the educated serf

(maybe some photos soon...i used real film in a 35mm camera.  slows things down a bit...) I bought some perennials on Monday.  Things with silver foliage. Straw-like flowers. A scented geranium.  Something with purple leaves.  Variegated sage. A lupine -- because two tiny ones came back on their own and they're too fragile to accomplish much bloom this year.  Cut them some slack -- give them a big sibling to do the work for this July and then next year they'll be big and this one will be setting up shop more permanently.   Last year I pulled out a corner of the endless pachysandra that wraps around our house and started planting a few things: a little mint and oregano and the lupine.  They got all gangly by fall but they came back this year with more heft.  Just today, I planted the whole corner full of what I bought.   I think it's because Zack rototilled a big area in the yard, serious about getting a vegetable garden in.  It messes with the pristine yard effect, which I ...

This is a picture of Erik Selby ,  farmer and  radio announcer.  He and his wife Susan  and his father-in-law ran a beautiful CSA called Meadow Rock Farm in Butler, PA.  Erik passed away suddenly last week and I am saddened by it. As writers, there are certain issues that draw us in but remain elusive.  To speak about knowing someone and about loss is to enter into the realm of the cliched and the overwrought.   For me, it's almost impossible to write without considering the ontological, especially knowing the Other, so I've got to enter that fray each day armed with descriptions, new and old.  But loss is complicated in a different way.  The losses in my stage of life, in my geographic, social, and cultural context are different from the losses of those who live with war or poverty or other hardships.   I quote at length from a story by Jane Smiley, who has chronicled the kinds of worlds I often inhabit:   ..it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arriv...

I just love this.  I don't have the original photographer info -- it was circulated in a email -- but I wish I could get in touch with this person and tell them how much I love this.   Anyone who's ever had a baby give you that kind of kiss knows that this is one happy pig.   And having hugged a few pigs, I can say that the baby is clearly blissful, too.   Pigs are good creatures.  H1N1 really should be named  the "Humans are disease-carrying messes" virus.   My apologies for not having more to say lately. It's all being absorbed by the great big end of the semester/finish a million projects writing machine.