Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Apple blossom

That time of year again – the last week before the recorded date of ‘last frost’ in this part of Texas. I suppose that in some year or other there was a spasm of frost after March 15^th – this is Texas, after all, where if you don’t care for the weather at any particular moment, just wait for five minutes. But March 15^th is the traditional ‘ladies and gentlemen, start your garden engines’ moment. We actually started last weekend, moving out the tender plants which had been sheltered on the back porch, protected by sheets of plastic hung from three sides to make a sort of temporary if terribly cramped greenhouse. It has been pouring, drizzling, misting and oozing rain off and on for the past week, and … well, really, the rainwater is good for plants, and they might as well get all the good out of it.

The Gargoyle on the Shed Roof

So it begins – another year of attempting to have regular backyard supply of fresh vegetables, in a variety of raised beds, pots large and small, and hanging patented tomato planters. Last year saw us add three sapling fruit trees – apple, plum and peach, along the back fence, where they all graciously consented to leaf out, and to produce blooms in the last couple of days. This week, we added another apple tree – it seems that it is necessary for the purposes of cross-pollination. Blondie’s Montero awaiting a new engine, it was necessary to bring it home in my Accura – and not a problem at all. I opened the sun roof, and Blondie lowered it in, and we drove home with the apple tree’s upper branches waving proudly in the breeze. We planted it today, and I took down the last of the sheltering plastic sheets and swept out the back porch. This seems like the first sunny, mild day in weeks, so we did take a few minutes to sit down and relish it all. Tomorrow – top up the big raised bed with garden soil and plant potatoes. Last year we had a lovely crop of them; not as many as we had expected, but oh, were they delicious – and smooth, like vegetable velvet.

The little ducks – in the birdbath

We also installed a number of small items which came from Mom and Dad’s place – things which had no particular value, particularly – so likely they would have been sold at a yard sale for a buck or two, or put into the trash by new owners cleaning up. A good few of them had survived the fire in 2003 which destroyed the house and garage, but left the garden relatively unscathed. There was a cast cement gargoyle, a hanging glazed ceramic bird-bath, a pair of cast-resin ducklings, a wind-chime, a glazed spatter-ware jug and some other oddments. One of them was the Moche-style face jug I made in the sixth grade, which always amused Mom enormously as it so looked like Grandpa Al. Blondie brought all these oddments back from California with her, and we scattered them about the garden in appropriate places.

The Moche-style Grandpa Al pot

The plants which did survive outside on their own did so in style; especially the one artichoke that I moved from a raised bed into a pot and thereafter ignored for the remainder of the year. I so love artichokes, and the ones in the store are usually as expensive as they are tasteless and tough. Here’s hoping for some likely blooms from it this year, and may the other two from Rainbow Gardens thrive just as well.

We might also have a respite from field rats, raiding the almost-ripe tomatoes and eating leaves off the pepper plants. We have detected a semi-feral ginger cat, lurking meaningfully in our yard, who might have set up occasional housekeeping underneath the shed. Blondie has nicknamed the cat Smeagol; if it turns out that he is a mighty hunter before the Lord, a dish of kibble now and again will so be coming his way.

The patent tomato trees

The New Doors to the Den

“You should be very glad,” I told my daughter a couple of weeks ago, “That I used to help my brothers assemble airplane models.” I did, too – JP was quite fond of putting together detailed 1/48 and 1/72 scale model aircraft, which he bought with his allowance money. He paid great attention to detail, fitting the parts together so that only a hairline crack showed – and often filling in those with plastic putty and sanding the piece so it that the join was invisible after being painted. He was just as careful in painting the models and their visible component parts, even to painting a miniscule silver zipper down the front of the pilot’s flight suit. At a later date he went to the extent of fabricating battle damage with fine wire and bits of tin-foil. So that was my introduction to following instructions and identifying the bits and pieces involved. Eventually my brother put away childish things like Airfix models, and moved on to tinkering with real automobiles, to the horror of his first wife, whose family was wealthy and in their world, one just didn’t pop up the hood in the driveway and investigate the mysteries within.

Myself, I moved on to another form of kit-building – that of miniature furniture, and then of full-sized functional furniture. Dad’s facility with, and collection of a wide assortment of hand-tools meant that I had a fair grasp of their various uses, and a tendency to have a bash at fixing whatever might need fixing. And following Dad’s many examples – once I became a home owner, there I was, replacing light fixtures, re-wiring table lamps, applying a finish to unfinished furniture, painting the house (inside and out), putting in new faucets in the kitchen and bathrooms… Piece of cake. Just follow the instructions.

What brought on the recent round of assembly was a jaunt through the Ikea store in Round Rock two weeks ago to collect some shelving units for my daughter’s work area/office. She has a corner of the living room for her computer desk, the various office items and storage for the materials for her origami art. Much of this was previously stored in plastic tubs and a couple of plastic drawer units which had been cheap to begin with and now looked even worse. So – a pair of shelf units, with some cupboard door, drawer and basket options were in order, all of which came packed with fiendish ingenuity in an assortment of flat cartons. I do have to say the assembly instructions were quite logical, and the language hurdle was gotten over by being completely pictorial. Still – all the side and shelving panels had to be sorted out, and the various connectors identified. It wasn’t a patch for thoroughness on the last bit of office furniture I had put together; a pair of wooden filing cabinets from Amazon, which had every single panel and piece identified with a little sticker, and the hardware packed in a blister pack with everything labeled. With Ikea and the usual kind of flat-packed items it’s more often a process of having to sort everything out of a bag, and identify by measuring, counting and matching descriptions.

This weekend’s assembly was a pair of bi-fold closet doors, to sequester the den from the cats. I was able to have some furniture reupholstered; two chairs and an enormous tuffet, and the last thing I wanted after having gone to the trouble and expense was to see the cats sharpening their claws on it all … as they had shredded them before. (The den used to be closed off with a pair of louvered doors, but I repurposed them in the last remodel and used them for my bathroom and closet, and used a long pair of curtains in the opening.) So – I was off to the Home Depot website, to order a pair of wooden bi-fold doors to fit – and with generous free home delivery, instead of having to pick them up in the nearest store, too. The doors were delivered Friday, we stained and finished them on Saturday, and installed them today – again, carefully following every instruction. They fit perfectly, met in the center and matched up exactly – and now I may rest assured that the chairs and tuffet will be safe, once they are delivered on Wednesday. And that’s my weekend …

Yes, I have tweaked my website and blog … just a little. I didn’t want it to get stale, and I had begun to think that the previous template was rather … fussy. So, just as I am redecorating and simplifying the interior of my house in some small ways – like getting some long-owned pieces of furniture reupholstered, contemplating new kitchen cabinets, and trying to keep up with general housekeeping (like putting stuff AWAY) so I am doing with my book website. This template is cleaner-looking, and offers the option of rotating headers, which I will take fuller advantage of, as I tweak it some more. I have so many lovely pictures of Texas scenery and places that I have taken over the last few years, I’d like to give them more exposure, rather than once attached to a post and then buried in the archives forever.
I pointed out to my daughter this morning, as we were talking the doggles – that it is twenty years this spring that I rotated back to the States from my last overseas in Korea, and packed up my then-car, my daughter and Dad, and drove to Texas. I didn’t want to essay the whole two-day drive alone, and I didn’t want to buy a house without Dad’s expert advice – so he came with us, and lurked meaningfully in the background of the mercifully brief house hunt … I mean – this was my DAD, the shade-tree auto mechanic par excellence, who had also maintained every house that Mom and Dad had ever lived in, who had bought two houses and built most of their retirement house himself. So Dad came out to Texas with me, and traveled home as soon as I closed on this house, and his advice and support was worth every cent. Of all the houses I looked at, this was the smallest, but in the best location, and the best quality. (Even with telling the realtor that I didn’t even want to set foot on the mat of those houses which had been built by a certain builder whose bad reputation was a legend, nationally.
So – appreciate the renewed website – and in a couple of days, I will have a new chapter … either of The Golden Road, or Sunset and Steel Rails. Depends on which one I feel motivated to work on first, now that the chore of sorting out my income taxes is done.
Yes – I do my income tax early. My accountant loves me for this.

The pretty new-to-us china set

I would never say that I am as house-proud as Granny Dodie – whose home was always immaculate, scrubbed clean, everything polished to an inch of its life, all bits and bobs put away in a proper place, and whose garden was a marvel – groomed of every stray leaf, the gravel raked and the shrubs trimmed. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, likely Granny Dodie has been brought back as a USMC drill sergeant with particularly stringent housekeeping standards. Me, I never had the time for that degree of Better Homes & Gardens/Martha Stewart perfection. Full-time work and single parenting will do that to you. You couldn’t eat off my kitchen floor, but I could almost guarantee that nothing would bite you on the ankle as you walked through.

However, things did descend perilously close to slum-hood a couple of years ago, inside and out. A very bitter winter and temporarily sheltering a pair of particularly destructive half-grown dogs did for the garden. But slowly, slowly, I began to make it work again, and some of the plants which had gone dormant either recovered or re-seeded. Planting vegetables helped as well. It’s mid-winter here, so the garden is not currently at its best, and all the delicate plants are crammed into the back porch – which is hung with plastic on two sides, so as to make a temporary greenhouse.

As for the inside of the house; the territory of cats and dogs. One of the now-deceased dogs was

Painted and landscaped, with fresh gravel – The Glorious Shed!

insensately fond of piddling on rugs and she was sneaky about it; eventually the rugs were cleaned, rolled up and banished to the garage. Two of the geriatric and now-deceased cats were also very fond of making deposits in unexpected and hard to find places, and making them faster than they could be discovered and cleaned up. Eventually, we despaired of ever banishing the smells of such accidents from Blondie’s barracks-inherited armchair and one of the household sofas – a cheap find anyway, and the last bulk trash day out they went.

Between profits from the Tiny Publishing Bidness, sales of my own books, and the sale of the California land – I could afford to do some serious and long over-due repair and replacement of household stuff. Totally renovating the HVAC system was just the start. Having the shed built out in back provided a storage space for garden and kitchen things, as well as the items needed for participating in the gypsy markets. Over last winter, the curtains in all windows but the sliding glass door were replaced as I could afford them, with wooden blinds, which gave the place a whole new look. Daringly, I replaced the every-day china with an extensive set found at a flea market, giving mealtimes another whole new look. A new dining area table (new to us – a vintage number from my daughter’s favorite thrift shop) helped reclaim that corner. The original table was a pedestal style, and one of the legs loose beyond repair, and the resulting sudden tilt pitched the cats regularly onto the floor, in their own version of the sinking Titanic. Replacing various rush chair seats last month with cowhide was another step towards reclaiming a livable and attractive space – and also one which is a little more pet-proof.

This month we advanced another big step: getting the love-seat/sleeper sofa, two chairs and a tuffet all reupholstered – in heavy leather-look vinyl, replacing the original fabric – and making them all look as if they are in a set. This is an aesthetic improvement, and offers a higher level of pet-proofing, in that accidents can be readily sponged away. The upholstery shop will have the first piece done by next weekend, and the rest completed two weeks later. Two rugs returned from exile in the garage; so far, so good; the surviving cats don’t seem inclined to make messes anywhere but in the small area around their litter-boxes. The cat-tree has a couple of sisal-wrapped columns which they seem to prefer sharpening their claws upon, so there is hope for the furniture to escape unscathed. So far the cowhide seats have done so. The final element in renewing the house involved accommodating oddments from Mom and Dad’s house; a few pieces in silver and crystal, a framed stained glass panel, and some kitchen things which no one else wanted … so, some things had to be put away, others Goodwilled, and some of them just plain thrown away in the interests of space. But the den and the main room look quite good now – better than they have in a while, if not quite as spic-and-span as Granny Dodie would have had them.

New year already – which arrived with a rush, it seemed like. Here everything seemed like it was on hold for the holidays, and now the holidays are over and … everything returns to normal with a rush. I have two books for Watercress which are just about ready to push out the door – I had hoped to get them done before Christmas, but what was that which Robert Burns said about best-laid plans of mice and men going aft agley, or words to that effect? Yeah, the final approval of proofs was put off until after the holidays. And now it’s after the holidays. The good thing, from a purely economic standpoint, is that sales taxes on one will be deferred until 2015 … which reminds me that I have to sort out the sales taxes on mine and Blondie’s Christmas market effort which are due to the bounteous and beautifully independent state of Texas by the 20^th  of this month.

After I finish the layout for the Big Book Project, of course; this is an autobiography, and quite professionally written … mostly because the subject hired an excellent ghostwriter to perform the heavy lifting, word-smithing-wise. But the subject – who actually has had a pretty long and interesting life, and lots of  … interesting friends – has about 150 photographs that he wants included in the book, and some of them are … well, family snaps. Out of focus, or with eccentric centering, or scanned at least once, and the newer ones in color, which have to be converted to black and white, adjusted as to light levels and sharpness, cropping so as to accentuate the subject … yes, I’ve been putting in a lot of hours on Photoshop for the Big Book Project. Perhaps now I am at last getting all the good out of that DINFOS shake-and-bake photojournalism course over the late winter of 1978. Anyway, that’s the top priority at this particular time. But there are other matters to attend to.

Blondie is in California for the next few weeks, attending on Mom and family concerns. Mom is recovering, but will never be able to return to hers and Dad’s house. She will be in a wheelchair for the foreseeable future and living in an assisted-living residence. The house is now on the market; it has been cleared of personal possessions, a few of which will be kept as family heirlooms – mostly those few things which survived the fire – and the rest disposed of at an estate auction. I feel at least a few twinges at the heart about this; it was Mom and Dad’s place, which they made and decorated in their own way. But Blondie was the only one of us who actually lived there … and the fire in 2003 destroyed all the furniture and just about all those bits and bobs of personal sentimental value to us. So there is that.

There has been enough taken in from various book projects and sales to do this and that as regarding my own house. Like … sorting out the home office. I bought a pair of wooden file cabinets off Amazon over the last week; very nicely made ones, originating from Vietnam. They replace one battered, crushingly heavy, non-functional (the upper drawer jammed and stuck fast about two months ago) and rather nasty oak-veneer file cabinet (it smelled of mouse-dirt and mold when I got it) inherited from Dave the Computer Genius… well, it was free, mouse-dirt, mold and all, and I was not in such an economic position at that time which allowed me to look down on such an item. But now I can, and so I bashed it all to pieces, put it in the trash, and transferred all the files to the new cabinets. I can recommend them, BTW. The units are attractive and very beautifully designed – every individual piece is labeled with a number corresponding to the instruction sheet, and even the screws and knobs are sealed in a numbered blister-pack. Best of all, it looks like a nice bit of classic furniture when assembled, not just like an office filing cabinet.

And then there is the new idea for the book after the next … another western adventure. A proper but orphaned and relatively impoverished Bostonian young lady takes her future in her own hands, and decides to go out west … as a Harvey Girl. More original than a schoolteacher, I think. I’ve sent away for two books on the various Harvey enterprises in the last quarter of the 19^th century. And that’s my week.