mullet and a popsicle

my study seems green. our world is ablaze with the stuff of summer. reasonably, it is ever-so-satisfying to work outside. pretty purple flowering vines are planted beneath the aforementioned euginias.



the bird bath emerges from her garage hybernation and finds a new place outside the study window. henry fills her with water. i brush away spiders and set the thing straight. and it's time to wait for birds. brave birds who will come after we go inside. after henry sets sail across the bath a leaf, a stick, the hurricane of his fingers and fists splashing the tree, the mama, the bare feet, the mossy earth.




we are lovers of work in this house. certainly, we celebrate a certain amount of laziness, the sunday nap, televised basketball, slow mornings, early bedtimes on rare occasions when the itch to create is not as strong as the burn to sleep. but there's always something brewing, something hummable, something delicious, something shining and readable, illegible and messy at one end, trim and zippy at the other. lately my thoughts turn to green somethings. black dirt and the twist of roots rising up into branch or vine, frond or flower.

ernie cuts the grass and cleans the garage. the boys and i buy spidery spindling ferns for an old green pot, for an owl, for some promised green-giving rain.



we've some sort of lilac blooming in the back. four of them across the west windowed wall. we fling open the door to the sunporch and the one to the patio and the smell of lilacs soars through, up the stairs, into the kitchen, in a swirl through the dining room, living room, out the front door. "drink it in!" ernie says and we laugh because the lilacs make us laugh. elixir of lilac.

"please stop, Ratty," pleaded the poor Mole in anguish of heart. "you don't understand, it's my home, my old home. i've just come across the smell of it!"

did we move here for a summer of dairy dreams? possibly. for a buck ninety we can buy this:



and top it with this:



and serve it up like this:



so silly.

did the thought occur when we contemplated moving to this midwestern place of corn and bean, that a whole summer of saturdays could be spent sipping coffee and navigating by newspaper from garage to yard to driveway, cash in hand and pocket, to sail the seas of trash and treasure? perhaps it did. i cannot remember.

it's "big trash pick-up" week in this burg. anyone and to the curb everyone drags their old appliances, scraps of metal, couch and chair, lampshade, mattress, junk in every shape and size. unimaginably and often horribly there are trucks with trailers perusing the trash, their drivers, wearing thin white (gray?) t-shirts and greasy jean cut-offs, are reckless and glassy eyed, blinded by the piles of trash at the curb, stopping without warning, the occupants jumping out to hurl the pieces of trash onto or into the vehicle, jumping in, cruising onward, oftentimes late into the night, flashlight in one hand, sifting through trash with the other.

yesterday our busy road was host to a man driving such a truck with trailer, who was loaded with moth and dust corrupted trash. a cumbersome bleached blonde woman with an aged face, the center of which seemed to be her cigaretted mouth with wrinkles in concentric circles deep and wide and tan, conducted traffic while digging through a box of cardboard-looking debris.

admittedly, i, too, scan the city streets for something of a treasure as my husband speeds on. he drives faster during big-trash week. i gasp and point and crane my neck and he drives on. i cannot help myself -- the idea that something valuable could be sitting amongst the trash at the side of the road, something that could be had for free, something that for years to come i could rave about my good fortune having found it, is too much to bear. i have to look. sadly, however, i've never found anything of note, although my mother boasts her own tale.

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did . . .