For a day that started out so peacefully, with breakfast on the patio with Miss L, yesterday ended up kind of a big deal around here.

One of the downfalls of being a small framed person is a distinct lack of upper body strength, which translates into the embarrassing problem of not being able to pull the starter on a lawn mower with any degree of success. One of the side effects of the overall life transition that has been occurring around here lately is an increased responsibility for yard work and the mower issue was very frustrating for me. I pondered alternatives that all seemed to point to splashing out for a new mower (not something I wanted to spend the money on at this point) until I had a big AH-HAH moment. A little Internet research + quick trip to Home Depot + a strawberry lemonade to keep Miss L happy with this extremely boring-for-her errand + $100 = solution.

I had remembered my mom using one of these when I was a kid, only it wasn’t a nice shiny new one with sharp blades, it was an old rusty antique one that I think had been salvaged out of the shed behind our circa-1800’s farm house. Who knew they still make them?

It’s definitely a different solution than a gas mower. It’s quiet, I can use it whenever I want. It isn’t a perfect cut and there needs to be some weed-whacking afterwards, and raking. It jams up with twigs and sticks, which was extremely annoying around our old shedding tulip tree. But I really enjoyed it. It’s a great workout and maybe after using it all summer I will have the arm and shoulder muscles to pull the starter on the other mower. It’s a convenient, cheap, green alternative and my lawn got mowed yesterday. Problem solved.

Saving the best for last…

As I mowed and trimmed our crazy rosebush, Mommy duck was angrier than usual, hissing and fanning out her tail every time I came even remotely close to her. Usually she just keeps quiet unless I’m sticking my face right near her nest. However, mid-afternoon I learned the reason for her increased agitation.

WE HAVE DUCKLINGS!

The eggs hatched yesterday and by evening, there were at least five little fluff ducklings rolling around the nest and poking their little beaks out from under her sheltering wings. I tried to get closer to take more pictures, but it just made them so upset, it wasn’t worth it. She would hiss and like good little babies, they would freeze where they were. I haven’t been out this morning to check on them, but hopefully they had a good first night and will stick around for a little while before decamping to a water source. Well done Mommy duck!!

The perfect Saturday ended with Miss L. and I enjoying burgers on the grill, a fire in the backyard, and smores. Emmett was furious at being left out and climbed up into the kitchen window precariously to add to the conversation with the occasional indignant yowl (he must have a Siamese back in the family tree somewhere). Life, my friends, does not get much better than that.

live authentic part II

I felt bad after my very cynical ‘live authentic’ post and guilty that perhaps I’d oversimplified things. It’s easy to do that in a blog post. You’re sort of shooting for this mixture of insouciance and humor and poignancy and you frequently let one element outweigh the others and miss the mark.

I thought about it a lot today and came to the conclusion that for me, living authentic isn’t about trying to make my life look or seem easy or beautiful, it’s about trying to isolate and identify the beauty and happiness lurking inside my everyday life and feel gratitude. There’s a tail-wagging-the-dog difference and to me, that difference is the actual element of authenticity. When you’re able to look at your life holistically, the good and the bad, and yet value and appreciate the quicksilver moments of elegance and happiness and loveliness, you are living authentically. At the age of nearly-41, I feel like I’ve only recently discovered this and will likely spend the rest of my life working on it. But it’s good work to do.

I have all the moments that I described in my last post and no, they aren’t the moments that get photographed. I don’t shoot selfies of my overfed tummy or unshaven legs or circles under my eyes when I’ve gotten insufficient sleep. I shoot selfies when I feel beautiful. I don’t take pictures of the endless dead seedling trays I’ve baked or over or under-watered, I take pictures of my beautiful flowers and herbs when they are at their peak and I am proud of them. I don’t take pictures of endless streams of traffic instead of walks in the woods and I don’t brag about the runs that are failures of fatigue and laziness and bathroom issues or shin splints, I feel exuberant about the ones where I feel like I could run and run and run and never get tired. And the ‘living authentic’ part is realizing that all of those elements exist all the time and ebb and flow and they all make up your day or your week and you choose what to be happy and proud of, and what you want to project to the world. I think this is the silver linings playbook, to capture a thought from one of my favorite reads of 2013.

Today I went to work and I had too much to do and I felt that bitterness of not being able to putter around and do exactly what I wanted to do in the comfort and solitude of my own home. And yet I had the kind of day where the relationships I’ve forged with the people I work with made me change my mind. I helped people, I accomplished things and they gave back in return. I had a CAD engineer excitedly consult with me about setting up a possible webcam for Mommy duck. I had my small cadre of teammates set up an outing for next week so I can take them to my favorite botanical gardens to see an 80-year old agave cactus bloom, something I never thought anyone around me would be remotely interested in. I had people in my office all day for one reason or another, laughing and talking and asking questions and making plans and working on strategy and developing ideas together. I had a beautiful lunchtime run in the sunshine and came back with a sunburned nose. I had dinner with my daughter and we lay in the hammock while we ate our ice cream and my shorts were too tight, and we watched the pine branches overhead, very green against the blue sky. Mommy duck went away and came home and the fish swam in his tank while the cats stared, hypnotized. I took the trash out and saw a pale moon shadow in the sky, waiting for the gloaming. All of these things happened and then I felt sad for my harsh and negative commentary about what is in actuality a very nice and sweet pair of words. For the time being, I’ve found a nice place in the world and I am lucky to share even the most tedious bits of my existence with good people and the gratitude that I feel and project is now for me the most authentic way to live.

live authentic

I loved this post on A Side of Sweet about what I informally think of as “the new YOLO” – the hashtag “live authentic” which at first glance can seem very positive and motivating and inspirational but, as Kelly’s post points out, can really just be annoying as all hell and make those of us who are actually forced to work for a living doing distinctly unbeautiful things feel a bit, shall we say, inadequate.

I wish my life was all about PeonyWatch2014, naps with beautiful yogaesque cats, communing with ducks, walks in the woods and going for long runs wearing perfectly coordinated Nike outfits while I “live authentically”. And I DO get to do some of that, sometimes (okay, I don’t have any perfectly coordinated outfits of any kind, much less for running). But more often than not, my version of living authentically is sitting in traffic or in my office thinking, talking, or writing about widgets, packing lunches, wishing my house wasn’t so cluttered, wishing I had time for a nap or a run, missing my kid, checking my finances, wondering what to read next, wishing I had time to weed the garden, feeling tired, feeling hungry, feeling fat, wondering if it’s almost time to eat, wondering if it’s almost time to go home, wondering if we need more wine, negotiating who does bedtime reading or lunch packing, going to bed at 8PM with the intention of reading but instead exhaustedly watching a rerun of the Real Housewives of Somewhere while berating myself for not cleaning the litterbox and feeling annoyed with the cats for breaking something or dragging a shoe upstairs to chew on (really). And then getting up the next day to do it all over again.

i can’t believe i wrote three long paragraphs about a duck.

Mommy duck is hanging tough on the nest and if the Internetz is correct about gestation, we have a couple more weeks until we have some baby fluffballs rolling around the garden. The debate continues over what to do then – should we get a wading pool and keep it filled next to the rosebush? Should we trust Mommy duck to know where to take her babies to water? I fret. Even the closest small body of water, which is a big pond in front of a local office building, requires crossing a very busy main street. Ugh. The stress of being an innkeeper is more than I’d imagined.

Also, she is leaving the nest earlier every night and staying away longer, and not covering her eggs as carefully. I feel like the anxious mother of a curfew-breaking teenager, waiting for her to come home every night. I am always relieved to see her waddling up the walk. She looks around suspiciously, lingers to make sure she isn’t being watched (I feel her gimlet eye roving over me from where I’m peeking out of the drapes) and then, when she is somewhat satisfied that no one has tracked her, she rushes back onto the nest.

I’m not sure if this means she is verging on abandoning her eggs for the wild single duck life in the local pond, or whether she just has more confidence in her surroundings and can leave for longer periods of time without fear. As one of my Instagram peeps said, let’s just hope she knows what she is doing.

room at the inn

we have a strange relationship with animals over here lately. they sort of come into and out of our lives in weird ways and although my motto has been ‘there’s always room at the inn’, there are limits. it started with a cricket that i found in my office last fall; he came home in my bestie’s cellphone box and lived on our top shelf in a little terrarium for five months. Five! he ate lettuce leaves and raw oatmeal, and apple slices, and even now i occasonally think i can hear his rusty chirping, which filled up several long dark weeks of winter nights in a very delightful way. not at all annoying.

after the cricket, of course we gained mommy duck, who is still hanging tough in the corner of our garden in her queendom of mulch and pinfeathers. she is grouchy over the constant comings and goings (she lives by our front door) but i think secretly she is sort of enjoying it all too.

everybody is welcome. sort of.

so last night, GB heard a loud scratching in the wall, and he informed me about it when i was sleepy and i promptly forgot. the situation apparently escalated quickly while i was stacking zzz’s. this morning, before i was even properly awake, he was standing in the bedroom door advising me that he was about to knock a hole in the dining room wall to release the scratchy thing.

‘ok,’ i said groggily, and then, after processing this for a few minutes, and hearing him noisily assembling his drills and moving the furniture around, i realized that i should probably wake up. i trust him where these things are concerned, but it seemed like a large undertaking that i should probably be present for.

‘it sounds BIG,’ he said, and after knocking around a bit to determine where the beastie was trapped, he drilled a hole and sort of punched it out neatly. after a lot of bright spotlight type flashlights and drilling noises and moving of furniture and stud locators and tapping around scientifically…he put a bucket in front of the hole and we stood with baited breath. it sort of felt like that television special where geraldo rivera broke into al capone’s vault, remember that? (i always felt real bad for geraldo about that one.) i tried not to think of the tana french novel i had recently read about a murder victim who drives himself crazy believing something is trapped in the wall of his house…anyway.

the beastie, which really did sound like a twenty pound raccoon or small bear inside the wall, nosed its way out very quickly, all things considered. behold; tiny little chipmunk. i recognized him from when i caught him sitting in the plastic bin of birdseed in the garage last week, stuffing his face. unfortunately, the intricate ‘cookie tin bucket’ trap that GB rigged had a tiny gap, and he went slipping out and zinging around the dining room before GB could catch him and clap the bucket down again. he transferred him to a jar with some cracked corn for a photo opp. the stupid piggish thing couldn’t stop eating the corn long enough to smile and wave at the camera. he was released into his natural habitat and promptly returned to hang out for awhile underneath the birdfeeder.

miss l. slept through the whole thing and when i showed her the pictures, she couldn’t believe it.

‘I CAN’T BELIEVE I SLEPT THROUGH THE WHOLE THING,’ she said, and her next question was where on earth she was going to eat breakfast if the chipmunk was now living in the dining room.

heirlooms

after a few days of drops for my eye infections, sprays for my nose, and allergy pills for the general misery of everything else, i am somewhat recovered and able to get back to running and do some work outside. it is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow (haha) that i have always regarded the outdoors as a healthy place to be, feeling virtuous whenever i get my vitamin D or go for a run or a long walk, and to be brought to my knees, figuratively, by doing something healthy seems simply unfair.

anyway.

my tomatoes have been such a disappointment over the past couple of years that i decided to get serious and go straight to a local greenhouse that grows and sells heirloom tomato varieties that are specifically chosen for michigan’s climate. michigan heirlooms has an awesome website with a listing of all the plants they sell, great descriptions and pictures, so i picked cherokee purple and paul robeson. my original bestie k. ordered some varieties too, so yesterday i packed miss l. up in the car and we drove out to fetch all of them.

i’d just showered after a run, my hair was pinned up, i filled up my water bottle, and miss l. was grumbling a bit about having to leave her swingset. i thought it was a quick drive but my nav kept taking me deeper on country lanes. after informing me “THIS IS WHY I DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO THE TOMATO FARM”, miss l. fell asleep in the back and the sky was jewel blue and the roadsides were full of tall slim trees and marshy bits where ducks and their babies swam and turtles sunned themselves. i was somewhat annoyed at having to be in the car for so long on a lovely day, and remembered that when i was little, driving was entertainment for our family. my mom and dad would load us up into the old brown buick and we would find country roads to drive down and look for bunnies. then my imagination took a darker turn and i started thinking about a stephen king story about a woman and her child taking their Ford Pinto to an old country repair station far from civilization and being trapped in the driveway in their baking, broken-down car by a rabid St. Bernard. luckily, i thought, i have a very reliable vehicle and a working cell phone and just an extremely overactive imagination. even after a year of taking aggressive steps to manage my various anxieties and worryability, i still have moments where i have to shut myself down, even over ridiculous things like a nice drive on a country lane on a sunny day.

and when we got to michigan heirlooms, of course there weren’t any rabid St. Bernards, just friendly chickens.

and a really lovely little cottage industry greenhouse run by an extremely helpful and good-natured family who, when they found a problem with my second paul robeson, gave me a jd’s special c-tex plant to substitute. which i was assured would be a superior tomato.

flower day

“If it weren’t for the Chicagos and Detroits and Toledos, the terrible things would spread out across the whole country and make trouble for everybody else. Such places were collectors of badness in the way hospitals were collectors of the sick and damaged.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Eating Naked: Stories

i’m not from detroit – i’m from a small town further north, somewhat in the palm of michigan. i didn’t grow up in detroit, i didn’t go to school in detroit. i don’t live in detroit. detroit scares the shit out of me and depresses me and i don’t go there much. but some part of me just loves detroit. i understand the fascination with the ruin porn and the photographers who come from other countries to photograph it. the scope of it is beyond comprehension and what is left behind is nothing short of post-apocalyptic. the infrastructure is completely shredded, rife with rot and corruption.

but there are a lot of cool things going on quietly in detroit, and although it will take decades for any sort of real recovery to take place, there are days and events and places that make you feel proud of the folks who stand their ground and try to bring some sense of joy and community amidst the zombie rabble. detroit eastern market is one. their flower day market has become an annual pilgrimage, joining hundreds of thousands of people every year.

where i’m calling from

spring has arrived with both feet, finally, and although i have been completely enjoying the lush green, the ever-changing sky, and the mild weather, i have also been completely walloped with some sort of sinus issue. i’m not typically prone to seasonal allergies but all the news reports have been full of dire warnings about an especially horrible year for that kind of thing, due to our extremely cold winter (they even have a snazzy nickname for it – ‘ALLERGEDDON‘). i have yet to find any kind of med that addresses it without leaving me comatose yet waking up every morning with my face glued to my pillow is even grossing out emmett and sarge, and they have a high tolerance for that sort of thing.

in other exciting news, we have a new houseguest.

mommy duck (apologies for our lack of cleverness in naming) arrived on mother’s day. i was in the front yard when she and her husband (or boyfriend, who am i to judge) made a flopsy near-crash landing. her partner waddled across the street and stood in the shade of a flowering tree, looking annoyed, and she huddled at the foot of our birdbath for awhile. later, when i went out to continue unpacking the car from that weekend’s journeys, she had taken up residence in a corner of our garden behind a bush, quite near to the front door. she has since laid six eggs, and every day the nest is banked up a bit more, a neat mound of mulch and soft pinfeathers. i worried for awhile about her eating, and tried to leave her some food, but bread isn’t a good alternative for ducks, contrary to popular myth, and she ignored the millet. the red squirrels and chipmunks stole her cracked corn, and brought out her tail-fanning-hissing mode, so i have had to be content with leaving her a dish of water which she may or may not be partaking in.

all i know is that every evening around dusk she carefully covers her eggs, then tiptoes down the walk and flies away. we wait with bated breath until we know she is waddling back up to the porch and safely home.

our suburban yard is full of life. the boy hummingbird is back and although he is skittish, vastly more skittish than the hummers we had last summer, every now and then we catch a glimpse. i’ve learned how to mow the lawn, although i still have problems with the pull cord on the mower, and there are a lot of other encouraging things going on behind the scenes that i can’t talk about (won’t, actually) due to the whole personal life thing. but life is pretty okay right now, and would be much better if i could just master my triangle of death.

good stuff

one long digression

I had a couple of hours to kill while my bread dough rose (I am trying Jane Brocket’s bread recipe from ‘Simple Art of Domesticity’; I have tried it before but didn’t realize I had an uncorrected copy of the book with several recipe mistakes in it owing to the conversion between metric / standard measuring, and the bread came out like a dense salty rock. Loving Jane Brocket, I am giving it another go with the corrected recipe. Even if it doesn’t turn out, there isn’t much better than the smell of baking bread in the house).

I digress.

I decided to go running. I’m easing back into a more aggressive running schedule, wearing embarrassing calf sleeves to avoid my typical scourge of springtime shin splints. My running friends are all quite a bit ahead of me, already turning in fast times in events and sporting new running ensembles. This makes the competitive “what about me” part of my brain very anxious indeed. I like to think I am one of those people who feels good for my friends and proud of their accomplishments when they do better than me and that I can say graciously, “I’m only competing against myself” and to be fair, that is how I strive to be, and those are all the things I say OUT LOUD. Inside, though, I have to squash a feeling of dissatisfaction when I feel outdone, and it makes me not proud to say it about myself. But being competitive only makes me not want to run at all, oddly. I only run well when I run for love, and so I have to trick myself with encouraging words and the promise of photography to get my running shoes on when I am in this mode, otherwise I will stay inside and watch Netflix and feel gloomy and guilty whenever my gaze lands on my Mizunos.

I spend a lot of my time trying to outfox myself, it’s kind of exhausting.

I ran on the trails, which is Strictly Prohibited, and I got a lot of dirty looks from the casual ambling Sunday morning birders in their big hats and hiking boots, toting their enormous-lensed cameras; but I went along anyway, and didn’t feel very bad about it. I don’t think it hurts anyone, I’m a polite runner. Anyway, I thought, they can catch me if they want to stop me, and I put on a showoff bit of speed up a hill and then winded myself and had to walk for awhile, feeling slightly foolish.

Trail running is harder than normal street running, uneven ground and lots of elevation changes, so I didn’t care about my time, just being outside. We are a bit behind in our greenery, but it is there, the woods are coming alive with it. Red-winged blackbirds – my favorite springtime bird – sang their bubbling, burbling song in the reeds, the sun turning their black feathers glossy. The wind was up in the trees and clouds blowing a gale, it was one of those spring days when the sun comes out and is so warm that you feel like you could curl up in a warm patch of grass and fall asleep quite cozily; but then a dark cloud is driven across it and the world falls cold and chilly, and your nose starts to run. It was the kind of day where you run and walk and run and walk and you get back to your car and all you want is a hot shower and a hot cup of coffee and everything is happy, sunshine and shadow.

At the end of my run, I came across a couple of others to share the path with. The turkey, looking fat and brilliant in the nice light, edged past me and ran on frantically, no doubt sensing the word DRUMSTICK as it swirled through my brain. The sandhill crane, however, was unbothered; he groomed himself carefully and surveyed me with a blank golden eye, and caused ME to edge by, no longer sure that I couldn’t be caught if I tried to run.