Hello, Old Friend

Moving to Tucson for the winter, we didn’t expect to know anyone except our grandson and his wife, but Tucson has surprised us with some old acquaintances and a surprising number of other Kansans.

I didn’t expect to encounter any familiar flora, either, and that proved to be the case. The landscape here seemed totally alien to me. Different trees, different shrubs, different smaller plants. Ocatillos fascinated me, as did the many kinds of cacti, especially the saguaro, whose dead bones are made into useful fences and shades.

Until last week, I hadn’t seen a single native that I recognized, but that changed when the plants were sitting in pots in the yard.

An ecologist planned the landscape for our front yard around native plants whose blooms would attract bees and butterflies, but some of the plants were downright ugly, such as this one.

A few days later I discovered a pod hanging from one of its branches, a pod I recognized.

That has to be a milkweed pod, I thought. I know milkweed pods well because eleven varieties of milkweed grow in our Kansas posture. Their pods are variations on a consistent theme: their pods burst open and release hundreds of tiny seeds with gossamer wings, seeds that float away like a troop of sky divers.

Butterfly Milkweed, Blooming

The green sticks I had hated were my old friend, asclepias, commonly called milkweed, adapted to a desert climate. It has only insignificant leaves that soon die. Photosynthesis occurs in the plant’s stems, which explains their green color. I’m not sure of the genus but it is either albicansor subulata. Both are native to this part of Arizona.

The Sonoran milkweeds are part of a chain of 156 varieties of asclepias that stretches across the United States. This chain is vital to survival of the monarch butterfly. Monarchs can feed only on the flowers’ nectar and can lay their eggs only on asclepiasbecause newly-hatched larvae can eat only milkweed leaves and live only on the plants until they become fat caterpillars and move away to form chrysalises. 

It’s very nice to see my old friend living in the Sonoran desert. He has changed, of course, as old friends tend to do, but I’d recognize him anywhere.Crop Circles

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer

Cut-Cut-Cut-Kadacket

When I was a little girl, hearing one of Grandpa’s hens cackle after laying an egg, I heard it as, “Cut-Cut-Cut-Kadacket.” Eighty years later, I still hear a hen’s bragging that way.

When I’m in Kansas, the hen’s ruckus is part of my life’s soundtrack. Here in Tucson the soundtrack switches to the hum of distant traffic and the roar of Air Force planes passing overhead. Not a single Cut-Cut-Cut-Kadacket can be heard. I miss that as well as the contented clucks the hens utter while picking at the grain Dennis scatters in their yard.

That’s why I’m thrilled about Grant’s latest big project – building a chicken house. A Tucson architect had designed a chicken house for the Tucson climate and built one for his son’s school. Grant bought the plans and materials, and he and Dennis laid a concrete footing to anchor the house.

Then Grant spent part of his days away from lawyering building the outer structure. 

Photo by Dennis

Since then, he and Dennis have worked together to put on the finishing touches. They’ve built nest boxes that we can access from outside. And Dennis has stained the building’s outside. 

With an improvised a brooder that will keep baby chicks warm and provide them with food and water, we were ready to get some birds. That was easy. An Ace Hardware about ten minutes away gets shipments of baby chicks several times a week. We bought five of assorted breeds, but only four of them chose to pose for this photo. As you can see, two appliance cardboard boxes make a sturdy, protection for the babies.

Photo by Dennis

The only sounds these little fluff balls make now is  “Cheep, Cheep, Cheep,” but when we come back to the desert next fall, I expect to be welcomed by the old, familiar, “Cut-Cut-Cut-Kadacket.”

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer

Peggy, I Get It

Years ago Dennis went around Douglas County looking at old buildings and interviewing their owners. The most interesting person he met was an invalid old woman, who was widely known in Kansas as Peggy of the Flint Hills. That was her pen name for the column she wrote for the Topeka Capitol Journal for 55 years.

In spite of being locally famous, she somehow ended up living alone in a stone cottage in rural Douglas County with numerous cats. Peggy was mostly bedfast but the cats weren’t. There was no litter box so the floors were a mess. 

Peggy didn’t seem to care that her life circumstances were less than ideal because she had her books, probably collected throughout her career as a journalist. She was reading them over again, one by one, and when she finished one she gave it away to a visitor. Handing Dennis a book, Peggy remarked, “When they are all gone, I will die.”

At the time I didn’t greatly understand Peggy. I was rather disapproving of her situation, but now I have become an old woman, I identify closely with her. I can’t travel anymore, and if truth be known, I wouldn’t care to even if I could. 

Why put myself through the hassles of travel when I can sit in my comfortable chair with a cup of coffee and open a book. Through a book I visit any place in the world, meet people of every culture, and even travel through time backward or forward.

I never met Peggy and don’t even know her real name. I can only guess that she died, happy with her books. I hope that only a few of them remained in her library. I do sort of wonder what became of her cats.

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer

Past the Cusp

Past the cusp of transition into being elderly, I’m now acutely aware of things one needs in order to be active when one reaches this stage. 

Bill gave me a cane years ago, when I was traveling by air and needed some support walking long corridors, Except for that use, I left it propped against a corner in the dining room. Now that has changed. The cane, awkward as it is to handle, has become my frequent companion when I go out. I drop it, it’s hard to fit into the car beside me, and finding a way to keep it accessible when I sit is not easy. It's made to collapse in length, which would be handy, but my hands aren't strong enough to fold it. Those inconveniences, though, aren’t enough to discourage me from using it. 

Holding the handle of a grocery cart is also good at giving me stability while cruising the aisles. Thanks to grocery carts, grocery shopping ha my main form of exercise.

Grab bars in the shower now are indispensible, whereas they used to be a convenience.

I bought a button hook (useless) and nail clippers for designed for handicapped people (also useless ). 

These things are just the tip of an ever-growing iceberg. Recently I bought a rolling walker that has a seat where I can rest when the back pain becomes overwhelming. I’ve had my eye on those for over a year, after seeing an elderly man resting on one during an evening walk. and recently meeting a woman at the grocery store who graciously let me try hers for a moment. Walking with it is as easy as walking a grocery cart. The down side is that I can’t lift it in and out of the car, but when Dennis and I go together, he will do that for me. I’m very lucky to be married to that good man.

Yesterday, UPS delivered another enabler. This time it’s a lumbar brace. I’ve hesitated to open and try it on because the packaging pictures a man with body-builder muscles modeling one. If the model were a frail old woman, I wouldn’t hesitate to try it on. But I know when back pain interferes with my meal preparation, on it will go, if my crippled  hands can use the Velcro fasteners.

That’s the trouble with the design of many “enablers;” often they don’t work. The designers didn’t consider all the forms of disability. Sometimes I wonder if they were even tested. 

If only I had a 3-D printer, I could custom design my own enablers as well as some for my friends.

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer 

El Nino, the Spoiler

When Halloween is over, many older Americans head south, seeking sunshine and warmth for the cold northern winter months. They call us “Snowbirds,” because, like many birds, we fly south.

Normally this is a good solution for bones that creak and muscles that ache in cold weather. We bask in southern sunshine and count ourselves lucky to be here.

This year, though, we aren’t so lucky, for El Nino has intervened. El Nino is the weather pattern that brings one cold front after another roaring in from the Pacific Ocean, clouding the skies and dropping rain on the Sonoran Desert. 

Our neighbor Val Bay shared his photo that tells the tale of Tucson skies this winter.

This cloudy weather is a reminder of how lucky we are to be here most years. We can be thankful that El Nino won’t last forever and that this year the desert will gloriously bloom, although we won’t be here to see it. 

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer 

A Spicy Romance

When I was a girl, a special treat was going to the drug store to drink malts at the soda fountain. After the soda jerk took our order, we saw him assemble the ingredients in a stainless steel jar, and whirl them in the electric malt maker. Then we saw him pour most of the contents into a glass and present it to us, along with the can, which still contained some malt, and a can of ground nutmeg to sprinkle on.

Nutmeg was not to be found in our kitchen at home, but it was the traditional addition to malts at Baumgartner’s Drug Store. For me, nutmeg was love at first taste and when I married, at twenty, I included a can of nutmeg in my rather limited spice collection.

Nutmeg, I now know, is best when freshly grated, so I have replaced cans of ground nutmeg with whole nutmegs and a nutmeg grater or microplane. 

The spice has numerous, but not extensive, uses. First of all, nutmeg is essential to grate over egg custard before baking. Making a tender egg custard is easy and it tastes marvelous served with berries such as fresh red raspberries .

Egg Custard

In a 1½  quart baking dish beat (in this order):

2 eggs

1/3 cup sugar

pinch of salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 cups milk

Set the baking dish in a pan of hot water and bake at 350º for 50 minutes. Only the edges need be set when you remove it from the oven. The custard will continue to set as it cools.

Second, this spice complements certain dishes made with members of the brassica family, cauliflower, spinach, and broccoli. Nutmeg is delicious in creamed spinach. It’s also delicious in my favorite broccoli soup* and can similarly be added to cauliflower dishes.

Oddly, I don’t like nutmeg in apple pie, although most apple pies I’ve encountered use it. Romance, as we all learn, can be a bit fickle.

*Published on this blog on April, 23, 2013, titled “Back to Soup.”

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer 

Our Lucky Day

Unpacking a dusty cardboard box that had been undisturbed for more than a decade, Marianne found a lizard amongst the box’s contents. She was startled and later said that she had reacted as if the four-inch-long creature were dangerous. Ozzie soon carried the box into the garage so that the lizard could escape. 

When Marianne, who is visiting here from Kansas, heard that Arizonans consider having a lizard in one’s house to be good luck, she embraced that  aGecko, which is one of the five subspecies of the Western Banded Gecko.

Our gecko is almost, if not fully, grown. The species ranges in size from four to six inches. They are shy, nocturnal creatures, foraging at night for insects and small spiders. 

I sure hope that our gecko decides to stick around. Many things will happen in 2019, and we all need some good luck with them. 

Copyright 2019 by Shirley Domer