Lehman’s Country Life

Journal Entry, Thursday, July 03, 2008
Clean, pack, label, lift, repeat.  Not exactly a shampoo bottle, but there is a sameness that is noticeable long about the fortieth time and it’s becoming my mantra.  The boxes that the admin assistant at work saved and sent home with me (bless you, Valda), which seemed far too numerous before, are in danger of becoming too few!

We are in Day 7 of the 9 that each of us has off during which we have committed to getting my roommate of several years moved to a new house.  The layers of Oscar Madison-ness are being peeled away, and although the herniated discs in the bottom of my back are reminding me I should be taking more breaks, the suddenly emerging empty spaces urge me on.
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You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.”
-Ziggy by Tom Wilson

Apart from the flowery, beautiful sonnets and songs written down through the ages about roses, I often find the more “common language” quotations the most enjoyable. If you were here a few weeks ago and learned, perhaps, some new things about planting and cultivating roses, you may very well have at least one lovely plant turning out its colorful bounty. If your roses are of the strains that are considered either “antique” or “old garden roses” (or those developed more recently with extra attention not to losing the magic of scent) you may also be wondering how you can preserve both the color and perfume of roses. You’ve come to the right place!
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For many people, the mention of roses conjures up images of perfectly formed florist’s blossoms, surrounded perhaps by a cloud of tiny white Baby’s Breath sprays at Valentine’s Day; or perhaps like me, you grew up seeing vines of powder pink “wild” roses climb chimneys and scramble over the roofs of coastal cottages. There are hundreds of variations on what qualifies as a rose, and whether your tastes run to the perfection of form as with the long-stemmed hybrids preferred by florists, or the heavily scented “cabbage” roses depicted by Renaissance painters, there’s a rose for everybody. In this first of two articles, we’ll look at the basics of growing roses, and dispel some of the common myths about their care and feeding.

If your experience with roses has been limited to seeing someone in your family or neighborhood constantly fussing with their plants, you may have concluded that roses are hard to grow and require constant care. Nothing could be further from the truth! I can’t tell you how many really good books on the subject will say quite plainly, “roses love to grow!” There is no need to fuss over your vines and bushes unless you choose to; and even then, I doubt you will much improve upon what the rose does quite naturally given just a few basics, beginning with planting. There are two different ways to plant a rose, and we’ll look at them here.
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It never fails — no matter how early or late it happens, that first moment when I see that flash of blue…hear that soft, watery warble and finally register that there are a dozen or more Bluebirds in my front yard, for a split second, I can barely breathe.

Journal Entry - February 1st ‘08

The Bluebirds are here! This is the earliest they’ve ever arrived and the ground is frozen! I need to get a rush order placed with Grubco and run to Petsmart for a couple of little cartons of mealworms to tide us over!

Last month, I wrote about “new traditions,” and although I still think of “deep winter” in terms of things I grew up with many miles north of here, there is no denying that here in the Mid-Atlantic, the arrival of the first flock of hearty little balls of winged blue fluff has become part of February into March that is a testament to the natural knowing of animals. Whether they read signs that point to winter ending soon can only be conjecture; but it’s been proven that Eastern Bluebirds do know, from one season to the next, where they can expect to find safe nesting places and where there is likely to be food. In the seven years I’ve owned this land, the collection of nest boxes has burgeoned from one to six, and in the months when they arrive while the ground is either frozen or covered with snow, there are emergency provisions offered up in ceramic plant saucers that are always emptied by day’s end.
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I’m from New England, where “tradition” was pretty much every child’s first three-syllable word; and as far back as I can remember, there were certain things we always did around our house that bespoke the deepest part of winter - that time when the last of the holiday decorations had been put away, the snowstorms paid no attention to whether or not Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, and daylight was that brief time between when the school bus picked everyone up and when it deposited us all back at home. The mornings were pink and mid-late afternoons were purple, and there were certain things we did and certain foods we ate that belonged solely to that time from mid-January to mid-March.
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Part II: Scent, color and natural additives

If you tried the basic soap recipe described in Part I, you got six cutlery tray “loaves” of soap out of their molds after two to three days when they were under wraps, finishing the saponification process. Most of the time, removing the soap from greased molds is a simple matter of giving the mold a little twist and then pushing down from the top and releasing the soap onto a sheet of waxed paper or directly onto the board where it is to be cut. On occasion, though, the soap is reluctant to leave the mold, and a couple of hours in the freezer following by repeating the twisting process usually does the trick.

This brings to mind a funny incident from years ago, when I had read somewhere that 3″ PVC pipe with an end cap at one end, stood up in a rack and poured from the top, made dandy round soaps.
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Part I: Art Meets Science 
       If I were to tell you I spent the weekend arranging for the reversal of esterification, or more succinctly, hydrolysis of esters by a base, would you know I was talking about saponification? For those of us who promptly forgot everything we learned in Organic Chemistry as soon as final grades came out, none of these terms are exactly household words. But for as long as people have been making soap, combining fats or oils with a base such as lye, they’ve been employing this amazing chemical reaction and have, over time, turned what was once a basic, no-frills cleaner for everything from bodies to laundry, into a lovely and infinitely varied luxury.
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Instant insulation for $20! 

When I was little and my grandfather was building our home “up in the sticks” of rural Massachusetts, we lived in three rooms plus an enclosed porch while the second phase was being added onto the back. It would become another two bedrooms and a bathroom, but for one winter I recall, it was enclosed but not insulated or finished, so an army surplus blanket hung in the roughed-in doorway at one back corner of the kitchen.
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