Yeah. Yeah. Here's My Solstice Post

Of all the pictures I deleted, there were as many of chickens as of anything else. If there is a theme to my photography, it is sunsets and chickens. I shit you not. I have a million sunset pictures. Dog Island, Cozumel, Roseland, Florida.
And chickens- well. Up until Owen they were the main focus of my lens.
Of course now that Owen is here, the chickens do not get as much photo-time as they once did but I still like to take their pictures. They still delight my heart, these fine, fat domestic birds of mine. This morning as Mr. Moon was leaving they were in the flower bed beside the kitchen, scratching away with great industry. Mr. Moon said, "You haven't had to weed that bed all year, have you?"
"Nope," I said. "And they fertilize, too."
They're like miracles to me, those crazy hens and that crazy rooster Elvis. Organic bug and weed control, organic fertilizer, all in one delightful package of comedic seriousness. And they lay eggs for us to eat!
I swear, whoever invented the chicken should be hailed as one of the major saviors of mankind.
Or, perhaps it is just the chickens themselves who should be hailed as such. Let me ask you this- who has done more, in practical terms, for the human race? Jesus or chickens?
No contest there, babies. Not in my mind.
Jesus may have fed the masses. ONCE! Chickens have been providing us with protein for hundreds of thousands of years, good perfect protein and they can do that with nothing more than the bugs and weeds in a yard.
Maybe this should be the Church of the Chicken Shit Crazy.
I'll think about that.

Yesterday was the summer solstice and I didn't say one damn thing about it. It's been so hot here for so long that the solstice had no meaning to me. So the earth was tipped a bit more this way, the day was the longest of the year? My legs did not register the tipping and I fell asleep on the couch at nine o'clock. I'd spent an hour or so weeding in the garden, forgotten my afternoon shot of espresso and ate a nice meal.
Knock-out!
I slept right through that extra one fifth of a second or whatever it is.
I'm not a very good Druid, am I?

Tonight, though, there will be a bit of a ceremony over at Kathleen's. She is having to help one of her dear dog children into the light on Thursday due to old age. The precious dog is blind and confused and as much as Kathleen hates to do it, she knows that if the situation were reversed, she would want to be held and let go. Wouldn't we all ask for that when the time comes? And Kathleen is the most responsible animal owner I know of. Her animals are adored and better cared for than most children. This is going to be very hard for her and of course, there is the matter of the grave. A Lab is a big dog so Mr. Moon and Rich and another friend are going over to help get that ready tonight. And on top of that, Kathleen has three roosters which are making life hell for her sweet hens and so Mr. Moon is going to turn them into meat for her. Two other friends are coming over and there will be food and beer and champagne and a celebration of life and a liberation of the hens through rooster-death.
Kathleen will freeze that meat and when we have our Jezebel party, she plans on making a dinner of cock to serve. Kathleen is like that- the tenderest of hearts and a streak within her as mean as Jessie's. You can just look at both of them and know how mean they are, Jessie and Kathleen. Both as pragmatic as accountants, both as ethereal as moonbeams, both as tenderhearted as...well- you know what? I can't think of any thing or any one as tenderhearted as those two.
So this is going to be a hard week for my friend, Kathleen but tonight we will try and help her in whatever way we can, a few of her friends. Second day of summer and we'll be gathering to kill roosters, dig a grave, eat some food, comfort our friend as she is about to lose one of her best friends. One of her kids as she calls her dogs. Kids without opposable thumbs.
Her kids have never let her down. Not once. And she has never let them down either. And on Thursday she will do what has to be done in order to do the best for her kid that can be done.

Life can be cruel and so can summer. One of the most beautiful passages in the Bible tells us that to everything there is a season. I take great comfort in this.

It is the season of the heat and the dark breathing green. It is the season of the afternoon thunderstorms and the season of the harvest of too many cucumbers. It is the blackberry season and it is the season for the chickens to rest long hours under the shed in the cool, sandy dirt of Lloyd after their work of scratching.

Death has no season. It is with us at all times. But so is life. And tonight we'll gather and celebrate that while Kathleen's dear kid is still with us and we'll prepare for her death.
Her release.
As death and life have no particular season, neither does love.

We will celebrate all of that in this season of summer tonight and it will be hot and the people digging the grave and slaughtering the roosters will sweat. We will all sweat, in fact. There is no way around sweating here in Florida one day after the solstice.
Part of life like tears and blood.

And we will put our sweaty arms around Kathleen and her still-living old kid and my friend's heart will hopefully be comforted, even as it pumps the blood around her body, even as she cries, which I imagine she will.

And her hens will be happy and will scratch around their yard with their one good rooster to watch over them as mine do here and there will be meat in the freezer, cleaned and ready to cook to sustain us in the future and well, to everything there is a season and we should all be comforted in that.

And Then...

Kathleen is having a party tonight. It is ostensibly a "hole digging" party. She has fruit and nut trees she needed to plant and hasn't had the energy so instead of digging the holes herself, she planned a party, mowed a pasture and a yard, cleaned her house, had the carpets professionally cleaned, had some plumbing and electrical problems fixed and made an entire dinner so that people would come over to dig a few holes.

Uh-huh. Sure, Kathleen.
The girl loves to have parties. What can I say?

I promised her I would come.
But then, after two days of a whole lot of activity and a sunburn and all my blah, blah, blah stuff, I begged out of coming.

And then the phone rings. It's the party calling. They want me to BE THERE. All the Sex Please folks and the Wheel of Murder folks and they're offering me bribes and rides and I don't know what all to just come to the party.

And I say, Oh no. I can't put on a bra. I am sunburned. I am exhausted. I say, The health department is going to shut down my left arm pit any second now. I say, I've never felt more loved. I say, Just say FUCK a few times and then say something ugly about religion. Every one will think I'm there.

And I wish I were there but I am equally glad I'm here too. The rain is starting to come down again and I've walked my yard and collected eggs and some tomatoes. I've fed the chickens some left-over cornbread. I've put some hydrangea in a vase and a few marigolds in another. My man is watching a baseball game on TV. I think I'll make some gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches out of local, handmade cheese that Billy got me at the New Leaf Market where he works that I have been wanting to try but which costs the big $$$, and those sweet, ripe tomatoes from the garden.

No. I'm right where I belong and just knowing that people are missing me across the county, that they would call and say WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? makes me feel like...well, like I'm one of the popular kids in high school. Seriously.

Wow. Fifty-five years old and I finally feel like one of the popular kids.

Okay. I can die now. Happy.

But I hope I don't. I really want to taste that cheese.

Surprise Party

Oh my goodness, y'all. The innocent little porch visit turned into a big old Monday night wingding with smoked fish dip and salad and fruit and bread and pasta and drinks and raspberry leaf tea and games and everything. Almost all the kids were here and Billy and Shayla and Kathleen and Herb (for awhile- Herb was having some issues with an intestinal bug) and Lis and a new friend named Rob. And Hank's girlfriend Leila, too.
And I haven't had time to comment on your comments and that makes me feel so guilty because I love to do that and tell everyone how much I really appreciate what you wrote.
But I will tomorrow. I promise.
But now it's eleven p.m. and I've been up and busting it since seven and I have hit the wall.
Sweet dreams, sweet sleep.
See you tomorrow.

And here's a picture of me and Billy because I talk about him so much and I just thought there should be a picture.
Ain't he cute?
Yes. He is.

With Friends Like This, Life Is Sweet

I have a very good woman friend who is one of those people you'd hate if she wasn't so joyfully wonderful. Her talents range from organizing and putting on a major folk festival every year to baking the most stunning and delicious wedding cakes you've ever seen or tasted. She also gardens, is incredibly smart, is wicked funny, dresses with a sense of style like no one else's, AND is beautiful. To top it all off, she's also a musician who plays what I guess we could call new grass, although recently she started writing her own songs which have sprung forth from her completely formed and amazing both lyrically and musically. In fact, she's already won several song-writing contests so I'm not just saying this because I'm blinded by love. She plays guitar, she plays banjo and fiddle and piano and probably about fifteen other instruments that I'm not naming here. But her true gift, in my opinion, is her voice.

She sings like an angel. I'm telling you, the woman can make you cry. Especially when she's singing one of her own songs.

Despite all her gifts, she's incredibly unassuming and modest. She certainly never says anything to the effect of I'm a musician and you're not, although if I were her, I definitely would.

But it's funny- no matter how close we are, when she goes onstage and begins to play, the fact that we share hearts, secrets, recipes, shoes, dresses, giggles, drinks, hopes and dreams- all of that fades away and suddenly, I am struck with awe and she is, for that time onstage, someone that I can barely look at. She is a creature of wonder and mystery to me.

Our joke is that when she goes on break, I can hardly speak to her. It's more truth than joke, however. I find myself tongue-tied and might as well be in the presence of Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan.

Anyway, I'm going to drive across the state tomorrow to see this friend and I'm really looking forward to it. She and her dear husband, who is also a fine musician and songwriter, live in a small house in the Florida scrub down near Gainesville and they are the perfect hosts. They are gracious and kind and go out of their way to make me feel at home and loved and I always do.

And now, to make it even more apparent how clearly superior this woman is to me, she's managed to have a grandchild and we'll be going to see him while I'm visiting.

So I'll be off in the great world, or at least a tiny corner of it, for a few days, visiting and being in awe and kissing a baby and listening to music, and I'm sure I'll come home a new woman, one determined and inspired to practice my own art and to strive to be the sort of person my friend is- one who brings light to the world and joy to the hearts of the people she loves.

Or at the very least, a woman who is even more intrigued with the idea of becoming a grandmother than ever. I'm certainly not about to develop any musical talent at this point in my life, nor am I about to start putting on folk festivals or baking wedding cakes and I'll never be, like my friend, beloved by thousands, but I'm lucky enough to have a friend who does and who is and with a little more luck, like her, one day I'll be a grandmama because all you need for that, thank God, is children.

You too can visit Lis, in the virtual sense anyway, by going to http://myspace.com/elisabethwilliamson
It's a trip worth taking.

They Say It's Your Birthday

There's a myth out there that aging is not for wimps.
Not true.
We wimps do age. We just bitch about it more.
I'm about to have a birthday and I'm having a lot of ambivalence about it. It's not the fact that I'm turning fifty-three. Hell, how much worse is that than fifty-two? Not a whole lot. And how much better is it than fifty-four? I guess we'll see. But frankly, fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four- they all sound really tired to me. Boringish birthdays, wouldn't you say? What's to celebrate?
I have a good friend who always loved to celebrate her birthday. She was of the opinion that her life had positively impacted a lot of people and that it was a fine thing for those people to get together with her and celebrate that life on her birthday. She was right and always had huge parties with lots of friends who agreed with her.
But when it comes to me, celebrating my birthday, I have some real issues. And this year, they seem to be getting out of hand, making me sort of crazy.
Last year, I had a fabulous birthday. I got on the road the day before my birthday and drove down to Tampa where I met up with my best friends from nursing school. Back in the mid-eighties, we four women were tight. You have to have good friends in nursing school to get you through it. We studied together, partied together, cried together, laughed together. No one but someone who's been through it can understand what a summer of clinical experience at Chattahoochee State Hospital is like. It's a bonding experience- nursing school.
But we'd gone our separate ways and this was going to be our first coming together in years and years. Between us, we'd had eight children since we graduated and one of us was pregnant. Not me!
We had a wonderful little reunion and it was great to catch up. I was the only one who didn't bring kids, though, and I felt a bit old and a lot happy to have gotten through the years of child-raising that all my friends were still firmly involved with. And when I left, the next day, on my birthday, it felt like I was driving away from all responsibility and care. I drove across the state to Roseland, the little town where I spent my childhood and which I blogged about earlier. It was an incredibly beautiful drive, and it was with true happiness that I sat on the dock over the river the night of my birthday and watched the sun go down. I spent almost a week there, eating what I wanted to eat, going where I wanted to go, having adventures on my own, writing for hours every day, taking care of no one but me. Any mother knows what I'm talking about here.
And that was just a great birthday. I celebrated me and it was perfect.
I should have remembered that for this year, and it's not like I didn't, but I just felt like for some reason, I shouldn't go off this year. We've got a trip planned for next month with all the kids to go down to Weeki Wachee Springs where we're going to meet up with my nursing school buddies again and that's going to be swell. And my husband and I were just in Roseland last month for his birthday.
So what do I want to do for this one?
Everyone keeps asking me. Kids, husband. A precious girlfriend called me and asked me if I'd like her to cook a meal for me, have everyone over to her house. That was a gift in and of itself.
But I'm so weird about all of this.
I love getting presents and having a fuss made over me as much as the next person. BUT, I don't.
I get very uncomfortable when given presents, and despite the fact that I've given literally hundreds of birthday parties for my own family alone, when it comes time for my birthday, I just get all Old Jewish Mother and martyrly. No fusses for me, please! I don't need a cake. I don't want anything. I don't need a thing in this world.
And yet, if no one makes a fuss, I get hurt. I know this is crazy. No one needs to point this fact out to me.
And I'm trying to figure out why.
I keep thinking about how I used to go out with another dear friend on her birthday, which was the day before mine. We'd go out on her birthday and come home on mine. We'd have dinner, go listen to some music, have some drinks, dance, laugh, and give each other our presents.
She's dead now. Died fifteen years ago and I miss her every day and when her birthday comes around, I miss her bad. So there's that.
And my friend who believed that her life was worth celebrating? She's in a nursing home, suffering from a horrendous neurological disorder that makes it almost impossible to take her out, much less throw a big wingding for her. And all those friends? They never come visit her. So there she is, her fifties passing her by as she spends her days sitting in the hallway of a nursing home, unable to communicate or do one damn thing for herself. She can't even turn on her CD player, put a little Beatles in to dance to.
And all of this should make me realize how precious the years are, make me want to celebrate them.
Somehow, though, I just mostly get sad.
And since I'm a wimp, I bitch about it.
And I have no idea what I want to do for my birthday. Today it feels like I want to dig a hole and crawl into it.
I hope I feel differently by Saturday, I truly do.