You won’t believe where I am. I don’t quite believe it myself. It’s nowhere really dramatic, but it’s big news for me. I am on a writing retreat, all by myself, looking out across the glorious salt marshes of the Georgia Coast. Months ago a close and very generous friend offered to let me use her vacation home near Harris Neck. She lives inland and only gets here once or twice a month. Finally I allowed myself this gift.
Low tide, near sunset.
Used to, I would never do a retreat. I believe in setting up one’s daily life so that there’s time and space to practice one’s art and craft, and I have done that well. However, nowadays there’s more business work that is not writing—emails to read, emails to send, posts to make, supplies to order, events to plan. Taxes are staring all of us in the face—my tax papers sit glumly in a box on the kitchen counter, begging me to add up a stack of feed receipts or figure postage expenses.
You know the drill and I hope I’m not tiring you out with this.
And at home I can’t get away from the non-writing work. It follows me around, breathing down my neck. On cold days the dogs come into the kitchen, and every day I have to sweep. Dishes perennially wait to be washed and supper (every other day for me) has to be cooked. This week Raven (my husband) brought home a bag of seed potatoes, and my heart fell when I saw it—potatoes get planted Feb. 14, so it’s time to prepare a bed. Then I saw he’d bought 25 starts of broccoli and 25 of cabbage.
We’re downsizing, to be sure. We have no breeding livestock, except for a few roosters: no bull, no boar, no ram, no stallion, no billy. We reduced our vegetable garden by half this winter. I’ve talked to Raven over and over that I want to travel more, and I’ve begged him not to bring in any more animals. Two months ago we lost Cypress, a sweet old girl Great Pyrenees, a rescue who lived with us for a decade. Her death took us down to two dogs, and one of them is extremely old, decrepit, and pathetic. She won’t last long and that will leave one dog, Asa.
Two weeks ago Raven saw on Facebook that a dog in Tifton, about two hours away, needed a home. The dog was a male Pyrenees. Before I knew anything about it, Raven had sent a message to the person who posted.
He found out that the Pyrenees’s owner had died, and the dog had run away, and had been found, and now needed a home. When Raven told me that he was headed to Tifton, I flipped out. “Do not go get that dog!” I said. “No more dogs. No more anything.” I did not say “please.” I just threatened to take off to Europe without him.
What happened can be counted as strange, weird, unbelievable.
Raven didn’t go to Tifton. But two days later—get this—a large white male Great Pyrenees showed up at our farm. He just came walking in from the road. We have no idea how he got there. He was wearing a collar but with no identification.
We keep checking the “lost dog” sites. We sent an email to our neighbors, who are few and far between, and he doesn’t belong to any of them.
Unfortunately, he’s the sweetest dog in the world, and I’ve fallen in love. If I make a run to town, he literally dances when I come home, throwing his head around and bouncing up and down. It’s the sweetest thing. Plus he barks at deer. I didn’t want any more responsibilities or any more mouths to feed, but what to do when Raven manifests a perfect dog?
I’ve been wanting to finish a book I’ve been working on, and I’ve been unable to focus on it. So I packed a bag, and I left behind the new dog, the broccoli seedlings, the tax papers—all the chaos and mess of farm life. Here I am, deep in a manuscript.
2|2|23
This week was my birthday. I turned 61 wonderful years old. You may remember that I had covid on my 60th birthday, so this year was dynamite. Raven and I took most of the day off and went to Brunswick. He took me out to a Thai restaurant, then we bought a bottle of Richland Rum across the street at the distillery, then walked to the library and got 3 books off the free shelves (Deepok Chopra, Lee Smith, and I forget the other.) My old pal, the poet Steven Croft, was working the front desk. Then we walked in blazing sunshine up and down Newcastle Street, visiting art galleries. We got ice-cream at the cupcake shop—it was the owner’s last day in business because she had decided to close up and retire. I felt a lot of grace in the day.
A Surprising Gift
When I got back home, a small package was waiting. Inside were six small plants in plastic bags from my friend Greg Bruhn, who I first met 20-something years ago at a native plant conference in North Carolina. Three of the baggies contained Georgia savory, a native plant he had started from seed. He included instructions to plant them in full sun.
The other three baggies contained sweetgrass, the same plant that Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Greg grew these little beings from seed, and the seed, he said, were very difficult to find, and they are growing well in upstate NC, far from the coast. So now I have three sweetgrass in the ground, striking root.
Three tiny Georgia savory and three tiny sweetgrass made it safely to the farm.
Last Thing
On Friday my walking group, the Walkie Talkies (with whom I rarely get to walk anymore), got together for a birthday lunch. The theme was Indian and Kelli hosted. She started things off with a mango lassi.
The mango lassi is sprinkled with cardamom and garnished with mint.
A full-course Indian lunch followed—chai, dal, basmati rice, butter chicken, yogurt, cilantro, nan. I’m dropping in the tablescape, since most of us love these kinds of celebrations.
Stephanie made a Persian Love Cake—pistachios, boiled orange, almond flour, rose icing. A Persian Love Cake! Lord, have mercy.
What I’m Reading
Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau. I get the distinct feeling that I would have loved this guy. I’m glad I missed the Civil War, but too bad I didn’t get to meet him.
A Question for You
I’m writing about this, and I’d love an answer: What do you do to make yourself a wilder person? What do you do to rewild? If you’re an older person (as I am), do you find it harder to be/feel wild?
And a Harder Question
You know when you read something and you feel power in the words? The words just fly out and hit you. They are zinging. What do you think causes that? Is the writer simply good with words or is something else at play? Was Mary Oliver just good with words? Was W.S. Merwin just good with words? Is theirs a kind of magic? What’s your thinking about writing and spirit? (This is a serious question. I’d love any thoughts you have.)
Thank you for everything, and have a wonderful week.
Hi Janisse,
You mentioned your substacks in class and I finally had a chance to explore this wonderful treasure. I was prompted, if it's ok, to share with you my own daily wilding that was published in the Dispatches section of The Common. You can trust the link: https://www.thecommononline.org/a-sliver-of-wild/ . Sometimes we have to find our wild wherever we can get it!
Best, cindy
For me, writing is a balancing act between being spontaneous and being disciplined. My father was a minister and one of the directives that he encountered during his formal education was the suggestion in the preparation of a sermon, was to spend 1 hour of preparation for each minute of delivery. I'm not that disciplined. I would like to be more structured, however I tend to be restless and have tendencies to not buckle down.
The wild exerts a strong pull on me. I celebrate it in our own yard of .45 acre and by driving to an area 35 miles north of here where I spent a couple of my formative years. There are many varied habitats on public lands surrounding the town where I lived when I was 10 and 11. On the steep rocky slopes west of town, there are thousands of trout lilies, that I know are beginning to bloom beneath the shiny, evergreen leaves of mountain laurel. A couple of miles to east of the slopes are dozens of disjunct prairie plant species that I was surprised to encounter at a prairie being returned to its previous condition, through restoration, when I visited northern Illinois some years ago. Perhaps the strongest attraction that draws me, are to the peaks of the Blue Ridge, where I can travel to a high-elevation landscape clothed in wind-sculpted spruce trees that provide dense shade and aromatically scented needles.