The garden in March is a ruin, but there are still parsley and onions for Hunter’s omelette Sunday night shared by all.
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[The experiment of freezing last summer's great tomatoes has failed. Brought out two of them from the freezer -- they made a billiard-ball clack, knocked-together -- but found when they thawed they collapsed into little wrinkly orange bags in a bowlful of their own water.]
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Back again on this topic of clotheslines and drying laundry in the sun.
I continue to sense myself at the brunt of an American avant garde when I wield wooden clothespins (British usage “clothes-pegs”) in the meadow. I sense myself the cleverest fellow in the world. My dryer is idle. No sound of propane jets. Early this morning I was pinning up laundry again, in a parka, warm January sun just coming over the tops of the far pines. Economists are coining new words, or reviving old ones, to describe the mix of inflation and recession that is coming over us all as the consequence of our rapacious and stupid relationship with Mother Earth. Oil prices (but also prices of all raw materials including land) are driving up even the cost of broccoli and steak and have brought the Limits of Affluent Growth to our attention. The word “stag-flation” is being brought back from the seventies.
A good word for what’s coming is "impoverishment." In an economist’s sense, that is. Lack of wealth. Scarcity of resources and capital. But it’s not altogether bad news, because another fitting expression would be “simpler living.” Also, the resources we continue to retain are our entrepreneurial and human-capital talents. So wealth is there.
That “putting up laundry” places me in an avant garde must sound pathetic, I know. It's a grandmotherly expression. And I know well, there are still neighborhoods (for some reason I picture them in Eastern states) where even “recycling” a little glass or aluminum is, still, a humilliation or an effeminacy or contemptible. I've been with people like that, and I know they're not bad people. I also know that my own sanctimonious holier-than-thou attitude, on these topics, is a privilege of one who can afford the “off-the-grid” life of divorce from the corporate (or, for a word-and-book man, academic) job scene. And one who is happy to live modestly and work at all kinds of different things. My boys Hunter and Dashiell don’t have all the latest coolest stuff, unfortunately. I know most folks need two huge jobs and total tie-in to all conventional institutions, just to keep up with normal. And I know I'm not keeping up with normal.
But it strikes me as rather a happy prospect that, soon, there will be fewer and fewer people trying to keep up with "normal.” There will be fewer of us looking down upon the economic choices of folks in (terrible expression!) “third-world countries.” Because I announce and declare now from the foothills, like Isaiah in my remote avant garde, we may already be a third-world country. Complete with a third-world country’s classic “dual economy” unsupportive of a middle class.
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February 20.
From the point of view of environmental soundness , the citizens in the best position for creativity are the cityfolk, not us country people. The great possibilities for innovation (as well as probity) are in the cities. Out here, the mess is still being created and the old Romanticism still prevails.
* * * *
Feb 21:
People who will find themselves somewhat plagiarized in my new novel, if they look close:
poet Charles Entrekin;
poet and anthropolgist Gary Snyder;
agriculturalist Wes Jackson;
my old workshop-mate Lynne Schatz.
Let us see if, in the published book, they can detect ideas I took and churned in.
* * * *
The Catholic catechism’s radical mysticism, in chapter on 'tenth commandment' to avoid envy: the impoverished are to rejoice because: “To see is to possess.”
Also this:
“Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love.”
* * * *
Hemp Is Stronger Than Iron.
It was time to cut down a stand of cedars. In so doing, I exposed some forest ground where my son discovered the frayed end of a buried length of rope, sticking up from the earth. (This is near where a barn is rumored to have once stood, as there is a squarish old foundation of stacked granite in those woods.)
By pulling the rope’s protruding end, he was able to unzip the soil in a long meandering path, from its burial-horizon about two inches under the modern surface, lifting dirt-clods wherever he went. Sixty feet later, at the ultimate end of the rope, a now-rusty nail (not a square nail; not that old) had been driven through the braids, once long ago, to fasten it against a tree or a post now long-gone.
The nail had corroded, it was nothing but a flexible twig of black rust, while the hemp fibers were still strong and hard and resilient. I dried the whole sixty-foot length on the garden-fence for a day or two, and put it away in the garage with other ropes, for future use.
* * * *
February 23.
Last month Dash lost his first tooth and was awarded a silver dollar by the Tooth Fairy. Then, this week, another tooth came loose – (these things are smaller than the kernels at a corncob’s tapering end) – so another coin appeared under his pillow. The two shiny coins have since been prodigally lost, somewhere among hoards of plastic toys. But the two discarded baby-teeth, they have been archived, by my wife, in a Zip-Loc Baggie with a torn-off paper identifying them and dating them.
This morning I was reading in bed while Dash (as a seven-year-old will) wandered around the bedroom silently exploring drawers and cabinets and dresser-tops, the mysteries of cufflinks and theatre-ticket stubs, suspenders and big old boots. I was aware of him picking through the drawer of the little writing-desk behind the bedroom door. Then he wandered away, toward other parts, wafting around the room, finally drifting down the corridor. It was about five minutes later that he drifted back to that drawer and said, with hesitation, softly but pointedly, “Dad? Why are my teeth in here?”
During that five minutes, only silence had come from his bedroom. During that five minutes, he in his sovereign loneliness was taking responsibility for the whole mysterious world. On the one hand, he had seen with his own eyes the gift of the Tooth Fairy, solid evidence of what a deserving boy he is and how ample the world is. On the other hand, there were the very teeth. I wasn't paying attention during that five minutes while he was totally quiet. He bore that weight because it’s something children know they have to do, even in their darkest innocence. I think of it now in regard to my father-in-law's cheery anecdote -- that his cardiologist in a jocular mood told him as he went off toward the oncologist, "Beware of oncologists, they just want to make you feel good."* * * *
March 3rd.
The oldest peartree on the east side of the house has, or rather did have, three main branches. Last summer, one of the three produced no fruit at all, and but little foliage. This winter, all that side’s wood and twigs were clearly dead: the spurs were putting out no incipient buds. So during the February cold-snap, I sawed off that whole branch, at its base, releasing a gallon of muddy rainwater that had been steeping like coffee in its hollow core.
Now April is coming, it’s blossom time, and one of the two remaining branches is behaving just similarly.
* * * *
March 20th.
The neighborhood lion – a solitary female described as long-bodied and not so tall as a deer – has been spotted this spriing on the road, and Hunter (who has loved the pre-dawn hike alone to the highway schoolbus-stop every morning, lighting his way on moonless winter mornings by the glow of his cell phone) now tends to stay in bed later, do some extra history reading, and let his mom fire up the minivan and scrape the windshield frost, to drive him out to the road.
* * * *
Cut down hundred-foot cedar with swift fine effective new Husqvarna 350 saw. Saved out two eight-foot lengths of the trunk for splitting into fenceposts. Rolled them up to the meadow and, with two iron wedges, split them lengthwise into posts, 6’x6’x8”. Enlarged the garden enclosure by establishing new posts on the south side, sinking them three feet underground, leaving five feet of vertical cedar standing aboveground, and stapled up ten-gauge wire against the depredations of deer. Hung old gate from new gatepost, using the same old doorhinges. Tilled the new-enclosed earth and, at this point, Dash appeared. His videotaped cartoon-shows must have ended. He turned on the irrigation-spigot’s rusty gush, to make mud in the new-tilled earth, while I fenced him in. Eventually he was flopping and tumbling in it, sitting in it and squashing it into little castles. By dinnertime he could claim, rightly, that he looked like an orc, and had to be hosed off on the threshold before tiptoeing through the house to the bathtub, and I told him at dinner that today had been a good day because, ninety years from now, when he’s old and grey and nodding by the fire and can’t recall much about his life’s ambitions and achievements – and doesn’t even recognize anyone in the room with him anymore – he might yet remember with crystal clarity, as if it were right before his eyes, the great day when he was seven and played in the mud in the sun.
* * * *
March 21: started tomatoes indoors, Brandywine and cherry. And planted one row of bok choy outdoors as experiment. Lettuce, cabbage, onions, chard will go in tomorrow outdoors. Broccoli and cauliflower still to come. Potatoes and corn when frost is no longer a danger.
* * * *
March 24. Today I parked behind the bookstore/cafe on the main street, to walk around to the front for my double-cappuccino to go. On the parking pavement out back, all three waitress-barista-girls were on their hands and knees -- circled in a huddle -- all wearing their ripped-denim skirts and other pretty gear, bare-shouldered or silk-shirted. They were following the dopey adventures of a small, dusty, brown thing that tumbled slowly there, a honeybee who had fallen into the cannister of powdered chocolate. The entire wait-staff was outside. Work at the "Wisdom Cafe" had come to a halt while they discussed whether to let him be, or "dump a glass of water on him," or find a little brush somewhere and poke at him, as meanwhile he blindly revolved.
* * * *
Religions make preposterous claims, but they are oddly practical claims. It’s true even of the most antiquated irrational old religions. Plenty of impractical-looking human institutions – art, for example, or poetry – have real benefits in our lives which are hard to frame simply in material or economic terms, for example a poem or a painting that provides a grain of useful self-knowledge, with good results in the world. Such benefits of poetry or art are hard to explain to those – perfectly intelligent! – people who are bored by museums and libraries. A number of successful smart people go from cradle to grave without setting foot in a museum, or caring about food, or sensuality.
In the case of a tried-and-true religion, if it’s the real thing and not merely a pretext for racism or sexism or war, its practical result is (let’s face it) to transform you into a saint and mystic. That’s the inevitable point: sainthood and mysticism. Since, in every full life, it is finally necessary to be a saint-and-mystic – yes, for every one of us; it’s the sieve we’re all inescapably ground through (most of us with the dignity of our privacy) – then a “religious” attitude of some sort becomes an inevitable necessity, whether homemade or off-the-rack.
There is a lot of talk these days – especially post-9-11 – about the obvious deludedness of religion; how ridiculous religion is; as if one day we could all be rational! And overcome it! And everything would make sense! Such writers as Sam Harris and the author of The God Delusion are perhaps – I don’t know – too young, or too wilfully pretending an innocence. They would say they don’t believe a day will come when they’ll have to be saints and mystics. They pretend, publicly, that they have no idea what such a bizarre warning could possibly mean.
Christopher Hitchins is a marvelous rhetorician, always a pleasure to read, and a lively entertainment-personality. But one with an interest in "truth" or "verity," of some kind, ought not to go to an entertainment personality for it. Mr. Hitchins has some unexamined assumptions. A useful way of defining God is: "a necessary logical assumption." "A first logical assumption." Most theologians would insist on its being an unexaminable assumption indeed.
* * * *
These Are A Few of My Favorite Things:
Gluttony
Lust
Envy
Anger
Greed
Sloth
Pride
* * * *
April 12, 2007: Zucchini planted, in pots indoors, to be moved outside on May 1.
This year in the fruit trees I’ll try something new. Traps for coddling moths. Last year coddling moths came to live in at least half of our apples, so that every bite was an investigative exercise and we couldn’t, without admonitions, give them away to people. These commercial moth traps are designed like cardboard-origami boxes, which you hang from a branch. They use pheromones to seduce the moths inside, where, with their libido, they presumably die of impatience, hung up in the perfect breezes of May and June.
Personally, I've never minded eating an apple where a worm has lived. It only takes a little paying attention.
The weather this spring was perfect throughout blossom time. Every petal and pistil stayed intact, during a loud bee time. Already the pears are starting to look abundant. Knobs as big as marbles have appeared overnight, six or eight for every foot of branch. I suppose culling will be in order. One particular stupendous old tree seems to produce a full unculled crop of pears as big as softballs. When the August nights come, the sound of branches’ snapping will come over the meadow. A real farmer, I know, would fashion crutches for the branches. It's wasteful not to.
* * * *
Bok choy has failed decisively. Not one sprout appeared. Have hoed up that row and will attach it to adjacent corn plot.
Corn, now, corn is exciting. Not like bok choy. Every kernel germinates, and fast, so in a matter of days I see the entire complement of thirty-six miniscule pale phalluses. Corn is an experiment this year, but it already looks like it will be a success. I'm planting so many because -- as I understand -- you need a lot of them to get cross-germination, and they must be planted in three or four rows to take advantage of the wind.
* * * *
The Power/Love Trade-Off. In the journey of forking paths, at every fork, Love lies on one side, Power on the other. When you choose the one, you are forsaking the other. Also in choosing the one, you veer permanently farther from the other, as you go along.
(I notice this to be a constant theme in my writing.)
* * * *
May 17, 2007. Hot days are here, and laundry is drying on the line. The rumble of the dryer, its jets of hot propane, will be idle for the summer mostly. Thanks to Al Gore, maybe now at last, rough-nap stiff bathtowels, folded on linen-shelves, can be the pride of a clever household. Let them be a status symbol.
The sight of laundry on a line today has caught me unawares in a sentimentality. We’re educated to see really magnificent or summary beauty in certain conventional places – the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s B-minor Mass, Proust’s big book, the Grand Canyon, even a close look at a wildflower. I’m a conventionally educated man and I’ve been, of course, made aware of all the usual ways we’re supposed to get access to “the sublime.” But the sublime can sneak up from unexpected directions, and laundry on a line in the spring wind – the big bedsheets in various colors bellying out – comes to me now. There was a children’s-book we used to read to Hunter, called “All the Secrets of the World,” and it contained, spread out over two pages, a particularly moving illustration of a lawnful of laundry hanging out to dry, as seen through the eyes of a child. In a wind that was palpable from the artist’s pastel-strokes, on a slope of lawn that tilted with a moody passion and a predestined ineluctability, the great flying badges of laundry were framed to represent a scene a child would remember forever, a simple spring day, to one side a granny figure, slouched in her metal garden-chair. Today on the meadow behind our mudroom, filtered through my memory of that artist’s illustration, our laundry stretching from a pear-tree’s branch to the corner of the house above a cord of firewood – more than taking another crack at Proust, more than a day at the Louvre – exactly captures the thing I might come back for, if there were such a thing as “reincarnation.” I would leave the Louvre, for this: I would walk right out of the rooms of Dutch masters and down the staircase, and get on a plane straight back here on this meadow. The pure and austere "sublime," according to my education, is contaminated by such corny ingredients as a particular sentimentality, and in this case, the taint of nostalgia, too. But an education isn't always-and-unfailingly a useful preparation for life. The whole organism is constituted for the perception of the elusive "truth-and-beauty" revelation.
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I’m Elmer Fudd now. I’m Mr. MacGregor. A rabbit is my nemesis. He has dined systematically on my rows of broccoli, eschewing the lettuce and onions and the new asparagus-mist above the ground and Swiss chard. (The Swiss chard is instead is food for green finches, and is a total loss.) So today I fortified the enclosure with finer-mesh wire, and I put a second latch on the garden gate at ankle-height, because a greedy rabbit can flow through the gap there. Will I soon be waiting at a rabbit-hole with a big mallet up-raised?
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* * * * * * * *
June 10, 2007.
Broccoli has been mostly lost to the rabbit: two whole rows were nibbled down to nothing, in as many weeks. Now I’ve put finer-mesh wire all around, and all depredations of the rabbit have come to an end.
Then this week, a quick hail storm put bulletholes in all the broad, soft leaves – pumpkin, zucchini, pepper, tomato. The survivors are the corn, the onions, the cabbage, some of the lettuce that hasn’t bolted, and about half the tomatoes.
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Good Meadow Party this year. Three fiddle players, with all the courtesy of the eminent, were here among the usual mix of dobros and guitars at the campfire. Also a great mandolin player.
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June 12, 2007. I’ve been making a practice, for some years now, of sitting in the rear pews Sunday mornings at a very traditional Episcopalian church. It's fascinating, it's intellectually stimulating, and when I can manage it, it's an hour in the week well spent. Now I’m asked whether I “believe” in “all that.”
It’s an ineffectively framed question – the usual purely semantic trap – because “belief” is a word nobody has a handle on. The truth is, people don’t know what they “believe.” Rather, refer not to “beliefs” but refer to “things we say.”
Of the “things we say,” a few might be “beliefs” but the rest are just “announcements.” And they’re announcements for our own hearing, our own ears, our own enchantment. Especially when we talk of higher things – guardian angels, quarks – our one most-enchanted listener is ourselves.
An example of something we seem to believe, freely, is that this table here is solid and will support an elbow. Or, we believe that the light pouring into our eyes begins somewhere, and represents an object. Or, we believe that, at the lapse of one moment, another moment will rush in, consecutively, to sustain the “flow” of “time.” Those are things we believe. Call that theology.
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Flannery O’Connor, when asked whether she “believed in all that,” said something like, Well, if it were all just a lot of symbolism, then the hell with it.
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The logic of Western religion: If you paint a slash of lamb’s-blood on your doorpost, the bully will pass by your house. The message is: “Pass me over. This house has been ruined. The one thing most precious here has already been slaughtered. Pass on by." Then X-ianity came along and did accomplish the slaughter of the son, quite publicly.
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I was in L.A. on Saturday, at ten o’clock in the morning, giving a commencement speech to graduating students who had won awards for Creative Writing (I spent much of the time warning them basically not to be writers, if they can possibly help it). Meanwhile Brett and Hunter were home on the meadow, in canvas chairs, watching baby birds learn to fly. According to Brett, they would zip out from the appletree about fifteen feet, do a U-turn, and zip back into the tree.
* * * * * * * *
Other evidence of the season. Hunter on June 22 will get on a plane for New Hampshire. It’s something I find myself boasting about. On the strength of a couple of string quartets, he has been accepted at a summer composers’ school and been given a scholarship, so for six weeks he’ll be gone from home, for the first extended time. At the airport, he will enter that telescoping tube connecting airport to plane. He’s sixteen. His parents will be shrinking at one end behind him waving ‘bye, and he’ll go through the plane hatch alone, carrying his ticket in hand, and start looking for his seat alone. What a great pleasure that moment is, for him.
* * * * * * * *
Arborist comes to call: that peartree is doomed.
The oaks are fine – this is just a particularly big year for the little green caterpillar, and those two-hundred-foot trees are in the prime of their lives.
No sign of leaf curl on the young peach. Have not sprayed this year.
* * * * * * * * * *
Don Knotts . Remember him? He was “Barney Fife” in the television show about the sleepy small town sheriff. The prtorusion of adams-apple and eyeballs.
He has been on my mind lately. When I was young, Don Knotts was, to me, an excruciating instance of pitiable mistakenness. He was a man who had built a life upon his own ridiculousness, his scrawniness and foolishness, all to make people laugh. Compare him with Mick Jagger, who was incarnated in the exact same physical form as Don Knotts (fact: they were twins separated at birth) but who parlayed it into a form of power and glamor. When I was young Mick Jaggers’s seemed a life much better spent.
* * * * * * * *
It’s been a big year for wildlife. Big animal populations. As in no other summer, squirrels keep invading the Annex, taking bites from the apples in the fruitbowl. Neat black defecation-pellets by the phone and message machine. So we set a Have-A-Heart trap and release them by the Truckee River. Then as more squirrels appear, to be trapped and released, we begin to suspect that, Heffallump-like, it’s the same squirrel over and over again, and not a multitude. It’s suggested that, for identification purposes, we should spray-paint this squirrel before releasing him again, and see if he turns up again (as there is a Krylon spraycan of “Champagne Gold” in the basement); but this idea is discarded because the other squirrels around the Truckee River might gang up on a new squirrel who showed up with too dangerous a fashion sense, wearing Champagne Gold.
And the bears. At lower elevations, this year, they’re raiding my pear and apple trees. They leave huge piles of wet shit directly under the trees where they stand, while sweeping lower branches of all their fruit. At higher elevations in Squaw they provide an instance of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Here is that chain-of-events: For years the local bears learned to dine on people’s garbage. Then, in order not to train up “Bad Bears,” the new local law was that all garbage must be housed in bear-proof steel containers. Everybody invested in those, including poured-concrete footings. The result is that now bears, disappointed with garbage-forage, are entering houses freely and browsing around, hankering, gross, mystical. They need to be chased out by a featherless biped waving his arms and hooting.
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An unusually cold December: the compost heap outside in the mornings (last night’s broccoli stem, banana peel, coffee grounds) is frozen sparkling. But still a little bit of summer hangs around: beside the kitchen sink, every time I lift the lid on the sloppy compost bucket, one little fruitfly appears.
(It isn’t the same fruitfly of course, it’s a descendent and heir of the fruitfly I saw the day before. September’s fruitfly seems to have reached a reproduction rate of exactly “replacement level” in there, months after its proper season.)
* * * *
The form “ecological collapse” will take: not a dramatic crisis; simply an economic pinch will educate us. The price of an apple. The necessity to learn a new trade.
And the art of making things last; which provides a pleasurable kind of creativity and a constant education. All I learned in grad-school is irrelevant. Our streets and roads could one day look like Havana’s, with old cars nicely maintained.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Cynic” in literature: one who sustains a display of eternal innocent wonderment at the portion of “evil” in the world which he is so sharp-eyed as to discern. It’s a manner of evading looking within oneself to discover one’s own portion. So as literature, it’s not really, anymore, for grown-ups. Good for kids. Mark Twain would be an American instance. It’s why so many of Twain’s books are in the end tiresome, his always holding his own “Having-Never-Grown-Up” before himself as a lamp to light the world. The world doesn’t measure up, for him. Sorry, but Mr. Vonnegut is probably an example too. Very Twain-like. When I was young, his books got me interested in the moral power of fiction. A fond goodbye to Mr. Vonnegut. In heaven now with Barney Fife.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Address to an atheist.
The fact is, nobody believes in “god.” People who claim that they believe and that they never doubt, though they have that light in their eye, are simply caught in a language dilemma: they aren’t exactly lying or uttering an untruth, they’re just oversimplifying. I really think that when they look you in the face and say they believe in god, they have a tiny heartache. Not a heartache of duplicity but, call it, a heartache of hope.
Yet the fact is, everyone believes in “god.” This is whether they know it consciously or not. Again, this is just a fuzziness in language.
God is an assumption, that’s all. “He” (to use the sentimental old pronoun) is the assumption before all other assumptions, the unexamined assumption, and the unexaminable assumption. The unexaminability of this assumption is necessary. To attribute any further qualities to god, other than its necessary “existence,” (that is, to wax theological) is to take the risk physicists take when they start saying that light is (incomprehensibly) both a wave and a particle. Though conjecture may be irresistibly interesting, one must always admit undecideability. This is where myth and liturgy become necessary: they are the only language that aims outward at what’s indescribable. Like “quark” and “lightwave” in the physicist’s lexicon, myth and liturgy are acknowledged as rhetorical figments. (Yes, by the Catholic Pope too. I’m sure he’s no fool. He’s got a sort of clever, been-around-the-block look in his eye.)
Christopher Hitchens has a new book on the subject of Religion, How Stupid It Is, and Why It Poisons Everything. Well, face it, Christopher Hitchens is largely an entertainment personality, not a thinker you’d take your sincere interests to. He’s a terrifically amusing writer; I happen to enjoy his tone and rhetoric, and he himself obviously enjoys it; but of course, Mr. Hitchens believes in “god,” too, at bottom, just as fully as does, say, that Catholic Pope (with all his peculiar rhetorical limitations, and his obligations to his public as an “entertainment personality”). Even Mr. Hitchens has an unexamined assumption.
Hitchens’s idea isn’t wrong. Religion does have a way of, you might say, “poisoning” or at least confusing our affairs and our discourse, as well as abetting a lot of wickedness. But you may as well say, by analogy, that “sex poisons everything,” a remark that’s often been made with a rueful sigh and perhaps by women more than men. Of course sex “poisons everything,” it leads to so much folly, and even violence, and unhappiness, but we can’t on that account ask people to dispense with it. Or pretend it’s not there. Sex is a condition we exist within. Like space-and-time, it’s hard for humans to resolve to “live above it.” Some people do seem to eschew sex and love and romance and all that. [I’m still talking about religion, here, figuratively.] Not only are they able to announce aloud, to themselves and to the world, that they would rather renounce the human kiss, or human caress, and be alone; they really would rather be alone; they do very well alone. Maybe they’re angry or broken-hearted, maybe they’re some kind of übermenschen, maybe they have hormonal reprieves. Such people can definitely appear to be happy and effective citizens and mortals. Maybe such people’s lifetime arcs, without sexual love, are neater, more rational, et cetera.
Similarly, some people seem to live happily without ever setting foot in an art museum. They have other successes: they get rich, they get sophisticated about food or wine or reading or investments or cars, they have love and work and children and grandchildren and travel the world, but yet are bored by art. Or, some people have silent houses where music is never played. Maybe all these kinds of people are übermenschen. The most hopeful way of interpreting Hitchens’s anti-religious announcements is that he’s an übermensch of this sort.
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Jan. 4. Hurricane-force winds are coming to the foothills. The National Weather Service radar shows a fantastic low-pressure zone offshore swirling, wandering our way. Have garaged both cars, set stones around the skirts of all my woodpile tarps, roped the loose-swinging gate, latched the screen doors by hook-and-eye, filled the bathtub with cold water as our only cistern when the power goes out and the pump doesn't work.
* * * * * * * *
Winter: chainsaw won’t start and needs servicing; the lettuce has stopped growing and its leaves are hard and unappetizing; the woodpile is shrinking faster than I’d planned; Hunter is doing home-schooling this year and drinks coffee continually; all of us in pajamas at noon; no word from my agent.
* * * * * * * *
May 1 -- Have delayed all plantings, especially of corn, in order to make fruit last longer into the fall. At this point, in the small garden patch, all I've done is turn over the soil.
* * * * * * * * *
Notice advertised to all interested parties: Hunter's second string quartet will be performed in SF on June 1, by the Del Sol String Quartet.