This morning we opened our weary eyes to light winds stirring up fresh air, deep blue and grey skies, and well watered fields. Another storm is moving in, but it’s gentle. Overflowing the banks of our pond as if with tears. The thunder is rolling smoothly today, a sad but soothing backdrop to this new reality.

   The animals are calm and safe. I am stunned by how normal everything looks, despite how it feels. Last night’s tornado swept just past the edge of our farm and touched down across the road. Our house, incredibly, is unharmed by the past two days of severe weather. This time, not even a shingle slipped out of place.

   We are in tact physically, but our true home, our hearts, are hurting deeply. Aching because so many in Oklahoma have lost everything. So much life is gone. And so many of our loved ones are in shock from close calls that can barely be understood or articulated. I cannot peel away from updates from family and friends, and proceeding with a normal day feels bizarre. It will be a long, long time before thousands are able to enjoy normalcy again. Never, for some.

   Storm season is part of life here in Oklahoma, and everyone has a story. So sometimes we joke about it; sometimes it’s exciting. Then sometimes we are struck down by it and reminded of the danger. Unfortunately most of us have by now dealt with the most extreme tornadoes, especially the folks in Moore, my husband’s home town.  Still, Oklahoma enjoys a civic intimacy here that I know is special. Something contracts us tightly, like a great loving muscle, when tragedy strikes. We are drawn closely together to help each other and to share each other’s pain.

   Please keep Oklahoma in your prayers for a long time. The shock will begin to wear off in a few days and those affected by this week’s devastation will need grace, strength and miracles. As I write this the thunder is rolling more and more. I cry spontaneously and can barely breathe, thinking of how many people are mourning the worst, most unspeakable losses.

   We have so much here for which to be deeply, forever grateful.

   Love your people fiercely, as I know you do!

“There’s a long road ahead. 
  In some cases there will be enormous grief 
  that has to be absorbed.
  But you will not travel that path alone.
  Your country will travel it with you,
  fueled by our faith in the Almighty
  and our faith in one another.”
  ~ President Obama
  May 21, 2013
xoxoxoxo

   This farm has lost its ever-loving mind. Every day we discover new chaos and silliness. Greedy horses. Specifically, Chanta. A pregnant llama who thinks its funny to never have babies. Honeybees who visit us but apparently sleep and make honey elsewhere. A parrot who screams wildly, with the appearance of random noise but with really specific messages we are slow to interpret. A cat who refuses the food we buy but also hunts the cardinals. A guard dog who escapes and runs free but gets spat on by a guard llama. A buffalo who has severe separation anxiety. Roosters who battle each other despite the fact that they share a harem of twenty hens. Geese. Just, geese.

   If Handsome and I couldn’t laugh about it, we would be clawing our faces off.

   So we laugh. We laugh so much. And our face or more or less in tact.

   Lots to tell, more to do. Happy Tuesday everyone!

   Over and out.

   xoxoxoxo

   Good Thursday morning, fine people! The Lazy W is awake and frosty and already bouncing with activity. Lots is happening these days, and I crave in my bones to write in detail about each and every item. But time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin… into the fuuuuutuuuuure… So as a result we have me writing once a week. How about a list today? Grab your morning’s last cup of coffee and please join me.

Oklahoma has been experiencing earthquakes more frequently, and the farm is not far from a commonly identified epicenter. They are getting stronger, too. It doesn”t bother me that much unless Handsome is out of town, but it is one more thing to consider. Side note: as with thunderstorms and other wild weather events, our yard birds seem to know when earthquakes are soon coming. They roll in the sand, cluck excitedly, and fly about alerting us to imminent danger.

This past Sunday evening, Handsome and I welcomed our friends Luis and Kevin and three of their friends to the farm for dinner and a moonlit bonfire. Two of their friends were visiting from New Zealand, and we had the nicest time laughing, eating, and singing around the fire pit. One of the guys brought his acoustic guitar and treated us to so much good music. The out of country guests were as accommodating as you can imagine answering my gazillion questions about Kiwi culture and such. Now I want even more to visit their beautiful island nation down under. In the mean time I am faking a gorgeous (but really awkward because it’s me…) Kiwi accent. To my ears it’s even prettier than French.

My garden is marching forward like a stalwart soldier of chlorophyll. Growing and blooming, reaching toward the fickle sky with her tiny broccoli heads, ruffled spinach rows, and curling sweet pea vines. Even the squash and eggplants are thriving. Ignoring the frost. Daring winter to lash out again and again  The pastures are drinking up this abundant rain and cool temperatures, blushing deeper and deeper green every week. The pond is so high right now that I still cannot run my normal lap around the back field. It’s a good problem to have, you guys. The fruit trees are straight and tall and heavy with variegated blooms. The hens are producing eggs like someone gave them magic egg-producing pills. Life is thrumming right along. I definitely celebrate the days when I get to stay home and enjoy so much activity and progress. Like today!

Our mama llama has yet to drop that baby, but we feel like it could be any time. Care to place a wager? Several of this blog’s Facebook friends have already done so, and your guess is just as welcome. Winner gets choice of either a personalized tea towel or a batch of fresh homemade cookies.

I run my first half marathon this coming Sunday morning. The event benefits the memorial of the Oklahoma City Murrah Building Bombing of April 1995. I am running to honor my husband’s parents and our good friend Alan, all of whom worked tirelessly the day of and for for weeks after the bombing, both as rescue and in the morgue. They certainly deserve to be honored.

My hands are so cold as I type all of this. But I refuse to use the house heater. Not at the end of April. No matter how cold it gets. I’m not complaining, just trying to be as stalwart as my garden is. Which is very. If you need a pep talk on why this craziness is actually good news for Oklahoma, please read this article by a local meteorologist. Good stuff.

Our fair city’s annual Festival of the Arts is this week, and I can’t wait to have time to go! It’s always fun. Great food, gobs and gobs of visual inspiration, breathtaking flowers… Oklahoma City has really come to life in recent years, and we are all very proud of the progress and liveliness. If you’re local and want to go with me, drop me a note! Here is a link to the schedule.

Tonight is World Book Night. Global activities abound, all of which I failed to plan on joining. But we can make our own fun, right? At the moment I am polishing off our book club’s current selection, Don Quixote. It is hysterical. And later today to celebrate World Book Night I want to make a lampshade out of old book pages. And return my library books. Which are only three days late. That’s kind of a record for me.

   Okay, honestly you guys, this list of random things that make me excited today could easily be three times as long, but the farm awaits. And my coffee cup is empty and cold. So I wish you all a super happy day! Allow yourself to be overwhelmed by beauty and opportunity rather than burdens. This month, this week, today… with all of her unique challenges and benefits… will only pass by you once. Grab it all!!

“I got a fevah!
 and the prescription is 
 MORE COWBELL!”
~Christopher Walken
xoxoxoxo

   Hello there fine fellow bibliophile… What are you up to today? What is on your table to read? Are you progressing quickly and easily through it, or is it requiring some effort?

   I just finally polished off a book that should have taken me far less than the eighty-nine years and six months I spent reading it. But it is an excellent book and I did enjoy it and would love to chat with you about just a little.

   Please pour yourself some sweet iced tea or something and get comfy for a few minutes… We can have a tiny little book club meeting, just us.

   The book is Typee by Herman Melville. Yes. That Melville. The same author of Moby Dick. Typee is lesser known to contemporary readers, although that may change with its recent re-publication by Rare Bird Books.

   What’s interesting, before we get to the book itself, is that Typee, while not his most critically acclaimed work, was evidently Melville’s literary debut and was a huge commercial success. Isn’t that refreshing to hear? So often we learn about great historical talents who suffered and struggled for their art, living as paupers and often dying penniless and unknown, their names connected only to posthumous fame. But not Melville, at least not in his beginning. He splashed onto the publishing scene in 1846 with this tantalizing story about a man’s sensuous and eye opening experience living four months among savages on a remote Polynesian island.

   The story is fascinating, and it’s less than 300 pages including the foreword and epilogue. Why it took me so long to read says more about me than this book.It is written in that somewhat bulky, long-winded 19th century style. Just not my fave, you know? Also, Melville handles somewhat delicate matters in effusive ways that make sentences long and paragraphs longer. At least in my opinion. Again, this reflects more on me than him. When he gets to meatier subject matter, though, like observations of humanity and some detached philosophical questions about “savage” versus “civilized,” I am all into it. He speaks clearly to me then, making good use of the bulk and loftiness. But at least some of the sexiness of this Polynesian adventure is lost on me in the murk of so many words.

   Nathaniel Hawthorne reviewed this novel at its release, a fact which is perhaps more interesting to us now than it would have been then. Here is what he had to say:

“The narrative is skillfully managed, and in a literary point of view, the execution of the work is worthy of the novelty and interest of its subject.”

   Besides feeling a bit thick and cumbersome to me, Typee really does offer an escape if you relax and just read fluidly. Don’t agonize over every syllable. I read most of the chapters while Oklahoma was still in the grip of the bitterest end of winter, so what sensuous details I could evince were truly delicious. Coconut groves, topless group bathing in mineral lagoons, dark, dangerous waterfalls, and every aspect of this people’s peaceful, languid living… It grew into an oasis in my mind. And I thoroughly enjoyed a recurrent theme of innate chivalry, feminism, and easy desire…

“Nowhere are the ladies more assiduously courted; nowhere are they better appreciated as the contributors to our highest enjoyments; and nowhere are they more sensible of their power.”

   As for the philosophical questions Melville tapped on the shoulder, I think the most fascinating were about the differences between modern, civilized life and the savagery of the islands as he had experienced them. He does more than just highlight the obvious pleasures of an extended vacation in this Eden-like place; he points to the polluting effects of Christian missionary behavior and the deficits in Western culture.

   Melville asks directly and frequently the question, will the savage be happier if he is made “civilized?”

“In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve; – the heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissentions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people.”

   Overall, I enjoyed this book. I won’t read it twice, but I am glad to have tried it. Typee is part fantasy, part anthropology, part satire and social commentary, and certainly a sensuous read if you can relax enough to get past the 19th century style.

   Look for Typee at your local book store, like Full Circle in Oklahoma City. If you’re near me and want to borrow it, I am always happy to share books!

   Thank you, sweet Julia, for exposing me to something I would probably have missed without your guidance! Now let’s bring on summer. I need a lagoon and some coconut milk.

Read Unfamiliar Books!
xoxoxoxo 

   So… Yesterday I went for a run in the back field wearing yoga capris, a tank top, and my super cool, personalized, turquoise beekeeper’s ball cap. Within just half a mile I wished I was wearing less. Because of the heat and humidity, and because the wind had yet to really kick up, I was sweating buckets. My face and shoulders felt baked by the sun, and I loved it…

   Then around dinner time the weather shifted. Just a little.

   We were told to expect temperatures in the twenties, winds in excess of seventy miles per hour, hail, tornadoes, sleet, brimstone, earthquakes, landslides, volcanic ash, frogs, and locusts.

   Quite a switch from the warm, peaceful days of late.

 
   Natives to this Indian Territory are certainly accustomed to sudden and extreme weather changes. I’m pretty sure it was favorite son Will Rogers who first said, “If you don’t like the weather in Oklahoma, wait five minutes.” And generally I scold people for complaining about our mysteries of meteorology, because we all know it changes on a whim and we can’t do anything about it anyway. Right?

   Before I continue, let me stress that I am NOT complaining about the rain. I love it. I love being awakened by thunder. I love seeing the thin, silver streaks running downhill in our middle field, helping the pond to rise slowly but surely. I love the green grass turning greener because of the soaking. Everything about this steady, gentle watering is good. The forests already look healthier, and I rarely have to water the gardens right now.

   Rain is good. Cool weather is fine. Storms are inevitable. I get that.

   But this.

   This is Crazy-town.

   The forecast had me in emotional twists. I asked my Facebook friends to vote: Would you rather endure a last minute ice storm or a tornado? The vote was evenly split. Nobody was really happy about it.

   Going into the stormy evening I was stressed. I was worried about the animals, particularly our two horses. It’s not that they cannot handle cold, wet weather; it’s that big, sudden changes can be dangerous. I was worried about my thriving vegetable beds and new little fruit trees which have recently set blossoms. I was just worried. Worried and mad and irritated that only a few days away from the biggest planting week of the year we could be losing all of our beautiful progress.

   The two raised beds that have food in them have really been making nice strides. The broccoli, red and green cabbages, cauliflower, spinach, carrots, sweet pea and English pea vines, brussell sprouts, kale, and lettuces just seem to be growing by the hour. It’s all super exciting. And very, very delicate.

   See how pretty it is? And this photo is a few days old. They have grown even more since then.

  My husband knows how much I love these tiny gardens, how much time and energy I spend day dreaming about them. And he loves me. Too much sometimes. So after work yesterday he marched outdoors as I was preparing to cover it all with just some plastic tarps, and he insisted we could do better than that. He nailed old stockade fencing across my two planted raised beds.
 

 
   I fell in love with that man all over again.

   We slept soundly last night, waking only to enjoy the symphony of a thunderstorm. At dawn, we peered through the silver mist and found all the animals tucked away safely where they belong. The geese were honking plaintively. The roosters slept late, warmed in their coop with their feathery harem.

    In contrast to yesterday, today, just to do an hour’s worth of work outside, I wore seventeen and a half thousand layers of protective clothing, a pair of heavy gloves, rubber boots, plus my super cool, personalized, turquoise beekeeper’s ball cap. And I was still freezing. I fed and pitied the animals with all my heart, found nine fresh eggs, checked on every ice-capped corner of our farm, then retreated back indoors with numb fingers, slightly wet feet (my left boot had split open), and a shivering rib cage.

   But not before going to see how the little green babies fared beneath their picket canopy…