This morning I woke up  remembering the bag of oranges you brought in yesterday.  Lying in bed staring up at the treetops I could see the clouds had come back after departing so dramatically yesterday in the afternoon, creating that beautiful space of clear air, blue sky and sunshine.

The clouds returned with their rare friend the fog; thick, dense and moody.

There is the familiar stirring in my belly. Why hate myself for this? Call it crazy if you want but I call it love. Frankly if I had more of it maybe I could do what I really want, bring it all inside of me and let it fill my bones and blood like breathing, so that I could truly grasp it, hold it, understand it.

A foggy damp morning in late October, a harbinger. And then the announcement:

“Say, I heard they’re closing out. Shuting it down, goin south HA! Get it? South for the winter.
 6!
 5!
 4!
 3!
 2!
 1!
Shutin it down!!!

Here it comes. Get your inner belly ready.

We are creeping toward the crystalline, the winter night, naked and dark, shiny and cold that puts us in our pajamas by 5 o’clock! But wakes us up deep in the darkness with the cry of the wolf, the moon itself howling in the black crystalline sky.

I went to the farmer’s market and bought pumpkins and those incredible orange squash and pulled up in the driveway, jumping out of the car practically dancing I opened the trunk and lifted the box filled with orange squash and pumpkin–heaving I carried it to the porch. You watching with one sleepy eye on me and the other on your ipad.

Standing over the box I could hardly speak. Thinking to myself, “I am such a rich person. I can buy a box of squash and pumpkins just because they called me by my name.”

Do you know that you didn’t even ask how much they cost?

I took them out one at a time. I placed one here, one there arranging, decorating the ledge of the old porch. I dashed out to the street to get perspective on my placement while you read the latest news and sipped your coffee.

There it was that day, too, that longing in my belly to take it all in, fill my veins, my heart, my bones and blood with the splendor of a whole box of orange–squash and pumpkin–he didn’t say a word about money–

but what you did say was, “speak to me only with thine eyes” what you did say with your eyes was this: “Tomorrow she'll be in the hammock all day watching leaves fall one by one. My kinda' crazy. She has in her belly the fire.”

Belong

I could have sworn I didn’t want to get up this morning when Blue came in and licked my face. How in the world he pushed both doors open I don’t know, and why he’d never thought to do it before, I don’t know. I only know that I was very tired from getting up early yesterday to go to the Farmer’s Market and tired from baking bread all day the day before. I’d hoped to sleep late or sleep in as they call it now. But I know me and when I’m waked at waking time there’s no going back. I’d seen daylight through the blinds and Big Blue the hunting dog and Little Gertie the terrier were ready to be fed and the world was waiting for me to come and see.

 I fixed my coffee and just happened on my way to the porch to catch a glimpse of an old book Billy bought years ago, before we even married. It’s called The Hand of God.


 The book is a collection of photographs from the Hubble Spacecraft with quotes from famous writers and philosophers beside each picture. Down in the corner of each page in tiny print is an actual description of the photograph. The descriptions of the photographs were much more profound to me than anything the philosophers had to say so I would have put their quotes in tiny print and description of the picture in the big print. Descriptions like this: “this photograph to your left is of two galaxies 1000 light years away and 150 light years across in size that will collide a billion years from now.” That’s a quote worth putting in bold letters in my opinion .

 This morning on my porch is still and quiet. A squirrel just broke the silence by jumping onto the limb of my neighbor's dogwood tree, making what sounded like a splash onto the now dry late summer leaves. The doves are calling each other, the redbirds clicking and the truck in my neighbor's driveway just cranked, they’re no doubt taking their dogs to the park for a walk. And I wonder in this silence this Sunday morning what it must be like to fly out into this universe and float among the galaxies and nebula and supernova and watch and listen to all these explosions of universes larger than I can imagine colliding, beginning, ending, fading, birthing, living, dying. I wonder what’s going on out there, all this creation and expansion and energy.

 I’m not one of those people who believe there has to be life out there simply because the universe is so vast, in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we humans are the apex, the consciousness the awareness that sees, and that we are the culmination of this project and whatever created all this is waiting on us to come into all we were meant to be. I mean why not? If you go in the other direction it seems just as vast, studying molecules and atoms and quarks and whatever other invisible particles there are. That too, seems infinite on a smallness scale. But I have to say, this morning, looking at those beautiful pictures of stars and galaxies and reading the quotes:




  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.


 Albert Einstien

I have to wonder about this book. It’s been in the house for years and I never even looked at it, but this morning the book called me. As for why I feel like crying when I behold the heavens, as for why I have such a bond, remembering the dark nights of my soul some years back, going out onto my front porch when I was living out in the country and staring for long periods of time at the sky, where no street lights or vapor lights could block or obliterate the view, when I was at my worst and the darkness of my soul was at its blackest staring into the sky at millions of twinkling stars and hearing God’s voice, always saying the same mysterious word to me, the word that even now I understand and I don’t understand, “belong,” God said to me, “belong.”

 And I wondered what in the world that word could have meant a year later when the porch on which I’d been sitting at night staring at the stars was hooked by a chain to a fire truck and pulled away from the rest of the house simply to keep it from burning into the night, and the crash the thunderous crash as it came to the ground exposing the violent flames that were consuming my home of 25 years. I wondered in that moment what in the world God was talking about when he’d said “belong.”

 I’d thought he’d meant belong to this home, this house, this place and now it was on fire. But I held on to it, the word, but wondered again three years later when the marriage, the 28 year marriage with four children dissolved, sadly, bitterly before our very eyes and I wondered about the night sky and the one word of comfort I could actually hear from it, “belong.” It’s seemed that everything I was trying to belong to was disappearing.

 But now, nearly a decade later I have a different husband, a different porch, a different home, but the sky is the same and I’m learning little by little to belong to this, what is, what will never burn or dissolve or fail. To belong to the invisible, the mysterious, the being, the isness of life. And there is peace in that to know this. At last, finally, I belong.

I planted parsley in the spring. I like to cook with it, but mainly I like to lure caterpillars to it.

They come every year. This year I've had two batches.

Batches?

Of Caterpillars?

Late yesterday afternoon I took my camera out to take a few pictures. They surely are fun to watch.

This little guy seemed to be stretching out looking for more parsley to grab onto. He's holding his entire body weight horizontally by the suction cups of his hind-hind legs!

A meeting of the minds.

Sarah came up with the idea of adding local produce to our breads, our Wild Yeast breads.

This is a picture of yellow cherry tomatoes from Tim's Family Farm. Monica did the "prep" work, slicing them and roasting them. Before they went into the oven all three of us, Sarah, Monica and I, simultaneously stopped what we were doing and stared at the baking sheet amazed at the brilliant colors. I don't think I've ever seen more beautiful colors together.

We roasted the tomatoes to take the moisture out then worked them into each loaf individually by hand with caramelized onions from Flora Farms.

Here Monica is weighing the loaves. She's working on carrot sunflower, flax seed loaf. The carrots came from our friend Brandon of Delta Sol. We're also doing a Rosemary Olive Oil loaf with rosemary from Valerie Smith's mother's garden. Did you get all that?

My rosemary plant died during the winter, but I've started another two or three for later in the summer.

And we'll have baguettes, too. We're very proud of our Wild Yeast Breads. They're so much fun to make. We begin with our original in house German Rye Sourdough Starter and no commercial yeast is added.( I'll save the story of the starter for another day).

I'm energized and excited to have the subject of bread to write about. But I warn you, I'm going to throw in pictures of my garden and my front porch and Gertie and Blue whenever I get a chance. Maybe I'll just take a picture of Gertie and Blue eating a Rosemary Olive Oil boule out beside my butternut squash vine. That would cover all three bases.

Hope to see you at the market, soon!

the beer in the coolie was left on the porch a couple of nights ago– even I don't drink before 8am

There's a black cat in our neighborhood who likes to get things going in the mornings. He slinks down the street from Midland and comes to the edge of my yard to see if Blue and Gertie are on the porch. Of course, they’re always on the porch at this time of day. They're waiting on the cat.

The cat comes to the edge of the driveway just close enough so that one of them can get a good look at her. She is fully aware of the fact that Blue and Gertie can’t jump the fence, that they are restrained, so to speak, so she waits and swishes her tail back and forth until she gets at least one of the dog's attention.
Blue has several different barks. I always know when the UPS or Mailwoman are at the gate because of the furiously urgent sound of the bark. It's different from The Cat's in the Driveway bark, which is more in the frantic category.

In this bark Blue becomes indignant. His entire body springs into action. He engages all four paws jumping vertically, just a fraction of an inch off the ground, whoof!whoof!whoo!whoof!whoof!whoof!whoof!

The hair stands up on a ridge all the way down his back. His bark is frantic. He shoots desperate glances at me as if pleading for help. He dashes back and forth from one end of the porch to the other. I almost hear him asking me questions: “Can you believe that black cat? She’s in our driveway again?"

Blue has three stations on the porch. One is by the St. Francis statue at the south end of the porch, one in the middle and one at the far north end, which is where the fence is.

Blue with his head peeking through his own personal hole in the fence.

The black cat ignores Blue's barking until it reaches a certain decible, a certain hysterical determination only the cat understands. It says, "This dog means business."

Whereby the cat rises to all fours, lowers her ears, shifts her shoulders into slink-mode and pitter-patters quietly across the street to my neighbor's house where she will prowl back and forth under her bird feeder.
They watch the cat for a while and bark at it even though it is in my neighbor’s yard across the street.Whoof!whoof!whoof!whoof!whoof!whoof!

When at last the cat-threat has passed, Blue will rest with his chin on my legs.

I love my dog.

Yesterday my daughter Sarah and I were sitting on the porch. She said casually, "there's a praying mantis on the shutter."

I dashed into the house to get my camera and began snapping photos.

The mantis was patient. Maybe the mantis was suspicious. Whatever the case he remained motionless staring into my lens.

I believe it is a good omen to see a praying mantis on your porch. Not the kind of omen that predicts the future. I think of omens in my mind, that is I carry my own definition. Omen–a signpost, a reminder, a direction.

And the reminder is?

The direction is?

I wake up early in the mornings and come out onto the porch where I sit and enjoy the quiet. I hear crickets and blue jays.

Lately I watch for the occasional leaf drifting down from my neighbors oak tree across the street.

Cars come and go. People walk their dogs. I am the watcher, the listener.

This praying mantis, maybe I saw her in June, a tiny fragile little thing, jumping around on the hanging basket of fern. Airy, nearly invisible and almost totally without substance; I thought nothing, except "You're good for the garden."

It is a mystery of seasons, especially fall, and insects deliver the cryptic message, the cryptic question of time and meaning.

I said to my new friend, "Where have you been since June? Where and how did you survive? And how is it that this morning you show up on my porch a full adult, announce your presence and pose for pictures?"

"Where are you now?"

This is Henry. I met him at the Memphis Farmer's Market. My daughter Sarah and I sell bread there on Saturday mornings.

Henry sat with me in the kitchen last night while I was cooking supper. My husband, Billy, was all wrapped up in the marathon tennis game going on at Wimbledon.

Can I tell you how much I LOVE Henry? He's so easy to talk to. We sat (he sat, I chopped vegetables) and talked.

He cracked up when I told him how

I bought my new fish Bobo the very afternoon I arrived home after spending 3 days in New York with my daughter Mamie and her husband, Sam.

.

Mamie and I had gone shopping at her favorite store– Rudy Volcano's–It's where she bought all of our Christmas presents this year. She gave me a hand carved gourd.

check it out

www.rudyvolcano.com

I showed the gourd to Henry last night, too. It's from Peru or maybe Ecuador.

Rudy Volcano and Mamie have gotten to be friends because of all her shopping expeditions, so I was looking forward to meeting him when I was in New York and looking forward to doing a little expeditioning myself. Oh phooey! He was on vacation.

We were standing in front of the cash register/display case area when I noticed a ceramic pot on the floor about the size of a spherical black diamond watermelon if there is such a thing–white on the inside and geometric patterns of blue, orange and maybe a little green on the outside and lo and behold there were goldfish swimming around in it–happy and healthy.

Oh my God! It's just like the one Mamie gave me for Christmas, the one that broke to bits during the plane ride down from New York, the one that she spent all one afternoon gluing back together! I'm putting two and two together, it came from Rudy's!

"Dangit," I said to myself, "I want a fish." I couldn't use my pot because of the cracks and leaks. but...

I got off the plane and made my way to Billy who was waiting for me at the gate with open arms.

"How was your trip?" he asked.

"It was wonderful. I'll tell you all about it on our way to PetCo."

"Petco???"

Here is Henry talking to Bobo my new fish.

Sometimes it's hard to tell about Henry. I worry about him.

He lives much of his life vicariously. He doesn't have many friends and he's terrified of traveling.

"I prefer the garden," he says.

I mean as hot as it was yesterday, he stayed out in that heat all day until I MADE him come in.

"Henry," I told him, " you're not going to meet other vegetables standing out here in the compost heap."

He looked down all sad, then promptly changed the subject.

* * *

I felt kinda' bad about fussing at Henry. I honestly don't care one way or the other whether he has a boyfriend or not. I just want him to be happy.

Well, you won't believe it. The next morning I woke up early. I was making my coffee when I heard voices quietly talking. I peeked around the refrigerator and there they were, Henry and the gourd, chatting.

I could just barely make out what Henry was saying but it sounded a bit like this:

"So, you were grown in Guatemala and hand carved in Peru. How long you been in the

States?"

At last. A romance seems to be–pardon the phrase–– blossoming.