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On yoga night, this little orphan was left on our doorstep.
Frog Dog Pose
Here he joined us for yoga, demonstrating what one of the evening’s yogis dubbed as “frog dog.” He is also quite accomplished at savasana. Though you can’t see it in the picture, he is solid black except for the tiniest splotch of white at the very tip of his tail. Last night he demonstrated another one of his amazing talents: yodeling.
Periodically through the night, we awoke to hear him serenading us with,
“Yep! Yep! Yep! Noooooooooooooooooooo! Nooooooooooooo! Nooooooooooo!”
Is there a kind soul out there willing to give a loving home to this sweet puppy? (Please? I’ve tried pawning him off on everybody and still no takers yet.)
I’ve raised two puppies in the last year. With Project Moo-Moo underway, I am all out of puppy time. This guy is really, really cute though! And he won’t cry sweetly serenade you in the evening if you share your bed with him.
~~@~~
In other news, a new family has moved in to the Angry Russian’s birdhouses. The Angry Russian transformed into the Very Delighted Russian when I showed him.
Robin eggs in Angry Russian’s Birdhouse
…and speaking of eggs, Kiki has dethroned P. Recious Rainbow and installed herself on The Nest as Kiki Queen Mother. Either she is delusional or it is very close to hatching time, because she’s not budging. Not even for food. Yesterday, after a tremendous amount of coaxing, begging, and singing on my part, she finally stood up enough for me to look at her eggs and see that no eggs had hatched just yet.
This was the song that finally got her up:
Kiki, Kiki you’re so pretty,
Let me see your eggs.
Kiki, Kiki you’re so pretty,
Stand up on your legs.
And! Here’s the melody for the first two lines…just in case you are ever faced with this situation and are in emergency need of a song:
~~@~~
And last, but not least, I’m still going flower crazy.
bedraggled, but still beautiful
Each flower smiles with me.
–Thich Nath Hahn
Let your wings of forgiveness flutter and take you into a garden where the flowers of peace blossom.
–Dodinsky
I have arrived – I am home, my destination is in each step.
–Thich Nath Hahn
~~*~~
…if only there was a way to post the scent.
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light, nothing flowers.
–Mary Sarton
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.
–Gertrude Jeckyll
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
–Buddha
Earth laughs in flowers.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flowers don’t worry about how they’re going to bloom. They just open up and turn toward the light and that makes them beautiful.
–Jim Carrey
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
–Chinese Proverb
But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.
–Anne Bronte
a sweet gift from a little friend
dishing out the dirt
El-D took issue with last week’s post in which I highlighted the rationale behind “His & Hers” seedlings.
It seems I got something wrong.
It happens.
Apparently, this happens a lot.
I confess, not too long ago I wrote about his awesome Amish Friendship Rolls. Afterwards, Dear Readers, I was informed that I had deceived you. Please realize this wasn’t an intentional deceit. He made Amish Friendship Bread the week before the roll incident. I saw warm steam rising from fresh baked goods and I went crazy. In my feeding frenzy I shouted the good news of great joy from my bloggy version of the highest mountain.
Except I shouted it all wrong.
They were yeast rolls people. YEAST ROLLS!
I’m sorry if the error offends your sensibilities.
And here I stand wrong again.
El-D does not, in fact, require “an intricate mix of dirt samples taken from various points in the yard.”
He informed me that the dirt he used in this year’s seedlings came from the yard of our OLD HOUSE, as in the house we moved out of when we moved to the farm last June.
During the chaos of moving somehow this detail managed to escape my radar.
That means that all last summer as I was writing about stuff like the practice of letting go, I had no idea the dirt from my former life had followed me to this one.
When I heard this I had a momentary existential crisis: Is my whole life a lie?
Then after meditating on it awhile I recalled the words of a great yogi:
I have affixed to me the dust and dirt of countless ages…who am I to disturb history?
–PigPen
…and now I’m happily back to everything being right-wrong.
Arugula, freshly picked
I’m the black sheep vegetarian in a family of meat eaters. It’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it.
This is not a brand new thing. It’s been two years since I converted. Still, when I get invitations to family functions they say things like this:
We’re having a party. I know you don’t eat x or y…or z — good lord aren’t you starving yet?? Well, you can come anyway.
I swear I am not trying to wreck havoc on people’s dinner parties (unlike The Good Greatsby, whose humorous post can be found HERE). I don’t mean to be difficult, but I might be a little complicated. The vegetarian thing is just what makes sense in my heart and in my head. I’ve tried to explain it all, but I obviously haven’t really done a good job of it because just a week ago I was asked (again):
So…I still don’t understand…are you doing this for religious reasons or what?
And then there was there was the following exchange with the Resident Teaologist, who when preparing lunch couldn’t find what she needed:
Resident Teaologist: You said you had arugula, so I didn’t get any at the store, but I don’t see any in the fridge…
Me: That’s because it’s out in the yard.
Resident Teaologist:….oh.
So we go out to the yard to pick the arugula. She stares at it and says,
It’s so weird that you are about to eat something that was just growing in your ground.
I had to giggle. That this bewilders others bewilders me. How did we ever get so far removed from our food? And what have we lost as a result of this distance? And what exactly have we gained?
Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
–Wendell Berry
The roses surrender.
Defeated by frost:
their heads bowed;
their scent rendered mute.
The Devil builds three-year compost bins from pallets. (There is no rest for the wicked.)
The Devil confers with his minion.
This rascal creates mischief.
Leaves fall all around the “Greek Ruins” ensemble.
Tasty treats are harvested from the garden.
…and there is more still to ripen..
Duck tails waggle.
Sweet wildflowers bloom alongside the mean roses. (One of the mean ones bit me on the thumb several days ago. To quote Charlie’s brother, “…that really hurt…and it’s still hurting.”)
…and we celebrate six years of a little person’s life.
P. Recious Rainbow laid another egg, but some critter stole both of them.
The Devil spent an entire afternoon creating a Duck Defense System that included security updates to the coop and live traps. We’ve caught and apprehended three bandits.
Bandit One
Bandit Two
Bandit Three
The bandits were banished from the farm. We released them in fields far, far away from our ducks.
Much more happened this week that I hope to eventually get the opportunity to share. My weekly blogging schedule has been a bit derailed by the 500 preschoolers I have 45 days to meet, a rapidly approaching deadline for an article, the start of a new semester, and the contemplation of how I wind up in these situations.
Yesterday I met the Braveheart of wasps while deadheading the Black-eyed Susans. I must have cut down the house he built on a flower stem because he went all sorts of berserk on me. I have learned to wear the equivalent of a spacesuit to work in the garden because I’ve come to the conclusion that everything out there is trying to kill me. The rose bushes, the poison ivy, the spiders, the mosquitoes, the ants, the wasps and the hornets – they all want in on the action. Even the grasshoppers, who once had the good sense to jump away and hide when they saw me coming, have become so fat and entitled that they don’t even bother anymore. They stand their ground, ok well their leaf, and stare me down like they’re daring me to do something about it.
But back to Braveheart. His flower stem was dead and it was time to go. Really, if I didn’t take it down, it would have eventually fallen on its own, so the intensity of his anger was a bit out of proportion to the facts of the situation in my opinion. I could practically hear him screaming, “I KILL YOU!” every time he tried to attack me, which was repeatedly, over the course of half an hour, from one end of the backyard to the other. If anyone (like the neighbors or someone from Google Earth) was watching (s)he probably thinks I’m insane because with each attack I would panic, shriek, flail, jump up, and run, all the while slapping at myself and screaming “Get away from me!”
Did I mention I was running with scissors? And just like in horror movies there was the inevitable scene in which the heroine (that’s me) stumbles and falls at a critical moment. I barely managed to escape being impaled. I scrambled up and ran some more and just when I thought I’d lost him, there was a menacing buzzing about my head and he began flinging himself at me all over again. Obviously he needed a moment to cool off, so I went inside for water and shelter. Ten minutes later, I went back outside and there Braveheart was again hurling himself at my back and head repeatedly, turning me into a raving lunatic. How one little wasp with a sand speck brain containing less than half a million neurons can have such a long attention span is completely beyond me.
I guess I’d be pretty upset too if someone came and cut my house down off my flower. Fortunately, neither party was injured in the making of this story.
