I came across this passage in one of Dorothy Day’s monthly columns for the Catholic Worker paper the other day, written when she was staying with her daughter before the birth of her third grandchild:

“It has been a month of ‘ice, rains, snow and stormy winds,’ and every morning after the routine of fires, breakfasts and dressing has taken place, Becky, Susie and I rock in the wicker chair and sing, ‘All ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; oh ye ice and snow, oh ye cold and wind, oh ye winter and summer, oh ye trees in the woods, oh ye fire in the stove, oh ye Becky and Susie, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.’ It is a song with infinite variations. You can include Mr. Clark’s cows, Leslie’s horses, the Hennessy goats, and all the human beings for miles around…What are we here for anyway except to praise Him, to adore Him and to thank Him? … and there is plenty to remind us of that in the country.”

-Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (in the CW paper – not the book) March 1948

We have our own verses to add lately. (Because of course you don’t have to be in the country to come up with more.)

Swallowtails and zinnias, bless the Lord.

Sprouts and seedlings, bless the Lord.

And as Hurricane Ida gets here, it will be winds and rains, bless the Lord. Fortissimo.

It’s a good reminder: we aren’t on Earth just to work and to suffer, we are here to praise God. Last week our praise (besides morning prayer) included our school work and dance and play-doh and some spent-grain bread; next week I expect it will include fallen-limb removal.

The pre-hurricane preparations are finished, except for the boards for the picture window, which we’ll do tonight. And then comes the waiting. And we get to be reminded just how small and not in control we are.

I’ve been doing some stress gardening lately. It’s a lot like stress cleaning, but with more dirt and sunshine. (And sweat, of course. It’s August.) It’s a practice that has felt natural and necessary as we endure another massive wave of Covid here in Louisiana, driven primarily by our low vaccination rates and high proportion of unwavering anti-maskers. It’s been hard to hear every day of someone else we know who is quarantined or sick, some of them very sick. 

If that were not enough, my oldest is starting school for the first time (as a freshman in high school) and Craig’s workplace is not a safe place right now. Despite how closely this pandemic is hitting us, many people, including some I love dearly, are still choosing their preference not to mask over protecting those around them. 

And it is hitting extremely close to home – I got an email from our nearest hospital last night explaining that they are so overcrowded that they are going to be rescheduling appointments. One of the board members from Craig’s school needed to be admitted with Covid, and there simply wasn’t a bed for him. He waited two days before it was his turn.

There’s not a lot I can do about other people’s choices, so I’ve been pulling weeds. Gallons of them. The summer plants are mostly done, so I pulled out the sad-looking bush beans and the dried-up sunflowers. I’m still battling the blackberries that took over the back corner of the garden and threatened to overwhelm our yard and our neighbor’s. Slowly, something resembling order is rising out of the chaos.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, in their vision for the Catholic Worker, spoke often of the need for scholars to be workers and workers to be scholars. Right now would be a bad time for me to live entirely in my head. But being on my knees, hands in the dirt, working to make something beautiful has helped. If nothing else, any time I spend in the garden is time I’m not scrolling Twitter or reading the most recent nurse’s plea for people to get vaccinated.

Because most of the work has been in ripping out rather than planting, and because it’s been a blisteringly hot August, the gardens aren’t much to look at yet, mostly just bare dirt. Starting over is a slow process. Still, two weeks into my refocused gardening efforts, I’m starting to see a difference. The kale and mustard greens and cosmos by the front porch have sprouted. They are a very hopeful shade of green. The long vegetable bed that came with the house is now clear except for the tomato jungle and a couple of leeks, and the bare earth looks eager for new life.

We weather storms around here. It comes with the territory. Just how much this one costs us remains to be seen, but I’m sure we’ll get through it, too, eventually. But it may not be before I start harvesting all that kale.

The blackberries have come into their own.

We planted a few unassuming cuttings given to us by a friend roughly a year ago, right at the beginning of quarantine, if I remember correctly. Our friend’s gardens are lush with life, so I had high hopes for any gift from her.

We put too many plants in too small a space in a bare corner of the garden, where the weeds had been kept at bay by a layer of crunchy red pumice stone. (I’m still wondering what I’ll do with the box full of stone we took out.) We settled the plants in, and we waited.

The pile of vines grew. (Pile is really the best word for it – a pile with tentacles.) As the weather warmed this spring, cheeky white blossoms started to cover the plants. We started to get excited.

The white petals fell, leaving tiny green clusters. We watched and drooled, and started planning parfaits, pies, cobbler.

Still the brambles grew. Tentacles came up in my daughter’s garden nearby, in the vegetable bed on the other side, in the neighbor’s yard on the other side of the fence. I played yank-a-shoot, whack-a-mole style, in long sleeves and heavy garden gloves.

(Summer project: Operation Contain Blackberry…if such a thing is even possible. I have a feeling we’ll be fighting blackberry shoots and lemon balm for the rest of our lives.)

In the last week or so the berries have started to ripen. Ten, even twenty fat, dark berries a day from our little 3×3 square of land, plus the area the plants took for themselves. We are at the point of growing our own cobbler.

A friend of mine has a theory that blackberry plants are actually carnivorous. One of her sheep was killed (not by blackberries), and where she buried it now grow the fattest, sweetest blackberries she’s ever had on her property. As further evidence she sights the fact that the thorns on the blackberry plant curve inward, back towards the base of the plant, like it wants to hook you and pull you in for its dinner.

Having painstakingly extracted these little delights during the last week, I think I agree. This bramble pile would eat me if given the chance. Which is how life works, of course, but I didn’t realize I was bringing anything quite so menacing into my backyard. 

So we’re keeping two eyes on the toddler these days. And the cats. And the dog. Warning them, Don’t get too close to the blackberry bushes! 

We’re also preheating the oven for the cobbler.

And when we’re not tied up with graduations, recitals, and final exams, we’re researching trellises for next year, in case there is any hope of our taming this (delicious) beast of an urban homesteading experiment.

It’s that time of year again: May Madness. Finals, graduations, recitals, Mother’s Day, and we have a birthday (7th) and wedding anniversary (16th) in our family to round it all out.

Needless to say, I’m hiding in my bedroom with books of poetry more than usual.

Still, it’s amazing to watch our kids blossom. They’re stepping out of their comfort zones, getting in front of crowds (or cameras) and sharing the gifts God has given them. I’m constantly in awe of the beauty they’re already bringing into the world.

And as much as I cringe at the thought of making small talk (or worse, housecleaning) of course it’s always good to celebrate family and new beginnings. I usually even enjoy it. Especially if there’s cake, which there will be.

But I also look forward to June, and the calm after the storm. Time for lounging and reading, playing board games, going for family walks in the evenings. Basking in the flowers and good things to eat coming from the garden.

It all comes back to the garden again, that little bit of refuge where things are slow and simple. Even in the face of army worms, slugs, and flea beetles, it’s a comfort to see these tiny seeds grow and produce twenty-, or fifty-, or a hundred-fold. Such bounty!

A talk I was listening to this week mentioned the quote, “One plants, another waters, but God gives the increase.” I feel that all the time right now as I watch our kids grow. There is no way I can take credit for their talents, or their kind hearts, or their humor. God is causing the increase in them daily, and it is my privilege and blessing to witness his goodness.

So…we painted a piano green.

In our defense, the sound board is warped, and it won’t hold a tune anymore. But we didn’t want to put it on the curb…so we’re turning it into a planter. (Can’t you just imagine some purple basil in there?)

I thought I was painting it a nice deep sage green, but something comes over me when I look at paint chips. This color is listed as “Mossy Bench,” but the members of our family agree it’s closer to “Day-Old Mate Latte.”

So we are dedicating this piano-planter to Pope Francis, as he is well known to love mate, the traditional Argentinian beverage. (Though I expect he likes his fresh, not day-old.)

Now it just needs a catchy name…something like Habemus Piano or Papa Piano or The Mate of Music. I’m open, as usual, to suggestions.

No deep thoughts this week, so here’s the garden update:

The scraggly bush-tree that was a stump when we moved in 2 1/2 years ago has shown its true colors.

It is most definitely a Japanese magnolia, which I have wanted in my yard since I first met one almost 20 years ago at Tulane. Score one for the house, and one for being too lazy to dig out the stump before we knew what it was.

It’s time to bring in the cabbages, but I’ve lost the cabbage soup recipe I used last winter that the kids loved. If you have suggestions, please send them my way.

I harvested about a gallon of curly kale yesterday, all from a roughly six-inch by two-foot space. Bunches of cilantro are next.

I wouldn’t have harvested it all now, except that it’s time to start planting, and I need to sheet mulch this bed before we put tomatoes in it. Craig is determined to have a repeat of last summer’s Wall of Tomatoes.

I invested in a grow-light this year, and the first seedlings are ready to harden off, so that we can plant them in…

THE SPACESHIP BED! We have grand plans to turn the whole back yard into garden beds, and this one is the first. Three walls complete (thanks to a diligent and creative husband) and it will be a while before the fourth, so it’s been double dug and will soon be planted with the zucchini, anise hyssop, and oregano from under the grow-light, as well as lots of other goodies. It just happens that, with the keyhole walkway, it looks a little like a spaceship. Hopefully it will be less noticeable once the plants are in.

I also pruned the climbing rose WAAAAAY back, which is a little terrifying. But the guy on YouTube said it would make it happy…I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Turns out I have one Deep Thought after all – it’s been a good two days (or week…who’s counting?) digging and lugging and planting a little. Even when it seems like I’m just piddling, not really accomplishing much, it’s still been refreshing, and at least felt like I was doing something worthwhile. Which maybe says something about the importance of the worker part of Peter Maruin’s worker-scholar ideal.

And, God willing, there will be vegetables from some of this work on our table three months from now.

It’s happened twice now: my daughter has requested that we grow Brussels sprouts in the garden, and I have sallied forth to the local garden center right around October and returned with cute little baby brassicas. Only weeks later do we realize…these are not Brussels sprouts.

How can this happen twice, you might wonder? The first year they were cabbages. And a Brussels sprout looks like a cabbage on a stick, with little buds all over the stick. So I kept watching these cabbage-shaped things and waiting for the stalk to shoot up. Needless to say, it never did.

This year, I resolved to try again. The plants were clearly labeled. I brought them home, my daughter happily planted them in her little patch of garden. We waited. Giant green leaves and a knobby white center emerged…we had planted cauliflower.

I thought my daughter was going to cry. She loves Brussels sprouts and she had waited a year and a half for these. And they were cauliflower. (In my defence, they’re all in the same plant family. The little ones look enough alike to my untrained eye…but I digress.)

There was no point in digging them up by the time we realized the mistake, and it was too late to try again this year. So we watched the cauliflower grow to a pretty ridiculous size, and then I chopped one down and brought it in for dinner.

Whatever the ancients may say, I think that ambrosia might just be home-grown cauliflower. It was really, really good.

When we realized that we could cook and eat the leaves like any other green…well, it almost made it worth the four square feet of garden each plant took up to make its tasty head.

And it almost made it worth missing out on the Brussels sprouts, again.

So I went to the freezer section at the grocery store, loaded up on bags of Brussels sprouts, and we’re making the best of it. I also added one thing to the wish list attached to my seed catalogs: Brussels sprout seeds. If those grow up to be kale…well, I guess at that point I’ll concede defeat.

Check out my latest post at Mighty Is Her Call:

Re-opening the blog attempt #…

yeah, I don’t know either.

The whole keeping-up-frequent-posts-with-no-home-internet thing is a bit of a drag.  It requires discipline.  Which I sometimes lack.

But here goes again, anyway.

I went to my first writer’s conference this weekend.  The Louisiana-Mississippi region of SCBWI held its first ever KidLit conference Saturday at Sacred Heart Academy in New Orleans.  It was lovely.

The take-away:  Write for yourself, revise for your readers.  Thank you, Cheryl Klein.  

We also got to meet Angie Thomas, four days after her debut novel The Hate U Give hit #1 on the NY Times bestseller list.  Needless to say, she was glowing.  Though I suspect that is usual for her.  She was definitely an inspiration.  Yes, I bought the book.  No, I haven’t read it yet.  Really have to finish Octavian Nothing Part II before I take on anything else.  And that may be a while.  

I also got to meet Carrel Muller, who is the lower school librarian at Sacred Heart.  I want my girls to go to school there so she can be their librarian.  She is lovely!  She convinced me I need to go back and fill in all the holes in my folklore and mythology education.  And read do the same with my kids.  She also read a piece of mine (in the First Look part of the program where they read and critique the openings of several submissions), and it was exactly as I would dream of a children’s librarian reading it to little ones.  So that was a very cool moment.  Now if I can just convince someone out there to publish it…

Right.  So on that note, I could use prayers for persistence – to keep showing up at the page, and to keep sending things out, despite the piles of rejections.  Blah.

For those of you who are here less for the minutiae of my writing life, and more for cute baby stories, the lovely children are well.  I’ve picked up two Latin classes at JPG in the mornings, so they are spending the mornings with a friend and coming home for lunch, naps, etc. in the afternoons.

Just through May.  If the headmaster asks, you can assure him I still do not want to come on full time next year.  This experience has been a good reminder of where I want to be.  Home.  Period.  Which, of course, includes the library and the park.  But mostly home.

I thought our chickens had stopped laying, but it turns out they laid all their eggs in the bushes for a while.  Under the blackberry brambles, to be precise.  We found 24 one day, and 7 the next.  We have three chickens.  Three eggs a day, at best.  So it was a jubilee.  They seem to have figured out the purpose of the nesting boxes again, though.  Which is easier, but less exciting.  You can’t have everything, I guess.

We planted some vegetables and flowers last weekend.  (Thanks to Fr. Sam for the seeds!  The wildflower bed is well on it’s way!)  Hopefully there will be pictures…when I get better at technology.  Maybe next spring.  
Book of the week: This Is Not My Hat by John Klassen.  Hilarious.  It should be used in film classes as a study in dramatic irony, and in writers’ workshops as and example of how the pictures and text work together.  No redundancy – each does its own part towards a flawlessly integrated whole.  And it’s soooo funny.

I hope that there will be more posts soon.   And that is not intended as ironic, but whether it is or not remains to be seen.

Friday Lucy helped me make strawberry jam – our best batch yet.  She was very excited about making it so we didn’t have to buy it any more.
Saturday the girls helped me weed a bed at Nana and Papa’s and scatter seeds for the polyculture.  That meant lessons on mulch, different kinds of seeds, weeds, manure, and lizards.  We went to Mass and to Mimi’s for a St. Patrick’s day dinner.
Sunday was our day off for the first time in a couple of weeks.  The girls got to go swimming and played outside with the neighbor kids.  Lucy is just like Craig – she wants to invite everyone she meets to dinner immediately.  Lucy also helped clean up some shelves I found on the side of the road and both girls helped cut strawberries for “fruit nachos”.
Today (Monday) we read the first story in House at Pooh Corner and Lucy had ballet.  We tried to Skype with a friend in Seattle, but it didn’t work right.  But we did get a geography lesson on where New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Seattle are.