Pig and farm report

I have been giddy with sun lately. And dresses. And punctuation. I planted more blueberries two bushes named Chandler. I bought them at the little bait&tackle gas station store where they sell worms and triscuits and fishing and crabbing licenses. And blueberry bushes for ten dollars each. They sell at nurseries for at least $30.00 each. The lilacs are out on the island and are beginning to open on my deck. Lilacs make me giddy and stupid. Lilacs make me slather myself with fancy girl perfume and wear my tiara to the grocery store. Lilacs make me dance. Lilacs are the smooth rock hidden in my boot the secret to my creaky hips in the morning. I wanted nothing more than to be the famous Lilac Queen or one of the famous Lilac Princesses of Spokane when I was growing up. Of course I was not. I have grown weirdly nostalgic for the smell of city busses and lilacs in a vase or purloined lilacs in my arms. They grew everywhere when I was a girl. I thought they were wild flowers but they are in fact intentional. When I was a girl my stepfather told me that if I ever saw lilacs growing randomly in the woods or in some deserted old place it meant someone lived there once and loved there enough to plant those gorgeous flowers intentionally. In other lesser news I titrated my dose of carbamazepine down so quickly that I got a sudden reminder that I am in fact still fucking crazy. So I have titrated back up by 100 mgs. It’s exhausting and typing it out here makes me want to cry. I keep thinking if I’m good enough if I’m fragrant enough if I’m princessy enough I will eventually outgrow my bipolar diagnosis. In fact I have spent this past year thinking I had outrun it. It’s hard to think about in the guts because it harkens to giddy it harkens to scrounging it harkens to dolphins by the jetty it harkens to accepting love it harkens to that lost world where I lived without a bathtub but a turquoise swimming pool was there and I swam in it every single night under the busiest flight path of the airport. The way the scent of lilacs can knife you in the belly or lift you clean up into the sky without warning.

 Learning to Drive the Tractor

I'm mostly alone, cut my hair,
sorry as soon as the weight
of my braid went missing,
spent my entire life in a hotel lobby
guarding the suitcase.

That kind of hate is stunning,
so clean I stop breathing sometimes
with the sheer heat of it.

Eldon said brake, push. Eldon said
shut the fuck up. Eldon said
he could drive his motorcycle right off
the Lewiston Grade and he did,
and he keeps on going, into an Idaho
spring, all that green making me itch.

Don't give me any crap about Mercury
in retrograde. I could flip it on its side
and that flat coin becomes a blade,
a helmet spinking down a mountain.

Oh give me a home where they stack
the cream in little pyramids. And napkin
dispensers, Land-O-god.

Remember, remember when
I lose my head, to put me down,
put me down like my sweet
Brown Dog.

I’m on the left wearing my beloved saddle shoes to ride Ginger with my cousin Bethany or was it my father’s bastard daughter raised by one of my many aunts I no longer know but I know you can’t trust history the man in the hat was my grandfather not grandpa or gramps always the formal grandfather sir he whose love of language and length of legs I inherited and one of his horses it is an entire mood that strikes me in the blue hours how I was trotted out with my hair brushed just so the only time I was allowed to wear it long and true on display so my mother could get the money my grandfather was rolling in how my hair flew behind my head when I rode and my sister who I dreamed about all those years but in my dreams she was always my twin and I with my hair streaming out behind me like wings on fire

Pig and farm report

 

Spring as an ice storm spring as the first watermelon of the year is so blood red and perfectly sweet that your heart breaks a little spring as lilacs that refuse to let down their green knickers to show their purple spring as pale pink tulips in the house in a milk jug nodding their heads

all the tulip tourists have descended upon this quiet island so my coffee shop bakery is now overrun with women wearing bedazzled jeans dragging small children in by their arms to get an ice cream or use the bathroom while their tired cranky husbands wait so the line stretches out the door everyone crammed shoulder to shoulder ignoring the pandemic go away tourists I don’t love you eating my fear and scaring the whales

I spent an obscene amount of money this weekend on an expensive bottle of French perfume eau de parfum in fact from Paris that carries the scent of fig O Fig God's Candy I had a sample which I slathered myself in and my son told me I smelled like wood and it is true fig wood fig bark fig leaf fig fruit with an undertone of pepper I am so utterly fancy haha I am in fact so fancy that I might shave my legs for the first farmer's market or at least one leg

what I really wanted was a haircut but I'm waiting for my son to get his second vaccination he is off now to the orchard where he is tending to those fruit trees that are left standing and fishing with his father and shopping for a new truck because why would he buy a truck in pricey Seattle when he can drive over the mountains and get one for half that price in Spokane that sucking chest wound of a town that I call home

I spent this weekend preparing my garden for more blueberries and raspberries because the blueberries just took off last summer did you know that blueberries thrive in acidic soil therefore they love pine trees and tomatoes and tulips do not these are things you learn the hard way

it has been cold and sunny or rainy which is normal spring weather I keep wearing my summer dresses but with my leggings underneath in order to call forth summer

I'm reading Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for the fifth or fifteenth or one hundred and fiftieth time I type with Hal draped on my arm as a tiny fierce fur stole my hair is actually long enough to braid so I have been wearing it braided on both sides not a look I have not imagined for myself since I was 30

I have recently been tapering down the amount of Tegretol I take because my doctor said my sodium levels were low and Tegretol is notorious for messing with sodium levels Tegretol for those of you who aren't bipolar is my main medication my number one crazy control my man in Amsterdam for keeping me from spinning off the earth's skin after I bought the parfum this weekend I questioned my sanity for a hot minute because crazy spending is always a sign of creeping mania but all my bills are paid I did not go to the mall and try on clothes or fly to a sparkling city to play I can sleep and read and I haven't been crying or laughing too much and I look okay in the mirror

except for my goddamn hair and there is nothing I can do about that at this point except wait 

Pig and farm report

OSTARA

 

Two nights ago I went shopping and bought an obscene number of chocolate rabbits and peeps and theater candies like milk duds and bubbles with bubble wand and a small plush pale blue bunny and hazelnut ladybugs and bumblebees and green plastic Easter grass and I built my son my darling good boy a towering Easter basket of baroque proportions because yesterday he had his first Pfizer vaccine and because last year I couldn’t even get to the store for a candy bar much less such delicious Easter basket guts I also bought a huge batter bowl with a handle to contain all this richness because he is the chief pancake maker of the house 

we had scrambled eggs for breakfast and coffee and headed for the beach I wore a summer dress but put pants on underneath because I didn’t get this old without learning at least one thing maybe two my lilacs have tiny purple buds I go out on the deck every morning and talk to them my blueberries have fresh green leaves hummingbirds are back at the feeders deer are all over the place I dream about getting a haircut and a manicure and shopping for expensive perfumes in a department store but mostly I dream about the farmers market which opens in June last year I did not go not one single time because out here in red neck country no one believes in science so masks were scarce so I was only able to can some marionberry jam but I only grew enough strawberries for a few pints of no pectin small batch jam and believe me when I tell you sister I am down to one last jar of my own dam jam ma’am and maybe it isn’t tragic to you but you just don’t understand my secret relationship to peanut butter but now I am vaccinated so hahah there will be jam for miles this summer

 

LOUDON'S   JAM  EMPORIUM

~MILES OF JAM~

and fine chocolates

mostly I feel invigorated and happy and I just took a pan of enchiladas out of the oven and I made curry deviled eggs and a no bake cheesecake and my son my darling good boy got his first vaccination and he and I we are going to be just fine

love to you all from Summer’s End

Good Friday

 

Good Friday

Bird startled at how I adore my old woman face dry mapped throat waterblue eye shrubnest hair Look! I leer into the face of angels middle finger aloft how did cronewitch appear I watched the tomb never slept never shirked that duty or any other age you keening bitch snuck up stole the red river rapids that ran between my legs my plumb my stupid dangling fruit I don’t give a good goddamn for your flesh season your learned or any other wanderlust whose tiny silly face bobs under such a ridiculous hat oh hello sister hello auntie hello grandma wee granny gammy invisible hag HA!HA! I’m keeping all my secrets to myself 

Maundy Thursday

 Maundy Thursday

Owl’s racket and god appears 

in the low bones of mice

my daughter sews spangles 

to her left heel the kitchen clangs

with her ghosts and copper hooves

let’s build a death star behind the fig tree 

stitch marigolds into our manes 

float along the salt edge

take honey from its gold gold bed

this is a call to voluptuous

Babette the Queen of March rises

in the frog marsh my daughter 

dances and dances across the yard 

in her wild season