Poetry Month!!! Here goes...

In honor of Poetry Month (and nagged by the thought of friends who are doing this, without apparent effort) I am again attempting a poem a day. I have not much hope of success, as April promises to be full of visitors and Folger tours and workshops and Shakespeare's birthday and other assorted events...but enough excuses. Begin. Even if I'm a day behind already.

A Poem a Day?

A daily poem—

I don’t think enough occurs

in my circumspect life

to feed

that ravenous a beast..

A daily note, perhaps,

a period or casual comma—

even a dash

of wit, of wisdom--

but a daily poem entire

and succinct?

It would gulp and gobble

the exact words, the painful

precise words of my heart

and churn them to

a digestible butter,

smooth and soft

and safe,

without even a burp

to mark their passage.

AND...for today?

Spring Cleanup

Who knew that winter would

hoard leaves from the fall—

concealing them in miser’s piles,

wedged in corners and narrow nooks,

weighted by ice and snow,

compacted by

cold-hearted rain and wind?

The blackened grit from snowstorms past

litters steps and walks.

Dead foliage, clinging to the cold earth,

impedes the upward path of  

leaf-green shoots:

winter’s last stand against

profligate spring.

,

Spring: are you out there?

The wind is howling outside my door. Well, actually, it's getting under the aluminum casings of my windows and doors and is performing that annoying whine/whistle that only wind and aluminum can produce. Like Mother Nature joining my house in a kazoo chorus. Appropriately irreverent and ridiculous. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and the cold is penetrating. Spring? Hah!

I'm beginning to think that spring has passed us by. I'm standing at my door, frantically signaling and trying to flag her down as she swings past. My poor pansies, lured into bloom by the one warm afternoon this week, are being battered and blown by a wind more appropriate to January. The gate is rattling in protest, and the buds on my shrubs are as close-mouthed and grimly-tight-visaged  as the Wicked Witch of the West. Just when Glinda should be sailing in with flowers and fairies, we're getting nothing but flying monkeys and wintry glares and brown and blasted gardens. Even Oz was green, but not us. We are, it seems, perpetually Kansas, in stark black and white.

Come, now. Have we not suffered enough this year? Coldest winter, deepest snows, record lows and more. Time to pull out our ruby slippers and click our heels and chant three times: 'There's no time like spring."

Maybe that will get us there. I'm willing to try anything right now.

Not there yet

Easter is creeping up on me. Daylight Savings Time is here (whatever you may think of it) and that means spring is coming, unbelievable as that may be, as the last of the dirty snow piles are still, ever-so-slowly, melting.

It's hard to believe in spring when the garden is still an ugly green-gray/brown, and the remains of last year's leaves dangle dispiritedly from the trees. The plants I didn't cut back in the fall (liriope, day lilies, lavender--there's a complete roll call out there) droop, frostbitten and forlorn in their pots. The cute little rosemary 'trees' I positioned on the front porch after Thanksgiving didn't make it through the last bout of snow and ice, and while I will optimistically cut them back and hope for resurrection...I don't think so. Brown is not the color of faith OR hope.

What I need is one warm day with no agenda (hard to find these days, with all the postponements we endured during this last month) so that I can clean up, clear up, cut up all the debris that seems to be the major crop of my little garden, and start anew. I am determined to do the clean-up first, so that I may see what hardy plants dare to sprout again in my garden of (sometime) neglect before I indulge myself at the local nursery,

With this good intention in mind, I am reminded of a Peanuts cartoon of Lucy writing on a blackboard  over and over again "I will not talk in class" until she reaches the last line of the last frame and writes, "On the other hand, who knows what I'll do?" I will probably buy plants before I finish cleaning up, no matter what I say.  My trip(s) to the nursery are my own little act of faith--faith that spring will come, that the birds will come back, that my precious little fountain will not have  sprung an irreparable leak, that I will be able, again, after  acquiring the requisite pound of dirt under my fingernails (gloves are for sissies), be able to see color and texture and beautiful things growing right here outside my door.

I need some daffodils. I need some green. I need spring. Now.

The Move Mysterious

Years ago, when we bought a vacation (possibly retirement) home, we decided to furnish it with the contents of one of our (several) storage spaces. We contracted with a mover, met him at the storage compartment and watched him cart off beds and dressers and tables and lamps and assorted boxes that had languished in storage for far too long. We had furnished our then-current household with all we needed. The excess was headed west.

Now you may think this was rather cavalier of us to send boxes of the unknown on a cross-country trip. Surely we could have winnowed out some useless stuff and thereby reduced our moving bill. Maybe. But the luxury of time was something we could not afford just then, so out it went, to be winnowed at the other end.

That was seven years ago, and we are still surprised by items that surface at the San Diego house: bits and pieces of our past, a number of “I-know-it’s-here-somewhere” items that we have searched our Virginia house for in vain (there are two glue guns here in California, for example), some totally random books, half a set of china, a child’s Japanese tea set, the odd vase, a framed print or photo—even an icon of Elijah the Prophet that I painted once upon a time. There is a hodgepodge of furniture and appliances and tableware. My mother-in-law’s everyday dishes and a mix of her Revere-ware with an old set of Copco enamel-on-cast-iron pots that I won in a contest years ago in Virginia Beach. Glasses scrounged from the sale when the restaurant on the corner closed; a blender from a yard sale, a set of Pyrex bowls and some Corningware from a local estate sale. There is no rhyme or reason, much less color coordination going on here.

So the question is: what will happen if we ever move here more permanently. The Wal-Mart mixer will give way to my loyal Kitchen-Aid; some of the dilapidated furniture—the dresser with the broken leg, the wobbly chairs,  the wooden patio table and chairs that are past their prime-- will have to go. Likewise the duplicate utensils, cookie sheets, muffin pans, the childrens’ books, the bouncy chair.

I can see my future. It’s wearing a ‘Yard Sale’ sign. 

Homesick? Not so much...

We are a week away from returning to Virginia.  I’m not particularly excited about a return to the land of cold and ice and sometime snow. Particularly the cold. I have quickly adapted to a place where there is a minimum daily requirement of sun—and if clouds intervene (or, god forbid, rain!) the populace, by and large, apologizes for the weather. This is the place where, at 70 degrees and cloudy, the local Jiffy-Lube manager tells us that the bad weather kept people home and that’s why business is so slow today. Really? This is “bad weather”? Let me take it off your hands, please.

It’s a blessing to walk out in the morning without a coat, to eat at an outside table at a restaurant, to sip a cup of tea because it tastes good, rather to have something simply to warm my hands. I like seeing green things growing, and pink camellias blooming their hearts out in our yard. But most of all, I love sitting at the kitchen counter with the sun warm on my back and rainbows playing across the floor from the beveled glass window in the family room. It’s liberating to make plans without factoring in the possible disruption of (truly) bad weather, be it snow and ice or even heat and humidity. It’s nice here. Almost all the time.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think any place can compare to Alexandria in the spring, when gardens wake up to daffodils and tulips, and the parkway trees turn green almost overnight. Dogwoods and redbuds are spectacular, probably because of the contrast with their winter selves.  And after a long, hot, meltingly humid summer, the first crisp morning of fall is a thing to be savored. But…there is always a ‘but’… February in San Diego is a guilty pleasure and I am loving it.

Buttermilk

I am an inveterate recipe reader. I skim cookbooks the way other people read novels, and am constantly on the lookout for something new, something tasty, something easy and original and praiseworthy to set on the table. I think it’s a function of a weird kind of personal ADD that relates solely to food. Other people may eat the same baloney sandwich for lunch every day for years—not me. I’m lucky if I can handle the same lunch two days in a row. Obviously, my palate is not designed for leftovers. Which explains the stacks of recipes on my coffee table and the shelves of cookbooks overflowing from my kitchen.

So, it’s no surprise that, every now and then, recipe, ingredients, and stars align correctly—almost-- and I  try something new. Today it is a cranberry tea cake. With the best of cookie-baking intentions, I had loaded my pre-Christmas refrigerator with butter and eggs and an inordinate number of cranberries. (Cranberries are a problem for me; I have scones and Jezebel Sauce and cranberry bread recipes—over and above normal cranberry sauce—and cranberries are only available for a month or so. Plus they are easily freezable, so I always figure I can freeze what I don’t use.) In any event, after the scones and Jezebel Sauce and adding them to everything from fruit salad to spiced peaches this holiday season, I still have about four bags in the refrigerator.  Just the time for a cranberry tea cake recipe to come along. And it did.

The fly in the ointment (or batter, if you will) is that the damned recipe calls for buttermilk. I do not buy buttermilk. It has a unique ability to creep to the back of my refrigerator shelf and expire, unbeknownst to the casual observer (i.e. me.) Also, the only size cartons it comes in are: not enough, too much, and way-too-much. I have thrown away as much buttermilk (it being nasty in consistency AND in taste) as I care to, and am therefore faced with the powdered version (out of it; it expires faster than I can use it), substitution (yogurt or sour cream, I’m told will work) or the old ‘stir a spoonful of vinegar in a cup of milk’ routine which I have never quite trusted.

Sometimes the world doesn’t give you what you want or what you need to do what you want to do.  Sometimes the alternatives aren’t that great, either. Sometimes the only choice is which disappointment you are able to live with most easily. Whether it’s a cranberry tea cake, a cashmere sweater, a popular toy or gadget, a new job, or sometimes, just a good meal on the table, there’s always a ‘buttermilk’ ingredient that stands in the way, a compromise that we might be unwilling or unable to make, a step too far for us to take right now.

Particularly at this time of the year, fresh from Christmas wish-fulfillment fantasies, and on the verge of post-holiday let-down, it’s good to recognize again that not all wishes come true—and that that is sometimes a good thing. It can be a challenge to make things work when you’re missing part of the puzzle. Buttermilk (or the lack thereof) opens the door for experimentation and often gives you a shot at something else entirely, something better than you’d hoped for.

(And, by the way…the tea cake turned out fine. I used the milk and vinegar and, while it didn’t rise as nicely as I’d hoped, it tastes pretty darned good. And I AM now down to only three bags of cranberries..)

Birthdays

One thing I have in common with God is a December birthday. (Now, I know that this whole December thing is a Christian myth to counteract the Roman Saturnalia, but, given the whole celebration compulsion, the myth might as well be true.) I never much liked the idea of a birthday that was co-opted by Christmas, that precluded birthday parties, that gave friends and family the option of covering both birthday and Christmas with one gift. In short, I always felt my ‘special’ day got lost in the shuffle.

Perhaps Jesus and I have more in common than I thought.

It is so easy each year to lose track of the honoree in our celebration of his birthday.  There are so many other things going on that Christmas itself becomes just a sigh of relief at the end of a long month of dashing hither and yon in pursuit of all the rituals and traditions, the visits, the parties, the cards and gifts. Maybe what Jesus would really prefer is a nice quiet observance—just family and friends—with cake and ice cream, balloons, and some well-thought-out gifts.

Family and friends? I believe that would be everyone. We are all part of God’s family, even though—like many families—we have our disagreements. But families do come together for special occasions like birthdays, and (at least temporarily) bury our respective hatchets. We could do that. The cake and ice cream are a little harder, but I think Jesus would settle for a simple meal with all of us sharing one table. The gifts? What would Jesus want? That is the premier question of Christmas, and our task, during Advent is to figure that out, to take the time to think about what we can give that would be a good birthday present, that would light up his face and warm his heart. We all know the gifts that would do just that; we are just haggling over the price.  Can we afford the time and effort? How much will this cost? But Christmas is a time to be generous, and so, weighing cost against return on investment…maybe we can find time for that tutoring. Maybe we can give that extra bit for the missions. Maybe we might squeeze out an hour to serve a meal, make a sandwich, volunteer for a good cause.  So what if it doesn’t wrap up nicely in a box? I think he would understand and wholeheartedly approve.

And perhaps Jesus might be interested in my family’s solution to my badly-timed birthday.  We started celebrating my HALF-birthday in June.  What a concept that would be: celebrating Christmas in mid-year. Or …why stop there? Maybe we should celebrate him all year long, and start each day with a cheerful “Happy birthday!”

I’ll bring the balloons.