Tender Dirt

My New Home

(& Garden) on the internet is here ~ or more precisely http://tenderdirt.blogspot.com/. 

See you there!

Remember This

Plants in my Father's Mother's Garden:

Marigolds around the lamp-post, Black Eyed Susans everywhere.  Both the house and car were mustard yellow.  One refined yellow rose bush, some shrubs trimmed into balls.  A few pots of geraniums my grandfather kept alive over winters.  He worked hard. 

After he died, each Mother's Day, it was my job to plant the marigolds.  In fall, my mother and I would go over  to the house and collect the seeds.

Plants in my Mother's Mother's Yard:

Rugosa Roses -- both pink and yellow.  The yellow ones bloomed tiny blooms in giant clusters.  I look and look for the names of these roses, but they were as old as the homesteads they were taken from (1870s & 1880s). 

Daisies.  Poppies (blood red).  Plenty of peonies (as befits Ka nsas).  Purple and White Phlox everywhere, even right under trees..  Vinca.  Elm Trees (now dead).   Nasty arborvitae, cluttered with bag worms.  Sunflowers (like weeds).  Iris for corsages.  Daffodills, maybe.  Bridal Wreath Spirea, hedging the "woods" by the "creek" -- still the most lovely thing I've ever seen and the smell (like vanilla and powder and antiques).

If I didn't have the internet

I wouldn't have a place to run to, shouting  --  hawk!

I was hurrying -- making coffee -- a pile of dirty dishes to the left of me, a pile of Five Year Old art supplies to the left.  I stared out the west window at my two chickens, and saw Perpetua (the loosely feathered and aggressive crevecour) spread her blue-black wings and Bawk. Fidelia (the peckish salmon favorelle) dashed inside the coop.

Out of the pale sky a hawk swooped down, herself not much bigger than the chickens, but her wings wide and perfect.  She didn't get the chickens, of course, who much loved are under the protection of plastic net.  Coolly the hawk recovered from the blow to her ego, perched herself in the V of my teenaged maple tree.

While chickens and hawks may be much the same size, the difference is decidedly in their wings.

~

But in order to have the internet, I may have to switch the home for this site over to Blogger.  I will (hopefully) be posting a new URL in the near future. 

Pe(s)ts

It is no accident that pets and pests are one letter away from each other.

We have perpetual free-range rodent.  We call him Squeaky.  I don't think he is a rat (too small) yet too dark for the average mouse.  He evades traps, springing them but surviving.  He only has a stub of tail (did it come off in a trap?).  He lives behind a dryer: a safe warm place.

He is cheeky.  He seems unafraid.  The five year old stands next to the dryer and issues ultimatums.  "You can only come out when I say it is okay!  We won't invite you back!"

She squeals in mock fear when she sees him.  "It's SQUEAKY!" She knows he is nothing to be afraid of.  I've started letting her watch those gladiators: Tom and Jerry.

We also have a colony of moths. (I must go look up the proper group name for moths).   Grain-eaters, perhaps.  Maybe cloth eaters, for they hover around the closets.  I have a paticular interest in moths, feeling myself to be rather flighty.  The husband is always lurching for them, hoping for a kill.  But moths are at once elegant and common.  I like them better than butterflies.

"But don't you think," I defend them to the husband, "they have some sophisticated lovely moth culture we can't at this moment begin to understand?  What does it mean to have such mysterious moonycreatures in our house?"

He rolls his eyes.  "They are moths.  They need to die."

Okay, I say, we can get a cat.  So this week to the shelter to pick out another creature to share the home of the mysterious rodent, the moths, the three people, and  the creatures un-named and un-seen: hopefully this new housemate will be more pet than pest, with a dash of hunter, but one never knows.

North Wind

Yesterday turned terrible, so cold that the five year old , though dressed in faux fur and looking like a baby polar bear, went outside and turned right back to come in.  I didn't get to the garden or the chickens.

The wind, which started mid morning, was mean and loud, moaning through everything.  The polar bear child stood at the screen door, watching it like a show.

"I want to listen to the music.'

Some of that Good Chicken Love

You all should see me, step by step reclaiming an inch or two of life.  I have a list of "things to do to not collapse from grief" (for I am a person given to strong emotions even in kind circumstances).  On my list is to go out to the chickens, Perpetua and Fidelia, and other than just feeding and watering them, give them some of that good chicken love.

They hatched in March, so this is their first cold season.  Oh they are neglected -- if neglected means fed watered, inspected, let to hang out all day in their little yard with the mangy cat staring them down from their netted chicken-yard-roof.  They don't react to said mangy cat anymore.  The cat has no chance against their fat sloppy pecky chickeness now that they are grown.   

And each time I feel guilty that my chickens get no love, I have only to recall images of how factory chickens live.  Then a backyard chicken keeper, even if not a doter, can feel saintly. 

Each morning, still in my bed clothes, hair still rubberbanded in clumps on top of my head, I grab a handful of seed and scratch, skate across the deck and yard (just a straight diagonal) and cluck "mes poulets!  girls".  They jump at the sight of me (I don't dare go out without food for them, even just table scraps).  Sometimes I feed them weeds.  These are such useful girls they even eat creeping charlie.

The five year old calls them trash cans.

Today, on the way out clucking and cooing, hand filled with scratch,  the air felt warmer, tolerable.. Something like sunlight (I hardly remember it -- sun?) is peaking through silver clouds as I write.   I'm going to go take those girls out, one at a time, and get me some chicken love. I'll pet them a bit, inspect their talons, their second eyelids.

Perpetua and Fidelia  have never been too cuddly (not like my pal T's girls, who sit on laps at parties, beer bottles clanking all around them, bonfire stoked). But while not wildly affectionate, they do know who feeds them, and there is no use having chickens unless one can particpate in chicken zen. 

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Chickens were good enough for Shakespeare (who wrote a chicken sonnet).  Good enough for WCWilliams . . . yes, so much depends.

I've lost the baby, but just coming back here to write I will get back here and write some more.  Gardening might just be the one true happiness, but surely a whole lot of work.