Friday, quotidian

1.

I’ve been circling a stack of fabric, waiting for a quilt. I thought it would involve stars, ones I pieced together a few years ago, and I thought it would involve the Big Dipper, and for weeks I’ve been thinking about how I might do that. Now I don’t want to. Or at least not just yet. But I am lost without something to sew, the experience of finding my way through my thinking with thread and cotton. So I’ve laid out a dark length of cotton/linen and some patches of Japanese cotton. I still don’t know quite what I’m doing but at least I have the materials.

2.

At least I have the materials. Ocean spray (Holodiscus discolor) stakes to cut for supports for the 38 tomato plants in the former garlic bed–Pruden’s Purple, Pink Brandywine, Coracao de boi (seeds bought in the Bolhao market in Porto in March after tasting the huge tomatoes sold there), San Marzano Lampedina. Comfrey leaves for the smelly tea the tomato plants love. Coffee grounds to feed the five blueberry plants around the garden’s southern fence.

3.

The garden’s southern fence is a tangle of honeysuckle, deep pink moss roses, a rampant apricot climber, and the sound of hummingbirds. On a stump, facing west, an elk skull, brought down from the mountain after discovering it, and the rest of its skeleton, the skull being used for target practice. Sometimes elk pass the garden and I wonder if they see the skull, wide-eyed, looking out.

4.

Wide-eyed, looking out, the megaloceros at Lascaux, the bison at Altamira, the panel of horses at Chauvet. I was reading in bed last night and this morning. I was (re)reading Gary Snyder’s Back on the Fire and stopped at this:

Crisp, economical, swift, sometimes hasty; fitting into the space, fitting over other paintings, spread across…outlined in calligraphic confident curving lines. Not photo-realistic, but true.

And when I came downstairs, I said, I have a travel wish list. Oh, what’s that, replied John, pouring coffee into my mug from Sointula, with a gillnet and corks. The caves of France and Spain. I need to see those animals. That shouldn’t be too difficult, he said.

Note: the quoted passage is Gary Snyder, from “Entering the Fiftieth Millennium”, in Back on the Fire (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007)