Poor Meredith. All my hard work in the garden is starting to pay off, and I’m beginning to harvest a lot of vegetables. To give you an example, for the last couple of weeks I have picked a large basket of green beans daily and over 10 to 15 pounds of tomatoes every other day.
Most of these vegetables are being canned or frozen. And that’s where Meredith enters the picture. I do the growing and picking, and Meredith is in charge of the produce preservation department. And she has been busy. To date, she has prepared and canned over 78 pounds of pickle cucumbers (36 quarts and 20 pints canned) and 88 pounds of tomatoes (26 quarts of pasta sauce), not to mention over four quarts of pickled peppers and five pints of candied Jalapeno peppers. She has also frozen 19 pounds of beans. And there is more to come. As I write she has 15 pounds of tomatoes ready to be made in sauce.
I didn’t realize how time consuming it is to can or freeze large quantities of vegetables. Take the pasta sauce. The tomatoes have to be washed, put in hot water, allowed to cool, have the skins removed, mashed into a paste, put through a sieve to remove the seeds, boiled down to the right consistency with added diced peppers and onions, garlic and oregano and poured into canning jars. After the lids are placed on them the jars have to be boiled for the right amount of time to be preserved.
That’s a lot of work, and I’m starting to feel guilty about all the hours that Meredith is spending in the kitchen doing all that canning and freezing. I hate feeling guilty. Fortunately I have the same ability as most married men to come up with ways to justify the division of labor within the household.
Most men probably do not believe these excuses are sufficient to convince their wives that the division of labor is fair and equitable. That would be tantamount to selling refrigerators to Eskimos. We realize that most experienced wives have long since learned that men are shiftless no-accounts when it comes to household tasks. I believe that men invent these rationalizations in order to avoid having guilty feelings that might otherwise ruin important activities like fishing, laying on the couch watching football, golf and puttering around the workshop making useless things.
There are several tried and true excuses that men rely on to justify not helping out with household chores like canning and freezing. One of them is that “(insert wife’s name) really hates having me under her feet when she’s doing (insert household chore).” I know it’s weak.
Another way men avoid feelings of guilt is by being ignorant or inept. In some cases this is not an invented excuse. I am genuinely ignorant or inept when it comes to so many household tasks. Washing machines and dryers baffle me. I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to set the timer on the coffee maker. In my hands a vacuum cleaner with its cords and hoses is an invitation to disaster or serious injury. I do not know how to can, blanch beans properly or prepare tomato sauce for canning. You might argue that I could learn to do these things. Yeah, well, I’ve been trying to learn how to use the DVR remote control for two years, and how’s that going?
For me, one of the best of the tried and true ways to rationalize why I’m not helping out with the canning and freezing that I cannot do anything in the kitchen without making a mess. Like most men, I unable do something as simple as making a sandwich without leaving a trail of evidence on the countertop in the form of crumbs, spots of mayo, pickle juice, and whatever else has gone into the sandwich of the day—and that’s when I’m are trying to be neat and tidy. If I tried to make tomato sauce from scratch the kitchen would look like the aftermath of an explosion at the Chef Boyardee factory by the time I finished.
I’ve come up a new reason to justify doing the picking and leaving the canning and freezing to Meredith. It protects Meredith from being exposed to the perils of the garden. Laugh if you will, but harvesting vegetables from the garden is not an easy task.
Take pickle picking. It’s a chore to hunt for small cucumbers. They hide under the leaves. You have to get on your hands and knees to find them which means that you’re probably going to put your hand on a slimy slug at some point in the process. The plants are trained to crawl up tent-like frames to keep the fruit off the ground, and you have to crawl under the frames to get at any cucks that have grown there. The sweat is running into your eyes, and then Mr. Horsefly decides to land on your neck. The resulting frenzy of panicked action is not pretty or pleasant. Imagine a man having a grand mal seizure in the middle of a flower bed, and you’ll get the picture.
Picking tomatoes is not a lot of fun either. I’m growing 36 Roma tomato plants. They each produce a lot of tomatoes, and they do so continuously throughout the season. You have to pick the ripe ones and leave the others on the plant to get ripe. The plants are big and bushy which means that you have to bend over or squat to find the ripe tomatoes. When I’m through picking tomatoes for the day I feel like I need physical therapy. But that’s not the worst. The worst is when you encounter a tomato hornworm caterpillar. I’m not exaggerating. These things are as long and as thick as a large man’s middle finger. The first time I reached into a tomato plant and one fell on my arm I about soiled my pants.
Even picking green beans is not without its perils. I grew pole beans on seven-foot tall frames this year. I don’t have to bend over to pick the beans like I did with the bush beans last year. It’s easy on my back. What could be more pleasant? But green beans produce blossoms, and blossoms attract bees—big bees and little bees, but particularly bumblebees.
Bumblebees are huge. Science suggests they should not be able to fly given the size of their wings. But they do fly, and they sound like an A-10 Warthog on a strafing run. Apparently human ears resemble large bean blossoms because bumblebees seem to spend a lot time investigating ear holes from close range. When you’re standing between two seven-foot walls of green beans with a basket in one hand and picked beans in the other and a large, fuzzy, buzzing bumblebee threatens to get intimate with your ear it takes a lot of willpower and dedication to the task not to cut and run.
The way I figure it, facing the perils of picking is a fair trade for the work of canning and freezing, and that assuages any feeling of guilt I might have about not helping out when I see Meredith slaving away in the kitchen. And if that excuse starts to wear thin after a while, give me time—I’m pretty sure I can come up with another.
Several times a week the thought occurs to me that moving to a rural area in North Georgia Mountains after I retired is one of the best things I’ve ever done. There are many, many reasons I believe that. Some of them are big, complicated reasons, and some are small, simple reasons. Many times the thought is triggered by some event that has no great significance in and of itself other than to remind me that I no longer live in Pinellas County, Florida.
For instance, a few evenings ago I drove through a violent mountain thunderstorm. I experienced some hellacious thunderstorms when I lived in Florida, but a thunderstorm in the North Georgia Mountains is a different animal.
I had been to a meeting of the Fannin County Master Gardeners. Evening thunderstorms had been predicted on the morning news. One of the Master Gardeners received a text from her husband near the end of the meeting and announced, “It just crossed the border.” That’s all it took for the meeting to adjourn instantly and everyone to scurry to their cars. We moved quicker than Congress during an anthrax scare.
I was halfway home on a narrow, winding back road when the storm struck. Lightening arced across the sky, and loud peals of thunder rolled and echoed through the mountains. Strong gusts of wind presaged the storm. The tall grass in the fields besides the road lay over in moving waves, and the limbs of the trees began to whip violently to and fro. Leaves and twigs flew through the air across the road in front of me. I was half expecting to see an airborne squirrel. It grew dark, and then the rain hit—torrential sheets of rain that obscured my view of the road ahead despite the best efforts of my wipers. The rain fell so hard that the roadside ditches were quickly filled with swift running water.
I had to swerve several times to avoid large tree limbs that had fallen on the road, and I began to worry that I might get hit by a large branch or even an entire tree. That’s not an irrational fear. There are so many trees here in the mountains, and you often see blown over trees. In Pinellas County, which is largely paved over, the chance of getting hit by a fallen tree in a storm is minimal. You have a better chance of getting hit by a windblown homeless person. In fact, the next day I drove the same route to town and saw that a large tree had fallen across the road less than a mile from my cabin. It had taken out the power line. The trunk of the tree was at least 20 inches in diameter. I realized that the tree had fallen the night before in the ten minute interval between the time I passed it and the time I got home to find the power out. That’s getting too close for comfort.
To me a thunderstorm in the mountains is a closer, more personal and immediate experience than one in Florida. I think that’s because the struggle between the power of storm and the resilience of nature is more visible. Whatever the reason, the storm was another reminder that I now live in a different place.
Here’s another example of the type of small event that can remind me that things are different in a small rural community. I was sitting in my truck behind a car stopped at a light at an intersection with the main highway through Fannin County. The sun was beating down, and it was a really hot day. There was a smiling young man with a backpack at the corner of the intersection. He had a large, worn Bible in his hand, and he was witnessing to his faith in a quiet and restrained way. He wasn’t bothering anyone. He didn’t have a sign saying that I was going to hell if I don’t repent or that the end was near.
The man in the car ahead of me rolled down his window and called to the young man. There was a brief conversation, and then the man in the car extended his arm out the window with a baseball hat in his hand. The young man walked over, took the hat, thanked the man, put it on his head and walked back to where he was standing. The light changed, and we all proceeded on our way.
I’m not sure why, but there was something about the incident that made me think that life is different in a rural area away from the city or crowded suburbia. It also made me thankful that I chose to move to the country. And, yes, I can be accused of overly romanticizing this place, and I know that random acts of kindness happen everywhere, even in the populous places, but happiness is as much a state of mind as it is a state of being, and I find that I am happier here.
Finally, I was sitting on the downstairs porch putting on my boots early one morning when I noticed a strange turd on the edge of the deck. One notices these things, and I know it had not been there the day before. I wondered what animal had left it there. Was it a harmless forest critter or one that could do mischief to the cabin or my garden like a groundhog or a raccoon? Was it a weasel, a possum, a fox or any one of the many small critters that live in this place?
I found myself smiling at the thought that I was devoting so much mental energy to analyzing a turd. That, too, was a reminder that I no longer live in a suburban environment teeming with people but short on wildlife. The way I figure it, any time you live in a place where a strange turd can bring a smile to your face and make you appreciate where you are, you’re probably living where you should be.
Some time ago, on a whim, I bought the 2015 Old Farmer’s Almanac (OFA). I skimmed through it, then laid it aside. Recently I started reading it more closely because it occurred to me that it may contain useful gardening information. It is, after all, an old farmer’s almanac. Furthermore, it’s been around 223 years and that must mean that some people find it informative.
Now I’d like to think that I’m at least as smart as an old farmer, but I have to confess that I find parts of OFA to be pretty damn obtuse if not unintelligible.
Let me give you one example. According the dictionary, an almanac is “an annual publication containing a calendar for the coming year, the times of such events and phenomena as anniversaries, sunrises and sunsets, phases of the moon, tides, etc., and other statistical information and related topics.” OFA says that the 27 calendar pages are the “heart” of OFA and what make it a “true almanac” because they present sky sightings and astronomical data.
Since the calendar pages are the heart of OFA that’s where I started my efforts to understand the almanac. The calendar pages give you such data as when the sun and the moon will rise and set, the length of the day, the phase of the moon, and the time of high tide, as well as the moon’s place.
I wasn’t sure what was meant by the “moon’s place.” Luckily, OFA provides the following explanation. The words in brackets are mine.
The Moon’s Place is its astronomical placement in the heavens at midnight. Do not confuse this with the Moon’s astrological place in the zodiac. [Why would I ever think of doing that?] All calculations in the Almanac are based on astronomy, not astrology, except for those on pages 244, 246-247. [Are you kidding me?]
In addition to the 12 constellations of the zodiac, this column may indicate these: Auriga (AUR), a northern constellation between Perseus and Gemini; Cetus (CET), which lies just south of the zodiac, just south of Pisces and Aries; Ophiuchus (OPH), a constellation primarily north of the zodiac but with a small corner between Scorpius and Sagittarius; Orion (ORI), a constellation whose northern limit first reaches the zodiac between Taurus and Gemini; and Sextans (SEX), which lies south of the zodiac except for a corner that just touches it near Leo. [As if I know where the constellations are that I have to locate in order to find AUR, CET, OPH, ORI and SEX.]
Well, that clears that up. Now I know what the moon’s place is even though I have to take an astronomy course to actually locate it. I decided the hell with that. I’ll just walk outside at midnight and look up for the biggest and brightest thing in the night sky. That should be the moon unless there is something else I’m missing.
What OFA does not explain is why in the heck I or an old farmer would need to know this information.
The next thing I discovered is that all the times for the length of day and when the sun and moon rise and fall are for Boston, Massachusetts. I’m not sure I understand that. How many old farmers can there be in Boston?
In order to find out the times for your area you have to go through the complicated process of ascertaining the key letter for your day (sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset each have a different key letter for each day), consult a time corrections table located elsewhere in the almanac and then do some calculations. By way of example, here are the instructions for calculating the length of day:
Note the Sun Rise and Sun Set Key letters on the chosen day. In the Time Corrections table on page 252, find your city. Add or subtract the minutes that correspond to the Sun Set Key letter to/from Bostin’s length of day. Reverse the sign (minus to plus, or plus to minus) of the Sun Rise Key letter minutes. Add or subtract it to/from the first result.
I don’t know about you, but I’m lost. The person who wrote these instructions must also write tax form instructions for the IRS. To complicate matters further, you have to make corrections for longitude to determine when the sun and the moon will rise and set in your area, and that requires you to consult a second table.
Thank God we live in the age of the internet where you can find this information on-line. If I lived in the old days and had to use OFA to find this information I’d be thoroughly screwed. The next time anyone implies that old farmers were simple folks I’m going to set the record straight. As far as I’m concerned any old farmer who can use OFA to calculate when the sun will rise is a frigging genius and automatically qualifies for Mensa.
Thankfully, you don’t need to be able to figure out the astronomical stuff to gather information from the calendar pages. For every calendar date OFA gives you pithy information about the day. Most of it is incredibly obscure, and I really don’t understand why an old farmer would give a shit. These are just some of the entries for January:
Jan. 3: Mary Jacob received a patent for a brassiere. [Did old farmer’s wives even wear bras?]
Jan. 15: When wild geese soar overhead, even terrapins stamp their feet on the ground. [What? Is this a coded message?]
Jan. 17: Baseball player Roger Peckinpaugh died, 1977. [Gee, just the other day I was just wondering when he died.]
Jan. 24: Cape Breton Railway opened, N.S., 1890. [For crying out loud, Cape Breton is in Nova Scotia. I bet it has a five day growing season. They’re probably lucky if they can grow radishes. I’m pretty sure the five farmers in Cape Breton don’t really care when the Cape Breton Railway opened. I’m positive the rest of the world doesn’t.]
Jan. 29: Fire destroyed much of Maryland Agricultural College, College Park, Md. [The next time you run into a graduate of Maryland Agricultural College be sure to impress him with that bit of arcane knowledge.]
I could go on and on with the obscure information contained in the calendar pages. It’s worth it to buy OFA just to see what the editors thought an old farmer should know or find interesting. Did you know that the first dental use of nitrous oxide was in 1844 (Dec. 11), that Hiram W. Hayden patented a machine to make brass kettles in 1851 (Dec. 16) or that a 9-lb., 6-oz. chain pickerel was caught in Homerville, Georgia, in 1961 (Feb. 17). I didn’t. I’m amazed I made it this far in life without this information. One thing is certain—I’m never going to challenge an old farmer who reads OFA regularly to a game of Trivial Pursuit.
I’m sure there is valuable gardening information somewhere in the Old Farmer’s Almanac so I’ll keep studying it. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.
I have noticed that drivers around here tend to treat stop signs and stop lights as suggestions rather than commands. It is not unusual to see someone proceed through a stop sign or make a left turn at a stop light without coming to anything close to a complete stop. I would see this happen occasionally in Florida, but around here it happens a lot.
I don’t think that the rolling incomplete stop is peculiar to drivers in North Georgia, but I do believe it is a driving habit that drivers in rural areas are more likely to have. I attribute this to the fact that rural drivers are used to driving on lonely country roads. Coming to a complete stop for a stop sign when you’re in the middle of nowhere and the only vehicle in sight seems a silly waste of time.
It doesn’t help matters that you rarely see a police or sheriff’s car on the back roads. They tend to stick to more highly traveled roads. Thus, the usual deterrent to failing to come to a complete stop—a ticket—is considerably minimized.
I'm afraid that I’m beginning to pick up the habit but then I have an added incentive to maintain momentum on these hilly mountain roads. There are very few roads around here that are flat. Some of them are quite steep, particularly to someone used to driving on Florida roads. Most of the time you’re going to be facing uphill or downhill when you’re stopped at a stop sign or a traffic light. I drive a small pickup truck with a manual transmission, and when I’m going uphill and come to a stop sign or stop light, it’s much easier to get moving again if I do not come to a complete stop.
This is particularly true when driving in the City of Blue Ridge. Blue Ridge is located at the bottom of a natural saddle of land. Drive east or west from the railroad tracks in the center of town, and you’re driving uphill. I get nervous when another driver stops close behind me when I’m facing uphill at a stop sign or a signal. In order to go forward I have to take my foot off the brake, engage the clutch and hit the gas before I roll backwards into the car behind me. Of the four possible things that can happen in that situation, three of them are bad: I can hit the car behind me, I can stall my truck, or I can hit the gas too aggressively and “scratch” through the intersection like a novice driver.
If you do something enough it soon becomes an ingrained habit, and I suspect that it won’t be long before I acquire the habit of making rolling incomplete stops. That means I run the risk of getting traffic tickets if I ever return to civilization. That sounds like a good reason to never leave my country Shangri-La. It also sounds like another way that life in the sticks is changing me for better or for worse.
Another bad habit of local drivers is riding your bumper. It happens all the time. I’ll be driving 50 or 60 miles an hour on a twisting country road and look up in my rearview mirror to find a car two or three car lengths behind me. It’s really dangerous since you never know when you’ll come around a bend in the road and find a deer or wandering cow or a slow moving tractor or downed tree in the road. Just the other day I encountered three of those four situations driving the seven or eight miles into Blur Ridge.
Frankly, it pisses me off when someone rides my tail. When it happens I glare and scowl in the rearview mirror at the driver and in extreme cases stick my hand out the window and give him or her a one finger salute. Other times I’ll slow down just to irritate the other driver. There are many times when I am sorely tempted to tap my brakes in hopes that the butthead behind me will panic, slam on his brakes, lose control and drive off the road.
The only thing that stops me from going into full road rage mode is the thought that getting into a driving altercation around here could be dangerous. I think it’s fair to assume that local motorists are more likely to have handguns in their cars than in, say, Pinellas County, Florida. I carry one in my car just in case I encounter a radical Islamic terrorist or a UFO intent on abducting me.
I have yet to read about any shootouts on the local roads. I’d like to think this is because people around here are generally nice and polite despite their bad driving habits. However, it could be evidence that knowledge that the other guy may have a gun tends to deter bad behavior. That may also explain why country people wave at each other when they pass on a back road—they’re playing it safe and trying to stay on the good side of someone who may be armed and dangerous.
Regardless, if you’re planning on visiting this area you need to keep an eye out for drivers making incomplete stops and gun-toting tailgaters. That’s advice that you will not find in any of the brochures at the local Chamber of Commerce.
