Farewell, Back Yard! I shall see you again in July, when the scalding sun sends me toward cover of the only shade this property owns. The ragged and weathered yet sturdy awning of aluminum will cover me from direct sun and occasional summer storm, but you deserve a break from my peering, watchful eyes.
I have observed this yard from cold to mold and through two seasons have seen it rotate like a carousel. One day it was wet and bogged down with the melt-away snow; on another it was arid in a sneak attack March heatwave. It has been barbed with ice and softened under a downy breeze, and all throughout these four months it has withstood the throes of passion that weather commands.
Perhaps I will return for July and just sit. The cold winter months forced me to stand, mobility my roving eye as I canvassed like a detective week after week. I traipsed the perimeter certain that a clue was left uncovered to reveal the mystery of nature. How did so much change so rapidly? A wind, a sunburst, a rainy night, all mutable. The evidence was abundant – a rusted spring of ivy laced through an aged fence; a clump of mud, smile-tossed by children during October’s fancy days of splendor; a slab of ice picked from a sled in February, reminiscent of snow so fast and sudden as to freeze slush into miniature ice rinks; the first green blade of spring returning. I witnessed the scene yet found no solution. I had no lab other than my mind and my words within which to process data, and really no crime had been committed. Proof pointed toward creeping motion, a prowler at large. While I slept or worked or watched the football play-offs, subtlety slid across this yard from day to day and altered from dawn to dusk and week to week the meaning of surroundings. I wonder if anyone else even noticed.
This yard is not much different than either of my neighbors’ to the east or to the west, and to these backyard sanctuaries we often retreat in singular pods of separate families. One has a statue fountain that no longer flows, the other a bare and thwarted hillside of dry dirt ready to flow for the next downpour. Both yards run flat in quarter-acre plots; without two fences and openly connected to my own yard, they would make a grand play area for kids of all ages. Yet we hardly know them, the neighbors. It is as if backyard has come to mean recluse.
It is possible to imagine that the backyard was the impetus for the denigration of community. Before housing developments and pre-dating the suburbs, families sat “out front” on long summer evenings. Whether to cool off, shoot the shit or watch passersby do their thing, people congregated on the stoops and steps of American homes. Now we isolate ourselves, as if reaching out were inconvenient, as if making friends were a chore. It’s funny that I invite friends from two boroughs over to have a cook-out in the yard behind my house, yet do not really know the people who live right next door to my home.
This yard that I have watched and studied will be a gathering place for dinners and card games and the occasional whiskey and cola, as well as swimming in a few months (it’s a cheap pool that won’t last ten years – don’t be impressed), but the safety of my neighborhood could be undermined as I avoid meeting new friends, getting to know old neighbors and keeping a watchful eye on all who come and go along my street.
You know what, Back Yard, I think I’ll need to take a rain check on that July visit. I’ll return for October instead, when all my neighbors begin to hibernate. Meanwhile, I’ll be in the front yard if you need me.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing: Final Prompt Journal Post
To Blog, or Not to Blog?
No, really, that is the question.
There is an old saying that suggests that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If an endeavor, be it building a house, starting a business or loving someone, has any intrinsic value, then it seems obvious that it is worth the time and effort and focus and concentration to complete the initiative effectively; in other words, to do it well.
Writing is no different, but the blog presents some interesting challenges. In the current reality of internet ramblings and social networking, the keeping of a blog doesn’t necessarily mean that something is written well. Anyone with a computer and internet access can put words together to formulate ideas that resemble a blog. The trick is in the credibility. Of course there are writers who possess amazing credibility. Likewise, there are unknown literary hacks who have quite a unique view to share and a lot of good verbal ideas to offer.
So, wherein lies the rub? It’s hidden in the content.
I was hesitant to “blog” at first, not wanting to add my name to a potential list of writers mistaken for social updaters. These are the people who feel it is necessary to tell us what they are doing with their lives as if a blog post is intended to replace a book status that resembles someone else’s face. These include people who spout their political views or religious ideals or music rants or sports opinions, whatever the subject might be, without having any real merit behind their point of view. They share little, express less and offer no insight for a reader to consider. These “writers” scared me away from the blogosphere for a number of years.
Then a trusted friend suggested I might revitalize a column I had written in college under the guise of a blog. The format took some getting used to but now, after a few years into the experiment, I am starting to get it. I understand the blog to be a forum for social commentary or humor, even the occasional rant when necessary. This has brought me no “outrageous fortune,” but it has yielded a few followers who generally like what I have to write.
When I returned to school to study creative writing and enrolled in a Nature Writing class, this blog served as a weekly journal to develop and express issues that are specific to the genre. The experience has been humbling, though hardly baring the whips and scorn of publishing. Nature is all around us, so finding inspiration was not difficult. Gaining a fresh perspective concerning the environment, however, was challenging. And then something happened. As weekly observation and contemplation continued at a concentrated level, perspective slid into focus; aligned with priority, the ability to reflect upon nature and respond accordingly became intensified.
What happened to me can be explained well by a song. I often quote from the rock band Rush because their philosophy has influenced me as an artist. Their lead singer, Geddy Lee, released a solo album with a song that echoes the experience I have had while expanding this blog into a temporary nature journal. The song goes like this:
No, really, that is the question.
There is an old saying that suggests that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If an endeavor, be it building a house, starting a business or loving someone, has any intrinsic value, then it seems obvious that it is worth the time and effort and focus and concentration to complete the initiative effectively; in other words, to do it well.
Writing is no different, but the blog presents some interesting challenges. In the current reality of internet ramblings and social networking, the keeping of a blog doesn’t necessarily mean that something is written well. Anyone with a computer and internet access can put words together to formulate ideas that resemble a blog. The trick is in the credibility. Of course there are writers who possess amazing credibility. Likewise, there are unknown literary hacks who have quite a unique view to share and a lot of good verbal ideas to offer.
So, wherein lies the rub? It’s hidden in the content.
I was hesitant to “blog” at first, not wanting to add my name to a potential list of writers mistaken for social updaters. These are the people who feel it is necessary to tell us what they are doing with their lives as if a blog post is intended to replace a book status that resembles someone else’s face. These include people who spout their political views or religious ideals or music rants or sports opinions, whatever the subject might be, without having any real merit behind their point of view. They share little, express less and offer no insight for a reader to consider. These “writers” scared me away from the blogosphere for a number of years.
Then a trusted friend suggested I might revitalize a column I had written in college under the guise of a blog. The format took some getting used to but now, after a few years into the experiment, I am starting to get it. I understand the blog to be a forum for social commentary or humor, even the occasional rant when necessary. This has brought me no “outrageous fortune,” but it has yielded a few followers who generally like what I have to write.
When I returned to school to study creative writing and enrolled in a Nature Writing class, this blog served as a weekly journal to develop and express issues that are specific to the genre. The experience has been humbling, though hardly baring the whips and scorn of publishing. Nature is all around us, so finding inspiration was not difficult. Gaining a fresh perspective concerning the environment, however, was challenging. And then something happened. As weekly observation and contemplation continued at a concentrated level, perspective slid into focus; aligned with priority, the ability to reflect upon nature and respond accordingly became intensified.
What happened to me can be explained well by a song. I often quote from the rock band Rush because their philosophy has influenced me as an artist. Their lead singer, Geddy Lee, released a solo album with a song that echoes the experience I have had while expanding this blog into a temporary nature journal. The song goes like this:
“Something you said, it made me step outside the moment;
Eyes pan right and left around my world.
Open yourself up to the possibility,
Aware of some reality outside your world.”
(Geddy Lee, 2000)
I don’t think Geddy was talking about nature, yet his perspective expands into an understanding of how I now perceive the natural world. It has always been my world, as much as it is yours, hers, his or that other guy’s, but I now relate to it on a different plain. It is isn’t spiritual or tree-loving; it’s more of a rhythm with the spinning of the so-called third rock from the sun.
Somewhere in the writing prompts, I was able to step outside of myself and receive ideas and meaning from nature herself; as well, I recognized the possibilities that were presented to me. This is not to say that I was against writing within nature before. I had just never taken the time to really absorb the natural world so that it might inform my writing. I have often written poetry while being outside, which made sense on its own. This journal, however, has been more about finding new things to write about, as well as new ways to concentrate on the observational experience.
To comment further about these ideas might give credence to the genre of the blog, or it might just provide a reason to continue writing about nature. There are many columnists who now write blogs – very good writers writing very good material. The question, then, becomes, are readers reading the good stuff or are they trapped in a world of poor writing that is better left for social chatrooms?
Whether I continue to reflect on nature or add my own humorous rant (which I have been known to attempt), the writing of this blog will reflect heightened patience. When I am in nature I have no concept of time other than our Dear Old Sun. When time is all but removed from experience, one tends to see things with greater clarity. From that clarity I have learned to watch, to listen, to experience nature, and not just the places where I live but rather the entire context of our surroundings.
With a portion of integrity, a good self-editing eye, a reason to write and willingness to try new avenues (or in this case, dirt paths), the writing of any genre – whether it is stage plays or nature blogs – is worth doing well.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt Entry #6
Time is a bridge between memories. One day you are walking to a store angry that your mother wanted Diet Pepsi and sent you on the errand. The next – though hardly the next because some 10,950 days have elapsed – you are a dad walking to the same store with your son to buy yet another Diet Pepsi so you can play with the silly stocking stuffer he gave you at Christmas. And in a single moment you realize that the passage of time is about letting go and a little bit of healing.
There is a slight track of land in our neighborhood that reminds me of everything I despised and worried about as a child. The street I walked then and now is called Prospect, a road that fronts the parking lot to a 7-11 convenience store. The lot and the road merge at a sloping angle through a tiny yard. For years it had been common for kids to cut the corner and make our own footpath along a beaten trail up the slope and into the parking lot. We didn't have the patience (or respect) to walk to the concrete and take a right angle as drivers do. The path urged into existence by short-cut teens was no more than fifty feet long and all of three feet wide, but it was trampled down to a dirt path like you might see on a hiking trail. It was a well-trodden path. It is now only a trace of its former self. The ridge is there but grass has grown in; it looks like a scar healed over.
The gift my son gave me is a tube designed to make a geyser from Mentos candy when dropped in diet soda. You attach the tube to a full bottle of pop laced with phenylalanine, drop the chewy treats down the tube, release the safety string so the candies plummet into the soda, and then watch a geyser of foam explode through the opening. It actually works! After a few seconds, the brown froth rises and erupts through the tube to shoot a sprout into the air almost two feet high. It is a complete waste of terrible soda and good candy, but the smile on Brian’s face is worth the three dollars we spent. Cost is nothing compared to a Christmas promise fulfilled. I had told him we would test the toy come spring time.
Years ago, I felt pressure boiling under my tension as I walked to the store, angry and still very confused about why my parents had divorced. I hadn't learned yet how to place blame or come to terms with problems of the adult world. When my mom asked me to walk to 7-11 to buy her a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi, I went but I was furious. I huffed and steamed the whole way there, grunting underbreath for the equivalent of four city blocks. The errand, it seemed to me, was no different than fetching my father's beer, the same cans of alcohol I was told had ruined my family.
I eventually moved away and then a decade later returned to that same neighborhood as an adult – long story short, that sort of thing – in order to raise my own family. I live two streets from where I spent my formative years and the 7-11 is still there. It has changed as has the neighborhood, but only in terms of who works there and who lives where, and the absence of busses that used to slide through the streets all day and all night.
I had first moved into the neighborhood as a ten-year-old boy; a striking irony now that Brian is also ten. As Brian and I walked to the store on a recent spring evening warm enough to make me wish I had worn shorts, I remembered that log-ago Diet Pepsi and realized how easy my life has been. I never witnessed a drive-by shooting, nor the atrocities that people from other countries have suffered. The scars of social and political injustice mark my neighbors as much as my emotional wounds have healed. After all, it was just a soft drink my mom wanted. But people have fled Burma and Serbia and Yugoslavia and Bosnia to find a better life, here, in a place I have long called home. The houses remain, though the addresses receive mail of different last names, some I cannot pronounce.
Where my friends and I used to traipse toward the store and stomp the land into a finely packed trail there now grows rejuvenated grass. It is as if scars from our minor disrespect have grown over with the fresh seeds of better-mannered kids. Or, do kids even walk to the store anymore? We ran up that slope in races! We shot our bikes toward the hill with no effort – we were ten, fifteen, and soon we drove there anyway. Maybe today's kids get dropped off to get their moms' Diet Pepsi. "Be back in an hour," a parent waves as they retreat in the family SUV or minivan. This generation is being raised by new absenteeism. Not my kids.
Our walk that evening was simple, the time-honored truth of quality over quantity. Brian asked about pirates of the high seas and whether a stick he had found could defend him against a swashbuckler with a sword. He wondered whether The Hulk could lift that car, that car, that one? “What about that truck?” he asked as we avoided the trail to enter the store. He proposed that maybe I was stronger than Hulk. It depends, but it’s doubtful, I thought. Can the Hulk heal scars as they grow invisible year after year?
There is a slight track of land in our neighborhood that reminds me of everything I despised and worried about as a child. The street I walked then and now is called Prospect, a road that fronts the parking lot to a 7-11 convenience store. The lot and the road merge at a sloping angle through a tiny yard. For years it had been common for kids to cut the corner and make our own footpath along a beaten trail up the slope and into the parking lot. We didn't have the patience (or respect) to walk to the concrete and take a right angle as drivers do. The path urged into existence by short-cut teens was no more than fifty feet long and all of three feet wide, but it was trampled down to a dirt path like you might see on a hiking trail. It was a well-trodden path. It is now only a trace of its former self. The ridge is there but grass has grown in; it looks like a scar healed over.
The gift my son gave me is a tube designed to make a geyser from Mentos candy when dropped in diet soda. You attach the tube to a full bottle of pop laced with phenylalanine, drop the chewy treats down the tube, release the safety string so the candies plummet into the soda, and then watch a geyser of foam explode through the opening. It actually works! After a few seconds, the brown froth rises and erupts through the tube to shoot a sprout into the air almost two feet high. It is a complete waste of terrible soda and good candy, but the smile on Brian’s face is worth the three dollars we spent. Cost is nothing compared to a Christmas promise fulfilled. I had told him we would test the toy come spring time.
Years ago, I felt pressure boiling under my tension as I walked to the store, angry and still very confused about why my parents had divorced. I hadn't learned yet how to place blame or come to terms with problems of the adult world. When my mom asked me to walk to 7-11 to buy her a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi, I went but I was furious. I huffed and steamed the whole way there, grunting underbreath for the equivalent of four city blocks. The errand, it seemed to me, was no different than fetching my father's beer, the same cans of alcohol I was told had ruined my family.
I eventually moved away and then a decade later returned to that same neighborhood as an adult – long story short, that sort of thing – in order to raise my own family. I live two streets from where I spent my formative years and the 7-11 is still there. It has changed as has the neighborhood, but only in terms of who works there and who lives where, and the absence of busses that used to slide through the streets all day and all night.
I had first moved into the neighborhood as a ten-year-old boy; a striking irony now that Brian is also ten. As Brian and I walked to the store on a recent spring evening warm enough to make me wish I had worn shorts, I remembered that log-ago Diet Pepsi and realized how easy my life has been. I never witnessed a drive-by shooting, nor the atrocities that people from other countries have suffered. The scars of social and political injustice mark my neighbors as much as my emotional wounds have healed. After all, it was just a soft drink my mom wanted. But people have fled Burma and Serbia and Yugoslavia and Bosnia to find a better life, here, in a place I have long called home. The houses remain, though the addresses receive mail of different last names, some I cannot pronounce.
Where my friends and I used to traipse toward the store and stomp the land into a finely packed trail there now grows rejuvenated grass. It is as if scars from our minor disrespect have grown over with the fresh seeds of better-mannered kids. Or, do kids even walk to the store anymore? We ran up that slope in races! We shot our bikes toward the hill with no effort – we were ten, fifteen, and soon we drove there anyway. Maybe today's kids get dropped off to get their moms' Diet Pepsi. "Be back in an hour," a parent waves as they retreat in the family SUV or minivan. This generation is being raised by new absenteeism. Not my kids.
Our walk that evening was simple, the time-honored truth of quality over quantity. Brian asked about pirates of the high seas and whether a stick he had found could defend him against a swashbuckler with a sword. He wondered whether The Hulk could lift that car, that car, that one? “What about that truck?” he asked as we avoided the trail to enter the store. He proposed that maybe I was stronger than Hulk. It depends, but it’s doubtful, I thought. Can the Hulk heal scars as they grow invisible year after year?
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place Entry #6
In like a Lion, out like a Lamb. Equinox. April Fool’s Day. Easter. March. April. May. The words remind me of proper nouns, as if Spring holds a clarity unlike any other season. It is a time of Cliché, of Rebirth, of New Beginnings, even of Baseball. The Earth, I have long argued, is the ultimate proper noun. Perhaps in our language we should label it EARTH. Without Earth, where would we be? That type of rhetoric might lead to absurdist humor. We’d be nowhere, out in space, among the abyss. We wouldn’t be of course, but that is a topic for existentialists to consider on other platforms. I can only be in my own existence, and I have a messy yard to drain, grass to cut (if it dries), and the ever-pleasant task of cleaning up after the dogs.
My yard upon this Earth curls under an overcast day as if the clouds were at play with a saucy mixture from a cake recipe. The surface water swill from last night’s storm has flooded the yard again; flood being a relative term. Steps are sloshed and shoes muddied. There will be no playing for children here today. Somewhere, terror floods fields and farms, but that is in another nation whose capitalization I am not concerned with. Today, I only worry about a plot of land on Beryl Drive owned by the Kirks. A slight breeze slings the fresh-top grass blades in pulsating dance steps that swing against the wishes of the sunblock-generation-kids in my yard.
They want so badly to play. My youngest tries cartwheel kicks over by one dry patch as she continues to learn gymnastics. The older two chase and dart after each other in a game of tag, the rules not clear to me. I survey the yard not as an observer today, but rather as a dad who longs for these longer moments. A seasonal dip in the temperature has returned things to normal. The air hovers around forty and light jackets make our play cumbersome, yet we invent a game of almost-tennis over the failed ice rink. At least those borders were good for something! I win the first two matches and then lose three straight. Might that forecast another losing season for my beloved baseball Pirates? I hope not, hope to the point that Hope itself should also be a proper noun. Hope may be a thing, but it is a thing of beauty. So many other things of beauty get the shift key treatment when one is typing: Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, why not Hope?
My yard is not as wide as Arizona’s hole nor as damp as our natural border with Canada, yet it falls on this dad’s shoulders to maintain a certain suburban image and borough ordinance concerning yardwork. I hate yardwork, Hate it with a capital H. And what about Dad? What work and trouble with the yard will I encounter? The kids don’t seem to care that the grass is too high. It is common for people to refer to their own father as Dad, but to the general principle of parenting as the guy known as dad. It is a fair comparison. But what if Dad came to represent a status in our society? What if deadbeat dad deserves lower case and an honorable dude earned his Dad spelling? What if Father meant that this Dad is further removed from the dad who lives farther away and only calls on Father’s Day? Perhaps we could rid the world of fatherless homes if we gave merit to a Dad and a Father whose rank was worthy of such address.
But the yard will soon needed tended to, and I also happen to be lousy at yardwork. In that realm I would earn a D-minus if grades were being handed out; or worse, an F. My landscaping skills look as if a third grader had drawn them up in art class and magically transplanted the slanted and mismatched picture onto my property. I am no Dad of Grass-cutting either. Then again, I prefer less curb appeal and more memories. Yes, I declare that a good back yard ought to be one smudged with dandelions and divots where wrestled-down knees meet their match, spots where Tide earns its keep. I decree a rally cry for Better Dads and Who Cares Yards!
Oh well, tis time to play. My kids want to get out on the yard and really Play. There is so much for them to experience – Mud, Laughter, Dirt, Breath, Smiles – all as they traipse upon this Earth.
My yard upon this Earth curls under an overcast day as if the clouds were at play with a saucy mixture from a cake recipe. The surface water swill from last night’s storm has flooded the yard again; flood being a relative term. Steps are sloshed and shoes muddied. There will be no playing for children here today. Somewhere, terror floods fields and farms, but that is in another nation whose capitalization I am not concerned with. Today, I only worry about a plot of land on Beryl Drive owned by the Kirks. A slight breeze slings the fresh-top grass blades in pulsating dance steps that swing against the wishes of the sunblock-generation-kids in my yard.
They want so badly to play. My youngest tries cartwheel kicks over by one dry patch as she continues to learn gymnastics. The older two chase and dart after each other in a game of tag, the rules not clear to me. I survey the yard not as an observer today, but rather as a dad who longs for these longer moments. A seasonal dip in the temperature has returned things to normal. The air hovers around forty and light jackets make our play cumbersome, yet we invent a game of almost-tennis over the failed ice rink. At least those borders were good for something! I win the first two matches and then lose three straight. Might that forecast another losing season for my beloved baseball Pirates? I hope not, hope to the point that Hope itself should also be a proper noun. Hope may be a thing, but it is a thing of beauty. So many other things of beauty get the shift key treatment when one is typing: Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, why not Hope?
My yard is not as wide as Arizona’s hole nor as damp as our natural border with Canada, yet it falls on this dad’s shoulders to maintain a certain suburban image and borough ordinance concerning yardwork. I hate yardwork, Hate it with a capital H. And what about Dad? What work and trouble with the yard will I encounter? The kids don’t seem to care that the grass is too high. It is common for people to refer to their own father as Dad, but to the general principle of parenting as the guy known as dad. It is a fair comparison. But what if Dad came to represent a status in our society? What if deadbeat dad deserves lower case and an honorable dude earned his Dad spelling? What if Father meant that this Dad is further removed from the dad who lives farther away and only calls on Father’s Day? Perhaps we could rid the world of fatherless homes if we gave merit to a Dad and a Father whose rank was worthy of such address.
But the yard will soon needed tended to, and I also happen to be lousy at yardwork. In that realm I would earn a D-minus if grades were being handed out; or worse, an F. My landscaping skills look as if a third grader had drawn them up in art class and magically transplanted the slanted and mismatched picture onto my property. I am no Dad of Grass-cutting either. Then again, I prefer less curb appeal and more memories. Yes, I declare that a good back yard ought to be one smudged with dandelions and divots where wrestled-down knees meet their match, spots where Tide earns its keep. I decree a rally cry for Better Dads and Who Cares Yards!
Oh well, tis time to play. My kids want to get out on the yard and really Play. There is so much for them to experience – Mud, Laughter, Dirt, Breath, Smiles – all as they traipse upon this Earth.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt Entry #5
Open space and shade are what soothe my soul. Under the open sun of Pennsylvania summer a blistering blaze bothers me the way I used to pester my brother. It is nagging and relentless. One day, my brother grew up and socked me a good punch of retribution; sometimes it still hurts where his first punch landed on my arm. He is older by eleven-and-a-half months but was a small kid. The years he developed passed like a track star lapping me on the one-mile sprint. If he is heat, perhaps I am shade. We lead very different lives but have relied on one another just the same.
The star that bakes the front of my house must consider itself the foreman of a job unfinished. The bricks were fused six decades ago, yet the sun still dumps its warmth as if they needed to be fired today. The sand-water-gravel mixture blocks absorb and hold heat in a most impressive way. They remain warm to the touch hours past dark on a summer night and even during the coldest and clearest of January days.
I have read that in Ireland the temperature rarely goes above seventy or below forty on the Fahrenheit scale. I must be more Irish (and even less German) than American, despite being among the third Kirk generation to hold an American birth certificate. At that very moment when pleasant spring turns to annoying summer I feel my Germanic half disappear and my Irish-kin blood step forward. I long for shade, a massive shield above my house to filter sunlight is all I wish. I think if it could just cool down by six or eight degrees I would feel less sluggish, have longer energy and get more yard work accomplished. All of these might please my wife in various ways.
Shade. Oh for a bit of its gray, translucent gift. Envy creases my thoughts when I visit other homes. They sit down in a valley or just over a small glade. They rest in sliding degrees of shade from one hour to another and offer respite in cool, calm moments. Someone else’s yard holds an oak tree; along the driveway stands a lumbering maple or a proud, hefty pine. Each tree blocks the sun during the most intense hours of afternoon. It is not as if I desire to be an underground dweller. I only want shade. Cool. Comfortable. Direct. Dispersed. Soft. Serene. Shade.
I move about the exterior world grateful for open air. Winter walks are as fine as a summer stroll, and rain ranks high upon the things I adore. I don’t want to be inside. I want only to be out in open space and under shade. There is a pressure of tight spaces, not claustrophobia nor agoraphobia either. The tightness doesn’t originate from halls or classrooms or malls, but rather from the cramped neighborhoods, narrow city streets, bumper-to-bumper highways, and the confined spaces that impede nature. For as much as shade is desired, it is as if a house or store built in the way doesn’t offer real comfort. They are artificial shields.
That bit o’ me that feels Irish is at a crossroads. To one direction sits the blazing sun from which I turn my morning-blue eyes and squint under brow-salted sweat. The other casts the disappearing gray of day. I check both directions...
The star that bakes the front of my house must consider itself the foreman of a job unfinished. The bricks were fused six decades ago, yet the sun still dumps its warmth as if they needed to be fired today. The sand-water-gravel mixture blocks absorb and hold heat in a most impressive way. They remain warm to the touch hours past dark on a summer night and even during the coldest and clearest of January days.
I have read that in Ireland the temperature rarely goes above seventy or below forty on the Fahrenheit scale. I must be more Irish (and even less German) than American, despite being among the third Kirk generation to hold an American birth certificate. At that very moment when pleasant spring turns to annoying summer I feel my Germanic half disappear and my Irish-kin blood step forward. I long for shade, a massive shield above my house to filter sunlight is all I wish. I think if it could just cool down by six or eight degrees I would feel less sluggish, have longer energy and get more yard work accomplished. All of these might please my wife in various ways.
Shade. Oh for a bit of its gray, translucent gift. Envy creases my thoughts when I visit other homes. They sit down in a valley or just over a small glade. They rest in sliding degrees of shade from one hour to another and offer respite in cool, calm moments. Someone else’s yard holds an oak tree; along the driveway stands a lumbering maple or a proud, hefty pine. Each tree blocks the sun during the most intense hours of afternoon. It is not as if I desire to be an underground dweller. I only want shade. Cool. Comfortable. Direct. Dispersed. Soft. Serene. Shade.
I move about the exterior world grateful for open air. Winter walks are as fine as a summer stroll, and rain ranks high upon the things I adore. I don’t want to be inside. I want only to be out in open space and under shade. There is a pressure of tight spaces, not claustrophobia nor agoraphobia either. The tightness doesn’t originate from halls or classrooms or malls, but rather from the cramped neighborhoods, narrow city streets, bumper-to-bumper highways, and the confined spaces that impede nature. For as much as shade is desired, it is as if a house or store built in the way doesn’t offer real comfort. They are artificial shields.
That bit o’ me that feels Irish is at a crossroads. To one direction sits the blazing sun from which I turn my morning-blue eyes and squint under brow-salted sweat. The other casts the disappearing gray of day. I check both directions...
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Food Writing Observation
She cracks the eggs with the enthusiasm only a child could muster; she is, after all, a child. She flips eggs but is disappointed that pieces stick to the pan. She has a lot to learn about cooking: patience, experimentation, timing. I will regale her with tales of my early days – when sunny-side up became over-easy and then over-medium and finally scrambled eggs because I lacked that virtue known as patience. This may be my finest educational challenge yet, to teach what I once did not know to my daughter. She doesn’t understand why she can’t take the turkey bacon by hand from the skillet and eat it right away. She is precocious; she is seven. Meet Bethany.
He greets an invitation to help in the kitchen the way I have always approached a baseball game – unbridled thrill ricocheting from a boy like scrapple being shuffled inside a hot pan. He willfully does what he can to pitch in; fills measuring cups, brings milk from downstairs. He spreads butter on toast and adds piles of brown-sugar cinnamon, then passes the butter-crisp treat to all who are seated around the table. He is eager to please. This is Brian, he is ten, and he has the knack for becoming a cook. (How cool is that?) He didn’t get it from me.
She whips up French toast batter as her mom taught her and contributes in the way of a mature pre-teen. She will help spread sauces, leaven bread, pre-heat the stove. She will stir the home-fries, check the sausage gravy and recently made her own non-breakfast side-dish. She ignored the box directions that I rely upon yet the bow-tie-garlic-alfredo noodles went well with lunch. How does she do that? Instinct, I suppose. Her best ability seems to be mixing tuna. As it slicks into a gooey, oozy goop of mayonnaise and slivers of pinkish-tanish meat, I cringe. Tuna, yuck. I am glad she likes it but grateful it isn’t for breakfast. She is our oldest at twelve; she is Becca. Neat kid.
I stumble through various ideas, experiment here, repeat an easy favorite there, and often misplace the spatula...somewhere. I am absent-minded in the kitchen. I juggle through preparing breakfast and look left, then right, then back again wondering where I set anything from the flipper to the butter to the salt to the batter. I need the boxes that provide specifics but have recently treated myself and the family to daring new recipes spurred by the teachings of a class and the artist-of-another-trade figuring things out in a whole new medium. My name is Dan, 41, the dad of the house. Nice to meet you.
She makes magic – in the kitchen and in a lot of other ways. She is identified by some tax code as a homemaker, but she is all that a mom should be; or at least all that I expected for the mother of my children. She pulls together meals when I testify that there is nothing in the kitchen, the pantry, nor the freezer-fridge combination. Dishes arise in her mind the way characters are conjured from my creative spirit. She brings two or three generations of gram-to-mom-to-daughter lessons to our kitchen and passes history and heritage along to our kids. She is more like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia than she is Becky Home-echy, but she can cook. The woman can just plain cook. My wife’s name is Michelle. She’d love to meet you and would probably invite you to a dinner party.
We work together on most weekends to break-fast as I teach my kids the origin of the word “breakfast.” It is a secular lesson, not a scriptural one. I try to bring little things that I know to the meals that Michelle provides. But mostly breakfast at our house is a task for family time. We laugh together in chimes and sublime giggles. We look forward each summer to the deep, profound heat of August when we repeat a silly breakfast tradition that started years ago as a dad-in-the-moment prank. As breakfast ends, I slowly kick off my flip-flops or sneakers, pretend to be thinking aloud as I remove my glasses, and make a bee-line for the pool.
I dive head-long into the undersized inflatable pool, and the cool sip of summer refreshment drenches me better than my syrup-drizzled pancakes. Breakfast dishes can wait as Bethany, Brian, Becca and Michelle join me. We cool off, frolic, swim, splash, and laugh and laugh and laugh. We aren’t ignoring clean-up; we’re making memories.
We are the Kirks. It’s nice to meet you. Welcome to breakfast.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place Entry #5
Written March 11, 2012:
Daylight Savings Time, and the sun sets in a way that it hasn’t in months, though really it has, only at a different clock signature than yesterday.
We are tricked by daylight. In tiny reserves of confusion, we allow ourselves to think the world has changed. It hasn’t changed a bit, and neither has the yard despite another upheaval of a quick snow, a thick rain and tricks of perception.
The need to adjust our clocks twice a year appears more like folly than common sense, an example of humanity’s flawed thinking. Must we fix everything? Must we right the tiniest idiosyncratic miscalculation of our ways? Earth did not hand us a calendar; we created a logic to fit the random beauty of nature into something we could understand. We are so naive.
I stand along the fence, steel-clasped and its surface absent a winter chill. Steel is as reliable an indicator of temperature as either Fahrenheit or Kelvin’s scales. It is unseasonably warm today, enough to render that term meaningless; not hot but tepid upon the steel posts I installed five years ago to pen up three dogs. They have room to run, to wrestle, to rest. Two of them are gone now – one buried..,or, destroyed...to some place I shudder to consider the Humane Society might have taken him; the other adopted out to a farm. Both were rescues. Now, we own two dogs again – one our aging beagle mocked within these pages before; the other a new puppy all of a dozen weeks old, a scrappy brown lab with hints of collie and shepherd.
The warmth of a post-clock-changing day is disconcerting; as if the power of Timex brought forth heat from the east. It hasn’t been this warm in March at any time that I can recall before. The air is dense with oven-fresh warmth, the sun’s rays sharp, the steel posts comfortable to the touch. All human constructs are longing for early spring and refuse that other manmade chronicle, the calendar. Leap Day came this year; another folly, another passage of time forced upon us by ourselves and our infantile comprehension of the Earth.
Science can claim rotations away in calibrated twirls and spins, but something larger suggests that maybe that extra four-quarters of a day (perceived) has it purpose. Did we ever stop to consider that the leftover portion of day, like all of the world’s natural phenomena, was meant to be? That maybe we need to think further to figure out why the Earth revolves the way it does? Instead, we build a clock and a system and a concept to refute the natural order. It’s how we are.
The puppy snips at an eager branch, the stud of a bush desiring to awaken early from winter. The yard is scattered with moments of prematurity; patches of grass green-rich like a Notre Dame tee-shirt; springs of poison ivy tormenting like a bully in pre-emptive threat; tufts of something steel-wool-like that could be my cut hair blown into a corner from last summer or could be a sort of mold ready to disappear from winter’s wet, raggy ways; a yellow buttercup leaf budding on vines that twist and maze through the hillside. All signs of spring are present too soon.
A haunting feeling settles in. This isn’t right; this time, this sunset, this season, this longer day; this warmth. The world continues to surprise me. In forty-two winter thaws I have come to expect certain things. Heavy snow melt, slowly increasing warmth, piles of dog dirt to wade through and dispose of, leaves left to rot and decompose into free fertilizer. This winter has been mild and as such the snow was gone weeks ago and I already scooped the yard four times. It is different. Even the date on which we adjust the stupid clocks was changed a few years ago by a benevolent officer of some benevolent agency of the benevolent govern...well you get the picture.
Today, I let the puppy play with the dog longer than most post-dinner outings. I don’t need to return inside yet. Despite having “lost an hour of sleep,” it will be bright after seven o’clock, and that means more time outside. It is embarrassing to think we can channel time and space, yet I know tomorrow will seem to come quicker: back to work, back to the whim of Clock. But the sun’s heat pulses over me as I observe the yard. The tranquility is as silent as the motionless sway of the kids’ still-winter-dormant swing. It has no interest in springing forth early to play; then again, it isn’t alive. I am alive, and the sun is alive in its relative way. Over the next few weeks the yard will come to life with birds, caterpillars, chipmunks, sloths, dandelions, and the ivy will look on with envy, waiting to wreak havoc matched by the puppy on the stick that doesn’t have a chance. The puppy is alive, our last one dead; I am alive, the clock has never lived.
Daylight Savings Time, and the sun sets in a way that it hasn’t in months, though really it has, only at a different clock signature than yesterday.
We are tricked by daylight. In tiny reserves of confusion, we allow ourselves to think the world has changed. It hasn’t changed a bit, and neither has the yard despite another upheaval of a quick snow, a thick rain and tricks of perception.
The need to adjust our clocks twice a year appears more like folly than common sense, an example of humanity’s flawed thinking. Must we fix everything? Must we right the tiniest idiosyncratic miscalculation of our ways? Earth did not hand us a calendar; we created a logic to fit the random beauty of nature into something we could understand. We are so naive.
I stand along the fence, steel-clasped and its surface absent a winter chill. Steel is as reliable an indicator of temperature as either Fahrenheit or Kelvin’s scales. It is unseasonably warm today, enough to render that term meaningless; not hot but tepid upon the steel posts I installed five years ago to pen up three dogs. They have room to run, to wrestle, to rest. Two of them are gone now – one buried..,or, destroyed...to some place I shudder to consider the Humane Society might have taken him; the other adopted out to a farm. Both were rescues. Now, we own two dogs again – one our aging beagle mocked within these pages before; the other a new puppy all of a dozen weeks old, a scrappy brown lab with hints of collie and shepherd.
The warmth of a post-clock-changing day is disconcerting; as if the power of Timex brought forth heat from the east. It hasn’t been this warm in March at any time that I can recall before. The air is dense with oven-fresh warmth, the sun’s rays sharp, the steel posts comfortable to the touch. All human constructs are longing for early spring and refuse that other manmade chronicle, the calendar. Leap Day came this year; another folly, another passage of time forced upon us by ourselves and our infantile comprehension of the Earth.
Science can claim rotations away in calibrated twirls and spins, but something larger suggests that maybe that extra four-quarters of a day (perceived) has it purpose. Did we ever stop to consider that the leftover portion of day, like all of the world’s natural phenomena, was meant to be? That maybe we need to think further to figure out why the Earth revolves the way it does? Instead, we build a clock and a system and a concept to refute the natural order. It’s how we are.
The puppy snips at an eager branch, the stud of a bush desiring to awaken early from winter. The yard is scattered with moments of prematurity; patches of grass green-rich like a Notre Dame tee-shirt; springs of poison ivy tormenting like a bully in pre-emptive threat; tufts of something steel-wool-like that could be my cut hair blown into a corner from last summer or could be a sort of mold ready to disappear from winter’s wet, raggy ways; a yellow buttercup leaf budding on vines that twist and maze through the hillside. All signs of spring are present too soon.
A haunting feeling settles in. This isn’t right; this time, this sunset, this season, this longer day; this warmth. The world continues to surprise me. In forty-two winter thaws I have come to expect certain things. Heavy snow melt, slowly increasing warmth, piles of dog dirt to wade through and dispose of, leaves left to rot and decompose into free fertilizer. This winter has been mild and as such the snow was gone weeks ago and I already scooped the yard four times. It is different. Even the date on which we adjust the stupid clocks was changed a few years ago by a benevolent officer of some benevolent agency of the benevolent govern...well you get the picture.
Today, I let the puppy play with the dog longer than most post-dinner outings. I don’t need to return inside yet. Despite having “lost an hour of sleep,” it will be bright after seven o’clock, and that means more time outside. It is embarrassing to think we can channel time and space, yet I know tomorrow will seem to come quicker: back to work, back to the whim of Clock. But the sun’s heat pulses over me as I observe the yard. The tranquility is as silent as the motionless sway of the kids’ still-winter-dormant swing. It has no interest in springing forth early to play; then again, it isn’t alive. I am alive, and the sun is alive in its relative way. Over the next few weeks the yard will come to life with birds, caterpillars, chipmunks, sloths, dandelions, and the ivy will look on with envy, waiting to wreak havoc matched by the puppy on the stick that doesn’t have a chance. The puppy is alive, our last one dead; I am alive, the clock has never lived.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #4 Entry
A scant smell of sulfur lists into the air on a morning in March, the otherwise bright pre-cursor to spring tinged by hints of acidity. The houses on my street lie under a cloud of unseen toxins, as if the sky is coughing itself awake the way a lifelong smoker hacks and gags his way into the day. I have known of the scrap yard on the hill, it has been there for as long as this neighborhood has been my home, longer, according to the company’s website, than my house has been where it sits.
Until recently, I did not know what non-ferrous meant; truth be told I also did not know what ferrous meant either. Driving past the facility where Tube City IMS recycles steel and aluminum is a common commute to the mall and to the movie theatre. A sign advertises both a ferrous and non-ferrous plant; separate entrances are marked by corrugated signs, one for each type of metal. Only when I had aluminum to cash-out did I start to think of what goes on there and consider its place in the community.
Ferrous refers to metals that have a trace of iron in them and non-ferrous being those without iron. It seems logical, then, that ferrous metals would be magnetic. But what do I know? According to The Tenebaum Recycling group, "ferrous metals are in the form of steel and iron and commonly take on magnetic qualities" (www.trg.net). The Tube City plant hauls cars, refrigerators, and all sorts of scrap from window frames to bed frames in and out on a daily basis. Judging by the mountain of twisted rust, business is good. But at what cost?
The scrap yard is no more than a quarter-mile from my house as the crow flies, and as the air currents move and as sunshine illuminates the pile of junk. At night, the lights of the midnight shift can be seen as a twinkle, a shimmer of obfuscated stars through which a crane passes to cast a shadow, a beam interrupted.
If it were my choice I would remove the noise before the smell. The pollution index seems to be bothersome on only certain days, humid days or rainy days when atmospheric moisture holds escaping toxins down and blankets surrounding areas with the shop’s sharp and bitter odor. That rain runs off into streams and carries particles of rust, chips of decaying paint, oozes of leftover oil, and drops of undrained windshield washer fluid toward the water treatment plant. In small doses small business poisons a small amount of water. They count the toxicity in "trace" amounts of so many particles per so many millions of gallons, the assumption being that so little can do no harm. Our treatment plant dumps chemicals into the water to neutralize the iron, the niacin, the sulfates, the whatever-it-is that gets into the so-called fresh supply. As a whole, as Society, we recycle those things we desire and others which we do not.
If we were not so distracted by our work routine and our family hopes, we might add to our agenda that such a business needs to report to us, to someone, to anyone not with a vested interest, just what it is doing to preserve our community. Does it spray-wash acid battery sludge as part of the cleaning process? Do they gut the car and properly dispose of plastics and rubber, or do those things burn up in some fiery blaze that is only occasionally seen emitting from the multiple-acred plant atop the hill across the way? And does such a pyre offer up the acrid scents I catch in the morning? The smoky smell cannot just be from smashing metal in a grinder. Something else must be going on. Metals burn at extreme heat, so too do car cushions and windshield wipers. Day to day, though, it is the noise that creates calamity.
The clack-clang-crash sounds repeatedly. It isn't quite a disturbance as a persistent nuisance, something we recognize as background noise that doesn't do much to ruin our social events. A picnic might be going on in the yard when a car lets loose from the magnetic crane above a pile of mashed metal, and the crash-boom-slide-screech distracts momentarily as we look westward to make sure it is just the scrap workers at their toil and not a plane going down or a car going into a pole. We return to conversation. What were we talking about?
Works Cited
"Ferrous Metal Recycling." Tenebaum Recycling Group. http://www.trg.net/metals-recycling/ferrous-metal-recycling. (Accessed March 2, 2o12)
Until recently, I did not know what non-ferrous meant; truth be told I also did not know what ferrous meant either. Driving past the facility where Tube City IMS recycles steel and aluminum is a common commute to the mall and to the movie theatre. A sign advertises both a ferrous and non-ferrous plant; separate entrances are marked by corrugated signs, one for each type of metal. Only when I had aluminum to cash-out did I start to think of what goes on there and consider its place in the community.
Ferrous refers to metals that have a trace of iron in them and non-ferrous being those without iron. It seems logical, then, that ferrous metals would be magnetic. But what do I know? According to The Tenebaum Recycling group, "ferrous metals are in the form of steel and iron and commonly take on magnetic qualities" (www.trg.net). The Tube City plant hauls cars, refrigerators, and all sorts of scrap from window frames to bed frames in and out on a daily basis. Judging by the mountain of twisted rust, business is good. But at what cost?
The scrap yard is no more than a quarter-mile from my house as the crow flies, and as the air currents move and as sunshine illuminates the pile of junk. At night, the lights of the midnight shift can be seen as a twinkle, a shimmer of obfuscated stars through which a crane passes to cast a shadow, a beam interrupted.
If it were my choice I would remove the noise before the smell. The pollution index seems to be bothersome on only certain days, humid days or rainy days when atmospheric moisture holds escaping toxins down and blankets surrounding areas with the shop’s sharp and bitter odor. That rain runs off into streams and carries particles of rust, chips of decaying paint, oozes of leftover oil, and drops of undrained windshield washer fluid toward the water treatment plant. In small doses small business poisons a small amount of water. They count the toxicity in "trace" amounts of so many particles per so many millions of gallons, the assumption being that so little can do no harm. Our treatment plant dumps chemicals into the water to neutralize the iron, the niacin, the sulfates, the whatever-it-is that gets into the so-called fresh supply. As a whole, as Society, we recycle those things we desire and others which we do not.
If we were not so distracted by our work routine and our family hopes, we might add to our agenda that such a business needs to report to us, to someone, to anyone not with a vested interest, just what it is doing to preserve our community. Does it spray-wash acid battery sludge as part of the cleaning process? Do they gut the car and properly dispose of plastics and rubber, or do those things burn up in some fiery blaze that is only occasionally seen emitting from the multiple-acred plant atop the hill across the way? And does such a pyre offer up the acrid scents I catch in the morning? The smoky smell cannot just be from smashing metal in a grinder. Something else must be going on. Metals burn at extreme heat, so too do car cushions and windshield wipers. Day to day, though, it is the noise that creates calamity.
The clack-clang-crash sounds repeatedly. It isn't quite a disturbance as a persistent nuisance, something we recognize as background noise that doesn't do much to ruin our social events. A picnic might be going on in the yard when a car lets loose from the magnetic crane above a pile of mashed metal, and the crash-boom-slide-screech distracts momentarily as we look westward to make sure it is just the scrap workers at their toil and not a plane going down or a car going into a pole. We return to conversation. What were we talking about?
Works Cited
"Ferrous Metal Recycling." Tenebaum Recycling Group. http://www.trg.net/metals-recycling/ferrous-metal-recycling. (Accessed March 2, 2o12)
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #4 Entry
Flat is a relative thing. Neither the world nor the sky could ever be flat, yet mankind has found a way to bulldoze sections into level fields while accepting that the best we can do is cut through the atmosphere in flat, even lines aboard airplanes.
MY YARD IS FLAT! I might have declared to Columbus centuries ago. I would have been wrong. Its general appearance resembles a flat surface, but one needs to get close to observe all the tiny hills and dips and imperceptible divots that mark the miniature pasture.
A mole in summertime will scuttle under the grass like a cat playing beneath a blanket. It lifts the sod with a ripple-run, a bump in motion. The effect is that one could peel back the top surface and expect to witness a web of roots, rocks and mud underneath. I tug at it out of curiosity, yet it yields only two stubby blades of separated grass. The surface holds. How does the mole find passage under there?
That memory rattles me as sharp winter clips the tops of those same blades. Small patches of green refuse to hibernate and now the flatness reveals its facade. A pale veil of snow not worth shoveling stretches unevenly across the surface; it’s a Kleenex pulled from a box, a fluttering bridal gown caught on video. The image is almost impossible to describe without uttering pithy things like cotton, blankets, sheets, pillows. Tiny tufts of snow mound together above the determined grass, and their white estuaries resemble the mousse a stylist puffs into her hand before spreading the oozy-goo across my graying, curly hair; sometimes my yard covered in snow looks like the wavy, inarticulate mop I brush daily.
When the snow melts there will be three distinct pools left after the initial seepage moves most of the water back to sea level. One near the house will round out in a semi-circle and slowly drain toward the foundation; the largest will form where the pool will go in late May and where now sits a feeble attempt at an ice skating rectangle we built on New Year’s Day (you can do a lot when you’re not hung-over); and another will remain stagnant beneath the kids’ playset where their feet have dragged and scraped beyond the warranty of durable grass seed. The rink that never was was never given a chance by a tepid, strange winter, though lack of construction skills did not help. The tiny slivers of snow-melted-to-origin-water will be the final proof that the yard isn’t as flat as it appears.
These puddles are testament to upheaval, to the minuscule dimensions of terrain around them that drain off quicker. It is as if three lakes for birds and squirrels and worms have been built upon a quarter acre of Earth. Those pools will sit for days, dry down or evaporate up and then the whole stretch will again seem to be level. The human eye is easily tricked.
Fifty years ago when this house was built the yard was surveyed, rendered tabletop-flat by a steamroller and left to settle. Through a half century it has held picnics, cook-outs, parties, and has been repeatedly pounded by the too hot days we think will never end, the too deep winters we can’t tolerate and the too wet rains we beg away; it has withstood limited surrender and now ripples in nature’s own imperfect, sauntering, uneven undulation.
Stumble though I will three months on with the clunky lawnmower as it catches upon dirt mounds, I cannot now come to terms with what the snowy patch is if it isn’t flat like a pancake or soft as a downy quilt or resting like a funeral pall. The yard is resilient and for now the snow doesn’t seem to mind how much it resembles a...
MY YARD IS FLAT! I might have declared to Columbus centuries ago. I would have been wrong. Its general appearance resembles a flat surface, but one needs to get close to observe all the tiny hills and dips and imperceptible divots that mark the miniature pasture.
A mole in summertime will scuttle under the grass like a cat playing beneath a blanket. It lifts the sod with a ripple-run, a bump in motion. The effect is that one could peel back the top surface and expect to witness a web of roots, rocks and mud underneath. I tug at it out of curiosity, yet it yields only two stubby blades of separated grass. The surface holds. How does the mole find passage under there?
That memory rattles me as sharp winter clips the tops of those same blades. Small patches of green refuse to hibernate and now the flatness reveals its facade. A pale veil of snow not worth shoveling stretches unevenly across the surface; it’s a Kleenex pulled from a box, a fluttering bridal gown caught on video. The image is almost impossible to describe without uttering pithy things like cotton, blankets, sheets, pillows. Tiny tufts of snow mound together above the determined grass, and their white estuaries resemble the mousse a stylist puffs into her hand before spreading the oozy-goo across my graying, curly hair; sometimes my yard covered in snow looks like the wavy, inarticulate mop I brush daily.
When the snow melts there will be three distinct pools left after the initial seepage moves most of the water back to sea level. One near the house will round out in a semi-circle and slowly drain toward the foundation; the largest will form where the pool will go in late May and where now sits a feeble attempt at an ice skating rectangle we built on New Year’s Day (you can do a lot when you’re not hung-over); and another will remain stagnant beneath the kids’ playset where their feet have dragged and scraped beyond the warranty of durable grass seed. The rink that never was was never given a chance by a tepid, strange winter, though lack of construction skills did not help. The tiny slivers of snow-melted-to-origin-water will be the final proof that the yard isn’t as flat as it appears.
These puddles are testament to upheaval, to the minuscule dimensions of terrain around them that drain off quicker. It is as if three lakes for birds and squirrels and worms have been built upon a quarter acre of Earth. Those pools will sit for days, dry down or evaporate up and then the whole stretch will again seem to be level. The human eye is easily tricked.
Fifty years ago when this house was built the yard was surveyed, rendered tabletop-flat by a steamroller and left to settle. Through a half century it has held picnics, cook-outs, parties, and has been repeatedly pounded by the too hot days we think will never end, the too deep winters we can’t tolerate and the too wet rains we beg away; it has withstood limited surrender and now ripples in nature’s own imperfect, sauntering, uneven undulation.
Stumble though I will three months on with the clunky lawnmower as it catches upon dirt mounds, I cannot now come to terms with what the snowy patch is if it isn’t flat like a pancake or soft as a downy quilt or resting like a funeral pall. The yard is resilient and for now the snow doesn’t seem to mind how much it resembles a...
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #3 Entry
“Indigenous – (adj) originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country; native” (www.dictionary.com). I have lived in this neighborhood for twenty of my forty-two years on this planet, and no more than six years in any other locale. This is my home. I awoke this morning to a freeze-dried February dawn, and as I released the dog, a pesky, stupid beagle, into the yard, a hooting hello greeted me. I presumed it to be an owl. I can’t say for certain whether I have ever heard that song before in my near-wooded, near-suburban, near-city neighborhood. It is difficult to peg this place into one sociological category. We are shaped like a paisley print, our six connecting streets, and are lifted up and away to the east into a dense wood where on the far end, I am told, stands private hunting grounds. We are where city and country converge in a small, modern way. I used to play in those woods as a child, but as an adult now realize I only ventured one-half or three-quarters of a mile beyond my front door.
I didn’t know before that owls live here. I remember hearing the rat-ta-tatat repetition of an erstwhile woodpecker for three or four summers in the 1980s, but otherwise only deer, wild turkey, raccoons, chipmunks, and birds, lots and lots of birds, have made their way onto our streets, through our neighborhood and into my auditory circumference.
A simple Internet search reveals that there are at least 8 varieties of owl in Western PA: barn, saw whet (no typo, that is not supposed to be wheat), great horned, snowy, long eared, barred, short eared and screech. Of these, I have heard of barn and screech but know very little about them or the others.
What owl could have called to me this morning? Is an owl even a bird by classification? Encyclopedia Britannica’s on-line site defines it as a bird, a raptor, of the order Strigiformes, a word I have never heard. I wasn’t one for biology. There are thought to be 180 species of owls throughout the world.
According to The Pennsylvania Game Commission, which is currently conducting a study to count the number of barn owls in the state and to determine whether their population is on the decline, the barn owl can be described in one-hundred-twenty-five words. How stunning! A creature thought to have been the Bird of Athena, and the work of mythology and mystery long these many years, can be summed up in so few words. The necessary highlights so that I might recognize one are these: “10-15 inches tall...wingspan of 41-47 inches...distinctive long heart-shaped facial disk...referred to as the "monkey-faced owl"...nearly pure-white to dusky breast with small spots, small dark eyes...a hissing or scream-like vocalization” (http://www.portal.state.pa.us/). That was no hiss I heard this morning; it was, rather, the soft calling of a baby’s coo, the voice as nonthreatening as when my children nestled in their cribs and searched with sound for words when words were only just developing in their minds.
And where might I locate the owl; should they be found in my neighborhood? “They are found in agricultural fields, grasslands, and other open areas...nest in cavities of large dead trees, rock crevices...burrows in riverbanks....[and] as their name implies, they nest in barns, silos, abandoned buildings and artificial nest boxes” (IBID). A review of aerial photos of my larger neighborhood, my borough, reveals that the wooded area I traversed as a child is impressively large. It is an undeveloped tract in the era of community development, suburban sprawl and housing mania. I cannot read the acreage but it appears to be equal in size to the land covered by homes, schools and buildings. There is plenty of room for owls to live.
I have never taken a long look at where I live; it was always just the place I drove through and the environ in which I slept. I am grateful for so much raw Earth, so much around me that I hadn’t searched when my adolescent limitations kept me close to the front door. The possibility is out there – right here! – in my extended living spaces, that the barn owl could be found amidst a rock formation, large dead trees, and though the Monongahela River is no more than ten miles due north, one might be along those banks as well.
I won’t feed one but won’t disrupt its dinner either if I were to locate an owl. Something about that word “raptor” places me at a cautious distance. They eat rodents, and this, it is said, is good for farmers. This might be helpful information to the novel-in-progress I am penning.
You could say that I am indigenous to my neighborhood. I act like most of its citizens, have been here most of my life, feed my children and make my home here. But have I ever really paid attention to the world that is more indigenous around me than I could ever become? In his essay, “Among Animals,” John Daniel wrote that, “we have so far removed our lives from the wild...that many of us can scarcely see wild animals when we do encounter them” (Daniel 114). Add to that notion the fact we may not even hear them when they have been calling out to us for more than two decades, and one longs to grab the kids now that they are older, pick up a field guide and a pair of binoculars and our best boots, and head out beyond the immediate streets and into the wooded neighborhood to tally a count for the Game Commission. I heard a barn owl, maybe a screech, this morning, I would wager. Will we find it if we only look?
Works Cited
Daniel, John. “Among Animals.” The Trail Home. Pantheon Books; New York, NY. 1994.
“Barn Owl Conservation Initiative.”
http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=622800&mode=2 (accessed February 12, 2012)
“Indigenous." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indigenous (accessed February 19, 2012)
I didn’t know before that owls live here. I remember hearing the rat-ta-tatat repetition of an erstwhile woodpecker for three or four summers in the 1980s, but otherwise only deer, wild turkey, raccoons, chipmunks, and birds, lots and lots of birds, have made their way onto our streets, through our neighborhood and into my auditory circumference.
A simple Internet search reveals that there are at least 8 varieties of owl in Western PA: barn, saw whet (no typo, that is not supposed to be wheat), great horned, snowy, long eared, barred, short eared and screech. Of these, I have heard of barn and screech but know very little about them or the others.
What owl could have called to me this morning? Is an owl even a bird by classification? Encyclopedia Britannica’s on-line site defines it as a bird, a raptor, of the order Strigiformes, a word I have never heard. I wasn’t one for biology. There are thought to be 180 species of owls throughout the world.
According to The Pennsylvania Game Commission, which is currently conducting a study to count the number of barn owls in the state and to determine whether their population is on the decline, the barn owl can be described in one-hundred-twenty-five words. How stunning! A creature thought to have been the Bird of Athena, and the work of mythology and mystery long these many years, can be summed up in so few words. The necessary highlights so that I might recognize one are these: “10-15 inches tall...wingspan of 41-47 inches...distinctive long heart-shaped facial disk...referred to as the "monkey-faced owl"...nearly pure-white to dusky breast with small spots, small dark eyes...a hissing or scream-like vocalization” (http://www.portal.state.pa.us/). That was no hiss I heard this morning; it was, rather, the soft calling of a baby’s coo, the voice as nonthreatening as when my children nestled in their cribs and searched with sound for words when words were only just developing in their minds.
And where might I locate the owl; should they be found in my neighborhood? “They are found in agricultural fields, grasslands, and other open areas...nest in cavities of large dead trees, rock crevices...burrows in riverbanks....[and] as their name implies, they nest in barns, silos, abandoned buildings and artificial nest boxes” (IBID). A review of aerial photos of my larger neighborhood, my borough, reveals that the wooded area I traversed as a child is impressively large. It is an undeveloped tract in the era of community development, suburban sprawl and housing mania. I cannot read the acreage but it appears to be equal in size to the land covered by homes, schools and buildings. There is plenty of room for owls to live.
I have never taken a long look at where I live; it was always just the place I drove through and the environ in which I slept. I am grateful for so much raw Earth, so much around me that I hadn’t searched when my adolescent limitations kept me close to the front door. The possibility is out there – right here! – in my extended living spaces, that the barn owl could be found amidst a rock formation, large dead trees, and though the Monongahela River is no more than ten miles due north, one might be along those banks as well.
I won’t feed one but won’t disrupt its dinner either if I were to locate an owl. Something about that word “raptor” places me at a cautious distance. They eat rodents, and this, it is said, is good for farmers. This might be helpful information to the novel-in-progress I am penning.
You could say that I am indigenous to my neighborhood. I act like most of its citizens, have been here most of my life, feed my children and make my home here. But have I ever really paid attention to the world that is more indigenous around me than I could ever become? In his essay, “Among Animals,” John Daniel wrote that, “we have so far removed our lives from the wild...that many of us can scarcely see wild animals when we do encounter them” (Daniel 114). Add to that notion the fact we may not even hear them when they have been calling out to us for more than two decades, and one longs to grab the kids now that they are older, pick up a field guide and a pair of binoculars and our best boots, and head out beyond the immediate streets and into the wooded neighborhood to tally a count for the Game Commission. I heard a barn owl, maybe a screech, this morning, I would wager. Will we find it if we only look?
Works Cited
Daniel, John. “Among Animals.” The Trail Home. Pantheon Books; New York, NY. 1994.
“Barn Owl Conservation Initiative.”
http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=622800&mode=2 (accessed February 12, 2012)
“Indigenous." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indigenous (accessed February 19, 2012)
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #3 Entry
I always want to be elsewhere when it snows. Not because I dislike the winter shawl, but because of how much I adore it. I have looked out my window onto this same yard for eleven winter seasons of my own and countless winter days when my grandparents owned this house. Somewhere, elsewhere, snow in Chardon, Ohio, or West Allis, Wisconsin, or Ithaca, New York, must be different. Landscapes as varied as the people I could meet lie under snow in patterns and shoots and gaps and hollows and hills of every angle and reflection the Earth can conjure or man create.
Snow is non-discriminatory, and my yard reflects no prejudice today in angles slanted, circles rounded, flat-tops flattened. Everything, from the kids’ slide to the covered air-conditioning unit to the roof above the porch, holds the snow in its exact pattern, as if either the falling mist had been too tired to go farther down or if each branch, each rock, each clump of dirt insisted on impressing its embossment upon the snow in an upward thrust. Even the roof, built as if an uneven piano had been placed next to the house, gives its shape to snow. Keys C D E F G A B C are staggered so that it would read C d E f G a B c, if it were in positions of ups and downs, and the snow had fallen into place in just the same lazy way, the ups are up and the downs are down.
The snow has returned, as if nature’s fury had a summer rental somewhere in the south and left early from vacation to come home. We have seen a wet season, but not a cold one, not by any stretch. This “winter” would stand meager in any record book that traces the highs and lows of the day’s airy climb on a thermostatic scale. Had season climes been “normal,” we would be housed under a few feet of snow. The echoless depths of winter would be rampant. But not this year. The rain throughout January was marked with teeming intensity, spring-like sprinkles and even summer’s thunderclap as enough rain fell to make up for all those times we sang that song, “Rain, rain, go away – come again some other day.” The ledger is clear, so let the children sing again. They must have dried a lot of summer days away because these past months had no winter snow, just rain.
This weekend finally brought the snow we had wanted since before Christmas. Pennsylvania’s purest has drifted down from the sky in white and slanted bands, tufts sprawling headlong toward the yard. Across driveway walls, wind-cliffs of snow balance over the freshly shoveled cement as if annoying avalanches could ruin one man’s twenty-minute toil in a snap. The wind cuts in from the west and howls through the same slants of evergreens that in six months will produce the most memorable sunsets. Each grr-howl sounds like a car on its way toward someone else’s unfinished driveway, and I am constantly distracted, knowing my son is playing hockey in the street out front. It was his birthday this weekend and we gave him a hockey net – the perfect winter gift for a ten-year old Pittsburgh boy. He lobs a contraction-hardened ball toward the net and misses often enough that I fear he will chase it into the street and into the path of an oncoming car. It takes four, then five, then six whispering howls before I finally convince myself it is just the wind and not an automobile. The game goes on and the howling increases and the cold beneath my Levi’s suggests this isn’t the best day to be outside.
I think of the weather prediction from this morning’s news: 14 degrees, high only near 30, and I think of winter. What it finally means to experience winter. I don’t understand other climates because I am neither a part of those regions nor a product of their upbringing. I am Pennsylvanian through and through, and like a calendar too quick to be pulled from the wall as day gives into days as month gives way to months as year turn into years, I note the seasons. Without them I am incomplete, as if a chunk of shoveled snow is all that had been removed from a bright landscape where color no longer exists.
My life is a series of comforts and threats, no warning to severe as to run for shelter but strong enough to find safety in the warmth of furnace-forced security. I say I love winter, but I only watch the snow fall for serenity and shovel the inches away for the enjoyment of work. If I could live out here I probably wouldn’t. For as much as I am built of the Pittsburgh seasons, as much as they have become part of me, I am also indoctrinated to a soft bed, warm sheets, a hot shower and dry, dry gloves that insulate my aging hands from this winter I had longed for, this season I waited to feel again. It can stay a while, it’s a good guest.
Snow is non-discriminatory, and my yard reflects no prejudice today in angles slanted, circles rounded, flat-tops flattened. Everything, from the kids’ slide to the covered air-conditioning unit to the roof above the porch, holds the snow in its exact pattern, as if either the falling mist had been too tired to go farther down or if each branch, each rock, each clump of dirt insisted on impressing its embossment upon the snow in an upward thrust. Even the roof, built as if an uneven piano had been placed next to the house, gives its shape to snow. Keys C D E F G A B C are staggered so that it would read C d E f G a B c, if it were in positions of ups and downs, and the snow had fallen into place in just the same lazy way, the ups are up and the downs are down.
The snow has returned, as if nature’s fury had a summer rental somewhere in the south and left early from vacation to come home. We have seen a wet season, but not a cold one, not by any stretch. This “winter” would stand meager in any record book that traces the highs and lows of the day’s airy climb on a thermostatic scale. Had season climes been “normal,” we would be housed under a few feet of snow. The echoless depths of winter would be rampant. But not this year. The rain throughout January was marked with teeming intensity, spring-like sprinkles and even summer’s thunderclap as enough rain fell to make up for all those times we sang that song, “Rain, rain, go away – come again some other day.” The ledger is clear, so let the children sing again. They must have dried a lot of summer days away because these past months had no winter snow, just rain.
This weekend finally brought the snow we had wanted since before Christmas. Pennsylvania’s purest has drifted down from the sky in white and slanted bands, tufts sprawling headlong toward the yard. Across driveway walls, wind-cliffs of snow balance over the freshly shoveled cement as if annoying avalanches could ruin one man’s twenty-minute toil in a snap. The wind cuts in from the west and howls through the same slants of evergreens that in six months will produce the most memorable sunsets. Each grr-howl sounds like a car on its way toward someone else’s unfinished driveway, and I am constantly distracted, knowing my son is playing hockey in the street out front. It was his birthday this weekend and we gave him a hockey net – the perfect winter gift for a ten-year old Pittsburgh boy. He lobs a contraction-hardened ball toward the net and misses often enough that I fear he will chase it into the street and into the path of an oncoming car. It takes four, then five, then six whispering howls before I finally convince myself it is just the wind and not an automobile. The game goes on and the howling increases and the cold beneath my Levi’s suggests this isn’t the best day to be outside.
I think of the weather prediction from this morning’s news: 14 degrees, high only near 30, and I think of winter. What it finally means to experience winter. I don’t understand other climates because I am neither a part of those regions nor a product of their upbringing. I am Pennsylvanian through and through, and like a calendar too quick to be pulled from the wall as day gives into days as month gives way to months as year turn into years, I note the seasons. Without them I am incomplete, as if a chunk of shoveled snow is all that had been removed from a bright landscape where color no longer exists.
My life is a series of comforts and threats, no warning to severe as to run for shelter but strong enough to find safety in the warmth of furnace-forced security. I say I love winter, but I only watch the snow fall for serenity and shovel the inches away for the enjoyment of work. If I could live out here I probably wouldn’t. For as much as I am built of the Pittsburgh seasons, as much as they have become part of me, I am also indoctrinated to a soft bed, warm sheets, a hot shower and dry, dry gloves that insulate my aging hands from this winter I had longed for, this season I waited to feel again. It can stay a while, it’s a good guest.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #2 Entry
The lake. The words are simple yet promise me escape and wonderment unlike any other place on Earth. “Something there isn’t that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost one wrote about nature creating upheaval upon its shoulders where a wall had been built. I could not imagine a force so great as to disrupt a lake, whether manmade or not. Hurricanes ravage the sea and change its slope, its shoreline, its very appearance only to return to stasis once fury subsides. Torrential rains spill rivers over their banks, the muddying flow surges energy forward to rattle and scar nearly everything in its path, only to crest, be absorbed, retreat. The tsunami – forget it, such wrath is indescribable. But somehow a lake holds greater dignity no matter how much water deluges upon it. Somewhere I am sure there are damns and floodgates that withstand the forces of nature which a lake harnesses, but my position and posture are of distance, removal, safe haven.
The dock swings and dances upon artificial waves - wakes from speeding boats eclipsing some posted limit as if rules mean nothing. The bounce beats a rhythm unlike any salsa I could balance, unlike any mambo I could step. The pier is my skateboard, my waverider, a teeter-totter of surrender as I give into the waves, ride out their momentum, saunter. But these are only in my memory. The undulating rise and fall of gravity suspended are remnants of last summer’s get-away to pure-air elevations of escape. So high in the sky, the mountain lake captures the sun in a way the desert deflects its glare – unimpeded, accepting, translucent. The atmosphere is thin and cool, yet the sun is a mentor offering patient guidance. Just wait! The heat will surface and the lake will absorb and the day will stretch on timelessly.
It has been promised to my kids that one of these years we will go to Deep Creek Lake in Maryland in the depths of winter to see the lake, to maybe skate if safety allows, and to finally feel summer in January. For memory pulls me toward the water as if a time machine were my transport. At home, in Pittsburgh, under a pensive, crisp and mild February, something I cannot recall having lived through for any of my years, I think of the lake, of The Lake, of the place on the planet that beckons me with unfiltered passion and promises unabashed serenity.
No matter the season I can sense the water as it eluviates before me, a folding-fan’s open but creased flatness that stretches deep to the west, my left, and reaches up and high to my right, the east. My spot is shaped in the smiling rind of mauled-over watermelon, and its breadth as broad as fields of Iowa corn rolling into the horizon. Watching The Lake, my lake, must be what it means to stand at the farm and peer over the giant, heavenward stalks.
I stand on the shore, firmer, less ebullient than the dock, and cast a line or dip a toe into water that feels less like water and more like cool slips of syrup. The thickness isn’t slime, or muck, or year-upon-year of algae; rather it is a oneness with lake I have felt nowhere else. It is a cradle calling me home. I wish to die there.
The dock swings and dances upon artificial waves - wakes from speeding boats eclipsing some posted limit as if rules mean nothing. The bounce beats a rhythm unlike any salsa I could balance, unlike any mambo I could step. The pier is my skateboard, my waverider, a teeter-totter of surrender as I give into the waves, ride out their momentum, saunter. But these are only in my memory. The undulating rise and fall of gravity suspended are remnants of last summer’s get-away to pure-air elevations of escape. So high in the sky, the mountain lake captures the sun in a way the desert deflects its glare – unimpeded, accepting, translucent. The atmosphere is thin and cool, yet the sun is a mentor offering patient guidance. Just wait! The heat will surface and the lake will absorb and the day will stretch on timelessly.
It has been promised to my kids that one of these years we will go to Deep Creek Lake in Maryland in the depths of winter to see the lake, to maybe skate if safety allows, and to finally feel summer in January. For memory pulls me toward the water as if a time machine were my transport. At home, in Pittsburgh, under a pensive, crisp and mild February, something I cannot recall having lived through for any of my years, I think of the lake, of The Lake, of the place on the planet that beckons me with unfiltered passion and promises unabashed serenity.
No matter the season I can sense the water as it eluviates before me, a folding-fan’s open but creased flatness that stretches deep to the west, my left, and reaches up and high to my right, the east. My spot is shaped in the smiling rind of mauled-over watermelon, and its breadth as broad as fields of Iowa corn rolling into the horizon. Watching The Lake, my lake, must be what it means to stand at the farm and peer over the giant, heavenward stalks.
I stand on the shore, firmer, less ebullient than the dock, and cast a line or dip a toe into water that feels less like water and more like cool slips of syrup. The thickness isn’t slime, or muck, or year-upon-year of algae; rather it is a oneness with lake I have felt nowhere else. It is a cradle calling me home. I wish to die there.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #2 Entry
Much can change in two weeks. In a world of constancy, we are faced with what poets called mutability, the reminder that things always change. In small ways this spot in the backyard has been altered in two weeks; in large ways it is no different; in truth it is always the same.
A feeble winter has passed through southwestern Pennsylvania, as if Nature’s energy has been focused elsewhere. Like the parent of a run-away child whose focus wanes on three kids at home, the intensity cannot be evenly disciplined between two places at once. Somewhere winter storms rage, but here in Pittsburgh we waddle through puddles that would have been massive snowdrifts in Winter’s typical attention. It has been a rainy season.
The yard is muck – two weeks ago it was like standing on a moon-surface snow. The crackle beneath the feet would have deterred a criminal in action. Now the heels sink into a trap of sludge, each step a sqa-woosh-pluck-glosh of sound as the boot holds, pops out, lifts up.
The snow has melted yet the yard holds water across its surface in a green-brown soup waiting to be reheated. Pennsylvania clay, they say, is thick that way. Under two or three feet of tillable soil resides clumps of un-mouldable material, useless in all ways other than holding the Earth together. The clay is a barrier that slows filtration and fills my yard with tiny, melted pools. Eventually the water seeps through, down to a water table only geologists and construction workers worry about. Perhaps those who rely on well water are also concerned with levels and depths and natural streams as well. If that clay could be turned to statues and monuments, what yard would I have for my children to play upon? If crayons could be made or if pots and tableware were to be carved from Pennsylvania’s clump, then the snow-melt-January-rain would drip down to the center unimpeded and flow back to the rivers faster.
The air smells of comfortably pungent reserve, no mold, no festering, and yet not quite spring either. Rather, a hint of dry air evaporates the muddy trenches toward the jetstreams and reeks of scant, day-old moisture. The invisible transformation continues before my very eyes. The sun is engaged in the battle, and like a divorce lawyer watching over custody hearings, it too has a say over which water will go to the clouds and which will sink deep into the folds of the planet.
The runaway child drips into the aquifer as the remaining three ascend toward the clouds; their paths will be different.
Here I stand, the last to rise up and follow Sky Mother, so tempted years ago by Father Dirt, and I wonder aloud about choices, about decisions made when we were too young to even know what decision was. The sister who disappeared into the dirt later returned, clean (sober and clean as they say) and seemed worse for the ware. The others rolled into thunderstorms and violent squalls of their own, as I rode the misty forgiveness of soft spring rains. We were kids then, and this yard was our grandparents’ who have now gone on to be amongst that clay, as has the father who lost a custody battle he didn’t wish to fight. It is my yard now, and I can’t help but think that Pap-pap didn’t have to wait for it to drain, nor do I remember standing water at his house. As nature changes, life holds the scars.
A feeble winter has passed through southwestern Pennsylvania, as if Nature’s energy has been focused elsewhere. Like the parent of a run-away child whose focus wanes on three kids at home, the intensity cannot be evenly disciplined between two places at once. Somewhere winter storms rage, but here in Pittsburgh we waddle through puddles that would have been massive snowdrifts in Winter’s typical attention. It has been a rainy season.
The yard is muck – two weeks ago it was like standing on a moon-surface snow. The crackle beneath the feet would have deterred a criminal in action. Now the heels sink into a trap of sludge, each step a sqa-woosh-pluck-glosh of sound as the boot holds, pops out, lifts up.
The snow has melted yet the yard holds water across its surface in a green-brown soup waiting to be reheated. Pennsylvania clay, they say, is thick that way. Under two or three feet of tillable soil resides clumps of un-mouldable material, useless in all ways other than holding the Earth together. The clay is a barrier that slows filtration and fills my yard with tiny, melted pools. Eventually the water seeps through, down to a water table only geologists and construction workers worry about. Perhaps those who rely on well water are also concerned with levels and depths and natural streams as well. If that clay could be turned to statues and monuments, what yard would I have for my children to play upon? If crayons could be made or if pots and tableware were to be carved from Pennsylvania’s clump, then the snow-melt-January-rain would drip down to the center unimpeded and flow back to the rivers faster.
The air smells of comfortably pungent reserve, no mold, no festering, and yet not quite spring either. Rather, a hint of dry air evaporates the muddy trenches toward the jetstreams and reeks of scant, day-old moisture. The invisible transformation continues before my very eyes. The sun is engaged in the battle, and like a divorce lawyer watching over custody hearings, it too has a say over which water will go to the clouds and which will sink deep into the folds of the planet.
The runaway child drips into the aquifer as the remaining three ascend toward the clouds; their paths will be different.
Here I stand, the last to rise up and follow Sky Mother, so tempted years ago by Father Dirt, and I wonder aloud about choices, about decisions made when we were too young to even know what decision was. The sister who disappeared into the dirt later returned, clean (sober and clean as they say) and seemed worse for the ware. The others rolled into thunderstorms and violent squalls of their own, as I rode the misty forgiveness of soft spring rains. We were kids then, and this yard was our grandparents’ who have now gone on to be amongst that clay, as has the father who lost a custody battle he didn’t wish to fight. It is my yard now, and I can’t help but think that Pap-pap didn’t have to wait for it to drain, nor do I remember standing water at his house. As nature changes, life holds the scars.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #1 Entry
Where Have All the Sidewalks Gone?
Baldwin Borough is a suburb south of Pittsburgh that does not have sidewalks. I spent my formative years here and have wondered often why the town planners who developed the space decided to leave such common appendages from its streets. Perhaps the notion that everyone would one day be driving everywhere moved such a decision forward. Built in the mid-1950s, Baldwin would have been a quintessentially American idea – success lead to progress and progress lead to thinking about the future in different ways, in newer ways. It has never made sense to me.
Those formative years were between the ages of ten and eighteen. While having on-street parking became a pleasant convenience, my younger years seem to have been stagnated by the inability to go somewhere. I just never thought to walk anywhere because directional suggestion was lacking – as if kids should need suggestions for what to do on a summer day!
We rarely road bikes, too many of us had the new-fandangled Atari game systems in our gamerooms, and without sidewalks to lead us anywhere we did little to motivate ourselves. Sure, we had a few friends whose houses we visited often but hardly enough to amount to exercise. The lack of sidewalks likely resulted in many having no motivation at all, a sort of community-wide laziness. We kids of the 1980s settled for the neighbor’s pool and waited until mom or dad got home to take us anywhere.
Some of us got jobs at sixteen, a few even went off to college after buying our own cars. But for the most part we just kind of hung around our own houses, shot occasional hoops into an under-used basket and walked to the store only when the cool lure of Pepsi aspired us to reach above our coach potato personas.
The community swimming pool was so far removed from our homes that a school bus ran through the massive borough each summer morning to pick up kids who had a pool pass stitched into their name-brand swimsuits. No one wanted to be that nerd who actually bought a pass, so we hung out in the small wooded lots that divided the subdivisions, doing little. The library sits dead-center within the borough, equidistant from both sides of the map which show Baldwin to be shaped like two “C”s cuddling, one upside-down and backward hugging the other at its upper crest. The building of books was too far to reach on foot, but really, what kid thought to read in those summers?
The borough didn’t make me lazy, that is squarely upon my shoulders. I eventually learned to work hard motivated by necessity, not activity. I returned to the same neighborhood in 2001 to raise a family. Baldwin’s lack of sidewalks cannot be blamed for complacent youths who grew to carry massive debt, vote less than any generation before it, raise teen pregnancy statistics to all new levels, surge the popularity of binge drinking, pot consumption and tattoo sales, but you have to wonder what could have happened if someone had said no to the idea of an entire community without sidewalks.
Baldwin Borough is a suburb south of Pittsburgh that does not have sidewalks. I spent my formative years here and have wondered often why the town planners who developed the space decided to leave such common appendages from its streets. Perhaps the notion that everyone would one day be driving everywhere moved such a decision forward. Built in the mid-1950s, Baldwin would have been a quintessentially American idea – success lead to progress and progress lead to thinking about the future in different ways, in newer ways. It has never made sense to me.
Those formative years were between the ages of ten and eighteen. While having on-street parking became a pleasant convenience, my younger years seem to have been stagnated by the inability to go somewhere. I just never thought to walk anywhere because directional suggestion was lacking – as if kids should need suggestions for what to do on a summer day!
We rarely road bikes, too many of us had the new-fandangled Atari game systems in our gamerooms, and without sidewalks to lead us anywhere we did little to motivate ourselves. Sure, we had a few friends whose houses we visited often but hardly enough to amount to exercise. The lack of sidewalks likely resulted in many having no motivation at all, a sort of community-wide laziness. We kids of the 1980s settled for the neighbor’s pool and waited until mom or dad got home to take us anywhere.
Some of us got jobs at sixteen, a few even went off to college after buying our own cars. But for the most part we just kind of hung around our own houses, shot occasional hoops into an under-used basket and walked to the store only when the cool lure of Pepsi aspired us to reach above our coach potato personas.
The community swimming pool was so far removed from our homes that a school bus ran through the massive borough each summer morning to pick up kids who had a pool pass stitched into their name-brand swimsuits. No one wanted to be that nerd who actually bought a pass, so we hung out in the small wooded lots that divided the subdivisions, doing little. The library sits dead-center within the borough, equidistant from both sides of the map which show Baldwin to be shaped like two “C”s cuddling, one upside-down and backward hugging the other at its upper crest. The building of books was too far to reach on foot, but really, what kid thought to read in those summers?
The borough didn’t make me lazy, that is squarely upon my shoulders. I eventually learned to work hard motivated by necessity, not activity. I returned to the same neighborhood in 2001 to raise a family. Baldwin’s lack of sidewalks cannot be blamed for complacent youths who grew to carry massive debt, vote less than any generation before it, raise teen pregnancy statistics to all new levels, surge the popularity of binge drinking, pot consumption and tattoo sales, but you have to wonder what could have happened if someone had said no to the idea of an entire community without sidewalks.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #1 Entry
Nights With the Kids and Time with Nature (January 15, 2012)
Becca is a smart kid. My twelve-year-old daughter shares the experience that will be my first Nature Writing blog entry as we step outside on a cold January night. Our backyard is of average size but flat with a rough, uncultivated wooded hill behind and a fair view of the sky. We are natural talkers, so we quickly turn to discussing the stars that are visible on a winter evening. I show her Orion; she looks for the Big Dipper; we discuss how star gazers, our name for mappers of the sky, must have lived and worked at night four-hundred years ago.
The sky is skirted along its rim above the horizon, as if a blanket is beginning to grow off of the tangible Earth and toward the dome of atmosphere. It could be frost or ice sparkle, but something of a thin cloud-like band wraps the lower edge of the sky. And then, like an inverted ice cream bowl, the dense gray of the season opens softly across the span and highlights stars against a backdrop that looks more like a negative photo than anything my own eyes could witness.
Cold air has a way of breaking you down. At first, the chill is a thrill, an exhilarating spark of excitement that reminds me of deep, long winters of the 1978 blizzard or the record snowfalls of 1993. The transference of heat through thin cotton sweat pants is no match for the warm barrier provided by a thick, pleated leather jacket yet I feel myself getting cold quickly. I am warm enough to discern the decreasing warmth as we stand and talk.
She remembers a point she had learned in girl scouts – something about seeing from the bottom of a well, a scenario as if you had fallen in; something about stars being brighter even in the middle of the day. It troubles me to think of my kid falling into a well, and I wonder where we even have a such an ancient construct in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.
Becca adds the observation that what we perceive as Orion’s Belt are three stars that are actually millions of miles away from each other. I have three kids. They too will form one identity in my spirit, in my observation, in my life. They already have, yet as their lives go on and forward, they will drift apart and find their own ways, make their own marks, much like the stars. But in a tangible way they will all be part of my personal Orion.
I envy Becca. I didn’t know until I was nineteen what she repeats to me about the stars and about Orion. The clarity of the ages look down at us from illumines millions of miles away, and this observation/writing segment for dad and kid and nature has grown long. We are getting cold, our sentences shorter. The old coat of mine that hangs from her shoulders like a dripping blotch of river-bottom-brown paint is thinner than my jacket. She holds onto the warmth in order to avoid sleep; I hold onto the moment to avoid its passing. There are no wells to drown in, of that much I am certain. A ceiling of stars that have seen the greater magnitude of man’s history will still be here when she lowers me into the Earth some day. My only hope is, that from a grave one can see stars more brilliantly than on any winter night in Pennsylvania.
Becca is a smart kid. My twelve-year-old daughter shares the experience that will be my first Nature Writing blog entry as we step outside on a cold January night. Our backyard is of average size but flat with a rough, uncultivated wooded hill behind and a fair view of the sky. We are natural talkers, so we quickly turn to discussing the stars that are visible on a winter evening. I show her Orion; she looks for the Big Dipper; we discuss how star gazers, our name for mappers of the sky, must have lived and worked at night four-hundred years ago.
The sky is skirted along its rim above the horizon, as if a blanket is beginning to grow off of the tangible Earth and toward the dome of atmosphere. It could be frost or ice sparkle, but something of a thin cloud-like band wraps the lower edge of the sky. And then, like an inverted ice cream bowl, the dense gray of the season opens softly across the span and highlights stars against a backdrop that looks more like a negative photo than anything my own eyes could witness.
Cold air has a way of breaking you down. At first, the chill is a thrill, an exhilarating spark of excitement that reminds me of deep, long winters of the 1978 blizzard or the record snowfalls of 1993. The transference of heat through thin cotton sweat pants is no match for the warm barrier provided by a thick, pleated leather jacket yet I feel myself getting cold quickly. I am warm enough to discern the decreasing warmth as we stand and talk.
She remembers a point she had learned in girl scouts – something about seeing from the bottom of a well, a scenario as if you had fallen in; something about stars being brighter even in the middle of the day. It troubles me to think of my kid falling into a well, and I wonder where we even have a such an ancient construct in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.
Becca adds the observation that what we perceive as Orion’s Belt are three stars that are actually millions of miles away from each other. I have three kids. They too will form one identity in my spirit, in my observation, in my life. They already have, yet as their lives go on and forward, they will drift apart and find their own ways, make their own marks, much like the stars. But in a tangible way they will all be part of my personal Orion.
I envy Becca. I didn’t know until I was nineteen what she repeats to me about the stars and about Orion. The clarity of the ages look down at us from illumines millions of miles away, and this observation/writing segment for dad and kid and nature has grown long. We are getting cold, our sentences shorter. The old coat of mine that hangs from her shoulders like a dripping blotch of river-bottom-brown paint is thinner than my jacket. She holds onto the warmth in order to avoid sleep; I hold onto the moment to avoid its passing. There are no wells to drown in, of that much I am certain. A ceiling of stars that have seen the greater magnitude of man’s history will still be here when she lowers me into the Earth some day. My only hope is, that from a grave one can see stars more brilliantly than on any winter night in Pennsylvania.
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