My Lucky Moment

Yesterday I was emerging from our greenhouse shower and I hear my name being called, "Joanie, Joanie" and with a strong Polish accent.  I grab a towel and it is our neighbor, Andres.  I tell him I am not dressed and he smiles at me, "It is my lucky moment."  It's not a creepy moment, just me in a towel and this man my age with a large dog on a leash outside the house. We are both laughing.  Nobody has ever caught me in dishabille and it doesn't embarrass either of us.  I get Michael who also thinks it is funny.

I am just back from a week at Ghost Ranch with my grandson.  I have three days and then I am off to Pittsburgh so see my dwindling family, my brother and wife, my niece and great niece.  Ghost Ranch in summer, and lots of walking from our room down at Corral Block which I have always called Cell Block.  I liked it.  The Milky Way was showing off. The other folks sharing the communal bath were all very sweet.  Galen tooled back  and forth on his bike and practiced hanging out with kids all day.  I was the writing part of Hiking, Writing, and Yoga for Women.  The women were amazing, strong, uncomplaining, game.

One woman, seeing someone in line thought she looked a lot like a girl she used to go to school with at Miss Hutchinson's School for Girls, in Mississippi.  When Ashley saw the name tag, it was Cassie.  Now these women had not seen each other in 26 years and were in our group.  That was amazing, but Dona, our fearless, leader, just attributed it to Ghost Ranch.  The next day I felt a poem in my pocket.  Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I was trying to memorize it.

Randomly, of all the poems I brought with me and my limited time with them, I read it to the group of women.  I didn't know it at the time, but Cassie and Ashley were doing inward somersaults.  That was their class graduation poem.

 We discussed coincidence, which may be after all just random chance and statistically usual.  I asked painter and poet, Cynthia West, what she thinks.  Her take is that at a place like Ghost Ranch, which really has wild beauty and power, the veils between world is thinner.  These things are always happening, but we notice them here.
Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay. 

Robert Frost

   Ashley and I were walking down the hill.  She works at United Way as a publicist and likes it, but also shared that she really likes small grass roots foundations that grow, lets say, out of a mother for her son.  A few hours later I speak with C. S.  Merrill, who has lost a son. She goes into the library and shows me the press release.  She has started a peace foundation in his honor.  I give some suggestions, and relay to Ashley who spends an hour on publicity for fund raising.  Issa Merrill Sakaki Peace Foundation. Now, excuse me.  But this is an odd amount of random for a few days if you ask me.  

Here we are, Susan Weber, Yoga teacher extraordinaire and Ghost Ranch Wellness coordinator, Dona Bolding, the fourth in the country spring board diver for her age group, and me in the middle, happy to be there in my lucky moment.  I realized I have spent so much time at Ghost Ranch it is like my body.

I am intimate with this place, going there since the 1980's and offering workshops over 23 years.   I was there 28 years ago when I learned I was pregnant with Hope.  I had crushes there, marital  crises while teaching there,  and got to be with my own teachers, Robert Bly and Gioia Timpanelli.  People I loved a lot have now passed on.  I felt my own mortality mixed in with the permanence of cliff face.

If I didn't realize the deep connection before, I do now.   Nothing gold can stay, and the last light on Kitchen Mesa  seems to have memorized that poem and is giving its interpretive rendering.  

Fruit Loops

Every day when there is nothing on the calendar is a full on experience.  There is no structure so it is wandering in Eden all the time.  Yesterday I was dressed for a swim, two days after making our baby quilt.  I was so sore from sewing all day on the quilt, with my lovely daughter across the table sewing as well, that I could barely walk.  I had never had so much muscle ache from sitting still.  I am a practiced sitter.  So I am trying to get back into my sixty sixth next month, bathing suit shape.

Here's the quilt.

Mike and I decided to go buy fruit from Marguerite since it would get us out of the house, see Marguerite whose quilt show I missed, and eat lunch out on the town.  We did. I changed out of my suit into city clothes.

 We bought cherries, strawberries, apricots masquerading as plums, and nectarines.  We ran into Carl and Lisa Ray there and though planning ahead makes me tired, running into people delights me.  We talked about our daughters, and they bought two PoemHolders which made my day.  That's what I mean about Fruit Loops.  I sent out a notice of Marguerite's fruit sale, and that brought us all together.  Lisa and Carl and Mike and Marguerite and me. After feasting in the quilt studio, Marguerite gave me fabric scraps from her quilts so I can enter recycle Santa Fe in November with my recycled projects.

Here's what they are looking like.

Rowing in Eden, Emily Dickinson said.  Or that Sabbath is a taste of Eden, say the Jews.  My Peeps.  That's it.  This odd time, my shut-in stay-at-home make no plans, is a Sabbatical.  I think giving a name to my post PL life gives some credibility to it, but maybe not having credibility is a part of it.  It is illegitimate time. Wasted, composting (ugh!), down time, seclusion, hermitage/ home.

I have no idea if I am the happiest I have ever been or teetering on the edge of depression. 

I am just myself, the same girl who loved getting Weekly Reader at school, ordering those cheap paperbacks at the book club, and going to the Carnegie Library and flaunting my library card. I know how the library smelled. It smelled like times past and words.  Today smells of Italian herbs I picked to dry. Words, herbs-- finally I am going to swim not laps but loops.

After a Perfect Day

I can't even begin to tell you what it is with Española, so I will begin.
Monique says I romanticize Española and she can't find anything to resonate with there.
Somehow, though friends I admire have called me a romantic, I don't like to hear that diagnosis
about my relationship with my nearest town.  Believe me, I know its foibles, have been robbed, visited the schools, swum in the outdoor pool when it was functioning (which is not this year), gone to its movie theaters, and longed for Italian food after its one good non-New Mexican restaurant closed.

And today, Española proved itself to me again.  We went to Farmer's Market to drop off books for Sabra. Sabra Moore, an amazing artist from the Women's Movement in New York, by way of a Texas childhood and Peace Corps in Africa, gives a free book to the children every single week.  I love this low key approach to literacy, plus she has grown this market over the years and we all take ownership and rejoice at season's end with a Biggest Vegetable and Best Poem Contest. Sabra has made our little market very successful, a secret that I try to spread --every Monday in summer, 10:00 to about 2:00.

The musicians were there again, five old guys playing their beautiful Spanish music just for fun and a tip jar.  I danced with Sabra Last week and tried unsuccessfully  to get Mike to dance this week, so I danced alone. It made the farmer's smile, me in my Keen sandals and black clothing, dancing with an invisible and handsome partner.  Michael Combs called out my name and he and his beard gave me a big kiss.

I saw my friend from Ghost Ranch, Patricia, who liked my jewelry and I told her it was from a wonderful jeweler named Sue who sells at the Ranch.  Mike and I bought lunch from a vendor called Edwin, a Guatemalan thirty years in this country.  I trusted that his ceviche would be fresh and good and it was indeed perfect withs its shrimp and fish and forty limes.  He said that this is Guatemala, the cultura. While I was sitting on the cooler and loving this guy's food and activist outlook, who should amble onto the scene but Sue, the very jeweler I was marveling about. Of course I hollered down Patricia to meet her.

 Then Esta, my old friend, showed up and I got to thank her for sending me to the one outdoor public pool in Santa Fe last week, a place I hadn't been in over a decade.  I took my grand daughter there and as we walked in, my grandson with red cheeks and a big smile happened to be there. I got to thank Esta for sending me into another beautiful sychronicity and my day in Espanola felt woven and whole.

Michael and I spent a perfect day, planted some salvia we'd purchased from a very cool market dude, moved a Buddelia or Butterfly bush, walked around congratulating ourselves on having a good day. We visited the Datura and the chickens, and our daughter Hope, and grand child came to play.  The three month old slept on my chest as I rocked the recliner She splashed in a blue plastic dishpan, and did her chubby best to be happy to be alive, even if teething. Hope is a beautiful mother who lives in, you guessed it, Española.  A house where a dear friend lived for 13 years, wwhre there are still marks on the wall to show she grew.  The same house where my son, Matt went to Montessori school, the little desks are still stored in the barn. So somehow, I am woven into this funky place.

Today Mike's truck broke down on his way out of town for a week, and my friend Elaine is ill, and it's not so perfect.  But I am trying my best to focus on the out of synch, beauty of the mismatched and the random.  The twelve colored spools of thread Monique gave me from Mexico, the mystery I am reading by Lesley Poling Kempes, the laundry I get to fold because I am still alive, and the day is long with  light and beauty.  Broken truck and all.

Brownies and Miracles

Lately I notice the words go by in my mind and I have lethargy, I watch the world, the hawk outside the west window and I mean just feet outside on a branch. The return of the lucky turtle we called Scar trucking across the grass.  My grand daughter in her white bassinet,  just her fingers and toes showing above the deep white wicker of it.   The miracles are there, but like Scar they are a rarity.

Last night I cam home wondering how I could possibly cook.  I was deeply tired from the joys, and true pleasure, of grandkid watching, both Galen and Kaylee.  They mostly got along well, one scuffle that I intervened with my superior grandmotherly politics, and the rest of the time I was their servant.  I am  Jewish women raised by a combination of wolves and hired help. I treat the kids like royalty. I don't know any other way.

So by last night, ten meals between then tucked in, I had not an ounce of dinner planning or even motion left.  I crashed onto the bedspread and wondered where the brownies were.  I would take an edible brownie or one who wears green pointed shoes. My daughter called, wondering if they could make elk burgers on our grill.  They would bring more greens to supplement my little garden's offerings.  So, two of the three offspring arrived, and we ate well, tried to comfort the newcomer Kaleia who was just too tired to do her job as Baby Medicine and cure what ails us.  She was the one who needed to be treated royally, and we did.

Meanwhile, the miracle of loaves and fishes and stone soup and an elk hunted by people I know and love.  By the next time I stretched out again

I wasn't even tired, just relaxed.  I am wildly lucky and anyone who doesn't think so didn't feel the night breeze last night and hear the world trying so hard to rustle up some rain.

Sitting Still for Love

People have been asking me what I am up to.  Nothing, nothing at all this summer. SInce April we have had this new baby, Kaleia.  Then I went to Minneapolis where I taught poetry to elementary students, me and The Giant Pencil.  Tobie and I hit about five Happy Hours, and these are Minneapolis happy hours, not the chai happy hour at Annapurna in Santa Fe. Then Tammy, my daughter-in-law graduated from UNM in dental hygiene, and then her mom took a turn, fighting cancer, and died. We had Kaylee at the house the week of this sad sad transition.  Kaylee began reading psalms, an amazing response to loss.  Overlay this with our houseguest, six-foot-tall-girl, who was spiffing up the condo she bought and then she and I got stomach flu.  I got it twice.  Then we attended the most beautiful funeral at St. Ann's church, mariachi, community, and the life of a woman of this valley. Sweet Bernadette.

So, I am doing nothing and this is what nothing looks like at my house. I recall my friend Grolnick, the late and great jazz musician, who said that if he sat still the entire world would come to him.  He sat outside the music department where he had a practice room and where I eventually met him. He also said, famously in our house, "Money's no expense" and "Don't make me uptight in my own house."  He died very young but is oft quoted in my mind.  So, I have decided to sit still and let the world come.

On the back porch every night someone shows up.  And it's not as if we live downtown.  We are out here.  The forest explodes like a bomb, you can see it to the east.  The honeysuckle blooms like mad and halfway through a porch visit, the sitter says, "What is that smell?'  Frances came here with stories, and Shebana with flowers and flamenco wisdom. Julie and Scott ventured over last night and we sat pouring fingers of Bourbon and eating grapes while speaking of family and R. Crumb.  Sam and Deb stopped by on their second anniversary.  Monique, who  feel closer to in her year of widowhood, comes over regularly and we sit missing Gary Eckard and talking about her next steps as she prepares to sell and not be my neighbor after thirty years.  I am happy for the magnetism that we seem to have.

So, this summer, I am doing nothing.  I better go move the hose to the next plant.  I have a pomegranate to try and grow.  I have a takeover of cilantro to tend to.  I am trying to move sunflowers.  Like me, the sunflowers want to stay put. They do not want to move.

This summer I play with the baby Kaleia, swim laps, water my garden.  The forests explode like bombs, they are that fuel packed. I am resting up, catching up on sleep.  I said to Anne Valley-Fox that I am doomed. I love so many people and when each one, should they die before I do, dies, I feel guilty that I wasn't a good enough friend.  Anne suggested I treat each time and person as a last time.  We said goodbye, as if for the last time after our New Mexico Literary Arts meeting.  I thanked her for being such a good person and always making me feel better about my life.  She said, we're good, we're both good with one another. I guess I am still the PL of last times.  And as Linda Gregg said, "I am filled with all things seen for the last time."  This time, not by traveling to Greece as she did or in my dreams of Mumbai as last night, but the even more challenging, sitting still.

Coinkydinks revisited-3 of them

Reading Paul Auster's Red Notebooks for the third time I think we should collect people's best coincidences.  I love and treasure mine and am going to give you a few that come to mind. I remember that when I was in high school and we read Charles Dickens, the question of coincidence came up, and I seem to recall that some of his plot turned on unlikely occurrences. As young women we didn't find it plausible, and Ms. Hickman, our wild and wonderful English teacher concurred.  As adults I find them not only plausible, but essential.

I'll start with yesterday and go backwards,

 1.

Frances and I flipped a coin on whether to have sensible oatmeal with walnuts or go out.  When staying home for breakfast won the coin toss we decided to tempt chance and go out. So as we were having breakfast at Flying Star in Albuquerque before I was taking the train home, in the middle of our always engaging conversation, the phone rang.  It wasn't the best of manners, but I answered and Judy Goldberg invited me to a birthday party for that very night. Judy Goldberg's husband has been a friend of ours for almost 40 years. No way was I going to go home to La Puebla and come back to Santa Fe. On the train, having dragged up to the top level for the view, I called Mike to tell him about our friend's presumably 70th birthday.  As I am leaving a message I Iook up and the man's son is two seats away, coming as a surprise from Portland.  He's on the phone too, and tells his mom, "Joan Logghe's on the train talking about my dad."  His mom says, "Welcome to New Mexico."  Then there was someone I knew across the aisle.  And when I went to the bathroom, the door didn't open, occupado.  When it opens a second later it is an old student of mine who looks at me and not missing a beat says, "I was waiting for you."  I could not remember any of the three names, but Forest, for that was the son's name, came and sat by me and we talked deeply the whole ride home, even as we passed the geese and sandhill cranes in the farmer's field.  I went home, got Mike some clean clothes and we met up for the party.  I was one of the few who spoke and any last minute feeling I had about the party dissolved in the sweetness of the beautiful event.

By the way, the woman in the bathroom, whose name still escapes me, gave me my first persimmon,
her hair the color of persimmons, so though I just recalled she is Sally, I think I will call her Persimmon.
The other woman across the aisle, whose name I have forgotten twenty times is Adela, pronounced in Spanish. She is always sweet when she reminds me of her beautiful name. Adela.  She is coming from a film editing job in ABQ and was the student of TJ, the very friend who set up this very blog.

2.   It had been a difficult and amazing week at Hollyhock, the retreat center on Cortez Island, near Campbell River in British Columbia.  My fellow teacher told me right away I wouldn't be invited back, since we only attracted ten students.  I felt sad,as if I was being booted out of paradise, then thought of all my friends living with AIDS and the line of Linda Gregg, "I am filled with all things seen for the last time."  I decided to live my life more  the way my dying friends did.

Then there was the Queen of England on the neighboring island. They set up a telescope to see her and we went over in kayaks with an opera singer to a little rocky place to sing "God Save the Queen."  I had a wicked crush on a large carpenter who got it and told me he was celibate and that he and his wife found it worked best that way.  And one of my students gave me a Jewish name, Jocheved and I think had a little crush on me.  I thought I taught well, I was content. The Book of Miracles sat on the shelf in my little room and I didn't even have to open it.  One afternoon a women talked to me about grace.

On the final day of the week I was preparing to leave Hollyhock and Cortez, and tying up the loose threads.  I wanted to give a gift of milagros to my favorite staff member, a woman named Eve Marie who sang folk music divinely.  I told her that here people make such deep eye contact, and that in New Mexico it was not culturally proper, at least among the native people.  We said our goodbyes, eye contact and all.  She walked off, her arms full of towels for the laundry. As I waked into the lodge,
I saw a card from my House of Cards, the childhood deck by Charles Eames that I had given my students to write from.  When I turned the card over the image I met was a pair of eyes, a carved mask but only the eyes.  My heart flipped.  I walked outside for a breath of air and several deer were waiting, their large eyes fixed on me.  The coincidence knocked me into a holy dimension for days.  I said to the deer, "Thank you" and there was an answer, "You're welcome."

3. I came back from Hollyhock pretty wide open, knowing I had to be careful.  As I was driving a red car sped past me with vanity plates,  2EVL4U.   I told my husband, my daughter, the experience.
And soon upon my return we found out the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land behind out house, 10,000 acres, was slated for oil exploration.  They would level three three-acre plots and drill sample wells, bring in roads 20 feet wide to accommodate the trucks driving in near the town cemetery.
We walked into the land with a few neighbors and it became clear we had to fight Giant Oil, the 100 year lease holders.  One land owner had wind of the possibility for years and had an environmental lawyer, Grove Burnett, lined up.  Also, the Sierra Club was present as we gathered the community, united that we didn't want our lands destroyed. You should see the formations they were going to cut a road through.  I somehow led the meetings, as the wife of a fireman in the La Puebla Fire Station.  We needed letters to the BLM and when the community said, we aren't writers, I answered, "But I teach writing!"  We met for a letter writing session and the BLM got over 100 letters from a little traditional community at the top of Santa Fe County.  We were in the paper. My phone rang and rang, my husband watched as he headed off to work. We got a letter from Mr Tedford of the Museum of Natural History in New York pointing out the archeological value of the site.  There are the bones of prehistoric mammals and giant turtles here. Whew, it was intense and I was in the middle of it.  I fell totally in love with my home of over twenty years and my neighbors.

They backed off.  Giant Oil went away. We all were amazed.  I was exhausted, pulling up to a store for groceries. I thought, we didn't do this ourselves, all those Guadalupe candles I lit, and other friends prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe. She helped us, I thought.  When I opened my car door I saw a small wristwatch lying on the asphalt.  When I picked it up and turned it over, there was the Virgin of Guadalupe. Time stopped. I have it still, I can show you.

What are your coincidences.  joanlogghe@gmail.com since messages don't seem to work on this blog.

PL Recyled

So much blogable in this life and do I even bother?  I am extremely busy being recycled.  My daughter is pregnant and so my genes are having a party inside her.  She has a site that sends her vegetal graphics of how big the baby is.  We have been through lentil, blueberry, grape, kumquat (when do we think of kumquats?), fig, something, something, and now we are mango.  I can't recall if avocado comes before or we are on our way to avocado.  You understand, I am doing nothing but thanking God I am old and not pregnant and praying gently.  Her husband is off on an elk hunt and they have moved from the yurt to the wilds of far off Española.  I find out the house is one where my friend Camilla Trujillo lived until age 13.  I want to rush right over and check for the lines on the doorframe that charted Camilla and her siblings. My Pittsburgh friend visiting has no sympathy as his three grandsons are in Kenya.

But besides being a totally codependent mother of the pregnant daughter, I literally recycled and sold at Recycle Santa Fe.  Here is what I was up to for the last year.  I didn't keep records but I am sure I have topped 200 of these Poemholders.  I make two almost daily, and for the show in 100% recycled fabrics.

My other daughter made wrist cuffs and cool belts, sort of like a half miniskirt, out of leather scraps.  We had a great time, sold a lot, and I bragged that I wasn't even tired.  Then I did go into total fatigue days later and have been milking the time change, going to bed before dinner. The time change is great.  I am recycling time.  I use it and then use it again, and then I still have some hours I can use.  Right now I found the time to do this blog when there are chickens still on daylight savings time waiting to be fed.  Get a watch, I tell the roosters.

But really this is how to recycle a poet laureate when the laurels (nobody bothered to wreathe me in) fade.  I have no idea how I am doing but I have a clue. I weathered the Mayor's Award dinner and was happy to talk with current PL Jon Davis and hear him read. Then a few days later Carolyn came up to me on Lincoln near Marcy, mere blocks from city hall, and said, "Didn't you used to be somebody?"
It was the best thing anybody had said to me. It made me laugh at how true it was. I always start Joan and the Giant Pencil readings with, "I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?"  Emily knows how I am feeling without even leaving Amherst or even being alive.

When my metamorphosis is complete into Nobody, or I am transmogrified as Emily likes to say, I will let you know.  Until then I am watching my daughter beautify in pregnancy, waiting to taste the elk from the hunt,  sewing Poemholders, and pretending that Nobody is what I always wanted to be.  I think I will go recycle some kitchen scraps into egg production and send you lots of hand-me-down second-hand love.