A word about the nothing of something

It's been raining for three days now, on and off, a drizzle here and there during the day, a downpour late at night or early in the morning.  The reports gloomily predict the same for the next week, and hold up as the bright spot the mid-seventies temperature, cooler and lighter than the eighties we'd otherwise bear.

Meanwhile, I have been slowing down, sitting on the porch with my cup of hot water in the early mornings, after my swim, and then later after dinner until the dark comes, enjoying the sound of rain or almost rain and the light scent of the gardenia my kind sister-in-law Sue gave me for Mother's Day.  This morning I opened my eyes and didn't pull on my suit as usual...my swim, for once, didn't seem to matter; instead I pulled a book of Hawaiian stories down from the table behind me and began it over again, though the marker I'd left in it was already past the middle pages.  This time I read word by word, catching images my eyes hadn't taken in the first time.  When I got up an hour later, my side a bit pinched by the way I'd been holding the book, I thought of several errands I could do before I had to set out my uncle's breakfast, but my new mood talked me out of those for the moment.

It's not a bad thing to unload the requirements of one's life every now and then.  This minute I am hearing the yard-trash truck lumbering up the street below my house, and it's not bothering me too much that I haven't taken the bin full of tree debris out to meet them...nice people who greet me with a cheery good morning every week, and don't mind if I have forgotten to dump the rainwater out of the bin first.  It'll wait til next time.

So instead I've begun this post, for the first time without a title.  I'm usually centered about that, not always knowing what it will become but always with a phrase or word that seems to unlock my word-hoard, as the Beowulf translations call it.  It's not that I'm floundering here...in fact, only yesterday I had a perfectly good idea of what I wanted to impart this morning, and eventually I will get to it on this page, but first this rainy-weather wandering through the land of the slow riser.

My neighbor will appreciate particularly appreciate this, since she claims to enjoy taking the morning bit by bit, her robe tucked around her, her coffee in hand, hearing or reading the news, clearing her energies for the busier parts of the day.  My feet usually slide off the bed and onto the floor in one quick direction after another; morning is my get-things-done time of day.  Right now, on her wave length, it feels restorative.  In a minute I will go down to get my cup and sit on the porch, pondering whatever, and accepting whatever the day brings, without much guidance from me.

But back to what I originally had in mind to relate here.  Though it has nothing to do with slow mornings or letting go, I realize now that there is a sort of thin thread between them...perhaps you will see it, too?

I was going to call this post Cats and Boys.  Two days ago, coming back early from the pool, the ordinarily traffic-clogged road in front of the middle and elementary school was emptied by the state teacher's determined march on the capital, and with the lane to myself I passed a young mother on one side of the street, holding in her arms her boy child, who was intently watching a huge construction site rumbling into motion on the other side.  The mother was pointing across, and the boy...the baby boy, no more than a year at most...had his eyes fixed on the huge yellow machines rolling and crumbling and dumping and piling the (notorious) henna'd clay, in preparation for something not yet identifiable to be built.  I wish I'd had my camera ready to take a picture. 

And yet, I already have a picture, indelible. 

Are you grinning yet, those of you with boys raised on torn-up street-corners, in formerly vacant lots, along wire fences looking in at those mechanical creatures that, no matter how earthbound their jobs, fascinate small eyes for hours?  Can you feel the weight of the child in arms, held high enough to see the goings-on, to lean forward eager for the next lift of the crane or digger arm?  And who, though he might have few spoken words in his vocabulary beyond dada yet, can still manage to distinguish aloud between an excavator and a bulldozer?  That look on their faces, concentrating so hard on the slightest movement of wheel in muck, eyes roving back and forth to detect practically before it happens the next big dig.

It made me laugh out loud, remembering how many times, over two generations, we counted trucks on the road or managed to entertain a fussy boy by strolling him down to where the workmen had dug into their day.  The road pavers, cable and pipe layers, the yard trash people, the recycler, the garbage men, rolling down the street in front of the house...how, from East coast to West and in between, we'd race out in time to meet them, and once or twice even "help" the agreeable handler, no doubt a parent of a boy himself, push the button to pick up and dump the containers. 

https://youtu.be/MXhhXXsxSfE

If you need a jog of memory, here is the link to the Excavator Song, now conveniently on YouTube in case there is no construction site handy when one needs it.  It is guaranteed to stop children mid-fuss.

It's not, of course, as good as the real thing in motion.  But it has the advantage of a song which will fill your head for the rest of the day.

Art with Alexander

I never feel age...If you have creative work, you don't have age or time.

--Louise Nevelson

I have been reading a (rather pedantic, I'm sorry to say) life of Louise Nevelson, the sculptor who worked most of the 20th century on large constructive walls you can find in museums and public spaces, and while you may look askance at those installations (for her work, the perfect word), they are impressive not only in their scale but in the straightforward lines, shapes, and blackness.  In them seem embedded her immigrant background, her upbringing in a family caught in the first generation dichotomy between old country ways and new social adaptations, not to mention the fierceness of her intentions for art.  She made her place among other modernists (I'm sure the art history people would categorize it as something else, but it is so evocative of what we think of in ordinary life as modern, so I use that term deliberately)...Albers and Calder, Frankenthaler and deKooning...and was known to be as flamboyant and extravagant in her personal style as any wild rock star, not that that's the point here.  She made her mark, pulling people into her endeavors, crises, complications, and mostly her work.

Which brings me to the subject of today's post:  Alexander and I at work at art.

Like Nevelson (and me), Alexander is a builder with found materials:  outside he chooses sticks and branches, which become, with a little tape and glue, sculptures on their own.  This one is the tree he made at my sister's house last weekend; it began with a load of yard trash from her neighbor's fire pit and though he wanted to make the wood into a fort, little by little its inherent intention became clear...it might be a totem (he'd been admiring my brother-in-law's miniature American Indian set from his childhood), but eventually it got to be a tree...a tree made out of leftover tree parts.  He wanted to bring the graceful twig art home with him, but I convinced him we would make another when we got back here, and besides, his favorite great-aunt went gratifyingly crazy over it.  So, apparently, did her flowering vine, which you see clings charmingly to it.

Inside, he scours the studio for interesting scraps...clock parts, copper shavings, rusted wire and tools...and invents new life for them.  Last week, Alexander came over for a long afternoon and evening, and so we had plenty of time to do lots of creative things.  After we shopped, made cookies (of course), invited our neighbor Louie over for a session with Legos on the porch, had snacks and supper, we settled down to painting.  Though up to now, his art work has been mostly lines and geometric shapes, you can see that these days he is into picasso-like images, with stories behind them.  He likes colored paper and watercolor, and talks nearly the whole time he is working.  It's a lot of fun to engage in art with him, and even moreso to learn all kinds of things, including inspirations for more art.

For instance, as the painting (of palm trees) last week went on, the paintbox got pretty much drowned with the excess water he had been lavishly dipping into it, and so I placed a paper towel over the box to soak it up.  Pulling up the towel, I showed him the imprint it made...two rows of color blinking back at him.  He was excited..."Let's make more!"  So I got some white paper, and an enameled pan, and squirted some paint on it...or rather he did...in blobs.  We put sheets of paper over it, rolled them with a brayer, and saw what designs ensued.

Yes, yes, we know everyone knows this simple trick of printing; we'd done it on a previous visit with a pan of gelatin, too.  But through Alexander's eyes and hands, old hat becomes new again.  He found stories in it and shapes...see the turtle? And the designs were so interesting, I decided to use them for cards.  Here are four that became of his impressions, enhanced with handmade paper scraps, a bit more paint, pen and imagination.  I have to say I'm pretty proud of them, and him.

So nice to work at art with a kindred spirit!

Foundlings, or How Does Your Garden Grow?

The past few days, after a minor cold spell, have been too beautiful not to be outdoors.  My uncle and I were on a short walk down our neighborhood street last week, when I discovered a small elegant purple flower popping up all by itself in the otherwise barren desert of the lower end of my front slope.  On closer inspection, it turned out to be a dwarf iris (the crested variety, I found out later); I have no idea how it got there.  I may have planted it myself from neighbors' gifts a year or two ago, or perhaps it's been hiding out for years before my coming, waiting for enough gumption to show its face.  It may soon have some company, for I also noticed nearby one or two of the same sort of leaf croppings breaking through the clay. 

After a really weird cold-hot winter, it at first seemed that I had lost quite a few of the small perennials I'd been in past years trying to make into a recognizable garden.  Of the hellebores (deer-, drought-, neophyte-resistant), famed for taking over whole plots (at least in other people's gardens), only one plant returned; same with the heuchera.  Of the ferns, so joyously returning each prior year, nothing was left. From an aesthetic view, April seemed more like February than spring, although the earth was warm enough.

So in the last weeks, I have been digging in about a dozen or so new varieties, hoping they are sturdier ones.  Some came from the garden store, some were gifts of pitying neighbors, some culled from the sides of the road. Last week, just as a huge storm was forecast, I'd hurriedly put the last of them in so that the rains would settle them, and enclosed them in small circular rock "terraces" to hold the water back from rushing down uselessly past them into the street.  Alexander helped me put down some mulch in the most vulnerable areas.  It seemed to have worked.

Since then, each time I pass by the slope, I notice evidence that I may not have lost as much as I thought.  Here and there, a cluster of violet appears, and with them, amazingly, a few of the hosta leaves from the plants the deer chomped off last year the day after I planted them.

 Ditto the Solomon's seal and the liriope which had met the same fate.  Even the eaten-to-the-root hydrangea has small leaves shouldering up from an inch or two under the dirt.

What kind of living thing voluntarily rises again, knowing it will be devoured before it matures?  But here, bravely, these specimens are trying again. And talk about determination:  vines from way back of the house have crawled 50 or more feet underground to pop up like sunbathers on a popular beach, spread from one end to the other along the curb twice that length.

Like the dwarf iris, there are as well things I've never seen before.  Consider the lily, or something like it (see below; you can tell me what it is), which seems to be establishing itself quite prolifically all along the slope.  Invasive or not, its bright green tiered leaf makes me admire its spunk.

On the other hand, that English ivy also traveling from its tangles back there, and the million small maple sprouts that seem to want my yard to rival Lost Maples forest, I can do without...I foresee hours of tugging and pulling as the weeks ascend into summer.

Fortunately, there are gifts that bloom in larger measure:  look at this dark iris I have watched since its bud, today in full flower...if the only one to bloom of all those I planted.  Whatever else happens in the garden, I have this moment of pride and amazement.

I'm thinking that my feeble attempt to design this plot might be futile, considering the larger plan organized by things beyond my sight.  Each day, I see what will return or move in on its own, and besides, I am lazy enough to have the sort of yard that accepts orphans and interlopers.  Before I make any more guesses about what will work where, I will need to see what these foundlings make of themselves.  There is a lesson in there somewhere about the degree to which resilience depends on patience, perhaps even more than fortitude.  And another lesson about giving up on nature, plant or human, too soon.

_______________________________________________________________________

Miracles

                                  for A_

It is a long flight between 

    hope and blessing

the promises we string together

like pearls

clasped around our hearts

each begun with so tiny

a grain

of willfulness

(or something like it

virtue perhaps

good)

we hardly noticed 

we embraced

night after night we whisper

persist in believing

(oh! the longing, the pulse,

the ache for grace)

One by one, they strengthen

and shine

until they become us

adorned in faith.

                                               r   04 18

Pictures of April

The trees resolve

to endure for now

 they will leaf out in April

Ꙍ

and I must be as patient as the trees

Ꙍ

Sweet breath drifting through the windows:

perfume of memory

Ꙍ

...what we don't quite see comforts us

[selected words from "The Months", a poem by Linda Pastan]

The slow lane

About a month ago, spurred on by our helper and friend Sharron's enthusiasm for her water exercise class at the Y, I began to swim again, a few times a week.  I'm ever grateful for her encouragement to get into the water and move, for winter (this everlasting chill) had me pinched and disjointed.  So off I went to renew my lapsed membership and joined her there.

I did try to like the class, really I did, knowing that an hour's worth of underwater bouncing, kicking, arm-waving and skipping to over-sexed 'eighties tunes would leave me refreshed.  About a quarter of the way through the third class, however (you knew this was coming, didn't you?), I looked over my shoulder and saw that the lap lane behind me was free.  Free.

I glanced quickly left and right, then ducked under the spiral lane marker and began to stroke my way to freedom.  It felt so good to stretch and pull at my own speed, arm over arm, legs in harmony, body aligned just right.  I hadn't swum in a long time except for occasional dips in the ocean and tropical pools, but having been born on the beach, swimming is second nature, and here I was, on my second, third, tenth and finally 16th lap.  Over the weeks since, alternating crawl, backstroke, breast stroke and something upside-down-turtle-like which I call my rest stroke, I slowly made my way toward this morning's 28th.

I'm not a fast swimmer, nor do I care about speed.  After the first day, I didn't bother noticing how I measured up to the others racing in their lanes, men and women, younger and older, all willing to get up before dawn to fill the pool before work or home life distracted their energies. One morning, all lanes occupied, a young woman politely asked if she could share mine.  Equally politely, I agreed, but warned her that it might be hard to follow as slow and irregular a swimmer as I. "That's ok!" she chirped, but after two laps, I noticed she'd moved two lanes over, with someone clearly more predictable.  That was ok, too.  I just swim to my own rhythm.

This morning, on my way to the showers, someone drying her hair greeted me by wondering how I was.  "Well, thanks." I told her.  "Only well?" she laughed, "after that nice long swim?"  But well was how I felt, inside and out.  Hip not buckling, shoulder easier, tangles untangled:  well-being.

Part of the swim I take is mental, rolling my mind back and forth as I do my muscles, imagining the day, sorting out (idealistically, more often than not) the issues coming at me in much higher waves than a pool full of swimmers will produce.  It's been an complicated winter...indeed, the whole last year seemed one affaire after another.  My cousin said to me the other day, "I thought this new year would bring better days, or at least slower ones, but it's just more of the same, isn't it?"  I know what she means by wishing for days slow enough to breathe through, one inspiration at a time.  At the pool, slow is possible.  Sometimes, stroking backwards, I simply stare at the undulated ceiling, the red, white and blue flags fore and aft, the windows looking out into the wooded yard, and think of nothing at all.  And soon the sun is up and it's time to climb out.

Whatever the day brings, I'm glad for having begun it in my own way.  I smile the whole five minutes home.  Indulgence, indeed.

 ________________________________________

Slippery slope ii

Well, after a fine afternoon looking at the offerings of two nurseries, I came home with a few pieces of advice and a few plants to put in after the rain this weekend.  They are good plants, each in themselves...hellebores (lenten rose in a nice rose shade) to add to my timidly growing ones; a small holly fern (the first fern I really have ever liked) which I'll plant under a copse of trees;

 and a prickly, blood-orange quince to pair with the one I share with Anna, growing up between trees near my shed.  I know the latter's flowers will be soon gone, taken over by green leaves on thick-wired branches, but I couldn't resist, and next early spring they will return, flaming (I hope), just when a little flame might warm us.

Shopping for garden things (and fabric) with Angie is always a treat in itself, and this time Jim came along to lunch to make it a celebration.  Angie always introduces me to places I'd never have found on my own, and I always come home with a surprise or two.

One of the surprises this time is that none of that plants I bought are intended for the slope at all.  I hardly got into that with my nursery visits yesterday.  I did try, but somehow inspiration failed me except for a few small ideas of periwinkles and vinca, which turn out to be old ideas anyway and today the periwinkle notion is fading.

So the slope is still the slope, and digging into it will be a job which, this morning at least, I don't relish.  Plans are one thing, executing them is another level of energy entirely.  So much has happened lately...plans afoot, plans being slowly put into practice, plans even more slowly becoming reality, and plans entirely unforeseen...that I am in something of a confounded state this morning.  I don't know which hope to put forth, or which to put on hold in the back of my spirit for a later moment when I can handle it with more aplomb.

I'd love to get into my workroom to make the confounded into art, but it's unavailable...undergoing renovation for new space (a good thing) but keeping me at stairs distance for a while longer than expected (not so).  Back to digging in the earth is the next best thing.

But isn't life full of such discombobulations?  Why, except for remembering that that is so, is each occurrence such a new shock to us, no matter how similar the experience?

As I wrote in my last post, that spring weather (and its spring-like joys) had better be around the corner waiting for me...or at least bud out of the tight promises the azaleas are making right under my window.