nature – Page 3 – Mary's Room With a View

HOPE

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

Emily Dickinson

Hope is the first green-gold bud of spring on winter’s leafless limbs. To have a word for hope is a miraculous thing, for how else could we express the force that inspires us to move forward in times of despair? Some linguists argue that without a word for an emotion, you can’t express, maybe not even feel the emotion. I disagree, but I understand the clarity that comes with being able to say, “I hope…”

Hope is not expectation, the latter assuming some planning and reasonable certainty. For example, we wait to plant lettuces until the last frost has passed so we may, according to the seed package, expectabundant produce in 58 days. Hope ,on the other hand, takes over as a word of the imagination, so we plant in April’s cool earth, regardless of knowing there could be more frosts, even snow or ice. Nevertheless, I press the seeds, little flecks, into the cool, damp soil while I imagine June’s salad.

Because it is a word of the imagination, hope reaches for the poet’s tools – simile and metaphor. Emily Dickinson writes “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” We see, in our mind’s eye, not an amorphous soul, but a small, fragile bird chirping in anticipation of attracting a mate, a bird so fragile it would be easy prey for my cat. Emily’s hope is one pounce away from extinction. Nonetheless, her poem moves to gratitude that hope comforts without expecting anything from her. True, it has none of the planning and preparation of expectation, but hope is not fragile. It holds us in our own sturdy hands above the grave.

When does Dickinson hear the hopeful bird song? She hears it in the gale or on the chillest land or the strangest sea. We are most aware of hope when our lives face challenge. It faces off against another strong emotion, despair. Hope was the flag that preceded the march of youth from Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School to the steps of their nation’s capital. Students did not march to scream their despair, like King Lear howling to the heavens. They marched to speak their young hope for a violence-free nation, and it is that hope that sings in the gale. Hope looks forward, not backward. Barack_Obama_Hope_poster Barack Obama based his drive to the presidency not on a slogan to “Make America Great Again”, but on hope. The Barack Obama “Hope” poster is an image of President Barak Obama. The image, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, was widely described as iconic.

It is President Obama’s version of hopethat connects with me in my seventy-fifth year. Words shift meanings when you enter the last couple decades of your life. My hopes are no longer so personal, though I may hope I don’t die of some long-drawn-out disease. I do know I will die, a knowledge I could shove aside in those years when my mirror didn’t offer me wrinkled skin and thinning hair. My hopes now are less personal and more universal. Having 75 years to look backwards, I have the courage to imagine 75 years forward in my absence. At a recent Seattle Arts and Lectures event, the host asked guest author Barbara Kingsolver where she found hope in today’s divided world. She replied that hope is a kind of energy she chooses to renew each day. To abandon hope, she would be abandoning her children, her grandchildren and the children of the world. Each day, as readily as pulling on her socks, she renews the energy of hope. I too renew hope in the storm for my grandchildren, for my planet. I may no longer imagine the June salad on my own dinner plate, but I can hope for food on the tables of a world where climate change has been acknowledged and ameliorated, where peoples around the world share the bounty of what each contributes.

April is almost here. I drive through the Suquamish Reservation to Hood Canal. The highway dips between stands of evergreens spaced by deciduous trees now wearing a yellow green hue, those fist buds on spare limbs, limbs that last week were winter stripped. The windshield wipers click rhythmically to clear steady rain. Like a chant, I hear the punctuated consonance of hope, hope, hope.

WHAT IS METAPHOR FOR?

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies –

Emily Dickinson

With metaphor, you know precisely what something is by explaining — if not exactly — then almost. You pinpoint a treasure by standing nearby. Long before Google, even before Johnson’s Dictionary, or the first written word, metaphorical thinking expanded the human world. I like to think of my cave sister explaining sex to her daughter when she ventures out to accept an invitation to mate. “Mating? It is like taking a long hike through unfamiliar woods with a person who will exhale his being into your being, like the wind that comes into our cave when we roll away the stone.” That may be a far-fetched example, but how else can a mother communicate the leaving home, then the joining of man and woman without using a comparison to something known? Such is the excitement of metaphor. It doesn’t travel alone into the unknown. It always has one foot in what we know so that we can extend the other foot into the unknown.

Metaphor is particularly useful for understanding abstractions, like TRUTH. Poets use metaphor for exactly that purpose. How do we communicate grief? It is both personal and universal. Archibald MacLeish writes in Ars Poetica, “For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” What profound absence he expresses in one metaphorical image, so that my heart hollows out with sadness as I picture that open doorway beyond which there is absence. In defining grief, a dictionary would settle for “deep, sadness, often lasting a long time.” The dictionary is accurate enough but cannot replicate the feeling of grief defined in MacLeish’s open door or the falling maple leaf.

My piano teacher explained to me how I should properly begin the music by Liszt that I was learning. He instructed me to first put my foot on the pedal, then slowly lift my hands to the keys — first the right, as the opening note is in the treble clef, then the left, joining it for the first chord.

“Think,” he said, “that you are giving a gift to the audience. Do you want to simply hand out the gift, or do you want to wrap it with a bow, then offer it? A polished performance is a beautifully wrapped gift.” Now as I play that first measure, I envision the notes, but I also see an exquisitely wrapped package. Without the metaphor, I might have played the measure correctly, but not with the same commitment his package metaphor describes.

In my church community, we regularly discuss how literally or metaphorically we read the Bible. Many Americans have left religion altogether because the Bible remains the cornerstone of churches, and in an empirical age, people will not subscribe to a belief in miracles such as virginal birth. Others, in some fundamentalist churches, turn off the reality button, permitting their literalism to deny what science disproves. The Bible itself abounds in contradictions, making “the word of God” as evasive as mercury spilled from a broken thermometer. For me, literal readings can make the Bible as shallow as a puddle in which we look no deeper than the reflection of our own face. Metaphorical readings expand in lakes and oceans, often feeding channels between islands no one mapped. Christ does not have to resurrect in the flesh, offering his wounds to Thomas or anyone else in doubt. Christ can “come again,” among his followers who, despairing his death, realize his teachings never left them, but will endure. Christ had risen!

For those of us who love to read and to write, metaphor is an engaging friend. I recently finished reading Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming. I will never be the First Lady of the United States and cannot possibly experience living in the White House for eight years when every move the family takes necessitates hovering protection from secret service agents. Even the windows of the White House are so thick that a helicopter landing on the roof cannot be heard from a top floor room. These are facts about Ms. Obama’s life there, but it was her metaphorical descriptions of her life from the South Side of Chicago to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that helped me to feel what she felt. Metaphor opens the envelope for empathy. What a wonderful organ our brain is that we can look at the moon while Alfred Noyes describes “the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,” and we can see a full sail sailing ship in rough seas and at the same time a real moon, flitting in a tumultuous dance among clouds.

Heron

The Heron

How do I know she senses my presence

long before her needle-thin throat

rises from ochre reeds, also thin,

bending agreeably with shore breeze?

The incoming tide hastens my spotting.

I silence the oars, letting the current carry

me to her eye, set unblinking

in a shape that might be an upturned scythe

poised in grasses not meant for mowing.

Hers is a lesson in patience,

mine a lesson in measured paces

like an elderly man

practicing tai-chi in the park.

I would not startle her to flight,

that I might be with her

together in what is timeless,

although the shoreline separates

like the division of cells

who belongs to the shore

who with the sea.

Only the two of us now,

where recognition destroys acquaintance.

I watch her blue-gray wings

lift as if exhaled from updrafts —

those wonderful wings

wider than my arms

always out of reach.

1-great-blue-heron-in-flight-brian-wallace

Mary Kollar

Why Run?

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Other than listening to folks describe their medical procedures one of the least favorite topics is the athletic endeavor. That said, when over seventy-years-old, I am running – rather, jogging—along East Quilcene Bay and up the cedar lined hills, the kilometers demand an examination of why I am doing this and why I feel so good.

Last Sunday, we awoke to steady rain, and would have crawled back under the quilt, but we had volunteered to man the water station at the 5-mile mark of the annual Quilcene Half-Marathon Oyster Run. By the time we dressed, the skies began to clear, so I asked my husband to man the water station alone, and I went to the starting line at the Linger Longer Stage where I signed up to run the 10k race. I don’t think I have run more than 6 miles in 2-mile increments, since 2016, when I ran the half marathon (another last minute decision) . This Sunday, I turn on I-Tunes on my phone at the start of the 10K. It will take only two complete replays of Pink Martini’s “Get Happy” album to keep me company until the finish line.

The scenery alone will keep me running. Morning shadows lengthen, stretching across the dampened road so the tree shadows appear even longer than their height, and I am running from one to the other. After a kilometer up Center Road, the course dips down past a farm, its green barn open like a mouth to exhale its hay-fresh breath. Sunflowers shine from the garden, September heavy with produce. Behind the garden, ochre grasses cover the tidal flat intersected by Donovan Creek. The salmon will soon work their way up that creek, and though I can’t see them from the road, their perseverance energizes me. After the farm, McGInnis Road ends at East Quilcene Road, that hugs the bay like a necklace around wavelets of white, because the wind that brought that daybreak rain still billows from south to north. Its force reminds me that I am a slender woman who with a big gust could be blown off the road to topple on to the grassy fields. I pass ancient apple trees, their trunks bent in testament to the wind, fallen apples fragrant with fermentation.

Then the road turns to a slight rise by the Sunday Egg Stand a girl from a nearby farm built to sell eggs and flowers. White dahlias smile from the stand by the egg cooler. I begin the slow ascent south that will take me by the field where Racer the horse used to run to greet me for a fistful of grass. Gone now, his spirit keeps me running. Soon I approach the water stand outside our own drift-wood fence where my husband sets out paper cups of orange and lime Gatorade on a small table. I grab, gulp and go on. I know the hill rises steeply for another eighth of a mile, the open view from the top, showing the bay is at high tide, the longer autumn shadows splitting the sun on the water’s surface. Blackberries thrive on that hill top, berries now dried and fragrant as old wine. Turn-around for the 10K comes in a dip in the road, darkened on both sides by Palmers’ woods, old as the peninsula itself in giant Doug Firs and Big Leaf Maple trees. If I were not mid-race, their deep woods would invite me in. But here is turn-around, monitored by Linda and Stan Herzog. Linda calls my name. Stan snaps a photo.

And that is another reason to run — the people. Two years ago, when I ran more often, I would do this 10K stretch alone. Some days it felt demanding, lonely and masochistic. Running in a community is exhilarating. Back at the start line I stood among families who would walk the 5-K, some with toddlers in strollers pushed along like envoys on a mission. Kids in t-shirts and jeans, twenty-year-olds in fashionable running tights that show off the ripple of taut muscles, people my age wearing rain or sun hats tied securely under sagging chins. Then there are the thin men in short shorts. They are lithe and slim hipped. Have they never stopped running? Some might be 25, some 65, but the way they stretch out their hamstrings, you know this will not be their only race of the year. Around us white tents cover food stands staffed by volunteers. Unknown This is an oyster run, celebrating Quilcene’s famous oysters, so the aroma of wood coals and garlic bread already permeates the air. Depending on where you stand, it is fried food or local ale to keep a mind motivated for returning to this spot after the race. Everyone is happy. Those who know me, cheer me on. They seem more confident than I that I will make it the whole way. I will make new friends as the race begins, when I discover whose pace falls in with mine. That is how I meet Michele and Meg. We don’t talk much during the run. All of us are tuned in to whatever music lifts one foot in front of the other, but there are moments of encouragement among us. Good going. Feel free to pass. Yes, the hills are tough for me too. I pass a woman with her arm around her young son, a stalky boy who clearly has some cognitive impairment. He smiles widely at me.

“You brought out the sun for us,” I tell him.

He laughs. My voice and his voice fill the same space on the road. That connecting moment energizes me all the way up the hill.

The sheriff at the bottom of the road directs me to keep to the right until I am at the police cars where I can safely cross over to the finish field. She applauds me as I run. Her green shirt has an oyster image: Sheriff Volunteer it reads.

And finally, the physical part. I want to remember when the endorphins kick in after the 2^nd kilometer. I am running downhill by the green apple tree where yesterday I stole enough for a pie. I look up to Mt. Walker ahead and my chest fills with autumn-washed air. Breath is wonderful. Deep, deep breath is exhilarating. I could run forever on this feeling. I could spread my arms and mimic the gulls and ravens swooping over the bay. I start to write this essay in my head so no feeling will fail to remain.

Farther into the run, my legs get heavier. I need to remind myself that I pronate on my right foot. I might trip over my foot if I don’t consciously lift it. Remembering coaching from my friend, Jan, I extend my legs, more forward, less up and down. My face flushes in the sun, so I scold myself for forgetting sunglasses and sunscreen. I have long ago left the cool morning start, so I toss my rain jacket to my husband when I pass his water table. Sweat alternately warms and cools me. When the finish line is in sight, I imagine myself lying in the park grass. I imagine how good it will feel to pull my knees to my chest and hug my shins. When I do arrive at the finish, I stride out as I had not for the entire run. Here I am about to cross under the finish balloon, people on each side applauding, the announcer calling my name and town. The friends I know who are standing behind tables loaded with water, fruit, oysters and beer, smile at my success, but show no amazement that I did it. Only after one takes my picture, do I realize my face is raspberry red. I sit by another runner on the grass while our bodies cool. The sun is full out, but I am beginning to chill. My newly acquainted runner drives me back to my cottage where I peel off my running pants and shirt. My tongue tastes salt. My skin feels like salt. I realize I have excreted a good amount of salt water. As soon as I persuade myself to leave the hot tub jets, I will drink a tall glass of water. Every part of my body has been used: my feet, my legs, even my shoulders and neck. I should feel beat up, but I don’t. I feel twenty years younger. Maybe I will get back into this running thing.

The best way to feel like a big fish is to select a small pond. There were 40 runners who ran or walked the 10K. There was one 81-year-old walker, but I was by far the oldest runner at 75. I finished smack dab in the middle at #20 with 13 minute miles. I am proud enough of my over-seventy pace, my over-seventy race.

Vulnerable While Mating

From the second week in October through the end of January, wildfowl, flying above or riding the wavelets on Quilcene Bay, survive in the grace that falls between shotgun shells. Mallards, pintail, buffleheads, and Canadian geese, known for pairing for life. Looking to the horizon above the tawny shore grasses and beneath the green and purple foothills of the Olympics, I try hopelessly to count the individuals in a flock, their migrations so wide and long, undulating like a flag in the winter wind. There are hundreds, although plentitude cannot heal the stab in my heart with each blast that brings one down to the fetching dogs. In my empathy, each fallen bird may as well be Icarus. The loss cuts more cruelly in my gut when a goose falls, its life-long mate honking rage in the smoking gunfire. For over thirty-years I have watched the flocks, as large one year as the year before. I marvel that they return to the killing fields. But they do. Are they that foolish, or are they aware the odds are on their side as they are hundreds strong against a handful of hunters, hovering before dawn in a chilled swampland?

Hold your breath between the end of hunting season and spring. Where are the garrisons of courageous birds? In Seattle, they are walking down the center of the Burke Gilman bike trail, not a body of water in sight. Mallards waddle in courting pairs, as dodging cyclists swerve around them, without a single duck pulling in a pin feather to avoid a crushing death. Oblivious. Completely oblivious, not only to cyclists, but to camera-toting pedestrians. I walk as close as I want to photograph a pair, their muffled quacks indicating more annoyance than fear. And what comes to mind, is not the under-fire ordeal they may have experienced over a duck hunting winter, but how vulnerable they are when mating.

Vulnerable when mating. How true for us all. I will not be too anthropomorphic about this. Surely the ducks are following natural urges to reproduce; theirs is not human love. Yet note how the drake puffs his breast, putting himself between the hen and the bicycle, as if to protect his lover. Human love is just as vulnerable, with or without reproductive urges.

Spring is the season of love. As we leave the shelter of our winter homes, walking out into the first days when the temperature exceeds sixty degrees, we look both ways crossing the street. Do we look both ways when approached by a potential lover? My twenty-something friend writes to me about her true love visiting from Ireland for a few weeks. She has longed to see him, but casually mentions he wants to date other women as well as being with her. I want to scream out “Look both ways! A truck is barreling down the road and its brakes don’t work.” I say nothing.

Our mailbox usually holds a couple of 42138510-greeting-card-with-roses-watercolor-can-be-used-as-invitation-card-for-wedding-birthday-and-other-ho wedding invitations for the month of June. We buy a gift, attend the wedding and listen to one more couple swear “’till death do us part.” Having known divorce from life-experience, I wonder, sitting there in the church pew, “Does the covenant refer to death of the individuals, or death of the marriage?” Either way, commitment leads to grief. I bought an anniversary card for my husband last week. Pictured on the front was a rustic couple in comical attire. Above the picture: “Marriage requires commitment. But so does insanity.” Inside, on a cheerier note: “Still crazy about you after all these years.”

There is no armor to protect us from falling in love, save living a life of not having been loved. Failing to be embraced may make us amateurs at stepping in to the vulnerable mating mess. Or perhaps the unloved jump in more eagerly to fill the hole in their hearts. We find ourselves in love like stepping unwittingly into consumptive quicksand. Any acceptance or rejection of advances will decrease or magnify the love, but won’t prevent it swallowing us like the invasion of the body snatchers.

call-me-by-your-name Recently I saw the film Call Me By Your Name that depicted the infatuation of a teenage boy with a man about six years his senior. How much more vulnerable could the boy be than to fall deeply in love with a person of his own gender, a man who would only be with him in the same Italian estate for a summer’s duration? “Where is this going?” one partner often asks as they couple. Here was a passionate love that showed no hope of continuing to a life of companionship. Still, I (and probably lots of others) applauded as the romance intensified, sensuous and consensual. Does love need a promise of security from heartbreak? I doubt the young boy could muffle his desire, even if he saw the truck rumbling down the road. Both partners could have chosen not to act on their love, though I doubt that too. Passion becomes its own reason for being. And even though the summer ended, and the older man married, there lingers a celebration as if the boy had an experience like climbing Mt. Everest, something the rest of us can only experience vicariously, looking on with envy.

My condolences to those who are “strong” enough to steer clear of love, even loving a pet. My friend who bonded with her cat for twelve fulfilling years, will not get another, now that beloved Chubby Toes is gone. “I could never endure the loss again,” she explains, as I try to drop a soft kitten on her front porch. My friend lives alone. Surely another cat would offer companionship, but a pet also offers loss, death by vulnerability.

Here I go again, I hear those trumpets blow again.
All aglow again, takin’ a chance on love.

It is good that so many classic songs pull their lyrics from love’s risky business. Somehow it makes us one of a huge flock. We may go by violence, but how much sweeter to be vulnerable to love.

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Growing Memories

Throughout his twenty-five year ministry at University Congregational Church, Dr. Dale Turner frequently distributed little cards with pithy sayings to the congregants as they lined up to shake his hand after Sunday service. Our daughter was eight-years-old, when we stood in line together, I, waiting for the card, she eager for his hug. A sketch of a potted geranium illustrated the 3 X 5 card on which was written: “Bloom Where You’re Planted.” That Sunday, there was an additional take-home gift, because Professor Thomas of the UW Forestry Department donated trays of evergreens, each one seeded in a tiny test-tube for planting. Our daughter clutched hers in her small fist all the way home. No waiting for lunch. First, we had to spot the perfect sunlit, but well-watered site in our back yard for her tree, a fir of nameless variety. We named it our Dr. Turner Tree. Just like our daughter, the tree grew, and grew until we realized we had a fir of Pacific Northwest proportions. The Seattle backyard could not contain its potential. Within four years, we dug up the tree and transplanted it on our wooded Hood Canal property in Quilcene, where it could mature next to its Douglas Fir cousins. Years have passed; Dr. Turner retired, and has passed away. His tree is over 40 feet high, spreading its evergreen limbs over the drive down to our cottage. I rarely walk past, without looking upwards to remember the pastor who performed our wedding ceremony, who guided us and thousands of others on our spiritual journey.

“Bloom Where You’re Planted” has returned to my restless mind often when I have leaned toward a geographical solution to a dilemma I would like to escape. What also roots me is my connection between plant and memory, a bridge that snugly holds me to home. In 1975, we bought our well-lived-in house in Seattle. The 1906 house showed generations of child wear. The back yard served as playground for very large dogs. Its surface was clawed like a rugby field.

In the early ‘80’s a nurse who worked at the University contacted my husband about acquiring one of his prints. That exchange led to friendship with Mary Pearlman whose only son was serving in El Salvador to help with land reclamation for the citizens there. When Mary saw our skinned back yard, she insisted that we take from her yard a Russian olive tree and a deep purple lilac bush. I eagerly planted the lilac next to the back-porch stairs, so that coming and going I could recite to myself, “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,” the opening line to Walt Whitman’s moving elegy for Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln was assassinated in April. The lilac blooms in April, its intoxicating fragrance mourns with the hopefulness of spring. Mary Pearlman’s 31-year-old son, Mark, was gunned down in a hotel in El Salvador, killed under the Duarte regime that could never conclusively bring any killers to justice. Not a year passes without my thinking of all of this loss and all of the generosity, as the deep purple flowers bloom again.

Objects also evoke memory: art, books, even furniture can bring back a parent sitting in a particular chair, under a framed portrait and reading Treasure Island. However, the gift of living things, of plants and trees, not only holds memories of the giver, but the gifts themselves evolve. Their very growth feeds hope for immortality. Perhaps it is the English teacher in me who projects such import to my growing gifts. Next to the bench where my mother loved to sit and watch ducks land on Quilcene Bay, I have planted a Lady’s Mantle her neighbor brought over the week my mother died. A perennial, it holds rain drops in its plate-like leaves, drops I saw as tears. In my mind’s eye, I can see my mother, tea cup in hand, sitting on that bench. Also, I recall her neighbor, Sharon, a woman whom I have not seen for decades.

Down the hill from Mother’s bench, spreads a Texas maple my brother John sent from Houston twenty years ago. It arrived in a narrow cardboard box. The tip of the tree had snapped off in transport. Now, John brags that everything is bigger in Texas, so his maple should shoot up past the ancient Big-Leaf maple across the lawn, but Washington State won’t bow down to Texas when it comes to tall trees. This year, the Texas maple runs about fifteen feet, a spreading, delicate canopy. I wonder if the two maples talk to each other across the span of lawn. Scientists know that trees do communicate, if not by speech, by sharing nutrients and even warning signals when infection or blight is in the neighborhood.

We are a transient people, packing up and moving around the globe. We may inhabit several homes before we die. As hard as it is to leave a house, to leave the plants around the home is more poignant. A tree inhales and exhales just as we do. It lives on. And today my husband is holding up my I Phone to photograph me in front of a ten-foot chain tree in full golden bloom. When my granddaughter was a little girl, we bought a six-inch stick of a thing at the Quilcene Village plant sale. What fun to buy the smallest plant, the 25-cent thing for which we had to ask its name, and to gamble that we could help it grow. It grew! I transplanted it at four feet when it needed more room. A deer found it in the open yard and munched it back to two feet. I am texting that photo to my granddaughter, a sophomore in college in New York City. Remember our chain tree? Miss you. Love, Nana.

City of the Lost Spring

Candytuft against a picket fence.

I planted it there,

a sprig of a thing, fifty cents of a chance

that April would return

and the sun would warm the fence

you painted in August’s heat.

Like white coins, these flowers

where I walk through the gate, alone,

my ears tuned to the words

of one more Holocaust novel,

all despair thrown up against what

spring would want me to forget.

What I had forgotten was spring itself,

some faith that it would return

after you had gone.

I looked for you in the odd places —

the tool shed behind muddy rakes,

a corner of the shed where I stored seeds.

Loss is like that, fooling recollection —

where you last set a spade

before turning to another task,

or the combination to a lock

you thought you knew by heart.

It had always opened the door.

Now this two o’clock sun

on an April day calls out

White on white –

the candytuft,

the whitewashed fence.

I close winter’s gate behind me.