It's hot.

Photo by Lauren Rivers

Just as I was doing the bills, safely inside, away from the 90+ steamy weather, the doorbell rang.  It was Lachlan, Alexander's friend from down the street, asking if I wanted  some lemonade.  He and his friend had a stand in front of their house, but he had come to my door instead, knowing in this heat that I probably wouldn't be going out to walk by any time soon.

Smart fellow!  So on his bike he came to offer, then deliver, a cup for me.  

While Alexander and his dad have been enjoying the cool, beautiful scene-scapes of Alaska, summer here has come in on a fast, fierce heatwave (what a change for them when they return!).

I have the fans on and the air set at a degree lower than usual.  Writing this on my desk tucked away in a corner of the back room, shades closed, is also unusual; I'm usually on the porch, cup of coffee at my side, ruminating in the light and breeze.  But porch weather is now very, very early in the morning or later in the fading solstice light of evening.  The coffee is iced.

The move to indoors has me conjuring up a few projects, though...one of which (I'm jittery even as I admit this) is the reluctant idea for an art show here at home in the early fall.  My neighbor, on my telling her that the other day, had a look of horror on her face and said, "Is it because you need the money?"  I quickly disabused her of  penury.  No, I told her, I'm doing it because there is art stacked up all over the house...paintings, books, hangings...and I don't have another inch to display or store it.

Showing art is a real pain for me...there is no other way to describe it.  I love working the art itself, but I hate having to offer it for open sale.  If someone admires it, I'm happy to let it go. And I do give some as gifts, but those go only to people I suspect/hope would actually want it...often, it has been created with them in mind. 

Even the physical acts of choosing, framing, cleaning, setting up displays, sending out invitations, don't inspire me.  It's like that box of writing I have stored somewhere...a novel, some stories, a few collections of poems...once I'm finished with them, I'm done, and on the shelf they go.  I don't, I'm afraid, have the necessary commercial bone in my body.  (I do admire Lachlan for his lemonade stand.)

 Truthfully, if I could, I'd build a hall only to keep my art hoard safe from having to do something with it.

Frankly, the chance to sit down at the worktable and see what rises out of paint, paper, words, wood, metal...good or not so..is the best of my ordinary days (except, of course, when Alexander comes in the door, and once in a while he sits down with me, too).  Then, I'm finding myself in art.

 It's like a cocoon, where I grow into something bigger than myself, something even I can't conceive at the moment; it sometimes takes years to see what I've been in art.  I wish the cocoon of making were all there were.

Stay cool, you all.   Have a taste of some lemonade.

Beautiful morning

 As I write this, it's really only a bit to noon, but the fan on the porch is whirring a breeze my way, and the air is still a cool 73.  I've been on two walks already, taking advantage of the shady paths.  

On the way around the circle, one neighbor tells me she's been hearing so many birds this morning; she names them...a red breasted woodpecker among others...she has an app for identifying them by their sound.  I meet another who walks with me a while...we straighten out Life's affairs along the way.  On the second walk, in another area, one I used to enjoy while I stayed there briefly, I walk to deliver a guide book to a couple soon off to Switzerland. 

Even earlier than that, in the lovely 65 degrees of seven a.m., I had gone out to wait for Alexander to say a good morning before school, meanwhile pulling weeds and all those brown flaccid daffodil leavings.  I'd woken by 5:30, ready for the day.

Writing now, I too am hearing the enthused voices of birds...I have to identify them by sight since I don't have the app...a pair of cardinals taking turns among the elianthus, several finches busy pecking around for fallen seeds, rustling the tall stalks of the false indigo and the light purple thing I can't name, and a woodpecker I can't see, busy on the pine tree (I wish that were my photo above, but alas, I can't get birds to stay still for a photograph).  

Outrageously, at the side of the road in front of the house, two bluebirds, with their startlingly deep hued wings wide open, fight each other so fiercely they don't pay me any mind.  What they are at odds about there is anybody's guess...territory? food? jealousy? When they finally each fly off in different directions, their voices screech as if cursing each other.   Or maybe me? I shrug it off.

If this kind of day has me ready to burst out, yesterday was another story.  Our Memorial Day gathering over, the house already put to rights easily enough, being outdoors then meant barely an early 20 minutes sweeping the front steps and pulling invading grass from the front walk. The humidity was 86% for one thing, and the rising temperature mattered worse because of it. 

So I stayed in the house, dabbling at this and that, not very productively...a 6 on wordle, worse on quordle (the game cheated with a proper noun).  Looking for an activity I could do with some success, I started a wash and changed the bed linens. 

In between loads, I picked up one book for a few pages, put it down for another's few pages. Both were interesting, but I wasn't.  A neighbor stopped by for a brief chat ("I thought you weren't home at first," he said.  "Your kitchen light was out.").

As I was out of my chair anyway, I opened the porch, sprinkled some water on my newly acquired bamboo plant (a passed-on gift from one of the graduate-school graduates next door) and walked right back inside again. On the sofa with my feet up, I wrote a few thank-you's.  Up again, I wandered room to room, fixing a few out-of-sorts things and re-organizing the leftovers in the frig. 

Souls rising from woodland home, 2024

Late afternoon I shuffled into my workroom to address a piece that has had me frowning for a few months.  I think it's done now.  I checked my card calendar for June birthdays (the very first one, there can be no card for, alas...my husband's), and then, out of a vague, "someday"  idea of having a showing of art (because it's beginning to crowd me out), I began to pull bottom-shelf paintings to see what could be salvaged. 

Salvaging the day was what all that was about. By evening, I forced a decidedly desultory walk, after which I sunk into a few episodes of Shakespeare-quoting Rumpole and went to bed early.   

Yet, as it often happens, that ramshackle yesterday cleared the way for a more livesome one today. My list now has only one ordinary chore on it (it's summer, so I'm ironing linen wear).  For the rest, the more creative ventures.  Time to dig into the box of thick wisteria vine I took from a friend's chopping to make a new outdoor hanging...with fabric? metal? wire?  Time to see about a front panel for Alexander's tree house...barn door maybe?  Time to look up the new summer American Dance Festival schedule...Paul Taylor?  Ballet Hispanico?  Time for this blog.

Here's hoping your day livens into one you can make something interesting happen, too.

Bookish wanderings

Good morning.

The art table showing no inspiration and the inside chores already checked off, what is there to turn to but books on a clouded day.  Fortunately I have quite a pile ready...all kinds.  Besides the stories they house, impatient to be released, they are marked by the way I have received them, and the whom received from, tales in themselves.  

I'll begin with the one I've nearly finished...only a chapter to go, but the most recent to arrive, a Mother's Day gift from Joseph, who remembered that his friend Rachel and I had talked about it at dinner last week:  A Really Strange and Wonderful Time, by Tom Maxwell, once a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers whose music zippered open old and new listeners in the late 80's and 90's.  It's about all the music in what was known as the Chapel Hill scene (or scenius, as one pundit put it), and it involved a few friends of mine whose adventures in and out of the music world mirrored what this town used to be like...a place to start anything, to try anything, to mix it up.

I wasn't here for most of those two decades, but Rachel rightly guessed that I'd find touchstones to interest me.  The language of the book is music-business talk, mostly, about which I'm clueless, though it doesn't stop me trying to decode the culture just too young for my years.  There is, in fact, such youth in it that Maxwell, who can't call himself young anymore either, still vibrates with it, and that endears me, a lover of the many different lingoes we choose to write and talk.

A lot of the way books come to me has that catalyst.  This next one hasn't arrived yet...it's only in the first stages of writing, in fact...but lunch yesterday with John May gave me an enticing glimpse into his newest project, about the Algonquins of Virginia. It follows the one published this week, on the Jamestown colony. His excitement over his newest research and ways to describe this to-be novel, especially his fascination with the language and its various translations..."the literal ones are so elegant!"...I'm ready for it.  (More amazing is the fact that though he and Alice have just moved house, a huge endeavor over the last four months, his study is up and running and producing text.)

It was OneTree books online that sent me to the library to pick up Anne Enright's Yesterday's Weather, chosen over her latest novel because I've been in the mood for good short stories these days, and the two I read last week, off my own bookshelf, weren't really doing it.  But as I came up the B aisle, a yellow and orange cover caught my eye. and sure enough, this line on the inside front cover made me take Carol Birch's Orphans of the Carnival home, too: 

Julia stood apart from the other carnival acts.  She was fluent in English, French and Spanish, an accomplished musician...

That's how I first found the slim volume I have now taken out for the second time...Kaouther Adimi's Our Riches, about the famous bookshop and printery in war-torn Algiers who sent Camus out into the world and which epitomizes the tribulations and triumphs of small bookstores everywhere.  Its storyteller fascinated me...so inclusive that it determines you along as if a hand on your elbow guided you from street to street.  And yet listen to what I copied down that first reading:

    There are some cities, and this is one, where any kind of company is a burden.

It's true enough...I know a few cities like that; though I had never been to Algiers, I have read that place now.

At home, all that yard work sent me to The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year, Margaret Renkl's calendar of garden insights.  Randomly opening the book, I found  "Praise Song for Solomon's Seal," at the end of week 11:    

    The purple-tinged stalks pop out of the ground with their foliage tightly furled, but very soon the leaves will open up like a teenager who has just learned she's beautiful, like a lonely person finally loved.

 Oh, those bittersweet memories of Solomon Seal (and other) plantings I cannot keep the deer away from.  I will read one chapter each week, beginning mid-May , and complete the whole next April.

My tables, floor and walls fill with books sent by friends, sometimes memoirs they or their spouses have written, but also books they have taken to heart. The most poignant of which latter was given me by a dear friend, but it isn't really a memoir at all: the  award-laden, star-reviewed novel, Reparer les vivants by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French and called in English The Heart. 

"I read The Heart in a single sitting," Atul Gawande notes in the beginning pages, but I have picked it up and put it down countless times after barely a page, its elegant,  overriding, language ripping up my memories.  I doubt I will ever finish it.  Still, it stays on my table.  And I am grateful for my friend's offering.

Outside, the little roadside library flourishes with things in, things out, so now and then I catch a good one there, wondering who left it, wondering what I can leave that entices in return.  I found Maeve Binchy's A Week in Winter there.  Short and Binchy, it served me a night's reading about one of my favorite subjects...turning a downtrodden building into a guest house.  (Not that I have ever had the push to do that...it's the spirit of it, the dream of another, more energetic, life.)

Do you read as I do?  Interestingly, of the two book groups I attend, I doubt the traditional one, whose monthly lists seem to come from the Times book list or other book groups, even old college reading lists, would take to any of these...indeed, they've regarded skeptically those I have recommended so far.  

Fortunately, the non-traditional one, where each month we bring what has meant something of import to us, is the more curious, more intense, more questioning and discursive...it has no trouble ranging out anywhere. My kind of reading aloud among friends...through and between the lines.

Viva la libra!

Entanglings

 

Good morning from the porch, where I am watching new star jasmine acclimating themselves to the fence in back.

Back in March, I'd ordered 6 small ones from Southern States, but it wasn't til yesterday that they called to say they were in.  Not quite what I wanted, they admitted a little sheepishly:  the order arrived in 3-gallon buckets.  I laughed, and told her I'd take two of them.  "Instant gratification!" said the register attendant.  

Well, true.  Already they are spreading themselves out to make a lovely view from my kitchen window, and will curl around for a little porch view, too.

I am happy to grow things from small to large, but this time I won't have to fight the deer off for the tender sprout beginnings, as I have for the chocolate vine babies, the honeysuckle, and the clematis.  I gave the clematis away, but the chocolate vine, though with barely any leaves left on its upper tendrils, is still climbing possessively up the fence wires.  It shows a spirit I admire.  

Meanwhile, the birds seem to be enjoying the looping plant encasing one of the old iron gates at the edge of the yard behind the small patio I built...I can't remember its name...it will have tiny summer flowers.  There must be a nest nearby of red and brown wrens, for I see those more often, along with a bluebird and a cardinal couple, hopping around among the plant and the iron chair and table.

The point I think I am slowly coming to is that, although I talk about my "garden" and the "gardening" I pretend I work at, this yard is a mass of things crunched together, entangled in ivy and vinca in the back, or scattered here and there on the front slope.  Real gardeners might call it a jungle, with good reason.  But because it is roofed from April to late November in deciduous trees (and grows in poor, you could say non-existent, soil), after March and April's energetic planting and weeding and arranging and re-arranging, I let it all go where it wants and will.

I've even decided that this year the wild purple mint that is already sprouting in the driveway can encroach all it wants.  There are other weeds to pull, and I as usual will do a few each day, as well as pick up the endless twigs and branches the trees rain each morning.  Until the mint reaches its 12-inch height, and then I will yank it out where it's getting too big for its roots.

So I apologize if previous posts have intimated that I am more a gardener than I am.  I've decided that I like my jungle of green, sometimes unplanned, often surprising over-growth.  I like to see what does and doesn't make it, year by year.

For instance, the bulbs I planted last year, in what was previously a wildflower garden I thought had failed, came out magnificently in March, but now that they are spent, here come the wildflowers again reaching, pushing themselves through and around the folded-over daffodil and iris leaves. 

 Likewise, the peony I thought was dead by winter has, Phoenix-like, sprung up again, with a healthy bud, maybe two.  

The two small magnolias which have grown barely an inch or two a year since Tom Krenitsky brought them to me from his magnificent magnolia preserve have sent up signs that they might bloom at the top this year.  (Tom advised me just to let them be what they will be, no care needed.)  

So I keep watching them, and others, as they mature, or not, making a wilderness of yard and sometimes mind.  And will do so long after I can't pick weeds anymore.

  

Happy garden to you all, however yours grows.

New windows

 It's deep gray this morning, and my plants and I are waiting for promised rain. So far, it's only come in such light drops that there aren't even puddles forming.  I'm usually a morning person, but except for putting on a wash [I  just broke off to dry them], going for a focused grocery run, and making distracted mistakes with wordle and quordle, I haven't been able to settle into something.

Yet I've had that opening line on my mind for hours now.  I wonder what it is about the urge to write that washes into you, until you abandon everything else on the list. (Though there is the silence, too, when no words come.)

Last week, I had new windows put in the house; they are bright white emblems of what I need these days...a new view on life.  In a few days, I'll be traveling west again for sort of the same reason, a change of scene and heart.  Old friends to see, places to return to or rediscover, new routes to try out of the familiar.  Melding the past and the present, those days away dig themselves in and out of sorrow, a release, a pleasure.  A spur to engage the future.

Like those windows, it's mostly the same landscape I see through them, but by a new configuration, a new brightness.  The season helps.  Spring leaves things underfoot, as it opens up all the color and beauty we have been missing on the barren ground.  Walking along the front slope, I see flowerings I forgot were planted there...or perhaps they arrived on the wind.  It's a haphazardly growing slope, but I enjoy the surprises there.   And in the one sunny spot, at the end of the driveway, daffodils threw themselves up brilliantly. Though most are drying on their stems now, I've still got one pot bright.

The back fence garden, on the other hand, is being newly, deliberately laid out (too early for surprises yet), and so it is, in fact, a new look.  I'm enjoying that, as well, seeing its length not as one long outlook but as separate images through one back window after another.  The surprise there is that, though I didn't plant it with those individual views in mind, it just came to be that way.

My new windows have only one drawback...they've run away with any far travel this year.  Still, it's worth the sacrifice, not only for new ways of looking out, but for the satisfaction that I'm helping ready the house (and myself) for a new stage of life.  Whenever it happens to come for me.

Ought

 

My dear readers,

It's been months since I wrote, weeks filled with all kinds of distractions.  I'm sorry not to be in touch. 

Today is spring, which has been flowering prolifically hereabouts, the daffodils, especially, blooming in waves front and back...including beautiful, complicated ones I planted from a mixed bag last fall.

I did write in late February, but never sent it: all about how I was struggling to puzzle out the back garden.

I'm about to update that today, but before I do, I thought you'd like to see for yourselves what the struggle has been about.

Part I:

February 23:  Ought...as in I ought to be on my way to the garden shop to pick up mulch, paving stones, plants and vinegar for my back garden, standing unresolved since the back fence was installed, defining a space so different than before.  You would think, with a list like that, that I knew what I was doing.

I don't like fences, but this one was necessary if I was to claim that back jungle.  Like the writer who promised his editor that he'd begin his awaited novel as soon as he polished his tennis shoes, this morning I read, painted, checked airline flights (to where?) and even cleaned the bathroom in another attempt (conscious or unconscious) to avoid facing the giant unknown:

I don't know how that back garden should look.  I ought to, but I don't.

It's been a puzzle obsessing me for weeks.  Seeking advice, letting visions of greater grandeur than I can afford...or find tolerable...clutter my thinking. I can't number the times I've woken to an idea and said, "That's it!" only to undo it by improbability (too complicated; too expensive; won't last; won't grow in shade or that down-to-China depth of clay, tree roots and rock) or, like today, an equally down-to-China depth of inertia.  Ought.

It's not that I've done nothing.  I've collected pots and art for hanging on the wire between the fence posts; arranged a small area of stones in the lowest bowl of clay nearest the house; dreamed of star jasmine  that would entwine, elucidate, bring spring and fall shape and color to the landscape there, even bought large bags of potting soil in hopes.

But now I am thinking I ought to go back to the word "puzzle".  Like those 1,000-piecers my sister, nieces and I like to do together (though I am not as adept at them as they are), why not think of that back wasteland as a puzzle put together piece by piece.

Frankly, I have never been much of a whole-plan thinker.  I paint, collage, wire and sew without knowing what image will emerge.  I write by starting with a few words, which engender more words, line by line til I get to a point I might or might not have intended. I make meals by opening the refrigerator and building with whatever occurs to me to use, changing guest menus even at the last second. 

Even my life (a conversation with a friend the other day is reminding me) has been a piecemeal endeavor, each decade or parts of decades looking, if mapped out, like a jumble of mismatched eras that somehow got me here, together in one piece.  After that, the back landscape should be a piece of cake.

Well, all that comes down to what I do next:  hit the garden store.  Maybe with all the pieces jumbled out of the box in front of me, I can begin.

Part II.

Today: The garden store yields more treasures than foreseen.  I wander around, choosing raised garden boxes (no point in trying to grow anything in that clay and rock); dark  grasses to rise stiffly from new pots; and instead of the mulch I envisioned along the fence line, I choose pebbles and rectangular patio pavers, because...

...suddenly I see there should be a path toward the near corner of the fence, where a cluster of pots will brighten the view from my kitchen window.  The picture is beginning to emerge.

I bring them home and, with some help from Joseph to haul the bags of stone (heavy) out of my trunk, we set to work putting down the path.  I've already lay some of the stone, so now the pavers claim the rest.

I fill pots with new dirt, transplant some old plants and dig in new plants, roll pots into place along the fence.  For a few days, I continue this, shifting things around until I am happy with the composition.  My neighbor gives me an old chair I paint turquoise to sit at the end of the path.  It has no seat yet, but it will clearly be a destination for a quiet sit.

At a new garden shop I spend an hour with the helpful owner ("I love listening to gardener's plans!" she tells me as we walk lane by lane through everything) and buy a few more helibores for the front slope and three clematis I want to climb up the fence wires from the raised boxes.  I plant, water, spread organic fertilizer.

The next morning I look out onto my work, happy.  Then I look further down the fence.  Overnight, the vines have turned to spindly stalks.  Deer.

Despite my repellent, despite hair in the dirt, they've enjoyed their dessert in the dark.  One flower remains testimony to its once-potential.

But it's still growing.  I wonder whether to rip them out and try another vine, moving these to a more sheltered spot.  I order three or four Carolina Jessamine, purportedly indigestible to deer and rabbits.  We'll see what happens.

Once bitten; twice shy.  It's warm enough now to plant my Valentine's gift of a raspberry hydrangea outdoors, but I am on the offensive:  in a large pot borrowed from the front steps (once the home of a gardenia that grew too big for itself), I nest the hydrangea where I can keep an eye on its blooms.  Then I fashion a cage of chicken-wire over it (one dessert is all the deer get).

I'm still working, front to back along the fence, but little by little the pieces are falling into place.  Next, more stone winding further back, and then Alexander's tree house...and finally a secret path toward it.

I know exactly where everything will go.