Category: George Freeman – Urban Campfires

If you’ve ever wondered how columns like this become words on a screen (or a page in the magazine), here’s how it works:

From about 70,000 thoughts each of us has on average each day, grab one. This is not easy. Most of the time, it gets away, or has some flaw. And, of course, there are ideas whose time has not come. You know when you read them again.

As you realize the days are a bit longer, you may wonder if Daylight Savings Time is worth the agony each morning for an hour of daylight in what amounts to a mind game we play each evening, and conclude that it is likely someone has exhausted this topic.

When you have considered perhaps a dozen such such notions, when you have just about given up, the tiniest seed of an idea lands neatly on the end of your nose and you look at it cross-eyed, hoping that your reading glasses will focus before you lose it to a sneeze.

Here at GREENE Magazine, we understand that wise reminder, "Be careful what you ask for, you might get it."

With this issue, Greene Magazine goes regional.

With this issue, we are truly a regional publication, available on news stands in four states: from Little Rock to Fort Smith in Arkansas and points north; from Kansas City east to St. Louis and south, including Columbia, Jefferson City and hopefully where you live. We’re also available in northeast Oklahoma and the eastern tier of Kansas, bringing the total number of sales locations to more than 400, but that doesn’t public and school libraries, local garden centers, greenhouses, waiting rooms and bistros around the Ozarks. And of course, please consider subscribing at GREENEMagazine.us, which reminds us to again thank the thousands of you who have thumbed through our pages or visited us online through Facebook and our web site. In our third year, this has been a promising adventure for a couple of curmudgeons sharing our skills in a profession reinventing itself. My personal thanks to my partner, Mike Noggle, who believed we could come this far and proved it. And to our wives, Gail Noggle and Nancy Freeman, thanks for your patience.

Living not far from the James River Freeway for 25 years means our venerable Parkcrest/Springfield neighborhood that once was buffered by Greene County meadows is now surrounded by a steady surge of suburban sprawl. The smell of burning leaves that once sent smoke signals (and CO2 gas) int0 the autumn air has been replaced by a whiff of St. Louis-style pork ribs conveyed by mesquite, hickory and wild cherry smoke.

But then, so is the sound of the neighbors’ lawn mowers, or some other two-cycle, four-cycle or unmuffled hot-shot conveyance trying to set a new land-speed record. Add to this the occasional emergency siren and you might begin to think maybe the Amish had a good notion.

"It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature."
– Dena Dietrich

Mother Nature can be so cruel.

Such are the rhythms of her seasons that we cannot be sure if she has changed the rules or is simply teaching us a planetary lesson in the effects of global warming. Let’s remember that while we’re suffering from drought, some regions, such as the residents along the Gulf of Mexico, have been deluged with more water than they can handle.

A warm winter followed by a seemingly perfect spring was followed by the hottest summer on record and the driest season since the 1950s. The past two summers of drought in the Ozarks and the hottest temperatures on record nationwide have unsettled even the most stalwart wooly worm watcher.

Farmers surely have it the worst, but their consequences affect all of us.

It’s the same with water.

This is for you who live in confined spaces and only dream of wiggling your toes in the rich black soil-less potting mix. We know you’re out there, poor lost troubled souls reading this magazine in some undisclosed secret location, embracing conspiracy theories as if plants and grass linked their tendrils to make you look foolish.

Yes, you, who only read in waiting rooms, waiting, waiting, waiting. And watching, and yet wondering, “What do they know that I don’t? Maybe I could.”

That’s right, even you, waiting to get your teeth cleaned can enjoy gardening, though your time may be limited by work-related travel or because you are constantly using up those accrued frequent flier miles. There are plants that will thrive in spite of you.

So buck up, oh you tired wayfaring apartment dwellers lounging by the club pool during happy hour, yearning for a plant to call your own. Cast aside your fears and get back to your roots.