Forsythia

Warmth.  Signs of spring.  I love that my birthday falls during this time, that every year the Earth comes alive again just at the moment I am turning a year older.  This is like New Year’s for me, screw that January 1st business.  And you know, if you were running low on useless trivia for the day, March was originally celebrated by the Romans as the New Year, when lots of grand festivals were held and troops marched off to war (March is named for the Roman god of war, Mars).  September was originally the seventh month, hence “Sept”, “Oct”, “Nov”, Dec”, etc.  Julius Caesar moved it back, later on.  Something about the innacuracies of the lunar calendar.  Whatever.  I’m sticking with March.

In any case, the weather made it possible to head down to the farm again on Sunday.  Inside the house I painted one of the bedroom ceilings while my sister sorted and boxed years of keepsakes, clothes, and junk.  Outside I was able to clean up a few flower beds and plant somewhere around 15 or so azaleas, butterfly bushes, shade perennials, and an herb or two.  The LOML continued with the old fence removal, a herculaean task that hopefully will be finished up this summer.  As usual, there were beautiful flowers in bloom everywhere.  The camellia japonicas are at their peak, joined by early season snowdrops, forsythia, daffodils, and narcissus (yes I know they’re taxonomically the same thing).  Pictures after the cut.

In other news, the novel is treking along.  1000 more words yesterday, hopefully a pace I can keep up all week.  Right now our heroine is deep in the bowels of Hell, having a little fireside chat with the big man himself.  Trouble is brewing.  “No fear,” Satan whispers.  No fear.

And speaking of Satan, yesterday my shiny, new, signed copy of Joe Hill’s latest, Horns, arrived in the mail.  I’d ordered it from The Signed Page, so it came inscribed with a cool little drawing.  Happy, happy, squee!  For those of you who don’t know, Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, author of a couple of books now along with an outstanding short story collection.  A fine, fine spec fiction writer in his own right.  In some ways, I actually prefer his work to his dad’s, as he explores a wider range of themes than his father does.  Very cool.  I’ll probably devour it over the weekend.

And now, as promised, some photography.  All cultivar names, incidentally, are just guesses.  My mom bought and planted what she loved, but she wasn’t a big record keeper:

While waiting on pins and needles for Teh Springs to arrive, I thought of this.

Multnomah Falls, Oregon. June, 2007

Nice memories.

This work by Lynette Mejia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This flower that smells of honey and the sea,
White laurustine, seems in my hand to be
A white star made of memory long ago
Lit in the heaven of dear times dead to me.

A star out of the skies love used to know
Here held in hand, a stray left yet to show
What flowers my heart was full of in the days
That are long since gone down dead memory’s flow.

Dead memory that revives on doubtful ways,
Half hearkening what the buried season says
Out of the world of the unapparent dead
Where the lost Aprils are, and the lost Mays.

Flower, once I knew thy star-white brethren bred
Nigh where the last of all the land made head
Against the sea, a keen-faced promontory,
Flowers on salt wind and sprinkled sea-dews fed.

Their hearts were glad of the free place’s glory;
The wind that sang them all his stormy story
Had talked all winter to the sleepless spray,
And as the sea’s their hues were hard and hoary.

Like things born of the sea and the bright day,
They laughed out at the years that could not slay,
Live sons and joyous of unquiet hours,
And stronger than all storms that range for prey.

And in the close indomitable flowers
A keen-edged odour of the sun and showers
Was as the smell of the fresh honeycomb
Made sweet for mouths of none but paramours.

Out of the hard green wall of leaves that clomb
They showed like windfalls of the snow-soft foam,
Or feathers from the weary south-wind’s wing,
Fair as the spray that it came shoreward from.

And thou, as white, what word hast thou to bring?
If my heart hearken, whereof wilt thou sing?
For some sign surely thou too hast to bear,
Some word far south was taught thee of the spring.

White like a white rose, not like these that were
Taught of the wind’s mouth and the winter air,
Poor tender thing of soft Italian bloom,
Where once thou grewest, what else for me grew there?

Born in what spring and on what city’s tomb,
By whose hand wast thou reached, and plucked for whom?
There hangs about thee, could the soul’s sense tell,
An odour as of love and of love’s doom.

Of days more sweet than thou wast sweet to smell,
Of flower-soft thoughts that came to flower and fell,
Of loves that lived a lily’s life and died,
Of dreams now dwelling where dead roses dwell.

O white birth of the golden mountain-side
That for the sun’s love makes its bosom wide
At sunrise, and with all its woods and flowers
Takes in the morning to its heart of pride!

Thou hast a word of that one land of ours,
And of the fair town called of the Fair Towers,
A word for me of my San Gimignan,
A word of April’s greenest-girdled hours.

Of the old breached walls whereon the wallflowers ran
Called of Saint Fina, breachless now of man,
Though time with soft feet break them stone by stone,
Who breaks down hour by hour his own reign’s span.

Of the old cliff overcome and overgrown
That all that flowerage clothed as flesh clothes bone,
That garment of acacias made for May,
Whereof here lies one witness overblown.

The fair brave trees with all their flowers at play,
How king-like they stood up into the day!
How sweet the day was with them, and the night!
Such words of message have dead flowers to say.

This that the winter and the wind made bright,
And this that lived upon Italian light,
Before I throw them and these words away,
Who knows but I what memories too take flight?

-Algernon Charles Swinburne

Cloudy, cold and windy this morning, the remnants of the storms that passed through yesterday.  The local weatherman reported that the science backs up my suspicions – it has been colder and wetter than normal here this year.  Colder, and wetter, it seems than it has been in many years.  It’s made pulling myself from the grip of winter that much harder.  Still, I am here, dreaming of the warm sun on my skin.  Peter Pan says to think happy thoughts and you can fly.

Working on the novel today.  This blog feels like that first book sometimes.  I have no audience, really, save myself at this point.  Like the entries I make here, this first book is written for me, whether I sell it or not, whether anyone ever reads it.  It is my cry out into the aether, my scratched paintings on the wall of a cave, my thin, ever-so-human voice calling out into the darkness.  Will anyone hear?  Who knows.  What’s important is the sound.  When I am dead, all that will be left are the memories of me in the hearts of my children and these words.  The memories will pass away, as all intangible things do. But my words – my words will remain.

After the cut, the requisite a-ha video of the day.

Tired.  So very, very tired.  This is the worst time of year for me, the last few weeks of winter that seem to last forever.  By this time I’ve almost had it with being indoors.  I’m a child of the summer, of bare feet and warm breezes and green things.  I’m a child of gardens and picnics and barbecues; of hazy, humid summer nights lit up with fireflies.  Every year as the end of February approaches I become more and more restless, resentful, and bad-tempered.  I’m literally aching to get outside, to work until my fingernails are ragged and dirty, and the air around me is filled with the sound of bees buzzing and the lazy, sensual smells of jasmine.  I’m out of sorts, and anxious.  Spring just can’t get here fast enough.

Saturday was nice.  We woke up early, packed a spartan lunch and headed out to Arcadia.  The morning was spent cleaning and packing while the LOML installed a plywood subfloor in one of the bedrooms.  Due to the recent (unending) rains, the outside areas were literal bogs, but bogs make for very easy fence post removal, so the afternoon was spent pulling up old rusted fencing and cleaning up debris from recent storms.  At one point I took down a sign I’d put up last year to find an adorable little bat curled up, half-asleep and clinging to the wall.  I was very excited, as we’ve been talking about installing bat houses on the property to invite a few to live there and eat the host of mosquitos that swarm throughout the summer.  The LOML softly reinstalled the sign without disturbing him.   All over the yard he spring bulbs were blooming en mass, and I couldn’t resist taking a giant bouquet of daffodils, narcissus, and camellia japonica home so that, for a few days at least, I could close my eyes and pretend I was there again.  Good dreams that night.

This week stretches out before me into a jumble of medical checkups, car maintenance, vet appointments, and homework.  Not even sure if I’ll get to write.  Supposed to be cold and rainy a good part of the time.  I’m despairing and longing for Spring.  Just a few more weeks, I keep saying to myself.  Just a few more weeks.

Snow is predicted again for tonight.  This is truly the strangest winter in my memory.  As a kid I can recall several winters when it snowed, even up to a couple of inches accumulation, and times when the snow stuck around for a couple of days.  This, however, will be the third measurable snowfall this season in this area.  Very strange, Mr. Watson.  Very strange, indeed.  In the meantime, my wait for spring continues.  Lots of trees and shrubs are beginning to bud, and the first daffodil bloomed on Sunday.  They’re all very put out by the persistence of the cold and snow.  I’m not sure what to tell them – hopefully they’ll make it through the latest bout of teh freezes without suffering too much damage.  Spring will come, damnit, if I have to call her up from Hades myself.

Got little in the way of measurable work done on the novel yesterday.  I have sheaves of notes lying around on my office floor, spread around me like an offering.  I have notebooks filled with plot outlines.  I feel like I am standing at a crossroads, only instead of four choices there are four thousand.  Roads, possible directions, spreading out in infinite directions like the rays of the sun.  More outlining done yesterday, and I’m heading back into Lucifer’s curiosity shop today, so we’ll see.  Ever hopeful for a tiny light in the darkness around me to lead the way out of the forest.

An archeologist has recently discovered a temple complex in Turkey that appears to be approximately 11,500 years old.  This is before agriculture, before towns, before even pottery, firmly still in the hunter/gatherer period.  His theory is that everything we’ve ever imagined about the development of civilization is exactly backwards.  We did not come together, form societies, and then decide to begin worshiping gods.  Worshiping gods is what brought us together in the first place.  Many, many implications here.  Both my academic and my artistic minds are trying to wrap themselves around this.  How much we have yet to discover about our development as a species.  Fascinating.

Back to work.  Or some reasonable facsimile thereof.

This work by Lynette Mejia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Friday was a great, productive day.  The best I’d had in ages.  Over 1000 new words on the novel, the entire day spent sifting through piles of notes, organizing plot lines, and adding scenes to better flesh out the characters.  I’m hoping to keep up the momentum today after a couple of days away from the pen.

The weekend was spent with my children, helping them with projects and working on various scouting badges.  On Saturday the LOML and I built a birdhouse with my son, and he went to his bi-weekly pack meeting.  On Sunday my daughter had an beginner’s ice skating clinic, and we stayed afterward to let them both have some time on the ice.  It was great – ice rinks are few and far between in this area of the country.  They’ll have an opportunity to learn something I never did as a kid.  The free time I had in between was spent cleaning up and working in the garden, taking advantage of some rare warm and dry days to take down the greenhouse and plan out the projects I want to tackle for my birthday week vacation.  It’s on March 10th, very near the frost date for my zone, and so every year my birthday gift to myself is  a week off to work outside.  It’s my official spring celebration, the waking up ceremony, if you will.  A little premature for the equinox, but what the hell.

Saturday night we watched Jane Campion’s Bright Star, and were mightily impressed.  I’ve studied Keats for years; wrote my senior thesis on his work, but it was a joy to watch the LOML become interested.  After the movie he did some web research, and read my favorite, “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  Made me happy, happy.  Am re-reading Complete Poems this week, as well as finishing Aileen Ward’s biography, begun years ago but never completed.  I do that a lot – watch a movie, read a book, hear a song, and then plunge headlong into studying the topic for weeks.  It’s just my nature, said the scorpion to the turtle.

For those interested, the title reference below the cut:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Author: William Carlos Williams
Online Poetry at PoetryFeast.com

Trying to work my way back into a routine of some kind after two weeks away from the keyboard.  It’s tough, sometimes, living the life I do with the standards I have.  I feel like I’m constantly juggling a million details of the lives of others, while at the same time carving out the continuing story of who I am and who I hope to become.  I take my responsibilities as a wife and mother very seriously.  I take myself much less so.

Still, I’m trying to do better – to take care of myself.  Small steps.  I made an appointment the other day for my first comprehensive health check up.  Ever.  I’m working on changing my diet.  I’m working on exercising.  I’m working on writing, on going back to graduate school and getting my PhD.

Last week I was sick with what I imagine was the flu, or perhaps some kind of sinus infection.  I felt horrible for days, but my pre-Apocalyptic paranoia dictates that I rely on my own immune system as much as possible, so I stuck it out instead of hopping over to the local clinic for an antibiotic.  Needless to say, not much writing got done.  I considered it an act of sheer willpower to simply be on my feet.

Mardi Gras around here was unusually quiet.  The kids went to stay with their dad, who took them on the rounds of the New Orleans suburban parades.  The LOML and I stayed home and took care of a huge project I’ve been drooling about for months, viz: retrieving my bed from my daughter.  By way of explanation, the bed is a 200-year-old four poster bed with a tester that my mother refinished for me when I was a kid.  I’ve had it since she died in 2002, but passed it on to my daughter in 2006 when we moved here to Lafayette, as the LOML had a queen-sized bed that seemed a better fit for us.

Just for the record, it is a BIG mistake to give a 200-year-old antique bed to an active seven-year-old child.  Through the simple act of being a kid, bouncing, jumping, climbing, etc, the bed was slowly being abused to death.  On top of that, with the tester and all set up, it was much too massive for her room.  To rectify the situation, this weekend we refinished an old twin Jenny Lind bed we’d come across in one of the storage rooms at the farm, painting it a bright, cheerful blue, and allowing me to move my bed out and back into my room. My daughter loved the result, loved how big her room felt.  And now, she has a place to sleep that is nigh to indestructible.

And I, of course, LOVE having my bed back.  It comforts me as I sleep, wrapping me in memories from my childhood.  It’s old, and wise, a great-grandmother among furniture.  I like to imagine that children have been born there, that perhaps someone once died in it, and that one day perhaps I will follow, and die there as well.  Its bones tell the tales of lives slipping in and out of this world, stories begun and ended, a secret doorway in plain sight.  My bed has permanence, and history, and one day, when she’s old enough to take care of it, my daughter will continue the story.

The obligatory photo, for those interested: