March 8, 2025

Shoulder tender from yesterday’s vaccines– an unusual reaction for me. Back into the garden: weeding, uprooting of wicked vines, planting of white rhododendron and hellebore. Left unfinished (a hole dug and fertilized, but the last rhododendron not eased into it) because of the shoulder and a faint flu-ache that I think must also be related to the shots. 

The hawk-shape flying over my shoulder as I worked was not Sweetboi, but a Cooper’s hawk– sleek, silvery, more compact than the red-shouldered, and with a faster– maybe more orderly–flight. 

Listening to Russian sacred music. Holy Russia is not to blame. 

Dream during a brief nap. I heard slow, firm footsteps outside my bedroom window. I rose and saw a huge antlered creature–an Irish elk, perhaps-- making its way under my dogwoods. 

Some great emotion builds in me. I don’t know when or in what form it will fountain forth.

 March 7, 2025

Wandering the ruins of the garden. It’s actually much improved in every objective way, but right now I’m fixating on the destruction of things which I would have saved. Nothing could have been done except to walk every step with them saying “no” or “si.” The debris-filled dumpster is hauled away. Jason returned my two tools– hoe and shovel– which found their way onto his truck. 

Got COVID and pneumonia boosters. The nurse talked about what a medical disaster RFK Jr is. “You’re just in time,” she said, “who knows how much longer these will be available?”

 

March 6, 2025

Mezzaluna. 

Ash Wednesday

 March 5, 2025

Folia on Pandora.

Ash Wednesday. Surprise phone call from Jason, and now my yard is full of Mexicans working at a red heat. He speaks to them in what seems to me fluid Spanish. They’re doing more than I wanted, but I know that later on I will wish it to have been done, so– Sound of chainsaws. . . I can’t look. 

Read America: a Prophesy for our Blake seminar. The mightiest poetry that ever was in English, though blowing in from a place so foreign one doesn’t always know what’s going on. 

Late afternoon. Started Folia again. The gang finished up in one day rather than the prepared-for two. I’m glad of that, and not only financially. The procedure was surprisingly stressful. I had to stop myself from running out screaming “Get out of my garden!” They cut down Sweetboi’s perch. I asked them not to. . . but. . . .things did not always translate. All six workers were finishing up, and I asked, “How many of them are in danger of being deported?” Jason shrugged, said, “I don’t know, but if they send them away, I close my business. I can’t go through that a second time.”

Shrove Tuesday

 March 4, 2025

Shrove Tuesday. People wear bright beads, and I realize I’d forgotten this or any day can be joyful. Need to go into hiding from the media: I could be content among my birds and flowers. The clearing of debris from the garden will begin, to my surprise, tomorrow. Wrote gigantic checks to satisfy the IRS. The lady at the accountancy and I discussed the possibility that, the nation crumbling around us, nobody would know or care whether I paid my taxes. My personal taxes, it must be noted, are greater than Elon Musk’s, if things are as they’re reported.  

 March 2, 2025

The sermon related the story of Jesus walking amid the crowd after the Transfiguration, and the man running out and crying, “Master, look at my son, my only child!” The grief I felt relating to him was unbearable. Glad I was seated in the back row behind people taller than myself. Recalled later when I was in Israel our guide stopping at a service station for our comfort, then pointing casually to the hill across the road, “And that is the Mount of the Transfiguration.” 

Revising. . . proofreading. . . unsure that anything will come to anything. 

Terrible world, terrible age. I don’t know what to do. 

 

March 1, 2025

Saint David’s Day. His flower is the daffodil, and I have a few just putting forth incipient yellow tips. 

Cool, bright. More work in the garden, largely pruning. Excessive growth of hydrangeas and sweet shrub has constricted my driveways for a couple of years now. I am SO much the person who adjusts to his environment, rather than changing it to suit himself, that it never occurred to me to prune them back. I relied on maneuvering my car just the right way. J who came to do the estimate lit on that first thing. Another I pruned back to allow peonies in the front garden more light. Mockingbirds thronged me as I worked. A black vulture soared low over the garden, banking almost at the ground before rising again. His hugeness altered the perspective of size in the garden for a while. 

Playing tracks of the Ukrainian National Hymn and weeping. This is America’s lowest point, a traitor to our friends and a lap dog to the worst of our enemies. Shame consumes me.