Monthly Archives: September 2025

Monday rain and flowers.

homemaking, my garden, , , , , , , , , ,

So many little tasks need doing before setting off on a journey. Of course there is the packing of supplies to use while I’m away, but there is also the making ready of Home. It needs quite a bit of tidying up, just to show the homemaker that she does love this place. Being extra nice to the garden by deadheading and cleaning up also does a lot to ease my sore heart, because it dreads saying good-bye once again.

And I’m in the middle of my biggest garden project ever, that is, the biggest I’ve ever taken on by myself. Ten areas of the garden will have been changed in different ways, when I’m finished. That sounds like it is almost everything, but it’s not. I won’t be finished for a few more weeks, mostly because October and November are better months for planting perennials around here, but also because I plain ran out of time this month.

Last fall I planted three clary sage plants, which are biennials and will bloom next June. I hope I can remember to start a few every fall so that I can keep them coming. Below you can see one of the older ones in the foreground, next to the pincushion flower I planted last week, and in the background two of the younger clary sages I was able to get from a local nursery recently.

As three big conifers to the south of me, including my own Canary Island Pine, keep growing taller, the amount of “full sun” in the back garden has been shrinking. It was a case of bit by bit, and then all at once. All at once I realized why the purple coneflower barely blooms, and even the recently planted Mexican Evening Primrose is not happy.

apple mint

Also there is the problem of the unpleasing design, or lack of design, from the last landscaper, of the area near my front door. I’m unwilling to live with it, so it’s taken hours and hours of thinking and thinking and reading on the Pacific Horticulture site, researching and shopping for plants, imagining how they will look if I put them here or there. I’m moving several plants installed last year to better places.

When I get new gallons or 4″ pots on site, I arrange them still in the pots where I think they work, and then I think better of it, and carry them elsewhere. To the front yard — No, the back yard — how will it look alongside this other plant that can take part shade? Weird? Probably… Oh well, they will have to get along. It can be exhausting being so unsystematic.

Naked Buckwheat

I’m excited to have my very own Naked Buckwheats — this is a California native that I often see in the mountains. My daughter Pippin has them growing wild around her place. And now me!

I decided to grow annual vegetables in the front garden near the perennial asparagus, because they will be sure to get enough sun there; but I need to add more soil first. I should have waited to buy the kalettes and Chinese Broccoli until that bed was ready, but I didn’t, and they were in little six packs, so I spent an hour transferring them to larger pots so they won’t get rootbound while they’re waiting.

I have cut down the asparagus a few times, first because of the aphids, and then so that I could rake away all the mulch and add more soil, and new mulch. But spears keep coming up, and looking ferny lovely:

When I cut them, I throw away the fronds or chop them up for the worms, but there are always several that haven’t become fronds yet, and that are the right size for eating. I accumulated enough to roast a panful this afternoon.

And I made a batch of Jammy Eggs to have for snacks on the journey.

It’s to Wisconsin I am going, because my granddaughter Miss Maggie is getting married! It was barely over a year ago that her brother’s wedding took me to that state, and now back I go. It will be a very happy time, and I will be over my leavinghomesickness before you know it.

One of the asparagus beds.

It started raining this afternoon. Early autumn rains are just the best. I can leave the windows and doors open and breathe the rain, and hear it pitter patter. The drops began to fall when I was still in the middle of planting my Bouteloua gracilis, or blue grama grass (“Blonde Ambition”), and after I cleaned up my tools I still had to put out all the trash cans, plus an extra green bin a neighbor is letting me use. Four neighbors, two on either side of me, are always letting me use extra space in their green waste bins for my overflow.

Blue Grama Grass

Do you find that when you are getting ready for a trip, not only do you have the packing for the actual trip, and the everyday housework and cooking that has nothing to do with the trip, but also extra, surprise things that come up that take some of your precious time? I realized last week that I needed to lay in some firewood, and that took a whole day to deal with. I got a half cord and stacked it almost entirely by myself. In the course of that my neighbor Eric lent me his wheelbarrow and offered to repair my wheelbarrow. He noticed in going through my gate that it didn’t latch behind him, so I spent an hour figuring out how to adjust that latch. I don’t want the gate to fail to close when I’m away, if he should come for the wheelbarrow.

And what do you know, I also got inconvenient visitors this week — ants! They have been mostly crawling around on my computer table and keyboard — and my hands — so I am going to cut this shorter than it might have been, stopping at long instead of longer, and I’ll hope to check in from Wisconsin soon. But I still don’t have a tablet or anything larger than my little phone to work on, so I don’t know…

Happy Autumn Days to you all.

To spit on a corpse.

death, quotes, ,

“There is a cruelty that lurks in the human heart: to speak ill of the dead. They lie silent, their mouths shut by the grave, unable to repent, unable to defend themselves. And yet our tongue, restless and unbridled, digs into the soil to unearth their sins. Scripture cuts us off: ‘Do not speak ill of one who has died, for we are all to be numbered among the dead’ (Sirach 8:7). To spit on a corpse is to spit on your own grave.”

-Father Charbel Abernethy, “Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead.” 

Stanley Spencer, Port Glascow Cemetery

Her every gemstone grew heavier.

poetry, stories, women, , , ,

This poem about Queen Esther of the Old Testament I find fascinating, in the way it portrays the enervating terror Rilke imagines the saint experiencing, as she forces an audience with the king without an invitation. It recalls the truth we all have heard, that courage doesn’t mean you aren’t afraid, but that you do what you must in spite of fear.

Maybe she didn’t know what she would say, exactly, but she knew that she had to do something, to intervene on behalf of her people, the Jews. (You can read the whole story in the book of Esther in the Bible.) The translator guesses that in the poem, what Esther conceives at the touch of her king’s scepter “is, presumably, the plan to save the Jews of Persia from Haman’s plot.”

For seven days her maids had combed the ash
of her grief, as well as the whole cache
of woeful recollections, from her hair,
and had borne it and bathed it in sunshine,

Queen Esther

sustained it and nurtured it with fine
spices day after day; but then and there

the time had come when, uninvited,
with no more respite than the dead,
she finally entered the palace door,
draped upon her women, to see Him —
that one at whose bidding and whim
one dies if one ever dare come near.

He shone so that she felt his brilliance
in the rubies she wore, which seemed aflame;
like a jar she was filled up with his presence,
and quickly she was full to the brim,

before she had reached the third chamber’s end
she overflowed with the great king’s might,
and it seemed that the walls of malachite
flooded her in green. She did not intend

this long walk with her every gemstone
growing heavier as the king shone,
growing cold with fear. She kept walking.

And as she at last approached that one
sitting high on the tourmaline throne,
looming above her like an actual thing,

she was caught by her near-at-hand women,
who bore their fainting mistress to a chair.
He touched her with the tip of his scepter;
and without thought she conceived it within.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke: New Poems
Translated by Joseph Cadora

In this telling, the jewels play a big part, in the way they weigh her down; they express something about her relationship to the king, who would have been the giver of them. He was the reason for the events that led to her unique standing as one who had been elevated from being a simple Hebrew girl to the status of royalty. In that role in which she now finds herself, she feels the heaviness of her responsibility. I wonder if Rilke was inspired by this painting by Nicolas Poussin:

Nicolas Poussin, Esther Before Ahasuerus

Joseph Cadora translated all the poems that are included in Rilke: New Poems, the collection in which I found this one. He includes a short commentary on each poem in the anthology, which he says are “mostly a result of reading the poet’s letters, several biographies, and three other works of Rilke’s …” He also writes that “translating New Poems has been a labor of love, and thus, no labor at all.”