We have a monster truck.

I have mentioned it before; I mention it again. It is huge, orange (definitely orange; even oxidized orange is still unmistakably orange), dirty, scratched, pocked, dented; in a former life, it worked for the railroad.   Its one and only beauty mark is a dragonfly sticker on its butt. Our truck’s popularity as a DIY landscape companion seems to be on the rise in our neighborhood; it practically invites itself along on trips to the dump with friends and neighbors. It is a no-risk companion where dirty work is involved. And it is so dingy and ravaged that new damage blends, slyly inconspicuous, with our monster’s well established character. A friend who’d borrowed our truck for backyard cleanup accidentally drove into it with a tractor; the only tangible evidence of the tragedy was our friend’s dismay. The truck looked just the same to us. As a matter of fact, I kind of wish he’d hit the passenger door; maybe a good smack would fix it. [continue reading…]

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.

Also in my bedroom I have a castaway chair, one that I rescued from a thrift store a couple of years ago, confident that I could recover it by the end of that month.  Like the other three chairs I rescued that autumn, it has escaped reupholstering and remained in its dilapidated state.  A project not even begun.  As time has passed, I have grown to like the vintageness of it—soft cream velvet piped with a fading grass green, buttons everywhere.  It is worn but it does not appear to be dirty; today, I turned it around to face the tall tall windows.  The sun shines full in my face.  My laptop warms my legs.  I feel content as a cat.

But I’m not a cat.  Or I would wax indignant [continue reading…]

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. [continue reading…]

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.

If summer isn’t over for the meteorologists this week, it is over for my kids.  Like whatever killed the radio star, the beginning of school kills summer, and it is sad.  My spirits sank abysmally the first few days of school last week.  [continue reading…]

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.

This Is How It Went.  The wind shrieked.  Ok, it didn’t shriek; it gusted, and it only gusted while we were setting up and for a couple of hours afterward.  Later in the day it was so still and suffocatingly hot I longed for the wind’s return, in any form.  The early gusts were enough to flap my paintings around on the sturdy wire-and-2X walls that they were hung on (once, one blew off).  [continue reading…]