Don't Eat These Beans

The trumpet vine (campsis radicans), also called trumpet creeper or hummingbird vine, is native to Missouri, and its red and orange horn-shaped flowers are lovely, but it's a pest and twines around anywhere it feels like twining, and climbs like ivy, so it's classed as invasive too. The hotter the weather gets, the more they bloom. Hummingbirds like the blossoms so I like them, but today I saw beans like six-inch green beans hanging from them. Some "beans" hung in clusters of three; others were single like this one. I didn't know trumpet vines had seed pods that are a dead ringer for green beans.

Can you cook and eat them like green beans, meaning with mushroom soup and canned french-fried onions? No, they are poisonous.

Water from the Sky

The storm introduced itself with a gust of wind of the kind that snaps trees and sends logs flying through the air. Earth-quaking thunder passed over. The electrical power shorted out at 11 p.m. Soon the violent part of the storm was over. My device's battery ran down and, with nothing else to do in the pitch darkness, I went to to bed wondering what I'd see outside in the morning.

The pump is electric, so the only water was in the pipes and there wasn't much. I had filled pans with water as the storm approached, and had also put in a few gallons' supply, but these bottles past their expiration date tasted chemical, so I used it only for washing. Made a cup of tea. All things, including my life, felt like luxuries. Going outside I saw downed branches but nothing serious; my fragile tomato plants were undamaged. In fact all plants sang with happiness because they'd been rained on. With great curiosity I approached the rain gauge and was amazed and grateful to see a full two and a half inches. So ended the hottest and most dreadful stretch of drought here since the Dust Bowl days.

For a while I tried recharging my device through my car battery to check the electric company's outage map, but soon ran low on gasoline. I couldn't work on the computer so I took a walk and saw a swollen, muddy LaBarque where there had been only a thin nagging trickle. I then swept leaves from my porch, broke down boxes for recycling in the garage, and had my first full day outdoors for many weeks; the storm cooled the air from the 100s to the 90s. As it got too warm I went into town to an air-conditioned hair salon to get a haircut I'd been putting off.

Just as the day was beginning to be not so wonderful, when after 16 hours without electricity I started to think about the spoiling food and useless toilet, the electric power resumed and everything indoors sang too.

Brown Eggs with Value Added, Part Two

He said when the moon is waning and gives light all night, I can expect the tomatoes I'm raising to ripen faster. I believe him. Farmer Bob, whom I met in December and last posted about in early spring, sits beneath a canopy on the roadside every Wednesday and Saturday next to his 1988 Dodge pickup, selling brown eggs and now summer vegetables in the hellish summer heat. He offers customers a seat in the extra chair he sets out for socializing, and almost always when you drive by there's somebody sitting in it, sometimes me. We've had several conversations on life and gardening.

The eggs are great, although he raised their price to $3.50 because of fuel and feed costs. He knows that's high. He said, "The eggs in the store for 99 cents are okay if you want to bake with 'em. Mine are for if you want to eat 'em." He said he eats eggs and bacon every morning and he's been married four times. I told him I'd phoned a witch and asked her to cast a magic spell for me. He said I didn't have to call a witch, that Jesus was always there to help me.

Spider Caucus

It's election day not only here in the human world but among the daddy-long-legs. They are caucusing to nominate candidates for president of my bathroom. The office includes nice perks: water (in these times of severe drought) and a human occupant who doesn't squash them or allow any juveniles to pull off their legs. It's a two-party system divided along color lines; you can see two centrists working hard to create common ground. They are all happy to quit making those dreadful political commercials accusing each other of lying and support for gay marriage and whatnot. The truth is that after the vote and a few martinis these are the gayest spiders I have ever seen.

Daddy-long-legs often gather in groups, what the biologists call "aggregation behavior," and nobody but me knows why. Somebody needs your vote today, so please vote.

Introducing "Piehole Midwest"

It's a Midwestern home-cooking orgy, so if that sounds good to you please see my branch blog, "Piehole Midwest," get on your elastic-waist pants and join in. In Shakespeare's soliloquy "The Seven Ages of Man" the fifth stage is described as a man with a "fair round belly with good capon lin'd, " and some good-cook and big-eatin' friends and I are at that stage now. "Piehole Midwest" (thepieholemidwest.blogspot.com) is blissful photos, recipe try-outs, and remarks about the food that ends up in front of me, and of course like all Midwesterners I eat what's put in front of me. I've also posted hand-picked links to guaranteed enjoyable food and recipe blogs, and I take the best photos I can.

Drama on the Dining-Room Floor

(Not retouched. The flash was 5 inches from the floor.)

Opened the door to the laundry room and saw coiled there a three-inch baby blacksnake. It startled, crawled down a step and snaked away along the dusty dining-room baseboard, where he got caught by the tail in a spider's web and struggled to move forward. Couldn't. The more he thrashed the more he was caught. The spider, who'd been waiting, descended, about to make a meal.

I felt sorry for the snake and snapped the web around it to set him free. Sticky webbing and dust balls were still tangled around his tail, though, hobbling him as he tried to escape. He did all he could to free himself. Here's the 7-second video:

I terrified him trying to remove the dustballs and sticky webbing, but succeeded, and then he curled up for a moment to rest in a safe little pile. By then I had set the camera to "flash" and,as in the photo at the top, saw the reason that the small blacksnakes I meet with in sunlight often look bright silver, not black: reflectivity. Which probably protects them in some way.

Talking reassuringly, I manuevered the snakelet into a container and freed him outside where there was cover so he wouldn't become anybody else's dinner.

Yes, Your Honor

This local vegetable stand is unattended. Choose and weigh and bag and pay for your choices (mostly tomatoes, but sometimes potatoes, squash, or jars of salsa) and nobody (or at least nobody I ever see) watches you open the cash box to make your own change. It's an honor vegetable stand, open every summer for years now, an amazing sight in the year 2012. I like its assumption that most people are honorable and decent and don't cheat and deceive, and I like proving that its assumption is still correct. Fear the karma if you are ever tempted to steal. It's fast and and tailor-made for the transgression. In my salad days I once got $10 too much in change and told myself, "What the heck, it's not like I robbed somebody; I will keep it." Shortly after that someone stole my $10 in quarters, all I had with me, stranding me at the laundromat I'd walked through a snowstorm to get to, and I had to drag heaps of dirty clothes and linens home again. That learned me.