A Few Frames From the Garden

"I wonder if a wild tree planted in the middle of an ordered landscape can make the reverse happen, can unstring this taut garden, I mean, and allow the cultivated plants all around it to sound the clear note of their own inborn wildness, now muffled. There can be no civilisation without wildness, such a tree would remind us, no sweetness absent its astringent opposite."

--Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

This week, instead of reading more about the phone hacking scandal, debt ceilings and the Greek bailout I fell into my garden. My tended area was beckoning -- a despatch at dusk.

I’ve been monitoring a poppy that I didn’t plant. It has grown nearly as tall as me and is now forming seed heads. This drifter found it’s way to me through the wind and now I’m going to collect what it has to offer. It has bloomed into deep pink and purple and next year I plan to help it put down roots and stay for a little longer. This one’s brother has come up about ten feet away but must not have inherited the height gene. (I can relate).

My feline housemates seem to think the garden has been planted for their pleasure. My beloved Foo is fascinated by many things – a full bath, bullying, cameras, toilets flushing and here the Green Fennel. He appears to have mistaken it for catnip!

I get strange looks at work when I describe my peas as beautiful. I am checking on them daily for signs of fattening.

Here are some marigolds that have grown from seeds self-scattered and sown after flowering last year. I was tempted to intervene in their life-cycle by pulling them up but resisted. I let the seeds put on their show for me.

All this gardening means the housekeeping is neglected. I always say that if I were to win the lottery I would hire a housekeeper. You can imagine my excitement when my friend gave me this one!

Although I can't even have five minutes of peace on Sunday while this cleaner is busy...

Laura

Same Hands, New Tricks: A Brand New Knitter!

A few nights ago, I was sitting next to Sherry, a very fine chef and friend. Her fingers were tangled in burgundy yarn; her cats, Robert and Ash, convinced that anything dangling was free for swatting until napping in our laps proved a better option. The first lesson in knitting, casting on, came deluxe this night with giggles at stiff fingers and cat snores.

I had almost forgotten there was a time my fingers didn't know how to hold the yarn taut to produce the right tension of stitch, how well my thumb and forefinger work together to slide each stitch onto the needle, how our hands are tools at all! How often we forget.

My lessons in knitting came under a beach umbrella in the thick heat of July. Emolyn, the daughter of a mountain woman who spins wool from her own beloved sheep, watched over my crooked and confused first scarf with the specific patience of a well seasoned knitter. And then we'd run into the waves of the Oak Island beach, where we never heard a car run but saw and swatted more mosquitoes than I cared to know exist. Regardless, I learned to knit with salt and sand coating my hands. If I were you, I'd stick to the cliche of winter nights by the wood fire, but nix the image of an old lady wearing a tight bun. I quite like my hair down, a glass of wine, and the right to toss expletives when I drop a stitch.

But watching Sherry knit for the first time reminded me how hard it can be to teach our old hands new ways to hold, maneuver. Our fingers want to act like a bunch of over-caffeinated kids on the playground, but eventually, when we realize there's no gun to our head, we begin to trust chance-taking and the fact that no thing is perfect. So let me shove the needle into this loop and wrap it with this yarn and pull it through and off and WOW! A brand new stitch. When we finally divorce the unhappy couple, creation and perfection, we can get on with better things, like creation and play or creation and healing.

So I wish Sherry very much luck in her new, volatile relationship with knitting. I may request a trade-off: a couple lessons in the kitchen. After all, we must learn to share!

Love,

Corrie Lynn


PS. A poem I wrote about the Oak Island adventure with Emolyn: http://poetryspark.sparkcon.com/poems/white/crossing_carolina.html

PSS. A link to Sherry's catering business: www.cateringbychefs.com

PSSS. Here are the precious Robert and Ash!

Finding Breath in Winter

For several years I have wondered if I may suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, but then I relax and back away from the hypochondriacal tendencies and into the warmth of a cardigan and fleece blanket. Next I invite my cats onto my lap for communal warming. I want to think it is the ebb and flow, the seasonal turns our human bodies must obey, or as my yoga teacher would say, the yin and yang.

The summer makes us slow with its heat, while the winter calls for a brisk walk or turning over earth in the garden to churn our muscles and give our bodies the warmth that is so plentiful in summer. Winter is contemplative, to summer’s humour.

In the spring I felt like a newborn, plump with desires for the year, plans. After my defrosting I was aglow with the sentiment that blooming was ahead, progress, long hours of sunlight. Of course, the days again will shorten and the green things float back down to the ground. The leaves provide autumn its palette with their color change and eventually become food for the worms underfoot.

It is now the end of October, and I recently bought a new raincoat to bridge the gap between late summer and early winter. It hasn't yet seen many days because the cold arrived too soon and a heavier covering is required. Nearly everyone you meet mentions the return of “dark nights” (although they come around each year they are still a phenomenon which must be spoken of). My green-fingered endeavours have proved a modest success. I have potatoes, petite onions, a few bulbs of garlic among other things. The parsnips are still pushing underground waiting for the frost to bestow flavor. Some things have flowered early and others have flowered late, flowered for longer than expected, or not flowered at all. I have learned that next year I won’t be so calculating in my attempts. I will lean more towards experimentation without a fear of failure. Most of the time, things find a way to grow.

In these next cold months instead of giving in to moods of melancholy, I will empathize with the snow crocus bulbs. Having just been planted they rest beneath the surface, in waiting, and in spring I will monitor their (my) peep above ground, a harbinger of beauty to come.

Let me introduce you to Georgie (right) and Axle (left). Friends since infancy.

And a few of the many local sheep. I'm afraid I can't tell you their names.

Stay warm!

xx Laura

Pretty (and) Grotesque

Last Halloween we threw a party for the kids (Matthew, Joseph & Rebecca) and to tease their imagination we made shortbread fingers with fingernails made of blanched almonds, fruit punch full of floating frozen hands, and tactile mystery boxes of oozing jelly eyeballs, slimy maggots and wiggly worms.

In my real life, however, I was pleasantly surprised the day I found a dead rabbit’s eyeball lying solo on the kitchen floor, staring up at me. It made a change from the leftover kidneys and other unidentifiable innards that my graceful and sleek grown up kittens leave scattered in dark corners and also in plain sight when you wake up in the morning and when you get home in the evening.

Rabbits (young and old), pheasants, a kestrel, mice (all varieties), moles, voles, rats, a HARE (!), blackbirds, a swallow, pied wagtails, a hedgehog and I could go on. I can’t say they’ve ever brought me a fox, or one of the young Shetland ponies down the road, but who knows? I wouldn’t put it past my most intrepid cat, Axle.

It comes as a shock when a person of the town or suburbs hears of these things, but when your reality is a life in the English countryside with a dog and three young cats, it ain’t all wildflowers and frolicking lambs. I heard my work colleague complaining about a rat in her garage, in near hysterics and thought to myself, “Honey, you ain’t seen nothin’.”

Should I feel pity for the ill-fated rabbit or mole? My mother-in-law is a bona fide sympathizer - the shortened life, the terror the animal must have felt when feline jaws clamped around its neck and the sunlight faded into darkness. I suppose I just think, hey, it’s life. The Circle of Life!!! (as sung by Elton John with Simba in mind). Or maybe I am playing out in my own imagination a scene in which my cat Axle, as Simba in training, hunts on the African plains.

Frankly I do not understand those who squirm at the sight of spiders or other “creepy crawlies” because these creatures are harmless for the most part and the fear (in my humble opinion) is irrational. Ants can carry at least 10 times their own body weight, and we as humans are afraid of insects? Get over it! My young niece Rebecca was mesmerized by the sight of my cat Axle chomping his way through a rabbit. She could not take her eyes off the act despite her mother’s attempts to lure her back indoors. Perfect illustration of a child’s insatiable curiosity. Simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Or perhaps she just wanted to witness a scene that was beautifully grotesque.

Of course the hour of day and your mood can affect how you react to such things.

It is not always so beautiful to be greeted by a headless rabbit on a 3 am journey to the toilet.

Welcome to my world.



Sort of reminds me of Nemo...

xx Laura