Tomstock

Cousin Tom didn't plan a fish fry just to observe our last night at the farm, but it worked out that way. His fish fries, held in his welding shop, are the stuff of local legend. You get the parking gridlock of Woodstock, but the food is much better. And instead of Jimi Hendrix, you get our Uncle Charlie. The guy in the red hat is about to turn 101.

Tomstock features an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the main draw is the fish. Tom and Cousin Jack are noodlers, which means they think it's fun to catch fish with their hands. It works for them, and we get to eat it. Whatever. The buffet is filled out with the neighbors' pot-luck offerings, which means lots of sinful desserts. Grace ate the icing off the red velvet cake, so I had to eat the rest. Darn. Also, UM pointed out a roaster filled with meat that looked like chicken, except that it wasn't. I have a suspicion that I knew the guys in the roaster back when they could croak.

In addition to all its other fine qualities, Tomstock is a kid's paradise. Tom has tricked out his place with all the usual grandkid-friendly gizmos. In addition, though, you get the playground equipment from the country school that was near his childhood home. So you get a terrific slide and jungle gym that no school would dare put in its playground for fear of litigation. The merry-go-round is particularly terrific. 

Poor Cranky Girl #2 got grief from Meta Cranky Girl for leaving her shoes at home. Attending Tomstock is a bit like exotic overseas travel in that you really want your tetanus shot up to date. Upon reflection, I find that the glory of Tomstock is that it requires you to improve your game, or else. Do you want to jump on that trampoline with five other kids and not break your cervical vertebrae when you're bounced off? Great, then let's see some agility and problem-solving skills. Do you really want to crawl to the top of Tom's archway to see what's there? That's fine, but just don't whine when it's time to come down.

And you really do want to crawl to the top, because then you get to see the summer's last sunset. 

--MCG

Dirt Work

The Cranky Girls have returned to their Not Farm space to prepare for Kindergarten and Middle School. Meta Cranky is preparing to have someone else take her trash away each Friday. But on our way out of town, CGs managed to collect several adventures and a photo backlog that we will process urban tranquility. 

Here's what we saw on our last day at the farm:

What we didn't see was the road, our mailbox, and our house. Our vision was obstructed by our neighbor's farm, which was vigorously blowing north. Here's what it looked like from our house, moving in from the south:

Turns out that what you really want on a hot windy day is a luscious alfalfa field. Not just because your legumes are fixing nitrogen in your soil. No, it's because those 15-foot roots are holding your dirt down. 

This has been a sorry summer for farmers. After the harvest, we got a drought and weeks of merciless heat. Last summer, we could plant field peas after harvest, a fine way to get a summer crop while scoring more of those nitrogen-fixing legumes. But without a rain, field peas were pretty much out of the picture. So we waited, and waited, to prep the field for a fall crop. Our field has been plowed once, with great trouble and expense, and more broken plow shears than we care to count.  

Look closely and you'll see the light brown wheat stubble in our lumpy field. Turns out that lumpy and stubbly is terrific on a day like this.  The dust you see wafting above our field isn't ours: our lumpy field stayed put while south wind picked up the smooth, twice-cultivated field nearby.

Make all the Dust Bowl comparisons you like, but a perfect storm of high wind and dry conditions can make any farmer look like an idiot. On our farm, we clearly remember when our sandy hill began to blow in the '60s. The Cranky Family unrolled bale after bale of hay on the sandy spots to keep the dirt where it belonged. Now we've planted the hill (which is classified as "Highly Erodible Land" by Feds That Give Us Money) into permanent grasses, so we won't have to go there again. 

Erosion on a this scale is tragic, of course. But can we take a moment to say that it's also a big pain in the tush? The Crankies' front porch has drifts that would be at home in Lawrence of Arabia. We left open a south basement window: the beds downstairs were covered with a layer of sand that brought to mind the snow drifts of Dr. Zhivago. Those aren't the film references that we're going for. Babe or Chicken Run  we can handle. But you can keep Ralph Fiennes, his swishy khakis, the Libyan desert, and The English Patient. 

--MCG

A Real Operator

*photo credit to Lydia

Today, MGC became a real operator by signing paperwork at the U.S. Department of Agriculture office at the county seat. I signed on the line that clearly said Operator, so it must be true. You may be interested in knowing that your tax $$ will be going to make sure that MCG's '09 wheat crop is more lucrative than an uninsured, drought-stricken, and frost-bitten 20 bushel/acre crop otherwise would be.

Some federal offices are comforting and sustaining. Post offices, for example, smell familiar and have employees who seem genuinely interested in helping me process my mail. The Ag Department, however, makes me feel like I've walked into the wrong seminar room. Like my poor professor who walked in ready to talk about Middlemarch when the rest of us were primed for Mill on the Floss. 

Things I have learned from the Department of Agriculture: 

1)If you want $$ from a government program, buying local is counterproductive. Our lovegrass project was complicated by buying seed from a neighbor rather than from a dealer who would have all the handy paperwork. For the USDA, locavores kind of suck.

2)It's really just easier to do it the way the the feds do it. Case in point: Our soil test indicated that our lovegrass needed 32 pounds of nitrogen/acre to meet the standards for a program that establishes grasses in erodible land. So, like a wierdo urban cranky girl who doesn't put Sevin dust in my tomatoes, I asked about alternatives to commercial, petroleum-based fertilizer. The answer: it costs more to apply feedlot manure, and the feds are not going to cover it. Oh, and we used to have a program to fertilize with chicken poop from eastern Oklahoma. We know that all the crap from factory chicken farms is screwing up the watershed over there. But the program expired, so never mind.

MCG was doing her own translation from the original government-speak, so the nuances may have been lost on her. Also, she is distracted by the voice of her deceased step-mother-in-law, the opinionated organic gardener. From Organic Gardener Heaven, she is communicating that commercial fertilizer is a great deal for Monsanto, but not so good for her grandchildren's health. Clearly, MCG is out of her league and should go back to picking tomato worms off her Jersey Girls.

--MCG

Bespoke Birthday Cake

Grace ate cake at an early-summer birthday and declared, "She can make this cake for my birthday." "She" was Wanda, and when Grace's birthday rolled around, she did. It's a glorious angel food confection, delivered on Aunt Minnie's Fosteria cake plate. Talk about eye candy. Perhaps my favorite part was the Alma Cronin icing, a seven-minute creation that pre-dates marshmallow stuff from a jar. I like this icing on lots of levels, and not just because of the way it sticks to my fingers. In my apprentice cranky days, I spent a lot of time watching elderly women (crones over 40) making funeral dinners in the church basement, and Alma had an engaging prickliness that spoke to the cockles of my cranky little heart. 

The Alma icing makes me mentally review the recipes I refer to by a proper name. My mother's recipe box is lousy with them: Berta's Fan Fan rolls. Ruth Ann's White Mountain Ice Cream. My system is less colorful, but mentally, I insert the name of the person who introduced me to something fabulous: (Mark's) Hummus with Pomegranate Seeds on Top. (Laura's) Carrot Soup. (Liz's) Soup with Spinach that Small Children Eat. Recipes come with baggage, not to mention responsibility. Let's just hope that I'm not remembered by posterity with (Toxic Mom's) Scorched Broccoli.

--MCG

Evoking Closure

At the farm, crankiness is a form of self expression, and this has not been a subdued summer. MCG has loudly uttered Mother-of-the-Year-type statements, such as If you two want to turn me into a drooling idiot, just keep it up. Some of us have proclaimed that the world will end if others of us touch particular CG property. MCG has declared she will not listen to any sentences beginning Sister said. Then came the day that cranky words were said over two boxes of mac and cheese. One exuberantly cranky outburst followed another, a door was slammed, and a window was sacrificed on the altar of crankiness.

At this point, MCG entered the category that Uncle Michael calls "Toxic Mom." Crankies 1 and 2 have made reparations in the form of extra acts of housework. And after two tries, we finally received a tempered-glass window of the correct size. Lydia held the glass while UM nailed in the trim.

Apparently there's a special tool called a nail set to help install finish nails with small heads. Do we have this tool? Take a big guess. But we do have a metal file. You put it over the nail and then whack. Extra points for adapting available tools to do the job.

We spent a month with this empty space between the laundry room and the kitchen, and it afforded us opportunities to perform clever tricks and Marx Brothers-type pantomimes. But now the window is replaced and the cranky incident that broke it has become Amusing Family Lore. MCG could get all literary and talk about literal and metaphorical closure, but she's sure you appreciate her walking away from that temptation.

--MCG

Dog Update

I was going to post a picture of this goofy bird dog and report that she was settling in nicely. Still chewing a bit, not so much jumping, putting on a few pounds. Everything on track to take her to Texas, where a new family is waiting to see whether she's a good fit. 

And then, the dogs had a news flash this morning:

Apparently, there's a porcupine in these parts. Both dogs ended up with lips full of quills.  Coco didn't look so great, either.

A morning's visit to the vet and all's well again. Both dogs appear slightly chastened, but I'm sure that will pass. The vet assures me that if the porcupine is still there, the dogs will do it again.

--MCG

The Choir Invisible

My mother used to have a pile of cards and programs collected from the funerals she attended. They were almost all conducted by the same undertaker, with the same illustration on the front and the same Victorian-sounding poem on the back. Only the names and dates were different. I'd find these tucked into her top dresser drawer when I looked for a handkerchief and wonder how a person would collect so many. Now I find these cards in the pocket of the black dress I leave at CGF to wear to funerals. Every summer, there's at least one funeral. 

You would expect the actuarial charts to catch up with farmers, who are an aging demographic, despite what the Times says about those hip, young organic farmers with Political Science degrees. But the black dress and I are going to other services, too, each with its own set of grieving family members and, often, awkward family psycho-dynamics. The service for a heartbreakingly young man that had the Lynyrd Skynyrd soundtrack. The banker's funeral that I watched on TV in the overflow room. Mass for the mother of a high-school boyfriend. Cancer victims, suicides, traffic fatalities. 

It would seem be a grim litany, this forced march to the services of friends and neighbors. And yet the generosity of spirit I see at each of these events is invariably heartening. It's not just about the predictable Protestant casserole; I think it's about time. 

Ponder this: I went to a beautiful funeral at a historic Episcopalian church in Austin with the burial following at the lovely state cemetery. Afterward, most friends and associates expressed their sincere and heartfelt condolences before time constraints required them to return to their law firms.  This urban tribe is no less thoughtful or considerate than my rural one, but home visitation and church dinner are not part of its folkways. In contrast, about 40 friends and family members stayed at my grandparents house for three days after my uncle's funeral in 1957--it took that long for the floodwaters to recede. My mother was one of the first to leave, and she flew out in a crop-duster's airplane. I still hear stories about that post-funeral camp-out from the people who were there, and none of them indicate that those three days in a house full of damp, grieving people was a waste of their time.

Tomorrow, Michael and Jamie will sing Amazing Grace at the service of a a long-time civic leader. The black dress and I will, once again, watch and learn.

--MCG

*key to obscure literary reference: I know this George Eliot poem because it's from the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch:

O may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence

Axis of Evil

The Cranky Girls have been merrily visiting with their Urban Company for the past few days. Lots of fun with visitors, their lovely daughter, and their alarmingly intelligent dog. After our very happy visit, we return to the garden to find that CGF is under attack.

The edible plants that began their career in March have prevailed against the heat, the wind, and the drought. However, they have met their Waterloo, their Dunkirk, and their Dien Bien Phu in the form of bugs. Here's what a squash bug can do to a zucchini. Avert your eyes if you're squeamish.

And there are the tomato worms, which I think of as the al-Qaeda of the bug world. If I were the size of a tomato, I'd be really scared.  When the business end of the worm points my way, it's kind of scary despite my size advantage.

I fondly remember when my granny had a generous container of Sevin dust in the garage that would take these suckers out. My granny didn't spend much time worrying about what toxins were collecting in her tissues. After reading too many books about the dangers of ingesting scary chemicals, we choose to just remove the worms by hand. It's an art, not a science.

Lucky for us there's not so much that wants to eat the eggplant. 

--MCG