present perfect continuous

Setting out with Beryl for a New Year afternoon stroll, I wasn’t looking for Milkweed.

I wasn’t even thinking about it. That season is over, right? Have I not said so several times?

I was after sun and cold air, ready to admire the silhouettes of trees against fleeting patches of blue sky. But what do I know about what is going to catch my eye?

What, indeed, do I ever know about what is going to happen—at least when it comes to this amazing plant. Here I was thinking about the soup I was going to make for supper, and there ki was: dry stalks proud amidst the frosty grasses, exquisitely sculptural seed pods silhouetted against the sky, and treasure on the ground.

So instead of the brisk face-in-snatches-of-afternoon-sun walk home I’d tried to engineer, we had the slowest of meanders. Beryl kept track of the squirrels and rabbits (walking with admirable restraint while wishing to run), as my frozen fingers fiddled with fibers— flakes of papery grey bark fluttering to the ground behind me as my eyes moved from the silvery strands to the seriously uneven sidewalk beneath my feet (who wants to trip and fall on New Year’s Day?)

And when we got home I had leftover winter squash for supper because, you know—cordage to twist?

Honestly, I shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. You’re probably not.

But I am a little embarrassed—both shy about my milkweed romance (can’t she talk about anything else?), and a bit regretful about my plan for today’s Gusset, as I’d kinda hoped to brag a bit about the epic, three day photo thinning project I just finished.

But I suppose I can talk about it anyway. At least briefly. I mean it is quite a thing to reduce eight boxes of prints—

—that’s five decades of assorted snaps (some neatly in envelopes, others haphazardly tossed together with no sense of order or timeline)—

—into a moderately organized mass in one plastic tub. I can even (mostly) close the lid. Talk about nostalgia/regret/hilarity/and an emotional roller coaster —kind of like what our phones sometimes do to us “here’s what you did four years ago today!” only on and on for hours.

Luckily there were only a few of my mule-packer 20s (who carried a camera around?), but not so luckily, a bazillion adorable hard-to-thin photos of my son’s childhood —and of course Dan, my late husband. Easier to get rid of were the endless out-of-focus images of tapestries in progress (geez but I went through a lot of tracing paper in those days), photos of me at teaching gigs, and unsuccessful attempts to capture the gorgeousness of hand spun, freshly dyed skeins of yarn.

There were also, as Beryl pointedly remarks, many many many photos of Samantha, Jeremy, Scarface, Jane and Sirius.

Sirius ‘n me in Red Dwarf on her maiden voyage. Note the ice.

Indeed there were so many (always part of things as dogs are), that I had to remind Beryl that she is already the subject of more comics than all the others combined.

Whereupon she reminded me that for all the heart-wrenching nostalgia evoked by all that history and time and life—

—right now, with her, is pretty darned fine.

And I have to agree.

For if she and milkweed have anything to do with anything—

—which they both apparently believe they do¹ —

—(after all Beryl has hardly been out of my sight since we met each other last April and I have been moderately obsessed with Milkweed since my neighbor gave me the aphid-infested stalks from her compost pile in July of 2020)²—

—the delicious messy stream of friends and family and fiber and photos and dogs that has been flowing along for decades is continuing, at least for the time being, and we’re in it: past into present and on into unknowable tomorrow. ³

And that’s not too shabby.

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1. Along with yesterday’s chance encounter with the winter-retted milkweed, a couple of weeks ago I happened upon two semi-hidden books about Monarchs and Milkweed while cruising the aisles of a local hardware store: 100 Plants to Feed The Monarch, a Field Guide by The Xerces Society and Monarch Butterflies, a beautifully illustrated children’s book by Ann Hobbie, Illustrated by Olga Baumert. Then, waiting in the mailbox when I got home last week, was another surprise: The Milkweed Lands: An Epic Story of One Plant by Eric Lee-Mäder and Illustrated by Beverly Duncan. The fiber properties of this glorious plant (seed floss notwithstanding), doesn’t seem to be a feature of any of them, but my yarn-centric explorations are made ever more thrilling as I broaden my understanding of the botany and ecology of this marvelous plant.

2. My first two Milkweed-centric blog posts: Cordage and The Inner Capitalist: An Exchange of Views, and Milkweed ‘n Me.

3. The present perfect continuous (also known as the present perfect progressive) is a verb tense used to talk about something that started in the past and is continuing at the present time.