October 23, 2020 by fleurdelysfarm

Fleur-de-Lowcountry

My buddy Wally and I were having an email conversation about grief (his mom died at 99; mine at 91) and he basically said, grieve all you want but you must take care of yourself.

“You sound like my daughter, always preaching self-care.”

“And your daughter is right,” he replied. “Come take a swim.”

I had been saying that October was my favorite month for swimming at the Isle of Palms, S.C.—water warm and crowds gone.

Now most mornings in State College I just head down the road three miles to the YMCA for an easy lap swim. Wally’s casual invitation switched me into overdrive. Why not take a Lowcountry vacation, stroll on the beach, and wander down the Charleston Battery? Isn’t that self-care? OK, 739 miles of driving for a dip in the water is a bit much, but …

Well, the first thing I did was share my impulsive thought with my kids so I wouldn’t chicken out. They were encouraging.

So … I packed my bathing suit, several face masks, a couple towels, a bag of dog food, a massive amount of fruit and orzo salad, and off we went.

I guess this is a good time to explain that I am no stranger to the South Carolina Lowcountry. In the early 1970s I took summer classes at The College of Charleston (where I met Wally). I graduated from Penn State after winter term, so that March I loaded up my Datsun station wagon and headed south.

I had a job interview at The News and Courier. The newspaper didn’t have an immediate opening but the managing editor pulled a few strings and got me a waitressing job to tide me over until I could join the Trends (debutantes, brides, and features) Department later that summer. Long story short, I stayed until 1980 when I sold my house in Mount Pleasant, across the harbor from Charleston, and returned to Pennsylvania.

Forty years later I’m standing on the doorstep of the Mount Pleasant home where Wally and his wife Michele live. I’m wearing a mask. He isn’t. We agree to social distance without masks. They invited me (and Sandy 4.0) for shrimp and grits (a traditional coastal dish). Michele loves dogs and they have a fenced-in yard that leads to their dock and motorboat.

Michele spent an awfully long time cooking the grits, so Wally and I had time to catch up. He has two sons, 28 and 30; my son is 28 and daughter 30. His mother died a year and a half ago; mine, four months ago. As an executor, he had a house to sell and mountains of paperwork; I’m experiencing the same. His retirement date may shift a bit because of COVID-19 but he is close, maybe 6 months or so. I’m looking at 12/21—my retirement palindrome.

Wally was born and raised in Mount Pleasant—and never left. He is the assistant director of fishery management for S.C. Department of Natural Resources. But, as an authority on billfish (BIG predatory fish with a long dagger on their upper snouts, such as marlins and sailfish), he has travelled the world—China, Africa, Europe, Australia. When he was a youngster, he visited the Lehigh Valley and remembers going to Dorney Park. I told him when I worked as the Penn State Master Gardener Coordinator for Lehigh and Northampton counties I had a window that looked out at the Dorney Park roller coaster.

Dinner is an escape to the past. I can’t remember the last time I had grits. And dessert: Flourless chocolate cake with hand-whipped cream. Mmmm.

The following morning Sandy and I return for a two-and-a-half-hour motorboat tour with Wally at the helm.

He takes the twisty tidal waterways of Hobcaw Creek past Remleys Point, around Daniel Island, and who knows where else, and probably not in that order. We venture out of the estuary to the “new” bridge (completed in 2005) over the Cooper River and see the Charleston Harbor at a distance. The morning gusts are too rough to motor any closer.

Wally gives a running commentary in his 18.6 Sea Hunt (loved that show starring Lloyd Bridges) Triton as I hold Sandy, wrapped in a beach towel, shivering with temporary fright on my lap. When we go against the strong current, saltwater spray spritzes our cheeks.

Captain Wally points out dolphins dancing in front of us, pelicans diving for breakfast, and bald-headed wood storks and white egrets roosting in a tree, waiting to wade out for a low tide buffet of minnows, mullet, crabs, frogs, and aquatic insects.

Pal Wally updates me on our old haunts and friends. The Windjammer still exists (but I wouldn’t recognize it); Big John’s is gone. Sammy coaches high school basketball; Ken sells insurance, and Tate is an artist who makes much of his living selling reproductions of his Charleston scenes made into jigsaw puzzles.

Biologist Wally shows me a pole in the waterway where a tracking device records the tagged fish that swim by, charting their migration. One of the big challenges of COVID shut-downs has been getting the manpower to replace the batteries on these devices so SCDNR doesn’t lose a year’s worth of data.

Homegrown Wally points out open lands that became golf courses. Million-dollar mansions. Infinity swimming pools. Boats tied up to elaborate docks that together cost more than many homes. He shows me an all-glass house on the marsh where he partied in high school.

And he talks about changes to the Lowcountry environment. He and Michele have spotted manatees in the Cooper River. Forty years ago, manatees never left Florida. They see the rising tides in their backyard and hear high water warnings issued for Charleston and other coastal areas. The water oaks skirting their home bear scars from Hurricane Hugo when it battered the coast in 1989.

It may have been a long drive for a dip in the Atlantic and laps in the hotel swimming pool lined by palmetto trees, but returning to South Carolina was so much more. Laurie Lynch

Mast Year: When we walked into Michele and Wally’s backyard after supper, I thought I heard fireworks in the far distance. Michele said the sound was from the live oak acorns dropping onto their shed’s tin roof. A mast year is one of those mysteries of the natural world when fruit, seed and nut production is especially high. We’re also having a mast year with oak trees in Central Pennsylvania. These “bumper crops” of hard mast occur sporadically with oak, hickory, beech and hazelnut trees, as well as soft mast for blackberries, blueberries and apples.

The Stats: When I left the Village of Mount Pleasant in 1980, the population was 14,464. Construction of the eight-lane Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge linking Mount Pleasant to Charleston was completed 15 years ago, replacing the two aging bridges I remember so well. Today, the population of Mount Pleasant has more than sextupled, topping 91,000. No wonder it took me two days to find my old house on McCants Drive.

Small World: Dave, one of the front desk clerks at the hotel where Sandy and I stayed, is a 1979 PSU graduate.

Firsts for Sandy 4.0: Automatic sliding glass doors at the hotel, elevator at the hotel, sleeping in a hotel, organic doggie biscuits for poolside dining, and romping on the sandy beach and surf of the Isle of Palms.

Sweetgrass Serenade: Sweetgrass, used to make baskets in the Lowcountry, was “starting to purple” while I was there. Earlier this year I wrote a blog on the book Braiding Sweetgrass, so the landscape sightings were even more meaningful and beautiful.

October 11, 2020 by fleurdelysfarm

Fleur-de-Quilt

Sunflowers There is something about a farm that stitches through the fabric of life.

Fleur-de-Lys Farm so entwined around my soul that when I left the Maxatawny Township farm I kept the email address and blog, thinking that Fleur-de-Lys isn’t so much a place as it is a state of mind.

Fleur-de-Lys is abloom on Marina’s rooftop garden in Ghent, Belgium. It followed me to Central Pennsylvania. It filled the Ag Progress Days Master Gardener high tunnel with a jungle of luffa vines and grew rows of garlic, tomatoes and peppers at Limerock Court Community Garden. And now, after my mother’s death and the sale of our family home, it promises to come with me on a new adventure.

Then, just this week, I got a message from long-ago customer, Valerie. Fleur-de-Lys Farm inspired a quilt on display at Kutztown Community Library. The library lost $22,000+ during the pandemic lockdown, Valerie explains. The quilt she made had been hanging at the library before COVID-19 and, if sold, she would have donated a percentage of the sale to the library.

“Nothing like a pandemic to change your perspective on things,” Valerie writes. She suggested that the library raffle off the quilt and the total proceeds could go toward the library. Irises

It took Valerie about six years to complete the quilt. It is a patchwork of gardens with bold sunflowers, birdhouses and birds (shapes made from cookie cutters), and hand-appliquéd and hand-embroidered flowers of many shapes and colors. There is a central cathedral window, a rainbow, and hens, rabbits, cats, and ducks.

“It has everything I have and wish to have in my backyard,” Valerie writes.

She first told me about the quilt back in 2010, and here we are, 10 years later, and I’m writing a check for raffle tickets. ($2 for 1 ticket, $5 for three.) Besides a love for the natural world and recipes, Valerie and I share an addiction to books, and, yes, a fondness for the Kutztown Community Library. Valerie’s Backyard Garden Sampler (70”x88”) is on display at the library and pictured in the October at the Library email newsletter (I included two detail shots). The drawing will be April 8, 2021, and tickets are available at the library, 70 Bieber Alley, Kutztown, PA 19530. Laurie Lynch

Support Your Local Library: My local library, Schlow Centre Region Library, has been instrumental in getting me this far through the pandemic. Although it closed its doors during the shutdown, I was able to download e-books for my Kindle and with its partial opening I’ve also borrowed a few hold-in-my-hands, old-fashioned books.

Just for kicks, here is a list my Top 20 books (from the library and the libraries of friends) I read during the pandemic. Maybe my list will inspire a virtual or personal visit to your nearest library:

A Dublin Student Doctor, Patrick Taylor; The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins; With No One As Witness, Elizabeth George; Queen Bee, Dorothea Benton Frank; Someone, Alice McDermott; Unorthodox, Deborah Feldman; Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Francine Prose; Unto the Sons, Gay Talese; The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert; Farm City, Novella Carpenter; Leaving Tangier, Tahar Ben Jelloun; Meet Me at the Museum, Anne Youngson Anders; Dare to Lead, Brené Brown; Resisting Happiness, Matthew Kelly; Manuscript Found in Accra, Paulo Coelho; Elon Musk, Ashlee Vance; Untamed, Glennon Doyle; Paris, The Novel, Edward Rutherfurd; The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, Joe McGinniss; and The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett.

Garlic To-Go: Not knowing exactly where I’m headed in 2021, I’ve planted my garlic in moveable Fleur-de-Lys farm containers. And yes, where I go, Sandy 4.0 and my garlic will be right by my side.

October 2, 2020 by fleurdelysfarm

Fleur-de-LoveLetters

It was during our second Great Divide that I found them. Ten love letters. Ever since, I have been traveling through time.

My four sisters scheduled two long weekends, one in August and one in September, when they would drive from Florida, Connecticut, Philadelphia, and the other side of town to redistribute my mother’s household and personal goods.

As we sorted through stacks of scarves, baskets of belts, recipes from the Greenbriar Cooking School circa 1978, my paternal great-grandmother’s will (hand-written in Italian), and a newspaper clipping from 1973 announcing a local girl swimming for PSU with a photo of yours truly in a tank suit and racing cap, I overheard one of my sisters say, “Mother really was a packrat.”

But these ten letters, they are gold.

The letters were filed away in one of four (4) four-drawer filing cabinets. The envelopes and letters were yellowed; some with a few brown stains. Each had a single, purple, 3-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp. All were addressed to Miss Marie Wrobleski, 426 Second Street, Braddock, Pa, in my father’s beautifully legible cursive.

They begin June 26, 1952, and end two months later, August 18. Dick was 30; Marie, 24. They met on a blind date in May while Marie was teaching school in State College. Dick was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate. After World War II, his uncles in the Lehigh Valley, expecting a boom in construction as The Pennsylvania State College grew, asked him to open a State College office of Duggan & Marcon.

Just to read the words addressing my mother as “Dearest Marie”, “Darling Marie”, “Marie Darling”, and, my favorite, “Sweets”, fills my heart with honey.

The letters are snapshots of the times, and of timelessness.

Soon after their initial date, Marie moved to her parents’ home in Braddock for the summer. Apparently, during a phone call after her arrival, Marie gave Dick permission to write to her at home.

“It was a relief to learn that it’s all right to write. I have wanted to so many times, but restrained myself.” So polite.

In the letters there is chatter about golfing at the club (Centre Hills Country Club), plans to swim after the 4^th of July Golf Tournament, and a report of one of Dick’s golfing buddies, Jack Harper, having a “terrible case of poison ivy.” Jack, a State College native, opened a men’s store called Jack Harper’s in 1926. In 2020, the store, named Harpers, remains, although owners and location have changed.

“I continue to get the business from the caddies, but I love it. I’m rather proud that they like you, the girl I love.”

As we sat around the dinner table discussing the contents of the letters, my sisters remarked that we never knew our dad was such a golfer—before his five daughters came along and arthritis set into a bothersome football knee injury.

Before we get too far into this love story, let me explain one detail. My dad had a few strikes against him. He was EYE-talian and my mother’s family was Polish. But the real problem was that my father was divorced. The big D. For a devout Catholic family, that was trouble. And Marie was their baby. To this day my main memory of my maternal grandmother, Stella Scholastica Ciepcielinski Wrobleski , is her sighing like Eeyore on almost every occasion with two simple words, “Poooor Marie.”

Marie and Dick kept seeing each other.

“I can’t wait until the train arrives in Altoona,” my father wrote, anticipating my mother’s visit from Pittsburgh. (Imagine, trains were the mode of transportation for many in those days.)

My dad had a car—I’m not sure what make or model—but he often drove “the boys,” as he called his golfing friends, to out-of-town tournaments. According to his letters, all of the wives of the “boys” wanted Dick to get married so that their husbands wouldn’t arrive home so late.

Cars and parking tickets appear to be important to my dad. He wrote of seeing my mom’s landlady downtown but he only waved “Hello” because, “I was fighting time against the parking meter—and made it too, to the disappointment of O.K. Brown.”

Actually the parking enforcement officer was named O.F. “Oakey” Brown. Sgt. Brown later made quite a name for himself within the State College police department as a training officer. After he died of cancer in 1981, the Sgt. O.F. “Oakey” Brown Memorial Award was established for dedicated officers on the force. I, being a police reporter during that time, wrote at least one article on the award. I didn’t know then that my father lived in fear of the man and his pad of parking tickets.

Oh politics, we can’t escape you. In a letter postmarked July 9, 1952: “I suppose you have had your eyes glued to television and are taking in the antics of the convention. I’ve watched a good deal.” About two weeks later, “Are you satisfied with the way the Democratic and Republican conventions turned out?”

After a little investigating, I found that both the Republican and Democratic national conventions were held in the International Amphitheatre in Chicago that summer. The Republicans, from July 7-11, came away supporting Dwight D. Eisenhower; the Democrats held their convention July 21-26, and the delegates nominated Adlai Stevenson on the third ballot.

Marie was offered a teaching job for the new school year in nearby Mifflin County but decided not to take it, much to Dick’s relief. He was holding out for State College. Apparently she was too.

In State College, Dick’s home and office shared a house on Hillcrest Avenue. And I thought my working at home in 2020 was a new thing. Both generations found that while a home office has its pluses, there are a few minuses too—sometimes you just need to get out. In midsummer Dick wrote one of his letters to Dearest Marie stretched out, a little uncomfortably, on the lawn, writing as sunlight faded to darkness.

I can’t tell you how many times my parents swore to me that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” during my teen-age and college years. Well, during that summer of ’52, they sure weren’t absent from each other for very long stretches.

In a letter on July 31 Dick enclosed a $20 check for Marie to buy four “good” tickets for the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game Aug. 11, for the two of them, plus my dad’s friend “Bauch” and his date. The Cincinnati Reds played the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field with 9,304 people attending. The score was 10-4, with the Reds winning. I have a feeling Dick and Bauch couldn’t have cared less.

A thread of drama weaves throughout the summer. In several letters Dick mentions trying to “get information” and hoping to have an answer by Aug. 12. In his last letter, Dick said he drove to Bellefonte to see a Father Fremont. “Things don’t look too good but he is far more broadminded and understanding than most lay Catholics.”

At least I know the rest of the story.

Dick and Marie were married November 15, 1952, by a justice of the peace, five-and-a-half months after their first date.

As my parents were also fond of saying, “Love conquers all.”

When I was a senior in high school my parents receive word that my dad’s first marriage had been officially annulled. Dick and Marie were finally able to exchange vows in Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church. Laurie Lynch

Sneaky Marie? After spending several days reading and re-reading these letters, and deciphering Wrobleski family history, I stumbled on the realization that perhaps my mother was less than honest when she suggested to my dad that it was OK with her parents for him to write to her during that summer of 1952. The Wrobleski family lived at 428 Second Street, the brick house my grandfather built. My dad’s 10 letters were addressed to 426 Second Street—the next-door neighbor’s. Poooor Stella.

Nature’s Mystery Solved: Occasionally during the last few months I’ve heard an incessant chirping of a bird’s call—tat tat tat tat. I look up in the trees or above the pergola, but never spot the bird. It is loud and distinctive, but I couldn’t figure out the source.

During the last Lemont Village Green Concert of the summer, the group Simple Gifts was playing world folk music. Linda (who lives in Lemont) and Karen (who lives a few miles down the road in Houserville) are amazingly talented. They play the violin, guitar, mandolin, and banjo, sing a little, and continue to entertain with instruments including the hammered dulcimer, the bowed psaltery, and the spoons. During one piece, Karen remarked that the bird chirping loudly in the tree was like playing with a slightly off-rhythm drummer. It was the same bird song I’ve been chasing all summer.

Well, luckily, a fellow in the audience (we were outside, masked and socially distant, of course) shouted out that the sound was not a bird; it was a chipmunk. Well, I never … but I went home, got on my laptop and listened to a National Geographic recording of chipmunk trills and chucking, brought about by the little guys protecting their territory from hawks, cats, and strumming musicians. Bingo. Check out our local treasures at http://simplegiftsmusic.com and Google “chipmunk sounds”.