Who ARE you?

Where Dreams Come From
by Marge Piercy

A girl slams the door of her little room
under the eaves where marauding squirrels
scamper overhead like herds of ideas.
She has forgotten to be grateful she has
finally a room with a door that shuts.
She is furious her parents don't comprehend
why she wants to go to college, that place
of musical comedy fantasies and weekend
football her father watches, beer can
in hand. It is as if she announced I want
to journey to Iceland or Machu Picchu.
Nobody in their family goes to college.
Where do dreams come from? Do they
sneak in through torn screens at night
to light on the arm like mosquitoes?
Are they passed from mouth to ear
like gossip or dirty jokes? Do they
sprout from underground on damp
mornings like toadstools that form
fairy rings on dewtipped grasses?
No, they slink out of books, they lurk
in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages
turned they rise like the scent of peonies
and infect the brain with their promise.
I want, I will, says the girl and already
she is halfway out the door and down
the street from this neighborhood, this
mortgaged house, this family tight
and constricting as the collar on the next
door dog who howls on his chain all night.
"Where Dreams Come From" by Marge Piercy, from The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010. © Alfred A. Knopf,


  I read this first thing this morning and had to laugh. Someone has written a poem about me. When I was about 9, I wanted to learn to play the violin and my mother laughed derisively and said: "Who are you?"  When I was 14 and talked of going to college, she looked at me like I was from another planet and said "No one in our family goes to college. We are poor."


  I supposedly have a visit today from a sister who lives down south, finally at home in the fanatically Christian world she has built around herself and her family.   It has been about 15 years in the making, I would guess, and she is insulated from anything that doesn't suit her. And by anything, I mean weather, poverty and heathens. And unmanageable family.  I suppose I am part of the latter...she is in the area and was supposed to call me about whether I got the day off today, but I haven't heard a word from her since she arrived on Friday. None of this is unusual. She often makes plans to visit and then never even makes it to the state, but never calls to let anyone know. She lives in a world that excludes consideration of things like that, not maliciously I think, simply unconscious of those things outside her parameters of God and home.  It makes me crazy, of course.

  On a spring note....we have been hauling manure into the garden beds and getting it all turned  under.  Cleared up last years debris and setting things ready for planting in a month or so. The weather around these parts is still flip-flopping around: we had a magnificent hail storm the other day with hail the size of ping pong balls! It gets warm, it cools back down...up. down. up. down. But the lilacs at the end of the driveway are blooming and I think I'll bring some in the house for a vase.  The fruit trees are all abloom as well. Maybe spring really is here....

  I have been doing a little house renovating. painting and the like. Been needing to paint for a couple of years, and this year my son came to do it  and everything now looks fresh and new. I have been decluttering and have not put back 1/2 of all the stuff I took off the walls. It's inspiring me to get rid of even more stuff. I have 2 new loveseat covers coming today that I ordered from Overstock.com...sage colored corduroy stretch-fit covers. It was 1/4 the price of having some made.  I am up early and wanted to get on the computer a minute before I get back to my cleaning and such. I have to make granola bars for the Irishman too...he's been out several days and neglected to tell me.  I'm going to marinate some chicken breasts for supper, make a big wonderful salad full of mixed greens and whatnot,  make some cocnut pudding or maybe even a pie...although I still have some leftover blackberry pie that I made for the Irishman to take to the coffeehouse Saturday night out at the Oblate.

  We had to put one of our dogs to sleep this past Friday. She was a sweet dog and I miss her terribly.  I keep expecting her to run up to my car when I come home at night... She was a big part of our family these past 4 years.  I might be cried out, I think, and then I watch our littlest dog Caylee sitting out in the yard looking for her to come home and I cry all over again. She and Caylee have been constant companions and best buddies since Caylee came to live with us.  I am so emotional over my animals...and each time something happens, I swear that this is it. I will not do this to myself again...and you can see how that works for me. In all fairness to me though, most often God just sends another little angel to me, and they show up on my doorstep abandoned. And I fall in love all over again....


   Okay, this housework isn't going to do itself and it's going on 8 AM already. 


  I'll write better this week and show up and be present. Life has a way of getting away from me....

Mondays Moments

This is a new Goodwill find...caught my eye and spoke to me, so I ponied up the 2  dollars for it.

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  An interesting day today around here. I went shopping for a few groceries as a girlfriend is coming for lunch tomorrow. Bought some things like fresh asparagus and artichoke hearts and mushrooms to make a yummy quiche. Found fresh mozzarella and some lovely spring lettuce mix with raddichio and arugula and all the good stuff in it. Bought a cantaloupe and some more pineapple as well, as the price was right.Some butter and some half and half and my fridge is stocked !

  I made a couple of decisions today concerning some things that were important to my well being and unfortunately pissed a couple of people off.  One was very snotty to me on the telephone and practically hung up on me. She doesn't have a lot of social skills anyway...so it's hard to tell if she was hanging up on me forcefully or simply being her usual self.  The other had asked me to do something that was uncomfortable to me, and I declined.  She wasn't very happy either.  It's funny how people will expect you to fulfill their requests without ever thinking that maybe you won't.  lol  I'm not exactly a yes-man...you'd think the people in my circle would know me by now.  The most interesting part of all this, was that I really wanted to call the first one back and give her my opinion of HER and her behavior.  I picked that phone up twice...and put it back down. I called my sponsor instead. (And she hasn't, BTW, returned my call.)  But like most of the rash things I think about doing, when I let it lay for long enough to try to call my sponsor, I changed my mind about calling her. It wouldn't have accomplished a thing and I would have felt bad about it later. Maybe much later, but still...*grin. Sometimes I can actually take the time to ask myself..."How important is it, anyway? Will it matter in a month, or a year or 5 years?"  Most of the time I can lay it down and leave it there.

  I've been feeling like a change of venue may be in order. I live in an area where there are lots of meetings in different areas that are all about the same distance from me, travel wise. Each areas meetings are about as different as they could possibly be. To the north of me is rural and things are much  calmer and peaceful.  To the south of me is a college town, and the meetings there have their own flavor, I hesitate to say intellectual, but they are in a way, a different class of people. To the west of me, which is where I have been going the majority of the time,  it's more working class, and hard core.  I'm feeling a bit burned out and wanting to isolate. And I'm thinking maybe I need to get out and about a little more and switch my recovery neighborhoods around a bit.  Just feeling like maybe things need a little shaking up.

  It was a gorgeous sunny and warm day today. I opened up the house and let the breezes carry out the staleness of winter.   I think it's supposed to be like this the rest of the week.  I hope so. It was nice. I walked around the yard and checked on the plants. The forsythia are just on the verge of bursting into their magnificent yellow blooms. The lilies are all coming up like gangbusters and the sedum is looking good, in fact it's so interesting looking that I think I'll get out there tomorrow and get a picture of it.  My Egyptian Walking Onions (remember them from last year??) are up and looking good at about 6-8 inches high. And they have spread out nicely in the little plot I planted them in, looks like there will be a nice patch of them this year.  The shasta daisies are coming up too, little green mounds of leaves.  I forgot to go look at the asparagus patch. It should be showing some signs of life as well.

  It got me all fired up to start planning the gardens. 

  But, first things first. I have to get up early to get things ready for my lunch.  Which means I have to go to bed. Now. I'm making a concerted effort to get to bed earlier and get more sleep. And believe it or not...midnight IS an improvement (for me!).

  Happy Spring, everyone.  We have an equinox plan for Saturday and a potluck at the CSA gardens for Thursday. Life is good...

Namaste.

Dammit, Phil....6 MORE weeks ??!?!?!?

(Just inserting a bit of levity into an otherwise depressing damn day) LOL

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The overgrown rat in Puxatawny has predicted 6 more weeks of winter. I could get a gun and go shoot him myself. *%@#!#%^ WAIT A MINUTE !!!!!! I think we've been bamboozled here. Isn't 6 weeks only the middle of March? Isn't the 4th week of March spring anyway?
Once again the media has pulled the wool (or the coarse dirty fur, in this case) over our eyes. Here everyone is, bemoaning the fact that we have another 6 weeks of winter ahead of us, when we had another 6 weeks ahead of us all along. We could have all been out celebrating, but no, we've all been behind closed doors crying like babies. And all because one little flea bitten rodent HAD to be on national television. How crazy have we become?



How crazy HAVE we become? I have heard at least 10 people today talk about the final episode of LOST. And talk about it like those people REALLY EXIST SOMEWHERE ON AN ISLAND.... I have a friend (acquaintance, really) who is so hooked on Days of Our Lives, that she talks about these people and what 's happening on the episode like they were her neighbors or family. And the other day after a meeting, someone asked me if I had heard about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston getting back together. I said "What?" Blinking, like an great horned owl suddenly in the glare of headlights at 3 in the morning. And of course I'm thinking, what in the hell is wrong with people? I want to take out a banner ad in a newspaper and say "LISTEN UP, FOLKS. THESE PEOPLE ON TV ARE NOT REAL!!!!!!" Even the Pitt/Aniston/Jolie triangle isn't REALLY real. In fact, between the 3 of them, there might be part of a real person, but with Hollywood, it's hard to tell. (I know that sounds a little harsh, but today I'm feeling vaguely despondent, so I can say whatever I want here, and it doesn't count.) At any rate, it scares me, the way the lines are blurring more every day between what is real and what is not real. Between Fact and Fiction. Between true and make believe.

I want to shout from the rooftops: Go outside!!!!!! Stick your hands in the dirt! Plant a garden, tend some chickens, nurse a sick animal back to health. Talk to your children! Turn off the idiot box and go lie on the beach somewhere. Bake a freaking cake!!!!! READ A BOOK FOR godssakes !!!!!

But if I did that, they'd carry me off and give me a room in the Happy Hilton somewhere. Because we just don't do these things. We don't go against the status quo, we believe everything we're told, and we get upset because a giant rat refused to lie to us and say that spring will be here any minute, and that we can all celebrate the end of a grey and brutally cold winter.

Sigh..........


Maybe I should get some sleep.

I have been moody and emotional all day and I don't know why. I actually slept almost 8 hours last night, which is HUGE for me. I am eating right and not overdoing it. I am taking minimal pain medication. However...I found myself weeping (???WHAT????) several times today, and now I just want to sleep. Is it SAD? Is it delayed exhaustion/reaction to the chronic pain? Am I just a big crybaby?


Maybe. Or maybe...(omg, this happens every stinking year, and every year I block it from my mind until the final hour) ...maybe... tomorrow would have been my dad's 85th birthday. This August will mark the 25th anniversary of his death, the event that made me an orphan. A rather OLD orphan, but an orphan nonetheless. And even as my conscious memory cannot recall this, my cell memory is alive and well and working overtime. Feelings of loss and of grief like I had never known, visiting me all day.


On his last birthday, as he lay dying slowly of lung cancer, I went to visit him with my yearly batch of his very favorite thing in the world. Peanut Brittle. He was so weak already then, and had lost so much weight that he was a shell of his former self. I had by then moved about 4 hours from where he lived, so my visits were less than I would have liked, and there was always such a big change in him when I would see him again, that I could barely recognize him. My dad was looking so old there at the end, fighting that ultimate fight. His eyes lit up when I came in and the first words out of his mouth were "Did you bring it??" And when I handed him the box, he grinned like a kid. I had started making the brittle myself for him about 6 years before, and was always trying new recipes out on him. He got a lot of extra delight out of the fact that I made it for him. "They don't want me having much sugar anymore. Can you believe it? How stupid is that? I'm dying." and he laughed like a boy, as he shoved another piece in his mouth.



Even after all these years, I miss my dad. He taught me about life and he taught me about death. He taught me integrity and he taught me love and he taught me everything I needed to know about living in this crazy world. He gave me his Indian heart and he gave me his work ethic and he gave me, I hope, some of his courage.


Happy Birthday, daddy.





Namaste.

Tuesday January 5, 2010

My favorite part of winter is not the crystalline beauty of the snow and ice. Not even the incredible birds that show up here. No, my favorite part is that January is the month that they start sending me seed catalogs for the upcoming gardening season. My favorite one is the one in the picture above, from H.R. Shumway seeds, out of Randolph, Wisconsin. I love it especially because (as you can see from the cover) the pictures inside of the veggies and fruits are all hand drawn. It is absolutely a work of art. It's an oversized newsprint papered bounty of the most wonderful things your heart could imagine. Every year I start checking the mailbox the first week of January, and I always can count on them to have it in my box at or before my birthday. It's one of those" little gifts from the Universe to me" kind of things. lol Well it came and it's beautiful and I plan to wear it out by the time spring arrives.


I get another one I really like from a company in ...Connecticut or Vermont. It's called Kitchen Seeds. And it's a hip and slick publication full of things you rarely find elsewhere. I like it a lot, but it's no Shumway....lol

I'm one of those gardeners that plan. I have a garden journal where I draw diagrams showing where I've planted what in any particular year, so I can identify them, when they start coming up and also so I know how to rotate when necessary. I keep detailed notes on germination times and yields, and this helps me to organize my garden for the next year. Also helps me to remember what not to plant again. (Like the baby Japanese Eggplant....) I am a companion planter, so this helps me to learn what does well next to what, and it really does make a difference. I keep some sketchy weather notes in there as well, like the date of the last frost
and about how much rainfall we have.


I have high hopes for the 2010 gardens, especially now that we have water.


Well, it's officially midnight here and I am officially 57 years old. Time for me to go to bed, my sister is talking me to lunch tomorrow and I am really tired tonight. So, I bid you adieu and sweet dreams of gardens and all things green. (And that's a really nice wish, especially around here this week, whee the temps have been as polar opposite from spring temps as is possible.)



Namaste.