Mikhail Bazankov, giving a speech in Kostroma, Russia. Mikhail and I worked together on Sister Cities Writer Exchanges, 1990-2001. He is 78 and dying of cancer. We won't forget you! *** THE OMENS ARRIVE XXIV. August 23, 2015 I have never asked why we were brought together, quickly knew each other’s real nature, and couldn’t refuse love when it burst into flower. It’s our great luxury which no poverty of spirit can ever take away. Like a spring sun thawing an unexpected hard frost, melting the frozen leaves of violets and chickweed, thawing the petals of daffodils, letting the tender peas and onions return to pushing up their green a little farther each day, we have been given this unforeseen gift, this bounty, the grace of mutual love. May we cherish and honor it until we die. –The Omens Arrive V. Be yourself. All the other people are taken. –Oscar Wilde Where is my serenity? The rock I always stand on when I’m troubled and need to see? It must be there. For years I found it easily whenever I needed to. What fogged me in? Fear. My aging signs are minimal, but they buzz around me like a panicked fly that lands on me when she can’t find anything else to eat. There’s no doubt that I’m up against my dreaded bulldozer enemy. Coal ash trucks could be running any time through our village. My efforts to grow food, to make spaghetti sauce, pickles, and preserves, to pull weeds and water the vegetables, keep the old hens and new chicks flourishing, to organize a benefit plate sale for our legal fund, seem inadequate, but I do know that everything I do matters. People count on me, even love me. I wish I had more energy, more time, more help, and yet people arrive with their gifts: weeding flower beds, offering egg cartons, helping find donations, writing grants. The zinnias bloom, the okra and bean plants rise. Sometimes I lose my balance, and once in awhile I fall, but I don’t hurt myself. My forgetting is a nuisance, but if I focus, I remember. Everything is harder, but I can do a lot, and others are picking up what I can’t. There are detractors and skeptics, people blind where I can see. It comes down to faith, and I have faith. I always have been good at spinning my web across an abyss. This is
THE OMENS ARRIVE XXIII. August 16, 2015 You can’t argue with a light display like I have seen both outside in the world and inside in my deepest mind. I am chosen, yet I fear. How can I, at nearly seventy-eight years, do all that this omen insists I must do? A day at a time. Resting when I can rest, working when time opens. Speaking when my opportunity comes. –The Omens Arrive VII. My own hope springs from a mysterious source, deeper even than my Muse, from that core the dragon once guarded, that inner circling sun I released for service years ago. I know how to risk all. I’ve penetrated fear and dread, kept despair away for years. Why? Because it’s how I’m made and why I’m loved. –The Omens Arrive IX. Bees are the optimists. Do they know they are threatened with extinction? Probably not. They find my new sunflowers, planted last year but only rising to their full height this year when I can’t get enough comfort and reassurance. Yet the more I give away, the more I receive. This must be where that myth about the little pot boiling up more and more porridge comes from. In me courage rises again and again. I give it away as fast as I can. I’ve seen butterflies in the cosmos and lantana, bumblebees, and even hummingbirds, but now come honey bees. They feed us more than we conceive. This year the heat kept me inside for weeks. The weeds were rampant everywhere. I worked from urgency to urgency and never caught up. I did make spaghetti sauce. I have enough figs to eat and make preserves. Zinnias finally flower, but it’s the eight-feet high sunflowers that seduce the bees. If the bees are at work, we will win.
The zinnias were looking like this yesterday, hens in the background. This morning frost zapped them, but the hens are not troubled. Photo from October 2009. This October 20 coal ash trucks began running past my house. Will I be okay? Will my chickens be okay? *** THE OMENS ARRIVE XXI. August 2, 2015 I’ve never been here before, and it’s scary. I must lead others, break this path I’m walking. Pathfinders don’t have it easy. Then gifts arrive when I least expect them. My activist friends volunteer their husbands for farm work. Letters from older friends comfort me. This leyline path I chose is for life. I can’t turn back. I wade through bamboo grass up to my knees to find ripening tomatoes. I pluck fresh figs. Some things are alive and well, including me even if bad dreams wake me up. The zinnias I freed from grass clumps work on blooms. The winged chicks flourish. Each agony of mind and heart passes because I persist, dig deep to lift out fresh courage. These years take a steady hand, a long vision, all my practical wisdom, and the gift of grace. ***
Not yet laying, but soon. They love chickweed now growing in my backyard.
My son Tim with hens a few years ago. *** THE OMENS ARRIVE XX.July 26, 2015 People do count on me. Remember that. If I stand tall, they will, too. If I raise the flag of hope, so will they. This next score of years won’t be easy. I’ll need all my wits and courage, stamina, energy, and common sense. I’ll nurture them daily by writing letters to myself the way I’ve cared for the chicks: food and water, checking every few hours; rejoicing when they spread new-feathered wings, fly to the high roosting bar. When I come to tend them, they buzz around, cheep louder. They know fresh feed is in the works. They attack my hand when I reach in for their feeders, squeal when I catch them. Am I mother yet? Their eyes regard me as if I were. So I have, after years of apprenticeship become all the mothers: of animals, plants, spirit, and earth. I may forget names but my Muse is livelier, bolder than it was seventy years ago when I began writing stories. The weeds test my patience, but I do know how to dig them out, cut them down, save my flowers, fruit, okra, beans, herbs, and tomatoes. Live as if each day were your last. Fill them to the brim, then rest. Sleep like the dead–a practice run. Work as if the years had not accumulated. You are healthier than you’ve ever been. Others rely on you to show the way to our common goal of being the best people we can be and not resting on our laurels. Here on earth we have to work, but this labor places us in the Human Hall of Fame. ***
Judy's figs for sale at Chatham Marketplace in Pittsboro, in July 2012. Harsh winters have been hard on my fig trees, so I haven't had figs to sell in 2014 or 2015. Trees still live. Hope does, too.
Okra plants just beginning. July 2014 *** THE OMENS ARRIVE XIX. July 19, 2015 You can’t argue with a light display like I have seen both outside in the world and inside in my deepest mind. I am chosen, yet I fear. How can I, at nearly seventy-eight years, do all that this omen insists I must do? A day at a time. Resting when I can rest, working when time opens. Speaking when my opportunity comes. –The Omens Arrive VII., April 12, 2015 When I said, “We will fight to the end!” they cheered and clapped. Today I wrestle with grass roots, digging, pulling, jerking them loose to make room for okra seeds. The rains came to water what I planted three days ago. Each garden chore seems beyond my powers, but day after day I make these spaces for flowers and vegetables to grow, a few feet at a time, on my hands and knees. It’s the way I do everything. Work, then rest. Do the most urgent first. Wall off despair when it sneaks around the curtain. I’ve made this farm fertile. Now it gives me wild, unruly growth: berries and figs, leeks, carrots, tomatoes. If I’m persistent, okra and beans. Human storm clouds gather, too. We take shelter, assess strategy, plot actions, laugh. We fear the harm those lightning flashes can do, but storms have a double-edge. Yes, they terrify, but wait. Here comes life-sustaining rain, with sun to follow. Then fruit. ***
Judy by "no coal ash" sign in downtown Moncure, the Coal Ash Management Company, Charah, uses that building on the far left. We put it up in the summer. Now the coal ash trucks have to pass it. It stands. The WRAL report showed it on Oct. 27, 2015.
