Huck has not yet seen Bambi, but his inflection perfectly mirrored Flower the Skunk when he said, for no particular reason, “You can call me Mechanic if you want to.”
***
I have worms on the brain. We had to give up our compost pile a few years ago since it was attracting rats. Not composting kills me. Our town offers coupons for a small enclosed composter, knocking the price down to $40. Or…there’s this. I’ve been interested in vermiculture for a very long time. There are cheaper methods than the Worm Inn; YouTube abounds with videos demonstrating the Rubbermaid bin technique, and that’s probably a better option for starting out. Our favorite local nursery sells bags of redworms for about $15. I’m contemplating.
***
Yesterday evening, with little fanfare and a grin bigger than the Cheshire Cat’s, Rilla learned to knit. We were lounging in my room while Scott was making dinner, and she happened to spy a pair of knitting needles in the pencil mug on my shelf. “Oh!” she gasped. “You were going to teach me to knit!” (I think we last mentioned it around Christmastime.) Jane supplied a ball of yarn, and before Scott’s chicken fajitas hit the table, Rilla was purling away. I’m putting it here so I’ll remember the day.
(Tip discovered by chance: Use variegated yarn for teaching beginners. The color changes make it easy for newbies to distinguish the different loops on the needle. Rilla got the hang of it much more quickly than her sisters before her, and without the learning-curve frustration. I remember prior first lessons ending in tangles and tears.)
You mustn’t take me too seriously if I now proceed to brag a bit about my exploits as a poet. There is one qualifying fact always to bear in mind: there is a kind of success called “of esteem” and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with a critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it – don’t you doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviar to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do – if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.
Feels like my “Caught My Eye” sidebar is bursting at the seams these days. So much so that things get pushed off the page before anyone gets a chance to see them. Here’s a rundown of recent links:
Looking forward to exploring this collection. I once had the the pleasure of chauffeuring Robert Pinsky from Charlotte, NC, to Greensboro. We talked about gardens (I confessed my habit of planting imaginary gardens everywhere I went—sizing up people’s yards and deciding what I’d do with them) and, yes, poetry. I’ve always meant to write a poem about it. One of these days I might get around to doing it.
“It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.”
“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.”
“Moore, as I understand her project, champions both clarity and complexity, rejecting the shallow notion that they are opposites. Scorning a middlebrow reduction of everything into easy chunks, she also scorns obfuscation and evasive cop-outs. Tacitly impatient with complacency and bluffing, deriding the flea-bitten critic, unsettling the too-ordinary reader, she sets forth an art that is irritable, attentive, and memorably fluid.”
(Obviously I went on a bit of a Marianne Moore rabbit trail.)
“The Los Angeles Times has issued a call for poems. I’ve longed for such a moment. It seems a natural marriage, not just because newspapers and poetry both seem to be involved in the same meta-conversation of their respective survivability and relevance in an iWorld, but because the news and poetry both should be considered daily. ”
• Free course: Man and Mammoth in the Carolinas. (Scroll down for links to video & teacher/student guides. Aimed at middle-school students. Yep, the Carolinas are a long way from the Pacific coast, but I’m enjoying these videos with my gang.)
One of the best opening lines ever. How many times have I read it, I wonder? And how many times aloud? This morning it was to my three youngest, all of us smushed together in a heap on the bed. We’d surprised a hundred tiny spiders in the garden just a little while earlier; an egg sac must have hatched only moments before I happened to rip out the weeds hiding it against the garden wall. Wee spiderlings scattering in all directions. “They’re jumpers!” cried Rilla, watching them leap into the breeze.
Of course we had to come in and begin Charlotte’s Web after that. How could we not?
That first concise chapter: a marvel. The jolt of that opening. A father going to kill a baby pig. Fern standing up to her parents, first her mother, then her father—pulling at his ax, even. And—he listens to her. Is moved by her passionate plea for justice. Gives in. And then the magic of a piglet you can cradle in your lap like a baby and feed a bottle to. Even an obnoxious older brother getting a mild comeuppance. Utterly satisfying. And all in seven pages, before breakfast.
“I flipped the face,” she told me—changed its angle from the tutorial in the book, using a field guide photo to help her. I love the work she’s doing with texture and shading here, diving in and trying things out. The speckles on the breast, the little squares on the wing.
So much of my role with Rilla is staying out of her way. Giving her vast stretches of time to draw and play, giving her space to get messy in. (Actually, she’s kind of a type A artist—very precise about her materials and workspace.) And of course strewing, strewing, strewing, the good old Sandra Dodd coinage* that captures the essence of my approach to family life: leave neat stuff where the kids can find it—and be around to talk about it when they’re ready.
She spent half the evening working away at this owl. Yesterday it was a pair of goldfinches, because they’ve been delighting us at our feeders.
Here’s the book that has captured her fancy: Drawing Birds with Colored Pencils. Amazon tells me I bought it in August, 2011. It saw a brief period of use then, with Beanie I think, and has mostly lived on the field guide shelf until now. I don’t know if it was chicken or egg—whether Rilla found the book and decided to dive in, or went hunting for help because she wanted to draw birds. I’ll ask her tomorrow, if I remember. All our drawing and nature books are stashed on shelves in our dining area, right behind Beanie’s chair and directly in Rilla’s line of sight.
*Sandra’s strewing page begins with a quote, “I just strew their paths with interesting things,” captioned “long ago, AOL homeschooling boards.” I was there, reading along, nursing infant Jane, when she wrote it! And now, many strewn paths later, Jane’s preparing to head off to college. We made the first big dorm shopping expedition today. I can still see those early AOL conversations scrolling across my screen—I got my first modem and my first baby in the same month—and thinking, Ohhh, this homeschooling thing has possibilities, I’ve gotta talk to Scott. Amazing.
I was going to say July was a month like we’ve never had—on the road almost the whole time—but I remembered that’s not true, of course; three summers ago the kids and I spent three weeks on that cross-country trip from San Diego to Virginia and back, and a few years before that was the grand expedition to our new home, which also took the better part of a month. I guess that’s our pattern: hardly any travel for three or four years, and then something epic.
We drove through Utah and across the Rockies to my parents’ home in Aurora, Colorado. Spent the 4th of July in St. George, UT, where our hotel parking lot afforded a view of six separate fireworks displays across the valley. Spent hours goggling out the van windows at spectacular scenery: so much beauty none of us remembered to read the books we’d brought, or to fiddle with the iPads.
Spent a week in Colorado visiting with my old friends and family. A whirlwind week, full of chatter. At the tail end, I gave three talks at a homeschooling conference and (so very marvelous) spent a series of evenings sitting up late with my pal Karen Edmisten and her husband, whom it was high time we met in person. A very good week. A full week, capped with a wagon ride to a buffalo herd on the prairie I love so much.
Then we drove home just in time for Comic-Con. Had a family playdate with Jenni Holm and her gang—one of our favorite families on the planet. Spent the next four days in the usual blur of crowds, meetings, lunches, dinners, late nights gabbing at the bar. More good time with faraway friends. These conversations with our writer and artist pals are why I love conventions. That, and the panels—I’m an oddity there; few of my pro friends spend much time at other people’s panels, but for me it’s a highlight of the summer. This year I hit Graphic Novels and the Common Core (illuminating; perhaps more anon); Graphic/Prose Hybrid Works (delightful, and dangerous to my reading list); Today’s Kids’ Heroes…and Why They Don’t Wear Capes (featuring my hubby, among other stellar panelists—a most excellent discussion); and a Prismacolor Shading Workshop, which included to my delight and surprise a handful of Prismacolor brush pens and markers. Heaven.
And then! Because that wasn’t enough! The college I attended for my freshman and sophomore years—before it was sold out from under us and we all had to transfer—has never had a reunion, for obvious reasons. Until last week. A number of my theater classmates converged in Denver, and Scott and my mother conspired to send me back out for the fun. The photos tell several thousand words of that story. I’m so glad I went.
All of it, each day of July, merits a post in itself. But here I am back at home, slipping back into routine, and I find that mostly I want to write about my garden. It suffered less than I expected during the month of neglect, but still there’s a lot of cleanup to do. I’ve spent the past two days digging out bermuda grass and planting a few new natives in the butterfly garden. And the new veggie garden is in. Pole beans, cucumber, cantaloupe, tomatoes (I had one good plant in already and expected to find it withered upon our return, but instead it was green and happy and loaded with ripe tomatoes!), strawberries. I’ve ripped out a lot of ice plant and took at least a dozen cuttings off a geranium gone haywire. The red rose bush and the yellow one each presented a single blossom upon our return. The salvia was limp as old lettuce, but perked up after a good soaking. The goldfinches are having a field day with some giant dandelions gone to seed in my absence. The scrub jays have returned to their favorite perches, where they harass us until we’ve filled the birdbath. Home sweet home.
