Rhubarb My Rhubarb Not only did I get a vigorous rhubarb patch when I bought this house, I got a rhubarb patch with history. Apparently, mine is patch semi-famous in the neighborhood for its sweetness. Several people have pointed out my rhubarb patch and commented on this. But the true defender of the rhubarb is Betty, my 80-year old neighbor who comes running out of her house, screeching with alarm should anyone stray too near the precious rhubarb. Apparently, Betty has been coveting my rhubarb for years, and two or three years ago when the dear departed Mrs. Warnick was…
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New Blue Bike I bought a blue bicycle for forty bucks yesterday — it’s perfect. A Schwinn Collegiate — a blue “girl’s” bike with a front handle brake, three speeds, a big wide bouncy seat, and a coaster break. It’s much like the bike that was so fatally wrong that I was taunted all through sixth grade, but now, as an adult, it’s perfect. What I wanted was a bike I could ride around town, and which was old enough that no one would ever ask me to go mountain biking on it (don’t like mountain biking. I’ve never seen…
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Blooming Lilacs and a Runny Nose I have fifteen-foot-tall lilac bushes running down one side of my property line, and they’re gloriously in bloom this morning. It’s not eight yet, and the temperature is a balmy, sitting-on-the-porch-in-shirtsleeves sixty degrees. The sun is shining. The grackles are searching for bugs in the grass by the street. The puppy is lounging on the wicker sofa next to me. I love my life. Yesterday, I put the garden in. Such an old-fashioned phrase. I planted five varieties of tomatoes, and put their protective green wall-o-water hats on them. Since I started them indoors…
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Reading Lolita in Tehran This is one of those books that people tell you is really great, and you think “yeah, yeah, a book group in Tehran … sounds interesting.” I don’t know where we all got the idea that this book is about a book group of the sort we know here … a sort of hen night where a bunch of women get together and after a desultory discussion of the book at hand, retreat into drinks and gossip and general social activity. This book is not about that kind of book group. This book is about women…
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Blog in Progress I loved my old template, but alas, with my new laptop, I can hardly read the text … it’s a very faint grey and my poor eyes were having a terrible time with it. So, for the next couple of days I’ll be fussing with the template. I know, change is hard … but after my Powerbook died on me last week, I’m in that state where one must get used to a lot of computer change all at once. That said, I must admit I love my new iBook — it’s so tiny, so compact, so…
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Snow on the Lilacs Good thing I didn’t plant the tomatoes on Friday, when the sun was shining, when it was 70 degrees and my apple trees were blooming and the lilacs were this close to opening. Good thing because today it’s snowing. Snowing like winter, big fat wet flakes falling outside my window, two inches on the lawn, and the poor lilacs are all bent over from the load. Everything will be fine, this is expected, it’s Montana after all, and although the official last frost date was yesterday, the 17th, everyone knows that if you put your tomatoes…
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The Perfect Yellow My living room is now the most perfect, Provencal, mustard yellow … actually the color is called “Golden Pollen.” Since this is an old house, there are beautiful old oak moldings and window trim in this room, moldings that remind me of my grandmother’s farmhouse in Illinois (sadly torn down now, but it was really getting pretty unsafe), and against the yellow paint, they look even warmer and more lovely than they did before when the room was painted in 25-year-old flat off-white paint. And with a coat of fresh paint, the, shall we say, topographical element…
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Spelling for a Cure There’s a woman in town who has cancer. Since she’s your basic writer/musician/storyteller, and since she lives in the good old USA where if you don’t work for a big corporation you’re hosed, she has no health insurance. And now she has cancer. So what did the good citizens of Livingston do? Had a spelling bee. A spelling bee that put the local writers on the spot. So at seven o’clock last night, there they were: Elwood Reid, Tim Cahill, Thomas Goltz, Diane Smith, Alston Chase, Jim Liska, and a bunch of other people who I…