Lovely Saturday... in These titles mean nothing.

I brought one of the Keenan peonies in for the table. Keenans were the people who lived here before we did. They were a big family descended from early settlers in the county. Patrick Keenan is reputed to be the first naturalized citizen - in my father’s story another man who arrived after Patrick was the first white man in Allamakee County and he slept in Keenan’s straw stack. That story is apocryphal. Or maybe just racist against the Irish. Though the teller was Irish himself. Oh well the Irish are like that. Honest to a fault.

One Memorial Day we took flowers around to the graves and found Patrick Keenan’s grave at Cherry Mound. I left him a tin can with some late daffodils and lilacs.

Spring is here in its glory. The roses by the barn are blooming. The lawn needs to be mowed always. The corn is six inches tall and the beans are making rows.

The cows and calves who summer on rented pasture have been separated and paired from the rest of the cattle and taken for trailer rides. The first hay has been cut. The new baler - well not exactly new but new to us - is going for it’s trail run this afternoon. Laundry is drying happily on the clothesline.

The deck flowers are doing pretty well. We had a rainy week when I didn’t have to water them but I’m now back into the daily swing of it. I need to get some more Miracle Gro or maybe I’ll make tea from the cattle manure behind the barn. The German ivy is almost lush. The geraniums are almost in bloom and the two begonias are coming back to life.

I didn’t shop for any plants this year.. I noticed Pop’s plant place in town is having a dollar sale but I wasn’t tempted. I never got to the greenhouse between Dorchester and Spring Grove either. I guess I’ll stick with what I have. I’m too lazy and too allergic and too busy to spend much time with plants anyway.

Note: the pea tree is doing well. Jim gave it a shot of manure and mulch - we did it last year too. The pea tree is a Keenan plant too. It looks like it might be a relative of mimosa. It grows like a lilac from woody stems from the ground to about the same height as lilacs. It has yellow pea like flowers that mature into seed pods. It’s been north of the kitchen window and has survived severe cut backs and general neglect. A few years ago it started looking peaked. And last year it was just about dead. The woman at the greenhouse between Dorchester and Spring Grove told us to work up the soil around it and mix in fertilizer. She recommended a bring back from the dead plant treatment that is available at WalMart. We got some but tried the digging and manure thing first and the tree put up new shoots. I still have the WalMart magic potion. I must be saving it for another crisis.

I cleaned a bit this morning. Well I cleaned a bit yesterday when I got home from work. I washed dishes and swept and cleaned off the counter and the kitchen table and did some laundry.... yesterday. Today I organized the nickel cans and sacked up the newspapers and catalogs and magazines I’m willing to part with. I got Jim to help me clean up the laundry room - the cats had knocked stuff over. I put cans and glass and the other stuff in the trunk of the Buick.

I went to the recycling center north of town. It is a nice place and it’s open Saturday mornings. I am listening to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men in the car. Another violent shoot ‘em up. The library has a lot of them. I’m not a fan but I get sucked in. Oh well.

After the trash place I dropped off a sack of nickel cans at the can place. I put them in Joana’s name.

The car wash is next to the can place and I washed the Buick. Poor Buick is getting rusty on the rocker panels and along the wheel wells. It’s a beautiful car though. It’s a Century - it came from New York. A friend of Jim’s is a bit of a car jockey and he got it for his wife when she was delivering mail on a country route. It got a bit banged up from getting close to mail boxes. I’ve had my share of dents and dings too. I took out a whole mailbox one night I fell asleep coming home from work at 3 am. I skidded on really bad ice in the driveway and hit the corn crib. I turned too sharp in the yard and hit an invisible bale trailer. I had to get all those things fixed. Kious and people with a long German name that begins with B and a distant Regan cousin all had a hand it putting it back together. Oh and it’s had its share of trips to Larre the mechanic and to someone else. So.....

The Buick works for a living. And it’s a beauty. It has pretty lines and it’s a pretty color. I have some affection for the beast.

After the car wash I went to the library where I had several nice conversations (with a former fellow worker at Northern who I hadn’t seen in a long time. with the neighbor’s daughter who works at the library and who is helpful - she wants me to get an ipod so I can download books through the library and play them in the Buick, with a semi-retired doctor who was volunteering at the book sale - he was bored and we covered a lot of ground, with Joana who turned up the book sale, with Jim’s land-lords’s wife who took over for the doctor) that I could tell you about but my fingers are getting tired. I ended up buying a bag of books from the downstairs sale.

• Wambaugh’s *Finnegan’s Wake *

• a book of piano music - country hits

• a damaged county history that I may be able to tape up with Kolor Graphics tape

• Jane Smiley’s Thousand Acres and Moo. I’ve read them but they are Iowa books and I need to own them (and reread them or lend them or give them away or all three)

• A Literary History of Iowa - yeah well…

• The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs by Josephine Herbst

• Twilight at Monticello - the final years of Thomas Jefferson by Alan Pell Crawford

• True at First Light by Hemingway - after he was dead.

• A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester. I love Manchester. This is about the middle ages

• and a little art book about Degas - the man and his art.

For five bucks you could fill a nice black and orange bag. I only had a ten so I donated the extra five. I passed up Anita Bryant’s book. And several hundred others.

Then I bought groceries and then I came home.

Things I didn’t do:

• stop at Pop’s plant sale

• get an ice cream cone

• stop at the preview for the big antique and clock museum action

I guess that is it.

Except a picture of a train in Marquette last Sunday:

And a series from the Logger’s opener a week ago Thursday:

This little girl and Logger Dog had a good time.

This was the home opener and the Loggers beat the Rafters (as in river rafters - at first I thought they were roof beams and then I thought they were Rapters as in hunting birds but it turns out they were Rafters - like Huck and Jim). It was an exciting game and the crowd had a good time. After this fame they lost two games with opposing scores of 14!!. But it’s fun. It’s baseball. These are college kids and the point is for them to have a good summer. The team’s website says so.

“