More Late Summer Gratitudes

Two weeks from today, I'll be getting ready to drive down to Spartanburg for a day of meetings, faculty workshops, and not just one but two meals.  Those of you who have never worked in a place with a day of meetings and faculty "development," but no food or coffee provided may not understand why I am so happy and grateful to be in a place where we get food along with our trainings and meetings.

But what I'm most grateful for is finding myself in a place where faculty are appreciated.  That appreciation takes the form of food or a verbal thank you during meetings or supplies . . .  on and on the list could go.  It seems so simple and yet in so many places, berating seems to be the default, not appreciation.

Today, though, I want to post about summer gratitude, here in these waning days of summer.  I've already touched on some of my gratitude, like for summer veggies which turns into good eating (in this blog post) and creative time with friends (in this blog post about making cut paper cards) and Music Week gratitudes of all sorts.

Earlier this week, I saw a Facebook post from Beginnings Quilt Shop about a birthday party for Georgia Bonesteel and inviting us all to stop by on Tuesday from 10-noon.  I was relatively free, so I decided to pop by.  And I'm so glad I did!

Georgia Bonesteel's books on lap quilting were some of the first I read, and while I never could figure out how to put the smaller quilted pieces together into a larger quilt, I was inspired by her work.  I was one of the first ones at the shop, and I had a chance to tell her how much her work meant to me, and that felt great.  I was not starstruck and mute, the way I have found myself in my younger years approaching writers whose work had meant a lot to me.  She asked me what I was working on, and I had a photo on my phone that I pulled up, the one I posted Tuesday morning:

We chatted a bit more, and I moved over to get a piece of cake, so that I wasn't monopolizing her time--even though there weren't others waiting their turn.  

I considered some pieces that had potential as a backing fabric for the quilt, but decided it was better to wait until I'm sure of how big a backing I need.

Yesterday I zipped down to the Spartanburg house to deliver yet another light fixture, in the hopes that we can get a final inspection on the fixer-upper house rewiring.  In some ways, I don't mind.  It's a lot less commuting than I do in the school year.  I was also able to pay the water bill in person.

In the afternoon, I went to the Lutheran World Relief quilting group at Lutheran Church of the Nativity, the Lutheran church around the corner from my Arden house.  They are a wonderful group, and I'm happy to have a chance to work with them, as I have been doing for 4 years.   

We also got the phone call that both final inspections (for the HVAC and the rewiring) are scheduled for Friday--fingers crossed!  Then we can figure out what makes sense for a timeline for the remaining work that we need to get done before we move in:  painting the interior and refinishing the hardwood floors. 

I was very tired by day's end, and I finally gave in to my urge to go to bed, even though it was only 6:30.

Today one of our South Florida church friends is coming by for dinner.  I am looking forward to catching up, grateful that she's the one on her way back to Florida (she, too, has moved away from South Florida, but not out of the state), not me.

I have been feeling such joy this summer and so much gratitude, along with feeling a bit odd about feeling this way.  The world is burning, both literally and figuratively, and my mood doesn't match.  I'm grateful about that ability too, to be aware of my good fortune, to try to help others, and to be able to have such joy, even with the sorrows that come from being 61.

Poems for the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene

Today is the feast day of Mary Magdalene.  If you came here hoping for a historical and theological and feminist type blog post, I wrote that type of blog post for my theology blog, which you can read here.

This morning, I'm thinking of Mary Magdalene and the way she has appeared in poetry.  My favorite is Marie Howe's Magdalene is my favorite, both the book and the individual poem, "Magdalene--The Seven Devils" (the poem is here).

And a sidenote before continuing with this post:  I do realize all the ways that talking about demon possession is problematic, and I do think that characterizing Mary Magdalene as a prostitute possessed by demons was a way that the early Church tried to discredit her.  Back to poetry.

Howe's poem is so fabulous that I hesitate to post mine here; I'm fairly sure that I had not read her poem when I wrote the two poems below.  I wrote one and then a few years later, decided to revisit the idea in the poem that I thought had more potential.  It's an interesting insight into the ways that poems can influence each other, talk to each other, and lead to different poems.

Here's the first one, which I wrote after reading the passage in Acts where the slave girl has her demons cast out, which makes her valueless, since she can no longer forecast the future.

Demon Dwellings



Mary Magdalene misses
the sixth demon the most,
the one who was her best self,
the one who knew what to say,
how to dress,
how to make the best cocktail,
the one who slept
peacefully through the night.

The slave girl misses
all her demons—
no one else would talk
to her when she was possessed.
No one talks to her now.

I eat dinner with homeless men,
and I remember my mother explaining
demon possession as an ancient
way to explain mental illness.
The homeless man rants in a language
not quite human, and I ponder
those demons and their destiny.

Here's the poem I wrote a few years later, when I was continuing to think about Mary Magdalene and what healing from demon possession might be like, especially after Jesus was gone.

The Fifth Demon



You moderns read about my demon
possession, and you think of The Exorcist:
gravel voices out of the mouths of schoolgirls,
mouths that spew gobs of green goo.


I tell you, it wasn’t like that. Each demon
had a unique personality, a tone
that only I could recognize. In the night,
the hiss of their suggestions soothed
me into sleep. By day, their constant
criticisms and complaints proved motivation.

And then I met Jesus. His voice
filled my head and crowded out the demons.
His stories left me slightly dizzy,
like I had spent weeks sleeping
on a sailing ship and returned to land.

I miss the fifth demon most.
I lost them, and then I lost
him, and now I have only the tomb
of my empty mind.

Last Weeks of Summer

Three weeks from today, my onground classes start at Spartanburg Methodist College; it will be both similar and different for me.  It will be my 3rd year of full-time work at the college, after 1 year of adjunct work, but the beginning of the tenure track for me.  I'll write more about that in a few weeks.  

I wish I could say that our plans to be in our fixer-upper house in Spartanburg are on schedule, but they are not.  I will make a few phone calls today and hope to figure out where we are.  We've been having electrical work done and HVAC work done, and from what I can see, we're close to having final inspections done, but those haven't been scheduled yet.  

Once those final inspections happen, we'll paint and redo the hardwood floors.  We're holding off on the kitchen remodel until next summer, mainly so that we don't sink all our liquid cash into a not-liquid asset, our house.   The kitchen that is there is workable, though far from ideal.  We've had worse, but we are now used to having better (like a dishwasher).

Today I will also go to Hendersonville, where my favorite quilt/fabric store, Beginnings, is having a 90th birthday party for famous quilter Georgia Bonesteel.  Her books on lap quilting were some of the earliest on quilting that I read.  Those books in the 1980's had a plan for how one could quilt in smaller pieces and then join the pieces together into a bed-sized quilt.  

I've spent the summer making a quilt in my old-fashioned way, hand stitching much smaller scraps into what I hope will become a beautiful quilt.  

I do a lot of this work while my spouse is watching T.V.  This week we've both been enjoying Clarkson's Farm, which is a good reminder of why farming is so difficult, even when one is a TV figure with other income streams that are significant.  Jeremy Clarkson has lost several small fortunes in these seasons of doing farming.  He can afford it.  It's a very funny show, if one ignores the sobering reality of farming in a world where the climate has changed dramatically.

I'm hoping to have a quilt top ready for Quilt Camp in late August.  I want to create a quilt for our new bed that I hope we will have in the house by late August or early September.  In some ways, each time I pick up my needle and thread, I feel like I'm doing some version of "manifesting."  

It also reminds me of my garage sale rambling as a child, where I would pick up things like napkins and dishes and think of the hope chests that I read about in books about pilgrims and prairies.  In my darker moods, I find myself thinking that I'm doing the enjoyable work while trying to ignore the harder, sweatier work that needs to be done to make the house habitable--or even avoid phone calls to contractors.

Happily, our time line is our own.  I've been commuting every week day to Spartanburg, and I can keep doing that.  So far, the costs that come with an additional house have been manageable.  And I much prefer to spend summer in the mountains, instead of doing home renovation work in the Upstate (SC) heat and moving in August.

Farm Stand Eating

We have had a stretch of farm stand eating.  You may say, "Of course--it's July--it's how we're all eating."  But I spent 24 years in South Florida, where summer is not a growing season, where growing any sort of vegetable during any month takes planning and good fortune and is likely to end in tears.

One summer, I wanted peach cobbler in the worst way, a homesickness that was wrapped up in missing my elders that had died, missing friends far away.  I stood by a display of overpriced peaches, not one of which had any kind of smell:  not peach, not rot, not any smell at all.*

I wanted to cry.

And because I'm an English major, I thought of those lines from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":   

"Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn"

I thought about tears and alien produce and how I didn't really like peaches much anyway, and then I moved along.  I thought about my peach triggered homesickness a few weeks ago when I was peeling peaches from the box I bought to support one of the high schoolers in the church I serve in Bristol, Tennessee.

One of my other parishioners has been bringing us other gifts from her garden.  We've had a blueberry pie because she made jar after jar of pie filling made with blueberries from her yard and brought the jars to church.  Yesterday she brought a bag of green beans and implored us to take them all so that she didn't have to can them.

I was happy to help, even though beans aren't my favorite vegetable.  On the drive back across the mountain, I snapped each end and got them ready to cook.  I thought about hot afternoons on my grandmother's front porch, with bowls of beans on our laps and a paper bag on the porch floor to catch the vegetable waste, which my grandmother would dig back into the compost strip in the back yard along the detached garage.  

Back to yesterday's beans:  I found some hunks of ham frozen from Thanksgiving, and we let the beans and ham bubble away on the stove and had a wonderful dinner.  I had gotten some Mills River corn that had just been picked on Saturday, so we had that too, along with  the yellow squash casserole I made on Saturday and tomato slices.

Classic farm stand meal--and could there be a poem peeking around the edges too?  Or would it just be a collection of cliches?  Is there anything new to say?

I do like the idea of snapping beans in the front seat of a car instead of a front porch.  I like the idea of channeling the elders by way of food, but that's not a new idea--far from it.  Let me continue contemplating.

*After writing this blog post, I wondered if I had written about the earlier peach experience--and I did!  Go here to read that blog post from 2016.

Housing Contentment with Ants

For the past two weeks, we've had a solitary ant in the kitchen.  I've thought it odd--ants don't usually travel alone.

This morning, I'm wondering if it was a scout ant, sent ahead to find a good homestead.  This morning, we have ants all over the kitchen.

We rarely have bug problems in this house in Arden, which is strange because we live on a densely wooded lot, the kind of woods that means we don't have any yard care tasks.  We pay for termite protection because we're in a wooden house on a wooded lot.  But we don't have roaches and ants only a few times in the last 4 years we've lived here.

Wow--we have lived here 4 years.  I still think it was a smart move.  My spouse still misses Florida.  I used to say that I missed every place I had ever lived, even the ones I didn't particularly like while I was living there.  Now I am realizing that I don't miss those places anymore.

Is this one of the undiscussed joys of aging?  More probably, it's something specific to me.  For decades I was baffled to discover that most people don't miss places where they used to live.  Most people don't go back and give deep consideration to roads not taken and decisions made.

I am now in a place that I don't long to leave:  I love all my jobs, and I'm happy to be able to live here in the mountains.  I have good friends, both near where I live and far away.  My health feels stable.  I'm also happy with our fixer-upper in Spartanburg.

Yesterday I took a quick trip down to Spartanburg.  I needed to get the check to our neighbor who takes care of our yard and to get the mail.  I also wanted to see first hand how the rewiring project was going.  The rewiring project is much closer to finished than I expected--all but 1 fixture is installed.

It is much easier to feel less stress about this fixer-upper house because I love our mountain house so much.  We're going to keep that house and move back and forth.  If I have some additional commuting time to Spartanburg Methodist College, if the fixer-upper house isn't ready by the time classes start, that's O.K.

It's easier to deal with home repairs when I'm not living in the house being repaired.  That, too, is a source of my current contentment.

It's time to shift my focus.  This week brings major due dates:  SMC online grades on Monday, a Candidacy Endorsement Writing Project on Monday, and my Paul paper on July 26, Sunday.  Let me turn my writing attention to other projects this morning. 

Making Cut Paper Cards

Earlier this week, I went to the studio of a neighborhood friend.  She wanted to make cards out of cut paper, and I was happy to try my hand.  She had the supplies, including papers we painted earlier in the year for a retreat.  If you look closely, you can see the hymnbook print behind the paint.

One approach is to look for words that match the picture or mood.  I rarely did that.  I was primarily looking for the colors that I needed.  But when I returned to the picture below to add some additional green circles that I hope look like a tree canopy, I saw some bits that worked, most notably at the top word "Seasons."

It was a fun exercise, but harder than it looks.  I was trying to make shapes that evoked tents, but I'm not sure the purple under the trees or the red shapes at the bottom of the mountains in the upper card do that.  I was more pleased with the trees and with the mountains.  

My friend also decorated the envelopes to match the image on the cards, but I didn't have the patience to work with that canvas that needed to be smaller so that there's room for the addresses.

It is fun to work on a project like this one while catching up.  I'm grateful to be able to share her supplies and the hospitality of her studio.  And now I have two more cards to send out.  I am feeling truly fortunate.

Angels of Deliverance

Today is an important nuclear anniversary.  On this day in 1945, scientists exploded the first nuclear bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

I hadn't remembered until doing some Internet wanderings that the explosion was scheduled for this date because Truman had an important meeting with Allied leaders in Potsdam on July 17.  Bomb as savior?

Oh, so many poetry possibilities!  There's the desert aspect, the prophets that so often emerge from wilderness areas.  There's the fact that this part of the country has become a detonation point for various immigration fights through the last four decades.

Those of you who have been reading this blog and/or my poems for awhile now will be saying, "Haven't you already explored this poetic terrain?"

Indeed, I have.  Yet I think there may be more to do.

It's also the birthday of Tony Kushner.  I remember long ago, in 1994, my friend who dreamed of writing plays told me about Angels in America, which she had just read.  It happened to be available from the Quality Paperback Book Club, so I ordered it.

I consumed it in one sitting.  It has haunted me ever since.

I watched both Angels in America and Perestroika when they came to the Kennedy Center during the mid-90's.  Wow.  Sometimes I forget the power of live theatre.  The HBO version came out in the early years of this century, and it, too was powerful, but when I'm watching something on a screen, I assume that part of the power comes from high-tech sorcery.  With live theatre, I give all the credit to the humans on the stage.

I have spent the years since wondering about the idea of writing that tackles the big issues of an age.  I've thought of August Wilson writing a play that represents the life of African-Americans during the twentieth century, one play for each decade.  And he pulled it off!

Some days, I think I dream too small.

It's oddly comforting to think about Angels in America, a play written about a dark time in American history.  I remember the early days of the AIDS crisis, when we weren't quite sure of the cause and how to prevent it and even as we discovered more about it, the thought that haunted us was that maybe there were additional transmission routes that we hadn't found yet.  The disease seemed more ravaging in those days, as people went from healthy to corpse in six months or less.  And then, as now, the government seemed helpless--or worse--in the face of the devastation.

And yet, here we are, into a generation or two saved by protease inhibitors.  There's recent talk of a pill that prevents transmission.  Darkness can be split apart by light.

I have hopes that ten or twenty years from now, we'll look back and say, "We were at a turning point, but we didn't see it then.  The world was about to emerge into a better place, but boy did it look bleak then."

And what writers/works will we see as the documenters of that dark time?  As a writer, is it better to document the dark time or to dream of the brighter future?