Years ago my mother planted a calycanthus occidentalis in my front garden.

Only this season did it put out flowers – strangely scented lotus-like burgundy things .

(Charles Webber © California Academy of Sciences)

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They run up and down its long thin branches.

When I scrape its bark, my fingers smell of cinnamon.

It wasn’t until I asked my neighbor, Barbara Shidler, to come over and tell me what it was that I could identify the calycanthus. I’d tried Google Images and gotten nowhere.

It’s so beautiful, it suits so well my dark house and garden, that I want to move it forward. (“Move your mahonia and put the calycanthus there,” said Lizzie, another neighbor who happened by. “Get rid of the mahonia. Stick it in the back.”)

It’s positively hallucinogenic.

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Okay, so that was rather difficult. Not the digging up part and the transplanting part. It’s been raining; the soil is soft. The tree is still thin and delicate.

But the bush just adjacent to the newly placed Spicebush has a cardinal nest with three eggs and an hysterical mother. [Scroll down for eggs, nest.] As I dug a hole for the calycanthus, I told off the bird for putting her nest steps from my front door.

I went to a great deal of trouble not to disturb the nest with my digging and watering. The mother bird flew off as I worked and watched me like a hawk from my roof. She didn’t stop chip-chip-chip-chip-chipping until I left.

UD‘s daughter, La Kid, is in Rome, and suddenly she’s surrounded by a million beatifiers. She and her friends didn’t realize they’d scheduled their Rome jaunt to coincide with this event. “Flags. Shirts with his name printed on them in big letters. Songs. Prayers…”

She’s upset that she missed gathering with her GW friends at the White House last night. I reminded her that she was in the crowd there for the Obama election celebration.

I also pointed out that she missed one world historical event, but was at the right place at the right time for another one.

Last night, and then this morning, I heard extended high-pitched shrieks coming from the back of my woodland acre.

Theories:

1.) Rabbits being seized, killed.

2.) Fox kits? I think they’re being born about now. We have gray and orange foxes.

3.) Coyotes?

With everything in bloom, and with birds everywhere, I take lots of walks every day around my woods and garden.

On a hidden path lined with vinca I stopped a moment ago to study an eastern box turtle, quite motionless, head extended.

The white flowers on our azalea bushes are popping out; they’re a calm counterpoint to the harlequin madness across the street, where our neighbors exhibit massive mixed azaleas in a ring around their house and in a path to their door. UD‘s friend Al Teich took a picture a few seasons ago.

Our white flowering dogwood got absolutely hammered in the big snowstorms this year – we had to pull down dead branches. Yet it’s glamorous again already.

More glamorous. The thinning made it delicate, Japanese.

Major infestation of rabbits, natch, and they’re eating my hostas. One of them hops across my front yard as I write this. Fuck the Easter Bunny.

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Joanna Soltan, Curator, School of the Museum of Fine Arts (she’s the person talking to the audience), at Kidding Around with Patti Smith at the MFA. (Patti Smith is on the far left.)

Today, no lights in my Irish Literature classroom (I rolled up the shades and enough light came in for us to manage); yesterday morning, no power of any kind in the Foggy Bottom metro station.

It was strange, entering that station and finding it almost totally dark. A massive cave. Metro personnel lit our way with flashlights. Tourists (tourist season has begun) hitched strollers over their shoulders and marched up the dead escalators.

Outages, as faithful readers know, have become a way of life for UD. Garrett Park, the town where she lives, often loses power. For the town’s upcoming musicale, UD wrote a song called The Garrett Park Outage Song.

Here’s UD‘s latest column (“A Hot Time in the Old Town”) in the Garrett Park newspaper.

This was the first question my American Literature students asked me as we arranged ourselves in a tight circle outside yesterday.

Outside? UD doesn’t do outside! Teaching outside is a waste of time! Too many distractions! (GW ain’t Kenyon.) No one can hear anything! I’ve tried it before!

But it’s the end of the semester; it was a spectacularly beautiful day; and my students, who charm me right down to the ground, were insistent. They pointed out that we were discussing one of Annie Dillard’s nature essays (we trashed her), and it was all too inescapably appropriate for us to talk about her while staining our slacks with grass.

And so we sat in the mild sunlight, surrounded by flowering cherry trees and daffodil beds. A few yards away, a student from my DeLillo course gently played a guitar.

Everyone heard everyone else perfectly, and we had a terrific discussion in which almost every member of the seminar (there are fifteen students in it) took part…

But first they wanted to express their anger at the now-famous Fox News headline: GW SUICIDE TRAGICALLY COINCIDES WITH OBAMA SPEECH.

Fox has taken the story down, but as The Daily What says: Fox News: Just like the Onion, minus the kidding.

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AS UD got off the Farragut North metro train this morning and trudged up the perpetually non-functioning escalator, she pulled her fare card out of her jacket pocket and got ready to insert it into the exit gate.

At the exit gate, she saw something she’d never before seen in a metro station. The station manager had positioned himself inches from departing passengers and was saying to every one of them, in a very loud voice: GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING!! GOOD MORNING!!! THANK YOU FOR USING METRO. HAVE A BEAUTIFUL DAY. HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY. BYE NOW. THANK YOU. MAY YOUR DAY BE BEE YOO TIFUL. THANK YOU.

UD felt vaguely threatened by the blast-effect of this good will and said nothing, as did most everyone else. But one woman met and raised the stakes. AND GOOD MORNING TO YOU! GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING!! Shook his hand.

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Although she thought she’d put plenty of money on her fare card earlier at Grosvenor station (after twenty-five years, UD doesn’t know the fare from Bethesda to Foggy Bottom; she just puts a bunch of dollars on the card), she was short a dollar. Off to the AddFare machine.

The AddFare machine takes only singles and fives. UD had a single, but it was so faded and thinned that the machine rejected it. She had no fives. She had tons of twenties.

No problem. She’d do the thing with change. Scrounging the bottom of her bag, she came up with all sorts of coins. But they turned out to be euros.

Nothing to be done but interrupt the station manager’s greetings with her problem. She crept up to him as he buoyantly readied his shtick for the next batch of exiters. She felt oppressed by her stupidity (if she were smart, she’d use a SMART card) and guilty at interrupting his shtick…

He took one look at her woefully waving her card, opened the exit gate, and bellowed JUST GO ON THROUGH. YOU’RE FINE. GO ON THROUGH. HAVE A BLESS-ED DAY.

Yesterday, the SEC went after an FDA chemist who made a mint trading on inside information about approved and unapproved drugs.

Mr Liang is accused of using confidential information about clinical trials of new drugs to trade the securities of 19 pharmaceutical companies ahead of 27 public announcements.

Today, a friend of UD‘s sister sent her an email: “This guy’s wife made my wedding cake!”

The weather is glorious – sunlight everywhere and a soft wind. But UD is under the weather, stuck in bed and mainly sleeping.

Unless the head of the NCAA announces he’s had enough of the farce and is dismantling the organization, UD will lie silent until she regains her strength.

… the supermoon (Image 5 is best); but I got back to Garrett Park in time to see (five minutes ago!) a brief, massive hailstorm, complete with thunder and lightning very near my house. The hail battered hard against the house.

My backyard deck is sprinkled with glow-in-the-dark hailstones.

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Update: Parthenon Moon.

… so don’t expect much coherence. You find me on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, and it’s another majorly sunny day, with views all the way to the mainland mountains. We’ve just made the rocky climb to Dún Aenghusa, and we’ve also walked about the island a bit, so I’m rather in the way of nodding off and that’s the truth of it see.

Things here are somewhat surreal, which accounts for the dreamy as well as the sleepy… The shiny black heads of the seals off the little stony beach we just passed were a strange sight. When you pass the islanders, they’re speaking weird soporific Gaelic. Tea and scones in front of a blazing hearth in a thatched cottage at the foot of the old fort deepened the deep calm.

Outside, church bells ring, and bicyclists with broad smiles on their faces follow the curving stone walls of the villages.

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Conversation one flight down at the internet cafe. Here’s what you need to know: The police are currently in the harbor searching for a body. (Could the parallels with Joyce’s Ulysses be any more exact??)

“I don’t think he jumped. It was a fuckin tragedy Christ it’s hard but I don’t think he jumped. He was takin pictures and leanin out and the weather was bad.”

“The weather was bad that night. He didn’t jump. Jesus it was a fuckin accident for sure.”

“Have you had a boat out yet? Any fishing?”

“No, no, not yet.”

The air was cool but pleasant; the wind was mild. We went to the Burren and the scary cliffs of Moher.

All around us as we drove, the long stone fields of Clare fell away to the ocean.

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At night, in Galway City, we keep seeing belligerent drunks getting into fights.

Everyone’s talking about the economic collapse. People are furious, frustrated. They shake their heads, take long drags on their cigarettes. “There’ll be no getting out of it for ages.” Their faces swell with rage.

… UD‘s now in Dublin. The city is currently sporting classic Irish weather: exuberantly sunny one moment – opening up amazing, long O’Connell Street vistas – and then wham. A wet black blanket of cloud.

Somewhere in Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, he quotes from his lover’s Paris notebooks. Back in Paris after years away, the lover describes feeling the drag of nostalgia.

It’s a little like that for me, being in Dublin after having spent a lot of time here when I was much younger.

I’m glad to see O’Connell isn’t gussied up the way I worried it might be. This is still an old and somewhat thready city – the Dublin I recall.

I see the Liffey River and O’Connell Street in two ways, really: With my own particular nostalgias, and with the more objective eyes of someone who reads and re-reads Joyce’s Ulysses. I see not merely scenes from that novel, but scenes from Joyce’s life along the river and street, as I (my feet aching from the long airport corridors) walk and walk, taking it in.

… And now it’s getting sunny and warm. The weather has been strange.”

La Kid, in a Skype chat today, described the weird world UD‘s about to enter as she flies to Ireland. She’ll be in Bono’s Clarence House for a few days, and then here, in Galway.

While she’s in Ireland, she’d like to revisit a few places: Newport House, with its salmon river; Newgrange; Inishbofin. All of these are locations that have lodged in UD‘s mind for many years. She’d like to see them again.

UD will blog of her adventures.