Read Online The Natural Laws of Good Luck by Ellen Graf - Free Book Online
Authors: Ellen Graf
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massaged her back. When she lay in bed with a bad sore throat, he boiled fresh ginger in a saucepan with sesame oil and maple syrup, filled a bowl to the brim, commanded her to drink it, and left the room. After a few swallows, she gagged and thought to hide the bowl under the bed, but just then Zhong-hua returned to check on her progress. He stood over her until the bowl was empty.
Once, after Athan visited for a weekend, he needed to catch a six oâclock bus to get back to college. Zhong-hua rose at four thirty, drove to Price Chopper for hot peppers and chicken, and prepared a breakfast stir-fry with a side of dumplings for Athan, who does not like red-hot food. My son sucked air between everybite. He grinned at Zhong-hua, allowing that he was getting used to the spices and now actually preferred not to be able to feel his tongue while eating. With time he was honest and asked if we could serve Chinese
and
American foodâhow about pancakes and syrup?
In the summer our food troubles vanished as our beautiful Chinese-American vegetable garden flourished. I had erected an eight-foot fence around my quarter-acre garden and divided it into raised beds mulched heavily with old hay from the neighboring farmer. I came home from a job one day to smoldering fires around the circumference of my beloved garden. âBurning all this junk. This junk no good,â my husband said. That junk was all my mulch. He had raked half of the raised beds into one large square and was sifting the soil of nine hundred square feet through a screen of hardware cloth shovelful by shovelful, a job for a small village. Along with the mulch, the border of German chamomile was up in flames. I was horrified and started screeching at him, but my husband just chuckled and shook his head, saying that this chamomile would all come quickly back. It did.
After sifting soil Chinese-style for several hours, he conceded that half of the garden should, in fairness, be tended according to American methods and the other half by Chinese methods. I believe he was confident that I would not be able to ignore the difference in productivity between those plants tended by the ancestral wisdom of forty centuries and those tended by a few decades of New Age foolishness.
By midsummer my end of the garden orgied around a centerpiece of black hollyhocks and purple coneflowers. Outside of that sprang bright fountains of corn in a circle. Another circle of every kind of bristly virulent weed grew up around the corn in a thriving hedge attractive to bees. From the outer circle, red raspberries flung their thorny arms this way and that, and then America ended in compromise with one raised bed of Chinese tomatoes and one tepee of Chinese string beans.
Zhong-huaâs side of the garden was neat and regimented. There were no weeds and no rocks. Tall trellises of saplings supported Chinese cucumbers with their foot-long thorny fruit hanging straight down. He had hoed trenches for little waterways between each trellis and every night stood outside spraying into the moonlit vines, holding the hose in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The long-legged shadows cast from the cucumber trellises angled eighty feet across the field, as if they intended to walk back to China, ten thousand leagues at each step. Water beads clung to the darkened jewels of hot peppers, and the patch of Chinese cabbage and lettuce was lush and curly, iridescent green. In the American night, the plants revived, intensified, and shared themselvesâhuman beings could relax without having to justify their existence beyond being waterers of plants. In China the morning watering was already finished, and thousands of simple waterers had gone dutifully into the complications of daylight.
* Written by Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, and Phil Galdston.
Hustling
M Y HUSBAND was having such a hard time with English that we enrolled him in a summer English program at the university. The grocer gave him time
Once, after Athan visited for a weekend, he needed to catch a six oâclock bus to get back to college. Zhong-hua rose at four thirty, drove to Price Chopper for hot peppers and chicken, and prepared a breakfast stir-fry with a side of dumplings for Athan, who does not like red-hot food. My son sucked air between everybite. He grinned at Zhong-hua, allowing that he was getting used to the spices and now actually preferred not to be able to feel his tongue while eating. With time he was honest and asked if we could serve Chinese
and
American foodâhow about pancakes and syrup?
In the summer our food troubles vanished as our beautiful Chinese-American vegetable garden flourished. I had erected an eight-foot fence around my quarter-acre garden and divided it into raised beds mulched heavily with old hay from the neighboring farmer. I came home from a job one day to smoldering fires around the circumference of my beloved garden. âBurning all this junk. This junk no good,â my husband said. That junk was all my mulch. He had raked half of the raised beds into one large square and was sifting the soil of nine hundred square feet through a screen of hardware cloth shovelful by shovelful, a job for a small village. Along with the mulch, the border of German chamomile was up in flames. I was horrified and started screeching at him, but my husband just chuckled and shook his head, saying that this chamomile would all come quickly back. It did.
After sifting soil Chinese-style for several hours, he conceded that half of the garden should, in fairness, be tended according to American methods and the other half by Chinese methods. I believe he was confident that I would not be able to ignore the difference in productivity between those plants tended by the ancestral wisdom of forty centuries and those tended by a few decades of New Age foolishness.
By midsummer my end of the garden orgied around a centerpiece of black hollyhocks and purple coneflowers. Outside of that sprang bright fountains of corn in a circle. Another circle of every kind of bristly virulent weed grew up around the corn in a thriving hedge attractive to bees. From the outer circle, red raspberries flung their thorny arms this way and that, and then America ended in compromise with one raised bed of Chinese tomatoes and one tepee of Chinese string beans.
Zhong-huaâs side of the garden was neat and regimented. There were no weeds and no rocks. Tall trellises of saplings supported Chinese cucumbers with their foot-long thorny fruit hanging straight down. He had hoed trenches for little waterways between each trellis and every night stood outside spraying into the moonlit vines, holding the hose in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The long-legged shadows cast from the cucumber trellises angled eighty feet across the field, as if they intended to walk back to China, ten thousand leagues at each step. Water beads clung to the darkened jewels of hot peppers, and the patch of Chinese cabbage and lettuce was lush and curly, iridescent green. In the American night, the plants revived, intensified, and shared themselvesâhuman beings could relax without having to justify their existence beyond being waterers of plants. In China the morning watering was already finished, and thousands of simple waterers had gone dutifully into the complications of daylight.
* Written by Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, and Phil Galdston.
Hustling
M Y HUSBAND was having such a hard time with English that we enrolled him in a summer English program at the university. The grocer gave him time
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