I did a drive today I have done many times over the last thirty years. I always notice new buildings, dirt piles, and traffic changes. But today I recalled all the times I have driven north across the Potomac River at Point of Rocks just as the leaves unfurled and a green skin grows over the changes in the landscape. Home again to walk the dog, admire the weedy garden, bring a few things into the studio where I have a hand painted sign that reminds me to “keep going” — and yes I’ll take it all.
When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
–Ada Limon, from Instructions On Not Giving Up in Poem-a-Day, 5/15/2017
In late winter we cut down a big mulberry tree at the back, north side of our house. It had gotten too big for its spot. Shading the deck and dropping mulberries all over, making a big mess, it attracted wildlife, lots of wildlife. I could live with the deer and the birds and the squirrels. But it was more alarming when I saw a bear out the back door with a cub. However, what pushed me over the edge last summer was when we routinely had a skunk off the back deck eating mulberries. My young impulsive dog was sure to get skunked before long.
A few years ago I asked our tree arborist about cutting it down but he persuaded us that too much wildlife depends on the tree. I lived with the tree for a few more years as it cast ever more shade and dropped more berries until the skunks rejoiced. I feel slightly guilty that I got someone else to cut it down, but they could remove it, a task beyond us these days. Today I walked around our property identifying which of our other mulberries bear fruit and which ones are males without fruit, relearning the fact that not all mulberries bear fruit. I said hello to groundhogs, squirrels, a young buck with fuzzy nubs of horns, and listened to the birds. I feel better now having relearned the habits of the mulberries. When I surprised the buck in multiple locations he looked up as if to say you caught me purple-mouthed. A nice variation on the old phrase caught red-handed as if smeared with guilt in the act of stealing delicious fruit. Now that I investigate the trees further from house and garden I am happy to share.
Purple-Handed
Which the phrase red-handed, meaning caught in the act, meaning smeared with guilt, out out damned spot, is a bastardization of, given as purple-handed is the result, this time of year, of harvesting mulberries, which Aesop’s ant might do with freezer bags or Tupperware, but, being sometimes a grasshopper, I do with my mouth, for that is one of the ways I adore the world, camped out like this beneath my favorite mulberry on cemetery road, aka Elm Street, aka, as of today, Mulberry Street, the wheel of my bike still spinning, as the pendulous black berries almost drop into my hands, smearing them purple and sweet, guilty as charged.
–Ross Gay, in The Book of Delights, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019, page 215.
It’s the first of June, the beginning of my seasonal project until the 21st. I have been toying with a new series name and have tentatively settled on the name summer shards. I like the alliteration and the ceramic association. I also often use poem fragments, broken from the whole. If someone concocts a better name there’s a free cup awaiting.
Catalpa blossoms
Who
These lines are written by an animal, an angel, a stranger sitting in my chair; by someone who already knows how to live without trouble among books, and pots and pans . . .
Who is it who asks me to find language for the sound a sheep’s hoof makes when it strikes a stone? and who speaks the words which are my food?
I write and draw pages in my sketchbooks and they outline the substance of our lives. They mark the cups of coffee and spring noodle bowls, summer oysters, the fall Osage Orange collections, and the winter dried flowers. My words document hopes and fears, memories and dreams. They are carved from the habits of our lives and minor deviations in routines. I am working towards firing the wood kiln, soaking peas to plant in the garden, drawing on a new backdrop for a photo to mark the equinox. Each week I try to take at least one photo with the good camera. Everyday phone photos provide a chronology, a tangible record of daily actions. Quick images transform impulse into a visual language which helps to articulate the nameless inspiration so it can be further shaped.
“… poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
We have reached the solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. At the summer solstice my impulse is to say keep this light alive, but now I want to chant bring more light back into my life!
This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar
–Margaret Atwood, from Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995
Last year as I began to write my decembrance notes I imagined it to be full of new things, insights about a new life ( based on Larkin our grandson who had just been born). Every year I hope by writing I will find new ways to appreciate the season. Sometimes I am embarrassed by how much I retell family stories.
This fall I lost another important friend, fellow potter, journal keeper and correspondent, Douglass Rankin. With her husband and fellow artist Will Ruggles they composed the duo of Rock Creek Pottery. Today would have been Douglass’s 74th birthday. Our lives became intertwined through pottery. She taught me to love the mountains of North Carolina through pots, walks and gardens.We shared ideas, food, stories and laughs as well as many letters full of images and insights.
When she and Will moved to New Mexico we always intended to visit their new digs. It was still on the list when the pandemic hit. It’s like our lives were vines that twisted for a moment and then growing from a similar root base took off in their own directions. Recently I have paged through my archive of our correspondence. Today I looked back through a slide show I made about a magical visit to their house in 2007.
It seems as if life is full of absences these days. It seems as if I can reach back and taste the light in their mountain cabin. I stretch back in my memory for the spaces that Douglass created. I will struggle to grow around the gaps in our life that she has left. But she is dearly missed as we go forward in our lives full of holes.
Rock Creek vase on the left; my vase on the right
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.
So much of my decembrance project is based on making friends with the dark. My heart thaws as I write and pay attention to the darkness of the season. This week I have been walking at sunrise and sunset. There is a balance in these strolls. In the morning I admire the first light on the trees in my neighbor’s field. Again at sunset my focus lingers on the orange light on the other side of the same trees. As the shank of the afternoon settles I rest in the uncertainty of the season. I plan to put out my garden mystery squash along the fence line for the night critters to encounter a bit of unexpected bounty.
So I am teaching myself to rest in uncertainties, to revel in the secrets of darkness. I welcome the hungry creatures, cold and wild, that find their way in the dark to this unexpected bounty, but I don’t need to know who they are. Let them live out their lives in mystery. Let the cold nights hold them. Let the cold nights hold me, too.
—Margaret Renkl, Falling a Little Bit in Love with the Dark, New York Times, 12/19/2022
Ever since Zoë was born Warren and I debate whether or not to get a tree. I remind him the tree is really a pagan tradition. So some years we call it our Hanukkah bush. This year we once again debated when Zoë requested a small tree. After lunch we all loaded into the car and made a short trip to a farm we have enjoyed over the last several years. We chose what I thought was a small tree. However once in the house it was not so skinny or tiny. Lights on the tree will poke little holes in the blackness. This tree only has to last another eight days. We are hoping there are no minor pet/tree disasters. We will reminisce over holidays from other years, eat well, maybe gamble and remember the miracle of light.
Dried Persimmon
Season of Skinny Candles
A row of tall skinny candles burns quickly into the night air, the shames raised over the rest for its hard work
Darkness rushes in after the sun sinks like a bright plug pulled. Our eyes drown in night thick as ink pudding
When even the moon starves to a sliver of quicksilver the little candles poke holes in the blackness.
A time to eat fat and oil, a time to gamble for pennies and gambol around the table, a light and easy holiday.
No disasters, no repentance, just remember and enjoy. The miracle is really eight days and nights without trouble.
–Marge Piercy, from The Crooked Inheritance, Knopf Doubleday, 2006
“shames” [line 3] is the middle candle that lights the others every night
My day was filled with so many small moments which could be bursts of photos as if a thousand blackbirds filled the sky. My camera was trained on an old onion while everyone in the house was resting.
All I want to be is a thousand blackbirds bursting from a tree, seeding the sky.
–Jim Harrison, from Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, 2003
I feel like I have been jumping through hoops for both art and family. Our daughter, her husband and our grandson arrived this afternoon. It is a great relief that we all made it this far. Now we can relax and retreat. Our winter metamorphosis results from good meals, deep sleeps, conversations, fires and time spent shoulder to shoulder.
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
–-Katherine May, from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
