Today was like being let out of jail. The sun was shining. There was no wind. The sun, did I mention? It was shining. It was warm outside — 40s up into the 50s. I cleaned up the yard (dog poop patrol), cut some hollyhock stalks and put them over where I want hollyhocks to grow next year. I turned over a garden bed. I pulled all the dead stuff off the herb bed so the parsley and the chives can start coming back. I pruned a couple of errant branches off the greengage plum tree. Then I hung out…
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This is the first winter I’ve had a clothesline and I find I use it fairly often. If it’s sunny, and above freezing, I’ve been hanging things outside. Today is very windy, which is a bit of a challenge, but there they are, some clothes, getting dry without using my dryer. It’s a small thing, but makes me weirdly happy. (Plus the sheets smell so nice.)
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There’s no shortage of praise going around for Updike’s work in the wake of his death, and I’ve been hesitant to jump in because well, there’s that prohibition against speaking ill of the dead. For all I know, in his personal life he could have been an exemplar of many fine qualities — I wouldn’t know. He was certainly productive, writing three pages a day over a lifetime he produced more than 40 novels, collections of essays, and short stories. However, I found his work repellent. The pervasive and unrelenting misogyny is only a part of what I hated about…
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Last night was one of those bad white nights where you wake at two and worry. The kind of night where you’re haunted by worries that are just practical enough to be real, and which yet, you know you can do nothing about at two in the morning. Or three in the morning. Or four thirty, when you know you only have another hour until the alarm goes off. And of course, by the time the alarm goes off, you’re finally finding yourself slipping under the wire into real sleep. Except that now, you must get up. The saving grace…
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Mornings in Montana lately have featured subzero temperatures and, as is the case this morning, 30-50mph gusts blowing right up against my kitchen windows (that sun porch I want is seeming less like an indulgence and more like an investment in insulation on mornings like this). At any rate, it’s been deepest winter here. Dark. Cold. Windy. And so, I’ve become addicted to this stuff, Zergut Hot Ajvar: It’s from Bulgaria. It contains peppers, eggplant, sugar, sunflower oil, salt, garlic and hot peppers, oh and some acetic acid (Vitamin C). It’s bright red. It tastes like summer. The jar says…
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I sometimes go on jags where I’ll find a new writer and read three or four books in a row, and Sebastian Barry has been one of those writers for me this winter. Irish literature was my undergraduate specialization — I went to Dublin for a semester my senior year to study Joyce (and lucked out and also got to work with Eavan Boland before she became famous). So it’s been a delight these past couple of years to discover Anne Enright’s work, and now, Sebastian Barry. Barry is an interesting figure — his mother was the Irish actress Joan…
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Sorry all of you who are trapped in the cold, but it’s 53 degrees in my backyard and I’m writing this blog post from the patio furniture, in the sun. And I’m just beside myself with happiness about tomorrow’s inauguration. A new day dawning. Oh happy happy day.
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I’m on a very old version of WordPress, mostly because I haven’t had the time to upgrade, and while it used to email me when there were comments, so I could moderate or respond right away, it seems to have stopped doing that. Hmm. Don’t know what that’s about. At any rate, it was only this afternoon that I realized all of you have been leaving great comments, and chatting amongst yourselves, which is fabulous. I’m just chagrined for being a little late to my own party. Perhaps another resolution — upgrade soon.
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My lovely friends Chris and Debi Lorenc have gone off on an adventure worth reading about. Chris and I met in a workshop during the very first year of the Art of the Wild workshop at Squaw Valley. I was workshopping the very first chapter of Place Last Seen, and Chris was working on a luminous manuscript about the Santa Cruz mountains as an ancient spiritual site. He’s a beautiful writer, and he and his wife Debi are spiritual people in the deepest, sweetest sense — true seekers. I love them dearly and their dispatches make me kvell on a…
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It’s a recessionary January, and I came into this new year wondering how on earth my credit card balances has mushroomed like they have? With the state of the economy being what it is, and layoffs happening right and left, I find myself in a bad position. A position that all this LivingSmall stuff was supposed to protect me from. So I’ve been drawing up budgets, and it’s a good thing I have full freezers and pantries and a garden that will eventually thaw out and come back to life, because if I’m to get out from under this terrifying…