Garden update: Up here in the country every green thing has re-appeared. Every year is its own magic in spring. Finally, the oaks are leafing out from their original pink! toward green greener and dark green. At the moment, toward a light green. Even the 275 year old Resident Spirit oak never looked younger.

Because there's been over 70 inches of rain as well as days of over 90 degree weather, roses are coming on fast. In fact, the Cecile Brunner in the fir tree has come and gone, bloom-wise. The Souvenir de Malmaison has fat buds and they will very probably not last long because of the extremes of temperature, especially the hot days. This is one rose intended for a temperate clime. That's not here, I've learned. Snow and hard frosts are not unheard of in late April. Heat waves are common in early May. The sun's higher now and we should be starting with vegetable planting but we dare not before the end of May. Still I persist in treasuring the one in ten years when everything comes right and all the early roses bloom together, the plants we foolishly plant too early survive.

 The apple trees have bloomed and set fruit, all of them, except for the Jonagold. It's an every other year producer. Even the Santa Rosa plum which usually gets caught by frost has little fruits on it. The quince trees, the two older ones and the two younger ones, the hardiest fruit trees anywhere, I contend, are covered with astonishingly porcelain-like flowers. The fig's doing well though it really shouldn't here in this sink of ours at the bottom of Cahto Peak. We'll have a crop. Maybe enough for a real dessert, maybe enough for scarfing down as we stand there looking at the tree, one evening.Then there are the crabapples so excellent in bloom so much work later.  I'm not looking forward to the way the labor takes over whole days with making crabapple jelly--the two trees went crazy earlier with blooms every inch. Still crabapple jelly on a breakfast biscuit is pretty special.

Don's busy getting the vegetable beds ready--these are round beds! old wine barrels. This year they need to have gopher-stopping material put in the bottoms. Lots of hard work removing the dirt, fortifying it, then putting it back in over the new wire cloth.  Last year the critters broke through the wood bottoms. Down the road, Cindy and Eric have put in huge numbers of strawberry plants--the rows of them are doing fine. Last year it was several rows of strawberries and quantities of kale. This year they have reversed the order. I don't know how they deal with the gophers. Maybe they don't have them. Maybe the gophers haven't made over there. Yet. We tried berries for a couple of years, raspberries, ollalieberries: what the scarlet tanagers didn't get, the robins did. We'd think we had closed up every gap of the net and still the birds, clever guys, found ways in. --I'll never understand why people use the term bird-brain as an insult. We're too greedy for berries for ourselves and too lazy to beat off the birds with complicated netting systems.

We gave up with berries though we persist with a few grape vines along a fence. When the grapes are ready we scramble around finding the ripe bunches. Meanwhile, the pileated woodpeckers scream at us akk-akk-akk-akk, hammer d-d-d-d-d-d on the fence wood, and stare us down--we want those grapes/they REALLY WANT those grapes. It's hard to stare down a woodpecker's unstaring eye. Actually, we grab some bunches anyway and leave the rest to them. Then somehow or other tanagers hear about the crop and they arrive--they come by stealth rather than by woodpecker noise--and flock into the vines saying nothing. Unlike the woodpeckers who eat one grape by one grape, the tanagers strip the stalk--no idea how they manage so many grapes in one gulp. Some old-timers contend that the grape berries can ferment in birds' stomachs, making the birds drunk--? Who knew getting drunk could be so simple--all that smashing and stomping and crushing and straining, refining and bottling is completely unnecessary.

 It's overwhelming to go out in the garden right now: everything is healthy and growing fine and this is a good thing, and you feel right too. Then you look at all the jobs that need doing in the next two months, the weeding, the planting, the water system, the mowing, the hauling, and creaking about on old knees, and you don't feel right.  Every year I forget the garden's rule:  one thing at a time. I eat too fast.

A photo of a woman with wrinkles!

OK.  The New York Times Style magazine is not my go-to section. But this last past Sunday, August 25, I thought that maybe I should take a look. One more time, take a look, see if anything had changed, see if the models still looked...well... miserable.  I did find a very happy looking guy, on page 169, selling Andrew Fezza ware. That was a nice change of pace.  And there was Andrew O'Hagan's article, Laws of Attraction.  "No one can deny the glory of youth, but when a woman's experiences can be read on her face...it is then, and only then, that her true beauty appears,"  I read this and was hooked.

"There has probably never been a period so youth-obsessed as ours: we speak of unlined faces as we once spoke of noble minds..."  I liked that, too. By the end of the article, I got the part about the beauty of youth and the loveliness of aging with confidence and intelligence and the part about women nowadays maybe doing a better job of combining looks and intelligence, feeling better about themselves.   

But I was puzzled, too. Very puzzled, and I wondered a lot about the photos accompanying the article. Were they really Mr. O'Hagan's choice, and if so, what was he thinking? Weren't there any available photos at all of beautifully grown women?--They exist. I know they do. But rarely, if ever, in this part of the newspaper. How odd. If the choice was not Mr. O'Hagan's then who was it at the magazine who could have been so laughably (and rather pathetically) out of touch with what's out here in the world, as well as, so wrong about the gist of Mr. O'Hagan's article?   Who was it who thought that photos of young women would make a good match for an article about the beauty of old (older) women? Is the fashion world really that afraid? A photo of a woman with wrinkles or a woman with a figure? O shock, o horror. Can someone there at the magazine or newspaper explain this to me? What century is this?

Back Again

No entries here in 2012. Hm-m. I'm still not sure that my venture into blogdom isn't delusional. Still. There are some more of my poems at Yourdailypoem.com (look in the Archives drop-down) and at Haiku.com. Thanks for having a look. Contact me if you'd like to see more. GHC

To one particular mocking bird on the last day of March, 2011:

There you are, you sit on the limb of a sycamore and you run through your repertory; it’s long and I recognize only bits of gull song, Brewer’s blackbird, hummingbird, sparrow. You sit on that bough, under the same sun as I, same blue sky, a blueness, which the New York Times today explained calmly for its readers. You sing. I sit at my desk. Your song sounds urgent, pretty but urgent, because it is spring and finally it’s warm, the rain has moved on, for now, and you want to get on with business--dreary to work in the damp and wet of rain. I think this for myself and for you. I don’t want to envy you. After all, you are “only a bird,” and what does a bird know, compared to me? Do you know what I know? Do you know what’s happening while you and I are busy? Do you know about us making electricity in a very special way? in nuclear power plants, all so that we can have more things? and that these plants have fuel rods that are extremely dangerous while they’re producing electricity and even more dangerous after they aren’t making electricity? Do you know that, right now, as you sit in the sycamore and I at my desk, right near us, we have a lot of these spent fuel rods? even more than in Japan?--It’s a dream of ours to always have more than anyone else of any one thing. But, and here is the best part: neither they nor we, nor anyone anywhere knows what to do with all of these rods except keep them cool forever? Forever. Do you even know about forever? Used to be, forever was God’s purview. What am I going to do with forever? Cooling fuel rods forever. Live forever so that I can keep something cool forever, keep something covered with water forever, not hobnob with angels before God’s throne forever, as I’d been promised. No angels, no sherbet fed to me by beautiful maidens, no return for my descendents, generation after generation, until we get it right. No, forever I’ll be guarding spent fuel rods. Forever. You don’t even know this, you poor bird, you. You get to come and go, find food, defecate every once and a while, defend your nest, sing until it’s time to turn over the keys to the next tenants.

GHC

At the start

In the beginning is the word and, o you youth who wants to know, this is the beginning, thanks to you.