Inch One Hundred Seventy-Two: My Good Enough Garden, Year Two

Last year, I blogged about my good enough garden. Another year has come and gone, and this year's garden will also be a good enough garden. At this point, the harder work has been done.

Tilling? Borrowed our neighbor's electric tiller. It's small, but so is our garden. Warren tilled some, I tilled some, Warren tilled some more, and if it took more than 45 minutes, that would only be because I had trouble moving the fairly lightweight tiller when I wanted to till a different patch.

Budding butterfly weed

The perennials that we planted just to winter over until they could be transplanted to new beds? We didn't move them last fall. We didn't move them this spring early either, so they are solidly up and, in the case of the butterfly weed, budding already. Warren tilled carefully around the flowers to get the tilling started.

The plantings? I went out to one of our local family farming enterprises and bought tomatoes and peppers. They went in the ground on the heels of the tilling. We had a day of (mostly) soft rains yesterday, so the plants settled in and are doing nicely.

The flowering sage

The sage, to my surprise, wintered over and is in full bloom. I'll sow some basil seeds close by because I cannot imagine a garden without basil and without bees in the basil flowers. I'll sow marigold seeds in the concrete blocks that delineate two sides of the garden and call it done.

It remains to be seen whether the cucumber beetles return to plague my tomatoes this year.

In an effort to thin out the spiderwort that dominates our front bed, I moved more clumps to the backside of the house. There is a spindly strip of "garden" along the backside of the house and I cannot think of any better place to let spiderwort run riot than there. Spiderwort is the easiest plant I know to transplant. You dig a big hole, you go dig up a clump of them with a shovel, you slide the clump into the big hole, you put the dirt back, you call it a day. Other than the physical energy needed to shovel up a large clump of spiderwort, it's low effort work.

Fortunately for any latent gardening impulses I have, we have new young neighbors to the south who are energetic gardeners. The day that Warren and I visited late last fall to welcome them, they invited us in and I spied a copy of The Urban Homestead on a table. Wonderful! Our neighbors (and their very, very young daughter) have taken urban homesteading to heart. They have planted fruit trees of every kind and have put together two substantial raised beds in which all kinds of vegetables are already up and flourishing. I love seeing it and I love seeing someone other than me laboring over such a full garden. And I was pleased to hear that they planted cucumbers, which means the aforementioned cucumber beetles may stay to the south and leave my tomatoes alone.

With luck, I will have some tomatoes by the second week of July. That is when the Pacific Northwest contingent—all of them—are arriving and I would love to have the joy of watching Ramona pick tomatoes off the vine.

A good enough garden? You bet.

Inch One Hundred Seventy-One: Bone Tired and Other Little Bits

Last week I wrote about finishing the attendance mediation and speculated on its length and depth. I spent a part of the work week this week running numbers. Our department attended 384 mediations, 341 of which were mine. Our first mediation was, as I had speculated, in September 2016; the last was almost eight months to the day in May 2017.

And I am still recovering.

How tired am I? Yesterday I gave our bathroom a long overdue deep cleaning (and noted this morning as I showered that I still missed some spots in the shower). A byproduct of the cleaning was a stack of wet, dirty cleaning rags, destined for the washer. This morning, I started to hang up the rags to dry before I washed them, um, later today.

Really? Really?

You know you are really, really tired when you start to hang the wet dirty rags so they'll be dry when you go to wash them the same day.

While I type this, Warren is downtown doing some of the earliest grunt work for the weekend's Arts Festival. Time was, a decade plus ago, when I would have been downtown at about 5:30 a.m. to help chalk the streets and prep for the vendors to arrive. I have great memories of those days, but can't say I'm sorry they are over.

2007 Arts Festival Prep

A well-meaning friend recently reminded me that, in our early 60s, we are all at the age where we are more tired, take longer to heal, and generally are older, so I should not be so quick to look to my myeloma as the source of my exhaustion. I replied that I know we are all older, and I take that into consideration, but trust me, there is a difference between the two types of tiredness and I can tell the difference.

The caption of this post promises "Other Little Bits."

The first little bit is that I got my first poetry acceptance by an online journal. No pay, just publication. I am thrilled. More to the point, I am encouraged to go on.

The second little bit is about pets. When my sons were growing up, we did not have pets. Period. Their father was opposed to having a dog, ever. There were enough allergies in the house that a cat was ruled out as well. Ben, especially, very much wanted a dog, so it was no surprise to me when, as a young adult, he and Alise acquired Lucy, a medium large dog of indeterminate background (at least to me) and gentle temperament. Lucy accepted Ramona without much fuss and has tolerated her many depredations over the years.

Let's hope the newest addition to the family does as well. Meet Squishy Sanchez, joining Alise, Ben, Ramona, and Lucy this week:

I don't name them, folks, only meet them on social media.

Inch One Hundred Seventy: Finish Line

Yesterday, I completed the last three attendance mediations of the 2016-2017 school year.

We are done.

It has been a long season. I do not have my work folders at home while I type this, but I am pretty sure our earliest mediations were in September. September! The school year was still fresh and new then. As of yesterday, when we concluded the last mediation, there were eight days of school left. Eight! 

I scheduled and appeared at over 300 mediations; a coworker appeared at another 60+. "Appeared" means I was there, along with one of my amazing school colleagues, Stacy, Vikki, or Lisa. "Appeared" does not mean we necessarily had any parents show up to participate, but because we hold the mediations at the schools, we have to be there, period. (Historically, I do not mediate without a parent, but we are changing that policy, at least at the high school level, for the upcoming year.) Next week, I will run the numbers on how many mediations were actually held. That number varies widely by district, to no one's surprise.

Ohio has just revised its laws on attendance, decriminalizing the offense for juveniles. (The adult offenses, failure to send and contributing, seem to not have changed, but many of us are still combing through the new legislation.) I sit on a committee at the Ohio Supreme Court charged with helping the Court direct our state's juvenile courts on how to implement the new legislation, which took effect April 6. All of us on the committee are going into the upcoming year with our eyes as wide open as possible, albeit wide open staring into a pretty murky fog.

One thing is clear: there will probably be even more mediations next school year.

But back to being done. I would like to say that we finished and popped champagne bottles (well, seltzer water—we do work for a court, and a juvenile court one at that, after all) and that confetti and balloons dropped down from the ceiling. I would like to say that Lisa and I walked out of the middle school and airplanes were writing "WELL DONE, LADIES" in the vast blue sky above us. I would like to say a brass band was waiting for me when I pulled back into the parking lot at court.

No. No balloons, no skywriting, no brass bands. We finished the year quietly. When I got back to the courthouse, I went in and up to my office, logged out of my computer, shared the news ("we're done") with my supervisor, and came home.

I am spent. I feel like I could be in one of those videos of runners who are physically depleted but staggering blindly, often with help and encouragement, to the finish line. I am grateful I made it over that line, grateful for the aid and encouragement of my colleagues and my husband.

The school year is all but over around here. It will be back soon enough in mid-August. I will be ready when it comes.

But for now? Let summer begin!

Inch One Hundred Sixty-Nine: Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

I have spent the last several evenings immersed in Anne Sexton, reading first her daughter Linda's memoir, Searching For Mercy Street, and then Diane Middlebrook's in-depth biography, Anne Sexton, interspersed with selections of Anne's work out of The Complete Poems.

 April was National Poetry Month, and as I have done for the last few years, I marked it by posting a poem a day on Facebook. This year, subconsciously or otherwise, I posted mostly works by women poets, Anne Sexton among them.

I don't know which poets, if any, are in today's high school literature texts. (Poetry has fallen out of favor because it doesn't lend itself to standardized testing.) When I was in high school, back in the 70s, the poetry curriculum was very much the white male canon, English and American poets only. No works in translation, only token writers of color (yes, Gwendolyn Brooks, but only if it was "we real cool;" no Langston Hughes), and few women except Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who I found monotonous (and still do) and Emily Dickinson, who was still decades away from being reexamined and was still very much presented as a troubled agoraphobe who quaintly used string to bind her poetry around marmalade jars.

I discovered Anne Sexton by wandering in the library, as I was wont to do, sniffing around the 811 (Dewey Decimal System) aisles. It may have been All My Pretty Ones I cam across first. At some point, I discovered Transformations, her wonderful adaptation of Grimm fairy tales. No matter, I was hooked.

Sexton was a revelation. For one thing, she was a contemporary poet. High school lit texts, the process being what it was to get one approved and to market, let along adopted, ran decades behind contemporary writers, especially in poetry. All the poetry I'd been exposed to in school to date was by poets now dead.

For another, Sexton wrote with a loud voice. For an aspiring writer, for an aspiring female writer, I was thrilled to find that the whispery lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson (as she was then portrayed) were not my only options.

In the poetry world, Sexton was in the vanguard of the confessional poetry movement. Sylvia Plath, George Starbuck, Robert Lowell, William Snodgrass, Anne Sexton—these were poets who wrote of intimate, intense themes—mental illness, body, divorce, family, sex—that the academic and critical poetry world did not recognize. Confessional poets were willing to take their own lives, their own triumphs, failures, and shortcomings, and shape them into poetry in the first person voice. It was that first person voice that delineated confessional poetry from the impersonality and universality of the then standard canon.

And maybe that's what drew me to Sexton (and then to Plath, hard on the heels of Sexton): that sudden realization that poetry did not have to be written in the third person, did not have to be removed from the poet, but could be immediate and personal. Poetry could be about messy topics, about hurtful topics, about real topics, about anything. As I commented to Warren as I talked about this post, I observed that if you looked at what little poetry from my past still remains, you could see the shift from the impersonal remote to the first person. That was Sexton's influence on me.

Anne Sexton committed suicide in October, 1974. I was in college in Chicago when it happened; I read the news in The Maroon, the school newspaper.  It shook me up enough that I remember having to find a place to sit down and reread the brief article. I would like to think I was conscientious enough to have headed to the library to find a volume of her poems, but I doubt it. But the realization that this poet, this bold, audacious writer, was dead, stayed with me for days.

I stumbled backwards into this recent immersion. Too pressed for time to get to the library for new reading material, I resorted to what was at hand on my shelves and Sexton came to the top. I don't know yet if I will tackle her collected letters (which are well worth the read), although I hear their siren call as I type these lines. At this point, Sexton has been dead for almost as long as she lived and I have outlived her by a decade and a half. But the power of what she wrote, and the impact of that power on my own writing—that is still with me all these decades later.