Month: September 2025

I am an accidental gardener. If anything I plant grows to maturity, and by some fluke of nature becomes edible, it is sheer accident.

If we had to survive on what I grow, we would both be very, very thin. Spaghetti thin. We are not spaghetti thin; we are more like rotini.

Several years ago, I dreamed of growing potatoes. I threw some potatoes in a shoebox, threw the shoebox in a cabinet in the garage and the spuds sprouted wildly. I chopped up those taters, buried them in the ground and forgot about them.

That year we feasted on baked, mashed, sliced and diced potatoes from late summer through Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and into spring. It was a starch marathon.

Last year, I was deliberate about the potatoes, reading, researching, spacing and hilling, tending their every carbohydrate need. They grew to the size of marbles. Not even the chipmunks wanted them.

This spring I ventured into mini-pumpkin territory. Once again, I read, researched, dug and planted according to specs in a diligently-ended vegetable bed. Mission accomplished, I threw a few leftover seeds into a perennial bed that thrives on neglect. I figured the seeds wouldn’t sprout and even if they did 40-pound rabbits would bound out of hiding, devour them, belch to wake the dead and lumber back into hiding.

I tended the carefully-planted pumpkin seeds in the vegetable bed with great devotion and high hopes. I watched and watered and weeded day after day. Days turned into weeks. Nothing.

The seeds in the perennial bed were long forgotten. I may have hit them with the hose a time or two, and if I did it was purely accidental.

Back in the well-tended bed, on what seemed like day No. 479, a single bloom appeared.

That same day, I happened to walk by the dried and cracked perennial bed and was shocked. A pumpkin vine measuring 30 feet was rolling through black-eyed Susans, twisting around phlox, and cutting straight through a patch of veronica. What’s more, a secondary vine split off, branched north and was heading for the neighbors.

Back in the carefully tended garden bed, the single bloom had collapsed, no doubt doomed by the suffocation of excessive attention.

As for the vine thriving on lack of attention, I peeked beneath the enormous leaves and counted 40 blooms.

We may be harvesting crate loads of miniature pumpkins by the time you read this. We may be selling them in the driveway.

Once again, the accidental gardener has achieved victory. It may have been by chance, but it is still one more in the win column. I’ll take ‘em however I can grow ‘em.

 

My husband is one of those people who can sleep anywhere, anytime.

He can sleep sprawled halfway on and halfway off the sofa, in a straight-back chair with three grands crawling all over him styling his hair, and during cross-country flights with severe turbulence.

It’s a gift. The man is so gifted he can even fall asleep while I’m talking to him.

I do not have the gift of sleep.

The dark circles under my eyes are green with envy.

Now, I am more sleepless than ever after reading about a study from China linking “sleep irregularity” to an increased risk of 172 diseases.

Yes, I did read it right before crawling into bed.

After tossing and turning and pummeling my pillow, I was finally drifting off when I heard a toilet flush and remembered that kidney disease and urinary incontinence are linked to poor sleep. Maybe I should get up and drink some water. Of course, if I did that, I could be getting up again a few hours later.

I put kidney disease and incontinence out of my mind, which meant I had 170 more poor sleep-related diseases to go.

I threw the covers over to his side, was semi-comfortable again and heard my left knee pop. It’s a Rice Krispy knee that often snaps, crackles and pops.

Poor sleep is also linked to bone fractures. Maybe I just fractured my knee. Is that possible? Just when I convinced myself I didn’t have a fractured knee and was feeling drowsy, all the diseases linked to poor sleep began racing through my head like a thoroughbred at the Preakness . . . gangrene, fibrosis, cirrhosis of the liver.

Respiratory failure, heart disease, obesity, diabetes mellitus . . . I was on a runaway train destined for insomnia.

If only visions of sugar plums would dance in my head.

I may not have the gift of sleep, but I do have the gift of waking up. I can tell myself what time to wake up, and I do. I’ve been able to do this my entire adult life.

The next time you can’t sleep, try thinking about what time you want to wake up. I can tell you from first-hand experience, it  wo  r    k

 

We just dropped some serious money on an air purifier thinking it might help with my allergies. I have seasonal allergies. They’re only bad in fall, winter, spring and summer.

I do a lot of sniffing.

Somedays I sniff, hack and cough so much that if you heard it from another room, you’d think an old ranch hand was choking on chewing tobacco and holler to see if the guy was all right.

Everyone is used to me sniffing and coughing. Nobody hollers to ask if I’m all right. That one was decided a long time ago.

If the air purifier works some magic and helps my allergies, it’s possible I could have more energy. I might win more games of Mancala and chess with the grands. I might even be able to reach dishes on the top shelf in the kitchen without having to stand on a chair.

Clearly, I expect a lot for my money.

Not only is our air purifier supposed to help with allergies, but it is also supposed to rid the house of cooking odors. The leaflet that came with it says it will rid the house of bacon, pizza and meatloaf smells.

The cooking smell I’d like to eliminate is salmon. When I cook salmon, I throw open the windows, which lets the salmon smell out and clouds of pollen in.

Salmon tastes good, but it’s not a scent you’re going to dab behind your ears or want to permeate your clothes.

My better half and I were talking about all the different ways people fragrance their bodies—creams, lotions, cologne, deodorant, hair products, hand sanitizers. There are so many different scents and fragrances interacting on one body it’s a wonder we don’t spontaneously combust.

We even load up our homes and cars with fragrances: pomegranate rose water dish soap, mandarin coriander laundry soap (do you cook with it or wash your clothes in it?) calm and bliss-scented fabric softeners. Scented outlet plugs like almond croissant, salted butterscotch and warm apple pie enable you to fragrance while you sleep. I’m afraid I’d wake up and immediately want to start baking. Or eating. Or both.

The husband said, “Do you know what I think a house should smell like?”

“What?” I said.

“Bacon.”

I didn’t respond.

I just let it hang in the air. Along with the salmon and pollen.

Oh well. At least I have a gift idea for his birthday – bacon-scented plug-in air fresheners for the house. He’ll be in hog heaven.

We used to tell our kids to act their age. Now they tell us to act our age. We try, but it’s not easy when you are twenty-somethings trapped inside the bodies of seasoned citizens.

The husband spent five days last fall channeling Paul Bunyan, swinging an axe at the roots on a 60-year-old maple tree that a removal service had taken down. In addition to getting most of the roots out, he got two frozen shoulders, a wrist injury, steroid injections and months of physical therapy.

Not to be left out, I injured my back lunging over a seat in a moving SUV to retrieve a coffee mug. The vault went well but my landing was a disaster. I pose no threat to Simone Biles.

We are now trying (at least temporarily) to time our heavy lifting to whenever someone younger stops by. We don’t tag just anybody. We size ‘em up, study their spines, guess how much they can lift and whether they’ll sue us if something goes wrong.

We had new gutter filters installed last week. We signed the paperwork, offered the installer a lemonade and swiped our credit card. The installer hadn’t been out the door for five seconds when the husband charged after him on a dead run.

He caught the fella just in time to help move some heavy patio furniture back into place.

We have a huge hedge that requires being on a ladder and leaning over somewhat precariously to give it a flattop. Our son often spends the night on his way to and from jobsites in the area but usually arrives late at night and leaves before dawn. We’re not sure how the neighbors would feel about electric hedge trimmers buzzing while they sleep.

On the upside, if a delivery guy has a heavy box and I see him coming, most of the time he will gladly set it in the front hall.

Our house is on a crawl space that needs checking every year or so to make sure it is dry. To get in the crawl, you remove a metal partition from a window well, drop down on your arms and squeeze through the opening like a gator. We presented this opportunity to two grandsons as an adventure that would be second only to camping in the Rockies with no adult supervision.

They slithered down, reported the crawl was bone dry and emerged with a dead mouse. Naturally, other grands wanted to go down, but when the boys told them there weren’t any more mice, they lost interest.

We are now eyeing a large, worn, matted area rug in the family room that anchors an extremely heavy sofa sleeper. We may have to wait until the entire family comes for Thanksgiving.

I’m stealth about slipping outside each morning to retrieve newspapers from the driveway. I dread someone driving by, lowering their window and yelling, “Get with the times!”

Oh, darlin’, we’re with the Times—and the Journal and the Star and the News. Two papers in print and four online.

Back when an apple was still a fruit and nobody ever heard of the internet, every house on both sides of the block got a morning newspaper. Today, we are the only house on the block to get a newspaper in the driveway. We might be the only ones in the whole subdivision.

Paper and print are part of our history. We met in college. He was a graduate teaching assistant in the photo lab and I was an undergrad. We met in the darkroom to see what would develop.

We bonded over newsprint, halftones, the deafening roar of offset presses and the smell of darkroom chemicals.

I grew up in a home that received a newspaper in the morning and another in the evening. Mom and Dad had the same thing every day for breakfast: coffee, buttered toast and the morning paper.

They had the same conversation every day, too.

He’d say: “You don’t need to read that to me; I just read it.”

Then she’d say: “Ok, but did you read this—”

Then they’d trade sections.

After dinner, it was the same thing all over again, but without the buttered toast.

My husband’s first job was delivering newspapers door to door on his bicycle. As a girl, I poured through the Women’s section on lazy Sunday afternoons vicariously attending weddings of strangers, learning where they were from, who their parents were, how the groom planned on earning a living, where they would live, and how long the train on the bride’s wedding gown was.

A great aunt used to make sailor hats from newspapers, clean windows with them and wrap tomatoes in need of ripening in them. Newsprint was a multi-use tool.

Newspapers took us through the assassination of JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and the horrors of 9/11.

And now? Newspapers in print are novelties — like turntable record players and 35 mm manually-focus cameras.

Before any big family gathering, the husband tears out pages with comics, the crosswords, Sudoku and word puzzles. A son-in-law and half-dozen grandkids charge through the front door and make wild grabs for them. There’s often a cluster working to solve for 61 across: solid fossil fuel.

Yes, you can find everything in print online, but there’s just something about a newspaper in your hands. Maybe it’s the feel or the crinkle. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of wrestling that monster into position. You bat back a page, snap it behind another, give it a shake, fold the whole kit and caboodle and are ready to read. Newspaper aerobics.

Some may think people who still get a newspaper in print are relics. We prefer to think of ourselves as affectionate historians.