Coonties

Probably at least a dozen years ago, I was inspecting a house owned by an attorney and his tree hugging wife and she told me all about these little plants that lined her driveway.  They were the most ancient plant still living that was native to Florida and nearly impossible to find.   She was proud that she had paid $100 each on the internet for the two score plants among all her other fancy landscaping.  She said they were prehistoric and "living fossils."   Big deal.  So am I.  I looked at them and didn't really recognize what they were because I hadn't ever seen any that were so small.  I had seen mature ones but her's were probably less than a year old.  

What they were was Coonties.  For what its worth, they are Cycads.  How that's different from a palm is beyond me but they are one of a few plants that look good planted around a house that actually want to grow in North Florida.  I was no stranger to Coonties.  I had seen them in a couple of North Florida graveyards and at some old houses where old relatives lived when I was very young.   My Grandfather put them by his Father's headstone and then put them at the corners of my Grandmother's family plot where he would, one day, rest next to her.

Coonties were a popular plant a long time ago because they look good and, like I said, they want to grow in North Florida. They are making a come back of sorts now that everybody has decided to stop trying to force plants that have no business being in Florida to grow here.   They like poor, sandy soil.  They Don't really mind drought and can survive occasional flooding.  They thrive in the filtered, shady sunlight of an upland hammock but can also do well in the sun.  Heat?  Turn it up.  Cold?  Florida can't get cold enough to hurt one.   Old folks would plant them near the corners of their houses.  When my brother and I went to see what was left of the old settlement on Atsena Oatie Key, it was coonties that told us where the houses were before the big hurricane washed most everybody away.  We noticed big clumps of coonties and found piles of bricks next to them. Those were the piers that the houses were built on.   We also found the brick outline of a fireplace.  We stood amongst the coonties where someone had built their living room back in the 1870s.   Had we not known their significance, we would have just walked on by.

It wasn't but a  couple of months after getting the $100 each speech, that the Lovely Bride and I happened to be at a place called The Hand Me Down Nursery, looking for azaleas.  The Hand Me Down Nursery was a kind of a strange place.  It was situated in the middle of a residential subdivision but had been there a lot longer than the subdivision so it was grandfathered in.  You'd drive through the gate and wait in the car while the dogs barked at you.  Pretty soon, a little old lady that looked about like Granny Clampett's older sister would come out and ask what you were looking for.  The dogs would calm down and you'd have free run of the place. 

We went there looking for azaleas but  it turned out to be coontie potting day.  Granny's family was working in a potting shed splitting up coonties.  Hundreds and hundreds of 'em. They were big enough that I recognized what they were so I asked her the price.   The small ones were two dollars and fifty cents each and they went up from there all the way to twelve dollars for a nice big one.  Her small ones were bigger than the $100 ones the lawyer's coontie-expert wife had bought on line.  I forgot about the azaleas and bought half a dozen medium ones.  Several years later, we went back and Granny was gone.  Her daughter was selling off the last of the stock and we got ten big ones for five bucks each.

The thing about coonties is that they look like a cross between a sabal palm and a fern and they have seeds.  Big, bright orange seeds that look like giant kernels of corn.  The seeds grow on a cone at the base of the plant and start to fall off along about May.  Then they do everything they can to avoid germinating.  If the big orange corn kernel doesn't attract a certain kind of beetle to eat the outside away, it shrivels up into a hard shell.  I have been told that they only germinate after forest fires once that happens.   I tried throwing a handful into a pile of burning pine straw and it didn't work.   I have read that nurseries will use acid to eat the coating away from the seed.   Its well-adapted to living in a place that wants to kill everything like Florida does.

So, last May, here I was with coonties growing in two different places in the yard, hundreds of fresh, bright orange coontie seeds and the idea that there had to be a way to make the danged seeds grow.  I found some info in the internet and eventually stumbled onto a site called the Cycad Jungle.  That fellow knows more about coonties than just about anybody and he uses an enzyme to remove the shell. I called him to get some enzyme and he said to just soak them in water for a couple of days and peel the orange off with a paring knife unless I had ten thousand or so to do.  Well dang.   It took a couple of hours to peel the orange off fifty seeds but I got it done and I planted them in some sandy soil that I shoveled into one of those cheap, plastic pans that they sell for mixing small batches of concrete.   I fastened a piece of hardware cloth over it to keep squirrels out and waited. 

Nothing happened except that I grew one hell of a crop of weeds.  The Cycad Jungle guy had said that it would take two or three months  for them to germinate so I didn't worry when we passed the two month mark.  Three months came and went and I just had bigger weeds.  The Lovely Bride wanted me to dump the whole thing in the yard and try again next year. I checked it every couple of days for any sign of coontie life and there was just nothing until last Friday.  I looked at the pile of weeds and there was familiar frond sticking up through the hardware cloth.  I got down closer to it and saw more.     I started cutting and pulling weeds so I could get the hardware cloth off the pan and see what I had and found fourteen little coontie seedlings.  

 

Fourteen out of fifty isn't the greatest yield but it beats letting the seeds sit around forever.   Come next May, I'll be at a  couple of cemeteries not that far from the Suwannee River.  Besides a fist full of plastic flowers from the  Dollar General, I'll have a couple of paper sacks for coontie seeds.  I will grow coonties from seeds off the ones my Grandfather planted seventy five  years ago.   We will be connected .

Transition and Tradition

I came here because I want to be alone.  Its a good place for it.   The cretin with the shovel that ran me off the last time I was here is probably retired.   That was, what, fifteen years ago?  He may even be dead like everybody else here.  Everybody else here but me.  I'm mostly still alive.

I don't come here often.  I think I've been here just three or four times in the twenty seven years my brother has been here.

I don't really know what to look for.  I don't know what it looks like anymore.  I remember the single granite headstone with a double next to it for my Parents when they finally need it  but I don't remember much else.   My Dad used to put American Flags all over it.   Trying to tell the world that his middle son really was the soldier that he imagined, not just a kid that joined the Army to get away.   Dad doesn't even remember him anymore so there are no flags to guide me in.  My sister used to put Mickey Mouse figurines on the grave because my brother liked him when he was a kid.  People always stole them so she stopped.  Not even a mouse to help me.

All I know is that the last time I was here, I wanted to grieve.  I was the one that had to be strong when my brother killed himself.  No one else could so it fell to me.  I never got to grieve so that's what I wanted to do the last time I was here.

I remember crying that day.  I remember talking to the grave as if it could give me answers.   As if it could tell me why.  I remember looking up from my anguish and seeing a City Parks Department worker leaning on a shovel at the maintenance shed watching me.  It must have been a good show.   Like today, I had been there to be alone.  I left because of that ill-mannered cretin.  I've not come back until today.

So I know that the grave is fairly close to the street and in sight of the maintenance shed.  Because of the trees and because of a rise in the ground, that narrows it down considerably.  It has to be in this small corner of the cemetery because that's the only place in the whole graveyard where you can see, and be seen from, the maintenance shed.

I start walking.  Its hot.  Its muggy because its Florida and its summer so it just rained.  That's OK.  It won't take long to find my brother's grave.  Its right around here somewhere.   Maybe then I can finish that talk that I started way back when.

Truth be told, I want to talk about something else.  I'm here to grieve but not about something that happened half my lifetime ago.  My brother's grave is just a place where I think I can go to do that.  No one goes there anymore.  I can be alone.

I'm having no luck.  I check all the places that look right.  Nobody with my last name there.  I expand to the next block of graves, and then the next and the next.  Still no luck.

I decide to search smarter.  I go to the top of the little rise because I know it can't be behind it.   If it was, I couldn't have seen the maintenance shed and  shovel-leaning cretin.   My shirt is drenched.  Sweat burns my eyes.  My sleeves are too wet to dry them anymore so I use my fingers to sling most of the sweat away.   I keep walking.  Its right here someplace.  It has to be.

I notice coonties growing at several plots just as they are at the old family plots farther North in the Suwannee Valley cemeteries where four or five generations of my Grandparents, Great Grandparents, Mary Ann and my Great Uncle and Great Aunt rest.  I have coonties at home that I grew from seeds that I took from those cemeteries.  I decide that I will find the grave, do what I need to do and come back tomorrow to plant those coonties.   It is a good idea.

I keep walking.    I think about my brother.  How the people that tried to help him were the last people on earth that could have helped.  How everything they did just pushed him closer to the edge.  

I still can't find what I'm looking for.  How many times have I seen this grave or that one over there?  Five, six?   I can't see the maintenance shed from any other part of the cemetery so it has to be here but where?  How do you misplace a grave?

I ask God to show me where it is.  I imagine that He smiles just a little because he knows better than I do that I'm not there to find the grave.  I get the idea that He is about to show me what I'm really there to find.  I decide I'll make it easier on both of us and let Him.

I pray as I walk.  I ask God to help the friend that is weighing so heavily on my heart.  I tell Him that I don't care about the friendship.  I just want Him to deliver the friend.  I tell Him that I know I have nothing to offer Him in exchange.  Nothing with which I can bargain.  I just ask for mercy and promise that I won't get in the way.

And it hits me.  Like my Parents trying to help my brother, I may be the last person on earth that can help my friend.  The preacher said it wasn't in my power but I still want to.   Half my friends say I can't help.   The other half say my friend isn't worth worrying about but I still want to do something; to find the magic words that will deliver my friend from the demons.  Why else do people have friends?

I keep walking.  I keep looking for the grave but I've found what I came here to find.  This makes it different.  I realize that its not just that I can't help.  Its that I would get in the way.  What I can do is ask God and have Faith that He will work His will in my  friend's life.    That He will deliver my friend.  I will stay out of the way.

I haven't found the grave but I can't stay any longer.  They are already closing the gates in the back.  Its OK.   I didn't get to be alone but I found what I was looking for.  

If work is slow tomorrow, I will come back and find the grave so I can plant the coonties.  Some things change.  Some don't.  It is still a good idea. 

Coonties

This one sure is early this year.  Friggin Mayans got everything screwed up.

Purple Tops

A few years ago, we had a slight “sinkhole activity” issue at the house and Joan, the neighborhood HOA Nazi, just couldn't stand it.  When a house in Florida has sinkhole activity, its recorded in Public Records. Insurance companies keep track of that and when there's sinkhole activity in a given neighborhood, they make you pay more to keep the coverage you bought even if you aren't the house with the problem. When the Nazi's insurance company told her that she'd have to pay more to keep full coverage, she looked up sinkholes on the internet, crowned herself an expert and decided that we had created our own sinkhole problem by over-use of our sprinkler system. That made it our fault that she had to pay extra for sinkhole coverage. Never mind that we don't have a sprinkler system. Minutiae like that only cloud the issue.

She came over one day while I was out and started her passive-aggressive whining and bitching but I happened to get home before she left. I told her that I put more faith in the geologist that said the sinkhole had been there dormant at least ten thousand years and had just been reactivated by stresses on the bedrock that came from a thousand or so houses that sprang up within a few blocks to a couple of miles from us during the mid 2000s real estate boom. She didn't even know what an alluvial sinkhole is. Some expert.

She smiled her Jezebel grin, thanked me for the information, went home and called the HOA to set her plan for revenge in motion.

  

The thing with sinkhole activity is that fixing it takes time. Each case is different but it generally involves injecting “grout,” which I can't tell apart from mortar, into the voids in the ground to recompact the soil under the house and give the steel pins that they put under the house something solid to bear on.

Injecting the grout takes a week or two and then it has to cure for a month before the pins can be driven into place so the whole process takes about two months even if all goes according to plan.

Joan is one of those people to which nothing ever just happens. Whenever something unfavorable happens to her, its because someone did it to her. Besides us causing her to pay more for sinkhole insurance through over use of our imaginary sprinkler system, she was also torqued because she had to buy flood insurance for the first time since moving to the neighborhood back around 1990. She had not figured out how to blame that on me but she was convinced that someone had singled her out, lied to her mortgage holder and make them think she needed flood insurance. Never mind that FEMA had just updated the County's Flood Insurance Rate Maps and expanded pretty much every flood zone to include lots more properties. Never mind that it had been in the papers for over two years as the County fought FEMA over it. Never mind that half of her house was in the flood zone on the new map. That's just more irrelevant minutiae. In her case,  somebody specific had singled her out, gotten her mortgage holder's information and lied to them about her and her alone. She couldn't figure out who to strike back against on the flood inurance trouble but she darned sure knew who made her insurance go up.

Joan is just fine with a porta-potty in the front yard of a house under construction for three or four months because those people never did anything to her. She couldn't stand one in our yard for two or three months because, in her warped little mind, we caused her sinkhole coverage to go up with our imaginary sprinkler system. 

 One day, about a week after running her off the front porch through the use of actual facts, my contractor happened to mention getting a call from the HOA asking whether he could move the porta-potty to the back yard. He said he told them he'd be glad to as soon as they posted a ten thousand dollar bond. Somewhat taken aback, they asked what the bond was about and he explained to them that the truck that services the pota potty weighs about sixty-thousand pounds and would destroy my concrete driveway if it had to go to the back yard. My insurance company would naturally expect the HOA to reimburse them the cost of the new driveway since there's nothing in our deed restrictions that says I can't have a porta-potty in my front yard when people are repairing the house. (By law, facilities for #1 and #2 have to be available for the workers). That was the end of that conversation.

A couple of weeks later, I was down at the HOA office paying my dues and thanked them for working with me on the porta potty issue. I told them that I didn't understand why it had been an issue when porta-potties stay in other people's front yards a lot longer than that one was in mine. That's when they told me “Oh, that was just Joan.” It seems that she's constantly bitching about something and they are constantly having to make calls and report back to her about why they can't make someone bend to her will.  That was her idea to get me back for "causing" her insurance coverage to go up.  She tried to get the HOA to force me to move the porta-potty. Some folks are just sick.

 

So I got to thinking about poor little old Joan. While contemplating something I once read about praying for people that spitefully use you, I realized that the other thing that she constantly does besides bitch is preen her yard. She will spend days in a floppy hat, long sleeve shirt, long pants, boots and gloves, sitting on a tiny stool in 96 degree heat and close to 100% humidity plucking little weed spouts out of her yard. As I thought about the tragedy of a life spent doing nothing but being a plucking bitch, I got to thinking that if she had more weeds to pluck she might have less time to bitch and might even actually make a friend or two. It was a tall order but if you're gonna dream, you might as well dream big.

Unfortunately, nobody in my town sells weed seeds. Its like folks expect weeds to just volunteer. Here I had a plan that was going to give Joan something constructive to do, make her be nice to the neighbors and maybe even enable her to make some friends but I had no weapon, I mean, no means to give her the gift that was going to make it all happen.

So I got to looking at what weeds grow around here and there's one that, when its small, looks for all the world like a small turnip plant.

I have a buddy with a farm about three counties over and asked him to get me a pound of turnip seeds and to make sure he paid cash. He asked me if I knew how many seeds that would be. I admitted that I did not but allowed that it would probably be several thousand and, if it wasn't at least several thousand could he get me two pounds? A week or so later I had a paper sack with a pound of Purple Top turnip seeds. 

  

If you aren't familiar with turnip seeds, they ain't real big. Maybe like #4 or #6 bird shot. They don't weigh much either. A pound of them is about as big as a good sized baking potato. Its more than a few seeds.

Not having a spiteful bone in my body and confident that purity of my motives would carry the day, I proudly showed the bag to The Lovely Bride.

“Why do we need a pound of turnip seeds?”

I explained that I was turning the other cheek, being a good neighbor and giving Joan something to do that she enjoyed immensely. I explained that it could end up changing the woman's whole outlook on life. Before I was done with all the explaining, I was practically the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future all rolled into one.

My own wife doubted my veracity.

She said something about Proverbs 24:8, vengeance belonging to God, dieing by the sword, that we are supposed to pray for our enemies and stuff like that. By the time she got done, I didn't know whether to wait for the collection plate or an

altar call. I put up a spirited defense. I had prayed and this was the answer that I got. I said that Joan wouldn't be an enemy if she had something constructive to do. Besides, it was turnips. I wasn't even taking a sword.

Might as well have been talking to the wall.

After three or four days of intransigence on her part, I finally called off the whole operation. I figured that if I couldn't convince my own wife that my motives were pure, I probably couldn't convince a jury.

I've kept my pound of turnip seeds in my reloading room ever since. Every now an then I take them out and dream of what might have been. How Joan would probably have friends and be happy if only I had been allowed to intervene. I sometimes wonder if, at my final reward, I'll be required to answer for the sin of not sowing thousands upon thousands of turnip seeds in her yard to give her one last chance at happiness in her declining years. Then I force myself to move on.   No sense in wondering what might have been.   We can't change the past.  We can only ask for forgiveness.

Besides, the seeds probably won't even germinate anymore.

  

For the past couple of years, I've had a bunch of young coonties growing in one of those plastic trays that you buy at Hoes or Lowm Depot for mixing individual bags of mortar. A month or two ago, I transplanted them to a flower bed by the driveway. I got to thinking about what to do with the tray and decided see if my turnip seeds were still good.

I filled the tray back up with soil and made a couple of grooves in it. I sprinkled maybe a teaspoon of turnip seeds into each groove and covered them up. A little water and a few days later, turnips started popping up. These seem to be a self-culling variety. At the start, I had about forty little turnip sprouts going but all but five died before growing their first real leaves.  Those five have thrived.

So now I have five healthy turnip plants and they will make a nice little pot of greens. I also still have about 0.9999 pound of turnip seeds left.

Sowing and reaping.

I am blessed just for being willing to help my neighbor.

I happen to like turnips.