December 29, 2009

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

A crow cawls across the ridge.

Snow tips from ten thousand limbs.

Some falls up, the way

ash ascends a flue.

Ladybug Riff

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

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

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

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

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.