So long

It has been so long since I have posted here, and so many changes have taken place. I've decided to shift the purpose of this weblog to sharing the gifts that I receive on a daily basis rather than to question the gifts that I think that I should receive or the ones that arrive broken. Or the ones that never arrive at all.

Today, I am still grateful for Sunday. Sunday morning, Denise and Gary, my neighbors and family, cocooned me between them in church service. Sunday evening, the Beals parted like the Red Sea to put me in their midst when I felt sick in my heart and alone. I thought about these two experiences over and over on Sunday evening and Monday. I am so grateful to be loved and nurtured by people who are so far beyond me.

Renaissance woman.

I dropped out of school. I wasn't actually getting a degree anyway. Just a certification. It occured to me that I was making myself more useful but not more valuable. The difference translates into: more work, same money. I have to say that dropping out has improved my year vastly already, and I have a much greater appreciation for the kids in my classes who drop out.

But, then again, do they use their new found time to carve polar bears out of bath soap? I think not.

But what I want to say is that this is a new year and I am going to do some new things.

I am going to be in love this year. And I'm not going to be afraid of it. And I'm not going to worry about whether it is reciprocated. I'm just going to simply be in love and enjoy it. I'm going to write love poems and daydream. And when I'm hurt, I'm going to write worse poems, but I'm going to enjoy that too.

I am going to also sing in public. My venue may be Wal-Mart or just down the block, but I am going to sing and I am going to sing loudly. I will probably sing "You must have been a beautiful baby" or "Fever" or "The best is yet to come" since I will simultaneously be in love.

I am going to sketch all of the contents of my world. Or at least all of the interesting contents. Which might be all of the contents, but it might just be some of them. I haven't decided. But what I have realized is that sketching makes me look at a thing closely, which is the whole point. To notice the curls and dips of rose petals bunched together or the segmentation and iridescence of Japanese beetle legs.

I am going to play guitar. At least, I intend to learn one song. Maybe one of the songs that I mentioned above so that I can accompany myself when I am simultaneously loving and publicly singing. And passers-by will say, "Wow! She can do a lot of stuff!"

I am going to continue my soap carving adventure and see where it takes me.

I am going to learn to appreciate Elvis. I've never been a big fan, but, by God, I'm going to take some time this year to learn why people loved the guy so much. I owe that much to him.

Peggy Lee, too. Why not?!

Overall, in a nutshell, I'm going to become this year the Renaissance woman that I've dreamed of becoming since I was in the seventh grade. Just watch.

I might as well...

It's been so long since I've written, and I certainly don't have the time now, but I might as well. Why not take a moment? I've had lots of lovely things to say, but no time in which to say them.

Summer and drought quashed my designs on gardening. My celosia withered into dribbles of pink-crimson, like tassels left in puddles on the side of a busy road after a party, unraveling and graying. My beautiful snowdrift crabapple has died. I'm certain of it. The wildflower bed became unruly with weeds as did the foundation beds. A few plants have thrived, namely the flaming lips sage and a French variety of carnations...the lantana of course and some marigolds deposited on my front door step by a little old lady who lives down the lane. Everything else looks miserable. Even the grass died. And I haven't lifted a finger to improve the situation. The heat was just too intolerable.

I never painted the shutters haint blue or the doors sunflower gold as I intended. The old wooden rockers are still chipped, ugly green. Rugs still cover the spaces in the living room where the wall was removed. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And yet I haven't been doing nothing.

I even have a few friends. I mean, real friends who live right down the street and drop in just to say hello or eat dinner. It's an exciting time for me. I'm exploring this whole new world of normalcy. Gardens and garden clubs. Church. Work. Mothering. Scolding other people's children. Cooking roasts and mashed potato. Hanging clothes on the line. Waving to neighbors. Dreaming of Thanksgiving Day turkeys.

The Spring fire.

I've been sensing in myself a creative impulse, particularly toward writing. I haven't given much thought to writing in months, since my last (quickly) doused effort at the National Novel Writing Month endeavor. I even have a few vague notions and shadowy characters tiptoeing through my mind. I wanted to say "lurking," but these characters seem innocuous and kindly, perhaps slightly misled and slightly bitter at times, but people with good hearts and intentions. I'm not sure. And I'm not sure when I'll ever have a chance to write. Anyway, it may be too early for that. I may just be in the kindling phase, and if that's the case too much movement might smother the fire.

One solution that I've been toying with is to re-direct all of my classes to a creative writing path. As teenagers, they are necessarily apathetic and uninterested in whatever I choose to teach anyway, and, as the principle said when he dropped nine more students into my last class of the day, "At least the writing test is over." Of course, the implication is that once the state tests are concluded, it doesn't matter what I teach the students or if I even bother to teach them at all. I've, in essence, been given a blank check, so why bother with all of those pesky objectives? Why not re-structure the class to my own creative needs? The kids might even like it better. Certainly, they'd prefer creative writing to essay writing.

Each day when my students come into class, I have a prompt posted for them to respond to. During essay writing times, they are often quotes or serious thought-provokers. Now, I've begun to use prompts like, "Pretend you are a sandwich. What kind of sandwich are you? Why?" or "The black dog barks..." They look at me as if I'm crazy before opening their composition books to write. The invariable barrage of questions begin. "Does it matter why the black dog is barking?" "Does this have to be a true story?" "Does it have to be a sandwich on loaf bread or can I be a hoagie or a gyro?" At first, I attempted to answer these questions, which I perceive as their pitiable reliance upon adults to activate their creative thinking centers. Then I stopped. Someone has to break the co-dependency. I put my hand up and shake my head. The only advice I give now is: Don't write about the first thing that comes into your head because it's probably the first thing that came into everybody else's head. Think beyond your first thought and embrace your second or third thought. For example, yesterday's prompt, which came from an old writers' calendar, was: It's 3 am. You hear a bang and then glass shatter. I asked students to raise their hand if the first thing they thought about was someone breaking into their home. 98% of the class raised their hand. Point proven. It was my first thought, too, but I went with my third thought: a fish being busted out of an aquarium by animal rights activists. I was impressed with their second thoughts.

Camellias.

I've never noticed camellias before this spring. For some reason, I think I'd even convinced myself that I didn't care for them. But this year...I don't know why...they seem so remarkable and vivid. I've seen several varieties, some with pale, blushing blossoms that make me think of ballerinas or dreams of ballerinas that I had when I was a little girl. Others bloom like ivory froth in the nest of dark leaves. The leaves are what make the camellias so beautiful in this late stage of winter barreness. They are dark, glossy malachite, stiff and imposing, imperially refusing to loosen their hold on the branches, in spite of sleet or snow or wind or rain. Dark, black-green. Not even especially attractive, but when the buds swell, large and robust even in infancy, clenched tight like tiny fists, and then when they suddenly rupture and over-spill their tight floret corsets, they become miraculous. The red - the true red - camellias, a red that I cannot adequately describe, the red of red cellophane enveloping red foil heartboxes on Valentine's Day, the red of shocking behaviour, the red of red dresses and outbursts of passion, these red camellias, encamped in the malachite forests, glow. They glow. There is no other way to describe them, and I take a different path home to pass them, to slow and to stare and to wonder at them.

Spring again.

I can feel it. I can smell it. The house wrens and bluebirds are congregating on the birdfeeders in front of my windows. The tips of Bradford pears and redbuds have taken on a pinkish pregnancy. The grass has begun to prickle. The dirt has begun to darken. The robin redbreasts are too fat to fly and wobble from worm to worm. The evening is longer and winking.

Last night, while the air was still cold, I felt the urge to begin starting my seeds. I grabbed a red mixing bowl, a wooden spoon, and a measuring cup full of tepid water, three paper packets of tiny, furry tomato seeds - Cosuvolto, Persimmon, Camper's Joy, Beefsteak, and Black Krim - several stacks of peat pot planters, and a large bag of potting soil. I dumped soil into the mixing bowl and added water, letting Fain stir it to make a mud pie batter. Then we added the soil to our planters with our hands. Fain threw some but ceased and desisted with a mild rebuke and turned his attention to the moldering hay bale left over from Halloween, running to leap on it and fall off, a favorite pasttime of his. While he played king of the hill, I poked holes in the soil with the poking end of the wooden spoon and then dropped two seeds into each, carefully covering the seeds, imagining their gratitude for enveloping them in rich, damp, warm soil, away from the still cool nakedness of the world. I wrote their names on multi-colored straws that I found in a kitchen drawer and stuck them into the little pots. Lacking a greenhouse or suitable space, I lined a living room window's sills with the brown pots of expectancy. I warned Fain to "look but not touch" and promised him that we would take turns feeding the little baby seeds until, as he said, "They get big like us." Well, let's hope not quite that big.

Needless to say, considering that I have nearly fifty individual pots already planted and still ten or so packets of seeds to go, I'll have far more plants than I can accomodate in the small plot of earth that I've dug up outside of my kitchen door. Even if I had more room, there wouldn't be much sense in planting all of these tomatoes. Fain and I could never eat them all. So with a spirit of entrepreneurship, I've decided to have a plant sale in April, when my little seedlings are mature and ready to leave home. Maybe I'll also set up a lemonade stand for Fain. Anything seems possible and promising with spring so close.

Play-do Art Project and its Demise.

Artists at home.