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...
Sunday, February 26, 2012
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.
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