The drought ruins a few plantings

                                                 —but not all                                                    

by Pat Laster                                                                               

           The first cooler days of August last week—and the rain, plus a dose of nutrients––prompted a rejuvenation in part of the flora that surrounds Couchwood Manor. Showing WHITE were abelia blooms, an airplane plant blossom and, against maroon foliage, shamrock flowers.

            Different shades and hues of PINK turned up in a few Encore azalea blossoms, the long-blooming crape myrtle, oxalis, and Mom’s old hanging begonia.
           
             BLUE wandering jew, PURPLE monkey-grass blooms and beautyberries, FUCHIA dianthus, YELLOW lantana and lance-leaf coreopsis completed the rainbow of colors.

            Wait! I forgot the various colors of the rose moss/moss rose/portulaca. [See picture: disclaimer: not mine, but similar.]

             Also a community of white tent-capped toadstools sprang up in the lower south yard.
           
               Not everything in this hilltop acre survived the drought. It was easy to water the front and porch plants, but not so much the back where cannas are still green but have not bloomed. Oxalis and monkey grass planted around the yellow ash stump pretty well went dormant/brown or the foliage disappeared, leaving bulbs stacked like miniature minarets.

             For the second year running, two property-edged plants on the west died of thirst. Only one branch of a variegated privet survived. The neatnik neighbors will like that: they can encroach farther into my yard with their mower. Suits me: less for me to mow.

              Grandmother’s rock garden/our pet cemetery under a three-tree sassafras grove, is way out of reach of a hose. Earlier, optimistically, I planted lamb’s ear, a coreopsis, oxalis and tansy to the already- growing, single stalk of pink chrysanthemum and an ancient stand of day lilies.

              I carried water from the rain barrel (a number ten washtub) at the northwest corner of the house. Eventually, with no rain, I also let that bed go. Only the lilies and the mum stalk still show green. And a community of wild asters. All the leaves of the volunteer dogwood sapling are half ECRU. (Ecru—now there’s another color to add to the ones above!)

           The pear tree is so loaded that on one branch each pear touches another all the way down (or up; I took a picture for proof [for later]. This tree does its thing without benefit of pruning—except what nature does––or spraying. One fellow stopped by earlier in the month to see if I were going to “do anything” with the pears. If not, could he have them for preserves. I assured him I was.

          “You can have what’s already fallen,” I said, but he didn’t take me up on that. My disabled-vet cousin will likely be by again (I don’t see him until pear season) to get “a few for his wife.” He fills a five-gallon bucket!

         I’ve sometimes thought of adding a faucet on the north side, but since I can’t keep the ‘mum bed on the south alive and blooming, why add to my responsibilities?  P. Allen Smith I’m not!!

         Speaking of the south mum-and-lily bed, it is the worst-kept rectangle of them all. Located under the breakfast room windows, and close to the only outside faucet, it is built up a foot high with rock-and-mortar—Dad’s doing, I suppose. What it needs is a complete dig-out. Which may happen after I finish the kitchen painting project.

           Always plant for color, Janet Carson says, but isn’t GREEN a color?

c 2012 by Pat Laster dba lovepat press

 

Times spent in the kitchen: variation and near fiasco

by Pat Laster

 

                In a recent post, I said I didn’t spend much time in the kitchen. Meaning, I don’t ordinarily cook. But one day, I did, and it turned out swell [Slang: excellent]. 

          I needed a dessert for a family dinner I was hosting in a week or so. Frozen pear sauce (with peelings) from last year’s early crop lay in the chest freezer. [Advice to self: if you do this again, put the hard little knobs through the sausage grinder.] I thought: look for a recipe for applesauce cake; it should be the same thing, right?

                From a Piggott United Methodist Church cookbook, I found one. Since I already had ingredients similar to those in the recipe, I thought again: what about substituting what’s already in my pantry/fridge. I set all the needed supplies except eggs out on the countertop thinking I would cook either early morning or late night. I did neither. For a week or so, those things took up habitation.

                But on a day when the temps were supposed to be MUCH cooler, the spirit finally moved and I got busy.

                I turned the oven to 350 degrees, then greased and floured a glass 9 x 13 inch glass dish instead of a bundt pan, per the recipe. I had one, but I didn’t want to use it.

                In place of “one box French vanilla cake mix,” I used what I had: a Betty Crocker white cake mix, expiration date, August 2012.

                In lieu of “one package French vanilla pudding mix,” I used a plain old vanilla, store brand box.

                The four eggs were a no-brainer. Nor the one-third cup vegetable oil.

                Instead of “one cup raisins” I used one cup of mixed dried fruits—cranberries, yellow and dark raisins.

                Rather than “one cup chopped pecans,” I used one cup sunflower kernels. Cinnamon and nutmeg amounts remained the same.

                Instead of “one cup applesauce,” a cup of pear sauce.

                I beat the eggs together first with a whisk, then added and “blend[ed] all the ingredients.” With the same whisk—no getting out the hand beater and counting three minutes as some recipes say to do.

                Voila! A perfect cake using similar ingredients. Now, if I can keep from eating it before company comes.

             Do you suppose I could copyright the recipe?

                Oh, and now, the new crop of pears is coming on, er, down. Just today, I gathered a bailed bucket of windfall or weightfall or too-crowded-I’m-getting-outta-the-way-fall. This is the second batch I’ve brought in.

                The first batch of small green pears, I cored and gouged out the rot, dropped them into water sprinkled with Fruit Fresh. I would cook them with the peelings, and then rice them into smooth pear sauce. In my aluminum kettle, I dumped the fruit, added sugars, both brown and white, a dash or two of salt, and a dash or three of cinnamon. Put the heat at 5/10 [medium?] and went off to the computer.

                Soon, I smelled something. I ran into the kitchen and turned the fire off before grabbing a hot pad to the metal handle of the lid. The fruit was prettily glazed and sitting in a little floor of honey-textured syrup. Well, a little thicker than honey, to be truthful. No need to rice these skins. They are as tender as the pears.

                Maybe I’d better stay out of the kitchen after all.

c 2012 by Pat Laster dba lovepat press

GUEST COLUMN on folklore adages

Will Rogers inspires recollections of    
                                   childhood sayings
                                             by Lew Taylor

         Will Rogers is famous for a number of his activities, not the least of which is his origin of quotable sound bites of encapsulated wisdom. One of the most quoted, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” can be a source of wonder and dispute. Another one of my favorites: “The trouble is, we know so many things that ain’t so.”

         History has proved him right on that one, but it set me to wondering about the things we knew in my youth that seem to have no basis in fact. We knew those things with a certainty, and since there was no one to dispute them around in our mountain home at the head of the creek, they must have been true; at least in those days as far as we were concerned.

         Take, for instance, “If a turtle bites you, he won’t let go until it thunders.” Now, on our trips we often caught turtles of various types and sizes. Since getting the hook out of the mouth of a turtle could be risky, we frequently cut the hook off the line before we dispatched him with a rock.
         Thus, we never knew anyone who tested the premise; that is, no one we knew was ever bitten by a turtle—which was good, because it could be a long time between thunderstorms.

          Another, while we’re on the creek bank. “Snakes won’t or can’t, bite under water.” Thus we confidently waded the streams known to harbor water snakes of two or three kinds, knowing we could see them swimming toward us on the surface and beat them off. And, of course, they did not pose a danger under water.
         Never mind that the Dawkins boy was bitten on one toe wading Big Cedar Creek. He must have stepped on its head, because snakes don’t bite under water. No one thought to ask how they caught the fish and frogs on which they thrived. It was just reassuring to know they don’t bite under water.

          Another well-known fact in our mountain home was that eating fish and drinking milk at the same meal would make us sick. How we came to know that I cannot surmise, but no one at our house ever ate fish and drank milk at the same meal. None of us got sick afterward. That was all the proof one should need for that wisdom.

         Of course, a lot of our quotes to live by from my childhood proved themselves valuable. One of those wise pieces of advice, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” proved its worth in some way almost every day.

        Some sayings have passed into cliché, or common folk lore. “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” I had no problem with that one, as I do not recall seeing any wooden nickels, although there must be some historical event that gave rise to it.

        “Not enough room to swing a cat by the tail without getting fur in your mouth” always sounded like good advice, too, but I never saw anyone try to swing a cat by the tail in a larger space to check the need for the adage.

        The real gems from childhood, though, were all the things we knew that weren’t so.   

        Will Rogers was more than a pretty trick roper.

 Lew Taylor is retired from the Foreign Service and is a poet living in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

c 2012 by  Lew Taylor and Pat Laster dba lovepat press

Thank goodness for Willis Carrier

 by Pat Laster

                One other thing I’ve learned by listening to my highway-department employee son: The reason the plug of the old 12,500 BTU window AC is getting hot was at least three-fold. First, the appliance was old; second, it was trying to cool an area (three rooms) too large for its capacity; and third, “You are using a 3-way bulb lamp on the same outlet!” which pulled juice needed by the AC. Duh!

Solutions: First, move the lamp to its own outlet! Done. Second, buy a new AC to replace the old one. Third, add a 6,000 BTU window unit in the office to help with the cooling. Done and done, thanks to Jodie and Robert from McClendon’s Appliances in Benton.

Eighty years ago when the house was new, each room could be shut off with French doors. At some point, said doors were removed, which opened the living room, sunroom (my office) and dining room into one larger space. With 8 children in the house, the fewer doors to open and the less space needed for them when opened, the better.

As if that weren’t enough, the original swinging door from dining room to kitchen had also been removed. Beyond the narrow kitchen was the breakfast room (now used to temporarily store things bound for the back porch or the shed or for recycling). In later years, it was Mom’s sitting room. A window unit on the west would cool the room, but usually, she left it off. Even when her “help” was smothering, she was comfortable, so it stayed off.

The kitchen, with the refrigerator motor exuding heat, was never as cool as desired, even with a small ceiling fan. But who stayed in the kitchen for any length of time? Not me!

The back AC finally bit the dust. Of course, it would happen during this season’s extraordinary heat wave. But Son and Wife and Home Depot saved the day. And the unit even has a remote!

I shouldn’t complain about not having air conditioning. At least all of us have access to electricity.

 I read lately that some 300 million people in India have NO access to electrical power at all, and another 300 million have only sporadic access.

The recent blackout in India affected about 670 million people, according to G. Harris and J. Yardley, of the New York Times.

                Of all the books of trivia I own, I decided to investigate “air conditioning,” that modern appliance we think—at least grandson Billy thinks—we could not live without.

In Paul Dickson’s From Elvis to E-Mail: Trends, Events, and Trivia from the Postwar Era to the End of the Century, there’s one piddling entry:

During 1948, “crude air conditioning systems show[ed] up with … hoopla—in top-of-the-line Detroit cars.”

                Fred Worth’s Trivia Encyclopedia had nothing.

                But Reader’s Digest’s The Origins of Everyday Things gave me two sentences. “The first true air conditioner, featuring humidity control, powered ventilation as well as mechanical refrigeration, was patented in 1902 by the American inventor Willis Carrier. AND

“The addition of a dust filter in 1906 to improve the air in textile mills led to the term ‘air conditioning’.”

                At least on this subject, President Obama is correct: we couldn’t have our quality of air conditioning without the astuteness of others before us.

c 2012 by Pat Laster dba lovepat press

by Pat Laster

                One other thing I’ve learned by listening to my highway-department employee son: The reason the plug of the old 12,500 BTU window AC is getting hot was at least three-fold. First, the appliance was old; second, it was trying to cool an area (three rooms) too large for its capacity; and third, “You are using a 3-way bulb lamp on the same outlet!” which pulled juice needed by the AC. Duh!

Solutions: First, move the lamp to its own outlet! Done. Second, buy a new AC to replace the old one. Third, add a 6,000 BTU window unit in the office to help with the cooling. Done and done, thanks to Jodie and Robert from McClendon’s Appliances in Benton.

Eighty years ago when the house was new, each room could be shut off with French doors. At some point, said doors were removed, which opened the living room, sunroom (my office) and dining room into one larger space. With 8 children in the house, the fewer doors to open and the less space needed for them when opened, the better.

As if that weren’t enough, the original swinging door from dining room to kitchen had also been removed. Beyond the narrow kitchen was the breakfast room (now used to temporarily store things bound for the back porch or the shed or for recycling). In later years, it was Mom’s sitting room. A window unit on the west would cool the room, but usually, she left it off. Even when her “help” was smothering, she was comfortable, so it stayed off.

The kitchen, with the refrigerator motor exuding heat, was never as cool as desired, even with a small ceiling fan. But who stayed in the kitchen for any length of time? Not me!

The back AC finally bit the dust. Of course, it would happen during this season’s extraordinary heat wave. But Son and Wife and Home Depot saved the day. And the unit even has a remote!

I shouldn’t complain about not having air conditioning. At least all of us have access to electricity.

 I read lately that some 300 million people in India have NO access to electrical power at all, and another 300 million have only sporadic access.

The recent blackout in India affected about 670 million people, according to G. Harris and J. Yardley, of the New York Times.

                Of all the books of trivia I own, I decided to investigate “air conditioning,” that modern appliance we think—at least Kid Billy thinks—we could not live without.

In Paul Dickson’s “From Elvis to E-Mail: Trends, Events, and Trivia from the Postwar Era to the End of the Century,” there’s one piddling entry:

During 1948, “crude air conditioning systems show[ed] up with … hoopla—in top-of-the-line Detroit cars.”

                Fred Worth’s “Trivia Encyclopedia” had nothing.

                But Reader’s Digest’s “The Origins of Everyday Things” gave me two sentences. “The first true air conditioner, featuring humidity control, powered ventilation as well as mechanical refrigeration, was patented in 1902 by the American inventor Willis Carrier.

                “The addition of a dust filter in 1906 to improve the air in textile mills led to the term ‘air conditioning’.”

                At least on this subject, President Obama is correct: we couldn’t have our quality of air conditioning without the astuteness of others before us.

An alphabet for August

How Dry I Am --       Earth

by Pat Laster

           A is for August, originally the sixth month (moon calculations by the Romans) and called Sextilis. In 8 B.C. the Roman senate renamed this month Augustus in honor of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome. In Old English the Latin form was anglicized to August.

           Bachelor buttons’ blue blooms should brighten any garden that hasn’t already been given up for dead. Like mine.

           Cactus – spiny plants from the 1930s or earlier, when Grandmother Couch began her gardens—still exist in the southeast yard. They don’t spread much, but are tenacious. No one plays in that area, obviously, but the horseshoe court is nearby.

           Daredevils––bikers who zoom by here without helmets––are the epitome of insanity. As my sis Bev would say, “Stupid tax!”

          
        Eager for cooler weather? Join the crowd.

        Forecast, weather: The first 21 days of August, average highs will be 93 degrees. August 22-27’s averages, 92 degrees, and the remainder of the month, 91 degrees. We can expect the highs to gradually fall as autumn waits in the wings.  

        Gadgets and gizmos. An upcoming contest has this for its theme. What can I write about?

        Hymnals—books from earlier days that congregations needed to sing. No more; words on the screen make them obsolete. As my sis Barb said, “Heresy!”

        Intercession is needed by pray-ers for those who have no moral objection to killing others.

        July’s extreme heat and ensuing wildfires are now an ever-fading memory. Except to those who lost their homes.

       Karaoke allows one to perform without engaging a live accompanist. Granddaughter Emma likes that.

       Labor Day: a time to anticipate both a day off and the promise of cooler weather.

       Memoir: time to begin writing yours—before you forget.

       Naysayer: if you are one, stop and think the next time you want to ‘pooh-pooh’ something.

       Okra: if you like it, good for you. I’ll eat mine pickled, thank you.

       Puzzles will keep your brain working, even in this hot weather. Find somewhere cool to solve them. In front of the AC perhaps?

      “Quarterback hurry”—when a defender runs for the quarterback before he can throw the ball.

       Ripening times for raspberries depend on the cultivar. Brandywines should be about ready. Yum.

       School openings are fast approaching. But Kid Billy’s school time never stopped: biology the first summer term and music for elementary teachers the second term, which ends tomorrow.

       Threats of a welcome thunderstorm came through a new Saline County warning system last Sunday. I juned around and maneuvered the (new) Taurus under the shed porch. A false alarm, alas.

       Unbeknownst to me were animals whose names begin with U, except the Utah Prairie Dog, an endangered species and a pest.

       Verbena didn’t do well in my garden last year; perhaps it didn’t like the concrete-block opening it was planted in.

       “Water! Water! My kingdom for some water.” This is the plea from all the plants this year—if plants could plead.

        X-rated movies I won’t watch, but KB probably will, now that he’s over 21.

        Yuletide is still a ways off, calendar-wise, but it brings pleasant thoughts of cooler weather.

        Zinnias are a favorite of mine, but I didn’t buy any this year. Maybe next year. ‘Ztay cool!

c 2012 by Pat Laster dba lovepat press