The secret to growing lettuce

Aug. 8, 2002

Dear Leslie,

Bodies fly apart almost daily in Israel now. The news is gravely reported. The president of the United States expresses anger, sadness or both. Nobody knows how to end this blood fight, and most everybody has tried.

Not everybody gets along at Amity Hills Farm, either, but we take better care of each other. The Great Pyrenees dogs and the donkeys keep the coyotes and the foxes away from the chickens and the geese. Castor beans keep the moles out of our garden.

It's not a pretty garden. The corn cobs look like miniatures. We have nice pepper and flowers. The weeds are growing best of all.

"When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce," says the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. "You look into the reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce.

"Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce."

The three Great Pyrenees puppies from the farm have come down with a disease called puppy strangles, a disease so rare our vet had to look it up in a book. It's in the lymph glands and causes lesions on their paws and noses and tails. Nobody knows the cause.

The puppies are taking a steroid and antibiotics and getting a chemical bath every day. Without treatment the disease is potentially fatal. Giving steroids to puppies is chancy, too. We were scared at first.

For a week they looked like big scabs in white fur, but now their extremities are taking on the pink glow of healing skin. In the last few days, all three of them caught a cold, too, so there are little puppy coughs.

DC is Shirley MacLaine's Aurora Greenway in "Terms of Endearment," always listening at night for her loved ones' vital signs.

"Do they seem weaker today?" she'll ask in the morning.

We take them to the farm once or twice a day to get milk from their mother, Mickey, and feed them from a bottle the rest of the time. When it's my turn, I lie down and sit each one in turn on my chest and try to hold onto the bottle as they begin the attack.

We measure their progress like the parents of newborns. DC called me at work to tell me two of the puppies were wagging their tails at Hank.

I worry about them, too, but I'm more Robin Williams' T.S. Garp in "The World According to Garp." I love to watch them sleep.

Sometimes we forget how dear life is.

"Blaming has no positive effect at all," Thich Nhat Hanh concludes, "nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.