Matinee: Everything and the Kitchen Sink

by Kathryn Santoyo




Standing at the kitchen sink of our aging home and and washing last night’s dishes, I look out the window glazed with our dirt road’s dust and I am content.



There’s a show I helped produce playing out the window, and here at the sink, I can see it all.



The stage is green and growing. The cast of characters is large and getting larger. The show changes daily, but the first act always begins in the same way, with me at the kitchen sink.



Morning after morning, I wash the dishes, and send all the bits and pieces of yesterday down the drain and out to my garden. There, the alchemy of soil microorganisms turn them into something new: a rich humus that grows the garden and calls in the wild to come and play.



My garden is a lively oasis in a quiet world of dry colors: tans and olive-greens from the thick chapparal and scattered coast live oak, and an aged bone-white from the limestone that  cracks through the hillsides. A show plays farther out there, no doubt, but more hidden and less extravagant.



Here, I see wrens popping in and out of the lush foliage of the nearest garden bed like wind-up toys, foraging and chattering. Crispy celery, refreshing mint, and sweet sugarcane are the first to drink of the kitchen’s water here, along with the equisetum whose silica-rich stems I use to clean the dishes. It is an ancient plant, horsetail -- perhaps one of the oldest -- and its various uses extend deep into human history.



I step outside to pick a fresh batch, and see for the first time how much like antenna are their long and thin hollow stems.



What are they receiving, I wonder, and return inside with several inches worth of scrubbing material to continue with the production.



Back out in the pathways, towhees and quail scratch like tiny chickens, and in the bed of mixed greens, finches perch, nipping the buds and seedheads. I smile. There’s enough for everyone.  Olive-colored birds hop through the towering kale, drinking dewdrops and snacking on bugs hidden in the thick leaves.



Lizards patrol the stonewalls, hunting for food and mates. I see one male do a quick set of pushups. Look out, she-lizards.



A pair of bluebirds swoop onto the highest perch, surveying the scene and stealing the show. I stop washing for a moment and lean closer to watch.

I saw them visit sporadically in the fall and wished for them to stay. So on New Year’s Day, I gathered together some scrap wood and made a bluebird house for them. It caught their eye; they checked it out thoroughly and decided to move in and raise a family.



Soon their children will be needing homes, too. I reach for another dish and begin to plan for a nest-building day come fall.



It wasn’t always like this.



Two summers ago, when my husband and I first came here, it was simply a dusty, dry wasteland, a place once used as a construction dump. Gravel, sand and chunks of asphalt were covered with a smear of weedy soil, and the landscape was silent and empty, save for a hawk crying high above.

We had stood there on the house steps, considering our next move. Would we take this on? We started to leave, and then stopped. A giant rattlesnake was coiled by the bottom step. I stared, thrilled and afraid, until slowly and silently he slid away under the porch.



Dusty and desolate I knew I could handle -- but this? I had been raised on scary snake stories by my mother, who feared all snakes, even the rubber ones. Besides, rattlesnakes always seemed to play a deadly role in all the westerns I had seen growing up.



The hawk cried again and I glanced up. A red balloon was floating through the sky. For a moment, everything stopped. I knew my mouth must have gaped, because I was trying to say “Look!” and couldn’t get beyond a single great exhalation. I flashed back to when I was a child in elementary school and saw a French film about a red balloon befriending a little boy. It had been strange, disturbing and fascinating. Just about how I felt at the present moment.



My husband saw the balloon too, and we looked at each other in wonder. We would take this project on. We would make it work.



First, soothe the sunburned landscape with a deep blanket of mulch and all would be well, we thought.



And so we did, and so it was.



Truckloads of treetrimmings that no one else wanted were welcomed here, and thickly spread to smother the weeds.



I planted giant dead branches in the empty landscape, so that the birds would have a place to perch and watch us work. A few scouts began to visit, and kindly brought fertilizer too.



With the coming of the winter rains, the fungi awoke and began to turn the woodchips into soil. Kitchen scraps buried in the mulch called in the earthworms who feasted, adding their own magic to the mix.



Bushes, long-stunted, grew three feet that first winter, and seedlings emerged easily from the rich soil.

Buckets left out to catch the rain caught frogs as well, so I added water plants, and the frogs began to sing and multiply.  Word traveled, and the cast of characters grew.



My garden plot began to thicken.



Time passed.



We brought in a backhoe to break up the asphalt in the future garden site- such a beautiful thing that was -- and then friends helped us pull out thirty wheelbarrow loads of the stuff.



A local mushroom farm gave us truckloads of compost to form the beds, and later, friends again came to play, and helped us build garden walls with concrete chunks salvaged from the dump.



We plumbed the kitchen sink to drain to the new garden. I washed my dishes, and the list of players grew along with the stage.



Now, frogs and toads, bees and beetles and birds of all kinds claim the garden as their own. Hawks keep watch from way up high, and hummingbirds buzz through to sip nectar and collect fuzzy seedheads for their nests. Snakes glide through the mulch, keeping the mice in check and me alert . No more rattlesnakes, but, look-alike gopher snakes visit, and garters, racers and just recently (to my delight!) a young king snake.



Songs are sung here, mates are wooed, and babies weaned. Death comes here too sometimes, but I know, from the flow of my sinkwater and compost bucket into the garden, that the ending of all things is the beginning of another.



The show goes on, and I have dishes to do. I am content.



Kathryn Santoyo

EarthFlow Design Works

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