Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Well, today I had a reminder of how those of us on the scene of, or immediately after an incident are the ‘first responders’ on the scene – generally beating out the police, fire department and ambulance, by minutes and sometimes hours. As this happened in a suburb, and on a heavily-trafficked intersection where two four-lane roads meet not half a mile from the fire station, the professionals were on the spot within five minutes. I’m certain other people had their cellphones out and calling 911 within seconds, as did I.

It was all very startling – and as these things usually do – happened in a matter of split seconds. I had concluded that I needed to make a run to Lowe’s for some more spray paint and other stuff for a couple of furniture renew projects and stop by the HEB grocery store for pet food on my way back home. So there I was, waiting in the left-hand turn lane on Nacogdoches, to turn left onto O’Connor, with one or two cars ahead of me, also waiting for the signal to turn green for us. The intersection seemed to be mostly clear; traffic waiting in both directions on Nacogdoches – first for the line of cars behind a small white compact, waiting to turn left from O’Connor, then for the other lanes to move.

I am not certain where the blue car came from – either flying up O’Connor from the direction of the highway, or up Nacogdoches in the other direction from me and trying to beat the red light. It was going at a good clip, at any rate. And it crashed head-on into the little white compact, just as it edged out into the intersection on seeing the light for the turn-lane go green. No matter which direction the blue car came from, it was going so fast that the impact flipped the white compact clear over, front to back. There it was, wheels up to the sky, and everything frozen for a moment.

It’s a peculiar metallic crunch, the sound that an auto crash makes, a sound that sticks with you. Several of us agreed on that, later. It’s the sound that an aluminum baseball bat the size of a small telephone pole makes, upon striking a pallet of empty cans.

It was a bit past noon on a working day, so there was a lot of traffic at the intersection – there’s a HTeaO outlet on one corner, a Black Rock Coffee outlet on the other, and across from those two enterprises on Nacogdoches, a CVS, and a Chase Bank with a good-sized HEB and a row of other enterprises behind it. I don’t imagine there was more than a moment before people began piling out of their cars, and going to the aid of the driver and whoever else was trapped in the white compact. It reminded me of the dash-cam video of the concrete pedestrian bridge over a busy artery in Florida a couple of years ago. A moment of shock … and then car and truck doors opening, and people – mostly men – running towards the scene of the collapse.

I was at a place where all that I could do was call 911 – and when I got through, the dispatcher already knew there had been a rollover at that intersection. I did manage to weave through the parking lot of Black Rock and make a way through the CVS parking lot – by that time, two police cars, an ambulance and a fire truck were already on the scene, and the police had all the witnesses that they needed for their reports. By the time that I came back through that intersection an hour or so later, everything was cleared away, all but a couple of piles of absorbing grit poured onto fluids leaked out of the crashed automobiles.

Reminder to self; remember to count to three before venturing into an intersection, upon the light turning green. Also – keep an eye out for a-holes coming the other way who don’t seem to be slowing down…

My daughter and wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson are in California to visit family – notably my sister and her family, and to introduce Wee Jamie to them all. They are having a glorious time, so far … and meanwhile, I am getting things done, now that I do not need to schedule them around Wee Jamie’s naptime, appointments, walks, scheduled playtime with the therapists, bath time … all of it. So this was how I was able to write one book in a matter of three months, a trilogy the same length as Lord of the Rings in a mere two years … anyway, I am filling in the hours, pottering in the garden, refitting a couple of inexpensive steamer trunks that my daughter snagged from a pile of discards from a neighbor who is moving lock-stock-and-barrel to Hawaii. One trunk is to be Wee Jamie’s toy chest, the other to be the storage, transport, and display for Matilda’s Portmanteau goods. Both are battered, and rather dirty, and … well, I’ll see what I can do with them. I also must refinish and repair a small oak armchair for Wee Jamie, against the day when he outgrows several other baby chairs.

Then there are a couple of sewing projects, notably a white cotton early 20^th century blouse from Past Patterns, sized up to fit me in my present incarnation and trimmed with crocheted ecru lace. The Seguin book festival has been moved back to late in the year, which I am grateful for, as it is a two-day outdoor event, and April in Texas is about the last time of the year that I can endure such, in my customary Victorian/Edwardian costumes.

And the garden … I’ll go on planting seeds and transplanting seedlings, as I have a goal of eating fresh garden-grown vegetables daily and freezing any surplus. The pea plants did so very well, I will probably want to plant more, as they mature and die off. The beans are doing so nicely that I’ve had a good few side dishes of fresh green beans in the last couple of weeks. The first crop of bush beans are likely soon to age out of productivity, but I have several pots of pole beans coming along. I rather like pole beans, since they grow up, rather than producing only at ground level. Tomatoes … I also have a good lot of tomato plants coming along at various stages of development. Yes – tomatoes; infinitely variable in use.

And this might be the year that I have edible squash of various sorts (cross fingers here) – especially the small green ruffled patty-pan squash, which I deeply adored as a kid. They were cheap. readily available, tender, and tasty, and Mom bought them frequently – but where are they in markets today? I haven’t seen patty-pan squash in ages in the supermarket.  As for zucchini, they are often seen, but expensive, so I’d like to grow them. I’ve never been able, save for one single year, to have a good zucchini crop – and the joke is that anyone can grow zucchini and have enough of the darned things to inflict on your neighbors, by leaving a bag full of them on the doorstep, ringing the doorbell and running away. The only year that I did have a couple of edible zucchini squashes was the year that I tried out some exotic hot-weather variety from Lebanon, in a raised bed … and I think I had all of two or three. The squash-borers get to them, it seems, unless one is very lucky.

And that’s my week, since getting up very early Sunday morning and sending off my daughter and Wee Jamie on the train to California. Yours?

My daughter and the Wonder Grandson, Wee Jamie, are off in California for three weeks, visiting family,  showing Wee Jamie to his living ancestors, cousins, great-aunt and uncles and assorted other kin, and giving my sister and her family a bit of a break, in looking after Mom, who is mostly paralyzed and bedridden, since a fall in her kitchen some years ago. This leaves me alone in the house, or as alone as one can be with a pair of dogs, three cats and two hyper-energetic kittens. (They all seem to be extra-clingy to me, in the absence of my daughter and Wee Jamie, though.) Is there a feline version of Ritalin for kittens… no particular reason for asking. Really. I am under strict orders from my daughter to check in with the next-door neighbor, Miss Eileen at least once a day, or else a welfare check from SAPD will be ordered up. No kidding. On an occasion in the early Oughties, when the Daughter Unit was still in the Marines, one of the cats knocked the bedroom telephone extension off the night table, and I didn’t notice. The Daughter Unit tried to call me for most of a day and only got a busy signal. A nice patrol officer from the local substation rang the doorbell early in the evening…

I’d rather not have that happen again.

Not having to work my day around Wee Jamie’s naptime, activities, exercise and appointments allowed me to get an enormous lot of stuff done, over the last several days – laundry without worrying if the noise from the washer and dryer would disturb his nap, time at the computer without little hands grabbing for my phone, keyboard or mouse, or keeping an ear on rotating alert for dangerous noise or even more dangerous silence … and time in the garden without worrying.

The range of potted herbs and veggies by the front door

The Greenhouse, with one of the newly-paved sitting areas

Yes, the garden. The greenhouse is done, and altogether splendid, although I made some mistakes in installing the eave panels, mistakes that I can’t go back and remedy, not without tearing it half apart again. Better just to adjust and move on … move on to covering more of the side garden with pavers to permit sitting areas and clusters of potted plants; the soil here is so dense and clay-like that I have long given up trying to grow anything in it. Better to pave with ornamental pavers and pea gravel and containers on top, or larger metal-sided raised beds full of purchased garden soil … the container garden is burgeoning with green, after a number of days of rain. We’ve already had several side dishes of fresh beans and peas. Last night I had two small red potatoes from the raised bed, and they were delicious and creamy. I’ve depended for weeks, nay, months! on the blessings of fresh basil, parsley, oregano, fennel, cilantro, sage, and dill from the pots by the front door. The container garden holds a tempting promise of tomatoes of all sorts, okra, squash and peppers of all kinds, from Bell to various exotic hot peppers. I’ve managed to fill an extended raised bed with topsoil, leaf mulch from the mulch pile, and maybe I’ll be able to plant some more beans, corn and pumpkins in it by the end of the week.

Of other projects – besides finishing the Civil War novel – three of them concern items that the Daughter Unit snagged at yard savings, or from a pile of discards from a neighbor who is moving to Hawaii and ditching every shred of excess to needs items; an oak child’s armchair and a pair of small steamer trunks. One is to be fitted out as a toy trunk for Wee Jamie, the other to be an all-in-one traveling display and storage for Miss Matilda. I’m hoping to finish all three by the time that my near family returns from California.

When my daughter was small, we were living in Greece, in an airy, second-floor apartment in suburban Athens, a suburb called Ano Glyphada with a view of the Saronic Gulf from the long windows. I shopped almost every week in the local street market, where vendors from little farms and orchards out in the country set up on one day a week. By custom, the municipality blocked off a two or three block-long stretch of street, and the vendors came with their little tables and awnings, to sell produce fresh from the country, although the farmer who came with ancient deuce-and-a-half truck full of potatoes just dumped the potatoes in a pile on the street, and weighed them out with a battered old-fashioned shop scale, which likely had been around since the Ottoman Empire. Everything for sale in the weekly market was fresh off the vine, the tree, stalk or in the case of the potatoes, just out of the dirt, with crumbled fresh earth still clinging to them. In fact, the vegetables and eggs available from the weekly market were so superior and augmented by feta cheese and yoghurt from the local supermarket and bread from a nearby bakery, that we went vegetarian for days and weeks on end. Therefore, one of my most-used cookbooks was Nava Atlas’ Vegetariana – which I think I must have bought from the Quality Paperback Book Club. (I belonged to a lot of book clubs then, and received book catalogs galore, as I was most often stationed in places without English-language bookstores – and this, Oh Best Beloved, was way before the advent of Amazon, et cetera.)

One of our favorite dishes from Vegetariana was this one – Rotelle Pasta with Tomatoes, Artichokes and Basil, especially with fresh basil from my balcony garden, and with blissfully fresh tomatoes.

Simmer until al dente – ½ lb rotelle pasta, and when done, drain and set aside.

Sautee in 1 TBsp olive oil – until softened, not browned

1-2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 medium sweet red bell pepper sliced in julienne strips

Add and stir until they just lose their raw quality

1 lb ripe tomatoes, diced

Stir in

½ cup firmly packed chopped fresh basil leaves

¾ pound marinated artichoke hearts, drained

1 TBsp red wine vinegar

1 tsp dried oregano

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Combine the sauteed vegetables with the cooked pasta and 1 ½ diced mozzarella or gruyere cheese. Serve at once, with toasted French bread slices on the side.

I totally wore out my original copy of Vegetariana sometime in the 1990s and had to replace it with a newer edition.

So, I am trying again with an expanded garden of herbs and vegetables this year, since I have a simply staggering number of good-sized pots and six medium-sized raised beds, of which I can only afford currently to fill three of them with that good growing soil … If I had known when I first moved into this house, what I now know, I’d have had the nasty clay-like topsoil stripped down to the caliche (about eighteen inches) and brought in a truckload of prime growing soil. Alas, I couldn’t afford something that drastic then, so I have made do ever since by growing the delicate stuff in the huge array of containers and planting tough natives or native-adapted in the ground. Honestly, I could make bricks very readily out of most of the dirt in my yard.

This last week Costco had bags of container soil available for a very reasonable price, so I’ll go back and get two more. I have a huge collection of garden seeds, and many of them are coming along very nicely. Some years I have had better results or better luck than others – this year, I hope that everything is aligning in my favor. The usual herbs – parsley, fennel, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano and cilantro are doing pretty well, since I could shelter them during the very worst weather earlier in the year. With the teeny yard that I have, I hope to have enough fresh vegetables to have something fresh every day from the garden, for as long as the vegetables bear – I managed that feat the year that we were in Utah and had a large garden plot. And Texas is milder, weatherwise, than Utah…

As for vegetables in my current garden – one raised bed is full of various bean plants, and the other of potatoes, which won’t be ready to harvest until the green tops wither and die. I have a large pot with climbing pea plants in it, and last night we had some of the first fresh peas from it. Okra, tomatoes, various squash, cucumber, and peppers fill out the rest of the containers. But this week, since a client paid in full for a project, I took the plunge and bought a bigger, sturdier greenhouse to replace the small plastic one, which had disintegrated after a couple of years use. That greenhouse was a cheapie from Amazon; not only was the plastic cover shredded, but half the connectors had splintered as well. I looked around and found a suitable aluminum and polycarbonate panel greenhouse on Wayfair. It came today, in two boxes, and on two different trucks, since somehow the two got separated. The instructions, of course, were in the second box, which arrived about two hours after the first. The second driver was ransacking his truck, looking for the other box – was quite happy to hear that it had arrived already. So, that’s the project this week – putting it together will be like assembling a full-size Erector set – aluminum beams, polycarbonate panels, and about a kajillion nuts and bolts.  And I’ll have to re-site the paved path that leads to the back yard gate, as the greenhouse sticks out about six inches too far, and fit out the inside with paver blocks and gravel…

It’s not just that I need a greenhouse to propagate seedlings in a sheltered space so much, as I need it for those days and weeks when I have to move plants into shelter against the cold. With this greenhouse, I can run an extension cord from the house to power a small space heater, on those periods when it gets very, very cold, and skate through periods of bad weather without losing half of my plants. And that’s the project for this week and next.