Tag: nature

Pine Trees or Politicians

Certain phrases stick with me like burrs to my clothing when walking through a grassy field.  No sense in trying to brush them off; besides, to do so I may discard something of value, that in the right surroundings could save my life.  This week’s sticky burr of a quotation comes from John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth Sacred Soul,  in which he covers a chronology of Celtic Christianity with short biographies of theologians as far back as the 4th century who lived a Celtic spirituality. 

Perhaps the phrase stuck for its alliteration – easy to hear those “p’s” skipping from my lips as I juxtapose pines and politicians.  Nonetheless, White’s phrase stays with me.  I want to consider my relationship to Nature and Politicians.  How do I start my days?  I often turn on NPR for the morning news and commentary that is 99% depressing.  I hear voices of politicians in their most recent declarations of intention. Their words are consistent with whatever feeds their ambition.  There is no plot to follow.  I could skip listening to Morning Edition for a year, then return to it a year later to discover I had not missed a thing in the tenor of our time.  Rather like a bad soap opera.  For variety, I could switch to another newsfeed, perhaps not aligned to my feelings about the state of the world, not to mention the condition of our country.  But would any of these broadcasts enhance my life?  Would their negativity call me to action?  Would I come to a fuller understanding of my purpose on the planet?  Ironically, I am often listening to Morning Edition on my walks at dawn from my house down to and around the U of W campus, a six-mile morning walk under old established trees in old established neighborhoods: blossoming cherry trees in April, vermillion maples in autumn, tall proud pines and cedars all year long.

Now here comes Scottish poet, Kenneth White suggesting I might join him in listening to the trees rather than the politicians.  How do I listen to the trees? The cherry blossoms are speaking beauty and rebirth.  The autumnal maples and sweet gums recite their own poetry.  Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins evokes images of trees in fall and mourns the imminent death of summer “Margaret are you grieving “ over Goldengrove unleaving? … worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.” Then winter arrives and Robert Frost reminds us “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”  Surely the poets help me listen to the trees.  Yet even without the writers, if I block out cars and pedestrians passing by, and if I concentrate, I hear the trees.  Their leaves whisper in summer breezes.  Occasionally, such as this very dry summer, the trees crack and snap, discarding a branch that lands on the sidewalk. These are city images.  Now if I take myself to the woods, I remember recent books I read about trees, teaching that there is a conversation between alders and the firs, one fast growing and nutritious to the welfare of the other.  Is that alder speaking to the fir?  I guess it depends on how we define language.

And if we can listen to the trees, especially hearing their needs for water and space and clean air, can the trees hear us?  Although we don’t share the same language, we are all living things.  Life communicates.  When my husband and I began to restore a clear-cut lot we purchased after the owners sold the trees and evacuated their property, we decided on a variety of trees, some 20 -foot Douglas Firs purchased from neighbors across the road, and some small fruit trees for a space left vacant when the previous owners disposed of their cabin. One pear tree initially grew fast and tall, but its pears did not thrive.  Insect-infested and hard, the few pears on gnarled branches fell to the ground where deer consumed them before we had a chance.  Every time my husband and I walked by the pear tree, he said, “That tree looks bad.  It really has to go.”  So how would you feel if every time someone passed you, these were the descriptive words for you?  You would want to die, right?  And of course, the pear tree died.  Not wanting to accuse my husband of projecting a death wish on the tree, I nonetheless registered the lesson.  Years later, I desired a Katsura tree, for there are several in Seattle where I walk.  In autumn the pink leaves wave a fragrance I associate with the sweet smell of cotton candy.  From the moment we planted it, I have welcomed that Katsura tree almost every day.  I tell it how lovely and thriving it is, even though a workman backed his tractor into the trunk last year, leaving a two-foot scrape on the trunk.  “Good morning, Katsura.  I am so glad you are here.  Looking forward to your autumnal fragrance.”  It is now almost twenty-five feet, its leaves fluttering in the dappled sunlight, even though nearby cedars consume a great deal of available light.

On the way back to Seattle Monday morning, three gigantic logging trucks rolled on to the ferry ahead of us.  Their beds were piled with logs about five feet in diameter and perhaps fifty feet or more in length.  These were not the usual harvest of tree farms.  Rather they looked like the established trees from the National Olympic Forest.  I recall Donald Trump’s call for opening-up national forests to loggers.  I can imagine what birds and animals would say in response. But what about the trees?  Is any politician listening to the pines?

WHAT I DIDN’T PLANT

A rare sunny spring day at our cottage on the Olympic Peninsula, I walk up the hill and through the wooded path to the adjacent space that includes my hopeful vegetable garden, a small frog pond and a field of what was meant to be grass below four fruit trees. Today, the grass serves as a green canvas for an abundant peppering of dandelions, seemingly more sun-yellow this year.  They rival the sun itself, an in-my-face yellow that wins me over with joy for their prevalence, weed-reviled as they are.  Prime in their moment, I imagine their demise to fluffy seed balls the wind will scoop up and shake out and reseed in resurrection.  As children, we speeded the seeding by picking a large puff ball and blowing the white effervescence until it rained with whiteness, an act motivated by power and plenty, but always uplifting with joy. Who cannot love a dandelion? Yet today, my meditation on their yellowness is disturbed by the growling John Deere mower moving up the hill to level them all within minutes of their glory.  I am resigned.  My husband loves a flat and green lawn as sterile as a golf course.  Or is it his glee in riding high on the cushioned seat of the big John Deere while its whirring blades shave the upper lawn of dandelions, clover and moss?

I turned my back on the devastation, opening the gate to my garden to discern if any vegetables, whose seeds I planted two weeks ago, are surviving.  The temperatures were still equinox cold at night, and rain predicted almost daily when I decided to borrow from the early spring light and put in rows of spinach, lettuce, arugula, radish, kale and beets.  Having loosened the garden soil and mounded rows for each, I gently planted each seed an appropriate distance from the next, patted a little soil on each row and covered all with a diaphanous cloth that serves like a greenhouse, allowing in only warm sun and easy rain.  In today’s sunlight I raised the cloth with a Christmas present hopefulness that I might spy a thin line of green venturing through the garden soil. Voila!  Radishes boast boldly as the dandelions.  Although timid and circumspect, spinach germinated in thin lines like new grass.  What a marvelous start to a gardening year.  Surely there will be leaves of lettuce and crisp bites of radish for salad days in June.  I felt a “Look what I am growing” pride.  Gardeners do that, you know.  We are a boastful bunch, hosting garden parties in early summer, or carrying bunches of kale to our neighbors.  We dd it.  We planted, fertilized and watered our abundance.

Yet, I cannot dispel that image of lawn-dotted dandelions planted perhaps by birds, but more likely by wind-blown fluff.  Why do I celebrate what is cultivated more than what is wild?  In April, there is nothing that better signals resurrection than the trillium flower.  One trillium returns each year smack dab in our cedar-chipped trail on the way to the treehouse.  We welcome it like an expected house guest, marking its space with a circle of stones so we can find it early the next year and avoid discouraging its return with a pile of newly spread cedar chips.  Why did it grow there?  Or why along the way to the woodpile are three thriving trillium that would go unnoticed were it not for our trips to fetch logs for the woodstove?  They start as white flowers in the shape of a cross, so I associate them with Easter.  As weeks spill into spring, the white moves from pink to vermillion.  I would have a flower border of trillium if one could seed these flowers, but no, they rise where they want to rise.  They surprise us as we walk through the woods, for the blossoms may peak under branches felled by winter wind.

Every season I feel the political pull between taking credit for creation and being surprised at what Earth created with no contribution on my part.  At best, the contribution could be that I left undisturbed a patch of lawn.  Perhaps I once planted them (I cannot recall), but every spring in a narrow flower border below a bird bath, checkered lilies sprout.  Their stems are thin as a chive.  Its head bended as in prayer, a delicate lavender and white checkered lily.  Sometimes there are only a couple of blooms.  This year there were four.  I am surprised and delighted as one receiving a birthday gift, though that date is two months away.  In the autumn when Seattle’s rain returns in regular earnestness, I often find on the parking strip at least one amanita mushroom.  Deep red with spots like the shell of a ladybug – but bigger – they are the image of mushrooms depicted in story books, mushrooms that serve as umbrellas for dwarfs. Amanitas are hallucinogenic, and unless boiled down, likely poisonous.  Like the dandelion, their reputation suffers with no respite from their beauty. 

As soon as I spotted that yard of dandelions, I knew I wanted them to launch my next blog in Thoughts After Seventy, (now Eighty). though I had no idea how I would relate the little flowers to thoughts worth blogging.  Now I reread and realize.  These days, as old age insists that I recognize her, my thoughts often drift to what I can still create and what I am given.  Purpose seems as random as those aging dandelions, their white fluff blown to the wind.

False Spring

After three weeks of February freeze, we have enjoyed a couple of promising weekends that the local forecaster calls “false spring.”  That’s to keep our optimism in check, not that many are optimistic these days.  Those who are still listening to national news are ricocheting between what is true and false, so much so that despair chills us from our toes to our ears, just like those icy February days.   We who have abandoned the news in preservation of our mental health, may still flounder for a sense of purpose.

            Then here comes “false spring,” and I throw my gardening arms around it like a prodigal child who has returned home just when I was longing for reunion.  I lift pitchfork and rakes from standing attention in the shed behind the greenhouse and call them to work, composting and turning the soil in my vegetable garden.  For an eighty-one-year-old woman this is muscle work beyond her actual strength.  But I have always excelled at denial, ignoring the arthritic elbow or the challenge of getting up quickly after I have bent over to harvest a row of wintered-over beets.

 I love my compost bin, a wire and wood enclosed structure just feet from the garden gate.  I back up the red wheelbarrow while chanting William Carlos William’s poem: “ So much depends on a red wheelbarrow . . .”, I spear a heavy chunk of composted leaves and grass with my pitchfork and swing the load over until the compost mound in the wheelbarrow is my little Vesuvius to spill like lava on my garden.  Over and over, eight times I do the trip before shaking on six bags of steer manure.  I call for my husband who pushes out the rototiller from the shed, its winter-chilled motor spitting and coughing before it starts to plunge and rise through the soil as Allan disciplines it like a willful animal.  Soil, compost and manure blend together in a farm fragrance only a gardener would love.  I inhale it mixed with the late winter salt air from the bay below the hill.  This is sensuous.  This is loving the land and feeling the land love back.

            This quarter, at the University of Washington, I am taking a class in Literature and the Environment.  The texts include writings by Charles Darwin, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and more.  Subjects evoke awareness of all the crimes we have wrought on our environment from pesticides, plastics, fossil fuel emissions . . . Each day I leave campus more informed but grieved. I walk through the Quad where cherry blossoms crouch tightly in their buds.  In a few weeks visitors and students will swarm below those trees, taking selfies among the delicate pink blossoms.  Brides will pose for wedding photos.  Japanese children, dressed in diminutive kimono or lacy party dresses will pose for their parents’ cameras.  This bountiful gift of nature arrives each spring, yet I know now that those blossoms are a false spring as well.  Sadness chokes me even as I luxuriate beneath the warm spring sun in an overheating planet.

            I can only evade the news so long.  This past week, Donald Trump announced his intention to encourage logging for profit in the National Parks, leading to fewer trees to absorb the excess CO2 emissions — excess CO2 from proliferate use of fossil fuels.   Here I am preparing soil for a garden, for vegetables my family will eat all summer and early fall.  I will bag up beans and carrots for my neighbors.  There will be plenty to take to the local food bank as well.  There is dirt under my fingernails.  I am aware of it as I wring my hands in despair at the disregard for our planet exhibited by enough people in our country who thought Donald Trump would “take care of them.”  My grief and rage diminish somewhat in the fresh air and in my preparation for a garden. Why should I experience anger while I prepare for nourishment?

Today’s reading for the Literature and the Environment class is from Terry Tempest Williams ’Refuge (Third Vintage edition, 2018. P.137). Williams relates a conversation with an African woman: “I am Kikuyu.  My people believe if you are close to the Earth, you are close to people. . . What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family.  Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community.  It is a matter of living the circle.  Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land, our kinship with each other has become pale.  We shy away from accountability and involvement.  We choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged.  In America, time is money.  In Kenya, time is relationship.  We look at investments differently.”

Engaging with the land may be an unusual octogenarian occupation, especially as my harvest years will be fewer, but we all need hope for regeneration.  I am slower in my gardening tasks.  I am easily distracted after latching the garden gate to return down a path to the cottage.  I pass a bark-shedding birch tree we planted twenty-five years ago.  The old, grayed bark cracks its way up the thirty-foot height of the tree.  Hundreds of holes, large and small, tell a story of invasion by insects and foraging for those insects by red-headed sapsuckers.  Some page-sized sheets of bark have shed to the ground.  I reach to experience the satisfying release of more bark, coming like wallpaper peeled from an ancient wall.  The exposed trunk stands in striated caramel and cream.  I lay my hand against it.  The surface is moist as the flesh of a newborn child. 

CHRISTMAS RETURNS

Christmas and Returning – not standing at an Amazon Returns Outlet with an unwrapped gift that doesn’t suit your needs or desires.  Returning is also about remembrance and renewal.

Our cottage on the tidal Quilcene Bay looks out at migrations in cinemascope. This week the scaups return, hundreds whistling down to the water’s surface.  Last week there were mallards.  Soon the Canadian geese migrating north will divide the horizon in a perfect V-formation that is a marvel. Which goose gets to lead the flock?  How does each following goose sense the exact spacing one to the other like cadets on a drill field?  While pondering these ornithological questions, I remember Huey.  Years past, on the hill behind our cottage, a man found a goose egg in a nest and brought it home to see if he could hatch it and have the goose imprint upon him.  It worked all too well.  That goose, we called Huey, thought he was dog, and therefore chased any visitors off his owner’s property, flapping his wings and honking a battle cry as he flew low at knee level to attack the passerby.  That hiker was my husband who knows waterfowl and gave Huey a toss by his neck that not only humbled the goose but attracted it to Allan’s authority   Soon, Huey left the hill and settled on our waterfront lawn, there to nip at my bottom when I bent over to pick strawberries.  Some days he marched around honking his ownership of our place, leaving deposits of goose poop for our grand-dog to slurp up.  

Surely ours was a love/hate relationship with Huey, but who couldn’t feel affection for a bird so clearly devoted to my husband as to follow him around just in case Allan needed a goose to lend him a wing.  Inevitably, Huey looked up during the autumn goose migration and spotted an attraction to divert his attention, likely a lovely lady goose. And he was gone. We rather missed him. Then the following spring, while planting the garden, I heard the clarion honks of returning Canadian geese.  Like a mother remembering the cry of her infant, I swore I could discern Huey’s distinct honking.  I looked up to see one goose peeling off from the perfect V, flying toward me, then landing on our cottage roof where he waved his wide wings, singing something like “Hey guys, I’m returning home.”  For two years Huey went and returned, until he didn’t.  Perhaps he fell victim to the waterfowl hunters shooting from the opposite shore. Perhaps we will never know, but what we do know is that somehow Huey returns in the telling of his story.

Christmas is a season for telling stories.  Surely, nostalgia may invite emotions of loss and separation. But stories of those departed or times long gone live anew in God’s wonderful gift of remembrance.  I am fortunate that my Seattle home is walking distance from Lakeview Cemetery where my parents are interred. Early in December, I bring a little decorated evergreen tree to the stone, placing it in an embedded vase.  I clear the detritus of autumn from the carved names and wish Merry Christmas to Mom and Dad.   Sometimes, I sing a favorite carol. This year I retold them the story of Dad marching down the stairs Christmas morning.  He wore an off-center Santa cap and carried sleigh bells that usually hung from the mantel, all the time “Ho Ho Hoing” with a baritone Merry Christmas. As youths, my brother and I would roll our eyes wanting to get on with the presents. Now, standing in a mist at the cemetery, I retell the scene to the December air while the image of Dad’s white hair beneath the red Santa hat brings me comfort and cheer.

Each year, my husband and I send out Christmas cards that are his art accompanied by a poem written by me.  This year his watercolor depicts two pair of mallards landing on a wintry shore.  I dedicated my poem to Florence Cotton, a long-time member of our church, whom I visited monthly when old age and declining vision kept her from attending services.  Writing the poem reminds me of those visits and how Florence’s optimistic and venerable wisdom enriched my life.

                         Again                                                                                                              

 For Florence Cotton who lived a hundred years                       

This might be the year I return
in a season when songbirds have flown
but the first snow blesses brown grass
and skaters in red scarves carve
figure eightrs on the frozen cove
before Father calls us home,
his flashlight forming a cone directing
us back to where we belong.

Seasons are like that, marking themselves
in migrations. Nature shows off like Hope
born from living through months
with expectant faith that whatever fled
will return like shallow tides to flood.

Sometimes I miss things, Florence says, events
I meant to attend before succumbing to sleep.
Yet deep in morening dreams, departed friends
return, their names and forgotten faces arrive,
bringing me what I feared had flown away.

                            

                              

   

WITHOUT

Walking in January, I praise what is absent.  Usually lined with sweet gum trees — a canopy of broad green leaves in summer, large golden leaves in autumn–in January not a stubborn leaf remains on a tree.   It is as if this part of Capitol Hill did a thorough house cleaning, stripping each tree, but for the brownish gray branches.  They reach outwards and upwards, a tangle of geometric limbs, reminding me of Nature’s architecture.  Each limb seems to have purpose as a balance for another on the other side, or an extension from which thinner branches reach out like tendrils to the sun.  Rather than admire a shower of leaves, I note the rounded burls up the trunk, like moss-covered hats.  Thick moss paints itself between heavy limbs that decided to make their own way from a massive trunk.  On this twenty-seven-degree day, surely insects must snuggle in the soft moss.  Grateful for the absence of leaves, I see high in some trees, baskets of crazily assembled twigs and grasses.  Perhaps they are nests for squirrels cleverly camouflaged in other seasons, but out there now vulnerable to winter’s wind.

In the absence of abundance, I look for things to note, as if I were in a museum where the major exhibition is closed, and so I take time to view a few treasures I had ignored on other visits.  Last week, a wooded walk on Hood Canal revealed a giant stuffed bear attached to a tree. This morning, it is the angle of the sun on my neighbor’s door.  Although the solstice has passed, and each day may be a bit longer, it is as if the sun barely creeps over the horizon, casting long shadows even at 11:00 AM.  Today the light captured my neighbor’s front door where a Christmas wreath still hangs, a deep black-green circle with a velvet red bow.  Shadows from surrounding leafless trees dance around the wreath.

Granted this is a sunny day, uncommon in the Pacific Northwest winter, so sun and shadows grab my attention.  But rain or shine, there is interesting stuff dropped on parking strips and sidewalks.  A gigantic pine tree on the corner drops pinecones as large as ten inches long and three inches wide.  They lie atop a bed of thin dry needles.  Surely they would be a treasure if I imagined a creative use for them.  A friend celebrated Christmas by gathering large cones and stuffing them with suet and peanut butter, then hanging the cones around a park adjacent to her home.  She said her project was her gift to the many birds that winter-over in the woods. 

Walking through Volunteer Park, I note park benches and picnic tables without people enjoying them.  In summer they would be full.  There is something poignant about an empty park bench.  Is it waiting to be occupied?  Does it hold a memory of a couple resting there in June, holding hands, planning their future together?  And the playground, too cold for children today.  Iron poles chill a child’s hands.  I recall those warnings we shared in childhood about not putting your tongue on a frozen iron pole, then daring a kid to do it, but fearing consequences if the child accepts the dare.  The playground also remains in Waiting mode. 

Perhaps it is waiting that defines January.  There is no definitive Christmas on the horizon.  Even spring is far off, so waiting becomes waiting for what?  Yesterday my mailbox had three seed catalogs, each with a colorful cover of abundance:  golden carrots, blushing tomatoes, leafy lettuce.  If I fill out the order sheet, will my garden be ready any sooner? In my backyard,  I walk past raised beds where today skeletons of  tomato and pepper plants droop, bowing in submission to the freeze.  There too, a kind of beauty in the plants without fruit.  

At noon, I took a walk with my grandson to have a good, long visit before he returns to New York after his semester break.  As we walked along Prospect Street, an historic avenue of old Seattle wealth and mature maples, I shared with him my attraction to leafless trees. “Sure, Nana,” he agreed.  I have a leafless tree outside my New York apartment.  I love it in November when the last leaves drop.  Inside, I have more light.”  That’s it!  In a month when daylight only lasts seven or eight hours at best, we can feel as if we are deprived.  Yet a tree’s bare branches let the light shine through.