Untempered

So glass, too, finally melts.
Imagine.
Stained glass windows lying in puddles,
Main Street drooling along under the gaze
of suddenly sighted buildings.

Garden Parties

Garden Parties

Our yard is rustic, untamed, watched by us with much worry and too little action. There’s a falling-down Connecticut wall, twisted branches of dead rosemary wound with ivy, plenty of places where missing bricks have left holes for animals to burrow. We have seven fruit trees which, with the exception of the Meyer lemon, produce little.

One morning this Spring I noticed a fallen lemon; it had been neatly and perfectly peeled, the fruit flawless and unbroken. The oddness of it barely registered then, but a few days later there were three more peeled lemons in a neat row under the tree. Looking up, I saw at least a dozen others hanging pale and naked in the branches. Under the tree were hundreds of bright strips of peel with the pith completely gnawed out. Each ribbon was perfect; thin, golden and transparent —a chef’s delight, really.

I’m afraid the bottom line here was rats--big Norwegian ones. But I can’t see them in too bad a light. What they were doing was wholesome and industrious. They were only eating riboflavin. If Ratatouille got restaurant work, these rodents could be stripping peel for martinis in bars all over town.

There Is Something About A Chicken

The Department of Agriculture once issued a booklet on how to keep chickens--just six pages long, its instructions are as simple as those for assembling a cardboard box. Chickens are easy to keep, easy to feed, easy to kill and easy to eat. But in my experience (spanning over twenty years) they pose some questions I can no longer ignore.

First, let’s look at the Garden of Eden and the Big Snake. We know that birds of all kinds have their origins in the reptile. The proof? Well, they both lay eggs! It’s true, chickens don’t reveal much about the actual contents locked in the fruit and fiber of the Tree of Knowledge—but neither does God— and does that mean they don’t know?

Here’s another thing; hens will lay eggs without a rooster. Hen’s eggs are issued on a daily basis and are good and edible. How many people, especially women, don’t understand this simple fact—most human eggs go completely to waste.

In flocks composed exclusively of hens, an occasional one will wake up one morning and start to Crow. These butch girls are called dominant hens because they now have the confidence to control and instruct the flock and otherwise set a good example of hard work and Self-Sufficiency. Since they also continue to lay eggs, they must be credited with taking on responsibilities usually divided between the genders and which we, since Time Immemorial, have insisted are imbedded in the Ten Commandments.

I don’t mean to get ahead of myself here, so while I am still on safe ground, I’m going to stop. Consider this a soft boiled, five minute intro, but understand—there’s a soufflé on the way.

(Painting: "Chicken King", by Sandra Smith-Dugan)

So Green
Somewhere—probably not in a hair salon—I picked up a magazine featuring people with pierced bodies. These folks, studded, strung, lanced and bejeweled through every conceivable body fold, were cheerfully flaunting parts ordinarily kept tidy and tucked away. Seeing folks, naked as peeled eggs and raw as oysters was surprisingly stimulating, which seemed more appropriate for me in the 60s than me in my 60s.

During this heated page flipping I actually thought about a visit to a piercing parlor. However, like so many flash enthusiasms, the urgency faded. I cooled down, then plummeted to sub-zero regarding any redecoration below the neck. Now, it seemed like a better idea to pierce the cartilage at the top edge of my ear and stick an emerald in that. Does all desire eventually evaporate upwards?

The only jewel I’ve ever wanted is the emerald. More than all the gems in Solomon’s mine, it has the luster of true treasure to me. No jewel could be more surprising, suddenly struck upon in the split of a black rock; tempered by licks of lava and cool passages of water, it finishes as pellucid and transparent as air. I don’t know what piece of time it takes for this to happen, but it’s a big one.

However, I’m not an experienced judge of emeralds and wouldn’t know a good one from a bad one. Also, not being the kind of woman who is given gems, and having only dead female relatives who were similarly ignored, I knew I’d have to shop one for myself.

There are synthetic emeralds--hot-house gems grown in laboratories. Minerally speaking, they’re supposed to be identical to mined stones, but the only instant rocks I ever cared for were the ones you could order from the back of comic books, which could grow to chalky maturity in special, gooey water. My emerald turned up at a gem show. After peering at trays of beautiful and impossibly costly stones, it became clear to the sexy and subtly flirtatious Brazilian seller that I didn’t have any real money to spend. But he finally produced a single ear stud set with a pretty, bluegrass green stone. It was simply faceted, triangular, flat on top, and tapering down through the mounting to a point. I bought it—it was very small and I was satisfied more than delighted, as though I’d stolen something owed to me.