FIND A COZY WINDOW

My window with the Gothic Arch.

IN BIRDLAND THE SKY IS GREY AND THE DRIZZLE IS CONSTANT, BUT AFTER THIS SUMMER'S DROUGHT I WOULDN'T HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY. It is, after all, October. The grass is finally green again, and the leaves are just beginning to turn. They are muted so far, with only a little yellow. The hackberries outside my window seem to be going straight from a washed out greenish-yellow to a dry brown. Leaves crunch on the sidewalk below and I wonder if the extra stress of the heat and drought drained all the color from the trees. Or will they light up yet in the coming weeks?

The cornfields by my house have been harvested, and it looks like Jim and Sean have already pulled a disc through them so that they're a moist jumble of brown earth and tawny brown stubble. Ursula still runs out into the field to glean the few dropped ears (stunted this year), bringing home one or two a day. My dog will play with these ears for awhile, cheerfully gnawing the golden corn off the cob, and then leaving it for the chickens to peck. Everybody is happy.  

Looking forward to Winter

The days are getting shorter and more and more often, by the time I get home in the evenings, the chickens have already gone to bed and I'm only left to latch the door. Soon I will have to cover the coop and the aviary with plastic. Soon I will have to plug in the lights for warmth. As much as I'm enjoying sweater weather right now, I do look forward to the coming winter with all its glorious ice and cold. For one thing, when I turn on the lights in the chicken coop, I'll finally get eggs again. This flock is all pullets, bought as day old chicks this spring. I've been buying chicken feed since April without collecting one single egg. I can't wait until I get my first one, which usually happens for the first time soon after I put on the lights in the winter.

Reflecting on Peace

 For another thing, Michael's been cutting a lot of trees. Most notably some poplars we planted many years ago, which have lived out their lifecycles. They are fast growing trees, which is why we planted them to shade the south windows in summer, but quick growth means they don't last long—maybe 20 years. They've been dying one by one, and now we have a big pile of firewood. I don't think Poplar is the very best firewood, but it's still nice to have a big pile, and I'm looking forward to warming the house with fires in a few months.

Find a Cozy Hidey Hole

Today I'm cozy in my little office and something about the overcast day makes me snuggle down deeper into my sweater and wrap my hands around my warm cup of tea. I've got errands to do across campus, but they can wait. Today is a day to sit and write, read a chapter or two, grade some papers and talk with students. Today is a day to pause and take a long glance out the old window with the Gothic arch, to see the small, brown berries on the tree outside. Suspended on each berry is a silver pearl of rain, shining with refracted light. Below, umbrellas sail back and forth on the sidewalk. Everyone has somewhere to go. But me? I'm content to sit here and turn another page, take another sip, and enjoy the warm coziness of a fall day.

Sit in Beauty; Soak up Peace;
Blessed Be.

THE SCENT OF LAVENDER

THE SCENT OF LAVENDER

I USED TO BE A MORNING PERSON. No matter how late I stayed up, or how tired I still was, I'd be up at the crack of dawn, unwilling, but relentlessly awake. The moment the sun creeps into my window, sleep is over for me. In many ways this was a good thing. When the sun rises early in the summer, I'm up, and after the blood starts flowing and the grogginess wears off, I'm energetic. I try to get most of my work done early, while the energy is high. It's a little harder in the winter, when I often have to get up before the sun, but I have always embraced that rhythm. The flip side is that I can't stay up late. Come 9 PM, I'm yawning and stretching and thinking about my cozy bed.

But everything changed when I made myself a lavender eye pillow. I first discovered them in yoga class, where we would spend the last five minutes of the session in shivasana, or corpse pose, lying flat on our backs with our arms outstretched. I'd take off my glasses and cover my eyes with a lavender eye pillow, and would instantly relax deeply. It was partly the gentle scent of the lavender, and partly the gentle weight on my eyes, blocking all light that might distract me from my relaxation. Often, I would nearly settle into sleep before Bev's voice would call me back.

 I made myself a lavender eye pillow. It was very simple. I cut a rectangle out of my favorite dress, after I finally admitted that I was not the only one who could see the tiny holes in the floral pattern. I cut it a bit wider than the eye pillows at yoga class—more like a card envelope than a business envelope. I wanted it to cover more of my face. I sewed it up on three sides and filled it with a mixture of rice and lavender buds. I drizzled some lavender oil on the mixture, stirred it and let it sit for awhile. Then I poured the mixture into the pillow and sewed up the last side. I stitched around the edges a couple of times to make sure it wouldn't leak.

WHAT IS IN THE SKY?

I keep that little pillow on my bedside table, and in the morning, when the sun gives its first, creeping call, I decide whether I've had enough sleep. If not, I grab that pillow and lay it over my eyes and let the gentle weight, the powdery scent, and the quiet darkness lull me back to sleep. The only problem with getting this extra sleep, is that it's pushing my bedtime later and later. I'm now in a cycle of late nights and late mornings, and I suppose I'll live to regret all this when school starts again.

LAVENDER EYE PILLOW

This morning, it was after 9 when I got up. I went out to feed the chickens and saw something strange and wondrous in the sky. I was a little frightened, because it was like the whole world was covered with a flossy grey blanket. The sun was nowhere to be seen, and the blanket was low over the corn and filled with puffs and swirls. I sat down in the glider, and as I looked at the sky, I could feel that I had seen something like this a long time ago. Then I noticed another strange feeling. I wasn't sweating! It was cool. I let the breeze wash over me as I sat in wonderment.

SLEEP IN BEAUTY; PRAY FOR RAIN;
BLESSED BE.

As I sat, the breeze grew stronger and started blowing holes in my protective blanket, and I could see the familiar blue of the sky. Around the pockets of blue are the bright, puffy clouds that carry no rain. And now the breeze comes from the east, pushing whole parade. For a few minutes a big hole of blue sails directly above us. The shadows return and I feel the sun on my back. I sit with my chickens, and together we wait, and wait for rain.

LOOKING FOR LAVENDER

IN BIRDLAND WE GOT A LITTLE RAIN--JUST ENOUGH TO TEASE US. Not enough to turn off the heat or dry up the dust or coax the wild blue asters into blossom. The corn is in tassel and maybe it was enough rain to get a little bit of a crop this year, but not a big harvest. The corn is sending its sweet, sweaty smell out with its pollen. It's a green, fertile smell, but not particularly pretty. Grandma always used to say that we need rain the most when the corn was tasseling, but we are still several inches down. The last rain was maybe 2/10ths of an inch, and we need an inch a week to pull us out of this drought. Even with watering my garden every evening, it grows so slowly without rain.

What we need is lavender. Lavender will bloom despite the dry weather. Last week some of my knitting friends made a trip up by Rantoul to visit the lavender farm at Sharp'sCrossing. It was hot, but the heat diffused the lovely scent so that when we got out of the car, wafts of perfume greeted us. We could see the smaller field from the road, and turned into the driveway where we saw a big, white barn with old wagon wheels spaced around the wall. A larger field of lavender was next to the barn. We went first into the barn where we could sample tiny little lavender shortbread cookies and see various crafts—soaps, tinctures, sachets, pillows, lotions, wreathes and wands—all made from lavender. In the barn we picked up scissors and rubber bands, and then went out to the fields to cut bundles. There were three varieties, I think, and I picked a bundle each of two of them. As we walked out of the barn, the owner called after us, “Cut ginormous bunches.” she said. “There's plenty out there.”

The plants grew in regular diagonal rows through heavy-duty weed barrier. They grew in pretty, rounded cushions. Some plants were already harvested, and these were hemispheres of greenery, almost like topiaries. Others had sprays of tight, blue flowers, an open invitation to the bees and other pollinators. But I didn't see too many bees. Maybe it was the drought—or the mid-day heat. One field was long stemmed, and I picked plenty of that. I cut and sniffed, and cut and sniffed until my nose didn't work any more. Then I took my bundle inside and started again in the other field. They wrapped up my two bundles in purple tissue paper and gave me ribbon and the directions for making a lavender wand. Lavender is one of my remedies when I have trouble sleeping, and a wand would be just the thing to keep by my bedside. I also got a spritzer bottle of lavender water in case the wand doesn't work its magic.

At home, I have old glass bottles in all the windows, dug up from a stream in our woods, where people sneak in to dump trash. I filled each of the bottles with a few stems of lavender to freshen the rooms. At the lavender farm they had a bunch in a vase that they said was a year old, and it was still fragrant. I figure I'll keep these in the bottles until next year, and then I'll take the buds off these stems to use for a new eye pillow. The lavender lady said to put the stems in a pillowcase and roll your hands over it to remove the buds from the stems. 

I was inspired to research the growing of lavender and found it is drought resistant. I'll get a couple of plants to add to my path to joy, or maybe I'll start another path in the sun, just west of the garden and chicken coop. One thing leads to another in my planning, and I begin dreaming about the marriage of bees and lavender: lavender honey!

Rain in Beauty; Bloom in Peace; Blessed Be.

THE FERTILE SMELL OF RAIN

I DIDN'T WANT TO GET MY HOPES UP.

IN BIRDLAND IT'S BEEN DRY FOR SO LONG THAT THE FERTILE SMELL OF RAIN WAS A DISTANT MEMORY. In the past few weeks we'd had two middle-of-the-night thunderstorms that carried a lot of sound and fury, but in the morning, though the dust was dampened down, the cracks in the earth were still there. Yesterday's showers were very welcome. It began as a gentle sprinkling and grey skies. It brought with it a welcome coolness and the lovely, earthy smell of rain. I didn't want to get my hopes up, though. The skies weren't all that grey.

BEDS IN THE
GARDEN COOP

We had been preparing the beds in the garden coop for planting. Yes, it's very late to start a garden, but it's always June before I can get into the summer rhythm. The dryness actually made the soil a bit easier to work after the digging, and I thought maybe I could get the beds ready and planted before the rain, but I am always over-optimistic. The forecast was for rain in the night, and I was racing the sun to get the last bit of soil turned over. The sun always beats me. I went to bed dreaming of a little house full of lush greens and dotted with bright tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers.

The garden coop is a little house of chicken wire next to the coop. We built it to keep the chickens away from the more tender plants after we saw what they could do to my tomato crop. They are worse than tomato horn worms, which can eat half a tomato or all the leaves on a stem before you even realize the caterpillars have arrived. They start out small, but soon turn into monsters. They're hard to see even after they grow fat, so close in color they are to the plants. I usually find them by following their little packages of poop, in neat, geometrical stacks, or looking for the decimated leaves. I've heard that Guineas eat the bugs but leave the plants alone, and they are probably a very good fit for my garden. I should try them sometime, but I think I'd have to build another coop first. Chickens are great for preparing soil—scratching it up and eating grubs, but you can't trust them in the garden itself.

 The garden coop will accommodate about 6 large tomato plants. I try to plant some herbs in the corners and lettuces in beds between the tomatoes while the tomatoes are still small. The tall walls are great for growing cucumbers and pole beans. We can live for the whole summer on fresh cucumbers. I keep one big ceramic bowl on the counter filled with them, fresh off the vine, and another in the fridge to float slices in a vinegar and herb marinade. The vines grow up the walls and make a lush little house. If it weren't so full of tomato plants by midsummer, it would be a great place for a picnic.

The rain didn't come in the night, after all, and next morning I was able to finish digging the bed. I like to make raised beds around the periphery with a low valley for a walkway and kneeling space down the center. I was just about to start digging that when I began to smell the rain coming. It started gently, and I had time to put away my tools, enjoying that lively scent and the chill on my skin. I spent the rest of the day on indoor tasks—guilt free, since it was raining. I sorted my seeds into piles for inside the garden coop, existing flower beds, and other possibilities. I envision a rambling squash bed a little ways off. Maybe they will develop their leathery skins before the chickens find them. 

This morning it's even chillier, and the skies are still grey, but we only got about 1/3 of an inch. The cracks in the earth are still there, though softened. But the fields! The corn looks like it's grown 6 inches overnight. The soil in the garden coop will be dry enough to rake out in a few hours, and then I'll get my seeds planted this afternoon. The seeds will begin to sprout and we'll look to the sky and hope for more rain, and the cycle will begin again.

PLANT IN BEAUTY
HARVEST PEACE
BLESSED BE