A Wondering Wandering

It's that time of year again. The bamboo is coming up. I wrote about it last year here.
I realize that last year the bamboo was coming up on March 28th. It's been a slow spring this year and here it is April 10th and the bamboo is just making its appearance.

I did not pose the bamboo with a flip-flop this year. Sorry. You'll just have to imagine how tall it is, how stout its girth is. Was. I kicked that mother-fucking sprout OVER. It's gone. Well, it's actually still laying there in the yard but it's not going to grow any bigger. That's the good thing about bamboo. When you kick over a sprout of it, it does not come back up in that same place. For at least a year, anyway.

I also see, from going back a year in the blog that the tung tree, which I wrote about in the same post as the bamboo, was in much fuller bloom on March 28th than it is now. It's only starting to open.

But there you go- the earth has its own internal clock and it is more accurate for the earth's purposes than the one on my wall and its calender is more accurate even than the Mayan's was, which is more accurate than the one we use. And no, I do not think the world is going to come to an end in 2112 but if it does- I won't be around to care so there is that.

Mr. Moon is preparing to go to the island to do a bit of a reconnaissance mission to see what this past winter's cold has done to the house. Pipes must have frozen and no one drained them this year so there must be that to deal with. One never knows when one crosses the bay and then unloads the boat of the supplies you'll need (food, beer, drinking water- not in that order, necessarily) and loads up the Jeep and drives down the soft sandy road to the house, what one will find when one gets there. It wouldn't actually surprise me to find the house entirely gone one of these days. The water has been rising so that what was once our beach is now good fishin' and I wonder how many years the dunes that are in front of the house will be there with their sea oats, their pieces of driftwood we've collected, the aloe plants our partner in the house has planted.
I will be so sad when the sentinel pine trees disappear. And they will. Eventually they will.

The ghosts of other pine trees litter the beach on the island and even in the ten or so years I've been going there I can see drastic changes in the shape and width of the shore. Global warming or natural shifting of a barrier island and its sands? I don't know.

Seems to me that the most over-used phrase at Bless Our Hearts is I don't know. I use it honestly, I'll say that, because mostly I do not know. I don't know the meaning of life, I don't know why I do half the things I do, I don't know why I'm such a lucky woman, I don't know how tides really work (even though I have tried to understand- really) and I don't have the slightest idea why I have four dogs. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what all I do not know.

And I think you can probably tell (if you've gotten this far) that I don't know where I'm going with this post. My brain feels a bit scrambled this morning, not unlike the flan I made last night which was lovely, lovely until I tried to upside-down it on a platter at which point it became, well, scrambled. But god, it was delicious.

Unlike this post.

I got an e-mail this morning accusing me of being a lot of very unattractive things. It didn't make me angry because I don't feel that I am really most of the things I was accused of but I think my brain is processing it all, trying to make sense of something there may be no sense to that I will ever be able to discern.

I feel like a friend of mine who was called by someone else a "buck-toothed, slew-footed bimbo," and who replied, "I am not slew-footed."

Throw enough out there and something will stick. Something will ring true.

And really, what I need to do is get my ass out in the garden and weed. That is exactly what I need to do. Get in dirt and get dirty and be surrounded by...dirt. The real kind. That kind that one can produce food out of and flowers, too.

I've made sandwiches and packed them with flan and grapes for Mr. Moon and our neighbor who are about to leave. The boat is hitched to the truck, they are doing their final loading.
There are dishes to do and Owen is coming for a short time today. I have so much I want to say about that boy who is growing so fast and with whom I had more fun with yesterday than I've possibly ever had in my life. I can see the wheels turning in his head, the connections being made and it makes me feel so humble and joyful to be able to see this day-to-day rocket-like growth.

I mean- can you believe this? He knows where the cabinet is where he can find the pots and pans and he can crawl over there, open it and get them out.
His mama apologized for needing to have me watch him today when she called last night and all I could think of was, "Yes! I get him again!" I just look at that picture and I can't wait to grab him up and feel that warmth, that life, that beauty of a boy in my arms.

Well. I need to get with it. I feel like I have a whole day stretching ahead of me, but in truth, it's half-way over. Life is like that. I think. We feel like we have an entire eon of it stretching before us and we will have so much time to do what we want, what we need, what we should.
In truth, though, we no more know how long we have before us than we know how long the dunes of a beach will stand.

And so we need to make use of it as well as we can. The time, the beach, the stages of a baby's life. Whatever. And as the time gets shorter, we need to make sure we take care of the things which are really important and we also realize we need to let go of the things we cannot change.

There. That's all I can say.

The dirt is calling. The bamboo is sprouting. The flowers are blooming. The boy is coming. The men are leaving. The day is passing, the world is spinning, the universe is burning itself up and reinventing itself in glorious and unknowable ways. Have you told the people you love that you love them?
Good.
I think that may be the most important thing we can do.

Happy Saturday, y'all.

Love....Ms. Moon