For a brief time in the spring here in the White River watershed, the redbuds fairly glow with their pale purple blooms. It’s one of the signs of the shifting seasons. You suddenly notice how widespread the trees are: all over the hillsides, along the roads. Who knew that those small trees–unnoticed for the rest of the year–were capable of such beauty?

As I write this, our neighbor is having his healthy redbud cut down. Something about it making a mess on his roof. Suffice it to say we have very different ideas about trees.

During that spring bloomtime, I can walk up my stairs and see the redbud framed in our bedroom window. It’s astonishing, every time.

One day I had been changing clothes in our bedroom with the door shut. As I turned to leave, I was caught up by the light playing on the door. Later, I wrote the following:

I reach to open–
pause–the redbud behind me
glorifies the door.

Rachel and I went out to the nightmarescape that is our backyard in the dark after the rain. Slugs and snails everywhere, even eating each other. Enormous nightcrawlers that dive lightning-quick into the soil. Pill bugs everywhere. All doing good work, but goodness it was a bit of a horror show. 😄

A crow has showed up in our backyard a few times now to eat seed. We’re that much closer to our goal of making friends with a corvid…

“How Jung and Tolkien Tapped into the Collective Unconscious”

One of my finds from my Friday drive was a Stanley no. 80 cabinet scraper. $15, which I thought was a pretty good price for one in such good condition. There was minor rusting on the hardware that came right off after a few hours in vinegar. Replacement blade coming from Lee Valley Tools.

Wonderful, ten minute documentary about the Zuni Map Project—an art project to “depict the topography of myth, memory, and prayer embedded in the land, returning a tool of power to a space of connection.”

I made a frame for a scanned copy of the Civil War letter from an ancestor.

I’m on the road today—driving from Salem to Paoli to French Lick to Loogootee, looking for old tools in junk shops and flea markets. Listening to the Why We Drive audiobook, appropriately enough.

Beautiful lavender. Also, the grapes are doing something new! Turns out they’re flowering. What I noticed before were not actually grapes but flower blooms. (Which I would have know had I thought about it a bit more carefully. What can I say? I was excited.)

OFA on how to garden vertically. Because of our limited space, we’re trying to do more of this. For example, this year we put up a PVC arch on which we’ll grow some cucumbers and melons. We already have a pergola for the grapes and honeysuckle. The malabar spinach will be growing up a fan shaped trellis. And we’re going to try a three sisters planting again this year, where pole beans climb corn stalks. (It didn’t do well last year, we theorize, because 1. we planted it too late and 2. corn doesn’t like raised beds.) As Adam Savage says, “there’s always room on the z-axis.”