Oh Dear No, My Darlin's

I am afraid I gave the wrong impression in that last post. I seriously doubt I will be posting any less. I just hope I am going to be posting better.

My presence will not be as felt elsewhere in the blog world. And I may not answer all my comments. We shall see. I have a feeling that the world will still continue to turn on its axis. Your toilet will still flush when you flush it.

But no, no, no. You can not take my crack away from me. You can not take my joy.
I must write. And as long as I have breath in my body I will.
I hope.

For instance- here it is, Monday night and Mr. Moon is out of town and I've just gotten back from a rehearsal and if there is anything I want to do more than sit here on my back porch with the frogs shrilling my ears out and my fingers taking the thoughts I have and making them visible, I don't know what it is.

Oh! it has been a beautiful day. The sun shone and it was warm enough to make me want to go outside and I did. I cleaned out the chicken coop and put fresh hay down for the hens to nest in and I trimmed up some of the frozen plants in my yard and on my porch. My poor plants! I have lost a few. I hope not as many as I fear. I ripped the whole damn huge spider plant out of its pot, though, and I threw it away. It was nothing but a greenish brown mush of a plant and I have so many of its babies in another pot which has survived. I was amazed to see that a small and delicate-looking begonia which is in the backyard and which I did not even cover up was fine. Now how did that happen? I have no idea. We never know, do we? Or at least, I don't.

I know we'll get more freezes. It's inevitable. But for now, we are experiencing a sweet reprieve from the last several week's misery, time enough to soften our bodies, our faces, to truly feel and appreciate the warm sun as it cuts through the cool air to fall on our skin.

I've already killed a mosquito in the last few days and so has Mr. Moon so do not tell me that cold weather kills those motherfuckers. It does not. I have never believed it did, hearing as I have that Alaska has mosquitoes the size of moose. Is that true, Nola? The only time our mosquito population goes down is during times of drought and I worry then so much about the birds and frogs that live on the mosquitoes that it's hardly a comfort that they're gone.
Everything is connected and yes, call me a hippie, but I truly believe that all is one.

I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had not planted even one pot of pansies for winter color. I have often wondered why anyone who is perceived as a weakling is called a "pansy." Pansies can take whatever winter brings them and still bloom and be beautiful. They are strong and don't you forget it! The other day Kathleen told us that Lowe's had baskets of pansies and Sweet Williams on sale for a buck apiece and Mr. Moon got me some when he went to get a light bulb for the kitchen. And some cyclamens in small pots, too, which I have never been able to keep alive but they were something like twenty-nine cents apiece so he brought some home. They are so pretty.
And so today I thought about where I want to plant my flowers and I took the time after I did my trimming to put some of the Sweet Williams in a pot on the kitchen porch which had held a New Guinea Impatiens which died a nasty-looking death in the freeze and then I planted two of the cyclamens, one in a terra cotta pot, another in an old enamel pot with holes in it that Mr. Moon had found in the woods behind the garage and set up on a fence post.

Those spots of color make me so happy. They may not last but for now, they are beautiful to me. And perhaps tomorrow I will even sweep the steps.

I'm not sure where I'm going to plant the other things but I'll figure it out. It feels so fucking good to get my hands in the dirt.

My chickens discovered the plants waiting to be planted and this is what they looked like:

Red, Miss Betty and Mable. They are the hens which fly out of the hen house in the morning when I open the door to escape having to spend the entire day with a sex fiend. They scratch around and dig with their funny feet and whenever I come outside they come running to me. "Grapes, Mama?" they ask and if I have none, they turn aside in disgust and go back to whatever it was they were doing. Kathleen and I agreed the other day that chickens are good examples for us all. They are industrious a good part of the day but they rest, too, either on the roost or fluffed down into the dirt. I love watching them as they go about their explorations for good things to eat. The cats seem to as well. I often find them sitting sentinel over the chickens as they go about their busy-ness, the cats lying in the shade, watching all of this work going on with great interest but no desire to join in or threaten the chickens. I find this amazing. Sometimes I find the cats, the chickens and the squirrels all occupying the same few yards of space and I feel as if I am in a lion-laying-down-with-the-lamb situation and it makes me smile.

And after the yard work I sat down and tried to learn a few more lines. My brain feels like a sieve. Just as I think I have a few lines down pat, they leave me and I remember the gist, but not the exact way the words need to fit together. It's frustrating but it's good for my brain to work like this. I went to a rehearsal after Mr. Moon left town and before we started, I wanted to make an announcement. I felt the way you feel with a few beers in you and you have all that boozy love for everyone around you and you feel compelled to tell them. "Hey man, I love you, man!"
But I was stone cold sober and still, I felt that way. This little group of people I'm playing with. We pretend to drink our tea, pretend to knock on doors the way children do when they play. It's ridiculous and profoundly lovely. The play is going to be perhaps the most fun play I've ever been associated with. Instead of lying beneath Colin, he is going to end up with his face in my crotch. Oh my! How insane it's going to be for the "young people" to see all of us "old people' making jokes about sex, wanting to have sex, having sex (not onstage, I assure you!) and talking about libidos in older age, talking about champagne and caviar and roses and moonlight and Viagra and hot flashes.

Ah-lah. Sex Please, We're Sixty, being the name of the play, people should expect a little geriatric juiciness. And they are going to get it! Monticello will never be the same. And do you know how glorious it is to go from digging in the dirt and hauling dead plants and branches and mucking out the hen house to saying lines that will make my children blush?

The richness. The riches.
And tomorrow Owen comes back and I will have him for hours and if we make it to the Post Office and watch the chickens and collect eggs and I get the breakfast dishes washed, it will be a good day. Here he was on Sunday with his Pop-Pop:


Not a great picture but a picture of my two great loves. He is working on MORE teeth and for awhile on Sunday he cried so hard that it shook my soul and made me more upset than anything I've experienced since Jessie was a baby, most likely. He was inconsolable and I had to send him back to his mama for her break, still shrieking with anger and pain, I suppose, and I shook all the way to Monticello, driving to rehearsal. But he has been fine since and I hope he will be fine tomorrow. I'll show him the flowers and the chickens and we'll play giggle games and maybe I'll get to watch Wife Swap.

Ah yes. The frogs are still singing, it is getting cooler and cooler and I think I'll go in and heat up some leftovers and watch TV for awhile and then I'll go to bed and sleep through the night, although as my character in the play says, "What I wouldn't give for one night's good sleep without waking up drenched!"

Me too. I wake up so many times a night with hot flashes but it's okay. I go back to sleep soon and I love my dreams of chaos and parties and confusion and the Opera House and friend's faces and it's almost like an entire other life I live in my sleep. I remember the days when I woke up because my baby needed me and it's nothing compared to that. I think the best thing about being a grandmother is that I get to enjoy that baby boy during the days but I always get a decent night's sleep, hot flashes be damned.

I am blogging without guilt. I am doing what I love. And I will check on you. You are part of my joy. I promise you.

Good night, sweet people. Sleep well and I will too and tomorrow we will tell each other some more stories.

If we want to. If we want to, we can.