Windbreak House

. . .
I was not feeling well on my actual birthday. (1)

But Jerry and I went for a lovely drive: up to Roughlock Falls, where we enjoyed a picnic, and then walked the fenced sidewalks to look, with hordes of other tourists, down at the falls. As is my habit when visiting the Falls, I explained to Jerry (quietly, so no one else could hear) how George had showed me how to walk behind the falls the first and every time we visited there. (2)

We sat on the benches at the top of the falls, feeling the spray on our faces, while Jerry smoked a cigar. I watched people arrive, peer over the edge for 30 seconds, and leave. Some took pictures. The longest anyone spent looking at the falls was less than a minute.

Back in the car, we drove for several more hours on well-maintained gravel roads, looking at the cows grazing on the national forest, mostly alone with our thoughts and the scenery. Sometime during the drive, I began to explain to Jerry my concept of the Birthday Week.

I believe this to be a unique idea (3), based on the fact that age encourages us to a deliberation in our actions. We are not merely slow because we can’t move faster; no, we are often contemplating the feeling of every move, what it will mean to our bodies. Perhaps we are remembering past experiences. Hmm. That leap hurt. I wonder if it will hurt that much if I do it again. I used to be able to jump that far a hundred times a day.

In order to properly celebrate an important milestone such as a birthday, particularly after more than six decades of birthdays. one cannot be limited to a mere 24 hours, or the much shorter span of twelve hours during which most of us are awake. Even the twelve hours is frequently interrupted by a nap or two, so our time to celebrate our natal day becomes even more brief.

In addition, of course, few of us in our sixties are willing to celebrate quite as vigorously as we did at younger ages. I like to do something special, see friends, call more friends, dine well, open gifts-- far too much excitement and activity for a single day.

For that reason, then, I’ve begun to introduce the concept of a Birthday Week. You will notice that the week of my birthday was tentatively blocked on the list of "Available Retreat Dates," so we would schedule no retreats during that time. We’d planned a more extensive trip, but when that didn’t work out, I chose to celebrate in smaller increments.

The drive on my actual birthday was terrific, a restful day of enjoying the Black Hills at its most beautiful and serene, since it was a week day. I wasn’t feeling well enough for much dinner, but managed to scrape up the energy to open a lovely collection of presents. (Among other things, Tamara gave me potting soil, walls of water, and mystery books; Jerry gave me tomato cages and 8 pounds of salt water taffy. Jerry’s folks gave me a gift certificate to a gardening catalog: do you see a theme?) I spent the day after my birthday quietly but the sense of relaxation allowed me to search some storage and finally find the letters Badger Clark wrote to me in 1957; more on that in a later blog.

Then on the third day of birthday week, I called a friend my age and we chatted for an hour about our lives, including recalling our friend Winston. Her father raised Winston, a beautiful Hereford bull, on his ranch near Newcastle, WY, and his children rode the bull the whole time he was growing up. By the time my father bought Winston, he was a massive breeding machine, with the white curly face and immense circle of horns that mark a true Hereford. I loved taking my friends to the corral to see him, and then casually climbing on and riding him around. Naturally, like the self-centered little monster I was, I allowed my playmates to think I was responsible for the bull’s kindness, but his innate Hereford gentleness kept him calm.

That afternoon, Jerry and I continued our policy of getting acquainted with the near neighborhood and I took him to see the Norbeck Information Center in Custer State Park, an incredible building created by the Civilian Conservation Corps out of native rock and ponderosa pine. We dropped into Coolidge Inn, and I signed copies of my books for sale there, though the clerk was not at all sure I should. Then we dined at the Game Lodge. Sadly, the kitchen couldn’t manage to cook my buffalo steak the way I wanted it, so Jerry ate most of it.

On my fourth day of birthday week, I went to 4 garage sales and an auction/estate sale, spent $1.36 and acquired enough pots and peat pots to fill my greenhouse needs, possibly forever. Then I had lunch with good friends and lots of laughter, and sat in on a private showing of the recent paintings of my good friend Tom Thorson.

As the sun was casting long shadows, a UPS truck roared up the driveway bringing the complimentary copies of the newly-issued paperback edition of No Place Like Home. The cover has been made darker and more dramatic, the spine is a prairie-sky blue that makes the title stand out, and the back cover features my photograph plus the usual collection of great things said about the book. In this case the quotations are from Judy Blunt (whose book Breaking Clean is great writing about ranching) and Booklist.

To top off the day, we got a cooling trace of rain. Now, on the fifth day of my birthday week, I’m going to till the garden; celebrating my birth also means proving I can still do some of the work I love. I plan to call another old friend today for a long chat, and have lunch with a high school classmate next week, just before my birthday week officially ends.

I might note that one’s endurance also builds as one ages, so a week of celebrating a birthday becomes possible. One does not, however, celebrate with the excessive consumption we might have achieved in our younger days.

Calm, quiet delight in living is the theme. May you all experience the same, aging happily.

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Footnotes to Birthday Week:

(1) I have reluctantly concluded that the reason for the illness might be because I ate a large quantity of raw red onion in a tuna salad sandwich the day before. The discovery that eating something in particular causes heartburn and a sleepless night is one of those things about aging that nobody ever mentions when we are young. I now know why some of my relatives wore those twisted smiles when I chomped onto a hamburger with raw onions when I was about nine.

(2) I won’t detail the technique of going behind the falls here, lest I encourage some reading daredevil to do it and draw down some official wrath on their heads. A few people walking under the falls didn’t seem to hurt the falls much, but if one person were seen to do it, others would surely follow and someone might get hurt. George and I were doing this before Political Correctness started trying to make it illegal to do dangerous things. And it wasn’t really very dangerous. Standing under the falls, out of sight of all but the most alert observers above, was incredible. Leaning back against the damp walls, I could feel the thunder of the water pouring over the edge above us, feel the chill of centuries in the wet sand under my feet. I know I started a poem about it, but don’t believe I’ve ever finished it. I'm glad to have had the experience and perhaps enjoy the fact that few others will.

(3) I thought I’d invented the birthday week until I received my annual birthday call from my friend Suzan, who has been my friend for about 50 years. "Humph!" she said. "I’ve been doing that for years. Birthday Eve, Birthday Week. Lately I’m plugging for a Birthday Month!"

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. . .
Here is piece about growing tomatoes. I wrote it in 2002 when I lived in Cheyenne, WY. I read it in public once, but it’s never been in print. Today, the sun hot on my back as I pruned tomatoes in my raised bed in South Dakota, I remembered its relevance.

* * *

On a stony-cold March day when the sky is the color of concrete, I am hunched into my coat, getting into the car, when the first evidence of spring catches my eye. Pale purple buds bubble up from the bare sand beside the driveway.

I drive away humming. The lavender pasqueflower blossoms also shock me into longing for my home in South Dakota, where they are the state flower, but they are also a pledge.

Fragile as silk, the blooms rise repeatedly out of March snowstorms. Their deeply serrated leaves appear only as the blooms crumple and turn to wisps called “prairie smoke,” just as I spot johnny jump-ups and violas glowing under heart-shaped leaves. Each day brings another omen. I can practically taste tomatoes by the time leaves push up from the perennial native plants lining the parkways of the streets cornering on my house. A few birds flicker at the corner of my eye: sparrows or finches with rosy heads feeding on leftover seeds.

Every morning I take my first cup of coffee on a tour of the wildflowers, marking time by the first daffodil, then a blue blossom on the myrtle vines, succeeded by a royal purple grape hyacinth. Throughout April, the days pass slowly: a Shasta daisy, one columbine and then dozens. Each evening, I tour the gardens again with a beer to see if the clematis on the arbor has opened while I worked inside, watching for the sign, the omen.

At last, usually after June 1, the first iris blooms. Much as I enjoy the purple and bronze and copper blossoms, I do not celebrate the iris only for themselves. No; the iris incarnate a particular time: the wise, or experienced, gardener may plant her tomatoes.

During my first few years in Cheyenne, I was tempted to tomato folly several times. My post office stands next to a gardening center; each May day, I had to park a half-block farther away and hike past crowds of buyers choosing from the dwindling supply of tomato plants arranged along the curb.

Growing up on the northern plains taught me not to set tomatoes out before the first of June. But a couple of times I succumbed anyway, reasoning that the heat amassed and reflected by the acres of asphalt and concrete surrounding my house in the center of town might act like a greenhouse, creating a mini-climate. Those strong Early Girl plants looked lovely on the day I dug them into the rich black soil: the pointed leaves showed deeper green where they met the stem, and a blossom or two was already open, gathering sun.

Tamping earth, I chuckled at the inexperienced gardeners who were misled by the pictures of giant Beefmaster tomatoes; they probably own the biggest SUV available, I sneered, and live in a house with too many rooms and too many windows in one of the ugly subdivisions ringing the city.

Carefully, I fitted a tomato cage around each hefty plant, picturing those branches thick as my thumbs and heavy with fruit come August. To protect against cutworms, I raided my recycling bin for yogurt cartons to trim into collars for each stem.

The sun was sinking by that time, and I was sunburned and tired. I’d stand up, massaging my back, and survey the sky. Surely it wouldn’t frost before I had time for the next step: the walls of water that might keep the plants alive even if we had a late frost.

The next day my back and legs ached, and I only smiled at the plants on my way to the post office. The day after that, I laid the drip hoses to each plant, mulching with grass clippings to preserve water.

And then one night when I was hunched over my computer finishing some writing job, the sky cleared and the temperature dropped. In 1993 I managed to kill two sets of tomato plants. After the first frost, about June 6, I tossed the black carcasses into the mulch pile and set out six new plants.

The next week, while I was tending to ranch business in South Dakota, another frost killed the top half of every one. I lopped off the blackened branches, and crowded a few new plants into the fenced garden plot.

Each year since, I wait to plant tomatoes until after the iris bloom, and I always finish the job by adding another layer of frost-proofing. That first year of my reawakening, I collected glass bottles from the recycling barrel, placing them in a ring around each tomato plant, and filling the bottles with water to form a protective, heat-holding barrier. Besides protection, each plant gained an identity: the Single Malt Scotch plant, the Coors plant, the Club Soda plant. I believe the Jack Daniels plant produced the most fruit. Since I found walls of water at a yard sale, I use those, but I miss the eccentric originals.

That evening, I told myself the work was wasted, that surely frost wouldn’t strike in southern Wyoming in the third week of June. When the final frost of the year struck a week later, none of the plants were harmed. I was a little smug, buying herb plants at the nursery. Even little blue-haired ladies who had known better since before I was born were lining up with wagon loads of replacement tomato plants.

A month later, when many gardeners were lamenting the cool and rainy weather, my plants were growing, blooming, setting on tomatoes, aided by the greenhouse effect of the bottles. I looked on them with justifiable pride, knowing I’d provided for their needs, given them everything they required for reasonable growth.

In mid-July, several guests at my fiftieth birthday party, held in our backyard around the garden full of tomato plants, remarked that I'd never get ripe tomatoes this year. I thanked them for their optimism, wondering to myself if they always assume a project will fail when it is half finished. And wondering if they were simply unobservant, or were denying the evidence in the garden.

And yes, we got all the tomatoes we could eat.

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