O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
jacentem in praesepio!
Beata Virgo, cujus viscera
meruerunt portare
Dominum Christum.
Alleluia.
For fifteen years, D and I have hosted a Christmas Carol party. In the beginning, when we lived in the City, we actually bundled up and went around our neighborhood, singing on doorsteps, but as we got older, the charm of trudging around in heavy coats and clunky boots lost out to the allure of a fireplace and mulled wine. Since moving to the hill, we’ve expanded the guest list to include non-singers, who tend to huddle ‘round the kitchen, eating all the best food while the singers make merry around the piano.
The party means a lot to D and me. Now that we no longer have a church home, and our former choir colleagues are scattered about the area, we don’t have an opportunity to sing together very often. For friends who were used to having a built-in chance to be together every week, losing the opportunity to worship and make wonderful music together each Sunday morning was a devastating blow, but only one casualty in the petty, ongoing religious turmoil of our generation. Luckily, the Carol party gives us a chance to reunite our voices, even if it is only once a year.
Near the end of my decade-plus tenure as a professional chorister at the Cathedral, I felt most powerfully how the gift of music can transform. It was the midnight service on Christmas Eve, and the choirmaster had chosen an especially moving setting of the ancient O Magnum Mysterium, written originally as a responsorial chant for the matins service for Christmas Day. The text, with its focus on the mystery of the Son of God being born among farm animals, has always been a favorite of mine, since it moves beyond the human-centric, and widens God’s mercy to include the rest of His creation—horses, sheep, cows, barn mice, mourning doves…
Because of the setting’s quiet dignity, we sang the piece during the most sacred part of the service, communion. And as we sang, I watched as the young priest who was preparing the bread and wine became entranced by the words and music, the candle-lit beauty of the sanctuary, the lateness of the night. Listening to us singing Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Christum, he forgot where he was, and what his duties to the mass were, and simply stood, mouth agape, and listened. On the high altar, in a crowded downtown cathedral, on Christmas Eve, in full view of the congregation, this young man was transported—there is no other word for it. And I, standing and singing alongside a group of my very best friends, had a hand in taking that priest out of his world, for just a moment, and placing him in the stable, with Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and the animals. It was a feeling I’ll never forget, and a high point in my life as a musician and a Christian.
Not long after that—a year, maybe—the choir received calls at home over the summer, letting us know that we’d been sacked, the choir disbanded. Although I had been a chorister, and church member, for 13 years, I was a relative new-comer. Many of the choristers had been singing together at the cathedral for twenty years or more. It was not a surprise when the choirmaster and organist, who’d held his position for thirty years, was let go as well. The factional, and fractious, nature of organized religion in America moves in mysterious ways. And most of them are ways I will not tread.
So, instead, D and I gather our friends and loved ones around us every Christmastide, and sing together ancient and miraculous poems. Standing around our piano, elbow to elbow with our cathedral family may not have the grandeur of processing down a long, candle-lit nave in wool cassocks from England, sliding into carved wood choir stalls at midnight, wreathed in incense smoke, but it is no less sacred, nor any less welcoming to a God who chose to become incarnate in a stable, among farm animals.
A song, regardless of where it is sung, is—after all—a prayer twice prayed.
(The setting that caught our junior priest all unawares during communion on that Christmas Eve was by Morten Lauridsen, a contemporary American composer based in California. You can hear his setting of O Magnum Mysterium here.)
O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
Christ the Lord.
Alleluia!
October 2010
Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets, --
Prodigal of blue,
Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.
With apologies to Miss Dickinson, I have to respectfully disagree. The hill is absolutely awash in yellow—from the tiny honey locust leaves to the twining bittersweet, from the wide witch hazel to the towering tulip tree. With the lack of rain, yellow may be the only splash of color we get this year; many of the shrubs that produce more sought-after fall foliage in shades of burgundy, cinnabar, and scarlet, like the viburnums and dogwoods, are looking too tired and dry to put forth much in the way of showy hues. Still, we’ll take what we can get, and against an azure autumn sky, even workaday yellow is a perfect complement.
With the exception of D’s tomatoes, it wasn’t a wonderful year for the garden. The growing season started off great—lots of snowmelt meant the ground was moist and friable. But a heat wave in April brought the daffodils and tulips to their knees in a matter of days, and put the whole season about two weeks ahead of where it normally lies. Mid-summer, rainfall simply stopped—with just a few exceptions, we’ve not had a soaking, regenerative rain in months.
Like many of our neighbors, we’ve limped by using our sprinklers, hoses, and watering cans. But I’m actually relieved to see the leaves turning yellow and floating to the ground—even with the hand-watering, the plants are exhausted, ready for dormancy. As am I. While I wouldn’t wish a winter like our last one on anyone, the garden could use another year with ample snowfall and a protective blanket of white to insulate the ground. But, like everything connected to the garden, we’ll just have to wait and see; nature, as we know, exercises her will independently of man’s desires.
So, for now, we’ll take our pleasure in the somewhat ho-hum yellow leaves and ignore the papery brown ones as we walk along the garden paths after work and on the weekends. After all, yellow is the color of enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition—hence the saffron robes of many monks. Corazon Aquino adopted yellow as a potent populist symbol during her struggles to lead the Philippine people against the Marcos dictatorship. And yellow ribbons have symbolized our prayers for the safe return of American armed forces for decades, thanks to Tony Orlando.
Wisdom, courage, hope, faithfulness—that’s a lot for one color to live up to. And yet, it’s easy to understand why Cory Aquino, among so many others, named yellow as her favorite: it reminds us of the sun, warming us, and bringing cheer into the most blustery day. Assigning attributes to colors is certainly nothing new. We’ve been celebrating red-letter days since the Middle Ages, when monks used red ink for holy days when transcribing calendar rubrics for monasteries and churches. We feel blue, or sometimes green with envy. When things really don’t swing our way, our mood is black. Of course, we can be in the pink, too, thankfully.
As a chill starts to creep back into the air of these early fall days, we’ll revel in the yellow swatches that the trees send earthward on invisible breezes. It’s true that, despite its abundance this year, yellow doesn’t hold the promise that the pinks and lavenders of spring do. The ephemeral blossoms of crocuses and daffodils are heralds of warm weather and balmy, lazy weekends spent out-of-doors, while the golden blazes of the maples and hawthorns are the season’s final hurrah before the monochrome winter sets in.
All the more reason, then, to enjoy the yellow whilst it lasts. For soon, nature won’t be spending yellow, or any other color, “like a woman.” In fact, in no time at all, she’ll be hording all her colors like Ebenezer Scrooge hording his shillings. And in those drab months, deep in the winter, we’ll look back and be thankful for the yellow that now crowns the hill we call home.
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets, --
Prodigal of blue,
Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.
--Emily Dickinson,
American Poet, d. 1886
With apologies to Miss Dickinson, I have to respectfully disagree. The hill is absolutely awash in yellow—from the tiny honey locust leaves to the twining bittersweet, from the wide witch hazel to the towering tulip tree. With the lack of rain, yellow may be the only splash of color we get this year; many of the shrubs that produce more sought-after fall foliage in shades of burgundy, cinnabar, and scarlet, like the viburnums and dogwoods, are looking too tired and dry to put forth much in the way of showy hues. Still, we’ll take what we can get, and against an azure autumn sky, even workaday yellow is a perfect complement.
With the exception of D’s tomatoes, it wasn’t a wonderful year for the garden. The growing season started off great—lots of snowmelt meant the ground was moist and friable. But a heat wave in April brought the daffodils and tulips to their knees in a matter of days, and put the whole season about two weeks ahead of where it normally lies. Mid-summer, rainfall simply stopped—with just a few exceptions, we’ve not had a soaking, regenerative rain in months.
Like many of our neighbors, we’ve limped by using our sprinklers, hoses, and watering cans. But I’m actually relieved to see the leaves turning yellow and floating to the ground—even with the hand-watering, the plants are exhausted, ready for dormancy. As am I. While I wouldn’t wish a winter like our last one on anyone, the garden could use another year with ample snowfall and a protective blanket of white to insulate the ground. But, like everything connected to the garden, we’ll just have to wait and see; nature, as we know, exercises her will independently of man’s desires.
So, for now, we’ll take our pleasure in the somewhat ho-hum yellow leaves and ignore the papery brown ones as we walk along the garden paths after work and on the weekends. After all, yellow is the color of enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition—hence the saffron robes of many monks. Corazon Aquino adopted yellow as a potent populist symbol during her struggles to lead the Philippine people against the Marcos dictatorship. And yellow ribbons have symbolized our prayers for the safe return of American armed forces for decades, thanks to Tony Orlando.
Wisdom, courage, hope, faithfulness—that’s a lot for one color to live up to. And yet, it’s easy to understand why Cory Aquino, among so many others, named yellow as her favorite: it reminds us of the sun, warming us, and bringing cheer into the most blustery day. Assigning attributes to colors is certainly nothing new. We’ve been celebrating red-letter days since the Middle Ages, when monks used red ink for holy days when transcribing calendar rubrics for monasteries and churches. We feel blue, or sometimes green with envy. When things really don’t swing our way, our mood is black. Of course, we can be in the pink, too, thankfully.
As a chill starts to creep back into the air of these early fall days, we’ll revel in the yellow swatches that the trees send earthward on invisible breezes. It’s true that, despite its abundance this year, yellow doesn’t hold the promise that the pinks and lavenders of spring do. The ephemeral blossoms of crocuses and daffodils are heralds of warm weather and balmy, lazy weekends spent out-of-doors, while the golden blazes of the maples and hawthorns are the season’s final hurrah before the monochrome winter sets in.
All the more reason, then, to enjoy the yellow whilst it lasts. For soon, nature won’t be spending yellow, or any other color, “like a woman.” In fact, in no time at all, she’ll be hording all her colors like Ebenezer Scrooge hording his shillings. And in those drab months, deep in the winter, we’ll look back and be thankful for the yellow that now crowns the hill we call home.
September 2010
Oh heart, if one should say to you
that the soul perishes like the body,
answer that the flower withers,
but the seed remains. --Kahlil Gibran
I hit a bird driving to work today. It flew out from the side of the road, low to the ground. My tire must have caught its wing, sending it spiraling into the opposite lane, where it landed, flapping its uninjured wing frantically, but fruitlessly. I was in a pocket of traffic on a busy stretch, with no place to turn off, so I wasn’t able to circle around and try to move it off the road or tend to it in any way. I was forced to continue along as it lay there, maimed and terrified. That it was a robin, the most prosaic of birds, somehow only added to the absolute horror I felt.
It was a fitting end to a week that started with ominous warnings from the vet about the dog’s heart. She’s seven, now, and showing her age in a graying muzzle. Still, dogs her size often live 15 years or more, so we feel like she’s just hitting her stride. Plus, D and I both went grey early, so we laughed that the dog was genetically predisposed to a salt-and-pepper coat. Although I accept that the dog’s span of days will probably be shorter than mine, facing that fact unexpectedly wasn’t easy. To hear the vet talk about canine cardiologists, EKGs and over-night hospital stays was no less difficult than if she’d been referring to my own health, or D’s.
Everything, though, does have its allotted span of days; we certainly see that in the garden this time of year. We’re anxious to cut back the spent coneflowers along the drive—no longer lovely and inviting, but ugly and withered—yet we hesitate: those unattractive remains are filled with seed that the tiny yellow finches love. Pulling down our drive in the morning sends the birds flying out of their perches in the flowerbed like lemon-colored bottle rockets. So, we leave the flower-heads where they are for now, letting the birds, and time, have their way with the remains.
The few vegetables that escaped this year’s bane—the groundhog who’s taken up residence under the barn—are pretty ragged, too. The seeds that D smuggled out of Tuscany last fall have produced a bountiful crop of lovely San Marzano tomatoes. But, like the peppers and eggplants, basil and sage, they’re all spent and ready to be plowed under.
Not long ago, friends loaned us their copy of “Man on Wire,” a recent documentary about a Frenchman who, during the 1970s, managed to finagle his way into, among other places, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Sydney Harbor bridge, and the then-unfinished World Trade Center. In all of these places, the man, with help from friends, was able to string a tight rope and spend time in high-wire acrobatics hundreds of feet above the earth before finally being arrested. The documentary spent most of it time focusing on the walk he took between WTC’s north and south towers. There was no mention—none whatsoever—of the towers’ eventual demise, but foreknowledge infused every scene with a ghostly image of what remained after 9/11.
That those towers are gone is irrefutable. Like this season’s plantings, they’ve been plowed under—dust to dust, ashes to ashes. But, like the coneflower seeds the finches relish, or the packet of Italian tomato seeds D slipped between the pages of his in-flight novel last October, or the impact that a tiny, brown dog has had on the lives of two adult men, there are parts of them that will live on and on, even after all manifestations of the towers, the tomatoes, the dog, have disappeared from the face of this earth.
I don’t know the fate of the robin I injured. Did it struggle in vain until its lifeforce ran dry? Did it, unable to escape the busy road, get run down by oncoming traffic? Did someone stop and at least move it off to the shoulder? Or, did it, by some miracle, shake off its injury and fly away? I didn’t return home by the same road at the end of the day—I didn’t want to know its fate. I could (can) barely stand the suffering I’d caused it.
My only hope is that, if indeed its body withered, like the flower in Kahlil Gibran’s poem, its soul soared off into a bright blue sky—as beautiful and blue today as it was nine years ago.
Requiescat in pace.
that the soul perishes like the body,
answer that the flower withers,
but the seed remains. --Kahlil Gibran
I hit a bird driving to work today. It flew out from the side of the road, low to the ground. My tire must have caught its wing, sending it spiraling into the opposite lane, where it landed, flapping its uninjured wing frantically, but fruitlessly. I was in a pocket of traffic on a busy stretch, with no place to turn off, so I wasn’t able to circle around and try to move it off the road or tend to it in any way. I was forced to continue along as it lay there, maimed and terrified. That it was a robin, the most prosaic of birds, somehow only added to the absolute horror I felt.
It was a fitting end to a week that started with ominous warnings from the vet about the dog’s heart. She’s seven, now, and showing her age in a graying muzzle. Still, dogs her size often live 15 years or more, so we feel like she’s just hitting her stride. Plus, D and I both went grey early, so we laughed that the dog was genetically predisposed to a salt-and-pepper coat. Although I accept that the dog’s span of days will probably be shorter than mine, facing that fact unexpectedly wasn’t easy. To hear the vet talk about canine cardiologists, EKGs and over-night hospital stays was no less difficult than if she’d been referring to my own health, or D’s.
Everything, though, does have its allotted span of days; we certainly see that in the garden this time of year. We’re anxious to cut back the spent coneflowers along the drive—no longer lovely and inviting, but ugly and withered—yet we hesitate: those unattractive remains are filled with seed that the tiny yellow finches love. Pulling down our drive in the morning sends the birds flying out of their perches in the flowerbed like lemon-colored bottle rockets. So, we leave the flower-heads where they are for now, letting the birds, and time, have their way with the remains.
The few vegetables that escaped this year’s bane—the groundhog who’s taken up residence under the barn—are pretty ragged, too. The seeds that D smuggled out of Tuscany last fall have produced a bountiful crop of lovely San Marzano tomatoes. But, like the peppers and eggplants, basil and sage, they’re all spent and ready to be plowed under.
Not long ago, friends loaned us their copy of “Man on Wire,” a recent documentary about a Frenchman who, during the 1970s, managed to finagle his way into, among other places, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Sydney Harbor bridge, and the then-unfinished World Trade Center. In all of these places, the man, with help from friends, was able to string a tight rope and spend time in high-wire acrobatics hundreds of feet above the earth before finally being arrested. The documentary spent most of it time focusing on the walk he took between WTC’s north and south towers. There was no mention—none whatsoever—of the towers’ eventual demise, but foreknowledge infused every scene with a ghostly image of what remained after 9/11.
That those towers are gone is irrefutable. Like this season’s plantings, they’ve been plowed under—dust to dust, ashes to ashes. But, like the coneflower seeds the finches relish, or the packet of Italian tomato seeds D slipped between the pages of his in-flight novel last October, or the impact that a tiny, brown dog has had on the lives of two adult men, there are parts of them that will live on and on, even after all manifestations of the towers, the tomatoes, the dog, have disappeared from the face of this earth.
I don’t know the fate of the robin I injured. Did it struggle in vain until its lifeforce ran dry? Did it, unable to escape the busy road, get run down by oncoming traffic? Did someone stop and at least move it off to the shoulder? Or, did it, by some miracle, shake off its injury and fly away? I didn’t return home by the same road at the end of the day—I didn’t want to know its fate. I could (can) barely stand the suffering I’d caused it.
My only hope is that, if indeed its body withered, like the flower in Kahlil Gibran’s poem, its soul soared off into a bright blue sky—as beautiful and blue today as it was nine years ago.
Requiescat in pace.
August 2010
Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of that candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
We’ve been sharing a lot lately, up on the hill. Despite D’s best efforts, we’re “sharing” some of our newest perennials with the deer, rabbits, and now, a groundhog. The freshly-planted Japanese Painted ferns got mysteriously smaller over the course of a weekend, and by the time I checked on them Monday after work, poof!, they were gone—“shared” right out of existence. Then, a similar mystery with the glowing orange-red blossoms on our spindly young ‘Tiki Torch’ coneflowers. Big, fat, promising buds one day, gnawed stubs the next. Ditto the hakone grass and the toad lilies.
All these plants are old stand-bys for gardeners who have problems with deer, so it was an unexpected (and unwelcomed!) mystery when we found their sad chewed-off remains. Seems like D’s ultra-smelly putrescent-egg-and-garlic deer repellant doesn’t work so well with groundhogs and rabbits. And apparently the deer have never read the plant care tags that feature a drawing of an innocent-looking doe inside a circle with a red line drawn through it, meant to lull lazy gardeners like us into believing we can outfox a hungry buck or a fawn with an experimental appetite.
Luckily, we’ve shared some of our flora with the local fauna a bit more willingly, as well. Never in the years we’ve been gardening have we had so many butterflies sharing the nectar of the weigelas and buddleias and nasturtiums. And flocks of hummingbirds are helping themselves to the scarlet blooms that the coral bells send up on waving stems. The tiny birds move so fast that the dog doesn’t even have a chance to bark—by the time she recognizes their presence, they’ve moved on, leaving her with a puzzled look and a sotto voce growl.
But the sharing we’re most excited about didn’t involve wildlife. Over Independence Day weekend, we hosted the four children whose parents built our house back in 1941. Living all over the country now, they were coming to town for their school reunion, and reached out to see if we’d consider letting them stop by their old home.
“Of course!” Every gardener and home renovator’s dream: a willing audience, with some history to share. So, for the next two weeks we spent our free time weeding and tidying, painting and planting. And when they finally walked up the drive, it was as if Acorn Hill understood—the gardens looked their loveliest, the house seemed to open its arms in welcome, and the weather was perfect: the golden sunshine of late afternoon, blue skies, no humidity. Positively un-Pittsburgh for July.
We ended up, counting the kids and grandkids, spouses and neighbors, a group of 16; and for the next hour and a half, there were at least three concurrent conversations occurring at any given time, along with photographs from seven decades passing between eager hands, and an entire set of the home’s original blue prints spread out on the kitchen counter.
We learned some wonderful details about the house and the family who lived in it when it was new (it wasn’t always painted white, after all!). We hunted in the basement rafters for the bell that was connected to a buzzer in the dining room floor that allowed our guests’ father to summon the maid silently and unobtrusively (lost, unfortunately, to the ages). We even learned about where the stones in our dry-stack walls came from (an old barn foundation in Beaver County). Mostly, though, we learned that happiness is contagious—the joy these four siblings and their families felt at being “back home” radiated from them, coming off their smiling faces in waves as constant as the ones that lap at the sandy shore of the beach. We felt honored to be a part of such a happy moment in time.
After our visitors left for their reunion dinner, we walked out to watch the sun sink down below the hills beyond the high school. As we passed under the oak tree that was already old when our house was built, we spotted, growing up through the sad remains of those deer-munched Japanese Painted ferns, new growth—barely-there, tightly-wound, vibrant green fronds. The fiddleheads were tiny and vulnerable, but evidence, nonetheless, that the Buddha was right: perennials and fond memories, like happiness, never decrease by being shared.
-- Siddhartha Gautama, founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.
We’ve been sharing a lot lately, up on the hill. Despite D’s best efforts, we’re “sharing” some of our newest perennials with the deer, rabbits, and now, a groundhog. The freshly-planted Japanese Painted ferns got mysteriously smaller over the course of a weekend, and by the time I checked on them Monday after work, poof!, they were gone—“shared” right out of existence. Then, a similar mystery with the glowing orange-red blossoms on our spindly young ‘Tiki Torch’ coneflowers. Big, fat, promising buds one day, gnawed stubs the next. Ditto the hakone grass and the toad lilies.
All these plants are old stand-bys for gardeners who have problems with deer, so it was an unexpected (and unwelcomed!) mystery when we found their sad chewed-off remains. Seems like D’s ultra-smelly putrescent-egg-and-garlic deer repellant doesn’t work so well with groundhogs and rabbits. And apparently the deer have never read the plant care tags that feature a drawing of an innocent-looking doe inside a circle with a red line drawn through it, meant to lull lazy gardeners like us into believing we can outfox a hungry buck or a fawn with an experimental appetite.
Luckily, we’ve shared some of our flora with the local fauna a bit more willingly, as well. Never in the years we’ve been gardening have we had so many butterflies sharing the nectar of the weigelas and buddleias and nasturtiums. And flocks of hummingbirds are helping themselves to the scarlet blooms that the coral bells send up on waving stems. The tiny birds move so fast that the dog doesn’t even have a chance to bark—by the time she recognizes their presence, they’ve moved on, leaving her with a puzzled look and a sotto voce growl.
But the sharing we’re most excited about didn’t involve wildlife. Over Independence Day weekend, we hosted the four children whose parents built our house back in 1941. Living all over the country now, they were coming to town for their school reunion, and reached out to see if we’d consider letting them stop by their old home.
“Of course!” Every gardener and home renovator’s dream: a willing audience, with some history to share. So, for the next two weeks we spent our free time weeding and tidying, painting and planting. And when they finally walked up the drive, it was as if Acorn Hill understood—the gardens looked their loveliest, the house seemed to open its arms in welcome, and the weather was perfect: the golden sunshine of late afternoon, blue skies, no humidity. Positively un-Pittsburgh for July.
We ended up, counting the kids and grandkids, spouses and neighbors, a group of 16; and for the next hour and a half, there were at least three concurrent conversations occurring at any given time, along with photographs from seven decades passing between eager hands, and an entire set of the home’s original blue prints spread out on the kitchen counter.
We learned some wonderful details about the house and the family who lived in it when it was new (it wasn’t always painted white, after all!). We hunted in the basement rafters for the bell that was connected to a buzzer in the dining room floor that allowed our guests’ father to summon the maid silently and unobtrusively (lost, unfortunately, to the ages). We even learned about where the stones in our dry-stack walls came from (an old barn foundation in Beaver County). Mostly, though, we learned that happiness is contagious—the joy these four siblings and their families felt at being “back home” radiated from them, coming off their smiling faces in waves as constant as the ones that lap at the sandy shore of the beach. We felt honored to be a part of such a happy moment in time.
After our visitors left for their reunion dinner, we walked out to watch the sun sink down below the hills beyond the high school. As we passed under the oak tree that was already old when our house was built, we spotted, growing up through the sad remains of those deer-munched Japanese Painted ferns, new growth—barely-there, tightly-wound, vibrant green fronds. The fiddleheads were tiny and vulnerable, but evidence, nonetheless, that the Buddha was right: perennials and fond memories, like happiness, never decrease by being shared.
July 2010
You'll fly away, but take my hand until that day.
So when they ask how far love goes,
when my job's done, you'll be the one who knows.
It’s almost ten o’clock at night, and the midsummer sun’s remnants are still visible on the horizon behind the hill. I’m watching thousands of fireflies light up the garden around me, like an entire constellation of stars, winking at me from the universe of our garden. I’m perched, like some intergalactic traveler, on a garden bench that commemorates the 39th wedding anniversary of our dear friends; we inherited it when they passed away, just days short of their 60th anniversary together. Behind me, a crazy rooster statue stands sentinel—a gift from my father in recognition of my desire (that D assures me will go unfulfilled) to have a flock of urban chickens.
The beauty of the night, coupled with the wine from dinner and the recent convergence of Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, and my dad’s birthday, have me thinking about all those relationships that touch and form our lives. Parents, siblings, neighbors and friends. Children, or in our case, nieces and nephews. Each of those bonds form us, just like the stars formed images of hunters and scorpions and water dippers for our ancestors anxious to find meaning in the world around them. Like those ancients, we’re all looking to understand our place in the greater scheme of things—family, community, the cosmos.
Time it was I had a dream, and you're the dream come true.
If I had the world to give, I'd give it all to you.
I'll take you to the mountains; I will take you to the sea.
I'll show you how this life became a miracle to me.
D has lost both of his parents now. I sense his loss on certain days, at certain hours, by the look in his eyes. Last weekend, I ran into an old acquaintance at a party, and she told me her father was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, and that her mother had fallen and broken a hip; so my friend and her husband moved her parents from Florida back to Pittsburgh, into my friend’s home. “We thought there were just days left for Dad; he wasn’t eating and his body was shutting down. But once we got him up here and set up with hospice, he rebounded.” Indeed, he looked robust and healthy sitting at a picnic table under a canopy at the party. But I saw the ambivalence—born of a deep love for her father—in my friend’s eyes. Her father was gone, and had been gone from her and her family for years because of the effects of his disease. And yet, there he was. And yet…
All the things you treasure most will be the hardest won.
I will watch you struggle long before the answers come.
But I won't make it harder--I'll be there to cheer you on.
I'll shine the light that guides you down the road you're walking on.
I start counting the myriad fireflies, whispering grateful prayers for the positive influence my parents have always had on me and my family with each tiny twinkle I count. I remember a note I received not long ago from a former neighbor, gently taking me to task for an unkindness that I’d committed in this space a few months back. She wrote as a mother looking out for her child. Never mind that the child is old enough to have children of her own. A parent’s work—or a friend’s, a son’s, a partner’s—is never done. Our bonds and obligations to each other travel with us throughout our lives. And beyond. Out into the now-dark summer sky. Above the invisible clouds, through the thinning atmosphere, into the great beyond.
Before the mountains call to you, before you leave this home,
I want to teach your heart to trust, as I will teach my own.
But sometimes I will ask the moon where it shined upon you last,
and shake my head and laugh and say, “It all went by so fast.”
You'll fly away, but take my hand until that day.
So when they ask how far love goes,
when my job's done, you'll be the one who knows.
--The One Who Knows by Dar Williams, American singer/songwriter
So when they ask how far love goes,
when my job's done, you'll be the one who knows.
It’s almost ten o’clock at night, and the midsummer sun’s remnants are still visible on the horizon behind the hill. I’m watching thousands of fireflies light up the garden around me, like an entire constellation of stars, winking at me from the universe of our garden. I’m perched, like some intergalactic traveler, on a garden bench that commemorates the 39th wedding anniversary of our dear friends; we inherited it when they passed away, just days short of their 60th anniversary together. Behind me, a crazy rooster statue stands sentinel—a gift from my father in recognition of my desire (that D assures me will go unfulfilled) to have a flock of urban chickens.
The beauty of the night, coupled with the wine from dinner and the recent convergence of Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, and my dad’s birthday, have me thinking about all those relationships that touch and form our lives. Parents, siblings, neighbors and friends. Children, or in our case, nieces and nephews. Each of those bonds form us, just like the stars formed images of hunters and scorpions and water dippers for our ancestors anxious to find meaning in the world around them. Like those ancients, we’re all looking to understand our place in the greater scheme of things—family, community, the cosmos.
Time it was I had a dream, and you're the dream come true.
If I had the world to give, I'd give it all to you.
I'll take you to the mountains; I will take you to the sea.
I'll show you how this life became a miracle to me.
D has lost both of his parents now. I sense his loss on certain days, at certain hours, by the look in his eyes. Last weekend, I ran into an old acquaintance at a party, and she told me her father was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, and that her mother had fallen and broken a hip; so my friend and her husband moved her parents from Florida back to Pittsburgh, into my friend’s home. “We thought there were just days left for Dad; he wasn’t eating and his body was shutting down. But once we got him up here and set up with hospice, he rebounded.” Indeed, he looked robust and healthy sitting at a picnic table under a canopy at the party. But I saw the ambivalence—born of a deep love for her father—in my friend’s eyes. Her father was gone, and had been gone from her and her family for years because of the effects of his disease. And yet, there he was. And yet…
All the things you treasure most will be the hardest won.
I will watch you struggle long before the answers come.
But I won't make it harder--I'll be there to cheer you on.
I'll shine the light that guides you down the road you're walking on.
I start counting the myriad fireflies, whispering grateful prayers for the positive influence my parents have always had on me and my family with each tiny twinkle I count. I remember a note I received not long ago from a former neighbor, gently taking me to task for an unkindness that I’d committed in this space a few months back. She wrote as a mother looking out for her child. Never mind that the child is old enough to have children of her own. A parent’s work—or a friend’s, a son’s, a partner’s—is never done. Our bonds and obligations to each other travel with us throughout our lives. And beyond. Out into the now-dark summer sky. Above the invisible clouds, through the thinning atmosphere, into the great beyond.
Before the mountains call to you, before you leave this home,
I want to teach your heart to trust, as I will teach my own.
But sometimes I will ask the moon where it shined upon you last,
and shake my head and laugh and say, “It all went by so fast.”
You'll fly away, but take my hand until that day.
So when they ask how far love goes,
when my job's done, you'll be the one who knows.
--The One Who Knows by Dar Williams, American singer/songwriter
June 2010
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, author and Nobel Prize winner
We’re ready for some warm nights, up on the hill. The cold and wet start to May has set our tomato harvest back a few weeks. Along with some other garden favorites, tomatoes relish the heat, and May’s late-season frost warnings meant waiting to get our little plot growing. True, if we were a bit more industrious, we could have had several harvests of cool-weather greens by now, but somehow, it is the globular beauty of tomatoes and eggplants and peppers that spur us on to double dig and weed and water. All that work for some leaf lettuce? Not so much.
Last year, we joined a CSA—community-supported agriculture. From Memorial Day to
Thanksgiving, I stop on my way home from work and pick up a box filled to the brim with fresh produce grown just to the north of us. Our first season kicked off with beautiful tiny spinach leaves and crazy-curled garlic scapes, a Seussical-looking cross between garlic and scallion. New potatoes, raspberries, rhubarb followed. Mesclun, pencil-thin asparagus, golf-ball sized beets in a treasure-chest array of colors. Corn, acorn squash, heirloom tomatoes, even some peaches. Tasty treats for weeks on end. The real fun is that the contents of the box remain a mystery until they’re getting unpacked; standing in the kitchen, up to our elbows in produce, we puzzle over the coming week’s menus, trying to figure out ways to incorporate all the bounty we’ve just cleaned and sorted.
Now, it won’t surprise many that I’m a vegetarian. Given my penchant for trees over asphalt, and my willingness to carry bugs outside instead of relegating them to the heel of D’s shoe, it isn’t a shock that I gave up eating animals some time ago. It was right around the time we got the dog, actually. She bounded, full-tilt, into our lives, overflowing with joie de vivre. Call it anthropomorphism, I don’t care: she wears her emotions on her sleeve every bit as clearly as I do mine. It doesn’t take a clinical psychologist to tell when she’s happy or sad, scared or feisty. When I get mail from my mother, the dog goes crazy sniffing the envelope. Just that one—no others. Whatever vestige of Mom that remains on the mail sets the dog’s tail wagging and her feet dancing, just as if my mother were in the room.
So, witnessing the dog’s small life up close, filled with the same sorts of emotions that I feel, it wasn’t much of a leap to stop one day and consider who else might share a life of the mind. Accounts by people who keep pigs almost always contain at least one story bearing witness to their intelligence (the pigs, I mean). If dogs and pigs, how not chickens and cows? And fish? Yes. All, in my opinion, possess too much of what Singer calls “the spark of the divine” for me to justify killing them for food. While the food web depends on animals eating other animals, my survival does not—I can choose, and do, to find other sources of nutrition. That’s not to say I don’t miss bacon. But when I remember that bacon = pig, it becomes easier to bear the loss.
In the beginning of my vegetarianism, it was “no food with a face.” Eventually, inevitably, it expanded to encompass all animals—even mussels, a pretty integral part of moules frites, my favorite meal ever. My choice isn’t for everyone, and I understand that. D still enjoys fish with a vengeance. And even he used to chafe a bit when I’d explain “I don’t eat animals” to servers in restaurants. “Why not just say, ‘I don’t eat meat?’ ” he’d ask, with some exasperation. Partly because that led to the inevitable string of questions: How about chicken? No? Okay, what about fish? Better just to cut to the chase: I don’t eat any animals.
But part of me, I admit, wants that slightly-shocked reaction from people. We’ve made it easy to forget that the primary ingredients of Big Macs and gyros and hot dogs are really cows and lambs and, well, whatever animal parts hot dogs are made out of. “I don’t eat animals” is a reminder. So, like Isaac Bashevis Singer and his chickens, I’ll stick with the box of produce and leave the animals off my menu. I just wish someone could come up with a tofu mussel. Or at least a bacon-scented air freshener. Now that would get my tail wagging.
(For those interested in more information about Community Supported Agriculture and how to join a produce pick-up program, click here.)
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, author and Nobel Prize winner
We’re ready for some warm nights, up on the hill. The cold and wet start to May has set our tomato harvest back a few weeks. Along with some other garden favorites, tomatoes relish the heat, and May’s late-season frost warnings meant waiting to get our little plot growing. True, if we were a bit more industrious, we could have had several harvests of cool-weather greens by now, but somehow, it is the globular beauty of tomatoes and eggplants and peppers that spur us on to double dig and weed and water. All that work for some leaf lettuce? Not so much.
Last year, we joined a CSA—community-supported agriculture. From Memorial Day to
Thanksgiving, I stop on my way home from work and pick up a box filled to the brim with fresh produce grown just to the north of us. Our first season kicked off with beautiful tiny spinach leaves and crazy-curled garlic scapes, a Seussical-looking cross between garlic and scallion. New potatoes, raspberries, rhubarb followed. Mesclun, pencil-thin asparagus, golf-ball sized beets in a treasure-chest array of colors. Corn, acorn squash, heirloom tomatoes, even some peaches. Tasty treats for weeks on end. The real fun is that the contents of the box remain a mystery until they’re getting unpacked; standing in the kitchen, up to our elbows in produce, we puzzle over the coming week’s menus, trying to figure out ways to incorporate all the bounty we’ve just cleaned and sorted.Now, it won’t surprise many that I’m a vegetarian. Given my penchant for trees over asphalt, and my willingness to carry bugs outside instead of relegating them to the heel of D’s shoe, it isn’t a shock that I gave up eating animals some time ago. It was right around the time we got the dog, actually. She bounded, full-tilt, into our lives, overflowing with joie de vivre. Call it anthropomorphism, I don’t care: she wears her emotions on her sleeve every bit as clearly as I do mine. It doesn’t take a clinical psychologist to tell when she’s happy or sad, scared or feisty. When I get mail from my mother, the dog goes crazy sniffing the envelope. Just that one—no others. Whatever vestige of Mom that remains on the mail sets the dog’s tail wagging and her feet dancing, just as if my mother were in the room.
So, witnessing the dog’s small life up close, filled with the same sorts of emotions that I feel, it wasn’t much of a leap to stop one day and consider who else might share a life of the mind. Accounts by people who keep pigs almost always contain at least one story bearing witness to their intelligence (the pigs, I mean). If dogs and pigs, how not chickens and cows? And fish? Yes. All, in my opinion, possess too much of what Singer calls “the spark of the divine” for me to justify killing them for food. While the food web depends on animals eating other animals, my survival does not—I can choose, and do, to find other sources of nutrition. That’s not to say I don’t miss bacon. But when I remember that bacon = pig, it becomes easier to bear the loss.
In the beginning of my vegetarianism, it was “no food with a face.” Eventually, inevitably, it expanded to encompass all animals—even mussels, a pretty integral part of moules frites, my favorite meal ever. My choice isn’t for everyone, and I understand that. D still enjoys fish with a vengeance. And even he used to chafe a bit when I’d explain “I don’t eat animals” to servers in restaurants. “Why not just say, ‘I don’t eat meat?’ ” he’d ask, with some exasperation. Partly because that led to the inevitable string of questions: How about chicken? No? Okay, what about fish? Better just to cut to the chase: I don’t eat any animals.
But part of me, I admit, wants that slightly-shocked reaction from people. We’ve made it easy to forget that the primary ingredients of Big Macs and gyros and hot dogs are really cows and lambs and, well, whatever animal parts hot dogs are made out of. “I don’t eat animals” is a reminder. So, like Isaac Bashevis Singer and his chickens, I’ll stick with the box of produce and leave the animals off my menu. I just wish someone could come up with a tofu mussel. Or at least a bacon-scented air freshener. Now that would get my tail wagging.
(For those interested in more information about Community Supported Agriculture and how to join a produce pick-up program, click here.)
Spring
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
We’re spinning broken records lately, up on the hill. Not the Michael Phelps or Sidney Crosby kind of broken records, but the kind that skip and jump, repeating the same snippet of scratchy music over and over. Coming home from work the other day, yet another section of scrubby undergrowth along the country club road had been bull-dozed, leaving the same sort of ugly destruction that has become all too common around our community. I may start taking the longer way round, just to avoid this latest round of carnage.
While D does many nice things for me—chief among them, a home-made cappuccino every morning—perhaps the nicest was introducing me to a whole genre of music that I was too young to experience when it was new. Our iPods and stereo cabinet overflow with Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen. Something about these singer-songwriters, with their smart and literate lyrics and folk-inspired melodies, struck a chord with me. Hearing them for the first time was a revelation, and over the years, I have memorized album after album, just like a junior high kid. The fact that so many of the songs deal with the turmoil of the 60s—Viet Nam, the environment, civil rights—gives a lot of the music more than a tinge of sadness. Hopelessness, even. Now, with fifty years’ worth of hindsight, that sadness has become a burnished melancholy, which fits my approaching-middle-age world view pretty well.
So, last week, when I rounded the corner and saw wild crabapple and pear trees in full bloom, covered in white and pink blossoms, but hacked off at the ground and lying on their sides, helter-skelter over a multi-acre space, Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” popped into my head immediately. We’ve picked yet another patch of flowers—when will we learn? The fact that the trees were strewn like bodies on a battlefield made a later verse of the song all the more fitting:
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one--
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Some may have looked at the parcel of land and seen nothing but a weedy, littered patch, ripe for yet another McMansion. But it was a rare natural spot along that increasingly busy road, a tiny wild refuge for flying and crawling and hopping things, and now it’s gone. I know, I know, “It held a handful of rabbits. What’s the big deal?” Yeah, a bunch of bunnies. A dozen or so tribes of Native Americans. A few thousand Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica. The Inca and Mayan empires. Entire species of animals. Six million Jews and 11 million other non-Aryans. It adds up. The bunnies add up.
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
Where Have All the Flowers Gone --Pete Seeger, 1961
Girls have picked them every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
We’re spinning broken records lately, up on the hill. Not the Michael Phelps or Sidney Crosby kind of broken records, but the kind that skip and jump, repeating the same snippet of scratchy music over and over. Coming home from work the other day, yet another section of scrubby undergrowth along the country club road had been bull-dozed, leaving the same sort of ugly destruction that has become all too common around our community. I may start taking the longer way round, just to avoid this latest round of carnage.
While D does many nice things for me—chief among them, a home-made cappuccino every morning—perhaps the nicest was introducing me to a whole genre of music that I was too young to experience when it was new. Our iPods and stereo cabinet overflow with Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen. Something about these singer-songwriters, with their smart and literate lyrics and folk-inspired melodies, struck a chord with me. Hearing them for the first time was a revelation, and over the years, I have memorized album after album, just like a junior high kid. The fact that so many of the songs deal with the turmoil of the 60s—Viet Nam, the environment, civil rights—gives a lot of the music more than a tinge of sadness. Hopelessness, even. Now, with fifty years’ worth of hindsight, that sadness has become a burnished melancholy, which fits my approaching-middle-age world view pretty well.
So, last week, when I rounded the corner and saw wild crabapple and pear trees in full bloom, covered in white and pink blossoms, but hacked off at the ground and lying on their sides, helter-skelter over a multi-acre space, Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” popped into my head immediately. We’ve picked yet another patch of flowers—when will we learn? The fact that the trees were strewn like bodies on a battlefield made a later verse of the song all the more fitting:
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one--
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Some may have looked at the parcel of land and seen nothing but a weedy, littered patch, ripe for yet another McMansion. But it was a rare natural spot along that increasingly busy road, a tiny wild refuge for flying and crawling and hopping things, and now it’s gone. I know, I know, “It held a handful of rabbits. What’s the big deal?” Yeah, a bunch of bunnies. A dozen or so tribes of Native Americans. A few thousand Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica. The Inca and Mayan empires. Entire species of animals. Six million Jews and 11 million other non-Aryans. It adds up. The bunnies add up.
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
Where Have All the Flowers Gone --Pete Seeger, 1961
UGH--I've been hacked.
If you've received an odd email from me recently, please delete it without opening. Seems that some hacker infiltrated my email contact list and went to work offering all of you free Zocor, a breast enhancement, or tax-free income--perhaps even all three. If you'd like my new email address, click here.
Sorry for the hassle. And sorry I can't fulfill your order for that Zocor, but I do have $1.8 million in an account in the Democratic Republic of Congo that I can transfer to you if you'll send me your routing number...
Sorry for the hassle. And sorry I can't fulfill your order for that Zocor, but I do have $1.8 million in an account in the Democratic Republic of Congo that I can transfer to you if you'll send me your routing number...
February 2010
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
-- Virginia Woolf
-- Virginia Woolf
The snowstorms this winter have kept an almost-constant mantle of white over the muddy and leaf-strewn ground, hiding the season’s naked disarray with a beautiful, albeit tiresome, blanket. On those mornings when a fresh layer of snow coincides with a bright blue sky and shining sun, the absolute pristine loveliness stops us in our tracks. The snow-covered spruces and pines look almost lush—their waxy blues and deep, deep greens all the more vibrant for being weighted down with brilliant white. The leaf-bare shrubs are hidden under undulating drifts, giving everything a plumpness and fullness, like some frigid-but-bountiful jungle.
But when we look closer, we see the snapped-off branches and split trunks that the heavy
snows have caused. And while the icicles dangling from everyone’s rooflines are story-book quaint, the damage they cause to property and person are anything but. After the big snowfall a few weeks back, we and our neighbors lost power for six days. Our little street was cut off from the rest of the world—quite literally—by downed trees and power lines, so no plows or landscaping crews could dig us out.D, the dog, and I toughed it out for two nights. The second evening, when the chilly house got dark at sunset, we sat in the den under heavy blankets, staring out the windows at the beautiful but damaged garden. The full moon reflecting off the snowy lawn lit up the house and sent huge shadows around the bedroom, like a klieg light at some movie premier. It was so bright I felt I’d be able to read by nothing but moonlight if I tried. Instead, I went from window to window, gazing out at our familiar garden, now suddenly exotic and broken, bathed in blue light and backlit by a moon the size of the sun.
On the morning of the third day without power and heat, it didn’t take long for us to decide that we’d hike out to the main road with the dog and some hastily-packed belongings, where D’s sister could pick us up and take us to her place. Once ensconced in her warm house with a television playing in the background and coffee brewing in the kitchen, we realized how undone we’d become when we were deprived of heat and power and mobility for three short days. The items we chose to bring, and those we left behind, were a testament to how disheveled our thinking was. That night, lying comfortable and safe, I imagined how poorly we would have fared had we been shivering in a crude lean-to, or some other hastily-built shelter high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the way the 87 pioneers who became known as the Donner Party must have done during the unending nightmare winter of 1846-1847.
Patrick Breen, an Irish immigrant who, with his wife Margaret; sons John, Edward, Patrick, Simon, James, and Peter; and infant daughter Martha, survived the horrors of that winter, documented their plight in short diary entries between November and March. His words, like those of Virginia Woolf, speak to the duality of the natural world—at once both beautiful and cruel:
November 30th Monday. Snowing fast. About 4 or 5 feet deep, no drifts. Looks as likely to continue as when it commenced. No living thing without wings can get about.
December 10th Thursday. Snowed fast all night with heavy squalls of wind. Continues still to snow, the sun peeping through the clouds once in about three hours…looks likely to continue snowing. Don't know the depth of the snow-- maybe 7 feet.
December 25th Began to snow yesterday about 12 o’clock and snowed all night and snows yet rapidly. Great difficulty in getting wood—John & Edwd. has to get. I am not able. Offered our prayers to God this Christmas morning. The prospect is appalling but hope in God. Amen.
December 31st Last of the year, may we with God’s help spend the coming year better than the past, which we propose to do if Almighty God will deliver us from our present dreadful situation… Looks like another snow storm. Snow storms are dreadful to us. Snow very deep…
January 13th Snowing fast, higher than the shanty--must be 13 feet deep… dreadful to look at.
February 12th A warm thawy morning. We hope, with the assistance of Almighty God, to be able to live to see the bare surface of the earth once more. O God of Mercy grant it, if it be thy holy will, Amen.
February 26th Froze hard last night. Martha’s jaw swelled with the toothache. Hungry times in camp… Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don’t [think] that she has done so yet, it is distressing. The Donnos… commenced to eat the dead people four days ago. They did not succeed that day or next in finding their cattle, then under ten or twelve feet of snow...
March 1st So fine and pleasant. Froze hard last night. Ten [rescuers] arrived this morning from Bear Valley with provisions; we are to start in two or three days [to descend the mountain toward civilization]. There is amongst them some old ones who say the snow will be here until June.
The suffocating snow, the unrelenting cold, and the unmitigated sadness that underscores these terse entries bear witness to Mr. Breen’s realization that nature pays no heed to rank or position, nor to any of man’s contrivances of self-importance. The members of the Donner Party knew, in a very personal way, the ravaging beauty of nature. That something as lovely and delicate as snowflakes can force good people into unthinkable acts, is a striking dissonance.
After six days we got our central heating and four wheel drive back; the house and garden didn’t escape unscathed, but we were thankful, nonetheless—others in our neighborhood fared far worse. But the Donner Party had little other than each other. Just the elements and man’s poor protection from them. And the necessity of choosing between unacceptable alternatives—what Woolf would call “anguish that cuts the heart asunder.” And yet, the membrane that keeps Woolf’s two beauties—laughter and anguish—apart can be surprisingly thin. As thin today as it was in 1847.
January 2010
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
--Ecclesiastes III, i
Christmastide is over, up on the hill. The headlong holiday rush starts with Thanksgiving, picks up speed all through December, and finally sputters out sometime in mid-January when the garland and wreaths come down, the Christmas tree is stripped bare, and the big red lanterns that welcomed guests are taken off their sentry posts along the gate and relegated to their dark cellar shelf for another eleven months.
This year, after weeks of bitter weather, we were blessed with a balmy
Saturday afternoon custom-made for de-decorating the outside of the house. Once those exterior decorations were down, the spell was broken, the holidays over. Down came the tree, the snowman cookie jar, the mistletoe. The crèches were carefully packed up, the dog’s jingle-bell collar tucked away, and the poinsettia chucked onto the compost pile. By Sunday night, the house was a leaner, and cleaner, version of itself. Now, if we could just work that same deductive magic with the weight we put on over the past month.
January’s fierce cold and snow has turned us into semi-hibernators—we come home from work in the gathering gloom, throw together dinner, grab the nearest pair of fleece pants, and grudgingly settle in for our long winter’s nap. Saturday’s reappearance of the sun improved our outlook somewhat—it always amazes me how restorative those sunbeams can be—but no matter how kind the weather patterns be, we’re in for more clouds than sun over these next months, and the idea of it is a little draining.
D is faithful in his campaign against the deer—he sprays his foul-smelling repellent on our trees and shrubs every week, all year long. And I make periodic trips to the compost pile and bird feeders. But neither we nor the dog spend any real time outside now. We hustle from house to garage to work, reversing the dance steps nine hours later. The dog does her thing outside with record-breaking speed, a model of efficiency. Even at the weekend, we busy ourselves with interior chores. My desire to have my hands in the soil is still strong, but my desire to be warm and dry is stronger. So, between the rich excesses of the holiday meals and our decreased activity level, it is no wonder that we three, like a cave full of brown bears, have added a layer of fat to get us through the winter.
Most winters, we have a trip to some sunny destination to pull us through the short days and long dark nights of January. This year, though, we’ve opted to forego the travel and concentrate on getting some work down to the house. Knowing we won’t have to don swimming trunks and parade half-naked in front of strangers poolside adds to the lack of motivation to exercise away those sugar plums and gingerbread.
So, here is my resolution for 2010, three weeks late, but my resolution nonetheless: I resolve to take the winter for what it is—a cold, housebound stretch of days—and let my body react as it will. No more self-recriminations for not awaking at dawn for a five-mile run through the dark and frigid streets. No self-loathing for the reminiscences of countless Christmas cookies enjoyed. Instead, I’ll patiently await the time of the year that sees us more active and out-of-doors lugging, digging, hauling, bending, sprinting, sweating. I resolve to accept that there is a purpose for this time of year, that this season imparts its own set of blessings—more cloistered and sedentary than other seasons, but important nonetheless for their regenerative powers.
And in resolving to accept them, I can enjoy these next months more, knowing that the time to plant and laugh and dance lies ahead.
--Ecclesiastes III, i
Christmastide is over, up on the hill. The headlong holiday rush starts with Thanksgiving, picks up speed all through December, and finally sputters out sometime in mid-January when the garland and wreaths come down, the Christmas tree is stripped bare, and the big red lanterns that welcomed guests are taken off their sentry posts along the gate and relegated to their dark cellar shelf for another eleven months.
This year, after weeks of bitter weather, we were blessed with a balmy
Saturday afternoon custom-made for de-decorating the outside of the house. Once those exterior decorations were down, the spell was broken, the holidays over. Down came the tree, the snowman cookie jar, the mistletoe. The crèches were carefully packed up, the dog’s jingle-bell collar tucked away, and the poinsettia chucked onto the compost pile. By Sunday night, the house was a leaner, and cleaner, version of itself. Now, if we could just work that same deductive magic with the weight we put on over the past month.
January’s fierce cold and snow has turned us into semi-hibernators—we come home from work in the gathering gloom, throw together dinner, grab the nearest pair of fleece pants, and grudgingly settle in for our long winter’s nap. Saturday’s reappearance of the sun improved our outlook somewhat—it always amazes me how restorative those sunbeams can be—but no matter how kind the weather patterns be, we’re in for more clouds than sun over these next months, and the idea of it is a little draining.
D is faithful in his campaign against the deer—he sprays his foul-smelling repellent on our trees and shrubs every week, all year long. And I make periodic trips to the compost pile and bird feeders. But neither we nor the dog spend any real time outside now. We hustle from house to garage to work, reversing the dance steps nine hours later. The dog does her thing outside with record-breaking speed, a model of efficiency. Even at the weekend, we busy ourselves with interior chores. My desire to have my hands in the soil is still strong, but my desire to be warm and dry is stronger. So, between the rich excesses of the holiday meals and our decreased activity level, it is no wonder that we three, like a cave full of brown bears, have added a layer of fat to get us through the winter.
Most winters, we have a trip to some sunny destination to pull us through the short days and long dark nights of January. This year, though, we’ve opted to forego the travel and concentrate on getting some work down to the house. Knowing we won’t have to don swimming trunks and parade half-naked in front of strangers poolside adds to the lack of motivation to exercise away those sugar plums and gingerbread.
So, here is my resolution for 2010, three weeks late, but my resolution nonetheless: I resolve to take the winter for what it is—a cold, housebound stretch of days—and let my body react as it will. No more self-recriminations for not awaking at dawn for a five-mile run through the dark and frigid streets. No self-loathing for the reminiscences of countless Christmas cookies enjoyed. Instead, I’ll patiently await the time of the year that sees us more active and out-of-doors lugging, digging, hauling, bending, sprinting, sweating. I resolve to accept that there is a purpose for this time of year, that this season imparts its own set of blessings—more cloistered and sedentary than other seasons, but important nonetheless for their regenerative powers.
And in resolving to accept them, I can enjoy these next months more, knowing that the time to plant and laugh and dance lies ahead.
Autumn
At last count, we had 86 trees up on the hill. Of that number, we’ve planted all but a dozen, which were well into their maturity by the time we came on the scene. The Chinquapin oak and American elm (Ulmus americanus) I’ve written about (over and over), but we also have a beautifully-gnarled honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos); a pair of swamp maples (Acer saccarinum) that are, along with property taxes, the bane of D’s existence; and two sets of triplets: three Fraser firs (Abies fraseri) and three Alberta spruces (Picea glauca). There are also a few straggly chokecherries (Prunus virginianus), some decrepit Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana) and a towering Catalpa that inexplicably sent one of its huge branches crashing to the ground the morning D’s mother died.
The rest of the trees that surround the house are our handiwork. They represent an insane amount of time, effort, and income, so we just don’t think about what we’ve invested over the years. I've enjoyed every hole I’ve dug, and love looking out of the second floor windows at the spreading branches of our arboreal family. With the exception of a tricolor beech (Fagus sylvatica) that got mauled early on by some young bucks rubbing the fuzz of their adolescent antlers, and a Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) that has been dying a slow death ever since we planted it the summer after we moved in, we’ve had great luck with our trees.
Rosslyn Farms has a staggering number of species represented in its tree cover. From our house we can see all sorts of flowering ornamental fruit trees, evergreens of every shade, a monumental Ginko biloba, and magnolias of all sorts. Not many communities in the northeast can boast of having elms; here’s hoping that Charlie’s efforts this summer will save the remaining specimens for future generations.
And that’s what trees represent to me: hope for, and belief in, a future where the earth and its inhabitants are able to enjoy the wonders of nature, the way I have been able to enjoy them. Clean air and water (at least relatively); hospitable seasons, by and large; species and varieties of flora and fauna just awaiting closer inspection. With every tree that goes in the ground of our hill, I think about those faceless future generations who might take shelter under their boughs on a hot July afternoon or gather up the colorful leaves that fall from their October branches. I try and picture the esplanade of weeping crabapples (Malus floribunda) that our neighbor told us she used to play under with the daughter of the original owners of our house, before there was a high school, or even a parkway, outside our doors.
I love this time of year, when even the most prosaic of trees gets the chance to shine a bit. On my way to work, I'm treated to a scarlet splash here and there on the hillsides I pass. The Katsura tree outside my office window will, overnight, turn John Deere yellow, making my colleagues stop in their tracks and look at it—really look at it—for the first time all season. That Katsura, and all its relatives, deserves a few seconds of attention. It and its brethren breathe out oxygen, the oxygen the rest of the planet needs to survive. And they absorb some of the stuff in the atmosphere that would otherwise slowly choke our world to death.
So go ahead, hug a tree. Hug the next one you see—it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. That tree adds to the beauty and health of our world. Besides, “tree-hugger” has such a nice ring to it.
The rest of the trees that surround the house are our handiwork. They represent an insane amount of time, effort, and income, so we just don’t think about what we’ve invested over the years. I've enjoyed every hole I’ve dug, and love looking out of the second floor windows at the spreading branches of our arboreal family. With the exception of a tricolor beech (Fagus sylvatica) that got mauled early on by some young bucks rubbing the fuzz of their adolescent antlers, and a Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) that has been dying a slow death ever since we planted it the summer after we moved in, we’ve had great luck with our trees.
Rosslyn Farms has a staggering number of species represented in its tree cover. From our house we can see all sorts of flowering ornamental fruit trees, evergreens of every shade, a monumental Ginko biloba, and magnolias of all sorts. Not many communities in the northeast can boast of having elms; here’s hoping that Charlie’s efforts this summer will save the remaining specimens for future generations.
And that’s what trees represent to me: hope for, and belief in, a future where the earth and its inhabitants are able to enjoy the wonders of nature, the way I have been able to enjoy them. Clean air and water (at least relatively); hospitable seasons, by and large; species and varieties of flora and fauna just awaiting closer inspection. With every tree that goes in the ground of our hill, I think about those faceless future generations who might take shelter under their boughs on a hot July afternoon or gather up the colorful leaves that fall from their October branches. I try and picture the esplanade of weeping crabapples (Malus floribunda) that our neighbor told us she used to play under with the daughter of the original owners of our house, before there was a high school, or even a parkway, outside our doors.
I love this time of year, when even the most prosaic of trees gets the chance to shine a bit. On my way to work, I'm treated to a scarlet splash here and there on the hillsides I pass. The Katsura tree outside my office window will, overnight, turn John Deere yellow, making my colleagues stop in their tracks and look at it—really look at it—for the first time all season. That Katsura, and all its relatives, deserves a few seconds of attention. It and its brethren breathe out oxygen, the oxygen the rest of the planet needs to survive. And they absorb some of the stuff in the atmosphere that would otherwise slowly choke our world to death.
So go ahead, hug a tree. Hug the next one you see—it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. That tree adds to the beauty and health of our world. Besides, “tree-hugger” has such a nice ring to it.
September 2009
My famous last words
Are laying around in tatters,
Sounding absurd, whatever I try.
But I love you,
And that’s all that really matters.
If this is goodbye, if this is goodbye…
It has been a string of goodbyes lately, up on the hill. There’s the end of the lilies, a few colorful blossoms left amidst the yellowing leaves. They look a little forlorn, all their bright raiment surrounded by tattered foliage. But they’re not such good cut flowers—they only last a day, and they spill pollen all over the table tops and mantle—so we leave them where they stand, and say goodbye to another growing season.
Your bright shining sun
Would light up the way before me.
You were the one made me feel I could fly.
And I love you,
Whatever is waiting for me.
If this is goodbye, if this is goodbye…
The summer really winds up right about now, too. We wave goodbye to the quiet, student-less halls at work and ready our classrooms—and nerves—for the return of children. We’ve given up on the idea that we’ll take a ride to the Country Market in Ligonier some Saturday morning, or maybe a long weekend at the Jersey Shore. The time for those sorts of forays is over for another year. It’s back to business. Nose to the grindstone. No more late-night sunsets, viewed from the porch, glass of wine in hand. Even the sun seems to have returned to a more workaday schedule, turning in earlier and earlier each evening.
Who knows how long we’ve got,
Or what we are made of?
Who knows if there’s a plan or not?
But there is our love.
I know there is our love.
These sorts of goodbyes are easy, though. They have built-in hellos—we know that Back-to-School means Christmas is just around the corner. After that, it’s a bit of a slog through some dicey weather, that’s true. But soon enough, frozen brown gives way to fertile green, and we’ve started the whole song over again: lilies and Saturday drives, plans for the beach and sunset glasses of wine.
There are other goodbyes we’ve been making lately that are much harder. They’re the kind that the calendar can’t erase. No built-in hellos. While hard, these goodbyes are still happy, however. We have neighbors moving on to the next phase in their lives—exciting, adventure-filled phases in new homes. We’re sad to lose their presence on our little street and the sense of history that only long-time residents of a place can impart—sad to lose chance meetings in a doorway or at a mailbox. But happy for them, escaping the burdens and drudgery that come with being responsible for keeping up a home. And “we’ll be back,” they tell us. “We’re moving not so far away,” they say. So, while hard, these goodbyes are happy ones. Well, bittersweet rather than happy, truth be told. Fare thee well, friends.
My famous last words
Could never tell our story,
Spinning unheard in the dark of the sky.
But I love you,
And this is our glory.
If this is goodbye, if this is goodbye…
But there’s also been a hard goodbye that isn’t a happy one, or even bittersweet. We’ve lost a neighbor on our little street who hasn’t moved “not so far away”. And she won’t be back for visits. She slipped away from us—just slipped away—leaving us looking down at our empty hands, thinking, “Wait, I was just holding you.” Thinking, “I just heard you laugh.” Thinking, “You mean so much to us.” Blowing us kisses goodbye one day, then gone from us the next.
We study the dear one she left behind, and have to clench our hearts together, so that they don’t fly off in a million broken pieces. He, too, looks down at his empty hands, and we hear his unspoken thoughts—“I was just holding you. I love you. Goodbye.”
If This Is Goodbye
Mark Knopfler, English songwriter
(1949-present)
Are laying around in tatters,
Sounding absurd, whatever I try.
But I love you,
And that’s all that really matters.
If this is goodbye, if this is goodbye…
It has been a string of goodbyes lately, up on the hill. There’s the end of the lilies, a few colorful blossoms left amidst the yellowing leaves. They look a little forlorn, all their bright raiment surrounded by tattered foliage. But they’re not such good cut flowers—they only last a day, and they spill pollen all over the table tops and mantle—so we leave them where they stand, and say goodbye to another growing season.
Your bright shining sun
Would light up the way before me.
You were the one made me feel I could fly.
And I love you,
Whatever is waiting for me.
If this is goodbye, if this is goodbye…
The summer really winds up right about now, too. We wave goodbye to the quiet, student-less halls at work and ready our classrooms—and nerves—for the return of children. We’ve given up on the idea that we’ll take a ride to the Country Market in Ligonier some Saturday morning, or maybe a long weekend at the Jersey Shore. The time for those sorts of forays is over for another year. It’s back to business. Nose to the grindstone. No more late-night sunsets, viewed from the porch, glass of wine in hand. Even the sun seems to have returned to a more workaday schedule, turning in earlier and earlier each evening.
Who knows how long we’ve got,
Or what we are made of?
Who knows if there’s a plan or not?
But there is our love.
I know there is our love.
These sorts of goodbyes are easy, though. They have built-in hellos—we know that Back-to-School means Christmas is just around the corner. After that, it’s a bit of a slog through some dicey weather, that’s true. But soon enough, frozen brown gives way to fertile green, and we’ve started the whole song over again: lilies and Saturday drives, plans for the beach and sunset glasses of wine.
There are other goodbyes we’ve been making lately that are much harder. They’re the kind that the calendar can’t erase. No built-in hellos. While hard, these goodbyes are still happy, however. We have neighbors moving on to the next phase in their lives—exciting, adventure-filled phases in new homes. We’re sad to lose their presence on our little street and the sense of history that only long-time residents of a place can impart—sad to lose chance meetings in a doorway or at a mailbox. But happy for them, escaping the burdens and drudgery that come with being responsible for keeping up a home. And “we’ll be back,” they tell us. “We’re moving not so far away,” they say. So, while hard, these goodbyes are happy ones. Well, bittersweet rather than happy, truth be told. Fare thee well, friends.
My famous last words
Could never tell our story,
Spinning unheard in the dark of the sky.
But I love you,
And this is our glory.
If this is goodbye, if this is goodbye…
But there’s also been a hard goodbye that isn’t a happy one, or even bittersweet. We’ve lost a neighbor on our little street who hasn’t moved “not so far away”. And she won’t be back for visits. She slipped away from us—just slipped away—leaving us looking down at our empty hands, thinking, “Wait, I was just holding you.” Thinking, “I just heard you laugh.” Thinking, “You mean so much to us.” Blowing us kisses goodbye one day, then gone from us the next.
We study the dear one she left behind, and have to clench our hearts together, so that they don’t fly off in a million broken pieces. He, too, looks down at his empty hands, and we hear his unspoken thoughts—“I was just holding you. I love you. Goodbye.”
If This Is Goodbye
Mark Knopfler, English songwriter
(1949-present)
August 2009
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. --Chinese Proverb
Even before we visited in person, this hill held sway over us. The fuzzy, pixilated images on the real estate website captured our imagination. Coming from the city, where our only exposure to nature was our tiny back yard wedged among the shadows of all the close-set homes, the image of a house set high up on a hill seemed almost biblical. Once we’d moved in, the property became like a person to us—alive, responsive, sometimes inscrutable. It exerted such a strong sense of place that naming the house and grounds seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Maybe because D and I don’t share a last name, or maybe because we spent so many weekends in Ligonier, where homes—both grand and humble—sport names instead of street addresses, the idea of naming our house felt right somehow, not silly or highfalutin or twee.
Settling on “Acorn Hill” was easy enough. The huge Chinquapin Oak that towers over the yard sends down showers of tiny acorns every other autumn. (They sprout the summer after they fall, pushing up hundreds of baby oaks that we diligently pluck out of the garden beds, for fear of turning our acre into Sherwood Forest; between the oak and the maples, we could start our own timber company, given enough time.) It wasn’t long till we started receiving acorn gifts: birdhouses fashioned into oversized acorns, acorn-shaped candles, table linens with acorns embroidered on them. We have a porcelain acorn platter from Ireland and sterling-covered acorns in a silver maple-leaf bowl. We even have an acorn garden sculpture the size of Mini Cooper. And we love them all. It is as if the name was there all along, patiently awaiting someone to speak it aloud.
Once the property was named, we began, like all other fledgling gardeners, to fill it with plants, learning their names as we went. Some were easy: we already knew the vine on the
back trellis was wisteria and the shrubs lining the drive were peonies. We learned that the beds along the north border were lined with dozens of huge old mock orange and honeysuckles, but not until after we’d spent a king’s ransom on a crop of spindly, puny mock orange plants from some fancy New England nursery’s catalog. We learned the names of the ancient trees, then fretted like old grannies over the elm at the top of the driveway—how did it manage to escape Dutch Elm disease; what would happen if it died; how would we ever live without it? Despite its robust and stately appearance, hand-wringing commenced immediately upon learning that tree’s name.
Gradually, we realized that common plant names aren’t always enough. We grew plants that didn’t do what we expected—grew too large, bloomed in unexpected colors, died without explanation—until we learned that not all viburnums are created equal. We swallowed hard, girded our loins, and jumped in to learning binomial taxonomy—the dreaded Latin botanical names. Discovering that there are hundreds of species of the genus Viburnum, each with its own characteristics, explained a lot.
But the names that have come to matter most to us don’t belong to house or plant. The most important names that the hill taught us are the names of people: kind, generous, welcoming neighbors. Learning those names helped us become part of the personality of this place, rather than just observers of it. Eventually, like our plants, we put down roots, blossomed in unexpected colors, and flourished. Not every day is a balmy June afternoon; sometimes it’s a frigid midnight in February. But no matter, it’s all part of living on the hill and experiencing our existence as part of a larger whole. Those cold and dark moments make the sunshiny ones seem all the warmer and brighter. In between learning that Viburnum nudum ‘Winterthur’ is also called witherod viburnum, Appalachian tea tree, blue haw, Shawnee haw, possum haw, and wild raisin, we began to gain some real wisdom: that knitting oneself into the fabric of a community has a name. That name is Life.
Even before we visited in person, this hill held sway over us. The fuzzy, pixilated images on the real estate website captured our imagination. Coming from the city, where our only exposure to nature was our tiny back yard wedged among the shadows of all the close-set homes, the image of a house set high up on a hill seemed almost biblical. Once we’d moved in, the property became like a person to us—alive, responsive, sometimes inscrutable. It exerted such a strong sense of place that naming the house and grounds seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Maybe because D and I don’t share a last name, or maybe because we spent so many weekends in Ligonier, where homes—both grand and humble—sport names instead of street addresses, the idea of naming our house felt right somehow, not silly or highfalutin or twee.
Settling on “Acorn Hill” was easy enough. The huge Chinquapin Oak that towers over the yard sends down showers of tiny acorns every other autumn. (They sprout the summer after they fall, pushing up hundreds of baby oaks that we diligently pluck out of the garden beds, for fear of turning our acre into Sherwood Forest; between the oak and the maples, we could start our own timber company, given enough time.) It wasn’t long till we started receiving acorn gifts: birdhouses fashioned into oversized acorns, acorn-shaped candles, table linens with acorns embroidered on them. We have a porcelain acorn platter from Ireland and sterling-covered acorns in a silver maple-leaf bowl. We even have an acorn garden sculpture the size of Mini Cooper. And we love them all. It is as if the name was there all along, patiently awaiting someone to speak it aloud.
Once the property was named, we began, like all other fledgling gardeners, to fill it with plants, learning their names as we went. Some were easy: we already knew the vine on the
back trellis was wisteria and the shrubs lining the drive were peonies. We learned that the beds along the north border were lined with dozens of huge old mock orange and honeysuckles, but not until after we’d spent a king’s ransom on a crop of spindly, puny mock orange plants from some fancy New England nursery’s catalog. We learned the names of the ancient trees, then fretted like old grannies over the elm at the top of the driveway—how did it manage to escape Dutch Elm disease; what would happen if it died; how would we ever live without it? Despite its robust and stately appearance, hand-wringing commenced immediately upon learning that tree’s name.
Gradually, we realized that common plant names aren’t always enough. We grew plants that didn’t do what we expected—grew too large, bloomed in unexpected colors, died without explanation—until we learned that not all viburnums are created equal. We swallowed hard, girded our loins, and jumped in to learning binomial taxonomy—the dreaded Latin botanical names. Discovering that there are hundreds of species of the genus Viburnum, each with its own characteristics, explained a lot.
But the names that have come to matter most to us don’t belong to house or plant. The most important names that the hill taught us are the names of people: kind, generous, welcoming neighbors. Learning those names helped us become part of the personality of this place, rather than just observers of it. Eventually, like our plants, we put down roots, blossomed in unexpected colors, and flourished. Not every day is a balmy June afternoon; sometimes it’s a frigid midnight in February. But no matter, it’s all part of living on the hill and experiencing our existence as part of a larger whole. Those cold and dark moments make the sunshiny ones seem all the warmer and brighter. In between learning that Viburnum nudum ‘Winterthur’ is also called witherod viburnum, Appalachian tea tree, blue haw, Shawnee haw, possum haw, and wild raisin, we began to gain some real wisdom: that knitting oneself into the fabric of a community has a name. That name is Life.
July 2009
I am not young. I am a 66 year old American woman schoolteacher, retired. I wanted to add my comment in support of freedom in Iran, as I believe it is not just the youth who would stand for freedom, but the elders as well. We love you who are fighting for freedom in Iran. We pray for your success, God willing, in achieving democracy in your country. God be with you. God bless those who have died in defense of freedom. God Bless the women who have courage to stand---and die.
--Posted on The Boston Globe's website by Eleaner Morgan June 22, 09
We’re sporting green, up on the hill. No, not just the gardens—although they’re looking lush and verdant with all the rain and cool weather—but as a show of support to those protesting in Iran. We listen to reports on NPR each morning as we drive to work, anxious to hear if the demonstrators have won any ground, or if they’ve been beaten back by riot squads. When D was a student in Paris during the 70’s, he met a Persian woman who had left Iran with her family to escape the dictatorship of the shah. Now, a generation later, this woman’s children could be back on the streets in Tehran, protesting their lack of freedom under the current regime. These daily protests are, in a way, a bookend to all those purple-inked pointer fingers we saw on the news after the first popular elections in Iraq, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A reminder that democracy doesn’t necessarily equal freedom.
So, we carry around in our thoughts the green that has become the symbol of this Iranian citizens’ uprising. We give small signs of support to the Persian family that runs our favorite take-out pizza place, asking them about the green ribbons they wear on their wrists, talking with them about their family back in Iran, commenting on the Iranian soccer team’s green armbands at a recent World Cup qualifying match. Whether Mousavi would a better or fairer ruler than Ahmadinejad is anyone’s guess, but that the hundreds of thousands of marchers in Iran each day want change is unquestionable.
Now that the summer sun lingers so long in the sky, we get up early and stay awake late. D
walks every morning before work, for exercise, while the dog and I sit on the porch or out in the garden, for a different kind of exercise: soaking in the blue of the sky and the green of the garden. As I sit, my mind goes repeatedly to the luxury of living under a government that allows freedom—to speak, to live, to be. While we don’t always agree with government leaders and their decisions, and are sometimes the financial victims of botched policies and extravagant taxes, we are, nonetheless, essentially free.
At night, after the dinner dishes are put away and the day’s chores finished, we sit out in the inky darkness, content to be still and silent for a while before bed. Although we don’t see as many stars in the night sky as we used to before all of the commercial development in Robinson township, we still see enough to set the imagination wandering—through time and space, backward and forwards, remembering and dreaming. Maybe it’s because of the vastness overhead or simply to effects of too much wine at dinner, but I find myself again thinking about the big issues of life, rather than the quotidian. These perfect early summer mornings and nights almost demand that we think higher thoughts than what items to add to tomorrow’s shopping list or when to schedule an oil change before the car’s engine falls out onto the parkway.
Lately, though, when I look up at the stars, or out at the morning sun hitting the trees, I think about millions of unknown people—people we’ll never meet—who see the same sun and the same stars, but under conditions that they find unacceptable, and I wish them luck—the same luck that I had, being born into a loving family in a country that protects the civil rights of all, even if imperfectly. And I send up a silent prayer that those unknown millions will one day live in a community that has a yearly parade to celebrate its Independence Day.
--Posted on The Boston Globe's website by Eleaner Morgan June 22, 09
We’re sporting green, up on the hill. No, not just the gardens—although they’re looking lush and verdant with all the rain and cool weather—but as a show of support to those protesting in Iran. We listen to reports on NPR each morning as we drive to work, anxious to hear if the demonstrators have won any ground, or if they’ve been beaten back by riot squads. When D was a student in Paris during the 70’s, he met a Persian woman who had left Iran with her family to escape the dictatorship of the shah. Now, a generation later, this woman’s children could be back on the streets in Tehran, protesting their lack of freedom under the current regime. These daily protests are, in a way, a bookend to all those purple-inked pointer fingers we saw on the news after the first popular elections in Iraq, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A reminder that democracy doesn’t necessarily equal freedom.
So, we carry around in our thoughts the green that has become the symbol of this Iranian citizens’ uprising. We give small signs of support to the Persian family that runs our favorite take-out pizza place, asking them about the green ribbons they wear on their wrists, talking with them about their family back in Iran, commenting on the Iranian soccer team’s green armbands at a recent World Cup qualifying match. Whether Mousavi would a better or fairer ruler than Ahmadinejad is anyone’s guess, but that the hundreds of thousands of marchers in Iran each day want change is unquestionable.
Now that the summer sun lingers so long in the sky, we get up early and stay awake late. D
walks every morning before work, for exercise, while the dog and I sit on the porch or out in the garden, for a different kind of exercise: soaking in the blue of the sky and the green of the garden. As I sit, my mind goes repeatedly to the luxury of living under a government that allows freedom—to speak, to live, to be. While we don’t always agree with government leaders and their decisions, and are sometimes the financial victims of botched policies and extravagant taxes, we are, nonetheless, essentially free.At night, after the dinner dishes are put away and the day’s chores finished, we sit out in the inky darkness, content to be still and silent for a while before bed. Although we don’t see as many stars in the night sky as we used to before all of the commercial development in Robinson township, we still see enough to set the imagination wandering—through time and space, backward and forwards, remembering and dreaming. Maybe it’s because of the vastness overhead or simply to effects of too much wine at dinner, but I find myself again thinking about the big issues of life, rather than the quotidian. These perfect early summer mornings and nights almost demand that we think higher thoughts than what items to add to tomorrow’s shopping list or when to schedule an oil change before the car’s engine falls out onto the parkway.
Lately, though, when I look up at the stars, or out at the morning sun hitting the trees, I think about millions of unknown people—people we’ll never meet—who see the same sun and the same stars, but under conditions that they find unacceptable, and I wish them luck—the same luck that I had, being born into a loving family in a country that protects the civil rights of all, even if imperfectly. And I send up a silent prayer that those unknown millions will one day live in a community that has a yearly parade to celebrate its Independence Day.
June 2009
From the Book of Job, chapter XII, verses vii-x: But ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee. And the fowl of the air and they shall tell thee. Or speak to the earth and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. For who knoweth not, in all these, that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing.
Because my schedule is tied to the academic workday, I am back home, up on the hill, long before D returns each evening. Most days, that time is filled with quick chores—lugging the rubbish to the curb, chopping up ingredients for dinner, other mundane activities necessary to running a house. But occasionally, when everything is right in my world, I get home from work and have nothing pressing me into duty. On those days, the dog and I usually end up sitting on the porch or out on the patio, soaking up the late afternoon sun.
Last week, we were doing exactly that, the dog and I—relaxing on the porch and waiting for D’s return—when there was a sharp rap on the glass. Looking out, I could see that a tiny yellow finch had flown into the full-length windows that encircle the porch. It sat on the ground, stunned, for a second or two, then shook its head from side to side, just like a cartoon character after running into a signpost or some other obstacle. But, unlike a cartoon, the head-clearing shake gave way to a quick seizure, and suddenly the little bird fell over, dead.
The dog was on my lap, and witnessed this small drama unfold. She watched intently as a second finch, this one even smaller than the first—obviously a chick, given its tiny size and still-downy feathers—flew over and landed on a small rock next to the dead bird. The chick cocked its head, then hopped back and forth nervously between its rocky perch and the body of the adult finch several times before finally flying off. When it flew away, the dog jumped down from my lap and disappeared upstairs.
After quickly burying the finch under a redbud tree next to the bird feeders, I went back inside to wash up. I found the dog huddled in her crate, shaking uncontrollably. The shaking happens a lot when she’s cold, given her small size and short coat. But going into the crate voluntarily is unusual; she retreats there only when ill or to escape large crowds. Somehow, I believe she understood what she’d watched with such interest. What she made of the quick and arbitrary death of the bird, or the confusion of the smaller chick, I can only guess at. That she was upset by it, however, was clear.
PBS broadcast a special on Memorial Day that took viewers to each of the 21 American overseas military cemeteries in eight countries throughout Europe, Northern Africa, and the Philippines. While explaining the history behind each, and the battles that led to the 125,000 American servicemen and women interred therein, the program’s real power lay in the interviews with the families of the fallen and the Europeans who lived through the invasions and liberations. To the last, they spoke of bravery and purpose, of duty and honor. From President Roosevelt’s son to General Patton, from band leader Glenn Miller to the airmen whose bodies were so entangled that they had to be buried together, unidentified, these men and women died a death—whether quick and arbitrary like my finch’s, or slowly and deliberately at the hands of the enemy—that deserves commemoration. Those interviewed understood the responsibility the living have to the memory of the fallen.
The finch and the soldiers ended up together in my dreams that night. The bright yellow bird lighted on one of the thousands of white grave markers D and I visited near Omaha Beach in Normandy several years ago. I watched it in my dream, as it looked about, then flew straight away, off into a huge chestnut tree covered in white flowers. I don’t know what the dream meant, if anything, but I was happy, when I awoke, that I’d taken the time to bury the tiny, weightless body.
Because my schedule is tied to the academic workday, I am back home, up on the hill, long before D returns each evening. Most days, that time is filled with quick chores—lugging the rubbish to the curb, chopping up ingredients for dinner, other mundane activities necessary to running a house. But occasionally, when everything is right in my world, I get home from work and have nothing pressing me into duty. On those days, the dog and I usually end up sitting on the porch or out on the patio, soaking up the late afternoon sun.
Last week, we were doing exactly that, the dog and I—relaxing on the porch and waiting for D’s return—when there was a sharp rap on the glass. Looking out, I could see that a tiny yellow finch had flown into the full-length windows that encircle the porch. It sat on the ground, stunned, for a second or two, then shook its head from side to side, just like a cartoon character after running into a signpost or some other obstacle. But, unlike a cartoon, the head-clearing shake gave way to a quick seizure, and suddenly the little bird fell over, dead.
The dog was on my lap, and witnessed this small drama unfold. She watched intently as a second finch, this one even smaller than the first—obviously a chick, given its tiny size and still-downy feathers—flew over and landed on a small rock next to the dead bird. The chick cocked its head, then hopped back and forth nervously between its rocky perch and the body of the adult finch several times before finally flying off. When it flew away, the dog jumped down from my lap and disappeared upstairs.
After quickly burying the finch under a redbud tree next to the bird feeders, I went back inside to wash up. I found the dog huddled in her crate, shaking uncontrollably. The shaking happens a lot when she’s cold, given her small size and short coat. But going into the crate voluntarily is unusual; she retreats there only when ill or to escape large crowds. Somehow, I believe she understood what she’d watched with such interest. What she made of the quick and arbitrary death of the bird, or the confusion of the smaller chick, I can only guess at. That she was upset by it, however, was clear.
PBS broadcast a special on Memorial Day that took viewers to each of the 21 American overseas military cemeteries in eight countries throughout Europe, Northern Africa, and the Philippines. While explaining the history behind each, and the battles that led to the 125,000 American servicemen and women interred therein, the program’s real power lay in the interviews with the families of the fallen and the Europeans who lived through the invasions and liberations. To the last, they spoke of bravery and purpose, of duty and honor. From President Roosevelt’s son to General Patton, from band leader Glenn Miller to the airmen whose bodies were so entangled that they had to be buried together, unidentified, these men and women died a death—whether quick and arbitrary like my finch’s, or slowly and deliberately at the hands of the enemy—that deserves commemoration. Those interviewed understood the responsibility the living have to the memory of the fallen.
The finch and the soldiers ended up together in my dreams that night. The bright yellow bird lighted on one of the thousands of white grave markers D and I visited near Omaha Beach in Normandy several years ago. I watched it in my dream, as it looked about, then flew straight away, off into a huge chestnut tree covered in white flowers. I don’t know what the dream meant, if anything, but I was happy, when I awoke, that I’d taken the time to bury the tiny, weightless body.
May 2009
My true religion is kindness.
--Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
May is my birthday month, and celebrating it up on the hill is extra-special. The property around our little green house comes fully alive this month, so there’s no need for crepe paper streamers, or party hats, or gaudy wrapping paper. The wisteria and crabapple trees take care of all that for us. My birthday cake can be plain, as well—the lilacs’ scent is sweeter than any buttercream frosting. And, although I love a party, our guest list can be pretty short: the woodchuck who lives under the big pine, the rabbit family, our crazy squirrels, and the throngs of chickadees and dark-eyed juncos will be plenty of company. It would really be a special day if the fox we’ve seen on just two other occasions showed up.
The hill has my birthday gifts covered, too. A rosy pink sunrise, a few mild showers mid-day, and a fiery sunset are all the presents I could ask for. Although I wouldn’t turn down a bit of solitude, some camaraderie, lots of smiles and maybe a quick tear for those no longer around to help celebrate. But most of all, it’s kindness I seek. I want kindness for my birthday. Not toward me, necessarily, but kindness practiced by those around me, and by those around the people around me, and by the people around the people who are around me, until we’re all kind to each other and to the other inhabitants of our poor, mistreated planet. I want us to do to what St. Paul told the young church at Ephesus to do almost two millennia ago: Be ye kind, one to another.
The loveliest thing about kindness is that there’s an inexhaustible supply. Although it is as essential as food and water, it cannot, like these, be used up. In fact, the more we use, the more there is to go around. Kindness—and its twin, compassion—might not solve all of the
world’s ills, but they would go far in halting the creation of new ones. If only we could be kinder to each other, kinder to the creatures around us, kinder to the environment and the planet as a whole, the problems we face would seem less insurmountable than those we grapple with each day on what folk-singer Nancy Griffith calls “this big blue ball of war.” For, even in a world suffering from kindness-deficit disorder, kindness begets kindness, and compassion should be, as philosopher Helena Blavatsky implored, the law of laws.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one—there are plenty of you out there, dreaming, praying, working for a kinder world. One where we can celebrate the trees and flowers instead of bulldozing them down to build another unneeded superstore. Where wildlife is invited to the party instead of being corralled and dismissed, or worse—simply exterminated. Where people feel valued for being themselves, not reflections of a pop culture run amok. Where “Drill, Baby, Drill” can be swallowed up by “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Where a morning spent on the seat of a bicycle, or an afternoon walk through Fox Hollow with a neighbor, or a quiet evening at home under the stars is all the entertainment we need.
On my birthday, I’ll call my parents and thank them for all they’ve done for me over the decades. I’ll walk around the garden with D and the dog. I’ll celebrate the fruits of our landscaping labor and revel in the sights and sounds and smells of our hill. And I’ll try very hard to remember always to be kind. A birthday gift to myself. After all, as Judy Collins sang so long ago, “it’s easier than pie to be kind.”
--Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
May is my birthday month, and celebrating it up on the hill is extra-special. The property around our little green house comes fully alive this month, so there’s no need for crepe paper streamers, or party hats, or gaudy wrapping paper. The wisteria and crabapple trees take care of all that for us. My birthday cake can be plain, as well—the lilacs’ scent is sweeter than any buttercream frosting. And, although I love a party, our guest list can be pretty short: the woodchuck who lives under the big pine, the rabbit family, our crazy squirrels, and the throngs of chickadees and dark-eyed juncos will be plenty of company. It would really be a special day if the fox we’ve seen on just two other occasions showed up.
The hill has my birthday gifts covered, too. A rosy pink sunrise, a few mild showers mid-day, and a fiery sunset are all the presents I could ask for. Although I wouldn’t turn down a bit of solitude, some camaraderie, lots of smiles and maybe a quick tear for those no longer around to help celebrate. But most of all, it’s kindness I seek. I want kindness for my birthday. Not toward me, necessarily, but kindness practiced by those around me, and by those around the people around me, and by the people around the people who are around me, until we’re all kind to each other and to the other inhabitants of our poor, mistreated planet. I want us to do to what St. Paul told the young church at Ephesus to do almost two millennia ago: Be ye kind, one to another.
The loveliest thing about kindness is that there’s an inexhaustible supply. Although it is as essential as food and water, it cannot, like these, be used up. In fact, the more we use, the more there is to go around. Kindness—and its twin, compassion—might not solve all of the
world’s ills, but they would go far in halting the creation of new ones. If only we could be kinder to each other, kinder to the creatures around us, kinder to the environment and the planet as a whole, the problems we face would seem less insurmountable than those we grapple with each day on what folk-singer Nancy Griffith calls “this big blue ball of war.” For, even in a world suffering from kindness-deficit disorder, kindness begets kindness, and compassion should be, as philosopher Helena Blavatsky implored, the law of laws.You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one—there are plenty of you out there, dreaming, praying, working for a kinder world. One where we can celebrate the trees and flowers instead of bulldozing them down to build another unneeded superstore. Where wildlife is invited to the party instead of being corralled and dismissed, or worse—simply exterminated. Where people feel valued for being themselves, not reflections of a pop culture run amok. Where “Drill, Baby, Drill” can be swallowed up by “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Where a morning spent on the seat of a bicycle, or an afternoon walk through Fox Hollow with a neighbor, or a quiet evening at home under the stars is all the entertainment we need.
On my birthday, I’ll call my parents and thank them for all they’ve done for me over the decades. I’ll walk around the garden with D and the dog. I’ll celebrate the fruits of our landscaping labor and revel in the sights and sounds and smells of our hill. And I’ll try very hard to remember always to be kind. A birthday gift to myself. After all, as Judy Collins sang so long ago, “it’s easier than pie to be kind.”
April 2009
Now the green blade riseth
from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth
many days has lain;
love lives again,
that with the dead has been:
love is come again,
like wheat that springeth green.
--John MacLeod Campbell Crum, 1872-1958
Canon, Canterbury Cathedral
It is sunny, but still cold, as we walk around the yard looking for signs of life; there are hundreds of green, thumb-sized shoots in the daffodil and peony beds, a sure bet that we’ll find other green-and-growing things scattered about the property. There is something akin to the feeling of a treasure hunt as we walk from dormant shrub to dormant shrub, peering close to find swelling buds and sometimes even tiny leaves unfurling to meet their first rays of sunshine.
We try to walk slowly and casually, but what I really want to do is run thither and yon like an eight-year-old, seeing as much as I can see, as quickly as possible. Are there buds on the dogwoods? How about the wild tulips at the front gate, are they awake yet? Is the cherry tree by the drive loaded with blossoms just waiting for the perfect April day to dawn? Even the dog is excited to be outside after our long exile indoors. She runs her wild circles in the yard, expressions of sheer joy at being back outside and under the shining sun again. The three of us are like seafarers, back on Terra Firma for the first time in years.
By the time you read this, I imagine we’ll have sprays of forsythia decorating Rosslyn Farms, along with bright yellow daffodils, crocuses, and all those other harbingers of early spring. What would we do without them, these green blades that riseth from the dark earth? They are a promise that warmth and sunshine are just around the corner, after months of cold and dark. How fitting that springtime and Easter have become so intertwined, as Crum attests to in his hymn lyrics, above. Both speak to us of rebirth, of hope, of miracles.
This year, Easter and Passover coincide, although that isn’t always the case, for some reason. Like Christmas and Hanukkah, these holidays dance around one another, sometimes together, other times apart. At least Christmas is a fixed holiday--anyone who has ever tried to use the Golden Number to determine when Easter will fall in any given year can attest to the mind-boggling nature of the formula: first full moon after the vernal equinox, Metonic cycle, Dominical Letter… Huh?
Much easier to take the days as they come, and let others plot our holidays for us. And that is the rule in the garden, as well: the green blades rise when they are ready, regardless of what the calendar, garden books, or old wives’ tales tell us. So, what better way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon than wandering, from plant to plant, around the yard in hopes of catching a glimpse of spring.
Note: Anyone brave enough to want more information on the fascinating (and highly convoluted!) history of calculating the date of Easter can check out the website for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England:
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/astronomy-and-time/time-facts/the-date-of-easter
from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth
many days has lain;
love lives again,
that with the dead has been:
love is come again,
like wheat that springeth green.
--John MacLeod Campbell Crum, 1872-1958
Canon, Canterbury Cathedral
It is sunny, but still cold, as we walk around the yard looking for signs of life; there are hundreds of green, thumb-sized shoots in the daffodil and peony beds, a sure bet that we’ll find other green-and-growing things scattered about the property. There is something akin to the feeling of a treasure hunt as we walk from dormant shrub to dormant shrub, peering close to find swelling buds and sometimes even tiny leaves unfurling to meet their first rays of sunshine.
We try to walk slowly and casually, but what I really want to do is run thither and yon like an eight-year-old, seeing as much as I can see, as quickly as possible. Are there buds on the dogwoods? How about the wild tulips at the front gate, are they awake yet? Is the cherry tree by the drive loaded with blossoms just waiting for the perfect April day to dawn? Even the dog is excited to be outside after our long exile indoors. She runs her wild circles in the yard, expressions of sheer joy at being back outside and under the shining sun again. The three of us are like seafarers, back on Terra Firma for the first time in years.
By the time you read this, I imagine we’ll have sprays of forsythia decorating Rosslyn Farms, along with bright yellow daffodils, crocuses, and all those other harbingers of early spring. What would we do without them, these green blades that riseth from the dark earth? They are a promise that warmth and sunshine are just around the corner, after months of cold and dark. How fitting that springtime and Easter have become so intertwined, as Crum attests to in his hymn lyrics, above. Both speak to us of rebirth, of hope, of miracles.This year, Easter and Passover coincide, although that isn’t always the case, for some reason. Like Christmas and Hanukkah, these holidays dance around one another, sometimes together, other times apart. At least Christmas is a fixed holiday--anyone who has ever tried to use the Golden Number to determine when Easter will fall in any given year can attest to the mind-boggling nature of the formula: first full moon after the vernal equinox, Metonic cycle, Dominical Letter… Huh?
Much easier to take the days as they come, and let others plot our holidays for us. And that is the rule in the garden, as well: the green blades rise when they are ready, regardless of what the calendar, garden books, or old wives’ tales tell us. So, what better way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon than wandering, from plant to plant, around the yard in hopes of catching a glimpse of spring.
Note: Anyone brave enough to want more information on the fascinating (and highly convoluted!) history of calculating the date of Easter can check out the website for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England:
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/astronomy-and-time/time-facts/the-date-of-easter
March 2009
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
--Isak Dinesen
We’ve been sleeping poorly, up on the hill. The dog naps all day, and her only exercise is sprinting out the back door to sniff, squat, bark at imaginary interlopers, and run back inside before her paws freeze—a trip that takes 30 seconds or less. Otherwise, she’s sleeping under the table in the breakfast nook, or between the pillows on the guest bed, or nestled against the arm of the blue sofa upstairs. By bedtime, she’s done with sleeping, and instead spends her time jumping from bed to floor and back again, her flapping ears and jingle-bell collar acting like miniature alarm clocks that sound every few minutes all night long.
I toss and turn from side to back to side to stomach till just before night gives way to day, then fall asleep long enough to feel completely groggy when the alarm goes off—the same disorienting feeling as stepping off a plane in the wrong time zone: daylight when your body knows it’s really night time. D, though, is as stalwart in sleeplessness as he is in his waking hours. He lies motionless, his shallow breathing the only conceit that gives lie to his performance. He told me recently that on those sleepless nights, he walks around our old house, room by room, remembering as many details as he can. It’s his version of counting sheep.
I have a similar tactic, but it revolves around my grandparents’ farm—not a working farm, but a weekend retreat where we spent most of my childhood weekends and a lot of holidays. I don’t take a room-by-room tour, as D does of our house in the city, but instead recollect all of the antics my cousins and I undertook: jumping from the hayloft into the un-baled hay below; catching salamanders and tadpoles in the stream and pond; building sailing ships from scavenged pieces of wood and empty Pepsi cans; complaining bitterly when asked to help with the vegetable garden’s endless chores.
In our reminiscences, we don’t remember the reality of these past moments in time. The intervening years have burnished off all of the rough edges, muted the discord, and left instead, a golden version of the past in its place. A past where every plaster wall in our old house was perfect, and where the roof never leaked. Where a campfire burned late into the summer evenings as my cousins and I got along perfectly. Although she doesn’t gloss over the trials and tribulations of her life in “Out of Africa,” Danish author Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, casts that same golden glow over her years as the owner of a coffee plantation in Kenya. Her remembrances take on a mythic—almost epic—quality that I’m certain she didn’t feel when she was living through them.
Time and memory are like that: we tend to minimize the painful and ugly, the tedious and distasteful. What we’re left with, given enough time, is the sweet distillation of a life, like the syrupy sap of a maple, condensed by thousands of hours of enduring all sorts of nasty weather. The garden’s like that, too, although the time needed to forget all the disappointments and sore muscles is surprisingly short—less than a year, if D and I are any indication. Already forgotten are the dead plants, the calluses, and the endless hours of watering and weeding. In fact, we can barely wait to start it all again. Failure and exhaustion are distant memories. What remains is the longing to again nurture the earth around us. Earth that, for the moment, is still frozen iron, but that will, in just a few weeks, begin springing green.
Just a few, short weeks, and we can begin creating another year’s worth of gardening memories to carry us through future winters’ long sleepless nights.
A few, short weeks.
--Isak Dinesen
We’ve been sleeping poorly, up on the hill. The dog naps all day, and her only exercise is sprinting out the back door to sniff, squat, bark at imaginary interlopers, and run back inside before her paws freeze—a trip that takes 30 seconds or less. Otherwise, she’s sleeping under the table in the breakfast nook, or between the pillows on the guest bed, or nestled against the arm of the blue sofa upstairs. By bedtime, she’s done with sleeping, and instead spends her time jumping from bed to floor and back again, her flapping ears and jingle-bell collar acting like miniature alarm clocks that sound every few minutes all night long.
I toss and turn from side to back to side to stomach till just before night gives way to day, then fall asleep long enough to feel completely groggy when the alarm goes off—the same disorienting feeling as stepping off a plane in the wrong time zone: daylight when your body knows it’s really night time. D, though, is as stalwart in sleeplessness as he is in his waking hours. He lies motionless, his shallow breathing the only conceit that gives lie to his performance. He told me recently that on those sleepless nights, he walks around our old house, room by room, remembering as many details as he can. It’s his version of counting sheep.
I have a similar tactic, but it revolves around my grandparents’ farm—not a working farm, but a weekend retreat where we spent most of my childhood weekends and a lot of holidays. I don’t take a room-by-room tour, as D does of our house in the city, but instead recollect all of the antics my cousins and I undertook: jumping from the hayloft into the un-baled hay below; catching salamanders and tadpoles in the stream and pond; building sailing ships from scavenged pieces of wood and empty Pepsi cans; complaining bitterly when asked to help with the vegetable garden’s endless chores.In our reminiscences, we don’t remember the reality of these past moments in time. The intervening years have burnished off all of the rough edges, muted the discord, and left instead, a golden version of the past in its place. A past where every plaster wall in our old house was perfect, and where the roof never leaked. Where a campfire burned late into the summer evenings as my cousins and I got along perfectly. Although she doesn’t gloss over the trials and tribulations of her life in “Out of Africa,” Danish author Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, casts that same golden glow over her years as the owner of a coffee plantation in Kenya. Her remembrances take on a mythic—almost epic—quality that I’m certain she didn’t feel when she was living through them.
Time and memory are like that: we tend to minimize the painful and ugly, the tedious and distasteful. What we’re left with, given enough time, is the sweet distillation of a life, like the syrupy sap of a maple, condensed by thousands of hours of enduring all sorts of nasty weather. The garden’s like that, too, although the time needed to forget all the disappointments and sore muscles is surprisingly short—less than a year, if D and I are any indication. Already forgotten are the dead plants, the calluses, and the endless hours of watering and weeding. In fact, we can barely wait to start it all again. Failure and exhaustion are distant memories. What remains is the longing to again nurture the earth around us. Earth that, for the moment, is still frozen iron, but that will, in just a few weeks, begin springing green.
Just a few, short weeks, and we can begin creating another year’s worth of gardening memories to carry us through future winters’ long sleepless nights.
A few, short weeks.
February 2009
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.
--Anne Frank
Lately, the constant cold and persistent snow conspire to keep us inside, even though we long to be out walking the dog or tooling around the hill—gathering twigs, checking for crocus buds, plotting for next season’s new additions. Instead, we stand at the back door and watch the birds devouring sunflower seeds, or gaze over the back garden beds from the upstairs windows, noticing all the four-footed traffic patterns in the snow-blanketed yard. We get far more woodland visitors than we realized, if all the tracks are to be believed.
There’s a deer freeway from the thicket in the northwest corner of our property, all the way down to the soccer fields, off to the southeast; the purposeful tracks cut diagonally across the
yard, with a detour to the crabapple tree, where the hoof prints become so thick that the snow’s been trampled away and green grass shows through. So far, they have eaten only the shriveled, frozen fruit, not the stems or bark from the tree. Every weekend, D religiously coats all of our plants with an ultra-smelly repellant, in an effort to keep the deer from lunching on our arborvitae and hydrangeas. Only time will tell if the animals find the odor of putrescent eggs as awful as the humans do.
There are assorted other prints looping through the property as well, making us realize just how many creatures share this small acre with us. The squirrels have beat their usual paths from the acorn-laden oak to the bird feeders, which they consider theirs, not the birds’. The squirrels’ tails are fluffed out like feather boas, and the tiny wrens and chickadees likewise expand their feathery coats to trap as much body heat as possible. They hop about, waiting impatiently for the squirrels to finish, like tiny old women in big fur coats.
Last week, when the temperatures never came out of the single digits, we wondered aloud several times how the birds and other animals manage to deal with such unremitting cold. We hustle from house to garage to car, then from office or shop to car and back home, spending only minutes outside, yet complain bitterly about the numbing temperatures. It is almost unthinkable that our woodland neighbors are out in it, day and night—no warm duvet, no central heat, no L.L. Bean slippers keeping feet comfy and dry. A sobering thought, and one that leads us to look the other way when the squirrels are in the bird feeders yet again. Eat up, friends.
Still, cold or not, we have to venture out soon—there is only so much time spent indoors that a soul can abide. Even the dog agrees; she is constantly restless, pacing and grumbling. She gets too much sleep during the days and misses the time outside, surveying her realm or walking her people. She remembers those long July evenings, when there were after-dinner gambols in the yard and neighbors to visit. We remember, and miss, these activities too, but give in to mid-winter lethargy and the darkness outside by grabbing a book or the TV remote. Eventually, the dog realizes that we’ve settled in for the night and makes her bed on the ottoman between us. Soon, she’s fast asleep once more, and dreaming: her jerking back legs and stifled yips tell us she’s outside, in her dreams, chasing some foe or other. We smile knowingly, for outside, basking in the warm sun, is where we all dream of being; especially in the depths of winter, it is a primordial dream. Perhaps no one drives this point home more poignantly than Anne Frank, who wrote these words on a cold and hopeless February day in 1944:
When I looked outside, right into the depths of Nature and God, then I was happy, really happy.
--Anne Frank
Lately, the constant cold and persistent snow conspire to keep us inside, even though we long to be out walking the dog or tooling around the hill—gathering twigs, checking for crocus buds, plotting for next season’s new additions. Instead, we stand at the back door and watch the birds devouring sunflower seeds, or gaze over the back garden beds from the upstairs windows, noticing all the four-footed traffic patterns in the snow-blanketed yard. We get far more woodland visitors than we realized, if all the tracks are to be believed.
There’s a deer freeway from the thicket in the northwest corner of our property, all the way down to the soccer fields, off to the southeast; the purposeful tracks cut diagonally across the
yard, with a detour to the crabapple tree, where the hoof prints become so thick that the snow’s been trampled away and green grass shows through. So far, they have eaten only the shriveled, frozen fruit, not the stems or bark from the tree. Every weekend, D religiously coats all of our plants with an ultra-smelly repellant, in an effort to keep the deer from lunching on our arborvitae and hydrangeas. Only time will tell if the animals find the odor of putrescent eggs as awful as the humans do.There are assorted other prints looping through the property as well, making us realize just how many creatures share this small acre with us. The squirrels have beat their usual paths from the acorn-laden oak to the bird feeders, which they consider theirs, not the birds’. The squirrels’ tails are fluffed out like feather boas, and the tiny wrens and chickadees likewise expand their feathery coats to trap as much body heat as possible. They hop about, waiting impatiently for the squirrels to finish, like tiny old women in big fur coats.
Last week, when the temperatures never came out of the single digits, we wondered aloud several times how the birds and other animals manage to deal with such unremitting cold. We hustle from house to garage to car, then from office or shop to car and back home, spending only minutes outside, yet complain bitterly about the numbing temperatures. It is almost unthinkable that our woodland neighbors are out in it, day and night—no warm duvet, no central heat, no L.L. Bean slippers keeping feet comfy and dry. A sobering thought, and one that leads us to look the other way when the squirrels are in the bird feeders yet again. Eat up, friends.
Still, cold or not, we have to venture out soon—there is only so much time spent indoors that a soul can abide. Even the dog agrees; she is constantly restless, pacing and grumbling. She gets too much sleep during the days and misses the time outside, surveying her realm or walking her people. She remembers those long July evenings, when there were after-dinner gambols in the yard and neighbors to visit. We remember, and miss, these activities too, but give in to mid-winter lethargy and the darkness outside by grabbing a book or the TV remote. Eventually, the dog realizes that we’ve settled in for the night and makes her bed on the ottoman between us. Soon, she’s fast asleep once more, and dreaming: her jerking back legs and stifled yips tell us she’s outside, in her dreams, chasing some foe or other. We smile knowingly, for outside, basking in the warm sun, is where we all dream of being; especially in the depths of winter, it is a primordial dream. Perhaps no one drives this point home more poignantly than Anne Frank, who wrote these words on a cold and hopeless February day in 1944:
When I looked outside, right into the depths of Nature and God, then I was happy, really happy.
January 2009
The merry year is born--
like the bright berry
from the naked thorn.
Hartley Coleridge, English writer (1796-1849)
And so begins another year, and another winter, up on the hill. Although the just-passed holidays seemed to occur, as they always do, outside the normal flow of time, it is inescapable that the river of years carries us all along in its current. And these dark, post-Christmas days make that point with chilly efficiency. We feel older, now that the revelry has passed; we’re sluggish as we rouse ourselves in the still-dark morning, and exhausted as we make our way up the gloomy drive after work. We avoid looking at the calendar, as if that will somehow negate the fact that winter is just getting settled in. Coleridge and his “merry year”? Humbug. Right now, it’s all thorn, and no berry.
Still, since that river of years flows only toward the sea, older is better than the alternative. So, we gather up this year’s new crop of gardening books, Christmas gifts all, and begin dreaming of the coming spring, when the naked thorns will be surrounded by tender shoots, then fragrant blossoms, and finally, bright berries. During these bleak weeks, it is easy to look out on garden beds devoid of leaves, and imagine that we need plants, plants, and more plants to fill in all those empty spaces. But looking through photos from last summer, we quickly remember how full the beds really are, once the plants awake from slumber and dress themselves with foliage.
In fact, it is hard to imagine that these bare and twiggy beds are the same ones pictured in the photos we keep stuffed in drawers and on our hard drives. What’s now brown and grey will soon be green and lush. Today’s rimy, hoary ground will again sport, in not so much time after all, verdant coverings of crocus and daffodil. Although we’ve been diligent about keeping a photographic journal of the changes we’ve made to our property, we’re lacking one key component in its recent history: how the acre looked when we moved in. So, even though we can compare last fall’s garden to the bare-bones beds of our first growing season up on the hill, we cannot, alas, compare it to what we started with. And more’s the pity, as the last traces of that original yard are all but gone, swallowed by the spreading limbs of our young trees and shrubs.
Of course, the river of years would scoff at this hubris, our assertion that the way we found the property when we moved in was some sort of benchmark against which to measure our changes to the landscape, or that it was, in any sense, the “original” state of this hill. The land around all of us is a palimpsest—a page on which words have been written and erased, written and erased—and our efforts will someday go the way of the diseased old plum tree we felled during our first weekend living in this house. The river of years takes us all—people, animals, gardens, even seemingly-timeless mountain ranges.
So, Coleridge is right, after all: it is a merry year, for we are all still here.
like the bright berry
from the naked thorn.
Hartley Coleridge, English writer (1796-1849)
And so begins another year, and another winter, up on the hill. Although the just-passed holidays seemed to occur, as they always do, outside the normal flow of time, it is inescapable that the river of years carries us all along in its current. And these dark, post-Christmas days make that point with chilly efficiency. We feel older, now that the revelry has passed; we’re sluggish as we rouse ourselves in the still-dark morning, and exhausted as we make our way up the gloomy drive after work. We avoid looking at the calendar, as if that will somehow negate the fact that winter is just getting settled in. Coleridge and his “merry year”? Humbug. Right now, it’s all thorn, and no berry.
Still, since that river of years flows only toward the sea, older is better than the alternative. So, we gather up this year’s new crop of gardening books, Christmas gifts all, and begin dreaming of the coming spring, when the naked thorns will be surrounded by tender shoots, then fragrant blossoms, and finally, bright berries. During these bleak weeks, it is easy to look out on garden beds devoid of leaves, and imagine that we need plants, plants, and more plants to fill in all those empty spaces. But looking through photos from last summer, we quickly remember how full the beds really are, once the plants awake from slumber and dress themselves with foliage.
In fact, it is hard to imagine that these bare and twiggy beds are the same ones pictured in the photos we keep stuffed in drawers and on our hard drives. What’s now brown and grey will soon be green and lush. Today’s rimy, hoary ground will again sport, in not so much time after all, verdant coverings of crocus and daffodil. Although we’ve been diligent about keeping a photographic journal of the changes we’ve made to our property, we’re lacking one key component in its recent history: how the acre looked when we moved in. So, even though we can compare last fall’s garden to the bare-bones beds of our first growing season up on the hill, we cannot, alas, compare it to what we started with. And more’s the pity, as the last traces of that original yard are all but gone, swallowed by the spreading limbs of our young trees and shrubs.
Of course, the river of years would scoff at this hubris, our assertion that the way we found the property when we moved in was some sort of benchmark against which to measure our changes to the landscape, or that it was, in any sense, the “original” state of this hill. The land around all of us is a palimpsest—a page on which words have been written and erased, written and erased—and our efforts will someday go the way of the diseased old plum tree we felled during our first weekend living in this house. The river of years takes us all—people, animals, gardens, even seemingly-timeless mountain ranges.
So, Coleridge is right, after all: it is a merry year, for we are all still here.
December 2008
Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis.
--John I, xiv
Not too long after I started submitting these columns to our community newsletter, the then-editor emailed me, saying that she tried to experience the world in the manner I wrote about, but that “life keeps getting in the way.” Not wanting to seem too “Donna Reed,” my next column was about the house stinking to high heaven because there was a rodent decomposing in our attic. I didn’t want it to appear life up on the hill is somehow charmed. D and I argue, there are ugly financial surprises, we suffer difficult loses just like every family in our neighborhood and the world. But, I do strive to see that there is some underlying poetry to what we experience, both good and bad, mundane and life-changing. And life can’t get in the way of that poetry—life is that poetry.
That’s not to say it’s all lovely sonnets; sometimes it’s ironic, snarky couplets hissed in the dark, or even open verse, stream-of-consciousness babble howled at the moon. But there is always a thread weaving through those moments, and I experience that thread as poetry, of a sort. When the interior poems are too devastating, I go outside, where every twig and blade, every squirrel and bird calls out its song, the lyrics a love-poem to the Creator. Or, I look up and see the poetic movement of the stars and clouds, or down, and hear poems murmured by roots and insects. All, for me, sublimely hopeful and beautiful.
This time of year—these mystical and mysterious days between Thanksgiving and year’s end—poetry is everywhere. Not in the tinny music spilling out of every store’s speakers, but in the quiet and personal moments. For church musicians like D and me, Advent contains some of the best poetry ever written, all set to gorgeous music we sing, and play, and listen to. But even non-musicians are surrounded by life’s poetry, ripe for the taking during these days of family and friendly gatherings.
Stop. Listen.
Regardless of religious belief, there is true and undeniable power in what is, perhaps, the most beautiful line of poetry ever written: Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis. The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. The older I get, the less it matters to me what exactly others view as “The Word.” I think we all experience life in unique and, ultimately, unknowable ways, so a Hindu’s idea of The Word, or a Native American’s or Jew’s or Buddhist’s—that has become, for me, of little importance. But the fact that, when we stop and listen, stop and think about The Word--the divine--somehow becoming part of our world, oh, what priceless poetry is caught up in that paltry handful of words: Verbum caro factum est. That grace—no matter what you call it or how you experience it—can somehow be made flesh, become tangible and experiential is mighty powerful stuff. And makes for great poetry.
So, whether you’re getting set to celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Dawali, listen for the poetry—it’s there. It’s in a solitary cup of coffee in a predawn kitchen. It’s in a walk through a late-season pile of leaves. It’s in a busy airport. It’s in a medieval carol so familiar it is part of your very soul. It’s in everything, and everyone. Listen: Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis.
--John I, xiv
Not too long after I started submitting these columns to our community newsletter, the then-editor emailed me, saying that she tried to experience the world in the manner I wrote about, but that “life keeps getting in the way.” Not wanting to seem too “Donna Reed,” my next column was about the house stinking to high heaven because there was a rodent decomposing in our attic. I didn’t want it to appear life up on the hill is somehow charmed. D and I argue, there are ugly financial surprises, we suffer difficult loses just like every family in our neighborhood and the world. But, I do strive to see that there is some underlying poetry to what we experience, both good and bad, mundane and life-changing. And life can’t get in the way of that poetry—life is that poetry.
That’s not to say it’s all lovely sonnets; sometimes it’s ironic, snarky couplets hissed in the dark, or even open verse, stream-of-consciousness babble howled at the moon. But there is always a thread weaving through those moments, and I experience that thread as poetry, of a sort. When the interior poems are too devastating, I go outside, where every twig and blade, every squirrel and bird calls out its song, the lyrics a love-poem to the Creator. Or, I look up and see the poetic movement of the stars and clouds, or down, and hear poems murmured by roots and insects. All, for me, sublimely hopeful and beautiful.
This time of year—these mystical and mysterious days between Thanksgiving and year’s end—poetry is everywhere. Not in the tinny music spilling out of every store’s speakers, but in the quiet and personal moments. For church musicians like D and me, Advent contains some of the best poetry ever written, all set to gorgeous music we sing, and play, and listen to. But even non-musicians are surrounded by life’s poetry, ripe for the taking during these days of family and friendly gatherings.
Stop. Listen.
Regardless of religious belief, there is true and undeniable power in what is, perhaps, the most beautiful line of poetry ever written: Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis. The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. The older I get, the less it matters to me what exactly others view as “The Word.” I think we all experience life in unique and, ultimately, unknowable ways, so a Hindu’s idea of The Word, or a Native American’s or Jew’s or Buddhist’s—that has become, for me, of little importance. But the fact that, when we stop and listen, stop and think about The Word--the divine--somehow becoming part of our world, oh, what priceless poetry is caught up in that paltry handful of words: Verbum caro factum est. That grace—no matter what you call it or how you experience it—can somehow be made flesh, become tangible and experiential is mighty powerful stuff. And makes for great poetry.
So, whether you’re getting set to celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Dawali, listen for the poetry—it’s there. It’s in a solitary cup of coffee in a predawn kitchen. It’s in a walk through a late-season pile of leaves. It’s in a busy airport. It’s in a medieval carol so familiar it is part of your very soul. It’s in everything, and everyone. Listen: Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis.
Thanksgiving 2008
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace
has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,Secretary of State
A Proclamation.
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace
has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union. In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,Secretary of State
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