Hoob's garden

the ice is slowly melting

2009-03-30T22:21:00.007-05:00

It’s been a long cold lonely winter, a frozen monotony thawed at whiles by the warmth of a few friends but firmly in the icy clutches of too much school work, and me with no motivation.

So, I sat in my sun porch yesterday, most of the day, watching a gentle snow cover the sprouts of garlic and shallots and wildflowers that I had been watching intently make their first tentative reaches into sunlight the days before. It was a different kind of snow, wet and gentle, barely freezing and mostly pleasant; I can’t forgive myself for not going running. It felt easy, almost happy, after the long bitter winter of discontent. There being little sun, I started a fire to keep myself toasty; the plants had to fend for themselves under their blanket of snow. I was working on a comprehensive exam paper for my PhD program, and the view was relaxing. And on the porch, there’s room to pace.

Planting and pacing have been about the only diversions from my frenetic attempts to study. Last Sunday, my friend Elizabeth visited and we planted lettuce and hops. I followed that with grass seed on Monday, and followed that on Thursday with spinach and radishes and peas, oh my. My neighbors on both sides look at me as I do this, the one lady making politely derisive comments as she scurries about her yard, busy to no visible end, and the guy across the street occasionally waving and giving me a curt nod before turning away and shaking his head. I’m not crazy, tho, or if I am, the gardening is the remedy not the symptom.

And indeed, though this be madness, there is method in it. Blessed with a patch of great weather over my spring break from the University, I planted garlic and shallots, now over two weeks ago. The garlic should have been in the ground back in the fall, but either weather or class work conspired against me, so I wanted it in the ground as soon as could be now. The hop rhizomes arrived from cold storage and were to go into the ground immediately. Then, we were due for rain, and I figured that would keep the grass damp – I generally forget to water grass seed and it dries up promptly upon germination. I knew there was snow coming, but peas are pretty hardy anyway, and I figured they would have just started germinating and wouldn’t freeze two inches underground. The lettuce won’t have sprouted to be bothered by the snow, either, and the radishes… the package said they liked the cold, and well, if they don’t make it, it’s hard to care. They’re mostly keeping the ground covered for a month until I plant something I like there. The chives and wildflowers and oregano are doing their own thing, no help from me.

When I tried to explain my the plotting of my planting – an extended version of the above tedious paragraph, a discussion to bore all but the most ardent early planters – to my friend at the computer lab in which I’m stuck all Sunday afternoon, he said, “So, what? You think you’re outsmarting Mother Nature?”

Hubris! My brain went clunk. Be careful!

“Ye gads, no!” I insisted. “We’re working together! She told me the rules, and I’m just trying to play within them.”

The method was animated by wanting to use the tiller I bought last fall and barely used. I almost always would rather that the tool I am using not be a word processor. It feels good to build, to dig, to hammer. The tiller feels good to hand, with its smooth vibration and occasional staggering lurch, the ironic whiff of petrochemical exhaust, the dirt and noise. Each spring finds me checking the ten-day weather forecasts, scheming when to put what in the ground. This spring doing so is a cross between manic obsession and guilty pleasure; not much of a cross, I know. It feels good and unproductive. Tilling was supposed to wear me out and send me back to typing. The more or less I garden, the more I want to; opposite for study.

This spring has been worse than other springs which have been otherwise the same. I can’t concentrate and am not entirely sure anymore why I ever wanted to. I feel like compost. School work has been the same old thing, only more of it done less well. I feel stagnant like my pond’s water. Writing this, looking for a metaphor, I remember a fairy tale sort of story: the king offers a reward for someone who can show him something nobody has ever seen before, and the kid brings him an egg as it’s hatching. Not that I’m the type of person to look for symbols in his vegetables, for new growth in spring. There is this literary tradition that likes to make a to-do of that sort of thing…. I wonder if the snow mightn’t have been Ma Nature telling me to relax, new growth can be hidden some times, the rules state that eventually the winter of your discontent will be made glorious by the sunlight at the end of the tunnel. Be patient, like a spring snow, like winter garlic, like people who put up with you; it’s just that the tunnel ends sometime towards the close of June this year, when you hand the fucking exams in. There is time enough yet for every season and all types of tools, shovels and keyboards in spades.

Garlic Link: Welcome to Filaree Farm. This guy is serious about his garlic. I've got some ordered to plant this fall.

Hops Link: The Thyme Garden. Hops are quick growing, bushy vines... good for privacy... and they smell, like, well, hops....

Planting Calendar:

Date:	Plants	Activity By 3-29
Last Year:	Prairie Smoke	All growing; one blooming
	Butterfly Milkweed	Strangely missing. IDK….
	Side Oats Gramma	Not much yet
	Little Bluestem	A couple green blades starting
	Aromatic Aster	Spreading like CRAZY. Am going to have to find a way to contain it soon.
	Left-Over Last Year’s Garlic	Clumped up and crazy growing
3-11 –	Garlic and Shallots	25% sprouted; some squirrel damage. Grrr.
3-21 –	Hops and Lettuce with Elizabeth	Nada so far
3-22 –	Grass seed… not really garden, I know	It’s being patient
3-26 –	Spinach, Radishes, Peas	Soon, I’m sure...!

A Trip to Oxford to Visit Augusta

2009-01-12T09:52:00.005-06:00

If you’re not a vegetarian, I think ya just gotta be impressed with a place that can pull off a duck and asparagus omelet for a Sunday brunch. Augusta, the newest and perhaps only restaurant in Oxford, Iowa, can do just that. My friend Elizabeth and I were duly impressed by the specials, if less so by the young bus-girl crumpling up the large paper tablecloth at the next table down. Besides, ya gotta figure that any place that can pull off a duck and asparagus omelet for Sunday brunch can pull off French toast and sausage.

Well, not so fast.

The story behind Augusta is that a couple Hurricane Katrina refugees returned to their Iowa roots, met a business partner in Oxford, and set up a bistro with a small town location but with Big Easy flair. Rave reviews are proliferating on the web since their opening in January of 2008.

My friend and I liked Augusta… in the end… overall. It was good but quirky, the problem being that the quirks weren’t all of the charming variety. Uncharming quirks may be better known as annoyances. We might have had an overly romantic idea as we set of on the fifteen mile westward drive from Iowa City, thru Tiffin, to Oxford. We wanted to feel like we were driving to some unknown culinary jewel lost in the backwaters of Iowa – a place with charming tablecloths and leisurely feasting and old world charm, not to a small town diner with a competent chef and local high school girls as wait staff. Arriving we were met by a gregarious woman who smiled but unceremoniously deposited us at a table topped with a large sheet of paper by the door. The interior was quaint in a neuvo-rustic sort of way, and I got the feeling that it might develop a bit more over time as it settled into its style and developed its wait staff. The farmland bistro atmosphere extended through the single rectangular room with the bar and kitchen at the far end and a number of smallish tables which they didn’t mind pushing together.

The waitress mentioned a few an impressive sounding specials, all of which were still available even tho at a bit past 1:00, we were perhaps the last customers to arrive. Elizabeth went for the Duck omelet - to which they offered to add whatever other traditional omelet stuffings she wanted – and sides of fruit and a pancake. What I liked about the menu for the regular breakfasts is that they all came with three sides. That’s right – uno, dos, tres.. This means that one doesn’t have to choose between the biscuits and gravy and whatever else looks tempting, or try to get a single biscuit and gravy along with the meal. One can simply order the French toast and get biscuits and gravy, cheesy grits, and AND sausage on the side, then eat the bacon that your friend gets with her omelet. I was smiling, but all the while thinking of the damage I would do to my heart.

The bacon was fine, better than average even; good but otherwise unremarkable. Nothing else was what I expected – the aforementioned quirks. The biscuits were almost scones, layered and flaky inside, browned outside, but strangely sweet and a bit dry, not I thought a great match for the gravy, which was a bit thin but very rich. The cheese grits I had expected maybe in a bowl or maybe on the plate, but definitely scooped out of a pot and amorphous. They arrived in a sharply geometric triangle, seemingly deep fried, and potentially pre-formed and just taken out of a deep freeze, with a crispy outer coating and mushy interior. Nott bad, but not super, and definitely quirky the wrong way. The home-made sausage had an interesting flavor – very, very peppery with black pepper, not hot but biting. It was a very fine grind with an interesting round along one edge and flat along the opposite edge crispy not on top and bottom but around the outside, that led me to suspect it was cooked as a meatloaf and sliced. It was okay but not especially to my liking – too dense and too peppery, didn’t go well with syrup – but definitely distinctive.

The French toast was the thing that was most disappointing in a way, although it also partly redeemed itself in another. Again, this may be a personal preference, so I’ll try to explain. I think to be good French toast needs to be soaked in the batter long enough to soak it up. It doesn’t need to be so saturated that it resembles some custardy bread pudding slice, but the grilled bread with a thin shellacking of egg on the outside and a cooked dry interior that some places try to pawn off as French toast is a crime against breakfast. Augusta’s variety was closer to the latter, and disappointing on that front. But it wasn’t the average white bread, either. In fact, the French toast was made out of something almost resembling brioche, soft and moist and a bit eggy. It almost made up for the lack of saturation of the batter. But only almost.

I think our disappointment came from overly high hopes, and as I said earlier, in the end, we liked Augusta. I like the idea of Augusta, and I like the drive to Oxford. We’re thinking about going back next weekend. I hope that some of the quirks will seem more familiar and others will have been changed. I want to support a small town diner that knows its crowd yet maintains its ambition to be something other than another small town diner.

Bluebird Diner: My extra 2 dollars worth

2009-01-05T23:22:00.014-06:00

I don’t usually see the value in saying what’s already been said. Sometimes, though, it’s worth it; I can think of it as building solidarity or engaging in conversation… or bitching. And I suspect that not everyone has had a chance to read the review I’m echoing from my friend’s Panoptibolg. But I, too, went to the Bluebird Diner.

I was meeting Gail, a professor / friend / advisor from out of town for lunch, and told her about this new place and Mike’s review. On the strength of his endorsement she paused before agreeing. “Any place,” I said wryly, “this mediocre, I just gotta try,” and she said she’d meet me there at noon.

The place in question was pleasantly full, and for what is essentially a large room with tables strewn across it, being pleasant and anything like full simultaneously is itself a success. Perhaps the mood was benefiting from holiday cheer. Gail and I sat close to each other so as to hear our conversation over the din and talked shop until the waitress came, nice but flustered.

I’ve sometimes talked to my friend Rich, a bar tender and cook and waiter at a local bar that caters to a tradesman lunch crowd, about the staff’s idea of being busy. Now, I don’t mean to have implied earlier that other folks don’t also not see the value in saying what’s already been said; folks look for ways in which to make the same story interesting. This generally isn’t by making it mediocre. One exaggerates… ‘Can you believe how busy we were at lunch…?’ one asks instead of, ‘did you notice that just slightly more than half the tables were full?’ Rich looks on them with scorn. ‘This isn’t busy,’ he says to me after. ‘This isn’t hard. Everybody orders the special. You put it on a plate and give it to them. It’s not really something to get worked up about.’

Of course, I appreciate that people have reasons beyond conversation for their conversation. It’s probably much more interesting for many folks a lot of the time to perform some role other than ‘average day at work.’ That is, it can be nice to consider oneself busy, or bored, or otherwise engaged in an exceptional activity. And, hey, I’m all for whatever gets people through the day. So long as they can perform that role competently. So long as it doesn’t mess with my lunch. You know who I mean, the waitpeople with good observation skills, that handle multiple tasks with easy grace, that make few mistakes and deal efficiently with the ones they do make. The ones who can look around and think, ‘Huh. It really *is* busy here today. Good thing I’m good at my job. It’s not really something to get worked up about.’

Our waitress at the Bluebird was nice but flustered. I can imagine her saying, ‘Wow. It’s really busy in here today,’ and Rich rolling his eyes. I say this by way of extended introduction to explain why, when she brought me the eleven dollar steak and eggs instead of the nine dollar chicken fried steak I ordered, I was neither especially surprised nor especially upset. Half anticipating a moment like this, I hadn’t even asked for my hash browns to be cooked crispy. ‘You ordered the chicken fried steak?’ she asked, looking at the crunchy, well done meat on the plate. Now, the question that follows ordering a steak is, ‘how would you like that done?’ and if I’ve ordered a steak, I reply ‘medium rare’ and if I’ve ordered chicken fried steak I reply, ‘huh?’ and any mistake gets sorted out before I’m eating something unordered and overcooked. No such conversation here.

So, after we told the waitress her mistake and she looked confused before claiming they were out of chicken fried steak, I took the food because I don’t like the idea of it getting thrown away any more than I like the idea of waiting another twenty minutes for something else.

Now, I’m not saying that they should have given me this lunch for free. I’m mostly just saying that they should bring me what I order. And when they don’t, well, at least they shouldn’t charge me extra for having messed up my order. Paying the nine dollars I had agreed to pay for the lunch I wanted for the lunch that I didn’t isn’t really compensation but would have been better than paying the eleven dollars I hadn’t agreed to pay for the lunch I hadn’t ordered. This is a subtlety apparently lost on the Bluebird staff. I would have liked to get the meal for free, sure. I would really have liked a manager or some such person to come out and apologize and check if the situation had been resolved to my satisfaction. That would suggest to me they are trying to say, ‘we’re human and make mistakes but we’re trying, and want to do a good job’ instead of saying, ‘we’re incompetent, and we don’t care.’

I still had hopes for the food. Both meals came with toast. Not every breakfast does, but every breakfast, regardless of time of day and even if it's French toast, should come with toast. So, a plus. Gail’s corned beef hash was strange, less hash then corned beef julianne tossed with fried potatoes. She said it was good. The steak wasn’t shoe leather. The egg – scrambled – had been sizzled dry on a large flat griddle, paper thin and chopped into strips like Gail’s corned beef, a sort of visual motif. My hash browns, if not brown weren’t exceptionally bad, but tasted strongly of artificial butter flavored shortening that I wouldn’t want to waste cholesterol intake on. The portions, like Mike said, weren’t large – enough, but just barely enough, not enough had I been really hungry. In short, the food was nothing special and pretty pricey, and that’s a disappointing combination. We didn’t stay for pie.

But, oh – despite my harping, the waitress was nice. She refilled my iced tea a couple times (that a *miserable* Earl Gray concoction with extra tannins and apparently the philosophy that lots of flavor that is bad is better than little flavor that is good) and smiled through her flustration.

The botched order is fun to write about but not that big of a deal. Food that proves to be mediocre and service that seems consistently sub-par is. I’ve had worse food, and I’ve been in worse places than the Bluebird, but given the local options I’m not sure why I’d go back.

News Flash: QT Scrooges Wonderland

2008-12-16T15:40:00.011-06:00

“You ought to be paying me! You’re working in a freaking winter wonderland!” I was on a roof, a steep roof, in the snow, when Matt Bockensteadt, my employer at the time, yelled that to his crew. It was cold and scary and a long way down. I shivered.

Another time, in Delhi, Iowa, I woke up at my friend Frank’s parent’s house to what looked like an avalanche outside the window. Frank and Matt were high school chums growing up in Delhi way before I knew either of them.

Accompanying the snow, I heard thumping on the roof and envisioned reindeer or a snowy apocalypse.

“Where’s Frank,” I asked his mom.

“Shoveling the roof,” she replied mater-of-factly. 'Of course,' I thought, 'like one does.'

I’m reminded of these incidents on a day like today, walking to the Lindquist Center from just south of campus, past the Quick Trip on the corner of Madison and Burlington. It is a winter wonderland out there. It’s not my favorite snow today. I like the warm snow, the soggy, big flake snow that drapes itself over the grass and leafs on the ground, draping them with cold messy beauty. They melt for a while upon contact before beginning to cover it up. Those are catch on your tongue snowflakes; that is snowball snow. It’s not the best to walk to class in as it clings and moistens unduly. And, it’s just not as pretty. Today, it’s cold. The snowflakes are small and the wind is still. They float on the air as much as fall, turning the sky white with slow motion. They don’t melt, and they don’t stick. It’s too chilly to be sticky. They just pile up in and around the grass, covering it by slow degrees, four inches in eight hours. If they land on your shoulder, they brush off or fall off in the least breeze of movement. This is the snow of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”.

Which is to say that it ain’t that hard to shovel.

Last year, the ice build up on the two sidewalks outside of QuikTrip lasted from first freeze to final thaw. It looks like they’re gearing up for that performance again this year. This doesn’t so much surprise me – Iowa City businesses – with notable exceptions – are abysmal at scooping their walks. But this with QT is what I really don’t get.

The weather report confirms that the snow is coming down at half an inch per hour. This means if QuikTrip sent out a minimum wage employee once an hour, said employee would have to move half an inch of snow off the walk with a shovel. No shovel, you might wonder? They sell them. What about accumulations overnight? They’re open 24 / 7.

But last year, it may be noted, was an icy year. Ice storm after ice storm. That was beautiful, too, except for the broken trees that reminded me more of Frost’s “Birches,” ice sickles on the ground like the dome of heaven had shattered, or hanging from the trees like a coat of diamonds. But that stuff’s not like shoveling powdery snow. It’s freezing.

QuikTrip sells ice melt.

So, one might want to ask: why does a store, staffed with young able employees, a store that is open all night on a corner lot and has an inventory of shovels, a store that sells ice melt, why does such a store not think it has a responsibility to, oh, I don’t know, people who walk – not to mention those that get around by wheelchair or other mobility device – not think it has a responsibility to shovel the sidewalk. Or maybe they think their frozen burritos are community service enough.

Maybe they’ll figure this out at some point, but in the mean time they’re Scrooging up my Winter Wonderland.

Luddites aren't just crotchety old geezers

2008-12-12T17:59:00.008-06:00

One of the dangers in /using/ computers is that people may think you /like/ computers. Any vestige of liking them disappeared for me when Apple introduced their new line of laptops and decided not to include firewire ports, thereby making them totally incapable of importing digital video from mini DV tapes. The Apple folks seem to think that since newer cameras connect thru USB ports, there is no need to maintain the previous standard. Of course, these newer cameras record video in a different format and at much lower quality than the firewire models. In a cynical way this makes sense – Apple figures that it can save a few dollars on the computer, affect a small portion of their consumers who use mini DV, and offend only a percentage of those, most of whom they figure will get over it or buy the upgraded model Mac laptop (for 800 dollars more) that still has the firewire port. Those not offended by the removal of this port call it progress; firewire is an old technology that is much less common than USB. I don’t particularly care for that argument, and I am resistant to change. For the worse. Here I feel like a luddite, insisting the past is better as I feel the overwhelming push of a present that surrounds me and I can in no way stop.

Only, here, the old thing clearly is better.

I also feel nerdy knowing all the things I do about firewire connections – transfer speed, compatibility, reasons for their superiority over USB, why digital video is meant to work with it, etc. – and this is where the danger of appearing to be an enthusiast rears. Consider a comparison with baseball statistics and automotive details. Think about people talking about cars, and what image do you conjure? Is it men in work clothes but at their leisure, arguing Chevy vs. Ford vs. Chrysler trucks, or talking racing and modifications and after-market accessories? Boring things out, adding turbo chargers, cleaning and polish and chroming of parts you haven’t heard of? Or the more sober comparison of similar figures by cautious consumers looking for a family sedan? See, unlike baseball statistics, some of these things have value. I sometimes feel like a car dude, bragging up my machine, except it’s a computer, the speed measured in megahertz and the size measured in gigs.

Same with computer stuff, I like to think. I don’t want to be the guy who buys a computer and a camera and runs home to find they don’t match up. And, in this example, my equipment doesn’t match up with the new computer I wanted to get. So, this I suppose makes me a luddite, despite the superior quality of the older product being replaced. Which, I suppose, is exactly what the weavers thought in 1811 when the idea of breaking the looms, that promised increased production and reduced labor, in order to protect the livelihood of hand craftspeople occurred to them.
But this isn’t my rub. I spend lots of my day in front of a computer – at home, at work in three different rooms, at my other job teaching teachers how to use computers, my laptop at the coffee shop – and it’s implicated in virtually everything I do to maintain my livelihood. I recognize the computer’s power as a tool, but am an abysmal typist. I understand computers – I took college computer programming classes while I was still in high school – and have a good memory for technical details. I work in tech support. But I don’t like it.

My friend kept himself from laughing at me Wednesday night when I told him what classes I was taking next term. One of them is in bookbinding. By hand, with needles and string and arcane apparatus. I may take papermaking in the fall – will, if I have time. I would rather have my hands on materials. Sawdust. Sandpaper. Stain. Shellac. I like that tactile feel, so unlike the clicking of the keys.

I wonder if there’s a market for handmade paper.

I don't have a koi pond

2008-12-09T17:38:00.012-06:00

My fish aren’t koi. They’re Carp. Not that I suppose there is anything wrong with koi, per se. I met a couple koi at the garden center this last summer and they were cute and friendly, and really, as creatures of privilege, why wouldn’t they be? Of course, one could say the same about the eventual owners of koi, and anyone else with the means to have a pond in their yard. But not all of them are.

I painted a house this last summer and talked to the woman who lived next door to it. She had koi in her pond. She just moved in and had had her house painted in an off white, off due to the addition of a pink tinge. The trim was bright, flat, purple. She kept promising to anyone who would listen that she would paint a mural on the wall facing where I was working. My employer, a former co-worker where I teach, and I shuddered. Mural woman fancied herself an artist, and the mural and her pond was part of her art as life as art programme. The pond was artistic but not aesthetic, I might want to put it. Nature in a frame. The koi weren’t fish anymore; they were art objects. It might remind me of poodles with the grooming where they’re shaved except for poofy spots on their heads and tail and feet, poor things.

At least it seemed to me that to her the koi weren’t koi anymore. How this seemed to the koi may be different. They probably had an easier time respecting themselves than a lot of poodles out there.

No, it’s not koi, but goldfish what’s in my pond. Twenty-three cent goldfish. At one time there were fifteen, then there were five survivors, now there are some ridiculous number. Not all the fellas were fellas. I need to find someone to give the newbies away to. Freecycle, maybe, when they get a little bigger and I can fish them out. I was afraid that the oxygen supply in the pond wouldn’t be great enough to support them all after it freezes over and they’d suffocate under the ice, but I checked with the pond guy at the garden store. It’s deep enough that they should all be fine.

It’s a bit difficult to describe this reason why I like the fact that my fish are plain carp, not fancy koi carp. Or at least the principle is inconsistent. A friend and I compare the respective worth of our fish, hers indoor in a tank and mine out in the mild wild of the yard. She’s appalled that I keep the fellas there in the winter, freezing with the garlic and shallots. I pretend outrage that she keeps hers locked up in a bowl with cats nearby, and I tell her she should bring her fish out for a swim. I like to think of the fellas as rugged, blue collar, Joe the Piscine sorts of guys. Like me. With a pond garden filled with irises and water lilies.

Mural woman’s pond isn’t deep, maybe eighteen inches. It was more shallow at one point in the summer when I put some water lettuce in it. The fish swam frantically en masse, almost like flopping on the beach, only occasionally finding the deep end. I guess Italy has banned giving away goldfish as prizes at fairs; it seems to be illegally cruel to suffocate them in plastic bags. I suspect mural women’s fish will die this winter, freeze their little fins off.

I wasn’t sure my fellas would live thru their first winter. I did buy them a heater, which melts a small hole in the ice to let toxic gasses out. I bought them a filter for living through the winter. It seemed like they deserved a reward, and I also developed new respect for them as fish. But I’m not trying to say I’m so far above letting fish die. I don’t want to sound too all crunchy, but life and death are all part of nature, after all, the eternal cycle and all that. Fish die all the time and it doesn’t so much bother me(*). I just think that if they’re going to die as part of nature, they should be able to do so as part of nature, not artistic ostentations. What’s the difference between a wolf starving to death because it can’t catch any more food, and a dog starving to death because its owner won’t spring for Alpo? What’s the difference between freezing to death climbing a mountain, and freezing to death in your home?

Unless of course the killing is part of the art.

(*) Unless it’s because of river pollution; that pisses me off. The fish frequently try to jump out of the water, it hurts them so bad. That is an interesting thing to think about: can you imagine not trying to jump into the water – another medium in which we can live – but out of the air, into some mystery element that will kill us? Jumping out of the air and into the fire to find relief?

The Iowa DNR on water monitoring

Iowa DNR on fish kill reporting

Iowa DNR on fish kill investigations

I don't have Koi Pond

2008-12-08T20:45:00.003-06:00

I have an iPhone. I recently quit my years-long affiliation with Verizon – they being bastards – and took up with AT&T, they being iPhone purveyors. It’s okay as a phone, nothing special, somewhat unergonomic, being flat, and somewhat quiet, being shrouded in an after market protective silicone skin.

In the case that you don’t know, I’ll tell you that the cool thing about the iPhone is that one can download applications for it, some made perhaps by Apple but mostly by third parties. These applications run on the phone and vary from the ‘flashlight’ that makes the screen shine usefully, to tic-tac-toe, to sophisticated games, to file transfer programs, social networking interfaces, and translators, converters, and widgets of all manner. One such application is Koi Pond. It costs a dollar.

I don’t have Koi Pond

The application shows cute pictures of koi swimming around the screen. If one touches them, they wiggle and move away. The urge to poke the screen with the sort of force that would break it is hard to resist.

I never want to hit my goldfish. Our taunt them with worms on pointy hooks. So, what gives?

The thing is, I like electronics. Gadgets. Quad-core processors. On my iPhone, I have the TanZen application, a tangram program. It’s a puzzle in which simple shapes – triangles, a parallelogram, and a square, sized in clever mathematical relation – are used to fill out complex shapes. I play to help increase my visual literacy.

I remember other kids making wooden tangram puzzles, or something like them, in shop class twenty odd years ago. I never got into them. I like the game on the iPhone, tho, in the same why in which I still don’t care for Hangman, which I also have on my phone. The game seems natural.

What I wonder is why I don’t care about the tactile feel of the game. I work in wood, whenever I can: more construction than sculpture, with a preference for cabinet making and shop work. I’ve considered making a tangram puzzle out of exotic woods, rubbing the pieces with rare lustrous oils, French polishing them, rubbing with rottenstone, spraying them with urethane and buffing them out smoother glass before scootching them around on a velvet felt pad. I can’t seem to get much motivation to do it, tho. In fact, I down right don’t want to. It might be a nice shelf piece, something I could have given to my grandmother. I know I wouldn’t use it. Why would I? I have it on the phone.

I could have a pond on my phone.

It’s clearly not that I’m against non-embodiment or electronics. So what do I have against disembodied fish. That I don’t have against unembodied tans? That I don’t feel for polished craft art wooden tans. That I do for fish?

Farm : Garden :: Stadium Supergroup Concert : Local Bar Band

2008-12-02T16:30:00.014-06:00

Maybe winter is a time for looking in; it’s taken me until now to put these things together.

I remember in the summer a friend coming over and hanging out. I was showing off my garden, and he said something along the lines of, ‘you’ve made this a real nice part of your yard over here.’

I thought he was wack. We were standing with the mosquitoes between two raised beds. The peas were nice; instead of cooking or weeding, I stand by the garden and eat them off the vine, shelling the older ones. The peas were also messy and over grown. So were the collards. And the beans were looking to be. The onions don’t really get over grown, but they had needed thinning and I hadn’t had time to cook. The place was a mess, not a scenic outdoor destination; it was neither sacred nor profane, just a place. It wasn’t a place I’d go to.

When I was over there, why I went over there in the first place, I would pull a few weeds, look and see what had grown, pull a few more weeds, tie a piece of jute or strip from an old pillowcase around something. In between each of these, I would eat a few peas. A week after that conversation I would eat a few peas and a few young carrots, too. Then not so young carrots. Eventually, I started thinking about it. I did go to this place. Every day I went to this place. I spent a good portion of my time outside there, as the multiple piles of pea shells demonstrated.

So I became enamored of this little space.

It made me revise – I won’t say rethink – my ideas about the sacredness of nature. They became more expansive. A priest, Father Ed of the Iowa City Newman Catholic Student Center, told me once that all things were sacred, having been made by the hand of God. He wasn’t giving me the answer that I wanted.

I wanted him to afford something special to cemeteries and ancient holy spots, and he was having none of it. Cemeteries, a thousand years later, the bones aren’t even dust any more, but the dirt and the flowers and the nature probably still would be. He admitted that some places were sacred to individuals for idiosyncratic reasons, but that everywhere was sacred to God; the bones had nothing to do with it. Of course, I suppose this means that quicksand is sacred, too. But still.

So, I’ve been looking inward. Trying to find the meanings I associate with my idiosyncratic spaces. I like to sit on the other side of the yard. The fish are more fun to watch than the plants. They do more. But I don’t so much like to sit outside. It’s not like I usually work in the garden; I usually fart around, and it’s difficult to fart around on a grand scale .

More on that last thing

2008-12-01T21:39:00.002-06:00

I have a friend who doesn’t have a phone. We’re not old best chums or anything like that, and his lack of electronic communications makes it difficult for our relationship to progress. I basically have to hope to run into him at bars. Still – I envy him, not only for his ability to avoid me.

I got some bad news the other day, so I left my phone at home, went running, ran errands, ignored it for a while. An old acquaintance (I have no other term; I can’t believe a friend would behave thus) was pissed at me, having tried to txt msg me all day to ask me to hang out. Kerfuffle ensued.

I feel too connected sometimes.

I teach a class, and in this class I teach students to make comic books and digital videos. One student – not my favorite – after skipping all the class’s work, wrote a nice final exam in an attempt to… something. For good measure, he tacked on a part railing about the class. The gist: how dare I pretend that I teach a progressive class when we made such politically impotent texts. Comics? Commercials? Piffle! I suppose probably should have had them doing something that would have motivated real change – reading Marx or Chomsky or Foucault, I suppose. The commercial his group filmed made fun of methamphetamine users.

When I get a message like that, I usually use it as an opportunity to open a dialogue, but this kid was only in my class that one term – trying to make up credit from before – so I didn’t write back to him on his final. Had I, I might have told him not to confuse the message with the medium. The parody of a Mark Foley campaign ad was super, as were a number of send-ups of tele-consumerism. Comics – I just re-read this in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers – are not a genre.

Neither is the internet.

So, to balance my Facebook bashing – I wish someone would comment on my status – I want to point out that I just looked up “kerfuffle” (and variants “kerfluffle” with an extra “l,” “carfuffle” with a “car,” along with numerous other variations and the etymology of both) before I trusted myself to use it above.

I also downloaded the complete text to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and the video of same from some old-timey TV show. I’m talking lesson plans here for my unit on textual adaptation.

I love being constantly connected. I want all the information in the world at my finger tips. I don’t want to miss it, or anything. I don’t want to be bothered either, and I can’t say how this connectivity has made my life any better in a liberationist politico sort of way.

I’m starting to wonder if it’s a problem of personification. We think of the internet as a thing. A vaguely anthropomorphized thing. Not big brother, altho so were big brother a mining engineer, but something with a brain that does things somehow on its own. It’s not a thing, not a monolithic one. Sure, there’s the superhighway, but that’s quite literally just the medium, the thing through which all these channels of information are channeled. The content is, the purposes we put it to, are of our own devising. We can drive to the hoe-down or the symphony or the store. We can talk about our gardens or the internet. So, what is it that pisses me off here? I’ve met the internet… and it’s us.

'Cause evrybody does it-

2008-12-01T19:29:00.002-06:00

Ya know what we don’t hear enough of? People criticizing the internet.

And I don’t mean kiddy porn. And I don’t mean corporations whose employees are spending all day on Facebook or eBay. No, I mean we don’t hear enough criticism of the stuff on the web that we’re supposed to like. This must be bad for democracy.

Social networking. WooHoo! I was asked to go to a party a few months ago. Not asked in any personal way, mind you – asked by mass email – and not really a party – a work related affair. My friends rolled their eyes and grumbled about how asked me how I was getting there; I said I wasn’t.

“Why not?” one asked? I was confused by the question, so I retreated to what I thought would be safer ground.

“Why would I?”

My friend said I could see… a whole list of people I barely knew – some woman I had a class with 3 years ago and hadn’t talked to since, some guy none of us liked – as if this was a good thing, and she called it, “You know. Social Networking.”

I joined Facebook because I knew a friend had created a profile on Facebook, and I wanted his email address. So I could invite him to a party. I don’t mean to say that I hate the site. I’ve used it to distribute virtual drinks (via the distribute virtual drinks application) and to become a fan of Pabst Blue Ribbon (a beer I like to drink) and I have read multiple reports and seen numerous pictures of former students getting and being drunk.

More even than virtual alcohol, the great promise of the internet was in the promotion of democratic ideals. Everyone would come to have free and easy access to accurate information from which they could construct their own realities and truths, and those truths would set them free. Armed with the facts they could get outside of the dominant ideologies that convinced them to vote against their self-interests, cast off the shackles of the repressive anglo-male dominance and do whatever it is people do once people do that. Which, apparently, is put up pictures of your friends doing beer bongs and twitter to the world existential questions like, ‘why haven’t I read that book?’

I just posted a witty comment on a friend’s Facebook status. She’s updated her status and failed to publicly recognize my comment. Now I feel bad. At least I thought it was witty.

Can one load most pages with a dial-up connection anymore? If not, who can’t afford broad band? And are those the people who need access to info?

I voted. On Facebook I joined the ‘remind your friends to vote’ thingy, and altho I suspect it was really more a ‘tell the world you’re a good person because you voted’ thingy at least it was trying. I’m sure without all the searching for old classmates that’s now possible, many people might otherwise have forgotten about the election.

It’s the unexamined nature of all this that irks me. Ya know why everybody does this? ’cause everybody does this. Let’s hope none of the early adopters jumps off a cliff.

Winter Companions

2008-12-01T19:00:00.001-06:00

Garlic and Onions. Yup. And Shallots.

“Oh, no. No. You didn’t eat them did you?” I had a distasteful vision of planting stock sizzling in butter.

She looked at me with a bit of puzzlement. “Well, not yet.”

“Good. Those are for planting.”

“Oh. That’s right. You told me you were going to bring me shallots.”

Then what on earth were you going to eat them for, I thought. I gave her the planting instructions for the organic goodies I had left her: red shallots and yellow shallots and three types of garlic, and hurried on my rounds. I stop and look at the school pond – too shallow for fish, but with a lot of nice irises and rushes. Students walk by and wonder what I’m doing. I smile.

Working at a school, I get many of the opportunities to exchange pleasantries that make Facebook seem like deep conversation. These sorts of thing are, I suspect, meant to reassure each other that we are ready to acknowledge each other’s existence. Most occasions, matching their ‘hello’ with my ‘how ya doin’?’ is sufficient. Other times, from opposite ends of a hall, we see each other coming and I’m sure they can see me thinking about how I’m going to entertain them as they walk by. Typically, their exchanges are focused on weather. And mine are too.

“Looks like winter’s almost here!” I’ll say, taking the initiative, as we close in.
“Yeah,” they take the bait, “don’t you hate it when it gets like this?” they try to agree as we pass.
“Nah… I love it!” I say half turned to disagree before they’re too far gone.

Late fall is not the best time for gardening, especially when the ground freezes. I need to plant kale next year, and leeks – both of which I understand to be very cold hardy. My Swiss Chard remains colorful and healthy after our killing freeze, and even the collards are hanging in there. They’re not long for the world, but the garlic, that’s a different story.

Garlic and shallots plant in the fall. Not unlike flower bulbs, tho not nearly so deep. It’s part of their life cycle, cold then cool, then hot. They start to grow in the fall, hunker down for the winter and greet spring with wiggly finger-like leaves. Ones that I hadn’t harvested over the summer have sprouted again, and may hold me over for the winter. I’m reluctant to till my shallot patch, because ya can’t really afford shallots, and they seem to keep growing back every year. It’s a good thing.

I do like the winter, almost as much as I like garlic. I think of my plants out there in the wind and the snow when a colleague complains. It’s all weather, I think, the weather. No, I don’t want floods or old folks to die in ice storms, but you never hear the shallots complain about a November flurry. I think of their green in the fall and their underground life in the winter and want tot tell people to take heart. Variety is the spice of life, and that counts for the weather as much as for the veggies.

www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM1894.pdf

Vegetables and Ironies. Kinda.

2008-10-07T15:55:00.001-05:00

This isn’t the entry I had intended to write. What I was going to write is a reflection on a particular irony that I enjoyed: while I should have wanted to work in my garden, there was too much dirt around, and this made me not want to. The dirt came from the city ripping up the streets and sidewalks where I live, and along with them, considerable chunks of my yard. It was sad, and looked like hell. Then, after months of inactivity, the workers came back to finish the job, and the concrete sidewalks they poured made me want to garden. Concrete makes me want to garden; dirt makes me want not to. So much for creating a natural environment.

But that isn’t this blog. After immediate and impressive progress upon the return of the workers, the project once again ground to a halt. They replaced the sidewalk but ripped out the street, piled the chunks up around my property, and stopped. More dirt had been piled up, more gravel. More gnashing of teeth. More people stood around whenever I ventured out to do something. Then came the night of the rain, followed by the dark morning of the long trek to the car through the sinking in mud. In my nice school clothes. In the rain.

This is how that post was to have started:

A few weeks ago, I was excited by the return of the workers.

Saturday morning, I was cleaning the filter on the aeration pump in the fountain, a foam affair that fits over the submerged pump’s intake and gunks up every few days. I had recently talked to the city engineer, the galoot, and had been expecting the concrete guys. They wasted no time getting started.

This is how that post was to have ended:

Concrete and vegetables. I hadn’t expected how the arrival of one would lead to an appreciation of the other. But I like the irony.

Looking back, I see that the irony is illusory. It’s not the concrete or the dirt. It’s the dirt where there is supposed to be concrete, and the concrete where there is supposed to be dirt. This isn’t a ‘time to every purpose under heaven’ moment. It’s the fact that whatever illusion of nature I make in the yard, the concrete is never that distant and illusions are short on substance. It’s noise and dust and mud where I want sounds and sunlight and loam. It’s holding a garden trowel and kneeling on a root watching a man sitting in an air conditioned cabin running a backhoe, the helplessness of planting a flower while acres of pavement are hauled off.

And the fact that it’s still not done doesn’t help, either.

Companion Planting, Part One

2008-10-06T20:08:00.005-05:00

I’m not always in my garden, or even thinking about it. My university has been witnessing how a mishandled sexual assault allegation plays out in its internal bureaucracy. After wending its way through the school athletic departments, the case came to rest in the office of the president of the university, an office which has seen its share of turmoil in the last couple years. At the heart of that earlier turmoil was a prolonged and contentious search for a new president that left us with only interim leadership for six months as we went through multiple rounds of searching, leaving faculty disgruntled and morale low. Now, it is not so much the mishandling of the alleged rape of a drunken female student athlete by at least two members of the football team that is at the heart of the current turmoil; the president’s incompetence in that regard is by now old news.

The current turmoil, still less than a year into the new president’s tenure, resides in the mishandling of the aftermath of the mishandling of the sexual assault case. This mishandling comes in the wake of the suicide of a university professor accused by his students of offering to trade better grades for fondling them. Sweeping new sexual harassment prevention and reporting directives have been implemented without input from the university community, and as a face-saving measure in the rape case a widely respected and long-term employee of the university has been made the scapegoat and fired on the basis of dodgy evidence and without explanation, due process, or a chance to defend himself. To be clear, he isn’t accused of anything malicious, but rather of inexpertly navigating a labyrinthine conflict of interest between the family of the victim, the board of regents, and various university offices both athletic and administrative. We were talking about the case as my arts research class was getting started a few days ago.

As a high school teacher, a sometimes gruff and usually groggy one, I at times forget that I am some sort of role model. I think that part of my professional life is modeling the human behaviors that I want to see in the world. Almost. I should say my job is to model the behaviors I want to see in the world in a way that makes sense to high school students. One beautiful day a few years ago, before I had a pond of my own, I sat on the bench near the pond in front of our school looking at the water plants, and my friend Kara came out and sat with me for a while. “Does this mean you’re going out with Mr. Schott?!?” her students were asking her later that day. This is how the world makes sense to tenth graders.

School itself is a strange environment. Students cling physically to each other in all manners of ways from cute to obscene, while we adults in the school seldom touch anyone. We rarely shake hands. The bustle of children that the adults try to avoid can feel like an extension of being lonely in a crowd. We never, never, touch the students. I was myself uncomfortable earlier in the term when a student of mine walked over to where I sat reading his homework and sort of leaned on me, pawed me over, generally got in my space as he eagerly pointed out things I should pay attention to in his paper. He’s a squirmy kid like that, still learning boundaries. But still.

As we discussed the university’s troubles in my art class, in a pleasant gesture another professor walked across the cavernous basement room to say hello to us where we sat at tables talking. “I just wanted to say ‘hi’ to you all,” she announced generally, “I never get to see most of you.” We smiled and murmured pleasantries.

Then, unexpectedly, “I’ve got some questions for you,” my proff said to the other professor as she made to leave. His tone was more serious than his eyes. She paused, wryly skeptical.

“Tell me about the haircut,” he demanded. Her hair was short, with bangs swept dramatically over one eye, coming to a nearly geometrical point. As she looked for meaning in this question, I stared, confounded. “How do you make it into a triangle?” he continued, his close-shaven head tilted up to look at her, the smile creeping into his voice.

“Gel,” she said to him, stepping close, leaning into him, her hand on his shoulder. “Lots and lots of gel.” She looked up to the rest of us and explained, “He likes it when my hair is longer.” How, I wondered, could she know he thinks that?

“Gel,” he said. “Maybe I should try that.”

She ran her hand across his head, more so than through his close cut hair. “Maybe we can get you a die job, too,” she smiled. She didn’t rub his shoulders or poke him in the tummy or kiss his forehead, but at this point, if she had I wouldn’t have been surprised.

When I recounted this scene to a friend, I had to ask myself what they were modeling so unselfconsciously in front of their students, not only at a time when sexual harassment policies at the university are on everyone’s mind, but oblivious of them while in the middle of a discussion about them. They weren’t modeling respect; any faculty member would have that for these two. It was something more than that, a calm assurance in their playful humor and gentle affection for each other of the sort that I had never seen in a professional environment before. It makes my spirit smile to even remember it. Maybe being out of the garden isn’t such a bad thing.

Community Development

2008-10-06T15:32:00.003-05:00

I maintain a narrow view and inhale the dust. This just isn’t working.

A few days before, I was complaining to my neighbor, Kevin: Where is all this pond sludge coming from?

“I thought you were digging a pond over there by your bird feeder?”

“This, what you’re doing here,” Kevin had said, pointing to me where I stood with fish swimming about my knees, “looks a lot like maintenance. I don’t want to do maintenance.”

“What do you want, Kevin?” I can’t remember what he wanted.

The origin of the sludge, however, I recall him suggesting was the dust. A car drove by, followed by a white and brown cloud that wasn’t exhaust. “Every time that happens, it ends up in your pond.” Dirt and rock settled in a layer on the patio furniture.

A truck, laden with fifteen cubic yards of gravel, labors forward and back behind me. I smell the diesel as a skid loader bounces over toward the truck; I hear the clang of steel and voices. It takes the same amount of maintenance to have a pond and read beside it as it does to have a pond and sit reading in the coffee shop. I’m debating.

Last summer, people stopped by. I got to know my neighbors. “Digging a pond?” they would say as I leaned on my shovel, “Planting flowers?” as I took them out of their flats. They said these things as they walked by, when there was somewhere to walk. I think it showed that I was one of them; everybody planted something, except the ones that were already leaving when they signed the lease. Chatting in the front yard was neighborly, and working there made it a neighborhood.

As the gravel pours into the street behind me I put down my book and go for a beer. It’s too early, really, but it’s kind of my ‘fuck you’ to the workers whose fault it really isn’t that they are still mucking around in the devastation that is my neighborhood’s roads, lawns, and sidewalks. I take a long, slow drink and squint into the haze. One of them looks back and wonders just briefly what I’m up to before going back to work on a backhoe like a child who didn’t want to grow up so grew his Tonka toys to keep pace with him.

As I drink, I look at the flower bed between my two trees in the front yard. It’s scraggly at best. I want to want to do something about it, plant something, weed something, give a damn. This is only the bed’s second year, too early to get tired of it and quit, and lots of the perennials and some of the new bulbs are thriving. Annuals are non-existent. The view just beyond the bed explains why: mud and the ruins of the edges of my yard. It’s a story long in the unfolding.

One day, I asked a galoot with a camera if I could help him. “Just taking before and after pictures,” he told me. “Before and after what?” I asked, somewhat concerned as my yard was the subject of his work. It turned out that the next day the work would begin. The sidewalks were to be uprooted, the roots of the tree on the corner of my lot maliciously cut out on two sides, a cavernous trench dug by a machine that tore down overhead branches, the water main replaced, gas pipes run, smaller trenches across the yard, grass ground into the ground, bulldozers and backhoes and bobcats, oh my. Then they would replace the entire street. This was in May. “Six weeks start to finish,” the oaf had said. Done before my birthday party. The galoot is the city engineer. When first he and I spoke he had had his job one day.

The city owns a grotesque portion of my yard, past the inside edge of the sidewalks on both sides. When they want to replace the pipes underneath, it seems they can. Or, at least start to before getting tired and leaving. As the rear hatch of the dump truck slams shut, the coffee shop is sounding better and better.

Mud. Dirt. You’d think that this would be the stuff of organic inspiration. It’s not. It’s four months of a disheartening mess. It’s a summer of looking the other way and pretending something growing is all that’s going on behind me. It’s tracking in on the floors. It’s nowhere to study and nobody to invite over to share the outdoor living space. It's no visible neighbors. It ain’t too god damned much like a garden.

School Days

2008-10-05T13:50:00.006-05:00

“How’s your garden doing?” Asabi asked me.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in three days.”

Asabi works with me at the computer lab in the college of education helping students scan images and convert files and upload assignments so professors can check them. She and I became friends over the summer when we co-taught the class that teaches students how to do these things. Asabi had heard I had a garden, and kept a watchful eye towards any surplus produce.

“Collard greens!” she had exclaimed, “You all have collard greens?”

Yes. I had. And plenty to share, altho she and I never managed to get the sharing done.

I’m not a very energetic gardener. I prefer to let things take their own course for the most part. This inhibits certain kinds of garden success. In the summer I spent a lot of time in the garden, standing in the heat and imitating the plants, soaking up the sun. Sometimes I would make a mental list: should ought put that fence back up, might could weed the carrots, need some sort of trellis for the peas. The list was mental only, without any physical manifestation. Like I said, my gardening isn’t very energetic.

Now that school is in session, from Sunday night until Thursday night, I’m not home in the daylight.

Weeds have been a problem this year. We’ve had a lot of rain and the weeds keep… shooting up like weeds. The Saturday before Asabi had asked me this, I had plunged into the weedy mess with resolve. The day before I had simply stood and stared, wondering where my vegetables were. It was a mess, enough of a mess to put off dealing for as long as I could.

And then, that was it. Cut down a bunch of weeds and run off to study. Leave the garden to its own devices. It feels somehow that without me standing there to watch it, it must be going to have problems growing. Or something. It needs me.

I soak up fluorescent light from the school and the flat screen monitor glow from the lab and grow pasty and pale. And the plants. The plants and the weeds soak up the rain and remains of the southening sun and dispute my claims of relevance to the whole operation.

Gardening 301

2008-09-02T16:06:00.002-05:00

Milton and Malachai are looking up at me, and I share with them my frown.

Mike and I had not so recently been carpool talking about the lottery. What would the school I made be like when I won the 300 million dollar lotto? What would his school be like? Some of the talk was the predictable rehashing of our changing footings on whether media production should be a separate class or part of language arts; science and social science would both require critical thinking; good gym classes were a good thing.

More interesting was the surprise, “I think in my school we’ll have classes about gardening.”

“Yeah, me too. Have the kids grow stuff.”

“There’s something about growing your own food. It’s amazing – you put something in the ground, give it a few months, and it turns into food. Or flowers.”

“Hands-on. Playing in the dirt.”

“Yeah. Have the kids grow stuff.”

Milton wiggles his tail to swim to the next plant and chews on it. Malachai wiggles more enthusiastically, darting back and forth and looking at me expectantly. I drink some beer and wish they would both eat more algae. Murdoc’s white nose and orangeshiny body eases through the gap in the water lettuce and I drink more beer, Iowa Pale Ale from the Millstream brewery just down the road. I am resting off a long day, and wonder if they can tell their days apart.

This is a forcedly myopic peace for me. To my left and to my rear my yard is a shambles, the turf ripped out along with the fence Nik and I put up fourteen months before, which stood barely eleven before giving way to the advance of progress. I’ve been too dispirited to weed the flower garden that runs out to the mud that the workmen promise they will turn back into a sidewalk. Continuing my frown, I return to thoughts of Malachai. Is he tainted by the hand of man? He prefers me to feed him, but lack of foraging in the seaweed hasn’t seemed to skinny him down any. Another swallow of beer. I spy a dead bird on the rocks alongside the water. I look at the plants, blossoms drying out and leaves turning brown. I created this space without knowing what would grow in it. The waters aren’t still. From the five fish that survived the first week last summer, fifty more swim amidst the flowers and wilting leaves in miniature mimicry of their parents. I’ve got to get a bunch of them out of there before it freezes or I worry they all will asphyxiate under the ice.

Getting up, I cross the yard then the driveway, and stop in front of the prairie plants. Caterpillar creatures have finished eating the butterfly milkweed, and the little bluestem screening my windows is turning red, like I think it’s supposed to. Past that, where it all started, the garden plants struggle to be seen over the weeds. The beans have overcome the fence and threaten the irises. A city rabbit hides in my oregano, the neighbor’s bees buzz by. It’s a tangled mess.

Yeah. Have the kids grow stuff. I grin childlike and toss my bottle in the bin. I got stuff growing, alright.