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Puppy Party!!
06.20.12 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Puppy Party!!A can of fresh dog food, a nice walk and extra lovies all await our best girl today. Happy 10th, Marthetta!
This photo was taken upon arriving at a friend’s on our way home with our girl. She was timid and clingy to her mother and continues to be timid and clingy with me as well. That week my back was covered with claw marks as she clawed her way around our bed with the energy and fervor of a newborn. Martha has grown from one of the craziest pups ever to the kindest and sweetest dog I have ever met. I have only heard her growl at someone one time and never has she bit a person, or really, another animal. We couldn’t ask for a better, more loving puppy than our Martha-Dog! Happy Birthday!
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Fixer
06.16.12 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Fixer
There are songs that come on the radio at the right moment and they stick to your emotions. Your guts burn, you break a little and the songs kinda glues the pieces back together again. You probably cry and feel a little more alive than usual. Maybe you redouble your resolve, or your resolve just shatters.
I had that with this Coldplay song on our way home today. I am tired of being in charge of fixing. Even if it is my job. There is a point at which people get to retire… to take a sabbatical at the very least. I would like a sabbatical. I would like a life of my own and a pat on the head just for leading that life of my own. I am pretty tired of the adrenaline, and the alertness that comes with all of the worry for others’ well being. Sure it grounds me, and maybe defines me, but I would like it to be all about my family for a while… I would like to just try that.
I woke at about 3:00 this morning from a dream. I had given my guitar, my beautiful guitar, to a man behind a counter. I gave him that guitar because I felt guilty having such a nice thing. An object that gives me so much joy. He handed me a fifty dollar bill. I knew that I couldn’t buy another guitar that was even playable for that, but I gave my guitar to him because I felt ashamed of having something nice for myself when I could do something else with it. I don’t even know what, just something utilitarian and humble. I felt sick but it felt like I deserved to lose my guitar.
He sat the guitar on the counter and started to pull pieces of it apart. Dream rules applied as he pulled the soundboard apart as though it were composed of strips of wood. The tuning pegs fell apart with just a touch to each of them, and the strings sprang and broke with just a brush of his hand. I grabbed for the guitar with regret and tried to strum at the low E string, the only string remaining and the guitar would barely even murmur any longer. I was crushed. I asked for the guitar back and the man just shook his head and put his hand out to take it back from me. It felt like he was breaking it just because he could. Just because it was in his power to do so.
I deserve more than allowing my most prized intimacies to be deconstructed by others. It isn’t my job to give and give and give and open up my doors, my family, my heart to people who won’t do productive things with their lives, who won’t love me back, who won’t build me up as I build them. I don’t have to be that person. No one has to be that person. People seem squeezed by their lives now. Lots of people leading normal lives with little problems feel like tiny mice in the strong fist of a mean little boy… like they want to bite and scuttle and frantically fight for their very lives over little tiny things. Like our American lives are squeezing the breath from them. But even at a low ebb our lives are great things, invulnerable things if we believe them to be so.
I am charting a course towards integrity , toward a life of kindness for kindness’ sake. I am going to re-double my commitment to being good, joyful, loving and the best person that I can be. But I am not going to hand my guitar over to anyone so they can destroy it just because. I think I have been in that bad practice for far too long. Break your own things if you must, although I’d rather you fixed them and joined me in the band.
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The fuchsia is now!
06.09.12 | Permalink | | Comments Off on The fuchsia is now!We got our fuchsia on back in April and the rewards are starting to arrive already. I was able to overwinter my Swingtime fuchsias from last year and I am experimenting with using them as a curtain draped across the retaining wall this year.
We did the Fred Meyer fuchsia event this year, something I have long been oddly, obsessively interested in and that gave us a real early jumps tart in our hanging baskets. I tried out lots of different double fuchsias this time and I am happy to be able to compare and contrast them all this year. The first to bloom is Archie Owen, which has defeated my pinching and snuck in some blossoms already.
White eye (eww. Reminds me of pink eye) got jealous and hopped on the bandwagon next to Archie with some tight little red and white blossoms more typical of the term fuchsia.
It has been fun throwing in sweet potato vine or creeping Jenny with the baskets this year to bring out some of that chartreuse that makes the darker greens so intense and glossy. I happy I overcame my tendencies toward monoculture in my baskets!
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Honeysuckle Hideout
06.08.12 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Honeysuckle HideoutThe honeysuckle is so happy to be crucified on the new fence. Big wads of blossoms are festooned across the fresh cedar. If only smell-o-vision were real!
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Certitude
06.05.12 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Certitude
Dear Tami,
Thirteen years have passed. That makes my mind stutter, trying to take in all of the details and compose a “this is how I feel about that” statement, with regards to the breadcrumb trail we have followed together. Just in the past year we have looked up from that walk through the woods and realized we aren’t little Hansel and Gretel any longer. We are pretty much all growed up, and it shows in our love, our outlook on life, our bodies (for better and worse), and the certainty which has come with THIRTEEN YEARS. We have ALWAYS had the ooey-gooey, lovey-dovey gravity between us, and we have always said to one another since our wedding vows, “Ever & Always”, “Always & Ever” (we even had the cups engraved. LOL.). But sometime in the past year, post-house construction, the cement finally set firmly. There is a deepened knowledge of who we are together now and there is a certainty that transcends the pretty phrases, the eye gazes, the intimate moments…  I suppose because who we are has played out over time and even survived trial by fire. We have grown, conquered, failed, overcome, been reduced to ashes and risen from those ashes in the same Ever & Always iteration so as to make us CERTAIN of one another.
I suppose it could sound like I am saying “reliable”, or “played out”, or “predictable”, but that is not it at all. We are “certain” now and it feels really good. Surprising too, because it feels like we are entering a secret stage that I wasn’t paying attention to. I heard the messages about what my twenties were supposed to look like, and I figured out what our thirties were supposed to be. I got the outline for a young married couple, for young parents, read the memo for how to be creative thirty-somethings, but I skipped the chapter or dropped the course for what to expect from the beginning of middle age. It always got explained like a twilight… the beginnings of Ragnarok. Any whisperings of it from others make it sound ominous: the beginning of the end. But the past year or two have led us to something that is much more of a sunrise. This feels like a really wonderful dawn… like an early morning when the bags are packed and downstairs by the front door. The coffee maker is set to brew at 5:30 so we can make our morning flight to somewhere new. Like we can take on bigger and better things because we are vetted and know how to accomplish things together, even when things get tough.
Can you see who is holding the train?
I feel like society has lied to me and undersold, or just isn’t bothering to appreciate, what we are heading into. I LOVE this part of our life because we are one THING now, we aren’t just trying that mantle on anymore; we are becoming seamless now. We are that grafted cherry tree out in the yard. The grafts took. The fruit actually grew (it was a little touch and go there for a while, but we popped two of them out. Phew). Now we get to stretch out the branches and grow some more. Sure we have to keep the red aphids from eating us to ribbons, and minimize any frost damage on that sensitive Black Tartar grafted limb, but this is the summertime of our life. Let’s do this thing with certitude.
I love you more than bees have knees, and trees have leaves. I mean that more so than ever, because there is more to weight that phrase with- the first few volumes in a library of our lifetime behind us, and more certainty to cement it with. Thanks for a pretty spectacular thirteen, my love. I will follow you down any path with or without breadcrumbs.
Lovingly,
Bradley
