13 and a Wakeup!!!

For my veteran friends, you know what this means… for everyone else: after 13 days(not counting today), I wake up and I go home! Well, assuming everything goes as planned, that is. There are some tests to get through… a CT scan, a PET scan, a pulmonary function test and some exotic blood work, all of this scheduled for the week of the 4th. Doc says that when I meet with her on the 11^th, if everything is OK, she’ll cut me loose. Oh, how I’ve waited for those words. And so has Ruth Ann and Becky and everyone else.

I don’t know what it’s going to be like to walk into our house again… strange, I guess. But it’ll be good to be around my stuff… no woodshop or gardening, tho’… I sure hope my fig tree survived. I talked to Mike, my neighbor, and said it was doing well. The parsley that was INSIDE the lanai is dead, and at some point I would like to replant it and some basil. I also want to put in another sage plant… the guys who spread the rocks around my house buried it and it died. The rosemary is getting HUGE… I may want to dig it up and pot it and bring it inside the lanai with the rest of the herbs.

Gardening is in my blood. When my grandfather died in 1949, one of the things that my father took over was the two-city-lot garden. During the depression that garden kept the family of eight fed. They also had chickens and rabbits, so there was a steady supply of meat. Nonnie and grandpa only had to buy the bare necessities… flour, butter, milk, sugar, etc. By the way, I said my first swear-word at a chicken… I was about 3.

So Dad’s planting several hundred tomato plants and beans, carrots, peppers (hot and bell), celery, onions, garlic… etc.  Around the first of August, a lot of the stuff started coming in… tomatoes, especially. We had a canning shed out in back of the house (over the wine cellar!!) and Nonnie would clean it until you could eat off the floor… and clean the old wood/coal stove, also. Dad would come home after working in the factory and would pick whatever was ripe, starting with several bushels of ripe plum tomatoes. The next day, Nonnie would can whatever he picked. EVERYTHING got canned… veggies, fruit (peaches and pears from our trees), homemade jellies (grape and quince). And of course a whole ton of plum tomatoes. I think I was about 12 before I learned you could actually BUY tomatoes in a store.

This process took all of August and September, filling the shelves of the cellar with stuff to last all winter. Believe me, there is nothing like opening a jar of peaches in the middle of February and eating a peach that really tastes like a peach.

About October 1^st, or so, the grapes got delivered. The crates of grapes, and what seemed like thousands of bees! Uncle Pat would come to our house on a Saturday and the grapes would get crushed. Paul and I got to play with the empty boxes, building a fort as big as we could reach. Dad would do two barrels of red and a barrel of white. The wine would be ready to drink by February. Dad only did wine, but I recall a story about Grandpa having a still during prohibition. A relative came to visit from New York and told him that Grandpa’s was better than what the relative was selling. Another skeleton in the closet.