Farmer Gene

I grew up on a farm.

Surrounded by farmers.

Autumn was a time of much activity. Corn and beans were picked, with combines and grain trucks running late into the evening. The slightly musty smell of dusty cornstalks and freshly tilled earth filled the air and settled on all the furniture. The grain bin fan was my lullaby.

Consequently, even though my 'farm' consists of four raised beds no larger than 6x8 each, when November rolls around, I have the uncontrollable urge to put up 'crops' and put the farm to bed.

I manage to refrain from the desire to run out and buy a pair of overalls...

Our garden was pretty sad this year. I got a passable crop of lettuce and radishes. I think we managed to find about 8 grape tomatoes. But where Miracle Grow dirt failed at zucchini and peppers, it excelled at carrots.

Weird, toe-shaped carrots.

But no matter their anatomical shape, they remain sweet and crisp.

Which is why I am roasting them for dinner.

I am just not sure how much longer I can open the crisper drawer and see that zipper bag full of orange tarsals.

 Roasted Carrots

as many carrots as will fit on a baking sheet

toss with enough olive oil to coat

sprinkle with salt, pepper and around 1-2 Tbs of fresh, crushed thyme and rosemary

roast at 400 for 20 minutes or until of desired doneness.

Drizzle with balsamic vinegar reduction

I had better luck with my herbs.

If you have never gardened and have the tiniest desire to give it a try, I highly recommend herbs. They are forgiving of most transgressions – failure to water, feed, weed, water... And there is nothing better than adding a fresh picked handful of basil to spaghetti sauce or lording it over a co-worker that you have fresh tarragon on the sauteed mushroom...

I mean adding some freshly picked rosemary to homemade bread.

As it was, I nearly missed getting the last of my basil picked.

Thank you 39 degree day last week.

But the basil stood strong with only a few brown leaves. And once it was picked and cleaned there was just enough for one last batch of pesto. 

 Pesto

1- 2 cups fresh basil

1-3 cloves of garlic

1/4 or so cups of pine nuts

drizzles of olive oil

blend to a paste

Add to pasta sauce, salad dressing, or use as a topping on toast when the hipsters have nabbed all the avocados.

(As you can tell, pesto is not an exact science. But, it tastes wonderful and smells even better. You can keep it in the fridge for around a week or bag it in small zip lock baggies and freeze for later use. Preferable in the dead of winter when the scent of fresh basil makes you forget the fact that you haven't seen the yard flamingo in 3 weeks as its buried under twelve feet of snow.)

Rosemary also outperformed this year. 

Sadly, rosemary does not over-winter on this Coast. I have tried repotting and bringing it inside but I just can't bear to watch as those beautiful fragrant leaves pine for the great wide open and slowly shrivel and die.

This year I cut the plant back to about 6 inches in height, mulched it with half a ton of leaves (leaving only 17.5 tons on the grass to be mulched) and brought the remaining stalks in to dry. Where I can watch it shrivel and turn brown but without the guilt of seeing the entire plant fade to a pitiful twig.

I have only recently arrived at a love of rosemary. But I am making up for lost time. I love adding it to roasted veggies (see carrots above) and homemade breads.

Or if you are short on the homemade bread department, you can add it to softened butter and spread it on whatever bread type product you have.

Plus it just looks so homey hanging in the window. 

I managed to finish up my tiny harvest just in time to watch as the storms began to blow in.

See all those leaves on those trees?

Tomorrow morning they will all be in our back yard.

Even though they are on the neighbor's trees.

Across the street.

And I will enjoy watching Rob push the mulching mower over them as I eat pesto toast for breakfast and prepare to clean all the furniture which is coated with leaf dust.

Its not grain bins and combines, but it will do.

Haunting

The house was quiet, save for the muffled thud of clothes in the dryer. Outside autumn blustered its way in with gusting breezes which sent falling leaves into a frenzied swirl. The kitchen was warm and smelled slightly of pumpkin as soup simmered on the stove.

All in all a pleasant morning.

But the woman was restless. She drank her coffee and glanced cautiously at the phone. It lay on the table in a mocking silence. The minutes passed. The phone remained still. The woman grew nervous, afraid to consider the consequences.

Still the phone refused to ring....

Welcome to my morning.

I am off but on-call.

Every hospital workers' nightmare.

On-call is a mixed bag.

Get called in – it's time and a half. And sometimes a bonus on top.

But

Get called in – and it's no longer a day off.

Do you know how many things I can think to do on my on-call day?

Five. Just off the top of my head.

Get called in and you know how many things get done?

ZERO.

But so far, it is 1050 and that phone remains silent.

I started a load of wash.

I put a pot of soup on.

I messaged our son to stop by for dinner.

Contingent on the silence of the Phone....

Now I am flying in the face of all that is evil and work related and have started a new blog post...

It's nearly Halloween. According to every scary movie I have ever watched, no good can come of this. 

This is NOT my house. Because there is clearly a little girl ghost in that attic window...and I draw the line a little girl ghosts...

Why oh why is it so fun to be scared?

Not real life scared: Will the kids get home safe? Just what will that biopsy show? Which line will our political leaders cross today?

Oh no. I am not talking that sort of scared.

I'm talking that reading a Stephen King book right before bedtime after watching the Walking Dead sort of scared.

Scary movies are on a continuous loop around here in October if I am in charge of the remote.

My husband hates them. Too much shrieking and silliness.

Thankfully my son loves them. Together we watched that poor woman get sucked down the well in The Ring. We discovered that daylight is the best time to watch a bootleg version of Paranormal Activity. And covering your EARS is way better than covering your eyes when watching The Grudge.

(Although it is still possible to scare the beejeezus out of each other by making that ehehehehe sound as you creep down the dark hallway.)

I am fairly certain my first truly scary movie was The Legend of Hell House circa 1973. I would have been 12. I remember sitting in my Grandma's living room, mesmerized by a handsome Roddy McDowell. I have no idea why I was watching this movie in my grandparent's living room. We rarely watched TV at their house and we certainly wouldn't have been allowed to watch something with HELL in the title. I don't know where my siblings were. Or my parents. I do recall it was night time.

The movie was scary and awesome and I have been hooked ever since.

Keep in mind, I am talking scary. Not slashery.

I have no use for torture and murder.

Give me good ghost story any day.

Which makes a lot of sense.

St. Louis has a rich history of hauntings: The Lemp Mansion, The Bissel Mansion, the library at UMSL, Alexian Brothers Hospital... This is just the beginning.

I have had dinner at the Lemp Mansion – the former home of the Lemp family of brewers in the 1800s. Several family members killed themselves in the house, it was rumored that a 'monkey boy' was housed in the attic, a sister was certified insane and there may have been a murder...

The place was creepy from the start. Lights flickered and the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck when I walked into the ladies room. You can stay at the Lemp, IF YOU ARE INSANE!

I worked at Alexian Brothers Hospital for nearly 15 years. The current building sits on the grounds where the original hospital was built and where part of the exorcism in the movie The Exorcist occurred. Several of the brothers who were involved in that event still lived and worked on the grounds. We were told in orientation to NEVER ask about the exorcism. So I didn't. But I can tell you that many evenings, while working in the OR suites with one other nurse, there were mysterious doors slamming and footsteps where there were no people.

We live in a haunted house. Mrs. Durbin passed in our kitchen and she stops by every now and then to open a cupboard door or have a smoke in the basement. No one would support my opinion on this guest until the evening my husband and I both felt the cat walk across the back of the sofa. The cat who was asleep in his box on the opposite side of the room....

This was in the rafters of our basement. Wisely, Rob made it into a tray, coated it with many layers of mod-podge to seal in the evil and then we gave it to our daughter's boyfriend's parents. I think that makes us ecto-plamically related now...

But its okay.

Maybe it's because I have spent most of my life in hospitals where the line between life and death is all to clear.

I have heard that these 'hauntings' are just the energy left over from previous lives. In a weird way I find this comforting. I like the idea that some energy is strong enough to remain behind and touch the future.

Some would argue that not all that strong energy is 'good'. True, there is a lot of bad energy in the world. I want to believe that bad energy burns itself out over time, provided it is not allowed to gain momentum.

Which is all the more reason to put only GOOD energy out there. Embrace that energy from previous lives and roll it into one big monumentous wave.

And think how wonderful it would be to be described as haunting...