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