Bless Our Damn Hearts, We're Lucky

 

The flamingo floats eternally on the green pond in the camellia bed.

The frogs are not disturbed.

Home and home and home is where you come and the walls sigh their heavy sigh and say, "You are here," and the dogs bark and you find all their poop and clean it up and YOU sigh and get out the mop and you unpack the stuff and you go to bed and you get up and here you are.
Home.

Such a beautiful morning to be home. It rained here, poured, drenched, filled up the coffers of green's sweet need, wet the ground and made it cool again.

The sun is shining filtered through the trees and making glory, glory hallelujah in the side yard, as it does.

It shines up the figs on the fig trees, it reveals their perfect fig-shape, oh Adam, do not weep for me.

I went out and let the chickens out, the big ones first and then Mr. Moon and I decided to let the young ones and Flopsy out too. Flopsy's babies walk in and out through the wire of the coop anyway and are outside the fence half the time which drives her crazy because she can't get out to be with them so we just opened the door and she flew through it and began to scratch like crazy- new dirt to scratch in! and the babies followed her and here came Elvis, the father of these chicks.

It went okay. Elvis sort of tried to fuck Flopsy but she side-stepped him and he left her alone.

 

 

The teenagers haven't quite figured out the exit thing yet but they will. Here's the quail-looking one, on top of his/her (I hope, hope, hope her) little shelter. Those banties can fly like crazy. 

 

 

It is so odd to me that the only new chick I've named is Curly Sue who is looking so much like her daddy. 

 

All of the other babies are unnamed little beings. There are the three of Flopsy's and the six of the incubator hatchlings. Well, only five of that group came from our incubator. The sixth came from next door. The product of an unwanted pregnancy and an uninterested mother. 

The zinnias are blooming! Ah, the garden is mess but the zinnias are blooming. They bring joy, joy, joy, down in my heart. 

 

I've got to get in the garden and dig up my potatoes and tie up my tomatoes and see if there's anything I can do about the multitude of buggy pests attacking everything. And clean up the kitchen where every surface is covered with things which do not belong where they are sitting and sweep up the dog hair in the hallway and make this place my own again. It's so funny how even three days away can cause such a disturbance and a turbulence in the order of my home.

Vergil and Jessie are out helping Mr. Moon clean the boat and there is oatmeal with apples and raisins ready for them and they will be going home today. They will drive away, unlike Hap and Julia, who took off in Hap's plane late yesterday afternoon. I stood outside yesterday and waved as they passed by, already so very high up in that beautiful sky. I wonder if they saw me. I was waving my love to them.

Coming and going, we are all coming and going all of the time, even me, hermit that I am.

I think today, though, that I am going to stay right here. Maybe go down to the post office. No need to go further. I have everything I need, right here. For now. By tomorrow I will need to see those boys and their mama and I also need to see May and Hank. May made me cry on the phone yesterday, calling to wish me Happy Mother's day. She had spent all day at work, serving generations of mothers their Mother's Day brunch and she said she didn't see any families who looked like they loved each other the way our family does.

Do you know what that means? It means my life is good. It is better than good. It is everything I ever could have wanted and never even imagined. A life of beans and zinnias, chickens and babies, sky shot with golden beams, sky shot with silver arrows, sky filled with green magnolia leaves, sky filled with live oak branches holding silvery Spanish Moss, draping, dreaming, dripping onto the resurrection fern, feet on ground, old black dirt, hearts beating, entwining, going apart, coming back together, home where we live and sometimes eat oatmeal with raisins and apples and the blackberry honey that Julia brought us from North Carolina.

Love...Ms. Moon