Another Day in the Country
Great expectations
© Another Day in the Country
I always have great expectations about what I’ll accomplish in another day, but often I’m chagrined as the sun goes down. “What have I done with these hours?” I ask myself.
My big accomplishment today was that I painted zinnias, twice.
There’s a certain vibrance in their color that stretches my vocabulary to describe. There are bright pink and purple hues, and I find myself in need of a very specific tube of watercolor paint from which you could mix those pink and purple shades — a color that is not in my regular pallet of paints.
I tried making do (which is a specialty of mine) more than once, but it’s still not right. This means that if I want to get it right, I need to make a trip to Hobby Lobby before the flowers fade.
Trees once again are coming up in unexpected and unwanted spots in my acre yard. Maybe, in my spare time, I’ll go out and remove the seedlings sneaking up taller from my flower beds.
If I have a list of tasks I want to accomplish, I do better — even if I make a list after I’ve started a project and can immediately check it off.
With a lineup of 2 or 20, it makes no difference, I’m kept on track, checking things off. And there’s that sense of satisfaction when there’s a line drawn through the task when it’s done!
But there is something in me that hates the task of making a list — as if, once made, it cannot be deviated from.
The kid in me rather enjoys the adventure of freewheeling a day, wondering what will happen next in my retirement years. However, the adult side of my nature shakes her head in dismay at how glibly I can diddle away a day.
Last weekend, we were sitting at a lovely Chinese restaurant when fortune cookies came at the end of the meal. I chuckled.
“You will accomplish great things with your spare time,” I read.
Great things? Oh, my! I suppose I could try to make that prediction come true.
So far, it’s a couple of watercolor paintings of zinnias, a pile of young potential trees cut down in their prime for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and another book by Alexander McCall Smith that I’m reading. He’s such a prolific writer. I know what he’s doing in his spare time: churning out another book.
I’ve also cooked some unusual things in my spare time this week, including bierock rolls and ratatouille crepes. How’s that for eclectic cuisine?
I picked green beans from the Three Sisters garden for supper.
If I hadn’t known before, I would know now why green beans are called string beans. These were the stringiest beans I’ve ever grown.
I de-strung them on both sides and was left wondering whether I should try to release more strings from those veins.
We’re talking serious strings, as if the beans were woven rather than grown.
I made sure our erstwhile beans were well done when I served them for supper, but we discovered you couldn’t really chew those beans toward integration.
No matter how long you chewed, there was a wad of strings left in your mouth roughly equivalent to the size of said bean.
You can bet that when I get beans for next year’s regular, row-by-row garden, done by just One Sister (not three) that this sister will be checking to make sure the beans planted are advertised as “stringless.”
Between potato skins and bean strings, there was quite a mound of compost beside our plates at the end of the meal.
If those strings were any longer, they could vie with rawhide for strength and be used for something useful. Maybe we’ve discovered the Indian way of flossing in the olden days — eating green beans.
At the supper table, I watched my sister untangling bean strings from her teeth and began to laugh.
“I think that when the Indians planted this Three Sisters type of garden, they just planted and went off hunting or something.” I said. “I bet they didn’t even eat those beans green. They just waited for everything to mature in the fall, sitting there symbiotically in the same hole. When everything froze, they gathered up the corn and shucked it, hulled the beans, picked up the squash, and saved some of the seeds for next year.”
They weren’t worrying about balanced meals and probably never voiced concern about having enough green veggies on the plate or too many things that were white.
What the meal looked like “plated” was definitely not on their to-do list, as it is on mine.
I like my meal to be colorful, and red blood doesn’t ever come into the equation. So, my expectations for my Indian lore garden were a bit hilarious to put it mildly.
After tonight’s string bean meal, I made a list, which includes pulling the corn and beans up.
That’s it! I’ll leave the squash and their cousins to grow a while longer before I pull the plug on them, too.
In all my spare time, I’ll form those corn shucks into a mini-display celebrating the fall season.
I’ll tie them up with those green bean vines and call it another good day in the country.
PS In my spare time, I also wrote a column.