Lazy W Marie

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

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Potatoes A La Pinterest

   I was admittedly in a baked potato rut.  Since disovering the microwave method, seriously, there is nothing easier.  It’s nutritious, delicious, and easy.  And fast.
   But like I said, rut.  Then I was browsing my fave new eye candy site and discovered a brand new possibility.

   The visual got me first, becuase all things neatly fanned and buttered are on my culinary bucket list.  What about you?  Then the method convinced me to try it, and I am soooooo doing it again.  Here’s a proper online recipe, because I don’t groove writing such things.
   Personal advice:  In lieu of using the called-for butter pats and garlic cloves, I melted a whole stick of butter and seasoned that with some stuff I like (garlic salt, black pepper, and crushed red pepper).  I poured the melted, seasoned butter over the prepped potatoes and had PLENTY left over to use on some yellow squash that needed some yummy lovin and was destined for the grill.
   Almost Failed:  Accustomed to quicker (lazier) techniques, I did not budget quite enough time to achieve the advertised crispy outside-tender inside just using the oven.  So I had to zap the still too firm spuds in the microwave just as our steaks were finishing on the grill.
   Handsome’s Verdict:  He liked it.  I don’t think he loved it, but he liked it, and he is no longer in the business of bluffing me out on recipes to keep from hurting my feelings.  This means we’ll have it again, but not necessarily on extremely special days.
When my Grandpa Dunaway was alive,
he used to talk about growing potatoes.
He said the harvest it was so exciting. 
Sometimes they would be quarter-sized,
sometimes nickle-sized spuds. 
The rest were just small potatoes.
Now my Dad repeats this family legend,
and I crack up every time I think of it.
Love you Dad. 
xoxoxo

Autumn Changes Things Again

  

   The water was boiling. 

   She had been standing there in a daze, halfway waiting like a timid little girl for the universe to intervene on her behalf, halfway simmering in anger as hot as the water now steaming and hissing in the tea kettle.  None of this should be happening, she thought bitterly and helplessly.  Tears welled up in her throat but choked her, refusing to bloom in her eyes.
   Still mostly numb, she poured the steaming water into a pitcher with dry tea bags waiting at the bottom.  She turned the burner off, returned the empty kettle to a cool corner of the glass cook top, and wiped her hands dry on the red towel with yellow and gold owls on it.  These few motions seemed to cost her all the energy remaining in her limbs, so without a choice she leaned backward against the counter top and slowly crumpled to the floor.
   She sat on the shiny tiles reviewing the words in her mind, letting every syllable repeat again and again, hoping to gain some understanding that had so far escaped her.  Nothing would take hold.  The facts were cold and stubborn and two-dimensional, unyielding to pain and deaf to reason. 
   They are not coming home, and according to the phone call it was their free and final choice.
  She spent the next few hours just going through the motions of her routine, mechanically and with a hollowness that made her mind way too vulnerable to dark thinking.  Every task had happy memories attached to it; every square foot of the property was still vibrating with the colors and fragrances of family life.

   While in the barn raking hay, she heard a few tentative drops of rain ping against the tin roof, startling the cats and causing her to gasp and shake her vision loose for a moment.  Maybe this is temporary.  Maybe if I handle this wisely and with enough love they will feel the solidarity they need, the peace they deserve, and everything will right itself soon.

   She finished making the rounds outside, taking note of the quietness and mournfulness of the early autumn weather.  How was it possible that every animal seemed to know what was happening?  They all looked at her cautiously, as though a breeze might shatter everything.  

  
   By the time she reached the edge of the pond, the rain had advanced from a gentle sprinkle to a heavy, slanted downpour.  The midday sky was dark now and the air had turned cold.  Thunder boomed and echoed in the valley.  The horses had retreated to their loafing shed, perhaps to escape the rain, perhaps to grieve.  The rain slashed into the surface of the pond with increasing ferocity, finally drawing out of her the wild, primal tears she needed to cry.  She screamed and sobbed and the surface of the pond jumped and kicked against the news.

   The water was boiling.
Mama’s Losin’ It
This post inspired suddenly and unflinchingly by Mama Kat’s prompt:
“Write a story that begins and ends with the same sentence.”

   I haven’t written much this week because I cut my ankle shaving.  I cut it deep.  Blood was gushing out, thin and hot, mixing into the sudsy shower water and draining in a downward spiral like I was Janet Leigh in Psycho or something.  It was the kind of cut you don’t even feel for another five minutes, or until a minuscule drop of soap falls onto the open wound.  I may or may not have been using a hunting knife instead of a disposable razor, and I may or may not have had the lights out to conserve electricity because I showered during peak time. 
   Long story short, I developed a ferocious staph infection and had to be hospitalized three states away from here, where they have excellent doctors.  More excellent than ours, they say.  But they don’t have Internet there, or coffee, so I could do no writing.  None whatsoever.
   Instead, I sat there and pondered the universe while my slashed-open ankle healed.  You know how at hospitals they never leave you alone?  Every few hours, here comes another nurse to change my band-aid and refill my little plastic yellow mug with diluted sweet iced tea.  And every time, I was reminded of all the incredible, insightful, significant things other people were reading and writing, all the ideas and truths that were being passed around without me.  Sigh.
   So in the middle of the night I crept out of the blue and white hospital room, wrapped in a papery gown and shod in those rubber-flecked booties.  So comfy.  I stole exactly two extra band-aids for my journey home (just in case) and guzzled one last throat full of weak, diluted sweet tea that was sitting at the empty nurse’s station. 
   I walked home without delay.  It was no biggie since I was all tanked up on great writing ideas, all motivated to rejoin the conversations.  My staph infection had burned out purely from literary frustration, and my ankle was almost fully healed too.  The only real obstacle that night was not getting skunked on the dark roads after exiting the Interstate.
   So here I am, brimming with incomplete sentences and anxious to read what has been written during my historic grooming incident-slash- recovery.
   What didn’t kill me has made me, well, sillier. 

http://lazywmarie.com/524/

Second Chance Garden

   Around Mother’s Day this spring Handsome took me on a veggie and seeds shopping spree.  He sneakily drove me to a hardware store about fifteen miles away, wheeled a cart up to me and said, “Go for it!  Grow me somethin, woman!” 
   I took a deep breath.  My eyes were big and glassy as we cruised the aisles of tiny green promises.  He helped me choose the leafiest, strongest looking tomato, pepper, eggplant, cucumber, sweet potato, and watermelon plants.  And zucchini and squash.  And hot peppers. 
   Then we went inside and scooped up several million packets of seeds for summer flowers, herbs, and a few late lettuces.  The earth at home was plenty warm enough by May, and I had been composting all winter.  Most luxuriously, Handsome had already tilled the majority of my garden plot, so I was not fazed by this gargantuan purchase. 

   We were ready, baby, MORE than ready.  And the clock was a tickin’.

   Within a few days every single seedling was tucked neatly into the soil.  Admittedly, it wasn’t the most shapely or creative layout I’d ever planted, but it was full to bursting with edible potential.  I felt that what it lacked in design could be compensated for by volume.  The Lazy W Garden 2011 had the potential to be my most prolific yet, and  I.  Was.  Happy.

********************
   Fast foward about a month.  The mild spring weather turned suddenly and unpleasantly to a record setting Oklahoma summer.  After growing for just a few safe weeks, my green babies were dying a fearsome death.
   The previously lush pumpkin and squash vines were rotting in the sun.  The sweet potato leaves were turning a lovely but dangerous shade of bronze.  The pepper plants were emaciated almost beyond recognition.   I can barely stand to talk about the basil and clematis.
   I tried mulching and watering and sort of weeding, but the truth is that in the midst of the heat wave I had far more pressing issues at hand than the out-of-the-way veggie garden.  I had to keep the animals cooled and watered twice a day, and I needed to work on my tan before our big anniversary vacation.  You know, important stuff.
   So as we packed for that trip in mid July, I silently resigned to the likelihood of returning home to a cemetary of vitamin ambitions.  There were more than a few tears.  Acknowledging this big of a failure is painful, but I did have a pretty respectable base tan.  So there’s that.
********************
   Everything you might imagine about how a garden suffers in more than fifty consecutive days of one hundred-degree-plus heat, and a drought with the power to shrink lakes, all those horrible things are true.  And I feel terrible about it.  But there are lessons to share and hope to celebrate.
     Here is what I have learned:  In addition to being realistic in your garden planning (ahem), it seems to be really important to make your garden at least inviting enough to draw you there and tempt you to stay.  It doesn’t have to be English knot garden perfect, but when I planted after Mother’s Day, I did so hurriedly.  With precious little shape or pattern, all mess and zero fractals.

   A certain amount of chaos is exciting, but vast expanses of weeds and constant formlessness can drain the gardener’s spirit.  It made me feel like no amount of work I could possibly do there would help.  I never wanted friends, family, or especially even Handsome to see it, that is fo’ sho’.  That’s not an excuse, just an acknowledgement of my human nature.  Beauty matters.  Even if it’s truly wild beauty, we all crave it deep down on a cellular level, and where it is lacking we tend to want to escape.  Agreed? 
   That is the philisophical lesson from this summer.  I pinky-promised myself to do better next season.
   The pratical lesson is that planting things too far apart (like I did) can be painfully challenging for the plants.  It’s actaully groovy to plant pretty closely together.  The plants shade each other and help each other retain soil and moisture, too.  And if you plant stategically you can naturally eliminate lots of pests.  MARIGOLDS.
********************
   So where are my few survivors?  They are in Veggie Triage.  It’s a three-step healing process consisting of reduction (of both overall population and individual plant size), relocation, and rejuvenation. 
   I have moved the surviving plants from the remote garden up to the flower beds on the east and south sides of the house.  The rationale is that the attractiveness of the flower bed will encourage me to spend more time tending the edibles.  The flower beds had space to fill anyway, so here again we have symbiosis in nature.
   I have already seen marked improvements in every single little baby, and I feel confident that in the coming weeks we can add seed plants like lettuce and spinach, then later on some broccoli, cilantro, etc, to really fill in the blanks.
   Green thumbs up, friends.  I do NOT want to give up completely on Lazy W Garden 2011.  With a little luck and the logic and magic of these two lessons learned, we might be frying green tomatoes by Labor Day.
  

Pockets of Joy #1

   A few days ago I stumbled on a lovely and complex blog called  Bohemian Twilight    Soooo worth a steady gaze, especially if you are in need of the creative person’s equivalent of a B-12 shot in your upper arm.  Check it out and see for yourself.  I found her through some luscious home interior photos on Pinterest (she has a Tumblr slide show), so you can bet I am already planning on how to gypsify the farm.  PLEASE don’t anybody warn Handsome.  Okay?  Okay.  Deal.

Credit for both amazing photographs:
You are welcome for directing you there.
   In addition to the visual feast, this blogger has a lot of wisdom and insight to offer.  Read  her post on anger and the full moon.  Enlightening!

   On Fridays she graciously hosts a link-up where you can share your “Pockets of Joy” for that week.  I groove this.  I warmly welcome the intervalled practice of expressing gratitude and joy for the beauty in a person’s life.  We have so much!  And  sometimes intending to just maintain an “attitude of gratitude” can be rather thin and quiet, at least for me.  Sometimes it’s nice to share those feelings of bounty.

   So without further ado, my fledgling entry:
1.  Rituals.  Piping hot, strong and rich coffee very early every morning, sweetened with real sugar and real cream.  This (especially the cream) is a luxury item that starts the day off wonderfully.  Showering in the afternoon, right before Handsome arrives home.  Cleaning the kitchen just at sunset.  Locking up the animals as the moon reveals herself.  Braiding my legs together with his while we watch some History channel.  Daily rituals are joyful in their regularity.  They help us keep the pace of home.

2.  Weather.  Oklahoma’s extended drought and extreme heat wave have finally come to a close.  At least for now.  This week we have joyfully worked and played in mid-nineties, shade, and even the occassional rain shower.  This is a wonderful refreshment, one we cannot help but celebrate.

3.  Feeding the chickens.  I love delivering kitchen leftovers outside to the chickens and watching them jump and scurry for the best stuff.  I love the way their little talons sound on the gravel paths, the way they skeedaddle and sprint this way and that in feathery bursts of energy.  I have said it before and will say it again:  Letting the chickens go free range in the mornings is the best animal decision we have ever made on this farm.  This week the chickens are enjoying the cooler temps and have been especially joyful.

4.  Speaking of birds, the geese…  They are getting bolder and bolder, waddling up from the pond several times a day now.  I love to be busy indoors doing housework or writing and hear that strange but happy chorus of honking outside the south door.  One goose in particular, Mia, craves human touch all day.  He (Yep, it’s a he named Mia; I will have to tell that story soon.) honks until I am seated in the grass then curves his long neck in an inverted bass clef shape and whines while I pet him gently.  Geese are hilarious and affectionate and joyful creatures!

5.  Blogland.  Meeting people through blogging whom I would never have met otherwise, like Keda from South Africa.  Hello there!  Staying warm?  Check out her blog too.  Thorough, sensitive writing, beautiful lifestyle.  Truly.

6.  Health.  This week I am keenly aware of how good our health is and that we should be grateful for that.  We ate lightly, slept well, stayed really active, and enjoyed the myriad benefits of this practice.

7.  Music.  I rediscovered a Carla Bruni album and listened to it three and a half times while plowing through my overflowing ironing basket.  Something about her effervescent sound and her poetry got me thinking about bubbles, circles, fractals, and mandalas, so I detoured from ironing long enough to get these words out of my head.

Whether or not you participate in the Pockets link-up,
I would sure like to hear about your joys this week.
May they be genuine, multiplied, and ever changing.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

joy pockets