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My Dad

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Father’s Day is next week, and my favorite bookstore is full of cards for the occasion. Some are funny, some are tender, and they all make me a bit sad, remembering my Dad, and a bit happy, remembering my Dad. Like many men of his generation he served in World War II, and I probably wouldn’t be here writing this if that hadn’t been the case. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, my Mom was born and raised in a tiny town in Texas, and they only met because the Army Air Force stationed him in Amarillo Texas. This fact has often led me to muse that the purpose of war is not world domination, but rather the stirring up of the gene pool. It would explain why, despite all these millennia of killing each other, there are more of us all the time.

After the war they worked their way back to New York, to a house in the suburbs and, eventually, four children. This was Dad’s favorite picture of the first two of us – me and my older sister. Dad called us his “hobos.” I remember that hat, which I wore for years until either I outgrew it or it fell apart. There has never since been a hat so fine to wear.

Dad was a wonderful photographer, shooting black and white film and making gorgeous prints. I used to watch him in the darkroom, waving his hands between the enlarger and the photographic paper, a magician altering exposures for emotional depth. I always thought his prints were museum worthy but, trained as an engineer, he denied being an artist. He always encouraged and supported me in my own work as an artist and poet, and claimed he had no idea where I got it from. He said he “didn’t get” poetry. Then my Mom slid into dementia, and I showed him a poem I wrote about it. And he said, “Now I get poetry. It’s like why I take black and white pictures instead of color.” 

He had other hobbies, too – a wood shop, a metal shop, restoring antique cars, shooting at a rifle range. He taught me to shoot what we called my mother’s .22, though I never saw her shoot it. When age made it too hard for him to use his shop equipment, he built model ships. I have his model of  The Victory here, in a town unexpectedly suitable for the name. I have many of his custom-made tools, too, repurposed for my crafts. Writing this, I can see where I got my propensity for running many creative outlets at once.

He also gave me my love of classical music, which was always playing when he was home. He gave me my first serious camera when I was a teenager, and this is a photo I took of him with it. He looks – well, a little amused, a little proud, a little indulgent. This is how I remember my father’s face; a face it always made me happy to see. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. 

What Heaven Would Be Like

In my father’s heaven, there would be
perpetual restoration of antique cars.
The needed part would turn up
at the perfect moment,
just late enough
for deep satisfaction.
Authentic colors of paint
would line his garage,
real wood for the dash,
real leather for the seats,
and none of the necessary clanging
of this ecstatic work
would drown out Moussorgsky,
Tchaikovsky, or Zarathustra.
In my mother’s heaven,
there would be no workshops.
My father, coming in 
from the harp-strung air,
would listen only to her,
and however wild and incredible
the stories she told,
he would believe them,
and they would be true.

published in The Kansas Quarterly

Summer A-Coming In

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It’s been an especially lovely week to be out in the yard and garden. We’ve had a run of gorgeous weather, so that prepping the raised beds for their tomato plants and flower seeds was less like a chore and more like sunbathing. I cleared off the weeds, sheared the clover, spread compost, and glanced down idly, wondering if there would be four-leaf clovers this year. Yes! There they were, laughing up at me – half a dozen good luck omens, casually waiting to be noticed and carried into the house. Why should flowers have all the fun? 

In the front yard all the perennials are showing up in order. The crabapple finishes flowering, the pear tree finishes flowering, and the iris knows it’s next. How do they do that? The bearded iris toward the back, the Siberian iris in front, and the pear tree off to the left make a joint project of shadows together on the newly bright lawn.

And once the iris are underway, the peonies chime in. It’s turning out to be an excellent year for peonies – many blooms and many buds on every bush. This is a close-up of the peonies, so you can’t tell they’re interspersed with more irises. They seem to enjoy each other’s company. That inspired me to look into companion planting – the idea that certain plants do better together than separately. The classic example of this is the Three Sisters of native American farming practice: beans, squash, and corn. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the squash and corn, corn provides a support for the beans to climb, and squash shades the ground with its broad leaves, blocking out weeds. Since I don’t have room in my garden for corn and I don’t like beans, I’m looking for other combos instead. 

Meanwhile I found a different companion right at my front door. The shaggy part appeared first and I had my doubts, but once the gap between lantern and wall was filled in, a neat little nest appeared on top. It’s very touching to see that a bird feels safe from predators when close to people. We may be disturbing their flyways and disrupting their climate, but indeed the foxes, owls, and hawks flee when they see us coming. Birds have figured this out. You’d expect a creature that started out as a dinosaur to be adaptable like that. 

Perennial Thoughts

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The weather’s been up, down, and sideways this spring, uncertain enough to keep my seedlings stuck in the house, looking out their sunny window as erratic frost rolls and unrolls over the lawn. But out in the yard, the perennials are not confused. The reliable chives wave their purple goodbyes to the daffodils, while the last of the wild hyacinths refuses to cede ground. Nice try, but nothing can stop the chives. 

Across the lawn from the herb garden, at the edge of the woods, I’ve made a tiny patio of a few rows of bricks. It’s just big enough for a single chair, me, and a cup of tea, maybe a book. The lilies of the valley would like me to know, though they look dainty and possess the scent of sweet innocence, that they are a power to be reckoned with, and should have been consulted. Their outrider will move that brick if I don’t stop him.

The asparagus, another perennial, has been poking its fingers up through leaf mold for weeks now, and the time has come for me to stop cutting and carting them off for dinner, and let them feed themselves instead. They’re at the stage now where they look like, well, sort of skanky Christmas trees – the tightly-closed tips expanded into branches, but the ferny leaves not yet fluffing them out. 

Sturdy, reliable, undemanding, how nice that these trusty plants come back every year with no effort on my part. My lamium, for example – such an excellent groundcover. But what’s that little purple flower sneaking into the picture from the upper right hand corner? Creeping Charlie! A weed! Alas, a perennial too, and just as determined to come back as all the others. The traits so wonderful in a plant you want, so aggravating in a plant you don’t. It’s hard to see their habits as the same, but they are.

Take garlic mustard, for instance. Early colonists brought it with them as a desirable salad green, but few here today consider it palatable. Including me – I’ve tried it. It’s not perennial, but so profligate of seed it might as well be. When I first moved to Michigan and saw stands of garlic mustard blooming in spring, I thought it was lovely. Then I discovered its aspirations to world dominance. Its specialty is swamping the opposition in a bid to turn diversity into monoculture, as though some mega-chemical company were in charge. If only my basil would do that.

 

The View From 35,000 Feet

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I’m a little late with this post because I just returned from a visit to friends and family in San Francisco. I like a window seat when I fly, and no matter how much reading material I bring, I mostly look out the window. I like to watch the maze of taxiways resolve into a map of the airport, and when it disappears in clouds I hear Joni Mitchell in my head: angel hair, ice cream castles, feather canyons, she said. She didn’t mention this one, a teddy bear, or maybe my cat waiting for me at home. 

Then we’re above the clouds looking down. I watch for mountains carrying snow maps of their canyons and ridges, as natural as the crinkly lines of rivers, or the clouds and their shadows. But what about the big smooth snowfields – treeless due to landslides, or landscaped into ski resorts? The hand of nature or the hand of man? 

There’s no question about it when we come to the green circles of irrigated farms. The first time I saw these they made me laugh – could anything be more incongruous with natural landscapes? It’s blatantly obvious that they’re not natural, but why is that? Nature pulls off perfect form with flowers, and likely with some of the plants being grown in those circles. These are on a grid and straight lines are another tip-off of human activity, but I’ve seen circles randomly placed and they looked just as unnatural as these.

Earth, we’re told, is not a perfect sphere, but a lumpy one. From cruising altitude you can just see the curve in the earth’s horizon, a small version of those photos of earth from the moon. For me it packs the same message: we all live here; we’re all in this together. We share the sky, too. On cross country flights it’s not unusual to pass a plane going the other way, whose progress in the opposite direction gives the illusion that it’s zipping along much faster than we are. Then I think of a woman in that plane looking out her window and seeing our plane zipping past hers. Maybe she’s taking a photo of us.

Some four and a half hours after we lifted into the sky, we came back down again. One last view of Detroit area street grids, and the big picture so clear from our high perspective fragmented back into the tangle of details we live in. I’ll be knee deep in them tomorrow, but right now I’m going to fix a cup of tea, sit here, and think about the sky.

Field Trip

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On a beautiful spring day I went with some friends to visit the Community Farm of Ann Arbor, located, according to the Michigan Historical Commission, on “Centennial Farm, owned by the same family for over one hundred years.” Community Farm was Michigan’s first CSA – Community Supported Agriculture – an arrangement where, typically, members of the community pay a share of the costs of farming, and then receive a share of what the farm produces. In some cities this may mean a box of produce shows up on your doorstep every week. But when the farm is accessible members can really become a community, showing up, volunteering, connecting what they eat with where it came from: dirt, water, sunlight, and in the case of Community Farm and its lead farmer, Kacee, joy in the process of engagement with nature. 

So we toured the farm, and learned about Biodynamic Agriculture. Kacee told us biodynamic theory originated in the early 1900’s, considers the farm as a complete organism, and combines organic practices with astrological factors such as phases of the moon. They’ve been practicing it on the Community Farm since 1988. But wait, I said – that sound like the Old Farmer’s Almanac. People have been planting crops according to the phase of the moon for at least 230 years. “Well,” said Kacee, “I wouldn’t say the Old Farmer’s Almanac had biodynamic farming, but I’d say biodynamic farming ripped off the Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

The farm has two barns, built over a hundred years ago on foundations of stones cleared from the land. The timber came from local maple trees, and was put together with mortise and tenon instead of nails. All of it, of course, done with hand tools. Right next to the old barns is a shiny new solar array which powers, among other things, a solar tractor, once an ordinary tractor, which they modified themselves.

There were three cows out in a meadow, and when we learned they were not milked one of my friends said, Oh, they’re freeloaders. No, said Kacee, everyone on the farm works. They’re out there in the fallow field, browsing and fertilizing it for us. There were also three non-freeloading sheep and three non-freeloading goats. Advice on the farm’s website says, “it is best never to grab a goat’s horns, as it triggers a butting reflex.” Good to know my instinct was correct.

They had a small flock of chickens, including this very handsome one. She’s a Golden Laced Wyandotte, and doesn’t she look the part? They do collect the eggs, which go into the farm shares. There are two cats, but they and the chickens coexist peacefully. The farm offers lessons in stewardship, solar electric systems, soil workshops, and canning workshops, but unfortunately not one on coexistence. If the cats and chickens offered it, I can think of lots of world leaders I’d like to sign up.

Last on the list of animals at the farm, came bees. Why do I never think of bees as animals? There’s no denying how animate they are, and how estimable: organized, cooperative, productive, communicative. They won’t attack unless the hive is threatened. Bees, too, could teach us a lot if we’d listen. The farm offers Hiveside Chats for those inclined to pay attention.

April Comes

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Now that we’re past groundhogs and the equinox, it’s really starting to look like spring. April veers from Fools’ Day to Arbor Day, sweeping Passover and Easter along in a current of National Poetry Month, rainshowers, and regrowth. If T.S. Eliot thought April was the cruelest month for pushing out lilacs before he was ready, what did he think of the daffodils? Look at them there, mocking misanthropes. Go daffodils, I say.

Last fall Doug helped me plant a lot of scilla in the lawn, perfect bulbs for the job because they bloom and fade before the grass needs mowing. Also, the deer and rabbits won’t eat the flowers. They will, however, nip off the emerging tips of the leaves. It’s a little hard to tell which perpetrator is responsible for this damage – rabbits have sharp front incisors and make clean cuts; deer bites are more ragged. There are both types of damage here, so the bunnies and the Bambis are sharing. How lovely that would be if they were eating weeds. 

I like my flowers to naturalize into nice thick boisterous clumps, swaths, and patches, but I do think this little one growing all by itself in the leafmulch is very elegant. It was moved off its original spot by unknown forces of nature: hyperactive squirrels; frost heave; or maybe the human element of a snow plow going a little too deep, a little off target. Sometimes it turns out well when your plans go astray.

It’s time to start the seeds for my garden. Doug took the folding tables upstairs to the big sunny window in the guest room, we set them up, and I spread my trays across them. Frassy was extremely interested in this, even more so when I started filling pots with dirt. She stepped from one tray to the next, inspecting, and apparently approved enough to commandeer one of them for a nap.

Outside, meanwhile, the perennials that vanished with winter are reasserting themselves. T.S. Eliot might see these as ghastly hands reaching up from the grave, but in fact they’re new growth rising from the roots of peonies. They have all of April and all of May to build out the torrent of ruffles and perfume that will burst from them in June; they’re in no rush. I’m happy as long as I can see it coming.

 

Not Winter, Not Spring

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When Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow six weeks seemed like a long stretch of time, but like all stretches of time it has passed. Faint signs of spring are accumulating. Stuff that looks like snow still escapes from the clouds, but by the time it’s on the ground it’s rain, and has even melted the big snow berms the plows pushed up. The hellebores whose blooming I doubted, have unfurled themselves in plenty of time to stake their claim as Lenten Roses. 

The foxgloves in the front yard are also waking up. They looked so dead for so long, but the bright green whorls stashed in their hearts have escaped into sunlight. The deer are attracted by the fresh color and step up with hopeful hearts, but when they get close enough they realize this is digitalis, and poisonous to eat. Which has a positive impact on the flowerbed, because while they’re standing there in their disappointment they deposit a lot of manure. 

The milkweed in the back yard launched many seeds last fall, but held some back for spring. Winter laid the tall stalks on the ground, where the last winged white seeds fell out into snow and flew nowhere. Seeing them once the snow melted off, I thought – what’s that, dryer lint? Feathers? But it was milkweed seed, staking a claim to its parental territory, while the early crowd prospected further afield. 

Through the last few weeks of up-and-down weather I’ve been checking for progress in the fenced garden. Several of the raised beds that grow tomatoes in summer spend the winter months nurturing tulip bulbs, and they need to send shoots nosing up a few weeks before they intend to bloom. So they had to be getting ready. I looked – nothing – looked – nothing – and then pop, a whole gang of them, fat tulip leaves like donkeys’ ears standing up out of the dirt of tomatoes past. It seemed to have happened faster than it could possibly have happened.

But however fast or slow, it was certainly expected. What I didn’t expect was two tatsoi plants in the next bed over, acting like perennials. Cold hardy is one thing, but surviving a Michigan winter is something else. Not all the tatsoi did. What made the difference? Mini-micro climate?  Different snow cover? Good genes? Random luck? Will this survivor tatsoi differ in taste, toughness, or texture from tatsoi eaten in season? I would find out, but I don’t want to reward its efforts at resilience by ripping it out of the ground. For now I’m content to marvel at it. Resilience is a wonderful thing.

Winter, Light, and Windows

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The weather’s been having a lot of fun with us. Over the last week we’ve been up and down the thermometer from ten degrees to fifty and back, with the coming week predicted to do the same. In the warm spells the snow goes, and when the snow goes we lose a lot of information. In this photo from a few days ago, you see a clear demonstration of why I only grow my tomatoes behind a fence. A few other animals wander through, but that’s mostly the heart-shaped hoofprints of deer.

That evidence is gone now, but the strengthening light has its own games to play. To me this photo shows the lovely effect of the sun’s rays reaching out like fingers of a warm, gentle hand. My grandmother saw it as “the sun drawing water.” I thought that was awfully prosaic, but it’s another possible point of view: where I see something coming down, she saw something going up. It’s so common for different people to look at the same thing and see it differently, it must be an advantage to a community – whatever’s happening in the world, you have options in deciding what to do. 

Whether the sun is pulling them up or their roots are pushing them out, my hellebores are positioning themselves to be ready for the race to spring. They don’t exactly die back in winter but they lie low. Their newly perked-up posture chimes with their nickname, Lenten Roses, and bodes well for flowers well before Easter. 

The increasing light also plays games with my indoor plants. From the dining room window it looks like there’s something red blooming outside on the snow, or at least some persistent fallen leaves. But no. It’s the reflected glory of the poinsettias, the window partly a mirror and partly transparent in this particular afternoon sunshine. 

There’s a little of the same thing going on at my studio window, though you have to look beyond the riot of frills and frolic that is my amaryllis collection to see it. The red phantom of an amaryllis has materialized way out by the road, where a last strip of snow hangs on in the shadows. Is it a ghost of the past winter? A mirage of the coming spring? Now new snow is falling, thin and unconvincing, much of the ground too warm to sustain it. The red ghosts are gone but their fleshly originals are still at my windows, stretching out to lean against the glass, in case the sun calls on them again for a bit of magic.

Olympics and Valentines

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This week I’ve been watching the Olympics, where athletes ski dangerously fast down dangerously steep slopes, slide across rock-hard ice on narrow steel blades while carrying other athletes or leaping into the air, wheel up and down curved walls on small boards, and do other activities where they are subject to, and frequently suffer from, very hard falls with dire results. After which a reporter holds a microphone to their exhausted lips, and they say it was fun and they loved it. 

As a person whose idea of a great time in February is sitting in a chair by a window, listening to music, drinking tea, writing, and taking the occasional photo, I have a hard time wrapping my head around this. Not only how do they love doing their sport now – how did they love it enough to do it enough to get this good at it? Then I hear their stories, how they knew it was who they were from an early age, and I understand that. I’ve felt I was a writer since I was eight years old. Something catches you by the heart, and there you are. Maybe you were born to do it, maybe it came sailing to you from the outside world, or maybe it’s some of each, but it nestles into your nature one way or another and you can’t not do it.

The closest we have to an athlete in our house is definitely Frassy, born fully equipped for hunting birds and mice. Mice show up from time to time, but she’s adapted to the lack of birds indoors by playing with feathers we dangle from a string. In the absence of even that, she makes moves anyway. I can’t say if she loves what she does, but she definitely can’t not do it. 

A very wise friend used to say “Love is not what you say. Love is what you do.” He was speaking of love in human relationships, but I’ve come to feel it applies much more broadly. It’s the way champion athletes love their sport. In fact a democratic civilization is built on saying anything you want, as long as you’re respectful in what you do. Love your neighbor, your city, your country, your world – it’s all in what you do. I hope you all got sweet, kind Valentine’s Day cards yesterday and gave and got kind deeds to go along with them.

Instead of counting medals as I watch the rest of the Olympics, I’ll be looking for more stories of how people fall in love with the crazy endeavors we call sports, and thinking about how anyone falls in love with anything – a sport, a person, anything. Some take losing harder than others, but it seems for many Olympians it’s better to have played and lost than never to have played at all. I wish success to all of them, but since that’s impossible I wish them all joy in the skid, the slide, the leap, the turn. The doing.

Snow and Shadows

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I put on my insulated snow pants, Doug’s thick, heavy alpaca sweater that he found too warm to wear, wool socks, snow boots, down-filled gloves, and my great big hooded down coat, and went out to take pictures of this beautiful, if hyperactive, winter. The sky was bright, the snow was brilliant, and the shadows were deep. Even the tracks of Christen’s truck, where she plowed our driveway, made a dramatic statement. The world was black, white, and blue.

The snow became a record of everything happening in the yard. I walked to the mailbox and back to put a letter out, leaving a swoopy swath, a frozen wake. When I went out again to bring in arriving mail I saw my footprint trail and got inspired – or maybe goofy. The cursive loop on the upper right is my path back.

The deer made more sensible trails, skirting the crabapple tree where, alas, there was no more fallen fruit, on their way from the river to the woods. Some clouds passing through moved the shadows around. My gloves were supposed to work on touchscreens, but my phone failed to recognize them. I pulled one oversize sweater sleeve out from my coat cuff over my hand, slipped off the glove, and snapped the shutter. Except a phone doesn’t have the kind of shutter that snaps. I think I activated it to scan.

Winter shadows bring out so much structure we otherwise don’t see. Documenting it reminded me of another function of shadows. Tomorrow will be Groundhog’s Day! The premise is ridiculous in Michigan, where starting at February second we are absolutely going to have six more weeks of winter, shadows or not. Furthermore, our local groundhog comes out of her burrow at random times during the winter, for her own woodchucky reasons. She makes amusing, long wallows as she shuffles through the snow between the woods and the deck. But a bit of the ridiculous to lighten up life in its coldest moments is not amiss.

Then I came inside, removed my insulating layers, fixed a cup of tea, and scrolled through my photos. They were full of animal tracks, but the only critter out there was me, protected by fur, wool, and feathers, whose providers perhaps found shelter under our decks, sheds, and woodpiles. A mutual aid society. The sun slid off to the west and the string of lights on the deck came on, both muffled and emphasized by the softly folded snow. The lights burn for six hours and then the timer turns them off, leaving the sky undisturbed and whoever’s sleeping under the deck in peace. I feel a lot more charitable toward the deer and woodchucks, and even squirrels, in winter. It’s hard times for them, and after all I have no flowers or tomatoes to worry about. In hard times everyone needs all the friends they can get.