Green Market Press Blog

Somehow, I don’t remember it being this much work nine or ten years ago.

 “It” is the “pavilion,” the canvas-covered wooden framework that shields our small backyard pond from the falling cones and needles shed by the nearby pine tree. The pond has a small fountain and a turtle that spits water. It’s the nearest thing we have to a water feature.

 For years the pond was filled in with dirt and geodes. Then one summer Karen dug it out, and I sealed and painted it. But we needed something to keep the litter out of it, so I sank a landscape timber at each end of the pool, put a crossbar between them (a distance of about nine feet), and constructed two “leaves” about 9’ x 4’ which were hinged to the crossbar and could be raised and lowered. I covered the leaves with material cut from a blue plastic tarp.

 I thought the material might last two or three years, but amazingly it didn’t wear out, although over the years it did get pretty shabby, as well as splattered with bird dooey. What wore out (rotted out, actually) was one of the supporting uprights, which broke off at ground level this spring. Time to rebuild the whole thing.

 Well and good, but it’s turning into an all-summer project. So far I’ve set new, stronger posts in cement and replaced the crossbeam. These have been painted. I’m about halfway through restoring, repainting, and recovering one of the moveable leaves. While I’ve gotten quite a bit done during our current cool weather, I suspect the project may languish for a while in July. I also suspect I don’t work as hard or as fast as I did 10 years ago. Can this be?

 But it will get done—before the snow flies, I hope. I’ve promised the lady who dug out the water feature in the first place.

A Wisconsin friend has posted an extensive report on his blog about his equally extensive garden and berry patch.

I’m in awe of all that he does (especially since he’s still getting over major surgery), and he had several good tips, including the use of electric-fence posts to anchor tomato cages, which can blow over in a high wind.

 I used to do large gardens, following in the footsteps of my father who had big ones for years to help feed his family on a schoolteacher’s salary. A few years ago I cut mine down to about 20’ x 40’, and last year almost didn’t have one at all, since we were traveling during planting season. Half a dozen tomato plants and a few hills of Sugar Baby watermelons was it. (An effort to plant the rest of the former garden in blue flax was a total flop.)

 But this spring I got the bug again, so we have half a dozen rows of sweet corn (“Serendipity,” which the clerk promised me was the world’s best), a few tomatoes, peppers, and onions, and a row of the “Sugar Baby” melons. I also threw in three rows of sunflowers for the birds.

 I’ve never had the problem of wind blowing over the tomato cages (I sink the feet pretty deep), but electric-fence posts would certainly solve it. What I do have trouble with is the vines falling out of the cages—Karen just gave me an old pillowcase, which I’ll tear into strips to tie up roaming vines.

My plot is strictly low-maintenance. I can’t lay claim to being a serious gardener anymore. But at least we’ll have roasting ears, tomatoes, and watermelon.

 The Wisconsin friend is enthusiastic about gooseberries, which I also love. But Karen has a prejudice against them, having fallen into a patch as a child and gotten a gooseberry barb so embedded it had to be surgically removed. (She doesn’t like to stem them, either, but I’d gladly stem for a gooseberry pie.)

 Colin and I worked hard at planting a much smaller patch of blue flax this year, doing everything by the book, and it has actually come up. But so have the weeds, so I don’t have much hope of a flax crop—flax is planted broadcast, which makes it almost impossible to weed. But at least I now know what the stuff looks like when it sprouts.

That was the title of a daily column by Bess Scholler, which ran for many years in the old Franklin Evening Star. I doubt if Bess ever spent more than 10 minutes writing it—but she was a keen observer and knew everybody in town. The town joked about her often trivial comments, but the column was probably the best-read item in the paper. If nothing else, it was full of names of people Bess had run into that day.

 I’m not up to Bess’s standard, but on a grocery-shopping trip with Karen to Wal-Mart yesterday, I saw:

 —A young mother with a white flower in her hair shepherding two small boys and a cart hung with at least three dozen bottles of Mountain Dew.

 —In the parking lot, a van with a sign: Official Harp Transportation Vehicle.

 —My former faculty colleague Hank, who lamented that his first skydive had had to be postponed because of wind damage to planes and buildings at the Greensburg Airport. Skydiving sounds like a relatively safe amusement—safer anyway that bull-riding, which Hank tried several years ago at a rodeo, and which landed him in a hospital. Hank is a writer and always on the lookout for new experiences.

 —Not on this trip, but on a recent one we ran into the woman who ran the cash register for years at Henderson’s Pharmacy. As I recall, the pharmacy gave her a sendoff in a limousine when she finally retired. She’s in her mid-80s now and looking great, thank you. It was good to see her again—and to recall that in 1993 she was the last person I talked with in Franklin before embarking on nearly a year and a half in Washington, D.C., and Taiwan.

I’m very gradually easing back into the blog, although it may not go back to being a daily affair.

 I’m on the blog today to muse a little about the current debate going on in my town, Franklin, Indiana, over plans to build a new public library—specifically, a new Franklin branch of the Johnson County Public Library, replacing a structure built in 1989, 22 years ago. That would seem a fairly straightforward topic, but it’s anything but.

 The library board has narrowed the sites to two—one in downtown Franklin and one on the north side of town, near Highway 31. The costs: $33 million if it’s built downtown and $26.8 million if it’s on 31.

The cost difference is only the beginning of the debate, though. The downtown site is more expensive largely because the site would have to be built up to get it above a flood plain, and because a 320-space parking garage would be needed. That’s a cost of nearly $8.5 million, of which the city might provide about half. Keep that “might” in mind.

 The city’s mayor, Fred Paris, and at least one other city councilman want the new library downtown. The mayor argues passionately and eloquently for it, as a way to rejuvenate the downtown and attract new industry. The city has suggested it might donate the land, and the city’s redevelopment commission has indicated interest in donating $3.5 million for the garage.

 Remember that “might”? The city and the redevelopment commission are in a bit of a Catch-22 here because they’ve been reluctant to commit definitely until voters approve the project in a referendum, possibly as early as November. But this conceivably could change by the next city council meeting.

All five members of the public who spoke at the most recent city council meeting (which I attended) expressed reservations about the project and the downtown site. In a thoughtful letter to our local newspaper last weekend, another resident, Suzie Hivnor, put her finger on several things I (and perhaps others) wonder about. I visit the present library frequently and never have any trouble finding a parking place. Suzie sees empty chairs when she visits, and so do I. She says the library never seems overcrowded, and that’s my experience, too. The library’s website says 50 people were waiting to use computers on one Sunday afternoon—I’ve never seen any lines, although perhaps there’s a waiting list. But 50 people waiting to get on? Sorry, I haven’t seen them.

 Bev Martin, the library director, told the recent city council meeting that 70,000 people a year visit the library and that she knows this because “librarians count things.” When I was at the library yesterday I asked how this counting is done; the clerk said with a device on the front door, which my librarian son tells me is the best way to determine actual visitors.

 But the library’s website doesn’t quite tell the same story. In fact it says that in 2010 “patrons visited and used the branch 160,000 times.” This would seem to go wildly against some other counting done by the library. A comparison of the website and a leaflet from the Franklin branch says 288,635 items were checked out in 2010, down from 304,350 the previous year. Fewer books were checked out in 2010 than in 2009. Same with DVDs and videos checked out, questions answered by staff, and people who used the library’s Internet. So where’s the picture of exploding usage?

 I looked for the library’s 2008 strategic plan on its website, but found only introductory paragraphs about such things as patron trends and strategic directions. No actual figures.

 As for the city’s still-tentative offer of land and parking-garage money, very little actual planning seems to have been done—it’s not known who would manage the garage or how security would be handled. And there’s a question about whether funds raised for industrial development should be used to help bring a library downtown.

 I find myself agreeing with those at the recent meeting who urged taking a little more time to get questions answered. No doubt everyone is operating in good faith, and the mayor’s eloquence is moving. But if this is rushed to a November referendum, I’ll vote against it. Maybe by next May’s primary enough planning will have been done and enough questions answered that I can support a plan. But not now. And certainly not in November.

The following is part of an exchange with a former student, Andy Stoner, who Karen says is writing a book about presidential campaign visits to Indiana. I sent him my recollection of a 1956 visit to Franklin by Estes Kefauver, who later lost the Democratic nomination to Adlai Stevenson. Andy had also found a piece by John V. Wilson Jr., remembering one point of the visit differently—Kefauver’s error in referring to Franklin as “Alexandria.” Hill recalled seeing a “Hotel Alexandria” across the street, but there never was such a hotel in Franklin. Here’s my windup letter to Andy—a little exercise on a hot, torpid Memorial Day.

 Dammit, Andy, you forced me into doing some actual research—and on a blazing hot Memorial Day afternoon, too. I could have gotten heat stroke and it would have been YOUR FAULT!

But I didn’t, and it was an interesting exercise in the vagaries of memory. I wrote my Kefauver piece right after the event, and feel it’s accurate. But what about the Alexander sign on the former livery stable? I drove downtown, walked around the Courthouse, and went to look at the sign. It says “Jarve Alexander” on the top line, and “1907” underneath. The sign is visible, barely, from the front Courthouse lawn, but isn’t really readable until you go clear around to the southwest corner of the Courthouse. Kefauver could not have seen it from where he spoke. He was looking north across Jefferson Street at Woods Drugstore and the Citizens Bank, and maybe the Willard Hotel a block farther north (which could have contributed to Hill’s error).

 But did Kefauver and his party, including Hill, see the other Alexander sign earlier and perhaps comment on it, thus lodging the name in their minds? That’s possible—the only good parking was on the south side of the Courthouse, so it’s possible they drove past the old livery barn and noticed the name. Certainly not a hotel, though, except at one time for horses. I stand by my version, but will give Hill the benefit of the doubt that he perhaps saw the name Alexander on a building, and maybe combined it with the Willard Hotel sign when he wrote long afterward..

 It doesn’t matter, of course, and this is no doubt a whole lot more than you wanted to know. It interested me because I noted when writing memoirs that my relatives’ treasured recollections were often wrong or misplaced by years, when checked against newspaper accounts.

 Quote me on anything you care to, but please don’t get me in a feud with Hill, whose mistake is honest, I’m sure. What are you writing, anyway?

Bill