Reflections on the Fourth Week of Fall – Unexpected

    “I wasn't ready for fall,” Spence said and bent to finger a frost-blackened winter squash leaf. “Time to put the garden to bed for the winter.”

    The calendar, a week of nippy mornings, and several weeks of leaves changing color had acclimated me, but I hadn't done my fall garden chores either. The last time I'd picked blueberries was September first. Since berries wouldn't form till next summer, now was the time to remove the blueberry tents we'd constructed in June.

    We had built frames with PVC pipes. Spence wound three foot high chicken wire around the bottom of the frames to discourage raccoons and to give pollinators access. I covered the top with reemay, agricultural cloth that lets in sunlight and water but keeps out bugs and birds. With bull clips and cable ties (strips of grooved plastic that feed through cubed knuckles to hold bunches of electrical cables together), I attached the cloth to the frames. All summer the blueberry tents adorned the garden like ghostly sentries.

    Monday, under a the sunny, October-blue sk, I hung a plastic grocery store bag on my belt and carried aviation snips to the blueberry tent in the north garden. Squeezing rusted levers, I freed bull clips and dropped them into the bag. Clink. I snipped cable ties and stuffed them into my pocket. Because I'd pulled many ties too tight last June, I couldn't slip the blades under the plastic. Regretting I wasn't a raccoon to shred the cloth with claws, I angled the snips around the plastic fastener knuckles. Teeth gritting and two hands pressing, I cut. Reemay flapped.

    Bugs had entered through the chicken wire. Many tried to exit through the reemay. Spiders took advantage of the bugged-brained critters and built webs. I met these hungry spiders and the trapped bugs while I snipped. A grape sized, red-with-white-dotted orb-weaver spider hung from the northwest corner of the tent. I tiptoed past and freed the other sides of the cloth. Wind blew the spider away. When I pulled the cloth off the PVC frame, dead earwigs  fell onto my head. I shook them off me and the cloth. Then I folded the cloth for next year.

    More bugs waited in south garden tents. A black spider, the size of a black widow, landed on my sleeve. Preferring to call it a black house spider, I brushed it off and kept working.

    Spence said, “I could use the cloths to protect my peppers.”

    “Fine with me.” Without shaking or folding, I dumped the cloths in a pile.

    He gathered the buggy fabric in his arms and walked to the pepper patch.

    I uncovered a Late Blue bush and shouted, “Ripe berries!” Late Blue bushes usually fruit from the beginning of July through the first week of August. I picked a dark blue, firm globe. A ripe berry indeed. With a handful of berries, I hustled to show Spence.

    “Who'd have thought?” He bent to spread a cover cloth over his Hungarian Hot Wax peppers. It blew off. He grabbed it and placed it over the peppers again. “Better check your beans.”

    I unfastened my belt and handed him the plastic bag. Maybe the bull clips would weigh down the cloth to keep it over the peppers.

    Heading to the house for my picking bucket, I ate half the berries. Super sweet–not the sweet-tart of the earlier blueberries. At the waste basket I emptied my bulging pocket. Cable ties flowed like a string of never ending scarves from clown's sleeve. Back in the garden, I picked straggling purple beans and three cups of strawberries.

    Blueberries, purple beans, and strawberries weren't ready for fall either.

 

Reflections on the Third Week of Fall - Puzzled

    Three Thursdays ago, a smiling curly headed fifth grader at Learning Center asked, “Would you like to try our math puzzle, Janet?”

    “Yes,” I said. “I like puzzles.”

    The youngster and two of his friends had created a number table containing six rows of five boxes. Each box had an addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division sign and a number. Holding the paper in his left hand he said, “Start at one of the three arrows on top.” He waved his thin, right pinkie finger horizontally then vertically. “Move this way or that–no diagonals. Exit with fifty. That means you'll be at forty-five when you get to the plus five box at the bottom.”

    I took the paper. “Thanks. I'll work on it at home.” How hard could it be? To solve the puzzle I just had to calculate along a path.

    Three different afternoons I made trial and error runs through the maze, doodled numbers on scratch paper, and decided to ask for more clues when I volunteered again. Two Thursdays ago, I checked with the curly haired youngster to see if the path could go up as well as down.

    He held his chin with his hand for a moment then said, “I guess so, but you can't go through any square twice.”

    I also asked the teacher, “Are negative numbers or fractions involved?”

    She shook her head. “But you go over fifty. It took me an hour and a half to solve Sunday night.”

    I'd already spent more time than that. Maybe I needed help. Spence doesn't like puzzles or games so I wouldn't ask him. His high school friend Eric and Eric's wife Kay would be arriving the next day. Eric, a retired electrical engineer, was a whiz at math. Kay had trained teachers and liked games. I could ask them–after they'd had time to settle in.

    Friday afternoon, Kay and I prepared home grown vegetables–honey boat squash, purple beans, and zucchini. Spence cooked pork and chicken. After a leisurely dinner, we watched jazz videos on the large flat screen TV. The puzzle could wait.

    Saturday I baked a pie with Wells Wood apples and blueberries. Kay cooked swiss steak with Wells Wood tomatoes. We played Banana Grams and Dutch Blitz. The fellas took a walk in the dark and drizzle. At bed time I casually mentioned, “I got a math puzzle from the children at the school where I volunteer. Maybe you could help me solve it?”

    Kay shrugged.

    Eric chuckled. “Sure.”

    Sunday after breakfast, I pushed away the breakfast dishes and placed the puzzle on the kitchen table between Kay and me. She studied the puzzle. “You have to do this by trial and error,” she said. “There are millions of combinations.”

    “The students probably wrote their sequence of numbers then just filled in the spaces around them,” I said.

    We worked top down, bottom up, and top down again. Six scribbled pages of figures later, we still didn't have the solution.

    “Eric,” Kay called. “Will you help us?”

    He chuckled, put down his electronic book, and stared at the puzzle.

    Kay and I roasted two home grown pie pumpkins and made pumpkin soup for lunch.

    Eric calculated, drew circles connected by arrows, and wrote numbers. After forty-seven scattered circles, he didn't have the solution either.

    We put the puzzle aside, ate the soup, and packed for a late afternoon/evening Erie outing. We walked through a tunnel of trees on the Sidewalk Trail from the Presque Isle Lighthouse to Misery Bay then drove under a rainbow to the Bayfront Grille for a gourmet dinner. On the way home, Kay told us about playing in a Dixieland jazz band at Geauga Lake amusement park, and we listened to The Bad Plus on a CD.

    This past Monday, the day Eric and Kay would leave, I was desperate. When Eric took his second sip of coffee, I shoved the puzzle at him. He chuckled. We munched breakfast and figured. “We've got to try every possible path,” I said. I drew a copy of the puzzle and jumped up to fetch my colored pencils.

    “That's a dead end,” Eric said when a path proved false.

We'd try another direction. Six colors later on three marked charts, we had tried every whole number combination from top to bottom and bottom to top. None worked.

   “We must have made an calculating error,” I said and chose the path that started plus eleven, minus one, divided by five. Lucky guess. We'd made an error on the tenth step in the sequence. That path worked.

    Kay walked into the kitchen, yawned, and held out her hand for the paper. She studied our numbers. “You made a mistake . . . no that's right.” She handed the paper back. “Fun.”

  This past Thursday, I took the completed puzzle to the curly haired fifth grader. “I finished,” I said and handed it to him.

    He grinned and pumped his fist.

 

Reflection on the Second Week of Fall – No Worries?

    After months of scrubbing and painting the Cleveland Heights house, months of keeping it viewer-visiting clean, and weeks of negotiating with a buyer, we signed the contract to sell the brick house where we'd raised our children. Relief. Time to relax. I could let the stress of maintaining two houses evaporate. We only had to wait for the buyer to get his mortgage, remove our last few possessions, and sign the closing papers.

   Or so I thought.

   This past Monday morning, Kate, office manager for our Realtor Paul Blumberg, emailed to say the appraiser would be at the house Thursday morning. “All utilities need to be on. Turn the furnace on too.” Spence had already left for a day in Cleveland. I sent him an email in hopes he'd get it at a coffee shop, since we'd already canceled Internet at the house, and left a voice message on his cell phone. Success. He got both messages and turned on the furnace.

   No worries. I relaxed.

   Late Wednesday afternoon. Sharon, from the Competitive Title Agency, called to say we had to clear the lien on the house.

   “We paid off the mortgage years ago,” I said.

   “Key Bank says there's a open mortgage on the house. They won't tell me the balance,” Sharon insisted.

   Did Sharon mean the home equity line we took out when we built the log house in Pennsylvania? We payed off that loan too. The bank had sent several notices saying the home equity line would expire if we didn't renew.

   We didn't renew and let the loan expire.

   I called Key Bank. In a polite, methodical tone, Vivian explained we had a zero balance but needed to “pay a twenty-eight dollar fee for closing the account.”

   Sheesh. Expired didn't mean closed? Was this a variation of a Wells Fargo banking technique?

   Spence had spent Wednesday at meetings in Cleveland. Sharon's call came too late for him to close the account at a Key Bank office. That meant Thursday, armed with the letter, account number, and routing number, we had to drive half an hour to the Huntington Bank in Greenville. We sat with Sandra, the personal banker who had let me use her bank computer to pay bills when our Wells Wood Internet went down for a week. She walked us through the procedure for wiring money then shook her head. “Are you sure you want to do this for twenty-eight dollars? The fee is another twenty-five dollars.”

   “We're sure, and could you fax the letter to the bank too? We must submit a written request for closing the account and releasing the zero balance to the title agency.”

   Sandra looked over her shoulder toward the glass enclosed office. “If SHE weren't here, I'd do it gladly. But, I can't today.”

   No worries. Spence had to drive to Meadville to get groceries.

   We drove home. He drove another half hour to Meadville. Letter faxed, medicine ordered, and groceries bought, Spence called me on his cell phone. “I'm stuck in the parking lot of Giant Eagle. The truck won't start.”

   “I'll come get you,” I said.

   “No need. I called AAA for a jump.” He called back ten minutes later. “The truck started so I canceled the AAA request.”

   Though not as easy as turning on the furnace Monday, the problem was solved. Time to relax.

   But Friday morning, Kate, the office manage, emailed with an addendum to the contract about the point of sale inspection being extended. I signed electronically, replied with a note summarizing what we'd done about the lien, and asked if there were anything else I needed to do.

   Kate emailed back. “Please call me.”

   Drat.

   Now what.

   “There's the matter of the easement,” Kate said.

   “The six inches our driveway curb overlaps the neighbor's yard so our cars don't slide onto their property on icy days? The driveway was already there when we bought the house in 1975. We gave Paul the easement papers last April.”

   “I know. It's just a technicality. But the buyer made the sale contingent on resolving the easement. You can't move the driveway. There's nothing to do except explain it. The title agency lawyer can handle that.”

   Now I'm waiting for the next phone call or email request to jump another house-sale hurdle.

   No relief.

   I can't relax.

   Not yet.

 

Reflection on the First Week of Fall – Surpassing Worm Yuck 

   Red wrigglers usually behave well. Nestled in plastic trays of the worm factory in the shower stall of our basement bathroom, the placid creatures stay under the cover, eat kitchen scraps, and produce rich compost which helps pansies thrive.

   But this week? YUCK. Mucous encased globs of worms writhed in corners atop the worm factory lid Monday and Tuesday. Not wanting to touch the lid either day, I backed away and called Spence for help.

   He lifted the lid, shook the clinging masses into the feeding tray, and set the lid aside. “Maybe they need more food,” he said.

   Indeed. Worms eat their weight in food every day. How many worms were there?

   I climbed to the great room and settled the computer on my lap. The Internet said red wrigglers live two or three years and double in number every sixty days. Setting the computer on the table, I grabbed scratch paper and sketched a chart. Starting in January 2015 with 1000 worms, I doubled the amount every two months until September 2016. One million, twenty-four thousand worms. Sheesh. When would I have a billion? Tired of calculating, I wrote a story problem for the older students at the Learning Center where I volunteer and emailed it to Dan, one of their teachers.

   Knowing how many worms didn't solve my problem. I still needed to manage the expanding worm population. If I put them in the garden, they'd enrich the soil till the temperature dropped below forty degrees and killed them. I didn't want to be a mass murderer. Buy an air conditioner to cool the basement to forty degrees and slow the marathon reproduction? Give them away?

   Wednesday morning I called two bait shops. Neither wanted the worms. The man from the Wilhelm Marina said, “The worms would just sit in my refrigerator.” For him, fishing season ran May through August.

   Would I have to contend with the masses until May?

   After the bait shop calls, I headed downstairs with chopped worm food and cleared my throat to call Spence. No need. Though the worms still wriggled in thick globs, they had tucked themselves under the lid where they belonged. I didn't know why they behaved except for the nonsensical notion that they'd heard the phone call and didn't want to end up on a hook.

   Wednesday after dinner I took a break from worm manager and drove to Homespun Treasures for my quilt guild's fun night. A dozen happily-chatting women gathered to listen to our special guest Kim, who taught us how to make greeting cards with double diamond designs. Delighted with the project and enjoying the women, I still couldn't get worm globs off my mind. I asked the quilters, “Does anyone know fisher people and might want red wrigglers? My worm factory is exploding. I need to get rid of some.”

   A few women chuckled, but Kim said, “I'd like some. People who fish in my ponds are always asking me for worms. With a worm factory, I'd have worms on hand.”

   Before she could change her mind, I gave her directions and arranged to give her a pound, approximately one thousand worms, Saturday.

   Thursday morning, the worms rested on the lid again. I didn't want to deal with them so yelled up to Spence in the kitchen.

   He couldn't hear me because the fan whirred to keep hot pepper scent away from me.

   I took a yoga breath, reached for the knob in the middle of the lid, and tugged. The suction of worm slime kept the lid in place. I pulled harder and harder till the seal broke and the lid popped off. With a thin, two-by-four inch plastic rectangle, I coaxed the wiggling, slimy globs back into the tray, sprinkled food on top of them, and left for the Learning Center.

   I read with the lower elementary and kindergarten classes before heading to the fifth, sixth and seventh grade room. When I opener their door, students bounced on blue and green balls that they used as chairs for their low tables. “Janet!” They beamed at me. “We solved your problem!” I sifted through a stack of papers with impressive amounts of addition, multiplication, and charts. Answers for when I'd have a billion red wrigglers varied from May 2017 to July 2018. I smiled, thanked the youngsters, and decided whichever date was correct for hitting over a billion worms, I needed to find homes for the rapid reproducers.

   Shyly, Ellen, the other classroom teacher said, “We're thinking of starting a worm factory to compost lunch leftovers. Do you think we could have some of your worms?”

   Two thousand down, nine hundred ninety-eight thousand or so left. Maybe I could buy more trays for the factory from Amazon. I only had three, and Mike McGrath on You Bet Your Garden said I could stack seven.

   Friday the worms hid under the lid in thick ropes–easy to scoop for Kim.

   Saturday I felt more in control. After breakfast, I selected a clear plastic quart container, fetched the food scale, and descended the stairs in search of worm globs atop the lid or food layer. Sigh. The worms had buried themselves in the food. I dug through hunting for inch-diameter balls of worms. As if playing pickup sticks, I pulled shredded paper, bean tips, and aging zucchini slivers away from the agitated worms then dumped them into the plastic container. Repeating the process again and again, I collected over a pound of worms with some food and lots of slime. I put the container in a paper bag to keep the worms in their preferred dark.

   Kim arrived around 11:00. We went to a lovely quilt show at New Vernon Grange, and I gave her a tour of the log house complete with discussions of the quilts on the beds. When she was ready to go home, I picked up the paper bag and pulled out the worm container. Red wrigglers clung to the sides in long stripes.

   Kim said, “Ew,” and covered her mouth.

   I quickly slipped the plastic container back into the bag. “Your husband can dump them out for you.”

   I had overcome the yuck–mostly, calculated numbers, and figured a couple ways to manage the sexual proclivity of the red wrigglers.

   Kim is still at the yuck stage. Given time, she'll learn to manage like me.

Reflections on the Thirteenth Week of Summer – Finding the Story

    Sweeping cobwebs from the ceiling of the guest room Tuesday morning, a lump of white schmutz clinging to the log wall caught my eye. Assuming I'd found another wad of cat hair, I set the broom down and grabbed the white blob with my left hand.

    A cabbage white butterfly, wings folded, sat on my palm.

    I cupped my right hand over my left and hurried to the great room.

   “You'll never guess what I have,” I said holding my hands toward Spence.

    He stopped tapping computer keys and looked up. “What?”

    Butterfly feet tickled my palm.

    I crossed the room, slid open the sliding glass door, and stuck my hands outside. “A cabbage white butterfly.” I moved my right hand away to free the butterfly. It sat on my palm. I lowered and raised my let hand several times. The butterfly didn't move.

    “Blow on it,” Spence said.

    As if blowing a kiss, I puffed. The butterfly opened its wings, rose, and swirled away. I turned to Spence. “I can write a story about the butterfly for my blog!”

    He cocked his head. “Do you have enough material to make a story?”

    I mentally reviewed Timons Esaias' seven point story.

1) A person. Check.

2) A place. Check.

3) A problem. Oops. Forget about 4, 5, & 6, the protagonist striving and failing three times before 7, the resolution. I needed a problem, the “what's at stake” writing challenge.

    I settled in my Adirondack chair, gazed out the sliding glass doors at cabbage white butterflies fluttering among pansy planters, and commanded my brain to create a problem. Nothing.

    I grabbed my camera, attached the zoom lens, and told Spence, “I'm going to get a picture of a butterfly then I'll think of a way to make the story.”

    He waved one hand and hit keys with the other.

    A flock of cabbage white butterflies swirled over the north garden. I stepped closer to three. They flew away. Even with my zoom lens, cabbage white butterflies kept out of range. Why hadn't I asked Spence to snap a picture of the butterfly on my palm before I puffed it away? I stood still, let butterflies zip my way, and squinted through the view finder. By the time the camera focused, it snapped garden vegetation where butterflies had been. I switched to close up mode and moved the camera along the flight path of the butterflies. After forty-nine tries, I had two possible pictures. In the first, a butterfly opened its wings above an out-of-focus purple cabbage. The other showed a butterfly flying down the blurred driveway. At least the cabbage white butterflies didn't resemble lumps of cat hair.

    I wrote my saga, complete with striving for picture more than three times and failing, then read it to Spence.

    He bobbed his head slowly and grinned. “Your problem,” Spence said, “is you don't have a problem. You're looking out not in.”

    “I'm writing about butterflies.”

    “No, silly. You're the butterfly.” He walked to the deck and turned on his sander.

    Sitting in the Adirondack chair, I ignored the blue and green outside the glass door to focus my gaze inside the story. I typed ideas in a list.

    My body clenched as if I were a white cabbage pulling away from a bird's beak. I, the protagonist, had struggled in the Adirondack chair, behind the camera, and against the “what's at stake” question that every writing instructor I'd ever had threw at me. No zombie apocalypse. No puzzling murder. Just a weekly blog of life at Wells Wood with a husband and two fat cats.

    With that, I blow this story out with the puff of a kiss and head off to enjoy butterflies.

 

Reflections on the Twelfth Week of Summer - Watermelon Feast

    Gardening at Wells Wood can bring feast or famine. This year we had a feast of watermelons. I hadn't expected any. Spence had grown watermelons for years, but groundhogs devoured immature fruit or frost killed plants before melons ripened.

    What changed? Spence bought seeds for Blacktail Mountain Watermelons, the earliest maturing variety, from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. He also slit holes in black plastic ground cover to set out his hardened off seedlings.

    By the end of July over forty watermelons grew in the patch. To protect the plants from groundhogs, Spence stood on the deck, blasted the air horn, and yelled, “Get out of my garden.”

    Riley, an eight year old visiting during the first weekend of August, wanted to open a watermelon. I doubted the fruit would be ready but cut one for him. No red. No pink. The watermelon was pure white from rind to rind. Riley shrugged his shoulders, flashed me a toothy smile, and carried the two halves to the compost pile.

    Riley didn't ask, but I wanted to know, when would the watermelons be ripe?

    On Mike McGrath's You Bet Your Garden radio show, Mike advised referring to the seed package for days to maturity. Spence checked when he planted the seedlings in the garden, referred to the seed catalog for maturation time, then added seventy days to get an estimated date of September 2.

    Groundhogs didn't wait. As if checking for ripeness, they gnawed grooves and holes into the rinds. During the last week of August, a groundhog took a half cup size bite out of one and exposed pink. I cut around the groundhog's teeth marks and tested the fruit. Red, juicy, and sweet with multiple times more flavor than grocery store watermelons.

    Without using a groundhog tester, I picked several immature watermelons to discover the round, eight-to-ten pound fruits with a yellow spot on the dark green rind were ripe.

    Though critter bites caused a dozen watermelons to rot, we harvested about thirty. I enjoyed them for dessert, served them to guests, and gave watermelons to friends and family. At the beginning of the week, I still had a bushel of watermelons.

    Saturday afternoon I tied an apron over my white slacks and cut open melons. I dug out seeds and cubed the flesh. Juice splashed. The blender whirred. I mixed ingredients for Popsicles with added lime and sorbet with added strawberries and minced mint.

    Hours later I tested the treats. Not sweet, the watermelon Popsicle charmed me with its zesty zing. The sorbet had a harmonious sweet blend of watermelon and strawberry with an accent of mint. I didn't mind that mint pieces stuck between my teeth but wasn't pleased that the watermelon juice decorated my pants with red splotches.

    I still have half a bushel basket of watermelons. At Wells Wood this year, it's watermelon feast.

Reflections on the Eleventh Week of Summer – Assaulting Peppers

    Spence wanted to prepare a special breakfast for our visiting son, Charlie.

    While Spence clattered pans and rattled utensils in the kitchen, I climbed to the loft and inserted a Rodney Yee DVD into the player tray for yoga practice. Below, in the great room, Charlie petted fat cat George with one hand and took notes for a story with the other.

    I breathed out for plank position and in for upward dog.

    Whiffs of bacon floated to the loft. The refrigerator door swished closed, a plastic bag rustled, and a knife thudded against the cutting board.

    In the middle of holding downward dog for five breaths, I coughed, the lining of my nostrils tingled, and my eyes watered. Spence wouldn't be cooking hot peppers, would he?

    “Are you cooking peppers?” I yelled.

    “Yes!”

    I sniffed and whipped my eyes. “Turn the fan on,” I said without adding “please.”

    “But the lid's on,” Spence shouted, “and I can't smell the peppers,”

    I coughed. “Turn the fan on now.” Cough. Cough.

    In the great room, Charlie chuckled. “This from the woman who hates the sound of fans.”

    The buzzing fan blended with droning flutes and my coughs for the rest of the yoga routine.

    When I went downstairs, the pepper essence saturated the kitchen more than it had in the loft. I couldn't eat breakfast at the kitchen table as usual. I walked to the front door, and said, “I'll eat on the porch.”

    Stepping outside, I took a gulp of fresh air then sat on the love seat.

    A mourning dove cooed. A robin sang “cheerily, cheer up.”

    The front door swung open. Spence came out with a breakfast burrito, pears, oatmeal, and peppermint tea for me. Charlie followed with his breakfast tray. Spence headed back for his own breakfast and met George in the doorway.

The fat cat stood on the threshold and contemplated the scene.

    To clear the way for Spence, Charlie scooped George up and set him on a folding aluminum chair. He thrashed his back legs displacing the fabric cushion and falling through the metal slats. With back paws on the cement floor and front paws on the seat's frame, George dangled with a dazed expression on his face.

    Charlie grabbed the cat's ample middle, pulled him straight up, and said, “You're okay.” He set George beside me on the love seat. The fat cat circled and circled and circled and circled. Finally he lay down, tucked his tail around his back legs, and closed his eyes.

    Chef Spence created something special for all when he prepared that special breakfast for Charlie. Spence served me a porch breakfast on a lovely day. He inspired George to lounge on the love seat all morning which gave Emma, our other cat, quiet time without her face-licking brother interrupting her rest. Spence joined our alfresco meal to eat his meat and vegetable stir fry.

    His menu for Charlie?

    Bacon, potatoes, and a cheese omelet with onions, tomatoes, and the assaulting hot peppers.