Breathing

*A quick note, I’m taking a little vacation from writing here. Expect my next newsletter on July 17th.

Summer Fields

Poetry

Here’s Mary Oliver’s wonderful “The Summer Day,” wild and precious, indeed.

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Journeying

Mornings are the worst. I can’t go for a run with my partner, can’t pull weeds in the garden, can’t string words together on a computer screen. But I can sit on the back porch, the one just off our bedroom and listen to the traffic a half block from our house, the mufflers, the trailers bouncing on their hitches, the garbage truck’s mechanical lift, the distant beeping and tapping of construction equipment, like a mechanized woodpecker. A hoarse shriek startles me. The neighbor’s chickens sound more like dinosaurs than their benign descendants. I hear the songbirds and remember that one of the now-grown feral kittens caught a robin in her mouth two days ago. It kept escaping and getting caught again. I told my daughter, who was watching out the kitchen window, to stop narrating the scene to me. I was rolling out pizza dough, flour covered. Eventually, she said, “you’ll be glad to know that the bird got away. It’s in a bush.” I wondered if the bird really escaped or whether the only thing keeping it alive was adrenalin, whether free of the cat’s mouth, it died of shock and its injuries somewhere else.

The wind blows the curtains on the porch toward me, then sucks them back flat against the screens. I’ve moved some of the houseplants out here for the summer, a thirty year old asparagus fern I got from a friend, and a yerba maté plant I bought in honor of an Argentinian friend, who drinks maté everyday. The maté is native to the rain forest. It soaks up the paltry humidity of a Nebraska summer and manages to grow tall and narrow. Of course, there’s also a philodendron. This one vines up the window and over the curtain rod. When my daughter wanted a plant for her college dorm room, I bought her a philodendron. I knew it could survive the distracted care of a first year college student. Philodendrons are hard to kill. They can whither, look dead, then revive with a cup of water.

Mornings are the worst because I’m so tired. At breakfast, I take the little yellow pill stamped with a capital “L.” The pill is incredibly efficient. It finds its way into my bloodstream, seeking estrogen and removing almost all of it. Without estrogen, my arms and legs feel like dumbbells I drag around the house. Without estrogen, I ache as if fevered. Free of estrogen, I might escape the cancer and live. Several hours from now, after lunch, my body will begin to adjust and awaken. My arms and legs will lighten, the pain settle into dullness. Then I will head out into the garden to transplant a few of the black eyed Susan volunteers coming up between our yard and the neighbor’s, the ones they mow short each week. I will transplant the fuzzy shoots to the steep bank of my front yard, where they will get a chance to grow beyond the height of a mower blade.

Not now though. Right now, I sit on the porch and listen to the birds and machines. Watch as the wind breathes the curtains in and out.

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Gardening and Making/Mending

cosmos, sunflower, purple poppy mallow, and a feral cat in a pot

It’s June. Everything is happening. The wild rose is smack in the middle of its yearly party of pink. The penstemon, wild white and cultivated pink, are blooming. The common name for this plant is beardtongue, descriptive, though slightly off-putting. The tall dusty prairie plant, whose name I can never remember, has done what it always does, which is to stretch up and then fall, like a drama queen, all over its neighbors. I’ve wrap cotton twine around its middle to improve its posture and remind it that boundaries are thing. The weeds grow up between the zinnia’s, sunflowers, and cosmos. I do some perfunctory pulling, then give up. The flowers have already outpaced the grass that grows between them, and that grass will hold the moisture in the soil during the coming drier months. Purple poppy mallow (say that five times fast) advances across the lawn, sending runners into foreign, but hospitable territory. I am careful to guide the mower around the scouts.

In June, the rain still falls, the temperatures are moderate, the tomatoes have not grown into leggy giants, the groundhog hasn’t sampled all the cucumber leaves, the squash bugs have not discovered the zucchini, and the gardener hasn’t grown weary from heat and mosquito bites. June reminds me of what can be, what is, and what will come again.

Sweater swatch

In a couple of days, my family will head to Montana to visit my dad and stepmom. Of course, I will bring my knitting. I’m working on a hat for myself, a sort of hooded scarf for my daughter, and I have just received a bag of wool containing enough skeins for two sweaters, one for each of my sons. I’ve told them they will receive their new woolen wear upon graduation from college next May. I have about ten months to knit two sweaters. I am a slow knitter, not in the actual act, but in the time spent in the act. I have many other interests. But a deadline is a deadline, and a promise to a child (or two) holds more weight than most.

Threshold Takes a Break in July

Julia Rymut and I are taking a break for the month of July (and the last week of June). We’ll be back with our weekly live podcast on all things liminal August 3, at 11am CT.

In the meantime, all previous recordings are available here: