Tag Archives: life

Weekend Dish-Summer!

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I know what you want.
Cherries. Peach juice dripping down your chin. Bare feet. Sandy toes.

Chair

You want 101 days of summer.
The countdown officially begins today. 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

What will you do with these 2,420 hours, these 145,440 minutes, these 8,726,400 seconds of your one precious life?

There’s no way you’ll make a to-do list. You want a game.

Scavenger Hunt

Remember summer night scavenger hunts? You and your friends split into groups then set out in the neighborhood with a list? First one back with all the loot won?  Yeah. You’d like to try that again.

Take a photo of each of the 101 Days of Summer.
Post them on Instagram. Hash tag the photos with #backyardsisters_101days

Ready. Set. Go!

Epic BBQ

1. Perfect your go-to summer barbecue meal.
2. Learn a new grilling technique. For a great veggie grilling video, click here.
3. Invite a new neighbor for dinner.
4. Eat outside. Every night. Unless there’s thunder and lightening.
5. Eat by candlelight. Every night. Outside. Unless.
6. Sit on the grass with your dog’s head in your lap.
7. Watch fireflies.  If you catch them in a jar, be sure to let them out before you go to bed.
8. Learn 5 new objects in the night sky.  The free app SkyViewFree uses an i-phone’s camera as viewfinder.
9. Plan ahead to find a dark viewing spot for the Perseid Meteor Shower, August 11 and 12.  You’ll catch the summer’s best display of shooting stars. More info here.
10. Make your own ice cream. You don’t even need an ice cream maker. Check it out here.
sunset

11. Stay up late.
12. Get up early. Photograph your days.
13. Learn the names of 5 birds in your neighborhood.  The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has an amazing library of birdcalls. Link here.
14. Take your morning beverage on the porch, patio, or near an open window.
15. Prop your bare feet on a ledge.
16. Plant one living thing, even in a small pot if you don’t have a yard.
17. Plant something you can eat. A few green onions. Parsley. One tomato plant.
18. Visit a farmer’s market.
19. Take home something you’ve never eaten before.
20. Eat it.
21. Learn to make the perfect margarita or mojito or favorite frozen treat.
22. Invite neighbors over to help you drink it.

Gammy and girls

23. Visit your mom and dad.
24. Look at photos from childhood family vacations; yours and theirs.
25. Record favorite memories either on video or audio.
26. Visit your children.
27. Look at photos from family vacations; yours and theirs.
28. Record favorite memories.
29. Create a family yearbook of photos.
30. Do one thing that scares you.

get wet

31. Swim in a natural body of water.
32. Cannonball into the deep end of a pool.
33. Play Marco Polo.
34.  Learn one new water skill: surfing, body surfing, paddle boarding, water ballet moves.
35. Teach your new skill.
36. Pick fresh blueberries.
37. Make a summer fruit cobbler. For the Backyard Sisters favorite cobbler recipe, click here.
38. Eat dinner on a blanket under a tree.
39. Walk after dinner through town or your neighborhood.
40. Listen.
Waimea
41. Hike a new trail.
42. Learn the names of 5 new native plants in your region.
43. Visit 3 new state parks. The rangers there will know the names of the plants.
44. Take a new friend with you.
45. Volunteer for a park clean-up day.
46. Tune your guitar, your piano, your cello, your drum, your voice.
47. Learn one solid song.
48. Lose your inhibition.
49. Make a campfire.
50. Sing under the stars.
51. Make s’mores.
52. Sleep under the stars.
53. Learn how to remove ticks from your dog. (Same concept applies to humans.) Great video here.
Art

54. Sketch, photograph, or journal what distinguishes your local ecosystem from others.
55. Learn 5 edible plants.
56. Learn 5 poisonous plants.
57. Learn to pack lightly.
58. Learn to clean up after yourself.
59. Learn to read a map.
60. Get lost.
61. Go to a car show.
62. Attend your state or county fair.

stevenson quote

63. Submit something: homemade beer, photography, literature.
64. Hold hands on the Ferris wheel.
65. If you win a giant stuffed panda, give it away to a neighborhood kid.
66. Visit the booths with prize-winning pies and jams and wines.
67. Congratulate the blue-ribbon winners. Ask one fine question about their process.
68. Hear an outdoor concert.
69. Watch an outdoor movie.
70. Wait for the Milky way.
71. Visit your local library.
72. Remember summer reading when you were a kid? Check out ten books.
73. Visit an independent bookstore. Buy one thing.
bookstore

74. Hear a live author reading.
75. Thank the author in person.
76. Perfect one aspect of your craft: Great openings. Killer closings. Trimming the fat from word count.
77. Slow dance under the Full Flower Moon on May 25.
78. Sip strawberry wine under the Full Strawberry Moon on June 23.
79.  Dance with abandon under the Full Thunder Moon on July 22.
80. Fish under the Full Sturgeon Moon on August 20.   For full moon name meanings, click here.
81. Invite neighbors over for a pancake breakfast.
82. Visit the housebound neighbor who couldn’t come.
83. Bring flowers, or stories, or one of your photos.

all birds and sand

84. Call your grandmother or grandfather or aunt or uncle or long lost cousin.
85. Tell them about the trees and birds and stars. Ask about the view from their window.
86. Ask about their favorite summer memory.
87. Remember to return your library books.
88. Lie on your back on the grass and watch the clouds.
89. Swing.
90. Swim again. Again. Again.

balcony art
91. Travel.
92. Learn five bits of history about one place you’ll visit.
93. Read before you go.  You can find a literary companion for more than 20 destinations from Whereabouts Press where the mission “is to convey a culture through its literature.”
94. Attend an outdoor art show.
95. Bike ride. On a beach cruiser. Along the beach if you’re lucky.
96. Learn hello, goodbye, please, thank-you and I love you in five new languages.
97. Learn how to come home.
98. Harvest and eat your one small thing standing barefoot on your own patch of ground, balcony, stone or wood.
99. Cut flowers from your yard. Take some to your neighbor.
100. Send an old fashioned hand-written note, with some herbs or fragrant leaves.
101. Set 5 small items – a shell, a rock, a poem – from your summer on your desk.

DSCN2585

Last one done is a rotten egg.
~Catherine

You get what you need

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Of course you can’t always get what you want. But one Wednesday night in the middle of a perfectly ordinary week you might get this:

The Rolling Stones: Forceful

Photo credit: Genara Molina, Los Angeles Times

If Mick and his pals aren’t too old to keep rocking, then I’m not too old for my first Rolling Stones concert. It’s not like I didn’t like live music the first time I wore a suede headband with feathers and beads. I sat so close to Elton John at the Inglewood Forum in 1974 that he took my hand and mouthed thank you for the hand scrawled “Elton Babe I love you!” poster I passed over the rail to him. I stayed on my feet all night long for The Who, Jethro Tull, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Neil Diamond, Joe Walsh, and the Beach Boys enough times to be considered a groupie.  I’ve even seen Kanye West in concert. But The Rolling Stones? Not so much.

Why now? Falling for those skinny boys from Bloody Old took a long slow burn. Maybe it started at a frat party or a wedding when the fastest way to get everyone onto the dance floor was to blast “I (Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Boys shouted the words feeling misunderstood and restless as under-loved mongrels while we girls echoed the lyrics a hey, hey, hey, tipping our shoulders just enough to promise that maybe this would be the night that the “girl reaction” would be satisfying indeed.

When things ended badly “Get Off of My Cloud” gave us the perfect chorus to hitch up our thumbs and sing out at the top of our lungs of a serious need to be alone. If the Stones wanted a little space, “’cause two’s a crowd,” we did too.

Decades pass like dandelion dander and we find ourselves once again in the age of frequent weddings – this time our friends’ children. Any event with music and a dance floor  – cheesy New Year’s Eve parties, milestone birthday bashes, charity parties and backyard barbecues – is guaranteed to have a band covering epic Stones tunes or a DJ spinning them.  “Brown Sugar,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and “Emotional Rescue” still pack the floor with lip-synching, lyric shouting dancers of our age, yes, but also children and grandchildren who know this music as well as their own. These songs are in our bones the way the ocean is.

I finally had to see The Rolling Stones with my own eyes, had to be in The Honda Center, Section 202, joining the roaring crowd of bleached blondes wearing ripped black and white striped pants and red sparkly circus shoes, of long white-haired ponytailed men in tye-dyed t-shirts, of a pink twirly skirted little girl holding her grandmother’s hand, and strangers on a first date, a dad taking his big brown-eyed daughter to her first concert – He’s the best dad ever! We all wanted to see the original before a man who’s “got the moves like Jagger” is all that’s left.

lights and mouth

Watching Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and the entire cast of characters that create The Rolling Stones “50 and Counting Tour” feels like standing on shore watching winter waves ceaselessly crash toward you. It’s an unstoppable force of nature that miraculously transcends time. I don’t feel so bad now that my rarely modernized dance moves pinpoint, like some sort of carbon dating science, that my teenage coming-of-age happened in the early 1970s. Mick still dances the same too.  Footage of Rolling Stones concerts is prevalent enough for the gyrating, wiry, clapping, finger waving, prancing, Jagger to be unsurprising. Yet when you are there miles further away than a TV camera close-up and you can still feel the power of the man then you wonder why you stayed away so long.

As the band tore into its signature concert-closing song, I peeked over at J as he pumped his right fist to the roof of the arena shouting along.  “I can’t get no-oh satisfaction.” Our eyes caught. I tipped my shoulder back just a bit and smiled before offering up a little hey, hey, hey to the rafters.

With fuzzy ears,
~Catherine

p.s. Genara Molino, photographer for Los Angeles Times captured far better photos than I could get from my seat in Section 202; view his slideshow here. But, from his fancy spot near the stage, he missed one thing.

A cool thing about arriving early was the chance to watch the spotlight team ascend from the back of the floor seats, right in front of sections 201 and 202. These guys spend the concert suspended by cable providing spots for the musicians.

light boys start

Object will move before show.

light boys up high

Indeed. On their way to the ceiling.

Dark. Then light.

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I ran a marathon once…

dark

Today’s post comes from Theresa, the eldest Backyard Sister.

I ran a marathon once.  I ran because my life was a train wreck right then and I was afraid if I didn’t get up and move I would never get up again. I ran to learn how to just breathe. I ran to be a part of something larger than me.

I spent months training, long hours alone with my thoughts and the sound of my ragged breaths. I learned to love the smell of early morning and the peace of downtown before shops opened and the sidewalks filled with people hurrying to begin their day.  I came to appreciate the soft breeze of twilight and the gentle shapes of nightfall when the world is infused with the last bit of sunlight. Trees, leaves green and then brilliant with fall, and birds with their busy chatter and endless fluttering kept me company. As did my faithful training companion, a middle-aged Jack Russell terrier whose exuberance for life and tireless motion inspired me to keep going many days when I didn’t think I could. I ran in rain and wind and cold and wondered if I was crazy. I discovered that I could struggle with self-doubt or pain or fatigue and emerge still moving, still breathing, still alive.

I ran that marathon, 26.2 miles, each mile an adventure. Through it all, people lined the path, there on a Sunday morning in January for no other reason than to show support for a group of strangers who had an idea they would challenge themselves to do something really hard and were there to accomplish their dream.  When I finally came around the last corner, there was a crowd of spectators and runners who had already finished, calling out encouragement and congratulations, helping us celebrate what we had done. I have kept these lessons I learned in my heart – one foot in front of the other, breathe, things get better in time; run after life,  even when you aren’t sure where you are going; and there are many more good people in the world than bad.

And so this brings me to the events of the week, the bombing at the Boston Marathon, how to make sense of something so senseless, so purely evil. How to live with the images forever etched into my brain,  runners reaching the finish line, the joy of that moment, the cheers of the crowd juxtaposed with the sound of explosion, the smoke and screams, blood and shattered glass. I have struggled with this contrast all week, angry and deeply saddened that someone chose a marathon as a backdrop for murder and tremendously moved by the stories of courage and sacrifice that are emerging.  Stories of strangers comforting the injured and saving lives, strangers offering a bed and food to those stranded by the bombing, people who when faced with a situation they never dreamed  possible embraced the challenge and ran forward to help. What I have decided is that there will always be good and evil and shades in between, always the overlay, always the pattern, there is no making sense of it, it just is.

I have stopped looking at the pictures and videos because they live in my mind now, the contrast of the horror of the bombing with the celebration of the day. I play them over and over, trying to rewrite the ending like I do when I wake up after a bad dream. And I am starting to see other parts of the picture emerge, I see people bent over the wounded, I see those who rushed in and began the terrible work of saving lives and I am beginning to realize that in the same moment of great darkness is the light of goodness we all contain, in the moment we are most fragile, there is great strength. And I do believe that good always triumphs over evil, maybe not at first, but always in the end, I am holding on to that thought – to ponder more during my next run.

~Theresa

light

You can read more by Theresa. Her essay “Lessons From Winter” is here.

Touchstone

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I am drawn to certain empty things like urns and skies.
I abhor other barrenness, like empty promises or hearts.

I rail against the empty life. Fill it with books, philosophies, a deep well of love.
I protect certain empty hours. Create a space for dreams and meditation, staring into spring.

EdenMy backyard before I moved

When I am on the abandoned beach, I miss you.
When I am deserted, I miss my beach.

Patterns emerge against emptiness.
Sound breaks silence.
Silence relieves talk.

Knit one. Pearl two. Add one. Drop a stitch.

My grandmother used to mutter directions for a sweater or scarf she was knitting.  If the pattern were disrupted she’d have to rip the stitches out.

You can unravel yarn but it always shows the kinks of where it’s been.
If you don’t know how to knit, what do you imagine?

DSCN2735

Backyard Sisters’ mom and dad

A pattern emerges against the emptiness.
Knit two. Pearl: One.
Now isn’t that a fine direction?

~Catherine

p.s. Maybe you like to read. I do. Maybe you like to knit. I don’t. Either way, a rather interesting book crossed my path. Literary Knits: 30 Patterns Inspired by Favorite Books,by  Nikol Lohr, is a book about as self-explanatory as its title.

9781118216064_cover.inddLohr has created knitting patterns for clothes items for women, like the Daisy cloche inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; for men, like the Gregor sweater inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; and for young girls, like the Anne Shirley dress inspired by Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud. If knitting is your thing, or if you want to see one yarn artist’s rendering of a word artist’s description, check it out.

Admirable use of the concept of patterns in literature I would say.

Give me a break

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Sometimes I have an urge to use big words I don’t yet know the meaning of, or better yet to make up new words to describe certain perfections, like this dawn when the sun rose into a fog-shrouded sky at the exact moment the mist receded. For one instant the dark flared – gilded with stars – then gave way to morning.  The camera was no match, nor really is this description.

I’ll remember the moment, keep working to get it right. And then I’ll drub it up against something rugged to set the beauty in relief. “No threat, no poem” is a truism we poets abide and practice and teach. As Dave Smith writes in his essay “St. Cyril’s Dragon” The Threat of Poetry:

Great art intends threat…The good poem destabilizes, unbalances, stirs up, digs down, demands feeling in exact circumstances…No poem succeeds without threat, implied or explicit. Threat manifests what is important to know. Threat engineers the struggle of self to come into being.

That’s all well and good, but the constant struggle takes energy and it’s necessary for me, for you, to take time to revive.  Whenever I forget to build rest into my schedule, the universe has a gentle way of reminding me. The cast of characters hanging around La Jolla Cove this weekend taught infinitely wise lessons with their presence.

Seal with ballJPG

Play whenever you can.baby sealTake care of your own.

full beach

It’s great to hang out with friends.

two sleeping

But having someone special is the best gift of all.

Now before you think there’s no threat here, consider. The La Jolla Cove seals are no stranger to peril. Tourists and restaurateurs complain about the stench of too many seals too close to town.  Conservationists and environmentalists clash with businesses to protect the seals. You can read a roundup of the controversy, or crisis as some call it, at the Seal Sitters link here.

Or you cannot. Sometimes it’s alright to take a break from crisis or controversy and simply enjoy the beauty right in front of you.

And that, good readers, is the last word on the March of contrasts.

Sealed with a kiss
~Catherine

p.s. When you are revived and ready to seriously consider how addressing the threat can create a fine poem, do revisit Dave Smith’s essay, “St. Cyril’s Dragon” The Threat of Poetry.”  In fact, you might even sign up for Poetry Daily. From the “About Poetry Daily” page:

Poetry Daily is an anthology of contemporary poetry. Each day, we bring you a new poem from new books, magazines, and journals.

Poems are chosen from the work of a wide variety of poets published or translated in the English language. Our most eminent poets are represented in the selections, but also poets who are less well known. The daily poem is selected for its literary quality and to provide you with a window on a very broad range of poetry offered annually by publishers large and small.

Life after death

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Dear One,
Last time we met, 40 years ago, you were five, maybe seven? Would I recognize you today if we passed on a trail?

I hear yesterday from my father – still close with your father who passes along your news – your husband is dead.

I dream you last night. I see you far off, vulnerably alone, head hunched against a great grey howling landscape.

caterpillar

I didn’t know your husband, don’t know your children, can only impose any understanding of your grief based upon imagination and experience losing others who are not my husband.

So, why write now? I have no balm to erase pain.

I do have one small wonder to offer. Have you ever, as mother, as teacher, observed how very much we are already our one true self in childhood? As we age we grow longer legs, big teeth replace baby teeth, our noses broaden a little. We learn about history, mathematics, physics, and literature.  What I’m talking about though, is that flickering now, flaring then, essence of our true being that burns through the years of a life.

I vividly remember an essence of you: your all out glee when playing Hide and Seek, as if the thrill of returning to base, of throwing yourself absolutely into the game was the secret to staying alive; the way you measured both sides of an argument and implored us squabbling playmates to just get over it; your unruly hair and dirty knees when there were hills to charge or mud to tame; the way you begged us to play wedding and house. You loved those games more than the others and cared for dolls and the mop-stick man with fierce fervor. I love you forever you’d say to the wooden handle. You’d swoon and we’d giggle until breathless.

When we lose someone, I know it is the person we miss. We miss their laugh and their warm hand, their scent, and voice, and the way they break into a smooth slide and spin us around the kitchen on a Tuesday night for no reason. I love you forever.

But more than that, there is a singular way we see ourselves reflected in the eyes of a person who absolutely knows us and loves us in spite of all we are. We simply are with some people in a way we aren’t with the rest of the world.

Your husband isn’t here to look at you that way now. Unfathomable.

But I see you, that fiercely strong and passionate girl. There are many others who still see you with love and caring. We reflect your deep goodness back upon you. We are here, not in your kitchen yet here, a steady presence for you and your children, holding you up in our hearts while you tumble upon grit and boulders. We will wait with you through the grey.

DSCN2076

With gentleness,
~Catherine

p.s. There is no one way that grief happens, though many doctors and psychologists refer to its five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  Whenever I hear this, I imagine a five ring circus. The audience is an assemblage of family and friends peripherally affected by the grief waiting and watching for signs that the new widow, the newly one-child-less parent, the orphan, will make it through a little tap dance, a little hissy fit, a little barter or a wailing upon a stage set up in each ring before being allowed to exit stage left and reenter The Land Of Normalcy.

I don’t know what to do.

I hate being audience. I hate doing nothing. I write.

I offer Mary Oliver‘s book Thirst, a collection of the most achingly beautiful poems written by a poet in a state of grief.

Heavy

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.

Cacti and clouds

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trail

I’ve run away from home again in the name of love. Book love.

Sometimes this writer needs to stop using her wife voice, mother voice, daughter voice, sister voice, auntie voice, professor voice, neighbor voice to recall the voice that sounds most like her inner soul. Her writing voice.

There was a red suitcase involved, a bag of books heavier than a week’s worth of groceries, my cappuccino maker, and a short to-do list.

  • Write the last poem of THE BOOK.
  • Finalize order of poems in THE BOOK. (Yes, this contradicts Item #1.)
  • Edit all poems in THE BOOK.

On Monday, the list felt an awful lot like this:

Western Prickly Pear

The weird thing is, I chose this week, right in the middle of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference, the single largest gathering of writers in North America.  More than ten thousand writers and editors traveled to Boston. I stayed in California.  I haven’t missed a conference in five years. And yet I desperately needed to be alone and write more than I needed to schmooze and buy books and be inspired by what other writers were doing.  I couldn’t afford both a writer’s retreat and to put myself up in Boston, so I chose me.  Alone.

As the week winds down, THE BOOK has been tamed back down to all lower case letters.  Needles have been plucked, rough edges smoothed.

The new perspective comes by paying attention to the Backyard Sisters theme for March: contrast.

low tide rocks

Home. Not home.
Clay. Sand.
Dust. Water.
Omnipresent trail. Tidal path.
Warm toes. Cold bed.

Narrative moves forward, I tell my students, when that which is bumps up against that which is not. The best poetry happens, says poet Amy Newlove Schroeder, when there’s “a yoking together of the concrete and the abstract,” like “blending the perfect martini.”  Last year I had the pleasure of hearing Amy give a poetry talk titled “Concrete Abstraction” at Chapman University.  She urged poets to consider how all language is representational and the most “successful” poetry is that which can translate an experience, an idea, an aloneness, “from the tangible to the real.”  It’s how we don’t die of loneliness, Schroeder suggests.

If you’d like your own university classroom experience, you can view her talk here.  And if you’re anywhere near Orange County, you can catch her at Literary Orange, Sat. April 6, 2013, at the Irvine Marriott, a hotel. Not home.

Leaving. Returning.
Watching the sky. Waiting for tomorrow.
Missing you. Knowing I will miss this.
clouds and oceanWith a skip in her step,
~Catherine