Poetry Friday: Something There Is That Loves A Fence

Poetry never seems to really leave me alone, not that I am asking it to...but I don't exactly beg it to stay either. I haven't written a Poetry Friday post for some time and yet when I planned today that I would join in again and post something up I had about four or five ideas for poems come zinging into my consciousness. I would never self-identify as a poet but I do love a good poem and I seem to have a lot of poems rattling around in me trying to get out.

Poetry Friday is being hosted today by Poetry For Children and I am thrilled to join in again! Check out the other contributions. Happy Summer!

Today I am sharing a poem about our California backyard. This is our first yard with a genuine privacy fence and I have to say that I love it, the privacy and the peeking over and through it to talk to the neighbors. Its amazing how much I think of Frost's poem and chuckle.

Privacy Fence
I walk the high board fence between our yards
Escorting the black hose the length of the flower bed
Hissing fallen petals, shed leaves and dust ahead of us.
Your glory vine is pushing fingers through the planks,
Spying at my boys as they lounge in the hammock
My leadwort is getting positively coquettish,
Throwing its sky blue tresses clear over the wall.
In your direction.
Neither of us mind.
You peek at me through the slits in the boards grinning
Passing bags of Cambodian shrimp chips over to us
Or dropping candy bars to my jazzed 6 year old
I bow and wave and wish you a good day
Sometimes sending over a bouquet of mint
Or a few choice stems of rose blossom
And over us, your banana cluster ripens benevolently
While my passiflora vine tenderly creeps up
Into the arms of your apple tree.

Green Brain

I have Green-Brain. Its that time of year. There are any number of things sprouting and greening and budding in our sunroom which is very cheerful. This is a good time of year to be one of my houseplants. I'm dreaming of gardens and gardening and yet feeling so cold averse that I want to spend all my time snuggled up indoors. All of that amounts to much more attentive, loving care for the plant members of the household right about now. I am clinging to each little chartreuse leaf and unfolding blossom to tide me over until the warm comes back and until the baby is willing to me wander farther than a foot from him with my pruning shears and my trowel.

Almost every night I am carting the clanging metal compost can outside to our backyard pile and dumping more veggie trimmings and fruit cores. I feel very motivated to grow the heap, thinking about all the earthworms that I hope are churning away in the core of the pile, making me sweet fertilizer for filling up anemic raised beds, and tucking around my sad strawberry plants. Its a good time of year to be anything gardeny that wants my attention. Green leaves, and curling tendrils and produce of all kinds from my own land are what I am dreaming about at night, craving at the library, and turning my camera on whenever I look around for subjects.

Pom is not a fan of plants, unless he can eat them. He puts everything in his mouth and is scooting around backwards making himself angry at the way everything gets father and farther away every time he moves. And he is starting to make stabs at standing and stepping a little with hands to hold. The doctor tells me he is 5th percentile for weight and height but I find it hard to be too concerned, when he's so impossibly round and happy.  He's just a small, plump, happy man.

Greening and Cleaning

The world is greening, the lawn wants mowing already and our new baby guinea pigs are living high on boy offerings of dandelions and grass blades by the fistful. We have been spending a lot of time outdoors. The garden is in, all but the tomatoes, the corn and the possible melon plants which I am waiting on just a little, little while. I feel quite accomplished....as long as I don't think too hard about my spring cleaning plans.

 Spring Cleaning is hard. It's grueling, back-breaking, mind-bending, knee throbbing work by design...that's why it's only done once or twice a year. We can't really put out this sort of effort very often and when we do we go all out. I'm not sure how much pressure to put myself under while pregnant.
There's a piece of me that says:

          "You better push hard now girl! You think its hard to clean this house when you're shaped like a beach ball and everything aches? Just wait till you're trying to heal up from birth and nurse in all your waking hours. This is the time. Don't whine. Just get it done." 

And then there's the voice that says:

           "Heh. Right. You're enormous, everything hurts, and who really spring cleans anymore anyway. All your friends think you're insane! Just mop the floors and give yourself gold stars for even attempting the job. There's always later."

Which little shoulder voice to obey....what to do, what to do? At the moment I am weakly still claiming to be cleaning and making tiny, little feeble stabs at the list every day now for the second freaking week running. Am I duping myself or am I a Spartan of a woman, fierce in my stubborn desire to make it through, even if it means accomplishing it all at a crawl? I'm not sure. Maybe I'll still give up. It remains to be seen.

 In other news, A is off work this week...he took some time for sanity segue before his new job he's starting (cue confetti!) so we have him around the house all week in varying measures which has been super productive and quite fun. His new position will be similarly geeky (programming extraordinaire) but at a local company a little closer to our house, right in our own city no less. He just breezed into the house from a test run rollerblading to the new job site....30 minutes by blade from our front door. Not bad....honestly its exactly the same by car minus the exercise credits.

Tiny Bouquet

I have been thinking Lenten thoughts, going over ways to add penance, giving and prayer to my life in more ways and one of the ways I've been working on is a silent walking time first thing in the morning. Time to pray, listen, be still, hear and just generally not be online or on my phone or carrying on two or three conversations at once with the boys. I've been enjoying it a lot and am starting to wind my walk down with a little poking around type browse around my own yard to see where spring is showing up and what little touches of new life I see. This week, I saw that my Lenten Rose is blooming! It was just an unlabeled, cheap grocery store potted variety that I put in the ground after it finished blooming for me indoors last year.

I so hoped it would take, a Lenten Rose has been on my gardeny wishlist for a long time and lucky, lucky me...I got one for a pittance at my local grocery! I think I bought a mixed pot of several different cream, pink and burgundy shades and it looks like only the dark wine color has managed to set itself firmly into the soil. Still amazing to me that even when we are getting temperatures in the 30's and sometimes even 20's this brave little flower does its thing, undeterred. I have noticed that there are still several upcoming buds so I took to liberty of bringing one indoors to enjoy in a bottle. What a treat to have a small bouquet from my own garden in February!

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Mommy, Heal Thyself

Sometimes, life is just too much and I'm kind of blowing steam out my ears and afraid someone will talk to me at which point I will either explode or burst into tears...not that anything super horrible is happening.  I just need a little time in a safe place sometimes, a little hope and a little healing and some way to create some extra buffer space and margin for myself.

Image by tkw954 via Flickr

Historically, the woods where I grew up was my "safe place" where I went to recover and breathe again. There was a bottomless sort of solid freshness to the feel of a mound of moss under my fingers or the tinkling run of the crick at the bottom of our little valley.

Image via Wikipedia

Once I no longer lived in a woods I had to extemporize. I would escape the pressure of campus relationship dramas, my roomate's eating disorders and the endless industrial pavement of the city and drive my little clunker around in aimless wandering spirals on little country roads north of town and south of town and east of town, wherever the sidewalks ended and the farmstands began. I'd roll the windows down and play loud music and sometimes stop to sit in a roadside ditch just to listen to the crickets sing around me.

Image via Wikipedia

Then once I was married life got a little busier and I couldn't always dash off to drive off my worries but I discovered a greenhouse in town not far from where I worked and sometimes when a rough shift ended on a cold winter night, I'd stop at the greenhouse and dawdle my way through every single row and table, reading the names of different epiphytes and orchids, playing in the water the the table-top fountains they sold burbled and petting the ubiquitous greenhouse kitties. I don't know if it was the sound of moving water, the smell of growing things, the green haze in the air or the purring nudge of the resident cats but it always worked. I'd go back to my car feeling like I could walk again, like I wouldn't cry after all and like there was a reason to live.

Lemons as big as your head!

Maybe you think I'm crazy and shallow and even selfish, but that's how it works with me. The one last place that has been a haven in tough times (don't laugh!) is Panera Bread. Somehow everything is alright again when I am snuggled own in a warm booth, watching the fireplace flicker with a mug of coca as big as my head between my hands. I think I can thank my sister-in-law, Jane for introducing me to this particular form of healing. We spent many a chatty afternoon back in my college and post-college Michigan days noshing in the comforting glow of Panera after they built one right down the road from her house. Now Panera makes think of all those who love me and slow conversation and laughter and good times and there's also something very boosting as the perennial mommy-person who takes care of everyone else, in having someone else make me lunch and bring it to me on a platter (special perk of appearing at the counter with your arms full of babies) even if "someone else" is a guy named Jose who doesn't know me from Adam is being paid by someone else to make my lunch. Still. I'll take it. And it does come with a fireplace and a mug of cocoa the size of my head.

Giant green leaves. :)

Today I took the boys to Panera. (They pretty much always have to come along whenever mommy needs some healing.) I've discovered that Panera makes pb&j perfectly and that they serve these exciting little yogurt-in-a-tube snacks that Mommy never buys which are thrilling to my sons. We had lunch together, watched all the other people eating lunch and talked about them, snuggled up to the fireplace, and then bought a gingerbread man to split over our cocoa. Life was better.

The beautiful herb wreaths they were making while we were there today, all sage and bay and thyme etc. They smelled amazing.

Nib, wandering the aisles.

And then I remembered that there was a greenhouse I'd heard a rumor about that I'd been meaning to visit for some time...so we gps'd it and drove ourselves right over. There are actually about four greenhouses, a special one just for herbs, one with an amazing, lush lemon tree and one with an indoor farmer's market once a week (today, just by chance!). There are kitties curled up snoozing on the top of plant racks, there is that moist green smell that all greenhouses have and there are little corners where nobody is and you can just let your boys sit down on the ground and run the pea gravel through their fingers while you smell flowers and meander around fingering tags. The doors on each house close so there's no serious losing of the toddler and it turns out my boys light up just as much as I do when they walk into a greenhouse. We all left ready to come back again soon. I think I just found my safe place. If you need a little solace yourself and you happen to be in the area, this particular greenhouse is called Gilbertie's Herb Garden. So, I'm feeling better now, and our house is one jasmine plant and a few herbs richer and we have a place to run when the needle is on E.

Tomato Stars

These shining beauties were the first tomatoes off our vines this year. Am a big fan of the orange streaks and stripes. It still takes my breath away to pluck something out of the yard and take it straight to the table for dinner, there's a really deep empowerment to the process, somehow being part of something deep and mystically sacred, much bigger than you, but paradoxically also something you did by the sweat of your own brow. I get fairly drunk on it all.

The Wind That Shakes The Corn

 We've got our paintbrush out and we've been helping the wind pollinate the corn at our house! Corn plants have both male and female parts on the same plant and the plant sex that creates big juicy cobs of corn is all about the pollen getting from the male parts (the tassels, up top) onto the female parts (the silk, at the tip of each potential ear).  In a big field of corn, the wind does the job admirably. In our little backyard patch with only three rows and a hedge around our property to block wind, not to mention neighbors houses and trees and such, we can't be sure the wind will get the pollen in the right spots.

 So, we're helping out a little. Here is Ru, demonstrating what I've been doing with my biggest watercolor wash brush. I snipped several tassels that were shedding pollen and put them in a ziploc and then dipped my brush into the bottom after giving it a few good shakes. The pale yellow dust collected on the hairs of the brush and then I went around giving each tassel a little brushing.

 Some of our tassels are this pretty color, like some of the female parts got all My Little Pony and wanted to make sure everyone knew their gender by wearing all pink. Kind of makes me chuckle.

 And some of our silks are this pale blond color, almost transparent in the sunshine. I am interested to see how the corn kernels relate to the silk color. (If they do) Every single one of those hairs runs down to a specific kernel of corn and if each strand finds a granule of pollen it will develop a juicy bump on the cob...if not it will be a dry blank spot. Trying to hand pollinate our corn makes the whole process seem ridiculously miraculous. I think it will be astounding if I manage to get any full ears out of the process. How can you ever be sure that every single hair has been given pollen? There are so many of them and the pollen is so tiny. It's amazing to me that it ever works with just the wind to do the job.

 We were the only ones after the pollen. Some bees, not our bees as far as I noticed, but a larger variety that werem't honeybees, were collecting too. Bees actively gather pollen in addition to nectar. Pollen has a lot of protein and fat, basically a meat substitute for a vegetarian species...nectar is mainly sugar, which is a good energy source. The bees turn nectar into honey but they just eat the pollen. Fun to see that our corn is making food for us and others, with no extra effort!

corn, plants, garden, pollen, pollination, sex, ear, cob, kernel, bees, grown, summer, gardening, food, sweet corn

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Impromtu Beach Stop

 Mama saw a taco truck. Mama pulled over. Mama told the boys to put on their bathing suits. Mama bought some tacos. The Beach + A Taco Truck??? Crazy cool.

 There's a lot of sea lettuce on the shore right now at this particular spot, and so you had to find a clear spot or wade tip-toe through it to get to the open water. Love that my boys aren't to prissy to handle it.

 You can see why it got the name it did. I hear it's edible. I've never tried. I don't actually personally like sea veggies unless they're on the outside of my sushi.....at least as far as I have tried.

 Isn't this red kind pretty? Anybody know their seaweeds? I need to learn their names.

 There was a little wading, which became a little splashing, and a few falls...no harm done. Just slightly more damp  on the ride home. We don't mind a little sea water.

Found a lot of scallop shells at this beach right now too....interesting to see how the natural detritus changes over the season and location to location. We don't have many scallop shells near our house, we have whelks (Look! I know a new one!) and lots of oysters and mussels.

We sat and ate our tacos, watched the freighters unloading across the harbor, launched a few driftwood ships and then hopped back across the sand to our car. First impromptu beach session of the year? Check!

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