4-3

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Keely

The little porkers are getting friendlier by the day. I managed to pet one while it was snoozling the other day, and they didn’t scamper away when we went into the pen earlier this evening.

Coming back to school from break has been challenging. Waking up before sunrise every morning doesn’t feel sensible anymore, and spending all day inside feels like madness when the weather is perfect. The mosquitoes aren’t out in force yet, and I spent an hour this evening reading on the lawn in the purple shade, soaking up the bike-riding light, the t-shirt temperatures, the silence of butterflies on the purple flowers in the grass and the smell of yesterday’s rain. The redbuds are blooming like confetti in the understory, and the sassafras tree by our steps has these peculiar firework flowers. Trees are poised to leaf out at a moment’s notice, hazel alder catkins are dripping from branches everywhere, and the quince in the side yard is electric pink. I don’t know how to describe the smell of the wind, but it feels like a warm washcloth on your forehead.

Seeing my kids again has made me happy. I missed their ingenuousness and their contrasting self-consciousness. I missed their jokes and their smiles and the ways they express their frustration. I love teenagers, especially my teenagers. I’m feeling inspired this week, which is a pleasant change from the frustrated apathy I’ve been feeling toward my job recently. Geometry has been awesome and conceptual. I wouldn’t say they’re all grasping the material, but I can confidently say that several of them are grasping it at a high level, and most of them are grasping it adequately. Algebra has been okay. My 7th period is a train wreck right now, but my first and fourth are doing impressive work with quadratics. I have a few students who have made incredible strides this year, and I know that if I hit PEMDAS and writing expressions hard next year (hard = ton of bricks vs. tower of eggs) I’ll see some real magic happen.

When I got home tonight, the piggies had snurfled dirt up over the lowest electric wire of the fence and joined the chickens in the chicken yard. Bad Pork! I chased them back in and collected eggs, noticing the carpenter bees bumbling around the eaves for the first time this year. Freckles is still on her eggs, fluffing up to approximately a cubic foot and gurgling every time someone enters the chicken house. We expect her eggs to hatch within the next ten days.
Look at all those eggs! These birds are out of control!
You can see our automatic chicken door in the background, which has been an absolute life saver and, along with the solar fence charger, one of most useful technological advances in farming since the dibbler.

We had dinner yesterday at Pizza Hut in Helena to help a friend fundraise to bring some of her Spanish students to Costa Rica. You can help her out by making a donation here. On the ride home, Sean and I almost finished listening to Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. We couldn’t stop, so we finished up while we washed dishes together. The book was beautifully written (another win for Gary D. Schmidt, who has a gift for motifs that astonishes me every time) and told a story about my home state that I had never heard before. Mainer or not, you should check out the book, but if you’re a Mainer, you should make a point to learn about Malaga Island.

Look what was raiding the critter-food bin! The flash scared it off… for now. Dang things have those cute little hands and they always figure out how to get into our feed. Sean is going to put something heavy (like our fat cats?) onto the food bin to thwart the varmints.

The Blue Door

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Keely

Spring is the right time to paint your door blue. I worked on things today that might have felt frivolous in the summer or fall: I cleared the poison ivy from a long-neglected rose bush, cut and arranged three kinds of daffodil, and painted my front door. I napped in the sunshine with my belly to the sky and I walked through the pasture to the house next door.

The daffodils still come up in the spring along each straight edge of a long-gone path to the steps. Who lived here once? This house and ours are close together by country standards, and similar in design. In the present, our nearest neighbors are a mile on either side, but this house is the last ghost of something of a neighborhood. The occupants must have been friends or kin to the Lyles, the original owners of our place. Did they work in each other’s gardens and picnic in the pasture together? Did they borrow this and that and forget to return it and eventually forget who it belonged to to begin with? Did they fight and feud and make up? Did their kids play together in the woods? There are stories in the short, pretty walk across the pasture.

Spring is a season of thresholds. Everything is on its way to being something else, and everyone is on the road. A couple of friends rolled in late on Monday night and were gone in the morning like the last frost. We have other guests right now too, though these are less welcome.

The ladybugs sound like a heavy rain, smacking their bodies against the windowpanes to reach the sun. They drown themselves in our tea and crawl up our legs at night. Sean claims he pulled one out of his pocket at school the other day. They get into our towels, and, when I got out of the shower this afternoon, I accidentally crushed one against my body and choked on its sharp odor. I think we’re going to try vacuuming them up and letting them go in the garden.
The garden, too, is on its way to being something else. It’s in that phase just before everything springs out of the ground in spades. The lettuce is growing slow now, but it’s eager, and the more it grows the faster it will become. Plants are wonderfully exponential.

When Sean got home from school, we gardened. He tilled while I raked, and we each took a turn mulching the aisles with straw. I planted cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower starts from the feed store, and we tucked in a row of onions together.

screen door swings the breeze
halfway through this blue doorway
laughing with goosebumps

Spring Saturday

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Keely

I’ve been wanting to paint the front door since we moved in. It’s going to be blue for luck.

Sean made bacon, eggs and cornmeal pancakes for breakfast while I worked on the door. The smell of bacon frying made me smile. Spring is really here: I worked all morning with the front door open and a chill breeze blowing dust out of the corners of the ceiling; there are flowers coming up under the tree where we slaughtered Pinkie last fall, and the hennies are laying five eggs a day. We can’t keep up with production, so if you’re an Arkansan, we’re selling homestead eggs for $3 a dozen. All proceeds go to chicken feed.

Smells: bacon frying, rosemary oil snapping out of dry twigs as I cut away the dead, lemongrass and rot, fresh mint lingering on my hands from pulling out dead stalks and discovering new beneath; exhaust from the tiller as it roared and pulled. We planted coneflowers, hollyhocks and bachelor’s buttons. Lettuce and peas are sprouting now, and the quince is flowering.

There are a thousand
things I should do
buttons to button
not frilled with blue
practical things
in a practical queue
things without ruches
in that coneflower hue
but despite all the things
that I really must do
there’s nothing I’d rather
than plant flowers with you

Pterodactyls

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Keely

In Arkansas, birds in chevrons unzip the winter sky, always on their way to some finer place. Maybe they’re going someplace with topography. From time to time, on my way home, I’ve seen whole fields carpeted with white acres of snow geese, invariably melted by morning. One day this winter there were hundreds of seagulls fishing in the lake. On Thursday, there were a handful of handsome white pelicans, drifting like dignified marshmallows in the fog over the water.
I had a praxis in Helena this morning, so I took the low road and drove slow with the radio up and the windows down. I’ve come to love country music since I came to live here: I like songs about badass ladies, loving men, bare feet, dirt roads, skinny dipping, hard work, and campfires. I also like bad puns. There are still no leaves on the trees, but today had the feel of a spring Saturday, and with Sean on a field trip, I had the world to myself. After my test, I picked up snacks in town and had a picnic at the rookery. The rookery is miles of pitted dirt from anything, and the sun was shining on Carro’s roof like the bat signal. I heeded the message and hopped up, snacking on chips, basking in the sunshine, reading, gazing up at the blue sky framed by the bare cypress and water tupelo, and tuning in to the barred owls, the absence of human noise, and the occasional cry of a prehistoric monster from the treetops.

We think they’re wood storks, but we haven’t gotten close enough to be sure. They nest in the bald cypress and they are magnificent. They’ve been gone all winter, and I’ll take it as a sign of spring that they’re here again. One of my summer ambitions is to paddle out to their trees and collect a feather. I want to feel the panic and the cool shade on my shoulders as a pterodactyl shadow flows over me, muting the sun for seconds as a time.

P.S. Sean found a dead possum in our garbage can yesterday, and neither of us put it there! It’s a mystery: did it crawl in there before the ice storm and then die of exposure? Did it choke on some particularly nasty bit of refuse?

Snow Day

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Keely

The plastic blew off of our garden in the night. Poor baby greens are under an inch of ice. Goodbye, spring salad.

As predicted, the daffodils were hit hard by the ice storm. They’re beautiful as they are now, a lesson in impermanence and a study in fragility.

We went for a hike in the woods this morning. Our house was cold, and we knew we’d have to leave the country until our power is back on, so we decided to take advantage of the day off and spend some time out in the woods. We don’t get to enjoy our back yard often, and during the last ice storm, we had to settle for driving through the sparkling forest on our way to and from school. It was painful, spending our days indoors and watching the sun set behind the frozen tree sculptures all week. By Saturday, the ice was gone.
Sean and I bundled up in long underwear and layers of sweaters and jackets. I put on two pairs of socks to wear under my sneakers. We don’t really have winter attire here in Arkansas.

The yellow dock leaves were frozen so solid that when we kicked them, they shattered. The ice in the trees tinkled like crystal.

The grass was frozen solid, and the hill was slick. There was a huge part of me that didn’t believe that we’d actually get the sleds to move. I sat on a saucer, not expecting much, and then suddenly I was bumping down the hill, crackling the ice and shredding my gloves on the frozen grass.