It’s been hot. Very hot. I’ve been walking Finn early and late to avoid the worst of it. I’m even watering the trees at this point.
My writing workshop resumes next week and so I am collecting prompts, cleaning my work area, and thinking about the writers who will hopefully be showing up. I ordered a few books in anticipation as well.
Not shown: Peter Elbow’s WRITING WITH POWERParis Collage Collective visual prompt plus quilt with writing and more. Used dianaphoto app
I hope I get back in the blogging grove soon, but it doesn’t seem to be today. (I meant to say “groove,” but I like the idea of a blogging grove!)
The above collage was produced digitally, then printed out, and marked with white and regular pencils. I am excited about this. Maybe I’m excited about this all out of proportion to the technique, but it feels like a new direction, one that might yield unexpected and interesting results.
Speaking of offspring, here’s a lament written during the summer writing retreat.* I can’t remember what the prompt was — maybe something about emptying your mind?
Golden rod tug slightly in a breeze. Higher up, the rustle of maples. And everywhere: insects. Bees and flies and stinging pests. How sweet it’d be to merely lament the season coming to a close and not the earth herself melting, collapsing, churning, with the Ring of Fire activating quakes up and down the coasts on either side of the Pacific. Which one will open up under Brentwood, Pasadena, Korea Town, and Studio City and gobble up great edifices of society not to mention, people: Brother, Son? I could never have been the mother who said, ‘No. Do not go.’ And even if I had been, he’d not have listened which is how it should be, but still — a bigger worry added to the usual worries.
And then there’s the plains of Nebraska, the river banks along the Mississippi, the lower reaches of Missouri — should so much land be under water?
And how can the potential destruction of, say, one American Western city compare to all of Greenland’s ice melting, Paris and London frying under a merciless sun? Or colony collapse, the bees giving up the ghost, along with whole caveloads of bats, unable to fight the poisonous fight any longer, tongues and nails, slab and tourniquet. What place, then after?
When we look at the data, we also look away, preferring to note how a grasshopper landing not five feet away says something about summer ending and the memory of other summers ending — times when bikes, hoses, pools, bare feet were the signifiers. Our poor brood when little watched nature show after nature show offering up news of habitat decline and species extinction and people wonder why millennials are anxious?
We wonder why the young refuse heirlooms of any kind, but especially have no interest in the Rosenthal china, the Royal Doulton, the Strawberry Wedgewood. ‘Will we have a home or air?’ they wonder — the inability to afford the former a trifling but inescapable concern compared to the latter.
‘We have ten years,’ they keep saying, trying and failing to sound the alarm. ‘Ten years’ means something different to the young than it does to my aging ears. Gone are the days when insects present as cute and annoying pests. Not when closer scrutiny might reveal how numbered their days are. How connected they are to everything else.
Even if we all rowed in the same direction, what a monumental challenge! But with lies the prevalent currency and corporations granted all ascendancy, we first have to clean house and by then — I’m sorry, the thought is there — mightn’t it be too late?
How many monarchs migrated to the milkweeds, those perennials standing proud and erect, proper in their heliotropic course, casting lozenge-shaped shadows, offering praise to sun and nourishment to caterpillars? How many? Less than last year? A tenth of the year before?
It’s easy to shrug at the extinction of some two-toed sloth or a miniature lizard with nocturnal habits literally never seeing the light of day, but what about ALL of the passerines? Polar bears and reindeer? What about us? If we’d cared more about the two-toed sloth all those years ago, would we be better situated today — able to enter the “Wild Kingdom” programming, sponsored by Mutual of Omaha and hosted by some hokey and corny know-nothing, instead of learning about floating islands of plastic the size of Delaware and about Colorado burning for half a season?
* It turns out that the response to the prompt mentioned yesterday became a chapter in the book (working title: •Blood and Indigo•). That means I’m precluded from ‘publishing’ here (seriously, with 100 hits a day?) What would happen if I ‘published’ it, left it up for ten days, and then tagged it private? SShhh
Oooh boy, am I in for a treat with the novel, “The Overstory,” by Richard Powers! Abandoned another piece of fiction in order to begin. Since that disqualifies me from airing any opinion about said abandoned book: My Lips are Sealed (but maybe I don’t like farce all that much?)
“The Overstory” is already blowing the top of my head off, in much the way that “Lincoln in the Bardo” did. Grace, Mo, Alden, Maureen, and Deb have all led me to it.
One of the prompts at the AWA writing retreat in August came from the opening page. I think you’ll swoon to read the lines, too:
… The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.
When I find what I wrote, I’ll post it, even though as I recall it was a bit opaque. In the meantime, scroll down for a response to another prompt that mentions the 250+ year old copper beech that dwells next door.
I’ve probably photographed this tree more than any other feature of our built or natural landscape. It towers over the houses with a reach nothing short of spectacular. The trunk, muscular and sturdy, mediates between sky and earth, while beneath the soil? A downward fractalling mirror of the canopy, unseen and necessary.
A story I’m submitting to literary magazines describes it. My son featured it in a third grade project.
My neighbors steward the being with utmost care: cables strung for support, twice annual feedings.
Can you imagine all that this beech has witnessed? The household secrets, the stirring of war and war again, the native people who may have honored it and perhaps also drank at the spring which once (supposedly) offered cool respite nearby. People with pox, barn fires (our house and its charred beams), orphans and the enslaved, tavern owners and farmers (the Bartletts at the corner).
The Jacksons who built the house in the 1700’s witnessed the early, young days of the tree’s life. Maybe it was the tree that inspired one owner to bequeath the house to an illegitimate daughter. Such things were not done!
Ghosts have been noted. A smithy and a soldier hanging in a closet. Not here but next door.
This little untitled poem by me mentions the tree.
She flipped the french toast, vanilla fumed, and twisted to a morning made of thread and diary, made of weeds along the road — dandelion and chickweed — and a sun that glared hot mystery through the copper beech.
This time of year leafery, cotillion, cockswaddle, and steak. We could be made of spores and engineered lumber, but find ache and patchwork inside instead.
How his back moves down the road. She, off with the dog down another. Was there no plan to map the distances, to cloud handshakes and rollovers with sleep or with taking out the trash?
And how about Yellow? Primroses flat, then yarrow, regal. Soon the pansies made of sugar and sunlight bought by the flat will land while the dog pulls away, scents of cow dung and denim rot irresistible.
She left the dowels at the store. The quilt unhung for another week. Made of forgetfulness, inclined toward suspense, turning away not gathering up, and a scold or two.
If only the oceans lingered near the driveway, instead of maple tree detritus and scum bubbles of tar.
Meanwhile, an unintended consequence of a rheumatologist’s advice last week to “be active like you were ten years ago,” led to bravado in the garden and a back with more pain than I’ve ever experienced. Chiropractor at three. PT beginning within the week. K even stayed home today because yesterday I could barely get up the stairs or into bed. I’m much better now.
In other news: it looks like I have enough people for my first writing class. I’m so excited!
What do you think of my name: “Page by Page?” It’s a little bit like Annie Lamont’s “Bird by Bird,” but not critically enough to foreclose my usage.
Just completed a five day Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) facilitator training. Who-hoo — intense, exciting, and the best people, including my weekly facilitator, Kathleen Olesky, and from Amherst, Mass., Maureen Buchanan Jones (blog: Writing at Full Tilt).
Since I haven’t obtained permission to post peoples’ pictures, here are a few blurry shots, a form of photography I seem to do rather well lately!
Now it rains. I’m home. I feel like I’ve been through something. Finn is out with the Handsome Dog Walker for the last time.
Lots of changes.
Because of the workshop I haven’t had time to respond to the incredible comments people have left lately. Know that I’ll get to them. In the meantime, thank you for taking the time to comment so extensively and personally.
** If you’re interest in the AWA method, check out their website.
Oooh boy, am I in for a treat with the novel, “
I’ve probably photographed this tree more than any other feature of our built or natural landscape. It towers over the houses with a reach nothing short of spectacular. The trunk, muscular and sturdy, mediates between sky and earth, while beneath the soil? A downward fractalling mirror of the canopy, unseen and necessary.
A story I’m submitting to literary magazines describes it. My son featured it in a third grade project.
My neighbors steward the being with utmost care: cables strung for support, twice annual feedings.
Just completed a five day Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) facilitator training. Who-hoo — intense, exciting, and the best people, including my weekly facilitator, Kathleen Olesky, and from Amherst, Mass., Maureen Buchanan Jones (blog: 
Since I haven’t obtained permission to post peoples’ pictures, here are a few blurry shots, a form of photography I seem to do rather well lately!
Now it rains. I’m home. I feel like I’ve been through something. Finn is out with the Handsome Dog Walker for the last time.