Toughsledding

Recently, I entertained a houseguest for several days, a dear friend and sculptor from the San Francisco area.

As I ferried him around town showing him the sights, introduced him to my friends and family, I realized once again just how pleasant a town Pocatello is, as well as how much of my life is now embedded and defined by these last 12 years living in southeast Idaho.

My friend and I toured the sculpture on the Greenway, particularly those at Benton Street and Arthur Avenue, as well as the sculpture garden under construction by Idaho State University students at the former bicycle shop site on South Arthur.

We toured all the art galleries, those at ISU as well as Main Street: Tara-James, The Gallows and Lori Piccolo’s new one in the pink building.

My friend marveled at the Stairway to Nowhere on South Lincoln, a landmark we Pocatellans affectionately protect. He enjoyed the Center Street underpass, how cars sometimes beep to each other as they enter, and those with fast engines rev them up turning the tunnel into an echo chamber.

On Friday, we attended Theatre ISU’s production of MacBeth and were delighted by the incredible witches’ costumes, the troupe’s energy and dedication, and enchanted by the venue itself, the Bistline Theatre in the new Performing Arts Center.

From there we attended a blue grass concert, a band from Colorado called Whitewater Ramble, at the Portneuf Valley Brewery. Great beer. Great music. Great gathering of friends and acquaintances.

Saturday, we drove the “old road” south of town through Black Rock and Inkom to Lava Hot Springs where we explored the town and drank a beer at the Blue Moon.

All weekend my kitchen was filled with fresh aromas. My friend is a gourmet cook. Just so he could flex his expertise, we bought fresh salmon at the Butcher Block, along with aged cheddar and herbed goat cheese.

We cruised the Farmer’s market for fresh vegetables and apple/rosemary sausages.

Meals included baked salmon with lemon and herbs, tomato salad with fresh basil and goat cheese, a tagine of mixed vegetables and sausage using garlic that magically appeared at my door, as well as the last summer squash from my own tiny garden.

One breakfast consisted of a puffy, baked German pancake made with Tony the Boyfriend’s fresh pullet eggs with deep orange yolks. We filled the pancake with homemade vanilla custard and fresh raspberries, the last of the season.

Sunday morning, while church bells chimed, we turned the leftover tagine into a delicious frittata with café mocha on the side made with a bar of cinnamon-flavored Mexican chocolate.

The weekend ended all too quickly, but thanks to an afternoon of merely hanging out at home working on projects (me weaving, he cutting and bending wires), an old light fixture in my house was transformed into a wire and glass sculpture, a lovely memento of a good time and a toast to the inestimable value of friendship.

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What creature walks on four legs in the morning
Two legs in the afternoon
And three legs at night?
—Riddle of the Sphinx

POCATELLO — There’s a significant new addition to my life, a 37-inch long metal stick with a plastic handle.
It’s not pretty, but it’s a marvel of technology in that it supports a considerable amount of weight and relieves the painful pressure on my ailing hip joint.
I’ve reached the point in my life when the forces of gravity have begun pulling me more strongly toward the grave.
Gravity/grave/pushing up daisies. I think I get it now, the laws of physics becoming more clear with age.
The gravity of the situation is that I can no longer run freely in the wind or dance as if to defy the forces of nature. I have difficulty picking up my toddler grandson or carrying my kitchen garbage to the bin, never mind pushing the container down my front steps to the street once a week.
If the city’s trucks weren’t mechanized, I could leave the container in a stationary position in the alley -- a technology that does wonders for the garbagemen’s backs, but nearly kills mine painfully, one concrete step at a time.
Nearly overnight, I have become a three-legged, one-armed woman.
While wielding my marvelous stick, I cannot carry a cup of coffee and a plate from the kitchen to my dining table unless I stack them precariously on top of each other or make two trips.
My handbag slips off my shoulder as I struggle to carry books and student papers with my one free arm, and I am helpless to catch it.
Space, time and distance, have higher positions in my consciousness these days. I plan my time carefully knowing that I will not be able to quicken my lumbering walk to make up for delays, that I will probably not be able to make a “run” to the Student Union between classes for a bite to eat, or to catch a noon-time lecture.
I also consider how much pain I am willing to endure to get somewhere. Such considerations cause one to slough off the kinds of events for which one merely “makes an appearance.”
I now spend more time doing just what I want to do, what I quite literally FEEL like doing, which is quite a lot.
My homely cane has other advantages beyond keeping me upright, mobile and independent.
While wielding the stick, people are more likely to hold doors open for me and speak to me politely. Others in similar stages of mobility talk to me in elevators and while waiting in lines.
Before the cane, I spent a year or more unsteady on my feet, quite literally staggering about at times. I’m sure mothers gathered up their children and stayed clear believing I was drunk or crazy.
I had nightmares of being stopped by police, being unable to walk a straight line and them not believing my story.
A cane is a visible sign of a problem; no explanation is required. And in some cases the stick can add an air of dignity to a less than desirable situation.
I think of author James Joyce’s ashplant accessory, TV’s character Dr. House’s cane that he uses as a pointer or golf club, old photos of poet/playwright Oscar Wilde, his stick the mark of a gentleman.
Of course, female equivalents are few. The ones I recall from literature are witches or hags leaning on their canes dishing out advice or casting spells. But even then, the canes had an element of power as magic wands or weapons that keep thieves at bay.
My artist friends, however, insist I need a more colorful extra appendage, one with a rapier hidden in its hollow core perhaps, one sporting a carefully carved antique ivory handle, or a naturally twisted piece of wood.
Hollowness, antique, twisted -- all fitting the stage of life at hand -- more color . . .
All in good time.

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POCATELLO — This year the end of the garden season holds a different meaning. This 2006 garden may literally be my last great effort.
These days (I should have done this sooner) I’m hiring help to weed, prune and trim, all things I used to do myself, but a deteriorating hip joint now prevents me. Those I’ve hired are doing a wonderful job. Their deft and skillful bodies relieve me of considerable stress, as well as guilt.
My physical predicament isn’t jibing with my preconceived vision of what these middle-later years would be like. I imagined wrinkles, gray hair and some weight gain, but not this level of physical discomfort.
After all, I have my mother and her sisters as role models. They are all in their 80s, slowing down, but going strong. My mother is 83, and this is the first year she’s hired help for yard maintenance.
Because I imagined only my looks would change, with maybe a minimum of minor aches that could be fixed with a good night’s sleep, I prepared myself to replace any elements of youthful beauty I may have had by developing my eccentricities.
I covered my little Westside hovel in vines, turned my entire house into a weaving studio draped in red mosquito netting, the windows are hung with handwoven window rugs, and the walls decorated with posters of Bob Dylan and Jack&Neal.
I have lots of books collected over the last half century. I painted a mural of bright red flowers on my dining room wall, and I not-so-secretly ferment fruity concoctions in a dark cupboard and store them in crystal decanters.
I keep a supply of champagne in the fridge for visitors, and my weavings have taken on a Gypsy theme, colorful wanderings from the status quo.
Lately, I’ve taken to playing 1960s music almost exclusively: John Sebastian, Jesse Winchester, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins . . . Their golden voices cast a nostalgic pall throughout my rooms, memories of the olden days when I was a hippie poet living in the East Village in NYC and could march for many blocks in anti-war rallies.
Then there were the 1970s and 1980s at the Central Idaho ranch when I could cross country ski, ride horses, run after my kids, climb stairs two at a time, dance, scale ladders in an apple orchard, grow 100 cabbages in my garden, ferment and preserve huge crocks of sauerkraut. . .
This morning I brought my potted herbs into the house, bay, rosemary and basil. I can still handle this flavorful level of digging in the dirt.
When I finish writing this column, I will chop onions and garlic, saute them in olive oil, add garden produce: tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, summer squash, and chard to make a healthy fall soup. Bay and rosemary add depth to the flavor.
Some of these vegetables were given to me by gardening friends whose bodies are more spry than mine, and I am very appreciative of each healthy mouthful. I am also pleased to peruse our local Farmer’s Market, a joyful place that makes it possible to regret my gardening abdication much less.
Change is about the only thing we peculiar humans can count on; the trick is learning how to accept the universe as it shrinks and expands, accept the earth as it crumbles and groans under our feet, pulling us under to nurture future generations -- you know, like the dead Hiawatha pushing up that famous corn patch . . .an early garden that predates those Puritan ergot-inspired witch burnings . . .

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Near the end of the spring planting season, I purchased a couple of cucumber plants and set them in a flower bed under my kitchen window. I didn't expect much -- never do from cucumber plants because of the excess shade in my gardening area. However, this year I have been pleasantly surprised. I've harvested four lovely plump, delicious cucumbers which I've eaten in raw chunks accompanied by chilled glasses of champagne and the company of friends.

Years ago I read a report in a literary magazine from a writer visiting a poet in Soviet Russia. The poet produced chilled bottles of beer then ran out of the house to the street market returning with cucumbers and tomatoes. They drank their dark Russian beer with cucumber and tomato chunks and furthered releasing the grasp of oppressive governments on freedom of speech.

It's sort of odd the things that stay with us, the simple things that make for lasting impressions, like the comical vision of my father wearing a pith helmet, plaid bermudas and hip boots as he worked in our garden in Western Washington. He sang while he worked, sea chanties and old songs like "Juanita". To this day, I associate those songs with cucumbers, string beans and carrots. I save the corn memories for Shane, my sister's horse, who desimated the corn patch the morning my father left on another of many sea voyages. We never told him.

This week is the anniversary of my baby sister's death two years ago from a long miserable bout of cancer. I remember her gardens, a lush one in Wenatchee, Washington: summer squash by the bushel and fresh blueberry jam. Her last garden was a zen garden in the backyard of her new house in Twin Falls, Idaho. She was always meticulous about her spaces, and her loved ones knew it was the end when the garden's edges became shaggy, then overgrown, then choked with weeds like her body.

Humans are more like plants than we admit. We do, afterall, desire to set out roots and harvest friends and lovers. We return to the earth, compost, fertilize the future.

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It's too hot to think much less work in the garden. Once the temperature moves above 90, I go into slow motion. I am managing to keep plants watered, although I nearly killed my basil plants and resusitated them just in the nick of time.

The irony is, I now have fresh vegetables and an un-airconditioned house, so I don't feel much like preparing them. I even find myself wishing for winter's sub-zero weather during which firing up the oven is a pleasureable warmth.

The thought of making jam or canning sounds like torture today. I am saved from dealing with a small batch of apricots -- the first ones my little tree as produced -- the squirrels ate them all, all at once one morning when I wasn't looking.

My grape vines are trying to take over the world. There are several luscious bunches of grapes. I hope there are more than the squirrels can eat.

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POCATELLO — Recently, I’ve had the privilege of touring a couple of local gardens.
One was perfection, neat rows, completely weedless, and the plants tall and healthy.
Corn, not quite as high as an elephant’s eye, bobbed happily in the Southeast Idaho afternoon gale; individual heads of red and green lettuce had just reached reached their peak; several varieties of onions pushed the earth aside with their exuberant growth, and peas bloomed profusely as they climbed harmonious lattice work.
Squash and melon plants emerged from their black plastic mulch with every hope of bearing fruit before summer’s end, and the gardener himself beamed with full confidence.
I was enchanted, so much so, that the experience has challenged my entire concept of gardening.
Why do I do it?
My tiny backyard plot pales in comparison. It’s overcrowded, full of quackgrass and weeds. I allow volunteer plants to further crowd those already crowded because I’m too curious to pull them.
A certain level of vermin always attack some of my plants every season, while none appeared to have devoured any of the plants on my garden tour.
My lettuce, in comparison, although planted early, was just beginning to be harvestable, and my onions were as thin as pencils. And although half of my zucchini plants survived an infestation of slugs, I will be overwhelmed with joy if I get to harvest a few.
I’ve yet to experience the abundance of zucchini that causes people to lock their cars during harvest season lest gardeners fill up the backseats with “gifts” of the lusty fruit.
Other people’s tomato plants are loaded with green tomatoes by mid-end of June, while mine are blooming, but no fruit is setting on. The plants are wind pollinated, the book says, and there has been plenty of wind sailing through my garden. What’s the problem?
Last fall I toured the Franciscan Sisters’ garden during their harvest festival. Their tomato plants were amazing, beyond anything I’ve ever seen: thick lovely stems on the plants and a plethora of huge Roma-style fruits hanging like giant clusters of grapes, each fruit the size of baseballs in all stages of ripeness.
I’ve not recovered from the experience.
It appears that what each of these gardens has that mine hasn’t is full sun. Being in the city, sunlight is limited by neighboring trees and buildings. In fact, some of my plants literally grow sideways in a fruitless effort to reach full sun and become leggy in the process.
I guess I could sell my little westside hovel and search for a better location, but these past 8 years I’ve put down some rather solid roots, literally and metaphorically, in the neighborhood.
And some plants are quite successful; for instance, my grapes are lush and prolific; their presence fulfills a long-standing dream. My pleached apple arbor is just now becoming what I envisioned after seeing an example in a garden magazine.
Vines are beginning to cover my house and fences, fulfilling another longing after years of living on a high prairie where none of these things would grow, where I had to content myself with growing 100 short-season cabbages and onions so strong in flavor it was difficult to eat them raw.
On the prairie, a crab apple tree I planted when my daughter was born, finally bore one tiny apple the year we left the ranch when my daughter was 13, and then a wind storm whipped the tree about until it split the trunk vertically.
Another Pocatello acquaintance didn’t plant his garden until mid-June with every confidence that his plants will mature.
Perhaps I jump the gun too early every year, anxious after a winter’s confinement to see green, harvest fresh herbs to fuel a soup or chicken fricassee, eat that first heaping bowl of wilted lettuce.
Afterall, there are only so many gardens possible in a lifetime, and now that I’ve reached my 59th year hobbling about on a bad hip with a cane, I’m wondering just how many gardens the cosmos will continue to grant me.

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"Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution than we used to be." -- E. B. White

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