Alecto's Ophelia

2010 - Coming Home

The last 90 minutes of 2009 frizzled out while I was sleeping. When my contacts are fogged enough I'm stabbing myself with a needle every third stitch it's time to go to bed. I left the girls in front of the television, gathered up my animals, peeled the contacts off my eyeballs (and I do hope I'm going to find them in solution) and went to bed. I wish I'd brushed my teeth. Sometime in the night a small tribe of Pygmies set up camp and decided to have a rain dance on my tongue. It was dry, dry, dry in there. This morning I staggered to the bathroom,spit them unceremoniously into the sink and proceeded to beat the hell out of my mouth until I looked into the mirror and noticed I was just South of rabid. That's usually a good indicator.

The alarm on the iPod went off at 7:30 like it does every weekday morning. I was dreaming it was something else until I woke up enough to turn it off and then climb back into bed warning the dog that it was technically still the middle of the night. Somewhere. I haven't bothered to turn that alarm off because it makes a good 15 minute warning before Little Girl needs to head out to the bus stop (which is the end of the driveway) and on weekends it doesn't go off at all although Simon will generally put his great slobbery face right up against mine (or the back of my head if I'm lucky) and breathe heavily while moaning pathetically about the fact that he's not going to be able to keep his legs crossed forever. Simon has no trouble getting my attention in the morning. He is 79 inches long snout to tail tip, 31 inches at the whithers and his head is massive. Someday I'll figure out how to weigh it. Maybe I can slide the flat digital kitchen scale under his head while he's sleeping. Remind me to try that. The drop from the top of my mattress to the floor is 36 inches and while that's five inches above his whithers we must consider the length between whithers and snout. Unless I'm sleeping in the middle of the bed there's really no escape and if I don't want St. Bernard slobber ON my sheets I need to respond fairly quickly even if it means telling him to lay the hell back down and go to sleep. If his need is not immanent he will. He's a good boy. 

Little Girl let him out this morning. I was out cold. I have no recollection of the door opening and closing again after my baby boy lumbered across the threshold, made an abrupt 90 degree right turn and galloped down the hall coming to his usual skidding stop at the top of the stairs. When he's got his bearings he tip toes down the six carpeted stairs and stands patiently at the front door followed shortly by the manic Rat Terrier. The only time the Rat Terrier is not manic is when he's overslept and slinks up the stairs from the lower level hoping I won't notice but knowing perfectly well he's been caught sleeping on the couch again. Sometimes he hides until I'm back upstairs. He's sly and has great bladder control.

I nuked a cup of yesterday's coffee and here I sit thinking about what to write while my fingers typed out three paragraphs (which I just read) while I wasn't looking. I was thinking about resolutions.

I have no resolutions. I don't do resolutions. The only time I made a resolution was in the first few minutes of the last year of the twentieth century and that was more of an invocation to the fertility gods (it worked too, I delivered Little Girl on December 11, 2000).

I have nothing to invoke this year except maybe patience, perseverance and the strength to let be the things I have no right to control. I know perfectly well what those are too I just have a really hard time not panicking and grasping a float that has no intention of being grasped. The float does like to be grasped at though. I think it makes him feel wanted and needed. I think that's poison for me.However, invoking a negative does not create a positive. So here they are, my resolutions in spite of not doing resolutions (because God forbid I don't keep them):

1. Bake more bread. We lost that in 2009.
2. Order the seeds and actually start the seedlings.
3. Repair the fence and till the garden hopefully one week after the last hard freeze (sometime in March most years).
4. Compost. Everything that ought to be composted. Lost that in 2009 too.
5. Put the seedlings in just after Mother's Day and protect the tomato plants with plastic bottle hot houses. Pay attention to the weather and don't boil them.
6. This year pull UP all the volunteers from last year. That was fun but unproductive.
7. Cultivate early and often.
8. Order more broiler chicks. Maybe even eggs if I can work out an incubator and commit to turning them every day.
9. Get back on the elliptical in the morning at least until the heavier garden work is in full swing. Bikram is not enough.
10. Walk away from 2009 and don't look back. I can't imagine turning into a pillar of salt particularly pleasant.

That's it. I'm stopping at ten because I'm an over achiever and usually bite off more than I can chew without choking. Those ten are probably a big mouthful but maybe there should be an 11th:

    11. Give myself permission to fall down and get up again. You know, permission to be a bona fide member of he human race. The expectation of perfection is a horrible conceit.

Happy New Year, peoples. I wish you joy, love, passion, strength and surrender.

Peace out - Alecto

 
Borrowed without permission from an artist who's name I can no longer locate.

Getting dirty, living clean

It's been too long since the last post. The garden grows fast, the weeds threaten to eat up all the space and the world moves at a pace it's hard to keep up with sometimes. Last weekend was prom 2009 and my big girl had a date with a very hot football player. Not her style but all she wanted was arm candy at that point. Her heart's still too tender over so many things. She wanted a princess moment and she got one. Don't we all sometimes?

Simon is growing at an alarming rate. He is not as big as we'd estimated but 154 pounds two weeks ago at 9 months is still a scary proposition. Getting him in and out of the car is not so easy but doable as we discovered. All it takes is some patience, two people and a fairly good quantity of chicken parm. The dog is a fool for anything covered in tomato sauce and cheese. He also likes his doggy pills (to clear up what looked like doggy leprosy that probably came from an infection from a bite from some unknown thingie in the swamp). He eats his doggy pills like candy and aside from having trouble with them getting stuck in his flews he usually has them consumed in under a minute.

Here are gratuitous doggy shots to go with the gratuitous princess shots:

He considers and weighs the risks against the benefits of eating bees. He hasn't done it yet but Homer does occasionally with the expected results. As soon as the swelling goes down on his face he finds and eats another. This guy might just be too lazy to work that hard. 

Here comes swamp dog toward the back of the garden. I should probably have posted the entire series because he's just cute as hell but that would have been too gratuitous even for me. 

 

I love this. My girl and her dog. OK, he's my dog but they do love each other. She didn't go to prom like that she just didn't get dressed at the house. I think she kept my denim jacket on for most of the night though. Reminds me a bit of Molly Ringwald in whatever movie she altered a wedding dress for. And it wasn't Sixteen Candles.

 

This is what my compost bin looks like so far this year. The path to the left is the doggy trail leading to the swamp and woods. I am hopeful that they will stop covering the lawn with landmines and just contain that stuff to the back of the property. It's not as if there isn't enough room back there. Everything a doggy, not to mention small children, could possibly ask for. Except a tree house. Haven't quite gotten around to that yet. Maybe this summer. I think I need to modify the bin a bit to make it easier to turn. I read something about building or containing a compost heap with bales of hay or straw and I'm thinking that might be more effective and certainly easier to maintain. I don't much care for the big plastic rotating things that put the creation of hummus on light speed. Makes me nervous happening that fast.

 

If this isn't enough to get you to stop and slow down, or better yet just sit in the dirt getting your hands, nails and feet encrusted I don't know what is.

 

The wild buttercrunch is getting ahead of itself. I'm thinking a graze through this patch would make a good start to breakfast. Although I think I'll pass on the bug protein and stick with eggs. My replacement chickens and little guinea babies are due in the next week or two. I still need to build an incubator but I should have everything I need. We went and bought a light and a heat rock for a rescued Ball Python. Somebody threw the guy in his aquarium stuffed into a plastic bag into a trash compactor and was rescued by the maintenance people in my building at work. I took him home and we called him Steve after the The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove  (Christopher Moore). We were just getting to the point of walking around the house with Steve when he made a break for it one night and is now living somewhere in the house. If the Rat Terrier doesn't get him he'll take care of any rodent issues we may have. We miss him though and would really like it if he'd come out now and then for a cuddle. In any case, the snake habitat can be converted to baby guinea home fairly easily and if Steve decides he want's to come back to his nice safe cage he's just going to have to wait until they've outgrown it.

 

Silly pre-prom girls. They'd make fabulous garden accessories. Sort of like a useful version of my pot smoking Garden Gnome that has yet to be located and installed this year.

Why I loves the Internet

 This is a pictorial waltz through a day in the life except it starts at 7:50 PM and ends now, at 8:36 PM. Stage is set; assume I've been working all day (I have) and that I have to drive to work and home again (I do) and that I walked in the door in my cfm boots, took the dog out, chastised one or two girls, got the fire going again, looked at homework, signed some homework, checked the roasting chicken that daughter number one put in at 6, put my coat back on, went down the back steps with a flashlight and a bowl of water, tucked the girls (chickens) in and changed their water, picked up another egg, locked the side door, kissed a chicken one more time and then went upstairs to make dinner. There was a glass of wine involved in all this as well.

And we ate dinner in the living room in front of the television and the wood burning stove inserted in what used to be a fire place (yes, I did feed my family in front of the Barry Manilow infomercial on Entertainment tonight and NO I do not want to hear about it). And when dinner was just about done and I was tired of hearing the sniveling coming from three directions (I think we were all cranky tonight) I thought I needed some nummies and of course we don't keep ready made nummies in the house.

Problem.

I do, however, keep lots of supplies on hand hidden in various and assorted locations (chocolate chips back left corner of lower shelf of the indoor freezer (there are two more freezers in the garage and while they might contain half a cow and other various and assorted frozen things they do not contain any chocolate parts)).

Here is what after dinner looks like in my kitchen:

 

Here is the Internet in my kitchen (cute, huh?):

   

In case you didn't notice, the Internet has provided a loose recipe for chocolate chip cookies which I have chopped in half, eliminated some of the butter (because I only had 3/4 stick soft) and added some vinegar because I kind of like it that way and also I had an accident with the vanilla bottle because I do not measure often and had at least half a glass of wine in me and well, I spilled). In the mean time, NoMans is being a pain in the ass because he needs the microwave which is in the kitchen to soup up his tobacco curing chamber which we have because I grew a butt load of tobacco this summer kind of by accident and he refuses to waste it despite the fact that we quit smoking over two years ago.

 

By the way, that's the box our turkey arrived in. Please do not ask me to explain that or the brick of dry ice or the carbon footprint involved in obtaining a pastured bird in the state of Connecticut where everything I want to do is illegal (J Saladin). Because my guilt is legion. Really, people, it is.

Here is little girl licking the bowl:

 

Here are the cookies right out of the oven. Notice they needed about 90 seconds more? I lost my mind and pulled them out anyway.

 

Here they are on the cooling rack. You know, I fail to see the problem here. 46 minutes start to finish from the initial desire to the sitting down to write about it.

Heh.

Don't you have chickens on your front porch?

 

I know our neighbors have struggled with the idea of our chickens. I know this because our neighbor right across the street makes her granddaughter catch and lock them up (ha ha ha, like putting them in the chicken pen keeps them in) when they cross the street and our neighbor to the left yelled at Little Girl one day (and I'm thinking she needs her meds adjusted for yelling at a little girl instead of talking to her parents) and said her dogs would eat our chickens because they cross the invisible boundaries from two acre yard to two acre yard and our neighbor diagonally across the street said, 'oh, I thought that might be you.' In reference to our birds.

And I want it noted that we have wild turkeys on the loose in this neighborhood. And I want it noted that the vet's wife two doors down feeds them morning and night too. And I want it noted that our neighbor directly across the street (the one with the granddaughter) rescues raccoons. I just want it noted that in all this wild life we raise eyebrows because we keep chickens and, gasp... eat their eggs and stuff (so dirty, apparently).

I guess the truth is I don't find it even remotely remarkable anymore. What I find remarkable is that we appear to be alone in this neighborhood.

I can't wait until the meat birds arrive in the spring.

That should have been the end of the post but I know I'm going to be too distracted next week to remember to tell you this but...

1. I waltzed about like a lunatic (I was fully clothed at the time, I swear) scattering assorted seed six weeks ago and now I have assorted greens coming up all over the place.
2. I planted many things in this one little patch back in April and May (that gave me nothing but radishes this year) and I see carrots coming up?! Now?
3. The fat chives (I don't know how else to differentiate them from the skinny chives that put themselves to bed already) are making a concerted move on the potato beds.
4. The dill has reseeded itself. Everywhere.
5. My oregano has lost it's mind and headed for the swamp. Everywhere.
6. The Romaine reseeded itself EVERYWHERE.
7. The celery is delighted with the weather and looks better than it ever did.
8. And I am glad I was late putting in the stiff neck garlic because the daffodils are coming up already (they'll duck down again shortly).

I put up no cold frames, have done nothing other than turn over a few beds and pull up the tomato and bean stakes and I just want you to know that on November 16, the garden is very much alive and well.

Chickins and Bugs, Chickins and Bugs

I have two step sons who are being raised on high fructose corn syrup and processed white flour. They are both highly medicated and highly suspect. OK, that last part isn't true but it's funny and when it comes to coping with the reality of who they are versus who I am, I often need all the humor I can find.

In the six years I've cohabitated with their father we've come face to face in a state of abject discomfort more times than I care to think about. Many of these occasions has stopped just short of bloodshed (mine and / or their father's, not theirs (don't worry, I wouldn't (probably (but you never know))). In the last year and a half alone it got bad enough that he (Nomans) traveled South to visit but they (Thing One and Thing Two and I name them that most affectionately) did not come North at all. Last summer we had one weekend that went well enough (although there was a bit of bloodshed over some communications that I filed under the category of entitlement that nearly caused WW III yet again) and then an actual week at the beach (and no one died but oh my goodness it took super human efforts from every single one of us). After that there was nothing due to the holidays and some other such scheduling conflicts as you've got to understand that all nineteen moons (I made that up, I don't actually know how many moons are required) must be in full alignment or god help us all.

The other thing, and this is a bit of an aside, is that in the past Nomans spent a full twelve hours in the car each weekend (three down three up three down three up) on the bloody New Jersey Turnpike until he could no longer and then the trips spread further apart and the whole darn thing just broke down until something finally gave and those boys took the train to and fro.

So you can imagine that I greeted this most recent arrival with some level of trepidation because I have to tell you that when I hear a child recoil in horror from the sight of swamp dirt it just makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck and I want to drag them into the muck until they get it about not being separate. Plus dirt is good. We need to eat a lot more of it than we do. And... that might just get me started on classroom allergies.... yadda yadda yadda moving right along now...

I was worried about the chickens. I was worried about the garden. I was worried about the fact that we don't have chicken nuggets or anything even close. And I was worried about my ability to withstand the assault of constant whining without ending up back on the psyche ward and / or in divorce court. In short, I was freaking fatigued with panic. Neat visual, isn't it?

Something gave, that's all I can say. Something caved in like a sink hole in Pennsylvania except in a good way and one of those boys ran down the back stairs on Sunday morning as fast as his growing boy legs would carry him and barefoot ran through the chicken pen (with a boat load of requisite chicken poop) and into the coop to release the ladies to their breakfast buffet (called my late fall garden) and help himself to the three morning eggs. The other boy stared hard at said eggs on the table an hour later and asked if I'd added cheese. No way, no chance, no how, they just grow that color when you don't do anything to them but let them eat veggies and bugs and then he proceeded to inhale every last bite and then some.

Somehow in the magic of the frogs and the bugs and the tree houses (it's on the ground but she and nanny built it themselves)and the swamps and the dirts and the Little Girl on the swing with a chicken in her lap (oh WHY does this one chicken permit this?) Thing One and Thing Two fell down the looking glass and came out grass stained and grinning without a single smidge of processed anythings anywhere about their bodies all weekend long. (OK, nice story but we did go for Hibachi on Saturday night and it was the holy hell of bad food but nobody died and it was Thing One's fifteenth birthday and he was so very happy with it all)

And at lunch which involved a veggie lasagne that did not come out of any sort of can or box followed by a Dutch Apple pie made before their very eyes, before the ride to the train, Thing One has been thinking that if all of us just ate a little more locally and with a little bit less fosile fuel involved (well, yeah, OK, I was ranting a bit over the weekend) and took a little bit more care of the world and maybe took care to eat food that was really food that we might just be, well, um, a little bit happier and a little bit healthier and maybe, just maybe a lot less likely to blow each other up.

And we all lived happily ever after until the very next adventure which might have started three minutes after.

Sometimes you just have to wait for it.

When the world is spinning, spin yourself the other direction to unravel the tilt

OK, I think can say (write) this now. If not, I'll delete with the rest of my miserably failed attempts at sorting through my own feelings and realities (since, really, we do make it all up, every one of us).

I,we, my family and and I, stand to lose quite a bit. Maybe we already have (I'm not looking at the moment). We stand to lose our retirement funds, our jobs, our home, our four remaining minor children's college funds. We stand to lose it all. We always have, day in and day out just like anybody might lose anything. Today, just like any other day in the last few weeks, it is horribly and painfully evident.

There is no right or wrong to this. We do not live in debt (oh, wait, there's the mortgage, right?), we do not take part in manipulating the market (oh wait, we do trade, don't we?) and we have busted our proverbial asses getting to where we are today and that might be all gone now or tomorrow. It really might.

I did not support the bailout. I do not support the bailout. I firmly believe this economy, this country needs a reset, and not a free and painless reset either because we are all compliant, one way or another. I say that in the face of what I still refer to as a horrible loss. I quake in my space boots (to borrow a Cletus phrase) and cry out in the night. I am terrified. But I still don't support the bailout.

It makes you take stock of what matters though, I'll tell you that. I sit at a chair in my kitchen, head and shoulders bent over two pots on the floor. One is full of apple peelings and the other salt water and apple bits. I peel, peel, peel, core, core, core, chop, chop, chop until after no time at all half a bushel is processed and set aside for the winter. I go to the farmers market and my own garden and I buy up all the fresh produce I can store away. I take that home and can and freeze and cook and eat and feed my family one step closer to the earth. I have set aside a ridiculous quantity of flour and rice but in reality, is 300 pounds really so ridiculous?

On Mondays I go to work with tiny cuts and abrasions on my finger tips from all the peeling, cutting, processing, cooking and I type on the keyboard for enough money to keep paying the mortgage and those cuts remind me that I am far from helpless after all.

None of this changes or alters in any way the level of fear I experience on a pretty regular basis these days. However, when I turn my face away from my fear and toward that which is hopeful, real, and living, I find it far easier to breathe.

Adventures in raw food, or, I feel better now, thank you.

I'm feeling much better now, thanks.

In an effort to distract myself from the absolute panic over an impending 5 solo days I ordered up a juice fast. Actually, I think they call it a cleanse, but whatever. This is nothing I've ever done. As a matter of fact it goes against every grain in my belief systems in terms of what we should or should not put in our bodies and how. It also goes against my belief that we should have an intimate relationship with the food we consume. I am also late to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma but I appear to have drifted in that direction anyway. 

The whole purpose of the cleanse (I thought) was to create enough physical discomfort to mask the emotional drama because I'm well known for creating physical discomfort to mask emotional drama. Or trauma. Take your pick. As it turns out I wonder if it was something else all along.

After a bit of research, and I'll be honest, it wasn't a lot of research, I eliminated all powdered mixes, cooked or processed in any way food (?) and focused on raw food. I found a very local vendor (NYC and Southern CT only and if you really want to know who and what, leave a comment and I'll send you an email and no, they don't ship) placed my order on the internet and then promptly put it out of my mind until Sunday at 3 PM when I had to drive 20 miles to pick it up. Now, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you probably have a good idea of what goes on in my kitchen on Sundays.  All the cooking for the week. That's right, all of it. Unless Nanny's cooking something in which case I'm off the hook (she's awesome, this one).

I started early Sunday morning with a trip to the farmers market for the stuff my garden doesn't give me enough of these days. I needed to slow roast some tomatoes for paste (thanks, Kitt, worked wonderfully), make a boat load of Sunday sauce to eat and to freeze, braise some frozen (I thawed them first) lamb shanks with a ton of leftover salad turnips (they're really sweet) some potatoes about to get too starchy and a mess of other veggies needing to be consumed (plus an entire bottle of Chianti, to braise in, not to drink) and then also some red beans for rice to sit and stew in hot sauce for three days in the fridge. We had a potato leak pie for Sunday dinner so there was that too.

In the middle of all this I have to pick up my juice. I leave Cletus baby sitting the roasting tomatoes and bubbling sauce and head out to parts generally avoided. Not a bad neighborhood, per see, just a bit snootier than I tolerate easily. I'm still having trouble with the Prada Moms in Escalades. I pick up my juice at a yoga studio. I am happy about this because I keep thinking yoga might be a nice thing for me to do I've just never gotten around to working it out. When I arrive the juice has not been delivered and there are several unhappy women milling about. It is not really that late, just twenty minutes and the poor guy is stuck in traffic.

I sit down to wait. I have found a book to read and the silence of the space is working for me. Until more women show up and the atmosphere turns a bit testy. After awhile the man is still not here and the women are demanding their drinks and the poor girl at the counter is beginning to lose her cool and I bury my nose deeper into my borrowed book. By the time the delivery vehicle arrives there is a swarm on the back of the truck reminiscent of Filene's Basement in the old days. I am not a pusher. I hate confrontation so I sit and wait. After awhile I get nervous because what if they don't have enough? What if a mistake was made or someone took what wasn't hers? What will I do? I wade into the crowd in hopes of grabbing my three green bags. One of the more irate women is blocked in by the truck. She yells at him to get out of her way. He cannot move his vehicle, there are too many women stuck head and torso first inside. I am suddenly one of them; I dive, I scoop, I bolt. I run like hell for my car nearly getting myself run over by one of the hostile ladies screeching past me and out of the parking lot.

I am terrified.

I go home with my juice, unload it into the refrigerator as instructed and promptly (again) forget about it. I finish cooking and baking. I am light headed with the smells in the house. I want to eat all of it immediately if not sooner. I am beside myself in anticipation of coming meals. I sit down to write the last post and I go to bed. 

In the morning I get up and remember that I am fasting. I am not too sorry yet. I pack literally half a gallon of fluid (properly contained) into my backpack along with my computer and all the other garbage I haul back and forth every day. I get on the train and go to work. The fluids were fine, I was not.

Eventually I learned about juice fasting. I learned this because I googled everything I could find to explain the current state of my body, which was in significant upheaval. I went to bed that night and slept very badly. In the morning it was a little better and off I went again with my fluids. At this point I want solid food so bad I'm ready to chew tree bark (city tree bark even)and need I mention the effect of the re-roasting lamb shanks and lingering scent in the morning?

The next evening, which was last night, I went to bed and slept better than I can remember only waking to disturbingly loud music coming from a disturbingly lingering vehicle at five AM. I didn't go back to sleep. Apparently my body was done sleeping. I can't remember the last time this happened either. I laid there for an hour wondering what was wrong with me and then I got up, went downstairs and ran like hell on my machine (which I'd been doing since Monday anyway in an effort to sweat out as much garbage as possible). When I arrived this morning, on day three of my fast, I felt unbelievably good, nearly euphoric. It is now nearly 4 PM and while I'm looking forward to my prescribed raw fruit and lightly steamed veggies tomorrow, I am not in bad shape at all. I miss my husband, he really needs to come home now but you know, I'm OK.

I wonder about balance, I really do. I also wonder how those women feel today. Better, I hope.

And the next time I feel the need to do this I can bloody well make my own.

The abundance of being alive

I didn't expect much of this garden after the first set of tomatoes more or less bit the dust and most of the carrots and onions didn't bother to do much of anything and the cucumbers turned out round and orange and the squash rotted on the vine and Audrey the pumpkin got out of hand and I did my best just to breathe because that's what brought me here in the first place.

The need to breathe.

I am alone today and tomorrow and two more sleeps after that (not in the car, CG, but I do think of it that way because it is hard to imagine any world that does not have he and me in it together) and I am the epitome of uncomfortable. I have not been alone other than for just one night since I came out of the hospital on Valentine's Day blinking into the sunlight and wondering how it got to be so hard to walk outside in the world. A few of you will know what I mean when I say that the world inverted in on itself and I walked around like some crunched up easter egg rolling off the edge of the universe. I miss MC most times like these because she knew too and it's hard to explain if you haven't had the top of your head come off because words don't come anywhere near doing it justice. It's just a state of being too far off the map for speech. Which might be part of the problem, this need to explain something that probably cannot be said in words. Just breath, maybe. And I'll tell you, neither therapist I've been intimate with for six months could even begin to navigate this paragraph. I just go and write the checks and come home because I am still a good girl in my little compartmentalized ways.

And if it is a good day it's all good and I do what I do and I am satisfied that I have a place in the world. And if it is a bad day I come home and crawl into Beloved's arms and find some amount of peace there. And if it is a very, very bad day and I scream and rail at the world he finds a way, most times, to bring me home again.

He's not here.

I am OK but OK and uncomfortable are coexisting which is a step or two in the right direction. I was never afraid like this. OK, once, when I was pregnant with my boy and I thought about how I would feel if my husband died and I thought, well I have this boy inside me (I knew) and as long as I can get him born all right I will have a piece of something to get me by. I have always struggled with being alone in the world and hold on with all my might when I find a place to put my heart.

And now, really for the first time, I hold on with all my might when I decide to be safe outside my own four walls. I cried last night and fretted up one side and down the other for weeks and finally worked out that none of this was about being alone for four days. It is about being alone forever.

Eighteen months ago we all went to this conference. Eighteen months ago I held Jeffrey's hand and we found an old friend and he confessed to a ten year crush and she blushed and he did and it balanced something and we moved on. We went to dinner, Nomans and Jeffrey and me and another friend who matters like air and is hardly seen at all these days and ate Tapas and drank Sangria except Jeffrey who was still trying to say alive. And we were together and we were happy.

And Jeffrey is dead and NoMans is in San Francisco and I couldn't bear to go without Jeffrey this year even if we hadn't suspended all travel and I didn't want to leave the girls alone for that long with just the nanny. And I know that not all rats bite but I am so very, very afraid that he will not come back the same way that Jeffrey just did not come back and I have no idea how I would even begin to bear that.

Sometimes there are land mines and sometimes there are craters and I'm sitting in one now but I think I can see the end of the other side and I can get there on my own. And that's a good thing.

Passing by the open windows

It is really very easy to get yourself lost in the world and wind up serving your soul sunny side up to some cosmic parking lot attendant at the train station. I was sitting in my car at the station this morning, not feeling all that balanced, staring at the platform and thinking, what the fuck? My ears and throat hurt and I've yet to recover from the lost sleep incurred during the trip into the city Tuesday night with the big kids to see one of the final productions of Rent (I'm still crying over that one).

And then I got out of the car and approached the platform. I'm reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road from the original scroll which means it's like reading the inside of my own brains at nine thousand miles per hour minus any sort of punctuation or spell check. I rather like it a lot. The rest of you might get to feeling a bit sea sick as most people eventually out grow the desire to be hung upside down by ones feet and spun around until the world forgets the lie of linearity. After awhile I forgot about the soul sucker in the parking lot and got lost in Kerouac's version of reality (I quite like it).

None of this resolved the soul sucking and its really just a bit of a bandaid. Sometimes I need to come home and just get hit upside the head with the desires and textures of my own life. You know, the real part where I operate under the illusion that I'm making up at least a good portion of my own rules. So you know how this goes; I take off my monkey suit, pour myself a glass of wine and head out into the great and mighty jungle which calls itself my back yard.

Some of you might remember this little guy in a prior iteration when he was quite a bit smaller and I questioned Audrey's ability to keep him hanging off the deer mesh. Well, here he is and I suspect he'll hang here, slug free, for quite some time. This is food people. Through the garden walls and into the mini jungle, this is food. It's awfully hard sometimes to find a way back to something real and true in all the muck of soul suckage out there. And to reiterate an earlier point, I do actually love this thing they pay me money to do. I LOVE it. However, it is still corporate america, not my life and a bit of a soul sucker all the same. I need grounding, people, and here it is.

This is a little hard to see but it's one giant mutha of a sugar pumpkin (they are supposed to be TEENSY) resting in a bed of corn. I'm just going to wait and see what it does despite the fact that the slugs (that I thought I didn't have) have finally moved in and consumed the first of my ripening sugar babies (bastids).

When Little Girl shakes this pumpkin it sloshes.

Here is a butterfly stuck in the meshing. We freed him without contact and he flew away...

  To the tiny cupola on the roof top. You can see him, he's the little beige spec, on the peaked roof of the cupola.

  You can see the bottom of the new chicken coop behind Little Girl who is doing her own version of geeking the camera (does anybody out there besides me recall the origin of the word geek and it's relation to chickens specifically?).

  And then there's this seven nearly eight year old version of peace. Yeah, I do actually buy it.

In the light...

And finally, I know it's kind of hard to see, but this tobacco type plant I bought two of that got no more than 18 inches high at any point in time suddenly makes this gianormous offshoot that's nearly four feet tall (not that you can tell because those cone flowers are nearly eight feet tall now) and he stands up like some porn star out of the seventies and says, come 'er, babe. let me show you what I've got...

Have a great weekend. I'll be rolling about in the dirt and other such scandalous things.

Nantucket

I was on Nantucket once about fourteen or fifteen years ago to visit a client on Main Street. This is when I sold software to insurance agents and nobody, but nobody would go out to visit this agency with the exception of my major competitor who probably had the deal anyway and I'm thinking they may just have asked me to come out to see if I would. Well I did. I got in my little Rx-7 and drove like the demon I was up I-95 North through Connecticut and into Rhode Island where I picked up the 195 beltway around Providence to Route 25 and then 6 which I followed right onto the Cape and out to Hyannis which I'd heard about but couldn't place because my political and local history was still a bit sketchy at that point. I parked my car, hopped on the ferry and rode across sitting on a bench on the outside of the boat for two and a half hours because this was before the high speed and I was hot because of the navy blue wool suit with a skirt that came down below my knees and those standard issue navy blue pumps with two and a quarter inch heals and panty hose and a helmet head of sprayed hair and a notebook computer and full size monitor on a post WWII wheelie with two bungee cords to keep it from falling into the gutter and I step off this ferry onto Main Street which is cobblestones the size and shape of regulation footballs. The sidewalk isn't much better.

But I walked several blocks up that sidewalk dragging my wheelie over the cracked bricks staring in wonder at the houses and shop fronts and the cobbles in the streets and tripping over my own feet because of it until I reached the agency at the top of the hill where I could go up the stairs and look through the gallery window at a painting of the ocean that made me think I'd fallen right over the edge.

I remember the sunlight streaming through the windows and thinking, around the thought buckets and angles of my two hour demo that I might have reached some coastal version of nirvana and it about took my breath away. In the end they packed me back up and sent me on down to the wharf the very same afternoon and I boarded the ferry, got back in my car, drove like a demon, spilled hot McDonalds coffee between my legs which caused more damage than I care to discuss and did not at any point in time consider a law suit. I listened to Sting singing Fields of Gold and tried not to think about a) how much it hurt and b) how I was probably never going to get back on that island in a million years and it made me very sad but I was happy to have seen it. Once. Briefly.

As it turns out I was only locked out by my own imagination. I found the key to that particular lock about a month ago while vaguely surfing the net and trying to remember why on earth we never went out to those islands and thinking something about crowds, traffic, cold water and the cost of living and all that mixed up with that odd flashback of sunlight on a painting and cobblestones and a phone call, some more searching and we had tickets booked on the high speed ferry there and back over Labor Day weekend. Who goes anywhere over Labor Day weekend? Apparently we do. That's the side door, up there, of the Anchor Inn on Centre Street where we, New Nanny, NoMans, Cletus and I, stayed for three nights.

We rented bikes and rode over a small portion of the island, maybe we could have covered more ground, but the crazy German tourist (New Nanny) stopped every twelve feet to 'make a picture please' and forced us to stop and actually look at the small moments that make up a life.

This is what my garden would look like if I did everything right, including, but not limited to, living on an island in the North Atlantic.

The water is very, VERY, cold even in August. We refer to it as 'bracing' and don't bother until we're too hot to stand it one second longer and then if you just jump right in it really is kind of cool, pun intended. Miss Cletus of the extra sensitive skin didn't even pack a bathing suit but spent an entire day fully clothed under a rented umbrella reading her birthday Kindle (which she's loving, by the way, and is saving an entire forest of trees because that girl's never spent a penny on anything other than books).

This beach is crowded but reasonably well behaved and you can walk a ways (and it really is just a little ways) either up or down this beach and find plenty of empty space. We didn't bother.

I would like to rent a house with a sign like this on the side just so I can say the name to as many people as possible.

Or I could just have a room with a view like this. And the traffic, it was not too terrible.

Insert cool picture here that I didn't bother to take because I was in too much of a hurry

Here's where I wish, on a final note, that I could insert picture here of me making my way through Audrey's vines in the garden darkness coming back with an armload of ripe tomatoes and whipping up a marinara that couldn't be beat to feed four hungry road warriors something other than pizza in a box.