Rules is Rules

Note from the editor: Hi, Mom! You're terrific! Love, M.

My editor and I had a warm friendly conversation last week about the use of the personal pronoun "us" instead of "we" in the Nomad piece, below. Properly speaking, "we" was the pronoun of choice, like in "we, the people" and "we band of brothers," etc.

My stand was, a simple peasant voman would be thinking in the vernacular subjective sense "us" rather than the patrician collective "we," and it looks like I won this one.

I understand that you can't argue with the rule book unless you wish to take up arms, be subversive, and put it all on the line for an idea (after you have raised a lot of money or received a grant). But you should choose your battles and maybe it isn't worth it for a personal pronoun, unless it is My or Mine.

So I guess this piece entitled Rules is Rules may open the door to communicating about the verb "to be" and plurals. (I wouldn't dare -- editor.) Isn't English exciting? And we haven't even addressed that comedic opportunity scenario, misplaced modifiers, my favorites. I love this job.

Euell Gibbons, Luther Burbank, and me

Weeds.

I read once that weeds are doing God's work, keeping the earth green. That's fine with me, but I just wish I could rid them from this little patch of a yard where I live in the summer.

It used to be the wild lettuce, and now it's the dandelions that have staked a claim to my yard, and although I am informed that both are edible, neither appeals to me. Being diabetic, I prefer sweet things, not bitter ones.

The pre-emergent killer stuff works, but then you lose the delightful johnny jump-ups and other volunteer surprises that pop up by themselves. There is just no substitute for getting down on your knees and pulling the unwanted plants up. It's life. You've got to "weed" out the interlopers, the bad guys, and encourage the nicer things... or go live in a high rise apartment and forget about digging in the dirt. There are always options. There are not always options that you like.

Philosophy aside, we are lucky to live in an area where you can actually stalk the wild asparagus. Old timers around here tell us that the asparagus that grows abundantly along the bar ditches in the county are escapees from pioneer gardens. All I know is that the taste of these volunteers is much more flavorful than the cultivated asparagus that you buy in the market. I sometimes surprise overnight guests with creamed asparagus with cheese on toast for breakfast, and they soldier on after the initial shock of eating something green so early in the morning. When we first moved to Colorado, the kids and I would come in from an asparagus foray with about a bushel of asparagus at a time, which we would eat, and/or freeze against "hard times" (summer, fall, and winter) to come. I didn't have a pressure canner then so freezing was the only way to preserve it, but we certainly had our fill while the season lasted, and it was for free.

There are a plethora of tomatoes to choose from when you plant a garden, or even a container. So many kinds, and so tempting, it is difficult not to try for some of each. But I have found that on balance, the very best tomato is the Brandywine, the old heritage stock. It grows luxuriously, with potato-like leaves, and they are large fruits with a wonderful taste. I had so many one year that I had to can most of them (we couldn't eat them all). I felt like I was butchering them to cut them small enough to get into the canning jar. I hope I have the same problem again this year.

I've been asked for gardening advice, and the only thing I can suggest is, Plant stuff that is expensive in the stores.

Besides tomatoes (my goodness, $4 a pound?), try beets, artichokes (fun to grow but you need a large space), peppers, cucumbers, string beans, and whatever your favorites are. A green thumb is usually spelled W-A-T-E-R with F-E-R-T-I-L-I-Z-E-R. Meanwhile, before tomato season, try this simple exercise to enhance the store-bought tomatoes so they won't taste like art gum erasers:

Slice the tomato onto a plate.

Sprinkle lightly with salt, sugar, lemon juice, and olive oil.

Let marinate for a few minutes.

Almost as good as home grown.

(The juice that is generated is good, too.)

The Nesters

Remember the cowboy movies wherein the ranchers grab up all the public land and think that since they got there first, the land was theirs... until the Nesters arrived and staked out a claim to some of it? And put up fences to keep the cows out, otherwise messing up the landscape and causing a range war?

You may be glad to know that this lifestyle still exists in my backyard, that magnificent spread of about 36 feet by 24 feet, pretty small for a range war. But then, the participants are pretty small, too.

When we moved from the mountain cabin into the house in the village, this was the best place available for the dime, and it had some advantages. The elevation was lower and tomatoes grow better here than at 7,500 feet above sea level. So we set to work and the first thing you knew, we had five fruit trees, a garden spot, a postage stamp of grass, wild asparagus, a solar fountain, 42 (count them) tomato plants, and a bird house in that tiny space. Naturally, we then had to add bird feeders, a swing set, raspberries, a rhubarb plant, an artichoke plant, and a table with an umbrella. Plus a sprinkler system.

I had hoped for a glamorous renter for the birdhouse -- say an oriole, or a bluebird. Instead, our Nester turned out to be Mr. English Sparrow. In nature, a nest isn't needed unless you intent to start a family, and to start a family you need one each of opposite sexes -- this is not going to turn into a political/social essay, relax -- and to attract a female, Mr. E. Sparrow does what other bird dudes do: he sings his mating song. It is nothing like the symphonic arias of his cousin the mockingbird, or like the rhapsodic melodies floating down from the trees of the house wren.

It goes like this: Chirp. Chirp-chirp. Chirpchirpchirp. Chirp.

All the same note. No inflections. No harmony. No crescendos. But it does the job, because sooner or later a few female sparrows arrive, and he shows off the nest he has discovered, and finally one of them likes it well enough, and they start moving in their furnishings (dry grass mostly). The insemination of the female does not occur within the privacy of the birdhouse, well maybe it does, but if it does, it is in addition to the flirtatious behavior they exhibit on the fence. My land! Such abandon!

Eventually they do get down to filling up their house with selected straw -- some pieces so large it takes two swipes at the entry to get it through. Both of them work at this until is passes muster. Several weeks go by with Mr. Sparrow bringing in worms and I guess taking his turn at incubating the eggs until one day, out pops Mrs. S. and she is followed by five or six little S's and they all fly away to continue the line.

Now enter the ranchers, in this case, wasps. It was a bad year for wasps; that is, they were everywhere. Eventually, they moved into the birdhouse and the sparrows stayed away. Finally, we sprayed the birdhouse to be rid of the wasps -- who wants to watch a wasp? -- but the sparrows didn't come back; I suppose due to the smell of Raid. So we took the birdhouse down, washed it in soap and hot water, and put it back up again. This year, we were disappointed to see wasps going back into the birdhouse again. Phooey! But who else was in the picture?

This little sparrow (I think he was wearing a cape with a big yellow S on his teeshirt) appeared, took out after the wasp, and chased him away. He actually went into the birdhouse (his, now) and came out with wasp cocoons in his beak and spit them out! Several other soldier wasps appeared, and he gave them the boot, too. He had taken charge. The underdog ruled. A sparrow with Spunk. Now we listen to:

Chirp. Chirp-chirp. Chirpchirpchirp. Chirp!

It is music to our ears.

Us Nomads

Definition: “a member of people... wandering from place to place usually seasonally and with a well defined territory in order to secure a food supply.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary.

National Geographic documents real nomads every now and then. It looks so glamorous. The man of the house rides up on this Mongolian pony, hair in a pigtail, face bronzed from the sun (a direct descendant of Ghengis Khan), dressed to the nines in rawhide and fur. He swaggers into the yurt, and tells the little woman, Honey, tomorrow we pull up stakes and head south because the horses are having trouble finding grass. Honey looks around–her priceless Persian rugs hug the walls, the cookstove heats the tea for supper, goat meat sizzles on the spit, she knows she is pregnant but she hasn’t told him yet. She will have to leave all of this, strike the tent, roll up everything else, search anew for herbs to flavor the meat and buffalo chips for the fire, secure the stores of foodstuff packed away for a rainy day, find all of the dogs and coop them up, make sure the children are dressed appropriately, and be ready by daybreak to trudge at least 10 miles uphill where the grass still grows, all the while having dinner ready and keeping track of the kids and keeping in place the smile, smile, smile..

I never thought of myself as a nomad, a transient person, but excepting for the search for a food supply, it fits me pretty well. As a matter of fact, it fits a lot of folks pretty well, although I will wager that they don’t think of themselves that way, either. Ask us, and we will tell you “We’re following the sun; we are tired of shoveling snow; we don’t want to fall down on the ice in the driveway; we don’t like winter,” and other excuses. They call us snowbirds. I’ve been doing it for eleven years and it is beginning to wear on me. I took my snow boots out of the Colorado closet last week, and they looked downright comfortable compared to my sandals. When I complain to friends about the difficulty of pulling up stakes every six months and beginning anew, they take this holy attitude that they have no trouble at all with the transition, what’s the matter with you?

I’ll tell you how some of them cope.

Example number one: They don’t even pack their car. They hang their clothes on a rail in the backseat of the car and Away They Go. Pretty simple, eh? Yeah. And they have everything they need in duplicate. That's solution number one.

Solution number two: They fly back and forth and have a car in both places. But they are beginning to rail at that flight surcharge of $25 for the second suitcase and they pack some stuff and other friends take it in their car to the destination they share. Lucky they have a laptop. It’s a carry-on.

Solution number three: They too fly back and forth, but the lady of that house digs up her geraniums and mails them to herself back home the day before her flight leaves (really!). You’ve got to admire that.

In my case, there are lots of things I just don’t need two of. So our van looks like part of a gypsy caravan when fully loaded to the Plimsoll line. It was bad enough before we got a dog, because Molly’s crate takes up a space 42" Long and 36" High and 36" Wide and that is a considerable amount of cubic inches that I used to be able to utilize. For my plants. For the sewing machine. (Who wants two sewing machines? Suppose someone’s seams get ripped? Suppose you want to make something? It’ll have to wait six months because the sewing machine is at the other place.) For the new printer. For the golf clubs. For the ice chest. For the foot bath. For the tool box. For the Simpson meter. For my seeds. For the bathroom stuff. For the favorite CDs. (Who can live 6 months without listening to your favorite artists? Jimmy Durante. John Gary. Any Italian tenor singing Tosca. For Gilbert, for Sullivan. The list is endless. Thank goodness they don’t take a lot of space.) For the garage sale end table that will just fit under the window where we are going? We are old. We take a bunch of medicine. I can’t cut down on the Christmas trees; I already have one of them in both locations, just in case. Et cetera.

We’ve been home for two weeks now and we are still eating food I brought along from my Arizona pantry. So here’s the thing. I can’t just not nomad any longer because it has become a health issue for my husband. He thinks he can’t live in a cold climate again. What is the use of marrying a Scandinavian if he doesn’t like snow anymore? (No, that’s not an option, and I’m keeping the dog, too.)

So: 1. No more overstocked shelves even if groceries are a lot cheaper in Arizona than here.
2. Adjust to being frugal. Do without some of that stuff. Where to start? I need all of that clutter.
3. I have 5 3/4ths months to think of something but I already know what the answer is. I’ll do it all over again in October. Well, everything but the smile, smile, smile...