Spring Cleaning Memories

" Memory is continually created, a story told and retold, using jigsaw pieces of experience. It's utterly unreliable in some ways, because who can say whether the feeling or emotion that seems to belong to the recollection actually belongs to it rather than being available from the general store of likely emotions we have learned? Memory is not false in the sense that it is willfully bad, but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past." Jenny Diski

I put on the extra large waders and ventured into the pond yesterday, which turned out to jog the jigsaw memories on the card table of my mind. You can see how shallow the pond is – barely rcovering my knees.

This excursion into the pond recalled memories of other chapters the story of love and loss in our backyard pond. Koi need at least 4 feet of depth to survive predatory attacks from great heron, gophers and skunks. Let's just say my knees are way less than 4 feet deep. Since the last midnight massacre a few years back, we have lost all our sparkling golden and white friends, some of them 20+ years old.

But despite the death of most of the fauna, the flora survived. Hardy pink water lilies, toad lilies, some lovely tall pond plant with fragrant short-lived purple spikes of flower, and a free floating grass mat so thick that small songbirds could miraculously walk around on it. Since we no longer stock the pond or visit our long lost koi, plants dine on the layer of excitingly corrupt muck at the bottom. The plants have overrun the pond like Godzilla rampaging a tiny black and white model of Tokyo.

I waded unarmed into a Mekong delta jungle of the pond’s thriving water-plant habitat. There was much more below the water that didn’t meet the eye, providing a metaphor for the under-water oil plumes overtaking the Gulf. Outgrowing pots, the water plants settled in the 5-year-old decomposing muck on the bottom. The primordial ooze forms with fallen leaves and pine needles a few surprisingly large branches, decomposing plant matter, fish feces, and several various and heavy stones – once stacked to give cover and long since having collapsed in rubble

And the smell. I plunged up to my arms into the muck, with each splash anointing myself in this eau d’ mud. I can think of nothing so excitingly corrupt as that smell of old pond muck, slurping and draining on the side of a muddy pond and beginning to dry out. I could still smell it my hands this morning, despite a very long and very olfactory product-laden shower last night.

I wouldn't know an “excitingly corrupt” inclinations to re-write history if it bit my hand; but I do remember that yesterday was pretty corrupt.

On second thought this morning, I'm thinking that there are a lot worse ways to be corrupt than exciting. Riding the sled of life down the increasingly slippery slope, I submit that delightfully exciting is a lovely kind of corrupt to become. Moreover, I don’t care whether I’m newly learning it, or whether I'm just trying to remember today's story. What matters is that I’m already halfway to becoming excitingly corrupt myself.

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"Hark to the rush of the bird’s wings. Majesty, so close around us. They say the gods send u messages in their flight…"
Zachary Mason, "Guest Friend" from The Lost Books of the Odyssey

I can't interpret what the noisy birds are trying to tell me this morning. The error message seems to illustrate the relative paucity of inspiration I have received from my garden lately. The weather outside is doing its best to break the world record for being the stereotypical impossibly lovely springtime afternoon, but it feels like a cliché. The tomatoes are getting bigger but not redder. The sunflowers are stretching higher while greedily holding on to the promise of giant Van Gogh blooms. Everything is getting ready, but nothing is quite here: like a blank canvas, or one with only the ghostly outlines of the first rough sketch.

And yet I wait inside for inspiration, preferring to retreat to the doll house in the back room that nears completion (the house, not the room). Or if not actual completion, at least a state that approaches that briefest moment in eternity where all the lights work together at the same time – a state that races toward the entropy of total darkness the minute I put the soldering iron aside to cool down and plug in the lights for a test. Stupid doll house wiring.

I’m not quite sure what I’m searching for exactly, only that I feel the restless lethargy of someone who knows that as soon as I step outside and begin to sweat the garden will capture and channel my energy somewhere fine. It’s just that I can’t quite recall such a mood at the moment. I can’t muster the focus or the energy to tour the back yard only to observe all the things that need attention. Instead, I make another cup of coffee and browse the innertetz for inspiration - like playing with a Ouija board that delivers only a cryptic error message, and that does little to calm my twitching unfocused energy.

This is exactly the mood that gardening cures. So what am I waiting for?

A Bitter Lesson

"Actions speak louder than worms."
Roddy Lumsden

The only part of my garden that suffered in my one-week absence was the compost pile that didn’t get watered. Most of the container plants were all positioned near a sprinkler set on a timer to give them 5 minutes in the morning and 5 more in the later afternoon.

The rest of my container plants, my veggie garden and other miscellaneous cultivated patches amid the general dry neglect were also watered by a timed sprinkler for a similar ten minutes a day. I discovered a luscious cucumber yesterday, and dozens of green tomatoes wanting only a bit more time to develop their sweet red flavor.

Instead of being grateful, or relieved, I’m feeling - oddly - betrayed. My traitorous plants thrived in my absence. I take this thinly veiled slap in the face (is that a mixed metaphor?) from the gardening gods as a message that I don’t give my garden the amount of water it needs. It seems, my habitual gardening efforts were actually holding them all back. Even the camellia, previously stationed at the edge of the irrigation system and looking like a goner, has begun to sprout new leaves and even a few buds. Terrific!

If my plants had shown me a few wilted leaves; some yellowing or shriveling; some bug-nibbled-around-the-edges leaves, there would have been a joyous celebration of the return of the gardener to the struggling garden. Instead, I feel only bitter disappointment that nobody seemed to miss me very much.

Perhaps a more generous spirit would find this a cause for joy, or at least for relief. Instead, I find myself feeling that I am not only superfluous, but actually, probably (almost certainly) detrimental to my plants. The ungrateful bastards! At least my kitties were glad to seem me come home.

Rapturous Monotony

“It is a terrible terrain
No mortal eye has seen
Whose image still seduces me
This morning as it fades…

“Sleep is full of miracles!
Some impulse in my dream
Had rid the region I devised
Of every growing thing,

“And proud of the resulting scene
I savored in my art
The rapturous monotony
Of metal, water, stone…”

Charles Baudelaire, “Parisian Dream, ”Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)

As long as I’ve lived in the outskirts of the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest California, I have never learned to see it as lovely. Driving back and forth across the middle of this desert last week simply confirmed my opinion that the desert is an empty wasteland. Having lived in the urban east coast and west coasts of America my entire life, I am always amazed at how big and empty of human habitation the middle of the US is, especially in the high deserts.

I know my opinion of the barren desert is uninformed, biased, and simply wrong. But it’s mine.

So, we went across this high, dry grassland in Arizona that was formerly a vast floodplain, to visit the Petrified Forest (which, to my eye, is more like a petrified, scattered wood pile). According to the U. S. National Park Service brochure from the Petrified Forest/Painted Desert, trees growing on the banks of the once-numerous streams became fossils as the water dried up. “The trees, Araucarioxylon, Woodworthia, Schilderia, and others, fell, and swollen streams washed them into adjacent floodplains. A mix of silt, mud, and volcanic ash buried the logs. This sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs’ decal. Silica-laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. Eventually the silica crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood.”

The Painted Desert seems even more barren and lifeless to my gardener’s eyes than the Petrified Forest. The Painted Desert was also millions of years in the making. According to the Arizona Leisure Vacation Guide:

“It took millions upon millions of years for nature to create this natural canvas of unimaginable design that some describe it as a multi-colored layered cake. The Painted Desert draws upon the earth’s indecisive nature. From shifts in the earth’s crust brought about by temperamental volcanoes and earthquakes to complete inundation by fresh and sea waters alike, a veritable host of elements have breathed life into this area. Colorful sediments of bentonite clay and sandstone, stacked in elegant layers, feed off the setting Arizona sun in an ever-changing display of colorful splendor.”

One man’s colorful splendor is another man’s barren wasteland. I apologize in advance to those who see these places as variations on Mother Nature’s creative and diverse landscaping style, but the few stunted and struggling plants and wildflowers we saw simply reminded me how harsh the environment is toward growing things today. I don’t need to be reminded of this.

My preference for the transience of flora over the very literally glacially slow changes of desert environments may be another manifestation of my impatience, my temperament so intolerant of sluggishness; and my preference for soft, brief life, over hard unyielding stone. Or it may simply be that I will always appreciate ephemeral seasonal changes more, and simply resent the slow-motion geological changes that I can only witness as snapshots frozen in the moment of my comparatively brief existence.

Desert Driving

We managed to get through interminable Texas yesterday. Too many oil dericks, giant windmills, and billboards about Jesus and the approach of judgement day. If I could figure out how to get photos from my phone to blogspot, I could include one of the strangest images from Texas: at a roadside Dairy Queen, right next to the counter, a rack displaying bull whips for sale.

So we went through El Paso Texas, where the interstate highway follows the Rio Grande river for a few miles. This is the border between The US and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The lovely high black chain-link border fence is on the US side of the river adjacent to a flat cleared no-man's-land where green and white Border Patrol vans circle endlessly back and forth. Because the land rises on either side of the river bank, the people on each side have a lovely view of each other.

We spent the night in Las Crucas New Mexico. We may have escaped from Texas, but crappy country music followed us to Eddie's Place, the restaurant/cocktail lounge where we had dinner.

We are back on the road. We will go through Tuscon and Yuma Arizona and then home to San Diego late this evening. We cross the last time zone - from Mountain to Pacific time, gaining an hour, but we still have a 12 hour, 650 mile day ahead. It will be worth it though, to get back to the land where you can order martinis from a menu of a dozen exotic choices.

Going Home

We have decided to return to San Diego bypassing the high desert areas and heading farther south. We will not take Route 40/"Historic" Route 66. The rout will take us to Roswell NM tonight. The road ahead of us looks strangely familiar, but I have never been here before. Then we realize it looks like those pictures taken from storm chaser vehicles. There are virtually no other cars on the road, and open fields on either side, with the rare farmhouse a silo.

J graduated from Basic Combat Training at noon yesterday and an hour after we returned her to Fort Sill she texted us to say "We are shipping out at 23:00 no sleep necessary."

it was wonderful to see her but bittersweet to say goodbye for at least a other three months. She is in Fort Benning by now, beginning OCS.

Today Texas. Tonight Oklahoma

We made it safely through Arizona yesterday without having to show our papers. Which is a
good thing because I would have refused.

We stopped for lunch in Gallup NM. If you ate harboring fond memories of road trips along what signs now proudly proclaim as "Historic Route 66, get over them. Gallup now has their own Wal*Mart and Home Depot. We had lunch at an Applebees, " eatin' good in the neighborhood". But all local color was not lost. Tech Support Guy had a reubin sandwich and the wait person asked if he would like
it well done. Better still, my Marguerita was served in a brimming 12 oz glass. Drinkin' good in Gallup.

The other bizzare event was passing a man dressed as a Fransiscan monk (including a rope around the waist of ho long brown robe) and carrying a life-sized cross on his shoulder. As if this wasn't weird enough, he was spotted in the high desert east of Albequerque at 6,200 feet elevation, where I was gasping for oxygen.

On the Road

We spent last night in Flagstaff Arizona at the dizzying altitude oa 6,500 feet. This was not particularly enjoyable for Tech Support Guy who suffers from COPD. We are now on Interstate 40 East and down to 4868 feet, 1485 meters. I love the apps on my iPhone.

We passed through Winslow, which according to the Meteor Crater channel (1620 AM) is "The City in Motion". We passed through Winslow in the time it took me to write this sentence. There is no Starbucks in Winslow.

Nor is there a bilboard ordinance. Billboards may the chief source of revenue in Winslow.

Good Luck with That

“In a mucked up lovely river,
I cast my little fly.
I look at that river and smell it
and it makes me wanna cry.
Oh to clean our dirty planet,
now there's a noble wish,
and I'm puttin my shoulder to the wheel
'cause I wanna catch some fish.”
Greg Brown, Spring Wind

This is not my regular everyday post about gardens. I found somebody else who feels the same heartsickness about the oil spill that I do. I have no idea if these people are crazies or journalists. But I also don’t know if I’m crazy, so we're all in good company.

“Louisiana will be the new Bhopal…. This is what it means to get the government off the backs of big business…. You wanted deregulation? You're soaking in it. “
Read the full post here.

Breathing Warm and Slow

“It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer."
- Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

We have a family of Peregrine falcons in our neighborhood. A dead-topped pine tree by the front driveway gives a view of the El Cajon valley to the north.

A small canyon to the south provides a lovely updraft to the power lines, where they can survey the wildlife in the otherwise uninhabited (by people) canyon out back. Although Tech Support Guy can hear their cries from indoors, I have to sit outside to be sure I’m hearing their screech rather than hearing-aid feedback. Strikingly similar. The falcon sounds I find here aren’t the screeches I’m hearing out back, which remind me more of the petulant sounds my vocal cat makes when she’s being ignored.

Although the calendar might disagree, summer has arrived.

The house finches, spoiled by multiple bird feeders, have grown fat and lazy. This guy permitted me to approach quite closely before he made a leisurly two-hop take-off from the arbor. The finches have a very distinctive cry as well.

The antics of the finches are driving the territorial Anna’s hummingbirds to attempt suicide in my tsukubai. Either that, or he’s having a cool-down before engaging in vigorous climbing and precipitous dives to court the ladies.

On Memorial Day, my Easter Lily was still hesitating to open.

It waited until this morning before the first bud opened. The fragrance would be cloying in a perfume, but somehow in the summer morning air it smells just right.

This is a wonderful time of year to spend a cool morning outside with a camera and a cup of coffee and a good book. The first 7 lines of T’ao Ch’ien, Reading The Book of Hills and Seas, agrees:
In the month of June the grass grows high
And round my cottage thick-leaved branches sway.
There is not a bird but delights in the place where it rests.
And I too – love my thatched cottage.
I have done my ploughing:
I have sown my seed.
Again I have time to sit and read my books.

Martha in Michigan can take heart: rabbits can’t eat books.

Summer at last!

“The key to happiness is not being rich; it’s doing something arduous and creating something of value and then being able to reflect on the fruits of your labor.”
– Arthur Brooks (as summarized by David Brooks)

What could better describe the satisfactions of gardening?

While WS is on the road, I post again from Michigan. Today was our theoretical last possible frost date, although global warming has surely moved that back at least two weeks. Accordingly, I moved a half-dozen raised-from-seed pepper plants out to the garden yesterday—between the raspberries and the roses in the photo.

Within six hours, the four that were not protected by hardware cloth had disappeared into bunny gullets. Dang it. When will I learn that the garden is not solely mine?

It’s snowing in Michigan!

Cottonwood trees make me think of James Michener’s Centennial — something to indicate where the creeks are on the vast prairie. Here, though, they are common yard trees, and they do seem to enjoy the environment. I tried to capture the falling cottonwood “snow,” but this is the best I could do. It fell thickly enough that you could not avoid inhaling it outdoors today, as the curbside drifts indicate. I recall cottonwood clogging the pool filter around the Fourth of July — is it the generous spring rains or global warming that brought on the snowfall so early this year?

Update on the porch lamp robin’s nest: at least three babies survived. Perhaps the eggshell below the nest was just from hatching and not a sign of a premature end. They are long since fledged and have dispersed to feast on my unripe Bing cherries. It is once again safe to use my front door.

The giant bumblebee is busy in the wickedly thorny but delightfully clove-scented rose. As honeybees die off everywhere, thank goodness the bumblebees continue to thrive.

For someone who does not like pink, I sure seem to have a lot of it in my yard. I could show you the clematis, the roses, and the peony, but let’s settle for the lemon thyme, with Tiny Monster geranium in foreground counterpoint. They aren't the colors I’d prefer but are beautiful nevertheless. The turtle is not real but still seems to enjoy sunning himself on a poolside rock. Once the cottonwood storm abates, I’ll have to wrestle the cover off that pool one last time. The steps are cracked — it’s time I ripped it out and filled in the hole before the toddler next door and his newborn sister discover the “attractive nuisance.”

Somebody Could Really Use That

“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.”
Tennessee Williams

These days, I have trouble dragging myself out of bed in the morning. The house is haunting me. Permit me to explain. I don’t hoard. I do, however, have loved ones who do. Yesterday, Tech Support Guy was heard to say: “I hate to get rid of them. Somebody could really use them.” His comment slipped out when we were cleaning out the back room and I suggested he toss a carton of old computer manuals (Commadore 64? Really?) and electric cord adapters to prehistoric cell phones. This is exactly what hoarders say on that TV program about hoarding. I’ve heard them.

Alas, we weren’t cleaning the room to make it into an actual inhabitable space.

We have to make more room to store more progeny stuff that progeny hoards. Is there a disease called second-hand hoarding? If so, I’m a sufferer. I hate living in a mess, especially watching it slowly accrete on tables and other flat surfaces, like chairs and couches. The back room was stuffed to the doorway. Now there is room - if not to actually swing a cat – at least to fit both of us in the room at the same time. Me and the cat, that is, not me and another human being.

I have no doubt that somebody could really use this stuff for purposes other than providing a three-dimensional play space for curious cats. Does that make me a hoarder too? Hoarding is contageous?

So, next week it’s driving up to Berkeley, hauling minor furniture and more cartons of books than you could shake a dirty dust mop at down four flights of stairs and into a Rider truck that the person who loses the coin-toss will drive back to SoCal; unloading the truck, thereby once again blocking the closet filled with my dress-for-success clothing I no longer wear, and scattering a box of moth balls in before closing the door for another six months. Meanwhile, I’ll just try to stay on the hot tin roof. At least there’s plenty of room up there.

In Medias Res

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
- Franklin P. Jones

I could be losing my mind. Sometimes, my life suddenly confuses me. I get this feeling like I have entered a theater after the first act is well underway; and I can’t quite catch up with the plot.

Standing by the coffee pot this morning, waiting for my coffee to brew, I looked out the window at the perfect spring day. I smelled fresh green growing things and coffee. I suddenly couldn’t remember what I was doing there or what I had been doing before. For that moment, I was just soaking in the present and that was enough.

But then, I realized it was probably just an attack of geeziness; a brief burst of static shorting out my short-term memory. Some mornings, I feel as dumb as a pink balloon before I have my coffee. I once invented the inflatable archery target in just such a mood. So it’s not all bad.

I have a good mental exercise to bring me back from the brink of stupidity, and I will share it with you now. I try to remember if my safe word is albatross or applesauce. Some things you can afford to forget. Others, you shouldn’t. By the time the coffee was drunk, I was back to my old self again. It’s albatross.

New Lifeform Discovered at Whole Foods!

“The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

This package of "Beef Marrow Bones" has a nice orange sticker announcing that is it "LAMB." The clerk and I decided that it comes from an animal called a Blamb.

Spring Wind

"Love calls like the wild birds--
it's another day.
A Spring wind blew my list of
things to do...away."
Greg Brown, Spring Wind

My sweet peas are sparse this year, but lovely. The bunnies discovered most before they got very far, but the survivors don’t disappoint – either for sight or smell. I’m excited to see my tumeric returned this year. Last year’s experimental mail order sample seemed to die back over winter. I wasn’t sure it would re-appear. Once it gets big enough to be worth a picture I’ll snap one.

Meanwhile, I was distracted from photographing flowers to show Martha in Michigan that I do same some flowers. I found a holy carrot. I’m pretty sure this is Mickey Mouse. Now, I know this may not be worth as much on eBay as, say, the BVM on a picture of toast. But I’m pretty sure it would have been more impressive than a piece of toast on the BVM. But I ate it – the carrot, not the toast. I did dream of Mickey Mouse that night…

Reality of spring - posting from SE Michigan

All the bright colors in the photo, just two weeks old, are now gone: the redbud tree, the grape hyacinths, the red tulips, and the last of the golden daffodils. But they are being replaced by the next in the procession of spring beauties: the clematis on that lamppost is now in bloom; irises succeed the tulips. Out back, the periwinkle bloom and the violets multiply. The cute little mazus reptans are thriving and flowering, although too tiny to appreciate from across the yard.

The lilacs, after a glorious season, are done for the year. It is time to hack the neighbor's back from my driveway and mine back from my other neighbor's driveway. My dwarf red and extra-dwarf apricot azaleas have opened their first flowers, with the real show still to come. The Tiny Monster geraniums, more monstrous than tiny after many years, have begun their summer-long flower show, and the lemon thyme is a carpet of deep pink. Rosebuds are fat but still unopened, although that will change with all the rain we've been getting.

Other rhythms of life are also evident. Mama robin, on my porch light, has raised her brood of three, and she and papa no longer shriek and head-smack all who dare to approach my front door. The family waits for its annual gorging on my Bing cherries. Although "extra dwarf," the tree has long since grown too big to net.

The power was out all Saturday after a lightning storm killed the transformer in my backyard, so I spent the day planting, between showers, lots of things I'd been looking at in catalogs for years and unexpectedly found in the nursery just outside my neighborhood: Queeny Purple hollyhock, pyrethrum red painted daisy, tradescantia Zwanenburg Blue, crocosmia Lucifer, chocolate daisy, blue dwarf sea holly. I moved a few plants to better homes for them and also put in the red-leaf begonias around the mailbox and the deep red callibrachoa across the back yard. Much of these had to be covered against frost Saturday and Sunday nights, as did the Early Girl in its wall-o'-water and the rosemary, parsley, and basil; I was glad I had held off on the other tomatoes and peppers on the kitchen windowsill. The two big planter boxes were also filled with new assortments of plants, but those can be wheeled into the garage overnight.

It may have been premature, but I'm glad I did all that planting, since the gardening parts of the backyard are now under inches of water and will be unwalkable for weeks, even after the rain stops. It is this time of spring when I am relieved not to be fruitlessly washing the paws of my late dog many times a day as she returns from patrolling the swamp. And maybe it will even be too wet for the bunnies who wiped out my early greens and snap peas (and astilbe!) to come after the second crop before I get the anti-bunny fencing up. I don't like to do that until I have the veggies all planted, since it's a pain to lean over. I really need to get some genuine rubber boots for this season — my tootsies nearly froze in the crosslites when I was placing and removing anti-frost covers in standing, 40-degree water. We'll see soon enough whether that tradescantia really does like wet feet.

Allegory of Spring

By Eugene Grasset

"It is now the time of Laylock, White Thorn, Musk, Florence Iris, Lady’s Smock and White Violets."
J. R. Anderson

'Nuff said.

What the World Knows

“There is not one thing I might say to the world / which the world does not already know.”
Brian Turner, Phantom Noise

My backyard beckons while there is so much yet to do inside: chores; daily routines; several concurrent books with bookmarks midway through stacked by my chair; the hobby project dollhouse. There are a rainy winter’s worth of dead leaves on the shallow pitched roof – an invitation to a conflagration when things dry out later in the summer. They make great mulch, but I have to climb up there with a rake and trash bags to bag them, drop them in the yard, then scatter them. If you simply rake them off the roof into the yard, the dust raised covers every surface, including your lungs, and you have more of a mess to clean up. Once, we did just that, raking the leaves into a patio with two open sliding doors: the dust inside was testimony to one of my more depressing mistakes.

And letters to write. It’s been years since I’ve written so much by hand. I send a card each day to my soldier, now about midway through Basic Combat Training. That’s nine weeks of letters. Over the years, I’ve grown accustomed to typing my thoughts, and I’m a fast typist. But writing things in longhand slows me down and I find some sentences are bereft of verbs by the time I arrive at the period. Others end up as mere phrases, their connecting thoughts lost in the mists of the time taken to write the first few words. Is my hand slower or is my mind faster? While the later would please me, the former is more likely the cause of this disjointed handwriting.

And what’s “news” when you write every day, and when the ideal day is one spent fitting floor tiles together in the doll house, or matching wallpaper patterns, or cursing at the abominable Cir-Kit lighting that is so crappy the chandeliers don’t work straight out of the package? Remind me to post a scathing review of these inferior products. I’ve learned how to solder, and even discovered the joys of no-lead solder, but eventually, the electricity confronts the actual light made by this irresponsible company without any apparent quality control. The other kind (of solder) gives me a headache from inhaling the tiny whiffs of lead-laced smoke – and is probably causing more brain damage than the crack I smoke before beginning to tackle miniature electricity. Kidding.

Besides, what gardener in their right mind would spend such a lovely Spring day blogging or Facebooking when they could be outside, chasing the birds from their bird feeders to plant, weed, water, and generally get their fingernails dirty? It’s too nice outside to stay inside and try to blog the world something that it already knows.

Not-So-Great Heron

"You would know the heron if you saw it... A queer tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs."
- Sarah Orne Jewett, A White Heron

What’s so great about these ginormous birds? They’re “protected” from predators: humans aren’t allowed to hunt them. Yet they are allowed to use my fishpond as an all you can eat buffed. Now I ask you, is this fair?

The bird in this picture was totally not worried when Tech Support Guy walked to the other side of the pond to take this picture. He (the bird) is taller than I am, although I outweigh him by a few pounds. As you approach his position, he stares you in the eye long enough to communicate that he can come and go whenever he wants and there’s nothing you can do about it. Then he shrugs his wings and lifts like an elevator to the top of the nearby roof, where he remains sneering down at you for a few moments before flying away, as if to say that you are literally beneath his notice. I submit that giving wildlife a protected status ends up turning them into spoiled snobs.

The heron couldn’t be bothered fishing for the small mosquito eaters that populate the pond. The few surviving koi/goldfish are all almost black. Anything that flashes any color is soon dispatched by the heron during the early morning and twilight hours, or by the raccoons et. al. who hunt at night. So our pond is a living demonstration in genetic selection to adapt to the prevailing conditions.

Here I Am

“When you can’t go any further, turn around, and you’re there.” Kermit T. Frog

The little ceramic bird now lives atop the old stone and tile table. Last year, I stuck a stem of rosemary in the hole in the center. Once open to allow for placement of an umbrella, the center hole has long since become clogged with dirt. Rosemary is one tough customer.

Speaking of tough customers, Tech Support Guy and I finally fixed the pond filtration that was plugged up, and the pond is once more cycling through the filter. The goop that came out of the clogged return pipe – part fish poo and part decomposing plant matter – compares to compost tea the way my Dad’s eggnog (equal parts Southern Comfort and store-bought eggnog) compares to store-bought eggnog.

TSG reached over and over again into the bucket sized pool to grab hands full of solid matter that were clogging the return pipe at the bottom of the bucket. He dumped the black stinky ooze into a five gallon bucket that I then carried around and dumped on various plants and pots. This routine was repeated until the force of the gravity-assisted water pushed the rest of the muck out of the back end of the clogged pipe. We then moved to that end of the no-longer-clogged pipe and back-flushed the filter. What came out of that into my bucket was more watery, but blacker and nastier.

Of course there was splashing involved, and spilling, and perhaps just a bit of horseplay. The result was that at the end of the day, we both exuded an aroma that matched the black gunk splashed onto our arms, faces and clothes. But we were so delighted with our success that we sat on the patio, waiting for the Advil to kick in, and admiring the motion of the pond, now cycling through the uv lights that will, within the week, eliminate the algae covering the back (shallow) end of the pond behind the turtle rock in this picture. We felt like it must have felt to make mud pies and get dirty in a playground: tired, filthy, and jubilantly admiring our accomplishments.

I won’t detail how exhausted we were, and how much longer it took us to accomplish this task than it did in the old days. And of course, there's more to do. The grassy water plant that is taking over the foreground of the pond has to be cut way back. I should get the water lily pots out and divide the bulbs, or corms or whatever, but that’s for another day – a day in which I will don the fashionable fisherman’s waders – a set of rubber boots that turn into overalls, completely enclosing me up to my chest and enabling me to enter the shallow but nasty pond.

But for now, I’m tired, dirty, stinky, and content. And I’m there.

Going, Going, Gone.

With a painful irony, I realize that even memories are not forever.

But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity).
- Samuel Beckett, Watt (1943)

When friends part, the experience can be joyous, or sorrowful, or bittersweet. Fondness and sadness mix in measure proportional to the closeness of the bond, and to the time and the distance apart. When family departs, it’s mostly sadness that descends, at least on me. Being parted from a particular woman in my family has pushed me down the old familiar spiral water slide of self-pity, to splash feet first into the muddy pool of despair. Ok, you may ask, isn’t that metaphor a little over-the-top? Perhaps, I reply, but doesn’t the gardener languish in winter – separated from her garden? And plus, I’ve been here before, and know we all not only survive separation, we grow.

Separating from loved ones - even as the rich dark chocolate of love may smolder into the bitter ashes of extreme distaste - is more painful still. My fragile mental equilibrium teeters and I get indigestion and acid reflux. Yuck. I once went to a female holistic doctor and homeopath. She said that all physical symptoms have mental counterparts, if not direct causes. What more proof does one need to know that heartburn comes from a bruised heart? My heart feels hot and fussy, unsettled and anxious. It would not surprise me to learn that those I am separated from suffer a collectively similar fate. But that which doesn’t kill us just makes us madder, and also I’m told, wiser. I assume the ex-vegetarian now consuming MREish cooking has experienced some similar symptoms.

Growth happens while we’re apart, almost like the exuberant growth in my backyard drenched by recent rains. Although I never went to summer camp as a child, I am familiar with the miraculous growth a child can achieve in a few short weeks away from home. Not just in inches, but in the look in their eyes - those of a person whose heart has also grown stronger. We grow up, we grow apart, we grow old. Just like a garden. Or, as Mom used to say with more clarity, “It’s the frickin’ cycle of frickin’ life.”

And we continue to grow after being parted, even if we never reunite. There’s a song called “Someday I’ll be forgiven for this.” One of the lines is “Someday you’ll be forgiven for this.” A lifelong believer in the healing powers of forgiveness, that’s the only treatment I have for my burning heart now. Well, that and Tums.

The Circle

“Trust in the circle.
To end is to begin.”
- Charmaine Aserappa, In a Japanese Garden

Sitting here on this crisp, fresh day, I feel infected with Spring Fever. The old wheel of the seasons has ground creaking into Spring. This is the season that I most want to take up verdant residence inside my head. Spring opens wide the windows of the cramped sour winter cabin of my brain and lets the breeze blow out the cobwebs and dry autumn leaves from my mind.

Spring renews my trust in the circle. This is the form of immortal life that comforts me now, a thick mossy covering over my original conception of everlasting life - Our Return to the Garden that Christ promised – where our souls would go upon leaving our compostable bodies. Either way: reincarnation!

I read somewhere that in his Autobiography, W. B. Yates says he sought to express his poems in “metrical forms that seemed old enough to have been sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey.” I feel old like that in winter. I go into a kind of hibernation and dream like a man half-asleep on horseback on a sacred journey.

Spring wakes me up. Spring starts a new circle in motion.

Bao Yu, is the central character in A Dream of Red Mansions, his name means Precious Jade - reportedly for the piece of jade he held in his mouth at his birth. This 3” ceramic pot has been sitting on a eucalyptus tree trunk next to the driveway for years. I stuck a piece of jade in years ago and have completely neglected it since. No water sprinklers reach it, forcing it to be stunted but tought enough to survive. Here in the afternoon light, is my very own precious jade, glowing with vitality and smug self-importance.

Gardening for Mental Health

“I have tried to write Paradise.

“Do not move
Let the wind speak
That is paradise

“Let the Gods forgive what I
Have made
Let those I love try to forgive
What I have made."

- Canto CXX, The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Here is an almost empty shop, without a sign, but with a table that includes (pretty sure) the necessary equipment for me to rule the world. It looks like the left over detritus from a mad scientist's lab, old ham radio gear, including to the left of the tall piece of equipment, a hand keyer to send Morse code.

Now, I'm no expert, but after carefully studying the picture at great magnification, I postulate that the tall item in the center is a secret mind control device that would enable the skilled operator to dial in the brain frequency of any nearby brain, and then to gently adjust the brain waves in several different directions. I know it will require a bit of practice for me to master thought control, but I promise I will only use my powers for good. Or mostly for good. For me, that is.

Still, in case some combination of radioactive mutant villans, DHS, and those girls who were mean to me in high school conspire to foil my plan for world domination, I will still have the brain wave machines secreted in my underground hideout. There, I'll crouch at night, twiddling the dials, petting the kitty asleep on my lap, and laughing maniacally as I work. First I'll adjust my own brain waves to enable me to understand why some people find the taste of olives desirable, to sense danger before it strikes, and to remember to turn off the soaker hose before I go back inside at the end of the day.

Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps I'll go back outside while the white wisteria blooms are still so fragrant the scent might knock some sense into me. There's winter's mess to clean up, and that could take days.

So. It's either world domination or gardening…

Return of the Tourist

“Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good…
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”
- Wallace Stevens, The final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

I’m back in So Cal after about a week on the east coast. I arrived in time to see the cherry blossoms in bloom in Washington DC. Déjà vu, Momma.

Although I’ve lived here for most of my life, I grew up in suburban Washington. We used to walk around the reflecting basin at this time of year. We’d pass people with cameras, framing a shot that took in cherry blossom boughs overhead with the Jefferson Memorial in the background. According to a statistic I made up for this post, 93.8% of tourists with cameras take the same picture. As we passed them, we would smugly mutter, “Been done.” So my cliché-compliant pictures serve to remind me that I was a smartass once. I’m a much better person these days – much wiser, much more modest, and barely any older.

I spent a few nights with family, then a long day walking around the Mall, stopping in museums like the Freer Gallery where one sister’s inner goddess was revealed. I’m sure that’s never been done, because nobody else ever goofs off in museums. According to the results in an exhaustive a Pew Research Study of museum visitors I made up for this post, nobody else in the history of the Freer Gallery has ever taken this shot.

I dumbly wore new shoes for the trek around the Mall, from the Capitol Botanic Gardens where there was an amazing orchid show, to the Smithsonian, riding Metro, and limping to the “historic” Williard Hotel for cocktails. I’d forgotten how everything that stands still for more than ten minutes in Washington DC ends up with a brass plaque memorializing famous historical events. One sign said “On this spot in 1766, British forces clashed with rebel militia, who, upon realizing they were outnumbered 7 to 1, heroically handled the battle the way a dog handles stress: since they couldn’t win, eat the British, or roll around on the ground and tickle then, they pissed on the brick below this plaque and walked safely away.” Ok, I made that up too. But I sure enjoyed the cocktail hour seated in a nook in the lobby, watching the beautiful people without blisters on their feet stroll importantly to and fro.

You're In the Army Now

"By its nature, strategy is more demanding of the intellect and imagination than most other military and policy competencies. Strategists must possess highly developed analytical and problem solving skills to rapidly conceptualize and develop creative feasible solutions to complex strategic challenges. Further, they must succinctly convey complicated conceptual or analytical material in a manner that is clearly understood by decision makers."
FA59 Education Opportunities (US Army)

Here is my final report from the front lines of the demonstration Vegetable Garden at the WCG. It’s not illustrated with photos because my stupid camera batteries on my stupid new camera were dead. Stupid camera.

Today, we harvested the last of the cabbage: both green and blue, as well as all the broccoli, red and green lettuce varieties, and the exhausted cauliflower that never got around to blooming. We spent the morning amending the planting beds with fragrant fresh warm compost, planting two squash and two cucumber starts, adding some worms, and covering the beds with a confetti of colorful ornamental kale and cabbage leaves to encourage the worms to make themselves at home.

Next week, we hope to add final compost and to begin covering the beds with mulch. We hope to have starts of warm season plants in the ground by the Spring Garden Festival next month.

Today was one of those days when I realize I live in paradise. Temperature in the mid-70F range, soft breeze with enough moisture to waken the rich warm compost, the living greenness of cabbage, the pungency of the thyme.

Bright and early tomorrow I leave for a few days in Baltimore, Washington DC, Greenbelt MD to visit with 4/5 of my sisters and miscellaneous other relatives. There’s nothing like being able to complain about your spouse to people who already know you love but also are being driven insane by your beloved spouse. Isn’t that what love matures into?

Someday My Prince Will Come

“Americans love junk. It’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love” - George Santayana

I love junk too much to let this go. It’s a spinning garden stake with a frog on either side. I especially love frog-themed junk.

Shut up. It’s better than garden fairies, imho. I say you can never have too many little garden embellishments, particularly in my climate where actual living plant material is so endangered. Besides, note that the frog is wearing a crown. He's not just your ordinary garden frog. Possibly he's a prince who will take me away from all this to a magic castle in a land where there is enough precipitation for me to grow stuff I like, and where I’d consequently not favor such cheesy garden ornamentation.

Which reminds me of the joke about Cinderella who took some garden photos in the days before we all had digital cameras. She took the film to her local photo developing store and returned a week later to pick up her pictures. They weren’t ready that week. Or the next. Or the next. After about 4 weeks, she was so discouraged she was overheard to say, "Someday my prints will come."

And thus was the legend born.

Seeing Everything as Brown or White

"Brown shoes don’t make it.
Quite school, why fake it?"
Frank Zappa

Unlike brown shoes, brown sage, in my always modest opinion, does make it in a garden. Here is the brown sage (salvia Africana-lutea, native to South Africa) now blooming at The Water Conservation Garden. Brown flowers belong in any garden that has no pretensions about being sophisticated, but is more comfortable with an amiable mix of the quirky and spontaneous. I have always been suspicious of the late Victorian conceit of “garden rooms” where different themes prevail in different places in one’s yard. I’m pretty sure I didn’t come to this conclusion only upon finally admitting my yard is a hodge-podge of design, but that I had this fixed in my mind all the time I was (apparently) haphazardly cultivating different corners with different impulse buys from the nursery. But even if I just use it as a retroactive justification for the goofy survivors who populate my yard these days, I stand by it, and I am not crazy. Then again, I may have Alzheimer’s, but at least I don’t have Alzheimer’s.

These lovely white jonquils are in the “white garden” at The Garden. I get the idea – that white flowers seem to hold on to the last light at twilight, making them almost glow. But white flowers have always struck me as about as silly as women who drop hankies in the hope that this clumsy gesture will prompt adjacent gentlemen to introduce themselves. Nature is brown, green and sometimes when the light is right, a sort of golden yellow that green becomes when backlit by slanting rays of early morning or late afternoon. The whole point of hankies are to dab coyly at the corners of your eyes to avoid smearing your mascara.

The whole point of flowers are to add other colors to your garden. My favorite kind of calla lily is the green goddess that always looks hand-painted. You can see one in the very left of banner picture at the top of my blog. Some might say my yard puts the “eck” in eclectic. I say if I wanted white in my garden, I’d paint a fence.

Ninja Rain

"Wherever I am,
Anyone in need has a friend.
Whenever I return home,
Everyone is happy I am there."
- Ninja Warrior Creed

Ninja Rain: (Attacking noisily outside the window) Hah! I scoff at your puny landscape, small and stunted, slowly being swallowed by the creeping Sonoran Desert. Drink this, puny carbon-based life forms!

Me: Hah! I care not toothless villain! I report to the courthouse these days; subjected to bad coffee, strange jur-fellows and metal detector lines almost daily. I have no fear of your pathetic attempts to overwhelm my back yard with fresh water.

Ninja Rain: Hah! BTW, You, what’s your case about?

Me: Hah! I engage daily with the forces of stupidity, vacuity and poor oral hygiene on slow and crowded elevators. I endure attempted conversation with “peers” who have attention spans as short as their opinions are shallow. While I dote on grand-child-aged relatives, oddly I’m not as captivated to hear about yours, dear. Besides: see this book I’m holding open on my lap? I was reading it. Where light conversation has proved difficult for four weeks, I now cower to think of attempting to collaborate and deliberate the final week with my fellow jurors. Ergo Ninja Rain, your noisome rain is like music to my ears.

Ninja Rain: Hah! I shall depress your spirits, Seasonally Affect your mood Disorder and enforce a chronic light shortage. Not to mention increasing your aging roof’s leak potential to Sesame Street Terrorist Threat Level Bert. (He’s the orange one, right?)

Me: Hah! Leaky roofs are the farthest thing from my mind!

Ninja Rain: BTW, You, what’s your case about again?

Me: Hah! I shall not capitulate to your assassination attempts on my confidence in our legal system. I have already had at least two nightmares about being tried by jury of my peers. In fact leaky roofs go to the heart of the matter of this case. So, shut up.

Ninja Rain: Ha ha! Hah! No seriously. Sorry. Hah!

Me: Very Master Ninja-y of you, NJ. But you gotta listen here. My case is about a homeowner who suffered winter rainstorm damage and fought the insurance company. Talk about Threat Level Bert. Here we sit, six years later. Listening to battling expert witnesses, silently witnessing revelations of shady conduct, trying to keep track of over 600 surprise exhibits, tortured by logic and the lack thereof, and by fornicating plaintiffs living an alternative lifestyle several pay grades above the jury members. Funny undisputed fact: The roof still leaks.

Ninja Rain: Hah! Sounds like a noble assignment: Everyman vs. The Man, and Hapless Small Business General Contractor. Meet the ungainly and unlikely heroic sole proprietor subcontractor trying to make an honest living practicing his craft and ending up as collateral damage. Pretty sure it's an undisputed that this guy doesn’t have health insurance.

Me: Yeah, huh? Greed, lies, revenge, innuendo, shady unasked questions, and disputed answers. Objection. No foundation. Sustained. Stricken, Question. Day after rainy day taking notes on technical details about insurance lingo, advice from architects and structural engineers about all the nasty things rain can do when roofs leak.

Ninja Rain: Ok, but still, sounds pretty cool. Dark arts, deceptions, class warfare. Did the workers rebel against their overlords and save the day for Socialism? Viva Revolution, eh?

Me: NJ, I know more than I ever dreamed of about leaky roofs, covered damages, mold remediation, obscure construction attempts gone bad, code violations, lies, and damn lies. So technical at times I had to clench my fingernails in the palm of my hand to keep from nodding off. So gripping at other times that Juror #6 woke up.

Ninja Rain: Hah! Puny juror! Sounds to me like you’re really mad that you didn’t get to sleep in mornings, and fool around blogging. Just for that, I’m going to blow a branch into a bird feeder, knocking it on the patio where the birds too drenched to fly can waddle around the all you can eat buffet.

Me: Well, NJ, good for the birds, and for me. The trial is over. So I’m back home to my favorite job – playing around on the innernetz when I should be cleaning out the old e-mail in-box. So rain your little head off.

Ninja Rain: Wait, You. What was your verdict?

Me: We reached a verdict midday yesterday that will displease “The Man” and “the man” about equally, and will please only the innocent contractor. I’m completely satisfied that we did the right thing. My only regret is that we did so for reasons having more to do with the personalities of the characters that performed before us for 5 weeks than with the carefully outlined jury instructions on the law, or the objective and undisputed facts of the case, or even the basic principles of accounting.

Ninja Rain: You win some, you lose some. Others, you merely screw up.

Me: Thanks, Ninj. Your precipitous wind-whipped wetness, bringing the haunting residual smell of the prehistoric glacier melt is just what I need today to clean the salts out my flower pots and the cognitive dissonance of jury operation in my brain. Besides your winter El Nino rain is a far cry from a shower of silver shurikens whizzing toward my chest. By the way, if you ever wanna make an origami shuriken, check this out.

Expert Testimony

“I used to be offended, but now I'm just amused...”
Elvis Costello, (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes

I have spent several weeks listening to expert witnesses disagree under oath about technical details of building and construction codes so boring they would make my ears bleed if I had bothered to replace the batteries in my hearing aid. Kidding. Of course I listened, and took notes, and only doodled the barest minimum of time necessary to keep from smacking someone upside the head. Then, there are the liars. Well, some of them must be lying, because something can’t be metaphorically black and white at the same time unless it’s a zebra wearing an orange prison jumpsuit huddled beneath a blue tarp at midnight on the longest night of the year. In the rain. I should know, because an expert said so under oath.

Common sense and reason won’t save us here. As one expert witness said, reason is 6/7 of treason. Or maybe that was James Thurber. He also said nobody ever told him there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Momma. Or was that a dead Beatle?

So, after going around in circles for the last several weeks, I’m thinking of going into the professional expert testimony business and wearing a business suit, and swearing to tell nothing but the truth for $500 per hour plus expenses. All that remains for me to put this brilliant plan into action is for me to settle on a specific field in which to purport to be an expert. My big brother recently mentioned that what happens in tautology club happens in tautology club. So I’ve decided that when I grow up, I want to be an expert in tautologies. Why, you (might) ask? Because that’s what I want to be when I grow up.