Tag Archives: Texas

Come on in, the Water’s Fine!

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Since rain has been scarce here in the last year, today is a day for being happy to see ‘too much’ of it–it’s pouring out here. Texas style. And what, pray tell, is Texas style? If you haven’t already heard, Texans pride themselves on everything they have or do being big, bigger, biggest, and the weather is no exception: when it’s hot and dry, let’s just git on out there and set all time records, like last year’s string of almost unbroken triple-digit temperatures that exceeded all previous years’ totals. That, of course, is hard to maintain with an accompaniment of rain, so the skies simply curled up into an impenetrable ball like a li’l ol’ armadillo and gave up nary a drop of water until the whole state finally retreated into official drought. Our county was the last to comply, being somewhat feisty and all, but we finally dried up too like last year’s roses.

So today’s pelting, while it won’t miraculously restore the lake levels and revive the dead trees, goes a long way toward soothing shriveled spirits. It will, of course, drown some of the poor little sprouts that fought their way to life after the heat relented, and that’s just the way things go in a land of thorny mesquites and tough hombres. So far we haven’t had to build an ark, and that’s a pretty good tradeoff as these Texas-sized weather happenings go. So today I’ll leave you with a little photo-essay and a link to a bit of YouTube rainy-day fun I posted last year, with a little help from my good friends Joe and Eddie.

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The view from the kitchen is decidedly watery today! Hurray!

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No worries about whether the little seed tray I prepped yesterday (sitting on the farther chair) will get watered . . .

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Maybe I should consider installing a koi pond at the foot of the patio steps . . . "Just Add Fish" . . .

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*Now* do you know what I mean by "eavesdropping"? Doesn't really matter if the gutters are clean or not; when it rains around here, they can't keep up with the rivers coming off the roof, so we just have Instant Water Features all 'round the perimeter of the house . . .

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. . . and who doesn't like the soothing sound of a lovely waterfall?

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From the shelter of the front porch, there are new "waterfront" views of ponds, rivers, small lakes and more cataracts showering off the roof . . .

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I suppose the Texas Sage babies I picked up at the nursery yesterday won't drown, at least, because I hadn't set them in the ground yet, so they're still safely raised up in their pots for now . . .

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. . . the little coreopsis I'd nursed through the winter indoors, however, is tucked in and now inundated. We'll see how that fares, never mind the rainbow chard sprouts (microcsopic green specks in the upper right of the photo)--I hope they turn out to be aquatic plants!

So this is how it goes here. Dry as a bone for months on end, and then an outpouring so generous that it might well cause new mutations of several plant species into amphibious forms in one fell swoop. I hadn’t realized we were moving to drought-and-monsoon country, but here we are. The slope of our property has definite ideas about where the water should go, and ultimately it does head for the little rivulet in the ravine behind the backyard, but in the meantime, I do think that directing the flow a bit on our actual lot will go a long way toward making the yard happier, if I can do it right. I was considering a moat around the house, since that’s the level spot where the water from up on the road naturally settles before wandering down-slope again, but I’m afraid the alligators I kept in there would eat too many of the neighborhood pets–or the neighbors–and that just wouldn’t be very sociable of me I suppose.

So I suspect a wiser thing might be to terrace a bit, put in some raised beds, and amend the living daylights out of the impermeable, gluey clay earth here, for starters. In the meantime, I’ll just say that it’s a good sump test for the property to tell me where the natural flow patterns and self-designed ponds like to go and see where it all leads. Good thing I got me some nice, tall, silly polka-dotted, ultra-waterproof gumboots. ‘Cause it’s rainin’ like nobody’s bidness out they-ah.

Into Each Life a Little Rain *Should* Fall

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The spring rains near where I spent much of my youth watered many a tulip or daffodil right along with me . . .

I come from waterlogged stock, I suppose. Born and bred in western Washington, where it is rumored that children are born with webbed feet and mildew is every basement’s middle name, I grew up accustomed to the proprietary blend of intense green and hazy grey that is the trademark of the region, a badge of honor of its own kind. The Evergreen State was not called that for nothing and earned the moniker by the bucketful; as a child, I may have feared that the immensity of the rain’s reach might require us all to develop gills, especially if Mount Rainier also decided her geologic pregnancy was complete and blew off the entire west coast into the ocean. There were times when, of course, I doubted the mountain‘s very existence because it had disappeared behind a rain-cloud bank so persistent that we hadn’t seen that glorious white diadem on the state’s brow in ages, but eventually a good shaker or at least a seismic cough would confirm that behind the cumulonimbus wall somewhere lay the spectacle of the mountain in wait for the return of drier skies.

Don’t mistake, as much of the Outside World has done, that this is indeed the whole Northwest experience. Children, perhaps, would contend that there is nothing but rain their entire lives, but I know from a much longer stretch of years, not to mention a gradually shifting climate over the last number of decades that has seen a skew toward somewhat later seasonal changes all ’round and definitely a degree-or-two of push in the direction of both the warm and cold extremes (among other things): the northwest is gorgeous, The Mountain does grace us with its presence pretty often, and the sun DOES shine. With true shimmering spectacle, in exaggeratedly cerulean skies. Sometimes whip-creamed with piles of white landscape-painterly clouds and sometimes just in that fabulous bowl of uninterrupted enameled sky inviting eagles to slide across it if they dare.

As a transplant in Texas, I’m learning a whole new vocabulary of extremes when it comes to things meteorological and geological. I spent a couple of brief, mountain-less years living near Chicago in my youth and had made enough family road trips to know a bit about how much terrain and weather could vary even over short distances. Moving to Texas, even north Texas, proved something of a paradigm shift in that regard, especially as we arrived seemingly on the cusp of some rather spectacular worldwide change when it comes to things weather-related. So it was an intriguing and, well, oven-crisped adventure to face a summer where our county officially slipped into drought right on the heels of all the other counties in the state, most of them throughout the region as well. My roots, accustomed to their abundant if not excessive access to cool clean water, began to protest. The arrival of the first low enough temperatures, accompanied by the first blessed misting of rain, well into October, and the appearance then of early summer blooms as though they thought it was just hitting mid-May seemed slightly ludicrous but nonetheless as welcome as a long-awaited prison pardon.

Today the temperature dropped, thanks to a sudden “cold front”–sorry, I just had to put it in quotes when it referred to 12C/52F degrees at the end of October; that’s the Northwest in me talking. Since we had had pretty solidly insistent summer temperatures until yesterday, this seems like rather high drama! It’s a firm reminder, if we really needed one, of our being composed of such a high percentage of H2O ourselves and having not just an inborn affinity then but a core-deep need for water, water everywhere. The problem is distribution. There’s so often too much of it in one part of the world and too little in another. Balance, by planetary measure, is not the same thing as our sense of balance as tiny little individuals and groups upon that planet, so we’re almost always wishing, wherever we are, that Ma Nature would set up a much fairer sharing system. Least she could do is let one of us kids divvy up the water and the others choose which glasses to grab for our shares.

That’s what makes it seem like such a benison when the floodwaters recede, the monsoon season ends or the hurricane relents and dissipates. When the parched clay gets a sip of rain, the stream-bed feels that first trickling, slaking return, and the blurry looking cloud that’s been hovering just a hair too far off by the horizon finally acquiesces, rolling in with its bellyful of soothing eau-de-vie. Today we’ve had a bit of rain again at last, and the grey lid over the oaks looks promisingly like the skies I knew in my “northwet” youth, and I am comforted by it all. Sun fills me with hope much of the time, I’m moved by the legendary promises of rainbows whenever they bend across my view, but when it’s been long enough between squalls and spritzers for me to miss them so, nothing is more beautiful than the dirty mashup of colliding clouds as they commence spitting their payload of rain on house and garden and me, umbrella or no umbrella. Let it rain!

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When I am thirsty, let it rain . . .

Foodie Tuesday: Everything in Due Season, If You Happen to Have That Sort of Thing

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Don't you just love autumn, with its colors toasted by the long summer sun, its air wafting with spice and earth . . .

I am very fond of autumn, at least what I think of as autumn. It signals the waning of the full ripening cycle of living and fruiting things on the earth, an anticipatory time when wind should be sweeping out old leaves and old habits and letting in the last cracked-open windows and doors an air of things to come. I’m having a little trouble getting my personal clock synchronized to believe it’s autumn right now, though. Sliding ever so gradually out of a blast-furnace summer so that temperatures in the middle of the night are still too warm for a coat and the roses and cosmos decide they can finally get into bloom–in October–contradicts my sense of logic when juxtaposed with being back in the school-and-concert season. And don’t get me started on the two-week “winter” thing!

I don’t dislike the virtually perpetual bathing in sunlight, no, you’re never going to hear a serious complaint from a SAD-sack like me about too much light, but I find the whole thing just a little confusing. I didn’t come from a land of perfectly defined, archetypal seasons, either, but there was a certain rhythm and temperature change that even in the temperate northwest tended to make me think seasonal thoughts with relative ease. So I could really get behind the whole logic of eating seasonally as well as locally. Up to a point. See, out there I had, admittedly, an overabundance of a whole range of foods available fresh and nearby for a bigger chunk of the calendar year than those living in more truly distinct seasonal climates could have. I might have to trade out one fish or vegetable for another, even one fruit for another, from month to month, but having a truckload of choices at all times spoils one for having to think very hard.

Here in Texas it seems there’s an even finer line between when you can and can’t get foods at their peak. So if I’m not getting clues from the outside temperature or the scent of the air, I’m having to rely more heavily on more artificial indicators of What It’s Time to Do, culinarily speaking. Frankly, it’s still picnic-and-popsicle weather around here when we’re practically hitting Midterms and the first big flurry of constant recitals and concerts of the year, and I feel, well, a little weird wearing sandals and short sleeves to attend those things. I’m almost grateful that most indoor events tend to be overenthusiastic with the air blowers so that the air conditioning requires my bundling up indoors, at least, even if I can’t do so outdoors yet.

Meanwhile, all of the food writers I love and all of the sitcoms and stores and advertisers are conspiring to tell me it’s long since time for pumpkins and braised lamb shanks and don’t forget, Talking Turkey, because as well all know, Thanksgiving has already happened in Canada and that means it’s headed our way! I just can’t quite reconcile the whole thing. It’s not that I don’t find pretty much everything not nailed down quite delicious regardless of time of day, month, or year if it’s available–sometimes it’s all about whether it seems right.

So I leaned ever so slightly off the summer chuckwagon when I made lunch the other day, because even if the weather refuses to cooperate with my sense of seasonal propriety, I’m darned well going to have a touch of autumn. I don’t suppose, when it comes right down to brass tacks, that there are limits to what tastes good at any given time, so if I can lay hands on it and it’s not so artificially shelf-stabilized as to have the half-life of radium, I guess I need to just make my own seasons here.

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Duck breast with wine sauce, carrot chips and bok choy

I kept the preparation simple both because it’s my M.O. and because anything more demanding would’ve taken enough time to kill off my urge for something a tad autumnal, as I’d break a very unladylike sweat in these temperatures if I got the least bit hyperactive in the kitchen. Duck breast sous vide is, I must say, a dandy and handy fix. I figured if the maximum time recommended for medium-rare duck breast s-v was about eight hours, the same temperature for a lot longer could bring it to the edge of confit, and so it was. All that remained by the time I’d put together a dish of quick steamed bok choy in light ginger-lime-soy-sesame dressing and reduced a handful of blackberries, a cup of Merlot and a knob of butter to a syrup and strained it and sweetened it up with a spoonful of Texas red plum jam was to sear the duck skin and plate it all up. As usual I took an exceedingly casual approach to the latter action (as you can see above), which was just as well because those pieces of duck hadn’t a hope of staying in neat perky little slices by the time they’d been virtually melted. In that condition, they would in fact make pretty fabulous tender shredded duck tacos, the direction I suspect I’ll take next time I lay hands on el pato fantástico. If it looks like a taco and quacks like a taco . . . .

So at last I’ve started edging my way toward eating something that at least sounds more autumnal to me than all of the stuff I’ve felt right eating up to now. Perhaps feeding my sense of the season by the forkful will have a better chance of getting me in an autumn frame of mind than what the relentlessly summery weather has managed to do so far. Otherwise, I’ll wait too long and it’ll be winter I’m having to invent, so I’d best get moving on this or I’ll hardly have myself ready for all of the necessary delights awaiting me.

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All seasons have their gifts . . .

Leading Me down the Primrose Path

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Amid the fragile glories of a garden . . .

I am as gullible and easily ensnared as they come. When the weather is just perfect (however that may be defined by me on the day) and the blooms begin to go off like temperate fireworks and all of the insects are humming benignly in delight, I am easily convinced that the garden is the only place on earth to be.

It’s not that I’m quite in the league of those master gardeners and other addicts that find true solace in being elbow-deep in dirt, for everyone who’s not been nodding off like Rip Van Winkle knows I rarely get the urge to work that hard, and gardening can be truly heavy labor. But the smell of deep loam mixed with mouldering pine or fir needles and crisp fallen leaves, blended expertly by Ma Nature with top notes of any sort of sweet flora, and perhaps just a splash of wet pavement to finish–this is the perfume of a kind of happiness found nowhere but in a garden and in the heart of a garden-lover.

The lovely rustle of leaves, the metallic buzz of a sonorous cicada, perhaps the musical flow of water over stone, this is the soundtrack of contentment. Birds can sing to it with ease, and their choruses may interweave with a depth and beauty seldom heard in the most sophisticated counterpoint and polyphony devised by human composers. Even the neighborhood dogs and cats seem inclined to dance when passing by in these marvelous moments of song. A far distant lawnmower’s roar is softened by the miles to a point where it almost has the same romance as the sound of the passing train.

Every one of the gorgeous growing things is lovely in its own peculiar way as well. Grasses stretched to bristling brushy heights in wild bursts of growth may be just brown to those not tutored in a garden’s joys, but on a close inspection can reveal a magical array of brown and yellow, ruddy, rusty, tan and bronze, and silver and gold tones in every shade. Leaves and blooms in colors ignored by all but the most discerning eyes in a rainbow’s arc are suddenly broadcast with prodigality in all the craziness and grace a garden’s bed can possibly begin to hold. Somehow even the spots that might look bare at first hide secret gifts if one has patience just to take a closer look and see what moves among the bits of soil, the scattered rocks, to lean in far enough to find that velvet dust left by a butterfly, the drifted petals of a rose. I am enchanted, too, by the silky feel of a the bold tissue-paper blooms of a tree peony or the rough warmth of a sun-baked cedar trunk, by the taste of the honeyed air when I breathe in the sweet perfections of a summer afternoon.

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There is beauty enough for all the senses . . .

Here in Texas it has been a fairly brutal summer for such things to thrive. Only the profligate expenditure of water where there has been none could possibly allow for garden prettiness of such a delicate sort to live and grow. Other than trying to help our venerable oaks and full-sized Bradford pears survive with dignity intact, I’ve not been generous with water, knowing that there are more urgent uses for it at the moment than for personal pleasure’s sake. I have been working all the while to devise an appropriate native-planting-x-xeriscape new landscape plan with which to revise our yard for the long term–when we can afford to do it. I’m building a rather nice new scheme for it, I think!

Meanwhile, there came a little rain. In the last few days there’s been a little respite from the drought. It hasn’t ended the drought, of course, nor anywhere near undone the damage that’s been wrought. The dire dryness will likely continue for some time, and we know that droughts, historically, have shown the power to last for decades in a place, but for this little point in time it’s heavenly to get a sip.

So even though I know this hint of watering is likely only to lead me down some primrose path if I believe it means it’s garden time for real, I still give in. I’ll acquiesce to the false sense of springlike play this water brings and go, I’m sure, to the garden once again, only to be chased back by another wave of heat. But for this little time I cannot lie: the roses tentatively opening after a splash of rain make me want to believe in them, make me want to head out to the yard. There’s life in the old lady yet.

Sometimes Tears of Joy, Sometimes Tears of Relief

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It rained.

We’ve been waiting for it a rather long time. No shocking records set here: there have indeed been worse droughts in history, not just in the fabled devastation of those parts of the world we in the United States tend to think of ever after as expanses of desert and the lost worlds of the permanently starved and impoverished, but even in the annals of the region here, where there have been longer and more immediately cruel periods of dry-roasting. Endless iterations of “hot enough for ya?” aside, there are certainly serious consequences already being seen and felt from the current drought: the desiccated crops, the herds being thinned or entirely liquidated, and yes, farms and ranches closing. So many aspects of the damage will only be seen and felt over a very long stretch to follow.

Now, it has rained.

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Desert. Dessert.

It hasn’t rained a whole lot. There’s nothing “cured” in a true drought by a couple of sparkling, sprinkly moments of respite. Much remains to be salved and salvaged and, hopefully, soaked–but not too much, I beg you. An excess of water is so clearly as dangerous and terrible as being horrifically parched, and following the remaking of the region into a vast basin of concrete, there’s plenty of danger that whatever rain does come will be unable to find a safe way into its intended locales.

But still, there’s that welcome urge to join the sky in a little cathartic crying when the unwilling skies finally relent and shower a little love on us. I am ever so glad and grateful that our Gaia, our lovely Mother Nature, has seen fit to grant us this kindness and am ever hopeful of still more. Call me a cry-eyed optimist.

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Rain, love, hope . . .

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Be ever with us!

Insect Asides

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Sitting here listening to the cicadas‘ serenade, I am reminded that one of the pleasures of having relocated to Texas is the variety of new flora, fauna and experiences I get to enjoy. I’ve long been an admirer of insects, both factual and fictional, for their wild-yet-practical construction, exquisite colors and textures, remarkable sounds and skills and most especially, for their very different-ness from us two-legs.

The series below was reverse-painted on some old windows when I was in one of my phases of such fascination.

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L-R: Balancing Act; Hello, Earthlings!; Let Us Prey

As we’re fortunate to have bought a house that backs on a modest greenbelt ‘ravine’ that can’t be built, I’m hopeful I’ll continue to meet new local denizens on a regular basis. So far, there have been visitations from numerous small lizards and frogs and snakes, a ‘writin’ spider’, a plethora of insects–many on a larger scale than I’ve previously known–a possum or two, raccoons that (to date) have only shown their glowing eyes as we pull into the driveway. There are birds galore, from hummingbirds to grackles, mockingbirds and killdeers and scissor-tailed flycatchers and cardinals and waxwings and-and-and . . . . The wild rabbits have made occasional appearances. Some neighbor is reputed to have been nervous about her kitty-cat and ‘turned in’ the otherwise beloved local foxes to the animal-control police, so we’ve little hope of ever enjoying them. I’ve heard tales of coyotes and wild turkeys and deer and other assorted visitors in nearby neighborhoods, but don’t know if or when they’ll visit the ravine or our yard.

The visitor I’d most like to see is one I’ve only yet heard and, once in the snow, seen footprints bearing witness to on our property: a bobcat. I’ve only seen armadillos yet in their, um, postmortem state alongside the roads, so maybe I’m a bit behindhand in converting to true Texanism, but hey, I’m working on it.

It’s Hotter’n Holy Habañeros

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Finn's grasshopper

Only the truly fabulous can look good when it's 104ºF in the shade

I generally try to keep a moderately cheery demeanor. Even on days when I’m forced to get up before, say, 10:30 a.m. or when the taxes haven’t been completely totted up and yet the single malt seems to have run out already. But when the thermometer sneers at me menacingly and I open the door to a whack of devil’s-breath heat, that’s it, I’m fried. The only saving grace is when I can retreat to the AC with unladylike speed and lounge around vegetating until my respiratory system and my hide recover and my bifocals turn back from the instant Spy-vs-Spy black they dive into as soon as the relentless rays stab at ’em. I’m grateful for the latter, mind you, as opposed to ocular cauterization, but there is a much greater lag on the return to clear-lens visibility, so why not just lie down until the emergency passes anyway? Perhaps it’s a natural consequence of sliding toward geezerhood, like so many other talents and skills I’ve been developing.

I’m trying to develop a metaphorical exoskeleton, to fend off the stuff that, like high external temperatures, is relatively escapable and inconsequential. So far I haven’t found the technique for making myself completely impervious to external woes, let alone those generated within, from personal crochets and peccadilloes–or are the latter, now that I live in Texas, armadillos?–to hot flashes. But I still fancy the idea that it should be possible to get past, through, and over the junk with which the rest of the galaxy opts to bombard me. A girl can dream . . . .

Tetched by Texas

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As a Seattle native, moving to Texas two years ago was far less culture shock than I expected. Yes, it’s decidedly a new planet, but hey–it’s a friendly one, dadgummit. We’re in a university town, so it’s got great used bookstores and welcoming watering-holes and a hint of Bohemia around the edges, and while the new terrain is ocean-free here in the north part of the state and the closest I’ll get to mountain hiking nearby will be if I sneak up a water tower to survey the rolling flats, it’s countryside with its own kind of beauty.

Still, having family and friends visit us here is a fine excuse to explore a little of the legendary Texas and larn me some wild-west history along the way. Naturally, I find I’m inclined to play with the yarns of yore in my imagery as well, so I shall present you with a glimpse of the same herewith.

Trick roper & longhorn

Lassoed by the Lone Star