curly headed baby

i have started making a little comic about random thoughts related to wee critter living in my kk's belly. here is the first installment. it is a bit on the choppy side, but stick with me...



oh. and you should click on the pic in order to read my cursive!

swollen

Well, I guess I've been served up a super fancy dose of sitting time. I had planned to work in the gardens all weekend, but yesterday's work will have to suffice. For the first time in 1.7 years, my knee has ballooned up into its swollen irritated self.

Instead of garden work, I will consume copious amounts of ibuprofen and heat, ice, heat, ice, heat, ice. It seems like my knee always has a beef with me after a strenuous work event.

I guess my body responds in ways that I listen. It is saying sit the fuck down. And now, I am forced to.

It gives me time to think and write and perhaps read things I feel like catching up on.

Now, on to nursing my gelatinous appendage.

party for penelope and pregnacy still hopping

okay. Sorry to flit away. But my life is out of control busy. I feel totally overwhelmed to the point of acting slap happy most days. Tomorrow we throw a big ass party for penelope. penelope was the director of where i work for over 23 years. she retired back in march and tomorrow is this big fundraiser/retirement party to honor her 23 years of prisoner rights work.

i ended up being responsible for most of the organizing even though i am so far from an event planner i smell extra strange when aiming to plan an event.

i think what starts happening is my mind drafts a story of how the evening should go--please understand the stories in my mind are not all that normal. so how the evening should go gets all goofy, and, in the end, i hope that goofiness turns to interesting.

simply put there is a party mix containing multiple covers of john denver's rocky mountain high; shitloads of desserts (provided in large part by my always pulling for me friends);a presentation that i've been working on for days; and dancing (international folk dancing and regular dancing).

in baby world, k had an ultra sound on monday and she saw the critter jumping around "like a monkey." those are her words. i was not there, cause i was working; busy life made flesh.

the doc could not see the hemorrhage and the bleeding has mostly stopped.

In another news, it is fucking hot for may. we are talking nearing 90 and the gardens are thriving and i have so many more plants to get into the ground, but they will have to wait until the weekend.

i also have another amazing bee hive experience to share, but that too must wait.

till then. happy hopping baby and parties celebrating a person who gave (and gives) a damn about those who are often considered the most unlovable.

we got the beat, we got the beat, we got the beat--yeah

kk had a doppler this morning and we heard the little heart a thumping. so it is still in there all alive and everything. k is also still dripping dots and skids of blood, so the midwife ordered an ultra sound and then we see her again on june 2 to go over it all.

maybe, k will have one of those strange pregnancies that consists of bleeding throughout. i'm hoping not, but if we get a kid out of it all in the end, well we will take whatever the planet has in store for us.

we decided to take the day off today and work in the yard. we have a new beehive to paint, 3 new garden beds to finish off (i still have to haul some more compost into them), chicken coop/run to muck, new bee frames to string with delightful wild comb in order to go as foundationless as possible, and other urban farmesque things to do.

i'm sticking with the go-gos soundtrack today. yes, we got the beat.

hilarity, horribleness, and absurdity.

Well. K is still wiping pink tinged stuff and sometimes spotting, but we are trying to chalk it up to the hemorrhage and not the beginnings of a miscarriage.

I also am chalking it up to the fact that last month, at this same time, is when her spotting was happening before, and last month, at this same time, it was also when yours truly was PMSing and having her period. I have a new hypothesis. My alpha hormones are pulling at kk's uterus and making her drop the remnants of the pool of blood that is hanging out in her womb.

Of course, this is totally my non-scientific conjecture, based on the leanings of my ass, but it helps me get a laugh in every once in a while.

With all that being said, kk is standing up in her dear friend's wedding this weekend and we will be staying down in the D Friday and Saturday night at the Ren Cen. So we are getting a little vacay and simultaneously keeping our fingers crossed that kk is not having a miscarriage that accidentally bleeds out all over the light green dress she is wearing in the wedding.

Believe it or not this morbid thought also brings us a little chuckle. Cause wouldn't that be just fucking perfect. You have to laugh at the horrendous shit every once in a while or how can you deal with it?

Really?

Even at work, day after day, we are bombarded with stories of abuse and isolation and desperation that would just break all of our hearts in thirds if we did not draw out a hee hee every now and again at the absurdity of it all. Undiagnosed c.olon cancer is no joke, but a dude collecting pair after pair of bloodied underwear, storing them up in his cell, and taking them with him over to pr.ison health to show the people who are entrusted with his life that he is not lying about blood seeping from his ass, well I have to smile at the smarts and audacity of the dude.

And sometimes when fellows send us blood samples in the mail and poop smears and sem.en samples, cause they think we have a full-on CSI style lab in our little garage of an office, well it makes me laugh my ass off and then wish that I always had latex gloves on when I opened up the mail:)

and did I ever tell you all about the guy who wrote the most detailed story of how he rose from the dead in the morgue of the local hospital with IVs hanging out of his arm. He, of course, was explaining how he had been killed by officers over a period of days. The story itself was so batty I had to smile, but the fact that the man believed this had actually happened--tears came a welling up over the edge of the smile. Cause something really bad must have happened to him sometime in his life--whether in the life of reality or the life inside of his brain that was as vivid as the realest of moments.

So, ya. I can try to make light of the nastiness that surrounds me. I can try to get through with chuckles and laughs. I can open my heart up to the absurd and think about how all of it is just that.

That's where I am at for a while. Riding on a pink tinged wave of hilarity, horribleness, and absurdity. Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts and the traces of things likes prayers that help us conjure up laughter and love in the midst of struggle.

nothing left to say

since saturday, my dear k has been consistently bleeding.

it blows.

how many times have i said it here on this blog? those words, that is? or something like them? it blows. it sucks. fuck it. damn. hard times. suck. etc. etc. etc.

i am trying to be all in the present about it and all that lovely bullshit, but guess what, at this point in time, i'm over it. plain and simple over scavenging for remnants of dreams that are yet to manifest into concrete flesh and blood before my eyes. the day when i feel the little being's scrawny paws upon the tender, yet sharp, curve of my collar bone--when the soft little animal unfolds in ringlets of new skin before me--until then, i will curse the wind and the rain and yell out profanities to the stars and then reel myself back into the present, this moment and take it for what it is.

and what it is is this:

people, we are so fragile and fleeting. at anytime it all could stop for you. at anytime we could be the 25 year old pga pro golf player found dead in her home on a sunday. or we could be the one to be sideswiped by an 83 year old woman who should have had her license taken away 8 years back. (and hell no I am not an ageist; i am a fucking realist).

often, i want to really be okay with all of this passing on that happens before our eyes. i want to know that we leave some kind of imprint--for good; for bad; for always. we do, and still, we do not. we are flashing. we are leaves. we are strong and green and flapping in the strongest of winds and then we fall heavily to the ground and dry up and break down into something else. hopefully, always something life-giving.

but, how do i capture that moment of waiting to know if what is (or was living inside of kk) is still alive? how can patience fortify itself in a heart that desires more than anything to know. to know what is real. to know what is next, and still to understand that we can never know what is next.

i can remember being in the 5th or 6th grade. my parents were gone out for the night and, of all things, I sat on the toilet and started to cry uncontrollably cause i realized my mama could die and not come home. i realized one day the person i cared about the most in the world could and would be gone. i cried and cried and my chest heaved with sadness.

today, that person has shifted to my kk. and now it has shifted to the two lives before my eyes. the life of my lover--the upper quadrant of my heart and this other life trying to forge a path to our world through her womb. and so when the blood is made visible and this threat of new death dangles on the edge of her being, i am paralyzed and devastated.

and now, i have nothing left to say...

it will be okay and maybe even better

I have things to do. Work—lots of it. This work includes my paid work and my house work, but then it also includes the work of my own head and heart.

I need to work through some themes that keep surfacing. Since k had all the bleeding spells, she has not been riding to work with me (though she did ride both ways yesterday for the first time in three weeks). It leaves a void, but also this time to contemplate the things of the world.

Spring is such an active time. Everything is bustling with energy and newness. It makes total sense that my mind is doing the same thing. It is shrill with desire. The desire to know; the desire to understand; the desire to love; the desire to make love; the desire for something bigger than human to help.

Help with what?

To make sense out of human motivations, love, desires, actions, hatred. I do not need definitions or total explanations. I need a bigger peace.

I need to know that when I witness the heinous actions of humans against humans that amidst the knowledge of those actions I can survive and so can those that I know and love and do not know and love. And the survival I am writing of is not just getting by, getting through it; rather, it is knowing that the little efforts toward something better do indeed matter and that these little efforts translate and carry over to generations to come.

And when I speak of generations to come, I do not simply mean human generations, but I mean the vitality and security and well-being of all living things and the rocks, soil, water, and air with which they all exist.

All of this gets me waxing spiritual. Whitman comes to mind a gruff booming in my ear. The rhythm of his voice a fixture in my head though I have never really heard him (except on the gravely, “36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem ‘America.’”) But rather the rhythm bounces over my memories because I have been reading him religiously since 11th grade American literature when I fell in love with his words and the rapture they induced in my belly.

And, so when I ride my bike down by the river and I think about this woman I met last weekend—the daughter of a man who probably sexually abused hundreds of young woman—I move to Whitman and the words that he wrote; the words that invoke the turn toward something akin to perceptiveness and peace.

I think of our fallibility and our ability to harm. I think of our holiness and our ability to heal. I think of how this woman who expressed that she had done all that she could to keep her father from acting out again and again should never have had to endure that endeavor alone. I think about the messed up world we live in that isolates and abandons people leaving them to their own devices rather than welcoming, developing community, and holding one another accountable over and over again for all of our actions and in-actions.

I think how I want it to be different. I pray that it will. I hum praises to the birds that bring me peace and spin smiles and gestures to the water lapping over rocks and ridges of river.

I listen to this old man, long dead; the cadence of his writing like a comfrey balm. It seeps liquidy over the bristled edges of my heart into those cut places where pus and angst rise up and where I yearn for something more to cradle my face and whisper in any form that comes--it will be okay and maybe even better.

From Walt Whitman's Song of Myself
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and
vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the pass-
ing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies
of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs
wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from
bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd
the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

compost and other updates on urban farm and kk

me and some of our compost (not all of the compost I've been shoveling is from our batch, but some of it is including this)

long week.
long, long week.

busy at work.
busy at home.

just so you all know, k has not bled for about 5 days. I hate to put it out there; it is like needing to knock on an all wooden ship from 1776, but here's to hoping the bright red liquid has eased off for good.

I took a half day thursday and a full day yesterday in order to get the garden beds a little more prepared. I rearranged my compost heap for maximum heat and space utilization. It was some back breaking work, but well worth it. I am attempting this eliot coleman, straw bale style compost. The back bin is for brown (on the left) and green (on the right) and the front right is my active pile. The front left is where I will layer the new pile. I am hoping the front right will be ready by July. It is tarped and I keep it nice and moist and turn it when I feel inclined. This pile contains a whole micro-world of goodness. I cannot express how much i love compost!


We adopted another chicken yesterday. Her name is Buffy (she is a Buff Orpington). Her sisters (10 of them) were all killed by a mink on the farm she lived at, so now she is trying to adapt to our flock of bitches. picture of buffy to come.

Yes, our chickens are mean little buggers. they have been pecking the hell out of buffy. Alas, yesterday night, we kept her separate in the mobile run i made last summer.

Hopefully, she will acclimate. She is beautiful and bigger than the bitches.

I dug up two new side beds where we took down three trees this spring in order for more sun to shine on our very shady space. I am loading them with compost.