just call me puddin' pop

01:36 am: what about if I hike from northern virginia starting in mid-march? It'll be chilly, but I'll have good company for that first week, and soon there will be mud and dogwoods and spring ephemerals and flame azaleas. I can get picked up for graduation and I can walk and then go on with something else. Something I will have cooked up in my two months of reflection time.

10:37 pm: zero
that is the number of cats I had in my bathtub yesterday

five
that is the number of cats in my bathtub right now. Four of these did not exist yesterday.

11:22 pm: BABIES
BABIES.

12:14 pm: a digression in favor of plants
So often I have forgotten
to admire the plants around me
you see, I see a landscape
and don't strawberry smell the red-almost-brown flowers of calycanthus
or notice the lettuce that fell from the rolled up
cuff of my work overalls and took root in the patio.
Who notices the yellow haze of spicebush flowers
that heralds the unfolding of thousands
and thousands of little red and green parasols
to gather light for the great, straight Aesculus?
To fall asleep with the word Euonymous
rocking its syllables across my mind
or its other name: hearts-a-bustin;
to stop to smell the carrots
in a queen-anne's-lace
or the sourdough in fall mums
these are fine things.
Who brushes the bristles of wineberry and murmurs
Rubus phoenicolasius? Who strokes the staghorn sumac
and barks Rhus typhina?
Oxydendrum tastes of sorrel, Robinia flowers are good in omelets.

The man who taught me to see cherry seedlings
growing through the itea
knelt and pushed aside the lily-of-the-valley
"look" he said, "and take a whiff"
I couldn't see anything.
"the little brown thing, looks like a fungus"
I smelled rotting flesh.
"it's a flower", and he let the lily-of the valley fall back
Plants are our secrets, our subtle satisfaction.
The little-brown-jug grew well within the boxwood hedge.
It's a detail: the taste of a particular tree's fruit.

11:28 am: More than a gallon of peaches
like the smell of the sweet south
spilling over the chin of a mason jar
like a fan humming the sticky heat out the window
like rolling into a sticky bed that's big enough
while the lids ping sealed under the kitchen sink.

10:16 am: Dan Copulsky (Internet Superstar) rides again?
check it out, and if you like it, repost to help a friend of mine.

http://stories.dancopulsky.com/

I want Dan to write a story about the bison in Yellowstone's Geyser Basin during the winter: the things that they say to one another, mostly.

05:22 am: unsent letter
Dear Sky,
As I often have, I am finding that you are peculiarly good at being where you're least convenient. Tonight, you are on my mind and I can't sleep for it. As usual, all I really have to say is that I'm sorry and that I hope (with all my heart) that you'll forgive me someday.
I look at pictures of you and Cat and I think you're happy. That's all the news I have of you now, so I make wild conjectures and tell myself fancy stories about your life. It kills me to see you smiling, and I'm happily loving someone else, and it would kill me to lose him.
The world is a convoluted and frightening place, and when I start thinking, I know I'll never love someone as fearlessly as I loved you. Perhaps I loved you overconfidently. That was a passion, with all the vigor and innocence that I could dredge up to fuel it. As I grow older, I realize that it must not have been that way for you. Yours was a wiser and more cautious thing, and I still pay the price for my foolishness in losing control.
One thing I particularly regret, silly as it is (sort of) is the drugs and alcohol thing. It scared me so much, and you had so much more experience with that stuff. I'm sorry I never got to share the good aspects of those things with you. I forced you to hide a part of yourself, and I wish I hadn't been so afraid to open that door. I wish I'd had the courage to know all of you. I don't think I've ever apologized for that before, but it's been on my mind. Bre and I smoked at the beach the other day, and played on a playground and made a beautiful dinner. I thought of you, and how much you would enjoy that. I don't know if she was thinking of you, but I'll bet she was.
I will always regret that the thing came apart. I guess it wasn't real for you for a long time. I only wish I'd known that. I can't now stop deceiving myself, convincing myself that it came apart at once, with little warning from either of us. I remember sometimes thinking that I would ask you on my eighteenth birthday if you would marry me someday. I thought that was the next big way that I could tell you I loved you
I fell apart that fall, (though I didn't know it at the time; I thought I was growing). I saw little of you and I needed a lot. I had a lot to give. Over and over I'll call myself a whore. I thought I needed to know what there was in the world before I gave myself completely into your keeping. I found out too late, and I'm yoked to the answer now. I should not have hurt you the way I did. I can't tell you how sorry I am. The worst was the way it dragged itself out. I lost interest in everything but my private struggle, and It fell on you, and I'm sorry.
I don't know if there will always be doubt in my life. I hope not. Doubt is the worst kind of disease. It twists all of the parts of you that belong to others. My heart and my arms and my head and my left breast ache sometimes. I only know where a few of those are trying to escape to. All of them are sometimes crippled.
A part of me can't stop hoping that we'll meet again someday, on terms that are gentle. (though part of me ternally harbors a smoky future, this is beyond that: it has to do with honor, the fact that it would be a crime to lose a friendship that was once the driving force of my life. Letting go of or intentionally warping my feelings for you would be unforgivable in the eyes of what I see as right and true). I wish we could talk sometimes, and I wish I were better at writing to you when I'm not sad. You get a twisted picture of me from all of this. I promise I'm worth something. I work hard every day to be worthy of the incredible thing (the very first love of a good heart) with which I'm trusted. I hope you can meet Sean sometime. Perhaps tonight.
I am learning to live with doubt and regret. I don't believe in fairy tales any more, or at least I no longer see myself in them. If everything were as it is in fairy tales, true love would have prevailed, and it has not been allowed a chance. I know your pride and your fear, and I know it won't be. I also, however, know that it was true love. Because of that I am trying to teach myself to appreciate the kind of severe grace in the complexity of my feelings. I cannot do anything else.
I love you, I always will, but I'm at peace with that. It doesn't drive me, Sky. Please stop being afraid.

Yours always,
Keely

11:49 pm: I miss sky.
I looked through a high school yearbook today, and I thought about how young we were. He was so handsome and silly and smart. He was everything I wanted and needed at just the right time. And I was so so so young.
He's back in the country and I want to see him. I want to know what's on his mind and who he is now, and I want to try to reclaim what was so beautiful and honest and innocent and secret and miraculous and strange about the way we fit together. I don't want to restart the romance: I'm happy with Sean, and the romance is what brought the thing I valued most to an abrupt, painful, irrational end. I want the connection, the pure delight that two minds can take in conspiring and laughing and rippling in and out of each other. We were able to talk without speaking. To me, he is irreplaceable. I grew around him, and I want to restore something of the happiness that he brought me, because I have an empty, sky-shaped depression in my heart.
I've incorporated that emptiness and learned to focus on the things that make my life beautiful now. I like to think that embracing pain and allowing it to shape me makes me beautifully weathered, like seaglass, not like a shard. Maybe that's conceited, but I honestly believe I've made my way through it stronger, albeit with little dignity. The old happiness troubles me with an ache when I know he's around, but I'm content. He is not for me now. I have just what I need.
And yet, how am I to think of him? He disregards my attempts to communicate, yet the last time I heard from him (november) he promised never to lose touch. Last time we spoke (a year ago) he wondered "what are we going to do about this, Keely" and promised me that he believed in the smoky future, a place where we could find between us the things we're lacking. If he's still afraid of me, why hasn't he realized that waiting isn't going to lessen that fear? What's to be afraid of, if I've been "erased from his life"? Is erasure really a solution? It's like Lady Macbeth, who cannot wash the blood from her hands. You can't forget the things that have marked you, so embrace them, and allow them to have marked you. Grant them at least the dignity of recognition.
I've changed.

10:00 am reflection on last night
When I'm getting emotional, why do I use pretentious language? it makes me look ridiculous. Bleeargh.

09:49 am: Gardening
Mark and Sean and Lora and I got up early to go work in the garden. It started raining and we stood in the shed and listened to the rain on the metal roof. There are carrots in the ground already, and we're going to plant onions, tomatoes, broccoli, basil... It's nice to get dirty and wet early in the day.

08:47 am: a list of things I want.
1. a pressure canner for my next birthday (canned soup stock, oh my!)
2. a butter churn
3. to learn to sharpen knives properly
4. a mysterious benefactor who pays off my student loans and sends me boxes of food, general delivery, when I hike the AT, south to north, starting this time next year. Thanks to his or her generosity, I won't need to get a job, after all.
5. chicken korma
6. rosemary, asparagus, and basil

10:46 am: had a big ol' dinner last night for the first time in ages. Tiny wilsonburgers and shortribs and mashed potatoes and a stir fry. so wonderful. Cougar made volcano cakes. Sindbad is here. I had fun watching him dance with Maya. It's raining. It's been raining for days. Had a scary empty-movie theater experience on friday. It was pitch black with the audio going. I went on to the next theater. No one there. I thought I was going to be murdered and hidden under gross red seats.

07:59 pm: laid up with the flu. GLORP.
Ibuprofen works wonders, but my eyes are still tired.
It snowed here on Sunday, a few inches. I got the first fever that night and it's come and gone since. I thought I was pretty cleared up yesterday, but no such luck. Sunday was wonderful though. Big thick snowflakes and lemon ginger scones with my sweetheart, then dinner at Tom's house with pasta sauce so thick you had to cut it with a knife (it had chunks of sausage and was wonderful).
NEED TO GET BETTER.
blearede!

09:20 pm: I just went to the cowpie formal with L(o)(au)ras Moon and Cougar. Now I'm in Sean's room, trying not to burn Wellness to the ground with little heart shaped tea candles. I made a cut paper farm and arranged the instruments of romance on the table (a bottle of wine, a sketchbook, Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle", a comb, a red rose, and nail clippers. you know.

08:03 am: it snowed.

tuesday.
8:00 to 11:00 work.
11:00 to 12:30 class (enlightenment).
1:00 to 4:00 class (drawing).
4:00 to 5:00 work.
insert dinner, a meeting and some homework.
9:00 to 10:30 snow call (work).
10:30 to midnight homework

wednesday
5:45 to 9:15 snow call (work).
9:30 to 11:00 class (forest biology).
11:00 to 12:00 work.
1:00 to 2:30 work.
2:30 to 4:00 class (grammar).
4:00 to 5:30 skipped work. needed sleep.

and then it was over. a long few days. I didn't get to bust myself sledding down the ballfields hill on a mattress or a rocking chair or Jake Naughton, but I busted my ass, and it felt alright. Between the end of grammar and the beginning of work on thursday (8:00) I slept 12 hours. Deserved. I could sleep more, probably. But I love my job. I love it. Watching the sun come up from the bridge is splendid. These mountains are splendid.

03:17 pm: Sorry, it's been a hectic while. I was going to sit down and write for a while but I spilled my juice and you aren't even supposed to have beverages in the library. I cleaned up at a whisper level.
1. I'm going to learn to drive stick. Sean let me shift for him from the passenger's seat when we went to go get the brace off on inauguration day. When I learn stick I'm going to drive our right hand drive japanese mini truck.
2. The first crocuses and snowdrops came up in the last few days. I just ordered 200 sunflower seeds to plant in the annual bed outside the science building and in the cut flower bed in the formal gardens. We're designing a deserty rock garden for the hill by the gym, and I'll learn to transplant sedum and yucca. Not to mention landscape design in general.
3. Wildly loving. Making plans. I have a hickey on my neck and it looks like I got smacked with a golf ball. A summer of adventures and starts to sleep under.
4. The weekend in Pisgah with Mark and Sean. We slept in a gully between two giant boulders. Couscous for dinner, oatmeal for breakfast. We scaled a rock wall and mark panicked close to the top but Sean and I helped him out. Our fire was burning just as the sun went down over the mountains. It was unbelievably beautiful.
5. Jesse has a girl. Zoe. She's real cute and I'm so glad, because we can hang out now and he (presumably) will not be depressed.

off now. it's snowing like mad and i want to see it cupped in the crocuses.

09:45 am: Dear Nandy

11:27 pm: Most of an Email to Sky
yeah! so I'm going to get to drive one of these
http://images.google.com/images?q=japanese%20mini%20truck&oe=utf-8&rls=com.google:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
for work this next semester. I am psyched - it's a right hand drive, manual, 40 mpg and we're converting it to propane. It's gon' be awesome!

The other day in Vermont, Sean and I stopped because an 18 wheeler had rolled over in front of us (not immediately, perhaps "we came upon a rolled over 18 wheeler"), and we thought we'd see if they needed some help. It wasn't until then that we realized it was the beer truck. This was a Simpsons moment. The beer truck was flipped in a ditch and needed our help.

Went out to pitcher pond and built a sweet ice boat-contraption. Tim and I are going to perfect it this weekend, and maybe Bre will help out. (?) It sails well with wind-power, but we're thinking Bloss-power might be more effective and delightfully risky.
Made puff-pastry for blobster newburg - we started cooking at 3:00 and ate at 10:00. It was amazing. We used 3 pounds of butter that day.
Daddio's brewing his first beer. You guessed it, a pale ale. It's bubbling away, happy as can be. We're bottling this weekend.
We've got a new expansion for Catan, and Mark and Sean (not to mention Tim) love it. We're going to have to play when we all get back to Wilson.
Dylan got into Lewis and Clark. He's excited.


I think more and more about the future.
I think I want to bake sometimes. Bread for my neighbors instead of store-bought, make enough money to pay for the wheat - I want to grind my own flour.
OOh! I made an amazing focaccia for New Years!
But doing what I enjoy by finding a small-scale way to make it pay for the time it takes? Maybe?
And having a garden and some solar panels and keeping bees... It sounds pretty good to me. I'm going to do some chainsaw training in the fall, and go to bee school this spring, then I want to see about some Americorps / internship opportunities to pay off my debt and learn a skill... I think I'd like to learn to build log cabins. I saw an amazing video of a man building a log cabin this weekend, and my dad promised me a draw knife for christmas. There must be a way to do that, right? Learn for money?

yeah. SCA type backcountry internship in yellowstone on horseback doing trail work? sounds pretty sweet to meeee....
k

06:12 pm: my back yard tonight

11:26 am: 1 complimenting the woman with tiger striped fingernails in the tollbooth
2 the two hour rainbow in 6 hour virginia "nice spectrum" how else does one compliment a rainbow?
3 smiling and waving at the old woman in the car beside us on the highway, her grin
4 "truckin 4 santa" on a UPS truck - written in the dirt
5 portland yesterday, everyone with parcels in the snowy streets, pushing that woman out of her slippery parking space
6 prospect of 18 inches of snow tonight
7 being crazy about a boy
8 giving holly to the attendant at that rest area in connecticut "they just ripped out all the payphones in the state - they're gonna have to start reimbursing me for my cellphone bill"
9 snow on the evergreens
10 talking to mark about how we're going to raise our children

11:27 am: what I think I want to do
I think I want to spend next summer doing things for me.
Bethan flaked for the bike trip, so it's just me and TimZ, and I think that would probably be a strange situation - I don't really want to do it if it'll be just the two of us, and besides, I'm tired of gas stations and obligations and distractions. I'll be at the rock for graduation, because I sometimes feel like I'm losing touch (let's not kid ourselves, I am losing touch) and it'll make a difference (just a little one) if I'm there on that day that we all had in the back of our minds at the moment we met.
I got a critique back from my poetry professor that started with the word Wow and drew comparisons to Joyce. That's flattery for you.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a research topic re: anything Joyce, Woolf, Wells, Shaw, etc? Ten pages, due Wednesday by five. I have no idea.
what an aside!
I think I want to be at the rock for graduation and home between then and my little brother's high school graduation on june 6th. After that? I want to do something for myself. I thought a little about trying to find work on a farm, learning things I might use if I do what I want to do with the rest of my life (live well in a place that's well) but I don't want to do something for a reason that isn't my own. I want my own goals. I'd rather dedicate the time to making movies or art, learning to dance or cook or some other skill that I choose in a given day to push myself towards. I want to spend time writing, and learning the things that interest me and building a space that I can keep notes and objects and journals all arranged, accessible, permanent. I've a nesting urge, and also an urge for meditation, a long walk alone - introducing myself.
hmmm?