Rooftop poetry

The Balancing Act

At 2:45 I wrestle with my plan to attend the 3PM poetry reading

     in the rooftop sculture garden.

Mow the lawn...........?        Poetry.............?

     Poetry............?      Mow the lawn............?

Sunday afternoon, and the weekend

             is slipping

                         away.

The gallery is a ten minute walk

The grass is staring me in the face.

Will I have enough energy to do chores when I return?

At least enough to make the day  - 

          productive?

Curse this underlying work ethic!

At 2:52 I jump in my car,

Park in the town lot,

Amble up the block,

Enter the serene gallery space

Up the narrow staircase,

Through stunning sculptures.

Warm paintings calling -

                        Look at me!

Enter the sky

And those eyes upon me

A little late,

  A few seconds early,

    On time.

"Welcome"

As the words drift over and through me,

Leaving no marks,

Yet penetrating like

gentle breezes from the harbor

And lifting me

Into a Yes!

This is where I should be

   -Inspired

      -Arisen

         -And taken

Away



Breakfast with Lucy Kaplansky

Aaaaahhh, relentless beautiful summer............

Another splendid weekend. Another outside breakfast on the deck after a perfect morning walk to the harbor. It is hard not to gloat about the divine aspects of summer in Maine. It has been an unbelievable year.

So as the white light shines down on midcoastal Maine, bathing us in late summer vistas, I cannot say enough how lucky I feel to be living here.

I woke this morning to the most splendid sunrise over the trees and rooftops to the harbor. So panoramic that I ALMOST bolted from bed to grab my camera and the dog leash for an earlier than usual walk. Instead I just propped myself up with pillows, deciding to marvel and meditate my fortune at just being here.

An hour later, with sun up and glistening across the water, I did sit on a waterfront bench to deepen my meditation. A sole swimmer was standing waste deep in a mirrored reflection - arms raised above head with hands clasped as if in salute to a perfect morning before plunging into the water for a cleansing swim. A mental note - remind me to do that tomorrow.

I feel guilty taking time to sit at my computer to take any notes when it is a day for just being. But something tells me to write down and remember how it feels on the days when we wake up and all is truly well in the world.

Despite whatever.

Over breakfast, I wrote my to do list for the day:

• Plant mums
• Mow lawn
• Bike Ride
• Swim
• Write
• Bake banana bread
• Buy notecards
• Put a tall birdfeeder outside the kitchen window

And I expect that will be clearly 'enough'

Before I change the blade on my mower and tidy the yard, I leave with a few lines from Lucy Kaplansky

"But I'm old enough to know

Old enough to understand

All these things I carried here

Belong in a child's hands"

Open Windows

There is a well-known Andrew Wyeth painting - Wind from the Sea - of a lace curtain blowing in an old house window. For anyone who has spent a summer in Maine, it is one of those essence of place images. Like the fields of Lupine, or harbors filled with sailboats, or rock beaches.....except very up front and personal. Scent and sensation added to the visual dimensions.
When I moved to Maine, I was lucky to find several lace curtains, and I bought them all. My two bedroom windows face east to the sunrise - and to the North Atlantic. They have been open and bringing me sea breezes for a good two months straight now. Although I have metalaise currents over them at night, I delight each morning in opening them to peak through the lace and over the rooftops at the sunrise. And watching them flutter in the sea breezes.
As I watch the temperatures soar in most parts of the country, including triple digits again today in Virginia as a new renter moves into my house there, I am so greatful to be living here. I can breathe. I can think. I can sit on my deck or in my yard to read or daydream. I can stroll to the harbor and sit on a bench and be lifted like my lace curtains by the breezes coming off of the great Penobscot Bay. Life is good.

Yard Art

After decades of spending most of my non-working, non-parenting time in the gardens, I am trying to take the yard surrounding me a bit less seriously. Perhaps it was being given a copy of the movie "Grey Gardens" by my daughter for Mother's Day a couple years back. That was kind of scary. But for whatever reason, I've come to think of needing a different kind of comfort zone in the green space surrounding my house. My time in the garden has always been my self-proclaimed therapy. I love seeing the succession of season and profusion of blooms, however short-lived and temporal. Or perhaps it is living in a place where the big enviromental picture is so incredibly beautiful that is seems a bit of folly to think that you could improve on Mother Nature in this neck of the woods.

For whatever reason, my gardens have decided to add whimsy as one of their defining features. Now flowers and plants can have whimsy - but you have to be a seasoned grower to get the humor in a curly willow or waving petunia. I think I'm going for a more instant smile or chuckle here. Life is short - laugh often. Plus, my passion for garden centers is somewhat matched by my love of cruising thrift stores for buried treasure. Wallah! - a seemingly perfect match.

While a few pieces of art in my garden are true pieces of sculpture, most are returnable, exchangeable gifts from the Goodwill. I say exchangeable because if this 'habit' becomes addictive, I'm going to have to rotate images to avoid turning into a cluttered roadside attraction. When did the pink flamingo become overly silly?

Cheshire Cat: If I were looking for a white rabbit, I'd ask the Mad Hatter.
Alice: The Mad Hatter? Oh no, no no...
Cheshire Cat: Or you could ask the March Hare. In that direction.
Alice: Oh thank you. I think I'll see him...
Cheshire Cat: Of course he's mad too.
Alice: But I don't want to go among mad people.
Cheshire Cat: Oh you can't help that. Most everyone's mad here.
(laughs maniacally, starts to disappear)
Cheshire Cat: You may have noticed I'm not all there myself.

...............Well, so.......if you enter the Purple Slipper Gallery and Garden..... my hope is that you will smile as you share a glass of wine or cup of tea. Afterall, gardening can't be all tilling and planting and weeding. Flowers are flirting and fleeting and fun. I guess that's the message I see now. They can inspire laughter as well as deep inspiration or profound thoughts. Life needn't be so entirely serious, or the toil of our passions so fully consuming that we forget to indeed stop to smell the roses.

I encourage you to click on the pictures for a closer sniff :)

I inherited the gardening gene from both of my grandmothers. I expect that means it will always be a part of what I was, am, will be. A window to my soul......and a glimpse of how I see the world around my homes. Yet it needn't be all that serious..or time consuming. We are afterall temporal, like the seasons we pass through. Virginia - and Annie Dillard in one of the essays she wrote there- taught me about felicity and fecundity. Maine will have other lessons to teach and learn.

When I closed on this house three years ago this week, I was delighted to arrive to the surprise of a bed of bright poppies spilling across the front of the house. What a happy flower! Now they are popping up in my driveway or between sidewalk stones. Delightful! Though I have added some lillies, sage,  starfish, and such to keep them company, they will, perhaps, always be the landmark expression on the face of my homefront here.

“That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.”

-John Berger

More transitions

If someone had told me a year ago that I would again be renting a Budget rental truck for more long distance moving operations, I would have pulled out the cross to ward off the demons of moving madness. Or maybe a gun. Weeks of clearing out, cleaning out, and fixing up living quarters???? NO WAY. Not me this time - I am still happily and firmly planted in my Maine home. This time a long journey to help my daughter move from near NYC across the big state to Buffalo, and then to travel together to Virginia to transition our house there to its next incarnation after a year as a rental. 2300 miles later....through layers of bruises and waning exhaustion....I can mostly say "mission accomplished." And shake my head at the long list of chores ticked off the list.

• Drive from Maine to NY
• Load 16' rental truck with accumulations from Corrina's 2nd and third floor apartment
• Drive in tandem (me in the truck, Corrina in my car) across the big and beautiful state of NY at 45 mph
• Hole up in a Super 8 for 3 days while we hunt for an apartment and store her stuff in storage
• Drive the long mostly back roads from Buffalo to Charlottesville
• Arrive to find the house left dirty by renters
• Clean
• New roof
• new ceiling and screens on screen porch
• new french drain to aleviate water problems
• Repoint bricks on house face
• Recover long neglected gardens and yard
• paint kitchen, living room, dining room
• Show house to potential renters
• Decide to not deal with cleaning up after others, and vrbo the house
• Refurnish house
• Replace central air conditioning which broke down 2 days after we arrived
• leave Corrina in VA with a finish up "to do" list
• Drive solo the 16 hours back to Maine

I think it was trying to accomplish the Virginia house transition in mid 90 temps with high humidity and no AC that allowed me to fully detach myself emotionally from living there, though it was starting to look cute and comfortable again when I headed back up the long road north and home.

I guess that lesson of downsizing has not been yet fully learned. And it IS tricky when despite all of your best intentions to avoid the "sins of our fathers" pretty much my full 'retirement package' sits in real estate. And try as I do to see a better way to plan for years ahead, and to get out from under so much work on the homefronts, the way out is not yet clear. Not much hope of selling in this downtrodden market. Totally discouraged by my first episode with long term renters. No way to go but forward. Which has been decided as short term rentals, toward hopefully selling what was the home place for 20 years.

Leaving my daughter to ponder the demise of her only real home base for most of her life......I headed back up to my beloved new digs in Maine. It is not hard to loathe Virginia in June and July and August. It is simply not habitable for those of us who don't function in the 90s (heat AND humidity) Yet for a host of reasons mostly out of my control, we still have a roost there.....and now one that is mostly devoid of personal affects. The gardens are all but succumbed to neglect and climate and prolific climbing vines which literally cover and choke all in their way. No way to stop them.....or the deer who have found my gardens there a virtual salad bar for years. Unless of course you live there heavily armed with pruners, sprays, and lots of elbow grease. So in comes a hired landscape guy to weed whack and mow - to at least keep the near perimeter navigable. Sad, when once the gardens were teeming with color and butterflies and the voices of happy children splashing in the pool or playing in the woods. Yet change is one of the best motivators in this life...... and the VA house awaits its own next transition to new owners. I suppose I do look forward to a next visit in a kinder season, of planting carefree, inedible plants to brighten the yard for a hopeful spring sale, and to ponder again a life that is in constant flux.
All of its episodes offering new adventure, fond memories, and wisdom gained slowly from the experience and memory of all we are, have been, and can be.

Mother's Day

For years my favorite indulgence on this holiday is to spend much of the day in the garden. Digging, planting, admiring, comtemplating. Kind of like parenting. Nurturing the  blooms through the seasons, and encouraging them to take on a life of their own. Feeding the soil that will allow them to put down firm roots. Doing what you can to manage the weeds that will undoubtedly try to run interference. And realizing that time, weather, and the changing winds of the climate and zone in which you plant will ultimately have the final say. But aahh! the splendor of any season in bloom!
With that in mind, I headed out for my early morning walk today. After weeks of unbelievably early warmth bringing lilacs into bloom a good 2-3 weeks ahead of schedule, it is cool today. Maybe more contemplation that planting....
I stopped short of the end of the driveway. A bed of tulips in full bloom yesterday was shy a lot of petals and color. It was breezy, but not so much that it was likely the wind had scattererd the petals I saw strewn on the lawn and sidewalk ahead. On closer examination, I saw the severed stems, some ripped off close to the bloom, others further down.
A slow curdle, as I realized neighborhood children had likely struck. I had this happen last year - and actually caught them while walking back down the street with the dog. They - at least the 5 year old- were apologetic. As I walked down the street today......following a trail of petals to the house where I knew the likely culprits lived...I tried to rationalize and dispel my anger.  Maybe they had picked them for their mother, knowing no other way to say thank you. That thought calmed me somewhat. But step by step I saw that they had simply discarded them, petal by petal. She loves me, she loves me not?? OK, pushing down more anger and frustration - it was too early to knock on their door and ask what exactly they were thinking??? - I tried to imagine other possibilities.
I know that the mother of these children has been in and out of jail.  She is seldom and irregularly involved in their lives. They are being raised by grandparents who are at a loss to control the unbridled anger that erupts regularly and loudly through the doors and windows of their little house. I know that the most out of control of these children has sat mournfully on a stoop with a neighbor and reported that his mother hates him. All of this backstory actually helps to quell my being ticked off at the loss of a handful of tulips. Anger to sadness to hope - that whatever pleasure derived from those flowers yanked from my garden was worth it. Even, I suppose if is jealousy that I have a yard full of flowers where they have only dirt.
A wise psychologist said that the one thing that we need in this life is unconditional love. From someone. Anyone. With it we can flourish. Without it, it is almost impossible to bloom. For most of us, this comes first and foremost from our mothers.
My own mother always put her children and grandchildren first. Though she had many hardships as well as many successes in her life, she was first and foremost and always, a wonderful, loving, and supportive mother.  I picked up one of the tulip heads off the sidewalk, and brought it home to put in a little vase that I inherited from her. Thank you, Mom. And Happy Mother's Day!!

Swiftly tilting planet...

OK, what is going on here??? I was supposed to go to Virginia for a long weekend tomorrow - but they are getting so much snow, ice, and winter that I am cancelled. No sense escaping the sunny, relatively mild midcoast winter of late to fly south into winter disaster. The power company had restored almost all of the tens of thousands of customers who lost power in the midatlantic storm last weekend.......but alas they are getting freezing rain to be followed by heavy snow and high winds tonight.  Not my idea of a February break. The temperature was 20 degrees warmer up here today! What a wacky winter. Of course it will also probably give fuel to the skeptics who don't believe in global warming, and of course swell the federal government when they bring out the extra snow plows, salt, and sand in DC. Sheesh, the pinheads are going to have a hard time arguing their way out of this one!
Weathering the weather. What a complex chore. I've been trying to master the balancing act of being a socially responsible energy consumer in this my first winter in Maine. Invested heavily in added insulation and new super energy efficient windows. Not enough, I discovered, to get the maximum credit when I invoice the federal stimulus package....so I'll get to buy more insulation and windows this year! My little house has three main energy sources - an oil-fired boiler, a little vented propane heater in my mud room, and a little jotul woodstove in the kitchen. And oh yeah, a little electric space heater up in the  attic type room above the kitchen where I go sometimes to watch a movie. So, stoking fires and balancing thermostats beomes its own little dance. Add to that the opening and closing of doors to keep zones cooler or warmer, opening and closing drapes and blinds with the rising and setting sun, and just keeping track of the various sweaters and throws that you keep around to take the chill off your shoulders or legs. Jeez, winter life here is complicated!  But I guess I shouldn't mention that to my friends down south who are actually getting pummeled with snow and cold. Go figure!!!!!
Winter or not, problems are getting old, and folks are getting short - tempered and ornery. February, the longest short month of the year. I've had my three bad luck charms back to back in the last month or so, and I sure hope that trend is over. The tree falling on my house is a fading memory. My badly sprained wrist is coming along, and, well....I'm still really ticked about my car getting rear-ended and the near $7000 damage to maybe my favorite car ever. Well, it used to be.    hopefully they'll put it back "good as new" like they promised, because we all know how easy it is going to be to sell a Toyota in the near future - especially one that was just in a wreck. OK, I'm pretty much over being bummed about all of that. What are you going to do??  Stick your head in the sand?  Well, OK, we do still have a little bit of snow...
Hey, but look at the bright sides. or keep your chin up, as my mother used to say. Where else but small town and a great work team would your program director show up at the scene of your accident while you're talking to the policeman and tow truck....with a thermos of hot tea. (It was cold that day). It's so OK here I'm going to take back my two scheduled days off this week, and just go to work because it's really not that bad of an idea.  I'll take the vacation time later when I really need it. Plus, I really like all the little people I get to play with. Although they too are swimming in problems what with their parents losing jobs and houses and such. They also of course have developmental delays and disabilities, but they're still too little and cool to have an inkling of all that just yet. Life is so rich.....even when it seems to be turned upside down.
OK, it's way past my bedtime. The dog stinks to high heaven from some critter he found out in the dark of night- and I have to move as far away from him in this house as I can. Any idea what might reek like a skunk, but have some little added dank and rank twist........more like I imagine a moose might smell??? Tomorrow is another day to deal with that one.......