out of practice

Very little time this week was "given" to my writing life. I am doing my morning pages so that is a good stretch, but after that, I have had to pay attention to the other part of my life: big task this week was helping my husband move his dad into a retirement community with assisted living. Now there are just "odds and ends" to attend to on that task and move on to other of life's events and work.

I am still grieving for yet another dying oleander in our backyard. I guess we will have to have a soil sample ($) tell us if we have blight before we plant anything to replace it and fill up the gaping hole that I can now plainly see out my kitchen window. I was thinking about planting bamboo instead of oldeander. At the Tucson Botanical Gardens they have a really thick setting of bamboo in the children's garden. It makes a crinkling sound when the trees rustle in the wind. Bamboo has a nice sound to it: soft (bam) and funny (boo). The word itself bends in two without breaking, like the tree.

There, that's a nice image to carry with me as we go to the hot (105 degree) afteroon to buy a microwave for my father-in-law. Maybe we will go to Home Depot first and look at bamboo trees and I will call out to them in their buckets: "bamboo, bamboo, where are you?" And now a poem comes...

silliness on a sunday afternoon
is imagining bamboo trees
bending in the fall breeze
and a cockatoo in their branches
dancing and bobbing
like a boxer
in the ring.