Raggedy Patches And Feathers For All

This week-end Philip mucked out the chicken run. This is a big job we only do every few months. We add new hay every couple of weeks which freshens up their run and the old hay and droppings compact themselves underneath. Eventually you have got to remove it all and give them all fresh hay and clean out all those old droppings. Philip piled them into our raised beds to age. By springtime the chicken manure should be mellow enough for plants to grow well in it.

This is Flower-bud. She has lots of pin feathers developing on her bare patches. Pin feathers are the hard sheaths that the new feathers emerge from. They look like thick porcupine needles and just about as comfortable. I want to wrap her in a down comforter until she is no longer so bare bottomed. But these urges are human and she's a bird. She has no need of comforters. The cold air on her body will prompt her body to get on with making new feathers.

And, hello?!, how sick is it of me to wish to cover her in a blanket made from dead bird's feathers? That's like wanting to feed a sick calf beef stock.

One thing our girls love is getting a bunch of fresh hay to kick around. It rustles and flies satisfyingly under their foraging claws. Philip found a rich cache of snails for them too. Always a culinary treasure for both birds and French people. Our hens would find it sacrilegious and mystifying to cover the snails with butter sauce.

Lots of hay for the hen house too. Perhaps they'll start laying in here again. If it weren't for the bird feces in there I'd want to crawl into that little house and sleep all winter with the winds howling around me.

Even though David Bowie's music was the back drop for most of my teen years, what I might call the real voice of my breaking out and sharpening my independence, I would have to say that if there is one singer who's music, lyrics, and voice can capture what my spirit is really all about it would have to be Bob Dylan. If I was to try to tell you who I am underneath all the layers, the B.S.; stripped down to the essentials, it would always be Bob. There are a thousand brilliant voices whose songs I love, whose notes speak to who I am, but Dylan gets it all in one breathless collection of stories.

It's no surprise that I have been hungry for Dylan's music in the last week. When the weather turns in the fall and I start hearing the wheels of winter moving, I come back to where I started. Always back to the beginning. I was born in midwinter and it's where I come to roost. Heading back to winter always makes me feel happy. Sometimes in that childish way where I feel an uplifting inside so steep and bright it catches my breath and exhales in spontaneous laughter. Pure joy for no special reason.

Sometimes in that bittersweet way that melancholic people can be happy within life's vicissitudes, it's known evils and laments. Happy that though life always brings with it a banquet of experiences not all joyous, all of them are worth knowing. Happy that it always comes down to the simplest movements; making the beds with fresh sheets, standing over a hot stove stirring soup, sitting under a blanket with the people you love best in the world.

Dylan's voice is, for me, like the sharp bite in the autumn air that tells birds to start their migration south. Except that I'm always pointed north. I only go south to visit friends and the past. So isn't it appropriate that I'm listening to "Girl From The North Country" right now? I do wish it was the version he recorded with Johnny Cash which has to be one of the most amazing recordings ever. Two of the United States best story tellers. They write about the true spirit of Americans better than anyone else.* They have told our stories and made an imprint so deep we won't forget.

I am a political, earthy, independent, folksy, brash, brave, ordinary, boot-wearing, new, and hearty individual. If Americans were to shed their mansions, their lust for the biggest cars, the cheapest food, and have a look in the mirror, perhaps they would see what I see. What Bob saw. What Johnny saw. I think Americans have always been about newness and the big broad sweep which I suppose is why we love big cars and homes. Back when we were a bunch of German and British immigrants we were a bunch of misfits looking for the new frontier. Everything here was bigger than in England and Germany. It's too bad we had to kill off so many of the people who were already here. But they are also part of the legacy of who we have become. Native Americans are part of this whole mesh of who we are.

Although I am pretty intensely ashamed of my country right now, Bob always reminds me that Americans have a wonderful spirit that I'm proud to be a part of. But like children who have yet to learn that the world does not revolve around them, Americans are busy stepping on everyone and obscenely ignoring other people's needs and human rights.

I will never be a flag waving American. I am too worldly to believe the myth of our great (ever shrinking) freedoms or the myth of our forefathers' great plan for us all...because what they wanted for us is definitely not what we have created and I think they would all be pretty shaken to see how we have interpreted their declarations. A few of them were slave owning people which automatically makes them ineligible for any honest hero worship.

I'm not waving any one else's flag either. There is no country on this earth that has not, at some point in their history, done all the things my country is doing now. The only flag I will ever wave is one of peace. I know humans too well to believe there will ever be a time of complete peace, I am not that naive, but I will never stop hoping for it.

Isn't it funny how one thought leads to another until you find yourself where you had no intention of going?

There was a possible on-line job opportunity that I had to take a test for. I failed it last night. I feel let down a little that I couldn't pass it even though the truth is that I don't think I would have really liked that work. I looked at the local job situation after that and I've got to say it's quite depressing. A dampener on my happy. The truth is, I haven't cultivated the proper good attitude about my necessity to go out of my house to look for low paying full time work that will necessitate my child being in day care. I'm going to need to change that attitude. Life throws us these curve balls and your eyes have to learn to follow them.

So I must turn back to my plan which is to get my house to a place of better order and to do some of the things I need to do that will make it easier to leave it every day and happier to come back to. Like painting my living room, dining room, and "family" room. Like making some curtains to frame the gorgeous storms coming. Like duvet covers to brighten the rooms we dream in. Like a couple of big quilts to snuggle up in when we all come home grumpy and tired from our unhappy situation. Home should always be a place we feel good coming back to. Especially if we must leave it every day unwillingly.

Our finances will allow me a couple of months to do this. Then it's all over. This long happy homesteading dream. I wonder if we've made the right choices. Should Philip have kept looking for work that would pay him enough to live on? But he's happy with where he is, no commute, working for people he likes, and doing work he's good at doing. Would anything else have been available to him? No other opportunities seemed likely to crop up.

This is what life has thrown us. Time to catch it and keep moving.



*My personal opinion which it is not necessary for anyone else to agree with.

This Isn't Deneuve's Life, Is It?

Your Grief

Your grief is like a broken stopwatch
tarnished gold filigree
ticking the same
minute to death.

The thought that just flitted through my brain two minutes ago is "What would Deneuve have done in my place?". I wonder if she has conducted all her relationships with as much class as I imagine? The thought that is going through my head right this very second like a hot poker is "Did mother Theresa ever have a toxic friendship in her life, and if so, what the hell did she do about it?" I thought this because I strive to be a person with both class and grace. I think "class" is a misleading word though because it smacks of social order which is where the expression "having class" comes from. The idea of me having grace is a bit hard to swallow too, because there is nothing bumbling about it, nothing out of bounce, out of rhythm, or silly.

I am at least three of those things.

But I won't say which ones.

I believe that even the craziest and goofiest individual is capable of having spiritual grace. To me this has absolutely nothing to do with a person's relationship with God (though if one is religious it certainly would apply). Grace, as I perceive it is a state of being in which your spirit has a quiet flow and flexibility. It's about not needing to seek retribution. It's about healing. It's about walking softly and loving loudly. It's about being pliant without being weak. It's about allowing every person you meet a chance to impress the crap out of you and not minding if they don't.

I have not been a completely brave girl. Even now I am frightened of the shadows of the past. How long can they possibly nick me in the heels? When I keep so few secrets, what power does it hold over me? Things come rushing back to me tonight. Not my own grief or sorrow. Other people's. First cups of coffee. I am remembering my first cup of coffee and the hundredth crush I ever felt. Sixteen and still alive. Like a miracle I ought to have lit a candle for in the Notre Dame. I smell clove cigarettes, (not mine). I smell rice powder for Kabuki faces.

Did I see myself in the mirror or not? Was there any part of me then that knew I would be looking back through time at who I was, did we send each other glances in that ever elastic mental world from which we both sprang? What would I tell my old self now if she could hear me? Some sweet letter of love and nostalgic ultimatums to enjoy youth while I have it and not to squander it on sorrow or madness or another pack of cigarettes? Would I suggest that I have sex a little more often like everyone else? Would I tell myself to relax, that I'm just fine sitting here at my desk in 2007, not yet dead? See how it all worked out? See how much time you waste on investing in death?

I think I used to know who I was going to become back when I was sixteen, saw myself aged in the mirror, how much lighter I was with life in my eyes in the reflection, and I think I didn't recognize myself at the exact same time. Who, looking into the future, recognizes their own corpse?

I would like to dine with Dylan and Deneuve tonight. I have questions that I imagine only they can answer. The poet and the grace. Both of them with the kind of cheekbones that make people fall over themselves to touch. To consume. I don't know which one of them is more beautiful to me. Which one is more deliciously iconic.

Metal edges come naturally to me. Like my skin is magnetic. Attracting all the metal shop shavings. They come and I didn't always walk away.

Sometimes I am my own secretary, secretary to the crazy boss upstairs who dictates while my pen screeches across imaginary pages. I am my own Girl Friday. Where's my pencil skirt and scarlet lips? You are present on my tablet. A rare glimpse of a mind in full motion. Evaluating itself in real time.

Is there a ship sailing out there on the high seas full of every person I've cut loose? Do they sit around eating maggoty bread while setting their hair afire with gin like voodoo demons throwing darts at my likeness against the moon? Am I on someone else's ship of cut loose souls? Are we all organized according to whose ship of demons we are scouring with our metal brushes and our locks full of crows?

Has someone cut Deneuve loose? Will we pass each other under dark waves and white froth? Will she still be wearing her lipstick? Will her hair still be perfect? Will we throw each other biscuits across the planks?

I know plenty of people have cut Dylan loose. You can't write like that, sing like that, live like that, without ending up on some one's ship of cut loose souls. I love him for his words. Because he said what no one else was saying until he was saying it.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself who you really want to be: Dylan or Deneuve? And then you have to know who you really are. I have always wanted to be Deneuve. I have always been like Dylan, only without the cheekbones or a voice that reaches Viet Nam from here. If I crawl down the barrel of someone else's gun, please tell Dylan to write my eulogy. He's the only one who can do it. He'll tell you how it really was. He never lets the common man fade into anonymity.

I used to ask the universe what was waiting for me on the other side of youth. What the hell was the point in staying alive when soul-ache threatened to eviscerate me anyway? Why walk across that great big wasteland of my nightmare to the boundary where I can't see past? What makes all the pain worth enduring? I no longer ask this question. The answer is in the living. The answer is breathtakingly simple. You walk across the wasteland of your nightmare because on the other side you will find wine, bread, and pesto. You traverse those dark distances because the most simple joys will heal. Because everyone has love to put out there, if they choose, and if you put love out there you will taste the world as though it was all inside of you.

And you can still crack wildly inappropriate jokes. If you really love not only yourself, (and first yourself), and then as many people as you can. Love being the most open smile you can flash at a complete stranger. Love being able to look in any human being's eyes and see what is human in them and see that even if they are unlovable now they weren't always that way and may not always be that way. Love being a great walk in the pouring rain and a face turned to the prettiest angle of the sun. It's everywhere when you cross that wasteland. If you keep your expectations low but your hopes high you will find it everywhere. How can you not find it everywhere if you are throwing it into the air yourself like a flock of magic doves?

At the end of all these thoughts is this last one:

This isn't Deneuve's life, is it?