Composting Poetry

In the garden, compost is black gold. Since I started gardening, way back when…back when my kids were small and I was buried in diapers (cloth, this was the olden times), breast-feeding, (really olden times), canning, sewing, cleaning, cooking, I was gardening, too. It was necessary. Times were tough, the economy was tanking, lots of men out of jobs, (this was before most women worked…the real olden times), no one could afford to actually invest in stock. That was for the wealthy.

My husband took his lunch to work, including coffee. I cooked everything from scratch because there just weren’t packaged meals (aside from TV dinners). I even ground my own wheat and baked bread. Oh, but that was such a tactile experience that every now and then I still bake my own bread, only now I use a bread machine, thought I do like to get my hands in there. I love kneading bread. Somehow, trouble seems to get smaller and smaller until I can handle it. A lot like air bubbles in dough.

I extended the paycheck with coupons and by doing-it-myself. One of the best things I found to stretch my food allowance was growing a garden and putting by what I could. I grew green beans, carrots, peas, zucchini, sugar snap peas, corn, peaches, raspberries, tomatoes and peppers. I was given pears and apples. The challenge was time. Tending to the garden, peeling, slicing, pickling, water baths and pressure cookers took tons of time. The picking, the watering and even more, there was the kids, the house, the pets. I had to come up with shortcuts.

As always, I turned to books and when I fell into <em>Ruth Stout’s “How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back” I knew I fell into the answer. You can see how the name caught my attention. I had the aching back and no time. Ruth Stout (Rex Stout’s sister) mulched between and around her vegetables and flowers with straw, newspaper, grass clippings, coffee grounds, vegetable peels—whatever organic matter worked. This cut down on watering (a big money saver there because we had to use culinary water), weeding and fertilizing.

It turned out all this organic matter feed and improved the soil. I was amazed the next year the difference in the dirt I’d used mulch on and the dirt I didn’t. Now, Stout’s idea was to layer the organic matter where you need it first, without composting it in a pile or bin. This worked great, but it was sometimes hard to have enough mulch for all my gardens and often the vegetable garden didn’t always get the best layer of mulch.

Of course, through the years things changed: family grew up and away, I stopped canning, sewing and was able to bury myself in writing more and more. I started a compost pit for my flower garden. It just seemed to me to make so much sense. The leftovers, you know the carrot peels, the leafy tops, the bean snipping’s, the coffee grounds, the onionskins, the banana peels gathered together to make rich garden dirt. Every time we take something from the earth we put some part of it back—a tithe, of sorts.

That compost pile seemed like a miracle and a duty—put garbage in and receive this dark, rich, loam soil thick with worms that feeds my gardens with something akin to magic. Today I use both methods in combination, but more I’ve learned to use the same kind of thing with my poetry.

I gather, use, discard, reuse words, ideas and experience, but some don’t fit the poem I’m working on, so I put in a separate file titled: compose file. It might be a whole idea or just a word, phrase or sentence. It might be a whole stanza or just the end that didn’t work. It sits in that file until I begin work on another poem. Then I go to the file, sift and sort and read, let my mind get fertile, rich and loamy. It’s organic and real with hands on, just like the miracle of compost.

Sometimes It's Not the Writing, But the Living

Arrr! It’s National Talk Like a Pirate Day, actually I think it might be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. In any case, we should be practicing our Pirate speak, if for no other reason than it’s supposed to be fun, but why not celebrate?

I’ve been on a vacation, of sorts. It was not restful, it was not perfect. I wouldn’t even say I completely enjoyed it. It was one of those vacations we’ve all had, where everything just goes south. Like seven days of rain on a vacation to the beach, but it’s the good you find. I guess that’s true of life too, isn’t it?

Vehicle trouble, forgotten needed items, a sick grandchild, bee stings and frustrating fishing. That was the bad, but the good outweighed all that. Marvelous sunsets, big, yellow moons in inky skies. You forget how distant and faded the stars have become until you get into the wilderness and see the unlit night. Then you just feel smaller and bigger than yourself.

There was helping two stranded boys on the archery hunt, one of which looked exactly like a fifteen-year-old Ricky Schroder. His companion looked about seventeen. Well, I couldn’t help thinking about my own sons, hoping they would find someone that would help them jump their battery, too, if they were ever in the need. It was so refreshing to see two super polite boys, so worried about worrying their dads. Sometimes we forget how great the younger generation is, but I have had several incidents that just make me have all kinds of faith in putting things in their hands.

There was the wind in the aspen. How I love that sound and the shiver of the leaves. And of course, the food: the best grilled pork chops I’ve had for ages, Catalina chicken, messy and sticky, just as it should be, fried filleted fish for breakfast, plus bacon and egg breakfast cooked by my son, watching my most miracle granddaughter introduced to camping, cold and all, hot chocolate, grilled steak and of course, s’mores.

Discoveries too, that fall begins at the bottom. The grasses have turned golden, the banded-winged grasshoppers make their short bursts of flight with a loud clicking ahead, the wild strawberries are beginning to turn scarlet and the willows, amber. Touches of golden quakies have just begun and when it rains the smell of dry grass and wet pine gives me all the aroma therapy I could ask for. And everyone looks beautiful by campfire.

Shiver me timbers, it sounds a bit like I'm a land lubber now, don't it, me hearties?

Rejection -The Least of My Worries

This week is the end of a beautiful, productive poetry workshop: World into Word-Poetry Editing with Melanie Faith. As I scan my old rough drafts, I’m finding gems and new ways of looking at old ideas. My enjoyment of poetry writing has sparked again, which helps spark all my writing—couldn’t happen at a better time. I feel a little more confident in not only my editing but also my writing decisions.

Not really. My tenacity, my determination and even the reason to keep struggling to publish is flagging, big time. Oh, there is not one thought to stop writing. I don’t think I could even if I wanted to, but I’m finding just the thought of dealing with the reality of my life as it is right now enough. Do you remember the scene in Regarding Henry when Henry (Harrison Ford) at the end of the show tells the secretary, “I’m saying when.”

I wonder, more and more often, if I need to say, “when.” It isn’t the writing and hasn’t been for a long time. I love the work, the writing. I have no trouble coming up with something the write about. In fact, I will never have enough time to get all the things already in mind to write actually written.

No, it’s my life. I’m blessed with a supportive family, a great life. At some point shouldn’t that be enough. Do I really need to keep reaching for impossible? Everything I truly care about is right here where I live. I’m lucky and blessed to be able to say that and what’s more, I know it.

Do I want to complicate what has become a very complicated time with another major wrinkle that publishing would be? I’m not alone in my feelings or realizing the impact being a caregiver has on one’s work. I just finished reading an article about the impact caregiving has on the workplace. How many workers are impacted and how it affects promotions, wages, and the wealth and health of the caregivers. Many workers are afraid to mention they are caregivers, afraid how their bosses will see it as affecting their work.

And the thing is I don’t think it would be fair of me to blame it all on being a caregiver. It’s often a struggle to keep the rest of my life on some kind of an even keel, too. And always has been. I have, technically been a widow all my husband’s career as he worked out of town, more than half the time, which gave me a unique view. I know what it’s like to be a single mom and a mom who has to learn to compromise with a husband who has different views on things. Neither is easy. Both have their difficulty and their blessings.

And now, since he’s been retired, it has been not only an adjustment to having him around all the time, but another complication. He’s spent his whole life working and has some things he’s been planning to do.

The fact is many people of my age, more every day, are struggling with the job of caregiver. It’s a strange place to be, caring for those who cared for you; making decisions for them while letting them keep as much independence as they can. It’s a lot like being a parent of a teenager—a grown-up, but not really. There isn’t an instruction manual and if there was, I’m afraid it wouldn’t have anything in it about my particular model.

I’m one of the lucky ones. My husband has taken on a lot of the chores involved and I know he does so because he loves my mom and because he loves me. While that makes things easier for me…it, also, makes it harder.

I’ve wondered if these feelings are just fear. You know there’s as much to fear about success as failure. And truthfully, I do fear. It’s not what you’d think. I can take rejection. I have had so many now, it is only a small blip and success isn’t one of those jump up and down things around here either. The best way to describe how I feel when something I’ve written is praised, accepted or wins a contest is stunned drunk. You know, a little slog, soggy, bewildered and gratefully the win, the good didn’t stumble up the not-so-well-oiled machine of my day to day.

Do I want to rock the boat? I’m scared to death, if I do, I might just drown. I’m taking on water as it is. So I sit here at my desk wondering if I ought to just work on my novels and poems and put them away. I lie awake at night worried that I’ll get the call that someone wants to see the whole manuscript of Ella and the Tie-down Man and then what? It’s ready, true, but then what? It seems the least of my worries is rejection.