WORKSHOP COMING. TUMMY QUIETING

I am pretty much ready for my juried intensive poetry class that starts Monday morning.  This week, more rain and then for a change, a downpour.  Today is sunny.  I have been freezing veggies and strawberries and drying herbs.  Cilantro doesn’t dry that well, so I froze eight little baggies of it. I had a tug of war with huge Xena today while I was picking over the catnip that Woody brought in this morning.  Xena lay her considerably body down on it and didn’t want me to take any away, although it was a good sized pile.  Now the fragrance wafts through the diningroom from the dehydrator.  On the dark red tablecloth are roses from the garden, very fragrant, pink and apricot and red, and what are probably the last peonies of the season, bowl of beauty [pink with a bushy yellow center] and the old standby that is one of my favorites since childhood, Festiva Maxima with its splash of blood on the perfumed white petals. The rain attacked the rhododendrons which were gorgeous and now the ground is covered with petals. Tomorrow I’ll have to do the entire wash I usually spread over two days, since Monday I’ll be teaching in the morning, doing conferences in the afternoon and also working some with my assistant.  Mostly Monday and Wednesday, she’ll have to work alone, with only the cats for company.  That shouldn’t be a hardship. She likes cats and Puck has a mooney crush on her. I ate something that was off either earlier yesterday or the day before, so I was up most of the night with food poisoning, maybe a light case of salmonella, who knows?  I am better today but weak, wobbly.  I have to get it together before my class starts.  I am eating very carefully today, oatmeal, yogurt, and for supper, I’m making chicken soup.  It also may be a virus that has all my symptoms and is going around. Wrote some poems this week.  I am altogether done planting for a while.  I’ll have to start seedlings late this month – yet more basil, cucumbers.  We have been primping the garden for the class party here on Friday as the workshop ends.  Then on July 6th, we’ll have our big annual garden party for our friends here. Then we stop primping and our effort goes back into the vegetables, mostly.  And fruit.  I am watching the red and black currants and the sour cherries.  If I feel stronger tomorrow, I will go back to pruning the gigantic wisteria.  I wrote a poem about it this week.  Pro-nuclear power people have been writing into the Cape Cod Times angry about my poem, One of the expendables, that ran on their editorial page.  We are going to have a group here, a local branch of Down-Winders.  Woody has an idea for a march all the way from Provincetown to the Pilgrim plant.  I hope people like the idea. Friends over last night.  I didn’t start to get sick until late in the afternoon, so I was able to cook and Woody made oysters Rockefeller, which I love but couldn’t eat by the time we all sat down to the table.  I gave Ramon the present I had got him for his birthday and he liked it very much.  I like to try to give people presents that actually are something they might like and use or wear or read or listen to. Woody doesn’t understand this desire and habit of mine.  Gifts to him are pretty much of a nuisance. The cats were very good. Efi retired early by herself, as she does – my oldest cat who is getting kidney disease – but all the others seemed to understand I was sick and were very good.  They got into bed with me but in an undemanding way and were tolerant of my getting up about sixteen times during the night.  Sugar Ray always knows when I am sick or injured.  He believes that he takes care of me.

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