Church Fish Fry

The big social event of the Lenten season is the Sacred Heart Church Friday Fish Fry with its parking staff and long lines and heaping plates of really wonderful fried fish made by a cheerful team of handsome Christian gentlemen in a hellishly steaming little shed out near the parking lot. We, the mobs, who come to dinner from 4 to 7 p.m., eat in the Sacred Heart school gym with 300 other people all enjoying the bounty of $8 or $10 (refillable) plates with pasta, slaw and green beans, plus coffee, iced tea or milk. Find a table with malt vinegar and you are set.  Other mobs buy take-out. The dessert table, 20 feet long, displays individually wrapped servings of all kinds of desserts, and if you look hard you might secure a chocolate pecan pie slice as I did last week. Nobody leaves hungry!

A Sound You Don't Hear Anymore

Is This Buck Legal?

How to survive if lost in the woods: Build a fire using your waterproof matches or a cotton ball smeared with Vaseline; fire your gun three times after hunting hours; and hope you left a hunting plan and a stamp of your bootsole on foil beneath your car's window wipers. Stay where you are; find or build a shelter for the night; know that you can live for 14 days without eating but only 3 days without water; and no Missouri stream is clean enough to drink straight up. How to hunt turkeys in season (April and November): Don't wear red, white, blue or black, turkey colors; keep your back against a thick tree or rock; don't make too loud of a turkey call; don't shoot roosting turkeys (it's not fair); aim at their heads; put the turkey that just bought the big casino into a hunter's-orange bag, tucking the wings in so no other turkey hunter imagines it's a live one. . .some of the many tips from Missouri's ten-hour hunter's education course. Free to all students 11 and older thanks to Missouri's one-eighth-of-one-cent sales tax that funds our marvelous state parks, conservation areas, shooting ranges and programs. A husband-and-wife team taught us how a muzzle loader works, how to track game, I.D. six kinds of firearm actions, and the six ways to carry long guns safely on the hunt. Much emphasis on safety. A million Missouri hunters have taken this course, reducing the average number of fatal hunting "incidents" from 20 per year to 4. I passed the 50-question written test, earned the coveted orange patch and now with this credential maybe with my squirty little .410 I can tag along with friends who hunt birds at Marais Temps Clair. I've never hunted. My father did, sometimes. He certainly wouldn't have taken a female along.

My coveted patch, earned 3/22/12

Our first speaker, though, was a young former hunter who accidentally killed his best friend's father--involuntary manslaughter normally avenged by eight years in the pen. He got five years' probation and cannot own a firearm or hunt. The best friend and his family withdrew their friendship, which he understands, he said. As the speaker left the front of the room, one man, with great simple American manly grace stood up, took the young man's hand, and said, "I'm sorry, brother."

Why'd I take this course, mandatory only for hunters born after 1966? Because this is the environment I live in and the people I meet.

The Most Secret Secret Place

1. When I was 10 my mom called from work and told me to cook the steak for dinner. I didn't know how. The heat was too high and I burnt it black. Scared, before Mom got home I took the pan outside and dumped the charred steak - BEHIND THE GARAGE!

Behind the Divine garage

2. Grownups hated it when kids climbed their fences and sneaked through backyards, but we did it anyway. This route down our block began in the bushes BEHIND OUR GARAGE!

3. If my little friends and I wanted to play with matches or plant dollar bills to grow money trees, we went BEHIND THE GARAGE!

4. The previous residents of our house really liked the neighbors who lived in back of us, and had left a gap in the hedge and two flagstone steps leading into the neighbors' backyard. When no grownups were looking, we kids used this as our shortcut to Carter Street! These steps were located ______________.

5. When I grew up, my husband threw what I didn't want inside the garage BEHIND THE GARAGE!

6. In 2002 I rescued pink Missouri granite bricks from the gateposts destroyed when the state widened Highway F. I had no place to put them except BEHIND THE GARAGE and they are still there!

7. To get rid of 2x9 planks full of nails I can't pry out, I drag and dump them BEHIND THE GARAGE!

8. The only place on the property that Dutchman's Breeches (pictured) ever grow is in the woodsy, north-facing incline _______________!

Happy Spring Equinox y'all!

Rarities of Spring - This Week Only!

Temperatures have hit the 80s for most of March so far, making everyone wonder how monstrously hot our summer is going to be, and sparking April flowers weeks ahead of time. But while living in the now, everyone's crazy 'bout the flowers: spring beauties, dutchman's breeches, redbuds, magnolias, daffodils, phlox (always phlox) and wildflowers, like these tiny, tiny four-petaled bluets (Haedyotis caerulea), an annual which forms mats in my south-facing lawn and won't share its space with other wildflowers. And then wild Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) behind the garage, the only place they grow on my whole acreage. Like the bluets, getting about 10 days to express their fullest beauty. Their puffy blooms nod in the light wind. Golly. We must all deserve these things! Wildflowers like a pastry shop for the eyes! And just go to the garden section at K-Mart or Wal-Mart! Or rather, don't, right now. It's mobbed by people hungry for plants, greenery, vegetables, divine beauty, and volunteering huge portions of their lives to grow it. Also called "gardeners."

"Well Begun"

Installed the refinished cabinet door and drawer on Wednesday. I can refinish the other drawers any time but the next project, now that I'm warmed up and skilled, is to refinish a solid-core wooden door whose paint chips show a history of being painted both sea-green and white. For that one I had to ask for help. The landlord's handymen will unhinge the door for me and take it to the garage where I can work on it. It's the bathroom door, so I'm hanging a curtain there for the duration. Curious always to uncover the lost pattern in the wood.

Sweet Sweet Sweet

Spring peepers are tiny frogs that trill and piccolo all night when spring begins. It sounds like they're saying "Sweet, sweet, sweet." Demetrius said they were really saying "Love me, love me." That seemed right.

Aware now, along with my age group, that any spring could be my last, with all my soul I love every bit of it, even this odd 81-degree weather in mid-March. It's causing the neighbors to use their fireplaces and burn up the wood they didn't burn all this warm winter. It caused me to weed about four square feet of earth and plant arugula, a low-maintenance green which thrives when planted early. Three days later there was a little green mention. Two more days and genuine cotyledons (kottle-ee-dons), or baby plants, in their ballet skirts, had appeared. Like an idiot (who's lived alone on big acreage for a long time) I fell to my knees and said, "My sweethearts!"

And last night two barred owls howled and sparred for an hour, so much I thought they were coyotes, so much I stepped outside and said, "Okay, that's enough."