restingmotion

In the Garden

I finished planting the vegetable garden on Saturday.

This photo was taken about 5:30 Saturday evening, shortly after I finished planting and before going out to a Mother's Day dinner.  It quite possibly illustrates a potential problem with the current layout.  For example the tomatoes are in the bed that is in the shade in this photo, on the lower end of the garden, on the far right of the picture.  I believe they get enough sun beginning early early enough in the day so that sun after 6 PM is not an issue, but I do not know that yet since I have not really been home during the day since planting, I have not been able to confirm the path of the sun in regards to this particular spot. It is too late to change things however.  Whatever happens, the garden is planted as it is planted, and it will either thrive or not. 

 

Last year I only planted half the beds and did so with no planning.  I was not thinking of the future.  I was not thinking about crop rotation.  I just stuck plants in willy nilly and the layout I chose was not actually the most conducive to a long-term rotation schedule.  The tomatoes are in the only place they can be this summer, but this location will also allow me to work out a more suitable plan for the future.

 

The entire garden bed layout is further south than it should have been, closer to the telephone pole than was indicated on the blueprints, so they are further into shady territory than anticipated. Once again, since the landscaper built the beds when I was out of town, without telling me in advance, I had little say in the matter.  This year will simply be another experiment to see what works and what does not.  There is room to build additional beds if needed, heading into the bright space at the right side of the picture. Gardening is always a learning process, and experiment, and a bit of an exercise in letting go of control.  I am fortunate that I can have this garden, but will not starve if it fails. 

 

Sunday morning I flew to Texas to see my mom.  It had been sixteen months since my previous visit. I returned home Tuesday afternoon, and spent most of Wednesday at the hospital for tests.  Today will be the first time I have spent much time in the yard since I left.  Admittedly I am all eager and excited, waiting for seeds to sprout in the vegetable garden.  The bok choy bed should really be the first to germinate.  The tomatoes and peppers are doing well, as are the globe and Japanese eggplants.  Someone has been nibbling on the fairy tale eggplants however, and I am wondering if I need to run around trying to find replacements.  I loved my fairy tale eggplant last summer. 

While I was away the garden has burst into bloom. The blackberries are covered in blossoms, and the roses that are mixed with the blackberries along the deck railing are also full of buds.  The blueberries are covered in fruit. 

The Louisiana irises and the flag iris are a riot of deep purples and blues.  This is one of the Louisiana irises above.  It still needs to be transplanted to its permanent home, but seems to be thriving here, and if it needs to sit out another season it will not be a tragedy.

 

I will admit that I loved being in Texas. The weather was cool, in the 60's, like Knoxville of late, and it was too easy to forget that I don't love the heat.  I do love the openness of the landscape, the depth and breadth of the sky.  I find that sense of open space calming, and even like the way the city spreads out as if space is endless. The scale of Dallas fits the scale of its landscape.  I can accept the contradiction in these feelings, my love of the open space, of having to drive to get places, and my urge to keep human spaces compact and more environmentally friendly.  I admit that I sometimes feel the dense growth of parts of the east coast, of the Hudson Valley, where I lived before, and here in Tennessee, is almost claustrophobic.  There is alway growth. Some part of me prefers to see the sky touch the earth on a distant horizon, finds comfort in seeing for miles, for knowing what is coming at you across distances. I used to have nightmares of being consumed by plants in my sleep.  I am beyond that now, but that Western sense of space still soothes.

 

I can also admit that although I miss that broad expanse of the sky, that I find it calming, I also love coming home to my garden, to seeing the flowers, even to loving the lushness of it all, even though some of that excess remains weeds.

Even though it is the sunny garden that is in bloom at the moment, it is the shade garden that draws me in.  I am a creature suited to shade. Of course the hellebores are still in bloom, the hydrangeas are leafing out, the hostas and heucheras are lush. In so many ways I am blessed with this garden, even when it leaps ahead of me.

 

I love coming home.

A Reading Update: April and Beyond

Somehow my reading plans for the year have shifted.  Here is my Summer Reading List.  I will read other books of course, but this is a more focused list, one to see me throughout the rest of the year.  I am one of those people who likes to learn as much as I can about whatever I find myself involved in, and the thought of learning about cancer is calming.  Since I cannot, at the moment, ignore cancer, I can learn as much as I can about it.

As you will see from my April list, I've already read two of these books, and yet they remain on the stack.  I actually shelved them and brought them back.  I have referred back to both books repeatedly, and both have excellent references and I also have a growing list of articles to work my way through.  Best to keep them at hand.

 

But what about April?  My reading in April was scattershot and unfocused.  Often my head wasn't in it.  Sometimes I was simply depressed, sometimes I was simply too tired.  It doesn't matter.  It seems likely that I will not reach my 120 book goal for the year, but then so what.  No one is keeping track but me, and it is a minor distraction. No groupings this month, simply fiction, and nonfiction.

30.  Jane Harper, The Survivors.

31. Danielle Girard, White Out.

32. Siddhartha Mukerjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

33. Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist

34. Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind.

35. Paulette Jiles, News of the World.

36.  Avrom Bluming, Estrogen Matters.

37. Việt Thanh Nguyễn, The Sympathizer.

38. Winifred Peck, Bewildering Cares. 

 

I started the month in need of some escapist reading and, as it turns out, The Survivors was not the best book for my state of mind.  It is beautifully written, but although it centered around a murder, it is really a slow-burn character study filled with gloom and the narrator's sense of guilt.  Given my own state of mind I found it difficult, but I stuck with it and I actually liked the ending, which pulled the story together.   I think, in a different frame of mind, I would have liked this very much as it is a very good exploration of how tragedy, as well as mindset and the assumptions and stories people tell about the tragedy, marks and changes people.  In this case a murder resurrects long buried but not dead feelings about an earlier tragedy, and the reader gets to see how those memories and fears have shaped both individuals and a town.  There are inconsistencies in the accepted version of what happened in the past, but no one really sees them because they have already formed their own narrative.  In some ways, when the truth arises, it seems like it came out of left field, except that it had been present all along, in the subtext.  I found the novel fascinating, tragic, sad, but also hopeful in some ways.

 

Still looking for some kind of escape, I next picked up Danielle Girard's White Out. It opened well, and I did finish it, but again I struggled.  I perhaps could have forgiven the rough transitions, the holes in the plot, the disparate themes that were never quite connected, had the characters felt more compelling.  But to this reader they seemed so immature and inconsistent, behaving in ways that made no sense, and the inconsistencies were never pulled together in any coherent way.  Mostly I was just constantly annoyed with the lead detective, Kylie, who struck me as self-centered, illogical and often downright stupid.  Heaven help this fictional town, but at least my annoyance, and my desire to learn what had happened to the one interesting, but still too inconsistently drawn character, Lily, drove me forward.  Kylie does not interest me, so this will not be a series I will pursue further. 

 

After two iffy attempts with fiction I leapt into Siddhartha Mukerjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, which had been sitting on my shelf for what, a decade, now?  This was the distraction I needed.  I plowed through it as if it were the most gripping novel. I read hungrily.  I jotted notes and held conversations with myself.  I could not put the book down.  Yes, there was a lot of information, yes the author has some writing tics that I found annoying, but I think the book was compelling and beautifully written with wonderful metaphors and great flow.  Perhaps this too was just me, but reading about cancer as I started my own cancer journey proved to be a very calming thing.

 

The next book on my list, Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Antiracist,  just showed up because my turn finally arrived on the county library wait list.  It is an excellent book, a well written book, a book I am glad I read.  But I wanted to like it more than I did. Maybe if I had read it sooner.  I am grateful for Kendi's argument that you are either a racist or an antiracist, and his exploration of how racist ideas sneak into our consciousness without our even realizing they are there. I like the way Kendi explores the development of his own understandings as a kind of guidebook to how we can look at ourselves, the way he tells us that just because we do not know we are racist, we are not absolved from the responsibility of rooting out our own misconceptions and hurtful ideas.  There are some issues, more than we would like in fact, and racism is a big one, in which there really is no neutral territory.  You are either upholding it or trying to tear it down.  Unfortunately, and Kendi reminds us of this, the act of tearing down always starts within.  I am either upholding a system that harms others, or I am trying to fight it.  There really is no middle ground. I write this as the Tennessee legislature is attempting to legislate what can and cannot be taught about racism and American history.  I find this morally heinous.  There is no middle ground, I am either upholding racism, or I am acting to fight it.  If one does not acknowledge one's history of failings one cannot become a better person.  We all have failings, admitting them is not the same as saying we are bad people, only that we are flawed, as are we all.  I am either a racist or an antiracist. I hope I can become the latter.

 

After Kendi I returned to fiction.  Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is a fascinating novel, very low key, but the very sense of detachment that the author employs serves to emphasize the disconnect here, the disconnect between what is happening in the world and what we want to be happening, between what really is and what we see, between how we act and who we think we are.  A middle-class and fairly middle-brow white family is renting a house on Long Island for a summer vacation.  They want to pretend that this is their house, their life, if only for a moment.  But then a black couple knocks on the door in the middle of the night, claiming to be the owners, seeking refuge from a disaster as yet unfelt in this vacation world.  Everything is challenged.  The internet is out, the news is out.  When there is no information people are driven both by fear and by hope, including the irrational hope that if they just can get back to their old life all will be well.  This is not so much an apocalyptical or even post-apocalyptical novel, but a pre-appocalyptical novel.  What happens when we don't know what is happening?  How do we behave? Who do we become?  Fascinating.

 

Next I picked up News of the World, which I had read before.  It holds up well on rereading.  I watched the movie as well.  Much as I enjoyed the movie, I still prefer the book, but then I almost always do.  Jiles captures Texas as I know it and remember it in her prose, the space, the landscape, even the history and the people.  I am reminded that I intended to read The Captured after my first reading of this novel, the true story of children captured by Indians.  I still have not gotten to that, but I will even though life intervenes.  I am also reminded that the Indian problem has been a problem throughout American history, not the problem of Indians killing settlers, but the problem of settlers who, once exposed to Indian culture did not want to return to their European roots. This dates back to Plymouth Rock, to early Virginia.  What does this tell us about our own civilization, about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves?  Reading this book again, especially following Alam's novel, the difference between Captain Kidd, who is very much a realist who deals with the world and what he needs to do, and Alam's characters, self-obsessed with their own bubbles and their neediness, so self-absorbed they don't really see others clearly, is striking.  Don't know where I am going with this yet, but that thought hovers.

 

I picked up Estrogen Matters after listening to an interview with the author on Peter Attia's podcast.  I have long been interested in the topic.  I went through menopause early, and was diagnosed about the time the a report was published from the Women's Health Initiative (2002) stating that HRT was dangerous and it increased the risks of cancer, stroke, hart disease and death.  Despite the fact that I had severe symptoms and was only in my early 40s, my doctor's refused to give me HRT. They continued to refuse, even as it became evident that this was not at all what the study found, that this report came from a misinterpretation of the data and it was not vetted by the scientists undertaking the study, that the risks were exaggerated or downright wrong.  I knew this because I had a tendency to read all my husband's medical journals from cover to cover. Yet I still could not convince my doctor.  It may or may not be too late for me now, nearly 20 years later, but there is all kinds of interesting information in this book, and all kinds of reference material available for follow-up.  I love a book that makes me think, and makes me reexamine my assumptions.

 

Next, I finally read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer.  I read it now because his next novel The Committed came up on my library queue and I wanted to read The Sympathizer first.  I was completely blown away. It is a novel that it is almost disturbing in its intelligence, in its unsparing look at the world and the foibles of humanity. And yet it is not really polemical fiction.  It is brilliant and sharp, clever and touching. The author has a way of capturing a feeling, a place, a pivotal moment with such clarity that the reader feels the emotion of the time and is connected to his or her own pivotal moments, a way of capturing the mindset of its participants, of exploring a culture, its strengths and its discontents without really preaching.  It is a very clever book, at times bitterly sarcastic, at time outrageously funny, and although it takes place in the past it is still relevant to our lives today and our future.  As you can tell, I loved this book and was primed for the next one.  I am in the middle of reading The Committed now. 

 

I actually started Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck before I picked up The Sympathizer.  I usually like these mid-twentieth century novels of women's lives, and I usually like the novels of Winifred Peck.  But I struggled to engage with this one.  I suspect that I really needed a book that took me outside of myself, a book like The Sympathizer, and Bewildering Cares was just a little too slow for my agitated and peripatetic mind.  It is the fictional journal of a week in the life of a vicar's wife during a week in 1940, the story of a middle aged woman of some wit, who loves her husband and her parish even though she is often exasperated with the petty cares and trials of life. The novel is somewhat more serious and less light-hearted than Peck's other novels, but still funny, and I did love Camilla's constant obsession with the small things, when there were big things brewing all around.  But this is so much like most of us I found it endearing.   So there you have it, I enjoyed the book even as I struggled to read it.  A bit of an oxymoron, no?  But then, when did being human actually ever really make sense?

 

 

 

The Irises

Several of the irises are in bloom.  The Louisiana iris have bloomed but I neglected to snap pictures, and there are several winter-blooming irises, which are, of course, out of season.

There are these small irises, iris Japonica, named Porcelain Maiden.  The foliage suffered a bit as it was covered by a downed laurel for too long and so it is difficult to capture the masses of tiny blossoms.  I had worried that they were too heavily shaded, as very little light got to them before the laurel was removed.  Either they were happy enough, or this was a difficult last gasp.  I need to watch them closely over the coming year, as now that the laurel is gone, they may now get too much sun.  Below is a detail shot.

The older patch of roof iris, Iris Tectorum, is also in bloom.  

These are named "Slippery Slope"  and they are blooming well.  Below is a detail shot with a bit of an early morning glow.

I planted more roof iris last year, but they are not yet in bloom.  Since they were gifted, and I do not remember the specifics from my friend's garden, the specifics shall be a surprise..

Finally, iris versicolor, is in full bloom.  This is actually a hybridized version of the native blue flag iris, named John Wood. Above is a single flower that I also posted on instagram, but there are about 8 open now.  I transplanted this in a bit of a rush last year, as it was not happy in its temporary holding spot, which was too shaded.  It had been rescued from trampling by the  men with boots and heavy equipment attacked my yard, and seems quite happy in its new home.  Certainly I am happy seeing its blossoms out my kitchen window.

 

I still plan on putting tall bearded iris and dutch irises as well.  As you might surmise I am not convinced that there is such a thing as too many irises, too many hellebores, too many hydrangeas.  We will see what else fills out my garden as it continues to evolve.

 

 

Five Things Friday

I weeded a section of flower bed yesterday and I planted 9 plants.  I hoped to do more but rain and tiredness won. After today I will be able to lift 10 pounds again, or more, and that will make gardening easier as well.   It sounds like such a little thing, but if I plant 9 things every day, and perhaps some seeds in the vegetable garden, everything will be planted and in before the chemo kicks in and steals my ambition.    There will of course be days when it rains, or I have to many appointments, so a little fudge factor is included.  It is a manageable goal, and manageable goals are good things right now.

 

Otherwise, it has been a long time since I have done a "five things" post, and it seems about time.

Gifts from friends:  I posted this photo on Instagram earlier this week.  A few things that brightened my life following surgery.  Each of these is perfect, kind, distracting, soothing -- but more than the things itself it is the thoughts and kindnesses even the smallest kindnesses, that remind me of how fortunate I truly am.

Jar Weights:  After my fermenting session with Owen, I was thinking about fermentation weights and the impracticality of the glass weights that came in the fermentation kit I gave Owen for Christmas. Or at least they seemed impractical to me.  They fit in the jars, but as a single piece, nearly the width of the wide mouth jar, they seemed like they may be difficult to remove, at least to someone with arthritic hands like myself.  I wondered if anyone made weights for mason jars that were like the weights that are made for crocks -- in two pieces.  Lo and behold there are such brilliant people in the world.  I love these.  I haven't used them yet, but garden season, and fermenting season will soon be upon us.

Yarn and Knitting:  I now have two cardigans in process.  Yes, I started something new and relatively mindless, something suitable for tired evenings and post-anesthesia mental fog.  And even though I am supposed to be knitting down the stash, which I am, more yarn arrived.   In the April box from L'Atelier were the yarns to finally start my blanket squares.  Those are the yellow and green yarns at the top of the photo.  More amazing to me were the yarns that came for a new sweater project,  the variegated yarn and the three yarns right around it.  Notice how perfectly they coordinate with the current stripe in the sweater I was knitting as I attended the zoom and opened the box, with the blue and wine yarns.  Of course I will not be wearing these garments together, but they are my happy colors, the colors of this moment in my heart.   I don't have a picture of the sweater, or I would show you, but for me, the idea for a garment always starts with the yarn, with the color, or with the fabric if I am sewing.  I never start out thinking "I need this dress", I start out with "oooh isn't that lovely, what does it want to be?"  Of course my wardrobe could use some specific item-oriented planning as well.  But that is not today's topic.

Mirror Reflections:  I continue to be fascinated by reflections in this rolled glass mirror, which was admittedly placed in the hall to reflect the light, not for photography sessions.   But still, but there is something specific about the lack of clarity, the breaking up of the image into separate panes, the reminder that everything we present to the world is exactly that, a shifting mask.  Oh, I should stop philosophizing.  Even though I need a mirror where I can take good photos, especially as I start sewing and fitting, I still think I prefer the vague.  This mirror reminds me of fog, something else I love, and the way it shifts our perceptions of the world around us.

Friends, Flowers, Impromptu Moments:  Flowers, dropped off by a talented friend.  Wine and conversation with other friends.  The impromptu note.  A new favorite cracker.  A prayer. A silly text GIF.  It is our community that sustains us, soothes us, strengthens us, each according to his or her own gifts and focus.  I am constantly surprised.  I think that is what I wish for, to be constantly surprised by people, by life, by the good that surrounds us, often untapped.   

 

Gardening in Slow Motion

This is my front yard as seen from the master bedroom window.

I took the photo a week ago, Sunday the 18th.  Since then the field of green weeds on the right hand side of the center island has been filled with little yellow flowers, flowers which gladden my heart, even though, yes, I know they are weeds.  I love violets too, and apparently do not care if there are violets or clover in my lawn.  Something to consider for the future, but at the moment the lawn is something green I don't have to think about.  The same can be said for those areas of the garden that I am not yet ready to plant.  Weeds are Mother Nature's interim plantings.

 

Weeds and all, the vista makes me smile.  The center brown area, between the slates and the road, contains the blueberry bushes, and I hope to have small annuals beneath them, preferable to my eye over mulch, or, eventually, some form of ground cover.   I am the kind of gardener that wants the beds filled with a panoply of growing things.  To the right of the stones is where the three peonies were transplanted, and I am still in the process of  planting Columbine and other perennials to fill the space.  Something similar will take place to the left of the blueberries, in the still-weed-filled green patch.  More peonies, a rose, some delphiniums -- all are planned but not yet planted.  I hoped for this spring but plans may have been interrupted.  More about that later.

Next photo.  Still looking north, slightly to the east of the first photo.  This bed, along the east side of the house, was the only part of the yard I disliked when I bought the house, now it is much more my garden.  Hydrangeas, coreopsis, daffodils, irises, nepeta, even a stray peony are located here and are beginning to fill in nicely.  The laurel that is falling down has finally been removed, and replaced.  I suppose I should update the photos, but that is not going to happen today, not for this post.  

Ther azaleas between the fence and the driveway are thriving, blooming intermittently, and there are more plants to go around the curved wall near the steps to the circle, all planned and ordered before I knew the course my summer would take.  If you look you will see plants lined up, awaiting new homes, in the lower portions of the top two photos.  I will get to them in time.  Life is like that sometimes, and I grow annoyed with interruptions, but there is nothing to do but live with them.

 

The top two photos were taken two days after I had a partial mastectomy for a breast cancer that showed up on my mammogram in March.  Remember that week I was crying?  I was crying because I had to have a biopsy, my first, and I was tired of doctors and hospitals, tired of illness and exhaustion, of broken noses and broken heart rhythms.  I felt it was silly to cry over a biopsy as 80% are negative.  It was as much frustration as it was fear: I was finally starting to feel good, starting to walk and work in the garden and it didn't seem fair.  Well, no one ever said life would be fair.

 

I've gotten over that now.  There is no help for it.  Now I am in fight mode.  It seems I have an aggressive little breast cancer but it also appears we have caught it early and my summer will revolve around chemotherapy with radiation to follow in the fall.  Many women have done this before me. Many more will follow.   My primary goal is beating back the invader and reclaiming my body. My body is a war zone and I cannot make predictions as to what I will or will not do, when or what I will, or will not, write.  

The last photo is of an iris, a Louisiana iris, that opened the morning I had my surgery.  I missed it at its peak.  We had cold temperatures and it only lasted a day or two.  In this photo, taken that same Sunday, two days after surgery, it is already waning, but still beautiful. I love it even as it begins to curl and fade -- the grace is in the living not the perfect moment of full actualization, something ephemeral that we somehow always seem to miss anyway both in the world around us, and in our own lives. Even these photos, celebrating a past already lost in the mists, reminds me of the multi-faceted nature of every moment, reminds me of the fractal geometry of memory.

 

Life really isn't about what happens or doesn't happen, it is about how you chose to deal with it, or chose not to deal as the case may be.  It is about where you chose to find beauty and joy, and what, when, and where you chose to let go.

 

Good grief I say! Enough is enough.  And if I were talking to you in person I would probably say exactly what I can't write -- I am going put every effort into kicking this M-F-B (imagine the swear words here) in the balls.  I will knit or sew or cook when I can as these things all soothe my soul. My hands will be in the soil.  I will write whenever those splintered moments of clarity arise. 

Fermenting with Owen

Last week I started a batch of  sauerkraut. and, somehow thinking that too much was never enough, I also started a large batch of kimchi.  Owen came over to help and we made more. I started with three heads of cabbage, with a total weight of between 9 and 10 pounds, and two large heads of Napa.

I had already started chopping cabbage for a batch of sauerkraut when Owen texted and inquired about making some pickles or ferments.  This is sliced more thinly than my last batch of sauerkraut, but thicker than is traditional.  I am okay with that.  I have learned that I am not a sauerkraut purist, and that I not only like a variety of textures, I may prefer them.  Nine pounds of cabbage was shredded to become sauerkraut.

By the time Owen arrived it had been salted and massaged and was resting.  In this photo the cabbage has already begun to relax and release its brine.  I always intend to buy more, larger, bowls, but why do so when pots work just as well?

 

Owen brought another 2 1/2  pounds of cabbage, some beets, and a couple of cucumbers. I had a generous bunch of carrots, but I only needed about half of them for my kimchi.   We decided that Owen would make a beet and cabbage sauerkraut and a carrot, cabbage and cucumber kimchi.  In all of the excitement of having company in the kitchen, I forgot to take pictures, so these are all after the process was finished.

I got the kimchi started.  Here it is in a large Le Creuset pot.  Although many kimchi's start by cutting whole Napa cabbage into lengthwise quarters, I prefer this batch to be chopped into large chunks.  This particular batch sat out a couple of days before being moved into the refrigerator, where it resides now. The intention was to make a fairly young, sparkly, kimchi.

 

While I worked on the kimchi, Owen added the salted cabbage to the fermentation crock and pounded it down to make a good brine.  Those three large cabbages filled my large, three gallon, fermentation crock a little over half full. That batch of sauerkraut is still in the basement fermenting away where it needs at least another week or two, possibly more as it has been cool and the basement cool as well.

 

Then we finished up Owen's ferments.  The sauerkraut is pretty simple:   beets, cabbage, salt.  Owen did some spice testing and added celery seed, caraway seed and a bit of cumin seed as well.  The beets turn the sauerkraut a lovely shade of pink.  The kimchi is also red, but that is mostly from the Korean Chile powder.  That one has carrots, regular cabbage, and cucumbers as well as other standard kimchi components, including fish sauce and salted shrimp.  They both had excellent flavor when they left my house, and Owen tells me they are progressing nicely.

 

Because I had some extra cucumbers I also tried a short cucumber kimchi-style pickle, inspired by David Chang.  That has turned into a softer condiment, something I can only think of as a kimchi-pickle-relish type of hybrid.  But I don't really know anything about cucumber kimchi.  I only know that mine is soft, has the consistency of pickle relish but the funky umami of kimchi, and was excellent on a hamburger for lunch yesterday.

 

 

March Books -- Taking Flight and Settling In

It has been a long time since I have actually wanted to throw a book at the wall, years in fact, but March of 2021 proved exceptional in that there were two such books in my reading queue, although only one actually took flight.  The second was a digital edition and I was loathe to break my iPad in a fit of pique. 

 

But first, what did I read?

 

21.  Mary Beth Keane,  Ask Again, Yes.

22. Annette Valentine, Down to the Potter's House.

23. Joe Ide, Wrecked.

24. Kristin Neff, Self Compassion.

25. Joe Ide, Hi Five. 

26. Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half.

27. Bill Gates, How to Avoid A Climate Disaster.

28. Ivan Doig,  The Whistling Season.

29. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance.

 

Mostly March was about reading fiction, but there were two exceptions, one of which I finished, one which I did not.  If you follow this blog you know I read How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which I wrote about here. It is an interesting book, and a useful book, but rather lightweight.  I believe this was the intent. Still although I feel Gates occasionally glosses over individual responsibility, he brings insight and the book is worth reading. If you are interested in greater detail on energy use, driving, and individual responsibility, my friend Grace has put up a remarkable series of posts recently, which I highly recommend.

 

Which gets me to the other non-fiction book, and one of the two books that earned a flight rating.  I have heard Kristin Neff speak, and I do think her book Self Compassion makes some important points about the way we treat ourselves and how that relates to our compassion for others, and about the dangers of self-criticism and the tendency to push oneself with mental abuse when one feels one is not achieving at a desired level.  This is, in a sense, the protestant ethic and self actualization gone horribly awry.  But the language of the book itself, and the examples just drove me crazy.  It seemed shallow and self-indulgent to me, which is a shame because it is not a trivial subject.  This is the book I literally threw at the wall, with a loud verbal "bah".  This doesn't mean this book is bad.  As I said the information is important.  And I am certain that Neff's approach will help many, many whom could not be reached perhaps by the kind of book that would appeal to me.  In fact I do not believe the book is trivial or shallow, but it is written from a perspective that does not align with my own perspective, either culturally or generationally, and that this is one of its strengths, because if this explosion of self-criticism that Neff sees is indeed a growing phenomenon, a cancer even, it is perhaps even more a problem in younger generations than in my own.  Just because this is not MY book, does not mean it is not an important book.

 

Alas I have less to say about the second flight-worthy book.  As you might recall, I was not thrilled with the first Annette Valentine novel, which I read in February for a book club.  I purchased both books in kindle format, and I was determined to read the second with an open mind.  I did not succeed.  Whereas, with Eastbound from Flagstaff, I found the story compelling enough to drive me forward despite my struggles with sanctimonious language and less than artful transitions, I found that I simply could not read Down to the Potter's House.  I believe the subject matter of the novel should have been compelling, and perhaps the language was not an issue for those drawn to this kind of Christian historical family drama, but I found the language artificial, sanctimonious, and the story, oddly, without soul. Had I not read Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Shakespeare and Tolkien, Saunders and Murakami, perhaps I would have found this novel rich.  This does not mean that reading certain kinds of books makes me a better person, it does not, but because what I have absorbed from those books as inalterably changed my perception of the world. In that sense this is a problem of my own internal wiring and my own perspective on things seen and unseen.

 

Notice that I balanced the two flight-worthy books with two books in Joe Ide's IQ series, Wrecked and Hi Five.  Both are over the top suspense/crime novels. Both were adequately distracting.  I don't know that this was planned, but it was certainly intentional as I felt I needed some kind of shock to my system, palate-cleansing, novel following each of the previously mentioned books.

The rest of the month was occupied with novels, and rather good novels at that.

 

I started with Mary Beth Keane's novel Ask Again, Yes, which is a sensitive and humanizing novel about small things, about the human condition really.  The story revolves around the intertwined stories of two families of NYPD officers who move to the suburbs.  It spans decades and, although this is the story of these  particular families, it is also a story that could be told on almost every block in every city in America.  The telling is straightforward, from the perspectives of several of the characters, and although there were moments in each telling that I wanted to roust the characters out of their own self-absorbed pity, I also have to admit that I have to do the same thing to myself, and this is very much a story of late 20th Century America.  That said, although I found this novel mostly satisfying, I wanted to like it a bit more than I did.  At times the main characters seemed more like wraiths, as if they existed merely to illustrate an emotion, a reaction, an internal state, rather than becoming characters fully formed. It felt as if their internal lives, or specific aspects of their internal lives, were more important than any external aspects of their lives, or even the complexities that makes us fully human.  I found the novel deft, intriguing and deeply thought-provoking but somehow still wanting.  I wanted to know these characters deeply but felt I could only grab onto their shadow-selves.

 

Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half was much more rewarding but suffered to some extent from the same malaise.  Here, identical twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes grow up in a small town in Louisiana, a bubble of isolation and racism although all the residents of Mallard are "light".  In many ways this story is a fairy tale and unapologetically so, but fairy tales give us a structure for examining truth and culture, and The Vanishing Half does this well.  Mallard is an almost mythical town, which eventually disappears, never officially recorded as it is, more a state of mind than a place, where the residents pride themselves on their lightness, and take pride on their breeding -- only with people lighter than themselves -- yearning to be white, but never actually crossing that line.  It is no surprise that the girls, Stella and Desiree, in leaving this fishbowl of their upbringing cross that line in different ways.  Stella, light, becomes white, marries a wealthy man, and moves into an entirely different world whereas her sister Desiree, or desire,  marries the seemingly blackest man she can find and produces a child, Jude, with "blue-black" skin, escapes for a while, but ends up back in Mallard, almost as if some part of her feels she must atone for her love of "blackness".  The sisters are separated for decades, each living in their own special kind of hell, riddled by their own absorbed prejudices, fears, and sense of inadequacy.  They are ultimately brought together again through their daughters, but are never fully reunited. This is a fascinating and moving novel which explores the deep psychological loathing and pain brought about by racism, the way it is absorbed, the way it taints perception and creates both fear and need, a need that in its own yearning causes yet more pain and keeps the characters from finding connection, even when that connection would benefit them and bring some degree of healing. This novel is hauntingly sad, and filled with heart-rending moments of human cruelty to one another, but it also shows the toll this cruelty takes on the victim's self-esteem and the ongoing repercussions, in perpetuated bias, denial, lack of self-esteem, echoed over generations, which steal joy from people's lives.  Some of these characters do find a place of acceptance, and although I found the book poignantly sad and unsettling, it is also thought provoking and well worth the investment in reading time.

 

After the depths of Bennett, I stumbled into The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. This is a book filled with well drawn, complicated characters, and with beautifully evocative writing.   It is another "small" novel, by which I mean a novel about family, about a time, a place, a moment really, less than a year, when a boy begins the process of observation and outside awareness that will lead him from childhood to adulthood, and the realization of the deeper, sometimes hidden consequences of action and inaction, or the choices involved in becoming a caring, responsible adult.  It is also an homage to place, to a time now gone, to the spirit of the American West and the people who made it. It is a novel about deeply invested in the joy and power of language and a novel for the reader who loves the beauty and power of words and the images and emotions they invoke.  If you can't tell, I adored this novel, and, of the three novels discussed so far, it may be the novel I've written the least about, but it is the novel I would most likely consider reading again.

 

Which brings me to Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, a novel I have just read for the third time.  The first time I read this book, shortly after it came out, I certainly loved it, and saved it, thinking it was the kind of big grand book one could throw oneself into.  And there it rested, on my shelves, through two moves but I am not certain I read it again until three years ago, when I was packing it up, yet again, for yet another move.  It is always a gamble with a book one has not reread for decades, and it could have gone either way.  Certainly there are other novels from the 1990s that I thought were fabulous at the time, that I have since decided either now seemed dated, or that I once loved, but which are no longer suited the person I have become (see White Noise in my January book list).  But I loved A Fine Balance perhaps even more the second time I read it than I had the first.  And it has not fallen in my esteem after a third reading.  The novel concerns four friends during the period referred to as The Emergency in India (1975 - 1977).  I remain convinced that the characters, Dina, Maneck, Ishvar and Om, were created specifically to illustrate the atrocities of the period and to show the reader how the cultural biases and norms of the time, as well as how the policies enacted during The Emergency, affected the various cultural groups.  In that sense the characters have something in common with Bennett's characters, except that this novel is far richer, and these characters far more deeply and humanely drawn.  This is a big grand novel in the style of Dickens perhaps.  One member of my book group commented that she had read a review (after reading the book) that compared it to Tolstoy, and I can see the comparison.  I myself was thinking more of Dostoevsky, especially in the character of Maneck -- the bright, naive, idealistic depressive who could not reconcile his hopes with the world in which he lived. Maneck was much a character of his time, but lost in his own time, and and yet a young man who could very much be a young man of the burgeoning 21st century.   In this reading I see more transformation, about the way love and friendship, but also tragedy, can refine us and transform us. I suppose, however the biggest shift for me in this book is that my younger self found the ending depressing, but my older self finds the end hopeful, or at least a combination of tragedy and hope.  The world remains a vicious and horrible place, but I see transformation there, and love -- perhaps that "fine balance" after all. 

 

Garden Walk

My garden remains more a field of dreams and promises than an actual garden, more unplanted bed than lush landscape of greenery and flowers, and yet, easily pleased, eager, silly, proud, garden mom that I am I am thrilled with every small bit.  

 

Let's take a walk around the garden this early spring morning.  Many of these photos were taken over the course of the past week.  There was a hard frost last night however, and some of what I show you may no longer look as lush.  This is not true of the daffodils of course, which will easily survive temps down to 25 or so, are upright, almost laughing in the light frost.  This photo was taken slightly after dawn this morning.  These are the daffodils in the back, by the porch, the bulbs I planted too late.  They are not as large and showy as they will be next year, but despite the setbacks, they are blossoming, and they make my heart sing.

As I turn east to go around the house, I see the bed next to my small patio, along the side of the garage/studio.  A hosta is beginning to emerge in the foreground, an itoh peony toward the back.  They seems safely ensconced in this protected spot.

 

The east walk, is mostly a woodland garden, primarily filled with hellebores, but a few wildflowers and other treats are mixed in as well.  I missed capturing some of the early blossoms.  But not all. This garden is well established and therefore accustomed to the vagaries of Tennessee weather.

In this protected spot at the Northeast corner of the house, the hosts is a little further along than the one in the back, but still defiant.

 

 

As I approach the top of the driveway on the east, the Jane Hydrangeas that were transplanted over the winter are opening up.  These were dug up during construction and had been sheltering behind the garage for two seasons.  I see that a peony accidentally got relocated with a hydrangea, too close really, but they must have survived well together in a pot for those two years, and I suspect their roots are intermingled.  Both survived the frost.  These two pose the kinds of questions to which I do not know the answer.  Do I move the peony now, or let it sit out this season here next to its companion, recovering somewhat from one transplant before disentangling the roots and moving it again?  The two will eventually come into conflict, perhaps even this year as they will both get more sun. Act now or Wait?  I am leaning toward waiting...

The hydrangeas are in the same bed as the daffodils, which have been doing quite well.  They too dance in the morning sun, mocking the sparkle of frost on the ground around them.  As the hydrangeas leaf out, they will hide the fading daffodil leaves, perhaps a perfect companionship.

Next I turn west, along the street.  This is the bed I showed you a couple of weeks back, in its planning stage.  I spent a weekend digging up the area that had been marked with orange paint, digging holes and amending soil for transplanting peonies which had also been sheltering in back.  A large part of that area was a mixture of rock, concrete, and clay and difficult digging.  Not quite hardpan, but not easy.  It took me three days to get the area ready, but I did transplant the peonies, and I planted alyssum and strawberries, from seed.  The peonies are doing well.  Most are up and leafing out, but one suffered partial frost damage.  I have no idea what will happen to the seeds, or where they will come up as we have had over 5 inches of rain since.

This past week I planted these ten encore azaleas in front of the wattle fence.  The soil here was easier to dig. 

One of the azaleas, variety autumn chiffon, had a single bloom, and I captured it.  Good thing too as that blossom succumbed to the frost,  I think the azaleas are fine, but it is always iffy when things are so newly planted. I probably should have covered them, but I was too exhausted to roust myself out of my stupor yesterday evening.

Here is a close up of the blossoms on the crabapple.  This morning they are all frost burnt and sad, so I am happy to have captured this moment of beauty.  I've made it my screen saver for now, for a little bright spot of daily joy.

The peas and faves are, of course, oblivious.

This lovely field of weeds has been a great joy to me this spring.  I love the soft fluffy greenery.  It is looking a little flattened today, but whatever happens, and something will, I am not going to be planting this field this year anyway, so it can remain nature's playground.

 

This World: Friday Musings

I drove 188 miles in January of 2021.  In February I drove 256 miles, and March came in at 307.  

 

Why am I telling you this?  Well, not to say look at me, I am driving less, aren't I environmentally conscious.  Because I am not, or not as much so as I could be.  It is true that last year I said one of my goals was to drive less, or more exactly to be more conscientious  about how I live and my priorities.   Part of that is combining errands into fewer days so that I drive fewer miles but also spend far less time going here and there, time that could be more fruitfully put to use doing something that is actually important to me.  Sadly, time in the car does not count as quality time in my book.  And much of this is as much due to restrictions from a global pandemic.  That doesn't mean I should drive willy-nilly once the world returns to normal, assuming we even know what normal will be.  Despite a global pandemic, we saw very little drop in carbon emissions in 2020, about 5% according to Bill Gates in his new book.  It is not enough.

 

But why now?  Again, another good question.  Perhaps I started musing on these environmental issues again when my book club read A Children's Bible back in December.   Perhaps one of my regular produce suppliers moved from paper packaging to plastic clamshells.  Perhaps I was upset one day when I saw one of my neighborhood recycle bins was overstuffed with recyclables packed in plastic trash bags rather than loose in the bin; the bags are not recyclable, and someone has to open the bag and unload it it sort the recyclables out, or it all just goes in the landfill. I was upset because I recently read that 25% of my local curbside recycling is contaminated in some way, by materials that cannot be recycled, or food waste, and has to be sent to the landfill.  We can do better.

 

It seems perfectly obvious that no single one of us is going to stop global warming.  But that is not enough reason not to do our part. it also seems perfectly obvious that if we focused our attentions and worked together we could beat this; if not, change will be forced upon us and our children.  We can chose to control it or we can chose to let it control us.  That of course is never as easy at it sounds. And the whole things actually sounds rather overwhelming.  Sometimes it seems we are not wired for looking at long term objectives, nor for differentiating between the big picture, ie. the goal, and the tactics for reaching that goal.  We look at where we are not and cannot work out a way to move ourselves forward.  It is difficult for us to look at where we should be and then start working backward to where we are now. The space between these approaches can feel like an insurmountable gulf.  

 

And yet it is a gulf that must be faced.

I was reminded of this recently when I was reading Bill Gates new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.  The truth is that I did not expect a great deal from this book, and perhaps for that reason I found it more interesting and enjoyable than I anticipated.  Gates' writing comes across as if the book is written by an enthusiastic nerd who is fascinated with technology and human ingenuity.  Surprise? No.  But he reminded me of things I forget, or don't think about at all, like how much carbon is produced in construction and the very process of making things.  He reminds the reader of the enormity of the task, and he does not gloss over the difficulties involved.   Sometimes his enthusiasm runs a little wild.  But the book is easy to read and I think that is of benefit.  Gates writes that he loves the books of Vaclav Smil.  I love Smil.  But Smil is not easy reading, more like the opposite of easy reading.  

 

Gates makes reading about climate change manageable, but I suspect many people will discount the book simply because it is written by Bill Gates.  It is worth more than that.  And he makes very good points about change, the enormity of the project, and the hidden pitfalls in choosing short term, partial solutions, that in the end can distract us from the ultimate goal, and instead make the process more difficult.  He gets wrapped up in his enthusiasms and sometimes misses things, as do we all.  How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is more of a wake-up call, a book for the generalist, than a serious treaty on what should be done. Gates doesn't know everything, no one does.  And I disagree with Gates on some points.  But that doesn't mean there is not a place for this book.

 

Gates is convinced we can beat this.  I agree that we probably have the ability to beat this, I question whether or not we yet have the will.  I do believe that if we, the population of this earth, really set all our greatest minds to solving the big problems -- net zero emissions, with as little cost to global human well-being as possible  -- we could do it.  However I am far from convinced that our governments, our national and corporate interests, and even our personal comforts, are quite ready for that.  I hope we manage it before too many people suffer.  But then, too many people already suffer the costs of climate change, and for too many of us this fact is so remote that we can't see it.

 

But what can I do?  I can be more conscientious.  I can think about the choices I make -- what I buy, what I waste --  and how I chose to use my own space on this earth.  I am not always conscientious, and I am constrained by the limits and biases of my own location, society, culture.   I do believe that we can all live a good life, and we can do it in a way that neither destroys our planet, or builds a life of comfort and even luxury for some on the suffering of others.

 

 

It has been a difficult week here in my little bubble ,and I write this week in honor of all those who have had difficult weeks, all those who tell themselves "things are getting better", while wondering why they don't feel better, who try to buck themselves up with "we can see our loved ones soon", and even "spring! There are flowers everywhere, why don't I feel happier?"   

All my good intentions somehow went out the window this past week. I wallowed. Perhaps it helped that it rained.  "Oh it is raining", I would think, and excuse myself from working in the garden because I felt too overwhelmed, too lost in my own tears.  Or perhaps the fact that it was gray and dreary and raining fed that impulse.  There is no benefit in castigating myself for sitting in a chair one day and losing myself in mindless television.  Should-have-done has no place in the landscape of the heart.  Neither does judgement.    I have been struggling.  I will be struggling a bit more until something going on in my life is either resolved or not resolved and I come to terms.  But I am not ready to talk about that now, just to say I am struggling, and if you are struggling as well, let us hold each other up, whatever the reasons, for the reason for our struggle is irrelevant in the face of the reality of our emotions. Even if you are not struggling personally, hold someone else up today.  

 

I am sending virtual hugs.  Let us all send them around.

At the same time.  I am in the garden today.  I don't know for how long.  I don't know if I will do all I need to do.  I don't know if having my hands in the dirt, will keep tears at bay.  But if it does not, and if I do not plant everything I should plant, so be it.  If there are still weeds in my front yard when the dogwood trail opens next week, so be it.  The spring planting won't be done anyway.  April will be prime planting month and I will simply do the best I can.

 

At the same time there are, as always bits of joy in the garden.  Peas and fava beans are up. The top photo shows tiny pea shoots beneath their trellis.  Tiny spring greens and herbs are up as well.  The second photo shows a sedum sending up spring growth.  if you look closely, at about halfway between 9 and 12, on the upper left, you see a tiny green shoot.  That is one of the daffodils I planted late.  They are at least sending up leaves, which means they will survive, and I will be rewarded with flowers in the future.  So often our efforts fail to show immediate results and we grow disheartened, or I, at least, grow disheartened.

Still no more daffodil blooms, but it is early spring yet.  We have had a mild winter in many ways, but also a consistently and evenly chill one.  The forsythia and Bradford pears are in bloom, the early magnolias, so it is early yet, even though it seems we are so desperate for promise about now, and we wish for nothing more than the promise of abundance.  Yet, as you can see, the daffodils are full of buds.  I just have to remind myself it is early.  And remind myself again, plant some early daffodils next year.  I too need the reassurances of spring blooms.

I am actually working the front yard, the public face of the garden.  I have been in the process of planning out my first ever perennial bed in sunshine.  I haven't planned the entire bed yet, only four small sections, figuring it is better to plant a block at a time.  In planning this far I have already exhausted my spring planting budget and quite possibly the amount I can physically plant in one season.  We will see how that goes.  It is time to get shrubs in now, and to transplant peonies.  It remains a little early for many flowering perennials and so thinking ahead is important.  I have absorbed lessons from observation, watching landscape crews plant the small things only to stomp on them while the planted the big thing that went alongside. 

I am planning on getting the three peonies in this weekend.  One will go in each of those roughly 3-ft squares.  But I also need to prep the areas between the peonies and the boxwood hedge because those plants won't go in for a few weeks yet.  I don't want to be standing or kneeling on new peonies when I am trying to plant those small spaces.  The area between the peonies and the grass will be easier, well, obviously, because I can stand and kneel on the grass.  

 

I am excited and nervous.  I have had fun playing with ideas and colored pencils.  I will have fun with the plants, with waiting and watching, and I may have to move everything around next year, because I have no idea if I've made the right choices or not.  But at least it is a start.

And because, I am still on tenterhooks, and because I may grow tired and weary and even teary again, I want to be reminded that even sadness is important.  I want to look at this picture of the spent camellia blossoms on the back patio.  The plant itself is still heavily laden, and beautiful, but this, this carpet of red, this carpet of promise and loss, this too is beautiful and worth celebrating.

 

Hugs to all.