the window tree

I was sitting in my studio working on projects and playing online spider solitaire, when I heard a bump, bump, bump behind me. Zerlina was asleep, no one else was home, and the wind wasn’t blowing. The bump sounded vaguely familiar, but before I could place it I turned around and discovered the source: a robin was attacking its reflection in the window.

I understand it from the robin’s point of view – there he was, flying peacefully toward a tree outside a window, a good spot to build a nest, when suddenly another robin appeared flying straight at him. Outrage! He attacked! And immediately, the other robin attacked him exactly the same way! Intolerable!

Fortunately, the noise woke Zerlina, who jumped up onto the table under the window. The robin, finding a cat apparently in the tree, backed off. But only as far as the next window. Thus began my spring ritual, carrying my cat around from window to window following the robin, holding up my pointy-eared would-be slaughterer to dissuade the bird from knocking itself out against my windowglass.

Zerlina doesn’t really like to be carried around, but she does like watching birds. She glanced back at me as if to say, just let me out there and that bird will never bother you again. An indoor cat now, she remembers her days on the street.

backing off

How many generations will it take for birds to understand windowglass? Surely there’s a survival advantage to not flying smack into them on purpose like this, beating your brains out and wasting energy on something that’s no threat at all instead of getting on with life, building a nest, or finding a mate, or singing. What kind of ridiculous species would do something like that?

Oh. Wait.

April’s here, a month of many seasons. Yesterday we had snow, today we have brilliant sun, and tomorrow could be anything. No wonder it starts with a Fools’ Day.

future glory

Sometimes it hosts the wandering holidays of Easter and Passover, but it’s not committed to them.

April aspires to spring, and carries the mantle of expectation so far as to encompass both Earth Day and National Poetry Month. It is famous for rain. Chaucer begins his Canterbury Tales with it: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…” Children sing “April showers bring May flowers.” But daffodils bloom in April, so presumably Wordsworth wrote about those crowds of them in an April past. Forsythia delivers “spring’s yellow telegram” in April, and the hellebores that

hellebores blooming

nosed up in March are April openers.

But April flowers don’t always bring happiness. When Edna St.Vincent Millay lost a loved one in April she wrote, “April/ Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month. Its position as Child Abuse Prevention Month would seem to agree with that.

I spent parts of several Aprils in Chile, where they ushered in the autumn. Spring had to wait for October.

April also hosts International Pillow Fight Day. Imagine an international pillow fight: opposing border guards toe to toe with bolsters; or maybe two guys with huge pillows flinging them across an ocean. Or over a wall. That one seems quite independent of season, though, so it would work in any hemisphere. And in any hemisphere, a day dedicated to learning to fight softly seems like a good idea.

The tables come up from the basement and settle under the wide upstairs window. The cut-off milk cartons come out of the garage. The mailman has been delivering seed orders for some time now, bags of potting soil have appeared in the garage, and the clocks have been set forward to so-called daylight savings time, bringing dark mornings back to Michigan. It’s time to start seeds for the garden.

My all-time favorite tomatoes are Burpee’s enormous Supersteak and little Black Pearl. I start nearly a whole packet of each, and then a couple of new varieties and one of last year’s trial successes, to see if it will recreate its former glory. Since weather and pests vary every year, it takes time to sort out the champions.

My neighbor says she knows spring is coming when she looks up and sees the cartons in the window. I am happy to provide this sign of coming spring, and I look carefully for others. The robins, which have wintered in the woods and shrubs, emerging only rarely, are out on the hunt for worms. Worms! Can the ground be thawed enough yet for worms? And the squirrels – are they digging up buried treasures from the fall? And look at that, the buzzards are back. Must mean the roadkill doesn’t freeze solid any more.

The earliest signs of spring – buzzards and worms. I’m still waiting for the first flowers.

Speaking of metaphor, I’ve just been reviewing and correcting proofs for my chapbook that’s being published by Finishing Line Press. Pretty exciting! Here’s the link to it. They say they’re running late, so instead of coming out at the end of March it’s likely to be published in April.

April! National Poetry Month; and also famously, according to T.S. Eliot, “the cruelest month” Obviously he was never in Michigan in February. Though if he’s going to insist that flowers blooming out of  “dead land” is a bad thing, he might really love Michigan in February. I’m glad he had those cats to cheer him up from time to time.

Here’s how it starts: a lump of a bulb, some dirt, water, and a great big window keeping the cold midwestern winter out. Add time. That’s it, just time – the bulb is tightly packed with flowers, waiting to escape. If you cut off the first amaryllis stalk after it fades, another will come up and bloom. You do nothing to deserve this, but there it is.

In fact, the dirt is optional. The bulbs will bloom without it, but if you have an urge to feel necessary, give them potting soil along with the water and let the leaves grow for a few months when the flowers are gone, and the amaryllis will stock itself back up so it can do this again next year. But don’t let it go to your head. The narcissus may or may not go along with this.

For another connection to February, both these staples of reliable indoor beauty are named for characters in stories of obsessive love. In the case of Narcissus it ended badly, but Amaryllis got her shepherd. Whether their efforts were wise or misguided, they showed great determination, and released their inner natures. Metaphor is everywhere in the garden, indoors and out.

ice on the inside

Ice crept in under doorways and wind polished the sky: minus seventeen degrees on the thermometer, minus thirty six with windchill. Skin would be frostbitten in five or ten minutes depending on your source of information, which I decided not to test.

People in Michigan are hardy in the cold – it’s called winter; life goes on – so when I tell you everything’s been closed and cancelled for the last two days you know it’s serious. I put on my thick Chilean alpaca sweater and found I could stand on the porch for a few minutes wearing it. I had to find out what this kind of cold felt like.

The first thing I felt was a bold slap on my cheeks, the kind you usually get from wind. But at this particular moment there was no wind. Air this cold didn’t need to be moving to assault you.

didn’t see the deer but I see where they slept

The next thing I noticed was how quiet it was. Was this a feature of extreme cold, or was it due to lack of traffic, birds, dog walkers, or any form of life at all except me?

In a few moments a faint creep of chill rattled at my hands, feet, and legs in their ordinary wool and leather. That was when I realized all the parts of me covered by the sweater, wrists to neck to hips, were warm. This was not only how the alpacas of Chile withstood the climate of the Andes, it was how the Inca did. Strange as this cold is to me here now, there are places in the world where people have always dealt with it.

Doug built a fire in the fireplace. The state’s Department of Natural Resources stopped requiring a permit to collect downed firewood in state forests, for the duration of the Polar Vortex. We’re burning wood that came down in our own backyard in last year’s storms, relying on the squirrels to keep planting walnuts, acorns, and wild cherry pits for a perpetual new crop of trees. If the deer don’t eat all the saplings, the woods will continue to restore themselves.

I once came across the results from a competition for The Best Job in the World. The runner-up was the person who built rockets and castles out of lego for store displays; the winner was the guy who drove up and down the state of Vermont all autumn long, tracking peak color.

But what about whoever thinks up names of plants for seed catalogs? Oh Happy Day tomatoes, Dragon Roll peppers, Magic Molly potatoes – inspirational; Jack Be Little pumpkins, Pesto Party basil, Black Cat petunias, Bees Knees monarda (it’s short) – informative. The possibilities are dazzling.

And I am dazzled. It’s hard to keep the size of my fenced garden in mind as these voluptuous images, promising desirable traits, flow out of my mailbox. I sit by my window with a cup of tea, my cat, the catalogs, and post-it notes to mark all the pages that have stuff I want. It’s only when the catalogs bristle to bursting with neon colored post-its that I will sit down and get real, pull half the markers out, and order.

No doubt producing the new hybrid comes first, but how about getting a name first, and breeding a product to match? Crowd My Roots tomatoes. Squeeze In eggplant. Vertical pumpkin vines. Works With Asparagus Cosmos. I would splurge on extra post-its for those.

Meanwhile, here’s my January gardening: the windowsill.

narcissus, jasmine, heliotrope, and amaryllis

For my far-flung family Christmas means the mailing of many packages. Some of the cartons have been used for years, have crossed the country many times, and have so many pairs of crossed-out addresses on them I can only congratulate the mailman for figuring out where they were going, versus where they were coming from. Maybe we should have left the addresses alone and just pasted on big arrows for every change of direction.

Some of the boxes have been disassembled, turned inside out, and taped back together for a set of fresh downs. Forgive me for that, I’ve acclimatized to Ann Arbor.

As each box appears, I approach with my very careful utility knife. Bubble wrap and packing paper explode across the room, revealing a stash of wrapped gifts wearing tags and ribbons I have seen before.

Finally room under the tree for the cat

On Christmas morning we find the new gifts inside are nestled into old familiar tissue paper, creases running through angels, trees, and peppermint stripes. Well-traveled shirt boxes limp a little at the corners, supported by bits of tape. I roll up the ribbons, collect the tags, smooth out the tissue, fold the boxes flat, and pick over the wrapping paper for usable centers and bits to save. The gifts will stay here, but the materials of their transport have eleven months of rest ahead of them, and will be on their way again.

Something old, something new, and one perpetually changing into the other. As Christmas turns into the New Year I make more room on shelves and tables, drawers and closets, and the new things settle in and become familiar.

Happy New Year!

My chapbook of poems, The Museum of Fresh Starts, is being published by Finishing Line Press. The book is 18 poems connected by a theme of migration, change, and the need for refuge. It will be published on March 29 but you can pre-order it here to help determine the press run.

It isn’t the direction seasonal wonder usually goes in, but it’s quite miraculous to me to walk out into the yard as winter sets in, and feel how everything has changed. A few weeks ago I was barefoot on soft ground, and now I’m in clogs and woolly socks. Air has changed, earth has changed, water has changed – all that was soft is hard. Christina Rosetti was delightfully apt noting that in winter water is like a stone; but it doesn’t seem bleak to me. It seems full of sparkle and strangeness, that just the tilt of the earth’s axis is enough to turn summer into winter.

Imagine our farthest ancestors out of Africa tripping on that rock of winter for the first time. Water like a stone – what sorcery was this? Had the sun, now so low on the horizon, changed its mind about us and gone looking for a better set of creatures to support? Even in the time of the ancient Greeks, Herodotus wrote that the Scythians believed no one could travel in the northern parts of the

Snow Scrim

continent because the air was full of feathers. He knew it to be snow, but the story reflects the astonishment of a first encounter.

We have only a scrim of snow on the ground as yet and early predictions are for a mild, dry winter; but that depends on an El Niño developing in California. A wet west coast makes a dry midwest. We are assured there’s science behind this, but it sounds like action at a distance, which is to say magic. There’s science behind winter turning water to stone, too. Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it can’t seem magical.