Art in the Sonoran Desert

It seems strange to be in Tucson in December with a steady rain pouring down. The same thing happened yesterday. Today, though, there’s thunder and lightening, making me feel more as if I were at home in Kansas. Even so, I'm thinking of desert art.

Some people who live in the Arizona desert country use the desert as a junkyard, abandoning old metal pieces to the elements. These pieces survive for years of burning heat and monsoon rains. Other desert-dwelling people like going into the desert to shoot their guns. They shoot up cacti but their favored targets are those abandoned metal pieces.  

Our friend Gabe, who is a welder of ornamental and artistic pieces, likes to walk in the desert, collecting the old metal, including the metal used as a target. After he flattens and shapes them, they become pieces of art.

I love found art, and have many examples on display in my home. I was naturally drawn to Gabe’s art, and told him so. My enthusiasm earned me two gifts from Gabe. 

Last year he presented me with this piece. Gabe offered to hammer it out flat, but I loved it just as it was.

When we returned to Tucson this fall, I discovered another gift. This one has not been a shooter’s target. The shape is wrong for that purpose. The piece appears not to hove been in the desert long enough to develop rust. Grant tied it to the shed wall with wire for display..

I love these pieces partly because, like me and like many of us, they are bent and twisted, but they have survived. 

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

And All That Stuff*

After they had both retired Mother and Dad left their six-room house and moved into a two-bedroom apartment. I was amazed to see how little they took with them when they moved. The 1930’s dining table, six chairs, and buffet were at my house, I knew their Haviland china for twelve, sterling sliver tableware, and the teardrop crystal were now part of my brother’s household. But where was all the other stuff? 

There hadn’t been room in the 1925 bungalow’s small rooms for a lot of stuff. I finally figured out that Mother had pared life’s necessities to their bare essentials. Her bathroom medicine chest seemed spacious because just a few things lined its selves. Her bedroom closet, likewise, seemed much larger than it was because Mother had simplified her wardrobe to a few coordinated polyester outfits, housecoat, and winter coat. Gone were the costume jewelry, the cultured pearls, the blouses that needed to be ironed, the pants and blouses that didn’t go with any other piece of clothing, the high-heeled shoes. The only nonessential she didn’t throw out was her dozen or so bottles of cologne. 

Mother died at 78. Now I’m 83 and longing to be as free of stuff as my mother was. I’m tired of the boxes of materials and tools, pictures on the walls, books and papers, and all the other stuff in drawers and closets and cubbyholes. I want simplicity like Mother achieved.  I’d better get cracking on that right away.

Early autumn on the patio

*I use the term "stuff" rather than "things" because of the verb "stuff" means fill tightly with something.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer

Wrinkles in Time

Making my bed this morning, I noticed a number of wrinkles in the covers, and tugged at a few, trying to straighten them before deciding that was good enough, and walking away. Once upon a time I would have left the bed covers perfectly smooth. That woman – the one I used to be – believed that if something was worth doing, it deserved obsessive attention and care. She certainly would not have made a bed poorly or walked away while a wrinkle in the covers remained.

What happened to that vigorous woman? She is gone, replaced by a disabled old woman, who looks back at that old self with astonishment and jealousy. That old self was endlessly studying, planning, figuring out how to accomplish her goals, and pursuing them with joy and strength. She used a 35-pound crowbar to move 700-pound slabs of rock to make a tiered garden on the slope behind our house. She raised vegetables and made baked goods to load in the truck at four a.m. and carry to the local farmer’s market, where she set up a tail-gate display and served customers until late mid-morning. She gave parties, invited people to dinner, and was hostess to many large family dinners. 

She was a wonder, yet something was missing. In her strength she was somewhat arrogant and indifferent to others. She hadn’t experienced sufficient pain. Her body was strong, reliable.

Now, many years later, having suffered pain, lost strength, and deteriorated, she is a different woman. She has learned humility and empathy for others. She has learned to ask for help from others and to give thanks for it. She knows how to reach out, one human being to another, look them in the eye, and smile, as if to say, “I know what it is to live and struggle, yet we two find humor, and persevere.”

Her bed covers are wrinkled, as is her face, but they are merely the surface. They are merely the wrinkles of time.

San Xavier Mission near Tucson, Arizona.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

First Soup Day

The first autumn rains came last night, chilling the air and sending us searching for warmer clothing. Already some leaves have yellowed and Virginia creeper is snaking flaming leaves up tree trunks in the woods. The sky is grey and we feel lazy and sleepy. 

This seems a good day to make the season’s first soup. It will have to be chicken soup, because there’s half a roast chicken in the fridge. That’s fine! We have onions, celery, carrots, and garlic. What else? There may be a quart of chicken broth in the freezer, but if not, we can use chicken base and water. There is thyme for seasoning, or we could use Poblano peppers for heat. Finally, do we prefer noodles or brown rice? Noodles if we use thyme or rice if we choose the pepper version. We can decide that later when we’re cooking.

Meanwhile, we can take a nap. It’s the perfect Saturday afternoon activity on a dreary autumn day.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

Jammin'

This morning Dennis and I made red plum jam – 7 pints of it plus about a cupful in a bowl. I hadn’t made jam all summer because the fruit crop, along with almost every other crop from garden or field, failed this year. The weather has been mean to us. Too cold, too hot, too dry, plant diseases, all conspired to disappoint.

Our stock of homemade jam was getting low. There wasn’t enough left to last until the next growing season. We had options. We could buy many kinds of jam and jelly at the grocery store. Nevertheless, I wanted to make our own jam, so I bought 5 pounds of red plums and a bag of sugar. 

Financially it hardly made sense. The plums and sugar cost about eight dollars and the cost of heating our stove burners to cook the jam, and sterilize the jars and lids increased the cost. We both spent two and a half hours completing the task, including clean up. The value of the product was just $35. Homemade jam was not a profitable use of our time.

So, we asked each other, why did we do it? We found good reasons. We had worked for the satisfaction of carrying on tradition, the pleasure of seeing our handiwork, the ultimate pleasure of smearing the jam on our morning toast, and the perhaps irrational joy of doing it because we know how. Having made jam and jelly so many times, we move like clockwork, each of us knowing exactly what to do and when to do it. That, alone, made jammin’ worthwhile.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

Grandma's Apology

Like it or not, climate change isn’t just coming – it’s here.  This year, along with the three previous years, make the hottest years ever recorded.* I don’t need to lay out the details for we all know wildfires are raging all over the world, people are dying from heat, and crops are failing worldwide. This, scientists say, is notthe new normal, for temperatures will continue to rise.

I’m an old woman and won’t have to live long with climate change, but I shudder to think what my grandchildren’s lives be like at the earth heats up. This is my apology to them for our stupidity and for the human weaknesses that have created this mess.

We love ease. We want machines to do as much of our work as possible. Machines wash our dishes and clothing, mow our lawns, carry us from place to place, and much more. We even need machines to help us build and maintain muscle strength, because we no longer use our muscles to perform the work of living. Machines run on electricity, most of which comes from burning fossil fuels.

We love convenience. It’s so much easier to carry a plastic bottle full of water than to fill a container from the kitchen faucet. Never mind that great-grandmother had to carry a bucket of water from the well or the creek. Poor old soul; she had to work so hard. We don’t want to bother with cooking when it’s so convenient to get packaged meals from the grocery store or carry out from a restaurant. We prefer to ride in motorized cars than walk or exert ourselves riding a bike.

We love our tribe.We are suspicious of people who look different from us or hold different beliefs, and we often make war on them. War is a tremendous waste of resources and requires clean up and rebuilding when it’s over. 

We love luxury. We must have not just one indoor bathroom, but two or three of them. We crave the latest style clothing, and discard things that are out of fashion. We want new carpet on our floors and the latest model cars in our garages. We want, want, want, and are never satisfied. 

We love money.We will happily destroy our environment to get more money. Renewable forms of energy – solar, geothermal, wind – can’t be promoted because oil has made so many people rich, and continues to do so. 

We love self-indulgence. We will do whatever it takes to immediately gratify our whims. No matter what a mess we make or how much debt we incur, we must have everything now.

The upshot, dear grandchildren, is a foul world, drowning in rising sea levels, wallowing in plastic trash, stinking with poisonous air, and awash in filthy rivers and streams. I’m sorry. 

*“The Year Global Warming Turned Model Into Menace,” page 1, The New York Times, August 10, 2018. 

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

I Couldn't Believe It

I was shocked by the map that AARP published in its July/August 2018 Bulletin: 

This is a national map of eligible voter participation in the 2014 mid-term elections.  In only six states did more than half of eligible voters actually vote. In fourteen states 30 percent or fewer of eligible voters participated, which means that in these states, a mere third of voters determined the elections outcomes.

This, of course, is not how democracy works. Democracy requires every one of its citizens to participate by voting; otherwise it is not a democracy. None of us can afford to become complacent. Our personal lives consume us, but we must remember that we live freely because of the foundation of the democracy we share. 

By voting we give voice to our preferences by supporting as our representatives in government those who believe as we do.  If we do not vote, we have no voice, no say in what happens to our country. 

November is not far away. SPEAK UP!

Copyright 2018by Shirley Domer 

Terrible, Horrible, Awful Summer

This spring and summer have been a terrible disappointment.  April was cold and cloudy. Suddenly, when May came, the weather turned very hot. Eastern Kansas enjoyed no spring at all.  Fruit trees bloomed exuberantly, but very few apples and pears actually set fruit, and cherries set none at all.

The spring garden was passable. We ate some asparagus and a handful of little strawberries. Flea beetles ate millions of holes in the mustard greens. (The chickens ate the greens anyway.) We did enjoy fairly nice Buttercrunch and Romaine lettuce and a few beets.

Our local nursery provided us with tomato plants that were twisted and spindly, due to overcrowding in their greenhouse and their pepper selection didn’t include any of our favorites. As soon as Dennis planted the tomatoes in the garden, they developed fungal diseases.

Late July is here and we’ve had no rain since early June. When Dennis dug the potatoes he was disappointed to find there were only small and tiny tubers, in spite of his having watered them throughout the drought. The struggling tomato plants are still small, producing only eight tomatoes; most of them quickly rotted . We still haven’t eaten at garden tomato. Sweet potato plants should have formed a vast mat of leaves by now, but they are still small, separate plants.

Wildlife is on the move, desperate for water. Raccoons got in the hen house last night. Wild turkeys roamed the yard this morning. Deer have been eating the few, tiny apples on our trees, and I say “Eat up.” 

And here’s the kicker: chiggers live on, although they normally die off when there’s no rain. Dennis, who never gets a chigger bite, has had several in the past week.

One good thing comes of this miserable year: grass isn’t growing, so there’s nothing to mow. At least the noisy, polluting mowing machines are silent.

Please note that I am sparing you from seeing photographs of this failure.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

Sentinel Time

The summer unfolds in fleeting stages, a slide show of lovely, familiar scenes. From year to year each scene will very in length, from two days to three weeks, depending on the weather. This year we raced from winter in a cold April to summer in May. Nature forgot about spring this year. In May our irises blossomed and, two days later, the blooms dried to dust. Columbines flower were so fleeting that the humming birds didn’t bother to show up to sip nectar.

Now, well into a hot June, we have reached a new, but familiar stage – one I call “Sentinel Time.” I name it for the yucca blossoms that have a colony in our yard and south pink pasture roses east pasture, but the stage also includes Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, and pink pasture roses along the country roadways and pastures. 

The sentinels foretell that the wheat harvest is about to begin, and, indeed, the first harvesting machines started their work in the fields near us yesterday. Now mere stubble is all that remains of the amber waves of grain.

Next there will be homegrown tomatoes in our kitchen along with sweet corn from a local farm. Before we know it the corn harvest will begin and the woodlands will add gold and reds to their color scheme.

Time keeps marching on.

Copyright 2018 Shirley Domer, .

Jammin'

Right after breakfast this morning Dennis and I made a batch of strawberry jam. It took us about an hour from start to finishing the clean up.  We’ve made a lot of jam together in recent years. By now each of us knows just what our tasks are and we move like clockwork. While I was stirring the boiling jam my mind was pondering a question: why do we make jam? Most people don’t.

We both grew up in families that weren’t far removed from farm life. Our folks still kept gardens and preserved most of the harvest for cold weather months. Dennis’s dad, a banker, even built what he called “the canning kitchen” in their basement. My mom was a high school history teacher and my dad was still a farmer, although we lived in town. He planted a big garden at the farm and hauled bushel baskets of produce to our house in town for Mom to “put up” in glass jars which were stored on long shelves in our basement. So we grew up eating that food all of our young lives.

Because my only household tasks were to sweep the front porch and dry dishes I didn’t get direct experience in canning food, but I somehow absorbed it into my being. When I married, one of the first things I bought was The Farm Journal Canning and Freezing Cookbook.Sixty years later, I still use it every summer, even though it is literally falling apart.

We make jam not only because jam-making is part of our heritage, but also because it is more economical than commercially prepared jars of jam and jelly and because it tastes better than anything we could buy.

Today we used two pounds of strawberries and about two pounds of sugar, for a total cost of about seven dollars. Those ingredients made for pints of jam, which would cost ten dollars each if purchased. Also, we use only fruit and sugar in our jam, but no high fructose corn syrup or expensive commercial pectin.

We use eight cups of berries and six cups of sugar. We buy the strawberries at the grocery rather than a you-pick local patch because locally grown berries are usually fully ripe, while commercial berries are picked slightly under-ripe so they will survive shipping. Under-ripe strawberries have more pectin than fully ripe ones, so there’s no need to add additional pectin.

Alas, this knowledge will be lost. None of our children is interested in jam or jelly making. The tradition will die with us.

RIP

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer

No Thanks

About five years ago a friend invited us to an informal reception immediately following his daughter’s wedding ceremony. We attended and took a gift, an immersion blender (which I consider an essential kitchen gadget).  The bride and groom didn’t open the gifts at the event, nor were they expected to do so. But weeks went by and no one acknowledged the gift by note, phone call, email, or text. To put the best light on ii, I thought perhaps the gift card and gift had become separated and the couple didn't know who to thank. 

In ensuing years more friends invited us to their children’s events – weddings and baby showers.  Each time, even when we couldn’t attend the event, we sent generous gifts.  Thank you notes never arrived. Slowly I’ve come to the realization that mores have changed, and the tradition of thank you notes has been cast aside.

My mother taught me that every gift must be acknowledged, even if it is ugly, inappropriate, or useless. The ritual of writing thank you notes was an essential part of the baby or wedding shower.

Obviously that isn’t done any more, but I wish I knew why the practice has been abandoned. 

And, yes, this change is one more thing about modern life that makes me disgruntled. I may stop responding to these invitations and send no gift. Instead I will just attend funerals and send condolences, which need not be acknowledged since the person who is honored is unable to respond.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

Disgruntled

I awoke this morning to find that the electricity was off due to a storm. No coffee! That fit right in with my almost perpetual irritation these days. The new lenses for my glasses did not arrive when they were promised. A generous two weeks went by. I called the dispensary to complain. Now three weeks have passed and they’re stillnot here.

I’m not happy with the blood pressure medicine I’m taking, either. It makes me dizzy and unsure of my steps. I feel like a drunk reeling from lamppost to lamppost, and that makes me mad.  What good is medicine if it makes me feel worse?

It isn’t just the big issues that irritate me. For example, toothpaste tubes used to be made of something I could roll up from the bottom and they would stay in that position, forcing the remaining toothpaste to the top. Now they’re made of plastic that keeps its original shape and will not cooperate. UPC code stickers on fruit and vegetables in the grocery store also irritate me no end. They are too difficult to remove, and rip the skin right off a delicate pear. Even stickers on peels that will be discarded irritate me because we give kitchen scraps to our chickens, and they certainly don't need to eat the stickers along with the banana peels.

I could go on naming all the irritants – people, thing, and cs, situations  – but you get the idea. Everything makes angry or irritated. I’ve become a cranky old woman. 

Or could it be Donald Trump?

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

Stuff

Stuff everywhere I look! Paintiings, ceramics, dried flowers, nonfunctional but attractive wooden bowls, do-dads people have given us, photographs – you know, stuff. Everybody has it, it seems, but it’s beginning to feel like a burden to me. 

Why? The sad thing is that these things have grown so familiar to my eyes that I don’t really see them any more. 

I want to shake things up, to start over, but how? Once, years ago, I boxed up some things and put them in the basement to give them a rest and recuperation time.  They may have been as tired of being ignored ad I was of not seeing them. Later I got them out again, and gave other things a rest. That won’t work now because I can’t carry boxes to the basement any more.

Once I gave myself a birthday potlatch. I insisted that everyone take something home with them. I had set up a table, covered with give-away things to choose from. Everyone found something they liked, and a lot of Stuff went out the door. Alas, I’m too old and tired to have parties any more.

Maybe I’ll call in the troops – the children and grandchild who check on me to make sure I’m all right.  I’ll tell them I’m not all right but that I would be if they would come and took away all this Stuff.

Copyright 2018 Shirley Domer

Back to Nature

To reach our home in rural Kansas we drive through several miles of farmland. Over the years I have watched the fields and houses evolve, some holding their own, but others declining and being overrun by the first wave of reforestation.

First a couple of Eastern red cedars pop up in a pasture. Then, before you know it, there are twenty, then forty.  

Meanwhile our native dogwood, moves in. This is not the flowering dogwood so prized and vaunted by southeastern states and the state tree of Missouri. Our native dogwood has but one purpose in life – to help reclaim pastures. It grows in copses, spreading underground until the copse is 15 feet wide. A shrub rather than a tree, it blooms modestly and produces white berries the size of large peas.  

Another interloper, the Osage orange (also called “hedge “ or “bois de arc,” among other names) sometimes shows up, Early farmers planted the trees in a row between fields as fences. Branches of these thorn-covered trees were woven together to form barriers that cattle could not cross. The tree produces “hedge apples,” bright green, hard as rocks, the size of large apples, each containing enough seeds to populate every pasture in Douglas County. Squirrels like to carry a hedge apple to a nearby spot and eat some of its seeds, letting some seeds fall to the ground to become new trees. 

For example, forty-three years ago a pasture not a mile from our house was home to cattle. But the farmer gave up the cattle business and the pasture fell into neglect. Little trees showed up. About twenty years ago the thirty-acre pasture was put up for sale and someone bought it. The new owners put in a water meter and a stand-faucet.

The new owners’ dream of building a home in the country didn’t work out for some reason and the cedars and hedge trees continued to grow. Today the pasture could not be properly called a pasture any more, as you can see n the photo below.

Several vast copses of dogwood have developed, too.

Along the fence row I also see mulberry and  honey locust trees, as well as lush forests of poison ivy. This is the first stage of a succession forest in Kansas. We describe it as the woods taking over. 

I think sometimes of the man who first cleared this land and the hours of hard work he spent chasing a dream. I think, too, of the people who bought the land with their unfulfilled dream of living in the country. Nature will triumph, as nature always does.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer 

Saving Water

Reading on the Internet, I came across a post by a woman who had attempted to save water by hand-washing her dishes.  To her dismay, she wrote, rinsing each dish under a faucet of running water actually used more water to clean the dishes than the dishwasher did. She gave up the idea.

Well, Honey, that ain’t how it was done. Having grown up in a household that depended on a cistern for water, I knew every trick in the book for saving water, and had I not used them, my mother and Grandma Alice would have scolded me severely.

I knew I could “fill” my bath with two inches of water, part of which I heated in a teakettle on the kitchen stove. Our old Maytag washing machine in the basement was filled just once each week with water, also heated on the kitchen stove, and used to wash everything in the laundry. No refills. We rinsed the laundry in a separate tub, filled with cold water. This water, too, was used to rinse the entire laundry. No refills. 

And when it came to dishwashing, we used two dishpans that hung on nails on the kitchen wall, one for washing, and the other for drying. We heated two kettles full of water on the stove, and poured some into each dishpan. We washed in one, dunked the dish in the other and handed it to the person who was waiting, dishcloth in hand. ready to dry and put the dish away. So, that’s how it was done. There was no running of water over each dish. They all went into one dishpan full of water.

The dishpans were enamelware, like this one offered on eBay for $16.95.

The general principal was to wash the cleanest things first, and so on down the line until only the dirtiest remained. For example, first wash the glassware, then the tableware, then the plates and bowls, and finally, the pots and pans. In the case of laundry, first wash the white things such as white shirts, sheets and pillowcases. Then bath towels, followed by colored dresses, shirts and underwear, then Dad’s work clothes and, finally, rags. My friend Yvonne’s family, who lived in the country, even extended this principle to bathing the family, from cleanest to dirtiest, in a round galvanized tub on their screened-in back porch in summer and by the wood-burning kitchen stove in winter.

Every drop of water was used, you see, until it was too dirty to use. Even then, we carried the used dishwater outside to pour on the flowerbed by the back door.  Our gutters were equipped with a moveable spout, and when rain came, Dad let the first few minutes go by to wash off the roof, then went outside to switch the spout to drain into our cistern.  That was our water supply and we hoarded it until the next rain.

                                                                                                        

Want to give that life-style a try?

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer

                                            

Giving Up

This journal has been neglected for months. Last fall, shingles laid me low. The pain was excruciating and I was getting just a few hours’ sleep every night. I lost weight. During the last week of my recovery, the new shingles vaccine was announced. I felt a strong sense of resentment as you can imagine. 

Tomorrow I will get the vaccine. I understand that it is expensive and not covered by Medicare. I, fortunately, am able to pay so that I will never (knock on wood) get shingles again. I wish everyone could.

Finally, I seem to be recovering from that hideous ordeal. A little energy has returned and I’ve almost regained lost weight. I had lost almost ten percent of my weight, which I could little afford.

Feeling a bit like my old self again I straightened up the laundry and cleaned a bit, did the laundry, and swept leaves and dirt out of the garage. Then I made supper. I felt pretty frisky. Hey! Maybe I’ll try to remove weeds and over-zealous perennials from the hosta bed, which extends about 40 feet across the front of our house. 

Hoe in hand, I started working on the east end of the bed, where American bluebells and others are trying to crowd out everything else. Also I removed a lot of weeds, hacking away with my unsharpened hoe.

I lasted about ten minutes before the joints in my hands began to ache, along with the severe, calcified scoliosis in my lower back. I didn’t dare bend over, fearing I would do a face-plant in the hosta bed, so I limped away, put the hoe in the garage, and went inside.

Gardening has been a huge part of my life. I love every stage of gardening, from the time I spend waiting for seedlings to sprout to pulling up past-their-prime vegetables to compost or feed the chickens. I love squeezing a handful of soil to test its friability or dampness, and smelling the fragrance of the earth that feeds us all. 

As much as it hurts to admit it, my body just isn’t capable of gardening any more. The hosta bed experience has convinced me of that sad truth. But I remember the joy it gave me and I’m thankful for all those years of digging in the dirt.

Copyright 2018 Shirley Domer