Him and Me: 3

Re-posted from my contribution to Literary Traces this week.

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I thought it would be something like the genetic aversion to the taste of cilantro. You know, how some people think cilantro tastes like soap. I don’t get it, but there is an entire website devoted to hating cilantro.

I could find no such thing in regards to lilacs. No study finding genes that would influence my perception of their aroma. In fact, ihatelilacs.com is an available domain, as are .info and .net…so, maybe I am alone in this? A genetic anomaly?

***

It was such a sweet gesture, though. He brought bouquet after bouquet of them inside, our first Spring in the farmhouse. I guess I had never really noticed lilacs before, not on the west coast, but after getting through a long Vermont winter, they were the first blooming thing we saw (that wasn’t yellow), and well, they happened to be breathtakingly beautiful after the cold and the white and the brown branches…and here, here were mason jars full of them in several shades because -oh joy!- they were prolific around our new home…dark, medium and light purple blooms. Even the snow-white flowers were gorgeous, set against the deep green leaves.

He was full of delight at their beauty, placing them in the kitchen, on the dining table, in the bedroom, everywhere. “Lilacs are just incredible,” he told me. But, I…I hardly noticed them for my sudden and consuming obsession of figuring out where the heck the cat was pissing.

“What do you mean you can’t smell it?” I asked him. “It’s, like, all over the house. In every room! I just don’t get it…it’s not like Enki. He must be anxious about something.” The smell was overwhelming…why couldn’t I find it??!?
The smell was stronger where the bouquets were placed. How odd. No…wait a minute. It was all becoming clear. I asked him why he didn’t just tell me it was the flowers all along. Why did he humor me, looking around for puddles of cat piss? He looked at me like my hair just changed color or something. I thought, oh my God, he thinks they smell NICE.

Crestfallen. Now he wants to remove them from the house. No, no, no. I can deal with it. They’re pretty. Pretty nauseating. No, just pretty. He thinks they smell a little like roses, but more…oh, what was the word? Intoxicating, yes that’s it. And then I realize that I’ve never particularly cared for the smell of roses, either, as lovely as they can be.

It takes me a while to convince him it’s okay to leave the lilacs be. I’m just glad we don’t have an annoying problem going on with the cat, I tell him. And in a few days they’ll wither and I can take them out to the compost. 

***

There’s a lilac where we live now. It’s the first really spectacular bloom of the season for us, since we have only a few tiny stalks of forsythia that don’t get enough light. I admire it from the sliding door, and the bees admire it, too. It really is beautiful, but he never tries to bring the blooms inside anymore.

The other day I went out for a morning run, and there is a house I sometimes pass that is completely surrounded by mature lilacs. I counted them: nine, each of them easily 10 times as large as the one beside our deck. When the aroma hit my nostrils I nearly swooned with the nausea it induced. How awful to see such beauty and feel so sickened by it!

I got home, and our lilac tree seemed puny dainty, in comparison. A jar or two’s worth of clippings could not take me down the way that cluster of giants did earlier. I can make this sacrifice.

I bring a bouquet in and place it on the dining table.
Another, I put in our bedroom.

He notices the gesture, and is moved.
I love you more than avoiding nausea, my dear.

Twenty: 52

 

 

 the 52 project.
Portraits of my main squeezes, every week.

 

O, this week you…

…keep asking me when kitty will come home and all I can say is that I don’t know, that he may not, but we can still love him forever.

…took apart your old bike, just to do it. You broke it down completely, dividing up the parts into piles of what you might like to keep around for repairs and what you will repurpose for building projects, like that robot you keep talking about. Nothing is trash, and I think that’s pretty great.

…were really interested in the process of getting our bees situated this time around. We’ll enjoy watching them work this summer.

C, this week you…

…made it through, even though it was a tough one. We are stretched thin and feel a lot of pressure from many sources. We’re strong for each other, and I am grateful.

…felt disappointed when you didn’t get as far with the garden prep as you wanted to this weekend. Breaking new ground with only hand tools…it’s punishing, exhausting labor and, being the observer, I’m amazed at how much you were able to change the landscape. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

…set up the beeeeeees, and they seem happy in their new digs.

…kept yourself distracted and busy, as did I, so as not to constantly wonder if kitty will ever come home again.

 

Five (or Six) Senses Friday

FSF is a weekly ritual of sensual reflection. Play along if you wish, in the comments or link to your own blog. What is striking your senses this week?

 

Tasting:  Fresh green garlic. I thinned a few plants out of the garlic bed and chopped them up, greens and all and added them to cubed sweet potatoes for roasting. Perfect.

Touching: Roots and thorns and tender leaves. Transplanting is the word of the day week month.

Smelling: Lilacs, lilacs everywhere. Dizzying, really.

Hearing: Night creatures. The sounds that disappear from November through May have returned to lull me to sleep.

Seeing: The miracle of wood bending and not breaking. So much wind this week.

Feeling: Frustrated. Disappointed with the results of my job search, so far. I know it takes time and perseverance, so yeah…carrying on and all that. Hot cocoa cure tonight.

 

Oh, and I’ve also been here this week.

And here.

Growing, growing is the topic on Luminous and Literary Traces this week. Enjoy.

Petal Play

Then came the day on which I picked ALL THE DANDELIONS. It only happens once a year, if that, because it’s quite a tedium, de-petaling the darlings. Usually, I just make biscuits or some such, but this year I got a bee in my wool hat (still wicked cold ’round here for bonnets), and decided to make a batch of dandelion wine.

I’ll send you here for the recipe, as I’m following it to the letter. I trust Sandor Katz with all my soul, and I’m not going to experiment with my first batch. I’m in the stirring-it-whenever-I-think-of-it-for-the-next-three-days stage of the proceedings. It’s an awful lot of work plucking a gallon’s worth of petals and I admit I was a little shy of the mark, and it seems a big to-do for just one gallon of finished product, but there is loveliness potential in a year’s time and the joy is in the process (especially for me, since I don’t metabolize alcohol very well and won’t be partaking, anyway).

For immediate consumption, these are fun:

I tweaked the only dandelion flower cookie recipe I could find so that I could use coconut flour and therefore triple the quantity of eggs. We have an abundance of the latter.

Dandy Cookies

1/2 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup honey
6 eggs
splash vanilla
scant 1/2 cup coconut flour
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 to 3/4 cup dandelion petals

Preheat oven to 375º. If coconut oil is not liquid (it was too cold in our house), melt it with the honey and let cool a bit. Add the eggs and beat them in. Stir in the rest of the ingredients and mix until well blended. Let the mixture sit for a few minutes. The coconut flour will absorb the liquid and thicken the dough. Drop by tablespoons onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake for about 10 minutes. Keep an eye on it because liquid sugars tend to burn quickly. You could also double up your baking sheet to prevent the bottoms from getting too brown.

Protein-packed and gluten-free, yo. Enjoy.

 

Nineteen: 52

 the 52 project.
Portraits of my main squeezes, every week.

I do believe they are plotting against me.
And, um, O…dude, I can see your cards.

I planned the usual sort of post, but long days outdoors, preparing for potential frosts the last two nights (meaning the gooseberries are covered in Felix the Cat sheets, and pillowcases are staked over the blueberries), and then a bizarro power outage for several hours yesterday afternoon/evening meant I didn’t get a whole lot done involving the glowing box.

There were moments squeezed in for dandelion-picking. These petals are destined for a batch of dandelion wine. We are using this recipe, but I had begun to follow another at first and already have the flower petals steeping without any of the other ingredients. I’ll just heat it up a little today to dissolve the sugar, and continue with the Katz recipe as written. More on this process to come!

Oh, and the duck eggs? I found those in our neighbor’s yard. We had noticed the girls weren’t laying in the coop anymore…it seems they are just dropping them whenever and wherever they get the urge. I also found one on the driveway.

Oh, and the goats? They were reunited with their mamas and cousins to pasture out on a neighbor’s land. A great escape was made at midnight and now they are all back up here on the hill.

I am surrounded by silly, exasperating creatures.

Good thing they’re cute as buttons.

In which I also play with fiber…

In the sunshine, even!

 

It may be a little while before this happens again, as we’re headed into a cooler, wetter spell of weather, but I was pretty darn pleased with the Spring-sweet colors that resulted. In fact, I probably won’t turn on a dye pan again until Fall…why bother when I can have rainbows under glass on the deck railing?

I promised some updates, and they’re coming, throughout the weekend. Here’s one for tonight:

Click on the pic for a link to the listing.

Back to FSF (Five Senses Friday) next week!

Oh, and I am also here today.

Enjoy, and happy Friday!

 

 

Him and Me: 2

Our topic this week at Literary Traces is Elements. It inspired another when-we-were-young sort of story…

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It is morning, and we escape.

Out of our neighborhood that is only slightly less sketchy than the next street over, where the gas station attendant was shot to death last week.
Away from the loquat trees and the boy next door, who shuffled heavily and carelessly through my little garden to spray ant poison all over his house and the herbs I was growing for tea.
Out of the city, out of the walls and doors and artificial light of every day.
Away from the ceaseless grating whirr of Carlos’ blender. What does he blend all day? 

It doesn’t matter. Today, we are free. 
This is the precious day of the week when your “weekend” day overlaps with mine, the day we set out early and expect to come home late. It’s just us these days, and we take our ritual cleansing very seriously as we set out into the wild.

At first, we thought we would go to a different place each time, finding strange paths to get lost on…breathing in the forest one week, salty sea air the next. But, it didn’t work that way. You see, we found a home. It was the place where we really lived together after a week of going through the motions of our city life routine, of punching time clocks and making the bed, paying bills and folding laundry.

I don’t remember the exact moment it became ours. It happened so organically we didn’t even notice we had forsaken every other wild place on the planet for this one glorious creek.
And so this morning, we escape. We go home.

You know, there was this boy I used to come here with. Before you. We would climb together and he didn’t know about the creek or at least never thought it was worth taking the time away from Little Yosemite to explore. It was different, the climbing thing. I was always trying to get somewhere. I had a goal and I would accomplish it and then I would go home. The elements were all there to be conquered or tolerated.

And then you brought me to the creek and we had no goal except to have no goal. We didn’t try to get anywhere. And the elements were all there to bask and bathe in, to give ourselves up to entirely.

We roll up our pants and step right in, shoes and all. It’s what we do every time, so we can be ready for anything. The chill of the water can be shocking, but we know that within an hour, the sun will be searing any exposed flesh and we will be glad of having some part of ourselves in the water. This is not a place to swim. It’s shallow, just up to our knees at the highest, and full of creatures tiny and not so tiny. We always enter at the same shady spot and just follow the green snake of the creek up, up, up, and although it is the same path each time, it always feels new.

There are boulders to scramble on and places where the trail meets the creek and follows alongside for a while. If we’re going to encounter any other humans, this is where it happens, but most of the time it is our own kingdom.

Perhaps this is why we always come back. Here, we feel like the only two people left on earth. It is you and I, the hot, dry air, sometimes heady with sulfur, the fiery intensity of California sun in high Summer, the solid rock beneath our feet and our backs when we sprawl out for a post-meal rest, and the water that cools our baked skin and provides a glassy surface for skipping stones.

Just that.

Senses buzzing, this kingdom of ours glittering in such crystal clear focus…
The everyday drifts apart and the gunshots, sticky loquat and Carlos’ blender are many thousands of miles away.

 

Eventually, we come back to the place we call home but isn’t home, a little dazed and drunk with thirst and hunger and happiness, ready to fast forward to the next day when your weekend overlaps with my weekend, when we can once again wash away all the stuff in between that gets in the way of living.

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Golly, what babies we were. Wow.