The week began with a wintry onslaught. It snowed most of the day last Sunday and then on through that night. We awoke to a white world on Monday, 27°, high winds, and a wind chill of 15°. I knew the day would be rough when I heard the snow plow go by at 5:00. All the poor spring flowers that a few days before were lovely, were buried under snow. It made me sad to see them.
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| Monday morning. |
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| Iris reticulata buried in the snow. |
I was not called into school on Monday and with nothing to tempt me outdoors, I found myself looking for some distraction that morning. I decided to go on a musical quest. A few weeks ago I wrote about the things I learned in the fourth grade. As part of our study of Pennsylvania history that year, we learned about famous Pennsylvanians and our music teacher, Miss Spangler, taught us songs by one of the state’s most illustrious composers, Stephen Foster. I spent Monday morning listening to his songs.
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| Stephen Foster |
Stephen Foster was born in Lawrenceville on July 4, 1826, the same day that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. From his early childhood he showed musical talent. He played the flute, guitar, and the piano. He loved to go to minstrel shows and other musical theater. In 1844 he published his first song and his skill and fame as a songwriter steadily grew. In 1850 he married Jane McDowell, the Jeannie of his songs. Their daughter Marion was born a year later. Despite his talent, he struggled. His marriage was troubled. He and his wife separated, reconciled, and separated again. Despite success in writing and publishing his songs, his finances took a turn for the worse, owing largely to the lack of copyright protection. His health deteriorated, worsened by his alcoholism. Saddened by his personal struggles and the outbreak of the Civil War, he spent his last years in New York City, living in the Bowery and writing songs for ready cash. When he died on January 13, 1864 at Bellevue Hospital, his purse contained thirty-eight cents and a scrap of paper with the scrawled inscription: “Dear friends and gentle hearts.” He is buried in his birthplace, Lawrenceville, which is now part of Pittsburgh. His childhood home still stands there and his grave is there. I want to go and see it when we’re down that way one of these times.
Even before Miss Spangler began teaching us, I already knew some of his songs. They were very popular in my family. Camptown Races, Oh! Susannah, and Beautiful Dreamer were in our riding-in-the-car repertoire. Family legend says that my great-grandfather, Samuel Adam Showers, especially loved Stephen Foster’s songs and, as he lay dying, he sang the last lines from the song Old Black Joe, “I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low; I hear those gentle voices calling, ‘Old Black Joe’.” Stephen Foster’s songs have faced some criticism in recent years for being racist. As a student of history I know the danger of judging and trying to erase the history and culture of the past based on prevailing present sentiment. In doing that, many great works of art and literature are censored and even destroyed and we forget our history and how we came to be where we are today. The past should be preserved and learned from, not erased. Stephen Foster’s songs are great no matter what the current revisionist opinion is. Two of them, Old Folks at Home and My Old Kentucky Home, are the official state songs of Florida and Kentucky – with some politically correct revisions to the lyrics.
Stephen Foster wrote over two hundred songs and I only know a handful of them, but I love the ones I know – Camptown Races, Oh! Susannah, Beautiful Dreamer, Hard Times Come Again No More, Ring, Ring de Banjo, Old Black Joe, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, and Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair. They are melodious, sentimental, and lovely. My appreciation of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair is also based on two strange childhood associations. One is Bugs Bunny in a Looney Tunes cartoon punning the song by singing “I dream of Jeannie, she’s a light brown hare.” The other is one of our favorite 60's television shows, I Dream of Jeannie. Little did Stephen Foster know… Listening to this music was a pleasant way to while away a cold March morning.
Tuesday was a nice day. It was sunny. It was supposed to hit the 50's by noon and I decided when it got there, I’d go outside to work. While waiting for it to get there, I decided to undertake a task I’d been meaning to do for a while. We dried some whole red peppers from last year’s garden. They’d been hanging on the dining room wall all winter. They were pretty and bright red and quite decorative, but I wanted to render them into a more usable form by grinding them into powder. That’s what I did on Tuesday morning. It was quite an experience. I cut off their stems and loaded the crisp pods into the food processor and turned it on. I knew from past experience to wrap a dish towel around my nose and mouth, but it made no difference. Within seconds I was sneezing. My eyes were burning. My throat started to close up. I had snot gushing from my nose. It was awful. I endured the misery until the grinding was complete then I dumped the powder into a jar, quickly closed it, and fled the kitchen. I had to go out onto the front porch and do some deep breathing for a few minutes. The powder turned out nice. I think it’s pretty powerful and we are not fans of spicy hot food at our house, so I don’t know what we'll use it for. It’s pretty much pepper spray in powder form.
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| Iris reticualta after the snow melted. |
When the temperature hit 50°, I went outside for the rest of the day. By 1:00 we hit 60° and I started working in shirt sleeves again. The snow was mostly gone by then and the flowers were perking up again. Nature is very resilient – more so than I am these days. After five hours of raking up winter debris in the orchard and off the lawn around the house, I was worn out. But I felt great, having accomplished so much in such nice weather.
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| The lower end of the long border. |
Thursday was another lovely spring day. We hit 65° that afternoon. After school and barn chores, I mowed the lawn for the first time this year, but I wasn’t cutting grass. The grass is still mostly dormant. I was mowing up all the little twigs and leaves that had accumulated over winter. It felt good to be out there cleaning things up. I liken it to vacuuming a carpet after not being able to all winter. When I finished that, I burnt the leaves that were piled up along the edge of the front yard and the road. Things are looking much tidier in the yard now.
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| The front lawn after mowing. |
I wasn’t in school on Friday and I wanted to keep working outdoors, but nature did not cooperate. After several nice spring days, winter tried to assert itself again. It was chilly, drizzly, and windy. Typical March behavior. Barred from being outdoors, I decided to clean the woodshed workbench. It was a mess. Over the winter, we tend to dump things there that we don’t want to deal with. It’s time to begin planting seed trays and I use the workbench as my tray station, so I had to clean it up. I relocated items to their proper places and threw out things that weren’t worth keeping. Then I set up my tray warming mats and grow lights. Tomorrow I will bring seed trays into the kitchen and scrub and sanitize them. Then I’ll be ready to sow the first seeds – the slow growers – parsley, sweet peas, and hollyhocks.
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| The workbench before and after. |
Saturday morning we went to church for a brunch to celebrate the 182nd birthday of the Relief Society. Stacey is the Relief Society president in our branch and Miriam is one of her counselors. I got to go along because I’m the branch president. The tables were beautifully decorated. They had a nice brunch prepared – two breakfast casseroles, fresh fruit. Hannah made a strawberry dessert. Miriam made chocolate Easter eggs as an edible decoration. After we ate, we watched a broadcast message about the Relief Society. It is the largest and oldest women’s organization in the world. There were fourteen of us there, about what you’d expect in our little branch.
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| Brunch at church. |
When we got home from that, Stacey and I went back out to our friends Bob and Nancy Jones’s place. They have scaled back their gardening and have some wire tomato cages they said I could have. We took Kurt’s truck thinking we would load it up, but it only held ten cages and the Joneses have maybe a hundred! So we will be making multiple trips over the next few days transporting the cages. They also gave me a barrel of chicken food. They had a mink get in their coop that killed all of their chickens. They decided they are done with chickens, so they gave me all their food. It’s nice having friends like the Joneses.
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| More crocuses. |
That afternoon was cool and windy, but the sun was shining, so I decided to tend the raspberry beds. I grow autumn-bearing raspberries that bear fruit on this year’s canes. So I cut down all of last year’s canes and weeded the beds. There are already little shoots coming up. That’s another job finished. Only a hundred more to go. I don’t think I’ll get much done outdoors this week. It looks like the last days of winter will indeed be wintry. There is snow in the forecast almost every day and the temperatures range between chilly and freezing. It snowed a little as we were leaving for church this morning, but it didn’t amount to anything. Tuesday is the first day of spring, not that it means much here in cold Gold. My poor spring flowers! After a snowy beginning last week, during the rest of the week the flowers were beautiful – crocuses, iris reticulata, snowdrops, and the first squill. There are daffodil and tulip shoots emerging everywhere. The cornflowers, poppies, and lupine have all put forth new tender leaves. Now they will be delayed, damaged, or destroyed by another wintry onslaught.
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| Raspberry beds all clean and tidy. |
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| Crazy for crocuses, while they last. |
Today is St. Patrick’s Day. Our observance at our house consisted of wearing green to church. I wore a green tie. Stacey wore green. Miriam, and Hannah wore blouses with shamrocks on them. Miriam is making some Irish soda bread for a treat later this afternoon. Éirinn go Brách!
We’re home from church now. We had a surplus of eggs, so we took eight dozen to church to give away. Our meetings were good. On our way to church we saw a bald eagle and on our way home we saw a group of buffleheads in a pond near the road. I saw today that the church has announced the location of the temple to be built in Osaka. It is in the city of Hirakata which is near several areas that I served in. That’s exciting news. It will be 29,630 square feet on a 16.74-acre lot. Our temple here, the Palmyra Temple, is only 10,900 square feet, so the Osaka Temple will be twice that size. I’m excited that we will (if all goes as planned) get to go to the open house for the Osaka Temple, whenever that will be. The sun has come out for now, but it’s chilly and the snow is supposed to start right around chore time. And then winter will linger on through the week, overstaying its welcome, as it always does.
