All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

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About Eve Ogden Schaub

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.

Me and My Black Thumb

One in a Thousand, ,

E.O. Schaub

Not so long ago, they used to make you raise your right hand and take the Freeman’s Oath to become a registered voter in Vermont. You know why, of course. It’s so they could see whether you have a green thumb or not.

Now, if you have ever made my acquaintance, when you shook my hand, you perhaps noticed that my thumb is a rather unsightly shade of black. Not coincidentally, I have a rather unfortunate talent for killing plants. Luckily, the kind people of Vermont have decided to overlook this massive character flaw and let me live here anyway, primarily on the basis of the fact that I bake a pretty mean cherry pie.

Nevertheless, ever since moving to Vermont thirteen years ago I have attempted to beat the odds and, perhaps, manage to grow a few things here or there when the gods of nature were otherwise occupied. I mean, what with global warming, catastrophic oil spills and frogs growing extra sex organs, you’d think I could slide a few swiss chard plants by without too much notice. But nooooooo. Rhubarb and zucchini seem to be about all I can grow- or rather- fail to kill.

Take last year. I was exceedingly excited when my husband Steve built two very lovely raised beds for me to plant my doomed vegetables in. I ran to the nursery and brought home several cheerful looking starter plants which would, in time, grow to become slightly larger plants. This, for me, was excellent progress.

The Fortress

So you can imagine my delight when my plants did not die. Okay, well the tomatoes did die. Or, at least, they got really yellow and sickish looking, and gave a very convincing impression of fully intending to die, but only after a prolonged illness, perhaps involving an expensive nursing home. After polling my local friends and acquaintances who speak plant, it was universally agreed that I had made the classic rookie mistake of actually buying and planting tomato plants. Ha! Apparently everybody and their pet cat knew that it was way, way, way too early to plant tomatoes and that the plants they put out around Mother’s Day at the local nurseries are, in fact, stunt tomatoes. Continue reading Me and My Black Thumb →

The Barbed Wire Fence

One in a Thousand

E.O. Schaub

This morning I was sitting in the drive about to leave when a friend passing by stopped. We had our car windows open and I leaned over and said, “Did you hear about—”

“Yes,” she said.

That’s what it’s like to live in a small town. And interestingly, it was instantly comforting. Today we are all thinking about the same thing: Matt Waite died yesterday.

It’s inconceivable, as any tragic, out-of-nowhere accident always is. All the more so because Matt was an active, healthy, solid guy. He was young, by which I realize I mean he wasn’t much older than me. He was a prominent community member, well-known and liked, dad of two bright-eyed girls, one of whom is in my daughter’s fourth grade class.

Although I didn’t know Matt well, I know some things about him: I know he occasionally liked to go to Vegas and gamble with his wife Kelly; I know he liked to go to Bike Week in Florida with his buddies where elaborate practical jokes would provide storytelling material for years to come; I know he had a big laugh and a wide, ready grin. He had no fear about standing up at Town Meeting and speaking his mind. Like my husband, he was surrounded by women in his household, and he seemed to have a good sense of humor about being in the minority.

Of course, when you’re a teenager you think that nothing can kill you; when you’re an adult you realize that everything can. Part of the trick about being a grown-up is that necessary suspension-of-disbelief required to forget that you could be tapped out of the big game of Musical Chairs at any time: no matter how comfortable we are in this skin, it is, after all, a loaner.

Despite this, virtually everything we do has to do with planning, maybe even more so in the country: buy wood pellets in the summer so this winter you’ll be warm… plant asparagus knowing you’ll harvest them in three years… plant a tree over there so you can have apples in ten… slather sun-screen on your kids so they won’t get skin cancer when they’re your age… what don’t we do for the sake of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? We spend all our time trying to raise our kids, grow our plants, tend everything just right, all with the idea that we have some idea what tomorrow will bring, when of course we don’t. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a punctuation mark appears, ending our own personal run-on sentence just like that.

The ramifications of such a loss are surely incalculable. On her third birthday, my mother lost her father to a sudden heart attack, and that salient fact is as much a part of her as her love of animals and her laugh and the funny way she sneezes… like a tree that grows up in and around the barbed wire fence, it is a wound that may heal, but never goes away- the tree grows differently because of it. Now our town will grieve with Matt Waite’s family not only because we will miss Matt ourselves, but because we wish his daughters and wife didn’t have to have that terrible wound, the wound that will heal, but will always be there too- a part of them.

Next month our family will attend my children’s great-grandfather’s 90th birthday celebration. Today our next door neighbor went into labor. Here at our house, like a mother hen, I anxiously await the appearance of our now third-year asparagus… life goes on. But every day somebody, somewhere, is tapped out of the game, fair or not. Next time it really, truly, could be you- or much worse- someone you love. Next time- tomorrow, the next day, someday- that gaping wound could be, will be yours.

So. How do you cope with that?

“Did you hear about—” I started to ask her.

“Yes,” she said.

Today we are all thinking the same thing. And that, I suppose, is a start.

Welding is Dead

One in a Thousand, , ,

E. O. Schaub

I’m pretty depressed. I mean, I am a good, irony-appreciating, iPhone-packing, Lost-watching citizen of the twenty-first century. I knew liberalism and/or conservatism was dead. I knew the thong was dead. Except in New Jersey. I had heard God was dead; ditto atheism. Also: figurative painting, campaign finance reform and Tab. Also: content, privacy and— apparently— Jewish Hip Hop.

What I wasn’t expecting was the assessment last week, by the National Council for the Preservation of High Temperature Metal Joining Technologies (NCPHTMJT), that, in fact, welding is dead. (!!!!) I know, right?

I mean, it was one thing when photography died. Sure, that was sad. And when the death of newspapers and magazines followed so quickly thereafter, we were all still a bit stunned. When book-publishing was declared dead last year, we all observed a moment of silence at the gym, during which everyone pretended to turn off their iPods. The subsequent news that clothing was dead certainly caught everyone by surprise, only to be followed by the news that cheese was dead, as well as goat herding, geometry, Cirque de Soleil, and— strangely— toothpicks. But this…? This really was too much.

I mean, I had always meant to take up welding more seriously, and now… well, now it was just too late. Sure, after a tiring day at the Twitter Factory I’d come home, pour myself a nice glass of chablis, and dabble in some underwater shielded metal arc welding… but it never amounted to much. Not more than a hobby. I guess I just always thought there would be time for all that, down the road.

But the fact is— and we all knew this on some level— there’s just no money in welding anymore. For one thing, there’s so much free welding out there now, no one feels they should have to pay for it. I mean, everyone’s a welder now, right? Who among us doesn’t own an acetylene torch just for fun? For casual spot welding at family picnics and so forth? And then the realization comes that, if everyone is a welder than, by the inverse appropriative law of suckiness, no one is. And suddenly, just like that, all the best anode and slag suppliers go belly-up and poof! It’s over. Welding, as we knew it, is as dead as the apostrophe.

So friends, heed my cautionary tale. Pretty soon, we’ll all just be sitting around reminiscing about all the things people used to do before they became valueless. In the meantime, I’m going to pursue my new hobby while still I can: neurosurgery.