Scraps Stitched Up Into A Very Small Quilt

I went outside with the camera this morning because although it is a bit warm and muggy, it's beautiful out there. I took pictures of light and of spiderwebs, abandoned but still so strong they are holding strands of jasmine straight up into the air


and one of a baby lizard that required me to stand in an ant hill (and what are five more ant bites compared to the dozens I already have?) but none of those pictures really came out to suit me.
That one, though, at the top of the page of the dark shadow of the garden gate and me with camera lifted, is sort of nice.

Jessie just called to ask how to cook black-eyed peas and collard greens. We talked for awhile about that and about her fella and how he's coming to visit in October. She is very, very excited. She has read me bits and pieces of letters from him and they certainly sound like what you would want a man to write about and to your daughter. I am looking forward to meeting him, the boy who has captured my Jessie's heart. We also talked about nursing school and how, amazingly, there are some of the same teachers as when I was there. We talked about how some of the teachers are so open of heart and helpful and how some are so tight-assed and miserable which makes your experience in their particular areas so miserable. We agreed that miserable people want everyone around them to be miserable and do whatever they can to make that happen.
I think this is a truth, no matter what field you are in.

Mr. Moon and I spent a good part of the weekend in the garden, weeding. It is all done now, the earth bare and ready to receive the fall plants and seeds. Right now the chickens are in there, benefiting from the work we did. Bringing up the roots and shaking them out before we put the weeds in the wheelbarrow brings up the bugs and those bugs will be eaten by my beloved hens and turned into perfect eggs of blue, green, and brown. Talk about elegance of design! And when I speak of "design" in this context, I am speaking not only of the egg, which is the perfect shape and the perfect protein, I am also speaking of the design of the turning of bugs and shoots into that perfect egg.

I have said it before and I will say it again, there is very little which I have ever done or experienced which has satisfied some very deep and old part of my soul like the keeping of chickens. It's like the first time I ever made a stew of vegetables and meat over a wood fire and I knew, without a doubt, that the taking of raw things and cooking them was something I was put here on earth to do. Like the first time I ever wrote a poem. Like the first time I held a fountain pen in my hand. Like the first time I ever held one of my babies.
Some things are meant to be.

Speaking of babies, I saw a pregnant woman the other day and suddenly, I had a great urge to deliver a baby. Not a baby of my own, but to catch another woman's baby. It has been so long since I was in the baby business and I have never actually caught one myself, although I have attended and helped at hundreds of births. I saw this woman at the Opera House and I know she's had about a dozen kids already (okay, maybe only like seven) and I had a fantasy that she would go into precipitous labor in the ladies room and I would be the one to help her. I could feel how the baby's wrinkled skull would feel as it emerged from his mama, how I would have to put a bit of pressure on the head, very carefully, it cupped in my hands, to get the top shoulder out, and then the bottom shoulder would come and then, whoosh! the body and I would hand the baby to the mother and call for some towels or whatever was at hand and I would check her uterus to see if it was contracting and then wait for the placenta and...
Well, as you can see, I really did think about this.
A lot.
I'm not sure why I have this urge right now to catch a baby. Perhaps because it is soon to be Owen's first birthday and I have the memory of his birth on my mind? Who knows? I don't, but it is real, this urge and I feel it in the same places I feel the need to get the fall garden in.
Our minds are strange little critters, aren't they?

Well, it is Monday and yet, a holiday, so a strange sort of Monday. Mr. Moon has gone off to the woods and will be leaving later to go to auction. I have a rehearsal at the Opera House at two. The rehearsal yesterday went very well. The energy was there, the stage is looking good. I am quite sure this is going to be a very fine production. Each actor in it has much to offer and the story is good. It's strange, being on the other side of the curtain. So much less nerve-wracking and it is such a delight to see the actors find their characters and bring them to real-life. I have done nothing, really, except make a small suggestion here or there, mostly with a word emphasis to make sure the meaning of a sentence doesn't get lost. I have no idea what I'm doing. With acting, like writing, it all comes from my gut. I have no training and learn as I go, learn by doing. Come to think of it, this is how I have learned almost everything whether it is cooking or chicken-tending or baby-rearing or gardening, and as such, there will never be a time when I will feel as if I have graduated from the study of any of it. The learning will go on until I die.
And isn't that how it's supposed to be?

I think so. Although it doesn't hurt to read a manual now and then.

So to sum all of these thoughts up, it occurs to me that the perfect day would be for me to attend a birth in my garden, surrounded by my chickens, and then to cook a delicious and healthy meal for the new mother and then to write about it all.
Hmmm.

You can be sure I'll let you know if that ever happens.

What would your perfect day be? I'd be interested to hear.

In the meanwhile, I'm sending kisses, I'm sending love. The crickets and cicadas are taking that love, those kisses, and vibrating them through this clear, fallish air directly to you.
I swear they are.

Call me if you want to know how to make black-eyed peas. Or collard greens. I may not know the best way, but I know a good way.

Happy Labor Day, y'all.
Love...Ms. Moon