Wind, Birds, White

October 15, 2010 at 12:13 pm (Air, Earth, Home)

I’ve been journaling privately in recent weeks, but I’m still here.  It’s this glorious, windy, sprinkling-out-of-a blue-sky type of day.  I need to get out and do a number of Very Important Things, but as usual on a day off I am slow to get started.

I have actually already accomplished a number of things already.  Last night I checked the traps before going to bed, and had caught mouse #12 since the beginning of Summer.  She was larger than most of the others, and had just gone in the trap, I think, because she was high and dry (they usually pee eventually) and still very active.  I felt her rustling around as I carried the little Havahart upstairs.  It was too late to release her then, so she was the first one to spend the night in the Transit Pod (the plastic carry-cage).  At least it was big enough for her to rummage a bit and hunker down in the crinkled-paper bedding.  I had a little kibble and water in there, and placed the cage on top of a folded towel so it would reflect her body heat from below when she finally went to sleep.

And I went to sleep, and dreamt a recurring theme of remembering there was a room in my house that I hadn’t even been in yet.  I was very excited about going up there, and somewhere along the way became lucid and realized that this was the recurring dream of the special unexplored room, not the actual waking occurrence of same.  Still, good feelings and happiness.

Woke at 6:30 — still too dark to go out.  Woke again around 8:00, got dressed, and conveyed a very sleepy and still curled-up-under-bedding mouse to a new location on the edge of a forest.  I was just cruising around looking for a lonely place where I wouldn’t be observed, and I passed two enormous white things that looked like slightly deflated volleyballs.  On the way back I investigated, looked them up on my phone, and they seem to be giant puffball mushrooms.  I brought them home to show Karl.  He’ll be really charged up about them.  We have a mushroom-identifying application on our phones and would like to go on a hunt one of these days.  Mycology is fun!

I’ll do some more investigating, cutting one up and so forth, and if they turn out to indeed be the type I think they are, I’m going to let them decompose and spread spores somewhere nearby where they can grow again next year.  These are too far past prime to eat – they’ve already puffed, and become softish.  Of course I would be extremely cautious about identifying and assessing a mushroom.  But we could observe what happens if they procreate, and pick them earlier in the summer next time.

Just amazing!

And this morning when I first got up and went into the kitchen, I looked out the window and the whole meadow and driveway were populated with more robins and what I have just identified as Northern Flickers than I have ever seen in one place.  It was after the night of rain, and the worms must have risen, because those birds were having a party!!  The occasional sparrow would drop in for some feeding, too.  It was glorious.  I have two squirrels this year and they were VERY busy trying to figure out where they’d buried everything so far.  But — Northern Flickers!!  I have never seen them before last weekend when we were driving through New Jersey — at a rest stop a tree was full of them and as I walked under it all I could see were their speckled bellies.  I wondered what in the world they might be.  They must have followed me home.

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The noon bells are ringing in the white church steeple down at the street.  I am so fortunate to hear them.  In the months of waiting and anxiousness before we knew we were buying this house, I would hear them at Rose’s house and long, long to be here where I could hear them daily.  Though I have no connection to the church, or to religion in general, it conveys a sense of place I have never had before.  Lucky, lucky me.  In these very uncertain times I make it a point to be consciously grateful.

In one last note — the house painting is progressing!  Here’s what I see coming up the driveway now.  Most of this is just primer, still, but it will be painted white.

LOVE.

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On a Jet Plane

August 12, 2010 at 10:33 am (Air, Earth, Trading Time for Money)

Rose travels, with the group of 25 or so, to Accra.  They closed the clinic up yesterday; tired, satisfied with those they saved, sad for the ones they had to turn away.  She texted that two more of the volunteers had gotten dysentery and she’d gone on C1pro just in case.

The flights are tomorrow, so they have a day to rest and shop at the big market where she supports as many local artisans as she can, given the room in hersuitcase.  Beautiful mudcloths, cheap and sturdy, paintings and carvings and toys.  She asked if I wanted a hair stick, the kind that is put through to hold a bun together.  My hair’s not quite long enough for that, but I said yes for future.

I just turned on my phone and she’d texted an hour ago that they were on the bus to Accra.  How did she get wifi on the bus, I wonder.  Anyway, she’s jubilant.

Thursday is my Friday, and thank God.  K. had to leave early yesterday and since we carpooled, he officially gave me 45 minutes off so we could both go.  The final hour of work was crazy — an emergency shipment to a customer, and we kept not having everything we needed to put in the box.  Ten patch cables — there were four in stock.  K. helped me scrounge six more from people’s offices.  One CD with instruction manuals — we don’t keep many in stock because they keep changing.  Did we have any?  No.  I had to make one, but the files had been moved so I had to call Eric, who was on an install somewhere, and ask him where to find them.  Oh, and the color printer is dead, so the labels had to be black and white.  All of this took a little while, and meanwhile K. is trying to figure out why the server isn’t running the inventory software any more since the upgrade we did in the morning.  We left almost on time — maybe fifteen minutes late — and rushed out the door before anything else happened.

Then, once in the car, K. got a phone call that cancelled the thing he was leaving early for anyway.  We looked at each other, shrugged, and continued on home to pick tomatoes.

Aaaaaand, the tomatoes.  It’s safe to say we’ll have gobs soon.  We picked quite a few, tossing them to one another over the overgrown rows.  It took quite a while, and after that I finally mixed up the Mexican Bean Beetle Death and sprayed the squash.  This stuff is supposed to be not terrible for the environment, but I’ll tell you, it smelled like condensed paint thinner.  No wonder they don’t like it.  I tried to avoid spraying bees and spiders but may have gotten a couple by accident.  But so much of the squash is decimated now, we had to do something or lose it all.

Apart from that, the unstaked-tomato chaos and the rampant grasses and weeds out there, things look pretty good.

I tried hanging the new curtains I made for the built in shelves in the living room.  I hadn’t counted on there not being room outside the cafe rod brackets for the actual ends of the cafe rods.  There is no place else to put the brackets unless I invent something with pieces of white-painted wood.  I could either do that or invent a different kind of bracket, one that sticks out farther.  Well, that would work on one side but not the other.  Some cleverness must ensue.  I sent a picture of the first effort to B.H., and looking at it I got a great idea for a sort of false hem at the top that would make a higher ruffle in front, thus hiding the gold clip rings AND taking up the 3″ of length that presently drags on the floor.  So it’s all fixable.  I hope to finish it this weekend, in between more photo shoots and other organizational business with the band.

Nights are cool now.  Sometimes windows must be shut, screens removed.  But the jasmines have been blooming beautifully — the scent arrests one, passing a doorway, like the memory of a secret lover — and I got the latest catalogue from my favorite nursery where I get them.  They specialize in tropical container plants.  I may have to get out there this weekend and adopt a few more fragrant interlopers.  They seem to have a lot of good low-light plants now, which I could put in the back windows.

And, time again to go to work.  K. is coming with the truck so we can remove a bit of trash from my upper driveway and put it in the dumpster there.  Maybe work will be more placid today.

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Chickadeedeedee

July 19, 2010 at 2:42 am (Air, Earth, Home, Light on Thrush Hill)

I’m still hearing unfamiliar and new bird calls here.  I like that this place still has mystery, that I haven’t figured it all out yet.

Like the little vine I ripped out of the ground because it had grown all around a wire crate I needed to stand on.  I didn’t notice til afterward what a pretty vine it was, and just about to bloom with some flower clusters that looked a little like miniature wisteria only a wine color.  I was sorry to have pulled it up.  I’ll be more careful from now on; these wild things are as pretty, sometimes, as those deliberately planted.

Dar mowed like a madman today.  He skipped the farmers’ market and let Rose and me go on our own.  Our favorite baker finally had the seven grain bread we’ve been trying to get the last three weeks.  They sell out half an hour after opening and what remains is either sweets or white breads.  They had two loaves left and we snagged them both.

Snow was there for the first time, with her booth of luxury linens.  It was perfectly situated inside the entrance, and she’d done it up beautifully.  I know she’d been very stressed out about all the last minute sewing and other complications.  She pulled it off, though.  I couldn’t afford to buy anything from her (fine linen ain’t cheap), but Rose bought a garden apron and Snow practically did flips, she was so pleased.  There were a lot of people in her booth, too.  Later she reported that a restaurant wants her to make custom aprons for them, and someone else bought some high end items, among other sales.

It was hot again, of course.  Dar came in gasping a few times for something cold to drink, and I kept the ice trays full and gave him water and low sodium V-8 juice and Emergen-C (fizzy vitamin C packets) in fruit flavors.  We had a lovely lunch of: local squash and tomatoes, cucumber, cranberry walnut oat bread, brie and hummus.  I brought back loads of paint swatches from Home Depot and consulted him about the desired color for the back door.  He ended up pointing to a footstool I painted at the apartment — it was the trim color for my walk-in closet/office, a deep sea bluish turquoise — and said he really liked that.  I couldn’t find the swatch so will have to go hunting for a match.  Nobody much seems to carry Glidden paint any more, and it was a Glidden swatch.  They’re getting hard to find.

Anyway, we moved on to priming the back door, which has been leaning in the mudroom since December, while the old back door continues to rot and not latch.  Up it went on sawhorses.  He had the task of putting the blue masking tape around all the glass panes, and there was much swearing under the breath and dubious confidence involved.  He really did all right, though.  By the time he was done, he had to go back to Boston.  I continued working and managed to get primer on the front of the door and one inside edge, while a chickadee nattered nearby.  It was good to hear that familiar voice; they haven’t been prominent for a while.

The afternoon was waning.  By four or so I’m usually getting tired and reluctant to start anything new, but I had three dining room chairs I really wanted to get spray-primed.  I’d sanded them earlier and hosed off all the dust.  They were drying in the sun in the front yard.  I brought them back and used up exactly one can of spray primer covering them all.  I have to say it was gratifyingly quick, but there was so much paint mist going everywhere it seemed pretty wasteful and toxic.  Oh, well; it saved me several evenings of brush priming, anyway.

All that done, I managed some dinner and watched the latter part of one of my favorite movies, “Local Hero.”  It’s one of those I like to see every year.  Later Karl came by to help me hoss the door back into the mudroom, against the rain we’re predicted to have in the next 24 hours.  He had the brilliant idea of detaching the door from the frame, so I can paint either one as I please, right in the mudroom if necessary, just as they are leaning against the wall.  We stood in the driveway and watched the light fade as a bat flitted here and there against the pink and blue sky, and fireflies blinked on and off around the trees and hedges.

The chairs are now upstairs awaiting their true color.  And I am in my little bed ready to get some sleep.  Tomorrow is another working day, and showing up is half the paycheck!  What a nice weekend it was, and good to have my three-day stretch back.

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Muggy

July 17, 2010 at 3:11 am (Air, Earth, Fire, Home)

I came home just before the rain came down in earnest.  I was pleased to see the fireflies are still flashing in the front yard around the forsythia and wild rose; they seemed to be answering the lightning that preceded the downpour.  We need the rain.  The grass has gotten just a little amber inside its greenness.  I am grateful every day for the hose and the water that comes so readily from it; from the deep well at the bottom of my hill, at the street.  Good, happy water, making all things possible up here, in the clearing.

I had dinner with my family, another one-dish delight involving lots of vegetables, two kinds of sausage, beans, chipotles and mole sauce.  Diva the parrot sat on her play gym nearby, sharing our meal and going through some of her widening repertoire of words.  She imitates the chickens, the songbirds, the phone, the washing machine, laughter, sneezing, two versions of people saying, “What?” and many other things.  If she’s hungry she’ll try to bite my finger if I attempt to pick her up.  If she has eaten she’ll come up willingly, or bow her head to get a neck skritch.  She can fly a little way now that her flight feathers are almost in.  She’s very enjoyable to visit but I am a little afraid of her in the bite-y stage.  She probably knows this.  I’m not over there enough for her to be really used to me.

Normandy visited for a few hours today.  She arrived about 45 minutes earlier than expected; I hadn’t vacuumed or made my bed or tidied anything.  She insisted she didn’t care, and I said, good, you just saved me a lot of time!

Her life is complicated.  She’s a 50 year old single mom of an eight year old, she’s stuck teaching in an ultra-conservative school system that makes no room for sillyhearts, and is in an on-again, off-again relationship with someone who doesn’t bring out the best in her but is a very nice, albeit introverted, person.  She rarely gets away.

And I look around this place and think how lucky, lucky I am to be me, here, now.

Carol learned last week that a friend and favorite presenter of ours in New Jersey died last February.  We hadn’t been in touch in a few years.  He was diagnosed with lymphoma late last year, went into the hospital in December, and by mid-February had died of “opportunistic infections,” which is the danger with depleted immune systems.  We just couldn’t believe it.

And our other friend who masters our albums for us just had some exploratory tests done to figure out why, in spite of everything, he is still losing weight (over 20 lbs. now, and he was a thin guy to start with).  He had what they term in the biz a “flip flop,” which is endoscopy and colonoscopy back to back.  While the docs gather results, he and his family are going on vacation for a week.

I’m cognizant that I have more of my life behind me than ahead.  Dar, being 16 years my senior, is even more aware of it.  We have to make the whole journey count.  I am trying to be less impatient with the house progress, carry my nowness with me and hold onto those flashes of bliss when they come.  I didn’t used to have them except ramping up for Christmas.  Now I get them frequently and realize this is how it feels to be happy.  I didn’t know.

So Normandy visited, and we talked long about a lot of things, and she loved the house and tried to orient the experience of being here to all the Facebook pictures I’ve posted.  She told me about a couple of the guys we knew in high school, with whom she had affairs in her college years.  I told her I lately realized I haven’t had sex with another person in nearly three years.  I find it oddly amusing rather than sad.  I’m still glad there isn’t a lover hanging around here expecting me to pay attention to him.  Maybe Dar and I will get sexual again; right now there is so little time.  Sex takes up so much time, I said.  She asked if I was done with menopause; I said I thought I had not even begun.  No hot flashes any more these days, really; nights can be a little clammy, but it depends on the weather.  But I’m still bleeding regularly so my body hasn’t given up its youth entirely.

Before she left I picked a big bag of chard for her and sent her off with half the bread we bought for our lunch.

I so rarely do social things these days!  There was so much talking, all this air going through my vocal cords.  I listened to myself and wondered if it was me.  It was a good visit, but now I’m glad to have the rest of the weekend to get some things done as I please.  The rain has stopped for now.  I must have a little bath before bed.  We’re in another heat wave and it’s muggy.  Tomorrow, 90 degrees.  I will try to get the back door primed, and the garden gate, even if I do nothing else.

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Primer, and Short Notes

July 12, 2010 at 11:14 am (Air, Earth, Home)

Recently I’ve developed an interest in learning Middle English.  I’m looking for a primer.

The thrush is back!  I heard him just briefly this morning.  I guess he had an out of town gig.  There was also a great to-do among the crows at 5am.  Family squabble, maybe, or hawk infiltration.  They don’t take well to certain types in the neighborhood.

And Hop the bunny has been grazing on the front lawn.  I stepped out the door to release a(NOTHER) centipede a few minutes ago, and he didn’t even run off.  He’s watchful, but he doesn’t fly off like Dash used to.

Dar changed the oil in the lawnmower yesterday.  The manual says you HAVE TO run the gas tank dry, or else SIPHON it out, before tipping the mower to change the oil, or the world will end.  Karl glanced underneath and found the plug whose removal will allow the oil to drain into a conveniently positioned container without tipping the mower.  I guess the manual isn’t quite up to date with the machine.  Anyway it was still too wet to actually mow, and let me assure you that Dar was despondent about that all day.  “I feel so unproductive,” he said.  But I put him to work taking down some light fixtures that a friend is going to restore for us.  We also went together to the farmers’ market, and he was enthralled.  Remember he’s a city mouse.  He doesn’t get to wander among stalls of freshly baked goods, homemade cheeses, locally grown produce, homespun yarns, honey from nearby, grass-finished meats and handcrafted stained glass.  And everyone’s doggies, all bathed and gussied up for the market.  Every time he comes down here I think it’s harder for him to leave.

I didn’t get around to starting priming my chairs until last evening.  I got two coats on the new little chair from the flea market.  Tonight the unirrigated half of the garden needs water again, and I got a message from Carol asking for a conference call at 5:15, right after I get home from work, so I’ll be watering while talking on the phone.  I think we’re discussing the album title.  We’ve come to a slight impasse at the moment; I like one title and Carol likes another, but I think neither of us is married to our choices, so we have to figure out something that works for everyone.  Concept is hard.

So is getting out the door for work.  Bye!

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Taking Stock

July 9, 2010 at 2:35 am (Earth, Home, Trading Time for Money)

Ten o’clock and all is well here.  We’re not sweltering any more; days are hot, but nights are mid 60s now, and the air is sweeeet.  There was one night last week nobody anywhere slept very much (unless they had air conditioning set up already).  That’s the kind of night where you keep a spray-mist bottle of water with you in the bed, aim a fan at yourself, and just keep spritzing until you cool off enough to fall asleep.

I look around at the small pockets of order I’ve created and I get a little wash of ecstasy.  My favorite pants (restaurant supply, a print of grapevines and wine bottles) hanging on a hook on the bedroom door.  A card Dar gave me.  Books.  Even the silly tube of A&D ointment that currently soothes my hands.  All this comfort and familiarity within reach.  It feels like when I took Lexapro for a little while, only less sleepy.

Karl and I power-watered the half of the garden that doesn’t have drip lines, last evening.  Tonight I puttered in the raised bed, weeding and watering, picking three ripe strawberries (motherlode!) and a bunch of valmaine lettuce.  I ate a small mountain of greens at dinner, the valmain and a lot of chard I picked yesterday.  It seems like we wait so long for things to grow out and ripen, waiting, waiting in poverty, wanting, and then suddenly — Bounty!!  And there’s so much we rush to the garden each night to keep up.  I glance sideways at the lawn — oh, how tall the weeds have all grown already, needs mowing, no time tonight — and survey today’s progress in the little fertile rectangle.  Don’t forget going in the gate with a flick of the latch these days.  Marvellous!  Everything looks good.  I am surprised by the strawberries.  So we will get a few this year after all.  I dole out the water, pull some stray grass, greet Linus as he comes up meowing.  He’s twitchy in that way he gets when he’s been hunting small, unlucky creatures.  Glazed eyes, wide-mouthed meows, wanting to be near me.  I’m glad he can’t tell me what he’s been up to, at the same time hopeful his scent will remain around the garden to deter voles.  He wanders off to loll on the front stoop.

The perennials are fine.  A couple are between blooms but they look all right.  I deadhead the snapdragons.  I’m not sure you’re supposed to do that, but they look all weary with the old dead blooms and the new ones coming in.  The Carpathian Harebells have buds on them now.  I notice I’ve planted them next to the loosestrife and both are white.  I name that small rectangle the White Garden and make a mental note to expand it with other white flowers.

I haven’t done any bouquets in a few weeks so I go for the scissors and cut nasturtiums, marigolds, fragile wisps of lobelia, long lavender spikes.  I fill three small vases and line them up on the dining room table.  Finally I can get down to the business of making dinner.

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There are something like 250 tomato plants in the big garden.  Many of them have little green fruit now.  The Amish Paste are pear shaped; there is also some kind of yellow tomato that is squat and wide.  They look like little green gourds so far.  We have two or three summer squash, big enough for a family of gnomes to snack on, and as many tiny butternuts.  Rose and I picked about 25 sugar snap peas and sauteed them last night with modified “Slap Yo’ Mama” seasoning and olive oil.  She also made a slow cooker dish with chicken, hot salsa, chipotle peppers, black beans, kidney beans, corn, garlic, onions and cumin.  It burned a hole right through all the world’s problems and made everything all right for a while.

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I had two dreams about dogs last week.  In the first one I was supposed to be caring for the former owner (of this house)’s dog.  It was being housed nearby or in the basement or I’m not sure where, but after a day or two I realized I hadn’t fed or watered it, or taken it out.  What the hell!  I was frantic, trying to figure out how to get to it.  I thought it was in the basement but it was turning out I had to take a bus somewhere.  I woke up then, thinking, how stupid to have asked me to take care of a dog across town.

We do know that his former dog was kept locked up a lot in the house, as evidenced by the residual effluvium here.

Anyway, Rose reminded me of a dream she’d had about a guinea pig she’d forgotten to take care of, that was near death.  Someone told her she was the guinea pig; she needed to pay more attention to her own needs.

Last night I had the second dream about a large black/brown dog.  This one was owned by my bandmates.  I was watching it for the afternoon, and it was just wild, jumping up and biting my sleeve and pulling madly on it.  I was trying to be firm and authoritative with it but it just wouldn’t calm down.  I thought my sleeve would rip.  Also its name was Josh, who is my sister’s boss.  So I awoke wondering why in the world Rose’s boss would show up in my dream as a wild dog.  But then I thought it was a metaphor for the band itself, being the “boss of me” for so long, dictating my schedule, my level of commitment, my freedom or lack thereof.  And, finally, that I am the wild dog, needing for once to be the Josh of my own life, maybe theirs on paper (for now) but determined to get the attention of the “thinking me” and get my needs met.  Good dog.  Good dog.

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Snow is now helping me with the inventory stuff.  Thank heaven Karl took her off the documentation project for a few days.  She’s researching the new software to learn in-depth how it works and what it can do while I continue the grunt work of bar coding, Bills of Materials, sorting stock, and entering quantities.  Big Boss comes back on Monday and he wants to see RESULTS.  Karl told me of a Navy saying:  Work it may; shine it must.  In other words, make things look like a lot has been accomplished, for the boss that has never project-managed and has no idea of the details involved.  Tomorrow we’ll put big signs on all the aisles and shelves in the warehouse, get rid of all the chaff (banker boxes of unused materials) that have built up in piles, and finish entering the last straggling components.  All the items no longer in inventory  have to be catalogued so that our accounting person can remove them from the old system.  Tedious and pesky, but necessary and I’m really grateful that I now have help.  Snow is excellent at research, and I haven’t had time to do it.

Okay; past my bedtime now.

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Upper Window

July 5, 2010 at 1:28 am (Earth, Home, Light on Thrush Hill)

At last, after a year, I finally got the upper hallway cleared out.  There was a bureau left behind which I finally convinced Rose and Karl to take, a plain plywood table with a drawer containing Anna’s unopened Max Factor cake makeup from maybe 1960 and lots of corroded plastic jewelry, a huge “NO TRESPASSING” sign on a very tall pole, a broken crib, parts of a broken bamboo blind, rabbit ears from some ancient TV set, and various other dirty and bug-infested items.  We brought the lot down to the trash pile.  I was going to throw out the table (oh, that powdery smell of ladies’ makeup from the past!) and Rose said let’s see if K. wants it for the shop or something, and then later she happened to back into it with the truck anyway.  The leg can be mended if they still want to keep it; it could be useful somewhere.  But it has no real aesthetic value and I thought it was sad to keep it in the house.  She died in the mid ’80s and Mr. K. lived here twenty-three years by himself — and never cleaned out her stuff.  There was an old, tarnished St. Christopher medal from when they made them out of lead.  I found a few of her clothes in the attic.  But then, he never really sought closure in things.  He just ignored what was no longer useful to him.  His suicidal son’s golf trophies were dumped into a bin in the basement.  And that, until I moved in, was that.

So here I am at the top of the stairs for the first time.  I cleaned the floors with Murphy’s Oil Soap, the landing and the back bedroom which will soon become my sewing center.  The front bedroom is a wreck, of course, with falling paster and dead bugs.  Next month, I’m hoping, my team will get together and REDO that room, top to bottom.  It’s kind of exciting now.  We have to take it down to the lath, ceiling and all, redo the electric and check the insulation.  I might put in central air ducts for future hookup.  I am going to paint the floor.  It would have to be sanded and refinished anyway, and I have always wanted one painted-floored room.  So that particular nice oak floor will be the chosen one.  It gets the best light, that room, with four excellent windows facing southeast and southwest.  The full moon is always visible from that side of the house, and one can look down on the front lawn and see fireflies.  When it’s done I’ll make it my bedroom, until the back one is redone along with the adjoining bathroom.  Then the front room can be my sewing and bookmaking room.

It’s so unusual to have a light up here.  This window has always been dark.

The two windows on this landing are puttied shut like most of those in the house.  Unfortunately I can’t open either one at this time.  I have a two-way fan in one of the bedrooms and am trying to suck some cooler air in here and fan it into the hall.  It’s just going to be hot up here for a while.

Because of the debit card snafu, I am having to be rather careful with spending cash for a bit.  The illegal charge still had not gone through by Friday, so now we have to wait until Tuesday to begin the resolution process.  But today was market day, and I spent much of what I had on fresh food for the week.  The strawberries have gone by, but suddenly farmers have blueberries and peaches.  We found the best price for both at a stand down Rte. 44, and got hothouse tomatoes at our favorite general store on the fringes of our town.  He wasn’t open today but had all his produce out with an honesty box.  If you have correct change, leave it in the box, or take the change you need; if you can’t make the right change, just leave him a note and he’ll settle with you next time you come in.  I just love that.  I love that my village will do this.

I also scored a darling little chair for $8 at the flea market.  I have this drop-leaf little farmhouse table, and one cool chair that was left in my house that goes nicely with it.  Oldish, you know, not old antique but like they don’t make any more.  Well, this chair I found is a perfect companion chair for the other one, and now two could sit at this table and have breakfast.  It needs a bit of shoring up — it wobbles a little, but could easily be fixed — and it needs painting.  No big deal.

Even as I wonder where to put the table long-term, I’m noting that it could actually come up here on the landing, with its two little chairs.  I could have tea on the landing.  That would help me move myself into this space, and get the table out of the parlor where it’s rather in the way.  I get wireless signal up here, so it could still be my computer table.  Maybe that would relieve the temptation to be at the computer downstairs so much.

Damn; I just wish I could open one of these windows.  Believe me, we’ve tried to cut through the putty.  Someone suggested heating it.  Maybe I’ll ask K. if he has something that might soften it.

The fireworks have started over at Patriot’s Park.  For the first year in a long time I’m not watching them.  It seemed more important to be here, at home.  After all the marketing I got a bit done outside, and sweltered through the cleaning in here.  I have a new perennial called Gooseneck Loosestrife.  It’s just lovely and will spread until I want to yank it out.  As for tomorrow, there is still the garden gate to make, and the new back door to get primed, and more mowing to be done.  I’m hopeful that I can get on top of some of that before the heat gets too high.  Last day of vacation.  I’m trying not to be sad.

I watched some of “The Cur$e of the Were-Ra66it” earlier. You know that says rabbit, of course.  I have some fantasy that someone googling the movie won’t end up here.  Anyway I hadn’t seen it in a few years.  I just love W&G.

That “Ra66it” thing reminds me of a story I heard on NPR once.  Archeologists were excavating ancient garbage dumps in Egypt, looking at bits of papyrus and whatnot, and they found texts indicating that the number of the beast was 616.  Not triple six.  Somehow there has been a typo along the way, and all this time people have been going around fearing six sixty-six, when all the time it’s six sixteen.   Just think of all those interpretations, all wrong and stuff.  All that time spent doing the wrong math.  Me, I think we should just tend our gardens.

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Perennial Joy

July 2, 2010 at 3:26 am (Earth, Fire, Home)

One of the perennials I’d bought several weeks ago didn’t take to the native soil.  The others nearby seem okay, though two are between blooms, but today I replaced the dead one with something called a balloon flower.  It’s quite beautiful, with gentle purple, starlike flowers that pop open from balloonlike buds.  I planted in that late hour just before the gardener looks up and realizes it’s too dark to work any more.

Returning last night late from my last recording session of this album, I almost stopped by the bank to deposit last weekend’s gig check.  As it was so late, though, and I was really tired, I decided to wait until today.  Good thing, too.

Upon depositing it at the ATM today I checked the balance on the receipt and noticed that it was a lot lower than it should be.  Whipping out my handy iPhone, I went online and looked at recent transactions.  Not two hours previously, there had been a charge to somewhere in Oklahoma for over three hundred dollars.  Fortunately I was still at the bank, so I went in to have them look it up.

Apparently someone hacked my card number and ran up a large bill at a Walgreens in the Midwest!

The charge is right now on “request,” and nothing can be done  until it actually goes through.  That may be tomorrow.  At that point I submit an affidavit and they investigate.  They’ll put the money back in provisionally until they get their findings.  So the money should be back in my account in a couple of days or so.  But I had to stop my debit card, and cannot apply for another until the affidavit is underway.

Meanwhile I did some investigating and found the actual Walgreens in Muskogee, OK, where the transaction occurred early this afternoon.  The manager was nice enough to dig through pages of charge records from several registers to look for that particular amount.  At first she seemed put out, but when she called back a while later she was pretty excited to have found it.  She said I could put her name and number on the affidavit if it would help them prove that the charge was illegal.  She also said there had been a program on twenty-twenty about scammers actually manufacturing bogus credit cards with other people’s numbers on them.  That must be how this was done, as there is only one card on the account and it’s been with me all the time (and certainly was today, in Connecticut).

So; some inconvenience, and I’ve had to change a few auto-deduct profiles, and for the moment I don’t have much in the account.  But I was glad to have been able to figure out what happened, and there is a system in place to right the wrong.  And if I had deposited the check last night, before this transaction occurred, I might not have known until a check bounced that anything was wrong.

It’s causing me only a little anxiety.  After tomorrow, if we’re able to proceed, even that may fade.

I won’t say I was a tornado of productivity today, but I did a bit of spot weeding in the big garden, clipped the grass and clover inside the fence of the raised bed, watered some, planted my new balloon flower and went a long way toward straightening the parlor.  I mostly cleared off the little blue farmhouse drop-leaf table where my computer sits — I hadn’t seen that in weeks and weeks — and sorted the filing, the shred pile, and the trash.  The floor is mostly vacuumed and tomorrow I can actually damp mop in here.  I don’t think I’ve mopped it since Fall.

My plants are enjoying spending some of these warm days outdoors.  The jasmine loves it, the aralia is totally coming back from its winter die-off, and I rotate a few others.  My one remaining healthy orchid suddenly has a flower stem on it.  Thank goodness it’s doing well, at least.  The dendrobium looks terrible and I keep saying I’ll put it on the compost heap, but it’s still trying to grow so I keep giving it a chance. The other phalanopsis has mostly died off, but has one new sprig so we’ll see if it survives.  They seem to do well for two or three years and then give up.

I’m wondering if we could have a little housewarming here in September.  Just a friendly little gathering of folks who have helped with the house or who haven’t seen it yet at all.  I made a list of fifty people.  Fifty!  I didn’t know I even knew fifty people within spittin’ distance.  But if we get the top of the driveway cleaned up (lots of detritus from last year’s work) and make headway on the upstairs bedroom (so it will look like SOMETHING is going on in here), and if I can finish the parlor (priming, painting, replacing quarter round molding around the floor), it could show off well enough.  True, I won’t have a proper kitchen, and the ceiling in there still looks like there was a fire… but I figure we’d get a grill and cook outside anyway, and everyone knows it’s a work in progress.  It might help me to have a deadline of sorts.

Okay, much too tired to continue now.  Lots more to do tomorrow.  I’m gonna get up early and meet Rose out here for weeding around six-thirty (it’s her morning exercise before work), and then go back to bed.  The rest of the day will sort itself out.

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Cherries

June 16, 2010 at 1:55 am (Air, Earth, Home)

We wondered what seeds were in the scat we’ve been finding around my property that looks like dog poo.  There are no stray dogs here, so we’ve been assuming coyote.  I read in some places that they will eat vegetation sometimes.  But what has a pit almost as big as a bittersweet berry?

Tonight I watered the front flower beds and the salad garden, wandered down to the wall to observe the honeysuckle grown rampant again in one season.  The grass below the stone wall was almost too long again to mow it, so tonight was the night.  First I raked a good deal of old brush, and some new, into a pile away from the grassy part.  There were more bittersweet vines to pull up, more wild rose to tame with loppers.  One full wheelbarrow load went up the driveway and right onto the burn pile by the big garden.  Then the mower came down, and a small eternity later I had coiffed that wild swath that had not been mown in two years.  I never got around to it last year at all.  It’ll take a while for all that cut grass to mulch in, and meanwhile it doesn’t look very pretty, but one day that, too, will be garden.

I was going to stop then, but once I got the mower topside again I thought I’d just do a little bit between the driveway and the big garden, around the burn pile, skipping where the hose and electric cord go out to the fence.  On my way around the back end, where we piled the free wood last year and where the cold frames are stored, I noticed something.  Fruits, small and dark, hanging from a tree at the edge of the woods.  Suspicion arose that they might be cherries, but I wasn’t sure so I didn’t want to eat one.  It looked like cherries, though they were smallish.  Like bing cherries, in fact, the color of wine.  That would explain the pits in the scat.  Hmm.  I finished mowing and went in.

Dinner fixed and eaten, dishes gathered, and I remembered I wanted to look up pictures of cherry tree leaves to compare them to the one outside.  Bingo!  Cherries for sure.  I took my stepladder out there and a little plastic container.  Tried one… oh, Cherries! What coyote could resist them?  But he is gathering only windfall; I can pick as I please, up to a certain altitude, and I picked all the ripe ones I could reach.  Brought them in, washed them and put them in a special bowl.  Oh, let me tell you how good they were.  What a gift of tree.  I am already planning how we can fell a couple of others to give it more light.  We were going to clear that corner anyway.

I imagine the old man’s sons, picking cherries before the woods all grew up around their tree.  How their fingernails got stained purple-black from the juice.  How they would have pit-spitting contests.  Did Anna make jam?  Were there enough to bring in the house, or did they stand under the tree and eat as they picked?  Did they think, as I do, about eating something that was nurtured by the soil on which they live?

I become this earth, this particular bit of earth.  I pour myself back into it — with my love, my toil, my hope and my compost — and the earth becomes me.  We have an agreement.

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Mackerel Sky

June 9, 2010 at 10:54 pm (Earth, Home, Water)

It’s a rare sight.  I stepped out this morning to go pick greens from the raised bed, and was greeted by an entire sky of this.  How lucky I felt, overcanopied by such beauty.

I have borrowed two longish tables from the warehouse at work.  Once I’ve cleaned up the back bedroom upstairs and tipped my mattress up against the wall (back in plastic, I suppose, as when I moved), I’ll set up a sewing area.  I’ve been so eager to make pants and shifts, since Snow gave me the beautiful linen shifts.  It seems convenient to keep sleeping in the tiny room downstairs until the upstairs is renovated.  Since we’ll start with the front bedroom, which is in worse shape, I figure I have most of the summer to play in the back one.

I also found a few sewing projects that have been lying around for a year, so perhaps I can take those off the list too.

It’s rainy and chilly and Fall-like tonight.  Chilly enough that, a couple of nights ago, I was able to burn off what pellets remained in the stove and shut it down until Fall.  It still needs cleaning out, and I’ll have to disconnect the pipe in back and see what kind of sooty stuff built up in the bottom where it curves to horizontal.  That’ll be a nice, messy job one of these days.  But once it’s done I can use the top of the stove for something useful, like… a vase of flowers.  Or an art project.  A painting of a Mackerel Sky.  I could cover it with a magnificent fabric and call it a table.

********

Snow is depressed.  “I’m quiet today,” she’ll say.  Or, “I’m grumpy as hell; I apologize in advance!  I just don’t know what to do with myself.”  When I first met her, she described herself as a glass-half-empty kind of person.  I see that’s true.  I recognize shades of myself in her, myself from before.  I know what that feels like, that half empty worldview.  I haven’t had it in a long time.  She makes me realize how far I’ve come since the days of pining for Will, of pining for Home, of never knowing what to do with the restlessness.  No one understood me, nothing was enough.

Snow left California a year ago to get away from a lose-lose relationship.  “He was the love of my life,” she claims.  But he was married, and after years of broken promises she realized he was never going to leave his family.  She’d left her former lover, a woman whom she describes as “my wife,” for this man.  The woman later committed suicide.

So there are reasons why life’s libation looks meagre.  Her ex lady died four years ago.  She held out another three with Mr. Married, and then up and came across the country.  She had a good friend in Connecticut, who helped her buy a house.  (She tried to buy mine, but we outbid her in the second round.  No end of ribbing over that; it was something we only discovered upon meeting a few months ago.)  (It also turns out that the used fridge and dishwasher I bought on the cheap from the local antiques guy were hers!  This only came to light last week.  How we laughed.)

And she does laugh, that big whoop that ends in a girly giggle.  I try to keep her cheered.  But in between I know she’s struggling.  She met a guy here last November, and by December was really hoping he’d ask her to marry him.  By now, of course, she rolls her eyes and realizes how premature that all was.  She has broken up with Guy, not without sadness.  He’s not at all right for her, nor she for him.  But now she feels even more alone than her own reclusive nature imposes.  Evening is for wine and sorrow.

She works on the house; she likes it here.  But much of her conversation still begins with, “In Napa, at my old house, I used to…”

I write about her, I guess, because I’m holding her in the light tonight.

Rose, Snow, and Me.

********

I go next door for dinner tonight.  My friend Red from Texas sent me her knitting books; I’ll take them to show Rose.  She’ll want to make all the socks.

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