Summer Travel - Back in Time to Upstate New York

 August is my favorite summer month to make our trek to New York and New England. By August the heat in Virginia is monotonous and I appreciate some cool weather relief. Our first stop this summer was back home to the Albany area to visit brothers and sisters. The temperature gauge in the car slowly dropped as the miles north ticked by. We found the welcome relief I was longing for. It felt good to be outside all week without the need to escape the sun and heat.

Before we reached Albany, we stopped in Fultonville, New York to visit the Auriesville Shrine. I went to this shrine with my parents, aunt, and sister a couple of times back in the 1960's when I was young. My memories of the shrine were vague. They were also from a child's perspective. I wanted to see it again as an adult and with a mature understanding of our faith. The shrine marks the place where three Jesuit missionaries were martyred by the Mohawk Indians in the 1640's.  The history of the shrine can be found HERE.

 

Stations of the cross along the pathways were beautifully done in mosaic. There was another set of stations that went up to a hill of prayer.

 The grounds were not as I remembered it and it was difficult to get my bearings. The trees were all fifty years larger and the entire perspective was different than from my memory. However, it was more beautiful than I remembered. We must have visited it on a feast day when I was young because I remember there being a lot of visitors walking along the paths. Today it was quiet and serene. The place is rustic and has the northern, woodsy, Adirondack feel to it even though it is not located in the Adirondacks. Each path leads to different contemplative spaces with statues, prayers, chapels, and a church. Steve and I walked along the pathways and read the various plaques before attending Mass in the large, circular church. There was more to see than we allowed time for. The grounds aren't overly expansive but it is a contemplative space and one feels led to stop and pause for a time at each location. I was sorry the gift shop closed before we could get to it because I wanted to find some books to further explore the history of the shrine.

The Kateri Chapel built in the 1800's at the foot of the Hill of Torture.

 

The coliseum where Mass is held, built in the 1930's.

 

I am glad we had the opportunity to make the pilgrimage here this year. It took a memory from childhood and brought it to life and into the present moment. It also gave me a deeper appreciation for the holiness of this place and the sacrifices the Jesuits made. (Ever since reading The Musket and the Cross, I have been fascinated with the early explorers and settlers of North America and the interactions with the various native tribes.) Rather than completely satisfy my questions and curiosity, our visit to the Auriesville Shrine has left me feeling the need to go back again. I guess I now understand my mother's desire to take us there on more than one occasion. It was a gift she gave to me, perhaps without realizing it.

The August Garden

 

Here we are already in August! Thanks to hurricane Debby we had an abundant soaking. I can hear the plants all giving a sigh of relief from the drought of July. I tried to be proactive in the garden this year by pulling up vegetable plants as they finished producing. The two back beds, center and right, had Swiss chard, beets, snow peas, radishes, and lettuce. As one crop finished, I planted a succession of another up until now. Those two beds are empty except for a few beets. My goal was to plant one more crop of seeds with zinnias. I got sidetracked with canning tomatoes and pulling weeds so the zinnias never happened. It is a shame because they are always a bright and cheery flower, good for cutting, and they bloom well into October here. However, I have two consolations to make up for no zinnias. One is that the garden still looks fairly tidy and "alive" rather than scraggly and dead. The second are the beautiful hollyhocks, which are new this year, to the left of the shed. 

I had hollyhocks in that spot several years ago until Steve planted a hops plant and it became a monster and choked out the hollyhocks. The hops was invasive and required aggressive pruning, which we did not do. In addition, the dried hops weren't brewing a beer that Steve felt made it worth keeping the plant. Last year we finally pulled the hops plant out. I left that area empty with the hope of returning hollyhocks there. I searched for hollyhocks seeds or plants in all the garden centers around here but could not find any. One day I was rummaging in my seed box for something and I found an old packet of hollyhocks seeds. I felt like I won a prize! The packet was outdated by a couple of years but I figured I had nothing to lose. I planted them and they germinated! The, within a week, the resident rabbits had eaten them down to stubs. I sprayed them with Deer Off and that kept the rabbits from eating them again. Now they are big and beautiful and blooming. I couldn't be more pleased. Steve's mom always had hollyhocks growing near her back door and they remind me of her. This is the view of the garden that I see out of our kitchen sink window. I keep an eye on the garden from here and it gives me pleasure to see everything growing. 

Believe it or not, our county schools went back into session this week. When we lived in New York, the garden was  spent by the time school opened in September. School in August confuses my ancient internal time keeping clock where I associate the seasons with what grows when and what activities take place when. The heat, humidity and growing things tell me it is still high summer. The school buses do not belong in the picture not to mention that we haven't even vacationed yet. August is the best time to be in New England, when the ocean is finally warm enough to step into. I'm going to ignore the school calendar and stay on the summer clock a bit longer.

Quilt Finish- It Took Me Long Enough!

 

 I finally bound this lap quilt I started last year. It's called, "Carousel" from the book, " Simply Fat Quarters Quilt Book, It's Sew Emma #ISE-901" The spring time color palette really caught my eye. I also thought it was a pattern that would not be too challenging for me since I do not quilt that often. 

I had it pieced together fairly quickly. Then, last summer, I dropped it off at Fork Mountain Quilt Shop in Rocky Mount, Virginia to have it quilted. It was there for about six weeks waiting its turn. Since the pattern was all straight lines and right angles, I chose a swirling quilt design as a contrast. I have no excuse for not binding it when I picked it up last August. I tucked it into the blanket chest where it sat for an entire year! 

I finally bound it last Tuesday when two friends and I got together for the day to do hand work. We try to get together at least once a month to sit and stitch and use that time to get some work done. I targeted the binding on this quilt to be my project for that day. It feels really good to have it finished!

Putting Up for Winter, Peaches and Lavender

 As if our own garden doesn't keep us busy enough, the local farm stands are offering wonderful, local produce that are too hard to pass up. It is officially peach season! I stopped at Ikenberry's to buy a bag of peaches to make a peach galette for dessert on Saturday. I ended up buying a larger amount so that I could make some jam too. As much as I hate weeding and laboring in the garden, I love canning and saving food. 

In the late 1970's we were renting an apartment in the city of Albany, New York. Steve was in college and I was working in an office to support us. I longed to live in the country. We took drives and dreamed to one day make that come true. Back then, I subscribed to Mother Earth News. It peaked my interest about country life, especially putting food up by canning. I knew nothing about canning and quickly learned that it is not complicated. I started canning produce for my father from his garden. I remember making tons of pickled beets for him. I canned cranberries from the supermarket at Thanksgiving and gave them as gifts. We bought produce from farm stands and I canned that too. I would can anything I could get my hands on.

We also listened to Prairie Home Companion on the radio every weekend. I recall Garrison Keilor singing a song about canning that I will never forget. The thought of those stained glass colored jars all lined up on a shelf waiting to be opened on a cold winter's day to feed family around the table still fills my heart with joy.

Peaches and jalapeno peppers ready to simmer

Sitting pretty until I take them to the basement

Dried lavender buds stripped from their stems

 Another wonderful harvest from the garden is lavender. We have three lavender bushes around the edge the garden. I never picked the blooms this year so they all dried on the stalk. It was now time to cut all the stalks back. After that was done, we gathered them up and took them to the patio. It was a pleasant evening with a soft breeze cooling the air. Steve fixed us each a drink and we sat with a bowl between us and stripped all the buds off the stalks into the bowl. I have the bowl in the house now, where the humidity is lower and the buds can dry more. I stir it a few times a day to help the drying process along. The aroma of the lavender is released each time I stir it. The house smells wonderful! Usually I will make little sachets with the lavender but for now I can't think past the bowl.

Progress on Apothecary Rose and Finished Stitches

 

I am slow on getting this rug completed. It is a large three feet by four feet and getting heavier each time I put more wool on it. I need to use the floor frame to work on it and that is too cumbersome to lug around for hooking with friends. So, I prefer to work on this at home. I just need to set my mind to completing it and put in a good two or three days of hooking and it will be ready to steam and bind.

I did finish stitching the "Hens Pin Keep" pattern by Stacy Nash. At ten by ten inches, I think it is too big to be a pin keep. I love the pattern and I will look for a frame so I can hang it in the dining area in place of a snowman sampler that is currently on the wall. I am beginning to swap pieces out with the seasons now. The same is true for some of the rugs.

I also finished stitching "Tribute to Summer Sampler" by Stacy Nash. I meant to hang this in the kitchen in place of two other Stacy Nash pieces that I switch out for the seasons. I have one for fall and one for winter. This was meant to be in place for the summer. It turned out too small to hang in that particular spot so I haven't rushed to frame it yet. I love the border and the simple hues of color on this one. It will serve equally as well hung in another location. Stacy's pattern front shows this framed in a gold frame which I think looks very pretty. I will probably do the same. Neither cross stitch has been ironed or blocked yet.

These are the things that have kept me busy when it is too hot to be outside or I have some quiet time to relax. : )

The July Garden: A Saga of Weeds, Bugs, Drought and a Mystery

 

If I had to title this post a week ago, I would have titled it "A Garden of Death". I was feeling that fed up with the weeds, the bugs, the unrelenting heat, and the need to water these beds while fighting an assault of gnats. I feel a little differently about the garden this week. 

The first encouragement came in the form of rain, five days of it. The softened earth enabled me to start getting the weeds up. The plants responded to nature's watering much better than to that of hose water and more produce began ripening for us to use. The ripe tomatoes went into wonderful Panzanella salads and BLT's , we ate freshly cooked beets and green beans, and put fresh basil on everything. I canned salsa and sweet pickle relish and I am getting ready to can jalapeno peach jam. (Steve grows the jalapenos and the peaches are local from Ikenberry's.)

The downside of the garden mainly consist of two things that irk me the most: the weeds that grow in the gravel surrounding the beds and the worms and bugs that destroy the produce. I try to pull the weeds by hand since they are growing around a food source. The weeds are relentless! They consist mainly of purslane, spurge, and oxalis. The purslane and spurge are the worst and HATE them.The only thing I can do is pull and pull and pull. The main pests right now are the tomato horn worms, Japanese beetles, and some invisible bug that makes a perfect hole in the tomato. The worms are camouflaged  by day and easier to hunt after dark by using a black light flashlight. The black light makes the worms glow brighter than the leaves, hence making them easier to spot and pick off. The Japanese beetle population has been reduced by hanging those beetle bag traps a short distance away from the garden. They really work! I did discover one surprise about the bags, though. We had one bag hanging rather low to the ground and some animal came along and bit the bottom of the bag open. I guess it wanted to eat the bugs that were inside. Sigh. We can only keep trying.

Our current dilemma is trying to figure out what is taking bites out of the tomatoes. The round holes are clearly worm or bug made, but we also have nibbles with bite marks made by something with teeth. The garden is surrounded by electric fence for larger animals so it must be something smaller. The bitten tomatoes seem too high up for a rabbit. We have set the game camera out for two nights and spotted nothing on it. Maybe mice climb up to the tomatoes? Do mice even want tomatoes? Whatever it is is very sneaky. I try to pick the tomatoes at first blush but the bites are showing up on green tomatoes, not ripe ones. We may never solve the mystery and by next year's garden, I will have forgotten all about them.

Even though the garden is aggravating, the reward of having pretty jars of preserved goodies and fresh produce on our plates has begun to bring some immediate gratification. Cost wise, growing and preserving from seven raised beds is way more costly than buying the items off the shelf. Not to mention the labor effort, especially of pulling weeds. I really don't know why we do it other than that we always have.  I also have a short memory of all the bad things in gardening. During the winter I will romanticize our lovely garden and start dreaming of what to plant and how lovely it will all be. It will be just like the photos in the plant catalog. I am so gullible when it comes to dreamy, beautiful photos.

In retrospect, it boils down to one thing that keeps us gardening- the salsa. Steve is like a little kid with  his hot pepper powders, sauces, and salsa. He eats salsa or hot pepper sauce or jarred peppers of some sort almost every day. He puts them on everything. Seeing him so happy with such a simple thing makes me willing to do it all over again next year.

A Week with Violet

 

 I had the pleasure of having our youngest granddaughter, who is six, with me for a week. Steve was away so we had all the days wide open for fun. We got an early start to each morning and kept busy from start to finish. I know how much energy children have but I forgot that it goes and goes all day and does not wane. So, my biggest challenge was keeping up with all of Violet's ideas. 

Violet loves to draw, cut, glue, fold, build and create. She was content to let her imagination free with all the craft supplies at hand. I noticed she liked to fold paper into three dimensional box shapes so I asked her if she knew what a diorama was. To my surprise, she did! I found a shoe box and she decided to make an ocean scene inside of it. She wanted me to craft along with her so I made two fish to hang in her diorama. We spent an entire morning adding more and more ideas to the scene. I showed her how to create tabs to use in gluing shapes to the bottom and how to use thread to hang things from the top. We added shells, lobsters, and a hermit crab made of Sculpey clay. Finally, in the basement we found a pile of tissue paper leftover from Christmas. Violet crumbled that up into foaming ocean waves and glued them all around her scene. 

The next day we went to the library where they had a special program called, Didgeridoo Down Under. It was a wonderful program with an educator who played the didgeridoo, talked about all things Australian, and had a lizard and a snake for everyone to touch. Violet thought it would be fun to make a didgeridoo so we stopped at the hardware store on our way to lunch and bought three foot pieces of one inch PVC (which the performer suggested) and some brown spray paint. We practiced trying to make the right sounds come out of our didgeridoos and we decided we need a lot more practice. In the meantime, we have future plans to decorate the plain brown pipes with Aboriginal art. When Steve got home at the end of the week, we showed him our didgeridoos. He was amused with them and picked one up to play. He got the right vibration sound to come out immediately! We were jealous. He chalked it up to his playing the saxophone.

The following days were filled with more crafting, another diorama of a farm scene,  lunch at McDonald's, lots of swinging on the swing in the basement, games of Uno, watching the movie "Hook" (during which I closed my eyes and snored), looking at all the jewelry in my jewelry box, trying unsuccessfully to change out Violet's newly pierced earrings, reading books from the library, cooking a dinner, and baking cupcakes.

It was a delightful week. After it was all over, I thought about when I was a young mom and I had four Violets to keep up with. We were together all the time, for home school and play. It brings to mind all the young mothers with children that I see in the stores or at the pool. I recall that season of life and I realize these moms need prayers, kindness, and plenty of support to get through those busy years. It needs to come not only from family and friends but from strangers too. I pray that for my daughters, three of whom are young moms. A smile or word of encouragement from a stranger can go a long way when a young mother is having a bad day or is bone tired. I need to be mindful of this when I am out and about.