MindSpinner

The orange tent out back
will come down today.
The blue cooler still partly filled
with ice and cans
of Coke and Ale 8
will be emptied.
Diverse sleeping bags
will be wrangled into rolls,
more or less,
and stashed away.

The boy who invited his
best buddies over for a rolicking
midnight Airsoft battle
(and when he was two
strode straight into the roiling surf
of his very first sea)
will be leaving
on Tuesday for eight
months of training.
His Special Forces unit
has already been calling
to see how long
’til he’s ready.
Military Intel people,
so it seems, are needed yesterday.

On the other hand,
last night’s 6mm plastic BBs
will be unearthed in my garden
for the next thousand years.
Green. Blue. White. Yellow.
I swept up the ones
strewn across the driveway
near the car and the wood pallet
stood on end for defense,
but I will not pick up
the ones fired and fallen in the garden
among the carrots and the onions,
the thyme and the slender
green blades of iris.
Not even one.

1) I checked the beans yesterday and have a bucketful, so I’m pulling out the canner. I have enough tomatoes to make a small batch of sauce, too. I am happiest in the garden and least happy bumping about by myself in the house, ordering aimlessness with a to-do list. Today, however, it is steamy hot out. I’ll save the outdoors for evening.

2) I had thought that cats were loners of the animal world, that they preferred their own territory. Certainly Bobby, our five-year-old cat, has never liked other cats; he tolerates dogs better because he is more accustomed to them. Presented with a neighbor’s Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy (a creature bred for lion hunting), he will chase it around in the spirit of fun. Presented with a new cat, he will hiss and spit. And so he did at first with the orange kitten who has come to stay. Orange Stripey Dude, for his part, unabashedly expected to be loved and played with and would have no demurring. So now they play, they bathe each other with their tongues, and they often curl up together for a nap. So much for cats being solitary creatures.

3) The new academic year planners do me good. They have “November 2008″ printed right in front of me on physical pages, promising that the next presidential election really will come, and George Bush really will have to leave office.

4) My fifth period sophomore class of about 25 students has at least one precocious student who performs at college level, three who read at fourth grade level and one who reads at first grade level. One expects a range of abilities, but this mix is unusually challenging.

Since I teach at a school that operates on a semi year-round schedule, summer break lasts, in practical terms, about six weeks. That six weeks has come to an end. With the first day of school just around the corner, I just want to tally and celebrate the best of summer.

• Taking four girls to see the mewithoutYou concert and inadvertently meeting one of the band members beforehand, a feat which, for one brief shining moment, made me a way-cool mom .
• Taking Dark-haired Daughter and Catapult Kid whitewater rafting. Hearing “No guide! No guide!” all the way down the country until we saw the river and then hearing “We’re going to die!” instead.
• Watching them paddle all over the lake at my mother’s home in our big canoe.
• Spending time with extended family, including my brother and his family. Helping my mother stake anasazi beans.
• Paying attention to the wild upstarts I’ve called weeds for years and years and learning what they actually are.
• Waking up to rain that ends a dry spell and waters everything at once.
• Driving down to see a not-so-far-away college to learn about its commitment to sustainable living and sustainable agriculture. Seeing how a straw bale house is built. Learning about permaculture techniques that make a lot of sense.
• Going to see Wild Hogs with Catapult Kid one night when his sister was working. (Catapult Kid is doing the inner work of leaving home and declaring his independence - rather overdoing it - which means that good mother-son time is a big deal when it happens.)
• Getting on the Interstate going south with Catapult Kid when we should have gone north. We ended up turning around one exit down and pulling into gas station/fast food joint where Catapult Kid bought food for a homeless guy who had almost the same last name and I bought a handmade basket from an Amish couple.
• Noting how many high school students showed up at Open House at school when they really don’t need to, just to see everybody and to say hello. It really will be OK for school to start next week - these are lovable kids.

The process by which we find our way through life intrigues me. Life seems a river that, guided by gravities of heart and need, flows around unyielding obstacles and digs its channels in remaining possibilities, winding at various distances from might-have-beens.

Today, while I write, the marmalade kitten (AKA Orange Stripey Dude) bats and leaps at a strand of leftover yarn tied to the doorknob. No, Orange Stripey Dude didn’t go to the animal shelter. Something came up on the afternoon of July 3, and we didn’t make it to the shelter. On July 4, the shelter was closed. This was fateful. Anybody who can resist the charms of Orange Stripey Dude after 48 hours can be suspected of having a flinty heart. His gender has now been confirmed, he’s been proclaimed healthy, and he’s had his first shots. Like the rest of the fur folk, he is a reliable companion - you feed him, you pet him, and he opts to stick around. He isn’t much good at intelligent conversation, no more than Cat the First or the dogs or the bunnies, so thank heaven for NPR and audiobooks, blogs and the Internet. He does have an appalling amount of playful energy, hence homemade cat toys such as leftover yarn strung from doorknobs. (The leftover yarn means I finished crocheting the string bag as of Sunday, which is a good thing, because work started Monday, and I won’t have time anymore to waste on crocheting unneedful things just because I find the task soothing.)

Outside, vegetables grow in the kitchen garden and in eight raised beds. I’m making plans to expand the effort further and to include more herbs. I’ve even ordered seed for a stand of amaranth. In the past year, besides the vegetables, I’ve added three apple trees, a pecan tree, currants and gooseberries, and I’ve investigated permaculture. Someday, when the teenagers are making their way in the world, food from the backyard will replace much of the food from grocery store. I’ve taken a rather involved look at the matter of how food gets to the grocery store to the table this past year and decided that I don’t want to be at the mercy of all possible threats to food security and affordability.

So, I have too many animals and a yard that’s going to look like a microfarm. All this seems random, but it isn’t. It’s all factored into a knowledge that’s sunk into my bones, “I am on my own.” This is different from saying “I have no friends” or “I have no social life,” for I have these in modest measure. I have too many animals partly because they keep me company. My yard will turn into a microfarm partly because that’s one form of security I can manage while my income erodes against the cost of living. And because being outside planting or weeding does me good when nothing else can. (Alas, mowing affords nothing of the same benefits, though it needs doing this very day. If I have to have a lawn, I should have sheep to nibble it. I wouldn’t have to crank a sheep and push it tediously back and forth on a hot day.)

In my bedroom, beneath the gable, an arched window admits stars, sometimes the moon, white clouds dry-brushed on blue sky, inky washes of storm clouds, and the blended pastels of morning. Blinds obscure my view of the neighbors’ house below during the day and the neighbors’ view of me slipping out of clothes at bedtime, but the half circle at the top of the window remains uncovered to frame an arc of sky, a succinct heaven. I’ve long rejected the notion of concocting window treatments, the window being the point.

Beneath the top of that arch, a tiny spider wove unseen a month or two ago a radiating web not larger than the spread of my small hand. It has gathered dust now until it is a proper cobweb. One or two of its delicate threads have been torn by tiny wings, but it is still near perfect. The artist in me has overruled the fussy Victorian housekeeper who would swat the web down with a broom lest visitors glance up to see it. I feel too much affinity for the spider and the web to sweep the work away.

I think in webs that span void, circumference and even contradiction. It seems to me that there is nothing that is not connected to something else and even to its own opposite. There is no strength that is not connected to weakness, no virtue that is not connected to flaw, no ending that is not connected to beginning, no beginning that is not connected to an end, no gain that is not connected to loss, no gift given that is not also received in the giving, no selfish choice that does not incur loss as well as gain. Reality and consequence and perception are always webs, as interconnected as the forces that generate the trajectory of the ripple that rides the wave there and back again, in a foam of physics calculations the nimblest mind cannot follow. The web also represents connections felt across spans of distance, forged in conversation yet not absent in silence or difference or even death, rope bridges spanning roaring chasms between souls, precarious, yet sturdy enough for white-knuckled crossings.

The spider web at the apex of the arched window that greets morning, midday, and night, is mute. It only reverberates a little with currents of air and clings to the anchors that suspend it two inches from that plane where the world within meets the world without. I look to it daily from my chosen spot on the side of the bed nearest to the light and nearest to the dark.

So ends my apologetic for lapses in dusting .