Snow. And Lots of It

It's 19 degrees at 7 a.m and according to the intrepid television reporter, that's the day's high. Looking out of my office windows, the snow is in whiteout conditions - I can barely see the pines at the edge of the clearing.

Garden? What garden? The only thing I can still see is the trellis into the flower garden.

Snow is really beautiful....as long as the electricity and heat stay on!

Calm Before the Storm

Yesterday was the last warm day before the impending storm. John changed the burned out light bulbs in the patio garden area. We have pretty lanterns lining a pathway that loops around from the garage to the patio, and several bulbs needed to be replaced. Shadow was "helping" him when suddenly he disturbed some mice that were wintering over behind the heating unit. There's a bit of tall grass there, and the warmth from the fans must be very enticing to the mice. I looked out the window to see Shadow zig zagging around and around the heating unit, her tail held high like a plume, as she barked excitedly and chased the mice hither and yon. John was yelling at her to stop (he was afraid she'd hit some of the big electrical wires connecting the unit to the house) and laughing all at the same time.

We then went to the vegetable garden to see what survived the last snow, so we could monitor what survived THIS snowstorm expected tomorrow. My spinach is the only green showing in the vegetable garden. I planted seeds in the fall, and the spinach was about an inch high when the December snowstorm came. The snow has melted, and the spinach was thriving...it's now about 2 inches tall...but tomorrow we are expecting another foot of snow, and the temperatures will plunge. So I bid my little patch of green farewell until the next thaw.



We did something unusual yesterday. It was 55 and sunny. Around 3pm, we put our work aside, leashed up Shadow, and took a long walk along the country roads. We needed to feel the sun on our faces and smell the rich earth from the pastures to fortify ourselves against yet another winter storm.

Wish us luck...the Richmond, Virginia weatherman said yesterday "Snow will fall like lard." Which is really a strong, albeit disgusting, visual image.

When is spring, exactly?

(photos today are of the vegetable garden, but taken in October...and Shadow racing through the orchard while the first snowflakes fall, but picture was taken last March)

I Plan to Hide Under the Covers

...and take my cues from the black bear. Hibernate. You know you're in for trouble when the Weather Channel's meteorologist, with a happy gleam in his eye, announces your forecast as "very interesting." His voice takes on a more excited pitch as strange maps showing front lines, cloud formations, and places where such things will "collide" in the atmosphere flicker on the screen like dreadful oracles. Weather was never this exciting in my youth except when snowstorms meant school closings.


According to the best predictions, a massive storm that's now out near California will rumble down south, slam Texas with ice, then sneak in through the back door into the southeastern United States. Just as this nasty trick occurs, an icy blast of Canadian air (gee, thanks our neighbors to the north) will hit the California traveler, creating a band of snow and/or ice over our region Friday and Saturday.


Ice is bad out here in the countryside. Very bad. Not only will it take down trees, but it will take out power lines. No power means I have no water. We did buy a generator, but a small one to keep essentials like a space heater and the refrigerator going. I have been stockpiling drinking water all year in containers in the basement for just such an occasion, however.


So my Thursday might be spent (depending on the updated forecast) filling bathtubs with water, charging the laptop and cell phone batteries, and making sure all the flashlights, lanterns and candles are where the rest of the family can find them (for I appear to be the only one in the entire household who can remember this fact.) For the uninitiated into country life, filling the tub with water is so that you can dunk a bucket into the tub water, draw a bucket out, and dump it into the toilet tank to flush it.

I'm actually better prepared than before, which is usually a sign that nothing will happen. It's like taking an umbrella when it threatens to rain; umbrellas ward off rain very well. I've got paper plates and cups and disposable utensils (so we don't waste water washing dishes if the water isn't working), enough canned food to feed an army, Ritz crackers and peanut butter (somehow a staple when the power is off), a propane stove and grill for cooking, and a pantry stocked with pet food (Pierre the Portly breathes a sigh of relief and pats his chubby tummy). Batteries in the radio and a pile of unread books. MP3 player charged? Check. Hey, I might be snowed in, but I plan to be comfortable.

I think I will take my cue from the black bear and hibernate if it snows a lot. I will dive under a thick comforter with a stack of seed catalogs and dream about warm weather, digging my hands into the dirt, and watching hummingbirds buzz on by the geraniums on the porch.

The photo below is me and my Shadow girl in the road here taking our walk after the snowstorm of March 2008 .

Remembering Miss Nita

In Floral Park where I grew up, the family living behind us had a maid. This was very unusual in our middle class town. The "M's" were divorced. Mrs. M and her two sons lived in the house. The maid cooked, cleaned and watched the boys after school. I wasn't supposed to play with the M boys - they were wild, used bad language, and according to my mother, were hoodlums in the making. But sometimes when I got bored I'd run around the corner, knock and the back door, and use the formal phrase we all used back then: "I'm calling for [names of the M boys]. Can they come out and play?"

The maids that worked for the M's had starched sky blue uniforms with a white cap, white apron, and white nurses' shoes. The first maid was Miss Jenny and I loved her. She would give me cookies and tell the boys how well behaved I was. No wonder they stopped playing with me for a while.

But it's their second maid that I wish to tell you about now - Miss Nita.

Miss Nita came from Haiti. I didn't know where Haiti was. I just knew she was the blackest black person I had ever seen - her skin was shiny and beautiful, with blue lights in it. She wore her hair in little braids with plastic ties with pretty colored glass balls on the end. The light would catch the colors in the glass balls and sparkle like jewels in the kitchen when she walked around. It was hard to understand Miss Nita's accent. She yelled at a lot at the boys and hit them with a broom. She cooked delicious and exotic foods and she cleaned nonstop. The boys did everything to make her life miserable. They really were hoodlums in the making as my mother said.

Miss Nita sat at the kitchen table and chain smoked and sometimes she cried. I would sit on a stool and drink a glass of milk and watch her smoke while the M boys ate the magical food she prepared. I remember rice, chicken, pork chops, bananas (probably her equivalent of fried plantains?) and pies...oh, could that lady ever make a pie. She talked about her brother Claude in Haiti and her mother. She had come to America to make money and she sent her checks back to Claude so her family in Haiti and her mother could eat.

She told scary stories about Haiti. I remember how she said that gangs of boys would stick firecrackers in animals and blow them up. Sometimes they would do this to other children and laugh at their burns. She talked about gangs, and she talked about how frightened she had been growing up there. But her mother and her brother were there and you could hear the longing in her voice for the family she had left behind.

She was very angry. She would stub out her cigarettes and say in her beautiful voice, "These boys do not know how lucky they are." This was before the two M boys would run out and do bad things in the neighborhood. My mother was right - I shouldn't have played with them.

One day, Miss Nita saw me skipping around the corner to the candy store. She was standing on the M's porch shaking out a rug. She waved me over and I ran up. "Hello Miss Nita." I was probably around seven or eight years old.

"I'm going back to Haiti," she announced. "I wanted to say goodbye to you. You are a good girl. My momma's ill. I want to see Claude and my babies." Her babies were her nieces and nephews.

That was her way of saying goodbye. Strangely enough, she gave me a hug, squeezing me as tight as my grandma used to. Her hands were rough and she smelled like chlorine bleach, probably because she was always doing laundry.

As I watched news coverage from Haiti last night, I started to cry, especially as the reporter showed a ward of children with legs amputated. In a poor country, would they get a prosthesis? Would they be able to function or will they starve once the relief workers leave because they cannot get work - they are now crippled? How can this be happening in one of the poorest nations in the world?

I remembered Miss Nita and I haven't thought about her in 30 years or more. I wonder how old she is now? I'm guessing she's in her 50's...of course when you're a kid, everyone seems old, but she was probably in her early twenties then. Did she go back to Haiti, or did she eventually get her family out and move them all to the United States?

When I worked for a 'famous' PR person, she taught me a PR trick. When we had to write materials for big and hard to understand projects for our clients (mostly non profit clients), she taught me to take a big concept and instead of writing about the concept, find a person to write about. So if we wanted to help people understand how a mathematics education could change a person's life, instead of writing praise for math, we'd find a child. Preferably a poor child who had been inspired to take math, and who was now a nuclear physicist or something like that, and we'd write his story. Then people would be moved and understand the big idea. They would take action.

I don't know if I've captured what Miss Nita was like with this essay. It is so, so hard to watch the earthquake relief and news coverage. I feel overwhelmed by the damage, by the pain and suffering. I start to cry and I get angry and then I swear a lot and then I have to go to confession or say an act of contrition, and then I get angry with God and I don't want to do that. I just get angry all over. I want to jump on a plane and dig people out of the rubble with my bare hands. But I don't know any useful skills to help the Haitian people. I'm not strong enough to dig them out. I have no medical training. My French isn't even strong enough to order in a restaurant much less translate Kreyol (Haitian Creole).

So I will write about Miss Nita, and think about her today, and pray a lot, hoping that by remembering one of the few Haitian people I have actually met in life that my prayers can do some good, and help you think about them too.

Every Room a Garden

I love my houseplants. In the dead of winter, they bring warmth and joy and life into my home. My little garden room which we call a "Florida room" is my refuge in the morning. After walking Shadow, I retreat there with a cup of coffee. Then it is time for religious devotions, prayer, spiritual reading and reflection. Sometimes I just sit and count my blessings. I thought you'd enjoy a peek into my garden room. Image a small room with four wide windows overlooking fields and woods. The walls are knotty pine paneling halfway up, and near the top are painted a rich woodland green that sparkles with crushed quartz stone that was mixed into the paint. There's a rocker for you to sit and enjoy the sunrise, because the room faces east; or you can sit in my ratty second hand club chair, put your feet on the heart shaped braided rug, and sip your coffee gazing out towards my vegetable garden.

My pink geranium won't give up and admit that it's winter - it is still blooming. Its blossoms cheer me on a cold day.





I have about a dozen African violet plants. When I visited my sister in New York in 2007, she gave me cuttings from three of her African violets that I admired. One was a blue-purple, one was white with burgundy edged ruffled leaves, and one had gigantic pink ruffled flowers. Each cutting rooted. But now, all of the plants are producing the flowers, below! This is called a chimera, according to African violet breeders....apparently the cuttings did not have the same genetic material as the parent plant, so they reverted to whatever genetics the leaves carried. They are still wonderful. I love the shy bursts of purple peeking out from the windowsill garden.



And lo and behold - my discounted Christmas cactus from Lowe's is not only living, it's thriving! See it in the red pot, in the middle, below? It really revived. I hope it will bloom next year!

Waiting Isn't for Me

I hate waiting. I'm no good at it. Is anyone good at waiting? Yet I don't get a choice. Spring won't come when I will it...it comes when it comes.

All the gardening advice I'm reading about just makes me more and more grumpy. I want spring, and I want it now. (Stamping my foot a la Veruka Salt in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory: "Daddy, make it spring NOW" - I have to laugh. That's probably what I look like to God this week.)

I tried fussing with my houseplants yesterday. The dollar store, my favorite haunt, had decorative flower pots on sale and I snagged three to give my African violets a face lift. My dendrobium is already dying; I moved him into the family room, hoping that getting him away from the daily blast of heat from the vents and the chilly window will please him. But picking dead flowers off the violets and the overwintering geraniums only made me more depressed.

I sent away for an iris catalog. I sat in my plant room on Saturday afternoon with my little tabletop iris fountain going and read through my Country Gardens magazine, but I couldn't shut my inner editor up...and now I'm writing a letter to the editor to point out all the mistakes in their African violet article. And I do wish when they show gorgeous gardens that make me drool that 1) they tell me what zone the person is in and 2) they tell me how long it took to get the garden that gorgeous. I mean, come on, if I had million dollars, 20 years, and a perfect zone 7, I'd be on your cover too.

I thought that after church, I'd head over to Lowe's and Wal Mart and look at flower seeds. That always cheers me up. When I was a little girl, we spent many winter Sunday afternoons wandering the greenhouses at Gardener's Village, Garden World, and all the garden centers. My dad rarely bought much, but standing in a tropical greenhouse and playing with Pepper the parrot at Gardener's Village was always fun.

Nope. Nobody had seeds out yet! Lowe's had the Burpee heirlooms out yet, but I know better than to buy them first. I'll wait to see what cheap seeds go out at Wal Mart.

So it's cold, I'm grumpy, my garden is still covered with ice and snow, and I'm like a deer in headlights today with my work projects. I've got a pile of work to do, a dog that needs medication from the vet, companies to call to cancel services, and online workshops to plan for my consulting practice. I've got writing assignments and marketing work to do and....well, all I want to do is go outside and play in the dirt.

Can someone make it spring? Please?

It's Beginning to Look Like Seed Starting Time!

It's beginning to look a lot like seed starting time! The catalogs have arrived - fewer this year than last year, much to my disappointment. I know it's expensive to print catalogs, but I love flipping through gardening catalogs in the evenings while my husband watches television. I mark pages, write down notes, and dream about my garden.

On Saturday evening, we had some friends and their families over for dinner, and after dessert we sat around the dining room table and talked about our gardens. What joy we had dreaming of our flowers to come! Helen introduced me to several new ideas for butterfly gardens, while Annette and I talked about flowers that easily reseed. Sharing my vegetable gardening tales with friends reminded me NOT to plant more turnips but to again plant lots of peppers; we all agreed that there is nothing quite as tasty as a pickled organic garden pepper, enjoyed right from the jar during the winter. I've got notes from last year, but talking with friends about gardening on a January day when it's only about 20 degrees outside helped me remember all the things I want to do differently this year. I am already starting to get cabin fever, and it's only early January. If we get a day above 40, I'm heading out to turn the compost pile.

This weekend I used up most of the remaining garden carrots and the last of the beets. Two lonely turnips remain in the fridge bin waiting their turn in mashed potato and turnip dishes. I straightened up my freezer and found bags more of green beans, peppers, corn on the cob, and Swiss chard. Snow still covers my raised beds, so I can't pick whatever spinach, lettuce and chard was there in winter.

It's time to think of those seeds. What will I plant? I've marked down six butterfly gardening perennial seed packets from Swallowtail Garden Seeds. I plan to add new varieties of Echinacea because they did so well, as well as Gaillardia and Salvia. Aescalpia tuberosa (Butterfly Weed) is on the list to plant, along with the Missouri Primrose. I've started sketching out a new flower bed, very small but filled with more butterfly-attracting flowers. It will be right at the end of the pathway that leads to my front porch. Now that we've lived in the house for two summers, I know the best views from my rocker on the porch, and I plan to fill those views with flowers!

A lovely gift of long term food storage seeds arrived from Hometown Garden Seeds; thank you, Chelsea! I've never grown some of these and they will be welcome additions to my vegetable garden.

As for the annuals, I am planting three new snapdragon varieties from seeds. I love the bronze to golden yellow snaps, and I didn't plant nearly enough last year. I've had them winter over, so they seem to be like tender perennials here instead of annuals. And as for zinnias...the bigger the better. Giant, giant and giant!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'd better get back to work. Got to earn the money for my seeds somehow!