Waiting

Waiting

Posted by Heather Harris

I am very bad at waiting. This is of course a failing of human nature. It seems odd that God would make us so horribly impatient when everything requires patience. Maybe it's because a lifetime to us is nothing in the context of cosmic time. Maybe that's why dogs are so slobberingly, deliriously excited for you to throw a stick during fetch. In dog years, by my unscientific calculations, the thirty seconds that you are toying with them, faking tosses and laughing at their stupidity, is like waiting for three minutes. I don't know about you, but three minutes of a practical joke at my expense, repeated over and over would drive me a bit loony too.

I am currently waiting for a call on a job interview that I had this week. My phone is glued to my hip. Under "Recent Calls", which I keep checking compulsively despite the fact that not only does my phone ring when a call comes in but it also flashes blue, vibrates, and pops a notice up on the screen, my most recent call is from my sister 13 hours ago. To a dog that would be like five days. My finger nails are wearing out from the percussive tapping on every surface where I wait. Somewhere in the deep wrinkles of my brain, I know that the artfully crafted kindergarten lesson I taught at the interview was awesome, but as the minutes tick on, I imagine every minute flaw as the reason a call isn't coming in. Surely I was a complete moron and just didn't know it.

Without waiting though, how would we know hope? And hope, while extremely difficult to muster as my silent phone lays black and lifeless at my side, is a far better feeling than the inbred, backwoods cousins of impatience: annoyance, dread, despair, and self doubt.

I was certain three days ago that my cucamelons were done for. My kale, planted on the same day, was 8 inches tall. My peas were blooming, the massive scarlet runner beans were winding their way up the trellis like something out of Jack and the Bean Stock. My cucamelons had not even poked through. My husband enthusiastically pointed to a wild tomato seedling and said, "There's one!", in much the same way that he keeps saying, "They'll call!" Zucchini seeds were popping up, CARROTS were popping up. Wandering visitors kept stopping at the empty box of dirt saying, "What's in there?" I'd say as hopefully as possible, "Oh, those are my cucamelons. They haven't come up yet..." Then I would quickly distract them with the freakish bean plants before they could ask any more questions. And then, just when I was about to rifle through my dirty, half empty pile of seed packets to find something else to plant in there, two of the tiniest little leaves you've ever seen from a squash seed emerged from the soil. The next day, green seedlings were sprinkled all over. Turns out it can take four weeks for those dang things to germinate. Once again, seeds proved that they will, in fact, grow, in their own time, and there's nothing we can do about it. What looks like a pile of dirt in May will be so overgrown and claustrophobic in September that you will beg for the first frost so that it will all rot away and you can finally catch your breath.

And so, I wait...

Return of the Chicken

Return of the Chicken

Posted by Heather Harris

We are getting chickens this weekend. If anyone has read my old Harris Family blog, you will know that I have completely sworn off raising chickens for a multitude of very good reasons. They are stupid. They roost in very inconvenient locations. They turn out to be roosters, requiring gruesome executions. They get eaten by raccoons, coyotes, and dogs. They catch a cold and die. They have never produced one egg for the Harris household. We switched to ducks and have been perfectly content with that decision for the last five years. The problem is, our ducks have turned part feral in their new digs, and spend their time between our creek and the neighbor's five star pond resort, having wanton sex with who knows what other ducks and secreting their eggs away in hidden forest caches. Even if I found an egg, I would certainly not be eating it.

The Neighbor's Pond Resort

So, here we go again. We have tried to combat the past chicken issues with three new rules:

1. We will not name them after tragic Shakespearean characters. Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Ophelia didn't turn out so well (comedies are still in).

2. We are not getting chicks; only proven laying hens from my brother-in-law's girlfriend's brother's lovingly nurtured brood of blue ribbon winning beauties. Of course we're not getting the fair-worthy chickens, so they should have fairly low self esteem which I imagine is great for egg production. We wouldn't want vain hens spending all their time preening and parading around the chicken coop.

3. They will not be free range chickens. They would certainly find the neighbor's five star pond resort if that were to happen, then they'd roost in one of their trees, fall out because they are stupid and then get eaten by a coyote waiting eagerly below. No, they will be cooped, at least until one of the kids "accidentally" lets one out...


I will post some pictures of our new ladies when we get them on Sunday, but in the meantime, here are some mugshots of the not-so-lucky chickens from the past:

A Smashing Good Time

A Smashing Good Time

Posted by Heather Harris

The first really warm days of the year happened last week. That was really bad timing because I had 15 tomato plants sitting in a tidy little row by my sliding glass door, lifting their sad little arms towards the light, begging me to plant them. I was faced with the same problem I have every year: Are my seedlings better of growing sickly in their little start pots while I wait for the magical "Mother's Day Weekend", the date every sage gardener says is when to plant tomatoes, or are they better of being planted in the nice fertile garden beds, where most assuredly some nasty cold front will roll in right before Mother's Day weekend?

I voted, as I always do, for planting. After all, if they die in the pots I only have myself to blame. If they die in the garden I can blame just about anything else: weather, gophers, my cat, the kids...mollusks.

As usual, I couldn't just stop with planting tomatoes. I looked over my lovely garden and my eyes kept screeching to a  halt at the weed choked cinder block pile lying just beyond the edge of my vegetable paradise. Someone long ago decided to stack cinder blocks, two bricks high, in a horseshoe shape in the boggiest part of the yard. What was it? Who knows. Maybe a really ugly flower bed designed for skunk cabbage, maybe an ill-conceived dike, maybe a pig roasting/rotting pit? No clue. But it was ugly, functionless, and falling apart. In the lovely sunshine I thought, "Today's as good a day as any to move it out." That is right about when I heard the glass shattering screams of my daughter coming from down by our creek. I was certain she had stepped into a bees nest. My four-year-old son ran up to me, as I ran down to the banshee wail,  shouting, "Lily fell in the creek!" Out from under the redwoods lumbered Lily, arms outstretched, like a really loud, wet zombie. If she was a zombie she would be a loud one.

She was drenched from head to toe. Apparently she had grabbed onto a branch to catch a frog on the other side of the creek and the branch broke. You can picture the rest. I tried to be motherly, but really I wanted to laugh and/or explain how her dunk tank adventure was taking up precious gardening time. I kept it in though, which I suppose is what being a mom is all about. I shed my gloves and rubber boots and got her into the bath tub and then trudged back down the hill to address the cinder block problem.

I went to pick up the first one, and discovered the mud was not going to relinquish it so easily. Black, dense muck was packed into the holes of the heavy cement block, and weeds were growing up through it, lashing it tightly to the block underneath it. I let out a sigh, grabbed my trowel and began hacking away at the water-logged soil. I managed to get one out and heaved it into my yellow wagon. Then I pried the other one out and threw that in with the other. The only problem was that I forgot to remove my finger from the side of the cinder block, and managed to smash it between the two blocks. I mean really smash it. The kind where it doesn't even hurt because you know you have bigger problems, like finding the nearest emergency room. I grabbed it with my other hand, not really wanting to look, and woozily tromped back up the hill, feeling a little queazy, and a lot mad. Lily came skipping out of the bathroom, all of the creek drama forgotten, and showed immediate concern. She was ten times more motherly than I had been moments before with her. I peeled back the digits that were clenching my wounded index finger and investigated it. Not good. It was swelling quickly and abnormally. I'd broken my foot before, and this had all the hallmarks of bad news. Greg was gone at a class in Portland and not answering my telegraphed emergency texts. Hurt. Stop. Think I should go to emergency room.Stop. It's my finger. Stop.


I ended up loading the kids into the car, drove with one hand down the road while resting the other on the ice that Lily lovingly prepared for me, and then sat through two hours in the emergency room with snot nosed, typhoid ridden children running around playing with Luke and Lily. The doctor looked at my x-rays, and said, "I have good news. It's not broken", and then proceeded to wrap my two fingers together with a $100 piece of tape. Oh, Luke and Lily got an apple juice, so maybe it was just a $98 piece of tape.

Anyway, some lessons were learned from this. One: Lily is a better mother than I am. Two: Don't move cinder blocks without another grown up around (I've already ignored this lesson. 10 more blocks to go!) Three: The tomato gods will seek their revenge, one way or another, if you plant before Mother's Day!