Reflections on the Eleventh Week of Winter – Hunting Coltsfoot

    Monday, when I walked down Chestnut Street in Meadville with a swim bag over my left shoulder and a packed-for-all-emergencies purse on my right, a flash of yellow stopped me. Crocuses bloomed in front of the Unitarian Church. Pausing to soak in the tiny flowers’ beauty, I wondered why I hadn’t seen any coltsfoot along the roadsides. Also yellow, coltsfoot often bloom before crocuses.

    Though coltsfoot resemble dandelions from a distance, they are daisy-shape up close. They dot country berms with yellow and signal the waning of winter. I’d never searched for coltsfoot. Like dandelions, coltsfoot just appear in abundance. Puzzled that I hadn’t seen any yet this year, I lugged my bags to the YMCA and vowed to hunt for coltsfoot on the way home.

    None flashed by on the highway so I slowed the car to a safe, berm-scoping crawl on West Creek Road. No yellow flowers.

    Had the wet winter disturbed their rhizomes?

    With only six sunny days in February, was the weather too cloudy for the flowers to open?

    Tuesday afternoon, during a moment of sunshine, I searched by foot. Between the log house and garage, I inspected leaf litter and gravel on the bank above the drainage ditch. The debris camouflaged eight coltsfoot flowers–smaller than the normal one inch diameter but still vibrant yellow. Coltsfoot had survived the wet and clouds.

    Then snow fell Wednesday night.

    When I lugged my school bag, swim bag, lunch bag, and purse to the car for a day in Meadville Thursday, snow covered every coltsfoot. I didn’t worry. Late winter flowers can handle a little snow.

    I celebrated Dr. Seuss’ birthday with children at the Learning Center. While the younger ones wrote sentences about cats in hats and the older ones guessed which books rhyming passages came from, snow melted and left the crocuses by the church flattened as if they’d been knocked down by a flood.

    Uh oh.

    Back at Wells Wood, I paced between the house and garage staring at gravel and dead leaves. No yellow flowers. On the fourth pass, a speck of yellow the size of a pencil’s diameter caught my eye. Green sepals encased all but the tip of a coltsfoot. Five inches to the left another closed flower sported an even smaller tip of yellow. Only two of the original eight survived the snow.

    Stretching my leg across the two foot wide drainage ditch, I settled my boot in an inch of trickling water and gravel. Bags banged against my sides and back while I bent over and rummaged through the leaves for broken branches. Glad no one was around to wonder why I was in such a ludicrous posture, I arranged the branches in a triangle around the two closed coltsfoot. The triangle would save me time locating the plants again.

    Or not.

    Friday morning snow covered the triangle and the coltsfoot. Saturday, temperatures in the mid twenties (-4º C) and cloudy skies kept the coltsfoot closed. And today, after the temperatures dipped to 10º F (-12º C) overnight causing the logs in the house to contract at different rates and pop, crack, bang me awake, I didn’t even check for flowers.

    But next week, with bags hanging off my shoulders, I’ll walk to the garage and hunt for coltsfoot, a sign of a waning winter.

 

Reflections on the Tenth Week of Winter – Country Car Washing 

   Monday, I opened the Subaru door to the assaulting odor of dead fish. Yuck. An escaped piece or two of an on-the-go sandwich was completing the death cycle somewhere in the car’s interior. Impossible to tell if the culprit was trout or salmon. Holding my breath, I powered down the front windows, backed out of the garage, and headed for the YMCA. Wind blew hair in my face and chilled the arthritis in my neck. I closed the windows, took a tentative sniff, and hoped the brief country airing fixed the problem.

   It didn’t. After swimming laps, I opened the Subaru door to the smell of dead fish. Double yuck. I’d have to clean the car.

   Car washing in the country is as efficient as raking leaves in a windstorm. Dirt lanes keep the white Subaru looking like a guernsey cow. Though rain dirties cars in the city, country folks use rain to wash off some of the caked mud. That kind of country car washing wouldn’t work this time. If I was going to drag out the vacuum cleaner, I might as well give the Subaru the full inside, outside, showroom clean job. I just had to wait for a warm enough day. 

   I didn’t wait long. 

   Friday, two days shy of a year from the day I drove the showroom clean Subaru out of the Franklin dealership and into a snow storm, sunshine warmed the air to a record breaking 71º F (21.67º C). I parked the Subaru at the end of the house driveway then lugged vacuum, extension cords, rags, Subaru recommended concentrated car cleaner, and two five gallon buckets to the wash site.

   With the narrow-nosed crevice tool, the vacuum whirred and sucked dust, pebbles, and schmutz. I didn’t see any identifiable fish particles, but the nozzle may have reached them under the seat. I took a deep breath. Fragrance of spring mud–progress.

     I filled the buckets a quarter full with cistern water so that I could carry them up the rise to the driveway. They stretched my arms longer than the standing forward bend pose in yoga. Pouring the red syrupy cleaning concentrate released the fragrance of cherry lollipops.

    Did Subaru executives imagine children would be washing cars?

    The cistern had kept melted snow water melted snow cold. But I didn’t pull on waterproof gloves because the sunshine warmed the rest of my body to sweaty-hot.

    While I sloshed cleaner, splashed rinse water, and toweled dried the car, wind clanged chimes and tousled my air. On the road, dump trucks hauled gravel, pickups towed horse trailers, and every vehicle raised dust. As planned, the settling dust didn’t reach the car at the end of the driveway.

    After I’d washed the interior vinyl and dried the last window, Spence came outside and said, “The car looks like it should be in the showroom not the dirty garage.”

    Backing the Subaru out of the house driveway, I crept five miles per hour to the garage driveway so I wouldn’t raise dust then slipped into the slot beside the country mud splashed truck.

    On the next trip to the YMCA, the car will regain its mud splashes. In the meantime, it’ll smell of window washing fluid instead of reeking like dead fish.

Reflections on the Ninth Week of Winter – Recipe Roulette

 

    I didn’t think tucking the Old Farmer’s Almanac into Spence’s Christmas stocking would make a difference in how I spent Valentine’s Day, but it did.

    He perused the almanac in his reading, soon-to-be-sleeping, sofa position: head and shoulders supported by two pillows, knees elevated on five, and fat cat George wedged between the almanac and raised knees. “Here’s a recipe for you,” Spence said. He marked a paragraph with his thumb and stretched his arm to give me the book.

    His thumb pointed to “Cinnamon Stars.” No dairy. No soy. A cut-out cookie I could actually eat. “You need almond meal and parchment paper,” I said. “I don’t have either.”

    Spence reached for the almanac. “I can get them for you.”

    In January, he bought the almond meal and parchment paper.

    I put them in the cupboard, wrote Cinnamon Stars on my 2017 project list, and wondered if the cookies would work with a gingerbread man cookie cutter, the only one I’d kept when we moved to the country.

    Life intervened, and before making time to try the recipe, I pureed the last garden pumpkin. Pumpkins had thrived this year so I’d already made pumpkin soup, pumpkin oatmeal cookies, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, and pumpkin muffins–repeatedly. Time to try something new. On February 6, I chose the “quick and easy . . . healthful snack” Pumpkin Oat Bars posted by Portland Girl on recipe.com/.

    With equal parts oats and pumpkin puree, one large egg, dark brown sugar, and spices, I only had to substitute almond milk for the mixture of milk and cream. I stirred, baked, and removed the pan from the oven after the designated thirty minutes. Light pumpkin and cinnamon aromas tempted me, but I let the bars cool, ate lunch, then cut a bar for dessert.

    It looked more like fudge than the granola bar I’d expected. I took a bite. Chewy, uncooked oats floated in a gooey pumpkin-spice colloid. Had the egg cooked? I put the pan back in the over for another forty minutes.

    The bars remained pumpkin-oat goop. Yuck.

    Figuring that decent ingredients had to make decent bars, I nibbled them five different times during the day with the hope they’d improve. They didn’t. Maybe Portland Girl had forgotten to list an ingredient or two.

    I dumped the “bars” into the garbage and vowed not to waste my time on a new recipe again.

    But, Spence had already bought almond meal and parchment paper especially for me.

    So this past Monday, I revised my vow to never trying a recipe from the website posting Portland Girl’s Pumpkin Oat Bars, dug through a two foot deep carton in the basement to find a small heart-shaped tin, and leafed through the almanac to get the Cinnamon Star recipe.

    The recipe called for three and a half cups of almond meal. I had two cups. Undaunted, I multiplied all the ingredients by four sevenths.

2 2/7 egg whites

1/7 teaspoon salt

1 5/7 cups confection sugar

4/7 tablespoon lemon juice

6/7 teaspoon cinnamon

    Measuring proved trickier than the math. I estimated, stirred, and put the batter in the refrigerator to chill overnight.

    Valentine’s Day, after oohing and aahing over the red cyclamen and romantic card with glittering butterflies that Spence gave me, I spread a sheet of parchment paper on the kitchen table, sprinkled powdered sugar on the paper, and rolled a dollop of batter. The sticky batter clung to the rolling pin and parchment paper.

    Uh oh.

    Had I messed up the balance by estimating measurements?

    I sprinkled more powered sugar, placed a second sheet of parchment paper over the batter and tried again. The batter flattened. I peeled off the top paper, cut a heart, and carefully wedged the spatula under the cookie. It smooshed.

    I rerolled, cut another heart, and scraped the extra batter away from the edges. Not trusting the spatula, I gently pulled the paper off the bottom of the heart. Another mashed blob.

    Back to the spatula, I learned to only squash one side of the heart when lifting the cookies. I reshaped the messy side with my fingers and persisted to the last bit of dough, which I rolled and patted into a circle without cutting. After spreading the confection sugar and egg white mixture on top of the cookies, I shoved them into the oven and figured I could always feed them to the wastebasket.

    When I opened the oven twenty-five minutes later, overwhelming almond aroma burst out. The cookies looked fine.

    After they cooled, I bit into a heart. My teeth crunched through fully-baked batter, and sweet almond flavor exploded in my mouth. Forget the wastebasket. I sat in my Adirondack chair and savored every indulging bite of the four cookies I ate on Valentine’s Day.

Reflections on the Eighth Week of Winter – #RaiseTheCat

    The email my son Spencer Charles sent last Sunday triggered this week’s zaniness. He copied a link and wrote “Cavs win: GEORGE!”

    Puzzled, I clicked the link and gawked at photos of seven people raising cats to their chins, onto their shoulders, or above their heads. The 76ers basketball fans cat raising meme started with a tweet from Dennis Grove. His idea for celebrating infrequent Philadelphia wins came from injured player Ben Simmons posting pictures of his cats and from a scene in The Lion King.

    Clicking a few buttons I searched for the latest Cleveland Cavaliers basketball score. They’d beaten the Knicks 111 to 104.

    I set my laptop on the coffee table, grabbed fat cat George from his sprawl before the wood stove, and hoisted him over my head.

    Spence glanced up from his Chromebook, chuckled, then returned to computer key tapping.

    George went limp. Perhaps he thought I picked him up to smear hairball medicine across his nose or to stuff him in the cat cage for a ride to the vet. Neither happened. He glanced at me with questioning eyes.

    “The Cavs won, George.”

    George yawned.

    Monday, Spencer Charles emailed, “Big game against the Wizards tonight! Get ready to #RaiseTheCat!”

    “READY!” I answered, but I fell asleep early. Tuesday morning, before getting out of bed, I checked my Nexus tablet: Cavs 140, Wizards 135. With a squeal of delight, I raced to the wood stove and hoisted George.

    Spence, who’d been computer key tapping for over an hour, looked up, and said, “You and your son are crazy.”

    George turned his head to gaze at the roof supports and loft railings from this new angle.

    I set him down, and he waddled to the food bowl for a snack.

    I didn’t need any more reminders from Spencer Charles.

    Thursday morning after checking the Internet, Cavs 132, Pacers 117, I handed the camera to Spence and grabbed George.

   We often joke that George is in a different time zone because he needs four times as long as his sister Emma to think through novel situations. On this third raising, he figured out my zany behavior. Squirming, he clawed my right forearm leaving a bruise the size of a Cheerio and a bloody scratch the size and shape of the Cheerio hole. Ouch.

    I put George down and hoisted Emma. She extended her claws, merrowed complaints, but didn’t scratch. Of the two, she’s the cat that likes to be held–even a foot and a half above my head apparently.

    Friday morning’s scoreboard recorded a loss: Cavs 109, Thunder 118. “That’s sad,” I said. “No #RaiseTheCat fun today.”

    Lips twitching back a laugh, Spence said, “George said he preferred the loss.”

    This Sunday, just a week from Spencer’s Charles email, I settled in the Adirondack chair, searched basketball scores, and announced, “Cavs 125, Nuggets 109.”

    Spence paused computer key tapping long enough to say, “Uh-oh.”

    After breakfast, I buttoned the cuffs of long flannel sleeves and waited for the cats to munch food, lap water, scratch litter, and settle for morning naps.

    Emma chose the guest room bed.

    George settled by the wood stove fire.

    I picked Emma up and carried her to George. Hoisting her to my left shoulder with my left hand, I grabbed George with my right. I raised him to my right shoulder. Their limp weight prevented me from lifting them higher. Pressing the cats against my ears like puffy white ear muffs, I said, “Look, Spence.”

    He looked. “Spencer Charles would be proud of you.”

    When I set the cats down, they waddled to the food bowl for a reassuring snack.

    So, persistent reader, pause your computer key tapping and join the fun.

    #RaiseTheCat.

    Don’t have a cat? Raise a goldfish. Raise a pillow. Raise your shoe.

    Don’t follow basketball? Celebrate your favorite team, a personal win, a productive day.

    A little zaniness this time of year will raise your spirit.

 

Reflections on the Seventh Week of Winter – A Discombobulated Groundhog Day

    Thursday morning, February 2, I gobbled potato pancakes and waited for the sun to rise over Wells Wood. WESA radio in Pittsburgh announced they’d report on Punxsutawney Phil in ten minutes. Why wait? With a few taps on the Nexus screen, a news article appeared. The famous Pennsylvania groundhog had seen his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter.

    Seven inches of snow blanketed Wells Wood and lumpy clouds covered every inch of the sky. Only deer and squirrel tracks crisscrossed the woods when Spence and I took an investigating walk during the sunny afternoon. As our friend Joyce in England had predicted, Wells Wood groundhogs hid in their burrows all day. None of our groundhogs saw a shadow in its burrow that cloudy morning.

    Did Groundhog Day predictions even count this year when groundhogs had left their burrows earlier?

    January 18, a week after the torrential rains (See January 15 blog), I drove home from a quilt guild meeting. Clouds blocked the moon and stars making the country night blindfold dark. But the car’s bright beams lit a dozen yards and highlighted the slushy mud rains had made of the back roads. When I drove out of the mud, up a grade, and onto the metal bridge spanning roaring Deer Creek, an animal scooted two feet ahead of the car in my lane. I slowed down and crept behind the brown critter. Its broad, pumpkin-shaped posterior hid its head, but the furry tail belonged to a groundhog.

    Groundhog? On a January night?

    Groundhogs hibernate in winter. They don’t leave their burrows in January.

    Groundhogs are diurnal. They don’t come out at night.

    Discombobulated, I doubted my eyes.

    The next morning under cloudy skies, Spence called me from his truck on County Line Road. “You really did see a groundhog last night,” he said. “I just passed a groundhog looking down at me from a rise at the edge of the road.”

    Flooding must have chased discombobulated groundhogs out of their burrows.

    The night groundhog definitely saw its shadow in the bright headlights.

    Spence’s morning groundhog didn’t see a shadow under cloudy skies.

    Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow – from camera lights if not the sun.

    Wells Wood groundhogs didn’t see shadows under morning clouds and hidden in their burrows on February 2.

    Could anyone make a plausible weather prediction from the conflicting data?

    Regardless, Phil could determine something. He’d decide which fabrics I bought to make napkins for the log cabin place mats I’d sewn last year.

    Fox’s, a quilting store in Meadville, offered a 22% sale on fabrics matching Punxsutawney Phil’s 2/2 prediction. The discount applied to “lightly, brightly colored fabrics” if

Phil saw his shadow. The discount applied to “deeply, darkly colored fabrics” if Phil didn’t.

    I entered the store ready to choose “ lightly, brightly.”

    The owner met me near the counter and said that any fabric would be considered light and bright if I could find a darker fabric in the store. “And we have black fabric,” she added with a wink.

    Shadow. No shadow. Lightly brightly. Deeply darkly.

    After a discombobulating Groundhog Day, I’ll do what I always do. Slip into my boots, zip up my coat, and pull on my stocking cap till spring arrives.