Almost Like an Easter Egg Hunt

Quite some time ago we moved to this caboose from an eight room 168 year old log cabin on three hundred plus acres out in the deep woods. It was a hard decision to make, but my heart was pushing me to get closer to an ER. During the move, it was snowing and the guys, all six of them, they made me stay in the cabin next to the wood stove and stay warm. I realized after they left with the stuff in a huge U-Haul truck that they didn't want the "the little woman" organizing this last detail. I would have made three rows of boxes and with all my typed labels facing out so that I could read them and get the right box if I needed something. Well, the guys just threw the stuff in and that was that seemingly forever. I lost a whole box of poetry. I wasn't sure it was even in the storage unit we had rented. Well, last night I found a crucial ms I had been working on for five years. I kissed the pages and went leaping (bad mistake) out to Dan's writing room with the pages. We were so relieved. This was years of research before even putting a finger to a typewriter. I spent days in the reference library taking notes about the tribe of native Americans who lived in our valley before it became so brutally our valley. Then I had to decide on a format-how did I want this historical to appear on the page? Whose voice did I want to use? Another whole year of finding out all these pieces of information, before I could even put one finger down on the good ol' Remington Rand. Not electric. Now that I've found it, all these pages and pages of story, I can transfer them into the computer, back it up on disc and print out hard copy. And then of course, continue writing the history of one place, many people, much time. But it's work I love to do; it's my bent in life. I haven't gone through the whole box yet. I was so happy to find just this single ms. Another day, another hunting venture.

In Washing the BirdBath, The Birds Now Bathe

The tiger lilies are open in their funny little turban hats. I used to hate the color orange and tiger lilies have made me love it, in all its different shades. I took my digital camera and got right smack into the face of the lily and snapped! it's portrait, you might say. I did the same thing with a poppy.
The bird bath I cleaned out yesterday has had two visitors today: a Roufus-Sided Towhee and a Western Flycatcher. Maybe I'll write more later.

"Don't Need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows..." Bob Dylan

Damn cold in the shade, frisky hot in the sun. There seems to be no spring this year, no oh holy spring of pixies and fairies and the playing of telephone with the foxglove blossoms....After church I shifted goatshit from one bed to another and watered everything down mixin' it up with the little lady-like pitchfork, because to use any of those good manly efficient tools sends me to bed for at least a day with swollen up vertabraes and muscles twitching and jumping, "Let's do the Twist, let's do the Mermaid and Twist and Shout in the bathtub while the watering runs on my soreness and I have to close the door and cry baby cry wishing wondering why did we move in here without remembering to check if there was a bathtub or not? Fools, I say, damn fools. But it IS a caboose and charming as heck when the weather is perfect and I'm wearing a sundress, (my genius friend Cynthia with the sewing hands took my feather weight Singer and a Ralph Lauren pattern and we're changin' them around here and there and making six summer frocks all different by adding rick rack here and lace there and I found some old white cotton bloomers as gossamer as those faery wings and we're gonna make a pattern for more bloomers and petticoats to wear under the frocks and, slap a straw hat on our heads and our bleached pink converse, no laces (thanks Zaby *vogue mag*) and man, we're gonna hit every lemonade stand in town and make the six year olds rich as howard hughes..

We emptied out our storage unit and gonna have the biggest best-est come-one-come-all yard sale this side of the Tahachapis and that'll save $92 ducats a month. Then I had the great idea of savin' more money by Daniel growin' his hair out again like Rex did AT cHURCH and Erin braids it every morning before he goes out to split wood or clean out the spring box wearing his khaki kilt cuz he can work his butt off in it and then jump into the outdoor shower when he's done with all his garden chores, just by unbucklin' a few pieces of leather, tearin' off his Tshirt and unlacin' his loggin' boots. (i have Dan's first braid, a foot long, in the Victorian Curio Cabinet inside the stray pieces of Great Aunt May's china pieces, wrapped around itself inna dessert bowl of that cobalt blue design on white,which was my great grandmother Nellie's (glorious!)and vireo nests with dried up inside eggs and arrowheads the Boy found in the meadow by settin' down (ouch!). There are so many treasures in that cabinet that I'm already making out my will who wants what, rather than who I want who to have what. Like it was a cinch to know that my niece Asia Renee ought to become the owner of my Sir James Barrie collection because she loves Peter Pan like I do and she wouldn't sell "Peter and Wendy" just because it's worth over $400. She's smart as a whip knowin' that with three girls in the house, that the money would disappear in two grocery shoppings and then she couldn't read it to her girls come winter nights. I have so many precious books that really aren't worth an arm and a leg but they are dee-lish for lovin' yr girls and boys with at night when everyone clean and in clean P.J.s, tucked in bed and listenin' to the Adventures of oh so many heros and heroines. So can ya see why it's nye on impossible, but I'm havin' the Will noterized tomorrow so that everyone gets o' chunk of Mimi to remember and love her by just in case my heart goes worse. And I had fun doin' it!

Madonna Blue

Can there be anything prettier than a western bluebird nest with three madonna blue eggs inside the crevice? But wait...something's wrong with this picture...What's in that nest used as material for making a warm bed for the eggs, but a bit of plastic? Humanity has brought its ugliness and danger into the planet again. Once I saw a video of a shredded blue plastic tarp in a nest. (they shred in the sun quite easily from the heat.) It was wrapped around a baby bird's leg and as the bird grew, the tarp string grew tighter and tighter and the leg had to be amputated as it had grown gangrenous, all because some humans didn't fold up their tarps and put them away at the end of winter and let the sunshine into the pile of wood they were keepin' dry. The people didn't know about it until it was too late or they would have cut the tarp piece off sooner. I'm so embarrassed by the human race at times. It makes me bow my head in shame.

When both my sons were eight, they had the burning need to rebel and I had raised them to NOT litter. They are eight and a half years apart and ironically, both of them at eight, decided to rebel. We had a family policy of candy on Saturdays only and "no littering" and they both decided to break both policies. Then they looked at me, as if to say, "And what are you gonna do about that,huh, Mimi? So I sat down on the curb, which you could do back in the seventies and mid-eighties and said, 'Rest my dogs right here until you pick up the wrapper and then we'll walk on home' and they saw how serious I was, so they picked up their trash and we went home. It's a good story to remember cuz this way I can tell the grandkids when they come along.

The Garden of Bit and Pieces

When we first moved to the Caboose on Catherine Lane, the backyard was filled with plantain lily, clover, crab grass and other ugly "weeds" with intense root systems. We roto-tilled it twice, the second time digging sheep manure into the soil and soon, after several more tillings, I could pick up a handful of chocolate birthday cake and let it crumble through my fingers. It was wonderful and smelled liked the beautiful loam of an old garden, even though it wasn't. Old, I mean. It was an ugly lawn turned into "potential". I had brought small pots of this and that from my old garden up String Creek, but I was still in the 'keeping them in the shade' stage and watering them, while I decided what I wanted the garden to look like. Our caboose was at the end of a lane that was easy enough to block off because I had spoken with one of the men on the city planning commission and I had known him for twenty years. He said, "Robin, Catherine Lane is last on the list and the list is long. The City just doesn't have the money to fix the ruts in the road or fill in the potholes for several years, I'm sorry to say." I held my glee inside and said to him, "Oh, it's ok Dave, I just wanted to know where we stood in the scheme of things. I'll manage alright." And he actually thanked me for being understanding, little knowing I took his words for permission to go right ahead and make my wishes come as true as I could make them on my small pension.
I began by collecting stones and rocks and drawing out on graph paper some ideas. I had never done a garden this way. Always before I was so organic I didn't know where I was gonna put one stone after the other. I just carried stones to an area, dropped them in a pile and began laying them out. But this time, I knew I had to have a plan, because the garden area was so small. By the end of the afternoon and heading straight into twilight, I had made six beds measured out three on each side, north and south and in the middle, I placed a stone bird bath that i poured seed into. I had a fountain that I placed over by the windows that opened into our bedroom and after filling it with water and turning the pump on, water came spurting out of a stone pine cone which sat on top of the wide saucer (yes, very Grecian) and three wonderfully naked ladies, the Graces of course, danced around and around holding up the saucer with their arms. I had found the bird seed holder at a thrift store and the water fountain at a garden hardware store and its price had been knocked down to a third because someone had broken one of the Grace's feet. I decided since I was lame, my Grace could be lame just as well, and bought it.

My brother began a tradition of sending me a gift certificate for a hundred dollars to a local nursery to help me actualize my dreams and when I was at someone's house for a garden party, I always sat next to a bed of something growing, and as we talked, I would absent-minded weed that bed. After a while, the host of the party would notice what I was doing, and I would apologize. It's just that I'm shy and parties are hard on me and I like to keep my hands busy. They always joke about they feel they should pay me and I always reply, "Can I have a piece of whatever it is I've just been weeding?" and they always say yes in gratitude and thus, the garden grows. I cannot believe it's been ten years that I've lived in the caboose, come down off the mountain and made my home again, anew, it seems I am always starting over again and again. Twice I have been in two different places for fifteen years. I was shocked both times that I had to move. I could move out of this dear little caboose, but it would have to be into something a bit bigger and definitely have garden space. One birthday years ago I bought a quarter flat of corsican mint and it has finally after planting many thumb sized plugs of the sweet-smelling stuff, taken over most of the dirt in between the garden plots which ended up being made of brick one birthday. I buy a dwarf fruit tree every year and the bartlett pear actually has pears on it this year. The strawberries are massive and I cut their stringers and plant the new little plants in other places, so that I now have several borders of the fruit. My fox glove are seven, eight feet tall and the other day I saw a fat ol' furry bumbley bumble bee inside a 'glove'. I put my ear up to the glove and I could hear him buzzing away. Gardens make me happy.

This is the first year that I haven't been able to pull every single weed out of it for a fresh look. That hurts me more than the lame part does, but I simply can't do it. I weed fifteen minutes, rest, do another small amount, until I have done about an hours worth of work and then I have to go lie down. It's so disappointing. I couldn't afford seed or starts this year and I panicked. The Gleaners, a town group who collects food at the end of the season has now started selling plants. I don't know what for, the money, but I went over to their sale after church and just straight out said I have no money this year and if I don't put some vegetables in, we won't have anything to put by for winter and they said, take whatever you want and someone will drive you home. I was so happy. I hadn't expected a free lunch. I had expected a trade at the least. So I got a great deal of tomatoes, summer squash, some white currants (I grow red currants, so this will be interesting), dill, cilantro, I am not remembering what else right now, but it was a windfall. People around the world call America the richest country in the world and I just don't see it that way lately. It's a little frightening.But things are looking up and last month I was given three ever-bearing raspberries that I'm pretty sure I wrote about, and they are thriving. Also my snow peas are climbing their way up to the end of their ladder and I'm going to have to add more climbing stuff. I want to get some eggplants, because then I will be able to make ratatouille and freeze it for the cold snowy nights.The cherry trees in my neighbor yard are groaning and sagging with cherries and me and the man next door intend on fighting off the blue jays this year and getting some to jam and jelly up. Oh yes, and PIE!

Roses are going crazy all over town. And so are the foxgloves. Everything is big big big. And I know why. It's still raining. I don't know if it's because of that hole in the sky, global warming, none of it makes any sense to me, but if this is the end ecologically, it's sure puttin' on a mighty spectacular show in the natural world in our neck of the woods.

A Restless Song

They were twitchy, the horses;
late moonlight braiding their manes with shadows of spindly trees.
I watched them with my face leaning on my elbows at the windowsill
‘til I couldn’t sit there in the room any more
breathing in the hobbled horses, the pastures, sucking up the air
of western dreams I was born to be part of, no matter
my upturned wooden box under a bridge in eastern Europe.
My town was across a sea, and I was headin’ back this evening.
So what you hadn’t received my letter yet.
My suitcase bangin’ at yr door day after tomorrow
would be the envelope and my face the postmark.
You’d know just by lookin’ at me,
I was yrs for the keepin’, you just had to say yes.

Dawn happened and I settled my satchel on my shoulders,
walked down flights of stairs where
history was made on every single step
between now and three hundred years ago.
The breadman lifted his basket and the tabac squeezed coffee
through everyone’s nostrils like alarm clocks.
All that history wasn’t just war. Some of it was wedding shoes.

The horses shoved their huge faces into mine as I raised my throat
to their eyes and rubbed the bald marks where the straps
had shaved their shoulders of hair.
Soon enough the panniers would settle
down into the grooves and be loaded up for market.
I pulled their manes through my hands
and stood there talkin’ to them while I braided a bracelet
chock full of memories and a cuppla beads from my earrings.
These gypsy horses were my brothers
and the man who led them through the streets to market, well,
I coulda stayed, shared his bed for longer than I had,
but there was an ocean with yr name on it somewhere,
like a ticket under the waves, as if the sea foam
was a brand on the ponies’ asses
I had to ride: my antiquated surfboard.

The rock salt on the baker’s bagels
was the sea on the back of my throat;
I shared the last chunk of bread
with these my brothers and chased the tears
from my face with tangled manes.
I was born to travel with these men,
their wives, their horses, but yr face kept calling me back
to a country so civilized it was barbaric and I shuddered to think
how I was trading pony bells for car horns, the squeal of brakes.
I slipped on the bracelet, shook my fist to the western skies
and climbed up the embankment to streets,
to that civilization I scorned.

I turned one last time to memorize the horses, the bridge, when
I saw the man I had lived with many months, slam open the door
to his wagon and run after me, his face, struck by lightening
as he sees me leaving. The knowledge of this
is too much for either of us.
It is a distance, but we both can see
the tears on each other: rain and thunder.

A Eulogy, A Celebration

Today I received in the mail my late husband's letters and scientific treatises on ethno-botany and the shamanic implications of the plants' hallucinations, by a professor he had grown up with and wrote to.My late husband was a genius.He was also schizophrenic.He was quiet about it. He had no social skills even before the schizophrenia exhibited itself.But he was fascinating to listen to.It came upon him as a late teen and it frightened him. He had no social skills, but he knew so much and shared,amazed people.Then people came to notice something was wrong.Finally his father.His father was not a sensitive man,but he was also a scientist.
When my not-yet-husband graduated high school and went out on his own, he actually was able to get a job at the post office,which was a very good thing, because when the illness became full blown,his income put him at a high rank on the SSI,or disability,
list for a big check each month. Even then,I read in these letters, there was often not enough $ for food the whole month and he ate at church dinners for the homeless. I have been reading a time capsule:it is so painful.The photograph at the top of the entry is one I have treasured:I have just given birth to our son.My husband's face was so full of love and awe.I treasure the photo,wanted to share it,because so many people have misconceptions about schizophrenia and think that the ill person is always "out of it".My husband was often very clear and brilliant.When word salad popped out of his mouth,it made us giggle.It also frightened him.I did what I could to assure him.It frightened me as well, but not as much as the violence.

I spent all that rainy day in bed with these letters,essays,listening to the storm, listening to the ghostly sobs of a boy who very few people understood. I was reading a foreign language.I had a dictionary of madness compiled by myself through time, but it was incomplete,the grammar only went so far and emotional dangling participles often confused a concept.My poor boy couldn't even speak sometimes and it frightened him into deeper terror and a broken spirit for a time.

In reading these letters, essays,I piled on more woolen clothes,I shivered with compassion and fierceness: why didn't they notice sooner. Why'd they expect thank you notes every time his family sent him $100,a $20.Madness does not understand thank you notes.Madness writes operas of gratitude, but it is rare they get through the mouth to the givers' ear. Schizophrenics don't have stamps very often. The govt. doesn't send money enough to pay the rent. When I had to leave with the baby, (listen, I had no choice.)he had to eat at the local catholic church which served meals monday through saturday. What do the mad do on Sunday? He moved into town after burning his/our cabin down around himself,scarring himself terribly. That what they do. They are not good cooks I think.He was in the burn unit for months.

Madness is rude, violent, it cries in yr arms when you are soo tired from going out in the forest to collect firewood, cleaning out the wood stove, hauling water to the garden...madness doesn't know any better. He didn't know he should be doing it instead of me; he was lost in a barrage of shouting, whispering voices of command. I tried to let that not make a difference.But I was young.In reading these papers I felt so bad for all the places I failed. Im sorry I can't hold him now,right now,and tell him, I discovered the alchemical process by which to"kiss and make it better".But I haven't discovered it yet.I've only grown old enough to discover compassion and patience.

I've read Lisie's Story by Stephen King. I know the violence first hand of madness. But I had to leave.He would steal my clothes, my shoes, every time he caught me trying.

At first there were nights I found myself suddenly awake in my own studio flat 150 miles away in Berkeley again, (where we'd met years before when i was still a teen), just out of dream-time, a baby in arms, or strapped across my chest or along side my shoulders,my side of ribs, barefoot, wearing a holey T shirt,nothing below,just young downy legs splattered with tattoos and mud, a cold butt because it's the beginning of February, but there's no moon and therefore no shadows..I am walking, walking, down a dirt road with crooked fences on each side and that startling bird sound that mimics a wild cat...I am getting away, away, as far as I can, I am fast-walking.I am crying.I am missing him already. I am crazed in my own way, but not enough to stay.This child is the sanity which allows me to disappear.

I raised two sons to who I also had to say, I don't know how to make it better, but let's cuddle and when they were older and told me they were too big to cuddle, I'd say, " let's make cookies, let's go out in the valley and I'll let you drive that long stretch where no cars come"..anything to make them feel better,as if I were making up for the inability to cure mental illness, give my oldest boy,the genius son, back his genius father. I am hoping thats what happens when I give him these papers after I've copied them for the professor: I hope he hears the Good Father who always stopped before the violence came out to the baby. Except once. And that once is why I had to leave. You don't shake babies,even if they are crying for hours.It's a dangerous practice to push that little brain pan around inside that still soft cranium. I guess what his own violent and cruel father taught him was that violence works as a fear tactic on women and babies: they were for taking out yr own frustration out on. What he didn't know was I grew up on that. I knew all about that first hand from one parent and her husband. I am no stranger to violence. I tried to teach my sons that violence is no answer, and they being sane, know this is true. My sons are beautiful, intelligent, gentle and fierce in their own sane ways. There is so much to be grateful for, as I grieve the loss of one less genius in a world full of idiots, angry monsters with guns and wars to fight. He played dulcimer when it got too hard to hear me over the head-voices.My late husband knew in his heart that violence was wrong,but the voices in his head were louder than the beating of his own heart.Those voices took over like robotic monsters inside his skull so he couldnt hear his heart sing.He longed to hear the Gloria of his own heart, his paen to God and the Universe inside each tiny wild flower, fingers splashing across dulcimer strings singing latin botanica as if poetry. I wished I wasn't the only one who could hear the joy as he played and grinned at me over the instrument. I wished the whole world could hear the beauty of his heart and head, all healthy and happy, a married man, a father, a learned scholar, living in a shiny clean cabin where the only shadows were made by candles as the evening deepened into night.
Good night John, sweet dreams and G-d Bless.