It is not April. Don’t be a fool.

I SWEAR I’m still here. All of me. Okay, the old me and some added fat which means parts of me are new.

I have no idea what I’ve been doing with my time.

dishes, yes. hours and hours of dishes.

cleaning and laundry. a little bit of time, but it adds up. hanging up and folding and putting away clothes, even with a tiny bit of help from the kids. it all adds up. you know this.

trying to sleep for as many hours as possible after 11 pm (until 6:30 am), some tossing and turning, some restless, but about 7 a night. sometimes a few catching up in the a.m. (bliss bliss bliss if this can happen)

prepping and cooking food, yes. hours and hours.

buying food. not so much time.

farm share. yes, picking up farm share, but that doesn’t take too much time.

health, yes, managing my health. this takes a bit of time.

hiking, yes. yoga, yes. biking, a bit. These 3 add up. Hours and hours.

eating. yes. eating.

planning a trip to California, yes. This takes oodles of time.

But really, the real culprit is Facebook Scrabble. Which just crashed, right as I was posting a 30-point word. This is how I find myself blogging.

Oh, and I’m reading Anna Karenina, but I’m only on page 60-something after about a week-and-a-half, so that’s not it. All those patronyms do take extra getting used to.

learning my lines. for this show. this takes a lot of time. learning lines is hard. for me. no one else but me.

my mother. enough said.

two teenage daughters. (see last item)

the cat. a little bit of time a week.

marriage. this takes time. good time, but yes time or else one finds oneself not feeling so married as one would most like.

not writing poetry. not reading poetry. not submitting poetry. so, no time.

waiting. waiting takes FOREVER.

This all makes me think of Bruegel. I am not sure why. Because I am thinking of all the photos I’ve taken of the leaves. And how busy everyone seems to be in these paintings. Busy Busy Busy. My god. All of the sinners and workers. Work is all we used to have until now. Now we have online Scrabble.

These people are at a fest-i-val of some kind or other methinks. Maybe a change of seasons is being observed. Not like today when it was almost pitch dark when we finished our hike in the woods at 6:25 p.m. and now I am in my kitchen, full of lights when I should be sleeping.

Have fun, you folks, you. And PLEASE don’t vote for the bad guys. They are SUPER bad and SUPER stinky. You know of whom I speak. You need to vote for the people who will protect the peasants the most. The peasants are you and me. And who do your think will do that? Think about it because it is not Romney.

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A note from the management

Before Thankful Thursday gets into full swing, the management would like to alert you to the fact that several posts are now password protected; I am exploring new avenues for a few of my poems. I am not, however, ready to remove them completely. (There was one poem a few months ago that was and will remain password protected unless I can edit it to protect the innocent; truly, as it is about children.)

I love my blog and I love putting poems up here; I love the comment section if I’m lucky enough to get comments. At times I’m torn between blogging my poems and simply putting together a chapbook.

A blog is both mutable and stable (as long as one has access to electricity at some point…another irony of a blog’s “permanence”); the fact of the technology blows me away sometimes. I puzzle over it. Knowing that it is only in a nascent state makes it even more amazing and mind-boggling.

What I miss sometimes is reading words off of pages. The computer hurts my eyes. I get tired more easily sitting in front of a screen. I miss touching paper, but I love youtube. I love the speed and the tricks and the access, but I also love reading in bed at night propped up on my queenly down pillows with real paper between my opposeable thumbs and fingers.

On to Thankful Thursday. Some time. Later.

Ciao! twinkly

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Thankful Thursday, Friday edition

I took my mother to the Dutch and Flemish masters exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum yesterday. She loved it and was reminded of many things from her life as a young girl in Germany.

I visited the exhibit in a hurry last week but yesterday I was able to spend a relaxed series of breaths with the paintings and I could love the ones I love for a wee bit more time. The rooms were more crowded, too, and it was fun to listen to people talk about the paintings. I liked observing and participating in this little expression of human nature. What struck me as funny was how people have a lot to say about art and what they are seeing, have lots of ideas and feelings and impressions; but as there seems to be an unspoken pressure to be right about art (as if there is some objective truth beyond each person’s interpretation), a lot of folks tended to clam up. Then again, to give the patrons the benefit of the doubt, maybe silence helps most people take in the visual, and verbal commentary detracts from this pleasure–?. Being on the verbose side myself, I thought the funnest folks were the ones who were willing to say things out loud, to ask silly questions, and to engage with their fellows and fellowines (okay I know that’s not a word, but shouldn’t it be?).

My mom and I ate lunch out, ate dinner out, walked on the beach in Gloucester, and drove around in circles at various points on our journey because I no longer use a map (thanks GPS) and because the British-voiced GPS Lady is sort of !@#$ ed sometimes in her satellite-induced calculations. I used to be a champion map-reader, but not any more, and what does it matter because, map or GPS, when you get lost in a place and come back again some day, you’ve got a better lay of the land than if you hadn’t gotten lost at all.

Thankful for yesterday with mum, then.

Thankful for this beautiful herb drying rack which I ordered on etsy a few days ago (first ever etsy purchase):

You can see that I’ve been gathering lavender and bundling it to dry; cutting a few other herbs as well to see how they’ll fare. This is something I love–the flowers and herbs in my garden. I imagine how wonderful it would be to make those lavender bundles like you see in France or in fancy, expensive gift shops all over small WASPy and affluent towns in America. How do they get the lavender to stay darkly-colored and fresh for years? I think it has something to do with boric acid and that’s a step too far for me, so my lavender eventually dries out and sort of shreds away. Like the motif of fleeting time and mortality one finds in paintings from the Golden Age of Dutch art.

Here are a few of my fave paintings, at least ones of which I could find images:

Here’s one which didn’t have any commentary attached to it, as many of the pieces did. I love it. Of all of the paintings, I think it is the most pornographic in nature (there was one other, too, a dandy man in the early stages of disrobing in his dressing room, painted in shades of ochre). It is called “Young Girl Eating Sweets.” And so she is and wouldn’t I like some of what she has? But I don’t think she plans on sharing.

And this:

Isn’t she beautiful? I think I am in love with her.

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