What If I Said Yes?

I let errands pile up until I have four or five, then drive to town to do them, and yesterday, as the snows melted in the February sun, came an impulse to pick up a takeout salad. Oh, man, how I fought with myself, turning in the direction of the place, then turning away, then turning the car around and back because I could make salad at home. I shouldn't spend the money, because when I'm old and shivering I'll wish I'd saved it . . . But gosh, I can't ever treat myself? And the portions are big enough to make two meals . . . I overthought a Chicken Caesar salad. I wanted it all readymade, with potato chips and a cookie. It's been months since I've had a bag of chips or an oversized greasy coffeehouse cookie.

Thus they were made manifest, bagged, and passed to me through an open window and as the day neared noon and 60 degrees -- a full 60 degrees warmer than the previous week -- I thought it ideal for the year's first picnic. I added a plate of sliced apple and a beer. (Beer: It's not just for breakfast anymore!) My in-laws always know when they visit to bring a case of Wisconsin beer, and because they visit twice a year at most and less so this year, I hoard my beers for special occasions, like the first day of 2021 warm enough for porch dining.

Salud! Then I had a nap.

About This Winter

Only dustings of snow. Only brief intermittent frozen rains here, not enough to endanger us (downstate was a different story). It's as if (so far) winter here has hesitated to speak, out of politeness, so as not to interrupt our important activities.

Yesterday I led our "spiritual group" on the topic of raising our vibrations to attract our "perfect mate." We had fun listing the many fine qualities of the him or her just about to arrive, who is looking for someone just like us. I brought unicorn and princess valentines enough for all and wished everyone Happy Valentine's day.

Only one sprinkling of salt has been necessary on the concrete steps this winter. And. . . already the bluebirds are back, very active, and they love to have families in my bluebird box and I can hardly wait. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy day every day. Love is everywhere and spring is gaining momentum.

Please to the Table.

It's a work of yard art that Patrick built and delivered today, the table made of scrap wood abandoned in the garage--now back outdoors where it came from, and under the twin oaks, replacing the old redwood picnic table. I had no idea what the new one would look like and am delighted. Its legs, old 3x3s, are specially and uniquely textured with termite channels (see photo). Patrick and his son installed it on paving slabs that'll settle into the earth after a few rains. It's built so it will be great as a gardening table and for barbecuing, since all I have is a hibachi. Come see it! I'll give you lunch and lemonade. I'll make you espresso, too, if you want. A table is a holy thing.

Prepare a Table

Golly, the prices on nice new redwood picnic tables that come in pieces and are properly drilled so I'd have a cat's chance of assembling them, and on state-park-quality weatherproof synthetic tables I could leave outside 365 (no longer eager to drag them into the garage every autumn); a chintzy plastic table, the only affordable kind, wouldn't last two years in our I-love-you-I-hate-you Missouri weather. But I'd like a table again beneath the twin oaks. I dismantled the old rotted one screw by screw, about two weeks ago.

Thought then to look up plans to build my own. There's a lot of wood in the garage, all sizes and shapes, much of it just fine, like 3 x 3 posts, and big sheets of pine and plywood, and hollow wooden closet doors, and braces, and other pieces I did target practice on, but most of them whole. It's been there unmoved for seven years. I hardly even saw it anymore. I'd need certain kinds of varnish, paint, power tools (with no electricity in the garage; I once refinished a door by flashlight). Demetrius bought the stack of weights in the photo, becoming for the first time in his life a crazed health nut when diagnosed with terminal cancer; he was so human. And he bought all the wood, too, because we were going to have a treehouse, and just because. This would have been my first carpentry project. Never handled a power saw in my life. Changed my mind. (My mind is my power saw.)

It occurred to me I could ask and pay someone to build a sturdy outdoor table using these available materials. So I did. It might get started as soon as next week.

First Picnic of the Year

Humble meal: leftover cabbage curry with yogurt; mandarin orange; bottled water. Awful if I would have had to eat it in the car, but  this checkered weather (one day gray, next day brilliant; typical March) delivered today a wonderful sun-filled 70-degree experience, and into the city park I went, the only picnicker around, and enjoyed my lunch and looked forward to all the picnics of 2015. Okay, I admit I was looking for mushrooms too.

Sole Picnic

On my screened porch, on a brawny picnic table built on the spot because assembled it wouldn't fit through either door, is where I serve most summer meals, but another picnic table, much older, waits patiently in the shade beneath the twin giant oaks, its paint pummeled off by at least 15 years of rain and snow, its joints rotting. About every other year I nail, C-clamp, or wood-screw its raggedy pieces together, hoping it will last one more year as a buffet table or a stand for my cast-iron grill. But this summer I hadn't hosted a buffet nor had I grilled. Patient as ever, the shabby eyesore looked appealingly toward me each day while I refused to consider risking splinters, wasps, or the ticks and chiggers teeming in the taller grass around it, but most of the time it was beneath my notice.

Today was the day, a perfect September day, about 78 degrees, sunny, with cotton-ball clouds in a vivid sky, the grass recently cut; and almost everything is still so intensely green I thought, "The earth is covered with plants."(A marvelous fact.) As I gazed at the decrepit picnic table I suddenly understood it, and loved it, and set my dinner out there: a bowl of jambalaya, a flaxseed wrap, and a beer.

Usually I picnic in the open air away from home, doing it a pleasant number of times during this mild summer, but today I woke again to how amazing it is that I can cross the lane, sit down, picnic in my own Missouri yard right in the mainstream flow of life, "bugged" only by a very small wasp which drowned in the jambalaya.

The planks in the grass are the last surviving pieces of a cold frame Demetrius built in 2002.

Lust for Lunch and Fall Colors

A certain aura surrounds lunch; it is like no other meal, a civilized refreshment in the meat-grinder of the workday, twice so if you can consume it outdoors. I packed a picnic lunch of ham and cheddar on a seeded bun, a dill pickle and a bottle of well water, drove to Babler State Park (2300 acres), had my lunch there and have never had a happier meal. The woods are still green, and that made me happy, but I lusted too after the orange and chocolaty tones suddenly so satisfying at this time of year. On my lustful lunch hour I bushwhacked until I found some. I'm attending courses to learn my Missouri mushrooms but am not set to eat any. I do know one must cook all edible wild mushrooms; never eat them raw. The bright orange mushroom is Cinnabar Polypore (Pycnoporus cinnabarinus); the striped one, fresh Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor). Both are pretty. Neither is edible.

Cops: 0; Me, 1

We got our colorful eastern Missouri autumn, beyond our wildest dreams, and today was its most gorgeous day. So I lunched in a little county park along the Big River, where I have a secret spot for fishing, and was at a picnic table being enriched by the view when up behind me comes a sheriff's deputy, a very handsome one, all in brown (I love a man in uniform) and surprises me when he says, "Maybe you didn't take the time to read the signs at the park entrance when you came in, but glass bottles aren't allowed in the park."

"Oh, I'm sorry," I said. I had half my sandwich and  two-thirds of a bottle of orange juice left. I picked up the bottle to surrender it.

"It's not glass, it's plastic!" I said.

"Sure looks like glass."

"It's plastic. Here, squeeze it," I said to the deputy. He hesitated but he did it.

He said, "Lotta people don't take the time to read the signs at the park entrance that glass bottles aren't allowed in the park." And he turned his attention to the folks on the sandbar, fishing, saying, "Wonder what they're catchin' today."

He wandered off to sit in his patrol car, and after lunch I took a little walk to see if my secret, small and narrow fishing spot down the bank was still there. It was.

Bring Back the Wooden Picnic Table!

At Dickey Bub's a patient man named Lowell looked at the long and rusty 1/4-inch-wide wood screw in my outstretched palm and said, "Sure I'll find it for you," and we walked all the way to the rear of the store, where I had never been, and searched little segmented drawers full of gleaming wood screws, and finally he said there wasn't a correctly sized wood screw with a rounded top but I could use a flat-top and screw it in with pliers. I asked for a matching nut, because I'd seen some screws with nuts in the picnic table, and Lowell did not laugh at me, and gave me matching washers. They're sold by weight. I got four to fix my picnic table. The little bag of wood screws cost me 89 cents. I thought this was marvelous.

This old picnic table predates my living here. There's one that stays protected on my screened porch, but this one has always stayed outdoors getting shabbier, wobblier, wetter, more termite-eaten and pecked at over 10 years, and I tugged it across the lane last year and it nearly fell apart, and in 2011 either I fix it or have no picnic table, or have to buy a horrid new plastic one. Starting out so ignorant I barely knew a wood screw from a sheet-metal screw, I replaced its ancient iron nails with shiny new wood screws, C-clamped its one splitting leg, reinforced its wiggly support beam (is it called a joist?) with one of the big new wood screws, drove some finishing nails in from the top, and it aint a neat job but it's sturdy now and has a future. Ends of its legs are rotted and uneven, and I don't know how to fix that, but it'll hold Midwestern picnic food, and I was smart enough and strong enough to have stored its matching benches in the garage every winter so they're just fine, so y'all come. It's under the twin oaks near the fire bowl now.