I always suprises me when I stop and realize what kinds of things make me happy.
I really do like living at the foot of a cliff in the middle of the woods. I love having bird feeders and a hummingbird feeder right outside the window where we eat. I love the four chipmunks who play tag with each other across the patch on which we’re trying to grow grass. I think they live under the wooden steps. They use the drainpipe to hide from each other.
I love watching the universe of birds and critters share the wealth that we spread out there for them. That’s the answer isn’t it? If there were enough to go around for everyone, we wouldn’t have to fight for it. Enough food, enough places to make our nests. Water. Space. Peace..
The plump mourning doves and the skittery chimpmunks share the wealth of seeds that fall from the feeder, where the red-headed woodpecker and several as yet unidentified warblers assign themselves perches. When they leave, the nuthatch acrobatically addresses his food alongside what I think are little wrens. The timid cardinal awaits his turn on a perch, casually checking out what he might prefer that’s already on the ground. And through it all the two irridescent hummingbirds take turns dipping at the yellow plastic flowers on the red feeder. I know there are two because one has a skinnier backside.
I can sit all day and watch my flowers grow — the Kenilworth Ivy draping slowly over the rim of a tall clay pot — small pinkish flowers peeking out from the glorious pale green screen. The rows of lettuce — in leaves of reds and greens, lined up behind a stand of multi-yellow marigolds. Begonias and petunias and geraniums and flowering things I bought and lost the names of. But it doesn’t matter if I can name them, just like it doesn’t matter if I can name the birds.
They are all growing in the sun and in my line of sight. Sometimes I think I could be happy as a hermit — become some legendary lone woman who grows odd herbs and knows old secrets.
I have sent away for a compost bin. I just hope the bear who has been known to visit this place does not think it’s for him. Or her.
Oh well. I have to live a little dangerously. I can’t always count on the sun.

Ha! Glad I stopped in at Doug’s tonight!

I should be psyched. It’s a beautiful day. My vegetable garden is in and I have riotously colored flowers set in planters where I can see them from the window. I even got the old tire spray-painted and filled it with a mound of various green ivy.
But not.
Each evening, after I sit and watch television with her for several hours, my mother asks “Where are you going tonight?” I’m not going anywhere. I have no where to go. “Are your friends coming over?” she asks/adds, ignoring the point of what I had replied. I have no friends around here, mom.
I don’t have the energy to go out there and make them. I feel the anger churning in my stomach. I want to go and gorge myself on Breyer’s mint cholocate chip ice cream. Or, even better, black rasberry chocolate chip.
I know where it all starts, this slumping. It all starts because whenever I take the time to really get into something, she interrupts me with her needs. I can never get up in a morning and look forward to a day of doing meandering “me” things. It’s always about her — at some point, usually when I get into some kind of zone — it comes back to her.
Yes, I know that’s the fate of a caregiver, and that’s the road I chose when I moved down to this mountain. Sometimes I actually can rev myself up and go out and garden (as I have done over the past several days). But when I get back inside the house, dirty and sweaty and tired, all I have to look forward to is making supper, doing the dishes, and keeping her (boring and addled) company.
I think to myself at that point in the evening — why don’t I try to play Bingo with her (“try” is the operative word here), or make an effort to interact with her somehow. But at that point I’m hating what I have to look forward to; I’m hating having to amuse her when I’d rather go to my own space and sew or read — anything but be with her.
It’s not that I don’t have options. There was a big ballroom dance weekend recently at one of the big hotels in the Catskills, which is not too far from here. But it would take an enormous amount of energy to get myself there. I would have to go alone; I would have to find something smashing to wear, and these days I don’t look smashing in anything; I would be there competing for dance partners with younger more smashing females. Scratch that option.
I just don’t have the energy. I don’t have the energy to go out and make the new friends that I yearn for.
I think it’s time to plan a few days’ visit with the almost-four year old grandson. Or maybe a day trip up to Albany to lunch with someone from the old girl-group. It would be worth the exhorbitant cost of the gas.
The one thing I’m looking forward to is my college class’ 45th reunion early next month. We were not a gung-ho class to begin with, so I’m not counting on lots of my close friends being there. But I’ve been in touch with some classmates who had not been my best friends back then but who have become better (virtual) friends since. I’ve even started a weblog for my Class of ’61 in hopes of stirring up……something.
Stirring is better than slumping. Stirring means there might be something to look forward to.
I need something to look forward to. But it’s hard to break out of this slump.

I used to think that the problem around here was the rocks. Stones, rocks, boulders embedded in clay almost as hard as cement. I pry them loose. Use a pick-axe If I have to. I can’t plant carrots on rock.
I turn the rocks into borders, cairns, artfully placed natural scuptures. They have their places. Just not where I need things to grow.
I used to think the biggest problem was the rocks. But it’s not. It’s the roots.
Sneaking and snaking undergroud from various stands of trees, just deep enough to thwart any deep digging, they insist on their claim to the earth. Roots as thick as wrists, as strong as bone. Under the land cleared for living, they still hold their own.
It is easy to let them discourage my dream of a nourishing garden for the senses. Lettuce, lilies, lemon balm, lavender. Carrots and cone flowers. Tomatoes. Peppers. Strawberries. Foxglove.
The tree leaves surrounding me are uniformly colored in all seasons. I have a red maple to plant. Two lilac bushes. A red bark willow. The old roots are tenacious, adamant in their ownership.
But so am I.

Because it means so much more than what it is; because hummingbirds love it; because I never had a place to plant one before — I now own something that looks like a dried up bunch of twigs with something that looks dried up straw hanging from their ends. That’s because I sent away for a Rose of Sharon plant rather than tracking down a nursery that already had one a few years old. That’s because I don’t always think things through and I never seem to have time to ride around and shop. That’s because I didn’t want to remember that gardens take years to become what you want them to be. Unless you have loads of cash to pay expensive landscapers and gardeners. Which I don’t.
Oh, I did put in some annuals — again, buying the cheapest flats I could find, which means the flowers are barely budding. Except for the marigolds. I’m going to have lots of marigolds, since the ones I started indoors in peat pots are perkily popping. I like marigolds — pungent in all the senses.
I never really decided where to put the Rose of Sharon either. It needs sun. And there’s no point in putting it in a sunny spot that you can’t see from the garden — which is now really a square smothered in grass seed surrounded by small shale-y rock gardens, a strip of struggling flowering plants, the sides of the house, and a fence that needs to be replaced in front of which I have temporarily planted a planter with ivy and geraniums. I have a feeling that this is going to wind up a “planter” garden.
Except for the Rose of Sharon — which, although now planted in a big pot in a sunny spot, can’t stay there forever.
My task now is to chill out and watch what happens to those twigs. Will they or won’t they?
And, if I can manage to chill, I can allow myself to enjoy the family of chipmunks feasting on the grass seed; the little bird with a striped head that makes him look like mutant chipmunk, and the dozens of other winged creatures who mill around our quickly emptying birdfeeder.
Although it’s hard to chill out with my mother always looking for me to complain about what she can’t find this time. Which is what she’s doing right now.
I can’t wait for that first bloom on my Rose of Sharon.

It can’t believe he got away with it.
He’s my new hero.

No, I’m not thinking about myself becoming gay.
I’m thinking about what it is like to be gay after seeing Brokeback Mountain, after emailing back and forth with a relative who is.
I never met anyone who (as far as I knew) was gay until I went to college. I didn’t have much to do with gay girls at that point because I could never tell whether they were hitting on me or just wanted to be friends. I liked straight boys too much to understand where those odd girls were coming from. But the gay guys (well, back then the guys didn’t openly admit it)! But we all sort of knew. They were usually the best dancers and the most fun on dates. As far as I’m concerned, the same is pretty much true to this day.
In my professional life, I worked alongside of all kinds of gay people: male, female, somewhere in between, closeted, out, flaming, and subdued. As with all of the people I met, some I liked, some I didn’t, and some became friends of mine. One of my first cousins died of AIDS. Another cousin is still alive and kickin’ in his 80s.
And so I’m posting here a eloquent letter sent to Jay Leno by Jeff Whitty, a playwright who wrote the hit Broadway musical “Avenue Q.” The letter was featured on CNN, but in case you missed it, here it is:

April 20th, 2006
Dear Mr. Leno,
My name is Jeff Whitty. I live in New York City. I’m a playwright and the author of “Avenue Q”, which is a musical currently running on Broadway.
I’ve been watching your show a bit, and I’d like to make an observation:
When you think of gay people, it’s funny. They’re funny folks. They wear leather. They like Judy Garland. They like disco music. They’re sort of like Stepin Fetchit as channeled by Richard Simmons.
Gay people, to you, are great material.
Mr. Leno, let me share with you my view of gay people:
When I think of gay people, I think of the gay news anchor who took a tire iron to the head several times when he was vacationing in St. Maarten’s. I think of my friend who was visiting Hamburger Mary’s, a gay restaurant in Las Vegas , when a bigot threw a smoke bomb filled with toxic chemicals into the restaurant, leaving the staff and gay clientele coughing, puking, and running in terror. I think of visiting my gay friends at their house in the country, sitting outside for dinner, and hearing, within hundreds of feet of where we sat, taunting voices yelling “Faggots.” I think of hugging my boyfriend goodbye for the day on 8th Avenue in Manhattan , and being mocked and taunted by passing high school students.
When I think of gay people, I think of suicide. I think of a countless list of people who took their own lives because the world was so toxically hostile to them. Because of the deathly climate of the closet, we will never be able to count them. You think gay people are great material. I think of a silent holocaust that continues to this day. I think of a silent holocaust that is perpetuated by people like you, who seek to minimize us and make fun of us and who I suspect really, fundamentally wish we would just go away.
When I think of gay people, I think of a brave group that has made tremendous contributions to society, in arts, letters, science, philosophy, and politics. I think of some of the most hilarious people I know I think of a group that has served as a cultural guardian for an ungrateful and ignorant America.
I think of a group of people who have undergone a brave act of inventing themselves. Every single out-of-the-closet gay person has had to say, “I am not part of mainstream society.” Mr. Leno, that takes bigger balls than stepping out in front of TV-watching America every night. I daresay I suspect it takes bigger balls to come out of the closet than any thing you have ever done in your life.
I know you know gay people, Mr. Leno. Are they just jokes to you, to be snickered at behind their backs? Despite the angry tenor of my letter, I suspect you’re a better man than that. I don’t bother writing letters to the “God Hates Fags” people, or Donald Wildmon, or the Pope. But I think you can do better. I know it’s “The Tonight Show,” not a White House press conference, but you reach a lot of people.
I caught your show when you had a tired mockery of ” Brokeback Mountain,” involving something about a horse done up in what you consider a “gay” way. Man, that’s dated. I turned the television off and felt pretty fucking depressed. And now I understand your gay-baiting jokes have continued.
Mr. Leno, I have a sense of humor. It’s my livelihood. And being gay has many hilarious aspects to it — none of which, I suspect, you understand. I’m tired of people like you. When I think of gay people, I think of centuries of suffering. I think of really, really good people who’ve been gravely mistreated for a long time now.
You’ve got to cut it out, Jay.
Sincerely,
Jeff Whitty
New York, NY