Whatever Turns on Ya

My old friend Walter Sweet used to say that. "Whatever turns on ya." A play, of course, on the swingin' 70's saying, "Whatever turns you on."

Any more, it's pretty simple. Sun. Flowers. Being outside. Not being cooped up because it's raining and gray. 

Hey, if I can't whine here, where can I whine?

Today (Sunday December 7) was stupendously clear and sunny. I felt like an appliance, dragged from a dark cupboard, plugged in and ready to do my thing. I felt like a mixer. A Cuisinart. An electric knife. Gimme something to do.

Which turned out to be a five-mile run with the dog, a photosafari and hymn singing in the old church, and a trip to Athens for a concert, dinner and frozen custard. Whoot! 

While I got ready for my day Chet had a good chew with his boy. 

He's kind of cute when he chews, with that little white glove and that spaced-out face. He's in Chewspace. 

The aquarium is looking thrifty of late. Maybe I'll do a tank post here in a bit, when the new fish settle in. 

Speaking of things turning on ya...

My primary winter coping mechanism is badly out of whack this season. The Groanhouse is driving me nucking futs again. In the last huge wind (gusts in excess of 60 MPH), three panes blew out of it. Because the stupid rubber weatherstrip never fit in the channels in the first place, they were more prone to blowing out. And, surprise! I couldn't get the panes back in right without disassembling the entire structure. So I had to force them back on (as opposed to in) and duct-tape them more or less in place. 

Disassembling the Groanhouse. And then trying to reassemble it.

This is something I can't even think about doing. Talk about diminishing returns.

On top of that, the new heater I got is way, way too much for the space. And it has thermostat issues. The temperature swings from 56 to 80 within a few minutes each time the damn thing kicks on. It won't keep the temperature even in the space.

You can imagine what my poor plants think of that. When it's cold outside, they literally cook, their leaves scorching.

All of this is my fault for buying what looked like a good greenhouse, which turned out to be impossible. I just can't win for losing with this structure. And then buying the wrong heater. It seems every time I have something figured out, something else goes wrong.

So I've moved all the plants into the house until I can get something figured out with a new smaller heater. That will happen this week, I hope. I don't know what to do about the Groanhouse's propensity to blowing apart. Who can predict the next gale? And what if I'm in Costa Rica when it happens? 

And on this ridgetop, it WILL happen.

Everything dies?

blaaaaaa

Bill has sweetly promised to put his head together with Tools and present a solution. Tools, y'hear that?

Marcy!! Now is the time for all good countrywomen to lend me their man!!

Thankfully, a few select plants like Hibiscus "The Path" have come into our living space and are doing what they can to cheer me up. The rest are in the tower room, where they'll get cool temps and plenty of light, but no extreme swings. My Fitbit says I climbed 125 flights in one day. Part of that was bringing plants from the Groanhouse to the Tower Room. I was wondering why my knees hurt...

Even when I had the heating situation figured out last winter, The Path never was able to bloom in the greenhouse. Temperature swings were too wide, punishing. But oh, she's blooming in the living room. For her, it's all about having an even ambient temperature. Or at least not being chilled, then cooked 30 times a day. The Path is a plant in perimenopause. She gets a pass.

Honey, if you make 7" wide flowers that look like that, you can demand anything you want of me. Daily spraying for aphids? You got it. Warm watering water? Check. Kisses right on the pistil? 

Yup. Mwah!

So, not being able to futz in the greenhouse any more, and having a deadline that is breathing hot fire down my neck, I've poured myself into work on the new book. It's called Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest. It's due April 15, 2015, and it'll take a full year for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to produce it. So it's due out spring 2016. I know, a long time. But not to me! I've been working on this for 13 years. What's another year to a writer? What's time to a hog?

I get a lot done in these quiet days, especially on the gray ones when being outside isn't so alluring.

Working on the book is life itself. It's so affirming to paint squirming young birds in dark December, to paint them growing and changing and becoming birds before my eyes.

But a sunny day...ahhh. So rare, so fine, so desperately needed when one finally comes around.

 This Sunday Dec. 7 was the last day of gun season. I wrote a little haiku couplet in its honor. 

Gun season's last day

Orange men, pickups in full force.

In thickets,ears twitch. 

They filled their bellies last night.

Legs folded, hearts still.

Tonight, under a Yule moon

They will dance again.

Making It Through the Winter

That cold snap that blew in the night of January 5, that was a thing. The afternoon before, it was raining and almost 50 degrees, and I knew it was time to act. I was sure I couldn't heat the greenhouse adequately through temperatures in the teens, much less the negative single digits. So out it all came, carried in relays into the downstairs bathroom and my studio. Because I wound up losing about two-thirds of my plants in the big freeze of November 24, it wasn't all that much trouble. Well, nothing is too much trouble where me and the plants I love are concerned. I sometimes catch myself working like a draft horse to keep these plants alive and wonder why I bother. Yes, I felt pretty ridiculous evacuating the greenhouse, but what was my choice?

So there they are (about half of them) luxuriating in the bathroom while it's zero degrees and below outside. You can just see the back side of the greenhouse through the window. Good news is the gas line didn't freeze this time. Bad news is the heater I have isn't big enough to keep the greenhouse warm in those conditions. It's a work in progress, this new greenhouse, and Mr. Murphy and his cruel law keeps close watch over all proceedings. A new leak in the roof rained down on my hundred-dollar freeze alert unit that I was so proud of, which ruined it and put our phones out for a week until I figured out what had happened. Nice. Hi-tech is great, until a raindrop hits it.

I kept them inside for a week, until the coldest weather blew through, which made the bathroom a pretty nice place to be. That gave me a chance to clean out the greenhouse, throw out all the dead plants and take the soil from their pots for recycling. It was time to get rid of the Shelves of Death, lined with row upon row of pots studded with stems that I finally admitted were not going to send out shoots. I became expert at checking for life in root and stem. I didn't find much. What lived, lived, and a lot of what lived wound up dying anyway.

So here, I'm focusing on what I do have. 

"Grossersorten," a rangy single pink geranium, lost a few leaves but never batted an eye. It's blooming now.

Next to it, an amaryllis that was a Christmas present from Elsa and Laura.

It wasted no time getting big and beautiful in the unaccustomed confines of the greenhouse. Usually amaryllis have to do their thing on kitchen tables. Clearly, it's getting just what it needed.

Another grand survivor, my 24-year-old Mammilaria cactus. It seemed to take the freeze as a challenge to throw out bigger and more beautiful blooms.

I lost my old Wonderboom fig bonsai, but this new recruit is doing beautifully and I've become quite fond of it.

Lots of new healthy growth, and no scale as yet.

This gardenia is taking its own sweet time, tantalizing me, dropping buds here and there just before they open, then making more. Arrggggh.

But two have finally opened and there is no better scent. 

What a grand plant. I hope I can keep her in the manner to which she'd become accustomed.

Acid, acid, acid, that's the soil they love. This one is f-f-f-fusssssy.

The jasmine is going nuts. Not fussy, and perfuming its space as specified in its job description. 

The fresh green leaves are so much more beautiful than the ones they had before the freeze. Jasmines hate getting very cold, and their leaves go yellow. These leaves have never felt the sting of cold.

I didn't see this little pot of Bellis perennis, or English daisy, on the floor of the greenhouse when I evacuated, and it froze solid in the cold snap. Only days later its dark-green translucent leaves had come back to life, and it was throwing out flowers! I dug these plants on the lawn of the Fayetteville WV courthouse a year and a half ago. Bellis perennis is a longtime European invader that establishes itself in some lawns. I haven't quite been able to figure out why it does well in some places and not others. As far as I can see, it does no harm, and I find it very beautiful.  I've been trying to establish it in our lawn for years. These are the best plants I've had yet. The beat goes on.

The same thing happened to these Buttercrunch lettuces. Froze translucent, then bounced back.

The dwarf pomegranate continues to delight me. I downsized its pot from the gallon container it was in, and once it's established will downsize it again as I train it as a tropical bonsai. Its flowers are opening, throwing out crepey petals and stamens, and I hope it will choose to form fruit. Gotta get in there and pollinate them, probably...

Speaking of pollination, I noticed that my grapefruit's flowers were falling off without forming fruit. So I schnoodled around in them with my pinky and played bee.

It worked--I probably have a dozen fruits now on a "tree" that's not even a foot tall. Whoops. Brood reduction is in order. That's it in the left-hand blue pot, below. Imagine it with a dozen full-sized grapefruit. Where's that Tilapia in Grapefruit sauce recipe, anyway? I might need it in a year or so.

Yep, things are happening in the greenhouse. It's got an aura of life again. I like going in. I find myself singing, "Hello Ladies!" when I do. I haven't yet taken to spending evenings down there. I still have a little PTSD about that, I think. Make that a lot.

I was most thrilled to see the first bud open on one of my stellar Graffiti geraniums that lived through the freeze. I was absolutely sure I'd lost the red one. I figured the pink one, which I wasn't all that crazy about, was the one that made it.  I got that plant on May 1, 2006, and I sure hated to lose it. I had a tiny cutting that I thought was the red one, and a big plant that somehow survived which I was sure was the pink. The tiny cutting died yesterday without rooting. And the same day, the big plant opened its flower.

When the bud opened, it was just the color of a scarlet tanager. I can't even describe how happy I was to know it had survived. It's such a good red, a brilliant, clear, happy, firepink red.

I always plant it out in a pot next to the Bird Spa, hoping to one day see this again. 

It happened June 22, 2009.

 It could happen again.

That's become a mantra this winter. It happened once. It could happen again. I won't say the mantra has gotten me through. Mantras may work for some people, but I need living things. The plants that lived through it all and came back, the new plants who've come to live and flourish here, my family (which includes Chet) and friends and love and running and the very occasional sunny day and that little church on the hilltop, that's what's gotten me through. 

Snowy Run: Finis

My grave peregrinations done for the moment, I turn toward home. Tall spruces mark Gary Morgenstern's house. They, some narcissus, and the naked lady amaryllis that springs up each summer, are the only visible reminders of his life that remain. Well, that and the Blatz cans down in the ravine in the woods behind. Want to hear me tell about Gary? Go to the NPR website and listen.

I feel another season change coming on. Fergus' Pond as it looked in December:

and in September. 

Yes, it's killing me, too.

And yet...

nothing wrong with that scene, either. Mmmm. Oh, those spots of color. Must paint. So glad I brought my camera. It really is just ridiculously beautiful out here.

If a bit nippy. I'm coming up on the Three Graces, trees I am helplessly in love with, and hope to hell the new landowner won't fell. 

As they danced in September's wine-gold sun, party dresses gleaming

and as they shiver in a naked row today:

This wintry musing brought to you by your freezing blogger, Zicksicle

who was delighted to find a fake deer covered in snow, a jaunty Christmas hat on his antlers

and, upon returning home, to be welcomed (well, stomped and snorted at) by a real one in the driveway.

Snowy Run: Two

And so we continue the Snowy Run, an exercise in aesthetics and cold-hardiness, 4.5 miles out and back. Just think...all this can be found within a couple of miles of my home. That, I'm grateful for.

I simply must give you another season change.  December.

Aaaand....September. Please wait while I roll around in the flowers, kicking my feet in the air. Aggh.

Pleased as punch that, come December, I remembered where I stood for the September shot. Those are sweet peas abloom, with tall goldenrod, and a basking Chet Baker in the road. I knelt to get the flowers in the picture, hence the lower angle. But still. 

 September, I remember. A love once new has now grown cold.

I look back and see my beloved tower poking up through the trees, just left of center. 

Closer:

It's a good place to live, a good space to have. Just below it, my studio, where I spend my days painting and not painting and writing and not writing, packing up books and prints to send, fooling around and talking to my kids and laughing and wiping tears too.

So far away now.

I can't resist a climb to the Waxler Church and Cemetery, which sits on a high hill, now overshadowed by a big blue water tower. 

This must be the original church bell, now encased in a plexi-sided box and dedicated to a local parishoner. The church is vacant, but not abandoned. I can't see inside but I hold up my G-12 and let it look for me. Ohhh. Those are punitive pews. Imagine sitting in that for an hour and a half. I'd have to bring a rubber donut.

Intrigued by the reflections, I make more images.

Inside and outside, reflected in glass. Hooo.

I like it. I find myself wishing there could be a square dance in here, some kind of life in it again, even as I know there aren't enough churchgoing people in the area to fill it with worshipers. So it will stand and reflect on its past. What's its choice? That, or fall down.

It doesn't really have the "move forward" option. I pick that.

The bouquet of fake flowers on the old altar gets me, especially as combined with the drifts of what is likely bat guano on the floor. There's an upright piano just to the left. Sigh. So cold, gone dirty. A perfectly good building, wasted.

Outside, a common name in this area. Married 66 years. Trying to imagine that.

Way to go, Clarence and Bessie. I hope you were happy.

My favorite stones are auf Deutsch, but I can't read it. It's too worn, the lettering too unfamiliar. If I came back here for a year or so I'd probably get it figured out. But I won't come back here that much, so it will remain a mystery.

Another familiar name. I'm thinking he dug NASCAR (Dale Earnhardt in particular) and deer hunting. Quite a shrine,  Jim Morrison-esque by country graveyard standards. A well-loved man, well-remembered. I'm guessing he left too soon.

Next post, we'll conclude the run, the musings, and the cheek-freezing, and hope it all melts off. I'm writing this January 3, and there's no hope in sight. Having to walk my run. Phhhhh.