the poet in you

The shame of it all, to just completely stop blogging and not even poke my head in once. I don't even have the excuse of having an eventful two weeks. I did have a busy, busy, busy few weeks of bookselling though. I even let myself believe, for a brief moment, that it was not at all seasonal, that droves of people returning to school had no bearing on my good fortune. I played with the idea that this is just the way it was going to be from here on out. Goodbye vet clinic, goodbye dowdy receptionist smock. Goodbye forever!

Then this week happened and the momentum was lost. Now instead of packaging books for shipment, I have many dozens to list and that requires bucket loads of motivation and focus and everything I am lacking at the moment. I am interested in doing just about anything but listing books. I am interested, for instance, in what's cooking. Literally. And I wonder if I can actually wait until Michael comes home at midnight to eat? I think not.

It's chicken molè, folks, and who can wait for that? My smell-o-meter is in overdrive because the crockpot has been simmering the good stuff for a solid 5 hours so far. The aroma of molè has permeated the entire house and I cannot escape it, the anticipation has taken hold of every twisty nook of my brain. I even  thought to myself that it would be a downright shame if anything unthinkable were to happen to me this evening before I sat down to dinner and dear lord who I've steadfastly refused to entrust with any faith o' mine whatsoever, if something is going to happen to me tonight pleez o pleez let it happen after I enjoy this  molè. And the Spanish rice with little green peas. The green peas that come in the tiniest little can that makes Michael laugh everytime he looks at it cuz it's so small. If I can enjoy my dinner tonight then I promise to consider the existence of perhaps not a Lord God, or a Son of God but I will at least consider the possible existence of a Mole God. Amen.

I came home with a few boxes of books from the sale yesterday. There was an oddly hostile couple that I had to contend with but they left earlier than me so it wasn't all bad. At the opposite end of the spectrum there was a rather nice book scout who offered me a book that he was passing up. In the end we both passed over it but it was a friendly gesture.

I found two books that I'll keep. The first is a very clean copy of Joyce Carol Oates novel, The Falls. I remember when it came out a few years back and I thought I'd like to read it. I haven't read any of her novels. The story gets moving quickly, the reader learns right from the start that a young couple go to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon where the groom commits suicide by defenestration (I think). I'll find out soon enough.

The other is a hardcover copy of the vegetarian cookbook The Greens. It isn't the greatest copy, there is some soiling and some mildew but I've always liked browsing through it at the bookstore. The recipes aren't too complicated and I'm always looking for a new vegetarian dish. I have a very small repertoire.

There will be no gardening; still too hot. I told Michael that I felt like I was in the middle of battle, The Earth vs. The Sun and surely The Sun is winning, at least at this stage of the game. But hey, August IS HALFWAY OVER. Fall is right around the corner.

Keep on reading and stay cool, friends!

I just wrapped George Soper's Horses: Celebration Of The English Working Horse for shipment. A beautiful book. Rushing never helps. I had to use an oversized box, I needed paper wadding and pleaded Michael to fetch some from the car so I could remain pant-less. I am usually fully clothed while packaging but hey, I didn't feel like I even had time to put pants on this morning (there's simply not enough time to do everything that I need or want to do). Then I dropped a roll of wrapping paper behind a fairly heavy bookcase. Michael moved it and got that for me. Then he vacuumed behind said bookcase. He's probably glad that I'm leaving to a booksale soon. An event which, I assure you, I will be wearing pants at.

I have no business blogging but am making a concerted effort to create some continuity with my blog posts. So there it is. Life. Half-naked and rushing right through it.

A few drops of rain fell yesterday afternoon. The clouds came en masse at around four. Michael pointed it out but I stubbornly refused to acknowledge both clouds and remark. I kept my fingers moving along the keyboard. "What, you don't believe me?" he asked. "Clouds don't mean rain. And besides, it's a hundred stinkin' degrees. So what if it rains? It's still hot. It'll be like a sauna out there."

Twenty minutes later I was standing at the compost bin trying to imagine how many pounds of kitchen scrap it's gonna take to fill the thing when I felt the first little pelts of rain. My paranoid mind could hardly enjoy the pleasure, it was too busy playing a short film in which the hoe that I was holding acts as a lightining rod and knocks me off my feet, one shoe flies free from my foot, the other remains tied  but smolders at the ankle. The other scenario is that the compost bin posts are the conduit. I make sure not to lean on the wire surrounding the pile of cantaloupe rind, eggshells and basil stems.

Esperanza came and stood close. She can hear thunder miles and miles away. We sat outside for a short while in our little covered area and listened to the heavy drops hit the dry dust. Any break from this heat wave is a relief. We went in and within an hour it was coming down steady. Michael left, driving to work instead of bicycling. It was just me and the dogs. Rainfall is a good sound to spend time alone with. I wish it was raining now.

It was a weekend of shameless dumpster diving. Well, one morning really. I can't even remember which day it was, maybe Friday, maybe Saturday. I was driving down the street and saw a cabinet/armoire sitting by the curb. There are all sorts of goodies curbside this week because our neighborhood got the notice that the city will pick up unwanted large items at no cost. Naturally I pulled over immediately and opened the rear door of my car and got to work. The armoire got stuck halfway so I called Michael.

He was half asleep when he answered.

"Michael. I am putting a very large piece of furniture in the back of my car. Get outta bed and come help me."

"Ummmm, yeah. Five minutes"

By the time he made it down the street I had worked the armoire loose and had slid it in at a most precarious angle. We met back at the house so he could unload it. I tell you, the man is gold, people. Pure gold. But he was not impressed with my find. His lack of enthusiasm made me doubt myself. Was I losing my touch? Part of me was afraid that I was simply trying to redeem myself for letting a leather club chair get away from me last year. It still comes up when I talk to Michael. He says I let it get away and  he's right. I did. I slowed down, eyed it and noticed a truck behind me doing the same thing. And I was right there at the curb but I drove on. When I turned around two and a half minutes later the chair was gone.

Over the weekend we gave the armoire a thorough cleaning. Michael primed it and reinforced the shelves, then we went to Home Depot for paint. Even after all that I couldn't read him. Did he like the armoire or not. I told him we could take of the doors and use it in the chicken coop, we could put nesting boxes in it. He was unmoved. But then he started painting and that did it.

We decided to keep the interior color the same. It's a sort of institutional green. It's a nice contrast to the exterior warm grey that we chose, Elephant Breath. I love paint colors. Making up names for paint colors is my secret dream job. He put a few coats of paint on and all the while kept saying how luscious the paint was. He totally got into it, maybe it was the fumes.

We're 99% done. All we need are handles and a way to latch the doors shut. There is an Anthropologie in town so we'll check out some of their hardware. They don't have a lot but what they do have is very unique.

The best thing about the armoire, besides its rockin' new color and reinforced shelves is that it holds....are you ready for this? It holds approximately 150 books. Oh yeah! one-five-o. This makes us both very, very happy.

Surfing the net is such a time killer. It is. Forty-five minutes can whip by in what seemed like only ten minutes. Each morning I check my email for new book orders, check the news and check out a few blogs that I like to read but it is inevitable that a diversion will arise. Such as the following...

While looking through my 'Bookmarked" sites I remembered how much I enjoyed this blog, Nova Scotia Island Journal. It's so dreamy, it looks like a fantasy camp and in fact, reminds me of Fantasy Island. Does anyone remember that? "Za plane! Za plane!", Tattoo would shout. Not long after his death, the seedy-side of Herve Villechaize life come to light. Shudder. But that aside, visitors to Fantasy Island could vacation anywhere, anytime. The one episode I remember was a woman who wanted to visit New England in the 1600. She ended up in Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials. A little more than she bargained for.

Here I have illustrated how easily I digress and wander off the given path. What I wanted to share was Nova Scotia Journal. Another blog with beautiful photographs is Day-Lab. There are some really very nice photos of wildlife, architecture and landscape.

I have yet to wrap todays orders for shipment. I haven't had breakfast. I haven't watered. If I sit here much longer I'm going to root right into this chair so I better get up and out!

The television weather person gave a heads-up to viewers last Friday. She reported that temperatures this week would hit the "triple digits with a vengeance". With a vengeance. That phrase has rattled around in my head all weekend. We did enjoy a few days of cooler weather, temperatures dipped down to the 90's but we've had week after week after week of triple digits. I don't know how much hotter it could get.

What this really means is that there will be no coop building until temperatures drop a little. We need to call the gas company so they can mark out where our gas lines are. We need to sink posts and I don't want to drive one through a gas line. We wouldn't be very popular with the neighbors if that happened. We'd be the people that 'made us evacuate our homes until the gas company could contain the leak' . So we'll wait a few weeks.

Book selling is a nice hot weather activity. I need to clear some space and am determined to post older stock on ebay this week. Probably some cookbooks, maybe some comic books. Last month I sold two great gardening books, both through Alibris. The first was The Moonlit Garden by Scott Ogden. I may have mentioned selling this book earlier. It was an unusual gardening book. It highlighted plants that had a presence at night, either by fragrance or bloom. There were lots of photos and it was a good size. I don't like books that are too heavy to hold and leaf through. The whole presentation was very appealing and the subject just a little unusual.

I also sold my signed and numbered copy of The Wild Braid by the poet Stanley Kunitz. This was a book of poetry, gardening and memoir. Kunitz was the Poet Laureate in 1974 and again in 2000. He was an ardent gardener and died at the age of 101 in 2006. I bought The Wild Braid years ago. I'd page through it from time to time. I never read it from cover to cover. It didn't resonate with me until I started gardening again at which point I found it difficult to read. The few passages that I lit upon were his meditations about his garden after his death. Who would take care of it? Would they change it? Should they change it? How would he like it to go on? It made me feel sad, the thought of leaving things behind, the things that you loved so much and devoted your life to. I could never wholly enjoy the book and am glad that someone sought it out. It was my best single sale of the year and we'll put the money to good use.

Going through the books to post on ebay is a little like strolling down a row of beans and picking out the best ones, the ones that lure you in. I pull one by one from the shelf and look it over and think,  "surly someone would like to take you home"'. Eventually they will find a new place, a place where someone step into the open the pages and get lost inside.

This summer was our first year gardening in Austin. Our garden started out as a very modest endeavor; it still is but we have visions of grandeur. We've enjoyed some success considering the record-breaking heat. It just seems like it is always hot. Most days are over 100 degrees so we've had our challenges. Michael and I took a stroll this morning and visited each little bed all the while discussing what we did right, wrong and what we would do different in the future.

Basil
The basil was very satisfying. We started with 4 small plants that we bought at the nursery. We now have a jungle of basil. We've had LOTS of pesto and a few dishes of roasted zucchini-basil. You really can't tell that I've clipped at least 6 cups worth of leaves from the plants. Not all at once but so far this summer I've probably collected a solid 6 cups. I added another 4 basil plants that I started from seed and they are also enormous.

All of the basil plants are mature and growing in a mixed 4x4 raised bed. The roots have made their way into the neighboring square foot plots and have grown so densely that they choke out anything else that grows close. I thought that with the raised bed the roots would want to travel downward, not sprawl out but that hasn't been the case with the basil. Next year we will grow all the basil from seed (no need to spend the extra money on plants) and we will "quarantine" it in it's own bed.

Peppers
The peppers have been under siege by ants and aphids for weeks now. I was slow to identify the pests and I think that the peppers are pretty much stunted now. I may be wrong, wouldn't that be wonderful?
I didn't realize that the ants and aphids had such a special relationship. The ants are like little cattle ranchers and the aphids are their herd. The ants enjoy the sweet excretion that the aphids release. They accumulate around the pepper blossoms. I was afraid to kill anything beneficial so I let them be but now that I know who's taken up residence in my pepper plants...Well, it's all out war.

Tomatoes
Hybrids vs. Heirloom. Simply put, I was seduced by the heirloom. I relished the thought of growing an open-pollinated  plant (pollination by insects, birds, wind), a plant that had been passed down through a family for generations, a plant with a history. I liked the imperfections that I saw, the cracking, the irregular skin color. Some, I imagined, probably had a natural hardiness specific to their geographic area. The hybrids, I thought, would be like growing clones. No variation, one just like the next. My plants would be exactly like my neighbor's, whose plants would be exactly like his dad's, whose plants would look exactly like his neighbor's. Little clones growing all over the country.

I've learned that there is something to be said for hybrids. They are hardy and disease resistant. They may even produce under adverse conditions such as unrelenting heat. We just picked our first tomato today from our Early Girl. She's fairly unassuming in her foliage. Not especially dense, not especially tall. But she produced for us a perfect little red globe of fruit. It is even in color with no cracks, no insect infestation. Our heirloom on the other hand, is very tall, leafy, lots of blossoms that wilt and die. She has not produced a single tomato. I still have hope. She reminds me of me last weekend when we took the neighbor's chicken coop apart. I can practically hear her panting and heaving in the heat. She just wants to sit a minute in a shady place to catch her breath. She's full of good ideas and intentions but just needs to summon the energy. Perhaps when it cools down a bit.

Zucchini/Squash
The zucchini/squash bed is beautiful. Unfortunately the plot has been invaded by enemy combatants. I looked out the window yesterday and saw that one of the squash plants was completely wilted and hugging the ground. I went to see what would have done this and found a vine borer in several stems. I don't know what to do about this. I removed the stem and hoped for the best. This morning it looked good but I can see similar looking holes in several stems and am preparing for the worst. Complete annihilation.  I'll have to do some reading and see what, if anything, can be done to prevent this in the future.

Miscellany
The marigolds are beautiful and growing strong. Next year? More, more, more. The cucumber vines and cantaloupe vines are just that. Vines. No fruit yet. We'll have to be patient. The eggplant leaves are regularly gobbled up by something. I never do see the creature, just the gnawed leaves. The cardoon seedlings have yet to get past the cotyledon stage. Next year I'll grow them in containers until they are more mature and a little stronger before putting them in the ground. I won't spend money on begonias again. We don't really have a good place for them and they look washed out. I'll put marigold or purple heart in their place.

In Summary

• Throw any preconceived ideas out the window. Gardening is organic, not fixed.
• Plant science in not all bad; hybrids are workhorses.
• The internet is a good place to gather information, a fellow garden is very often an even better source of information.
• What you learn in the garden is cumulative. You can apply what you've learned this season to next season.
• Worms and frogs are for good, not evil.

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A few weeks back Michael and I went down to Boggy Creek Farm. It is shamefully close, there is no excuse for not having made our way there sooner. But better late than never. The setting is so idyllic, you really feel like you are in another world and another time. The claim is that it is one of the oldest still existing homes in Austin. The family settled at the farmhouse in the 1830's.  It is a whitewashed Greek-revival design and currently occupied by the newest owners who purchased the home and farm in 1992. They have a market day every Saturday. You can see the work gloves are strung across the length of the porch and chickens roam everywhere. Enjoy the photos! I'm new to Flickr and still trying to work out all the kinks.