MindSpinner

1) I checked the beans yesterday and have a bucketful, so I’m pulling out the canner. I have enough tomatoes to make a small batch of sauce, too. I am happiest in the garden and least happy bumping about by myself in the house, ordering aimlessness with a to-do list. Today, however, it is steamy hot out. I’ll save the outdoors for evening.

2) I had thought that cats were loners of the animal world, that they preferred their own territory. Certainly Bobby, our five-year-old cat, has never liked other cats; he tolerates dogs better because he is more accustomed to them. Presented with a neighbor’s Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy (a creature bred for lion hunting), he will chase it around in the spirit of fun. Presented with a new cat, he will hiss and spit. And so he did at first with the orange kitten who has come to stay. Orange Stripey Dude, for his part, unabashedly expected to be loved and played with and would have no demurring. So now they play, they bathe each other with their tongues, and they often curl up together for a nap. So much for cats being solitary creatures.

3) The new academic year planners do me good. They have “November 2008″ printed right in front of me on physical pages, promising that the next presidential election really will come, and George Bush really will have to leave office.

4) My fifth period sophomore class of about 25 students has at least one precocious student who performs at college level, three who read at fourth grade level and one who reads at first grade level. One expects a range of abilities, but this mix is unusually challenging.

Whenever I run the water for my daily bath and step into the water, the kitten (AKA Orange Stripey Dude) insists on presiding. He wears a new expression on his face as he peeks over the top of the tub at me and down into the water. His eyes wide, the look is something between grave concern and mild alarm. He seems to be saying, “You aren’t going to drown, are you? Please tell me you are not suicidal. Don’t you know that it’s possible to drown in a mere two inches of water - I’ve never heard read this, of course, because I don’t read, but I know it because I am a cat, and cats don’t need to read things in order to know them. I’d say you’ve got four inches of water in there, not two, which likely doubles your chances of perishing. Be careful! Go easy with that sloshing about. Now, look what you’ve done.  Your ears are wet!”

The application of shampoo to my hair elicits even greater concern and two or three steps back. Orange Stripey Dude’s green eyes widen even farther and his back hunches a little. I don’t need a mirror to confirm that I’ve been transmogrified by suds. He is a question mark in striped pajamas. “Are you still you? Or are you becoming something else? Why does your head keep changing shape? Aaiyih, jump back! Part of your head just fell off, and it’s floating away there, in the water!”

This morning I read in the New England Journal of Medicine online about another cat, a cat named Oscar. Oscar assists patients, families, and medical staff on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. If Oscar curls up beside a patient, it’s time to call the family.

Since I teach at a school that operates on a semi year-round schedule, summer break lasts, in practical terms, about six weeks. That six weeks has come to an end. With the first day of school just around the corner, I just want to tally and celebrate the best of summer.

• Taking four girls to see the mewithoutYou concert and inadvertently meeting one of the band members beforehand, a feat which, for one brief shining moment, made me a way-cool mom .
• Taking Dark-haired Daughter and Catapult Kid whitewater rafting. Hearing “No guide! No guide!” all the way down the country until we saw the river and then hearing “We’re going to die!” instead.
• Watching them paddle all over the lake at my mother’s home in our big canoe.
• Spending time with extended family, including my brother and his family. Helping my mother stake anasazi beans.
• Paying attention to the wild upstarts I’ve called weeds for years and years and learning what they actually are.
• Waking up to rain that ends a dry spell and waters everything at once.
• Driving down to see a not-so-far-away college to learn about its commitment to sustainable living and sustainable agriculture. Seeing how a straw bale house is built. Learning about permaculture techniques that make a lot of sense.
• Going to see Wild Hogs with Catapult Kid one night when his sister was working. (Catapult Kid is doing the inner work of leaving home and declaring his independence - rather overdoing it - which means that good mother-son time is a big deal when it happens.)
• Getting on the Interstate going south with Catapult Kid when we should have gone north. We ended up turning around one exit down and pulling into gas station/fast food joint where Catapult Kid bought food for a homeless guy who had almost the same last name and I bought a handmade basket from an Amish couple.
• Noting how many high school students showed up at Open House at school when they really don’t need to, just to see everybody and to say hello. It really will be OK for school to start next week - these are lovable kids.

The process by which we find our way through life intrigues me. Life seems a river that, guided by gravities of heart and need, flows around unyielding obstacles and digs its channels in remaining possibilities, winding at various distances from might-have-beens.

Today, while I write, the marmalade kitten (AKA Orange Stripey Dude) bats and leaps at a strand of leftover yarn tied to the doorknob. No, Orange Stripey Dude didn’t go to the animal shelter. Something came up on the afternoon of July 3, and we didn’t make it to the shelter. On July 4, the shelter was closed. This was fateful. Anybody who can resist the charms of Orange Stripey Dude after 48 hours can be suspected of having a flinty heart. His gender has now been confirmed, he’s been proclaimed healthy, and he’s had his first shots. Like the rest of the fur folk, he is a reliable companion - you feed him, you pet him, and he opts to stick around. He isn’t much good at intelligent conversation, no more than Cat the First or the dogs or the bunnies, so thank heaven for NPR and audiobooks, blogs and the Internet. He does have an appalling amount of playful energy, hence homemade cat toys such as leftover yarn strung from doorknobs. (The leftover yarn means I finished crocheting the string bag as of Sunday, which is a good thing, because work started Monday, and I won’t have time anymore to waste on crocheting unneedful things just because I find the task soothing.)

Outside, vegetables grow in the kitchen garden and in eight raised beds. I’m making plans to expand the effort further and to include more herbs. I’ve even ordered seed for a stand of amaranth. In the past year, besides the vegetables, I’ve added three apple trees, a pecan tree, currants and gooseberries, and I’ve investigated permaculture. Someday, when the teenagers are making their way in the world, food from the backyard will replace much of the food from grocery store. I’ve taken a rather involved look at the matter of how food gets to the grocery store to the table this past year and decided that I don’t want to be at the mercy of all possible threats to food security and affordability.

So, I have too many animals and a yard that’s going to look like a microfarm. All this seems random, but it isn’t. It’s all factored into a knowledge that’s sunk into my bones, “I am on my own.” This is different from saying “I have no friends” or “I have no social life,” for I have these in modest measure. I have too many animals partly because they keep me company. My yard will turn into a microfarm partly because that’s one form of security I can manage while my income erodes against the cost of living. And because being outside planting or weeding does me good when nothing else can. (Alas, mowing affords nothing of the same benefits, though it needs doing this very day. If I have to have a lawn, I should have sheep to nibble it. I wouldn’t have to crank a sheep and push it tediously back and forth on a hot day.)

In Barnes and Noble over the weekend, I passed the time among books while dark-haired daughter and a friend shopped in nearby stores for black skinny pants. In the poetry section, I thought I would buy Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing as summer’s last treat, but it was Stanley Kunitz’s last book I carried to the counter instead: The Wild Braid.

I wanted it for the photograph of the poet’s pale, aged hands folded behind him, his fingertips still black with garden dirt.

I who have never seen a wild owl up close wanted it for the story of five owls so at ease with an ever-patient Kunitz that they perched on his arm.

I wanted it for wisdom:

Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature’s tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame your garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.

It must be said that my garden is not in danger of being tamed into landscaping. My neighbors probably think it in more danger of tending toward minimally ordered wildness of the sort not often seen in subdivisions. It moves from garden to meadow to forest. I want to be a part of the living world when I walk there.

I wanted it for all the poems and especially for six lines of “The Testing Tree”:

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

Kunitz’s wife, artist Elise Asher, died in 2004, at 92.

Kunitz writes movingly of feeling her presence in dreams; he would sometimes dream that she still held his hand. I wanted it for this, too, and for the pages I haven’t yet read.

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.