mantisphiles

May 20, 2017

Out of the dark ages…..

Today I transplanted two shrubs. One was a viburnum that “volunteered” into my yard, of course in the wrong spot. About five feet tall, I had to wrestle through creeping sumac and tree roots to remove and rehome it. The second shrub for relocation was a beautiful pure white rose of sharon, called White Chief. I planted this pup a few years ago. This year, for some reason I noticed it had grown ‘wonky’. This roughly eight foot shrub was growing at almost a 45 degree angle.

I was flummoxed by the growth trajectory of this beauty. It needed to be moved and righted as it was now tangling with other shrubs in my mixed hedgerow.

After completing that fairly daunting task, I was thinking about how it had come to grow at such an extreme angle. Had it shifted after planting? Did I plant it so the crown was pointed almost due east? Did she just decide she didn’t like her circumstances and was moving on out?

As I thought about it, my brain said, ‘you planted it in the Dark Ages, that’s why you don’t know’. The Dark Ages.

Indeed.

The Dark Ages. Five years. Followed by 1+ of treading water and getting bearings, feeling the waves kind of subside.

As I considered my Dark Ages, it dawned on me what followed the Dark Ages.

I am singing again and the voice is getting stronger, the musicianship is becoming clearer and easier. And the garden?

I am going out on a limb here, but here goes. There is a lot of research in the sentience and empathy of plants. Go ahead and laugh, you’re welcome!

Plants are now shown to recognize specific predators so they can respond with the appropriate defense. They recognize family groups, they recognize beneficial beings other than themselves. I have had a lifelong belief, well before this scientific research, that plants know we are here. My modus operandi has long been not just to talk to my plants, but to speak to them specifically, to touch them much like one might a good friend.

The spring of 2017 has been off the charts, everything is lush and big and robust, despite a late frost. Intellectually, I can argue it’s because of the early spring, combined with a mild winter. Or even the cumulative result of several mild winters.

This year I feel “awake”….is it possible, the garden has been biding in the Dark Ages and now it’s awake too? Does it feel its mistress awakening and know the time is now?

Renaissance……!

Indeed.

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April 17, 2017

The Seven Year Itch

With enough frequency to draw notice, in the last few months I have been asked the question, ” How long has it been….”, and there has been no need for a completion of that question. I knew immediately what the questioner was asking, the countdown has been like the Times Square countdown clock on New Year’s Eve. Now I am feeling as if I might be the portal to a palpable space time wrinkle, other folks feeling my clock.

Seven years. Almost.

Done a lot of scratching in the mining of my soul. Finding the will to live. Facing impossible truths. Scratching the hives left by so many peeled onions, only to find many more fields of them to go. Seven years of scratching.

Never knew I had so much itch.

I itch to learn to trust, others and even more so, myself.

I itch to lean into this life I’ve built on the edge of the volcano. (Don’t mind the heat, baby, just enjoy the beauty, the power.)

I itch to binge watch my life to see where this amazing, convoluted plot has been taking me.

I itch to have the life I jettisoned. I itch to accept the life I have carved from the now, vein by vein.

I itch to immerse myself in beauty.

I itch for companionship.

I itch to know who the real me is.

I itch to converse with Lincoln; with MLK; with Walt; with God.

I itch to just have it be over because sometimes the scratching is just too damn hard.

I live, therefore I itch.

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November 27, 2016

Vissi D’arte

Wrote this a while back, just found it and thought it still works, still has truth………..

Never cared much for opera. Still don’t. But the training was classical and everyone told me I had the voice for it. Until the day I was told I would never really make it at the Met. I had this tell tale jaw wobble. “Bummer” since I really wanted to sing on Broadway, but I processed the tunes, none really sticking. Until I met Tosca.

I lived for art, I lived for love.

I thought it made us bullet proof, pun not intended. Love. Love deep and profound. Love preventing the ugliness of life from making inroads. My rod and my staff, love. Love explained everything, made sense of everything, bright lined the work and decisions of life. Love. Beauty. Art.

Love of beauty and art we had in spades. Museums, Merchant Ivory films, Miles Davis, mist lifting from a farm field in autumn, a small backwater town on a sleepy summer day.

Like Tosca, I sacrificed. There were things more important than dancing and friends and Broadway shows. There was love, and there were no sacrifices. None that mattered. I stopped lifting my voice to heaven and put my shoulder to the wheel. There were milestones to catch.

Our engine caught fire, eating mileage, gaining ground. We were moving, moving towards that bright shiny ring, just ahead.

I lived for love.

Clear now, what is missed is love. Love cloaked, enveloped, made us whole. The feeling what I did mattered, contributed to our universe, contributed to the whole. We were special. Protected. Unique. To one person I was the universe, and my universe was him. Worlds without end.

2008, 2009 when I felt the love was gone? Thought he was leaving me, waited for the shoe. Then decided it was time to heal myself. Maybe if I dropped some weight. Work on me, try harder. Nothing took. Love was dying and I was fumbling with the CPR

It was the rapine slaughter by the dregs of the world that killed it. Silent, invisible, deadly.

I miss love. I miss its palpability in my everyday ordinary. I miss it in taking out the trash and mowing the grass, singing a song badly but with gusto. I miss the pull of its invisible threads binding me to a bigger reality.

I have struggled with loss and grief, suicide and alcohol. So much bottled up, a vintage not for this year, this decade, this world. And in the end, I lived for love, would have died for love, and still, even now, question whether I actually had it or not. Question why I cannot follow in the footsteps of my hero, my Tosca. Am I too weak, am I too strong, did I not really love?

I have lived for art, I have lived for love. Lived and lost.

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June 25, 2016

Bad Ju-Ju

Here it is, 2016. It’s not as if it’s the whole 60 days. Anticipation begins Memorial day. The first hurdle, June 3. The last, July 11. Not really a whole two months. But my life is no longer on linear time and June/July feel like a lifetime.

Unless you’ve put on my big sweaty shoes, and there would be no reason to do so, no, you would’t know.

2016. We would have been married 30 years. Early retirement would have been the conversation du jour. He’d have been 60. I would have worked a few more years and then a rollicking 24/7 us.

Instead, a life barricaded with guilt and anxiety and loss and history.

It’s not as if strides haven’t been made. Progress has indeed been charted. Milestones met. Moving ahead. Things and times, they are a-changing. Everything but me.

Taking a few moments last night on the deck, in the corner of my eye he came through the shaded side yard, and before my eye could even register, my heart knew. As I turned to greet, gone. But I knew. I know.

Bad Ju-Ju, made better.

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January 19, 2016

Pilgrim’s Progress

Every newcomer gets the same schpiel. There was nothing here when we moved in, except mature trees. It’s hard to internalize the work, plants and time altering this homeplace. Time and an eroded memory made me start to question what progress indeed has been. There has certainly been a lot of back and forth in this dance, but how much ground has really been covered?

I stumbled across some pictures of my little arboretum, taken about the time it was purchased, early May, 2000. The house was purchased more for the possibilities and the amenities than curb appeal.

Front

West

East

Stick built in 1960, one of the first in this new country estate plat outside of Dayton. Cedar and brick, definitely mid century modern, but also with some hollas out to Frank Lloyd and the early century brotherhood. A project house, inside and out.

Outside there were oaks, locusts, linden and silver maples. Apparently the folks from whom we purchased had been told to boost the curb appeal. Curb appeal translated into purchasing eight very small boxwoods and plopping them around the drip line of the house. One of the first changes I inflicted was moving those boxwoods into a hedge on the east side of the house. About the time they reached maturity, they were heavily infested with white fly and mites. I have learned to hate boxwood and will never willingly have them in my landscape.

What a difference a decade (or so) has made.

This space became my outlet, my sanctuary. Two sides of my roughly acre lot have mixed plantings, 200′ x 6′. (I learned Great Dixter’s beds are 200X20, I need to catch up). Beds now surround the house and all the trees. A particularly wooded area with an ancient crab apple, now sorely in decline, has been embraced with shade lovers. A lot of sweat, trial and error, time and ………. dollars. “Estate” trees, code for self seeding volunteers, redbuds were moved to the west side along the drive, alternating with limelight hydrangeas. Fast growers, the redbuds have created quite a screen. Giving weight and age to a blank slate. The west side of the house almost unrecognizable compared to it’s year 2000 genesis.

The year Hurricane Ike exacted vengeance on Ohio, a 50 foot scraggly white pine was lost, luckily taking nothing else with it. In its wake, an opportunity to “spruce’ up this island bed in the front of the house. While it took a couple iterations to get it right, it’s now filled with mahogany leaved paper birch, witchhazels and grasses.

The borders I added on two long sides of the property were achieved with massive amounts of chopped fall leaves and layers of cardboard. The plantings are mixed. Lilacs, roses of sharon, nine bark creating the backbone; shrubs and sub shrubs like caryopteris, mock orange, daphne and roses filling in at their feet. This doesn’t comprise all the plants but these are the repeaters that I use throughout the beds.

Terraces were built in back, since the house had been built on a “hump” on a sloping plot. Impossible to mow safely, the hump had to be eliminated. The base of the terrace is over 120′ feet long. Built from those easy construct-a-wall cement “locking” blocks, pushed a cart load at a time by me. Each block weighing about 22 pounds, I could haul nine of them at a time. Built after work and on weekends, it took quite a few months to complete.

The terraces had to have plants capable of transitioning from “bright” shade to six hours of brutal western sun exposure. The shade part was easy: hosta, a few spring bulbs, hellebores, jack in the pulpit, ferns. But as it moves west, becomes exceedingly more difficult. Some sedums worked, a couple of fairy roses held on, tall phlox pretty much overran everything. I am still trying to work out a mix.

I’ve added trees. Beyond being a tree-hugger, I am tree lover. Given a space big enough, I believe I could populate it with every tree I encountered! To date I’ve added three beautiful columnar red birches called “Obelisk”, variegated dogwoods, a couple of columnar hornbeams and some big leaf magnolias. Future trees will have to be in pots; as I age the pots I create are becoming more and more of an issue. Glutton for punishment, I bought tiny japanese maples late last year, so I’m not out of the “woods” yet!

A couple of years ago, I turned to the house. Window boxes were installed. Five, each five feet long and roughly a foot wide. Transformative!

This year was a banner year in many ways. After five years of searching for a me place, I decided to stay in the one I already created. During those years I had held back on doing much in the garden beyond maintenance. With the decision to stay, came the decision to take on two areas that had long been a burr in my saddle. They were begging for a facelift and I had ignored their pleas. So, I ordered three dump truck loads of leaves from the township, which delivered them free! Leaves and cardboard were spread, deep enough to retard the grass underneath. As my neighbors chased every leaf from their lawns with leaf blowers, I cheered the arrival of dump trucks full of them.

Front walk wall

Curbside

Since visiting Yew Dell Gardens near Louisville several years ago, I have been madly in love with paper bark maples. Rarely seen in any landscape, especially a suburban one. Smaller trees, with great fall color. The real attraction is exfoliating bark, colorful and crazy and marvelous. This year I attended a local garden show and like a bolt from heaven two vendors had two different types. There were dwarf brooms possibly attaining 5-10 feet and then a “normal” one topping out at about 20′. All of them came home with me, the dwarf brooms becoming specimens in my new curbside bed along with grasses shared from other spots in the garden. I went crazy with bulbs, a friend shared poppy starts and I found some amazing scratch and dent roses for $2 each.

Progress, progress indeed!

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February 18, 2015

Gardening, from Eden

I have been reading a lovely book, Deep-Rooted Wisdom by Augustus Jenkins Farmer, a multi-generational gardener. He speaks to the slow way, the older way of gardening and gardeners. Ways not only pragmatic, but in the new lingo, sustainable, renewable, cost effective. Taught how to root plants, save seeds, and plant by his mother, friends, grandparents, father and others. It sends tremors through my psychic web, and not in the supernatural sense. Many of these techniques I have been doing myself, in a vacuum.

While I have read quite a bit about gardening, in books and periodicals, these techniques are generally not covered and certainly not “condoned” by the folks running the Master Gardener’s course I completed. My Mom has always loved plants and we certainly had a decent sized vegetable garden for a time in my childhood. I cannot recall any gardening lessons, just the eating ones, picking a fresh tomato and sitting in the garden with the salt shaker eating it right off the vine. So, from what ether did my psyche pull these tricks?

A work table in my garage near the back door simultaneously has pieces from projects completed and not so much, other detritus working its way to the shed or into the basement; a backdoor catch all. It’s also the place where flotsam from houseplants and garden converge. Used pots, fertilizer, drainage dishes, seeds. Jars and envelops of seeds; sometimes in paper bags, sometimes on paper towels, paper plates. Not too long ago, electricians were in house, working on the never ending remodeling projects. One of them commented on a paper plate by the backdoor, filled with the seeds from a Eucomis that bloomed prolifically last summer. A pineapple lily called ‘Sparkling Burgundy’. As each flowering stem waned, I harvested it. The flower spikes are very long and covered with seed pods, the best option for allowing them to dry out without losing any seed was a paper plate. So my trove of eucomis seed ended up by the back door, awaiting my next move. The electrician, probably about my age, said he hadn’t seen anyone save off seed like that since his grandfather.

I cannot have florists roses in my home without the overwhelming desire to cut they little heads off and root them, especially if the stem shows some fecundity. I have rooted enough roses this way, with nubile young stems cut from other roses, including those rustled from parking lots and ditches, to know that I have about a 50% rate of return. According to Mr. Farmer, that’s 100% success. I stumbled across this technique quite by accident, and then found out within my circle of acquaintances, their grandparents did this.

Shrubs, like forsythia, oak leaf hydrangea, roses taught me other lessons. These are natural self-peggers, rooting where branches and stems fall to ground level. I gave an assist to these “under gardeners” to create plants to spread throughout my garden, adding to its cohesion. Repeated plants giving the eye a sense of continuation, familiarity as one travels through the garden. A neighborhood of relatives.

And then there’s the self-seeders. I remember a first trip to California, amused by some of the terminology used in the wine industry to create a sense of weight to their product, finding out many of those terms didn’t necessarily mean anything but an advertising ploy, “old vines”, “ancient vines” and a personal favorite, “estate grown”. As I built beds around our personal arboretum, it killed my soul to think of killing these intrepid little interlopers, so I started using them in the garden plan. Roses of Sharon, redbuds, tree peonies and even hostas found their way into beds and planting scheme. The little seeds that could. Being able to distinguish between a seedling and a weed at the formative stages is not always easy, but quite a few of these hardy little self seeders were relocated to better fit within the garden and became my own version of “estate grown”. For me, estate was a state of mind, an inward chuckle on garden tours.

I also can’t stand to see plants in big box or grocery stores without wanting to rescue them all. It’s a primal instinct, I can’t explain it, nor can I deny it. I have a hard time letting anything die, even when I know it’s well past the time it should go. These plants are put in harm’s way, a marketing gambit for an impulse purchase, often to become fodder for the garbage dump.

How did this become so intertwined in my life? Maybe it’s vestigial, harkening back to Eden. Perhaps a recognition or a line of shared memory to a time when surrounded by a garden, life was perfect. Many of the greatest moments of peace I have had as an adult were experienced in my garden. Certainly not in the overly manicured, overwrought professionally landscaped places, but in areas where plants feel some sense of inclusion in the creative process. Allowed their own captaincy in how they will live, and ultimately, die. Living near their parent, their siblings, finding their own place in the world, in my garden. Like Mr. Farmer, I would rather weed out the excess than baby those divas that really don’t belong there. So I have evolved into a live and let live gardener, messy by some folk’s standards.

Some people are compelled to make music, paint, or play soccer; I have lived a life in blissful coexistence with plants. From where this drive comes, I will never from know. But in the larger scheme of things, in saving and nurturing the lives of these denizens of the garden world, I have been saved, over and over again. Even in the dead of winter, sometimes wrapped in despair so dark I cannot feel my way out, suddenly a house plant will lure me to its side. A leaf to be culled, a vine pinched, water applied, and before I know it my spirit is transformed and an hour or two has passed as I move amongst rooms of house plants, communing, supporting, loving. A plant whisperer………….or am I a plant listener?

For my part, I believe we are descended from the same mother, the one who began her life in a garden. From her have I inherited the gene to be looking homeward to Eden, and by osmosis becoming a gardener.

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January 30, 2015

At Play in the fields………

Taking country drives as newlyweds was a cheap and lovely means of entertainment. No matter the season, the desire to discover sights unseen, using gas already paid for was like proffered gold. Early Sunday mornings, Saturdays at dusk, always something to see.

In southeast Ohio, delving deep into the back roads, encountering the downtrodden Amish farms of those shunned due to mental illness or alcoholism, not the quaint buttoned down places of the tourist traps, but slightly derelict farmhouses on borrowed time. Fifteen pairs of boots lined up on a peeling porch, slightly askew.

In the deepest depths of winter, sharing the roads with Amish families wedged into buggies, lap-rugged and freezing. Cheeks ablaze with cold. Staunch and hearty. Two lovers grateful for a speedy Honda and blasting heat.

Some favorite roads rollicked through the rolling hills and woodlands; fields fallow for a year or for fifty. Golden in the sunshine, skimmed with snow or mysterious and beckoning in the twilight. Maize and buff, charcoal and siena. Mine eyes were dazzled. Heady stuff, holding hands, young, in love. Buffered.

There were fields like rejected lovers, cast off by a booming oil and gas business in decades past, populated by time warped industrial structures. Slowly, slowly crept upon by honeysuckle and sumac, grasses and sunflowers. Fallow farm fields were plenty, crop rotation being practiced, the skin of the mother being allowed to rest, rejuvenate. Luxuriating in wind and weather, rain and sun. Recharging, sleepily and steadily.

Later, as I began to grow in my gardening life and relocated into suburbia, I read more about crop rotation and organic gardening. Fallow fields and crop rotation almost biblical in its simplicity. Fields allowed to go dormant not only allowed for recharge but also detoxed in the event any unwelcome, unseen inhabitants had been encouraged by former tenants. Seeds and plants introduced into prepared, rested ground performed better, were healthier. A process ensuring the viability of the soil for generations.

In 2014 I completed the first year of the last half of my century. A year of momentous change, risk taking, decisions made. When I left corporate life in 2013, I took the plunge and changed gears a bit. Became a consultant. Yes, the C word. But still “employed”, bringing in the bacon. But I found myself becoming unhappier and unhappier. In 2014, I decided I had lived through enough unhappiness, it was ridiculous to perpetuate it further with a bad professional choice. Roughly mid year, I cut the cord. God had guided me through some pretty nasty sailing thus far, a small thing like income was a no brainer for a guy like him. So I trusted and leapt.

There was plenty to do. Remodeling was still ongoing in my mid-century modern. Basement to finish, mudroom to design. Being a “doer” meant I did as much as I could on my own. But it seemed disaster followed disaster as my aging home rebelled, and like a furious diva extracted a pound of flesh for every improvement forced on her structure. Sometime in the fall, I was beyond exhausted. Four plus years of grief, depression, loneliness and remodeling had drained my reserves. I was spent.

I had been reading two books “Letting Go” and “God Will Make A Way” to try and move myself forward. Instead, the onion peeling work of “Letting Go” seemed to increase the malaise in which I found myself. The late summer cloaked me in the wet wool of an even deeper depression. And I thought the first year was tough. But somehow, as I became immersed in “God Will Make A Way”, a curious thing began to happen, and I wasn’t even going to the forum. The work of the first book led me to the path of the second. “Letting Go” was beginning to happen. I was on the right path.

The time was right to become fallow. And I understood I needed no one’s permission but my own. After 26 years in the corporate trenches and a year as a consultant, it was time to recharge. I had lost my roots in the creative arts, in music, in dance. They had been lost to the pressures of being a contributor to a marriage, a household, a professional life. An unnecessary casualty of an unexamined life.

My mind and body began their dormancy. Wet wool began to lift. I wanted to dance for the first time in years. So I took salsa lessons. I bought a canvas and a sketch book. Every day items are becoming evocative of a possible hidden life, an artistic use. Last night, I couldn’t sleep because I was mentally exploring a new art project. Heady.

Surprising and yet not surprising that the dust of our bodies works like the soil of the earth. 2015, looking for a year of happiness, of health, of creativity. Long live the Mother, and may she rest.

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November 30, 2014

Dear Dad,

Happy Birthday! It has been a long time since we’ve spoken. I miss you. I miss knowing you.

Your life has taken on an epic arch for me. You were born into abject poverty in the coal mines of western Kentucky. One boy out of five children, one lost early to diphtheria. Living in a shack on company property, using company scrip. Always hungry. Always underclothed. Never having shoes that fit, never having shoes in summer. Your first winter coat coming from the largess of a man you would never know or meet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Waiting in line to get it.

Your dad a quiet retiring man. Loving kids and cigarettes. Braving machine guns posted at the door to his workplace, helping to bring justice and equality to those who descended into the deep dark, bringing up black gold for the men who would live in palaces. Dying from black lung and disappointment. Your mom, intelligent, driven, hard. Hating life and hating you. Finding Jesus long after she needed to find Him to bring His compassion into your life.

You escaped. Or so you thought. You left Muehlenberg County for a life in the armed forces. Bringing that manly, silent type to the close lipped service of the Air Force during Korea, bringing our boys home, again and again. Suddenly, you saw life outside of coal dust and poverty. Bright lights and big cities. Tailor made suits for your slimness, bringing life to your dapperness, your aesthetic. Stylin. A long way from no shoes and clothes worn too thin and too small.

Leaving the service with the vow to never go back, never be a slave to those who would require kowtows and secret handshakes. But the world was no longer the same. You were no longer the same. What does an intelligent, undereducated guy do after seeing the world?

How you got to that blackened hell hole of a steel mill, I will never know. Did you jump at the first job opportunity? While other southern migrant workers were finding positions at GM and Ford, Bethlehem and US Steel, you landed at Blaw Knox. Being under serviced by a second tier, corrupt union, taking your dues and looking the other way. Sometimes working two jobs when a strike was called, attempting to put food on the table for your fledgling family.

The baby children we were, adored you. You were funny and giddy. I remember the dancing and singing and the smell of Old Spice. Eventually, your growing silences distanced you from your children. Those silences becoming frightening and stifling. And the silences themselves growing, broken more and more regularly by angry outbursts.

We were orphans, our family. Not that there weren’t grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. We were isolated geographically, we were isolated by experience, by circumstance. The annual pilgrimages back to the promised land were what connected us to our people, but it was a one way trip. There was only us, and we were fracturing.

By the time I was in my teens, our interactions were sparse. More often, I would attempt to escape the house, escape your notice, afraid I would raise your ire yet another time. When it came time for college, I only wanted to get as far away from home as possible. And that leave taking was the first time as a young adult I knew you loved me. Hugging me good bye when you left me on campus, you had tears in your eyes. Standing there by the gaping maw of that empty LeSabre trunk, you cried and I was stunned. It was game changer.

It was never possible to have a phone conversation with you, you passed the phone to Mom. It was on the breaks from school that I found my Dad. We talked and you started telling me a few things, teasers. I had found myself during college and in so doing, lost my fear. Those were precious years, but neither of us knew we were in the elimination round. There should have been more speed. I was able to catch a glimpse of what you had endured, what you had climbed out of. A surface scratched.

Your sickness started sometime in the 70’s. Your silence and anger masking what must have been debilitating pain. None of us knew what you suffered, you didn’t let us in. After that first major episode, there were ups and downs medically. When you had passed the ten year mark, you were safe, isn’t that the rule? By the time my life was gaining momentum, focusing, yours was veering off course.

I married in 1986. As I prepared to walk down the aisle on your arm, you gave me a chance to back out. Maybe you knew something I didn’t; maybe you just wanted to keep your newly found baby girl. You were so handsome that day, no indication of the time bomb going off in your chest. Ten short days and you were gone.

I have a tendency to shift the scraps of knowledge I have about you to try and build a complete, or a more complete, picture. The game I play to try to wrap my arms around a wraith. The picture always stays slightly out of focus. Lately I’ve been learning to let go. It isn’t easy. Sometimes there’s a great comfort in hanging on to these painful scraps, especially when they’re all you have.

In the end, I know you loved me. You gave to me all that wasn’t given to you as a child, and so much more. You sacrificed, you loved. I benefitted. I have had opportunities and experiences you wouldn’t even dream of. Your tough love made me strong, resilient, independent. Prepared me for even tougher days ahead.

I love you.

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July 25, 2014

Dorothy

Two of my favorite films of all times are Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Growing up, there was not a time when this aired on television I didn’t clear my “agenda” and make sure that I was available to watch this commercial-interrupted version year after year. I couldn’t get enough of it. As I became a teenager and a singer and actress in my own right, I sometimes wondered, pre-k.d. lang and Patsy Cline, if somehow I weren’t somehow linked with her. I had her song book, knew her life, watched her films. I so wanted to be Judy Garland. A career spanning stage, screen and cabaret, what not to want to be? Yes, there were addictions and temperaments but to me small price to pay.

Growing up in the overlapping hoods of The Jacksons and Stevie Wonder, living in a neighborhood of a melange of early 70s music, I hotly anticipated Q’s remake of my classic. When it came out, I was sold. Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsy Russel just to skim the surface on a visually and musically funkalicious score. I was hooked. Don’t care about anyone else’s opinion. If this is my guilty pleasure, believe me, there are worse.

And then there was Home. Shortly after buying the two album set, I had the words, timing,emotive part down. I could do this cold. Performed it live at a gig in 1982. I have sung this tune naked, drunk, painting a shed (none of these public venues). It’s my go-to tune. Like mac and cheese or a really good pinot. Home food. Pun intended.

For me it turned the corner on Somewhere Over the Rainbow (also in my repertoire), and added an urban need to knowing what your life was/is. Diana killed it. Already a Diana fan from The Supremes days, this was icing. A really well executed butter cream type.

And then life hit. I left music, became suburban, stopped singing. Spent too many years trying to anticipate the demands of the man. After life hit, it left. I had forgotten about Home.

It’s been just over four years since life slammed into my psyche like a derailed express train. I searched for home. There were so many days I just wanted to run somewhere, anywhere. I looked at real estate in France, Italy, northern California. I have lost count of the times I drove around town talking myself out of missing the turn off or even hitting the bridge abutment. Sometimes a really active argument. I even fantasized about swinging by the house, picking up the fuzzy faces and heading out of town, no looking back. Couldn’t leave them but surely did not want to stay.

I wanted to exfoliate this life by any means necessary. It itched. I was raw with it.

You see, I felt I had a home with my life partner. It didn’t matter the zip code. He was home. Where he was, was home. It sounds so biblical, but for me it was. And home had evaporated; not sure it ever really was, except in the zip code of my mind.

For several years, I have searched. The areas have changed, sometimes closer to family, sometime closer to here. Consuming the real estate listings like an addict. Looked at a couple of real possibles. The one that got away still haunts, a beautiful 1930s bungalow on 13 acres outside of Danville Kentucky. Again, that whole 1930s thing. I still look for it in the Danville listings. When I encountered it, I was still far too wounded to decide. And it slipped away.

For four years I have tried to execute the projects I knew would make my house salable. Painting, flooring, remodeling, lighting. I let the garden go until 2013. By that time, becoming a sad neglected jungle in places. The house consumed me. I needed to get it off my skin. I needed a place of my own, I needed. I needed. I needed. I needed peace, contentment. I needed.

Last gardening year, was a time of clean up. I knew no one would want this place with overgrown beds full of self seeders and self pegging roses. So most of the summer was spent trying to reclaim, trying to simplify and streamline. Suburbanners don’t want high maintenance landscapes. If my house were to sell, I had to make it simple.

As I cleaned up, I started connecting, talking to my plant partners. This may be even crazier than liking The Wiz, but I fully believe plants are sensitive to us, they hear our voices, know our presence. I touch as often as I can, talk, encourage. There have been studies recently that indicate plants hear. It mattered to me to know who had made it through the years of neglect, who had met their demise. Who was flourishing. My 120+ year old rose bush was transplanted. My zone 7 crepe myrtle, a miniature I cloche every year, had survived. And so many others had put their cockney thumbs to the sides of their noses and were thriving.

The 2014 garden year was about accenting what was already here, with as minimal a cost as possible. So many plants had not been divided in several years, a means of killing two birds with one stone. Build up beds with plant materials already on the farm. The repetitious use of plants is how a cohesive planting scheme is achieved, as well as minimizing costs. I have spent the spring and early summer dividing and tucking, moving plants hither and thither. Fleshing out areas that needed, well, you know, fleshing out. Nothing crazy.

Interestingly enough, the midwest has been blessed with what I will term as “California weather”. Not too hot, not too cold, plenty of precipitation. Clear skies with low humidity. Ideal for transplanting. The skies this summer actually remind me of time spent in Montana with crystalline blue skies, no humidity and just a touch of coolness. Beautiful. If this is global warming, where do I sign up? The beds this year are lush and diverse. My zone 7 crepe myrtle, as tiny as it is, is the biggest it’s ever been. My 120 year old rose surviving its transplant is on its way to climbing the arbor. The grass is lush and verdant. The farm is full of birds and insects. The air is sweet and caressing.

There are still projects. The basement remodel, a problematic little so and so, is on its way to being finished. There are a couple of smaller items on the wish list. I need a new roof, a new air conditioner, a new driveway. Cheap.

This afternoon, I took some time off from doing. The yard was mowed, the basement ready for the next onslaught of contractors. Surrounded by fuzzy faces, farm cat Fletcher, Joy and Dante, I carved out some sweet moments on the deck to read. I listened to the wrens and the robins. Watched the crows. Heard the music of the wind soughing through the branches of the oak and the locust and the linden. The air was unbelievable, almost too cool for normal summer gear. I was digging it. Fletcher curled around my feet, Joy and Dante flanked my chair. No sounds of mechanization anywhere.

The sound of Home, right here in my own back yard. No heel clicking necessary. When I think of Home, I think of love overflowing. Welcome Home.

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June 13, 2014

The Slow-Rhea Movement

It’s only June and the year has already been so interesting and so tough. In the past I’ve written mostly as a catharsis, sometimes healing wounds too deep to see. It’s been a while since I put digits to keyboard; I’ve been avoiding the demands of the computer lurking and taunting me as I scuttle through my day.

It’s not as if I haven’t had some ideas. The slowness of the spring to develop lent some ideas for the Burgeon Queen or the Burgeon Rhea, but I just never could force my self to sit down and do it. Like my dogs, there have been too many distractions to sit and stay.

Today, I missed my window for mowing. My mowing method is a trusty, old John Deere push mower. While self propelled, in the last couple years the propelling has become open to interpretation. When it dies and I scatter its ashes, time for a new mower. But not today.

No, today I bother my dear reader with the musings of a different 2014. I ran across a quote a couple years back “If you want different results, you have to do things differently.” My experiment for 2014. I attempted a consulting life in 2013; in 2014 I realized that I really didn’t like working with people that really didn’t want me in their offices, regardless of how badly they needed help. So I learned to say no and bye-bye. Instead of rushing into the next gig, I am taking a step back. As Jim Carey said in his graduation address, I think I want to fail at something I really love to do. At least I will have enjoyed the journey.

I am trying to Let Go and Let God. I am trying to not always be DOING. I am still trying to learn not kill myself with so much hard labor. And I am learning while alcohol is a compelling way to relax and sometimes temporarily forget, it is a slope I really don’t have the muscle to climb.

How do you slow a Rhea down? Very carefully.

2014 in the garden has also been a year of different ventures, different results. Last year, I had to take the bull by the horns and do massive scorched earth operations in beds not maintained for three years. Self pegging roses attempted to eat me alive and not even leave anything for compost. I decommissioned a huge sun bed full of tree peonies, roses, irises, butterfly weed. Giving away, transplanting, sometimes abandoning. It was going back to sod. I needed to simplify.

While our Plains brethren scoffed at our winter weather, for the midwest it was an unbelievable season. I grew up outside of Chicago, so I know a few things about winter weather. First, let me say that this area is not used to sustained weather of any kind. The winter of 2013-2014 not only brought lots of snow, it brought sustained low temperatures, aggressive winds lasting for days. The result being even lower temperatures.

Generally, by the time April has rolled into the hood, there are some pretty advanced signs Mother Nature is softening her stance. Not so, 2014. For weeks it was even too cold to venture out to check the beds without some serious gear. Finally able to go out with only a heavy sweater, I saw so little peaking above the soil level it was frightening. Sometime in May, early, or very late April, I saw the first defiant digits of peonies clearing the ground. It took several days after that before anything else was brave enough. Scary. There was a bit of a warm snap and for any intrepid hostas that proved their undoing. Some came up and some were scorched back to earth by cold.

Then finally, temperatures began to settle in the warmer brackets. Slowly, slowly trees budded out, spring ephemerals launched. Ahhh, burgeoning.

As it turns out, for some peonies and most of the irises it was a great spring. Apparently the coral family of peonies really loved being hammered by cold. My woodland tree peony was stunning, and some of the irises bloomed like they have never bloomed before.

For roses, a spotty spring. Most roses died back to the ground. Even the two knock outs I purchased for $5 in a scratch and dent sale, were knocked back to earth. As it turns out, rosa The Fairy which someone begged me to pull out of their yard a decade or more ago was hardly impacted. And while my rangy pink Grootendorst had some fall out, she’s doing quite well, thank you. The real rose stand outs were Darlow’s Enigma which has been trained into a maple on an exposed northern face of the yard;

the Chrysler Imperial which is about the only hybrid tea I fool with, for me never a very robust rose but I cannot live without that fragrance;

and the last rose has no name and no picture. It is a storied rose in my garden. Part of the roll out of the old sun garden, last year it was moved. As it came out of its spot of 15 years, it broke into pieces. And in pieces, it was placed along a new arbor and fence line. As of today, this rose is about 120 years old. Given to me in the mid nineties by a friend who had no need of it, but because her 90 year old client had given it to her she couldn’t just take it out with extreme prejudice. So she gave it to me. This rose had been growing outside the front door of her client’s birth place. I was saddened and worried that I had to move this gem. It was a beautiful rose; old fashioned quartered blooms in a nice palish/mid pink with a marvelous old rose fragrance. It had been growing inside a tuteur with a dusky purple clematis in my sun garden. I had low hopes that either would survive relocation or that deadly winter. And she thumbed her nose at me. All the various pieces living and blooming, including the clematis. Will try to post pictures when the second flush graces me with her presence.

The real beneficiaries of this new winter/new results have been my hostas. Even those clobbered by an early roll out, have thrived. So thick and so lush it’s been unbelievable.

Weeds too appear to have been unintended beneficiaries to this harsh new winter. Commando efforts will be necessary to eradicate or at least knock back these interlopers. Different efforts here include having to resort to chemical means in some areas to removed these unwanted pests. A very conflicting change.

New on the scene this year are projects I am taking on:

The truck garden that from last fall to this went from compost to set up to full of, yes burgeoning, vegetables.