We’ve reached the time of year where we can open the windows to let the cool fresh morning in. We’ll need to close up mid-day when we start sweating; the air conditioner feels glorious when that happens. For now, I hear the whir of grasshoppers, the caw of crows, and the chirp of songbirds.
When I walked out of my bedroom this morning, my heart did a little dance to see both of our children’s doors closed. For four years now, our son’s door has stood open while he’s been away at college. For two, our daughter’s has. Their closed doors mean they are both here, sleeping the summer sleep of not-yet-adults, my children.
Memory is a funny, fuzzy thing. Most of us can relate to not knowing if our first memories are our own or if they’re based on photographs we’ve seen or stories we’ve heard. Many untold, unphotographed memories are gauzy: I don’t recall specifics, like what year it was, or a teacher’s name, but I do recall a sense of the setting and what I felt: unease, comfort, safety, pleasure.
I don’t know the first book I ever finished and still remember to this day. I have distinct memories of reading Salem’s Lot in high school. It scared the crap out of me. My bed was pushed up against the window, where palm fronds screeched against the glass right next to me, like vampires clawing to be let in. It was scary, too, but we didn’t have sewers in our neighborhood, so I didn’t have to worry about clowns on my walk to the bus stop. I read a lot of Stephen King in those days — Carrie is still a favorite, and of course The Shining. Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, Pet Semetary, Misery. “The Body” that Stand by Me was based on, and “Children of the Corn,” which may be the only adaptation ever that’s better than the original story.
Those are not the first books I finished and remember, though. Before those was a book called The Girl With the Silver Eyes, which was probably my gateway to Stephen King. The main character has telekinetic powers. It may have been my first interaction with the supernatural, and it blew open my mind. I kind of want to find it and read it again. My memory is that it went deep for me. It totally sucked me in. I couldn’t wait to get back to it when I was away from it.
Before The Girl With the Silver Eyes were probably my Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High years. Those books were like potato chips. I churned through them. Not much lingers except Nancy Drew’s convertible and that the mysteries were fun.
Before those, I think the earliest books I read by myself and that I remember were probably the Little House on the Prairie books. I loved them so much. I had the whole set in paperbacks. We didn’t have snow where I grew up, and I remember being captivated by the snow candy they made: they packed snow into a pan and poured molasses or maple syrup into it, I can’t remember which. I remember the blizzard that was so bad, Pa had to run a line from the house to the barn so he wouldn’t get lost in the storm going between them. I remember the grasshoppers. I read those books over and over again. When we moved to Minnesota, it was a highlight of my life to be among real prairies and to experience those winters that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about. My love for Lonesome Dove may be the grown-up version of what I felt for the Little House books.
I don’t know all the books I read in my young life or what order I read them in, but I do remember my room being a sanctuary for reading. I remember how it felt to lay on my bed, my feet up on the wall, not a care in the world except whatever was going on in the pages of my novel. Reading time was the best part of my day. I felt ease, content, safety, pleasure. There was nothing better than the release I felt when all my chores and homework were done and I could escape into my my books. I still feel the same way today.
On Friday night, we drove over to Roanoke to see Ravi Coltrane, jazz saxophonist son of John and Alice Coltrane. For the opener, Ravi started on the sax; the keyboard, trumpet, and drums quickly came in to play together on a Thelonious Monk song. My eyes and ears jumped from the keyboardist to the trumpet, to the sax to the drums, to the trumpet, to the keyboard, to the drums. Streams of sound flowed from the stage, sometimes together, sometimes crashing into each other. This was a more avant garde performance than my unsophisticated ears were ready for, and it often sounded discordant to me rather than musical
Ravi went to town on his horn, playing up and down its shiny brass body, trilling, swinging it up then crouching back down, before a final blow, and applause from the crowd. He stepped out of the spotlight and into the dark recesses of the side stage, and then there were three instruments playing. The trumpet player took his turn next at a solo while the keys and the drums played on. The trumpeter tooted on his slender horn, his thick glasses and afro glimmering in the stage lights. He rocked his torso side to side at the waist until he, too, blew a final note, the audience applauded, and he stepped out of the spotlight and into darkness off to the side.
The remaining players were the keyboardist and the drums. The keys player had a piano and multiple keyboards on top of the piano and on stands to its right. At this point, my toes started tapping. I started feeling the rhythm. When it was down to just him and the drummer, it sounded like music to me. I could hear how the piano and drums worked together. I felt the pianist’s flourishes flow from my ears to my chest and shoulders, which moved with the music.
When the keys player finished his solo, he backed away from his instruments and took up his bottle of water. All that was left was the drums. And at this point the music came most alive for me. My feet tapped, my body moved. The drummer’s kit was positioned so that he was in profile to the audience. We could see every move he made: every stick or mallet he grabbed or put away, every bend, every reach, every ting or tap, boom or smack. He was spectacular, and there was no distraction from his artistry.
Sometimes things get better when you take away instead of adding.
Our son graduated from college last weekend. He now has some wayfinding to do. He double majored in English and computer science. All along, he expected he would pursue a career in computer science for practicality. The English degree was for his heart. As the semesters went by, we saw his literature classes light him up. We saw pride when he talked about the papers he wrote.
When graduation weekend approached, he really wanted us there for his English ceremony, where he’d get to walk the stage with the English department and shake hands with the professors he loved and that helped him find and appreciate great literature. We were there for it, in the outdoor amphitheater surrounded by white columned buildings.
I expected our son to have some wayfinding to do after graduation. I did not expect his graduation exercises to affect me as deeply as they did. The English ceremony knocked me off kilter. I cried during the main speech, given by an exceptional speaker, probably a Shakespearean actor, who quoted passages and referenced authors I love. My heart swelled for our son because I knew these were his people. I thought, these are my people, too. And it shook me up, because that is not the path I chose.
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what moves me, about why we’re here, about what I’m doing with my life. I’m trying not to have regrets. I don’t want a different outcome for my life. If I’d made different choices, I wouldn’t have the people in my life who I love: my husband, my kids, my post-college friends. I do regret not paying attention to my own loves, to what lit me up, and pursuing more of that so that I could have that experience. I loved my literature classes. I loved reading and learning and digging into the meaning of texts with other people. At our son’s graduation, as the English department speakers talked about what the graduates learned in their studies, I longed for that for myself. I came home and looked into graduate school. What would it take to get a masters in English? Do I have it in me?
As a 51 year-old woman, I find myself doing my own wayfinding right now.
I woke this morning thinking, I want to blog today. I’ve been quiet the past week after graduation, not really ready to talk about my unsettled feeling, my deep seeking. Now I’m ready. When I saw today’s blog prompt — What is the meaning of life? — I had to laugh. I guess the universe is ready too.
I’ve been tracking my activities the past couple of weeks to pay attention to what engages me, what energizes me, and what drains me. This has been especially poignant after the graduation exercises last weekend. The English ceremony made me reckon with my struggle to understand myself and be true to what lights me up.
Today I seeded a mind map with one of the things from my activity tracking that both energizes and engages me — communication — and did a bunch of free-word association from there. A few things popped up multiple times in this and another similar exercise I did yesterday: books, stories, art, beauty, humans, laughter, understanding. Peace. Connection. I guess these are the meaning of life to me. These are my way.
Every day, the world gets greener. Appalachia in spring is lush. It fills your eyes with emerald and peridot, your ears with birdsong in twirs and twees, your nose with cool crisp mountain air.
To ease stress, I watch my garden grow. I pay attention to the flowers. The catmint is blooming in soft blues, and the salvia in indigo spires. The roses have started opening their deep red blossoms, the columbine shiver in lavenders and pinks, and the poppies have buds the size of a baby’s fist.
I have been watching the snapdragons in my flower baskets out back. They’ve seemed on the verge of opening for over a week. Yesterday, they finally began. Now I get to watch as each of those buds opens into a crimson flower. I hope the bees climb in.
One of my friends at work gets mad at me every time I say this, but I don’t consider myself to be a very technical person, even though I work at a tech company. At least not compared to all the people I work with. I just want technology to work and do the things I need it to do.
I am decent with language, though, and when things start to get technical, as long as I can ask questions and understand words, I can get there. Fortunately I work with a lot of kind and patient people who are usually excited to help someone else understand the work they’re so passionate about. They answer all my newbie questions and I am enlightened.
And fortunately for me, in this wild world of AI, regular old language can now help me build the technology I need to help me design my garden.
I think in words, not images. This makes it really difficult for me to visualize what something is going to look like if I can’t actually see it: a room painted a different color, furniture arranged a different way, arrangement of plants in a bed. Then, layer on top of that sunlight needs, bloom times throughout the year, vulnerability to different critters, plant form (mounding or upright), foliage type and color, bloom type and color. And then on top of that, I have specific dreams for my garden. As I told Claude, I want to “attract pollinators and to have pretty flowers and pretty foliage, in that order.”
For years, for decades, I have struggled with putting plants together in a way that manages all of the complexities of the plants’ needs and my garden desires while also arranging the flowers in the beds, and the beds in the landscape, in a harmonious and pleasing way. It’s really hard! I’ve tried to graph things out manually or annotate photographs, but I still can’t visualize what it’s going to look like when stuff is actually in the ground and blooming (or not), so it’s always a crapshoot. I mostly I just end up with pick stuff I like at the nursery, put it in the ground and hope it works, and then feel frustrated that everything looks hodgepodge.
When I was on a run the other day, thinking about how I need to solve my new problem of the groundhog eating all of my beloved echinacea, it hit me: can I build software that can help me plan my beds and generate images of what they’d look like with different plant arrangements? Thinking in words isn’t good for visualizing, but it is good for working with conversational AI, where I can just tell it what problems I want to solve and then work together to solve them.
So that’s what I’m working on this weekend. Ultimately, I want an app that will help me design my garden, research plants, and track how plants do over time. I want it to do exactly what I want it to do, in the way I want it done, for the preferences and constraints I care about. It will know everything about my specific garden: what my USDA plant hardiness zone is, which plants get mowed down by deer despite “Deer resistant!” on the tags, and what the size, shape, and sunlight are for all of my flower beds so it can help me fill in with plants that will attract butterflies, and so that the beds will have something interesting going on in every season. And won’t have invasives. And, oh yeah, I also want caterpillar hosts.
Before starting on an app that will allow me to repeat the process with each bed, I started with the one problem I want to solve right now: the groundhog in the echinacea. Starting with the real problems I want to address — my struggle with visualizing and the need to plan around so many mammal grazers — grounded the development and gave us a practice session to build a spec for what the final app will need to contain and what output I want from it.
For the back bed, we came up with plants for aesthetics, butterflies, spring, summer, and fall interest, a shopping list for the plants I don’t yet have, schematic plans to help me position the plants, and a funny and also really helpful visual of how the plants will go together.
Schematic plan“Realistic” rendering
We’ve got a long way to go, Claude and me, but I’m delighted by the possibilities. Now it’s using what we did with the back bed — my constraints changed what will go in the database, my excited reaction to the rendering (vs my lukewarm one to the planting plan) bumped up the important of the visual — to execute on the spec. I get to write this post while it does all the technical work of building the software I want.
Butterfly Mind 