greens thinnings

Good weather for thinning.  Cloudy.  Cool. Soft.  Like spring greens themselves.  Tender, too.  Helps to actually have greens to thin.  Did so in a trance.  Melodic, mellow.  Partially related to not enough sleep.  Partially related to other factors.  New neighbors in white house across street or just visiting?  Graduation party?  Never seen them before.  Damp air possibly related to muted sounds.  Work I should be doing but not.  Fuck work?  Saw a child many years ago with a Somebody in Texas Loves Me t-shirt.  Said, Doubtful.  Was a child myself.  Little asshole.  Sometimes still asshole.  Whoop-di-doo.  God will forgive me?  Bag it and tag it. 

        

Trim off root ends.  Discard into compost.  Stroke of blade through greens onto pad of thumb.  Favorite stroke.  Chef one time called said stroke "the mom technique."  John Boy, use the mom technique.  The mom technique?  Then he showed me.  Indeed had seen my own mother do it.  Technique often used while standing over trash or sink.  Plunk plunk plunk.  Important technique.  Must not forget to call mom tomorrow and wish her happy birthday.  Not sure how old.  Bad son?  Better to forget age than forget birthday.  Called sister before thinning greens and said, When's mom's birthday?  Knew it was coming soon.  Sister said, Tomorrow.  Justin's is on Wednesday.  Thanks, sis.  What would I do without you?        

Take greens inside and dunk in bowl of cold water.  Jostle.  Remove to drain.  Rinse bowl of dirt and debris.  (Sometimes little bits of dry grass.  Sometimes little maple helicopters.  Various stuff.)  Refill bowl.  Repeat process until greens are clean.  Mr Clean Greens.  Spin in roommate's salad spinner until dry.  Don't have a salad spinner?  Put greens into clean cloth, bundle up like hobo bag, take outside and spin around head.  Water will come out.  Centrifugal force.  Learned about in school.  School where can't smoke bathroom.  Can drink Coke though.  

carrying

What does it mean to carry something, to really carry something?  To carry a glass of water from one room to another?  To find a stone on the road and carry it home?  To come to the front end of a difficult day, but to find strength somewhere and carry the day?  How far can one day be carried?  How much can we carry in our minds before the bottoms of our minds give out?  When you are shopping for groceries, and you fill a bag with heavy items, the bagger will often tell you not to carry the bag by the handles but to carry it from the bottom, and so carrying is also supporting from beneath.  And how recklessly can we support something from beneath?  And how carefully can we transport something delicate?  Carry is a word that we don't often stop to think about, but carrying is something we do all the time.  And it's not just us, our hands and our machines that carry.  Birds will find a bit of straw on the ground and carry that straw to their nests.  One time I had a natural fiber doormat outside my back door, and a squirrel, strand by strand, chewed it up and carried it off until there was no more doormat.  To carry something into the distance, to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.  To cinch your books in a leather belt and carry them home from school.  I could go on. 

         
In the spring, when the trees are blooming, the wind carries their pollen around and gives us allergies, but can the wind really be said to carry anything?  Does it take a mind to carry?  Perhaps the wind has a mind of its own, and when it hoists a pollen grain into the air and carries it from tree to tree, perhaps the wind is doing something we cannot understand, and so we pin a label onto the wind.  The natural world does not use our labels.  It takes them, or so we think.  We are pinners of labels, and we carry our labels with us as we carry our histories, and we pin our histories onto the new and foreign things we come across, in part to know these things and in part to shield ourselves from ever knowing them fully.  

One time I moved from Indiana to England, and I carried an odd selection of items with me, my pepper grinder among the oddest.  My pepper grinder traveled the ocean among my clothes, my trivet among my pains.  My friend laughed about my pepper grinder and could not understand, of all things, why I would pack and carry a device to grind dried berries.  Did you think there would be no pepper grinders in England?  I shot back, Do you think that it took up that much space in my luggage?  There were surely many pepper grinders in England, but none of them were mine.  None of them had been in my hands when I stood in my difficult kitchen; and though I was leaving Indiana and would never return, I wanted to carry some of its difficult things with me.  And besides, I said to my friend, this is a nice pepper grinder.  Why spend the money on a new one?  My friend took me out for a beer and listened to my stories, listened to me carrying on.  


    

  

two birds

I don't live alone, and that means that I share a kitchen and pantry, a living room, a dining room, and a bathroom.  I share a porch and all the other little spaces, too.  The cabinet under the sink where the dish towels are, where the plastic and paper bags from grocery outings are, where the cleaning products and the trash bags are; the drawer under the kitchen counter where the knives are; the cabinet in the back of the pantry where the bulky and seldom used kitchen items are; the two boxes under the pantry shelves where the tupperware containers and jar lids are; the drawers underneath the china cabinet where the sheets of floral patterned fabric and ceramic baking dishes are; the nook beside the plant table in the front room where our guitars are; the flat surfaces throughout the apartment where little piles of junk mail and books periodically build up and disperse.  This is all normal household living.  What I don't share is the attic studio where I am now.  My roommate and his girlfriend were preparing to leave for New York when I woke up this morning.  A pot of water was boiling on the stove, my roommate's new French press loaded and ready beside it.  I put another pot of water on the stove, sang a few lines of choo-choo cha-boogie, and headed to the attic to pee.   

The attic is very cool and quiet this morning.  It's mostly uninsulated and mostly unfinished.  Old sheets of fiberglass insulation sag from the roof rafters in some places.  There are white dots of bird shit on all the windowsills.  Birds nest under the eaves of the house and sometimes find their way inside.  Twice last winter I came up here and found dead starlings on the unfinished floor by the front window.  I took the first one to the back window and threw it onto the snow, three floors down in the back yard.  The snow at the time had crusted over, and the dead starling spanked it without ceremony.  It was dead; I hadn't killed it; but still I felt as if I had done the bird some cosmic disrespect by throwing it out the window.  I figured I would find it in the spring and deal with it then.  I put the second bird into a plastic grocery bag and carried it downstairs and outside, where I dropped it in the garbage.  Both birds were dead, stone dead.  They had become objects for disposal.  I would not throw an empty beer bottle out the window, but I threw that first bird out the window.  It seemed like a small, savage act, and one that I needed to repair.  When my landlords visited in the late winter, I told them about the birds, and we made another attempt to stuff the likely holes under the eaves to prevent future birds from becoming trapped up here.    

It's not that I mind dead bodies, nor do I mind the dots of bird shit.  In fact, the live birds that sometimes inhabit this space feel like companions to me.  What bothers me is the panic the birds feel as they repeatedly slam into the front window, looking for egress.  They come in assuming that they can come out, but they cannot.  I have shooed many trapped birds out.  They are all nervous.  They hop around, fly onto a rafter, perch momentarily, fly onto another rafter.  I open all the windows, follow them around methodically and slowly with a broom, encouraging them toward an open window.  This attic studio is a place of peace for me.  When I come up here, my anxieties do not follow me.  It's as if they are dumbbells or heavy pieces of furniture that cannot make it up the three flights of stairs between the apartment where I live, fret and love, and the attic where I look down on the neighborhood that embraces me.  We like to think of birds as creatures that are free to soar over the world, creatures that are free of earthly troubles, but I would never want to be a terrified starling in a middling artist's studio.       
  

what can be seen

It's overcast this morning, or rather it was overcast this morning; the cloud cover is breaking up now.  The houses outside my window that only an hour ago were flat and shadowless are now reflecting enough sunlight through my window to make me consider twirling the wand on my mini-blinds to block some of that light.  I am still waking up.  These sentences are coming slowly.  I pause between my thoughts, look out the window, notice the shadows on the ground, consider the objects throwing those shadows, attempt a rough guess about the position of the sun.  I consider making a diagram of the grounds, an architectural plan centered around this window beside which I write, a plan upon which I note the position of the neighbor's garden hose and the one, sad, yellow and red tulip alongside their porch.  It seems, around here, everyone has one sad tulip.  Observations are one thing, but having something to say is something else entirely.  What can be said about a sad tulip?  How interesting can a shadow be?    

On a pleasant afternoon about a week ago, I told a friend that a sage seedling was the most interesting thing in my life at the moment.  Last summer, after my sage plants flowered and went to seed, I cut their seed tops, bundled them up with polyethylene twine, and hung them upside down from the beams of my porch so that they could blow and twirl in the wind and cast interesting shadows on the porch floor.  Most of the seeds probably dropped onto the porch and skittered to a place where they could not germinate, but some of the seeds  got tossed into the garden, and after sitting beneath the snow all winter half a dozen of them had managed to sprout. I spotted one, said holy shit, got onto my hands and knees, turned my eyes into combs, and combed the rest of the garden where I might possibly find more seedlings.  It is a private thing to crawl around in your garden, hunting for something that is less that an eighth of an inch tall.  I suppose it's a hopeful thing, too, like an ultrasound is hopeful.  To spot new life as soon as it is possible to do so seems so human to me, to look for it intently because you suspect it's there and wish for it to be there.  Or perhaps you are terrified and need to confirm your terror.  Whatever the case, we know where to look for the signs; and if we cannot see them with our naked eyes, we'll make better eyes.

  
What can be seen is not a question of vision; it's a question of attention.  I have been watching The Wire on the internet, and in one episode Bunk tells Kima that she needs to use soft eyes, that she won't be able to learn much about the corpse on the ground without them.  I hadn't heard the expression before, and I didn't understand it at the time, but I suppose soft eyes are the kind of eyes that allow you to see the full picture.  If you obsess over one or two details, you will miss the rest of them.  If you throw something into sharp focus, that which surrounds it will be hazy.  This is both optical and metaphorical truth, and I think that buried in this truth there is some lesson about relaxing and taking a thing for what it really is, which is to say that nothing exists in isolation.  Looking closely at a thing is a way to enter a bubble, and bubbles are sometimes very comforting places to be, but where there is comfort there is also the risk of losing oneself in a detail.  I think what I'm trying to say is step back and breathe.  Breathe.  The breath is real.  Rub a sage leaf and smell it deliberately.  There is nothing else.  The future does not really exist, won't ever actually exist, but don't act as if this were true.  You will soon wake up and find you have no coffee.                          

alleyways

I don't have much to write about this morning, but I want to write.  The question then becomes, What do you write about when you have nothing to write about, when nothing is so pressing that you must write?  Do you choose some arbitrary subject and attempt a few ideas about it?  Perhaps I should go out into the world and walk around.  The premise is simple: we must exist in the world before we can write about it.  The same is true of memory: no memories come without existence.  Should I write about memory this morning?  My window is open.  I can hear some birds, but my keystrokes are louder than they are.  

            
If you look very closely at this photograph, you will see that there is a cat seated on the porch.  Look at the very left-hand side of the porch, at the top of the steps.  I was not aware of the cat when I took this picture—god—I think ten years ago.  I would only find out about the cat after I printed the picture.  I had a dark room back then.  Once a week at best, I checked my hotmail account at the public library.  Was I living on Madison or Fairview?  I am not sure.  When I look beyond 2007, exact dates detach themselves from my memory, and I remember only the era, the spring when I walked around town and took photographs of my favorite houses.  I was unemployed, but I had money in the bank.  That was rare.  It was a rare spring.    

This is the back of my house on Madison street.  The dark roof in the foreground is the shed.  We kept tools in there, and my roommate would smoke pot in there.  I look at the trees in this picture, and I know that the picture was taken in the early spring.  The trees had not leafed out yet.  To the right of the house (your vantage point) a gravel alleyway sloped uphill from the street and divided our yard from the neighbor's yard.  Bloomington Indiana has many such gravel alleyways, unofficial streets that divide the blocks into four roughly equal quadrants, and I would walk those gravel alleyways a lot, admiring the homes and gardens, stirring up dogs, and acknowledging neighbors in their semi-private back yards, a Pentax K1000 slung around my neck.  I might not have known it at the time, but those alleyways that abut so many homes give Bloomington so much of its charm.  

       
I should say that I misused those alleys more than once to build my first gardens.  Bloomington has a semi-rural feel, and while some people do put their best face forward, toward the street, it is not such a private place that people try to hide every fact of their existence.  On my walks I would spot piles of old bricks and plants that had gone to seed, and I would sometimes return later to collect what felt like communal property.  In milk crates that I had also considered communal property, I hauled off the bricks I needed to build the border of my first garden.  I was poor, or I considered myself poor enough to choose which minor infractions applied to me and which did not.  I would like to think that I returned to the community as much as I took from it.

   
What interests me most about the spring when I took these pictures is that the person who took them and the person who is writing about taking them feel like two completely separate people now.  I know I lived there in Indiana and took these pictures, and I know what I did there, who my friends were, and what my life was like; and I am still in touch with some of those friends, but we greet each other through the internet now, whereas before they used to walk unannounced through our open doors.  We never locked our doors.  In spring and summer our doors were wide open, and friends could come and go as freely as flies and air.       
    

What's New?

I had the good fortune to sit on my front porch yesterday afternoon and tell a friend why I allow some weeds in my garden, which weeds I shun and which I adore, what a front yard garden is good for (it's good for producing a gift economy among neighbors), what I would do if I owned this house, how I would transform the west side of the house, what I could do in the back and what I want to do in the back (chickens), and so on and so forth for a couple hours over a couple jars of wine, the sun about to slip behind the houses toward North street.  In short, a gratifying afternoon spent in good company in the place where I feel most confident and satisfied in this life in which I often furrow my brow or pinch that small patch of loose skin above my nose and between my two brown eyes.  A spring afternoon in New England can make anybody wonder why they ever considered moving to a sprawling city where eighteen million people live in what would have remained a desert had an engineer named Mulholland and a bunch of developers not figured out how drain a valley of its water, divert that water, and turn this desert into 21st century Los Angeles.  This is not to put Los Angeles down.  It is only to say that while on vacation there in March I kept looking for a house where I could replicate, approximately, what I already have here in Massachusetts, which is to say a porch with a garden abounding from it.  So here I am, presenting to the world wide web, more pictures of my garden and the neighborhood that surrounds it.  A part of me wants to copy a post from this time last year and pass it off as something new.  What difference would it make?  Who would know or care?  What has changed since this time last year?

What's new is one of those vexing questions that all of us get asked from time to time, especially when we're among acquaintances who care enough to ask, who don't have enough energy to compose an original question, or who ask the question because they know it almost always delivers the safe and predictable answer, Oh, not much really; how about you?  If you don't have growing children, or an aging pet, or a pregnant wife, or a fast-paced career, or a budding romance, or sick parents, or rambunctious and unpredictable neighbors, or one of the many other things that reliably throw life for a loop, then you can tell whomever it is that not much is new, that nothing noteworthy is happening at the moment, that your life is pretty much the same now as it was this time last year, and this can be a great way to conceal, sometimes even from yourself, what's really happening in your life and, even better, what's on your mind.  Nothing much.  How about you?  

         
I am re-reading Stan Crawford's book, A Garlic Testament, and a passage that jumped out at me the first time I read the book jumped out at me again today:

There is a kind of knowledge that can be obtained only by a long succession of small or even absentminded observations and which remains so private that you fail to see it for what it is, and so entangled is it in a habitual activity spread out over many years.   

At a party recently at Flying Object I got to tell a stranger what would happen to this garden—and how quickly it would happen—if I were ever to leave it, as I eventually must.    There are so many different chores that I must do to maintain and develop this garden, but the list of those chores has been so privately and silently developed over the years, I would be hard pressed to enumerate them, and the person listening would likely lose interest in one minute, which is exactly what happened the other night when I started talking about the wild yarrow that must be checked each year lest it take over the garden.  So yeah, not much at all is new.  Late April is always late April.  A small comfort to be sure.    

moody afternoon