Life in a Northern Town

Bite Me

2011-07-04T11:48:00.002-04:00

I am mosquito bait. Put me in a 3000-square-foot house, add 20 other human beings, introduce one mosquito. The mosquito will locate me, bite me, and nobody else in the house will have seen nor heard the mosquito. In fact, those 20 individuals will think I’m crazy. “There are no mosquitoes in here!” they’ll proclaim. “Then how’d I get these bites?” I’ll ask, pointing to my shins, my arms, my neck.

They’ll squint, they’ll tilt their heads to the side. They’re assessing my sanity.

“Maybe you already had them when you came indoors,” one will say.

“Could you have gotten them yesterday, and only noticed them just now?” another will wonder.

“Maybe they’re hives,” another will say.

I’m accustomed to this reaction, and have learned not to engage in further discussion. There’s no use in saying I SAW the mosquito, tried in vain to kill it. Conversely, there’s no point in meekly holding my hand out and showing that I DID kill it…after it had bitten me four times. (It’s a bit distasteful, apparently, to offer the broken bits of a smashed mosquito as evidence. And I’ve learned that nobody wants to see the smear of blood on my leg after I’ve slapped a mosquito in the process of biting me.)

It’s not just mosquitoes, either. Black flies and deer flies single me out. When Leigh and I take a walk together – something we do at least once a day – she is part companion, part protector. We’ll be ambling along, chatting and enjoying the sunshine, and I’ll suddenly begin contorting. I wave my arms, I duck, I dodge, I slap at my own head like an imbecile. “Just stand still and I’ll get it,” she’ll say. My choice, at that point, is a painful deer fly bite or a smack from Leigh. I tend to choose the latter. She’s fast, she has excellent aim, and usually after one slap the fly is dead.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not just one fly. This happens over and over and over. I can get bitten five or six times over the course of a couple of miles, or I can get slapped an equal number of times. It’s a weird kind of trade-off, requiring an “I’m doing this for your own good” benevolence on Leigh’s part, and an “I’ll take this kind of pain instead of that kind of pain” acquiescence from me. Since I’d rather endure the 2-second sting of a slap over the 5-day maddening itch of a bite, it is, I suppose, an easy decision.

There are all sorts of theories as to why some people are magnets for biting insects and others are not. Some have to do with carbon dioxide, or lactic acid, or cholesterol. Some believe that movement and body heat attract mosquitoes, although I am just as much a magnet – in fact, much MORE of a magnet – when I am sitting still. Last summer, for instance, I went to a nice restaurant with four friends. We had a choice – dine outside or indoors. It was a balmy evening, summer had barely begun. I wasn’t yet, in other words, in full mosquito-alert mode. When the others unanimously voted for the outdoor seating, I agreed.

Before we were even served, I noticed a couple of mosquitoes. “Oh, I’m going to get bit,” I said.

“What are you talking about? There aren’t any mosquitoes,” one companion said.

“Don’t worry – mosquitoes LOVE me,” another said. “I guarantee they’ll bite me and not you.”

This was very noble of companion number 2, and I agreed to stay outside. I recalled taking long walks with Leigh’s dog, Fan, when I’d be mercifully spared of mosquito or deer fly pestering because all of the biters would go for the dog. I’d walk her up and down our road feeling both unusually free and terribly guilty. Fan was being sacrificed, essentially, for my comfort. Those were some of the best walks of my life.

I also recalled, however, a party I’d attended. It was an outdoor affair and roughly 50 guests were there. I didn’t notice any mosquitoes and was happily socializing. At one point, Leigh and I strolled across the wide lawn to look at the nearby lake. Again, there were no mosquitoes, and I had a wonderful time.

When I arrived at home, however, my ankles began itching. All up and down my legs were tiny red bumps. The itch was wicked, but I could tell they weren’t mosquito bites because of the clustered arrangement and the size. “What the heck bit me?” I asked Leigh.

“Oh,” she said, looking grave. “They look like chigger bites.”

I appreciated Leigh’s solemnity. Since for her, I’m the equivalent of Fan – the sacrificial companion – she virtually never gets bit. She does, however, have to live with me and my tendency to be driven to desperation when I’m covered with bites. She treads, in other words, lightly.

I had never heard of chiggers, but I was momentarily halted from my scratching frenzy by the prospect of a new word and a new insect. I immediately looked them up and learned that chiggers apparently like grasses and areas near lakes. Bingo – lakes, grasses… and me. Not one other person I subsequently asked – including Leigh, who had been standing right next to me in the grass next to the lake – had received a single bite.

Back at the restaurant, it soon became apparent that Noble Companion had nothing to worry about. The mosquitoes came for me and me alone. While everyone else enjoyed their bruschetta and pasta, I spent the evening on high alert, taking a mouthful of food then sitting back in my chair, waiting, watching. I employed an oft-used method of attack – er, to be accurate, counter-attack – allowing the mosquito to land on me and begin to pierce my skin, then slapping it. This tactic slightly raises the likelihood of killing the mosquito, as it takes a split second longer for it to dart away. I ended up with half-a-dozen bites and slightly fewer kills. My dinner companions – including Mr. Noble – received exactly no bites.

Sometimes I pretend that I’m some kind of rare delicacy to these insects, the most savored of desserts or after-dinner liqueurs. To mosquitoes, I’m Drambuie, I’m flan, I’m the sweetest apricot mousse. But when I’m lying in a darkened room, in the middle of the night, and one determined mosquito is planning its attack on whatever centimeter of exposed skin it can alight upon, I’m not thinking about my good blood. I’m strategizing with the stealth and steadiness of a professional assassin. I’m trying to save my own skin.

Hummers and Snappers

2011-06-26T11:27:00.000-04:00

Every season seems to bring with it an obsession. One year it was a rogue sunflower seed that had become embedded in a cut log. Rather than dying, it sprouted a shoot right out the side of the wood. One summer it was fresh peaches, which were so delectable I almost didn’t want to eat anything but. Last year it was art, or my version of art. I took a class, set up a second desk for my non-writing work. I tried to make things. I had fun being bad at it.

This year, starting in late spring and continuing to date, my attention is split. On the ground, I’m in love with snapping turtles. In the air, hummingbirds have invaded my consciousness.

These aren’t new interests, exactly. I’ve loved turtles since I was small, and started being interested in hummingbirds when I lived in Arizona. But this year both the birds and the turtles are more there. I don’t know why the snappers have suddenly materialized, but I spot one almost every day. In previous years I’d be lucky to see just one – more often, it’d be none at all. The hummers have been ever-present since Leigh bought me a canister-style feeder which she hung outside my study. Each May a couple of birds adopt the feeder as their own. This year, however, we have four birds. I don’t know if they’ve paired up, but they are fierce. One will zip in, begin to drink. Another will zoom close, buzz the first, and hover. It appears to be a challenge, and sometimes the first bird will ignore the challenger and fly away. Other times, however, the two will go breast to breast, appear to almost bounce off each other. I can hear their wings tangle, and then they retreat.

The turtles are significantly less flashy. I’ve observed two primary behaviors: lumbering (moving) and waiting (not moving). The ones I’ve encountered close up have been rather large – imagine the biggest dinner plate you’ve ever seen, then extend it by a few inches. A friend recently came across one in a pond; she said it was two feet across. She doesn’t tend to embellish, so she may have been lucky enough to see a turtle that was quite old.

For all practical purposes, I leave the hummers alone. About every 3 days, I fill the feeder with a sugar/water mixture and then listen to them battle and court one another. All day, every day, I hear their buzz through the open window as I sit at my desk. They’re so close it sounds like an active beehive. Once in a while I swivel around and watch them for a few minutes. Sometimes all four are trying to get their licks in, but more often it’s just two. I see them in the yard, as well, darting their long tongues into a flower or just speeding from one resting site to another. Sometimes one will execute a series of deep, swooping arcs – part of their courtship ritual. I watch, I marvel, but I don’t talk to the hummers, don’t attempt to interact, nor interfere with their antics.

I don’t bother the turtles, either, in large part because I take their name seriously. They can snap, and I don’t want to get snapped at or on. I’ve read that they will latch onto a finger or hand and hold tight. Even if they’re not attempting to take a piece of me as a souvenir, I don’t like pain and would prefer not to mess with a snapping turtle jaw.

What I do, with the snapping turtles, is usher. I have become a turtle crossing guard. Whenever I see one in the road, I stop my car, get out, and direct approaching vehicles around the turtle until it has safely reached the other side. It gives me a certain amount of pleasure to be a good Samaritan in the turtle realm, but I mostly do it to avoid the alternative: dead turtles. So far this year I’ve encountered four, all hit by cars. One morning, right down our road, I saw a big snapper. I stopped, made sure it crossed okay. That evening, as I headed out for dinner with friends, I saw it on the side of the road, quite near where I’d earlier observed it. It looked like it was resting. On my return trip, it was in the same spot and I realized it wasn’t resting. I felt broken-hearted --- I’d enjoyed that turtle. We’d spoken a bit, as I waited there in the road for her (him?) to make the journey from one side of the road to the other. That morning, she’d decided to pause mid-way, settling down to think or rest or just see what this human was up to… After a few minutes she grew bored with me and headed west, into a swampy and wooded area.

I don’t know if she ever made it to her destination or if she was, perhaps, making a return trip when she was hit. I do know that the road is flat and straight, and any driver paying the slightest degree of attention would have spotted the turtle at some distance and could have easily driven around her. When there’s something in the road here, you notice it. It’s almost always an animal – a snake, a frog, a darting chipmunk. Every once in a while a squirrel will do what I call a suicide run – dash halfway across the road and stop, then suddenly change direction. I’ve accidentally hit more than one – just about anyone who does a lot of driving out here will say the same. Deer sometimes leap across the road, too, and again, if I asked thirty people, I’d probably find at least one who’s had a vehicle/deer collision. They can be dangerous, even deadly.

But there are reasons those animals are hit. Snakes and frogs can be almost invisible; chipmunks and squirrels and deer are fast and unpredictable. They flash out of the brush and are in your path in an instant.

Turtles are visible.

Their movement is so slow as to be nearly 100% predictable.

They are easy to drive around.

We live in a rural area; there is virtually no traffic.

So why do snapping turtles end up crushed in the road?

Because some drivers think it’s fun to run over them. Something about the prospect of a crushed carapace turns them on, or maybe they like the bump beneath the tires that a 40-pound turtle would cause.

This might be a good place to say that I don’t understand many things that lots of other people think are fun. Farcical comedy, excessive alcohol consumption, getting a tattoo, high-risk activities like skydiving, low-risk activities like golf. The list goes on…

But I really, REALLY don’t understand what could be fun about getting behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and intentionally hitting a snapping turtle.

A friend – the same one who saw the giant snapper in the pond – recounted a story from her childhood. She was riding her bike down the road and saw a snapping turtle. She stopped to admire it, made sure it traversed the road safely. When it was just about all the way across, she headed off. A pick-up truck passed her a minute later. She stopped her bike and looked back down the road, wanting to make sure the driver went around the turtle. He didn’t. The truck swerved toward the shoulder, hit the turtle, sped off.

That was over forty years ago. She hasn’t forgotten. I won’t forget this summer’s turtles either.

Right now, however, I am preoccupied with wings – wings nourished, at least in part, by sugar I’ve stirred into boiling water, cooled, carefully poured into canisters and hung. The hummers’ throats are alit, they flash ruby-feathered brilliance in my eyes which yes, tear up with happiness.

--for MB

33-29

2011-06-25T10:19:00.000-04:00

It’s the morning after the New York State Senate passed what is widely referred to as the “gay marriage bill.” I’m hoping that we can cease referring to “gay marriage” now and simply call it “marriage.” I’m hoping, to paraphrase Governor Cuomo, that when the term “marriage equality” is used, fewer people get hung up on the concept of marriage, in its traditional sense, and focus instead on the word “equality.”

I’m also hoping that this belated but historic legislation makes an impression on all the teenagers who have felt bereft and alone. As I watched the vote – which seemed to take forever – I thought of Matthew Shephard, whose murder, in 1998, led to the passage of federal hate crime legislation over a decade later. I thought of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who jumped off a bridge, one of five teens who took their own lives in the fall of 2010. Those suicides directly led to an outpouring of support highlighted, most publicly, by the It Gets Better campaign (www.itgetsbetter.org).

I thought of my students, most of them heterosexual, whose easygoing acceptance of homosexuality will, I believe, change the world.

Happy Gay Pride Week, New Yorkers. Celebrate, and remember.

Preparing for Class

2011-01-30T08:38:00.001-05:00

I’m getting a kind of lesson plan together, something with poetry, aiming to be insightful and sensitive. Downstairs Leigh’s frustrated, trying to negotiate with the roofer who over-charged precisely when she’s feeling broke. No lie, there are at least three feet of snow on the ground, and so when I hear the robins I’m slow to react. Dozens of them in the bare trees. The birds are almost silent. When have we last seen robins in winter? Would you believe never? The sun or what passes for sun around here is visiting for a stretch, so I take off the screen and crank a window open, try to photograph orange breast against snow. They’re not skittish, don’t stir much when I head outside and scatter seed. But the flutter of wings as they roost is audible, like the whoosh of shaken fabric, or a racket stunned against a dusty rug. They poke at berries and ignore the seed, shudder and alight, knock clusters of snow from branches. Half a dozen rush the house then veer away; through binoculars they’re beautiful, heaving and composed. By lunch they’ve gone, but all afternoon I hear, over my shoulder, a promise of return.

Tucson 2011

2011-01-10T11:33:00.001-05:00

Because I teach, I tend to divide the calendar into semesters. At the start of this past semester, the big story in the news was “gay suicides.” What that meant: at least five gay teens took their lives. Story after story appeared about how each of them had been bullied, called names, harassed for being who they were.

Anyone who teaches and, in fact, anyone who has regular contact with individuals under the age of 30, probably hears the word “gay” bantered around in a joshing, informal manner on a regular basis. It’s used to label homosexual individuals, but it’s also used as a synonym for stupid, for lame, for effeminate, for sentimental, for tender-hearted, even for a certain brand of kindness. Young men use it as frequently as they use the word “the,” and young women use it as well. “That’s so gay,” or “Eww, that’s gay,” is ubiquitous in both junior high classrooms and on college campuses. Spend 10 minutes on Facebook and you’ll find at least one post using the word in this manner.

If you were to ask the user of the word why they’d chosen it, they’d be quick to proclaim no ill intent. “I was just kidding around,” they’d say. “It doesn’t have anything to do with gay people,” they’d claim. “It’s a joke. It’s just how we talk.”

Fast forward to January; I’m preparing for a new semester. Another group of people are dead, others seriously injured. It is widely suggested that language has again played a role in this tragedy, only this time it isn’t a word or two, but rather an atmosphere of vitriol, an environment of blame, and the regular, widespread use of careless and inflammatory rhetoric.

This language might start with politicians and the media – I’m not sure, honestly, if it matters where it begins – but it does not end there. Incivility, proclamations of outrage, and verbal abuse of every degree is rampant in many areas of public discourse. Facebook and Twitter light up when something newsworthy is first reported. The New York Times and other newspapers’ reader responses fill with accusatory comments and staunch position statements: I believe this, and nothing anyone says will make me reconsider.

I am not against passionate beliefs and I am not advocating for censorship. But I find it profoundly disturbing when rage meets ignorance and immediacy. Why do we feel the need to comment instantly and emotionally to everything? I lived in Tucson for six years and knew it to be a complex city, yes, with many difficult problems… but it is also a home to many artists, many reasonable political activists, many intelligent and compassionate individuals. For the last year or so, however, the city and the state of Arizona have been held up as models of intolerance, a kind of geographic aberration, as though the rest of the country does not have similar, if perhaps occasionally less public, problems. Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on the corner of Ina and Oracle, some of my Facebook contacts opened fire verbally. The immediate response seemed to be something like this: some nut in Arizona – surely a Republican – just killed a Congresswoman, a Democrat. Tributaries of this initial reaction included blame of, in no particular order, Sarah Palin, Republicans, the Tea Party, the state of Arizona, the city of Tucson, the contentious state of immigration policies, the recent ruling on Mexican-American studies, Washington politics, John McCain, and gun control policies.

It’s not unreasonable to question all of these elements; my point has nothing to do with having an opinion, making serious inquiry into contributing factors, or feeling anger about these kinds of events. It has to do with reactionary expressions of outrage, including overt or subtle intimations of violence, often based on circumstances with which the speaker/writer has little familiarity.

It takes effort to pause, and even more effort to think. That’s what I’m advocating for: thinking. Considering. Doing a little research, gathering some facts. Formulating an opinion that advances discussion rather than shuts it down. Simply posting an inflammatory headline or a knee-jerk response does nothing to promote conversation, even of a cyber nature. On Saturday, for a good hour or so on Facebook, Representative Giffords was pronounced dead over and over again. You can argue that this was simply a way of sharing information and, in fact, a way that has become one of the easiest and most popular ways of doing so. You can argue that it was a widespread expression of concern, even grief. But I think it can also be argued that a rush to post that particular information was, at least in part, an expression of reactionary outrage based on no factual evidence.

Some of my students – college students, in their early 20’s – still banter the word “gay” around; many of my acquaintances are quick to condemn the Republican party at any opportunity. I, too, have been guilty of blaming an entire party for some of the ills of our current political and cultural state. I can’t say, with any degree of honesty, that it would pain me to see Sarah Palin fade from the national scene; I found her “target” poster truly horrifying, although only one example in a fairly steady stream of appalling comments coming from her.

But Sarah Palin did not single-handedly create our woes, in Tucson or nationally. Nor did the Republicans or the Tea Partiers. Everyone who responds with hot-headed and righteous anger, everyone who speaks without thinking, anyone who naively believes there is a right and a wrong answer on any given political issue, anyone who gets off on fanning the flames… All are culpable.

As I finish writing this, the nation has just held a moment of silence for the shooting victims. Let’s take that seriously – the idea of pausing to reflect – and keep in mind that words and symbols have power. We don’t have to censor ourselves or others, we don’t have to spin what we really believe – but maybe we can consider using language in a more responsible, dignified and productive manner – a manner that contributes something authentic and substantive. Maybe we can start by recognizing this: despite that childhood rhyme, it’s been proven, many times over, that words can hurt. Proceed accordingly.

Here's to 2011

2010-12-20T11:58:00.001-05:00

High points of 2010, in no real order:

Trip to Texas and Arizona last January. Saw my family in TX, saw my friends in AZ. Lots of sunshine – great way to start the year.

Several close friends survived, and thrived, after serious illnesses. What could be better?

I learned that Susan Rogers’ book would be published. Yahoooooooo!

Landed the tenure-track position at SUNY Oswego. (Giant sigh of relief, still exhaling.)

And, although I said these were in no order, this one outranks everything: my brother came home from Iraq.

Books

Fiction: Well, I didn’t read a LOT of fiction, but I really enjoyed a novel called The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who a) likes graphic novels; b) loves maps; c) likes intelligent and quirky narrators. I’m not sure it’s rightly called a graphic novel – it’s just a very creative and charming novel. So yeah – that’d be my favorite of the year, although like Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, below, I wouldn’t have expected to like it so much.

Poetry: My favorite poems this year were written by my students. What would have been my favorite book was Nox by Anne Carson. Unfortunately, my copy was lost in transit, so I’m deferring my utter enjoyment of this book until 2011.

Nonfiction: Generally I read a lot of good nonfiction, so in no particular order:

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers

Reality Hunger, David Shields

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

About a Mountain, John D’Agata

Vanishing Point, Ander Monson

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse

Best American Essays 2010 (special mention to Ryan Van Meter’s essay, “First”)

Movies: I don’t see a lot of first-run movies, but the one movie I adored this year, and recommend to all artists, is The Beaches of Agnes, a documentary by and about Agnes Varda, the French filmmaker, and so much more. Loved it from start to finish and can’t wait to view it again.

(On a related note: I felt a couple of widely-praised movies were really over-rated. 1) The Kids Are All Right; and 2) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Good performances, yes… but beyond that?? If anyone cares to explain, please do.)

TV I enjoyed: Men of a Certain Age, Damages, Friday Night Lights, and Modern Family. And although I usually fall asleep in the middle of it, and couldn’t explain the show if I had to, I’ve really come to like Fringe a lot.

Last but not least: High Points of Facebook: It’s actually hard to choose – I have a lot of writer friends and a lot of friends who don’t post about their endless fatigue, break-ups, hangovers, random whininess, etc., but here are some that stood out:

Susan Rogers’ posts from Tasmania and Wyoming;
All of Kimi Eisele’s blog posts and gratitude posts;
A short video featuring my nephews’ home-made game, the infamous “Sting Pong.” I rarely get a kick out of stupidity, but that one made me laugh.

If you have any year-end high points of your own, please feel free to comment here or on Facebook. And thank you, sincerely, to anyone who’s been reading these blog posts. I really appreciate it.

Sliding & Spinning

2010-12-05T13:45:00.000-05:00

Early December brought our first significant snowfall accumulation. That phrase – “significant accumulation” – is subjective. Around here, anything less than 7 or 8 inches is usually shrugged off. We’re accustomed to regular – one might say unending – snowfall, and it’s typical that we receive at least a few inches a day when the season really gets rolling. To grab our attention, a good foot or more of snow is required, and some of us can ignore the onslaught until it’s measured in upper-body terms: up to my waist, my chest, my shoulder… Over my head.

Sometimes, it’s not inches or feet by which we measure a storm, but other factors, like wind chill, wind speed, and consistency of snow. The first two are self-explanatory – even a trace of snow, if accompanied by a wind chill factor in the single digits or below zero, will hurt. If you have to be outdoors when the wind chill dips that low, you get so cold that the slightest dusting of snow on exposed skin feels painful – more like hot than cold; even the lightest touch can burn. Wind comes off the lake and can literally knock you off your feet. Combine those gusts with slippery surfaces or walkways that are not shoveled, and getting from point A to point B can be an unpleasant adventure. Even my car, a small sedan, has been rocked on its wheels; a good body blow to the driver’s side has made me flinch as though being struck on more than one occasion.

What’s a little harder to explain is snow’s consistency. Everyone knows there’s a difference between powdery snow and wet snow. We get both here, sometimes during the same storm. There’s a whole spectrum of consistency that exists between those edge points, as well – snow isn’t just wet or dry, heavy or fluffy. There’s one particular kind of snow that locals refer to as greasy, and it’s as unpleasant as it sounds. I don’t think it falls from the sky in its greasy form or, rather, I’m not sure if its vertical form is entirely responsible for its horizontal slickness. I’ve heard that the phrase refers to snow that’s dense, almost slushy, and occurs when temperatures are right around freezing. It’s more slippery than other kinds of snow, and can make both walking and driving rather treacherous.

That’s what happened yesterday, and most of us were unprepared. By “most of us,” I mean everyone. The plows weren’t sent out early, drivers weren’t warned about the conditions, and my students, who walk to school, were taken aback by the deceptive intensity of the weather. It looked so pretty and, because it was the first real snowfall of the year, initially caused considerable delight. Delight, that is, for the indoor observer. Those who had to engage with the snow quickly felt their joy diminish.

When I headed out in the morning, we appeared to be enjoying one of those stereotypical picture-perfect snowfalls. The flakes were large, no wind was discernable and, although it felt cold, there was no bite to the air. It was just a nice winter day. As is my habit when I leave home during the winter, I always test my brakes. I want to see if the road is slippery and, if so, gauge how far I’ll slide if I have to stop suddenly. We have lots of deer in the woods surrounding the house, as well as darting squirrels, chipmunks, and a whole menagerie of slower critters I could conceivably encounter in my path. My tires are good, and usually I’ll slide very briefly if at all. Yesterday, however, although the roads looked fine – just an inch or so of snow – I slid and fishtailed when braking at a very low speed. Odd, I thought. I guess it’s more slippery than it looks.

I intended to take my time getting to school and was, in fact, forced to do so almost immediately because I hit a white-out. White-out conditions are my least favorite and I try to avoid them whenever possible. Given where we live, however, it’s inevitable that several times a year I’m going to have to keep driving when I can’t see.

Driving in a white-out requires two things: experience, and faith. I mean faith literally – you have to believe, fervently, that some benevolent force in the universe is going to assist you in your travels. Maybe it’s comparable to the faith some must feel when getting on a plane or stepping into a church. You aren’t entirely sure how that machine stays in the air, you aren’t able to explain, really, who or what or why you believe in whatever religion draws you… Driving in a whiteout is like that: it seems impossible that all over town individuals are at the wheels of two-ton vehicles, maneuvering them blindly towards and away from one another with little mechanical or technological guidance. It seems, honestly, like a miracle every time I get out of the car after driving through the density and chaos of a whiteout.

As for experience, generally speaking, pulling over and waiting out a storm of this kind is not an option. For one thing, you can’t see where to pull over. Where we live, there’s often no shoulder and even if there were, it may not be safe to stop. Approaching drivers can’t see your taillights and you could be at as much risk while parked as you’d be in motion. So you learn to seek out potential markers – either actual landmarks that will indicate your location and help keep you on track, or moving targets, so to speak – other cars. I often feel relieved when I see another vehicle’s taillights or headlights, because they tend to mean I’m still on the road. It doesn’t always indicate that, however – I’ve watched one car follow another car’s lights into a ditch or into a field, unaware that the road had curved.

That didn’t happen yesterday. The ride to school is only seven miles, and I thought that the worst-case scenario meant seven miles of low to no visibility. That’s plenty – even a hundred yards of driving when you can’t see is frightening, no matter how many times you’ve done it. But I had a feeling that the white-outs would be intermittent, and they were. Although there were stretches where I couldn’t see the road at all, the closer I got to the college, the better the visibility became. I thought the worst of the drive was over as I approached the school’s entrance.

The entrance, which would be for me a left turn, is on a sloping road. When conditions are clear and dry, you’d barely notice the slope. Walking up it would require little more exertion than strolling on a flat surface. Even so, I’ve learned, over the years, that the road near the entrance tends to be slippery in winter; I always slow to a crawl on the approach. Yesterday, crawling was too fast. As I began to turn, I also began to slide. I quickly realized I couldn’t complete the turn and so continued straight, downhill, preparing to turn around and take another crack at the entrance. Because it was early, not many other cars were around. As I saw my first opportunity to reverse my course on a side street, I also spotted a mother and her school-age son walking in the street. I knew if I made that particular turn, I might slide directly toward them. I passed up that street and came to a second opportunity. No cars, no humans, no obstacles. I inched around the turn, pulled into a driveway, made my way back onto the main road. This time I was going uphill, just slightly, and could feel my car – all-wheel drive – slip just a tad. That was my second indication that the road was incredibly slick -- normally I’d have had no trouble. I took it slow and turned into the college. I was now on a minor decline that segued into a fairly tight turn. Way ahead of me, a car stopped, waiting to pull into a parking spot. I pumped my brakes, well in advance, I thought, of having to stop. My car began to spin.

I should mention, here, that I’ve been driving for over 34 years. I’ve been pretty lucky, but I’ve also been rear-ended by a preoccupied student; I’ve slid on black ice; I’ve cried after surviving an hour-long white-out; I’ve driven too fast and paid the price; I’ve had the misfortune of hitting squirrels and birds; I crushed my own taillight once when backing up in an unfamiliar parking lot. And, because I live where I live, I’ve spun out before. The last time was on a busy road, two nights before Christmas, and my car came to a rest after narrowly avoiding half a dozen other vehicles, nose to nose with another skidding driver. Our front ends were within an inch of each other; we smiled weakly, waved, and maneuvered back into our respective lanes.

Yesterday, although the road was lined with parked cars, there were no oncoming drivers and nobody was behind me. I was effectively alone, on my own college campus, two minutes away from my office. Although it hadn’t yet fully registered with me, the snow was greasy and, in addition, may have concealed a layer of black ice. I don’t know, to be honest, what was happening beneath my car’s tires; I only know what wasn’t happening. The wheels were not gaining traction, and so my car executed a graceful slow motion spin, sliding as it spun further down the hill. I concentrated on minimizing my panic, tried to assess my surroundings and guard, as best I could, against hitting anything. Eventually the car just stopped, as though it had thrown a sudden tantrum and grown weary of its own misbehavior. I drove back out the entrance – I was now facing the wrong way and the road was too narrow and too slippery to right myself – and went through the whole procedure one more time. I made sure, on attempt number 3, that no cars were around, no students were walking, and took the entrance super slowly. I lucked out this time, as a snowplow preceded me and apparently scraped enough of the surface to allow me to inch to a parking lot without further incident. I then did what every other person who drove to school did: repeated and relived my adventure roughly 30 times, and in return heard other slightly harrowing narratives of other early-morning treks to school. In that manner I learned that at least six vehicles had gone off the road where I’d spun out and the unfortunate drivers had had to wait for hours for tow trucks to assist them in getting on track. I guess, in retrospect, I was lucky.

At the end of the day I was fortunate to have clean roads and clear traveling all the way home. Our driveway, although it had been plowed, had one last surprise in store for me. Although I’ve never hit anything stationary, bar one rear bumper after aforesaid black ice incident twenty years ago, my car slid at the bottom of the driveway – another slope, another curve – and before I could make the turn, rammed the passenger side up against a tree and rock wall that border the pavement. I absorbed the hit, heard the crunch, heard something shatter. I was fine, but a door was dented and a taillight busted.

Today I’m just the tiniest bit sore and more than a tiny bit worried. I’m not looking forward to driving in the snow again, something I’ll have to do today or tomorrow and every day for the next four months. I don’t want to navigate the route to school when the snow blinds me, or feel my car bashed by the wind, or fear that I’ll slide into another vehicle or a tree or a ditch. None of that is fun to contemplate. I won’t dwell on it for long, but since I’m still in the 24-48 hour range, I’m allowing the anxiety to take its toll and then, hopefully, it’ll dissipate and allow me to function normally.

In the meantime, I’m thinking about sliding, about spinning, about losing control of something tangible, like a car. Although it’s not fun, quite, there’s a built-in undercurrent that many might identify as a thrill. It’s thrilling to slide, to spin out, to wonder, in a concentrated and fleeting way, what’s going to happen next. It was so, admittedly, because I could assess, instantly, that the danger level was low. The worst thing that could have happened at school was I’d have hit another car. A bummer and a huge expense, to be sure, but had I gotten hurt it’d have been only mildly due to my exceedingly slow speed. And I probably could have taken out part of a fence at home, maybe some steps, if the car hadn’t hit exactly where it did. I could have crumpled my bumper but there, too, the potential for major damage or injury was low. I was free, in other words, to feel that momentary thrill. It didn’t translate into danger; had there been other moving vehicles or individuals, my reaction in retrospect would be considerably more sober. As it is, I don’t feel any residual elation. I feel low-grade fear and low-grade dread. There’s a dose of resentment, too, because I know I can’t indulge these feelings – I have to get through them, deal with them, tamp them down, shuffle them into the denial folder of my brain. You can’t be scared to drive here. If you are, you’re doomed. You’d have to leave this place, find a safer spot to set down roots. Danger’s part of the package and although I don’t like that aspect of my small town life, I accept it. I accept it the way I accept the blasts of the shots I hear as I type this – hunters stalking deer in posted (no hunting) areas that are, in effect, right outside my door. I accept it the way I accept the bitter cold and the battering wind. These things are facts of life, and there’s little to be done to mitigate or alter them. They’re the reasons for faith, perhaps. But I don’t mean faith in a god, or faith in the good will of human beings, or even faith in myself.

The kind of faith I’m talking about is, maybe, a faith in what I’ll call the sacredness of living -- a secular faith in our collective willingness to set out, day after day, on our individual quests for things we don’t often bother to properly define. “Why do we live here?” people ask, every winter, laughing in bewilderment after hearing or relaying yet another story of near misses on the road or superhuman feats of snow removal or unbelievable narratives of spending a week without electricity or having a tree land on your roof after an ice storm or watching a squirrel contemplate, with the focus of a physicist, exactly where to land after it leapt, blindly, from the third floor of a house to the drifting snow below.

“The heart never fits the journey. Always one ends first.” So wrote the poet Jack Gilbert and, although I think he’s onto something lovely and true, I also think that maybe he’s brushed up sideways against a definition of the kind of faith I know. It’s a faith of refusal – refusal to believe in that inequality. Maybe, despite all evidence to the contrary, the heart is a match for the truest, longest journey, and these beating, love-struck emblems of our very lives are up to the challenge of surviving every last ineffable and unimaginable feat along the way. If we come out with a few dents and bruises along the way, so be it. Part of the ride, part of the thrill of it all is the slipping, the spinning, the long slide towards something we know so little of… We drive in the dark, all of us, don’t we – even though it might look like light, even though we pray, this way or that, to come to a stop in one piece.

Thankful for (in no particular order):

2010-11-21T11:20:00.004-05:00

Geese squawking overhead

The endless scribble of tree branches

Sunshine in winter

The sky, the lake

Green apples

Thai food

Sweatshirts and jeans

Newspapers

Poetry

Best American Essays

Writers

Breakfast

Photographs

Fargo, the cat

Shells and stones and bones

Anyone who makes me laugh

My students, colleagues, college, and education in general

Fleece

Leather (sorry)

My 16-year-old car

Bruce

The ability to daydream

Blue. And green.

Post its, paper clips, binder clips (colors!), narrow-lined paper, gel pens, pencils

Being old enough to have learned to type on a manual typewriter

Growing up in New Jersey (my family, the beach, ice skating)

Living in Arizona (the desert, the mountains, UA, Pima)

Life in New York (Leigh. Syracuse. Everything.)

Anne Carson

Autumn

My grandmother’s ring*

Memory

And my friends, who should be at the top of this list or, rather, should have each their own pages, with photos and quotations and video and long, beautiful anecdotes and plenty of sentiment. Je t’adore.

*That's my grandmother, in the photo.

True Loves

2010-10-16T14:57:00.001-04:00

If the sensory world – the world we see, smell, hear, touch and taste – is a wondrous story, and each element of that story-world the equivalent of a word, then the first word I fell in love with was water.

It wasn’t the word itself – my infatuation predated my vocabulary – it was the tangible liquid I encountered in creeks, swimming pools, hoses, spigots, the Atlantic Ocean, even bathtubs. In subsequent years I’d fall for tulips, deer, moths, clouds, trees, wind, waves, snow, fields, mountains, geckos… but the first love and, therefore, a defining love, was water.

The way my love manifested itself was simple: I wanted to be in it. Where there was water, my body wandered. I walked in the creek behind my childhood home, noticing how the light played below the surface of the water, how it created moving splotches that sparkled on the silt. I observed but did not understand the phenomenon of refraction when I saw that my leg seemed to shift at the ankle, precisely where it entered the water, as though I were a puzzle that didn’t fit quite right. We had no swimming pool, but I begged neighbors to let me swim in theirs, unashamed of my need, willing to use big eyes and a winsome smile to get my way. I later became embarrassed of my desire, but I learned to swim at 5 and needed – yes, needed – to be submerged. I needed to be not just in the water, but under the water. I wanted to be a fish. I wanted gills and fins. I wanted to live beneath the surface of the sea.

I learned that if the world is a wondrous story, and if an element of that story is the word love, and if desire is a component of love, then a component of desire is unrequitedness.

I would never be a fish. I would never be able to filter oxygen from water, I’d never have a two-chambered heart, never spend my days swimming rather than walking. I would not make a home in a coral reef, would never learn to look up at the light from my perch below the surface. But I’d learn to hold my breath for long minutes, scaring my mother when I’d dart under the ocean waves and surface, too long after, yards from where I’d submerged. I’d learn to dive from a dead stand, or from a ledge, or from my father’s shoulders -- from any solid plane. I’d spend hours in any body of water I could – a pond, a pool, a last-resort tub. Each summer weekend my family would go to the beach, a sandy strip of Jersey shore that felt like home, and I’d enter the water in the morning and exit at sunset. I’d cut my feet on crab shells and have my calf stung by a jellyfish; I’d swallow sea water and I’d tumble in the surf of more than one dangerous undertow. Twice I’d be pulled from the depths, seconds from succumbing to a fantasy of deep-sea life. I remember being held, at 6, in the arms of an uncle while my aunt tried to rinse the weight of sand and seaweed from my hair after I’d been thrashed by the undercurrent. I couldn’t hold my own head up; it was heavy with sand-laden dreadlocks, my swimsuit bulging with pockets of scratchy sand. It was like the sea had tried to claim me; it was like part of me was left behind.

The physical world is a wondrous story, and part of that story is loss. Loneliness is a recurrent theme; loneliness and loss are currents, like desire, like love. Fins filter what we need to breathe; lungs work in conjunction with the heart; dividing lines blur; water erodes even rock to smoothness.

Autumn leaves.

Yes, it does. It arrives full of sophisticated glamour and giddy flamboyance, it makes an entrance, it demands attention. Autumn feels, year after year, like I’ve found my soul mate. Year after year I pledge my undying affection, and every time, every time, my heart gets broken.

An unambitious elementary school art teacher introduced me to the art of preserving autumn leaves. We never learned about perspective or the color wheel or the difference between a shade and a tone. But we did iron leaves. All it took was one sheet of waxed paper, which we called “wax paper,” shiny side up. An assortment of colorful leaves –usually maple, some oak, some cherry – was arranged on top, followed by another layer of paper. It was important that the waxy side touched the leaves – the shiny side of the paper had to be facing in, the duller side facing out. Once it was all just right – a wax paper and leaf sandwich – a single page of newsprint was laid across the top, and then a warm iron run over the newspaper. This melted the wax and preserved the leaves. The effect was a somewhat duller version of a stained glass window, but to my kindergarten self it was high art and I never tired of creating the simple compositions. The process engaged me physically, emotionally and even intellectually or, I guess, as intellectually as a 5-year old can be engaged. I was enamored of the idea of preservation, of saving something that might otherwise be lost. For me, the process was absolute – I thought that my pile of art projects would be stored with the care a Smithsonian curator might store rare dinosaur bones. That they ended up on my mother’s refrigerator or, at best, in her hope chest, was sufficient to my understanding of permanence. Those translucent panes of art were forever. They were my first attempts to unite nature and art by my own hand, and they became, in a way, another version of submersion: immersion. Rapture was possible via art. I was five, but I was a poet.

What happens when you mix water and autumn leaves? The leaves become saturated or, to say it more simply, their colors explode. During October, the wooden steps leading to our front door are strewn with leaves. On a crisp fall day, the leaves are yellow, orange, red. Still-green leaves are in the mix as well, and sometimes a precocious leaf or two is already brown. When a breeze blows, the brown ones skitter across the stairs like crabs. Close up, most of the leaves are mottled; one color fades into the next, much the way an apple isn’t uniformly red or green but some appealing blend of colors. The leaves are dappled, they’re veined, they’re dead. When they cover the lawn in great drifts, there’s something both baptismal and shroud-like about them. Baptismal, I think, because they beg to be entered, they beckon a body to jump into them, to lie down in them, to be surrounded by a halo of color. Shroud-like because they can feel just as somber as they do festive. Fallen leaves are one of the great metaphors of death. Autumn, we learn in grade school, is the prelude to winter, one segues into the next, and in the catechism of elementary symbolism, neither season leaves much room for kicking up one’s heels. Maybe that’s why we find a pile of leaves irresistible though – it’s temptation, pure and simple. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light and all that. Autumn leaves are seductive and for a little while each year they make my few acres of the world more beautiful.

When it rains on those leaves, their colors don’t change, but they become more vivid. It’s like being inside the Wizard of Oz when the film changes to Technicolor from sepia-toned black and white. The leaves seem more dimensional, revitalized. It’s a little like they are coming back to life.

If under some imaginary cosmic regime I were allowed only three great love affairs during my immersion in this wondrous story called the world, I’d start with water, move on to fallen leaves, and end with the calls of geese. Their calls fill me with longing in a way that no other sound or sight ever has. What I long for is not clear; I don’t analyze the feeling nor wish it away nor encourage it. The calls of the geese in their sloppy V formations each fall, each spring, sound funny to some. Sometimes they sound like a pack of barking dogs, sometimes they sound too literal: there are a bunch of big, fat, awkward birds squawking in the sky. But usually, for me, when they’re making their trek from north to south, south to north, criss-crossing right over my house in the woods, sometimes ten or twenty groups a day, usually, then, they seem to speak to me in an inexplicable language, a vocabulary that I understand not intellectually but in my blood, in my bones. Do I want to leave with them? I do. Do I want to fly? I do. Do I want to navigate by unknown means to unknown places? What do those calls say to me, how can I explain why they move me so? I don’t know. I am drawn to the depths of the sea and the heights of the sky. That sounds extravagant, overly dramatic… but I am extravagant and dramatic about the things I love.

No love, perhaps, is ever quite requited enough. Maybe that’s what it’s all about: to see how far we can love, how deep, how much, how often, how long. To push it. To see what we can endure when the love returned is not exactly the love we had in mind. To learn how to persevere when our love is not returned at all.

The tide goes out, the geese depart, autumn leaves.

And the tide rises, the geese return, spring pings its way into buds and blossoms. It’s like the world’s story cannot be contained, sometimes. Like when you walk out of the water on a summer day and feel the sting of salt tightening your skin. Break out of your body, break out of your body…

Some things can’t be contained. Some puzzles take a lifetime.

Five

2010-10-07T16:33:00.005-04:00

The first time I kissed a girl I was in college. I was pretty naïve for even a freshman; there had been no openly gay kids in high school and, in the late 70’s, there were considerably fewer representations of the “gay lifestyle” in popular culture. I had thought, for the first 18 years of my life, that I was straight. I liked boys, I’d had plenty of crushes, had fallen in love in that particularly passionate way that teenagers do. The guy I loved in high school was a little older than me, smoked cigarettes, had long blond hair that he always had to brush out of his eyes. We got into most of the kinds of trouble that teenagers tend to get into. I had no inkling – not a spark, not a sign, not a clue – that my attraction to boys would morph into an attraction to girls.

But so it did, and even then I was slow to catch on. I thought it was just this one girl, this one summer, thought it was just a phase… But then there was a second girl. And a third. And to my surprise I eventually realized that I was a girl who liked girls.

I’ve been pretty lucky over the last 30 years. Nobody ever physically hurt me, nobody singled me out for bullying. Sure, once I was walking near Syracuse University, happily smitten and holding my girlfriend’s hand, and someone yelled out “faggot!” And there was a brief period of time where I’d get anonymous phone calls from someone who would hiss the word fag! and hang up. A woman I once considered a friend told me she didn’t mind that I was gay, but she probably wouldn’t let me babysit her kids. All of those were difficult experiences – upsetting, rattle-me-to-the-core experiences – but overall, I was spared the merciless taunting and harassment that so many kids and teenagers endure.

This contemporary version of harassment puzzles me a bit, in part because I teach in a college and I’ve witnessed attitudes change radically in the last decade or so. Students today are often very supportive of their gay and lesbian classmates. This is true in many high schools as well. Young people are, in general, more educated about homosexuality, more open, and more accepting.

At the same time, it’s almost impossible to walk down the halls of any middle school, high school or even college and not hear someone use the word “gay” in what is considered, often, a joking manner. “That’s so gay.” “You’re gay, dude.” “Quit it; that’s gay.”

If I asked anyone using the word in the above manner what they meant by it, here’s what they’d say: it has nothing to do with being gay. It’s just the way we talk. We’re just kidding around. Everybody says it.

I believe them.

I also believe that they should stop using the word in that way. Why?

Because it carries within it an insult. The insult might be subtle, it might be meant as a joke, it might even be said with affection, but gay – used in this way – equals less. Less cool, less important, less macho, less desirable, less accepted, less good, less normal. Less than everyone who’s not called gay. Just less.

And guess what? We hear you. We – all of us who are gay, whether happily so, or confusedly so, or newly so, or proudly so, or enduringly so – we hear you. We hear you mock us, laugh at us, trivialize us, intimidate us, bully us, demean us… we hear you. Even when you don’t know we’re listening. Even when you don’t know we’re gay. Even when you’d swear up and down that you didn’t mean anything by it. We hear you.

And, to be blunt, it hurts.

The words you think are funny – just stupid, meaningless jokes – are hurtful. We – your sisters and brothers, your cousins, your classmates, your neighbors and colleagues, your coworkers – get our feelings hurt just like you do and sometimes, for some of us, it’s hard to get over it.

When you’re a 13-year-old boy and teased relentlessly for being WHO YOU ARE, it’s hard to get over it.

When you’re a lonely 15-year-old girl who’s harassed relentlessly for being WHO YOU ARE, it’s hard to get over it.

When you’re an 18-year-old boy who’s videotaped and mocked for being WHO YOU ARE, it’s hard to get over it.

And so what, right? Everyone gets their feelings hurt, everyone has to learn to toughen up, everyone has to navigate a whole architecture of social constructs and social pressures and social cues and isn’t that what growing up is? Don’t we all have to deal with situations like this, where someone makes fun of us and we have to figure out how to get through it?

I guess so. Sure. Okay, yeah, lots of us go through it.

But for a significant number of gay and lesbian kids and teenagers and young adults, the difference is that they see no end to their struggle. They can’t imagine that it will get better. Plenty of adults, after all, are homophobic. It’s not uncommon to hear an adult mutter “faggot” or “homo” or to warn their kids that they better not turn out to be gay when they grow up. How can these kids imagine that it’ll get better, when grown-ups seem just as bad, or worse, than their peers? The adult world, in their eyes, doesn’t appear too promising.

I don’t know if I could have withstood being mocked or harassed or teased or bullied. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have. I’m pretty sure I would have become withdrawn and depressed and maybe even suicidal. I know I wouldn’t have been able to talk to my parents about it. Whether I could have confided in a friend or not, I don’t know. I don’t remember everything about my 14-year- old self, or my 18-year-old self, or even my 25-year-old self. But I’m pretty sure I wasn’t resilient enough to endure what some kids endure these days.

It seems like it takes a tragedy to wake people up. We have to hit bottom before we can find ways to improve. Well, five teenagers are dead this fall, all suicides, all gay. That seems like the bottom to me.

I don’t think it’s enough to reassure a depressed or frightened kid that it will get better. I believe it will – I know it will – and I love the campaign that celebrities have begun to support gay youth by telling their own stories and affirming that it does, indeed, get better. We have to do more than that though. We have to change our ways.

So I wonder… How hard would it be to start changing on the level of language? Would it hurt anyone to stop using the word “gay” in a derogatory or joking manner? Would it hurt anyone to stop calling people fags or queer? Would anyone’s life be diminished by taking that one baby step?

I’d appreciate it, from the bottom of my heart, if you could try.

Late Bloomers & Caught Leaves

2010-09-29T07:09:00.001-04:00

Nearly October, and butterflies flit around as though the autumn leaves were flowers. I’m sitting on rain-soaked wood, enjoying a balmy afternoon that feels like summer but looks like fall. Morning showers left the ground saturated with dampness and color. The rain knocked off hundreds of maple leaves, and as they dry the edges curl. Dragonflies dart through the air and perch on the hydrangeas, which retain some of their summer pinks and blues but sag under the metaphorical weight of the season and the literal weight of rain. The potted red impatiens has seen better days, too. It looks garish and weary, an odd splatter of red against the yellows and oranges. Here and there in the yard a flower blooms – the last of the year, stragglers By all rights the summer flowers should have ceded dominance to the chrysanthemums, but one purple clematis climbs the trunk of the sumac, one primrose shoots a flower six inches into the air, the myrtle lets off a single violet star and one last rose taunts us with its tight fist for a week – will it, won’t it? – before bursting into aromatic dimension. I’m in love with these late bloomers; I check on them every day and pray they linger. The rose is so delectable I want to eat it like a coral-colored lettuce, but I content myself by just sticking my nose into its soft center. As I do, a gust of wind brings leaves and raindrops down upon me, and I see a pair of white butterflies twin and swirl in an updraft like scraps of fabric caught in a local tornado.

Everywhere, leaves get caught. Cradled, impaled, stuck – impeded in a hundred ways on their course from tree to ground. I see one maple leaf crucified on a dried out lily stem, several plastered to the mailbox, one twisted in some cable wires, several hung like laundry on a resilient piece of spider web. Everywhere leaves catch other leaves. They collect on the roof as though waiting for a sign; the sign is the wind, which sweeps them to the deck. When I walk across that deck the leaves catch in my sandals, flapping like clown shoes until they dislodge. I’d like to keep them near me – paste them to my arms and legs, tattoo myself with them. I’d like to be an autumn leaf magnet, and as I walked they’d drift to me, cluster around my ankles in eddies like land crabs. I’d like to live in this liminal zone, the zone that is both summer and autumn, literal and metaphorical, early and late. I’d like to live in a world where I could fall… and be caught.

Fall

2010-09-09T09:48:00.003-04:00

Summer is giving way to fall, and although autumn is my favorite season, it’s hard not to lament, just a little, the cliched lazy days of summer as they slip into the loose weave of memory. Today is a blend of seasons, as though time itself, weather itself, can’t decide on identity, is having trouble moving on. The air is warm, in the 80’s, and the sky clear. But in the yard already-dried leaves skip across the driveway, scratching at my feet while above the trees rustle in the balmy breeze. If I stayed outside long enough my skin would burn, but the morning will be chilly enough for a sweater.

I’m in love, today, with the various weeds and mosses that insist on growing where they’re not wanted. I love the dandelions that push up through fissures in concrete, the moss that continues to carpet a crucial stone step leading to our deck. Years ago I’d mow around tall and flowering weeds in the yard, leaving oases of overgrown grass to protect what had been, arbitrarily it seemed, designated pest when they could have just as easily been called flower. Who decided? I didn’t know, but on my own acre I could reclassify and shelter.

My brother missed the turning of spring to summer; he missed the summer; he missed major time markers in the lives of his wife and kids. Christopher held his first summer job, working with animals in a no-kill shelter. Jordan entered high school and made the soccer team. Jess seemed to grow a full inch taller and read so many books she can’t recall them all. Cassie learned to horseback ride, and my brother’s wife, Lori, figured out how to get the kids, week after week, month after month, where they needed to be, figuratively and literally. Every night the whole family sat in front of the big computer screen and talked via Skype. It wasn’t much, but it was something, a way of keeping in touch, a way of saying everything’s okay even though everything’s different.

My brother missed a lot, and his family missed a lot but they – we – are lucky. The kids’ father, Lori’s husband, my brother, my mother’s son… he’s coming home. He’s out of Iraq and, I think, on a brief layover in Europe.* In 48 hours he’ll be in the U.S. Lori will pick him up at the airport and take him home. The kids think he has another week in Baghdad; they each arrive home from school at slightly different times, so they’ll be surprised sequentially. Part of me wishes I could be there, just hop on a plane and miss a few days of work, witness the reactions of the kids as their father’s presence registers. But another part believes they deserve their privacy, deserve to freely respond with tears or laughter or disbelief or who-knows-what. Military families contend with absence all the time, contend with hardships most non-military families don’t. My brother and I disagree on almost every political issue, but we agree on this: his work is important and he does it well. He’s proud of what he does and I’m proud of him.

So here’s a little thank you for that which persists. Here’s a little thank you for the oasis of family, to naming that which is cherished, to the quiet shifts of season that tell us time is passing and we should pay attention. Here’s to Rob and Lori and their kids…

Although I know it won’t happen, can’t happen, hasn’t happened, I wish – I deeply wish – that all families with loved ones far away could say, sooner rather than later, welcome home.

*This was written a few days ago but couldn't be posted because of the planned surprise. Major Robert Scott is at home with his wife Lori and their children.

On a Tuesday in September

2010-09-07T15:25:00.000-04:00

Far as I’m concerned, America is home to Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Confucianist, atheist, agnostic, short, tall, thin, fat, brown, black, white, red, gay, straight, transgender, bi-sexual, the uncoordinated and the athletic, the fashion-challenged and the super model, nature-lovers, city-dwellers, southerners and northerners, those who hug the coasts and those who love the plains and prairies and deserts, the tired, the hungry and the poor, the wealthy and the middle-class, the employed and unemployed, the homeowner, the renter, the homeless, the student and the teacher, the uneducated and the self-taught, the Mexican, the Arab, those with documentation and without, the male and the female, the young and old, the Springsteen fans, the hip-hop fans, the classical music lovers, the jazz aficionados, those who drive SUVs and motorcycles and foreign imports, the pick-up driver and the Prius owner and the walker, the couch potatoes and the health nuts, the vegetarians and carnivores, dog people and cat people, those who prefer Pepsi and those who prefer Coke, the potheads and the addicts, the alcoholics and gamblers and risk-takers of all stripes, the cautious and the timid, the bold and the beautiful, the agoraphobe and the horder and the aesthete, the poets and the artists and the scientists and the mathematicians and the secretaries and the chimney sweeps and the construction workers and the lawyers and those with children and those without, those who love the real Jersey shore and those who are left-handed and the right-brained, the Democrats and Republicans, the insomniacs and those-who-have-yet-to-awaken. Come on, people. Walk the walk. Get out and vote. Say hello. Open the door. Grow up.

The Beauty of the Bowed Head

2010-08-29T09:45:00.004-04:00

My cat, Fargo, has a ritual that charms me. Every morning she will jump onto my desk chair and then onto my desk. She positions herself next to the lamp and waits for me to come upstairs from the kitchen, where I’ve fetched my tea. I check email and read the Times online while having breakfast, all of which I must accomplish one-handed (alternating between mouse, teacup, keyboard, cereal spoon), because my other arm is claimed by the cat. She curls herself into its curve and tucks her head into my elbow, where she purrs for 30 minutes or so before leaving me to the rest of my morning.

Sometimes she’ll sit and face me before heading off to her other endeavors. This is my cue to stop staring at the computer screen and pay attention to Fargo. I’ll put down my cup and place both hands on her sides, scratching or petting behind her ears. “You’re the best cat in the world,” I’ll whisper, finding the sweet spot on her neck. “The best cat in the galaxy,” I’ll say, as she leans into my hand. We’re usually just an inch apart, eye to eye, and her fur has been warmed by the lamp and my arm. It’s just about perfect happiness, but it gets better. On certain mornings, if I’m really lucky, she’ll bow her head in the midst of this ritual. She'll sit directly in front of me, still and silent on the desk, head bowed as if waiting to be knighted. I'll lean in and bow my head, too, so that my forehead is touching the crown of her head. Then we just stay like that, Fargo turning up the purr, me wishing I could purr, until the world shifts and the moment ends.

Maybe it’s a remnant of a mildly Catholic childhood, but there’s something about that posture -- shoulders still, breath steady, head bowed -- that I adore. It’s the posture of prayer, of deep thought, the posture of sorrow and of nodding off to sleep. When one is writing, the head is bowed – and here I realize I must clarify, because it is true only when writing with a pen and not when composing on a keyboard and screen. It is that position – pen or pencil in hand, head bowed, concentration utter – that combines all of the above. We are praying, we are thinking, we are in some reverent half-sleep half-dream half-wide-oh-so-wide-awake state. We are writing, and sometimes, if we’re really lucky, it feels like we are touching, in both solitude and total communion, the perfect reader, the perfect other.

July, Rain

2010-07-23T10:27:00.002-04:00

When it rains all day I feel like my senses need to be reset. Usually when I’m working at my desk, the window to my left is wide open and I hear, dozens of times an hour, the wings of hummingbirds coming to sip from the feeder. If the day’s breezy, leaves from the maple and locust and cherry trees rustle, and in the background I’ll note the irregular punctuation of bird song and an occasional car. Most of that is blocked out with steady rain. All I’ve heard for the last few hours is rain hitting various surfaces – the sturdy leaves of the hosta below my window; the stones of the rockwalls in the yard; the wooden slats of the deck; the rooftop shingles. Every once in a while I catch the buzz of the hummers’ wings… but most of the customary sounds are gone, replaced by thousands of drops meeting dozens of obstacles. The raindrops that hit grass in the yard or the fresh dirt of the new flower garden are soundless from indoors. But they make everything shine. As the leaves and flowers become saturated, their colors appear more vibrant.

I look up from the keyboard after that last line and see that I have to adjust my perception. The clouds have grown so gray that any brightening highlights on the ground are diminished. It looks more like 8 in the evening than 10 in the morning. The world is dark and wet and cold, and although it puts a literal damper on any outdoor activities for us humans, the steady rhythm of rain is a joy.

Vast Embrace

2010-02-21T10:04:00.002-05:00

i. Bird nests in the brambles cup chalices of snow. A scrap of blue scarf caught. (The tenderness of the scrap.)

ii. When I was a kid, I thought it would be fun to walk the plank of a pirate ship. I could swim. Danger was a foreign concept. Figured I’d bob in the water until the ship was out of sight, then head for shore. I’d show those pirates.

iii. Letter from my brother, age 10: Dear Donna, How are you? I’m doing very good. It’s only 11 days till you get here, and I’m still counting. Ever since Momy said I could type on your old typewriter I have been on a craze for typing. The office had a new typewriter. IT was great typing on it. It could type any way you wanted, because you can change this little ball-like object with different types of lettering. When I first started yesterday I was using one finger, and now I almost now the key-board by hart, and am using two hands, pinkies and all….. PLEASE WRITE (type) back soon. (if possible in my name) LOVE ROBERT

iv. Envelope saved from my brother, age 23. Scrawled on the outside, to the postman: PLEASE DO NOT BEND THESE BEAUTIFUL PHOTOS OF OUR NEW SON. HE WAS BORN ON NOV 9^TH. WE LOVE HIM A LOT!!

v. My brother is deployed to Iraq. We write messages in ink on the insides of orange rinds, leave them in each other’s pockets. When I find one in the future it reads: I will always meet you someplace else.

vi. “What are the two most important parts of an essay?” I ask. In unison, the class responds: “Openings and conclusions.” “Is it okay to bend the truth, twist the truth, leave out details or add details to the truth?” I ask. They fidget.

vii. His boy is 16. He thumb-texts. On my answering machine, saved messages cover his whole life. Hear his voice crack. Hear his voice change. I made the team, he says. Would you read this poem I wrote, he says. Call me back, he says.

viii. Nabokov, in the story with the funeral: “And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this:

ix.

x. (The tenderness of the scrap.)

Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T11:36:00.002-05:00

The icicles outside the front door are dripping. Where the drops land in the snow it looks like constellations, shallow indentations that seem significant, like if I recognized the language I could understand the meaning.

Next door, the little neighbor boy is shoveling snow onto his dog. The orange plastic shovel is bigger than the boy, and he finds it unwieldy because of its size but also because he is bundled in a fat jacket and snow pants. He and the dog are playing a game, and the game is called Joy. He scrapes up some light snow, tries to lift the shovel over his head – he’s only about 3 years old – and dumps the snow onto the dog’s ears or back or tail. The dog yips and leaps and the boy laughs. And then they do it again.

Outside in the yard, fallen branches poke up out of the snow. They look like skinny arms reaching toward the sky. It’s as though a contingent of stick figures was buried in the drifts, and the rescue party has yet to locate them.

I’m reading a book about writing memoir, and the famous author says “Voice is everything.” Another well-known writer says “Point of view is everything.” Sometimes I hear myself telling my students "Theme is everything." Really, I think nothing is everything.

But many things are enough.

Spin

2010-01-30T13:41:00.002-05:00

Three crows wick powder from the throat of a fat maple. January ground looks like a Rorschach, swatches of earth against swatches of snow. We had a bit of a thaw, a week or so with flurries and squalls but not much accumulation. It’s rare to see the ground at this time of year, but the occasional patch of green makes me happy. The green feels like a promise, an implied guarantee that winter will, eventually, end. It’s a reminder that’s welcome on a day like this when, despite the sunshine and the glimpses of hard ground, the temperature stalls below zero. I write wearing gloves and a scarf, a bulky jacket. We keep the wood stove stocked, burn level set at ROAR; periodically throughout the morning it’s necessary to go stand right next to it in order to warm up. For backup I’ve got a little space heater in my study that sits at ankle level. My feet are encased in boots made of sheepskin and suede but the heat wafts up and keeps my legs warm. It’s a lazy day in the heart of winter, and I can’t help but think of the beautiful title of the last novel I read: Let the Great World Spin. I sit and stare out the window, watch the crows and the shivering trees. Wood pops and shifts in the stove. My cat curls a paw over her eyes, a casual defense against the confrontation of sunlight. I drink it in, thirsty for light at this time of year. Even in the middle of the night, I stand and watch the wolf moon as it glazes the sky, feel the glow on my skin, watch shadows drift across the kitchen floor.

Let the great world spin… It’s cold out there, but time and again we find our way to warmth.

December 29, 2009

2009-12-29T02:47:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow is my blog’s first birthday, and I’m giving myself a moment’s credit for sticking to it. When I made that initial entry I wasn’t sure if a writing project called a blog was something I could sustain interest in. It seemed so anonymous, so lonely, so potentially unrewarding. Would anybody read it? Would anyone respond? Was that even the point? I had no idea, really, what I wanted out of the endeavor beyond feeling a need to get some work out into the world that might otherwise live out its days in the solitude of my word-processing program.

A year later, I’m still not sure who reads the posts or when or where, but occasionally someone responds. These responses are often from former or current students and they always, always make me happy. Responses, including those from strangers, seem like authentic moments of connection – someone visited the site, read what I wrote, and took a few minutes to comment. It’s a simple gesture, but tonight, at 2 a.m. on a cold, snowy, fairly bleak night in Oswego, New York, I feel it as profound. Thank you to every person who has written a comment on the blog or via Facebook, that weird and wonderful forum for fleeting contact.

It’s been a difficult year for many of my students, some of my family, and a few of my dear friends – many have struggled on the employment front, some have lost family members, suffered serious illness, contended with other private hardship. Each has taught me something about courage and resilience and faith. When I lived in Arizona, I’d often be awake at this hour, and I’d stand in my doorway and look out at the stars and the desert and wish to be back home, in the east, where it seemed like the lives of my friends were unfolding smoothly and joyfully and without me. It seemed like the loneliest time and place in the world… Now, when I’m awake and looking out at a different but equally beautiful landscape, I think of my friends asleep in the southwest, and recognize that I will always feel some degree of wanderlust and regret, some degree of what if and if only. It is my nature – perhaps a common nature – to want something other than what I have. But tonight I acknowledge and feel grateful to my bones for precisely that – for what I have.

We had an unseasonably warm day this week – it almost hit 40 – and the morning brought waves of increasing fog. My camera was jammed and I lamented that something so beautiful would go undocumented. Out of desperation I smacked the camera on the heel of my hand and it suddenly clicked into action. When I went outside to catch the light, the thinnest and most invisible sheen of ice covered every surface and I slipped on literally my first step. My right hand slammed against a wooden post, giving rise to an immediate welt. My left leg crashed into a step – a second bruise. My spine, already in less-than-perfect shape, felt like it torqued, twisted from left to right and from top to bottom. It was, in other words, not a graceful slip and I stood silently in place, trying to catch my breath, hoping I hadn’t broken my hand, hoping I hadn’t further aggravated my back, glad I hadn’t dropped the camera. I walked slowly to a level spot in the yard and began to take some shots. The effort rewarded me with some spooky and evocative photographs and, admittedly, a very sore back.

I’m posting one of the shots, above, because 2009 has been a year that will be remembered for its hardships, but hopefully, too, for its art.

Looking forward to more light, more beauty. Looking forward to peace and safety, especially for my brother and the other men and women who are, have been, or will be serving in the military, taking part in a war that we often seem happy to forget. Looking forward to healthy recoveries for my friends and family, and hoping that everyone who wants a job finds one. Looking forward to more art of every kind, including the beautiful and heartfelt poems & essays offered up by my students, the funny and creative notes on Facebook, the occasional cherished handwritten letter that arrives in the mail. Every word matters.

Peace in 2010, my friends. Thank you for visiting.

Winter, Ridge Road

2009-12-17T14:15:00.007-05:00

A crow cawls across the ridge.

Snow tips from ten thousand limbs.

Some falls up, the way

ash ascends a flue.

Ladybug Riff

2009-11-08T14:37:00.002-05:00

Here in Oswego, it’s unseasonably warm. High 50’s, slightly chilly despite the white wafer of the sun, which is making its descent behind the bare trees across the road. I like being chilled, I like unseasonably warm weather in November. I like, in fact, November. It rhymes with remember. Which rhymes with December. Which is a sentence fragment.

When I was a kid, I disliked the word “chilly,” which seemed, to me, like a grown-up word. I didn’t like the word “woman” for the same reason. Only adults used words like chilly and woman. Kids said cold and lady. I found it unlikely that I would someday become a woman, and slightly disturbing that I had no choice in the matter. It seemed unfair that circumstances beyond my control could dictate my destiny. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a boy. But I hadn’t been asked. I wanted an option. I wanted a say.

The option, alas, was nonexistent, and now here I am, both a woman and chilly. Using both words with ease. Having my say. Doing all sorts of unexpected things – things I never thought I’d do – including using sentence fragments with abandon.

I was sitting outside on the deck, reading, trying to appreciate what might be one of our last temperate days for a while. A ladybug landed on my knuckle. She climbed over my grandmother’s diamond ring, which I wear on the middle finger of my right hand, then hurried over my ring finger. I held her up to my eye so I could get a good look at her. (The ladybug, apparently, also has no say in determining gender.) She took determined but graceful steps – an expert knuckle navigator. She paused, accommodating my scrutiny, then stretched her wings for a second, as though performing. I smiled. The bug flew.

Next door, the neighbor is riding a mower with a degree of recklessness that I’ve learned is customary during this endeavor. Every twenty seconds or so the blades hit a rock or a branch and it sounds like a shot ringing out. He just keeps going, high speed, more interested in completing the task than in doing it well. In his real life, he does fine, precise work. He’s a craftsman. But when it comes to this chore, he’s like a drunken cowboy.

I’ve been trying to find a new way of concluding these writings, these pieces, as I call them. Seems like I always turn reverent, always feel a little moment of what I have to call holiness, or awe, at the conclusion. I think it’s related to another inclination – wanting to say, when I finish writing, thank you. I’ve never really known who I was thanking, but the urge persists. I think we have to break our own habits though, periodically try to do something new, something unexpected. I could, for instance, ask a profound or pseudo-profound question. I could make a timely although possibly suspect observation, like “the neighbor just literally yelled yeeeehaaaa when he hit a rock.”

Or I can wait it out long enough that I get lucky: Inside my shirt, like a shiver, a ladybug is hiking up my cleavage. I tent the collar – – freedom.

No Mask

2009-10-31T12:09:00.007-04:00

Awake on Halloween morning at 4 a.m. Head downstairs in the dark to feed the cat, barefoot, half-clad, then pause on the landing on the way back to bed. The moon is setting in a hazy sky behind the western trees. Normally it wouldn’t be visible at this point in its circuit, but on the last day of October most of the trees are shorn. Rather than impenetrable woods, I see what looks like a loosely milling crowd – a crowd of trees. There are breaks between the cherry and maple and pine and locust, and in one of those gaps the moon shivers in its last silvery moments.

I, too, shiver, although the night air holds no real chill and the date itself carries no superstitious weight. The traditions of Halloween mean nothing to me, but October 31^st feels important because it signifies, locally and unofficially, the beginning of winter. We’ve been fortunate to see no snow flurries yet, but it’s just a matter of time, and that awareness feels more foreboding than any collection of ghosts or goblins. The house seems to shudder, too -- a function of the wind, which hits in waves. I feel a draft whistle through the big picture window, which seems as good an indicator as any that I should go back to sleep.

Three hours later it’s a more reasonable version of morning. That is, we have some light. The sun is rising beyond the eastern trees and, because they’re at a greater distance than those in the west, there’s no observable glow behind what appears to be a dense, black ridge, an arboreal wall. I know the sun will rise soon only because it has risen in the morning for the last 50 years of my life. It’s the kind of quotidian faith I take comfort in, a reliability not always offered by the natural world or, for that matter, our human world.

The wind is still loud, still rattling trees and shaking the house in intervals. It’s a southern wind, and the air is mild, but the mildness is misleading. The wind packs a wallop and has ripped most of the leaves from the trees. They lay in heaps, almost neatly, as though some neighborhood handyman tried to impose order on chaos. The tenacious few that remain look like umbrellas inverted in a gale, or squash blossoms oddly placed on high rather than trailing on garden vines.

As though to support the mildness of the air and contradict the persistent bullying of the wind, we have what I like to call a Rothko sky. Distinct bands of red and russet and gold swipe long swaths across my field of vision. Fall colors on the ground, fall colors in the sky. In the distance, the composition appears calm and dignified. Close up, in the yard, a gust hits the cherry trees with such force their branches extend in a horizontal choreography. The yellow and green and orange-tinged leaves whip sideways, making them look like a school of fluorescent fish shimmying in place.

I have many hours of work ahead of me, and no reason to think of costumes and masks, no reason, really, to be concerned with weather or seasons or the swiftly ticking clock. Around me I see the naked world, an undisguised world, and that world offers, today, both the elegance and embellishment of an abandoned cathedral. If I thought someone might hear, I might say amen.

The Lip of the V

2009-10-25T14:41:00.003-04:00

Yesterday at dusk a deer walked through the yard. For two seconds, we made eye contact. The deer posed, body facing away, head turned toward me. “Be careful, baby,” I said, quietly. She had just crossed the road, and I was referring to cars, and hunters.

This morning I went outside and scanned the vicinity, visually tracing her path. We live on a ridge, which means she’d climbed uphill. She may have begun at the base of the ridge, where a small stream has carved a trajectory through stands of maple and cherry trees and knots of underbrush. I’ve seen other deer there, sipping clean water or, having heard the retort of a hunter’s gun, standing stock-still. Hunters aren’t allowed in the area, but posted bans are rarely enforced. One day I watched a deer stand unmoving for over 30 minutes. I needed binoculars to see to the base of the ridge, where she stood, and I got tired of holding them to my eyes. Every ten minutes or so I’d go back and check – the deer did not relent. Her life depended on her stillness – she’d heard or smelled a human being, a hunter – and, in a way, I suppose mine depended on my ability to look away. Had I continued to observe, had the deer been spotted by the hunter and taken down, I think I’d have had to move, to permanently leave this place I love so much.

I’ve lived in several locales that have been appealing to hunters, and there have been a few times I’ve worried that I would accidentally become a target. Even now, when I wander into the yard, I try to remember to wear something bright, colorful. More often than not, however, I realize upon returning indoors that I’ve been clad in earth tones, moving slowly, potentially mistakable for a creature not human. Generally, when I hear gunshots, I stay inside.

This morning, however, there were no shots. It’s a perfect October day, and the trees that bank the ridge have mostly lost their leaves. A few retain some color, so amid the vertical scribbles of brown and gray branches are a few swaths of yellow and red and orange. It’s an austere landscape: a radical slope, thousands of trees leading down to the creek, thousands of trees leading up the other side of the ridge. I feel like I live on one lip of a giant V, the house built into the ridge, trees our nearest enduring neighbors. Among those trees, deer slip. Occasionally one makes the climb up through our yard, and it is always uncanny and memorable. Unlike the wild turkeys, who are skittish, or the sleek foxes, who seem single-mindedly intent on reaching a distant destination, a deer will stop for a moment if it’s not in pursuit or being pursued. Standing among trees, in silence, nobody around but the deer – it’s a sublime and nearly inexplicable experience, though not uncommon. I’ve been within an arm’s length of a deer in the woods; during the few seconds in which both parties are startled into motionless observance, something occurs. It might be no more complex an occurrence than seeing – we see each other. It feels like authentic recognition. And then the deer disappears.

Despite their majesty, I’m aware that plenty of neighbors view deer as pests. The animals will happily munch on carefully tended gardens, and they’ve been known to smash right through sliding glass doors or windows and destroy a room or two in the ensuing panic. In places where deer are particularly abundant, they create a driving hazard. Hitting a deer means, often, totaling one’s car. It also usually means killing the deer. We’ll see them lying alongside roadways, as ordinary and ubiquitous as sheds or hay bales. Sometimes they look like they’re sleeping; other times their heads are angled crazily, dark eyes open wide like entryways to some other world. There might be skid marks where a driver tried to veer. Usually, however, there’s no sign of what happened beyond the relic of the animal. Whatever the human cost, it has been tended. The deer is left behind, exposed, vulnerable to scavenger birds, awaiting an official removal vehicle which may or may not arrive in a timely manner. Deer are left to rot, I’m saying. We overlook them.

Sometimes I wonder what happens to these creatures we brush up against. The turkey egg we found in the spring – kept it for a day, then replaced it in the garden where it had been discovered – just disappeared. I’ve read that turkeys will retrieve temporarily abandoned eggs – is that what happened? If so, did the poult survive? Is it among the rafter I see just about every morning, their giant bodies shining in the rain? And what became of the tiny snapping turtle I found on the front steps? I named it Bucket, after Charlie Bucket in Roald Dahl’s novel of poverty and discovery. As with the turkey egg, I’d previously found a turtle egg on the lawn. It looked like a punctured ping pong ball. We’d found a mature snapper in the yard as well – it was wider than a dinner plate, and Leigh had picked it up and held it away from her body, half jogging and half praying that she could relocate it down on the ridge before it amputated one of her fingers. Was Bucket an offspring of that turtle, had my tiny snapper been borne of that ping pong ball egg? Did it survive even an hour beyond the time I saw it, or did something bigger and hungrier make a snack of the turtle?

And what will become of yesterday’s deer? Will a rogue hunter take her down? Will I spy her through my binoculars this winter, standing like a statue near the frozen stream, picking her way through brambles and fallen limbs? We live in a dangerous, marvelous world, and one of its frustrations may be that we must live with questions like these. I find it difficult, at times, to not know the answers, to have no way of finding out the answers. Not everything can be researched, not everything can be discovered. Maybe that’s why we have dreams – I dream of animals as much as I dream of people, or planets, or structures. And maybe that explains the sightings. I don’t encounter ghosts of old companions or ancestors; I’ve never seen nor would care to see a human ghost. I am skeptical, deeply so, of those who claim to have had visions of the dead, conversations with the dead, interactions of any kind with the dead. I’m not much inclined toward the supernatural or even the merely spooky. But frequently, very frequently, I see deer ghosts darting across the road. I’ve seen the ghosts of bears, too, lumbering into the density of the woods. And for every creature I’ve actually seen – seen the flesh of them, the beak and hoof and feather and scale and fur of them – I’ve also heard phantom calls in the night. They’re out there, I’m certain, I sense them. Maybe they’re real sounds, legitimate sounds, maybe they’re explainable and tangible sights… Maybe it’s just one part of my brain trying to comfort another part…

Among us creatures there are many languages. And I hear them, and I see the shadows and the sources. And I take note.

The Saturation of Rain

2009-09-29T07:58:00.004-04:00

We are on the cusp of October, my favorite month. But September wants its full due, and rain is the name of the game this week as we trickle out its last few days. “Trickle” is nearly literal, although a bit of an understatement -- we’ve been sequestered under gray skies, the steady rhythm of rain providing consoling background music. I’m not given to romanticizing the rain -- as much as I enjoy the way it sounds, I become anxious when I feel quarantined, annoyed at having to deal with the weather, peeved that I and my students will get drenched walking from building to building on the way to school and then sit shivering through class. I try to keep my moodiness at bay by succumbing to the cardboardy patter of drops on the broad-leafed hostas outside my window. I hear splatter on the stone walls and driveway, and the quiet brush of cascading raindrops through the leaves of the trees. I enjoy these sounds. They appease me.

This morning, the leaves are falling haphazardly. Most are green and still attached to the dozens of maples and cherries and locusts in the yard, but a significant smattering litters the surroundings. Our neighbors -– who may actually perceive leaves as litter -- were outside the other day, on the roof of their house, determinedly sweeping the leaves. When I mentioned this to a friend, she said “they do know that more will fall, right?” They do indeed, but a percentage of the local population has low tolerance for the drifts of color that will accumulate over the next month or so, and they make it a priority to remove the leaves as soon as possible. Sweeping the roof seems obsessive, to be sure, but perhaps no more so than Leigh’s behavior. She picks the leaves up one by one as they land on our deck. She only does this when they first began to fall, and I think it’s her way of stalling the season. It’s not that she doesn’t like autumn… it’s that she knows -- we all know, here in Oswego -- that no matter how beautiful fall is, it is a harbinger for winter. There is, perhaps, an understandable degree of denial in our approach to the descent of the leaves.

One neighbor has no patience for the sissy endeavors of hand-removal or sweeping. He utilizes a leaf blower, a primitive, tube-like contraption that exists for the sole purpose defined in its name: it blows leaves. It blows them from one place to another – from, say, the left side of the driveway to the right. It does this quickly, dramatically, and at a decibel level designed to incite ire in all who hear it. I must compare it unfavorably to the time-proven efficacy of the rake, which may require more physical labor, may produce unwanted blisters and shoulder soreness, but is blessedly quiet. I appreciate the simple design of the rake, as well as the rakish sound of its name. If I were to be reincarnated as a garden tool, I might choose the rake.

The longer it rains -– we’re only on Day 3, with five or six more forecast -– the more leaves come down. On the lawn, there’s a roughly even ratio, leaves to grass, 50-50. Soggy leaves have accumulated on the plates of the hostas, like wet dollar bills in a church collection basket. The deck looks like a shiny brown rug with an embossed leafy pattern, and the driveway is a long swath of black scarf embroidered with golden leaves. The other day I mistook a tiny snapping turtle for a leaf. I almost stepped on it, but part of it lifted in an unleaf-like way and I noticed it was a turtle head, black and blinking and the size of my smallest finger’s smallest joint. Tiny frogs, too, come out to enjoy the precipitation. They are all but camouflaged by the green and yellow leaves, splotchy with brown spots, plastered to the front steps. I have to be careful where I walk. Everything’s a little slippery, but worse than slipping would be to squash a frog or accidentally kick a snapper.

There was a year –- I was in my early 20’s, I think –- where I found it difficult to step on fallen leaves. I was feeling pretty fragile myself, and I didn’t so much anthropomorphosize the leaves as project myself into them. I didn’t imagine, in other words, the leaves as human or human-like… I saw them precisely as me. We were the same, shared a soul, and I didn’t want to feel stepped on. So I walked to school in a carefully zig-zagged pattern, a kind of stagger that made me appear drunk but which I executed while entirely sober. I lived on a wide, tree-lined street, but I didn’t knock leaves out of my way. I didn’t skip through piles of leaves collected near the curb or enjoy the crunch of leaves beneath my boots or behave, I suppose, in any sort of normal ambulatory way. But I loved those leaves, and I protected them, and I managed to negotiate the season without feeling overly damaged myself.

Today, perhaps in a similarly nutty way, the leaves look to me like broken birds. All across the yard, up and down the ridge, I see splayed, winged bodies. The rain has made the leaves’ colors ultra-vibrant, and their positioning seems open to the sky, as though they fell not from the trees but the heavens and are now in the posture of supplication or release. One maple leaf has landed in a thick pillow of ivy. It was a good life, it whispers. Its red arms shine and its body glistens against the deep lime-green leaves of the ivy. Thank you, it says. Thank you.

No, I don’t romanticize the rain.

I come by my dreaminess naturally; my mother claims to have loved taking us outside, as kids, and playing in puddles as it rained. I have no recollection of this activity, but she is so delighted when she recalls these occasions that I merely smile and nod. I can almost picture us out there, me in a pink polka dot top and striped shorts, my sisters and brothers similarly and goofily attired. We’re doing funny dances in the rain, we’re splashing each other. My mother looks so happy. The neighbors point from behind their curtains, and when my father gets home from work he hugs us all even though we’re soaked.

I do remember that later, as a teenager, I liked to run in the rain. I also liked to run in the dark, so after nightfall I’d grab a windbreaker and head out to the hills of our safe, suburban neighborhood. Jogging was the craze, but I never saw another soul running in a downpour. The streets would be slick and saturated, as black as crow’s wings, and I loved how the rain felt on my skin. There was something athletic and noble about braving the elements, alone, in the dark. It was good training, perhaps, for the writing life.

My favorite memory of rain occurred in the most unlikely place: the desert. I had arranged to meet my brother and his family for dinner. He had three small children at the time, boys of 7 and 5 and their younger sister. I hadn’t seen the kids in a while and they were only visiting Tucson for the day. I arrived at the restaurant in the midst of a serious thunder storm; it was the kind where lightning would scratch its way across the sky like a witch’s fingers, illuminating every needle on every cactus and causing the air to crackle. Two seconds later there’d be a crash so loud I’d levitate. I waited right inside the glass doors of the restaurant and finally saw my brother and his wife, headlights sweeping the parking lot, kids squirming in the back. They pulled up as close as they could, I stepped outside and waved nervously, the side door of the van slid open. My niece jumped out and ran as fast as she could, leaping into my arms. I spun her around and kissed her and hustled her inside the door just in time to see the 5-year old take a wary look at the sky, inhale, and charge toward me. I did the same thing – caught him, lifted him up laughing, got him safely inside. Now only my nephew Christopher was left standing in the doorway of the car, beaming. Maybe because he was older and we’d known each other longer, he’d been a little more lonely for me lately, and I for him. “Aunt Donna, here I come,” he yelled, and I braced myself. He was a tiny, tan kid wearing sneakers and shorts, and he darted through the rain as lightning skimmed the mountains and buzzed the valley and his body hit me square on exactly as the thunder cracked. Ka…boom! The impact rocked me on my heels but I held that boy to my heart and spun in the rain until we were soaked to the skin. There were no autumn leaves for hundreds of miles, but my eyes were filled with brilliant color.

The Last Sunday

2009-09-20T10:47:00.002-04:00

There’s one Sunday every year that breaks my heart. It’s the last Sunday of the summer, and here in Oswego it’s often a sunny day, the kind described as cool and crisp, the kind described as brilliant. The sky is blue, the clouds – if there are any clouds – are swift-moving. Because it’s already more fall than summer, I can smell wood smoke in the air. Although the leaves this year have barely begun to change color, there are drifts of dry browns and yellows and a few oranges already on the driveway and the deck, collecting up against the rock walls and lining the road. Fargo, my cat, who goes outside for approximately three minutes every morning, has learned that if she steps on one it’s okay, it won’t bite her. It’s this particular Sunday, every year, that fills me with emotions I can’t entirely identify, although there’s some percentage of yearning, of longing, some percentage of simple sadness, maybe some not-so-simple regret. There’s a whole pharmacy of unnamed feeling in me today, and it’s not because of summer or wood smoke or dry leaves. It’s because of the geese.

They’re leaving. Great lines of them – some in aerodynamic V-formation, some in straight lines, some in patterns that might best be described as disorganized, a few in couples or straggling solo – fly directly over our house on their way south. “South” is relative; some geese head for Florida or Texas, but some are content to rest in southern New York or Pennsylvania. Plenty over-winter here in Oswego which is, technically, south for the Canada goose.

There are days when hundreds, even thousands fly their routes, and I’ll hear them in ten or twenty minute intervals. On this, the last Sunday of summer, I’ll go outside every time they pass. I look up, I scan the sky. There are so many leaves still on the trees this year that it’s hard to spot the birds; their calls echo off the ridge we live on and I can’t tell which way to look. Eventually though they’re right overhead in a big open patch of sky. This morning the sun was rising when I heard the first group and the bodies of the geese were lit from below and shone. It was an orderly contingent, row after row of V’s, like a parade, and although there were probably only two hundred their calls echoed for several minutes, bouncing off the ridge and back, as though the sky were full, for miles, of honking birds. Closer to earth, the local birds were more active than usual. I don’t know if they’re agitated or inspired by the calls of the geese, or if they hear them at all. But the trees were being stitched, it seemed, by dozens of robins and cardinals and the occasional crow. Seeds from the black cherry tree fell like rain drops – I could see them being released, landing in the grass, bouncing off the garage roof – and on the driveway I found a composition that included two red feathers, hundreds of maple leaves, and small round white cherry stones that looked like punctuation.

Every summer, on this Sunday, I wonder what it is exactly that calls to me when those geese head south. I have felt it since girlhood, feel it only when I hear the geese in autumn or when I stand at the edge of the sea. Maybe it’s some combination of mortality and urgency. Maybe it’s just the recognition of beauty.

Maybe someday I will categorize every subtlety of longing and gratitude that I can isolate. But today, I listen to the geese. I go outside, I look up. And they are there.

September Sun

2009-09-01T15:24:00.005-04:00

September 1^st, and I’m sitting against a fencepost in the yard, soaking up some sun. I never do this – although I’ve bunched a jacket beneath me and propped a pillow at my back, I’m not particularly comfortable. Nor do I enjoy sunbathing – it’s too hot for me, usually, and unless I’m at the ocean I get bored almost instantly. But today it’s partly cloudy, so the heat isn’t an issue. There’s a sweet breeze – literally sweet; I can smell it – and the fact that it’s suddenly September adds a bittersweetness to the mix, an urgency that I heed. We won’t have many more days like this and, even if we do, classes have begun and my time is limited. And so I’ve assembled this makeshift chair and rolled up my t-shirt sleeves so I can feel the brush of a burn on my shoulders. My feet are bare and I’ve abandoned my sunglasses – these rays are meant to reach me.

Our neighborhood is a quiet one. No such thing as traffic out here – I think I’ve counted 2 or 3 cars at most in the last hour. Someone out of sight is making a small racket. Sounds like he’s hammering a metal post – a rhythmic, ringing series of clangs and clanks – but it’s far enough away that I don’t mind. A neighbor kid is clearing some messy growth from our backyard. Leigh hired him to machete an area that has become a tangle. It’s not really the backyard… more like the back of the backyard, a nondescript area that separates the tamed lawn from the untamed ridge. Beyond this intermediate zone is the heavily wooded slope I refer to as “the jungle.” It’s really just an extensive, thick stand of mature trees and underbrush. I find it a little funny that Leigh’s having the margin cleared – she wants to improve the view. To me, the view can be summarized in a word: green. But where I see green – shapes and sizes, versions and varieties, tones and shades of green, yes, but in the end, just a mishmashed canvas of green – Leigh sees fern and wildflower and shrub and poison ivy and maple saplings. I think she’s needlessly shaving off a layer of green in order to appreciate another layer of green, but it makes her happy to open up the yard to the wider world, and it makes the neighbor boy happy to have a pocketful of twenties, so why protest.

Thirty yards upridge from his efforts, more in the front yard than the back, I’m surrounded by buzzing and chirping and rustling. There’s an aural intelligence to these acres, I’m sure of it. The overlapping sounds of the wind, the chipmunks’ persistent, cranky cheeping and trilling, the yellowjackets and wasps that whizz by but rarely bother – it’s complex but accessible music. Visually, too, there’s composition everywhere. In the grain of wood where I sit, in the fringe of grass which is really ten kinds of grass and clover and weed and moss and another dozen things I can’t identify. I’m a little in love with the nail heads visible in the wood planking of the walkway. You’d call them round, and flat, but not a one truly is. Each has an irregular perimeter – rightly call them roughly round, or roundish…And they’re grooved, some of them, or appear embossed. It’s possible I’m the first person to closely examine these particular nail heads, and I feel as content as an explorer who’s stumbled upon some new species of tortoise. Some of these nail heads look like tortoise shells, actually…

The breeze picks up and brings me back to my senses; it’s almost like I can feel the wind through my skin. Along the driveway, a stretch of dried grass, fallen leaves, and gently curved twigs is disturbed by a low-flying current. It’s like a leafy chorus line – the whole strip rises up and tumbles and flutters – but it’s a chorus line with no stamina. As quickly as it kicked up, it dies down.

The post I’ve been leaning my head against is embroidered on either side with spider webs. A couple of butterflies flit by, and two hummingbirds parry, battling for rights to the feeder. A big tree groans, the neighbor continues to hammer. The boy’s still hacking at the underbrush – every so often he exclaims from the effort. The sun’s become hotter and the clouds have dissipated. I’m sweaty and happy and – despite what I know to be pervasive suffering, near and far, despite what I know to be fear and loneliness approaching those I love – for this hour in the September sun, I have been sated.

Eat a Peach

2009-08-26T10:51:00.009-04:00

I have a thing for peaches. I love them. In the morning, with my cereal, I slice them up and have them for breakfast. My slicing method is precise and never varies. I wash the peach, and I am like a parent giving a child a bath. Firm, but gentle. It’s important to rub closely around the dimple at the top of the peach, where the stem was attached. Sometimes a little nub is still there, like what’s left of a baby’s umbilical cord in those first days or weeks of infancy. I use my thumb to knock it off, and it falls into the dish drain, which I clean as rarely as possible. I don’t like the sliminess of it. Those little translucent slivers of onion, spaghetti worms, thumbnail-sized specks of broccoli or garlic – it makes me queasy to look at them and more queasy to touch them. But that is a bad habit, my reluctance to clean the drain, and I’m trying to describe a good habit, this washing and slicing and eating of a peach. After I knock the stem stub off, I pay special attention to the prime meridian as I call it, which is that equator-like line that transverses a peach. It starts out as an indentation, near the stem, but often becomes convex as you follow it around the body of the fruit. I try to scrub out the indented part, in case any dirt or germs or chemicals – pesticides – are lodged in there. Sometimes I think microscopic insect eggs could hide in that spot, or even, say, the dismembered leg of a mosquito. It’s important, I’m saying, to be thorough.

Once I’ve covered the trouble spots, I rub the globe with my fingertips, almost as though I’m trying to rub off the fuzz. I have to admit, I’m not crazy about the fuzz. Food, I think, probably shouldn’t be fuzzy. But if I give it about 30 seconds worth of fingertip massage, the fuzz is either removed, or slicked down sufficiently to appear gone, which is good enough for me.

I use a paring knife to cut the peach, which might be one of the few times I use a gadget for its actual purpose. Well, technically, now that I think about it, I’m not actually paring the peach. I don’t peel it. Since the fuzz has been matted down, I eat the skin along with the flesh. I don’t ever think of it as skin and flesh, however, as that might make me even queasier than the remnants of old food in the sink drain. So it’s not paring I do with the paring knife, but simple, precise slicing. I start at the stem and follow the line of demarcation – what would be, on an actual globe, the equivalent of the prime meridian –around the body of the fruit, slicing deep enough that the edge of the knife blade hits the peach stone. Once the blade hits the pit, it is very easy to smoothly rotate the fruit in the palm of my hand, keeping the knife firmly pressed against the pit. When the incision meets up with itself at the stem, I lay the knife down and take the peach in both my hands, giving a gentle twist. The fruit opens into halves, one of which cradles the red, pocked pit. That part is temporarily put aside, and I devote my full attention to half number 1, which is quickly divided into equal slices – one, two, three, four. Each of those slices is then divided into 3 or 4 bite-sized pieces. Those pieces are placed on top of the waiting bowl of cereal. The milk has not yet been added so as to avoid sogginess.

Half number 2 takes slightly more care, due to the presence of the pit, but essentially the same procedure is followed. Often one last slice will continue to cling to the pit; at that point, a slight tug will dislodge it and the slices can be trimmed to their appropriate size and -- somewhat more carefully -- added to the growing heap of cereal and fruit in the bowl. If the peach is large enough, two additional steps may be required. First, several sections of peach may need to be eaten during the process of composing the bowl. Second, in securing proper placement of the peach pieces, one might recall the maneuvers involved in the game Tetris, and attempt to strategically place the pieces to ensure that no peach topples from the bowl. Such toppling is not tragic, but should a piece hit the floor it is lost and must be disposed of -- I am not a believer in the "5-second rule," especially when it comes to fruit. The lost peach must be relegated to the trash or thrown out the back door to join the unofficial compost heap located, roughly, 20 yards over the ridge that borders the backyard. The proper way of introducing the peach to the compost is by flinging it, although flinging a bite-sized piece of fruit is considerably less satisfying than flinging, say, an old egg or overly ripe avocado. Bananas, too, are quite satisfying as they produce the illusion of a boomerang effect. They do not actually circle around, but one could imagine they might if one knew precisely the right speed and angle with which to throw it.

Once the peaches have been arranged atop the cereal heap, milk is added and eating commences. I try to ensure that every spoonful of cereal is mated with a piece of peach. Depending on the initial size of the peach, this may be possible, but often one runs out of fruit at about the 75% point and finishing up one’s breakfast can become a slightly bleak affair. It is important, on those mornings, to maintain perspective and not allow one’s spirits to sink over the loss of peach.

There are, after all, fresh tomatoes for lunch.

Where in the World

2009-08-25T14:42:00.004-04:00

This isn't a new piece. Just lonely for my friends and ruing the end of summer. Enjoy.

Light catches the paddle of a weed. A hummingbird perches on a low branch of shrub outside my window. The blue spruce, which worried us in the spring with its sagging lower limbs and dried needles, no longer languishes. The open arms of the tree take a hit during our long winters; it’s as though the limbs attempt to hold up the snow, a heavy burden that collects on its boughs and causes them to droop. By summer, however, the tree has rebounded and its glaucous needles are gloriously blue, its branches sheltering a few sun-struck weeds and a smattering of grass below.

Early summer is dreamy here on the shores of Lake Ontario. The peonies are still flamboyant, although defeated, their pink petals accumulating like lingerie in the ivy. The irises, similarly, have shed their labial purple petals and are morphing into papery brown husks. A few flowers linger on the bleeding heart, but they, too, are getting in their last licks. The new stars of the yard will be the roses and the hydrangea, the latter of which will persist into fall.

It’s summer, and my friends are gone. My human friends, I mean, not these flower and avian acquaintances who are delightful, for sure, but harbor the quality of substitute. In summer, my friends visit other shores; they travel, they vacation. I’m not quite as ambitious as Emerson, who said he’d walk a hundred miles for a good conversation, but I do crave contact when they’re are gone. That’s probably why I watch the hummingbirds, listen for the zipper sound of their arrival, a sound that becomes the background noise of my days, as though the buzz of their wings is always right at my shoulder. They like the nectar I’ve mixed for them; it’s a little heavy on the sugar and I think I’ve become the equivalent of the neighborhood crack dealer for the hummers. I’m not sure whether they’re sparring or flirting at the feeder; the hummingbird social scene is a literal blur. But they dart and dodge and confront and zoom and hide and reveal and when one seems to gain the upper hand and temporarily stakes its territory, it sends its long quick tongue deep into the glass globe that holds the sugar juice and drinks, drinks deeply. I admire these dervishes, colorful as flying paint; they seem like tough little creatures as they charge, meet eye to eye, wing to wing, in some repeated dance of delineation that seems to say this is mine or I want you.

The hummers and the roses and the peonies are reasonable companions, I’m saying, but it’s a companionship based on observation that inevitably turns into imagination. There’s only so far I can go in my scientific zeal before I turn poet and begin to anthropomorphize too much, sentimentalize, over-imagine. The natural world tends to send me into some rather lofty realms where I imagine a mutuality that likely doesn’t exist. The hummingbirds don’t notice me, for the most part, and when they do, they flee. I am not their friend. The trees, the flowers, the wind, the grass – if there’s a consciousness, if there’s any relationship between these features of the yard and me, it’s a mystical one, a spiritual one. Sometimes I sense that relationship, but the sensation is problematic, as I believe in no god.

It’s complicated, you see, and so is this longing I feel for my friends. I miss the flesh and blood of them, the substance of them. I miss their words. I can’t really talk, in any satisfactory fashion, after all, to the robins or the spruce. And although I can listen, and do, and can learn from such listening – The first duty of love is to listen, so says Paul Tillich – it’s human language I crave. Vowels and verbs, words strung out in interesting ways, like lanterns lining a dark walk. I miss, simply put, talking the talk.

And, to be precise, I’m not really referring to in-person conversations with my friends. I’m talking about their writing. I miss hearing from them. I miss their letters, their emails. When I wake up in the morning, although I am blessed to hear birdsong – what could be better? – I wake with this thought: “Maybe someone will write to me today.” Those words, that hope, gets me out of bed. Not the warblers, not the chittering of the hummingbirds, not the rush of wind or the sound of rain on the broad leaves of the hostas... The prospect of the written word – that incites me to rise.

I sometimes joke with friends that when one of us dies, I won’t want to know, exactly. Instead I’ll want to think, a little sadly, with some degree of denial that’ll look like perplexity, “Ah, Jo stopped writing. I wonder why…” That is my anticipated euphemism for the deaths of my friends: so-and-so simply stopped writing. “Have you heard from Marianna?” I’ll be asked. “No,” I’ll reply, slowly shaking my head and looking off into the distance. “She stopped writing…”

There’s a corollary to my hunger for words; it’s not just that I need to see writing on a page, words on a computer screen. It’s a little hard to explain so I’ll be direct: I need to know where my people are. The degree of urgency might require emphasis: I need to know – need meaning I will panic, will feel anguish if I don’t – where my friends are on the planet. I want to know what country they’re in, what city or town they’re in, I want to have some faith that their normal routines are intact, want to know whether those routines temporarily incorporate the local surroundings. Are A and B having breakfast overlooking the beach; will X shower after a run; is L brushing back her hair, idly, while daydreaming through a novel, and so on. When I know the customary location of a friend is about to change – when they travel – I become anxious. I can’t sleep. I want their itineraries. I want, as I half-jokingly requested of friends heading off on a trip this week, for them to strap GPS receivers to their ankles and feed me the signal while they’re gone.

That doesn’t happen, of course. My friends leave, or I leave, and for a few days or weeks we are, as we say, out of touch. I don’t hear from them and, therefore, cannot listen. And maybe that means the second duty of love is to endure silence. To wait. Or to turn, temporarily and perhaps insufficiently, to a kind of alternative conversation. I’d like to decipher the maneuverings of the hummingbird, I’d like to understand the night calls of bats or the soulful trembling choreography of the trees. Vocabulary is everywhere. But when my friends are gone, all I hear are wings, and although I recognize no god, I recognize – I listen to – these angels.

On the Day of Your Brother’s Funeral

2009-08-09T10:39:00.003-04:00

Saw a man yesterday in a white convertible driving down a country road. No passengers but for three acoustic guitars in the back seat, upright as gravestones. The man's dress shirt rippled in the wind and his arm was propped on the door, crooked at the elbow, as though he were a carefree tour guide showing the instruments around town. “To your right are the college ball fields,” I could imagine him saying, with maybe a few gentle pings as response. “Up ahead we’ve got a great view of Lake Ontario…” A stronger strum replies. As they make their way down Bridge Street, a song develops. The man starts singing, and the guitars improvise their small-town blues. In the cemeteries, even the ghosts of the dead are pleased, and the sky assembles into elegiac cloud banks. Somewhere in the world brothers and sisters say goodbye.

From space, Earth is just a blue ball dipped in glitter.

Counting the Gulls

2009-07-14T18:59:00.003-04:00

It’s a perfect summer afternoon (mid-60’s, breezy, miles of architectural cloud formations) and I’m taking a walk after spending 4.5 hours in what my school calls an “intensive English Language Program.” That description translates like this: I spend six weeks teaching a fairly enjoyable series of summer school classes – two consecutive three-week sessions – wherein I attempt, as best I can, to tutor enthusiastic and highly motivated second-language speakers in some of the idiosyncrasies of my first and only language. (“Professor, why do you say “get in the car” but “get on the train?”) I love this gig, but by the end of every day I’m hoarse and weary and just a tad embarrassed about how many times I fall back onto the “English has many exceptions to the rules” response when they ask me yet another unanswerable grammar question.

As I pass a big green field – fifty yards, give or take – I decide to count how many seagulls are sitting or standing in a loose cluster at its center. They’re not easy to count – the local gulls have no interest in the clean lines of, say, marching-band formations – but I appreciate precision and so I gamely add them up and arrive at the number 122. I wonder if it would be alright to change that sum to 117, should I later decide to use the gulls, somehow, in a piece of writing. “One seventeen sounds better,” I think, although that’s clearly subjective. I question whether the tiny fact alteration is exactly the kind of tweak I sometimes warn my students against – the beginning of the proverbial slide down the annoyingly alliterative slippery slope – or if, rather, it falls rather obviously into the “creative” side of creative nonfiction. Losing interest in that question almost more quickly than it takes to ask it, I begin to wonder why I prefer odd numbers to even. What have even numbers ever done to me? What have odd numbers ever done for me?

The gulls have maintained a steadfast aloofness despite my wandering about, but now I must cross the field. I’m careful to stay far enough away that I don’t disturb them, but as I approach the halfway point I begin to feel mischievous. I want to wave my arms, I want to shout, I want the gulls to heave up in a great mass of gray-white cacophony and squawk in their shrewish and raucous manner. I want to report that it was like seeing oddly edgy angels arise from the meadow, but it’s not a meadow, the gulls are nothing like angels, and I remain, however foolishly, however much it limits me, enduringly devoted to what I believe, in my heart, to be the truth.

I took a walk on a beautiful day. A few common clouds rimmed the sky. The gulls pleased me. There were about 120 of them, white loaves scattered on impossibly green grass. For a while, I was happy.

27 Things My Father Taught Me

2009-06-21T11:35:00.002-04:00

How to ride a bike
How to fix a bike chain when it fell off the only bike we could afford
How to swim
How to dive
How to hold my breath without holding my nose
To love the ocean
That the ocean could heal anything
The importance of the right tool for the job
The importance of improvisation
How to put a sick pigeon out of its misery
How to watch t.v. and sleep at the same time
How to properly throw and catch a baseball
How to paint
To rinse the sand off our feet before getting in the car after the beach
The joy of driving fast
The importance of health
To appreciate a good sandwich
The importance of education
How to ride a horse
The importance of family
How to tell a good bedtime story
How to get one’s heart broken
How to leave and not look back
That much is worth laughing at
The elusiveness of luck
How to grieve
How to endure

Summer Time

2009-06-06T16:02:00.001-04:00

I’m convinced that time moves more slowly during the summer. I just spent a good hour watching two spiders in the corner of my study. No idea what they were actually doing, but among the possibilities: completing a web, boxing, playing, mating, philosophizing. They were right up close to one another, using two legs each to feint and jab, stroke and pat each other. Now they’ve backed off and appear to be at rest, utterly still and upside down. Actually, one is a sound sleeper, totally motionless, belly to the sky, while the other seems to be doing a dreamy ballet, two of its legs slowly stretching and contracting. This morning I watched another spider in the bathroom, at the ceiling. That one seemed to be trying to make out with its own shadow. Its body would bump and re-bump against the ceiling, over and over, until eventually it dropped on a strand of silk, either frustrated or sated. Who knows, maybe spiders really can mate with their shadows, maybe soon there will be ghostbaby spiders all over the house. Maybe that’s what I feel sometimes, those inexplicable shivers or tickles or faint caresses that seem to have no source. At any rate, I think I spent an hour with the spiders, but for all I know it was the entire morning, or a mere ten minutes. I keep losing track of what time it is, what day. No surprise -- half the time I don’t know what year we’re in, even though right now we’re smack in the middle of ’09 -- I’ve had six months to figure it out. Some mornings I lie in bed mulling over a lot of nothing, realizing that twenty minutes have passed and I’ve accomplished little more than determining which window a bee was buzzing at.

I should be grateful for these lazy passages, the lengthening of an afternoon or the enduring stretch of a given hour. Five decades have passed so fast… it’s only right that some benevolent deity or lucky twist of fate or circumstance of my own aging brain allows the perception that little parcels are exceptions, certain periods of time don’t fly, don’t fly, but unfold with the luxurious grace of a spider’s delicate leg.

The Egg Came First

2009-05-23T22:12:00.004-04:00

The day began with a gift from Leigh: an abandoned turkey egg she found near the top of the driveway. It’s larger than a chicken egg, and is dappled brown. Very pretty, and I have no idea what to do with it. Normally it’s the kind of thing I’d save, but apparently a mother turkey can abandon an egg for a while and then return. I guess I’ll put it back in the grass, although I’m worried one of the crows might make a nice breakfast of it.

Other things or creatures I saw in the yard today:

Our snake, Rocky. Rocky is probably a series of snakes who live in the rock walls in the yard, but I call all of them Rocky and jump every time I see him/them. Post-jump, I just want to pick him up and talk to him, but I don’t. I just watch the S of him slither through the grass or take in a little sun on a flat stone.

The first dragonflies of the season. When they rest up against a rock and the sun hits them just right, it looks like they have about ten wings.

Hummingbirds. Lots of ‘em. Refilled the feeders and they couldn’t be happier. Or, who knows… maybe they could be way happier. But I can’t get much happier every time I see or hear one. The other day one buzzed right past my ear – I felt it as much as I heard it. I keep wearing my pink t-shirt in the yard hoping one will come right up to me. It’s possible… I’ve seen it.

Big bumblebees nosing in the impatiens and exploring the nooks and crannies of the rock walls. God they’re fat.

An indigo bunting. This is noteworthy because I've never seen one in our yard before. Other blue birds, especially blue jays, whom I love, but never an indigo bunting. This one was eating a dandelion (the white parachute version, not the yellow kids-favorite-flower version). Then it disappeared under some hostas. Its mate was nearby, poking about in the grass. They both seemed very low-key, as far as birds go.

While digging in the dirt, many earthworms. I tried not to hit any of them with the trowel, fearing I’d slice them in half. Every time I saw one I remembered my brother, as a little boy, picking one up and holding it over his head, which he tipped toward the sky and said “dare me?” I said “yes.” He dropped the worm into his mouth. We continued playing.

A young cardinal, thrashing about in a low cluster of leaves. No idea what he was up to, but he wasn’t subtle.

A blue jay, in an adjacent tree. Making less of a fuss than usual – it was like the jay and the cardinal had reversed roles. Every once in a while the jay would dive straight down from his branch to the ground, eat some seed, and return. It’s not much of a flight, but he takes it head first and fast, like some kind of daredevil stunt pilot.

And Leigh, who helped me plant my flower garden. Last week, while roaming about the yard, I’d noticed a spot that wasn’t being put to any use at all, said “some flowers would look nice there.” I’d have left it at that – I’m not a gardener, don’t like dirt and mosquitoes and backbreaking labor. But Leigh decided not only that we’d put in a flower garden, but that I’d pick out the flowers and do the arranging. I agreed, mindlessly assuming Leigh’s method of gardening would be similar to mine – the yes-that’d-be-nice-someday-maybe-especially-if-someone-else-did-it version. Leigh’s approach to just about everything, however, is to do it. DO it. I mean, DO IT NOW. And so that’s how I ended up at Ontario Orchards, my favorite store in the world, picking out flowers. And that’s how we ended up paying almost $200 for said flowers. And that’s how I ended up digging rocks out of the dirt, which seemed, for a time, more like moving dirt out of the way of the rocks. Many rocks. And eventually, much dirt. And, a few hours after that, lots of flowers.

And now, for years to come, when I go out in the yard I’ll see, among all the other wonders, the geraniums and pansies and Jacob’s ladder, and the one we call the chive flower and the one we call the amazing climbing flower and the one we call the-one-that-will-be-amazing-when-it-blooms.

I'm going to put the turkey egg back where it was found... I'm hoping the mother will return. I keep thinking -- forgive me, those of you who can't stand this kind of thing -- that maybe that turkey will grow up to be the equivalent of the turkey-world president. If I kept the egg, I'd be altering the course of turkey history forever.

My birthday's not til next week, but today felt like it was full of gifts. I'm only returning one.

The Suddenness of Spring

2009-05-03T08:48:00.002-04:00

I possess only the most rudimentary understanding of what it means for time to pass. I see the sun cross the sky, the tides shift. I watch closely as the seasons change; I witness the wrinkles that appear around my eyes and mouth; I notice how my mother’s gait has slowed and realize my younger siblings are and have been full-fledged adults for decades now. My current students, many of whom have taken classes with me several times over their college careers, entered as socially awkward freshmen and are about to leave, four years later, with new depths of confidence. They have grown up before my eyes, and it has clearly been a process, but it also seems to have happened overnight.

Here, on the shore of Lake Ontario, winter is suddenly spring. The season seems to have staggered through its changes in a one-step-forward/two-steps-back kind of way. The crocuses bloomed, it snowed; the robins arrived; the temperatures dipped back into the teens; the daffodils began to appear, more snow; the mourning doves established themselves, an ice storm hit. And then one day in April snow fell in the morning and had already melted by afternoon. That was a sign that the ground had warmed, a sign that the snow was gone, at least – we hope – for half the year. Days that teased us by lingering in the 30’s suddenly leapfrogged into the 50’s, skewed twice in succession into summer 80’s. Lawns turned green, the forsythia exploded into a yellow cascade, the lines at Rudy’s and Bev’s started to lengthen as everyone began craving ice cream cones and French fries eaten lakeside.

In a few weeks, late spring, I’ll turn 50. That has been a puzzling and staggered process, too. Often I feel like I’m as carefree as I was in my 20’s, or as happy as I was in my 30’s. If I stare into the mirror, I’ll concede that I look 40-something. It’s only in glimpses, only in moments, that I realize: fifty. I feel it in my bones, in my heart. The disappointments and regrets I harbor are those of a 50-year old. My hopes and dreams are now tempered by decades of experience. The phases of my life feel as though they overlap: I can easily locate the girl of 8 who loved to read, the teenager who couldn’t imagine a better afternoon than one spent making out with a boy, the college drop-out, the young lesbian falling in love and buying a house, the writer crossing the country to study her art, the teacher, the woman with aching bones, the woman who has come to understand that failure is inevitable, enduring, necessary. These memories are like a deck of illustrated playing cards – I can shuffle through them and smile, I have no trouble recalling those girls, being those girls, those young women. It is a private comfort to be able to drift back into those years, the adventures and heartbreaks. Shuffle the deck, and I’m 30 years younger. I’m six. I’m nineteen. Shuffle again, and I’m smack in the middle of middle age.

It seems that just last week there was snow on the ground. It seems that just last week I was a girl. Today, the sun is shining. But hold on: there’s a chill in the air that can’t be denied.

The Meaning of Applause: The Popularity of Susan Boyle and Her Public Dream

2009-04-18T15:19:00.006-04:00

Last week I received three or four emails in rapid succession, each with a link to a YouTube video. All of the messages said something like “You’ve got to check this out – amazing.” I didn’t check out the video; I get so many messages like that, mostly from students or former students, that I’d have to add a few hours to my days to look at all of them. But these messages weren’t coming from my students – they were coming from friends. Friends who are in their 40’s and 50’s and 60’s. Friends who are not usually susceptible to idiotic Facebook quizzes or chain letters or Jackass-like stunt videos, friends who don’t send me dumb or time-wasting attachments. After yet another email from another reliable source, I finally clicked on the link.

Like forty seven million others, what I saw was Susan Boyle singing “I Dreamed a Dream,” from Les Miserables. She’s a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, and the video shows, in what seems to be its entirety, her appearance: a short backstage interview, a brief interaction with the show’s panel of judges, and then her rendition of “Dream.” It concludes with the reactions of those judges after Boyle performs.

Several things are remarkable about the video. First is the disdain Boyle is shown by at least one of the judges, as well as members of the audience who are panned by the camera as Boyle answers a few initial questions from Simon Cowell, the most visibly cynical of the panel. It seems obvious that Boyle is being perceived as a joke contestant, one of the by-now familiar losers who provide comic relief on much-watched programs like American Idol. The viewing audience enjoys laughing at these deluded wannabes, seems to find a good amount of glee in mocking their off-key attempts to find fame and fortune.

Susan Boyle – 47 years of age, plain, dressed the way your aunt might at a cousin’s wedding – does herself no favors by strutting onto the stage, forgetting the word “villages,” swiveling her hips, and – perhaps out of nervousness or a natural joie de vivre – momentarily vamping it up onstage. Cowell asks “what’s the dream?” and Boyle, without hesitating, responds that she wants to be a successful singer. When asked why that dream hasn’t been realized sooner – a moment in which it is clear that Cowell is setting her up, in front of the audience, who can see, they believe, exactly why the dream has been unrealized – she responds, simply, “I haven’t been given the chance.”

The next remarkable moment comes as Susan Boyle sings the first line of the song. It is instantly obvious – instantly, from the first note – that the woman can sing. Members of the audience spontaneously begin to applaud, and within ten seconds – that's literally all it takes to turn the tide of doubt that had built, just as quickly, when Boyle first hit the stage – the audience is on its feet. The camera takes turns highlighting the reaction of the judges, who one-by-one are shown jaws dropping, eyebrows raising, then smiling and clapping with delight – and showing Boyle, who appears confident and at ease, immersed in the song. She easily hits a high note, which sends the audience into a louder and more sustained ovation. Eventually we see Cowell sigh with pleasure, which may make us almost want to forgive his earlier assessment of this contestant.

Like many, I found Boyle’s performance thrilling, beautiful, and inspiring – I’ve watched it several times, and think of it as seven minutes of joy. I also found the follow-up reactions – those that have been published, at any rate – quite interesting. Most seem to focus on the clip as a resounding slap in the face to ageist and “looksist” stereotypes – stereotypes most often, but not exclusively, applied to women. Being 47 and lacking conventional good looks is apparently something many of us can relate to; I concur that the popularity of the video can be, at least in part, attributed to that interpretation – what my students would call the “relateability” factor. A lot of us are too old or too young or too fat or too thin or too short or too tall or too haggard or too uncouth or too uneducated or too this, too that. Most of us, I’d venture, are too something. But what the video represents to me, even more than a refutation of age or appearance stereotyping, is the triumph of the underestimated, the overlooked, the dismissed or easily ignored. It probably came as no surprise to anyone that Boyle claims to have never been given a chance before. She is not someone to whom chances are generally given.

I don’t like reality shows, in part because I believe they are often apt depictions of reality – aspects of reality that I rarely find entertaining. Britain’s Got Talent is, to me, a reality show – those few moments when the audience rolls its eyes, collectively, at Boyle say a lot. But – those moments don’t say it all. We can be a cold, uncaring, cruel people… but as Boyle’s voice hits the eardrums of every listener, the immediate and unanticipated reaction is one of utter surprise, pure pleasure. I’d like to believe that everyone in that room who had dismissed Susan Boyle ten seconds earlier was thinking, in that moment, “I was wrong.” I would like to think that they felt apologetic, that the enthusiasm of their applause was also a request for forgiveness -- and, perhaps, a mass thank-you.

In an age when we are all in danger of being overlooked or dismissed or taken for granted in any number of ways, I believe she makes us feel, for just a moment, a little less alone.

That's my dream, anyway, and I'll dream if for a while longer. And every time I watch Susan Boyle's video clip I'll whisper to her my own private thank you.

Bird Cemetery

2009-04-13T09:58:00.002-04:00

Ten minutes before heading out the door to have brunch with friends, I heard a pop against the large picture window that sits above the central staircase of our house. It sounded like a sharp tap – almost like a fingernail snapping against the window – and it was followed by an almost imperceptible bump. A sparrow had flown into the window and was lying on the deck, wings spread, chest heaving.

In the last twelve months, I have buried two other birds who didn’t survive similar crashes. One was a blue jay who hit the front door and snapped its neck. When I first saw it, the adult jay was splayed on its belly, brilliant blue wings perpendicular to its body. It looked like an avian savior on the cross, and it gave a great, slow-motion heave of its wings. I thought it was alive, and shouted out to Leigh that it was okay. It wasn’t okay; after that last valiant gesture, it died. The hummingbird may not have hit a window; Leigh found it on the porch, possibly the victim of a neighborhood cat or perhaps having succumbed to its own super-fast heart rate. Hummers go into a state of torpor at night; for some, getting that heart revved up in the morning doesn’t work and they expire. It looked like a little jewel, like I could stick a pin in it and wear it on my lapel.

In addition to those two deaths, dozens of birds have hit the windows and survived. When I hear them crash, I usually go outside to see what kind of shape they’re in. In the past, some have looked pretty bad and I feared they’d not make it. A warbler last year took nearly two hours to regain its bearings. I sat at its side, worried that a larger bird or one of those cats might spot a tempting lunch. I watched the bird breathe, blink its eyes, and occasionally try stretching out one of its wings. Eventually it hopped a few paces from me, and ten minutes after that proceeded to hop across the lawn. I still worried its wing might be broken, but the warbler finally gathered its composure and flew off.

I don’t think today’s bird will be as fortunate. It hit hard, and its right wing appears damaged. It can’t stand; every time it tries to right itself, it tips onto its side. I’ve spent 30 minutes with it, and now have to head over to my friend’s. I’ve built a kind of low fortress around the bird, a windbreak made of towels, so that it’s partly camouflaged but can still hop out, if it comes to that. I don’t think it will. I think that sometime over the next few hours, while I’m laughing over brunch, the sparrow will die.

*

When we got home, it was still breathing. I thought about moving the bird into the garage, where it would be absolutely safe from predators, but worried that if it tried to fly, it’d do further damage. Left it alone for the night.

*

It’s morning. The sun is a cold disc in the eastern sky. The sparrow is dead. Over the first few hours of morning, I hear two more crashes. Neither are casualties; both birds shake themselves off and fly away.

*

This afternoon, I will bury the sparrow beneath a maple tree. If sparrows have spirits, and if those spirits have an aesthetic sensibility, this one will have a view of thousands of trees and a winding creek, will hear the local owl at night and the geese at dawn; will hear, at times, the howl of a coyote or the whistle of a distant train. I’m beginning to think we live in a bird cemetery, but that’s probably only the start of it. Nature is full of the marvelous, for sure, but it’s brimming over with death and dying. Even now, at the start of spring, I’m noticing which trees survived the long winter, which will not bloom due to ice damage, disease, or other mysterious and terminal CODs. I watched the gallant attempts of the crocuses to survive several days of snow and wind; they didn’t make it. And now I will be nursemaid to the birds, talking quietly to them after they’ve hit a window, hoping they can recuperate, burying them when they don’t. Elsewhere, I will remind myself, a friend is trying to decide whether to keep her cat alive by giving it daily injections. “She’s my longest relationship,” the friend writes, having lost both her parents last year. I will remind myself of another friend, who is in the process of learning how to say goodbye to her younger brother, dying of cancer. And another friend, who is relearning his life after surviving a brain aneurysm. And another friend, who has endured two years of fruitless tests, all attempts to diagnose an illness that has sapped her of her strength, energy, and creativity. These are the people I am closest to in the world, individuals I consider my family. Of them, right now, I am the luckiest.

I hold no formal faith, believe in no true god, but when I place a rock on the grave of the sparrow later today, I will whisper a prayer.

Close up

2009-04-09T12:58:00.003-04:00

I spend a lot of time looking at things close up. For much of the winter and now into these weeks of early spring, I’d go out to the driveway, for instance, and stare at crow tracks in the snow, notice where small stones were visible beneath a patch of ice, study the juxtaposition of un-raked leaves against burgeoning shoots of grass. I took a lot of photographs, because much of what I saw was beautiful; I wanted to remember what it looked like, and I wanted to continue to study the photographs. I have frame after frame of abstract compositions; anyone looking at them would be puzzled at the subject matter. I might have to point out the thin layer of ice, the bubbles caught in and beneath its surface, the array of flattened vegetation or pebbles visible just below the crust. I’m intrigued by what is often overlooked. We are, as a species, capable of a narrowness of focus. This is often a favorable trait; intensity of focus helps us concentrate, helps us accomplish. But every day we overlook thousands of incidents, scenes, interactions, and conversations – many of which are of little consequence. But we also overlook distress and grief in those we care about. We overlook catastrophes of great magnitude. We overlook, for years and even lifetimes, entire continents of suffering. It is a survival mechanism. It is a necessity.

When I was a kid I read Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. In it, Horton, an elephant, notices a sound coming from a speck of dust. That speck turns out to be an inhabited planet. Horton heroically pays attention, even in the face of ridicule and imprisonment. Not only does Horton notice the planet, he does something for the inhabitants. He takes action.

Although I believe that human beings are inherently good, I also believe that we regularly fail to act. We might notice, we might pay extended attention, we might speak about our beliefs, we might speak up or out when it is difficult to do so. All of that is well and good and, at times, even admirable. But most of us, most of the time, fail to do anything. We might send a check, volunteer a few hours of our time – I felt bad for those tsunami victims, those displaced by Katrina, those going hungry in the nearby shelter. Some of us show up to dish out dinner every Sunday or help hang drywall for an afternoon. Lots of us do good deeds when we can.

But look around. Family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, co-workers, neighbors – a lot of people are overlooked. They are ill, they are stressed, they have lost or soon will lose a job, they can’t cope with the burdens of a long winter, they are lonely, they are afraid, they are confused, they are invisible.

We know this, don’t we? There’s nothing new here. Nothing new here, either: we look away.

I like to stack small, flat rocks. I don’t know why. I like the way they look. I have little stacks all over my study. Sometimes a passing truck or slamming door will cause them to topple. I re-stack them, carefully. To me, they are beautiful. For the most part, I neglect them after I stack them. Cobwebs form, and after a few weeks I might notice and dust them off, or just blow the cobwebs away. I can’t say that I pay much attention to these beautiful things I create, beyond the moment of composition. I say that I love them.

In much the same way, I think of my friends, my family, my students, my colleagues. I would say, in many cases, I love them. But I don’t pay enough attention. I sometimes look away. I often fail to act. This is done knowingly, willfully. The same might be true of you.

Today, all I can do is study this picture. I am caught up in the tilt of the rocks, I am a little mesmerized by the strands of the cobweb. The light draws me in. There is a kind of sadness in the photograph that is quietly appealing. Looking at pretty pictures is a nice way to spend an afternoon. But I wish I were doing something else. I wish I believed that tomorrow would be different. I wish we were all a little more like Horton.

Laid Low

2009-04-06T14:04:00.003-04:00

The crocuses avoided the barrage of wood, then withstood a day of April snow. But forty-eight hours of heavy winds finally laid them low, literally. Even so, they’re still beautiful. And, with or without the verticality of the crocuses, spring approaches. In two weeks, we’ll have daffodils. In three, hummingbirds. In seven, I’ll turn fifty.

So much math.

So much, so much.

Boxes

2009-04-01T15:23:00.001-04:00

Once a week, rain or shine, whether we have lots of snow or less snow, we pack our trash into Leigh’s station wagon and make a visit to the Oswego County Transfer Station. That’s a neutral-sounding euphemism for the dump, which is actually half dump and half recycling center. We hit both sides, usually two bags each. On the recycling side, we deposit one bag’s worth of newspaper and junk mail, and one full of cans and jars. On the dump side it’s just, well, garbage. There are satisfying aspects to the dumping of the trash, in part because it’s cathartic – a temporary freeing up of space – and in part because it’s physical. You literally throw the bags over the side of a giant bin; depending on what’s below, you might hear a satisfying thunk or bump or clunk. Off in the corner of the recycling area there’s a place for shredded paper, a material for which I hold a weird attraction. I like shredding it, I like looking at it – it’s confetti-like, almost festive – and I like thinking about the tangible remnants of lost secrets. In the back of my mind I think it would be fun, spy-like, to take all those pieces of shredded paper and reconstruct them, rebuild all the words and numbers. Find out what was so important that it needed to be destroyed.

There’s a metal area, too, and although we never use it, it intrigues me. People leave old washers and dryers, rusted bicycles or dirt bikes, tools, various deformed exercise machines, and an array of misshapen and mysterious metal. I always spot at least one tackle box or tool box – the old metal kind with sturdy locks. I imagine that they belonged to men whose children have given them new ones as gifts. Maybe they are the tackle boxes of the dead. If they recently belonged to someone still living, I suspect that they parted with them reluctantly. My father loved his old tackle box and luckily as kids we never had the money or the wherewithal to replace it. His tool box seemed sacred, too, something that would last a lifetime and grow more important and meaningful with age. But week after week, there in the corner of the dump, I’ll spot one, sometimes a whole heap of them. Today there were two old boxes; they looked like a long-married couple. One was a little bigger than the other, both were well-rusted but still functional. Next to one was a collection of ancient tools, probably a dozen or so. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone willingly parting with them; my father, again, would sooner part with a finger than a long-held hammer.

Tackle boxes and tool boxes can be purchased online now. They have some fancy contraptions as far as tool boxes go, including some that unfold up and out to two winged tiers with plenty of shelf space. They come in fire-engine red or silver or black; they’re generally rectangular with silver hardware. Some of them look as though they’d weigh 80 pounds if filled with tools, others are more compact. The tackle box industry seems to be booming – there are plastic boxes that look like little briefcases, others that fold out to look like staircases, see-through tackle boxes, even tackle bags – all in a variety of colors and shapes, including fluorescent green and pink.

I can’t imagine my father carrying a plastic box or one with colors or ever considering a tackle bag. It might not be a true equivalent, and I doubt my father would make the comparison, but maybe his tackle box and tool box were like my library, or what passes for my library. (Planks, wooden blocks, lots of books…) They’re each a kind of sacred space, a personal and private place. I arrange my books in the order I like, sometimes alphabetical, sometimes by subject, sometimes just one author I think might like another author right up against each other. (It’s like being a book/author matchmaker.) There are certain books I want nearby, and others that I believe have magical powers. I have one book by Michael Burkard and one by Anne Carson that WORK for me. I open them, I read a line, a word, a whole poem… and I am immediately inspired to write something myself. They have never failed me, and I haven’t abused their powers. If anything, I consult them more rarely – I don’t want to wear them out.

Those relics I saw today seemed to hold the remnants of someone’s secret life. What old hammer rested in one, what series of handmade lures in another? Were they full of little compartments, or drawers; had someone’s father sat her next to one, decades ago, and taught her how to bait a hook, how to use a socket wrench? If I could, I’d steal those old boxes. I’d open them up and imagine the lives of those who opened them before. I’d give them personalities, maybe even names. I’d cluster them into friendly groups, then neighborhoods. I’d have a whole room full of castoffs. A whole barn full of new junk, transferred from one station to another.

The Edge of April

2009-03-30T15:29:00.003-04:00

I haven’t been much of a cheerleader lately. My capacity to look on the bright side, cheer someone up, even offer a few words of encouragement has been just about wholly depleted. Winter is always tough here, and this winter was worse than usual. I found out, just a few days before Christmas (the worst gift ever) that my job was in jeopardy; several friends have been enduringly and scarily ill; my partner underwent surgery and toughed out a long recuperation; and, well, that was enough.

It seemed, in my mind, that all of these things coincided with challenges in the world outside the scope of my little world as well. The chaos in the economy, in particular, has underscored my personal uncertainty and fear in a way that has been hard for me to endure. The resultant stress knocked me for a loop in February, followed by a worrisome couple of weeks focused uncomfortably on my own health. It turned out, after a batch of tests, that I’m “perfectly normal.” More on that dull but welcome assessment later.

What has helped me through the winter has been a love for my job which, despite its precarious state, is a good one. It’s true that I’m underpaid and underappreciated by the powers-that-be, but I have 60 creative, fun, surprising, quirky, intelligent, unique students that never fail to hold my interest during class, never fail to challenge me in comical or legitimate ways, never fail to leave me, at the end of the day, exhausted but fulfilled. Two of my three classes are full of seniors, and I’ve watched them over the last few weeks as they begin to fully acknowledge the end of their college careers. They are excited. And they are scared.

My students feel unprepared for the world that awaits them. They attribute this to the news, to the unrelenting stream of depressing realities broadcast on television, reported in the newspaper, rumored about on Facebook, and displayed in the eyes of their parents and their professors. I want to tell them that every senior class before them has experienced similar fears. But maybe we all want to believe that our situations are unique, that we feel what we feel in ways that are just slightly more enhanced, more acute, more intense, more immediate and, frankly, more important than what anyone else feels. We are all, for a time, as sensitive as poets. One component of wisdom, I think, is learning the falsity of that belief.

The other thing that has helped me through this stretch is simply the world outside my window. The gorgeous trees, thousands of them; the constancy of the skies; the visitations by crows and hawks and robins and the breathtaking streaking red cardinals. I watched the lake as it changed from frozen plateau back to white-capped waves, and studied the snow, which so often is a burden here, but also, so often, is almost beyond description in its ethereal beauty.

It’s perfectly normal to feel overburdened, overwhelmed; it’s normal to be afraid and to wish that circumstances were different, were better. It’s normal to want to trade in this life for some other version of life, one where all our friends were healthy and upbeat, where our studies came to us easily and felt relevant and consistently stimulating, where we knew that two months down the road we’d be financially secure, intellectually fulfilled, and just flat-out happy.

I’m not that cheerleader who can push the facts aside and say hey! That better life is coming! It’s just around the corner! Have faith! But sometimes, in my own quiet corner of the world, I wish that somebody would say, in passing, don’t worry. I want to hear someone say it’ll get better. It’s gonna be alright. I might not even believe the words… but I can’t deny that I want to hear them.

Outside the kitchen, in the back yard, a few patches of crocuses are bearing up nicely under a late spring snow shower. They’re the same flowers that missed being crushed by a dump truck full of wood a few days ago. I don’t know, for sure, if they’ll survive a further dip in our temperatures, but if I have any faith at all, it’s that they will. Everything changes, and everything passes. That’s scary, true. But there is hope in there as well.

It’s normal to want to hear that better days are ahead. It’s perfectly normal to want to slide back under the covers and sleep through the snowfall, sleep through the quiz, ignore the phone, skip class, blink our eyes and magically wake up in a sunnier version of this world. But I’m going to watch the crocuses curl around themselves and live. I’m going to laugh at my students’ jokes and tell them, when I can, that they’re going to be okay. And if nobody’s around to say it, I’m going to chant, like a mantra, in my own tired and perfectly normal brain, that better days are coming.

Harbingers

2009-03-27T10:36:00.005-04:00

Here in Oswego, we’ve been taught, over the course of our lifetimes, not to prematurely anticipate spring. When friends downstate start writing about the robins or the crocuses, when friends as nearby as Syracuse mention that they have their windows open, we’re still a little leery. We know that as soon as we dare to put even one sweater away, or as soon as we put the shovel in the garage or – worst of all – say “I’m so glad it’s finally spring” – we will pay a price. That price might be as innocuous as a few days of snow, it might be a damaging ice storm, or it might be a massive bring-you-to-your-knees-and-make-you-weep blizzard. So we’re generally circumspect, a little reluctant to concede that winter is over. The gods might be listening, and we’ve learned that they have, at the very least, a warped and wicked sense of humor.

That being said, I couldn’t help but notice that a handful of crocuses are sprouting in the backyard. I mentioned it to Leigh, who had already noticed but hadn’t said a word. (I’m not the only superstitious one in the house when it comes to weather matters.) I was visibly happy, which has been a rarity lately, so Leigh felt obligated to add “Well, before you get too happy...” I thought I knew what her next line was going to be – some insight into our weather forecast, an expectation of snow… but instead she said “The wood’s coming today.”

At the start of each winter we have wood delivered. That wood -- four to six logs crammed in a single wood stove every few hours, round the clock -- heats the house for roughly six months of the year. It’s our only source of heat and the house is fairly large – we need a lot of wood. This year, for the first time ever, we ran out. Although it’s nearly April, a time when plenty of people in the northeast are thinking about turning the heat down, we’re restocking. We’ve got plenty of cold nights and quite a few cold days still to come. And so, more wood.

Two cords of wood fill a dump truck, and it takes some tricky maneuvering to get that much wood dropped as near the house as possible. It’s important that it’s deposited close, as it needs to be stacked and nobody wants to have to haul it, piece by piece, in addition to stacking it. Leigh and “the wood guy” have finessed a system that culminates in his truck stopping about two feet away from the kitchen door. What that meant, unfortunately, was that either the truck or the wood would land directly on top of the young crocuses. The only way to avoid damaging them would be to move the wood further away, thereby increasing my workload by, say, a few more pulled muscles, a few extra hours of an aching back. I conceded that the crocuses would have to bear the weight of the wood, but didn’t want to witness them being crushed. I walked away.

An hour later, the wood arrived with a crash. It’s literally an earth-shaking endeavor, and I felt the house tremble, felt the ground rumble. I looked at the clock: 5:45 p.m. Crocus time-of-death.

An hour later I went downstairs. The wood guy had just about finished stacking the wood – a gift from Leigh to me. What took him an hour would have taken me a few; Leigh’s recuperating from surgery and not able to participate in any wood-related chores. I was elated to see the high, orderly piles of fresh-smelling split logs. She slipped him forty bucks and he was on his way. The house will be warm for the foreseeable future.

As we turned our attention to preparing dinner, Leigh looked out the window and said “Hey, check it out.” She pointed to the area where the crocuses had previously been poking through the soil. “Look at the tracks,” she said. The wood deliveryman had maneuvered his truck so that the tires missed hitting the crocuses by a hair. I could see a few crocuses sticking up, then a tire track, and on the other side of the track a few more crocuses. Both the heavy truck and the onslaught of wood had spared the flowers’ lives.

I felt like mine had been spared as well. I opened the window and could hear staggered lines of geese, way in the distance, coming home.

Tracks

2009-03-06T13:46:00.004-05:00

This is a shot of crow tracks on the driveway, up against the neighbor’s dog prints. A small gang of three crows visits on a regular basis but we’ve escaped, so far, “a crow problem.” Apparently they can become quite troublesome if they invade the area, but these three just stop by, scavenge some road kill, have a raucous conversation, then take off. They’re gigantic and black as olives and I’m very fond of them.

Saw a pair of cardinals in the yard the other day, too. Male and female. Smaller than usual, but flashing in and out of the bare trees and giving the almost monochromatic landscape (snow, snow, don’t forget the clouds, snow) a dash of color. A welcome sign of spring.

And: this morning, the first long lines of geese high in the sky. These weren’t the local geese; these were the ones who head south for the winter (coward geese) and now, mercifully, return. There were three long strands of them; looked like a pitchfork in the clouds, or maybe more like a trident. Have my window cracked so I can hear if any more pass by. It’s a balmy afternoon by Oswego standards (40’s), so I’m listening to the last big patches of ice and snow melt off the roof. There’s so much runoff that it sounds like it’s raining.

I’m trying, at least for this afternoon, to appreciate these sights and sounds and not worry, as much as I have been, about the job, the friends who are ill, the stacks of papers to read. Trying to remember that everything goes so fast. Like those tracks in the snow. So beautiful – perfect, really – for a few hours, then gone. John Keats, who knew a thing or two about the fleeting nature of, well, everything: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination.” Amen. And as I type that, I swear, I hear the call of the geese. When I look out, I see that it's the local geese. The ones who stay. The ones who give the impression, the strong impression, that some things, against all odds, endure.

Geese

2009-02-20T14:29:00.005-05:00

I’ve been in love, forever, with the sight and sound of Canada geese as they fly over my house, skimming the roof or at high altitude, at dusk or dawn, season-round. Here near Lake Ontario – just about as close to Canada as we can get – most geese leave in the fall and return in the spring, but quite a few over-winter. These stragglers wake me in the morning – sometimes a whole crew of them, sometimes just a pair squawking as they wing toward the lake. Later they signal when the day is done, heading back to some swampy night-time grove or maybe just taking a spin for exercise. Their calls fill me with longing and devotion; their calls, for me, might be the equivalent of gospel songs to others. They incite wanderlust, they make me want to belong to a tribe, to leave and return…

I don’t know what their calls mean, but I believe they mean something. Whether they signal direction, (veer north!), or they’re cranking about position, (get out of my way!), or whether they’re phrases in an avian vocabulary about difficulty – how much effort is required to fly, the precision needed to create that giant V in the sky – I can’t guess. Maybe it’s a language of pleasure, maybe the geese are exhilarated and so they sing out. Could be those honks are laughter, or orgasmic utterances. Or maybe the mechanics of vocalization are connected to the wing in some incomprehensible map of bird physiology or neurology, and so for each wing beat there is a commensurate sound uttered.

I do know this: sometimes the geese are silent as they fly. And that is spooky and lovely, too, like some alphabet unwinding in the sky, and only those lucky enough to look up can hope to ever decipher it.

Photo credit: IAN Image and Video Library

Underneath

2009-02-15T14:25:00.001-05:00

I’ve been thinking about what’s underneath. Mid-February in Oswego generally means that everything is covered with snow or, in the case of the lake, submerged beneath ice. This year has been no exception, but we’ve had a grace period for the last few days that can’t be called a thaw, quite, but offered up enough sunshine to melt most of the snow off the roof. (Okay, there’s still about 8 inches of ice capped with another 8 or more of snow up there, but that’s better than the three to four feet we had.) The driveway’s reasonably passable, and there are patches of ice all over the yard, places where it’s easy to see what’s below. Mostly rocks and grass, but in spots the ice covers puddles, and the bubbles in the water, moving slowly, make patterns that catch the light. The yard’s boundaries are marked with rock walls, and those rocks retain enough heat that they melt through. Here and there plants have found their way up – shrubs shrug off the weight of snow, hydrangea branches, bare now, poke like asparagus up from the drifts. It’s almost like the snow is the earth’s winter skin, and I can wander about the yard seeing what’s hidden beneath that skin. Almost like peeling back to muscle, and then to bone, and then to the pulsing heart. The yard’s a casual mess, but when studied through the lens – I roam around with my camera when the sun’s out – it begins to appear composed, designed, almost neat. Maybe it’s just my tendency to impose order… I don’t know. The patterns in the branches settle me; the graceful sprawl of ivy, green as emeralds; the bubbles beneath the ice… I’m dreaming of spring, but already suspecting that I’ll mourn the loss of winter.

Valentine

2009-02-13T15:45:00.003-05:00

Love is all there is.

Rats with Wings

2009-02-09T10:54:00.005-05:00

My father built a pigeon coop in the backyard. It was a mysterious place to my brother and I, an outbuilding that seemed like it would make the perfect fort if only we were allowed to commandeer it away from the birds. It was the definition of ramshackle: plywood nailed together, rectangular windows covered with chicken wire, a clattering door hung on secondhand hinges. The door had just one flimsy lock, but he’d screwed it in high enough that it would have taken more determination or defiance to sneak in than either of us apparently held. The structure rested, at its corners, on uneven concrete blocks so that the whole thing looked like it could buckle at any minute, or tip off its foundation and tilt like some kind of half-assed raft at sea. The inside, which felt more stable than the outside would have indicated, was lined with shelves that held what seemed, at the time, like hundreds of pigeons. My father had painted the outside red, just like the picnic table that he’d also built and which suffered from similar endearing flaws. He liked to build things in the same way my mother liked to cook and sew – there was no artistry involved, per se, but they were sincere and seemed to enjoy their endeavors. Everything in and outside our home was always a little off, a bit askew, and there’s no doubt that my enduring need for orderliness was born of some reaction to the off-kilter nature of my day-to-day existence back then.

My father was part of some kind of pigeon club, a bird fraternity for neighborhood men. They were just a bunch of area guys who had their own birds and would get together on weekends and shoot the breeze and drink beer, looking up at the sky once in a while to see whose birds made it home first. Between races, there were daily feedings, medicines to administer, and once in a while a bird had to be put down. I’d tag along after my father when he fed the pigeons, sticking close to his legs, half curious and half timid, half wanting to hold a bird, half afraid one would peck my eyes out. I was 5 or 6, my eye level at about my father’s hand level if they were relaxed at his sides. That’s how I came to see a quick flick of the wrist, then a bird body held casually, the way a guy might carry a baseball. I could tell that the bird wasn’t right, was off kilter in its own way; I could see, as I shadowed my father, its head lolling loosely from its body. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “Had to put it down,” he answered. “Why?” I persisted, puzzled by the phrase, sensing “put it down” had nothing to do with placement but rather with something final and still. “It was sick,” my father said, never stopping in his ministrations to the cooing, nervous birds. “If I didn’t take care of it, all the other birds might get sick and die.”

This seemed reasonable to me, both noble and practical, and I think that explanation, coupled with my father’s cool demeanor, informed my earliest ideas of what a man was, what death was. A man could put a bird down if he had to, could snap its neck and keep on working. Death was awful and simple, a practical thing, a remedy. All the gravity and weight behind his words lent subtext I didn’t fully understand and may, in fact, have imposed years later, thinking back on the moment, crafting it, teasing the edges of old images in search of meaning. My father’s care, his attention, his tenderness and brutality towards those birds incited a love of pigeons in me, has allowed me to maintain great affection for them despite decades of hearing them called rats with wings, flying rats, filthy birds, useless birds.

I came across a sidewalk once, newly poured concrete, the tangible proof of other good men’s labor. The surface was pristine, the borders straight; had I been more mischievous it would have been a perfect canvas for handprints. But a pigeon beat me to it. All up an edge of the sidewalk was a trail of pigeon tracks. The tracks looked like climbing ivy, created a decorative, off-kilter border. I snapped a picture and moved on. Kept working.

pigeon photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

Shoveling the Roof

2009-02-01T15:18:00.007-05:00

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I've spent the last hour watching my neighbors shovel about four feet of snow off the roof of their house. If you're reading this in the south or southwest, you might be saying "huh?" For that matter, if you're reading from downstate it might sound peculiar, but yes, at least once every winter we have to shovel the snow off the rooftops of our houses. Right now, for instance, I should be outside planted in the snow on the roof. I can't, because I'm under doctor's orders to "take it easy." I have conveniently managed to take it easy NOT AT ALL, except for the roof situation. I don't want to shovel snow off the roof. I don't want to get dressed in layers -- I'm sick of layers -- climb over a snowbank to get the ladder, drag the ladder through snow up to my shoulders, awkwardly haul myself onto the roof which would really, to be accurate, be more like hauling myself into the snow on the roof, and then endure several hours of physical labor in order to make a mere dent in the accumulation.

I'm thinking maybe it'll melt. The sun's out, it's almost 40 degrees, some of it is melting. If I had to estimate, I'd guess that the snow's mass has decreased, throughout the day, by about 1/10 of one percent. So if we have -- what? -- ninety nine? nine hundred and ninety nine? -- more days of mild weather, it might all melt. (Do not, under any circumstances, do the math. I'm a poet. Poets can't count.)

Meanwhile, I'm worrying that if it all DID melt, quickly, there'd be so much runoff that our house might slide down the ridge. It'd be like those California landslides, only worse, because it would be me.

And then I'm thinking wow, if all the snow melted and the ground was so saturated that the house slid down the ridge and I SURVIVED, that would make a really good essay.

Sometimes I kind of wish I had my feet up, the t.v. on; I wish I had a six pack of something intoxicating and was getting ready to watch the Superbowl. No worries. No pretend conversations in my head where I say something stupid or something charming or something profound or, in short, something I'd never actually say. No daydreams where a nurse takes my pulse and flirts with me and, I suspect, earlier, as I emerged from a faint, leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

But then I think nah... Nothing's better than spying on the neighbors and watching the afternoon pass by -- drip by cold, melting drip -- daydreaming and thinking, however lazily, about the next essay, the next poem. The next sweet kiss on a cold winter day.

Swing, batter batter

2009-01-31T11:37:00.010-05:00

So far, the best part of this long winter is knocking down the icicles. I do it with a bat; Leigh taught me how. I'd been wondering for about five years why she kept that red, wooden baseball bat in the bedroom. Burglars, I figured, although we live in the middle of nowhere, as they say. It'd have to be a weird and determined burglar, one set on stealing, say, lots of catfood (from Fargo) or, perhaps, Diet Coke (from Leigh). I've got nothing worth stealing unless someone was looking for letters from my friends, student papers, or a random collection of stones and/or bones. Weird and determined, for sure. But irrelevant, because the bat's purpose isn't to ward off a hypothetical thief. It's to knock down icicles. Not those pretty, freeze-pop kind of icicles that look good enough to pluck off the eaves and lick (like the ones in the photograph). I knock those off with a metal shovel, and when they fall they sound like bells. No, I'm talking about the ones that are as big as your leg, as big as your 6-year old, as big as you. An icicle that could kill the sorry body hunched below as it lets go its perch.

Icicles that big hang from the roof of our second storey -- bad ventilation, heat leakage, whatever; everyone around here's got the same problem -- and in order to remove them I have to climb onto the back of a futon, crank open a screenless window, balance on the windowsill, lean out a ways, and do my best to take a swing at the ice mass. It's a little tricky, somehow like hitting a pinata, not because I'm blindfolded, but because my range of motion is limited by a) the house; b) a wall of windows; and c) my questionable balance. One false move and I'm either breaking a window or breaking my back. "Try to hit it at its widest point," Leigh wisely advised. "Don't swing so much as poke." I've developed a sort of awkward, two-fisted, overhead swing slash poke slash hammering motion to knock them down.

Sometimes I give a preliminary tap -- the way actual batters might tap home plate before getting ready to swing. Then I get ready for the real hit... concentrate... aim... Cra-aa-aaaaack! I'd initially expected more resistance when I swatted, thought it'd be like hitting a wall with one's fist, but it's not like that. There is resistance -- the icicles are thick, and heavy -- but it's a subtle pause, and gives way almost instantly to a freefall that I wish took longer, wish could go in slow motion. The icicle tilts, sometimes breaks into two pieces, and for just a split second is falling, somehow glorious, somehow catching the light and thrilling. The glory is short-lived, as glory often is; the ice inevitably lands with a thud in a giant heap of snow. It sounds what I imagine a body would sound like in similar circumstances, and I'm always a little let down, a little dismayed when I've completed the task. Feels almost like I've killed something.

Icicle: a tapering mass of ice formed by the freezing of dripping water. The definition makes me happy. Even the spelling makes me happy. (Ask a roomful of third graders to spell the word and delight yourself for hours: eye sikle; ize sickels; I siggle, ayesikkels...)

So much pleasure... so why do I raise a bat to it?

Snowblower

2009-01-28T10:23:00.006-05:00

So the other day I bundled up and prepared myself for a round of clearing snow from the driveway. There wasn't much -- 4, 5 inches -- just enough to necessitate removing it in order to get the car out. The sun was shining, my mood was up. This was in contrast to my usual snowblowing demeanor, which involves grumbling, swearing and, on occasion, weeping. There may have even been a time or two when I've looked up at the sky, heavily into the drama of it all, and asked why god had forsaken me. The snow, in other words, often gets the best of me. Once there's a foot or more, the work is hard. The driveway -- only about a third of which is visible in this photo -- is steep in places, deeply rutted in other places, and the snowblower itself is petulant, deceptively heavy, and more than willing to engage like a champion in our love/hate relationship. One gear doesn't work, occasionally we'll "toss a rod," which makes the whole machine tilt to one side, and even on a good day it's not my favorite way to spend an hour. I've compared it in the past to wrestling with a refrigerator. Uphill. In the cold. So I'd say it's generally like that -- only worse.

The snowblower and I, in short, have a history. On this day, however, I had put that history aside and was approaching my task, if not cheerfully, at least not with dread. Trudged out to the garage, turned this lever, lifted that lever, pressed this button, that button, and heard the machine roar to a start. As I pressed the handle that engages the rotating blades, the snowblower stalled. I repeated the process, still in reasonably good humor. Stalled again. Third time. Stall. Went inside, consulted with Leigh, who is on crutches and can't, therefore, attend to this sort of issue herself. She hypothesized that maybe a line had frozen. I had no idea if there even were "lines" and, if there were, what those lines consisted of, and had no clue as to whether or not they could freeze. Nonetheless, it seemed like a possibility, so I took her advice and started the thing up again and let it run for a while. Let the engine warm up -- that was her thinking -- and that'll melt the frozen lines. All would be well.

After ten minutes of listening to the din and feeling the lighter side of my mood dribble away, I tried to engage the blades again. No luck. Or, I should say, luck approached from afar. Our neighbor, Mark, yelled over, wanting to know if everything was alright. He lives in shouting distance, and with all the snow -- its way of insulating the environment, allowing sound to travel easily -- it was almost like we were standing within ten feet of each other although we were yelling across two substantial yards. I briefly explained the situation, across the acres, and he said he'd be right over. I said a quick "thanks" to the gods of small town neighbors' good-heartedness, and met him at the top of the driveway. "Sounds like the blades are frozen," he said. "Hmm," I said.

Mark proceeded to tip the snowblower on its back -- I had the weird sensation that I was eavesdropping on some weird human/mechanical gynecologic procedure -- and said "I need a tool." He maneuvered his way around the garage, which is a typical garage -- fairly low on organization, fairly high on clutter -- and intuitively found his way to the appropriate tool. (I should warn, about here, that if you retain that gynecologist analogy in your head, this is about to become disturbing.) He'd found a crowbar, and began -- what would the right word be? -- assaulting the snow blower's innards. He hacked at chunks of ice, he speared at the blades, he whacked that machine inside and out. It caused a considerable racket, what I'd normally call an alarming racket, and there were points at which I was sure he was about to destroy the snowblower entirely. The thing held up, however, and after another good ten minutes of battery he attempted to start the blades. No go.

"Gonna get my torch," he said, heading back to his place. "Torch??" I responded. "Yep," he said.

I went inside and informed Leigh that Mark had gone to get his torch. "Torch??" she said. "Yep," I said. "I'm just a little concerned," I said, "that introducing a torch into the machine, even near the machine, might be a little problematic. I just filled it with gas..." I trailed off.

"Oh god," Leigh said. "Yeah," I said.

I went back outside and met Mark at the garage. He had a blowtorch, the size of a small fire extinguisher except, I guess, its opposite. He got ready to light it and, I confess, I stepped back. I may have jumped back. Quite a ways back. I was willing to watch him blow up, apparently, if it came to that... but I didn't really want to blow up myself.

I watched as Mark ran the flame over the red insides of the machine with the fluidity of a welder, stroked the outside of the machine, over and over, smooth movements. Eventually a stream of water began to run from its interior -- a column of solid ice melting -- and a few minutes later we attempted to start the blades rotating.

They did. I mouthed "my hero" to Mark. He smiled, walked away. I cleared the driveway, wiped the snow and ice from the snowblower's guts before putting it away for the evening.

Today we're expecting another foot.

Stars wobble

2009-01-25T10:11:00.010-05:00

This is a piece I started working on this past summer, through December. Not sure if I'll push it any further. Just felt like getting some observations on paper. Not sure, really, if it comes together. But at least it's a break from writing about winter...

(If you look closely, you can see one or two ants on the peonies in the photograph.)

The Science of Light

Stars wobble. Scientists believe that observable wobbling of a star suggests the existence of a nearby planet; the wobble is a result of the orbiting planet’s gravitational tug. Even though the planet is invisible, it’s there – the wobble is evidence of the existence of a body.

Outside, an ant navigates its way across the globe of a peony. The flowers – fat pink orbs – grow at an angle. They seek out the sun’s rays, which are obscured by a mature maple tree. The peony appears to be stretching, reaching for light. The gesture suggests elements of strain and urgency, similar to that of a horse extending its neck while running.

A flower is not a globe, a flower is not human. A flower is not even a horse. We name things to isolate them.

Although heliotropium is a particular genus of plants, over time heliotrope has come to mean any plant that grows towards the light. Names, it seems, can stretch.

A common typo: plant and planet, one substituted for the other.

*

lighght

That word, above – a corruption, alteration, disruption, enhancement, rupture, call it what you like, of the word light – is a poem, reproduced in its entirety. It was written by Aram Saroyan and published in a Random House collection, creatively titled Aram Saroyan, in 1968. According to the author, the book, comprised of short poems, could be read in one or two minutes. Edwin Newman, in fact, read it on the NBC evening news. That was not why the poem and its author became celebrated, however. After the poem appeared in The Chicago Review, Saroyan received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry award in the amount of $750. That’s $750 per word or about $107 per letter. Not bad.

Ian Daly, writing for the Poetry Foundation, said, “The poem doesn’t describe luminosity—the poem is luminosity.”

Jesse Helm, (helm, from the Old English meaning to guide or control), among others – notably William Scherle, a Republican Congressman from Iowa – saw red over the NEA’s award, and his outrage played a large part in making Saroyan’s poem one of the most famous in recent history. (Ask fifty people if they’ve ever heard of it, and you’ll likely get 49 negative responses. Even so: famous.)

Although it was ridiculed by others – Helm and Scherle being simply the most public and, one might argue, the most publicly ignorant – I’ve been haunted by that poem for 30 years. Is that what luminosity is – to haunt?
If you look at the sun and then close your eyes, an afterimage appears, a continuation of the light, as though the inside of your eyelids is a movie screen.

If you blink your eyes, you miss something.

Luminosity is the study of ghosts. What is left when the material body is gone? Some say light. Some say not.

Hummingbirds shine. Light bounces off air pockets in their feathers at different angles, and the clear bubbles of air act as prisms, making the feathers irridescent. Hummers have the largest hearts, proportionally, of any animal; a hummingbird heart beats between 500 and 1200 times per minute. (That upper register calculates to 20 times per second.) Meanwhile, their wings beat 25 to 75 times per second. They’re tiny, they’re beautiful, and they require lots of fuel. The Portugese call them “flower kissers” because much of that fuel comes from flowers. Procurement of nourishment – they eat while hovering – demands a long tongue and great stores of energy. Round and round they go, flying, feeding, courting, feeding, fighting, feeding. At night they become torpid, and some die in their sleep, exhausted, unable to restart their hearts.

I have a hummingbird feeder outside my study window. Many times an hour a hummer will arrive, hover, its wings whirring, take a few seconds to sip the sugar water, and then zip away. Sometimes two are in contention for rights to the feeder and there will be confrontations so fast that I can’t tell what’s happening. I’ll see two dark specks in a whirlwind and hear the whizz of their wings, there’s some quick vocalization, and then one speeds away and the other returns to the feeder. I’m not sure if they’re battling for turf, just saying hello, or participating in a mating ritual. But the noise is perpetually at my shoulder; I am always either anticipating the arrival of a bird or noticing it buzz away. The wing-sound becomes almost hallucinatory, incantatory, avian background music.

Hummingbirds shine, and swoop, and for just a few months of every year they are coveted visitors. They seem as fleeting as meteors, or the brief visitations of ants when the peonies are on the verge of bloom.

Visitation is, perhaps, the most bittersweet version of relationship. A visit, after all, is temporary. A meteor, one might say, visits for a split second – we spot it, but if we blink, it’s gone. The ants visit the peony garden for a few days. The hummingbirds visit my yard for a few months every year. Friends visit, family visits.

With a visit, there is always a leave-taking. Visits don’t last… ever.

To live requires a tolerance for the temporal. Visiting is a synecdoche for life. Or, to be blunt about it: we die.

How old are the stars? Between one and ten billion years. How long would it take to reach them? More than a thousand of our lifetimes.

I collect stones and bones. I collect them because they are beautiful. They are artifacts, and remind me of visits. I have looked inside the eye sockets of skulls of foxes, deer, birds. I have peered inside a turtle egg. I have broken open wasps’ nests, bee hives. Nothing shines inside these things, although there is light.

A cavity within a bone is called a labyrinth. Inside some bones you can see what looks like a honeycomb. A true labyrinth (as opposed to a maze) is not designed to confuse. There is a single path in and, therefore, out. In hiking, this would be called an out-and-back. Some labyrinths look like fingerprints. Others look like the folds of a brain.

My friend is recuperating from a brain aneurysm. He was sitting at his desk. He was fine. He saw a band of light, and then the light fizzled. It was like when a t.v. screen blows out – the light shriveled to a thin, staticky line, and then it was black. When I visited him in the hospital, our hands kept touching. We don’t hold hands in real life. But a body near a body, sometimes, is like a planet near a star. We wobble in our orbits. We lean towards. Sometimes, in my own lonely trajectory, I have a song in my head. Sometimes the song goes like this:

el aye

gee aitch

gee aitch tee.

Nests

2009-01-21T14:28:00.004-05:00

One of the things I've been meaning to write about: the birds' nests in winter. What I see out my window, year-round, are trees. Hundreds of trees, thousands -- probably tens of thousands -- of branches. In winter, when the leaves are gone, birds' nests are easily seen. They're everywhere, all kinds, big and small. I can see them in the eaves of the garage, in the branches of the giant cherry and maple trees, and lower to the ground, in the shrubs. My favorite thing, however, is when it snows -- each nest becomes a cup. After a snowfall -- the light, fluffy snow in particular -- all I need to do to locate a nest is to look for a pile of snow in the branches. The nests are like chalices, or cupped hands, full of snow.

MLK DAY

2009-01-19T09:33:00.004-05:00

Woke this morning to what sounded like scratching on the window. Figured it was a squirrel, didn't want to open my eyes. When Fargo (the cat) leapt up, I groggily looked over to see what was going on. There was the cat, hunched on the nightstand, as though ready to pounce. Outside the window, appearing to look inside the house, was a woodpecker. Not sure what kind -- about the size of a pigeon, maybe slightly bigger, with a gold breast, black specks, and a patch of red on the back of its head that was, I swear, in the shape of a heart. I leaned over and peered at the bird, the cat peered at the bird, and the bird was oblivious due to, I assume, the sun reflecting off the window glass. We were about 8 inches apart, and just stayed that way for a minute or so. It was, perhaps, the best way to wake up in a long time, and made me feel, on this historic day that will segue into another historic day, that maybe all this talk about hope has some basis.

Mid-January

2009-01-16T11:12:00.003-05:00

At some point, the snow becomes a sedative. There's so much of it, and it's just there, and it keeps falling, piling, drifting. Beautiful, true, but superficial, perhaps, in the way that beauty can be. I used to feel sorry for the weather reporters in Arizona; they had to say the same words every day with the same cheerful smiles. Sunny and hot, sunny and warm, sunny and steamy... As far as forecasts go, winter here is comparable to summer there. Cold with snow flurries, arctic cold with snow showers, cold and heavy lake effect, cold and bands of snow, cold with an oscillating band of heavy snow. The sameness is what eventually becomes tiresome -- when a crow or a cardinal flies through the tree branches on a snowy morning, it's such a shock to the system I almost gasp. And when the sun comes out... even if only for ten minutes... feels like nearly a miracle.

Home

2008-12-30T10:09:00.005-05:00

Well, it's the end of another year, and it's been a wild ride. 2008 had a lot of high points for me, but it also included the serious illnesses of close friends, some unexpected job instability, and the shelving of a manuscript I'd had high hopes for. This is the title essay of that manuscript; it seems fitting, somehow, to meditate on home at the end of this year.

Although I've lived in New York State for the last five years, this essay was written in Tucson, Arizona. I'll dedicate it, in my sentimental, end-of-year mood, to my Arizona friends and my New York friends. And if there are any unknown, silent, blog-reading friends out there, hey, this is for you, too.

--Donna

No Place Like It

I remember the first time I noticed light. In the backyard of my childhood home a sapling grew up from a rocky, changeable creek that separated our small-town street from an endangered family farm. The sapling, possibly birch, possibly maple, curved in a gentle arc, and its uppermost branches sheltered a birdhouse my grandfather had built. The birdhouse was mounted on a pole and, to our amazement, birds had actually built a nest inside. Either those birds were reclusive, or they shied away from curious children; I heard but rarely saw them. What I could see: bits and pieces of their nest – dry grass and twigs cascaded from the door-like opening in the house.

I spent a lot of time in that backyard. My brother and sisters and I would swing on the two rusty swings or play tag or jump repeatedly off the splintery red picnic table. Sometimes we’d climb onto the lowest branch of a wild cherry tree and just sit, dangling our legs, as though we’d accomplished something important. When I was fourteen I’d bring my boyfriend back there. We’d lean against the garage door, hidden by tall hedges that surrounded the yard, and make out for hours. I could feel the hard bump in his jeans and would press against it, rocking back and forth the way I’d rocked as a child on a fence beam. I didn’t fully understand why it felt so good, but I liked the sensation and presumed he did, too.

That sapling didn’t survive my adolescence – a victim of storm, or some other vagary of the seasons – and the birdhouse seemed to disappear one day, or maybe I just stopped paying attention. But the first time I noticed light – the first time I really saw light – was on that slender, sloping tree. It was autumn, and only a few leaves clung to the delicate branches that swept the white side of the birdhouse. I suspect it was a late afternoon light, a slant light, for the branches and the little house were side-lit and stunning. The light on the branch seemed to drip, as though it had been painted on with a gold wash, and the birdhouse’s wood surface was drenched in Hockney white.

Part of why I remember that light is because it was the first time I wanted to write about what I saw, as though the writing and the seeing were twinned impulses. And there was another realization: I knew, in that moment, that I did not have, and might never find, the words to describe not only what I saw, but what I felt when I looked at the light.

This morning the sky is overcast with pale, gooey clouds that seem to stretch like messy clay across the sky. They are not attractive clouds, but they serve a purpose, keeping the Arizona heat at bay. Even though it’s November, the days regularly creep toward the 90-degree mark. Earlier it rained for a while, though when I mention this to a friend who lives nearby she is surprised. I am forced to admit that “rained” might be stretching it; precipitation fell for, at most, 60 seconds. But it was long enough to scent the air with creosote and dirt, a smell that used to make me feel like coughing, as though the dirt had lined my throat. Now, after four years in the desert, I’ve come to love the smell, understand that it indicates rain, or at least the hope of rain. My barren yard looks pocked; the fat raindrops left multiple, distinct indentations in its raked surface.

During our phone conversation, my friend and I discuss the weather. The morning is balmy, mild and unusually humid. We both grew up in the northeast, and days like today, though rare, feel familiar and make us nostalgic. I mention that a hurricane is threatening the Florida Keys; my friend confesses that she’s always wanted to spend hurricane season on those islands, just to experience the weather’s wrath. I have toyed with this fantasy as well, but remember too clearly the winds that battered my family’s house in New Jersey years ago. I’d feared, during those storms, that the windows would blow in. We could see the glass buckle, hear the wind whistle around the seams of the windows, a sound that terrified me. I would hide in the bathroom, which had only a small window, or hunker down against a wall, hoping that shattering glass wouldn’t slice through my clammy skin. My friend, who grew up in Jersey too, remembers the tall pine trees outside her family’s farmhouse. Although they lived further inland, when the winds came she would sleep on the very edge of her tiny twin bed, thinking that would give her some added distance away from the window. She spent every storm fearing that those enormous trees would finally bend so far they’d snap; they were big enough to crush through walls. She remembers a story her father told her about the first year her parents lived in the house. A hurricane had been forecast and the winds picked up all afternoon. Her mother was out, her father was working in the fields. When the wind blew the phone lines down he figured it was time to go inside. Although the windows were closed, he swears rain blasted through their edges with such force that the drops hit the wallpaper on the other side of the room.

I believe this story, having witnessed those coastal storms firsthand. The summer I was seventeen I drove with my mother and sisters to the Asbury Park boardwalk. We spent the day lazily strolling the seaside and eating French fries served in paper cones and sprinkled with vinegar and salt; waffles sandwiched around squares of ice cream; wax-paper-wrapped saltwater taffy. The ocean was wild, loud with giant slate-gray waves, but we’d all seen waves like that before.

The road home ran along the coast, but normally the only sensory indications of the beach would have been the salty smell of the air and the skeins of sand that drifted across the pavement. The water itself couldn’t be seen because of a high stone wall, a breakwater, which separated several hundred yards of beach from the two-lane road.

There weren’t many travelers that day; the rest of the world must have known a storm was fast approaching. As we drove north, a few drops of rain splattered the windshield. Rather, I assumed it was rain, and turned on the wipers. I’d only had my driver’s license for a couple of months, but I’d lived near the ocean my whole life. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to realize. It wasn’t rain that fell upon the car. The storm-riled sea had traversed the entire beach – a big, wide, and I’d thought permanent beach – the way I imagined a tidal wave would. The waves had swelled so high that they were rising up, speeding over the expanse of sand, and crashing on the road side of the breakwater. The rain splattering the windshield wasn’t rain… it was the sea.

I don’t remember how long it took to speed down that road. But I was frightened; I clutched the steering wheel and pressed my foot to the gas, driving as fast as I could, feeling a little like a surfer trying to out-race a worrisome wave. Even as I drove, however, knowing that I was responsible for the others, their bodies in my car, their precious bodies, even as I sped toward home I felt the adrenaline, knew I was experiencing something I’d likely never see again. I tried to memorize the black gleam of the road; the way the car seemed to rock sideways on its tires as each wave hit, like a fighter knocked back on his heels; the futility of the windshield wipers; the sheen of sweat that broke out on all of us… I was recording it, I was hyper-vigilant yet just a little detached, hovering, watching, taking notes. I did not then nor do I now understand the true power of the sea or, for that matter, the true power of the human heart. But I knew I’d been given a gift, and I knew I’d spend my life trying to understand the capacity of the heart to speak, to open wide, wide, open wide to the inviting and sublime beauty and terror of the world.

As I write this, the state where I live is burning. The second large wildfire of the year rages to the north. Just a few weeks ago a separate fire decimated a good part of one of Tucson’s landmarks, Mt. Lemmon. For two weeks it ate up the sides of canyons, threatened cabins, threw a massive plume of smoke into the northeastern sky every day, until finally the whole city smelled of ash and cinder. Today an even bigger fire – raging for weeks, already having burnt over 400,000 acres – tears through the White Mountains. This fire is a work of art, a monster fire – like those monster waves – and the firefighters are at its mercy. The news briefings are compelling. A spokesman for the fire team confesses they are dazzled, stunned by the intensity and creativity of this fire. “We have zero percent containment,” he says, which means the fire is 100% in control. When Mt. Lemmon burned the news reports had been increasingly optimistic: 5% containment, then 25%, then 60, 80, etc. until the fire was gone. But this one is eating through ponderosa pine so overgrown that the fire easily licks up the small saplings and reaches the higher crowns, sending flames hundreds of feet into the air – two hundred feet, four hundred. Eventually someone reports that the flames are a thousand feet high. When video airs on the nightly news the fire is gorgeous, you can tell that the cameramen are in love with it. There are long, sweeping lines of flame across the side of the mountains; we view shots of flames entwined around tall trees, flames so red and voluptuous you want to reach out and touch the t.v. screen, clouds massive, dark and undulating. “Nature’s in control,” the spokesman says. We’ve seen him on the news night after night; it’s apparent that he’s tired. “She’s dealing the hand,” he says, attempting to sound objective rather than worried or weary. The fire line is fifty miles long. One by one the small towns along its path are evacuated, residents instructed to tie a white towel or sheet on their front doors so officials will know they’ve left. “Take your medications, your pets, your photographs,” they’re instructed. “We don’t know when you’ll be back.”

Imagine all those streets of empty houses, white sheets tied to the front doors. I think of what I’d grab, what I’d leave behind. The two cats, of course, though they’d hate being disrupted from their orderly lives. I’d have to pack up photographs and papers: poems, essays, letters. I’d allow myself one luxury item: a framed pencil drawing of a tree and its network of roots. The tree, I realize, looks like it survived a fire. But how could I leave my books behind, how would I feel when I tied that towel on my door? My whole life, I’d think, my whole life about to go up in smoke.

I’m sitting here wondering about those evacuated residents, thousands of them, where they’ll go, what they’re thinking. That home is so complicated is not a new thought. But sometimes the other side surprises me, the simplicity of it. Maybe it can be reduced to a location, a structure… a house on a street, a house with a white sheet attached to the door, a house where ashes fall like snowflakes onto the roof, the picnic table, the trees we planted ourselves.

I say it aloud – home. The nice, long O, the comforting M which gets held, drawn out a bit, like saying yum. There’s a little moan in the middle, right after the whispered H. And the sweet, silent E, like a small secret, a door closing quietly after a parent has checked on a sleeping child. It’s a beautiful word, an easy word, a word that two-year olds can say and almost anyone can spell. It has excellent rhymes: poem, tome, roam, loam, comb, dome, foam, gnome. And it’s the one word in the English language that can reduce me to tears, bring me to my knees, leave me feeling shaken, broken, lost. I have no home or, rather, I know no place that truly feels like home.

My mother buys a new address book every couple of years just to keep up with my two brothers and me; in twenty years I’ve had twenty different addresses. (My brothers, who should be listed under “S” in my own address book, must now be listed under “X,” having long since grown past the S section.) I occasionally receive mail from two or three addresses back, friends who have lost track of where I am.

I say “I’m going home” when I visit friends back east. And then, when I leave them to return to the southwest, I say “I’m going home.” Neither statement is true. Neither place is home. The woman who loves me, who lives in another state, calls me home. I don’t mean that she beckons me, although she does, she incites an ache in me that tempts me to leave this place, to give up my job, my house, my friends, and head two-thousand miles back east. But I mean it literally, she calls me home, like it is my name: Home. She invites me to share her life; she’d become the thing I would save, the signs of her, the traces. “Where are Leigh’s letters,” I’d ask; I’d place them on my car seat, I’d wipe the tears off my face as I prepared to leave. “At least I have these,” I’d think: my cats, my lover’s words, my drawing of a single tree left standing.

But it’s not that simple. I can’t reduce my life to what I can pack in my car, can’t pare it down to one word, even “home.” Although we attach so much meaning to the word, although we create complex, gorgeous metaphors, like many of my generation, I’ve lost touch with what the word means. Maybe I never knew. As a kid, when I saw the light on that tree branch, I don’t think I knew. When I thought the ocean might sweep that big white car off the road, when I thought I might never make it home, I’m not sure I knew. And now, I really have no idea how those evacuated residents feel as they watch flames claim their schools, their businesses, their houses. I wish I could at least say I understood what this woman means, this person who offers me everything she has – I wish I knew what to say, what to feel, when she calls me home. But I don’t. All I know is this: I have been graced with so many things in this life. I’ve been loved like nobody’s business, I have seen the earth declare itself in water and in flame, and though it bears no relationship to any religion I’ve ever studied, I have seen the light.

I could not ask for more.

The Loupe

2008-12-22T10:59:00.003-05:00

This originally appeared in the literary journal Shenandoah. It was later listed as a "Notable Essay" in Best American Essays 2006. If you look in the back, you'll see my name in tiny little type.

I haven't figured out the technical aspects of this blog yet, so my paragraphing might seem off in places. Sorry about that.
--Donna

The Loupe

One of my favorite possessions is smaller than a chicken’s egg, and similar to a common egg in that it’s inexpensive but invaluable – to me, anyway. It’s a jeweler’s loupe, a simple thing, used professionally by horologists (watchmakers) and by jewelers in evaluating diamonds. Mine says TRIPLET on its outer body, designating that there are three lenses joined together to create one compound lens. Also inscribed is 10X, which indicates the loupe magnifies ten times. The last number is 18 mm, the size of the lens. Mine’s called a folding loupe, because its outer shell, of metal, folds out, creating a convenient hand-piece. By holding the grip to my cheek and the lens to my eye, I can take a close-up look at feathers, wood grain, skin – anything I want to magnify. When I’m done, the outer piece folds back over the lens, protecting it from dirt and damage. The contraption is further protected by a small, oval-shaped leather case. Some people like to hang the loupe from a cord so that it can be worn like a pendant, allowing quick access. I don’t use mine every day, so the brown case with its satisfying metal snap is just right for safekeeping. It’s compact – smaller than a golf ball -- and light enough to carry in a jacket pocket.

My favorite subjects for observation under the loupe are creatures – birds, lizards, insects. Since, in order for serious study, these must be cadavers, I have to take what I can find; I won’t intentionally kill even a mosquito solely to look at it. It’s not unusual, however, to find dead ants, spiders, and bees in the yard, as well as cicada casings and dragonfly wings. Shells and rocks are excellent subjects, as are bones. I have a few animal skulls, some of which look “bone-white” to the unassisted eye but, under the loupe, are pocked with dirt (and, one might surmise, dead skin). One small bird skull still has a few tiny feathers attached, as well as the remnants of an eyeball, which appears to have decomposed from the inside out. Some of the skulls harbor clusters of sharp, filthy teeth. I haven’t yet examined a human tooth; my own hair, however, is endlessly fascinating. Magnified, the dark hairs look as tough as broom bristles, while the blonder hairs look like filaments, as though an electric current illuminates them from within.

Regular window screens are well worth examining with a loupe. They appear formal and architectural, like a wall of windows drawn by an unsteady hand. All of the lines are slightly wobbly, but the symmetry of the grid forms a perfect backdrop for the debris inevitably caught in the screen. The debris – mostly dust and dirt – looks like delicate scrollwork. Bits of detritus and grime become a free-form overlay, juxtaposing swirls and curves against the more exact screen pattern. If I had a better eye, or perhaps a stronger loupe, I could probably discern sand from soil, ash from skin, cinders from sawdust. But I don’t, so it all just looks like an abstract pen-and-ink drawing. And, to my relief, when I put the loupe down the screen looks clean.

I’ve done a kind of meta-looking by observing my reading glasses through the loupe. Even after cleaning, they tend to be covered with small hairs, dust, and sweat or oils from the skin – in a word, disgusting. I’ve also tried to look at my own eyeball, by holding the loupe to my eye and peering into a mirror. The results are beautiful – deep greens and browns, a shimmering of gold – but initially confusing, for there are hundreds of small bubbles visible amidst the colors. I’m not sure if the bubbles are imperfections in the mirror glass, if they’re part of the loupe lens or if – my secret hope – the bubbles are in my eye. (Later, while studying a piece of green glass, I see similar bubbles. My heart sinks a little, suspecting there are, in fact, no bubbles in my eyes. But I vow to look at my friends’ eyeballs – as soon as they’ll let me).

Through the loupe, my white computer screen is made up of bright red, green, and blue dots. A plain brown envelope looks like an aerial view of a furrowed wheat field. Things are not what they seem.

Ink on paper is exquisite. Simple lines take on dimension and definition or, depending on the paper, lose a bit of definition. A glossier paper tends to allow for crisp lines, while a softer, matte paper, viewed under the loupe, shows ink spatter, bleeding edges, and the slight indentations caused by the writer’s hand pressure. Letters and words viewed close-up – one’s nose touches the paper at times – is ineffably lovely. One begins to understand graphology; it seems that character is truly revealed in these characters.

I like to examine my own hand; magnification changes the ordinary into the extraordinary. Fingertips look like raw salmon steaks, and knuckles look like elephant skin. Freckles I can barely see take on form and definition; gradations of color and distinct shapes are obvious. Even after scrubbing my hands with the devotion of a surgeon I can see all sorts of specks beneath my fingernails, as well as the fine ridges in each nail. Dry skin around the edges of the nail can look horrifying under the loupe. One vows to get a manicure, or at least start massaging some cream into the hands.

Legs can be fun to examine, in particular, the hairs, which tend to be coarser than most other hair. The dark roots can be seen beneath the surface of the skin – each hair looks like a sliver of splinter. A few millimeters of calf skin take on the appearance of a tray of seedlings; my knee looks as though it has been planted with microscopic rhubarb. A nearly faded scar looks like a battle wound; in fact, any kind of scratch or cut appears alarming when viewed at close range. Initiates to the loupe might be well-advised to brace for surprisingly garish images – even a mild scrape or a paper cut appears to have violent origins. The body, at close attention, becomes tender and dramatically vulnerable.

Flowers, which can be erotic under almost any circumstances, become nearly painfully sexual when scrutinized. A random collection of wildflowers taken from the yard yielded microscopic droplets of dew and pollen, a beautiful sheen on the petals, and a look into the depths of the flower that is so intimate one almost can’t help licking the specimen. Each must be held or stationed literally an inch or two from the eye – there’s something about detecting the barest hint of softness in the palm, coupled with the ability to peer inside the small flower that makes one feel like a giant, or a god.

I am brought back to earth when I examine a crushed ant which moved, just slightly, as I studied it. It probably doesn’t have quite the same shock value, but it reminded me a little of a human body moving during an autopsy. I jumped. Later, I whap a yellow-jacket that speeds through the open front door then slams against a window screen. It doesn’t seem overly aggressive – just aggressive enough. I hit it again, and kill it. Dead, or dying, it continues to move, quietly inflating and deflating for several minutes. Although I felt nothing but determination as I killed it, my heart breaks when I see it through the loupe. As I quietly and insufficiently repent, against the window – from the outside – another bee tap, tap, taps, a witness to my murderous act. He wants in, and he wants revenge. I am ashamed, but also curious. My dead bee’s head appears tarred and hairy. The wings are intact but the hindquarters are bent and broken. Look what I’ve done.

A friend, who grew up to be a painter, wrote the word “Look” in crayon on the walls of her parents’ farmhouse when she was a child. She sat on the bottom stair of the hallway and carefully outlined the word, then proceeded to the next stair and wrote it again – all the way up the staircase, until the hall displayed an ascending, repetitive series of the command or entreaty – Look Look Look Look Look.

There is value in the art of observing which goes beyond the aesthetic, although aesthetic pleasure, I think, is essential to daily life. It seems no coincidence that watchmakers use the loupe to manipulate the works of timepieces. I like to imagine they are looking into time itself, using the eye glass to maneuver the gears into precise alignment. When I look inside a flower so small I can balance it on my fingertip, or inside the skull of an animal, or when I study the complex surface of a white rock, I can’t help but think that things are not what they seem – they are so much more. We are limited, fallible creatures, and we have wreaked havoc on this earth – but look how it shines. If we can’t find redemption in that, if we’re incapable of genuine awe, genuine consideration and restraint, then we are nothing.

My neighbor, on the rural road where I live, is burning wood. I want to look at an ember close up, see that fire as I feel its heat near my skin. I want to take the loupe into the yard and peer into a luscious, just-bloomed iris. I want to take the loupe to my lover’s body, examine every inch, including the small tattoo on her hip. I want to see it all.

In June of this year, a rare astronomical event: Venus passed before the sun. Observatories set up telescopes so that those interested could scan the heavens. Like the loupe, it’s just another way of looking – a way of bringing the visible closer – but it’s also a way of measuring distance, comprehending, seeing the big picture. Sometimes I think we spend our lives like that, negotiating intimacy and distance, pulling things – or people – close, pushing them away. I missed the transit of Venus – the heavens rarely accommodate my schedule – but regardless of whether anyone saw it or not, a small dark body floated across the larger brilliance of the sun. The world sometimes feels like layers and layers of images, like those transparencies in medical textbooks – one sheet for the circulatory system, one for the bones, yet another for the muscles – we understand in increments, we try to make sense of the connections.

I have a dark spot that floats across my left eye – it’s the closest thing to my eye, the absolute nearest – yet I can hardly see it at all.

Before I put my loupe away, I follow a brief ritual; I polish the lens and clean the body. I wipe fingerprints from the metal, fold the two halves one inside the other, set the loupe in its leather case and snap the buckle. I can’t help but notice that it’s a hard devise, all metal and glass; there’s no give, no suppleness to it at all. Even the leather case is sturdy. This will sound sexual rather than intellectual, but maybe it takes a certain hardness to probe what is soft. Maybe that’s just arbitrary – I don’t know. But it’s not difficult to see why the act of looking, of gazing, has metaphorically been compared to rape. No permission is granted; none, in fact, is asked. All of this looking I do – along with its corollary, writing – is an odd privilege. I do it, in part, because I can. And because I can, in a sense, trespass – look where I please, write what I please – my attendant thankfulness can feel paltry.

A teacher once said, to a room full of nonfiction writers, that other people sacrifice their lives for us – our friends, families, lovers, acquaintances, students – they live, they work and love, they mind their own business – and we steal their stories. I’d expand that list to include animals, flora, the whole natural world… For this essay alone, I’ve used a half-dozen plucked flowers, the treasured story of a good friend, the very bones of creatures. Am I a thief, have I committed a criminal aesthetic act, stolen what is not mine? Or do I simply want to share what I see? Look look look look look – and once you do, you might be in it as deeply as I am. The reader is the willing accomplice to the writer.

Close up, nothing’s what it seems.

Cold

2008-12-16T10:53:00.001-05:00

This essay first appeared in the excellent literary journal Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing. Check it out at http://isotope.usu.edu/ and if you like it, subscribe.

I live in Oswego, New York -- on the shores of Lake Ontario -- and write about our long winters quite frequently. This is one of my first essays to explore some of the aspects of the long, beautiful season. More will follow.

--Donna Steiner

Cold

As with any methodical task, there is a spiritual component to shoveling snow that only those repeatedly forced into doing it come to know. I say “forced” intentionally, although it is legitimate to wonder how one comes to a spiritual understanding through force. Rather than force, let me refer to “necessity.” I must, by necessity, shovel snow if I wish to survive the winter. As with many chores, shoveling brings, if not exactly pleasure, at least some measurable degree of satisfaction.

I live in what is good-naturedly called a snow belt. “Belt” often seems precise; we are belted, with regularity and almost inexplicable fervor, by weather systems that take their sweet time to reach us – these are nor’easters, coming up the coast languorously. At least that’s the way the Weather Channel depicts them, swirling and moseying along the mid-Atlantic until they take a breather over Central New York and dump a day or two’s worth of snow on us. More insidious, and much more common, is “lake effect” snow. My small town of Oswego, New York is situated smack on the south-eastern shore of Lake Ontario, and the cold air that crosses the relatively warmer lake can produce lingering, seductive winter scenes. Then it’s like a picture postcard – it can be so cozy from the inside, looking out: gorgeous, big flakes limning the pine and cherry trees and smoothing out the angles of the landscape until all we can see is a sinuous, blue-white world – a world of snow. This is a cumulative, expansive beauty, and it seems to stretch out forever. The “forever” part is what begins to feel oppressive – not the quick sharp sting of the belt, but the perpetual dread of the next strike.

Yesterday was a lake effect day – snowing when we woke up in the morning, snowing at lunchtime, and still snowing into the early afternoon. By 2:30 the storm had begun to let up, and I decided to go outside and shovel the walkway. The flu had knocked me for a loop all week and I wanted to take it easy; I figured I’d pace myself, shovel slowly – I intended to enjoy my task.
I’ve seen a neighbor kid go out to shovel wearing nothing but a pair of boots and jeans. He shovels maniacally, filling the shovel with heaps of snow and flinging it as far as he can. He’s the half-naked Paul Bunyan of snow shoveling, and if he doesn’t change his ways he’ll end up killing himself one of these days. Every season the television news features stories about idiots like this – men, often, who shovel fast and hard then drop dead of heart attacks. This kid has youth on his side but still, he’s asking for trouble. My lover and housemate, Leigh, takes the opposite approach; she puts on layer after layer, transforms from a slender but strong woman into a formidable, if somewhat puffy, entity. She wears two layers of pants, three shirts, two scarves, a face mask, a hat, boots over thick socks (sometimes two pair), heavy mittens, and a giant down coat. Even with all of the layers, she sometimes gets cold while snow-blowing the driveway. Simultaneously she works up a sweat – the driveway is long, steep in parts, and a repository for heavy snow. Those under-layers get soaked with sweat, and when she comes in it seems like she’s been sitting fully dressed in a sauna.

My approach is somewhere in the middle of the extremes. I don’t like to feel constricted by my clothes, so I usually wear jeans, a tee-shirt, a sweat shirt, and a light, insulated coat. My gloves aren’t really warm enough and my headband/ear-warmer – I can’t tolerate a hat – isn’t warm enough either. I wrap a scarf loosely around my neck. My boots are the only truly weather-appropriate things I wear. Keeping my feet warm, coupled with the effort of shoveling, allows me to maintain a fairly comfortable temperature.

My method of shoveling differs from Leigh’s and the boy next door’s as well. He’s flat-out crazy and expends much more energy than is called for; she is more considered, and can heft what appears to be a ton of snow with each shovel pass. I have two tactics, depending on the weight of the snow. Heavier snow demands vision; one must know the goal and set a course. I am not strong, so I scrape away at heavy snow little by little then lift it, slowly, to a more appropriate spot. Heavy snow is displaced more than removed. Heavy snow requires organizational skills and a steady disposition.

Lighter snow calls for equal amounts of flinging and pushing. One can shovel quickly when the snow is light, even if it accumulates up to a foot or so. I scoop it up, I throw it. Scoop and throw, scoop, sigh, throw – this is how the stairs get cleaned. There’s nothing fancy about my method; it’s part aerobics and part housekeeping. I can whistle while I work, as though I’m sweeping the kitchen. Depending on how much there is to shovel, by the time I come to the flat section, I’m often ready to push. First, however, I take a break at the landing. I’m tired, sweating, and it’s time to take a look at the world.

The world is… white. The ground is white, the sky is white, the air is full of white shavings, as though the sky were being scraped. The house and garage look like white-capped mushrooms. The lamppost is topped in white, the mailbox at the roadside is encased in white. Everything else is hidden by white. There is little definition; the world is sugar-coated, a good four feet of sugar which, even by gluttonous standards, is too much sweetness. One of those feet still needs to be shoveled, and so I continue. But the pushing phase is less strenuous and therefore more boring; it lacks rhythm but invites thought. My thought is simple: there’s too much fucking snow.

So much for the spiritual component of shoveling.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, the snow turns blue. A respite of light often breaks clear of the clouds, a golden light, and fleeting. It breaks free and shines through the trees, crosses the voluptuous snow banks, turns them blue, then vanishes. When the snow is blue the treetops are lit, too, and they glimmer red under a thin coating of ice.

Today I’m watching the last moments of shimmering treetops while Leigh sleeps, shaking off a headache that came while she removed a foot of heavy, new snow from the driveway. She sleeps it off the way some might sleep off a hangover, and while she sleeps I watch the clouds reliably part, allow us a brief allotment of sun in an otherwise overcast, bitterly cold and windy day. The temperature is in the teens, and the landscape is reduced to its essential colors. Browns (the abundant trees), white tinged with a blue wash (the snow), golds and reds (the horizon and the treetops), and – I’m not sure it’s a separate color so much as a statement on the season – a fair share of grays. I watch the colors, the clouds, the occasional swirls of snow. And I watch the trees, which sway and bend in the strong wind. What fails to bend will break, and every once in a while I’ll hear a loud pop and a branch will fall silently to the padded ground below. The trees seem to dance, appear to have thrown their arms above their torsos and move in time to a kind of arboreal call. Each has its own orbit, and it looks as though they never clash, never intersect, although of course that can’t be true. If I could elevate to the treetops I’d hear them clatter the way palm leaves do in the desert; the insulating silence of snow muffles all but the loudest, sharpest of noises.

Tomorrow I will brave the roads, drive an hour to the city hospital, roll up my sleeve and let a technician inject some radioactive isotope into a vein. The iodine will accumulate in my thyroid, which will then be scanned. I have been falling – literally falling – tripping over my own feet, falling hard down the stairs. And my muscles ache, as though a low-voltage current runs through my arms and legs, exhausting my limbs. I am gaining weight. Blood tests show thyroid imbalance. Everyone says it’s “nothing” – it’s easily treatable – but I’m a little alarmed. And so tomorrow I will be punctured for the fourth time. I will be temporarily radioactive. I asked the nurse if I’ll glow afterwards. "No,” she laughed. “At least, not any more than you already do.”

The hospital visit doesn’t happen. It’s cold, icy, the roads are bad, the snow is coming down hard. I will have to wait two more weeks for the tests, which means two more weeks without the medication that relieves the ache in my muscles.

As it turns out, during those two weeks in January we experience record-breaking cold. Temperatures fall overnight into the minus 20’s, in some places minus 30 or worse, and I hear on the news that the region hasn’t been this cold since 1956. The extreme cold reminds me of the extreme heat of Arizona – once it reaches a certain degree, hot is hot and cold is cold. When I lived in the desert, 113 wasn’t that much hotter than 108; similarly, minus 15 isn’t that much colder than minus 3. But it gives everyone something to talk about: Did your pipes freeze? I skidded around the corner near that big white house on West 5th; My windshield wiper fluid wouldn’t work; I hate it when people don’t clean the snow off their cars… and so on. I enjoy talking about the weather, love how strangers in the grocery store will just start in about it. Crazy cold, isn’t it? they say. I nod, smile, say yeah, I’ve spent the last six years in Arizona. “Arizona” seems to be a cue – they light up, they try to impress me, they become the best winter storytellers ever. And then we pay for our groceries and head out into the air that almost hurts with cold. The snow is mirage-like, the flakes shifting and tiny. Only the slap of glaze on our cheeks tells us there is any precipitation at all.

When it’s cold all the time, very cold for days on end, indoors and out, I can’t tell if I ache from the weather or from the symptoms of my condition. All I can tell is that my body hurts and nothing relieves the ache. I lie on the couch or on the bed under layers of blankets, layers so high I can’t see out from under them. Slowly I begin to warm. It’s hard not to miss the desert at times like that; hard to resist falling into a reverie about sunshine that lasts for months, about lounging in shorts and tank tops, about always-open windows and the desire for nakedness. It’s hard not to miss the abundance of skin one sees in southern Arizona; so much flesh, so many arms and legs and bellies and feet, so much apparent good health. It was easier to stay fit there; here, in central New York, we begin to soften, fatten up like young or not-so-young calves. By degrees, I am falling ever inward, burrowing ever deeper. Under the bulk of extra pounds, under the weight of too many layers of clothing, under the stacks of blankets, under feet of snow, under the perpetual gray clouds. It’s beginning to feel like being buried.

But there are things to love about this northerly world. Like: looking out the window at thousands of trees, thin branches made fat by several inches of snow. The nuanced, colored world made black and white temporarily, less visually complex but no less beautiful. The snow becomes an optical effect, the white being the “shadow” of the darker branches, as though the world were being viewed as a photographic negative. Although it is mostly just lines and curves, the landscape is not easy to describe, but it gives me deep satisfaction to look at it without speaking. I like the simplicity, the grace and lack of clutter. I could draw it if I wanted to. I understand what I see in a way that I never quite understood the desert. I felt exposed there. Here, I can hide.

Even my cat is cold. She suddenly likes to cuddle next to me or sometimes slink under the covers. While I write she visits and sits on the corner of my desk, where currents from the small space heater warm her. I know that once the temperature rises she will leave me again, go about her business until she is hungry and needs me. I am her source of heat and food and little more. But I can live with the illusion of affection and am happy to believe that she has come to me for comfort. The habits and trappings of love are sometimes quite enough.
Sometimes in the night I hear the roof beams creak and wonder how much snow it would take to cave in on top of us.

The temperature has risen to –7, the warmest it has been all week. I’m a little stir crazy, and decide to take advantage of the heat wave. I head for the lake.

Lake Ontario looks, to the uninitiated eye, much like the sea. During non-winter months, waves lap at the rocky shore. The first time I saw the lake, a friend said that come winter, the water would appear to freeze in motion, and it has. All the way to the horizon, the lake’s surface is white ice, ridged and dramatic. At the jetties the water is frozen in waves, as though in a split second they’d been stricken solid, halted in air, mid-crash. The nearby river, too, freezes in places; its surface looks like giant, angular tiles of piled ice, as though it originally froze as a slab but continued to move and ended up buckling and breaking into large shards. I would like to look at all this ice close up, try to determine exactly how it froze, but so far it has been too cold for this type of extended observation. What is important to me now is its current appearance – the lake and the river, frozen, are something I have never seen. They hold the beauty of the unknown and, I’ll admit, are irresistible in large part because it has never occurred to me to even imagine them in their frozen form. I’d like to walk out on the ice, but the combination of extreme cold and common sense win out. I drive home. On my way, the sun breaks through the clouds and illuminates the snow – it begins to shine like diamonds. Each drift of snow has the elegant convexity of a blister, and the snow on the branches is ineffably rich, as though sheer white cream has frosted the trees. I sometimes feel like Leigh’s dog does, a big black Lab who likes to run in the snow and just sink her muzzle into a voluptuous bank, snapping at it, gulping it down, expecting, it seems, something more than a mouthful of icy water. I think of my mother in the presence of infants; when she lowers her face to their clean, swaddled bellies she says “I wanna eat you up.” Moments like this, that’s how I feel about the land.

So much beauty comes with a price, of course. The major highways leading into the nearest city were treacherous yesterday, the salt being ineffective once the temperature falls close to zero. Hundreds of accidents and disabled vehicles; there weren’t enough tow trucks to take care of the problem, and the police and the DPW urged motorists to stay off the roads until salt trucks and plows could do their jobs. In the last week or so, a few people have died from the cold; often it’s the elderly who don’t or can’t turn up their heat and hypothermia sets in. Sometimes it’s a hiker or camper who overestimates their survival skills, sometimes a skier goes off-trail and gets lost, freezes to death. People fall through thin ice, have heart attacks while shoveling, tumble from slick roofs and break bones on icy sidewalks. Kids riding sleds lose fingers to the sharp runners or get concussions when they’re hit by an out-of-control toboggan. The local emergency rooms report a high incidence of hand injuries: people trying to clear their snow blowers using their fingers. Cars dent other cars, tree limbs fall from the weight of snow and ice, houses are damaged by the melting snow that leaks into their roofs and walls, bushes and shrubs are crushed by falling slabs of ice, frostbite claims the tender edges of the ear, the tips of noses, toes… Already I’ve slipped a few times, pulled muscles, bruised ribs. My car slid around a corner the other day and, had there been any traffic, I’d have run head-on into the unlucky driver. My tire rims have rusted from the salt, having lost their hubcaps a while back. The windshield wiper fluid distributors have been frozen for weeks; I have to unclog them with an unbent paper clip before I head out. Leigh’s car was hit and dented in the drug store parking lot. Her friend Bob’s car and his wife’s car both wouldn’t start the other day. Brad’s wife Teresa, who teaches in the elementary school, is beginning to worry that she’ll be teaching a little longer into this summer; the local schools have used up all their snow days already. I’ve run out of medication and haven’t gotten to the store to pick up a refill. I wonder how many other people have this problem of needing meds and the weather being too cold or the roads too slick to get to the pharmacy. I’m not in any danger, but there are a lot of elderly people in this town who might be.

The cold makes me want to hibernate, to be quiet, to hide, to meditate and contemplate and ponder and hunker down. Conversely, I begin to feel increasingly antsy. “Cabin fever” usually doesn’t set in, for me, until February. But this year, maybe because I’m no longer used to the rhythms of the seasons in the northeast, it comes early. I want the snow to stop. I want the roads to be clear and the temperatures milder. I want to be able to leave the house without considering, at great length, what to wear, what route to drive, how long my excursion will take. I want extended sunshine. I want to take a walk. I want to feel something other than somber.

There’s a generosity to all this ice and cold and snow that feels, oddly, like exactly the opposite, like a lack of generosity. Abundance can be stifling. This is a lesson of nature.

The icicles hanging from the eaves are bigger than I am. A friend told me once about some girls she’d attended grade school with; she called them “the crazy Hobart twins.” One day the crazy Hobart twins were walking downtown and a massive icicle came loose from the roof of the cathedral and killed one of the twins. I’ve always wondered what became of the other one, but nobody seems to know. People just melt into the landscape sometimes.

Just as it seems like we might escape January and tackle the customary onslaught (but merciful brevity) of February, a four-day lake effect snow storm hits. Our town becomes the pivot from which the band of snow “oscillates,” which mostly means it sways, imperceptibly, slightly to the north, slightly to the south. During the worst of it, we receive six inches an hour. Leigh plows the driveway twice a day for four days, barely able to keep up. By the end of the stretch, seven feet of new snow covers the ground. A state of emergency is declared in the county. The highways, according to t.v. news, are “impassable.” When we hear this, we look at each other in bewilderment. We’ve lived here, cumulatively, for almost 50 years. Neither of us recall the word “impassable” being used before.

On the fifth day, we need to get out of the house. We have no idea if the state of emergency has been lifted, but we trudge to the car and head to the grocery store. The roads are icy; snow blows across our path. The wind is sharp and whips the top layers of snow into whorled, snake-like patterns; the air looks smoky, but it’s just whirling snow. Every road is lined with high, sculptural banks. The mail hasn’t been delivered in two days; most roadside mailboxes are either buried or busted from the plows. Everyone’s out shoveling or snow blowing their driveways and sidewalks. It’s Saturday and a lot of people haven’t been able to keep up with weekday snow removal. Almost everyone we pass stops in their work and watches us drive by, as though holding out hope that we might stop and help. We don’t stop.

Nobody has been able to shop for a few days; the store shelves are fully stocked. We buy everything we need and some things we don’t, feeling ravenous even though we’ve had plenty to eat. Partly it feels good just to be around other people; partly we don’t want to go back out on the roads quite yet. We can see through the big plate glass store windows that the snow has picked up again. I’ve begun to wonder if it might never end. As if on cue, Leigh says “Go grab us a newspaper.” The headline: OSWEGO BURIED; SNOW ‘NEVER STOPS.’ We read all about what we already know, but seeing the blitz verified in print makes it more exciting. “The storm has spent the last 2 days punishing a swath of the county…” “As snow bands go, this one was particularly lazy, shifting little during the 36 hours it did its heaviest damage.” Well, yeah, lazy in that respect – it didn’t like to move. But it was absolutely not lazy in doing its damage. I’d call it a conscientious, hard-working storm. I’d call it a workaholic. I’d say we were soundly and roundly belted.

It is hard to be exposed to the cold for so long without becoming cold deep in the heart.
Just as I write that last line the snow stops and I can see a small clearing in the clouds. The sky isn’t quite blue, but it’s less white. My heartbeat quickens; I hope, so fervently that it’s almost absurd, that the sun will come out for a little while.

Tomorrow, again, I will travel to the hospital for tests. My plan is to go regardless of the weather; I’ve already cancelled once and I want to get back on the medication. Pain is a motivator. It is also a depressor; much like the cold, it’s the duration that disturbs. I feel I’ll be putting my neck on the line, figuratively and literally, exposing my throat in a way that feels vulnerable and scary. One of the possible findings: cancer. Another: nodules that can grow to block one’s windpipe, disturb one’s speech. As a kid I thought if I said certain things aloud, they’d come true. I haven’t progressed much beyond that, and so have focussed on the most likely, most treatable options. I expect to be fine. That is what I say aloud.
The real lesson of the cold, of all the extremes of our seasons, may be resilience. Through an accumulation of days and months and years, one learns to endure. One learns what one can bear, and often it is more than anticipated. We learn to survive the day-to-day disappointments, the slights and misunderstandings, we weather storms and droughts of both real and metaphorical intensity. Actually, we do more than survive; we develop a great capacity for joy and delight; we learn to play and to love and to nurture and share and we develop our gifts for generosity and intimacy and pleasure. This seems to happen in imperceptible increments; a scientist would be hard-pressed, I think, to isolate the moment we first felt jubilance or the precise series of gestures, thoughts and feelings that led to the last time we fell, wholly, deeply and irrevocably, in love.

I can’t know, but I suspect I will survive winters as cold or colder than this one or, if circumstances change, summers as hot as those I spent in the desert. My acclimatization is slow; I need time to consider and reflect on everything – the slant of snow; the way my arm feels when the phlebotomist inserts the needle; my lover’s startled delight in the morning when she looks at me as though she’s never seen me before. And maybe that’s the bottom line – we have, none of us, truly seen any of this before.

When I drive to the hospital tomorrow and steer my car into unavoidable slides; when I sign in, fill out forms; when I unwrap my scarf and feel the cold air on my neck; and especially when I lean my head back and give my throat up to the x-ray, the ultrasound, the experienced touch of the doctor, I will try to remember that. Some icicles fall, when they begin to melt, in an arc, as though continuing a curve of their own making. I want to fall like that. So that when I land, I am somewhere surprising, a little off from where I’d expected.

The cold is bracing. We don’t know it yet, but February will dazzle us with sunshine.