pull up a chair

ha. in a million years i would not tiptoe up the stairs, climb into bed, pull up the covers and check out. not while the sun was shining, anyway.
i barely muster the whatever-it-takes to do that when the moon is out. when the night is all around. when lullabies are wafting in through open windows.
i am not wired to seek retreat. not in the middle of the act.
but, oh, how i long some days for a pillow under head, for some excuse, pure and simple, to call time out. to shout, “this mother’s done. she is wholly spent. she seeks retreat. do not attempt to find. not ’til dinner time. when she’ll be back, foisting chops onto your plate. worry not, she’s no deserter. she just needs a little break.”
i don’t know about you, but lately, the days are dragging. the overdrive is wearing down my gear shaft. i seek something deep and full of sustenance.
yesterday i launched full-scale refueling program. i called a friend. i cried. i went outside, hoisted hose. watered thirsty plants. imagined my own roots gulping what they needed. i lay on grass, watched puffy clouds scuttle by. put myself to bed at least an hour earlier than usual. heard the sound of the little one calling for his papa, calling for a drink. but i rolled over, went to where my aching tired parts would find their solace. i dreamt so deep i cannot tell you where that was.
i awoke, still achy, but not quite so very much.
it is time, my friends, to admit that there are spells when the demands of every day might make you feel as if you are under water.
the month of may, we’ve mentioned, is a tad on the over-scheduled side. but i am coming to think that it just might suffer from the famed seasonal affective disorder.
it is, sometimes, plain old sad. the leavings are piling higher by the hour. so, too, the hard goodbyes.
as one of the wisest teachers i ever knew once told me, when the subject was a young child’s birthday, every change of year brings with it as much longing for what’s being left behind as it brings joy for what is coming. do not miss the sadness, she counseled, behind the blowing out of candles.
so too, it seems, with end of school year. which in this little house this may is, you’ve heard before, end of kindergarten, the year that teaches you all you need to know (a much-passed-about book once told me so). and end of all of grammar school.
egad, i can see like yesterday that little pink-cheeked boy trotting off to limestone university castle, brand-new, bright-red backpack strapped around his shoulders. one day, in the door of kindergarten, now, whole lifetimes later, a wise man-child walking out another.
do not underestimate, a wise friend told me, the power of the 8th-grade graduation. you might think for a week or two that it’s just that you are busy. or tired. but suddenly, she said, it will dawn on you that moving onto high school exacts a heavy psychic toll.
perhaps it’s that, in part. perhaps it’s just the unrelenting daily grind. or holding down two jobs, one i do for love, the other for which i’m paid. and on top of those, the motherlode of jobs that come with being the mother.
whatever is the cause, the end result is this: i’m bushed.
and i know i’m not alone. which is why i say so here.
we can all be perfectly adept at getting along just fine for most of every year. but within each calendar, there are days and weeks where the climb is uphill all the way. and the air gets thinner with every lifting, falling foot.
it is, i am coming to believe, only deeply human to honor the fatigue. to admit that there are times when pillow, tears or time-out will not pump up the flattened tire.
it is times like this, i think, when you reach across the table, take the hand of a very tired friend, squeeze tight, and pray with all your might for a blessed wind to carry you until the load grows lighter once again.
which, i think, is what i just did.

as if my achy, tired self much mattered….yesterday afternoon, as i sat down to sink my teeth into a sandwich, i found myself staring at the front page of the chicago tribune. there, a photo of a beautiful iraqi teenage girl. i started to read, and barely kept from crumbling. the girl, dragged in a headlock into a circle of angry men, was beaten to death. gruesomely. for the sin of loving the wrong man. whole thing caught in cell phone images. i wept. i weep still. for a world that beats its women. i ask you to pray for her soul, the hearts of those who loved her, women and men. and for those whose stories we do not know, but which would leave us more than broken if we did. my silly load is nothing compared to these. God have mercy.

please, share your load….

look elsewhere, friends, if it is a recipe for fricassee of cicada you are after. you’ll not find ways to sizzle crunchy bugs in bath of butter. not here, i tell you.
not even if, if i understand correctly, they are best when just emerging from their rip-van-winkle slumber and shedding their standard-issue nymph skins, all naked milky-white there upon on the tree trunks, tasting rather like cold, canned asparagus.
now i like asparagus. even in a can. one of the rare few vegetables that can slither out of a can and still be considered chic enough to serve on ladies’ luncheon plates.
but i’ll not have at the poor emergent masses. will not spear them with my fork, the little darlings who do not bite, the red-eyed, orange-legged, technicolor visions that, at twilight this very night, shall be arriving without their suitcases.
who thinks to pack when going under for 17 winters, 17 summers, and all those springs and falls besides?
there is hubbub in all the land, it seems. everyone is gaga, getting armed for the invasion. i doubt there is a speck of netting left in any store. i have christo visions of vast acres wrapped in tutu netting.
but not at my house. not here where since my manchild was a wee one he has learned the fine art of shooshing out the fly. not smashing the fly. not splatting the fly. merely opening a window, and escorting the little fellow out.
i cannot quite so proudly boast of child no. 2. he is more the hunter than the gatherer. he is known to flick a worm, to poke the bug that thinks to land in his vicinity. i have my work cut out for me still.
but for tonight, i say, grab the picnic blanket, stretch out on the lawn, take in the epic, once-a-generation show.
because i grew up in an age of drive-in movies where black-and-white crawling insects, with bugged-out eyes, and flailing antennae, would be blown up big, so big you could make out the outlines from the other side of the cornfield, i have in my head a sort of 1950s sci-fi image of all the planet quaking, drum-beat drumming, as the earth lets loose and vast armies of cicada come up from the underground.
i see my whole backyard awash in exoskeletons. i hear the nights, the days, thick with cicada calls. that rubbing, thrubbing that, i’m told, will sound almost as if the bugs are chanting, “pharoah, pharoah.” (i’ll be ear to ground, i tell you, to see if i can make that out.)
in fact, before i did a tad of reading, i thought this morning would be that way. i thought i was waking up to a land of uninterrupted cicada, unbroken plain of newly emerging ruby-eyeballed critter.
but, dang, i went out to fetch the milk, and not a single bugger did i eyeball.
alas, we must wait still longer. tonight at sunset, perhaps, the underground alarm will rouse them from their mighty nap, and en masse, they will roust about, make for higher parts, begin their final march to death.
for really, truly, this is it. the closing chapter for what the bug people, the entomologists, refer to as brood X, of the order magicicada.
when the little nymphlets crawled into the ground, way back in 1990, back when lech walesa got the vote in poland’s planet-shaking presidential count and the two germanies agreed to come together, the life that lay before the ’cadas was plotted out as this: sleep. sleep. sleep. emerge. mate. die.
in six short weeks, it will all be over. their lives, recorded nowhere really, duly ended. by the time the fireworks of independence day burst into the sky, brood X, class of ’007: mere history.
this is, though, a rather booming crescendo to their humdrum lives. they sleep in silence, occasionally rolling over to nibble on a tree root. they slither out without much sound, an astounding fact considering that there are some 1.5 million of the little critters per acre, people. you would think that, even tippy-toeing, that many feets would make a rumble.
ah, but then, once they shed their nymph robes, take on the sleek black sheath of adult cicadahood, the rumble will begin.
they do not go quiet unto death.
they wake the neighbors, darn it. they keep the babies up and squawking.
if you were pre-programmed to sleep, to wake, to mate, to die with your entire population, you too, might make a hearty noise.
so let the noise begin, i say. let the backyards rumble.
the boy cicadas will shake their tymbals, that is the noisemaker on their bellies. if a girl is keen for how he shakes, she’ll flick a wing, let him in on her affection. sort of like winking from the far end of the bar in some smoky den on rush street, i suppose.
off they’ll flit. but once they fornicate (yes, that’s the scientific word), he’ll keel over. kaput, the end. he’s dead.
she, though, gets to carry on a little longer. she will bear her eggs, some 600 if you’re counting. and she will make a little slit in your branch (that’s where the netting might come in, if you are into cicada prohibitions). she will drop her load. and when she’s done, done carrying on the species, she, too, will succumb. she too will keel.
the little baby cicadas, now orphaned, will crawl back underground, will go to sleep, perhaps in teeny tiny tears. before they lull to sleep, one of ’em will have to think to set the alarm. turn the hands of the big cicada clock to 2024.
when once again, i will do all i can to keep the hungry paws of all the poachers off whoever it is who emerges from my lawn.

sign up here if you too want to join the save-the-cicada brigade. they really aren’t much nuisance, just a little crunching underfoot, a little noisy maybe. put up an umbrella if you must. but do not, whatever you do, wave a fry pan in my presence. let me know how you weigh in on the awesome sucking cicada.
stay tuned in case i change my mind…
oh, one last thing: the little darlings carry quite a load of mercury, it seems. so before you bite, consider that.

on another subject altogether: over on the bottomless cup, there is a newly poured essay from the mother of ben byer, the brave hero who lives with ALS, and who wrote and produced the award-winning documentary “indestructible.” check it out. you won’t regret.

the hands belong to henry. henry is my farmer. well, he wouldn’t probably think in quite such possessive terms, but i do.

henry’s hands, the way i see it, are sacred tools. and they do sacred work. he is all about the business of putting life into loamy, yeasty-smelling soils. soils that teem with life.

and from that teeming soil, henry grows mounds and heaps and bushel baskets full to spilling. henry coaxes life from life and puts it back again.

just this past saturday, at the first of the farmers markets of the season, henry rolled up his truck from congerville, smack dab in the belly button of illinois, where his 10 acres are nestled between kinder creek and walnut creek on what he calls The Land, and he hauled out tender baby leaves that taste of the earth, and roots too, that seemed mighty happy to see the light.

there was mesclun, and spinach, of course. and ruffly lettuces and lamb’s quarters and arugula and asparagus, in stalks so green and sturdy you wanted to eat ’em raw, right then and there before they saw a drop of steaming water.

and, because henry is no ordinary organic farmer, there were shiso leaves, and asian flat-leaved chives. and french breakfast radishes, and just plain red ones too.

there was rhubarb by the crate and tender baby beets, and hardy sweet potatoes that, like wine, henry said, got finer over winter.

with every freeze and thaw, the gnarly, nubby roots–jerusalem artichoke and burdock, to name but two–who spent the winter underground, took in what the earth around them had to offer. and it offered plenty.

henry knows and honors all the earth: the soil, the seeds, the wind, the rain. it is all of the circle that is henry’s life. it can become all of ours, too, if we pay attention. if we rinse the dirt off henry’s sweet potatoes, put them in our pots, in our tummies. if we commit them to our very souls.

i’ve known for weeks that henry was out early in the morning, tending to the alchemy of seeds and sprouts. tending, too, to the fields, the rich black canvas for his farmer art. he plowed those fields, churned winter cover back into the earth, where it, in turn–it is all about the turn, ecclesiastes’ turn, in farming–would feed the summer crops.

all the while, he was keeping close eye on warm fronts and sudden frosts. when it came time, time to clear the greenhouse of his headstart on growing things, he would be deep in transplant, tucking tens of thousands of sprouted things deep into the earth.

while we were waiting, waiting for the saturday when henry’s tents would once again be raised, the bushel baskets turned, their earthy prizes spilling onto tables.

i talked to henry early saturday, i asked him about his sacred work.

“it is sacred,” he began, cradling a clutch of beets, “but if you say that, it kind of ruins it right there. it’s at such a level, it just is.

“as soon as you start to describe it, you start to lose it. it sounds pretentious or silly. when really it is sacred. sacred is getting dirty, getting wet, getting hot, getting cold, producing food.

“i work with life and death every day. life means death to another organism. harvesting a crop is death. decaying matter is death, but it gives life. it is a sacred thing. there is a sacred balance between life and death.”

i stood there feeling mighty blessed that the man who grows my food thinks these thoughts while working in the fields.

henry let on that it was weed season now, meaning he is on the prowl, clearing out the things that shouldn’t be, to make room for those that should. he’s out the door at half past four, these days. back in at 8. and that’s night we’re talkin’, people. 15 plus hours, and getting longer by the day.

“it’s not hard at all,” said henry. “what i do, i match my life to the cycle of nature. nature does the hard work. it pulls me along. the sun actually pulls me out of bed. the longest day of the year i’ll be up at 4:15.

“you don’t feel tired at all,” he insists, and you get the sense he really means it, you get the sense henry never says what he doesn’t exactly mean.

“whereas in winter, i’d feel dead because there’s no light. in winter i get home at 5 o’clock, eat dinner, think about going to bed. i look at the clock, 8 o’clock. i think, ‘man, i wouldn’t even be coming in from the fields yet.’”

henry is in the fields from february ’til almost christmas. his hands, earth-stained, hard with purpose, are the tools that i’d been thinking most about.

i asked him if he ever blessed his hands; told him i’d been offering up a prayer or two for those blessed tools.
he gave a little chuckle, turned his wrists to give his hands a better look.

said: “i always liked my hands. i must say. they’re my best tools. i like to watch ‘em move.

“they work so well. they do whatever you want, pretty much, without you thinking about it. they harvest, they weed, they get cold, in the bone-cold autumn, they get so cold they won’t work the zipper to go to the bathroom. that’s the one time they don’t work. they’re game, they’re completely game, but they just won’t work, can’t make it happen.”

henry gave his fingers a little wiggle.

“they go places without you telling ‘em to do it. i think that’s why i always wanted to work with my hands.”

he wiggled ’em once more, he bounced the beets. he looked down on his farmer hands. “they sing and they dance.”

indeed they do. they sing, they dance, they feed me through and through.

ahhh, it is a blessed thing to have your very own farmer. i share henry with all of you because, like the bounty he culls from the earth, there’d be no sense in hoarding him or what he harvests. henry is so wise he knocks me speechless. i could listen to him all day. i hope you too know a farmer. tell us about your farmer. i’d love to hear a tale of other hands that sing and dance. especially deep in blessed sacred earth.

the bequeathing usually comes at the end of a muddy shovel. a clump is dug, is offered. it might land, for temporary keeping, in a soggy cardboard box. or get wrapped in wads of newspaper. and then it lumbers home, bumping all the way, in the back of a station wagon. or tucked in the bottom of a suitcase.
don’t think a serious gardener would think twice of, or be bothered by, airport security. certainly not a sentimental gardener.
which, no surprise, would be the box i check when it comes to categorizing those who muck about in mud.
i am, through and through, a sentimental soul. and so is my garden.
i grew up at the earth-stained hands of a hand-me-down gardener. so that’s the surest way i know to garden.
because i’ve watched her, for decades, ferry home orphaned things, discarded things, things that delighted her, or simply reminded her, i know that almost every single long-returning plant, every perennial, in my mother’s garden came from someone else’s.
oh sure, she makes the rounds each spring of the old greenhouse that grows geraniums from seed. and impatiens, too. but except for that single sweep for annuals, the growing things that insist on starting over every year, she does barely any buying for her beds.
instead, she gets her growing things the honest way: she lifts them from other people’s soils. with full blessing, of course.
she has a swath of english ivy you could easily get lost in. plenty of baseballs have. and every single speck of it started out on the hilly slope of the proud cincinnati red-brick where she, long ago, knelt beside her mother, learning how to turn the earth.
that house, once magnificently draped in ivy, is no longer. but the ivy lives on. now 350 miles north of where it once was loosed, its white waxy tendrils shaken of their soils, carried far to where the relocated daughter would sink her roots, would bloom, in a garden not in her mother’s shadow.
my mother’s peonies, which don’t yet grow in my yard but will, so help me, have roots that will make you want to trespass on my grass as soon as they do, and bequeath a peony or three to your very self. (i think they call that stealing).
if you promise not to tell, and try with all your might to resist the peony-poaching temptation, i’ll let you in on a big fat secret: they come from the yard of the old man whose family home was sold a long, long time ago, in memphis, to one mr. e. presley.
yup. the house, now known famously as graceland, was where the man who grew the peonies grew up.
oh, one little thing: he didn’t grow the peonies there. he grew them later, in another century-old house, one on the ravines that jut down into streams that feed into lake michigan, about 20 miles north of chicago, in a place called highland park.
and on and on go the stories of the plants my mother tends in her garden. the ferns from the biochemist who taught me much that i know about God. the lily-of-the-valley from the woodland where i grew up pretending i was a pioneer, making coffee of the wild chicory, berry pies of the honeysuckle fruits that stained my fingers red and my white shorts, too.
all of them, except those presley peonies, darn it, have hopscotched on to my house. they never seem to mind the migration. they settle in, sink roots, stay as long as they are welcome. and they are very welcome.
as would those peonies be, mother dearest. (hmm, i think they call that coveting. yet another garden sin.)
truth is, a garden, being of the earth, is most generous, without you even asking. you take a shovel, you slice the earth, the roots, and it gives forth.
you take, the garden gives. willingly. it asks no pay. other than undying devotion. but even that, it doesn’t demand. only appreciates. mightily.
one plant becomes two. life divides. multiplies. you move it, tuck it, water it. and, poof, the earth just gave you double bounty.
so, too, it gave you story.
to walk through a hand-me-down garden is to walk among those who’ve weeded and hoed and sweated before you. you bend and snip your grandmother’s ivy. you watch the fern unfurl; you think of the man with the booming baritone whose theology rattled you, shook you, and woke you up in your teenage years to its very rooted possibilities.
my mother, who has pedaled down the street, her trowel at the ready to rescue trillium and wild geranium before the bulldozer did them in, shakes her head at those who skip the stories, those whose gardens come bought, not borrowed.
“when you walk around the garden you remember all the people,” she says, as if that’s half the point of planting anything at all. “i think a lot of people now have landscape crews come in.” what’s the point, you hear her thinking.
two points: sometimes a hand-me-down reminds you of another gardener. sometimes it reminds you of another garden.
i know. i handed-down a plant to myself. from my old garden–my first, really–to my new one, the one that’s still becoming mine.
i ached, couldn’t bear to leave that magic garden, that little pocket of solace i had tended for a dozen years. one whose dirt i had sunk my sorrows in during some empty longing years when the one thing i wanted to grow i couldn’t.
i buried grief into those mounds, watered more than once with salty tears.
i pruned and clipped and hoped. i watched my heartache break open into bloom, each and every spring, when all my tender things jostled through the crust of earth, returned, reminded me of the resurrecting promise deep within.
i could not up and leave that little plot. so i took it. or a piece of it, anyway. a blessed fragile beauty, one with sky blue tiny petals, smaller than a fairy’s thimble, that float, it seems, a mist above silver-threaded leaves.
it’s called jack frost brunnera. and i don’t know if in the history of real estate transactions, there had ever been a contract that included what the lawyers call an exclusion—meaning something you won’t sell with the house—for a measly $25 plant.
but i wanted that brunnera. i wanted my every spring to include the magic of the floating mist. so indeed i excluded it. and now it blooms, my totem of my other garden, beneath another woman’s star magnolia, one that came to me with the contract on this old house.
one grows in the dappled shade of the other.
hand-me-down gardens do that. their roots get plenty tangled. they become a patchwork of all your life, a rolling blanket of ever-blooming beauty.
some day, you hope, the tender things you love will bloom in quilt squares in other people’s gardens, in the light and shadow of someone else’s heart.
some day, you hope, someone else will see that floating mist, kneel down, if only for a moment, and drink in the story of the crazy lady who would not leave her plot behind.
she dug up a piece of it. she kept her watch. and then she handed it down and down and down.
the truth of how a garden really grows.

ahh, people, do you have tales to tell of the old souls planted in your garden? do you know the joy, the thrill, of carrying home a tender thing, tucking it rather under your wing, watching it make itself at home in your parcel of the planet? plain fact is, the handing down of plants is, for those less inclined toward sentimental musings, just another name for weeding. as i can hear my mother say, she is making room for something else. why hold onto more than anyone really needs?

oh, look, you say. it is a house where they play paint-by-numbers. only, instead of paper, they play with walls.
why slosh paint all over, the way the normal people do? why not toss it just in little splotches?
the checkerboard effect: a dash of argyle here. stockholm down below. oh, look, over there, on the northern end, it’s a blob called scout, for reasons i cannot imagine. a variation of mud. one we all decided looked like something nasty smeared onto the wall.
the little one, not one to curb his words, told us impolitely just what he thought it looked like. the big one giggled. said, i wasn’t going to say so, but he’s right, you know.
which, of course, set me and the household critic back to musing color.
which, of course, set me, the chief supplier of said splotches, back to the little shop where the man sells many colors. so many colors we often get quite cross-eyed. and, eventually, rather color-blind.
who’s to tell the difference between the bluish-gray above and the grayish-blue below? does it really matter? well, yes, when you are married to the architecture critic. it all is scrutinized. it all is deeply thought.
so our house, quite often, looks as though it’s abstract art. looks as though mr. rothko’s been here, aiming opened cans of paint in the direction of our 8 1/2-by-22 plaster canvas.
it is our unique technique for deciding just which way the paint will roll. or, as those architecture people put it: we are eavesdropping on the walls, as they whisper to each other, discerning just who it is they wish to be. what is indeed their truest color? are they feeling blue? or are they deeply gray?
why horse around with little chips of paint, so small they make you squint? why not layer on the paint in splotches magnified, so big you really get the message?
and so it is that the room that once reeked of northwoods cabin, all done up in knotty pine, is now in midst of turning just a tad more uptown, morphing into music chamber where bass and keyboard will be bouncing off the pick-a-color-any-color walls.
and so it is that blue v. gray is once again the subject at the dinner table. no civil war, not here, just deeply-hued domestic debate.
trouble is, we are big on color around here. or at least one of us is.
the other, given his druthers, would paint the walls a minimalist palette. you might have noticed the kitchen walls are white on white on white. you might have gathered that one of us needed much convincing to lock her inner-paintbrush down deep inside where, every white-washed day, it hollers to be freed.
if keeping score, however, (and who would stoop so low?) the pyramid of drippy cans underneath the stairs might suggest that she who’s keen on color is ahead, 9 rooms to 3.
yup. the walls in the house where we live are, variously, schoolbus yellow (it’s not called that, but it might as well be), navy, gray, chinese red (known to the wise-guy architect—the one we pay, not the one we live with—as north shore red, poking not-so-gentle fun at the ubiquity and lack of imagination of those in these here parts who can’t help but ooze their country-club aspirations), and a few splashes of creamy, buttery yellow, besides.
once, not so long ago, in a fit of multi-chromatic fuming, one of the critics around here pooh-poohed someone else around here’s so-called kindergarten taste when it came to coloring on the walls. argued that to walk in here was to stroll through a box of crayola crayons.
harrumph.
at least i didn’t go for the 64-pack.
and so, in attempt to appease the color averse, we are down-hueing the formerly knotty front room. we are ditching sour lemon from surrounding walls. we are going argyle.
or at least that is now the bluish-gray of the western wall. with north, east, and south to follow suit, shortly.
ah, but as long as there are rollers, and painty puddles in which to roll, there stands a chance that we will once again change our mind and change our color.
mark rothko where art thou?

i have long been convinced i might be in a minority in the home-decor-with-hubby dept. (although, truth be told, things here are rather finer for his highly educated eye.) anyone decorate with a mate? anyone have a riotous color war on which to report? anyone else hem and haw over a scant degree of difference in the various hues at hand? go ahead, splash color…

once upon an innocence, i thought may was just another month. a stretch of days, the ligament, joining april to june.
and then i had a baby. and then that baby turned into a schoolboy. and then, poof, like the wizard with his cloud of smoke and falling stars, i got let in on the big fat lurking secret.
may is nuts. may is crazy. may, people, is madness.
in may, the list of verbs is long: you pant, you spin, you lope. it all gets very blurry.
you bake brownies for the teachers, then you whip up lunch, just in case they’re hungry after eating all the brownies.
you take your seats for recitals. but, oops, first you tear apart the house searching high and low for the gotta-have-it, no-excuses, black regulation belt that is holding in the tails of the blue orchestra shirt, keeping the black orchestra pants from falling to the stage.
did i mention that you sign permission slips, you send in envelopes of cash. you buy the teachers presents, because you love them, and because someone sent out an email demanding double bills–or else.
just this week alone, in the sorry story that is our life, we count: one recital, two concerts, one 8th-grade dance, one high school activities night, one sunday school service project, a baby shower, a bridal shower, soup kitchen, soccer practice, soccer game, t-ball game, bass lesson, carpool at 6:45 in the morning.
oh my. and that is totally not counting the other grownup around here who was in and out of town twice, once by train, once by plane, leaving me to fend for my dizzy whirling self.
ah, but as i can hear my straight-talkin’ sans kiddie friends saying, all together in a mighty chorus, “sorry, sweets, this gig you did sign up for. if you wanted bonbons in may, you shoulda skipped the mating game.”
so true.
it’s just that may sneaks up on you. december you expect. it’s the nationally hectic month. no surprises there.
but until they hand you that little wad at the maternity wing, the one they swaddle in a way that you can never do again, and shoosh you out the exit, well, you are clueless.
and you remain clueless (oh, in so many ways) through all the diaper years. but then somewhere around maybe kindergarten, earlier if your sweet thing is precocious, is signed up for every pottery-spinning, folk-tune-humming, shakespeare-at-the-zoo kiddie class under the blazing sun, you find yourself and your calendar slammed in the merry, merry month of end-of-year recitals, start-of-summer sports, and all-purpose winding-down-the-schooldays.
you could run out of ink, trying to keep your calendar appropriately up to snuff.
so there you are, a kindergarten mama, rubbing your sorry brow, trying to make the pounding go away, when you shift your eyes from right to left, make sure the coast is clear, then you lean in, and you whisper to another someone draped in mama-wear.
psst, you ask, by any chance are you spinning in your sleep? is this not the month of never, ever catching breath?
the one in mama-wear, she laughs. she laughs in the way of someone who is clued in, and who realizes that you are not.
she hands you a wad of tissue. she hands you oxygen tank. she slaps you on the angel blade, that little stub where your wing forgot to sprout.
“buck up, mama,” she says, sending you on your way. “june will be here soon. and then it’s only west nile and dehydration you’ll need to fret about. bug spray and water bottles will nip those in the bud.
“it’s just may you must endure.”

before whirling off the chair, diving deep into the day, anyone have a nanosecond to do some typing here? anyone else caught off-guard by the madness that is may? if it would make you feel better, sort of like stripping off the pantyhose that held you in all day, you too can pound your heart out, and tell us every sorry item on your laundry list of things to do. the one with the most things, will win a little prize: a personalized oxygen tank, with a pink nasal cannula. on your mark, get set, start typing…….

according to the number people, according to those who scribble little lines on charts, make dots, connect them, study the rise and fall of inclines, project into the future, anchor their living, breathing, to what the numbers tell them, today is the day you might think about lifting your trowel from its wintry slumber, shaking off the cobwebs and giving it a little aerobic workout.
today, people, is the official last frost date, the date the gardeners circle on their calendars, the date they know as surely as they know the 25th of december, the 15th of april, and, well, the very day they blow out the candles on their cake.
what it means, though, is all rather iffy.
it means that the middle day of may, a.k.a. today, is, if you dug through centuries of archives, if you played statistician, if you studied air masses and cold fronts, if, if, if, this would be the day on which the scales tip in your favor, and you stand a winning chance, should you grab the trowel and fling some dirt today, that you’ll not wake up some morning hence to find your geraniums shivering in their pity pots, decked out in winter white.
unless of course you bring up the subject at your nearby nursery, where the crusty folk who spend their days slinging 4-inch annuals, packing dirt under their nails, slugging back cans of Coke to keep up with the crush at the cash registers, have a decidedly guarded take on the matter.
“ahh, it might be the last day you’ll get a freeze. but the last frost date, i don’t care what they say, is memorial day. unless you live near the lake where it could go either way. i know plenty o’ years we lost plants memorial day,” barked bob, whose neck, from slinging all day long, was red as the aforementioned geraniums, the ones he was loading off a lopsided red wagon onto the plywood counter, tallying up yet another three-digit tab.
indeed, the date is highly amended. modifiers modifying modifiers.
and, yes, if you gathered all the gardeners in a circle, asked each to tell a tale of the latest date a garden ever froze, you would get as many dates as there are stories.
but statistically speaking, people, today’s the date to lift the trowel. if you live in zone 5 b. if you live close enough to the lake, but not so close that chill winds are likely to blow through your backyard. if your last name starts with the letters a-m.
which points, people, to the folly of all these means and medians, averages and statistical best-hopes.
you can garden by the numbers. or you can garden by heart.
i, being a mamby-pamby girl, i do a little bit of both. i keep an eye, at least, on the numbers, but i go with where the warm winds blow. i often jump the gun.
just yesterday, loading up at the ramshackle little nursery that i think i’ll call my own (i’m fickle, floating from nursery to nursery, deciding which one’s got the best characters, the most color–and i don’t mean in the pots), i heard tell that it was way too soon to have my herbs outside.
well, don’t tell the thyme and basil. they’ve been getting along just fine. added just the right touch to the red sauce i made the other night.
as always, the lesson here extends beyond the garden. you can play it by the numbers. live your life the actuarial way. or you can hunker down in your own personal micro-climate, make the most of the way the rays hit you on your cheek. grab for sweaters when the chill winds blow.
’cause you know, when you’ve been replaying this record for a while, that soon as you pin your dreams on some digits on a gridded page, a storm’ll blow in, knock you flat, and you’ll be left scratchin’ your head.
won’t do the window boxes any good to point to the calendar, claim a penalty on the field.
like all life, you plant with all your heart, you take your chances. you add freeze-dried basil to your salad, if you have to.

truth be told, i was at the nursery back in april. trucks weren’t even unloaded. but i was there, at the ready. i know we’ve got folks here who fling dirt far as california, fair london even, and i do believe you’ve been safe for weeks now. months, in the case of sunny southern california. you probably don’t even have a frost date. but you do have earthquakes. which get in the way of a garden. any oops-i-jumped-the-gun stories to be told? in the garden, or beyond? always we keep an eye to the beyond…..

quiescence, as often happens, was rather abruptly interrupted here the other morning. there i was, blah-blah-blahing on the phone, when suddenly, up above my head, i detected something flapping. it was not a butterfly. not a cicada–not yet anyway.
its wings, whatever it was, were making noise. right in my suddenly perked-up ear.
egad, i yelped, as whatever winged thing it was circled me, took off for parts south and west.
it was a bird, all right. a warbler or a wren. forgive me, i know not all my mousy-gray birds, and certainly not when they are diving for my head.
i thought, oh, how sweet. the birds have all been reading this here blog. one day i was yammering about putting out the smucker’s, the jam of choice should you care to bring on the winged things. the next, i was letting on about how i just can’t bear to bring the outside inside, mentioned how a little sharp-edged therapy was loosening the ties that bind.
and then, poof, the l’il bird brain puts two and two together, decides ol’ mrs. smucker lady needs to spend her morning up close and personal with a frantic feathered thing. the outside, rather fully inside.
fact is, i rather liked, for the while that it was here, having a little pet songbird. only problem was, it seemed a bit, um, rattled by the presence of my roof. and so it did was birdies do when they are rattled: it pooped.
oh yes, oh yes. it pooped and flew and flew some more. it was playing on the stairs. up and down. in and out of the bathroom (not politely putting that room’s function to any proper use, now, thank you).
it darted in our bedroom. checked out the bed, where poor cat, now wide awake, thought perhaps he was dreaming. he drooled, the cat did. but the bird did not. the bird kept darting in and out of rooms.
the oddest thing, as if none of the above is odd enough, i swear this house was sealed. the doors were closed. the windows, shut.
which reminded me of the night the bats came in, another night the house was allegedly, purportedly hermetically sealed.
i was home alone that summer’s night. had just come home from l’hopital, as the french would so poetically say it, with a belly stitched stern to bow.
i was sitting in my bed, when once again, flapping overhead. mon dieu, i might have said, keeping with the french, it is a bat.
but then more flapping.
it was not a bat. it was two. turned out a pair of bats were playing follow-the-leader around my bed, around my head.
soon as i dared to inch out from under the pillow, i called a neighbor. she tiptoed in, a blanket on her head. i tried really hard not to laugh. but she was in the foyer yelping for her life. she has a blood-curdling yelp, i discovered that very night.
and there is something about yelps and stitches ’cross your middle: they don’t do well together. not when you are laughing so hard you think the stitches, and what they keep from coming out, will split right open.
she yelped until my big brave warrior returned from the swimming pool. i yelled out the window, from the confines of my bat-protected room (i had closed the door, in the fastest dash you ever did see, ’specially for a lady holding her stitches to keep from splitting).
brave warrior, clued into the home invaders, did a warrior thing: he hauled in the yelping neighbor’s mate. they geared up for the occasion with bike helmets, soggy towels, and tennis rackets. tiptoed in, headed straight for the computer, leaving me alone upstairs, in stitches. quite literally.
while batman and robin googled “bats, how to chase,” i pressed against the bedroom door, ear held close, listening to the flap-flap-flap of bat wings in the hall.
to cut a side-splitting saga short: the racket-wielding boys, i mean men, opened up a window, and we surmised (you spend the night wondering, i assure you) that out the window the little batties flew.
which is where we return to the story of the little bird who came in for coffee the other morning.
at last, after much hide-and-go-seek, the bird and i found ourselves together in a room. poor thing, beak ajar, chest pounding, it was looking rather harried.
i tried to talk it down. it wasn’t listening. rather, it was flitting back and forth. from bed post to perch of closet door. when at last it banged into the window, my little bulb, the one inside my head, clicked on.
(“duh,” i can hear you saying. don’t think this magic computer does not tell me what you’re saying as you merrily read along.)
anyway, i opened the window, just like the bat boys finally did. tried to shoo. tried to point the way. but the birdie wouldn’t have it. stubborn little bird, he was busy polka-dotting. perhaps, i thought, he is waiting for some smucker’s all his own. served on little toasty points, on a silver tray.
oh, phew, at last, our playtime over, out the birdie flew. i saw him (i just have a hunch it was a boy, don’t ask me why), the little bird, land safely in the arbor vitae.
it was all, of course, rather eye-opening in the early morning. and, of course, the little sleeper child slept through every blessed flap-flap-flap.
while he wrapped up his little zzzzzs, i retraced the birdie’s every flap, wad of tissue with me, wiping as i went.
aha, the point of entry, i discovered. a front window, not far from where the nesting’s going on, it was open a crack and a half.
the little bird, it seems, took that as invitation.
this little tale, promised as a cautionary saga, really has no moral, no overarching point.
but in keeping with my promise i would offer only this: put in your screens, do not delay. you never know who might decide to beak and enter on an otherwise uneventful springtime morning.

it’s monday, people. time for wake-up tales of invasionary nature. anyone have a critter-in-the-crawlspace tale to tell?

and of course, just as once upon a time, monday meant washday, here at the chair it means the lazy susan spins afresh.

finally, hope that all of you who mother (and that would be all of you, in one form or another) had a most lovely mothering day. we sure did here…

let’s see, that would be quirk no. 313 in the big book of odd notions that are mine, all mine. and it would be filed under O for outside-in, aversion. or maybe P for pluck. to pluck or not to pluck, that is the pressing postulation.
what this alphabetical quandary is all about is this: queer, yes (oh, look, a Q), it seems i am wired with unnatural natural reticence (UNR) to bring the outdoors in. not in winter. not in fall. but, yes, oh, yes, in spring.
i am quite stricken (QS), i must admit, when it comes to displacing blooms from where they bloom. quite stricken, too (QS2), when it comes to bringing them in to where i can, well, A.) gaze upon them as i burn the broccoli (an almost every day occurrence, i am loathe to tell), and, thus, B.) bury my nose in them while scrubbing black off the bottom of said broccoli pot.
quick disclaimer (QD): i have no inhibitions whatsoever when it comes to gathering the garden’s wounded. in fact, the little ledge above my kitchen sink is, every spring and summer, a rather crowded flower infirmary.
the injured, the lame, i line them up, in a hodgepodge of tiny vases and shallow bowls. a drink for this, a splint for that. i love nothing more than to put my nursing skills to good use, rehabilitating broken stems.
a little aspirin, a little love, i patch them all together again. if my triage doesn’t take, i am consoled by the fact that the fallen let out their last gasp in my most heart-felt company.
ahh, but the well ones. that is where i fall.
i know it makes me the lone bulb in the bag, but it is the sturdy blooms that unsteady me. the erect that topple me. the ones perfectly content to stick their necks out, to reach high and mighty, undaunted, truly, for the sky.
who am i, i wonder, to wander by, sharp blades in hand, and snip to heartless heart’s content?
as one who cozies rather close to those whose creed is consume not anything that’s ever had a face, my logic, it seems, follows straight to the garden’s edge. and that is where my sharp-edged dilemma has me rather dammed in this here dirt.
is it, or is it not, cruel fate for flower stem to be felled? to die a sooner death, sucking waters, in the shaded kitchen, than to live out one’s final numbered days soaking in the sun’s undiluted rays, blowing willy-nilly in the breeze?
could it be the perfection of the tidy rows that i dare not dislodge? decidedly, it could not. as the rows are neither rows nor tidy. it is all rather hodge-podge and disheveled in my earthy beds.
could it be some bizarre, as-yet-unnamed, botanical neurosis? oh, great.
perhaps, the fear of rattling mother nature?
could it be i think it stingy to gather up the season’s beauty, steal it from the birds and bees, bring it in for me and me and only me?
was there some trespass in my past, a petunia perhaps, that i poached from mrs. crochet down the block? was i rapped on all my knuckles for the venial sin of coveting someone else’s lily-of-the-valley?
hmmm. a psycho-horticultural conundrum to be sure.
coaching myself through self-constructed 3-step therapy, i decided just the other day to give the other side a try. to do some cutting, and some gathering, to bring some stems in through the door.
it all started without much premeditation. the day was bright. the lingering bouquets, plainly dead.
i gathered steam. i mustered courage. i coached myself at every garden turn.
i reached, first, under the sink. i grabbed for felco no. 2s, the snipper that knows no stem too thick to cut off at the neck.
i decided to dip in easy here. i snipped the viburnum, the one that makes me swoon, the one i would bathe in if given half a chance. bringing in a stalk or two of that was not one bit disturbing, and besides i slithered through the crack in the fence and cut the blooms that crossed the line into my next door neighbor’s airspace anyway. i’m sure they didn’t mind me tidying up my messy bush.
now on a roll, i did in a few stems of virginia bluebells. but, pansy me, i did the dirty deed back behind the boxwood where no one but the wrens, or my hungry cat, could see them in the first place.
then, giving in to inner pang to round out this mass of baby blue and oyster-pink, i tiptoed out to where the daffodils, frozen stiff weeks ago, still lay. poor petals imitating old crepe paper, but yellow through and through. good enough for me, since this was, at best, mere starter therapy.
against all odds, i brought in my newly decapitated blooms. i dumped the old green almost-goo from the cracked milk pitcher, the pitcher that most recently had been holding well-past-expired grocery-store tulips, the ones i now feel guilty buying, but that’s another quirk we’ll not explore today.
i plunked, stood back and gazed.
i must say i was rather charmed by the misshapen stems, the drooping heads, the leaves with little nibble marks. there was something wholly unsterile, un-store-bought, about these blooms that bloomed the natural way.
it made me think: could it be, after all these years of not daring to disturb the grand outdoor’s design, that dear mother earth is, in truth, one indulgent mama, and more than willing to part freely with whole armfuls of her many varied stems?
it made me think that all these years i had been seriously bound by cockamamie notions, all of my own making.
it made me wonder what else is buried deep inside my inner gardener that i might soon dispel with just a little coaching.
and of course my felco pruners, which are more than suited for cutting any ties that bind.
(and filed under F should you need to find them in my alphabetically constrained house.)

okey doke, now you know my latest quirk. anyone else think twice before gathering what blooms and hauling it in the house? am i—no, make that, was i—all alone in my disinclination to disturb what creeps up from deep below? raise your hand if you think you too could use a little felco pruning therapy. in any area of your inner garden…

“psst,” i can hear them saying, nudging with their wings, “down there,” now pointing with their beaks. “dive-bomb,” one whispers to another. “take a hit. the lady’s cracked open the jelly and the oranges. and not just any jelly, pal. she went for smucker’s. dang.”
it’s pay day for the orioles. the baltimore orioles. and, nope, not the men who run in circles, swing at flying balls, get paid more than you and i will probably ever see.
i mean, of course, the orange ball of feathers that will make you gasp, will make you rouse the children, rouse the dead most likely, when you see one settling down at the oranges and the jelly you’ve left out for them, your diner always open.
the class today, as promised some time back, is migration 101. we are learning together, you and i, so i promise not to get too over-your-head. only so much as to make you swoon, like i am. i am in full swoon over here.
this here, from just the other day ‘til end of may, then trickling into june, is the thickest of the thick.
these are the days when birds are crowding in the clouds, nudging, budging, making way to make their northern nests and spend the summers lolling in the shady woods. sort of like you, perhaps, headed off to your northwoods cabin, except without the fishing poles and the bug spray.
the first, best thing you need, should you decide that swooping orangeballs will set you right this spring, is rather straightforward.
one quick trip to the grocery should do it. you can leave the kiddies in the car, if they’re not of an age that would leave you under lock and key, behind bars, making your quick trip to the grocery not so quick after all.
you’ll dash for just two goodies: a bag of oranges, any sort will do. just so they’re orange, and not greenish-orange. no self-respecting oriole will go for orange of other color.
next, please, traipse (skipping works fine, too, try skipping through the grocery, see what happens when you skip) to the jelly aisle. there, you will pass over all the other concord grape concoctions, you will settle only–finicky, yes, but this is for the orioles, after all–for the smucker’s.
in birdie circles (which we now are in), smucker’s is the whispered, venerated brand for which there is no substitute.
it is, plainly, the opiate of the orioles, if you really want to know. which of course you do.
“the birds go nuts,” says our old friend t.j. , the bird man, the one who teaches much. “some people swear by smucker’s. isn’t that ridiculous?”
to think a beaked thing would be so discriminating. perhaps they ptu-ptu the lesser grapes, spit out mere mortal brands.
but enough with all this high-brow jelly. what you want to do is tuck it into little jelly cups–yes, you read that right–for your little flying friends. pyrex works well, says t.j. and i’m sure they wouldn’t turn up their beaks at spode.
next, slice oranges. leave them on the ground, or lying on your fire escape. if you want to get ahead of the class you could pound a long nail through a 2-by-4, and impale the juicy half. this little trick keeps the ol’ greedy squirrels from making off with your navel. oh my.
in case you wondered: not only are your oranges there for all their juice, they are there as can’t-miss-from-the-clouds fruity billboards, backyard beacons to the sky.
as all the winged things are flap-flap-flapping on their birdie byway, en route, say, from the andes mountains or the yucatan, they’ll zero in on flash of orange and come diving from on high. sort of like the “open” sign flapping on the diner door.
the one last thing you want to make absolutely sure you always have enough of in these dry migration days is water, water, water. can’t have enough. the little birds, just think, have been flapping for miles and miles and miles and their little birdie throats are rather parched, to say the least.
so those, my fine-footed friends, are the to-do’s on your bring-on-the-birds migration list.
here is the why, here is where i swoon:
far far away, in thick jungles and tropical forests, the light of spring begins to change. the days are longer. the light, brighter.
little molecules of light, it seems, poing a little spot in the back of the birds’ brains. that spot, a switch, then lets loose a surge. their little bodies are filled, are flooded, with hormones that tell the birds: go north. build nest. get yourself back to where you and your mama and your mama’s mama once hatched.
and so, at nightfall, when winds are calm, when predators are few, when air is cooler and thus less dehydrating, the winged things take flight. sometimes by the tens and tens of thousands. often, they catch the updraft of a warm front, and come wafting in on southerly winds. no fools, they don’t flutter upstream, like those silly salmon.
my friend t.j. tells me that, true to the book, night before last, whole swarms came in, came in on the warm front that made us wake up without need for sweaters.
and, thus, when my mama called first thing to say. “the warblers arrived overnight,” she was right. my mama who knows the birds the way she knows her breathing, she woke up and knew the warblers came.
time-out to connect a dot: our rabbi, when asked, but how do you know there’s a God if you can’t see God, always comes back with this simple question, have you ever seen the wind?
all the warblers floating in on the warm front makes me think that one night, every may, the answer to that question is, yes, i saw the wind the night the golden-throated warblers, by the thousands, blew in.
t.j. tells me the birds will fly six to eight hours at a stretch, through the night. some birds will burn a quarter of their body fat in a single night.
as night gives way to daylight, as the first scattered rays of sunbeam peek over the horizon, the birds, exhausted, parched, famished, begin their dawn descent.
they look for sumptuous plots of land, a cherry tree frothed in its springtime meringue, an old dead river birch where bugs by the billions will make for a bottomless all-you-can-eat buffet.
they settle into limbs, nod off in birdie naps. but, mostly, intently, they inhale the fuel they need to flap again. for some, this is the byway’s end. your backyard might be their summer cabin. for others, there are miles to go before they finish flapping.
they’ll look for water. and oranges. and if they hit the jelly jackpot, little pyrex cups of smucker’s concord grape jelly.
indeed, it’s thick out there these days. so thick, and so raucous with all the birdsong, crazy people like t.j. and my mama, and now me, can’t get anything done.
we here along lake michigan–and that’s all of chicago–are smack dab in the fast lane of the flyway that stretches from south america to near the north pole. there are four main flyways through the united states: the atlantic, the pacific, the mississippi (that’s us) and the central, which is midway between the mississippi and pacific.
you can actually trace where we are in the migration by what birds are landing in your yard. the day the orioles and rose-breasted grosbeaks roll in, you know the great migration has begun. for the next three weeks the trees will be alive with bouncing, bopping birds. the air, dense with flitting, flapping, blue jay swooping, warbler darting.
but best of all, just stand outside and listen. in fact, you needn’t even go outside. just stand still. just listen.
it is the season for keeping open all the doors and windows.
there is the sound of heaven right within your reach. and it will come winging to you for just a little jelly spooned into a cup.
all the more sweetly if you make it smucker’s.

class dismissed. any questions?
p.s. thanks for putting up with my bird-brained madness.