Beatrix & Bouquet May 2012

Now, in the great tradition of "Beatrix and Bouquet Photos",

which I began shortly after Bea was born,

here are a few new ones:

 The difference, now, of course, is that Bea is picking the bouquets.  I used to lie her down or prop her up by the bouquets I arranged.  Things have changed.  Bea is the main supplier of freshly cut flowers for our house.  She has an impeccable eye for color.  Yesterday she brought in a bouquet compiled entirely of different shades of purple. . .beautiful.

For the early Beatrix and Bouquet photos, click HERE or visit the category link in the list, below right.

Happy Land

I sat down hoping to share with you.  But I'd prefer to share not my words, but my cookies.  All the gingersnaps our friend and once-student Natalie (who is staying with us for a month or so) and the girls made, the vegan chocolate cake (safely covered on the back porch) for a dear friend and precious colleague of Martin's, and the banana bread waiting in its foil for breakfast tomorrow.  These are my offerings for today.  I have little to offer in the way of words but I have a lot to feed you.

So I'll clip another little e-mail that my mother wrote to Merry and let that suffice for this evening. 

Grandaddy and I went to Happy Land this weekend.  We went for a walk and ended up there…lot’s of slimy mossy green water with boats with duck heads that you pedal to make it go.  It was lots of fun; it cost us about 30 cents to get in and another dollar to rent the boat.  There were funny statues that we will send you pictures of. 

Fancy a trip to Happy Land?  It will only cost you a mere thirty cents, which doesn't seem like anything to us--but from my quick research, is far too expensive for most Burmese families to afford.  If your daily wages are less than a dollar a day, Happy Land is not going to be on your agenda.  I did find a photo HERE.  Pretty crazy.

 Martin and his father worked on our 3/4 acre today, mowing and weed-whacking until they could barely walk straight.  But this last bit from my mother's e-mail certainly puts things into perspective:

Today I went a lovely long walk first thing in the morning, because it gets hot early in the day.  There were lots of people cutting grass…all with scythes, long knives, no lawn mowers here.  Can you imagine if your mom and dad had to cut your big yard that way?  And then there were women wearing bamboo hats who squatted down with smaller knives and went inch by inch pulling up each weed in the lawn.  They do that every day, all day long; they put kind of white paint on their faces so that the sun won’t turn their skin dark.  I carried an umbrella even though it wasn’t raining, to shade me from the sun.

Two hours of editing is nothing.  Two hours of writing is even less.  Sometimes I feel as if I could write for about twelve hours straight.  For about twelve months straight.  But, alas, and hallelujah too, school is almost over and soon my beautiful girls will be home with me.  All day.

Right now I have, at the most, five minutes to scribble a blog post.  Let me begin with Rilke's line, or the imperfect remembered version:  "Though we strain against the deadening grip of daily necessity, we sense this mystery: all life is being lived. . ."

This morning, robin's song.  Sunlight caught by curtain.  A yellow butterfly among the climbing rose, just now bursting with deep pink blooms.  Blue paths in a cloudy sky, the passing roar of cars outside, the hum of a lawnmower.  All life is being lived, a million lives just outside in the garden, and so many more in widening circles from this one point, where Martin and I sit and record more unfolding life, the life of characters--fourth grade Maple Mullihan who must try to find her talent, must find the key to the locked door that leads to the extraordinary.  Across from me, Martin ignites word after word on a blank white page, tending the many tiny flames that make a poem.

And now my minutes are up, and I must go and make myself presentable for the world, shake off the cloak that quiet writing wraps me in, put on my company face.  Two hours, such a very short time.

Perched on a Strand of Buddha's Hair

Picture from Wikipedia--The boulder is covered with gold leaves adorned by devotees.  Read more about this amazing pagoda and its mythical story by clicking HERE.

From my parents in Myanmar:

I just heard a gecko revving up with his obnoxious call, kind of gargling at the first and then going into a loud, nasal geck-ooo, gecko; took me right back to our early days at Kamalganj. Inside our room we have a little tik tik lizard who chirrups occasionally. We traveled north from Yangon today to Mon State and got here a couple hours ago; I expected to drive up to a little hotel downtown on the main street, but instead we pulled up to an incredibly lovely “resort” in the middle of lush trees and flowers. We had driven through mile after mile of rubber plantations, and suddenly pulled into this wonderland. 

Driving up to the resort, we drove through rubber trees, rows of papayas, lemon trees, and interestingly, pan vines…the leaves they wrap betal nuts in. The pan leaves and the nuts are slightly narcotic and a hot item all throughout Asia. The dining area is a large open veranda with a teak floor…you leave your shoes before stepping onto it. It is surrounded by bougainvillea, frangipani trees, banana plants and coconut trees with orchids growing out of their bark. The air is dense with sweet smells and almost dizzyingly exotic. The hotel isn’t what you’d think of as a 5 star place; the rooms are semi-attached at the top of the hill, each with a sweet little veranda with two heavy wooden chairs, where we sat and watched the wind rustle the coconut palms for as long as we dared as darkness fell (it’s a malarial area). Our room has a small airconditioning unit that barely cools the room, two dim lights and no mosquito nets . There is a TV but no reception.

~

Now it’s Monday afternoon. We ate fried rice and egg for breakfast and took off by 6:30 a.m. to see the local attraction; it’s a big one. The Kyaikhtiyo pagoda rests on an unlikely foundation; an unwieldy rock balanced crazily upon another rock on top of a mountain. It is at this site that Buddhism came into Burma, and it is their most revered site. To get there, you leave your car at the foot of the mountain, climb a wooden platform onto a flatbed truck fitted out with two x four benches, each about five inches wide, jammed in at one foot intervals. After jamming every single person that can possibly sit on this arrangement--Meredith was sitting with his legs splayed out because there simply wasn’t enough space between benches to accommodate his legs--the truck lurched off up the mountain.

It was a crazy, amusement park kind of ride for the next 25 minutes, the truck went as fast as it could around hairpin turns, bouncing over potholes and careening from side to side. Everyone in the back of the open truck gripped the person next to them, braced to offset the current turn as one collective body, a strategy that was pretty good except when we hit a pot hole everyone bounced into the air and came crashing down into new formations. Meredith was holding on to the low rail as he was on the outside and I was clinging to his leg so I wouldn’t smash the old man behind me. It was a very entertaining ride and incredibly beautiful, reminding me of the pictures I have seen of the heavy forests in Rwanda, with mist coming off the hills. I almost expected to see gorillas coming out of the trees.

When we got to the end of the line, there was still close to a mile to hike up a very steep incline that zigzagged to the top. We could see the golden pagoda in the distance and knew we had better get going, as it was only going to get hotter. I think that I was about as hot as I can ever remember being. To our astonishment, there were curious contraptions right out of old, old pictures; a reclining bamboo chair on two bamboo poles, carried by 4 porters. There were plenty of them and one attached itself to us, asking if we would like to ride. We declined repeatedly, but they patiently and discretely walked behind us, much like vultures who knew we would fall eventually. It was so hot and steep, the air so thick that we were streaming with perspiration, I in my long skirt that was prerequisite for this area.

Your dad takes blood pressure medicine that dehydrates him when he is in the sun, and it was clear that this was not going anywhere good. He began to get nauseous and dizzy and his vision was swimming. (it was about a constant 30-40 degree incline on a concrete road in the full sun with little shade. The temperature was probably in the mid-80’s as we began and became hotter as the day wore on.   Dad really did not want to get into one of those chairs, but finally I persuaded him…I was afraid he was going to have heat stroke. He finally gave in and I DID NOT MAKE A JOKE OUT OF IT because he felt really bad. A staff member with us said she couldn’t go on and we finally persuaded her to take a chair as well. That left me, the government doctor and the driver and we took it carefully to the top.

There were lots of fancy buildings, one honoring the goddess who is believed to be looking after the mountain, and the pagoda, which is believed to be 2000 years old.

When we all got to the bottom again around 11:30, we bought drinks and expected to be able to get on the truck and return to our car, but it turned out that the truck only went when it got full. So there we waited for nearly two hours.

~

Mom and Dad finally got back to their rooms, where they drank water all afternoon.

This afternoon I balanced two cups of tea and two gingersnaps on a little tray and managed to carry them, without spilling, to the red adirondacks under the birch trees.  The birch trees!  Queenly trees with fluttering skirts and sunlight dancing in each leaf.  Or perhaps they're more like dancers with streamered tambourines.  We are in love with them.  We planted them six years ago and today we sat in their shade and drank our tea and talked about what is most important in our lives.

And it's not the trees, or the house, or the programs and classes Martin developed over the last seven years.  And it's not our work, either, though we love it, and it's not our poems or stories or our small successes.  What is most important for us are the people we love and transform by our love--and the people by whom we have been transformed. We pour ourselves and our work and our energy into people.  The rest is important, but by contrast, the rest is temporal; it can blow away in one mighty gust of wind. And much of it has.  Martin came home from cleaning out his office disconcerted and sad.  I think it surprised him, how depressing it was.  All his beautiful programs, the ones he envisioned and worked so hard for--the literary magazine, the open mics, the reading series, each class sculpted and labored over.  And for what?  he asked.

But the birch trees spoke to us with their music:  It's not the programs themselves that matter; programs are for people.  Programs inevitably disappear.  But the impact they have on people, the ways they change those who experienced and participated--that is the lasting thing.

If we've been taught anything by all of this, one lesson driven home directly and mercilessly would be: very little is ours.  I keep rehearsing it.  I knew it, or thought I knew it.  Now I know it even more.  We are given gifts, we love them, we do our best with them, but they are not ultimately ours.  Not even our writing really belongs to us; we are stewards of a poem, or a story, but we walk alongside them; we do not possess them, and by trying to possess any of it, we ruin all of it.  I guess that rule goes for just about everything I can think of, including people--friends, spouses, children, parents.  We must perpetually let go if we want to find the core of what really matters, if we want to hold tightly to what makes life real and miraculous and lasting. 

We did some haiku with a bunch of fourth graders today, and that was healing: experience a moment; love it; let it go.  Also healing was the fact that every haiku master we came across loved talking about bird droppings.  Bird ---t in sake and on rice cakes.  One haiku basically read:  the happier the sparrow, the more he s---s all over you. (Insert appropriate word--not for young audiences).  So when one fourth grader wrote about a seagull pooping on his potato chips at the beach, we said, Ah, welcome to the fold, young poet.

Haiku is the only writing assignment in college I ever got assigned a B for.  I was crushed.  I have been intimidated by haiku, probably since then.  Apparently I stink at whittling a moment down to three, spare lines.  That's Martin's cup of tea.  Maybe I'll try it as a sort of spiritual discipline.  Maybe you should.  One freeing tip: what you heard in elementary school, that the lines must be 5 / 7 / 5 syllables--you can forget that tyranny.  What you're looking for are three short, simple lines.

Birch leaf--
coin of sunshine on my shoulder
We drink tea all afternoon.

Oh, I'm still terrible.  This will, perhaps,be a private exercise.  (I just had to slip in the bit about drinking tea.)  I think the fourth graders haikued me right under the table today.

Apparently I've become a weeding weakling.  A season of sitting on my bottom and writing and doing little else has rendered my wrists shaky and my legs jello.  After only thirty minutes of weeding.  Ach!

We were sad to see Maurice Sendak had died.  He would have been pleased to hear Merry, at age three, recite Where the Wild Things Are complete with sound effects.  This morning we sat in the sun room and drank our third cup of tea as Martin read his obituary out loud.  I will read Micky in the Night Kitchen with just a twinge of sadness from now on.

The house smells of baking sweet potatoes.  Yesterday, before rain filled the night with a wonderful, healing song, Martin mowed a path through the garden so now at least I can see the blue haze of speedwell and the white azalea petals among all the weeds.

Martin is packing up hundreds of poetry books and bringing home lamps and rugs and pictures and all that has filled his office for seven years.  It is a mercy that the Fine Arts building is slotted for work this summer due to asbestos, because he is only one of a great crowd packing up their offices and filling the elevator with boxes.  It feels better to be part of a crowd surging outwards than one lone fellow, the one who was not tenured, stumbling down the stairs under a tower of books.  Of course he'll use the elevator.  It just seems sadder to stumble down the stairs.

I am filling the basement with boxes and furniture, as well, for the first of a series of clean-outs that will eventually end with a pod, or a moving van, or the back of the pick-up, if need be.

Merry loves to chat about where we might live next, especially the house we might occupy.  Finally, after a long discussion one morning, I said, "Well, maybe we'll just sell everything and live in our car."

Merry made a face.  "That might be a little too small," she said.

"You can have your own seat," I pressed.  "All to yourself.  Some people live in their cars."

"I don't think they live in a Subaru," she said, "Not a family of five.  Besides," she continued, "Can you imagine what would happen to me at school when my teacher asked me to draw a picture of myself and my house?  It would be me, in front of a blue Subaru!"

Ach.  So scratch the car.  And scratch the almost-acre garden.  What were we thinking?  We're not big garden people, I've decided.  Just enough.  It will become my new mantra.  Just enough, and maybe, some days, a little more.

I just finished writing an e-mail to a friend: The plates of the earth shift; another crack appears.  Then you have to wait for everything to shift back again.  That is what being a parent of three children is like.  But you don't have to be a parent to feel an earthquake, of course.

I see people on porches with their children, planting spring gardens, walking around houses and yards that have been theirs for twenty or more years.  I wonder that they have been allowed to be rooted.  What is the magic formula that gives so many in this town a heritage of being, of family and friends, of land and home?

And then I wonder if that's what I really want.  Deep roots in one place.  But at the expense of what?  Adventure?  Opportunities?  Courage?

And of course I'm speaking for nobody but myself; of course being in one place does not have to limit your life.  But I told Martin that I should have known I wouldn't have been allowed to stay here for twenty years.  The curse, or the blessing, or the fact of existence, is on my head like an invisible crown:  this woman is part of the wandering crowd, heritage of fleet feet, of gathering and walking on.

Nobody in my family has ever lived in one place for over seven years.  Seven years is our family's biblical number.  And after seven years it was ordained that they should take up their children and travel. . .I lived for six in Bangladesh and seven in Kenya; those two periods (and now this one), are the rivers that connect the many tributaries: Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Montana, Iowa, Illinois again, Texas. . . .

It all takes a great amount of energy.  But why was I surprised?  I'm actually breaking a record by soon beginning on my eighth year in Pennsylvania next year; part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Eight years?  Two shy of a decade?  Surely that's more than a child of my heritage can ask for.

In the meanwhile I'm realizing afresh that what I said a year ago is true.  I can simply not get my house clean or my possessions streamlined without moving.  And that's the task I'm pursuing.  When it comes down to it, there are only a few things in my house I really want.  The rest could go up in smoke and I would never miss them.  Martin's Grandmother's quilt, my good Wustof knife, a few photographs.  My pillow, a few books.  And now is my chance.

I wish I could gather my favorite things from the garden, though:  the peonies, just opening, the aspen trees, so beautiful and delicate, the purple-headed alliums.

But they are, by nature, rooted things, and belong where they are.

As I wrote years ago in an erstwhile book: Home is something I carry inside myself.  I can encounter home in the face of a friend, my mother's hands, the smell of a favorite book,  in a peony opening its petals, no matter where I am.  Another mantra.  It remains true, even after endless transitions.

Daddy's Garden

This month, if you flip open the covers of the national children's magazine, Ladybug, you'll find a story called "Daddy's Garden" about a gentle Daddy who finds a snake in the family garden.  A girl named Merry narrates the story, and there are three more characters--Elspeth, her little sister, the baby, and Mommy, who tends to be a bit cautious around animals.

Coincidence?  Happily, no.  Though I've seen my work published many times in other venues, receiving my copy of Ladybug was, by far, the most satisfying and rewarding.

Here are a few of the photos that accompanied the first draft of the story, which I wrote as a birthday gift for Martin many years ago (check out Martin's long locks).  You can visit Ladybug's website by clicking HERE, though you won't be able to see the gorgeous illustrations (the Daddy character is especially handsome) by talented artist Betsy Wallin (visit her website HERE) unless you buy the magazine.  I had no idea what illustrations would accompany my text, but when I opened the magazine (breath held) I was ecstatic to see seven beautiful watercolors.