More Poppy, Less Road

Post 10

April 19, 2013
8:03 am

Ending anything in the middle of spring seems anachronistic. There are blooms everywhere, small stems and stalks pushing with determination. Everything is green. Everything is moving toward the vibrant and away from the dormant. There is a wildness that I notice every spring, different from the sluggishness of summer, the mauzy farewell of autumn and the tight constraint of winter. It is natural for every aspect of life to be lifting its heels a little higher as it steps into each new day.

I've learned from this blog that I can't escape the sentimental writing that environmental scientists shun. I realize that I can't ignore the side of me that reflects with metaphor and poetic language. Fortunately, the writers we've read through this course haven't completely abandoned that either, but they base their reflections on solid, analytical rock. My writing tends to lean. I would be completely satisfied to write that the forsythia are shouting in yellow this morning. 

I had goals for this blog: dedicated writing and writing as a witness. I appreciated the assignment of consistency, writing each week from the same place. This was a particular challenge for me since I live two hours from the place I call home in New Jersey. I would time my visits back to my mother's house in order to sit outside for twenty or more minutes and record what I found. I had an appointment with a patch of grass and during the course of blog writing, that patch slowly became comfortable, dead icy blades turned green again.

My standing appointment helped me with the most important part of this blog--being a witness. I was "forced" to observe my surroundings, take note of the animals and trees I've viewed thousands of times, and in one of my favorite idioms of writing, I had to "put them down" on paper. Last week, my mom finally received notice from her lawyer that the township was ready to decide on a date for closing. September, they said, september is fine. I immediately thought of what would be in bloom that month, the end of the hydrangea, the slowly turning golden leaves of the maples. Instead of standing inside the house behind a window saying goodbye, I pictured myself in a spot similar to the one I've chosen throughout this winter and spring: on a small plot of land, claiming it for my family and myself one last time.

The robins hop back and forth on the tender grass where I sit. There is loud, vociferous birdsong every morning. I received a text from my mom earlier in the week, excitement and exclamation marks--"Happy Spring! The swallows have returned!" When she became impatient with the silence from the township as they waited for soil tests and contract wording, she emailed their lawyer to imply that it was illegal to tear down the barn once the swallows had nested in its rafters. I'm not completely surprised that we are timing our departure based on the home life of birds.

I don't think I'm going to give up on this blog. I can't say I'll have any readers in the future, but as usual, I'm not sure that bothers me. It's enough that I'm taking the time to write about this place, to remember the smaller moments of each season and record the last few seasons we had here. I know my mom and I will take our own memories with us when we finally leave in the fall, but someday, maybe we'll open up a blog with a title about noticing the individual petals of a poppy instead of staying in the car racing by a field of the bright flowers, and we'll remark to each other about that last wonderful year on the farm. "Remember those bushes of forsythia around the pond? They were beautiful."

Witness

Post 9

Friday, April 12, 2013

4:31 pm

Even without the symbolism, spring would still be my favorite time of year. New beginnings, a fresh start, rejuvenation, new life; it has many associations but when I’m outside during the month of April and everything is a shock of green and yellow, all I need to appreciate it are the colors and the brightness.

It’s always been particularly lovely at my house in the springtime. When I’m away for a while, as I was this past week, the landscape can change so quickly that it’s hard to remember a time when snow was on the ground. I particularly noticed the wind this week. The breeze had lost its icy backing and in its place was a soft warmth. The sunshine had also lost some of the hardness in its rays and there was a softer light on the trees and my face when I closed my eyes and tilted my head up.

Today is unfortunately not a day for sitting outside. It’s a more typical rainy April day, cloudy and a bit misty which light rain falling. I walk over to look at the hydrangea because I’m more impatient for their growth this year. I suppose that since this is our last summer here at this house, I want them to grow big and beautiful as if they were saying goodbye to us. What a human response to nature, I think as I look at the green tufts of leaves just beginning to show. To fulfill my own expectations of sentimentality, I demand nature to be glorious, just for me. What a selfish way of viewing my surroundings, I realize as I hold one of the stems that are poking out of the ground outside of our laundry room window. If I left tomorrow and never returned home, the hydrangea would still bloom, still produce their giant mopheads of cerulean and royal purple. They wouldn’t wilt their leaf edges in sadness or hang their flowers a little lower to the earth. They would reach taller for the sun and drink whatever water fell on their leaves and petals. They don’t halt their beauty just because there are no witnesses. They exist gloriously without needing any measure of praise.

I sit on the wooden slider we have facing the pond and the driveway, perching gingerly on my raincoat since it is stained dark with wet. The asphalt of our long driveway turns dark gray when it rains and one side of the maple trees that line it have wet bark of the same shade. Spring is transforming, I think, redemptive almost. Just when it seems too cold and dark to bare, life blooms again. I sit and watch the rain fall with quiet drops on the pond, thankful. I am not needed as witness, but I am given the gift of drawing my own assumptions on what the new growth of hydrangea implies and the importance of the rain. It's nice in a way, not to be needed. 

Hydrangea

Post 8

Sunday, March 31, 2013
3:58 pm

I don't know when my love of hydrangeas became so pervasive. I knew they were common, flowering late in the summer like clockwork. I knew that whenever I walked around the perimeter of our house, I could check on their progress, the coloring and the expression of their blues vibrant at any given time of day. I know I am now militant about watering them, prodding my mom to make sure to keep them wet, check to see if deer have been chewing their bright leaves when their foraging in the woods produces nothing quite as green.

I love hydrangea for their flexibility. Don't love pink petals? No problem--add acidiy to change them from bright pinks to blues. I’ve never liked the pink variety. The shade always seemed slightly unimpressive and suburban; someone might mistake my favorite flowers for nameless landscaping shrubs. A pink hydrangea plant seem ready for that most virulent of adjectives—common. Realistically, are the blue variety that much more unique? Could they actually be called risqué, fabulous, rum raisin to someone’s expectation of vanilla? Probably not. But the blue hydrangeas that have their roots next to the twin chimneys on the side of my house could never be mistaken for the choice of a landscaper who needed filler. They produce the kind of shocking, spectacular blue blooms that artists would squat before in plein air exercises, the blue claimed by men of royalty who wanted a color that spoke of majesty and power from which they could exclude all others. These hydrangea are shocking.

The ability to change is perhaps my favorite aspect of the flower. They can be manipulated while remaining true to their nature. They grow more beautiful in the eyes of the beholder but neither lose nor gain anything from their own selves. They are hardy and love the shade. They droop in direct sun but deep watering will perk up their large leaves. They bloom graciously in the day, unlike petulant tigerlillies, and their flowers can last for weeks. They are almost as beautiful dead as alive; dried, they are a bouquet that can last winter after winter, preserved in delicate bunches. They grow in groups on a single plant, but they do not compete with each other as roses seem to. They share and worship the sun together, exultant in each abundant head. Hydrangea seem common, but they are in deep demand at weddings and garden parties, easy to gather into thick arrangements that seem expensive even as they shun the precociousness of orchids and peonies. 

In the beds and perimeters of the house I grew up in, our hydrangea have thrived and flowered for nearly twenty years. The oldest of the two bushes are on the northwest side of the house, where they thrive in the moist soil that a leaky spigot provides for their deep roots. On occasional days in the summer, my mother will cut a few of the mopheads and gather them on the worn kitchen island, the most beautiful of blooms never cut for a simple bouquet, but left to dry naturally on their stems outside. Besides their beauty and the common sense of their growth, hydrangea are consistent with one specific word that, when I look at them, makes their beautiful flowers all the more precious. Hydrangeas mean home. 

Sentinel

Post 7

Saturday, March 23, 2013
8:47 am

The pond was meant for grander landscaping. At one time, when we were a complete family and we dreamed of additions, in-ground pools, and another dog, we imagined a better version of what I sit next to today. By better, we meant changed. A gazebo perhaps. Cattails and decorative (ie non-native) grasses. In that perspective, we would walk down to the pond and spend the soft August evening listening to tiny summer frogs and casting a line or two into the depths with a delicate plop. The ground is still hard from our latest March freeze and the dried grass crunched under my feet as I walked out the front door and down to the decrepit concrete bench. It's beautiful in its own way, as resignation can be to a woman who has outgrown the girlhood dreams for her family. I put my hand down on the bench before I sat down, even though I knew the lichen-speckled concrete would be frigid and unwelcoming. I still sit down because its cold reality is not terrible enough to change.

Supposedly spring fed, this pond has a few issues with algae. (I read later that this is often called "Pea Soup Algae" and that the lack of vegetation around the pond could be hurting the PH level in the water. The quantity of geese droppings is not helping either.) Right now, it looks better than it did in the summer when I would hook up the hose to our outside pump and force running water into the pond, trying to get oxygen to the fish. I've never really thought of our pond as an "ecosystem," a true scientific term that necessitates scientific evaluation. It's just been our pond, high when we've had a wet spring and low when it's a hot summer and there's not been much rain. I know that in the next few weeks, the Canadian geese will sit on the same knoll overlooking the water that they've nested on for over ten years, that the male will be the picture of fidelity as he watches over his brooding mate. On the first day of spring, my mother emailed a video of a solitary goose honking from the top of our roof. "Happy first day of spring!" my mother exclaimed over its loud calls.

Know Your Geese

The pond is where we watch all sorts of wildlife come and go, the smallest of insects darting over its smooth water at dusk, the fish that burp the water as they rise up for the bugs. Some years ago, my mother and I escorted a gigantic snapping turtle from our back door to the edge of the pond because he did not seem to understand that he would have to go around and not through the house in order to reach the water. Using a combinatin of a green recycling can and a horse manure cart, we carried him to the edge and let him slowly trudge into the water, hissing his thanks until the water covered his scaly tale. I renewed my vow not to swim in that water. And just last week, I watched two young bucks dance and chase two does near the water's edge. They would charge and feint, face each other and then turn and change partners. I thought it must be some sort of mating ritual, but they playfully nipped back and forth for a long while, never stopping to actually consummate the relationship, choosing instead to race across the nearby pasture, white-tipped tails in the air. It was a beautiful day. I think they just wanted to celebrate.

This has been my non-scientific study of pond life and grateful as I am for those writers who can put a name to Pea Soup Pond Algae (cyanobacteria) and Canadian Geese (branta canadensis), I think there's a place for those of us who can sit on a cold bench in March and see the murky green water of a pond and hear the call of a goose as a different kind of sentinel, just as true to the glory of the natural world as any loyal, dark-necked mate.

Sentimental Trees

Post 6

Saturday, March 9, 2013
2:34 pm


I've been preoccupied with downed trees. They've caught my eye this past week, as I'm driving or being driven. I've noticed them on this property, I've noticed them on other's. Maybe it's because I know that spring will soon cover most of these patches of forest with green boughs and they won't be as noticeable. If you think about it, how often do we notice a cracked trunk or the splintered branch? I have always focused on the limbs that are reaching upward and guiltily, I notice the leaves more often than the leaf-holders. Once I noticed one fallen tree this week, I started to keep my eye out for others which is perhaps easier after the affects of Sandy and other storms. We didn't have as much damage, but it's possible I just didn't notice what had fallen, so concerned by what had not.

I originally thought this blog should be more impersonal. Why, I'm not sure. Maybe because my association with my place is so personal, that to let the tone be too close is to risk the apathy of something I hold dear. This is the dialogue I have whenever I write and poetry tends to be the most impersonal while seeming intimate. I'm growing out of this as I become more sure of myself. Rejection of my subject by others is not as debilitating as it once was; I know it's not personal, it's just a call for improvement. So now I feel like I need to let this blog be a bit more personal, at least for this entry.

Last week, at the spot where I'm now sitting, my boyfriend asked me to marry him. I knew it was coming; since I work as a wedding photographer with my sister, we have weekends booked from now until next summer so the date was planned well before the ring appeared. I knew I wanted to be asked here, somewhere at my mom's house, somewhere on this wonderful property that has been home for most of my life. On Sunday, he brought me to this place and reminded me that some time ago, we had been clearing some trees, knocking down dead and nearly dead saplings to let the others grow stronger and make a wider path for my mother and her horses. He had stopped when a small speck of bark found its way into the corner of his eye. Still just friends, I had stood close enough to breathe in his skin and softly look for it in his lashes. Just before sunset last week, he brought me again to that spot. "Do you remember that day? Do you remember that as the time when things between us started to change?" 

Sitting now in the midst of these orange and tan pine needles on the path where he knelt down, I think of the class discussion on anthropomorphism and that the practice of associating human characteristics with nature is frowned upon, a no-no. I wonder if the scientific community would also look down on attaching sentimental value to place, to recalling a moment most vividly in the context of what color the leaves were and was the wind cold or stilled. I am not sure I could ever refrain from giving a fall day or a swim in the ocean something more than just photosynthesis and tidal movement. When I put my hand down and pick up a maple leaf, or put my hand on a slim branch that could very well be on the ground because two friends went outside on a bright autumn afternoon to clear a path of trees, I know I'll want to say more about what the moment meant than how it scientifically came to be.

The Goose's Gift

Post 5
Sunday, February 23, 2013

Sound led me today. Not the bright and emphatic sun. Not the green shoots beckoning from the yellow grasses. Small, dark shapes bulleting above me, black punctuation against the February sky. Like any good end stop, I'm encouraged to follow the punctuation and I go toward the trees where these small, expressive birds are nesting. I stand with my elbows on the top board of the front paddock, facing the road. Like so many of our fences, these boards are weathered, a kind word for their deepened lines. I am reminded how often I write about wooden borders in my poems, the lines of fences tracing so many blank pages before I have put a single strike through a "t". If I dreamed and enjoyed it, I know wooden boards would be the boundary and also the goal.

I rarely dream, nightmares or otherwise, and never find the experience particularly enjoyable. I have skipped over passages in books where the author chose a dream to illustrate confusion or metaphor. I want to read between the lines of real experience, not headspace. I dream early in the morning, when I am awakened and then drift back to sleep. This morning I was awakened by the rhythmic alarm of a goose honking, the best sign that spring is near. As I fell back to sleep, I recognized that the next few hours would have hidden meanings and recollections. But when I woke, I remembered nothing of what the goose gave me.

 The birds are cacophonic. I realize the birds I've followed are further than I thought, but the sound is acute. If I am still and drown out the cars that are occasionally passing, I can hear individual songs where before was simply music. There are more than twenty robins in the pasture in front of me, their orange breasts still emphatic with the color of the ground. They are not yet bright against green grass, signatures of the spring reveal. The transparency of new growth; what was background becomes forefront. I kneel down and shuffle some of the grasses aside. They knot together, weaving low to cover the ground and survive the snow. I smudge the dirt between my fingers and pull on some of the green shoots. The dead leaves are classic crayola colors, burnt sienna and raw umber. I can't name their trees, what came before their torn and crinkled edges.

The wind brings a chill and when the sun is covered, I'm chastised for my premature celebration of spring. Each animal has its way of surviving, or at least lasting. I would like to be under the woven grasses when it snows, or tucked in the veins of a fence board. I would like to be buried and emerge. Such a glorious season of generosity. What does spring grant us? The shattering red of a cardinal in a waiting forsythia? A robin's tiny claws unbuckling from a tuft of crab grass? A lone goose perched on gray shingles with the sun on its dark beak? It give us dreams we can't remember to write of, but when we wake, there is ellipsis after ellipsis flitting across the sky.

Back Pasture

Post 4

Sunday, February 10, 2013

2:33 PM

My back is against the red siding of the arena, the sun against my cheek as it starts to set. The shadows are stark under my pen. The snow is bringing back the edges, making little brown oases that from the air, must look like pockmarks on the face of each property.

The rushing sound is not water. Instead of a current through liquid, the hushing is through air, metal and rubber hurtling on and above asphalt. I’m familiar with the sounds of the road, even if I can't see the vehicles from the house. I can hear the thick diesel engine of the mail truck as it rumbles past the fence and pauses in front of our black mail box at the end of the driveway. The yellow school buses have a distinctive growl as they slow and pull into the parking area of the township building across the street. I can tell when my mother drives her Ford truck down the driveway, especially in autumn when her departure stirs the fallen leaves. The ice on the driveway that has persisted after Saturday’s storm makes for good security, the crackling an announcement of visitors.

But in the trees, the sounds give over to the warmth of the day and the presence of the sun. The ice slowly gives way and stains the tree limbs darker, the excess water dripping slowly down to the snow in the shadows on the ground. I love this back pasture and its fortress of trees. I have always thought of it as the moonlight pasture, although that is my private name for it. In the summer, tiny speckles of light pop and fade against the wall of trees behind the fence, the fireflies congregating in the deep darkness behind our biggest outbuilding. We pasture horses here rarely, for the grass is rich and quickly mown down to nubs by their teeth. The ground has rolls in it, like an unmade bed, and in the fall, these striations are covered by a thick layer of dusky, aubergine leaves. Today, the quirks of the field are hidden under the whiteness of the snow persisting in its shaded location.

A brief moment of quiet on the road. The silence is peaceful and then deconstructed by the twittering of birds. I hear an owl with its lowly hooing. The shadows of the grey-brown trees are long and distinct on the white ground. What makes a ground holy, I think. What dictates respect and awe for a place? I think if someone else were to sit as I am, on this worn railroad tie with their face to the sun, they would not find these muddy, wet fields to be extraordinary. They would simply be sitting in a backyard with run down fences and some horses grazing a few fields over. As with people, beauty is not the only assessment of worth. The Alaskan tundra is breathtaking but the beauty contains hidden and not so hidden dangers for humans, the same with desert and the sea. There is something to be said for veiled loveliness, something I've also found occasion to celebrate in people. When I was a teacher, I always found the quieter students to be the ones I kept my eye on, their smiles when everyone else was finished laughing, their occasional quick blinking or fixed stare when everyone else was dull and day-dreaming. 

This spot of ground is like that for me. I find this backyard beautiful because it is mine and I know the memories it holds, concealed significance. It’s a muddy, occasionally dilapidated section of land, but I find it worthwhile. I wonder if part of the reason we are able to destroy whole swaths of land is because our perception of its value is limited to our own experience there. If it can give us gas or oil now, then what matters its value to the tenants years ago? I find this to be disrespectful and short-sighted, but I’m sentimental. My mother has the choice to preserve this land because to her, it’s a place to watch wild turkeys and count the deer. It matters to her because of the wildlife she loves. She wants to protect their habitat and in a way, she is preserving the life she made for herself here even though it’s time for her to leave. It’s a small gesture in some respects, but it’s the right choice for our family. Our honorable, visible road.