RAIN, RAIN...GO AWAY

My friend Lois and I are trying to coordinate rides into Boston for our friend Dale, who has to go on interferon for the next four weeks.  Thursday morning Woody and I will be in with him and bring him back.  The week after, Woody will have to take Dale in alone as my juried intensive poetry workshop will be on. I’m looking forward to it, although it always knocks me out.  There is a class every morning and most days I give an assignment.  Tuesday will probably be the bonfire on the beach, weather permitting. Wednesday night we give our public reading together at the Wellfleet library in the big room. Every year we have filled out with an audience of at leat 100. I help the poets choose what to read.  We also work a bit on delivery. Every afternoon we have conferences in the gazebo on my land if weather permits.  If it’s raining, we meet in the house.  Paul’s Himalayan musk rose grows all over the west side of the gazebo and should be in bloom next week. The roses are beginning as the peonies and rhododendrons are slowing down. We have more rain tonight.  With the heavy rains we have been experiences, mice come in the house.  Puck and Xena have learned to work together.  It amazes me how they have adjusted to each other and form a hunting team. I froze the last spinach except for what Woody used for oysters Rockefeller with Paul and Dan Friday night.  I froze 15 pounds this year. I froze enough cilantro for the next year.  Now I’m doing strawberries and rhubarb.  I made a rhubarb pie Friday night as well as Tasahara cornbread.  I love rhubarb pie.  I am willing to boast that I make terrific pies.  I like pies better than cakes. I guess we do will with food we actually long to eat. I made my mother’s chicken last night, sort  of a pot roast chicken with lots of veggies, potatoes, celery, onions, garlic, parsnips, carrots.  Always brings my mother to mind with that hollow sense that never seems to go away, no matter how long ago she died. We have the vegetable gardens in decent shape at the moment. I spent a couple of hours Sunday fighting with the wisteria that covers an arbor.  It has grandiose ambitions, to take over the world. I filled the back of the truck with clippings.  It finally bloomed this year. The other wisteria down by the road has always bloomed copiously.  We have much broccoli although not as big heads as usual because I let Woody plant it, and in spite of my warnings, he didn’t thin the plants I had started in the greenhouse, so they’re planted much too close together. Gardeners have to be heartless about thinning perfectly good plants to give the others a chance to thrive. My assistant Melenie found a box turtle on the road here this morning that had been hit by a car.  I called Wild Care and she brought it to Orleans, but they could not save it.  We both felt bad.  The world needs less cars and more box turtles. I have been writing some haibuns and other poems this week.  Five, actually. As I sit here at the computer the sky is getting darker and the air is cooling rapidly. Another storm is coming in. I can see the wall of dark green on the weather channel radar.   We had a huge thunderstorm last week.  The cats were scared and all piled on top of us.  Enormous cracks and tumbles of thunder, close.  Sheets of rain.  The sunporch turned into the rainporch.  Everything soaked.