The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything

One of my best reading memories was that weekend when Mason, not yet 4, delightedly joined me in a choral reading of The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything. And yes, that now-10-year-old tween hasn't been afraid of much since!

Michelle, do you still have the video :) ?

of June and fireflies . . .

I've started a second blog--haven't gone public with it yet though--called why i am NOT a writer. . . This has meant going waaaaaaay back in time, high school and college, Grainger and Duke, to discover what I've buried so deep all these years. Not exactly simple, not exactly pleasurable...just necessary in my quest to understand my own writing history so that maybe I can avoid repeating it with others.

But, in the midst of that shattered dream, I rediscovered, yes, simple pleasures. Looking out the stairwell window at dusk today. . .flickers of light in my oh-so-happy azalea thicket by the drive. Fireflies. My favorite Duke memories--ranking right up there with basketball (I'm having serious trouble getting past the first few pages of Last Shot at the moment!) and PP&M and Rubenstein--are fireflies in the magnolias on spring evenings on East Campus. . . Fireflies in my azaleas tonight. . . Yes!

It's been one of those years when the mind desperately needed physical therapy! My much neglected yard (thank you, Michelle and Rick, for the lawnmower resurrection) finally bubbled up to the top of the must-do-now list. I've been stung (three times, different days), poison ivied (probably not for the last time--found more of the demon to exorcise today), surprised by a snake (garter, not much bigger than some of my earthworms), scratched (monster vines with serious thorns and trash-can-lid tubers for roots), ant-bitten, muddied and sweated through and through. I've filled past capacity and hauled to the curb for pickup about 50 39-gallon trashbags of vines, prunings, roots, branches, and trees (the tall skinny types) that I've felled and chopped into sections trash pickup folks will accept. I've used about a pint of gasoline (need to remember to get some for the mower this week). The rest, except maybe the CO2 I exhaled in the process, has been environmentally-friendly me-power and hand tools.

I'm a real person again!

God has smiled on me. Rain, blessed rain. The grass, tentative at first, not knowing what to think about being force-fed after famine, is hopefully, eagerly even, exploring barren ground.

The "park", sloping away from the drive, and the gazebo behind it sold the house to me nine years ago. I began there, reclaiming established beds and the clearings between them. I've spread 50 bales of pinestraw and could easily spread 100 more. . . Maybe next year, after the leaves fall. . . But the woods out back had never, in all this time, reached the top of the list. Maybe one section here, another a year or two later, but clearing out all the undergrowth??? This will be the year. . .

Even being in class (perennial studentitis) last week and this has not diverted my gardener's sense of mission. . .

Oooh, and the 5 pounds I acquired while exercising only the mind last year? Gone, all gone. But enough sag and bulge remaining to amply fuel the mission . . .

Bees and ants making homes in the ground and Japanese beetles ravishing roses in planters out front and those white sucking things on evergreen leaves and stems everywhere. I've been seriously considering a yard-wide insecticide sweep. Until I saw fireflies in my azaleas tonight. . .

Simple pleasures. . .




"After" photos will be posted soon :)