Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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hold what ya got

My husband says something that drives me crazy.

Not the… please shut the cabinet door or would you please put your dirty socks away kind of crazy.

(Not that he does those things.)

(I’m just giving you examples.)

More of the… Sleeveless tshirt, backwards ballcap, and stern business voice on work calls kind of crazy.

That kind of crazy that gives me shivvers.

Handsome behind the wheel on a country drive…xoxo

At various crucial times around the farm, he says to me in his deepest, most controlled, most deliciously mellow voice, “Hold what ya got.”

And I almost can’t focus. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I love it, ha!

This past week he said it to me while we wrangled Scarletta Jones into our makeshift squeeze shoot to administer antibiotics. My job was to hold the rope against her strenuous objections and then apply whatever full body tension I could muster onto the steel gates to keep her still. Hold what ya got. He just utters the phrase calmly under his breath, without making eye contact, focused on his side of the task.

Earlier in the week and again yesterday, he said it to me many times while we worked together on our little greenhouse build. He has designed and purchased and organized all of it. Planned every step. He gives me useful-feeling tasks along the way, often amounting to lifting lumber to the sky while he measures some mysterious distance or holding two pieces together while me makes an angle just perfect.

Hold what ya got.

Then inwardly, to myself, Focus, girl!

There are innumerable examples of him casting this atomic spell on me. He’s been saying it for years, and I only recently intimated how it affects me. He doesn’t get it. But that makes it worse. Or better.

I suppose he’ll keep saying it forever. I hope he does.

And I absolutely will.
XOXOXO

snowmelt & hope for change

All week we been shivering and hiding ourselves away in near-zero temps, shrouded in snow and ice. Dark, moody skies. Until today.

Today, the sun reappeared. It started with a raw, rusty edge in the east, a quiet daybreak already more promising than the previous few. And although the morning was still frigid, still just four dergrees Farenheit, the brightness made it bearable. Then the sun rose fully and the sky turned from silver-grey to true blue, and I got very excited.

By lunchtime, sunlight was bouncing off of every surface, really truly streaming through the windows. I caught glossy reflections of water here and there. I saw drips, too. Wait, water? The ice is melting! I looked through a window in the Apartment and saw that the middle field, solid white just a few hours ago, was suddenly half mud. The pine trees were suddenly relieved of their snowy burdens, too, and the horses’ manes looked dry. Everything was bright and saturated with color. I ran downstairs to grab a light jacket to go play outside, and when I opened the door the cold nearly took my breath away. I folded in half and shut the door. It was still only around ten degrees, ha! Still frigid cold, even with the evidence of melt.

((snow day in January with Klaus, Max, Sadie, and Charlie!!))

So I bundled up properly this time and invited Klaus on a walk. He loves the cold. We checked on all the animals, distributed carrots to the horses and extra biscuits to the cows, made a bouncy loop around the back field, and caught Johnny Ringo on our way back uphill. When we passed the Batmobile and walked to get the mail, I started thinking about the sunlight and low temps and how we can enjoy a thaw even before we approach thirty two degrees. The concentration of light, I suppose, is pretty powerful.

You must already know where I’m going with this, if you’ve been here very long.

A little bit of weak sunlight, at low angles, is no match for ice in low temperatures.

But strong, abundant, uninterrupted rays of light, concentrated, directed energy, maybe bouncing off of surrounding walls and objects, can absolutely melt ice, even in low temperatures. That’s amazing.

I’m taking this as a reminder that focused attention can make all the difference in our work. That prayer can change things, if it is strong and focused. Abundant.

Maybe I’ve been playing a few things too softly, just casting my energy and attention vaguely where more focus is needed to accomplish something. Praying only in background ways, saying I trust God, when something more fervent is required. Pursuing a few worthy goals too lightly.

Maybe it was just a really beautiful, snowy day with a really beautiful, melty surprise tucked in. Maybe it was just nature doing her thing. But I can’t help but see the message and the promise:

If you focus your energy better, things will change.
XOXOXO

a charlie and rhett story

Read this short story in your best Rod Serling voice:

Imagine if you will, a ten degree morning on an ice covered farm. The sun is brilliant, bouncing wide, metallic sheets of light off of every surface. The wind is mercifully nonexistent.

Everywhere you look is a snow dusted pine tree or a pile of oak leaves, crunchy and frosted and as still as a sculpture. Chickens are clucking, a goose is skronking, and horses are whinnying their demands for breakfast.

Now you see a happy and energetic Puppy following his giant best friend German Shepherd during morning chores. They are flipping like fish and bounding across the weather stiffened tundra. Their claws mostly grip the ice, but not always. Still, they run and chase and beg the Lady to play fetch and keepaway with a frozen softball. When the Lady throws it, the puppy runs with absolute abandon, no thought given to its trajectory or obstacles or ice or anything.

The Lady is not great at throwing. The Puppy has not learned this yet.

The softball lands on this side of a wire fence, in the vicinity of a young steer, his face buried in a pile of soft hay. The puppy is exactly one second behind the ball. He hits his brakes. His claws fail. He skids on his bottom, pliable young puppy legs splayed, toward the ice dusted Thing With Horns. Thankfully, the fence is between them, but still they bump, giant face to small body, and the Thing With Horns emits the deepest, most baritone objection the puppy has ever heard. A rare sound, it startles the Lady too.

The Puppy regroups, retreats to the Lady without the prize, and checks over his shoulder to see that the fence is still in place. Fetch and Keepaway continue but not without some anxiety.

The End.

space to feel my feelings about Joc

My energy has been stalled for a few hours. I thought surely it was just from this spell of cold, dark weather. Or maybe from having a list of important but not very challenging tasks to finish today. Or maybe it’s the ambiguity of not being on a training plan right now. Some days I embrace my freedom and really squeeze a lot out of it. Other days, when I am low on motivation, the great openness is unnerving. I feel unmoored. Whether with fitness goals or caring for the farm or writing or anything, too much blank space can, well, stall me out. I guess I need to reestablish some structure, I think to myself, fill the calendar back up. Train for another marathon.

Then I noticed two prevailing trains of thought, both about Jocelyn.

One has surfaced almost every time lately when I get on the floor to cuddle Klaus, nearly every time we play outside: I am keenly aware that Jocelyn’s dog, Bridget, was a puppy when Klaus was a puppy. They were well acquainted then and even sometimes “corresponded” through the mail, when she and Joc first lived in Colorado. I see Klaus’ silver whiskers and ample belly, hear his gentlemanly groans and notice how his energy is so different now than it was nine years ago, and I cannot help but wonder what Bridget looks like now, how her energy is, what middle age looks like on such a strong and adventurous little woman. These are bittersweet imaginations, and I think maybe I can tilt that scale away from bitter, to mostly sweet. Maybe I can willfully conjure up how the reunion will soon look and feel. Bridget running in the grass towards us, no doubt carrying a rock for someone to throw. Retrieving rocks was once her favorite thing next to chasing bears off their cabin porch and stampeding behind deer up the mountain.

The second prevailing thought is much darker. I have been trying to silence a voice in my head that says, “She’s just not coming home. It’s been too long.” And I have no idea what to do with this, because it won’t stop. Hourly, at odd intervals, it just echoes. The actual words, typed out and spoken silenty in my head, are cruel enough. I don’t have to hear them to recoil. It makes me physically nauseated.

When people ask me if I have heard from her, the truth is awful. I have not. I sometimes hear updates about her, not from her. But I do appreciate hearing her name spoken. When noone asks, that hurts too. But I kind of understand why they don’t want to bring it up. When I see photos of her on my phone or her artwork around the farm, or even when I care for the horses she once loved so much, my god. Everything hurts so much. Sometimes it all serves to keep her “with us,” but right now it is terrifying. And complaining about this pain when so many people have lost their children forever, in undeniable and truly hopeless ways, feels so self indulgent and ridculous.

I still do have hope. Right?

Maybe these are just the emotions I have successfully avoided in all the previous months and years of being extremely busy and overcommitted. I probably was staying busy to not have to feel it all. Maybe this short season of loose schedules and low commitments have simply given my heart some space to unfold. Maybe this is what I have been feeling for a really long time, in other words, and none of it is a signal to any new and terrible thing happening. It’s not a prophetic warning, which is something else I fear; it’s just an emotional landscape finally visible because I have cleared some distractions. Is this a true psychological phenomenon, or have I invented it to make myself feel better? Does anyone know?

I tell myself again that this is just a season. A test. That one day we will be celebrating again, just as we have so many times already! And in that bright future, I will be ashamed to look back at any point before when I had given up hope (which is impossible to do with your children, actually) or indulged in sadness. So today, I’ll finish some work worth doing and get some exercise. I’ll bend some deliberate thought toward good things coming soon. And, because this feels like an instructive moment, I’ll be honest with myself about how I’m really doing: Not great. This is hard.

I love you so much, Joc. Nothing can change that.
I dream of you almost every night, and I talk to you all day, every day,
so much so, that I often trick myself into thinking you’re just across town
and could surprise me at the front door any minute.
I hope you are happy and being loved fully.
I hope you know that we are still here,
still loving and missing you.
XOXO

book review: How to Grow Food, A Wartime Guide

Hey friends! I’d like to share with you my thoughts on the shortest, sweetest, and actually most inspiring little gardening book ever. My long distance bibliophile friend Brittany sent it to me toward the end of Pandemic; but sadly it, it being so diminuitive and me being so aahhhhh, it got lost in the choas of the Apartment. I unearthed it last week while doing a deep clean and was drawn in all over again by the cover art and title: How to Grow Food, A Wartime Guide.

((find this on Ebay!))

Originally published in 1940, it was reprised 2012 and I have read it at exactly the right time for my soul, as these things tend to happen. Are we at war this minute? Maybe not explicitly. But spiritually and socially, kind of. And as far as supply chains and economies are concerned, sure. So let’s grow food and lots of it and have a great time while doing so.

Okay. 1940, Great Britain. The book is written in a narration style, with a calm, tongue in cheek cadence and light touch of humor, despite frequent mentions of Hitler, food rations, refugees, and guesses about how long “this new war” will last. The narrator kind of oversees the fledgling growing adventures of Mr. and Mrs. B, who are British city dwellers recently transplanted to the countryside, in the wake of the first World War. Mr. and Mrs. B. are visited and haphazardly mentored by the only other character in the book, the “Weatherbeaten Lady,” who is eventually identitfied simply as W.L. She is the local countrywoman who knows everything worth knowing about gardening, and she is the opposite of shy about imparting her knowledge to her new and very inexperienced countryside neighbors.

The book is barely 80 pages long, so it’s a quick and delicious little read. Practically a weekday blog post in my world, ha! And each section is as fun as it is useful. Only a few bits of advice seem to not have stood the test of time. One example is the use of cyanide to elminate wasp nests. I’m not even kidding. And the old practice of “double digging” a new seed bed, while not completely out of fashion, is now hotly contested by the no-dig approach made popular by Ruth Stout and Charles Dowding. Eveything else, in my humble opion, can be accepted as at least an old practice worth trying. It’s a sweet and casual collection of old wives’ tales, good habits, and rules of green thumb. Overall, I really liked the October-to-September conversation about how best to grapple with the seasonal rhythms. I have long thought that gardening literature gets super granular way before it first offers a digestible overview of how to just look at your garden. How to strategize. How to see what is possible in your space and how to maximize your unique opportunities. This tiny little book provides some thought stimulus that most gardening books lack.

Here are some short passages I found especially sweet:

“This little book is not intended to teach the farmer or market-gardener his business. It is for those who have never grown food before, either because they have had no gardens, or because, being possessed of gardens, they have grown nothing but flowers.” This is followed by a long passage about the call to become a more “useful” gardener, ha!

“Now that the country is at war… poverty is not the point. Nourishment is the point. Whether one has money or not, it is possible that on some days of the week one will not be able to buy enough food to fill the inner man. But with a garden of vegetables, one will be able to get over the difficulties of distribution that seem to afflict the Government’s well-laid plans for feeding the multitudes.”

(In a paragrah about combating the stress of being stuck at home during a war, which absolutely reminded me of most people’s Pandemic experience…) “…to counteract states of mind, from whatever cause, there is nothing like gardening. It matters not whether the object of one’s labours is a parsnip or a penstemon, the work’s the thing.”

“…to work in the open air, at tasks which really need attention, is to diffuse thought and lull it, and at the same time to gain in physical well-being. It is impossible to be consistently unhappy while digging, planting, or weeding.”

Regarding the W.L.’s advice to Mrs. B. against well manicured and polished hands: “I never set up to be an authority on how to keep the hands lovely while holding down the job of gardener-of-all-work. I am content to keep clean. That’s easy enough. Earth isn’t dirty like oil or grease. Soap and water and a stiff nail-brush are all you need.”

Regarding the arrogant and untried Mr. B: “He studies how to dig. Not any fool can dig.”

And then the same man, after digging a while: “Why, in the first place, does one dig?” I found this turn of thought unreasonably funny.

After some rationalizing and slow learning, once the bones of their new garden have taken shape but they have admitted to not wanting flowers because flowers are not food, an epiphany: “Pretty? Mr. and Mrs. B, in a fervour of utilitarianism, had forgotten that the first duty of a garden is to feed the soul.”

Mr. B. is really falling in love with the practice now: “He thought of the grand rhythm of digging: strike, shove, heave, strike, shove, heave. He thought of the chocolate earth, that was so satisfyingly dirty in such an essentially clean way. He made plans for after the war.” Isn’t that relatable? The sense of being vaulted to a better future while tending the earth?

The narrator pauses to address the choice to begin this gardening story in October: “It may seem that I have begun my account of a gardener’s year at the wrong end: but I think not. The preparation is the real beginning of a garden: not the sowing.”

And a bit more about winter work: “There is little more they can do at the moment, so they busy themselves in collecting information and making additions to their calendar. They wish they had begun gardening last year.”

Much of the middle of the book is packed with specific and practical advice about actual planting practices, certain vegetables and what they like best, greenhouse tips, and more. There’s even a chapter about keeping livestock for the sake of the garden and food supply. I love the parts about farm compost. Here’s one about potting soil: “The best people put their potting-soil through a garden-sieve; I work it and crumble it with my hands, merely because I like it.”

“March- Now we get busy.”

“But the thing which most exercises us in April is weeding.”

“June- Keep hoeing. Keep hoeing all summer.” Hoeing ain’t easy, friends. You know this.

A thought provoking insight about strategy, especially if your growing space is limited: “If the choice lies between small fruit and vegetables, and if the country is at war, the vegetables have it. Small fruit, however delicious, is not an essential of good diet.”

((Radishes. Grow radishes, you guys. They are fast, delicious, and good for aerating your other crops (like lettuce) if you sprinkle the seeds among them.))

I want to be friends with W.L. and wonder if one day I will actually be her: “The W.L. smiles tolerantly, and the B.s feel that she is so full of superior knowledge that she could probably tell by scent where each crop had been. “ This was from a whole chapter about garden arrangement and crop rotation.

The early lesson about feeding the soul needed a few tries to really stick. In answer to W.L.’s offer of shared flowers, Mrs. B. says, ” ‘Oh I don’t think so- it’s very kind of you, but you see, we’re going to grow food.’ Patriotism and virtue exuded from her.”

Okay friends, I hope I have tempted you to find this sweet little thing and gobble it up. Do it after your circle everything you want in the seed catalogs but before you go outside and start digging. Read it knowing that Victory Gardens were exactly what made the difference for thousand and thousands (millions?) of people during WWII, and although our exact circumstances are thankfully very different now, some themes are repeating. A new kind of Victory Garden is called for. Do it. Dive on in with us. Grow some food and some flowers and find yourself your own Weatherbeaten Lady to mentor you, if you are not yet one yourself.

I barely wear sunscreen or polish my nails, so I can try to help if you want.

Happy Growing!!
XOXOXO