July 8, 2009

• How did we blunder?

  Let me count the ways.

  1. My shopping list:  for a couple of weeks I have been noting our needs on the magnetic dry erase list on the refrigerator.  Monday, the day before my projected trip to Wasilla, I transcribed those items onto a page of a spiral notebook and did some serious checking of supplies and discussion with Doug, to fill out the shopping list.  When I left for town noonish on Tuesday, I left the list in the notebook on my bed.

  2. My lunch:  Tuesday around noon, all bathed and dressed and ready to go, I made a quesadilla.  Since it was too hot to eat immediately, I set it aside to cool while I enlisted Doug to help me get the potted rhubarb plant into the car.  That 5 gallon bucket of wet dirt is heavy.  When we got the rhubarb buckled into the passenger seat, I got in and drove away, leaving my lunch behind.  Doug had it for breakfast.
  3. My rant:  Greyfox told me a couple of weeks ago that he’d bought a hanging basket of nasturtiums and lobelia (he didn’t say “lobelia”, but “little white flowers”) at the farmer’s market.  A few days ago, he started asking me for advice on plant care because the leaves were turning yellow.  I had already advised him to remove the flowers as soon as they faded (deadheading), and to pick off any leaf as soon as it showed any yellow.  I repeated that advice, and said his problem could be root rot since the container had no drain hole.

     I wasn’t even out of my car yet when I saw what was causing his yellowing leaves.  The plants were going to seed.  I took the basket off its hook, sat beside it on the porch, and started picking off dead flowers, seed pods, and yellow leaves.  As I worked, I lectured him.  I ranted about people who neglect plants and said just because he could afford to buy it didn’t mean he deserved to have it.

     I was bitching him out pretty thoroughly when I realized my blood sugar was low and asked him what he had to eat.  He nuked a frozen burrito for me, which was awfully bland, so I started popping the spicy faded nasturtiums and immature seeds into my mouth.  I went around the rest of the day with my breath smelling of some of the sweetest flowers on the planet.  The food sweetened my mood too, but I had to apologize to Greyfox to sweeten his disposition.

  4. My hatch:  By the last supermarket stop, I was fatigued and my blood sugar was low again.  A kid helped me out of the store with my bags.  I had to unpack them, sort stuff, put the perishables into the insulated cooler, the fragile things on top of the pile, etc.  Then I got in and drove through the parking lot and across the street to a thrift shop — with the hatch open.  Greyfox asked me if I’d done that deliberately to give us more ventilation (It was a beastly hot day in Wasilla — a roadside time and temperature sign read 91 just after 6 PM.).  Sometimes that man gives me way too much credit for smarts.  Either that, or he was being sarcastic.

     On the positive side, I don’t think anything slid or bounced out while I was driving with the hatch open.  If it did, it must have been something non-essential, because I haven’t noticed anything missing.  Another positive:  I found a camera tripod at the thrift shop, a better one than I have ever used in my life, for $5.00.  I also bought seven VHS tapes of my kinds of movies, an antidote to the recent BAD FILM FESTIVAL of  “so bad they’re good” (not in my opinion) flicks Greyfox had given me.

  5. Greyfox’s glasses:  Early in our shopping rounds, the Old Fart put on his prescription sunglasses and put his regular glasses in their case in his shirt pocket.  When we got back to his cabin, he couldn’t find the glasses.  After searching the car, he phoned La Fiesta, where we’d had dinner, but he hadn’t left them there.  Our only stop after the restaurant had been at his storage shed at the far end of the strip of cabins where he lives.  I asked him if it was possible that the glasses case had slid from his shirt pocket while he was pulling things out of the storage shed.  His eyes lit with hope, and I drove back there.

     As we approached, he spotted the case on the ground in the driveway and I hit the brakes.  First thing he noticed when he picked up the glasses case was tire tread marks on it.  He had to straighten a bent frame, but otherwise the glasses were unharmed.  That is a very good thing, because his uncorrected vision is 20/900 — legally blind.  His special thick lenses don’t come cheap and they have to be ordered from afar, so he might have spent weeks with only dark glasses in his current prescription and an old pair that doesn’t let him see as well.

  Just as the left-open hatch turned out to be a harmless error and Greyfox’s glasses weren’t irreparably damaged by being run over, my left-behind list wasn’t a big loss in the end.  While Greyfox had been searching for his glasses, Doug called to say he had found the list.  I had him read it to me over the phone, and picked up the rest of my groceries after I dropped Greyfox off at home.  The Old Fart’s hurt feelings will heal.  It’s certainly not the first time I’ve bitched him out, and he has learned through the years to understand, if not appreciate, what happens when my blood sugar is low.

  There is a story behind the potted rhubarb I took to town and gave to Greyfox.  Years ago, when Doug was small, his dad, Charley, helped move one of the original cabins from the Matanuska Valley agricultural colony to the museum in Wasilla.  He salvaged a few things from the old homesite, including some rhubarb roots from the abandoned garden.

  They grew in my garden at Elvenhurst, my place across the highway from where we live now (have been “house-sitting” for ten years), and continued to survive unattended over there for seven or eight years.  A couple of years ago, I went over and dug up some of the surviving perennials, including several pieces of rhubarb root.   That season, I ran out of stamina (M.E., in case anyone is wondering why I’d run out of stamina) after planting only one of the roots.  The following summer, I got another one planted, and the rest of the root pieces stayed, with a little bit of soil, in the bottom of a blue plastic bucket through two winters, put out a few small leaves each summer, and SURVIVED.  This year, I got a third big piece of root planted, leaving one small piece in the bucket with just 2 little leaves on it.  I filled the bucket with soil, potted the root, and tended it for a few weeks.

  

  This is how it looked Tuesday morning, in my yard,

  
  …in the car before we (the rhubarb and I) left here,

  
  …and in its new home on Greyfox’s porch.
  

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