remembrance

this variety of dutch crocus is called 'remembrance', but i don't know why. i always thought rosemary was for remembrance, just because of that scene in hamlet. of course, she was crazy.

gus says...

...some days are better than others.

life goes on

life goes on, whether or not we're prepared for it. sprouts come out of the soil and we have a responsibility to them. there are animals that need their food. there are a lot of things to do and life goes on. irene's struggling with life the way it has gone on - no more pupper of the week as pupper status has lost its luster altogether. she's still pleased to be a part of things, and is seen here inspecting this year's garden sprouts...
...and here surveying her territory from the center of the vegetable garden, a whole new world of grassy sunbeams awaiting her.
the gardens have the bare look of promise, and everything seems to have wintered well. we're looking at a good year for dave and his dog in the garden as they welcome their new garden friend.
sedum are already sprouting beneath the bay window where the houses reflect so much sunlight and warmth. sedum are one of my favorite early spring sprouts because they look so burly and healthy and confident.
and then there's the day lillies. this picture was taken today, april 13th, and some of the sprouts are six inches. look at that bad mother in the back. he's all business this spring and i'll be he has a flower six feet off the ground by the forth of july!

august paul

birth and death go together, but maybe too closely sometimes. august paul was born yesterday after a long labor, just two days after his uncle paul died in a fire.

sunshine

i saw a movie that said every atom in your body was once part of a star.

laura and i watched another movie called "sunshine", which follows the misadventures of a mission to re-ignite the sun after it begins to burn out. its no "logan's run" but its good science fiction.

all the while, a little corner of our guest room is filled with its own sunshine, and most of the early seeds are sown. there are peppers, tomatoes and herbs, and more yet to be started. its like a miniature, indoor version of the garden and really helping me get past these last few weeks of wintertime.

on thursday some tragic news of a friend's passing was eased by a welcomed thaw. the snow over our lawn lost several inches, and whole regions of our garden emerged from under their covering. its great to see the landscape again - maybe its a cliche and maybe its not anything new, but its good to see life. there are bulbs sprouting just now and just in time to ease despair. i don't know why ts eliot said april was the cruelest month but i think he may have been a little off.

a sprout!

this year's first sprout has popped its special little self out of the soil today - its a leek!

i think it was a good choice to open this season with leeks, because they're something entirely new to our garden. 2008 is going to be such an exciting year of new things for laura and i (most of these new things being far more important than growing a new member of the allium family in our garden) and i want to keep the enthusiasm i'm feeling right now throughout.

leek and onion seeds are small. they're smaller than mustard seeds, in fact, which Christ used for one of his simplest and, i think, most beautiful parables (matthew 13:31-3). those of us without imagination quickly point out that the mustard seed does not grow into a tree and that it is not the smallest of seeds (these are the same people who like to point out the wires which helped kermit ride his bicycle in the muppet movie, of course), but it really doesn't take away from what the Lord was trying to teach. those same skeptics might be more comfortable with bruce springsteen's lyrics to "from small things (big things one day come)" but somewhere along the way the point gets lost.

its humbling to imagine that tiny person growing in laura's belly will soon be a person we name and hold in our arms, and then grow up to be a part of this world swirling around us. it makes you feel small but it also makes you feel very big, to express sincerely the conflicted emotions. planting seeds for the garden is no analogy for fathering a child, at least not one i'm going to stress, but when its something you want to happen, something that you've wished for and waited for, its a feeling you just can't find anywhere else.

its a little room

i'm still working on the potential of posting audio here on the blog. using an imic, i have recorded a lot of really great things off records unlikely to ever turn up on digital media. a lot of these records have been by jazz, bluegrass and blues musicians, but i also have a lot of comedy albums i'd like to share.

this morning i was thinking about a classic cosby routine which you can find on cd, in which 'cos talks about his empathy for the baby that hasn't been born (its "baby" from why is there air?). "they're in a little room," he says, "and its humid in there!"

and its true. we're told by our wonderful midwives that a baby grows something like an ounce a day during these last few weeks. all you really have to do is look at laura - that baby's gettin' big! and its spending a lot of its time stretching or (like 'cos said) "writing its name on the wall".

its a small room the baby's in (and its humid in there!) but we haven't got a much bigger room waiting for the baby. the little nursery in our house, when filled with a crib, changing table, dresser and rocking chair, gets pretty crowded. its a special space, though. i'm not entirely sure why, but it was the room in which we spent our first evening in the house, unpacking boxes and moving them here and there. its the chilliest room in the house and yet its got this special energy that's growing, i don't know, maybe an ounce a day.

we painted it a light purple before we expected a new arrival, so the color's not a gender-neutral compromise. in fact, we have a lot of blue and pink things for baby, and i think baby will like them all the same. i never got to painting a little mural on one wall because we never setttled on a theme (lots of things were discussed : farm animals, where the wild things are, little grateful dead bears, etc) and so there aren't a lot of decorations. people like themes when they're decorating a baby's room, its very important.

its a pretty simple room, but a little sit in it is just what i need when i'm feeling anxious about all the things coming our way - of course, nothing's really coming our way because the baby's already here inside laura's big tummy. i think its something 'cos could have riffed on for a half hour : that tidy little room full of tiny clothes and stuffed animals which becomes a whole different space overnight. what was once the tiniest room in the house and not used for much (often, in fact, the place we'd set things to get them out of the way) has become the space we think about the most ... a new nursery is so full of hopes and dreams and adorable baby things that its hard not to get a little gooey over it, and there's no reason to feel ashamed. in fact, i wish i could reimagine my entire life just like that little room.

letting go

why yes, faithful reader, today's picture does show the official laura and dave seed bank sitting on the kitchen block (the first illustrious appearance of the official laura and dave seed bank can be found here). this past weekend i planted several seeds, including a few peppers in small flats which i keep on the sunny windowsills on the second floor and a few things under the grow light in the bathtub. when they begin to grow, those peppers in the small plants will eventually be transplanted into small pots before the time comes to transition them outside, and many will spend the entire season growing in those pots. last summer's experiment with growing extra peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and herbs in pots all around the yard - around the composter, the flower gardens, the shed, or in other placed - was one of those rare encouraging garden successes around here. some of the plants in these scattered containers re-encountered one another in the vegetable garden after their diaspora as they were used to fill in empty spaces, and others remained in their containers and produced some of the best produce we brought into the kitchen (especially a ho chi minh pepper plant, which produced beautiful peppers so hot i was often asked by friends if i had been trying to kill them).

ian anderson asked (in "skating away on the thin ice of the new day") if you "ever [get] the feeling ... that everybody's on the stage and it seems like you're the only person sitting in the audience," and i sincerely empathize with that feeling. it leaves you resentful that you have no control over the whirlwind of events encompassing your tiny life and i think is the easiest, most likely path to depression.

i let myself slip into those feeling when i feel out of control of my life, unfortunately, and at times it takes a lot to life me out. fortunately, i am married to someone who knows me well enough to know the route out of those ruts, because i need "a place to go" (as neil young sang in "helpless"). maybe that's been the whole thing about our house, that here i can be who i am and be welcome for simply doing that. i'm lucky laura found me. i can't imagine the moment when she decided on me, or what was going through her mind, but i'm thankful for it nonetheless.

that's the way it is. there's not really a special moment or date when all the seeds begin to hit the soil, and that's part of what i love about gardening - the nuanced relationship between the reliable (like those familiar seeds you save from your own garden each season) and the unpredictable. who knows what the weather will hold, and when in the near future i will sow the remaining seeds? even those i start indoors are not subject to any rigid schedule. one really has to let go and simply follow the natural progression of the seasons, which is a challenge for a person like myself. i've always taken very seriously the maintenance and cleaning around the house because i want to be in control of it, and i struggle with similar feelings about situations i don't like in my work life. its nice to be in control, but when you're gardening you're simply not the force in control - there isn't anything in control.

unlike most of our lives, our gardens are the place where we can be at home and yet not be in control, and the whole situation is socially acceptable. that's something of an endangered environment, with social life, work life and media creeping so far into our personal spaces. there's nothing worse than feeling like you're always afraid, and maybe stephen stills was right that that's where it starts (in "for what it's worth").

so, incidentally, i discovered this afternoon that anyone can watch a whole great variety of performances on youtube, from gram parsons & emmylou harris to sincere homemade recordings of old favorites (like this guy's "hey suburbia").

so back to the garden : my enthusiasm for our garden and the rigidity with which i approach it is expressed in its shape and layout - i build rigidly measured raised beds and put between them even walking paths even though eventually the plants i grow in them are going to spill out of those boxes, render some paths impassable. i overplan and overwork parts of the garden, only to allow them to grow into chaos, and i think its because i don't feel as though i'm allowed to do this in the rest of my life. in a strange way, the garden becomes the place i go to for both order and chaos in my life, where i can be in control yet also become a passive witness to miracles.

all the same person?

here's muppet conductor nigel...









lisa simpson's band teacher mr. largo...





and a prairie home companion's richard dworsky. could they, in fact, all be the same remarkable man?

baby's coming so soon!

laura's done the math for her maternity leave, and 12 weeks (this isn't paid leave, of course) takes us right to the end of the school year. then laura transitions back to work and dave stays home for about the same length of time. its a nice arrangement when you compare it to a lot of the no-win situations working families find themselves facing in this backwards country, but its not going to be any golden age.

laura has to work until the due date or until the baby's born, whatever may come first. this situation led to reasonable grumblings this morning that after eight hours at work she's no longer rested, and has just given her whole day's energy up to work. we're having a hard time enjoying the last of our lives together without children - instead we're watching the clock at dead-end jobs and spending evenings on little chores and errands or resting on the couch.

and our problems are small. laura and i fall just shy of the standard definition of middle class (of course, here in the united states everybody is middle class). sixty years ago, in the road to wigwam pier, orwell wrote about how it had become fashionable to pretend there was some opportunity for class mobility, although it rarely exists. declining standards have led to a situation where laura and should aparently feel grateful for her 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave, and see this as a standard middle-class accommodation. i can't do it, myself.

there are so many things going on this spring as even with a baby on the way i have ambitious garden plans, although i'm prepared to be disappointed - i've even started seeds for a few things i have never grown before, including a new variety of tomatoes and leeks. the bathtub in our first floor bathroom makes a great space for seed starting, but its chilliness slows germination a little.

leeks are especially exciting to me, although we don't really eat them all that often. i think its all about potato and leek soup, and just how much laura and i look forward to our homegrown potatoes every year. i'd like to come up with a recipe or two that i could prepare entirely from our garden, and that's one (we also harvest garlic, onions, dill, thyme and oregano, and i could easily make a suitable broth from garden vegetables).

i don't know much about what i'll need to do for these leeks, and i've never seen anything wrong with an early start. it allows for some experimentation and for some learning.

i'm very excited for laura to be home with the baby, even though i will have to work until june. its something she deserves after working long days through her pregnancy. i feel like i've got things around the house organized for a comfortable transition into motherhood, stocking up the kitchen and fixing up favorite parts of the house. laura, in turn, has been supportive of my desire to keep our gardening ambitions high, even though its pretty likely that the baby is going to take precedence, and that things are going to grow wildly out of control or become disorganized. in fact, i think she and baby will be outside admiring sprouts and shoots and buds with me from the start.