DONIS CASEY: Write Errant

Yesterday was Don’s birthday. He made it to another one, (whew!) though it was touch and go, there, for a minute. We actually had a very nice day. The weather was wonderful, as it is in Southern Arizona this time of year. Don is doing infinitely better than he was in January and February, but he’s still housebound, so rather than make anything nutritious and healthy, I bought some onion rings and we pigged out on veggie burger and onion rings. Then, in keeping with his theme of “It’s My Birthday So To Hell With It,” I bought a mini cake and some ice cream at Albertsons and got a copy of “Nuremberg” from Hollywood video. We spent the evening eating corn chips, jicama, apples and dips, followed by ice cream and cake, and watching Alec Baldwin play a Supreme Court Justice who prosecutes Hermann Goering. And thus passes another year.

I had a good time on the 17th with my Type M 4 Murder blogmates, Deborah Turrell Atkinson and Vicki Delany. I wrote a little about it at www.typem4murder.blogspot.com, if you are interested, Dear Reader. I begin to feel a little bit like a fraud, passing myself off as a writer these days, since I haven’t been able to seriously do my work for a couple of months. I’ve spent the past week getting our taxes together. I’ve been thinking of Alafair today, though. I’m considering her garden. After they retired off the farm, my grandmother converted the entire back yard of her little house in Haskell, OK, into a truck garden, and raised very nearly all the food that she and my grandfather consumed. My mother also kept a very large garden in the back yard of the house I grew up in. Every year, late in the winter, she hired a man with a small tractor to come in and plow up her plot for her. She grew bushels of veggies, and spent days and days throughout the summer and fall canning and freezing produce.

Sadly, the green thumb gene seems to have been bred out of my generation. None of us garden. In fact, in spite of the fact that I try on regular occasions to grow stuff, I find that I have a particular talent for killing plants.

I am glad to report, however, that my brother, who would be perfectly content if he never had to set foot outdoors, married a woman with the Gift. They now own the house my mother lived in, and thanks to my sister-in-law, the gardens flourish.