Welcome to Packwood, Memorial Day Elk Rules Edition

 Welcome to Packwood! Memorial Day kicks off Visitors’ Season* in our tiny mountain town, high in the Washington Cascades. Please enjoy your visit. For your elucidation, I have put together a list of guidelines that will make your stay more pleasant. 

For me.

The Rules Governing Elk

1) Elk don’t follow rules. 

The Rules Governing Visitors and Elk

1) Elk don’t follow rules.

2) Don’t be like Elk.

3) Please enjoy the spontaneous elk parades that will take place at random intervals. Elk will wander out into the highway so that you can stop and enjoy their majesty. Please do.

4) Please watch for elk that will dash out in front of oncoming vehicles. There is almost always more than one. It is not considered a parade. Consider it a threat.

5) No, the Elk are not trucked in by the Disney Company. They do not talk.

6) No, you should not try to pet them.

7) Or feed them. If you really want to feed elk, I suggest you buy an alfalfa truck and park it, fully loaded, in town. This is the traditional way of feeding elk. Google it.

Googled it for you

8) Do not let them have your IPA. Elk are terrible drunks.  

9) Yes, you can take one home with you. In fact, every visitor is allowed to take home six elk, each. Per visit. Did I say allowed? I meant REQUIRED.

10) Please do not allow the elk to drive. Actually, don’t allow them in your vehicle as elk are terrible back seat drivers as well, and have been known to chew on the upholstery.

11) U-Haul trucks are available in town to transport your elk. Yes. That’s why they’re there.

12) Once you take the elk, they are yours. DO NOT TRY TO RETURN YOUR USED ELK.

The Rules Governing Locals, Elk and Visitors 

1) Elk don’t follow rules.

2) Visitors are leaning the rules. Please back me up on these rules. Especially the six elk/each, thing. I really think it might work.

3) Deer Season starts September 1. Permit required. Limit one.

4) Elk Season starts November 6. Permit required. Limit one.

5) Visitors’ Season* starts May 26. Please remember that no permits for hunting visitors will be issued.

May Flowers

 May is an excellent month for gardening. And by gardening, I mean buying flowers. Lots and lots of flowers. 

Besides all of my usual flower buying sources, May is the month of Gardening Groups Plant Sales and student horticulturist sales. If you play your cards right and plan your route carefully, you can make a single weekend into a plant-buying bonanza. Or so I hear.

It is also possible to tack on a little plant buying onto whatever activity you have scheduled. Need a new spark plug for your mower? Bet there’s a garden center where they sell spark plugs. On a family weekend away to the beach? Bet there are at least three nurseries that you’ll drive by on the way home...couldn’t hurt to stop in and see what they have to offer.

In addition to my flower buying habit, I have recently started vegetable gardening. The addition—finally-- of an electric fence to keep the elk out has made vegetable garden a lot less frustrating. Strawbale gardening has made it easy to grow tomatoes and cucumbers, beans and peas, zucchini, and pumpkins. To be honest—the zucchini and pumpkins grew a little too well; so much so that occasionally I would hack the vines back to keep their quest for neighborhood domination in check.

Tim Kelly brought his tiller over last week and smoothed out my future corn patch. I aspire to grow a bumper crop of corn this year. Last summer I planted about ten hills of corn as an experiment and it was promising. I harvested about 6 ears total, until there was the unfortunate incident of the Elk that ATE EVERYTHING. All because I left my fence unplugged when I went away for the weekend...stupid dang elk.

My garden would be a lot further along if it weren’t for the lawn that needs constant mowing, and the grandbabies that need kissing, and all those good books won’t read themselves. I don’t let any of those things discourage me from buying more flowers though, anytime the opportunity to crosses my path.

Keeper of Memory

 Recently, I spent some quality time with some of my Best Beloveds. We laughed, and talked, and ate delicious food. We listened to favorite songs, and gently tugged at the seams of the world’s ragged edges until we could reknit them to our satisfaction. Perhaps best of all, we “remembered when” together.

It is a blessing to be in the company of people who carry memory with you, who have shared experiences and adventure, who knew you “way back when,” who have loved you through your “becomings,” all the ideations of yourself, to this Self, now.  We spoke of those who formed and impacted us-- parents and teachers, friends and family, poets, and singers. We told our stories, and our jokes and our heartbreaks; life is made up of all of this, of laughter and tears. 

My cousin Jill, daughter of my mom’s sister Sue, brought with her some of our family’s genealogy—or, as we now call it, “The Judgy Genealogy”—and we marveled together at some of the family traits that go back generations, and some that seem to skip a generation. We find the entire thing hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing at the description of some of our forebearers and assorted kin.

Take, for example. Elizabeth W Leathers who was “...always very strong seemingly as she did an enormous amount of yard work.” There’s a gardening gene I can relate to.

Then there is the assertion that Alfred O Leathers was “...not the last Leathers to be a great mathematician.” Clearly, this gene skips like a stone.

Hosea Gradon Leathers, one of the “.... nervous, temperamental type. Also, quite intellectual, as well as unreliable...a lawyer.” Oh, I have so many questions!

Then there is JE Leathers, who was reportedly “spoiled and high tempered. Never quite like other people. Very brilliant in some ways. Reality finally proved too much.” Who among us has not wrestled with reality?

But the entry that made us laugh the most inappropriately was a relative that died in 1854, “...when he climbed a tree and shot himself out of it. It may have been on purpose. The family never knew.” There is something about the wording that—as my people are wont to say— “tickles me.” I wonder how many people have accidentally shot themselves out of a tree. Did he have a catapult up there? Was it a squirrel gun?

Whatever the answers are, they are lost to the mists of time, but the questions remind me of how important it is to have people who can carry memory with us, laughing, and talking. Remembering when...

Lady Slippers Death March or Why You Should Only Hike with Photographers

 

During one of my outside-between-rain-showers-adventures I went on a “little” hike -- in search of Lady Slipper orchids. My friend Cathy had told me of a simple path that was full of them, so Mark and I decided to go explore one Sunday. We wandered to and fro, exclaiming with delight at all the Lady Slippers we discovered. Here a clump, there a clump, everywhere a clump-clump. It was truly amazing how many we saw. 

Mixed in with our Lady Slipper sightings were the occasional Trillium—what my dad Willis always referred to as “Easter Lilies,” and in my heart, I still call them that. Some had already begun to turn lavender, but many of them were still that fresh, clean white of a new bloom. Each new discovery was a joy.

Like Hansel and Gretel, we wandered on and on, over hill and dale; up hill, and uphill, and up more hills-- until I finally figured out that Mark was cleverly using my love of Lady Slippers to counteract my strong dislike of “elevation gain.”

If you’ve ever hiked with me, you know I prefer the kind of hikes where “elevation gained” does not interfere with my ability to tell stories, i.e. make me gasp for air. I like gentle hikes—actually I prefer the term “walks”—and long stories. Mark had outwitted me by using the lure of “the next patch” of Lady Slippers so well that it was only when we were headed down that I noticed that the path was kind of steep and had been “up” most of the way. He’s very clever like that.

What he might not realize is that two people can play that game. While he was coaxing me ever upward with blossom after blossom, I was slowing him down by pointing out various bits of flora and fauna—actually I don’t remember seeing any fauna; all that storytelling had provided them ample warning of our advance. But any unusual flora was enough to stop his otherwise relentless ascent.

Look at that moss! Looks fern-like, doesn't it?

 

As a photographer, he loves to capture unique angles and framing just the right shot often interrupts his version of the Bataan death march, so I have learned to keep my head on a swivel and my eyes peeled. Together, we combined our personal gifts to hike nearly eight miles—most of it uphill both ways-- photograph various bits of moss and fern and fungi, all without the other noticing how high we’d climbed or how slowly we’d done it. 

Look at the texture of that bark!

Win/win, not winded.

Spring Sky

Procrastination, Eventually

 I can’t remember what my opening sentence was going to be about because instead of typing it, I got up and got a handful of peanut butter M&Ms. Buy the time I got back to the keyboard the idea I had had melted away...the chocolate of ideas melts in your brain... if you don’t have words in your hand-- worth two in the bush? Brain? ---strike that. That’s lame. Let me try again.

Every week I intend to write my column in a timely manner. “Timely” often ends up being one of those “eye of the beholder” flexible words; it means different things to different people. I have yet to decide on a final definition. Procrastinating on defining “timely”—classic Sue!

I’m also procrastinating in other areas. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that here we are, up to our eyeballs in April, and I have only purchased two—that’s right T-W-O—flowers. Usually, by the end of April, I have a couple of boxes full of tender blooms sheltering on my porch, waiting for the last of the frost to move on so I can safely plant them in my pots and baskets and beds. Two flowers—nemesia “Babycakes’; three tomato plants, two sweet peppers, one Poblano pepper, and fistful of seed packets for my straw bales comprises the totality of my plant purchases for 2021.

Sigh. I think I have Spring Fever. I can’t seem to settle on a task for long without wandering outside—between rain showers—and looking at all the growing things. It’s an on-going argument with myself not to hop in the car and go on an epic nursery tour...First I’ll stop at DeGoedes and wander thru the green houses, then on to Bennie’s Gardens in Chehalis/Napavine. Perhaps a quick stop at Adna Floral, before hitting up Sun Birds garden department...Any hardware store, 4H plant sale, or garden club I pass on the way by is also fair game. Please, take my money-- I must have all the pretties.

If my travels take me south, I’ll swing in to Tsugawa Nursery in Woodland. North, and I’ll find my way to Windmill Gardens in Sumner. But why go home yet—I’m this close to Flower World in Maltby, might as well keep on going. If you don’t know where Maltby is I’ll bet your Siri does. Ask her, she’s quite the enabler and Flower World is worth “getting around to.”

 Eventually.