The Pirate Queen

One of my friends is The Pirate Queen.  She has other avatars as well but when she is not at work, she is the Pirate Queen.  As the Pirate Queen she brings up her Pirates (two sons), makes sure they have swashbuckling lessons, attend the age-appropriate pirate schools, study pirate language, practice strewing/pillaging & wreacking havoc, fighting & wrassling.  But not even the Pirate Queen can do all this all the time. 

There Are Times When One Must Have A Rest Cure!! 

This week the Pirate Queen has traveled to England without her charges.  I am ever hopeful that there she may find respite & rest in Austen country.

Postal Address in NZ

Hello Everyone,
My friends tell me the internet access may be spotty until we move into our house at the end of August.  So I may not be able to get emails from everyone.  In case you want to communicate by traditional mail here is our address:
c/o Brady
43 Hanrahan St.
Ilam
Christchurch 8041
New Zealand

Fabulous Flowers of Summer

The Robin before me planted so many wonderful flowers which bloom in the hot & sticky days of summer.

 The blue Balloon Flowers are a family favorite.  I love to watch the flowers actually burst into blue blooms...the floral version of slow motion balloon popping.  In the photo you can see some of the greenish burgeoning buds.

The Lizard's Tongues (white droopy clusters) looks lovely next to ordinary day lilies.  They are marching into various parts of the yard---hurrah!















  

Southern writers speak truth when they describe summer's perfumed air.  Perhaps the humidity's function is to capture & distribute wafts of delightful aromas.  Gardenias are just amazing...their scent can fill a room.

One of my NC summer pleasures is to drive around at night, with the windows rolled catching scents of gardenia, honeysuckle and Magnolia Graniflora.

Blueberries and Peaches up next!

Versitile Banana Food

Now that I have a stomach bug, virus or something I must eat only Bananas, Rice, Applesauce & Toast.  I have found that a frozen banana can be sliced & then spread thickly on toast (much like jam).  And one can pretend that there is jam on the toast!

Consider the lillies of the Lemonade Queen

Isn't this an excellent day lily? Look at the triple layers of petals. The layers are even lovely when the lily is closing up for the night (in the second photo). I'm also excited because they appear to be thriving despite my limited plant care abilities. Perhaps it is all the wonderful tending they had before me.



About May my energetic neighbor, Mrs. Holmes, divided up her day lilies & put them out in handy carrying bags. The Holmes are rock solid neighborhood people. They live in the 1600 square foot brick home they raised their boys in.



Mr. Holmes used to run a toy store & sell his famous hand squeezed lemonade there {The Sundry is now LocoPops on Hillsboro Rd}. Mr. Holmes also sold lemonade from his garage for the first 10 years we lived in the neighborhood. I loved putting in orders for a gallon at a time. Yes, Mr. Holmes actually has business cards that say:

Bill Holmes
Lemonade King

His lemonade was the elixir of life while we were breaking up a 6 inch concrete pad in the back yard of 2116. When I sold it at the intermissions of OHS plays, Mr. Holmes had tips about the best sort of cup to use & how to set up the situation. Of course we had the lemonade for many of the kids' birthday parties. Our neighborhood committee always bought gallons of it for the 4th of July celebrations.



I enjoyed visiting Mr. Holmes' lemonade workshop in his garage. There was the squeezing station...a metal squeezer with an overhead handle bolted to a table and a bucket to catch the juice. A small stove for cooking the sugar & water into simple syrup. Then across the garage the three freezers for storing the lemonade. Over the squeezer station hung several types of mashers for breaking up the icy lemonade into an icy slush. As Mr. Holmes said, the slush is the secret to the lemonade's power....that way ice cubes don't dilute the taste. Now imagine drinking it on a North Carolina sultry summer day. Oh yes!



Mrs. Holmes used to work as a church receptionist, Mom & Grandma. She also keeps an amazing garden. Ever since both their sons died unexpectedly she has made her yard bloom. On one side (near the former lemonade factory) there are tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, and roses. Then there are daylilies, bird feeders and all sorts of amazing blooming plants. Mrs. Holmes just gets a notion to plant something new and creates beauty. She has been trying all kinds of plants. About 5 years ago the roses were her new adventure. Today they are amazing.



You have to get up early if you are going to keep up with Mrs. Holmes. Sometimes I catch her on her morning walk (around 8am). One time I was so happy to see her that I fell in step & walked several blocks in my PJs & bathrobe just because she's so much fun...and it was the only way I'd get a chance to chat with her.



She is a gardener who tends her plants in the early morning with watering, dividing, digging and all those necessary chores. On her 90th birthday this year friends & family surprised her with a huge planting of pink flamingos! In seeing Mrs. Holmes' garden I can feel her love for the world...how she has taken profound sorrow and created beauty.

Summer Time Routine

It's summer hot now in NC.
90's with a wet, hot, blanket of humidity.

I thought I'd take advantage of all that free heat & hang up the laundry.

24 hours later I remembered the laundry was sitting wet in the machine. So I hung it out. The weather was oppressively hot. The shrubbery was crisping.

When there isn't a drought we have afternoon rainshowers.

A hard summer rain soaked the laundry in 20 minutes.
"No sense in getting it now." quoth Henri.
So I didn't.
...but then we remembered the car windows were down.

oops.

About 9pm that night, the laundry went back in the washer for the super spin cycle...and then into the dryer.

And the good thing about the summer heat is that a parked car, in the direct sun, with all the windows rolled up...gets real hot real quick.

An adult's sanity can melt in such a car.

Our fabric car seats dried out in only one day! and the car now smells funny.

Ahhh summer time.

Hero Profile: Liz

Right now, while you are sleeping in (like me) on Saturday, Captain Liz & Team Flywheel are gathering for the trek to Raleigh. It is Race for the Cure morning and Liz has organized another team. This is last year's team. This year I'm sleeping in For The Cure.

Liz is also making tiny clay "chickens for the cure" in case you don't feel like racing.

Liz makes amazing ceramic creations: klein bottles, the "vehicle for butter" series, chickens, vases that cats can't tip over, and all sorts of presentation ware (salad bowls, platters, casseroles, etc). She teaches clay too. And she teaches writing.
Did I also mention that Liz creates the most delightful meals ever, writes beautiful distilled prose, doesn't mind a pack of kids trooping about her house & yard, studies & plays the organ professionally & knows astrophysics?

Artist, scientist, wordsmith, musician, activist, adventurer & raiser of a wonderful son.

Here's the link to Liz's chickens:
http://mightoughtashould.blogspot.com/2010/05/chickens-for-cure.html

Public Schools: it's personal!

School budget cuts just became very personal.

Last week after school my 9 year old began quietly sobbing. I asked him what was wrong. He told me his beloved art teacher got fired in the new round of "school saving cuts". This school is an Arts-Humanities Magnet School. After some sniffles he told me that he is especially upset for next years's Kindergartners. "Mom, they will come to school and never know what Art class is about!"

The school system feels that all elementary school teachers are qualified to teach art. In this universe it seems to make sense to fire the un-tenured art teacher to save money. As one of my teacher friends pointed out...sure she had a small art unit in one of her education classes...but this doesn't mean she's qualified to teach art or understands all the different media or appropriate projects. ARGH!!!!

We are working on some letters to various elected officials...and still crying.

What's in a name?

In thinking about what to name this blog and the great portent of naming something, I immediately began to think of Jabberwocky*. I thought "Gyre & Gymbal" might be a great blog title...so I began perusing Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I'd forgotten what a feast they are---chock full of wonderful nonsense phrases, poems, and ideas. "I must sugar my hair" seemed like a quite terrific title for a few moments. "Everything begins with M" was also another attractive thought. "12 Impossible things before Breakfast" was another blog title idea....but Jane Yolen has written a great short story/mini-biography with that title.

But while all of these are great phrases and favorite memories of mine, I decided to choose an idea that truly was my own...my favorite recurring childhood dream.

The dream began with the scary act of falling down my grandparents' stairs which had a menacing radiator** at the bottom. As I began to accelerate toward the radiator, I would suddenly remember how to fly. After some experimental zooming around the high ceiling dining room I'd zip out the casement windows for adventures.

What I remember the most is the actual moment my body would remember how to fly. It was very real physical and mental sensation. I've found it a few time in my waking life. I always felt it after completing the coveted job of Mrs. Shalit's classroom window closer (with the 3 minute before school dismissal prize) because I used my 3 minutes to get a running start across the playgrounds and through the woods to beat everyone else home. I also felt the flying feeling many times in during the high school cross-country and track seasons. It was a feeling of flying and joy. It is a time when my mind lets go and my body is open to the joy of the moment.

Peter Pan had been my favorite musical hero*** since I was about 4 years old. I used to spend my enforced nap time practicing flying (which involved dramatically falling off the bed, bookshelf and other objects) in my room. My mother could always tell when I was having a bout of flying practice because of the loud thumps. When life seemed particularly intolerable, I used to leave my window open a tiny crack so that Peter Pan could get in and we could fly away to Neverneverland. I didn't want to grow up and resisted it strongly until I realized that Peter Pan wasn't ever coming and that I, unfortunately, had to grow up.

In my current life, I'm often not open to the joy of the moment. Especially right now when I'm facing my very greatest fears on a daily basis to get ready for an adventure to the Antipodes: large stacks of important papers on horizontal surfaces and accumulations throughout the house. {Actually being in the middle of the ocean on a very small boat is my biggest irrational fear.} So those are some of my regular life fears...and having no idea what to create for dinner...especially as the boys grow hungrier and fiercer...!

Sometimes my fears turn out to be rather fascinating demons with useful insight. I do think that "important" paper is much like the Carolina cockroach...it seems to multiply and slide onto all sorts of surfaces. Really my desk was clean two days ago!! Ahhhhhhhh!



Fears aside, I'm naming this blog after the joyous feeling a mere dream used to give me. At the beginning of anything big, I usually have some type of fear to face down.

As I get ready for what I think might be a dream....perhaps if I write about life in this moment... I'll find that flying downstairs feeling...or perhaps I'll end up crashing into some radiators. This remains to be seen.

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The Footnotes
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*It's the only poem I can reliably recite, having decided to memorize it on a very long family car trip through England in 1977. The back seat of my dad's former student's european economy car was very cramped for us (13, 11 and 8 year old kids). I had to sit in the middle spot (between my siblings to keep them from annoying each other during the long drive). On a break between the first 3 Scarlet Pimpernel series, during my early stint as the backseat Berlin wall, I began consuming my brother's dragon book which included the poem Jabberwocky! Bored out of my mind, I decided to memorize the poem because it was the best thing I'd read that day.

**I have no memory except my mother's stories and the scars under my hair from the time I crashed into the radiator at the bottom of the stairs in the house of my early childhood. Box sledding down the stairs is not as safe as my three year old mind thought such an adventure ought to be.

***Because Mary Martin (the Broadway star) was completely amazing as Peter Pan...even though she was a grown up & a woman she could be a boy and fight pirates and FLY!! What is not to love in a hero like that? I later discovered that Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Wilma Rudolph and Billy Jean King all had some of these great qualities...of doing generally impossible things.