Sprouts and Seeds

The last couple of weeks have been, physically, challenging.  In between the necessary chores of living, I calculate an average of two hours a day I can devote to making things like meals and books.  This week I have two doctors' appointments that make me hopeful for some answers.  

I continue to collect materials and arrange my instruction sheets from the Handmade Book Club--tangible signs of hope for better back and foot days.  I continue to spin ideas for when my body says yes again. 

Thanks to my wonderful daughter-in-law Bonnie, my yard is now planted for spring!  She chose and arranged beautiful plants and Will helped with the unloading and arranging. Then a couple of days ago, Orlando dug the holes, spread the mulch, and got those babies into the softened earth. I couldn't be happier with the results! 

I love flowers but neither of my thumbs is green.  Bonnie loves and knows plants like I know paper.  She picked dianthus, sage, salvia and other native plants that will require less attention once they get settled in.   In the front, we filled a pot with petunias and pansies, more sage and purple in the flower bed.  

Orlando spread poppy seeds and strung solar fairy lights from casita to the house and wound a string of tiny ones with jasmine around the gate.  Before going to bed last night, I looked outside and saw a wonderland of twinkles.  

Dozens of goldfinch feast at one feeder of Nyger seed, along with cardinals and doves.  It'a feathered peaceable kingdom and queendom right outside my window. We added a hummingbird feeder and hope that the  ones I've' seen in the front yard's pomegranate blooms will soon find it. 

It's a cool cloudy day today, so I'll wait until these plants grow a bit bigger before trying to capture the beauty of them in a photo.

For now, just picture pink, purple, yellow, and white along with all the greens of grasses and leaves.  The colors and the constant chirping of birds--it's already enough to take my breath away!

Knowing what rewards are for

Luci's got it right.

In most canine-human relationships, treats and slices of turkey are rewards for good behavior, following directions, and whatnot.

Luci and I never started that silliness.

Instead, she has taught me this: Get rewarded for what's fun, what's joyful, what makes your day. 

For example, her favorite thing in the middle of the night is "You wanna go outside?" And when she does, she's a wild girl, fearless, running with all the speed of her puppy years.  She's out to capture a fox or a raccoon or whatever, but she never does.  Then she does whatever she does outside my view for a few minutes and comes back, beaming.

She goes to the treat drawer and looks at me hopefully--and is never disappointed.  Then she goes to the refrigerator door--this was a night (as every night of running is) deserving of two treats.

I learn so much from this love bug of a dog:   When something is really really good, cap it off with something worthy of joy.  

Collaging my life in a house

When I was twelve, my daddy couldn't speak due to an ulcer on his vocal cords.  He carried around one of those small leatherette notebooks you might remember-- with six small silver rings that held lined paper. I kept that notebook, of course, and am using parts of it this morning in a collage.  

This fills one page:

"Linda's girl friend was at our house all week.  She lives in Jonesboro--I brought her home today.  Her name is Patsy Adamson."

On the other side of that page:

"Grant and I went fishing and caught 9--weighed 27 pounds.  I caught 6 of them--biggest one 5 1/4 pounds."

Most of Lloyd Harris' loves are hinted at in these two tiny pages: home, hospitality, fishing, and friends. I treasure his handwriting because it captures who he was, what he cared about.  To anyone who showed up at the back door (only the Avon Lady used the front door) he'd say, "Come in this house!" as if whoever it was was exactly who he'd hoped it would be. 

I fondly remember how when any of us (or anyone at work or church) asked him a question, he'd pull out his little book to respond with his U.S. Government ballpoint pen. 

My book of the month in the Handmade Book Club is shaped like a house and made of recycled materials.  When I get mine finished, I'll show you.

Its base is cut out to look like a house, gessoed, and folded, and I'm arranging papers and bits of writing to collage on its front and back, windows and doors.

Just choosing the papers is a trip!  

It occurs to me that a house book, like a house, is a container of so many memories and treasures with meaning to the maker of the home.  Maybe everything we are is embedded in everything we make in this life--though to viewers the pieces we choose may just appear to be squiggles? 

After Sunday night church, our parents, or someone else's parents, would say, "Y'all come home with us."  Nobody had to get home to watch a program on TV or check emails or anything.  Nobody said "no" to spontaneous hospitality. 

My parents would make something simple like ham and biscuits.  After dinner, my daddy and the other men would ask me to play the piano so they could sing a quartet.  Or the adults would talk and the kids would play in the yard, catching "lightning bugs" or listening to music in somebody's carport or playing "Ain't no buggers out tonight, Grandpa killed them all last night."

I'm not sure what a bugger was--but it was dangerous, and we were safe.  My daddy called me "Bugger" as a term of endearment--but in that context, it meant something cute and adorable.  

He also called me Sugar.  

In homage to my daddy and nicknames, I'll sign off for now:

Sugar Bugger

Two weeks ago, a man Elena knows from her coach's barn asked if she would  ride his horse in one of her barrel races.  Working almost every afternoon with her riding coach, she's gotten to be a spectacular rider. 

A freak accident that occurred riding this man's horse had nothing to do with her skill.  On the second barrel the horse tripped.  (Her own horse fell just like that a few weeks ago, but managed to get up without injury, but this handsome one was not so fortunate.)

Her mother knew what the outcome would be and she walked Elena away from the field while the vet checked out the horse.  Long story short, it was his last ride.  

Elena was devastated.  At first, she felt that she'd done something wrong--but everyone, from the EMTs to the coach and all who saw it assured her that it wasn't.  

It took her several days to get past it enough to want to ride again.  She's told me that she cried more in that week than she's ever cried before.  We all felt heartbroken that she had to experience this terrible tragedy at fourteen. 

Her coach said, "He was ending his riding years and he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory,"--suggesting that the horse, on some level, chose how his life would end. 

"He'll be back, but it will take a minute," she said. "He's going to come back as a frisky young colt.  In the meanwhile, he's going to be watching over you."

From the beginning of time, when we humans lose the humans and animals we love, we look for comfort in the stories of our tribes.  

We may also grasp for lesson straws--not that the terrible event "happened for a reason," but since it happened, tragic as it may be, horrible as we feel, we look for lessons.

Elena is now back in the saddle, literally.  She will never forget what happened.  "But since I'm going toe a vet,  I need to know the good and the bad parts." 

April, Already?

Who can count the times, in childhood, that we made Crayola umbrellas and big fat rain drops on construction paper, gray clouds in the sky?  Underneath, the teacher had printed "April Showers."

T.S. Eliot wrote that April is "the cruelest month." 

It begins with April Fool's Day--which is now every day of the year....

But besides all that, it's a good month in Texas with weather that goes from moderate to summer hot in a day, the month of three of my friends' birthdays, the month when maybe it might possibly rain one day, and the month of San Antonio's Fiesta.

A tenth of the population of the U.S. participated in No Kings Marches on Saturday--which I would have done if my feet could march.

I'm enjoying several excellent shows on PBS: Thoreau, The Forsytes, and The Mount of Monte Cristo.

At the moment I'm eating a thin slice of white toast with blackberry jam. I prefer blackberry over any other topping because it reminds me of childhood in Georgia when blackberries grew abundantly.  Mamas made blackberry cobbler and jams, seeds in, cementing it in my flavor memory as the best of all fruits.   

Writings About Dogs

The minute I read the New York Times book review sent by Janet, I ordered this lovely book, a collection of essays by various writers collected by Alice Hoffman.  

the best dog in the world Alice hoffman

I could easily find her enough excellent writers to do a Volume 2--including Ann Patchett, Geraldine Brooks,  Alexandra Horowitz, and almost every one of my writer friends.  

It goes in my stack of dog books:

The Book of Dog Poems, Sarah Maycock and Ana Sampson

E.B. White (of Charlotte's Web) On Dogs

A Three Dog Life, Abigail Thomas

For the Love of a Dog, Patricia McConnell

I have no books on dog training.  

This morning Luci and I were walking, unattached by a leash.  A man in my neighborhood who always walks his German Shepherd off-leash commented, "Wow, you're a good trainer!" 

"She's training me," I said.  I just walk beside her and go where she goes. 

My friend Bonnie Lyons has written wonderful poems about dogs.  She and Grant have recently adopted a young Airedale named Baela. This poem comes from her book, Bedrock, 2011--a couple of Airedale generations ago. 

    Dog Training

    Sometimes I think

    the only lessons I ever learned

    were from my dogs.

    So here is the accumulated wisdom

    of Sancho, Max and Zorba

    three sage Airedales

    First, yelp when you're in pain

    but let it go when it's gone.

    Second, travel the earth

    with a quivering nose.

    Third, answer the needs of your body

    with seamless relish

    but then go right on 

    with the real purpose of the day: play

    And, finally, whenever possible

    leap right

    into the arms of someone 

    who loves you. 

Books: #1, #2, #3

 Okay, here goes:

Making a list of books I'm currently reading is similar to constructing a family tree, the lines of one leading to another, including the ways the books showed up for me. 

Let's start with Geraldine Brooks.  I'm sorry to say I haven't read her fiction, but after reading this lovely memoir, Memorial Days, shared with me by Freda, I will start with Horse. 

I love reading writers' personal stories before reading their poems and fiction and essays.  I can picture Geraldine now almost like a friend I've actually met, living on Martha's Vineyard.  Her writing is so vivid that it takes you there.  She talks like we talk, only better on paper.  In person, she tells us she's shy, but her friends are a bunch of rowdy women.  She throws parties, because Tony loves them, but he's the gregarious life of every party--while she prefers serving the food. 

I wish that back in the day, when I was a child and reading every book I could find by Lois Lensky, I had known that Lois was a real person who lived a certain kind of life.  I wish I could have gone to You Tube and looked for speeches and interviews, or gone online to see if she'd written a memoir or autobiography. Back then, it would have been called the latter. 

Geraldine and Tony Horowitz, her Pulitzer Prize winning husband, live a fascinating life--two renowned journalists who traveled the world writing for esteemed magazines and newspapers.  He had just completed his book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, when he suffered a massive heart attack on a book tour in Chevy Chase, Maryland.  

Geraldine and Tony had met in the Columbia school of journalism and had been married for 31 years.  His death was devastating for her and their two sons.

After three years of doing all the minutiae required to deal with the death of a spouse, she realizes that she's never had the full-throated expression of grief that she yearns for.  So she goes back to her homeland in Australia and stays in a media-free rustic cabin on Flinders Island.  

"This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet.  The place where I will not have to present that things are normal and that I am okay.  Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay."

I have now ordered one of Geraldine's novels (she's also a prolific novelist and Pulitzer Prize winning one) and the kindle edition of Tony Horowitz' last book, Spying on The South.  

Thanks to the internet, I can track down interviews and book talks--so the lines in the tree are taking me all over the place on this Sunday morning. 

Postscript to the previous post

Geraldine and Ann Patchett are good friends.  Of course, they are.

Ann, as you know, is not only a stellar fiction writer, but also owns Parnassus Books in Nashville.  I made a huge mistake on my recent trip through Nashville--I should have planned the whole return trip around Parnassus. I didn't yet know that Luci would have been warmly welcomed there, and by Nashville I was too crumpled and exhausted to stop for an extra day. 

Ann Patchett does wonderful book talks and recommendations every Friday, and you can find them online.  

As Geraldine recalls, when she met Ann in the bookstore ten years ago:

"I loved the bookstore on first sight, because it was full of dogs.  Ann, like me, is a dog obsessive, and her staff are encouraged to bring their dogs to work."

Ann told her, "I"m one dog away from being shut down by the health department."

The writing and dog loving worlds almost always overlap.  I love knowing how friendships begin and grow: 

Ann is both empathetic and acerbic, a combination that reminds me of my mum.  When her novel Commonwealth came out, I persuaded her to present it at the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival so that we could hang out together.  She and her husband, Karl, a chevalier from Mississippi, stayed with us.

And now we shared a strange bond.  The very last time Tony and I were together was in Nashville.  I'd joined a week into his book tour.  The events manager at Parnassas thought it would be fun if I interviewed him, and I jumped at the chance to join him on the road and reconnect with Ann.

The last meal we'd had together was after that event, with Ann and Bruce, Tony's roommate when we were grad students at Columbia Journalism School.  Bruce, a Southerner, had settled in Nashville, in a house just a few doors down from Ann.  

"I may be old, but I know stuff."

 On Friday, Jan sent me a strange text: "HAPPY LINDA HARRIS DAY!!!"

I didn't get it.  Later she explained, "This is the anniversary of the date you reclaimed your rightful name!"

Oh.  Oh yeah.  I remember doing that about 20 years ago, but I couldn't have recalled the date if you put me under hypnosis.  I told her that.

She replied, "I may be old, but I know stuff!"

I am hereby adopting that line for future use.  It's such an apt phrase to pull out when a younger person assumes you don't know shit about anything pre-1994 when the world as they knew it was just getting started. 

When my spinal cord stimulator stopped working, I told the pain management PA, "The vibrator isn't working to ease my pain anymore."

"I hope you don't call it that around your kids," she said--she, being about the age of one of my kids.  She didn't even try to conceal the smile that expressed her amusement that a person of my age knew what a vibrator meant in common parlance.  

I informed her that "spinal cord stimulator" was a mouthful; "Vibrator" was just my shorthand for the device implanted in my spine, that was, even as we spoke, vibrating my feet so noticeably that I wondered if other people even saw my feet shaking.

Younger people do that all the time!  "Do you do email?" they might ask--instead of "Wha's your email address?" 

Do I DO email?  I was doing email, Honey, before you were born.

Sometimes we really don't know things for a minute.  We've hopped on the bandwagon of the digital world, for example, but may temporarily not recall that "digital" used to refer to the fingers on our hand.

I mentioned a minor issue to my dermatologist.  "Occasionally, I feel a tingle in my fingers that feels like a tiny bee sting. " 

"Oh that.  It's a digital mucous cyst," she said.  "Nothing to worry about." 

In other words, a tiny harmless cyst in the finger joints.  Ohhhhhhh!  

Here I was thinking that even my fingers were in need of a password change!

As I left the dermatologist's office, one of the receptionists asked "Can I pet that dog?" and all the others laughed.

"Yeah," I said--"But this girl is really a dawg, not a bear,"

I heard them saying to each other, "I'm surprised she knew that one!" 

Yeah, I'm super cool for such an elderly person.  I know about memes and things go viral!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P8JgEAmToC8

Making and Reading

Making things--that was the seed pod in my childhood.  (That and church and piano and library books)

My mama made so many things: 

Every garment she and I ever wore.

Wardrobes of tiny dresses for my Christmas morning dolls. 

Stuffed animals made from scraps from our clothes.

Complex stained glass hangings, churches, lamps, kaleidoscopes, insets for doors and windows.

Cross-stitch and crewel embroidery.

Quilts

Flower beds

"Surprises"--little fold-over pies with left-over pie crust dough, filled with cinnamon, butter, sugar, and pecans.

Shorter term, she painted china dishes with her friend, Bea, and built a display rack for them on the walls of our carport-turned-den.  

She used to say she could fix anything if she could just go sew for a while.  Her sewing machine was a lifelong place for thinking things out, making decisions, and healing.  I spent countless hours conversing with her as she guided fabric under the presser foot. 

I was never as good a seamstress as she, but I'm certain that my lifelong love of papers and fabrics comes from the hours we spent in McConnell's poring over pattern books then walking the aisles and handling the fabrics and deciding what fabrics went with which dress patterns.         

Calico, gingham, corduroy, velveteen--ah, how lovely even the words!

When my daddy gave me the McCalls Make-It Book, it became my favorite book.  The pages showed me how to carve animals out of soap, how to weave pot holders, how to make Chinese lanterns out of construction paper--things like that.

Making books is satisfying in a similar way sewing was for Carlene.  (She just gave me her Bernina sewing machine)   I love the precision required to measure, cut, and fold papers.  I love that final happy moment of stitching when the cover snugly holds the pages together.  And I love poking in thrift shops for braids and buttons for final touches.

This has been a tough week with my feet.  My PT released me after 8 sessions ("It's not working for you") and sent me to a spine doc, suggesting that there could be something going on in my spine.  So this week I have three medical appointments.  I'm also looking into other options, one of which is low-dose radiation, another is nerve ablation. But in the meanwhile, it's virtually impossible to stand at my beautiful cluttered-with-paper dining table long enough to finish a book. 

So, as we used to say about things that got in the way of what we really wanted to do and opened up time for something else: "The Universe must want me to read more." 

So that's what I'm doing:

I'll write about that tomorrow.