Open Writing

Well, we made it through most of the winter without another real old-fashioned blizzard. That’s blizzard with a capital N as in Never Again. But most of us decided we could live through it, and we made up enough “good old days” stories to get everyone bored when we were too polite to ask them to go home.

I can remember when we really enjoyed snow and cold weather. But only in small doses. Maybe an hour or two, or an afternoon, or once in a while a whole day, with a convivial group, kids, adults or both. I can also remember some of the worst hours of my life, out doing a job that had to be done, with wet feet, frostbit ears and nose, fingers and hands so stiff you could hardly hold an axe.

All in all, I prefer April or October. Or maybe Costa Rica.

Diet water for sale

I was trailing Avie through the grocery when my eye happened to light on something that made me wonder about my eyesight. Or my attention span. Or the sanity of my world.

Bottled water has become such a commonplace in our part of the world, I take it for granted. I spend my money for some dumb stuff myself. But I couldn’t believe that one of the large, family oriented super markets was selling handy 12 ounce bottles of diet water.

Not just plain diet water, of course. Nobody would do that. But sitting right in the same row were two kinds of Schweppes Tonic Water, one plain and one diet. And next were two kinds of the Supermarket’s house-brand tonic water, plain and one diet.

In case you don’t know, tonic water has been around for a long time. First because a favorite of the Europeans who ran the colonies. The colonies were mostly tropical places where Europeans wee worried about malaria. When it was discovered, or at least alleged by South American medicine me, that a tea or tonic made from the back of the cinchona tree was a cure for the Fever and Ague, it became a very popular drink. Except that it was terribly bitter. But the bitter taste was said to be helped by the flavor of gin.

What a lucky break for the English, Dutch and Belgian burghers in far places. If they’d have been able to concoct diet tonic water, they could have stayed skinny, lived longer and invented all sorts of new troubles for the natives.

Not much malaria around these parts now, but gin and tonic is still popular. How can the diet variant miss?

Winter rituals

It just occurred to me this morning that one of our long-time winter rituals, which took up so much time, seems to have slipped away without leaving a trace in our lives. When I think of the hours we spent huddled at one end of the dining table, studying reference material, discussion, arguing, and planning, and then double-checking the necessary order forms, writing the checks and getting things ready to spring into action when the orders arrived.

I’m talking about seed catalogs. For the serious gardener, these are an important part of the gardening process, whether it’s vegetable gardening, flower gardening or the longer term and pricier orchard and ornamental trees and shrubs.

Neither of us could remember the last time we received a seed catalog in the mail. Some years ago, unless you count the commercial nursery price lists from companies who got us via my Nursery Dealers license listing. These kept arriving regularly long after the nursery succumbed to the age and decrepitude of its owner.

For any hobbyist, the catalogs, newsletters and trade magazines are what dreams are made of. The large, well-printed multi-paged books, on slick magazine paper, are good enough for framing. And once you learn the trade lingo peculiar to the garden trade, they can be as valuable as a college course.

Once you become knowledgeable, there are also small catalogs, printed in black and white on mediocre newsprint, which come from small family businesses who are specialists in narrow segments of the nursery trade, and offer only their own family-grown materials and perhaps family-owned variety names, acknowledged to be the very best for your particular part of the country.

One difficulty is learning how to grad yourself by the scruff of your own neck and firmly force yourself to buy only a little more than you can reasonably expect to grow or sell.

Before the seeds or plants arrive, you must rush to plan your greenhouse and bed space, make sure your watering, feeding and weed control equipment and supplies are on hand and in the place where you need them. And you must post a large chart showing when, where and how many varieties need attention each day of the growing season.

Now that we have been forced to give up just about all our vegetable gardening — just for a while you understand — and we haven’t done any canning or freezing for years, January is a boring time. February has longer days, but fewer of them.