Master Gardener Class #4

I'm not sure if I mentioned on here that I was going to attend the Master Gardener class from January through March. I am trying to progress from growing impatiens and tomatoes successfully to something a little more complicated. Not only that, but the growing environment in Tennessee is crazy different compared to Illinois. More and larger insects, hot and dry summer days, nosy next-door neighbors who prune and cut things down without notice.

The other night at work we had a little downtime, and I was sitting at the nurse's station along with a lab tech who was waiting to get into a room. My "Gardening in Tennessee and Kentucky" book was laying on the desk nearby.

"A garden book? Who's the gardener?"

"That's mine. I am. I'm from Illinois, so I need to learn more about growing things here."

ALERT, ALERT: Probably one of the stupidest questions ever asked to me:

"Does anything even GROW in Illinois? You know, with it bein' so cold up there?"

Hello foo, have you ever heard of "The Corn Belt?"

So today was my fourth class. Every night the "graduated" Master Gardeners serve a spread of food that follows a theme. Tonight was Italian night, I think. There was tomato bread and garlic toast with basil, pesto, and sun-dried tomato spreads, and pasta salad with feta cheese and artichoke hearts. Tonight was my first time ever tasting artichokes, which turned out to be a little bit of a disaster. There was a large woman sitting next to me in class and she had that "dirty" smell that I recognized so easily, the same malodorous stench that waifs around the ER all the time. The smell didn't ruin my appetite, but like my friend said on facebook, it could have influenced my opinion about the artichoke hearts in a negative direction. So I will have to be sure to sample them again sometime in this lifetime.

Continuing on with the food list (and this is about where the Italian ends, except for the pizzelles and pizza rolls)--pumpkin bread, vegetable tray, and nuts. The ongoing discussion in the food line during our halftime break was the impending snow.

"I wonder if the kids will have school in the morning."

"Well, it's got to be colder than in the 40's for them to cancel it."

"I hear the temperature is going to drop tonight and turn to freezing rain."

"They are predicting an inch of snow!"

A winter weather advisory for ONE INCH??? All I could think to myself was, wimps.

The woman who needed to thoroughly clean all of her body folds kind-of ruined the educational experience for me tonight. The speaker, who was a retired professor from the University of Tennessee, kept the discussion light and humorous. But even that didn't help much, because every time the woman laughed she would move around and kick up a new round of stench.

Quotes from the professor:

When speaking of living in Minnesota: "It started snowing in October and you could look outside and see snow until the 16th of April, and we found that somewhat excessive." Almost everyone in the class nodded in agreement.

While showing a slide of a badly-pruned tree that had the terminal branch (top branch) hacked off: "Yes Virginia, you too can have a 40-foot hat rack in your front yard. If you have to prune it again I recommend one single cut right here," and he motioned to the base of the trunk.

Toward the end of night, regarding his being the speaker for the class: "It's all in the unit, everything's in the unit. I don't know why I even do this." That got quite a chuckle from all, but I think he might have been dead serious.

It was overall a fun class, but I have been sitting here typing for the past 20 minutes, home for almost 2 hours, and have changed my clothes. Yet I can still smell that woman. Maybe next week I'll be antisocial and sit in a corner somewhere, just in case.

williamson county snow day

NEWSFLASH: school opening delayed for 2 hours

But you can't even play in this stuff!

Scenes from my backyard (and front, to be fair) II

Embalmed leaves

If anybody can help me identify what the name of this tree is I will buy you a virtual drink. I can't remember what the leaves look like since they have all fallen off, but what stands out for me is the bark. At first I thought it was covered with fungus, but now I realize that that is how it's supposed to be (I hope to God it is, for the sake of the tree!). It is covered in what looks like stacks of misshapen coins. Normally I would look this up myself, but my field guide to trees mildewed while sitting in storage here and it smelled too bad to save, and I have yet to buy another one (one more innocent victim of the move, including many daddy long-legs that made the trip down in boxes).

A pseudo-graveyard, but the only thing really dead here is my will to want to walk through this area in the summertime, down by the creek, where vines of poison ivy cover the ground

Sweetgum balls, which give the tree an interesting profile in the winter. And that is about all the good I can say about them!

Holly and berries. I never realized that this evergreen tree didn't like growing in the North. It seems so northern!

One of the few Tennessee snowmen in existence today. Two minutes after building him he was already beginning to lean backwards.

The aforementioned stream. During the summer it was pretty dry and you could see most of the creek bed. My next-door neighbor has an irrigation pump thingy that sucks up the water for his grass, and I have a theory that he was contributing to our drought. I was going to take some of the stones from the bottom for my garden path in order to give it a natural look, but I had to wait for the autumn to arrive so that the poison ivy would die off. Go figure. It is now a slippery, deep, rushing river. I guess that's what husbands are for--to risk their lives for the sake of the beauty of the house.

what is it about frozen water that is so nostalgic?

It is snowing all around Nashville tonight! AOL news described it as "Rare Snowfall Blankets South." Now I feel like Tennessee is home, or at least my home away from home.

I have every intention of playing in the snow with my kids in the morning before it all melts away. In Tennessee, you cannot count on keeping something like this around for more than a half day, so you need to act quickly.

I'm just so thankful that I have children to share it with. During my college days in Illinois, I used to take my sled to a small hill tucked away within the forest preserve, where I wouldn't easily be spotted by passing cars, and traipse up and down until either my legs gave out or my toes went numb. My oldest daughter was in early elementary school at the time, and she still doesn't know about my winter excursions. It is one of my silly secrets.

I'm wondering what I will do when my two youngest are grown. I very well cannot go out into my front yard and make snow angels alone. I guess that gives me one good reason to look forward to becoming a grandmother someday.

central Indiana sunset on the fly

Driving home from our short weekend trip to Illinois, I caught the end of the day just in time to snap these photos. Rolled the passenger window down--kids screaming in the back "we're cold!"--had to balance the camera on the door at 70 m.p.h. without losing it--hands going numb--kids still yelling for me to hurry up. Pity the life of an amateur photographer's family.

Christkindlmarket in Chicago 2008

The Daley Plaza, looking down Washington Boulevard

Horse and carriage on Washington Blvd.

At sunset, the millions of white lights adorning the trees in Daley Plaza begin to appear

One of the many food stands--this one sold flaky strudel filled with hot fruit or cheese. Danke schon--bitte!

Enjoying some warm gluhwein

Despite all the delicious food around the market, the pigeons are more interested in staying warm!

Wheelchairs and strollers--a good way to cut through the crowds

Everyone is dressed for the occasion--with temperatures in the teens and low 20's--and no one is complaining about the cold (except us "Tennesseans")!

the beauty of brown

We drove to Illinois today on what is henceforth to be called the "Annual Christmas Pilgrimage to the Frozen Homeland." The green melted away quickly as we proceeded north up through the central part of the state, from plentiful cedar trees lining I-65 to Japanese honeysuckle in its last throes of life clinging to fences.

Skeletons of goldenrods, pampas grass and other common prairie plants, dried leaves suspended on oak trees, remnants of cornstalks and soybean fields, piles of branches collected from summer storms, reeds and solitary shrubs in the median strips, a pine split in half--all contrasted with the occasional man-made brown of local attraction signs along the highway.

This was the aspect of the trip to Illinois that I had dreaded: the drive up north, to slowly watch the landscape become more dried and barren. Miles of nothing but houses, farms and graineries jutting up from brown. Worried that I might come to realize that I was glad to be living away from it, far away south, nestled in Tennessee.

For the first time, after all the years of living in Illinois, I noticed the tones of winter outside of the spectrum of snow colors (white, of course, but we mustn't forget yellow and black). Olive green, silver, and all the shades of brown that you can find in a stand of trees and in the fields lining the highway--coffee bean, burnt sienna, amber, chestnut, tan, rust, chocolate, sepia, auburn. I have never been deferent to brown, but moving away from Illinois has given me a third eye to be able to see beauty in a landscape that I once dismissed as ugly.

It must be possible to love two places and call them home, and have people agree that you belong to both of them and they belong to you. To admit that you love one and still not betray the other.

Thanksgiving in the ER

This was last night's prevailing scenario in the ER:

You visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday and sit down to dinner together. The Southern cooking is so good!--salt cornbread, turnip greens, ham, stuffing, a variety of casseroles including hashbrown, squash and the ubiquitous God-forsaken green bean casserole that always turns up on this day, 4 different types of chocolate cake--and you just can't get enough of it.

You begin to have abdominal pain, probably caused by your attempt to sample all the fixin's and go back for seconds. Still, you continue to indulge yourself. After all, how often do you get to eat like this and not feel guilty?

The cramping begins. You run to the bathroom and just make it in time to hurl all your hard work into the toilet. You no longer feel as if you've overeaten, but that bitter bile taste in your mouth sure doesn't resemble the cranberry sauce you just had. Back to the table after cleaning up. After all, you don't get to see these people very often.

But your GI system doesn't care about your social life. Everyone can hear your intestines writhing as you dramatically rush into the bathroom and make a split-second decision as to which end should kiss the bowl first.

Your family is concerned. They tell you that you should go to the ER. After all, you could get dehydrated.

The next thing you know you are lying on a cot with a bright fluorescent light over your head and I am sitting on a chair beside you starting an IV. Your significant other is holding your hand. You really do feel much better after puking up the last of those heavy sour cream-laden mashed potatoes, but hey, what the hell--you tell me that your pain is an 8 out of 10 anyways.

I draw your blood. You get a bag of IV fluids. I nag you for a urine sample for an hour until you finally decide to drag yourself up and hobble to the bathroom. You get some Dilaudid. It knocks you out for an hour or two so that I don't have to listen to your whining about how long this is taking. Your labs come back normal. I take your IV out and you wince as the tape is being removed. I say sorry, it's worse on men with all the arm hair. You get your discharge papers that say "return to the ER if symptoms worsen." You and I both know they won't.

Bottom line: You eat too much food, you get sick.

early November photos

The colors were still changing in early November. Today it was in the 60's! Hard to believe that it is Thanksgiving tomorrow. The air is so fresh when you step outside, the sun so bright. It reminds me of bacon frying in a pan. I think that bacon is the official state smell, judging from the fact that when you stop at the welcome center on the Kentucky/Tennessee border, bacon is the prevailing aroma in the air; either that or it is ham. This must be the tourism department's surreptitious method to get people to stay for awhile.

Happy Birthday little buddy. I love you.

My first award!

I just received an award for my blog from Nash Deville at A Yankee in Tennessee, a fellow northerner just trying to get by in the south. Thanks Nash--and to everyone who reads this--whether you agree with my viewpoint or not. I must also give a shout out to Tennessee and her interesting people for providing me with the inspiration to create this blog.

“Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is the scribbling child in a grown-up body, wondering if anyone is listening.”

~Herbert Gold, Elder Statesman of The Beat Generation