Escaping winter by thinking spring

Just about everybody I know is jetting off to warmer climes this winter. The destinations vary: Florida, Vegas, the Caribbean, Cancun. All of them accommodate short sleeves and bare feet.

Me? I’m stuck at 44th parallel north searching for signs of an early spring. The first of the new year appeared in my mailbox this week and it brightened my day a lot – in spite of the sub zero temps outside. It’s the Burpee Seed Catalog – 136 pages of glorious color that calls up all those wonderful memories of gardening yet none of the frustrating ones.

I’ve been pouring over its pages of sweet corn selections and contemplating some new spots along the picket and vineyard fences where I’ll just might put some morning glory seeds this growing season.

Planning gardens in January. How’s that for optimism? What else should you expect from a northern grape grower?

Renovations underway

Hubby's business is eighty percent lawn care and twenty percent home repair. In our northern clime, that means he works sun-up to sun-down, six days a week, from March through November. It also means, much like a school teacher, he gets about three months in which to pursue other hobbies. Fortunately for me and the old farmhouse, hubby's favorite hobbies are home repair and lawn care. (Trust me, if there was grass growing outside, he'd be outside cutting it!) Having his handsome and fearless helper (aka, college boy) in residence makes those hard to reach projects go much smoother. Here's what hubby and college boy have been up to while I've been blogging.

No more botched plaster repair screaming at me when I ascend the stairs.

Thought for the day ...

...The best things in life are not things.

Housewives of the rural Midwest

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

-Edward R. Murrow, speaking in 1958 about the future of television

Family and friends know I’m not one to mindlessly flip on television. But even I have weak moments and one of them led me to pick up the remote and flip until I landed on a show called Real Housewives of Orange County. I presume the program is reality television’s response to Desperate Housewives, a show I’ve also never seen. If you read the marketing hype, you might believe Real Housewives attempts to chronicle the lives of a half dozen “average” women who cope with life at middle age by partying on yachts, spending all their husband’s (or ex-husband’s) money on clothes, hair and spray-on tans, dangling jewelry in their ample cleavage, and hiring psychotherapists to fix their broken children.

Pretty “real” stuff, allright; has Hollywood ever got me pegged!

I peeked at the show’s web site and discovered each character has a blog. (The parallels are scary!) Here’s an excerpt on turning forty supposedly written by “character” Tamra: “No one wants to get old, but it is definitely better than the alternative! I try to live a healthy lifestyle, work out, and eat right, and the Botox helps.” (By the way, Tamra was thrilled by the diamond-encrusted Rolex she received from her beau, though her “friends” were jealous.)

Time for a “reality” check, dear readers. Real Housewives of Orange County is the chronicle of a half dozen clueless, desperate women coping with chronic discontent, purposelessness and spiritual emptiness by injecting chemicals and plastic into their bodies with the belief that happiness can be found in what’s reflected in their mirrors or by how much candle power their jewelry emits. There’s nothing “real” in this hour of reality television, proving Mr. Murrow’s point: wires and lights in a box combine to create the illusion that something is there. But nothing is.

Real housewives, at least the ones who live in middle America, don’t get weekly pedicures (what’s the point, we’re wearing wool socks), don’t ride to the mall in limos (a tractor? Maybe. A pickup? Certainly!), don’t inject Botox into our foreheads (those syringes in the fridge are for the barn animals), and we don’t define hard times by the value of our wrist watches compared to the value of our neighbors’.

If I learned anything from my recent foray into reality television, it’s this: I better get back to the library quick!

The long, long month that is January

I couldn't bear to upload another snapshot of the snow-covered farm yard, even though, that's really all I've got to offer you today. It doesn't matter which direction you look, all you can see is snow. The yard, the gravel driveway, the landscaping, the timbers, the woodchips, everything is buried under a solid crust of snow. To make matters worse, when you venture outside with a metal camera, your fingers get cold very fast. For a change of pace, I decided to get a bit artsy. Here's a shot Jim took (through the kitchen window), which I gussied up just a bit. Enjoy!

The transition we call the ‘empty nest’

The term “empty nest” turned up often in conversation this weekend. One couple talked about having both of their twenty-something children move into their own places this year as a long-anticipated and welcome change for them. Another couple saw their eldest daughter walk down the aisle last fall and they felt no trepidation about the day their youngest, a college junior, would embark on a life independent from their household. (They were making plans!) Yet another couple whose youngest isn’t yet twelve, talked about the empty nest as if it held the promise of a Sun City, Arizona, retirement – all clear skies and recreation that they’d enjoy “someday.”

When my sons drove off to college last fall, I considered my suddenly empty nest as sort of a reward, like a gold watch handed over for eighteen years of faithful service to motherhood. I client of mine at the time warned me not to get carried away over my newfound freedom. “They come back,” she warned. “You’ll be amazed at how often they’ll be home.”

Of course, she was right. The empty nest, at least during the college years, is a transition stage to be sure, if not a full-blown myth. These new adults, it seems, hold fast to their ties to the nest as they venture out on newly stretched wings.

In nature, one sees empty nests fashioned from twigs and views them not as a home to which one returns, but as a place no longer needed. In a tree, an empty nest symbolizes abandonment. A move out of such a nest could have been spurred by the life cycle or the weather; the cause is irrelevant because what’s left behind no longer serves as a home. It is simply a shell, an empty nest. Life has moved elsewhere. All ties have been severed.

There is evidence of similar abandonment having occurred throughout the rural countryside. In Iowa, and to a lesser degree in Minnesota, entire farmsteads stand empty, monuments to lives fallen on hard times. It’s quite sad to come upon an abandoned farmhouse with its peeling paint, broken windows, and sagging front porch, because you feel certain that its one-time occupants didn’t wing off to a warmer clime just because the days got shorter. These old buildings had been homes, nests to entire generations, and some have stood empty for years, maybe decades. These, these, dear ones, are the empty nests of our world, the sad symbol of final departure – death, if only of someone’s dream.

And so, what to make of the term we apply to home when our teens-turned-twenty-something have run off to play house in a dormitory or apartment or townhouse? What of the “empty nest?” Well, it’s not empty at all even if we wander from one tidy bedroom to another, remembering the days when toys and laundry littered the floor. For as long as our birdies can wing themselves back for a visit, we can call the nest what it is: home.