onions grown in Brunswick County, topped with mashed potatoes from our very own Toadflax Farm. With all those local ingredients, even such a pathetic excuse for a chef as myself couldn’t mess up too badly. It came out okay, I guess: we very nearly polished off the whole thing at one sitting, although we immediately wished we hadn’t.

Two pints pickled yellow zucchini

            Later, the dishes air-drying in the drainer, Alex Trebek running the Jeopardy! board with his usual aplomb, knitting in hand, I remembered I hadn’t turned out a blog post for this week. So here it is now. As with all things, I get around to it. Eventually.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                        Kathy

HAVIN' A GOOD TIME

Yesterday it was my birthday,

I hung one more year on the line;

I should be depressed, my yard’s a mess,

But I’m havin’ a good time.

I’m digging and weeding and planting,

I’m exhausted from gard’ning so well;

I should go to bed but a voice in my head

Says, “Oh, what the hell.”

                               with apologies to Paul Simon

            I have conducted a life-long love affair with Paul Simon’s music. His lyrics have spoken to me since the 1960s, when I knew all the words to all the songs from “Bookends,” “The Sounds of Silence,” “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (Still do.) I convinced my teenaged self that I was the Kathy on the bus from Pittsburgh in “America,” sans cigarettes. A term paper entitled “Themes of Alienation and Loss in the Songs of Simon and Garfunkel” turned in when I was a junior in high school brought me my first important accolades as a writer: so impressed was the English teacher that she made it required reading for her senior classes.

Fortunately, I had no social life at the time anyway so repercussions were insignificant.

What angst-filled adolescent didn’t thrum in harmony with “And a rock feels no pain / and an island never cries”? Or “You read your Emily Dickinson / and I my Robert Frost, / and we note our place with bookmarkers / that measure what we’ve lost.”  And “The Boxer”!

In the clearing stands a boxer

And a fighter by his trade,

And he carries the reminders

Of every glove that laid him down

Or cut him till he cried out

In his anger and his shame,

‘I am leaving, I am leaving’

But the fighter still remains.

Only the Beatles (with “Hey, Jude’s” nah-nah-nah-nah nahnahnah-nah), could command three minutes of radio airtime with nonsense syllables the way Simon did in “The Boxer”—lie-la-lie, lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie lie-lie-lie-lie-lie, over and over as the orchestra swelled in the background. Tears still prick my eyes when I hear it.

Mincers Pipe Shop on the Corner,
Charlottesville, Virginia

Never attended a concert given by the boys, but I did once see Art Garfunkel. He drove into town from his home near Charlottesville, Virginia, every Sunday morning to pick up his copy of the New York Times from Mincers Pipe Shop on The Corner, hard by the University’s Rotunda. Mincers was just up the street from the U Diner, where “grills-with”—fried-ice-cream-with-glazed-donut-heated-on-the-grill—could be had for a dollar or so all day. On my way home from a post-Saturday-night sugar fix, I spotted Art (may I call you “Art”?) getting into his car, a hefty hunk of newsprint under his arm.

In later years, I wondered by what Machiavellian contortions he managed to get the New York version of the Sunday New York Times delivered on Sunday. Mere mortals had to wait until Wednesday.

*****

In one of those simple twists of fate (old, pre-Christian Dylan’s a favorite, too), I recently rediscovered knitting. I grew up in a crafty family, and don’t remember not knowing how to knit, crochet, embroider, crewel, cross-stitch, needlepoint, petit-point, macramé and sew. Never cottoned to machine sewing, because it requires, well, a machine; but I’m still pretty adept with any sort of hand-held needle. This has come in useful over the years, especially for keeping beloved jeans and overalls in service.  I’m one of probably six people left in the world who actually knows how to darn socks.

Blue penguins wearing their protective jumpers

A few weeks ago, Tim, who trolls Google News most mornings, sent me an Attention All Knitters appeal for tiny sweaters for oil-coated blue penguins, victims of the latest disaster to befall New Zealand. The coverings keep the birds from ingesting the crude oil clogging their feathers until rescue workers can dip them in Dawn. Tim thought I’d like the picture of the jumper-clad birds: to his amazement, I leapt out of my chair to rummage around in the old blanket chest where I keep memories and things I might use again. Someday.

Piglet modeling my best effort

Ah, vindication! I emerged with 30-year-old knitting needles, single-pointed, double-pointed and circular, insisting we drop everything to go to our nearest JoAnn’s Fabrics—in Wilmington—to buy 100% wool yarn. (You see, the last time I knitted anything was around the same time double-knit polyester was all the rage, so the billions of skeins of yarn I kept are all acrylic or some even-more-sinister synthetic fiber.)

After a few false starts (like about 20), the stitches came back to me, as did casting on and binding off. Had lots of practice in picking up dropped stitches, and in un-knitting to correct mistakes. Must be like riding a bike, kinetic knowledge stored in one’s cells. The tiny penguin jumpers took shape. More or less.

Checked in with the lady at Skeinz, The Natural Yarn Store in Napier, NZ—a town I remember with great fondness for superlative fish-and-chips—who said the response from all over the knitting world had been tremendous, and every oil-coated penguin had an extensive wardrobe at his/her disposal. Oh, dear. No, no, she said, send your creations on: we’re dressing stuffed-toy penguins to sell, with a hundred percent of the profits going to the Penguin Rescue Fund. (I've already ordered two, at $25US a pop, for Christmas gifts. Click on "Take Flip Home" under Featured Products on the website linked above.)

Another penguin day, another penguin dollar
on the Otago Peninsula (photo by John Burke)

Why did I care? I’ll never forget the late afternoon I stood on a windy escarpment of the Otago Peninsula, watching yellow-eyed penguins coming home from another day of making a living in the Pacific. They resembled nothing so much as city workers disgorging from trains as they trudged out of the wave-break and trundled up the shore. All that was missing were the rolled-up newspapers and the briefcases.

Will I use some of my precious time to help them in their time of need? You betcha.

****

Marvelous Allium schubertii

            Anyway, yesterday was my 58^th birthday, and I spent a chunk of it outside in the garden, personalizing lyrics to Paul Simon songs, such as the one in the epigraph. I’m trying ornamental alliums again, despite years of one-season ponies (Simon, sort of, again), excepting the chive twins, garlic and onion. A sucker for any species of onion, I ordered Allium flavum, a 1759 heirloom, yellow-flowered, mid-summer bloomer; A. carinatum pulchellum, A. flavum’s younger (1810), red-violet-flowered cousin; and the Brent and Becky’s web-exclusive A. hyacinthoides, which was a no-brainer choice for me because it’s supposed to have blue blooms. Well, duh. Splurged on another five A. schubertii, an 1896 introduction with the most bizarre of all of Allium's bizarre flowers that, despite its cold-hardiness Zone 7-9 reputation, refuses to perennialize chez Fitz. Also treated myself to five more Scilla peruviana bulbs, a scilla with a secret yen to be an allium.

Happy birthday to me!

*****

 
            Since recovering (to a large extent) from the hormone-induced miseries of adolescence and the self-induced dramas of adulthood, my love for Paul Simon’s way with words endures. Unsurprisingly, his solo opus “Still Crazy After All These Years” provides the soundtrack to my maturation.

            So I sit by the window and watch the cars,

I fear I'll do some damage one fine day;

But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers,

Still crazy after all these years,

Still crazy, still cra-aaa-zy,

Still crazy after all these years.

You better believe it. Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy