May 10, 2013
Note: Every writer of a certain ilk must write at least one piece about gardening. I am of that ilk.
For years I had believed, without really thinking about it, that it’s wrong to buy a garden. You’re not allowed to have a nice garden unless you do the work yourself. I don’t know the origin of this belief, though it is certainly connected to a sense of guilt about our prosperity, as well as admiration for the gardens created and tended by my friends. But when we splurged with my retirement money and built a glorious pool and deck click, we decided to go whole hog and pay for landscaping.
the whole hog Image:wisecountyagrilife.blogspot.com
Bill Copenhaver, a good friend of Joe’s, was our landscaper. I drove out to his nursery and walked with him among the plants, talking about what I like, and why. I wanted native or near-native plants that, once established, don’t need a lot of attention, that tolerate a bit of cold and plenty of heat. I like curving lines, bright flowers, and plants that don’t look too tidy.
A good landscaper is an artist who paints with plants. Along with expertise in plants, Bill has an eye for space, balance and color.
With gentle persuasion over several weeks, Bill convinced me that we should dig up the so-called wildflower bed, a round area in the middle of the yard which I had left un-mowed. It was filled with wild petunias, spiderwort, Spanish needle and fleabane.
wild petunia (image:sunfarm.com), spanish needle with bee (image:beelievable.wordpress.com), spiderwort
A huge red and gold lantana had grown up there, and a magnificent beauty berry. In the summer, clematis (virgin’s bower) covered them with its soft fragrant flowers.
lantana (image:npsot.org), beauty berry (image:hsu.edu), clematis (image:whiteflowerfarm.com)
As I list all these I begin to regret that we destroyed them. But I have more clematis farther back in the yard. We moved the lantana and beauty berry to the bed by the shed, and the other flowers will pop up abundantly at the edge of the woods, where they will not be mowed.
I’ve never had a garden that didn’t eventually wither from my neglect. Now I know my plants will thrive. Bill and his son Asa laid drip irrigation tubes in all the mulched beds. He extended them to the citrus trees in the side yard, and the anise bushes at the fence line, which will protect my neighbors from the sight of my naked swimming.
I’d hate neighbors to see me like this (In the Water by Eugene de Blaas)
It’s hard to say whether the pool or the garden is giving me more pleasure. I see beauty everywhere I look – out our bedroom window, all around the pool, back by the shed, around the corner of the house where the citrus and herbs are growing. I walk around every morning, sniffing, deadheading, weeding, peeking at buds, looking for the tiny fruits forming.
from our bedroom
by the shed
The Florida blueberries have little berries on them, behind a pink flower. On the drift rose there are blossoms and many promising buds. The yellow jessamine are reaching up to the trees and the border grass is filling in, the dune sunflowers spreading till their tips touch. The princess plant is back from the freeze; the gaillardia burn red and orange. The grapefruit, tangelo, savannah holly and fringe trees are blooming, scenting my afternoon swim, and more lovely smells are coming: native azaleas, lavender, rosemary, and pineapple sage.
clockwise from top: drift roses, gaillardia, grapefruit, blueberries, dune sunflowers
In sixty-five years I have made many decisions, some good, some bad, .. Together, Joe and I have made three which I believe I will never regret: to marry, to adopt Amanda, and to build our pool and garden.
Apr 26, 2013
I have spent my adult life obsessed with poverty, and hanging around with people who have way less than enough. I believe it’s wrong that some have so much, and some so little, and when I bother to analyze the reasons, I find that the difference is rarely attributable to personal merit. click So I suffer from what people sneeringly call liberal guilt.
liberal guilt – image from Nicole Holofcener's film Please Give (2010)
I share all kinds of embarrassing personal information with you – about my messiness, my weak resolve, the complete and comical failure of my short-term memory – but the hardest thing for me to write about is our luxurious life. In the name of honesty, however, and out of my obsession with our latest adventure, I have to confess that we now have a swimming pool.
I’ve always wanted to have an outdoor living space. North Florida is glorious year-round, and it seemed a shame not to take advantage of it. We had a hammock in the backyard and a small wooden deck, but from May to September it was too hot and buggy to sit outside, and rain was a problem year-round.
too hot and buggy
Amanda gets the credit for suggesting we build a pool. I first seriously considered it when I was at the beach with the Muumuus: I jumped into the icy pool before dawn and felt all my old joints cry out in relief. Joe and I talked it over for months, and eventually decided that since we had the money, and it would make such a difference in our lives and health, we would go ahead and do it.
We began the process last April, consulting with contractors and making decisions about features and design. Joe did most of the work, and though I truly appreciated it, I had to struggle for patience with repeated discussions of every conceivable detail. click In the end we decided on a salt-water pool with solar heat, a lap machine, a big deck, and a screen enclosure with an overhanging roof, so we could be outdoors all year round.
First, three big trees had to come down. It was not a difficult decision. Two were completely hollow. The third, very close to the house, was a menace: the tree surgeon told us it would certainly come down on its own if we didn’t take it down. We had already had one tree through the roof click and weren’t eager to repeat the experience. Still, these trees had filled most of the sky in our backyard, and framed thousands of sunsets. It was sad to see them come down, but after they were gone, we discovered that the newly opened sky, still surrounded by trees, gave us many more stars.
roadrunner333 photobucket.com
The tree surgeon finished his work and the big machines came to stay for awhile. They rumbled around, tearing up the weeds and wildflowers, leaving a big expanse of bare sandy dirt. It was noisy, and there were men in the yard for months, but it was fascinating to watch the pool being built. I had a ringside seat from my recliner, and sat watching with a cat in my lap and a glass of tea. The best was when a concrete mixer moved into the driveway for a couple of days and sprayed concrete through a huge tube into the hole – they call it blowing the pool.
(Alas – ALL my wonderful pictures of the pool construction disappeared. This is from ultimatepools.com)
They built the deck, installed the pump, the salt chlorine generator and the lap machine. The electrician came and upgraded our circuits, hooked up the machines, installed lights and a fan. A solar contractor installed a bunch of tubes on the roof to heat the water, and a different company built a high screen enclosure. Finally they filled the pool with water from our garden hose – it took two days.
In November, for the first time, Joe and Amanda and I jumped into the cold water and played around for about ten minutes, till we were chilled to the bone. And then every morning before drinking my coffee, so that I was too sleepy to think, I jumped into the 64-degree water. I loved it, looking up at the stars and feeling the icy water on all my aching joints.
After ten days of this, I developed a terrible rash on my legs, arms, breasts, butt, and belly that itched like poison ivy.
image:poison-ivy.org (the pictures of rashes were just too gross)
A friend speculated that the curing concrete was affecting the water. Though our test strips didn’t show a problem, I decided to wait thirty days to let it cure, and try again. But when the time came, I kept postponing the trial. I was afraid the rash would return, and was bracing myself for the disappointment of a pool I couldn't swim in.
Finally in March I ventured in again, and all was well. Now Joe and I are swimming almost every day. In the evening the three of us cavort, and with the weather and water warming up, we’ll be inviting friends to play. Inside the screen, the bugs can’t get us, and when we get too hot, we just jump in the pool. Joe’s spacious design has given us a high open room, where we can sit under the roof and watch the wild Florida rains. Neither broken nest egg nor liberal guilt can diminish my delight.
Apr 12, 2013
Six months ago I told you how Amanda almost met Michelle Obama, and about my letter to Mrs. Obama. click I was beginning to wonder whether we would ever hear back, whether my letter had landed in the great pile that don’t get past her staff, never to bear fruit. Then, just a day after the election, a manila envelope arrived for Amanda, with the simple return address: The White House.
www.whitehouse.gov
Remember how lovely it was to get mail when you were a child? Partly it was the magic – how did somebody know your name and address, and how did the letter get to your house? It had a certain Santa Claus-Easter Bunny-Tooth Fairy quality to it. I still feel a bit of that same excitement when I get a real letter, from someone I know, among the bills and ads.
So when Amanda came home from Girls Place and dumped her 100-pound backpack on the table, I said,
“Look, you got a letter from the White House.”
“It’s for ME?”
“I think it’s from Michelle Obama. Open it.”
Inside was a letter and an 8×10 color photograph of Michelle Obama and her dog Bo. Bo had been groomed to a toy-like fluffiness – it’s hard to say which of them was more stylish. Both of them had signed the picture.
Amanda was every bit as thrilled as I was. It didn’t matter that I’d secretly been hoping for an invitation to tea. Watching her take it in, her quiet pleasure as she put it carefully back in the envelope and took it to her room, was worth more than any invitation.
The next day, she gave me permission to take it away to be framed. The young man at my favorite frame shop was delighted with the project, and we chatted about Mrs. Obama as we deliberated over matting and frame. The result was, as framing jobs always are, more perfect than I could have imagined.
She took it to Girls Place, where everyone oohed and aahed. She took it south for Thanksgiving for all the relatives to see, and to a visit with her Mommy. Now it hangs in Amanda’s picture gallery, the hall outside her room, with her signed poster of the University of Florida women’s volleyball team, and her many paintings and cartoons.
Here is Mrs. Obama’s letter:
Dear Amanda,
As First Lady, I have no greater joy than learning about the remarkable students across our country. That’s why I am so happy your grandmother told me about your impressive accomplishments.
Every American, no matter what age, has a special role to play in leading us to a better tomorrow. That is why it is so important for you to study hard in school and stay active in your community. If you keep up the good work, I know you will have all the tools you need to achieve your dreams.
Keep up the good work, and remember I believe in you!
Mar 29, 2013
I have been writing, or struggling to write, for over twenty years. I’ve encountered the usual obstacles: lack of discipline, lack of confidence, preoccupation with job and children, and the biggest one of all – the empty page.
Natalie Goldberg taught me to overcome the empty page with free writing: writing whatever comes to mind, letting words flow out of the pen without stopping to think, judge, or even punctuate. I have many old spiral notebooks filled with free writing. click
The empty page no longer scares me. I know that I can throw everything onto it, and when I come back later I will find nuggets of treasure amid the trash. And after twenty years I no longer lack confidence; I know that multiple revisions will turn a first dreadful draft into something that pleases me. But there are still the problems of discipline and distraction.
I recently discovered a practice that has helped me. It comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way click, but I was introduced to it by another blogger, Mandy Stadtmiller. click Mandy says the process has helped her get rid of her censor, warm up her writer, and find connections she never expected. It even changed her life: in just one year, daily morning pages led her to get a divorce, lose 40 pounds, and revitalize her career.
I began doing daily morning pages in January, free writing three pages every morning in my spiral notebook, scribbling away about anything and nothing. Sometimes it is journal-ish, describing an event, or more often, working out my feelings about something. Often the Rhymer emerges and nonsense doggerel pours out. And sometimes I write “I dont wanna, I dont wanna, I dont wanna,” or “Ive got nothing to say.”
I don’t wanna Now.Tufts.edu
In the past I have tried writing for a certain length of time, but if my mind wanders, or I’m interrupted, I feel guilty that I haven’t really written for half an hour. With this process, I write three pages, regardless of how long it takes.
Since the beginning of January I have missed only one day of free writing. It has not changed my life as dramatically as it did Mandy’s, but then, I don’t want a divorce or a forty-pound weight-loss. (Twenty might be nice.) It has revitalized my career, or more accurately, brought my novel back to life, and helped me with my writing.
With this practice, I begin every morning with an achievement, and this small success sets the tone for the rest of my day. It gives me the motivation to exercise, and to do the pesky errands and chores that inspire procrastination. Most of all, it gives me the motivation to write.
Nobody but me cares whether I write. It is not a job that stands in front of me demanding I do it. In fact, writing a novel, which takes me three or four years, is more like encountering a series of crossroads with no signposts. Fear of taking the wrong road sometimes makes me a master of avoidance. So I need all the help I can get to walk into the unknown.
The uncensored rambling clears the sludge out of the pipes. Sometimes clear water follows – thoughts about my novel, or ideas for a blog or story. I scribble NOVEL or BLOG at the top of the page so I can find it later. (That’s also where I jot down daily to-do’s as they pop into my mind and attempt to distract me from the task at hand. Then when I am through, I have my day laid out for me. )
Chores can’t distract me
Free writing every morning gives me daily practice in throwing my Inner Editor out of the room. It’s essential to get rid of her, because whether I am writing fiction or essays, ideas and inspiration refuse to come while she’s whispering, “That’s stupid. Who cares? Why bother?”
I googled The Artist’s Way so I could link you to the book. After twenty years it is now a ‘movement’ – with a workbook, a video course, and a web community. Well, that’s fine. All I needed was the daily three pages in my notebook. I appreciate Mandy for pointing me to them, Julia Cameron for prescribing them, and Natalie Goldberg for showing the way
Unless otherwise attributed, all content is copyright 2013 Elizabeth McCulloch. You may use it if you include a link to this blog.
Mar 15, 2013
Gainesville, Florida is a Tree City, which means it has a plan, a budget, and staff dedicated to maintaining the tree canopy. click In my neighborhood the sky is filled with tree tops. Sunrise,
sunset, moon and stars, fluffy white clouds or dark mountains of
thunder-heads – all are framed by the curving branches.
Though Gainesville prides itself on its tree canopy, trees are not an unalloyed blessing. Sweetgum balls threaten bare feet. Acorns make a racket on the roof. A giant sycamore across the street sheds 8-inch brown leaves every fall, littering gardens all around. Worst is the pollen. The daily paper gives us the pollen count, but we don’t need the paper to tell us it’s been high for the past week. All of our cars are covered in fine yellow powder, and even those who are not very susceptible are sneezing and coughing non-stop.
source: www.washingtoncitypaper.com
And then there is the lethal combination of old trees and hurricanes. In the summer of 2004, four hurricanes hit Florida: Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jean. Frances and Jean came to Gainesville. Trees fell on cars, houses and power lines. The streets were littered with huge branches and trunks, and all over town people lost electricity for weeks. As Frances blew away, our power came back in just thirty minutes, and I said to Joe as we went to bed, “We’re so lucky to have lights; I feel as if a tree should fall on us or something.”
I have no photo, but Gainesville looked like this. source:http://mplsparksfoundation.org
Not five minutes later our neighbor’s huge water oak obliged, crashing down on the roof right over our heads, breaking the beams and cracking the ceiling. We carried everything into the living room and slept on the couch. In the morning we saw the mess. The tree was over four feet in diameter. It leaned across our side yard and covered half the roof. It was dead, the core was rotten, and it was just waiting for a big storm to take it down.
The ceilings were cracked in all four bedrooms. We lived in the living room for the next nine months while workers invaded our home, drilling, hammering, painting, listening to right-wing talk radio, and reeking of cigarette smoke.
source: Wiki Commons
Several letters to the editor at the end of that terrible hurricane season had an I-told-you-so tone, sneering at tree-huggers and complaining about the money Gainesville spends protecting trees. But even with litter, sore feet, pollen and calamity, I remain a tree-hugger.
At the end of my street is a city nature sanctuary. It’s about 155 acres, and includes Paradise Pond and Hogtown Creek Headwaters Nature Park. Paradise Pond is a stormwater drainage area, two clearings in the woods. The first is a small pond, or in dry weather, a mud puddle. The trees here are full-grown, filled with birdsong and hammering woodpeckers.
Paradise Pond
In the second clearing, spindly saplings, all nicely labeled, were planted in a ring around a long oval depression – I’ve never seen enough water in it to take it beyond soggy. My dog Trisket and I last went there four years ago. It was not an inspiring sight, and we preferred the pond, where she could splash around and get muddy.
http://www.city-data.com/forum/garden
North Florida spring begins in February, with redbuds, dogwoods, and yellow jessamine high in the trees. Now it’s early March and we’re well into spring, though just last week we had to cover all the tender plants at night and scrape ice off our windshields in the morning.
After a long hiatus that was bad for both of us, Trisket and I have resumed our daily walks, and we returned to the second clearing and the ring of trees. The saplings are now sturdy adolescents, big enough to cast a bit of shade. Like all the trees in Gainesville, they are leafing out in every shade of jade,bronze and brick. The leaves are still too small to conceal the graceful branches and bright blue sky.
Though most of the labels have disappeared, some remain: white ash in the olive family, pignut hickory in the walnut family, and an overcup oak in the beech family. How did an oak get into the beech family – intermarriage? I check the internet and find that oaks, beeches and chestnuts are all in the same family: fagaceae. Who knew? My ignorance is as wide as the world. There is one tree I know without a label: the winged elm, so called because of the cork wings along the twigs.
copyright 2002 Steve Baskauf click
We’ve recently planted a lot of trees in our yard: tulip poplar, red maple, Savannah holly, fringe tree, white marsh grapefruit and honeybell orange. I walk from one to the other, examining their buds, touching their still-smooth bark, dreaming their futures. On my walks with Trisket, it’s easy to keep my eyes on the ground, looking for broken pavement and other obstacles. But trees pull my gaze up to the beautiful sky. Whether I’m pondering or brooding, grieving or rejoicing, I feel blessed by the universe. I love trees.
Many thanks to Stefanie Nagid and Stefan Broadus, both with the City of Gainesville, for helping me find information. Here is a gift for you that I found on a morning walk:
Sunlight in branches,
Silence in birdsong:
Morning lace.
Unless otherwise attributed, all content is copyright Elizabeth McCulloch. You may use it if you include a link to this blog.
Mar 1, 2013
In 1970 I was a 22-year-old hippie with a 3-month-old son. The baby’s father had gone off to Tahiti to build us a hut on the beach – his dream of the week. In the previous week’s dream I would support us while he finished high school, college, and a PhD in nuclear physics. The morning he left for Tahiti I told him I would not follow him. I had my own inchoate dreams. I was going back to Ann Arbor, where I had friends to help me get started again.
With other young mothers, mostly single, I formed a baby group. We talked while the children played, and it soon became a consciousness-raising group. We read Our Bodies Our Selves. We examined each others’ cervices with a transparent plastic speculum, and tried to see our own in the mirror.
click
We all tried to figure out where we were going, and what we would do next. Even the married women didn’t want to be “just” wives and mothers. We would not be defined by a relationship to a man, nor hitch our wagons to a man’s life, but make our own course.
I had not been raised to support myself. The goal was a husband and children – I would take care of the home, he would bring in the money. That was what my mother did.
Now it was obviously up to me. So I went back to college. I would become either a children’s librarian or a lawyer, the former because I loved children’s books, and the latter because I wanted to change the world. By the time I finished college I had decided on law school.
I was a full-blown feminist, bristling with outrage. When I wasn’t wearing flamboyant minidresses, I used to wear brown overalls and hiking boots. I was quick to flare up at a man who assumed I was looking for a leader rather than a lay.
My father and brother teased me when I visited. “Look at the feminist fixing breakfast for her baby.” “You’d better shut up or somebody will get kicked in the balls,” I snarled, and raced off to tell my sister what I’d said. We didn’t speak like that in our family.
The bristles are soft now, the edges and prickly bits smoothed out. Forty years and raising a son have done that.
Some 70’s feminism seems comical now. Popular media defined the movement through symbolic acts, sometimes invented by the media, without acknowledging what the symbols represented.
Bra burning. Flikr.com click
The movement suffered from internal politics, and from a perception that it ignored issues of class, race, and sexual identity, and addressed only white, middle-class, heterosexual women’s issues. But though certain organizations were self-annointed or selected by the media to represent feminism, the movement of the 70’s was anarchic, and way broader than any group. Women of all kinds were telling the truth as they saw it: Robin Morgan, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich.
True, these were intellectuals, mostly not subject to the indignities of welfare or the hourly wage. And many middle class women did focus on their own issues. Some professors, free to come and go on their own schedule, complained when a secretary stayed home too often with a sick child. They organized around barriers to tenure rather than the abysmally low pay of custodial staff.
9to5org.blogspot.com click
But others: writers, lawyers, community activists and organizers, took on welfare, childcare, health care, domestic violence and rape. The women’s movement I knew was not about a few leaders selected by and filtered through the media. It was about women supporting and valuing women. It was about changing the world so that women could be self-supporting and achieve power in the workplace while still valuing motherhood. It was about encouraging men to expand their role in the family and share as equal partners.
Some of the changes fueled by the movement are minuscule, some are being eroded by reactionary forces. Some made things worse for poor women. Welfare reform’s fraudulent veneer of empowering women to work failed to conceal the intent to reduce welfare roles by any means necessary. But without the feminist movement of the 70’s we would not have domestic violence shelters, rape shield laws, the glorious flowering of women’s history, and younger generations of women who assume they are equal to men: equally entitled, equally capable.
Peaceful Paths – Gainesville’s domestic violence program
click click
From feminism I learned the significance of being an outsider. For me the most important issues are still those affecting the least powerful. I know that poverty and injustice crush men as well as women, and I am thrilled to work with the (mostly) guys living in tents in the woods. I care more about what happens to them than I do about access to tenure, or a glass ceiling at the top of a business ladder, though I know those matter too.
coursepark.com
But as a group, I like women more than men. I understand and forgive our foibles. I see the world through a female lens, and value “women’s work.” My heroes are the suffragists, the welfare rights organizers, the women in the civil rights movement, and the countless women in the third world struggling against all the brutal forms of patriarchy. I am still a feminist, and proud of the name.
Johnnie Tillmon – welfare rights organizer click
