leaf

– A huge disconnect

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"At the Edge of the Quarry," July 2008

"At the Edge of the Quarry," July 2008

There is much beauty in the world and its people.

(Dear Reader, I beg your patience. In this post I’m going to attempt to start at beauty and end up at crisis. At this moment of beginning, I’m not sure I’ll find the path.)

There is much beauty in the world and its people. That is what I feel and what I believe. I would say, too, that beauty is what I see around me; it is my nearest and often most vivid experience. Children, what grows from the ground, surfaces, words on pages, good hearts. Beauty is real to me.

Last week I was in San Francisco, the first time since 1987, and I stayed with my friends Marcia and Steve, who live near the Presidio. On my first evening there, Steve and dog Henry walked me up there to look out over the city and across to Alcatraz and Angel Island, the Bay Bridge, a cemetery, the Golden Gate. We walked through cypress and eucalyptus trees that composed a woods both magical and spooky, and everywhere in the air was their scent.

Good words fail at these overwhelming moments. Continue reading →

– Paper whites

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paperwhites13It was time.

The paper whites — the ones we had forced indoors in jars around the holidays — were spent and blossomless, and still we let them sit there, leaves flopped over the jar rims, on the table and mantle.

Outside, enough snow has melted that I see dirt everywhere.

This morning I put the jars on the back steps that go from the old screened porch down into the yard. I went into the kitchen and put on my coat, slipped on my boots. In the garage, I found the small spade and pruners.

Near the southeast corner of the house, where it warms early in the spring, I dug a mini trench, about six inches deep. Into the damp cold dirt I pressed the four bulbs, with their whiskery roots, some even holding on still to the pebbles from the jars. Continue reading →

For hungry gardeners

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Betsy and I drove out to Broadmoor today to walk the trails. Unlike in Boston and Cambridge, however, which experienced rain and melt in the past week or so, the walkways out in the far suburbs — especially in the wooded shade — are not cleared of ice. We tried for 20 minutes, then laughed at our slippery efforts and quit.

We left Broadmoor and headed to the Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College, free and open to the public every single day of the year. Perhaps 10 miles at most from the Hub, in the midst of this New England winter it’s another world, indoors. Cacti, succulents, orchids, fish, ferns, flowering trees, forced bulbs, water, and two other women, who, in their own words, were “trying to learn to sketch.” And it seemed to us as though they had found the right place.

– Day one: salute

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Walnut Hill Cemetery, January 2008.

Walnut Hill Cemetery, January 2008.

These flags, marking the plain graves of veterans in our local cemetery, seem to me to be like the first bulbs of spring, in a way, pushing through as winter hangs on. They remind us to persevere, and look ahead.

I know, I know, my metaphor does not work perfectly, and yet no metaphor does. Still, today I feel the pricklings of hope, as well as the determination of a New England gardener, to roll up my sleeves and make what I can of a new season. What we sow, we sow on old, ancient, and even dead ground, but, still, what grows there can be glorious.

Last night at dinner, the five of us, who watched the Inauguration in five separate locations, talked first about our reactions to the ceremony itself.  And then the talk moved, remarkably, to what we should work on, from the long list of pressing national tasks that clamor for doing.

That Obama’s ethos of work and service reached Jimmy and me, two adults with liberal and even leftist leanings, is no surprise. However, that his message has reached three children, too, is a sign of its power and his tenacity.

I got my shovel out. Gloves are on. Feeling strong. Ready.

– Good use of time?

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Without the energy to start a new knitting or sewing project, much less decide on one, I experimented on knitting the same thing — a small leaf — in different materials: yarn, wire, plastic bag shreds, and dried grass.  The straight-up yarn leaf in marled red came out pretty nice, and it’s in the banner photo above.

With me, Grace sat and clicked her needles, too.  She has a few projects going on, all in yarn.  (She loves beginnings. Me? I like finishing.) She admired my yarn leaf and even the one done up in green plastic, from loops I had cut from a grocery bag.

About my attempt to harvest, tie together, and knit the dried ornamental grass that grows alongside our driveway, she said, “Now that’s a waste of time.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

knitting-grass

“Why are you doing it? It doesn’t even look good!” Grace smiled; I know she loves me.

“It’s an experiment. Somethin’ to do. And I’ll learn something.”

Grace shrugged.

I learned that grass is difficult to tie together securely, although not difficult to knit, albeit with care. Furthermore, odd textiles do not always make for odd beauty — sometimes the result is just a wicked mess.

leafy-leaf

I also was reminded that the mind makes interesting associative leaps while the hands are busy. The needles and my fingers seems like a convergence of beaks; I was a bird among birds, building a nest. For eggs. For baby birds.

Or for baby Moses, in his rush basket on the Nile River, with his sister Miriam watching him.

Or baby Barbie, in his knitted leaf nest on the green chair, with Jane photographing him.

moses

– Circumstantial soup

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I wasn’t intending to buy baby bok choy.  In fact, I had never bought the leafy green before.

But it caught my eye as I strolled the produce display, looking for a red pepper, in my recently re-arranged supermarket. I saw it and my brain leaped to the idea of “Soup!”

Attention-getting label on baby bok choy

Attention-getting label on baby bok choy

When I got home and unloaded the bags, I realized that some other shopper, or maybe even a produce clerk, had put back the bok choy and mistakenly turned the recipe-labeled side of the package so that it was facing the shoppers. On the other side, there is a small label on the big product window, as is normal for packaged greens.  I wouldn’t have bought it (or all the other soup ingredients, which I did), probably, if all I had seen was the usual view.

Perhaps words or information about the leaf persuaded me more than the leaf itself.

In any event, keep reading for my version of the recipe for the soup, which was easy and good. My variations are in purple. Continue reading →

– Earthkeeping

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leaf I cut back the clematis dripping from the arbor, the lone sunflower bowing its mildewed head, the daisy stalks, raspberry canes, baptisia.

I raked. I bagged. Here and there, I picked up stray wrappers and bits of paper and bagged those too.

At the end, I dragged the full paper bags to the street, and I swept the front walk of dirt and leaves.

I swept the dirt back into the dirt.

“Something to do,” I thought.

I remembered how my father, when I was a child, would sweep the road in front of our house every spring. There was sand scattered the whole length of it, sprayed in the winter by the town’s sand trucks, which followed the plows. The spring road sweeping was a ritual. It smelled like minerals and sun. We children tried to play in the sandpiles made by sweeping fathers until we were shooed away.

Then and now — why all the sweeping, raking, trimming? And the repetition.

Do we keep the world neat this way, livable? Maybe.

I wonder, rather, if these chores are what we do to keep busy, keep moving, keep our chins up.