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Poetry Challenge 53

August 17, 2010

Summer is winding down here, and the weather is changeable.  Saturday, we had a Chinook wind blow in; it was 75 degrees at 11pm on the last day of the Fair–a night that brings the first stars of the season and, sometimes, first frost.  Today, we loaded up the horses in sun, blue sky, and 80 degrees.  By the time we got to our lesson, we had driven under dark clouds and rode, shivering, in pouring rain.  The weather has us all off kilter.

Write about unexpected weather and someone or something reacting to it.  Be sure to use the sense of touch (as in warm sun/chilling rain) and some quality of motion.

Post the poem as a comment here and I will add it to this post.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

July 18, 2010

What the Thunder Said

Summer is slipping by here in the Interior. Spring came early so that we itched to have our gardens planted before it was mid-May, even knowing that the last frost could still hit by the first of June. But it didn’t and we got our usual bright June weather in May, our hot July temperatures in June, and now, mid-July, August’s rain. Even our short summer seems to be speeding by so fast we don’t know how to keep up. There are blueberries for the picking on some hills; they’re green on others. Some gardens have zucchini, some only flowers. We’ve had days of rain between glorious dry heat—haying weather, if it lasts long enough.

Last weekend, we were out at Quists’ again, picking up three pickup loads of first cutting hay from the field. This hay was dry and bright and we only got enough to stack two layers in the hay barn so that each layer had one side exposed to air and could finish drying thoroughly. It rained fitfully after we finished loading the hay, but we grilled sausages and ate a salad from the garden sitting out on the deck while Mattie and Sam munched their new hay below us in the corral. At night, we could smell the sweet grass smell of the hay drying in the barn.

This weekend we were supposed to get more hay from the Mayos’ field, near the farm where Trish and I ride on Thursdays. By Thursday, however, the clouds had thickened, and by the start of the lesson we were spattered with warm rain that lasted the whole hour. I have been planning to ride in a small show next weekend with the Horsemasters and hoped to ride Sam this afternoon to start ramping up for the weekend. But, as I was raking manure from the corral, the clouds blew in and the rain rattled through the trees. Ira and Mike headed for the house, but I stayed behind, gathering up the tools and putting things away that might get wet.

I headed for the greenhouse. I’m still doing triage transplanting of tomatoes into larger pots, trying to get all the ones I can fit and can’t give away into kitty litter containers with holes drilled in the bottoms. The rest, I at least want to get into pots one size larger so that they thrive till I can find them homes. I never give up on plants I’ve started from seed. I had plenty to do while I waited out the rain.

I stayed in the greenhouse for a few hours, mixing manure and a purchased garden mix of peat and sand. I added fish bone meal and dolomite lime and mixed it all together with some of last year’s dirt to put in the pots. As I worked, up to my elbows in dirt, the rain stopped and the sun came out and sparkled on the tomato leaves where I had sprayed them with the hose. At one point, I stepped out to check the sky and the corral to see if I might still ride Sam on good footing. As I looked up at the ridge behind the house, I saw a bank of gray cloud sliding across the sky, dimming the light. Below the dark cloud were wisps of white cloud like a mist rising—except falling below the deeper gray. They were moving quickly, curling back on themselves, fraying apart, and skimming the top of the trees. There was a sound like falling gravel from up the hill; the leaves on the willows began to shiver; then the rain hit.

At first it was just hard enough to drive me back into the greenhouse. Then the rattle became harder and tiny bits of hail fell with the water. Then pebbles of white ice, fast and thick, the sound like a train clattering across the greenhouse roof. I leaned out the door to check some plants I had staged there, and I grabbed a small Sungold tomato to bring back inside. Sam stood in front of his shed, sideways to it, as close as he could get to shelter without being right under the racket. Mattie huddled back against the back wall of her side of the shed.

Lightning cracked the air. Thunder shook the ground. I stood in the doorway worried about my lettuce, peas, beans, shouting, “No fair! No fair!”

It went on for an hour or so, loud then soft then loud again. I planted all the heirloom tomatoes my friend Cindy gave me and a few of the Chianti Rose slicers—all in their square buckets for the rest of summer now. Then I went back to triage transplanting more Romas and Chiantis.

Then the sun broke through. The corral was deep in water and mud. The tall spruces on the hill dripped, and the air felt thick with moisture. The day was over by then; the opportunity to ride, gone. The horses came out and stood facing south, downhill, heads down. The storm had exhausted us, thrilled us, left us to rest up for tomorrow.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

June 30, 2010

Rainy days now that the solstice is past.  We’re so greedy for light here in the Interior that we grumble about rain after three days of cloudy skies, even though the garden needs it and is drinking it up, transforming it into green.  We want sun in summer to make up for all the dark days of December and January.  We store up vitamin D—some sunny days I can feel it fizzing there under my skin, like a stockpile of caffeine saved for later.

But now it’s raining and gray.  Sam stands muddy in the corral, thinking up mischief.  He’s rolled and the freckles in his white coat blur beneath the gray mud crusted over his coat.  When the wind blows—or sometimes for no reason—he startles and bolts across the corral, while Mattie, on her side of the fence, breaks into the running walk, her fourth gait.

I’ve been in the greenhouse, transplanting tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers.  As they move from smaller pots to their final kitty litter buckets or five gallon buckets, the greenhouse first looks orderly, then crowded.  I’m giving away plants as fast as I can, but then another problem arises.  As I give away plants, I also give away dirt and I’m about to run out of last year’s potting soil, even mixed with this year’s composted manure.  Strange as it seems, I now need to buy potting soil to mix with the manure in order to have enough for all my plants.

Still, rainy afternoons in the greenhouse are pleasant, with their own rhythm.  I bring a go cup of hot tea with lemon and honey, then dig my arms up to the elbows in dirt, mixing last year’s soil, this year’s manure compost, some dolomite lime and fish bone meal.  All the while, I’m thinking of the meal it will provide the plants and how they, in turn, will provide meals for us.  In fact, in the greenhouse, separated from the phone, the radio, the computer—just the drip of rain on the fiberglass roof, and the sound of Sam walking by the corral fence, checking on what I’m up to—every part of this life makes sense.  I dig in the manure that Mattie and Sam produce from the hay we load out of our neighbors’ fields, thinking of tomatoes, so sweet and tart.  It’s not a perfect cycle—I have to buy more dirt after all, and I pay for the hay.  But it’s a cycle with its satisfactions.

And there are other satisfactions of life in the Interior.  Moments ago, I went to the back door, headed out to feed the horses, when I noticed something on the railing on the back stairs landing.  A Boreal owl, slatey brown, speckled with white.  It swiveled its head to look at me, yellow eyes that looked wide with surprise from the circle of feathers radiating out from each eye.  It didn’t move, but contemplated me, and I it.  Then it swiveled its head around, staring down at the wild strawberries that grow there.  I had time to find a camera and take one photo before it tilted its head down intently, fidgeted a little, then spread its wings to float down to land on a vole, nibbling on a strawberry.

I went out on the landing.  I could see the owl there behind the delphinium leaves, his head turned to look at me once again.  Then he gathered his wings and brushed the air and soared over to land on the cab of the truck.

I’ll keep an eye out for him again.  He’s too small to be a danger to my skittish new cat, but I’m glad for his help with the vole population.  Maybe I’ll get beets and carrots this year, not just the tops.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

May 26, 2010

We’ve made the transition from breakup to summer with a mere nod to spring.  Here in the Interior, we go from bleak to blossoms suddenly as the light increases every day.  Today I noticed purple wildflowers blooming along the road where there was nothing—not even a hint of green–yesterday.  On the bank behind the house, something yellow and lavish that I planted three years ago is blooming among the rocks.  By the horse barn, I saw the first bluebells, purple in the bud, then a sweet far-sky blue as they bloom.  The leaves are almost fully out and flashing in the sun.

And there are other signs of summer.  Mosquitoes buzz the horses during the night, sometimes annoying them so much that they begin to gallop around the corral.  I’ve taken to putting their mosquito mesh blankets on them at night.  And with the mosquitoes come those mosquito-eaters, yellowjackets.  Now the heavy queens hover in the willows, along the bank, in the eaves of the greenhouse, looking for a nesting place.  Now is the time to trap them and prevent the colonies to come, but the queens don’t seem interested in our elaborately baited traps, going, instead, for tomato plants, the manure pile, or the leaves of willows.   We will need to find the nests as they’re built and spray them down in the early morning or at night when it’s cool.  Except we no longer have real night until about 1AM, for an hour or two.  A few years ago, we had the worst infestation ever.  People all across the Interior were getting stung and having allergic reactions.  I hope that we don’t go through this again. A late frost or a week of heavy rain would knock them back, but those are things not to be desired.

Meanwhile, the greenhouse is filling with tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, squash.  I’ve started my cutting lettuce and zukes and crookneck squash, too, and the purple broccoli, which I’m a sucker for the idea of, though I’ve not yet gotten it through the growing season.

Sam and Mattie are sleek and glossy.  Mattie always looks like she’s made of polished metal at this point in the season.  Her coat is still nearly black and it shines.  Later in summer she will bleach out to dark bay with a few dark dapples along her sides.  She also has begun to get more flecks of gray, so that she may become a dark roan at some point.

I’m much tireder this year than last, coming off an intense school year feeling so behind in my gardening and having the sense already that summer could slip right through my fingers.  I have an ambitious riding schedule set for me and Mattie and Sam (with Trish or Casey, this year).  I hope we can do it all.

I have to admit, though, that events in the world shadow my joy at summer.  As I plan to trailer my horses around town in my clunker truck, I carry the image in my mind of oil gushing into the Gulf waters, unstoppable, all the beaches and bayous I spent time in during my years in Mississippi gunked up with oil.  I want to be responsible for my little corner, to not add to the troubles of the world, but in the troubles resulting from oil, we are all implicated.  And face compromises.  To have the horse manure that nourishes the gardens of many of my “green” friends, I have to drive to the hay field, pick up the hay that has been tended by a tractor, and drive it back.  Something as earth-bound as riding a horse is also implicated in the consequences we all face as a result of using oil.  The yellowjackets, warm, dry-weather-loving, may also be a consequence of a warming planet—or they could just be in a cycle.

I don’t know the answer to this, though I know scientists at the university who throw all their mental energy into finding out.  For me, adding composted manure to last year’s greenhouse dirt, transplanting tomatoes, turning manure into the raised garden beds, and planting the seeds that can grow directly in the ground is how I deal with it.  It’s all a symbiotic system—living things: horses, plants, people—support and benefit each other.  Each time I enter that system with all its beauties, I feel renewed, a small counter to the ugliness of what’s happening in the Gulf and elsewhere.

As I finish this, I hear rain on the metal roof.  I just came in from the deck, where I moved the deck chairs under the overhang of the roof.  Off to the east, there’s already a rose color in the high clouds, and the sky to the south is slatey blue.  I could see out across the river to the flats beyond, rich with green and darker green.  The air smells sharp with new rain.  A robin sings, perhaps one of the pair that has nested on the beam above our window.  The sound of the rain is soothing, even though I don’t yet have the garden planted—we’re still a week from the last frost date here.  I’m glad to be in the Interior in summer, yellowjackets notwithstanding.

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Poetry Challenge 48

May 20, 2010

We’re into leaf-out here in the interior–the leaves, still small and yellow-green, shine as they flicker in the breeze.  The wind has been stronger than usual as the ever-increasing daylight creates unstable warm air masses that move across the flats or up the river system.  The other day, I came home to find Sam in the middle of the corral staring hard at the hill behind the house, where a large spruce had fallen–luckily, along the side of the hill and not onto the house or the corral.   Yesterday, he spooked at the hose being pulled along the side of the corral.  We’re all a bit jumpy.

So write about a phobia that turned out to be nothing to worry about–or a close call (like the tree).  Let the wind blow through the poem–or have a cat run through it.

Add it as a comment and I’ll post it here.

———————————————————————-

Here’s a poem from Tim Murphrey:

Bernoullian Extacy

Scraping the ice from the pane
solidifies to my vision
the relationship between two lovers:
Me
and the ground.
But the doubt in our courting lies
on me, an Earthbound yearning,
and I wonder if she wants
like I do, or worse.
Our union can only end in disaster.
A buzzing, as of switches being thrown,
that light, airy feeling
from my new mistress
helps to lull me into the big lie
that this may never end.
Fast, too fast! and I’m always watching,
straining to see the ground, now grown cold,
expression seldom changing,
quick, constant, moving glimpses of us sailing over,
swollen belly mocking; what was once the Earth’s
now belongs to the vespers.
She’ll have to tolerate our presence soon, as we give in
to the sinking feeling –
Our union can only end
in disaster.

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Poetry Challenge 45

April 23, 2010

Spring is silly season here in the Interior.   The snow is melting, but the ground is still frozen near enough to the surface that the grass is still brown and the leaves have not yet begun to bud.  Same news as last week, in fact.   We’re waiting for the ice to go out in Nenana, when those of us who’ve chosen the exact minute that the tripod moves and trips the clock in the watch house will be a little bit richer.   On campus, today was a holiday from classes.  Years ago, it was a clean up day, but now, it’s an occasion to drop watermelons from the eighth floor, to play mud volleyball, and generally indulge in foolishness.  We all need a break.

So how does spring–or it’s maddeningly slow approach–make you silly?  Or how does waiting for anything that takes time send you off in wild imaginary directions?   And, considering the tender feelings of those of us who haven’t yet seen green, no poems about flowers, please!

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

April 18, 2010

Still waiting for green, though the air is warm again after a few chilly days and a freak hailstorm on Thursday.   Today, a Chinook wind blew in sixty-degree weather or, at least, the mid to high fifties.   In the sun, it felt like summer though the ground is still frozen just beneath the surface and we still have half a yard full of snow.  Out on the Tanana, a lead is opening up, dark and sleek in the punchy white ice.  Nothing moving yet, just the ever-widening black patch of water.  The willows are fluffing out their catkins, pussywillows.  I think of cutting some sticks of willow for the living room, but, when I think about doing that, I’m usually on the way from one thing to another—back to the house to get the Cowboy Magic for Sam’s tail or off to the greenhouse for more four-inch pots, as I am just starting to transplant the first flat of seedlings.

Today, Trish came up to work with Sam again.  She lunged him after we took another bushel of hair out of his coat, then we brought him over to Mattie’s side of the corral—the larger flatter side that doubles as a small arena—and got out the saddle.  Sam is a professional horse.  I often think he may have been a circus horse.  He stood stock-still in the morning sun while we fussed with him.  Finally, he was saddled and Trish got on.  She walked him around the corral, getting to know him.  He moved willingly, none of the usual feet planted stubbornness he used to exhibit back in the early days.  She seemed happy, and so did he.  It should be a good summer for Sam with three of us doting on him.

As for Mattie, it may be that some of our long-running issues are becoming resolved.  She’s trotting pretty reliably at the end of the longe line now, and stood for the saddle and for mounting today—her first ride of the spring.  We headed off around the corral and she trotted, leg yielded, trotted in small circles—in short, she remembered everything and it was gratifying.

There’s almost no ice left in the corral now and the sand drained quickly.  The yard is soggy and scattered with wood chips from the firewood chopping area.  The grass is flattened and brown.  We have chickadees and juncos at the bird feeder.   I’m listening for robins and thrushes in the woods and the rattle of a woodpecker.  We’re still a long way from greenup, but I have three flats of starts to transplant: tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and delicata squash.  I took them out for an afternoon in the greenhouse, and managed to transplant some of the cucumbers today into three-inch pots.

I heard a report that a friend’s spouse, out cutting wood, saw the year’s first mosquito.

Tonight, around ten thirty, a sliver of moon hung low in the sky, fuzzy through a thin layer of cloud.  With night, the chill in the air returns, but the light lingers longer in the sky now and there’s a slatey light on everything.  We could still get snow, but all our restlessness calls out for true spring followed soon by summer.

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Poetry Challenge 44

April 7, 2010

I hear that it’s spring in some locations south of here.  Trish McConnell in her blog The Other End of the Leash posted some stunning photos of crocuses and daffodils.  But here in the Interior, we have piles of gray snow, melting and refreezing puddles, and lots of brown ground.  It will be a month before the first green.

So write about opposites found in one thing–winter embedded in a spring month, the dog with the cat-like traits–or how opposites are more like each other than they are different.

Send a poem as a comment and I’ll post it here.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 24, 2010

Now that we’re past the equinox and into official spring, everything—light, temperatures, wind, the ground, animals, us—is changeable.  Each morning more and more light seeps into the tail end of our dreams, and light lingers on into the evening.  At mid day, the air sparkles with light and flickers with the shadows of birds flitting to the willows, birches, fireweed, brittle from last summer, rustling with last year’s seed.

At night, the temperature slips below zero, with wind, something we’re not used to after the long still nights of winter.  During the day, the sun warms the south-facing slopes and melts the crystalline structure of snow piled in the yard so that it becomes crunchy, brittle, dense from thawing and re-freezing.  The sidewalks on campus run with water in the afternoon, which freezes into thick sheets by morning, making walking precarious.

Mattie gets nervous in spring and fall.  In my narrative of her life, the spring was when she went to work as a pack mare and fell into the defensive patterns she sometimes still displays. I imagine someone sometime treated her badly, thus her ears-back attitude about anything new or unfamiliar.  In the fall, once, she was left out to fend for herself over winter, gaining a taste for wood as she survived in the wilderness south of the Alaska Range.  All this happened when she was between three and five years old—still an adolescent in horse years and very impressionable.  When the seasons change, she goes through a period when no trust we’ve established between us is certain.  She’s edgy, touchy, and would just as soon be left alone.  And in spring, after a winter of eating, sleeping, and standing looking at the valley or the road below her fence, she goes into heat again.

So, yesterday, I should have read her cues better.  I was grooming her, trying to desensitize her to some touchy spots, especially the area where the girth goes, under her chest.  Things were going peaceably until she started stamping her foot, and I left my hand under her chest, asking her to put her ears up.  Instead she reached over and grabbed the sleeve of my coat in her teeth—inexcusably bad behavior, and dangerous.

I have to admit I was frightened—whole scenarios flashed through my head—but, as far as I know, I kept my cool.  I yelled and she pulled her head away.  I untied her from the fence and backed her up, flinging the end of the rope at her till she skittered across the snow backward.  She still put her ears back and rolled her eyes at me as if she thought she was intimidating me.  I didn’t let on that she was, a little.   I unclipped the lead rope from her halter and walked away.  She stood there till I came back with the longe whip, with its long popper cord.  I snapped the whip in the air behind her, and she trotted away.  I followed and snapped it again to turn her in a new direction.  She trotted and cantered around the corral away from the snap of the whip so that I was driving her in front of me and not letting her rest.  Finally she stopped and turned to me, standing stock still, ears clearly up and pointed towards me, as if to say, “Enough.  Can we make up?”  I tucked the whip under my arm and said, “Step up,” and made a come-here gesture with my hand, a cue she knows.  She came up to me, and I took her halter.  She was a little trembly, and so was I.  Then we went on to work on the longe line, as we’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks.

I don’t have a round pen, the tool some horse trainers recommend for training young horses or for corrections like the one I was trying to give her.  Because she had transgressed on one of the cardinal rules of horse manners—don’t threaten or damage the handler—I had to respond immediately, dramatically, and fairly.  The last one is the hard part.  She was challenging my leadership in our partnership, and I needed to make clear to her that that was unacceptable.  The hard part, given how vulnerable I actually am as a human working with a thousand pound horse, is not to give in to or act out of fear, for that could lead me to act unfairly and could make the situation worse. So, while I was backing her up and making myself big and scary to her with the rope end and the popper on the longe whip, I couldn’t do anything that would hurt her or make her feel truly threatened, though I did want her to feel bossed around.  It’s a kind of acting, with serious intent.  I had to keep my wits about me not to push her over the line again while I was keeping her moving, and to, at the right moment, see when she had given up the “debate” over leadership and was ready to do what I wanted, signaled by her standing with ears up.

Coming back to horses when I did, after thirty plus years away, I have relied on reading all I can read—especially newer trends in positive horse training and horse psychology, and on listening and watching any horse person with experience that I can.  What I did with Mattie was based on reading Gincy Self Bucklin, John Lyons, Cherry Hill, Bruce Nock and others.   Yet, with a rescue horse like Mattie—and during the first heat of spring—I have to keep reminding myself never to take anything for granted.

By feeding time and then by morning, Mattie was back to her sweetest self, letting me rub the itchy spots on her face and neck.  All day, the wind gusted, and, when I came home this afternoon, she was standing by the gate, her black coat spiky where she had rolled in melting snow and dotted with pale spruce shavings.   She had her ears up.  I had my good sturdy Carhartt’s jacket on.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 10, 2010

Spring Break

A week’s respite from the intensity of spring semester; I am getting time for real life.

This morning, as I write, the sun is warm on my back through the glass door to the deck.  Recently, it’s been high enough in the sky to clear the ridgeline behind us, so the corral is in sun till late afternoon, and it’s light enough to work outside till nearly seven and later each day.  This time of year sneaks up on us—but all seasons do in the north; they’re so extreme and transition so quickly.  Now, during this fallow week, I planned to get out every day to work with Mattie and Sam, but it’s Wednesday already, and I’ve only been out with them twice, and I can already feel the week slipping away.

On the shelf by the south-facing window are this year’s seeds, sorted by planting date, and stored in those clear plastic shells that cinnamon rolls from Lulu’s come home in.  Yesterday, I washed the old flats from the greenhouse, and today I will plant the first seeds of the year: Chianti Rose, Pompeii Roma, Sungold, and Camp Joy tomatoes.  Later in the week, I’ll plant the Little Prince eggplant—trying over on an unsuccessful experiment from last year.  Although the ground will be covered with snow till well into April or, if we get a few good March snowstorms, May, my mind is full of the joy of green things to come.

I imagine lettuce—I plant a cutting mix and a red and green romaine mix—the speckled leaves, the russet leaves, the frilled and smooth leaves, glowing as the sun slants through them in the evening. I imagine pulling carrots—I’m trying King Midas this year, a long variety, with the horses in mind.  I miss the taste of them, sweet, with just a hint of garden grit with the crunch of the root.

Mattie and Sam still stand in the sun each morning to warm their coats—it was fifteen below this morning.  In the afternoon, it will warm above zero and I’ll head out to groom them and do some longeing and groundwork.  I imagine I’m working them towards fitness for summer, but know that the weather, the cold, the packed snow melting in April to a dangerous slickness, the work ahead to finish the semester will all compete with my intentions toward them.  We have an ambitious lesson and clinic schedule set up for summer, including a three day Centered Riding clinic.  Between now and May, they need to be fit enough to take hour long lessons and the trail rides I hope to go on.  And so do I.

So, now, I’m on the couch, Jeter the poodle curled on his end, writing this instead of grooming, longeing, planting, dancing.  The sun has moved farther along the window now.  On NPR, there’s a discussion on the role of poetry in our lives in the 21st century.  There’s more coffee to drink.  Spring is still a dream, but a lovely dream.  We gather our energy now for the work ahead.

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