Post Thanksgiving

I fell off the bandwagon last week, blogging wise. Well, I'm back, for better or for worse.

How was your Thanksgiving?

Our turkey was a delectable homage to what a turkey can be if stuffed with apples, sage, and onions, if his skin is pulled from his breast and his flesh prodded with butter and garlic and a freshly ground spice rub, if indeed he is roasted slowly, breast down, then flipped and glazed with an apple reduction. This should have been enough to make me swoon but by the time I sat down to partake, I'd had a headache all day from telling the girls what and what not to do, and I was having a bit of trouble being grateful for anything. After dinner I lay down on the floor, lifted a limp hand to shove puzzle pieces across the floor to Beatrix from a catacomb of blankets. The turkey was a success (thanks to Martin). I was a Thanksgiving FAIL.

That night I lay in bed and searched my recent history to find just one kind thing that I had said to Elspeth. I came up empty. All day, and nothing but reprimands and grumpiness from me.

The next morning, however, I awakened renewed and determined to live the day better, and so I did. Elspeth and I got on like a house a fire all day, and I went to sleep much happier that evening. What is wrong with me sometimes? I can be such a cantankerous wench.

Our little Christmas tree winks from our sun room window, decorated with ornaments from around the world. We let the girls choose one new ornament every year from the Ten Thousand Villages store, and the "Elephant Tree" as I dubbed it for its preponderance of little Indian elephant ornaments, is a happy presence in our house.

I just taught my second and last class of the week, and as usually is the case, now that the semester is almost over, the students are open and easy with me and with each other. I should be conducting some interviews for columns but right now I'm happy to just sit for a while and contemplate magnetic poetry. Martin's mammoth metal desk has that one thing going for it: a big surface to craft some magnificent magnetic poetry. Here's my latest effort:

honeydrunk as a moon
some gift peaches
or white milk
but chanting spring
winds to winter moan
and dresses in bare sleep

Okay, the ending is a bit melodramatic. Indeed it is! But choices are limited, people.

Also, there are weird accidents that occur, such as the juxtaposition of these two words: boil mother.
or
vision friend
or
bitter afterpound,
which is what I am sporting postThanksgiving.

PS. To read a Thanksgiving reflection (around Tecumseh's prayer) in my weekly column, please click the geranium at right.

What Tecumseh Can Teach Us

Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee (died 1813), composed this exquisite poem that I introduced the other evening at a potluck. We took the third stanza and danced to it with the kids it a "Rite of Thanksgiving" (something we all need more of, I think). Tecumseh was no stranger to injustice or to the threat that outsiders brought to his people. He valiantly defended his peoples' rights even as they were stripped away. Stanza two charges us today to welcome strangers, just as a courageous group of Native Americans welcomed a bunch of cold, starving foreigners that first Thanksgiving.

There are some excellent challenges in his poem for us as we begin to ponder what it means to be thankful and live bravely.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about their religion;
respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.

Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,
even a stranger, when in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people and grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself.

Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools
and robs the spirit of its vision.

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled
with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep
and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

She sailed away on a lovely summer's day. . .

Oh, there once was a puffin. . .

The owl and the pussycat went to sea on a beautiful pea green. . .

Can you finish the entire poems, preferably to a tune?

It just struck me that all three of these are about water, sailing or oceans. This doesn't surprise me, really, considering my mother (who grew up in the West Indies) and my father (who grew up in tidewater Virginia), are both obsessed with the ocean and feel happiest when standing in sand.

Sailing, sailing, over the ocean main; Many a stormy wind come up till Jack. . .

I remember my mother at some harbor somewhere, breathing in deeply of a wind that smelled (I thought) like rotten fish. "Ah," she sighed. "There's nothing like the smell of the ocean!"

Result: I find myself driving and panting up the tight green hills of Pennsylvania; she rides a ferry through the Puget Sound on a regular basis.

"And children, don't forget your toothbrushes." Where's THAT gem from? Kudos to you who know.

It's been busy, busy, busy, but with good things. And today it's dreary autumnal weather but at least the grass glows, and if there were leaves on the trees they would be glowing too. It's hard to say goodbye to color, but I suppose I should focus on tuning myself to the gradations of each color that is left: browns, greys, and soon, white. I will turn my eyes to this and try to appreciate what I can.

Of course, if you've seen my house, you know what a task this is for me. Our walls are blue, red, orange, two shades of yellow, green. . .I love primary colors ferociously. Maybe because I grew up watching bougainvillea clamber over trash piles and up hedges all year. You can't beat the colors of East Africa: Flame trees, all orange and red; jacaranda trees with purple trumpets; at school, always the sound of wind in tree branches, and the trees were never bare. Winter is hard. I long for color.

I was talking with a student and a friend this morning about grief--is it a colored thing? It surprises you, catches you like a bucket of water in the face, then sometimes like a wisp of smoke, thin and hard to smell. This student recently had someone who was like a brother die, and she was telling me how grief blindsides her in the middle of class, perhaps set off by a shred of conversation or a comment. I have found this to be true, too--perhaps I was most surprised at Catherine's birthday party back in early fall, when I was setting out plates and organizing food and readying the house for company--I suddenly lost all composure. Of course, I thought afterward, of course. In every previous birthday party for two or three years that I had hosted at my house because Nancy was sick, I would run around before everyone arrived, busy with details, but heavy deep down as I wondered, "Is this the last one?" I wondered that for three years while Nancy was sick. And suddenly, this year, it hit me: a birthday party for a girl whom I love without her mother, whom I also love. I remembered how Nancy always said that Catherine had been born on a beautiful, clear autumn day full of sunlight, a gift child.

Nancy believed in the cloud of witnesses--the abiding presence of those who have gone on before us who now stand all around us, reaching to us in support, celebration, understanding. They are not silent people; we just can't hear them, I suppose. They are much like the trees that circle me in winter time; I long to feel the warmth of their life, long to touch fans of soft green leaves, to sit in their shade. In winter time I remember green, and it is no less real because I cannot touch it. Faith for springtime, for buds opening and the ground thawing, faith that the trees are not dead even though they bow in wind and snow. Color hidden as a bird in a fist, glimpsed if only I could pry up one finger, find sudden joy in red feathers.

My story, Patron Saint of Trees, printed recently in Southeast Review, is linked online at their site, so now you can read it. . .please click HERE.

Braiding

My mind feels like it's stuffed with brussel sprouts, layers upon layers of words and images and shreds of things I'm supposed to remember and ambitions that are airless, unblown balloons.

Bea has burst two balloons in the last week, one because she was upset and banged it down on some pruned Russian Sage and the other, because she was having a lovely time and bounced it off the ficus tree. Only it didn't bounce--it burst and lay on the floorboards, nothing but a scrap of green rubber.

Parents, why do you give your children balloons? Why do you give them ice-cream cones? Who doesn't know the absolute heartbreak of walking out of the ice-cream shop, your heart full of a thousand licks and the thrill of ownership, and plop, on the concrete, melting fast, and your cone is just a cone with a thin ring of milky sweetness. Even those last drops are not sweet anymore; your riches are gone.

As an adult it is hard not to grieve these small losses when the sudden enormity is reflected in your child's eyes. Immediately I say, "Oh, honey, I'll get you another." If only all problems could be fixed so easily.

We spent a wonderful few days with Catherine, Nancy's beautiful daughter. On Saturday morning I braided her hair. It has grown long and lustrous through the late summer. The sunlight slanting through the window caught it, and I thought of the story of Rumplestiskin. The girls ran about the sun room and chatted and laughed, and I sat on the chair and the weight and privilege of brushing another's daughter's hair was full in me. Nancy, if it's possible, let your hands slip into mine as I touch your daughter's hair; let your fingertips feel the tug on her scalp as you draw three growing locks into one braid. Do not leave until the braid is finished, falling and shining down your daughter's back.

Poetry Daily's featured poet, Paul Henry, from Wales:

My window is full of leaves.

My window is full of bare branches today, but for a few last burnished reds clinging to the Japanese maple across the street.

What is it with poets from across the sea? Why do their poems always sound just a bit more luminous?

Read the poem by clicking on "Your Daily Poem" at right. The last stanza filled me with sweetness though the sky hangs with typical western Pennsylvania gloom.

RE: babysitting

Poetry reading tonight. We needed a babysitter. We found one. She wrote asking where our house was. Martin replied:

Super! We live on a hill and in a valley, everywhere and nowhere. On a tree and in an acorn. Squirrel mouth!

She never arrived tonight. I turned on the TV and told the kids not to climb counters or play with matches. I attended the poetry reading. We saved $20.

I just found Bea in her room (where the little angel is supposed to be napping), trying to clean up a sea of baby powder from her floor with a red bandana. And the baroque music plays loudly as she wipes in time to the harpsichord! It's enough to make a mother like me, who has a truck load of work to do, impatient. A shuffle, paper flipped by an imprecise hand. She's reading. Guess that's better than a million particulates in the air. Speaking of which, I wonder if she can actually breathe in there. . .

O blast it all.

Today is the third in a series of gloriously sunny days that peak in the mid 50s to 60s. Bea and I both have colds and were driving each other a bit batty this morning so off we went on a walk up through the neighborhood hills. We stopped for a while at Nancy's house, and I broke some leaves off her kale plants. Bea fanned the air with one; they were riddled with holes but still very beautiful. You can't tell we plucked any; the bushes are so dense and ruffly, planted right at the front step where I often sat with her.

And then I weeded. Nancy would have been sad to see the grass choking her bearded irises--she always gloried in their full, citrusy smell every year. She planted them in a wet corner of her yard along with purple echinacea (coneflowers) and something else feathery and green--fennel, I'm guessing. The echinacea has gone to seed, black spiky balls, and I left those, because I think they look pretty covered in snow. I made a small mountain of grasses and Bea ran up and down the lawn, eating (I later found out) at least one tiny purple berry that I think is poisonous. I watched her for signs of convulsions but she seems to be fine.

It was good to be alone in Nancy's garden with the plants she nested in the ground last spring. I pulled up the dried black stacks of basil, still redolent with scent. Bea picked the last of the tiny tomatoes and ate them and I walked home, the back of the stroller filled with kale leaves, which will be all the sweeter now after the first autumn frosts.

Across the street, a brown circle in the grass where the neighbor's inflatable swimming pool sat all winter. A Japanese maple weeps red on the lawn, the peonies I left in my mind are brown and papery. I need to go outside.

wednesday mishmash

I know this is bizarre, but I'm thinking how nice it would be to lower myself into a cup of hot cocoa, loop my arms around the edges of the cup, and push my face into a melting marshmallow.

Kind of disgusting but o so warm and sweet.

I interviewed two very intelligent zealots today who are leaders in the push for water quality, regulation and rights of land owners. I can't get them, or the issues, or the huge job of distilling almost two hours of interview into a few short columns out of my mind. Even when I was whacking back the hedges today--it was sunny and warm and perfect for outdoor work--my head spun with all I had heard. The chemistry is completely over my head but the urgency of the situation hits close to the heart, or should I say, to my mouth that I open to admit water, which, though it's filtered, is not as pure as I'd like and is certainly not good enough to give to my three daughters.

Sigh. Sometimes I think I was made to be just a poet and fiction writer. This journalism stuff is stretching me like taffy--see? What a terrible simile. It must be the stress.

One last thing. Last night I was taking a shower with the pocket door slid tightly to keep the bathroom as hot and steamy as possible. Suddenly, Elspeth, who was supposed to be sound asleep, burst through making a racket deserving of a large land mammal. "Mommy!" she said, as my precious steam leaked into the cold hallway.

"Mommy, Merry won't read me her WORDS and I want to hear them!"

Elspeth teeters at the brink of elementary fluency and not being able to read like her fourth-grade sister frustrates her sometimes. But I knew what she was talking about--Merry's teeny tiny journal--so diminutive, in fact, that Merry can fit only a few words on each page.

"She doesn't have to read you her words," I called from the shower. "She's writing in a diary, and diaries are private. You can have a diary too if you want, and then nobody can read what you write."

"Merry has a DIARY?" Elspeth was incredulous. "Like from her BOTTOM?"

"Go back to bed, and close the door after you." I had to grin, though--the lowest types of humor never fail to tickle a funny bone, even if its a hidden one you pretend you don't have.

16 oz jar: 13.25

Only three left in stock on Amazon.com.

But I bought mine at $2.50 a jar at Target a week and a half ago. Martin scoffed to see the kitchen counter covered in a small army of Smucker's creamy and chunky. But we'll see who's making fun of whom when February comes and peanut butter is costing us over ten bucks a jar.

Panic struck my peanut-loving heart when my mother arrived two weeks ago and informed me a peanut shortage was just around the corner. The farmers in Georgia did not have a good year.

I love a good PBJ with a glass of milk. I love peanut butter on pancakes, in cookies, smeared on apples. I left a token two jars on the store shelf, but I greedily scooped the rest into my cart. And now I'm glad I did, because the price on Amazon has doubled since I checked last week. Find your favorite peanut butter, people, and stock up. The day of reckoning is near. Read more by clicking: PEANUT BUTTER PRICES SKY ROCKET