Rolling Plains Journal

OVERTURE! CURTAIN! LIGHTS!

2012-01-27T14:53:00.000-06:00

I owe Mrs. Miller one pair of shorts. She let me talk her out of them, and all I can add is, Thank the Lord for small favors!

They are..were...a yellow, girlie, summery pair of shorts she made some years back, and neither one of us can recall the last time she wore them. So she gave them up for the sake of the arts here in River City. The show is The Fantasticks, opening tonight, 8pm, for the paying people on the Dinner Stage down at Backdoor.

And a HUGE THANK YOU to all who came out last night for our Press Release, Friends & Family opening. That first time in front of a breathing audience really points out the sweet and sour spots! Like in the second act when Socrates and Lodevigo manhandle Matt off stage while lustily singing a quick homage to West Side Story. Helluva place for a laugh break!

This is my fourth show at Backdoor? The first, I believe, that Mrs. Miller hasn't been up in the tech booth to run lights and sound. She's always been so good at lighting me up! Last night she got to see the show for the first time like any regular person, and I think she got a kick out of it. I know I did, but I surely miss not having her on my crew!

Fantasticks will run for a couple more weekends, at least, so get your reservations in now to see what became of AnniePie's britches!!

Save your work!

2012-01-20T12:52:00.000-06:00

Save your work, Children. Save your work!

We just dumped nearly a page of monologue and stage directions for our entrance into The Fantasticks... right after the Fathers’ It Depends On What You Pay number.

Six days out from final Press Rehearsal, and I’m still stumbling over lines.

So, I thought, write out the entire scene, complete with lines, stage movements and timing in as much detail, and in as few words as possible. The exercise helps me set my scenes internally, like dropping into extreme slow motion ...

Anyway, I was a good half page or better into it when my steam-powered laptop burped and swallowed it all! What untold labors are farted off by old men because old machines ate their homework?

We will have the lines AND the blocking AND the timing down pat come 8 pm Friday, Jan. 27 when we open the show at Backdoor Theatre’s Dinner Stage. Come see us!

Save your work, Children! Early and often!

The Age of Dinosaurs Has Expired!

President of these United States, Barack Obama yesterday thumbed his nose at Big Oil on the Keystone XL deal.

You may recall the other day one of Big Oil’s biggest talking suits told President Obama that if he rejected the pipeline permit, there would be hell to pay politically; that the full shock and awe of Big Oil Bucks would be targeted against the President’s re-election.

Good Lord knows I’m no fan of Corporate Greed in general nor Big Oil in particular, but I am a huge fan of a President who stands up to the neighborhood bullies.

Paula Deen! Paula Deen! Paula DEEN!!!

ROAD-READY, TAGGED & STICKERED! 1995 Chevrolet Corsica, Asking $600. If interested, leave your contact info in the "Comments" box.

[Vehicle pictured is NOT the car offered]

Journey well, Miss James!

2012-01-20T11:05:00.000-06:00

1-202-456-1111

2012-01-19T12:56:00.000-06:00

That's the telephone number to leave a comment at the White House on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, D.C. Somehow, it never dawned on me before today that I could call the President of the United States to tell him what's on my mind. Now, I carry his phone number in my cell phone's contacts list.

If you follow my Facebook page, you may have noticed yesterday that I publicly thanked President Obama for rejecting the permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the heartland of America. I did not merely agree with his decision, I stood up and cheered (1) for him doing the right thing for Americans and (2) for telling Big Oil to shove their political threats up their pipelines!

In the clear light of a new day...today...that somehow did not seem like enough, especially when you consider how much flak he is going to catch. So it seemed appropriate to look up the White House number and personally call to thank the President for his decision.

All things considered, I was surprised to be on hold for a mere 20 minutes or so...time enough to write up this posting and go to the White House website to fire off an email. The volunteer who took my call was very friendly, graciously taking down my 'Thank You' for action to stop Keystone XL.

"Let me be sure I've got this correctly," she said, soft laughter in her grandmotherly voice. "You want to thank him FOR rejecting the pipeline permit, right?"

I confirmed, laughing with her.

"Just wanted to be sure I got that in the appropriate column!" she added.

No doubt that other column is somewhat longer. So do me a favor, would you? If you, too, applaud the President for rejecting Keystone XL, call him up and say so!!

Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a night in the woods!

2012-01-15T12:54:00.000-06:00

The Vegas trip is off; seems straight gran’mas get audiences with Princess Maura J well ahead of mere Great Grandpas.... A new staging—by God Himself, rumor has it--of the old Fantasticks! opens two weeks from tonight at the Backdoor. I’ve got the Old Actor role and get to beat on Jesus.... The Big River City Home Show closes out February.... The Drafty Olde Craft Shoppe’s (DOCS) show pieces are too many hours short of being ready; and I’ve scarcely begun stripping Maura’s Cradle.... Then this old man trips up, taking out TV cable and internet connection in one fell swoop. Had to survive on FB with only a cell phone mere days before this post's deadline!

Children, this old man needs an extended weekender to hook up with his Higher Power! We are scheming for Caprock Canyons but could make do with Arrowhead in a pinch, given what Mamma always said about beggars not being chosers. We did manage to spend most of yesterday in the backyard--this writer's lifetime first camping site--playing Domestic Handyman, and I'm pretty sure I caught a spark. What is needed, though, is full blown, healing fire!

I don't mind telling you, this 2012 American Consumerism Lifestyle is damn near more than this old man can ride. Nor am I alone in sometimes feeling overwhelmed; thank you, Jesus! Sister blogger Peggy Browning the other day wrote about how her old job was killing her, not so slowly and ever so surely. Personally, this old man is fully prepared to turn in his pass and go home. But that's not my call to make, is it? We are, after all, meant to dance for as long as the music plays, are we not?

Henry David Thoreau said it best: In Wilderness is the preservation of the World. My earliest living memory of camping is my sister and I spreading a blanket between our twin beds for a tent to protect us from Ol' Griz, a four-foot-tall stuffed bear. Dear Old Dad never tired of telling how I brought both myself and cousin Frank Ed tumbling assholes over elbows down the side of Mount Scott. I suppose post traumatic stress syndrome wiped that incident from my memory.

One of these days again...soon, I pray. Meanwhile, back at the cabin.... Y'all come back now, hear?

Las Vegas road trip

2012-01-06T12:44:00.000-06:00

Playing around with Google Maps the other day, I discovered this cool 3D feature that allows you to sit at your computer monitor and do a virtual flyover of any route of your choosing. This function is in beta testing stage as of this writing and kind of reminiscent of those early flight simulator games. Only this time you aren't bothered with controlling the damn plane!

Our first great granddaughter Maura J. is expected in Las Vegas about mid March, and I'm restoring an old rocking cradle for her down at the shop. What better excuse for an extended road trip than delivering Great Granny Annie and a cradle to Sin City, right? So I decided to road test Google Maps (GM) 3D while screwing up enough courage to buy a realistic-looking pellet pistol and knock over a bank for the real deal come March.

Right out of the driveway GM shows its old bug of being directionally challenged. Rather than directing me east on Speedway to Holliday to connect with the freeway, GM sends me west to Harrison--totally ignoring Brook--then to Kell, then east (crossing Brook!) to the freeway to take the long way 'round! Still, less than a minute after exiting our driveway, we are blissfully highballing west past Iowa Park and probably needing to pee already!

Photographic imagery for this project, in part, comes from the Texas Orthoimagery Program and Image USDA Farm Service Agency, at least for most areas within Texas. The view appears to be roughly from about 10,000 feet, but the drive can be paused at any point to sweep down for a closer view of particular points of interest. Iowa Park not being one, we proceed.

The effects of drought are clearly visible all across the landscape. Nearly everything below is brown to grayish brown with scarce patches of green showing near ponds, streams and irrigated patches. The bed of the Red River is a gashing scar of dirty white salts deposits.

Less than ten minutes in and we're crossing into New Mexico. The ground below begins to show the firsts signs of buckling and uplift. In truth what we're seeing here is the last vestigial remnants of the Rocky Mountains' tail bones, I suspect. We're soon flying past Albuquerque, and it's fairly easy to see how today's I-40 is following old trails and wagon roads through cuts and passes in the mountains.

Less than half an hour into the trip, and we're parked on a corner in Winslow, AZ. Must not be the right corner, though, as there is nary a flatbed Ford in sight.

The images are copyrighted by Google 2011, but there's no way of knowing precisely how old they are nor when they were taken. Wheeler Peak outside of Flagstaff, for example, bears no snow whatsoever. In fact, no snow shows until just east of Kingman, Az, on some unknown peak off to the south.

Inside an hour we're parked at S.Las Vegas Boulevard and E. Flamingo Road, staring at the biggest freakin' fountain we've ever seen before! I swear, the Rat Pack wouldn't know the place, and just where in this crazy town is my granddaughter, anyway?

Not nearly as satisfying as a for real road trip but an interesting diversion nonetheless. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go shopping for a gun.

The write stuff...

2012-01-06T11:12:00.000-06:00

I finally broke down and cleaned out the cat box. The cat strolled over, glared into the box and gave me that look that says, "What did you do with my shit, man!?!"

Running dangerously low on orange juice and 'cold medicine'. Could be a long, nasty weekend of HACK writing in the making...

Water, Gas, Electricity. Funds are available to pay two, but not all three. Which one gets cut?

Sure could use a little good news today...

2012-01-01T16:34:00.000-06:00

When it comes to TV news magazines, nobody does it better than CBS SUNDAY MORNING for this writer's money. I've been a fan since the old days of Charles Kuralt and his ramblings On The Road. This morning, the first Sunday morning of 2012, was no exception. But just because you may 'like' a particular program or whatever, doesn't mean the object of your affection won't ever piss you off.

I tuned in late, the 2011 year end review was already in progress. End of U.S. troop occupation of Iraq...Joplin, MO...earthquakes and tsunami in Japan.... I felt my good mood evaporating. All the top news stories from 2011 involved tragedy or scandal. How the hell are we to carry hope in our hearts and minds into a fresh, new year with a seemingly endless laundry list of what went wrong in the year before? On this day, of all days, why not kick start the new year with a little good news ?

Love, they say, is where you find it, and I'm sure Charles would agree. The same can be said for news. With that in mind, I am joining forces with my own AnniePie in a pledge she initiated this morning on her delightfully quirky Facebook page. Mrs. Miller has pledged to post and re-post good news and only good news stories. No more political squabbling, no celebrity brat-assing, no focus on the bad things that happen to all good people to one degree or another. My AnniePie has pledged to be that change she wants to see in the world by seeking out and celebrating the good tidings that should bring great joy to all of us.

I, for one, stand up and applaud her for that.

Running on empty

2012-01-01T13:06:00.000-06:00

Hi. My Name is Jim, and I am a Low-T.

Low testosterone is defined as less than 300 nanograms per deciliter of blood. The symptoms of low testosterone include low sex drive, erectile dysfunction, mood problems, fatigue, and sleep disturbances. Of all men with below-normal testosterone levels, about one-half to two-thirds report symptoms. ~ Low Testosterone Explained: How Do You Know When Levels Are Too Low?

The effects of testosterone decline came calling and took up residence some three or four years ago, best I recall. "Well, shit," I remarked to Self and to Self only, because real men don't talk about this shit to anyone else, right? "More of the Joys of Aging!"

I recently posted on Facebook "Getting older isn't a sin; becoming lazier is." That's pretty much what Low-T feels like to me, personally--slowly, inexorably sinking deeper and deeper into slothful laziness. The desire to do remains strong, but the get-up-and-get-to-it stays down for a terminal nap! The energy just flat ain't there, so in the words of Jackson Browne, it's like running on empty.

The knee-jerk response to Low-T is like so many other medical/health/physical issues, namely, "There's a shot (or a pill or a patch) for that!" Just motor down to your local Low-T drive-through and get the tank topped off. Turns out that's about a hundred dollars a pop with the need to be popped every couple of weeks. A hundred bucks, maybe once, I could save up for just to feel "normal" again. But $200 to $300 a month for life without medical insurance (assuming medical would cover it) is out of the question. We simply do not have sufficient income to cover the cost.

So it remains how to carry on, doing what needs to get done both at home and in the shop feeling chronically tired all the do-dah day?

*****

Speaking of running to empty... Yesterday was the perfect day to mow for the last time this season and put the old John Deere down for a winter nap. Wasn't much to mow; mostly the backyard and perhaps a light trim to knock down the henbit in front. Surely what little gas there was in the tank would be sufficient to keep the neighbors' gripes to a minimum and empty the tank, too.

Got the backyard decent and the mower was still roaring. Took a sweet tea moment, topped off the bird feeding stations, gazed at a cloud or two and the mower engine is still roaring. Heaved a heavy sigh and pushed the mower to the front yard. I figured the machine would give up the gas before I could cover the entire front, and yet that damn motor kept right on roaring! I was at the point of eyeing the neighbor's WAY overgrown front lawn (the house is empty now) when the machine mercifully sucked down the last drop.

Thank you, Jesus!

Rockin'-chair moments

2011-12-31T05:42:00.001-06:00

Back in the day when this journal began, it was intended as a couple of old friends passin’ ‘round the good times and a decent screw-top bottle of wine out on the porch. Preferably the back porch as we expected there’d be bits best not exposed to the street. Let's face it. Until old men's bladders get larger or their prostates get smaller, not every urge is worth the trek into the house when the backside of a shed is so much handier.

When did we launch this journal, anyone recall? Had to be back in the River Bend days, as the journal also was conceived as observation and comment on and from Nature, a legitimate excuse for rockin' on the back porch and/or taking up camping once again. Hence the name Rolling Plains Journal. A quick glance down the archives shows the first post in August of '08.

Sometimes you need to look at where you started to figure out where you are and which way you wanna go. What better time than New Year's Eve--the 2011 version now some four and a half hours old as I write-- for such reflections?

I first caught the writing virus back in 1958 in Mrs. Johnson's 3rd grade class at E. 35th Street Elementary School, Kansas City. Have I ever said how much this small-town Texas boy loathed Kansas City? The afternoon before a book report was due I had yet to pick out a book, much less read the damn thing. The thinnest volume to be found among the stacks of 10-year-old approved tomes in the school library was The Old Man and the Sea. We were up all night...literally... a flashlight-under-the-covers and coffee-on-the-
hotplate kind of “all night”. By the crack of dawn "Write like Hemmingway" stood alone atop my bucket list.

Writing the "Great American Novel" fell to the wayside some decades back, but the infection to put words on paper lingers on and on. That urge seems to gnaw more persistently now that we've reconnected with the grandkids and with the first great granddaughter Maura J. due inside of three months. So it is we have dusted off the neglected journal and resolved yet again to maintain and publish in a more timely manner, shall we say?

It's all good, this New Year's Eve falling on a Saturday as it does. May go down to the Drafty Ol' Craft Shop a little while this morning to work on Maura’s new old cradle. Last report, Maura J. is expected about March 16, spookily near that Ides of March of which Mr. Shakespeare warned. Not that I'm looking for any devil's child. But knowing Maura's mamma and grandma and great grandma and great-great grandma as I do, the girl is bound to have spunk.

End of December or no, the back lot wants mowin' and Beano has left any number of dried blessings scattered across the patio deck that needs tending to as well. With an afternoon high temperature reachin' near 70 degrees, will be a good day for yard chores.

No big plans for tonight. Don’t let on to AnniePie but I suspect my boot-scootin’ days are done. Oh, I still like the music; it’s the steppin’ out that’s sorely lacking. City's finally gonna shoot off the 4th of July and Labor Day fireworks tonight that were put off because of severe drought conditions. I imagine we'll take a pass on that, too.

My old runnin’ buddy Dean and his honey might drop by. More motivation to clean the rough edges off the backyard. Deano and I keep dreaming up a campfire under a sky full of stars, but I suspect our backyard is about as close as we will get any time soon. Badly as we hate to admit it, old bones and cold, hard ground don't go together all that well. The "theme" for the evening, New Year’s Eve 2011, is straight out of John Denver's Poems, Prayers and Promises:
“...lie there by the fire
And watch the evening tire
While all my friends and my old lady
Sit and pass the pipe around”

And if it proves to be just me and Mrs. Miller tonight, well, that’s fine...not to mention dandy. This year’s closing weekend is a good time to kick back and think about where we’ve been, where we are and which way to head from here.

Thanks for droppin' by. Y'all come back now, hear?

The Stars at Night....

2011-06-28T19:07:00.030-05:00

...certainly aren't what they were on those long summer nights over on Elm Street. Not that I have any notion of what the Texas night sky looked like over River City back when Hank Williams died, for that is stretching the old long-term memory about as far as these few remaining brain cells can take. Back along that track, I do remember the one old lone street light; naked bulb hanging beneath a rippled metal shade that was dark green on top and white underneath. It cast a kind of eerie yellowish light, scarcely bright enough to cast a shadow of its own pole. With such wimpy excuses for lighting back then, the cloudless night skies had to be lousy with stars!

Mr. Beano--bad ass Beano who had a fit and went after Bob cat and got us both tossed out to The Cave--and I sat out from dusk to straight up dark last night. First time since Annie and I moved onto this place last December that I've just sat out to watch and listen to the night settle in. No, the mosquitoes aren't bad. One of the few-and-far-between positive side effects of a drought!

The stars, on the other hand, are pitiful! Just pitiful!

The fault, of course, lies not with the stars but with our way of doing urban communal living. We so fill the night with our artificial lights that the natural lights of the sky are a wash. None but the biggest and brightest get through, and our old familiar constellations are losing points. Mankind's first stories are written in those myriad points of light.

Stargazers who also are into Facebook might want to check out Star and Sky.

Renovating the One-room Schoolhouse

2011-06-27T09:25:00.000-05:00

At first glance the door seems bare-boned and sparse, something like a middle American refrigerator door with sundry notes, reminders and yesterdays' art projects neatly posted. Could this really be the front door to "America's largest classroom"?

The largest, most unpronounceable, acronyms in American media--PBS, WGBH, WNET, KET--have combined resources with the National Archives, the Library of Congress, NPR, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Education to produce and launch PBS LearningMedia, a free service for all teachers, students and families nationwide.

“As America’s largest classroom, PBS and our local stations are helping to re-imagine classroom learning and are partnering with our producers and teachers to engage students to accelerate academic achievement,” said Paula Kerger, PBS President and CEO. “PBS LearningMedia is a key part of the solution to one of the nation’s biggest challenges – improving student progress to build our future workforce.”

My Mom began her formal education in a one-room schoolhouse on the Rolling Plains, and to this day she is one of the smartest women I know. PBS LearningMedia today provides something akin to the solid integration of that old one-room schoolhouse in a truly global environment. This is one giant step toward accessible, quality education for every boy, girl and undeclared in this country today. And who knows, we so-called grown-ups might learn something from it, too, considering what Sesame Street did to and for us!

I cracked open that door to take a peek inside. Check out what Wynton Marsalis and his band are telling the kids about "collective improvisation".

It gets a little nuts.....

2011-05-26T14:11:00.000-05:00

Urban, or backyard, camping, that is. Goodness knows, the last time I tried camping in the backyard John Kennedy was President. I probably showed my kids, Melissa and Brian, how to do it once; but those two were practically born in tents and raised to gather firewood, so I saw no need to stick around and coach.

Come to think about it, this whole family camping thing started because of those kids. When Joy and I had any time off from work, we rarely had money to Go or to Do anything more than a pack of wieners and a state park. Luckily, a lot of our friends at the time were ex-, unreformed Boy Scouts. Funny, sometimes, how traditions get born.

Now come Melissa's kids, Michael and Diana, 21 years since leaving Texas; and all of a sudden, it seemed, this Old Man was backyard camping again and kick-starting the Memorial Day bash without so much of the former debauchery.

Although I didn't know it at the time, preparation for this coming weekend began over last Mothers' Day weekend with a simple act of cleaning out an old garden shed; but that's another story, being told on my other blog, Miller's Cave. Consequently, some three weeks on, I've got this guy pictured above, an eastern fox squirrel, dining just outside our tent door!

Squirrels have been around for some 40 million years or better, back to the dawn of mammals. Biologists with nothing better to do break squirrels in general into 50 or so genera with about 280 species. Texas is home to two of the three species of tree squirrels, the fox (seen here) and the gray, the fox squirrel being the most commonly seen in backyards across much of the Rolling Plains.

Clearly, at least one eastern tree squirrel who roams the tree top canopy of Brook Village has a taste for black oiled sunflower seeds!

I nearly walked into this guy yesterday, and he scarcely glanced up from stuffing his cheeks. Nor did he show any concern when I stepped into the cave for my camera. Not until I was close enough to literally reach out and touch did he reluctantly take all the seeds he could carry and scamper some feet higher into the branches.

Memorial Day Weekend Campout

2011-05-26T10:46:00.000-05:00

Lord, if ever a people needed a Memorial Day break, it's gotta be the good folks across the Midwest who have endured through weather gone wild. We will be at The Home, camping out in the comfort of our own backyard, listening to great music, probably making a few burnt offerings on the grill and sending up smoke for comfort and healing for whosoever may be hurting for whatever cause at this time.

Arlo Guthrie had his Thanksgiving Day Massacre; we had our Memorial Day Weekend Campout. Through the 1970s and '80s, we'd pack up the women, children and dogs and head out to Lake Arrowhead State Park or Hippie Holler, LBJ Grasslands or the Wichita Mountains for three or four days of burning too much meat and drinking to excess. Back then it wasn't too difficult to camp away from crowds, and we always knew of several select sites within reasonable distance of River City.

Since that time, campers have moved on, others have passed on and all the old spots have been discovered by RVers and other creatures who haven't the slightest notion what camping is about. Add aging to the mix, and it's not hard to understand why and how the MDWC fell to the wayside.

Until now. With all the tragedy that has roared across our heartland, the continuing conflicts on foreign sands putting American men and women in harms way plus a grand reunion with long lost Grandkids, we thought it was time to revamp and revise a grand old tradition.

Friends, family, followers and anyone else with nothing better to do or nowhere else to go, join us in camping out wherever you are and sharing your Memorial Day Weekend on our Facebook page, Miller's Cave.

Bourbon balls found!

2011-05-15T06:40:00.000-05:00

While cleaning in places that don’t get cleaned enough, I found a scrap of paper with a recipe for bourbon balls scrawled on it. Now, in a perfect world this bit of history would be all but undecipherable, layered with stain upon stain and brittle as grandma’s old bones; the ink a mere whisper of my very own Mamaw’s schooled penmanship. Ah, venerable ancient relic!

Truth be told, Cordie Ellen’s chicken scratch on paper was the Devil’s own chore to make out. I know, I scored countless headaches translating her love letters to W.P. into something that resembled late 19th, early 20th century Southern American English. And while Cordie fully appreciated a good bourbon...ONE good bourbon...with eggnog...on Christmas Eve...she wasn’t likely to go wasting good whiskey on a cookie. So no way this was Mamaw Saunders’ recipe. I had written it myself some three or four years ago.

Annie & I had come off the road, maybe a year earlier, I guess. Coming back to River City wasn’t exactly our first choice. More like our only choice. Times were hard, living in a poorly restored garage and both working at jobs we would have been happier without. Now throw in Christmas bearing down on us, and you’ve pretty well got the scene.

What better time for.....wait for it......BOURBON BALLS!!!

I had eaten bourbon balls. I had never made bourbon balls. Didn’t have the foggiest notion what, exactly, went into them other than the obvious. So off I went to the library’s free computer lab to consult the Oracle, Yahoo. Turned out good bourbon balls are much simpler than I had imagined.

We both pronounced that first, basic batch as surprisingly good. A little tweaking of a component here and a measure there, and the second batch did not disappoint, either. Annie took the third batch to work with her, and came home empty save requests for the recipe.

“Tell ‘em it’s a closely-guarded family secret that goes all the way back to the Great Depression,” I told her.

“They’ll just want to know what a bourbon ball recipe has to do with a big hole in the ground,” Annie said.

“Well, tell ‘em this recipe goes to my grave with me, just as I promised my Dear Old Grandmother.”

I was going to give the recipe to a few of Annie’s select acquaintances, the few who came close to being actual friends, anyway. But the scribbled recipe got tossed into a drawer and otherwise buried until and mostly forgotten.

Until today.

Humbly presented here, dear reader, for your approval, one free recipe for bourbon balls, pretty much as I scribbled it, lo, not so many years ago.

Combine 1 c v.waffer crumbs, 1 c pecans, 1 c con sugar, 2 Tblsp cocoa powder.
Blend 1/4c Jack, 1 Tblsp + 1-1/2 tsp lt cn syrup.
Stir Jack mix into dry blend.
Cover & chill, hours
Form balls & roll in con. sugar
Store in air-tight cont. in fridge
Roll in con. sugar

That second and final roll in the confectioners’ sugar is to be done just before passing these puppies around. Oh, no need to wait for the holidays.

When it rains....

2011-05-12T06:51:00.000-05:00

"Bring you all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in my house, and prove me now herewith, said the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." ~ Malachi 3:10

Lord, what I wouldn't have given for Google back when I thought I would make a preacher! Plug in a pinch like "...pour you out a blessing..." into search, and up pops about 3.9 million hits before you've finished typing! Ever mindful of Rev. Debbie's admonition against using quotations overly much in my writings, I do so here because this snippet above woke me this morning, and all because of an old foundling trowel on my front porch.

Yesterday was a day, wasn't it! We actually got some rain on the Rolling Plains, just about enough to wet the bottom of my rain gauge, one of Annie's old cake pans I left lying out. The rolling thunder and the lightning streaking the southeastern sky was more than excuse enough to duck into the cave and enjoy the show. I was settled, too, just inside the open door when it dawned on me to set the rain buckets out! You see, it's those little things ~ like putting out the rain buckets to catch runoff ~ one loses with lack of practice, and we have not had a good soakin' rain here goin' on nine months.

So we set all the yard buckets we had under the cave's eaves, then dashed to the house to enlist several of Annie's old plastic mixing bowls and a soup pot to collect runoff from the back porch. Got to dump three of the smaller bowls into the soup pot before it was all done and came away with nearly five gallons of water reserve for Annie's growing gardens.

For all the fun of playing in the rain, Annie was quick to remind that we had actual Old People chores to tend to; little things like delivering the rent check for another month's stay at The Home. By the time we had tacked on getting a bite to eat, it was near dark when we returned.

Lying on the front porch beside Annie's boot garden was this beautiful old trowel, heavy and well formed to fit the hand, an old school tool you can't find in today's cut rate mega markets. Some person or persons unknown clearly had come by while we were out and left this offering on our porch. But who?

Doesn't really matter who although the answer was found on Annie's cell phone much later last night. What does matter is a simple, beautiful act of paying it forward, neighbor-to-neighbor, without being asked and without expectation of return.

Thanks, Peggy!!! Your going on the Zucchini List!

Deadlines and old age

2011-05-10T08:10:00.000-05:00

What’s with missing deadlines in my old age?

Ya know, when you practice at something for 60 years, you might reasonably expect to be at the top of your game. So why is it, sitting here on the front porch of The Golden Years, I catch myself in rookie mistakes. Hell, not even mistakes, for mistakes implies the poopertrator acted in ignorance. I’ve held deadlines to be sacred since those salad days on The Rider Roundup. I can thank Mother Mac for that; the old bat drilled the fundamentals into us like a freaking’ jar head top kick minus the language, bless her heart!

Okay, thumbnail version; I put two days into building this dirt cheap mud hole in our shrub jungle, rigged up a waterfall base and trickle hose (Texas is in a record, Class Five Excessive Red Flag Flying killer of a drought, in case you did not get the memo, and the water police have eyes everywhere), stuck a self-contained solar LED lamp at its base and called it AnniePie Millers’ Mothers’ Day Garden; a fun little project that kept my now fully retired butt outside and from under foot when not actively seeking gainful employment outside The Home, don’ cha know. On or about that same time, I set a deadline to publish the next issue of this journal no later than Mom Day midnight, thinking to write a wrap up piece on Mothers' Day at Miller's Cave. You see, while Annie got a new garden out of the deal, I renovated our 8 X 12 shed into a man cave, but that's another story.

The two of you who follow this rag already know I busted deadline. Friends, the last time I recall that happening was the wee hours of April 11, 1979, when we failed to make the first early edition. There was a night!

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that I quit thinking of myself as a newspaperman when the Tribune-Chief was sold out from under me. Use it or lose it NEVER takes a day off! For the rest of it, I’ve just got to face up and fess up to the immovable truth. I am old.

I am old. I have reached the age my grandfather was when I was born; and I am here to tell you, children, that old Hardshell Baptist deacon, Wiley Preston Saunders, came into this world old and just proceeded to get better at it! Of course, he rarely hobbled himself with deadlines, choosing rather to approach his chores d'rectly ("JREC-lee", adverb, to get around to doing something when one is damned good and ready).

Invasion of the Russian Tomatoes!

2011-05-09T14:55:00.001-05:00

Early Mothers' Day morning I'm cruising the garden section at that mega-mart everyone seems to love to hate. Freshly unemployed with much more time than money, I had launched an addition to our backyard for Annie for Mothers' Day two days before. The project was all but finished--including a fully-functioning, low maintenance, conservative-water-using water feature--and I was on one of those rare solo scouting trips, looking for finishing touches. When what to my wandering eyes should appear but a tag I certainly did not expect to see in this establishment, HEIRLOOM TOMATO!

This writer hardly expected to ever use Wal*Mart and heirloom tomato positively in the same sentence; but there it was, tucked away amid all the usual hybrid suspects. A healthy enough looking little specimen, considering where it was living, and claiming to be an old-world variety called Black Krim from Russia. Its parent supplier is an Alabama outfit called Bonnie Plants.

I have seen Bonnie's products before in Lowe's. Plants are packaged in biodegradable pots made from recycled materials, so you just plant the thing pot and all. I like that. I also like that Bonnie is bringing their products into places like Wal*Mart. Oh! If you have one of them smart phones that can read QR codes, Bonnie's plant data tags has that covered as well.

Worth a shot at three bucks! The Black Krim is billed as a chocolate beefsteak, the "chocolate" referencing its dark brownish color, from the Ukraine. Well let you know how it shakes out in a couple of months.

Also worth three bucks to check out is this self-contained, solar-powered LED landscape lamp by Westinghouse, and also available at Wal*Mart. I took one to try, installing it at the base of Annie's new water feature. It does not put out a mass of light; more like a friendly glow. I like that these can be picked up as single units and placed wherever without any need for wiring. How well they hold up to life on the Rolling Plains remains to be seen.

Man, is it getting hot out here, or is it just me!?!

Kites return to the Falls

2011-05-01T09:39:00.000-05:00

Every spring Anniepie and I look forward to the return of certain friends who mark the season and who, kind of like old mesquite trees budding out, let us know spring is settling in. Scissor-tailed flycatchers, Oklahoma's state bird, arrived some weeks ago; a trifle early this year by our reckoning--I really need to keep better notes and records--but others testify the scissor-tails were about on schedule. We spotted our first a couple Sundays ago out by Lake Wichita Park, and I have since seen them in all parts of the Falls, including one in that big old pecan tree across the street from our house.

Last evening a couple hours shy of sunset, Anniepie and I were camping out in the backyard, toasting Willie Nelson's 79th with a couple of margaritas. The winds finally had laid down to near calm, and the temperature under a pale blue, cloudless sky couldn't have been any more perfect. The seed feeders weren't getting many callers save the occasional dove, mainly because Mr. Beano Miller kept chasing after his lime green squeaky ball ever time Annie would toss it.

I happened to glance up from the dog games and spotted what I took to be a chimney swift at first. On second look, though, the bird was larger than a swift, soaring higher than I had first estimated. As my 62-year-old tri-focaled eyes adjusted to the range, I spotted another bird riding air currents at the extreme limit of unaided vision, hardly more than a speck, yet faintly recognizable. Nudging Anniepie, I pointed to the nearer bird.

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Oh my god, I think so!"

Of course, about that time the bird's flight took it below the tree line, so I broke for the house to fetch the glasses. Before I returned to the yard, however, Anniepie had confirmed the Mississippi kites had returned to the Falls.

Mississippi kite, Ictinia mississippiensis, second cousin to our own bald and golden eagles, is a hawk-sized raptor dressed in shades of gray and elegantly graceful on the wing. I mean, this bird literally does "dance the sky on laughter silvered wings" so beautiful it can make a grown man get cinders in his eyes when there's not a fire within two counties. These guys spend the winter in South America. Why on Earth they return each spring to hatch and raise their young in Wichita Falls is beyond me, but I'm certainly thrilled that they do.

So Annie and I were both grovin' on our first kite sighting of the fledgling spring, watching a couple sky dance at about 10,000 feet, when another pair swooshed past us directly overhead at treetop level! I mean we heard the air whispering through their flight feathers!

"I guess they wanted to make sure we knew they were back," I said.

The literature will tell you that kites feed on insects. I'm here to tell you I watched a pair of them tag-team after a white-winged dove that only escaped by plunging into a dense cedar tree. Others swear they also will take smaller stick and disc golfers who do not keep an eye out overhead while on their rounds.

Final count right at sundown was at least a dozen birds at one time soaring over Brook Village in one of the most magnificent air displays any two-legged critter should ever hope to witness.

Thank you, Lord!

Is it just me.....

2011-04-10T10:18:00.000-05:00

Or has the heat and dry conditions come to the Rolling Plains all too early this spring? River City has seen not one but TWO daily high temperature records fall in the past week, virtually all of Texas is currently under one or another drought stage as determined by those who get paid to know, and as I type more, than 100,000 acres of land across the state are burning.

Bring into this mix an apparent spike in the numbers of natural disasters from Katrina to the current earthquakes rocking Japan, and this is the stuff conspiracy theories are written from. If I did not know better, even I might begin to suspect the Good Lord is a bit ticked off at Her children's behavior here below.

With all the dead still uncounted from the tsunami that swept Japan, Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara found himself in political hot water when he opined that the tsunami might be tembatsu, "divine punishment". Of course, Glenn Beck, bless his little right-wing extremist heart, was quick to chime in that the earthquakes might have been "a message from God."

Interestingly, a recent survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more Americans pin the causes of these disasters on natural, Earth-bound causes rather than any kind of divine punishment.

Some seven in 10 Americans believe in a personal relationship with God, according to the survey results, and nearly six in 10 believe God controls everything that happens. Nonetheless, only 38 percent believe natural disasters are a message from God, and only 29 percent believe such events are punishment for sins.

"Americans overall resist drawing a straight line from theological beliefs about a personal God to God's direct role or judgment in particular natural disasters," said Robert P. Jones, PRRI's chief executive officer. "Americans have more natural than supernatural views of disasters."

Naturally, that will fall short of convincing Beck and the End-timers crowd, but somehow I feel better.

The Papas & Mamas and heirloom tomatos

2011-04-03T19:45:00.001-05:00

That little cold snap—if it can rightly be called that—last week brought a chill to
the bones and stirred up Anniepie’s sinuses but did not seem to hurt the tomato
or zucchini seedlings. The spit of rain that came with the cold didn’t ease the
drought. We appreciate that 0.10 inch all the same, though, Lord. Always good,
from time to time, to see what we are missing. Some say this stretch of the
Rolling Plains has not been this dry since 1967.

I am reminded what a hassle growing tomatoes from seed can be, and this may
well be my last spring to mess with them. As long as Mama Cass keeps raising a
bushel of heirloom tomato varieties on her farm near Seymour, Texas, I never
need go to seed again!

She wasn’t born Mama Cass, but I wouldn’t want to be the poor soul to remind
her of that. Found her last week when I saw her ad offering heirloom tomato
plants for sale on Craig’s List. A couple of emails later we had a date for her to
bring several plants by the house Saturday. Meanwhile, I did some searching on
Facebook and discovered her groovy tribute vocal group, The Papas & Mamas.
That’s right, she is the Mama Cass of The Papas & Mamas, recently returned
from WOWing crowds in Vegas with their righteously right on California dreamy
sound.

But don’t take my word for it. Check ‘em out for your own self on YouTube.

Cass is one of those beautiful people with whom you feel an immediate
connection on first meeting. In fact, she and Anniepie killed a good ten minutes
or better trying to run down where and when they knew one another, only to
come up empty. A self-described aging hippie, she is raising chemical-free,
sustainable veggies on some 1200 acres which she further describes as “an adult
amusement park.” The Papas & Mamas, which she organized and gave birth to,
is “my day job.”

Admittedly, all I know about heirloom tomatoes is what I’ve read in magazines
like Mother Earth News. What I can share is the claim that heirloom tomatoes
and store-bought tomatoes do not inhabit the same cosmos. Heirloom tomatoes
are grown for eating. Store-bought tomatoes are grown for selling.

As the name suggests, heirloom tomatoes have their origins in those long gone
days before large-scale commercial farming and long-distance shipping. These
tomatoes were grown on small farms and in kitchen gardens by hand for one
thing above all others—flavor--the ONE thing above all others that is missing
from today’s commercially produced market tomatoes.

It’s a good week when two neat blasts from the past come calling!

I used an old pet rat cage (no longer inhabited) to hold the young plants so they can be moved inside until they have been hardened off. If you would like more information about Cass and/or her heirloom plants, leave a message with your email address here or message me on Facebook.

Oklahoma Redbud

2011-03-21T07:25:00.000-05:00

Two young Oklahoma redbud trees were on the property when we moved in last December, two Texas natives all but surrounded by invasive, non-native photinia. I took a cutting from this one Saturday, placed the cut stem in water and about a half inch of new tap root was showing Sunday! The stem was treated with root hormone powder and placed in potting soil.

Work with what you've got

2011-03-21T07:12:00.000-05:00

Cat litter buckets, particularly flaming yellow screamers like these, may not be the most aesthetically pleasing choice for container gardening, but they serve the purpose. The price is right if one must buy cat litter, and they make themselves useful in other ways.

Project Planning...or something like it

2011-03-20T20:33:00.000-05:00

Everything I've ever read about gardening invariably started out the same way: Plan Your Work, and Work Your Plan. I'm sure you've seen or heard the same theme, too. All them what are supposed to know always say to meticulously plan out your garden plot, neatly diagramed and labeled on graph paper, ere ever putting plowshare to dirt.

That's fine and dandy, I suppose, for all the meticulous planners and designers out there. I'm not one of those people. I tend to be more...organic, shall we say. Shoot from the hip, and let the seeds fall where they may! Yeah, yeah, yeah; I know it's far easier to correct a mistake on paper than it is in the yard, but you know what? We seedslinging, organic types don't make mistakes. We have happy accidents!

Not to say that I do not plan my work at all. I plan...sort of. My approach to planning, however, comes more from the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school.

Project in point is our new-to-us digs in the Brook Village neighborhood, and this blog will be following that project in the weeks and months to come. This Sunday morning mostly was spent preping an old flower bed along the western edge of the backyard. This area is home to a couple of rose bushes of yet-to-be-determined variety and old photinia runners along with an odd lot of velcro weed, dandilion, henbit and other assorted rascals. This week past we've evicted most of the invaders, scattered a home-tossed mix of herb seeds and installed two hills of zucchini squash.

Today we followed up on what was started by extending the concrete border blocks and working sand, humus and manure into the soil in the newly-turned section. Not sure what direction that plot will take. Leading contenders are a couple of "Silverado" sage shrubs, perhaps another yaupon, a pondling (not enough room for a legitimate pond) or other water feature and just maybe some sample stands of the taller native Texas grasses.

Both the roma and cherry tomato seedlings broke out today. Those seeds went into containers (recycled cat liter buckets) March 13. The Turtle Island water feature--a most minature pondling and place holder for a water feature to come--just happened while on a breathing break from working in the dirt. That's a big part of the appeal of my kind of planning. I'm not locked in from the git-go!

Making rain and creating rainbows

2011-03-13T11:51:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it is because I am a grandson of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and wartime rationing that patience never has been my long suit. I don't want much, but what I want, I want NOW.

Set up camp in the backyard Saturday morning on the pretense of "doing yard chores". That was about 10:30, and the temperature already was north of 70F degrees. Cedar row between our house and our neighbor lady to the east was cacophonous with boat-tailed grackles, but it beat all to hell whatever babble was issuing forth from the TV inside.

Right off we got the rainmaker going on the front lawn as it takes right at an hour to deliver an inch of water across the yard. No doubt you've heard by now that the Rolling Plains--all of Texas, for that matter--is facing what the folks that are paid to know are calling "moderate to worsening" drought conditions. Here in River City we're running some 7.5 inches behind our mythical annual rainfall average. When that happens responsible citizens (and I pretend to be one) begin throwing water at their lawns, mainly to keep alive turf grasses that have no business being in this part of the country. With any luck and a lot of education, we may be able to change that pig-headed behavior before we go completely dry. Anyone who cares to read more on what I'm talking about is encouraged to read Eric Berger's piece from the Houston Chronicle, "Drought's grip threatens state with arid 2011" .

But I digress, for it was not a lack of patience, waiting on the Lord to deliver rain, that got me going Saturday. It was that damned itch to scratch in the dirt. Around these parts our mythical average last frost is mid March, but everyone knows to be prepared for what is known as the "Easter Freeze". With the warmer than normal weather we have experienced for over two weeks now, I have been not entirely successfully resisting the urge to put seed in the ground. Yesterday I gave up and gave in.

The good news is if we do get that late freeze down the road, the roma and cherry tomatoes are in recycled cat litter tubs that can be brought inside. The sage, dill and poppies, however, will just have to take their chances with what Ma Nature delivers.

Bloomin' Redbuds

2011-03-05T19:10:00.000-06:00

Spent the late morning and early afternoon clearing out underbrush along the back fence. A tangle of shrubs gone wild and invasive vines from who knows where, that 20-foot run was where Stanky, the outside cat, and assorted other feral felines liked to lie in wait to ambush birds coming in to the feeders. Damned cat just kept giving me the Stank Eye all the while I was trimming out his playhouse which made the chore that much more gratifying.

The calendar records today as March 5, a good ten days shy of the average final frost date for this hump on the Rolling Plains. Tackling the tangled fringes of our still new-to-us backyard is my primary strategy for not putting seed in the ground, even as the urge to sow grows with each passing day of temperatures well above seasonal normals. Yes, I know seeds could be started indoors now, but I prefer not to do that for a couple of reasons. The first is lack of space for flats of seedlings, and the other is indoor cats and a dog, all of whom would dearly love to "help" tend indoor starts.

Reckless bradford pear trees bursting into full bloom all over town do not help. Then just today I discovered that buds had erupted on two redbud saplings out back. I knew of the one along the eastern fence, but the second one was not discovered until this morning's clearing chores. Talk about pleasant surprises!

Nor is it just early-blooming ornamentals pushing the season. With consistent daytime highs pushing 80F the tank tops and hot pants are bursting out all over, too. Hell, the neighbor lady across the street already has buzzed her front lawn with the mower!

In other news from the homestead, thistle seed in the tube feeder has brought in a trio of lesser goldfinches, a male and two females. A pair of cardinals also are regulars at the pagoda feeder, along with Carolina chickadees, house finches, house sparrows and dark-eyed juncos. We brought in a ceramic fire pit a couple of weeks ago, and I now have almost resigned myself to backyard camping of an evening.

No, it's not the same, but it is convenient!

Auld lang syne

2010-12-31T16:03:00.000-06:00

Had to look it up, of course. From the Scots--Robert Burns in particular, about 1788--literally, in English, old long since and more familiarly as long, long ago. Not exactly sure if four months back is long, long ago or merely long ago, but it has been that long since my last posting here. I am determined, going into yet another new year, to make these visits more frequent.

Momentous movements marked 2010, now ending. I moved from the nature center to the symphony, helped launch a legacy a cappella choir, reconnected with friends I had not seen nor heard from since one night of revelry back in 1967 and moved into a new (to us)house. Beano, I can tell you is thrilled! He has his own yard now.

And a little child shall lead them

2010-08-03T13:27:00.000-05:00

As much as I would like, I cannot take credit for the following. My own Anniepie sent this collection out in an email and, I suspect, attached my address as an afterthought. So for whatever they are worth, dear reader, enjoy some thoughts on Old People....

She was in the bathroom, putting on her makeup under the watchful eyes of her young grand-daughter as she'd done many times before. After she applied her lipstick and started to leave, the little one said, "But Gramma, you forgot to kiss the toilet paper good-bye!"

My young grandson called the other day to wish me Happy Birthday. He asked me how old I was, and I told him, 62. My grandson was quiet for a moment, and then he asked, "Did you start at 1?"

After putting her grandchildren to bed, a grandmother changed into old slacks and a droopy blouse and proceeded to wash her hair. As she heard the children getting more and more rambunctious, her patience grew thin. Finally, she threw a towel around her head, stormed into their room and put them back to bed with stern warnings. As she left the room, she heard the three-year-old say with a trembling voice, "Who was THAT?"

A grandmother was telling her little granddaughter what her own childhood was like. "We used to skate outside on a pond. I had a swing made from a tire; it hung from a tree in our front yard. We rode our pony. We picked wild raspberries in the woods." The little girl was wide-eyed, taking this all in. At last she said, "I sure wish I'd gotten to know you sooner!"

A little girl was diligently pounding away on her grandfather's word processor. She told him she was writing a story. "What's it about?" he asked. "I don't know," she replied. "I can't read."

I didn't know if my granddaughter had learned her colors yet, so I decided to test her. I would point out something and ask what color it was. She would tell me and was always correct. It was fun for me, so I continued. At last, she headed for the door, saying, "Grandma, I think you should try to figure out some of these, yourself!"

When my grandson Billy and I entered our vacation cabin, we kept the lights off until we were inside to keep from attracting pesky insects. Still, a few fireflies followed us in. Noticing them before I did, Billy whispered, "It's no use Grandpa. Now the mosquitoes are coming after us with flashlights."

When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, "I'm not sure." "Look in your underwear, Grandpa," he advised. "Mine says I'm 4 to 6."

A second grader came home from school and said to her grandmother, "We learned how to make babies today." The grandmother, more than a little surprised, tried to keep her cool. "That's interesting," she said. "How do you make babies?" "It's simple," replied the girl. "You just change 'y' to 'i' and add 'es'."

A 6-year-old was asked where his grandma lived. "Oh," he said, "she lives at the airport, and when we want her, we just go get her. Then, when we're done having her visit, we take her back to the airport."

Grandpa is the smartest man on earth! He teaches me good things, but I don't get to see him enough to get as smart as him!

From the mouths of babes, AMEN!

Singing in spring

2010-03-28T10:38:00.000-05:00

Ricky Tims--quilter extraordinaire, music producer and fellow tenor in the Donald B. Cowan Legacy Choir--in the midst of yet another blizzard blowing down the front range the other day asked, "What's a sure sign of spring in your neck of the woods?" Ricky, you see, calls Colorado home these days, and the question was posed to his hundreds of far-flung friends, fans and followers of his Facebook page. I pondered Ricky's timely question for a couple of nanoseconds and watched my fingers respond, "The return of the storm chasers!"

Okay, so I'm given to sarcasm. It's a curse; my cross to bear. Truth is--for those who do not live in Tornado alley--storm chasers are fairly late spring arrivals. Generally speaking, it takes a bit more heat than the ides of March typically muster to make our Rolling Plains weather get seriously interesting.

So how does one know spring has arrived on the soft underbelly of the Great Plains? It woke me this morning just as the sun was peeking in at my bedroom window; a male mockingbird proudly proclaiming his territory from the topmost branch of my neighbor's pecan tree. Mockingbird song may not do it for everyone, but it's good enough for me.

The Northern mockingbird inhabits all of North America from southern Canada down to Central America, but it seems to have a preference for the Gulf Coast. The Texas legislature named Mimus polyglottos, roughly translated "mimics many tongues", as Texas' official State Bird back in 1927. The mocker also has been adopted by Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee.

While mockingbirds remain year round in this neck of the plains, they are at their vocal peak when their avian hormones push them to songs of nesting and all that goes along with that. Other males invest in showy Easter finery to strut their stuff and woe the ladies. Not the mockers. Males maintain their gray and white feathers year round and depend on stitching together a prize-winning string of vocal strains to go a-courting. Spring inspired males may string together up to a couple dozen measures borrowed from the sounds of their habitat, including cell phone ring tones.

Henbit may bloom, crocus and daffodils may lift their showy heads and the air fill with the explosive sounds of allergy-inspired sneezing. All fickle signs of spring at best. When the pre-dawn chill is broken by the mockingbird's trill, it's time to pack away the long johns and dust off the weather-alert radio! The storm chasers won't be long in appearing.

Well, the first mass rehearsal of the Donald B. Cowan Legacy Choir is set for 2 o'clock this afternoon. Singers from 32 years of Don Cowan's Rider High School A Cappella Choirs will meet in Wichita Falls to begin work on a grand concert scheduled for June 25, 2011. Follow our progress at LegacyChoir.org.

A man and his music....One More Time

2010-03-14T12:47:00.000-05:00

Donald Bruce Cowan stood on a slight rise of empty plains southwest of Wichita Falls one early spring morning in 1960. Heavy construction equipment soon would begin etching the footprint of a new high school into the red clay soil where he stood. Accompanied only by sighing wind, the trill of meadowlarks and a creaky old pump jack, this rookie music teacher stood listening to a dream.

Born in Fargo, ND, Don Cowan grew up in Moorhead, MN, literally in the shadow of Concordia College, home of Concordia Choir, the House of Paul J. Christiansen and a bastion of the Lutheran a cappella choral tradition established in this country by Paul's legendary immigrant Norwegian father, F. Melius Christiansen.

A sneak peek of what was to come emerged at Moorhead High School where Don Cowan was student director of a 120-voice choir. Cowan was graduated from Moorhead High in May of 1950. North Korea invaded South Korea that June, and Cowan enlisted in the U.S. Air Force where he was assigned to the 761st Air Force Band at Sheppard Air Force Base, Wichita Falls, TX. Initially assigned as a clarinetist, he worked his way through three dance bands attached to SAFB to play alto saxophone with the top band, the Airliners.

The Airliners played for USO dances at the Women's YWCA in town, and Cowan received $9 a night for the 4-hour gigs. He would find something much more valuable than the cash before the last dance.

Barbara June Humphries. A dark-haired beauty with poise, grace and moves on the dance floor that were impossible not to notice. And Cowan noticed. Every night that Barbara June came to the club, Cowan noticed little else. But what chance did a tall, skinny kid with a goofy grin have with a beauty like her? As it happened, Barbara June's best friend was married to a fellow saxophone player in the Airliners. Cowan's colleague told him that his wife had told him that Barbara June had said, "You know, Don Cowan is kind of cute, don't you think?"

Did not take long after that for Cowan to take a break from the band and ask June for a dance.

Cowan's enlistment ended shortly before Christmas, 1954. He took his honorable discharge and headed home to Moorhead but soon discovered that his heart had failed to make the trip. Before the snows had begun to melt Cowan returned to Wichita Falls and took Barbara June for his bride.

He registered at Midwestern University to seek a degree in music education. Signing up at the band table, he was told he would have to march. Cowan told the nice lady he had spent the last four years marching. He really did not care to march. The nice lady told him he would have to march if he joined the band program.

Cowan smiled, turned on his heel and crossed the hall to the choir registration table.

He earned a Bachelor Of Music Education with a major in choral music, minor in voice, in 1958. The Wichita Falls Independent School District immediately offered a position teaching choir at Reagan Junior High School. The following year he established a choir program at the new Barwise Junior High School, with a brand new high school waiting just around the corner.

S.H. Rider High School opened for classes in the fall of 1961. Cowan composed words and music for the school's Alma Mater and wrote the music for the Fight Song. His first choir department consisted of 59 students in two choirs founded in the Lutheran a cappella tradition. One afternoon while perusing sheet music at Max Kruetz House of Music, he noticed a sign over a bin that read "Greatest Choir Ever". Cowan asked the late Max Kruetz if he might buy the sign. After hearing why the choir director wanted it, Kruetz gave the sign to him.

The next morning students noisily settled into the choir room. "Shut up, spit out your gum and sit down!" Cowan called out with what would become a signature call to order. "See that sign?" Cowan said, pointing to the new sign placed upside down in the window of his office. "When I decide you have earned the right to call yourselves the 'Greatest Choir Ever', I'll turn the sign right side up."

For 32 years Rider's elite A Cappella Choirs strove to turn that sign over. In the course of that quest they recorded 30-odd albums and performed in Washington, D.C., the State Capital in Austin, Mexico City and the major cathedrals of Europe.

Don Cowan touched and shaped the lives of nearly 3,000 students in his three decades at Rider. He still considers alumni of his choirs his "kids". June 25, 2011, a bunch of Cowan's Kids will return to the Memorial Auditorium stage as the Donald B. Cowan Legacy Choir to sing some two-hours' worth of Cowan's favorite selections just One More Time!

For more information on this historic concert please visit our website LegacyChoir.org.

On old friends rediscovered

2010-03-12T15:02:00.000-06:00

" Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." ~ John Lennon

Friends, forgive me for being away so long. It's been four months since my last confession. Most likely I would not be back here now had I not virtually ran on to a dear friend from S.H. Rider High School. I say "virtually" because we've been visiting one another in emails since I'm here in Texas and she is in South Carolina.

Since I did not ask her permission to use her name, I'll call her "Dee". One critique she had concerning this blog in particular and my writing in general is that I quote too many other writers. Naturally, then, I had to kick start this session with a quote, just to show her I can take a hit and keep on a-typing! Somehow she got the notion I pull these quotes right out of my head as needed. Not the case at all, Dear Readers. I pull 'em out of Google!

Dee and I reconnected because a bunch of us from the old school are getting up a reunion next year (and I'll have more to say about that project later). Through a half dozen or so email exchanges we've been catching up on roads, taken and not taken, in the course of some 43 years since she and I walked off the Memorial Auditorium stage as brand spanking new high school graduates. Seems we have concluded that John Lennon got it right, for the most part.

My life certainly has not followed the course I had envisioned for myself back then. And Dee? Well! Dee is next to the last person I would have tagged back in '67 to become an ordained minister and chaplain! Girls were not getting to go down that road a lot back then, for one thing; and for the other, well, Dee just didn't strike me as the backward-white-collar type. I mean, she wrote the first gossip column to be allowed into our school newspaper, for heaven's sake!

Isn't it funny how a friend seems to drop by just when you need someone to jerk your own head out of yourself? Dee probably won't go along with that. She subscribes to the Shit Happens Philosophy of Life, while I'm still casting about for rhymes and reasons. I look forward to continuing debate with her on that, overwhelming her with my ability to pull up and spit out quotes!

And the river she rolls...

2009-11-06T12:53:00.002-06:00

There's an old song that goes, "And the river, she rolls on around the bend, on down to Denver where she meets a friend. They sail together 'till they meet the sea. Wish I was a river, Lord, and the river was me."

Can't recall exactly where I first heard it nor who sang it, but I wove it into a medley of folksy, mournful tunes back when my first wife became my first ex-wife, and that little ditty has carried me through more life changes than I care to recount for better than three decades now. Yet again, just today seems that old river and I have turned another bend.

I don't believe change ever comes without some sort of signs preparing the way for it. That's certainly true enough in nature. A change in the weather or even a change in the seasons always is forecast by signs in the world all about us if we but open ourselves to them and pay attention. Same holds true, I believe, in just about every other aspect of our lives.

Signs that it was time for me to move on from River Bend Nature Center have been presenting themselves for at least the past several weeks if not months. Oh, I saw and heard them clearly enough. Something of a storm has been a-brewing for months, and I've seen more than one friend and colleague leave to escape the wind. I just wasn't ready to acknowledge the signs and let go.

I handed in my notice that I was gone this morning, and driving away from the center was like driving away from a much loved and loving friend. I do not pretend to know all the whys and wherefores of change. Such is not always given for us to know. I remain firmly convinced that in time River Bend Nature Center is going to be all right, and so shall I. And you never know. We may just get back together someday.

But for today, well...today it was time to take a lesson from my old buddies down at the AA meeting house. It was time to let go and let God. And the river she rolls....

When pillbugs come marching in

2009-06-25T11:10:00.003-05:00

The heat is on across the Rolling Plains, and we two-legged critters are not the only creatures affected by these triple-digit days. If you live with domestic animals, dear reader, please insure that they have access to shade, to whatever breeze may blow and to fresh water!

Critters of the wild suffer as well through the dog days of summer. Most of us who feed wild birds also put out fresh water, typically several times a day, for the birds. In fact, if you want to attract birds to your yard, water attracts far more birds than food, no matter what time of year.

And then there are

Armadillidium vulgare, a.k.a. pillbugs, sowbugs, roly polies, woodlice and even Armadillo bugs. Our entire 15 acres down at the nature center are crawling with them, and just this past week or so since the outside temperatures have been cranking up, these little isopods have been invading our air-conditioned buildings in impressive numbers.

Yes, I said "isopods", for the common pillbug is not a bug at all. Like I tell the kids, put one in your hand on its back, and wait for it to open up from its tight ball posture. Look close and you will see seven pairs of legs! By my 3rd-grade arithmetic that's 14 legs in all; and the last time I checked, insects still have but six.

In fact, the lowly pillbug as a group is the most successful of all land-dwelling crustaceans, numbering some 5,000 species. As crustaceans they are kin to shrimp, crawfish, lobsters and the like, and therein lies a connection as to why these guys come marching into all manner of man-made structures each summer. They, too, are looking for water!

Isopods go back at least 300 million years to the primordial seas of the Pennsylvanian epoch. Today their breathing organs remain more like gills than lungs, so they must have a moist habitat in order to survive. Therefore, these little guys are not invading your house to get to your house plants! They just need a cool, damp place to breathe.

Okay, IF they happen to find your house plants, they are not above snacking on them. But for the most part pillbugs and other kinds of woodlice dine on organic debris, helping to breakdown plant material into soil. As such they pose positively no threat to people nor any other animals, with the possible exception of nature center field guides.

You see, once a kid on a field tour discovers the roly polies, it's nigh on to impossible for the guide to get the groups' attention focused anywhere else!

Red ants never say die

2009-06-17T14:10:00.002-05:00

Back in the day, what's now called Gordon Lake over at Iowa Park had no name. What it did have was shrub mesquite, grass burs, yellowjackets, huge red ants and some of the best fishing in this part of the country. To hear my folks tell it at the time, the fishing more than compensated for the stickers, stabbers, scratchers, stingers and little red bastards bent on feasting on five-year-old human flesh.

That first encounter with Pogonomyrmex barbatus, or, red harvester ant, on the banks of Lake Gordon gave me a healthy respect for the breed. From that day forward I always gave a red ant bed a wide berth.

Fast forward some 55 years and the familiar ant beds of yesteryear are few and far between. Widespread application of agricultural and residential pesticides have all but wiped out the red ant and with it the Texas horned lizard.

Last year I was heartened to discover no less than three red ant colonies thriving on the grounds of River Bend Nature Center. Having established ant colonies meant that one day we might be able to have horned lizards, long a dream of mine for the nature center.

Unfortunately, our red ants were living where new parking lots were to be constructed around our new learning center. Anyone who has tried to relocate a colony of ants knows that the project is doomed to failure. Anyone who has tried to forestall "progress" for the sake of an ant has about the same dismal chance for success. I tried the latter and my appeal never even made it as far as the board of directors.

All three ant colonies were buried beneath rebar and concrete. I figured that was that.

Earlier this spring as I was walking across the new parking lot, a scurrying movement at the curb caught my attention. After some fairly decent warm days, the weather had returned to cold and miserable, yet there at my feet a red harvester ant scout snooped along the concrete gutter. I stood motionless for several minutes, scanning the pavement. Only a few were out and about, but there were enough to track them back to their colony in the southeast corner of the lot.

We may not ever get a resident population of horned lizards here at the nature center. But I am proud to report all three ant colonies survived and are thriving today. Maybe that will have to be good enough, I don't know.

"Gran'pa, tell me about when there were butterflies."

2009-02-06T07:57:00.005-06:00

Down at the nature center we try to keep plugged in with Chip Taylor up at the University of Kansas. For some 16 years now Chip and his gang in Lawrence have been running an educational outreach program called Monarch Watch focusing on everything relating to monarch butterflies. Seems now there is serious doubt Monarch Watch will survive for a 17th year.

So what? I mean, what's all the hoopla with some butterfly? Imagine some day down the road when a grandchild crawls up on your lap and says, "Gran'pa, tell me about when there were butterflies." Our young Texans have all but lost contact with horny toads, officially registered as a "threatened" species in spite of being our official state reptile. Will the monarch butterfly be the next wild creature to vanish from our yards and gardens?

Not if Chip and other dedicated professional scientists and citizen scientists can help it. Through Monarch Watch, thousands of school kids have learned and continue to learn about the life cycle and the astonishing migrations of the monarch. Thousands of students, their teachers and parents diligently plant and care for Monarch Waystations filled with host plants and nectar plants essential to the butterflies in an effort to replace habitat lost to human development. And something over 100,000 of these amateur scientists and naturalists tag monarch butterflies each fall during the migration to the wintering grounds in Mexico.

This annual tagging program provides Chip and other researchers invaluable data on the monarchs. More importantly, though, the several projects under Monarch Watch get our kids excited about participating in hands-on science. The get to experience science first hand, not as something done only by white-coated nerds locked away in ivory towers and only read about by real people in boring textbooks. These kids get to go outside and make a difference.

Now Chip needs our help if this invaluable program is to continue. See for yourself what Monarch Watch is all about and what it is accomplishing at http://monarchwatch.org. And while you're there, stop by the store and pick up a book or two. Before you leave, pull out the plastic and tell Chip and the gang "Thank you!" with a donation. Large or small, every little bit helps.

Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be glad you did.

Don't call a prairie dog a groundhog!

2009-02-02T09:53:00.002-06:00

Legendary local farm reporter and curmudgeon Joe Brown is adamant on the subject. Prairie dogs and groundhogs are not the same critter! Often, it is not easy to agree with old "Do It Up" Brown, but in this particular instance, Joe is right on.

The common groundhog (Marmota monaxor) or woodchuck is a marmot, a member of the squirrel family (sciuridae), that inhabits lowland areas of east-central Alaska and British Columbia south to Idaho, east through most of southern Canada, and south to eastern Kansas, northern Alabama, and Virginia. Woodchuck comes from a Cree Indian word, wuchak, identifying several different animals of similar size and color, including other marmots. The groundhogs' home range does not reach into the southern Rolling Plains.

Our local prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), the black-tailed prairie dog, also belong to the family sciuridae but bear only slight family resemblance to their northeastern cousins. Considerably smaller and lighter colored than groundhogs, prairie dogs prefer the short grass prairies from Eastern Montana and Southwest North Dakota south to extreme Southeastern Arizona, New Mexico, and Northwest Texas.

Prairie dogs are more active during the warmer times of the year, but they do not hibernate as groundhogs typically do. The groundhog's legendary emergence from its den in early February has more to do with love than checking out the weather. Males emerge briefly to scout out an appropriately receptive female and locate her home den address. Once he's found her, the courtship is put on hold for a later date as the male returns to his own hole to finish his nap.

Farmers and ranchers in the plains states tend to view prairie dogs as pests to be permanently evicted from the human's landholding by whatever means necessary. Consequently, the prairie dogs' days are numbered unless attitudes change.

Truth is prairie dogs are essential to the health of a grassland ecosystem. Their underground homes contribute to the vitality of the soil and plant cover as well as provide shelter for a whole host of other prairie creatures like burrowing owls and the endangered black-footed ferrets. Prairie dogs also feed, quite literally, a whole host of prairie predators from the aforementioned ferrets to eagles and other birds of prey.

Besides all that, the little critters are just flat fun to watch!

They say change is coming

2009-01-20T07:25:00.003-06:00

They say change is coming. Down at the nature center, the Japanese honeysuckle continues to invade the 12-acre woods, and cattails are threatening to fill the north pond. They say change is coming, and spooky old Annie has begun--again--to speak pointedly about time to clean up the hummer feeders and boil up some sugar water. Why it seems I am the only one qualified to do these chores the tail end of every winter escapes me, but there it is.

Change is in the wind, but what we really need here on the Rolling Plains is a slow, soaking rain. Not much, I suspect, a new fledgling President can do about that.

In a few short hours Barack Obama will place his hand on the late President Abraham Lincoln's Bible to become the 44th President of the United States. In so doing the United States of America takes one step closer to the realization of the magnificent dream expressed by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. God speed and good luck, Mr. Obama. You are going to need both.

With a little luck perhaps I can manage to be looking busy somewhere near a radio when our new President gives his inaugural address. No, he was not my first choice. But when it came down to the count, Barack Obama was the best choice.

After the speech, well...there's nothing for it but to pull on the waders and head down to the pond. Those cattails surely will not muck out themselves.

New neighbors on the western plains

2008-12-31T10:17:00.003-06:00

A relatively new neighbor will be stalking around the Hardin-Simmons University campus over in Abilene. His name is Rick Hammer, and his passion--after his wife and son, of course--is the blooming plants of the Rolling Plains.

I haven't actually met Rick, yet, face to face. He dropped into my email box the other day just to say "Howdy" and to mention that he had stumbled across this blog. Kind words notwithstanding, I just had a hunch Rick is the kind of guy you fall in like with at first sight. Of course, it helped that he didn't ask for anything...not right off, anyway.

One cannot be too careful, however, in this funky cyber age, so naturally I ran him through Google. Thanks to Google, virtually anyone can get the bonifides on darn near anyone else. I learned Rick--or, should I say, Dr. Rick-- just recently completed a PhD in botany at Texas A&M with a primary interest in systematics, population genetics, and informatics.

Yeah, I know. I was scratching my head over that informatics thing, too. Digging a bit deeper, I found this on Wikipedia:

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology. Bioinformatics entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data. Common activities in Bioinformatics include mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structures.

Rick's undergrad work at A&M was in forest science, then he got lured away into computers and information technology with Lockheed Martin Aerospace and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway in Fort Worth. But his love for natural history in general and botany in particular brought him back to A&M to work on his doctorate.

"I tell everyone I am now retired as I begin a career in teaching and fun research into the flora of the Abilene area," Rick told me in an email interview. "I am 49 and went back to school to finish a PhD I had started in the 1990s. My wife and I moved from Ft. Worth to College Station in 2001. Guess I took my time in finishing my school work as we have a 4 year-old son--family is important!

"At Hardin-Simmons I plan to do research on the floristics of the Rolling Plains and other areas adjacent to Abilene. They've never really had a botanist out there since the 1970s, so there is much plant collecting work to be done. That's really my passion--not so much the technical lab work. I consider myself a naturalist first then a professional botanist. A big interest is in biodiversity--both documenting and conserving it. I may be doing some rare plant surveys in the Abilene area for TPWD (Texas Parks and Wildlife Department) and possibly also a
plant survey for Abilene State Park. I should stay very busy in my retirement!"

My hat's off to Rick and the task he has set for himself. We can't know what we're in peril of losing until we know what we have now, and with the continuing climate shift, we stand to lose quite a bit.

It's also good to know Rick isn't one of those ivory tower academics who never venture beyond the confines of their own labs. Rick seems eager to share his discoveries with the rest of us in a very readable blog he calls Flora of the Texas Rolling Plains. You can find it by directing your browser to http://txrollingplains.wordpress.com.

The Long Night

2008-12-20T15:27:00.002-06:00

As the earth grows colder,
the winds blow faster,
the fire dwindles smaller,
and the rains fall harder,
let the light of the sun
find its way home.

Whoever you are, wherever you are on this longest night of the year
May you know warmth, may you be free from hunger, and may you find cheer.
May the Creator guide your steps on the path of sufficiency free of greed,
And may the abundance of Mother Earth always provide for you according to your need.
May all who call this Earth our Home hold Her in our prayers, too.
This is my wish, this longest night, with Love from me to you.

A tale of cottonwoods and chinaberries

2008-12-17T11:33:00.000-06:00

Frontier towns of the 19^th century came and went, often with little more than some old tree to mark their passing. Such is the case of Teepee City and a gnarled old cottonwood tree.

No one today knows when the stand of cottonwoods first set roots beside a little creek in what would become Motley County, Texas. In the 1870s when much of the country was on the move, however, the high spreading crowns of cottonwoods often signaled a source of fresh water for trail weary travelers and their animals. Sometime in the mid 1870s, cottonwood branches spread over the creek bank invited a band of settlers, some 100 wagons strong, out of Dodge City to camp and refresh themselves and their stock.

The water from the creek was sweet and clear, the grass plentiful, and buffalo numerous. When time came for the wagon train to continue south, about a dozen or so families left the train to found a new settlement near the creek and its cottonwoods.

In typical prairie fashion, some of these Motley County pioneers initially constructed crude dugouts into the creek banks. No doubt the first flash floods of spring gave them pause to reconsider their housing options!

Other settlers opted for above ground picket-style cabins. Chinaberry poles-- which the resident Comanche used as lodge poles for their teepees--were set into the ground vertically. Spaces between the poles were chinked with red clay mud from the creek.

Given the nature of these first homes, it might be logically assumed the settlers would name their fledgling town Chinaberry. Rather, they called it Teepee City.

American bison yet roamed the plains in great numbers in the 1870s, but the markets for hides and bones were growing back East. Teepee City became a headquarters for buffalo hunters on the Texas plains. The first timber-framed structure to be built in town was something of a frontier multiplex, a combination hotel-saloon-gambling house.

In fact, as the bison herds began to thin, the main commerce of Teepee City shifted from separating buffalo hunters from their money to separating cowhands from their money. The lure of that old house beneath the cottonwood tree became a long-standing thorn in the flesh of range bosses serving the XIT, Four Sixes, and other spreads.

Teepee City held out until around 1891. The railroad bypassed the little town to go through Childress, and a local rancher at long last bought the saloon so he could have it torn down. A county government was organized, and the town of Matador was named County Seat. Tumbleweeds blowing with the west Texas sand soon erased the last footprints of Teepee City.

But the old cottonwood that once threw its shade over a hotel-saloon-gambling hall stood fast, if gnarled and broken by weathering, well into the 1980s. One hundred years is uncommon for a cottonwood. While neither tree nor town stands today, there is a state historical marker at the roadside park on Highway 62/70 ten miles east of Matador.

SOURCE: Famous Trees of Texas, Texas Forest Service, Second Edition

Do you see what I see?

2008-11-29T10:09:00.002-06:00

Long before “I Love Lucy” changed Americans’ idle hours, folks watched the splendors of the night sky. That’s how we got those imaginary, connect-the-dots images called constellations that look nothing like what they are supposed to represent, which leads me to believe there were Dalis and Picassos among us even back in ancient days.

We don’t star gaze anymore like we used to. For one, the collective ground light from our cities, towns and commercial farms have all but washed out the brightest celestial objects that are visible on Earth without the aid of telescopes. For another, we no longer wind down the day by sitting on the front porch as the world turns through dusk into darkness.

From time to time, however, along comes a heavenly spectacle that’s all but impossible not to notice. Such a display is on tap for Monday evening just after sunset.

I’m sure many readers have seen the two bright “stars” hanging low in the southwestern sky the past several nights. Those “stars” are, in fact, our neighboring planets Venus and Jupiter. On the first of December this pair of sparkling jewels will be joined by a thin sliver of silvery moon.

When that tiny crescent of moon appears, take a closer look. Go ahead. Look long and hard and see if you can’t make out the faint bluish face of the rest of the moon’s surface that is not bathed in sunlight. See it?

That wan, bluish glow is called Earth shine. As we all should have learned in 3rd-grade science, objects like planets and their moons emit no light of their own but rather reflect light from the sun. Earth shine can be quite spectacular, depending on the degree of cloud cover at any given time, as photographs taken by astronauts from the surface of our moon attest. So what you are seeing on the fainter side of a crescent moon is sunlight reflected off Earth reflecting back to us from the moon.

And did you know that moon phases and Earth phases are in sync in what astronomers call complementary phases? We just had a new moon Thursday evening with the dark side of the moon was turned fully toward us. At the same time Moon Critters would have been marveling at a brilliant full Earth.

Of course, our trio of heavenly hosts will not be anywhere near one another Monday night or any other night. They only appear to be approaching one another as seen from Earth. The moon will be roughly a quarter-million miles out. Venus, meanwhile, lies some 93.2 million miles distant, and giant Jupiter is a mind-boggling 540.3 million miles away and approaching the far side of the sun.

Such facts are for textbooks, though. One of my favorite pilgrimages, if you will, is to Brewster County, Texas, down in the Big Bend Country. Lie on your back after dark without a campfire or lantern, and open your eyes to the heaven above. It's not so much what you see as it is what you feel. For me it's a realization of being incredibly small and indescribably insignificant.

That was a year that was!

2008-11-06T21:14:00.002-06:00

Beetle Bailey and Peanuts are the new comics in town, premiering in American newspapers two months apart, and the game show Truth or Consequences debuts on that newfangled television which some folks already are calling TV. Of course, radios outnumber television sets in American homes by something like eight or nine to one. Still, there are some 100 television broadcast stations in 38 of these 48 states, and the federal census this year put the number of sets in American households at five million. TV sales, however, indicate that number to be nearer eight million.

Folks still go to the movies, though. A full-length animated film from Walt Disney, Cinderella, generates a lot of buzz at its release, and tough-guy personified actor Broderick Crawford takes Best Actor honors at the 22nd Academy Awards for his performance in All the King’s Men. The film takes Best Picture.

There are uneasy feelings at home and abroad when North Korea blatantly invades South Korea and Russia announces it has developed its own atomic bomb. Dark headlines and ominous newsreels do not dampen America’s post-war rally, however. A new concept in consumerism, something called a shopping center, designed by architect John Graham Jr. opens on the outskirts of Seattle, Washington. Decent houses are going for around $8,500, and a new set of wheels can be had for about $1,500. Fueling the new car runs around 18 cents a gallon. Wages? Oh, the average American worker brings home around $3,200 a year.

In New York everyone is raving about that new show that opened at the 46th Street Theater, Guys and Dolls. The cast includes Robert Alda, Vivian Blaine, Sam Levene, Isabel Bigley, Peter Gennaro and a local comedian calling himself Stubby Kaye who, they say, steals the show as Nicely-Nicely. Tune in a radio and you’ll likely hear Nat King Cole singing Mona Lisa or that new kid Teresa Brewer with Music, Music, Music. Ruth Brown tops the R&B charts with Teardrops from My Eyes, but perhaps no one is making the tears flow like Miss Patti Page singing Tennessee Waltz.

The world said a final farewell to some pretty good folks this year. Novelists George Orwell and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Restaurateur Sid Grauman and American automobile pioneer Ransom Olds. We lost the Jazz Singer, Al Jolson, and Irish-born writer George Bernard Shaw.

At the same time we welcomed several new ones into a brave new world. Names from the nursery this year to watch include Debbie Allen, Billy Ocean, Natalie Cole (yes, Nat is her proud papa), Cybill Shepherd, Julius Erving, Karen Carpenter, Bill Macy and William Hurt, Jane Pauley and Tom Petty.
But the most important new arrival, as far as this writer is concerned, came along on November 7 of this year, 1950, at St. Mary’s over on Stanyon Street in San Francisco. I did not know little Ann Elizabeth at the time, but I found here just as soon as I could.

Happy Birthday, Mrs. Miller!

What is a "native"?

2008-09-07T11:36:00.001-05:00

“You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.”
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Today officially launches my seventh decade as an amateur naturalist, and the Web dropped Whitman’s quote on me as my reminder for the day. Thank you, Lord!

I have been in nature, observing nature for 60 years so far. Only in the last four years or so have I pursued nature as an avocation and just this past year that I have earned a fraction of a living at it. And while I do make a few bucks working with nature to teach others about nature, I refuse to surrender my amateur naturalist status and leave the ranks of giants like Darwin, Whitman, Thoreau and Muir.

Certain dangers are inherent in close observation and study of what goes on in the natural world. Chief among these (on my list, at least) is nitpicking; getting too hung up on scientific classifications, definitions and nomenclatures. I know Guy Here is a male ruby-throat hummingbird simply because he presented his red throat patch when he visited our porch feeder. Do I need to know his proper name is Archilochus colubris to appreciate his behavior as he camps out in our yard, defending “his” feeders against all male (no, he doesn’t chase away females) comers? No, I don’t. In fact, I had to Google “ruby-throat” to get Guy’s Latin name for this citation.

Like Willie said, “What’s in a name?”

But it goes deeper than that. Down at the nature center, our mission is closely tied to preserving the ecosystems on our 15 acres. Most of the site is river bottom wetland inhabited by cottonwoods, buckthorn, pecan, sugarberry, soapberry, rough-leaf dogwood, green briar and Japanese honeysuckle. Of those eight species, one is a foreign invasive introduced into the region long before there was a nature center.

Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), in fact, ranks high on Texas’ list of public enemy plant species because it is such a highly aggressive, invasive vine that left unchecked will take over everything in its way. Lonicera was introduced into the United States from Asia as an ornamental vine, and its popularity helped spread it across the country where it has naturalized in many areas.

Strictly speaking, then, all Japanese honeysuckle should be removed from the nature center as a non-native invader, right? Personally, I think so. Yet our resident honeysuckle has its fans who would be more than a little upset if the plant was totally wiped out. Many of those same folks would much rather I remove the prolific poison ivy that flourishes in our woods, even though poison ivy is native to our ecosystem.

So the debate becomes what is “native” and what is not “native”? The immigration issue does not apply exclusively to foreign nationals of the human species. Plants, like people, may become naturalized citizens, but it often takes more than an official status or designation to make them welcome.

When I was first invited to join the staff down at the nature center, one of my goals was to eliminate non-native honeysuckle (yes, Virginia, there is a native species, coral honeysuckle) from our acreage, and to my mind Lonicera is still the kudzu of North Texas. Today, however, I am more inclined to cut it back to the bordering neighborhood to the west, allowing it to remain on our fences as a specimen of what NOT to plant in your yard!

Home for the hummers

2008-09-01T15:49:00.003-05:00

Certainly did not take long for a handful of
hummingbirds to find us! I noticed this little
guy to the right here dining at our feeder just a couple of days after I put it up in the corner of the front porch. Nearly all the books will tell you NOT to hang a feeder on your porch if you want to attract hummingbirds in close. The accepted method, they say, is to start with a feeder some distance from where you really want it and then to gradually move the feeder in to your target viewing area. Hmmmm. Day One: Hang a feeder on the porch; Day Three: Male ruby throat hummingbird observed at feeder. Anyone see a pattern emerging here concerning myself and following the rules?

Turns out Guy Here--I just this moment decided that what I'm calling the male ruby throat above--isn't the only one. Not even by a stretch. Saturday afternoon, about the time we had that nice little shower, I called Annie out to the porch to check out Guy Here. She no more than got settled into the folding-chair stand-in for a rocker when she exclaimed, "Oh, look! There's two of them! No, wait....three!"

Of course, we broke out cameras and took up strategic positions to capture the moment. Guy Here wasn't having any of it. He and his cronies seemingly were masters at popping in when we least expected an appearance and buzzing right back out of frame just as quickly. All in all, Annie tallied no less than five individuals, and nary a one of them was captured in pictures that day.

Some five yards out from the porch is a soon to be dead tree of indeterminate species. I say soon to be dead because what remains of the tree is terminally infested with mistletoe. For now, however, this is Guy Here's tree. Rubys are known for being strongly territorial, and Guy Here's preferred sentry perch is a small, bare twig some 15 feet above our front walk. This post offers a clear hummingbird's eye view of both porch feeders. Woe be unto any other hummer who dares dart in on Sir Guy's domain!

Annie is convinced Guy Here and a significant other has a nest in that old tree. I'm not yet convinced. He will, from time to time, vanish into the foliage for a few moments in area where the mistletoe is quite dense and sheltering. And while hummers are known to have as many as three broods in a season, I'm not sure how much the male figures into the nesting and child care scene. I could, I suppose, climb into the tree and see what I can find, but that's not gonna happen. I can just hear myself saying, "Hey, honey, I found it!" just before branch, nest and my 60-year-old ass all come crashing to the ground.

Some things are better left a mystery.

Saga of the sage

2008-08-25T20:53:00.007-05:00

tzitzikas tzitzikas tzitzikas tzitzikasssssssssssssssssssss

Or so the Greeks transliterate the song of the cicadas, and if it's good enough for the Greeks, it works for me. The song is distant to the west where the sun is just sinking to the rooftops as I hand pull weeds from a small patch of earth at the base of the front porch. It's a rental, this house on Collins Avenue, so my Rule #1 was:

Do not plant anything in the yard! Use containers instead.

So I'm on my knees, ripping out handfuls of weed stubble left by Saturday's mowing and a few stringy remains of lawn grass, digging a hole in soil a lot better than I had expected to find and setting in a gallon-size Texas sage.

I can't really explain why I have such a liking for Texas sage, but I have planted this drought-tolerant sage of the desert in the last three residences Annie and I have shared. The first two plants, planted some four or five years ago over on Pennsylvania Road, are still there and well over five feet tall. They were gallon-size, too, when I set them in the ground.

Also known as purple sage and silverado sage, it originated in the Chihuahuan Desert's limestone shrublands of Northern Mexico, Southwest Texas and Southern New Mexico. Zane Gray fans, no doubt, are familiar with Riders of the Purple Sage published in 1912. It's the same plant.

Butterflies like visiting the delicate purple blossoms, and Annie does like her butterflies! So just a foot or so west of the sage I put in a second violation of Rule #1, a medium-sized starter plant of lantana. If I were going to create a butterfly garden but was limited to but one plant, that one plant would be lantana.

Two counts of planting in the ground notwithstanding, two or three specimens remain for setting out in pots. There's another, smaller lantana that I'll pot up and see how it goes. Then there are a couple of specimens of Mexican false heather which probably will need to spend the winter inside but will start out on the porch. You see, our neighbor lady to the east has a porch full of plants, and Annie is bound to have one, too!

Which, of course, means I get to collect, assemble and maintain Annie's mostly containerized butterfly & hummingbird garden while she gets to enjoy it and brag about it to her friends at work.

Kinda make a feller wonder just who's the real sidekick here, don't it?

They say they taste like popcorn.

2008-08-24T10:09:00.012-05:00

River City summers wouldn’t be the same without the song of the cicadas. Their lazy, modulating buzz is hypnotic and calming, like an aural downer, on a hot August evening.

Mamaw and Granddad called cicadas locusts, and locusts to them were grasshoppers. Took me years to sort through the confusing maze of common names to figure out what bug was what, and brought me to a greater appreciation of Latin-based scientific nomenclature, even though Latin names seldom sing.

Generally speaking, cicadas are insects belonging to the order Homoptera, suborder Auchennorrhyncha, superfamily Cicadoidea. Worldwide some 2,500 species of cicadas have been identified and many more await formal classification and naming. While “locusts” is commonly applied to these creatures throughout many regions of the United States, cicadas and true locusts are not related. Rather, cicadas occupy the same order as aphids, leafhoppers and spittlebugs.

Our neighbors in the Appalachian region know cicadas as “jar flies” or “dry flies” because of the dry exoskeleton, or shell, left behind when an adult molts. The most common U.S. genus Tibicen are also known as dog day cicadas or annual cicadas as adult Tibicens emerge every summer.

One would be hard pressed to find an order of insects more destructive than Homoptera, mainly due to aphids being classified in this order. Cicadas, however, do not fit the destructive mold as they are truly gentle giants of the insect world. Cicadas neither bite nor sting, nor are they destructive of plants. Of course, some folks find them ugly and obnoxious.

And, yes, some folks do eat them. African children delight in catching them for their grandmas to prepare as a crunchy, popcorn-like snack, and cicadas reportedly are consumed throughout many parts of Asia.

Guess I just haven’t been that hungry yet.

(Photo of Tibicen emerging courtesy of Roy Troutman)

About that rocking chair...

2008-08-23T18:41:00.002-05:00

Literally speaking, the rocking chair has not made it to the front porch yet. You see, as of now Annie and I do not have a rocking chair. We only got the porch a couple of weeks ago. So that rocking chair I wrote of in the beginning, well, that remains more metaphorical than actual.

Annie's got her bonnet set on matching high-backed wooden rockers parked side by side, looking out on the world of Collins Avenue. I'm in no hurry to make that particular dream real for her, though, even if I do break the 60-year tape in a couple of weeks. I acknowledged becoming my Dad at least a dozen or more years back, but I'll be switched if I'm ready to take the rocking-chair turn into becoming my Granddad!

That was the late Wiley Preston Saunders, by the way. He and his wife Cordie Ellen lived just around the bend at 14th and Clark Streets until his death in 1967. Can't help but think about him every time I drive over one of our remaining brick streets. Back in the day, Granddad and his oldest son Rodney--some River City old timers may remember Saunders Body Shop out on the old Waurika Highway--dredged sand out of the Big Wichita with a mule team for the mortar to brick pave those streets.

Some two years ago Annie and I left the road after hauling freight through every state in the lower 48. Oh, it seemed like a good idea at the time; to tool around the country, getting paid to cross "Visit every state in the union" off the Lifetime To Do List. Did not take this city boy long to figure out you don't get to see much nature through the windshield of an OTR freight hauler. I always wanted to snap a picture of the front grill of that old truck and send it to Dr. Horner over at the university; see if he could catalogue my bug collection!

Anyway, we came in off the road and rented a little two-room cottage right smack behind Mamaw and Granddad's old home place. Changes have been made to the place through the years, but I could still see the two of them of a summer evening, sitting on the porch and quietly enjoying their Coke floats. I even heard the same cicadas buzzing in the big pecan tree out front. Their descendants still define summer in this neighborhood to this day.

Annie will get her chairs soon enough, or, "d'rectly" as Cordie would say. I'm more into sorting out what variety of native Texas weeds inhabit the yard and figuring how far I can go away from "lawn" and toward native plains before the Landlady hollers, "ENOUGH!" Then, maybe then, I'll be ready to sit and rock for a spell with a tall, cold Lynchburg Lemonade.

Y'all come see us, now. Hear?

Thank God it's Friday

2008-08-22T17:50:00.004-05:00

We had one of those little low pressure systems pass through the area the first of the week. The good news is it moved out the high pressure ridge that was pinning our daytime high temperatures in the low triple digits and brought a spell of sorely-needed rain. Right at eight inches of rain, give or take a tenth, at the nature center in the bend of the Big Wichita River.

Our trees down in the bottom land were mighty glad for the drink, but the rising river did leave a mess the entire quarter-mile length of the main trail. When the river crested sometime late Tuesday afternoon, I'd say our woodland was standing up to four feet deep in flood waters carrying red clay that gives the Red River its name.

Could have been worse. In the spring of 2007 a so-called 100-year flood left nearly 18 feet of clay-choked river water inundating our 13 acres of bottom land. The waters took nearly a full week to recede to a point where we could make it all the way down to the north end of the trail. About an eighth of an inch of treacherously slippery clay mud completely covered the concrete walkway, and we all but lost two outbuildings.

A pair of Mississippi Kites set up housekeeping in our woods this spring. I counted as many as four young ones at various times perched in the tallest snags. Just before the rains moved in on Monday I noticed six kites resting in the snag. Tuesday, after the deluge, I did not see a single kite. Wednesday and Thursday as I hosed mud from the trail the kites were conspicuously absent still. I began to wonder if that low pressure system had nudged the birds into starting their move south. Then today I heard that familiar raptorish scree overhead, as if the bird was saying, "I'm back!" It was an adult, male I believe, although my bird identification skills fall far short of my colleague Penny Miller's. I checked the tall snag that towers thinly above the canopy of soapberry, pecan and red cedar, and sure enough there were two juveniles waiting for breakfast.

The water did not rise high enough to reach the fox's den, and Wednesday morning revealed sign that the raccoons, opossums and armadillos had been out and about, benefiting from the washed in buffet while it lasted. The red-shouldered bugs were again going after the remains of the last soapberry crop, and the pill bugs were just skittering around, distressed by the saturated earth and doing whatever pill bugs do when they're temporarily forced from their homes.

In short, the little low pressure system brought about a day's worth of drama to the nature center. Then it was wash away the mud and back to business as usual for all concerned. After all, it's a riparian wetland. Its continued existence as a unique ecosystem on the Rolling Plains depends on periodic flood events.