Daily Archives: April 9, 2014

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Tom(‘s) Thumb

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Spring                                                             Bee Hive Moon

Tom’s thumb will be done tomorrow, a nifty operation, done often, same day.  Then, no using that opposable thumb (and what are we, after all, without our opposable thumbs) for three full months.  This post is for Tom.

Talk about a great attitude.  Tom’s going to take this opportunity to use his non-dominant hand and thereby increase the flexibility of his brain.  Making lemonade out of hand surgery. Or something.

Doesn’t sound like much, three months, in the abstract, but when you begin to add up the things we do so easily with our dominant hand, especially after 60+ years of practice and habit, well, then three months sounds like a very long time.  Buttoning shirts.  Using table utensils.  Opening doors.  Driving.  Typing. On this one Tom’s going to try to learn Dragonspeak.  I hope he does, maybe it’ll spur me to finally learn it.

We’ll be thinking about you tomorrow morning, Tom.  8 am.

P.T. Barnum and Charles Sherwood Stratton (Tom Thumb)

General
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Spring                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Weather station says 65.  It’s sunny and warm.

After working this morning on my query letter, altering my hook to a young-adult emphasis, I continued editing Artemis in Minnesota.  This is a long story and one I can’t find on my computer right now.

It’s somewhere on one of these machines (I have two desktops in use and two older machines plus the laptop.)  Makes me wonder what else is hiding on other hard-drives. I’ll have to check.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wound

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Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

There.  Got out and did my first garden task of the new season.  Cut down all the raspberry canes.  That means no harvest mid-summer, but a more bountiful one in the early fall. Getting out there, just standing in the garden, healed a part of me that gets wounded in early winter.  It’s the part of me that’s glad the garden is done for the season.

And that’s true.  I am glad when the last berry is frozen and the last tomato is canned.  At the same time the finish of the garden closes up a part of my soul, starves it for nourishment and that becomes a wound, often unnoticed until its healing can be accomplished.  With the least good garden pruners, an early brand purchased before I discovered Felco, I cut into the canes, cut them all down to the ground. Now that wound has suddenly healed and I am again the Greenman.

Next I’ll plant those cool season crops before we leave for Denver.

Dogs, Garden, Weather +Climate

The Wolf Came Out

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

The sun is as high in the sky now as it is at Labor Day.  That means warmth is coming. Today we’re supposed to hit 70.  Then, maybe get some snow on Sunday.  Back and forth. With the sun high, the snow from winter will be gone by then, except for those heroic dirty mountains that rose up in large parking lots.  I remember a few years back when they hung on until well into May.

The dogs heard something this morning around 2:30.  And set to howling and barking to get at it.  Kate finally got up and let them out.  She later heard a high pitched scream and a while after that the dogs retching.  Whatever it was, they caught it.  She also said the owl was in fact hooting last night.  It was, however, quiet when I wrote the post below this one.

Not often these days, but on occasion, we get reminded that these gentle loving creatures remain red in tooth and claw.  Underneath that indoor sweetness lie genes borne of wolves, most often not aroused, but last night.  The wolf came out.