We have ducks.  Writing this, I realize that I phrase this fact in the same way one might announce that they have an infestation, disease, or catastrophe.  “We have fleas.”  “We have the flu.”  “We have a fire in the kitchen.”

But unlike fleas or flu or a contumacious blaze, the ducks we love.  Or at least I do, more or less. The ducks are a gift in aggregate, if not a gift that aggravates.  They are an exercise in the art of letting go, of making do, of squinting just right in order to see beauty in the wreckage of disillusionment.  Of adjusting desires to fit one’s reality.

Like many things people bring home, the ducks first suggested themselves five years ago in an advertisement– an infomercial, really– one that landed via word of mouth. Which is to say, my daughter told me in a phone conversation about watching domestic ducks being cute and friendly on YouTube, how one settled into its owner’s lap, lovingly twining its long duck neck up and around the man’s neck. (“I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck”).  Heaven help me, who doesn’t want some of that?

Plus, ducks eat mosquitoes, this daughter said, knowing I loathe mosquitoes (also, like ducks, we have mosquitoes).  She didn’t need to say more– she had me at twining– but she finished with: “You should get ducks, Mom, once you’re all settled.  Once the house is done.”

Which eventuality– being all settled, with the house done– seemed then, five years ago, far-flung and nebulous, a distant and mysterious world visible only through the strongest, most advanced telescopes, the renderings of the most audacious artist.  Frank and I still sigh deeply when we remember the rigors and losses of building (not to mention finishing) this house, whose grounds are now duck infested.  In such a gritty state of construction limbo, I could only dream about neck-twining ducks, and do a little duck Googling when I collapsed, bone weary, in bed at the end of a long day.  I say “could only”… but really, it was a favorite and seemingly safe escape from drywall dust, paint splatter, grout blisters– and our cramped, dingy rental.  

After all, I was just Googling ducks.  I wasn’t committed; I was still free of the risks and inconveniences inherent to actual duck ownership.  I could safely escape into the fantasy of duck cuteness and connection (and the neatly established, beautiful gardens and arbors, chic barns, and lushly edged koi ponds that naturally went with them), and come back without the slick smear of duck poo clinging to my shoes.

Before, in earlier bouts of home and garden making, we’d just had chickens.  Well, and besides the usual cats and occasional dog, two goats (goats were easier for me than dogs, to be honest…I visited them frequently, but didn’t have to live with them, as one must live with a dog– if it is to be well-adjusted.  I did sleep a few nights in the goat barn with Eugenia Beliza, our Nigerian dwarf, when we first brought her home and she cried in tormented loneliness, but that’s another story).  In my dangerously fluctuating, desert-west world of  backyard farming and chronic house-selling/building, the notion of waterfowl seemed remote, irrelevant.  Perhaps even superfluous… for chickens reliably provide all the feathered cluckiness (and eggs) that one should need. 

But that infomercial.  That sly Google, the siren call of a happy cuddly duck echoing in the twilit shadow of a not-quite-finished construction project.  

I’ve experienced enough setbacks and disillusionment to know that Googling and YouTube aren’t guaranteed to land one anywhere near the realms of Real Life (not to mention the practical edge of any rose colored distant galaxies).  But I was weary then, and vulnerable.  The ephemeral glow of what I was reading and watching online about ducks (nest feathers, as it were) bewitched me (ducks begging to be let in at the back door!  Ducks cuddling in an owner’s lap!  Ducks following their master in a happy quacking row!), even though caveats were mentioned.  

Indeed, the caveats seemed to me to be just one more endearing aspect of raising ducks.

Caveats such as: ducks are messy (now there’s an understatement).  Duck bloggers and homesteading YouTubers were quick to point this out, but then they were just as quick to share their clever ways of managing or even preventing the mess, and to insist that the benefits of having ducks far outweighed any inconveniences.  Benefits such as hardiness and disease resistance.  Ducks are said to be tougher than chickens. Drakes are mellow and easy-going, as opposed to raging, lecherous roosters (well, nothing is more amorous than a drake, which is putting it too delicately.  But raging? No. They’re lovers, not fighters.)  Ducks lay eggs years longer than chickens, and their eggs are bigger and higher in Omega 3’s and protein than chicken eggs.  And so on and so forth. 

After so many blog articles, a duck’s messiness seemed not only a small price to pay, it even began to add to the appeal.  A duck’s messy poo?  Great fertilizer; good for the garden– the more the better!  A duck’s splashiness?  Well, yes, they are splashy, but oh, so cute how they love water!  How they manage to fit themselves into even the smallest of dishes in order to eke out a clumsy swim!  How they’ll stand quacking happily in the rain, or even a fire hose.  How they’ll monopolize the chicken’s water dispenser if they’re sharing space with chickens, like so many gossips clustered around the office water cooler.  Funny ducks– the focal point and meaning of any fountain or pond (never mind that their poo will make a pond uninhabitable to koi, whose tolerance for mess is apparently much more limited than duck people’s).

After the house was finally mostly finished and we moved in, Frank and I lapsed into a season of decompression.  Evenings, we watched the dumbest TV possible (“The Good Witch”, and “When Calls The Heart”, for instance– so silly).  Neither one of us were interested in projects at all— I did manage to hang some pictures, and set my pretty blue sparkly things around the house, which made our new home feel even cosier, all the better to nestle into as we watched even more dumb TV, which sometimes included YouTube’s renditions of duck farming.  We did talk about ducks, me with some yearning, Frank with some skepticism, and eventually I conceded to his more objective, practical wisdom; ducks probably weren’t a good idea for us.  So much poopy water creating brown slippy ice in the winter was of course prohibitive.  We would just do chickens again, chickens who sip daintily from tiny, easily controlled apertures, chickens whose poo dries in a hot second on pine chips, chickens whose eggs were familiar and not at all gamey, chickens whose personalities and demeanors were already beloved by us.

It was spring, just weeks before my birthday, and we began touring feed stores in search of Blue Laced Red Wyandotte chicks, for joy and fun.  Frank and I both had our hearts set on this particular breed, because we’d read somewhere that they grow up into especially friendly chickens, and that their egg laying habits are pretty good– above average, even.  We had seen with our own eyes at the county fair that Blue Laced Red Wyandottes are just about the prettiest thing that can happen in a chicken coop, red feathers edged with an elegant blue-gray border, the magical conglomerate of all the upper feathers together shimmering like a voluminous satin ball gown over rounded chicken bodies– the soft gray of their fluffy chicken butts a skirted pouf, like ruffled bloomers.

We searched and searched, but never found.  At best, there was the vague possibility of Blue Laced Red Wyandotte chicks arriving “sometime in the next couple weeks” at one distant store.  At another, there was a calico mix of several kinds of chicks in one enclosure, apparently including at least a few of the coveted Wyandottes, but no one was sure which was which.  We were heading home in varied degrees of disappointment, when I brought up the duck proposition once more, for I had seen ducklings at most of the feed stores, and had been guiltily entranced  (I was going to say secretly, but my entrancement was no secret; Frank noticed, tolerated, and eventually had to pull me away).  By now, it was actually my birthday– the day of.  And by now, Frank had taken in a few YouTube videos about installing filtration systems in ponds– we had been thinking in the most galactic terms of a koi pond– and he was intrigued by the possibility of an engineering challenge (Frank is an engineer to his core, which neatly explains how we have managed, ultimately, to clear four house-building event horizons in the last twenty five years).

We agreed to just look at ducklings, and talk about it.  In retrospect, I confess the agreement was probably more about Frank’s reluctance to withstand my begging, especially on my birthday… but at the time, I convinced myself that our agreement was fair and just and equitable and furthermore entirely adult. My most significant regret now is not being had by ducks (I mean, having ducks), but dragging Frank down with me.

The ducklings were very cute, arguably cuter than any chick we’d ever seen.  And Frank was already scheming about fittings and filters for a duck pond.  Where my vulnerabilities to being had lie in nest feathering, his lie in opportunities to play with tech.

So of course we came home with ducklings– two black Cayugas, seven Golden 300’s, settled into two little cartons reminiscent of Happy Meal containers.  Nine ducklings, because (I reasoned) we wanted at least four hens for egg laying, and as there’s really no way to determine the gender of a duckling, nine insured the odds that at least four would be hens.  (Odds that could be challenged: we talked to a woman at one feed store who’d taken home seven chocolate runner ducklings, all of which ultimately turned out to be drakes).  Black Cayugas because supposedly these ducks lay charcoal to black colored eggs, a mystical and wonderful possibility (130-180 eggs a year).  Golden 300’s because Goldens are excellent layers (200-to just shy of 300 eggs a year), and their sign said they make good pets (I’d like to see actual data on that now).  

Ok, nine ducklings because, really… as each was caught, and plopped into the Happy Meal box, their cuteness exerted such an irresistible gravitational pull on me that I could only respond with “yes, just one more”, until Frank’s uneasiness became an opposing force that I could no longer ignore.  

That is how we got ducks (or how ducks got us).  Like expansions of plagues and wildfires and even the universe, ducklings too can grow and spread and take over existence as one knows it.  First they sweetly took up insignificant space in a crate, a week or so later, the crate outgrown, they barely occupied a big horse trough.  Within weeks the trough was stuffed and cluttered with adolescent ducks and I was cleaning soggy, poo-slimed wood chips out of the trough at least twice a day– this lasted until Frank (with some small help from me) built their house and fenced in a roomy yard and small pond (new use for the horse trough) out back.  The pond had a very clever but short-lived filtration system (you’d need something on the scale of a municipal sewage treatment facility to keep up with 9 ducks). 

Also in the wake of pond filtration failure, we gave five ducks away to innocent bystanders: the two Cayugas… one of them our only drake (a real Beau Brummel– in spirit, and purple-green iridescent attire, with an Elvis curl on his tail); the other a shy black hen who laid barely-gray-not-even-slightly-charcoal eggs; the last three were Golden ducks that we couldn’t tell apart.  Four ducks remain, and, because I let them roam outside their yard and into ours, we also have a perpetually poopy back porch.  Why they love the back porch, I cannot say– sometimes they line up in front of the sliding glass door and gaze in at us through it– but in the summertime, I can hose it off every day, and it will be splotched again within hours.  

Hosing the porch off in winter isn’t an option, but the ducks don’t acknowledge this fact.  

As the pond project was ultimately given up, I now scatter large shallow water basins around their yard and ours; I empty and refill these with fresh water daily, because it gets clouded and sludgy with mud and poo so fast, and they use it not only to bathe but also to drink and clean out their sinuses and clear their throats. 

The ducks dibble relentlessly.  They especially love dibbling under fresh mulch that I’ve scattered in the flower beds.  They rake it out over stone edges into gravel paths, popping newly planted flower babies out of their soft borders.  Our gravel paths are now permanently covered in displaced mulch.  I can rake it all back into the borders one day, and find it covering the gravel the next.  To keep the ducks from dibbling under new plant starts, I’ve plunged fences of small, sharp sticks around them, so many soldiers standing at attention.  An almost but not quite effective strategy (and to be honest, one that sort of defeats the purpose of planting flowers to look pretty in a border).  

Also the ducks love tender shoots of new perennials, baby peas, squash and bean seedlings.  They appreciate the ripest, prettiest strawberries, they play croquet with red tomatoes. Their favorite catch is earthworms; I wish they favored squash bugs.

All this last February, our four ducks molted.  Feathers are still everywhere– floating in their water, littering our yard and theirs.  Feathers have piled up in their house until it is a dung splotched feather bed.  And the eggs stopped coming.  Not a single egg all month.  This of course must be expected when molting happens.

A nation of mice and all the starlings in North America have moved in, attracted by and feeling entitled to our duck’s feed.  The ducks welcome their company, eager for outside news.

Three of the giveaway ducks perished at our friend’s home one dark night, at the hands of a raccoon (he came back for their chickens; by then our friend had installed a trail cam to identify the culprit).  I confess when I consider the possibility of a raccoon showing up here in pursuit of our four remaining ducks, my knees don’t tremble as much as I would have thought, five years ago.  My heart barely skips a beat.

Life with ducks is nothing like the fantasies I indulged in when we were in the midst of house building, or even when we were plopping cute ducklings into Happy Meal boxes.  Despite the fact that while they were ducklings, I sat in their trough with them every day and hand fed them; despite the fact that now they recognize me as their source of fresh food, water, and variety shows, and I spoil them with cucumber peels and shredded butternut, my ducks have never, ever twined their necks even remotely near mine.  They do not approach me to sit in my lap.  They will not even tolerate my petting them.  I cannot get near them without their flapping and quacking and running away.   Too late I discovered a blogger who commented, “Ducks are scared of anything that isn’t a duck”.  

Which turns out to not be entirely true; they welcome mice, starlings, cats, cars– even an ibis that settled into their little flock and shared her adventures in romance and travel with them.  (I’m afraid she may have engendered a little worldliness and discontent before she left…

Several times now, one or another has gotten bumblefoot.  We capture her (whoever she is– I’ve tried naming them but they look so alike I forget who is who) and I hold her on a towel on my lap (ducks poop once every fifteen minutes, at least), soaking her foot in an epsom salt solution (this works, amazingly enough– afterwards we bind her foot in a poultice of bentonite clay, and keep her quarantined in the old wooden crate with shredded paper until her foot looks better and she can walk on it again).  Wrapped tightly on my lap in a towel, hugged against her will to my chest, watching dumb TV with me, she holds statue still, shivering in terror.  Occasionally her long elegant neck swivels, so she meets my eyes, and she shivers even more.

I could laugh… or cry.  This is as close to a sweet moment as I have gotten with any of my ducks.

Unless… unless I consider the countless times I notice them waddling from the orchard to the gardens, all in a row, or from the border to their house, or from the side to the back yard; here a row of little brown quacks (my mother in law calls them her grandquackers), there a row of sleek wagging boat butts… and I have the sense that they are autonomous, curious, enterprising ladies on tour, dressed up for the occasion; that this is an excursion, an outing, a shopping trip.  They stop for hor d’oevres, dibbling, still more or less in a line, clucking and squeak-chirping with delight at their discoveries.  Or they line up in the back yard, all in a row, grooming plump breasts with their bills, coyly stretching out a leg, extending a wing like a ballerina.  

One disappeared for a week.  After she reappeared, disheveled and gaunt, I followed her wanderings that day at a distance and discovered that she’d built (and furnished) a gorgeous, full moon-sized nest, cleverly hidden in almost plain sight in the midst of a huge, shrubby perennial– the nest a perfectly round, tight woven wonder of sticks, leaves, feathers, eggs.

Last fall, I looked out the kitchen window to see them all lined up in their row by a rosebush, frantically quacking, looking towards the slough.  Over by the slough, I saw a wild drake and a wild duck lifting in flight towards the mountain.  My ducks all in chorus tilted their heads, so one eye each followed the drake and his date, and cried after them.  Their anguished quacking almost broke my heart– their only Beau Brummel long ago taken; no real chances of courtship (such as it is for ducks) and motherhood left to them, these flightless brown wallflowers, unable to catch a wild drake’s eye despite their passionate pleading and lovely plumpness. 

They seem to always be on my periphery though, from the kitchen window, about the gardens as I work in them, in my comings and goings to and from the house.  And they respond always to my proximity, sometimes following me at a distance, scattering when I get too near.  They get especially fluttery and frantic if I approach with some unfamiliar object: a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a box, heavy boots, a big hat.  They also will appear almost underfoot when I plunge a spade into rich earth, revealing worms.  This is as close to me as they ever get. 

Their sound and movement when they explore and forage contentedly is of a sort that I cannot take for granted…there’s this curvy, luxurious, clumsy grace about them, this appearance of everything being settled and nearly balanced and in good humor.  

And here I must catch my breath…They do that all on their own.  I didn’t get my ducks in a row; they lined up all by themselves.  Apparently even despite me.

And their eggs.  Not ideal; definitely extra.  But still, their eggs remain a treasure to me.  I’m always delighted to find them.  To me, duck eggs are like the acquaintance who talks way too much, but you love them and at least one or two of their stories, so it’s better than ok.  We have had, over the last three years up until this month, more eggs than we could use; we have given away dozens of extra eggs (Frank and I are the only household consumers– at four a day, we get a dozen extra quickly).  Out of our hearing, one beloved aunt expressed a private dread to one of my cousins, apprehension at the possibility of our giving her any more duck eggs (I know this because families are never great at keeping dark secrets). 

Yes, duck eggs are slightly gamier than chicken eggs.  Yes, the egg’s texture is stiffer, boingy-er.  Whites are almost blindingly white, shells are as tough (I expect) as a dinosaur’s.  Scrambled eggs are stiffer, German pancakes made with duck eggs don’t puff up at all… but oh, my!  The cakes and crepes, brownies and muffins and pancakes we make with duck eggs–pure magic.  Silky, buttery, tender, decadent.  

And my gardens.  Here is at least one infomercial promise kept:  duck poo is indeed an elixir for the garden.  Like Windex in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”… so many garden health problems seem to solve themselves with a splash of sludge from a duck bath.  Our orchard, which should have drowned in clay already, thrives, reaching to the heavens.  The rose bushes are rambunctious; there’s more than enough strawberries and butternut for both the ducks and us for the next two years.  Also, while there was high grasshopper pressure the last few summers all around us– one neighbor’s raspberries turned to lace, another had no perennials or roses left at all in her front yard; a local farmer had fruit-laden pepper plants mowed down to stems overnight– the grasshoppers in our yard never reached plague and lace proportions.  I would see just a couple here, and another there, leaping out of the strawberries, lunging for a ditch— just enough for brunch and afternoon tea for the ducks.
I cannot say for absolute sure that I owe all the little miracles I’ve mentioned to the ducks, and if it’s not already clear, I must also reiterate that the ducks check off almost none of the cute cuddly pet boxes I thought they would as I indulged in Googly duck fantasies five years ago— but I can also say, despite the poo-flocked back porch, the every-blasted-day chore of refreshing murky duck baths, the endless crises of duck-water ice rinks, mulch-covered gravel paths, displaced petunias, and diminished pea crops, my knees do tremble at least a little, and my heart does skip just a beat, when I consider the possibility of raccoons.  Or when, instead of ducks, a muskrat peers in at us from the dark night through our sliding glass door.

Frank would say getting ducks is that kind of idea.  Messy, life-threatening (I mean… carrying a water-splashing five gallon bucket out to the coop through the snow every winter morning–  in near-zero temps?  Feels a little Captain Scottish, even to me).

And as my past apron-extolling chapters and upcoming contemplations on ducks unfold, I know I’m not alone in these adventures.  We are all called to some kind of creative exploration (creating is one of the hallmarks of being human); figuring out what that is and how to travel in it is a universal expedition.  We travel our creative roads best in the company of others (connecting is also what it means to be human); we thrive creatively when we know it’s ok to create (experiment, really) imperfectly, when we don’t feel isolated in our imperfection.  As demonstrated by the miracles of seven minute free writes with my sisters: It’s all much better together.  

Also, we three (three so far) are creating another website, where we will post some of the results (and outgrowths) of our seven minute free writes, and other literary endeavors.  Mara Lee is working on a podcast; Leah, a published author, is muscling through a poetry class and past writer’s block; I too am paddling against the strong currents of an inner critic, in search of beauty.  Poetry, essays, short stories, art.  Our website will document a literary, artistic evolution– another travel log.  Hopefully there will be nothing but survivors– no irretrievable shipwrecks, no permanent frostbite.  Our website has a name: “Feathers In My Pocket”, but the design isn’t complete yet.  When it is up and ready to behold, I will post a link to it here.  I hope you all– any who are still here– will travel with us!  Meanwhile, come along with me here at Every Day Bloom.

Bon Voyage, Beloveds! 

Winter, Out of Order

The kitchen sink is out of order again, drain water oozing, drop by drop, to the depths of the sink cabinet, and from thence into a widening lake on the floor. At some risk to himself, Frank battles the leak (the result of insufficient coupling).  There is a natural enmity between Frank and plumbing; while he usually (eventually) wins, victory always comes at some personal cost– limbs, digits, psyche.

After this battle, he wears a bandaid.

I make Nora’s lunch in an early morning kitchen.  Here, pre-dawn’s native dark is diffused by lamplight; the lamps serve this purpose exactly: to cut the new day’s electric intensity– its glare, as well as the effect of its rapid-fire hours– by half.  In the slow-mo half light, I also try to at least half believe in the efficacy of my task, for Nora is difficult to please.  Spoonfuls of unset jelly take its cues from the kitchen sink; it spreads in a flood across a width of peanut buttered bread.  I try to dam the jelly’s progress by sandwiching another slice of bread on top of it.  My effort is futile.  Recognizing no boundaries, the jelly continues; it slides between the crusts, then onto and over the cutting board, and across the countertop. Go ahead, I tell it, noting its progress as I slice an apple. You, too, can try for the floor.

For As Long as We Can Remember

Nora wants a ball python.  It seems she always has.  At first, it is understood that I object, that asking for my permission is futile, and so the question lies mostly dormant, a thing Nora brings up only in her angstiest moments.  Which moments increase rather than decrease over time because, since our recent move, Nora is a stranger sojourning in a strange land, without friends to comfort her, and only the occasional rock for a pillow in the dark mountainous night. 

The ubiquitous tyranny of high school is amplified for Nora by hers being an unfamiliar one– thus her want of python pet grows even more.  She is our last, and furtively measures the special powers of a youngest child against my objections to the snake (which objections are, in order of importance: Odor, Lack of Space, and Possible Death of Persons by Snake Constriction).  

My finest objection– The Immorality of Buying Into a Culture That Breeds Wild Creatures for Life In a Cage– does not occur to me until it suddenly becomes irrelevant.  

September 22, Exactly

Because at almost the very moment that my righteous indignation against animal caging is stirred to a final “no”, Nora gets a chance to rescue rather than purchase a ball python.  Meisha, our second youngest, works at an animal shelter where the forsaken snake lands.  Meisha breathlessly breaks the snake’s story to us in all its tragic detail: Faustus (this is the name Nora ultimately gives the snake) had been abandoned, along with several caged ferrets, in a vacated apartment.  The ferrets perished, unable to survive those long, silent, empty weeks without food and water before they were too-late discovered.

But snakes are thriftier, and while Faustus is terribly emaciated and half-stuck in a thwarted skin shed, he is still alive.  

His tragedy is irresistible to all of us.  And so he comes to Nora’s room in a donated flannel pillowslip.  We give him a glass castle, a heat pad, a hidey hole, very specific wood chips, and clean water.

Also, we buy tiny, frozen, dead mice. So that he will no longer starve.

Winter Blurred: January– Erstwhile February, March, Even April

Early mornings slip into a blur of days.  Frank fixes the sink; I wrestle Nora’s lunches and my house chores into scant minutes, hasten my quota of steps in the park before the early sun crests the mountain.  Knowing the time I’m winning for afternoon painting will still be jagged with unmet expectations and fear of failure, I tuck small sweet things– dark chocolates wrapped with purple foil– into sparkly blue glass jars, to discover later.

I suspect that it is somewhere in this winter blur that certain favorite citizens in my gardens catch cold and die.  My Zephirine Drouhin rose (a Bourbon, bred to intoxicate with her raspberry fragrance in early summer) capitulates to winter’s inexorable advances.  In April, a wrinkled rose cane the color of burnt sienna will break in my hand, brittle, from Zephirine’s ground level heart.  In April I will run my fingers through a yellow crumble of young arborvitae needles, and they will shower, dry and lifeless, to the ground.  

So there is no chance I could, in good conscience, set a ball python (native to SouthEast Asia and parts of Africa) free in such an intemperate environment, even in summer.  Not that it doesn’t cross my mind; my sister’s summer garden in Central Oregon is bedazzled with reptiles, tiny lizards that flicker in and out of light and shadow, amiably munching on bugs.

A Few Fine Winter Days

While February alone plays hostess to Valentine’s sweet expectations, for me there must always be dark chocolate. Here and there, scattered amongst winter’s blurred days, is the glitter of purple foil wrappers.

A friend catches a glimpse of Nora in her car at an intersection, singing.  Nora’s windows are down; she is alight in afternoon sun, swaying in the happy lilt of her own music.  The friend tells me about this weeks later; her report of Nora’s joyousness invites a hopeful glow into the dim chapel where we stand talking amongst empty, shadowed pews.  

Valentine’s Day

On Valentine’s Day, another friend wakes up and finds his wife cold. She is gone, his new old love, the girl that got away in high school and was found again in their middle age, his fresh hope against past heartbreak. I remember the day they married last November, how the chill wind in the parking lot lifted the hem of my skirt and nipped at my legs, how the groom was almost tearful in his joy when he greeted us.  Bride and groom served cookies and a baked potato bar at the reception, displayed childhood pictures of each of them. 

His daughter calls Meisha, for in times of crisis they are as close as sisters. “You must come and be with me,”  she says. “My dad’s wife just died.”  She is setting out for her father’s home when she calls. After she reaches him, she calls again. She has decided, in the depth and warmth of her father’s grief, that she needs to be with just him; Meisha’s company at this point would be superfluous. “But thank you Meisha,” she says, “for always being there for me.”

Before Valentine’s Day, a couple we know heads to the hospital on the other side of the mountain. I imagine it is early morning; she is in hard labor. It is snowing and traffic comes to a standstill in the mountain pass, perhaps because there’s a white-out— almost certainly because the roads are too slippery to continue on.  The couple is marooned in their car on the edge of a dam in the storm; in the white flurry, the husband safely delivers the baby in the car (he happens to be a medical intern).  

They post a video of the birth (and their gratitude) on Facebook. 

Our bereaved friend also posts his gratitude on Facebook, for all the support and condolences he’s received.  His daughter posts a new family mantra, something about getting through hard things together.  In March there’s a picture of father and daughter, smiling at the camera.  He looks thinner than I remember him.

Frank Does February

Every morning Frank wakes earlier than either Nora or I.  He heads to the gym in his super cool Tesla (Frank finds an electric, moment-by-moment contentment, driving his Tesla).  He listens to podcasts, tries the heft and resistance of weights, treads elliptically through space.  His drive to and fro isn’t short; it includes climbing onto the shoulders of the mountain pass as well as descending into the fissures at its knees, but this is ok with him… more time for driving, listening, thinking; more opportunities to rescue random citizens. 

Because occasionally people on the road break down, or slide off, or have babies. A middle aged woman swerves wildly and lands her car beyond the ditch in a snowy field; a young man (a boy, really) gets a flat and needs a ride.

The boy is trying to inflate his tire with a bicycle pump when Frank stops to help; the boy has been at it for a while by then, even though he knows his tactic isn’t working, that it never will. The tire’s puncture is discernible; he has seen it, as Frank sees it. 

It is natural that one would feel desperate when one is stranded.

January is the Loneliest Number, and it is Cold

Scraps meant for compost fill a bucket outside the kitchen door: orange peels, apple cores, used tea bags, bits of darkened lettuce and celery– all stand stiff and at attention, all are laced with frost as if by a spreading crystalline mold. The trees at the park, usually beautiful in metaphor and grace, today are merely dead sticks reaching for each other and the sky, cold-blasted. Some twigs litter the path where I come to walk, their broken and crumbled widths like so many compound fractures, punctuated here and there with a scattering of bituminous deer droppings and the dessicated vomit of an over-eager, leash-resistant beagle (I have seen him at it, the vomiting, straining against his leash, his owner bemused, stumbling to keep up). The ground is bare, grey and brown, a crevassed rumple of iced mud, dead grass, and weeds the color of overused straw.

Large, sharp-edged snowflakes materialize in the dry cold air from nowhere; they drift from the vicinity of the mountain’s shoulder, over the stark reaching trees and into my anxious path, where they prick my cheeks and my eyes and disappear without a trace, not even a tiny wet mark.

I shift from peanut butter sandwiches to saltine crackers with ham and cheese,  then beans and cheese and tortillas, then pita and hummus for Nora’s lunches.  I beg her to take vitamins, sneak collagen and chia seeds into peanut butter.  I am desperate to find something that will entice and then nourish her; her attitude towards lunch has devolved from apathetic to dismissive. 

In my kitchen’s morning lamplight, I cannot blame her.  I wouldn’t want to eat alone in a high school wilderness either.  

And I don’t much like collagen and chia buried in peanut butter, it turns out.

Perhaps A Monday, Back in November

A girl in one of her classes at school learns that Nora has a ball python, and is immediately entranced.  “Let’s be friends!” she exclaims. “I wish I had a ball python.”  Though Nora feels a bit cynical and embarrassed about her new acquaintance’s reasoning and motives, she does exchange texts with her, chats with her in class.  The girl brings a crocheted pouch to school and gives it to Nora.  “For your snake,” she says. She hugs her. 

Nora leaves the pouch next to Faustus’s glass castle on her bedroom floor; it lies there for weeks.  Eventually I put it in the coat closet for safekeeping.  I don’t know if Faustus has ever been in it.

Late February, Early March (Most Likely)

Nora says that she is anxious and depressed.  I schedule appointments: first, with a neuropsychologist, and later, after the diagnosis (Nora is beautiful, intelligent, and generally anxious), with a counselor.  The counselor invites Nora to draw her anxiety and depression, to personify and imbue them with shape and color.  My daughter Maurya thinks this is a good idea; I think of Wendy from Peter Pan: “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do.”  Or Oz’s Dorothy, in a sparkle of ruby heels: “There’s no place like home, no place like home.”  

The little gray frame house, airborne from Kansas, that lights square upon a stripey-legged witch.

I keep trying to paint, of course not plein air, but from my own photos of the winter park and other nonsense I find on Pinterest (I have never painted outside, and February in Utah is hardly the time to begin). It is not going well; I am mostly just pretending to paint, swirling my brush in oil that’s gone sticky.  Sticky paint is a particular indictment; good artists do not paint sticky.  Still, I discover, entirely by accident, a lovely effect in an abstracted landscape… pink and gold light glowing out from behind muddy grey-blues… but then it is gone. I try to replicate it, chasing sequence, color, a turn of the wrist, a renewal of fresher paint… but really, it is gone. I cannot make it happen twice.

Wednesday, Late February

So preoccupied in paint am I that I miss the moment Nora drives away in the frosty afternoon, on an errand for mice for her snake. Euthanized mice, for she believes a live mouse defending its rodent existence could prove injurious to her pet. We have discussed this much, from a time of innocence, before the snake came to Nora, to the time when the snake was real and needing sustenance and there were tears because the mice Frank and I bought at Petco were insufficient.  Nora, like exiled Hagar grieving for her thirsting son Ishmael, has become desperate about the feeding of her snake.

Meanwhile, I transform a painting mistake into something else, a possibility.  Mop-headed trees, benign and wispy little monstrosities, straggle in a huddle up a sun-washed hill in a fierce burst of morning light.  Impossible to tell the season… the colors are evocative of an exceptionally bright winter moment, but there is, after all, foliage.

Late December

The python coveting friend stops coming to school.  She texts Nora that she and her family all have Covid; they are quarantined and of course it sucks.  She worries about her dad, who seems particularly ill and doesn’t want to see a doctor.

Earlier in February, Perhaps Tuesday, Thursday

Being seventeen with an untried brilliance, Nora reaches for diplomacy about the insufficient Petco mice we’ve provided, but lands instead in a blizzard of breathtaking vexation… bitterness appearing suddenly out of nowhere– overblown, sharp-edged snowflakes materializing in thin air.  Again and again, we three grapple to understand, persuade, find solutions, keep the peace and love.  Frank calls these episodes Armageddon.  

True, Petco mice are just pale cadaver blinks frozen in shrink wrap… but we assumed Petco knows what they are about.  Don’t the masses feed their snakes this way? we ask each other.  Foolishly forgetting that Nora will never identify or even politely agree with the masses. To her the Petco mice, like so many expired Twinkies, can only lead to a damaged or dead Faustus.  

I think of the saltines I pack in Nora’s lunches, the ham and cheese and peanut butter and drippy jelly.  Knowing  that I haven’t resorted to Twinkies is small comfort.

I fantasize again about  letting Faustus loose in the garden, to forage naturally for himself. But it’s just one more nonsensical thought; even if he could survive our extreme droughts and winter freezes, as a free garden citizen he would be incapable of honoring Nora’s notions of his role as her pet.  She would likely never see him again… He might even grow large enough, in his secret garden hiding spots, to eat our cat.

Then there is the moment a mouse is in my hand without my knowing it, one Nora has left on the countertop for just a moment while she boils water to thaw it in, one I have picked up blindly, unwittingly, during after-dinner clean-up– like a chocolate wrapper, orange peel, bread crust. I don’t know to scream until a stiff coldness penetrates my fingers and I look into my hand mid-stride and see that I am holding a small nightmare, a tiny frigid white corpse.

Early January

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” texts Nora’s python-loving friend, “But my dad died yesterday.  He got too sick; he kept refusing to see a doctor.”  Nora reaches for the right words, but there are none.  She’s left with Petco/Twinkie quality options: I’m so, so sorry, that is so hard, what can I do, I’m here for you.  “Thank you,” her friend texts back.  Nora learns her address; we make chocolate chip cookies and drive with Nora to the house where the girl is staying.  She and her mother and sister come out on the porch to receive the cookies and thank Nora.  I am astounded at how people can walk and nod and wave and accept the insufficiency of mere cookies when they have just lost everything.

Back To The Wednesday in Late February That Nora Drove Away For Dead Mice

So Nora drives alone to a distant town to pick up the new, superior, executed mice, while I paint alone at home in disquietude. She returns with her necessary burden and a chilling tale; for in fact, to my ears, the exchange of money and goods through her car window at the curb of the anonymous mouse-breeder’s residence has gone down like a scene from a crime drama. I tell her next time we should go together to buy the snake snacks, and she shows me the spoils of her venture: eight dead mice in a large ziploc bag. My throat tightens in startled grief; Nora agrees that the mice are tragically pretty. They look so real. Aside from their uncanny stillness, they seem almost alive– a clannish gathering of smooth-furred brown and white cuties edged in pink, each curled affectionately around another, front paws held aloft like unfurled jazz hands. Their glossy black pin-button eyes are wide open, unblinking, staring out of the bag at nothing.

I paint more trees in a broken line against a pink sky.  They are still in leaf, their foliage brown and grey.  Pink light tumbles from behind into a greyish foreground.  My imaginary critics tell me the trees aren’t recognizable as trees, necessarily, but maybe one day I will pull off a good abstract painting.

Northwest Passage Beginning, End of February

We leave home in a blanket of grey skies, to visit our parents in the Northwest. It is a long trip; we notice, crossing Idaho, that sometimes the earth is blanketed with snow, and sometimes it is not.  Wondering about the disparities of Western precipitation, we listen to a podcast.  And then a book.  

The podcast muses about Abraham and Sarah, their wanderings and patience-won solace.   I admire these ancient Hebrew protagonists– He is a centenarian and she is old enough that she cannot help but laugh when she learns she will at last be a mother.

The Hagar parts are sad to us, and complex; we cannot help but love her. We conclude for now (leaving doors open for other possibilities) that life is messy, conflict inherent, redemption’s alchemy crucial.

The book we listen to is The Book Thief. I adore the foster father, Hans Hubermann, his eyes that melt, in kind moments, to liquid silver, how he rescues traumatized Liesl from her nightmares by painting words she learns to read on the basement wall.  

When we arrive at my parents, they feed us shrimp and salad, steak and tart berries; they’re gentle missionaries, proselyting a Keto lifestyle, and we luxuriate in their evangelism. 

When we arrive at Frank’s parents, his father serves us carbohydrate-rich cheddar potato soup.  He shows us the soup mix he used, to assure us of the ease with which he manages his  cuisine. But he also has added his own touch, as he always does.  This time, rather than a dash of Chalula or pepperoncini or flotillas of melting cheese, Chinese potstickers (from Costco, not China) sink deep into the potatoey cheddar gravy. Once again, I am surprised that his culinary exuberance manages, after all, the impossible.  The soup and potstickers are actually edible… palatable, even. Perhaps because they are warm, and starchily bonded. 

Back in January

The school friend invites Nora to her father’s funeral.  Nora can drive herself, but she asks me to go with her.  It’s the afternoon of a beautiful day; trees shrouded with snow capture the setting sun in glowing golds, oranges, pinks.  The light streams through our car windows and caresses us as we drive.  Nora is telling me things– her dreams and grievances, Biblical in proportion and feather-light in weight– when I realize I’m on a collision course with a bicyclist who is crossing the road ahead of me.  I’m driving Frank’s Tesla; even so, the brakes lock up and the tires slide  to within inches of the biker.  He stops at our fender, waves at us, continues on.

We find seats in the mortuary chapel.  During the funeral, there are stories about the deceased father, the chickens he launched, as a boy, from a garage roof (with parachutes, because he’d discovered in earlier launchings that chickens cannot really fly), the clunker car he outfitted with booming speakers, how he met his second wife at Big O Tire and treasured her to the end.  I catch echoes of abiding love; it wrenches at me in ways similar to the transience of sunlight captured in snow, Hagar’s flights.  

Someone begins to play a piece on the chapel’s piano.  Just a few chords in, I know it; it is ours, my children and Frank and mine.  Nuvole Bianche by Ludovico Einaldi, which sounds fancy but is intimate and sweetly haunting, a confectionary Will o’ the Wisp, a vanilla phantom.  Meisha used to play it on our Gone With The Wind baby grand (which survived a fire and now belongs to Maurya).  I open Marco Polo on my phone because it’s the only way I can think to capture it.  Catching both Nora and myself in the camera, I whisper to Meisha, to all Frank and my children, through the phone, this is our song!  Remember? 

End of Northwest Passage, March (Armageddon for Reals)

We head south for home again Monday morning, slightly mournful. The beloveds we leave behind in the Northwest are as Sarah and Abraham to us, Hans and Rosa Hubermann.   Just past my parents’ home on a mountain shoulder, the freeway turns to a flood of ice, and across the median, on the northbound side, we see the worst piled-up wreck we’ve ever encountered. The jagged mess is strewn pell-mell for miles: semis jack-knifed by the dozens on the road’s shoulders; passenger vans, cars, and trucks munched between Goliath freighters like so many crumpled table scraps: crackers, foil wrappers, orange peels… fenders, doors, hoods, carriages… the wreckage touches everything. We imagine the people we cannot see, their moments of collision, the stark aftermath, the altered realities. Emergency personnel have yet to arrive in critical numbers; the first walks slowly through the scattered tail of the metallic leviathan; a second stands in the middle of the freeze-frame interstate, taking pictures with his phone. 

We see the first flashing lights a few miles beyond.

We look at the news, later, and learn that over 90 vehicles have been impacted.  Two fatalities, many hospitalizations. A strange guilt haunts us, that we passed Armageddon so freakishly untouched, while innocent others did not.

Wednesday, Home in Mid-March: It Snows.

Grateful to be unscathed by winter travel, I walk with a friend at the park. Our steps together are lighter than mine are when I walk alone; we talk and laugh as stray snowflakes gather, combine, expand, multiply. These are gentle flakes, generous and without edges; they carry the calm hope of feathers and guardian angels, and quickly become a comforter that covers broken twigs, the rumpled grey-brown earth.

After school, Nora selects a new cute dead mouse to feed to Faustus, who finished molting the day before, and has been refusing to eat since well before the molt began.  She is conscientious and tactful in this ritual; everything about the selecting, carrying, and thawing she does strictly behind the scenes. When she lowers the thawed mouse into the glass castle, she is careful not to startle the python.  She holds still in time, dangling, dangling the mouse by its inert tail.

Unable to paint for days now, I watch television (a crime drama) with Frank after dark and draw faces and figures in my sketch pad with a ballpoint pen. The pen, for me, is an attempt at forging ahead with confidence, staying committed, not turning back. Nevertheless, it treads elliptically in fixed space; its lines circumvent, circumscribe, gradually discover, pull quickly away.

Thursday Mid-March: We Bury a Mouse

I wake in the morning with a familiar dread in my chest. I cannot remember dreams, but I do remember a startling, a shifting, a certain restlessness.  Frank is already on the road, or at the gym. Somewhere in the days and miles past, Russia invades Ukraine; boy soldiers anticipating a camping trip in the snow find themselves instead prisoners of war. Buildings explode into rubble, antagonist and defendant argue over students. A Ukrainian farmer heists an abandoned Russian tank. 

My paint palette is buried, color by color, in the spherical wells of two small plastic containers rubber banded together in the freezer. I get dressed in my warmest leggings, pin up my bedhead, find a stiff, non-drippy jam for Nora’s sandwich. Cut celery sticks, pear slices. Set a jar of ice water on the counter— no breakfast, just a good lunch and a cold drink. Nora doesn’t do breakfast.

I know the thing to do once Nora is gone is to walk fast, to find loveliness in the mountain’s shoulder, in the bare trees that reach for the sky. I do walk fast; at times I even run; and like Frank in his Tesla, I watch and listen. I see light filter, circumspect, around the ridged bark of trunks and branches, spread coverlet-like over the mountain’s shoulder. I listen to a podcast, to an apostle, hear calm, warm voices, catch and hold bright things I’d let slip. 

The snake refuses to eat the mouse. They sleep together in his glass castle, a day and a night, the rumpled, thawed mouse– gray now, no longer cute– and the moveless, frightened snake, coiled up in his fake mountain rock.  Nora calls it and asks me if she can bury the mouse in the garden.

We walk outside into the garden together; it is a graveyard of dormant promises.  All the little babies I planted last year… I cannot tell how many have survived the winter.  The sun today has warmed everything; the thawed dirt heaves up in pre-spring freedom. Our shoes sink gently down into the ground’s dry softness; it is wind-tousled feathers, the hem of a lifted skirt, a downy pillow, a thick comforter.

We pick a spot together at the base of a young rose bush: Madame Ernest Calvat, a Bourbon survivor.   Her naked arms, unwrinkled, sprawl over and touch the ground.  You can always bury any cast-off mice around my rose bushes, I tell Nora.   I am trying to think in terms of compost and other gifts.  I dig with my hands, deep into the warming soil at the feet of Madame Calvat, and Nora lays the rumpled, grey-brown mouse in its grave, and we cover it with dirt.

Meditations in January: Exit Summer

One of the most intense summers of my life– the summer of great expectations, sweat, tears, dehydration, many blisters and even more metaphors– ended months ago with our first real freeze, and has erstwhile been buried (off and on) by subsequent snow. We are halfway through January; last summer’s toil, heartbreak, and gifts have long since dwindled and dissolved to shadow– phantom omens (and promises) of what’s coming next summer. It’s been months since I’ve accepted that I can’t drive the truck full of compost over even the shortest muddy expanse of our little acre. Only the volunteer arugula in my graveyard garden persists, haggard but stubbornly green.

In this stark netherland of winter, my hibernating gardener’s heart might feel a bit chilled, a bit bleary, like a reluctantly falling last leaf: weightless, aflutter, completely blind in a frosty night breeze. 

Might, but doesn’t. Momentarily adrift, I am yet carried safely along. Glad spirits– Pollyanna and “The Sound of Music”– accompany me.

Who Goes There?

Glad spirits? This is an outrageous claim. And it won’t be the last. As my daughter Maurya points out, I make all the claims here with way too many metaphors. But last summer I lived so big! Worked so hard! Thirsted and hacked and dreamed and grieved, and now it’s winter, and the only proof that remains of all the former bigness are these ghosts, these whims, this assortment of jumbled metaphors.

So yes, Pollyanna.  Mary Pickford, one of America’s first silver screen sweethearts, played a cute, slapstick Pollyanna in 1920, blithely catching her auntie’s crocheting on her shoe and unraveling it all over the house, but it was the 1960 Disney/Hayley Mills confection — the wide-eyed, innocent, super glad, bow-bedecked, blond Pollyanna– that fused meaning to the name for the ages.

A Home For Pollyanna (At Seventeen)

Pollyanna was also once an ill-conceived nickname of my own– a moniker bestowed in the yeasty give-and-take of a tightly cloistered high school annual staff (I miss them now, wherever they are– those smart, derisive, light-hearted children). 

At the time, I resented the nickname. I couldn’t make sense of it, other than as an embarrassing exaggeration of my naivete and (relatively) good manners.   What did I have in common with the “all-in” Disney character– optimistic, kind, talkative,  “glad”?  While my seventeen-year-old self believed wistfully in optimism, it evaded her, paralyzed as she was by the sound and fury of her adolescent world (not yet aware that clamor usually signifies nothing– it’s the quiet things that matter most).  Literally and metaphorically near-sighted (I mean, seventeen! Who sees well at seventeen?), she was largely blind to the beauty and worth of the souls and experiences she lived amongst.  She wasn’t kind so often as she was nice (not yet knowing the difference)- she certainly wasn’t talkative, except sometimes at home with her sisters.  Rarely was she truly glad.

Let Sleeping Dragons Lie

And deep, deep inside that timid seventeen year old slept a secret dragon.  Keeper of all things snarky: rolling eyes, cat spit, tiny doubt pins with which to prick balloons of contentment.  A caustic, impotent cynic.  When the dragon awoke, her fretting and smoldering only alarmed my teenage self, who never let her out in public (because remember, I was at least nice, if not altogether kind). 

Pretty sure Disney’s Pollyanna didn’t harbor an interior dragon.  There were only two similarities between the glad and intrepid Disney Pollyanna and myself then.  Firstly, blondness.   Which blondness is said to lend certain nuances to the personality whose head is halo’d by it…but these are unproven, inflammatory theories, and should be studied further before we make reckless claims. (Said the blond.)

Secondly, I’m convinced any and all Pollyannas would have loved “The Sound of Music”, as I always have, and always will.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Even watching “The Sound of Music” today, I’m still smitten by the gradual love story happening between Captain Von Trapp and ex-nun Maria: eye twinkles and glances askance. Also delightful to me are the costumes (Maria and Scarlett O’Hara could collaborate on the curtains-to-outfits thing), the songs and dances and clever lines and bits of wisdom (how do you solve a problem like Maria? Just…don’t! And how does one find her dreams? Climb Every Mountain, y’all!). All set against a backdrop of haunting realities:  Nazi suppression– a sentient cancer, morphing into blatant aggression; sixteen-year-old Liesl’s blithe acceptance of seventeen-year-old Rolph’s proclaimed authority.  (Notice that he proclaims his authority rather than actual love before he kisses her… perhaps a subtle comment on Nazi immorality, or at any rate on Idealized Romance: a kiss is never really enough).  

The movie now is as germane, wise, and lovely as ever, with its shadows and burrs lending depth and perspective.  Painful things do this for us, I think.  They provide breathtaking context and contrast to what we might otherwise not notice as beautiful and sweet.

“My Favorite Things”, one of the songs from the musical, is particularly iconic. Nun-turned-governess Maria (who gamely endures first-day-on-the-job initiations such as pocket frogs and pine cone seats) sings it in a gutsy attempt to rally the Von Trapp children during a thunderstorm. “When the dog bites! When the bee stings! When I’m feeling sad.”  Instead of considering the bee’s sting or the dog’s teeth, Maria “simply remembers”  her “favorite things”: girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, snowflakes that cling to her nose and eyelashes. 

 “And then I don’t feel so bad!” she belts, her night-gowned arms flung wide.

The Glad Game

Such a simple answer to life’s problems: focus on gifts and goodness  rather than becoming overwhelmed by the adverse.  And plucky, given the skulking enemy presence in the musical’s plot, and what we know now about the outcomes of  the real-life skulker’s  policies and campaigns.  (Not to mention high school, murmurs the interior dragon.)  Some, including my hidden smoky cynic,  might see “My Favorite Things” as an idealist pipe dream, simplistic platitudes running roughshod over complexity, an escapist’s unwillingness to face and address life’s harsh realities (could be, we’ll see… might be fun, though).  

One way or another, “My Favorite Things”  is essentially a super-glad Pollyanna anthem.  Who (according to her original 1913 author, Eleanor Porter) was born 40 years too early to be a member of  the Von Trapp Pillow-Fight Club, and therefore is really the only missing child in the whole thunderstorm-favorite-things bed-bouncing scene (Liesl can just stay out in the rain, for all I care… consorting with that perfidious masochist Rolph).

Aside: Since after all these decades my inner cynic-dragon seems to be with me to stay, I’m assisting in her rehabilitation– hoping a day job will tame her.  She’s finessing her baking skills, anticipating that one day she will make it onto the Great British Baking Show, where she will… no, no, not tell off Paul Hollywood. No telling off, little dragon. Rather she will attempt to persuade Paul that after a certain point, interpreting the doneness of a bake becomes a dogmatic pursuit, and that he would do well to lighten up a bit, as it were.

So… does that work?  Could Pollyanna and Maria have reckoned well with The Really Tough Things, like plagues and genocide, depression and D-Day?  

And how would my interior dragon fare?  

Reality Has Teeth Too

This summer, my hills were not alive with the sound of music.  My heart was too heavy to sing like a lark that is learning to pray; it had dropped instead like a lead zeppelin at my first real horticultural encounter with our newly claimed dirt.  

In a world beset by incomprehensible tragedy, this comparably minor sort of heart wreck is impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t been dazzled by the potentiality of paradise, who isn’t called by the Good Earth to Till and Sow and Reap in it.  It would be, perhaps, akin to George Ezra actually having to give up his golden grand piano for one made of papier mache, or Mary Cassatt trading precise brush marks in oil for wilder–even frantic– strokes with pastels as she gradually goes blind.  Beethoven with his ear to the floor, his masterpieces thrumming soundlessly against his head.

I imagined myself as Matt Damon in “The Martian”, a marooned astronaut/horticulturist recuperating from interstellar wounds, attempting to grow a crop of potatoes, alone, on Mars.  

Life Is a Chair of Bowlies, Princess

Because: Alkali clay.  This is what I’m dealing with (not to mention an erratic growing season, grasshoppers, and massively entrenched morning glory, which I promise I will mention a million times, for the rest of my life). Our clay is the exact kind one receives– cubed and cool and dense– wrapped in damp canvas in high school art class at the beginning of the sculpture unit.  To be made into bowls and vases and death masks  (our grasshoppers and morning glory would give each sculpture a nice fossil finish).  This may not sound dire to some folk– after all, pottery is nice.  (Mary Engelbreit once said, on a greeting card, that “Life is A Chair of Bowlies”).  Some grasses will grow in clay soil (Matt Damon did coax life from those potatoes on Mars, for awhile anyway). 

But I lack a kiln; besides, I want bowls of cherries, not chairs of bowlies.  And so much more than a mere patch of struggling greensward.  

The Grave Digger

If my last summer were a movie, it would be named, “The Gravedigger”, for all the graves I dug in the clay– so that I could replace it with rich compost that I fetched truckload by truckload from the dump (another Martian strategy: free “compost”).  Large, shallow graves (two feet deep, four feet wide, twelve to fifteen feet long) for my vegetable gardens.  Innumerable deeper pot-graves for shrubs, fruit trees, and perennials.  All the graves filled with compost before I planted them.  

My neighbors thought I was a lunatic, because I was.  One was kind about my lunacy, saying that while he’d never wasted his own time on fruit trees in such clayey alkali soil, he had heard rumors of other’s success (maybe Pollyanna and Matt Damon are growing peach trees down the road). “You’ll just have to baby them, and then replace them every five or ten years”, he said, his eyes sympathetic but not at all encouraging.  

Another neighbor kept telling Frank that she was worried I’d kill myself with all the hard labor.   “Tell her she doesn’t have to get the whole yard in during the first year!” our new friend exclaimed.

And the Rock Picker (Gathers No Moss)

A couple other friends let me pick unwanted rocks out of their fields.  One said, “Yes, please, take as many as you want, but remember– no returns.”  Most everyone around here deeply resents the presence of native rock in their fields, but I– not having much of my own– eagerly collect them.  I use them to edge graveyard gardens, want them to line raised parterres, raised borders.  

Neighbors Clive and Michelle* (*names changed to protect the innocent) even helped me fill my truck with their rocks (they don’t want any back, either).  Clive, a bee-keeper and as manic a DIY-er as myself, deflected potential slings and arrows that yet another alarmed neighbor (we’ll call him Pete) had aimed at my folly. 

 “Who is that woman, picking up rocks at the Smiths?” Pete asked Clive.  

“Does she drive a red Tacoma?” Clive returned Pete’s question with one of his own.  

“Yes, she does!  You know her?  Does she have any idea what she’s doing?  Is she crazy?”  

Here Clive calmly kept the peace.  “It’s ok; she’s all right,” he said.  “Don’t  worry; she’s just using the rock for landscaping.  She’s ok.”  

People do landscape with rocks around here, but everyone favors the really big ones that you pay for a track- or backhoe to put in place.  I’m after the freebies, the ones I can carry by myself.

Mountains To Climb

My best strategy all summer was compost.   I brought home mountains and mountains of compost. But the compost had hot spots in it, I eventually discovered.  Through late spring and early summer, random seedlings and starts in my compost-filled grave-gardens would inexplicably shrivel and die. 

Late frost prevented timely planting; early grasshoppers devoured survivors of the chill and hot spots.  Morning glory erupted everywhere, its network of underground roots unstoppable. I planted many things twice, even thrice and times four.  Out of several packets of nasturtium seed, only one resultant plant was alive and well by the end of summer (nasturtiums are supposed to be so easy to grow).  Any and all darling buds were shaken by the rough winds of May and also June, July, and August.  Which wind twisted and toppled straggling pumpkin and cantaloupe vines upside down, tangling them and tattering their pretty leaves.  It flattened tomato plants and rudely disregarded the deaths of apple and pear and plum trees. My treasured refugee hazelnut bushes gave up the ghost.  Twice. 

Aside: They died.  But then they miraculously lived.  And then they died again.  But still, weeks later, I found them to be not “mostly dead”, but partially–sort of–alive.  Even now, I’m not sure what my moral/ethical response should be, as steward of these fragile, tenuous lives… I read on a Colorado gardening blog that hazels are “never happy” in alkali soil.  Well, neither am I, though  I wholeheartedly yearn for all of us to be happy, wherever we are.  Isn’t it wise, I asked the hazels, to root where we’re planted, to be glad where we stand? This is what Pollyanna did, at least until the moment she fell from her upper story window.

…And Climb…

And so the wind blew, and late frosts pivoted swiftly to searing summer temperatures, but rain it did not, month after month, though we all, suffering from severe drought,  watched and wished and prayed earnestly for rain.  My nephew sent my parents pictures of a nearby wheat field crawling with grasshoppers (my mother was sure they’d eat me). Local feed stores ran out of all forms of grasshopper “control” but the most insidious, which I could not bring myself to use.  Nothing I did, shy of intense and perpetual digging, could stop the morning glory– I eradicated mere square feet of it in the course of one week, only to see it grow back within the next. The irrigation was turned off over a month early away south of us, and smoke from fires in California and further northwest blotted the sky and stung our throats.  My wrists and hands and lower back ached from mountainous shoveling and wheelbarrowing.  

Frank got heat exhaustion, installing a drip irrigation system.  Nora got congested, pulling coccia.  

Both Meisha and Nora, after watching “The Biggest Little Farm” with me, kept reminding me that I, like the biblical Jacob and the untried keepers of the Little Farm, had seven years of this travail yet to endure. (“If only!” my secret smokestack snorted.)

When the Bee Stings

There was an actual bee sting.  It happened in a way Matt the Martian would appreciate: I was alone.  At the dump, shoveling compost into the back of the truck, sweat trickling down every part of me in the still, hot sunlight.  Both alone and indignant–even hurt– that the municipal system kept ghosting me. There was a way, I’d heard, that I could pay the city seven dollars to mechanically scoop compost into my truck.  I just needed to know where to pay, which day and hour  to be there– but no one ever answered my calls, no one was ever in the only office I was aware of, and so I went again and again to shovel compost  into my own truck.  Yes, for free… but at what cost!  Sometimes other customers would show up, and receive instant, convenient scoops from the skidster while I shoveled solitarily.  

But that day I was, as I said, alone.  Alone except for a single hornet, who arrived noticeably upset by my presence.  I have no idea where he came from, or what about me upset him.  He buzzed my head; I swatted him away.  He returned, belligerent, again and again.  In the face of his rising anger, I fled.  Which flight required leaping out of the bed of the truck into the mountain of compost, running through scattered compost into the empty parking lot– all the while swatting at my own head, where the hornet had focused the magnitude of  his buzzing rage– and finally flinging myself into the deserted municipal office just beyond.  

The office was luckily open, but dismal as a scene from the Twilight Zone (or Mars).  I could only hear my own labored breathing and the slight tick of a clock– the front desk chairs were empty; a big screen TV loitered lifeless and dark behind the silent counter.  Sweating and afraid and close to tears, I waited. Minutes crawled to a stop; the universe stood still.  I hoped, as I waited, that if I hid inside long enough, the hornet outside would forget his wrath and move on to other skies. 

Of course he didn’t; I was no sooner back in the truck bed with my shovel than he noiselessly– and from nowhere– descended on my bare head and stung my scalp.  I felt his soft hornet body dissemble when I swept him away.  

That was the final straw.  My heart hurt as much as my throbbing head.  I was completely alone in my pain and dismay and heartbreak– over alkali clay and morning glory and drought and smoke, over grasshoppers and hot spot graveyards and the sting and death of a hornet. 

Over the clean, rational, orderly life I’d left behind– every beautiful, vanished garden that had once been my own, the birthrights I’d traded for chairs of bowlies.

I stood in the back of the truck in the empty parking lot and wept.  For a minute.  But because crying doesn’t fill a truck with compost, and there was that mountain to climb, I began shoveling again, blinking the tears back.  

Mustard and Other Glad Tidings

Just as I was finishing, a van arrived towing a trailer full of green waste.  I noticed the load was almost entirely wild mustard– an annual weed, beautiful in its blooming yellow chartreuseness. Handfuls of smiling young folk spilled out of the van and began unloading the piled weeds.  Two young men noticed me and rushed over to offer their help.  They had name tags; I realized that the wild mustard was probably a missionary service project.  I felt embarrassed; surely they hadn’t seen from a distance that I’d been crying?  Surely I didn’t look so helpless as to warrant service projecting?  Nevertheless  I let them finish loading compost into my truck– about two shovelfuls each.  They smiled and small-talked and glanced at me with both gladness, and concern. 

My invisible cynic dragon labored with steam and smoke– “too little, too late,” she growled, discerning little volcano that she is.  

But  later, almost home,  my entire head on fire from the hornet sting, I was struck by the timing of my rescuing Pollyannas, their offering of help (and company) when I felt most bereft, most isolated.  I was struck by their kindness, their “gladness”, the irony and sweetness of their seemingly too-late rescue.   

Like my hazelnuts, I had died, but  nevertheless lived.

Girls in White Dresses (With Blue Satin Sashes)

A couple weeks later, I was back at the dump, shoveling compost into my truck.  Again I was alone.  Again, it was a hot day.  Again, suddenly, almost out of nowhere, an appearance— this time, a municipal waste employee.  He said, “You shouldn’t be working out here in this heat!”  My heart sank, fearing further reproof and possible dismissal, but then he said, “How much do you want?  A full load?”  He disappeared, returning moments later in a skidster. The magical skidster! With which he scooped two huge buckets of compost into my truck, filling the bed to overflowing in all of thirty seconds.  For free.  

Looking back, I realize that one doesn’t always recognize Pollyanna when she appears out of thin air. 

One day the neighbor’s goat began escaping her tethers and stake-outs.  These escapes became a pattern; she is, after all, a goat, and knows her business.  With every jail-break, she eagerly cleared two ditches and a little road to reach my graveyard gardens.  Miraculously, either Frank or I were always eye-witness to her illicit approaches; we managed each time to catch her just as her lips met a cucumber vine, a cluster of kohlrabi.  

(She quickly developed a crush on Frank, who was always gentle when he re-tethered her, or untangled her from her quagmire of rope and halter.)

This is where I recall finally awaking to the girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, the brown paper packages tied up with strings, the beauty of glad feet on the mountaintops.  Not just in the earlier Pollyanna-esque interventions, but also… Why did the goat cross the road?  Because she wanted my gardens! The vulnerability of my gardens had shifted from alkali clay, wind, shriveled starts, and grasshoppers, to the longings of a goat.

Paradise Found

And why did she want my gardens?  Weren’t they hopeless, a wasteland, a loserly, heat blasted failure?  I was surprised to acknowledge that in fact, they weren’t.  The goat desired my drip-irrigated compost-in-the-clay gardens because despite all odds, the gardens were growing— becoming lush, even.  Somehow in my hustle-bustle wheelbarrowing and mountainous digging, I hadn’t really taken note of the transformation.

There was that cucumber vine the goat kept trying to lip, loaded with yellow blossoms.  And the kohlrabi… I had planted a purple variety from an old seed packet and it was beautiful, the leaves a hazy cool blue edged with lavender.  The kohlrabi swam in swaths of bright-lit chard and red peppers and purple basil. There was miracle and wonder in big-leaved pumpkin and squash vines, finding their way again after being tempest-tossed and wind-swept.  While I lost half my tomatoes early on, still ground cherries crawled, and cherry tomatoes sprawled, all of them loaded with ripening fruit.  Beans that I had planted in desperation (nitrogen fixers that they are) were hung with plump pods, like little curled green bananas.  There were sweet, succulent peas, even in July.  Radishes happened overnight (as they will, but still!).  Surviving strawberries multiplied, and the zucchini outdid its own abundant cliches.  I might have lost most of my nasturtiums, but beets, arugula, sunflowers, and zinnias prevailed.   

I discovered the glory of rose orach leaves, backlit by a bright July morning.  

I had at least as much to celebrate as Matt the Martian, eating a potato on Mars.  

Deflecting the glad goat from their sanctuary,  I saw how all these survivors arrayed my graveyard gardens in the hues, forms, and textures of paradise.  It was magical.  A Favorite Thing, reincarnate.

And oh the tenacity of an apricot tree!  Mine is called a Mormon Apricot (another nickname) after those tough pioneers (also nicknamed, the grittiest of Pollyannas).  I see these trees everywhere in abandoned rock and clay fields, hanging on and even bearing fruit for just one more year, decade, century, despite inevitable drought.

And the wondrous persistence of penstemon, sage, sedge, currants, aronias, sedum, daylilies, catmint, lavender.  I cannot name them all– but like one’s friends, like anyone’s favorite things, I hate to leave any out. 

Windows of Heaven

In August, just as Nora and I piled into the Cooper to visit my parents and their Northwest promise of blueberries, a record deluge began to fall, as if from its own upper story windows.  It was a miracle; my dad in Oregon kept watching the same weather pattern in Utah on the internet as it circled around and around from Logan to St. George, flash flooding communities in the south and settling into sloughs, reservoirs, and rivers in the north.  During the week we were gone, four inches of rain accumulated; our little weather station’s cup flowed over.   

In the month afterward, everything rejoiced, including the weeds, which sprang up everywhere.  Heartened by the surge of even more garden abundance, I redoubled my compost collecting efforts, scratched out weeds,  gathered more unwanted rocks, dug more graves, planted more things (rhubarb, for instance).  Conceded a little to the alkali clay, and installed swaths of tall ornamental grass to guard my borders.  

Beauty in The Eye (Let Sleeping Dragons Bake Tarts)

Still crazy, I didn’t leave myself enough time (or energy)  to adequately harvest or preserve all of the abundance that had so miraculously appeared out of nowhere.  Nor did I leave enough time to read, write, paint, cook, dust shelves, arrange pillows, wrap an easy arm around Nora.  Like my farmer’s tan, I was terribly unbalanced,  always sweaty, always dirty, a mess, a wreck… and yet, I dug and wheelbarrowed daily in paradise, tasted the mellow honeyed funkiness of warm ground cherries with constant surprise, saw pink stained light through rose orach leaves.

When I watched “The Sound of Music” with the girls, I cried, despite the internal dragon (she was making tarts).   Oh, Rolph, so sad you were assimilated.  Oh singing children in the trees, harmonizing voices in the breeze… yes, yes, be glad.  Be super glad, why not.  You’ll need that later.  

Oh gentle nun of the stolen Nazi distributor cap (“Mother, I have sinned”)… how kind your car heisting. 

And when the Von Trapp family set out for freedom over the Alps at last, Climbing Every Mountain with a resilience and moxie that typified an entire generation of stoic Pollyannas, I think of snowflakes and killing frosts, of wool coats and lined boots, and wish I could lend the Von Trapps my favorite shovel and only wheelbarrow and a bowl of ground cherries, to help with the mountain.   Just a couple more Favorite Things for their journey.

Back To Eden With Jethro

My mother kept a book by this title amongst her kitchen recipes.  She gave it to me a few years back when she was purging the randomness of fifty plus years of homemaking–  but it didn’t turn up when I unpacked after our move this last time.  

It was a small, thick book.  Like my mother’s recipe collection, it carried the stains of kitchen wear: dog-eared, yellowed, splotched, some of it missing.  There was a spirit of frontier and pioneering about it– further proof to me that it was an inheritance.  Jethro Kloss, a fellow with a passion for both herbal remedies, and their culture, wrote it. He was also enthusiastic about gardening. 

I think of “Back To Eden” with conflicted nostalgia.  It was around most of my life, not just a relic, but an heirloom of sorts.  Mom searched it when she was at her furthest limit of worry over one of her children’s ailments; if I knew I was the reason she was turning its pages, I felt both a wary hope, and the anxiety of an indictment. It’s both ironic and relieving– also a little disconcerting– that “Back To Eden”  is finally  lost to me now, at my last stop, our edge-of-the-wilderness home.  Where once again, at least for a few seasons, I’m bereft of Eden.

Some passages of the book I read as a child, some as a young mother. Each time, I found Jethro’s archaic (and blunt) voice compelling.  He addressed the vulnerable, corruptible mortal body– her functions and conundrums– with a stern tone; he was terse and authoritative as he enumerated treatments and prescriptions and cautions.  For every possible complaint (even life threatening ones), he advocated a nature/garden-derived treatment; one that seemed to me to exert both practical and moral pressure.   Not remembering particulars now— which herbs for which complaints– I still remember my fascination becoming displaced by the weight of his dogma.  One could not casually peruse, or easily dismiss him– was he apocryphal, or inspired?  There was no joking with Jethro, no friendly middle ground, no casual give-and-take.  No easy escape.

Well, until I lost the book.  That was easy enough.

I’ve Looked at Clouds From Both Sides Now

Searching for any residual influence of “Back To Eden” in cyberspace, I’ve discovered that it is experiencing a bit of a revival.  Amazon sells it; readers embrace Jethro’s prescriptions and techniques.  Most reviews of the book (many by people who recommend it to “preppers”) are positive; one, however, stood out in its contempt.  Just a worthless old hippy book, the reviewer snorted.  I snorted back; my mother hardly thinks of herself as a hippy– though I sometimes think that whether she realizes it or not, she does embrace some hippy notions.  Jethro lived too early to be part of the hippy movement… maybe his critics dismissed him as a bluestocking? Regardless, categorizing and labeling is problematic in so many ways; the least being it clouds the water, obscures all kinds of truth.

Tangent:  One of my daughter’s best friends told her that of all the people he knows, I am the most like a “real” witch.  Praise indeed.  What motivated his comment is the fact that I grow, harvest, and store lavender, plus I cook from my garden (particularly with herbs).  I really don’t mind this perception, but it would be sad (not to mention inaccurate) if this was all anyone ever remembered about me.

I do owe some sort of tribute to Mr. Kloss, who keeps turning up in my periphery.  Aside from (at the very least) my horticultural respect for him (and horticultural respect is a big deal), I recognize that even though I was never entirely comfortable with Jethro’s words, he walked a path that I’m journeying on now.  We are co-travelers.  With him (and the rest of humanity), I keep trying to find my way back to Eden.  

Over The Garden Wall

This is true both metaphorically and literally.   Can we count all the ways we seek Paradise Lost?  Not in a lifetime.  But under the auspices of a blustery April day in the desert, I can count one now: how I keep trying to get back to Eden through gardening.

Gardening is a heavenly strategy.

I’ve written about this before, how I’m always reaching for paradise via another garden.  All the gardens I’ve planted, digged and dunged and pruned and wept (and rejoiced) over, and then abandoned. Four times now, I’ve found myself in the next treeless dirt plot under some version of an agitated spring sky, wondering whether my soil (can I even call it that?– I bear so much angst for alkali clay) can sustain green life. Trying hard not to fear all the possible encroachments: grasshoppers, earwigs, squash bugs, drought– covenants, codes, restrictions, morning glory.  And now deer. 

Not one garden did I leave against my will or under real duress; there’s never been the inexorable glow of cherubim and a flaming sword to sweep me out.  I’ve always more or less chosen to leave– or I should say, we’ve chosen… because I’m talking about co-choice here, a delicately balanced, give-and-take consent, compromise, leap of faith.  Frank and I have consistently partnered up and owned these abandonments together– thinking not in terms of what we were losing (a house and its adjacent garden), but putting our hope in what we would gain (a different house, with a different garden).  Whether we were foolish or wise to leave each time (less than half the gardens we planted survived our leaving), and whether we managed it with grace, really doesn’t matter now, though I’m apt to grieve if I dwell too much on what we left behind.  We departed, and here we are, again.  Longing in our different ways for Eden, stretching for the confidence and courage to create it again.

Ways and Means

Frank favors serenity and low maintenance.  A perfectly flat, seamless greensward appeals to him.  Also, smitten as he is by Technology, he is driven by the imperative to find applications for her in his landscape– or to make her his landscape altogether (he’s tired after all our building and abandoning homes and gardens). He’s requested that a goodly portion of our dirt plot be dedicated entirely to solar panels.  

My dreams tend more to the Great Dixter/Oudolf’s Trentham end of the spectrum– of course impractical, because I’m tired too.  However, gardening is still my thing; like a salmon swimming upriver, I must go on until I die.  Both reasonable and ridiculous ideas flower perennially in my brain, keeping me awake and giddy at night, creating anxiety in my bedfellow, Frankly my Dear. 

But the man loves me!  He loves me enough to work in the alkali dirt with me, risking septic lines and his good character to contour the land. Also the good character of his rig; he’s driven 40 miles per hour all the way home from the landfill with a yard of compost fluttering mutinously in the back of his truck. Often (as in frequently).

(Compost reforms alkali… eventually. It might take a millenium– but you’ve got to start somewhere).

He even lets me lead out in this final approach to Eden, trusting I’ll respect his limits, grateful I’ve bought into the solar panel scheme.  I’m pretty sure we can build a compromise somewhere, between our two extremes.

Of Peace and Swords

This seems to be a common theme as we wander our wildernesses in search of Eden: Conflict–with its corresponding necessities of labor, loss, grief, compromise, adaptation.  Jesus– the author and finisher of all that is good and beautiful– said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword.” In Matthew’s context, Jesus is addressing his apostles, whom he has invited to preach his gospel of love and peace to the world, knowing there will be opposition to and conflict in that work.    

In my context, Jesus, Master Gardener, is telling me that I can attain nothing truly great (including paradise) without encountering and overcoming- transmogrifying- disarming… ah, enduring! some sort of adversary (the irony here is that sometimes, my most difficult adversary is myself).  There is, he tells me, opposition in all things bright and beautiful. 

I have found this to be true. Heartbreak and fatigue are common side effects when I’m in the pursuit of good things (gardening and otherwise).  

Let Me Count the Ways

Through gardening, I’ve learned to consider my sources as I search for horticultural truth and wisdom. For instance: gardening magazines, as pretty and inspirational (and even instructive) as they are, have, on occasion, yanked my chain. Besides offering such impractical ideas as chickens in the garden (there goes everything to chicken scratch!–including the supposedly poisonous rhubarb) and a flowering thyme lawn (so transitory, so much maintenance, so many happy bees underfoot), magazines are inherently mired in a conflict of interest. With their words, they peddle trends and conventions that coalesce with their ads. They address me at least as much as consumer, as a Back To Eden hopeful.

Gardening is rarely as easy or as cute as a magazine is obligated to make it out to be— and that’s ok, as long as one takes its words with a grain of salt.

My best sources for garden wisdom are other experienced gardeners (thank you, Mom and Dad), my own trial and error, and university experiment extensions (wisdom through experiment and experience, a wonderful thing).

Another truth I’ve learned through gardening is that you reap what you sow… and then some.  Miracles happen, with a caveat:  uncover new ground, and weeds will grow first.  There’s this preliminary, necessary fight to overcome noxious-ness before any significant progress with fruit or blooms can happen.

Still, never give up! When a garden is digged and dunged and pruned and wept over (and consistently weeded), it doesn’t just produce what is sown– it magnifies and multiplies the efforts of the gardener in inconceivably abundant ways.  At the outset of all my gardens, I started as many plants (lavender in particular) as I could from seed. Compared to the vast expanses of empty dirt I always had to fill, my scrawny, vulnerable little seedling attempts looked futile.   Not all survived.  But within a couple years, the survivors grew, flowered, and went to seed. Volunteer flowers, tomatoes– even pumpkins sprang up everywhere, filling every available space, surprising and delighting me with their appearances, the happy, incidental accidents, the lovely, unplanned juxtapositions.  I gave lavender starts away. 

There’s such beauty in that, such abundance and generosity– one of my very favorite things about gardening, and one of my favorite metaphors for life.  

Had I a Golden Thread

In this happy conflict, I’ve also learned that inheritances are sacred, powerful things, even the scrappy, dog-eared ones.  Nothing we inherit should be taken for granted; these are gifts we cannot easily recreate. 

I sacrificed relatively little to gain my first garden; it was, rather, an heirloom, as it had once been my mother in law Edna’s Eden, before she gave it over to the renters who preceded us.  When Edna left, it would have been as neat as a pin, but when we finally got it, it was indeed dog-eared and overgrown.  

At first I saw the hordes of irises (becoming hordes is what unrestrained irises do) as a problem to be eradicated. New to gardening, I didn’t know what the sword-leaved, out-of-bloom plants were, but once I’d dug them up, I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of them.  After all, now that I’d expanded my borders (my dreams were as Great Dixter as ever then), there was a lot of empty space to fill, and not much by way of a gardening budget.    I replanted the healthiest in recurring swaths through my newly enlarged borders.  Till the moment they bloomed the next year, I couldn’t have known how precious a surplus of iris could be (currently, the price for one start ranges between $8 to $32– or more.  I had hundreds).  And then, with that first big bloom after they were replanted, I was staggered by their beauty, their flamboyant purpley rhythm an invitation to the dance that brought all the new and old and seemingly irrelevant players together (in perfect harmony, Stevie Wonder would sing). 

To Edna’s timeless foundation of lilacs, irises, Roses of Tea and Roses of Sharon, Burning Bushes, fruit trees, and so on and so forth (I kept discovering more and more treasure as I untangled this inheritance), I added my own prizes:  Bourbon roses (and Bourbon is apt– their fragrances are that intoxicating), stretches of Shirley poppies and nasturtiums encompassed by a low hedge of lavender.  Tomatoes, white pumpkins, and oh, yes, strawberries.  I’m tempted to keep going with the list… I loved it all so much.  Gardening with such an inheritance had landed me in my first paradise. What had at first appeared to be an overgrown liability was in fact an immense wealth.

My appreciation for my mother in law blossomed. 

Paradise Lost

But, paradise lost!  Right?  Isn’t it a prevailing condition of the wildernesses that we live in, that we are forever forgetting/misplacing/disregarding our inheritances?  Frank and I sold that first paradise for the next (our birthright for a bowl of GrapeNuts), but before we did, we cut down a weeping white birch and a silver maple.  The maple, Edna conceded, might threaten the septic lines, yes.  It was technically a weed, yes (I can still feel her hurt).  But the cutting down of the birch was grievous.  Her favorite indulgence, the once-beautiful birch struggled after she left it. It had some sort of malady I should have consulted Jethro about, but also, it cast shade in the front yard. 

I was still enough of a gardening novice (and reading too many magazines) to not completely comprehend or appreciate shade.  Greedy for more flowers, I wanted full sun everywhere– to plant my pretty, pretty flowers in.  Perhaps with time and care, the birch could have regained its former glory, who knows. Ultimately it perished because I wanted more flowers, not because all hope for it was gone. Given that tree now, I would do so much more to save it (since that first garden, I never again have had the luxury of shade from a mature tree). 

Edna has another now in her current front yard, and it is a thing of beauty (proof that inheritances can be found again).

Wear it Out Loud

I ran across a moment on YouTube while I was ruminating about Back to Eden gardening.  The hostess of Roots and Refuge Farm (who has the presence of mind to grow squash up over an arched trellis) conceded to her couple hundred thousand loyal viewers that yes, Roots and Refuge is moving.  They’re selling their impossibly beautiful, productive farm for the next (larger) endeavor. I was a newbie viewer; even I was shocked.  What?  Yes.  They’ll be selling the farm by the end of this year.  She spoke earnestly (while she planted handfuls of baby leeks in a tunnel greenhouse) of why they (she and her version of Frank and children) do what they do on their farm and on their YouTube channel– their desire to invite everyone to the refuge of their garden– to the refuge of gardening in general.  How in moving on, they’re just upping the ante.  That in the coming year, before they walk away from their current paradise, they will finish a barn (because the property needs it) and a perennial garden, and they’ll plant a profuse vegetable garden.  For one last beautiful hurrah.  

Hurrahs and Hallelujahs

One last hurrah.  Mmm, I remember those.   At first my heart fell for her sake.  They couldn’t know, they couldn’t have any real idea, the loss that lay ahead.  You don’t know til you pass through it.  Like us, they are thinking not in terms of what they are losing, but putting their hopes in what they will gain.  In their heads, they think they’re going to take the best of their experiences with them, leave their mistakes behind (they’ve learned to start with good fences, and not let the pigs run wild), and build a Larger Paradise.  Better fences, nicer pigs.

They’ve already mastered squash on a trellis.

“Heavens, don’t.  Just stay and embrace what you have!”  my heart ached for her.  She said things I might have said: that she’d seen miracles, that they’d given her courage to do impossible things, that rooted in her faith is the knowledge that we are all stewards, responsible for what parts of the earth we touch (this precious inheritance).

She said, “I want to know that when I leave my farm, when I hand this farm to someone else to steward, that this property Wears My love Loudly.”  I nearly wept, not because I’m cynical about the chances of her farm surviving her leaving, but because I’m moved by that gesture; I recognize that urge, that wish, that yearning to shout our love– through gardening, mothering, writing,  painting, befriending, inventing, whatever.  But often, I feel as if I’m shouting my love into the wind.  It comes back to me, seemingly impotent: a ghostly wail.

It occurs to me that Jethro, filling his book with what he thought he should fill it with, was doing his best to shout, too.  Doesn’t matter that I couldn’t quite find it in me to altogether embrace the shouting– Jethro was true to what he believed in.

I was musing on this when Jesus came to mind again.  Wasn’t his entire ministry, and isn’t his continual shepherding even now a divine, insistent, perfect manifestation of love?  A most celestial shout, a most profound inheritance?  And yet it falls on all kinds of ground, from the hard-baked stony sterile, to dirt too shallow or overrun with thorns, to a blessed patch of fertile.  He is both “a light which shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” and “the light and life of the world.”  Ultimately he was crucified for sharing his love too loudly.  Do I regard it nearly enough?   Everything in his creation wears it, this love– this divine attempt to draw us all eventually back to his paradise. 

Love is the Point

“He that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me,” my Master Gardener says. He invites me to lift up my voice “as with the sound of a trump, both long and loud…”  in sharing his love.  Come what may; the point is to turn the light on, sow the seeds.  We don’t get to decide if anyone will appreciate– or even notice– that the light is glowing and that the garden is flowering.  “ I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,” Jesus says to the flock that he’s invited to his gospel-of-love-and-peace conflict.  “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”  For his love extends to all, wolves and sheep. What is a wolf but could be a sheep, and what are we if not prone, in moments of hunger, to wolfishness.  

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

It’s nonsensical to lose hope, or to give up, gardening and whatnot.   

In Christ’s invitation, I remember again the miracles, and feel enlivened and enabled by the memories.  Experiments, experience. The one seed that can become so, so many beautiful things, the multiplications and magnifications that come of digging, dunging, pruning, weeping— shouting love as with a trump, both long and loud.

In finding my way back to Eden, love is always the point.

Frost, Mystery, and the Re-Do Blues

We first noticed the sharp scent of onions when we were hanging, for the second time, the glass door in an exterior wall of what would one day be our new home in the country.  Which circumstance (the re-do), as anyone who has ever hung a door knows, is a loaded, fraught event. High stakes, low (plummeting, even) endorphins. Therefore, given the setting, the waft of onion in the frigid night air felt like a snicker from the universe.  Or at least from the hood, which up until the onions suggested themselves, we loved with unabashed abandon. 

(Look at this place, we said to each other.  The best kept secret. Mountains fields sky, river running through it).

We froze nearly to the marrow that night, but the door– now free of some cleverly hidden shipping brackets– ah, at last, the door hung plumb and true, and the onions became inconsequential.  A weird twist of fate that had nothing to do with us; a tardy (or lost) onion harvest on some nearby farm. Anything could happen on a nearby farm.

And anything does.  I can tell you this now.

(Maybe this is a good time to be clear about complaints; we’re not complaining.  We still love the hood. We love it even more now that the house is finished and we’re settled here. It’s just that we’ve been noticing things– acclimating to the eccentricities. Which eccentricities seems worth mentioning).  

Frozen, and Onion Tears

November became December, the temperatures became ever more embittered, the skeletal house took on the meager sinews of plumbing and ventilation, and we began pulling wire through its bones.  Always a tough, monotonous chore, for me anyway. With the falling Fahrenheit, the smell of onions in the frigid night air showed up again and again; it was chronic. With each iteration it became more consistent, pervasive, undeniable. It would start at dark, and become so strong that my eyes would anticipate the peculiar dryness, the arid slow burn of onion tears. 

I thought of my grandmother, who died a few years back.  In her youth and even in her agedness, she was a beauty, and she loved beautiful things, including houses: fixing them up, decorating them (she had porcelain figurines: a shepherdess, Rockwellian children at play). She loved keeping everything– her house, her person, her men– tidy and smelling nice.  And– contrarily-wise — she loved onions.  

At her deathbed, I had tried to sing to her the songs I knew she loved, and had sadly failed.  With her imminent departure as tangible as my own heartbeat, tears had choked my voice into a rasp, a ridiculous croak.  Someone said my grandmother couldn’t hear me unless I shouted, but she still once or twice murmured the familiar melody-lorn words I was reaching for, her splayed fingers trailing the wall next to her bed.  Also: I love you, when I half whispered my own love to her, having given up my attempt at singing.

The onion tears, those cold winter nights that Frank and I pulled wire, never came– a fact that made me sort of doubt myself, my senses and perceptions.  Since onions seemed so out of context for the time of year and day and even place (we could see no falling onion tops in a deserted field, no packing plant backlit by a rising moon, no onion silo– are there onion silos?– standing stark and smoldery against the mountains), we would ask each other if onions were really what we were smelling.  Yes? Right? Do you smell them too?  Of course we smelled them. It was as if a horde of miniature iron chefs crouched between studs, shadows in our unfinished walls, making salsa, their little chef knives flashing through piles of onions. I’ve made salsa; I know. All you can smell are onions.

Frank has a Theory, and Grandpa Makes Hamburgers

“Maybe it’s a CAFO”, Frank said as we climbed wearily into the truck after work at the house late one January night.  Whether this night was before or after our construction loan officer sent an email asking us to explain why we were moving so slow on our project, and when we’d pick up the pace, doesn’t matter.  With arthritis in Frank’s shoulders, bursitis in his elbow, my inadequate height, the snow, the cold, the flu, and our amateur skills, we were moving slow, heartbreakingly slow, but we were also working extremely hard, and freezing solid every bleak night of our lives, with only the ambient onion as witness.  Our souls were heavy and frostbitten.

“Mmm… I don’t think so”, I said, using up the last of my daily quota of contradictions (we get three; that is all).  “We’ve smelled CAFO before. This isn’t it.”

“Yes, but maybe this time, at this CAFO, they’re feeding the cows onions,” Frank said.  I stared at him.  Why on earth would someone feed their cattle onions? What cow in its right mind would eat more than one onion?  Because yes maybe a cow, being hungry, might accidentally eat one.  A cow’s bite is large and possibly undiscerning.  But many onion bites, in quick succession?  Images of doomed, mad cows crowded my tired brain.   

Frank had given his theory considerable thought.  “They feed the cows onions to flavor them,” he said.  “Before they’re slaughtered. So when people cook the beef, they don’t have to season it.  Pre-emptive flavoring.”

(Notice how effortlessly my man slipped from “cows” to “beef”. What big teeth you have, my dear.)

I pictured my grandfather, frying hamburgers in a cast iron pan in Grandma’s kitchen on a Friday night, each hamburger laden with finely minced onion. He would have cut the onions himself; when he cooked, he owned the whole project (he was nearly as proprietary as Grandma). Grandma insisted he cover the pan with a screen to keep the fumes and grease from overwhelming her own domain– not only the kitchen Grandpa stood in, but the entire house– the yard outside, even. She had an aristocratic sense of smell, a soulful pact with cleanliness.

The onions (and garlic; we were all raised on garlic) was a signature flavor– as were the Friday night hamburgers. Complete with root beer, possibly ice cream, and a sense of downright contentment. If we stayed the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s, we would wake in a clean bed; the morning air would smell faintly of clorox, pine-sol, and flowers. If the scent of onions persisted, it obliged my grandmother by cooperating with the florals.

I had no words with which to answer Frank (I’d used up all my contradictions).  Had I been my grandmother, a sharp answer would have been most natural, contradiction rule or no.  But now I could only widen my eyes and remain silent (another rule: no eye rolling, ever… we’ve read “Blink”*; we know better).  

Surely, You’re Joking (No, I’m Not, and Stop Calling Me Shirley)

A few onion peels littered the snow near our Honeybucket**, a day or two after we petitioned the help of a roof soffit contractor.  We were desperate for someone other than ourselves to tackle the roof soffit and fascia. The weather was so cold. We were so tired.

Meeting with this contractor, I felt the sharpness of the universe’s elbow in my ribs. We were chatting in front of the house, the familiar scent hanging between the three of us, the snow aglow in the bright winter light with the occasional onion skin, and we’d asked him (because he told us he was practically our neighbor, just beyond that field and that railroad and that other field over there) if he knew anything about the onion smell.  He did not, he said, with a twinkle. He didn’t appear to think it was a thing to wonder about. But there were the peels, scattered anon, and I actually wondered if we’d been caught in a practical joke. The twinkle seemed a tad suspicious.

Turns out I was right to suspect. Maybe not a practical onion joke, but certainly the wisdom in choosing this particular contractor. He eventually sent a guy out– one nice, otherwise retired guy, a fellow with beautifully waving hair who talked at length about the end of the world and had much to say about toilet paper hoarding. This nice guy only sporadically showed up, and at the weary end of nearly four months, left wavering lines of soffit along the eaves of the house. Also he left his pirate plank– an unbelievably heavy, rotten board that he’d used to create a sort of scaffolding between two ladders. When we installed siding, it would be impossible to match our trim to the pirate’s billowing soffits. We cared, but didn’t have the energy to protest; we simply paid our bill, took the plank to the dump, and moved on.

Of Trucks and Men

The day Frank got the truck stuck in a deep drift on the side of the house (a plight that didn’t last long, as our bishop thankfully happened by and pulled us out quick with a chain and the power of his own truck)— and also, possibly, the day that we re-hung the board part of the board-and-batten (another re-do with more high stakes and plummeting endorphins), I happened to glance over from our siding work to the road as an onion truck passed.  Wait, what? An Onion Truck? Truly? Were those onions, piled high and glowing golden in the dump bed?  

Yes. Yes they were.  

Of course I alerted Frank to this profound development, and we watched together in a sort of frozen awe as the truck shrunk smaller and smaller in our line of sight down the road.  We thought we saw it turn right, yes, there it was, surely, driving up towards the bare mountain in an empty field, do you see it there? We squinted; it was out of view. Destination: entirely unknown.  The relative emptiness of fields and road and mountain were all that was left us.  

Hazards of the Road

Then one morning a couple of weeks or a month or three years later (winter 2019 seemed to go on forever), I drove with my daughter Meisha  out to the house so I could meet with our drywall contractor. Also so that Meisha could have practice driving, because she really needed to learn how—such an irony, by the way, this driving in order to learn– one that by its very nature is rife with its own hazards.  A week later, we would be in a bumper-scuffing accident and a world of tears, simply because she didn’t know how to drive yet, but had driven anyway so that she could learn.

To my knowledge, my grandmother was never in a car accident, although the last few years that she drove, she got lost constantly. Once, trying to find my house, she landed on the other side of the state, somewhere around Midnight.

My dad has a boyhood memory of waking up in the bed of his parent’s pickup (I like to think this happened at Midnight, too) as it careened along the graveled road shoulder during the wee hours of a family trip. In the cab of the truck, his mother (my grandma) was asleep at the wheel. It took Dad and Grandpa (who had also been asleep in the pickup bed) a terrifyingly long minute to wake Grandma, the supposed driver, separated as she was from them by the truck’s thick cab window.

Barry, Dad’s older brother, was also in the truck somewhere, but his position seems nebulous; it changes with each telling of the story, or maybe with the teller. When Dad narrates, his brother is in front with Grandma, sleeping just as soundly as she. But in Barry’s version, he is definitely not asleep– maybe Dad is, but Barry is awake, frantically banging on the cab window with Grandpa.

At any rate, I have no idea how they all survived. But I’m grateful.

I always felt safest when Grandpa drove. But I also remember riding just about everywhere with Grandma.

The Onion Goblins Are Invoked

As Meisha and I pulled up to the house, I noticed more onion peels, littering the snow all over the lot. This was epic coverage; our place is nearly an acre.  Red onion skins, yellow onion skins, onion skins sodden with snow, onion skins fluttering in the humid, cold wind. Present, real…and accompanied by that familiar onion smell.  

Meisha laughed, and declared (as she maneuvered the car through a rut) that we had Onion Goblins.  Like it was this cute thing, a bestowal, a gift of notice from some mischievous, supernatural being.  A Sprite, a Faerie, A Witch Under The Mountain. “And for You, Foolish Ones, You Who Linger and Lollygag Far Too Long, Building Your House of Sticks– For You and No One Else,  I Invoke Onion Goblins.”  

I think of one of my children’s favorite goblins, Dobby. A friend to Harry Potter, darling with over-sized eyes and ears and wrinkles, he finds freedom with an errant sock… and is key to managing some of Harry’s most threatening mischief.

Sometimes life seems more…hmm… hospitable? when one thinks of its complexities in terms of whimsy, mischief, fairytale magic? Or views it from the lens of history, with an eye towards one’s ancestors. Either way. One must sometimes squint, blur the edges, apply the golden glow of the past, the glitter of pixie dust.

Enter Shirley

It was with an actual bestowal, a kind and very real gift, that we learned the truth of the onion goblins.  Our Relief Society president** — I’ll call her Shirley– saw our work lights late one night and stopped by with a steaming loaf of bread.

(I will interject here and tell you that this bread was delicious, that its tenderness, warmth, and timing deeply moved me. Also it is important to note that while Shirley is taller than my grandmother once was, her eyes have the same chocolate immediacy that I remember in Grandma’s).

Frank and I chatted (so grateful for company and the gesture) with tall, brown-eyed Shirley for a minute, and then, because the scent was strong that night (the metaphorical Elephant In The Room), I asked her if she knew anything of the onion mystery.

Of course she did.  Knowing things like this seems to be the province of Relief Society presidents.  Ask them, and they will dispel mysteries– both local and remote– in ways that make the world seem more like the one Norman Rockwell celebrated: friendly, humorous, safe.

She spoke of local sheep ranchers, reminded us that sheep are a big deal out here. Indeed they are: a slow moving herd stopped our framer in his tracks months before, as shepherds herded thousands of sheep up the highway, bringing traffic to a standstill.

Shirley told us furthermore that we aren’t just in sheep territory, we are in the neighborhood of Sheep Greatness, one of the largest sheep ranches in the country. Which obviously means that there’s a really big gathering of sheep nearby. And incidentally, Shirley said, these sheep ranchers feed onions to their sheep.

This is sheep, and onions, on a massive scale.

So it turned out that Frank’s CAFO theory hadn’t been entirely wrong, though we didn’t get a sense that the onions are meant, like the witch’s candy for Hansel,  to fatten up the sheep (maybe they are? I don’t want to know).

For as long as our new brown-eyed friend has lived in the hood (it’s been a long time; she’s happy here), the onion-fed sheep tradition has never varied. Sheep eat onions through the winter, every winter, all winter long.  This year, she said, the smell is particularly strong. Some years you hardly notice it. Regardless, it’s an annual thing, beginning and ending with the cold. Onion trucks drive up to the sheep pastures at the foot of the mountain, dump onions out in neat, shimmery rows, and the sheep nibble and graze and ruminate on onion. I imagine sheep bells tinkling as they chew.

(Perhaps I romanticize.)

Something to Hold Onto

We mentioned the onion skins, and she laughed and said, oh yes, we call that onion dust.  It’s a bit messy… gets stuck to your car, blows into your yard.  But it’s just temporary.  

I imagined onion peels, caught in strings of Christmas lights and on bushes, pasting themselves in delicate, glowing, translucent shreds onto living room windows.  A very natural confetti, a compost-able pixie dust (I believe in compost). In a weird but delightful way, celebratory.

I remember Grandma, her hands on her hips, hollering across a partial mile of undulating park at a dog owner who had neglected to put his dog on a leash.  The park rules were being broken, yes, but the dog cavorted harmlessly, far away from us. The dog owner could only look at her, and I remember both wanting to laugh, and squirming a little with embarrassment.  

Certainly Grandma would have had something to say about onion skins clinging to her shrubbery, and the onion goblin crossing her threshold every winter night with his peculiar fragrance.  Had the Sheep Rancher been a Handsome Man, though, her tone would have softened considerably. She had an eye for beauty; besides (as I keep saying), she actually liked onions.

It was obvious that the onions didn’t offend our new friend.  Neither the dust nor the smell. It was just an aspect– a mere triviality– of her neighborhood, a place she felt at home in, filled with people that she loved and was loyal to.

Knowing the power of narrative (and how seniority works), we took our cues from her.  How could we not, with such warm, delicious bread and friendly conversation? And mountains fields sky and river running through it?  My grandmother would have loved the place, the mountains fields sky. And the river running through it.

Unanswered Petty Questions

I still have unanswered, but mostly petty questions. Is feeding sheep onions a common practice everywhere? Why onions? Why not turnips, cabbages, carrots? Is it about nutrition, opportunity, cost, convenience? Tradition? Fond indulgence towards a herd of pets, a convention perpetuated by endemic largesse?

And how do they stand it?  The sheep (or even the rancher, in his nearby home)?  I imagine thousands of sheep, their hooves caked with inevitable winter mud, their deep-piled, off-white fleeces flecked with it, leaning over the rows of gleaming onions,  warm puffs of sheep breath crystallizing in the frigid air. The first ten thousand incisors meeting innumerable onions, muffled bite-shots fired in unison by massive squads of sheep-teeth. Volatile sprays of onion juice rising up from the no longer gleaming onions, rising and clinging to thick eyelashes, coating glittery sheep-breath with onion oil.  Rising and overwhelming downy nostrils. 

I imagine a sheep rancher’s wife, weathering yet another question about onions from a new neighbor, a visitor in her doorway. I have met, since we’ve settled here, at least one sheep rancher’s wife. She is approachable and kind; she has lovely presence, a keen glance. Does she overcome, again and again, the insistent temptation to roll her eyes? To contradict someone… the visitor, the rancher, the avid sheep, the onion goblin?

Even after having been told, after having looked around and seen for myself, this all– the winter/onions/sheep thing– still seems implausible to me.

What ultimately happens to onion-fed sheep?  I admit I feel conflicted about this. I like to think, with Sam from “Holes”, that the onions have restorative, healing qualities, that with their magic they produce such long-lived sheep and such very fine wool, that the rancher would never consider losing a soul from his flock to a butcher.

It’s hard to imagine the wool wouldn’t have a distinct scent though.

To Everything There Is At Least a Season (If Not Absolutely an Obvious Reason)

Grandma did love onions.  I recall watching, captivated, as she ate one.  She ate it like an apple, biting into it fearlessly with straight teeth; brown eyes sparkling with laughter at our awe.  A little like Snow White taking delicate aim at the fatal apple— except Grandma wasn’t soft like that; she was spunky, showing off; she loved drama– and there was drama in each resounding bite. The onion crackled as she chewed— I could almost feel the crisp juiciness, each layer its own vivid crunch— the cascading crunches a sort of singing that made the onion seem unquestionably delicious and caused my own mouth to water, despite the fact that I knew onions to definitely not be delicious.  Which of course also made me wonder if I didn’t really know onions, and complicated the cautionary elements of Snow White’s misfortunes.

I don’t recall my eyes stinging from Grandma’s onion-eating.  Perhaps I forget— but I think not. My eyes sting and water now, however, when I mince onions for dinner (I admit I almost never make hamburgers; Frank wishes I would). Mascara trails past my jawline; my nose runs. My pan screen, similar to the one Grandma insisted Grandpa use, is more or less ineffectual at blocking fumes. It only marginally mitigates grease spatter.

I also remember that when Grandma hugged us, we inhaled her. The commingled scents of her clean, pretty clothes, the vitamin E on her face, her lotion, her perfume, the hint of onion that danced on her breath and emanated from her glowing skin.  No iteration of Grandma’s onions ever offended us. The sheets and pillowslips of whoever’s bed she slept in would smell of her perfume and soap and vitamins– and ever so slightly of onions– when she left. Ah! To bury our noses in that pillow! And wrap up in those sheets! To own them all, and to sleep there in her enchanted spot, the first few days after she had gone!  This was her parting gift, one that made us long for her return. One that motivated us to volunteer our beds when she arrived the next time.

There aren’t always next times, do-overs, parting gifts. The time we get is just enough, the partings final, at least for now. Perhaps all that remains til the eventual tomorrow are the stories: a hand moving slow across a wall, a ragged bit of song, a passing I love you. Mountains fields sky, the river running through it– and yes. Assuredly this: the eccentricities and magic that bring these things into focus: the incessant onion, the well kept sheep.

The End

Footnotes (or a long PS):

(While once upon a time I had mastered a rudimentary approach to the sort of scholarliness that conjures footnotes, I have long since forgotten any formulas or patterns that would lend academic glamour to this blogginess. Sorry about that. But let us sally forth nevertheless, and not get hung up in technicalities.)

*Blink In this book, Malcolm Gladwell discusses all sorts of things worth thinking about– one is the correlation that researchers have found between outward signs of contempt– say, rolling one’s eyes– and the likelihood of divorce. It’s very high. Which isn’t to say rolling your eyes will ruin your marriage. But contempt certainly will.

**Honeybucket What is this? It is the brand name that our porta-potty supplier uses for their portable bathrooms (sans the bath, and honestly, the room). Where a rose by any other name might still smell as sweet, Honeybuckets are nothing like their name suggests. They are, however, clearly an instance of creative (if not altogether astute) branding.

***Relief Society President In a nutshell… imagine women in your community trying wholeheartedly to care for the folk in it, to enable individual and communal relief. There is power and grace in organized endeavors like this. In this case, the woman voluntarily accepts the assignment to lead out in loving all the people. With or without the assignment/title, countless women the world over fill this role beautifully.

(Editor’s Note)

Blogs are a relatively new genre– and a genre, by the way, that eludes definition. So do its rules and by-laws. I think this elusiveness is lovely, despite the fact that amorphous boundaries tend to make me uncomfortable. Whatever a blog may be, and whatever it should do, the fact is that this particular one has been, once again, neglected. By all appearances, totally abandoned. But here’s the editor, writing a note— which changes the blog plot from one that self-destructively embraces abandonment, to one that merely suffers the irritating hiccups of occasional (sometimes prolonged) neglect. A reader (assuming there are any readers) may be tempted to ask, “What happened?” For why and what-for did the editor’s writings disappear?

Well, I’m the editor, and after some reflection, I can tell you that for the most part, the why’s and what-for’s don’t matter a whole lot. Probably bits of relevant narrative will find their way out as we go; the rest will be left, like all the things we don’t bother (or want) to talk about, in the literary dust-heaps of the ages.

But one question is worth exploring at this moment: Why are we (the editor and her writing) back now?

I’d like for this post to address that question. Which doesn’t mean it will; not everything I wish for works out in the end. I’m just grateful to have a place to start again.

Pack the Anthology, Leave the Fluffy Jiggly Japanese Pancakes

Two of my sisters* and I have recently been recording some of our conversations with each other. It’s Mara Lee’s idea; she wants to publish a podcast from these conversations. What this means, amongst a myriad of other nuanced and layered things, is that our conversations aren’t always natural and spontaneous, aware as we are that we’re being recorded. Sometimes, surrounded by such artificial appendages as microphone/headset, a screen that serves as a mirror, and pre-emptive, imaginary audience judgment, we even get self-conscious, for heavens sake. Which further means, to me anyway, that I’m occasionally tempted to just… leave. Sign out. Excuse myself from the endeavor. But I love my sisters, and share their earnest desire to do good things, and so I stay. Following Mara Lee’s lead, we’ve agreed to talk about truth, about the necessities of connection, of being forgiving, generous, hopeful, grateful. Serious, deep topics… topics I embrace and find comfort in… and yet. When I attempt to speak about them with my sisters, my brain– frustrated by its limits and losses– wanders, and I’m shaken by childish impulses to rattle on about irrelevant things (this will out… anyone who’s read much of this blog may see my lapses into tangents and trivia).

I suppress most of these impulses, but enough find their way into the open air that I worry I’m becoming a liability to the whole podcast endeavor.

To Illustrate The Likelihood That I’m A Liability to the Whole Podcast Endeavor (AKA Fluffy Jiggly Japanese Pancakes)

To illustrate: A travel log of my recent YouTube views. YouTube views– we can agree on this I’m sure– carry all sorts of proof. Not that these topics are necessarily what I burst out with, but certainly they are indicative of the tangents and trivialities that eddy through my mind:

Micarah Tewers making a Valentine’s Dress (exclamation point). In which Micarah, per usual, sews– from her imagination and her hoard, with characteristically flippant/nebulous instructions to her viewers (sans the signature shoulder parrot)– a Regency-Meets-Twiggy mini-dress, in hot pink, with empire waist and yards of ruffles.

Various Parks and Rec clips, especially the one where Ron Swanson advises, on a news cast, that to fix a chewed-up table leg, one should rub a walnut on the scratches, and then adios the terrier that chewed on the table in the first place, because a dog under 50 pounds isn’t a dog, it’s a cat, and cats (according to Ron) are pointless (these links are generally courtesy of my daughter Meisha, who by the way loves cats).

How To Cook That– DEBUNKING (note the all caps) Tasty’s Fluffy Jiggly Japanese Pancake recipe. When my daughter Maurya learned how much I’m yearning for fluffy jiggly cakes lately (since fluffy jiggliness is missing elsewhere in my world?), she found the link for me.

Which leads me to the various Bollywood links another sister (Andrea) shared with me…and I of course watched. I mean, Bollywood! So much color! And mythology! And fluffiness, and jiggling.

I’ve watched how to make Macho Nachos, Breakup Pasta, Crepes, and Kale Chips (via You Suck At Cooking– this has nothing to do with my cooking desires, it’s just evidence of a middle-aged woman’s capacity to find shows her children recommend). I’ve watched John of the Vlog Brothers espouse washing sheets and towels, and hanging art on our walls (he’s hacking life, he says; I felt validated), and I’ve listened to both Vlog Brothers argue either for… or against? I don’t remember now… Existential Thought. And Batman. Either way… Squirrel!

I’ve listened to Brandi Carlisle, Lee Ann Rimes, Sara Ramirez, and Dolly Parton sing (each separately– but can you imagine the choir?) Brandi Carlisle’s “The Story”. Again, again. Every time one of them sings, I cannot sing along. I just cry.

But probably most telling, this Ted Talk: “Dementia is Preventable Through Lifestyle. Start Now.” (I’ve upped the ante on dark greens, avocados, brisk morning walks– and I’m reading more and writing again.)

And so– surely you must see, dearly beloveds: proof. I struggle… maybe not in thinking deep thoughts, but certainly in sustaining them! Their height, breadth, depth– ah, their weight! The responsibility they invoke.

Surely you must see that I have reason to wonder what the heck I’m doing, trying to be wise on a podcast with my deeper-thinking sisters. And by extension– what on earth do I have to say (that matters) on a blog?

But Then This Thing Happened

But then this thing happened. Things. First, my sisters and I continued talking without recording (or talked while pretending we weren’t recording). We explored ideas, shared impressions, listened well to one another. Leah kept insisting that in our search for truth, it was super important to seek to see others clearly, as God sees us. Mara Lee shared clinical (not to mention spiritual) proof of our need for connection. With intermittent floods of gratitude for Leah and Mara Lee’s collective insights and where they lead me, I’m realizing also that none of us feel particularly wise… I’m not the only one who is grappling here. I also realized that there’s beauty in seeking, trying ideas out, stumbling in the trying, talking about it, wondering and reaching and problem solving with people we love. Petitioning grace to attend– it always does, when earnestly invited.

Another seemingly unrelated thing happened: a heightened awareness of widespread trauma– not just of the pandemic, although its effects are indeed staggering. But beyond and amidst– people I love are struggling with cancer, thyroid disease, anxiety, MS, aging, loneliness, departures, arrivals, addiction. A dear friend nearly died (her medical team had to shock her heart three times before it would start up again) before a lifesaving pacemaker could be placed. Another’s brother died very suddenly of cancer. Another couple of friends went through an epic year of depression, another’s father is dying from the effect of diabetes– she is caring for him, and for her daughter who just had a baby. What a mix of joy and sorrow for her! She is, for the moment, in the midst of friends– but there’s been long periods where she’s felt alone.

And it Dawns on Me

I think there’s these lengths of time– whether it’s minutes or years– that we all feel alone. It is the risk of chronic aloneness that prompts me to write again now. I long for conversation, the hand on the arm; I find myself wondering how everyone is doing. I cannot bear the thought of all these my people being alone in their duress. Nor do I wish to be alone, either.

Tangent– two things. Thing One: I’ve seen how naturally and easily love can spring up– and am stunned by the beautiful places it can take us. I may not know you at this moment, theoretical reader, but rest assured, if I had even a small bit of your story, I’m confident I would just-like-that-so-easy fall in love with you; you would be on my list. This is due to the magic of seeing one another more clearly (stories help with that), not any inherent philanthropy on my part. Thing Two: I’m also painfully aware that my blog isn’t going to cure the world’s epic glitches or even assuage an individual grief. But it’s something I can do, a spider’s thread** of an attempt to contribute to our communal web of connectedness.

To April: This One’s For You

The thoughts of one of my beloveds in particular kept nudging at my mind: April, my cousin a few years younger than me. April wrote very kind messages to me years ago, thanking me for writing on my blog. My impression was that she was grateful for the things I’d written, not the clever or cool or polished way I’d written them. She was grateful that someone else had experiences she could relate to; she was grateful for the connection.

Whenever I have seen her since, this is still what I get from her: she’s genuinely grateful for our connection. Not just our genetic heritage– although isn’t having the same grandparents sweet?– but also that our lives have bumped and wrinkled and glimmered in sort of parallel ways. That as fellow travelers through Earth’s tricky atmosphere, we are compadres.

I think–no, I know– I’ve let polish, coolness, and cleverness (fluffy jiggly Japanese pancakes that they are) distract and discourage me, and haven’t just dwelt instead, more generously, on the experiences so many of us share. Or even the ones we don’t— the joy of discovering new things, of enlarged, vicarious memory. All of which connect us. We belong to each other; we need each other. I thrive on your stories, and the likenesses (and differences!) between us… and I need you to know I’m thinking of you; I need to reach out in gestures of comfort and assurance and acceptance to all of us, because I’m moved by what I can assume all of us are going through (life’s intensity rarely lets up)– and I cannot continue doing nothing at all to reinforce our vital connections.

So, April, this one’s for you. I have no wise words, but my random stories are back. I’m hoping one will make you laugh, or okay maybe not laugh but remember something? or at least wonder?— hoping all of them will help you feel not alone.

The End

Foot Notes, Because This is A Blog And I Can Do That

*I am one of six sisters. I also have three brothers, two of whom are living, and two parents. I have a husband and five autonomous children. Also grandparents not in this world anymore, and countless aunties uncles cousins nieces nephews and so forth. Enumerating my folk just feels important to me.

**This references “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman. Mara Lee found it and embraced it as a metaphor for why she wants to gather truth and podcast about it (because she’s cool like that). This metaphor resonates with me whenever I remember the truth that out of small and simple things, great things come to pass:

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated;
Marked how to explore a vacant vast surrounding,
It launched filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, o my soul.
–Walt Whitman