Perfection

Posted on November 1, 2011 by literarylee

Okra Glory

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The Synopsis of the Novel I’m Going to Write in November (and a Few Thoughts About its Impending Birth)

Posted on October 31, 2011 by literarylee

Reflecting on Being Heavy with Novel

What’s happening to me?  I am pregnant with a novel.  I feel it growing, swelling inside my literary belly.  In the last few days it has even started to kick.  I only dreamed I might do this someday, give birth to a book.  The kicking is what really surprises me.  When I first decided to become literarily pregnant, I worried it would arrive still-born, a lot of words: uninspired, boring, the result of an amateur’s wishful thinking.  I suppose that still might happen.  But this last week or so, I’ve been getting these feelings, this unmistakable quickening, the whispers and hints of a real story that someone might possibly want to read.  I anticipate the labor with curious interest, a growing expectation, and not a little dread.  I suspect birthing a 50,000 word novel will not be painless, though I want to deliver it as naturally as possible.

The Synopsis

The name of the story is Marigold Man.  It’s about a regular joe named Paul, anonymous office worker by day and gardener by other times who discovers the incredible fecundity of marigolds: one plant produces hundreds of seeds, each of which can produce hundreds more.  He hatches (or plants) a plan to change (or at least brighten a bit) the world with marigolds.  He starts his revolution solo, planting seeds wherever he can, but soon discovers his noble but (frankly) pathetic efforts barely make a dent.  The world is still the shallow, practical, prosaic place it has always been.  He finds a group of (somewhat) like-minded people who, next planting season, join the quest.  This small group, by the third year, becomes almost an army (a word Paul hates because it’s the antithesis of everything marigold), an unlikely congregation of marigold planters, determined optimists who only want a world with a dab of color and poetry.   What’s so wrong about that?  His revolution grows to sizes and takes him to places he never dreamed he’d go, so much so that he almost loses himself and everything he really values in the process.  Continue reading →

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The Rider Chronicles 12 – 24 Hours with Rider

Posted on October 30, 2011 by literarylee

I have not written about my grandson for too many weeks because I have not seen him for many too many weeks.  I’m not with him nearly as much as I wish.  Not only that, I’ve been a Rider Bachelor several times these last months.  No greater love hath a grandfather for his grandson but that he give up his wife from  time to time to go grandmother him.  Rider’s parents are busy entrepreneurs running their three-year old company, a so-far successful venture I think is sometimes like a multi-headed hydra: just when you think things are under control, two new heads grow in place of the one you just chopped off.  They are grateful when she can help.  Not only that, I hardly need to explain how grandma loves spending time with her grandson while his parents are running the family business.  She loves the opportunity to get  to know and be known by him.  Being an occasional bachelor for wife and Rider is a small but potent gift to give.  I miss her, and am a little jealous of her time with the child, but I stay busy winning bread and writing.  A couple week-ends ago, however, Rider’s grandmother and I arranged to drive the four hours to his home in Brooklyn for a visit.

Rider Lawn More

Continue reading →

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They liked it, they really liked it…

Posted on October 29, 2011 by literarylee

(I sent an email to my family and while writing it asked myself, as I do with most anything I write these days, should I publish this on The Life Literary?  I obviously decided I would.  My entire goal with this blog is to promote literary living for anybody and everybody.  I publish my own writing, as well as ideas big and small for how to live literarily.  From writing captions for your photos, to keeping a journal, from hosting a literary event to collecting words, or even writing a novel, I spread out on the table a variety of dishes , literary entrees to suit every taste and inclination.  The inquiry from the NaNoWriMo folks (copied at the end of this post) was such a fun boost to my own literary life (and completely unexpected) I decided to share it with a wider audience.)

Dear Family,

I could hardly believe the email I received yesterday which I’m forwarding to you at the end of this message.  I’ve told you I’ll be writing a 50,000 word novel starting Nov 1 and finishing by or before Nov 30 as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) sponsored by an organization called The Office of Letters and Light.  As a sort of adjunct to the main event (about 250,000 people each writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November), a team of professional graphic designers will be taking on a little challenge of its own: produce 30 book covers in 30 days, based on 30 of the thousands of titles and synopses submitted (NaNoWriMo participants register by setting up a page on the organization’s site on which the fledgling novelist writes some basic getting-to-know-you personal information and the title and synopsis of the book).  To make a long story even longer, I received the inquiry from the organization asking for my permission to add my novel’s title and synopsis to the short list of titles these book cover smiths will create.  Continue reading →

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I Dig Sweet Potatoes

Posted on October 28, 2011 by literarylee

I dig them in the garden, but I don’t like eating them.  I never have and I’m guessing I never will.  Too bad for me, I’ve been told, missing out on such a sweet and healthy treat.

This was Mrs. Gardener’s idea, planting sweet potatoes.  As Mr. Gardener, I was interested in the project, curious to see what would happen, but as an eater, I didn’t care much whether they were a success or not.  I saw them as garden insurance: something to grow and fill a space if something else I had planted didn’t.  She got the idea reading an article in Mother Earth News last spring about how to grow sweet potatoes.  Unlike Irish potatoes whose vines grow from a hunk of potato planted in the ground, you start sweet potatoes from a slip, a few inches or more of vine and root pinched off of a sweet potato partially submerged in a jar of water.  At the time, I thought the slips were growing too slowly (maybe I think that about most growing things), and when we did plant them, I was sure they wouldn’t do well, they were so small.  But they took hold and took off.

Later season vigorous vines

The vines really grew well, especially later in the season.  We gave them a later start, partly because we didn’t read the article until the end of April.  We probably should have started the slips in late March to be able to plant them a month sooner than we did.  But what did Mr. Bad Sweet Potato Attitude care? Continue reading →

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Duck 20

Posted on October 27, 2011 by literarylee

Duckscussion

Duck Series Gallery

 

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Among the Liberators: Like a Latin Villa

Posted on October 26, 2011 by literarylee

(The previous portion of the walk: Bolivar the Great)

A view that makes this odd little park look good.

After you’ve contemplated the great General Bolivar and walked the 360 degree circuit around the statue, meander through what I consider the funny little park that surrounds it.  When it comes to analyzing or critiquing gardens and plantings in mixed company (gardeners and non-gardeners) I try to restrain myself.  I’m pretty sure Virginia Avenue walkers don’t want to hear my yammering about landscaping.  Maybe garden geeks (like me) who don’t tire of plant talk are interested, but I’m sure the rest want to continue the walk.  I’ll keep my horticultural point brief.

Look: I like the statue, I like the pedestal, I even like the odd polygon pond next to it.  Taken as a whole, however, this little park (called Triangle Park on maps, it should be called Bolivar Park except he already has way too many things named after him in the Western Hemisphere, plus the park isn’t worthy of his name) is not attractive.  It doesn’t live up to almost all the other landscaping and green spaces on Virginia.  The plantings are untended, neglected really, except for some fresh mulch thrown on in spring.  The grass gets cut sporadically.  Marble paving stones around the statue are cracked and broken.  Ironic this parklet is the Interior Department’s front yard.  An agency responsible for, among other things, the care of our national parks and resources,  should make this one look better.

Is this pretty? A suitable backdrop to the Great Liberator Bolivar? I think not.

Glad to get that off my chest.

Continue reading →

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Of Leeks, Cucumber Memories and a Clean Fall Garden

Posted on October 25, 2011 by literarylee

Visited Smith on Sunday, a fine, Fall afternoon, to dig sweet potatoes and couldn’t believe what all else was ready, too.  I picked a half dozen honorable Anaheims, a mildly hot pepper we pickle and like for cooking because it adds a bit of a zip without knocking your socks off.  Also picked a green pepper and several pepperoncinis, those yellow peppers you get with pizzas or with salads in Greek or Italian restaurants.  I even picked some late-summer planted radishes.

Late October Harvest

I also picked one leek from the twenty or so growing there.  I planted leek seeds, part of the bag of 2010 seeds my aunt gave me, long ago in early spring.  Those sturdy and unassuming members of the onion family have been quietly growing ever since, watching lettuce come and go, enduring a wet spring, a hot, dry summer, and an August hurricane, being infiltrated by squash vines and squash, (though not overcome), and now, along with marigolds, royal castor beans (seven feet tall and wide, great, deep-red fans on thick stalks) and a few pepper plants have become the last man standing.  We picked a leek and cooked it (oh so good!).  My goal and challenge is to preserve some until January when we make Cockaleekie Soup for Burns Supper.  I am absolutely determined Smith’s leeks will be in that soup.  In November or December I will mound soil around the stalks, a winter coat to ward off freezing temperatures, so I can pick them directly from the garden in January.

Squash infiltrating the leeks, but...

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Autumn Striptease

Posted on October 24, 2011 by literarylee

About three hours west of here, close to the sources of the great Potomac which these days saunters lazily by our apartment, a small community in the Appalachians is convening a five-day festival called Autumn Glory.  I’m pretty sure scores and hundreds of towns up and down this eastern spine of the United States throw similar parties.  Words, phrases, place-names communicate abundantly: Autumn Color, Fall Festival, Harvest Home, New Hampshire or Vermont, Western Massachusetts or upstate New York, the mountains of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia: all evoke picture post-card perfect vistas of vibrant colors, impossibly beautiful seas of leaves, golden, red, yellow, orange, tan, brown, and a thousand gradients in-between.

Like a postcard: Brilliant, full Fall

This is surely and truly fall, but only the fall of vacations and three-day weekends, a week in October or a Sunday afternoon drive to marvel at the show.  These are the Great Autumns, the Autumns of memory to be toasted with chilled cider or mulled wine and orchards of apples and orange piles of pumpkins, but they are not the Autumns of Everyday.  The workaday Fall is a wholly different event, a magical, captivating striptease, an infuriatingly slow and deliberate revealing of the beautiful and, alas, the stark.

Slowly slipping off the green

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Down to the River to Pray – 5

Posted on October 23, 2011 by literarylee

(Down to the River to Pray Introduction and Explanation)

Faith isn’t an exclusive God Club with passwords and secret handshakes, who’s in and who’s not.  If you’re a member, say the code,

Person answering the door: “The rain in Spain fills the buckets of a train.”
Person wanting in: ” The man in the nightshirt, he walks with a cane.”
Person answering the door: “You may enter, my brother.”

and you’re in.  I know it seems that way but it’s not.  I don’t blame you for thinking that.

Faith also isn’t a list of things, concepts, ideas, tenets, a philosophy, one, two, three, four, five, got ’em? o.k.! and that’s that.  I completely understand why you would think so.

How can I communicate the God reality?  It is relationship, it is renewal, it is life from death.  How can I express that it is love, it is hope, and that it involves a real someone acting in real history?  I guess only by relating, renewing, loving, accepting, forgiving.

Oh Lord, heal and save.

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