Lingering Light

 April 27, 2024

Great & full day. Attacked the outside-the-fence garden head on, planting Shasta daisies, cat mint, false indigo, zinnia, and bishop’s flower. When did bishop’s flower stop being Queen Anne’s lace, and why? Golden spurge inside the fence. Much spreading of straw to protect seed until they sprout. I’m deep into my tenth year here, and this is the first day it occurred to me to heave the hose over the fence to water the space outside. It’s laborious, but works perfectly. Water was my great doubt about beyond-the-fence, and now that is alleviated. My other great doubt is the public tendency to vandalism, with its urge to damage anything beautiful in order to put one’s mark upon it. Maybe flowers are too lowly to count. 

I's son C comes tomorrow to wash windows. I engineered the job for when I’m at church, so I don’t have to witness any of it. 

Whatever my intention when I begin a painting, it turns out a little haunted.

Trump on air twenty four seven. Tolkien’s Sauron seemed over-the-top to me until Trump entered the picture, a being with no redeeming qualities, devoid of any sense of the other, a bottomless vortex of selfishness, the seal of all gluttony, soulless. Yet people adore him, find him Christ-like, feel that he has been victimized. That is the puzzle. That is the darkness one despairs of lighting, ever. Justice would have been for him to face a firing squad on January 7. I pray some more complicated justice awaits in the future. 

I rejoice now that light lingers deep into the evening. 

 April 26, 2024

Got one shield fern into the ground before being driven indoors by rain, not much of it, but enough to make outdoor plans unsalvageable. Couldn’t write. Painted.

Mountain Xpress

 

April 25, 2024

From Mountain Xpress:

UNCA professor writes play 

A God in the Waters, a new play by award-winning playwright, poet, memoirist and fiction writer David Brendan Hopes, will run Thursday-Saturday, May 9-18, 7:30 p.m., at the Bebe Theater.

Hopes teaches literature at UNC Asheville and is known to theatergoers for his plays Washington Place and Ben & Angela, which ran at the Bebe Theater last fall.

A God in the Waters follows an egocentric maestro whose family life is upended at the reception for his final performance, exploring themes of family and the making of art. “I’d been working with the Asheville Symphony for a while, and the two things blended together,” says Hopes. “What surprised me most was to discover, through the course of writing, that I really do have strong opinions about what makes good art and bad art. I’d thought that doing it and having opinions about it were somehow inimical.”

Hopes has been an Asheville resident for over 40 years, and the region is responsible for his turn as a writer. “I never wrote plays or prose until I came here, but whether that was in the air here or just a natural progression is difficult to know. My recent novels The Falls of the Wyona and The One with the Beautiful Necklaces have a fully Appalachian setting, so certainly in the sense of scenery it has made a whole lot of difference.”

A God in the Waters is produced by the Sublime Theater. Seating for the six performances is limited.

The Bebe Theater is at 20 Commerce St. For information visit avl.mx/dlz.

Indescribable Moon

 

April 24, 2024

GMC meeting here last night. We needed another song that expressed adversity, and I remarked that just about any Gospel song does that, and there was no such thing on our program. 

“We already have a Gospel number,” says B

“What?”

“Pilgrim’s Chorus.”

“That’s not Gospel. That’s Wagner opera.”

“Well, it mentions God.” 

I gave up. Whatever else, the group’s apparent hatred of religion, or Christianity anyway, pretty much limits music selection to mediocrity.

Began planting the new garden. Got two climbing roses for the fence and a tangerine bush rose not for the fence. Planted sweetpea and lupine that I’d already got. The big garden mystery remains the couple dozen tulip bulbs I planted, not one of which came up. Except that the bulbs were defective I have no explanation. Forgot where I got them, so I can’t even complain. I was right that the big machine scrape didn’t get the roots, so I’ll have to dig each time before I plant. At least it made them accessible. Alexa promised rain, but there was no rain, so I spent an hour hauling cans of water to the new roses. 

Indescribable beauty of the moon last night.

 

April 23, 2024

Shakespeare’s Birthday. 

Cool, and then lovely. G and his mute helper came early in their yellow steam shovel to scrape away the honeysuckle from my outside yard. I’ve not actually inspected the outcome, but I suspect it’s both horrifying and satisfactory. That it wasn’t the job it was supposed to be is likely, as they didn’t scrape deeply enough to remove the roots. But the incredible biomass that refused to admit even the sharpest spade is gone, and I can find the roots myself, dig them out one by one. I watched the elbow of their machine shaking the mulberry and the cherry. Perhaps they survived. Their leaves at this hour remain unwilted. While they worked I did the same job more traditionally on the other side of the fence. This effectively doubles the size of my garden. I bought huge amounts of seeds, as though I’d planned this project unconsciously this winter. G and Tony share being Mexican and talkative, which means I spend a measure of time listening to anecdotes I don’t fully understand. G told me about eating delicious cherries either on a job or back home in Mexico, a conversation brought on by his admiration for my mulberries, which are known and cherished in his homeland. He observed that several of his recent clients had been named David. 

K stopped by, and we chatted as we do once every year or so, living a two minutes’s walk apart. She continues to shed a realistic light on life as a flight attendant. 

 April 22, 2024

Earth Day. Surprise from ZR Landscaping that they can do the yard beyond the fence tomorrow. Must dig up whatever I want to save today. 

Thought of dad’s building projects, and how he must have anticipated with joy being a father: a sandbox with a roof, so we could play in the rain; a teepee made out of burlap; a dollhouse you could go inside and play in for my sister; most famously, “the big slide,” a sliding border bigger and faster than that on the school playground. I could go far beyond the neighborhood and be identified, metonymally, as “the Big Slide.”

 April 21, 2024

As to the yard work, one quote was $600 less than the other– but also the one that put me off at first, not knowing one vine from another. Have to decide if my scruples are worth $600. Likely not. 

An orgy of revision: Bathory, The Class of 1960, a section of The Garden of the Bears

Sweet notes from Charlie (whose baby will be a son) and Fred, who remembers the glitter of an ecclesiastical New York long gone. 

Strange passage before bed last night. I united with my mother and father in prayer, begging their forgiveness for all I did that hurt and disappointed them. I supposed they understood I was opening a new chapter, for the first time around, I could not possibly have known how to do better, largely because of their own example. Understanding one another might be enough.