Progress
July 5, 2009
We’re almost unpacked in our new house. We have pictures on a few of the walls and the boxes are down to the double digits (maybe even under 20?). Photos of the new place to come, I promise. I’m halfway through summer teaching and have gotten back into working on my book. I have a new once a week class starting this week at SD Writer’s Ink on memoir/personal essay writing. I’m lumbering through Cheever: A Life, though not as quickly as I’d like to because I have several other books on the night stand to get to, including:
Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks– wondrously illustrated and written letters from art historian Meyer Schapiro to his wife from the year 1926-1927. I’m captivated by the romance in the letters and his painstakingly accurate drawings of art and architecture.
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell– Thirty years of letters between these two poets.
Beyond writing my book and reading, I really want to get out in the (new) yard and work on my plants! Right now we have a sort of Cactus Garden going out there in the front yard– mostly succulents– that look really beautiful, some are blooming. But I’m dying to turn a portion of the yard into a vegetable garden. I’ve sectioned a sizeable square and hope to put in some heirloom tomatoes, basil, peppers (we have a habanero pepper plant from last year that is growing a few lovely-spicy orange peppers), and other herbs and veggies.
Speaking of, here’s a gorgeous poem by Caroline Miller from The Writer’s Almanac for July 5 (my sister’s birthday! Happy Birthday, Andrea). I love this poem, but especially the last four lines.
A Warm Summer in San Francisco
Although I watched and waited for it every day,
somehow I missed it, the moment when everything reached
the peak of ripeness. It wasn’t at the solstice; that was only
the time of the longest light. It was sometime after that, when
the plants had absorbed all that sun, had taken it into themselves
for food and swelled to the height of fullness. It was in July,
in a dizzy blaze of heat and fog, when on some nights
it was too hot to sleep, and the restaurants set half their tables
on the sidewalks; outside the city, down the coast,
the Milky Way floated overhead, and shooting stars
fell from the sky over the ocean. One day the garden
was almost overwhelmed with fruition:
My sweet peas struggled out of the raised bed onto the mulch
of laurel leaves and bark and pods, their brilliantly colored
sunbonnets of rose and stippled pink, magenta and deep purple
pouring out a perfume that was almost oriental. Black-eyed Susans
stared from the flower borders, the orange cherry tomatoes
were sweet as candy, the fruit fattened in its swaths of silk,
hummingbirds spiraled by in pairs, the bees gave up
and decided to live in the lavender. At the market,
surrounded by black plums and rosy plums and sugar prunes
and white-fleshed peaches and nectarines, perfumey melons
and mangos, purple figs in green plastic baskets,
clusters of tiny Champagne grapes and piles of red-black cherries
and apricots freckled and streaked with rose, I felt tears
come into my eyes, absurdly, because I knew
that summer had peaked and was already passing
away. I felt very close then to understanding
the mystery; it seemed to me that I almost knew
what it meant to be alive, as if my life had swelled
to some high moment of response, as if I could
reach out and touch the season, as if I were inside
its body, surrounded by sweet pulp and juice,
shimmering veins and ripened skin.
“A Warm Summer in San Francisco” by Carolyn Miller, from Light, Moving. © Sixteen Rivers Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission.
Posted in Uncategorized, books, my plants, nonfiction, poetry, writers
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