The Furious Spinner

It's Wednesday evening. Quiet. A slight breeze is scrubbing the heat out of the house. Even though the 4th of July is only days away, our 'hood is quiet. Often at this time of year, I join the neighborhood cats and dogs who hide and howl and temporarily develop post traumatic stress disorder. I loathe 4th of July. And I'm not kidding about the PTSD. I can understand the pretty lights, but what's with the bombs bursting midair? Can't the fireworks explode quietly?

But I digress. I can hear Mario walking around upstairs, like a giant mouse. I wonder what he's doing up there? Soon he'll come down the stairs, with a book in hand I imagine, and he'll sit on the couch and read while I write this. I hear the dresser drawers open and close. Oh, he's putting away the clothes I washed earlier in the day.

The rest of my dinner is sitting on the coffee table. I was full, so I left it there to eat later. Part of my garden is on that plate, so I can't waste it. Lettuce, thyme, rosemary, thyme flowers, snow peas. I don't like being away from home these days. I want to come home and work in my garden or gaze at my flowers. I never imagined I would like gardening so much, even though as a child I loved sitting in the dirt next to my father, planting and weeding and eating. I was all dirty and hair when I was a girl. Vines grew up my legs and twirled around my arms. Leaves unfurled in my curls, and birds tried to lay their eggs in my tiny perfect ears. But I moved around too much. Restless. My father never used a chemical on our garden. Ever. And he never noticed the roots growing out from the souls of my feet, spreading out, searching for home.

The giant mouse has ceased movement upstairs. Hmmm. Must be sitting at the computer now. Nearly right above my head. The sun is setting, and the exposed rock across the river on the gorge cliffs are slightly ruddy, almost cinammon-colored. For an instant. There. It's gone.

The Democrats are snarking at each other, have you heard? The mayor of Boston is angry that Kerry wouldn't cross a picket line to attend the mayors' conference. Or something. I didn't pay much attention because they remind me of two year olds! The Democrats and the left keep gnashing and bashing each other while the right wing runs away with our country. (If the mayor of Boston expected Kerry to cross a police picket line, he's an idiot, and if John Kerry had crossed that picket line, he would have been...wrong.) Mario had this to say about how the dems and the lefties are acting: A house is on fire—the house is the country, the fire is the right-wing. The dems and lefties are the fire fighters. We all arrive at the fire and someone yells, "Oh, look, that fence is broken over there. We better fix it." So we run over to the fence—meanwhile the house is still burning down. The fence is Nader, the mayor of Boston being pissed, Kerry not quite the man we think he should be, etc.

Speaking of idiots...my favorite gang of sexually repressed white men decided they could, indeedy, deny pro-choice candidates and their supporters communion. And before my venom and animosity toward these people curdles these pages—ether pages though they may be—I shall move on. Some of my favorite Furious Spinner readers are Catholics, after all. (If you ever want to read how I truly feel about the Catholic Church—since I'm so subtle about it here—read my novel The Jigsaw Woman. I take the institution to task for what they have done to women over the centuries. And I did it long before The DaVinci Code.)

Mario and I had a reading Tuesday night in St. John's. Our friend Dave Johnson put it together. We've known Dave since about 1982, when we moved from Michigan to Bandon, Oregon. He's a poet, dreamer, raconteur, sweetheart. We've been with and without each other through the good, bad, and ugly. He's living in St. John's now. Mario, Dave, and I read, along with Barbara Drake. We had not seen Barbara in twenty years. (She came to our writing group in Bandon a couple of times. Her first husband was the director of Clarion when Mario and I attended in 1980—in East Lansing, Michigan.) Another friend from Bandon showed up, too, storyteller Rachel Foxman. My friend, Cooky, joined us. She's been to several of my readings. We've known her since we lived in Tucson where I got my Master of Library Science. We met at library school and were instant kin.

We had dinner with other friends before the reading, Barbara, Mike, Patrick, Sara, and F.X. I've known them all (except F.X.) for 17 years. I'm telling you all this because I felt like I was looking at a tapestry—or living a tapestry—last night as I watched and listened to these people I have loved for so many years. We have come and gone and come again into each other's lives. Time has a way of smoothing past differences—or making them amusing, anecdotal—so that all that matters is that we knew each other when. I liked being with these people last night. I liked reading my work to them—most of it from this weblog. I was excruciatingly embarrassed to be in front of this small group with my nose running—having to stop reading to wipe my nose as though I was a snotty-faced little girl—but then I realized no one cared. Everyone was rooting for me, just as I was rooting for them.

Of course the best part of the evening was when Cooky first saw me, and she said, "You look great!" And I knew she meant it. I don't think anyone has said that to me in ten years or so. Because I haven't looked great. I have looked ill. I thought how wonderful it was to have a friend who would tell me when I looked wonderful and not tell me when I looked like shit.

Speaking of connections, I have been getting such great mail lately. I heard from Genevieve who heard about Furious Spinner from Patricia Lay-Dorsey, Windchime Walker, who has her own weblog. She is beautiful, a wonderful writer who talks about her activism, Nature, and living with disability. Every once in a while when I start to believe everything I'm doing is wrong, or no one is listening, or I shouldn't be writing about such personal things, I will get a letter from Patricia—as if a little birdie told her I needed her words—and she'll say exactly the right thing. Check out her 'blog.

Genevieve is an artist, living in Canada—where my sweetie comes from—and she had this to say about her own garden: "I, too, have a garden, though it is a little neglected and rumpled this year as my husband and I continue renovating our little cottage, my husband works on making flutes (our source of income) and I look after an ailing Mother with dementia (while struggling to find moments to paint). My strawberries, delicious morsels that they be, are hidden amongst the weeds and my potatoes, sprung from the loins of last years crop that managed not to get all dug up, are growing everywhere, even places that I intended other things to grow. We had so much rain this spring (good for the forest fire situation) that I put my garden in late and things have been slow to grow. Finally my beans have thrust their wee heads up through the ground and my sunflower plants are a decent 1 ft. in height. My glorious David Austin Roses are blooming and, as you state in your blog, wildflowers abound, even in the wild (for the fairies) corners of my yard. So I am satisfied even if there are more wild plants than cultivated flowers or veggies in my garden.

"I like mint amongst the daisies, raspberries obscured with long wild grasses and dill running rampant through the potato patch dug hastily out of weeds. It's okay, I reassure myself, I like things unkept and natural. We have long years ahead of us, I trust, to gradually make a little order out of this disorder. Patience, I am good at."

Thanks, Genevieve, and everyone who writes to me. Even if I don't write back immediately, I appreciate your response.

Well, I think I've gone on long enough. I'm not sure this post has any rhyme, reason, or seasoning. But it's nearly 11:00 p.m. Time to stop and finish my dinner. This weekend the Blues come to Portland. I'm hoping there is some Delta Blues—thems the blues, man. None of this pseudo blues/jazz/rock 'n roll crap. I want the aching, crying, down in the dirt I'm so miserable blues.

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