Life On Snob Hill: Cuttin' Heads

Imagine our surprise today, reading John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers A Food History of the Modern South, when we came to this passage that triggered a long dormant, yet long-stored memory: “‘…Neal talked of catfish stew, describing how the men of the family nailed fish to a tree and stripped the skin from the bones of writhing carcasses.’”

From the pages of this fine book to the depths of our memory came thoughts of trips to Lawrence, Kansas, made first from our first apartment in Kansas City and then from our addresses in St. Louis — all long before we became ensconced on Snob Hill. Along the Kansas Turnpike, there wasn’t much to see, a fact we came to know well because we made the trip often.

But there was one thing. Off to the north side of the turnpike, north even from the access road, sat a small house, perhaps a mobile home. Either way, it was a rundown property, old rusty cars parked on a gravel driveway, an appliance or two listing in the front yard. A creek jaggedly zigzagged along one side. It’s hard to think of a Kansas location as being gothic or having what could be called a holler or a crick, but it had that sort of vibe, a cross between “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the first season of “True Dectetive” and the energy emanating from the Clutter house in Holcomb (for fan’s of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”)

Why? It was the stunted tree just outside the rusty, chain-link fence, covered in skulls. This tree was not close to the highway and we were always traveling at a high rate of speed, so there was always a “what the hell was that?” sort of head-whipping reaction. At first, each sighting reminded us we had forgotten about the Skull Tree, but over time, we came to look for it, commenting and wondering on it, using it as a milepost for knowing we were 17 minutes out from the Lawerence city limits.

One time, we even exited the turnpike a mile or more away, then drove our Mazda RX-7 along the access road to get a closer look, And, yep, those were skulls, maybe a dozen or so, nailed to the tree like some sort of cautionary totem. We dared not slow down too much or turn toward the property, lest we find out own skulls on this old, rugged crucifix.

But why? went unanswered. Our imaginations went to dark places. We were reminded of a grandfather’s story about someone (it may have been our grandfather, though we hoped not, or it may have been an acquaintance) with a dog that needed to be “unlearned” of raiding the nearby chicken coop. As the story went, the dog’s owner caught the dog with a chicken in its mouth. He extricated the chicken and proceeded to whip the dog with the carcass. Then he tied the dead chicken to the dog’s collar and left it there until it rotted off. “As a reminder,” the grandfather would intone, “So he would learn the lesson.”

Of course, this was conveyed as a success story for how to train a dog to refrain from stealing chickens. The story reeked of being a tall folktale, an apocryphal anecdote. It might have been a story cut from “The Foxfire Book” or perhaps included in the bawdy “Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales,” a tome we read in high school. This story, sadly, revealed more about the teller (or even worse, the re-teller) than the story itself. To say nothing of the ignorance of canine psychology.

Nonetheless, we unconsciously conflated the dog story and the Skull Tree. We weren’t sure what type of animal skulls were nailed to the tree, though we knew they weren’t squirrel or rabbit, dog or cat. We conjectured fish, but couldn’t be certain. And still, “But Why?” remained unanswered. A warning about what, to what? A warning to wayward catfish? And did Kansas even have catfish?

As the years progressed, the skulls slowly disintegrated on the tree. In our memories, spines initially hung from the skulls, then fell away, but that is probably just overactive misremembering. The skulls were neither removed (from weather or otherwise) nor added to. Did the crick run out? By the time we no longer made the trip to Lawrence, the memory of Skull Tree receded to the brain lobe were latent thoughts languish.

Until today, miles and years away, sitting on Snob Hill, reading The Potlikker Papers, and instantly exclaiming a knowing “OH!” A flash of now-knowing. Mystery solved in an instant.

Most truths are simple truths that shouldn’t be trussed with our imaginations. But somehow, knowing what we know now about the purpose of the Skull Tree, we kinda, sorta prefer the embroidered imaginings better.

Digging, Not Praying

Life On Snob Hill: It being Spring here – as everywhere else in the northern hemisphere – our hands and hearts have turned to the soil. Spring is Dirt Time in a way not shared by the other seasons. After the hard-packed, frozen winter, it seems right to exchange mittens for our leather gardening gloves, to plunge our hands and trowels into the earth, and to embrace the faith that good things will emerge and thrive.

“Wrought - Spring” from the CB Adams film photography project titled Wrought.

Yesterday, we were assessing the open soil left when we removed a row of red twig dogwood bushes along the metal fence as the front of the Snob Hill property. We acquired the dogwoods cheaply at a school fundraiser more than 10 years ago. The bushes grew well enough, but the promised winter red twigs never really “redded up” and during the growing season they were just a bland green screen. So, we made what felt like the heartless, ruthless decision to pull them up.

Aristotle coined the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum.” To that we would add, “and so do gardeners.” The now-bare bush row practically begged to be replanted. After the substantial amount of hard landscaping we added this year, the budget for plant material (what a heartless phrase, that) is not as generous as we would like. So, we repurposed the decorative side panels from a black metal arbor by attaching them to the fence. We then planted a “mailbox blend” of Morning Glories, blue and white. Inexpensive, traditional and almost guaranteed to grow and thrive. As we dug the holes for the hard, black, pre-glory seeds, we thought of how we must look to passersby: prostrate, eyes downward, hands and arms gesturing rosary-like. We have acquaintances who say they begin and end each day, “on my knees.” We are reminded of our own Christian upbringing and our parents’ gentle admonishment at bedtime to “say your prayers” with hands clasped and pressed firmly against our impressionable faces.

We are reminded, too, of a plaque that graced the gardens of both of our mothers. If you search the interwebs, it is the first thing we see. We have seen various forms of this plaque in many gardens. We know you know it, too. It is from a poem called “God’s Garden” by Dorothy Frances Gurney (1913):

…The kiss of the sun for pardon,

the song of the birds for mirth,

one is nearer God's heart in a garden

than anywhere else on earth…

We have distanced ourselves from the gardening and godliness connection, but we still feel something reverential about the act of gardening. On our knees, almost in supplication, we may not be praying per se. We are, instead, in a state of uncertain hopefulness. In addition to the Morning Glories (what a hymn-like name!), we dug in a bag of 30 small Peacock Orchids (Acidanthera) and five “Anastasia” Amarines, as well as emptied a packet of heirloom Nicotiana, or Scented Jasmine Alata. These are all new to us – hence the uncertain hopefulness.

Will these plants “like it” here on Snob Hill? We can’t really know right now. Only time will tell, as it always does. In the meantime, we hope. On our knees, opening the earth and filling those small fissures with hope in the form of seeds and roots and corms and tubers. Hope for our dear Emily Dickinson may be a thing with feathers, but to us, hope is the thing with leaves and stems and stalks and flowers and nectar.

As the imagined passersby observe us in our reverential, soil-bound gaze and reverie, they cannot know that for reasons not entirely clear, as we caress the earth, we are also reminded of Jimi Hendrix and that line from Purple Haze:

“ ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

Salmon Fishing On Snob Hill

Somewhere between Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America and Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing In the Yemen lies our Snob Hill. And these thoughts…

Just as there are changes in the seasons and changes in current fashion and even changes in attitudes/changes in latitudes, to borrow a phrase from Buffet, there are changes – evolutions – constantly in motion on Snob Hill. We will celebrate our 25th anniversary as stewards of our piece of Snob Hill this coming August.

How time flies.

We are watching with interest the transition of a few properties here on the Hill. One house has stood empty but well maintained for approximately 10 years. The owners, part of the old-old guard, moved nearby to the inherited home of a mother, and use, as best we can fathom, their Snob Hill location as one of the nicest storage lockers ever. To be clear, the house is not abandoned, per-se, because the owners visit often and their yard man appears regularly to cut grass, trim bushes, and collect leaves.

We also have two elderly widowers on the Hill, and their two fates – though ultimately the same for all of us – are as individual as they are. One, Frank, is a cancer-battler who has kept his wild white hair, tousled up like Heat Miser in The Year Without Santa Claus, and who has been pursuing in his later years a modest career in stand-up comedy. But that is another story. We have nothing else to say about him now other than we refer to his slow strolls up the lane with a vocal, protective schnauzer named Aggy as “Franks Wild Years” in deference to Mr. Tom Waits.

How time ain’t nothin’ when you’re young at heart.

The other widower, Grant, hung onto his independence with a tenacity that was not sustainable, yet was also somehow admirable. His wife passed several years ago, and his own infirmities corroded his mobility, his moods and his ability to care for himself. Yet he insisted in both driving one of two vehicles – a PT Cruiser and a Ford Expedition – living out his remaining years at home. He gave it the ole college try, which required a couple of years’ worth of home healthcare providers who provided inconsistent quality to his care and wellbeing. When this arrangement because obviously untenable, the family moved him to a nearby assisted living facility just before the COVID-19 pandemic.  

How time runs like a freight train.

But it is his wife, Angela, to which we return. She was a master gardener associated for many years with our city’s botanical garden. She was known locally in the70s and 80s as the “Herb Lady” and people would clog the lane each spring to purchase plants she raised in her small greenhouse. We recently conversed with a woman at a nearby farm who, when she found out where we lived, described exactly this occurrence.

As might be expected, a master gardener saved some of the best plants and garden design for her own purposes. Yet, as cancer slowed her down and her passing, her once-admirable garden rooms with their English cottage influence and secret pockets, have gone to seed, to use an old phrase. They are now lush with poison ivy and oak, Virginia creeper and the invasive bugaboo honeysuckle. Still, many of the established plants still exert themselves through the weeds.

Such was the case this past week with a planting of a unique, salmon-colored iris. Among the world’s irises (and we claim to be no experts in the botanical sense), these are off the beaten path. Yes, we began to covet these irises. We desired the irises. They became an item of recurring conversations along the lines of “Wouldn’t those look lovely in certain parts of our own gardens? We know just where to tuck them.” Yet, as co-presidents of the Snob Hill Neighborhood Association, being caught as poachers would be both unseemly and just plain wrong. So we did the right thing. We called one of the siblings. We were not piggish. We asked to be allowed to dig up just a few rhizomes. To our delight, the sibling not only said “please do,” and added something about her mother’s legacy.

Like naughty children, we entered our neighbor’s overgrown gardens. We brought along our cell phone with the text from the sibling, just in case we were questioned about our activities. We carried a small shovel known as a “poacher’s spade,” which seemed only appropriate. We were careful where we removed the rhizomes, choosing to remove only those whose absence would be most unnoticeable. We also found another delicate blue iris, which we also chose to add to our garden.

As we planted the new flowers, we also realized how many of the plants on our property came from neighbors – clumps of ornamental grasses grabbed from a nearby yard with a handwritten Free! sign, clumps of hostas that a Snob Hill neighbor gave us after their son didn’t want them, and a new yucca that our next-door gave us after yanking it unceremoniously from her hill. We were also surprised this year when a neighbor from across the street had a “bumper crop” of tomato seedlings and offered “as many as you want. “ They weren’t our preferred heirloom varieties, but for free, we gladly accepted some.

We have come to prefer such botanical hand-me-downs in part to save money, but also because we know the plants are from our terroir, our local environment. They have histories. They also connect us with their owners. Sometimes, the “owners” are just the latest in a long line of plant hand-me-downers, like the plants from our parents’ gardens we shared in The Family Sedums.

We are surrounded by so ways of marking time – wall clocks and watches, holidays and birthdays, calendars and cadences, seasons and solstices, apps and emojis. We observe Snob Hill time, which is marked by the way of our sons visit (partners in tow) and park where they once played in piles of leaves. By the way neighbors move on, pass on, or relinquish their independence. By weather events, like the ice storm that disarmed trees whose branches broke like gunfire, like the tornadoes that spared Snob Hill but left us without electricity for a week, like the unnatural, eerily quiet skies during the days after 911, by the cautious, distanced chats in the lane as we sheltered in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. This kind of time almost always begins with “Do you remember when…?”

 Taking a bit of someone else’s garden is like trying to carefully scrape a bit of color from someone else’s painting. It could be a type of theft. It can also be a gift. A share. Like asking for Grandma Myrtle’s chicken and dumpling recipe and having her transcribe the faded, crumpled, stained 3x5 card in her recipe box, then hand it to you. It’s a loving act of assimilation. An opportunity to take someone else’s approach, or practice, or creation and   make it your own.

 In our desire, we thought of ourselves as iris thieves, which led us to recall something from Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief:  "Collecting can be a sort of love sickness. If you collect living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, because even if you manage to find and possess the living thing you want, there is no guarantee they won't die or change."

Which in turn led us to recall some lines from the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris:

“…And all I can taste is this moment

And all I can breathe is your life

And sooner or later it's over

I just don't wanna miss you tonight…”

Life On Snob Hill: Replacing Old Bastard

About a year ago, a storm blew across Snob Hill, and the casualty was a hard maple we had named Old Bastard. The maple was the progeny of a beautiful specimen that grew in a grandfather’s (the original front yard in southeast Missouri. He was the original, most-deserving of the moniker Old Bastard. We nurtured the little Old Bastard from the time it was the size of a pencil until it was more than 20 feet tall. It was becoming a beautiful tree, with brilliant yellow leaves in the fall. Until the storm cut its life short. The straight-line wind snapped it about four fee from the ground. The trunk still stands there; a headstone to itself. We haven’t had the heart to take it down

We considered not replacing Old Bastard, but it stood next to the stump of an Ash tree that an arborist claimed may have been the biggest in the State of Missouri. It was certainly one of the largest. We counted at least 160 rings. So Old Bastard was intended to be our testament to that Ash’s legacy. When Old Bastard’s life was cut short, we thought perhaps it’s best not to replace the loss.

Then we decided to try again. We pondered which species. A shag bark hickory was a top choice for a while. Then we spied a two-pack of pecan trees at the local big box store. We heard that the healthiest trees are planted as young and small as possible. We also have had the best luck with so-called “cheap” trees. We purchased three puny Japanese maples from Aldi, and they are all beautiful and thriving.

The two pecans have been sitting in their box, by the front door. Today, we noticed the first signs of life. We are reminded of something Joseph Campbell said during those famous Bill Moyers PBS interviews, “…A plant growing, I think of grass, you know. Every two weeks a chap comes out with a lawn mower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say, well, for Pete’s sake, what’s the use? It’s the coming into being that’s it, and that’s the life point in you…”

Stay tuned for the continuing story of the life points of these pecans. And dream of pies….

The Bastard Bush of Snob Hill

"Furled" by CB Adams

Is there such a thing as a bastard in the plant world? We don’t really know.

There is, of course, the Bastard Cabbage, the Bastard Toadflax, and the Bastard Mustard Plant, but these are only common, vulgar names.

We know that in the human kingdom that bastard is an old term to signify a son who could not inherit (ala Prince Herbert’s “What, the curtains?”) because he was not born out of his father’s (ala, the King of Swamp Castle’s) marriage even though he was the proverbial fruit of his father’s loins, even though such fruits can be of either sex. 

This, compared to illegitimate daughters who were still eligible be married off, or sent to a convent, or employed as a servant, or dreamed Cinderella dreams. How perfectly medieval.

We have pondered the etymology and gender of bastard all summer (leading to an unproductive sidetrack of reading-up-on William the Bastard) as the bush established itself in the yard. And even if bastard today tends to be gender specific (even though history says not), we might still feel free to apply it to the bush, to which we have (rightly or wrongly) assigned a femininity.

After all, we regularly hear young women refer to each other as dude, dick, and son of a bitch (which is doubly perplexing to us), so why not bastard? Especially given that the root of bastard is thought to be from the Latin, bastardus, or perhaps bastum, which is the same as “pack saddle,” which may stem from the idea being of a child produced from a relationship with a traveler.

You may be wondering what all of this has to do with a bush because if it is just a question of genetic lineage, then bastardism need not apply. Let us quote one of our favorite Tricky Dick Nixonisms: “Let me say this about that.”

We have adopted a bastard bush.  Or more appropriately, we rescued this bastard bush from landscaping euthanasia. For more than 20 years, this bush thrived at the edge of a Mother’s deck. It was not indigenous to this property, having been transplanted from its original home at our Parent’s former domicile, where it had thrived for at least a previous 20 years. 

 It is a common bush with common name, Rose of Sharon, but to Mother, it is a vulgar name, a name not to be spoken because Sharon is the name of the woman a former brother-in-law married after divorcing our Sister. Mother had enjoyed, maybe even loved, this bush for 30 years, but through no fault of its own, she condemned it now because its moniker was a too-painful reminder of one our family’s great trials (to say nothing of the damage to our Sister and Nephews).

And now we understand from whom we inherited our tangled associative tendencies, including the list we compiled of all the names we would never name either of our sons, drawn from all the people who had offended, bullied, us sometimes in our lives.

So Mother had decided (now ten years post-divorce) that she could no longer endure the bush’s presence. She summed up her animosity by way of a phrase from Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Shortley: “That bush is an abomination!” (Rose of Shortley, perhaps?)

And like a medieval king, it was off-with-its-head, except it was off-at-the-roots.

Mother had mentioned off-handedly that she was going to have her gardener remove the offensive shrub along with some invasive bamboo, a sap-drooling Mimosa tree, and some clumps of decorative grass that no longer interested her. Always on the lookout for free plant material, we asked if we could have it. This pleased Mother because she was glad for it to live, just not within her line of sight.

So that is how the bush came to Snob Hill. And with it we felt it required a new name. If Mother inquired about the health of the bush, we wanted a name that would not conjure unpleasantness. We tried:   

• M-m-m My Rose of Sharona, by way of The Knack

• Rose of BetterNotPickIt, with thanks to Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt

• Rose HasItsThorn, from GNR

• Nat King Cole’s Ramblin’ Rose, or was it the Grateful Dead?

• Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie

• And even Rose of Shawan, after a family surname and a great-grandmother who grew them

But none of them stuck. As didn’t Rose of WhatsHerName (too polysyllabic). And neither did Rose of Slut nor Rose of Crotch Jockey, keying off Mother’s preferred nicknames for that person. “It’s not fair to the plant,” she said.

For a bit, we promoted a sex change and referred to it as Rose of Sharon, but pronouncing it like Ariel Sharon, with a long o and emphasis on the second syllable. This proved unsuccessful. Not many got the joke. And most importantly, Mother was not a fan. It may of failed for her because this alias still reminded her of you-know-who, in the same way that gosh-darn-it is only a mask for the real intent of god-damn-it.

Mother didn’t say why, but we suspect it may be that she leans less toward the Judeo and more toward the Christian tradition. There is a certain form of irony in this because 1) Rose of Sharon is mentioned in the Bible, 2) said plant is not a true rose, and 3) is not the same plant as the bush we know today. If only flora confusion were the root of unrest in the Middle East…

One half of Us took a cue from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath suggested Rose a Sharn, as a tip of the hat to this bush’s hardy and resilient character. But the Other Half quickly dismissed this as: Too Joad family. Too Beverly Hillbillies. Too Gomer Pyle.

Besides, the Other Half of Us said, “That whole titty thing at the end is indelible in all the wrong ways, and I’m not talking about breastfeeding in public.”

In the end, we chose Rose of Snob Hill. It’s safe. It’s appropriate. And it’s accurate. Rose is happy on the hill and is thriving, especially with the mild and wet summer. His/her roots are going deep. And we can all live with that.       

Freaks and Beeks - The Art of Warre, A Beekeeper's Journey

I came out last Sunday…to my neighbors.

That is, I revealed that my backyard is now a bee yard, home to two beehives and the possibility of a third. This was big news to those at our annual summer picnic. We are a small neighborhood of twelve homes on a private drive, and there isn’t usually much that occurs without someone noticing something at least some of the time. We window monitors.

But I managed to buy 200 pieces of Western red cedar board ends, unload and stack them on the driveway, store them for a couple of weeks, reload about half of them to take to my father's workshop, and return a few weeks later with the components for three Warre hives, store them on my porch, treat them with ECO Wash in the front yard, install them in the backyard, and finally introduce two packages of bees to their new homes without so much as a “Whatcha doin’ there neighbor?” So much for all those Crime Stoppers stickers in our windows.

Oh, and I had even paraded around in my bonnet, pants, and long white goatskin gloves that make me feel like a cross-dressing Jackie O or Audrey H impersonator. Maybe this says more about what my neighbors expect from me than I realized.

And, that do-it-yourself cloaking device kit wasn’t a waste of money after all, honey.

So when, between bites of fried chicken and seven layer dip, I happened to mention something about “my bees,” well….let’s just say, heads did turn. I watched as this conclave of homeowners, which demographically skews more Downton Abbey than How I Met Your Mother, began an impromptu game of telephone as the news of my bees worked along the line of lawn chairs. I was surprised that by the time it reached the end someone hadn't blurted “What? He watches Glee?”

But the news made it intact. And, as I have come to expect, the first question is almost always “Why did you get into beekeeping?” or “What made you get into beekeeping.” Fair questions both, but, as with so many things bee-wise, it elicits something unique because no one ever asks, “Why did you get a dog?” or “What made you get into cats?”

No, beekeeping is its own brand of endeavor and people react correspondingly. Though most people are wary of an encounter with a bee or bees, they nonetheless overwhelmingly have a positive curiosity about them. And news accounts in recent years about their potentially imminent demise brings forth their protective instinct that is more save-the-baby-seal than get-off-my-lawn. Bees are like Sally Fields, people really, really like them.

In the hypothetical sense, anyway, because the people who congratulate my beekeeping endeavors are often the same ones who also say that bees freak them out with thoughts of anaphylactic shock, stingers, and B-movie swarms of killer bees (not with the fondness of those old Saturday Night Live skits).

For this reason and a few others, including my latent orneriness, I did not take the proactive approach promulgated by the fine folks in my beekeeping club and leaders of the beginning beekeeping course I attended. No, I did not “reach out,” nor soften the opposition, nor build an approval rating. Instead, I extended to my beekeeping the same bug-off attitude that I have carefully nurtured during my twenty years in this neighborhood known as Snob Hill. I’m actively seeking a Beware of Bees sign to post on my gate. I do not recommend my approach for everyone.

I was prepared for whatever backward backlash that my neighbors might launch. I even memorizing the number of the city ordinances allowing for bees, but they surprised me. They were pleasant and supportive. They told me about neighbors from years ago who raised bees. They wanted to know how long I’d been a beek. They wanted a tour of the hives. They wanted to know, of course, when they could expect some honey.

My beekeeping journey has just begun. Out of all us world citizens, those of us who also serve as bee stewards are a special sort of minority. And among those of us who are in that minority, I have down-selected myself into an even smaller minority. That is, I have chosen the Warre approach to beekeeping. It's philosophy appeals to me. More on that decision in my next posting.

Stay tuned. Don’t worry. Bee happy.

Fare Thee Well, FUBAR Gardens

And really, we don’t know what Paul Simon meant when he sang about the “sounds of silence” because life on Snob Hill is usually peaceful and relatively quiet, but never silent.

People speak about the chirping of birds as the harbinger of spring (but honestly, don’t birds sing year round?) (on the other hand, tulips announce themselves with color rather than sound) (though maybe, like dog whistles, our ears don't hear them)).

We know summer by the sound of the lawn mower and leaf blower operated by our imposing neighbor Mr. Vonk across the street. Mr. Vonk lets us know when the grass is dry enough to be cut (at least twice a week or more, it seems), when our leaves have invaded his expansive personal air space, and when all weeds need whacking. We look forward to the day when, like one of those hurdy-gurdy one-man-bands, Mr. Vonk will don all his mechanized equipment and mow and blow and whack simultaneously. If this occurs, we promise to provide some proof, like one of those herky jerky films of Sasquatch (apparently only the palsied camera-challenged are eligible for an audience with Pope Gigantopithecus) .

We know that autumn is upon us by the sound of acorns falling on the plastic (call it “composite material” all you want, but it’s still plastic) carport that our neighbors attached to their house like a piece of mismatched Lego. To gank a phrase from an old commercial, we wish they would “leggo that Lego.” Such a structure is unbecoming of Snob Hill.

As autumn approaches, we lie in bed, especially in the morning, and listen as the accords begin to drop – propelled at first slowly, prompted by slight winds, and then building into a crescendo as the temperatures cool and they are stripped by gusts from the North. It is as if the Mother Oak finally decides the time has come for her acorn children to go out a play…permanently. And try to not to get under foot!

All of this is leads us to our current feelings of good riddance toward our gardens, especially the vegetable garden. Sadly, our mantra, as we stand before them, surrounded by the plunk of freedom-seeking, plummeting acorns, the steroidal whine of Mr. Vonk’s leaf disturber, and the obnoxious natterings of the amateur announcer from the nearby stadium that describes the silly scurryings of third-tier college athletes, is simply, “Just die already.”

We have been known to be autumnally melancholic, morose even, as we contemplate the gathering gloom, the abbreviation of daylight (and increasing Vitamin D deficiency) and the inexorable slide into winter. We are reputed to be Fall People, fixated on the strip search and confiscation of the other three seasons of flora. This year, all of that flailing has been replaced with an overwhelming  “Oh, Get on with it!”

In the spring, we began with such high hopes. We moved what seemed like a ton of pavers from the back yard  to the front of the yard as we lined our new vegetable garden. We hired Rototiller Man (an archaeological descendant to Piltdown Man?) to break the earth and outdo Mr. Vonk’s landscaping motor madness, at least for an hour and a half. Then we furtively pored through seed catalogs like plant porn addicts, amended soil, fertilized, cold composted, and visited nurseries and Home Depot’s garden center.

We were inspired by a passage from Gary Paulsen’s Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass, describing some uncles during planting season:

Pick up the dirt and smile and say:

“Drop a seed in this drop a goddam seed in this, and you won’t make the edge of field before it’s up to your knee tripping you.”

Pick up the soil and taste it, taste a piece of it and smell it and throw it down and smile and say, “Clabbered dirt, sweet grass,” even though dirt doesn’t clabber and sour, but sill, still there is a thing to taste there that tells things.

Oh, such was our springtime Pollyanna hopes for the garden. Now, these several months later, we have devolved. We began like Big Edie in Grey Gardens when she said, “I love the smell [of Grey Gardens]. I thrive on it. It makes me feel good.”

Now we are like Little Edie when she said, “I can't stand being in this house. In the first place, it makes me terribly nervous. I'm scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes, I'm absolutely terrified.” (Is it no wonder that The Grey Gardens: The Musical CD had sold approximately 30,000 copies as of November 2007?)

So we are terrified of our gardens. We could list the many reasons why we have allowed them to fall into their current state of disrepair, but, really, are minor foot surgery and two months in a “cam boot,” poorly staked tomato plants, two gusty, bamboo-trellis-destroying rain storms, preparations to send our youngest child off to college, general professional obligations, aggressive avoidance of OODW, Lady Macbeth Syndrome (Out Out Damnned Weed), and the threat of West Nile really enough to offset and properly explain our failures as stewards of the soil? We think not.

Our gardens are FUBAR. If you don’t know this military acronym for utter failure please Google it. Propriety prevents us from such potty mouthings at present. Best now to metaphorically plow them under. Learn from our mistakes – apply a dab of disambiguation.  And spend the winter listening to the wailing soundtrack of Mr. Vonk’s snow blower. And preparing to do it all again next spring.

Such is the nature of gardening.

The Family Sedums

We received the call a few weeks ago.

Well, not that call, but an important call nonetheless. We are referring of course to the call from Mother, who wanted to know if we would like the family sedums.

Some receive the family jewels, others, apparently, the family sedums. They were currently in pots on her deck and, despite her best efforts, something insisted on eating them, “to the quick,” as Mother put it. Every morning she would look outside to find another sedum reduced to a sad stub. She had moved the pots all year, from driveway to walkway to deck, trying to make them inaccessible, in successive order, to the deer, the squirrels, the chipmunks, groundhogs, beavers, slugs, and gypsies, tramps, and orchid thieves.

To no avail.

The solution, Mother had concluded, was total exile, to secret them from her house in another county to ours … if we wanted them. We did, but this begs the question, “What if we said no?” The answer is, of course, “Not an option,” which sounds like the catchphrase from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that is our life. We are the inheritors of the family jewels and the family sedums.

Her offer came with some precedent. We already have the reputation as the repository of the family flora. Already rooted are the Hen and Chicks we were given in childhood by a great-grandmother who gave us “starters” from hers that she grew in strawberry pots, and Old Bastard, the maple tree flourishing in the backyard that is the progeny of the magnificent specimen a grandfather (the eponymous Old Bastard) had in his front yard before the Missouri Highway Department cut it down to widen the road.

There are no plant import regulations between St. Louis and St. Charles Counties. The sedums arrived in pots so large and heavy Father had brought along a ramp to slide them into the child-sized red Flexible Flyer wagon, the only wheeled conveyance we had since the red wheelbarrow’s tire went flat and we felt too cheap to spend $32 for a new one.  Who knew so much would have depended upon it?

Any of our looky-loo Snob Hill neighbors were rewarded with the sight of two 75-year-olds and two 53-year-olds (one limping along in a cam boot) guiding the sedums down the uneven stone walkway the way those people in the Macy’s Day Parade handle the giant Snoopy balloon on a windy Thanksgiving day. After safely seated on the front patio, our neighbors no doubt continued to be entertained as we stood, gesticulating over the pots, which Mother was quick inform that she wanted back.

There were three varieties of sedums, each with its own history and all of which are botanically unexceptional. They are just garden variety sedums. Mother pointed. Father pointed. We stood with hands on hips, trying to follow their disagreement about which sedum came from which side of the family. We can only be certain now of this: there is one from each side of the family and one that was purchased years ago by our parents. With a knowing glance, we acknowledged to each other that in a few seasons, after the sedums became established and spread in their new home, the confusion would only grow.

What our neighbors could not hear next was the story Mother told of the sedums from her own mother’s garden. This grandmother was a wonderful and giving woman with a tragic taste in men. She married twice after divorcing mother’s father (the only good one of the bunch). The third was a carpenter named Raymond (forever ruining that trade and name). Our grandmother was no gardener, but she liked to have a few flowers to brighten the yard that overlooked an interchange on Highway 55. She could never get anything to grow because Raymond delighted in running over with his riding lawnmower whatever she had planted. Tulips, marigolds, and Black-eyed Susans – all succumbed as he rode over them, laughing.

The only plants he could not kill were the sedums that she protected in beds, built of unattractive concrete blocks that lay along the basement foundation. During the last year before she died, Mother dug up some of the sedums and took them home. She nurtured them for more than 20 years and when she moved to two new houses.

Now this sedum legacy continues on Snob Hill. Family folklore blends with family plantlore – proof that love has the capacity to outlive cruelty for as long as we care to tend it and pass it on.

And Mother has her pots back.

--CB Adams

The Difference Between Snow and Leaves

We are digging out from yesterday's 14-inch spring snow storm. The weather people were right for a change; it arrived on time and in the predicted amounts. After a few years of paltry snowfall, this one is spectacular, even if a little late. We were inspired at first to offer our paean to snow. But from our perch in the kitchen, watching shovels, snow blowers, and helpful grandchildren materialize, something else seemed worth mentioning.​

Most of us on Snob Hill emerged about the same time this morning, intent on clearing paths for our selves and the mailman. The municipality will not plow our street because we live on a what the others call a private drive. We do not, as a neighborhood, think of ourselves as private drive people. That's a slippery slope. Next we may become a gated community. So we pay a man and his truck and his plow to clear the street.

What struck us this morning is how we all helped one another. Mr. W from two houses down, brought out a snowblower that looked like he needed a license to operate it. He cleared his next door neighbor's circle drive, and the driveway of the two younger families across the street. One of us helped an elderly woman from across the street, and she reciprocated with some kitty litter to help us extricate the Jeep from a snow bank.​ We all made sure to place snow piles in convenient places.

Snow, in other words, is a unifying event. The writer Jean Stafford got snow right when she instructed the this to be engraved in her headstone, “The snow was a benison, it forgave them all.”

Not so with leaves.

Snob Hill is filled with mature trees whose leaves fall throughout the hill at the whim of each prevailing wind. The leaves are like one of nature's united nations, all mixed together. Yet, it is hard not to be resentful raking large sycamore leaves when one does not "own" a sycamore. We should only be responsible for the leaves that are indigenous to our own property. The operators of leaf blowers have been known to "return" leaves to their rightful owners when the rightful owners aren't home. Others have the philosophy that if they ignore the piles of leaves long enough, eventually they will blow next door or across the street.

Snob Hill leaves, in other words, are not unifying.​ They bring out our lesser angels.