Country Life

Where the Hoe Meets Rock

/ cigarman501 / 4 Comments

“What were you thinkin’?” I propped myself on my hoe and contemplated my folly of thirty years ago.  Who picks a former ravine to make into a garden.  When Highway 11 was originally built, “fill dirt” was used to fill up the creek cut ravine, the newly created creek banks stabilized by what else, kudzu. The scourge of the South…at least one of them.

Who tries to transform a broom straw laden, kudzu encroaching, rocky, and sandy wasteland into a garden?  Easy peasy, I did.  I had no choice if I was going to have a garden.  The flat area flanked on one side by a creek and kudzu and a highway and swamp on the other is the only place that receives the necessary eight hours of sunlight.

It has remained a folly despite the years I’ve spent amending with compost, wood chips, grass clippings, even ground up cardboard.  After thirty years I have about four inches of arable soil…and the rocks continue to do the dirty and multiply.

A whiney voice in my head asks, “Why do you do this to yourself.  The roads around your house are dotted with produce stands.  Walmart has corn for twenty-five cents an ear.”  I hear many voices but this one is irritating.  It is the voice that makes a yearly visit this time of the year.  Outloud, I tell it to shut up.

My grandmother is in my head too, she speaks in a voice I barely remember, “You better clean out those middles.  Look at that crabgrass.  What about the Johnson grass coming up?  While you’re at it do something about the kudzu across the fence.”

“Yes Nannie, I know…and soon the bastard wiregrass will begin its slow crawl.”  Common bermuda grass will grow on hot pavement.

My tiller is down and I’m waiting for a part.  It’s supposed to be here Monday but who knows, it may not get here, and I have the mechanical abilities of a brick.  I should probably use this hoe for something other than a leaning post.

A thick morning cloud rolled in and for a moment I think I will be saved.  There was no rain in the cloud despite the “rain” frogs in the swamp singing.  The crows in the distance cawed their good mornings as my hoe contacted one of the many rocks.  Bending over to pick it up I watched a drop of perspiration from my nose land next to my hand.  I was suddenly a small child sitting under a tree as the sun came out again.

My grandparents farmed lands too far from the river to benefit from the fertile silt deposited by seasonal floods.  Bottomlands were for the rich.  My grandparents weren’t rich…at least not monetarily.  They farmed on the lien until my granddaddy, Paw Paw, went to work in a textile mill.  Their soil was red with clay and filled with rocks too.  Their life was hard…much harder than mine, harder than the rocks they threw out of the field.

Even with steady money, my grandfather couldn’t stay out of the fields.  After eight hours in the mill, he would harness the plow horse and do his farm chores before grabbing a bit of sleep in the afternoon.  Sometimes he would head out in the early evenings too.

Corn was our staple, for both humans and animals.  Somehow the poor soil yielded the needed corn along with beans, squash, okra, and tomatoes.  There was nothing exotic in their garden not even a bell pepper.  They weren’t the exotic kind.  They were the survival kind.

I have a mental vision of a man of medium height with a sweat-stained fedora or cap.  Thinning gray hair cut short, a wide nose, and dark-framed glasses.  A man I can’t remember smiling except when he was in the fields.  A man who watched over my brother and I as we played in a sandy ditch with Tonka toys and green army men.  We didn’t know he was slowly dying from a melanoma found too late.  I was nine when he died.  He was fifty-eight or nine.

I’ve gotten into a rhythm.  Hoe the hard ground toward me for a minute or two before pushing the dirt back.  Bend over and pick up the uncovered rocks and throw the rocks toward the creek.  Rest on the hoe for a minute, stretch my back, and start over.  I don’t have the arm I used to have, or the creek has moved further away.  At least the rocks seem smaller than they used to.

Again my grandmother spoke in my head, “Get back to work, you can think and work at the same time.”  I wish I had asked more questions, “What did you think about Nannie?”

As a small child, most of my mornings were spent under a tree with a book in my hands.  Nannie’s rule was “read or come out and pick up a hoe.”  I developed my love for reading under a cedar tree or in a clump of privet.  I remember the sounds her hoe made when it contacted a rock.  I can’t remember her real voice but I remember that sound.

When I got older, I didn’t have a choice.  Hand-picking bugs, hand watering tomato plants, and hoeing middles.  Putting out chemical fertilizer that made my hands burn.  Later she would invest in a front tine tiller that most days beat me to death.

I guess there is something meditative about hoeing…except for this blister between my thumb and pointer finger that interrupts my rumination.  My grand parent’s hands were much tougher.  Hands like tanned shoe leather with thick calluses.  I remember my grandmother’s deeply lined and sun-baked face too.

I don’t know if I could call my grandmother pretty.  She had a broad face and wide-set eyes.  A thick, strong body built for farm work.  Her face was cut with deep crevasses but I remember when she laughed.  Her whole face lit up.  She didn’t laugh enough.

The frogs have grown silent as have the crows.  The voices in my head are still there and I try to shush them with the sound of the hoe.  It is humid and the weather liars say it will reach near-ninety today.  As I watched the sweat fly from my arms I realized the liars might be right.

My garden is late.  Mother Nature has been an unwholesome witch for most of March, April, and May.  If June follows suit, it will make a hard, left turn into hell.  Too cold, too wet, thunderstorms and hail in March, snow in April.  Near record rains in May and a tropical storm kickin’ up a ruckus in the Gulf and it is just the first week of June.

In between tropical systems, I finally planted tomato plants on May the fifteenth…exactly one month past our last frost date.  The two-foot-tall plants are standing proudly and filling out in their cages, but it will be a while before my first tomato sandwich.  I have one small tomato, it reminds me of a green marble.  My guess is summer will be as harsh as the spring, but hope does spring eternal.  Sure hope there is no Duke Mayonaise or white bread shortage.

It does not matter.  For what I spend in plants, seeds, and fertilizer I could buy from the produce stands cheaper.  It is not about the tomatoes, squash, and beans.

My gardening is about connections.  Connections to the past, connections to past generations.  I see my grandfather in his overalls leaning against his hoe, fedora on his head.  My grandmother is in her feed sack dress, perspiration dripping off her nose, a huge straw hat on her head.

It is about connections to the land, even lands filled with rocks.  I welcome the clank made the hoe making contact with a rock.  I smile when it happens.

Don Miller’s author’s page  https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR3YVEkI2WW4ZAZbqiYKWyhVQdkGDO6zt6QzExlP8lFCl6FVitonudcbAPQ

The image used is  a watercolor, “Hoeing Turnips”, by Sir George Clausen http://www.artnet.com/artists/sir-george-clausen/hoeing-turnips-m85xrTGVVoEQTDt3k_TMhg2

 

I Always Wonder….

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

There is an abandoned house I walk past every morning when I force myself out to walk or run.  Yeah, I’m trying to jog a bit these days.  Slow and easy…slow and not so easy.  Try not to have a second heart attack or pull a muscle.

At a curve of the road below what has become my ‘hill from hell’, an old home sits forlornly surrounded by broom straw, English ivy, hemlock, and juvenal river birch.  It has sat empty for the past thirty years.  I vaguely remember people living there a long time ago.  They were solitary people who looked at you side-eyed when you drove by.  They were here today gone tomorrow folks it seems.

I stood, stretching after a five-minute warm-up.  Trying to steel myself for the quarter-mile trek up the hill, I paused and took a picture as I paused.

Have I said that I like old structures?  I like wandering through them looking at how they were built.  I like wondering about who lived there.  I hate to see old houses abandoned into ruin.

Once, a lifetime ago, I dared to investigate.  I’m not built for creeping or sneaking a look through windows.   Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me.  Don’t fear, I’m not a Peeping Tom.  I knew the place was empty.  I just wondered why they had left in such a hurry.  Looking through windows gave me no clue, only more questions.

Much of the furniture was still in place as if the people who lived there just went off to work or out for dinner, locked the door behind them, and never came back.  A plush easy chair and matching settee but no TV.  No lightened spaces on the walls where paintings or pictures might have hung.  I wonder why furniture and kitchen implements were left behind?   Why did the previous tenants skedaddle leaving so much behind?

There had been people there recently.  A stack of pyramided beer cans attested to their visitation.  Uninvited visitors disturbing the mice, taking advantage of an empty house.  Young people looking for a place to hang out but twenty or thirty years later it’s not a place I would want to spend any kind of “quality” time.

As I took the picture I saw only remnants of Venetian blinds and shredded curtains hanging in the windows.  Windowpanes have been knocked out and I imagine the furniture is covered in black mold or worse.  Still, I wonder…but not enough to go check.  It is a shame and a bit heartbreaking.

The house sits in a steep-sided ‘holler’ split by the road I walk. It is at the base of ‘The Hill From Hell.’  I’ve officially named it.  It rises two hundred feet over two-tenths of a mile.  There was a time when I ran it…that time has run out.

A rocky, shallow stream runs under the road and in front of the house with juvenal river birch taking over between the stream and porch.  Despite its shallowness, the stream runs quite fast.  I wonder why the original owners decided to put their home in a hole that gets very little sunlight.  Access to the water I wonder?

The original house was a sturdy, shed-roofed affair with a narrow screened in front porch.  What appears to be a rebuilt chimney dominates one side.  It looks too new…despite having been there for at least thirty years.  I wonder what the original chimney looked like.  Was it rock like mine, made from stones found in the area?  Was it added as an afterthought during summer after a long, cold winter?

A low and long addition was built on the opposite side.  It matches the original building like a scary horror movie and has not held up well to being left empty.  Loneliness destroys us all.

The screens on the porch are shredded and the tar paper and asphalt shingles have not held up as well as the metal sheets on the original.  The roof reminds me of an old swayback plow horse.

I wonder how many generations lived there, how they survived, what they did for a living.  What were their dreams?  I wonder how they lived and loved, what they ate, what games they played.  Were their lives as hard as my imagination leads me to believe.

Spring is three weeks away and the daffodils are showing themselves near the ditch that separates the house site from the road.  They have pushed up through a stand of blue-purple blossomed periwinkle.

Soon they will be spent and replaced by moon vine in mid-summer and the sickly, sweet smell of blossoming kudzu in the fall.    If enough sunlight can reach the yard, wildflowers will bloom in the late summer.  I wonder if someone once tended to their flowers long, long ago.

Each summer kudzu above the old house creeps closer and closer.  I wonder if it will eventually cover the old house or if someone will come along and knock the house down putting it out of its misery.  Either way, it will disappear from sight…disappear from history leaving no trace of itself or the people who lived there.  I wonder.

***

Don Miller is a retired teacher and coach who writes on various subjects, in both fiction and non-fiction.  Visit his author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM.

The image is of the lonesome old house taken with my phone.

Not Pioneering Stock

/ cigarman501 / 6 Comments

 

I am not pioneering stock.  My prayers were not answered.  My satellite went out at two and my power followed at five…in the AM.  It’s seven seventeen and it already seems like a lifetime.  Too much time stuck inside my head with nothing to distract me is the main problem.  At least the morning is brightening…a gray light, but at least I can see without a flashlight.

There is a beautiful winter scene outside my window…hemlocks and cedars laden with snow, their fronds drooping toward the ground.  There is an underlying silence, the sounds muffled by the snow…until a tree snaps under the extra weight of snow, sleet, and ice.  It sounds as if a war is being fought on the ridgeline above us.

It is eight oh two and the “Snowpocalypse” is upon us.  There is nothing to do but wait.  A cheery fire in the fireplace…cheery but not near warm enough.  A cast iron Dutch oven is heating water.  Cheese grits are on the menu…instant cheese grits.  Uck!  At least my coffee had perked before the power went off.

Stepping outside to bring in the wood I heard the winds on the ridges above us.  The sound of an old steam locomotive running at top speed…without the steam whistle of course.  Just a rapid chugga-chugga sound I associate with old movies I watched in my youth.  So far, we have been sheltered from the wind, but I see movement in the cypress cedar just beyond my backyard fence.

The snow, flakes once large and wet, have now changed over to sleet.  I can see my clothesline and it is covered with ice…much ice.  This does not bode well for trees or powerlines I would think.  My hothouse is without power and I worry about Linda’s plants…particularly her thirty-year-old scheffleras.  Worry…but there is not a damn thing I can do about it except feel her pain if they die.

Old poots like me are always talking about the good old days and how much better it was back then.  I wonder?  I surely wonder about the good old days the former tenants of my little piece of heaven had.  Three different sets of families left their imprints and memories before we began to add ours.  I wish their ghosts would speak to me.  I have many questions like, “How did you keep those fireplaces fed?”

Built in 1892, the old farmhouse had five fireplaces.  I am only trying to keep one burning and maybe later an old wood stove to cook on if necessary.  I can’t imagine…don’t want to imagine what it was like feeding four open fireplaces and the wood stove pumping smoke out smoke one end and heat from the other.

No, I’m not sure about those good old days especially as I look at the expanse of white between my house and the old privy.  A book comes to mind, “Ten Miles to the Outhouse,” by Willie Makeit and illustrated by Betty Don’t.  I think the cold is addling my brain…or the Jack and Coke.  Five o’clock in the PM and we still have no power, but we have seen power trucks on the move…and the power flickered once…dashed hopes in the blink of an eye.

I’ve also seen turkeys on the move.  A dozen or so all puffed up against the cold.  They look comical taking high steps trying to navigate the now five or so inches of hard packed sleet, freezing rain, and snow.  Thankfully the temperature is now hovering above freezing and it is now more snow than sleet.

The wind is still up.  Trees are popping all around.  Cannon reports in the distance.  Even if the power comes on soon there is no assurance that it will stay on, but I’ll take what I can get…damn!  A hemlock limb just hit the fence.

Light, heat, and water have returned.  At six PM the lights flickered and then held.  There was the welcome sound of air handlers kicking in and the feel of warm air.  Quick microwave something warm to eat.

This is not the worse “storm” we’ve ridden out.  Our first winter was in 1987-88 and in January we lay buried under eighteen inches…for those of you above the Mason-Dixon, that’s like you getting eighteen feet.  We were in complete shutdown mode for a week with only a VW Beetle and a Thunderbird to motivate with.  I swore I would never be without four-wheel drive again.  I think I’ve HAD to use it once since then.  An ice storm with a hurricane came through in ’93 but the four-wheel drive doesn’t work on ice.  I’ve used my four-wheel drive a lot but not because the weather dictated it.

No, I’m not pioneering stock.  There was once a time.  Now I have grown old and lazy…and hate the cold.  I think my next acquisition will be a generator.  Hopefully, I won’t need it any more than I have needed four-wheel drive.

LITTLE BANDIT-EYED CRITTERS

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“A day late and a dollar short” seems to fit…at least for the day late part. I stood in the middle of my garden perusing my small stand of corn and decided I would wait one more day before I collected my bounty of petite bicolor ears. Waiting was a mistake. Raccoons stripped nearly every ripe ear and obviously enjoyed the bounty from my efforts. The f@#$ing little bandit-eyed critters.

I recognize some of my garden bounties are going to benefit the wildlife surrounding me. I don’t begrudge them, I even try to feed them. I have an area, well away from my garden, where I put kitchen wastes, cracked corn and even the stray mice finding their way into my traps. My five pet crows seem to love it…to the point they no longer flee when they see me coming nor do they stake out portions of my garden. They just wait for me to put out the broken off corn tops, tomato peels and rotting cucumbers. I wonder if they discuss the menu? “D@#n, no mice or meat scraps today? Man! You need to add some protein back to your diet.” My possums are not so choosy.

The deer, turkeys, and squirrels love the cracked corn. My feeding area is next to a stream and many mornings or late evenings I will watch four or five does exit the stream to graze on the emerging grass and corn snacks I have put out for them. The same with the turkeys. The squirrels…well you know squirrels.

Yesterday evening I saw a red tail hawk was sitting on a dead stick up in my yard waste pile. Eyes glued to the food scrap pile…waiting. I was waiting too but finally gave up due to boredom and my own hunger. I guess it would be different if I didn’t have the tomato sandwich waiting to be made. I hope she found supper.

Obviously, raccoons don’t like leftovers. I could salvage only a half-dozen ears. They were tasty but I won’t make the waiting mistake again…maybe.

Several years ago, my wife and I watched a large female raccoon braving our backyard and puppy dogs while attempting to figure out a way to get to my bird feeders hanging under our deck. My wife and I viewed her activities, enthralled, for fifteen or twenty minutes while using descriptors like cute, engaging, delightful, inventive and the such. She wasn’t nearly as delightful when she broke into our bedroom’s bath, opening the French doors, before trying to make off with the bucket of dry cat food we left there. My wife “engaged” her in a tug of war over the bucket before chasing her off with a snapping bathroom towel. Take that you little bandit-eyed critter!

Luckily, fresh corn is available just about everywhere in the foothills of the Blue Ridge this time of year…my colon might disagree since I’ve eaten it every day since July 1st…too much information? Like most foods homegrown, corn seems to be just a bit sweeter due to the sweat from your brow…hope the little bandit-eyed critters thought so.

Don Miller writes on many subjects. To connect or peruse his writings and books please click on one of the following links:

https://www.facebook.com/cigarman501/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

or https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM