I started writing my Christmas cards yesterday. I’m not working ahead of schedule. Not supremely organized. Just the opposite. I have finally started writing my 2024 cards.
It’s not the first time I’ve been late, and probably not the first time I’ve been this late, but at least I can say it’s unusual even for me. Still, I’d rather send them late than not at all. This is the only time I connect with some of my friends and family, but every person on the list is someone I care about, and the connection is important to me.
So if you’ve been wondering why we didn’t send holiday cards in December, fear not. They’re on the way. I couldn’t possibly waste the work the husband put into drawing them.
Being March, it still occasionally feels like Christmas outdoors in the Midwest. We had snow earlier in the week, and occasionally my weather app tells me it’s 24 degrees still, or it’s 42 but feels like 26. It’s March in Chicago, and we know to expect late snow. Fortunately, it never kills the tulips.
Truth be told, I far prefer the vernal equinox to either solstice. So a celebration now makes more sense to me. Since spring is the time when life renews itself, why shouldn’t it also be the time when we renew acquaintances and connections?
Spring’s first crocus arrived yesterday in the back yard, a bright purple beauty that, astonishingly, is still around today. Astonishing because our wild rabbits seem to love crocuses (I know, croci, but really?!), and the purple ones are their favorites. You doubt me? Years of experience have taught me that the rabbits’ dining preferences are an exact match for my aesthetic ones. They love a purple crocus flower best, followed by a white one, and least of all the yellow, which sometimes get left in place when all the others have been devoured. As with most things in my garden, I don’t begrudge them, though I’m always sad to lose the cheery crocus blooms, which are for me a true sign of spring.
Inside, my seedlings have begun to sprout, sending delicate stems stretching up from the dirt to remind me that life goes on. I’ve planted mostly vegetables and greens inside: kale and kalettes, chard, summer squash, basil, spinach. In addition to the raised bed, they’ll fill pots on the patio alongside edible flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. I’ve started sunflowers indoors this year, too, a first for me. This is an experiment because the critters usually get whatever sunflower seed I direct sow outdoors. Again, I don’t begrudge them; even this year there’s extra seed left over, plenty for everyone. What else will I direct sow? Beans, lettuce, herbs, bee balm, and other seeds I can’t remember without hauling myself out of this chair right now to look.
Spring is my favorite season, a renewal, regeneration, start of the new cycle of life. It always cheers me, and this year I think I’m trying to escape the world by turning my eyes to the garden. I’m looking for reasons to be hopeful, and nature always provides.
It’s election season, which means postcard-writing season for me, and this year that has been an act of hope more than one of faith. I don’t know that I trust in the electoral process right now, but I refuse to surrender it. And so yesterday I dropped 100 postcards to swing-state voters through the mail slot at the Post Office that the current federal government wants to shut down. (That’s fewer cards than my usual contribution, but I’m plagued by a repetitive stress issue in my writing hand right now and wasn’t sure I could commit to more than 100.) Mailing GOTV postcards is always a joyous moment for me, and this year a somewhat defiant and very determined one.
Has it really been almost three weeks since I posted a poem on the porch? It turns out it has, but National Poetry Month is around the corner, and I might try to be ready for it. There’s a new poem up today, in any case, courtesy of Mother Nature and the resilience of her creations.
We had an inch or so of snow on Thursday morning. I had to drive to work in it, walking through a slushy parking lot in indoor suede shoes to get inside. But it was followed by sunshine, glorious sunshine, and by the time I emerged from the building for my drive home you might not even have known it had snowed. Except on the shady patio to the side of my house, where it still coated the aging Adirondack chairs when dusk rolled around.
When I emerged from my front door for my after-work walk, I discovered the forsythia newly covered in blossoms not yet open but large and decidedly forsythia yellow. She is ready to bloom, and bloom she will, undeterred by snow or wind. I hope when she is fully in bloom we will have more days of glorious sunshine to adorn her, to adore her.
I’m nearly finished reading Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows. I’m sad to say I had a slow start with this book, which it didn’t deserve, as it is a gorgeous piece of writing and a love song to our natural world. It begs you to slow your thinking, let time take its natural, slow progression, be one with all the world around you. It’s a book I normally would devour, then probably go back and read again more slowly, and I think my slow start was due to my own state of mind, anxious and perhaps brittle, ill suited to contemplation—it certainly was no reflection on the book itself. Years back, I read Nick Hornby’s Stuff I’ve Been Reading, a diary-like series of essays on what he was reading, and aside from making me add a lot of books to my own reading wish list what has most stuck with me from it is Hornby’s recognition that writing and reading are a two-way dialogue, and sometimes we are simply not ready personally to read a particular book, that this isn’t a reflection of the book’s quality, that what might seem a dull or even badly written book to us might in fact just be a book that we have come to at the wrong time. My start with The Comfort of Crows was like that. I knew from the first essay that I loved it, but my mind wasn’t fully immersed, and I found myself getting up and walking away from it after each essay, not to savor and think about what I’d read but simply because I was not ready for contemplation.
That has shifted in the last couple of days, and I have been reading as much of this book at a time as I can squeeze into the parts of my days that are available for reading. I think I might have the book itself to thank for slowing me down, settling my mind, and that is why this post is titled as it is, borrowing from Renkl’s own “Praise Song…” mini-essays (contemplations?) sprinkled throughout the book. This may be a book that I buy after reading my borrowed library copy; I may want to keep it around to revisit.
Today I’m grateful for…
Libraries
Bird song
The end to the thunder and rain that so tormented Elwood earlier in the week
I’ve finished reading Frida Kahlo’s diary, along with a marvelous book about her work, Frida Kahlo: Face to Face, by Judy Chicago with Frances Borzello. I might not yet be done sharing found poems from the diary with my neighbors, though. Here are the most recent two from the front porch. Maybe more to come.
I’m still reading Frida’s diary and still finding in it gems and inspiration. The result: There’s a found poem series progressing on the front porch now, word images from the diary replacing one another, walking a tentative path forward toward whatever comes next. Here are the latest two. More are likely to come as I continue to savor this beautiful book.
I write this while waiting for my morning coffee to brew before heading to my desk for a day of work. Today I’m grateful for:
My work week was a busy one, and I got behind in some places, including here. But I did manage to post a little bit of poetry to the front stoop. As a result, today we have a double edition of #frontstooppoetry.
Perhaps because the week was so busy, and perhaps because this country feels so fully dystopian, this rather free-form question spilled out of me on Wednesday. (It got dated Wednesday-Thursday on the chalkboard because it was late at night and I (rightly, as it happens) anticipated I wouldn’t get a chance to replace it the following day.)
Time seems these days to have folded itself; somehow the world seems to be moving simultaneously at hyperspeed and in slow motion. A single day seems to speed by in an unending barrage of extremist news from Washington, yet the long-term passage of time seems excruciatingly slow. How long will it take the coming years to go by?
Add in the fact that the Trump administration is trying to return us to the 1950s or earlier, and my sense of time has turned inside out.
Today, though, I found inspiration in the book I’m currently reading, The Diary of Frida Kahlo.
Frida started keeping a journal sometime in her 40s, sadly near the end of her life, and it’s both written and visual. Filled with casual drawings—almost doodles, really—it’s gorgeous to look at. And the writing is beautiful as well, quite free-form, almost stream of consciousness. It’s more a journal of her thoughts than a chronicle of what was happening in her life. Written in Spanish, the book includes an English translation with notes, so I go back and forth between the full-page color originals and the translation/notes.
This book is beautiful in every way, and I’ve ordered my own copy so I can have it nearby after returning this copy to my library. Meanwhile, I’ve written out several passages as found poems, and that’s what made it to the chalkboard today.
Postcarding
One of the friends I correspond with regularly via postcard wrote to me recently that she’s finding it hard to create art during the Trump Administration. Me, too, my friend—I hear you. Today, though, I found myself able to make postcards for the first time in weeks (possibly thanks to Frida’s diary?). For whatever reason, it was a much-needed catharsis. And I’m ready to share the love. I’m hoping to use these to prompt myself to write to more than the couple of friends I regularly trade cards with. Those friends will get the first, of course, but there are plenty to go to others as well. Here’s a sampling.
