Category Archives: Our Land and Home

Garden, Our Land and Home

Dig In!

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79  bar steady 29.88  3mph NNW  dew-point 56  sunrise  6:07 sunset 8:28  Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon  moonrise 1432  moonset 2259

More empathy for the sandhogs and ditch diggers from the old sod who threw the new sod.  The pit is down as far as I need to take it.  Kate and I have to decide now how we want to trick it out.  Stone?  Metal?  What kind of seating?  Cooking? When she gets back, we’ll figure it out.  She’s the detail person, the finished carpenter to my laborer. 

The notion of standing stones in the yard still draws me, makes me want to find the right ones, ones that look like the standing stones in England, Ireland and Brittany.  I haven’t put a full court press into it, but I will here at some point. 

This afternoon after the nap I’m going to sterilize the hydroponics and set little cubes of various kinds growing in the nursery.  I plan to have salad material growing, probably all but tomatoes.  They will await another iteration of the hydroponics. 

An African object written up, then back to the novels.     

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Our Land and Home, Travel

A Certain Inner Doldrum

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68  bar steady 29.98 0mph SE  dew-point 56  Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50PM  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Thump.  Thump.  Pause.  Thump.  Thump.  Thrudda Thrudda Thump.  Bang.  Thump.  Thump.  Most of the time it is quiet here.  At night the quiet becomes complete, with the exception of tonight.  One of the neighbors must have had left overs from the 4th.  Strange sounds at night make you wanna know what’s going on.  Kate went out back and I went out front.  Saw nothing.  Either of us.  Both of us concluded fireworks.  A suburban July nighttime mystery.

The tone of my last few posts has trended down.  My inner barometer falls, not steeply, but it does fall.  Why?  Midsummer blahs.  The whole weight thing.  A certain inner doldrum.  Maybe a change in my spiritual life.  This is the realm of melancholy, not depression, and it usually precedes a creative period.  As I fall deeper into my interior, it is as if my gifts and energy fall with me, not in a negative sense, but as preliminary to a harvest.  When I pull inward, my outer affect often declines, but the interior feeling is that of gathering my resources, marshaling them into a coherent whole.

The weather in Minneola, Texas has 97 and sunny as a theme for the three days we will be there.  97 is cooler than past reunions.  The last time I headed to Oklahoma for an Ellis reunion it was 107 the whole time I was there.  That’s hot.  We’ve gotten notes about what to bring to help defray the cost of food for 36 adults and a gaggle of kids.  Charles Paul, that’s me, gets a pass, but Kate and I will pick up something once we get there.

It just dawned on me yesterday why my name was Charles Paul or CP on both sides of the family.  My dad’s brother was my Uncle Charles and my grandfather Keaton was Charles Keaton.  A diplomatic choice of names by mom and dad, but it left each side with a need to differentiate between two of us.

Garden, Our Land and Home

Brute Force

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81  bar falls 30.07  0mph WSW dew-point 60   Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

The stump grinder applies brute force to the problem.  It has carbide tip blades on a rotary cutter that looks like a saw with few, but deep set teeth.  The first time required something of a learning curve, but not too much.  What it required more was strength.  The weight in it sits low to the ground and the tires were soft, so yanking it around the property had aerobic and resistance qualities.

The two yew stumps out front disappeared, though the mugo pine stump remains.  It had too much that required cutting with a chain saw, something to do before the next rental.  Four smaller stumps in the back went under the blade.  The major work though required putting the blade deep in the earth in the area where the fire pit will go.  This was to eliminate a number of roots encountered on the first round of digging on it last fall.

Kate made a nice lunch of encrusted sole with beans from our garden and a salad that contained some items from the garden.   The heirloom tomatoes have begun to change color, perhaps next week we’ll have our first.  These fruits are as big as my fist.

Now, a nap.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Our Land and Home

Belt Up

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69  bar steady 30.10  0mph  E  dew-point 58   Sunrise 8:58  Sunset 7:23   Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Follow up on the yak dumplings.  More and more my mouth likes things against which my lower digestive system rebels.  Yak meat roiled my stomach.  A familiar feeling these days, days in which I have fallen far from the grace of the nutrisystem weight loss this winter and subsequently have created various insults to my stomach and intestines:  fatty food, not enough fiber, too much food.  Like that.  Makes me feel yucky.

As I said yesterday, I don’t like victim status, but I am increasingly aware that my body is the victim of internecine warfare in my mind.  One part of me, the earthy bodily part, sends a sensation signal to the brain, “Boy, wouldn’t X be good right now?”  Another part of me, sometimes the Superego/father and sometimes Healthy Man, says, “No.  Not right now.  Too much.  Bad for the heart, blood vessels, stomach wall.  No.”  Then, too often, earthy body picks itself up and goes to the refrigerator.

I experience this, sometimes, as an actual dialogue in which one part of my mind shushes the other.  My hunch is that consistent eating habits lie in empowering the Healthy Man, but I need to figure out how to do that.  This feels like an old struggle to me, one I have played out in relation to alcohol and tobacco, but girding my loins for battle has, so far, not proved powerful enough against my appetites.  What is girding the loins anyhow?  What is a gird?

According to  Princeton Word Net,  gird is to put on arms or to put on a girdle.   Girdle meant, one source says, belt originally. OK.  So I put my belt on do battle with weight. Gotta admit that sounds logical.

This whole process literally drives me nuts.  In spite of all the good stuff I do, if I see myself as losing this struggle, I get down on myself.  Not a positive place to be.

On a brighter note Home Depot beckons.  The stump grinder.

Family, Our Land and Home, Travel

Vineland Place

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74  bar steady  29.89  4mph NNE dew-point 64   Summer, warmish and stickyish

Full Thunder Moon

Ah, the power of suggestion.  Especially from a spouse.  Spent an hour and a half clearing burdock, nettles, black locust, burrs, climbing wild cucumbers and virginia creeper from the site of the soon to be firepit cum family gathering spot.  An area in which everything has been removed invites the emergence of those plants whose seeds or rhizomes remain in the soil.

Over the last few rainy, hot weeks nettles have taken nourishment from the former compost heap to grow large, reaching for the sun and laden with formic acid to prevent uprooting.   The wild cucumber which climbs, then produces lacy transparent fruit liked the compost as did the virginia creeper.

While yanking on the long above ground runs of vine and pulling out their equally long runs of below the soil surface roots/rhizomes, I decided to change the name of our property from 7 Oaks, named for the 7 Oaks on the hill outside my writing room window, to Vineland Place.  I have no idea why, but our property is the ideal happy home for vines:  wild cucumbers, Virginia creeper and wild grape.  The wild grape in particular grows vines thicker than my upper arm (OK, so I’m not Ahnold, but still).  We have nurtured a wild  grape that has chosen the six foot fence we had put in the front after Celt began climbing the fence to go greet the neighbors on walks by our house.  At 200 pounds Celt, an Irish Wolfhound, was not a pleasant surprise, though in manner gentle and loving.

As the CO2 level rises with global warming, it favors vines.  I do not recall why.  I could not help but recall this piece of trivia as I drove through Alabama, Mississippi and Lousiana where kudzu has a presence akin to an alien invader.  It grows over lower shrubs and covers the entire highway easement up to the drainage ditches on divided highways.  In more than one case I saw old homes, uninhabited (I think), shrouded under the green of this conqueror vine.

Jon did many projects around Vineland Place when he lived here.  One of the early ones was to cut back the large grape vines that had begun to strangle the oak, ironwood, ash, elm, pin cherry and poplar that make up our woods.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Writing

Even Though It’s Still July

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71  bar steady 29.87  0mph ENE dew-point 62  Summer, wonderful

Full Thunder Moon

The color:  deep red, pale yellow, pink, mauve, orange, red, virgin white, flame pink with a burnt orange throat,white with a pink throat.  Scents ethereal as they are ephemeral.  The true lilies and the day lilies are in bloom.  A chaos of color.

The true lilies have a bloom architecture clean, sweeping, grand.  They have colors with hues so intense they can make the heart dance.  These are the regnant plants of this garden and this is their time.

Here’s the problem with putting stuff in writing:

“We will also finish creation of a fire-pit, family gathering area begun last fall.  These will be finished by the August date of my meeting.”  from my Woolly project notes.

Kate dug this up yesterday and reminded me of this commitment.  Sigh.  The one aspect of gardening that seems always to drain from consciousness is the July slump.  Not much gardening gets done by me in this month.  It’s too hot, too many bugs and I’ve usually worked way more than I intended in May and June.

In July I begin to need indoor time, book time and writing time.  By August things have become marginally cooler, I’ve satisfied the reading itch though probably not the writing and the bugs become tolerable.  August and September, sometimes in to mid-October can be intense gardening, too.

All this means I sometimes (always) project more completion than I will realize.   Even so, I want to finish the fire-pit, family gathering area, too.  I have not told Kate that I intend to rent the stump grinder this Wednesday, but I do.  That will clear out the roots I found lacing the fire pit hole last fall as I dug.  After some weeding, moving some sand and rock and cutting up a few logs for seats around the fire, the fire pit will be done by August 18th.  That’s the date of my Woolly meeting and Kate’s 64th birthday.

Maybe I’ll go out there right now and start pulling weeds.  Even though it’s still July.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

A Deere John Article

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66  bar rises 29.91 0mph N dew-point 56  Summer night, cooler

Full Thunder Moon

I went out tonight for a bit of moon viewing.  I’ve always thought a moon-watching deck would make a nice addition to the property.   We don’t have one so I stood in the driveway, watching the moon while Lady, the brittany next door, howled at me (instead of the moon).

This moon rides low in the sky, just below the tree tops, so I had to walk almost to the end of our driveway until I could see it free and clear of the treeline.  It is a polished coin of a moon, bright and sparkling in the sky, a moonstone on jeweler’s velvet.  A night out well rewarded.

From tonight’s Washington Post

Deere John: It’s Been Good Knowing You
Lawn Behemoths Are Going Out to Pasture “The riding lawn mower has long been a barometer of the American dream, been a symbol of having arrived in the suburban middle class. It says, “I have so much lawn to mow, I need to sit down.”

It says, I’ve made it, I’ve escaped that funky old rowhouse neighborhood with the asbestos siding and yards like dirt-scabs. My land, my spread, not enough to plow, but way too much to mow the old-fashioned way. It says, I’m Jefferson’s dream of the yeoman farmer. It says, I’m rich enough to not only raise a worthless crop, but to pay money for the privilege. It says, I’m a boy with a boy’s rightful toys; a real American man.

Or that’s what it said back when city dwellers would gather around the riding mowers at the old Hechinger north of Capitol Hill, and dream the dream.

Now it’s saying something else. It may be a measure of the forces lined up against us. The riding mower seems to be on the wrong end of every headline. If economic news — from gas prices to shrinking nest eggs — is like the magnifying glass focused by an 8-year-old to fry a bug with sunlight, riding mowers are the bug.

The news: The riding mower industry “is deeply troubled by the decline in housing starts,” says Kris Kiser, spokesman for the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute in Alexandria. “New home construction is a good barometer for us. But you add foreclosures, decline in housing starts and the decline in housing sales, and you have the trifecta.””

Dehn’s 4 Seasons, the lawn appliance store where we bought our chain saw, our riding mower, our snow blower and super charged weed whacker closed up shop and didn’t alert us at all.  I drove by there one day a few weeks ago and the place was empty.  Capitalism’s creative destruction is at it again.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

A Healthy Garden

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79  bar steady 29.84  2mph E dew-point 57  Summer, sunny and warm

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The garden.  When I refer to the garden in these posts, it is a term of compression.  It would be more accurate to refer to the landscaping, the woods, the perennial gardens in back and those in front and, finally, the vegetable garden in raised beds.  I give a lot of thought and care each year to the plants in all of these places.

While I try to do things in an aesthetically pleasing manner, my various efforts never achieve the shine of the  gardens in the newspapers.  I’m not a perfectionist, so the weeds here and there, the plants that have overgrown their neighbors do not bother me.  There is time to get to them and I if I don’t get it this year, then next year.

I do care, a lot, about the health of the individual plants.  In my gardening world a diseased or dwindling plant gets a lot more concern than the niceties of the border.  As a result, our garden tends toward the lush, the verdant, but not always the well-conceived, artful display of blooming varieties carefully placed for height, leaf texture and color.  I’m impressed with folks who can achieve that and on some days I wish I were one of them.  But I’m not.

Gardens and landscapes and woods work on many different levels.  In my case the chance to think about the plants, to place them and nourish them, to reconfigure the whole when shade has outstripped light or the soil needs amendment satisfies me.

When Kate’s 60th birthday was on the horizon and she warmed to the idea of a purple garden, I had a great time assembling various purple flowering plants, amending the soil in each one of our beds and replanting everything, established plants and the new ones.  It tickles me now that the purple garden is in its fourth year and that it comes into its own in August, the month of her birthday.

Not sure what I’m trying to say here.  I’ve just been outside pruning, spreading some mulch on areas I missed the last time around and I feel a little sheepish about the unplanned, somewhat haphazard look of things.  On the other hand, by my own standards, the garden looks fine.  One of those endless loop deals where the stuff you do is fine with you as long as you don’t compare it to anybody else’s.  Yes, I know.  Comparing is foolish and mentally harmful.  Yet it creeps in from time to time anyhow.

Cinema and Television, Our Land and Home, Travel, World History

The Land is Our Vantage Point

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                            62  bar falls 29.66  0mph N dew-point 55  Beltane, night

                                                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Started Gettysburg tonight to get me in the mood for the southern trip.  Even though I’ve canceled my Gettysburg trip for this time, I can’t head into the south without thinking of the Civil War and trying to visit a few battlefields or other historic sites along the way.  Even as I write the word historic, I think back to something I wrote not long ago about how young our country is.

Think of Stonehenge, a temple from the paleolithic, over 5,000 years ago.  There are probably citizens of the United Kingdom whose ancestors were there, helped position the stones.  Imagine Turkey and Iraq, nations where civilization has had a foot-hold for thousands of years.  Egypt.  China and its 6,000 years of history, much of it recorded. 

Here, where most of us are boat people, only a few of the First Nations survive.  They can trace their ancestry on this land back several thousand years, but none of us with roots in Europe or Africa or Asia (at least the most recent immigrations) can see deeper into the past than Plymouth Rock or Roanoke.  Our history here spans no more than 400 years and as a country we are only 240 some years old.

The Hudson River School painters, in particular Thomas Cole, believed that the American equivalent of ruins were the natural wonders. The frontier in his day.  The mountains.  The Great Lakes.  The mighty rivers.  The forests that stretched over millions of square miles.  Now we can add the Grand Canyon, the buttes and mesas of Utah, the homes of the Anasazi.  Yellowstone.  Yosemite.  The Boundary Waters. 

It is still true. Still true that the land itself is our vantage point to consider history and pre-history.  Still true that the sight of the Rocky Mountains or Lake Superior or the Mississippi or the Smoky Mountains or the Everglades can move us to tears and anchor us here, anchor us here as firmly as the Bastille, the Tower of London, the temples of Angkor or the Great Wall of China.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Garden, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Seeking Mastery Within

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54  bar steady 29.78  1mph NW  dew-point 44  Beltane, sunny and cool

                                       Full Hare Moon

The weather remains cool.  This is not a long spring; it’s a long late March or early April.  The gardening upside has been longer lasting blooms on the tulips and the daffodils and the scylla.  This weather has also proved excellent for transplanting, reducing transplant shock to a minimum and resulting in little wilting after a move.  The downside has been slow germination (no germination?) for some vegetable seeds planted and slow growth for the ones that have sprouted.  From the humans who live here in Andover perspective it’s been a great season.  Cool weather to work outside and to further many landscaping projects.

Last night’s conversation about mastery at Tom’s lingers today.  At one point we asked each person to claim what mastery they found in themselves, then we offered evidence of mastery we found in them, too, from an outsider’s perspective.  Various Woolly’s were masters of soulfullness, love, living, listening, communicating, design, the big picture, and drawing others out to see the best in themselves. 

Tom and I were wrong in our assumption that individual Woollys would find it difficult to claim a sense of mastery.  And delighted to be wrong, too.  We affirmed what each Woolly saw as their area of mastery and added ones they hadn’t seen or chose to ignore, e.g. mastery of forensic engineering, computer skills and sheepshead, making the complex accessible, letting go, the body in motion.

In my case, for example, I admitted I couldn’t find anything to claim since I’ve lead such a curiousity driven life, often running full speed down divergent paths at the same time.  Then, I said, “Well, I guess I could claim being a master student.”  That got modified in the eyes of the group to seeker after essential, radical truth.  OK, I can see that.  “You’re a master teacher, too.”  Hadn’t occurred to me, but that’s become a theme in various areas of my life of late, so it must be there in spite of my opacity to it.     

Tom initiated a get together for designing the evening and having me as a co-facilitator, rather than a servant lackey.  He made the food simple, sandwiches and soup followed by a big, really big, cookie.  Others seemed to appreciate the act of co-operation in design of the evening.  Tom and I wanted to introduce better time managment, and we did; but, that was not appreciate by everyone.  “Felt forced.”  Well, yes.  But every time together has its limits and therefore its limits on contribution.

As we closed, Tom observed that the Woolly’s as a group are a master that each of us can turn to for guidance in life.  I nuanced that a bit by suggesting that as a group, over 20+ years together, we have mastered groupness.  We are a living community, best evidenced, as someone said, by the fact that we show up.

I have signed out for the summer at the Art Institute.  I need the break.  I’ll use the time for writing, family and our land.