Tag: writing

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.

Resolution

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I like to start every new year with a resolution or two, chosen from my list – unwritten, but still a list – of things I really want to do, but keep not getting around to. Not things I should do but avoid, like exercise, or giving up snacks. There are so many happy, satisfying things that need doing and can be turned to instead. For instance, I’ve gotten behind on my favorite, persistently arriving magazine, because I haven’t been traveling. Magazines are perfect for places where your attention is frequently interrupted – airports and airplanes, for example – because they consist of discrete parts. You can finish a whole article while waiting for your flight to be called, and not lose the thread as will happen with a book. You can dip in and out of the letters, poems, and cartoons in between the good views out your window seat. I’m quite content not to be traveling these days, but I miss reading my New Yorkers. So that’s one possibility.

Then there’s my indoor gardening. I brought my curry leaf plant in for the winter so it wouldn’t die, and it didn’t die. It has such an abundance of wonderful, fragrant curry leaves that I really want to cut some and dry them, for future use. Would they make a nice tea? I don’t especially like to cook, but I do like to play with my plants.

My spider plants could also use some attention. Their adorable enthusiasm for life leads them to throw out new, spindly limbs in all directions, each one flourishing a baby spider plant at the end. I’ve gathered these into plant supports over Mamaplant’s head so they don’t sprawl all over their neighbors, but every so often I cut them off, pot them up, and resettle them on other windowsills, sometimes in other people’s houses. It satisfies my urge to grow and propagate things, despite the snow you see on the other side of that window. So, more possibilities.

Then there’s all this yarn I’ve collected in what Kaffe Fassett calls a colorway. Whatever else I’m doing I like my hands to be busy, so knitting or crocheting is another pleasure. Frassy has a new habit – pawing a hank or ball of yarn out of its nest and carrying it around the house in her mouth, kitten-like. She doesn’t unwind or chase them, and I really don’t know if they are substituting for kittens or dead mice. But it gives me the added motivation of using the yarn while I can still find it. Also good to finish any scarves or sweaters before I run out of winter. 

While I was saving yarn from Frassy, I came across not one but two little notebooks full of notes, bits, and pieces for poems. Between these and the many poems always in my head, it would be quite satisfying to convert some of these scraps into poems. Another possibility. I will choose one or two of these possibilities for my resolution this year, but can’t tell you which. New Year’s resolutions are like wishes on a star: I was taught that if you told anyone about them, they wouldn’t come true. It’s like why you say “break a leg” to a ballerina before she goes onstage, as though some malevolent force is listening in, ready to thwart your hopes. Wish her well and she’s doomed; wish her ill, and it’s certain not to happen. So, break a leg, one and all. Let’s see if we can nudge malevolent forces in the desired direction for 2026.

Remembering Jean Burden

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Every September first I think of Jean Burden. This was her birthday – September Morn, she would say, and laugh. She was a poet, an essayist, a teacher, and a cat lover, and would have been one hundred eleven years old today. This photo is from one of her lovely Christmas parties, probably when she was in her seventies. She died at ninety three. I met Jean soon after moving to Altadena, when I mailed off a set of poems to the poetry editor of Yankee magazine. Yankee, published in New Hampshire, was always in our Long Island house when I was growing up, and deep in its back pages was a single page of really good, serious poetry. I had a poem about a blizzard that I thought was a good fit, but it was aiming high to hope to be published where famous poets trod. I sent it off with a few others and a self-addressed, stamped reply envelope – that’s how it was done before email and websites – and waited to hear back. I was surprised and delighted when it arrived with a letter accepting “The Blizzard,” and the amazing news that Yankee’s poetry editor lived in Altadena! She also invited me to be in her poetry workshop. And that’s how I met Jean Burden.

Jean was in her sixties and I wasn’t thirty yet. She was elegant, knowledgeable, confident, and lived in a wonderful small house that might have been part of a farm before the suburb filled in around it. Though I’d had a few poems published in places of no particular distinction, I had never read my poems aloud to anyone. I was nervous and self-conscious but she was gracious and kind, setting out cookies and tea for the group. She could be brutal about the poems themselves, but not to the poets. One of her favorite expressions when someone was devoted to a line, or an image, that didn’t work, was. “Cut it out. You can always use it in another poem.” We had fun applying this to random words and situations, but really it was good advice. She helped us back up and look at our poems more objectively, checking what we said against what we meant. Sometimes a poem surprised you as you wrote it.

My copies of her first book of poems, Naked as the Glass, and her second, Taking Light From Each Other, bloom with bookmarks for my favorite poems. The pet care books she wrote under the pen name Felicia Ames are still available in used editions. Cats were her thing, as they are mine; another bond. My copy of her anthology of cat poems, A Celebration of Cats, is tattered from use. I still have a stuffed toy cat from her collection that was given to me after she died.

Her book Journey Toward Poetry is a good grounding in her approach. She says about her college studies with Thornton Wilder, that she was starved for “not only criticism, invaluable as this can be, but the contagion of enthusiasm for the art itself that can only be communicated by someone actively engaged in and committed to it.” Every year I got to meet, and sometimes have a seminar or dinner with, each wonderful poet invited to read at the Jean Burden Annual Poetry Series at Cal State LA. I felt the contagion of enthusiasm she wrote about, having Howard Nemerov advise me to take a line out of a poem, or even driving Maxine Kumin to the train station. Jean was long gone when her lovely little house was lost in the January fires, the porch where the cats sat, the small garden where they hunted, the rooms where poetry and laughter bounced off the walls. Whatever remained of it has been cleaned away, carted off to a landfill. It’s ready, now, for the next thing to happen there.