The inconstant blogger

I am the inconstant blogger, made so by equal parts busyness and laziness - the two-headed coin of my being.

How to explain the lapse since I last blogged? I have excuses, plenty of those, but no real explanation other than a lack of cohesive narrative in my life at present.

Fragments are all I have, impressions and fleeting glimpses.

A toad chirps and croaks outside my window at night and in the early morning. I wonder if he is the same toad I unearthed while vigorously hoeing weeds in the garden. I lifted him, his soft body impaled on a tine of the digger, and froze in horror. I gently shook him loose in the shade of the camellia bushes, and when I went back to look for him 20 minutes later, he had hopped away. It is fanciful to believe he is the same night singer I hear when slipping into sleep and as I swim up into bleary consciousness in the morning. But I like to think it is the same toad, trilling forgiveness for having been so brutally roused from his winter hibernation.

The garden itself is in transition from winter to spring. Slowly - and, yes, inconstantly - I try to bring order to the chaos. I pulled my carrots, surprised to find fat golden, purple and white fingers dangling beneath the lacy greens. I rooted out the baby beets, which taste both bitter and sweet and altogether earthy sliced into my daily salad. The sweetpeas are blooming, bless their pink and purple hearts. They smell like heaven. This weekend I will plant my tomatoes.

I helped host a baby shower and then a couple of weeks later held that new baby boy on my lap and breathed in his delicious baby smell. a different kind of heavenly odor from the sweetpeas. This weekend I will cook for his parents and take them food and hold him again.

One night on the sidewalk by Lake Ella, I saw the comet PAN-STARRS through a telescope and then found it in my binoculars, and I understood how people long ago were astounded and even terrified by such a sight. And then I looked through the telescope again and saw Jupiter with its bright moons all in a row, and I gazed at the milky knot of the Pleiades, and - last and best of all - I saw the Orion nebula where stars are born in a vast cloud of cosmic gas.

There was a party that seemed lifted from a dream - all flouncy petticoats and steampunk finery, where I wore a top hat and a sequined halter top and high heels and felt wicked and gay, although in the photos I look stout and a little shy. There was a bare-chested duo of young men who performed amazing feats of balance. There were saucy can-can dancers and lovely models in vintage clothes. There was sultry music and laughter, and outside there was a fire in a cauldron by the garden. It was a perfect party.

I drank too much wine with friends one night while watching "School of Rock" with them and their children, laughing helplessly and loving Jack Black and his baggy-trousered anarchy, happy to be in their family circle of baths and bedtimes and news delivered in snippets and spurts of their vacation at Legoland.

I am haunted by the photo posted on our neighborhood Facebook page of a cat with a terrible wound on its head. I know this cat, an orange and white tom who prowls through my yard with blocky insouciance and scraps with a grey and white male for dominance in the yards along my street. I assumed he was a stray, a member of what my friend Liz calls "the drain kitties," a gang of feral cats that slip like smoke in and out of the subterranean drainage system. Someone posted that he is in fact an owned cat but is prone to roaming and fighting, thus the wound. The grey and white male has not gone unscathed either - I have seen him limping through the back yard favoring one of his hind legs.

The storm that blew through with such drama and pyrotechnics early the other morning woke me from a deep sleep. I had left the living room windows open and the wind blew over a table lamp and some other items. The crash made me sit bolt upright in bed, heart hammering and unsure of where I was. I must have been dreaming of some calamity and the crash seemed to confirm that it wasn't a dream, that something real and violent was happening. Nothing was broken. I set the lamp back in place and curled back up under the comforter to fall asleep again as lightning lit up the white walls of my bedroom.

You see - impressions only, a bit of this, a pinch of that, not a narrative so much as a simmering soup with savory tidbits bobbing to the surface and slipping back under, obscured by the sheen of chicken fat and steam.

I know I will shake off this epistolary spring fever. For now, it's nice to settle into its dreamy cocoon, inconstant but faithful to this insubstantial pageant.