05.31.08
More than Just Roses
I have ferns, too. And last month the spirea tumbled its endless waterfalls of tiny white flowers, before the pink weigelia trumpets unfurled.
Now, though, the fragrant purple roses by my door have begun to open, and the peachy pink and those virginal blush roses are translucent. I begin to be in heaven.
In its eagerness to display its defiant life force, the wisteria has broken its flimsy little supports. A new solution must be found.
Not only this, but my dark purple Niobe clematis is showing off. There is more than Roses here, but when they start blooming it seems like there’s nothing but.
05.28.08
Suspect the Happy
Something must be wrong with you if you are happy. If you are truly, wildly, genuinely, gloriously and enthusiastically happy, there must be something “off”. After all we are in a culture that feeds off misery. If you are miserable, if you anxious, you are normal – everyone understands you. They understand unhappiness. Misery loves company and it has a lot of it nowadays. Everyone wants to sing the blues.
But happiness? real happiness? Not the quiet contentment of a homeostatic life, not the smugness of the dominant class, not the postcoital breath, but the foot-lifting dance of the happy-with-life person. Oh, there must be something wrong with you. You must be “touched”, you must be “high”, you must be a fool. At best, you’re “just different”, or the hopefully dark might suggest a dismal and sarcastic secret self. At worst, you must be stupid, to be happy like that, in a world like this. Don’t you know better? We should diagnose you as manic to “level you out”. It’s too saccharine to be real. It’s too cliched and like those moments in the movies just before the car hits the protagonist’s loved ones, or someone has an affair, or someone is accused of terrible things.
There is more of a story behind this but this world is too small.
05.24.08
Introducing Hapless the Bear
His name for a long time was Sad Bear – sad because he had a deflated head and only his body and three existing limbs were stuffed. Sad no longer, but not quite “happy” – he’ll never get over the trauma of his creation. I started knitting this guy three years ago from this pattern which is more like the platonic ideal than the reality. I diligently strove for the ideal but the physical manifestation seems – uh- lacking in fortitude and -uh- perfection.
I digress. Three years later I finally just bought more stuffing. that’s all it took – two and a half years of procrastination, and all I had to do was bring 4$ to dressew. Poor Sad Bear. He spent 2.5 years as a floppy, empty shell, another unfinished project lost in a pile of other, equally well imagined and poorly executed craft excursions. Anyways, his pearly pink eyes and diamondine nose may look cheery but he is indeed hapless. We don’t know what luck he will have in his life – his head is much heavier than his body and his one leg is weaker than the other, but he’s ours and we love him. Hapless will be coming with us on our road trips and other family events – Like us, he’s barely held together.
Hurray for Hapless!
05.05.08
Compost!
Today we hopped in the van and drove to the Landfill. Actually, we drove long distances down highways with no exits, cursing ourselves for yet again having missed another poorly marked offramp. Such long, long highways with seemingly no end in sight.
Once we finally got on the right road, we laughed at how many signs there were for the landfill. And when we got there, we were greeted by so very many individuals bearing and wearing safety equipment. The landfill is a very safe place. Children are not permitted to exit vehicles while there, but there are many lovely expanses of virgin grassland begging for a game of tag. What torture.
It’s the best place to see hawks and eagles. They are perched on the tops of trees, watchful sentries on fenceposts. Their enormous, predatory eyes and regal bodies wait for whatever rodents and small bird are crawling under the ever-growing piles of trash. There’s an individual falconer who works at the landfill – she stood at the top of a mountain of multicoloured nastiness with hawk on her gloved arm, saw us pointing at her and waved, showing off the bird. Here is the majestic tradition, modernized.
Throughout the month of May Vancouver and Delta households can get up to one cubic meter of free compost from the park-and-garden waste compost at the landfill. It’s Bring Your Own Container, though. We went with all our old manure and dirt bags and I shovelled the black earth into all of them. 1 cubic meter is a lot of dirt and I didn’t have enough bags for it all but hey, I got plenty for my postage stamp of a garden!
