Finding Your Bees

I went out for a walk (OK, it was my once-a-week smoke break) during my lunch hour yesterday.  Across the street from my office is a seedy, no-name motel - the kind of place that you seldom notice.  It is typical 1960s motel architecture: run down, no shade, with little-to-no green space, located in the middle of a downtown area.  Parking lot to one side, now-defunct bank on the other.  Not the most welcoming of places.

Testing the theory that stolen food tastes better

A year ago, I spotted a volunteer eggplant in the patch of grass next to the street.  On my walk this week, I wandered over to see if the volunteer had re-volunteered another generation of plants.

Sure enough, near the original spot, there was a big, green plant.  I lifted the canopy of leaves to find a host of small, beautiful, lavender eggplants.

I smiled, and picked one, slipping it into my pocket, while marveling at how wonderful nature was, to volunteer plants where there was once just a patch of weedy ground and a discarded eggplant.

Yeah, I don't know who discards eggplants, either.  That is to say, I don't know of anyone who discards raw eggplants in weedy lots.  I know plenty of people who discard cooked eggplant, and when I was a kid, I was responsible for some such discards when Mom was not looking.  But I don't think that kind of discard results in many volunteers.

But I digress.

Not much space.  Not much green.

The eggplant bush was in a tiny grassy area.  I looked around, and there were a bunch of weeds along the opposite edge of the parking lot, interspersed with decorative plants.  The nearest of the weeds, though, looked an awful lot like a pepper plant.

Dang.  Sure enough, it WAS a pepper plant.

A little further down, another pepper.  And another.  Twelve plants, interspersed in with the ornamentals. On a narrow strip of ground between the parking lot and the grungy parking garage of a sad motel.

Basil, too.  And mint.  And lemongrass.  Suddenly, I am seeing that this is not a volunteer location.

Instead, I had just raided someone's garden.  In a motel parking lot.  I looked around for the inevitable cameras that recorded my petty theft.

And then shrugged, with full smile on my face.  Someone had taken a crappy little corner of the universe and made it theirs.  They had found a way to bring something positive out of the peeling paint and auto-exhaust begrimed surfaces, and brought forth life for their table.

I love that idea.

A friend likened it to my hunt for bees.  For most people, having an infestation of stinging insects is not something to meet with joy.  But everywhere I go, I always keep an eye out for any bees, anywhere, especially hives that I could steal, bring to my house, and give them a new home.  My friend challenged me to write about it.

So the "Finding Your Bees" series is dedicated to everyone who has taken something that is overlooked and made it into something wonderful.  And I ask for you to share it with me - either in the comments or in email form.  Examples can include:

New Orleans Container House....

• Artists who make things with found objects 
• Repurposing artists (my brother Parker is a master at this!)
• Guerrilla Gardeners - who tame abandoned lots and make them into community gardens
• People who build houses out of shipping containers (not as novel now, but somebody did the first one not so long ago)
• Scientists who are working at re-introducing lost seeds to farmers
• Archaeologists who are introducing old techniques to help improve the lives of modern folk 
• Linguists who are working to revitalize languages in indigenous communities
• Brewmasters who re-introduce old recipes, based on either historic data or archaeological evidence
• Someone who figured out what to do with kudzu (or nutria, or water hyacinth, or Asian carp, or...)
• Someone who makes musical instruments out of unusual stuff, or that make sounds that are unexpected (left handed sewer-flutists like Michelle Bowe need apply!)

If you know of a Johnny Appleseed character, group, or collective, let me know about it.  Or if you are doing something where you are taming - or wilding - a piece of the world in a novel way, I want to hear the story.  

Non-profits and other programs are fair game.  My sister pointed me to a news story that talked about writers who were invited to move to areas of Detroit that were hit hard by the economic downturn - with the idea that creative folk can lift up a neighborhood (see the story at http://www.writeahouse.com/).

The world is an amazing place, filled with incredible people.  I love it when people see things in a different way than usual, and see possibility when the rest of the world sees none.  It is almost like they are giving the world the gift of a visual pun.

Tell me yours.

Mom, I love you.

All of us have that guilty pleasure.  Whether it is watching Ellen or Maury, or reading bodice rippers, or fixing key lime fudge just to eat by ourselves, there is always something that we do that just gives us a little thrill - something that is not part of what we would willingly share with the world.

I have a number of guilty pleasures, but one of my regulars is reading the Postsecret blog.

For those five of you who don't know what Postsecret is, it is a website that updates every Sunday, providing anonymous secrets that people mailed in from around the world.  The idea is that nobody will know it is you, and that there is something quite liberating to give up the secret.  It also provides a voyeuristic thrill to read other people's secrets, and let you share a little bit with people you don't know. Somehow, it  seems to make the world just a little smaller, and more likeable.

Last night, I was working on some classwork, and midnight passed; to celebrate, I opened a window to the website.

It is Mother's Day.  And people share some of the most heart-rending, saddest, happiest, joyous postcards ever on Mother's Day.  Common themes: Mom, I forgive you; Mom, I miss you; Mom, you are my heroine; Mom, please get off of heroin.

And this one.

This one resonated with me.

Let me tell you about my mom.  Patty Lawton is a caretaker.  She is a facilitator.  She is an enabler. She is a cheerleader.  She is a lover, and a fighter, and is devoted beyond all imagination.  She gives of herself, and loves with a fierceness that I have never seen in anyone else.

When we were in Brasil, I fell off the boat.  Mom, hearing my screams (I couldn't swim) woke from a dead sleep and dove over a four-foot rail straight into the Amazon River to save me. I knew I was saved, and stopped yelling (which was unfortunate, because she could no longer see me because of the glare.)  The she-bear instincts were strong in my mom, and she rescued me.  (Little Bear got his bottom warmed after that incident, but it was done in love...)

Granddaddy's Fig Preserves

Thirty seconds ago, I heard the lid pop into place on a jelly jar filled with warm fig preserves. Looking over to the backlit jars, I can just barely make out the thin slices of pale lemon rind, candied through the process, interspersed throughout the jar.  Nostalgia that hits so hard, I can, literally, taste it.

Thirty five years ago I helped my Grandaddy Lawton for a week during the early summer.  I dug up beds for his jonquils and built gravel 'thank-you-ma'am's' along his driveway.  And I helped him with his canning.  Summer canning on Lawton Mountain was a magical thing. Grandaddy took bushels of green beans and made pyramids of quarts of canned beans.  Bushels of sweet corn yielded mason jars filled with corn for all seven families.  Tomatoes became canned tomato juice - the basis of many a Bloody Mary - although that was NEVER their intent.  Baptists, after all, never intend to make their mixers. And they made jelly and preserves.

Grandaddy and Grandmama both had lived through the Depression, and it marked them.  They were frugal, and they used things until they needed fixing, and then they fixed them.  They did not buy extra stuff just because it was available; it was a way of life that didn't dispose of things just because they got old. 

Canning was a big part of their frugality, and their way of life.  The House in the Mountains (that was the only name I ever heard it called - never abbreviated or shortened) was the site of monumental canning efforts that extended from late spring throughout the summer, and the results were labeled and set in OCD-compliant rows in the pantry.

But the two jewels of the canning crown were the muscadine jelly and fig preserves.  Each teaspoon that was ever scooped from one of those jelly jars was liquid gold - and it was rationed out as such by the miserly jelly-bean counters in my household.  Because once it was gone, it was gone forever.  Until next season.

And one year, thirty five years ago, I got to help Grandaddy make the fig preserves.

The cutting of the stems from thee figs.  The slicing of the lemon.  The cooking of huge vats of figs, sugar, lemon and water, until all that was left was the citrus aroma, and the liquid gold of reduced figs.  Ladling the syrup into jars, licking fingers sticky with sap. A little nibble of the lemon rind in between efforts.  Into the pressure cooker, watching carefully to finish the canning process without blowing it all up.

And all throughout the process, the overwhelming smell of fig.

This weekend I took Kathe over to the grounds of my work, where a colleague of mine planted fig trees a decade or so ago.  They are now enormous trees, and in fifteen minutes we had collected a couple of gallons of figs. 

And I found a recipe that seemed very much like what my Granddaddy made (appended below, from this website).  And all afternoon, I got lost in the memory of working side by side with Granddaddy.

There are moments in life that speak to you.  For me, this was one. There is nothing like the flavor of goods canned in the home. Nothing that brings the memories back like leaning over the hot stove, stirring the pot to release the aroma-heavy steam. Even roadside stand canned goods, with all of their Mom&Pop labels and support-your-local-organic-farm caché cannot compare.

All afternoon, I labored over five pots of fig-related items.  Habanero-fig chutney, jalapeno-fig chutney, cardomom-fig jam, and a fig jam that ended up as a filling for fig newtons. (For the record, the newtons could have been submitted as a 'nailed it' pinterest fail, but they were SCRUMPTIOUS.)

And a few jars of the most glorious fig preserves ever.  Just like Granddaddy and I once made.

Bayou Woman's recipe.  See her online description here.

  

To-Do List (Broccoli redux)

This year, I planted broccoli in my usual way.  Which is to say, I churned up enough ground to disturb deeply buried archaeological sites (and likely nicked a septic system in the process) and chopped the dirt until I was tired of doing it.  And then scattered seeds roughly in a row, with very little attention being paid to spacing or exact placement.

And then I sat back to watch it grow.

My wife, who understands both plants (and me) better than I do, has devoted a few minutes each day to watering and fertilizing the 'row'.

And the broccoli has started to emerge. (Insert odd gleeful dance here).

Predictably, however, the seeds were spread in 'rows' that more resembled 'bunches' or 'clumps'.  And I have seen this before, and know what comes next.

I have to try and figure out which of the individuals are the most likely to give me good broccoli.  And then pull out all the rest.

This is a hard thing for me.  I want to see all of my seedlings thrive.  But without pruning, without thinning the herd, all of them end up puny, starved, or dead. Removing the competition (whether it is weedy competition or competition among healthy seedlings) is the only way to allow the final product - the 'keepers' - to do well.

Cultivating a Garden

So I ran across a quote from the end of Candide today - "We must cultivate our own garden". While the rest of the blog was about guarding against the unproductivity of unbridled optimism (and the concomitant self deception that accompanies it), it touched on a topic near and dear to my heart right now - failure. I am teaching myself to play banjo. It is a painful process. I love learning language, even with the pain and embarassment of getting it wrong. I am in a new job, and I gloriously suck at it. Because I am learning.
 

 

Maybe pure optimism isn't an optimal feeling. Maybe 'hope for the best, prepare for the worst' is a great summation of the motto that should be used instead. But I like the idea of each step in the learning process being seen as a process of weeding. Tending the garden. Encouraging the plants I like, discouraging those that I don't.

 

 

And there might be short cuts. Spray everything with toxins. Use massive industrial machines. Keep chickens and pigs and cows in boxes where they are fed chemicals and recycled chicken parts.

 

 

But the real value gets added at that moment when you realize you have been using the word in Russian wrong, and you laugh with your new friend about it.

 

 

When you hit that banjo lick right for the first time, and then try it ten times more.

 

 

When you watch the radishes come up, thinning out the ones that make the density too high. Fertilizing, mulching, weeding. Watching the pepper plants go from small to large.  Blooming, putting out peppers, turning from green to yellow.  Then making my pico de gallo.


Watching the cotton grow, pink flowers, then boll. Eating my own sunflower seeds.  Popping the popcorn that grew in my garden.


Playing my banjo, even when I'd rather be watching tv.

 

Cultivating our own garden, just maybe, is the only thing that is worth our time.

No short cuts.