May 2, 2025

Lovely Beltane. After rehearsal, returned and sat on my front porch crying “Draw on, sweet Night!” Heard myself uttering blessings for my life. Felt the air for the thin veil that is meant to exits between worlds on such a night, the mundane and the sublime, Asheville and Faery. Drank red wine, fell asleep in the rocker, woke at some undetermined hour, so perhaps I passed between worlds with no recollection of having done so. Perhaps that’s how it must be done. As I sat it began to rain. Never have I rejoiced in anything more than in that rain. 

Dug, weeded, transplanted milkweed out of the lawn into the garden. 

Rain now. Maybe it’s time to go outside. 

Beltane

 

May 1, 2025

Beltane. 

Overcast morning, faint metallic sheen in the sky. 

Rehearsal disastrous last night. K brought in a friend of his to “bolster:” the bass section– in sixty + years of choral singing, the ugliest voice I ever encountered– no concept of blending or ensemble, but an unmodulated, piercing, mechanical buzz– like singing beside a dentist’s drill. Left with a literal headache. What goes through peoples’ minds? 

First visit to the Barrelhouse, a nearby bar that people figured would be after my taste, and it is. 

Dream before waking that I had a new boyfriend, with whom I was still getting comfortable. A terrible blizzard was predicted, and my friend wanted me to move the car for some reason. I knew the car was fine where it was, but I suited up and went out into the stormy night to move the car to please him. A lesson in a situation I am unlikely now ever to face.

Sassafras

 April 30, 2025

Rehearsal last night exultant because, after months, my voice was nearly 100%. Let’s say 85%. Felt like singing with a steel blade. C has really no 2nd bass but me. Two old guys making faces and not even dropping below the staff. 

Dream that I was in a play with A, and after the play I had to find my way home through a city grown suddenly colossal, and my usual routes blocked. It was OK, as I discovered new things, and noted in the dream how much better my wind was than it used to be. In the dream. 

Weeded, cultivated, planted white cosmos. Way too many seeds, so I threw some hither and thither, allowing them a chance to find their own way. My sad task was to dig up the failed-to-prosper sassafras and return it to Reems Creek for a refund, but when I got there, a green shoot emerged from a green place near the bottom. I trimmed the dead wood away and promised I would help it recover and ascend. This made me unaccountably happy. The cherry I thought was dead last summer is in full leaf. The winter clean-up uncovered hidden trilliums, and a rather extensive plot of Quaker comfrey. The chewed-on comfrey explain why rabbits have been making the dangerous journey outside my fence. 

 April 29, 2025

Distant thunder. 

A young messenger from my insurance company (or something like that) arrived this morning to ask a series of questions. That I was working in my garden when he arrived got me many points. He said he’d been employed before getting this job with a group specializing in “wounds.” I didn’t ask what kind of wounds and how obtained. Later it was a haircut. The barber explained to me how Greek and Hebrew were so different there were bound to be uncertainties in translations of the bible. I quite agreed, but couldn’t imagine what got him on that subject. Maybe my white and sage-suggesting hair. 

Yesterday’s hard gardening caused a flare-up of arthritis in my left thumb– never quite gone, but sometimes all but unnoticeable. Noticeable it has been the last few days, the ache climbing to my shoulder, and some hours with it intrusive and very distracting. I think I won’t sleep, but I do. Arthritis. It’s always something. 

 April 28, 2025

Massive (for a skink) skink becomes active on my sunny front porch. He’s silvery with a brown head, and very timid. 

As of today, stock market losses are $27,230. Down from nearly $70,000. 

Last night was another Mystic Transport on the Porch night. I began in the garden. I’d not sat in the garden at night because, frankly, I was afraid of bears. But the garden turns out to be well enough lit by ambient urban light that I could, against expectation, see anything as it entered. Cloudy, so it seemed I was in a little room with trees as its walls. Moved to the front porch, because the stupid street lamp at once compromises the mood and makes me feel safer. Feel asleep in the chair for who knows how long. Any number of bears may have sniffed me where I slumbered.

Weeding

 April 27, 2025

Early rising, playing hooky from church. Wrote some, finished Magdalene Running, a painting that took two months after I thought it was finished to find its true subject. Then, a night and a morning to complete. Then into the garden, achieving what I believe is the most extensive bout of weeding yet at this address: the iris bed and the eastern bed freed essentially, if not quite absolutely, of interlopers. Every years there is a new primary culprit: this year it is cleavers. Tore out the entwined vines along the pond, aided by recent rain softening the soil. I had not intended all that weeding, but once I got started there was no reason to stop until the designated spaces were freed. Got one pink dicentra planted. Arthritis in my thumbs makes all such actions problematic, but not impossible. 

 

April 26, 2025

Day divided in half. In the morning I watched the Papal funeral. I felt sightly unwell, and worked at the keyboard. I don’t really recall what was accomplished, Napped, felt better, went out for some strenuous gardening. Only one white dicentra got planted, as I had spent the time trying to dig in the impossible, pebble-filled east side of the property. Fussed with the pond, improved the flow of the waterfall. Day ends in perfect celestial blue.