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...
Sunday, March 25, 2012
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)
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