Listen Up, Old Farts: From the Edge of Darkness 18

OK, now, lissen up.

I’m almost old enough to qualify as an old fart – not as old as some of you old farts out there, but old enough so that anyone under 50 would consider me so. That means I get to say what’s on my mind, and you have to shut up and listen.

I’m speaking mostly to the rest of you old farts out there – you know who you are. If you’re over 50, I’m talking to you, and if you’re younger than 50 but have an old-fart, easily-scared, self-aggrandizing, self-satisfied brain with opinions and attitudes that haven’t changed in years, I’m talking to you, too. 

It’s time for us to step down. Not all the way down – the youngsters need to have a few of us around to go to when they can’t make sense out of the tangled mess we’ve made of rules and regulations and how to get those things cleaned up – but we need to shut up, gird our loins, and stop thinking about ourselves and start listening to, and supporting, the youngsters who are brave enough to say there isn’t any time to fart around anymore – there are some things we need to change radically, right now, damn the consequences to our portfolios and our commerce, before we’re all sucked into the lowest pit of Hell. 

Yes, it will be hard; yes, it will mess with your comfortable old-fart lives and pocketbooks and long-held beliefs – but if we don’t do it, there won’t be a future to be hopeful about. And even if you’re a really old fart, you may live long enough to regret that.

We screwed things up, and we need to admit it, and we old farts don’t have the guts or drive or imagination or honesty to fix it or power the changes needed to see it through. The best we can do is to do something else, Joe Biden and the foolish, foolish DNC, or act as mentors and help-meets for the younger folks, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. You two have ideas we need, but we need young people with the vision who will be around and vital – really, really vital - for the next 20 years to implement them. Be a loud cheerleader, Bernie, but don’t try to do it yourself, it’s too late. Share your mind and your plans, Elizabeth, but recognize that your time was four years ago, and you didn’t take it.

We need people who will do what needs to be done and do it really quickly. It may already be too late to save us – the nation, the environment, the human race - but if we fart around for another four years, it surely will be. There’s a lot to be done, and it’s going to make everyone with an old-fart brain really unhappy. And all I can say about that is: tough. You blew it. We blew it. We continue to blow it.

The environment has to be dealt with, and if it screws up a lot of corporations, too bad – you’ll reap what you sowed. There are going to be a lot more immigrants, more and more and more, in large part because of the environment we screwed up, and we’ve got to stop being mean and nasty and deal with them fairly and honorably and accept them as fellow human beings. We have to clean up the messes we made that are destroying their homelands, their lives, their safety, and welcome them into whatever parts of the world still work.  

There has to be an end to violence, and that means a radical and immediate response to the ridiculous gun culture we have in this country, and major rethinking of international relations, and a big, big change in our individual attitudes towards everyone else who inhabits our world – our neighbors, strangers we meet in the community, all those groups of people about whom we’ve developed ignorant attitudes; those attitudes we cling to because they make us feel superior, or safer, or sager. We can no longer afford to run politics, international relations, immigrant policies, and adress people we don’t know, as the obviously superior us vs. the obviously deficient and dangerous them – we’re all of us we now, and we need to restructure our brains to get that.

There has to be a radical change in our attitude towards the human right to health care – the more expensive of which has mostly been made necessary because of the way we old farts messed up food, air, water, and more – and we need to change our attitude towards housing. No one should die because they can’t afford decent -  or any - health care. No one should live on a park bench, or huddled into tents in the winter, or under bridges, or in housing that’s unsanitary, unsafe, unreliable. No one. No one.

There needs to be an immediate end to cozening people with more money than they know what to do with. You made your money on the backs of other people, and quite likely from encouraging or promoting the destruction of the environment, food, health care, housing, and paying your employees sub-decent wages. Get over it. You owe your fellow human beings – we all owe our fellow human beings - decent health, a comfortable and safe place to live, sanitary conditions, nutritious and sufficient food, healthy air and water, dignity, education, and respect for their varied cultural and religious beliefs. We need to start paying a living wage. We need to start pushing, against our own over-inflated interests, for just laws and social systems.

Some of these changes are going to take a lot of money – and it’s going to have to come from those of you with too much. Capitalism, the way we play it, the way we’ve allowed it to develop, the way we’ve let it warp our democratic process and our vision as a just and honorable nation, has failed the majority of us and enriched too few, and that means somebodies are going to have to cough up a fair share to fix, and keep fixed, what’s gone very, very wrong.

And some of these changes, and others you know in your gut need to be made that I haven’t mentioned, are going to take some serious self-examination, a willingness to assume your truth isn’t the only, or the best, truth, and a willingness to give up your self-serving ideas – a soul tax, so to speak, and it’ll be a big one for some of us. 

It’s going to be painful. Old farts don’t like change, especially when it means you have to adjust to something new. When maybe you have to give up some of your shiny toys so someone else can eat, or have some warm clean clothes, or a place that’s safe to sleep, or get medical treatment. And those of you who are going to have to live with restrictions on your gun toys – you’re not getting any sympathy, here. You’ve had plenty of time to self-regulate, and you haven’t done it; you blew it. It’s time now for the rest of us to protect our children, people sad enough to commit suicide, domestic partners of angry gun-owners, friends with guns who’ve had too much to drink, and those wing-nuts amongst us who have no sense of human decency and too much to prove…

So - tough. We screwed it up – we can only hope the next generation can fix the messes we’ve made fast enough. So suck it up, old farts – big breath, deep gulp, open that wallet, don’t fight the fixes, be part of the saving of our future, and shut up unless you have something truly useful to say.

I’ll meet you there.

For the blog, 1 July 2019

From the Edge of Darkness: 18

 

Summer Came!

Unknown beauties from the Evil Store (OSJL) - they always have stuff you didn't know you needed 'til you get there, and you exit with a car-load of stuff. Always. No matter what you went for. And it's almost always stuff you're glad to have!

 

We’ve kind of skidded over into summer as the solstice kicked in, from weather that really was more like early spring. We went from 36-40-degree nights and 60-degree-or-less days, to 70-degree nights and 80+-degree days – and humid – over less than a week. Last night I made the Husband put the air conditioner in my bedroom window, and got a decent night’s sleep for the first time in a few days. No fresh air, but the fresh air is heavy and wet, so I don’t really care so much. And it cuts out the noise from the idiots who think 7 am is a good time to use the chainsaw, or take down an old shed.

Potato flowers

 

The weather’s having a crabby effect on most of us northern New Englanders – if you aren’t crabbing about the current weather, it’s a fair guess you aren’t originally from here. I know a few ex-Central and South Americans who are saying, “What! The weather has just finally gotten comfortable!” but what do they know? I tried explaining to one nice lady that when it’s hot, and especially when it’s hot and humid, first I get cranky, then I get angry, then I get a headache, then I get sick to my stomach, and then I turn into a fire-breathing dragon…and she just sort of looked confused. “But it’s summer – summer is really nice!”

Yeah, it’s nice, except when it isn’t. 

Peony bounty this year!

And let’s talk about mosquitoes, and ticks, and blackflies, which have all been out in endless hoardes, all at once this year, along with the no-see-ums (which I can’t usually see so I don’t know how many there are of them), and they all seem to be especially hungry and toxic. Someone I was talking to the other day told about sitting on a relative’s porch, and watching lines of ticks walking across the flagstones. That story kept me itching for hours.

The other things that keep me itching late into the night are the dozens of swollen, itchy bites covering my legs and arms that are, unusually, swollen and itchy for days, and taking forever to heal up this year. 

Broccoli flower

After I found a tick waiting for me on my pillow when I went to bed one night, the cats have been forbidden access to the upstairs, which doesn’t make them happy. They both have pretty thick fur, so it’s not often I find a tick attached to them, and they get the monthly goop that causes any tick that bites them to die; but they’re excellent tick buses and we spend a lot of time daily sitting with them or carrying them around, so the ticks are more than happy for a ride to a nice, tasty human. So far we haven’t had one attach to us – as far as we know – but with all the diseases the ticks carry nowadays, every little sensation presents itself in the brain as a tick crawling on skin, and we spend hours at night checking, checking, checking. I haven’t been in the woods for years because I just-can’t-cope, and using a fan for cooling is an exercise in feeling armies of imaginary ticks crawling across the skin.

Even in the garden, even with all the paved paths I’ve been making, tickiness is problematic. I can’t even run out for a handful of herbs while I’m making supper without doing a tick check before going back indoors.

Thai and sweet basils in a pot

Speaking of all the pavers I’ve installed in the past two years, the garden does seem to love them, and it does cut down some of the weeding. I live in a cold pocket in the middle of the snow belt, and where there are paths of pavers, the beds warm up faster, things grow bigger faster, and there are also lots of spiders. Spiders eat bugs – go, Spiders! Some days (only maybe three so far this year) I can walk across the pavers in the late-day sun, watch the spiders scurry away ahead of me, see the flower borders overflowing onto the pavers, and imagine I’m walking in a Mediteranean garden instead of a cold, windy New Hampsha attempt at a garden. Especially when I come to a spot where the thyme – which has taken over most of the field – is long and draping itself around the rock-like chunks. It’s kinda magical.

New path, between the raspberries and the peas

Thyme in the field

And speaking of the herbs, I’ve been bringing my excess to the local café and the café in my office building for several weeks now, and it makes me happy that the trimmings get used instead of being composted. I haven’t planted dill in years – it’s almost invasive, it self-seeds so readily, and at this time of year I have lots and lots and lots of plants that are all dillweed that need thinning out in places and removing completely in others. I also have a field full of thyme, which in spots grows tall enough to cut; a giant sage plant; way too much marjoram, which is the product of a single plant I put at one end of the garden years ago, that moved itself to the back fence and is constantly threatening to overwhelm everything growing around it. I told it to spread into the field with the thyme and it’ll be mostly unmolested. In spring and fall I have regular and garlic chives. Catman takes care of the catnip, but I have French tarragon, which is a perennial, summer savory, which is a reseeding annual, and this year I put in an annual lemon verbena and a couple of bronze fennel plants to play with. And there are three kinds of mint, and bee balm. I grow basil, too, but there is never enough basil to share. Is it possible to grow too much basil? It’s a perennial question, and one to which I’ve never found a positive answer. This year the basil and the Thai basil are growing in pots I placed on the pavers nearest the kitchen wart – so far, so good.  I also have cilantro, which mostly arises from self-seeding plants I grew years ago, though I added some seed this year; and I always put in some parsley. This year I’m growing it from seed instead of buying a couple of plants, and it’s taking an unbearably long time to grow to pickable size.

One patch of self-seeded dill

But the garden is starting to look good, in spite of the weird weather we’ve had. The clematis was gorgeous; the peonies are better than they’ve maybe ever been. For the first time ever, I was able to grow decent lettuce, and the garlic I planted last fall actually grew – I picked scapes this evening, which is the very, very delicious long, curling stem the garlic puts out with a flower bud on the end. Leeks and onions and shallots and Egyptian onions are all looking really good; the California poppies are in full brilliant bloom; the alliums I planted last fall pretty much all bloomed, and the drumstick allium are making buds now. Johnny-jump-ups spread themselves happily around, squashes are getting bigger, and the pepper plants and tomatoes, while still short and stunted-looking, are blooming…I hope they get bigger or I’ll be picking miniature fruits off them. All my beans are up, my peas are flowering, the carrots need thinning, the parsnips are up, the beets are coming, and even the corn experiment in the field might be fruitful – I planted eight hills, with squash on the sides, and the earliest four plus the squashes have germinated and are ankle-high.

The corn-and-squash experiment, in the field behind the back fence. Cloches cover newer plantings.

Now is the bending-over-and-yanking-stuff time in the garden: thinning carrots and eventually beets, pulling weeds, thinning parsnips, pulling weeds, pulling weeds, and, oh yeah – pulling weeds. There’s enough time to do some manuring and mulching, for fertilizing the new raspberries and the old raspberries and blueberries and peach trees, for piling up wood chips as mulch around the fruit trees, and for standing and just looking with amazement at the beautiful spread of blooming wildflowers in the back forty. So much is blooming now – devil’s paintbrush, wild forget-me-nots, daisies, clover, flea bane, yellow hawkweed/king devil, white violet, wild strawberry, wild chamomile, purple vetch, heal-all, buttercup, cinquefoil, dandelion, yarrow, and common chickweed, the current bane of my existence  – the field is a jumble of yellows and reds and whites and purples, and it’s just lovely. And a tick-haunt, as the Husband keeps reminding me. 

Carrots and beets.

One leek, shallot and onion bed.

I’m seeing lots of box turtles and painted turtles on the roads, crossing to lay their eggs in hot dry sandy patches of earth. We’ve started looking out for Old Lady Snapper, and haven’t seen her yet. It’s possible we’ve missed her – she does an excellent job covering up her nest, so if we don’t happen to look when she’s in the process of egg-laying, we’d never know she’d been there. But the weather is slower to warm this year, and the trek through the thyme from the marsh and her cool, shady wet home is long, so I’m betting she’ll show up some day soon. The Old Barkie Boys would have announced her arrival, but the Furry People stay far away from her, so this year we’ll have to rely on our own chance sighting.

Egyptian onions - reproducing via top bulbs.

Unless Catman Dog figures out how to bark. His latest dog stunt has been hopping into the car with me to take the short ride from wart-side where I leave groceries, to put the car away in the garage. He looks slightly bemused afterwards.

I'm expecting to hear a bark from him any time now - maybe after indulging in too much catnip.

California poppies in bloom around the bird bath.

For the blog, 28 June 2019

All photos Debra Marshall

Self-seeded daisies and biennial Lunaria (money plant).

 

Weather Update: My Garden

Flax

 Tomorrow is summer solstice. I’m still sleeping on flannel sheets, and there are still three blankets on my bed. I don’t use them every night, but I did three nights ago. We aren’t safe yet.

There are still black flies, which are voracious; there are mosquitos, which are voracious; there are ticks, which are voracious. My legs and arms and neck are covered with itchy, swollen mosquito and black fly bites; every day I spend in the garden, I pick at least a handful of ticks off myself.

It’s raining, again; the cats are kind of permanently damp, and sometimes look like they fell into the pond. The lettuce and onions and leeks and shallots and garlic and broccoli are loving this weather; and with the help of cloches, the tomato plants have grown some, corn has sprouted, squashes are beginning to look like real plants. The beans all finally got planted last weekend, and most are up. I need to fill in holes in the beet and carrot bed, but not all the seeds washed away, so some are growing. The basil and savory and cucumbers seem to be enjoying their experiment, being planted in pots near the south on the south side this year. The potatoes are big and lush and gorgeous. 

Catnip, Allium, Johnny-Jump-Ups

And in spite of all the strange weather, there are some really gorgeous flowers. Lilacs and the first flush of dandelions have gone by, azaleas are done, but rhododendrons are in full bloom, day lilies and iris in front of the house are in full glory, and there are patches of lilac-colored Robin’s plaintain, purple harebell, yarrow, pink clover, daisies, little tiny pink somethings I don’t know what they are and can’t find in my Spring Wildflowers book, white violets, Indian’s paintbrush; and Mom has a big patch of hoary alyssum, which is quite lovely. 

Robin's Plantain and Harebells

The birds are singing happily every day, though I haven’t noticed any making use of my birdhouses yet this spring-almost-summer. Buzzy Boy has chased me in from the garden several times when I’ve been out too late according to his Rules for Humans. I’ve seen bees and butterflies working amongst the flowers, and there’s nothing prettier than a big yellow butterfly perched on a purple chive blossom having a drink. 

Catmandude’s new catnip plants seem to be doing well. I’ve shown him where two are and he’s had a good chew on them, but he hasn’t discovered the third yet. He still hasn’t forgiven me for yanking out his great big plant, but the asparagus crowns I planted in that bed are doing well. Peas and fava beans are up and climbing; bee balm and marjoram and sage are about to bloom. The rhubarb plant is gigantic, and the sorrel has already gone to seed. Still waiting to see if the perennial seeds I planted will sprout – the annuals (cosmos, calendula, amaranth, love lies bleeding, salvia) are up, the self-seeding California poppies and lunaria – ok, that’s a biennial - are getting lush, and my clematis – yes, that’s a perennial -was beautiful. An iris I hauled out of one spot last year, which hadn’t grown and never bloomed, has an absolutely exquisite bloom on it this year. And the peony bed is about to break into bloom, and the bleeding hearts are bleeding beautifully, as are some perennials I planted last year and the year before that have lovely blue flowers and pink flowers on them, and I have no idea now what they’re called. I wonder if that’s why I struggle with perennials.

Iris and Lilies; yes, needing weeding...

I don’t do particularly well with perennial flower plants. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, sometimes I accidentally weed them out in the spring, mistaking them for grass. I’m never really sure. For years I’ve been trying to get Oriental poppies to bloom – I had a great bed of them when we lived in Maine: just dug up a patch of grass, threw in some seed, a few weeks later – voila! But here I can’t get a single seed to sprout. So last year I broke down and bought three very expensive potted poppies, which were settling in nicely, and then the damned chipmunks tunneled under them and chewed off their roots and killed them.   

I used to like chipmunks.

Perennial border pinks

Maybe I should try planting a slice of poppy seed cake and see what happens.

My new peach trees and cherry bush, and six of the nine new raspberries, all look pretty good. The final living limb of the old peach succumbed to frost this spring, which was very disappointing. It was covered with leaf and flower buds that were just on the edge of opening, and then, overnight, dried up and gone. Not a one opened. We sadly cut the limb off; but this winter, we’ll think we’re pretty nifty, maybe the only folks in northern New England burning peach wood in their woodstove. The garden looks very odd without the peach tree blocking my view across it.

I dug the solar lights out of the cellar the other day and put the big, color-changing ball back out in the garden, lined up the color-changing and plain white mason jar lights on the wart railings, and when I look out at night, my French-Canadian heart just thrills to the gaudy show. Earlier this week there was a moment – and I was there to see it – when the full moon hung directly over my color-changing ball. It was totally satisfying.

Annuals on the wart; Petunias and something orange

We haven’t erected the tent-on-the-wart yet – it’s been too windy, too rainy, too too too.  Too bad – it would be a break for Catman, who really wants to be outside in his chair this time of year, even when it’s raining, so he can survey his domain and have an excellent nap in the fresh air; and it would be great for me, so I could de-tick after being in the garden without entertaining the neighbors too thoroughly, and also not get chewed up by mosquitoes as I strip down and – well, you know. Full clothes and nekkid body searches, vigorous hair brushing, muddy hand and foot washing. (Hi Glen! Hi Darlene! Thanks for the fireworks show last weekend, we enjoyed it! Better viewing than what I’ve been giving you as I come in from the garden!)

Almost summer. And yet…

For the blog, 20 June 2019

All photos Deb Marshall

Very Happy Lettuce; and parsley