Nostalgia – Mary's Room With a View

TOOLS

Hanging on a leather strip from a nail on the greenhouse wall is a hand spade, its handle wood, its blade a fierce copper designed to uproot the most determined weed. Rewarding my passion for gardening, my brother gave it to me for my birthday. The spade is a more sophisticated tool than I would have purchased for myself, and so I wrote him a thank-you poem, which he, in turn fashioned on a wood slab to hang alongside his gift. How often tools bring us together.

In a tidily organized drawer in the garage, my husband stores his father’s tools: a skill hand drill, several wood planes and specialty hand saws. His father was a finished carpenter whose tools have long since been improved on by technology. Nevertheless, my husband stores those tools with the same reverence he has for any memento of his father’s life.

His dad’s lessons endure in the storage shed adjacent to the greenhouse where my husband has affixed wooden pegs in measured spaces one from the other to line up all sorts of gardening implements: hedge clippers, shovels, rakes, each in its place. When my sister-in-law visited and spied what her brother had organized, she laughed out loud at the reincarnation of their father’s devotion to his tools. Like father, like son, you might conclude, but surely no different than my daily use of a small cutting board once belonging to my mom. Why have I not replaced it with a larger one? You know why.

Tools are extensions of ourselves – the paintbrush to Monet, the baton to Leonard Bernstein. Tools can be the measurement of our lives. The artist, Jacob Lawrence, was not a builder, but his paintings and prints are full of tools — tools, hanging, tools overflowing in drawers. We are fortunate to own a self-portrait Lawrence drew of himself in the later years of his life. In the portrait, he sits before an open window in his Seattle studio surrounded by tools. In his hand he holds a plumb line up to the window while looking over his shoulder at Harlem from which he came. A plumb line is an essential tool for a builder because it works with gravity to assure things are aligned. Is Jacob Lawrence reflecting on the journey of his life, looking back to see if his course has been true? As a symbol of measurement, the plumb line occurs more than once in the Bible. In the book of Amos, the Lord explains his judgement to Amos: “I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel: I will spare them no longer.” (Amos 7: 7-8)

Although we most often think of tools as creative instruments, the Smithsonian Institute has an exhibition of Civil War weapons it calls The Tools of War. The Bible has much to say about those tools as well. In Micah 4:3, it is written, “He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Even as I copy this quotation, my mind moves to the Middle East and to Ukraine. What more can I say that is not already in our hearts? Here is a photo of a sculpture in the garden of the United Nations, a work of art by Yevgeny Vuchetich, a 1959 gift of the Soviet Union to the United Nations. The title is: Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares. Surely ironic today.

The poet, Robert Frost, was always ready to see cruel ironies:

Objection to Being Stepped on:

At the end of the row
I stepped on the toe
Of an unemployed hoe.
It rose in offense
And struck me a blow
In the seat of my sense.
It wasn’t to blame
But I called it a name.
And I must say it dealt
Me a blow that I felt
Like a malice prepense.
You may call me a fool,
But was there a rule
The weapon should be
Turned into a tool?
And what do we see?
The first tool I step on
Turned into a weapon.

COOKIE CONNECTION

My friend, Shemaiah Gonzalez writes a Substack blog Undaunted Joy wherein she writes about the many blessings of life. Recently she wrote about the pleasures of food, especially the way that food brings people together in community. Inviting her readers to reflect on how food connects them with others, I thought of a food memory that transcends a hundred years.

I am steeped in British landscapes and literature, so when our family planned a vacation in Great Britain years ago, the Lake District rose immediately as our desired destination. Wordsworth, Coleridge, even Beatrix Potter would await me among fields of daffodils overrun with charming bunnies. The tourist brochures reinforced my imagination illustrating landscapes bathed in sunshine, broken only by a few errant clouds that gave dimension to the sheep-dotted rolling hills between iconic lakes. Photos and walking maps depicted happy hikers taking the entire route on foot, no doubt stopping on the way at cozy pubs. We arrived there on an August day that felt like November in Seattle. Rain fell relentlessly. I had been unable to persuade my husband and daughter to tour the Lakes on foot, but we passed clumps of tourists who did, easily recognized by their heavy slickers glowing with water, their walking maps encased in plastic folders dripping from chains around their necks.

“There you are,” my husband teased as he spotted one soaked woman emptying her boots by the front door of a pastry shop. But the pastry shop! I wanted to stop there, having noticed its sign that read “Authentic English Shortbread.”

“Stop!” I begged, “Let’s go in and get some,” But my husband was trying to negotiate a roundabout, and so held me off with a promise to return before we left the area the next day. He forgot, and I forgot to remind him as we headed south to Northumberland. I could only sulk alongside him. Once in a village near Robin Hood’s woods, my husband entered a bakery and returned with two large cookies, hoping to soothe my spirit.

“These won’t be the same,” I complained, while reluctantly taking a bite out of the large, rather plain cookie. And it wasn’t likely the same cookie we missed buying in Windermere. It was, however, identical in size, weight and flavor to my Grandma Cartwright’s cookie, her only cookie she baked on her wood stove, every summer we visited her modest Wisconsin farm. The sun came out as I looked up the cobblestone street to other shops in the English village. I felt as if I had been there a hundred years before. My ancestors emigrated from England in the 1800’s, and at the moment of that cookie bite, I felt I was, in a way, returning home. Connection! Perhaps some Italian-American immigrants feel a kindred spirit when they taste a marinara sauce in the Tuscan Hills, or an Irish immigrant visits Dublin and savors stout. I am not suggesting that cookie recipe was passed down mother-to-daughter for over a hundred years.

I still have my mother’s cookbooks on my kitchen shelf. There in a scuffed three-ring notebook, my mother hand copied recipes from gelatin salads to tuna casseroles. I rarely recreate one of those recipes, but I love reading them, all in my mother’s characteristic penmanship. To see her handwriting is to see her. Now that recipes are flashed by email, my daughter will not have a favorite dish described in her mother’s script. But I do, and when I turned to the cookie section, there I found the recipe spotted with drips of what must be molasses. (Favorite recipes all had splatters of ingredients on the pages). In the upper right-hand corner, Mom wrote the name of the person who provided recipes –Mrs. Cooper, or Hilda Deck. On this cookie recipe I felt a solid connection with my mother and my grandmother for on the top right-hand corner, I see “Mama.”

Queen Elizabeth and the Button Box

My mother was an Anglophile. With only a rural high school education, she read herself through English history, starting with Sir Walter Scott through Dickens, British history (fiction and non-fiction), until she could recite with ease the lineage of English aristocracy starting with Alfred the Great on down to the reigning Queen Elizabeth. When meeting someone new, Mother acquired an affected British accent. How the practice embarrassed me until I matured to find it endearing.

As with all idiosyncrasies of one’s upbringing, I thought her knowledge of the British monarchy was common. I didn’t question it any more than I found unusual the numerous mugs or dessert plates emblazoned with images of King George or Queen Elizabeth. They fit perfectly with Beatrix Potter animals lined on the sideboard or ceramic hot plates with Old Fezziwig dancing under the mistletoe. Most of these treasured keepsakes have disappeared, but today, a day after the death of Queen Elizabeth, I take out a tin button box painted with Elizabeth’s coronation picture from the 1950’s. It had been a tin of Mackintosh toffee, always a favorite, and certainly a treasure the year of the coronation. Long after the sweets were consumed, Mother used the tin to store errant buttons—buttons lost, buttons saved in anticipation of loss, buttons purchased because they were oh-so-lovely and may someday be of use. I lift the button box from my sewing basket, shake it for its pleasing sound and admire the photo of the young, newly crowned queen, all the while missing my mom.

Mother and I were glued to our small black and white television set for Elizabeth’s coronation. Elegant and somber, the young queen accepted the heavy crown, its weight Shakespearian in significance. Crowds swarmed London, a city still darkened in the aftermath of World War II. Mom and I cheered along. And years later, then on color television, my attentive daughter would sit with her grandmother, filled with celebratory joy for the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana. Mother, newly widowed then, recently adopted a white kitten found wandering in the neighborhood whom she immediately named Prince Charles. Charlie grew fat and affectionate for her until her death.

“Oh Mom,” my daughter called yesterday, “Has the queen really died?” Together, my mom, her grandmother, arose in our memories.

And today, I reacquaint myself with my mother, seeking an explanation for her adoration of the British royalty. On the surface, they could not have been more dissimilar. My mother grew up on a struggling farm in northern Wisconsin. Her greatest goal was to flee the farm, which she did. Elizabeth grew up with affluence and privilege, although any urge she might have had to flee was stifled her entire life. My mother had little power or influence. Elizabeth had significant influence, but constitutionally curtailed power. And if you have watched The Crown, you will realize her boundaries were set by a corporate monarchy, right down to her pastel suits that framed her image.

Yes, humans reach for heroes; for example, in pop culture and sports, but I don’t think it was the grandeur that Mother might have hoped would spill over into her life. What she had in common with Elizabeth was fulfilling a promise, as unforeseen as it might have been. At eighteen, my mother pledged herself to our father. Although not always bad, the marriage was unstable. My mother endured economic and emotional instability that she mopped up with the same determination she showed when cleaning the kitchen floor. She took a secretarial job to support us, one where she worked with such perseverance that she became, and proudly to her, the executive secretary to the bank president. Today she would have been called a vice president, or at least a loan officer; however, the glass ceiling was concrete and exactly at the height of her braided hair. She would not leave her husband or her home for more opportunity.

At twenty-one years old, Elizabeth publicly declared her commitment to serve the British people for her entire life. And she did that, although many can rightly argue that her labors were not always on the side of the common good. Yesterday I emailed my young Belarusian friend, Hanna, who is doing graduate work centered on social injustice in countries such as Belarus. Since she is in London at university, I asked her what it was like to be there on the day the queen died. She responded forcefully with multiple citations of the queen’s suppression of human freedoms, especially in former colonies: “You might expect what my opinion on the monarchy is. Putting a bunch of people above millions, and billions of others by birth… I find there are few systems as unfair as monarchy,” she wrote.

So much for my nostalgic musings of Mother and Queen Elizabeth. Was my mother unaware of racism in Buckingham Palace? Certainly, she recognized the long silence after Diana’s death. What I am seeing now is a mother who wanted for her admiration a human being such as she was. Elizabeth make mistakes, ones plastered across tabloids. Mom made mistakes not significant enough to attract attention. Elizabeth stuck to a pledge made when she was too young to imagine its consequences, as did my mother. They endured. Perhaps it makes sense that among all the royal keepsakes I kept the button box. With effort, I pry open the tin lid. Inside there are common black and white buttons I will never use. But there are also those worth saving and some oh-so-lovely.

LAWN DAISIES

When I am feeling low, to lift my spirits I head for the garden – any garden — my vegetable garden, or this weekend, the square of earth surrounding a dogwood tree that might bloom pink any day now. Around that tree, wild grasses, forget-me-nots, dandelions and escaped strawberry plants elbow for space around lavender and rosemary, even a large hydrangea we surrounded with seasonal bulbs for daffodils and tulips. That square is a melting pot of chosen and undesired intruders that all stake their claim on an eight-by-eight-foot square that suffers intrusive saltwater damage in winter when high tides seep over our driftwood fence.

Last weekend, I carried a big orange bucket holding spades and clippers, plopped it alongside the wooden boards that separate the garden from our lawn and dropped to my knees to begin weeding. My knees sunk into the soil, a rather soft landing that came to meet me in my sorrow. I had taken with me feelings of despair following recent weeks of gun violence. Despair would not let go its grip on my helpless heart. Perhaps, unconsciously, I expected that spading and pulling out those weeds would lift me into hopefulness, the kind of hope that springs from an illusion of control.

How did my mother deal with sorrow? It was always clear when my mother was troubled. I would find her on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. When she aged and housekeeping challenged her arthritic limbs, I offered to pay for a housekeeper to do that hard scrubbing. She dismissed the housekeeper after one cleaning, because the woman used a mop at the end of a stick, refusing to get down on hands and knees. I should have known, however, that the task was never about cleanliness. It was keening, the kind of rhythmic movement made by Irish women when a death has occurred. That back and forth, the reaching into corners with sore fingers, the scraping with fingernails a stubborn gooey blob under the kitchen table. When my parents were not getting along, our kitchen floor was an advertisement for Aero Wax.

What kind of humility, what kind of praying is the down-on-knees pulling of weeds? I was not there to rescue the children. I too was a teacher back when school shooting was so unheard of it would never reach my imagination. I get down on my knees where I try to discern the weeds from the wildflowers, what to pull out, what to save, because even though self-seeded, the poppies are joyful orange and yellow, the foxglove a vibrant pink, and when clustered, they wave a snappy salute across the lawn.

Today, while I am purging my grief with what are becoming sore fingers, I hear the familiar hum of the John Deere lawn mower. Allan, perched like a prince on a dais, is riding around the yard cutting the rapidly growing grass. I stop to watch him speeding around in circles or diagonals, clearly enjoying himself, little filaments of green flinging from under his machine. He is headed toward a patch of small white daisies clustered mid-lawn. “Lawn daisies,” I called them when I took my grandchildren to the park, and we found them salted across the park lawn. So many, surely our picking a handful would not diminish their plenty. We picked and we laced them together, making bracelets for small wrists. Or we took one separately and plucked away –one white petal at a time, chanting “She/he loves me . . she/he loves me not” until we felt loved or rejected for one moment on a spring day.

I yell at Allan to stop, but he is wearing ear protectors. I jump up from my weeding and race to the confident green mower just as it bore down on the circle of daisies.

“Please,” I shout, circling the daisies in a protective dance. He cannot see me, but understands he is to leave the flowers. Perhaps they were his weeds in the lawn. He stops, and the daisies live on now, white and fragile as remembrance.

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
 
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
 
Christina Rossetti

Lines my Victorian-loving father recited to me. Today, winds waft in from the Southwest forming greedy tongues on the surface of Quilcene Bay. High tide surges in as if pushed by an eager parent sending a child on a swing. Waves carry fallen logs snatched along shorelines, and those logs are cradles rocking recklessly on the incoming tide. If this January tide is high enough, logs will be battering rams to wipe out our driftwood fence, falling each picket like a domino collapsing its neighbor. Then the waters will laugh through the gaps and surge across the lawn, all the way to our front deck. In past years, we have looked over the deck’s railing at roiling salt water. We looked down and held our waiting breath for ebb tide to return.

In the surrounding woods, cedars and Douglas Firs dance as if the band won’t take a break. Ferns lean over, revealing under fronds like girls who toss their hair over their heads to dry in the sun. There is no sunshine today. January 2, 2021 blows in the New Year, and I am celebrating fresh air. Barring a brittle alder limb crashing over my head as I walk the trails, and ignoring the threat the power could go out in the cabin, I am having fun.

When my daughter was between three and six-years-old, together we took Windy Day Walks, usually on October afternoons, another gusty month in the Pacific Northwest. Holding hands and skip-walking among falling leaves and plopping acorn hats, we recited Winnie the Pooh’s winter poem titled, simply, “Pooh’s Poem” in which my little girl played Piglet to my Pooh:

The more it snows, Tiddely Pom
The more it goes, Tiddely Pom 
The more it goes, Tiddely Pom
On snowing.
And nobody knows, Tiddely Pom
How cold my toes, Tiddely Pom
How cold my toes, Tiddely Pom
                      Are growing.

My daughter was always on cue with her tiddely poms increasing with exuberance as if we were a pas de deux. I confess that I devised the game to encourage us to get exercise on a windy day. She might have enjoyed more to stay indoors with Sesame Street. Poetry, a line and refrain, kept one skipping foot ahead of another until we were around a half dozen blocks and back home sipping tea.

“Who can see the wind / neither you nor I. ” Yes, unseen forces inspire our imagination. Today’s wind is the brushwork of the creative God, reminding me on this second day of a New Year the immensity of forces surrounding me. I am never alone in the woods or on the waters. I might as well have fun and inhale all the fresh air of a New Year.

Raking Leaves in the Wind

What is more ludicrous than raking leaves on a windy day? Yet when you feel like testing your power against the world, it is a perfect activity, therapeutic, in fact, especially for those of us who mistakenly think they should be in control of life. This morning, our usual pre-breakfast walk around the property takes us to a bench above the pond. There we sit to look down on the pond’s surface, last week covered with the slimy vestiges of duck weed that I skimmed off, but today littered with a confetti of yellow birch leaves as if all of the trees were celebrating the Biden victory and decided to shake themselves silly with joy. The pond accepts it all, summer or fall, duck weed or autumn leaves. I have a difficult time looking at Nature without seeing a metaphor in the whole experience. Could scooping duck weed or raking leaves around the pond teach me how better to live my life?

Today the wind has been bellowing down from the north, but the sky and bay are so crystal blue, no self-respecting Northwesterner would stay inside. After all, any day now the rain will return. So up the hill to the greenhouse I go in my rubber boots to fetch a metal rake and the wheelbarrow. I wedge the rusty wheelbarrow the best I can through the barn door while the wind slaps the door back in my face as if it knows two hours of raking leaves around the pond will be futile.

Do we ever do anything from pure reason? Every act has its collateral experiences. Raking leaves against a spirited wind allows me to feel my muscles, the pull on my left elbow, the stretch around my ribs as I bend to scoop up piles of crisp yellow and brown leaves. I will not have to go inside for physical therapy today. The cold wind fills my lungs with the freshest air. Leaning on my rake for a moment of gratitude, I realize that only a month back, standing on this same place, I choked on smoke from wildfires in Oregon. I will never take for granted the pure, cedar-laced air of the Pacific Northwest. And so, I draw a swath of leaves to me, turn to the right and repeat until I am circled with leafy dikes that shed their top leaves with each new gust of wind. Pull, pile, pause, and watch the top few flee as if back to the birches from which they came.

Acceptance is another virtue that needs restoring. See the leaves rise from my pile, lift into the air, settle down back in the middle of the pond where my rake will not reach them. Acceptance is much like resignation, unless you play with it. I pause to admire how lovely the one or two yellow leaves float in a little whirlpool in the middle of the pond. If keeping the pond clear was what motivated my raking, I lost on that leaf pile, but how easy to turn a loss into a win for aesthetics’ sake.

All the senses surround leaf raking. The sound of the soft scratching the rake makes across the mossy grass. Gratitude again. I could have asked my husband to bring out his heavy gas-powered leaf blower and roar clean all around the pond, even releasing those stubborn leaves strangled by heather plants. I didn’t ask him. I hate the arrogance of leaf blowers, the angriest of tools. That soft scratching of rake on yard, even on sidewalk, although a bit like nails on a chalkboard, evokes memories.

I have lived long enough to recall TBLF, Time Before Leaf Blowers, when you could judge the distance of your neighbor on a Saturday afternoon by how within earshot the soft scratch of rakes, a scratch that must feel good on the grass, for it perks up to an erect green until the next tree sheds. There is an airy, fluffy sound when the person raking swoops up a pile, one armful atop another.

When I was a child, I waited at the end of the drive until my father had a handsome edifice of leaves.

Then in the most self-sacrificing parental affection, he would let me take a hardy run down the driveway until I leapt full-body into the pile, scattering what must have been an hour’s work for him. No wind can destroy a pile of leaves as does an autumn-loving child. When we had completed raking and jumping enough times to exhaust me, I returned to the house, leafmeal sticking to my corduroys, the fragrance of leaf dust in my nose. Then Dad would take the well-used pile to the corner of the drive where it met the street, would stoop down with his cigar lighter and ignite the whole pile until it diminished to ash. The smell of burning leaves was intoxicating generations before I associated its kinship to the aroma of someone smoking marijuana. Yes, in the ‘40’s and 50’s composting succumbed to air pollution.

Today, four excursions of a full-brimmed wheelbarrowing to the compost pile left me ready to return to the cottage and the wood stove. Once inside, my wind-blushed face felt taut and young. I let Metaphor speak to me and here it is. As the presidential election approached, the weeks became increasingly tense. No, that is not true. Not the weeks, but I had been increasingly tense. Before this election, I felt as helpless as dry leaves tossed in the wind. I had done what I could, working on encouraging other Americans to vote and voting myself. Was I raking leaves against a wind? Many of us feel as if we have been doing so for many years. Perhaps that is why it feels so good literally to rake those leaves, relieving anxiety I have felt for myself, my family and for our nation. I accept the metaphor of the task. I accept the reality that I will never clear away all the fallen leaves from the pond’s perimeter.

Frog Blog

I thought I had lost my hearing aid while scooting down the hill above the pond where I was weeding . Later, I returned, my eyes focused for little things among the dense ferns. There I noticed a spotted stone that seemed to breathe . A frog, motionless and likely aware of me long before I saw its pulsing, crouching disguise. Unlike the robins and swallows that flutter away when I raise my camera, the frog remained for six shots before I continued edging down the hill, when it leapt away to the still waters below us. Splash!

Six shots. I am back six decades. I am fourteen-years-old, spending a week with a friend on the beach at Onset, by Cape Cod. Marsha walks with boys in her wake, and I am eager for the overflow — one boy in particular, a ringer for James Dean. Summer nights we drive with the guys to cranberry bogs where the boys take.22 gage rifles from the car’s trunk and aim them out toward the bogs where frogs have stilled their songs. Then the guns fire, the shooters gleefully enjoying the sight of frog parts exploding among the cranberries. Easy, fear-frozen targets for reckless teenagers.

I have not met anyone my age who doesn’t carry remorse for acts committed in thoughtless youth. And although I didn’t fire a gun, I witnessed without reprimand. Of all scenes collected in my memory there are few more vivid – the humid, salt-laden air rising with a fragrance amidst violence. My eagerness to blend in where I sensed I did not belong.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, in March, Nature’s early promise of spring comes with frog song from the pond and surrounding woods. Weeks before robins, chickadees and violet-green swallows take up their warbling sopranos, the bass line is sung by frogs caroling for potential mates from misty dawn until dusk.

Is it a coincidence that fairy tales have frogs turning into princes – princes into frogs? Potential for love abounds.

This spring is a moment in history to reconsider our world view. We are sequestered in our close environments with an invitation and time to consider the smallest and largest of things. We can watch and listen to the way our world is singing our seasons along.

Who else is wearing “unnoticeable” camouflage, aware that to be seen can threaten their existence? How can we value those songs we take for granted, knowing they are not our own, but somewhere around us in the vernal woods and waters that we treasure?

By the way, I found the lost hearing aid when I was dusting behind the couch in the cottage. I don’t regret having searched outdoors. Looking for something small, I found within myself, something large.

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.

A Need to be Needed

When I retired from the classroom, my heart felt as if had been tossed on the beach at low tide for the seagulls to pick at what remained of me. Although I knew better, I wondered how next year’s class of Senior English students could be adequately prepared for college by another teacher. These feelings demonstrate either humungous hubris or festering fear. What I have since acknowledged is that I need to be needed. Being needed justifies taking up air and soil from a planet with a paucity of resources.

Only recently have I explored how and by whom these needs are defined. I suspect that many are defined by a patriarchal tradition: making dinner for my husband, doing laundry etc. – all necessities for myself as well. When I look outside of my own experience to other women’s lives, I see similar patterns of fulfilling needs for others, mostly domestic needs, that make others’ lives comfortable. Does the fulfilling of those needs enrich the “needed” woman? Would she have chosen the tasks without societal expectation?

I reflect on my mother’s life in trying to understand my own. My mother began her typical day setting out sack lunches for her children (if we were still in school), and then making breakfast for all. Soon after, she set off to work as a bank secretary, eventually an “executive secretary” to the manager. Not only did she type his correspondence, she approved loans and managed certain business accounts, jobs that would today earn a title of loan officer, or even vice president, but executive secretary sealed her salary and her prestige. During her lunch hour, she walked across the street to the supermarket to buy groceries for preparing dinner when she got home. After dinner and with dishes put away, she made her “creative time,” either haltingly playing the piano, a treat she afforded herself with biweekly lessons, MV5BMTQ1MTIzOTYwMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM3MzYwMg@@._V1_UX100_CR0,0,100,100_AL_ or she sat before the television watching Murder She Wrote with Angela Lansberry, who had a startling resemblance to Mother. As my mother did her vicarious sleuthing, she did needlework, usually a square of a quilt painstakingly appliqued or cross stitched. She played piano for no one’s pleasure but her own. Her needlework may have ended in a gift or a practical blanket for a bed, but ultimately, she stitched for the beauty of the thing. At the end of her workday, she fulfilled a call to be needed by herself. Did it also fulfill her to know that her family needed her food, her cleanliness, her salary?

Our family chuckled at my mother’s devotion to Murder She Wrote. Having recently read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, I can revisit my mother through Levy’s words: “Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”

I considered calling this piece, After the Chores are Done, for that is when Mother’s needs were addressed. That is also when my needs are addressed. If there are domestic duties ahead of me, no writing happens. My piano stands silently accusing me of skipping another day to practice Chopin, although a lesson looms the next day. I ignore creative pleasures I hesitate to elevate to “need” status, because there are tasks ahead that improve the lives of others. Top on the siren call would be perceived needs from my grandchildren and daughter. My granddaughter, a college senior, emails me a draft of her senior English thesis for editing. Her request leapfrogs to the top of my to-do list, real or imagined. I am flattered to be needed, especially to be needed for something that acknowledges I have a brain, not only a scrub brush.

Her thesis has a reference to Mrs. Ramsey in Virginia Woolf’s To a Lighthouse. Married, and shrouded with the needs of her family, any creative vision Mrs. Ramsey might have is detoured through fulfilling family concerns. She knits socks, never quite finishing them. Juxtaposing Mrs. Ramsey is the unmarried Lily Briscoe who paints and completes a painting, Mrs. Ramsey’s domestic subservience to the needs of others shows a creative vision is impossible. Darning socks short circuits her visionary potential. I am considering that perhaps to be freely creative, a woman must be unshackled from family. On the other hand, an unmarried woman can be satisfied with fulfilling her own needs.

Would my mother’s life have been more creative had she not committed to a family? There is no way to know, but I am hoping she, like me, found enrichment in the creative imagination of thought, even in the sewing of quilts. For me, it would be ironing or kneading bread. For Mrs. Ramsey, as she knit, the narrative voice suggests a certain intelligence, a vision, so to speak. The reader has a sense of her visionary voice, however unfilled it might have been were she to complete a painting or write a novel.

The need to be needed may have hindered my creative life, or motivated it in inspiring me to be the most imaginative teacher I could be. Teaching itself is a creative act. With a filing cabinet stuffed with last year’s lesson plans, I recreated them each year. Although I may have been doing so to fulfill my students’ needs, I equally fulfilled my desire for change — delight in doing something different with certain literature I had taught several times.

For many women, the struggle continues in deciding whether we can live freely within a family structure. Perhaps the face-off of domestic duties and the poet within us creates an energized art that would not exist without the struggle. Deborah Levy quotes Audre Lorde in feeling that tension: “I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers”. (Audre Lorde)