Last year's garden, like most of us, endured a few challenges. First there were the aphids that attacked the potatoes and the organic death spray I used to kill the potatoes because I failed to read the label:
"Warning: This spray effectively kills anything you use it on, including your garden. But, hey, you don't have aphids anymore, right?"
And then there was the decorative gourd...incident. I can't even talk about it. I would be eating zucchini bread right now if 1/3 of the garden hadn't found itself infested with all that "pretty, inedible squash." If I want to see an inedible squash, I'll watch Veggie Tales. I don't need it in my garden.
I feel like I'm right on the verge of being funny, but I'm too tired to break the humor sound barrier.
I guess you'll just have to settle for an informative blog post tonight.
I'm taking a gardening class next week. (To All Y'all gals who wanted to join, I think it's through Southeast Community College, and happens the evening of the 15th. I wish it would have been on the 14th. That would have solved a lot of problems for me...but I digress.) We'll be learning about raised beds, soil mixes, crop rotation, vertical gardening, and staggered planting. I have tell you, just writing those words makes me happy. I need as much happy as I can get because I've been burning the useless "why can't I be better/perfect" oil lately, and this is a sure sign that someone has had too much time indoors.
The seed catalogs speak to me about being lifted from this white expanse into something I can sing about.
In the meantime, I'm going to rearrange these gourds.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Abstractions and other Groovy Things
I like:
John Cage saying there are two things that never need to explain themselves: music and laughter, and then he busts up on film, and I catch it, too, shoulders shaking with the kind of laughing you do in movie theaters--all movement and no sound.
Driving home and deciding to listen to static because it's better than anything else on the dial. And I'm just listening to sound, and there's something liberating about not having to "think" something about it.
How clear 34 is today. I drove back an forth between York and Seward twice today and will do it again tomorrow, and I just want to hug a snowplow.
National Geographic.
And I love:
The Valentine Nora gave me today, made secretly under the craft room table, and she's drawn an eye, a heart and a stick figure. Loud and clear, honey. Loud and clear.
John Cage saying there are two things that never need to explain themselves: music and laughter, and then he busts up on film, and I catch it, too, shoulders shaking with the kind of laughing you do in movie theaters--all movement and no sound.
Driving home and deciding to listen to static because it's better than anything else on the dial. And I'm just listening to sound, and there's something liberating about not having to "think" something about it.
How clear 34 is today. I drove back an forth between York and Seward twice today and will do it again tomorrow, and I just want to hug a snowplow.
National Geographic.
And I love:
The Valentine Nora gave me today, made secretly under the craft room table, and she's drawn an eye, a heart and a stick figure. Loud and clear, honey. Loud and clear.
Monday, February 6, 2012
1, 2, 3, 4: Count Them So You'll See Some More
1. They slide black and white codes across my desk, and I file them in separate plastic folders, secret them to the gas station and open them again to relive with them what thoughts and cares surfaced while they moved a pen across their lives, plowing and planting.
2. My fingers haven't touched strings in many weeks, and this "later...later" I use to pacify the song folds the laundry and keeps the house picked up, cooks some meals, and I pray through all of it, domestic paeans.
3. We read our stories, and I notice her little body like a furnace, her hand twisting my hair in rings the way she's done since she was a baby. The thermometer reads 101, and I wait for the clean sun of summer to warm us healthy and golden again.
4. I read all of Alice Walker's Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. I listen to Jose Gonzales' "Crosses" and Thomas Newman's "Any Other Name." I practice vocabulary: inchoate, fulsome, coruscate, disport, importunate. I am preparing myself for listening, for comprehension.
5. Did you see the whole world erased, and will you rejoice when God paints it again? Let's dance then together, you and me. Let's mudlucious. Let's seed the world. Let's waterfall and drive the truck I haven't bought yet to a national monument and when we get there, let's feel monumental, too.
2. My fingers haven't touched strings in many weeks, and this "later...later" I use to pacify the song folds the laundry and keeps the house picked up, cooks some meals, and I pray through all of it, domestic paeans.
3. We read our stories, and I notice her little body like a furnace, her hand twisting my hair in rings the way she's done since she was a baby. The thermometer reads 101, and I wait for the clean sun of summer to warm us healthy and golden again.
4. I read all of Alice Walker's Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. I listen to Jose Gonzales' "Crosses" and Thomas Newman's "Any Other Name." I practice vocabulary: inchoate, fulsome, coruscate, disport, importunate. I am preparing myself for listening, for comprehension.
5. Did you see the whole world erased, and will you rejoice when God paints it again? Let's dance then together, you and me. Let's mudlucious. Let's seed the world. Let's waterfall and drive the truck I haven't bought yet to a national monument and when we get there, let's feel monumental, too.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Without Proofreading or Perfection
The low string pulling. Has been happening
for some time now, the sensation of being tugged
ashore by some rope tied around my middle.
I wonder where I am going but not so much either.
I don't know how to explain it. Ah. There is a curiosity
rather than a fear.
Decide between competition and compassion.
This weekend I obsess about two small mistakes.
Have you done this?
Allowed the internal dictator to command the larger portion
of your time worrying about small things like accidentally pronouncing an author's name incorrectly or saying simile when you meant metaphor?
The liar hits me low, at my pride. When I could be thinking of so many
victories, that I may have helped someone with the same fear of being "not enough" or somehow "not qualified."
These wars parade so ugly between the countries inside (the borders of) myself.
And the hope comes blaring trumpet of
woman sitting cleared and humming
knowing the low string pulling is God
who will always, already love
some girl who is always, already going off to war.
for some time now, the sensation of being tugged
ashore by some rope tied around my middle.
I wonder where I am going but not so much either.
I don't know how to explain it. Ah. There is a curiosity
rather than a fear.
Decide between competition and compassion.
This weekend I obsess about two small mistakes.
Have you done this?
Allowed the internal dictator to command the larger portion
of your time worrying about small things like accidentally pronouncing an author's name incorrectly or saying simile when you meant metaphor?
The liar hits me low, at my pride. When I could be thinking of so many
victories, that I may have helped someone with the same fear of being "not enough" or somehow "not qualified."
These wars parade so ugly between the countries inside (the borders of) myself.
And the hope comes blaring trumpet of
woman sitting cleared and humming
knowing the low string pulling is God
who will always, already love
some girl who is always, already going off to war.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Reading Alice Walker
1. When I am thinking of Alice Walker, I am feeling closer to peace.
2. This hard, cold voice that tells me how much I am lacking begins at the core of me, and when it can't convince me there, moves to the outside and with greedy broom hands sweeps objects and ideas into the house that doesn't belong here as if they would make me whole again, and there is the first lie tucked under the door: you aren't whole.
3. There is an anemia of vocabulary, a holding back, a stinginess of shoulders hunched over, the shadow that keeps the heart from blooming.
4. I began reading Alice Walker when I was 19, and at some point Mom gave me everything she'd written. And I know this writer with a gardener's heart helps me locate where the ground meets the places we wander even when my feet seem too uncertain to step down. She tells me how to plant this life for good and with complete acceptance and thanksgiving for what has grown and is growing.
5. And though I don't know her, I still consider her a friend I've met.
2. This hard, cold voice that tells me how much I am lacking begins at the core of me, and when it can't convince me there, moves to the outside and with greedy broom hands sweeps objects and ideas into the house that doesn't belong here as if they would make me whole again, and there is the first lie tucked under the door: you aren't whole.
3. There is an anemia of vocabulary, a holding back, a stinginess of shoulders hunched over, the shadow that keeps the heart from blooming.
4. I began reading Alice Walker when I was 19, and at some point Mom gave me everything she'd written. And I know this writer with a gardener's heart helps me locate where the ground meets the places we wander even when my feet seem too uncertain to step down. She tells me how to plant this life for good and with complete acceptance and thanksgiving for what has grown and is growing.
5. And though I don't know her, I still consider her a friend I've met.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Love
Our hearts are fires. And the small tinder
I was able to gather now soaks in the basin
in case I would think to start again
that radiant and consuming story
of a light burning for another.
I was able to gather now soaks in the basin
in case I would think to start again
that radiant and consuming story
of a light burning for another.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Little Things
Nora and Mom snuggling under a yellow blanket.
Iced tea at the Spur reading the final pages as the fields stretch out like my dreams.
Finding the right words for the assignment after thinking someone else could say it better.
Dancing to the Fresh Beat Band with Nora in the living room, her smile.
Sharing a meal with my family.
Hide and seek and recycling and filling up the gas tank and that sucker they still give you at the bank when you've got a little one in the car.
Downton Abbey making me forget I don't live anywhere else but there. How much I love believing the "lie" of this work of fiction.
And then hitting the hay for the day.
Iced tea at the Spur reading the final pages as the fields stretch out like my dreams.
Finding the right words for the assignment after thinking someone else could say it better.
Dancing to the Fresh Beat Band with Nora in the living room, her smile.
Sharing a meal with my family.
Hide and seek and recycling and filling up the gas tank and that sucker they still give you at the bank when you've got a little one in the car.
Downton Abbey making me forget I don't live anywhere else but there. How much I love believing the "lie" of this work of fiction.
And then hitting the hay for the day.
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