The last two years I planted hyacinth beans at the feet of the arbor. Year one, it looked great. Year two: I did not cull anything and my attempts to attach the vines to the arbor failed. “We’ll show you what lazy looks like, lazy woman,” and they just flopped on the ground.

This year I noticed that when you plant the vines at the right time and cull them correctly (snip, don’t pull), then things go much more smoothly. At first.

Because a lot of weeds grew in the arbor last year (again, lazy), they also competed with the Hyacinth bean vine and the weeds all tried to come back this year. I was snipping them when I realized they had the same leaf shape as the hyacinth beans I planted last year. The stems were a different color, though. Weird. Eventually I remembered it’s a hyacinth “bean” because it makes huge seed pods … that I was too lazy to clean up last year.

So, little second-generation sprouts all over.

However, in the next few weeks I noticed that while the leaves were the same, one side of the arbor had green stems, and the other had purple.

And the green-stems grew faster, and began to twist up the arbor a week before the purple-stems.

Then Gary hung a bird feeder and stepped squarely on one of my two un-culled green-stems, and that undid all progress on that side. I manually twisted the green stems back where they’d been. I wasn’t too upset … until the next morning when I came out and they had hurled themselves back on the ground in a tantrum.

I sighed. “I thought you were resilient,” I said sadly. “I thought I could count on YOU more than your purple BROTHERS, but I SUPPOSE I was MISTAKEN.” Followed by another, more pointed sigh.

Then, after I re-twisted them back on the arbor, I went inside and researched if second generation beans are sterile or stupid or stubborn or what, and then I learned two things.

• Purple vines and flowers are likely a hybrid, and I don’t know how they make hybrids, if it’s like Gregor Mendel’s peas, but anyway my green-stems should line up with whatever flower color their great-grand-peas had been: probably white or pale pink.
• The second thing I learned was that vines are particular about the direction they twine. It you take a counter-clockwise-twining plant like a hyacinth bean, and try to change its orientation because of your own laziness and ignorance and stupidity, then it will untwine itself out of the clockwise conversion configuration and hurl itself in a heap on the ground until it can bravely start again.

More detailz: Counter-clockwise vines like hyacinth beans slant upward from left to right if you look at them from the side. Hops and scarlet runner beans go the other way.

Oddly, Chinese wisteria goes counterclockwise, while Japanese wisteria twines clockwise. It has nothing to do with the Coriolis effect: all DNA.

So I am looking forward to the arbor next month. Anticipating an ombre effect.

I needed some thread to tweak the belt loops on a grey pair of pants. Grey has all the primary colors mixed in, so that means three variables instead of two, so it’s harder to match the color.

I looked for a thread in Grandceil’s cunning sewing cabinet that I believe my step-grandfather built from a kit.

If it looks a little wonky, that’s because the wood glue I assume he used to adhere the dovetailing sublimated long ago, and every few years I have to hand-squeeze it back into right angles, and the squeezing is overdue.

I found the closest grey thread and 1) noticed it was strong – didn’t snap when I tested it — and 2) noticed I didn’t need any help from spit or a needle-threader. Not fuzzy at all.

When I looked, I noticed one more thing: it was one of her five remaining original spools.

(Don’t look at my nails. I was not expecting company.)

The bottom of the spool says it cost fifteen cents, which (along with the apostrophe-s in “Clark’s” visible on the bottom) dates it to (… researching …) mid 1950s. That thread is as old as my husband.

All I can say is “Mercerized” thread must be immortal or something.

(Researching again … )

No, but it’s been stretched and treated to be stronger, and let me tell you, I recommend 70-year-old cotton thread over today’s fuzzy cotton thread any day of the week.

I know everyone has probably already seen The Sheep Detectives, but if you have not, you should. It’s a sweet, gentle movie about sheep trauma. And … justice.

It’s a little distracting when one is compelled to work out the nearly-familiar famous actor’s voices with the sheep they play, so I would recommend scanning the cast list before you start.

Beef tallow is a conservative dog-whistle! Who knew?

One of the delights of our trip to England in 1994 was that the London MacDonald’s served Hot Apple pies deep fried in beef tallow, even after the U.S. McDonald’s had switched to pitiful smooth baked pies without the bubbly crust.

Everyone seemed to abandon tallow in the 90s. I remember being in the cafeteria at Big Barnes downtown in 1998 and listening to a doctor mourn that Burger King was the only place you could get tallow-fried french fries anymore. (He then said the requisite doctor-talk about moderation.)

Friday I told a friend that my weekend plans involved getting a retro Hot Apple Fried Pie into my face, and she said, “Do you know Steak and Shake went back to using beef tallow in 1995?”

I then adjusted my weekend plans to eat skinny fries and Hot Apple pies, free of shame.

First off: Hot Apple Pie. I don’t know if they used tallow but they did get the crust just as it ever was. I ate it the way that was literally BURNED into my memory: remove the top edge, eat that gingerly, blow onto the filling until a bit of it looked edible, proceed.

The Steak and Shake tallow fries tasted exactly like they always have. Pre-tallow or post-tallow, I can’t tell the difference. They did make me smile with their advertising send-up of the Chik-Fil-A ads with the cows imploring us to “Eat Mor Chikin.”

And now I find to my dismay all this return to tallow is due to RFK Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again campaign. Evidently seed oils are “woke” and tallow is good and it all supposedly hearkens back to when America was “Great.”

I was there. Not Great … Gays couldn’t get jobs, I couldn’t rent a chainsaw, rest of society was awful … EXCEPT FOR THE HOT APPLE PIES. They were, and are, briefly, great again.

I find myself again in the triple-witching month when the six-month doctor’s visits coincide with the yearly doctor’s visits and I see multiple specialists in a short period of time. It’s worse if I count in Gary’s doctor visits.

Wednesday was a double-visit day. The dentist let me know my teeth were not perfectly straight, even though I had followed all the rules and achieved the goal alignment, so it will be another month of plastinated teeth for me. (Unjust, i say. Just unjust.)

From the dentist, then, to the dermatologist. The dermatologist – like next month’s ophthalmologist – is to be sure the MS medication is not causing side effects. So I trudged into the medical building where a woman joined me in the elevator.

”Seven please,” she said, and then, “Oh you’re already going there.”

I noticed on 7 that she checked the sign pointing to suite 710 and headed that direction, and when I felt myself doing precisely the same thing I called ahead to her, “Don’t tell me you’re going to 710.”

She slowly pivoted and faced me with such mock horror and amusement that I thought, this woman’s fun. So for the next ten minutes we sat in the waiting room of 710 and cross-checked birthdates, names, cities, occupations, just to be sure we weren’t actually the same person.

Her hair and my wig matched enough that we thought we might end up with each other’s procedures, but thankfully, she had a tattoo.

When my name was called, I told her if there was any identity theft in the next few weeks she’d be the prime suspect, and she essentially said, right back at you.

It was just fun, playing with a stranger. You don’t always know what you’ll get when you talk to people you don’t know.