rosa-sinensis

Rosa's Poetry Archives: CS Lewis

2012-01-22T17:11:00.000-08:00

Yes, you are always everywhere. But I,

Hunting in such immeasurable forests,
Could never bring the noble Hart to bay.

The scent was too perplexing for my hounds;
Nowhere sometimes, then again everywhere.
Other scents, too, seemed to them almost the same.

Therefore I turn my back on the unapproachable
Stars and horizons and all musical sounds,
Poetry itself, and the winding stair of thought.

Leaving the forests where you are pursued in vain
-Often a mere white gleam-I turn instead
To the appointed place where you pursue.

Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in the one
Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing
So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade;

Not in all food, not in all bread and wine
(Not, I mean, as my littleness requires)
But this wine, this bread...no beauty we could desire.

Still Here, Just a Little Blurred As I Rush Past the Keyboard

2011-08-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

I am on my way out the door to engage in a little of what the ancients called 'tilling the soil.' That I am already tired is neither here nor there. I am a parent! This blog could be subtitled In Which I Escape To the Garden. But I have realized as G begins to read that I don't want her to get the wrong idea. I love my children. I stay at home with them, purposefully, because of this love. I think they will see, when they are grown with children of their own that raising Littles is not for the lazy or half-hearted by any means. And I am feeling the laziness this summer. The push towards indolence, a longing for the days when I could lay on the grass and peep up at the sky between branches, idly wondering when the cabana boy would be by with a refill. (I don't know where the cabana boy imagery came from....) Anyway, there is no grassy lazing these days. The site of a supine Mommy engenders only wild bouts of Mountain Man climbing from the two-year old, that or desperate cries to do something, anything, other than lie down. And most days, I am okay with that. This too shall pass, and probably way too soon. I am trying to glory in the moments of toddler huggies, and the sound of HO singing in the back seat. And G's early morning surprise tea parties. So life is good, especially when I get to do stuff like this:

Wally Wall Pockets for Attune Foods' San Francisco Office


Shabby chic-ing at the Abbey Coffee Lounge, Santa Cruz

I also managed to pick up some clients, somehow making a passionate hobby into a little business. I have used gardening for many things, but somehow I never imagined I could make any money from it! A blessing, indeed, especially these days. So I have started working again, something I haven't done since the littlest Little was in utero. It is tiring, but heaps of fun.
But may it continue to be a source of rich contemplation & worship: the fecundity of the Maker, the joy and vitality found in working the land; the peace & plenty as well as the struggle for life that is sown into every landscape. I am where I want to be.

Storms And A Few Questions For The Panel

2011-02-24T23:42:00.000-08:00

I inherited some sort of storm preparedness gene from my dad, or maybe my maternal grandfather. Today marks the beginning of a big storm for our area (maybe snow!) and so this afternoon found me outside in its harbinger: a light sprinkle, pulling tarps over things, sweeping soil off our steep driveway into the beds (so we don't lose any topsoil into the road) & muttering to myself all the garden queries I have compiled of late.
Raincloud to Me: "Catch!"
I have no idea how to do this, other than to stand large vessels out of doors in the rain. But what about mosquito larvae? Should I add a few drops of chlorine to the water to kill anything wanting to take up residence? Will chlorinated water be suitable for plants? Is our water chlorinated already, so this is a non-issue?
Um......
And then there is the cold frame. Of what should its floor consist? Gravel? Wood chips? Right now it is gravely, weedy soil and a half-smashed volunteer foxglove. Seedlings in trays are sitting above the ground on cinder blocks, which I imagine create some very nice hidey-holes for slugs and the like. So the blocks should probably go.
Potential Yuck
Also, can I plant vegetables over my septic tank? Should I just stay away from root crops?
A New Lawn, Please!
What is a drought & shade tolerant variety of grass for our latest hair-brained landscaping scheme?
Dew Point
Just what exactly is the dew point? How is it measured? (Acorn cups and fairy bells?)

And when, o when, will the spring come?

Rosa's Spoof Archives: Jane Austen Fight Club

2011-02-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

It's the little things in life. And this week it is this.

SO much better than zombies.

I Think We're Alone Now

2011-02-13T23:59:00.000-08:00

I am alone. It is a rare occurrence, and something that I cherish. I'm not saying that I prefer a hermitage to the hurricane of activity which swirls around me daily, just that it is nice to get out of the wind sometimes.The Littles are asleep, the spouse is in an undisclosed city on the east coast, (which I will refer to as La Gran Pomme.)

The soundscape of my evening belies my solitude. I can hear appliances, and the noise of my keyboard. Typety-typety. I start to mutter to myself. I putter around in my slippers. Mutter and putter. I am going to make an awesome old lady, I can feel it. Give me some pigeons to feed and joints that can predict rain and I am all set.

I used to think that I liked being alone because I was interesting, introspective and thoughtful. This was also the era when, like Morrissey, I wore black on the outside, because black was how I felt on the inside. I wrote sad poetry. I had lunch in the graveyard across the street from my high school. I was 15, and thought Cafe Pergolesi, Oscar Wilde & the Beat poets were the height-the very outer limits-of cool. I wanted to be Winona Ryder in Heathers.
Now, in my thirties, I know the truth. I do better alone because my brain is feeble and easily distracted. I am constantly derailed by the smallest things, and lack the mental acuity to cope with more than 3 things happening at once. And I find that I cannot complete thoughts over the din of other people's vibrant personalities, brash assertions and needy agendas. And that is just the children.
All kidding aside, it is not until I am alone that I can really begin to process my life, and as I go longer and longer surrounded by people, I find myself unable to answer the following question, thrown at me often, "So-how are you? What's going on in your life?"to which I dazedly answer, "Ahhhh...finejustfine. And how are YOU?"

The youngest is awake now, holleratin' at me, so I guess my time alone is done. Lord, have mercy! (And send B home soon!)

Now We Are Six

2011-01-30T22:03:00.000-08:00

Well,that's done. Happy Birthday to our own sweet girl-Little Miss G is six today! And true to form, we went completely over the top for her birthday. But I think it was nothing that a large mug of sweet milky tea and "Tokyo Godfathers" couldn't cure. We're done in! But glad to have parented 'Little Bit' for six lovely years.

Some Small Points

2011-01-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

Epiphany & Pruning
In the midst of all the Epiphany hoopla (you know-watching the Macy's Epiphany Parade & the crowning of the Epiphany Queen, fighting the crowds at the mall while doing my last-minute Epiphany shopping, etc) I managed to find time to give my pruning tools a good drubbing. They needed it! I started the yearly Pruning of the Fruit Trees in my MIL's garden, which resulted in 3 1/2 out of 8 trees done and a very tired (but satisfied) me.
In Which Spring Is Thinking About Coming I've been noticing the subtle changes with some of the more herbaceous plants in the garden these days. Our climate here on the central coast is decidedly mild & known for its Mediterranean sensibilities, and we rarely see the underside of 32F. However, most would refer to the past week as bitterly cold, and a few things have been killed by frost, not the least of which is any inclination to be outside.
That said, my early spring bloomers have that little twinkle in their eye that says spring is approaching.
Harbingers du jour include: the upward tilt to the leaves of the ubiquitous forget me not, and the swelling flower buds on the quince that borders the driveway.
Plants for Which I Am Nursing A Passion
-Hamamelis mollis (Witch Hazel)-I want it, and I want it now!
-Just about every plant exhibited in the Annie's Annuals spring catalogue. I must go and visit this place soon!
Books That Have Made Me Happy Of Late

Armadale by Wilkie Collins-I just finished it and it was deeply satisfying in that Wilkie way. G got it for me for Christmas (really!) and for a 6 year old she really knows her Victorian serial novels.
In the Company of Others by Jan Karon-the latest Father Tim novel. Ta, mum! A good read.

Sorry for the listy type post, but that is the mood I am in. I just went with it!

I'd Like To Thank All The Little Doggies Who Helped Get Me Where I Am Today.....

2011-01-03T22:50:00.000-08:00

Today I got an email from a company that let me know that my blog was receiving an award. It's so nice to be acknowledged!!!! Especially from a company that sells........accessories for dogs.Wait a minute-is my blog so canine-centric that the dog accessories people have finally sat up and taken notice? Finally!! ((Sniff!!))
Doggone It!
But hold on-now that I think about it, I can't remember the last time I posted about dogs. I don't own a dog, I don't intend to own a dog. Let's do a search on the ole browser......hmmmm.
Dogwood, Dog Rose, Dog Days, Farm Dogs, Dogged My Steps.......
Well, it seems that about once a year since 2007 I've let slip the word 'dog' here at rosa-sinensis, and apparently that is enough to get you an award from this website. Upon closer examination, of course, this is an ad. The email from 'Shiela' (sic) has about 5 obvious typos, and the name of the company itself, 'Accessories for Dog' seems to say it all.
As I'm told in the rousing post script- (and I quote): "If You Have More Quality Blog We Can Feature Those."

((Sigh))

Advent Reading: Day 24, or Quick Reflections of An Introverted Mother

2010-12-21T19:53:00.000-08:00

B just left the house with the youngest of our Littles and I think it is the first time I have been alone in a week. I am an introvert, the definition of which (I think) involves the origins of where one derives strength-being with or without people. (So for me, it is without.) (People.) In which case, this last week full of holiday hearth and home and all the convivialities that necessarily follow have made me almost cross-eyed with the mental strain of keeping up with it all. Some of my favorite yearly events happened this week (not including, of course, birthdays, fresh asparagus season and the All Saints Rummage Sale) and this introvert rallied around heroically, but it is only now, when I find myself finally alone, that I notice the effort it has been.
I want to be quiet. I need to get quiet and think and pray and write. I am desperate for some of that solid, solitary time. I think this is entirely typical of life with two small children-definitely when the oldest and most vocal child is home via school vacation, and especially since we are still grieving the loss of the spectacularly consistent 2 hour morning nap of the younger. That the rain has been unrelenting and the mildew overly-friendly has not helped.
I am thankful for home and hearth and all that, really I am-I think I need the quiet in order to remember it. I think I need the quiet just in order to complete a sentence. Some more sleep would be nice too.
Advent Readings, Resumed
Somehow, Christina Rossetti's 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter' is fitting here. I think I like Cyndi Lauper's take on Gustav Holst's melody best, mainly because of the funny juxtaposition.

In The Bleak Midwinter

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak mid-winter

Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him

Nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away

When He comes to reign:

In the bleak mid-winter

A stable-place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty,

Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim

Worship night and day,

A breastful of milk

And a mangerful of hay;

Enough for Him, whom angels

Fall down before,

The ox and ass and camel

Which adore.

Angels and archangels

May have gathered there,

Cherubim and seraphim

Thronged the air;

But only His mother

In her maiden bliss,

Worshipped the Beloved

With a kiss.

What can I give Him,

Poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd

I would bring a lamb,

If I were a wise man

I would do my part,

Yet what I can I give Him,

Give my heart.

Thanks, Christina! I feel much better now. Your careful use of words here, though sparse, convey a rich tapestry of images & theology. Especially the 'breastful of milk' part, we don't have many other carols getting into the scene so intimately, earthy, organic and familiar. Well done!

Advent Reading: Day 7, Charlie Lowell

2010-12-04T22:34:00.000-08:00

The Disarming Child

Helpless and human
Deity in the dirt,
Spirit married with flesh
We couldn’t make it to you,
But you come to us.

You always come to us.
In our stubbornness and desire,
Entitlement and shame
Remind us that we need you,
Merge your untamed Spirit with our flesh.

We try to forget those
Years of wandering.
Shackles and masters,
An eternity of doubting
And still, you come to us.

A divine intrusion
Through our scheming and chaos-
Coats of armor, angels and armies.
Do some wrecking here,
And gently come to us.

Disturb us this day
Through sorrow and through dancing,
The bliss of joy and sting of death
Past hands that would threaten and tear,
You come to us extravagantly.

From your manger lowly,
Mighty and mysterious
You come to us, Seed of Heaven
Spirit wed with flesh,
These broken hearts to mend.

Beautiful! Thanks, Charlie!

Advent Day 6

2010-12-03T23:38:00.000-08:00

I know this one is making the rounds, but it is also making me happy. Take it away, Opera Company of Philadelphia! Sorry about only half the screen appearing at any given point in the recording. I know. My IT go-to guy is in absentia. What a fun sentence to say out loud. Go ahead. And then watch the video!

Advent Reading: Day 4

2010-12-01T23:23:00.000-08:00


GK, looking a little windswept

'The Christmas season is domestic; and for that reason most people now prepare for it by struggling in tramcars, standing in queues, rushing away in trains, crowding despairingly into teashops, and wondering when or whether they will ever get home. I do not know whether some of them disappear for ever in the toy department or simply lie down and die in the tea-rooms; but by the look of them, it is quite likely. Just before the great festivals of the home the whole population seems to have become homeless.'
-GK Chesterton (1874-1936)

Advent Reading: Day 3

2010-11-30T15:39:00.000-08:00

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
   from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
   the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
   the Spirit of counsel and of might,
   the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

   He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
   or decide by what he hears with his ears;
but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
   with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.

He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
   with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
Righteousness will be his belt
   and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

-Isaiah 11:1-5

Advent Reading:: Day 2, George MacDonald

2010-11-29T22:39:00.000-08:00

Come, saviour of nations wild,
Of the maiden owned the child
That may wonder all the earth
God should grant it such a birth.

Not of man's flesh or man's blood
Only of the Spirit of God
Is God's Word a man become,
And blooms the fruit of woman's womb.

Maiden, she was found with child,

Nor was chastity defiled;
Many a virtue from her shone:
God was there upon his throne.

From that chamber of content,
Royal palace pure, he went;
God by kind, in human grace
Forth he comes to run his race.

From the Father came his road,
And returns again to God;
Unto hell it did go down,
Up then to the Father's throne.

Thou, the Father's form express,
Get thee victory in the flesh,
That thy godlike power in us
Make sick flesh victorious.

Shines thy manger bright and fair;
Sets the night a new star there:
Darkness thence must keep away;
Faith dwells ever in the day.

Honour unto God be done;
Honour to his only son;
Honour to the Holy Ghost,
Now, and ever, ending not. Amen.
-George MacDonald

My Sulky Vegetables

2010-11-29T11:49:00.000-08:00

It is cold. The trees, they drip, they overhang, they shade. The vegetable garden, it sulks. Escarole, kale, cauliflower & leeks comprise this seasons humble veg garden, and they are small green dots on a cold black landscape. I sowed a flat of mixed veg about a month ago. After they sprouted, while weeding & transplanting, I would conscientiously move them around the garden to hit as much sun as could be had in our little bit of redwood-ringed earth. And little good it did. Three weeks after germination and there are no true leaves, only the sad little green seed leaves atop the long white etiolated stems. The water cress looks particularly sad.
I suppose the lesson from all this is to sow seed for the winter garden in August or September. But here in the central coast of California our most severe heat wave of the year came in September, with temps regularly over 100 for two weeks. Take that, lettuce and other cool season crops! I need to talk to more veggie gardeners in this part of the world to see how they handle the transition from summer to winter. Most gardening books are written for the east coast gardeners, with their classically defined seasons.
I am not actually complaining about living here in this fabulously temperate climate, mind. Only trying to feel my way through a new venture in gardening.

Advent Reading: Day 1

2010-11-28T23:42:00.000-08:00

"Advent......helps us to understand the fullness of the value and meaning of the mystery of Christmas. It is not just about commemorating the historical event; which occurred some 2,000 years ago in a little village of Judea. Instead, we must understand that our whole life should be an 'advent' in vigilant expectation of Christ's final coming. To prepare our hearts to welcome the Lord who, as we say in the Creed, will come one day to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize his presence in the events of daily life. Advent is then a period of intense training that directs us decisively to the One who has already come, who will come and who continuously comes."
-Pope John Paul II (1920-2005)

The Man From Hippo Said It Best

2010-11-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

The Man From Hippo

O Holy Spirit, love of God....descend plentifully into my heart;

Enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling,

And scatter there thy cheerful beams!

Dwell in the soul which longs to be thy temple;

Water that barren soil overrun with weeds and briars,

And lost for want of cultivating,

And make it fruitful with thy dew from heaven.......

Come, thou hope of the poor, and refreshment of them that languish and faint.

Come, thou star and guide of them that sail in this tempestuous sea of the world;

Thou only haven of the tossed and shipwrecked.

Come, thou glory and crown of the living,

And only safeguard of the dying.

Come, Holy Spirit, in much mercy,

Come, make me fit to receive thee.

-Augustine of Hippo (Algeria/354-430)

The Winter Vegetable Garden & The Flower Grower's Confessions

2010-11-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

I don't know if this is a hopeless undertaking, but I am tearing my garden apart in order to plant......vegetables. I haven't grown anything that might be construed as a vegetable for many years now.
Raspberries, strawberries & herbs comprise the majority of my edible harvest each year (unless, like my 5 yr old, you count the sour grass....and I don't.)

Even though I graduated from a renowned institution dedicated to turning out organic farmers by the bushel, I've gravitated towards ornamentals. I don't know why, I've never been able to do things by the book, if they are training people for organic food production, I have to grow flowers & perennials instead. Ask my mom, it's always been this way.

But, I've been talking to some veg growers recently, and it's made me think more about this vegetable thing. In general, I like vegetables-there are even some of which I can't get enough; but I've never wanted to grow them personally. Over the years, I've blamed our garden's orientation to the sun (partial sun at best), our soil's tilth (poor & sandy), our climate (prone to drought). Also mixed up in that was an indignation at the higher cost of keeping a vegetable patch (fertilizers, etc) versus the low-maintenance life of most perennials. But I now realize that at the bottom of it all is fear.
Yes, I've been afraid of growing vegetables.

Nope, nothing to do with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Or
Auf der Jagd nach dem Riesenkaninchen, as we sometimes like to call it.

What I have been afraid of, though, is putting in all that time and effort, only to reap the harvest of weak, spindly slug fodder. It felt hopeless.
People who walk through life breezily offering their surplus of vegetables from the garden, or casually mentioning that they've spent the day canning this season's harvest secretly astound me. How do they do that?
I think I stick safely to my perennial flowers & herbs largely because they offer me a lot of return for very little input. Then again, maybe I'm just lazy.
Anyway, all that is changed now. I had a carpe diem moment a few months ago and subsequently have decided to transplant out all my perennials in my two sunniest beds and give the garden almost entirely over to growing vegetables. We'll see how it goes.
The Alchemy of Motherhood & Gardens
I'm a little behind with it, it's been hard to align the planets in order to get out there in the garden to work.
This is the alchemical formula I've come up with:
1 child in school
+ 1 child's nap
+ 1 clean house
+ no one 'just dropping by'
+no rain
Add essence of no current exciting books to read, and that equals approximately 1 morning spent in the garden. Which is sort of like making gold, and the elixir of life, rolled up together, if you think about it. I've spent most mornings gingerly digging up the lupines, clematis, verbascums, roses, flowering quince, lemon verbena, and all the other little straggly plants that need to move house in order to make way for the veggies. After that is removing the massive amounts of roots left behind (sorry!), amending the beds (lotsa lotsa compost) and then planting out.
Love Apple Farm
I spent the day over at Love Apple Farm yesterday, getting a refresher course on planting the winter garden. A beautiful property, off Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The morning view was staggering, looking out over the coast redwoods, watching the marine layer drift through the canopy of the adjacent scrub oaks. One of the things I love about visiting small organic farms is the way they are offset by the surrounding countryside, and how they seem to sort of stitch their way into the landscape. Farm dogs wound their way around our little class, woofing and flopping and managing very politely not to walk on the beds.
I came away with a lot of information and some fine veggie starts-including a cheddar cauliflower of which I am prodigiously curious. For all its beauty and fecundity and good growing practices, Love Apple Farm is biodynamic, a practice derived from Rudolph Steiner in the 1920's. I almost want to call it a belief system. It's too complicated to get into, that will be for another post, if I can be bothered. All I will say is that I am not much of a fan.
But what I am a fan of, is the winter veggie garden. Kolhrabi, leeks, kale, cauliflower, water cress,broccoli, rapini, mizuna, arugula, cabbage-I want to grow it all! And if the rain lets up (and the children nap, etc) we just might have some veggies on our hands in a couple of months. I'll let you know!

Rosa's Quote Archive: James Martineau & Jesus, or She Ra vs the Vine

2010-09-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

"Nothing less than the majesty of God, and the powers of the world to come, can maintain the peace and sanctity of our homes, the order and serenity of our minds, the spirit of patience and tender mercy in our hearts. Then will even the merest drudgery of duty cease to humble us, when we transfigure it by the glory of our own spirit." -James Martineau

I first read this quote this morning, in a lovely illuminated edition of Daily Strength for Daily Needs. Initially, I was encouraged by it, reminding myself that it is solely by God's good grace that I am able to think a right thought about him, and to produce the fruit of love, joy peace, patience, etc that in turn creates the 'peace and sanctity of our homes'. "Interesting, that last line," I thought, ruminating on it throughout the day. "What does Martineau mean about drudgery of duty being transfigured by the glory of our own spirits? Sounds like a reference to the Transfiguration of Jesus-in this analogy, is the drudgery of duty like Christ's own physical body that he transfigured so gloriously? What glory of our own spirit is he talking about? What the heck?"" All these mild speculations as I've been chasing Hecho around, our newly bipedal son, wiping sticky paw prints (aforementioned biped) and waiting for the bus from kindergarten to drop off our eldest.
She-Ra, Princess of Power

It wasn't until I Wiki'ed James Martineau that I discovered the Rosetta Stone that lays all my questions to rest. He was a Unitarian. Of course! (smacks head) All that bit about the glory of our own spirits. I don't know about James, but I wouldn't even know how to begin transfiguring the things I find drudgery by sheer force of my spirit's glory. Of course, this immediately makes me picture my spirit like She Ra in a spangly bathing suit, comb back and winged headdress, wielding my sword of Spirit Glory (TM) over my head. "Take that, breakfast dishes! And that, dirty diapers!"
Hey-my spirit's looking pretty good-who needs Jesus, anyway?
(ahem........where was I?) So yes, I'd say there are some definite fault lines running through this quote. Probably the biggest is that the last line doesn't line up with the first-"Nothing less than the majesty of God....", yet in the end it is the glory of our own spirits that transfigure the drudgery of duty.

The Vine

Instead let me turn it over to Jesus.
"Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing." John 15:5
I'll take the organic life-giving sap of the Vine over the spiritforce of She Ra and Martineau. I need the rest and the life that abiding in Jesus gives me, since I am seriously lacking in the She Ra Spirit Glory department. I think I'd make a bad Unitarian, lacking the belief in my own spiritual cojones, if you will-that, and the inability to keep a straight face.

((And then there's St. Paul, sticking his oar in:))

"Whatever you do, whether in word or deed,

do it all in the name of your Lord, Jesus Christ,

giving thanks to God the Father through Him."

Overheard, Or Why It Is Good That School Starts Next Week

2010-08-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

[In the kitchen with G yesterday]:
G: You know what a really terrible thing would be?
Me (distracted): Ummmm, what, honey?
G: To have a broken leg, a monkey, and no husband.
Me: (listening now): yeah, that sounds pretty bad!
G: Why does it?
Me: What do you mean, why does it? You tell me!
G: Tell you what?
Me: (trying to remain calm and failing) Gah! What about the monkey and the broken leg and no husband? Why is that terrible?
G: Because there's no one to take care of the monkey, of course!

Rosa's (Inappropriate) Poetry Archives: Richard Cranshaw

2010-08-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

To Susie, who is abandoning her alliterative last name in just a matter of hours, I dedicate this truly terrible poem, found in an innocuous Everyman collection entitled, Marriage Poems. While it is true that every poem found between the covers of this book is technically about marriage, not every poem (or any, really) are appropriate to read at a wedding. And okay, I admit it, I found this at Abbot's Thrift last week and thought, "I'm looking for meaningful poetry to read at Susie's wedding, awesome!"

SFX: throat clearing, and then in deep sonorous tones:

AN EPITAPH UPON HUSBAND
AND WIFE WHO DIED AND
WERE BURIED TOGETHER
To these whom death again did wed
This grave's the second marriage-bed.
For though the hand of Fate could force
'Twixt soul and body a divorce,
It could not sever man and wife,
Because they both lived but one life.
Peace, good reader, do not weep;
Peace, the lovers are asleep.
They, sweet turtles, folded lie
In the last knot that love could tie.
Let them sleep, let them sleep on,
Till the stormy night be gone,
And the eternal morrow dawn;
Then the curtains will be drawn,
And they awake into a light
Whose day shall never die in night.
-Richard Cranshaw

(sweet turtles!)

In Which The Long Awaited Moment Arrives

2010-08-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

Kids are in bed, dishes washed, extracurricular activities are at an all-time low and so for once I can sit, tea and pear tart at hand, listening to the Avett Brothers and sifting through all the words that are vying for audience. Because now I am ready, finally, to write.
But already I've done this all wrong. Bee and I just finished doing something so colossal, it has sucked up virtually all our free time, energy and money over the last 12 months. And what I meant to do was to blog about the process, the lead up to and the time during this big thing that we just got done with. But I ran out of time. And instead spent all my bloggable evenings on Google Calendar trying to coordinate said colossal event. So it is only now that it is all over that I can really begin to properly record it.

So what was this colossal event? Well, we went back to Scotland. We took a group of 10 people, 12 if you count the Littles, our own Gee & Hecho, back to North Ayrshire where we lived and worked for a year in 2003-2004.
The Back Story
We lived and worked at a Youth With A Mission training center called The Seamill Centre;YWAM is an international Christian missions organization that trains and sends people (of all ages) all over the world in a wide variety of contexts. Its mission: 'To Know God, and Make Him Known."

As I said, Bee & I lived at The Seamill Centre, where I was the groundskeeper on 4 acres and Bee was the Housekeeper. I worked mainly at the base, as it is known, but dabbled a bit in the local village, working with the local gardening group known as the Environmental Group. I went to a few meetings, helped muck out the Marsh Garden (very mucky indeed) and spent an odd afternoon in the greenhouse, pricking out seedlings and chatting with some of the local gardening color. One such bit of local color was a great guy, the local vet, named Charlie Garratt.
Charlie was one of the those dynamic, larger than life sort of guys, with surgeries in two towns, editor of the funky local 'paper', big mover with the Environmental Group. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone knew him. The last time I saw Charlie was a few days before we moved home. We stopped in at the surgery to say goodbye and to tell him our good news, that we were pregnant with our first child. He hugged us heartily on the doorstep and we said our goodbyes. Four years later, he died of a heart attack. We were grieved, and began to think about the Environmental Group, and how hard this must be for them. How could we support them? The idea was born. Taking gardeners from our church at home over to help the EG, to give them a boost during this hard time. As we talked it over, we began to see that a trip over there would further another goal, of building bridges between the YWAM base and the local community. We would stay at 'the YWAM' as it is known locally, and walk into the village each day to work. We would try to get long-term staff from YWAM to work with us as we helped the EG, encouraging relationships between the two entities. The village always seemed to hold the YWAM base at arm's length and we got the feeling that the large, international and typically gregarious community of missional Christians were a bit of a question mark for many people in the village. At the same time, we wanted to work in the grounds at the Seamill Centre, which always need help. We also wanted to come against some of the problems in the village. Like the vandalism proliferated by the local disaffected youth or NEDs (non-educated delinquents), and a sort of apathy that seemed to linger unpleasantly. Like the dog piles that were all over the sidewalks, the Johnny Walker bottles that littered the forest paths and the vomit puddles on the train to Glasgow. These sorts of things definitely belied the village's otherwise pleasant surroundings. We wanted to support what the village was doing to pull itself out of this sort of malaise.

So we took all these ideas to the missions board at our church, and laid it all out before them. And they agreed to it, amazingly. I remember standing in the midst of them, over a year ago, as they prayed God's blessings and anointing over us. I remember feeling like we needed all the help we could get in the blessings and anointing department. Typically, between the two of us we call these sorts of big ideas our HBSs, or Hare-Brained Schemes. This seemed like such a huge HBS,and as we began to advertise it amongst the church community (this was at the end of last summer), I began to wish we had just decided to go to Scotland ourselves, with little fanfare, and a lot less of an audience in case it failed. Not spectacularly full of faith, I admit it. But through it all, it became clear that it was God Himself who mysteriously wanted this trip to happen. That's really the only explanation I can give. I think somewhere around the 6 month mark I would have given up, snowed in under the avalanche of details and communication break-downs that we experienced. And I don't know how one event can be tinged at once with hysteria and tedium, but there you go. Somehow, we kept at it and things kept happening.

Soon we had people interested, filling out applications, putting down deposits, buying plane tickets, applying for visas and suddenly we found ourselves leading a short term missions trip to Scotland! Eeek!
Victorious
And it all happened. All of it! The gardening, the relational stuff with YWAM and the EG, all of it. We got wet, dirty, bug-bitten, nettle-stung, sick, back wrenched (Ed), foot speared by a pitchfork (Celicia), chased by cows (Joanna) zapped by an electric fence (Katie) eye poked with a stick (me, and not as fun as it sounds), and almost swept away in the West Kilbride burn (creek). But we did it! And it was amazing. Really, really great, and I am so glad we did it. I've even caught myself saying, "You know, next time we can do it this way..." which is encouraging. At least I don't want to run screaming.
I have so many vignettes from these past few weeks, as you can imagine, and this post is really just me circling around this deep pool of a trip, trying to figure out from which angle to dive in.

I think I'll start with the gardens.....

(Oh, and photo credit goes to Celicia Fikes, photographer and mad bramble-slayer!)

2010-07-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I came to a decision. There are things in my life that have brought me life and joy in the past;
I have let them get subsumed by the rest of my world. And truth be told, I've found life and joy in other ways, but now that some things have subsided I have decided it is time to return here to rosa-sinensis, to write.
My original plan was to leave rosa-sinensis to the garden prose genre, and to continue to write on rosa bird. What I didn't account for was that now I had two blogs to maintain, when I hardly had time for one.
So I am chucking rosa bird (chuck!) into the Slough of Old Blogs and am returning, flags waving, to rosa-sinensis. Good job keeping up.

"Life, with its rules, its obligations and its freedoms is like a sonnet: you're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself."-Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle In Time.

Rosa's Garden Notes

2010-06-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

I'm inspired by Esther again, she's just writing about her garden, IRL, without any smoke or mirrors or cleverness. (Although her cleverness is inherent in everything she does.)
At the end of day I am left with nary a post left in me, totally tired and good for not much more than a book or a Netflix session. So it means that I am writing very little and I find myself feeling sort of dumb and mute as a result. It's not as if there isn't anything happening that is blog-worthy, I've got writing material in spades, it's just been hard to write it all down. So here is my quick, 10 minutes of bare bones writing, Esther-style.
Our Garden, 15 Forest
Our garden has got that early summer look about it, which means flowers, and lots of kiddie toys littered throughout. It's not hot enough yet for us to have to cower inside, and the flowers still have a fighting chance with our sandy (read: thirsty) soil and watering restrictions. The grass wants cutting, and there are lots of seedlings that are quietly giving up the ghost in the cold frame, but for the most part I am pleased.
The Abbey Garden, 350 Mission
The Abbey Garden is looking well these days, and this where I've been spending a lot of my time. It's interesting, gardening in such a public setting, with people who for the most part really enjoy the garden, but have little clue about its design or theme. I get a lot of good feedback when I'm out gardening, and the courtyard has been full of people hanging out in the sun, or relaxing beneath the elder branches. I took a video of it, on our little Flip camera, and once I figure out how to upload it to Blogger, you can see it too.
I went to a staff meeting for the Abbey baristas a few weeks ago and got to formally introduce them to the garden. We were out there sniffing the lemon verbena and stroking the lamb's ear, talking about the proper techniques for watering. To be honest, I felt full of artificial bonhomie and a brave face. I definitely put on a show, and it felt like I came off sort of wacky. Not myself! But at least the staff know who I am now, and are not looking at me sideways when I come in to borrow scissors, with leaves in my hair and dirt on my chin.
There's a new website in the works for the Abbey too, and I'll be writing the content for the garden page. I've recruited Stepkas for the photography, so that means it will be class.
To tell the truth, I've figured out that I am lonely in this garden. It's been a work of collaboration from the beginning, and the other designers have had to step out for various reasons. So it's just me. As far as the actual work goes, it's not a lot, and now that the baristas are doing the watering, my time spent in the garden is even less. It's more the feeling of working together, and bouncing ideas off each other that I miss. I keep referring to myself in the plural, as in "the Abbey Gardeners" or "we want to put in raspberries", not quite the 'royal we', more of a way to help myself keep a little 'umble. And also as a little prayer each time I say it. ("Let it be so!") The thing that keeps me going is that I can tell that God has let me feel this lack, so that when He meets this need I will be able to recognize it, and thank Him for it.

La Communidad De La Playa

2010-05-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

Our town has a wrong side. Most towns do. Our wrong side of town is called the Beach Flats. Formerly this was just a neighborhood made up of little beach cottages on tiny one way streets, nestled in a lazy crook of the San Lorenzo River, just before the river mouth and right in the shadow of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk; our town's seaside amusement park which is replete with rickety roller coasters, aging doo-wop groups and discreet puddles of sick beneath the Tilt-A-Whirl.
The Beach Flats is generally regarded as one of the poorest communities in our county. I've never really been sure just exactly how to get to the Flats, so assiduously have I kept from going there. Because this is the place where all the drug busts happened, the prostitution and gang wars and all the other things that my mother warned me about. In high school, after our house was robbed, the culprits turned out to be part of a bigger drug ring that was centered in...you guessed it, the Beach Flats. So it was with a little bit of trepidation that I joined our church last Saturday morning for a workday down in the Flats.

La Luz

I was surprised to see how much has been done to clean up this area, a shiny new Community Center, playgrounds and 2 lovely little gardens.The neighborhood was awakening slowly as the morning shadows slanted down the narrow streets; the odd crumbling beach bungalow illuminated by sunlight. Children began to appear on the sidewalks, brothers and sisters on bikes of the loud plastic wheel variety, giving each other Slug Bug punches on the arm at the sight of our silver VW Beetle.
As I said, this neighborhood is right down the street from the Boardwalk, and I was constantly glimpsing the Giant Dipper out of the corner of my eye, looming over us. By lunch time the smell of fried churros & salt air was pungent.
Poet's Park
I was working in the community garden at Poet's Park, a little circular garden with many little pie slice plots that belong to different community members. Since this is a largely Latino community there were many plots planted out with cactus, chiles & tomatoes. Huge swathes of bright purple volunteer cosmos ran throughout the garden,along with what looked like yellow helenium, which is better known by its descriptive yet silly common name, Sneezeweed.
La Santidad
This garden also had that singular quality of joy mixed with holiness that seems especially native to urban gardens and other places of redemption and transformation. Beauty from ashes. I wasn't unaware either how it felt like an honor to be allowed to work in that space. The bluebird that kept a constant eye on the upturned soil, the weeds, the trash and the other women working with me-I could sense the presence of God there, and I was thankful.
La Fe

About halfway through the morning an older Latina woman came in to tend her plot of geraniums and roses and began to talk to us, casually at first and then more earnestly as talk turned to matters of faith.

And then there followed one of the most hair-raising gardening conversations of my life. A fervent follower of Jesus, she recounted some of the stories that have shaped her 30 years living in the Flats. Her children, drug addicts and gangbangers, miraculously saved from being killed while she sat up at home, praying. The shotgun that mysteriously jerked out of firing aim of her daughter, bullet shooting harmlessly into the sky. The rival gang that appeared out of nowhere, diverting the attention of the Norteños who were about to attack her son, while she sat at home and prayed (specifically) for a diversion, sensing that her son was in danger. Her husband, who was kicked out of his house at age 11, on the streets and addicted to heroin by age 14. She called me sister. "Sister, I am blessed of the Lord," she told me, "All my children and my grandchildren come to church with me now. They are all saved."
El Pavo
In the end, she told me she was doing a fundraiser to raise money for her son's missions trip to Mongolia. ("Oh sister, those poor children in Mongolia!") She was making tamales. I ordered a dozen.
She told me about how God had provided all the tamale makings, including a whole turkey, which apparently tastes just like chicken in a tamale context. This excited me, not because I've wondered about chicken substitutes in tamales, but because I have a huge turkey in my freezer, purchased on sale after Thanksgiving, and taking up too much room. "Praise You, Jesus!" she shouted, and hugged me. My mother in law kicked in another turkey and since that workday I've been back a few times, delivering turkeys, picking up fragrant tamales, and talking to the many little kids that seem to hang out on her front stoop. I love that she is giving out of her own need, raising money for children across the world, in the midst of a population that lives at or below the poverty line.
La Futura
I've been invited to volunteer at the Wednesday gardening club. We'll see where this leads. It is a surprise and a blessing to see that if I do agree to volunteer there, it is in a place that already has the light of the life of God shining through it, through people like my new friend. As my buddy A.W. Tozer says, God is always previous. And now I know that a part of my town that I assumed was lost is not lost after all. It's been found all along.

File Under:New Things, Sub Category: Rosa Bird

2010-04-25T23:57:00.000-07:00

I started this blog over three years ago, at a time when I felt like I was just beginning to lift my head above the waters of life at home with a small child. Many things have happened since then, including the birth of another 'Little' and I have somehow managed to hang on to rosa through it all. I've made some cherished friends along the way, something I didn't expect, and have solidified what I have long felt: I love writing. Under the banner of 'faith, poetry & horticultural derring-do' I have covered everything from compost to pruning primers, seasonal reports from the garden, travelogues, recipes, 'life with g & h' anecdotes, poetry archives, book reviews, theology and the odd strange dream. And then there was the post about the door to door meat salesman.....
Whew!
I still inted to write about such varied topics, but I have decided to try an experiment. For the next year, I am going to leave Rosa-Sinensis to the garden prose genre. I need the discipline to write about one subject, purposefully. So I've started a new blog, one that will include all the fun bits that have been found on rosa. So, dum ta dum! Here it is: Rosa Bird.
Please stop over and say hello! We'll see how this goes.

Spring In the Garden: I Am A Gardening Sloth

2010-04-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

I don't know what spring is like where you live, but here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, spring has read all the proper manuals. We are having balmy afternoons followed by days of guttering rain. The lion & lamb that went in and out of March can be found alternately roaring and gamboling through April. And I love it. These days I can be found in the garden, between storms, hunched over; deep in concentration as I flick the lupine leaves & watch the mercurial drops of water roll around. Also the crucial task of orienting the clematis shoots towards the trellis. And an awful lot of time has been spent with the little brown hats popping off the fuchsia-colored azalea buds. I'm swamped!
Botany 101
I know this is nothing new, plants grow in the spring. But it still baffles me how well things are doing despite the minimum amount of time I've spent out in the garden. For example, there are a surprising number of fat green nubs poking out of the soil, new shoots from the Star Gazer lily bulbs that somehow survived the strict regimen of neglect that I've instituted since the birth of little H.O. nearly a year ago. Somewhere in the midst of the sleepless nights and the fogged-filled days of life with a newborn I decided to become a charter member of the League of Slothful Gardeners. This is not the Zen-like 'No Dig Gardening'. More like the "When I Get Around To It" Method.
Sloth Gardening: A Primer
I think this new style of gardening will really catch on this year. In fact, if anyone wants to achieve our present state of fecundity; here is what I suggest. Slink past the weeds, dead grass and sickly plants that languish in the garden throughout the fall & winter months. Avert your eyes from the moss and mushrooms coming up in the beds. In late February, use a head cold as a malingering excuse to avoid weeding. In mid-March remember that you are hosting an Easter brunch and you want the garden to look nice. Convince your 5 year old that pulling weeds will help tidy up the garden for the Easter bunny. Begin to frantically apply compost and manure to everything, all the while praying desperately & hopping about from foot to foot, muttering, "Come on, come on! Just one little new shoot for Mumsy!" If you have some bulbs that should have been planted when they were purchased, last summer, plant them now. If you have a mulch pile, don't (whatever you do) spread it on your beds. Wait a few months until blackberry vines are beginning to obscure it. Then dig in, noting all the blackberry roots that are just waiting to be broken off and spread over your garden beds. A fine way to asexually propagate blackberries. I wonder no one has every thought of it?
Cheap and Cheerful Color

Another astonishing bit in the garden right now is the variety of color out there, surpassing the usual festival of greens and browns that this time of year usually celebrates. It's mainly due to some hard-working perennials like the purple carpet bugle (ajuga reptans) that, well, carpets the ground beneath our ancient rosemary that has been limbed up to see the branch work beneath. Also we've got ourselves a serious case of dicentra formosa. Sounds like some sort of a canker sore, doesn't it? It is actually the Western Bleeding Heart, one of the sweetest little bits of California native flora to charm itself into the garden. By 'charmed' I mean that I transplanted it from an undisclosed location in the dead of night. That was about 6 years ago and now I can dig it up by the bucketful to give away. With upright stalks of light pink flowers amidst lacy green foliage, it adds a note of woodland delicacy to balance out the heavy rhododendrons-and it looks lovely in a vase!
Forget Me Nots

But the main flower that is bringing grace and glory to the garden these days has to be the 'umble forget me not, good ole Myosotis palustris (syn. scorpioides). I've got huge swathes of this spread throughout the garden and I must say it is one of the most cheap and cheerful solutions to the perennial problem of early spring color in the garden. Especially the blue tones which are always so hard to bring in. True, it does self-sow at a brisk pace, leaving little doubt from whence comes its name. I think because our soil is so sandy and loose we have little trouble with these seedlings, we just cultivate, scuffling through the top few inches of soil with a little hand hoe. Another job for a gullible 5 year old. Tell her the forget me not seedlings are greens to feed Peter Rabbit, and she can leave it in a pile by the garden gate. And I suppose you know that the forget me not was adopted by Henry IV as his symbol during his exile in 1398? Of course you did. But I bet you didn't know that the little burrs were hell to get out of his beard.
Confessions: Neglected Cold Frame
In the spirit of full disclosure I will admit to buying a few 6 packs of pansies, alysum and stock at a large chain store. I give in to this every year, and every year I think about how I'll sow pansies next year, and how I'm actually going to use the cold frame that sits, forlorn and weedy, on the edge of garden. I even go so far as to open the cold frame and look inside. A long minute passes as I idly scrape the gunge off the Visqueen that covers the lid. And then I close it, and don't give it another thought until next spring when I want some pansies for the garden.
So get out there, Sloth Gardeners! When, you know.. you get around to it. I know I've raised the bar, but it's good to have standards, don't you think?

Rosa's Photo Archives: Matt Hutchinson

2010-04-13T11:22:00.001-07:00

Miss April

2010-04-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

King Edmund the Just, Lent & My Daughter's Imagination

2010-03-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

We started reading the Chronicles of Narnia to G a few months ago-I've been looking forward to this stage in her life for quite a while. I vaguely remember reading the first couple of Narnia books as a child; they were definitely enjoyable, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I read the series completely.
Now, they are the epitome of the comfort read. I read them in between other books, as a sort of palate cleanser. Cheap paperback copies litter the house and car, and B & I dip into them so often it's hard to remember which one we're currently re-reading. We collect different tattered paperback editions of the series, own numerous 'lender copies' and were up in arms over the decision to re-issue the books in a new order. (I think I've actually been quoted in saying,"The Magician's Nephew first?.... what, are they on crack?" ) We've made a couple of special trips (okay, 3) to Headingtion, outside Oxford to visit Lewis' church and its etched glass Narnia window. Yes, I bought a mug. And a keychain. But I resisted the Aslan bobble-head, and the Lewis and Tolkien Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots.
Bedtime Stories
I love the night time routine around here: bath, book, bed. Sometimes honored grown-ups are allowed to read the book du jeur, but most often it's one of us, on our bed. A nice end to the day, even when I'm so tired it's hard not to nod off between paragraphs.
So with Narnia, each evening we'd read another chapter or two and we soon plowed right through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as well as Prince Caspian, the second of the series. She seemed to be tracking with the over-all story, although it was hard to tell. (She is only 5.) At any rate she ran around for days shouting, "Soup and celery!" ala Trumpkin, the red dwarf in Prince Caspian. For better or for worse, we've shown her the recent Narnia movie as well as the BBC Wonderworks productions of Prince Caspian, and Dawn Treader. The Wonderworks productions are just so laughably bad. "Mom!" she said, in an accusatory voice, "Trufflehunter the Badger looks like a person dressed up in a skunk suit." And you know, that's exactly what it was.
King Edmund the Just

So last Saturday G awoke from a dream in which she saved Edmund, the youngest but one of the Pevensie children, who are featured in the first 3 Narnia books. In her dream, Edmund is being pursued by monsters, and she (G) fights them off. Ever since then, Edmund has been her constant companion. They go everywhere together, occasionally joined by the rest of the Pevensie children. She takes him to school, they get their hair "prettied" together, she baked him a sand cake for his birthday. A couch cushion became a stand-in Edmund for a while, and she left him her little paper bag puppet for entertainment when we had to go out. "I told him where the invisible Band-Aids are, in case he needs one. They're easier to find than the real ones." In the car the other day she told us we needed to be quiet so that she could have some 'alone time' to think about Edmund. I've heard her sort of mutter under her breath, "Come on, Edmund, let's go!" on her way to wash up or play outside. And she keeps repeating the refrain, "I love Edmund because his family loves him. They forgive him, and I forgive him."
Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time
The interesting thing about all of this is that it is preceded by a conversation we had on the way to pick up B from work. Winding our way down La Madrona Drive, through the leafy twists and turns of Carbonera we began to talk about heaven. She also wanted to talk about Aslan and about Jesus and the parallels between the two. I ended up talking to her about how Aslan knew the Deeper Magic that said that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's place, the Table (used as a place of execution) would crack and Death itself would start working backwards. This was all very heady stuff, but she kept asking about it. So I told her that just like Edmund deserved to have consequences under the rules of Narnia, after betraying his family to the White Witch, we deserve our own consequences for our own acts of betrayal under the rules of our own world. And our consequence is being apart from God forever. We talk a lot about consequences in our house, so I thought it might translate. G usually gets a 'Time Away' in her room; I guess I was eluding to the idea that the consequence of sin was a sort of eternal, Cosmic Time Away. I talked about how Jesus stepped in, just like Aslan, and did this startling thing for us. That we're like Edmund, undeserving of this great gift of forgiveness that has been given to us through Jesus' actions that first Easter. And when we tell God we are sorry for the wrong things we've done and ask Jesus for forgiveness and help, He will come to our rescue. "I think we need to pray that prayer right now, Mommy," she told me. So we did.
The Roar of Love
As it is in most of my conversations with G about life, the universe and everything I feel like I am tripping along, just barely one step ahead of her. It is so good to have to break theology down into words that make sense to a 5 year old; to purposefully strip my language of cliche phrases and unnecessary words. And to be able to talk about these things over a long period of time, in little fits and starts, instead of one pedantic outburst in a Sunday School classroom. I am honored to be here with her through this time, and I pray that her little imagination and spirit are infused with joy as she reads on through this seminal series by C.S. Lewis. And that she will continue in the great love affair that sweeps up all mankind into the arms of God.

Oh, What to Do? Worra Worra Worra!

2010-03-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

So here I am all alone in a quiet (very quiet) house. I find myself so thankful for these few hours to myself. As the car filled with children pulled out of the driveway, my first thought was, "Nobody knows what I'm doing! Look, I'm going in this room, now this one-no one is following me!"
I live at the hub, the nerve center of a family, often needed for everything that involves feeding and sustaining 3 other humans. Understandably, there is not ever really a moment to do something that just involves me. Like writing, or running, or gardening. As I look this list over, I realize that it's a big step up from last summer with little newborn H.O., when my list mainly consisted of bathing, grooming & feeding myself.
Imagine my torn emotions with a few hours alone on a Saturday. The garden offers hours of transplanting, there's a redwood forest with inviting trails just waiting for me, and a blog of which I've been a seriously absentee author.
I think this is all normal stuff. I hesitate to even write it down, I mean, who doesn't feel busy? I don't want to bleat about my blessings, which are manifold.I am grateful, exceedingly grateful for this time in my life, for the blue forget me nots that crowd the edges of the garden and the sweet pea seeds that need sowing. For my family, B, G & H, so vibrant and cheerful this morning. My morning glories.

There's a hundred odd things I want to write about, if I can ever make it to the computer. They include:

-King Edmund the Just, G's Invisible Friend Du Jour
-My 3rd Grade Saint Patrick's Day, A Cautionary Tale
-Going back to Scotland!
Okay, hopefully now that this list is out there for the world to see, I'll feel the weight of the anticipation and actually write. Sorry everyone!

(The title is taken from an old family joke-a Casper the Friendly Ghost episode that involves pot-o'-gold-less leprechauns all pacing and worrying. "Worra worra worra!")

The British Lawnmower Museum

2010-03-12T23:23:00.000-08:00

The Brits. You gotta love 'em-what other nation encompasses at once so much pomp and so much silliness? Over the years our love affair with this island of paradoxes has been spurred on by such things as a propensity for silly town names, a yard-long list of contributors to the halls of great literature & the ability to churn out both great cheese & great chocolate. Not to mention the roaring trade in ancient monuments and chlorophyll.

I was listening to Gardeners Question Time tonight, washing dishes and spacing out. Everyone was where they should be. The Littles in bed, B doing homework; I was looking forward to nothing more than a night of tea & books followed by as much sleep as I could stuff into me before H's nightly game of Wake the Mommy began. (He's best in his division.)

Anyway, on GQT Eric Robson was interviewing Brian Radam, mower enthusiast & curator of the British Lawnmower Museum, in Southport, Lancashire. Check out the website for some serious trainspotting for gardeners. Favorite bits include the section for Lawnmowers of the Rich and Famous; especially an impassioned appeal to celebrities to donate their Qualcast Panthers and Green Zephyr Specials.
Princess Di's lawnmower is on view, apparently. So.

My favorite lawnmower is hands down the Greens 6" Multum in Parvo (1860). Not only does it have a snazzy Latin name ('with little, much'), it's cog-driven, made to mow between gravestones & cute to boot. I'll tell you another thing, I never thought I'd ever start a sentence with 'my favorite lawnmower is......'
When you Mow, Flymo!
I was gardening at the Seamill Centre on the south west coast of Scotland when I first came into contact with the Flymo. I have no idea why this hasn't taken off in the States. Its many admirable qualities certainly outweigh the glaring design deficiences (top of the list being, of course, that there is no way to carry them without bashing your ankles on the plastic apron. That they are eye-watering orange is also a strike against them.) But the hover mower is really a great invention. Seamill boasts almost 45 degree hills of grass and the only way to cut the grass (barring sheep) is to
tie a rope to the handle of a Flymo, and let it down over the edge of the hillside. The hovering blade keeps the mower moving, and all we had to do was stand with braced legs and guide it in large arcs over the grass. Each time it felt like a bad, bad idea, but at the end of the day the grass was cut and we all went home, digits intact. And really, in the world of lawn mowing, what more do you need?

Miss March

2010-03-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

Rosa's Skiving Archives: Dinosaur Comics

2010-02-22T19:14:00.000-08:00

Sorry to anyone who checked in earlier, only to be greeted by the disconcerting image of only HALF of Ryan North's incomparably silly Dinosaur Comics. Somehow I couldn't quite squeeze it all into the space allotted me by Blogger. I think I need some sort of....code...um...thingy. Something that I should have. But don't? Um. So.
(cough)
Whew! Sorry for that detour into technical matters. I hope I didn't lose anyone. Believe it or not, I didn't really understand much of it myself.
So I guess the best I can give you re: all things dinosaurs & comics, is a little link.
Dinosaur Comics
Here's a fact little understood: it's amazing just how many things are funny when said by a big green T-Rex with tiny arms.

Rosa's Lenten Poetry Archives::Frederick Ohler

2010-02-19T11:09:00.000-08:00

AWE-FULL
Great and holy God
awe and reverence
fear and trembling
do not come easily to us
for we are not
Old Testament Jews
or Moses
or mystics
or sensitive enough.
Forgive us
for slouching into Your presence
with little expectation
and less awe
than we would eagerly give a visiting dignitary.
We need
neither Jehovah nor a buddy-
neither "the Great and Powerful Oz" nor "the man upstairs."
Help us
to want what we need...
You
God
and may the altar of our hearts
tremble with delight
at Your visitation
amen.
-Frederick Ohler

Lenten Beginnings

2010-02-18T22:29:00.000-08:00

Pruning
I was up in another peach tree yesterday, nipping and tucking. A little here....and a little more over there. It was all a bit hurried, as these tree's owners called me into active pruning duty a few days ago and out here on the balmy coast of California, spring has all but sprung. The race was on between me and the buds, the little furry slips of white encasing each bud straining against the pink petals within. I know there is a spiritual corollary here, about new life coming from seeming deadness, but all I could think about was the lateness of the hour and the canker that was quietly lacing its way throughout the tree's canopy. I felt sick about just how much diseased wood I had to remove, and since I forgot my gloves, I was dribbling bleach all over my hands as I tried to disinfect my clippers between cuts. I also took a smack to the face by my telescoping loppers, and still have a long red scratch from a branch that wouldn't let go of my neck. By the end of the afternoon I looked like I was trying to prune the Whomping Willow. But why am I complaining? The sun was bright, the Swell Season were singing to me, and someone else was watching the Littles (thanks Mum!)

I'd like to give up griping and moaning for Lent. I'd like to give up Netflix, and late night nibbling. I'd like to take up repentance and contemplation in place of spaced-out vegging and Internet voyeurism. I need Jesus to come in and rummage around in me, grub up the fear and anxiety, root out doubt and impatience. If there was some sort of spiritual analogy with double digging, I'd like that too. I want the oil of gladness instead of a heart full of dry ashes. I want Lenten beginnings.

This Birthday Brought To You By The Number 5.......

2010-01-30T22:44:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday To Our Own Miss G!

2010-01-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

We walk without fear, full of hope and courage and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good, which He is always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in.
-George MacDonald (1824-1905)

2010-01-24T22:47:00.000-08:00

Rosa's Pruning Primer: The Mighty Peach Tree

2010-01-17T23:59:00.000-08:00

I've been down in Steinbecktown, pruning fruit trees. I missed the last winter's pruning of them (pregnancy!) and consequently, someone else came in and did some desultory hacking and slicing. The trees still bore pretty well, but I can see that whoever did this to dear old Peachy, Professor Plum, Granny and the rest did not have one tiny clue how to prune. (And yes, I have named the trees. But that is just between us.)

I have a few tiny clues, and a book. (How to Prune Fruit Trees by R. Sanford Martin), to which I referred constantly as I worked. It always takes me a little while to get back into the swing of a pruning session, because it is something I do only once a year, and the methods vary from plant to plant. But it is one of my favorite times of the year, when I can see into the tree's canopy, getting down to the clean lines of branch & trunk, finding the slight swelling of wood that denotes the change from last season's wood to this. The delicate fingering of buds, and the questions-is this a leaf bud? A fruit spur? A fruit bud? Did this bear fruit this year?Should I thin this branch out-or this one?
And amidst all the silent ruminations are the tea breaks, when I find myself rubbing my hands together, smacking my lips and saying "Ooh, lovely!" I always feel like I should be wearing a tweed skirt & wellies.
Open-Ended
My jobs these days are open-ended, raising children as a primary occupation has few closures involved. Meals to make, things to take out and put away. Daily triumphs and losses, but few things that are ever finished. My successes these days are largely measured by the long term growth and development of my two little start-up enterprises. The Littles, Inc. I have learned to deal with the fact that I rarely have the feeling of immediate accomplishment that comes at the end of a project, or a goal finally met.
And that's usually okay, I am glad to be here with my two lovelies. That's why I look at a pruning job with such glee, and really relish the ability to stand back at the end and say, "Done!" I've decided to write down some pruning tips, for anyone out there with a view toward pruning fruit trees, and for myself, so I can look this post up next winter when I again take up Felcos and pruning saw.

The Peach
This tree is over 20 years old and subject to peach leaf curl. It is also the originator of some of the finest peach jam this side of the San Andreas fault line.
Some things to remember when pruning peaches: few trees benefit from heavy pruning as does the peach. The peach bears its fruit differently than any other type of fruit tree-the fruit appears on the twigs and branches that grew during the past summer, much like hydrangea macrophylla. And although there will be blossoms all along the length of these twigs, only the center third must be allowed to set fruit. Therefore in the midst of shaping the tree, all these twigs need to be pruned back to one-third of their length.
Here's a few over-all principles to keep in mind:
Balance
When pruning, you are trying to get the perfect balance between a) beautifully positioned branches that allow sunlight and freely circulating air throughout the tree or shrub, b) leaf producing wood (that's where all the plant's energy will come from) and c) flower/fruit producing wood, where, duh, all the flowers/fruit will come from.

The Three D's

When you first approach a plant to prune it, you must have in mind the Three D's, and prune accordingly.
That's Dead, Diseased and Disoriented. The first two are self-explanatory, the last refers to branches or stems that are crossing or rubbing against each other or growing up through the center of the plant. All these should be pruned cleanly out, not leaving a stub. Also, always prune to an outward facing bud. Trust me on this.
The important thing when pruning is to make your cuts right above a node, and not right in the middle of stem or branch, leaving sticky-up bits. Plants regrow from the nodes, this is where the undifferentiated cells are in a plant (stem cells) & where new growth will occur. Make your cuts at an angle, sloping away from the node beneath the cut, so that rainwater does not pool in it.

Getting back to Peachy
In the end, the peach should be funnel-shaped, with the outer branches forming the sloping sides and the center top left open for complete penetration of sunlight. This open center will permit better ripening of the fruit-R.Sanford Martin. I decided to take Mr. Martin's advice, and to prune out the giant center trunk and branch structure of the tree. It had minimal new growth on it, and lower down in the tree was a bad split that had healed over but had left the integrity of the tree badly compromised. Peach wood is brittle and known to drop branches heavy with fruit. Filled with trepidation and a faint whisper of childish glee at getting to use a big sharp tool, I started in with the pruning saw. When cutting branches, be careful to leave the branch collar intact. The branch collar is the distinctive bulge where the branch comes into the trunk, it is actually the interlocking of cells from branch to trunk and will seal off the wound left from pruning.
After I took care of the Three D's, I noticed that there were several vigorous new branches that were growing straight up in the air. I decided to train these into position to take the place of old branches that had been thinned out. One of the keys to successfully training and pruning fruit trees is the knowledge of the hormonal balance in the fruit tree's branches. It is a wondrous and complex subject and I will only scratch the surface here. (Anyone is welcome to jump in here and add to this.)
King of the Mountain

The branches of a tree are fighting for apical dominance, which is basically who is going to be the tallest branch on the tree. This is known as the central leader. When the tree is young a central leader is chosen and the rest are pruned out. If it becomes damaged or old, you might elect another branch to take its place. These vigorous upright branches will generally not form fruit- when a branch is upright the hormonal balance is towards leaf and wood production. If a branch is concerned with taking over apical dominance, it will not want to be bothered with something as calorically taxing as flowers and fruit. These vigorous uprights will also shade out fruit-bearing wood.
Fruit-Bearing Wood

In order to change one of these uprights into a respectable member of the fruiting branch scaffold, the branch needs to be bent down to a 45 degree angle. This can be accomplished with cotton twine and a stake if the branch is big, or something like weights hanging off the branch. If the branches are supple enough, wooden spreaders are often used. Ole Peachy got the twine and a stake treatment. Once the branch is at 45 degrees, the hormonal balance shifts again into fruiting wood, add to that adequate sunlight and air circulation and you are well on your way to some amazing peach jam.

Be careful not to let the branch bend down too far, the result is a weak crotch angle and subsequent breakage under a heavy fruit load.
Peach Leaf Curl

I mentioned earlier that this tree suffers yearly from peach leaf curl. It seems like I've never been able to get the timing right on when to spray, and with what. Since I was trained using the organic method, and my mother-in-law's garden shed holds a surprising amount of things that can kill you before teatime, I'm going to try lime sulfur, which I've heard should do the job. The trick is to correctly time the spraying; January before the buds swell is what I am hearing. When I head back down there next week I'll give it a good douse.
Kudos To Two Local Plantsmen
Orin Martin, up at the UCSC Farm and Garden is a master at fruit tree production, and really knows his stuff. He instilled some really great principles of fruit tree training and pruning in me. Even though I apprenticed at the Farm in 2002, I've come up since then for many of his workshops that are open to the local community. It's just so fun to be around him as he darts from tree to tree, snipping here, and whacking there. And I always learn something new. What the heck, here's a link to some info on the Friends of the Farm and Garden, so you can go and learn from the best. And I can't mention pruning without thinking about the incomparable Richard Merrill, who taught me the basics in my Horticulture 1A and 1B classes at our local junior college. Rich Merrill co-wrote a combination gardening/cookbook with Joe Ortiz, purveyor of awesome yumminess at Gayle's Bakery, a local institution. I wish more people knew about this book, The Gardener's Table, because it is great, and packed with many many veg. growing tips and recipes. Cabrillo's Horticulture Program lost a great director when he retired.
So that's it from me. I only wish I had the presence of mind to take pics whilst I pruned. Instead you must make do with these cobbled together diagrams. Heck, I wish I had the presence of mind to not drop my camera and break it a month ago! Ah well.

2010-01-17T13:10:00.000-08:00

It just started raining very very hard. And the tea kettle is about to sing. I have a cold, and a new book (John Elder Robison's Look Me in the Eye). B took the Littles to church and consequently the loudest things I can hear are the fan from the laptop, and the rain in the downspout outside.
A friend just stopped by and gave me a breakfast burrito. I found my sister's photostream on flickr. I am thankful for these small things today. I'm even a little bit thankful for the cold, which comes to me after many months of dodging the germs of the little people that swarm around me. We'll see how I feel about it in a few days, but right now the sniff sniffing seems to blend in well with the sip sipping of tea and the drip dripping of rain. (And the nap napping....you get the idea.)

January in the Garden::Part One

2010-01-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

Let me start off by saying how saddened I was by the news of John Cushnie's death. He was hands-down my favorite presenter on BBC's Gardener's Question Time; his trademark ascerbic humor and wit often had me guffawing out loud, thousands of miles away in California as I washed up from dinner or lay on the couch with some tea and knitting. Oh how I love to tune in to the GQT podcasts, with genuine little old British gardening ladies & gents, worrying over their wayward cotoneasters and leeks, being set right by the panel on matters involving everything you can imagine (and more) in the world of horticulture.
He will be much missed.

Incidental Epiphany and the Duckies & Kitties of Christmastide

2010-01-06T22:34:00.000-08:00

Lo, I Am Come To Make Bath Time So Much Fun
Haphazard celebrating of Epiphany tonight included, but was not limited to: rainbow-sprinkle Three Kings' Cake in a stunning mouth-staining blue, a retelling of the biblical narrative which was acted out by three red headed girl cubs in various states of costume, one of the Wise Men was on roller skates, and the rest arguing over who gets to wear the Princess dress. Also adding to the festivities, besides a glorious pumpkin risotto and glasses of honest to goodness bubbly (thank you, Bridgens!)) was roasted cabbage, the recipe for which I will record here, because it was definitely the sleeper hit of the evening
Roasted Cabbage Wedges

2 heads of medium size cabbage, cut into wedges, try to keep core intact
olive oil
salt & pepper
1 lemon, cut into wedges

preheat oven to 450.
Put cabbage on a rimmed baking sheet and brush both sides with oil. Season with salt and pepper. Roast, flipping halfway through, until edges are brown and crisp, 25 to 30 minutes. Squeeze lemon over cabbage.

"Martha, Martha, Martha!"(ala Jan Brady)
I didn't know cabbage could make me drool in anticipation. And this recipe actually came from a Martha Stewart mag-I know, I was surprised too. I guess I'm going to have to step down from calling her Mothra.......
Epiphany
I love little Christmas, as this holiday is affectionately known, with all of its resonating themes, about Christ's revelation to the Gentile world through the visit of the Magi, and their inexorable pursuit of the new King. The way in which they finished their journey worshipping the Christ child, which has always felt so utterly foreign and ancient, the strange symbolism of the gifts they brought, and the over-arching mystery of the star that they saw in the east, and somehow associated with the Messiah. Matthew is too brief in his depiction of this part of the Nativity story, I have so many questions.
The Three Magi Kitties Look Mighty Irritated...

And Is That The Little Drummer Cat?
Here is a link to the silly Going Jesus website, which has a fabulous assortment of truly horrible nativity sets, the above sampling of which is quite tame in comparison......
And there! That finishes off the Christmas blog posts! Not that there were many, but I am moving on now. And the tree comes down tomorrow! Beach bonfire this weekend, anyone?

three dreams

2009-12-29T00:07:00.000-08:00

Dream No. 1:
My sister has just started dating Barak Obama, who, in Dreamland, is younger and unmarried. I get to meet him, and he is nervous about meeting the family. I warn him about my dad, and he asks for tips on how to make a good impression. I shrug and then let Obama buy the first round of drinks, and feel like a sponge. "Well, he is the leader of the free world," I say, to console myself.
Dream No. 2:
I am walking with my sister in law, K, down a steep San Francisco street towards an outdoor event. There are alot of people milling about. Suddenly, K darts into an open doorway. Barak Obama sits in the darkness with his staff and advisors, shaking hands and making statements. K calmly introduces herself and I tumble in on her heels, feeling foolish and tongue-tied. Suddenly, over a loudspeaker, we hear that the L.A. marathon is about to begin (even though we are definitely in San Francisco). I leave with K and am horrified to discover that she has entered the marathon, and I must as well.
Dream No. 3: I am nursing H. It is bedtime but because of some floods we have been made homeless. We are with a group of other people, (maybe at a shelter). There are no beds so we have to all sleep together in a clump, sitting upright in chairs. We try to make ourselves as comfortable as possible, sitting in a circle and putting our feet up on each other's laps. Barak Obama and Joe Biden appear, wearing yamulkes and suits without the jackets, only the shirtsleeves and vests. They begin to fuss around us, tucking blankets around our legs. I am sycophantically eager, making stupid jokes about how the leaders of the free world are tucking us in bed; guffawing loudly at my own wit. Obama turns to me. "Do you still have my book by your bed? Get it out, and I'll read you all a bedtime chapter called, The American Family." I scurry to grab my copy of The Audacity of Hope and give it to him, saying, "You know, I've never cared very much about politics, but hoo wee that was a great book!"
Analysis, anyone?

Sorry, Santa!::A Brief Addendum

2009-12-27T16:03:00.000-08:00

Man, I really sounded like a grumpy old church lady in that last post, didn't I? Sorry, mainline denomination! Maybe the reverent singing of Frosty the Snowman was a blessing to someone, sort of a low church liturgy? Let's hope so. I'm trying to be up with people, even (and especially) the people that irritate me. Because I sure hope someone is doing the same for me.

In Which I Grit My Teeth at a 'Seeker-Friendly'- Christmas Eve Service

2009-12-26T22:39:00.000-08:00

We went to B's parent's church on Christmas Eve. A big, main-line denomination. I didn't have huge expectations; I assumed it would be a standard service- 'Silent Night', a show-boaty rendering of 'O, Holy
Night', maybe a bell choir.We were going out of deference to B's family; as I said, not a lot of expectations. I figured an hour of lite carols and candles, and then we'd be home.
Well, it took me quite a while to climb out of my irritation. I'm not sure why but the church felt the need to start off the night with 4 or 5 of the most insipid secular Christmas songs ever to spew out of a Muzak mall speaker. 'Let it Snow!', 'Rudolph', 'White Christmas',and my personal enemy of Christmas carols, 'Silver Bells', sung slowly and reverently. ("As the shoppers....... rush home with........ their treasures!') Probably the apex of the horrible sing-along was when we were all bidden to follow along with the singers on 'Frosty the Snowman'-"Thumpety thump thump! Thumpety thump thump! Look at Frosty go!" Eventually, they thought they could spring the subject of Jesus on us, now that we had sung a sufficient number of 'fun' songs. I think this was a 'seeker-friendly' thing, like we'll get them nice and comfy with our holly jolly Christmas and then whammo! Hit them with Jesus!
I kept thinking, Hello! We're in the church! Expecting to talk about Jesus! It's Christmas Eve, for goodness sake! It took me a while to calm down. Not only do we not have to hide the fact that we're celebrating the birth of Jesus, we have an awful lot of history and culture down through the ages from which to draw! Like this:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.

At His feet the six wingèd seraph,
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry:
Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Lord Most High!

I love the imagery of Christ descending to earth from the realms of endless day, blessing in His hand.
'Let All Mortal Flesh' was originally derived from the 'Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn', taken from the Litany of James which was written sometime in the 4th century. It is quite old and still packs a lyrical punch.
Now, I'm not surprised this church didn't include 'Let All Mortal Flesh' in their choral line-up, most churches don't. But I am saying that there is a deep and varied history of hymnody within the Christian church, 2,000 years of music, passed down through the ages. Would it be so hard to draw from some of these, and leave 'Winter Wonderland' and 'Frosty the Snowman' to the mall carolers? I'm just saying.

(Thumpety thump thump!
Thumpety thump thump!
Look at Jesus go!)

But sometimes you just gotta get silly:

Rosa's Video Archives::The Saw Lady, Silent Night, & a NYC Subway Station

2009-12-22T12:12:00.000-08:00

I can't tell if I really like this, or really don't. It's either ethereal & quirky or whiney & cringey.

See what I mean?

In the spirit of the season, I'll go with the former. I mean, who am I to sniff at the Saw Lady? All I can get from a saw blade is a rhythmic to-ing and fro-ing. It's true that this back and forth manner removes dead branches, increases air circulation, and brings sunlight into the center of a fruit tree. But it's hard to do that in a crowded subway station.
We don't get too much in the way of musical saw busking in Santa Cruz, at least not anymore-now that Tom Scribner, local Wobblie, has died. And B fondly recalls the chapel hour at his lil Christian elementary School-Mr. Copehanger playing 'Amazing Grace' on the saw. But for the most part our days are pretty musical saw-free. Which might not be a bad thing? I still can't decide.

(And many thanks to mike kobal for the Youtube link, and musicmuse_ca for the Tom Scribner pic. Beautiful!)

Christmas Shopping, Wings of Desire and the Brotherhood of Man

2009-12-19T22:56:00.000-08:00

I was downtown this afternoon, having shopped, coffeed and taken my library books for a walk. I was on my way back to my car, when at the corner of Pacific & Locust I heard the strains of street musician fare, pretty typical stuff, sort of pseudo-theremin thrown in with someone's Chinese water torture bongos. I had been musing on the idea of prayer, about how it often felt like a one-sided conversation, and while it was good to tell things to God, I wanted to talk to someone who would talk back to me. I used to pray and get some sense of the Divine discourse; lately it's been more like Anne Lammott's Outbox Prayer. She had a request, and would write it on a slip and put it in her 'outbox'.
As the music came more sharply into focus, I found myself thinking: what if it were true that each of these people walking by were loved, dear, and very important? I don't quite know how I got there, mentally. One minute it was plaintive inner bleating about unanswered prayer and the next I was hyper- aware of the people walking past. I peered at them from behind my scarf; the couple in front of the movie theatre, the shambly guy in front of the bagel place. The hipster girls by Urban Outfitters. The homeless guy curled up on the bench in front of the library; his cat gnawing on a chicken bone. I had wandered into Wings of Desire-I wanted to hug people and murmur encouragingly to them in German. And if all these people are so important and beloved, I must be too; we are all related, all children of the Father. I remembered that great Chesterton quote about the 'streets full of splendid strangers.' Click on the link for the full quote and an old post from the archives.
I don't often walk down the street thinking things like this, especially not in the midst of a crowded shopping afternoon, with irritating bongo drums that just. won't. stop. But there I was. I don't know if it was a Divine poke or just a really good cup of Peet's, but I don't need to know. I've lately come to the idea that I needn't question the way truth and grace come to me.
Here's the Innocence Mission to finish things up:

Rosa's Poetry Archives:Gerard Manley Hopkins-Advent Reading Week 3

2009-12-15T22:45:00.000-08:00

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights from the black West went
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast, and ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Why didn't anyone tell me about Gerard Manley Hopkins? I know I've heard his name before but 'God's Grandeur' is the first of his poems that I've stumbled across. This poem leapt off the page from an Advent devotional reader (from Holy Bible: Mosaic,) and carried me through the day. I found myself repeating, "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" to myself as I planted daffodil bulbs and 'the Holy Ghost broods with warm breast, and ah! bright wings' as I cared for kith and kin.

I was reminded somehow of Robert Southwell, although that could also have to do with the fact that they were both Jesuit priests. Last Advent I dusted off a Southwell poem from the Poetry Archives, and here it is. It's just about my favorite Nativity poem. Except Chesterton's. And Lucy Shaw's. Oh, and Lewis'. Maybe a series of Advent poetry posts is in order? I'll add that to the pile of good intentions.
And thank you Fr.William Hart McNichols, for the iconic portrait of Hopkins. Lovely.

2009-12-10T00:46:00.000-08:00

Sorry it's been so silent around here. Actually some silence would be nice-it feels like the circus is in town to stay. I don't even know how to catalogue it all, and if I were any less bleary-eyed I could be more eloquent in the descriptions of my days. Suffice to say, I am knee-high in children. I suppose I could say chest-deep, with a nursing infant.
The Littles

Both G & H are sick, of the gummy, runny cough-cough variety. Red droopy eyes and short little tempers. It's like living with tiny old people, hacking and kavetching about their ailments. "Oy vey! Mommy! ((cough cough)) I want to watch 'Dora Saves the Mermaids', if I should live so long!"

Today's Theological Interchange:
G: "Do you know how high Jesus could throw a sandwich?"
Me, slightly distracted: "Ummm...what was that? Uh, no. How high could Jesus throw a sandwich?"
G, jubilant, arms aloft: "All the way to heaven!"

Assessment: Tired, But Hopeful

I've decided that this time in my life I get to be the person to whom my family comes home; there's something nice about that. It's not a role that I've ever sought out-I've never aspired to being a domestic-y sort of person, except for the fact that I like to garden, cook, read and stay close to home. I suppose it's funny to think that when I told God I would do what He wanted me to do, and go where I was needed, I would be sent here, to this home-life, filled with the joys and struggles of child-rearing, the most difficult job I've ever undertaken. I've decided to start saying that I work from home, that I'm working on a little start-up project. G & H- my little start-ups.
School House Rock

Growing up in a single parent family, my mom was usually the last one in the door; my brother and I home from school for several hours, already having squandered untold millions of brain cells on after-school TV. My life now is a complete reversal from how I was raised, and I find myself floundering around quite a bit. It's weird to still be getting the hang of things that should be simple, like cooking, cleaning & communicating. But when you begin to add the different overlays of our life, the waters are a little harder to navigate. I welcome these challenges-I feel more tired these days, as well as a bit more hopeful.
If you could pray for me, I'd be grateful.

Rosa's Reading List::Blogs & A Book

2009-11-24T14:28:00.000-08:00

Blogs......

Esther In the Garden
It all started here with the story of Esther Montgomery, who married a Martian. She is trying hard to cope with an extraterrestrial family; and this comes out as she writes about her garden. The twists and turns are delightful, and pacing is brilliant. It has been 'mothballed' but you can read the blog in its entirety.
This blog spawned several offshoots, so to speak. Esther's neighbor,
Lucy picks up blog-writing and has two blogs:

Loose and Leafy
Pictures Just Pictures

Esther's Boring Garden Blog. This is Esther as her most brilliant, in my opinion, and her use of parenthesis is unparalleled.Click here to read a recent post about the correct pronunciation of the word 'hosta.' ("Hos-TA!")

Hugh and Camelia- this is a book on its own, written in blog form, chapter by chapter.
All of these reads go down better with a cup of something hot. For me it was usually Irish Breakfast tea, or Red Rose (can't get enough of all those ceramic figurines).
......And a book
I just finished Michael Chabon's 'Summerland'. It was entertaining, if a bit bewildering. A sort of Field of Dreams meets Native American/Norse mythology Chronicles of Narnia? It got a bit crowded in there, but it was well-written. And extra points for a plot contrivance based on pleaching, a woefully under-used horticultural practice. More on pleaching later, we just got back from a visit with a few of my fave examples.

More About Trade As One

2009-11-19T23:53:00.000-08:00

I've just been reading Trade As One's blog and enjoying immensely Nathan George's 3 part series on consumerism. One of the things I love about Trade As One is that it recognizes the crisis of consumerism and its harmful affects on the soul of the consumer; I'm talking about the sort of spiritual malaise that enslaves us when we are loaded down by debt and trapped in the cycle of work/spend/work/spend ad infinitum. Nathan says that the way to get out of this cycle is to cultivate gratitude and generosity in our lives.

'Through gratitude and generosity we step outside of our little world where we are the center of attention. In doing so, we step out of the firing line for all the messaging, advertising, fear-inducing hype-speak aimed at us. As the din from all that noise diminishes we start to hear all sorts of other things we have been missing all this time – like our names, our purpose, and the incomparable joys of living in that purpose.' -Nathan George, Founder, Trade As One

Crunchier than Thou
I realize that I have been too quick to take Fair Trade for granted. Living in Santa Cruz, I see it used so often as one more PC label, one more way to judge whether or not you are of the elect-"Is it organic? Free range? Biodynamic? Sustainably grown? Fair Trade?" One more phylactery on the PC Pharisee's proud forehead. ("I thank you, Lord, that I am not like that tax collector. He is so not green-and did you see that French roast he just bought? Totally not Fair Trade!")
27 Million
It wasn't until I started reading a book at a friend's house, Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade and How We Can Fight It, by David Batstone, that I began to sit up and take notice. The issue of human trafficking has never left us, and the fact that there are an estimated 27 million people who, right now, are slaves, is hair-raising, and left me wanting desperately to do something. This friend of mine told me she gets together with a few women every month or so to pray for these 27 million, each known and loved by God. When she told me this, it was like a light went on inside my heart and I realized that this was something that I could do, something that was within my grasp.
Viewing the Trade As One boutique last Sunday through the lens of the trafficking issue filled me with gratitude and generosity. Looking at the jewelry, thinking-"these bracelets were made by a woman that was rescued from the sex trade in Cambodia! Awesome!" I just kept walking around with the same silly grin on my face, self-consciously rubbing my arms-I think I had chicken skin all day. I wanted to buy it all. I didn't! But the few things we did buy we will treasure. It's not the first time I've been around this sort of thing, and the idea of supporting micro-businesses from the Third World is not new. But somehow it is hitting me differently.
"Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.-Micah 6:8"

I'm still ruminating on all this, and trying to assimilate it into my life. Most days, I'm either sitting in a nursing stupor, or dashing about, generally tired & absent-minded; forgetting important things like meetings, people's names and the odd noun, but inwardly my ear is cocked to the heavens, listening.
Subvert The Dominant Paradigm:
Have An Opinion, And Don't Put It On Your Car!
If you want a bit of a laugh, read the Santa Cruz Sentinel's two articles on the Trade As One boutique at our church, Vintage Faith, last Sunday. The articles themselves aren't especially chuckle-worthy, but the myriad of comments afterwords certainly are. We Santa Cruzans just can't help ourselves when it comes to opinions! It's something in the water. But I won't say what, or I'll get alot of mistaken angry comments about the controversial flouride in the water supply debate.

But please, have a poke around the Trade As One website, and hear a few of the stories from the producers of their products. They are marvelous-like the story of Divine Chocolate from Ghana, the world's first chocolate company owned by farmers, and the way they honor and support the equality of women in their company. Good stuff. I can't wait to open our Advent Calendar with their chocolate! If you missed the boutique, they will be at the Rio Theatre (here in Santa Cruz) December 12 & 13.

Rosa's Poetry Snippet Archives::B

2009-11-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

He has not left you orphaned

or alone

since He knit you together

soul and bone

through space and time

He winds His silver thread

for you to feel along

with heart and head

Allow no clamor to undo you

or hasty hoary hand to misconstrue you

Remember the first kisses of your

wakening day

and rush to meet your Maker

along the way.

-B

This sweet little snippet was found floating around on our office desk, written several years ago on the back of an index card; I preserve it here with love. It is possibly written with our little G in mind, I'll have to confirm it with the poet.

The picture, by the incomparable illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith, is from the 1920 edition of 'Princess and the Goblin' by George MacDonald. Note the thin sliver of thread that the princess Irene is holding; one of the finest metaphors of faith that I have found. The thread stretches from her ring to her great great grandmother, who sits at the top of Irene's rambling castle home; Irene has to follow the thread where ever it leads her, no matter how roundabout, in order to find her way out of the goblin's cave, and then-but wait, you really should read it yourself. And then you can read 'The Princess and Curdie', and come over for tea and a wee blether. If you need a refresher course on George MacDonald, here is a post from yesteryear to get you started.

Did You Mean Obtuse?

As I did a Google search for this image, I misspelled 'goblin' and was asked, "Did you mean princess and the globulin?"

Trade As One

2009-11-01T04:16:00.000-08:00

Vintage Faith Church of Santa Cruz, CA will be partnering with Trade As One to host a Fair Trade boutique November 15, 2009. It'll be in the Fireside Room- click on the church link for directions. I for one will enjoy this detour from the normal frenzy of purchasing that Christmas can become. I'm excited to buy gifts that will bring justice to those who need it. So come on out! Tell them rosa sent you.

Truth Amidst Schlock

2009-10-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Because of the Lord's great love
we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.

The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
Lamentations 3:22-26

1-800-CHRISTIAN
Who knows how these things happen, but somehow a catalog appeared on my coffee table bearing the title 'Christian Gifts: to Encourage, Comfort and Inspire'. You know the sort: filled with things like Guitar Praise: Solid Rock Edition, inspirational banners, key chains, wind chimes, mouse pads, and bible cosies. Also something called God's Girlz ('tired of toys with a worldly appearance? You'll welcome these dolls with a perfect fit of faith and fashion!'). I think my favorite is the description of the Gospel Masters CD set; Elvis Presley singing the hits of the tent revival era: 'Worship the King of heaven with the king of rock 'n' roll!' Normally I try to stay away from these sorts of Christian junk venues, it's bad for my soul, and I don't need any more fodder for bitterness and cynicism.
What Would Jesus Buy?
Years ago I read in Voice Of The Martyrs magazine about the Christian pastor in China who
was imprisoned for his faith and put into a labor camp-where he was forced to make Christmas tree lights, sold to the West. The very idea makes my head want to explode, and is why I found the whole WWJD? bracelets (made in China) particularly repugnant. As a culture we don't need more schlock, and we need even less the schlock that is based around the teachings of the homeless One who exhorts us to store up treasures in heaven, rather than on earth, for 'where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." And we give tacit approval to the social injustice of slave labor when we support an industry that is built on the backs of the oppressed. I should be the first to point out that I struggle with living this out: I don't check the labels of everything I buy, or boycott China and other nations with dodgy human rights records. But I'm trying.
Balaam's Ass
But this morning I found myself flipping through the Jesus junk catalog, just prior to chucking it out. I veered past the faux Gucci handbag-style Bible cosies (horrors!) & averted my gaze from the sick-making Precious Moments section. ("Lord, I've Sentimentalized the Gospel for Money!")
My eye was caught by a Scripture reference that I didn't recognize (I think it was on a Scripture-based travel coffee mug.) I looked it up,and found the above scripture from Lamentations. It was soothing, sweet & beautiful, and suddenly I had been handed the balm that I didn't know I needed. I sat still for a few moments, my anger and indignation momentarily placed on my emotional back-burner. God is so good, and always gets in there with just what I need to hear.

"For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." Hebrews 4:12

It also made me laugh, and remember that God is not above speaking to me through the pages of Christian schlock. And neither should I be. Who am I to snigger at the way truth comes to me? It's like finding an oasis in the desert and then turning up my nose at the glass of water that I'm handed because it isn't Waterford crystal.
(But I still threw the catalog in the bin.)

Hand Drawn Map Association : This is map #180

2009-10-13T17:59:00.001-07:00

Hand Drawn Map Association : This is map #180

Shared via AddThis
I am so intrigued by the Handmade Map Association and this particular map. I've always loved a good map, and have been known to use old atlas pages for everything from gift wrap to wallpaper. Go get lost in their collection of hand drawn maps, and tell them rosa sent you.

Rosa's Poetry Archives: A.A. Milne

2009-09-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

Bad Sir Brian Botany

by A.A. Milne

Sir Brian had a battleaxe with great big knobs on.

He went among the villagers and blipped them on the head.

On Wednesday and on Saturday,

Especially on the latter day,

He called on all the cottages and this is what he said:

"I am Sir Brian!" (Ting-ling!)

"I am Sir Brian!" (Rat-tat!)

"I am Sir Brian,

"As bold as a lion!

"Take that, and that, and that!"

Sir Brian had a pair of boots with great big spurs on;.

A fighting pair of which he was particularly fond.

On Tuesday and on Friday,

Just to make the street look tidy,

He'd collect the passing villagers and kick them in the pond.

"I am Sir Brian!" (Sper-lash!)

"I am Sir Brian!" (Sper-losh!)

"I am Sir Brian,

"As bold as a Lion!

"Is anyone else for a wash?"

Sir Brian woke one morning and he couldn't find his battleaxe.

He walked into the village in his second pair of boots.

He had gone a hundred paces

When the street was full of faces

And the villagers were round him with ironical salutes.

"You are Sir Brian? My, my.

"You are Sir Brian? Dear, dear.

"You are Sir Brian

"As bold as a lion?

"Delighted to meet you here!"

Sir Brian went a journey and he found a lot of duckweed.

They pulled him out and dried him and they blipped him on the head.

They took him by the breeches

And they hurled him into ditches

And they pushed him under waterfalls and this is what they said:

"You are Sir Brian -- don't laugh!

"You are Sir Brian -- don't cry!

"You are Sir Brian

"As bold as a lion --

"Sir Brian the Lion, goodbye!"

Sir Brian struggled home again and chopped up his battleaxe.

Sir Brian took his fighting boots and threw them in the fire.

He is quite a different person

Now he hasn't got his spurs on,

And he goes about the village as B. Botany, Esquire.

"I am Sir Brian? Oh, no!

"I am Sir Brian? Who's he?

"I haven't any title, I'm Botany;

"Plain Mr. Botany (B.)"

for the Elevens

The Sun Has Got His Hat On

2009-09-15T00:29:00.000-07:00

It's rare that I get to lift my head above the waters of hearth and home these days. In the past few weeks I've felt especially tethered to the house by the heat and Mother Hubbard-style pocketbook.
It's that time of year around here, that last gasp of a drought-filled and forest fire-riddled summer (tongue twister du jour). Which is all fine for the dry-farmed tomatoes, which just get juicier and sweeter the hotter and drier it gets. For me, not so much. My skin is librarian pale & I look like I belong on some misty moor somewhere, drinking tea out of a thermos and picking dead bracken out of my knee socks. Here in the SC mountains, when two weeks ago it reached 104 on my porch and we haven't had rain since the end of May, I can be found cowering indoors and administering lime Popsicles to sweating children. I can't even go out into the garden, it's too dispiriting. The tall stalks of my white Japanese anemones have a hangdog expression, and the Dutchman's Breeches (dicentra formosa) has gone all dry and crispy, which in garden parlance means dead. Most everything is still technically alive, thanks to drip hose irrigation, which is exempt from our County's water rationing, but since I can only overhead water before 10AM and after 6PM on Tuesdays and Saturdays the plants are looking fusty and cobwebby and the whole garden wants its face washed. I refuse to give in to the Red and White Sparkly Rocks School of drought-tolerant suburban landscaping, but if this continues, a foray into the world of California native bunch grasses might not be so far away. And what a desperate day that will be, I've never been able to get excited about bunch grasses.
Saved!
But then the other night-most unexpectedly-the foggy marine layer's condensation turned into heavy mist, which turned into drip drip drop and soon it was barreling down, for the first time since the end of May. It was glorious.
Yesterday morning we woke up early and trundled G off for her first day of preschool, which we reached after a five minute walk through our sylvan burgh. The rain had softened the edges of everything, like my life suddenly filmed with a gauze filter. I felt on top of things, for the first time in a long time, walking with the Littles, G and H.
My heart flipped over to see little G, so eager and fearless in her ladybug raincoat and yellow boots. She was a bundle of four year-old inconsistencies, skipping valiantly ahead and then doubling back to clutch my hand, nervously: "Hold my hand, Mommy! A car is coming. Do they see us?" We were even early to school. Now that is a miracle.

So much has happened on our little street in the 13 years I've lived here, but this morning's Preschool Walk felt like a processional of sorts, a culmination of all the late night walks with friends, with B, the runaway balls chased down, the post office jaunts and creek walk expeditions....it is a dear place to me, and I guess being tethered to it is not so bad right now.
Current Happy Things
1. The Mistmantle Chronicles by M.L. McAllister thanks, Blessed! Man oh man, these are great!
2. the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde. Totally silly! 'The Eyre Affair' is the first. I'm on Book 5.
3. Sammy, my nephew-I got to meet him this weekend. Los Angeles is too far away!

Death Cab for Cutie:Grapevine Fires

2009-09-01T22:50:00.000-07:00

2009-08-30T00:12:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd welcome the downhill slide into September that August becomes, but this is one seasonal change that I am anticipating.
We're finally in the home stretch before school starts and I have never been more happy to see September roll around. Instead of the usual melancholia that engulfs me at this time of year- (Gone again is summer, the lovely! Oh, the fun not had! The things we meant to do and didn't!)-I feel like I'm gasping for the finish line. It's been a long summer. Having a newborn and an exuberant four year old at home all day every day has definitely been wearing on me, especially as I navigate these waters with much less sleep than usual. I can't keep my eyes closed for too long (hide and seek; pre-meal prayer) without getting groggy. I didn't think it was possible for me to read any more books than usual, but I have been devouring them at a frantic pace. I think it's because I need a momentary escape into a different world than mine. Which feels strange to even say-I love my world, and those who inhabit it with me. It just feels a little intense right now.
B's teaching gig has a 9 month contract, which means in the summer he is ostensibly unemployed. So we have less money to spread around, and this time of year is usually the leanest. We're getting good at stretching paychecks to the last minim. Thus far we have seen a lot of God's provision for us all coming from unlikely places, and are generally feeling more grateful than usual, which is always a good thing. And B just started back to work last week, and G's preschool starts soon, hurray hurray.
I am grateful for this time in my life, I know I am. If only I could just look at it properly-surrounded by my loved ones, taking things as they come, one diaper change at a time.
I don't know what the next few months will bring but I hope they include:

-more of Laurel's Kitchen Fresh Corn and Tomato Soup
-Abbey Garden redo
-new compost piles
-sleep
-and of course

Hot!

2009-08-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

We've been cowering indoors all morning. It's the heat, you see...well over 100 degrees up here in the redwoods. We're heading for the beach!
Anyone else hot?

Gardening Forensics

2009-08-28T13:17:00.000-07:00

My soil and I have come along way together. In ways it's like an old friend, familiar and careless. I know that it is so sandy it seems to grow pebbles, that its black and acidic nature is due to the oak trees overhead, and that if I dig around the rhododendrons, I'll smell the old coffee grounds that anoint it daily.
Our tiny little spit of lawn is edged with river rock, at least it was-now the garden beds have been sucking stones into their soil like giant gumballs; I unearth them every now and again when I turn the beds over. I found the rocks in the nearby creek and hauled them all up in the rusty red wagon that now lies slowly being subsumed by the vinca behind the house. Most of the rocks turned out to be sandstone, and fell apart years ago, but a few of the original river rock remain. These tend to surface every now and again in the garden beds, like submarines or whales, spouting compost, partially decomposed mulch and old pieces of my 4 year old's sidewalk chalk.
I love how the soil in my garden tells the story of my life in it. If I ever had to move away from my garden, I might have to lift the topsoil and take it with me as my flower beds contain a strata of my last 13 years in this one place. If I dig down far enough I can find the remains of our broken Fiestaware dishes from our early days of marriage, we used the broken saucers and teacups as edgers, as I remember. B called the broken bits 'Fiascoware'. Gently decaying pieces of irrigation tubing, plant tags and twist ties add heft and bulk to the soil and remind me of old planting schemes gone awry. "Here's where I tried to plant those peonies two years ago! What was I thinking, putting them so far from the drip hose?" I mutter to myself as I poke around with a trowel, pulling out shards of plant tags. Old gladiolus husks, iris tubers and decayed roots are like the Ghosts of Plants Past, murmuring the stories of their lives to me as I bend my ear to the earth, stretching my fingers through the soil.
I feel so attached to this space, to the coming and going of seasons, the new growth and slow decay. I daydream about a larger space, with more sun and privacy, but honestly, I wouldn't know what to do with another garden; this is my home.

Favorite Small Places

2009-08-26T00:02:00.000-07:00

It's little wonder that I have a love for the diminutive: I live surrounded by tiny things: children, clothes, booties. I've never managed to recover from that intense desire of childhood: entering the world of the Borrowers, or The Littles or Thumbelina. And our house is like our own private diorama, especially by American standards: under 1,000 sq. ft. Our car is a VW Beetle. And every seat is taken. I don't want to sound virtuous, we really struggle with the lack of space, and I admit to occasional pangs of desire for one of the ridiculously monstrous SUVs, you know, the sort that should be named Goliath or U.A.E. (named after the country whose oil supply it depletes just backing down the drive.) But most days, I am content in my small life.
B is particularly adept at small space living, we have a lot of things hanging behind things, nested in other things, under beds, or somehow given dual purposes. I think he'd have been happy living on a boat, or designing train berths.
We've always equated small with coziness, like Mole End or Ratty's snug home beside the river in Wind in the Willows, always preferable to Toad Hall when you want to be cozy. It is easier to curl up with a book in 800 sq feet than in Buckingham Palace which, as we all know, is 828,818 sq feet. I do hope the Royal corgis will budge up for Her Majesty and Prince Phillip....
I've realized recently that there are a few places in town that give me that feeling of smallness, a sort of coziness/small town America feeling. Things that sort of reset my cultural vestibular system. So here are a few of the places- local charms on my Santa Cruz bracelet-just for you.
1. Porter Memorial Library
Soquel Village
This little place is part of a vanishing breed -the private library. They rock the card catalogue, and the dusty display case to patron ratio is high. It is volunteer run, and my library card is made of card stock and my name is written in by hand. And even though I've had a book overdue since 1982, they still welcome me back with open arms. There's so much to recommend about this place (Shannon Marie, if you are still a rosa-sinensis reader, you would definitely love it).
One of the last times I visited this library I spent a lot of time in the little local history section with the librarian who looked to be in her 70's. She told me about growing up in the mountains outside Soquel, off Old San Jose Road, educated in a little one room school house-her school would occasionally go to 'town' to share some classes with Soquel Elementary School (my alma mater.) She pulled out one of her old class photos, one of those long, thin, panoramic pictures that showed the entire school lined up on the grass in front of the school. It dated from the late 20's or early 30's. She pointed out a young woman at the end of a line of children, dark haired and smiling. "See her?" she said, "That's Miss Woolsey. She was my favorite teacher." I looked at her dumbfounded. "Miss Woolsey? Alice Woolsey? But she was MY favorite teacher!" We stared at each other for a moment, and then laughed. Sure enough, this septuagenarian and I had both been taught by one of the most exemplary teachers I've ever known, she at the beginning of her teaching career, and myself at the end. Alice Woolsey taught my second grade class, immaculately dressed in sweater sets, brooches & makeup. She was a classy lady. When we would take a paper to her desk and tell her we were 'done', she would reply archly, "Rare or well?" We'd all watch in awe as she would dance & sing to scratchy recording of 'Yellow Bird'. I felt loved and believed in & able to achieve with Miss Woolsey as my teacher. It was due to her that I won the second grade spelling bee. When she died, they named a street after her.

A Eulogy:
The Village Diner
Soquel Village
This place has been gone for many years now and the ache is still palpable. Does anyone (besides the Elevens/Izzie) remember this little spot? It was next to the Hairy Chair barber shop, across from the Bagelry in Soquel Village. A tiny little diner with heart-breaking retro decor and burgers and fries that would make you weep. The chocolate cake was exactly the size of the cake in Roald Dahl's Matilda, (masssive), the coffee was strong, and we were on 'hey-how's-it-goin'' terms with the proprietor. What more could you ask for in a restaurant? Even now, 7 or so years after its demise (help me out here) I still have to avert my eyes when I drive by. It's now the home of a garishly painted taqueria. Gone, gone. Here's an old review just to pound the nail in the coffin.

3. The Word Shop
Seacliff
The Word Shop is a sweet lil Christian bookstore,very tucked away and homegrown. Allie, the proprietor, is lovely and will sit around and talk about life, the universe and everything with you all afternoon. We know this from experience. There's a section on heretics, poetry and old hymnals. I love it. It's volunteer-run, and needs more exposure. Check out the website link, and go give them your custom. An added bonus is that it is right down the street from the coolest remaining 50's sign in the county, the Sno-White Drive In. The food I can't vouch for. But the kitsch is outstanding.
4. El Salto
Capitola
This is a nice little neighborhood, perfect for walkies. It sits on Depot Hill above Capitola Village and boasts many beach cottages with sweet little gardens and a walk along the cliffs above the ocean. I believe the parking just might be permit only nearer the cliff, so watch out for that.
5. Prayer Mountain
This little gem is located in Scotts Valley, right before you hit Mission Springs, one of the ubiquitous Christian camps in the area. What sets Mission Springs apart, by the by, is one of its Maintenance staff alumni. Which goes to show that you never know just what sort of mindless trivia you'll find on rosa-sinensis.
So I discovered Prayer Mountain years ago. It's proper title is the Fasting Prayer Mountain of the World, modeled after Dr. Yongi Cho's prayer retreats in Korea. If you are able to find it (and a lot depends on a little sign written in Korean on your left) you will be happy you made the trip. It's basically a retreat place dedicated to prayer, seeking God and getting away from it all. You need to register when you first arrive, after which you'll be assigned one of the small one-room cabins that litter the hillside. You can stay overnight if you wish, and it's free. But don't bring food-this is a place of fasting. It's incredibly peaceful and landscaped in this very Eastern sort of way, though without pagodas or Zen gardens. It's hard to describe. It's in a redwood forest, but every now and again you'll chance upon old stumps that have been planted with shade plants, mainly of the impatien type. Everything is meticulous. Why this means Eastern to me, I'm not sure. And I'm also not quite sure why I've included it in this list, but you'll be glad I did if you ever go there. Here's some yelp reviews (of all things!) to give you some more practical info.
6. Super Secret Staircases
downtown Santa Cruz
There are some fabulous little alleyways and streets that connect different parts of downtown SC to each other. I have fond memories of tramping them in the dark with friends, coffee in hand, the smell of jasmine and ocean air in our nostrils. I'm not giving you any real directions to find these places, since part of the delight comes when they are just happened upon. Start looking near Walnut Street, across from Santa Cruz High. Or Mission Plaza to Green Street. Find Walnut Street and the pristine and hidden Lincoln Court where I spent most of that Crazy Summer with Oliver and Scout. The summer I met the Contessa and was an official Slacker Employee at the Del Mar Theatre. But that's another story. So go to the Abbey, get something to go, and then start walking.
7. The Mystery Spot &
Gift Store
What list of favorite little local gems would be complete without the Mystery Spot? When I was little I remember some Japanese tourists, very polite and lost, knocking on my grandparent's door, asking for directions to the Mystery Spot. As a child this was akin to watching a space ship trying to parallel park out front.
I love this place so much it hurts. It's got all my favorite components in a tourist destination: a mention on Ripley's Believe It or Not!, kitsch, nature, dizziness, balls rolling up hill, free bumper stickers and goofy tour guides. (I think the suspenders over T-Shirt/belly/beard might be requisite). Did I mention the kitsch factor? It's high. When I was a kid the staff used to go out to the parking lot and put Mystery Spot bumper stickers on your car while you were on a tour. That was in the days when bumpers were not attached to your car, and they made those stiff paper bumper stickers with wire to wrap around your bumper. Now they are properly plasticy and sticky and they hand them out free. But it's not the Mystery Spot on its own that earns a place on this list. No, it's the gift store, which is an incredible treasure trove of 50's Americana, complete with buffalo nickel rings and redwood burl carved into clocks, cribbage boards & crosses. Add to it dubious tom toms and Native American jewelry which may or may not have been made in the USA and you'll have to agree that the tat is pretty outstanding. Now what did I do with my Mystery Spot shot glasses?

My Little Synesthete

2009-08-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

G, in from sandbox, reports busily to me:
"Mama, I just want you to know that the soup I'm making you is Hawaiian soup."
Me, preoccupied with a book & a nursing infant:
"Hmmm...does that mean it's got Hawaiian stuff in it?"
"Yeah! Rosemary and rattlesnake grass! Pretty Hawaiian, huh? And daddy's is English soup! Daisies and woodchips!"

Rosa's Poetry Archives: Leonard Cohen

2009-08-14T22:39:00.000-07:00

These Heroics
If I had a shining head
and people turned to stare at me
in the streetcars;
and I could stretch my body
through bright water
and keep abreast of fish and water snakes;
if I could ruin my feathers
in flight before the sun;
do you think that I would remain in this room,
reciting poems to you,
and making outrageous dreams
with the smallest movements of your mouth?
-Leonard Cohen

Flora Grubb Gardens

2009-08-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

B and I wandered around last weekend in the windy fogginess that is San Francisco. We took refuge in Flora's garden and nursery and enjoyed a good hot latte from Ritual Coffee. I wish more nurseries would catch on to the idea of giving their customer a little shot of something hot and stimulating whilst they shop. The only other place I've seen this is at Cardwell Nursery Garden Centre in Gourock, Scotland. Except that place is sort of like a Cracker Barrel with a nursery tacked on to the side and lots of coach buses in the ample parking lot, which seemed to emit hordes of geriatric Scottish women in capacious & bedazzled track suits without cease. And did I mention the cafeteria? Awesome.
Where was I?
So Flora Grubb Gardens-it was great. And you should go. The lay-out was great, with plenty of plants in the Dramatic Color/Architecture genre. And they appear to be the winners of the Most Blood-Curdling Succulent Collection-Bay Area Awards. But for me and my Aberdonian blood I found it to be a place of inspiration rather than actual purchase. $6.50 was a little steep for a 4" plant, and $49.50 for the uber-cool silk screened T shirts in the gift store elicited a hollow laugh. But maybe the price range is fine for the urban gardeners that shop there; me, I contented myself with taking pictures and garnering ideas-the few things that were in my price range. (Free!)
I put my name down for an Angelica archangelica (which is proving to be an elusive plant) and talked up the Abbey. I particularly loved the big wire bins of tillandsia for sale; they could be sold via bulk bins since they are epiphytes (in other words, they don't need soil & get their H2O from the atmosphere.) Apparently, a tillandsia comes with your purchase of a pound of coffee beans from the adjacent Ritual Coffee kiosk. Which I thought was classy.

I think my favorite thing besides the latte-in-the-garden was the hanging succulent portrait. I would dearly love to replicate this for the Abbey Garden, but I am sure that it's just a leetle too expensive. Maybe something on a smaller scale? Anyhow, I definitely recommend a visit to this nursery, especially if you have any junker cars that want planting out.
But go, have fun, and tell them Rosa sent you!

Flora Grubb and Her Marvelous Succulents

2009-07-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

I know I'm not the only one to be so mightily impressed by Flora Grubb, but I have to say-man! She is cool. I am all a-twitter. (The old-fashioned kind.) Since we are planning on stopping by her nursery digs (ha ha) tomorrow in San Francisco, I decided to have a rummage through her website.
And wow. I mean, the things she does with succulents! In the beginning of my gardening career I admit to being pretty ambivalent about plants of the fleshy-leaf variety. I think I just classified them under Spiny/Pokey/Flabby and sort of moved on, horticulturally. After all, I did grow up in California in the 70's and 80's-a time in which xeriscaping meant landscapes full of terra cotta pots shaped like animals, stuffed with hen & chicks, aloe and the ubiquitous and hideously flabbiferous jade plant. (Driftwood as a planting medium was also a requirement.) When I met B he was still smarting under the wounds of growing up in Salinas in the 1970's, he still winces when he hears wind chimes. Somehow tied up in that is a revulsion for all things succulent. And for a while I was inclined to agree.

But my heart has changed towards them, thanks mainly to an eye-opening horticulture class at our local junior college. My succulent admiration began innocently enough, learning about CAM, Crassulacean Acid Metabolism, which is a system of carbon fixation in some plants (but mostly unique to succulents.) Most plants open their stomata (cells on the undersides of leaves that act as pores, taking in carbon dioxide, letting out oxygen & water which are by-products of photosynthesis) during the day. Succulents open their stomata at night, when the heat is less. Very efficient.
And then I began to notice the beauty of the sedums, aeoniums and echeverias. Aeonium zwartkopf & its fabulous Dr. Seussiness. I began to love their surfaces, both glaucus and shiny, mottled and clear; as well as their stunning forays into the colors green, burgundy and grey. I began to look closer, and to discover the amazing symmetry of each leaf and its precise placement along the stem; each positioned so that none covered another, radiating out so that everyone received the optimum amount of sunlight. I was fascinated/repulsed by the weirdness of lithops, the aptly named living stone plant, which actually contains a partially or completely translucent top surface (a sort of window) allowing light to enter the interior of the leaves for photosynthesis. Another bit of protection for these plants that grow in harsh desert climes.
I now think most succulents are totally groovy, and this area is really one of the few places where B and I diverge in taste (besides his strange affinities for seafood, Aplets & Cotlets (he made me link it), and Ron Paul.)

At the Abbey Garden I've decided to redo some of the pots, taking out some of the things that are getting baked to a crisp, and replacing them with some of our CAM friends; I'm thinking sedums rowleyanus and morganianum, respectively. Any other suggestions?
But oh yes, Flora Grubb! I'll post pics after our visit......

Rosa's Blog Picks:: Cake Wrecks

2009-07-24T00:36:00.001-07:00

Thank you, Eleven, for the link to this towering monument-made of fondant-of a blog. Stop by and tell them Rosa sent you!

Accio Plot!

2009-07-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

Has anyone else found the new Harry Potter movie to be as underwhelming as I did? My expectations were a tad too high......I think I might have forgotten Rule #1 when Viewing Movies Made From Books, namely "'Libri est Melior"-'The Book is Better.' In this case, half the book is missing from the movie. Unfortunately, it's the half that made the book so good.
The worst part of it is that now that the series has been completed (no more HP books to come) the best thing I have to look forward to is another underdeveloped, rushed-through, apocryphal, thumbnail-sketch-of a movie next year with 'Deathly Hallows'..........
But I did find a good article about JK Rowling and the Christian themes of Harry Potter. Her last little quote at the end is the best. Here it be. And to bed I go!

The Abbey Garden

2009-07-13T19:53:00.000-07:00

So I had a baby, and a few weeks later, had a garden. The former event definitely eclisped the latter, which is why it is only now, two months later, that I am remembering to post about it. Our church's coffeehouse, The Abbey, is now approaching its first birthday, and the year has been good. I have been so impressed by the incomparable genius of Sara Peterson, The Abbey's manager, design maven, and barista champion.
The adjacent courtyard seating area took a bit longer-there were a few minor setbacks. Let it be said that if you are trying to get the county's ear, just build a wall without a permit and stand back. But that's all in the past now, and the courtyard looks lovely. It's a little more shabby chic than I would have done. It's hard to imagine a shabby chic monastic garden, but somehow I think it works-only in California!
So here are some pics of the garden, which opened with much acclaim and pancakes on June 6th.

I am happy with the design over all, and since it is a work in progress (which is a good definition of a garden, I think) I will not kick myself too hard for the things that I would have done differently. Although come winter, I will practive the fine art of Ultimate Pruning i.e. Hoik & Toss. Things to be hoiked include: the dirt in the pic above, cleverly disguised with mulch as garden soil, but actually terrible fill dirt. I meant for this planter (5' x 2') to only have a thin layer of the free-from-Craig's-List fill dirt, but with the volunteer help it was about 3/4 fill and 1/4 potting soil/compost. I was too pregnant to lift a shovel to fix it, so we just planted and held our breath. As a result the plants are pretty sickly looking-the lemon verbena, usually a rangy, ungangly (though fragrant) addition to the garden, is now sporting yellow leaves and almost no new growth. The rest of the plants look anemic and not long for this world. The first rule in organic gardening is to look after the soil, and the soil will look after the plants. In other words, healthy soil equals healthy plants. So I forgot this rule. Just don't tell them up at UCSC's Farm & Garden, or they'll take away my certificate.....

I still haven't got ahold of a few of the plants I've had in mind for this garden, namely; Angelica Archangelica, and biblical hyssop (not hyssop officianalis, as it turns out, but origanum syriacus). I've gone through two verbascum bombyciferum 'Arctic Summer' plants, which is a shame, since this is such a great plant.

I have really loved doing this design, getting to work with amazing people like Bruce & Claudia, The Abbey staff, and all the other Abbey Gardeners out there (you know who you are!)

Current Happy Things

audio
1.Welcome to the Welcome Wagon by the Welcome Wagon
gastronomy
2.lime popsicles
film
3.Harry Potter & the Half Blood Prince (B wants to see it in 3D. I am unsure. I'm afraid it will bring back too many Captain Eo memories...)
book
Great Expectations The thing that really tickles me about reading Great Expectations, besides that it is unexpectedly funny, is that I am unable to maintain any amount of internal smugness upon reading a 'classic'; Dickens wrote it as a serial in a newspaper. It's like feeling snooty for reading 'Prince Valiant' or 'Rex Morgan, MD'. When you consider that most of Dickens' works were published in this manner, as serial pieces for the masses, you can't help but think that despite what we've gained since that time (where to begin?!) we have become decidedly less literate as a culture. (McSweeney's not withstanding!) Here's a nod to a new online mag that is turning the tide: Content. Check them out and tell them Rosa sent you!

Rosa's Indie Short Film Archives: Souvenirs & Shiny Things by Annie Quick

2009-07-09T22:25:00.000-07:00

2009-07-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

I have never been so thankful for the volunteers in my garden; they are almost completely carrying the show-thanks to some eye-catching rose campion (lychnis coronaria) and the lovely contrasting chartreuse blooms of the euphorbia. Add to it the jasmine in bloom, purple veronica 'Chadwick Especial', and some tall weedy-looking white daisies and orange California poppies; these make up the majority of what's in bloom in the garden. I haven't figured out how to nurse and garden at the same time (probably a good thing) so any flowers that come up are there of their own instigation, as I can do little but move the sprinkler around.
Over in hydrangea corner, in all that delicious acidic soil, the deep blue and purple blooms are just lovely, as is the sky seen through the twisted and outstretched branches of the scrub oaks. I find myself outside often, on the porch with a baby, watching the trees: elder, oak, bay, madrone and redwood wave lazily in the light June breeze. It's been lovely. And helps to remind me why we live here, besides the fantastic rent, and the friendly neighborhood.

I need all the help I can get lately, when most things in our house feel cramped, broken, and in need of a paint job. I think I might be ready to live in a larger house (we've got about 800 square feet, the kind of place which feels bigger if we all suck our stomachs in), but meanwhile I'm trying to be grateful for what I have. I desperately want that sense of contentment that belies my surroundings, I think it might have something to do cultivating the inner life. I've just started Teresa of Avila's 'The Interior Castle'; we'll see what she has to say about it.
Bats!
Meanwhile, I have a weird ear infection-it doesn't hurt, but my left ear is totally full and I feel like I'm on an airplane. It's hard to hear and I've got that odd cocoon-like feeling all the time, sort of in my own world because I can't hear everything. Add to it the constant state of sleep deprivation that I live in, and you get a sort of spaced-out, vaguely smiling at everyone, prematurely batty version of myself. I'm beginning to feel like I belong in some sort of home, or at least in a rocker on a veranda, reminiscing about the olden days. Stop me before I start calling everyone 'honey' and collecting stray cats. Maybe I need some meds?

Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet

2009-06-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

Is anyone going to be in London this summer? Stop by Kew Gardens and think of me and then head over to the Barbican Gallery for their summer offering: 'Radical Nature: Art & Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009'. It looks like a great show, really interesting stuff. I love Agnes Denes' exhibit: Wheatfield-A Confrontation, 1982. The wheat fields were planted and harvested in the Battery Park Landfill, Manhattan.

This show is a retrospective, so B's bosses, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison- forerunners of the ecological art movement-were asked to include a piece that was originally exhibited in 1974. The piece is called 'Full Farm', which basically consists of raised beds and grow-lights in a gallery setting; which I think was cutting edge technology in 1974. Now it just looks like the museum staff have a little indoor allotment.

I bring this bit up because somehow, in the haze that followed giving birth, I agreed to design the plantings for this piece. Which sounds like over-commitment when I can hardly manage to dress myself before noon, but it seemed like fun at the time. Honestly, I can hardly recall what I put in each raised bed, but I think I did add some English wild spinach, chenopodiom bonus-henricus, in honor of our new little sprout, (common name, Good King Henry). I have no idea if this is commonly cultivated in the UK; I figured in London it might be considered a posh menu item, in a similar vein with California's dandelion greens, the edible variety of which is more of a wild chicory than what is usually seen gracing America's lawns. And what an awkward sentence, sorry. Anyway, do stop by the Barbican and graze on my design. Special prize offer for the first to send me pics!

It feels a little anti-climactic, my garden design debut at a London gallery, but who knows.....next year-Chelsea?

2009-06-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

I don't seem to have two minutes to rub together. But somehow I have plenty of time to sit around and read. How could this be? Oh yes, I am nursing a newborn. I have plowed through a small library's worth of books in the last six weeks, and am constantly scanning the horizon, looking for a new read. I've nursed my way through all my favorite comfort reads: the Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, Jan Karon's Mitford novels and I just finished the last of the Harry Potter series. Okay, so actually some of these I read right at the end of the pregnancy. I read fast but not that fast.
Appeal to the Bookish
So does anyone have any other books to suggest? I'm plowing steadily through Madeline L'Engle's 'A Swiftly Tilting Planet', and Thomas Howard's very groovy 'Christ the Tiger'. I think I want some more fiction, as my very tired brain probably cannot keep up with much more than a good story. But not that Shack book, or anything by Dan Brown. Oh, and if Oprah recommends it, or you read it at your book club, the odds are good that I don't want to read it. But I don't want to be picky....

Living La Vida Loca

2009-06-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

I'd say mostly it's good, actually mostly it's been great, these last 6 weeks of life with our new little guy. But then there are those days when my brains feel like mush, the mental equivalent of watching reality TV shows featuring the rich and whiny, eating Cheetos and swilling Dr. Pepper. And I can't seem to manage showering, teeth brushing and donning clean clothes, all in the same day. Let alone find time to blog, garden, call people back, or any myriad of things that I used to do with ease (except call people back, I never do that with ease.)
My World Measured in Square Footage
I forgot just how stymieing it feels, life with a newborn; tethered to the couch as I nurse and nurse. My world feels like it is shrinking down into the size of my home, as I spend so much time in it. And since my house is only 700 square feet or so, my world feels very small indeed.
I need grace for this time, which I already knew would be hard. But I forgot what kind of hard it is. Because in the midst of the hardness, the crying, the diapering, the sleepless nights, it becomes very hard to remember that this isn't my new reality for the rest of my days and that having two children won't always feel like this toiling procession through the Land of Needs.
Reeds and Wicks
So H.O. and G both are sick, and last Friday night we were down in Steinbecktown staying over with the in-laws. Little H.O. stayed up most of the night: snarfy, coughing and crying, poor little guy. And I stayed up with him, nursing and reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. As I lay there, in the wee hours, I felt such crushing exhaustion and something like despair. "Oh Jesus, help me." I whispered into the night.
And what rushed in was a half remembered bit of Scripture from Isaiah 55, a description of the Messiah, "A bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out."
It's a fairly accurate depiction of how I felt, actually. Like a reed that someone had tried to sever, left bent, twisted, unable to sway in the breeze. Or a guttering wick that is little more than a faint tendril of smoke. Jesus looks at these reeds and wicks tenderly, does nothing that would harm them any further and nurtures whatever life is left there. He looks at me and doesn't judge me, or tell me to just suck it up and get on with life. He reaches down with divine restoration in his hand and I trust that he will mend and heal where I've been bent, that he will strike the match that will relight this wick. I wait and hope.
"He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young." Isaiah 4o:11

In Which I Have A Spinal Headache

2009-06-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

Caveat: Not for the Squeamish
So apparently if you have a spinal block put in really really fast, sometimes the little hole in your spinal column doesn't close properly. And if this happens, a little bit of spinal fluid will drip out. And when it does, because it is a pressurized system, when you sit up, your brain flops down a little bit and you get the killer headache of the century. And if you then try to get out of bed and do something wild like, say, eat food-it will most likely come back up with a vengeance. So that was me, for 4 of the 5 days I was in there.
On the afternoon of day 4, after B had gone home to look after G, the docs figured out that I had what is known as a spinal headache. And the solution was to take a bit of my own blood and insert it in the hole in my spinal column which would then clot and fill up the hole. I know. I could hardly listen to him describe the procedure without retching. I've always been squeamish about anything having to do with my spine. The real reason I delivered G without any pain medication is because I was too freaked out by the description of the epidural-("a shunt? In my spine? Aack!") So I had to decide, right then, if I wanted this procedure done to me. I agreed, reluctantly. The anaesthesiologist skipped blithely off to prepare the room.
And all at once I was overwhelmed with the feeling of being totally alone in the hospital with my baby, about to undergo a procedure that would probably leave me paralysed. I tried to call B but he didn't answer. I tried to call my mom. Same. I started to get teary.
The nurse came in and tried to talk me down. I remember really wanting her to take my hand and hold it, but she was all bustling efficiency, and there's probably rules about hand-holding.
And just then, my mom walked in.
"Mom! I'm so glad you're here! I need to have another procedure done!"
"I had a feeling that I should come see you now, instead of after I get my errands done," she said. She came over, took my hand, and started to pray over me.
This evidence of God's interjection into my fearful, dark little moment calmed me almost immediately. She held little H.O. and I got onto a gurney.
Recovery
After 4 hours flat on my back (reading Sayers' Murder Must Advertise), I popped out of bed, put on my robe and started walking. I left mom with H.O. and went visiting next door: friends who had just delivered that morning. And I haven't looked back. Thanks, little blood clot!

Full Disclosure:: The Birth Story Part Two

2009-06-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

So there I was in the O.R., breathing through an oxygen mask and not quite sure how I got there. The whole thing was surreal, yet there was a strangely familiar element involved that helped to mitigate the fear & trauma; the 'voyeur of my own experience' feeling. I get this now and again-part of me stands back, watching myself do something and I think, "Here I am, doing this crazy thing. Huh. So that's what that feels like. Interesting." This has gotten me through a cornucopia of life experiences, ranging from grade school spelling bees & my first kiss to walking down the aisle on my wedding day & giving birth to G, my firstborn.
I got a spinal block, and felt mild panic when my legs went numb. I kept trying to wiggle my toes and ended up flapping my arms around, just trying to move something. The nurses hung a curtain in front of me, over my stomach, and B sat on a stool at the edge of the curtain, so he could at once see my face and the um...big show on the other side of the curtain.
He said later that it was hard to go from the horror of sitting beside me as I was cut open, seeing all my interior bits and pieces and then on the other side of the curtain, there lay I, doped up and smiling, teary-eyed and excited to hold our son. In fact, the poor guy got faint and the nurses made him sit on the floor in the ante room.
I'm glad I didn't know how serious the situation was, I had a very real feeling that Jesus knew what was happening, and that He was present. I mean this actually, not in a Precious Moments sort of way; I mean I really felt that Jesus was looking out for us. This also helped mitigate the fear.
He Was Green
Babies aren't supposed to poop in the amniotic fluid. They're supposed to have their first poop after they are born, thick, tar-like stuff called meconium. When there's some sort of problem, and the baby experiences trauma, he often poops. This is dangerous because the baby is also breathing the amniotic fluid, and aspirating the meconium can be life-threatening. When the doctor finally got H.O. out, he was green with meconium staining. This means that he pooped about an hour or so before and probably had aspirated it. So little H.O. went to the NICU (Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit), but not before he had been given to me and I could kiss his sweet face.
After
As I was being put back together, I started to shake. And shake. I couldn't stop; and I had intense pain in my shoulders. I found out later it was a deferred gas bubble, air had gotten in during the surgery and risen to my shoulders. It went away after a few days.......but the shaking. It got worse until my whole body was convulsing (except probably my legs, which were still numb.) They got me into a recovery room and gave me ice chips for the thirst and warm blankets for the shakes. This part seemed to take forever. I think the shaking was from the adrenaline, but I'm not sure. After an hour, H.O. was doing well enough to be brought to me. And the days of recovery began.
"Furthering the Healing Ministry of Jesus"
We delivered the baby at the local Catholic hospital in town, the same one where G was born 4 years ago. There's 2 hospitals in town, and this is the only one with the NICU. I was so relieved and thankful that we didn't decide to use the other, newer & swankier hospital across town, even more relieved that I didn't have a home birth.
Thank You
Thank you to everyone who visited, and prayed. Two people told me later that they woke up that night with an urge to pray for us, one person was awakened when we assume little H.O. was first in distress, an hour before we went into the hospital, and another person was awakened to pray at 3:30, when he was born-just about an hour after we checked into the hospital, on May 1. Our little May Day basket.
"The world's favorite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May."
- Edwin Way Teale
Later that morning, after sleeping a few hours and trying to de-groggy myself (didn't work, still groggy, in fact) a sweet L.O.L. came in to visit. She was there for some innocuous purpose, a survey or something. Sister Mary something.
"Are you a nun?" I asked.
"Yes, dear."
"Would you pray over our baby?"
She laid hands on H.O. and prayed God's blessings on his life in a tremulous yet strong voice.
And all the other blessings that I've left out, like that my dear sister was here from Australia just in time to see the baby, and that B's paternity leave came through the day before I went into labor-all these things serve to highlight the biggest blessing: our little guy.

Full Disclosure:: The Birth Story Part One

2009-05-19T18:21:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I asked B, "Should I blog about the birth on rosa-sinensis? Isn't it a little too....personal, or graphic, or something?" "Of course!" He quickly replied, "Talk about a creative act! Do it!"
So I went into labor on the 30th of April, waking to contractions every half hour or so. I was elated, having spent the past month prior moaning and lumbering through life, cursing and groaning whenever I would drop something, or lay down, or get in a car, or put on clothes, or breathe in and out. You get the idea.
B stayed home from work, and we spent the day walking through our little sylvan burgh, being hailed by neighbors driving by, "Hey-is this the big day?! Woohoo! I'll be praying for ya!" One woman pulled over right there and prayed for us, asking for protection and covering as we went into the delivery. At the time, all I felt was the joy of living in such a loving community-I didn't think of those prayers as being particularly needed, after all, we'd done this before with G.
So all day I labored. And the contractions never got consistent, or very close together. I'd heard all about how women would get turned around at the hospital, in false labor, so I wanted to be sure before we went in.
Labor seemed to stall out and then pick up again as the evening came on. B and I decided to get some sleep, and went to bed, with me waking up every now and then with contractions, that were getting more and more painful, but not very close together. (The recommendation is to come in when they are 5 minutes apart, lasting for a minute for an hour.) Finally, at about 2 AM (we're into Friday, May 1 at this point), we decided it was time to go.
We got to the hospital at about 2:20AM, and I was admitted. My midwife told me that I was dilated to 5cm (10 is when you are pushing), and that though my water hadn't yet broke, she was going to leave it intact. I continued to have strong (read: painful) contractions as the labor nurse put the fetal monitor on me, trying to get a read on the baby's heartbeat. We were chatting in between contractions when the nurse suddenly ordered me to turn over on all fours. Now, I haven't been able to do that for a few months, and that was when I wasn't in labor. B helped haul me over, and the nurse sort of threw an oxygen mask at me, and the midwife came hurrying in.
"I'm getting a decel!" the nurse told her (meaning the baby's heart rate was decelerating), and the midwife checked me again. I was at 7cm now, and suddenly she said, "I can feel the cord through the waters! We've got a prolapse here! I want the O.R. prepped now!" Or she might have said "STAT!" I don't remember. Suddenly it all became very medical, and it went from my expectations of laboring in the Jacuzzi like the last time, giving birth au naturel, sans medication,(whoops! I stumbled into some broken French there, sorry....) to being prepped for an emergency C-section. While we were waiting for someone to give me a shot to stop the contractions, I remember mumbling through the oxygen mask to B, "Pray! Pray!" And suddenly we both were praying out loud for God to save our baby.
Cord prolapse is when the umbilical cord slips through the birth canal before the baby, and threatens to come out first. This is dangerous because the cord contains the life supply to the baby, and if the cord gets pinched, the baby is at serious risk. The wiki page I am linking to here gives an 11-17 percent mortality rate for cord prolapse. I didn't know at the time how serious it was and I remember part of me being relieved that I wasn't going to have more contractions, or have to go through pushing again.
They wheeled me into the O.R. with my face smashed into a pillow, and my butt up in the air, covered with a sheet, so the pressure was off the baby and the cord. It was so surreal, in this position, that it took some of the fear away, probably because I didn't have that T.V. scene with me on my back, watching the hospital lights in the hallway flash over the heads of the O.R. nurses as they wheeled me into a room where I would be going under the knife.

The Darling Buds of May

2009-05-06T23:05:00.000-07:00

May 1, 2009 3:27 AM

6 lbs., 7 oz., 20 "

H.O.

our wee boy

Rosa's Poetry Archives: George MacDonald

2009-04-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

If thou hadst closed my life in seed and husk,

And cast me into soft, warm, damp, dark mold,

All unaware of light come through the dusk,

I yet should feel the split of each shelly fold,

Should feel the growing of my prisoned heart,

And dully dream of being slow unrolled,

And in some other vagueness taking part.

And little as the world I should foreknow

Up into which I was about to rise-

Its rains, its radiance, airs and warmth, and skies,

How it would greet me, how its winds would blow-

As little it may be, I do know the good

Which I for years half darkling have pursued-

The second birth for which my nature cries.

The life that knows not, patients waits, nor longs-

I know, and would be patient, yet would long.

I can be patient for all coming songs,

But let me sing my one monotonous song.

To me the time is slow my mold among;

To quicker life I fain would spur and start

The aching growth at my dull-swelling heart.

-George MacDonald, 'Diary Of An Old Soul'

Domesticity, Easter & the Ephemera of Sleep

2009-04-17T07:01:00.000-07:00

I thought it wouldn't happen until after the baby was born. Somehow I've been, for many mornings now, up at 3 or 4 AM. Awake. I lie there, hungry or uncomfortable but mostly just wide-eyed, staring into the darkness, willing sleep to return to me. I've read all about the physiology of pregnancy, how your body shifts it's sleep cycles to mimic that of a newborn: most of sleep time is now spent in light sleep.

Which I think was nice (in theory) of God to prepare me like that. But when you also have to be awake during the day, looking after other children, I start to wonder about the efficacy of giving all the supervisory powers of the household to the grouchy & sleep-deprived.

Rosa, Reluctant Dawntreader

This morning it was 5 when I awoke. I somehow decided that this was a relatively normal hour to be up. The neighbor's lights in the windows and chirruping of birds helped with this illusion. Food and the book of Isaiah also helped. It was with quiet pride that I made the coffee before B, Captain of the Morning got up. His bustling efficiency & exuberance in the AM has been a wonder since our first days together when he called me early one Saturday morning (at least it was before 9.) He started to describe his apocalyptic dreams the night before, while I clutched the phone and moaned silently. "Gee, you sure are up early!" I croaked sleepily after 10 minutes of dream analysis. " Yeah, you know, I guess my first impulse of the day is to find someone and talk to them!" he told me, chuckling. "Red flag! Red flag!" I thought.

And somehow we've managed together for 10+ years and his morning super powers have really been the hand of God extended to me. He would bring me coffee each morning, giving me flowers and reports on how the garden looked in the morning light. A neighbor cat used to accompany him, jumping on my bed and kneading my legs in a quietly reassuring way. It totally pandered to my self-diagnosis of MI (Morning Invalidity).

Her Strident Tones Pierce Through Me

But then G came along, as cheerful & unquenchable a morning sprite as ever strode through the dawn. Most days I let them alone together, enclosing myself in a shroud of dim light in the back of the house, trying to sleep through the squeals, shouts, ukulele chords and Sound of Music re enactments.....

Easter

We started a tradition on Easter morning of visiting a nearby meadow at sunrise. We watch the mist rise above the tall grasses, ringed with old growth redwoods and scrub oaks. Some years we see owls, this time it was bunnies and deer. We sing together and read the Easter narrative. I think we started it in order to ensure that we were able to keep Resurrection Sunday in a way fitting with the joy that we found in our hearts; especially since a multitude of other things (family dinners, church, Easter egg hunts and this year, art shows), threatened to envelop the day. Well, Easter morning we woke to G's requisite AM greeting: "Mommy or Daddaaaaayy!" It was 5:30. B leapt out of bed and soon the two of them were laughing and shouting about being at the meadow before the sun. I followed gamely, albeit it silently. And of course it was lovely.

Rosa, Pillar of Salt

But this morning, at 5, I expected to be awake for an hour and then to go back to sleep (G usually doesn't wake up until 8:30). G popped up at 6:45 and hasn't looked back. Me, I'm Lot's wife. And I'm looking back at a morning lie-in that has been destroyed in a maelstrom of fire.

Pretty melodramatic, I know, but as I said, I'm not a morning person.

(photo credit: found on Flickr; taken by real life friend Peter Thomsen. Thanks Peter!)

Stations of the Cross

2009-04-10T21:20:00.001-07:00

Easter is my favorite time of year, and somewhere inside me is the desire to contemplate and celebrate and garner all that the season has for me. But in all honesty, these days all I can think about is how I am still 4 weeks from being done with this 9 month Marathon of Rotundity (aka pregnancy.) It has gotten old! God give me strength.....
Good Friday
So I needed some help today to reflect on the meaning of Good Friday, and not to spend the day whinging and napping. (Although a good bit of that happened anyway. Sorry, B & G.)
We ended up at a Good Friday service in downtown SC, at the beautiful old red church, Calvary Episcopal, home of 2007's Santa Cruz U2charist, which I attended and blogged about here.
It was a lovely old service, we took G up for a blessing while we took communion; which, at the wooden rail in front of the church on garishly bright blue needlepoint kneelers, was totally novel to me.
The priest with his hand on G's head, praying aloud that bit from the Psalms 'The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and bring you peace. Amen.'-and her little 4 year old voice, 'Amen!' was one of the highlights. I didn't realize that the Good Friday service was one of the oldest liturgies in the church, dating to the 3rd century.......
And then I was off down the block, for something I had been heavily anticipating.
Stations
One of the things I love about our church is that it gives a gift each year to the people of our town; on Good Friday. It is a public art exhibit, a rendering of the traditional Stations of the Cross, done by a group of artists from our church community. We erect it right on Pacific Avenue, (aka The Main Drag) and so today I sat, watching people walk by. Actually, plenty of people hurried by, eyes averted, but I was surprised to see how many people stopped and came back, reading through each artist statement, stooping and peering at each station's display.
I was officially there as a docent, though I don't know how much official docenting went on. It was great just to hang out and talk to whomever was around, about anything and everything.
I talked with a woman from Poland who gesticulated wildly about her as she talked. She told me about her Catholic upbringing, singing in church choirs and her current interest in the religions and philosophies of the world. Another woman went out of her way to explain that though she had nothing to do with church or religion, she wanted to thank us for putting on the show. "It has been a profound experience for me" she said.
We just put the pieces out there and let people experience them. There was little to no 'evangivibe', something that apparently helped the Abbey (our church's coffeehouse) win the Metro's Best New Coffeehouse Award. (For whatever that's worth.....) But one of the things that I most love about this event is how incarnational it is. And not in your face.
Us Vs Them
Whether it's been Bible Parades or aggressive street preachers, ranty arguments & passing out Chick tracts-in my experience, growing up in SC as a Christian has been tinged with guilt for not wanting to participate in any of the above activities. (That and not wanting to listen to Amy Grant or Petra. And being bad at volleyball. I don't know how this one crept in to my G.P.S.-Guilty Protestant Subconscious. Youth group outings?) There was usually an element of "let's go witness to 'those crazy people downtown'."
Hey, We Are the Crazies!
But the beautiful thing about this instance is that this time, we are the crazy people downtown, bringing Jesus to where we actually live, letting our 'light so shine before men that they see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven,' in the words of Jesus. It felt good to sit back and give something to our community, no strings attached.
Gulp!
The plan is to set up the stations again at the church for Easter Sunday and to leave them up for a week or so. Since a lot of the exhibits are live (painting, music), there are a few new & different pieces that will be added in their place. B & I were asked (today!) to contribute to one of these new pieces. I am glad to do it, and can hopefully climb out of my Woe-Is-Me-And-My-Belly state in order to do this piece as an act of worship. It's sort of meant to be a secret, I think, so I'll wait to post photos until after it is unveiled on Sunday. (Now isn't that intriguing?)

(Oh, and here's a link to Pastor Dan's blog re: Stations of the Cross, I like how he describes it.)

We Made A Garden:: Part One

2009-04-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

In this series of posts I'll be laying out some of the practical aspects of the garden we are installing in the courtyard of the Abbey Coffeehouse, which is part of our church, Vintage Faith Church, 350 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA. The courtyard is expected to open at the end of April 2009.

Background
We started planning it last year, and expected to open along with the Abbey itself, mid-July. We built a large curving wall to enclose the space. A week before we were to open, we found out that we had been erroneously assured that we didn't need a permit to build this wall. Well, we did. So, almost a year later and whole lot wiser (thank you, City of Santa Cruz for this eye-opening experience) we are ready to plant the garden out, and officially open the space.

Design: Monastic

This is meant to be a monastic garden, in keeping with the Abbey theme, and so we are incorporating elements from these old monastery gardens: function & form, culinary & medicinal herbs & fruit. Wild and tangly with areas of quiet simplicity. We're trying to walk that line, design-wise, between free-form and ordered. We'll see where we go with this. Its really not so removed from our California heritage either: the California mission gardens had similar elements, and our Mediterranean climate lends itself well to many herbs-at least everything in the lamiaceae family, which makes up the bulk of most common culinary herbs. In addition, our climate works well for biblical plants like pomegranates, grapes & the (non-fruiting) olive tree that is a focal point in the garden.

Design: Problems

This garden is mostly concrete, so that's been a challenge. Against one long brick wall there are two beds that once held miles of box hedges. Last summer, we pulled the hedges and tried to dig in the soil. Our shovels bounced off the ground. It was terrible. And depressing-this, practically our only free (i.e. non-concrete) planting space in the courtyard, filled with nasty, impenetrable soil interwoven with 50 year old box hedge roots. So we decided to build up: we built planters over the beds, with open bottoms, just false-fronts really. They're backed by the brick of the building, and we decided to line the backs to protect the brick from the soil's moisture. Instead of spending the money on the wood for the back, we used a 1x3 strip of redwood across the back and hung heavy plastic from it, so that it sloped away from the brick. Instead of filling the entire planter with lovely and expensive soil, we used fill dirt and pieces of concrete and brick from around the back of one of the buildings. The milkweed and other weedy grasses that sprouted up from last summer we hacked down and then forked into the soil to add organic matter. Also tossed in were various dead rosemary plants we found littering the church work yard. I love the free section of Craigslist, yesterday evening someone came and delivered a truckload of clean fill dirt onto the doorstep of the garden, we paid a nominal $40 for delivery. In addition to B, Phil Barrick and Dave Boschen, we got a college student who was taking a break from studying calculus in the Abbey next door, and the mighty TJ, Master of the Brew Bar, to lend a hand at the shoveling, while I sat back and directed. Sometimes being pregnant has its benefits. We need a good bit of compost in order to amend the soil, I'm still working that angle.

Design: Turn Down the Sugar!

This section of the garden gets only morning sun, so its been a challenge to find plants that fit our monastic theme and low-light requirements. We put in the jasmine to climb the red brick walls

on wire trellising-the idea is to create arches with the jasmine and a few shade-tolerant heirloom roses and bleeding heart. It looked dreadful. So sugary sweet, way too saccharine. It was like a Disney Princess flick, done in plants. I wanted to gag. So I'm adding Angelica (angelica archangelica) which has a strong, architectural form and an umbelliferous inflorescence (like Queen Anne's Lace) atop 6 ft stalks. It sounds like Giant Hogsweed without the searing, painful sap and invasive nature. It's medicinal as well, which is a plus. I've not grown it before, and it's a little hard to get a hold of: I have my name down for it at 3 different nurseries.

Also, in one corner I decided to add an elderberry (Sambucus nigra). There is a dark purple-leaved form called 'Black Beauty' that might do. I'm still a little unsure of how the foliage will look against red brick.

So that should help tone down the saccharinity (new word!) It feels so cobbled together at this point: weird pipes run along the walls, and mysterious conduit & electrical boxes inexplicably stuck here and there. It almost makes me want to plant a box hedge in front of it......

But overall I'm encouraged, and am trying to keep in mind that all gardens are a work in progress, constantly changing, and few or none are planted in ideal conditions.

(and thanks to JR Crellin for the lovely angelica photo.)

Cultural Anthropology

2009-04-01T20:54:00.000-07:00

This is a slice of our life seen through the lens of a local grocery store chain, posted mainly for those who live elsewhere......(thinking of Susan particularly)

Rosa's Excerpts: My Antonia by Willa Cather

2009-03-30T22:20:00.000-07:00

'When spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only-spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high, wind-rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfolded on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.'

-Willa Cather, 'My Antonia'

.......and for this lovely photo of the exquisitely named Saint John's Prairie, thanks goes out to the College of Saint Benedict, in St. Cloud, Minnesota. This is also the home of the Saint John's Bible, a handwritten, illuminated edition of the Bible, commissioned for the millennium and executed by calligrapher Donald Jackson. Also exquisite.....

March in the Garden

2009-03-25T21:06:00.000-07:00

Last week the flowering trees down the street were at their most ethereal. You know, that point between budding and flowering when the pink-tinged twigs seem to shimmer, like waves of heat rising up from the hot concrete. Now it's in its typical flowering state, full-blown, nothing to hide. Everyone pulls over to take pictures, and sigh over the blossoms; next week the sugary pink petals will be blanketing the ground. These moments are beautiful as well, and I probably shouldn't quibble over any flowering that happens in the spring (except maybe for the acacias, which start out smelling like grape soda and end up clogging your nose with their syrupy stink.) But I prefer the early glimmers, the harbingers-the plants that remind me that winter is past and Easter is coming. Harbingers in our garden include the chinese forget-me-nots (cynoglossum amabile), flowering quince, (chaenomeles japonica) (which is not doing it's job, but I am forgiving-as long as they ante up next year), and the ephemeral spring bulbs: the muscari, daffodils, bluebells. I'm waiting for the checkered lily (fritillaria meleagris) to raise a purple checked head above its grassy foliage, this humble English wildflower is in my all star line-up of favorite flowers. Ready to devour the shade garden is the newly-emerged, lacy green foliage of my favorite native ground cover, dicentra formosa, the plant with way too many common names: Western Bleeding Heart, Dutchmen's Breeches, Lady in a Bath.
Abbey Garden
I'm going to transplant a lot of the dicentra into the Abbey Garden's part shade area, along with the more typical taller Bleeding Heart (dicentra spectabile). These will be interspersed with 5 or 6 shade-tolerant roses; I've found some with august histories like rosa rugosa alba, (1300's)r.r. rubra, (1700's) and rosa mundi (prior to 1591) , the oldest striped rose. It's a sport from rosa gallica officinalis, the Apothecary rose, and I've got one or two of them as well. Behind them all we're going to attempt to create trellising on the brick walls with wire; we want the plants (probably honeysuckle-lonicera periclymen-and jasmine) to frame negative space into the shape of the Abbey's signature aches. This monastic garden theme has been fun.
To Be Announced With Great Fanfare ; In the Style of Sufjan Stevens
And the Abbey Garden really is getting underway, with planting days scheduled this weekend. I'll try to post some photos later to let you see what we've been doing. I'm not only an abysmal photographer, but a truly wretched artist and it's been a challenge properly depicting the design to anyone not currently residing inside my head. So that's pretty much everyone. B is sold on Google Sketch Up, but I am not entirely convinced. You have to rely on plants that Google already has in its database, and things don't look like they do in real life.... I think I need to break down and take a wretched drafting class.
........Anyone?
If you live locally (Santa Cruz/Bay Area) and want to come and get dirty with us, we will begin planting out the Abbey Garden this Sunday, March 29. We'd love to garden with you! Address: The Abbey at Vintage Faith Church, 350 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
And a final question: has anyone had any success with growing (and/or sourcing) cobaea scandens, the cup and saucer vine? I want to grow some on a little wire pyramid tuteur. It's been a little hard to track down and I wonder if I should try to grow it from seed. It's lovely, and I suppose I never could resist bad coffeehouse plant puns......(who can?)

Please Pray.....

2009-03-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

Please, please pray for our friends in Scotland, Michael and Esther Franklin. Sunday morning they gave birth to Elizabeth Sophia, who was a stillbirth. The details are shaky, I don't know why or what happened. Please pray for God's mercy on them, and their family; for solace and comfort and whatever else it is that you pray in times like this. My heart breaks for them and I'm just sick about the whole thing.

Filing, continued

2009-03-16T22:08:00.000-07:00

File Under Ludicrosity

And the Award for Legal Fatuousness goes to Dominican Hospital-when tonight I found myself signing paperwork stating that my unborn child had received his HIPA rights.

Filing

2009-03-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

File Under Fingers In Pies:
Somehow I ended up collaborating with B and our friend Cheryl on the play that our church put on around Christmas time: 'NorthskyFlight 465'. We're entering it in a radio playwriting contest at the end of the month put on by a small mom and pop syndicate known as the BBC World Service. Perhaps you've heard of it? What we are thinking, I don't know. But it's been heaps of fun adapting it for radio, and collaborating with other people. I like to write prose mainly, so it's been interesting to work on a piece of writing that is dialogue-driven; where you must reveal who the character is by what they say. We've had to strip it down to what feels like very bare bones indeed, and are constantly going over lines to see what is clunky or over-explained. This is a new experience for me, as I usually err on the side of too many words, like my good friend Elvis Costello. (Really, we go way back.)
File Under: Pin Money
So a friend of ours offered me a little research job that I just couldn't turn down. She, a graphic artist, has a client who has written a children's book about a mouse living in a Depression Era house, who finds some seeds in the attic and plants them in order to help out the family he lives with. She wants me to research Depression Era recipes, sustenance farming and common seed varieties of the time period in order to add some historical accuracy and interest to the book. It sounds totally interesting, and like something I'd research just for fun anyway. Any ideas on where to start? The region is rural California.
File Under: Assorted Geekery
I'm not sure which type of geekery to file this under, but when I found this on You Tube, the top of my head tingled and I got unreasonably excited.
So my favorite garden tools are the fork and spade that I bought as an Apprentice at UCSC's Farm & Garden program. And it turns out that they are made by Bulldog Tools at Clarington Forge factory in Wigan, England. Founded in 1780, the factory is built on a site previously used by Cistercian monks.....who also made garden equipment! How's that for cool? So here is the clip, proving that you never know what will pop up on rosa-sinensis.........

(.......and for finding this, my thanks go out to B, my go-to-YouTube-guy.)

Rosa's Poetry Archives: Sylvia Plath

2009-03-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,

An elephant, a ponderous house,

A melon strolling on two tendrils.

O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.

Money's new-minted in this fat purse.

I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

I've eaten a bag of green apples,

Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Sylvia Plath

2009-03-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

Chenopodium bonus-henricus: Good King Henry

"Oh, Honey, Could You......."

2009-03-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

Man, I am like a big ole hen these days, nesting away. I want to turn the whole house upside down, paint this wall, recover that chair. Poor B comes home to a litany of things to lift and move here, no, over here. It 's comic. I can't seem to get around the side of the big dodge ball-type thing on the front of me, so Ive been enlisting the aid of my long-suffering family to help. Little G is low to the ground, so she comes along behind me and picks up everything I drop. B is my go-to guy for everything else, and it includes quite a lot. I don't quite need the jaws of life to extract me from the couch yet, but he's been there to strong-arm me into an upright position many times.
Tonight it was the dishes. Somehow the sink faucet handles have gotten farther and farther away, and I now have to stand on my tippy toes to get my belly above the edge of the sink in order to turn on the water. (A step stool is too high, and makes my back hurt. Yes, I've tried everything.)
I have just about 2 months to go, and I'm wondering how I'm going to get through this last bit of time, especially considering the planting season that is gearing up, coupled with the nesting instinct and spring cleaning. And it's just hopeless in the garden. I don't remember when I last lifted things with ease, or when the ground didn't seem so far away. I had B & G digging holes and watering plants this weekend, and I just decided that most of the plants in a major section of the garden need to be moved. Guess who I'll be calling.
The Abbey Garden Update
The Abbey Garden is a go, hurray hurray and thank You, Jesus. We've got the proper permits from the county, and the design pretty much nailed down, as well as a budget that doesn't depend on the discount plant section at the local nursery. (Although, being a thrift maven, and Scottish to boot, I shop there on principle.) Things should be moving by the end of the month. Our work days will include a lot of 'point-and-plant', and I hope I can impart clearly what needs doing, which can be hard, because it mean using lots of nouns, things I tend to lose quite easily. "Okay, now put that thing in the other thing, over there, next to the....you know, the...thing!" I hope I can restrain myself; otherwise it will be me in there, trying to heft things I shouldn't, and little H.O. will be coming 2 months early. "And his mother wrapped him in swaddling cloths and placed him in a planter box." No, no, bad idea. I'll stick to directing.

Rosa's Prose Archives:Hero Moon

2009-03-02T21:35:00.000-08:00

I used to think the sun was drowning and the moon's fingers on the water were a celestial rescue mission. Every night, the same hero moon dove for its friend the sun; every morning the sun was found and hung out to dry in the clean white clouds.
That was before I knew about the tides and rotation of the earth; hemispheres and gravity. These are all good things and I'll believe this story too, but sometimes I like to think about the moon and how he rescued the sun.

I think I wrote this about 15 years ago for a collaborative zine of which I was editor, 'Drink'. (It was made of paper and published via all-night sessions at Kinkos. Ah....the paper zine: Anyone remember those?) Anyway, I thought of this piece tonight when G was talking about the beach we saw today, the sand all but eaten up by stormy crashing waves. "The beach is all over." she said, very matter-of-factly. B tried to explain about the moon being like a big magnet, controlling the influx of the tides. I don't think she got it.

The Depths of the Earth: I Am A Garden

2009-02-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

These days I feel like a garden bed, and not because of the obvious ideas about burgeoning growth and ripening buds. I am a garden because of the little mole that is tunneling through my insides, delving deeper into my depths, burrowing (I can only imagine from this analogy) for grubs and snail eggs. This last week there has been considerable movement down there, from the Jab-Jab variety to the Pick Axe, and then lately, The Auger. I imagine him with a miner's headlamp looking for gold or at least big shoveler hands and a waistcoat like Moley in my favorite adaptation of the 'Wind in the Willows' by Cosgrove Hall.

In Which I Am A Building: Rosa as Row House
And then there's the beginning of 'The Magician's Nephew' when Polly and Diggory Kirke are traversing the long dark empty space behind the cistern in the attics of the London row house where they lived. I guess that makes me a building too. Not the usual pregnancy metaphors. Here are some other unlikely ones.

'For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.....My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.' Psalm 139:13, 15.

It is astonishing to think that when the psalmist spoke of his frame being made in 'the secret place' he was talking about somewhere that is inside of me. I contain somehow, the depths of the earth, and deep inside me is the potter's wheel. All the imagery of God as Artist is called up, Divine Knitter, Weaver, Potter. Somehow I am now a workshop, my womb a drafting board. I don't know what to think. Why, in the midst of all the aches and pains, the heartburn, nausea, sleepless nights, rotundity and crankiness, do I get to be the drafting table for some new work of God? It fills me with awe as well as gratitude. I can well understand Elizabeth's outburst to Mary: "But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?"

Fetus As Forerunner

A Catholic guy I met at a youth hostel in Rome asked me a riddle: "Who was the first person in the Gospels to acknowledge the Christ?" "Ummm, Mary? Elizabeth? Gabriel? Wait......one of the 'Friendly Beasts'. Like.......the donkey. Or.....the little drummer boy?" It turned out to be John, in utero. "As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leapt for joy." (Luke 1: 44) And so we meet John, who is already fulfilling his great destiny, going on before the Lord, proclaiming His coming. The first person to recognize the Incarnated God, the fulfillment of the ages, of all prophecy, all Pagan mythology (yes, I've been reading 'Surprised By Joy') was still being 'woven together in the depths of the earth', was yet to draw breath. I think the Catholic guy might have been trying to make a point about abortion, I don't know, but I came away from that with the idea that if God can use even the ones that aren't considered (by some) to be fully human-I guess the 'Personhood Fairy' hasn't visited them yet-how much more can He still somehow use me, as broken and 'in process' as I am?

Old World Roses

2009-02-18T20:52:00.000-08:00

So I put it to B that if he was going to splash out on a Valentine's bouquet for me, he should instead take me to Roses of Yesterday, an heirloom rose nursery just outside of Corralitos (in the southern half of our county); and buy me a bare root 'Charles de Mills'. And it worked.

Corralitos is gorgeous, just so rural with it's loping grassy hills, gently rusting farm implements and brown ponies behind split rail fences. The sun shone weakly through the clouds, a momentary break from the early spring showers that have been bucketing down all weekend. We drove out through land that had been through one of the big wildfires last summer. I heard rumors of horses being killed, so sad. There was new growth on the blackened trunks of the eucalyptus trees on Hwy 1, which I thought was encouraging.

Come for the Sausage, Stay for the Roses

I recommend a trip out to the demonstration gardens at Roses of Yesterday, it's only a mile or so from the Corralitos Market & Sausage Co., and there's ample space for a picnic. May through June are when the roses are at the zenith of their bloom. In May I will be busy (nothing big-just labor, childbirth, and sleepless nights with a newborn) so I'll have to come a little later in the year. This is actually a good time to visit if you're thinking of adding one of these roses to your garden, you can see what it looks like in its least lovely state; dormant and pruned, and so can see what you're getting yourself into. Although it's not so nice for picnics, being either damp from the previous rainfall or downright sopping from the current rainfall....

I also picked up the lovely red Apothecary Rose (Rosa gallica 'officinalis')-for the garden we're planning at the Abbey. The Apothecary rose dates back to before 1500, and is the red rose of the Lancasters in the War of the Roses (white rosa alba is for the Yorks). Also in its favor are the old rose scent and shade tolerance, as well as its propensity to sucker on its own root stock (if the bud union is planted below the soil level.) I had a nice chat with either Andy or Jack Wiley, one of the owners, and it was great to talk to people who really know their stuff. The nursery's been around since the 1930's and their catalogue is full of delightful little vignettes like this:

Souvenir de la Malmaison, climbing. Bourbon. (1893) 10 feet. Flowers repeatedly. Zones 5-9. (duh lah mahl-may-ZAWHN) I find it difficult to select the right words, for this is not just another old-fashioned rose, or can you describe its many subtle qualities with the usual catalog superlatives. Factually it is very hardy...no freeze-back even in the coldest Pennsylvania; a moderate grower, but a profuse all-season bloomer. Flower is large, many-petalled - a pearly soft flesh-pink. Full, tight buds open slowly to show many tightly curled petals full of fragrance. A sunny protected position is best, as well as a garden with low rainfall, as wet weather can keep a bloom from realizing its glory. This rose is well suited trained over an arbor, providing a lovely canopy for a bench. An old-world rose which speaks of history, romance and nineteenth century “Paris in Spring.”

All this and I don't even like Valentine's Day.

Rosa's Blog Picks

2009-02-15T20:06:00.000-08:00

Here it is, the best story I've heard in a week. Thank you, OT Girl, my favorite anonymous Occupational Therapist (don't we all have one?)
Reflections of a Rehab OT: Best Story So Far and a Spot of DIY

Dreams

2009-02-10T07:13:00.000-08:00

B and I are driving through our neighborhood, on the way to Joe & Heidi's house a few blocks away. We park our silver Beetle on a long incline behind their garden. It has just finished raining and the grass is wet with dew and the moldering railroad ties that border their property are steaming. Rising above some scrabbling blackberry bushes are the neighboring architectural jumble of red tile roof lines and half-timbered gables, as if our redwood forest neighborhood suddenly ended and Thomas Hardy's Dorset began. The incongruity of these tumbledown cottages is eclipsed by their beauty and we walk around to the front of the lane to see them better. Grey-branched wisteria grow through windows and empty doors. Off to the side is a white marble mausoleum that bares the faded name "Dutra". "I went to high school with a guy named Chris Dutra! I wonder if that's his family crypt?" I ask B, cheerfully. B is ashen-faced, afraid, and I can feel his fear coming out at me. He shakes his head, and won't look at me. Joe & Heidi meet us outside and they, too, seem afraid to talk about the mausoleum. "But I know a Dutra!" I tell them and I make them walk back with me to look at it. Symbols are traced all over the outside, some of the them moving. "It's Masonic Phrenology!" B says in a horrified whisper. "Let's get out of here!"

Vignettes

2009-02-06T20:13:00.000-08:00

Soundtrack to the day: Innocence Mission's 'Brotherhood of Man'.
5 AM-I raise the curtains to see: the neighbor's porchlight illuminating the street which is flooding gently with rainwater; rippling down towards the storm drain in soft glistening waves.

In the garden: The roof gutter has clogged and spills over; sending down a steady torrent of water; washing the silt from the soil and leaving a pool of white rocks.
The upper branches of the oak on the hillside glows with a shimmering green moss. The lower trunk is a stark contrasting brown, where it was sprayed last summer in the crusade against the encroaching Sudden Oak Death. Our loveliest oak, the one that overhangs the driveway and the shade garden has all but succumbed. I am grateful for that brown moss ring, it means that the hillside oak is still alive and has a fighting chance.

Noon-G and I are sailing bay leaf boats down the swirling eddies and rivulets of water across the street from our house. "HMS Rosabelle" beats the 'Good Ship Leafy' by a puddle and a half. G's red raincoat is the brightest thing around for a mile. Her new haircut, "I look like Maria (Von Trapp!)" is plastered to her wet cheeks, and she sings a little song as we walk.

6 PM-friend stops by, tea is drunk. She leaves with my favorite Bollywood flick, 'Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge'.

7PM-Dinner-red peppers roasting, tortellini boiling; B teaches G to play the C chord on the ukulele. She is a third of her way towards learning that holy trinity of chords: C-F-G.

It's an interesting life for me now. Staying at home mostly, expecting a baby whose arrival feels increasingly imminent. My constant companion is a 4 year old who today told me gleefully, "I have more energy than you and daddy, right, mommy?" I find myself approaching the smallest tasks with great alacrity and vigour: "Right. Grocery shopping, then library, then home. Okay. Go!" I think my brain has settled down into it's domesticity but it's still a little weird. I'm much more used to slogging away all day at a job, and coming home with a head full of work-related junk that I am trying to forget for a few blissful hours.
It'a little Mr. Mom, except I guess this is Mrs. Mom? Anyway. I am grateful for these days.

In Which I Talk About the Weather

2009-02-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

Living in here on the central coast of California means that our winters, though usually very wet indeed, are fairly mild. Rarely does it snow;and most winters all we can boast of is a week or two that leave car windshields covered with a light sheen of frost. This year our sylvan burgh woke up to a covering of hail, that took the better part of the day to melt. That's our winter. I've spent most of the last few weeks in T-shirts and light sweaters, and am tempted to start putting seeds in the ground. In January there were two weekends in a row that we went down to the beach, tidepooling and canoodling around in the sunny sand and driftwood. Nice. I think I've ordered iced coffee drinks twice in the last week. Not only the quince, but the ornamental plums, almonds and a magnolia or two have been brazening forth with pinks and magentas as if April were just days away.
But in the midst of this, I'm thinking about the wildfires throughout last summer, when the air crackled with heat and dryness and the police stood guard over the beach on the Fourth of July to keep revelers from setting-off firecrackers. I'm hoping for rain this weekend, for the plants' sakes and mine: I finally found my own copy of Tolkien's Roverandom and I really want to read it curled up, tea at hand, listening to the rain. Is that too much to ask?

Miss February

2009-02-02T21:02:00.000-08:00