la femme follette

matthew. thirteen. fifty-two.

I was feeling very unmoored for a number of reasons, there was a confluence of factors, and some time with the Israeli was absolutely in order.  I had not realized how very much until I was in his very capable (and metaphorical) hands.  The length of time that we have known each other, the ebb and flow of our intensity over the score, it always feels less important than the relevance of the time in our lives at which we met. 

We were so delicately young but also grownup; nothing bad had ever happened to us.  There had not yet been stonemasons in to build the façade for my heart.  We were in love with other people and delighted to have met each other and our lives felt full.  Since then so much has happened, but our relationship continues based for each in the elemental constancy of the other.  So much like a faith, very little to do with familiarity; Paul wrote about this knowing fully, being fully known.   

I returned home feeling very much snapped back onto the short leash of my essence. Beyond tranquil and also fascinated by a number of things in my life that exist in defiance of what I should have known better.  I feel like I have all the time in the world and also, so loved and so lucky.  To be a girl so alone in the world but for whom provisions were made in spite of logic, in defiance of analysis or expectation, the odds.  It feels mysterious and is humbling.

It has been quite warm, in fact it has been halter-top hot,  and I have spent a lot of time in the garden, sweating and tying things out of the way of other things.

 

Our nightshade jungle.  There was a Rosa Bianca eggplant last week: small and taut; creamy and streaked with lavender.

Potatoes are up.

Sweet potatoes are in love with the heat wave.  Also, being eaten by something obviously less voracious than that shiny motherfucker the Japanese beetle.   

 
The garden state is not so much getting it on in its raspberry gardens.  The four of us are pretty tenacious fruit harvesters and we called it quits at three quarts.  The stone fruits this year, though, are amazing.   

juggernaut

I have been dealing with a lot of fruit lately, with the four-plus gallons of blueberries we picked and the 10 pounds of peaches and then all the cherries. 

 

We just bought the cherries already picked.  So many.  Different kinds, too.  I made a cherry crisp kind of a thing last week and then wanted to play around with a New Something today.  I spent some time pitting these (without a pitting thingy) and then realized that they were a. sour and b. we had no sweetener.  Then I remembered our oven is kind of fritzy right now.  So, I just ate them. 

It reminded me of a really colossal snowstorm we got when I was a girl -- really still a girl, a teenager, nothing yet of this Kowalski or opening a bottle of scotch & throwing out the bottlecap or latex dresses or any of that latter-day nonsense.  My roommate & I sat around on the living-room floor with a large jar of maraschino cherries between us, watching Los Olvidados --  the Buñuel film w all the chickens  -- and practicing tying the stems with our tongues.  The determined oral dexterity & girlish perseveration this accomplishment represented may have been the first tiny step onto the path on which I would find myself just a couple of years later.   

I finally got the potatoes in.  Also, tied up the tomatoes, which are sprawling everywhere, in spite of their proper restraint in the outset.  Proper restraint.  Ha.   

I have a lot on my mind.  Like, a lot.  I am wandering around dreaming about drinking gimlets, not really paying attention to anything, and listening to Bring on the Night over and over, which though I have not listened to it since my 17th year, it was once on heavy rotation and yet, it suddenly seems like something else entirely decades later. 

O, I am in a mood of too many feelings --   Felting/is this feeling of so many feelings, rushing to crowd/each other, piling up on the weave of our hearts -- and I feel slightly unhinged and wacky, but intense and filled with flourish, but also easily distracted.  I feel exactly as Charo on The Love Boat.  

I have plans for a day very soon with the Israeli to which I am looking forward with something like great delight.  I just know it will be like the most excellent & aimless snow day.  Like snow-blindness.  Like sub-zero nights when the concrete rings and breathing takes the breath away and everything is so clear.  Clear.

bean sprouts. duck.

The beans are up.

I don't have high hopes for the bean experiment, though I certainly planted enough -- 2 10-foot rows and pots of them all around.

There are nasturtiums in there for my son and I are sometimes at what is called cross-purposes.

 

I shot this on vacation, while we were with pretty Meli & her family at the Booker T Washington National Monument. 

I keep showing this to Mari, exclaiming, "I have captured the soul of this duck!  I am like the Annie Leibovitz -- no, no, the Richard Avedon of duck photography!"  And then I laugh and laugh, and then say, "No, really!"  He says it is a pretty good duck photo, but I know it is something more. 

Camp started Monday, with its adjustment to what someone I used to know called the Lunchmaking Snackpacking Grind.  They are having an overload of summer fun this week, however, and there is a lot of transitioning and driving around.  I am kind of worn out from it all.  Next week will be a breeze and the rest of the season will be all camp all day and there are some exciting day trips and long lunches and spa treatments scheduled.  Summer!  

weeds and seeds

Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, in his own bed at Monticello.  Anyone can say what they like about Jefferson -- I mean, sure thing he could string a few words together, but so could Thomas Paine and with none of the associated and unforgivable controversy -- but would have to admit that old Jefferson knew an awful lot about having some nice things, and it is nice to look at them. 

Jefferson is like Martha Stewart.  I do not think much of Martha, really, but I sure would never turn down a chance to look at her stuff.  Also, really, the same in the way of needing to make controversy as compromise:  Martha, she had to have that whole unfortunate cheating scandal; Jefferson, he had his despicable slaving ways.  All that super-deluxe living costs a lot of money, people have to steal & cheat!    Also, keep humans in bondage!  There is just no other way!     

We took ourselves on a stop along the way to old Monticello, for I would not live if we only sped past Charlottesville without a tour.  We took the "Children & Family" tour, which is way less boring than the Regular House Tour, on which we had already been many years ago.  The house is ok, I mean, if you like old stuff arranged in a real fetishy way to which you cannot even get close, sure.  When we last went, it was January.  I just do not think enough of the guy to really get into his house, plus this was 8 years ago and they were really glossing over the whole Jefferson was all of these things plus-plus:  A Slaver! issue.  I found it really disingenuous and (again) fetishy, but this time when we went, they seem to have a new paradigm in the tours and collaterals.  Which is at the very least realistic. 

Anyhow, the tour is not even the whole house, because of the Fire Marshal's tyranny, and then in January there was nothing to see but cole crops and covers, and I was sad to see the amazing space allotted the gardens with nothing actually growing and I vowed to someday get back to see those gardens!  The gardens!!  The minute we decided to go to Virginia for vacation, I knew.  I was so excited!  I mean, fuck a homeschool history lesson, we were going to work on our horticulture!  Yes!  

It is really pretty there.  The children appear to be having some discussion about corn.  To their left are potatoes, to their right, a cover crop of clover.

Besides the 2-acre vegetable garden (in which the children are walking again, here), there are 8 acres of fruit growing at Monticello (including vineyards and orchards), and the whole endeavor serves as a preservation seed bank for 19thc vegetables, flowers, and fruits.  As a gardener, I love to see stuff in the ground, growing, and there is an awful lot of it there. 

I thought the most interesting part of the garden scheme was the retaining wall he had constructed to keep the garden where he wanted it.  It is just so fancy!  Over the little rail fence there is kind of a steep drop to the fruit garden (the vineyards behind Fifille).    At the opposite end of the wall from where we are standing (in about the middle, we are), all the way down on Garçon's left, there are about 27 fig trees, thriving in the reflected heat from the wall.

 

We ate cherries in the orchard.  I saw the smart trellising of beans.  I showed Mari the big bed of woolly ferns as tall as he is and said, "That is why we don't grow asparagus, ok?"  I mean, what would I do with all those fronds?  I now know what growing habit to expect from my sweet potatoes and what my potatoes are going to look like when I finally get them in the ground.   The flower gardens have been restored with all manner of period flowers and how nice to see them in real life!  I am v suspicious of anything in seed catalogs. 

I fell in love with the pincushion flower with the bees all over it, so bought some seed I found in the Monticello garden store.  Yes.  But there were so many more plants.  More than I could ever remember to name or with which I could retain my personal reception.  So many.  But I have pincushion flower seeds and I am excited.    

Here is our garden today.  

The first eggplant is on its way. 

Against the back fence, in the middle, there is a Brandywine tomato as tall as I am.  Eeek.   

A very happy birthday wish to the most loveliest Santos.  Here is a food photo for you.

 

wax

So, everything was tidier in the beginning, which is very much as life is, I guess.

I am impatient with rules, which is not to say honestly that I do not respect the rules, or that I do not know the rules.  It is just that there is more to life than rules.  Also, rules tend to tamp down impulsivity and make me shy away from what I love or find kind of exciting.  With gardening, as with everything else, I feel like if I chuck it out there, it should do fine -- I should do fine.  If it does not, I probably did not want it.  If I do not like it?  I can rip it up.  Oh, there is regret and ambivalence, sure, conflict; like with my Don Juan climber, but bloom where you are planted! 

I may be straying from the topic of gardening, as a matter of fact.

I did not have all of this laissez-faire attitude until I drank a fifth of scotch every day as a girl, and while I am looking back on it, I always realize very little suffered due to my abject neglect (except my reputation!), which is all fine and good because I drank to relieve myself of my calcifying perfectionism.  Relief at that time, not as a constitutional remedy.  I still have to remember it logically to reap its reward.    

The point is that everything is jammed in there, the beans just went in today, I still have potatoes to plant, and the children have dreams of watermelon and also pumpkins, but I am sure it will all do fine.  Even if (to use Daria's phrasing) I will have the Great Wall of Tomato back in the back there by late July. 

  

Back here.  Where the zucchini are sadly not yet large enough to smother out the weeds.  Some day.  But it is then going to be so rampant and smashed together, all of it, in a lushly overgrown extravagance.  Mari said that it kind of reminds him of one of my poems.  Y-E-S!  I cannot wait! 

kansas

Sitting here, doing the crossword, I for the first time fully understood stop & smell the roses.  Live and learn, I guess.

Speaking of live & learn; texting with Alex from the hair salon on Saturday:

Lala:  I am fixing to get some damn Bettie Page bangs right now!

Alex: Bettie Page bangs!  The universal sign of "that chick is crazy"

Which is, clearly, exactly why I wanted them.  O, derangement.  I changed my mind, mostly because I did not want to give my guy any New! Ideas! about how this haircut would go after we had already discussed it in a long & painstaking, dueling-romance-languages way.  The same old Veronica Lake bangs will have to do.  The universal sign of "that chick is extra-despairing + hiding it from you."  Or something.   

turn your heartache

 

It is true I have been sulky about the cool spring we have been having.  The rain has been a downer, but the sustained chill of it has been something again.  Then today was glorious, parfait, and I was remembering while sitting outside enjoying it that years previous I have been rustling and mewing because of the suddenness of this region's hot summer temperatures, and meowing on about how I miss the gradual and gorgeous increase of a midwestern spring. 

It would seem this year my wish has come true.  Even better, because there is not all that disgusting mud and the smell of thawed lake water.  I have changed my tune, the rose bloom seems forever, and which Midwestern girl feels entitled to grow eggplants, anyhow?

 

The antidote to homesicknesses real or imagined is always a choking gasoline gulp of the blistering expertise of Kowalski, who has been working on me a little overtime this month and for whom there are never enough socks in the world.  Maybe a little bit of bossy garden design for his cottage will make us all feel better.  I was thinking of something in the way of clematis.   I do not even know what garden zone that is, though surely it will not support the aubergine.

voir dire

If the sun would shine, these babies could go outside already.  Three "Kermit" and three "Rosa Bianca" eggplant.  They are getting a little big for their pots. 

Also, in the category of "babies," there is still an awful lot going on here with mes enfants and the associated strain of it all.  In the midst of all of this strain-combatting interaction,  I can often try to end conversation or skirt conflict or let others save face by shrugging and spreading my palms in a non-threatening gesture and declaring myself a. a simple midwestern girl or b. just a housewife.  It infuriates me that no one falls for this.  In fact, the intended recipient generally scoffs aloud.  These are the people that are on our side.  I am always sad to realize I cannot maintain my low profile and more than that, that people will not just allow me the masquerade.       

cherchez la femme

There are no photographs of the shame & horticultural neglect, but a three-foot-wide, 10-foot-tall section of my Mme Alfred Carrière just fell right from its corset to flop horizontally into the garden.  For months I really could not make time to give a fuck about it (also, thorny!  ow!) and all along the way, it was as if she had been trained horizontally, so she is covered in blooms this year, but only along that section.  Something about the word axial.

I love the flower, have written about it before, the three stages of old Mme Carrière -- the tight pink bud, all flushed at the bursting seam; the ruffly crinoline, chocolate-box-tidy layers of the bloom; the flower at its end, every petal open in every direction, not a trace of pink in sight, just an excellent, slutty, I-don't-give-a-damn mess.  Alfred Carrière must have had excellent taste in a certain kind of foxy firebrand, of that I am sure.

I never cut the flower to bring it inside, however, because the cut flower is so top-heavy on its teensy petite stems and my frogs are none the right size.  I am too distracted to find out from where to get floral foam.  Also, without a bloom, the plant is just this big brambly green monster trying to scale our house.  But this year, I have extras.  So, I just cut a big pile of them and kept cutting away at each one until they could be propped in a café au lait bowl.  I am so glad for my success, too, because it all smells incredible.          

out, lamb

The bulb show has started in earnest.  It is like they are all clamoring to get in the photo.  Me, too!  Me!  Me!  There are holes in the display where my perennials are, but this year, I am thinking if I take detailed photographs, then I will have a better site map in the fall when I fill in.  It is not as if I grow any perennial that will be put off by a little incidental root-pruning. 

I love hyacinths.  I wrote about it last year.  These seem a wee bit early this year.

I do not even know what these are.  This year, 5 people have asked me, not including the 3 who live with me.  "What is the little blue flower?"  and I say, "I don't know."  I know I planted them; I planted everything here, this was a lawn when we bought the house.  I kind of remember ordering them, too.  What are they?  Maybe next year I will know.  They are like a sweet, late, and blue snowdrop.  But there is no such thing, is there? 

Next are tulips.  Then it is time for my boy's birthday.  And another swell Aries fella I know.