Warm and Busy Week

This week, we pulled the second wave of cucumbers from my garden.  We actually got some small cukes in the process.  The peppers are still producing rather bountifully – not unusual here.  I find the hot peppers I’m growing, Arapaho, start making in early August but are pretty much winding down by now. The frying peppers make from late July on, still producing madly.  But the bell peppers give us only a few until fall is here and then as if to make as many as possible before the first frost, they belch out peppers of a decent size every day.  I have frozen four bags enough for 4 meals of stuffed peppers.  I will cook the others.  That’s plenty. 

 I found a bumblebee dead on one of my large orange marigolds I planted from seed.  I found it moving that she would die in the flower that attracted her.  I have been fiddling with a haiku about her and think I may finally have polished it yesterday.  Haiku and haibun, especially haibun, are the only forms except un-rhymed sonnets I ever write.  I hate sestinas.  When I was younger, I tried my hand at ballad form, but not in decades.

 Usually when I get into bed at night, Willow is right there, but last night she was out on the sunporch fascinated by something.  Mingus stood in the hall and howled for ten minutes  till I was ready to throw him into the living room and shut the door that leads to the hall and bedrooms.  But just as I was about to get up, Willow came in and he joined her and went to sleep on the bed. He demands to sleep with her every night.  Sometimes when I’m doing my glaucoma eye exercises and making notes between eyedrops, they wrestle and play, then settle down as soon as I turn off the light.

I made an error in last week’s blog.  I mentioned a book I had just finished but wanted to get the name straight.  Then I was interrupted and sent off the blog without every putting the name in.  It’s PANDORA’S JAR: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes, who also wrote A THOUSAND SHIPS.  She does a feminist take grounded in ancient sources, of which she is a scholar.  Now I’m reading VELVET IS THE NIGHT by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.  It’s fascinating to me because it deals with a period in Mexico city when the government was sponsoring right wing thug groups [much like our proud boys but with guns and automatic weapons] to violently attack student and other activists.  the period she’s writing about is a couple of years after my own terrifying experiences there in 1968.  I will never forget being shot at in a panicked crowd and seeing bodies on the university campus displayed of student radicals with their intestines wound artfully around their corpses.

I’m currently off FB because nitpickers kept driving me crazy complaining of typos. Generally, I post briefly to FB every other day or so.  But I do it fast and give myself exactly 6 minutes to write a post and get off.  I can’t give it more time.

Today at one I have a ZOOM workshop for the fine poet Maria Gillan, who runs the poetry series at Passaic Community College.  Then at 2:30, I perform a half hour reading.  That and not the workshop will be on YouTube soon afterward. 

Time to start eating Brussels sprouts and parsnips.  We’ve been eating a lot of salads, pumpkin and winter squash.  We never carve our pumpkins.  I learned when I was French how to cook them beyond pumpkin pie and pear pumpkin pie. 

I made rummy pumpkin this week, delicious!  I plan to make a cannellini pumpkin dish tomorrow with lots of gruyere.