Spring Equinox Eve

My household is a twitter with the excitement of the impending spring equinox. The eggs are decorated. The altar is set. Birds are chirping excitedly just beyond the windows. The cats nap happily in a pool of sunshine on the porch. And this morning, in my back yard, I had a face-to-snout encounter with Peter Rabbit, himself, the grand old hare.

I was headed out on garbage detail, and I whipped open the garden gate. There he sat: a huge, powerful, old rabbit. He, of course, bolted the instant he saw me. But when I calmly explained that I wasn't a predator and meant no harm, his ears twitched, and he stood still, pretending, of course, he was an invisible rabbit-shaped stone.

Being the sort I am, I left my garbage bags there and went to do some other outside work, thinking he'd scatter if I left him alone. Nope. He was still there when I returned with a bag of leaves (and garbage! yuck!) that I'd raked from the front boulevard and street gutters. Very slowly, I took the leaf bag and one of the abandoned garbage bags back to the alley. He watched me with large, beady eyes, but must have figured his old stone-trick was working, because he didn't budge. I bid him farewell since I had more to do out front, but when I came back with a second bag... he was still there.

I finally decided it was chilly enough out that I needed to finish up and go in, so I snuck the remaining bags past him. He finally left some time after I returned with the broom that I retrieved from the garage to sweep the dirt from the sidewalk.

Seemed auspicious, don't you think?

Gardening Dreams

Despite frost on my window shield this morning, the scent of spring is finally reaching the frozen north. Mason still has to wear boots to school, but now it's mostly to keep his toes dry while he stomps in the muddy puddles. There are still a few recalcitrant piles of dirty ice and snow in my back yard, but more and more ground is peeking through. At Crossroads this morning, I even saw a few, brave green sprouts of hosta (or perhaps tulips) poking through the ground.

I'm starting to look at seed catalogues in earnest. This year I'm planning two new gardening projects. The first one is a meditation/memorial area in the spiral herb garden. There's a section of deep shade near the neighbor's garage wall that Shawn has been considering for a mediation garden. Since very little grows in such dense shade, we're thinking about laying some paving stones and filling in much of the rest of the area with ferns, hostas, and perhaps a few native, woodland flowers like Virginia bluebells, jack-in-the-pulpit, and Dutchman's breeches. Shawn would also like a few bleeding hearts and other shade tolerant flowers to soften the area. We've got a Japanese lantern for decoration, and we're going to buy a bit of bamboo fencing to soften the neighbor's garage wall. She also wants a glider rocker out there, though we have a bench that says "Sit a Spell" courtesy of our friend Sean.

I took this photo of the area in late February, and I've been taking shots every now and again to get a sense of the light and "feel" of the space.

The other big gardening project I'm considering is planting a boulevard garden. Thanks to a lot of trees, we really don't have a lot of hot, sunny spots for flowers and Shawn would love a cutting garden. I'm thinking that the boulevard might be just the place, especially since Saint Paul actually encourages boulevard plantings and has published a guide on how-to, which I picked up some summers ago.

Can you tell I'm ready for Spring?

Up for a Lammy!

The anthology PERIPHERY was just short-listed for the 21st Lambda Award in the lesbian erotica catagory. My alter ego has a short story, "ishtartu" included in that, so a round of applause goes out to her... er, me!

Spring Has Sprung!

Spring has finally come to Minnesota.

Friday I complained about my car door being stuck, and over the weekend temperatures climbed into the 50s (F). You've got to love Minnesotans: a little sun goes straight to their heads. I saw FOUR young men in shorts. Despite patches of unmelted snow, Mason and I broke out his bicycle and we zipped around the block. We took a walk up to Ax-Man (a surplus store that is well worth the visit if you're ever in Saint Paul -- they have all sorts of funky remaindered things like parts of baby dolls, electronic bits and pieces, to things like an iron lung and a dentist's chair.)

I also put the finishing touches on my Ostara altar. WitchSchool is having a contest and I can hardly resist a little friendly competition, so, of course, I had to enter. The picture is a bit blurry, but here's what it looks like:

I made almost everything... including painting the stencil on the altar cloth. I have this great book of Celtic knot work stencils and I photocopied the goose knots and goose from there, cut it out with the exacto (which I finally found! Thanks Shawn!), traced it onto the cloth (an old shirt), and painted over the lines with puffy fabric paint. Here's a close-up: