Monday, March 28, 2011

Dead Wood

   I was a writer before I was a historian. For as long as I can remember my head has been filled with stories. At first, the stories were about others, about Laura Ingalls and Mary Lennox and Jo March. Growing up in a county where my mother's family had settled in the 1650s, in a town where the church had my ancestors names embossed in the stained glass, in a house built by my great-grandfather where the floor boards bore worm holes from being carried aboard his schooner, I was also surrounded by stories--and by history.

   My grandmother, Cleora, loved to tell stories that were more like snippets, enticing little facts about which she often neglected to provide details:
      "I broke your Pop Pop's ribs when we were horsing around."
     "My brothers once tied two cow's tails together."
     "A crab pinched my finger many years ago, that's why it doesn't bend."

   In 1985, when I was 15, the stories stopped. My grandmother was 85, and died of a massive heart attack. It came as a complete shock to me. As a small child, my substantial imagination led me to occasionally worry that something bad would happen to my parents, but I never, ever thought anything would happen to Mom Mom. I wrote my first "family story" the next year, a class assignment. It was called "Present Past." My  English teacher, John Wood, loved the title: "Get it," he said to the class, "the past is always present to the main character in the story."


   The past has always been present to me. About the same time I started writing in earnest, I became an avid genealogist and by extension, a student of local history. Names and dates were never enough  for me, however, and I was thirsty to know who these people were, these names on my family tree. Occupations, real estate, names of children, military service, much of this I could discover, but I longed for stories the documents did not reveal.

   So, I made them up. I took the anecdotes, the snippets, did some research (often not nearly enough), and imagined the lives of my family members. I did what every writer of historical fiction does (including James Michener, who I am certain based at least one of his Chesapeake characters on my Dorchester County ancestors) and populated my fiction with the people, places and events of real history. My senior English thesis in high school was a novel based on the Eastern Shore in the late 1700s; my history thesis was a history of Dorchester County during the American Revolution.

   Writing history, I learned, was easy. To write historical fiction well, was not. When I went to Washington College in Chestertown--the Eastern Shore writers' mecca--my split personality continued. My history teachers embraced my love of writing (as long as my facts were footnoted), but my creative writing teacher seemed to loathe my family stories.

   "You've got to get rid of the dead wood," he insisted. "Write about what you know."

   For my senior English project I wrote a novel (oh, and a history thesis analyzing the demise of the Federalist Party in Maryland). For a summer and a school year I retreated to my third floor fellowship room in the Victorian-style O'Neill Literary House and wrote about a young girl growing up on Maryland's Eastern Shore, struggling to exorcise the hold that small town traditions and secrets held over her, to escape her family history.

   Dead wood.

   I guess I didn't understand what he was saying. But that WAS what I knew, what I understood, what compelled me. I am still proud of my novel, the last fiction I ever wrote.

   As I see it now, it was half a novel. The novel of a 21 year old. Almost twenty years later, I can envision the second half of the novel, though it may never be written. The main character embraces the place that formed her, accepts the history that has created her, and finds a way to tell her own story. A story where the past is present.

   I remember the day that the resolution of the novel came to me. On a warm early summer day I was sitting in the shade with my nearly one year old son. It was a day just like one I describe at the beginning of my novel, a scene inspired by the idyllic description of Knoxville, Tennessee in James Agee's "A Death in the Family." It was also the day that I decided to put my full-time history career on hold in order to live my own family story.

I'm thinking of a day when I was five and I was swinging high in the tire swing that hung in the maple tree in my backyard as Daddy mowed the grass and Mother planted marigolds in the flower garden behind the house. I remember tilting my head back to see the deep, robin's egg expanse of the sky  through an olive-colored veil of leaves, then looking out beyond our yard at the sea of full-grown corn which spread to the line of pine trees in the distance. I breathed in the scents of cut grass, the dandelions I held in my lap, and the damp, raw smell of earth freshly uncovered in our neighbors' gardens. The hum of the lawnmower reverberated loudly in my ears while a chorus of sparrow chattered to each other above my head, the cicadas occasionally chiming in with their shrill, dried gourd rattle. Almost all afternoon I observed my world from that pleasant, breezy seat.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Meet My New Mini Tillers

I am a to-do list kind of person. I like checking things off, and have been known to write something down only to immediately check it off, just to feel a sense of accomplishment. Nothing makes me feel better than knowing something on my to-do list is getting done when I'm not even around. I'm not talking about a 'honey-do' list either. I'm talking about getting three loads of laundry hung on the line before you have to leave for the day, knowing they will be dry by the time you get home. I'm talking about perfectly timing the baking of bread, braising of a roast and boiling of potatoes so that everything is ready simultaneously.


Chicken-keeping has not been this kind of job. After a week or two of freedom in my back yard, the chickens began roaming over to the neighbors yard to scratch in her flower beds, looking for hidden bugs. This is not too much of a problem in February, but once the spring bulbs began to emerge I knew my neighbor would be out clearing her beds and wouldn't appreciate stepping in chicken poop. So I invested in 200 more feet of fence and decided to enclose a fair portion of the "back forty" as pasture. The added benefit was that it would reduce how much grass we have to mow all summer long. Within a week, the chickens had turned that 250 square feet of emerging weeds into a mud pit.

So back they went into the small chicken yard and I didn't let them out for nearly week. In protest, they flew up at the fence and rushed the door whenever I walked by as if trying to escape. They also began pecking and eating their own eggs. Chicken cannibalism. Nice. I get the picture. Let us out or the little one gets it.

Back I went to good old Tractor Supply, this time in search of some "step-in" fence posts and heavy-duty plastic fence. I had experimented with putting up some temporary pasture last summer, and knew I needed more fence and an easier way of moving the fence to new areas of grass. But since there was still no grass growing in the yard, I stretched the fence from the coop, around my vegetable garden and back again. The garden was mostly bare, but there were some weeds, broccoli stalks from last year, and plenty of leaves that had blown in.

Pretty soon, I started to appreciate how powerfully those chickens can scratch. Within a day, they were down to bare ground in spots, searching out seeds and sprouts and hopefully some grubs. In softer areas, they dug 5 or 6 inch holes and nested there in the afternoons.

I caught one hen throwing up so much loose dirt that it rained over her and she shook it off with delight, almost like a dog. Chickens use dust baths to keep off pests, but this looked like pure fun to me.

After two weeks they have begun to break down the tough oak leaves--I sprinkled some cracked corn in the thickest areas to encourage them to scratch around. The places I plan to plant potatoes, peas, lettuce and spinach in the next few weeks are outside the fence, and it won't be time to plant anything else until almost May. By then, I'm hoping there will be plenty of grass growing.




So meet my new mini tillers. They work all by themselves while I'm doing something else.

Monday, March 21, 2011

New Year's Resolutions

Yes, I know it's March. Yes, New Year's day came and went two and a half months ago. But yesterday was the first day of spring, and to me that is when the new year truly begins. It's about the time when--if you're going to have a garden all--you better have at least thought about it.

I am a pathological planner. I have a garden calendar I developed that tells me exactly when I need to start my peppers inside, when it is best to plant the first lettuce in the cold frame and when the first tomatoes can be safely transplanted. I print it out each year and check off when I complete each task. I can tell you that I was three weeks late starting my pepper seeds and equally as late in planting lettuce outside.

I am a pathetic perfectionist. I could not find the right organic seed starting mix when it came time to seed the peppers.
I had not found the time to build a small raised bed in the hoop house, so I held off seeding the lettuce. And I was so busy with other spring cleanup tasks this weekend, that I did not have time to apply a load of mushroom soil to the potato row and so I certainly couldn't get them in the ground until that was done.

I am a person who procrastinates. A gardener has nothing but time in the winter. Time to peruse the seed catalogs and dream. Time to make lists of what to grow. Time to place where each crop will grow in the garden. All of this could be done in January in front of a warm fire, cup of cocoa in hand. Yet, there I was last week, sketching out where to plant everything--you have to have proper crop rotation, of course--knowing that the seeds would arrive the next day. The poor tomato seeds still sit on my kitchen counter waiting to be planted and the seed starting soil has dried out in the pots. Today, I will do it. Really.

My compulsion to plan and my desire for perfection has most definitely led me to procrastinate when it comes to my blog. Even now, as I struggle to find the right "p"s to complete my alliterations, my brain is screaming "just write something!" I want each blog to have a theme, to instruct, to be properly illustrated--a feature article ready for submission. No wonder I postpone!

So my resolution for the New Gardening Year is to let go of some measure of perfectionism and try to write something at least once a week. Sometimes you've just got to get it in the ground.