Helen Lehndorf

Author: helenlehndorf

  • i am back in town – do you hear me

    The new chair sits next to the older chair and it looks like they are having a conversation. (Maybe I have been reading THIS book too much?)

    *

    I find this slid under my door. How intriguing!

    Except it isn’t. It turns out to be from a religious zealot, just letting me know if I don’t confess my sins I will burn in hell forever.

    How much more interesting if it had been from an old friend who wanted my attention….or a musician who really, really wanted me to come to his gig….or anything else, really. Still, great title!

    *

    When I took the kids to the museum, I experienced what I would look like with skinny legs in the hall of mirrors. I stood lookiing at my illusory skinny legs for far too long:

    *

    Then I became a giant on the new Museum carpet:

    *

    Finally, with the colder weather – the monsters return for hibernation. They leave their feet at our back door:

  • the last

    I write about the seasons a lot, don’t I? I can’t help it. I grew up in a small town in the middle of farmland – my Dad was (still is) a hunter and fisherman and so we ate with the seasons and the seasons were meaningful in a way they may not be for city-folks. Most of my friends lived on farms, so the drying off of cows marked the start of winter, new lambs heralded spring. Because I do write about the seasons so much, the editor of The Comforter, Helen Rickerby, organised the book into seasonal parts. I still can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to do that – but that’s why you need a good editor, right? To show you things which are right under your nose but you can’t see because you are over-exposed to your own work.

    Anyhow, of all the seasons, autumn is my favourite. The harvest, the golden days with cold edges, the sense of melancholy. Garden fires, washing the woolens which have been in storage since September, quinces, feijoas, walnuts…picking apples – we have two apple trees at our place:

    In my book, there is a poem about the beginning of autumn, the final day of daylight saving. There is a point at the end of summer/early autumn, if you are a gardener and eat seasonally, like we do, where you know it is likely to be the ‘last’ time you taste that particular thing for some time. That final meal has autumnal melancholy all over it – it’s a farewell to summer. In the poem, ‘the last’ has a deeper resonance – because of my beliefs about the environment, I feel that anything could be our ‘last’ time, because our existence on this ailing earth is so precarious right now, and growing more so.

    Late summer this year, we ate corn for a good eight weeks, thanks to the 60 corn plants I grew – & no, I didn’t tire of it, like I do with some gluts. With the last of our fresh corn, I made a bean succotash which also contained the last of our tomatoes:

    Also, ‘last’ for the season – I made a ‘pistou’ or paste with the last of our bush basil, some pine-nuts, garlic, olive oil and salt. It’s always a sad day when the last of the basil goes. We ate it on pasta.  I like to grind such things up in my big mortar and pestle, rather than blitzing with an electronic device. It’s calming and meditative to hand-grind.

    (A Wellington friend who has never visited me at home was surprised to learn that I don’t live on a farm – he thought I did from reading my blog. I don’t know if it was just him, or if others have that impression as well – but just to be clear, I live on a very average not-quite quarter-acre section right in the heart of Palmerston North. You can take a girl out of the country, but she’ll bring her small-town/country ways to the city!)

    Anyway, here’s that poem I mentioned, from The Comforter:

    FALL BACK

    Insects everywhere – dead bees in the garden, moths

    stud the bathroom ceiling like dusty ornaments, praying

    mantises crawl out of the compost bucket. The flies.

    The last day of daylight saving. Everyone

    tired and wistful on Sunday. That feeling

    like you lost something all day.

    The last-day-of-summer pasta sauce – made with the last aubergines,

    last cherry tomatoes, the last zucchini. The garden now

    full of fledgling winter vegetables: spindles of cabbage, arrowheads of spinach.

    Manawatu gothic. Even these bright days are tinged

    with a kind of violence. There is a black velvet ribbon

    threaded through your head, collecting debris.

    The last dinner on the dehydrated lawn.

    *

  • golden sunflowers inside

    I didn’t have much luck with sunflowers last summer – I planted a whole packet in the corn bed but only three came all the way up and one of those got blown over and snapped in a storm.

    Still, the two that made it were glorious in the way that sunflowers are.

    There’s nothing like a sunflower to be a measure of spring/summer/autumn…green and growing up, up, up all through spring and most of summer….then finally the flower head opens and never fails to impress – such a heavy head, such a strong stalk…then you know autumn is here when the petals fall and the seeds start to dry on the head.

    Sunflower’s point-of-view…chasing that sun:

    A bee visits:

    I love Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Sunflower Sutra’ (I nearly chose this excerpt to go at the front of my book, but then I changed my mind at the last minute and felt the other one summed up the book more) – if you care to, you can read the whole thing HERE, there are also great clips on youtube of Allen Ginsberg reading the poem, otherwise here is my favourite part of the poem, which I repeat to myself like a mantra in challenging times:

    ‘We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread

    bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all

    beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed

    by our own seed & golden hairy naked

    accomplishment.’

  • collage with fabric

    A couple of fabric collages I made. (Photos are a little blurry – I think my ancient camera is starting to fail me.) I’m not sure if that is the right term – I’ve seen similar things called ‘mini-quilts’ but that seems a little absurd to me…unless they are quilts for dolls or mice.

  • In the garden…

    The tomatoes are ripening by the bowlful every day and we are eating lovely pasta sauces and soups which taste of the sun and make me realise how insipid tinned tomatoes are! The chillies are starting to fruit – just in time for the cold of autumn, which will stunt their growth in no time. Every year I try to grow chillies – every year I get about two weeks worth of fruit before the autumn shrivel. You’d think I’d learn, right? Hope springs eternal. One day I’ll build a little glasshouse for year-round chillies.

    I love these lush little gem lettuces, so much nicer than ice-berg and I eat one a day. They grow very quickly – from seedling to edible head in about three/four weeks.

    The corn is nearly there – it seems like only yesterday I was pushing corn seeds into the warm earth…there are lots of pumpkins growing around the corn’s ‘feet’ too – we are going to have an abundant autumn!

    This is going to sound like such a cliche – but I swear, when I started growing my own vegetables, aged around 28 when I had my first baby, time seemed a lot slower and I was aware of my plants growing and can remember waiting patiently for crops to appear.

    Twelve years on, time seems to go a lot faster -I’m not sure if it is because of getting older, or because life is busier – and the seasons romp around. I feel like I turn my back for a second and the garden changes, vegetables appear, or plants die before I realised they were ailing.

  • This is not a gratuitous cute kitten photograph…

    …it’s a cute chicken photo, instead.

    This is Cockatrice – one of our hens. She is the leader of the pack, top of the pecking order and frankly, the brains of the bunch. She was also a quick developer – the first to grow her full comb and to start laying eggs.

    Cockatrice is intelligent, adventurous, nosey and demanding. She seems to be much more aware of us and interested in interacting with us than the other three chickens. She’s one of those animals who verges on being creepy, because you feel like she is way more sentient than she should be.

    (A Cockatrice is a mythological creature which is half-chicken, half-dragon. Willoughby, our resident dragon-lover, named her. She is his chicken.)

    My hen, Harriet, and Fraser’s hen, Hildegaard are bog-standard chickens. They are cute and charming, but don’t have the personality and boundary-pushing behaviour of Cockatrice.

    Magnus’s hen, Syndrome (named after the baddie in the movie The Incredibles) is a silly chook. She’s not very bright. She gets stuck, gets lost and gets easily confused.

    I swear Cockatrice knew what I was doing when I did this photoshoot with her – she stood patiently, stock-still in various poses, like a chicken supermodel.

  • leaf water stone sky

    I visited the creek.

    The stones hosted the leaves.

    The leaves bathed in the water.

    The water held the sky.

  • The David Merritt Experience

    I met David Merritt late last year when a colleague introduced us. We had a coffee and talked poetry and chickens and politics and I was very impressed by his dry, self-effacing humour and sharp-as-a-tack brain. When you talk to David it isn’t like the tennis of usual conversation: my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn, in measured thwoks….it’s more like chasing a snake through the grass – sometime he is right there, present and gleaming and you’re close – so close! and then he slips off into some elusive (but usually hilarious) tangent and you’ve lost him again.

    He’s a poet – a unique one, in that he makes small books out of the waste of other books (usually Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics which he rescues by the box-load from Dump shops because they don’t sell.) He tours the country, sitting on the street, making books, talking to people and selling his books out of a little wooden drawer ‘for the price of a good cup of coffee’.

    Last night he ended his latest tour of the country in Palmerston North (he lives kind of near by in Mangamahu) so I went along and it was a grand evening out.

    His performance is more ‘experience’ than typical reading, because he shuffles around the room, interacting with people so there is no illusion of the line between poet and audience, taking requests, talking and poking fun, laughing at himself and generally filling the space with his gentle, delightful presence and aroha.

    The night reminded me of a parlour performance I attended by the incredible actor Warwick Broadhead – there was the same invitation to people (not literally, but invoked) to engage, to be more present in their lives, to challenge what they are being offered and turn it into something better.

    The local ‘support’ act was Rob Thorne who does amazing things with Nga Taonga Puoru and effects pedals. Then David was accompanied by Chris Heazlewood (formerly of King Loser) on guitar playing incidental music between and behind the poems. The guitar playing was subtle and interesting and enhanced the poetry very well.

    There is no doubt from his poetry that David is a romantic – nature is beautiful and pure, jobs are for sell-outs, the disenfranchised are heroic, relationships with women are either high-romance or hate – however, I am entirely susceptible to this manner of romance, so heartily enjoyed it and found myself crying at one of David’s ‘barbaric yawp’-style poems exhorting the reader to shoot him if he finds himself in a litany of deadening situations – the kind that probably most of the audience dwell – suburban housing, day jobs etc.

    I had a great night and went home fizzy with ideas and inspiration. If the David Merritt Experience passes through your town – I reckon you should definitely make the effort go. It is entertaining, involving, funny, moving and much, much better than anything on the TV.

     

  • ‘May I admire you again today?’

    There was a brief window in the 1980s when people told me I looked like Molly Ringwald. I have brown eyes, full lips, thick hair. I loved Molly. I loved the way she chewed her lip, how she gave off an aura of ‘I’m quite resilient, but also tender, baby, tender like the tiniest pea. Don’t come near me, but also come over and shuck me and eat me off a spoon.’

    That window when people said I looked like Molly, Molly was so very hot  then, and I loved her anyway. It wasn’t like I had to start loving her just because people said I looked like her. That was my pretty time. It was a good time. It was over before I had time to bask. I’m thankful it happened at all.

    I even loved Molly’s name, like ‘dolly’ but with the gravitas of an ‘M’, like a gangster’s moll. She just kept getting hotter and brighter. She took ’16 Candles’ and raised it a ‘Breakfast Club’, then slapped down a ‘Pretty In Pink’.

    Aah – ‘Pretty In Pink’ – I have seen it dozens of times. Although I’m pushing 40, it remains one of my favourite films.

    I can’t see how bad it is, how cheesey because I can only see it with my teenaged, adoring eyes. That movie has everything perfect: The Smiths, second hand clothes, a record store, class war, an excellent soundtrack, ….and a funny alternative boy called ‘Duckie Dale’.

    Duckie! He was so perfect and fey and heartbreaking. The scene where Duckie is sitting in his ugly bedroom on a dirty mattress, because he is poor and has no proper bed and he is longing for Molly (in the film, her character is called ‘Andy’ but really Molly only ever played Molly so I will call her Molly), but he knows it is fruitless, that she only loves his wit, the wit that is a blanket he hides under, an umbrella to shield him from how ugly and cruel the world is – that she will never love his sad, yearning entrails, his melancholic viscera, that he will have to carry on cracking jokes into her benevolent indifference because she will never be able to see him ‘in that way’- in that ‘love, love, won’t you run your hand along the swell of my inner thigh. Won’t you lie down on this mattress beside me so we can just gaze at each other without saying anything’ way.

    In that scene, I think Duckie thinks, ‘although – Molly Ringwald- we laugh so hard together and I love that we laugh- it is not funny how much I love you, it is as serious as a dirty mattress on a floor in a shitty house somewhere west of privilege and south of comfort and yes, on the wrong side of the tracks, and you are the sun that comes in my curtains, you are the complete perfection of The Smiths playing over this scene. Yes, that is how deeply and seriously I love you, Molly, as serious as your alcoholic Dad and my broke-down house, as serious Morrissey’s voice on a dark Sunday afternoon.’

    The Smiths’ song which plays over Duckie’s scene is ‘Please, please, please let me get what I want‘, but he won’t get it, certainly he won’t get Molly, not in the way he wants her. There is a scene at the end of the film where Duckie has his arm around a girl at the prom, so that the ending isn’t in any way sad, so that we aren’t left thinking ‘sure, Molly got her rich guy, but what about Duckie?’, but we know that he isn’t really into that girl. It’s just a noble act for Molly’s sake. He loves Molly so much he doesn’t want her to feel guilty.

    That is how awesome Duckie is.

    I think that is why ‘Pretty In Pink’ haunts so many aging Gen Xers – because, now even more than then, it’s clear that Molly chose the wrong guy. Blane (as Duckie said: ‘Blane? That’s not even a name, it’s an appliance!) might have been rich, but he was a vapid a-hole. The film is a tragedy, because Molly should have chosen Duckie.

    I sure would have.

     

     

     

  • open heart

    (Life is)

    “…a slow, elated, awed recovery

    from humiliation.”

    -Geoff Cochrane

    On New Year’s Eve we climbed the hill behind the house and drank wine until the sun had gone. I gnawed on grass stems because they tasted like peas. When clouds crossed the moon, I couldn’t see your face and you talked about the ways next year would be ‘awesome’. I say ‘I can’t remember much about this year except that most days I felt tired and thought it would get better tomorrow.’

    We talk for a long time about ‘isms’. You are giving them up. I am keeping a couple. ‘Why can’t you just do Helenism?’ you say. The isms start to cause schisms. I switch to home-decorating. I tell you that a warm colour would be better for you in winter – Indian spice colours to warm you up, but you are set on hot pink, ‘1977 punk-rock pink’ you call it.

    Then it’s midnight and the countryside doesn’t care. We wait for the clouds to clear so we can find our way down again. The dog has come to find us, and the two cats, their bells tinkling in the long grass. Sheep are nestled under the ridge and don’t stir as we walk past. Around the north side of the hill we cast long moon-shadows.

    ‘Look’ I say ‘We have moon-shadows, like the Cat Stevens song! And there I was thinking that was a load of hippy bollocks all these years.’

    I make tea for drinking on the porch because the wine is making my gut sour, but then it feels very late and too cold to be outside. I have so much to tell you but I can’t think where to begin so I talk about the band playing in the Square on Waitangi Day and how long it takes to drive to Paekakariki from here.

    I start to shiver. ‘I need some sleepism’ I say. You swallow down a handful of vitamins with the last of your wine. The animals bolt off inside to avoid being shut out.

    I go into dark rooms to check that my children are still breathing. I notice how the quieter I want to be, the more the floorboards creak. The microwave casts a dim light across the kitchen, it’s LCD screen says ‘Err’.