Squirrel Hunting, Keith Richards, Camellias. You Know- The Usual

My friend Billy's beloved grandparents are fixing to move to an assisted living facility and before they go, Maw-Maw wants to cook and eat squirrel one more time. She is guessing that squirrel will not be on the menu at the AL dining room and she's probably correct.
Anyway, Mr. Moon who adores Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw, as do I, volunteered to be the squirrel hunter and don't you just wish you could see a picture of him walking around our back yard with a rifle?
Our new neighbors may not understand what is going on. Mr. Moon reports that they all went in their house and shut the doors. They probably believe we are redneck hooligans when actually, we are...well, redneck hooligans.
Not really.
I've never eaten squirrel in my life but I am not morally opposed to it. God knows there are plenty of squirrels around. Hundreds in my backyard alone. And they're all fine and fat, dining as they do on the pecans from the trees to the point where we never, ever get a pecan that hasn't been chewed into and the corn scratch I throw for the chickens as well as the birdseed we set out for the wild birds.
So if Maw-Maw wants squirrel I am glad to let her have a few of ours. I wouldn't be surprised if squirrel had been cooked and served in this house more often than any other source of protein over the years and that's no joke. Protein is where you find it and there's never been a butcher shop in Lloyd as far as I know and certainly no grocery store. Miss Ruby, back when she was alive and before her store burned down, sold sausage that was pretty good. But squirrel has always been available for the shooting and skinning. Just because I'm too damn precious to eat it doesn't mean I wouldn't if we were hungry and broke.
Or had a hankerin', as Maw-Maw does.

So we watched that DVD last night. It was fine. It wasn't nearly as fine as watching that live show a few weeks ago. Sorry, but it just wasn't. My favorite part was when Keith and Mick took the stage with Keith playing a 12-string and Mick sang "As Tears Go By" which was one of the first songs they ever wrote together and which they gave to Marianne Faithfull and which she recorded and was a hit in 1964.





It was one of the few times in the entire film when Mick and Keith actually "had a moment." I have to say that Jagger really doesn't give one molecule of himself to Keith if he can help it but Keith seems to understand and his face gives it all to everyone on the stage and it's glory when he smiles, which he does a lot. I may be wrong but it seemed to me as if Shine A Light was more of a love letter to Keith Richards than anything else and I think I'd sort of like to own the DVD because there were a lot of moments when the camera was loving that old craggy face as Keith was loving the music. When Keith was young he really wasn't the best looking man on the planet but now that he's older I think he's settled into beautiful. Isn't that strange?

Okay. I should probably stop talking about the Rolling Stones. I do understand and realize that I've gone way past normal boundaries here and am heading right into Obsession Land or maybe I'm already there but as I pointed out to May yesterday, it's not like I'm stalking them or have any desire to actually meet Keith Richards although if we did accidentally meet up somewhere (where? the Post Office in Lloyd?) I would so happily shake his hand and tell him thanks.
I would be too afraid of Mick Jagger to even look at him directly so he's safe.

Well, it's a beautiful Saturday morning and Lily reports that Jason may have rebroken his foot while playing with Owen and also that Owen fixed his own breakfast by microwaving a piece of pizza for himself. That child. Owen is fine and Jason took four Ibuprofen and went to work.

I'm not sure what the hell I'm doing today but it will probably involve some yard work and maybe even a little housework. This warm, warm air is delightful but a bit worrisome- it ain't natural. But the ants have all started coming up from their deep-in-the-earth winter beds and are breaking ground and making huge ant piles so they're thinking it's spring too. Damn. Well, nothing I can do but clear away some of winter's detritus and tidy things up both in and out and it's too pretty to spend too much time inside even with all the doors and windows open. Whatever I do I am not going to push myself. It's been one goddammed hell bitch of a week and it was one week ago that I was sick as a dog and then Mother fell and I didn't have time to be sick anymore and there was that night of horror in the hospital and I had the boys two days which was wonderful but somewhat exhausting.
I may not be eighty-five like my mother but I am fifty-eight and that's old enough to be sweet to myself when possible and I think it is possible today. I might even wash the sheets and hang them on the line so that they can gather in and hold some of this air and light.

Here are some pictures from my yard this morning. Mostly camellias, but not all. Do you see the bee making love to the blossom in the second picture?

Good morning from Lloyd.

Love...Ms. Moon

If Nothing Else, This

They're called Pink Perfection for a reason, no?

Owen caught five fishes at the sink hole today and now he's at the circus with his mama and daddy. Big day for that boy. Here's his new thing he says when he doesn't want to do what you have in mind: Hang on!
Hang on. I love it. It's somehow better than No way! which he still says. A lot. Two year old boys have their own agenda and it frequently does not agree with their grandmother's.

Mr. Moon and our friend Tom came down to the Opera House today to help build the stage. We're doing this play downstairs, which means that a stage has to be built and those men got 'er done. Judy and Jack and George helped too. I took my script and walked around in Monticello and studied lines and looked at old houses and stole those camellias from a yard in which sat a house that had "For Sale" and a number to call spray painted on it.
Why not? No one was living there. The thorn vines were taking over the camellias. Now they are a glory on my hall altar in my grandmother's old tea pot. The handle has been broken and glued so I don't trust it for tea any more but the color is too blue and lovely to throw it away and so it holds camellias when they are blooming. I could fill the house with camellias. When I hear the term "Japanese Import" I think of camellias.
Camellia Japonica.
Thank-you, Japan.

Some Spanish moss came home with the camellias. I liked it and left it.

When Lily told Owen that they were going to go fish with Bop, she asked him if he thought Mer would come. He told her that no, Mer would not be coming. She had to make dough.

Am I already stereotyped?

Actually, I had to stay home and study lines. I feel the lace of my swiss-cheese brain trying to retain these lines. The ones I know, I know. The ones I do not know I most certainly do not know. And they are all lines like this:
Hello, hello. Are you all right?
Hello, hello. Where are you?

The great blasts of dialogue lines I can handle. It's those little sparks of inset hellos which are making me insane.

My hands smell of arugula. I picked some for our salad.
Camellias have no odor that I can detect. Unlike roses and other scented flowers, camellias don't need perfume. They are perfection in their appearance. They are sometimes red and sometimes white and sometimes pink and sometimes coral and sometimes striped but they are perfection, no matter what.

It's going to get cold tonight. The moon is a slice of silvered melon. The cats meow for their dinner. The chickens cuddle on the roost. I go out to tend them and look up to the stars on my way there and back. The magnolia leaves are dark and sharp against the light of the house.

The camellias were free and I took them. They are the ones who found their way home and will not fall to the ground, brown and unnoticed.

If nothing else today, I did that. I brought home doomed camellias and I let them be as beautiful as they were meant to be, right here and called them glory and I guess that's something. In my grandmother's blue teapot beside the found turtle shell with Spanish moss they are glory. And every time I pass them I shall call them that in my mind and also, I will remember that house, abandoned, spray painted with a number to call and for sale, the camellias bending to the thorn vines, but glory, nonetheless, just unnoticed, just waiting to be freed.

An Embarrassment of Riches

Mr. Moon went out hunting this morning and I went out gathering.

Although it's seventy-something degrees here, it's overcast and the wind is blowing. The windchimes are playing music all over the place and the magnolia tree's stiff, glossy leaves are making a rattling music of their own.

And it's supposed to get back down into the twenties by tomorrow night.

Ah well.

Last night, when we went out on the front porch to have our Friday happy hour drink, I noticed that the Sea Foam Camellia, which I transplanted here from the last place I lived, was FULL of flowers. Unbelievable.

So this morning I went out and cut them all because they're going to be brown and dead and hanging from their bush-mother in forty-eight hours if I don't. Now they're gracing my hallway, along with a few pink ones from the back yard. I do not know their name and I feel shame at that. What kind of an old Southern Lady Gardener am I if I don't even know the names of my camellias?

Not a very good one. Not a BONA FIDE one, I'll tell you that. Did you know that bona fide is two words? I didn't either. But I see by the dictionary that it is, and it comes from the Latin meaning, "in good faith."

For my favorite useage ever of the word(s) bona fide please check out the following:



And, to get us back to camellias, I give you this:



It's Saturday, the wind is blowing a coldness our way, the camellias are posing in their petticoats in my house. A train is going by, scattering the birds with its sound, and I am happy.

Oh. Mr. Moon was as successful in his hunting as I was in my gathering and brought home meat.

Children, that man is bona fide.

Until Spring, These Will Do

Eh. Damp and chilly here today and supposed to rain and then get down into the twenties again.
Dang. I just unwrapped my porch plants and now I'll have to wrap 'em up again.

Winter is just not my favorite season. There are things about it I like, the number one being the fact that when I have a hot flash at night, I always have a cold, cold pillow to drag from beneath the window and hug to my body which is a sort of ecstasy no man will ever know.

And also, the camellias.

When we moved here, there was only one camellia bush in the whole yard, which shocked the hell out of me. Also, no mulberry tree. And no palms except for a whole bunch of sagos, which are not really palms at all, but are pretty, nonetheless although they are hell to trim because their branches are sharp as needles and when they prick you, which they invariably do, they leave a sore itchy place.

I brought two camellias with me which I transplanted and they are doing nicely and Mr. Moon and I cleaned out a bed in the back yard which cried out for camellias and we bought and planted a few more.

Now camellias are not an instant answer to your landscaping problems. They take forever to grow and by golly, if you see a camellia big enough for a child to climb, that thing must have been there for a hundred years. I have lived in houses with camellias like that.

But anyway, my baby camellias in the back yard which Mr. Moon and I planted are just starting to bloom this year, their fourth year, here in Lloyd and every one of them is a gift. Their bright blossoms stand out in the dull winter landscape like candy on a gray tablecloth. I am loathe to pick them but pick them I do because they are going to turn brown and drop off their bushes anyway and if I put them in my vase, I can enjoy them every time I walk by, which is about fifty times a day.

The funny thing is, my very favorite camellia is the Pink Perfection


which is pink and which is perfect and which I could have sworn was one of those which I brought over from my old house. However, that poor drought-stressed bush is finally blooming this year and it is NOT a Pink Perfection, although it is a lovely camellia, white with pink borders, the yellow stamens in the center.

How could this have happened?

Well, luckily the nurseries sell them and I will just go out and buy one and plant it.
Because winter is gray and brown and chilly and damp and everything I can do to try and cheer up my little part of the world when it's like this is a good thing. I make soup, I plant camellias. I wait for them to bloom.

And Mr. Moon keeps the bird feeder supplied with seed and the cardinals come and make a spot of brilliant scarlet that flutters and dips to feed. Yesterday I saw a huge pileated woodpecker climbing a pecan tree, his red and black and white feathers a startling contrast to the gray sky, the gray of the leafless, resting pecan. A gift.




Some seasons you have to pay a little bit closer attention to find color, to see the sort of beauty that stirs your heart.

Spring is a cheap thrill, only in that it is so abundantly full of life and color and I look forward to that glorious over-abundant spill of dogwood blossoms, wisteria and azalea.

But for now, I must make do with the delicate beauty of the camellia, the tiny sweet faces of the white violets blooming in the yard over near the old barn, the birds at the feeder and in the trees, their sudden explosion of color a shock, a thrill, a blessing of swift flying joy in the midst of the otherwise dull winter palette here in North Florida.

Haiku For My Neighbor

Today I stole a
White camellia from your yard.
I don't think you mind.