… UD likes the name so much she’ll go ahead and use it to identify the stuff she found on a branch during this morning’s walk.
From the left: Morning commuter train zips by. Bright sign is BLACK MARKET BISTRO, town restaurant. Sidewalk is brand new — just restored. Bright lower lights are the GP post office, where we pick up our mail. Continuing to the right, storage sheds for town equipment. Also picnic table, tennis courts.
… UD contemplates an enormous American Elm leaf blown into the Bonhoeffer Garden by yesterday’s wind, and this year’s BEST PERSON IN THE WORLD award.
A gloss on Kierkegaard. UD‘s meditation garden is already generating insights!
Looks awfully serene – and it is.
But don’t forget the MARC, Amtrak, and CSX trains chuffing through.
Both tykes and leaf blowers look like yellow-jacketed aliens.
Named after the anti-fascist martyr.
Red chairs are in; red tables on their way.
Wind chime from Sedona, AZ, a place Les UDs love.
Probably long dead red azalea I found discarded in the woods.
But they're really always here,
Watching in the woods to our right.
So long as they're out of the dog's sight
We'll keep this a pleasant walk.
She's not a cat; she doesn't stalk.
But one look at a doe or a buck
And she's off like a shot, as fast as fuck.
The circle of sunlight above the path --
That's the garden, where UD's political wrath
Cools itself when, in wind and light,
The high trees' leaves take flight
And a Cooper's hawk lets her stare
At its pale breast by just roosting there.
Robins scatter the unleaved dirt...
Bird, recites UD, thou never wert!
(Of people like UD, who spontaneously recite Shelley,
America apparently has had a very full belly.)
After Erika Fromm interviewed wee UD for a job as her assistant at the University of Chicago, she wrote a brief note to herself about your 20-something blogueuse, at which UD peeked —
V STRONG EGO
— and I’ll admit those three little words have rather followed me around all these years later. (Yes, I got the job and it was very strange – she basically invented hypnoanalysis…) I mean, it’s true that my VSE has blasted me through lots of doors in life (or as sour old Larkin puts it, I’ve repeatedly “burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic”), and that has more or less been a good thing.
Even this very day, when my headstrongism led me astray, my corrective action turned up some interesting stuff.
So for my meditation garden project, I bought a bunch of bulbs, which Xavier the Savior and his guys were going to plant for me. I knew in general that you plant bulbs in the fall, and I was way gung-ho to get them in the ground and start dreaming about the astonishing arrays of reds we’d get; but last-minute checking revealed that these particular bulbs, for my particular planting zone, must wait for early spring planting.
In my merry VSE way, I scoffed at and denied and ignored all of the impeccable sources telling me this, telling me something my freight train of an ego refused to hear, until, as the guys began climbing the hill to the garden, I finally put on the brakes and told them not to bother.
***********************
I could store one set of bulbs for the winter – I put them in a cardboard box and found the closest cool dark place I have to a root cellar – but the other two needed indoor planting. And this meant finding soil and containers to place along some sunny windows. I found four orange plastic containers with the skeletal remains of some plant or other (mums?), and I figured the soil was probably pretty good, so I began digging, and instantly, from all of the containers, multiple large healthy earthworms ooched out. Each of which I lifted and tossed gently onto the lawn so I could bring wormless soil inside.
But those worms – the surprise of them working away all this time, eating, aerating – it got to me somehow. The invisible worm, That flies in the night etc.