Vacation Plans

Ever since my co-workers found out I'm taking a two-week vacation, they have been plying me with questions about my plans.

"Where are you going?"

"Have you made reservations yet?"

"Are you driving or flying?"

"I hear Minnesota is nice this time of year."

You should have seen the look on some of the faces when I told them I hadn't planned to go anywhere.  At all.

"You're just...staying home?!?  That's not a real vacation.  I would never do that!"

"Don't say that too loud!  They'll call you in to work if they know you're just at home."

I know that they mean well and are really just asking out of curiosity and to pass the time of day.  But it made me think about what people in general believe a vacation should be.

Merriam-Webster defines it like this:

1: a respite or a time of respite from something : intermission

 

2a : a scheduled period during which activity (as of a court or school) is suspended b : a period of exemption from work granted to an employee 

 

3: a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation <had a restful vacation at the beach>

 

4: an act or an instance of vacating

 

 

After thinking about it, I decided I identify best with the first definition:  A respite or intermission from something.  Sometimes, when I am particularly frazzled by work, I see the weekends as mini vacations.

The 'traveling vacation' is way down the list at number 3!  While I do enjoy a change of scenery now and again, coming home is often a serious letdown for me.  After spending a few days or a couple of weeks enjoying myself tremendously, I come home to vacation laundry and a yard full of work and a kennel bill.  There's the hustle to get the grocery shopping done and put everything away and back in order before it's back to the daily grind.

I don't actually get away from it all.  It just waits for me to come back.

When this year's vacation time rolled around, we set it up to happen while some family we haven't seen in years will be in town.  I get to see someone I've waited a long time to see and I get to spend more time in my own little backyard sanctuary.

That sounds like a respite to me.

My Oasis

Isn't it lovely?  This green oasis I've created in my back yard?  What was once as flat and featureless as a patch of prairie has become lush and green, and dare I say it, fecund?

It has.  I love it.  My husband has threatened to get a monkey and a parrot and pipe in jungle noises.

This is what used to be the east end of our clothesline.  We built an arbor in the fence along the south edge of the property and used the existing clothesline lines as a vertical growing surface.  Now, walking under the lines is rather like passing through a jungle landscape.  All temporary of course.  The gourds are annual vines and when the frost finally does them in, I'll be bringing in the gourds for drying and tearing down the vines.

The really great news this week is that I finally have baby luffa gourds! This is the first of what has now become 5 babies maturing slowly on the vine.  I'm now hopeful that if the weather holds out and stays warm long enough, I'll have luffa sponges to play with this winter.

In a normal year, I'd say I don't have much hope.  We usually get a killing frost near the end of September or at the latest, mid-October in my neck of the woods.  But I've read a few long-range weather forecasts that warn we could be experiencing warmer than usual temperatures into the end of October.  That would be great for the gardening season.  It would also be a little freaky.  Even though it almost BURNS to say this, hopefully, this winter will be more normal in the way of precipitation.  Another dry year would not be good regardless of how much I despise the snow.  It's not the snow's fault.  I just hate driving in that mess.

Just in case you're wondering, here are the little Tennessee spinner gourds.  They have gone batshit crazy and I have what could be dozens of the little fellas.  I see 8 or 9 just in this little photo alone.  But, I have a project in mind for them.  Last winter I found an artist online who dries and paints the gourds to make Christmas ornaments.  Hers are gorgeous!  I don't believe for a minute that mine will be as pretty as the two I bought from her, but I'm going to try it out for myself anyway.  I love nature crafts like that and this one has me inspired.  So look out family!  You might be getting gourds for Christmas.

On a related note, I discovered a stash of dried birdhouse gourds in my storage building the other day.  Looks like I'm having a gourdy winter!

The eggplants just keep on a-coming.  Fortunately, I discovered that my boss has a fondness for them.  So I unloaded shared my prolific harvest with him last week.  I have another friend at work who likes them as well and she'll take some off my hands.  I love to grow them and if I can feed some friends in the process, that makes it all the sweeter for me.




Last week I finally decided to try drying my extra (!) cherry tomatoes.  I cut them in half and put them in my handy-dandy food dehydrator and a few hours later, voila!  Tomaisins!  They are so tasty!  I almost can't wait for it to be February so I can get some out and put them on my pizza.  I have a feeling we'll wind up with lots of tomaisins this year. I don't know if I have to, but we put them in little snack bags and store them in the freezer.  It doesn't seem to change the texture or flavor.

Well, I'm on vacation for a couple weeks here.  We have family we haven't seen for a very long time coming in for a visit.  Really looking forward to it.

A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall

This is what I awoke to this morning.  The picture was actually taken this afternoon. But I think you get the idea.

Rain.  Lots of it.  Coming down in buckets.  It has been so long since we got any substantial rain, that I rushed outside to see it up close.

I stood under the cover on the patio and gaped in awe at the torrent coming out of the downspout and wished I had gotten the rain barrel project started this summer.  We would have had several barrels worth.  It was, in a word, spectacular.

It was so spectacular that I slipped from the relative dryness of the patio into the onslaught and spun in circles in the rain.  It was freezing cold and delicious!  My bare feel splashed in the grassy puddles on the lawn beside the garden.  I was drenched in a matter of moments.

All of the plants in the garden were soaking wet.  The gourd flowers that I had so patiently awaited, were tattered and windblown.  The pepper plants were sagging heavily with the weight of wet peppers and leaves.

This is the rain gauge from my back garden.  It's kind of hard to see, but we got more than 3 1/2 inches of rain in just a couple hours' time.  What a blessing.  By 5:00PM, I swear everything looked greener already.

We took a drive up the highway to check out the local creeks and rivers.  Most of them have dried up almost completely.  Many of the rivers had a small stream running and some of the smaller creeks were full to the brim with freshly fallen rain.

The biggest river in our neck of the woods, the Platte, has been completely dry for weeks.  I had hoped that this would help restore the water flow.  Unfortunately, I think all the rain was south of the river basin.  The riverbed was still bone dry.

Seeing something like that is a little frightening to me.  I've seen the river low before, but I've never seen it dry up and turn to dust.  The local farmers assure me that this has happened before and the river will be back before I know it.  Some have even gone so far as to tell me that it's not dry from the farmers irrigating their corn and soybean crops.  All the irrigation in this neck of the woods is from ground water.  Anyway, we won't run out of water.  It can't happen.

I remain unconvinced.  I have just enough water science in my training to understand how hydrostatic pressure works.  Sure, they might not be irrigating right from the river, but they've pulled so much water out of the underground features that there isn't anything left to go downstream. The farmers poo-poo me and my scientifical leanings.  After all, I'm not a farmer.  What could I know about it?

A little, maybe.

I know that water rights have been a bone of contention since the American Frontier got out to these parts.  I know that water, or the lack thereof, was a prime mover in the Dust Bowl years.  I know that the Dust Bowl is the reason for all the trees in the windbreaks in the Great Plains. 

I also know, because I'm seeing it with my own eyes, that those windbreaks are slowly being dismantled.  Every summer a few more trees are torn out to make room for another half an acre of corn or soybeans.  Every year, another windbreak is taken out.

This is also frightening to me.  I've read the accounts of the people who lived through the dust storms.  About how they couldn't keep it out of the house no matter how many rags they stuffed in the cracks.  I read about how when the wind finally stopped blowing and they were able to pry their doors open and shove aside the mounds of sand and dust, the farmers found their livestock suffocated, choked to death on dust, in what was left of their fields.

It's frightening to me because once this very summer a dust storm blew through our little town.  We went into the house and turned on the scanner in time to hear the local cops making comments on the 'huge wall of dust' that just came through and how creepy it was coming up out of nowhere all of a sudden like that.

It puts a knot in my throat and a stone of fear in the pit of my stomach.  We have made so many dreadful mistakes.  We have much to atone for.  We have much work to do.  How can we just stand by and let people forget the lessons that history has taught us? 

Can this be fixed?  Or will that hard rain fall after all?