Call us Swamp People.
My back yard is, at best, Progressive. A work in progress, brimming with hope. At worst, it is a bit of an eyesore, an expanse of baking mud. A desert swamp stripped of its natural trappings.
My back yard is proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
See the half finished coop? The adolescent fruit trees, planted too close? The nearly boundless expanse of barren dirt/mud? See the lovely irises and sages and beginning roses, set haphazard against such a backdrop?
See Maurya strumming her guitar on the orange railroad truck in the back yard? A week before this picture, she strummed a ukele. On the truck. In the mud. In broad daylight. Who would do such crazy things? I will tell you. Swamp People. Progressive swamp people. Contradiction of terms? Get used to it. We, the Progressive Swamp People, live to set definitions and characterizations at naught, making us, what? Oh, I know. Inscrutable. Yes, Really. Inscrutable, and dented. [continue reading…]
In my bedroom, three very tall windows face south. They are blinded, at least partially, for the sake of privacy—because after all they line our bedroom, and south means the street— but I have no regrets about window or bedroom placement. The sunshine (which is too rare in the winter here) pours through the window transoms, and glides between the blind slats in a way that comforts, cheers, and moves me. I love these windows; I love my bedroom.
Joann’s, a local fabric/craft store, sends me coupons via email just about every week. They also send coupons in the regular mail. Though I am inundated by their marketing ploy, I’m not an innocent victim. I signed up to be harassed, scribbling my name and address on a little post card (which guaranteed my inclusion on a mailing list) as I hurried through their checkout line one day a year or so ago. Why? Because the coupons, in a sketchy, ephemeral way, seem to offer escape. Or I pretend they do. 
Frank tells me the news at bedtime, as I snuggle sheets up to my neck, burrow my ear into a pillow, and find another to clasp into the concave curve between my belly and knees. So sometimes I get a weather update just as I’m drifting off to sleep. He also runs headlines and weather probabilities past me as I’m waking up; this morning I learned, as I shuffled to the closet, that supposedly today would be our last hot day. “For how long?” I asked. “Forever? For a week? Is summer over? They’re probably wrong; they’re almost always off. By a day, or a month, or a week. We were supposed to have storms last weekend; we didn’t. We still haven’t. What do you think? Do you think summer is over?”. And I shuffled out of the room to make breakfast for school-bound children. Parenting taking precedence over weather musings.
The art festival. As if anyone other than a few dear friends (Shari, Gaylyn, Aunt Cynthia, and Frank–and perhaps you too, Sara Urry? and at least one of my Stephanies?) will see this. But. It is historical (tickles me sometimes how historical is just a couple of letters away from hysterical). Personal history, with distant (however unlikely) public potential. And so I will write about how it went, Babe.
Again! Another year. My Great Artistic Venture continues, however sporadic and interrupted, with my second showing of art on canvas at the annual North Ogden Art Festival. Saturday, August 13th. At the North Ogden Park (2650 N. 500 E., North Ogden). Last year was the best turnout so far. Small, but delightful. Intimate, fun.
Aloha, Y’all. Yes, Hawaii. Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. I wrote a blog last summer about how I was not in Hawaii, and now, this summer, amazingly, I am. Almost ten days in paradise.