Gardening and Cats

The weather here, and elsewhere, has been so changeable that I have not started the garden as yet. We had a week of 80n degrees in March and have been freezing for most of April, with some snow and sleet.

The little garden at the side of the driveway has done well in spite of it all. The purple swamp iris bloomed, as did the forget-me-nots and there are these little white things that popped up this past week. I don’t know what they are or where they came from. I know there were a few of them last year and now there are a lot of them. The mystery lily has spread and when it blooms this year there will be three separate plants. Last summer the main or “mother” plant had six blooms at the top. Quite showy.

Once again I neglected to thin out the Stella d’ oro lilies and they are so bunched together that I don’t expect them to bloom very well. I have heard it’s heavy work and that you have to take a very sharp knife or an axe to separate the bulbs and them I’m afraid I will replant them upside down and they’ll end up blooming in China. Or Australia.

While I was out taking pictures of the little white things, Sateen (our name for him) came purring over. He’s a stray who’s been in the neighborhood for five years. People try to take him in, but if there are or have been other cats in the house, he sprays, even though he’s been neutered. The woman next door feeds him and provides him shelter in bad weather in her garage. He’s very needy and he also drools. He is beautiful though. We are still missing Dupree. There was another stray around a few weeks ago, a lovely tortoise shell with Siamese markings, but she was quickly adopted by a neighbor. I think we need a cat.

Another Favorite Thing

A while back I wrote about some of my favorite kitchen things and plumb forgot a very important item. It used to be easy to find a brown pottery tea pot, even at the five and ten. When my last one bit the dust, back in the early seventies, there was not one to be found. When Polly made her first trip to Europe, which was going to include England (the Brits are very clear about not being in Europe which is a place they got to on holiday), I asked her if she could bring me back one if she happened to check out a Woolworth’s in London.

What she brought back was not a five and dime tea pot. It’s a beautiful Derby Stoneware pot with a light blue lining. It makes great tea. I bought it a tea cozy at a Woolworth’s in Scunthorpe in about ten years ago. That’s another thing that was hard to find over here. Just about the tie that cozy became threadbare, my friend jay Bell knitted me a charming number that the tea pot and I just love.

My shiny brown pot is now almost forty years old and looks like new. I think with all the trendy kitchen shops now tucked into every mall, one can probably find a brown pottery pot (not china, but pottery), but I treasure this one.

Painting Away

Been painting for the first time in a long while.  I’m experimenting with as looser style than I used to do. Still inspired by Gabrielle Munter. Emily sent me a delicious calendar this year and each month is a treat. I just love her use of color. I have a book Emily gave me a couple of Christmases ago, which shows some of the black and white photographs she worked from and the places she   saw around her in the Murnau area. (Since there was no color photography at that time, at least for the casual photographer, you can see how she actually saw things in her paintings. All of the subjects were right around the little house in Murnau where she and Kandinsky lived together. It’s just before the Alps begin, with a lot of little lakes and the mountains in the near distance.

The picture above is of a vacant house down in Holmes County. I happened to drive past it as the sun was rather low in the sky. The back of the house is missing, and the light in the windows is the sun, not indoor lights. I have been meaning to do this painting for a very long time and decided to just plunge in and think like Munter. I may do another one of the same subject, because this was fun to do.

The painting below is base on a picture that Ellie took of the wild cat, Francine. I haven’t met her, but she is the subject of many hilarious photos from the Petrou homestead in Erding. This one was so colorful and I couldn’t resist. I don’t think I have quite captured the zaniness of Francine, who is very photogenic in a wacky way. Both she and Izzy, the alpha cat of the family, are extremely nutty felines and I have Izzy’s photos on my refrigerator door, replacing grandchildren’s pictures. My beautiful granddaughters are much too glamorous for the likes of a refrigerator door.  Anyway, I love the photo of Francine contemplating the ennui of a late winter afternoon, close by a glass of wine and l’heure bleu.

What We Read

These past weeks, with the early spring, the view out my kitchen window reminded me of a favorite book I used to read to the children at bedtime, especially.

It’s the best bedtime book ever written, by Margaret Wise Brown, even better than “Goodnight Moon.”  It’s “The Little Fur Family" and the illustrations are by Garth Williams. The little fur child goes out to play in the wild wood and when he comes home in the late afternoon, this is what the sky looks like, and this is how the sky has looked on these chilly spring late afternoons.

This started me thinking about those days of reading to small children and the books, poems and stories they liked  the most. Each one had a different favorite. For Polly, when she was really little, it was the A.A. Milne poem “I want a soldier, a soldier in a busby,” from “When We Were Very Young.” She liked to hear it over and over. I actually found a wonderful metal wind up soldier in a busby, back when one could buy such things at the 5 and 10 for a coupe of bucks. He marched and played a drum, too. 

For Sally it was “Whatever’s the Matter with Mary Jane (and it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again..) which I think she identified with, even though I never made rice pudding. I think she liked the idea of a child saying “no” to food she didn’t like. They both liked the one about Bad King John who only wanted a red rubber ball.

Emily loved “Peter Rabbit,” especially the part where “the sparrows flew to him in great excitement and implored him to exert himself” when the buttons on his jacket got caught in the gooseberry net in Me. McGregor’s garden. She loved to say that part, even though I am not sure she understood exactly what it meant. Beatrix Potter did not stint in her use of language, giving children some respect in their ability to understand her stories as she wrote the.

John liked “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” even though he had all the other books available. I had to read it over and over, as I had read the others’ favorites. When he was old enough for his library card, that’s the book he’d get out. One day the librarian showed him “Mike’s House,” a book about a boy who always called the library by that name, because that’s where the book about Mike Mulligan lived. John liked that one, too.

My early memories of being read to were of Peter Rabbit, poems by Stevenson and Eugene Field (“Winken, Blinken and Nod,” among others). And I wanted to hear them, over and over again too.

I am sure someone has done a dissertation or some sort of research study on why children love the repetition of the same stories or poems. Most of the ones my children liked I didn’t’ mind reading again and again because language was so well written and soothing. In the case of Margaret Wise Brown, there was an element of musicality to her rhythms and word choices. Reading her books was like singing lullabies.

Footwork

It occurred to me that when Polly and Emily were home last fall that they seemed to have a lot of gorgeous shoes. I mean, every time either one of them comes home, there are new and very stylish shoes. Sally would like that, too, except that, unfortunately she has to wear a lift, which eliminates some of the better looking footwear. Anyway, I wondered why the two of them are so well shod in the latest fashion.

The other day, while looking under my bed for a pair of shoes, I fished out a pair that I had forgotten I even owned. They were from last summer, which speaks to my housekeeping skills – and also, I guess, to the woman who comes to clean every two weeks. Anyway, I was happy to find them. Then I realized where the shoe fetish comes from.

I have always loved shoes. When I could wear just anything on my feet I had shoes to match just about everything I wore. When I was in college I had a pair of black suede sling pump platform shoes which were admired and borrowed frequently. They were quite high and I was tall, which made it difficult to dance with short guys, since I ended up looking at the top of their heads. Thank God I found John who was over six feet tall, with whom I could dance without staring at someone’s’ dandruffy pate.

It’s been a long time since I’ve worn high heels now, or platform soles. Back in the seventies when we were all wearing Dr. Scholl’s wooden soled sandals, I was always falling off them. The thought of stiletto heels gives me acrophobia and fear of falling, too.

Well, when I found those neat little summer shoes (I had just ordered from Zappo’a another pair of Merrell clogs, too, for summer) I decided to look in the closet and see what else I had forgotten about. I tend to live in Crocs these days, having forsaken Birkenstocks for the clumsy looking plastic things.

Pictured above are most of what I found.

I do wear them all (one pair at a time, of course) on occasion. I favor Merrells, Clarks and Easy Sprit, all of which are extremely comfortable which I find more important now than style. Although I think these are not too un-stylish unless you’re looking for whatever is the rage these days. Is Jimmy Choo still in?

When I see women on TV wearing those 6 inch heels with very pointy toes, my feet hurt at the mere sight. Sometimes you see them running in those things. Running! There’ll be a lot of old women some day with feet that will look like those horrid, tortured bound feet of old, warped out of foot like shape into something gnarled and distorted beyond human pedal extremities.

Anyway, I still like shoes and I do resist getting new ones. Since I have so many (there are more than are pictured above) they never seem to wear out. And I do admire the ones that my shoe loving daughters wear when they come home. It’s good thing I can’t wear that kind or I might eventually sweep a pair out from under my bed some year.

While writing this, I have been listening on my IPod to a recording of a Mozart Requiem which was perform med by the Canton Symphony and the KSU Chorus some years ago. Sally was a member of the chorus then. I attended the concert and it was the most glorious rendition I have ever heard of the glorious piece. One of her friends at WKSU was the recording technician WKSU station and gave her a copy of it. She put it on my IPod and I just love it. Mozart would have been thrilled to hear it done so beautifully. Seriously.

Back to Mt. Hope Horse Sale

John read my post from last week and decided that a trip to Mt. Hope was warrantedd. We went down on Saturday, which was a beautiful, sunny day. That area is one of my favorite rambling spots. Mt. Hope is a few miles south of the Wilderness Center, where my storytelling group met once a month. After the meetings, sometimes I would just roam around the hills and farms of the Amish communityand pretend I was in the 19^th century, driving a 20^th century gasoline powered vehicle.

We stopped first at the Wilderness Center. I had not been there for almost two years, after being a member for over 25. I stopped going a couple of years ago when I was taking a pastel class which met on Saturdays. After that, Saturdays became too crowded with other things to do. I have missed it, of course, because I really liked the members of our storytelling group. We used to do two story concerts a year, drawing up to 150 people. That had slowed down a bit and we ended up with about 30 for each concert. I think a lot of people had other things to do, too. At any rate, apparently the interest in storytelling has dwindled, and I found out that the group had dissolved this past year.

I was glad to see Gordon, the director of the center and a fine storyteller himself. He’s a great guy and due to retire in a couple of years. He’s built the center into a terrific place for families. It’s right in the center of the Amish country, and they come there, too, and also help with the annual bird count every Christmas season.

We left the center and headed down to Mt Hope, to the horse auction. There was a huge crowd there. I found out that it was because of something called the Mid-Ohio; when dealers from all over the country bring retired harness racing horses down to sell to the Amish. I had not been there for probably ten years or so and it was great to be back. I love to watch them bring out the horses and run them back and forth to show off their form. Some of them were going for three or four thousands dollars. OF course they have bee groomed beautifully and their glossy coats and carefully brushed manes and tails just float like silk.

I asked a young Amish girl if she thought it would be okay for me to take a long distance picture. She said, “Of course. It’s all right.” It’s something I have wanted to do every time I’ve been t here because of the composition of the crowd. What is weird it this. The picture I did for the previous post was done from memory. When I got home and loaded my pix into the computer, I realized that my memory had not lied. You can see the similarity. Some of the men were wearing their straw hats instead of the black, but it’s the same picture, basically that I’ve had in my mind for a long tie.

A Day Out in Holmes County

I watched the rest of the PBS program on the Amish. I had fallen asleep during the second hour when it was on last week and caught it last night on PBS World. It reminded me of another image that I had wanted to photograph but didn’t. In a little village called Mt. Hope there is an auction house. I used to stop there after the storytellers meeting at the Wilderness Center, which is just over the border from Holmes County. The Saturday auctions at Mt. Hope seem to be very popular with the Amish, mainly because there are these great hoarse for sale. The merchandise consists of retired trotters from harness races. As the auctioneer would say on presenting a beautiful, sleek specimen: “This horse is carriage broke and perfect for the ladies.”

I would go up to the balcony, where I could look over the crowd, and there would be so sea of Amish farmers, all dressed pretty much alike in the dark coats and black hats. Across from me on the opposite balcony would be the women and small children. Teen aged Amish boys would be roaming the building, acting like teenage boys everywhere, showing off for each other and the girls, who tried to pretend that they didn’t notice the boys. It was like an old fashioned country picnic. There was a little restaurant there, selling hot dogs, popcorn and homemade pie, along with soda pop. It was cheaper than the movies and a lot more sociable.

I used to watch the farmers, trying to figure out how they were making their bids. They didn’t use anything so modern as numbered paddles, but must have been making some sort of gesture known to the auctioneer. There were more than horse auctions there: livestock, poultry and farm equipment was also offered, but the horse sales were the ones I liked to watch.

I went down once to see an exotic animal auction and wished I hadn’t. It turned out that they were selling animals to stock hunting preserves, things like deer and pheasant. In this case, the Amish were the sellers, not the buyers.

The parking lot was filled with buggies and bored horses. These families had traveled from all parts of the county and it was a day long outing for the families. Sometimes I'd watch them heading home, usually with a couple of sleeping babies or toddlers, having had a day away from the usual hard work

If you see highlighted links, don't click on them.