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

Giving Thanks for Bad Things

This morning while Grant was visiting our casita, he and Dennis and I discussed things to be thankful for – not the usual good health, family, and so forth. Instead we focused on being thankful for bad things that led to good things.

Grant recalled a gathering of University of Arizona law students before classes began for his first year of law studies. Wanting to get acquainted with his fellow students, Grant went to the sleazy bar where the law students were to gather. He was dismayed by the setting, but determined to stick it out. Soon, he spotted a lovely young woman sitting nearby and struck up a conversation. Soon they went for a ride on his motorcycle and got caught in a monsoon. It was not an auspicious beginning, but today that woman is his wife, for which he is thankful.

Then I recalled my unfortunate experience when defending my dissertation. My advisor was a smart young woman who had just been promoted to full professor. I had followed her advice to keep the dissertation short so that it would be ready to submit for publication in a journal. It was my bad luck that, while my advisor had been promoted, a member of my committee, a man, had been denied promotion. At my dissertation defense, the loser refused to consider my dissertation acceptable without the traditional long first chapter giving the overview of all research related to my work.

I went home in despair. While the PhD was not denied, I would have to completely re-write my first chapter, expanding it to the more traditional length. When a friend stopped by I told him what had happened and commented that what I needed was a day in the country. “As it happens,“ he said, “we’re going to have Sunday dinner with a friend in the country. You should come with us.”

I gratefully accepted and as it turned out, the host, whom I met for the first time that Sunday, was Dennis, my husband of more than forty years.

And so today we gave thanks for bad things that led to good things. We hope that the horrifying things currently happening in the United States will lead to an awakening of our true American spirit and dedication to a true democracy of the people, for the people, and by the people, and next year for that we will give thanks.

Copyright 2017 by Shirley Domer

Good Old Aunt Agnes

It started with a yam I bought in Tucson last February. I intended to bake it for Dennis and me to share, but the yam responded to the siren call of springtime and quickly grew three tiny sprouts. I enjoy watching things grow, so I gave it toothpick supports and put it in a glass of water.

By April, when it was time for us to trek back to Kansas, the yam had several green shoots seven or eight inches high. Could I leave that yam behind to die in the fierce Arizona heat of summer? No, indeed, I could not. Dennis agreed, and, in his whimsical way, decided to name the yam for his Aunt Agnes.

The first day Agnes rode in its glass of water in the front seat cup holder. Unfortunately the air conditioning blew directly on her there and she responded by wilting.  The second day she rode in the back, nestled in Dennis’s hiking boot. “That’s better,” she seemed to say, as she perked right up. Had I known what a star Agnes was destined to become, I’d have photographed her in the boot.

Back home in Kansas, Agnes moved into a less-tippy coffee mug.

As the sprouts grew longer, I broke them off their mama and set them in glasses of water to develop their own roots.

When there were twenty well-developed plants, Dennis set them out in the garden plot he had reserved, marking each plant with a yellow flag.

Agnes was still producing shoots, so she went to live with Laurie, our dear neighbor, where she produced enough yam starts to fill Laurie’s garden space. Finally, Laurie called to say that Agnes was still producing, but was nonetheless headed for the compost pile. Laurie felt sorry about that, but neither of us had more room for more yams.

Agnes’s offspring grew to cover a corner of our garden, completely hiding the yellow flags. The plants had beautiful pink flowers hiding among the leaves.

At last a killing freeze came, reducing the plants to blackened vines and leaves, and, incidentally, revealing the yellow flags that indicated where Dennis should dig for yams.

The intrigue of growing yams and potatoes is that one doesn’t know whether the tubers will be of decent size until it’s time to dig. Well, Agnes’s progeny did not disappoint.

When the digging was finished Dennis spread the yams on newspaper to cure. In a couple of weeks their delicate skins will toughen enough to be stored in baskets.

You may notice a heap of small yams in the center of the above photo. Every plant produces small yams in addition to large ones. As Dennis was digging, I encouraged him to discard the small ones, but he said our forefathers couldn’t afford to waste anything, and he didn’t intend to either. He expects me to make sweet potato pies of the small ones, and that’s going to be a lot of pies. I have a recipe from Craig Claiborn’s Southern Cooking ready to go.

Aunt Agnes's lineage will live on, for I intend to save one yam to start another generation for the 2018 garden. I may or may not live to see it, but I know that Laurie and Dennis will see that Agnes’s lineage goes on and on, as mine will when I’m relegated to the compost heap.

Copyright 2017 by Shirley Domer

The Loneliness of Pain

Late in August I began to notice pain on the right side of my spine, as well as fierce itching in the same area. Over the next few days, the pain increased in both intensity and frequency.

This was the beginning of a lonely, frightening two-month nightmare that still has not completely ended. The pain spread around my side and under my ribs, all on the right side. Pain woke me up at night and I was sleeping only three or four hours. Peristalsis  stopped and I became constipated. My appetite dropped and I lost almost ten pounds.

I saw doctors. I visited the hospital’s emergency room twice. I had X-rays, a CT (computed tomography) scan, blood tests, and a thoracic MRI. No doctor, nurse, or technician could say what was causing my pain.  All they offered me was opioids. My doctor suggested I should get a massage. Dennis wondered if my symptoms were psychological.

I saw a gastroenterologist, thinking that he could at least deal with my lack of peristaltic action.  He gave me pharmaceutical samples, with the promise they would get things moving. They had no effect.

I was in despair and wondered if death had come calling. If only I knew what was causing all my agony, as least I’d know what was going on. Then one day as I was lying in bed, trying to catch an hour’s sleep, my back furiously itching, I remembered that the gastro guy checked my back for an outbreak of shingles. He found no rash, and dismissed that possibility. But lying there, unable to sleep, I wondered if a person could have shingles without a rash.

Eureka! There is such a thing and it’s called herpes sine zostere! It’s uncommon, but it happens often enough to have a name. My doctors had never heard of it and were skeptical or disinterested. Heavens! The very idea of a patient correctly self-diagnosing was offensive to them.

Well, never mind. I have an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, and several friends and relative who use natural remedies. I’m taking olive leaf extract (an antiviral), a variety of herbs for constipation, lemon balm tea to relax my tension and several glasses of water every day. I’m gradually getting well, although I’m still underweight and tired.

Looking back I believe this has been the loneliest time of my life. Pain is all consuming and isolating. When one stops participating in life, life passes one by. People can sympathize and try to help, but then they go on with their lives, as they should. It would serve no purpose to linger with a person who is suffering.  That person must go it alone. It is enough to be remembered, thought of, and called. An occasional visitor is cheering. Gifts of prepared food help keep us going, but basically we are alone with our pain.

Still, there have been distractions from pain. I’ve read a lot of books, some very long. I’ve made a couple of pies and baked loaves of bread. Most of all I’ve enjoyed a piece of ginger root that was lost for a time in the bottom of the fruit bowl. When it turned up I noticed it had some swollen spots that appeared to be the beginnings of new shoots. Well, I planted it as an experiment. After several weeks the shoots appeared above the soil and started growing. They kept growing and became my inspiration. If ginger can change from a shriveled husk to a thriving plant, so can I.

The ginger plant is my renewal symbol and very important to me. Consequently, it has gone to live with Oz and Marianne while we spend the winter in Tucson. Here’s Oz, preparing to carry it away. Knowing that Oz is six feet six inches tall helps one appreciate how that pitiful ginger root has grown.

Copyright 2017 by Shirley Domer