Patsy Pridgen

Every July the entire family—my daughters, their husbands and children, my husband and I—all go to “The Conference.” For three nights and four days, we kick back at the Holiday Inn in Wrightsville Beach. We’re not usually people who stay in a hotel for a beach holiday, so the grandkids love the novelty of it. I love the maid service and restaurant.

My husband and daughters go to morning meetings related to the family business, and the rest of us hang out at the pool, the beach, the halls of the hotel, wherever the action is.

On the last night, the action is on the dance floor. After the final conference dinner, a DJ spins tunes for a couple of hours. A few grownups shuffle around to the occasional beach music song, but for the most part, it’s all about the kids. They aren’t one bit shy about showing off their moves. Or bugging their grandmas to dance with them.

This year Sammy, my ten-year-old grandson, insisted I be his partner for a slow dance. “Why don’t you ask Maddie?” I suggested, nodding at a bubbly little thing who’d been jumping all around to every song played.

“Geez, Grandma, she’s only nine,” he answered. So I danced with him. When I thought about it, I was glad he wanted me to. After all, before long he won’t have any problem dancing with a girl who’s only a year younger, and I’ll be on the sideline, yesterday’s meatloaf.

Maddie got a partner anyway. Charlie.  He’s Sammy’s six-year-old brother and evidently didn’t mind dancing with a girl who was not only older but taller.

Eventually, I got to sit down while Sammy went all disco, “stayin’ alive,” with the new buddies he’d made at the conference. The boys of summer, possibly the next generation for a family business.

As many of you know (I hope), I write a column every week for the Sunday Life Section of the Rocky Mount Telegram.  I’ve just submitted Column #300. How do I know this?

I number my columns when I save them on my flash drive. I’m in year six, with Column #1 dating Sunday, October 14, 2012.

Three hundred ideas for 300 columns. Hope I can think of 300 more.

Now for a different kind of progress report. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”  Well, good and not so good.  My cucumber vines are robust, as usual, but the cucumbers themselves are just a tad bitter this year.  I read up on causes and extremely hot weather can be a reason.  Someone set our state on broil in recent weeks (I got that clever line off Facebook), so I’m guessing that’s why my cukes are a tad off this year.

A less than stellar cucumber crop pales in comparison, though, to what’s happened to my tomatoes this year. Look at these vines.  I know I overcrowded the plants, squeezing four into an area where maybe only two should have gone.  (It’s hard to believe they’ll get this big when they’re seedlings.)  But I don’t understand such wilted, dying vines.  I’m getting a few cherry tomatoes, but I think I can kiss those big Better Boys goodbye.

Now for the good gardening news. My okra plants are thriving.  I’ve never tried growing okra before.  My husband doesn’t like it in any form, stewed or fried, so I haven’t had a real incentive to plant any.  But on a whim this year, I picked up four seedlings.  Glad I did.  I like okra in all its forms.

My squash plants are also coming along, which is a little surprising to me. I planted squash as an afterthought, simply digging an at-the-time wet, muddy hole in the shrub bed and plunking in a couple of hills.

Yesterday, I walked around my backyard and picked several cucumbers, a few cherry tomatoes, and my first okra and squash. Before putting everything in the refrigerator, I arranged a still life of my produce and snapped a picture.

Despite some setbacks, looking at this photo makes me feel like a real backyard gardener.

I’m home from my six-day trip to Minnesota (the reason for no post last week). My husband and I went to Duluth to watch our youngest daughter run in Grandma’s Marathon, and then hung around for a few extra days to check out the sights.

Before I talk about “What I Did on My Vacation in Minnesota,” though, let me brag about my daughter. She signed up for Grandma’s Marathon with the goal of running 26.2 miles in under two hours and 45 minutes.  Doing so would qualify her for the Olympic Marathon Trials in 2020.

She succeeded, clocking in at 2:43:09. Here she is moments after crossing the finish line.

Making the team for the Olympics, she tells me, is a really long shot for her since there’s lots of competition.  But she’s happy and proud that she’s now qualified to try out.  I’m happy and proud too.

After she went home on Sunday, my husband and I left Duluth and drove an hour north to our accommodations for the next two nights, the Cove Point Lodge in Beaver Bay, located on the shores of Lake Superior. This was our base for exploring up and down the North Shore, the 148 miles of scenic highway and quaint villages stretching from Duluth to the Canadian border.

It’s hard to describe how HUGE Lake Superior is. I’m not sure my picture below does it justice either.

Here are some interesting facts:

• It’s the largest of the great lakes: in fact, it’s the largest freshwater lake in the world.
• There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America with water one foot deep.
• There have been about 350 shipwrecks on Lake Superior, and over 10,000 lives have been lost in her waters.

Okay, I realize your eyes may be glazing over, but having seen it, I find Lake Superior to be SUPERIOR!

My trip wasn’t all about gazing at the lake, however. Food is a priority when I travel.  I try to eat something I wouldn’t have at home.  At the Cove Point Lodge, I treated myself to the Scandinavian breakfast one morning.  What you’re looking at below is pickled herring, a cold boiled egg on crisp rye bread, pickled cucumbers, sausage, and cheese.   Delicious…and different.

A place called Betty’s Pies came highly recommended. Here I ordered a piece of Great Lakes Crunch Pie, liking the name as much as the ingredients: rhubarb, apples, strawberries, and raspberries, with a topping of oatmeal and brown sugar.  Oh, and a big dollop of vanilla ice cream on the side.  Maybe the pie wasn’t as much of a regional specialty as my Scandinavian breakfast, but I don’t often let myself have this kind of treat at home.

Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes (including one HUGE one), Grandma’s Marathon, and delicious food.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Africa. Specifically, American Christian ministry in Africa.  A couple from my church, Mickey and Jackie Bailey, founded an orphanage in Zambia several years ago and now have added a school.  They’re asking for donations for books, used or new, for pre-school through seventh grade students.  In English, the language the children are learning in.

Yesterday’s Rocky Mount Telegram featured a story about their mission.  Click here to read about the difference they’re undoubtedly making in the lives of these Zambian children, and consequently, the future of this impoverished country.  http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/News/2018/06/10/Couple-educates-African-kids.html  Wow, just wow.

In July, I’ll attend a writer’s retreat led by author Elaine Neil Orr, who grew up in Nigeria. Her parents were medical missionaries, and—get this—the family remained in Nigeria during its civil war.

I’ve just finished reading one of her books titled A Different Sun, which is a fictional account of a Baptist missionary couple, Emma and Henry Bowman, who set off to minister to the Yoruba people of Africa.  It’s 1853, and the wife is the daughter of a prosperous slave owner.  The husband, twenty years older, is a former Texas Ranger who’s lived a wild and ungodly life before hearing his call to the ministry.

Their hardships in Africa are many, and the story reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.  (If you’ve never read The Poisonwood Bible, get your hands on a copy ASAP.)

Both books explore the culture shock and misunderstandings between the missionaries and those they’ve come to help. And both examine the gradual adaptation of the missionaries as they learn about and adjust to the differences of their new home.

A Different Sun is a totally engrossing read. Elaine Neil Orr has also written Swimming Between Worlds, which I read first and endorsed on my Author Facebook page.

Her third novel, which I plan to order today, is called Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life.  It’s labeled a memoir, so maybe I’ll find out how the author fared during the Nigerian civil war.

I don’t know that anyone noticed, but I missed my self-imposed Monday blog deadline. I’ve been in Charlotte, hanging out with these two cuties.

They’re on vacation between regular school-year preschool and summer preschool. Their mom, my daughter, works from home and needed help keeping busy, busy toddlers safely busy.  My pleasure….

On another note, talk about traffic. Whew!  I came home yesterday, hitting Raleigh around five o’clock.  (I know, bad timing; ever so often I forget to avoid the nightmare of rush hour on the Beltline.)

My usual route, I-540, was shut down to one lane due to a traffic accident, or so the flashing sign on I-40 East said. Rats!  Rush-hour traffic + one less way around Raleigh available = MAJOR TRAFFIC JAM.  We may not have loads of restaurants, theaters, and sports events in Rocky Mount, but we don’t have to contend with ALL THAT TRAFFIC either.

But I’m home now, back East, where my laid-back summer life can resume. I’ve checked on my backyard crops, and the cucumber plants have a few blooms.  The vines haven’t really taken off yet like they do some years, spilling over from the edge of the shrub bed into the adjoining yard. I hope I’m not in for a slim crop this year.  I’ve been looking forward to having cucumbers to share with family and neighbors.

Plus, having a bumper cucumber crop is a point of pride for me. You see, cucumbers and I go way back.  When I was a kid growing up in Edgecombe County, one of my summer jobs was picking cucumbers that were sold for pickling (see last Sunday’s column:  http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/06/03/What-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation.html).

I guess I consider myself something of a cucumber expert since I learned that

• while growing, cucumbers need a lot of water so as not to turn bitter,
• when conditions are right, cucumbers grow very quickly and require constant picking,
• smaller cucumbers fetch more money at the cucumber sorting station than large ones.

Need I go on? I’m sure I can wrack my brain for more cucumber trivia, but let me leave you with a picture of my hill of squash. I’m expanding my shrub bed gardening this year.

I can’t recall ever going to the North Carolina mountains in May. I’ve taken the occasional family summer trip in July or more often, gone in October to check out the stunning fall foliage.

But there have been years when I didn’t get to the mountains at all. It’s a long drive from eastern North Carolina. And I’m more of a beach person.

If you live in Charlotte, though, the mountains are closer than the beach. My middle daughter and her husband, Charlotteans, have bought a vacation home in Beech Mountain, 25 miles on the other side of Boone. She wanted her dad and me to visit Mother’s Day weekend.

It was close to a five-hour drive counting in a rest area stop or two. Well, actually, that was the trip going home.  On the way there, we got as far as Boone and then rewarded ourselves with a big country dinner at the Daniel Boone Inn. We needed fuel for that last 25 miles.  Eating at 5:30 on a Thursday afternoon in May, we just did beat the crowd.  There was a line at the door when we left.  I can’t even imagine how busy the restaurant must be during the peak of tourist season.

Yes, I ate it all.

My daughter’s house sits on a hill—or maybe a small mountain? We had to keep an eye on her boys, ages 4 and 19 months, to be sure they didn’t take a step off the side of the yard and go rolling down.

A steep front yard

It was Mother’s Day weekend and temperatures at home soared into the low 90s. But we enjoyed comfortable upper 70s as we walked along the dirt road in front of the house, stopping to admire gurgling streams. The trees were just beginning to leaf out, being a couple of weeks behind those in the eastern part of the state.

Who doesn’t love a gurgling mountain stream?

There was no air conditioning in the mountain house, but we didn’t miss it. Open windows and ceiling fans kept us cool, even a little chilly at times.

Arriving home on Sunday afternoon, I discovered there was no air conditioning on the second floor of my house in Rocky Mount. Open windows and ceiling fans didn’t work to relieve the stifling upstairs heat.  (Click here to read about my wait for HVAC assistance: http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/05/27/Waiting-for-cool-air-wasn-t-all-bad.html)

I wasn’t in the mountains anymore.

Does anybody sew anymore? I mean make your own clothes kind of sewing.  As in buy fabric and a pattern.  Pick out thread, zipper, buttons (called “notions” in sewing lingo).  Then stitch up a dress or a pair of pants.

I know I don’t. Despite the fact that one of the first big items I remember purchasing as a young married woman was a sewing machine, I never put it to much use outfitting myself or my young daughters.  Oh, I made the occasional item, a skirt here and there.  This one, a toddler size 5, stills hangs in an upstairs closet, though the daughter it was made for is now 36.

Clothes got cheaper over the years with all the made-in-China /Vietnam/Jordan/Mexico imports. And I was a working mom with hardly enough time to cook, let alone sew.  My seamstress projects became limited to specialty items, like the “window treatments” (drapes) I made for my dining room.

Growing up, a couple of my daughters expressed a fleeting interest in sewing. In fact, the last dress I remember making was a joint venture with my youngest daughter. We stitched up the simple sleeveless A-line number from this pattern.  It looked a lot like the one I made in ninth-grade home economics back in 1969.  My daughter liked the dress, wore it, but never wanted to make another.

My grandchildren often ask me to set up my sewing machine. They will cut out and stitch something they can stuff, producing lopsided pillows or vague animal shapes. The boys mostly like pressing the foot pedal to make the machine run.

But maybe my only granddaughter, almost thirteen, will turn out to be a sewer who sticks to it.  School will soon be out, and she’ll need some projects.  Perhaps she’d like to make a classic A-line dress.  I already have the pattern.

To read more about my thoughts on home sewing, click here   http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/05/06/Sewing-seems-unlikely-today.html

If my mother had ever heard the words “garden therapy,” she would’ve rolled her eyes. “Garden” to her meant that field of vegetables planted behind the backyard of our out-in-the-country home. Long rows of corn, butterbeans, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, squash, okra, and potatoes.

There wasn’t anything therapeutic in planting, picking, and preserving all that produce. It was a job that lasted all summer.

Fast forward to me. I don’t can or freeze vegetables, but I do enjoy planting a few hills of cucumbers along with a couple of bell pepper and tomato plants. By the time I buy the seedlings and amend the soil with bags of Black Kow manure I get from Lowe’s, I spend more money producing these vegetables than I would pay for them at the farmer’s market.

But that’s not the point. I enjoy growing stuff. In small amounts so that gardening doesn’t get to be work.

I’ve planted my cucumber seedlings at the edge of my backyard shrubs as I have for the last few years. I’ll have to post another picture later in the summer to show how much they’ve grown. If all goes well.

I repeat, if all goes well. The biggest problem I have with trying to garden at my suburban home isn’t drought or diseases. It’s animals. Deer, rabbits, and squirrels, to be exact. I’ve learned to plant everything in my fenced-in backyard, which at least keeps out the deer.

But rabbits and squirrels easily slip in. So this year, I’ve beefed up security. My youngest daughter gave me her cast-off raised garden beds and around them I’ve added a tight wire-mesh fence (thank you, husband for nailing it to the boards). I’m thinking it will take a Superman rabbit or a really starving squirrel to jump this fence.

Garden therapy isn’t so therapeutic when critters get to your plants.

To read more about my gardening (plants and flowers), click here: http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/04/29/Planting-Can-Be-Therapeutic.html

Yesterday was May 1, May Day if you’re old enough to remember when schoolchildren used to dance around maypoles. I celebrated by setting out my first summer flowers.  It’s been a cold spring, and I turned down a sister outing to the nursery a week or so ago, thinking I wasn’t quite ready to spring into summer annuals.

But turning the calendar page to May combined with temperatures in the low 80s this week got me in the mood to plant. I finally felt the need for garden therapy.

I love digging in the dirt. I guess it’s just the old country girl in me, but there’s something restorative about putting in a bed of flowers.  Communing with nature, I forget the minor irritations of life.

This week’s garden therapy began with a trip to Allen’s Nursery. I felt like a kid in a candy store as I surveyed all the types of flowers, rows upon rows of colorful options. I was almost giddy and momentarily forgot what I’d come to buy, a flat of my tried and true begonias.

Which kind do I always plant? For some reason, the begonias sold at Allen’s all have alcohol names: Whiskey, Gin, Vodka, Brandy, Rum.  Last year’s cocktail was a red variety, and none of the selections this year seemed to be quite the one.  I finally picked a bright pink named Brandy.

Back home, my husband volunteered to rototill my begonia bed. He’s not into garden therapy like I am but will do small jobs that require power equipment.  I spaced, dug holes, planted, and rearranged the pine straw.  These baby begonias have a lot of growing to do to catch up with crops from previous years.

I did yield to one impulse buy at the nursery. Pink petunias were calling me. I had temporary amnesia about my past struggles with keeping this flower alive and healthy.  Garden therapy is counterproductive when plants die.  But it’s May and hope springs eternal during planting season.

I’ll talk about my vegetable gardening in the next blog, Part 2 of Garden Therapy.

Who doesn’t love a hummingbird? I’ve put out my feeder and already spotted a couple of early birds (pun intended)!  My husband took the picture to the left through a window, which is why the photo’s a little fuzzy.  He was afraid if he opened the back door, this little birdie would fly away.  (Look closely to find the hummer!)

Though our guest was not a very colorful member of the hummingbird family, I was excited to see a market for my leftover bottle of  nectar.

  No, I don’t mix my own.

Last year when my backyard hostas bloomed, they were also a draw for hummingbirds. If foliage is any indication of flowers to come, it looks like another good year for hummingbirds to hover over my hostas.

Did you know the average hummingbird weighs only one-eighth to seven-tenths of an ounce? That’s the weight of one to eight pennies.  They aren’t tiny because they don’t eat, however.  Hummingbirds feed constantly, about 5-10 times per hour for 30-60 seconds each time.

In fact, they eat their weight in nectar or sugar water each day. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could eat our weight in sweets each day and be as small as a hummingbird?  Then again, maybe not such a good idea.  The thought of consuming that many doughnuts is a little sickening.

The above hummingbird info came from a quick google search, but I also heard a speaker at my garden club recently whose topic was titled “Those Amazing Hummers.” One aspect of the hummingbird she talked about that I found interesting involved raising their babies.

It seems male hummingbirds are playboys whose goal in life is to see how many lady hummingbirds they can impregnate. These cads don’t stay around to help with the young, but leave the mama hummingbird to do all the baby bird work.

But, our speaker said, the male hummingbird usually lives only three years while the female averages five.  Somehow I find that fact strangely satisfying.

Got any hummingbird pictures you’d like to share on this blog? Send them to me at patsy.pridgen@gmail.com, and I’ll post.