Green Thumbing

August 17, 2012 by

Let me tell you all about gardening here.  I have two gardens!  What a lucky little beast I am.  One is here at the house and it’s a good size but the deer fence needs some work and a few days ago that little, velvet antlered buck that haunts the shade behind the chicken coop managed to mow my lettuce patch, nip the tops of all the beets and consume most of my pea vines.  On the bright side, that darn deer doesn’t seem to like tomatoes — what luck!  Over at the smokejumper base, we have our community garden and my oh my, it is utterly spectacular at the moment.  The boys take so much pride in growing things and beautifying the base, it’s very dashing to watch.  I mean, they’re just such darling men.  The garden is a verdant, rich, diverse space that is literally frothing with ripe veggies right now.  Since most of the boys are currently deployed to other bases in Montana and Oregon, or out on local fires, I have taken the very great liberty of picking everything that is ripe, a few days in a row now.  Robert calls it raiding (and he is home at the moment, by the way, which makes me very happy) because if it’s ripe, I pick it, put it in my garden tote, bike it home in the milk crate I have attached to the back of my bicycle and then I ferociously eat it all like the veggie glutton I am.  I promise (maybe), I would share if the boys were home.  If it’s any consolation or proof of the quality of my character, the last time the bunkhouse boys came home after being on the road, I cooked them a beautiful garden dinner that was scrumptious, I mixed them all refreshing cocktails and we relaxed together in the living room and watched a movie.  It was so very nice to have them all home, all at once.

This morning I picked peas, a full bag of cherry tomatoes (of various persuasions), a few onions, a few pattypan squash, beets, and some herbs.  Robert hovered over me the entire time, once he was back from his morning briefing, warning me not to step on his prize pumpkin (he’s always growing a prize pumpkin) and proudly pointing out the melons in the melon patch.  He has such a green thumby plant tending soul to him.

This is all to say, I love to be in the garden.  I also love to sit with house plants all around me on quiet winter mornings when the world outside is sleeping and white.  That green.  It’s a quiet therapy, you know, the dazzling green all around.  It’s such a peaceful thrill, the sudden realization, when a space is more silent than noise, the turning of a book page is thunder, when I hear a chloroplastic humming and the everchance of root reach deeper and wider into soil — those moments of natural high always happen in the presence of the deepest greens.  In the garden, there’s the scent of growth, thick in the air, widening in concentric circles, foot by foot, like the reaching of the melon vines and the creeping stretch of corn husk.  My arms smell like tomato vines, my toes tingle.  The squash blossoms are a ricocheting-feist-orange, I want to press them over my face to breathe in some deeper chroma-harmony until I feel a sudden music trilling in my veins.  The garden is such a beautiful drug.  I always go back for more.

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Now, I do wish you were all coming to dinner this evening.  I’m going to stuff a couple squash with bell pepper, onion, country bacon, goat cheese and quiona and I’m going to partner these little stuffed squash with a delicious and gorgeous gem-toned beet salad.  If I make it into town this afternoon, I’m going to buy a nice bottle of something or a fizzy beer to go with it and if I’m really feeling generous, I might garner a ruby red steak for Robert because my fella seems to love a piece of meat to go with all the veggies I’m always feeding him.  Later in the day, once I am finished working, I’d like to make it to the lake to cool my heels and read a book in the shade between swims.  I’ve had a hithery tithery sort of week here, lots of annoying errand running gone wrong (which is the price to pay for living in such a beautiful little remote and inconvenient spot, frankly) and I’m ready for an afternoon of bliss-itude near some tranquil blue beneath the kind trunks of stalwart trees.  It’s such a beautiful day here.  The sky is clear blue and celestial cooing as far as the eye can see.  As I biked home from the garden, every time I had a slight push of breeze against my back, I found myself in a pool of scent sense:  green onion and basil whiffs swirling up over my back and down my arms.  The dogs are passed out on the lawn in the shade, it’s already hot, Titus is cheeping for grasshoppers.

Duty calls.

XX

:::Post Scriptus:::

A heartfelt thanks to every-lovely-one who visited my shop yesterday while I was listing a handful of rings.  Your support means the stars to me.  If you have a second, check out this beautiful essay by Wally on the topic of home  — it’s going to make you want roots, if you don’t have any at the moment.  Also, put this on and turn it up and see if you can keep your body still (thanks Dana).  It’s impossible.  I’m freaking out all over the living room floor right now, leg slapping, hand clapping, knee jerking, hair shaking…if it doesn’t make you dance, you’re hopeless.

:::Post Scriptus Scriptus:::

I should share with you here a cocktail that I invented the other week that has now been officially named “The Jumper Wife“.  It is utterly refreshing and fizzy, including the melon cubes at the end of the drink.  Here are the ingredients:

*Italian lemonade — the bubbling sort

*gin

*cubed honeydew melon

*one fresh basil leaf from yonder garden

(a few blueberries are also a lovely additional option, if you’re in the mood)

It’s such a gorgeous, refreshing flavor combination and and is still delicious if you choose to skip the gin — I am a free-pouring gal and I mix to my personal taste so I apologize for not including pour ratios here.  Pair it with a spectacular sunset, if you can.  Bottoms up!

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Ponderosa Milk Necklace

August 14, 2012 by

 

[the glimmering]

[sterling, onyx, enamel, resin]

For the love of the ponderosa pine tree!  Ponderosa Milk — glue of the interior West.

I really like how this piece turned out.  I mean, each time I look over at it, my eyes are surprised by the textures and dimension of the pendant and then my sight sort of audibly sighs.  I managed to use gems (huge, gorgeous, green onyx briolettes) in an unconventional way.  I didn’t just stick them in that milky white resin,  I actually had to build a tiny little wire suspension system for those stones — it’s invisible now but it was rather time consuming and nearly made me tear my hair out, to be frank.  Other things that make it special?  The handmade chain, the jangling jigsaw bark pieces hanging from the chain, the fact that I terribly burned my left middle finger while soldering one of the chain joints (worst burn of my metalsmithing career so far) — the flame went up and under my fingernail.  Can you imagine!  It hurt like heck.  Blood, sweat and tears.  I declare!  I’ve had a chunk of aloe vera strapped to my finger all afternoon, it’s quite soothing, what a magical plant.

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August Nights

August 12, 2012 by

I love that moment that comes in the evenings now, when the air switches to cool and the land around this house doesn’t look as sun burnt in the slanted sunset light.  I take out my ponytail, step out of the Airstream, and walk down the drive with the hum and spatter of the irrigation in the upper horse pasture making my little world oasis-like.  These are the August nights.

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I had a good day but a frustrating day out in the studio.  My mind is rushing and rambling with so many different ideas right now, it’s hard to draw together a cohesive design and go with it.  I’m bouncing all over the place, form to form, texture to texture, notion to notion — worse than I usually do, because let’s face it, my work is very often all over the place.  I rarely can stick to one thing, one series, and see it through to the end. For a long time I thought something was wrong with that, but I know now that it’s just how I work.  I make my way through wide circles, come back to ideas, again and again, over the expanse of time.  Things are never really laid to rest.  Not completely.  I wonder, from time to time, if I’ll ever be more steady with my personal aesthetic, with my work, if I’ll ever be one of those metalsmiths who makes a smattering of things that all look relatively the same…because I’ve found my thing and stick to it come heck or high water.  I like the look of so many different elements…perhaps the trick is to take all those different details and draw them together into single entities, single pieces of work that embody all that I love.  Gosh.

I’m feeling rushed.  I have a friend coming to visit at the end of the month, in just two short weeks, and know that part of the discombobulation of the studio work today was just me, trying to rush settling into the creative habit again after having house guests last week, trying to reach that point of rightness in my workspace before I have to give it up again.  Time feels short.  The end of summer draws nigh.  Being out of the studio, being out of the ordinary, changes my rhythm into something new and it sometimes takes me weeks to find my stride again with creative work.  I try to be patient with myself, but I can get a bit strung out while I wait to settle in to life again.  I sense our transition out of the Methow Valley and back home to Idaho coming closer and I already feel disrupted by the shadow of the move.  I fight hard to stay in the moment.  When friends phone me up and ask me out, I say yes, because I don’t want to miss out on building those relationships, on building those beautiful bridges with people I’m growing to love —  I’m not really ready to go.  Not now.  Not yet.  Getting here took so much energy.  Hopefully, going back takes less.

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I miss our friends in Pocatello.

I miss my bed.

I miss my houseplants.

I miss my ocean of sagebrush, my chickens, my little red Toyota Tacoma truck, my wardrobe, my Frye boots, my green tea kettle, my ceramic coffee cup collection, my weird kitchen, my beautiful tranquil living room, Scout Mountain in the sunrise, College Market coffee, Vain & Vintage…but depending on my mood, I don’t miss any of it at all.  Isn’t that strange?  The geography of my heart is so divided between here, Idaho and Canada that half the time I’m just walking around suspended in the windshine around me and when I stop to think about it, that’s not really such a bad thing.

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All The Trees

August 10, 2012 by

I went huckleberry hunting with the girls last night, the forest smelled like some sort of miraculous, freshly baked berry pie, zingy and stain-your-fingers-magenta.  Just gorgeous.  Our berry picking area was just down a slope from what is believed to be the biggest tree in this forest district so we went to visit that old grandfather and he was a real beauty.

For a tree in the interior West, this is a really huge, ancient ponderosa pine.  It took three of us to wrap the trunk in a complete hug.  The bark smelled of warmth, sugar honey and caramelized sunshine.  I couldn’t help but wonder how many forest fires this tree has survived.  How often it has nearly been struck by lightning, or struck at all, over the centuries.  I wondered how many birds have built nests in its branches, how many mountain lions have scampered up its trunk, how many people have leaned up against it in a contemplative moment, how many woodpeckers have taken bugs from its trunk, how deep its roots sink into the earth…I wondered a lot about this beautiful grandfather tree.  I wondered how many generations of trees it has sired and if they know each other by name and sing a family anthem when the wind blows through their glimmering needles, and let’s take a moment to be honest here, no tree glimmers like a ponderosa pine in the sunshine.

I love ponderosa pine forests.  They might be one of my very favorite forests of all.  They are peaceful, spacious and kind.  The combination of reddish trunks with merry green crowns is chroma-textural and striking.  A ponderosa pine forest is a bright place to be.  The coastal forests always seem so dark and dripping to me and feel almost oppressive when I am in them — like the dense, black spruce forests of interior Alaska — there’s so much darkness wrapped around the green.  But a ponderosa pine canopy does such a magnificent job of filtering light and holding light.  The forest floor beneath the trees is always dry, warm, and spicy, especially on hot summer days.

In the summer, when I step under a pondi and simply breathe deep, I feel filled up with sun cinnamon, I speak in waves of light, my heartbeat is refraction.

I’ve been thinking about trees for a couple of weeks now and have come to realize that there’s nothing else on earth that lives a life of service quite like a tree.  They spend their entire lives serving the forest they belong to, the dirt between their roots, the air and wind on our planet, the birds in their branches and the animals that populate the ground beneath them.  We, as humans, lean up against them when we read our books that are printed on tree flesh, we climb them to get better views or to reach bird nests or to rescue our cats, we sigh with relief when we step inside the shade of their canopies on the hottest days, we nap beneath them, we plant them in thick rows to protect the topsoil of our fields, we cut them down and burn them to keep ourselves warm, we harvest them and build our homes, our cities, our barns out of them, we craft our rocking chairs out of their bodies (canoes, fences, cradles, kitchen tables…), we print our money on the backs of trees, we make maps out of trees so we know where we’re going, we write love letters with trees, we blow our noses with trees, make grocery lists with trees, we pour the life blood of trees on our pancakes and cry out “YUM!” with every forkload of waffle that makes it to our mouth.  Our lives are so deeply entwined with trees, in every way, every moment of the day.

Trees live their lives in service to us.  And in their death, they serve us still.

Yesterday evening, when I hugged the grandfather ponderosa pine, pressed my nose against his jigsaw bark and breathed deep his sweet summer scent, I felt a flood of gratitude for how hard this tree has worked to stand steady over the centuries, for all the trees he has sired, for the beauty of the mountains around me, for the strength and girth of his tree trunk and for the beauty of the history I could see written across the plates of his skin.  And I thanked God for all the trees.  All the beautiful trees.

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Meet Titus McFlightus

August 7, 2012 by

Well, good morning to you all!  I hope you had a fine weekend.  I’ve been meaning to do an official blog post about the cedar waxwing chick I have been taking care of for the past couple of weeks but have been so busy catching him grasshoppers to eat and trying to keep up with every day life that I just haven’t been able to find time to.  But this morning, there is a small window of time available for me to give you an official introduction and explanation of how this little bird came to be in my care.

This is Mister Titus McFlightus.  He is a Cedar Waxwing chick.

Over at the smokejumper base, he was found in the grass beneath a tree and it was presumed that he fell out of his nest before it was time.  The boys took care of him for a day or so, Robert called me multiple times to try to get to me fetch the poor thing and bring him home to care for him and I  was rather wary of this plan, not because I didn’t think I could care for a little bird, but because I knew I would fall in love with it and if it died I would be terribly sad.  You know, little birds are delicate things, you don’t know how delicate until you’re trying to keep one alive.  We went out to pizza that night, with all the boys, and one of them had Titus in the breast pocket of his button down shirt and he was so tiny then with hardly any wings and just a nubbin of a tail and I wound up taking him home that night and have been his happy little human slave ever since.

Having a wild animal as a pet is such a romantic way of living.  I’ve always wanted to have something wild to take care of and live with.  But I have to tell you something very important — wild things are very wild and they are never really tamed.  Also, they’re a lot of work.  I had no idea that Titus would eat between six and eight breakfasts before noon, every day.  I feed him cherries, blueberries and raspberries along with living grasshoppers of varying sizes that I catch by hand outside our home here.  He asks me for food constantly.  And I have to feed him!  So I do.  But it is a tremendous amount of work and it’s only because I work from home and have an alternative work schedule that I can make this a possibility, and for that I am glad, but I just wanted to make it clear that raising a wild little baby bird is not for everyone and one should seriously consider the responsibility before making the commitment.

I know.  I know.  He’s just a little bird.  But I already love him a bit and I want him to live and be healthy and happy.  I really don’t want to fail at this so I am dedicated to the work, no matter the amount of work, and in that way, it’s been a real growing experience for me, raising Titus as his mother bird would.

Now let it be known, catching live grasshoppers for this little bird is very icky work.  I don’t have a love for grasshoppers.  I am from the Canadian prairies where the grasshoppers grow up to be the size of pick-up trucks and their nasty, grinding mandibles are like backhoe scoops clawing away, ripping and tearing at things.  Don’t even get me started on their horny, thorny feet.  Ugh.  Well, I’ve had to overcome my disgust of the darn things because I probably handle about 30 or more a day now — such nasty mastication machines dribbling their horrible tobacco juices.  Titus is a little bit racist and prefers the hoppers with green skin (their skin seems to be less woody, if that makes sense, they are softer, more pliable, easier to swallow).  I oblige him when I am able.  He also prefers his cherry meat without the skin, for the most part, unless he’s really hungry.  So I peel him most of his cherries as well.  He eats a couple of times an hour.  Sometimes, if I’m in the middle of work, I just feed him whenever I am able to take a break which can sometimes be every hour and a half or so — longer stretches.  I just feed him when I can, as often as I can.

Last week, when he was needier, I was having to take him to the smokejumper base to be babysat by the boys while I was out running errands.  It was hard to get anything done.  I have to be very watchful about keeping doors and windows closed.  Additionally, I have to constantly watch to make sure the cats and dogs are not coming in the house when he is out of the safety of the sun room.  I really am his bird mother.

He is now beginning to fly around, quite a lot, larger distances.  Our house is a high ceiling-ed cabin style home  and he’s always perching up on the side beams in the rafters and zooming about the kitchen when he’s in the mood to zoom.  It can get him in trouble.  He fell in the dishwater  a few days ago.

He’s quite the sassy fellow in the mornings.  When I wake up, I immediately find him two grasshoppers outside,  let him out of his sleep basket in the sun room, feed him those bugs because he’s going berserkers asking for food (flapping his wings, gaping, cheeping and jumping off the floor).  In the kitchen, I place him on the window perch in the sunshine and immediately give him a few pieces of cherry meat as well as two droplets of water from my fingertip to hydrate him.  I pour him a shallow bird bath in a dish and place him in the water if he doesn’t hop down himself.  Then begins his wild little ablution circus.  I wish you could see it in person.

When he is finished bathing, he is quite pleased with himself.  I place him back on his perch in the sun where he drys and fluffs his feathers in the warmth of the day.

Having him and caring for him has been special.  I know I said it’s a lot of work, and it is, but it’s a lot of fun too.  I won’t fib about that.

So there you have it!  The small and mighty Mister Titus McFlightus.  I’ll give him a kiss on his dapper little beak for you.

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