Fly-by

Here I am, stopping in to say hello to my personal blogging self.

Hello Chica, where the hell you been?

Funny you should ask. Seems like I never see me anymore. All the time on the go. I passed me on the way out the door a week or two ago, had to pretend I didn’t see me cause I didn’t really have time to stop and chat. Been playing phone tag with meself for a month.

What, is e-mail better?

Sure, but I never answer e-mail. You should know that.

Any relief in sight?

Well, today almost everyone cancelled on me. That helped a lot. My house is a pit though, and the wife is hiding out in the study trying frantically to finish her GPS final, which she put off til the last possible minute. I push a tray of food through the door every 12 hours or so, then back out quick.

The dogs have a message for you: Pay attention to them or they will be forced to have a big fat meltdown involving sneaking out and wandering in heavy traffic or possibly just incessant head-biting games til someone puts an eye out.

Right. Well, I know that.

What about your friends, family, the geese? What about the iguana, your mom, what about going to a movie once in awhile maybe? I notice everyone’s starting to give up on inviting you to anything. Anything you want to tell them?

Not much. Just working for a living. Well . . . vacation is coming up. 10 days off, in the middle of May.  

Gonna do the happy dance?

Believe I just might. Dogs’ll probably join me, right? I mean, if they still remember who I am.

 

Doppel

On Friday, I was shopping at Smith’s on my way home from work. I bought tortillas, sour cream, guacamole, wine and ice. Company expected. On my way out, I paused at the freezer to pick up my 10 lbs. There, I was stopped by a tiny old man with a snowy white beard. He was riding a red electric scooter chair, and his eyes were a sparkling, electric blue (not unlike my husky’s eyes).

“Whoa,” he said. “I gotta follow you for a little while.” I looked at him and smiled absent-mindedly, thinking more about my house and how to get ready for guests with less than an hour to spare. I crossed the parking lot, stopped at my car and opened the trunk. Then I realized that the little man really had followed me. I looked at him again and he looked back with those sparkling eyes, big smile.

“Excuse me, but I just had to tell you that there is a golden glow shining all round you, and following you, too. You are beautiful!”

“Thank you,” I said. “You know, you remind me of my friend Eunice F.”

“Why?” he asked. “What’s wrong with that person?”

“Not a thing,” I said back. He did a nice little preen, put his hand up against the back of his head as if puffing up his hair, and said “Well, thank you kindly” and looked delighted.

“You have a nice weekend, now,” I said. He scooted on to his own car, right next to mine, and put his things in the back seat. His license plate had DAV plates (disabled veteran) and a bumper sticker that said “Honor the dead, heal the wounded, end the war”.

I went home feeling decidedly perked up by this exchange, and thought about his strange similarity to my good friend Eunice F. Eunice F. is the seventh Eunice in a long line of Eunices. She is 63 years old, with electric blue eyes. She attracts lightning, and has been struck several times. She is an apple-faced hippie lady who lives in a stone cabin in the mountains east of Albuquerque. She is a doll-maker and an artist. She has a beard (not snowy white) that she does not remove, and she is a calm and moving storyteller. She is very poor, hauls water and raises chickens. At 63, she is suffering from the effects of a life of hard labor, and she has a lot of physical pain. She made me a doll with wings who flies around the house and appears here and there on window sills and mantlepieces, apparently at will.

I went home and told Mrs. Bosquechica about my strange meeting and she was amazed on many different levels. First of all, who gets stopped by total strangers with that kind of comment? Second of all, another Eunice F.? Astonishing! Funny thing is, though, that like Eunice F. and her repeated encounters with lightning, I have been stopped periodically with the “you are glowing/beautiful/ or something equally surprising” by total strangers, both men and women, since I was very young. Not, you know, weekly or anything, but about every two or three years someone does this. It’s been awhile, though, longer than usual, and I started thinking about that and about Eunice and the little man and his bumper stickers, and healing the wounded and electric scooters and lightning.  It occurred to me that, like the storyteller doll that Eunice made for me, maybe I have started flying again, maybe there has been time for healing and resuming whatever that glowing thing is that attracts lightning to some and odd compliments to others.

And here is the amazing Eunice F., for those of you who have made it this far.

 

 

Apes and aphids

A few thoughts about writing:

I’ve started writing fiction and poetry in small groups again after a long break. In these I work freewrite style, loose and open associations with timed writings — see Red Ravine for more on that, they are the awesome goddesses of writing practice. I love fiction and poetry, and often have no idea what I’m writing about until I’ve read it aloud.

My latest piece of timed writing, The physics lesson of Australopithecus, (written Monday in 30 minutes) is sitting percolating over at Cuentos, my fiction and poetry blog. It is a circular prose poem about time and evolution (I think). The phrase “apes and aphids” is tucked into the piece somewhere and it caught my eye.

Now, in writing practice it’s not unusual to write things like “apes and aphids” without thinking about it, and then wonder where the phrase came from. Typically, I can’t resist the urge to google and today found that ”apes to aphids” referenced both other poets and the biological sciences. Nice. I am a poet with a background in the sciences; it all makes sense.

Then I keep looking: From the Universidad Completense Madrid, I find lists of published works on the biological sciences, housed in the Royal Society of London.

These include:

Self-sacrificing gall repair by aphid nymphs;
Humans deceived by predatory stealth strategy camouflaging motion; and
A naked ape would have fewer parasites

I love all of these titles.

 Then, as I’m fiddling around linking at will, I discover that wow, Red Ravine is writing about bugs today too! Coincidence? But then again, I just stepped on a bug in my hallway in the middle of the night and had to scrub my foot in the sink (ugh), so I guess it’s just spring.

In summary, isn’t writing amazing?

Chickens with singers’ names

  Today someone found Trees for the Forest by searching “chickens with singers’ names”. I love that. I wish I had a chicken named Aretha Franklin or maybe Lori Anderson or Bono. I replicated the search (not having anything else to do, apparently) and was surprised to find Moonbeam McQueen at the top of the list. Small world, isn’t it?

I’ll be getting back to work here at Trees. So many things to say. Marriage, family, animals, springtime, woeful feelings, career indecision, poetry, politics, my ongoing discussion with myself about what I want to be when I grow up and I wish it was a beachcomber, like it always says on the Chinese astrology placemats. But enough about me. My main point is I’m trying to come out from under the bed and join in again.

Yard sale rhapsody

I love yard sales. I love the beginning of yard sale season. Like yachting, all the cheerful colored signs bobbing along on the horizon. Other people’s stuff.

I love yard sales the way I love eavesdropping, a guilty pleasure a search for rare treasure, a treat a retreat a brief moment away from my own life and into yours.

I love yard sales, the free box, the sticky lemonade and the 11-year-olds who wistfully offer me some for a quarter. I love the bad portraits of your mother’s cousin Jean, the macrame holders still tightly wrapped around 2 liter coke bottles, with leggy spider plants hoarily clinging to that crafty harvest gold past.

I love yard sales and talking to strangers, agreeing on the dangers of overpricing, underpricing, bad weather and early morning poachers. I love finding out that my girlfriend dated your son back in high school, I feel so local, and that he’s married now with two kids but having problems and then changing the subject.

I love yard sales and looking at other people’s decorative choices. The red walls with blue accents, the rock garden, the swoopy window treatments, kitchen appliance excesses, the incredibly organized and labeled garages of you not me. The beaten and smirched record of your children’s discarded toys, your baby’s first velvet dress with the little matching mittens.

I love yard sales and the over and under valueing we all do of our stuff and our stories, the unexpectedly good artwork inexplicably stuck in the workshop behind the arc welder and the broken rakes. I love the costume jewelry, the plastics and resins, the hand-blown glass beads and the tarnished milagros. I love rummaging for change, the good faith willingness to hold your perfect estante rústico until this afternoon when I can come back in the red truck with some muscle and moving straps.

I love yard sales, the lumpy old dogs, the ladies in sequined sweatshirts, the avon bottles shaped like ships and trains, the huddled men comparing tools and two-stroke engines. I love getting home with yard sale amnesia. Unwrapping the little packages in anticipation, I become my own secret Santa, pleased and surprised at the silliness in which your past becomes my present, rubbed clean and new and ready for whatever comes next.