Atticus, Art Director

I saw an article the other day whose title went something like "A Thanksgiving Centerpiece Constructed in Only Thirty Minutes?  Yes, You Can!"  I didn't click on it, because, well, I did read that title, but do you think that was for real?  Do people- other than florists and Martha Stewart- make centerpieces?

I really am curious, because the closest thing we get to a centerpiece is a bunch of miniature gourds my grandparents grew and sent home with me months ago, which are now covered in globs of paint courtesy of four out of five Crislers.  (Yes, I painted gourds, too.  I have to keep my inner 4-Her satisfied somehow.)  And they don't scream "centerpiece" so much as "way station before their eventual destination:  the garbage."

An added benefit to this style of "centerpiece" is that now I have a kitchen that is 25% more colorful than it was this time yesterday, because there is almost as much paint on the floor as there is on the gourds.  Not to worry; it scrubs off easily, which is why all art projects are undertaken on the kitchen floor rather than at a table like fancy folk.  

The best part is that none of this would have happened if we didn't have an Atticus who requests special art projects on a near- weekly basis, and who also insisted the finished product be put in "I don't know, like a bowl, or one of those jars that we keep the Band-aids in?  And can you put them on the table so we can look at them every night at supper?"  

Do you think Martha has an internship?  One specifically for seven-year-old boys?  Because I can only come up with so many craft ideas, and I'm running out of gourds...

I Love Gardening... Or I Will, Anyway

I've made it abundantly clear in the past that I love to garden.  I love, love, love it, right up until I don't anymore.

I really don't know how people do it in regions where you can garden close to year-round, because our six-month growing season is about all I can take.  Right around this time of year, every year, I'm like, "Ugh, ENOUGH ALREADY.  Why is everything still growing, like, ALL THE TIME?"

I think part of this is that I am a lazy gardener, but another big part is that I am a terribly, horribly spoiled gardener.  The beanstalk that climbed to the heavens?  I swear Jack dropped those magic beans in our backyard, because you can practically just fling stuff around and it will take root and grow.

Don't believe me?  Think I'm exaggerating?

I didn't plant this.

It's already netted me four zucchini.

I didn't plant this, either.

And yet there are gourds growing on it.

Matter of fact, I didn't plant any zucchini or gourds this year, but my yard still manages to grow them spontaneously.  This is some immaculate conception business, here.

Actually, if I had to guess, it's due to the squirrels and birds that are frequent visitors to my open compost heap.  I often see them frolicking around our backyard, apple cores and remnant vegetables clamped in their mouths.  I'm still going to insist on calling that vine up there "Mary."

Here's the perennially messy vegetable patch:

Out of all that, I planted three tomato plants and one strawberry plant.  The rest is all volunteer tomato plants.  Purposeful or not, it nets me a bowlful of tomatoes every few days.

Despite being the only tomato-eater in the house, 90% of these are already gone, because I made sure to have my favorite vegetable dip mixed up and on hand.  Of course, I had to pay the toll to collect all that tomato-ey goodness, extracted by the millions of mosquitoes that haunt the great outdoors around here.  Both vegetables (fine, fruits) and mosquitoes are made possible by

mass amounts of rain, all the time, even now as I type this.  Along with easy Iowa gardens come hordes of Iowa mosquitoes brought about by buckets of Iowa rain.  I'm not complaining, exactly, just... informing.  If ever you come to visit us in the summer or fall pre-frost, don't forget the bug spray, because there's no way you're escaping without a garden tour.

For some reason, when it comes to vegetable gardening, I'm a bit like roses, in that I have a super-enthusiastic-productive year, then a meh-lazy-just-for-show year.  Two years ago I grew plenty of sprouts and seedlings and tomatoes and onions and gourds and sunflowers and zucchini and peppers.  This year?  Some tomatoes and a few small strawberries.

I just have to keep in mind that this means come early spring of next year, I'll have my egg carton seedlings started and carefully labeled, and most of my seed packets ready, and a grand plan that I'll half-execute, because if this year was lackadaisical, it means the next is an On Year.  Heck, the neurotic side of me is stirring already, just writing this post.  

Coming Soon, To a Windowsill Near- well, not you, but Me...

Do You See What I See?

Today we're going to do that thing they do in movies where they show a shot of one invariably sad/brooding/pensive character staring at some celestial body or other, cut to a shot of the moon/stars/whatever, then cut to a shot of another character staring at the same sky, suggesting they're connected in some way, even when apart.  It'll be like you're right here with me in central Iowa just by forcibly looking at the same things I'm looking at.  Or something.


The view out our front door:

Leaves that I should probably rake up or mow over, but why the heck should I?  They're just too pretty.

The view when I wake Cade up from naptime:

I found these next to our sleeping four-year-old, and when I asked him what exactly happened to his sister's purloined Lip Smackers, he yawned and nonchalantly told me, "Oh, I ate them."  Right.



The view of our kitchen today:

Both the boys are now sick with whatever gunk Adelaide had, and they'll play with their usual vigor and energy until they collapse.  Then they'll play again, hunting for bad guys or fighting dust motes, then collapse.  Then draw and color in treasure maps to roll up and tuck into their belts, then collapse, because evidently even coloring will drain it right out of you when you're sick.  I keep finding them lying in odd places around the house and yard.  It's somewhat disconcerting.  

The view of me most mornings at home:

The morning after the half marathon, I was tidying up around the house, mostly trying to keep moving so my entire body didn't stiffen up and go all Petrificus Totalus on me when Caedmon asked me to kneel down to his level.  With great solemnity, he placed my finisher's medal from the race around my neck, then went back to playing.  I wore it for the next couple hours over my jammies while getting household stuff done- I mean, I already had it on, okay, and I wouldn't dare risk offending our youngest child, and it did lend a certain air of accomplishment to my highly important dusting of the blinds and reading of the picture books.  Cade, for his part, was tickled I'd left it on, and we've gone through a makeshift awards ceremony almost every morning since.  

The view of my garden's last offerings of the season:

Gourds.  Gourds coming out of my ears.  I had already foisted at least half of them upon unsuspecting friends, and this is what I'm left with, plus a few more I just found hiding among the weeds a couple days ago.  I ended up dumping most of them on the front porch, because Lord knows I needed some kind of color on there, what with the demon squirrels constantly uprooting all the ornamental kale I tried growing in my containers.  THERE ARE NO NUTS IN MY FLOWER POTS, SQUIRRELS.  TAKE YOUR DIRTY PAWS ELSEWHERE.  YOU'RE RATS WITH FANCY TAILS.  GOD REGRETS YOUR CREATION.

The view of our piano-top:

More late-season garden produce:  Ornamental eggplant!  Gracious.  Remember when the lovelies in the above two photos were just tiny little egg carton sprouts?

They just grow so fast!  *sob*

The Veggies of our Labors

Last week, in the midst of crazy vacation-prep hullabaloo, I stepped outside for a few moments so I wouldn't kill anyone.

This is how God speaks to me, by the way.  Moses got a burning bush.  Isaiah got rockin' visions.  I get a still, small voice that says, "Get out of the house, for Me's sake, before you maim someone."

So I got out of the house.


See this?

It's one of those sunflowers of the gorgeous packaging- the only one to grow of dozens I planted.  All my eggs are in this basket.  It better bloom, and it better wait til we get home.  

It's also well over six feet tall, so I'm glad the one that chose to grow is right next to the deck, so we'll actually be able to see the top.  

The coneflowers are in their prime, and usually playing host to pollinators.

Adelaide joined me outside for the reaping.  

"Reaping."  That word has such a sinister quality to it, post-Hunger Games, but not to worry.  We're just talking about vegetables.

The gourds are really starting to take off, too:

These 10 Commandments gourds are each bigger than my fist.

I felt much better after all that.  Nothing soothes like gourds, right?  I'm pretty sure that's an old Jewish adage.  Or something.

Suspicious Previous Owners *Now With 50% More Tetanus!*

Remember, a few months ago, when I wrote about those trash bags in the corner of our backyard that I was just sure contained human remains, thoughtfully left behind by the previous owners of our house?  Remember how they weren't actually dead bodies (shocking!), but giant colonies of roly polies and leaves?

Well.  After reading that post, Derek informed me that he left those sacks there.  He filled them right after we moved in, put them in the corner, then forgot about them, leaving me the ever-important job of over-reacting and stressing about them for years.

After that, I felt a bit guilty about suspecting the previous owners of our house of murder/ negligent lawn care.  BUT NO MORE.

Over the past two days, I have spent hours digging metal out of our backyard.  There's a few square feet along a section of our back fence where grass has always refused to grow, and I had picked a few stray pieces of metal (large springs, a gate hinge, etc) up the first few times I mowed over it when we moved in.  A couple days ago, I finally decided to investigate just what the heck was up with that section of yard, and started digging.  It had plenty of pebbles and ash, so I assumed this is the area they used for burning before building the fire pit, but then I started finding nails and screws.  And didn't stop for TWO DAYS.

I don't know how many nails I ended up with, because I lost count sometime after 137.  I do know the sack I used to hold all the old, rusty screws and nails weighed at least a few pounds.

What does this mean?  What were they doing?  Did the previous owners of this house one day look out over the backyard and say to themselves, "You know what this yard needs?  MORE NAILS."

I do know the husband was a roofer.  Is there some sort of secret society amongst roofers, the Brotherhood of the Shingle, or something?  And do they happen to have ritual burnings of things that don't actually burn, like METAL?

The only thing I'm really sure of at this point is that there are more nails out there, because I had to have missed a few, and I may not even have excavated all the points that contain randomly buried bits of metal.

The one bright spot in this?  I now have a big mound of gorgeous black earth along the fence where I still don't trust our children to tread, so I have no choice but to plant some heirloom Ten Commandments gourds.  Gourds like iron, right?