pleasantaeriequietgarden

I’ve been thinking a lot about food this month. It’s the end of the growing season here in the heartland, with a few exceptions, like broccoli, Brussels sprouts and late lettuces. It’s also not my favorite time of the year. (see previous sentence for clarification.) Standing in line at the local big box store, I happened to glance over to their overflowing rack of magazines. Why not, I thought to myself. Flip through a couple of magazines, maybe something will strike my fancy..it’s time for a jolt in my reading supply and cooking desires.

The covers of many of the magazines were sumptuous–full of autumnal colors, a rich palate of browns and oranges with a bit of yellow and a hint of burnt sienna. I was hungry just looking at the colors…juicy, plump, ripe. And these weren’t even the food magazines! I ended up purchasing a couple of food magazines, mostly because I loved the idea of what was on their covers: I wanted what they were subliminally selling–comfort, home, warm and cozy thoughts. I could just smell the soup on the cover of Sunset magazine.

I am a decent cook although I don’t do much of it any more. After 33 years of marriage, along with raising 3 hearty-eating sons, I have earned some time away from the stove, however. Somewhere in those years I also co-edited a quite popular local cookbook–cut and pasted and hand collated over 400 pages–and tried innumerable recipes on family and friends. Managed to drink a bit of Chardonnay with that project, too, as I recall! And gave a good many parties: large stand-up affairs with themes; small, intimate dinner gatherings with good friends and live lobsters; birthday parties, holidays doings; picnics on the porch and grilling at the beach.

The best part of all was the thinking it up: the recipes, the go-with’s, the table decor, the dinnerware and of course, what I would wear. I gave a Perfectly Pink Party for a dear friend for her 40th birthday one year. All the food was pink (shrimp and raspberries and pink daiquiris) and so was my dress. Then there was the Mexican-themed party with the red and yellow dishes–and me in red and yellow to match! Perhaps the most fun was the Formal Dinner on Board Ship that a friend and I cooked up–we pulled out all the stops on that one. The men were in tuxes, we were in our finest, the menues were old ones my husband had saved from his trip abroad on the Queen Mary and one of the guest couples even had their trunk shipped to our house ahead of the evening, asking if we could please lay out their evening clothes for them as they would be arriving just in time before the ship set sail! Glory Days!

I loved everything about the parties. Absolutely everything, Except for one little thing, that is. Well. Maybe it isn’t so little after all. You see, I really hate to cook.

I like gadgets and I get it: if you have the right gadget, it makes all the difference. So, I collected gadgets. Didn’t make any difference. If you are organized and have a plan, you will pull it off. I am super organized and planned to the hills and I did pull it off. I still didn’t like to cook. I do not enjoy preparing food. There. I’ve said it. I’ve confessed. I get no enjoyment from chopping or dicing or ricing. Beating and stirring; whisking and blending. Their very motions bring knots to my stomach. Even typing these words, recalling actions taken in the name of food preparation, make my stomach churn.

I find it almost inconceivable to understand that other people don’t actually feel that way in the kitchen. Watching Emeril or Rachel or even the indomitable Julia, I couldn’t believe they were enjoying what looked like to me to be prison-work.

I know where this comes from, sadly. From my mother’s kitchen where I was not a welcome set of hands. She, who was so handy, so clever, such a good cook, was not a good sharer/teacher. The harder I tried, the more buttery were my fingers. The more I did, the more water I slopped. I dreaded everything that happened in that long skinny kitchen of my childhood. I learned to set the table well but that was a set up, too.

I learned that preparing food for others was a duty; something to be done and gotten over with as soon as possible. Food was for eating. Food was nutritious; dishes should be presented colorfully and with a sensitivity to textures, flavors and cohesiveness. Food, however, was not love. Food served a purpose, but it surely was not for fun. Food, in my mother’s kitchen was a thing to be reckoned with, fought til the battle was o’er.

I absorbed those unspoken feelings just as any sensitive little child would. I took to heart the idea that feeding others was what I was to do . And do well. I learned that part of the lesson and executed it with precision and occasionally with flair.

I tried out lots of new recipes not because I wanted to taste them so much as I wanted them to open up a new world that was (I was somehow convinced) out there: the world that included laughter and conversation and cozy evenings of shared joy. Growing up The Joy of Cooking was just the name of my mother’s favorite cookbook to me. At least now I can recognize it and know it for what it is. It’s not the end of the world. By facing what I don’t enjoy and saying its okay, I let it go. So I don’t love to cook. So what? I love to meet over food, who cares who cooked it? Joy has come at last to settle in and make itself known, all on it’s own. No dicing, no slicing, no ricing, required.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thirteen months ago I received a not-very-nice letter from the City Forester informing me in governmental legal-eze that some of my plantings were not legal. I quickly responded by going out and ripping out the milkweed plants that the birds had planted serendipitously on the corner of my yard. They were incredibly tall so I figured that was what was causing the concern. (Who’s concern, I wondered.)

I live on a corner that is soft and rounded, the curb barely keeping the street in its proper place. The little-used half-street that is to the east of my property leads to only one other street. There are perhaps 15 houses that use this short little “place,” that these extra streets are named in our city nomenclature, as their regular egress. The street that runs in the front of my house is a much busier street at times. So much so that I find myself wishing for a SLOW Children at Play sign in my yard, like the one we had in our yard when I was growing up. One might think that since the stop sign is just one more house to the right of me, drivers might be slowing down, preparing to stop. You would, sadly, be wrong.

The landscape that I have been developing for the past 5 years curves around this corner and comes back into my front and side yards by about 12 feet. The theme is all about texture, color, and groovy shapes of evergreens, spruces, and firs; I am a connoisseur of conifers of contorted and weird shapes, the odder the better. The garden is my gift to the community–a last impression, a quick glimpse, before the driver joins and then is absorbed into the maddening stream of speeding drivers rushing to jobs that most of them dislike. A sad commentary on life as it seems to be in this dog-eat-dog world.

I’ve had lots of compliments on the garden-scape by drivers who take the time to slow down and say thanks or just wave giving a thumbs up. I’ve spent a lot of energy, countless hours and, if you would ask my adult children, way too much of my limited income on this little hobby of mine. The result pleases me to no end. It is my gift and my legacy, not that it will last long after I’m gone. That’s not my purpose here.

Back to the letter. It turns out that someone took exception to my plantings and complained. The City Forester investigated and discovered that indeed, I had done something illegal and he was here to tell me in no uncertain terms that I had a problem. Thirty days or else. I was required to move 2 7-foot White Pines that had been planted 4 years prior and 1 of my oh-la-la goofy ‘curly sue’s', also happily planted and thriving, boldly showing off in pride of place, mid-garden.

Moving evergreens of that size is no easy matter and takes a specialist who has a strong back and a good knowledge of what needs to be done. Last October, Eddie-my-love, the guy who helped me when the going got bigger than I could manage, showed up with his crew and moved the illegals out of the front bank and into a new kidney-shaped area carved out further back into my yard, closer to the house. I watered all fall and prayed that the three graces, as I had come to name them, would survive the winter.

Winter came and went and the spring had its turn. The trees looked to have survived! Yeah! I wasn’t crazy about the solution to the problem, the kidney-shaped area looked contrived and haphazard, dis-jointed at best, but at least I had the trees. For awhile.

As April turned to May and June followed suit, one of the white pines displayed brown needled omens of death below. A friend came and sawed her down; I couldn’t bear to watch. What had been the best I could do, became a scar with two conifers sadly reminding me that they belonged neither here nor there. No longer the Three Graces, they became just a duo out of place.

Summer brought no solution to the ungainly kidney-shaped eye-sore with the disengaged fir duo. The whole landscape looked out of balance, unfinished, unsatisfying. Not pleasing to the eye, not at all. I was out of sorts, too. Stumped and trumped; stymied and truculent. Plant a bunch of bulbs, I thought. That will help, at least for now, until I could come up with a better solution.

I stopped at the local garden center, a place I had avoided all summer long. It is one of my favorite places to work out problems, but I have no self-control when I’m there and this had not been the summer for extravagances of that ilk. The owner, who is a good friend, knew of my plight and had been kind enough not to encourage or lure me into a lair of my undoing. While reviewing the sad fate of the white pine I went about selecting some little bulbs for fall planting. With alliums and muscari on my mind, I spied something glorious out of the corner of my always-on-the-look-out eye. There! Right there! Oh my, I was smitten. No two ways about it!

There she was: the Marilyn Monroe of all conifers! A blonde bombshell! A Perfect 10! And, she was, even better, on SALE.

Now, in that beautiful, suberbly conceived, ever-so-lovely, graceful kidney-shaped plot in my front yard for all to see stands: Marilyn, plump and green with streaks of blonde, luscious and oh so cuddly. Why, I don’t think even such a gardener as the esteemed Miss Jeckyll could have come up with as great a solution.

Known in the horticultural world as Burke’s Red DragonEye Pine, she is Marilyn the Blonde Bombshell that brought the whole landscape design together. Better than ever. Out of the necessity of conforming to city rules and the sorrow of the loss of a beautiful white pine came beauty beyond what had been planned and torn apart; beauty beyond what could have been imagined by me.

Why do I doubt? Why do I keep stubbing my toes on my own ego? Why do I think I have to have all of the answers right NOW? Will I ever learn to let go and let the solutions just come in due time?

Maybe tomorrow.