Pears!

Pear picking is such an enjoyable task.  Bryce on a 12 foot ladder with a fruit claw on the end of a long handle, picked about two five gallon pails of pears the past couple of days.  Before that last week we picked a couple of grocery sacks full.

I heard on the Nebraska TV program, "Back Yard Farmer," that it is appropriate to pick pears green and wait for them to ripen, mellow, and sweeten in the house.

We had guests yesterday for swims, pizza and apple pie.  They went home with a large grocery sack of pears and an ice cream bucket of grapes.  Great grandchildren seem amazed to learn where jelly and fruit comes from.  Bryce said the boy, nearly 10 years old, counted every pear that he handed down to him from the ladder.

The "Antique Road Show" is going on without me and I am missing the first few treasures.  Life is good, small duties are a pleasure to finish, and picking produce is a grand reward for patiently waiting weeks during  our hot, dry summer for the pears to gain size and sweetness.

City Harvest

Pears ripe and ready for picking;  grape jelly canned in quarts. 

 

Our backyard fruit is better, more abundant, and larger this year than ever before.  The concord grapes are sweeter than previous years.  The many, many 100 degree days did not seem to harm our fruit. 

Picking pears and grapes is good for the soul; all the more perhaps because we planted both many years ago.  There is something comforting about being in one place for over 40 years.  It gives a person time to discover gardening mistakes never imagined.  Weather cycles make impressions and surprises me on the way the world works.

 Thirty years ago we planted 13 Scotch Pines on the perimiter of the west and north fence.  They must have been about four or five foot tall and trucked in from Iowa.  They grew and were trimmed and grew more, ever needing more trimming.  The neighbor to the west found them obnoxiously hanging over his back yard so he trimmed them also.  When they got too close to the power lines the power company trimmed them.  I loved the wild life they sheltered, even the possums and racoons.  But most of all the birds.  We were graced one summer by a small owl family, mother and three curious, sweet babies.

We didn't know when we planted them that three decades later pine wilt and bark beetles would wipe out pines near and far.  Omaha yards are blighted by dying pines; even one in a neighborhood is certain death for those within blocks. 

This week He Who Must Be Obeyed has taken out three;  cut limbs with a small chain saw and re-cut smaller limbs with a cutting tool.  Dead needles flew in all directions, but eventually he bagged them up in the yard waste bags seen behind the ladder.  Our city waste pick up crew threw 22 bags into the truck yesterday.  The rest of the trees will surely die.  With them will go my shady plantings, my reading hammock in the shade of one pine tree and the pear tree.  Will our hostas and ferns survive heat and sun?  Obviously, I can now select annuals other than the ones for shade.

Our little yard and the dirt that I cherish has been a source of never ending joy for me.  So much so that I, at this age, have discovered the satisfaction of making dirt in my mulch pile.  I am not very good at it yet, but I will learn.  My mother could turn plant matter into mulch for her African Violets in a plastic bag on her window sill when she was 84.  Surely I can learn how to turn plant waste into dirt in my back yard.

Use it or Lose it.

This afternoon I tried to log in to this site on my Kindle, which I have had long enough so I should have all of its capabilities mastered.  I do not.  As I Googled my way to this URL on the Kindle, I could not get access to it.  Instead I got a notice that my domain name was for sale.  Did I want to buy it?  That got my attention.  It is quite a relief to find nothing about that at this moment.

I wish I had been a regular writer all summer.  Now that I have had my miracle pain patch, perhaps my life will settle down and once more I will anticipate the daily delightful activities. It is very good to wake up to several task possibilities, each one equally enjoyable.  Today we, he and I, sorted and boiled the Concord grapes into the jelly juice to be canned tomorrow.  A couple of weeks ago we made 8 quarts of the jeweled purple perfection.  Jelly making has a wonderful aroma. I think there is something to aroma therapy.  All of my good feelings seem to be associated with food, unfortunately.  Ah, well

You know that visual illusion in which looking one way a person sees an old hag and another way is a beautiful young girl...well pain can give a person two sides that change equally fast with relief from the beast.  As I write this, I think the word "hag" is about the worst word in our vocabulary and to be sure there are a lot of 'worst words.'

Blue Bottle Gardens

My Little Blue Bottle Collection

Our church women's groups had a combined Spring meeting not long ago.  The speakers were Master Gardeners, one from the Lauritzen Botanical Garden and the other a nice former teacher friend who is a member of our congregation.

I had the pleasure of sitting with him and his wife for the luncheon and he asked me if I was familiar with blue bottle gardens.  The concept was new to me as well as intriguing.  There are a few hits within blogs for Blue Bottle Gardens I discovered.

My hunt was on for blue bottles.  I had three small ones that I placed in a pot of ivy; and as my dearest walked by the wines at Aldi's last week, he selected two in blue bottles.  It is a Landshut Riesling Mosel 2011 from Germany.  I guess the next pleasure will be to open them, but not for a while.  Being no wine connoisseur, I have no idea what it will be like.

Our Cozy Corner

The afternoon sun pours through the blue glass into this window facing west.  As you can see one of the chairs is used a great deal more than the other one.  This is a sight that I see nearly every afternoon after lunch.

One Large Leap

They, whoever "they" are, say that time flies when one is having fun.  I have come to believe that one season flies after the other.  Is this the blessing reserved to the old?  Or is the curse of those of us that would prefer to have a few more years of good eyesight and the brains to read.

And there is a darling, yes darling, camera in its new box under the Math Card Catalog in our bedroom. The high school librarians chose the physical catalogs for a symbolic putting away of the cards when the collection was digitized. I have an assortment of prized things in that catalog.  I kept one drawer of the math cards and now wish I had gone into the collection and chosen a few from each drawer.  This is what is meant by older and wiser, perhaps. 

The one year old, new camera awaits my fumbling fingers and the two inch manual awaits my numb brain.  A person has to move around and pretzel oneself into many positions to take reasonably good pictures.  I don't know what happened to my once agile self.  I have to practice getting off of the floor now and do it sporadically.  A couple of decades ago I took a goodly number of photographs from the ground.  Little grand-kids are not tall and even though a stumpy 5 foot, I find that is not low enough to take pictures of my unfolding ferns, flowers, or little children.

On Wednesday I will be taking a four and a half hour test to see if I can still think.  If I can, I will clean out the Jeep Wrangler and dust off my driver's license and practice on the busy Omaha streets.  I might have a book or two in this old wise noggin and I have a book to clean up and send off to the Library of Congress.  During all of this testing and doctoring I now know I have no brain bleeds nor any brain tumors.  All I have left is plain old age atrophy of the frontal lobes and who knows what else.

Test or no test life is very enjoyable and I have a houseful of wonderful reading head of me.  We (He Who Must Be Obeyed) and I, the reader, started "Dust to Dust: A Memoir" by Benjamin Busch.  I learned of it on C Span II's Book TV and it is going to be as good as I expected.  I am easily captivated by a good book.

Run for Your Life

Take Exercise'
Ukraine's Emergencies Minister Viktor Baloga has advised the public to take more exercise as a remedy against the cold.
"You need to get up in the morning, take active exercise and work," he was quoted by Ukrainskaya Pravda as telling reporters on Wednesday.
"It hasn't killed anyone yet and only makes a person fitter."His personal advice to keep warm, he added, was to "run 8-10km [5-6 miles] every morning and bathe in cold water, all year round".  From BBC

 My darling, He Who Must Be Obeyed, has told me the story many times over the nearly 60 decades that we have been married.  He tells of going to a country one room schoolhouse when he was a boy in Wyoming.  On a particularly windy and below zero day, he and his sister started out for school on a horse. When they came out of the more sheltered river bottom, up the banks and onto the prairie, the cold was life threatening.  His sister began to cry.  He jumped off of the horse and hanging on to its tail, he ran the rest of the way to school. When they arrived the teacher was nowhere to be seen.  They put the horse in the barn and went into the freezing cold schoolhouse. 


The teacher had a stack of magazines that he treasured.  They made for great fire starter, torn off page by page and twisted tight for makeshift kindling.  Starting a fire in a cold pot bellied stove is serious business.  With a stack of pitch kindling, it is easy if one knows how to set it correctly.  From that point my recollection of the story fades away like a whispy cloud.  Did he find firewood? Did the teacher arrive from Belle Fourche?  Did someone come in a car for him and his sister?  Maybe after warming up they once again mounted the horse and galloped for home. How far away was the school from home?  Five or six miles comes to my mind. 


I could get all the frightening details if he were awake.  I read him to sleep again after lunch.

So Dark So Long

It is 7:04 a.m. in Omaha and there is no sign of light yet.  Not through the closed drapes, anyway.  I see on earthsky.org. that the latest sunrises for mid northern latitudes is around January 5. And then there is that solstice that does not mean much to when the sun sets and rises.   "For example, sunrise time in the central U.S. – say, around Wichita, Kansas – for the next several days will be around 7:45 in the morning." 

With Epiphany yesterday what can we do, those of us who wish Christmas could go on a little longer.  Maybe start gearing up for it around Halloween like the rest of the masses, and I do not mean the Advent service folks.  I think it is that word 'mass' that divide the Catholics and we Lutherans.  It should be abolished and we could be one Christian family.  Maybe 'services' makes Catholics think about the army.  I don't know and it is way too early to think.

I am sad that we are not having a proper winter.  My lilacs want to bloom and are budding out, I have been told by my better half.  The pool freezes at night and thaws out by dinner time.  The photo header of that wonderful snowfall we had earlier is all I have to remind me what time of year it is.  It melted and now nothing but brown grass and dirt.  The grass is struggling to green up, however.