Category: Sky

Traveling Woman: Everyday Magic, Day 1059

Traveling Woman: Everyday Magic, Day 1059

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Suddenly, I’m on the road a lot after the time-bending months of the pandemic. I went to Wichita for a night to visit with an old friend I hadn’t seen since B.C. (Before Covid), then to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow Eureka Springs, Arkansas for another kind of travel: into the memoir I’m writing for deep-dish revision. I did a side trip to Fayetteville to see several long-loved pals. Today, I’m preparing to go a few hours southwest to the Symphony in the Flint Hills (free tickets arrived to compensate me for a poem in the field guide), and in a little over a week, we do a longer road trip to Minneapolis to help our daughter.

It’s a little discombobulating. It’s a bit exciting, and at times, on long stretches of monolithic freeways, a bit boring. There’s the old annoyances of drivers cutting us off or having to stop regularly to make my way through junk food to gas station bathrooms. Sometimes there’s a whiff of danger, like when part of a tire flew into the car yesterday somewhere on I-44 in Missouri. Often there’s great music to sing along to, good conversation (even when I’m alone because I can’t stop talking to myself), and astonishing skies. There’s also the memory games of what to pack and the hauling and sorting back into drawers and onto shelves after each trip.

Like many of us, I’ve been more wedded to my home after these years, so whenever I walk out the front door toward the car for such a trip, I feel a magnetic pull to go back inside, curl up on the couch with the cat, stay put. But June is, to quote the Oscar and Hammerstein musical, “busting out all over,” despite gas prices, rising temperatures, and a banner year for chiggers. The call to be with people and in places I love propel me to the car, and the car seems happy and jaunty on the road. So I’m a traveling woman lately, craving stillness and loving the journey all at once.

In the Cave of Winter: Everyday Magic, Day 994

In the Cave of Winter: Everyday Magic, Day 994

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Each day I crave a clear view of a clear sky, but fog, snow, sleet, rain, freezing rain, and variety packs of all this percipitation at once fills the well-hidden vistas. Narrower perspectives of what’s out there push me inside and inward to what’s in here. My technicolor dreams, on the other hand, go go big screen and high speed, involving shadow cities of places I thought I knew and a conveyor belt of swiftly-changing characters, many of whom I don’t know. Then again, I’m also sleeping more, giving those dreams extra room to get wild.

Like many of us, this is the time of year I drink a lot of hot tea, craving little butter cookies to dunk in that tea, and at night, hunker down under blankets and heater cats (real cats, real warmth) surrounded by a herd of animals, now including two dogs, two kitties, and one husband. I’m more aware than usual of the air, sometimes too cold or too dry, and right now, composed of clouds too close to the ground. Last night, I dreamed I looked out a high window that doesn’t actually exist on the imaginary third or fourth story of my house to see the ground, faded into brownish green with small patches of snow, then when I looked again, greening up like it will do in a few months. I looked away and saw a blossoming tree, something like a magnolia, but when I woke into darkness and chill, such a tree seemed preposterous.

Because the scene is so monochromatic, I’m drawn more to black and white movies, last night Mr Deeds Goes to Town, which also has plenty of foggy, soft-edges scenes that even lower the volume of New York City 1930’s lights and action to a whisper. I’m hugging the edge of home more too, forgoing leaving the house with its heart-rushing foray down a drive composed of layered snow, frozen rain, sleet, and more rain. Instead, I bake or ignore the urge to bake, plan sewing projects, talk with friends on the phone, and make a whole lot of soup.

But that’s all for the good because in the cave of winter we’re meant to do some hibernation. Although it doesn’t feel like it, spring will come soon enough with its fast-moving flowers. Now is the time is quiet down and listen to the space between not enough and too much. That’s more than enough.

Weeding in the Rain: Everyday Magic, Day 938

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Did you know you can sing “Weeding in the Rain” to the same tune as “Singing in the Rain”? In a sense, both songs are about falling in love, at least for Gene Kelly and me. After weeks of not getting to the garden for a garden variety of reasons — book release stuff to organize, too cold, too muddy, too dry, more book release stuff to do, too tired, third winter arriving, yet more book release things to check off the list, and oh, why go outside when I can lie on the couch and watch Netflix? — it was time.

I felt that call of the garden as soon as Ken and I stepped out for our evening walk around the edges of the fields. “Let’s just stay here and weed,” I reasoned, but no, he felt we just had to walk, so walk we did — taking in big vistas of elegant displays of great could verticality. By the time we got back, I headed straight for the raised beds where I should have planted stuff back in mid- to late-March. I sat on a ledge of one of the beds, started pulling out invasives and falling back in love with gardening.

Although you wouldn’t know it if you look at our gardens in, say, July when the heat and chiggers make me throw up my hands and use the word “fuck” numerous time as my people (New Jerseyans) are prone to do, I actually like weeding the best. I like it more than that fussy, get-it-right planting. I even like it more than harvesting although it is a luscious thing — quelle surprise! — to lift a leaf and find some nestling cucumbers. Weeding — the daily bread of a keeping a garden — is extraordinarily satisfying to me for many reasons.

  • I get my hands moving rhythmically in and out of dirt, which is one of the things cheap cialis and levitra hands are made to do.
  • If, like me, you imagine each weed as a pesky worry — everything from what to remember to buy at the grocery store or why someone won’t return my call to whether I’ll ever get over being too much of a people-pleaser — there’s great catharsis to be had. Pulling out invasions works well for the mind as well as the garden. Each weed is another niggling bit of anxiety, fear, and dread tossed out of the vacinity.
  • It feels really good to work hard in concert with plants, dirt, light, wind, and in tonight’s case, water. My body chimes as if beautiful music just swept through me. There’s something deeply cleansing about getting down and dirty on ground level.
  • Then there’s the artistic accomplishment: when I finish weeding a bed, I feel like I just revised a poem (which, incidentally, is the same process). Or I feel like I just made my bed (loyal readers know about how the  “Clean bed, clear head” advice has helped me and some of you).
  • Weeding also allows what we want to grow the necessary air time and space to actually grow — another satisfying symbol of reality!

Now weeding in the rain is all this and more as the drops fall on the my back and the backs of my hands while the wind and rain thicken up. I sat on the dirt,  turning increasingly to mud, deep in my groove of reaching, pulling, tossing. By the time I finished, I was about 80% soaked, and walking to the back deck, eyeing the flower beds, I thought of squatting and beginning it all over again, but I figured I’d save that for another day because I got too busy singing, “I’m weeeeeeeding in the rain, just weeeeeeeding in the rain! What a wonderful feeling! I’m happy again!”

Prevernal Wonders: Everyday Magic, Day 932

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I love the prevernal season perhaps best of all: that space between the start of spring and before the leafing out of the big, green world. There’s such a brief series of moment between the last dregs of winter and first flush of spring, snow and daffodils, or sub-zero nights and thunderstorm afternoons. All show us that there is no line between seasons, just a two-steps-forward, four-steps-back, one-leap-forth, and a-crash-to-the-cold-ground dance.

Last night, I was acutely aware of this when we took a sunset walk across part of the field, up the hill, and through the woods, all the trees so dry that we were snapping off interfering branches as we went to make the trail more of a trail. Yet in the middle of this drought moment, there sky exhaled humidity, and for the first time in days, I didn’t feel so thirsty. The clouds cleared, the sky darkened, and over the horizon of time and weather, finally some rain arrived at 4 a.m.

Having woken myself up from a nightmare in which I was the entire KU men’s basketball team, rushing around my house to lock all the doors against impending danger, I sat up in time to see lightning in the distance. I stayed up, convincing myself I wasn’t fragmented in all those star basketball players but just one woman watching the world change to rain.

This morning, the deck and gravel drive held shallow puddles, the top of the car was wet, and the grass around our house was amazingly and suddenly greening up, as if someone crayoned a black-and-white drawing of this world while we slept. Cottonwood Mel’s branches are  full of buds for the leaves to come. The one lone  backyard daffodil, stunted but in bloom will soon have lots of company.

This prevernal time in Kansas is famous for bringing us all four seasons in a day, so I don’t hold onto what sweet, damp, and shining weather is given to us at this moment, but maybe that’s one of the great meanings of in-between times. Change is coming, following an old pattern but unfurling in its own mysterious way. It’s outside of my control, but at least, I can still keep going outside, the air — whatever temperature it is — remembering me to who I am beyond my ideas about myself, and helping me remember what’s real.

An Expansive Kansas Road Trip in a Concise Time: Everyday Magic, Day 910

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You can drive a long way in Kansas and never leave the state, like 340 miles west from my home to western Kansas, and still be a ways from a state border. That’s just what I did to give a Kansas Humanities Council talk on wild weather in poetry, photography and our lives at one of the great community jewels-of-a-library, Pioneer Memorial Library (astonishing array of programs for all ages, and even a coloring night!)

The trip was fueled by coffee, of course, plus, because I’m trying to give up my M&Ma-and-Cheetos road trip habits, an entire box of Nut Thins (don’t judge me), hummus, a perfect Pink Lady apple, and an over-ripe banana. Getting over a cold necessitated a lot of over-the-counter meds and turmeric interspersed with those great Ricola cough drops. Between miles 107 and 200, I believe pretzels were involved while blasting podcasts of “This American Life” or singing loudly to “Now I Have Everything” from Fiddler on the Roof.

The view from my hotel room

I love the open road, and there’s few better ways to experience it than to drive to western Kansas where the locals consider it a little jaunt to go 50 miles, and where the sky widens and deepens all directions. The traffic is often non-existent, and it’s easy to get lost in all that open space, speed, and splendor of sky. I also love western Kansas where my mind relaxes, and the air is brighter, cooler, and often clearer.

The downside of losing track of things is that, instead of remembering to fill my tank in Hays, I got too caught up a podcast about a prison nurse falling in love with an inmate. Just as my caffeine- and cold-medicine-induced panic was about to rise, I saw an exit leading to a clearly abandoned gas station. The sign had been hollowed out from years of wind, and the building’s windows were whitened from the inside to block out viewing. But something cialis no prescription next day told me to take the exit, where I found a red sign that said “Credit Card Pumps.” I pulled out my credit card, and took my chances. When the gas started flowing, I lifted my arms to thank the god of abandoned gas stations.

But then, when a person is lucky, that’s what expansive travel can be. “Ask and it shall be given” came true for me throughout this little jaunt, such as when I realized I desperately needed a bathroom, and lo and behold, a rest stop appeared, which I had never noticed in the 213 times over 30+ years I’ve done this drive before. Or dinner, which can be dicey in rural communities on occasion when the only restaurant open is a gas station that sells stale pizza. I lucked out with one of the best Midwestern official fried chicken dinner (which always includes mashed potatoes, corn, and a roll) at the Welcome Home cafe (dinner also included a superb salad and fruit bar).

Wanting to stretch my legs after filling my belly, I wandered near the restaurant, which was in a kind of antique-mall-meets-strip-mall-meets-car-dealership, and I came up to what we know in Kansas as Wheatus Jesus, the haunting billboard I’ve seen from 75 mph for years but never stood beside. It’s very impressive, and so is the big field nearby at sunset. Right there, for a reason I couldn’t fathom, there was platform overlooking the field, but the steps to it were blocked by big pots of cherry tomatoes in the middle of a sunflower forest. I was going to climb the stairs to the forbidden platform, but my first step in set off some growling creature, so I jumped back just in time to remove a bunch of sticktites.

Now I’m home, the miles behind me, and the quiet of home all around me. Once again I’m glad to be home, but I’m also glad to have gone.