John Burridge

July is almost half-way done and our yard is flowering. This year we have an abundance of artichokes blooming; their purple crowns are a favorite with the bees. The gladiolas Mark planted earlier are growing taller than the foxglove; the hummingbirds love them. And the iris has given way to purple phlox.

After about six months of Mark dropping hints that I could join him for yoga at the local YMCA (yoga isn’t my cup of tea, though), I’ve re-started my fitness regime. This involves wearing a fitness tracker that talks with my mobile, and spending time on a health app keeping a food diary of weighed out serving portions. And waking up early and going to the Y to either swim, or run on an elliptical, or clink weights. Or sit in the hot tub.

I want to say the increase in activity has been good for my mood, so yay. If I can continue to exercise consistently through September, I’m hoping habit will carry me through the Very Very Long Grey Months around the Winter Solstice. I also want to say that my body is thinking about beginning to look a little more toned, so also yay.

I’m surprised by my sleep patterns: based on motion and heart rate, I wake up a lot more during the night than I realized and I actually sleep a lot less than the seven or eight hours I thought I was getting. It would be interesting to correlate when the tracker thinks I’m in REM sleep with an actual EEG.

---

The other weekend I went dancing. Mark opted out. The producers of the dance were the same folks who produced the Pride After-party.

I arrived at a local Queer/Pagan bar a little after 9 PM, when the event started. The music was pumping out, folks were around the bar and tables, and the dance floor was empty.

The theme of the dance was “Hanky Panky”; folks were supposed to wear a colored bandana in one of their back pockets to signify what kind of sexual activities they’re into. Since there is no hanky for “My husband stayed home, and I’m just here to dance,” my back pockets were bare and I wore a black T-shirt with a rampant rainbow unicorn on it. In retrospect, I should have worn a mirror-ball keychain… perhaps with a T-shirt reading “My ball-and-chain is a disco ball.”

I ordered a cola product and inspected the decor. This is somewhere between a theatre production of the Addams Family, an occult bookstore, a Hot Topic shop, and a leather bar—with a covered and fenced-in porch on the side.

I finished my drink, figured someone had to be the first person dancing, and headed to the stage end of the bar. The DJ, smiling, left his control panel, bounded past a Saint Andrew’s Cross and a bondage bench, underneath the big screen showing campy and risqué videos, through the strobing and whirling stage lights, past a dancer’s cage, and met me on the dance floor. “You’re early!” he said, and then introduced himself. Technically the dance’s start time was 9—but things wouldn’t get started until about 10 or 10:30.

This was fine by me, because I wouldn’t have to worry about stepping on somebody or thwacking them with an upthrust arm accidentally while I shook the rust off of my dance moves—which I’ll be the first to admit are a cross between cha-cha, the fox-trot, an aerobics routine, and a ritual summoning.

The music was a fun repeat of the mix during the previous week’s After Party, and, luckily, not quite as loud, as I had forgotten my ear plugs at home. The video on the big screen was a slightly more X-rated version of the previous week’s PG-13 video.

The dance floor filled up, and then go-go boys in day-glow fetish-wear jumped onto the stage. I’m not sure if they were dancers who strip, or strippers who dance, but at least they seemed to be having fun. Especially in the cage. My sense is that they had friends in the audience.

I danced and danced, and briefly re-connected with a queer pagan acquaintance I hadn’t seen in about two years; he went back to dancing with his partner, who was in a wheelchair.

Just a quickly as it had filled up, around 11:30, the dance floor cleared. I remember this used to happen thirty years ago at Perry’s On Pearl: you’d be dancing to the music, look up, and realize that about half of the dancers had left, presumably with each other. The energy of the room would shift from summer lovin’ to autumnal lean and prowling.

When I stepped out onto the smoking patio looking to chat up my acquaintance and his partner, I realized A) it was cooler out here; B) oh yeah, this was where people actually smoked, and; C) a bear in a leather jockstrap and harness wasn’t just waving hi, he was offering me a joint.

Actually, I’m pretty sure he was offering my hair a joint.

I smiled and said, “Thanks; I don’t smoke.”

“What?” he said in mock-horror. “A man dancing with long grey hippie hair doesn’t smoke weed?” (See, I was right; my hair had scored.)

“It’s true,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” —Not realizing until the next day when Mark told me that the leather bear was flirting with me that I missed the sub-text and was completely off script.

Note To Self: Next time, compliment a leather bear on his gear and ask him where he shops.

I went back inside. While the fantasy cater-waiter dance scene from the movie “Jeffry” played on the screen behind him, a lone go-go boy whirled some LED poi in front of a mostly empty dance floor. Which was too bad, because if I had to choose, the go-go boy with the whirling lights was the most interesting one on stage, and he deserved more of an audience.

The night had reached an inflection point. A long time ago, someone taught me the difference between staying at a party because you’re having fun and staying at a party because you’re waiting for something to happen. If one is waiting for something to happen, one either needs to make something happen or leave. Even with the disco nap I’d taken that afternoon, I was feeling a little tired after about two and a half hours of almost solid dancing. So it was time to leave.

The next day my fitness tracker reported that I’d taken 6,183 steps and that I’d burned through 586 calories during my 95 minute “Aerobic Workout.” I can tell from the graph of my heart rate when I was enjoying dancing the most, but, alas, I can’t tell from the valleys and peaks where the poi-whirling go-go boy or the leather bear are.

I can, however, find Mark.

The irises are flowering out front.  They get more sunlight than the irises in the back.  I love the way that they smell, which too me has deep base notes with a touch of sweetness.  Writing this, I think iris and carnation would go well together. 

The last iris is blooming out front.  The ones in our backyard have finished their show and only show brown, translucent fists where the flowers used to be.  I do wish they had a longer season--and this year they seemed to be done blooming more quickly than in previous years.

I suspect this year I really will have to get my act together and thin, separate and fertilize the rhizomes instead of just talking about it.  I like our iris's deep purple color, and I imagine that they would be the sort of flower that appears on altars.

This year we have no California poppies in our yard, and I have to make do with the ones that grow up and down and across the street.  Several years ago, we had some growing on our back steps, and I took a time-lapse photo of them slowly opening as the sun rose in the morning sky.  

I like them because they are orange, and because they appear in the cracks in sidewalks, or alongside roads, or in alleys.  I like them because they have a long blooming season, so you can never be sure where you might suddenly come across them.

Some of last year's other poppies managed to self-seed in unexpected places--assorted pots, and a few odd corners in a planter.  They aren't blooming yet, and we don't know what color the flowers will be.  Last year they were mauve, with veins of darker purple shading upward from the flowers' bases.  

These are the more formal kind of poppies, and as I recall, the green outer sheath of leaves over the buds will split in the evening, and over the course of the night fall off.  If the blooms haven't properly popped out by the early morning, they will by mid-morning or so--dropping the sheath.   The color and the shape of the blooms last year was sublime, and put me in mind of flowers an enchanter might grow.

I also enjoy the seed pods afterward, with their secret chambers and hidden structure rattling with tiny poppy seeds


Camas grows in our part of the Willamette Valley, and I wish we could encourage it to grow in our yard.  It's all over a slope about four blocks away, and similar patches grow here and there along the waterways, or near the neighboring slough.   I like it because it's purple, and because the stem structure reminds me of cathedral spires.   Supposedly, you can roast and eat the roots--but I think they're difficult to dig out.
Larkspur, between the Autzen Stadium millrace and the Willamette River.  This photo isn't capturing the gestalt effect of the spiky purple (purple, again) flowers growing in a curtain between the grasses.

We've got some growing along the eastern side of our house, and I'm afraid it's much less striking than the splashes I saw along the jogging and dog-park paths.  It strikes me as the sort of flower a milkmaid or farm girl would gather in her apron and place in a pitcher set on the kitchen table.

Mark and I couldn't figure out what these flowers were.  He thought they might be cone flowers or echinacea.  They're cute, in a mod, 1966 kind of way.  I can see them being made into boutonnières, worn by groomsmen in a meadow wedding.

It is the time of the irises.  It is the time of the falling cherry blossoms.

In early April, I watch the irises lift up their swords.  The dark buds sway at the tops of the waving stems and the rain falls.  It rains -- dark day after dark day -- sometimes a mist drifting downward and smelling of the coast, sometimes a torrent from bursting clouds.  On those days, I don't see much of the irises' progress.

I associate irises with the old farm my mother's mother was born on.  They used to have giant bearded yellow and blue irises growing in front of the pioneer farmhouse in the woods near Astoria.  Some of the rhizomes used to grow on the hillside below my folk's house long ago -- taller than we were -- but frost or deer or moles got to them and they haven't been seen for decades.

The irises at our house are planted under a cherry tree, and it's easier to watch the cherry's blooming.  As April progresses, the buds above and below begin to show their tightly wrapped packages.

When the buds open, the cherry becomes a giant swab of cotton candy and the dark purple spears of the irises unfurl.

Smelling the iris blooms is what I've been waiting for.  In the early morning, in the afternoon when it's not raining, I go to them and inhale their scent.  The cherries don't smell so much, but irises have a dark base note, like clove, but not as sweet or sharp; like licorice, but not as floral; like sandalwood, but not as volatile; like patchouli, but not as earthy.  It would be too twee to say "they smell like enchantment."

They smell like the perfume of an unconventional aunt who wasn't satisfied being a Pre-Raphaelite's model, and painted her own queens, knights, magicians and sorceresses.  Or an aunt who mixes her own perfume based on her research of ancient civilizations.  Or an aunt who bakes pungent cakes for obscure holidays, like Gazing Globe Day, or Chimes Night, or The Feast of the Invisible.

Perhaps my difficulty describing the scent is why I like it.  It is strong, it is unique, it is deep -- and by the time we're past the mid-point of Spring, they'll be memory.

The last of the irises bloomed last weekend (about May 10th).  There is one in the front driveway bed, and I'm hopeful the rainy weather we've had the last few days will extend it.  I keep saying every year that I will divide the iris bulbs, but I never do.  I guess next August I'll have to invite my folks over, have them sit in lawn chairs, and give advice on what to do. 

 Iris season has officially begun in our back yard.



Yay!

I think this year is going to be a low-iris year.    They haven't bloomed yet, but they're very close.  Then again, I could be wrong.  Looking back at previous posts, the iris typically open around the beginning of May.  Then we have two weeks of them.

The iris are blooming this week.  I was looking through old pictures and the first week of May is usually when the swords send up their flags.  Our irises are mostly purple, which I like.  Sometimes, I wish we had the Great Bearded Irises that I grew up with and which came from a stock from my Mother's Mother's farm -- but they died out or were eaten decades ago.  Oh well.

The cherry tree out back is blooming. Mark thinks it looks like some silly Dr. Seuss tree, but I kind of like it for the soft pink color it brings to the yard. Mark likes the tree a little later in the season, when it has leaves and provides shade. Still no blooming irises yet, but they're putting up their swords of leaves and I expect we'll see their purple flags blooming in a few weeks.

I'm still thinking a little about last weekend's character workshop.

This morning when I dragged myself out of bed to write, I found that the main story I was attempting to work on was defying me. It was annoying, because I'd tried to set everything up the evening before by leaving Scivener open with the words "this is the scene where they escape the Voivode" along the top. The Big Clue that this wasn't working were the lines and lines of "It was a dark and stormy night" and "I want tea." So I switched to the character scene I worked on at the workshop. I got a little farther, but it became obvious to me that I was not in a writing groove.

I guess some days are like that. I think some of the difficulty was that the previous night's sleep wasn't the best for various reasons. I'm trying to be serene about times like this, when I set out upon the path and stupid little things come to test my resolve (and I fail). I'm sure there's a seven of something tarot card that I should be looking at this morning.

And now, off the The Day Jobbe.

A few days ago, the irises started opening.







Last year they all seemed to open at once. I might be remembering incorrectly, but this year they seem to be taking turns.





Purple irises like these are my favorites, although I like cobalt blue ones, too. When I was growing up, we had some giant bearded irises that were descendants of ones from my maternal grandmother's homestead. They were light blue or yellow. There may be a few at my folks' house, but I think a really cold winter killed most of them off.

I love irises before they are fully unfurled because their triangular symmetry is apparent.  They remind me of NASA equipment opening, or alien telescopes, or ceremonial hats, or craftily folded napkins at an erudite café.



When I see the fuzzy yellow insides, I wonder what the iris would look like with ultraviolet light.






I wonder if the stripes on the inside of the iris are a kind of landing strip for insects to follow for pollination.





In the early morning or late afternoon, shadows and light play upon the blooms.






The sphinx looks on from a short distance.

The irises have been blooming. I like how the purple petals unfurl from points into tri-lateral lamps and their aroma is sweet and potent. This year the irises are larger and have more blooms -- I'm supposing that the bulbs have had longer to get established and that this year we've had more sunlight than last year.










The purple and green go well together. My folks have giant bearded irises (which I covet) growing at their house. I like the giant purple ones the best, although the yellow ones are nice, too (I think I've seen some pale blue ones growing at there, which are fun). When the sunlight filters through the iris blades, the different shades of green are beautiful.













My camera was a little confused on the auto-focus, but I think this photo came out OK. It's a sort of Georgia O'Keefe. I like it because the base of the petals look like a reptile or alien skin.



I didn't notice it at the time, but the sunlight created the number 7 on the side of the flower. It must be a sign!







Whenever I take multiple photos of flowers opening, I'm always struck by how the flowers start out so densely packaged. Sometimes I think it would be cool if NASA could use inflatable polymer sheets coated with photovoltaic material for the solar panels on spacecraft. I think that's the way flowers open, only with sap or water through the flower petal veins instead of air in a balloon....

More photos here.