THE PERSISTENT PURPLE POTATOES

They are back, this year wriggling up from beneath the fragrant thyme bushes like a purple and green hydra. I can never predict where they’re going to surface. Last year they emerged from behind the birdbath, the year before that it was smack dab in the center of the bean patch. They are sneaky, perhaps suspecting that if I knew where they had wintered I’d ruthlessly dig up every last scrap before they could weasel up from the soil in the spring.

Years ago a well-meaning friend presented me with a trio of grape-sized, grape-colored potatoes. Purple. What does one do with a purple potato, I wondered. Who had ever even heard of purple potatoes? My Irish ancestors cringed in their crypts. Potatoes were meant to be fat brown lovelies that turned into fluffy white mountains flowing with fresh creamery butter. But purple??!! Purple was for egg plant and the shoulders of turnips, for grapes and red cabbages, lilac flowers and summer shadows.

Unsure I wanted such a monstrosity in my vegetable garden, I buried the tiny nubbins in my compost heap. That was the beginning. Before I knew it they had sprouted out the top of the pile. I should have gone after them right then but I have to admit I was curious. What would they become? What would I do if they produced actual potatoes? So I let them sprawl all over the compost pile. By the end of summer they were covered with rather pretty mauve flowers. As winter neared I lifted the tired vines out of the heap. Hanging from the roots were dozens of gorgeous amethyst globes! Digging around in the compost, I unearthed a treasure trove - a bushel basket full. What had I gotten myself into?

I started experimenting. First disaster was when I boiled them too long and they totally disintegrated into an ugly grey soup. From that I learned that purples are more delicate and cook faster than white, yellow, or red potatoes - they don’t play well with others, needing to be boiled or sautéed separately. Gentry treated they turn an attractive blue - over do it and they lose all color and texture. Another thing, they don’t bake worth a darn so forget it. They also don’t have much in the way of flavor by themselves.

So are they worth it? You bet! I have since learned that these little sweeties pack quite a nutritional wallop - more so than their pallid cousins. They are chock full of super antioxidants, nummy vitamins and minerals. Plus they have the advantage of freaking out your guests - the “blue plate special” for sure! (I make a red, white, and blue potato salad for 4th of July.) My favorite recipe though is to simply sauté sliced purples with onion and garlic, then add them to steamed zucchini or green beans. Gorgeous as well as delicious! (Always nice to have something to do with the boatloads of zukes coming off this time of year too.)

And I might add that it’s a darn good thing I’ve come to love my weird purple potatoes because they, like vampires, are immortal. That first season I was under the mistaken impression that it was possible to dig every last potato from the compost and thus limit the adventure to one season. Did I mention the purples are sneaky? They are nearly impossible to see against dark soil so the moment I innocently spread the compost out over my garden I created a monster. Now, every spring they return. Of course I’m delighted to see them but where oh where will they show up next year??? I’ll let you know when I know.

LET THERE BE (PORCH) LIGHT!

Traveling through my second month of retirement to-do lists (yes, there's more than one) I've finished restaining the deck, painting the deck chairs, redecorating our bathroom, and a dozen lesser projects. Notable this week was installation of a brand new shiny front porch light to replace the scary, spider infested rust-lantern I've been cussing out for the last fifteen years - can't believe I suffered in semi-silence all that time! Given any amount of wet weather (note that in Seattle that's pretty much every week), moisture inevitably seeped into the socket, blowing the bulb like the climax of a New Years Eve fireworks display. Don't know how many dead light bulbs I contributed to the landfill but I'm wracked with guilt. Never mind, I shall sin no more in that regard.

Learned many things in the process of installing my pretty new porch light. At the top of the list: it's wonderful to have a tall son who can be coerced into assisting. Even with a step ladder I was still below the cascade of dessicated bug parts that came pouring out of the old fixture. Bluck, ptui. Another thing learned: it's wise to notify all the members of the household BEFORE you throw the circuit breakers! Mom thought she'd finally inflicted permanent damage to her computer. In addition, remember that it's a silly idea that all your fingernails need to be all the same length. And make sure that before you launch into a similar project you are current on your tetanus shots and you have a complete first aid kit. Have fun.

CANNING DAYS

PRESERVES

Fresh off the truck from Yakima,
they arrive - flat brown boxes of velvet Clings
yellow and pink as mountain mornings,
days on end, weeks even, steaming
the kitchen days on end - Mom bending
over the water water bath, gleaming Mason jars,
a snowy dish towel tied around her
like a sarong, sweat rolling down her neck
days on end - golden rings like pirate booty
piled on the white enamel table -
she pushes wisps of hair out of her eyes
with the back of her wrist, screws the jar
lids tight - morning til night, days on end
blanching the skins off, paring slick
globes in half, pulling wrinkled pits
from red centers until her finger tips
are old and the last peach slides
round side up into the last jar
and the day ends and the memories begin.


This weekend I worked at my local Fred Meyer's giving out samples of iced tea and nut clusters. It's a gig I enjoy and it gets me out of the house into the heart of our neighborhood. Where better to take the pulse of a community than where everyone shops? And everyone in Burien seems to shop Freddie's. I see all the same people each weekend. Lately I've started observing what folks are purchasing, taking an informal inventory of their shopping carts as they stop at my table. This weekend I noticed that Burien is canning! Their carts are overflowing with boxes of Mason Jars, canning lids, pickling salt, sacks of sugar and packets of pectin. A nearly lost art rediscovered in these tough times. I imagine all over town people are clearing space in their garages for gleaming jars of fruit and vegetables.

One of my most cherished childhood memories is of Mom's late Summer canning frenzies, every surface of our farmhouse kitchen covered with cooling jars of peaches, pears, jams and jellies. Mom stored them in the cellar on neatly labeled shelves. How beautiful they were in the dim light of the single bulb that dangled from the ceiling. Yellow, red, white, green treasures. All through Fall and Winter we enjoyed peaches or pears with every supper. A few years ago Mom and I revisited the farm, meeting its third owner since we sold it in the seventies - touring the renovations, marveling at the changes - then down the remembered stairs into the basement were the concrete walls of the cellar were still lined with shelves my mother had so long ago carefully labeled "PEACHES", "PEARS", "BLACKBERRY JAM", "PEAS" . . . empty and covered with dust. But are they empty now? Or have the present owners been laboring in the farm kitchen all month filling sparkling new jars with bright fruit? I sincerely hope so.

Setting Sail into Retirement

Westport Morning

Past driftwood benches
dedicated to dead men
a rusty Ford pickup,
splashes toward the marina
through seas of ice rain.
Over the breakwater
rocks a thin mist moves
like a memory of past
catches lost in the wake.


Beating myself up that I haven’t been writing more since I gave up the day job a few weeks ago. I figured by this time I’d be well on my way to a stellar career as the next hotshot literary flash-in-the-pan. Find it’s taking a bit longer than I thought to reorganize my entire adult life - go figure, after 20-something years slogging around Geekatopia with a brown water bucket in one hand and pruning shears in the other.

I’m finding that the first lesson of retirement is it’s not what any of us imagined - not that golden carrot at the end of the stick making sense of all the nonsense we’ve been putting up with since our eyes were bright and our stomachs flat. Nope, it’s a whole new set of carrots and sticks. Only trouble is we are the ones tying the root crop to the apple bough these days - without which we grow mycelium into the couch before reruns of NCIS (How many homicidal Petty Officers can there possibly be?).

Not that I’ve been idle. I’ve redecorated the bathroom (see previous post), painted the west wall of the kitchen, reorganized the spice cabinet, cleaned the fish pond, processed a whole bunch of green beans for the freezer, baked two loaves of zucchini bread, and bought a whole new wardrobe (no longer have company uniform to wear so it’s either shop or go bare), (Hmm, nice rhyme.) Today I’ll bake some oatmeal cookies. Tomorrow I’ll pick up some brown stain and tackle the back deck. Seems like all those tasks I put off for years by saying: “Can’t start that. Gotta go to work in the morning” have caught me excuse-less at last. But next week, yep, I’ll start that vampire novel I’ve been meaning to write.

WATCHING PAINT DRY

As delightful
as the blossoms were,
who would wish
to miss this
lush and fragrant fruiting?

After months of living the half-life of half retirement, working half a route while the boss tried to figure out how to do without me I am as of last Wednesday a lady of leisure! No way of knowing just how long I will be content puttering around the house but for a few weeks I intend to putter indeed. Been a long time since I had the luxury.












I just finished painting the bathroom and have moved on into the kitchen with the idea that before midnight tonight the West wall will have a fresh coat of pale sky blue. Many retired friends warned me there is no busier time than retirement - I’m beginning to understand how true that is. Without the day job I have no excuse for not tackling the household projects that have up until now been caught in planning-stage limbo.


Of course having been technically “laid off” means I’ll need to cast around for another job so as not to run afoul of the system - but since it is no doubt fairly unlikely in this economy that I’ll be snapped up any time soon I feel confident there will be a few coats of paint on the walls before the work world intrudes once more (if ever). With that in mind I will put my feet up while the sky blue dries and count myself the most fortunate of mortals. And if it indeed turns out that plant ladies are as in demand as typewriter repair technicians, who knows?, could have the whole house spruced up by Fall!

BEAUTIFUL BEANS

My small, shady garden has a delicious secret this year. Tucked behind the lavender hedge, below the mountain ash tree is a patch of bush beans - green, yellow, purple. The purple are a glistening deep regal color that glows with the shifting sun like the color of grape juice. They are by far my favorite. Crisp, shiny, tasty - and surprising in that I really had little hope I'd get a crop - too shady I thought. This is one of the times I'm glad to be proven wrong about something.











Aren't they spectacular? I've been picking a fist full of lovely fresh beans twice a day all week. We've enjoyed them stir fried with garlic and Walla Walla Sweet onions, made into bean salad, and today as a key participant in chicken vegetable soup. I'm feeling quite the farmer. When will we begin to tire of beans every meal? Hard to tell but should that unlikely thing come to pass my freezer will fill up with bright beans to enjoy on dark winter days.

The Pleasure Dome

(son Paul and cousin Eric "skin" the dome)
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

During the past month while I continued to struggle with computer/internet problems a second major project was in the works around here - the creation of my poetic get-away, The Pleasure Dome (son Paul christened it). Years ago my friend Rick gave me the makin's of a geodesic dome, a wooden framework we bolted together at the bottom of my back garden. We stapled greenhouse plastic over the frame and for 3 or 4 years I used the dome to grow bushels of sweet tomatoes and spicy peppers. But the plastic eventually started to disintegrate - after I stripped it off, the dome was a rather odd sculpture for the next few years.

Then this spring, with retirement looming and visions of glorious produce firing my imagination, I decided it was time to set up the greenhouse once again. Unfortunately I hadn't taken into consideration how my garden had changed over the intervening years. The trees had closed over the top of the dome, making it too shady to grow much beyond ferns and moss. To grow sun-lovers like tomatoes I'd have to remove two Western hemlock trees, limb up the English oak and the Chinese juniper, chop down the neighbor's sick old apple tree. Major forestry. None of which was going to happen. What to do?

Change plans, of course! My greenhouse would transform into a place of peaceful refuge where I can sit and write (as well as surf the internet if I can ever manage to get the wireless thingy up and running), listen to birds in the sheltering branches, decompress! I've run a long extension cord from the house, hung Chinese lanterns, arranged furniture, plugged in a fan. There is one tomato plant just because. Oh, the comfort! Tonight as fireworks light up the sky I'll be in the Pleasure Dome writing a poem to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.