In the Flux

I apologize for having left things hanging in a scary place!
Since I last wrote, I have returned to Homer.
I have moved from far in the beautiful back of beyond down to town, house-sitting for dear friends, getting around temporarily without my car.
I'm not running sprints yet, but my energy does seem to be steadily increasing.
I have been harvesting what others planted.

Feeling grateful for the abundance, warding myself off from the disappointment and self pity at not having planted a whole lot myself this year.

In this intense and poignant time, giving humor its space, narrow though its berth tends to be in my psychic space--thanks always to the carrots.

I don't yet know what room or apartment, and what fellow-dwellers, will be in my life this winter (if you have the room I'm meant to live in, please let me know!) and, as with everything else right now, I interpret that it's my job to be okay with that uncertainty.

Kidneys are all about water, flux, fluidity and shifting; in the Chinese cosmology they're associated with winter, the season into which we're moving now. I suppose it might be ideal if that energy were balanced with a rock of security in my life now--of warmth, comfort and safety--but perhaps the lesson and blessing here will be to sink down and find that security and comfort in each moment that I live from boxes, packed and ready to move, each time I throw out freezer burned veggies that have moved with me three times now, each time I release my habits of buying in bulk and storing as neither appropriate to my lifestyle nor actually providing of any real comfort or safety. Each time I let go another specious tie to safety, each time I invite the universe to show me real safety. Sinking means finding depth. The water bloat from the IV that troubled me so much when I left the hospital barely able to do up my jeans dissipated in less than a week--a little flag that told me to have faith (and not freak out over engorged body). But yesterday I got stung by a bumblebee (first time for that) when working in the garden, so I have a little reminding reservoir of fluid on my right wrist. Ebb and flow.

On a good day, this makes sense! What is also there for security is the writing and translating. The writing which has gotten all serious and intent and goal-oriented and "thesis year of the MFA program" titled. How did that happen so fast? And why don't I feel any less of a novice as a writer? And now I must make time to write as never before, and yet not feel that I'm up to the ankles in time's spilled milk when I sit a whole evening and morning, as I did recently, trying to 'catch' a poem and get barely a pair of consecutive words down. My dictionary translating job is marching toward its completion, and in order to stay on track, I must translate a certain number of words each day, an intended lemma on which to close the day. As time bound and time sensitive as the MFA completion is, I somehow have to admit the space for the 'get nowhere' times, the times when the blank page stays obstinately blank, the times when the scribbles stay obstinately obtuse and uninspired.

As for this blog, I intend to continue updating, more frequently than of late but not more than three times a week. I'll be musing mostly about writerly things, I suspect, but also some on sustenance of other kinds.
Thank you for letting me share my voice.
With love.

Garden Planning and Other Looking Ahead

I'm back home, Phil is back, and here I am! I missed blogging the last two days. In some ways, the daily post, the accountability, was helping me do better.

The last couple days have been backsliding, stressful, intense. Per my last post, I don't yet have full clarity on how much I should share here. So, per my strategy at other times like this, I'll focus on something else until I do have space and clarity. Coming up, I'll have a post on protein powders, as I've been promising for ages. I'll also talk about how to increase calories. All my kuntzim are specially directed toward reducing calories, so it might be interesting to apply some smarts to the reverse process. Just as a mirror never gives an exact image, so increasing is never the exact reverse of decreasing; so it's not a no-brainer by any means.

Garden Planning

Around this time every year, when the snow has gone away and green shoots forth thicker every day, we look around our place, take stock, start to think about our garden. Every year, Phil ponders the cost-benefit and wonders whether it's even worthwhile to do a garden, and every year we decide to do at least something. We have serious weed problems. For all the hundreds of thousands of hemp nettles we pulled last year, they are sprouting up everywhere in even greater profusion; ditto the cow parsnip (donor of blistering rashes). The paleocene horsetails are stubbornly ubiquitous--cut them out in one place and they'll spread thirty feet underground over the course of a year to pop up there. The snowshoe hare population still hasn't crashed, and they will gladly eat whatever we put out there. Later in the summer, the slugs clean up. Last year, redback voles ate all our peas from the ground up.

When there was still snow on the ground, Phil planted some carrots and spinach under an old skylight right on the edge of the bluff where it's warmest.

Under the skylight, it's a lush growth. There are some spinach and carrot greens visible in there, but mostly weeds are thriving in the steam room!


Here's a clump of horsetails, with hemp nettles coming up around them.

I took this picture of the view from one of our big garden plots last year up to the bunker as a snapshot of a rather unique time when you can walk clear up to the bunker unimpeded. Within a month, the nettles, fireweed, cow parsnip and other growth will be waist-high.

Here's some dock (with my boot beside it) coming up small but true.

While we were walking around, mama moose went on by, not very impressed that we were so close to her route, but unruffled.

It struck me that this two-acre piece we were walking, lamenting the depredations of bunnies, slugs, noxious weeds, was just a tiny puzzle-piece of the moose's beat, and is only a separate place with its peculiar weed problems in our own minds.

This is yet another push-and-pull point. After all our efforts hand-weeding for several years, Phil has decided to Round-up the worst weeds. I've vetoed that idea the last several years in a row; this time, he hasn't offered me the veto. Phil and I have such different philosophies around so many aspects of interacting with the earth. Phil also was raised on a farm and is much more actively engaged with the dirt on a daily basis than I am. Especially in the winter, I get stuck indoors with work projects and feel disconnected. Sometimes I fear my stipulations against herbicides and other interferences are just a kind of ignorance, and that I don't earn the right to a strong opinion because I don't put in as much work on the place. However, I've read recent literature suggesting that Round-up does not degrade/turn into water as quickly as it was originally claimed to and as Phil believes it does. At least I'm not raising bees this year.

I'm looking forward to raising herbs, but we have some pretty good ones that volunteer. This is wormwood (artemisia)--not the kind used for making absinthe, but a good cleanser, and so pretty! Nettles are in my future today as well.

That rainbow hat I got in Anchorage? Here's a picture of it on my head. It really could have been made for me.

My friend Lynn gave me an avocado pie recipe to rawify--I'm going to go see if I can do that, and will share the results. Another friend also gave grist to my mill for considering incorporating avocados into my diet again--I've been avoiding them for several months or more for a whole raft of reasons that mostly boil down to calorie avoidance and expenditure avoidance.

At least I'm thinking about doing something different! 

I'll have that to share soon. Would love your favorite avocado suggestions too!

Happy Cinco de Mayo and have a great weekend!

I Have Photos!!

A phone call to the Canon support team connected me to a real person in quick time, and it turns out that there was an extra step I needed to do to get the computer to 'see' the camera. In his words, Mac OS X.6 is 'a bit of a bear' when it comes to camera interface. He wasn't able to tell me why I'd never had that problem with the couple of cameras I'd tried - I guess that's not his to say.

But anyway - here are some pictures!

Here's Phil, whacking down the rampant horsetail grass in front of the outhouse. (It's rampant everywhere, including where we've pulled roots three feet down!) And yes, that is thin air and the edge of the bluff to his left, beyond the rowan tree. Best view from a toilet anywhere, I suspect!

Here I am in Anchorage last Friday, with a little wild rose Phil gave me. They are so pretty. Do you think my new hat is cute?

This is 'Turnagain Arm,' a long coastal inlet that the road south from Anchorage to Homer passes alongside of for the first 50 miles or so before climbing up into the mountains. This is the south side of the road. If you look closely, you'll see that those sticks of trees are festooned with terns. Right before I took the photo, they were all attacking an eagle, who must have been trying to make a meal from their nests. Eagles are so enormous and powerful, but we've been seeing them beleaguered by much smaller birds over and over these last few days - it's nesting season!
This next photo is the north side of the road in the same place (Girdwood). Still snow around in midsummer, but it is mountainous.

We drove back home with a stove in the back of the truck, which some friends of Phil's daughter had given her. We stopped in at Phil's friend Joe's place in Ninilchik, 40 miles from home. Here are Phil and Joe with Joe's boat and the truck swollen with stove:

Can you believe this photo was taken at 9pm?? And 45 minutes later, here's Phil's daughter, the proud new owner, with her stove:

Now I want to show some pictures of our place. I think I mentioned yesterday that we've actually harvested from our garden! Here's a picture taken from the cabin that we live in up toward the 'new bunker,' Phil's bugbear project, where three of our raised beds are in view:

And lots of our little starts too. And raspberry canes front right. Here's a closeup of the raised beds by the construction site:

The radishes are going great guns! And don't you love those stylish alder branches sticking up on the left? They're intended as trellis for those little baby peas. The garden cart in the background is loaded with about 100lbs of 'eel grass' that Phil harvested from the beach. Smells just like manure and makes great fertilizer!
But look at these mushrooms volunteering amongst the spinach and swiss chard:

Supposedly they are something to do with all the horse manure we mixed into the soil.
Here's my harvest:

And on the right you can see a salad tray that I recycle as a seedling tray.

Finally - I'm running out of time online here - I want to post a couple of pics of the beautiful used bookstore where I work occasionally.

Here's the view as you come in the front door:

Yes, that's quite a bookfilled desk from which to greet customers!

And here's another view of the first floor:

OK - I'd love to hear from regular photo-bloggers how to streamline this process! Maybe my computer and internet connection both are slow - but it's taken a long time to do this indeed. Probably I won't generally put as many pictures in a single post, but will just include a few each time. This is a bit of an overkill after many unillustrated posts.

lots of love.