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Plate. As In: Too Much on My

3/25/2013

The week's just begun, and I'm already behind!

The blog will happen, it's just a question of when. Check with your local provider
for updated date and time.

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Bin There, Doin' That

3/18/2013

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Turn me into compost, Baby!

I'm lazy.

Not a huge revelation, but since admitting this to a friend last week, I've a had the opportunity to reflect on just how slothful I've really become.

Let's talk about composting, f'rinstance. I live in a region that is very conscious of—conscientious about—its stewardship of our natural resources. This isn't just noise at a governmental level; it's a cultural value that extends to the everyday of households. Homeowners are installing solar panels to capture heat; we swap out our incandescent light bulbs for the fluorescent variety; our waste is sorted before we put it out at the curb—a container for recyclable materials, one for yard debris, another for the landfill. The system works. My large barrel of recycled materials is emptied every two weeks, but my smaller-by-half landfill container is only picked up once a month. Even then, only rarely is it filled to capacity.

Five years ago I moved from a neighborhood house with a decent-sized yard to a lower-maintenance house with a yard so small I can't even call it a yard without choking on my own hyperbole. There's a strip of grass up front and a patch in back which is planted up with lackluster shrubs that I only have to tend to twice a year. It's a lazy girl's dream, allowing me to idle on the interior side of the windowglass with my cup of hot tea and not-much-to-do when the mowers and rakes and shovels and hoes begin their spring flights off the hardware-store shelves.

And so I now confess that my do-the-right-thing genes have been hunkering down indoors as well. For five this-house years, I've been tossing my vegetable scraps blithely in the trash can under the sink. Every slime-gray potato peel, each boomerang of watermelon rind, all the inedible rowboats of celery—the whole biodegradable shebang has been going right into the can that's emptied into the barrel that rides in the truck where it's dumped into a hole and compacted to a loaf that will last longer into the eons than that proverbial holiday fruitcake and all those other unkillable clichés.

Recycling kitchen waste is not an activity alien to me. I kept a compost bin at my last house. I'd made it myself with cedar boards measured and cut and configured in such a way so that the contents would breath. I filled it with kitchen waste and grass clippings and the autumn trees' dropped leaves. I didn't even begrudge the dogs their scrubbings when, after a wet mowing, they'd bound their way into the open bin, making chlorophylly green leprechauns of themselves. I watered the heap and fed it and turned it. I laced the black harvest back into the soil in the yard.

In my current life I've donated uncounted cat litter buckets to friends who've employed them for their own composting needs. When asked, I wrote a poem lauding the another neighborhood's composting efforts. And with each small gesture I've carved a notch in the expanding waistline of my own inertia.

Fiction writers talk about "consistent inconsistencies," those at-odds-with-themselves traits that legitimize a character's humanity on the page. I've tried to run this scam on myself, explaining that my failure to compost is one of those exceptions that proves the rule of my humanness. But a scam is a scam, and after a while, even I get tired of sniffing out the ones I'm selling to myself.

So last week I bought a compost bin. A recycled plastic one that took, if I puff the numbers, approximately 5 entire minutes to assemble. I installed it in the back patch, behind a threesome of pampas grass that, guaranteed come fall, I'll again be whining about having to cut back. And I'll admit I'm feeling a little proud of myself—for finally coming to do that which I know I should have been doing all along.

Oh, I'm not delusional. I'll be annoyed in short order, grumbling about how quickly my kitchen container seems to fill up, about the long walk down the stairs to empty it out. A clearer conscious does not shake off the lazy blues. But a life is about choices, I think, about trying to make the better ones—one slippery banana peel at a time.

(with thanks to my confessor, Q)

The author, with Kobi, self-composting

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The Sweet Scent of Basketball

3/11/2013

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Nothing smells quite like a basketball. The rubber-leather-sweaty-grime of it. The wood-floor earthiness. Some old-gym, used-sock mustiness thrown in. Just looking at one makes it all come back to me.

What "it" is exactly, is up for grabs. My basketball career, if there ever was to have been one, lost all its air early on when it became clear that my DNA strands were studded with genes programmed for short & stocky, not lean & lithe. Then there was the matter of my easily distracted mind, which had me making mental artwork of the scoreboard's flashing lights instead of a launched ball's glorious parabolas.

As a point of fact, the one meaningful encounter I ever had with a basketball was in eighth grade phys ed, when a hoopster lobbed a loose one that headed straight for me while I was playing on an adjacent volleyball court. A bone in my hand was fractured when I brought it up to protect my gut. Ooompf.

Yes, okay—Dorksville—but who says you can't teach a never-to-be cager a few new tricks? Forty years later, I've developed an affection for the game. I know I'll never really comprehend the blocking rules, and my eyes aren't quick enough to see some plays through, but I know--I know—when a ball soars in grand arc from a player's hands the likelihood that it will find the net. And I can always tell you which team's got the possession arrow, or if that toe was on the three-point line. And hey, look at that woman a half-dozen rows up behind the bench. Is that a real duck she's holding in her lap?

I can't tell you how I know so intimately what a basketball smells like. My family had approximately zero interest in sports. My childhood home was somewhat isolated, at a remove from a conventional neighborhood that might have seen the occasional pick-up game. And that close encounter way back in 8th grade lasted only a half a second, even if its arthritic aftermath has nagged for a lifetime.

Is it too much of a stretch to believe that in a previous incarnation I was 6-foot-3, with legs as pent-up as pogo sticks and shoulders that understood the arc in advance of the throw? That if ever came the time when I held my face in my hands, it would take just one deep breath to bring all the glory right back into me?

CAN YOU DO THIS???

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The Birds of Conundrumville

3/4/2013

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Oh boy—spring—and the tube feeder outside my office window is already seeing some heavy action.

My neighborhood is fairly new, and as the trees and shrubs have grown ever fuller, so has the checklist of birds who've begun to find the environment hospitable. The house finches are now at it all year long. Last season the occasional junco flitted by. At some point during the summer, goldfinches discovered the easy cache and could be relied upon to empty the tube in less than a day. This delighted me personally, but I have to say that my pocketbook was somewhat dismayed by the expense of the refilling.

I like to think I have an ecumenical view on who is welcome to come and dine. And up to this point, with so little feathered wildlife to enjoy, it's been easy to be full-hearted and open-minded about the visitors. Even the occasional squirrels, orange-bellied and upside-down as they master the feeder designed, supposedly, to keep them out, have been enjoyed without the arm-waving and glass-banging my savvier friends advise.

Thanks to my friend Lynn, a suet cage now hangs near the feeder. An as-yet-unidentified variety of warbler has arrived to feast on the fatty cake, but the expected bushtits have yet to descend in their sweet frenetic clusters. I sit daily at my desk and type, one eye toward the window for any new movement outside the glass.

This morning brought a new addition—a starling. Well, it began with one starling. And then there were two, then four, then eight. In geometric progression their numbers increased until there were more starlings than tree, almost more starlings than sky. The fledglings in their speckly suits attacked the suet like coupon queens on sale day.

I didn't wave or bang. Nor did I dash outside to scold them away like kids in an alley who are up to no good. Even as I watched, disheartened, as whole chunks of suet plopped to the ground uneaten. It somehow didn't seem right to have put out the welcome mat only to greet the guests with a Members Only sign.

As it turned out, the starlings didn't remain for long. Denial always a favored position, I am choosing to believe that it was a momentary fling, their gorging. Who with new wings wouldn't be seduced by every single thing flight delivered them to? But it does give me pause to think about my so-called ecumenical stance. I may open my arms, but how to resolve who's allowed to land there?

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Nancy Carol Moody

I'm a poet and a letter-writer. Yup, that kind. The kind who uses pens and paper and actual stamps. The kind who will leave the house with nothing on the agenda but to get to the mailbox before the scheduled pick-up time. The kind who understands that technology is a wondrous thing, but nothing quite beats finding a real letter with a real stamp on it amid the credit card solicitations, pizza coupons and seminar catalogs.

Plate. As In: Too Much on My

Bin There, Doin' That

The Sweet Scent of Basketball

The Birds of Conundrumville

Nancy Carol Moody

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