Daily Archives: May 2, 2014

Garden

Planting

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Beltane                                                                          Emergence Moon

Went out to the beets and carrots I planted the day before we left for Colorado. No emergence yet. So I stuck my finger into the soil, gently peeling back layers until I found a seed, a rough beet seed, notable by how bumpy they are. Out of it grew two small thin green shoots. They’d been headed for the sun. Some warmth in the next week and they should all push through.

Tomorrow leeks and onions go in. Then the planting will be largely done until after the 15th, the average date of our last frost. After that the transplants: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, chard and kale.

It’s strange to think of this as the next to last gardening year here. Sweet and bitter. Maybe we’ll end up with a third season. That will depend on the date of our move.

 

Sport, Travel

Sombra a Sol

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Beltane                                                                      Emergence Moon

Le Plaza del Toros. When I sat down in the red and blue wooden seats, the heat from the sun was profound even though I had purchased a sombra seat. The tickets were sold sombra a sol. Beer vendors placed blue and gold buckets filled with ice and Dos Equis up the steep aisles of the Mexico City bull ring, more buckets on aisles closer to the ring, fewer on the ones further up. Another vendor had a long pole from which hung straw hats, mine sits now atop a bookcase over texts devoted to modernism and the enlightenment.

Supposing that the arena would be full early, I had come about an hour ahead of the march of the toreadors, but I was wrong. My seats, the ones in blue near the ring itself and on the sombra side, didn’t fill up until about 10 minutes before the music started.

4:30 pm “I have seen one kill. Took photos, felt my stomach turn and felt a fascination, too.”

“1st a few (two) go at el toro with capes, then the picadors, mounted on padded horses, pierce the bull’s shoulders. Blood streams. The matador does a few passes, then another, much thrusting of hips.”

“A fight between toreadors. The crowd yells at the hero of only a moment ago. Feedback is direct, intimate, abusive. Banderilleros put in their colored lances, banderillas, again into the bull’s massive shoulder muscles. Death has a festive, colorful air.”

“Ole’s reward skill; whistles express displeasure.”

4:40 pm. “There is music for the entrance of the bulls. The crowd first cheers the bull (and in the case of a poor toreador may choose to continue cheering the bull over the matador.), then the picador’s go in and do their ugly task. They look comic, almost pathetic. All the while jets fly overhead.”

“I don’t understand the exchange of the first sword for the second. Matador got gored! Got up. Going back. The crowd loves it. His leg bloody he seems more determined now. Now he seems braver, more confident. (just macho?)”

“Down on his knees, working closer, in the spot where he was gored. Now, the moment of truth. The bull won’t come. He charges the bull, sinks the sword in the first time. Crowd cheers. He walks, starts in front of the bull as it goes down and looks pleadingly at the crowd, then gets up. A last sword has a small horizontal piece near the tip, with it the matador flicks out the the sword he plunged in, then strikes with the odd sword. (a descabello which kills by a thrust through the spinal column rather than to the heart as with the rapier.)”

“Toro has personal attributes. He wants this, does this. My seat partner talks about toro as a person.”

(this is material I wrote back in 1993.)

 

 

 

 

 

Colorado, Family, Feelings, Friends, Third Phase, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

The Circus Is Leaving Town

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Beltane                                                            Emergence Moon

A slow moving mountain. Or, a slow move to the mountains. Sitting here contemplating my study, its hundreds of books and file folders, computer equipment, desks, chairs. I feel overwhelmed at the thought of pruning, organizing, decluttering for selling the house and actually moving. That’s one reason we’re giving ourselves two years or so to move.

Two years might encompass the remaining lifespan of Vega and Rigel. We really don’t know since they’re hybrids, but we suspect 7-8 years and 2016 is 7 years plus. That’s a factor though not a determining one. Hell, who knows, it could encompass our lifespan, too, though I don’t imagine it will.

Talk about liminal space. Between now and then we are no longer fully here and definitely not fully there. I imagine a huge circus tent with many ropes and stakes and poles. Each stake must be pulled.  Each rope removed. The poles must be taken down and the canvas rolled up. The canvas is our life in Minnesota and its attendant material possessions.

The stakes are friends, the MIA and the Walker, the Sierra Club Northstar Chapter, the background relationships developed over years of work in the church and in politics and in neighborhoods. The ropes are the emotional ties that bind us to places, to our years lived here, to our sense of ourselves as Minnesotans. The poles are those key relationships like the Woolly Mammoths, Anne, the docents, the folks Kate and I have worked with in multiple capacities: our vet, our doctors, our financial consultants.

All this must, in some way, be stored and the canvas packed. All these things will change once we reach our new destination. Our life will no longer be a Minnesota based life, but a Colorado based one. The friends will remain, of course, as will all the institutions and professionals, the places and their attached memories, but we will have stretched the ease and physical distance with many beyond the breaking point. It will not, of course, be possible to know which ones will suffer the most until time has passed. But all will suffer some, most will suffer a lot.

Feeling overwhelmed, of course, comes from imagining that the tent and its supports must be packed and moved for a train leaving tomorrow. That’s not the case. We have time and will use it well. It’s just that, well, right now, it’s a lot.