Tall Papa is potting up the rootling rosemaries. We started them about two weeks ago (I cut nine stalks from the mother plant — she’s 10, maybe 15 years old). We stripped off about half the leaves and set them aside to dry. Tall Papa moistened the bare stems, dipped them in rooting hormone and stuck them all into one container of potting soil. In the dark, the mysteries of roots took shape and began to grow. Now each plantlet will get its own small pot. When they have adjusted to having more root space they will go out, some onto the deck, some out to friends grateful for herbs. Young students on a budget, the eighty year old parishioner, all will have more savory meals.
Come October, I will cut our plants off at the base, cluster them around a cork, and use a rubber band to hang them from the drying rack in our breezeway. By winter they will be dry and I will collect them as the 2019 crop of rosemary. Cleaning and sorting herbs is a good accompaniment to election debates; one batch of pesto in particular kept my sanity during the Palin/Biden debate. The 2018 crop will have vanished into soups and roasted chickens.
All our seedling and rooting pots are recycled. Easy to make, free to give away with the plants, these recycled pots get multiple uses after their original contents have long ago been digested. These in particular are from Anderson Erickson, an Iowa dairy founded in 1930 and the source of consistently delicious, local dairy foods (all their milk comes from Iowa family farms). The large A&E container had cottage cheese in it which was eaten with garden chives or scallions grown from seeds or sets. Sometimes the cottage cheese made breakfast with some stewed rhubarb.
The smaller A&E cup at the left held vanilla yogurt. Our first shared vanilla yogurt was on Isle D’Orleans in Quebec province. We had bought raspberries at a roadside stand and stopped to buy some vanilla yogurt to go with them. The combination was so delicious that we stopped at the next roadside stand and repeated it. Every July we reprise those happy memories with Iowa raspberries from the back yard.
The drip saucer under the big pot, with a cobalt ribbon along its edge, is an Amtrak salad bowl. On our first trip we so enjoyed the plasticware at meals for its graceful lines that I was considering saving some. I gathered up my courage to express how much I liked the tableware to the waiter. He held up a hand and said, “Say no more!” and came back with a package with two of each kind of dish. Apparently we were not the only ones who loved the designs.
Tall Papa’s gardening tool is a Georg Jensen stainless steel salad fork, in the Mitra pattern. My beloved mother-in-law was fond of that pattern and put together a set for us from estate sales and auctions. Not only are her salad forks good gardening tools, her iced tea spoons are excellent for making chocolates, especially Tall Son’s chocolate butterscotch wafers.
Tall Papa has the lovely hands of a surgeon although he is a pathologist. His father was a general surgeon, one of the first for the Kaiser group and called a communist for his pains. He called general surgery “hard manual labor” and was delighted when Tall Papa chose pathology. Tall Papa saved his father from surgery when he told his father about the antibiotic treatment for stomach ulcers. Papa was rueful to think about how many stomachs he had cut up trying to ameliorate ulcers before that knowledge.
The ring on Tall Papa’s hand is the only piece of jewelry he wears - or owns. When we were planning our wedding, I asked him if he would wear one. At first he demurred but suggested that I look at the faculty in our department to see whether they wore wedding rings (at that time, I was the only woman in the faculty). Discreetly over a week I noticed who did and who did not wear one, and I relayed my observations to Tall Papa. “I’ll wear one.” It seems he wanted to visually align with the uxorious husbands and not the adulterers.
The deep blue behind his hands is a tee shirt from the Duluth Trading Company, one of the few places I have found tall tee shirts for him. When we were courting I noticed his shirts tended to come untucked so I asked him if they were tall shirts. “What’s a tall shirt?” he asked. His tall dress shirts now come from a men’s wear store in Iowa City that supplied my father and grandfather. Duluth Trading shirts have a good hand of heavy weight cotton. This Scandinavian blue goes well with Tall Papa’s Norwegian and Danish ancestry - and his blue eyes.
The brown tabletop is not wood, though it looks like it. It is our second small round table. Back in the eighties during a kitchen renovation we learned from a design book about small round tables for every day eating. That first one was a butcher block pedestal top, about three feet across. After a move it was retired to become a plant stand while our family of four ate in a breakfast room.
A second kitchen renovation and the departure of Tall Daughter brought us back to a small round table. This one is four feet across with a wood-look veneer, and came from the seconds section of an office store. It easily seats four - five, if they are friendly. The original table is again a plant stand - for Tall Son’s philodendron in Utah. That philodendron is a division from the original plant that stood for many years on the table in Iowa.
We grow our lives through scores of years, thousands of days, uncounted minutes and moments. In love we begin, and we end in love.