It’s certainly a fine time to be in the old familiar places of the northwest. The Evergreen State is at its lush floral best, the cool-weather walks already impossible in Texas by mid-June are still a fine evening pleasure for scoping out the neighborhood sculptures and specimen plantings in their cottage-garden settings, ferries ply the waters of Puget Sound, and even Mt. Rainier comes out of hiding behind various veils of cloud from time to time.
Sweet, blessed sleep! Yea verily, I got to sleep until the morning was almost gone today, and ohhhhh, how lovely it was indeed. Now this is vacation. A true holiday. Never mind the fun things we do, the glorious people we see, the magnificent scenery, it’s the sleep, Baby!
I don’t feel especially guilty about it, as you can tell. We once lived next door to a rooster, one of that breed who are supposed to be known as the royal emissaries of the dawn, but who deigned it his personal form of rule to choose when he would actually crow, preferably sometime in the early afternoon or perhaps around, no pun intended, the cocktail hour. I really admired him. I think that if I couldn’t choose when to be sleeping and when to be awake (even, astonishingly, productive at rare times) I would be a truly miserable character.
Instead, I get this great opportunity and I nab it gladly. I will go with my husband and complete an important business transaction with partners today; we’ll run errands, we’ll have dinner with longtime friends, we’ll come back to spend the night with my sister and her fur-bearing ‘family’. Seems like a useful enough day to me, especially if it culminates in a long night’s sleep before the next day. Hurray! Hurray!
When ideas and inspiration have ceased, at least for the time being, to well up from the inside, it’s a mercy that the wide world contains so many and will hand them to me if I keep my senses ready enough. I often find myself too distracted by the busyness and pedestrian chores of the workaday world to see the magical other dimensions right within my reach, and need some helpful pricking from a sight or sound or scent as I pass through to remind me to open up the eye and ear and heart and take advantage of the universe’s generosity when it’s poured out so liberally right within my grasp.
I walk in a haze of dully daily thought, lost to the world of rich and rare delights I’m walking in, when suddenly a mockingbird appears and turns its bright eye on me and seems to contemplate how absent I must be to almost pass it by when it’s quite nearly underfoot. In that shining eye a world reflects in which the other me is wrapped around with blooms, with drifting clouds sailing across a broad blue sky; with jasmine-scented breeze, with mist as the sprinklers spring to life, with happy shouts from a handful of little playing school kids passing me, looking for miracles of their own everywhere because they are yet too young to have forgotten them so foolishly as I have done. When the bird takes to its stripe-blazed wings and dives back into the air, my thoughts begin to follow and fly with it again: I am awake once more to flight and tune in to the rippling, rolling variations of its song as it rises to the trees, and soars above, and makes me remember that I am in a world full of wonder, if I will only let it fill me again.
Gleaming Afternoon
While I would soar, would gladly fly
Wide, in an arc across the sky
Whose dome of hotly burnished brass
Encompasses at every pass
The great wild height of atmosphere
That would engage to hold me here,
I can, eyes shut and spirit wide,
Pierce heaven to the great Outside.
Mornings are glorious, oh yes: last year’s blue morning glories in their full blazing beauty (center, with the infamous garden chandelier needing better candle power to compete with the blue brightness) inspired the planting of not only the blue variety again this year but also these hot beauties flanking it . . .
My friends, Texas gardening is a ceaseless adventure. I sense that Round One of the growth season has already closed and Round Two is beginning. The first batches of blooming goodies have quickly baked to dainty crisps and their leafy greenness gotten rather scrawny and lean looking. Yes, my darlings, it’s gettin’ hot around here.
The pavement and patio concrete have a certain handily dense solar mass that lends itself to emitting mirage-like rays of shimmering hottitude that fry up whatever seems to have escaped the downward dash of the sunlight as it fell burning from the sky in the first place. Hand watering with a hose, even in the cooler parts of the day, is an exercise in futility to a certain extent–you can practically see the spray evaporating as it comes out of the nozzle, and anything with full sun exposure makes me wonder if the roots of the plant in question will in fact be boiled in the water I’m trying to give it. Gives me a different perspective on the old saying about ‘killing with kindness’, to be sure.
While the planters are already past their first peak (in the left-hand shot taken during the roses’ first heyday), more blossoms are coming in readily; the blue-black ornamental sage next to the bell in the center photo are already a big favorite with hummingbirds–you can just see the white blurred silhouette of one in the lower right quadrant of the picture–and the brilliant blue of borage is in full swing . . .
The first burst of the rose blooms has passed and the buds are in place for their second coming after a couple of weeks of being pruned back and nurtured through their little rest period. The boxed herbs and vegetables are very thirsty and rather root-bound, so I shall have to ease their pain by some gentle dividing and see if they can continue to show their heroism in beating the heat. Even in their potted distress, the borage plants are putting out large trusses of those glorious blue, refreshing-flavored starry flowers, so I will hope all the more that a little judicious division or removal to allow them a little loosening of their too-tight pants will make them happy rather than prove an additional challenge.
Zinnias make fun little hideaway homes for local bug-dom, but katydids seem to prefer something with more windows, and the dragonfly always goes straight for the penthouse so he can survey all of the lesser insects down below . . .
I know that the garden creatures are happy. Besides having me to chew on, the insects have all sorts of plants, not least of all those greens that are heat-stressed and have their defenses down. Some of the little bugs are still shy, like the one just barely peering out of the peachy zinnia above. Most of them are quite happy to be a bit more brazen, though. My little green friend came to the window and hung out with me the other night quite willingly–or was it just staring and spying on me? The prize for showiness this week goes, though, to the handsome Carmine Darter (correct me if I mis-identify) dragonfly that calmly came and posed on my little homemade tomato cage so long that I could come out of the house and get up close and macro-personal with him.
Whatever else happens in my little playground here, the main development will likely be somewhat delayed by the depredations of my intended full-yard rehab and my entirely predictably inevitable mistakes and faux pas. And, of course, getting overheated. For the time being, I am enjoying the begonias, the silverbeet, the sweet potato vine, and the cyclamen; the marigolds, the basil, and the blue sage.
For now, all is color and joy . . . and there is undoubtedly much more to come . . .
Building Strong BonesIn the lovely resonant
shadowed hollow of
an architectural ruin,
the beauties of
its skeleton become
more than engineering,
more than a means
of shelter or a clever
way to shut people
in or out–
What happens is
life becomes caught
in the interstices of
a building’s bones–
vitality drawn off
from all the smaller lives
that have come through;
in the humming open space
of a lovely
building in ruin,
mortality is kept
as though in a jewel-case
or a body quite perfectly made
for being loved
The depth of the lake cannot be guessed
Its shimmering silicate glacial glow
With turquoise mask screens what’s below
In filtered glimmer, thought at best
To be just deep enough to hold
Beneath the frigid upper glass
Down in its centermost crevasse
Something mysterious, so old
It’s passed from memory and ken
And only surfaces when stars
Come showering down as red as Mars
To call it upward once again
Communing with its antique kin
For roaring moments in the night
Before the day dawns turquoise bright
And glassy water closes in
Once more its inexpressive glow
A wall of silence ageless, stern
And secretive, where none can learn
What lives those fathoms down below
It’s too soon to find them in bloom. They’re mostly two feet tall at best, thus far, and not nearly ready to flower. And the sky is overcast today. Quite grey and a little bit dark. Any sunflowers would be hard pressed to find the sun and smile at it.
The thing about sunflowers is, they believe in the sun even when it’s not visible. I do, too.
If I’ve learned anything in moving from the Pacific Northwest to Texas, it’s how to handle a wider range of temperatures than I was accustomed to experiencing on a regular basis. Part of that is thanks, I suspect, to a gradual cyclic change of the climate in general, and that was helpful in its way: the extremes at both ends of the weather spectrum had gotten slightly extended outward before I left western Washington, so while it was nowhere near as common to have three-digit Fahrenheit temperatures (around 38C) as it is here in my newer home, it came closer more often. And I can certainly credit a combination of my own tendency to freeze exceedingly easily, even to the point of having a nervelessly cold nose, during much of the year with the counterbalance of that delightful boon of aging, a personal microwave having been activated in my torso at various intervals from my arrival at a Certain Age and forward.
Then there was this relocation to Texas and the discovery that even a freezy-bones like me can learn to love air conditioning in the good old summertime, and conversely, that it really doesn’t have to be snowy, icy or even a notably low temperature to feel bitterly cold in the winter if the wind is howling through town sharply enough at the moment.
So what I’m working on is a sort of low-rent version of biofeedback: learning to think my way toward hot-and-cold happiness. Not hugely successfully, thus far, mind you–this is very much a work in progress. But I’m trying to convince myself that if other people can find the blast of the cold air returns in cafes and grocery aisles pleasant and comfortable, surely the temperature can’t be untenable for me. That if they can like sipping screamingly hot coffee or soup on a cool day and not develop third-degree burns, I should be able to warm up my refrigerated self in wintertime without having to set my socks on fire.
Now that it’s May and has passed 90F/32C at a hasty trot, I do need to get the whole plot in gear. While my brain is not necessarily already operating at top speed in gathering the necessary data to combat the actual, and already pretty nearly oppressive, heat, maybe if I dig deep into my treasury of imagination and do my best to imagine myself cooling off, there just may be hope yet.
It’s not your standard condition, that of being born loving to clean and tidy things. Some of us, as we get older, build up our own versions of tolerance and even gradually, a craving for neatness and blissfully shiny-clean stuff that grows strong enough to not only require that we do the work to make it possible but even, sometimes, to teach us to like it a bit. I’ve been fortunate to meander my way into the latter category, but of course the journey wasn’t without its bumps and twists. Because I was born with a natural aversion to Effort. Besides which, I figure if something is not actively imploding, it probably doesn’t need all that much help from me.
If it ain’t broke . . .
No surprise, then, if I looked at the laundry basket with something like loathing, even in my extreme youth when it was my mother who had done all of the labor of collecting, washing and folding all of the dirty clothes and filled the basket with them before I ever laid eyes on it. The mere idea of what it had taken to get from Point A (filthy kid coming in from playing in the woods) to Point B (pretty basket of neatly folded clean clothes) horrified me. The very thought of all of the tedious drudgery it would take to remove the neat and clean things from their current attractive assemblage and put them into the proper drawers and closets exhausted and demoralized me. And seeing Mom poised over the ironing board, sweeping at lengths of unforgiving wrinkled stuff with iron in hand–ohhhhh, don’t get me started! I had to dash for the nearest fainting couch at the slightest whiff of laundry. I will tell you right now that I never recovered fully enough to become friends with an Iron, and have not allowed one in my home or vicinity for lo, these many years since.
The Dreaded Laundry Basket.
But laundry; well, if I don’t exactly go door to door begging my neighbors to let me wash their linens, at least I have learned to simplify and organize my laundry days to the point where there’s a sort of easy rhythm to putting a load of clothes in the washer, going off to prepare a little something and tuck it in the oven, putting the clothes in the dryer and second batch in the wash, going over to organize my desk, taking the food out of the oven, checking the dryer, and so forth–and I don’t find I’m quite so bogged down by the immense weight of one task when it’s sandwiched rather innocuously between several others. By the time I’ve got clean things to fold, I rather like the reverse-zen mindlessness of being very methodical and fussy about putting creases just so and stacking like with like and sorting shirts by color and any other silly pattern that lets me quiet my thoughts or just free them to wander where they will.
Beware the snarl of the hairy, dragonish Duster! Flee before its smoggy breath!
Dusting has always seemed so futile as to be nigh unto ridiculous. If I don’t make a mark in it, it’s practically invisible, right? [I heard that!] More importantly, any dust stirred up–and you know some will stir up even if you use a duster coated with super-glue–is going to settle somewhere as soon as it can. Where? Directly below your duster, where it came from, of course. Don’t tell me that isn’t simple physics telling me I shouldn’t bother to try dusting. My elders, of course, have never had any particular respect for the laws of physics (as witness, trying to convince this square peg she would be happy learning to fit into any number of round or even triangular openings, at least until said Peg got too full of herself to fit any pre-drilled holes). So there was a regular expectation that I ought to better acclimate myself to the concept of dusting and do it anyway. Not only did I, however churlishly, do it then, I now own a duster as a fully independent adult. Only for the direst emergencies, mind you: I can still recognize the menacing beast’s mane at the end of a duster’s handle, thank you very much. Those jokers can kill you with one wheezy breath.
The lineaments of lint, in all of their mountainous glory.
I did finally succumb to the duster-buying pressure when I spent a little time contemplating what emerged from my dryer’s lint trap. Because it seemed to me that if freshly washed clothes gave off that much accumulated dust and hair and assorted dismembered insect components and stuff in one short tumbling exhibition, there might actually be a pretty fair amount just casually drifting around right under my nostrils and landing willy, nilly, hither and yon if it didn’t go straightaway into my lungs. Call me a pessimist. [Yes, I heard that, too! Cheez, people, cut me a little slack. I’m trying to keep a clean house here.]
Vacu-Man is coming! Hide the children! Save yourself if you can!!
The other answer to the dust problem is of course the bigger beast, the one that can eat larger quantities of dirt and disgustingness with wide slurps of its massive maw. There’s no wonder at all that pets and small children scatter in fear before the ‘Transformative’ power of a vacuum. Have you really looked at that scary mechanical menace lately? Every time I open up the closet and see that grimacing Succu-Droid glaring at me I get a little queasy thinking it’s about to drag me all over the house, growling fearsomely the whole time. Talk about being hauled on the carpet! Making me trudge all through the dark corners of every room, yanking my arms out of their sockets and working me up into a grubby sweat in an eyeblink, but seeming to take forever every time. And for what, to pull up enough loose grit so that it uncovers just how worn and stained and discolored the actual carpeting under the dirt is in the first place? That’s just plain mean.
Clearly I *am* capable of getting everything sparkling clean until ‘we’re all in our places, with bright shining faces . . . ‘
I still end up evading the vacuum for longer periods than is strictly optimal, keeping it in an intermediate parking spot outside of the storage closet so that it’s in brighter light and can’t pull its scary-face stunts on me so easily, so I can work my way up to grabbing it by the neck and hanging on for dear life until the rodeo’s over again. After all, I’ve got plenty of other things to do. The outside of the windows I can make less of a big deal because I can just jet-wash them with the garden hose while I water the flowerbeds–in Texas the heat dries them so fast they don’t have time to streak much. But the dishes, I’ve yet to find that hosing them down on the patio has quite the same desirable effect as actually putting them in soapy water in a sink or dishwasher. And we don’t have any pets that will lick them clean for us. So I credit any time spent immersed up to my elbows in bubbles or loading up the ol’ dishwasher as time I don’t have to spend vacuuming. It’s not like we have to eat directly off of the carpeting anyway.
Everything dirty does deserve the occasional bubble bath.
I do like my food to come into and out of a reasonably sanitary place, whenever possible, so I’ve been known to get seriously aggressive from time to time when it comes to kitchen cleaning. Once the food’s prepared, it may be that all bets are off, because hey, I already swept the floor, so how many cooties can already have occupied that little spot where I just now dropped a bite? I’ll take my chances. ‘Thirty second rule’, that’s nothing. I’ll give it a good thirty minutes if I happened to be on my way to another chore and can’t get back to pick up that morsel until the return trip. No wonder I dropped a bite anyway, when my hands were so full of the Good Deeds of good housekeeping! And it all came through a supremely safe and clean kitchen. I’m almost sure of it. I’ve even been known to clean the oven, though of course that’s only likely to happen by virtue of living in a house with a self-cleaning one, so I only had to figure out the arcana of its antiquated workings.
Look, Ma, no grime! (You may need to put your sunglasses on.)
All in all, I like to think we live in a relatively toxin-free, moderately tidy home and that the various arrangements I’ve made to survive the chores more sensibly contribute to a place that, if not up to royal standards, isn’t utterly slouchy either. When you come to visit me you can go ahead and put up your heels on the coffee table, because we’re big on ease and comfort around here, but I won’t let you stick them on the dining table. If your pants get direly dirty with our dusty red Texas clay, I’ll happily wash, dry and fold them for you, but ain’t no bucking rodeo bull gonna get me to iron them for you. You can fold them under your mattress for the night or even go find an iron and press ’em yourself, but there are some demons of the homemaking variety I’m just not willing to battle any more. I’ve seen enough of that combat in my time.
Weed or Wildflower? Does it matter? Everything here looks perfectly in order to me!
It’s why I have my relaxed attitude toward weeds on the property, too. If they’ll stand up and look pretty and behave sweetly toward me, I’m certainly not inclined to cut them down just because they showed up uninvited. Why, it’s what I’d do for any good guest.
Art-Colored Glasses 