Zucchini

The ground is cracked. After weeks of rain compacting the soil, the recent warm dry days have merely split the surface into fractured plates of hard earth. Tonight I mounded up the spuds some more and then encircled them with pea straw. I dug over a section of earth, added some blood and bone and dolomite lime and turned it some more. Then I planted a zucchini, surrounded it with pea straw and watered it in. The pea straw should make a lot of difference to the quality of the soil. While I was fossicking in the garden shed, I found citrus fertiliser and put some on the lemon.

The first arm of the purple cardigan is done. Next step turn round and do it all again. Tomorrow or the next day will be soon enough. Then I did some more twirly skirt sewing. Tomorrow night is writers' group and I haven't written a thing. I do like this poem on chocolate. Today's library visit yielded poetry from Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Fiona Kidman's Songs from the Violet Cafe and Robin Hyde's The Godwits Fly. Except I have already misplaced the poetry. So fast to fall, so deep the dark hole of lost library books. For many, it is a cue to spend tomorrow tidying the house.

Not for me.

The foccaccia worked. Um maybe I will write that louder. This morning as I made lunches and ate breakfast and talked to children and still managed to be dressed and at work at 8.20am, I also made bread. Not a usual occurrence, but a multi-tasking highlight to remember on the opposite days when I sleep until 7.15 and then see we have no bread for lunches and only yesterday's clothes vaguely fit to wear.

Leicester Kyle is a new discovery, thanks Maps. I've been thinking since I read this earlier today about how characters (and places sometimes) seem to loom particularly large on the landscape on the West Coast. That was part of looking up Jeffrey Paparoa Holman today, as he has links to Blackball, where they sell his books at the pub. I've always assumed that his middle name is for the Paparoa Ranges which Blackball is crooked into and which face the sea on the other side. To cross from Blackball to the sea the old way, you can walk the Croesus Track.

Comments

maps said…
I'm pleased you find Leicester interesting. He was a remarkable man and his poetic 'programme' was in many ways unique, especially after he hit the Coast. He used to turn out book-length cycle-poems which were intended to document various aspects of life in Buller. I imagine that a few of them, at least, would be in the library at Westport, though I'm not sure about Greymouth. I posted a poem I wrote about Leicester a few months back:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2010/07/remembering-leicester-kyle-and-thinking.html

It's great that you've got a literary group down there. Are you plotting a movement and a manifesto? When Leicester was asked to name the most salient feature of West Coast he replied 'watercress'.

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