Back Home Up North

It's taken a while to settle in, get my bearings and begin writing again. I've missed connecting with you. I'm glad to be back. North is still home. North is familiar glossy black sugar-eating ants rather than Florida's red fire ants. They sting. A few black crazy ants dance if you get too close and do not sting.

I feel at home when I take the lid off the compost pile and see this piece of disintegrating fabric. How long will it take for those embroidered flowers to disappear?

Someone on my block has put out books-- for the taking. There were no takers, not before rain soaked the books, certainly not after. None of the books interested me--pop, pulp, poor.

The next morning some of the books ended up in the gutter. Teenage marauders?

Small ruins are easy to take.

Tell me how you get your bearings.

Still Life: Garbage

We compost garbage. "Garbage" meaning "food waste." Rather than wasting, J. and I save, yet if we accumulate garbage in a container in the kitchen before putting it on the compost pile, it attracts ants, fruit flies, etc.--no mouse in the kitchen yet--and gives off a ripe-rotten odor even when covered. J. has solved the problem. Following his lead, I freeze garbage! The peels, stems, seeds, cores, and pith pile up, but naturally do not overflow. This morning the frozen pile made a zany still life, but I won't call it "still." Frozen, on the table, in 95 degree heat, the little garbage tower gave off a frosty cloud that my camera couldn't catch. A pleasure!

I rapped the container against the hard black bin, and the garbage slid out; the still-frozen tomato-peel 'torta' split off from the banana peels and tough eggplant ends. (The tomato meat had gone into a sauce.) By now wasps, fruit flies--and who knows what else--and the action of a layer of soil are bringing the mess back to life.

What does all this have to do with my August writer's retreat at home? Let me think. Although I wrote an essay, roughed out some poems and buffed up others, read till my eyes crossed, I was forced to listen to plenty of rubbish during 8/2010. Maybe some of it will find its way into stories. I'll trust to time and the vagaries of memory to transform some of the truly worthless parts into material--comedy, I hope. If you were here with me, dear Bloggerones, I might tell you about it. How was your August? And how are things on September first?

Volunteers: Tomatoes

In January, using compost he had brought to Florida from Massachusetts, J. potted up a juniper plant and set it on the balcony. Today, three months later, he moved the pot from the floor to a table. He was clearing the decks to sweep.

Trailing out from under the armadillo's paw was a green fringe. Not Juniper. At first I thought it was a weed. I lifted the fringe and caught the pungent minty smell of tomato plants. The fringe, composed of at least a dozen and a half tomato shoots, had grown in the compost from a discarded tomato. With a small sharp spoon I pried it up in one clump. The leggy plants had been reaching for more sun.

I wish I had taken a picture of the tangled shoots. Stem, roots, leaves: all tangled. They grew from one small clot to which, on one side, clung a frail papery, pale brown skin. The skin of cherry tomato. Would the stems come apart? Taking care not to break them, I eased the stems away from each other. None wilted. I picked out the largest plants--about five inches long--and planted them up to the hilt. Tomatoes send out roots from the stem.

Some I saved in water.

The rest went into the compost container John will take to our allotment in the community garden.

If I had tried to sow tomato seeds, would they have sprouted so luxuriantly? I don't know. But I treasure these volunteers and will try to grow them on. They will come north with me in April in my carry-on bag.

Right now, after having had a stretch of poems, each quickly generating the next, I am waiting for another poem, waiting longer than I'd like. The tomato seedlings have been growing for two and a half months without any help from us, except water. We didn't know we were watering them. Some fragment--word, dream, memory--I've tossed away may sprout into a delicate fringy green with long white roots. Perhaps I should think of myself not as a poet but a rescuer of poems.