Tag: outdoors

Parenting, Poetry

Side Way

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hidden-door

Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

– William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act ii, Scene 1

In case of paralysis, break glass. Out there
is here. Stairs, a whining thud, fat-bellied
cicada trapped in a breezeway
flings itself from wall to wall
until it surrenders
to defeat, so much like gravity.
Even with its trident of five eyes,
it is blind to the way through.
Corridor becomes vault. Had it been born
a bluebottle butterfly, it might stand a better chance,
its photoreceptors detecting
a million colors
more than those five eyes,
and far beyond what our feeble pair perceive
(and so believe). We are as wary of spectrometers
and their evidence of hidden hues
as we are of quantum wavefunction
and infrared snapshots of the Kuiper belt. Continue reading “Side Way” →

Music, Outdoors

Echo Location

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She scrapes bow across strings whose low moan rises to a shriek.  Her elbow a piston, it turns the wrist in a blurred ellipse that frees a cry, a frenzy.  Two boys appear from behind the stage, leaping sideways across the brush that separates this place from the garden plots where an old woman in a headscarf shambles between rows watering broad petals of cabbage.  One of the children waves a stick like a flag.  His face is a wide grin that says, see me, see me.

Another boy in a man’s body perches on the edge of a chair on this portable stage.  Shaggy hair falls across his forehead as he leans into the music.  He is from Ireland and lives in Portland where he has his pick of women.  He does to the accordion what Kobe Bryant does to a ball.  We call this thing “playing,” this version of play unlike anything the rest of us will ever experience.

Bent at the waist ever so slightly, he gazes far off towards what must be the west where a weary August sun peels back the day’s skin and exposes the pink, swollen flesh of dusk.  The grown boy’s fingers are dervishes in harmonious riot, balletic and blind, somehow whirling an unbroken ensemble piece on that tiny stage of keys.  I look where he is looking — in the direction at least because what he sees is all his own.  I want to imagine his eyes fixed on a montage of hills, rain, soil-scarred hands lifting open a latch and reaching for him.  Just as likely, behind his eyes growls a gauntlet of fractured traffic between the airport and the next gig.  Or a dim wash of notes.  When I look that way, I see only the deep outline of trees against a sky now a garnet throb.

Then the breath, the snared half-second of surprise when bow and key and string and drum, all stop —

it’s only a pulse of the heart yet it stretches, stretches like the still air across embouchure, its reverberation through a valley of brass.  It stretches like a quantum measure that is neither real nor measurable.  Swelling up into that pause (which may be the end of all history and also may not contain a single new beginning) surges the cry of cicadas thick in the shadowed branches.  Through the crack too flaps the leather wing of one bat dipping for a moth then careening off, this also in the direction our accordion boy looks but doesn’t see.  Not what I see see anyway, and certainly not what the bat sees, though his vision may be closer to that of his chiropteran brother, a sightless echoing that delineates a terrain through sound, through a chorus of shape and motion.  Maybe he draws a whole universe like this, one round, rapid beat after another firing across a field of night.

 

Adventure, community, Outdoors

Think Global, Hike Local

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CCT

You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.

– Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods

With a little vacation away from work and my kiddo off canoeing at day camp, it’s time for a fix of woods.  I pull up Hiking Upward to find something near enough to hit in a few hours but far enough for solitude.

This is the goal: solitude.  And its accompanying quiet.

Humans are social creatures, sure, and we need to be in proximity to people as much for a sense of connection as for all the stuff — the supermarket and hospital, the auto mechanic and school.  To survive, we need to be in community.  Even so, too much proximity to too many others can take its toll.  The buzz of engines and clang of machines, the soundtrack of urban and suburban life, can jam the signals.  When I start to notice myself too focused on the clock and task list, too alert, too aware of every demand and every passing vehicle, I know it’s time to seek out a forest. Continue reading “Think Global, Hike Local” →

Living in the Moment, Outdoors, Poetry

Counting Country

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blackberry farm

2 hawks burst from the upper branches

1 doe steps, pauses, steps again into the brush

1 neon-green bug skitters under the cover of a fallen leaf

On its back, 1 tiny frog pinwheels its legs until I toe it upright and it springs into the weeds

3 patches of vines curl around their stash of not-yet-ripe raspberries

5 fingers of thorns twist across the frothy pink blush of not-yet-ripe blackberries

1 pond plucks and echoes with the calls of rubber-band frogs

2 tractors packed with children and parents wave and rumble and sway and wave some more

12 rows of new corn cascade up and out, as high as a goat’s belly

1 creek warbles along its stone bank, becomes another as it bends into shadow, another as it reappears in a cut of morning light

100 blades of grass tickle four bare calves

1 lone cow glances up and continues to chew, 1 ear flicking at a half dozen flies

1 roller truck with 2 steel wheels makes 6, 7, 8 passes over the gravel lot pressing its noise over every other word

3 children sit in 3 patches of shade eating 3 mounds of shaved ice in 3 meting stripes of flavor

4 children in helmets lead 4 stoic horses into a barn

8 children with bare heads ride 8 plastic horses in lazy circles

2 women step between damp sponges of earth into the cascading chiaroscuro of leaf and web and wing

Image: Walt Curlee, “Appalachian Blackberry Patch Farm” from Walt Curlee Art

 

 

 

Living in the Moment, Outdoors, Things I Can

97. Things I Can Redraw: The Boundary Lines

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resistance

I remember to look up. The reason I remember is because I have been so busy looking down.

Down, yes, but looking as in actually seeing.

Vision is an unexpected discovery, like a forgotten scent stirring in a place of dead things. Like yesterday when I caught myself singing as I ironed my purple shirt for work. I’m gonna let it shine. . . The silvery thread of music startled me to a shiver.

My song. Still here. My sight. Always, again.

I have been looking down and so noticed for the first time the thick ropes of roots pushing up the sidewalk. This is why I’ve stopped and let my gaze slide up the gnarled skin, up and up into the turning leaves.

“What?” Bug says. He almost plows into me. Then he too peers skyward. Cars rip past us on the clogged road. His is an all-wheel-drive school. Walking is forbidden because keeping the children a safe distance from these thin-lipped, texting, whiplash drivers trumps community concerns about obesity levels and global temperatures.

It’s rare these days that this stretched-to-splitting mama has the guts or gas to rebel. Oh, but it is a tasty little thrill when she does. Because sometimes we have to step right out in front of absurdity. Sometimes we even have to let it run us down. How else do we keep the winners from winning it all?

Once in a while when the train arrives two minutes early or the traffic parts like the biblical sea two blocks from my neighborhood, a gash opens in the choking press of late hurry go more go hurry late. It is a bright gust, it is mountaintop air.

It is opportunity.

I get to flout that stupidest of stupid policies.

I get to walk.

And here we are doing exactly that. Bug is wearing his backpack and his first sweatshirt of fall. I’m wearing my Wellies. Hurricane Joaquin in bearing down on us and we are taking the slow route home.

We gaze up together.

“Have you ever noticed how big this tree is?” I ask.

He considers it. “Big how?”

“Look at these roots. The whole sidewalk is a hill. It’s growing right under us.” We nudge our toes at the knobby knees pressing through concrete. “It probably goes all the way across the road.”

Bug lifts his gaze again to the towering branches far above. “It would be hard to climb.” We circle around it and take in the grade of the sloping grass. Then he peers across the grounds of the hulking telecom sales center that abuts our neighborhood. “That one.” He points to a drooping, naked thing with one arm. “That’s a good climbing tree.”

We cut across, striding right through the chain of “No Trespassing” signs. Bug tosses his backpack on the soaked ground and gives me a sly grin. “You first.”

I consider my twinged back, the slick bark, a throbbing current of sleep deprivation. Oh, the warm couch waiting. Then I shrug. “Okay.”

I shimmy and slide, hooking my knee over a knot and swinging myself up. Bug tries but his shoes keep slipping. He peels off his sweatshirt and ties it around the trunk. “If it’s dry, maybe I can get up.” This is an imperfect plan. After his third try, he leaves the jersey limp and tethered like an abandoned prisoner. He races off towards another stand of trees. “That one!” He cries and leaves me to collect our things.

Inside a sheltering arc of boughs he ranks them, 1-2-3, from easiest to hardest. I go first again, contorting my limbs to fit. I haul my mass onto a branch and perch there under a damp canopy. He gets partway up too before we both sort of spill off. I laugh and show him my hands. Mud has worked its way deep in. Laugh line, love line, all in bold. He holds up his grimy palm and I give him a high five.

Near our heads dangles a bulbous seed cluster we notice now for the first time. From tumorous, split husks gleam half a dozen cherry-red zombie eyes. They look like they might actually blink. We step back and decide to forgo a deeper investigation.

As we circle the parking lot for the shortcut home, I glance up again. “If the hurricane does come, we may lose all these leaves before they even change.”

Bug kicks at some that have fallen. He stops at the edge of a cracked tree whose branches on one side are entirely bare. The other side is draped in rust foliage.

“The rain is coming,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“Feel that,” he says. “There’s a gust.” He lifts his face. I do the same.

“It’s darker too,” I say. “Storm dark.” We both watch the steel sky churn.

“Whenever there’s a gust, it rains,” he tells me. “The rain is probably like 30 seconds to 5 minutes away.”

“We’d better get home quick.”

“Okay,” he says. “And we can make a fire and wait for the flood.”

—

Image from the Cheap Art collection of the Bread and Puppet theater in Glover, Vermont

community, neighborhood, Things I Can

88. Things I Can Offer: A Playdate

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Castle Fort 2

My doppleganger lives at the opposite end of the hall. She is also a single working mom with a little boy, a squealing pup, and a sort-of-manageable custody arrangement. We both teach. We both have moms in the area who help us out but we both still struggle with childcare and doggy care. We both are juggling about 15 things too many.

We even share a first name.  Continue reading “88. Things I Can Offer: A Playdate” →

Change, Poetry, Relationships, Things I Can

85. Things I Can Hold: The Promise

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Honeysuckle Tag

Months after the last blossom
wilts and lets go, a tendril
of scent unfurls
among the parched weeds
and knotted shrubs edging
the broken road.
Only at night the perfume steals
out to stretch its cramped
wings and lean
into the hum
of cricket’s legs
and streetlamps. It will be gone
by sunrise, tucked
under winter straw
that falls in summer, swathing
thirst and throb in a jacket
of silence.

community, Family, Things I Can

76. Things I Can Lead: This Pack

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warthog-family

I sit cross-legged on the path and fold Noodle into my lap. A little boy who was stroking her with such a soft touch continues. Two others — younger, toddlers — step closer. One with a mop of curls squats in front of her and stares with the focus of a hypnotist. Unwavering, he peers along the length of her snout and into her steady eyes. She is so still. He ventures a touch, two fingers on the side of her head. She barely blinks. He steps closer and touches her flank. “Ga-ggie,” he says.

“Yes,” his dad smiles. “She’s a nice doggie.”

This is enough for the small one. He steps back and considers Noodle from a safe distance. His brother keeps that rhythm along her back, as regular as a metronome, as soothing as surf. Noodle’s fur drifts and settles, blanketing my black work trousers. She shifts ever so slightly and surrenders her weight to my belly. I feel her exhale. The third boy — another toddler — stands at his daddy’s shin. He grins and squeals then shoves a finger up his nose.

Behind me, Bug snaps off his rollerblades and tosses his helmet in the grass. I hear a basketball. Voices.

It is nearing dusk. Neighborhood moms call to summon their stray men home for dinner. I dump Noodle back onto the trail. She gives passive resistance a shot but her dead weight is more pliable than she thinks. Soon she falls into step beside me.

Bug is trotting around the blacktop in his socks, his blonde surfer hair flopping. Another boy passes him a basketball and Bug shoots then passes it back. I circle the park a few times watching while the boy’s dad stands and texts from center court. The duo abandons the game and strolls back and forth across the pavement. Bug trails a long stick. His companion holds the ball tucked beneath his arm. Their heads are bent together in a conspiracy of murmurs. They walk the length of the court at least six times over, six times back.

“Hey you,” I call. Noodle and I cut across the grass. Bug scratches his pooch under her chin and shoves his feet back into his skates. I chat with dad and boy. I’ve never seen them here before, although they live a block over from us. We talk schools and child care and pizza. Tomorrow, they kick off a week-long hiking trip in the Monongahela National Forest.

“I’m going to play on the playground equipment,” Bug says, rolling away. I love that he calls it that. Playground equipment. “Okay,” I shout after him. “But not in your blades.”

“I’ll take them off,” he hollers back. When the dad and I make our way over, I see helmet, wrist guards, socks, and wheels lying in a heap at the bottom of the slide. Bug is up high, straddling the outside of a suspended tunnel. His buddy is swinging from a bar. A third has joined them, a preschooler.

The small one points to Noodle. “Is she curly too?” He asks.

“Curly?”

“Yeah,” he poofs his arms around him. “Fluffy. Like that.”

I shrug. “She sure sheds a lot. You know how I know when she’s been sneaking up on the couch?”

Bug grins from his perch. “She can’t fool us!” He cries.

“She’s tricky,” I shake my head in disapproval and glare at Noodle who is straining, straining to play with the kids. “Fur all over the sofa!”

The preschooler stomps a foot. “My bro-zher is the smartest of all!” He declares.

“Are you sure? I think you’re the smartest of all.”

“No my bro-zer is! He teached me math. See?” He holds up two fingers on one hand and two on the other. “One -two-free-four.”

Bug is swaying way up high. “Do you know how to do squares? You know the square root of 100 is 10?”

The one from the basketball court swings then plants his feet. “I can divide.”

Then it’s time to go home. A mom collects her mini math whiz. Hiker dad answers a text from home. “Dinnertime, buddy,” he says. He and his boy wander off in the direction of the townhouses. Bug clambers down and slips mulched socks over filthy feet. Buckles, helmet, wrist guards, off we go. Noodle trots along beside us.

“So that boy goes to your school, huh? Did you know him from school?”

“No,” Bug says. “He’s in first grade.”

“You just met him today?”

“Yeah.”

I picture them again, whispering as they strode off together like they’d been buddies since kindergarten.

“You know what? That’s a really cool talent,” I say. “You find friends everywhere you go.”

Bug shrugs but I see he’s sort of smiling.

What a marvel.

To my right, this clickety-rolling kiddo who enters every setting as if the place has been waiting for him to arrive. He strikes up a conversation. He jump-starts a game. He conjures up companions, assuming friendship is a given.

To my left, Noodle the Wonder Dog, a magnet for toddlers ready to face their fears. A touchstone for kids who still believe that contact with a fellow earthling is the high point of any day.

And me in the middle, a mama leading this bold pack out into the world.

This force, small yet mighty.

My family.
 

.

 

Learning, Living in the Moment, Things I Can

55. Things I Can Attract: The Nameless Ones

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A rogue yellow blossom has annexed the cilantro’s territory. The butter bright petals bob at the end of a stalk that’s bolted into white lace.

In a blink, the flower takes flight. It circles the railing and alights on the end a strand of Thai basil. Slender feathers flash golden black. The breeze coruscates leaf, stalk, bird, into a kaleidoscope of shapes falling together, spilling away.

I am far across the room. If I had missed that moment of flight, it could still be butterfly, bumblebee, invading weed. I step closer and see now that the bird is dipping the brush of its beak into a tiny violet thimble budding from the basil stem. Its vertical sips meet a circular breeze. The oblique collision jars this usually quiet corner of the garden.

My Audobon book is unopened on a shelf in the bedroom. When I head to the woods, I try to remember to pack it along with the wildflower guide and The Trees of North America. To be honest, the opportunity for a hike rarely presents itself these days. When one comes to fruition, it tends to be a scrap shim I jam in to shore up the edges of this teetering palafitte of responsibilities.

The last trip out, I was halfway to the mountains before realizing the hiking boots and trail food were sitting back by the front door at home. After a few detours, I was strolling through the meadows of a local nature preserve. Hungry and shod in busted sneakers, I found modest satisfaction in having brought my guidebooks. One told me that the fragrant flowering shrub bursting along the forest edge is called a Small White Rambling Rose.

This bird here may be an oriole. A finch. A butterwing, sunpincher, pinbrush. It could be Ramone for all I know. Taxonomies of my animal kingdom neighbors are as foreign to me as the musical notations of a zither. I try to step closer to see what I can discern about this fellow’s tail or shape, but he’s done with his snack and flits up, around, down to the concrete floor, up against the glass door, then off into the much bigger green shadowing this modest corner.

His name goes with him.

Or maybe he left it here with me, that odd marking made by someone who only imagines the scratch and heat inside a nest, who only wonders how the nectar of summer’s purple herb tastes against the tongue’s single song.
 
 

Home, Things I Can

33. Things I Can Grow: A Container Garden

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Noodle in the Garden

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

– Margaret Atwood

This condo is my Taj Majal. I first stepped over the threshold on the eve of Thanksgiving 2012, and knew in a breath it was home. Honeyed bamboo floors, a wide open great room, blocks away from a park and Bug’s school. It took seven months to fight through the short sale until they handed me the pen at closing. That day in June is among the sweetest of my life.

Even so, through the giddiness, one regret tugged.

Condo living means no square of earth to line with stones and bury the bulbs through winter.

Every place I’ve lived since packing out of the college dorm two decades ago has had a little place to grow pole beans and bachelor’s buttons. Even if it was just a swath of grass in the back of a shared house, I would find a way to urge things from the dirt: snapdragons, vinca, tiger lilies dug up from the nearby creek bed. When living in a city apartment, I not only planted a small sun-burst shaped herb garden behind the driveway with my housemate, I shared a plot at the community garden down the road with one of my farmer friends.

This condo is a dream with sunny, west-facing windows and smiling neighbors. But it has no yard at all. Its only outdoor space is a teeny-tiny balcony looking out over a shrubby berm and the I-66 sound wall.

We’re now coming up on our second year here. Houseplants spill from all the corners and keep us breathing green through cold season. In fall or spring I might go to my Mister’s and help him rake or pull weeds. Shared labor is one hallmark of the Us we are becoming, and while sweating alongside him on his quarter acre binds us together, it does little to tie me to his land. I come home to a bare balcony and a hunger for plunging my hands into the soil at my own feet. Gardening’s decadence comes from tending a plot of one’s own — or one’s own circle, as the case may be.

This year, I looked out on the balcony and thought, It would be so nice if. . .

But I can’t.

No time, no money, never done it, don’t know how.

Except that this is a bunch of hooey. My son pours the same whine when he’s toiling away at fractions and decides to give up. He collapses in a heap, wailing, “It’s too hard! I can’t do it!”

I guide him back to his chair and say, “You can’t do it yet because you haven’t learned it yet. You can do it as soon as you learn it, and you absolutely CAN learn it. I’m going to help you.”

So I do, and so he does.

This is the season of Courage to Change the Things I Can. I won’t grow a thing if I come up with a dozen reasons why it’s too hard. Indeed, trusting I can pull it off is the first critical step in pulling it off. This Things I Can project keeps reminding me that every damned thing is hard until it’s easy. Which means it’s hard for the hundredth time, it’s hard for the 9,000th hour. It’s hard until the skills become automatic. Even then? It may still be hard.

Hard and Can’t share some notable features but they happen to be different species.

You can’t do it yet because you haven’t learned it yet. You can do it as soon as you learn it, and you CAN learn it.

In March, we bought a stash of seed packets and organic potting soil. Bug donned safety goggles and drilled holes through yogurt containers. We sowed, misted, nurtured, and cheered. We mourned a batch and started those over. We stocked up on Goodwill trash cans and old busted tupperware from the backs of our cabinets. I splurged on herb starts, pansies, and window planters from the nursery.

Now it’s May. Our garden thrives.

It brings me a step closer to doing the same.