My Dad's Secret Garden

When I was a kid we regularly tilled about a half acre in which we raised most every vegetable we would eat for the year. That meant early peas and lettuce in spring, green onions, and fresh tomatoes all summer long, green beans and new potatoes, cucumbers and squash, early sweet corn, melons, winter onions, late potatoes, okra, beets and turnips for the fall. We ate what was fresh and in season and canned the rest for winter use. Everyone worked the garden, planting, weeding, harvesting. Now, years later I live in the city and try to keep my two anemic tomato plants alive as my neighbors bristle because I don’t have perfect golf course turf in my backyard.

After having success with the tomato plants Dulcinea decided she wanted to plant a few native Missouri perennials. The next thing we knew the bird feeder, the one that no birds ever visited, began to need bird seed. Once the golden finches and red-headed house finches became regulars and began to hang out on the wooden fence to wait their turn at the feeder the human neighbors began to notice. One afternoon as I was mowing the back yard, my neighbor Barbaria yelled over the back fence, “How do you get those pretty yellow birds to come in your yard?”

But I digress. When my brothers and I matured and left home the garden shrunk. Although we continued to relish the canned tomatoes my mom doled out at family dinners and as gifts at Christmas. After she died the garden got very small. Lettuce and onions in spring, no more new potatoes or Kentucky Wonders, but always fresh tomatoes.



Over the years Dad has aged, receiving bionic hips, etc. The garden has gotten very tiny indeed. But it has never gone away. To this day, he is nursing fresh tomatoes on his front porch, that will bloom and bear until first frost.

The News from Hospital Hill

There is a complete full moon tonight. When the moon was just above the horizon it was a glowing orange; beautiful, but it makes you wonder what is in the Kansas City air. Now, hours later it is a brilliant perfect white globe.

I had lunch at You Say Tomato yesterday. It is a new combination coffee house, café, grocery, place to hangout, just south of the Hill on Holmes. It is a great concept and already has personality, and real potential. I hope it can survive long enough to realize that potential. Later that evening, I saw it mentioned on several blogs and in Pitch.

With the completion of the UMKC Nursing and Pharmacy school getting closer and all the new condos being built along Gillham Road the Hill neighborhood is beginning to undergo a transformation. Gentrification, happening in many urban cores is both praised and despised. I suppose it depends on your point of view. But it is nice to see some of the older brick homes and apartments that have stood in disrepair or empty for years now undergoing renovation. Time will tell if the developers overprice and kill the golden goose.

One thing does bother me though. I don’t need to tell anyone about the neighborhoods that surround Hospital Hill. There is a great amount of diversity. And the employees of the hospitals, medical and dental schools, and the research institutes all include many Asian, black, white, Hispanic, middle-eastern and other variations of racial and ethnic origins.

But the workers that are building the Nursing and Pharmacy School are very homogeneous. White, young to middle-aged male, drive mega pick-up trucks and commute from suburbs beyond Grain Valley. I walk this area every day of the work week. I have seen four blacks working on the construction of the School in the past year. The first was an iron worker, then a carpenter, a hod-carrier (brings the cement to the brick layers) and a night watchman. Something is very wrong here.


Okay, if anyone is listening out there send your comments. Thanks

Labor(free) Day Holiday Weekend

Friday, September 1, 2006
You Can Go Home Again

It's just not always the way you remember it.

For Labor Day Weekend I decided to visit my father who still lives down in the Ozarks. It was past time, I have been most everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere this summer now it was time to return home for a while.

Something about returning to where I grew up makes me feel like a child. I decided I was going to take the tent and camp out in the side yard under the big pine tree. Late the first evening, alone in the tent (Dulcinea, having not grown-up in the country, had decided to sleep indoors in a bed) and lying on the air mattress I was enjoying the early cool night air. For some reason I began to remember how much of my summers as a kid were filled with itching and scratching. I turned on the small flashlight and shone it behind my knee where a little seed tick was busily burrowing into my skin. And then I vividly remembered why I was always itching and scratching as a kid: ticks, chiggers and poison ivy.


Saturday, September 02, 2006

I did sleep great until just before dawn when I awoke to a cold pain in my butt. During the night the air mattress had deflated. I always did want to get up early to take pictures in the fresh light of early morning. After a pot of Dad's great tasting coffee (I think the secret is he never washes the pot) Dulcinea and I headed out for a morning of fishing in the creek that winds it way along the border of my Dad's farm. We use the word farm loosely in our family. The farm is the original homestead of my father's family; roughly 130 acres of Ozark hill country that has remained largely untouched since the Great Depression, except for a few fertile bottom acres my Dad lets a neighbor use to raise hay and winter pasture his cattle on in return for keeping our fence up.

After several hours of non-productive fishing and non-productive dove hunting the sun was now high overhead and we were perspiring profusely from the unusual exercise. I'm not sure who had the idea first, but within minutes we were swimming in the COLD spring-fed creek. Just like kids again and it felt great. We were back at the house in time for lunch.

As I write this during the lazy afternoon sitting in a cool breeze on the side porch I am watching two ruby throated hummingbirds do aerial combat stunts as each tries to keep the other from feeding at the red globe of sugar water . They are both so busy defending territory they are oblivious to my presence.

Later...
Time to head back to the city. It has been a perfect weekend. I have no problem with always being a kid when I visit here, if only in my memory.