. Spinning .

Peach trees, crabapples, junipers, lilacs, the mighty oaks and maples all grow as weeds within my small garden space.  Poison ivy too–whoops–I almost pulled it barehanded till I saw the leaves of three.  Pricker bush babies, sons of birches, and then among more normal weeds I see a struggling straggly rose.

Pull the purse strings tight again, No problem, I’ve done it many times before.  Groceries:  2 half-gallons of Friendly’s Forbidden Chocolate, a quart of Half and Half, a regular size jar of Hellman’s Mayonnaise, and 2 packages of pork sirloin cutlets.  Bottom line:  $9.91.

I’m tired, though, truly tired of it all.  A step ahead and three steps backward.  And grinning like a damn fool through it all. 

(Note:  Obviously we don’t need the ice cream or pork sirloins, but when it’s only $1.99/half gallon for the ice cream and the meat only came to $1.65, I think I did well.  The milk was the most expensive item at $2.29.)

This morning an urge overcame me to roll down the lawn.  I didn’t because of the wet grass-clinging snails.

But I didn’t go all girly when one squished in my handful of weeds.

Glad today to have my stomach filled with morning’s labor in the soil.  Stripped with sighing satisfaction as I peeled away my rain-soaked clothes.  Showered, scrubbed the dirt out from my fingernails and pores, then donned clean cottons and opened up my shop.

Still closed supposedly on Mondays, Tuesday; a phone call from New Haven and sure, I’ll open just for pickup.  But did some other things in there that needed doing, and without technology I managed just as well.

While waiting for New Haven another customer drives by, sees the open doors and moseys in.  How’ve you been, Mary, is innocent enough but turns a key that it would seem unlocks her heart.  Her husband died last month–Oh Mary, I’m so sorry!  I didn’t know…  "He shot himself," she says.  I have made her cry and hold her till she stops, then dry my own tears quickly so she doesn’t see.

I’m back in place and yet not there when Margaret finally comes at four.  We talk a while, an hour or more and then we pack her car with family photos and the like.  I bid goodbye.  "Wait a minute," she says, and for a moment I cease to breathe, and then exhale with happy luxury as she hands me a gold beribboned green foil-wrapped small package.

I hug her and I wave goodbye, and go inside to read the present that she’s left me.  Sand Creek, a collection of poems by Simon J. Ortiz.

A year ago tonight at 9:15 my best friend died.

Strange, how something kept me out in gentle rain all morning till the garden was completely planted.  Hoeing my heart out, soaked through cutoff jeans and cotton shirt.  Didn’t wear my glasses.  Didn’t need to see beyond the worried rows.  Tomato plants and jalapeno peppers–only ’cause I didn’t start the habanero seeds in pots late winter.  Yellow squash and butternut, cucumbers and basil, dill, cilantro too.  I’ll have to buy the onions to make the salsa come September.

And I suppose, I won’t have the help in cutting, chopping, ladling into jars, nor hear the laughter of my best friend this year.

Wet not from sweat but from a soft rain that’s falling, a perfect rain that you pray will follow the planting.  But the planting was not completed last evening, as tired from the day’s work you put down your hoe.

A price that you pay for the pleasure of seeding, of growing, of smiling at flower buds that turn into tomatoes.  Tomatoes that turn up sliced on your plate in late August, so today, you plant out in the rain.

A magical night.  Don’t think I have ever seen so many fireflys in the yard.  Some skimming the ground, some sparkling like Christmas lights blinking in and out of the treelines up to the bright horizon of night sky.  Heartening.  Magical.

Perhaps a dourness has set in that affects my vision of my day, my backyard, to change things to suit my mood. 

A butterfly, beautiful–black wings dotted with white and slashed with orange– flys by me. Flys by again, and again, and again.  Lovely, I think, graceful, but with the lousiest sense of direction, much like my own. 

I work in the garden in the hot morning sun, breaking the soil to accept my offferings of colors and flavors and scents.  Bright yellow squash and the sweet ripe tomatoes, and the basil and dill will lay pungent in late August evenings.

He’s off for a while and bids me goodbye as I warn him he’ll slide off my forehead.  He kisses the top of my head, smiles, looks down at the dust on my feet, and wipes his lips.

"Show me a new world," Professor Robinson had said.  (It is) An element of fiction, not easy to create within short story form, yet knowledge and awareness and practice can develop the skill.  Or, we can spend a week in a world where daily routine is completely foreign such as the conference schedule imposed, and then slide back into our own within minutes when we walk through the door.

My home based world has changed a bit in my absence, some good things some bad, all surmountable problems that take care of themselves in time with a little help.  Help from experience, help from caring, help from understanding that world.

As a writer, I can see that story needs a quick fix injected into a paragraph or two in the beginning in order to welcome the stranger (reader) into its world.