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.

I didn’t set out to be an Inscrutable Dented Progressive Swamp Person, originally.  I was hoping to be more of an Edna St. Vincent Millay minus the estranged lovers, or a Bronte sister with a less tragic ending, or an only metaphorically airborne Amelia Earhart.  But no.  I am what I am, and belonging to my People, moved with my husband and five chitlins in a desperate frame of mind to a house we’d built in a swamp, not realizing that we’d built in a swamp of course until we were committed to building in a swamp (framed, you could say).  Now, dragonflies are our esteemed cohorts.

And whenever it rains, our back yard, which hasn’t quite progressed so far as to be verdant, floods.  To further establish ourselves as Progressive Swamp People, we’re building a chicken coop in the mud of the flood.  True to our easily adopted lifestyle, we acquired the chicks weeks before the coop had walls.

The chicks innocently began their fledgling careers in a  big metal tub in the garage (they were so cute, so tiny).  We moved them out to the unfinished coop when they got too big for their tub; they eagerly await a roof as lightning claps and thunder roars.  We’ve covered a little section inside the coop so they don’t get drenched by passing rainstorms, but it still feels so…I don’t know.  Not entirely Ernest Hemingway (ah, to die, alone, in the rain), no…who wrote “The Yearling”?  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (excuse the literary references).  Yes, that is more like it.  We could be like her cracker folk.  Only…not quite.

Huzzah for the truck.

I’ve gotta say, though.  We’ve got great taste in flowers.