Through Nora's Eyes

I think that this one just looks pretty.

I think this one looks cute.

And I just like this one.

This is actually my favorite toy.  And his name is Rexie.  My Grandma made Rexie.

This is my pillow pet.  His name is Ruff.

That's a craft I made at school.  

This is my mom.  

These are my shoes.

This is a friend of Rexie's.  His name is Steggie.  My grandma made him, too.

This one is what I like because this one has eggs in it, and I like eggs because they are my favorite food.

These are two of my zoobles that I have.

This is ONE of the zoobles I have.

Advice for Kids Who Would Like to Take Pictures:  You should just ask your mom if you can borrow her camera.  Uh, you just have to look around.  You can see, you can look for anything you want and then send it to Nora and Lisa, so we can check it out and make sure that, um, they took it the right way.  Any obstacle you like in your house.  You can take a picture of that.  That's everything.

They Beds are Ready: Wake the Vegetables

Nora continues to watch from her observation tower for anything out of the ordinary as we finish putting the final two beds together.  

Mike checks to see if the corners are level while I consider the view.  I see Mom with the camera, and I pretend NOT to see Nora in her camouflaged observation tower.   

Henrietta wanted to say hello to Teagan and make sure the cardboard hamster is being fed.

Then Mike put together Nora's own raised bed garden.  We filled it and put seed in today.  Nora said, "Grandpa didn't give up when he was tired.  Not once.  This is how we know he loves us."

Growth

Homemade butterfly net.

When I asked Nora how she felt when she couldn't catch a butterfly, this is the face she made.

CHARGE!

I've moved all the seedlings into the shed so they might acclimate to their outdoor life, which is now.

Ila's gift of perennial plantings going back fifty years now.  The irises bloom.  

Feathered ferns, another gift from a life that walked before mine.

Using a couple of butter knives, I was able to rig Nora's hammock up in the corner of the fenced area.  She's reading Gravity's Rainbow on the kindle right now.

The rhubarb (Ila, thank you) is up again.  Unfortunately for my addiction to apricot rhubarb jam, I don't think I'll have any apricots this year, the bloom on the tree coming so early, before the bees arrived.  But there will be rhubarb crisp.  And this is plenty.

Flowering chives.  My gift for the next one here.

Working together, we put our broccoli in today.  Transplanting often leaves the seedlings looking hesitant about the new setting, but they soon find the soil beneath them, the sun above. 

Below the chapped earth, onion sprouts.  We had hard rains, and the soil has crusted over.   I'll have to go over much of what has already been tilled to loosen it again, so the green shoot doesn't struggle more than necessary.

And the asparagus continues to grow.  Soon they'll move into their seeding phase, and we'll wait for them another year, and when they arrive, we'll throw another Spring party.

The Garden Is Saying

"The garden communicates what it shows to you but you also contribute to the garden some of what you are seeking in terms of your own life, your own state of being.  One reason a garden can speak to you is that it is both its own reality and a manifestation of the interior life of the mind that imagined it in the beginning."  -- Stanley Kunitz

Raised beds:  A desire for defined potential and the full use of all available space to thrive, get closer to other living things, dissolve boundaries and rows so that all can touch.  A dance of cool and warm crops as the human hand wishes to respond rather than enforce something fighting too fiercely with its own environment, wanting to control it rather than nurture (in order to know it on its own terms) and sustain it.

Flowers and Carrots:  Bulldozing woman of purpose, will you not sit still long enough to hear what the flower whispers to the bee, what the carrot confesses to the zinnia?  Beauty has a purpose, too.  You won't waste time noticing it, stubborn list-maker.

Vertical or Growing Up:  The sudden bursting out and up of a thing held too long to the ground, pinned like a wrestler, allowed to tilt greenfacedleaf fully to the sun, tall and made to be taller.  And if I learn to not slouch, ashamed and sky-shy, perhaps I too could be fruitful, could take the full breath of lifting lungs and negotiate the space each one of us was given to move and not to cower.

When Good Friends Give you the Things They Say

1.  "Sometimes faced with a wall in our path we look up, gathering its height.  Sometimes we glance left or right, and walk around it instead... When there is difficulty we contemplate the height of the leap.  Never the potential narrowness of the obstacle.  To either side it might open into a garden."

"I'm stealing that."

"It's yours."

2.  She texts to tell me the song she wrote for me is finished.  "Can I come over and hear it?"

"This poor heart was scorched earth and his song was my rain...his voice coming through...I was blinded by sorrow and that big sky...but he sang me through every mile...you put me together piece by piece...you should know it was your words that helped me find my own...and if he ever comes to claim what I owe him, well, he'll have to take all of me..."

And I'm sitting on her couch after driving the truck from the pool parking lot where I sat grading essays with both windows open and breathing for me.  Our kids are at preschool, and I wasn't expecting to cry like this, to hear this thing she found written in my life before I knew to live it, but there it is.

"So, yeah, I wasn't expecting to cry today."

"Oh, man, I'm sorry."

"Nah, nah.  I'm not afraid.  I'm not scared of this."

3.  Friends, friends...lean in.  Lean in.  We're going to make it.  We can do this. 

"I walked the perimeter asking, 'What is needed?'  And there were answers."

Sometimes When You Just Need a Small Reminder

Very sharp bleu cheddar cheese.

Snapping asparagus out of the ground and eating it right then and there after brushing any dirt off onto your jeans, which you'll wash over the weekend and hang on the line, another part of the grand cycle.

The way the pansies lift their faces almost immediately after you water them.

Your daughter's pink flushed cheeks after chasing a butterfly through the mud, over the grid in the garden, over lumber, broken branches, windmill and dandelions--barefoot and openhearted and reaching.

Laughing with a room of poets who allow me to not be a professor while being a professor.

Sinking into the knowledge that it isn't what is taught but what is loved between each of you in the room as you build it and break it apart and lift each other up again stronger for having spilled it.

Stopping in the middle of the dark hallway in the basement where my office is, so I can follow rather than forge ahead.

Makin' copies.

More green whispering trees calls me summer mind and a hammock to hang between two mulberry trees in the orchard near the field, which will be planted in soybean this year.  My favorite because of the way the lightning bugs lift themselves out of the low, green foliage into hesitant dances that are there and then not there and then there again.

Teagan's Hamster Handbooks (Plural)

A few weeks back, our good friend Teagan came to visit.  She has a beautiful eye.  If you'd like to look through it, go here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/teagannicholle

After holding Nora's pet hamster Henrietta, Teagan began to wonder out loud if a hamster was something she might want in the future.  Nora had a lot of advice, and we made a cardboard hamster puppet for Teagan to practice feeding--just to make sure she would be responsible enough for the real thing.  I haven't heard how it's going, but I'm hoping the little cardboard hamster head is still alive.  Anyway, Nora has composed a three part guide about hamster care for you, Teagan.  Here it is.  Oh, and be sure to click on the photos, so you can read Nora's comments: