I Spy With My Little Eye

I spy with my little eye new life stretching out in the glorious spring sun.  The fields on our farm are awake.  Dainty flowers, climbers and clovers, and buds — all ordinary, yet extraordinary.  Come take a walk with me!

Birth Days

How sweet is it that my youngest son and my mother share the same birthday?  May 16.  How coincidental is it that my brother’s son and my father share the same birthday too?  October 16.  In our family, Grandma and Grandpa both have grandsons born on their birthdays.  However, my nephew ratchets it up a notch:  he has the same exact name as my father.  Good times on ancestry.com for future generations!

THE BIRTHDAY CAKE  ~by Victoria Chase

What goes into a birthday cake?

Sift and stir, and beat and bake

A cake that must be grand and fine

For a great big boy of nearly nine!

“What will he be when he grows up?”

High hopes are raised on the rolling board!

Fond, foolish memories that mothers hoard,

And love too full for a measuring cup!

Quick fear for the hurts the future holds,

Fierce anger, too, for the men of might

Who leave a world of pain and fright

As a heritage for nine-year-olds!

What goes into a birthday cake?

Sugar and salt, and smiles and tears,

Butter and eggs, and hopes and fears.

Sift and stir, and beat and bake;

That’s what goes into a birthday cake!

Momma’s Having a Hot Flash

Wine ordering websites need to come with an R rated warning.  S e r i o u s l y

After 10 minutes on wine.com, I need a room and a vibrator to go with my cigarette.  Who writes this stuff?

“Effusively juicy, rich and concentrated, showing plenty of snap to the crisp and well-spiced flavors of wild berry, dark currant and plum tart. Orange-infused chocolate notes linger on the exotic, mocha-filled finish.  There is real mineralite within this bouquet that, returning after 30 minutes, offers alluring ocean spray scents rolling in off the ocean.  It clams up a little towards the finish, shuts the lid tight and consequently there is the sensation of less persistency here compared to the Taylor’s or Smiths. But the Big Johnson has a knack of filling out with bottle age and becomes both gentle and generous with the passing years.

Somebody pry my fingers off that Johnson and bring me a towel and a cold compress.

More Horsepower

Planting time is here and, of course, we have breakdowns.  The 55 recently had a new fuel injector installed and when we tried to start it, all she gave was the sound of silence.  The dealer hauled it back to the shop with a promise that the tractor will be back in two days.  (insert skunk eye)

We also had a main hydraulic cylinder explode on the disk (which has only happened on one farm in the last 100 years) and replacement parts are a week away.  Typical.  Just about the time we are back up and running, the rain will be here to muck it all up.

Despite all the parts that work until we need them and the problems that crop up, we somehow manage to get our seeds in the ground on time.  Scaring them helps.  We name our tractors for that purpose. 

The fields start shaking and break open when the roar of our VelociPlanter gets close and then we stomp ‘em good with the big wheels just to lay a whoop-tail on ‘em.

Our stacks get to schmokin and the disks get to rollin and the packer gets to crushing.  Then we start digging, injecting, and cussing up a storm. There’s always a few wrench throws and busted hands or  broken backs when it comes to fixing on the fly.  Those moments are balanced by the “How Many Times Were You Flipped Off” Competion.  Each operator keeps count of how many California waves they get from the general public–who are always in a hurry.  We go as fast as we can, always, but drivers still get ticked off and make dumb decisions…like trying to pass us on a hill.

We put on our mean mugs

grab coffee jugs;

make our engines lug–

and get the job done.

Good times!

Three Mile Island

We were four brave souls who risked life and limb to participate in an expedition out to Turnip Rock, located three nautical miles from Port Austin, in Michigan’s thumb.  Our cast of characters included explorers from the states of Louisiana and Michigan.

Did I mention that there were titanic sheets of ice on the lake only 30 days ago?

None of us has any real expedition experience; it’s just that some of us have more brawn than brains.  This was risky business; disaster could strike at any moment:

• One spill in the 40 degree waters of Lake Huron
• Getting bombed by seagull poop
• Getting caught in a riptide that dragged us out to sea
• Breaking a nail
• A tsunami could get us, after all, there really was an earthquake that day!

We threw our kayaks and canoes into a black covered trailer (a very covert operation) and made sure our last will and testaments were in good hands.  The trip was a three mile paddle out, three miles back, and it took three hours without “horsing around.”

Of course, we had to film the expedition!  Click on the orange link below to join us on this epic voyage.

Turnip Rock Expedition 2015

Saguaro Sentinels

At sundown, they stand in silhouette

Silent in the fading orange light, ultimate icons of the great West

How many parched cowboys, with sweat stained bandanas drooped about their necks, have lead weary, spavined horses through the Sonoran Desert, weaving under and around the massive arms and prickly spines of the Saguaro cactus; all three with their own story of survival?

–No one can look at a Saguaro cactus for the first time and look away.

Saguaros are viewed as much more than a plant.  People see in them what they want to see.  Some loan these desert giants giant John Wayne personalities and loads of Wile E. Coyote animation!  We put Santa outfits on them at Christmas time.  Other seasons find them standing guard in subdivisions, sporting clown-sized sunglasses with a ten gallon hat and a shiny gold star pinned to their chest.  Woodpeckers peck bullet holes in them.  They accept these insults with a wink.  Saguaros steal our hearts because we feel empathy for them, stoic in their thirst against a blinding blue sky.

Saguaro Cactus are part legend, part song, and can be found everywhere–not just growing in portions of southern and central Arizona and northwestern Mexico!   A forth grade classroom in Wisconsin in February has Saguaros pictured and plastered across a cork board in the hall.  These sentinels stand in our living rooms while we watch Clint Eastwood “Hang ‘Em High” all over again.  Saguaros live in everyone who has experienced them (and they are an experience!)  Their arms hold our awe.

I am a changed person after having seen, felt and “knowing” them for the first time at age 54.  They are patient.  They are still.  They are funny. They are real.  They are strange.  They are heroes of the southwest.  They are inspiring and beautiful.  They are survivors.  They are miracles.   They stole my heart.

Facts About Saguaro (pronounced “suh-wha-ro”)

• Bigger ones are 25-35 feet tall, some reaching 50′
• The average Saguaro is 125 to 175 years old
• They don’t grow “arms” until they are at least 50 years old
• A mature 35′ cactus can weight 7.5 tons or 14,000 lbs.
• They are 95 percent water
• Of all U.S. states, only Arizona and California (with only 100 of them) have Saguaros
• They started to grow in Arizona only 10,000 years ago
• They produce 40 million seeds in a lifetime and only one seed might survive
• In full sun, a Saguaro seed will die so they find “nurses”…thriving only under rocks or plants to hide under for protection
• Cactus spines are finally tough enough at 12″ tall to deter predators such as birds and caterpillars
• Average annual growth is 8″ to 9″ because they are busy growing a massive root system
• A mature Saguaro can drink one ton of water after a heavy rain
• It breathes at night, when air is coolest
• The spines or spikes can provide as much as 70% shade for the plant
• Reproduction starts at about 50-60 years of age
• Their flowers blossom at midnight and die by next day’s noon sun
• Once pollinated, the flowers become fruit and a source of nutrition for desert animals and insects such as bats, birds, bees, desert tortoises, javelinas, rabbits, squirrels, wood rats coyotes, and foxes.
• Winged white doves eat the fruit and the seeds are pooped out and spread this way
• They are reluctant bird houses for gilded flickers and Gila woodpeckers as these long beaked birds dig out cavities to raise their young
• Saguaros, enjoying celebrity status, bring in the most scientific research dollars to the desert habitat

 A Western Legend about the Saguaro (a tall tale) that is worthy!

Joe Mulhatton was a man living on Arizona’s frontier.  He wears a big hat, boots that go jingle-jangle, and a fringed jacket that’s too clean and well-kept to be anything but decoration.  He is sitting behind a glass of really horrible whiskey in a shack-like saloon telling a story that shouldn’t, by any reasonable standard, attract a single believer.

He lived in Florence, southeast of Phoenix, an area where saguaros grow as thick as the tales, and in 1899 (true story) he told the following tale that was picked up and printed by several newspapers around the Territory.

Joe claimed that giant saguaros around Florence exerted an extraordinary magnetic force, probably , he theorized, from vast beds of copper running beneath the earth.  Because of this great power, each plant could attract or repel any object that drew close.  In his story, Mulhatton told of two unsuspecting tramps who took refuge underneath some of these monsters and of the grisly disaster that ensued.  He swore:

“One of the men was at once drawn up to and impaled on the sharp blades of the cactus, while the octopus-like arms folded around him crushing him through and into the cactus, where his blood, flesh and bones turned into a pulp very much like ordinary mucilage, which trickled out slowly from the aperture made by the passing in of the man’s body.

He went on to tell how the cactus loses its magnetic power while it is digesting its victim.  “So we were enabled to look at this wonderful yet gruesome sight and report about these particulars.”  A negative cactus repelled the second tramp and heaved his body about 100 feet against a positive one, whereupon he met the same fate.

Mulhatton’s story originally ran in the Florence Tribune, and it so impressed the editors of the Tombstone Epitaph that they printed a subsequent version with added details. 

It seems Mulhatton himself approached to within 100 feet of one of the man-eating cacti, but it was “all he could do to resist its influence to draw him in.”  He then returned to the town to fetch a rope, planning to tie it around his waist while four of his friends wrapped their arms around him and held on.  Mulhatton wanted to “approach near enough to minutely examine the wonder without danger.”

A traveling salesman in his work life, brave Joe, we can assume, was accustomed to approaching thorny customers.  In telling his story, however, there is something more going on than a prankster creating nonsense for kerosene-lamp entertainment. At the bottom of the Tribune version, Mulhatton concluded:  “There is very little travel through this wild section of Arizona, or this species of cactus would have been written about sooner.”  (Note the implicit danger in that statement, the romance and the mystery.  What’s out there?   Will I survive it?  Am I tough enough?)

Everyone who ever braved the Western frontier has asked those questions.  The man-eating cactus was less a story than an invitation–a dare to test ourselves against “wild Arizona,” using the saguaro as the lure.  Joe Mulhatton was an early practitioner of the art of promotion, a pioneer in more ways than one, and his legend lives on.