June Jewelled & Joyfull

A long one from across this month,

June 14th 11:21 am

Planting the garden on Good Friday, there were planting days after that, and on the weekend of may 10th, 14 tomato starts arrived from my parent’s neighbor out of Roanoke, saving seeds every year. He cut up an AARP card to use as plant tags, which was all for not, as the names washed into the soil after a hard rain. Now we walk the garden watching for horn worms, they get so remarkably big, it’s impossible to imagine it growing into something with wings. My last surviving chicken wouldn’t be tempted to eat any of them, and clucked disparagingly at us for making such an offer. After her companion disappeared into the dark woods, she is more likely to follow us from garden to garden in the morning.

The sweet potatoes blossomed today, just like morning glory flowers, except purple and white, easy to spot in the cascade of sweet potato vines going in every direction.

I planted sunflowers ahead of the tomato row in hopes of making a natural shade for them as the summer heat promises ahead of us. They are three or four feet tall and about to shine, we picked out a bright and unusual variety, he swears the red on this one will be like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Berry wrote “As she steps out into the day, the heat fits closely around her. She enters the brilliant ocean of it.” And he has well painted the ports and hollers of Kentucky but you can feel it here, too, the sweet days of summer before the heat starts and it feels like a walk on the beach.

We spent two months waiting and now the garden comes in like if only cucumbers and beans could be gold and riches, waiting for the tomatoes and the okra is a different variety this year and it doesn’t seem as happy as former years, still the yellow flowers sing hibiscus and roseasharn, and morning glories and malabar spinach climb near the little prairie.

Little things like moving the pepper plant to where he dumped all the gin trash two years ago, he’s never had such bell pepper fortune. We are bankrupt so far of zucchini and squash, but that’s ok for this year - the neighbor gave us some of her early yellow squash and we need to hurry up and cook it. The zucchini kept on all last summer and I haven’t even looked at the one we picked yet. (I tried this recipe using an iron skillet instead of a spring form pan, had to use more eggs and everything than she called for, but I liked it, if you’re looking for a way to use up some sweet corn and summer squash, it tasted like Nana made it, if only I had used bacon grease and put in some garlic, too - make sure to let the squash weep awhile if you use it instead of zucchini: https://pinchofyum.com/sweet-corn-zucchini-pie)

Sometimes I’ll be in the yard walking around and find Sandii in the bayou, splashing, sometimes I’ll see her laying around a sunflower stalk, chewing on it. Walking the dogs in the evening, which will soon have to be rescheduled for the morning as soon as summer really sets in, (isn’t that a blessing, June 14th, waiting for the heat), it is something so good to see them running the road. The new puppy Grim is low and all puppy-fat and has a hard time keeping up with the older dogs, and no one can keep up with Wilbur, usually by the halfway point they give up trying. Still, the puppy is always studying. He picked up a stick and tried to get everyone interested in playing with him. He now dips his nose in the water while he swims, independently, like he’s seen Sandii do - it was something to watch him progress. He’d stand on the slick steep banks and bark at big Bear and Sandii swimming in the ditchwater, and now he’s in there with him. It helps that the ditch has dried up to where his feet hit the bottom, but there’s enough water to play in.

A remarkable thing, nature - all of these fast magic occurrences - grass totally flattened in the middle of the field, a dozen speckled delicate black swallowtails on the mint and oregano, three or four sphinx moth caterpillars in the milk and wine lillies, which were abundant this year, unappreciated, even, the caterpillars making lace work of the leaves.

Waiting on figs and gone to mow, a baby rabbit runs towards the top garden, later, another into the swamp-woods, later I am in a narrow patch that runs along the bayou and a flash in the corner of my eye brings me to a frightened baby bunny swimming quickly out into the vibrant green duckweed of the black bayou - I reverse and leave quickly, hoping. Recounting the story later, he says yes, that’s why I don’t mow this prairie because once I ran over a nest of baby bunnies, and you can hear and see that he can still picture it, still feel it.

Since giving up instagram for the month I haven’t really accomplished very much but let me tell you, I can fill time snapping beans. We bring in baskets in the morning or evening, the only reasonable times to pick, and I’ll sit and snap until they’re all done, and you don’t have to do very much special to them for them to taste good, usually just some onions and salt and maybe potatoes all boiled together, butter after, bright green after the boiling and it’s like we’ve accomplished something in eating them, and already I am blanching them so we’ll be ready through the winter, patty pan from last summer’s garden jealous as the new bags arrive to the freezer.

I love walking out into the early of a thunderstorm, I’ve done it before where the rain moves east or west of me, and I can see it from the distance with all of the benefits of the cool breeze and atmosphere.

Native honeybees out after that last rain, early in the morning and buzzing, I worry about them the most,

Carpenter bees working on the telephone pole, there was one in the air conditioner for a little while before we plugged it in, and you could hear the bee buzzing and it’d echo around in the metal like someone humming.

June 17th 2:31 pm

Been trying to keep little notes of what is going on in the world of the yard, his brother declared many years ago that the Delta would one day become a petri dish - it would have appeared to have happened, we watch the men with their spray rigs head to the fields in the middle of the morning and can’t help but put our hands on our hips as the leaves curl on the tomatoes.

They’ve been curling for a month so all we can do is continue to Hope.

The soft Bluegreen morning of a thunderstorm, quiet, I wake up in the middle of dozing back to sleep after I had let the dogs out, Sandii has decided she is scared of thunderstorms and so I jump up and call to her, she appears out of her hidey hole in the cane and comes to me. Her head is laced with yellow leaves and spiderwebs,

Yesterday evening the walk was exquisite, after watering the garden and picking beans and cucumbers for the sake of it needing done, I watched the legendary alligator snapping turtle suspended in the clearing brown water, a dozen dragonflies overhead,

The dogs unleashed into the yard and down out into the road, they were on the phone talking about the farmers haven’t been able to get into the field since April 19th and it was kind of impressive to see all of the farmers return at once out into the sun, though our road this year remains slow and I am grateful, the water pumps only turned on once, and in the middle of the afternoon moving still life objects a sheen of sweat finds me,

Not long after we hit the gravel the neighbor’s dog Bear begins barking at something in the road and I don’t even have to think about it to know what he means, running and shouting, a baby cottonmouth fat and brown and curled up, I say go, go on guys, and then naturally I take a picture. Nothing to be done, no one was hurt, he goes to his soybean field and we return to our walk, peace in the valley, good boy Bear that was real smart buddy,

He’s sitting at the supper table but no one has moved to make supper, talking about he knew a guy that carried a slingshot and a pocketful of rocks whenever he worked the rice fields, water moccasins abound,

We go down the road and the dogs turn into the bayou, return coated with duckweed, down the road as the land dries up and the cracks begin to appear in it’s surface, the air still fragrant and changing as we make it slowly further south,

Distantly it thunders and the clouds cover the sky, but no rain, just a cool breeze and the hope of it, the dogs hopping like crazy rabbits in the soybeans, hunting, chasing, they return with nothing,

June 19th 1:43 pm

A blue morning and we walked in the heat yesterday to see they had turned the water off from the pumps, the farmers are always knowing it seems, he said they decide based on the moisture in the soil, the sunset turns purple and orange and we watch the turtles in the pond, he sanded the table and took off a whole skin of paint,

Maybe we painted it because of this burn on it, it looks like a solar eclipse, lets keep it, let’s varnish it, paint the legs green.

Woke up late into the morning after a couple false starts, rain started on the airconditioner, tink, tink, tink, before the power went slap-out. The man on the phone distantly in Lyon saying yes we are on the way we already received a call from your area,

Reading Berry by the window, it rains and rains hard, making coffee in the kitchen on the stove with a sieve and a filter and it seems like three pots going at once, a couple candles on the dining table and they reflect in the deep green on the thunderstorm, in the jungle-garden, a sunflower eight feet tall and still waiting to bloom,

Cold puddles of water and the wind blowing, distantly the thunder has moved and we escaped without hail again, what fortune, I do the morning chores now very late from the usual schedule, the cat fed from where she is hiding under the porch and the chicken working at her job of laying a little pale green egg. Somehow I see the rat snake as he bumps his head against the coop wire trying to find the way in. I open the coop’s wire door and call him, what do I do I don’t want to kill it, and he says, how long is it? Five feet? at least,

The snake sees me watching him and turns around, diamond backed and grey brown and very beautiful into the vines of the ground, little vignettes of his beautiful pattern on his long way going and gone.

June 23rd 12 noon

Soon into the heat of the morning it is bright and the sky is very blue and not the usual periwinkle except in the north where it nearly is, faded out in the bright white heat,

It was so hot going, my knees feeling weak and I laid on the drainage pipe just to watch the little pond made there in the ditch, big baby fish transparent and growing, they all look like little robots in their spots and translucency, yellow eyes, metallic flashings,

This morning taking the trash out I am always so sure there is a snake or a frog or some animal I simply do not see for not looking closely enough, and today it was a rat snake, not the same from the coop, smaller, more delicate, he watches me as he snakes down out of the cedar tree into the bushes, patiently, silently, movelessly, bright and dark at once, a delicate black tongue made in divinity,

What I meant to tell you was we were all standing there looking at the same dead tree for about five minutes before my father saw the orange feet and pinkgrey feathers of the whistling ducks in it’s branches, right there in front of us,

What I was really trying to say was, walking barefoot makes all of the difference in the world to your attentions, if you are trying not to step on anything that will sting you. With boots or shoes it is easy, it is automatic, to not pay attention to what is under your feet, to all of the life all around you,

I am a big proponent of blankets on the grass in the shade, a little home of comfort outside in the real world, it will teach you something, if you want it to - the first lesson is in the glory and value of a shade tree. The second, the little invisible lives that go on around you, very busily, all of the time. Little ants, miniscule white-fluff bugs, butterflies towards your thoughts, the birds begin,

The bob white has started out there in the trees, maybe in the cemetery woods this time, not as close as he was last year behind the pond.

The pond it’s own world of life, dragonflies convene overhead, a cottonwood looks to be blowing down the road, seeds of life,

the moon and stars melon speckled with its own galaxy, deep yellows, deep greens, swelling with only the help of the Dirt, the Sun, the Rain,

Did I mention how the snake must know my chicken better than I do? Her plans, her daily routine, he is aware of her laying hour and at high noon he creeps up to see if he can rob an egg,

He said, his mother died and he wanted me to make a cast of her feet so he could take them to the beach, she had never touched the sand, been to the ocean.

I said, I thought I’d heard it all. Did I tell you about the girl that got so good as making frog noises, she’d have a little hopping pack following her home?

She said, the way snakes break eggs after they’ve eaten them is they climb up a tree and fall out of it.

I’ve been eating up Wendall Berry books, and by eating up I mean sometimes having to re-read the same paragraph a couple times, or put it down until I become more awake, but he writes about birds needing humans - there was a conservancy out west where they wanted to protect the birds, and so they moved off the indigenous people. With the people of the land went the birds. And so to step outside into the yard and hear the birds, to know we are depending on each other, to know they are responsible for all of the sunflowers in the yard and countless other unknown volunteers,

Birdsong,

June 25th 10:44 am -

A little green stinkbug but it looks like a monarch caterpillar, bright lime green with yellow spots and delicate black lines, wow, an iridescent dogbane beetle quietly about his business, reflecting the sky, I wave to my reflection,

The local plant store was giving away some unsold stock, we came home with armfuls of perennials, I got some lambs ear, I felt rich,

That’s the woodpecker’s telephone pole, that’s that mockingbird’s pine,

Lightning bugs are still out there if you want to go stand out in the mosquitos to see them, the stars are bright but hard to see from inside. They painted the church again and it is as white as a full moon shining all hours of the day,

A butterfly in the ditch, a baby raccoon on the road, little sulphur butterflies flash towards me and I hope it’s because they just want me to see them, they flash away,

He leans down and picks up a bean from the honey locust tree, fat and looks like a tamarind almost, he says deer bean I said beer bean? Deer Bean, d-e-e-r, the deer eat these because they have a sticky sweetness inside, I tried it once, not much to it, I said like a honeysuckle?

The plants, especially the cantaloupes, (reading about it now, it says the name Cantaloupe (I was thinking maybe Canta - Loupe like song dog or Cantal - Oupe) and Bon Appetit says it was named after a Papal residency in Rome called Cantalupo, which means Howling Wolves, having first been grown there.) I mean, the plants, especially the cantaloupes, I walk by them the most often, in the morning their leaves are open like they are waiting for the sun to embrace them back, in the heat of the day they are wilted and collapsed, a closing wind-beaten umbrella, defeated, as the shade from the cane comes over them, they forgive and forget, or if they are watered at any time, bright and open again,

Oh Lord make me like the plants, let my heart be open and forgiving,

Also make me like an onion, makes most things better, included in all cooking,

Also make me like garlic, good for you, small but mighty,

Also if it isn’t too much, maybe like okra, durable, dependable.

Berry said, what you go out searching for in the world, you lose at home, a people with no ties to their community have nothing to defend, it is easy to run away then. He says (in a book of essays published in 1987): “In the face of all-annihilating weapons, the natural next step may be the use of no weapons. It may be that the only possibly effective defense against the ultimate weapon is no weapon at all. It may be that the presence of nuclear weapons in the world serves notice that the command to love one another is an absolute practical necessity such as we never dreamed it to be before, and that our choice is not to win or lose, but to love our enemies or die.”

Lord make me like the plants, let my heart be open and forgiving.

Amen,

Hello hello happy Sunday, hope June has been good and beautiful to you. The next show is Rural Virtues at The Gallery at 2265. This exhibition is open Monday through Saturday, 10am to 3:30pm at The Gallery at 2265, 2265 Market Street, Wheeling, WV. Take the elevator to the third floor. The opening reception is Thursday, July 31st, 4 - 6 pm. Looking forward to seeing you there. Showcards head out soon - if you’re not signed up and would like to receive show cards please visit this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pLLWumZnaKNXi9py3CSoBGPKXGArWRHIwkUeufAIi2I/edit

man we were in Ronnie Drew’s guitar shop, it’s white washed and looks summer sun bleached on the outside, sort of dazzling bright in the right light, and i never been in there before because i don’t fool with no guitars, man, and they got out of the car and you knew they’d been smoking i won’t say what and they offered him a miller lite, he declined, we went in and he picked up a little kitten they named The Fuzz. The kitten is truly a beautiful creature, like imagine the Perfect grey fuzzy tabby cat, little where you can carry him around in one hand, tufts of hair coming out of his ears and these vivid dark green eyes, and i carry this kitten around while they talk about amps and plugs and we look at guitars of every shape and color, one cut into the shape of the State of Mississippi. They’re telling whole stories and jokes but i’m messing with this cat and don’t hear anything else. We leave and now he’s got a tab but “don’t worry, pay it whenever you can, i trust you,” they went to school together sixty or sixty five years ago after all, played in bands, and later i go in to buy some power steering fluid off of old 61 trying to tell my friend about here comes the fuzz here comes the fuzz but we can’t find the song. I call my parents and say man what is that song that goes like here comes the fuzz and my mom and dad both laugh and say “it’s Here Comes the Judge,” and “i used to sing that at your mother when she’d come downstairs in her bathrobe.” Friends and neighbors i present to you: