The Tao of Martha: My Year of LIVING

by Jen Lancaster

  I grit my teeth. “FYI? I hate you all. Anyway, some tick sensed an opportunity and took it. One minute I was smiting Japanese beetles, and the next, this mothersucking tick scurried up my open leg hole and into my flappy underpants and then embedded himself directly in my…my…West Virginia. I was tick-raped.”

  I pause so that they may take a moment to soothe me.

  They do not soothe me.

  However, they do cry.

  “Stop laughing at me, you assholes! Have you nothing productive to say about this?”

  Tracey is the first to compose herself. “I thought ticks were arthropods, not arachnids.”

  “You are wrong; I looked it up,” I curtly reply.

  “We get covered in ticks at the farm whenever we walk in the woods,” Stacey tells me. “Never had one in my pants, but I did have one in my bra not long ago.”

  I hiss, “It’s not the same. Your tick got to second; mine hit a home run.”

  Gina pats my hand. “I hope you don’t get West Nile.”

  I can feel myself scowling. “Well, shit, I never even thought about that. I’d be all, ‘I went on a happiness project and all I got was this lousy autoimmune disease.’”

  Tracey helpfully adds, “I’m sure that won’t happen.”

  “You think?” I ask, hopeful that she’s right.

  “Yeah.” She nods. “You’re probably more likely to get Lyme disease.”

  “Oh!” Stacey crows. “Like Irene on The Real World: Seattle!”

  Gina’s face registers a flash of recognition. “Remember when Stephen slapped Irene when she said he was gay? He’s gay now, by the way.”

  I bang my hand on the table. “Let me just say this—one of you motherfuckers is buying my burrito today.”

  “I think it’s my turn,” Stacey volunteers.

  “So, wait,” Tracey says, “you were killing beetles when this happened? You think all the bugs in your yard are in cahoots? Maybe this was insect-world payback, like when there’s a gang shooting.”

  Our meals come and Stacey adds, “Makes sense he headed for your underwear. Ticks do go for warm, moist places, you know.”

  Then I almost can’t each my lunch, what with my hands clapped over my ears and all.

  As I chew my burrito and glower at my friends, I make myself two promises:

  A) That somehow I’m weaseling out of paying for lunch next time, too, and, B) that I need to buy new underwear, like, today.

  Six pairs of Jockey for Her French-cut hipsters have just arrived. Look at them, all fresh and nice and opaque! I try on a pair and they’re snug in all the right ways. Nothing’s sneaking past these leg holes; I can assure you of that. And they don’t hang down in the back like a saggy diaper that leaks! This must be how Kate Middleton felt the day she received Diana’s engagement ring!

  Although I can’t credit Martha or her Tao with this particular win, I’m substantially happier than when I had nothing but raggedy drawers, so it still counts.

  I shall celebrate this major accomplishment by executing more beetles…in comfort and safety.

  “Mike’s worried about your cutting garden.”

  “Why, what’s wrong with it?” I ask. Laurie and I are at our weekly coffee date. “I feel like I’m doing everything right. I’m even dipping my shears in alcohol between bushes so I don’t cross-contaminate them, just like Martha says.”

  I’ve gone so far as to research rose hybridization and have plans to mate the Mr. Lincoln variety with the abundant blooming Betty White this spring. The process involves pistils, pollen sacs, male and female parts, and, let’s be honest, likely a bit of giggling on my part, but I’m serious about taking my roses to the next level.

  Laurie is not convinced. “Maybe I should check on them anyway. You free after coffee?”

  “Absolutely! Come over! I want you to see the hydrangea bushes I planted.”

  When Laurie was here a few weeks ago, she helped me to visualize what Martha’s always talking about—sometimes less is more. I had so many different things happening in my containers that they were more distracting than attractive. Laurie taught me the concept of giving the eye a focal point in the garden, and since then, I’ve concentrated more on using my plants to tell a color story, and less on HERE’S EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER PLANTED IN MY LIFETIME. LOOK AT IT, LOOK AT IT, LOOK AT IT! I’ve been delighted with the results.

  In planting the row of hydrangeas in calming greens and whites, I even got over my fear of having to put plants directly in the earth.

  Okay, so maybe I had Fletch plant them, but I wasn’t anxious by proxy, and that’s almost as good.

  The dogs have joined us outside, but it’s so hot that Libby’s lying under a tree while Loki takes a few laps in the pool. I admire that dog’s ability to regulate his own temperature. I’m less fond of his desire to spray us with pool water as he shakes off, but that’s kind of who he is. Maisy’s stationed on one of the lounge chairs, because she’s as fond of the sun as I am.

  Occasionally she’ll glance over at us, panting and smiling her enormous pit bull grin. She’s happy as a lizard on a hot, flat rock. She thumps her tail in greeting and I blow her a kiss.

  Laurie casts a discerning eye on the new growth. “I don’t like what’s happening with these buds. I see what Mike meant. Look at this little guy—he’s listless.” She palms a curled brown bud.

  “Is it the beetles? Because I’ve been relentless with them,” I tell her. “I have gone Hiroshima all over their asses. I’ve decimated the beetles’ infrastructure and they’re not going to rally for thirty years and until they invent a more gas-efficient vehicle. Then they’ll eventually rule again due to technology and superior math skills, but I’ll probably be dead by then, so it’s fine.”

  “Uh-huh, yeah, the beetles usually go for the more mature flowers. I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong here, but something doesn’t add up. Are you using the drip line all the time?”

  I shrug. “Well, yes and no. I mean, I do hose them occasionally, like to knock off the beetles.”

  “Show me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you show me how you water them?”

  “Uh, okay?” I pick up the hose and blast away. “See? Look at how the beetles fly off when I hit them with the pinpoint of water!”

  Laurie claps her hand to her suddenly pale forehead. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “What? No, this is how I always water. The water comes out too slow on all the other settings, and if I use the sprinkle option, it takes forever. Plus, if I spray them really hard, the watering job goes a lot faster and then I can get on with my day.”

  “Jen, you can’t spray the roses on that setting.”

  I’m genuinely puzzled.

  “Really? But I thought a powerful stream would make them stronger, like the plants have to toughen up because they’re being worked so hard.” I lift my arms up to shoulder level and make biceps to illustrate my point.

  As soon as these words fly out of my mouth, I realize exactly how stupid they sound when spoken aloud.

  “No, no! You’re making them weaker! They can’t stand up to that kind of water pressure! They simply cower because they have such skinny little necks. Is that how you sprayed your wildflower garden, too?”

  Mutely, I nod.

  “Well, now you know. Stop it. Stop watering this way. Never do it again, okay? Also, I’m going to call Mike now and let him know we figured out what was going wrong.”

  While Laurie places her call, I sit down next to Maisy. All I can do is laugh at myself—I honestly, truly thought I was doing what was best for my roses, and in so many complicated ways, I was. Yet the basics? Well, perhaps I could have used a refresher course first.

  Still, it took Martha almost twenty years to build up her rose garden in East Hampton, so I’m not going to let this setback discourage me. In fact, I want to expand the cutting garden next year and incorporate bushes from David Austin Roses, which were featured on Mart
ha’s television show in 2011. But this time, I’ll seek more of Laurie’s advice before I proceed, instead of after. I guess that’s why Martha’s always so willing to bring experts on to explain the complicated bits. She’s already mastered the piece of the Tao that I’m just now realizing: There’s value in doing it yourself; there’s more value in learning to do it yourself from someone who’s been there before you.

  So I’m going to take everything I learned from this experience and channel it into what’s next—planting an organic vegetable garden.

  Look out, earthworms. I’m a-coming for you.

  ZUCCHINI RICH

  Now that I have a handle on the roses, my thoughts turn to vegetables.

  Specifically, one vegetable.

  All I want is some zucchini.

  Everyone says to me, “You don’t want to plant zucchini—you’ll have too much.”

  Okay, A) there’s no such thing as too much zucchini, and B) mind your damn business.

  Besides, the idea of an overabundance of zucchini is like saying, “Stop working so hard or you’ll have way too much money!” Or, “If you keep dieting and exercising like that, you’ll wind up with the ass you had at sixteen!”

  Trust me: These are the problems I want.

  If my desire is to be lousy with zucchini, that’s my choice. I want it to cover my countertops and fill my crisper drawers. I want to stick excess zucchini in the fruit bowl because that’s the only place left to put it. I want it to rain zucchini up in here; do you understand me?

  I love zucchini. I love everything about zucchini. I love saying the word “zucchini.” Zucchini, zucchini, zucchini! Even the individual syllables are charming! You can’t not be happy around such a big, green, comical-sounding foodstuff. Zucchini’s hilarious and delicious!

  Plus, zucchini’s my absolute favorite vegetable, so tales of zucchini the size of baseball bats and in amounts enough to fill a bathtub are anything but a deterrent. Every time I pick one of my zucchini from my organic garden, I’m going to be all, “Ha! Saved two dollars! Ha! Saved two more dollars! Ha! I don’t care if the world monetary system collapses, because I will be rich with the only (tasty) green currency that counts!”

  I keep hearing, “Oh, you won’t know what to do with all your zucchini,” but I beg to differ. I’m all about zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, grilled zucchini, sautéed zucchini, baked zucchini, and stuffed zucchini.

  In anticipation of my bountiful harvest, I’ve already bookmarked Martha’s recipes for zucchini lasagna, zucchini frittata, zucchini salad, and sweet zucchini cupcakes, followed by zucchini fries, zucchini gratin, and zucchini risotto. I want it roasted; I want it curried; I want it tossed with corn and orzo. I want it steamed and skewered and stuffed in a sandwich. I want to open my freezer this winter and see nothing but frozen zucchini-based dishes, so when everyone else is supping sadly on their third-world zucchini, flown in on ice-cap-melting, polar-bear-killing jets, I’ll still be enjoying good ol’ patriotic zucchini made right here in ’merica.

  I want to build a food pyramid entirely out of zucchini.

  I want to cut myself and bleed zucchini and then patch myself up with a bandage made of zucchini.

  I want to be the Bubba Gump of zucchini.

  (Also, to everyone who’s warned me of the ills of zucchini and explained how you had so much you couldn’t even give it all away? I never saw a single slice of it, so please know I hate you a little right now.)

  So, clearly I’m Team Zucchini, yet there are a couple of obstacles standing between me and All Zucchini, All the Time. Before I can plant my badass organic garden, we have to make room for it.

  Presently, there are a few trees in our yard that are the bane of my existence, particularly this one huge ash on the side of the house by the kitchen. Every time it storms, I think, “Well, it was a nice roof while it lasted.” Although I’d love a skylight in there someday, I’d prefer we install one, rather than Mother Nature.

  Bob the Arborist is here today to assess the ash tree in relation to my future zucchini garden.

  “Well, from the angle of the sun, I’d say you can find a way to keep the tree without sacrificing light,” Bob the Arborist tells us. We’ve already decided to lose a couple of scrubby pines and one weird tree that causes the birds to shart pink goo all over my patio chairs when its berries are in bloom. The trees are all dying and I won’t miss them.

  “But the ash keeps dropping massive branches every time it rains. Plus, the limbs look moldy,” I tell him. In my head, I call this tree an ash-hole.

  “What you see is the early stages of an emerald ash borer infestation. It’s soon enough to catch and treat, though. We can save it.”

  “That’s good news, right?” Fletch asks. I cut him some side-eye. Oh, honey, that is not good news. The minute an expert tells me something can be saved is the minute my wallet cries for mercy. I brace myself for his estimate. I’ve learned the rule of thumb in suburbia pricing is to come up with what I think is a fair price and then add a zero to it. We had a chimney repair guy in here who told us he could do everything for the very reasonable cost of…fifteen thousand dollars. I wasn’t even mad; I just burst out laughing. Heck, it’s a year later and his bid is still funny. Do I have “SUCKER” tattooed on my face? Did he believe that the Internet doesn’t exist and I didn’t Google that shit before he got here? Listen, Chimney Dude, unless Channing Tatum himself is going to reline the flues, then no, thanks. I’ll stick to burning candles in the fireplace for now.

  (Side note: Fletch mocks me for my constant Channing Tatum obsession, but the man has a pit bull named Lulu whom he taught to do the Dirty Dancing move where Baby flies into Patrick Swayze’s arms at the end. What do you want from me? Channing’s calling plays directly from my psyche! I’m not made of stone, you know!)

  “Bottom line, how much would it cost to save the ash-hat?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry?” Bob the Arborist asks.

  “The ash—how much will treatment cost?”

  Bob the Arborist launches into a five-minute explanation about various steps and inoculations, and every thirty seconds, I can hear a cash register ca-ching in my head.

  “…so over five years, you’re looking at about seven,” he finishes.

  “Seven what? Seven hundred?” Fletch queries.

  Fletch doesn’t believe my add-a-zero theory, yet it gets him every time.

  “No, seven thousand.”

  Fletch looks as though he’s been punched in the gut. Aw, it’s adorable that he thinks for one second that I’m going to fork over seven freaking thousand dollars to resuscitate a tree I actively despise.

  “And how much to chop it down?” I ask.

  Bob the Arborist is aghast. “But it’s a great tree! Given the size and spread, it’s at least one hundred years old. Surely you’ll want to save it.”

  I snort. “Um, no. For seven thousand dollars over five years, that tree would have to drive me to work. How much to cut it down, grind the roots, and haul it away?”

  Grudgingly, Bob the Arborist consults his clipboard. “Four hundred dollars.”

  “Sold!”

  I’m sure in Cantitoe Corners, Martha’s Bedford home, she’d do whatever she had to do in order to save her old-growth trees. In fact, the estate’s insignia is that of a bushy sycamore. But one of us is a billionaire and the other had to be violated in order to invest in a few pairs of underpants without holes, so there you go.

  (Later this year, during Hurricane Sandy, Martha will lose power and outbuildings’ roofs when massive old trees begin to tumble all over the property. Although I’m sorry for her loss and I sympathize with the inconvenience, I have to reiterate my point that sometimes trees are assholes.)

  As a nod to Martha, when the ash does come down the next week, I take a section and turn it into a plant stand, sort of like what she had Dane Buell (the arborist) of SavATree do when he turned her fallen sycamores into gigantic tabletops.

  And now that ol’ Ashtree Wi
lkes is gone, I sort of miss him—like to the point of anthropomorphizing him—but I’m definitely not feeling seven thousand dollars’ worth of melancholy.

  At least, not until I’m zucchini-rich.

  At the very beginning of the summer, Laurie brought me with her to the private gardens of this wealthy North Shore industrialist. She had to deliver one tiny pink rosebush and thought I’d get a kick out of seeing what nine acres of manicured lakefront garden might look like. If by “kick,” she meant “life-altering experience,” then yes, I got a kick out of it.

  I’ve never before witnessed so much beauty in one spot. On those grounds, even the ordinary was made extraordinary. Like, I buy little pots of pretty pink and purple fuchsias every year. They’re annuals, so they die when it gets cold and the plant never grows larger than the standard-size pots I keep them in. Yet that place boasted multiple greenhouses, so the basketball-size fuchsias at my house are as big as Christmas trees there. Maybe you see that kind of thing in the tropics, but definitely not in Lake County, Illinois. Or, I have a couple of fledgling hydrangea bushes; they had a solid wall of them. I have sixty rosebushes; they possessed thousands that are well established enough to enclose an area the size of a soccer field.

  Each part of the garden is considered a “room,” and every room was designed by a world-renowned horticulturalist. What amazed me so much weren’t the parts like three open acres of crosshatched bent grass, ringed with one hundred different types of exotic plants, all symmetrically placed to the point that the owner/landscape architects knew they needed one tiny pink bush, even though those sections blew my mind. (In those rooms, every tree was sculpted—all were square, round, or rectangular, like it’s Willy Wonka’s arboretum.)

  What got me was how even the smallest bits were painstakingly detailed. I spied a tiny patch outside the living room window comprised of various thyme varietals and arranged in such a way that the colors formed an argyle plaid. Spectacular!

  The best part of the gardens was the simplest; on the side of one of the gardeners’ offices lay a vegetable garden, but it was so artfully arranged that it was just as beautiful as the knot garden room (…and the English rose room…and the French avenue of side-by-side square trees and pea gravel room…and the Japanese room…and the conservatory…seriously, the place just went on and on and on). I loved how instead of the tomatoes being staked with cages or a couple of strips of plywood, the vines climbed on antique topiaries. Vegetable sections were defined and divided by clusters of zinnias and dahlias and were interspersed with interesting bits of statuary. (And did they grow zucchini? You bet your ass they did!)