May 13, 2010, snow again!

Yes, it snowed again and even stuck for a while. My little crab apple tree is stylishly adorned with oodles of pink blossoms. She is beautiful. She reminds me that I too can blossom...I just need to do it.

Now this is the scene this morning outside the door...

Needless to say I was not anxious to go outside.

I recently fell from a step ladder and injured a knee. This while quite inconvenient and not fun, has given me time to sit, and sit...and sit...and during that sitting I have been quite introspective and done a bit of reading. The book that spoke the most to me was Atchafalaya Houseboat by Gwen Roland. It is set in a swamp in Louisiana where she (with a partner) built her own home and lived for ten years in relative isolation. She talks about the summer...the heat...July..."We consider the sandbar our office, since we show up there each morning about the same time people in civilization head out for work. Stretched full length upon the damp floor of the executive suite, we firm up the plans for the rest of the day. Some chores call the shots themselves. If the blackberry wine is read for bottling or the elderberries are ready for picking, we have no choice. Tomatoes that were too green for making ketchup yesterday will be overripe tomorrow and so must be cooked today.

If no such crucial matters are pending, we may decide to put the quilting frame in a shady spot for some leisurely patching of our old quilts. Or perhaps a slab of dry cypress will be clamped into the vice under the cottonwoods for some paddle making. Plans made, meeting adjourned, we swim back home.

The planned chores finished early, and the hot part of the day is frittered away by eating and swimming, writing and swimming or just napping and swimming. We make no excuses to anyone. In the late summer the Basin is too hot for anyone who would be shocked by our lack of clothes or ambition. By 9:00 am birdsongs of early morning have been stifled and are replaced by the drone of a single bumble bee drilling into a porch rafter or a cackle announcing that another member of the egg detail has finished her work and is signing out to fluff herself into one of the hen sized holes under the dogwoods...

But with the first hesitant breath of evening, the suffocating stillness loosens its grip on the throat of the swamp. We shake off the drowsiness with a final swim and make a trip to the garden for a half dozen ears of corn and some tomatoes. A boat ride to our crosslines will finish up the supper shopping."

I want to live with that verve, that simplicity...savoring each day, hot, cold, or otherwise...celebrating meals and the day itself rather than rushing and pointlessly squandering my time here on earth. They live on a barge in a swamp! I am ready to move to LA today!

I also experienced this beautiful simplicity in Central America and Africa...I seem to really lose it here. Need some direction...thank you Gwen for the great insights and wonderful feelings of peace.