This week, I’ve lost another friend.  As I get older, I expect to lose more friends, and attend more funerals.  But when these friends are younger than me, it not only hurts my heart, but it makes me angry.  Janet was 46 years old.  She had a child under age 20, and a husband, and an active life.

Dammit, Janet.  Why?  Why are you gone?  It can’t possibly have been time for you to be gone.  Why?

Not that you didn’t have health issues – you had some pretty severe ones.  But I didn’t ever think you’d pass before me.  And you are not the first.  There was another friend earlier this year, and she was 20 years younger than me.  Both of you had health issues.  But still.  You took care of yourself, you followed the doctor’s orders.  You should still be here.

I guess I’m not really over the angry phase of missing you.  We weren’t that close, but we chatted often, and had many things in common.  We had similar causes we supported, we were both raising challenging children, we both knew many of the same people.  There were plenty of things that we didn’t have in common.  You knew a lot about makeup, and I never wear it.  You were a stay at home mom, and I couldn’t have that.  We had our disagreements, as any friends do.

But now you’re gone.  And I hear you in my mind, and I keep thinking Dammit Janet!  Why??

I will miss you.  I wish we’d have had more years.

And if you’re a woman and reading this, please please please know the signs of a heart attack.  This is what killed Janet.  She may have ignored symptoms, and was sick for two days before she went to the hospital.  She thought she had the flu.  Be aware of the symptoms, and get yourself checked if you have any of them.  Your life depends on it.

American Heart Association – Symptoms of Heart Attack in Women.

It snowed on Thanksgiving this year.  This is not all that unusual here in Colorado, although this year, we have had very little snowfall compared to past years.  As I was prepping food for our traditional Thanksgiving meal, the snow was coming down pretty hard.  We only ended up with an inch and a half, but as I write this on the Sunday after thanksgiving, it has now snowed every day since then.  We will get another inch or two tonight.

Of course it fits my mood.  I love this time of year, for many reasons.  The cold is good for me, I love the twinkle of holiday lights against fresh snow, I love being able to put on my warm clothes and feel cozy.  I love cookies and treats, I love warm, rib-sticking meals.  I love dragging out the mittens and scarves and boots.  The stores are full of yummy things I can spend hours looking at (and not buy), holiday cards come in the mail, Longmont’s Festival of Lights is happening, and many many people are in a good mood.

Are there downsides?  Of course.  Snow can make travel difficult, and floors muddy and slippery.  Those with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) are struggling with the reduced daylight, and there are all those memories that sneak out of our eyes this time of year.  I call it a case of the sads, my mother calls it the blues.  None of us are really immune to it.  We think about the family that have passed on and won’t be joining us, how our lives have changed since we were children.  All natural, and expected.  I had my case of the sads a couple of weeks ago, with no triggers (that I know of).

But a long weekend can sure help make things feel better, and today I am happy, relaxed, and just taking things at a pace that makes me comfortable.  The big meal is done, the holiday decorations are deployed throughout the house, and I’ve been listening to my favorite Christmas music on my iPod.  Presents are being acquired, cookies are being baked, and while I have a busy schedule, things do feel more relaxed.

The next couple of weekends have events scheduled – next weekend Klown and I get to play Santa and Mrs. Claus for a local real estate company, and the weekend after that is the Longmont Festival of lights that include a night-time parade, and events at one of our bigger parks.  We haven’t missed a year of the Festival of Lights since we moved here.  Santa even drops in – by parachute!

Then it’s just family time, and a regular routine, after that.  I am going to have to make a trip home right after Christmas for my dad’s 80th birthday party.  It will be a short, solo trip, as I can’t afford to do much else than that, even though I wish we could all take a nice week to go home to Missouri and see everyone.  But with the Perfect Child’s wedding coming up next year, I just can’t afford to spend the money.

The holidays are a mixed blessing, for sure.  We spend a lot of money, we get over-scheduled, we eat lots of things that aren’t good for us.  But really, would we have it any other way?

Our Thanksgiving bird!Clementine season!

Decorated for the holidays!

The Santa Shelf.  This is one of my favorite holiday decorations.

Icicles…

There are plenty of reasons I like living in town.  Convenience to lots of things that are only several blocks away, having neighbors that I care about (and who care about me), being close to city services I might need.  The library is 12 blocks away, the Ace Hardware I love is about 6 blocks away, the coffee shop I visit with extreme regularity is 10 blocks away.

But one thing I don’t get here, living in the middle of town, are good views of the sunrises and sunsets.  And I have never seen such spectacular ones as I do here.  There is a saying here, “If God didn’t love the Broncos, then why did He make the sunsets orange?”  Our sunrises and sunsets are just amazing – blazes of color streaking across the sky, and the rising or setting sun highlighting the incredible texture of the clouds.

Fortunately, I’m a morning person and work early hours at my job, so I usually get to see sunrises as I’m commuting.  But sunsets are much more difficult, unless I happen to be in the right place at the right time.  And by “right place,” I mean not in the middle of town.

I’d love to live on the edge of town, with unobstructed views of the Front Range, and the eastern plains.  Since I don’t sleep much – I am always up before sunrise – I would spend a half-hour every morning watching the sunrise.  In the evening, I’d spend a half-hour watching the sunset.  I have taken so many pictures, none of which do any of the sunrises and sunsets justice.  And yes, I could drive away from town each day to look at the sunrises and sunsets, but wouldn’t it be more ideal if I could sit in my kitchen or my office and see them instead?  Or walk outside and see them from my yard?

Maybe someday, I’ll have that house on the edge of or just outside of town.  Close enough to still be convenient to all those city services, but far enough away from the city obstructions so that I can see those amazing golden hours.

Sunrises

Sunsets

This is the third of three posts talking about Mom and my’s trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota.

I’m going to start today’s post with a bit of an addendum to last week’s post.  I forgot one small side trip we took on our way back to Rapid City after spending the day in Spearfish Canyon and Deadwood.  By this time, the weather had started to turn decidedly damp and cold, but we went for it anyway.

The man at the Pumphouse deli had recommended we go to Silver City, so that was our goal.  We never really made it, but we did  see some cool things anyway, despite the rain and cold.  We took this little two-lane road mostly covered in leaves, that was supposed to go to a lake and the aforementioned Silver City.  About a mile or so in, we crossed cattle gates, and signs telling us to watch for cattle.  We met no other traffic on the road, which wound tightly back and forth like a black snake.  We never saw any cattle.  But we did see turkey.  And we found the back end of the lake, a strange and creepy-looking access point that looked like it was probably a party spot for the local youth.  Still, it had its appeal.  There was a small feeder creek that I so badly wanted to cross, because on the other side was an upward path that looked like it broke into a clearing where you could see the whole lake.  But the creek was very cold, and the ground around it quite mushy, so I took a pass.

What we found most interesting about the spot was the strange rock.  It was fractured, looking for all the world like a row of books or paper, and like you could just peel one off with your fingers.  The rock was everywhere, with trees growing right out of it.  Mom has a thing for rocks – so she notices all of them.  But I think she was creeped out enough by the area that she was not interested in looking at the rocks.  I can’t really blame her.  There was such a strange feeling about the place.  The lake was actually a reservoir, which explains the strange back end of it.

I mentioned turkeys, too.  I often see turkey in Colorado, so I easily picked these out.  Turkey are very smart, and are hard to take pictures of, because they move away pretty quickly if you get within 50 feet of them.  Mom didn’t even see them when we first pass them.  I turned the car around and headed back so we could get pictures.  This is the best we got.  There were more than a dozen of them, but most were below the ridge of the road and quickly disappearing into the brush.

That is the last of our adventures from Friday.  So now we move on to…

Mt. Rushmore!

I swear.  It was back there.  Actually, I don’t know if it was back there or not, but the signs all said it was.  When we got up on Saturday, it was actively raining and the fog was so thick we couldn’t see anything.  But we were hopeful that as the day warmed and the sun got higher, it would clear enough for us to enjoy the last leg of our trip.  We paid our eleven dollars to park, and made our way through the gates and into the complex.  Nothing looked familiar to me, but I think I was maybe 14 when we last went, some forty years ago. I’m sure a few things have changed.  The flags along the Avenue of the States were limp with rain, and an ugly, damp breeze was forcing everyone indoors.  The museum was interesting, and we enjoyed it, but we’d have enjoyed it more had we been able to actually see the monument.  I was pretty disappointed.  Fortunately, it’s not that far away, and maybe I’ll get to go back at some point.

Mom noticed something interesting in the pictures in the museum.  Pictures showed workmen working on various parts of the project.  One man was wearing what appeared to be court/basketball shoes.  Most others were wearing boots, but this man was clinging to the rock with his feet, working on the rock in front of him.  Of course this was before OSHA, so can you imagine the safety risks all of these men took to do this monumental (pun intended) job?  You could tell who the bosses were, too.  They were wearing tailored slacks and dress shoes, even if they were standing on the rock, too.  Very interesting.

What was cool about the entire area, despite the fog, was the predominance of water.  Just outside Rushmore was a Pactola Reservoir.  From what we could see through the fog, there were cabins and vacation homes, and we even found a beach and a marina.  It was windy, cold, spitting rain.  Not pleasant.  I watched with some amusement as one boat moored near, but not in, the marina, kept getting turned in circles by the wind.  I can’t imagine the stress on the mooring rope.  I wondered if at some point it would twist in two and the boat go floating across the reservoir and off into the sunset.

Further down the road, we came upon Horsethief Lake.  By this time, the fog had lifted somewhat, but it was sprinkling and drippy, putting a complete hush over the mountains.  We saw mountain sheep on the road, which amused my mom.  Baby and Mama were wholly unconcerned with us, and didn’t even bother to pose for pictures.  They just kept to their business.  A few more turns in the road, and we came across Horsethief.  And what a pretty place it was.  It reminded me of the Pacific Northwest – the trees were dripping with moss, rain sprinkled quietly down onto the water, and a thin fog enveloped the higher trees.

There were walking trails, and fishing docks, and benches set in random places.  It was very peaceful, exceedingly quiet, and I could have stayed there all day.  Me, water, mountains, trees…I’m a happy girl.

So pretty, but mom was cold, and I was wet, and it was time to head back south to Colorado.  We headed out of the Black Hills just after noon, and by 1:30 or so, we were in Custer, South Dakota.  What a fun little place.  As elsewhere in South Dakota, casinos were in the strangest places – on the back of gas stations, in between a pizza parlor and a hair salon, etc.  These weren’t the type of casinos that one usually thinks of.  They are small, storefront operations.  No big flashing lights or fancy hotels next to them.

Custer was the cutest place, the kind of place that when I travel through, I think it might be a nice place to live.  It was obvious it was a summer town, and many of the establishments were already closed for the season. We kept seeing these buffalo sculptures tucked near buildings, and had to stop and take a couple pictures.  Longmont has giant geese.  Custer had buffalos.

They also had this.

We found the perfect place to eat – The Purple Pie Place.  They were on their last full weekend before closing for the winter, so the menu was limited to just a couple of things.  I had chili, mom had a turkey and cranberry sandwich.  The place was just adorable.  We talked to our waiter.  He was also the owner, along with his parents.  They had already left for winter in Arizona, and he was in charge of closing up for the winter.  We asked him what he did all winter without the restaurant to run.  He said he went ice fishing a lot.  Sounds like a good way to spend a winter!

And, of course, we couldn’t finish up our vacation without Vacation Pie.  Mine was cherry ala mode.  Mom had mixed berry.

Can’t wait for our next trip together.  We may not get one next year, since my daughter’s wedding is happening in June and Mom will be here to help for that.  But going to try as hard as I can for us to still have a trip somehow.  They’ve become a tradition!

This is the second post in a series of three chronicling my mother and I’s annual trip. This year we headed through Wyoming to South Dakota and the Black Hills.

It rained overnight our first night.  The hotel was comfortable and warm, the breakfast delicious.  Mom and I have grown attached to our stays at LaQuinta Inns.  Since we are always traveling with her little dog Sophie, having a pet-friendly hotel is important.  LaQuinta always allows pets.  We even saw someone with a big fluffy cat walking it on a leash/harness outside.  The cat didn’t even seem to mind the rain.

But the sun was trying to break through the clouds, so we packed our warm jackets and headed west to Spearfish, with the intent of going south through Spearfish Canyon.  I had been told by a new work colleague that the canyon was gorgeous and full of water falls.  He had spent much of his life in Spearfish, so I trusted him.  He knew what he was talking about.  And despite the mostly cloudy (although with some intermittent sun) day, it was indeed beautiful. (I’m going to spam you with lots of pictures at the end of his post.)

The first falls we came to were Bridal Veil Falls.  This set of falls was tall and thin, and part of Spearfish Creek, which had carved the canyon over the last tens of thousands of years.  This far north, the creek is rather narrow.  Mom and I were fascinated with the layers of rock in the canyon walls – some yellow, some white, some black as lava.  Other color in the canyon was provided by green leafy ferns and evergreen trees, yellow aspen, and red sumac.  Everywhere we looked was a burst of color – either rock or vegetation.

We kept watching the altitude on the GPS.  I’m used to higher altitudes, and assumed we were not very high, but there were points as we drove through the canyon where we got to over 5000 feet.  The roads were winding, some steep, with plenty of inclines and declines and switchbacks.  We would often round a curve and see water crashing over a falls in the distance, but then never see it again.  Spearfish falls was one of those – we caught a glimpse of it through the trees, but when we got to a sharp bend in the road that was also a wide spot in the road that included a restaurant, small hotel, and campgrounds, we could only see the very top of the falls where it started its descent.  We could hear the falls, but there was no way to actually see it.  There appeared to be a path below that we could have walked, had we been able to find how to get to it.  Later my coworker told me that that path was closed for renovation.  But I sure would have loved to see it from below.

A side road lead the way uphill to Roughlock Falls.  All along the way up to this point, we had seen places where the creek had been dammed to provide spillways.  Spearfish Canyon had been full of gold at one time, and the dams were used to power the gold mining operations.  Roughlock Falls was named because a road went through there – the miners and others used it to go up and down the mountains.  The road was so steep that they would chain the wheels of their wagons to descend, essentially “locking” the wheels so they would skid down the canyon rather than roll, overtaking their horses.  Looking at what we saw in that canyon, I cannot imagine the cojones it would take to make that descent.  Holy cow!

At the top of the little road, there was a picnic area, and event area (like for weddings).  We could hear the falls, and there was a nice paved path that descended to the falls and then to the creek.  The path was extremely steep, so we didn’t take it all the way down.  We knew if we went all the way down, we’d have to walk all the way back up.  Yeah, we’re wimps.   Everything was damp, whether from the falls or from the overnight moisture, it was hard to tell.  The fall colors were past their prime, but the view was gorgeous anyway.  The sun kept coming out, and the golden walls of the canyons just took my breath away.

On our way back down the little road, we caught up with a beautiful little Airstream trailer and antique truck.  My mom talked for a bit with the older woman passenger in the truck.  She said that their trailer and truck were probably the most photographed in the country.  I can see why.  I cannot imagine taking such a setup into the mountains, especially with the steep switchbacks we had been traveling through.

One oddity about this day – we kept seeing Porsches on the roads.  We did manage to talk to someone that was driving one.  Apparently there was a Porsche convention going on in Rapid City, and events were being held in the Canyon as well.  I didn’t know there were that many Porsches in the world!

After the Canyon, we were on the east side of the Black Hills again.  We traveled the highway up to Lead (pronounced “leed”) and then Deadwood.  Lead was adorable, with cute little houses all tucked against the canyon walls.  The town wasn’t even 1/4 of a mile wide – set right along the road with nowhere to build away from the main drag.  And the homes in Lead and Deadwood were sweet Victorians in bright colors.  You could tell there was money in the area, by the houses.  Deadwood is one of the newest upcoming casino towns in South Dakota, which explains the money.  Everyone is doing well there due to that industry.

We had a late lunch at the cutest little cafe after wandering around (and getting lost) in Deadwood.  It was in an old gas station.  The bay area (where they would have worked on cars) now housed a glass blowing operation.  The tiny “office” area was the deli/cafe.  All of the sandwiches were named after car parts or repairs.  Mine was the “Brake Pad,” meatloaf on ciabatta bread.  Mom’s turkey-and-cranberry sandwich was called “The Strut.”  Around the walls of the glass-blowing shop were all kinds of old metal signs that would have been in an old gas station.  And a shelf high on the walls in the deli side held old cans of oil and lubricants.  There were brand names I’d never heard of, and some that I remembered from my youth.  All of the windows had been filled with glass shelves that contained some of the wonderful glass art the artist had made.  When we were ready to leave, I took a few minutes to ask one of the deli clerks about the best way back to Rapid City.  He grabbed a tourist map and drew us a route that would take us through some really pretty scenery and almost back to our hotel’s doorstep.

By then, the weather had turned dreadful – dark, damp, and raining lightly, but we still very much enjoyed the drive.  We were near Rushmore and Crazy Horse at that point, and there were plenty of signs to tell us where to go.  But Rushmore was set for the next day, so we passed that by.  We did stop, however, to take a picture of the defunct “Presidents Park.”  “All 43 presidents,” the sign boasted.  “For Sale” was the bigger sign.  The area would have made great campgrounds, I imagine.  I should have called for pricing…

Enjoy the pictures below.  We still have more journey to go!

Pictures from the Canyon, in no particular order.

Pictures of water – first Bridal Veil Falls.

Spearfish Creek.  The first is one of the pools created by the damming of the creek.  In the second one, there is a fisherman in waders on the bank.

Spearfish Falls – we could only see it from the top.

Various pictures from Roughlock Falls.

Houses in Lead and Deadwood.

County Building in Deadwood.

This is the first post in a series of three chronicling my mother and I’s annual trip. This year we headed through Wyoming to South Dakota and the Black Hills.

For a grownup like me, a visit to Wall Drug seemed necessary on our trek to the Black Hills – it was a part of my childhood.  Not that it was on the way to where we were going (Rapid City), because it wasn’t.  We had to pass the black hills and head east nearly to the Badlands before we got there. It was grey, cool, breezy, and just not the best kind of weather for a vacation, but it didn’t matter.  It was vacation!  And I was with my mom! We started seeing the signs for Wall Drug before we even got to South Dakota.

(In case you can’t read the caption, it says “Relax, Captain.  They pop up every 3 light years or so.”)

Mom and I both have strong memories of Wall Drug. I was probably fourteen or so when we visited it on one of our family vacations.  The signs warn you all along the way – through Nebraska, through  South Dakota, that it is coming.  Every couple of miles, it’s “Home of the Jackalope!” and “Free Ice Water!” and “Five Cent Coffee!”  And yes, it has all of those things, and so much more.  Basically, it’s a giant tourist trap full of all the kitsch you would imagine, but in the happy, hey-this-might-be-a-bargain kind of way sometimes.  It also has a real pharmacy, and carries real drug store items, along with the souvenir mugs, t-shirts, cowboy boots, and “Native American” textiles.  There are creepy animatronic displays (a band of cowboys playing banjo on a front porch), giant taxidermied animals, carved “wooden Indians,” and plenty of giant plastic animals out in the courtyard for the kids to climb on and have their picture taken with.

And it was nothing like my memories of it.  Actually, the only memory I had of it at all was the sign, which still looks the same, and the taxidermied “Jackalope.”  The Jackalope was nowhere to be found when we got there this year.  In the 70’s, when I would have first visited Wall Drug, the Jackalope was the draw.  It was on all the signs.  It was touted as the biggest and best reason for visiting Wall Drug.  I suppose after all these years, the stuffed Jackalope fell apart.  The only Jackalope I saw was the big plastic one in the courtyard (picture below).  My memory places the Jackalope on a long, wooden bar with brass footrails.  There was still a long, wooden bar with brass footrails, but it was actually the lunch counter, and full of plastic cases of cookies, donuts, and other ready-made food items, along with the afore-mentioned “five cent coffee.”

What is a Jackalope?  Well, as the name might imply, it was a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope, both of which are prolific on the plains of Wyoming and South Dakota.  The Jackalope was a large jackrabbit fitted with the horns of a small antelope, as if the two had been bred together.  Yes, totally campy and cheesy.  But in the middle of South Dakota, you kind of need a marvel or two to get people to stop.

We ordered bison burgers at the lunch counter, and sat in the dining room to eat. Some of the look of that room was familiar, but I hadn’t remembered all the artwork.  Dozens of paintings hung around the walls, and we spent some time wandering around and looking at them all.  In fact, there was artwork all over the place, not just in the dining room.  There were also photos of local and national celebrities in hallways, and in the main inside walkway, plenty of totem poles, enormous taxidermied buffalo heads, and painted wooden saloon girl carvings that you could have your picture taken with.  There were a series of shops, all interconnected, hawking everything from $500 cowboy boots to $2 bumper stickers.  You could buy candles, Native American art, leather goods, clothing, camping gear, soaps and perfumes, knitted items, woodworking, tennis shoes, and all the postcards you could ever hope to send.

And there were bargains!  I bought my first-ever leather purse for under $10.  I also got fancy socks with wolves on them for Tater for $6, and an iconic Wall Drug t-shirt for Klown for $20.  I bought bumper stickers, a Wall Drug wall sign (is that redundant?), and pretty handmade copper earrings for my Perfect Child for $15.  Bargains!  I still spent over $50.  haha.  (A note about that leather purse.  It is the first leather purse I’ve ever owned.  My mom thought it was hilarious that I kept sniffing it after I bought it.  Every time I walk into the room where I left it, I can smell it.  I like that smell.)

Then we wandered around looking at everything else.  I found the actual pharmacy among the shops.  The giant plastic skeleton hanging in the window was funny, but it’s a real apothecary, complete with a pharmacist on duty.  Wall Drug’s initial purpose was to provide a drug store for that area of the country.  When the owners realized no one had money to spend in that area of the country, they then became a “travel stop” for people heading west during the Great Depression.  My mother traveled the area when she was a child, and she remembers Wall Drug’s “free ice water.”  She said it was a place to look forward to after traveling for hours, or days, on a trip.  I’m sure her memories are different than mine.  I know when I had talked to a coworker (who just moved to Boulder from Spearfish, South Dakota) about going to Wall Drug, he thought I was crazy for driving an extra 50 miles just to go there.  He grew up there, he thought it was hokey.  And it is hokey.  But it’s also part of my memories, so it was important for me to visit it again.  How could I be so close to it, and not visit it again?  In fact, if we’d had an extra day, we’d have probably gone a little further and seen the Badlands, as well, something I also have strong memories of.

One of the best parts of this trip was being able to share memories again with my mom.  When you’re fourteen, you don’t understand how precious those memories can be later.  You’re young, life is still ahead of you, and this is just a blip in a long list of memories you will keep with you throughout life.  Now I’m older, and so is mom, so these trips become as much about making new memories as it is about honoring the old ones.  And even if some of those memories are kitschy, they are important.  I am so glad we got to take this trip.

What kitschy places have you visited that gave you good memories?  Leave your answers in the comments!

Free ice water!  Of course, the fountain was turned off because it was the off-season, so we had to pretend!

$500 boots.  Yikes!

Fox tails?  Coyote tails too!

Mom and I.  She’s holding back those plastic horses like a pro!  And me?  Holding down a bench, of course! Notice our Wall Drug shopping bag off to the right – all of our fancee souvenirs were in there!  Including my under $10 leather purse!

You can ask my mom – I have a thing about buffaloes.  I still have my stuffed buffalo I bought somewhere out west (probably Yellowstone) when I was 14.  This one is the real deal, although it’s not live anymore.

The plastic box made it hard to photograph, but it was a fine specimen of a young grizzly.

My mom and I just got back from our annual vacation together.  This year, we headed north instead of south, to South Dakota.  This required a drive through Wyoming.  I’ve lived 45 minutes from Wyoming for the last four years, and have never managed to visit.

The high plains we drove through rolled on before us, with interesting rock outcroppings, bison ranches, and windmills to break up the monotony.  It is some beautiful countryside.  And what always strikes me about areas like this is how much energy could be harnessed from the sun or wind, yet we see only a few power-producing windmills, and virtually no solar capturing.  That seems so wasteful.

Once in Wyoming and past Cheyenne, we stopped at a small rest area.  All I could think about was using the bathroom, so wasn’t paying a lot of attention until I was sitting on the toilet looking up.  One wall of the room slanted at a 45-degree angle toward the ceiling, and was covered in metal panels on a cantilevered mechanism that told me they opened like shutters.  They were closed, but I could see light around the edges.  This intrigued me, so once I was back outside, I walked the perimeter of the building, looking for these giant shutters.

I didn’t find shutters, but I found a complete solar system in place on that same wall.  It turns out, the entire rest area is powered by solar.  There was the passive solar of the shutters, and a more active system of panels.  The solar power collected into batteries was being used to heat water, heat the buildings, and provide the power to lights and other electric needs in the building.  They even had a large panel displaying exactly how they were using solar to power everything the rest stop needed.

This part of Wyoming is virtually tree-less, and the long sunny days provide more solar than any small setup would ever need.  And in places like this, and places like where I live, solar should be the way to go.  Yet there are only a handful of places in town where solar is being used.  There is, I guess, no incentive to use solar, so it doesn’t happen.

I have long thought that there should be a requirement that all new construction, whether it is residential or commercial, contain solar energy collection methods.  There is no reason a big roof just needs to be shingles.  So much energy falls out of the sky, we should be taking advantage of it.

Mom is visiting, so I know it is autumn.  This is our time to be domestic as a mother and daughter.  Sometimes it is crochet and knitting.  Sometimes it is some sewing project or other.  This year, it’s linens and jams.

Last weekend, we canned.  There were tomatoes and pickled beets, and then there were jars and jars of strawberry jam and peach jam.  She brought a pressure canner with her, and I set up an outdoor burner to use it, since my glass-top electric stove would never handle such a thing.  And while the pickled beets and tomatoes hissed in the pressure cooker outside, my water bath canner handled all the jams.  We ended up with a dozen or so pints of tomatoes, and about the same of pickled beets.  I ended up canning 29 half-pints of strawberry jam, and two dozen half-pints of peach jam.  That doesn’t count the jars I left unsealed in the fridge for immediate consumption.  It was a good year for fruit jams. I haven’t made jelly or jam for many years.  Maybe 30 years.  Last year mom and I made champagne grape jelly, which was just amazing.  And this year, I jumped in with both feet and peeled peaches until I was sticky from head to toe, and mashed strawberries with a hamburger flipper until my kitchen looked like I’d murdered someone.  I regret nothing!

We get so domestic when we are together.  I don’t remember us behaving this way when I was younger, but perhaps we did.  Mom has always done crafts of one sort or another – sewing, crochet, for a while she did some cake decorating.  Mom has an artistic spirit – she painted, fiddled with jewelry making, and many other things.  I learned to sew from her and my grandmother, and I did quite a bit of sewing when I was a teen.  I did other crafts that caught my fancy along the way.  I even quilted at some point, although I don’t do much of it now.  So when we get together each year, along with planning a short trip, and heading up into the mountains or trolling through the second-hand stores, we cook things, or make things.  This year, it is the canning, and mom has been playing around starching my doilies that I am too lazy to starch.  She used every bit of my cornstarch to make old-fashioned starch to starch antique pillowcases she’d brought to give me, and used every pill bottle and even my Grumpy Cat squeeze ball to form the ruffles in an especially pretty green and white doily.

And we work in the garden.  There is harvesting to be done, and garden space to clean out for winter, and new gardens to either create or old gardens to maintain.  This week, we went to my big plot at the community garden, and harvested almost everything.  There were potatoes, and beans, and my one giant pumpkin (turns out it was 21 pounds of pumpkin!).  My future son-in-law, Robert, took a Sunday afternoon to build me a new raised bed, to expand my current vegetable gardening space.  I managed to find some rotten straw to get it started.  Mom and I will go get some rabbit poop in a week or two, to give it another layer to work in over the winter.  She knows gardening, and I depend on her expertise.  And I depend on my own physical strength to get the bed in place, get the hay and manure spread out, to get the grunt work done. We are a good team.

We are also tired.  So we’re going to take another little trip, as we do every year.  Last year we headed to southern Colorado and visited the Great Sand Dunes, Bishop Castle, Lake Isabel, and the Florissant Fossil Beds.  This year, we’re going north – to South Dakota.  We’re going to revisit some memories there.  As a child/young teen, we visited the area around the Black Hills.  I remember Mt. Rushmore, a horseback ride on a trail up in the hills, and a visit to a strange place, Wall Drug.  We’re going to take a drive through Spearfish Canyon and see the water falls, and spend some time on the Needles Highway.  There won’t be a horseback ride, but we’ll visit Wall Drug, and Mt. Rushmore.  A few days away is just what I need, and these times with my mom are precious because I don’t know how long they will last.  I look forward to these little trips, and I’m very blessed that I can afford to do them.

Oh, Kale.  You are so pretty!  You look great whether the weather is hot or cool, and your curly leaves look like they are waiting for dressing, or butter, or bacon grease.  You are so yummy!  You are so good for me! And you grew so great this year, I’m still eating you!

No one else in my house likes kale.  But that’s okay.  I’m happy to eat it all by myself.  Lately, I’ve been making a huge batch of it on Sundays, and eat it for breakfast throughout the week.  Kale for breakfast?  You bet!  Extremely nutritious, substantial, and full of good taste.  Why not?  Here’s my favorite way to cook it.  For breakfast, I put some in a bowl and heat it up, then scramble up a couple of eggs to toss on the top.  So delicious!

Basic Kale

Ingredients:

8 cups fresh kale, spines removed, torn into 3 to 4 inch pieces

1/4 cup bacon, cut into small pieces

hot water (if your tap water is hot, not warm, use boiling water

Kosher salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste

Directions:

Brown bacon in a large pot (I use a dutch oven) until crisp.  Do not drain.  Add in kale and allow to sautee for a minute or two.  Add hot water slowly while mashing the kale into the water as it wilts.  You don’t want too much water – just enough to barely get it all wet.  Add light salt and pepper.  Remember that the bacon has salt in it so you may not need as much salt as you would think.

Cover and simmer for 20 minutes or so, until kale is reduced and tender.  Young kale needs less cooking, older (tougher) kale needs more cooking.  Taste and add salt if needed.

Keeps for one week in the fridge.  Reheats well in the microwave.

It is getting to be time to wrap another gardening season here along the Front Range in Colorado.  The nights are dipping into the 40s, even though we are still seeing days well into the 80s.  Production in the garden has dropped off considerably.  I’m on my third round of bean plants, the second round having finally stopped producing.  I was probably pushing it to put in another batch of seed in late August, but I hope to get more beans before the first frost in early October.  I may not make it, but I can always hope.

As I look through this past growing season, I take away a few lessons and start to make plans for next year.  After three good years of seeing how things grow in Colorado, I have a sense for where I am wasting my time, and where I should invest my efforts.  When it’s a bad year, or a nonproductive year, or things we were counting on didn’t do well after all, we like to say, “There’s always next year.”

Some clear decisions have already been made:  I am giving up the big community garden patch I’ve had for the last three years.  This year was the worst for that patch for me.  The pests were awful – I lost most of my squash and pumpkin plants to borer.  My kale refused to grow until July, and then only when I’d over-seeded four times to do so.  I got one pot of peas out of the whole 20-foot row I planted.  The beets looked good, and the beans, when they finally started, produced well.  But beans are kind of foolproof.  I do have a basket set up for growing potatoes, but it is too early to dig them up, so I don’t know how they did.  I’m not hopeful about them either, as the plants are huge, almost grotesquely so, which means all the energy went into the plants, and not the potatoes.  We’ll see.  Last year that garden was crammed full, so full you could barely walk in there.  This year?  I could have a family over for a picnic lunch, and none of the plants would get stepped on.  I’ve had to pull up squash after squash plant.

What do I think is wrong?  Well, for one, the area is low, and next to the Oligarchy Ditch, a major water provider canal through town.  The ground is cold, even in the middle of summer.  At night, when the rest of town has a 60-degree low, that area has a 50-degree low.  There are the pests that keep being shared around – potato beetles, flea beetles, squash bugs, squash borers, squirrels, voles, mice, and other pests.  I had a couple of good years, but this year, I seemed to get all of the pests.  Squirrels decimated half my corn crop. A bumper crop of wild morning glory and purslane has layered my plot for the entire summer, despite the hours I’ve spent weeding.

There were other things that went wrong – things out of my control in most ways.  There was a decision by the board for the garden to replace one of the main paths along my plot.  The construction was supposed to be finished in early April, but instead drug on through mid-May.  I couldn’t plant until Memorial Day.  My plot was unreachable, and I lost 18 inches of ground on the east side of the plot – the ground that was the most stable and productive.  And there are the social problems involved with shared space – mostly petty politics and plenty of egos that can’t seem to keep themselves in check.  I’ve been scolded for taking on various projects for my 10 hours of workshare – most notably I was told never to prune the grapevines again because I “didn’t know what I was doing.” Last year, my pruning of the grapevines brought in a bumper crop of grapes, something they hadn’t seen for years.  But I didn’t know what I was doing.  I was also told not to work in the perennial shade garden because, again, I “didn’t know what I was doing.”  The board wasn’t happy unless all we peons were getting our workshare hours in weeding common paths and dragging the dumpsters across the street for pickup days. I’ve pretty much had enough of that nonsense.  It’s not worth it to stay there, when it doesn’t bring me joy.  Add in the poor production, and I have lost my will to do the work involved in keeping that plot going.

Besides, right now, I have great garden space where we are renting.  There was already a good garden bed along the south side of the house, and last fall I added a 16 x 3 foot raised bed along the fence.  Between these two beds, I’ve gotten a bumper crop of tomatoes, beans, squash, and eggplant, and more kohlrabi than I could eat.  When they needed to be watered, I could set up the sprinklers to run while I was fixing dinner or doing laundry or working on my novel.  Weeding took ten minutes a week.  I could pick fresh veggies for dinner just by walking out the door.  No gathering tools and driving over to the big garden to spend an hour or more doing everything at once.  This fall I am adding another raised bed.  There is room for a nice-sized one (about 5 foot by 12 foot) in the driveway, where there is nothing but mulch and the flattened stump of a buckeye tree.  It is south/west facing and gets good hot sun.  It’s perfect.  With that additional space, I should be able to go gangbusters next summer.

What grew well this year at home:  eggplant.  I planted two, and both reached a height of more than three feet.  THREE FEET.  I’ve never seen eggplant get so big.  I harvested nearly daily.  We were eating eggplant twice a week, and I made a huge batch of baba ganoush for the freezer.  It’s going to be mighty tasty come winter.  I also have some of the biggest beefsteak tomatoes I’ve ever grown, even compared to my river dirt back in St. Louis.  Every tomato is bigger than my fist.  I picked four or five a day, every day, once August came.  I’ve canned several pints of them – their meaty nature makes them great for canning.  I had great lettuce early in the season, and have replanted for fall.  The one zucchini plant was a good producer, and I had one “surprise” pumpkin that grew on its own from seed that was in the compost that I used to fill that bed.  I got a good harvest of cucumbers before they got mold and I had to pull them.  I also have gotten my herb bed up and running, using one square of the garden alongside the house.  There are perennials – thyme, oregano, chives.  I let the parsley reseed.  Yes, it’s messy, but I have all the herbs I want.  I planted basil this year, and harvested enough a month ago to dry and fill two pint jars.  There is more to be harvested, and I’ll probably grab those once we have an upcoming frost.  Same for the parsley.

So this fall will be busy.  First, I’ll be getting all of my things out of the community garden – the fences, stakes, hoses, sprinklers, etc., and getting them home.  Second, I need to get that raised bed built.  My future son-in-law will be helping me with that.  I’ve already picked up 7 bales of rotten hay that will the base for that garden.  I’m also negotiating for the delivery of some rabbit manure.  I intend to add edging to the garden alongside the house, then fill with a nice layer of hay and rabbit manure to build it up and rehab that space.  The raised bed from last year has composted well, which means it needs another 8 inches of soil to fill it up.  I’ll use hay and rabbit manure for that too.  And then there is the new raised bed – it will get a layer of leaves and seed pods from our locust trees, then hay, and rabbit poop.  We will toss compost in there all winter as well.  I’ll probably still have to buy some soil – I did this year – but at least everything will have a good start.

For next year, I’m going to continue to work on “growing up.”  When you run out of flat space, you start growing up.  This  can increase productive space.  I have some fencing to use to run up the cucumbers (this will prevent the mold, too), some winter squash (delicata and butternut), and of course pole beans.  I’ll plant the summer squash on the ends of the raised beds, so they can grow outwardly and pile on the ground if they need to.  As long as the base of the squash is stable, the rest of it can grow outside the bed, giving me more space in the center of the bed for bush beans, eggplant, lettuces, kohlrabi, kale, etc.

It’s going to be awesome.  That’s how we gardeners look at it – there is always next year.  And next year is going to be better than ever!