Fire the Handicapped

There was an old Saturday Night Live skit with Roseanne Roseandanna ranting about the campaign to "fire the handicapped", which she misheard, in her handicapped way, but was instantly placated when it was explained that the campaign was "hire the handicapped"
It crossed my mind on the way back from fiddling with the spring yesterday morning (after a rain! yes, a rain!) Last year this time I would have taken my camera and several detours through various overgrown fields and woods to get back to the house, but this year, it has been my habit to head straight home.
Now, my personality is one that by nature does not entertain even a glimmer of avoidance when family has suffered cancer, slow death, amputation, death of an intimate, alzheimers, etc. Grannies have taught me, we make the best of what we have, we continue to love, support and respect, no matter the infirmity.
So why have I been avoiding my beloved woods? I guess I have been a sissy.
"I orta knowed by now"that the nature of life is impermanence. It's time to buck up and take it like a woman.
So chop me up and feed me to the vultures, but tomorrow begins my lemonade campaign on this blog.

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Gimme back my seasons

So we got rain, a couple a weeks ago, one inch and one quarter. I write this long hand, because it was a giant event. We are still two dozen plus inches behind, but for that one morning after, the woods perked up, the birds cheered, and the insects trilled and sang and my whole world and hollow rejoiced.
But, in the big picture, the creek only got its whistle wetted, it is back bone dry and the spring still drips a slow and lonley "plop". Conditions are pretty much the same as they have been all summer

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And in these pictures, if you look closely, there are things you can see that are amiss. Too open, missing overstory leaves, dead and dangling dry leaves, in the upper picture, there is a dead baby cedar in the foreground and mummified blackberries.

I miss my seasons. I am a person who solemnly nods to each equinox and solstice, to each full and medicine moon, one who notes in a little notebook the changes and counts the "firsts and lasts" First mushroom, last berry, first cherry blossom day, last frost. Now I don't know how to act. Usually, I have unhooked the outdoor shower by now, in preparation for first frost, and lovingly covered the fall lettuce. Usually by now I have already built a fire to warm the house on a chilly morning, and steeped my ritual first hops tea for my first long night of harvest sleep. This year, it is too dry for a shower, and for growing lettuce, but even if it weren't it is still in the 80's and 90's. What kind of October is that?


Ok, I promised myself I wouldn't blog without something nice to say (hence the lack of writing)
So, I have discovered that, I can throw the kayak in the back of my pickup truck, go to the river, have an "other worldy" experience and be back at the house in less than two hours....(hey, that is sort of counting thing, a first and last thing....a susbstitute for seasons, perhaps?)

Signs and Omens

Wild ageratum is blooming right now, an impossible color to photograph..."granny blue"
I think grannies wore that color so much just because it was unusual in nature and hard to reproduce and so somehow powerful. Gandma Lillian called it "fairwell to summer". The grannies used an entirely different nomenclature. I was fascinated by the common names in use by the grannies in Michigan vs. the grannies in Tennessee, so much so that I would take my notebook and specimens and interview them and wrote it all down, lost now I suppose...but the granny memories are some of my best.

My ex used to get on my case about my affection for omens. I like observing and interpreting omens, I see them as nothing more than a form of poetry, a way to express some deeper meaning in words and images. I don't relegate them to the corner with superstition and anti-intellectual behavior, but then, it could be because he was very white, and my ancestry is slightly brown and I think our ancestry sets the beat for the music of our enterainment, the background music of our relationship with the world.
So there was this rain, 3 inches in some areas...around 1 inch here in the holler. That was a week or so ago. Everyone whoo-haaed and the powers that be decided all was well and the media moved on. This amount does not begin to make up a yard deep deficit. The creeks are all still dry, the water restrictions still in place and we are still flushing and showering with a bucket and hauling water for the animals...and I plumb gave up on a fall garden.
Yesterday I walked down to the what was left of the watering hole in the now dried up creek below the culvert.
I knew what I would find, but, hey, just checking, leaving room for a miracle.... It is right ugly, no matter how you look at it. Lots of thirsty critter tracks and mud licking going on. The rest of the creek is long dried up, a coating of white mineral and sage colored dried algae.
I hear a lot of talk on the news using phrases like "risk management energy strategies consulting."
I can't seem to take a walk without ticking off species destruction, tallying rising biodiversity risk factors, noticing microclimate destruction/evolution on a meteoric scale, right here, right now, right in front of my eyes and all I am doing is looking for signs of normalcy.
I thought that things had a chance of recovery after the "big freeze," but the double whammy of this cursed and unending drought is different than the hardships that the grannies experienced. They could count on the seasons, another one would roll around and it would "fix right" the freak happening. I am off kilter and feel discordant without the metronome of the season. I carry a weight in my chest that even a cold beer at the end of hard days work won't ease. I am sick of the drought and sick of the mourning and sick of the body count. I am so heartsick, that it is even difficult to put in a hard days work, as in, what's the frigging point?
So I sit down at the edge of the former water hole, and watch a single tiny forlorne bluet butterfly hover listlessly...there is not even enough moisture to satisfy a little bluet, and hey, where are his buddies, anyway? Bluets are normally cheerful gangs over the nutrient rich mud, so "where is everybody?" A cry I have uttered on every walk in the woods for months now......and thats when I start the heartsick crying, again, and I am sick of that, too. I have always been described as a "tough ol' sister" and I figured I always got that toughness from the woods, guess that was true, as it is gone now, too...my toughness lost the battle when the woods lost the battle.
I start back along the dusty and dried up pasture mule-path and through teary eyes spy, right in the middle of a particularly dusty spot ...an amazing thing! A one of a kind, not seen anywhere in this portion of Tennessee in this screwed up season of a screwed up year, a single, beautiful, perfect acorn!
I took it as a sign.