Rhythms

Now the doors are open

now the light shines through

And that's about all I have in me tonight. A promising, if cliche, beginning. But it's all about the rhythm, really.

Less than a month ago, it was almost 90 degrees F and miserable. Now, there is frost on the rooftops and it isn't even quite midnight. I am comfortable and happy about the return to seasonable weather, but I know that it's bringing a misery of another kind to many souls.

Well, there's really nowhere to go after thinking that thought. And now I feel guilty for being happy about true fall finally arriving.

Visiting old friends

    I just finished re-reading Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett last night. I enjoyed it the first time I read it, but I loved it the second...and perhaps third...time through. His stories, especially the later ones, are like the iron beneath the fluff: the silliness on the surface is fun and sincerely meant, but you don't have to look very deep to discern serious commentaries about human nature and society. And the characters! I just need to visit them sometimes.


    I'm saving the very last book he published, The Shepherd's Crown, until I have a nice quiet weekend, preferably a rainy and dark one, to curl up and read it straight through. With popcorn. And cocoa. And a dash of wowwow sauce.

Optimism. And throwers of dirt.

    Optimism...or maybe just desperate hope. I put out my rain gauge as though there would be something to measure. And for once: the weatherman did not let me down. There hasn't been much rain. Much less than enough--we are still watering with shower warm-up buckets. But it rained the night I did all that gardening, almost an inch. And it rained about half an inch the next Sunday night. And the next. I hear tell that we may get some more rain this coming week.
    Please oh please.
    The wild oats and rattlesnake grass sprouted almost immediately. The tips of the blades now wave about four inches above last years leaves. I have to watch where I step, because mixed in with the grass are some very confused grape hyacinths. The grass will pop back up. The hyacinths are more fragile.
    Raised tunnels curve calligraphically around the old pine stump and the roots of the Chinese elm. The moles who have been quiet for the last several dry months came back immediately after the rain to stir things up. I'm trying to see this as a sign of underground health as I attempt to navigate the yard without breaking my ankle. Because this is how I am, I had to look up more about these guys. They are nowhere near as, um, cute as skunks, which probably contributes the the fact that there are lot fewer stuffed animals shaped like moles delivered for Christmas. The only popular-in-a-good-way mole I know of is in The Wind in the Willows.

I don't know...which one would your kid rather snuggle with?

   

    My favorite anthropocentric fact about moles is not a fact about moles at all, but about what they are and have been called. "Mole" is basically a shortened form of the Early Modern English (spoken between the late-ish 15th century and the mid-17th century) "mouldywarp"--dirt thrower. I love this. I think I may never call them anything else from now on.

Gold

Gone like the wind

A whirl of leaves

A toss of dust

You wandered along the edge of the road

Hit the ditch and

pfwoof

Leaves and dust float to the ground

Now that you don’t need them to

give you shape any more

This is what optimism looks like

First day of November, 87 degrees F. Grr.

    It is supposed to rain tonight. I've been checking in with the radar images of rain all day. If it really is supposed to rain, I just can't figure out where the water is supposed to come from. The jet stream seems to be taking the only nearby clouds far to the north of us. I am not holding my breath.
    And yet.
    While I have been trying to avoid disappointment by not hoping too hard, I spent my precious day off preparing for rain. I went to my local farm store (my happy place) and talked to a guy named Angus about soil formation, and amendments that I could apply in one afternoon without spending hours sifting the perfectly lovely compost pile in our back yard. (I just don't have the time). I came home with five bags of mulch, five bags of compost, and a bale of straw.

    One of these days, when the rain finally comes, all these good nutrients will wash down between grains of sand and find the sleeping bacteria and fungi who, it is to be hoped, will respond by starting to break copper, magnesium, and other minerals out of the molecular bonds that have kept them away from the roots of my poor little lemon and lime trees.
    Of course, the water alone would help. We really can't grow anything that can't survive on a bucket of shower warm-up water once or twice a week. These poor little trees have suffered over-watering (when they were very young; too much water certainly hasn't been a problem for a while now), heavy frost, drought, and neglect. They haven't grown a single inch in three years. But they haven't quite died yet, either. I am humbled by their tenacity.

    I owe them. After all, I brought them to this nearly desert land. And this is where the optimism comes in. In case you can't see it, I've put a circle around it and made some arrows.

    Yes, a rain gauge. I'm really dreaming now.

    And this was my creative act for the day. I wrote no stories. I sewed no costumes. I put microorganism food on an exposure of the Santa Margarita Sandstone, formed 10 to 12 million years ago during the late Miocene, in the hope of eventually going out to pull a lime and a lemon to squeeze into a jug of water. The bacteria will be so happy.