Under a Blue Moon

Since it is Monday morning and we are all longing for Spring I thought I would do a post on….martinis.

Actually it’s more about the pitcher than anything else.   I was putting away a platter at my Dad’s house and I spied the pitcher tucked back in the china cabinet.  This pitcher is the one thing my four sisters and I are going fight over when the time comes.  Well it and the charm bracelet. 

My parents were often asked how they survived having five daughters and my mother would always laughingly say ‘Happy Hour."  People thought she was kidding but I’m not so sure…  She used to prepare a batch of martinis for my dad and put them in the green pitcher and wait for his arrival.  It was a very urbane, 60’s housewife sort of thing to do. 

It was probably just a short-lived phase they went through but all of us remember it so clearly.  And all of us want that pitcher ~ probably as a reminder of a happy time, a happy childhood, happy parents.

I was in a Michigan antique store when I was in my  early 20’s and I had $15 to spend.  I had a lace table runner (I’ve always had a thing for old linens) in my hand and I spied the exact same pitcher sitting on a dusty shelf.  Both items just so happened to be $15.  I am still kicking myself for buying the table runner (which is a fairly common item) instead of the pitcher. 

Every antique store I go into I do so with the giddy hope that I might find another one, sitting on a dusty shelf just waiting for me.

I wish I had an actual photograph of Lily of the Valley to share with you but since I live in a climate that is inhospitable to convallaria majalis (Lily of the Valley sounds so much prettier, don’t you think?) this vintage image will have to suffice.  I do wish I could grow it here in my Zone 9 climate but the one time I tried it was a dismal failure.  My sister in Wisconsin has it popping up like weeds all along her driveway – drives me batty with jealousy.

There are so many plants that I love mainly for the name.  So evocative of a gentler time ~ Four O’Clocks, Forget Me Nots,  Jack in the Pulpit, Queen Anne’s Lace, Foxgloves, Lady’s Mantle.  I can just picture a white picket fence and Canterbury Bells spilling over into the walkway.

When my oldest was in first grade he was rather a trial to his teacher.  There were many parent-teacher conferences where we discussed possible ways to keep him in his seat with his mouth appropriately closed.  At the end of the year he presented her with a gift we put together ~ a pretty pot, a pair of gardening gloves, a nice shiny new trowel and a packet of Forget Me Not seeds.  She took one look at the seeds, laughed a little hysterically, took a sip from the paper bag she kept in the top drawer of her desk and muttered something like "not bloody likely…" under her breath. 

It was a cute gift though.  Forget Me Nots do very well in our climate too.  They can get a little invasive and tend to powdery mildew when it warms up.  But for the name alone I’m willing to put up with these small inconveniences.

I have no idea, by the way, what the name of the plant is above.  I bought it a few years ago and put it in a big pot with a pretty French trellis.  Every year it blooms like mad all Summer and then in the Winter it dies down and I cut it off dirt level and let it start all over again in the Spring.   It probably has a terrible name like beggar’s lice or snotty gobble (actual plant names) so I don’t mind not knowing. 

Can you tell I’m just longing for Spring?  It was so nice here today.  I want to get out there and muck about in the dirt and spend way too much money at the nurseries.  I can’t think of anything more satisfying than a day spent out in the garden, setting everything to rights.  Getting flats of annuals planted, the beds mulched and the roses fed.

For now I’ll just look at the seed catalogs and dream.

I don’t know if anyone else looks at their blogging stats – I try not to be obsessive about it but I do find it rather fascinating to see when I come up during Google searches (you can tell this from your stats).  When people searching on ‘wrapping,’ for instance – I come up.  Or Flor de Fuxico – both subjects of posts I’ve done. 

The oddest, perhaps, is the search on ‘underneath my tongue is blue’ – not sure that I’ve done a post on the underneath side of a tongue but who knows – I do blather on so it’s possible.

The big hitters are full moons, names of the moons, and, of course, blue moons.   They increase around the time of full moons.  It got me thinking what are the names of the moons?  Other than Harvest Moon I don’t know any of the others.  So for those of you searching for the names of the moons here you go (according to the Farmer’s Almanac):

January ~ Wolf Moon
February ~ Snow Moon
March ~ Worm Moon
April ~ Pink Moon
May ~ Flower Moon
June ~ Strawberry Moon
July ~ Buck Moon
August ~ Sturgeon Moon
September ~ Harvest Moon
October ~ Hunter’s Moon
November ~ Beaver Moon
December ~ Cold Moon

I love that April is Pink Moon.  I hadn’t ever heard that before except in Nick Drake’s song Pink Moon which I thought was about a drug related hallucination.  Bit of a segue here but did you know that Nick Drake sold more albums in the month following the release of the Volkswagen commercial featuring that song than he did the previous 30 years.

There is a little bit of uncertainty about the actual meaning of "Blue Moon."  The most commonly accepted explanation is that is the second full moon in a month but there is also the belief it is the fourth full moon in a season.  I’m going by the first explanation and the only blue moon we will have this year will be on May 31st. 

We are going to declare it a holiday here at Under a blue moon. 

(photo courtesy of iStockphoto.com)

In 1969 my mother and father packed up their four youngest daughters, trunk loads of peanut butter and toilet paper and moved to Ankara, Turkey.  My father was on sabbatical and the Middle Eastern Technical University asked him if he would be so kind as to come teach there for a year and he obliged.

It was a very interesting year.  We packed as much into that experience as we did the trunks that come with us.  We lived on the top floor of an apartment building at the top of a hill overlooking the city – that in itself was rather novel (the apartment living) coming from the suburbs of California.

(Ankara, Turkey 1970 ~ Trish, me, Mom)

We could see the tall minarets of the Mosques from our balconies and hear the call to prayer when the city stopped for a few minutes, five times a day.  We were fascinated by the street vendors with their simits on long poles that could be had for a few kurush.  We very carefully avoided the odd, in the floor, toilet in the spare bathroom.

There were many things to get used to – like never ever drinking the water and washing our fruits and vegetables in a bleach solution before eating them (when we returned home we used to puzzle the neighborhood mothers by inquiring if the afternoon snack offering of an apple had been bleached already). 

We got plenty of advice from other ex-pats who had been living there before we arrived.  Passing on tips and tricks to living in such a foreign environment.  How to navigate the Saturday markets (you hire a young Turkish boy to carry your produce in a large basket carried on his back.  He waits for you each and every Saturday – those boys are very territorial about their patrons).  How to negotiate a good price with the butcher, where to find the butcher.   How much to tip the dolmus driver.  Practical advice.

(Ankara, Turkey 1969 ~ Me, Carolyn M., Trish)

The children of these ex-pats had their own wisdom to share with us – child to child.  Although their offerings were more in the form of dire warnings than actual advice.  Like to always always always stand during the pledge of allegiance at the American movie theater or risk getting thrown into a Turkish prison for the rest of your life. 

Another danger we were warned of was to watch for the gypsies.  Legend had it gypsy families would kidnap young American children and cut off their hands and make them beg (I swear I thought ‘alms for the poor’ was ARMS for the poor for the longest time).  I could not imagine a worse fate. 

One evening my youngest sister Trish failed to return home at a reasonable hour.  We tended to stick together for the most part and never really wandered too far from our apartment building.  No one knew where she was and I started to panic.  I ran up and down the stairs of the building, stopping at all the apartments of people we knew and socialized with.  No one had seen her. 

I ran up the street to the apartment of another American family and they hadn’t seen her either.  I ran down the hill to our apartment building calling out her name and ran up the six flights of stairs to our apartment hoping with all my might that she had returned.  Nope.  No Trish.  It was starting to get dark and I was in a full blown panic by this point and informed my parents that she had certainly been kidnapped by the gypsies.  I was sure of it.  I couldn’t understand why they didn’t share my level of concern – in fact, seemed fairly UN-concerned.  I was trying to figure out how I could alert the police myself when Trish walked in the door.   I threw myself on her, sobbing with relief. 

  She grimaced and shrugged me off and said that she had been at the apartment of an elderly Austrian woman downstairs, visiting her two dachshunds.  For crying out loud.  And you know I never heard the end of it – how silly I was to be so worried.

It really was a fabulous experience – all the sisterly angst aside – we saw a culture so totally different than what we were used to – we spent weeks on the road exploring Europe.  At age ten I could argue with a Turkish cab driver IN Turkish when I thought I was being taken advantage of.   I wish I had been brave enough to pack up my children and expose them to a foreign land when they were young.

(Ankara, Turkey 1969 – Trish)

Anyhoo – Happy Birthday Trish – I’m really glad the gypsies didn’t take you.

*Happy Birthday in Turkish

Winter is sneaky here in Northern California ~ we get this false Spring almost every year where it starts to warm up in February.  We start breaking out our sandals and start hanging out at the nurseries wondering when the impatiens will be in.

Then of course we get weeks of cold, wet weather and have to put our pale, pasty feet back into sensible shoes.   Mother Nature can be cruel that way.

Every year I think I’m going to do sweet peas and every year I forget to get them started.  I should have planted seeds late in the Fall but maybe it’s not too late for starting them indoors. 

When my sister Kate and I used to live on the same street I would come home from work during the late Spring and I would find a bouquet of sweet peas on my front porch.  She always remembers to start them but then her gardening work ethic is way better than mine.   She would order carefully thought out colors late in the Summer and had a sweet pea tee-pee in her backyard.

That’s probably the root of my forgetfulness – I probably subconsciously just wait for her to grow them and share them with me.   

There was one awful year when her husband thought the seedlings poking out of the ground were weeds and he whacked them all out.  He might still be sleeping on the couch for that transgression.

I think I need a trellis full of these blooming, don’t you?

iStock photo

Feeling a wee bit under the weather this morning.   Err ~ afternoon I mean.  Drove down to my Dad’s last night and met up with my visiting sister.  Someone may have had more wine than was prudent.  I can’t even muster up the energy to write a proper sentence. 

What is the first rule of blogging?  Have your camera with you at all times.  Where is mine?  Not entirely sure – it isn’t with me, that is for certain.  So instead of showing you the actual empty wine bottles (which would have been embarassing and rather alarming) I’ll just rely on iStockphoto. 

Since my brain is all sloshy right now I think I’ll just share some YouTube videos that I can watch over and over again.

Torvill & Dean – Bolero – anyone remember this performance?  It still gives me goosebumps to see it.  I wish the quality of the recording was better.

Horse Rescue – this is just touching.

Where’s Matt – makes you realize how small the world really is

Juggling – this guy really is amazing

There you have it – a little mindless entertainment for you.  Anyone care to share their favorite YouTubes?