But Can They Fly?

This winged wonder is the kite I've made to enter in the Mid-State Fair coming to my area this week. It's a triangular box kite variation on a conyne design, using vinyl shelf liner and photos by Ansel Adams from last year's calendar. Will it fly? Hell if I know. The fair's handmade kite competition doesn't require a flight.

The fair always comes up with some theme each year, and in the floral design competitions we'll have to find ways to illustrate the theme in flower arrangements. This year's doozy is "Mountains of Fun" and I nearly scratched from the kite business because of it. Easily overwhelmed, poor me.

But I'm a member in good standing of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the program does NOT advocate giving up when the going gets tough. I did what a good AA ought to do when she has signed up to make a kite and now thinks it will be too hard: call on her sponsor. Sponsors handle all kinds of odd problems.

I was reminded of that ever-so-helpful Chinese proverb: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What's the first indicated thing to do? Prayer is usually a smart idea.

Now, God is probably very busy with serious issues. But in AA I'm allowed to access a Higher Power of my own understanding. While the God of my fathers is far too tied up with enormous global and individual crises to care about kite anxiety, my own Higher Power has wiggle room to handle challenges of every sort. So I dialed my spiritual hotline. Next thing I know, that old Ansel Adams calendar comes to mind, with its beatiful black and white photos of mountains. Ha! It happened on the 101 freeway heading for an AA meeting. If anyone tries to argue me out of believing in my Higher Power, I will show them this kite. And I know it will fly even though it doesn't have to.

And here's a photo just for fun of my newest garden acquisition. The 30-inch curving top piece, headed with an iron butterfly on one end and an iron weight on the other, is simply balanced on the stand of stones on a quarter-inch ball welded to the top piece. The large butterfly and a smaller one partway down the backside catch the breeze, and the whole things turns gently on the stand. I wonder what would happen to the betterflies in a gale. Would they fly?

Reborn!

I discovered something useful yesterday during hand surgery. Apparently my constitution is resistant to the so-called "powerful" sedative Versed, which is used to induce a twilight sleep and erase memory during medical procedures. Even a double dose of it, combined with fentanyl, had no effect on me. I was completely awake through the whole thing and grateful that a) my hand had been numbed and b) I wasn't undergoing a colonoscopy.

Thank you for all your good wishes. I think the surgery was successful because there's just a wee bit of tingling compared to the usual burning pain. I feel like I've been stabbed in the palm of my hand, so I know it's not numb anymore. The price I pay for sobriety is that I don't get to take opiate pain medication unless I'm in dire need and someone else administers it. On the other hand, one of the blessings I get from sobriety is that I have a surprisingly high tolerance for pain now.

My hand therapist just told me to cut this short and rest my hand. I can't believe I can type already! But I will mind and will leave you with this wonderful message from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

"To live is to be slowly born."

I Lived On Fat

After a Winter Storm

The white china sky broke this morning
so the Diner brought out the blue-plate special.
Customers fell into a frenzy for it.
You over there: Can you hear them
pounding the tables with their forks?
Can you hear the slap of waitress feet
and the hiss of fat on the stove?

(This is a Friday Flash 55, a challenge hosted by the G-Man. Go visit his blog for more strange recipes in exactly 55 words.)

When I was growing up, child of Depression-era parents, we saved bacon fat, pouring it into a crock that sat on the back of the stove. Anything to be fried we fried in a heaping spoonful of that softly solidified bacon fat heated in the old cast-iron frying pans. How old was the fat at the bottom of the crock? Was it safe to cook with? Nobody asked. A mess of green beans fried in bacon fat was delicious. A pan of chopped potatoes and onions was scrumptious. That’s what you cared about. There was lard for pie crusts, shortening for Betty Crocker baking recipes, margarine for bread, and bacon fat for frying. I never heard of olive oil until I was married. I learned the word “sauté” then, too. Somewhere along the line, I disposed of the bacon-fat crock.

We lived on beans, beans and biscuits, beans and cornbread, black-eyed beans and ham hocks, chili beans. We had Spam, hamburger patties, beef stew, corned beef hash, chicken-fried steak, and pot roasts on special occasions. There was always gravy. We ate beets and green beans, potatoes, buttered carrots, fresh corn on the cob and canned peas. We had homemade cole slaw or shredded carrots with raisins, or iceberg lettuce with thousand island dressing made with catsup, pickle relish and mayonnaise, or Jell-O salad with fruit cocktail, or sliced fresh tomatoes picked that morning.

When we were really lucky, we had fresh abalone steaks dredged in smashed saltine crackers and fried in fat. I have two memories of abalone. In one, my older brother and I went with my dad and uncle to a friend’s ranch on the coast, and we rode in a Jeep over a mountain down to the rocky shoreline. There the men pried abalone off the rocks while my brother and I entertained ourselves. I had to go number two, and there was nothing to use but ice plant, which grew everywhere, and it was not an unpleasant, albeit strange, substitute for toilet tissue.

In the other memory, the men brought gunny sacks full of abalone into my grandfather’s sawdust-filled garage, where they gouged the shellfish from the shell and pounded the abalone with hammers. The women were cooking in the kitchen until the men came in with platters heaped high with abalone steaks. Then the men took over the kitchen. Cousins were running around everywhere. Women in aprons bustled back and forth. That abalone feast was the best thing I had ever eaten.

We eat healthier now. We use fresh-pressed extra virgin olive oil grown locally, or real butter. No more margarine or bacon fat. I buy a bit of Crisco in packaged blocks at Christmas time, and a block of lard only if I’m going to make a pie. I make a fine gravy at Thanksgiving or the occasional family breakfast. Abalone hunting is banned around here. We don’t eat canned vegetables or Spam or corned beef hash. My husband doesn’t like beans much. I never eat Jell-O salad except on Christmas Eve when my aunt makes my grandmother’s recipe.

I learned how to cook in Home Economics when I was 13, and from then on I was the cook in the family, coming home from school and making dinner for my working parents. I branched out from Betty Crocker. In college I cut out recipes from magazines and bought other cookbooks. I cooked dinners for friends. Friends taught me about other foods. I began eating in fine restaurants. I invented recipes. I cooked for more than 45 years, as a teenager, college student, young wife, single parent, and older, wiser wife. When my husband was injured out of his career, he went to culinary school. Now he’s the cook except for Thanksgiving, and this past year, I started teaching him how to roast a turkey. Sometimes I miss the bacon fat. There are few more wonderful breakfasts than bacon-fat gravy with sausage bits and biscuits made from scratch.

Which Wolf Will I Feed?

Today marks the longest darkness of the year. With the Winter Solstice, winter begins in all its bite and gloom and sense of death, where I live, its barren trees and frost-burnt landscape, shades of charcoal and brown as far as I can see.

This morning, as I look out on naked trees and gray sky during a break in a week-long rain, I feel the weight of the Winter Solstice on my shoulders. What it deprives me of is important to me: sunshine, warmth, the ability to walk sleeveless and barefoot in my garden, the joy of living in a fertile landscape. It will rain on Christmas, says the forecast, and the unrelenting rain has begun to cause problems around my county.

But then, with my second cup of coffee, I remember an epiphany I once had during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:

My attitude makes the difference between peace and unhappiness.

There's a Native American legend about two wolves. A grandfather tells his grandson that two wolves fight within him, one full of evil emotions, and one full of good. "Which wolf will win?" asks the grandson. The grandfather replies, "The one you feed."

The same message can be said many different ways, but the point is the same. First, my thoughts govern how I feel, and second, I have the power to change my mind - to feed a different wolf! The process, in the example of winter, looks like this:

The Winter Solstice is the longest darkness of the year. Yes, but from this point on, the hours of daylight will lengthen every day! The winter landscape looks dead, yes, but the life force is simply resting, as all living things must do. Sleep gives me strength to exert the energy of living. And the rain? Rain is the Great Nourishment of the earth. It hydrates the cells of our land, feeds our oceans, helps fuel our climates, awakens the sleeping seeds in the earth. Rain is the Lifespring.

All is well. Earth's cycles of rest and replenishment are in motion as they needs must be. God, or Gaia, however you name that power or life source, continues to provide for the needs of the planet, and the creatures living on it, like you and me.

Rain

After a three-year drought that turned to dust the riverbed,
today the manna from heaven falls on the surface of the soil,

Which laps it neatly as a cat. The pores of leaves open
like mouths to drink it. The shrubbery shivers with raindrops,

The pine needles quiver, the brave narcissus bow their heads.
Rain toots on the roof like a piccolo. A sigh of satisfaction

Escapes the mouth of the ground. Roots hum as their veins swell,
and brown water begins to pool in the riverbed. Small puddles

Rise in the low spots. Slowly they reach for their neighbors,
a trickle builds, they link, and the river’s muddy blood awakens


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



Speaking of rain, here's a vintage rain song on youTube by the folksinger Melanie, who performed it at Woodstock (where it rained). If you're like me and you can't catch all the words, lyrics are right beneath.

House of Sticks

House of Sticks

Lindy has a thing for picking up sticks
wherever she goes—the park, of course,
but also parking lots, surprisingly, with
their flotsam of trash, will sometimes
yield souvenirs of trees, and people’s
front yards where a tree clapped its hands
and threw a twig, and the ocean coughs up
sticks among the kelp, wrecked histories
of trees from foreign lands, stories caught
in their cellulose and they’ll never tell.

Lindy has trampled on sticks, passed
many sticks by with hardly a glance.
She has picked up a stick and then
thrown it away. She has walked
with a stick and then cast it aside,
as if it had finished what it wanted
to say and its mystery was solved.

But some whisper to Lindy and Lindy
picks them up, holds them up to the sky,
turns them this way and that, studying
their curvature or architecture or God
knows what. Maybe she imagines
a skeleton with that bone of the tree.
Whatever they say, whatever they are
is for Lindy alone, her ears and her eyes,
and she won’t explain why if you ask
her, only shrug with indifference
holding on to the stick. And that stick
comes home, joins others in jars,
and Lindy’s house is a tree
of myriad limbs, a Joseph’s coat
of a tree. It must sing like a choir
only Lindy can hear, as branches
grow over the windows and doors,
break through the roof and reach
for the sky.

My Exciting Hospital Adventure

Hello, all! I've had such an adventure in the hospital the past few days. It is lovely to be home today, enjoying the colors of fall as a storm passes over.

I had difficulties breathing late last week in an encore of the pneumonia I got the evening of my mother's funeral service in August. When all else fails and you're fighting to get air into your lungs, you become willing to do things you have never done before, such as wear pink lycra hot pants or go to a hospital. I've not ever been in a medical hospital. I never did hot pants either.

My ER doctor was a cute little lady named something like Dr. Platinum Blonde, only her real last name had to do with red hair and her first name was the pleasant spice commonly used in baking cinnamon rolls. I'm not kidding you. My ER nurse was a gorgeous girl named Courtney. I wanted to take her home and stare at her for days. I swear, they hire people for ER work who please the eyes while your body is in torture, because of it is good for your health.

So Dr. "Blonde" (insert something about redhead) says to me, I seem to have a case of congestive heart failure and acute pneumonia, with wild white cells and rampant inflammation. It's very interesting, she says, because I do not present as a usual case of congestive heart failure. I found this interesting as well.

They offered me a common anti-anxiety drug to help dispel the anxiety I exhibited upon hearing of my apparent impending death. I thanked them but no thank you, as I happen to be clean and sober, and we clean and sober types face congestive heart failure and large aggressive dogs with prayer and meditation.

So they popped me into the hospital and I didn't even have a chance to put on earrings or do my hair, let alone grab my laptop to record this special event. I'd been rather weepy and my eyes puffed up like marshmallows. The hospital gown did my zoftig shape no favors so I quickly went back to my sweats and they didn't fire me for it.

It was an exciting few days. They pulled me back from the brink of heart failure and stabilized the pneumonia. An x-ray tech came in my room with the bedside apparatus and said he was there to "do" my legs. "But I don't have legs," I said. He actually looked. The nurses and all were quite funny once I cracked a joke and turned down the pain meds. Paula the aide with menopause and an exotic accent ran around saying, "I am a HOT WOMAN today!"

I wrote what I thought might be my final poem, based on an emailed photograph of a distant family member that I received on Thursday last week. Here is what might have been my swan song:

To a Woman I Don't Know

My cousin the photographer

says you look like someone

we should know and he smirks

the knowing question: Who?

Your cheeks must mean something

after all -- I can't think

your bland smile is important

and anything could have happened

in those blue eyes.

When the Nazis had a party

they looked like you

with nothing to hide

except the unfathomable secrets

in their coffee every morning.

Well, nice not to have that be my swan song. I think I'll be sleeping and breathing exercises for a few more days, not to mention it is once again a deadline for my writing assignments. "Hello," I shall say in my new breathy voice, "I wonder if you might comment on the state of affairs at the food bank this Christmas. Hold on while I do a quick breathing exercise and then we shall have a proper interview, shall we?"

Mourning Is Electric

A complete stranger, during a business call on Wednesday, became an articulate and insightful grief counselor who had lost her own mother a few years ago. "It's a life-shifting event," she told me. "Lean into the pain. Let it out, whether it be a whimper or a sob fest."

I’m doing well, I think. Sad for me, happy for my mom, full of memories good and bad, feeling like an orphan, being businesslike in attending to Mom’s estate, juggling everything at a time when I feel oddly weak and incapable. Following in that stranger's footsteps, my daughters and I held a wonderful ceremonial gathering at the ocean in memory of our mother and grandmother.

I took an armful of my garden flowers. We went to a beach where my mother and father used to take my brothers and me.

One by one we took a flower and thought of some wonderful thing embodied by my mother when she was younger, before the Alzheimer's took her away from us. Then we threw the flower into the sea.

It was a powerfully lovely thing to do.

Mom seemed very near, free at last and whole again.

Secret Recipe for Lemon Tart

Here it is, the recipe you asked for!

Creation of a Lemon Tart

It began with an egg.
And then an ovary of eggs.
Each one in turn dashed
itself on the altar
(what a mess!), offering
to become part of the
greater good: A lake
of clear slime with stratums
of yellow yolk.

Sugar dived in, nectar
of the gods to sweeten
the primordial ooze
(carbohydrate heaven!)
Yin and yang commanded
sour soften sweet
and so lemons poured
out their juices
sacrificing themselves
to the protoplasmic mass.

Butter next, melted gently
slid into this biological soup
swimming with eddies
of sweet-sour protein
making amoebas.

Then cream creamed
the crop, the nucleus
that rocked it all
with an explosion of
higher life. The gods
loved it.
They slurped it up.
It was the greatest creation
the earth had ever seen.
For this,
I will never leave you.

Abundance!

We harvested our little cherry trees yesterday. In February, I showed you this photo:

Here's what the buds look like now:

These Queen Anne cherries are delicious. We harvested a bucketful that filled up half the sink. The Van cherries that live cheek by jowl with the Queen Anne were even more abundant, filling the sink three-quarters full. The vibrant red Vans are more tart than Queen Annes and are smaller than the Bings you find in grocery stores.

We are wondering what to do with this abundance. Besides eat them, naturally (I'm surprised that thus far we've had no untoward side effects from eating all those cherries as we picked them). So far we've shared with neighbors and family and still have more than we can eat. Can we freeze fresh cherries, does anyone know?

Are you jealous of our abundance? I would be if it were you bragging about all your cherries. I love cherries. I'm also very proud of our harvest, because I've lovingly pruned these trees, which are full-sized genetically, into bonsai-size to fit into my minuscule backyard garden plot (maybe 10 feet by 20). The trees have to share space with perennial herbs, dahlias, hollyhocks, chrysanthemums, butterfly bush, and lamb's ears, as well as lilies, narcissus, and sunflowers in their seasons.

Not to mention I'm grateful as hell to God for sending the good rains last winter.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about going on the warpath. My time these days has been consumed, unlike the cherries, with gut-twisting developments. Please forgive me if I haven't your blog lately. I'm working full time on my mother's situation and then researching at night past the midnight hour... I've become a werewolf, with a bloodthirsty attitude. Tune in tomorrow.

Wonderful! Day 3

"Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful."

A.R. Ammons

To follow yesterday's talk about suffering, I want to think about something wonderful. The word might be overused, and we might have forgotten its root meaning.

wonder: state of amazed admiration or awe

wonderful: outstanding, amazing, magnificent, breathtaking, astonishing

Mr. Ammons was a fine poet noted for his nature poetry. He looked closely at the natural world... a wave, the bark of a tree, the sand beneath his feet... and found the beauty in it.

But he says "anything" and I think "anything" includes people, and maybe even things we make or situations we take part in. If we look closely enough, so many things can make a person feel awe.

The eye of a fly through an electron microscope is magnificent. That a guy can hit a fastball going 90 miles an hour with a thin stick inspires awe. The ordinary telephone, a plastic device that carries my voice to your ear the instant I speak, is an amazing invention. A painting, a poem, a marriage lasting 50 years, a child's curiosity...

I went around the yard and took photos of some wonderful things, but they're just the tip of the iceberg of stuff around us that can induce admiration if we only look closely...