Spring ritual

The yellow tulips in this bouquet come from Simon's "S" and Emma's "E".

Tulips from the garden

In my grief over the death of Emma Rose Coleman (1992-2011),* I planted bulbs in my winter-empty garden. I had a basket of mystery bulbs from my mother-in-law and no plan. Then I found myself making a trough for an "S" and an "E".

December 2, 2011 (lines drawn on photo)

I watched in early spring for the green leaves to pierce the earth: orange-gold crocuses came first, followed by red and yellow tulips.

April 13, 2012

Here's a shot of the garden today. The red tulips mark the top end of Simon's "S" and the bottom curl of Emma's "E". I sure miss the company of those two people in this world. The flowers are a living hint of their beauty.

April 22, 2016

*I mentioned Emma and her mom, Rebecca, during the "18 Years Ago" series in May 2015--in the Fashion Post (photos #4 and #5).

18 Years Ago: May 19th--Cocooning

May 18, 1997
(backdrop: Rebecca Cross quilt)

May 19, 1997: Home with our baby! Welcome, little Simon. That's what a 7 pound 12 ounce baby looks like against his daddy. Words like "peanut" come to mind. This photo was taken the previous day, probably by my father, after we arrived home from the hospital. Home felt strange at first. The living room was in a particular disarray. Why was the coffee table next to the sofa instead of over by the window, as it usually is? Oh, yeah, I asked Markus to scoot it over so I could look at the bouquet of iris while I breathed through contractions on the couch. Oh, yeah, I went through early labor in here. Labor is a strange place to remember things from. During the earlier part of my labor, Markus alternated between timing contractions now and then and looking for something useful to do. He cleaned out the fridge!

May 18, 1997
First car ride

Simon slept during his first car ride, and we brought him inside still strapped to his car seat. He slept in the car seat a fair amount, as it turned out. We kept it in the living room and set him down in it sometimes.

As day one at home progressed into day two, I was busy learning from Simon how to breastfeed. He seemed to know what he was doing, and all I needed to bring to the situation was patience and plenty of time. I soon became an avid reader of the New York Times Magazine while breastfeeding. Its wide pages of text kept me occupied without requiring too many page turns. My hands were busy holding Simon in place.

Markus and Simon spent a lot of time together, too. This photo shows Simon in the favorite sleeping position of both our children: snuggled up on Daddy's chest. During the first months of Simon's life, we let him sleep in a bassinet (the same one my father slept in!) and later in his crib. During night-time feedings we often brought him into our bed. I remember Simon's early months involving a fair number of attempts to lay him down in his crib. I can say three things about that. One, he never woke up happy in his crib. Two, neither of my babies ever "slept through the night." Three, co-sleeping with your nursing baby is incredibly convenient and sweet. With baby number two, Miriam, we went straight to co-sleeping, and she'd usually go down for the night, after nursing, on Markus' chest in our bed.

Aside from breastfeeding, figuring out diapers and clothing, feeding ourselves, cuddling, and feeling completely in love with our baby, we didn't do a whole lot more than that.

May 19, 2015: I had a full teaching day (9:00 am - 4:15 pm), and I got to see several of my students who ran the half marathon on Sunday. Their young bodies seemed to be doing fine, although several admitted not having trained past a distance of 6K before attempting 20K. But that's what you do when you're 18, 19, 20, right?

May 19, 2015
Backyard garden, Flein

In Ann Arbor in 1997, the flowering trees were just beginning to bloom (now that Simon was finally there!). Here in Flein, we've been enjoying the bulbs and trees since March. This week the roses are blooming generously, and the clematis has also burst forth. Only the peonies continue to hold their petals in tight fists. The ants are still crawling all over them (the kind of ant--I found out this morning--that stings when it touches your skin). You might want to compare this photo with a previous look at the same flower bed, from the opposite angle, on May 9th.

The flowers that bloom in the spring... (Tra-la!)*


*Ten points if you know the reference!

18 Years Ago: May 9th--Due date!

Blogspot, May 9, 2015

When I confirmed that I was pregnant early in September 1996 (and I can't say "found out" because we were "trying"), the "first day of your last period" became an all-important data point. Sheila Kitzinger's Pregnancy Day By Day (which I have found in a 2001 edition as a used title on Amazon) provides a chart that pairs the start of your last menstrual cycle with a date exactly 40 weeks later. My pairing was August 2 and May 9. "Remember this date is only a guide," she says, "since babies are usually born between 37 and 42 weeks." The day I had a positive pregnancy test was the day before my Granny died at the age of 96. I didn't get to tell her, but I instinctively connect her lovely soul with Simon's.

Kitzinger's advice about the inexactitude of the due date, along with with other information such as both my mother and sister had given birth "late", convinced me to focus my energies on not expecting my baby to arrive on this date rather than gearing myself up for the event. Un-raised expectations cannot be dashed. I remember being cautious in my assumptions throughout this time. I don't want to use pain medications during birth (but if I can't bear it, I'll consider options). My baby is clearly a boy based on ultrasound (but what if this baby is actually a girl?). My baby appears to be healthy and so am I (but what if the pre-natal testing was wrong, what if we have a difficult situation ahead?). And so on. What I don't see in my notes is anxiety of this sort: what if I can't handle the birth, what if I can't be a good mother? All in all, I believe I was calmly awaiting whatever would come.

May 9, 1997 Due Date! (a Friday): "155 lbs; 40 laps" All I can say about that is you go, girl.

Elderberry-apple Schorle
and Rhubarb Schorle

May 9, 2015 (a Saturday): In breezy spring weather, I biked with Miriam from Flein into Heilbronn. We rode across the fields (grassy early wheat and rye, emerging potato plants and maybe some sugar beets) and down a big hill into Sontheim. From there we joined the path along the Neckar River and rode all the way to town. (Markus uses this route to bike to and from work every day. It's about 6 kilometers one way.) We had lunch at a pleasant restaurant called Pier 58 that serves Flammkuchen (Alsatian pizza). Next we hit Stein und Duftparadies (stone and scent paradise--needs no further description). In general, the area along the Neckar downtown has spiffed up considerably since we arrived five years ago (although the stone and crystal place has been there longer than that).

We ran a bunch of other errands, trying not to step on toes in the crowds at the unnamed international festival in the pedestrian zone. Back home, I took some photos in the garden and set myself up for blogging on the back terrace. The real benefit of writing in daylight hours will be getting to bed earlier than I've managed for the last several nights. I love the serial writing (it's also kicking my butt).

(Almost) ready to bloom: peony, clematis, rose.

Ants, doing whatever they love to do on peony buds.

Deadheading (flash post)

I think (in the garden)

therefore I blog

Today's project: cutting back the dried up blooms in my flower bed before they go all the way to seed. The practice, known as deadheading, is one I learned from my mother, who found she could assign me to the pansy bed and ask me to pinch off the wilted flower heads with their thin stems. Pansies, she told me, are called "little kitten face" in Chinese. Sometimes I filled tiny vases with pansy bouquets. Generally, I objected less strenuously to this task than to others, such as yanking out the ivy runners infiltrating the lawn to prune them back. "If that's so important to you," I spat in preteen indignation, "then do it yourself!" (The line requires exiting at a run. Apparently, I still feel a little bad about it.) 

My mother's connection to China goes back to her birth in Suzhou, where her parents served as Methodist missionaries until they fled the Japanese invasion in 1939. Her connection to deadheading comes from her father, primarily, who gardened in the yard around my grandparents' Tenafly, New Jersey home. The deep, shady backyard was a late spring paradise of blossoming dogwood, impatiens, azalea, and rhododendron: white, pink, salmon, and red against lush green and delicate tree bark.

My main backyard activity in Tenafly was the trolly swing Gramp hung across the full width of the yard behind the house between two tall trees. With handles and a seat, the trolley hung as a vertical line from a metal wire and ran on two grooved wheels, making a squealing noise as the rider went forward toward the opposite tree at high speed and backwards, slighly more slowly, to the start. At that point we had to hop off and give the next sibling or cousin a turn to climb up the step ladder and hop on. 

The other backyard pleasure was a cloth hammock strung between two trees perfectly distant from one another. Alone, or with a companion, we rocked back and forth. We played ship. We wrapped ourselves completely within the darkness of the fabric and let ourselves be flipped round and round from the outside. Over time, Gramp noticed we had caused the sturdy S-hooks to bend out of shape.

I expect we ate corn on the cob and spat watermelon seeds into the bushes. I bet we played tag and croquet. But what I remember is the trolly, the hammock, and the impressionist painting look of the grove of blooming bushes and trees in early summer.

The point of deadheading, according to Gramp as my mother tells it, is "to frustrate the plant." That is how you keep it blooming, keep it working toward its reproductive mission. Even my snail-nibbled, mildewed yellow coreopsis will bloom longer after I've trimmed these browned stubs back.

Coreopsis, pre-deadheading.

Gramp also advised removing suckers from plants, like the side branches on tomato plants that steal energy from the primary fruit-bearing stems. They look a little like a new arm trying to grow out of an armpit. The biggest pumpkin plant has a few suckers already, but I'm leaving them alone. The plants are tenuous this year. Maybe that would be an argument for eliminating side spurs. At this point, I'm eager to see survival, so I will let them be. Ten years ago, in the inaugural summer of Simon's pumpkin, the ur-pumpkin was already bigger than a softball by mid-July. There's still time before the fall frosts, of course, but I'd say this is the week for these plants to act like the garden is all theirs.

The biggest pumpkin plant, growing one leaf at a time.

Lapidaries--preview to Learning from Robin Hemley

I can't follow with the next lengthy post today (I have Michael Martone in my sights), so I am presenting a small preview of my learnings from Robin Hemley. Robin was the instructor to whom I apprenticed myself during the Writers at Work conference: I took part in his nonfiction workshop, I listened to him read and speak on panels, and I discovered many common interests. So many of his ideas have resonance for me that I am perhaps now more aware of why he selected my essay when judging the nonfiction fellowship competition.

In workshop, Robin introduced a simple exercise to write "the shortest travel essays in the world." He said Victor Hugo had a practice of writing miniature essays called "lapidaries" in four lines. The idea is to write quickly, saving polishing for later. The result is four lines of detail in haiku-like prose. The form takes its shape, and name, from the practice of carving an epitaph in stone. As a writing practice, it develops minutia awareness. The idea reminds me of something I do "out and about" to entertain myself. I look up at the ceiling of a church, for example, and notice the first thing I see. I keep looking and note what I see next. And next. I'm always astonished at the hidden details that emerge around step four.

Robin suggested a practice of writing 5-10 lapidaries per week: "One a day will be a collection."

So, I've tried it. I also did some mostly fruitless research into Victor Hugo and other possible lapidary writers. Web searching turns up the occasional literary site but also yields a lot of companies that sell stone-carving equipment. There's one famous quote by Hugo that uses the word lapidary (but about a stone-carver, not an essay form): "Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman." (http://izquotes.com/quote/89064) I believe Robin really has something else in mind, though.

At my friend Cindy's garden last week, the place where I wrote ten lines of iambic pentameter (Ellen Bass, exercise 4), I wrote a few lapidaries, too. Sometimes I cheated a little in the length, and none of these are about travel. The below texts are very minimally "polished."

1

Voice trails in empty air--an erasure
Lulled consciousnesses stir in tiny alarm
Is it now--was that it? Do we need
to clap? Dry hands shuffle together
like canvas flapping in wind.

(from a note to myself: what does perfunctory clapping sound like?)


2

Canyon crack in dirt departs knapsack strap
carves nearly straight, then bends at rise
around tuft of grass in a quarter circle
before it splits into paths of wide divide.


3

Tongue-colored trumpet bells out
round and gentian violet; an only
bloom on a twine-held stalk
aiming toward the sun in open promise.


4

Empty chair: black mesh with shiny
charcoal armrests casts square shadow
on the grass, soaks in the rays of sun.
The seat would warm my thighs.


This practice is a lot of fun. I highly recommend giving it a try!

Pumpkin update

"I wonder if they're blooming? You never know what a flower does when you're out."

Simon Craig Vodosek, age 4, April 15, 2002

Simon made that comment as we were driving home from daycare. The weather was unseasonably warm, and I'd asked him what he thought the tulips might be up to, the ones he'd helped plant in the fall. Somehow, the quote came to mind today, and I searched for it in my files. You can read the original Simon Says entry on Simon's Place. Scroll down to find April 15, 2002. But then read the whole page. I found many quotes to chuckle over--just normal times with two kids, aged 2 and 4. And some entries help us understand what it might feel like to be four years old and have cancer.

Seeds from the original 2004 pumpkin, just up since yesterday.

Simon frequently commented about nature in ways both cute and thoughtful. Markus and I always believed we heard an echo of Linda Britt, the wonderful daycare mommy who cared for both Simon and Miriam in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She guided the kids' appreciation of holding roly-poly bugs and hand-picking raspberries. Linda's brilliant rule for little ones: one-finger touching. Kids can't damage a flower by pointing gently at it (just by grasping and mashing or tugging it).

On Simon's birthday, May 17th, I planted pumpkin seeds directly in the soil outdoors, taking advantage of the warm spring. Other years, I've set seeds to sprout in the house on Simon's birthday, then planted them in June. Four days later I was on a three-week trip in the USA, solo. I hired Miriam as my tender and waterer. A week after the planting, she sent a photo of the first sprouted seed. But soon she noticed nibbled off  leaves on all the small plants. Markus helped her replant the pumpkin patch. Knowing they truly always sprout, I had placed a single seed next to each yellow marker. To assure success, Markus said he planted a bunch of seeds at each location and covered them with plastic cones to keep the munchers away.

A cluster of seedlings awaits thinning.

Now Markus knows the pumpkin seeds really do come up. It will be his task to thin these out. I told him if you want to overdo things, then plant two seeds instead of one. 

Growing out of the cone, a pumpkin from year "?"

Soon they'll be big enough to evade the munchers. Pretty soon they'll take over the garden. But for now, they make roots and prepare. Here's what things look like today, June 13th. Miriam made 31.50 Euros, by the way.

About five pumpkin plants this year.

The other end of the garden has the returnees of last summer's perennials. On a sprig of lavender, in front of the gaura (whirling butterfly), there's yet another delight: a real butterfly. The German word, aside from "Schmetterling", for this sort of creature is "Falter", which carries the meaning of folding. I find the word poetic. I'm guessing Simon would, too.

White butterfly alight on lavender.