I love sleeping – the deliciousness of lingering in bed, rolling over for more dreams. But I have come to cherish the stillness and emerging light of early morning and now try to rise before the sun, unfolding out of slumber as the first birds begin to sing. I pad downstairs, make a cup of tea and sit in front of open computer and, now that it is warm enough, the
open window. From here I can see the birds, or this morning an upside-down squirrel raiding the feeders. Sometimes it is really the compulsion to write that has me leave my dreams and the heat of my man, but many mornings, it is just the dog barking. Like an alarm clock, he erupts at 5:30 AM — half an hour after my alarm of bird chirps as an early rising neighbor walks by with her dogs. Tetley yells his greeting – or perhaps, his threat to stay off his turf. In any case, his barks bounce off the bedroom walls — impossible to sleep through — so up I get, shooing him out the door before me. This is my window for writing, thinking or simply sitting. Time and space before the requirements of the day begin.
Category: Seasonal Musings
Garden Update
Yesterday, we filled and planted two raised beds — heirloom tomatoes and peppers, dill,
parsley, marigold plants and chard, spinach, lettuce and arugula seeds and cucumber seeds tucked into a corner. The main garden is already planted and even tasted: leeks, spring onions and lettuce. And in another week, our first share of CSA farm vegetables will arrive.
This year, I think I might have overdone it.
On a cold, dark night, one of the many of this long, bitter winter, I decided to pre-order plants for the garden. As the days warmed up and no box appeared, I began to think I might not have actually placed the order. It is like me to fill a cyber basket and then balk at the shipping charge, abandoning my spree. This notion solidified in my mind when a search through my emails failed to turn up a confirmation. So a few weekends ago, I went shopping for plants — Paul Robeson tomatoes (will they sing?) Thai dragon chiles (will they burn?). Last week, a box arrived — yes, with more plants. So if you need tomatoes, peppers, (as long as the critters are not too greedy) I’ll have them.
Looks like there is other bounty in store as well — tiny bunches of grapes already blanket
our arbor and the strawberries are beginning to ripen. Still early, but it sure feels like summer has arrived.
Faking It
Even after 10 years of gardening on my not-quite quarter of an acre, I sometimes have no idea what I’m doing. Case in point: only two of the Dahlias I planted in pots a few weeks ago are emerging. I pushed aside soil in the other planters until I found the root still a woody end, dry and ragged as a calcified cigar. When I potted these tubers a few weeks ago I 
turned them over and over, poking the ends, unsure which end was where the plant would grow out of when I buried them. For all I know, the poor things could be smothering under there. (Rob suggested I should have planted them sideways.) Times like these, I feel like an incompetent gardener.
This feeling of being a dilettante extends to other things I love – like cooking. I believe that if you can read, you can cook — it’s just directions, right? I credit great cookbooks and food blogs for deliciousness conjured up in the kitchen. While I know I make kick-ass sandwiches – (stuffed with roasted peppers, jalapenos, herby-greens) without recipes but otherwise, rarely create something new from scratch. So really, any scrumptious meal I may make is only Tricia’s as designed by (insert recipe author here).
Although in my single years when it was easier to live on a dime, I fancied myself an artist and worked a paying job as little as possible in order to ‘do my art’, I always felt a bit of a fraud, even when galleries showed my work and people bought it. Now, I feel the same way about writing, wondering if I have the right tools or talent.
I marvel at the confidence I see in others. Where did they get theirs, why didn’t I get a dose of it when it was being doled out? But then I think about the Dahlias and the possibility that the invisible ones may just not be ready to bloom yet – and might end up the most spectacular of all.
Smelling Spring
I have been inhaling my way through spring, almost drunk on the fragrant shrubs in my garden. Last year’s extreme pruning left me with fewer Lilacs this year but I am reassured by wiser gardeners than me that next year will be better. Tiny Carol Mackie Daphne, on the other hand, is exploding in exotically scented little blooms. The Daphne’s fragrance is more delicate than the larger, almost vulgar smelling Virburnum shrub with it’s heavy white heads of flowers. I made the mistake of planting these beauties all in the same corner at back of the house where we like to sit in the summer, imagining a scented garden. But it’s still too cool back there at this time of year and we rarely sit, as I’d imagined, inhaling the perfumes while soaking in the sun. Instead, I regularly venture out to this spot to get my scent-fix and lob off branches of blooms to fill the house. But after only a day or so, both blossoms and perfume fade. It’s not the same.
What is it about scent that is so evocative? I think it’s the ephemeral, passing quality – like time. We cannot keep it – not for long. There, the poignancy of spring.
Mother’s Day Without Mothers
My mother became a mother way too young to know what she was getting into. Irish-Catholic and in the 1950s – getting married and having kids (4 in 5 years) was just what you did when you wanted to get away from home. She told my siblings and I (young adults at the time) that if she had it to do over again she would have done grander things than just had children. This was not said in anger but rather announced as a confident declaration of her brilliance (she was) but our existence had thwarted her success. Certainly a strange thing to tell your children. Still, she believed she was a better mother than her own.
I too think my mothering skills surpass my mother’s. For a start, I wanted my daughter more than anything else in the world. Being a mother will alway be the most remarkable thing in my life and I can’t imagine how she would not have felt the same. Like her, I also wanted to get away from home and did at 17 after my father moved out and my mother’s depression and neediness threatened to smother me. For the rest of her life she ignored suggestions to seek help, instead stoking her bitter anger and sadness with alcohol. I stayed far away, living in the midwest and overseas where our contact was limited to often maudlin phone calls.
When M was a year old, I moved back with my new family, into an apartment within minutes of my mother. She doted on her granddaughter, found her brilliant and beautiful, read to her, praised her, delighted in her. She embraced being a grandmother and with this glimpse of her unconditional love for my daughter, our own relationship began to blossom. Six months later, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and six months after that, she died. It is as a grandmother I miss her today.
Preferential Treatment – the Garden
Just shy of a quarter of an acre, our yard bustles with wildlife. Yesterday morning, turning the corner of the driveway with Tetley, I spotted a Bluebird. No, not a Bluejay – a real Bluebird perched on a recently pruned oak branch. It was perfectly and entirely, an extraordinary royal blue. I hoped this fantastic bird might be considering taking over one of the birdhouses, although I think the sparrows might have claimed them all.
Later, I brought my cup of tea outside and settled into a wicker chair on the un-mowed lawn when a rabbit emerged from the hedge. With slinky-body moves, he moved out of the shadows into a patch of sun where he proceeded to preen and clean himself not ten feet from where I sat. I made no effort to stay still, shifting in my chair, crossing my legs, yet instead of diving back into the bushes, he came closer. Soon he was six feet away, close enough for me to observe his eating technique. His mouth moving like a non-stop motor, he leant over and plucked stems of dandelions (ours is an organic, thus interesting patchy lawn) from the bottom, then munched the stem down to the blossom end, he paused before swallowing this last (favorite?) bit. He seemed to prefer spent blossoms, no longer an explosion of yellow, but not yet turned to seed. Sucking in half-a-dozen dandelions stems like so much spaghetti, I couldn’t help but think of the devastation he and his family (you know there are more) will cause in the vegetable garden. I’ll dust off my camera on the chance I’ll see him today and you can see how cute he is.
Even as I imagine rabbit just as quickly devouring tender lettuce, peas and other produce planted by me, I am charmed by him. Yet I do not delight in watching the big-old groundhog that has sniffed at our traps, (of course humane) circumvented our fences, and ignored our dog for many years. I feel mean and yell at him when I see him loping across the yard. Nor do I watch the surplus of squirrels with much pleasure although their gymnastic technique to reach the dangling bird feeders is nothing short of remarkable. So what kind of double standard is this?
Seasonal Reminders
The spectacularly short lives of spring flowers makes me melancholy. Hyacinths, as if overwhelmed by their own perfume, topple over into the dirt. The frill of petals around the face of the Daffodil crinkle like old skin. The Tulips are next on the scene but it’s a race with the squirrels to score some for a vase or two. The Lilac bush I whittled away at last season has come back with the promise of many blooms in each tightly packed cob, but a tree at the end of the driveway that was a blizzard of delicate blossoms last spring, this year sprouts only leaves.
Maybe it is this fleeting-ness of the season causing my anxiety. I blamed work, but after a week off I still wake with a clenched jaw and thundering heart. I force myself to take deep breaths, stretch out into a yoga move or two, but psychically, I am still wound up. I flail around for another reason, any at all – but I know why I cannot shake this feeling. The scents, light and essence of this season are visceral reminders of the anniversary of N’s suicide. Even though these days are endlessly rainy and that week was incongruously sunny, memories of terrible days are still conjured up by spring. I can’t shake, ignore or forget — 7 years later at this time of year, a state of strung-out, high-alert is still my lot – as is an eternal unanswerable question of whether there was anything else I could have done.
The Power of Herbs
Yesterday we finally enjoyed a Spring Saturday of sunny warmth. I gardened all day, transplanting, mulching, raking. My body now buzzes with the delicious, all-over, day-after ache of a good workout. I think that’s from wrestling with Mint. For years now, every spring I must rip out the thickly woven roots of this magnificently fragrant, insidious plant that threatens to take over my vegetable garden. And every year I think I have completed the job yet, between tomatoes, basil and beans, stalks of Mint emerge.
Standing, I loosen the roots with a pitchfork, a ripping sound my cue that I can pull them out without injury to my back. Then, sitting down in the dirt, I grab the roots with gloved hands and yank. As I do this, strings of tentacles pop out beneath the soil, leading me to another tangle of growth. I planted this mint as a fledgling gardener, not knowing I would forever battle this harmless looking plant – so delicious for tea and in salads. Now I cautiously plant perennial herbs only in pots or where I want wild, fragrant coverage. Never in the vegetable garden.
Yesterday, I also pulled out a Purple Sage that for over a decade, has grown beside the vegetable
garden’s gate. In spite of ruthlessly cutting it back every spring, by July I must squeeze between the fence and furry leaves on woody limbs, to get to the rest of the garden. With my pitchfork, I easily lifted out the Purple Sage and moved it to a flower garden where I am attempting to orchestrate a constant show of color of perennials and shrubs. Hopefully, it will thrive between the Irises and Azaleas.
Every time I bruised by the Purple Sage, or plucked some leaves for roasting a chicken or to be sauteed in butter for a simple pasta sauce, I think of the friend who brought it to me during my first spring in this house. She was visiting from NYC and arrived with a flat of herbs. This plant survived those 15 years although our friendship did not. I have never known why she no longer wanted me in her life. She disappeared into silence during the height of addiction drama in my marriage, when she had just launched into her own, happier marriage. I imagine, we were too much for her — and don’t blame her: I would have felt the same aversion to us, her messed up friends. But she had been there at our beginning: she and I were off for a weekend break and were passengers on the same military transport plane out of Sarajevo when N and I connected for the first time. She predicted our future then – with a happier ending. Over those years in the madness that was former Yugoslavia at war, she was my dearest friend – family to N and I. Then, we all ended up here — her in the city, us in Connecticut. We saw each other less, especially as N descended into his hell of addiction and I scrambled to keep the pieces of our lives together. I left her a message or two and sent an email wondering what I had done, but I never heard from her. I still wonder what happened and miss her brilliance and hilarity. I moved this shrubby herb to gain more space to plant vegetables, but also, unconsciously, perhaps to end these flashes of mourning evoked by the scent of Sage.
Write Me a Letter
This morning, I met with my First Book friends recapping recent events like a wine tasting where we drank wine (oh – and raised money) and a literacy fair where we gave away lots of books to kids. Both were successful and even more importantly, fun. Two of my favorite things: wine and books. At our meeting I offered to write a handful of thank you letters. Afraid I’d forget about this if I did not write them immediately, when I got back at the store I found a pen and stationary and sat at my cluttered desk. I wrote these letters on beautiful, plain paper. By the time I was done with the third one, my hand was cramping. Beyond signing my name or scribbling a quick note, I never, ever write and the necessary muscles seem to be atrophying. And they looked like they were written by a 4th grader as if each successive word were climbing a little hill across to the other side of the page – slanting up. Supposedly that’s an indication that I have a positive outlook on life – true – but that doesn’t make for a lovely looking letter. Still, it counts for something to have someone handwrite a note these days so I folded up the letters and mailed them, quirky penmanship and all.
I won’t moan about the demise of letters and all that — I actually prefer the immediacy of email — even texting. But I did used to love getting letters when that was the only option, so wrote them regularly myself, sometimes pages and pages. And I saved most of the letters I received so boxes of yellowed envelopes are in my basement – if any old friends are looking for a glimpse into their past. Two friends of mine still write me – at least one fantastic letter a year: Jane in England and Jenny in Australia. Usually, just after New Year, they send out at least a page or two written to ME – not one of those dreadful group letters. I love these letters, and love that I recognize their handwriting. At certain points, we all shared at least one mailbox – Jenny and I shared a house in Japan and Jane, in Kentucky and later, also Japan. We all had the same rush of excitement when we heard the metal drop of mail being delivered to our house, the thrill of a glimpse of white through the slat of the box — letters!
Later on in the afternoon today, an unbelievably calm and endearing customer whom I had told last week about my latest agent rejection (sigh – and it seemed so close!) gave me a beautiful pen with a note of encouragement. This was after I’d written the thank you letters. So there you have it: time to write a letter — at least two — one to Jane and one to Jenny.
Believing in Spring
A deceptively bright, Sunday morning — officially spring, but still winter cold. Tetley and I do our morning wander down the street serenaded by birds. Different songs than the desperate beeps and chirps of winter. It’s mating season and the Mourning doves and Cardinals are in full swing of seduction. Sparrows have already moved into one of the bird houses and Robins are everywhere. But at least at this early hour, it’s still cold.
Last week it snowed – burying the mini Daffodils and other blossoms that so bravely appeared a week ago. The croci wound themselves up like little torpedos and by the afternoon, the white stuff gone, heroically opened up again. Little hand shaped leaves of lupine emerge hopefully along the sunny bank beside the driveway, and on the slope just beneath them, the strawberry plants seem to be spreading by the day. I have meant to read up on what I should do with them — although last year’s harvest was brilliant, in spite – or maybe because of, my neglect.
I began some early season garden tasks last week with very serious pruning. After a quick computer reference (my poor garden books gather dust) I grabbed my lobbers and shears and ruthlessly cut back the Roses, Autumn Clematis, and Butterfly bushes and grapes, to mere sticks. I love how these plants climb up the side of the house and across our backyard arbor. Tangled in the trellises and half-way up the chimney, they already had such a great head start. So I paused before cutting, but cut them I did, leaving scrawny sticks against the house and piles of thorny branches across the lawn. A gardening leap of faith for the future.