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