Out to the Greenhouse

Our spring has sprung. Many seedlings I started have gone out to the greenhouse. Broccoli of 2 kinds, salad bowl lettuce, bok choi, cilantro, parsley, 3 kinds of Chinese cabbage [an experiment; since falls are now too hot for cole crops out here, I’m experimenting with starting some in spring besides broccoli and bok choi] and Savoy cabbage.  Inside in the bay window, four kinds of peppers including frying and hot, Oriental eggplant, Italian eggplant and I expect soon some of my paste tomatoes will pop and can join the other tender seedlings.

Woody is hoping to plant spinach this weekend. We always used to get it in by St. Patrick’s Day, but it was too cold this year. What a winter it has been!  Too much cold, too much snow, a long power outage, lots of stormy winds, some dangerous.  Trees down. Branches ripped off. But the garlic is sticking its little swords in the air, come to life.  Witch hazel is still blooming. Daffodill spikes are everywhere on our hill, since for decades we put in 50 - 100 daffodil bulbs every fall.

I am still without an assistant and have no idea if Dale will ever come back or if he wants to.  I have resumed writing poems this week, two of them, after a hiatus. I can’t even tell where poems were sent and if they were accepted, rejected or still sitting there at that zine, whatever zine it is.  The submissions list is somewhere on his MAC. I ask him to update it to me frequently, but he often forgets and now I have no idea where poems are and I can’t send them out unless I wrote them after he got sick. Those I can send out and have, but that’s a small number compared to the folder of poems to send out. Still, it feels good to write poetry again. I am hoping my poetry group can meet this Wednesday. First blizzards and then the power outage kept us from meeting.

This illegal and unnecessary war drags on and prices spike higher and higher. None of those billionaires understand that a few cents on every object drives people into poverty. Or they understand it far too well and just don’t give a shit or actually like it since it leads to culling the herd – getting rid of the millions of us no longer necessary to them. Any other president who killed 175 children in a girls’ school would apologize. Not Grump.  Why should he care? He doesn’t care if young girls suffer here, so why would he care abroad?

I’m doing an interview with a professor from California on Monday about my work for the new edition of a book on feminist culture and history. I wonder if there are many women’s departments left in colleges? The authorities couldn’t wait to get rid of them.

Tonight we have dinner with friends in Orleans who just returned from Mexico.  The wife and husband both write fine poems. It will be my first time in a restaurant in many months. Woody is nervous about my fragility.  I’m just excited to get out of the house.