summer morning in the cemetery

At twenty after eight the sun is already strong. Walking up the gravel path, eighteen twenty through eighteen eighty-nine, eighteen seventy-three through nineteen oh-one, the shadows are still long enough and forgiving. Junipers stand straight, whose roots do not up-end the stones. The light old flat ones are cool, the new dark shiny ones are already taking on the day’s heat. Summer comes, too, to the cemetery.

     (Q: Can I forgive these narrow thoughts?

            A: Does the world forgive the sunset?)

The crow scolds. I want to be him, inky feathers folded, head cocked, at home on a tombstone. Here in the heat autumn auditions, at once I see the corner oak turning copper, the maples scarlet and blowing. Without invitation snow settles and the sun arcs low. Something in me stays, with the crow, while the seasons swiftly ebb. Thank goodness for the prism, the sight that sees two sides. Small things fall away.  And we are (gladly) left like living stones.

the transplant

Spring is coming. Temperatures hover near zero, and the ice whines on the reservoir, but days lengthen and footsteps thump like sap in a bucket. Well after five, here in Vermont, the day lingers and fades to a pinky gray. Six-thirty sees a pale glow. The evenings bite, but March doesn’t feel that far off.

Here in Vermont.

We transplanted ourselves according to wisdom, in the hard dormant freeze of winter. Our stores should have been full, all energy pulled into our efficient, hearty cores.  Growing and fruiting require stability, resources, to support the vulnerable blossoming. We left Western Massachusetts in a deep freeze, with two feet of snow on the ground. We couldn’t see the grass we were leaving, and some old planting pots stuck to their ground and refused to come with us. It made sense – less ground to stir and muck up, a heartier surface for travel.

            (It’s a pity our lives can’t ebb and flow with the seasons – as I think in every 

              season. The world around us cycles, in New England, but our energy

              requirements stay the same, with our schedules. The whole business of 

              dormancy remains lively in its figurative sense, but I think waiting for winter

              to transplant oneself has more to do with the land).

It was kinder to our destination, too, to steal away in the night of the year. As newcomers in winter, our boots and boxes don’t yet leave an imprint. It’s a gentler approach, to this sleeping land. I suppose we can spy a bit, too, before our surroundings notice. Stark and sere we can see all the crooked limbs of trees, their bare forms. Even the leaf scars, the bundle scars, the velvet naked buds of witch hazel.  Bud before leaf.  Form, structure, then flesh. Maybe when the maples wake up, they’ll have thought we’ve been here all along. They’ll yawn into fullness, and our own toes can thaw with the ground, sneaking our subtle roots into icy mud.

At least, for now, we have our houseplants, who have only dropped a couple of nervous leaves in the process. And we have the great Green Mountains, as always, pink and grand and constant at first light, even in winter.

the end is the beginning

This is the new year, and the beginning starts with loss. A talk with a mediator who specializes in helping communities transition through loss and embrace new identities has me awestruck at seasonal coincidence.[1]

All around there is the subtle change in palette, now, a bronzing, the russet of an apple, but all over our woods. Here and there a young red maple has decided to dive deep and early, and is crimson from crown to trunk. The aspens are golden.

I was cold sitting outside today, feeling more distinctly the exact location of my furnace, decidedly not in my extremities. And a birthday poem by Mary Oliver spoke about the trees turning themselves to torches. The wind doesn’t set the trees to roaring, yet, like they will in October, when they will actually gesticulate by sending their own leaves falling. But they more than rustle, now – is there a word? It has sibilance to it, with an ‘x’ in there, too. It’s not raucous, yet.

But this is the beginning, this is my new year. Technically, too – seed is set, buds are born, and dormancy is merely growth, inside-out. We all know the wisdom of cycling, by now, but I’ve just begun to understand the importance of the order of it all. Now is when we plant our bulbs. Spring is resurgence: “re.”

The maple who decides to go for it, to burn up, to set its buds and immolate, has it right. It’s right there in the word: decide. Cidere, to cut. De, away from, out of, of, etc. To cut away. From the misty infinity of potential, choosing means loss. Beginning means loss. First the leaves let go, then comes the buds’ dormancy, then the leafing.

It is still taboo to grieve at the beginning, because, I think, grief gets mistaken for a lack of gratitude. Just like when we’re scolded for feeling angry – how ungrateful. But the loss is right there, and often it’s first, and when it’s holding us, begging to be seen, our energy can’t go into what’s been chosen.

Like how we prune our apple trees, cutting the water sprouts, those endless, perfectly vertical spikes you can see on a neglected old tree. And corn suckers, and calendula blossoms, like lilac sprays. Prune them, direct the energy, and multiply the fruit. Deciding to bear fruit, and bear it well, means choosing, and that means cutting. Which always, always needs to heal.

What if weddings, those ultimate cultural beginnings, recognized the necessary end and accompanying grief that comes with something new? When you choose your person, you cut away all other potential. What if this were acceptable to acknowledge, and made the choice wiser, sweeter?

My dear friend Cella described to me looking into the face of her newborn, and the depth and purity of the sadness, and the love, that welled up- it was magnificent and overwhelming. I wonder, and it’s just wondering, that even at the very beginning, that extraordinary, finite specificity of a new being brings the understanding of loss. I have no idea what this means. I just marvel at the maple trees.

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[1] See Ken Downes Consulting, www.kendownes.com

the fifth season

The sounds this time of year sure are funny. It’s no wonder traditional Chinese medicine, with similar seasonal cycling, calls late summer the fifth season, when growth comes to a plateau, fruit sets, and all is still for just a bit. The outward, upward yang meets inward, reflective yin who will bring rest and let us fallow, and for a bit they overlap. What an auditory overlap!

The raucous celebration of summer visitors has mostly disappeared – the warblers are all gone, though I still see flycatchers and swallows. The cedar waxwings are flocking, now – along with the turkeys – and their unmistakable high-pitched ‘tseee’ is greatly amplified. They’ll be descending on anything with fruit (they are entirely fruititarians) pretty soon, leaving a laden honeysuckle bare.

It’s the mornings that are most different, with no more robins querying at dawn. The general uproar has quieted and old friends, here all along, have come back to the fore. Most notably the jays and the crows, who seem to have the reigns again. It’s a funny thing, a jay scolding over a slow and lazy ka-tee-did. A chickadee calling, not singing, while picking ripe tomatoes. And yesterday of all things I heard my personal bell of winter, the nuthatch’s puttering ‘yank!’ All while watering beds still full of flowering Echinacea, black-eyed susan, and daisy. The cardinals sing all summer, but now they have no competition in the thrushes and wrens for virtuoso status.

I think it’s just me – my ears are ready to hear the full-time residents again. I’ve luxuriated in the fancy and exotic and now I’m happy for jays and crows – the trees will take the lead in sensation, now.  A hillside of golden aspen and firey sugar maple – what punctuates that better than a jay? A thrush would be audacious, a gilded lily.

Before that happens, though, we have a plateau – we can watch the squash plump up and relax, a bit. Feel the last push of growth and sniff the oncoming chill, but slowly. Revel in the overlap, the fifth season. 

we need rain

We need rain. There have been a couple of passing showers, enough to soften the cracking grass a bit and to plump the leaves just slightly, but not nearly enough to satisfy or invigorate. The neighbor’s flowering dogwood has all but folded in on itself, pointed leaves with deep parallel veins now rolled together like little papery cones, all silver underside. The lilac that bakes in full sun beside the raspberries is limp and rattling – its velvet triangle leaves have little protection, with no thick cuticle like the oaks. The jewelweed, some of which already have their mottled orange flowers that look like gnome caps, is tired and far from its vigorous, succulent self. Our corn, too, is stunted – two feet tall and already tassled out. The peppers seem to hold up alright, and the maples.

But there are those hearty ones too who are showing their stress. Roadside sumac, their peaked fruit still ripening, are starting to burn scarlet, and an oak sapling in our yard has ruddy tips. What is a showy and blazing and beautiful decline in September and October seems like an SOS now (we see neon everywhere, now, but it seems to me without chemicals sumac and sunset must be the brightest colors anywhere). But interesting, to me, is how this early, spotted shift allows me to try on the next season. A month ago it would have seemed unthinkable, exhausting even, to think about lush green maples wearing their crimsons and golds. But now I’ve progressed enough, perhaps, to settle into it – to see scarlet and let my mind wander to spice, to squash, to crunching leaves. I stoke my figurative beard and think, ‘yes, interesting.’

It is at these times of dry weather especially that I think about the underneath of trees. That they have a mirror image, or nearly, anchoring them in their vast swaying greatness. I wonder where the water table is, and whose toes are still wet, whose roots have enough energy to reach a bit further, whose roots hairs are clinging by toes to their roots, reaching and sipping. It is the old ones, usually, who reach the greatest depths. The ones with great height have big ropey taproots, and I wonder what it must be like for ones whole enormous, old body to live in such extremes. Imagine, your hands one hundred feet in the sky, parallel to hawks, fingers catching hot sun, great stormy wind. And your toes in topsoil, mineral soil, and down down to cold bedrock, sweet pure groundwater. All manner of creatures burrowing, laying, digging, digesting, transforming. When I sip cold water it starts at my tongue and cools my chest; the enormous elm would feel just the opposite.

It reassures me, the big old ones who’ve tapped so firmly in the ground beneath them. I root for the saplings, too, though they will have to earn their stripes. At least when they are stressed, and thirsty, and tired, their blushing is brilliant and beautiful. But we do need rain.

Change is a tonic

The few times I have gone away from New England I have always ended up feeling parched and stagnant. We grow according to our topography, I think, and often underestimate its effects. This is not to say that we cannot adapt, and that certain landscapes cannot offer us an expected release, reprieve, or connection. My friend Erin grew up on a pear farm in California, and found the sage scrub-steppe of Colorado disconcerting at first, and then extraordinarily liberating. She then felt like she needed to take deeper breaths when she transplanted herself to the dense vegetation of western Washington state.

The grandeur of the Pacific Northwest was what I couldn’t take. The overwhelming lushness. Maybe that means I’ve taken the puritan aversion to self-indulgence too far, but there it is. Everything is bigger, taller, wider, rougher – more extreme. Take Acer macrophylum, the maple out there. ‘Macrophylum’ means “large leaf,” and they are, actually, bigger than your face. The trees themselves are often two hundred feet tall, all a-covered with draping moss. Western hemlocks tower over our eastern ones, and the shrub vegetation of the forest floor is dense and can grow to eight or more feet. Much of it is green all winter, and when you rise up over any old hill there’s the jagged, fourteen-thousand-plus foot peak of Rainier. There’s only so much gasping one can do.

It may seem odd that one could feel something like ‘parched’ in a region as notoriously wet and verdant as the Northwest. What I craved was the quick and magnificent turning and cycling of New England. The distinct and dramatic nature of our four (or more) seasons has become a circadian rhythm for me, and as years tick by I notice and begin to understand my own periods of dormancy and fruition. Change, these cycles of death and birth and death, a thousand times a day, are the stuff of life. I have finally recognized the great myth of the upward, linear climb, finally reaching an inert and stable plateau for the great illusion it is. It’s more a messy sine wave, I suppose. What I fear is not failure but stagnation (well, I’m sure I feel failure a bit, still).

All landscapes change, of course. The desert for some is as inspiring and evocative as any other place, and the Pacific Northwest squirms and roots and fruits and changes, too. But I’ve set my clock by New England, and the springing robins at dawn open something, always, in my chest. I’ve adhered my own weather to our own barometer, and now I need thunderstorms. And the sound of sap thumping the bottom of the bucket, the great humidity of summer, fireflies, a ponderous winter. I need rock walls to train my eyes through a naked deciduous forest, to see what’s bare and stark in myself. And then a floor of warmed pine needles to bring a languid rapture.

who speaks for spring?

“Spring is like a perhaps hand,” says e. e. cummings, whose poem of that title goes on to evoke an ethereal jack frost-of-the-spring, lightly and kindly undoing his work. A blush of rose here, a quiet hand quickening the willows to bright gold. The ‘veil of green,’ as my father put it, which appears when buds swell. This image is often used—the maiden of spring – as opposed to the bold, brazen, boisterous matron of summer and harvest. The one with wild hair and twinkling eyes, who produces tomatoes and pumpkins and corn and honey – all things outlandishly fertile. She is delicate spring, come of age and fruitful. Round and rowdy and overflowing.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t felt the abundance of summer in almost a full solar orbit – the feeling that every inch of space is not only alive but brimming – but it seems to me spring is as bright and daring and messy as anything else this year. Snowdrops appeared full and hearty, thrown suddenly amidst dead leaves and hummus. The grass has greened, unabashedly, overnight. There are grackles, blackbirds – the icterids are home. Daffodils don’t coyly lift their heads, blushing with attention, either. They do what they look like they should – they trumpet. The whole world is blaring, just like the crepuscular robins. But that’s for the next entry. Let us say for today that robins (some individuals of which do, in fact, overwinter, changing their diet from worms to berries) are cheerful, evocative, social, and extremely demanding of your attention come dusk. And soon, come four o’clock in the morning.

All this blaring and wild waving of blossoms and beaks makes me doubt the ‘maiden’ idea. It all seems twinklingly sneaky to me, but kind. Maybe spring is a coyote, but she’s wiser than that. The archetypal hag? Clarisa Pinkola Estes is an anthropologist and storyteller, who has championed the wise old woman. She lives in muck and dirt, the edge where things die, only to be transformed. A conjurer of bones, a seamstress of flesh.

There’s a touch of all forms in spring – that is the magic of the ‘edge’ of a season, where you can see all things in one. But when I see the alien purple tentacles of skunk cabbage reach out of the ooze, see the snowdrops bust out of leaves and mud – I hear bright laughter, and something that resembles a happy cackle.

a new wind

There is a new wind tonight. She is born of mud and crack and thaw, on the heels of sunlit last snow. Usually she first whispers in March, but the sap is running now in early February and I’ve already heard someone say “snowdrops.” So, the bulbs and the buds and the wind have it.

Winter wind cracks and whips, it is more force than voice. It is hollow, sharp, and fierce. On a dark January night it catches us, snaps at us, and then leaves us staring at stark stars, everything sharpened. It does not linger in its work.

But the wind tonight was speaking, with chill enough to hone and brighten, but now with character. It is beginning to be laden, as now there are bits of the world to carry, opening. Soon galls and buds will release; the machinery is at work. The stew is stirring. It won’t be long now before skunk cabbage, those alien claws that seem to exhume themselves.

This year’s turning of seasons is dipped in unease, come too early and earned too easily. But tonight’s wind, and the moonlit river, and that first smell of grass can’t be written off. They speak too softly, are too lovely, and move us too deeply and deftly. We are grasped, gladly lured into another brimming turn.

the morning river

Heading east in the early morning, winding along the Deerfield, everything is golden. The trees are encased in ice, crystalline, drops of diamonds arch elegantly over the water. There is a stretch of the river that is true flood plain, the river diverges and there is an island of marsh grass, it too coated and sparkling. And the river holds on to heat, the freezing morning air condenses the moisture and the whole, wide river is steaming. Each rising molecule catches sun.

And what comes to mind is easy brilliance. Simple ebullience. Something better than anything that took just about nothing. Like all colors, it is the changing conditions of atmosphere and light that make the content, the substance seem unbelievably altered. The temperature rises as the sun’s angle widens, and everything is altered again … greater contrast, less sparkle, more depth. A different picture.

These ticking mechanisms, day length and earth tilt and the trees each with a clock in its heartwood are a chorus. A kaleidoscope that stays still but flashes change moment to moment. If I am moving too it is a clacking cliché, but when I stand still after a climb in winter early in the day or towards the end of twilight I am struck. Especially if I can feel my heartbeat in my feet or stomach or wrists, that other precarious mechanism, I understand that absolutely nothing is ever the same. It is different two inches to the right, or left, and I feel glee and desperation when I think of all the scenes that go unseen, un-gulped, un-awed. There are perfect frames of composition and light that are struck like a gong, boldly, which are left to fade and darken as quickly as they appeared. Like it was no-thing.

And that itself is a pretty enough sound-picture, I think. Imagine hillsides and valleys and plains all ringing out, as the light hits them just exactly so. A chiming, shining world. Especially in winter.