I’ve wanted to get my hands on a copy of Amanda Soule’s “The Creative Family” since I first read about it. Buying books isn’t a top priority right now, though, so that hasn’t happened yet. This morning, The Simple Mom is featuring a great interview with Amanda, and she’s giving away 3 copies of the book.
Amanda has some great advice on prioritizing and on how to balance your own work with your children’s play. Even if you’re not interested in winning the book, the interview is worth a read!
Where I grew up, kudzu is inescapable.
At this time of year the trees along the highway stop being trees and they become big green shapes, as if someone threw a leafy tarp over all the oaks. Some of them look like other things, like oversized animals with a general shape but no real detail. Like looking at clouds miles and miles away that look like dragons or clowns or something. This is summer in the Southeast, where kudzu is king.
Some people I grew up with actually found uses for kudzu besides “erosion control,” which it was originally brought to the region to help with. Some old ladies at the local flea markets would use the big rubbery vines to make baskets or other such things. Other capitalist ventures included using the blossoms to make kudzu jelly. It tasted a lot like grape jelly to me.
Continue reading Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts
The Happiest Day
Linda Pastan
It was early May, I think
a moment of lilac or dogwood
when so many promises are made
it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered
in the background, part of the scenery
like the houses I had grown up in,
and if they would be torn down later
that was something I knew
but didn’t believe. Our children were asleep
or playing, the youngest as new
as the new smell of the lilacs,
and how could I have guessed
their roots were shallow
and would be easily transplanted.
I didn’t even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.
So we sat on the porch
in the cool morning, sipping
hot coffee. Behind the news of the day —
strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere —
I could see the top of your dark head
and thought not of public conflagrations
but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder.
If someone could stop the camera then …
if someone could only stop the camera
and ask me: are you happy?
perhaps I would have noticed
how the morning shone in the reflected
color of lilac. Yes, I might have said
and offered a steaming cup of coffee.
I don’t handle the “small irritations” well. I get bogged down and overwhelmed easily; I’ve been there lately, in fact. But the camera stopped for me a few nights ago when I read this poem in “Good Poems for Hard Times.”
Here’s what I know but don’t believe: These days when the kids are “new as the new smell of the lilacs” are slipping by me. So I hope I remember this poem the next time I get caught up in the minutiae — tomorrow, when I’m trying to pour a cup of milk and fold the laundry and change the diapers, or next week, when all the bills are due and the fuel gauge is on E again and I don’t know what to make for dinner. I hope I’ll be able to shout out “salt on melon! salt on melon!” and rise above the irritations. I want to recognize that I’m happy now, not in retrospect, not when things have been transplanted and torn down.
Now.
I’m happy now.