writing

If You Give a Cat a Twist Tie

Deb Zuroski, , , , , 2 Comments

My elderly cat — she is 18 or 19 — has always had a penchant for bringing a little something to the food bowl. As a last resort, she’ll carry a stuffie or sock to gnaw on in between bites of cat food but her favorite item — far and away — is a twist tie. My next question, really my only question: where does she find the abundance of twist ties? Socks? Pretty easy to find. We leave socks stuffed inside shoes or drop them by the washer. Stuffies? The dogs leave them absolutely everywhere. 

But twist ties? I may not be the tidiest housekeeper you’ll meet but I can assure you that there are no twist ties just lying around for a cat to collect. Does she have a secret stash? Can she open the junk drawer to get one out? Does she have a twist tie radar that pings out the coordinates to the lone twist tie that somehow ended up under the frig? I expect that I’ll never know the answer, that I’ll go to my grave (or the crematorium) with this question lingering like the last hint of honeysuckle in the air.  

I have been thinking a lot recently about “what I’m good at” and “what I like to do.” For some, these are usually complementary concepts. With the exception of writing and making foods that I shouldn’t eat, I’m sorry to report that I can’t claim that level of compatibility. That’s okay, though. Instead of being good at things, I am learning how to do things. 

Last week, I installed a new dishwasher. Removing the old, broken one was the hard part, surprisingly. While it wasn’t heavy, it was … um, connected, tightly, with the screws inserted backwards. There was a lot of puzzling and out-of-the-box thinking involved in figuring out how to remove screws that couldn’t be reached and how to remove epoxy (don’t ask) and on and on.

Connecting all the bits and pieces and having the new dishwasher work was an extraordinary feeling … until I heard Haley say, “Uh, Mom. You need to come down here.” Water was dripping, paint was bubbling. The dishwasher was leaking into the finished basement, in exactly the same place I repaired after the old dishwasher leaked in 2015. Sigh. 

I’d like to thank the inventors of pipe dope and the internet for assisting me in figuring out that teflon tape was not the leak-proof solution I had expected. And yes, for those who will inevitably ask, I did test for leaks prior to running the dishwasher. To the dishwasher industry, I would like to suggest a product enhancement:  the addition of a leak frog to the underside of the dishwasher! 

Really, the greatest gift to myself since I lost Ken nearly 4 years ago has been allowing myself to learn, to make mistakes, to try with uncertainty. Yes, I will be checking the basement drywall for damage and yes, I’ll be repainting a wall where the paint bubbled but that’s okay. I learned that I can replace my own dishwasher and that I can fix mistakes in the process. The dishwasher has been working like a champ for a week now and I’ve chiseled away at another insecurity. 

A member of my writing critique group gave me the nicest compliment, saying that they could see their teacher-spouse reading my latest book to their classroom. I hope I find an agent who agrees with that assessment.

The weather is improving here. We’ve had multiple dry, warm-ish days and even held school outside today for the first time. It was lovely to sit on our patio while the birds chirped and tweeted and the neighborhood kids giggled and shrieked and the sun shone on the backs of our pets as they sprawled in the warmth.

Stay safe. Wear a mask. Get your Fauci ouchie.

Much love.

If You Give a Cat a Twist Tie

If You Can’t Be Nice …

Deb Zuroski, , , , , 5 Comments

My daughter and I were out doing the food shopping recently and we stopped at the Dunkin Donuts drive-through. (Haley likes their coffee.) She wanted a doughnut but they didn’t have any. So, she asked for hash browns and the voice, a young person, said “I’m sorry. We’re really short-staffed and we can’t cook anything.” 

I said, just casually, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. That must be making your day really hard.” She told the manager. Get this. They comped Haley’s coffee because we were the only people who had been nice to them that whole day. 

And that’s all I’ll say about that.

If you live in the eastern US, you may be feeling a little down today because Phil has doomed us to another six weeks of winter. Here in Pittsburgh it has been a shockingly snowy winter; already this year we’ve more than doubled last winter’s total snowfall.  It feels some days like we’re hibernating, settled in our winter nests, awaiting the warming breezes of spring.

After a disastrous four months of virtual learning, Ian and I decided to begin a new journey. In January, we moved to homeschooling for the remainder of the 2020-2021 school year. I mean no disrespect to any of his teachers or the administrators trying to figure out how to help students learn this school year. We simply came to the realization that Ian could not be successful in the current learning construct. 

It has been a remarkably positive experience for both of us thus far. We’re lucky to be living in interesting times, as they say; so our civics lessons always run over. We both dislike math so we bless Khan Academy for helping us over the hurdle of geometry. The Khan Academy site has also supported Ian’s science requirements gracefully. 

Ian wants to stop talking about sentence structure (hehe) but we’re really enjoying our literature discussions.  This week, we’re reading books that have been re-told as movies. He’s reading Stardust. I’m reading Chocolat. We’ll be discussing them next week and picking out our next books from the stack I’ve already put together. 

Having far too many books has been helpful on this journey. We’ve pulled from the shelves for our civil war/confederacy discussions, our review of sentence structure and the roles of passive/active language, our early budget creation, even our discussions about propaganda.

We had our first conflict when I tried to do a combined civics/poetry lesson using the inaugural poems by Jericho Brown (in the NYT) and Amanda Gorman. We watched the inauguration live, including Ms Gorman’s moving reading of The Hill We Climb; but when I planned to review the role of poetry and those poems in particular, Ian staged a protest, stating emphatically that he has no particular love for poetry and no desire to review either the messages in those poems or the means by which those poets communicated their thoughts. He was both more direct and less polite than I’m being. It made me think again that we don’t pay teachers even half what they deserve for their efforts.

As we sit together every morning, however, I watch his eyes light up before he laughs and I listen to him sing softly to himself while he works on a problem and I am thankful for all of the decisions that brought us to this particular moment, to this opportunity to be here, now, embracing the slower pace of our lives and the strengthening bond of our relationship. 

Writing has been more of a challenge, as I expected. I carve out some time every day to work on my current WIP but teaching is intellectually and emotionally draining which means less daily progress on the WIP! I used to complete four full verses daily for the book but now I’m happy to get one *mostly* done each day. Mary Oliver’s exploration of grief has helped a lot and has inspired me to do some exploring myself. 

We continue to cook. Last week, for National Chocolate Cake day, I made half of a dark chocolate layer cake (it’s made with boiling water — MOIST!) with chocolate buttercream frosting and shared half of that with our next door neighbors. 

They’re in their 90s and don’t make many treats anymore. The cake was a big hit but Mr Neighbor especially likes it when I share homemade cookies. I gave them a gift bag of Christmas cookies over the holidays — buckeyes, ginger snaps, frosted nutmeg cookies, decorated sugar cookies, etc — and his wife texted me that she didn’t get to eat any! Mrs Neighbor said she was inspired to make Scottish shortbread. She’s from Scotland so when I say that shortbread SMASHED, I suspect you get what I mean. 

My current favorite recipe is heavy cream biscuits. They are tender and flaky, heavenly with the spicy winter stew that simmered on our stove all afternoon today. 

Stay safe. Wear your mask. Be kind.

Update: Here are the recipe details for the foods I mentioned.

Beef Stew — I add approximately 1/4 cup of dark soy sauce and 1/4 cup of Worcestershire sauce with the beef stock/bouillon/better than bouillon and I simmer it for 2 full hours before adding the veggies. Sometimes, I also add a hearty shake of Penzey’s Black and Red Pepper (a spicy black and cayenne pepper mix).

Heavy Cream Biscuits — After trying a zillion different biscuit recipes, I stumbled on this one in a cooking subreddit. It’s a Kenji sausage gravy and biscuits video. The biscuit recipe is the first five minutes of the video. I’ve never made the sausage gravy but the biscuits have turned out perfectly every time. We cut them in half and ladle the stew on top.

Dark Chocolate Cake — I halve the recipe, making a single 9″ layer that I then cut in half to make a half layer cake.

Buttercream Frosting — This is identical to the Hershey frosting recipe we used when I was little. Still my favorite! Don’t forget to halve this if you’re making a smaller cake.

If You Can’t Be Nice …

If The Fates Allow

Deb Zuroski, , , , 3 Comments

As I stood at the window a little after noon today, a tufted titmouse landed on the sill. We looked at each other for a moment before he warbled a sweet note and flew off, leaving behind only two small bird footprints in the snow that has been falling steadily for several hours. 

I’ve been thinking about friends and family. Certain lyrics — “…we all will be together, if the fates allow” — resonate. I miss my distant family deeply. More than once this year, I have had to argue myself out of going to events that I wanted to attend with a longing that nineteenth century writers expressed so well because they knew what we’ve forgotten, that sometimes you cannot be where you want more than anything to be.  

Although we are not religious, we decorate a tree every Christmas. Many of the ornaments are pictures of family or are handmade, like the pictured snowflake from my mother-in-law. We bought this year’s tree from Gene, a veteran who sells fresh cut trees in a small parking lot behind a gas station in the East Liberty neighborhood. 

It’s as seedy as it sounds and Gene may be the nicest man you’ll ever meet. In his 70s, he’s tall with the ramrod spine of a man who spent some serious time in uniform and he barks orders like he’s still wearing the insignia of a leader. My kids aren’t used to authority figures and they were delighted by his “you do this” and “you carry that” teasing demands. Perhaps we would not have made particularly good soldiers but we jumped to obey his commands as though we were. We talked about him the entire ride home and agreed that, if the fates allow, we’ll buy from him again next year. 

If the fates allow … 

Tristan’s 2020 Wreath

A week before the zoo was shuttered by the new closure rules, we were blessed to make our annual wreaths at their fundraiser. They changed the structure this year, reducing attendance to 3 masked families at a time and using their auditorium to ensure that we had a lot of social distancing. The four of us shared a big round table, laughing and teasing each other while we decorated our wreaths.

Haley’s 2020 Wreath

I took lots of pictures of my three blessings as they leaned into each other and discussed their creations. Then, we squealed (okay, Haley and I squealed) over the prehensile-tailed porcupine named Rianna who was happy to eat her dried mango and pose for pictures (per the handler, don’t touch her tail unless you want to spend the rest of your day pulling quills from your torso). 

Ian’s 2020 Wreath

Ian’s wreath is a treatise on the failures of capitalism in a pandemic. It’s not outdoor-friendly so we’re using it as a table wreath to maintain its quality. Also, it can’t hang because it’s very heavy!

Might have a poem to share before year-end. It depends a lot on my brain which is a dangerous thing to rely on these days.

Wear a mask. Stay safe. Don’t let your guard down; we still have months to go before the vaccine is widely distributed. 

Wishing you all the best.

If The Fates Allow

BOO!

Deb Zuroski, , , , , 1 Comment

I woke up at 5:30 in the morning recently with two phrases swirling around in my brain. One of them, “mourning for one’s self,” is from the poem “Melancholia” by C. Dale Young. The other, “slip this skin,” is from the Bruce Springsteen song, “Streets of Philadelphia.” Did you make the same connection I made — growth, change, fear? I wrote most of the poem right then, in my phone’s notes app. It still needs some polishing but I like the idea it represents. 

The last month has been busy. I’ve been submitting poems to a variety of poetry festivals and literary journals. In addition, I’m STILL editing the novel I finished. Plus, I just finished the first draft of a picture book. I’m absolutely in love with the main character so I’m going to put the story away for a couple weeks. I can’t edit my little guy until he’s no longer in my head. 

Like poetry, picture books rely on a small number of words to convey their message. Having grown up as a writer in the minimalist writing movement, I really appreciate the goal of requiring every word to matter, every word to carry a significant amount of the weight of the idea. Have you ever listened to an audiobook and been suddenly yanked out of the story by a word that is just wrong? When you’re writing 100,000 words, an untidy word here or there is pretty easy to miss and less impactful than in a story or poem that’s 100 words long. 

I’ve been working on sestinas lately. The form is really challenging: six stanzas of six lines each and a final tercet, which is a three-line stanza. 

That isn’t what makes it challenging. The six final words of the first stanza are the final words (in a changing order) of each stanza of the poem. For example: 

Apples red (A)
Sunshine yellow (B)
Leaves green (C)
Sky blue (D)
Clouds grey (E)
Puppy brown (F)

Earth brown (F)
Blood red (A)
Eyes grey (E)
Sunshine yellow (B)
Ocean blue (D)
Grass green (C)

Motion-sick green (C)
Chocolate brown (F)
Depression blue (D)
Flame red (A)
Butter yellow (B)
Stone grey (E)

Do you see the pattern for the next three stanzas? The ending tercet is usually AB, CD, EF, though it’s a little more flexible than the overall form. The challenge of a sestina is conveying the idea without becoming repetitious or overly rhythmic. My first try at this form was almost a chant and very frustrating. 

All poetry forms take a lot of practice honestly. I’ve said before that Jericho Brown’s Duplex form, which involves a word re-use somewhat similar to the sestina, is wrenching to work in. The Duplex form is two-line stanzas which, according to my son, is so fast-paced and immersive the reader can’t catch their breath. Jericho Brown deserved the Hell out of that Pulitzer.

One of the forms I find immensely frustrating is haiku, which I may have mentioned before. My  husband was particularly good at it and, worse, he made it look easy. Some people describe the form as “single breath poetry.” For example, here is a haiku I wrote recently:

Autumn leaves falling
To a migrating wing beat
Wintersong calling

I’m annoyed by the rhyme of the first and third stanzas but I like the staccato sound, which matches the rhythmic imagery of leaves falling and wings beating as birds fly south. 

Speaking of migration, we have a problem in our house: migrating critters. I’ve found four mice and a chipmunk on the first floor in the past month. I’m sorry to report that I was not alone in the finding. There were two pups (the third disdains hunting rodents) and three cats involved. No critters survived the event, unfortunately. 

Finding five leads me to a passionate interest in knowing how many small creatures have successfully moved in. We’ve not previously had unauthorized tenants. I have thus informed the pets that they are failing to cover the cost of their residency and that I expect better work from them. They have all responded with wags but I am not optimistic since they immediately went to sleep after our discussion. 

It’s time to get back to work. I’m writing a middle grade horror short. It’s a commissioned project that doesn’t pay particularly well but I am enjoying the exercise of writing horror. 

Have a delightfully spooky day and, please, wear your mask….

And, you know, VOTE.

BOO!

Take Up Space

Deb Zuroski, , , , , 8 Comments

In 2013, Terry Tempest Williams wrote a book called When Women Were Birds. I haven’t read the book (I’ll get to it but the “to be read” stack is already going to kill me if it falls over while I’m sleeping) but the title cries out to me. It swirls in my head like windswept leaves taunting the freshly raked lawn. I have started so many times to write a poem using that imagery that each version now has a numbered title. They are collected in their own folder in my storage. I keep telling myself I will wrestle this poem into some shape. However, what I actually need to do, I think, is give it time and space, let it take flight. And I mean that in both the most pun-y and literal way.

I’ve been following, over the last 24 hours, an interesting and sad example of erasure of women in power. Having myself struggled both to be heard and to be given credit in past leadership roles, I feel a lot of empathy for Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Sleeping Giants. If you aren’t familiar, it’s worth looking into it just to read her article and her co-founder’s shameful “life is really hard for me” non-apology.

Anyway, for all the women and girls who have been told you are “too bossy” and that you “will get recognition, we promise” and that your male colleagues are “more relatable” and, my personal favorite, that “you’d be prettier if you wore makeup,” I’ve been working on a poem. Tell me what you think of it.

Take up space
Oh, you beautiful girl
Spread your arms
Widen your stance
Lift your chin
Choose your place

Raise your voice
Oh, you warrior queen
Call your truth
Speak your song
Spread your words
Live your choice

Dance your dance
Oh, you wondrous woman
Mark your time
Set your beat
You are those who came before
You are all who take the chance 

Wear a mask because you’re not a monster.

Much love.

Take Up Space

Thanks, Sam Neill, For the Inspiration

Deb Zuroski, , , 2 Comments

Sometimes, I’ll read or hear something that takes root in my head. Maybe a week ago, Sam Neill — yes, that Sam Neill — posted a video on Twitter about his Gran. Several times during the 2 minute video, he called her “a lovely old thing” as he talked about how blessed he was to have lived with her briefly when he was about 7 years old. This poem is about my “lovely old thing,” my paternal grandmother, Myrtle, who died when I was 17.

She Was a Lovely Old Thing

She never walked when she could
Stomp or glide or march, mowing down
Every obstacle, physical or mental
No doubt or hesitation, ever 
Stayed her hand or her feet 
Or her voice 

If there was music she was dancing
And when there was silence she was still dancing
Though you probably wouldn’t know why and
She wouldn’t tell you because 
Your opinion didn’t matter and  
She would even say that if you asked

When she walked in the room
People sat up straighter and
Waved, even if she wasn’t looking
And if she stopped beside you and
Put her hand on your shoulder
You knew what a blessing was

So far as I know 
She was never afraid of anything
Though of course she was 
But she would never, ever let it 
Change her or alter how
We were allowed to see her 

She lived fiercely and when she got sick
I didn’t know what that meant and
Then, when she died 
The sun fell out of the sky
And I finally understood 
What she’d been saying all along
Thanks, Sam Neill, For the Inspiration

ConGraduations

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Today would have been our final Kennywood picnic at the school we’ve been a part of for more than 19 years. Of course our sorrow is as a paper cut to the gaping wound that is 2020 for many people. It is unfair, though, not to recognize the reality and truth of our own grieving. We join with many graduates who lost the opportunity to say good-bye to their younger, fully outgrown selves as they look toward whatever comes next. 

It was a complete shock when a group of teachers showed up at the house this afternoon with an air horn, balloons, a gift, and a graduation sign, personalized, which they stuck in the lawn. Secretly, I think my son was pleased, though his demeanor was … er, understated. 

I was thinking, last night, about our years at that school and I wrote the below short poem. There’s another thought about this bereavement floating around in my head like Emmet’s double-decker couch but when I try to grab hold, it slips away. “Pazienza, Bella,” my mother-in-law would say. She would nod as she said it and, maybe, pat the back of my hand. 

Time has stepped 
Into its wing-ed shoes
And flown
Leaving behind 
Only the deepening bereavement
Of memories

The helicopters aren’t circling outside my window today, the first time since the protests started. There were two, one higher in the sky and one low enough that sometimes I could just spot the pilot. I’ve gotten so used to their chop-chop-chop that the absence of their sound feels like a warning. I hope the rain, and not something more sorrowful, is what keeps the protesters away. Things became violent here on Monday. We could smell the smoke on the breeze as the police used gas and smoke canisters and rubber bullets on members of our community. 

Stay safe.

ConGraduations

Hummingbird

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As I sat on my little deck in my tiny backyard Friday morning, the early sun shone in a stripe on the bright pink-red flowers of our weigela bush. I looked up as I finished reading aloud a poem I had written about a hummingbird. There, hovering above the flower cups of the weigela in that brief strip of sun, was a little gray hummingbird. I watched as she lingered for a moment, sipping from various flowers, before darting off to parts unknown. 

I can’t share the poem. It’s part of a book that is currently with an agent; fingers crossed, my friends. Most of the work I’m producing right now is for specific projects and I can’t share it … this after setting myself up on Instagram to highlight some of my work, though I did post the hummingbird spoken word below that is not included in the book. 

My name is hummingbird
And I’m here to say
I don’t flap my wings 
In the usual way

I make a figure eight
Which is kinda cool
It helps me fly and hover
Yo tiny birds rule 

Most of my children’s poetry is written in quatrain, some of my more adult stuff too. If you are looking for a brain exercise, I recommend giving it a try. (It’s not hard!) Don’t try to be prophetic or deep. Just pick a subject and give it a go. I like to write poetry that makes me laugh, though, unfortunately, a lot of the stuff I end up writing is pretty sad. I think it’s just the nature of the path my feet tread. 

We had a dog guest for a few days last week. She did not enjoy her stay. My dogs didn’t enjoy her stay either, to be honest, though they accepted our guest much better than our guest accepted us. She went for walks, growled at my dogs, napped on the sofa, and tried to jump onto the kitchen counters/ dinner table. Her efforts to steal food caught me a bit by surprise. My expectation that she would eat the dog food I gave her caught her by surprise so, overall, I think we can call the experience a draw.

Although my plans went awry, I did, initially, expect to make one of my mom’s signature dishes, German potato salad, over the weekend. My kids have never had it but it was a staple growing up. For almost every picnic we ever attended, Mom made German potato salad and lemonade cake. 

In my memory of cutting up the onions for the potato salad (my least favorite childhood job, perhaps tied with grating cabbage for coleslaw), my mom is still younger than I am now, teaching me the difference between onions for meatloaf and onions for potato salad. “Don’t chop,” memory Mom says. “Slice them thin so the warm sauce coats the onions and makes them soft.” 

Saturday, late afternoon, I discovered a tiny bunny who had somehow gotten herself trapped in the window well. The kids took charge and, after putting on gloves, they rescued the baby, who screamed like she was being targeted by a hawk. She has a paw injury so we’re currently keeping her safe in a pet-free area while we await the re-opening of our local wildlife rehab center.  I must say: she has absolutely the best ears I’ve ever seen. 

One last thing: For many of us, today is a day like any other. That, my friends, is privilege.

Stay safe. 

Hummingbird

Making the Shift

Deb Zuroski, Leave a comment

I had an idea this morning for a story in verse and I really, really want to work on it right now. Not possible though. I have a lot of writing projects in flight at the moment and I’m also trying to write a poem a day (still going strong!). On top of that, I’m super excited to be attending a virtual writer’s conference in July. I will be meeting telephonically with an agent through the conference — this is a big deal and I need to be at my best. Gulp.  

I have to give the agent my revised first chapter in a couple weeks. And Jooney is NOT behaving. We are going to have a falling out because I’m going to speak to her very sternly about her recalcitrance. Jooney is, unfortunately, a typical teenager so she’s absolutely going to half-listen to my scolding and then completely disregard everything I said. Maybe she’ll nod and agree during the discussion but I know that she’s secretly rolling her eyes, EVEN if she admits (unlikely) that what I’m saying is true. So, anyway, I’m devoting myself to polishing her story until it is so high-gloss that the agent is absolutely blinded by its brilliance. HA

It’s time to start marketing my work. Many years ago, I was a self-employed writer and editor. The work was fun and (mostly) interesting, though it was in the time of desktop publishing and every single customer thought s/he was an undiscovered design genius. The two things I hated about that life were: billing customers and marketing myself. I got lots of word-of-mouth business but that isn’t an effective operating model. The need to market myself didn’t disappear when I entered the corporate world and I was equally bad at it then! However, it is one of the most critical components of this new career I’ve chosen. 

Therefore, I’m going to market the heck out of myself in all my weird … er, glory. Yes, yes, glory. That’s what it is. Anyway, after Jooney and I have a chat this afternoon, I’ll be posting some poems to my Instagram account. If you feel some slight seismic tremors, it might just be me making a social media impact (I’m so sorry). Or, you know, it might be an earthquake, in which case you should find somewhere safe to shelter. 

Either way, I would appreciate your continued support. I hope you’ll keep following the blog and that you’ll hop over to Instagram, @BuffySlayer579, to read my poetry. (Yo, vampires rule!) Followers are important metrics in the publishing world; so, please also consider following me on Instagram if you like what I’m doing; and you know, you can tell your friends how awesome I am too, if you’d like.

I’ve got a couple new poems lined up so I can publish every few days in the beginning. Even when the poem flows out of my brain and onto the digital paper, I like to let it sit for later tweaking. I think I mentioned that one of my favorite new authors, Kwame Mbalia, (Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky) tweeted that he wrote a chapter one day and still liked it the next day. Talk about achievement unlocked; my gosh, I dream of that moment.

Okay, enough procrastinating …. Hey, Jooney, it’s time for that talk.

Much love. Be safe.

Making the Shift

Ivy and Avocados

Deb Zuroski, , , , , 2 Comments

Our house is very old, a double-walled brick monstrosity built in the 19th century. It’s wonderful, with its wavy windows and hardwood floors with visible nail heads. 

The house is painted and there’s only one place to see the color of the bricks, a single exposed kitchen wall. The bricks there are deeply red and pink and reddish brown. They are different sizes too and you can see where the bricklayers used mortar to even things out. Sometimes, when I walk through the rooms, I think about how many feet have trod those floors, how many voices have been absorbed into the walls, how many people have lived and died here, how many teenagers have forgotten that the third step from the bottom squeaks at about 120 dB.

There are many, many inconveniences that come with an older house. It was originally heated only with fireplaces, which means that it’s cold year-around, except in my attic bedroom which is freezing all winter and hotter than a glass kiln from May until November. The electricity was added in the early 1900s and outlets must have been quite a luxury because there are only like 10 in the whole house. As the house shifts and groans through the seasons, the doors stop fitting properly into their door frames. Several of the door knobs only work occasionally which might keep you in or out of a room without warning. On top of all that, the basement walls are limestone and they weep like a grandmother who has buried all her children.

Our house also comes with an extraordinary abundance of bricks. When we first moved in, I was going to plant a vegetable garden in the back. It was terribly overgrown but I like to dig in the dirt so I was ready for the challenge. Two weeks after we moved in, I pushed my way through the weeds, armed with gloves and tools, and discovered, after significant clearing, a brick patio under all that overgrowth. I felt as though I had unearthed ancient treasure. 

It’s still there, years later, but it hasn’t been the treasure I was expecting. It quickly becomes overgrown every year by the encroaching ivy that some evil, evil gardener planted. The ivy grows under the bricks and then pushes up between them, destabilizing the patio and destroying my confidence. Each spring, I roll up my sleeves and give myself a pep talk:  “This is the year, dearest; this is YOUR year. You are going to conquer that ivy. You are smarter than that ivy; you are better than that ivy. You have opposable thumbs. GO. GO. GO.”  

Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be my year for conquering the ivy but we have decided, at least, to embrace that extraordinary brick abundance, currently tucked in every conceivable hiding place. They line some of the garden beds; the Hostas push their way through every year (so do all the weeds, I assure you). They are stacked against the fence and the outside walls of the house. They’re piled in the weedy back and under the deck. They’re everywhere you want to be, just like Visa but without the purchase options. So you think you want to add tulip bulbs to that garden bed? How much do you want to move the 30 bricks stacked there?

What are we planning to do with all those bricks, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you! We’re building a dry-laid container garden. And, oh, what a task it has turned out to be. The weeds! The tree roots! Leveling the ground! The weight of the bricks! We have blisters on our blisters but we’re finally, as of yesterday evening, at the point where we can see the future image of our completed container, which is something of a reward in itself. 

I’ve been working on some new poetry. The poems are kind of a spoof of pop culture poems. When I get stuck, as all writers do, I’ll take a break from one project and move to another. Recently, I’ve been focused on food-based poetry, an unexplored poetic theme, in my opinion. Here is a poem I wrote on Saturday: 

It’s That Simple

Life is an avocado
Don’t bake it
Slice it and
Smear it on some toast

I have no idea what that means but I laugh every single time I read it (so embarrassing to laugh at one’s own writing).

Find a moment of joy today and savor it. 

Much love. Stay safe.

Ivy and Avocados