Cabbages and Kings

Lots has been happening here at the Frazer “homestead”, as a friend called it today. Summer has set in and we are surrounded by weeds, biting insects, and oppressive heat. The mosquitoes are relentless. The chiggers are worse. It was 100 degrees on the porch at 5:30 this evening. I have to battle my way through knee high weeds to the garden, and when I do, I see nothing but a few scraggly peppers, two cute but dwarfish sunflowers and a bunch of miniature limas perishing in the heat and sun. Only the zinnias are thriving, providing us with a steady two or three pretty white flowers each day to cheer us up when we begin to wonder why, oh why, do stay here?

Because we can’t afford to leave! That’s why. I’d be sipping lemoncino by the quay in Vernazza if I had my druthers. But let us be realistic. Europe is not in our future; a bountiful Fall garden is (knock on wood). One good thing about Florida is that you can plant almost everything you planted in the Spring, again in the Fall. So today I mixed up a  tub full of gorgeous crumbly planting mix to start my seeds in. Which means I spent the morning sifting cow manure through a screen. (Oh, Italy. Oh, the lemon trees and the sun setting over the Mediterranean…) Tomorrow, in go the seeds, and we’re off. I have a spectacular plan for improvements to the garden plot, with three long, wide beds surrounded by a narrow band of herbs, cutting flowers and a few vining crops on the west end. It’s all marked out in string and croquet wickets in the yard. Now Matt just has to dig it all up for me. (I’ve said it before: I’m just the artist, Matt’s the muscle.)

But right now, the muscle is in bed with a bad fever, poor guy. The girls had it last week; Lillian’s is lingering. I’m hoping I’m not next. My throat does feel kinda itchy…And I am working on an average of five hours of sleep each night this week (Lillian is a night owl; Bea is an earlybird. I have not figured out how to live with this yet.)
So I’ve also been doing double duty today, and you could tell. Lillian threw a fit about going to sleep at naptime, threw a fit about waking up from naptime, threw a fit about a snack, about going outside, about her milk, her clothes, her bedtime story. She even threw a fit about the color toothpaste she wanted to use. It takes two people twenty four hours a day to raise this child. Meanwhile, Beatrice is tottering around the house bestowing smiles and gentle little greetings on everyone: “hi papa” “hi dog” “walk, walk.” Oh, I love them so…

And yes, we got a dog. Her name is Kate. She’s a hound mix (we think part Pott Hound?) puppy. She’s a pretty brindle color, and she’s very gentle and sweet. But she has been throwing up all over the house, until today, when her deworming medication finally took effect. (Oh, the morning cappuccino and croissant, the strolls under the pines on the Palatine Hill…)

Ah, maybe I’ll flip though my photos of our European trips before I go to bed. Or maybe I’ll make a cup of tea and relax with a book of poetry. Or maybe I’ll just go to bed. I could get in a good six hours if I start now. But before I do, I’ll tiptoe in and say a little prayer over both those sleeping little heads and feel that it really is all worth it after all.

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I wrote most of this a couple weeks ago, so some of the details are old, but the idea is the same.

Tonight while I was rocking Beatrice to sleep and singing one of my favorite hymns, Be Thou My Vision, I was surprised by the line in the last stanza that reads, “High King of heaven, my victory won/ May I reach heaven’s joys, Oh bright Heaven’s Sun.” I’ve sung it a thousand times, but I had never thought to wonder at the military metaphor. Am I fighting a battle in this life? Some days, it sure seems like it.

Today has been somewhat of a rough day. Despite our hard work, a stroll in the garden revealed problems: end rot on the tomatoes, bolting basil plants, splitting watermelons, blossoms dropping (no honeybees to pollinate), and two cantalopes devoured by deer. Matt has been tediously peeling wallpaper in a tiny bathroom for two days, and I’ve been tired and irritable. Both girls were fussy all day, probably sensing that their parents were in low spirits. In fact, it’s kind of been a rough year so far. It seems like every couple weeks we hear bad news of one kind or another: death, depression, divorce, high prices and drought, sickness and violence. And I don’t even watch the news.

It’s easy for me to start to fear and despair when discouragement seems so overwhelming. But I have to remember that this type of fear—worry and anxiety—is never from God. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” I don’t pretend to know why God allows evil in this world, why He doesn’t stop the innocent from suffering, or why He doesn’t come back and fix everything right now, as I often wish He would. But what I do know is that He didn’t lie to us about it. Jesus said that in this world we would have trouble. But He also said he would give us His peace even in that trouble. (Perhaps even because of the trouble; at least that has been my own experience.)

Matt and I were talking a couple nights ago about some troubles that have been on our mind lately and how difficult it can be to come back from a sense of despair. I won’t speak for him, but I know I have felt despair sink its claws so deeply into my flesh I thought it would crush me. How do you stand up under that? How do you let light and hope come back into a cold, hard heart? How do you let love conquer that spirit of fear? I believe that only the Holy Spirit can do it, because the Holy Spirit is Love. Only self-sacrificing Love can pry our fingers off the tight little bundles of our own self-centered thoughts. We feed on those thoughts like hungry spiders in dark hole: our guilt over the past, our dread of the future, our sins, our disappointed hopes, our slighted expectations, but what we are feeding on is our own life, and probably the lives of those we love. Only Love can bring us back to the fresh air, the light and the real nurishment of the Gospel: the good news that One has laid down His life for us so that we might live. And He said, “He who tries to save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will save it.” It may sound strange, but have you ever heard of anyone who has poured their life out for others and feels that she has wasted it?

One way, we thought, that God can free us from despair is through our imagination. In the darkness of fear and doubt it is hard to think of anything else, but once you can imagine the light the darkness is no longer complete. I sometimes think of a beautiful passage in one of my favorite books, The Lord of the Rings, when Sam and Frodo are deep in the darkness of Mordor, tired and thirsty and almost without hope. But Sam looks up into the night sky and sees through the clouds a single white star:

Nothing changed for Sam, except that he could imagine a place untouched by the darkness around him, and it gave him hope.

C. S. Lewis once wrote a poem in which a jailer pronounces: “The proper study of prisoners is prison.” Of course that is what the jailer would say; it makes his job a far sight easier. I grew up studying jailbreaks, in the form of novels and poems and stories, and I think these fictions have done more than anything to pull me out of times of despair. I could read about Eowyn facing down the Nazgul and feel courage coming back to me. I read of Laura and Mary Ingalls beaming with thankfulness over a single stick of candy for Christmas and be more grateful for the bounty I had. I could follow Edmund up to the face of Aslan and know what it was like to be forgiven for a terrible betrayal, or bury my face in his mane with Lucy and feel the joy of a childlike love. Stories, good stories, give us the ability to imagine and articulate the way life could be and often the way it should be. This gives us hope, and hope is a very powerful thing.

Stories are also powerful because they enter us into a great conversation that has stretched over time and space throughout history. They put us in touch with other people. God didn’t make us to be alone, and it’s easy to get depressed when you feel isolated. That’s also why I think real working community is another antidote for anxiety and despair. Stay-at-home mothers are particularly susceptible to loneliness, I think, because we are no longer connected to other people through our work. We can have friends we see at church, even small Bible studies, or at the park with the kids, but we don’t usually depend on each other or work together. We don’t usually cook together, help each other with cleaning or gardening, sew or knit or make things together (unless you count scrapbooks, which I think are a highly disturbing manifestation of post-modern boredom, but that’s another post). Without shared work and shared living, it’s easy to feel alone and disconnected. Even people you’ve known all your life can be strangers if you share no common work and depend on each other for nothing.

Real community is built on practical, earthy, everyday sort of relationships that foster longterm openess, trust, and respect. When you are working with people, when you are open with them, share food and stories and hopes and troubles with them, your mind and energy are taken up with the life of the community, and there isn’t much left for fear, boredom and self-pity. And inevitably, a community will teach you humility and forgiveness, without which we can’t hope to be forgiven ourselves (and that would be something to despair about). This might sound far-fetched in our disconnected, egocentric culture, but I think it’s what we really need, and I think our families and our churches can lead the way.

In the end, we know we’ll have trouble in this life. But God does not leave us comfortless; He gives us stories, and He gives us each other. I’ll close this rambling with one of my favorite poems by Jane Kenyon, who was no stranger to melancholy herself:

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through the chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

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Late this afternoon, as I was waging war against a small army of tomato hornworms–nasty creatures–and a great multitude of aphids, I was delighted to have the battle interrupted (I was winning) by thunder and rain. Rain! A full fifteen minutes of beautiful life-giving rain!

I can’t say I was surprised, being that I have been obsessively checking the weather channel website ever since I saw that magical phrase “precipitation: 50%” appear on the 10-day forecast. Every cloudless day it edged closer, until last night when the clouds began to gather. All day the air was heavy, and we kept looking at the sky…

I am not exaggerating when I say that I don’t think it has rained here in six weeks. I know it has only rained three or four times since we planted the garden, and that was early March. So much for May flowers–really: I planted them and those few brave souls that poked their heads above ground were soon fried crisp. We’ve been diligently watering the garden every other day, but it always seemed so dry. There is nothing like real rain to make everything grow.
So when the showers came this afternoon the girls and I stood out on the porch watching. Lillian danced about, Bea laughed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t last long, and we got less than half an inch, but it felt like a new beginning. Rain now seems like a possibility again.

And the heaviness of the day has been lifted. The night air is cool and sweet smelling as I sit by the open window. I hope the plants are enjoying it as much as I am.

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One of the best things about having a three year old is the daily glimpses one gets into a little mind totally free of cliche. Language is so new to her that she puts her thoughts together in very original ways. The title of this post is one example. Here are some more:

Last year, when we lived in an apartment, we often took Lillian swimming in the kiddie pool, which was shallow and round and almost always empty but for us. One day as we were putting on our swim suits, she asked, “Are we going to the cat pool?” It took me a minute to figure out that she had been hearing “kitty pool” all that time, and imagining that she was sneaking a dip in the pool just the right size for the neighborhood strays.

The other day, she thought she saw a “red robin-head” pecking in the front yard. Another day she was pretending to be a “jawalla monkey,” which lives in the trees of Australia and carries its babies on its back.

The big dipper, she told me, is a big mound of stars.

And my favorite: A few days ago, Lillian got in trouble for something she did while we were working in the garden. She knew I was angry with her, and as I was cleaning up she came to me with a sort of contrite, tentative look on her face. “Look Mama,” she said, holding up a couple of weeds tipped with tiny purple flowers. “I picked these beautiful flowers. I picked them to joy me up.”

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A quick post before I go wake up Beatrice to take her to the doctor for the second time this week, poor girl.

Here is a picture of my first garden success story: bush blue lake green beans. They shot out of their toilet paper roll seed starters and haven’t slowed down since. Big busy leaves and a host of little white flowers on their way to becoming beans. And the cucumbers in the foreground don’t look too bad either. I have to admit that I, suburbanite that I am, kind of doubted that anything would really come of all this planting nonsense, but it’s nice to know that this photosynthesis stuff still works. There may be hope for the world after all.

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Throughout most of my life I have run into periods of restlessness and wanderlust. Everything seems dull and I just want to get out: do something, break free, drive too fast listening to counting crows or patty griffin, or someone with guts. When I was a kid, before I could drive, I would rearrange the furniture. When I got older, I’d dye my hair some absurd color, or retreat to my room and write long rambling entries in my journal, paint a picture, or write bad poetry. Then I turned 18 and found how intoxicating freedom can be. (Not literally, of course–don’t worry Mom.) I could go anywhere, do pretty much anything, and I still got restless. So I moved from school to school and place to place, until marriage gave me a partner in crime, with whom I’ve lived in four cities in the past eight years.

I’m pretty busy now, with two kids and a big house and garden to keep up, but that old wanderlust still comes upon me sometimes. Only now I do crazy things like get a haircut, or make graham crackers. And now, as is usual when I feel restless, my daughter interrupts my solipsism with her own simple needs, and I have to snap out of it. So I’ll get to the point. As a manifestation of my momentary restlessness, I’m changing the name of this blog. I never really liked Piers Plowman anyway, and I do like “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and I seem to say this line to myself often these days: “the time has come, the time is now, to talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings.” So there it is.

And now I must go rock a feverish baby and comfort the fears of a two year old while I listen to the rain on the roof and the thunder in the sky, and think of something else entirely.

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Part I: The other day, Matt and I were working on a budget out on a park bench by the river in Jacksonville. As evening fell, it began to get cooler, and we jotted down a few quick notes to remind us of some things we needed to discuss later on. The list looked like this:

Dog

Chickens

Vacation

Beer supplies

Gun

I suddenly had a vision of myself in plaid pajama pants, imitation crocs, and a camouflage field coat, and I knew that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong…
Part II: Out in the family room, which is empty but for a wire bin of dirty shoes, a portable crib with pine needles wedged in the wheels, and a length of clothesline holding a foul smelling feather bed, sits an assortment of about 200 seedlings growing out of a variety of plastic trays, toilet paper rolls, wads of newspaper and recycled tofu containers. This is a sad, sad snapshot of my current life.

Gardeners, so I hear, are a thrifty bunch, and that bodes well for my future as a gardener. (I use the future tense because my gardening endeavors so far have produced only a handful of small side salads and one small but exceptionally delicious chard tart. Oh, and one lunch portion of cooked kale.) In this, my long awaited debut season, I have forgone the fancy peat pots and mini greenhouses, the all-in-one self watering seed starters, and have planted my spring crop in a motley assortment of homemade biodegradable containers. So now, every morning Matt or I will carefully tote each try of seeds out onto sawhorses in the sunniest part of the back yard to give them their requisite six hours of sun, and then tote them all back in for the night. It’s become quite a hobby of mine to check on them every couple of hours to see how they’ve grown. The tall spindly collards, elegant tomatoes and peppers, stubby basil and bright pink chard take their time, but the beans and zucchini erupt from their cardboard tubes and throw out bright new leaves all in one day’s work. I’m still waiting on the cucumbers, the winter squash and the melons, but suspect one more warm day will do the trick.

So watching plants grow has become my favorite pastime. Another is digging in the dirt. I would post a picture of my most recent accomplishment, but I am afraid it would not inspire the high praise it is due, being that it looks like three long piles of dirt. And that is essentially what it is: three long piles of dirt. But it’s what is in the dirt that counts, and that is about 75 pieces of Red Pontiac seed potatoes, all sending out their creeping sprouts into the dark soil, getting ready to make lots and lots and lots of new Red Pontiac eating potatoes. I am quite proud of these dirt piles, being that I dug them myself with a shovel. Their lines are so neat, the paths around them so level and uniform, their tops so smooth and rounded. I almost forget the backbreaking labor that put them there. Perhaps this is because most of the back breaking labor was Matt’s. Our system, sans tractor, rototiller or mule, is for him to pull out all the big roots and loosen up the soil, while I come behind and shape the beds. I’m the artist; he’s the muscle.

But it’s still hard work to shovel all that soil. All that work is the reason for the pile of muddy shoes, and for the pine needles in the portable crib. You can’t shovel dirt with a baby on your hip. You can do just about everything else but not shoveling. The Native Americans would have just tied Beatrice to a tree, but since I have the crib, I might as well use it. Unfortunately, I have to drag it a hundred yards or so down to the garden plot, across sandy patches, oak leaves, pine needles and various other yard debris. When you add Lillian’s filthy feet and the dirt and leaves and rocks she “feeding” to her “aminals”, you get a fairly dirty crib and a fairly dirty baby (not to mention the dirt-encrusted toddler).

But it is good to be outside, good to feel the sun on my back, good to be doing meaningful work. No matter that almost no one in the history of the world did this kind of work without draft animals, mechanical or otherwise. I feel that some sort of line was drawn, some Rubicon crossed, when I started to wish for a mule. But let’s not dwell on such dark thoughts, but move on to, well, to more serious threats to my Fashion and Sophistication.

Part III: Yes, that was me you saw walking down Baker Road with a brand new plastic children’s golf set I’d snatched from the jaws of the garbage truck. No, I didn’t go walking on Tuesday morning on purpose just because it was trash day. Really, I didn’t know; it was just a stroke of good luck.

You’d be amazed what people throw away. On the aforementioned walking trip I also saw lawn chairs, a pair of cowboy boots, plastic storage bins, particle board bookshelves, and pretty good fairly used lumber. Unfortunately, my hands were full.

Matt and I have different philosophies on trash picking. I tend to draw the line at small items: electronics, dishes, CDs, foodstuffs. But Matt only seems to get embarrassed about the large items. A weekly test of fortitude has come in the form of huge piles of salvage (read: trash) out in front of a house next to the building where our church meets on Sunday mornings. Someone died, we suspect, and another someone is remorselessly throwing everything in the house away. So the question is: Do you stop and look and risk the censure of your more prosperous neighbors? or do you pass up on a potential gold mine of free stuff? If you are a Frazer, you summon up the courage and tightfistedness of your ancient clan, and start to dig.

Besides an array of office supplies, picture frames, baskets, alabaster bookends in the shape of stallions, ammunition (yes, ammunition), and other small items, that particular vein produced a futon with matching feather bed and a couple of interesting iron railings. Ok, so the mattress stinks and the feather bed is a little musty, but I’m working on it. A few days in the sun and they’ll be as good as new.

I have begun to think to think of trash picking almost as an obligation. Scavengers are always necessary in nature, and this particular scaveging is actually a highly sophisticated social protest. We are protesting against rampant materialism, ubiquitous advertising, wastefulness, and never-ending flood of cheap disposable junk. Or we just can’t bear to see useable stuff go to the landfill.

Trash Picking, I have decided, is an honorable pastime: thrifty, resourceful, and environmentally responsible. Our only regret is that our little Camry cannot accommodate the larger items we are constantly spotting. And that’s another place that mule would sure come in handy.

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Yesterday we harvested our first garden produce: a lovely salad of leaf lettuce, baby spinach and swiss chard. (The hard, tasteless winter tomatoes came from somewhere in south Florida by way of the local produce stand.) But the greens were delicious, and I’m not sure we didn’t get a little extra protein in the form of a few aphids. Just one of the bonuses of pesticide-free gardening…

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As I write by an open window, I can smell the wet earthy smells of a dewy morning. I imagine I can make out the particular scent of greens in the garden, but I know that’s my imagination. Our little plots look so small from up here on the second floor, but they were hard work to put in, and I’m proud of them. We have two four-by-four gardens near the house, and two more planned for as soon as Matt is done with school this week. We have spinach, kale, collards, broccoli, parsley, scallions, marigolds, swiss chard, and some unidentified sprouts we found growing out of the compost pile and couldn’t bear to throw out. I’ve found that the life of plants seems much more precious to me now that I am trying to coax it out of seeds and tiny sprouts.

Lillian has a great time helping in the garden. She has her own shovel, gloves, hoe and pink plastic watering can. She has a few “seed-el-ings” of her own, and she checks on them daily. She has a good memory for names of plants and flowers, even getting into a heated argument with her Grandma over the name of a certain flower growing near the back door. (Lillian said impatien, Grandma said periwinkle. Grandma was right, but still, I like that Lillian cares.)

We are also attempting to plant some bigger crops down at the end of the back yard in a sunny clearing that was intended for a big garden back when Matt’s parents lived here. We have a row of 100 onions, and a box of strawberry starts waiting in a cardboard box. But it’s hard work with a shovel! We may have enlisted the help of a man with a tractor to break up the big plot, clearing the way for corn, sunflowers, melons, squash and beans this summer. It’s all new to us, but very exciting.

And will Lillian eat all this produce? Resoundingly, yes. She gobbles greens at the table. And the other day she characteristically tried to define “treats,” asking me exactly what that meant. I said it’s anything you really like, but especially sweet things. She said, “Oh, like kale, and donuts.”

Here she is with her seedlings:

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Here is the dumpling recipe to go with the chili. These are really good and make the chili fantastic.

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1 cup fine yellow cornmeal

2 t baking powder

1/2 t salt

3 T cold unsalted butter, cut into 5 or so pieces

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

2/3 cup milk

When chili is ready, mix dry ingredients into a large bowl. Add butter and rub it in with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Mix in cheese. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add milk. Stir just until combined and let rest for a couple minutes.

Divide batter into 8 or 9 even lumps. Drop into simmering liquid (chili) and cover. Let simmer 10 minutes without peeking!

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