Light It Up

As I said, always a strange season for me. But then again, all the seasons are strange, this one is always crazy busy. If I'd known how much busier I'd get throwing kids into the equation for this holiday season... Well, I wouldn't have changed a damn thing, but I might have paused and reflected for something like 10 more minutes.

I fulfilled my family duties last Sunday and actually got on a borrowed 20' ladder and stuck lights on my house. Yes, I know, hard to believe. I've been trying to talk my family out of wanting them for years with arguments like, "Do you want our house to end up looking like the house across the street?" (which turned out to be rather poor, as it's got every Christmas decoration available strewn across it and thus is a child's dream) and "Do you know what it costs to run those little lights for a month (poor argument, too as I have no idea, either. It could cost a nickel).

Hard to believe Ryan, a 9-year old boy, and I actually pulled the whole thing off. We went to the requisite Big Box Hardware store and stood for those stunned few minutes while surrounded by the myriad of lights (or myriad lights, if you prefer) only the Big Box Stores can offer.

Well, except of course, the ones I wanted. The white mini lights with the white cord.

But we were here. And, apparently, few other people in the aisle. Which as we all know from past holiday shopping experiences, is a good thing.

A guy started talking to me when I was looking for the white lights - telling me he hadn't had to put lights up for years, since his divorce, and now that he and his fiance were living together here he was back buying decorations.

You know, I never divulge stuff like that on aisle 23, or any aisle in department stores. In fact, it took me a long time to tell my therapist I wanted to leave my girlfriend.

Regardless, this was a really nice guy, and it turned out, a heck of a source of information on Christmas lights. He knew stuff about lengths, timers, cords, all that stuff and really sounded down-to-earth about it. Before I hear you complain, "How could he NOT sound down-to-earth, they're Christmas lights", I'd like to remind you Martha Stewart bought 7 large houses explaining to us a variety of things that we should know and that should be easy, things like pie crusts. So hearing someone say, "Ah, they say 3 sets, but really 4 won't matter much if you string them together", was really reassuring.

I hoped for the best with this guy's new fiancee. I mean, he started giving advice to the woman behind me. When I went to go check out the LED lights, I got advice from that woman, too (was it his advice passed on or her own advice? At this point I didn't care. I needed everything I could to get me up that 20 foot ladder.)

We bought under $50 worth of lights and said No to the animated deer that pretends to eat your flowers (which is funny, I'm guessing, only if you don't have real deer eating your begonias on a regular basis).

I explained to Ryan the plan and, if you can believe it, he was really good about the whole thing. He got down off the roof when I told him to, he reached over the side and did not slide down the saltillo tiles onto the sidewalk, really it was a banner day. We did have problems with him wiggling the ladder for some reason while I was 18 feet up and (I felt) really close to crashing through our plate glass front window.

When Wendy came home, she was more than surprised - she let out a, "Gorgeous".

Now this is a woman who never lets out that sort of sentiment and we'd done it, we'd moved her with miniature Christmas lights hung all across our Spanish style 1927 casa, which is a beautiful thing.

I'm going to try to hold that moment close as long as I can.

For I know when January 7th comes, I'm going to back on that roof with the shaky ladder.

Not Playing Possum

November and December are without a doubt my busiest months, both at home and at work.

We host an annual Early Thanksgiving, which has blossomed into a sit down potuck dinner for 70 which is almost immediately followed by a party I throw at work for 200, then for staff at work for 80.

On top of that we throw all the rest of the holiday craziness, kids plays, Wendy and Ryan's birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and a trip back to Nebraska for the Christmas holidays.

By the time I get back to the Midwest, honestly, all I want to do is collapse in a chair.

This was the weekend after our enormous potluck. So it was supposed to be the weekend we put the house back in order. Which would have been fine if we hadn't had house guests for the Thanksgiving vacation.

Happily, it's our favorite family, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Unfortunately, today meant a lot of putting stuff back, cleaning, and getting our world back in a little bit of order before the week starts.

Wendy had asked me to grab our big metal bucket out back to be used as Woodstock's nest in the school Charlie Brown Christmas play (Abby is playing Woodstock). You know, the last thing I expected to see when I lifted it up was an incredibly angry mother opossum baring her teeth at me. Ryan was behind me and I jumped and pushed him back into the garage. He had no idea what happened. He thought there was a skunk underneath there. Nope, just an angry opossum.

After going back with a large poker and being greeted once again by those bared teeth, I decided it wasn't the brightest idea in the world to take on a possibly rabid varmint in my back yard. (The coach of Ryan's soccer team just picked up a snake last week, only to discover it was a baby rattle snake, which also has a venomous bite.)

When I came in to tell Wendy her response was, "Wow, really." Then a pause. "Well I guess your turning the yard into a nature sanctuary is really starting to work."

Damn her eyes.

This Is Not A Love Song

There was a time when I would have gone to see No Country for Old Men at the movies with friends. Or by myself. Or as part of a class in college.

And perhaps I'd think about it, talk it over with people.

The fact is, I'm intrigued by it.

For one, I love Cohen Brothers movies. Raising Arizona remains one of the funniest movies I've seen of all time.

But I've also heard how violent it is, even from people who watch violent movies.

I was so intrigued that I watched the first five minutes of it - just enough to watch to young Sheriff (so young, apparently, that he doesn't put his detainee in the prison, he leaves him sitting behind him, so he can't see him) get snuffed in under 20 seconds.

And then I took the movie out.

I'm done with these movies.

I don't know about you, but I have a ton of hatred in my heart. There's bad guys I want to see strung up by their thumbs... And not just the bad guys you'd think of, but those politicians, businessmen, and rulers who lie and cost people their lives financially or physically.

Watching a mass murderer doesn't mean anything to me, except that I'm watching an aberration of society. Fact is, I don't really care to have a look at how Hitler became the colossal madman he'd become.

I just had to start asking myself, "Why"?

When there's so much work to be done in the world, with famine, hatred, intolerance, and disease, it seems myopic to stare at these glaring man made errors in a darkened movie theater.

I know I'm sounding a hell of a lot like those Sally Do Gooders I used to abhor so much in high school and college. But I'm able to admit I'm wrong. There's some art for art's sake, which doesn't make much sense to the cognizant, thinking person.

Maybe this in fact is a great Cohen Brothers flick. And all I have to do is make it through "strong graphic violence" to get to it. But I'm not going to do it. I've seen torture scenes, then had to listen to the description of how we treat men in Guatanamo Bay. Or how the Japanese treated Asian Comfort Women. When I hear such stories, of how humans brutalize one another, it breaks my heart for all of humankind. At that point I don't know if we are above dogs, bears, or even the lowest of the animal kingdom. At that point we have debased ourselves, we've lost control of what someone has given us which could only be called a soul.

There are better, higher things to do than watch this movie. Lest we all forget that this is entertainment.

I would suggest to you that instead you listen instead to Father Boyle, who lifts up men from streets of violence and gives them something so much more.

That's here.

And I bid you goodnight.

Insert Sad Face

It's funny, I've been a writer forever and a gardener for so few years, that it's odd I spend so many waking hours thinking about the latter.

And how working with the soil just a few hours a week can change your viewpoint.

I was having a discussion with my brother a few months ago who turns out to be a "man is not the cause of global warming" person (or just being a naysayer to irk me). Being smarter than me by a long shot he can rattle off all sorts of facts he's read and remembers at his finger tips.

I'm not good at arguing. And I am woefully slow. But when the US government's own Environmental Protection Agency (who has been heavily influenced by an anti-environmental Bush presidency) puts out this Q&A on their site,

Q: Are human activities responsible for the warming climate?
A: Careful measurements have confirmed that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing and that human activities (principally, the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use) are the primary cause. Human activities have caused the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane to be higher today than at any point during the last 650,000 years. Scientists agree it is very likely that most of the global average warming since the mid-20th century is due to human-induced increases in greenhouse gases, rather than to natural causes.

After our own government doing so much to negate such statements for the last many years, how can this not move you to get on board,?

My wife had this brilliantly simple (but not simplistic) thought:

If I'm right, and human influence is heating up the earth and potentially going to kill us all, then cutting back on carbon emissions may save us.

If you're right and the pollution we toss into the air isn't doing anything to warm the earth and we cut back, we'll just have cleaner air.

Not really a loss.

When you put it down to that simple statement, it sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

Mind Weeds

I remember years ago listening to this Zen Buddhist monk speak about mind weeds.

I love that he chose an expression so rooted to the earth to explain a simple, pervasive phenomenon.

Everyone knows what mind is and even the person who has spent their life in Manhattan knows what weeds mean to farmers.

The funny thing for me is how intertwined these two can become when gardening. I go out to the yard to take care of things on a Saturday and suddenly all I can see is weeds.

And my mind starts whirling, "Where am I going to start?", "Look at this mess, how the hell did I ever think I was going to tackle this without a gardener?"

I should take a moment to remind you (and myself) that most people who talk to me about my yard think it's beautiful. They don't see the weed patches the way I do. Or, if they do, they mean little to them in the big picture.

But I am so caught up in these weeds because they mean something to me, they actually set off many different parts of my mind. This dandelion over here says that I'm lazy. That volunteer fennel tells everyone I'm sloppy. This huge patch of grass tells the whole world that I have no idea what the hell I'm doing out here.

It's inescapable, actually. Well, almost. I've learned only over the last month or so, that two cups of coffee before working in the yard is one cup too much for me.

Wendy's perfect solution was to only concentrate on one little patch of weeds at a time and tackle them.

Bird by bird, Anne Lamott might say.

Your Lucky Day

August 10, 2008

Roses blooming again (even though I never feed them. Benign neglect?) Tomatoes finally coming in. Eggplants blooming. Lantana, as ever, blooming its blooming head off. Fennel gone to seed.

Ah, the fennel gone to seed.

Talk to any naturalist or ranger in Southern California and they'll tell you, fennel is one of the scourges of the Southwest. It's a weed, that's for sure. It grows in vacant lots, along disturbed roadsides, and anywhere the soil has been broken up to let it get a toehold.

When I tell them at the native plant centers that I have some in my yard (most likely volunteers), they almost always tell me to rip it out. I don't, for my own reasons, I'll get to in a bit. But what I do is, before it goes to seed to feed the birds and thus spread into other disturbed places, I cut it back and put it in the compost bin.

Ryan and I took our trimmers out yesterday to bring down and stood beside the 10 foot plants. Butterflies and bees were buzzing around the flowers and, as every time we cut them back (twice a year? three times?) they are covered with ladybugs.

I'm talking hundreds.

So it's a bit of a dilemma when we stand out there with our trimmers. Sure fennel is a heinous weed, but here it is producing the number one natural control of pests in my yard. It's always hard for Ryan because he thinks not only is fennel cool looking, it attracts all these wonderful insects.

He's right (though really you do have to cut them down to the ground or they get a bit ratty mid-summer), so we we make it our duty to cut them down, but to try to save as many of the beneficial bugs as we can.

So yesterday Abby, Ryan, and I took our places. Ryan was the fennel chopper ("Timber!!!"), I caught each as they fell down, and Abby was in charge of relocating as many ladybugs as she could to neighboring plants. It was a nice little set up, actually, as Abby has wont to play imaginative games while Ryan and I are working in the yard ("Okay, Dad, you're the gardener and I'm your daughter who is just going to school.")

We chopped them all down (and thus exposing a really ugly and weedy patch of the yard, unfortunately), put the pieces into our green yard waste bin and left the lid open for the ladybugs to fly away away, hopefully, to our yard.

I don't think anyone who has read my take on gardening, or even the title of my blog, believes I think gardening is easy. It's physically hard and sometimes frustrating work. So why have it as a hobby? Why indeed.

Our Saturdays are free(ish). Wendy, my wife is at work until 2 or 3, and I'm in charge of a 6 and 8 year old. I did my years of staying inside and playing Thomas the Tank engine, or racing outside to do my work while someone was napping. I needed something that was close to home and was actually interactive with my family (Wendy pointed out, rightly so, television and movies aren't really interactive.)

So here it is, something close to home, that teaches my kids about the natural world around them, and something that allows me help bring back a little patch of ground to a sort of balance.

And, of course, there's moments like these ladybugs.

Who can deny such a wonderful moment such as this?

No one indeed.

Bike It

Matillijas popping like mad. Love-in-a-Mist flowering and becoming seed pods. Corn coming in. Roses out our ears.

The big news, the wind. Earlier in the week we were in the mid-90s downtown, unheard of in this season. Now the northern wind seems to have picked up (and man is it picking up, the trees are swirling like mad) and is driving everything back to a reasonable 70s.

I'm on Day 8 of biking to work, with a brief drive in on Monday.

How is it? Surprisingly good.

I'd spent so much time ruminating (which I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me) about how I'd get myself and the kids the 6 miles to their school and me 4 more miles to my work without using a car. The grand fact is, unless I want to take the bus and 1 1/2 hours to get there, it's not going to work.

There, I said it. IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK, PEOPLE!

There was a fellow who suggested on his Website taking kids in a trailer. Hey, fella, the trailer company, that is the company who manufactures the trailer to carry children, doesn't recommend taking them on streets. Why? Because your kids are eye level with the bumper of cars like the Toyota Tercel. And pretty much under the tires of anything the size of an SUV.

It's not going to work. As hard as that was to tell myself.

But I digress.

Fact is, I can haul the kids into work (which is sort of a three-fer with fuel, right?), then take the bike off the back of my car, and ride the rest of the way to work.

Now I'm not saying I'll do it every day. If I can eke out one or two days a week, that'll be good.

The reason? Well, it's manifold. (That's weird, isn't that a weird word?) a) saving gas b) getting exercise c) getting outdoors

I really don't enjoy driving cars, and I really don't enjoy traffic. I don't really even like it on the bike, as a matter of fact. But I do like riding a bike. And I love, love, love being outside. Which is how the hell I became a gardener in the first place. Trading the inside Saturday chores for the outside Saturday chores.

I do not know why I have biophilia (that is, love of the outdoors) or why I love stuff that people do under their own power, but it has fascinated me since I was a kid.

Well, here I am, 42 years old and enjoying the heck out of it.

Who'd have thought?

All The Best Things

I have an amazing tendency to put things off. Like buying mutual funds for instance. After researching them on the Web and settling for the advice that Motley Fool was offering, I went to the library Web site to get an interlibrary loan on one of their books. Which led me to an Amazon review of it, which essentially ripped its pages out and threw them on the ground. Then ignited them.

Which, ironically, was very pleasant for me, because I was back at Square One, which is much more enjoyable than reading about mutual funds.

This led me to order Mutual Funds for Dummies from the library, which is now gathering dust on my nightstand. And now I'm blogging instead of reading about mutual funds. Do you see how this intricate system helps me prepare for my retirement? See? Oh, consider yourself lucky that you didn't hitch yourself to this star. Honey, we're 67, and it's time for the Trailer Park!

Which leads me to those pictures of my yard I promised several months ago. Before I had a camera. Or could hook it up to the computer. Or get around to reading the instructions.

Lucky star indeed.

Working Backward

My mother writes to me that it's snowing outside in Nebraska. That sneaky Midwestern weather.

We're having our spring and a quick weekend into summer, with temperatures in the mid 90s in most of the city.

Here comes spring.

I'm still figuring out what Microsoft Vista has done to not recognize my camera anymore, so you'll have to do with this picture of a Joshua Tree Ryan took during our yearly camping trip to the park.

Everything is in bloom in our garden, the lavenders, California poppies, irises (both Dutch and Siberian), all the rose bushes, the Catalina Island tree poppy, alyssum, snapdragons... it makes you realize why all the gardeners wait for spring.

Having spent last weekend out in the desert, this weekend was (mostly) devoted to trimming the rapidly growing grass and installing shelves into the kids' bedroom closet.

The grass always makes me think. For one, I kind of love grass and sure enough when I was thinking about it while mowing a young, tattooed couple walked by and the woman sniffed the air. "I know", I said, "It smells like summer." And it does for me. And nothing feels like a better accomplishment than mowing a fresh carpet of grass.

The sad fact is, what lies beneath the surface. Yes, I'm going eco Nazi on all of you. I can't lie and say that I don't live in a Mediterranean climate, I do. I can't tell anyone who has watched Chinatown all the way through that the fight to bring water to this dusty little town led more than one person to their early grave. I know, I know. But I'm not preaching, I'm just trying to be realistic. I love the grass, but it's not really grass anyone uses. It's that sad little area between the sidewalk and the street. The area officially owned by the city yet maintained by the homeowner (as we discovered when our tree needed to be cut down because it was breaking the sidewalk and our main sewage line). It makes a convenient walkway for people avoiding the onslaught of matillija poppies when they come into bloom and reach over the sidewalk.

I mean, it's a waste.

I dutifully mow it once a week, trim it every other week, water it two to three times a week during the hot season, and fertilize it with a nice organic fertilizer a couple times a year.

And thus my working title, "Working Backward".

I left the Midwest with a snooty Easterner's attitude. I was going to move to the city where people understood more my way of thinking. Probably true, as I might be more of an outcast there than here. But there were a lot of things, homey things, I thought were ridiculous, which have only made sense to me in the last ten years.

Like what? Can you believe canning? Making homemade cookies. Garden tomatoes. Feeding songbirds. Using your ingenuity to make due when you can't have what you crave.

That last one is the kicker. Yes, making due. I think of the people of the past and how we've found their garbage in piles and deduce what kind of people they were. I'm guessing they'd be the kind of people who wouldn't be able to stop vomiting when they saw the sort of excesses in which our society lived.

Lawn is an excess. And, crazily, it's part of a landscaping dream spread to my dry little corner of the country by people living in "it's raining even when it's dry" England.

The 50's were about moving forward, conquering nature. But I think we've figured out that's not exactly working the way we envisioned, with flying cars and... what the hell did the People of the Future eat?

I'm willing to say I've gone too far on some things. I don't need to be able to go to Paris tomorrow on a jet. That's a nicety.

I mean, hell, we've got a pretty cush life here, if you look around. I can go home to Nebraska every year, which was not always the case. I can afford to call my family and spend tons of time on the phone with them for dollars, not hundreds of dollars, as it was when I was growing up. I don't have to dry my laundry in the freezing winter down in the basement, as my grandmother did.

We've got it very nice, and maybe that sometimes makes me feel a wee bit guilty when I think (or I hear about in church) all those people have nothing. I mean, I've got more than a wonderful wife and two kids, I've got a roof over my head, a decent job, and a car to get me back and forth to work. Heck, my kids are going to a better school than I did growing up.

And the grass? The grass in comparison, isn't even a nicety, it's kind of this bad-tempered friend at a dinner party who keeps eating everyone else's dinner.

I'll keep you posted on how this goes.

High Hopes, We've Got High Hopes

Roses trimmed. Lettuces out of their cups and into the garden. Broccoli sprouting. Pregnant squirrel raiding all bird feeders (save the hummingbird's). California poppies blooming, blooming, blooming.

And, god love him, the Golden Cat Bee (a Carpenter Bee? We're not sure) has returned himself for the Spring.

Summer cannot be too far away.

When I worked for The Walt Disney Company one day I was reading a newsletter missive from the then CEO, Michael Eisner that I've kept with me for awhile.

He said something like this, "Being Disney, we are expected by the public and our customers to have higher standards. Thus we get a lot of criticism when we fail to meet those expectations."

Many non-practicing religious people think of practicing religious folks as hypocritical.
"How can they claim to worship God when they won't welcome homosexuals into their churches? Or bad mouth each other as soon as they get into the parking lot".

And though they have a point, I believe thoughtful Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists keep those points in their minds during their days. And to stand off to the side and pretend to have no opinion on anything is a bit ludicrous. You can say you're not perfect, but choosing to do nothing about it is a bit like wishing you could save money, but spending your paycheck every week. You're basically never going to hit any goals.

The same applies to trying to be "green", I believe. I've got a friend who is a bit "greener than thou". She does a lot for the environment, she gives freely of her money to worthwhile causes, she's rid poisons from her house (and thus our landfills), cuts back on utility, water, and energy costs, and has made her landscaping business as green as they get. But, unfortunately, she's not quick at making friends because she's a bit of a bull in a china shop. When you say you've switched to Method Cleaners, she tells you she mixes her own Soap and Baking Soda Cleaner and dresses you down for going to the store and buying another bottle.

She's a bit like Frank Lloyd Wright, who insisted everyone who he built a house for use the furniture he built, which, it turned out was incredibly uncomfortable. Sure enough, when they paid him off, they threw it into storage and got furniture that made sense.

Frank Lloyd Wright never understood how to convince people without throttling them around the throat. If he'd made a stunning argument why his furniture made sense, maybe everyone wouldn't have chopped it into firewood when the going got rough.

Yes, there are high standards with going green. And yes, it's hard when there's so much bad news facing you every day telling you that what we've become, especially we Americans, are wasteful, polluting nightmares hellbent on destroying their home.

So the stakes are high, but does that mean you should badmouth your friend who drives to and from work alone in her Chevy Suburban? I don't think so.

We used to sing a hymn in church when I was a kid, "They will know we are Christians by our love." What made it so special to me was its proof in the pudding type of thought. People who get Christ's message need to strive to love one another, even though what you actually feel sometimes is intense hatred.

Maybe one day people will look at our little, old stupid Jetta and wonder, "How the heck does a family of four get along without an SUV?" Maybe they'll ask us why we don't use pesticides in our garden. Or, better, ask how they can stop using them in their garden.

Yes, maybe I'm a bit of a coward. But I don't see the point of telling my neighbor his gas lawnmower, ever minute its in use, is the same as 5 cars idling at a stoplight (which is when they're polluting at their maximum) and that's why I chose an electric one. He'll probably think, "Damn, what an ass." Then speak to me less frequently and think, "What an ecofreak!" every time I'm dumping old eggshells into my rosebush soil.

At that point, I've certainly turned myself into an ecofreak.

An environmentalist group could probably come into my house and gasp at the amazing array of plastic, PVC, and use of chlorine. But I would hope they'd be above that.

We've got hard enough work to do as is, without criticizing each other on the methods we're using to get there.

And, don't you know, there's people like Rush Limbaugh out there who'd love to see us fail miserably.

Which is sad, because if the world goes to hell, someone's going to try to eat that man.

Golden Hour

The poppies are up. Bound to be the best time for the garden. Broccoli in (and already attacked by the snails) as well as Golden Lights Swiss Chard and some mesclun type lettuces Ryan and I raised from seed.

I don't know if it's from the weekend we mostly spent at home (true, I went to bed Sunday thinking, Hey, I haven't left my front yard today), but today feels, what? Vast. Vast, upon coming home.

I think it's a feeling we regular folk don't have very often, this sense of glorious opportunity in front of our evening. Often, when my inner mind is complaining about the dishes I'm doing at night, knowing I have another hour worth of bookwork out at the computer, I think of the single moms, and how insanely taxed they must feel all the time. I cannot imagine what it's like to go this route alone and on half the money.

But today, or tonight rather, exactly the opposite. My office is finally clean. A bamboo palm the kids and I picked up from a Plant Yard Sale for $10 brightens up the corner, and there are a few bills to go through, but they can wait for this post.

Spring in so many ways signals beginning for gardeners. The dreams you have looking through catalogs, the hopes as the seedlings come to life in little rooms lit merely by grow lights. The season mimics the life of the young. Before we had responsibilities, when everything rolled ahead of us like a carpet of grass.

Maybe it's just the memories of an aging man. Or of someone who had the privilege to dream. But the days begin to creep up on all us adults where the dreaming stops and the hard work of doing and being busy begin.

Raising children is harder, far harder, than gardening. And it's hard to stop and think, If I don't stop and try to enjoy some of these moments, they'll be gone soon.

Sometimes I'm worried that my writing at home has dwindled to nearly zero after so many years in front of the computer screen or writing pad. But sleeping in the next room is my real work and what I'm aiming at giving the world. It's scary, yes. But very important.

Where am I going with this post? Hell, I wish I knew.

Let's leave it at being happy at the res of the evening being ahead of me.

Good night.

Manic Sunday

You know you can tell people that January is different when you live in a Mediterranean climate, but you really have to see it to believe it.

Which is why I give to you the picture on the right - taken sometime in mid January.

The good news? It was warm enough to be wearing t-shirts and shorts.

The bad? Those leaves didn't just pile themselves up like that.

Living here and doing your own gardening is like owning a house anywhere, everything is your responsibility all year long. Which gives new meaning to the word "Winter interest".

It wasn't such a manic Sunday today, and I'm sure everyone now is cozied up to their TVs with popcorn in hand watching the latest Academy Awards. We had a party to attend but Ryan woke up sick with a fever. Again. Two weeks ago he and Abby missed their whole week of school (with me working at home) because of the flu that's been going around. Wendy caught it, too.

It took a whole week to catch up to me and put me into the shivers for two days, and I'd just begun to hope we'd all turned a corner.

Nope.

It's a mystery to me. Ryan was just up yesterday playing soccer and helping with dig free mulch from the City Free Mulch Giveaway.

Which, in itself is hilarious. We'd been waiting forever for a mulch giveaway that was closer to our house and were excited when I got a flyer announcing a new location. Less that 3 miles from our place. Ryan, Abby and I set out in the car with two shovels, gloves and two of those enormous storage containers [one which would weigh more than 70 pounds when I was done filling it. Smart move with my back]. We had trouble locating it and I told Abby to look for a brown sign and Ryan to look for a gate with someone posted out front. Then we saw we were headed down a one way street. "Wait, this can't be right," I started to protest, but then I saw it. Right there at the end of the street in a light-industrial area, mulch piled about 8 feet high with a sign behind it [already graffiti'd] Free Mulch Giveaway. I don't know which was more hilarious, us standing on that steaming pile of mulch, or the guys walking around us going down to the toxic LA River to fish.

So, not so manic. Just rerouted Sunday. Which is not bad, just takes some adjusting.

The rain was on and off today. Finished the leftover chores from yesterday: the cat box needing emptying and the compost taken out.

Oh, ordinary day.

Tonight, fewer than five miles from here, people are walking down a red carpet, flashbulbs are popping, and microphones are stuck in the faces of actors and directors who will voice their opinions to their adoring fans worldwide.

Oh, but I believe the opinions elsewhere, among those watching, are much more valuable. Take it from a guy who worked those trenches for 7+ years and still lives close to that world.

"The common man's opinion" I say is a diamond in the rough.

Like a mulch pile in the middle of the city on a dead end block.

Hardship

What, you were expecting a funny title like: "Roses are Red, My Violets Aren't Blu-ming?" Surely that's got to be somewhere on the blogosphere somewhere....

Rains a comin', they say, but I haven't seen it yet. When it comes, it's supposed to come gangbusters.

I'm backdating a bit, because I'd meant to write about this, but hadn't had time during the holidays.

The second Saturday in December I was opening the windows to let some sun in, inching by our Christmas tree when I saw a mess outside the window. My Mom once told me an ice storm had hit Eastern Nebraska before the leaves had time to fall; the ice collected on the full trees and pulled entire hundreds of pounds branches to the ground, closing streets, downing power lines...

This wasn't that, but in some ways it was as hard to take.

As I looked out the front window I could see that half my lion's tail, 4 feet high and 6 feet across, had been ripped in half, the bed of irises all trampled, ditto the daylillies and fennel. The lantana had been ripped to the side and newspapers, the sex ones distributed for free around the city, lay on the ground making a bed.

My first thought was, "Oh my god, I don't want Ryan to see this."

And I didn't let him for a bit. I went out and assessed the damage.

It was hard to tell exactly what happened, but it looked like a homeless person who was either extremely drunk or just out of their mind, had repeatedly rammed a shopping cart or something like it into the butterfly bush, making some sort of hole. They ripped out 7 fennel plants and strewn them everywhere, and any other plant he or she could get hold of.

The last sign of them, beside the bed of papers and cardboard, was a black trail of wheel marks headed down the street and my daylillies all over the road, flattened by countless cars who'd passed over them in the night and early morning.

Ryan made it out of the house and started asking questions. "What's going on, Dad?" I had him go inside, get into his work clothes and get our gloves. I brought the yard trimmings can and tools over to the site.

It was hard to separate. Here nature hadn't taken its toll, but a human had purposely done this to my yard. All our hard work just ripped out by its roots and crushed. It felt as if someone had punched us in the gut and laughed.

But they hadn't. This wasn't a malicious act by sullen teens out to prove they aren't piano keys, this was an act by someone who didn't know better. Someone whose life was so much worse than ours. Who obviously didn't have anyone to care for them or love them. A man or woman who didn't even have a place to sleep and saw the world as hostile and hateful.

Ryan, Abby, and I had just volunteered (for the first time) at a homeless shelter the weekend before and we'd seen how down on their luck many of these folks are. Somehow that act helped me see through this one.

When Ryan came out he was... well, devastated. "How could someone do this?" He was also angry. He wanted to call the police and tell them to find this awful person who crushed all our work.

I explained to him what I thought happened, and tried to explain we should feel sorry for this person, as hard as it is, because we had this wonderful yard that would grow back, and a house and pillows to lay our heads on, and we had each other. This person probably didn't even have anyone to love them, to tell them goodnight when they go to bed every night.

It worked for a bit. He cleaned up near the daylillies, then suggested calling the police again. Got himself together then ran to the front porch. I didn't know for a few moments where he'd gone, but I sensed that he wasn't doing okay with it.

I set my rake on a bush and went up to the porch, where he was sitting, crying.

I put my arm around him and explained again. I told him I didn't quite understand, either. I didn't explain alcohol, drugs, or mental imbalance, but I don't think I needed to. I don't think it helped me understand. The heart of the matter was that this person didn't know what he or she was doing and we, thank god, have each other - and that is worth more than anything we own.

He was at least able to get up and begin to work again, still not totally grasping the point, which is understandable. I mean, he's in 2nd grade, Pokemon is in his grasp, but we're struggling with explanations of racism, segregation, and the Civil War.

We put up a little mock fence, just to tell the person, should they come back, (as I explained to Ryan and Abby), "This isn't a place to sleep. Please go find a shelter like the one we were just in."

I convinced Ryan we didn't need to arm the fence.

Like I said, the points are slow going with him sometimes.