103. Gardening

            I wrote about fresh garden tomatoes as being something I appreciate about being an American but I just love the entire aspect of gardening. I love getting out there, working the soil, planting flowers and vegetables, harvesting, watching the birds and bees enjoy what I’ve planted…I just love it all.

            I can spend five to six hours of a summer day just trimming hedges, weeding vegetable patches, redoing flower beds, tinkering in the shed and dreaming about what I’m going to do next. I love to watch viny vegetables from day to day. Squash and pumpkins will go from tiny little sprouts to green mounds in a fortnight. Then they start sprouting out tentacles, climbing into the corn, up the fence and into the hedges. Cucumbers are the same on a smaller scale. I will place wire near them so that they can climb up and be kept to a smaller area so I have room to grow other exciting things.

            The taste of fresh corn on the cob is something I love. There is nothing as sweet as corn picked just a few moments before you cook it. Candy cannot compare. In the autumn I cut the stalks down and put them into shocks to act as sentinels to our doors, blending with the colors of the golden leaves falling from the maples. If I’ve grown enough pumpkins, I’ll carve jack-o-lanterns and set them at the base of the shocks.

            And roses are always beautiful. Since most of mine are hybrids they keep me busy with pruning, winterizing, drying, and pest control. I love their beauty, their photogenic quality and their intoxicating scent. And there are always herbs. Fresh basil to mix in a salad with tomatoes. Sage blooming and attracting honey bees. Lavender, chives, tarragon, and mint all working together or apart in some concoction to sooth, make meats savory or refresh in a lemonade. And pansies and petunias and sunflowers and marigolds, iris, tulips, lilies—oh I could go on forever. Gardening is one of the best preoccupations of this American.

           

102. Garden Fresh Tomatoes

           

            I grew up eating lots of homegrown fruits and vegetables because we lived in an isolated area where it was hard to get good produce and the climate was relatively mild and conducive to good gardening. Where I live now is not quite as mild so it takes a little more work to get the same success with a garden, but I have a love for my home grown tomatoes. I know that’s certainly not an exclusively American thing, but it’s here and an enjoyable part of my life as an American.

            Grocery store tomatoes always look beautiful but most of them never seem to have any flavor. I don’t know why that is, but it is. The tomatoes grown in your back yard or garden always have incredible flavor. Ok, you can occasionally find a good pear shaped cherry tomato or a Roma in a produce aisle in winter, but even they made no comparison to those specimens you grow at home. A Beefsteak tomato vine ripened just before the first kiss of frost in September that you slice and salt reminds you just how wonderful summer has been and how bountiful the harvest is. But I never limit myself to Beefsteak.

            Because I live where winter is a reality and the summer growing season is short, I experiment with all sorts of tomatoes. Yellow Taxi are prolific and grow on smaller vines. Varieties developed for this part of the world out of local universities can also be successful. Why stick with traditional red when you can have things like Prudence Purple and Yellow Taxi? Give those green striped tomatoes a try. They may not look quite ripe but you’ll know when those stripes pop and the flesh has lost that hardness only to give way to a soft delight. Any of these can be cooked down to a wonderful tomato sauce. Got some stale French bread? Snip some basil, chop the tomatoes, slice some fresh mozzarella, and mix it all up in balsamic vinegar and olive oil for a great bread tomato salad. Let the end of your summer be a tomato paradise. We’re a melting pot so we should enjoy our American heritage of fresh garden tomatoes.

           

101. The Constitution

           

           One of the greatest things about the United States and being an American is our constitution. It makes us a nation that is open to debate ideas and even battle them out with rancor in courts that can dissipate that rancor, but all of this is conducted with a belief in the rule of law. We aren’t a people who just accept what’s given to us, but we have managed to figure out how to fight for those things we deem fair. We are a very diverse people who sometimes can be at great odds with one another, yet our founders discovered sensible ways to deal with our disputes. In the country we do our best to abide by the rule of law that we have established in our constitution.

            I’m not one to think everything about our constitution in its written form or its living form is perfect. The opening lines of the preamble are the poetry of which I cling when recognizing this, as do all Americans, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…” It may not be perfect what we’ve got here, but it’s pretty damned good.

            As a man of words I find great comfort in the American Constitution, its insurance for this people that we can abide together fairly peaceably even in the most trying of times. We are allowed to abide together from great diversity as one people: E Pluribus Unum. Sometimes it seems like we’re falling apart at the seams but that one blanket holds us together in our squirming, rioting, tumultuous beauty that one blanket that really seems to be seamless is our constitution. I know it is still more ideal than reality, but through it we can resolve our differences, hold onto our differences, soar like eagles or creep like worms but remain through it all one nation believing in justice even when we struggle to attain it. This is our constitution, we, the people, the American people.

            Enjoy this 243^rd American summer and our diverse independence.

100. Automobiles

          

            While I’m bragging up American ingenuity and inventions that make me proud to be an American I can’t forget the automobile, that most expensive of things that I haven’t figured out how to live without. I love my cars. Here in Idaho it would be very difficult to live without one. I couldn’t live as far from work as I do, nor could I do a zillion things that I do to live because there is absolutely no public transportation where I live. Second only to the train is the automobile for opening up the American continent to the countries that are now here. Luckily we still have plenty of places where cars can’t go, but even exploring those places would require a great deal of perseverance if you couldn’t get nearer them by car.

            I will say this. I am looking forward to the day that cars no longer leave such a huge carbon footprint and I’m quite glad that electric cars are becoming a viable option. But I still love cars because they get us around. I don’t think you’ll find a country in the world that doesn’t now use automobiles to get from place to place. And, of course, this clever invention all came from an American named Henry Ford.

            You know, I’m so thankful for my car that I think I’m going to take a drive today to see some of those trees that I was writing about in some of my previous entries. The automobile is just one more thing that reminds me of the many good things there are about this country of ours.