Category: Seasonal Musings

Balance

The sky is cloudless, the temperature is perfect and  I am torn between being in the dirt  planting vegetable seeds, tomato and jalapeno pepper plants – or writing.  Since I seem to only be able to write in solitude, when R leaves to run an errand, I drop my spade and dash inside to write, and when his car pulls in the driveway, I head back to pull weeds and water plants. And in this way, I find a kind of rhythm.

Here I am inside now – garden gloves abandoned in the dirt.  I have less than an hour before M is home from school.  A room of my own?  I imagine such a place for myself  and maybe, one day we can transform the crawl space – not quite an attic.   But if I could really disappear for hours on end to a cubby of my own, away from them and our shared life, would I? Certainly, if this was my ‘work’ but not now.  All moments beyond the hours spent at my job are carefully mined and  ultimately, it is the time I spend with these ones I love, that is most precious to me. But were I to win the lottery…

April Showers

Today’s rain is welcome.  Yesterday I spent hours potting herbs (parsley, oregano, lemon verbena, basil and more basil) and filling window boxes. As I make my morning tea, a movement outside my kitchen window makes me jump – newly planted red geraniums out of the corner of my eye appear as if someone is looking in at me. It will take some time to get accustomed to their presence.

Although recent sunny days have been lovely, I am glad  to stay inside, read papers and do indoor spring cleaning tasks. Every room in the house is filled with the scent of lilacs – the result of trimming almost 3 feet off the top of an overgrown bush. This was one of those jobs I have meant to do each year and never gotten to – until now.  The blossoms were out of reach of my nose so it was time. According to a Google of ‘Pruning lilacs’ one should wait until the flowers have finished blooming. But wanting their evocative fragrance in these rooms, we took the lobbers to the branches and now the shrub looks sad – all chopped up. Fingers crossed it hasn’t been traumatized too much and next year’s blooms will be glorious.

We’ve done a lot of that around here this year – hacking away at old growth, chopping butterfly bushes practically to the ground. What were awful looking stubs only a few weeks ago are sprouting green. It works. Of course, all summer we will have to look at the bald limbs of the lilac and trust we have done the right thing for the future. There are so many ways this applies to my life: in a mundane way, cleaning out closets, throwing out, giving away, making SPACE!  But in psychic ways too. I will try and examine thoughts and habits so long ingrained in my life they might just be stunting growth and try and be brave enough to make uncomfortable changes for a healthier future. A good exercise for the seasons.

Slow Down Spring!

Forsythia is fading fast and daffodils are already shriveling. Last week’s days of summer temperatures seems to have fast forwarded us. I wanted to get into the weather car speeding us towards summer and put on the brakes.  Too fast!  The heat itself doesn’t bother me although I haven’t yet managed to do the seasonal clothes change thing (and I prefer this direction!) and so, spend such days, a little overheated. Much happier to be hot than cold, I never complain.  I feel like it slows me down to a more leisurely pace.

Still feeling behind in terms of the garden although I managed to plant some rainbow chard, kale, lettuce and peas last week.  The next morning, looked out the window to see a squirrel digging up the chard seeds – munching away as he looked around.  No wonder entire plantings from last year never even surfaced from the soil to be eaten by the groundhog.  Crazily, year after year, I plant again although I know this lumbering creature will climb the wall or dig a tunnel right into our little plot and devour what I plant.  Eyeing some seedlings at a garden store last week of red leaf lettuce and other beautiful leaves, I thought – a ready meal for the groundhog, and left them there.  I try and plant things he doesn’t want. Or just a lot of what he does so we get some too. We have onions and leeks and a big bag of lettuce seeds this year.  We will do battle again. And he’ll probably get the soybeans (love edamame!) before me, but I remain an optimist.

Day of Light

I  do not have the clarity that religion offers, but in my own way, discover spiritual moments, although – never in a church. Easter Sunday, we work out in the garden. R is tying up branches both fallen in recent storms and trimmed by us. Wearing gloves against the thorns, I prune the rambling rose bush and pull the dead wood out of the hydrangea plants. There is a woody vine that since last summer has laid claim to a stone wall.  I push my sheers beneath the dirt, snip out the roots, yank and cut. I know I did not go deep enough and suspect it will be back again within a few months when I get lazy and turn my attention to other parts of the garden.  But for now, it is enough.  Cleaning out the dead or undesirable branches and plants, clearing the way for new life.  Filling my lungs with scented spring air I am grateful for the day. That feels like a prayer to me.

Saving Daylight

Still trying to catch up from saving (losing?) that daylight hour and am slow to pull myself out of bed. The dark morning is hard but the extra evening light is worth it. Yesterday (Saturday), I worked for a few hours hosting the lovely author and chef Leticia Moreinos Schwartz with her new book The Brazilian Kitchen: 100 Classic and Contemporary Recipes for the Home Cook – a beautiful cookbook I had to buy myself after salivating over the photos and recipes like Red Pepper and Brazil Nut Pesto or Avocado Creme Brulee. Yum.  And the little sweet treats she brought for customers to taste – Brigadeiros – were scrumptious.  Food and good people – I was able to forget that it was a beautiful, first day of spring and I was inside.  And there was plenty of time in the remaining afternoon and evening to work in the garden.

When I got home, we leveled a Rose O Sharon shrub hovering over the corner of my vegetable garden for too many years.  I am loathe to cut down trees and shrubs where the birds might hang out. Not yesterday.  Without sentiment, we brought it down, opening up that corner  that has always become overgrown, blocking the sun from my tomato plants.  What bugged me most about this shrub was the shoots that spring up all around it – a flower garden next to the garage, the corner behind that we have been trying with little success to claim from the weeds and determined raspberry shoots.  Hundreds of little twigs that are Rose O Sharon offspring – they are poking out already, some tenaciously stuck in there, resisting my yanks. We worked for hours into the evening, the sky turning a deeper blue to dark with a sliver smile of moon up above. Ah, spring.

Spring

Daffodils poke their yellow heads out from under wooden steps added to the front porch last summer.  I thought I moved all plants and bulbs before construction but obviously missed these guys. Amazing that hidden though they are, they manage to get what they need to still bloom gloriously. I’ll try and remember to crawl under there this autumn and move them to another spot.

So much damage was done by the crazy storm last week that the schools in my city never opened. Yesterday, as I drove my daughter to and fro, the streets were full of kids – their tiny t-shirts and shorts, flip flops – already retrieved from their summer clothes stash, walking in groups, filling the playgrounds, on bicycles, skateboards. Did so many kids always live here or am I just seeing them now because I have one?  I pay more attention to children closest to my child’s age – so now the world seems full of high school freshman – other age groups fade into the background. I don’t always like what I see and remember being almost 15 and feel oh-so lucky (so far!) with my beautiful girl.

Pansies!

Garden centers are selling pansies. Out of all the flowers in the world, pansies are not particularly ‘lookers’. Their blooms are small, like silly little comic-faces and they get scraggly too fast (I know: you’re supposed to pinch them back) and they have no scent.  Still, I will pick up a few plants and pop them into the window box outside my kitchen window, and even if it snows again, these brave blossoms will reassure me that spring is almost here.

March is always a teasing month.  After some stunning, cloudless, warm days, yesterday and today are cold and rainy (but not snowing!) today with winds that keep the metal chimes left hanging on the porch since summer, furiously tinging away. Yesterday, the neighborhood hawk went swooping so low across the sky,  I was able to see him shifting his red tail, catching the wind steering him to a a distant tree. I say ‘he’ because upon landing, he  hopped onto the back of another hawk.  Mating hawks in the neighborhood – exciting. Watch out squirrels!

Yesterday we spent the day cleaning up outside, working in our shirt sleeves, pausing to drink tea and eat lunch in the sun.  Glorious!  Four crocus in bloom – a set of purple on one side of the garden and yellow on the other.  By the time the sun retreated below the tree line, the yellow ones had tightened up into torpedos against the cold of night. There is a lot of work to be done – we beat a quick retreat indoors from winter. Broken birdhouses, flower pots, garden furniture and tools, half-done projects are strewn about, abandoned to the winter elements.

Yesterday, we raked leaves – a job we do not do in the autumn, preferring to mow them up into shreds for mulch. At least that’s our reasoning. But there are bags worth of leaves out there still, and my compost pile is full.  We cut back the butterfly bushes to  stubs and made trips to the dump. Our neighbors do this before winter sets in, but by the end of summer, we preferred to spend our free time kayaking and then, we just lost heart.  Closing down our favorite season makes us sad.  Now, fired up for spring just around the corner and glad to be in the sun, we attack these tasks with joy.

Also in the spirit of clean-up, I am back to my book for rewrites based on the good advice of a venerable agent. It’s been months since I’ve immersed myself in this story – my story – and while I feel inspired to make it stronger, I am also dragging my feet, reluctant to recollect those dark days again, like a return to winter. Perhaps I can pretend I am revising fiction – but then – what a different story I would tell.

More Snow and Some Good Books

Dashed hopes of an early spring as we get walloped by another snow storm. Good thing I have my wall of ‘books-to-be read’ in place – a dam against the winter doldrums. Thanks to my sister for alerting me to Claire Keegan’s short story in last week’s New Yorker. She warned me that I would not be able to read it with dry eyes and of course, she was right. I’m talking sobs.  The next day I searched for more Keegan at the bookstore (yes, it’s nice to work in the proverbial candyshop!) and scooped up a collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields.  Not a sentence that doesn’t sing. Her writing is powerfully poignant without being manipulative. Familiar characters for anyone who grew up with an emotionally unavailable father. Publishers will have to go back and print more of her books because there were none available to order when I checked – lucky I found one on the shelf. If you’d like to read the story:  www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/02/…/100215fi_fiction_keegan

Shadow Tag, Louise Erdrich’s newest book also held me in an emotional headlock for the two days. I have so far to go as a writer – whew – each of Erdrich’s sentences are perfect and not one to spare.  An almost frightening thread of passions (love and hate) runs through the book, woven through gorgeous images of a frigid, winter.  But there is no reprieve when the thaw comes. Such smart and poetic writing and a compelling, painful story – very close to the bone.  Although I felt an all-too-familiar sense of dread throughout the telling of this doomed marriage, I could not tear myself away.

I am also reading an Advance Reader Copy of a book due out in March: If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous.  A young American woman goes to Japan to teach English not long after her father commits suicide. It reads a bit like a memoir – or maybe I think that just because I read everything with a comparative eye to my own book and wondering how to tell the story, weighing the pros and cons of telling a tale in fiction vs. non-fiction.  Watrous tells a good story.  She brilliantly captures the life of an expatriate in Japan and what a perfect setting for the shocking and strange, sad limbo land of being a survivor of a loved one’s suicide. Read this and you’ll fall in love with each of the strange and wonderful characters in this tiny Japanese village where the main character – Marina – finds for herself and brings to others, healing and hope.  A good read that I’ll look forward to hand-selling in the store.

What next?  I guess I could get back to the WordPress for Dummies book to try and figure out how to make this site a little more interesting…zzzzzzzzz.

Winter’s End

The last week of this short, cold and snowy month is here, and with it, welcome signs of spring. The sun’s pace seems to have slowed as it slips across the sky, lingering a little longer in warm patches throughout the house.  The dog follows the light, curling into the heat and I try and make it up into the bedroom to read by the last glow, mellowing into reds and finally, blues of dusk-to-night. Garden catalogues are stacked and two cherry trees ordered.  Yesterday, the snow mostly melted, we walked the yard, assessing what needs to be done.  There will be at least another snow, or maybe more – but we are on the right side of winter – the final leg – so I can bear it.  The branch tips are heavy with buds and the birds seem to be singing different songs and for a few hours each day, I forget about the cold night still ahead.

Follow

Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.

Join other followers:

%d bloggers like this: