Weeding

Saturday, a perfectly sunny day, I headed to "the farm" where the afternoon's job was to weed the student plots, abandoned over the winter, of the deep-rooted mallows that had invaded them. There were a lot of volunteers, some new, some from last year, including N, an Iranian-American, who came all last spring and summer, often with his wife, occasionally with his student-daughter. There was a Japanese man and his young son, and a group of campus students, plus M, the coordinator. 

It's like sorting beans, mindless, physical, satisfying, rote. Yank the weeds, bringing up the roots, heap them on the paths, fill a wheelbarrow and take them to the compost. Some people began loading mulch and dumping it on the paths, delineating the plots. Every now and then I'd stand up and look at what we'd done. By the end of the afternoon, most of the dozen or so plots had been weeded, forked over, seeded with a cover crop and, in some case, covered with weeds to keep the birds off. Among the weeds I'd found a few leeks and a couple of lettuces to take home for supper.

N said he was supposed to go to Iran next week for business, but his company was looking into whether that was still feasible. He has double citizenship; maybe he shouldn't risk leaving the country.

Cakes and Emily

 A friend, Ditta Baron Hoeber, has a wonderfully meandering, complex, humorous poem online at the moment. It's called "Cakes and Emily." Ditta, whom I met years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, is also a visual artist whose website I love to explore.

Marches

In October 1967, when I was a student at Columbia University, a bunch of us piled into a friend's old car and went to Washington for the March on the Pentagon. My friends were from Chicago; I was Canadian, just back from a two-year stint as a volunteer teacher in Ghana, where I witnessed my first political marches following Nkrumah's overthrow--brightly coloured, with lots of music and dancing (in Ghana, even funeral colors are bright). I went along to Washington pretty much by accident, not knowing a whole lot about U.S. politics at the time. I'm glad I was there. It was one of those historical moments. 

Last night I stood in the rain with a couple hundred other people on the edge of El Camino Real, a local prelude to today's Women's Marches in Washington and elsewhere. My sign said Not My President on one side and Love Trumps Hate on the other. In red and black. (I've seen some terrific signs in the news stories, including Grab your own). There were lots of kids and their parents, a drummer, and cars driving by honked happily. The March in Washington looks awesome and I wish I were there: this time I'd have been a fully-committed demonstrator.

Beans and Poems

Back in California, and yesterday morning I spent a couple hours working at the Stanford O'Donahue Family Farm. It was a beautiful morning (as opposed to the greyness and rain we've been having since we returned on Monday) and my task was to husk and sort beans that had been harvested during the autumn and spread out on a table in one of the greenhouses to dry. There must be a zillion varieties of beans, but we had five buckets to sort them into: black beans, larger, black and white beans (like little round dominoes), speckled, elongated, kidney-shaped red and white beans,  tiny darker red beans, and some white beans (not many of these, perhaps a mistake?) It seemed very Mendelian, all these similar but different beans, but I'm not a scientist.

It was restful: grab a pod, open it, aim for the right bucket. Eventually I could recognize from the size, shape and texture of the pod what colour bean I was going to find inside. It's a little like ironing, I thought, keeping your hands busy while your head wanders. I had a companion to talk to, then another couple of companions. We exchanged stories...someone went to feed the chickens and gather eggs: 6 green ones we shared between us, and which we ate for dinner last night, green egg omelet.

Poetry Review Magazine (UK Poetry Society) has a very generous review, by Carol Rumens, of my new book, Hunting the Boar, in the current issue: "[Beverley Bie Brahic] has the translator's sixth sense for intertextuality and it deploys it wittily in the mischievous interleavings of 'Two Varieties of Common Figs'...here the sex needs no fig leaf of metaphor. [...] her aesthetic intellicence fees her fasination with the human encounter...there's a new music in these poems, and while it originates in an oral tradition of story-telling, Brahic translates it brilliantly into the poetic line."

Out the window

A series of cold, sunny days. Mornings, I sit in bed

and read and write and look out the tiny, open attic window

at 1) high thin branches of the plane tree, with a scattering of brown leaves.

2) The ridge of the neighbours’ roof and their chimney; 3) smoke rising from a chimney lower down; 4)the Plain towards Caromb, hazy, tree-lined roads

meandering towards the town, that makes a low mound; 5) mist; 6) in the distant background the Luberon; 7) sky, blue with mares’ tails.

The sounds are traffic sounds, barking dogs, intermittently, a power saw, a small plane, footsteps below me in the kitchen—my daughter thinking about lunch?

 A fly has just flown in through the open window.

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Upside-down road

A day of heavy rain right after my husband painted the garage door and the garden gate. So they were still sticky two days later and we all got paint on our hands. It cleared up yesterday and late in the afternoon (that is, around 3) we walked to the next small village, taking the path up past the old lavoir and cemetery into some orchards and old stone cabins, then down into another valley full of vineyards, leafless now, but still with a few bunchlets of muscatel grapes clinging to the vinestock. We stopped to nibble. Someone’s hunting dog was going in circles, a bell jingling on his collar. No sign of the owner.

 When we got to La Roque we tried a new road back that someone had told us about, but ended up circling back to the vineyard valley. Tomorrow, weather permitting, we’ll try it from the other end. The road we took was called “Chemin a l’envers,’

the ‘upside down road,’ or maybe “back road’?

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South

We took the train to Avignon this midday, rented a car and drove towards the Mont Ventoux, stopping to buy fruit and vegetables and some caillettes and boudin blanc in the next good-sized town.

When we arrived in our village (which has only a cafe-grocery-post office), our next door neighbour had just come back from chopping wood. It’s what he does every year in December, after he picks his olives and takes them to the mill to be crushed into oil. It’s part of the annual routine: harvest the cherries, harvest the apricots, harvest the grapes, harvest the olives and chop wood for the winter.

‘But,’ my husband protested, ‘your shed is already full of wood.' 

'Oh,’ said P--, who is 90-something, ‘one of these years I won’t be able to cut wood any more, and then I might be cold.”

Birdlife

Elizabeth Bishop wrote a poem about a crow, and perhaps that is why they interest me, though they tend to leave my kitchen balcony to the pigeons. But the woman who lives across the street, as I've said, occasionally dumps a little dish of leftovers on a ledge of the church's buttress, watched, from a safe distance, by a couple of crows. When she goes back inside, the crows swoop down and pick through the goodies. Once they brought a chicken leg or thigh to the zinc roof out the kitchen door and cleaned it meticulously and left the bone lying on the roof. It's still there, a couple of months later. Sky burial, I guess, though it also brings to mind a wonderful children's book I may have a copy of, somewhere, about a talking bone. I wonder if the clean white bone on the slope of the roof opposite is talking, only too low for me to hear it.

I put a still meaty chicken leg on one of my flower pots, hoping to attract a crow of my own, but not luck. It was untouched a week later, so I threw it out. Meanwhile my husband has bought some little plastic pinwheels to stick in the flower pots and keep the pigeons away. I think I was hoping that if I had a crow of my own, the pigeons might not try to sneak back in our absence.

We are off to the Vaucluse this morning on a nice fast train, to spend Christmas with my husband's family.