The Editorial We: Because, Living On Snob Hill, We Are Amused

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There is a tale of the unfortunate equery who ventured during dinner at Windsor to tell a story with a spice of scandal or impropriety in it. "We are not amused," said the Queen when he had finished.-- Caroline Holland, courtier to Queen Victoria, in her Notebooks of a Spinster Lady, published in 1919

The impetus for this blog is simple: Stories from our lives on Snob Hill, especially those with the whiff of spice, scandal, and/or impropriety, are indeed amusing to us, and to you as well, we hope. We have always been guided by the words of the esteemed Southern social philosopher Claire Belcher, who said, " If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me," in Steel Magnolias.  Such people have been sitting next to us, sometimes invited, sometimes not, for 20 years now, and we thought it was high time we sat next to you, dear readers, and spread that spice and scandal, those vanities and humanities, and boners and bon mots, collected here, among 12 humble households, on a private private drive somewhere in Middle America.

Life On Snob Hill: The Stuff of Bittersweetness

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We were reminded this weekend of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” This can be interpreted or applied in any number of ways. For us, it is a bit of an admonishment as we look at some long-wished-for family items that we removed from the house of a now-widowed father. One the one hand, we could be pleased that we “finally got” some items that we’ve wanted for years.

On the other hand, we obtained these items only after the death of a mother and a father’s decision to sell his home of 30-plus years and downsize. That’s the price of these pieces. It makes us assess our own home, especially as we just celebrated the marriage of a son. In those wedding preparations, we never heard the phrase, “Setting up housekeeping” or “Building a home.” Those were common phrases when we were married, and we heard it often in reference to our own parents’ post-wedding responsibilities. Wedding gifts were mostly directed toward the necessities of young newlyweds as they set up their new household.

Our son and daughter-in-law have been together for several years, and they explicitly have stated they don’t need “necessities” like a toaster or everyday dinnerware. Instead, they have requested funds for their upcoming European honeymoon. Fair enough. That’s their reality. Ours was different.

When told we were free to pick up some asked-for family pieces (is ‘heirloom’ too grand a word?), we felt gratitude and excitement. When we arrived, we also had the opportunity to unpack some storage bins and review the contents of a couple of cabinets. There was a yin-yang about this process. As the mid-century bun warmer was discovered and bestowed, there was a visceral, sense-memory of the smell of crescent rolls wafting up as the shiny, penguin-festooned warmer was passed around at parties and holidays. The piece is still in pristine condition — proof of how lovingly a mother had taken care of this wedding present. How small it seems now, and how small those crescent rolls must have been compared to the supersized ones of today.

But the hope and love and care that gleamed from its surface is shadowed by the loss of the person who cared for it. Preserving it, even. We would gladly return it to have her back.

Our domicile on Snob Hill is no manse. It is a modest-sized home, yet perfectly sized for us. When the other set of parents downsized, we made a few cross-state trips, U-Haul in tow, to bring home the furniture and other items that we wanted. Then we faced the challenge of how to incorporate those items into the tight, puzzle that is our home. It took months after each trip to rearrange and accommodate those items — usually at the expense of pieces we had acquired at estate and tag sales. Family pieces always trump items we had purchased more recently.

That still holds true. We are now the proud owners of a grandmother’s wrought iron, glass-topped table. It came from the best home furnishings store in southeast Missouri (which may or may not be damning with faint praise). This grandmother had impeccable taste, and we were anxious about whether or not it would be transferred to us. It was, and it is now displacing a larger similar table that already fills our sunroom. Hello, Craigslist and Marketplace. We will be sad to see that table go (and we just had the seats and backs reupholstered last year), but after repainting the ‘new’ table, we are happy.

Not everyone wants to be the steward of family heirlooms — or has the room for them. We have certainly curated the pieces that will best fit into our home. Some, sadly, will go out of the family. We can’t take it all, and the next generation won’t take most of it. There are plenty of stories about the youngins not wanted grandma’s china or tchotchkes, and so we go into that here.

We filled the bed of our truck with the items (and there are still others we want). We were reminded of and couldn’t help feeling acutely the sentiment in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” in which, a city daughter visits her mother.

“‘‘Oh, Mama!” she cried…I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.”’

We feel the need to ensure that we didn’t seem greedy or grubby, yet still wanting to emphasize how much we wanted certain items. It’s hard to know where that line is. We are still stung by the words of the mother who so carefully cared for that bun warmer, one of the rare times when she was handing over another family heirloom: “If I give you this, I better not find out you turned around and sold it!” There’s context to that incident, not for here — and maybe not for ever. It’s probably moot now that she’s gone, anyway.

And that’s just what happens. Couples make a life together. Create a home with stuff — something borrowed, something blue, something new. We can feel all the hope that goes into housekeeping because we experienced it. But nothing is forever. At some point — sometimes sooner (divorce, death, etc.), sometimes later (as in this case) — the stuff of coupling must be released.

Driving home with the truckload of items, items we remembered from our formative years, we hope to honor the transfer of tangible, touchable family history. Yet it is also a truckload of bittersweet reminders that family ‘time’ is never static, always changing. And can merely haul that notion around.

Which brings to mind the opening stanza of Mark Terrill’s poem “Down At the Gate”:

“You could never add up

all the years it took

for this time to finally come.”

Family heirlooms destined for Snob Hill.

Life On Snob Hill: In the Flesh

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We have four, poorly sited heirloom apple trees on the property and we can attest to the finicky nature of apple crops — generally poor sunlight, late frosts that damage the blossoms, the biennial nature of some varieties. The past two years have yielded almost no apples, but two trees were rather abundant this year, especially our "favorite" tree, the Lady Apple, also known as the Christmas Apple.

This year has been an interesting one for our Fameuse Apple. According to the “Out On A Limb” website, it is “…also called Snow, is one of the oldest North American varieties. Historians have speculated that the apple may have originated in France, although evidence suggests that it is more likely to have originated in French Canada sometime before 1700. By the 1700’s it was widespread in the Champlain Valley of Vermont, and it may have made its way to Maine via that route.”

How it got to Snob Hill was through a mail order catalog 15 years ago. Ours is a hit-or-miss kinda tree. This year was a hit, but a majority of the crop withered on the tree because it almost immediately began to go bad as soon as it was ripe. We couldn’t eat them fast enough. They hung for a remarkably long time, fermenting and looking like burgundy scrotums.

We had fun this week, using our long-poled apple picker to find a handful of still-good Fameusians.

Again from the website, “Like McIntosh, Fameuse is very susceptible to the disease, “scab”, a cosmetic blemish that can be removed by peeling and does not affect flavor. The apple’s other name – Snow- comes from its “snow white” flesh. It is really, really white. The 1865 Department of Agriculture yearbook summed it up: ‘Flesh-remarkably white, tender, juicy...deliciously pleasant, with a slight perfume... No orchard in the north can be counted as complete without this variety... It is just so good that everybody likes to eat of it; and when cooked, it is white, puffy and delicious.’”

We still have a small basketful of Lady Apples, with many more on the tree. Such is its nature. Who knows if it will bear next year, so we enjoy them when we can.

A final, interesting bit about the Snow Apple, “Here’s an 1889 recipe for something called Apple Snow that might be perfect to prepare using these apples: Pare and core tart, juicy apples; stew with just enough water to keep from burning; sweeten with white sugar; flavor with lemon, the juice is better than the extract; sift through a potato masher or beat it until light; eat with whipped cream.”

It’s easy to see why the Fameuse is also known as the Snow Apple. Like snow, they melt fast.

'Growing Through' Summer on Snob Hill

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A relative offered this chair earlier this year, saying, “It’s great chair that just needs a new seat.” Little did he know it was destined to become a Grow-Through chair.

It’s a bit ironic quoting Robert Frost – with that icy surname – as we experience the height of summer here on Snob Hill, but we sweatily embrace his notion that, “The best way out is always through.” The heat and humidity of life here have definitely “built” as they say. The two Hs are a fact of life here in the upper south, an area that may well become the middle south as the planet warms.

We have no choice but to embrace the weather and be grateful for air conditioning. Things may slow a bit in the summer, but they don’t stop. We visited an architectural salvage “yard” last weekend and acquired a length of wrought iron railing for an upcoming project. We also brought home two metal chairs to add to our collection of what we call “Grow-Through” chairs.

This became a thing several years ago when one of us brought home a chair, plucked from a pile of free items on a neighbor’s lawn. We said at the time, “Don’t know why I picked this up, but I like it.” The chair was missing part of its back and had no seat (as none of the Grow-Though chairs have had). For reasons lost to us now, we spray painted the chair purple – a color not in the usual Snob Hill palate. We moved the Purple Chair around the property for a few years before hitting upon the idea to use it as a decorative plant support. That seemed like a risky thing to do because it skirted the practice of repurposing old toilets as planters or bathtubs as grottos for virgin mary statues.

The original Grow-Through, the Purple Chair.

We strive always in the gardens of Snob Hill for balance and conservative use of decorations. With the two new chairs (painted a chartreuse similar to that of the potato vine in a front planter) we don’t want to overdo the use of Grow-Throughs, but these, with their mismatched grape cluster backs, are a welcome addition. It’s too late in the garden season to use them, but we have decided to try to use all of the chairs in what will become the trial Chair Garden.

The Grow-Though chairs serve more than one purpose. Yes, they support tall plants. We like this year’s for a clump of Bee Balm and the first Hollyhock we’ve ever grown successfully. The chairs support the plants, especially after rain, and they protect them from our big-butted dog Maggie, who can unintentionally decimate a garden with her sashaying hind quarters.

We think of our bees, who begin their winter preparations with the summer solstice. The heat and humidity can be unpleasant, but that’s life in this part of the world at this time of year. The cold and too-dry days are ahead of us, and we will dream back to today’s enveloping summer season.

The Grape Chairs, painted and ready for next year’s Chair Garden.






Digging, Not Praying

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Life On Snob Hill: It being Spring here – as everywhere else in the northern hemisphere – our hands and hearts have turned to the soil. Spring is Dirt Time in a way not shared by the other seasons. After the hard-packed, frozen winter, it seems right to exchange mittens for our leather gardening gloves, to plunge our hands and trowels into the earth, and to embrace the faith that good things will emerge and thrive.

“Wrought - Spring” from the CB Adams film photography project titled Wrought.

Yesterday, we were assessing the open soil left when we removed a row of red twig dogwood bushes along the metal fence as the front of the Snob Hill property. We acquired the dogwoods cheaply at a school fundraiser more than 10 years ago. The bushes grew well enough, but the promised winter red twigs never really “redded up” and during the growing season they were just a bland green screen. So, we made what felt like the heartless, ruthless decision to pull them up.

Aristotle coined the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum.” To that we would add, “and so do gardeners.” The now-bare bush row practically begged to be replanted. After the substantial amount of hard landscaping we added this year, the budget for plant material (what a heartless phrase, that) is not as generous as we would like. So, we repurposed the decorative side panels from a black metal arbor by attaching them to the fence. We then planted a “mailbox blend” of Morning Glories, blue and white. Inexpensive, traditional and almost guaranteed to grow and thrive. As we dug the holes for the hard, black, pre-glory seeds, we thought of how we must look to passersby: prostrate, eyes downward, hands and arms gesturing rosary-like. We have acquaintances who say they begin and end each day, “on my knees.” We are reminded of our own Christian upbringing and our parents’ gentle admonishment at bedtime to “say your prayers” with hands clasped and pressed firmly against our impressionable faces.

We are reminded, too, of a plaque that graced the gardens of both of our mothers. If you search the interwebs, it is the first thing we see. We have seen various forms of this plaque in many gardens. We know you know it, too. It is from a poem called “God’s Garden” by Dorothy Frances Gurney (1913):

…The kiss of the sun for pardon,

the song of the birds for mirth,

one is nearer God's heart in a garden

than anywhere else on earth…

We have distanced ourselves from the gardening and godliness connection, but we still feel something reverential about the act of gardening. On our knees, almost in supplication, we may not be praying per se. We are, instead, in a state of uncertain hopefulness. In addition to the Morning Glories (what a hymn-like name!), we dug in a bag of 30 small Peacock Orchids (Acidanthera) and five “Anastasia” Amarines, as well as emptied a packet of heirloom Nicotiana, or Scented Jasmine Alata. These are all new to us – hence the uncertain hopefulness.

Will these plants “like it” here on Snob Hill? We can’t really know right now. Only time will tell, as it always does. In the meantime, we hope. On our knees, opening the earth and filling those small fissures with hope in the form of seeds and roots and corms and tubers. Hope for our dear Emily Dickinson may be a thing with feathers, but to us, hope is the thing with leaves and stems and stalks and flowers and nectar.

As the imagined passersby observe us in our reverential, soil-bound gaze and reverie, they cannot know that for reasons not entirely clear, as we caress the earth, we are also reminded of Jimi Hendrix and that line from Purple Haze:

“ ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

Salmon Fishing On Snob Hill

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Somewhere between Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America and Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing In the Yemen lies our Snob Hill. And these thoughts…

Just as there are changes in the seasons and changes in current fashion and even changes in attitudes/changes in latitudes, to borrow a phrase from Buffet, there are changes – evolutions – constantly in motion on Snob Hill. We will celebrate our 25th anniversary as stewards of our piece of Snob Hill this coming August.

How time flies.

We are watching with interest the transition of a few properties here on the Hill. One house has stood empty but well maintained for approximately 10 years. The owners, part of the old-old guard, moved nearby to the inherited home of a mother, and use, as best we can fathom, their Snob Hill location as one of the nicest storage lockers ever. To be clear, the house is not abandoned, per-se, because the owners visit often and their yard man appears regularly to cut grass, trim bushes, and collect leaves.

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We also have two elderly widowers on the Hill, and their two fates – though ultimately the same for all of us – are as individual as they are. One, Frank, is a cancer-battler who has kept his wild white hair, tousled up like Heat Miser in The Year Without Santa Claus, and who has been pursuing in his later years a modest career in stand-up comedy. But that is another story. We have nothing else to say about him now other than we refer to his slow strolls up the lane with a vocal, protective schnauzer named Aggy as “Franks Wild Years” in deference to Mr. Tom Waits.

How time ain’t nothin’ when you’re young at heart.

The other widower, Grant, hung onto his independence with a tenacity that was not sustainable, yet was also somehow admirable. His wife passed several years ago, and his own infirmities corroded his mobility, his moods and his ability to care for himself. Yet he insisted in both driving one of two vehicles – a PT Cruiser and a Ford Expedition – living out his remaining years at home. He gave it the ole college try, which required a couple of years’ worth of home healthcare providers who provided inconsistent quality to his care and wellbeing. When this arrangement because obviously untenable, the family moved him to a nearby assisted living facility just before the COVID-19 pandemic.  

How time runs like a freight train.

But it is his wife, Angela, to which we return. She was a master gardener associated for many years with our city’s botanical garden. She was known locally in the70s and 80s as the “Herb Lady” and people would clog the lane each spring to purchase plants she raised in her small greenhouse. We recently conversed with a woman at a nearby farm who, when she found out where we lived, described exactly this occurrence.

As might be expected, a master gardener saved some of the best plants and garden design for her own purposes. Yet, as cancer slowed her down and her passing, her once-admirable garden rooms with their English cottage influence and secret pockets, have gone to seed, to use an old phrase. They are now lush with poison ivy and oak, Virginia creeper and the invasive bugaboo honeysuckle. Still, many of the established plants still exert themselves through the weeds.

Such was the case this past week with a planting of a unique, salmon-colored iris. Among the world’s irises (and we claim to be no experts in the botanical sense), these are off the beaten path. Yes, we began to covet these irises. We desired the irises. They became an item of recurring conversations along the lines of “Wouldn’t those look lovely in certain parts of our own gardens? We know just where to tuck them.” Yet, as co-presidents of the Snob Hill Neighborhood Association, being caught as poachers would be both unseemly and just plain wrong. So we did the right thing. We called one of the siblings. We were not piggish. We asked to be allowed to dig up just a few rhizomes. To our delight, the sibling not only said “please do,” and added something about her mother’s legacy.

Like naughty children, we entered our neighbor’s overgrown gardens. We brought along our cell phone with the text from the sibling, just in case we were questioned about our activities. We carried a small shovel known as a “poacher’s spade,” which seemed only appropriate. We were careful where we removed the rhizomes, choosing to remove only those whose absence would be most unnoticeable. We also found another delicate blue iris, which we also chose to add to our garden.

As we planted the new flowers, we also realized how many of the plants on our property came from neighbors – clumps of ornamental grasses grabbed from a nearby yard with a handwritten Free! sign, clumps of hostas that a Snob Hill neighbor gave us after their son didn’t want them, and a new yucca that our next-door gave us after yanking it unceremoniously from her hill. We were also surprised this year when a neighbor from across the street had a “bumper crop” of tomato seedlings and offered “as many as you want. “ They weren’t our preferred heirloom varieties, but for free, we gladly accepted some.

We have come to prefer such botanical hand-me-downs in part to save money, but also because we know the plants are from our terroir, our local environment. They have histories. They also connect us with their owners. Sometimes, the “owners” are just the latest in a long line of plant hand-me-downers, like the plants from our parents’ gardens we shared in The Family Sedums.

We are surrounded by so ways of marking time – wall clocks and watches, holidays and birthdays, calendars and cadences, seasons and solstices, apps and emojis. We observe Snob Hill time, which is marked by the way of our sons visit (partners in tow) and park where they once played in piles of leaves. By the way neighbors move on, pass on, or relinquish their independence. By weather events, like the ice storm that disarmed trees whose branches broke like gunfire, like the tornadoes that spared Snob Hill but left us without electricity for a week, like the unnatural, eerily quiet skies during the days after 911, by the cautious, distanced chats in the lane as we sheltered in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. This kind of time almost always begins with “Do you remember when…?”

 Taking a bit of someone else’s garden is like trying to carefully scrape a bit of color from someone else’s painting. It could be a type of theft. It can also be a gift. A share. Like asking for Grandma Myrtle’s chicken and dumpling recipe and having her transcribe the faded, crumpled, stained 3x5 card in her recipe box, then hand it to you. It’s a loving act of assimilation. An opportunity to take someone else’s approach, or practice, or creation and   make it your own.

 In our desire, we thought of ourselves as iris thieves, which led us to recall something from Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief:  "Collecting can be a sort of love sickness. If you collect living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, because even if you manage to find and possess the living thing you want, there is no guarantee they won't die or change."

Which in turn led us to recall some lines from the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris:

“…And all I can taste is this moment

And all I can breathe is your life

And sooner or later it's over

I just don't wanna miss you tonight…”

Behold! The Holy Grail of Nut Grinders!

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So, why the fanfare for this humble item? We are reminded of the quote, “I am haunted by waters” by Norman Maclean from the ending of A River Runs Through It. We have been haunted by this nut grinder — not by it’s presence, but by its absence.

For years, we have followed the example of countless PBS and cable cooks who chopped nuts with a knife (not to mention wending our way through Martha Stewart’s Christmas Cookbook). Sure, it was quick and efficient, but not even our best Damascus steel could provide the tactile delight we felt turning the crank of this humble grinder. Walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, and, we admit, the occasional cinnamon stick, fell through the tin chute and were transformed by circular tines into the nut gravel required for cookies and cheese balls. A culinary chipper-shredder.

Remember, we would say (sometimes out loud, more often just to ourselves)? Remember how fun it was to chop nuts with that old grinder? The one our great-grandmother bought at a Christmas Bazaar at the Methodist church and gifted to our mother. Yes, that one.

As Tim Burton once said, “Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It’s less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.”

The problem was, of course, memory and its damned specificity. We scoured garage sales, estate sales, and antique malls. We found plenty of nut grinders — plastic ones, electric ones, hand pumped ones, but never that one that we remembered. It had to be that one or nothing.

Imagine, then, a Thanksgiving day as our family gathered. Imagine it was this year, for instance. Imagine, too, our mother who extends a brown bag with handles, brimming with colored tissue paper. Imagine setting this “hostess gift” on the counter and turning to baste the turkey, only to have your mother pick it up and hand it to you again. Imagine as she says, “Please open this now. I think you’ll be pleased.”

And imagine your childhood flooding your eyes and the back of your throat as you pull it from its nest.

It may not be the prettiest item. It may not be the latest and greatest in nut grinding technology. It not even be exactly the color and pattern, neither of which you remember. But the design, the glass bottom, and, of course, that little handle. It’s almost — but only almost — better than the memory of it.

Beware nuts of the world. Behold, the holy grail of nut grinders.

The Bastard Bush of Snob Hill

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"Furled" by CB Adams

"Furled" by CB Adams

Is there such a thing as a bastard in the plant world? We don’t really know.

There is, of course, the Bastard Cabbage, the Bastard Toadflax, and the Bastard Mustard Plant, but these are only common, vulgar names.

We know that in the human kingdom that bastard is an old term to signify a son who could not inherit (ala Prince Herbert’s “What, the curtains?”) because he was not born out of his father’s (ala, the King of Swamp Castle’s) marriage even though he was the proverbial fruit of his father’s loins, even though such fruits can be of either sex. 

This, compared to illegitimate daughters who were still eligible be married off, or sent to a convent, or employed as a servant, or dreamed Cinderella dreams. How perfectly medieval.

We have pondered the etymology and gender of bastard all summer (leading to an unproductive sidetrack of reading-up-on William the Bastard) as the bush established itself in the yard. And even if bastard today tends to be gender specific (even though history says not), we might still feel free to apply it to the bush, to which we have (rightly or wrongly) assigned a femininity.

After all, we regularly hear young women refer to each other as dude, dick, and son of a bitch (which is doubly perplexing to us), so why not bastard? Especially given that the root of bastard is thought to be from the Latin, bastardus, or perhaps bastum, which is the same as “pack saddle,” which may stem from the idea being of a child produced from a relationship with a traveler.

You may be wondering what all of this has to do with a bush because if it is just a question of genetic lineage, then bastardism need not apply. Let us quote one of our favorite Tricky Dick Nixonisms: “Let me say this about that.”

We have adopted a bastard bush.  Or more appropriately, we rescued this bastard bush from landscaping euthanasia. For more than 20 years, this bush thrived at the edge of a Mother’s deck. It was not indigenous to this property, having been transplanted from its original home at our Parent’s former domicile, where it had thrived for at least a previous 20 years. 

 It is a common bush with common name, Rose of Sharon, but to Mother, it is a vulgar name, a name not to be spoken because Sharon is the name of the woman a former brother-in-law married after divorcing our Sister. Mother had enjoyed, maybe even loved, this bush for 30 years, but through no fault of its own, she condemned it now because its moniker was a too-painful reminder of one our family’s great trials (to say nothing of the damage to our Sister and Nephews).

And now we understand from whom we inherited our tangled associative tendencies, including the list we compiled of all the names we would never name either of our sons, drawn from all the people who had offended, bullied, us sometimes in our lives.

So Mother had decided (now ten years post-divorce) that she could no longer endure the bush’s presence. She summed up her animosity by way of a phrase from Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Shortley: “That bush is an abomination!” (Rose of Shortley, perhaps?)

And like a medieval king, it was off-with-its-head, except it was off-at-the-roots.

Mother had mentioned off-handedly that she was going to have her gardener remove the offensive shrub along with some invasive bamboo, a sap-drooling Mimosa tree, and some clumps of decorative grass that no longer interested her. Always on the lookout for free plant material, we asked if we could have it. This pleased Mother because she was glad for it to live, just not within her line of sight.

So that is how the bush came to Snob Hill. And with it we felt it required a new name. If Mother inquired about the health of the bush, we wanted a name that would not conjure unpleasantness. We tried:   

  • M-m-m My Rose of Sharona, by way of The Knack

  • Rose of BetterNotPickIt, with thanks to Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt

  • Rose HasItsThorn, from GNR

  • Nat King Cole’s Ramblin’ Rose, or was it the Grateful Dead?

  • Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie

  • And even Rose of Shawan, after a family surname and a great-grandmother who grew them

But none of them stuck. As didn’t Rose of WhatsHerName (too polysyllabic). And neither did Rose of Slut nor Rose of Crotch Jockey, keying off Mother’s preferred nicknames for that person. “It’s not fair to the plant,” she said.

For a bit, we promoted a sex change and referred to it as Rose of Sharon, but pronouncing it like Ariel Sharon, with a long o and emphasis on the second syllable. This proved unsuccessful. Not many got the joke. And most importantly, Mother was not a fan. It may of failed for her because this alias still reminded her of you-know-who, in the same way that gosh-darn-it is only a mask for the real intent of god-damn-it.

Mother didn’t say why, but we suspect it may be that she leans less toward the Judeo and more toward the Christian tradition. There is a certain form of irony in this because 1) Rose of Sharon is mentioned in the Bible, 2) said plant is not a true rose, and 3) is not the same plant as the bush we know today. If only flora confusion were the root of unrest in the Middle East…

One half of Us took a cue from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath suggested Rose a Sharn, as a tip of the hat to this bush’s hardy and resilient character. But the Other Half quickly dismissed this as: Too Joad family. Too Beverly Hillbillies. Too Gomer Pyle.

Besides, the Other Half of Us said, “That whole titty thing at the end is indelible in all the wrong ways, and I’m not talking about breastfeeding in public.”

In the end, we chose Rose of Snob Hill. It’s safe. It’s appropriate. And it’s accurate. Rose is happy on the hill and is thriving, especially with the mild and wet summer. His/her roots are going deep. And we can all live with that.       

Freaks and Beeks - The Art of Warre, A Beekeeper's Journey

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I came out last Sunday…to my neighbors.

That is, I revealed that my backyard is now a bee yard, home to two beehives and the possibility of a third. This was big news to those at our annual summer picnic. We are a small neighborhood of twelve homes on a private drive, and there isn’t usually much that occurs without someone noticing something at least some of the time. We window monitors.

But I managed to buy 200 pieces of Western red cedar board ends, unload and stack them on the driveway, store them for a couple of weeks, reload about half of them to take to my father's workshop, and return a few weeks later with the components for three Warre hives, store them on my porch, treat them with ECO Wash in the front yard, install them in the backyard, and finally introduce two packages of bees to their new homes without so much as a “Whatcha doin’ there neighbor?” So much for all those Crime Stoppers stickers in our windows.

Oh, and I had even paraded around in my bonnet, pants, and long white goatskin gloves that make me feel like a cross-dressing Jackie O or Audrey H impersonator. Maybe this says more about what my neighbors expect from me than I realized.

And, that do-it-yourself cloaking device kit wasn’t a waste of money after all, honey.

So when, between bites of fried chicken and seven layer dip, I happened to mention something about “my bees,” well….let’s just say, heads did turn. I watched as this conclave of homeowners, which demographically skews more Downton Abbey than How I Met Your Mother, began an impromptu game of telephone as the news of my bees worked along the line of lawn chairs. I was surprised that by the time it reached the end someone hadn't blurted “What? He watches Glee?”

But the news made it intact. And, as I have come to expect, the first question is almost always “Why did you get into beekeeping?” or “What made you get into beekeeping.” Fair questions both, but, as with so many things bee-wise, it elicits something unique because no one ever asks, “Why did you get a dog?” or “What made you get into cats?”

No, beekeeping is its own brand of endeavor and people react correspondingly. Though most people are wary of an encounter with a bee or bees, they nonetheless overwhelmingly have a positive curiosity about them. And news accounts in recent years about their potentially imminent demise brings forth their protective instinct that is more save-the-baby-seal than get-off-my-lawn. Bees are like Sally Fields, people really, really like them.

In the hypothetical sense, anyway, because the people who congratulate my beekeeping endeavors are often the same ones who also say that bees freak them out with thoughts of anaphylactic shock, stingers, and B-movie swarms of killer bees (not with the fondness of those old Saturday Night Live skits).

For this reason and a few others, including my latent orneriness, I did not take the proactive approach promulgated by the fine folks in my beekeeping club and leaders of the beginning beekeeping course I attended. No, I did not “reach out,” nor soften the opposition, nor build an approval rating. Instead, I extended to my beekeeping the same bug-off attitude that I have carefully nurtured during my twenty years in this neighborhood known as Snob Hill. I’m actively seeking a Beware of Bees sign to post on my gate. I do not recommend my approach for everyone.

I was prepared for whatever backward backlash that my neighbors might launch. I even memorizing the number of the city ordinances allowing for bees, but they surprised me. They were pleasant and supportive. They told me about neighbors from years ago who raised bees. They wanted to know how long I’d been a beek. They wanted a tour of the hives. They wanted to know, of course, when they could expect some honey.

My beekeeping journey has just begun. Out of all us world citizens, those of us who also serve as bee stewards are a special sort of minority. And among those of us who are in that minority, I have down-selected myself into an even smaller minority. That is, I have chosen the Warre approach to beekeeping. It's philosophy appeals to me. More on that decision in my next posting.

Stay tuned. Don’t worry. Bee happy.

Bedding Down on Snob Hill

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The irony did not escape us recently when Parents phoned to inquire whether we had any interest in accepting the offer of their king-sized, extra-long (Dad has long legs), four-poster bed. We said we needed to think about it, which is to say, with more than a little artistic license, that we needed to “sleep on it,” which is often a euphemism for something along the lines of, “No, but we don’t want to hurt your feelings.” We should be clear also – by bed they meant bed frame, not the bedding, mattress, and box springs.

While we were sleeping on it that night, we realized something: So much history from one little fact. We have never purchased a bed – either had to, wanted to, or otherwise. Not for ourselves individually. Not for ourselves as a couple. Not for either son (cribs not included). And neither new nor used. We have bought mattresses, box springs, sheets fitted and flat, and egg crate and memory foam toppers, but never the bed. How’s that for intelligent design?

Childhood beds do not count because our wonder years were featured like apartments with furniture included, so starting in college, we slept in the dorm bunk, imported a bed from home, or slept on a life raft mattress on the floor (aka the faux-futon). Our first apartment as a couple was furnished with her childhood bed because it was a double, compared to his frameless single life raft, but the name-brand solid cherry bed did not survive more than a few years of service, no doubt because it was neither purchased or designed for the vaults, tumbles, and hard athleticism of early married life.

Fortuitously, yet sadly, around the time that we could no longer tighten the bolts and screws of the old cherry bed, a cherished grandmother died and left to Her the antique that was – and still is – known as The Lincoln Bed. It’s the kind of bed that inspired us to imagine donning bed clothes, night caps, and curly toed slippers (shades not of grey but, “And Ma in her kerchief. And I in my cap”).

This was, to borrow a phrase from tea time, a proppa bedda, befitting our then new-found status of first time homeowners. It anchored the euphemistically referenced Master Suite in our new ranch-style starter home, described by an inebriated father on his first visit as “Nice and new and all, though it does resemble a double-wide from the front and the butt (he said ‘rear’). In retrospect, we wish we could take back our needlessly apologetic reply, “Well, we had to start somewhere. But home alone, to be as honest as Abe, we had fun referring to it as The Lincoln Bedroom – Missouri Annex.

Eight years on, and we were planning on taking The Lincoln Bed here to Snob Hill. We were trying to negotiate that rare occurrence, the door-to-door move, and we were being batted about by the mortgage company like a shuttlecock during a game of drunken badminton. Before the closing, we secured an additional private visit. We measured and diagrammed (oh, the joys of graph paper) the placement of our bedroom furniture, including The Lincoln Bed.

We still appreciated the walnut behemoth, Boyone was five and Boytwo was due in a few months, and this patch of double bed real estate was beginning to experience, not quite border wars, but certainly lines of scrimmage. Into this moving mix, a Mother unexpectedly offered to give us her nearly new, recently acquired king-sized four-poster bed with what seemed to us to be fancy, almost high-tech mattress composed of a series of water tubes. After months of visiting bedroom stores and mattress retailers, Mother had chosen this bed as the cure for her sleeplessness and fibro myalgia. Six months after delivery, neither condition had improved – plus she didn’t like using a small step stool to ascend/access the bed. To borrow an analogy that could not have been made at that time – getting into this bed felt to her like assailing The Wall in Game of Thrones (nor was she a fan of Pink Floyd).

So we inherited the four-poster. Boytwo would graduate to the Lincoln Bed in a few years after he graduated from his crib. We learned to love spreading out. Besides many good nights of sleep, there is really only one story related to this bed. While hosting the annual Snob Hill Christmas Party a few years after we moved in, our neighbor the Death Star heaved herself upstairs rather than send her obedient lackey and sycophant husband, Sam, just to nose around the second floor of the house, ostensibly to retrieve her coat.

Her husband was code named (by us, anyway) Sam for Secret Agent Man because he had “retired” from some sort of other job while in his 50s to become a real estate agent for the company co-owned by our next-door neighbor. He never seemed to sell anything. We think he just liked to see his name planted on signs throughout town like toadstools after a heavy rain. Still, he seems to still have captured the soon-to-be deceased widow market—those little old ladies to shed their mortal coils as well as their earthly abodes—an always diminishing but ever sustaining segment of the local housing economy.

The coats were piled on our four-poster. And, yes, we did—and still do—have a brass chandelier above the bed, a perhaps extravagant touch, except we had acquired it during a silly bitof aggressive bidding – fueled by the double trouble of competitive bidding and an open bar at our sons’ school’s annual dinner auction. It was for a good cause we told ourselves, but the truth lay elsewhere, hung-over. The morning after (there’s got to be one and there’s no pill for it), as the boozy fog lifted, we stared at it – the chandelier – wondering what we were ever going to do with an extra chandelier (and reciting the morning-after mantra “What were we thinking. What WERE we thinking?”) an answer appeared – the bedroom.

Out of breath, and thinking they were unobserved, the Death Star said to Sam, the almost code-like, “To the manor born.” They nodded to each other, as long-established married persons often do in the nearly silent, private language, created during their years together. We could only ponder her assessment of our boudoir and recall the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King of Swamp Castle says, “One day, lad, this will all be yours.” To which his son Prince Herbert replies, “What, the curtains?”

The next bed we did not purchase sits now in pieces in the living room. The four poster this spring let us down finally – and literally. The footboard suddenly split one night when we were sleeping, no athleticism required.  The jokes have abounded about whose side was the one that collapsed. Thanks to the dust ruffle, the temporary repair we made with lag bolts and sistering boards, we were able to make the repair, but it bothered us knowing it was there and not knowing when next it would fail. Then a Father called the offer of his four-poster king-sized bed. He was reluctantly downgrading to a single bed so a Mother could continue to make it for him. The king-sized bed had become for her a painful, herculean task to change the sheeting.

And so, almost 20 years from the receipt of our last gifted place of repose, we have avoided again the opportunity to buy a bed. Yet, there are still consequences. The bed has been sitting in pieces in the living room for more than two months with a deadline of Thanksgiving to install it in our upstairs master bedroom. It’s not as easy as it may seem, but that, as they say, is another story.

For now, we will ponder all of this history from just unpurchased beds. We’ll sleep on that...for a bit longer.

Fare Thee Well, FUBAR Gardens

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And really, we don’t know what Paul Simon meant when he sang about the “sounds of silence” because life on Snob Hill is usually peaceful and relatively quiet, but never silent.

People speak about the chirping of birds as the harbinger of spring (but honestly, don’t birds sing year round?) (on the other hand, tulips announce themselves with color rather than sound) (though maybe, like dog whistles, our ears don't hear them)).

We know summer by the sound of the lawn mower and leaf blower operated by our imposing neighbor Mr. Vonk across the street. Mr. Vonk lets us know when the grass is dry enough to be cut (at least twice a week or more, it seems), when our leaves have invaded his expansive personal air space, and when all weeds need whacking. We look forward to the day when, like one of those hurdy-gurdy one-man-bands, Mr. Vonk will don all his mechanized equipment and mow and blow and whack simultaneously. If this occurs, we promise to provide some proof, like one of those herky jerky films of Sasquatch (apparently only the palsied camera-challenged are eligible for an audience with Pope Gigantopithecus) .

We know that autumn is upon us by the sound of acorns falling on the plastic (call it “composite material” all you want, but it’s still plastic) carport that our neighbors attached to their house like a piece of mismatched Lego. To gank a phrase from an old commercial, we wish they would “leggo that Lego.” Such a structure is unbecoming of Snob Hill.

As autumn approaches, we lie in bed, especially in the morning, and listen as the accords begin to drop – propelled at first slowly, prompted by slight winds, and then building into a crescendo as the temperatures cool and they are stripped by gusts from the North. It is as if the Mother Oak finally decides the time has come for her acorn children to go out a play…permanently. And try to not to get under foot!

All of this is leads us to our current feelings of good riddance toward our gardens, especially the vegetable garden. Sadly, our mantra, as we stand before them, surrounded by the plunk of freedom-seeking, plummeting acorns, the steroidal whine of Mr. Vonk’s leaf disturber, and the obnoxious natterings of the amateur announcer from the nearby stadium that describes the silly scurryings of third-tier college athletes, is simply, “Just die already.”

We have been known to be autumnally melancholic, morose even, as we contemplate the gathering gloom, the abbreviation of daylight (and increasing Vitamin D deficiency) and the inexorable slide into winter. We are reputed to be Fall People, fixated on the strip search and confiscation of the other three seasons of flora. This year, all of that flailing has been replaced with an overwhelming  “Oh, Get on with it!”

In the spring, we began with such high hopes. We moved what seemed like a ton of pavers from the back yard  to the front of the yard as we lined our new vegetable garden. We hired Rototiller Man (an archaeological descendant to Piltdown Man?) to break the earth and outdo Mr. Vonk’s landscaping motor madness, at least for an hour and a half. Then we furtively pored through seed catalogs like plant porn addicts, amended soil, fertilized, cold composted, and visited nurseries and Home Depot’s garden center.

We were inspired by a passage from Gary Paulsen’s Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass, describing some uncles during planting season:

Pick up the dirt and smile and say:

“Drop a seed in this drop a goddam seed in this, and you won’t make the edge of field before it’s up to your knee tripping you.”

Pick up the soil and taste it, taste a piece of it and smell it and throw it down and smile and say, “Clabbered dirt, sweet grass,” even though dirt doesn’t clabber and sour, but sill, still there is a thing to taste there that tells things.

Oh, such was our springtime Pollyanna hopes for the garden. Now, these several months later, we have devolved. We began like Big Edie in Grey Gardens when she said, “I love the smell [of Grey Gardens]. I thrive on it. It makes me feel good.”

Now we are like Little Edie when she said, “I can't stand being in this house. In the first place, it makes me terribly nervous. I'm scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes, I'm absolutely terrified.” (Is it no wonder that The Grey Gardens: The Musical CD had sold approximately 30,000 copies as of November 2007?)

So we are terrified of our gardens. We could list the many reasons why we have allowed them to fall into their current state of disrepair, but, really, are minor foot surgery and two months in a “cam boot,” poorly staked tomato plants, two gusty, bamboo-trellis-destroying rain storms, preparations to send our youngest child off to college, general professional obligations, aggressive avoidance of OODW, Lady Macbeth Syndrome (Out Out Damnned Weed), and the threat of West Nile really enough to offset and properly explain our failures as stewards of the soil? We think not.

Our gardens are FUBAR. If you don’t know this military acronym for utter failure please Google it. Propriety prevents us from such potty mouthings at present. Best now to metaphorically plow them under. Learn from our mistakes – apply a dab of disambiguation.  And spend the winter listening to the wailing soundtrack of Mr. Vonk’s snow blower. And preparing to do it all again next spring.

Such is the nature of gardening.

The Family Sedums

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We received the call a few weeks ago.

Well, not that call, but an important call nonetheless. We are referring of course to the call from Mother, who wanted to know if we would like the family sedums.

Some receive the family jewels, others, apparently, the family sedums. They were currently in pots on her deck and, despite her best efforts, something insisted on eating them, “to the quick,” as Mother put it. Every morning she would look outside to find another sedum reduced to a sad stub. She had moved the pots all year, from driveway to walkway to deck, trying to make them inaccessible, in successive order, to the deer, the squirrels, the chipmunks, groundhogs, beavers, slugs, and gypsies, tramps, and orchid thieves.

To no avail.

The solution, Mother had concluded, was total exile, to secret them from her house in another county to ours … if we wanted them. We did, but this begs the question, “What if we said no?” The answer is, of course, “Not an option,” which sounds like the catchphrase from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that is our life. We are the inheritors of the family jewels and the family sedums.

Her offer came with some precedent. We already have the reputation as the repository of the family flora. Already rooted are the Hen and Chicks we were given in childhood by a great-grandmother who gave us “starters” from hers that she grew in strawberry pots, and Old Bastard, the maple tree flourishing in the backyard that is the progeny of the magnificent specimen a grandfather (the eponymous Old Bastard) had in his front yard before the Missouri Highway Department cut it down to widen the road.

There are no plant import regulations between St. Louis and St. Charles Counties. The sedums arrived in pots so large and heavy Father had brought along a ramp to slide them into the child-sized red Flexible Flyer wagon, the only wheeled conveyance we had since the red wheelbarrow’s tire went flat and we felt too cheap to spend $32 for a new one.  Who knew so much would have depended upon it?

Any of our looky-loo Snob Hill neighbors were rewarded with the sight of two 75-year-olds and two 53-year-olds (one limping along in a cam boot) guiding the sedums down the uneven stone walkway the way those people in the Macy’s Day Parade handle the giant Snoopy balloon on a windy Thanksgiving day. After safely seated on the front patio, our neighbors no doubt continued to be entertained as we stood, gesticulating over the pots, which Mother was quick inform that she wanted back.

There were three varieties of sedums, each with its own history and all of which are botanically unexceptional. They are just garden variety sedums. Mother pointed. Father pointed. We stood with hands on hips, trying to follow their disagreement about which sedum came from which side of the family. We can only be certain now of this: there is one from each side of the family and one that was purchased years ago by our parents. With a knowing glance, we acknowledged to each other that in a few seasons, after the sedums became established and spread in their new home, the confusion would only grow.

What our neighbors could not hear next was the story Mother told of the sedums from her own mother’s garden. This grandmother was a wonderful and giving woman with a tragic taste in men. She married twice after divorcing mother’s father (the only good one of the bunch). The third was a carpenter named Raymond (forever ruining that trade and name). Our grandmother was no gardener, but she liked to have a few flowers to brighten the yard that overlooked an interchange on Highway 55. She could never get anything to grow because Raymond delighted in running over with his riding lawnmower whatever she had planted. Tulips, marigolds, and Black-eyed Susans – all succumbed as he rode over them, laughing.

The only plants he could not kill were the sedums that she protected in beds, built of unattractive concrete blocks that lay along the basement foundation. During the last year before she died, Mother dug up some of the sedums and took them home. She nurtured them for more than 20 years and when she moved to two new houses.

Now this sedum legacy continues on Snob Hill. Family folklore blends with family plantlore – proof that love has the capacity to outlive cruelty for as long as we care to tend it and pass it on.

And Mother has her pots back.

--CB Adams

Embracing My Inner Jew

Like many Americans, my heritage is a hodge-podge of ethnicities. Genetically I am a Heinz 57 – related to both John Adams and Pope John Paul II as well as a host of nefarious characters I can only imagine. Culturally, I am equally diverse – according to my DNA, my ancestor was an African man by way of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and England, Ireland, and Wales. Harry Potterally, I am Muggle.

In a culture that encourages us to embrace our inner child, inner femininity, and inner peace, today I embraced my inner Jew. The details are sketchy, but I have Jewish ancestry on both sides of my family. On my father’s side, there is a murky story about a Jewish boy from Germany who was adopted (or kidnapped, depending on who told the story) in the early days of World War II and became part of my lineage.

I credit my love for a good bagel to my Jewish ancestors, whoever they were. I am constantly disappointed by what passes for a “bagel” these days. They are too soft, bready and lack any satisfying texture. So, as with many things in life, if you want something done right, do it yourself. I stumbled upon a traditional bagel recipe last week and it has haunted me. I make a mean challah, so I thought I would give bagels a try.

As I walked through the aisles of Whole Foods, past all the faddish “gluten free” items, I was actually searching for wheat gluten. I found it, as well as another new ingredient – barley malt.

I mixed. I kneaded. I rolled. I boiled. I baked. The results were not as pretty as those in a good New York bagelry, but the taste, texture, and chewiness were right on. I will work on my technique of shaping them better. But I may never enter a Panera again.