Phoebe is 28!

This heirloom tiger lily from our dear friend Tanya opened today. How many years ago did I plant the tiny black bulbules Tanya gave me? Six? The chipmunks got all but three of the wee plants. I put them in the back of my raised patio bed for safekeeping.  They got a tiny bit bigger every year. And the first one opened this morning, on Phoebe's birthday. How fitting, for a graceful, flame-orange flower to make her debut on July 11!

 

It was a morning something like this, but a lot hotter, more humid. I could tell by the white sky over the softball fields as I labored.  From my delivery room window, I saw men running around practicing, hitting and throwing, in the oppressive heat and thought about how very different their lives were from mine at that moment. I was in a life and death struggle to get this baby out into the world, and they were throwing balls around. 11:39 AM, 6 lb. 14.5 oz, 20" long. She was finally here, and I'll never forget looking into her cloudy blue eyes and getting the sense that there was Someone very ancient, Someone very new, looking back into mine. 

 I contemplate waking her at 11:33 AM in this long but too-short lazy summer, when she is resting from all that she does the other 10 months of the year, cheering and coaching and teaching and buoying her students higher, helping them reach for their stars, but she wakes up on her own. We share a banana with whipped cream on it at the moment of her birthday.

 She's a top-drawer human being, and the students and their parents at the academy where she works all know it. She's been running this summer, so she can train alongside her cross-country runners as assistant coach. I watch her lithe form run steady 9-minute miles and can only dream. I've never run a nine-minute mile in my life! There's a certain peace in knowing I never will, either. I'll reach for different stars. 

Watermelon sunset glow

Watermelon sunset, in progress

How lucky can you get, to be able to spend a couple of summer months with your grown daughter and her delightful husband, at home, deep in the country? 

We've been sealed off from the insanity all around, just grooving on the flowers and birds and the fresh vegetables that are coming from the garden, that hard-won garden that I turned over by hand, weeded of its waist-high hay, and planted, that Phoebe might have peas. Honestly, the picture I kept in my head over the nine days it took to weed it was Phoebe picking peas. And we had a smashing crop! Beans are in now!

Today is her birthday. There will be cake she makes herself for the first time in 28 years.  I think she's finally grown out of Betty Crocker Fun-Fetti mix. She knows that's my once and future cake repertoire and she's upping the game. I'll make the entree: chicken posole from our dear friend Anne's recipe. We'll gather on the patio with the swamp cicadas going, and we'll stay there until the katydids kick in, two weeks early; still beautiful. The whip-poor-will will sing and flutter and cluck, Curtis will try to look like a puppy while he waits for scraps, and he will get said scraps.

A rare connection in Columbus! We've seen far, far too little of busy Liam this summer! We miss him like mad!

Ducklips in a pub

Sibling love in Columbus

                         

             Jeni's is required

If I know anything, I know these days with Phoebe and Oscar are precious and rare. To have a girl who wants to come home for the summer, and can, and does? It's too good to be true. We walk in the butterfly meadow and identify each flittering thing, moving from bloom to bloom like a couple of giant, earthbound hummingbirds.  

             

A fresh zebra swallowtail is turquoise-blue. Speaking of butterflies...

There have been some glammy moments for the pair this summer--a black-tie wedding in Philadelphia caused them to get all dolled up.

Professional makeup? Another thing I'm sure will never happen to me...

We're going to the mountains to see my family soon, and from there Phoebe and Oscar will continue on to the coast, so poor Piscean Oscie doesn't dry up and blow away in this drought. He's got to soak his merman fins in the ocean before another school year in Indiana begins. He's a silkie, for sure.He'll start work then, and be glad of it, and we will think back on these lazy summer days when nobody had to go anywhere, and smile.

throwing baked eggshells on the roof for our barn swallows

                     tying her shoe while balancing on one foot. I remember doing this, before the ballast...

                                         Happy birthday, my beautiful woodland elf. 

                              You light up the world for anyone lucky enough to be around you. 

Phoebe is 27!

It's 3 AM in La Gomera, so I'm going to post this at 10 pm Ohio time, so you'll have it when you wake up. 

It’s a time of reflection, Phoebe, as I watch you  beating your wings so hard, taking off. You’re strong enough to fly over the ocean to the Canary Islands, all by yourself. 

 One minute, it seems, I’m watching you clomping your way down the back stairs in pink heels, Mardi Gras beads, and nothing else, announcing, “I yam a pancess!” and the next you and I are talking in a nervous, excited yet tentative way about what actually constitutes a wedding ceremony. Pomp and circumstance, ceremony and ritual. It’s your birthday, my sweet beautiful girl; you’re an ocean away, and I’m feeling verklempt.

The other day  I found a box full of old photos that never made it to the digital realm. Some real doozies in there. Here, when you were still small enough to fit in a backpack, and I was half the woman I am now, and we’d go adventuring through the woods.

 The autumn of this year, we were coming down into the Chute when we put up a ruffed grouse practically from underfoot. GROUSE! I exclaimed, then turned around to see your one-tooth grin, your wet chin, and I heard one of your very first words: “Gowse!

 More adventures, this one at The Wilds, an endangered species breeding facility near Caldwell, Ohio. It was a cold but sunny winter day when Daddy trained the old Kowa scope on a tall metal pole barn far, far away, and a reticulated giraffe stuck its head out of the door. We put you on the eyepiece without saying a word and asked you what you could see. “Gaff!!” you exclaimed. Here's the moment you saw your first live Gaff.

Yep, mai, I saw it. It was a gaff. Now Daddy lookin at it.

  Summer in Granny’s backyard, playing with a sprinkler. 

 Studio fun time, painting your belly bread when Mai wasn't looking.

 And now look at you, and look at sweet Oscar; you’re like staring at twin suns. One hardly knows where to focus, you’re both so beautiful and alive and in love.

 He, barely able to hold the food he’s grown on the small patch of earth high on a terrace above his Canarian home; that boy’s got mangoes and passionfruit, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, eggs and papayas by the armload. There’s nothing he can’t grow, nothing he can’t do. And I'm still trying to figure out what that feather is he's wearing. Sparrowhawk?

 He’s bought a car and learned to drive it; he’s learned English; he’s ready for the big leap, and still we all wait for the US Embassy to catch up and grant him permission to come over. It will happen. And you both have been more than patient, as they took a year to even touch your application. You've made the best of it, seeing each other whenever you can, filling those too-short times with memories for the ages. Oscar is your rock.

And now we're talking weddings. Sometimes I'm grateful for the slowdown. It's all happening so fast, at least for this one who lives like a box turtle, tucked away in an Ohio meadow.

 

I walk among the wildflowers, thinking about which week in the summer would be best for a wedding of two people I love so much. This one. No, this one. Wait. Mid-August is so special. But mid-July...I just don't know. Could we bottle this July, please, and uncork it in a couple of years?

 

I walk toward home and tears begin to fall, thinking about it, the enormity and the beauty of it, the big

 and the very, very small of it.

I think about how we got here and all that has happened, all that will happen and then the tears come again. And the rosinweed blossoms nod, knowing. 

                   Happy birthday, my beautiful bird.  The endless waiting to begin your real, true life is almost over. It's flying toward us even now.

Phoebe is 26! News from Home (and Abroad)

Dear Phoebe,

I thought you should know the important news from Indigo Hill. Through the magic of FaceTime, I happen to know that at this very moment you are stretched out on a beach on La Gomera beside your beloved, Oscar. And I know there's no place in the world you'd rather be, and that makes my heart happy. 

However, you should know that the liatris is conspiring with the butterfly weed to incite a riot of color.

And farther up the meadow, there is a gray-headed coneflower insurrection going on in the New England aster patch. Two years ago I scattered some seed (it didn't seem like too much at the time) from my Wisconsin prairie friend Laurie, and now LOOK at what it's done!

As long as the purple asters come through in the fall, I will breathe easy. But this seems a bit excessive. Do you think I should be worried?

Also. I took a look at the yard and decided the birches, beaten down by ice storms two winters ago, were a bit much. So I spent a good half day with my chainsaw, whose original blade is so dull it spews fine sawdust all over me. Time to break out the spare.

Don't worry. I didn't fall off the ladder. That's not why I'm writing.

It's just to tell you that every once in awhile you have to take a look at your yard and decide what to do about it. Trees grow over and lean and bend, and sometimes they need to be brought back into line.

You'll know this once you've had a yard with trees in it for more than a couple years.

Sometimes you have to let the light in. I've taken off half of the birch to the left

and one whole trunk to the right

and nobody would notice it but me and the Stewartia tree, which had 40 blossoms on it this June. 

We notice the light and air and visibility, and we are grateful for that dull chainsaw.

After this I tackled  the giant prune hedge and fought it and its thorns away from the garden again. Liam helped. Awful job, no photos.

In prettier news, the crape myrtle is the biggest it's ever been. Even though it stayed in the single digits for about a week of nights in January, it didn't die back! So I had to tie it up when its blossoms got laden with rain. It's been the MOST beautiful, lush, well-watered summer I can remember. Not too much. Just right. 

That silly crape myrtle is my little piece of Richmond, brought to Ohio. Curtis gives a sniff to the drainpipe in the patio bed every time he passes by. There might be a chipmunk in there.

    

We leave the lawn chairs set up by the evening primroses, because we're out there every single night, winding down, watching them. I'm going to gather their seed this fall, and sell it this winter, as this plant seems to be hard to come by. I got my plants from Elsa, as you know. The best kind of heirloom. Anyway, they're more beautiful this year than they've ever been. They've had plenty of water, and we groom the old flowers off them every evening. You'd be proud of us.

I realize that this deeply bucolic and virtually news-free letter from home may be of interest only to someone who cares about flowers and trees as much as your mother does (that would be you!)

 I'm sending it out as a reminder of what's happening here.  Your life is also full of flowers, especially today!

For once, you get to be with your true love on your birthday, and what could be better than that? He's taking such tender care of you!

I took these screenshots as we chatted this morning (afternoon for you). You and Oscar were headed to the beach! I can't imagine. We're at least 8 hours from a coast. 

You told me about how much Aráfo has matured

that he's not nearly as much of a pain as he used to be. That's good. He is such a sweet, cute gentleman.

and he has eye makeup that makes him look worried all the time. I don't think he worries much.

I can't tell you what joy you and Oscar bring me, in those too-short weeks you get to be together. Just look at my tiny face in the lower right corner! About splitting with a grin.

Don't you think it's time Oscar came to America?

For good?

I certainly do. I know, it'll probably take a year to get all the clearance, a visa and a green card, but you two have started pushing the boulder up the hill, and I couldn't be prouder of you.

Anyway, honey, there's a little pile of presents waiting for you when you come home, and I wrapped them yesterday so at least they'd be ready on your birthday. Even though you've still got some time with Oscar on La Gomera, that basalt rock way out there in the Atlantic Ocean.

Speaking of rocks...that castle out there on the sea-carved point off Bilbao, España, is some setting

for the best birthday present of them all: a life spent with your Oscar Bello Goya. 

Any time I want to remember what love looks like, I have only to look at you and Oscar. 

Thank you for that. Some birthday you're having! 

Love you and Oscar so much,

Mai