Memento Mori

Surprise! Just when I thought life boiled down to mask shopping, binge streaming, binge snacking, and mucking about in the yard, along comes this tidbit: There are things in my house and garden that can kill me.

This is not exactly bad news. I’ll explain.

Yes, it’s a bummer that in The Strangest Year Ever, we’ve shaved our lives down to the bare essentials, packed a go bag, tried not to breathe, and had to keep one eye on the window to watch out for the coming Fire Tsunami. It’s exhausting.

Then this happened: Just the other day I went out into the yard to take solace in the few hearty plants that have managed to struggle through another season of neglectful good intentions, and I came across a black widow spider.

Where we live, black widows—species Latrodectus—aren’t uncommon. You don’t often spot them because they’re shy and they like to hide away in dark netherworlds, such as crawl spaces. But they’re there.

I spotted her uncharacteristically strolling along an eave. I wasn’t entirely sure it was a BW, so I captured her in a glass jar so I could check out her underbelly. Sure enough, there was the telltale red hourglass shape. My first thought was, Good Lord, is there no escape from potential danger these days?

As it turns out, there isn’t. And that’s not a bad thing.

Sure, we try to mitigate risks. We try to keep stupid moves to a minimum. We wouldn’t, for example, wear a wetsuit made entirely of raw meat and then swim in shark-infested waters. Okay, maybe if Shark Week producers offered us a stunning amount of cash, but no, the vast majority of us wouldn’t risk it.

Yet we live in a world where our self-appointed tenure at the top of the food chain can be a matter of circumstance. Risk abounds. There are times when animals such as grizzly bears, great white sharks, mountain lions, and crocodiles occupy the top spot of the food chain hierarchy and relegate some unfortunate souls to the second tier known as “lunch.”

I don’t mean to be cavalier about it (although that’s a splendid-sounding word, “cavalier”) or dismissive of others’ misfortunes. But we desperately need these amazing creatures—they’re reminders that despite the “triumph of human evolution” (Joe McCarthy and daytime TV notwithstanding), we’re not the top bananas. Occasionally, we are eaten. And bitten—a diminutive black widow spider strolling along an eave is not in awe of us.

It’s a sensibility that has a name: memento mori. That’s Latin for “remember that we die.” It’s not a doom-and-gloom slogan. It’s a call to be vibrantly alive, to enjoy, to be kind, to partake, to savor, to be humble, and to get your bulbs in the ground before winter.

So what did I do with Ms. Widow? I thought briefly of dumping her over the fence onto my neighbor’s property. Hey, what are neighbors for if not to provide a little memento mori? But those folks are too nice—well, fairly nice—so I didn’t do that. Instead, I drove her up into the woods and let her go in the deep brush where I hope she establishes a nice web and enjoys an endless supply of hapless bugs. Part of me wonders if she might find her way back to our house, like those stories of lost schnauzers who travel thousands of miles back to their hometowns. I could picture her showing up at our front door, carrying three or four tiny hobo bags on sticks slung over multiple shoulders, politely knocking and announcing, “Remember me? I’m back!”

Fun bonus fact: I found another poisonous arachnid, a spider with the curiously unhelpful name of false brown widow. Steatoda is often mistaken for a cousin of the black widow—the real brown widow—which it’s not at all. See? Anyway, it’s got some venom but not as much as a brown widow, which it isn’t. This Steatoda was under the wooden bin where I coil the garden hose. I didn’t feel compelled to capture this widow imposter and transport her to a distant locale. Instead I took her picture (above), eased the bin back down so as not to squish her, and thought, “Live long and prosper, little Stea!”

Stay safe everybody!

Ridin' the Wild Leon

It’s the doldrums of summer (in so many ways, n'est-ce pas?) and time to point with a certain amount of pride to the things that are tres manifique in our garden, namely Leontodon.

Why the French? Hey, pourquoi pas? Anyway, once you get started on www.translate.google.com it’s hard to stop. Especially in a doldrum.

Back to Leontodon (and not a moment too soon). This perky little yellow-topped flower grows like a weed. That’s because it is a weed. In our yard it enjoys a certain late-season dominance mostly because I don’t feel like weeding and also because we’re PC and we let our grass go dormant on account of we don’t want to use up too much water because the Colorado River is drying up. We are not connected to the Colorado River system, in fact we’re hundreds of miles away, but we live in an arid summertime climate and it’s the thought that counts. Bonus: I don’t have to mow it, either, not that I feel like it.

So we let our grass endure a slow and tortuous moisture starvation until it’s as dry and crispy as a fresh-out-of-the-bag Tim’s salt-and-vinegar potato chip (mmm!) This deliberately conscious water-conserving decision—some would say neglect—turns our yard into a crunchy brown wasteland by August.

Almost.

To the botanical rescue gallops Leontodon, drought-defiant, stubborn, broad-leafed and well-deserving of its reputation as a crappy weed. No self-respecting homeowner would allow such a plethora of botanical low-lifes to populate their lawn (we have hundreds). However, in my defense I must say that sitting in the shade of the front porch eating whole wheat flakes with blueberries and yogurt and watching honeybees land on Leontodon flowers so that even their tiny bee-weight causes Leontodon’s long stems to bend and swing in wild arcs so the bees have to hang on like little rodeo riders is pretty good doldrum entertainment.

Leontodon is often called a “false dandelion” and that’s a claim to fame for a buttload of other plants: Hypochaeris radicata, Agoeris, Crepis, Hieracium, Nothocalais, Pyrrhopappus, and of course Scorzoneriodes (but you knew that). Several of these other species have made the noxious weed lists of various states, so you can get a good idea of the type of plant we’re dealing with here.

Cute Wikipedia fact: Leontodon is also called “hawksbits” because back in mediaeval times it was thought that hawks ate Leontodon to improve their eyesight. Apparently, you can make up any historical fact as long as you attribute it to mediaeval times.

Want another Wikipedia amazement: Try this: “Recent research has shown that the genus Leontodon in the traditional delimitation is polyphyletic. Therefore, the former Leontodon subgenus Oporinia was raised to generic level.”

Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. That kind of stuff will set you right back into a doldrum. Time to pour some flakes, shake out the blueberries, and watch bees ride some wild Leontodon.

Attack of the Tiny Tomatoes

Is too much of a good thing a bad thing?

We put in a salsa garden. This is a big deal because previously we’d only put in flowers and shrubs and this was our first attempt at growing edibles. We planted cilantro, peppers, onions, and of course tomatoes. We stuck those little plastic identification markers near each seedling so we’d know a poblano from a Ponderosa pine. Personally, I was full of hope, and envisioned tender mounds of fresh, homegrown pico de gallo delivered to my lips via tortilla chip and quesadilla. I reveled in the idea of eating completely organic food that we’d made with our own plants (and about $900 worth of soil, compost, mulch, landscaping blocks and gravel). It was going to be magical, if not exactly cost-effective.

It almost was.

I blame it on Deb.

Sure, it started innocently enough. She wanted cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes are by far her favorite vegetable (they’re actually berries, but you knew that). She adores cherry tomatoes with an unnatural passion the origin of which I will only guess at—I’m not ready to plumb those depths just yet. Anyway, it was Damn the Romas, full cherries ahead!

Like the other salsa-intentioned things we’d planted—peppers, onions, cilantro—the cherry tomato plants started out diminutive and darling. There were two of them growing up about eighteen inches apart, their little raggedy-edged leaves waving in the breezes. I forget the name of the variety (what the frick happens to those little plastic markers anyway?) but I anticipated stout little bushes about three feet high.

Maybe you’ve seen The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the iconic Disney cartoon where Mickey Mouse tries to game the system by commanding brooms to carry buckets of water for cleaning, but then he can’t think of the shut-off spell and the brooms keep pouring water until everything’s awash in good intentions gone off the rails. Our cherry tomato plants were like that. They wouldn’t stop growing. Some kind of pump-you-up soil hormones made them hearty and swollen and so full of themselves that they began to subsume the entire salsa garden with tomato-ness. They surpassed three feet high, then four, then six. I had to surround them with stakes and rope them upright so they wouldn’t flop all over everything. They threw prodigious amounts of shade, stunting the peppers in their tracks, swallowing the cilantro whole, and driving the onions into oblivion.

Despite the collateral damage, it was something of a miracle that we had grown something that far exceeded expectations. As the tomatoes began to ripen we could barely keep up, trotting out to the plot morning and evening to pluck what would turn out to be hundreds of fat little red tomatoes. The plants were so full and branchy that picking tomatoes was an endless game of peek-a-boo. You’d pluck every ripe tomato you could see and then, just by shifting over a few inches, a whole new galaxy of bright red balls would appear. We ate tomatoes right off the vine and cut them in half and stuffed our salads full of little red hemispheres and those we couldn’t eat we heaped into various bowls and stored them in the refrigerator so that when you opened the door everything was so bright and glowing red it was like staring into the core of a nuclear reactor.

We did not, however, ever make the homegrown organic pico of our Dos Equis dreams. The other ingredients and pretty much our entire little veggie garden failed to survive the attack of the tiny tomatoes. Nevertheless, Deb was predictably ecstatic with our bumper monocrop, so that was in the plus column. And after a trip to the co-op for onions, cilantro, garlic, limes, chips, and a six-pack of tall necks, I was in the plus column, too.