nature – Page 2 – Mary's Room With a View

SHADOWS

IMG_0423[1] Peter Pan met Wendy when he came to ask her to sew his shadow back in place, having lost it when escaping through a window that closed, separating himself from his other half. Unknown Detaching from our shadows is a fantastical fright, for what is more intimate and yet mysterious than our shadow, our companion from the first sunny days of our lives? We watch it grow with our own growth and with the rise or fall of sunlight behind us.

The lyrics of Me and My Shadow conclude, “Just me and my shadow / Strolling down the avenue /All alone and feeling blue.” It is a sad song, but Peter Pan and I know that shadows keep us from loneliness. What better friend than one who sticks with you all of your days, who goes with you where you want to grow and can be manipulated in a small gesture, simply by turning with the light?

As a child, did you play with your shadow? Chase it? Try hopelessly to escape it? My father taught me to play with shadows, casting bunny ears with his hands on the walls of our playroom. My brother and I competed, trying to stomp on the other’s shadow. IMG_0420[1] Most days, unmindful of my shadow, I am surprised when I notice it lengthening before me on a spring walk. I notice my aging stance. Did my knee always turn in at a funny angle, or is this something new? Communicating with our shadows is a self-indulgent pleasure .

Some sunny days, I look beyond my own shadow to those cast by what exists around me. Any artist values shadows for how they define the artist’s subject, providing depth and definition. Sometimes the shadows share importance with the object, as in some paintings by Norman Lundin. His many compositional brilliances that feature shadows cast across classroom blackboards are equally as important as the object or person who cast them. Our admiring eye finds pleasure in the angles of lines across a flat surface.

Similarly, going to snip a rose to bring inside, I found the shadow of the rose, the pattern of leaves flattened against the driftwood fence behind the roses, as appealing as the bright red rose itself. Not a chance of clipping the shadow for a vase on the dining table.

Spring and fall are tops for shadow appeal, especially mornings or late afternoons. Sun is not yet on top of us. Its angle splashes across streets, magnificent shadows of trees in their early leafing. You could be tempted to run out in the road and try to climb them. IMG_0419[1]

My good friend Jan, who has a scientific understanding, teases me that often I am going off poetically about natural things that have a rational raison d’être. I agree, and would be amiss if I ended without personifying shadows. “Only the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men” were Introductory words to the broadcast radio episodes of The Shadow (1930’s and ‘40s). The Shadow was the hero of a whodunit that drips with ominous associations. So too the superstition around not standing in the shadow cast by a gravestone. I gave some thought to that on a recent walk through Lakeview Cemetery. How tantalizing to stand in the shadow of a massive monument to Seattle’s forefathers, to test whether my body temperature dropped in that shade. No icy fingers reached to pull me inside.

Meanwhile, taking my I-Phone from my pocket, I photograph myself leading with a shadow when riding my bicycle along the end of the bay on a Sunday morning. Can I photograph myself and the bike with our morning shadow preceding us? Who is that cyclist riding the bike? Only the Shadow knows.

Taking Notice

Mondays, before leaving Quilcene Bay to return to Seattle, I take my cottage journal on our morning Kitty Walk.

Pausing at one of the benches on the way I record the date and what happened worth noticing that weekend – the first sighting of violet green swallows investigating the birdhouses, or rototilling our garden and planting the first cool-crop seeds.

Most years, I don’t look back through the journal to see if nature progresses “on schedule.” However, this year seems so out-of-sync, I flipped back a calendar year in search of normalcy. This has been a cool April. I did not plant arugula or potatoes by the end of March, as I did other years. Am I waiting for warmth? If you read the instructions on seed packets, most insist soil temperatures must reach 55 degrees for germination. In the Pacific Northwest, that would be summer expected in spring. I substitute light for heat, counting on the lengthening of daylight to summon growth.

In any season we hear advice to slow down, pause, notice life unfolding. But like a stern mother whose advice wasn’t heeded, Mother Nature and the Coronavirus have forced us to narrow the circumference of our activity, making time for noticing. In these weeks, the media has elevated poetry to the popularity of rock music. Poets are known to take notice. Forced to touch each other only through cyberspace, we email to our friends, poems, words of wisdom, images of sunrises and blossoms.

I am fortunate to have a wooded acre and a small vegetable garden to notice in my forced slowness. Others within small, city apartments may have only a potted violet on a windowsill to watch nature unfold. For the first time, their meditation may center on the endearing way their child butters a slice of bread.

This day, April 25, 2020, I photograph one of many ferns unfurling. How otherworldly their serpentine fronds. For weeks I have passed tight-fisted knuckles in their hearts, for in late winter I had pruned last year’s large, browning fronds. Regardless of my watching, they uncurl in their own time; but I also have last April’s memory of supple green ferns spreading across the hill. Almost May 1^st, I am comforted, looking forward to where their funny, twisting dance is going.

Planting in the Year of a Pandemic

Last April, arugula greened

in fine lines, while spinach and lettuce

followed in their own leafy time.

Make a record of planting

so next year

if frost grips the soil

and black earth stares blankly back

in a year of illness,

you can look back

and say I had seeded by now.

Open the packets of promise.

If you have forgotten

the earth at fifty-five degrees,

imagine then the light

beckoning longer days,

the sun pushing gently against dusk.

In the garden soil

make a clean V in the shape

of geese migrating over the bay,

then mound the chilled dirt

like a dike in Amsterdam.

Drop each seed a safe distance

from the one beside it.

Cover them with one inch

of humus you enriched

with compost from summer grass.

Pat the seeded earth

with your own warm hands.

Composition on Birch Bark

DSC_6065 (1)

Composition on Birch Bark

This lewd peeling away

of birch bark

this shedding of old skin

this rejection of whiteness

that warmed the trunk

throughout a gripping winter.

Flagrant peels roll

from upper limbs.

March wind flaps them

like skirts of Lautrec’s dancers

imperfect skirts striated with

lichen and spots where

sapsuckers plucked

their patterned design.

But where the child can reach

sitting on his father’s shoulders

the bark gives way to eager hands

tearing off wide parchment

like linen for writing

a poem on the copper

underside, a few rhymes

to welcome spring

with words that whip

winter on its way.

Mary Kollar

Kitty Walk

Now when the world shouts, “Stop!” we are slowing to notice life at a measured, appreciative pace. May all of your senses awaken your day with observation and gratitude.

CIMG4661

Weekend mornings here at our Quilcene cottage, we begin with the Kitty Walk. Allan makes us each a steaming latte in tall covered mugs. From underneath the cottage, he fetches a red plastic bucket he has filled with bird seed, stuffs a couple of dried ears of corn in his breast pocket and returns to the front door where he whistles for me and our two cats to follow. A dozen years ago, the cats would skitter after him almost tripping him up in their eager escape. Today, Willow doesn’t budge from her bed by the wood stove. Homer reluctantly lumbers along to the whistle, with a heavily furred sigh, “Ok, if we really have to do this again.”

Up the trails softened by aromatic cedar chips, we walk the circumference of our three wooded acres, stopping at each of six benches my brother built for us as scenic rests. Allan reaches for a vine maple limb with a chain to which he screws on a cob of corn. Walking on, he scatters seeds on fallen logs that line the trail, tucking more seeds and peanuts in the cavities of trees. IMG_0278[1] Some trees are decaying remains of towering firs, in their slow death, still useful for persistent woodpeckers. Stellar’s jays drop from limbs above, then hop along behind us snatching peanuts in defiance of Homer who long ago gave up terrorizing the hungry birds, choosing instead to pounce between us on a bench where he nestles against the warm coffee mugs. Today, we have passed our first trillium sticking up like a green finger from the middle of our trail. IMG_0282[1] We have touched the pliant leaves of wild plums.

The first bench is by the stream that tumbles like a toccata into the pond below. We reminisce about the creation of our arboretum, a restoration of once-forested land devastated by previous owners who clear-cut the site for building, then sold off the property for being too hot, lacking shade. Sitting on this first bench, we reimagine how we transplanted 20 – 40-foot Douglas Firs from across the road, built a stream and pond, planted vegetation and fruit trees, made room for a sun-lit vegetable garden.

IMG_0283[1]

The coffee is cooling as we climb the ladder to a treehouse, our next stop. Only a three-foot shake covering suggests a “house,” Although we billed the project as a treehouse for our grandchildren, all along my husband envisioned an elevated station for hanging bird feeders, a panorama for spotting flickers hammering on the birches. About thirty feet above the treehouse, a nest of eagles is new, but the tall fir was long a roosting point for them to oversee the bay below — the migrating ducks, the salmon run spring and fall. We hug Homer closely when we hear the eagle’s piercing cry mid-swoop to fetch whatever the eagle feels like fetching.

Our treehouse pause lasts a good while. Allan fills the feeders and teases the jays to come closer as he lines peanuts precariously on the railings. Homer makes that twitching sound cats make when birds are nearby. The hummingbird thrills around the red disk. The only other sounds may be high cedar wind wisps or the distant gurgling of the creek. I take my journal from my jacket and write. Today I begin this blog.

Those mugs are drained of coffee as we step down the ladder. Sometimes Homer rides Allan’s shoulder, for the cat’s weight makes a downward climb cumbersome. Then we are off down the trail to the sandy beach. This bench affords a western panorama of Olympic foothills. The sun illumines snowpack or new spring green. Along this lower trail, I kneel to clear off fallen leaves that cover two crosses made of stones, one with the name Celeste, the other Toulouse, grave sites of our first two felines whose companionship named our routine the Kitty Walk.

Circling back up the hill, purpled with periwinkle, we return to where the creek has emptied into our pond. A bench above the pond allows a wide-open view of lily pads in summer, but this March morning a few drops from hovering trees shed last night’s rain. The drips entertain me with their concentric circles interrupting a blue, reflected sky. Homer takes his sweet time to leap between us, then impatiently hops down toward the vegetable garden.

We cross the driveway through the woods above the cottage, on our last trail through a wooded plot we acquired years ago — a steep, heavily treed site whose massive trunks remind us of our smallness in the woods. More chipped trail, some narrow stairs built into the bank, then on to shoreline again before pushing open a driftwood gate that returns us to the front of our cottage. Homer does not follow us through the gate, but pushes himself between a capacious gap between two of the driftwood planks behind a line of rose bushes. He has caught up. He meows to let us know it is time for Allan to hang up the red bucket and climb the stairs back to the cottage kitchen for breakfast. Both man and cat have been anticipating the aroma of bacon.

WE’RE ALL MAD HERE

Unknown

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.

(Alice in Wonderland)

If Lewis Carroll were alive and residing in Seattle today, he would find the perfect atmosphere for writing Alice in Wonderland: anxiety circles around where we are going and how we will get there, wherever there is.

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” (Red Queen: Through the Looking Class.)

First, there is the upcoming Washington State Democratic primary on Tuesday, although our ballots arrived in the mail almost two weeks ago. In a city that is as Blue as any city can be, this primary looms as an important destination. Voting early left people struggling to discern, among six contenders, which best fit the ideal liberal candidate to beat Donald Trump in November. Those who suspected on March 7^th there might be fewer candidates from which to select, held their ballots close to the chest until the race fell to two: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. These voters are basking in the wisdom of their patience. The early voters feel the disappointment of wasting their vote, like eating dessert too soon, while still being passionate about the entree.

Then the Corona Virus. Seattle prides itself for so much: the home of Microsoft and Amazon, stunning national parks, an abundance of green landscapes resulting from weeks of rain. This past week, the Vice President described Seattle as the tip of the spear in the Corona Virus, for having more cases and, sadly, more deaths, than any other city in the country. Seattleites are used to dealing with affluence, rapid growth and tourists. They are not accustomed to germs. The University of Washington has suspended live classes for the next few weeks, and called home all students from their studies abroad. So too have other schools, public and private, are closing for at least two weeks. From our cottage two hours west of my Seattle church, I attended first-time online church services this morning. Prayer is necessary now, but not in a common location where many church members are over sixty-years-old, the population vulnerable to the Corona Virus.

Yesterday on NPR, the talk-show host interviewed a local mental health professional about the anxiety shrouding our Seattle citizens. What can we do to lessen that anxiety? “For one thing,” the therapist said, “ we can all stop listening so often to the media.” Yes, that is all well and good, but one is also advised to stay tuned for alerts and closures. Yep, straight out of Alice in Wonderland. But the therapist had a useful antidote to anxiety: calm, single-focused meditation. “ Take time to notice something slow-moving such as a fallen leaf drifting downstream.” With her advice in mind, I focused here on our wooded property by Quilcene bay. Join me in looking closely at moss:

Lying thick upon a fallen log

its green promise of alive

soft as the morning fog

that moistens, that invites

you to touch what is close

was always there inching along

while you were running through the woods.

Today’s close-up is moss

beside unfolding ferns,

a talisman to tuck

in your breast pocket

while the sun scorches

the fog away

opening up another day.

WAVES

Here on Kahana Beach, I have had two weeks to think about waves. The screen doors to our sleeping room remain open for the cooling trade winds, so the constant crashing waves soothe us to sleep, a welcome diversion from Seattle’s mid-city traffic. But there are similarities. Whereas the all-night movement of vehicles on our city street, coincidentally called East Aloha, is occasionally interrupted by an emergency siren, so too the predictable waves periodically burst upon the rocks like a bass drum upstaging a symphony. We are not startled into wakefulness, although an accompanying tropical storm, slamming its arrival against the screen, will shake us so we slide the glass door shut and turn off the ceiling fan.

Daytime, the waves froth over the lava rocks, hiding the most jagged peaks. In their rush to slam against the sea wall, they carry turtles along for the ride. (In the lower middle of the photo you may spot a turtle’s shell) Sea turtles feed on the greenery on rocks along the shore, so succumbing to slamming against the boulders is like an encouraging push forward to feasting. Huge shells, some the size of a dinner table, ride just below the water’s surface. Whether the flippers help the turtle to navigate at this point is unclear. Rather they seem to give in to the waves’ force, all decision-making left to momentum. There must be a lesson for us there, something about trusting what carries us ahead.

Does one wave differ even slightly from another? Why do I admire the pearly opalescence of some waves while others roll over in a blue-green sameness? How is it that the sea before me may depict a calm plane for miles out, then spot itself with wavelets where there are no rocks to be seen for crashing? Had a whale passed by? Was there a sandbar too far out for my imagination?

Those are five sequential questions for which I have no definitive answer. So much for Oceanography 101. No mind. Poetic connections to the waves complement what science offers. The string of curling waves evokes images of peppermint ribbon candy. When the wave hits the rocky coastline, it splashes high and frothy as thrilling fireworks, then recedes leaving a damp memory on the stones.

Currently, I am reading Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, a story that is an accumulation of soliloquies from siblings who, unique in temperament, are together an amalgamation of consciousness. It is as if Woolf wants us to see one identity made up of separate souls. How appropriate, then, to call her work, The Waves. Looking out now at wave after wave approaching, then receding to the ocean, I can follow one just so far before it is consumed by its neighbor and they become one wave.

Most of our planet is surfaced by the sea, yet until we are slammed by a tsunami, we look landward. The waves reflect our own inspiration, they inhale and exhale, a lub/dub of each heartbeat. Perhaps that is what makes the sound so comforting. It asks for familiarity, for identifying with its life force. All it takes is one venture in for a swim to trust those inhales and exhales. Gingerly, I walk across the sand, my feet sinking its prints until the place where the water has washed up, erasing sandcastles and the presence of swimmers before me. I take cautious steps forward, letting the wavelets tease me, toes-first. Step, sink a little, step again. As the waves surge to my knees I look out, guessing where the next large wave will rise. Will it break on top of me, sucking me helplessly under, grinding my face to the sand? Or do I wait until the breaking point and dive within its incoming belly, emerging only when the wave has receded for the next roller behind it. I dive. How successful I feel emerging up through the wave that took me, then I swim in a parallel line to the beach, far enough out to spot the fish, but close enough to see the shore where I want to return.

Alas, returning to shore requires more tact than knowing when to interrupt a conversation. I focus on the shore where I will land; my back must be to the waves. I have to allow a wave to ride me inland. I need to have my feet within inches of the sand so I can set them firmly for a fierce run up the beach before a kindred wave chases the one that carried me in, and thus sucks me back to the deep or splays my body across the sand. I have experienced both scenarios.

We have been coming to this small Maui resort for two weeks every February for over twenty years. IMG_0155 (1) On each visit, we note how the waves have chewed up more of the beach and/or the retaining wall that keeps the condos high and dry. The beach was once long enough for an invigorating walk at low tide toward a cave in the far rocks, a place I led my small grandchildren where we imagined pirates storing chests of gold doubloons, then hurried back before an incoming tide flooded the crevices in the rock. No tide is low enough to allow that walk today. Nearby, huge tractors work to restore a wall that had shored up the property of a wealthy landowner, his estate now several feet closer to sinking into the sea. Once long, the beach now is but a patch of sand. From half a world away and in eighty-degree heat, melting ice caps deliver messages in the rising seas.

When we return to Seattle at the end of the week, the weather will not encourage opening windows to hear nature’s noise. Traffic will replace the rhythmic surge of water plunging through my dreams. There I will look out for waves of spring rain, daffodils bending before each in-coming breeze.

The Readiness Is All

“Mrs. Kollar!” a student returning from her freshman year in college greets me, as she confidently bounds into what was our last year’s senior English class. “I have learned so much in my English 101 class at the UW. I found out that ‘between you and I,’ isn’t grammatically correct, because between is a preposition and it needs an objective pronoun.”

These weren’t her exact words, but she and other college returnees excitedly share some “newly discovered” wisdom that I had taught the year they sat in the front row of my senior College Prep English class. They may have recently “learned” that Emily Dickinson was a recluse or Walt Whitman sold verses of Leaves of Grass on street corners in New York. Unknown-1 How excited they are to fill me in on what I failed to teach the year they were in my class. Here I could groan in 3-D cynicism, not to mention disappointment. Instead, I share their joy that their minds are still engaged learning about their English language and literature.

I had not failed in the way I taught any of this knowledge they think they have now heard for the first time. When I taught prepositions or the poems of Dickinson and Whitman, they weren’t ready to take it all in. In college they are ready.

If I taught only one literary work, it would be Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In that play there is more truth and psychology than Freud could later explicate (as if for the first time). Unknown-2 In the final act, Hamlet is about to have a duel with Laertes, a fight that he will likely lose. Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, tries to deter him from the match, because Laertes is by far the better and more practiced swordsman. Hamlet won’t be dissuaded, saying, There’s special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. ( Hamlet, V, ii, 230-233). Hamlet knows he will likely die, so when he dies is not his concern. What is important is his readiness to die. He is ready. How lucky for Act 5 and for preparing the audience to accept the inevitability.

Well into my retirement, Hamlet’s accepting wisdom echoes. The readiness is all! Am I ready to retire, to slow down my life, to give up running, to see my friends leave the world, to die myself? And how do I make myself ready for what is coming next? This is a big question having to do with acceptance and a volume of self-knowledge. We humans are not quitters. We flail to keep going long after our muscles fail. Young Dylan Thomas exhorts his dying father, “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light / Do not go gentle into this good night.” I wonder if his father was simply ready to go. The readiness was more with the old man than with the son.

There is power in readiness. Children who are not “ready to clean up their room,” or the haughty person who is never dressed and ready when the car has pulled up the drive. On the opposite side, there is humility in readiness. These are the agreements we make with each other to step out of our comfort zone, to try something new. One-two-three- ready . . . set . . . go! and I am leaping off a small ledge to cold waters when my brother encourages me to swim downstream.

So far, I am seeing readiness as positive, something akin to preparedness for everything from earthquakes to college entrance. This week, reading for a UW class I am auditing, I see readiness may also lay the groundwork for evil. It is a Comparative Literature class: The Literature of the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Reading about the German environment prior to Hitler’s rise – the accepted antisemitism, distrust of immigrants (Roma), excessive nationalism, putting The Fatherland first – it is clear that enough of the German populace was ready for Hitler. He was duly elected in a “democratic” republic.

Perhaps readiness may be a power we can wave like a flag against Authority. I guess it depends on who is the Authority. I am ready to plant my sugar snap peas with the first south western breeze in February. The soil turns easily beneath my spade. Earthworms rise to the soil’s surface as if to welcome the peas to join them. I imagine myself crunching on sugar snap peas in April, weeks before my patient neighbor who plants when she hears the spring robins. Inevitably, a freezing March wind, sometimes even a foot of snow, laughs at my readiness. I hear myself reciting from another sacred text: For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: . .. God has made everything beautiful in its time. (Ecclesiastes 3, 1 & 11). Yes, a time to plant and a time to sow . . .. Every year I jump the gun when my readiness does not match Mother Nature’s.

Readiness calls in voices other than my own. Perhaps this year I will be ready to listen. There must be a few other teachers out there to prepare me for what I might learn in 2020, even if the subject has been sitting on my lap for the last seventy-six years.

Poetic Moments

Poet Bill Carty opens the evening’s workshop asking, “Did anyone experience a poetic moment since we last met?” One or two writers share their moments. No one asks Carty to define “poetic moment,” as if they intuitively know one when they have it. Besides, as with all things significant, it is better intuited than defined.

For me, salmon migration from Hood Canal into Quilcene Bay; a journey to the Big and Little Quilcene Rivers to lay eggs, to fertilize them, and to die; creates a series of poetic moments beyond a biologist’s explanation. Every year, I reflect on the sheer determination of the salmon: the impulse, the mission, the harrowing journey past humans with snagging hooks, and spread nets – as well as dodging ravenous seals a hundred pounds greater than the fish’s silvery weight, and the penetrating eyes of eagle and osprey from great heights. Moses’s flight from Egypt pales in comparison.

I lean precariously over the Little Quilcene Bridge and hold my camera steady, my back against the glare of early autumnal light, to capture the thrilling swish of a spawning pair. The shallows swirl around them in mock frenzy, river water splashing upwards like reverse rain.

When the tide recedes, only the stream beds remain across the flats. What fish have not yet reached the river’s mouth, struggle up thin streams, surrounded by twenty to forty, rubber-booted people, their trousers rolled. They have parked their trucks along the road at the end of the bay and sloshed through the flats with fishing gear to snag the stragglers in the shallows. Determined to spawn, the fish have lost interest in feeding, ignoring any dangling bait, and thus victims only to snagging. Some sport.

Yet, in a way, I too am taking something from the salmon run. Within hearing distance of the fishermen on the flat, I sit on my beach with my journal open. Overhead, a raven calls, like a muse from ancient tribes who fished this bay before white intruders were imagined. I thank the salmon for another poem.

Decay

Through September’s opened windows,
comes a stench of chum rejected
from tribal nets, and tossed overboard,
rotting corpses half buried in sand
and whiskered eel grass.
I fetch a shovel and the rusty wheelbarrow
from my garden on the hill.

Where the tide retreats, September’s
light spills like olive oil
across the muddy flats.
On the beach where yesterday I swam,
three large salmon lie,
shining slabs in wasted stages of decay.

It should be easy to shovel
one into the waiting barrow,
then push it up the hill to a hole prepared
beside late-to-harvest squash.

Death’s stench softens in the salted sand.
Shovel ready, I thrust
the tool under a silver belly,
golden roe spilling like marbles intended
(in her unfinished swim)
for the cool stones of the Quilcene River.

Her agate eye– a stone too–
as is her three-foot corpse, a defiant
cemetery slab refusing to bend.
End over end, I wedge and swivel
with my tool, until feeling like a fool
flip her into the waiting barrow.

What would you expect?
Not her defiant weight,
nor the way her fragrance freed
from beach to garden gags me.
I wrap across my nose
a towel used to dry the morning dishes,
then push the little boat of a barrow
to tip it over radishes gone to seed.

I promise to visit her in spring,
when compost brims with mulching
autumn leaves and the soil is
turned for another hopeful crop.
One fish, a gift to earth, will with winter’s rain
nourish us with lettuce next July.
But when April comes,
not one flinty bone of her remains.

High Tide and Low Tide

Our cottage sits on a tidal bay, a thumb, if you imagine Dabob Bay as an open hand, one of many large bays on Hood Canal. Thirty years ago we looked every summer for a low-bank waterfront property we could afford, and curiously settled for a tiny cottage on Quilcene Bay where there is water in front of us for only half of the day. Summers, when the sun warms the tidal flats to swimming temperatures, we are “tied” to the tide book. No matter what tasks we are doing, we stop to run through the open gate and plunge in for a swim, push out in a kayak. or balance on a paddle board as soon as a chart in that book registers eight feet or more. Winters, the high tides can exceed 13 feet, and when married to high winds, the sea trespasses, often knocking out the gate with a floating log, white caps swamping our lawn.

Before purchasing this waterfront property, I lived blissfully unaware of the moon and the tides. I didn’t think about highs and lows, not to mention high low tides and low high tides, abbreviated by locals as High Lows and Low Highs. This morning my husband looked through the window as the tide seemed to inhale from the shoreline, revealing mud flats gleaming in the early morning sun, with intricate patterns of streams that ribbon across the shining silt. These streams are the terminus of two rivers and an old creek, all delivering salmon fry in the spring and welcoming returning fish in the fall.

“I love the low tide, as much as the high tide,” he said, reaching for the binoculars to spot heron tiptoeing between the streams and the violet green swallows checking out the boxes he has raised on poles along the shore.

More of a swimmer than bird watcher, I am happiest when the tide is in, but I have memories of my grandchildren flailing joyfully in the warm mud, emerging like faceless sea creatures to be vigorously hosed off before permitted inside the cottage. I too have ventured out on the flats where my feet sink, then my knees, until I fall helplessly in the sucking mud, leaving no option but laughter.

Before inhabiting our tidal bay cottage, I did not imagine the allegorical truths inspired by connecting with those fluctuating tides. In the past thirty years, by connecting to what the tides are communicating, I am discovering revelations of life itself.

Near dusk a few years ago, my brother and I shared a canoe we had paddled a few miles south of the cottage. As the sun continued to set, we turned to paddle back home. Sitting in the bow, I lengthened my stroke while I visited with my brother. He paddled deeper and harder from his seat in the stern.

“How do you think we are doing?” he asked.

Proud of my stroke, I answered, “We should be home soon.”

“Look to the shore,” he said, indicating the oyster company where the lights had just turned on. I looked. I paddled. I looked again, and I paddled. The oyster company lights remained fixed in place. The tide was retreating so fast, that if we didn’t double our efforts, we would make less distance forward than backward. The strength of the tide, accompanied by an expanded vision, remind me that all effort may be relative to some fixed reality. Changing tides inspire humility, helping me to accept what gifts I didn’t know were coming. Just as high winter tides carry a battering ram of a tree trunk to wipe out our driftwood fence, so the water retreats, dumping our fence and stairs at the end of the bay. Neighbors help us retrieve what is ours, and in our scavenging, we find even better planks for restoration. Low tides uncover oysters and clams: a table-is-set ebbing of culinary fame. Even baby crabs scramble along the shore. In late August, salmon return along the streams that lace the flats. Salmon battle determinedly up those streams between lines of families fishing for a big one to take home for dinner. The tides give and take away, like the hand of a natural god.

How do I answer the ubiquitous question, “How are you today?” Ninety percent of the time, I answer, “I am fine, or I am well.” Perhaps, it has been a good day, or I may venture to say a “bad day,” – if the one asking is a friend whom I can trust will hang around for sorry details. Certainly, our days are never all good nor bad. I like to think the condition of my days parallels the tides. If it is a Low – Low, I may forget that there ever were welcoming waves in front of our cottage. If it is a high tide day, I know I am riding a surface on a paddle board, head-high enjoying the sunset sink behind Mt. Townsend. Most days are those Low Highs or High Lows, but nothing is stagnant. All life is movement. We know the moon will turn from crescent to full, and the bay that emptied all but bubbling craters where clams breathe, will within hours, cover meandering streams with salt and sea.

My Feminist Garden

I am a seventy-five-year-old poet

who writes lyrical poems

tuned to iambic pentameter.

Today, I want to write a modern poem

about daffodils I planted in October.

Some line up in a row by the split rail fence,

but more often now I plant them in clusters.

I’ve learned over the years that one flower

isn’t beautiful because she stands

next to one that is plain.

In clusters, or circles, the yellow bells

sing like a choir of sopranos.

That simile slips out from the lyrical

voice I am trying to suppress,

in order to present as post-modern.

Yet, over seven decades, I’ve learned to be heard

by suggestion, not assertion,

a voice others call strident in women.

I have endured cruel winters

like my green daffodils

standing unblossomed in March.

January tricked them with moderate rain,

so they pushed through soil

before February snow muffled their mouths.

The package of bulbs boasted

they would regenerate each spring

without my having to do a thing.

It is like a law, once passed —

say a woman has a right

to choose motherhood or not —

forever she might decide.

Yet, I return to our nation’s capital to march.

holding high a drawing my granddaughter made–

a uterus with flowers growing from within

reading Not a Political Object.

Two generations from my granddaughter,

my seed within her germinates

in colors I will not live to see.

She speaks in phrases I did not have:

sexual harassment, right-to-choose

equal pay for equal work.

She didn’t have to work at the corner drug,

where the pharmacist draped mistletoe

above the counter where I reached

for packages to deliver to nursing homes.

I am straying from my struggling daffodils,

something I do often these days,

meandering like Wordsworth in my garden.

I text my granddaughter to tell her

I enrolled in a University class:

The Philosophy of Feminism.

She texts back: Woohoo!

Spring arrives in twenty days,

but I have history on my side —

the bulbs I planted will bloom.

I will still need to pull weeds.