Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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Archives for November 2011

Slow, Beautiful Decay

   I luxuriated with some time in the flower bed today and noticed even further advancement into dormancy. The changes happen so gradually, yet so suddenly, that it is easy not to see every colorful, textural stage of the season.

   After the abundant sunshine, the first thing that is apparent is how many leaves have fallen and how much of the crunchy stuff has accumulated in the corners of the farm, mostly against the buildings and fences.
   Then there are the brilliant colors. Brick red, true gold, bronze, mustard yellow, crimson, and brown, every shade of brown. Nearly every leaf has surrendered its green now. Only a few waxy stems remain here and there, but they were probably frozen that color and will soon be kneeling to winter’s authority.

   The second chance tomatoes are stubbornly offering up their remaining fruits, but those fruits are blistered and burnt now from our cold nights. I am having a hard time pulling up these dead lovelies, after all they’ve endured this year. It seems overly brutal of me to insist they have reached their end. Maybe if I leave them all winter we’ll enjoy reseeded babies next Easter. Those are always stronger, by the way, in case you didn’t know.

   I watered everything today while the sun was warm and the soil receptive. We have a few more cold nights forecasted, and Mom & Grandpa have always said that you should water deeply right before a freeze. The idea is that the water will soak down and freeze around the root systems, forming protective insulation against the harsher freezes soon to come. Then in the springtime, of course, the buried ice melts at a snail’s pace, giving each plant that deep, slow kiss it needs right as it’s waking up…

   Cannas are as striking in dormancy as they are at the height of a tropical summer., I love the structure of their big leaves, the fuzzy seed pods, and the rusty colors. I never cut them down until new growth emerges in the late spring. Often winter does it for me, though, and the fodder makes excellent mulch.

   Speaking of pruning, I also delay cutting anything healthy off of the rose bushes until maybe February. Borrowed garden wisdom says to let the sap slip all the way out of the branches before cutting, which takes the entire winter. So unless you see something truly diseased or so badly tangled with another branch that it needs to be removed, let it stay for now. Make like McCartney and Let it Be.

   The pansies I planted earlier this autumn have all doubled in size. And they are so fragrant. Of course you have to be pretty near the earth to smell them, but what a treat! Don’t you love the fragrance of wet earth mixed with that peppery, sweet smell of petals? So nice and clean. Better than Scentsy even.

   The mums all seem ready to trade their first round of blooms for another, but I am not ready to snip anybody’s head off quite yet. I adore the colors of straw and burlap all around me.

 Delay, delay, delay…have I found reasons to delay, or am I delaying for good reasons? I think the former is truest. Any way I can keep from busying myself right now allows for more wandering, more touching, more dreaming, especially in the garden where God does His quietest work and where I find the most miracles.
Enjoy the changes around you…
xoxoxo
   

Inspired in Stillwater

   Yesterday evening I had the slightly unusual pleasure of going with Handsome to a work event. An actual work-work event, not a social-work event. Although there was a delicious barbecue meal served and we did enjoy a little socializing. But technically it was work for him, a co-op meeting about smart energy sources and asset management in our great state. 
   I always enjoy seeing him in the context of his job, and last night was no exception, He shines. I am so proud. As an added bonus, I was freshly inspired by the speaker to learn more about the energy discussions that are taking place all around us. You may or may not know that in many ways Oklahoma is something of a benchmark for this wide reaching global issue and that our citizens, our professionals, are considered the go-to experts in the oil and gas industry.
   Before I begin to stutter out my pedestrian understanding of these important topics (this might take a few days), allow me to share a few personal notes from last night:
  • I wore a bright red sweater to a semi-political citizen gathering in Stillwater, OK. Raise your hand if you grasp the seriousness of this error. Thank goodness for my favorite threadbare denim jacket which protected most of my vital organs.
  • After ten years of marriage I still get butterflies when I hear my guy introduced by first and last name, and I get double butterflies when I am introduced as his wife.
  • Life lessons can be found anywhere you look, even town hall meetings. That place was oozing with inspiration last night. 
  • I am so proud to be a native Oklahoman. And on that note, today happens to be the anniversary of our statehood!! Happy Birthday to us!
  • If you are willing to spend time identifying problems, please also be willing to spend time seeking solutions. This, of all the meaningful anecdotes shared by the speaker, spoke the thickest volumes to me. I plan to annoy you guys for the rest of the month with expansion on this idea.
   Okay, that’s it for this morning. Hopefully I have properly whetted your appetite for energy information. Hopefully you turn off the lights when you leave the room. Hopefully you say Happy Statehood Day to the nearest Oklahoman. Hopefully you have the sense to wear local colors to local events.
Have a fantastic day everyone!
xoxoxo

5 Senses Tour: Current Reads

   We are between book club titles right now, so my daily reading has been even more customized than normal. For Monica’s Five Senses Tour this week, here are the five books most frequently cracked open around the Lazy W:
   In the early mornings I have been devouring inspirational writing from Norman Vincent Peale, along with excerpts from the Bible. Do you know much about this man? I find his book to be practical and solidly based in scripture, which is important to me personally. His suggestions on positive thinking and daily thought conditioners as an extension of prayer are so straight forward and nourishing. I tend to live in my head a lot, and this book has led me to much brighter, stronger thinking about prayer and how God operates.
   It seems that my thirst for spiritual invigoration is matched only by my appetite for planning and daydreaming about the soon to be tilled Potagerie. This gardening book was given to me by my sweet and vibrant ol’ Grandpa Rex, the world’s classiest, funniest, most talented and most affectionate gardener. I have read it cover to cover at least seven times and, as evidenced by these crinkly pages, have left it out in the rain almost that many. It is informative and energetic, and when the book itself finally gives up its spine, I plan to wallpaper my kitchen with the pages. Another thing nobody should tell Handsome, please and thank you.

   The other gardening book on my table right now is all about herbs, since that is the intended focus of the new garden at the Lazy W. The paper cover makes my mouth water every time I see it, with its olive green, white, and turquoise artwork. And the black and white photo you see here is about as illustrative as the book ever gets, leaving its 634 pages free to over inform me. I am completely enamored now with the magic and science of cultivating herbs, and I cannot help but see parallel after parallel between this and the art of cultivating joy.
   I’ve also been gathering up and taking inventory for my Thanksgiving and gift giving recipes, so Martha Stewart’s classic volume has made regular appearances in the kitchen. And on the couch while I watch movies, notebook and pen in hand.
  

   In the two photos above you can see our little family’s favorite quick-bread recipes, complete with handwritten notes to the cook and dried splatters of their respective batters. For the banana bread, I highly recommend stirring candied walnuts into the mix. Also, butter your pans then dust with both flour and cinnamon before filling them. This is good for both recipes.
   With what time is left for recreational reading, I nibble at a piece of new fiction titled The Memoirs of Little K. It deserves and will receive a full review when I am done,  but in the mean time there are so many thought provokers!
   Here is one for you that got my attention, especially as the daylight wanes and the calendar fills up. “You must remember we had no television, no radio, no cinema. Russia’s winter days are short, and there are many dark hours to fill.” This was written about a late 19th century culture. How differently we live today! Now our days are brimming with technology and entertaining distractions. We rarely complain about the days being too long, but about how they speed past too soon. Maybe the solution is simpler than we want to admit.

   So that’s my coffee table these days. My sense of sight is happily overwhelmed by books as well as by the changing landscape. Oklahoma is enjoying one of the most dazzling autumns I can remember, so I am trying to soak it up daily, between chapters.

Happy Sensing!
xoxoxoxo

5 senses tour

Family Meals a Favorite

   Mama Kat certainly has a way of begging bittersweet memories lately. 
This week I am answering about my favorite place to eat as a child. 
This fresh hell, on the heels of so much reflecting on legacy and empty nests.
I cannot help but wonder how my own children will remember our family meals, 
whether any of our tables and traditions over the years 
will ever slip into focus as “favorite,” 
but that’s not the question today.
   Growing up, as I may have already mentioned, Mom & Dad made regular family dinners a priority. We encircled our solid wood dining room table every single night. Dad sat in the same chair for most of my childhood, maybe all of it until he became a Grandpa, a turning point for so many wonderful and hilarious reasons. 
   Before eating, we always prayed as a family. During Advent and Lent we lit candles and took turns reading from devotional books. From time to time Mom would have a new baby for us to call brother or sister, and that baby always sat in the world’s most beautiful carved wooden high chair with an over-your-head table tray. Many a bowl of marinara sauce spaghetti has been painted onto that high chair.
   We ate delicious, healthy meals, often crafted from leftovers, and we drank whole milk, never soda or even tea. To this I feel we all owe our basically admirable eating habits. Basically. More or less.
   This family dinner business was not negotiable, unless we chose to watch a VHS tape or a laser disk movie together, as a complete family. Also, those movie dinners were always on the weekend, never a school night, and they provided me a whole other happy chapter of childhood.
   As adolescence approached I gradually became aware that our family was unique among my friends, that most people ate fast food and drank unlimited quantities of soda and did so in front of televisions. In their own rooms. For a season I was rude about it to my sweet, steady parents. It was several years before I appreciated how much effort this daily ritual required and even longer before I glimpsed the investment Mom and Dad were making into our hearts, night after night and year after year.
***************
   Thankfully our family still gathers at home for dinners now and then, though of course now the crowd is significantly larger. I suppose we could separate into smaller groups throughout the house, but we never do. We just keep adding chairs and squeezing in on Dad’s handmade wooden bench until everyone is wedged in  front of a skinny piece of table real estate and our silverware is overlapping. 
   We are loud and silly, but manners are paramount. More or less. We pass food to and fro. We use cloth napkins and Mom’s colorful collection of plates. We give small, pretty plates to the kids and try to help them eat what they don’t want so nobody gets in trouble.
   With this larger family crowd we all know that whoever chooses to sit in the chair nearest the kitchen will inevitably be asked to go fetch just one more thing, approximately nineteen thousand times per meal, so we all flood the furthest posts first.
   Once again I look around at my adult friends and realize how blessed I am to have this gift in my life, this dinner table, these loving parents who are always eager to feed us. Not many people my age still get to eat in their childhood home, at the same beautiful table, with both of their parents and all of their siblings. 
It was so easy to pick my favorite.
xoxoxoxo

5 Sense Tour, Potageries

   The past few months I have been preparing a little plot of earth near our south facing dining room door to become a Potagerie, a small kitchen garden for growing herbs, edible flowers, and small daily use fruits and veggies. A lot of planning and work will go into it before anything this beautiful happens at the Lazy W, but good things are underway. Here are five of my favorite inspiration photos to get the organic juices flowing.
The connection between dirt and counter top is so vital, 
and I love everything about this photo.
This pretty little corner is just part of one hundred acres of gardening
at a museum in Massachusetts.
Different hardiness zone, I know, but close enough to inspire and teach.
Pinned Image
This curvy, well stocked little garden 
brought to us by This Hopeless Romantic.
Perfect.
Pinned Image
This photo was originally on a site called “Bliss and Kiss” but I cannot find it now. 
I have always loved growing blue morning glory vines over a doorway. 
They impart such a grandness and coziness at the same time. 
Pinned Image
The variety of height and depth makes this garden really interesting, 
and using grapevine obelisks for climbing foods is just beautiful.
   I am linking up a day late with Monica on her Five Sense Tour, collecting all kinds of wonderful eye candy along the way. Have an inspired, imaginative day everyone!
xoxoxo
5 senses tour