Hello readers,

Currently in Vermont we are back-to-backing wildfire smoke haze and severe thunderstorms. My house is ok, flood-wise, but lots of Vermont is not, and it is heartbreaking. (Some of the relief support options: donation, fundraiser/gift options, and volunteering. More local and mutual aid opportunities continue to circulate via social media.)

My body is struggling and so is the rest of me, with the volatile weather, the cancellation of plans and restriction of activities, isolation, climate anxiety, the still-not-over pandemic, etc. My medical team pretty much evaporated and I know way too many disabled folks this is happening to right now. It is a rough summer, in a rough year. I feel like people are tired of hearing me say I am struggling. I am more tired of saying it, believe me. ​I am grateful for my garden even if I can't do the work I wanted to in it right now. It's still here. Every day I check on the flowers and the other plants and the frogs and the insects, rain or oddly-orange-smoke-filtered shine. I always find something new happening.

But I wrote most of this letter earlier this week, and then we had two beautiful days in a row, the first in months: sunny, not too hot, air breathable, no imminent thunder. It is amazing what that does for my well-being. We also finally got the aerial rig up in the yard, so - at least on the days the rain and smoke let up, today we're back to rain - I can start working toward height again. Try to feel like I have a body again.

In this newsletter we have:

On theme let's make our track this time "Wildflowers", by the Wailin Jennys. Friends, you do "belong among the wildflowers / You belong somewhere close to me (close to me) / Far away from your trouble and worry / You belong somewhere you feel free"


This year in the pond we have six frogs so far! One big one, who has been here all season and probably is a return visitor from last year, or perhaps overwintered here - I'm not sure there was enough substrate in the pond last fall for that, but it doesn't freeze solid and he was here as soon as spring came, so, maybe. There are also at least five little tiny teenage frogs who have arrived during the various storms of the last few weeks. I rarely get to see all of them at once but today found all five close enough together for one camera shot. Can you find all five? Answers at the end!

Some of the flowers: in an old and overgrown bed, this summer's project, there is a particularly nice tangle of yarrow and bee balm. Some of it needs to be thinned out and relocated where it can grow wild and carefree but some will stay in place. In the native plant realm we also have coneflowers, nearly as tall as I am, and extruding their rays in such style.   Rudbeckia makes the whole flower first and then slowly unfurls in a bedhead-esque tangle. The northern blue flag iris growing in the pond is over now but was beautiful. The liatris is fluffily purple (and huge this year!).

A former homeowner here really liked daylilies. Last year I found eight or nine varieties, mostly in the yellow-to-red spectrum. I moved a lot of them around (and divided and gave away quite a few) and then didn't note down what I did, so it's been fun to find out where I put them all. There's still more dividing to do. The daisies are also running absolutely rampant and need reining in (want some? hit me up this fall), but some will be kept.

Roses were my gift to myself when I got a garden, after decades of wishing for them. Two formal roses survived on the property when we moved in - barely - as well as a much more vigorous rosa rugosa (beach rose). With relocation, feeding, and winter protection, they're flourishing this year, along with the two I bought for myself last summer. The bed they're in is an absolute tangle - that's where the daisies are, as well as the extremely aggressive gooseneck loosestrife - but that's a problem for another year. (This year, when possible, I've been fighting the creeping bellflower in the bed space near the house, and continuing to make inroads on all the highly invasive multiflora rose. Some roses are better neighbors than others.)

Gardening is an exercise in long-term thinking, for sure, but I'm still frustrated that this year's goals are slipping away. Anything outdoor or body-using is nearly unplannable, right now. And not being able to move my body due to pain and illness keeps me from doing things outside sometimes when it IS nice out, and being unable to be outside due to weather and smoke makes it harder to recondition and regain stamina. I'm way behind on where I wanted to be for rehearsing or dancing or trying to make anything of my show. I don't even know how to think about trying to get it out of hiatus. I keep trying. It keeps feeling impossible. 

Back to flowers. (This is how my days go.) (And hey, at least now the rig is up. I can try.)

I observed the clematis carefully last year to figure out what kind of pruning it wanted and saw it blooms on new wood, so I chopped it back to the ground last fall and this year there are so, so many flowers. The white lily was not so beetle-eaten this year; this fall I need to dig it out from the encroaching daisies at the back, lowest part of the bed (why is it there!) and move it somewhere it can be appreciated next year. 

Poetry (and flowers) 

In early June I participated in an online reading of queer spec poetry and that reading is now online! (With closed captions, including of all the poems and the discussion afterwards!) I read "Transformation of the Rule-Broken", "Relapse", and "Green Thumbs" (that one has flowers). You can find me at about 19:50. Lots of other excellent poems here! It was such a pleasure to be in that space with those poets and I'm pleased to be in continued conversation with some of them by discord and instagram. We get to talk about things like queer-normativity in worldbuilding, and the balance of thinking of poems as expression but existing as products under capitalism, and what to do when your poems are all coming out bitter and hard. Do they do anyone any good? (Yes.)

As marginalized artists/authors, the more authentic a work gets - which does not always mean more bitter or more painful, though there's a lot of that at the moment, but instead, generally more vulnerable - the harder it is to believe it has worth. The more your work represents you, the harder it is to believe it has worth - if it's hard to believe you have worth, if you and the work exist in a world that explicitly and implicitly says you have nothing, are nothing, of value. 

I've been grappling the last few years with what value or worth even means, in late-stage capitalism, with all its ableism and white ethnonationalism and general christofascist and eugenic fuckery. It's strange to be this depressed but not, for once in my life, feel like I am personally the problem. (Daunting, too: the hurt is so much bigger than me.) But even if I can see the worth in my self or my work, on the days that is possible, what does it mean if no one else does - or anyway, no one with resources? When worth is tied to monetary value but nothing you can do is a kind or consistency of labor that accumulates that value, how do you pay the bills? How do you live? What does it mean to matter and how, practically, does that work? 

I am trying to think of different ways to be in the world. Dream, write, pray, beg them into being. Poetry is good for that.

A not-so-secret new stream-of-thought poem (with flowers), "What If"

you can't pay
for wheelchairs 
with wildflower seeds,
but what if

what if we had
what we needed, if 
we and the world
were worth one another,
together

You belong somewhere you don't just feel free, but are free. We are not free until all of us are free. (And interdependence is how we get there.)
Love,
toby

PS: here's the frog spots!