Jane's World

Buffalo (not sheetrock) in McIntosh County

Jane — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:14:40 +0000

“What are they like?” I asked the woman at the Georgia Buffalo Ranch on Highway 17 in McIntosh County as we scooted through the electric wire that, she assured me, was not activated. I still look for sheetrock when driving down Hwy. 17, thanks to Melissa Faye Greene and her incredible book about a people and a county, “Praying for Sheetrock.” But now there are buffalo, a couple miles south of the Smallest Church in America.

“Aggressive,” Sherry DiSimone said without hesitation. “They’re aggressive.”

That’s when I changed my mind and handed her the bag of treats I just bought for $2. Something about their long, thin grey tongue (“just like a giraffe’s tongue,” she said). And their long wooly coat, which looks like dreadlocks. A little scary. Each one of those suckers weighs in the range of 1,850 pounds. They are broad in the shoulder with giant humps, square faces and bulging eyes. There are 40 buffalo at the Ranch, including eight bulls. We were feeding bull No. 5, but Get Her Done was lumbering up from the back of the pack.

The good news is the country’s buffalo population is up to 600,000 from an 1847 low of 800. The bad news is the cost of a skull: they start at $130.

Two little wires between them and us

A conversation

Jane — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:10:48 +0000

If you were a wild garlic plant plunked down in the middle of a city next to a sister garlic what would you be talking about? These two plants appear to be deep into something heavy — one, gone to seed, over a certain age, a little long in the tooth, the other, on the cusp, ready to burst forth, filled with energy, but not sure what to do with it. These plants just appeared. I think they must be elephant garlic. It might be time to unearth them and divide them up. I can’t find any evidence in reading that they propagate from seeds — only the root, which we love to eat — but that just doesn’t seem right to me. Wish I had an answer. Anyone know anything?

A tasty garlic-filled confab

Follow the dots — or dirt

Jane — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:00:27 +0000

The resolution lasted two days and two hours: take off your shoes before you come in the house. That’s the secret to a clean house, right? Other than dogs, cooking, yanking vegetables straight from the dirt and bringing them inside to clean. Ah, the beauty of clean surfaces, fan blades, couch crevices, the bottom of table legs — especially after the four-hour, deep-dish, paying-someone-to-help cleaning session. But what about when you’re late and you don’t have time to untie and kick those puppies off at the door? Or when you have to pee like a race horse? What about when you forget? Huh, what then?

Busted

A frangipani goes north — and lives

Jane — Sun, 12 May 2013 12:58:23 +0000

What a shock to see a frangipani in a woman’s garden in Savannah. Note: Frangipani as in plumeria, distant cousin of the oleander. Double shock when this India-born gardener who smuggled plants from her home country gave me one she had potted up. Triple shock that the gifted tree lasted through the winter inside Carmela’s studio with no water. Now, outside, it looks healthy and is putting out a new leaf a day. I met this tree when I lived in Key West. And people in Savannah think jasmine has an intoxicating smell! What until they get a whiff of this. There was a beautiful yellow-blooming tree outside the pink library on Fleming Tree in Key West. People would make leis of the leaves. Maybe I will too this summer.

Tomfoolery!

Jane — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:24:13 +0000

When you have a very public garden (although garden may be putting too fine a point on it; play-space may be a better term, although there is a giant compost pile, there is a canoe to collect rain, and there are things that grow, including, currently, collards, fennel, baby broccoli and bunches of seeds), you have to expect some foolishness, some playfulness. And I do. This time after taking a workshop with Bob Rizzo about assembling unlike items — like drilling and gluing a pig’s head on a stick — I put the final project in the garden only to pull up one day and see someone else had another vision, another use for the skull, something involving the plastic legs of a doll. Tomfoolery strikes again! Keep the party alive, that’s what I say.

Tomfoolery strikes again!

My first tattoo

Jane — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:45:30 +0000

All right, so the image of Flannery O’Connor is on my truck, not my arm or back or neck. But it feels like a tattoo. It’s a stencil drawing of that my friend Christine Sajecki put together for the annual Flannery O’Connor parade we put on every year. For this year’s parade, Christine marched around the square on stilts. Flannery lived in Savannah until she was 12 when her family moved to Milledgeville, Ga. Her childhood home is a museum. My favorite story about her comes from a nun at the nearby St. Vincent’s Academy. When the nun would come over to play with Flannery she’d find her in the bathtub surrounded by books. What a fearless writer. And she only lived until 39.

A tattoo of Flannery on my 1992 Isuzu truck

The great waiting period

Jane — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:01:05 +0000

This is the tough time. Waiting. For. Germination. Followed. By. Growth. The baby needs to put on a few pounds before anything else can happen. I’ve never done it this way before — handling those itty-bitty seeds with these chunky-monkey fingers, directing those DNA-puppies into a gaggle of black plastic thingeys, all before transplanting into the big pond. Before, I relied on willy-nilly circumstance of direct seeding. Whatever comes up is gravy. So far so good. So far the round hibiscus okra and sorrel seeds did their thing pretty quickly and have made it into the ground. Now i’m waiting on the eggplant, the peppers and the fennel. But the Mississippi brown cotton seeds I grew a few years ago? They’re going directly in the ground. Today.

The outdoor seed laboratory

The “S” word and bumping the app

Jane — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:10:41 +0000

It used to be the “L” word that people whispered. “L” for liberal (or lesbian). But today I ran into someone who whispered the “S” word, as in “S” for socialism. She and her daughter had just returned from a trip to Iceland. She raved about the utter beauty and the food and a smartphone app that helps Icelanders avoid accidental incest. With a population of 320,000, flirting and bedding down with a not-so-distant cousin is a very distinct possibility. Apparently the phone emits a warning alarm if the two people are related. As the slogan goes, “Bump the app before you bump in bed.”

But what really got her — and was making her re-entry all the harder — was how it felt to be in a socialist country that provided for children and old people. “Pretty depressing to come back and read the news,” she said.

Fashion and flowers

Jane — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:01:17 +0000

It’s always interesting to pull up to the garden to move a little dirt and to see a photo shoot underway. What’s the assignment, I know now to ask. Something with fashion and flowers, the one with the camera answers. This looks like a cool spot for a shot, I say. They don’t ask why I’m there. Once I pulled up on a Saturday morning and there were probably 20 people along with a portable wardrobe closet, several white drop cloths for proper lighting and a director with clipboard. Their assignment? To illustrate Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery.” I meant to go home and reread it but I never did.

First-year photography students

When the numbers don’t add up

Jane — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:23:00 +0000

Jane Fishman: When the numbers don’t add up

Savannah Morning News, April 28, 2013

By Jane Fishman

Math doesn’t lie.

Do memories lie? All the time.

And photographs? Do photographs lie? Is the pope Catholic? Of course photos lie, mostly because we Photoshop or throw away — excuse me: delete! — the bad ones, which means we don’t have to look at the ones of ourselves we don’t like.

What about what comes out of our mouths? Do those words lie? Are you kidding? Can you say obfuscate? Our words obfuscate, all the time, deliberately or not.

But math — not algebra or trigonometry or algorithms, just plain old addition and subtraction, as in carrying a number and crossing out another one and then doing a little borrowing — well, those numbers don’t lie. They don’t go backward, either. I can still remember wondering what we would call the years after 2000. Would we say twenty-one or two-thousand-one? It doesn’t seem much of an issue now.

But, really, people, a soon-to-be-birthday that numbers 69? How can this be and what can I do about it? In a way, I think 70 might be more exciting. This one is just a holding pattern. Most of the time I don’t know how old I am because the number is so ridiculously ridiculous. Most of the time when someone asks my age, I have to do the math in my head and then it just seems plain wrong and by that time in the conversation we’ve moved on to something else and the actual number never comes up. Now I just give the year — 1944 — and let the other person do the math since I’m usually wrong anyway.

In short, the person I see in the mirror is not the person I see in my head (even if she is shorter).

The only choice is to own the number, to celebrate the age. Hey, Alice Walker was born in 1944. She’s not doing so badly the last I looked. The last book she wrote — which I read — was about chickens. That sounds about right. And Tina Turner is 73. That’s a little shocking. (You’ve heard of Tina Turner, right?) And my old friend June Millington — a Facebook freak and a rock ‘n’ roll singer who was in one of the first all-girl rock bands (Fanny) and is now all white-headed — just turned 65. And she is all over the number. No reconstructive math for June.

It doesn’t help that a few days ago when I was rooting around a friend’s garden looking for some errant horsetail — which I gave him decades ago (when you start talking decades that should be the first clue for the 69 thing) and which have become the butt of many jokes since the thing at one time took over his front yard — a neighbor passed and asked me, “Oh, are you Tom’s mother?”

Tom, I might add, is about eight years my junior.

I tried to resurrect something my mother said when we were riding in an elevator in her old folks’ home and someone asked me if I were her sister: “Don’t worry about that,” she’d say. “She can’t see anyway.”

I know this about being 69. I’m a lot more careful about my teeth. I don’t even use them to bite my cuticles anymore, let alone try to open bottles.. And I have a little less faith in gold fillings. I thought they were supposed to be forever. Not. My advice to anyone thinking of going into medicine? Consider dentistry. You’ve got a sure population.

Other than that I have no advice, except never say, “Have went” or “Him and me,” and when in doubt about the apostrophe just leave it out. Oh, and start putting money away for a dental implant. You’ll be needing one.

On the bright side, I just learned that the 3-year-old down the street told his daddy he wanted to “have a play date with Miss Jane?” What does age mean to him? Not a darn thing.