Tomatoes

My tomato garden has become for me a triumph of hope over experience. (An expression I first heard used to aptly describe second marriages.  I rather liked it.)

Each spring, I put a few plants in the ground, hoping against hope for summer's delicious bounty to be mine. This year, I planted only cherry tomatoes, hoping they'd do a better of ripening than the big ones have, given my limited sunlight.

I hadn't reckoned with the absence of my much-missed sycamore tree next door.

My plants this year have taken off. They have overflowed their carefully sculpted boundary and have taken over a good foot of the yard. They covered themselves with blossoms early, a promise of bounty to come.

It's been dry this year, and I have been diligently watering my small crop, already able to taste the explosion of sweet goodness.

Enter reality.

Turns out a lack of moisture leads to thirsty squirrels. My furry friends may have abandoned their condo in my eaves, but they didn't move far; just to the neighbor's oak tree. They, too, have been eyeing my bounty.

Last weekend I was sitting on the porch enjoying my morning coffee, surveying my kingdom. Scampering along the top of the fence came one of my neighbors, intent on her own breakfast. I saw a chance to temporarily delay the inevitable, and chased her away. She didn't go far, just back to the corner of the yard, where she had a handy tree to jump to if I decided to take this to extremes.

For the next hour, we played our game. She'd come down, intent on stealing one of my green tomatoes. I watched for her, and chased her back down the line.

Inevitably, for she was hungrier than I, I was more intent on my phone conversation than the squirrel, and she managed to snag her prize.

She didn't run far before she stopped, took the precious morsel from her mouth, and took a bite. She looked back at me as if to say, 'I don't know what your problem might be - I just took one, and there are many more on the vine. Surely there are enough for you to share just one.'

*sigh*  I suppose.

I have managed to get a few for myself, by going out each morning and snagging them from the vine as soon as they show the slightest hint of turning from green to red, then leaving them to ripen on the counter top.  And one, one was hidden beneath the leaves, and I was able to pick it ripe from the vine. Warm from the heat of the sun, the explosion of sweet goodness was mine!

I win.

Torch: Passed

Iowa - sunset, moonrise

Last weekend was my niece Autumn's graduation party, so I trucked on up to Minnesota to celebrate with her and her family. The trip was good, if too short. (I swear I'm getting too old for these weekend to Minnesota trips every time I do one - and every time I do one, I'm glad I made the effort.)

I drove on up with my brother Ted on Friday night. The trip was the best kind - uneventful. Talked my sister into visiting REI with me on Saturday. (I like to shop up there because there are more tall women running around the area, and thus, a better selection of tall clothes in the store.) Saturday night, my local family was busy (what???  they have lives???), so I met up with my brother Tony from Iowa, and got to meet his new girlfriend (who seemed like a good gal).

To my surprise, Libby and Autumn decided to make time to show up at Saturday's dinner. (I was surprised because I didn't think they'd have the energy - they were throwing a big party the next day.) Libby's hair was gone again - she is on a new type of chemo - Lynparza - a new targeted type of therapy just approved for her type of cancer this past January. According to the ever-helpful internet, the drug targets an enzyme, PARP, fast-growing cells use to repair DNA damage. No repair, the cells die.

She hasn't been on it for too long, but she said it's working to shrink her tumors and slow their growth. She said her last scan showed places in her bones where the cancer had taken hold, and then been stopped. (How they can tell this from a scan, I have no earthly idea.)  Hallelujah! - anything that can give her more good days is a good thing! (Especially since she said the side effects haven't been too bad, given the givens.)

The party was Sunday afternoon. All of my siblings and many of their children came. I talked to everyone, then stood back for a minute to just watch. It was a proper grad party. There was a baby to be passed around, and a couple of four year-olds having a contest to see how high they could jump. Over at this table, the older adults gathered to share stories. Over there, young adults gathered; our children, who are children no more. The little ones belong to them now - my siblings and I are the older ones, the grandparents (and proud of it, thank you very much!). Our offspring have turned out to be competent adults, done with school, in long-term relationships, having children, holding down jobs, buying houses.

It was clear that, sometime in the last decade, the torch of life had been passed. And once again, though I thought I'd been watching for it, I'd missed it. *Dang!* Time is a funny beast. The days seem long, but the weeks and years pass by at an ever-increasing rate. And I think Frankl was right when he said, in Man's Search for Meaning:

In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

From this one may see that there is no reason to pity the old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that: Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past -the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized -and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past."

It's not that my siblings and I have already reached the point where our futures are devoid of possibilities, but our harvests are certainly well under way. I do treasure my memories, love to sift through the past to find the places I did well, the times I made a difference in someone's life. It's comforting to know these deeds won't be erased, even if they won't be remembered - they have become the foundation blocks upon which the future is being built.

These were good thoughts to carry with me on Sunday's long drive home.

4th of July

Sometimes, I swear the holiday weeks seem longer and are harder to get through than the regular ones. It's the change in routine. Take this last week, for instance.

Monday was a regular Monday.
Tuesday was Friday, since it was the day before a day off. I like Fridays.
Wednesday was Saturday, since I had the day off. I really like Saturdays.
Thursday was Monday again. This is where it got tough. The second Monday of the week, doubly hard to get my keister into the office.
Friday was, thankfully, Friday.

I did enjoy the 4th. Sandwiched in the middle of the week as it was, I initially planned to keep it pretty low-key, but it turned into a bigger day than I'd planned.

What started it was a yen for baked beans like I remember from when I was a kid. You can't just make those kind of baked beans for just one person, so I picked up the phone and invited over some friends.

With seven people now coming for dinner, I got in touch with my inner chef. I woke up on Wednesday inordinately proud of myself for remembering to set the beans to soak the night before. I dug out some bacon from the freezer, chopped up an onion, mixed in all the ingredients and set it in the crock pot to stew for eight hours.

An hour or so later, I walked into the kitchen and inhaled, expecting the intoxicating aroma of cooking beans, bacon and onion. The stench which assailed my nostrils was not what I was expecting. Clearly, the bacon had gone bad. *Sadness*

Fortunately for my taste buds, I'd thrown an extra bag of navy beans in the cart when I was at the store; a little digging in the pantry uncovered enough ingredients to start over. Looking at the bag of hard beans, I knew my relatively cool and easy afternoon had just come to an end. Beans CAN be cooked in a day, but it involves hours of simmering on the stove top.

That's OK. What's the 4th of July without a little sweat? I spent the next few hours chopping for potato salad and anxiously tracking the progress of the beans, turning up the heat to make sure they softened on schedule. I chopped and precooked the bacon this time. (At least that way, if it was bad, I wouldn't have spoiled the entire new batch of beans.) I browned the onions in the grease, tossed the whole mix back into the crock pot and let it cook on high for the remainder of the afternoon.

Amazingly enough, it all came off (with a little help from my friends, who brought the watermelon and other desserts). Beans, burgers, potato salad, and chips - dinner tasted like a 4th of July dinner SHOULD taste. My inner eight year-old was in heaven.

Crawl Space

There's a guy at work who accuses me of being too quiet. Too head-down, too hard working, not enough socializing, not enough partying.

I'll admit he's got a point, and boy, oh boy, did I show him this past weekend. Yup. I spent Saturday insulating my crawl space. Can't get much better than that. (Can I????)

It was AWFULLY warm here in Kansas City, and I definitely didn't want to work outside, so I turned my attention to my list of inside to-dos. The oldest item on the list was insulating the crawl space under my no-longer-new addition. I've had all the piece parts I need to do the project for months (the original plan was to do it last winter), so there was no excuse there.

I still didn't want to do it. But, sometimes, you just gotta buckle down and do something, and so I did.

I got out my handy-dandy kitchen stool and crawled up into the opening, glad I'd been doing situps for these past few months. (It took some core strength to get across the lip of the old windowsill.) As I shimmied in, I had my eyes peeled for spiders and other small residents, but found no evidence they lived there, to my surprise. Guess there's not much to eat, even for a bug, in the space.

Encouraged, I took some measurements, wriggled my way back out, and spent about thirty minutes making little foam boards out of big foam boards.I tossed the boards back into the hole, grabbed some Liquid Nails and started to put the foam into place. Now, I can't remember who told me to use Liquid Nails to hold the foam in place, but they obviously never tried it with any size piece at all, because it didn't work. It would hold for just a moment, and then the piece would plop back down. I didn't let this deter me. I just started making little braces out of the extra foam I'd helpfully brought along with me, and wedged it into place.

Went back out, and got the expandy-foam-stuff to spray along the edges and in the cracks. It's fun to spray that stuff and watch it work, but boy is it a mess if it doesn't get where it belongs. It sticks to EVERYTHING. Fortunately, I'd learned this from past experience and (mostly) managed to avoid getting it on my skin. As a bonus, I'm pretty sure, between the wedges and the expanding foam, my work will stay in place. (When that stuff hardens, it STICKS!)

As I worked, the air grew stiller; I figured it was a good way to know I would see some benefit from my efforts. Three hours later, (covered in rock dust, which sticks very effectively to sweat, in case anyone needed to know) I was done. I have an impressive set of bruises on my knees and left butt cheek (who knew I lean more to one side than the other?) from spending too much time crawling around on the gravel, but they're victory bruises. Received in the line of duty.

When I got back to my list, I checked off "insulate the crawl space" with extra relish. Added an extra check mark just because I could.

Who needs a party to feel good?