Garden of Words

The Baby Factory: Thea Versus Butterflies

Word on the street was that Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden was just littered with millions of exotic butterflies. My own mother -- apparently, a connoisseur of butterfly gardens (Right? Who knew?) -- was not impressed, but Nikole and Thea and I charged ahead anyway, carving a slice of our Sunday afternoon out to hang with the Malachite and Blue Morpho.

Somewhere between the hype and my mother's experience lies reality.

There were not hordes of butterflies, but there were about a hundred more than you'd ever see in our backyard. Better looking, too.

Oddly enough, despite the headline of this post, I downloaded very few of the photos of butterflies -- with or without Thea engaged in mortal combat with them -- that were on Nikole's camera. Just the one that leads things off, actually. And you have to really hunt for the butterflies in that one. (There are three of them, seek-and-find groupies.)

After sweating almost to our deaths in the butterfly sweatbox, we rolled down to the children's area so that Thea could regret not packing his swim gear.

The Baby Factory: River Weekend

It was the traditional Lewis Family Memorial Day weekend in Deltaville last week -- a celebration of the holiday, as well as the birthdays of Nikole's brother and grandfather.

The photo above is special for Nikole's family -- the two boys (Baxter to the left and Baker to the right) were born within a week of each other. They are the sons of Nikole's brother and his oldest friend, who were also born within a week of each other. And they are the sons of Nikole's dad and one of his oldest friends. Three generations of friendships. Baxter's older sister is standing watch, while Thea wonders why there are other children in her wagon.

It was great seeing Thea and Baker begin to interact, although he's a nimble, two-legged locomotive and she's still happily plowing along at a rapid crawl. He's two months older than she is. We're hoping to be able to spend at least several weekends with the kids (and the rest of the family) at the river over the summer.

 

Nikole's grandfather turned 86 over Memorial Day weekend, and I think he's tickled beyond belief that he's able to see and interact with his two great-grandchildren as they begin to explore his favorite place -- a little spit of land bounded by Broad Creek, the Rappahanock River and the Chesapeake Bay in Deltaville. Below, Thea hangs out with her Pop-Pop and his wife, Phyllis.

The Baby Factory: We're Going Mobile

Nikole caught this action shot of Thea a few weeks ago. She's been pulling herself up and walking with assistance (a finger, a hand, a chair) for several months now, but refuses to take those first independent steps. Apparently, being the daughter of two compulsively verbal people, she's busy perfecting her vocabulary so she can tell us that she's taken her first steps.

End of May Gardening

Last year's garden was a shambles because we had a newborn in the house. This year's garden is only slightly more organized now that Thea is a full-fledged toddler -- but still too young to sit in the dirt while I plant and weed. That said, I got into the garden this morning to pull a few weeds, and to pick the first crop of peas and massive handfuls of Swiss Chard (which probably should have been picked weeks ago).

For some reason, I also decided to try cucumbers and a tomato plant in hanging baskets. The ones in the garden itself are going gangbusters; the potted versions are healthy, but much less robust.

Earlier in the week, I finally got a million zinnia, daisy, sunflower and hollyhock seeds into our back beds. Last year, I put them in too early. This year, I hope I'm not too late!

Mom Sweeps at the Virginia Senior Games

Earlier in May, my mom competed in the swimming competition for the Virginia Senior Games (formerly the Senior Olympics). As impressed as I was with her silver and gold medals in the 70-75 age group, I was blown away by a 94-year-old woman who competed virtually back-to-back in four different swimming events. Below is a action-packed sequence of my mom hitting the water for the 50-yard freestyle event. (Click a picture for a larger version.)

Cousins

My neice Morgankara playing with Thea earlier in May during the Virginia Senior Games. We were hanging out at the pool watching my mom sweep her events.

Paragraphs About Poems: Cairo Fragment

"Cairo Fragment" is about as concise a snapshot of our first morning in Cairo as I could ever capture.

We woke in the bedroom of our friend's apartment in a middle class suburb on the west side of the city. It was a chilly January morning, and we heard loud cracks and pops outside the shuttered windows -- and the squealing of children. I pushed open the shutters to discover that the kids at an adjacent school were letting out. The firecrackers were in celebration of Ramadan.

Every morning in Cairo brought with it the same sort of jumbled imagery.

Read "Cairo Fragment" here.

Paragraphs About Poems: The Birth of Loss

"The Birth of Loss " was meant to be a poem about nuns in France, and it somehow transformed itself into a poem about miscarriage. Odder still, it was a poem about the miscarriage of someone I knew -- several years before Nikole and I experienced our own series of losses.

In the process of writing this poem, I tried to slip into the lives of a couple slightly removed but still surrounded by the grief of losing an unborn child. The transition from nuns to a grieving couple happened in the transition from the first stanza (almost untouched from when it was first written) to the second. As often happens, it simply slipped from one poem into an entirely different one.

I think its transition is exactly what needed to happen to this poem.

Read "The Birth of Loss" here.

Paragraphs About Poems: Above Franklin

In the midst of significant emotional events, words tend to bubble forth. Trips overseas are a strong catalyst for my pen, as were the deaths of my father and stepmother, and my separation and divorce from my first wife. "Above Franklin" was written in the midst of that last significant event, when clarity emerged only through yoga, connection with myself and quiet.A friend's cabin in Franklin, West Virginia, proved to be a genuine refuge that helped me sort through the noise and discover my heart -- sometimes alone, sometimes with others who could help me plumb the depths.

Read "Above Franklin" here.

Paragraphs About Poems: Al Tahrir

My first published poem, Al Tahrir was written following a six-week excursion to Cairo, Egypt, early in 1999.

I spent far too many hours during that trip sitting in a cafe in the heart of old Cairo sipping shay bi na na (tea with mint) trying to teach myself Arabic. The cafe in question was always packed with old men, usually huddled over one of Cairo's daily newspapers and always talking loudly and emphatically to and past each other. Missing from the final version of the poem is a stanza about the cafe's recent crop of kittens, the cutest and dustiest kittens I'd ever seen, which left blackened paw prints as they hopped from the floor to my lap to the table.

There is little that can replicate the feeling of displacement faster than being immersed in an utterly foreign land where everything -- the language, the signage, the clothing and customs, the pace -- is almost impossible to decipher. When we stepped out of the airport that first night to meet our friend, we hit a physical wall of hundreds of Egyptians waiting for arriving family and friends. The cab drive from the airport to our friend's apartment was as real an exercise in the Force as I'd ever seen outside of a Star Wars movie -- six lanes of vehicles traveling at 80kph along four lanes of highway.

Of all of my travels through Europe and slices of North Africa and the Middle East, I've never felt so viscerally and powerfully disconnected from what is familiar and reassuring. The ability of such disconnection to unwrap deeper understandings of yourself, and of your environments, is abrupt. It is something I hope to reexperience again and again.

Read Al Tahrir here.