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.

our year in pictures--part 1

not that a year can belong to any human, but here are some of the things we did and loved while doing it...


I did not write about it here, but after the miscarriage, etc. k and i held a special ritual to say goodbye to that which could have been and the pain of trying to conceive for so long then having it happen so quickly then losing it all at once. our friend drew our blood and then we froze it and then we mixed it with soil from our yard and lavender from my garden and we burned flames and read poems and threw it all in the river that i love--huron.


herb and corn garden with bees--sweet lovely creatures that create life giving liquid. ever thankful is my heart for their existence.


and then we had chickens.


the front of the house where we make our lives. someday, i hope to build a bike rack with a thyme bed beneath it, so that when we lock our bicycles the deep green scent of thyme comes alive.


the community garden that i am steward of--we had a lot of gardeners.


that's my mama with me. we rode to the top of a hill in northern michigan. me and k whipped my ma into agonizing leg pain. but she loved it. and so did we.


at k's dad's place up north with my wee boy nephews and girl niece. my sis and her husband and ma and dad all came on vacay with us and we had a lovely time! I am so proud of my little sister; she is a very, very good mama (and her man a very good daddy) and their children become more amazing human beings every single day.


discovering karaoke with dear friends at this strange joint and the house dog a poodle with pink and purple dyed fur.


a mantis in northern michigan. how i love this part of the planet and all the creatures that roam here.


we dug a swale during my permaculture course with mid.west permaculture. it was sweaty and delightful.


our baby, bike ypsi, kept on cyling along. we held another spring ride and another fall ride and hosted all kinds of fun rides and participated in advocacy efforts. how i love to bicycle and how i love the community cycling creates.


a thatch roof we saw during my permaculture course field trip.


threw a big thanksgiving with k and a and had all our families over!


my love; my darling; my lifemate; my best friend in the whole damn world with the big lake behind her--the lake we both love the lake that feels ancient and cold and bigger than this little living we are doing here beneath the stars.

dirty hands in 2010

every day slips by a little faster. the sun falling and then rising and the moon cracking white lines over blue black sky so many nights. then all darkness--sometimes. pink lines bend through the eastern horizon in mornings when the sun peeks out to reach us.

and by noon the ball of fire beams sends volts of light beyond measure into the trees and soil and over the tails of animals.

and we just keep going around and around on this ball of life and decay.

last year at this time i was sick with a life inside of me. this year at this time i look back on that time and think it was only a minute ago or it was so long ago or did that really happen at all?

it is like a vivid blur. too real to be hazy for always; too surreal to be entirely clear.

my body for 10 weeks was held captive by a brief curious sort of experience. many cells congregated in my womb and grew all liquidy and blood-filled and then the growing stopped and the cells busted through that supple place between my legs. i was flabbergasted throughout the life growing, then dying, then birthing the death, then bleeding a lot to eradicate the fleshy parts that had built up in my womb, and then this grieving surrounded by a cloud of panic and depression and questions.

and through all of it what i have learned is that the calling i have felt since i was fifteen needs to be gradually more realized in my life. while i do farm on my little urban plot, one day i want nothing more than to grow vegetables, nuts, fruits, animals, and bees and to do it well and do it surrounded by good community--good created family--good friends.

2009 started off with a miscarriage. it was a swooping bang of a wake up call; a kind of startling alarm orchestra blazing like a string section on speed. it told me that my body is very female. it is also very fertile and very connected to the rhythms of the moon and tides; the pulses of the seasons. I knew this already, but it raised it to a new level of realness in my heart. it made me ready to return to the soil and the roots and rhizomes that weave through her darkness. it made me more aware of the cycle of life and the deepness of decay and death connected to that life.

My desire to always be grounded to place and to establish deep roots seems to have multiplied tenfold since the miscarriage. Now, the question is where should these roots be put down. for so long i thought it would be here in ypsi. but now i keep questioning where we should be and k does too. we want to grow things together and growing on an urban lot in a city where people all too readily toss bloody bandages and burger k.ing cups and fry containers and homemade crack pipes and used condoms on the ground is a bit tougher than leasing or buying land somewhere more open and not as touched by the grimy, ill-intentioned/ignorant hands of humans.

cities need green spaces too and we have been doing it well here. chickens, bees, vegetables, trees, bicycling groups, friends--we've been growing it--many questions. few answers. we will see what 2010 brings.

i know i want my hands in the soil more hours of the day than not.

i know i want dirty hands in 2010.

yearning without devotion

lately, ambivalence has struck a chord in the sinewy parts of my muscles. it is that in between place--the not too deep in the dark but not quite above water place.

michigan winter always casts a fervent deep blue over my days. sometimes the blue appears gray and other times it is trying for azure and little specks of sunlight on the horizon shift over the silhouettes of barren trees and dried stalks of sunflowers.

i'm not apathetic. i'm just yearning without devotion. without devotion to act on the yearning that has singled itself out on the deep red threads of my heart. and i do act in small ways, but i do not jump into my dreams with fierce confidence.

when it comes to that which i am not ambivalent about, i become animated with delight and willing to sweat and sweat and work and work on the little projects around my small homestead. cause it is the keeping of bees and the raising and tending to of chickens and the planting of trees and the preservation of food and the cooking of things we have grown or that have been grown close to where we make our home, these things make my throat tense up with a tightness close to joy.

i do not necessarily think it is bad or wrong to not act right away on making the big changes in my life--the changes that would lead to eradicating the ambivalence.

the small steps i have taken lately to move closer to working with the land and the creatures who live around my family are outlined below in some pictures with words. also, i will be attending the young farmer's conference this week in new york and i am not ambivalent about that at all. i am super happy about it.



did i tell you that i am in love with honeybees. they are miraculous and beautiful beings that rush forth sweetness from their bodies and create such useful and intricate comb.

the above picture is me going into the hive for a late fall harvest. i did it on my own and things went very well. the girls are so mild and mostly just not interested in humans unless of course i stay in their space a little too long.



more bees



comb and honey in a bucket. i cut the comb into the bucket and used a paint scraper knife on the end of a long pole and crushed and crushed the comb and honey. i crushed it till it was a liquid mess that i could drag the knife through more easily. then i strained it through painters' sieve cloth and let the weight of it press out the liquid honey in two batches for 24 hours each.

then i jarred it.

and i also made labels. someday, i'll show them to you.

And, I love my chickens very much. They are so funny. Kk says she cannot help but smile when she watches them run around the yard and i agree. They are like our little, Pomeranian dog friend, Lilo, she always makes me smile and so do my chickens. Except the chickens' tongues have never entered my ear with wet, slobbery, stanky kisses and they never will.



and someday sooner than later i want to get some goats. The picture above is me milking a goat at the ann arbor reskilling festival. i would probably get Nigerian Dwarf goats (not pictured above--Nubian above). But k says no for now.



oh, and I also like to cook stew over fire.



and walk through the old cemetery in this town i love...

i'm not ambivalent about those things.

good bye sabbatical

I've been back to work for one week.
It was hard diving in. I cried. Well, I wept hard.

I was scared that all my compassion had dried up and that stumbling back into the madness of direct connection to a justice system so full of injustice and ache and madness (not insightful madness, but the angry, heart wrenching madness of a system rusty at the root and too heavy with the bones of too many souls to turn in any degree of right direction) would be too difficult to stomach.

When the days were long and the flowers were blooming and life was pulsating in the perfect patterns of aliveness all around me this summer and early fall, I felt contentment. I also felt that deep satisfying exhaustion due to all of the hard physical labor I did around the yard (our little urban farm on the edge of some woods; the kind of wooded area in cities where dead, human bodies turn up--eerie woods I would not walk alone in at night).

Anyhow, I was so fortunate to have these many months off and explore the pieces of myself that have often been pushed asunder because so much of my time is spent working away from my homestead. When I list what I accomplished over the last 3.5 months it is quite amazing:
Scraped and painted front porch and railings
Got chickens
got bees
learned about beekeeping from my beekeeper mentor and some books
harvested over 2 gallons of honey two weeks ago by myself--well kk was my helper--but I did it without my mentor
rendered beeswax
made lip balm
built from scratch with no plans mobile chicken run for chickens
put together pre made coop and permanent chicken run
took a permaculture course and got a certificate
dug a four by four by four root cellar in the back yard
filled it with a shit load of michigan squash, onions, and soon some sweet potatoes
planted and tended gardens at home/gardens at community garden
made a lot of pies
went raspberry picking
went blueberry picking
made blueberry freezer jam
dehydrated a hell of a lot of roma tomatoes
taught myself to cook lamb shank
cooked a lot of good food from local farms and my own backyard
read some books
tended to kk's dying grandma
ushered in her death in our living room
eulogized grandma s at memorial service
spent a vacation up north with my sister,eo, her husband, the 3 wee ones, my ma and dad, k's dad, and grandma c and got along swimmingly
threw a great dinner party for my baby sister's,ea, pre-wedding celebration
stood up in aforementioned sister's wedding with kk and other sister
road my bicycle a lot
planted three american black currants, two precocious hazelnuts, one american hybrid chestnut, two beach plums, four regent serviceberries.
pulled out bushes in front yard including stumps, by hand, in order to plant the serviceberries
ran a chicken wire fence behind where the tall bushes once lived
went to reskilling festival and milked a goat
wrote
drew a little
loved a lot
enjoyed my friends
enjoyed sleeping
drank good beer
rested
got my hands dirty
hit 5,000 miles on my portland
loved some more
realized how much i love animal husbandry and how one day i want to keep goats too and homestead as full time as possible

so, I am back to work and I still have an ever-flowing chest of available compassion which I am thankful for. And I have the understanding hearts of people around me, at work, who are insisting that I not jump full force into the nitty gritty and that I be good to myself.

Good bye dear sabbatical; you were so good to me and my heart is better for having known you.

their small fingers dipped into the dripping honeycomb

the confused longing pounced on my heart like a stealth cat on the prowl for a helpless rodent. it came fast and furious--the ache. not quite empty; not quite loss--just a sadness fused with a smile for the memory of the moment that brought the longing.

their small hands--hands that are learning everyday more and more to draw and write and maneuver hockey sticks with grace and finesse--dipped excitedly into the oozing honeycomb. they scooped up wax and dripping, sticky amber liquid and chomped down on it with fierce laughter at the newness of the experience. and i smiled.

cause only at our house--this home k and i are creating everyday--could these young boys have this experience. the experience of tasting honeycomb in their aunts' kitchen. honey that was harvested only days before by me, a novice beekeeper, and my beloved, my kk.

and the longing hit, because the excitement of sharing this gift from the beautiful bees that live behind my garage and forage the neighborhood's gardens and sparsely wooded areas with our nephews brought up all kinds of dreamed desire for building our lives together with the honest yearning of our own children.

and then the longing retreated to a silent place in the long cavities behind my blood filled organs. and i remembered my thankfulness for all this life that has surrounded me these last many months. the lives of these bees and the chickens and walnuts, zinnias, turnips, beets, black raspberries,autumn-orange-brown oak leaves, and all that shines deep red orange in the morning sun and even deeper purple orange in the setting sun makes my heart full and lessens the ache to a dull thud that only surfaces in tiny moments.

tiny moments when small fingers fall into the sticky life of a honeycomb and small mouths turn up in amused smiles of wonderment and astonishment. smiles that adults do not know how to conjure up to our faces. smiles that we may be missing out on for ourselves...

soil

I've been digging a hole in my backyard. It is an experiment. A root cellar experiment. I will be sinking a rubbermaid tub full up of sand and apples, carrots, and squashes down in my deep, deep hole. I will seal it up tight and add rocks to the top to keep out unwanted critters. It may work. The hole will end up being approximately 4 X 4 X 4.

Grave like.

I love the soil. I love digging in it and pulling my hands through it. I've found quite a few bones in this area of the yard. I've also had to lacerate tree roots, and I marvel at the water that pours from their sad underground limbs--so much like blood, so full of life.

The theme of this week; maybe the theme of my whole sabbatical is soil--earth--that living body of death, decay, life and energy below us. I am reading the Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan right now and re-reading the Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry and simultaneously digging a hole in my backyard and watching my chickens shit and scratch and cultivate and create beautiful, fertile compost.

It is all too amazing for words. And still my eyes well up with tears as I read and dig and watch because, dammit, I desire something different for my life. I desire this closeness to the earth that I have been able to foster over the last few months away from my paid work.

The Worst Hard Time is about the dust bowl--the killing off of the buffalo; the massacre of the soil the destruction of the earth in the name of profit and the constructed american dream that trampled down the Comanche and other indigenous people in the name of profit for the "civilized" and the mad vengeance that befell the people who were still there when the dust came ripping. I'm not done with the text yet, but the first 90 pages are a fantastic historical account of the tragedy that human beings can create by fucking up the planet.

In the Unsettlng of America there is a great chapter called The Use of Energy. It is all about soil and agriculture and the destruction that we have waged on the planet through the god of big agribusiness and our disconnection from the land, animals, and plants.

Soil.
on my mind.

I'll end with this great passage by Mr. Berry, "The Soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life."

coop, insects, photos

soon chickens will be living in here

Right now my body is hurting with some deep muscle pain from hours of scraping and prepping our front porch for a new coat of paint, priming the clothesline poles and the porch rail, and helping to carry an enormous chicken coop over our fence and then screwing it together (at one point k and I almost literally appeared to be screwing the chicken ramp cause it landed between our legs while drilling up under the house).



Besides house improvements and mini-urban farming, I've also been riding plenty of mileage on my bicycle. I am up to 4,400 miles.

Lately, I have this obsession with insects and eugene o'neill. Below are some pictures I took on one of my bike rides down by the river i love.


ladybug


many at work


grapes


alone at work


sumac

a soundtrack to one story

The soundtrack to this story is throw silver by mecca normal (the song is used without permission and produced by K records). For, many years now, this song has brought up so many feelings in my gut. It makes me long for something and at the same time it makes me feel buried in the beauty of the present that is made by all of the pieces of the past.

The soundtrack reverberates with the theme of generations—coming and then passing subtly and ever-so-real from this world into the place of dust and stone. There are practical things in my life that are making these thoughts so present and persistent, but also there is this propensity within me to care about that which has happened before I lived and to think and care deeply about that which is to come after I pass from the living.

Two months ago, K’s 96 year old grandmother was moved from her apartment to a nursing home. We have been going through her things and hauling old pictures, and letters, and keepsakes, and pottery, and the belongings of a woman who held onto objects as if they were oxygen to our house, so we too can hold onto these things as our own oxygen.

All of these brittle belongings are lifted and looked at and cared for by us and then I move to my gardens and weed and mulch and fork the soil. I am so much more at peace with my hands in the earth, but I also love to hold onto the remnants of human laughter caught in a photograph or an old note.

And maybe in this time—this very specific time of dying, cause, yes K’s 96 year old grandmother is beginning to pass (she is starving herself)—I am drawn even more to the land and the birds and blueberries.

These words from Bill McKibben’s essay entitled Enoughness (he wrote a whole book entitled Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age) fit in nicely to the throw silver soundtrack busting through my head and this post, "Nature schools us in sufficiency—its aesthetic and its economy demonstrate ‘enoughness’ at every turn. Time moves circularly through the natural world—next spring there will be wild flowers again…The testimony of the rest of creation is that there’s something to be said for fitting in. And because of that, the natural world offers us a way think about dying, the chief craziness for the only species that can anticipate its own demise. If one is a small part of something large, if that something goes on forever, and if it is full of beauty and meaning, then dying seems less shocking.”

In the gardens and the woods I see that all will continue. In the eyes of a granddaughter looking at her grandmother’s past in objects, I see that generations will go on. It is a story; an okay story—set to the sparse guitar and creaky voice of a two person band I have loved for too many years to count (this particular song is slower than much of their other rather loud and irritating-but in a good way-music).

Below is a little quicktime slideshow with photos of the community garden, K’s grandma and some of her old pictures, pics of food and backyardness and my art, and flowers, and lake Michigan, and some of k’s grandma’s furniture from the 1930s all with Mecca Normal’s Throw Silver in the background.

life is so full

life is so full.

goodness, green, stress, sweat, muscle pain, fatigue, happiness, heartache, sore hands, hard dreams, escape dreams, chewing and swallowing, speaking to one another, crying, smiles forming everlasting creases on the surfaces of human skin, not knowing, knowing too much, wishing for more, yearning for less, wondering, being mean, being kind, patterns, persistence, the calm before the wind comes blowing hard and fast, the calm after the rain leaves dents in the soil, burning in the gut, watching the birds, learning to love always, listening to the sadness, vegetables, animals, bees flying dances of fertility all around the yard, berries, drying the clothes that keep us sheltered from the elements of wind, rain, and fire, calf muscles pulsing as pedals push, enjoying friendship and family, food and drink, dancing on the porch, laughter.

knowing our ever empty wombs are right and that in spite of no children our lives are full and good and sad and lovely and all of it.

below are pictures from the last many weeks.
life is so full.


blackberries--many bushes live and give in our yard


my new beehive in the back of our perennial garden


pie made by A from the blackberries and mulberries in our yard



K hanging clothes on the new clothesline that A and me (and my pops did help with drilling the eye screws) built and put in while k was in scandanavia


a beautiful turnip from one of my vegetable gardens


the turnips cooked in butter in salad with feta and walnuts


garden flowers


trey and me after the ypsilanti fourth of july parade that we rode our bikes in

garden dinner

It sucks that my girl is in Scandinavia, and I am left camera-less because now you can't see my veggie garden thriving nicely next to my driveway or my new beehive quaintly tucked in the perennial bed in the back yard, or my tomato bed at the community garden that is bursting up ever taller and thicker with life.

But I can tell you what A and I had for supper which ended up being just divine. Oh, and byt he way K and I have a new roommate. A moved in with us nearly two weeks ago. A is one of our best friends. We redid our back downstairs room and now she's all set up with a robin egg blue space and gray carpet that K and I laid ourselves one long night.

A is a great roommate and we are so happy she is here with us. We worked hard in the yard this afternoon on something I cannot tell you about, and then I weeded and watered all of the garden beds--home and community--and then I picked four young turnips and four pea pods and a bunch of kale and stir fried all of it with the turnip greens in olive oil, salt, pepper, honey and sharp cheddar cheese. It was really quite tasty--sweet and sharp with a bit of spicy zest and served over whole wheat noodles.

One other big note in my life right now. In approximately 3.5 weeks I will begin a two week unpaid furlough from work and then when that is over I will begin a 3 month sabbatical from work. I cannot wait--I need a breather; a big, deep break.

On August 8, I will begin the Midwest Permaculture course in Columbiaville, MI
I'm using some of my tax return to pay for the sort of very expensive course, but I will be certified in Permaculture design when done!

Tomorrow for dinner I will munch a bunch of lettuce from the garden and wait patiently for Sunday to arrive so I can see my kk again and have my camera back.

blue, food, badminton

Yesterday, on a walk with k and my mama in the arb in ann arbor, we saw an indigo bunting and my breath was taken by the brilliant blue of this darling bird. It glisten like a sapphire on a thin green reed at the foot of the hemlock edged woods on the cusp of the prairie.

Seeing this small little life of feather and bones and blue was one of the highlights of this long weekend. I also enjoyed spending the day with k and my ma, and talking a lot and eating good food.

And then today k and I worked the earth long and hard. We put in the rest of the vegetables--my colder weather plants/seeds have been in for a couple of weeks (lettuce, beets, turnips, carrots, sweet peas, kale). Today, in went cayenne, anchos, jalapenos, tomatoes, basil, russian tarragon, beans, acorn squash, cucumbers, cilantro, zinnias, lavender, some more bergamot, mint, beetberries, zuchs, more chamomile, cosmos, marigolds. We prepped a bed for some corn and sunflowers and still need to prep another bed for more corn. We mulched and mowed and tidied and weeded and transplanted and worked our asses off.

When we finished after almost 8 hours of outside work, t and r came over and we ate dinner together; a yummy salad of roasted asparagus and carrots and radishes and spinach and arugala from t and r's garden; mini fake sloppy joes, chick pea feta rice salad; cheddar sun ships; yummy cheese (a goat cheddar and a swiss) and strawberries; and ultra delicious brownies.

Then we played badminton at dusk and had fun laughing and trying to see the nearly invisible birdie. K and I got beat by t and r. It was close, but we went down.

So it was a full and lovely weekend of work and people I love. It feels so good and right to have my hands back in the soil and the sun searing my neck and the wind whipping my energy right from under me. Even in the midst of all of the loss of the last couple of months, things are starting to feel a bit more right--a bit more in order and bit more like me and like us. All in all, this me and us is sans kids. Probably, eternally so... we will see. In the meantime, I will stare at the blue stain of the sweet bird who I was blessed to gaze upon this weekend and revel in all that is growing in the earth outside my door and chuckle at the memories of four of us volleying crazily in barely any light on an almost summer night.

a long-winded narrative of my hard-working, lovely weekend

one work outfit for the weekend

A slush storm whipped around outside today and I am a bit dazed by the brightness of white that has eroded the brightness of green typical of the first week of April in Michigan. How strange, really, that this weekend consisted of lots of hard, physical, fulfilling labor in the sunny outdoors and now the sun has stepped away behind the gray of precipitous clouds.

I took Friday off from work and drove down to my parents to drop off my little rollerskate of a car and pick up my father’s orange, elephant of a truck. I found myself at ikea buying a cd tower and marveling at the unimaginative minds of the Swedes when it comes to envisioning families. The family lot runs adjacent to the side of the enormous maze-like store and the lot consists of about 40 parking spots for families. However, the markers on every space consist of a representation of a hetero-normative family. Vomit.


driving big orange

At first, I was like: oh well that stick figure in something like trousers could be me and that stick figure in something like a skirt could be k, but really we know who they are depicting and it is not a family like mine.

I left ikea for home and made myself the drabbest rice and chickpea dish for lunch. Then I set to cutting open the cracks that are looming in our backroom’s walls in preparation for filling them up with plastery, stiff stuff. See, we are redoing the room so our friend A can move in with us. And this room is kind of in shambles, but it is downstairs away from our bedroom and therefore more private. Before we started in on it, it had a terrible mother-of-pearl 1987 peach tinted wallpaper on two of the walls and it still has an awful linoleum covering the floors.

Two weekends ago we hauled shit out of it and with the shit, came this heavy energy. Really, you all have heard me roar on about how lovely our house is and how good it feels, well for the first time this dreary, overwhelming feeling came falling off the walls into my head and heart and punched my chest like weighty cement. I had to leave the house it was so intense. But then we washed and scrubbed and opened the windows and let out all of the sadness that clung to this rarely lived in space.


the back room (A hard at work)

So, on friday I cut the cracks and filled them with durabond and cut and filled and cut and filled. And then I went to the bar and had a couple of beers with friends (it was P’s birthday) and we took a napkin and measured our foreheads. I have the smallest among the 9 of us who were out.


measuring tm's head

We came home from the bar and I set to filling more cracks.
And then I had to sleep.

On Saturday, I woke early, drank coffee, ate an egg and toast, and picked up T to go fetch some compost. The fellows at the compost yard were confusing, and I drove in circles in the mud and finally ended up with over 2 yards of compost in the bed of the truck. We came back to my yard and shoveled and wheel barreled load upon load throughout my garden beds. Then we headed to the community garden and dumped two loads each into our four beds. Then we went to T’s and hauled more compost to her beds.

Then R brought us back delicious burritos from Zorros. They tasted so good. The burrito was full up with black beans and rice and peas and carrots and guacamole and lettuce and pico sauce. Always, after working hard, thick food tastes so delicious and nourishing and in the company of dear ones it is even better.

After lunch, we set back to shoveling more of the moist, beautiful stuff that helps nurture green rooted things to full life. I widened out T’s front bed with my hefty hips, sturdy weight, and sharp shovel. The finished product looked lovely—A dark rounded mound waiting for R and T’s bright dahlias to be planted and then grown up to grace us with their colorful petals and reminders of life.

We finished.

I went home and talked over our fence with my neighbor about the traveling demon that occupies her apartment. It was the first I heard of the hauntedness of that house and will one day reflect on that more…

While I was out, K, sanded and sanded my patchwork. I came home to the most adorable woman—covered in the fine grit of plaster; bandanas covering face and head; little eyes poking out from beneath large, wiggly goggles.


my beloved--glowing in the dust

Then, A arrived and helped k clean up the gritty mess sanding had left. I ran out for the paint. And then we primed the walls. Though, by this time exhaustion had fallen over my bones and the stank of the primer was leaving me breathless and gaggy. A worked hard and rolled all of the walls.

Then k and I we went to Yotsuba and I ate Udon noodle soup with fried tofu and savored the warm, salty broth. At 8:15 we were still out and about grocery shopping. We stopped over T and R’s to drop off some delicious beer (dogfish head India brown ale is yum, yum) and we ended up staying for a wee visit—a fine end to a long, hard, and beautiful day.

Sunday, I shoveled 6 more wheel barrels of compost and widened my side vegetable bed. In the afternoon, when my work was done, I went to the library and read in the window by the woods all of Mary Oliver’s Red Bird and savored her words and the teachings wrapped up in the observations she captures in fragments of sentences and full sentences on the stirrings of all the living going on around us and without us—all the breathing and decaying and anticipation of more living and the final falling to our ends.

I checked out my books and headed home. At home again, I cut onions and peeled carrots and chopped potatoes and ripped through cabbage and sliced celery and garlic and created a mess of a meal for friends who are new parents. We drove over to drop the food off and stayed for an hour. I held the wee, new baby and thought about children and the raising of them and held a brief longing in my heart that then fell away to its own end.

fixing my gaze on other things

still bleeding. still having cramps here and there. wanting it to be over and done with. thursday night was the worst so far. I was up all night with pretty hard cramping. every hour i got up to piss and a quarter size clot would disembark from my vaginal canal into the not so sacred place of toilet water.

i'm trying to just go on with life, minus work. I skipped work last week. I hung out with k at her work on thursday anticipating hard pain. But the pain did not come until that night. I went for a walk yesterday with pookah, our sweet whippet. I walked through the pain of some pretty heavy cramping and felt better for it upon my return home.

my plan now is to train hard. after that which once lived within me is totally expelled from my womb, I plan to get back into the groove of cycling hard and fast and long. My new goal is to participate in the ODRAM (a ride across michigan in one day--150 miles) in september of 2009. last year 20-25 miles a day was normal for me. This year I want a 30-40 mile ride to be normal for me.

I also cannot wait for spring. I look forward to gardening like a mad woman. I might not be able to grow a human just yet, but I sure can grow living things that come out of the earth. I'm really going to focus on herbs this year. I want to quadruple my chamomile plants. I am hoping to get some bergamot growing throughout my yard. I want to up the ante with lavender and coriander (I've already used up all of my coriander from last harvest). and I also want to explore the possibilities for creating my own herbal essential oils...

i am focusing on things far away from the creation of children. i have to to keep my sanity. as i explained to the midwife on the phone after she confirmed the miscarriage was happening (which was first confirmed by the really calm and nice ultra sound tech), there have been two wombs involved in all of this trying and loss and it has been going on for almost two years and it is tiring and trying.

so on to other things that give me the deepest sense of being alive--physical activities out and about in the beautiful surroundings of this earth and growing things in the soil then harvesting them and taking the bounty into my being and providing sustenance for the bodies of the people I love.

at night the emptiness of what we have constructed as a desire for our lives--the desire for children + the absence of those children = the emptiness--does surface and haunt my heart, but I steady my gaze on other life-giving ideas and plans and then it doesn't hurt so bad.

sample platter of my summer

This summer has been beautiful. Work has been hard. trying to get pregnant has been tiring and interesting. friends have been abundant. the garden and yard have filled up many of my hours with joy. eating good, locally grown food has been delicious. Below is a taste of some of it.


today we took off work with a and r and went to the lake. this is the lake where we swam and floated and ate good food for hours and hours. there are no houses only woods and green herons and blue herons and fish and hawks and trees and cat tails.


t makes beautiful, delicious salads. r and t shared this one with us last week.


a cone flower from our garden.


more flowers from our garden.


delicious beets from t and r's garden and the farmers' market.



me after a long day's work in the yard.


beans and fennel growing in my garden.

bug juice and human juice

this morning i got up and watered the garden. i found some brown metallic bugs mating and eating big jagged holes in my zinnias, so i caught some of the sticky legged critters and squished them and mixed them up in the watering can and drenched the hole riddled plants with the deadness.

then i went pee and washed the sticky bug residue from my hands, only to find the jam jar with last night's sperm spendings soaking with the syringe in the bathroom sink. I thought about bug guts mixing with the little bits of sperm and water and reflected on how lucky i am to have such diverse and cycle-of-life connected fluids all around me.

after much deliberation and debate, we have decided to do it ourselves again this month even though k cannot get in to see the repro doctor until next week.

We were going to skip the next couple of months and wait on the results of all of the testing that i am sure he will order, but then well what the hell? we might as well keep kk's parts use to all that male sticky stuff.

i am not very hopeful that this do it ourselves while kk has low progesterone again will work, but there is something to keeping the patterns of our lives fluid and together. so, this effort is that--an effort in not-giving-up and staying with it and charging along as though a miracle might happen and realizing that waking up every morning and feeling the humid air of summer creep over my skin and the gooey gush of plant eating bugs spilling over my fingers and experiencing the presence of the night sky falling around me every late evening and the bats circling through the dusky sky and the buzz of summer creatures saturating the heavy air--realizing that all of this is miracle enough.

too many days; too much writing; but oh so much fun

i will not moan.
i will not groan.
the days have been beautiful. full of life and sun and friends and family and goodness and things growing.

i've been evaluating and evaluating my life. and soon i will have to start to take some action on what i want to do with the rest of my living when it comes to work.

but in the meantime, this weekend was good in spite of that unending feeling of sadness that seems to have wedged itself in my gut and heart for sometime to come.

so, on friday i rode in the ypsilanti fourth of july parade with a group of twenty bike ypsi folks. we came out in our neverending unusualness--families, avid cyclists, man with a hand-pedaled bicycle, punk rock kids and punk rock elders, and me in my 4th of july pants.



i am not patriotic--far from it--but red white and blue make good striped pants and i rode with my one less car banner taped to my bicycle and others had great messages about stopping dependence on oil for transportation and stopping the war connected to that dependence; it was all beautiful and simultaneously subversive in its own local way!



then we headed to my aunt m and uncle e's for a party with our friends t-motion and mandark and remus. we drank piss water beer and ate yummy food and i got to see my cousin c and her man j and their chitlins. then we all headed to my sister's and hung out and kk, remus, t-motion, and mandark all drank a lot of mojitos and some of them swam and i shot the shit out with my dad and watched huey lewis and the news play music in front of the white house on some pbs fourth of july special. then some of us crashed at my sis's and t-motion and mandark crashed at my parents and listened to my parents tell crazy ass stories about me.

the next day, saturday, we went home. of course.

i mowed the lawn and did yard work.

then we went to kensington metro park with t and r and rode our bikes into island lake state park. we had a delightful picnic--basil, caper pasta; garlicky fava beans; goat cheese, gouda, and munster with crackers; corn on the cob; watermelon; fake oreos; blueberries, and wine. we talked, laughed and rode a good 16 miles through meadows and shadey wooded areas. then i stripped under a towel and put on some old shorts and jumped in a lake and swam and kk joined me and we tuckered ourselves out. it was a calm and good day; a day with people who love me and k for all of who we are and with our flaws included, a day that helped me dig out a little from this ever-creeping sadness.

on sunday, we slept till 10:00--yes 10:00. i woke and went directly to the back yard and weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded. i like to weed. i weed when i am waiting. i weed when i need peace. i love that weeding is always needed. i do love it.

then we went on a good, long sunday bike ride with 12 other folks who came out for our weekly bike ypsi rides.

then we had a spontaneous (kind of) bbq with t and r and tc and j. again, we ate delicious food. vegan pesto pasta, veggie and fake sausage and veggie and shrimp shish kabobs, bbq sauce quorn roll ups (salad and cilantro with grilled quorn naked patties and bbq sauce), black bean dip and tortilla chips, and rhubarb sauce/fresh strawberry drenched angel food cake with vanilla ice cream for dessert. we drank beer, sangria and mojitos (i only drank the beer) and talked and enjoyed dusk.

monday, i did not work. my 5 year old nephew, m, spent the day with me and we had a blast. i picked him up at a storage unit in plymouth (his dad was there for his new job) at 9:30a.m. and he stayed with me until 8:30. a long and lovely day. this was his birthday present (his birthday was in may). we drove to ann arbor and i ate breakfast; he had half a cookie and took the other half over to kk at her work.
we then walked to the comic book store where i proceeded to buy him a demon figurine (i did not know that spawn = satan's fallen. m and his family are believers/christians. but the figurine is super cool). Then we had an almost pee accident, but we ran like olympic sprinters through the streets of ann arbor. and we made it.

then we took kk over to the bike shop to drop off her bicycle so that it gets new brake pads and a tune up. we got m a new helmet (his ma asked me to) and then we ate some sushi (m wanted it).

then we dropped k back at work and micah and i went cheese tasting. the whole point of our day together was centered around this cheese. the plan was (and unfolded as planned) to make macaroni and cheese together and then his mom and dad and brother and sister and kk would all be at my house for dinner! M loves cheese and he picked a lovely, grassy montgomery cheddar and a mild but earthy chantal for the mac and cheese.

we came home and made the cheesy noodle goopiness. M shredded like a mad shredder and he whisked the cheesy sauce with amazing gentleness. then, we took pookah the whippet for a walk. micah discovered the ball launcher, and, after pookah tired, he continued to sling the ball very far and run to boy-fetch it.



we clipped kale from both of my gardens and made it home before a thunderstorm. while it stormed, we sat in our "new" art room (k and i have been rearranging our former male-rental space--we used to rent our back room out and two men at two different times were our only renters--into an art room. we had to smudge it profusely to get the strange ass energy that had landed there out) we drew large veggie mania signs (the name of our dinner service for the evening).

then kk came home all wet from the storm. shortly after her arrival, M's family arrived and we baked the mac and cheese and steamed all of the kale and then we ate and ate.

we listened to music and micah's little sister,a, danced to the banjo picking, foot stomping tunes and micah's big brother,j, listened with an ear intent on figuring out what instrument he wants to dedicate his time to.

kk and ayla

there was more but i am now breathless and ready for bed.