The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...: July 2018

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

midsommer

We're barely into summer by the calendar but in the middle of summer by all other measures. The 4th of July is past, Christmas decorations are up at the craft stores, and the bugs are horrific. We used our screen tent last night and it was tolerable to sit outside and have a beer while we grilled peppers. We mocked the gnats and mosquitoes trying to gain access. Little bastards.

I love the landscape of this time of year: crops are green, rows are tidy, usually some haze off in the distance, clear blue skies, small farms dotting the horizon. We took Gus to Nicollet this morning for his monthly shave and a haircut and as I watched the miles go by, I thought how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place.

We have forsaken the news for a while because there is only so much outrage you can stand to bear. We read snippets on twitter and the online WaPo, but the nightly gathering of the talking heads is getting a much earned vacation. We started watching Shetland, a wonderful British mystery drama that takes place in the Shetland Islands.

I snatched this photo from the Instagram account of @inspiredbyshetland. I hope that's enough of an attribution so I don't get nabbed by the copyright police. Such a wild and lovely place. Did you know they have winter hurricanes? It might be a place I'd like to visit, but it would require several airplanes, some of them quite small, and a ferry into the North Sea. I'd have to be sedated.

I spent 3 hours in the front yard yesterday. I was a sweaty, bug spray covered, hot mess by the time I finished. There is mor to do...not sure I can make myself do it today. So sad.

Sunday, July 08, 2018

we aren't the traveling kind of folks

I know some people wouldn't even consider a 130 mile trip to be travel, but we plan it for a week and we labor over the details. We're exhausted when we get home even though the biggest exertion was to go twenty miles (by car) to eat. Sigh.

Here's a good article about why it's ok to dislike travel.

We had a nice time and even stepped out of our usual routine by going downtown to sit on the patio of the local pub until near dark, chatting with the locals. I know. Not like we were bungee jumping or anything but you have to take your bows when you can.

I do love the landscape...cows, prairie, corn fields, wind towers.

I don't need opinions about how we should do this or that. I can find a poem about the pleasure of not traveling and I'd be happy to share it. Somebody has to stay home, you know, or we'd all be out running up and down the highways.

Tomorrow, I am attacking my outdoor jobs. I'm sure the garden plants are competing for space with the weeds and my front yard looks like Boo Radley's yard. I'm going to spray myself up with DEET and just do it.

Mom and Me

Thursday, July 05, 2018

a major cloud of ennui settled over us

en·nui

änˈwē/

noun

a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.

synonyms: boredom, tedium, listlessness, lethargy, lassitude, languor, weariness, enervation
Yup. That's it. It hit me Tuesday, but Regis drove the bus that day so he did not succumb until Tuesday night. Wednesday, we were in the throes all day. We can't remember a day when we did less...if there has been one. It had all the markers.

A nap in the chair immediately upon waking.
Consumption of leftovers, twice.
Lack of interest in any community goings on of which there were many.
Lack of focus and nothing accomplished.
Abundance of reading and Scrabble.
Minimal conversation.

In our defense, I would say that we both showered and got dressed. This would have been a 911 situation if we had been in our pajamas all day. I would have suspected a leakage of carbon monoxide.

Toward evening we had a burst of creativity and gumption enough to order this as a way to combat the mosquito hordes that have prevented almost any patio time this summer.

It's 10x10 so it will hold two lawn chairs and not much else. That's ok since my general malaise includes lack of interest in cooking for crowds, even the familial kind.

I have a busy day planned...some baby watching, some work at the Arts Center, some celebrating of the birthday of my sweet husband. Ta da! The cloud has lifted!

Sunday, July 01, 2018

what the hell

The weather. I saw on Facebook, a trusted source of legitimate news, that 10 weeks ago from July 1st we had almost three feet of snow on the ground. I didn't bother with any fact checking because...you know...fake news.

We had a long, gray winter and a snowy spring that lasted about 18 hours. I had a few wimpy daffodils that bloomed for a few hours before they were bludgeoned to death by 100 degree winds. Winds like you get on the Sahara Desert.

Since then, it's been too hot, windy, rainy, or buggy to care about anything outside. I do, under duress, spray myself down with a lethal does of DEET and do a few things outdoors but I can't say I enjoy it. It's a year of just surviving.

The river is rising, again, so who knows when all routes out of here will be closed unless you have a raft. The dog park is completely submerged and giant carp have been seen swimming over the fences. When the water goes down, imagine this: the stench of rotting carp, hellish mobs of mosquitoes, clouds of gnats that get through even L.L. Bean's finest mesh screen hat, and a nasty case of West Nile.

It makes me yearn for January.

Regis and I went to a comedy show last night. The weather forecast was for thunderstorms and high winds but the venue is right down the street and it's a one story brick building so I felt safe. Remember that scene from Twister where the cars are blown by a tornado through the screen of the outdoor theater? That could happen.

During one of the breaks, we talked about how we have been retreating to books and stories this summer, hiding from the world. We both have felt, during the day as we go about our business, the anxious calling of a book. The difference is that I read escape literature and Regis reads science fiction and dystopian literature. That might be worse than reality.

It was so hot yesterday that the smell of hot asphalt recalled memories of other hot summers in the past. I'm writing another post in my head about that. Funny how smells are so evocative of memories.

Well, onward my friends, into the heat and humidity and windblown rain. Have a pleasant day.

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Winter Grace

by Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed-down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over; your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Permission Granted

by David Allen Sullivan

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don't have to bury
your grandmother's keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube—the machine's wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.
You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world's pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides.

"Permission Granted" by David Allen Sullivan,

from Strong-Armed Angels.

Gratitude by Barbara Crooker

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war

grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,

or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of

for twenty or thirty miserable years—

And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man

with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times

have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines

through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves

as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree

that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:

cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,

and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,

so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,

Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world

sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s

sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock—

And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,

the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,

finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,

know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing

on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,

flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.

And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands

in gratitude, bend to the sky.

From Line Dance (Word Press, 2008).

Starfish by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Do Not Expect That If Your Book Falls Open

Dana Gioia

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

Riveted by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

"Riveted" by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace: Poems 1997-2002

I Was Always Leaving by Jean Nordhaus

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself

Barbara Crooker

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.