From a Sunday Morning Writing Prompt

The hemlocks grew behind the left corner of the house. Sadly I have  no photo of them.

Most Sunday mornings I write with a friend. She provides the prompts, we write for half an hour, then read our efforts to one another over the phone. The prompt today was taken from John Hay's writings regarding a tree he grew up with. (A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen: “Fire in the Plants”)

One afternoon when I was five my father called my brother and sisters and me out to the back yard. It was really two yards divided by a stone wall with a rose arbor. The cesspool was also located out there so summertime found two vastly different scents competing for our attention.

On this day dad stood at the corner where rose garden and cesspool occupied the same bit of earth. Four small hemlock trees surrounded him. “Pick a tree,” he sang out, his face one big smile. My mother often accused him of being less than a landsman – he’d grown up in New Rochelle, NY; he was a city boy, after all – and being surrounded by farmers on all sides made him a bit defensive. He decided to prove his worth as a country man by planting trees for his children, trees that would grace the corner of the yard for years after we’d all grown and gone.

One by one we held our trees straight as Dad shoveled dirt over the roots. My brother’s tree was tucked directly into the corner of our property, mine stood slightly tilted next to his with the twins’ trees crowding close to avoid getting their feet wet in the murk of the cesspool.

My mother came out to inspect the proceedings. She was a city girl herself but her own mother had been born and raised on a farm. Mama knew a thing or two about gardening. “I don’t know, Jay,” she said, shaking her head. "Those trees are awfully close to the cesspool. Plants don’t like human excrement.”

The cesspool had always been a bone of contention between my parents. In the 40s, when they married and moved to the house my city-escaping Granddad had called his summer home, the modern leech field had not been in existence. Instead, a long pipe led from the house to the far reaches of the back yard where the effluent collected in a scum-covered pool before sinking into the surrounding earth. Though it was barely visible behind its shield of tall, rank grasses, it stunk in high summer when the air was hot and still. Only the roses planted in great sweeping pink swaths offered the nose any comfort.

My mother’s observation made us children anxious. We’d interrupted our play to help Dad plant our very own trees and in the space of half an hour had become very possessive of them. “They’ll grow just fine,” my father assured us, waving his hand at the surrounding woods to make his point. “Look at all those trees. They don’t mind a little sh… .” Intercepting a black look from my mother, he didn’t finish the word.

“It,” my brother muttered under his breath and scampered off, brandishing the wooden sword he’d been threatening my sisters with before Dad had summoned us. We whooped after him, leaping the lowest of the rose bushes that separated the two yards.

Those trees did grow, but slowly. In my teen years the branches of my tree were finally high enough off the ground to shelter me and on those days when hiding was a stronger urge than dodging the awful smell of the cesspool, I would take a book or my sketchpad and crawl under its sheltering branches. In winter I loved trying to sneak under the branches without disturbing the snow so that when I looked up, it was like being in the Snow Queen’s castle.

One by one my siblings and I left the home place for college and new lives but every time I returned I took time to visit my tree. The cesspool was filled in by then, replaced by a holding tank. I brought my first born to the back yard to play under the hemlocks and then the other children as they arrived. We had picnics there and built tiny houses of fallen twigs. Often we’d bring a book and I’d read aloud. Stories read in the company of trees seem more real somehow.

The trees grew for twenty-five years. Their spires reached high into the blue. I noticed a few bare spots here and there on the branches, accentuating the brown needles that still clung to the branches but it was a warning I missed. Several months later, a letter from home brought the news of my father’s illness. I returned in time to say goodbye and before leaving, stumbled out to the back yard to seek solace under my tree. I stood beneath its branches and looked up. Only then did I realize that my tree was dying, too. In fact, all four hemlocks were turning brown, their needles falling in sad puddles on the ground.

The summer following my father’s death, all four trees had to be cut down. My mother and I stood watching with tears in our eyes. Taking my hand she turned to me and said, “I’m glad I was wrong about these trees. Your father would always point them out to me when I had doubts about something.”

The home place has gone out of the family now. The rose bushes are gone, too, and many of the trees that surrounded the house of my childhood. But in my mind’s eye, those four hemlocks we planted with my father so long ago rise up out of the corner of the yard, growing between the roses and the cesspool, proof that life finds its own way to flourish despite unfavorable conditions, despite our doubts.

Outside My Window Right Now

The clouds have knit themselves into a gray coverlet and the wind is picking up. Stray leaves go whirling into the air and flit momentarily with the small birds that have come to the feeder. Little gray and white juncoes sit on the fence, sharing space with the downy woodpeckers and the wee brown finches. Every hardwood has shed its summer leaves. They wave their stick fingers and clatter their branches like castanets. Though bits of the lawn are still green, it is last summer's color and it's liberally sprinkled with buff and brown. Every surrounding meadow is a pale expanse of wheat colored stubble. Against the cobbled bark of a maple tree sprays of winterberry glow red and mahogany oak leaves cling tight to their parents.

I have replaced the Thanksgiving corn with a beaded bittersweet wreath. Tomorrow I will fill the suet feeders and buy more birdseed. I collected pinecones this fall and will slather them with peanut butter for the squirrels. If I give them their own treats at wood's edge they come less frequently to plunder the birds' food. I have turned the garden beds and put away the patio furniture. I like the spareness of this season when I can see the bones of the earth and smell the clean, metallic scent of snow on the air.

Winter can come now.

Today, Tomorrow

Maybe it will snow...

My life has been such a balance lately, of happiness and small, poignant partings, of solitude and busy-ness, of tension and release, of bustle and pure relaxation. There are the days with my family, days full of noise, of early risings, of multi-tasking, of running up and down stairs, of laughter and pretend-play and small arms about my neck. Offsetting the commotion are my days at the cottage where the activity centers around my own dictates - gardening, long solitary walks, hours of quiet reading, a little desultory housework with now and then a burst of energetic cleaning and painting. No matter which realm I am occupying at any given moment, I find myself thinking, Oh! How lucky I am to be here!

Today is a cottage day. The fog wraps the bare shoulders of the hardwoods and makes ghosts of the pines. There may be snow flurries tomorrow. Inside the cottage Christmas music plays and I sit on the floor surrounded by wrapping paper, scissors, colored pens, tape, boxes, labels, packaging materials, and gifts that must travel for days before arriving at their destination. Last year I had to muster some Christmas spirit. This year it has descended on me all on its own.

I love Christmas not for its religious overtones and certainly not for its often violent pagan beginnings but for my childhood memories. It was a time for secrets and wanting to please, a time for thinking of others as well as one's own wants, a time of special once-a-year foods and decorations, a time of colored lights and tinsel, jingling bells and snow and anticipation. I still love tramping the cold woods looking for the perfect tree, unpacking ornaments that belonged to my parents and to me as a small girl, stringing lights and listening to the Manheim Steamrollers' version of traditional carols. I love  wandering through decorated stores (but only after Thanksgiving) waiting for the exactly right gift to present itself, perusing catalogs, making cookies and holiday breads and fruitcake. (I'm one of the two people in the world who genuinely love fruitcake, the dark kind that's chock full of dried fruits and nuts and soaked in brandy for a month.)

Tomorrow I will pop round to the Post Office with my packages, make and send a few Christmas cards, take a walk in the promised flurries (and perhaps find the Perfect Tree). I will nap, I will read, I will luxuriate in the quiet and enjoy this unexpected rise in spirit toward joy.

A tree from the past.

Learning to See

It’s not wise to think that there’s only one way to see things. Occasionally it’s a good idea to look at the world from a different perspective, to turn things topsy-turvy. Today the outdoors tugged at me like wind at a kite string so I pulled on my coat and boots and set off across the fields. In the center of one is a great heap of rocks piled up when the field was plowed under for corn. I climb to the top and sit in the hollow of the largest boulder. From there my view of the meadow alters.

Over the tops of the willows that line the creek bank I can see a third field with rows upon rows of old corn stubble converging to a point at one corner of the woods. I spy a small brown bird clinging to the tattered spike of a cattail. It sways slightly in the wind and I hear it singing, “Here I am, here I am, oh mine, this one’s mine.”

Over my head two geese wing their way through the too-blue sky, their harsh cries echoing down to me like falling leaves. Farther on, a red-tailed hawk sits on a branch high above me and watches me watching it. I climb into the lower branches of a sturdy tree and look down as the hawk does. My view of the earth changes again and so do my thoughts. With my feet ground-anchored and my eyes looking up I contemplated flight. Standing shakily on a tree limb looking down, I think of falling.

A dusting of snow on fallen leaves forms a patterned carpet and the sky is bracketed by tree branches sketched in sepia. Safely back on the ground I search for a soft dry place to lie down and discover a hollow. I snuggle in and the whole world becomes suddenly smaller to my eyes, encompassed by leaf covered banks and tree trunks and thick branches that allow only tiny glimpses of the sky. Here where my view is limited, I can let my imagination soar. When I was a child, this came easier. I was less reluctant to let go of my rational mind, more able to move unrestricted through the worlds inside my head. I could be the hawk soaring above and the girl on the ground and know them both from my protected place.

I have learned to acknowledge that while all things change, they stay the same. The wind still blows, even if I cannot feel it in the hollow. The sky changes from blue to smoke to dusk. At the end of today tomorrow waits, and tomorrow I will see everything differently.

Do You Know?

My childhood home

Where do we go when we dream? To places inside our heads? To places of the heart? Are our brains trying to make sense of our daytime lives or just processing the excess information? Are we working out unsolved problems, perhaps putting them in a new light? Do dreams come true?

I dream in color. Always. Sometimes I'm a participant, sometimes an observer and other times I watch myself, all the time conscious of the fact that I'm also doing what I'm watching. Most often my dreams take place in familiar locales. I have repetitive dreams; one reoccurring dream finds me in a familiar house, going from room to room explaining to the people following me what each former inhabitant used the rooms for. I have falling dreams and dreams of being chased. I've had numerous dreams about being in a car that has no brakes.

I've had prophetic dreams, dreams of destruction, of the end of the world, of trying to save my children.  Such dreams came before my then husband and I moved to Vermont with our four children. The real estate agent drove us to a town that I recognized from those dreams. It should have been a warning. My husband and I divorced in that town. My children had to choose a parent to live with. The world we'd all known ended there.

Ah, but last night's dream was of a different sort. A lifelong friend who died of cancer years ago came to see me. He was whole and happy and he had a life he was pleased with. He showed me his new house and it was the house I'd grown up in, the loss of which I still mourn. And I was delighted to realize that if he now lived in it, I could go there too. I could still see him, talk with him. And I'd be home. I woke smiling and the happiness has remained with me all day.

Changing Seasons

The bulk of yesterday was dominated by a gray mass of storm clouds that dumped rain at frequent intervals. I drove alternately through bursts of rain splatters and swirling leaves. Just before sunset the wind tattered the clouds and blew them eastward, letting pure gold light gild the treetops as the sun melted down to kiss the pond. Then the whole sky blushed scarlet. The temperature dipped into the low 30s overnight and today's high did not reach above the high 40s.

I have been out of doors in the wind and sunshine and the occasional snowflake, readying the garden beds for winter. I clipped back the dead stalks of phlox and bee balm, picked the last tiny rosebuds to tuck in a vase on the kitchen windowsill, and pulled the dead tomato and pepper vines. The patio chairs are stored in the garage, the umbrella has been folded away. The forsythia still has its leaves; when they fall things will begin to look winter-stark.

Birds frequent the feeder morning and afternoon. Earlier, a large jay perched precariously on the top of the slender shepherd's crook and yelled as he teetered, but he didn't keep the busy finches at bay for long. All winter long the small seed feeders that winter over here will come to eat. Soon it will be time to put out the suet cakes for the nuthatches and woodpeckers. The view from my window is better than TV.

Geese are gathering by the hundreds on the pond across the road from the cottage. Already I've seen several large flocks headed south. They call to one another and then rise as one above the water, circling once before beating their way high into the blue. Soon the only sounds will be the wind and the hush a million snowflakes make tumbling over each other - possibly as early as the middle of next week. Over and over the great seasonal wheel turns.

Trick-or-Treat

Halloween was yesterday and my little owl and pussycat are back to their normal selves. But, last night they were among the ghosties and goblins that made their way along the streets, looking for treats.

The owl and the pussycat on the move...

I had fun making the costumes. What did we do before downloadable patterns? Ran to the store a few days before or made do with what we had. The Bean's owl costume is made of felt "feathers" stitched and glued on a purchased sweater with a fur lined hood. The babe's hat is decorated with pipe cleaner whiskers and a pink kitty nose.

Row of felt "feathers" line an attached felt cape for wing span.

The Bean wanted purple feathers (of course) and "don't hide my pocket sparklies, Nini." 

We all marched in a town-wide parade on Tuesday night. Halloween isn't much like it was when I was a child, where nearly everyone made their own costumes and masks, and herds of kids wandered our rural streets without fear of abduction or doctored candy. No trick-or-treater has ever found his or her way to my cottage, tucked away as I am. It was fun to be back in the magic of the night.

All Good Things

I am dreaming over a pair of Privo MaryJanes in a shoe catalog. "Wait!" says my friend. "Let's check the Good Will bin first."

Privos? At Good Will? In my size? Nah.

Guess what's in my closet!

Hardly worn!

I lust after a very pricey mattelasse daybed cover and bedskirt at Pottery Barn. "Wait!" says my landlady. I have..." She runs out the door and comes back minutes later with a mattelasse cover and a deep, double ruffle bed skirt. "...these!" she finishes, out of breath.

The bedskirt has a mushroom ruffle trimmed with cream colored fringe that just matches the cover. Washed and pressed, my second-hand daybed and previously owned coverings look brand new.

An entire living room change for a fraction of the price of new.

"What? No photos with your blogpost?" bemoans a friend who lives far away. "My camera's broken," I tell her, "but I'm saving for a new one."

"Wait!" she says. "I have a second camera I never use. I'll package it up and send it to you." It arrives in the mail, still in its original packaging, brand new and unused until today!

A new, new camera!

I tell my neighbor I am headed off to pick apples at a local U-Pick place. "Wait!" she says. "There are more apples on my trees than I can use this year. Help yourself!"

I grab a basket and fill it in minutes. Four quarts of apple sauce and three bags of pie filling are in my freezer now. There's also a bowl of snacking apples.

The best for last.

All good things come to those who wait.

In HIs Footsteps

Wobbly table gets a new life.

My father could never be accused of being a handyman. He did know which end of a nail to hit and he had a handsaw hanging in the garage for emergencies but he made no apologies for having little aptitude for building or repairing things. So, when my mother requested a small table she could use as a sink counter extension we thought Dad would head to the nearest furniture store and purchase one. Head out he did, but after a fruitless search for a table that was both tall enough and narrow enough for the allotted space, he announced to us children that he would have to make it himself. My brother, who was taking carpentry lessons from a neighbor, offered to help, but my father politely declined, saying he wanted the table to be a surprise for my mother. We had no doubt it would be.

 I followed him out to the taproom where his worktable stood. Beneath the large workspace, which was covered with boxes of things that hadn't found their way to proper storage, were a number of boards of varying lengths. Stored on the floor beneath them were cans of paint, some half-used, some unopened.
Dad sent me into the garage for the handsaw. When I returned he had a board trapped in a vice and was hammering another board to it. I watched, impressed, as he selected, measured and cut another. Catching my expression he said, "I took shop in high school. I know what I'm doing."

Hence I didn't worry at his perplexed look when it came to affixing the legs to the narrow frame he'd nailed together. He had, by chance (or from some previous, unfinished project), four long, straight pieces of wood that seemed the perfect shape for table legs. After fussing about with them for awhile, he had me hold each piece flush into its proper corner of the frame while he nailed them in. The result was a bit wobbly but serviceable, a word that dominated my father's vocabulary.

He dug about in the board pile until he found one that was bigger than the frame. With a steady hand he spread wood glue along the frame edges, set on the table top and clamped the whole thing together. "We'll paint it tomorrow," he told me. We draped the project with an old sheet he used for catching paint spills and went in to dinner.

After supper the next evening he jerked his head at me and winked. I scrambled after him into the workroom. Dad pried the lid off a can of blue paint first but there was a mere inch in the bottom of the can, thick with scum. A can of brown paint wasn't much better and the white paint was so old it was ochre clear through. "This," said my dad, holding up a new can of canary yellow paint, "will have to do."

I had my doubts that Mama would be delighted with a canary yellow table in our predominantly pastel kitchen but I held my tongue. Turning the table upside down, Dad let me help paint the legs. "Tomorrow, when they're dry," he told me, "we will put a coat on the top and it's done!"

If my mother wondered what we were doing out there, she never asked. If she'd peeked beneath the sheet and saw what my father was planning to surprise her with, she never said. The night after we applied the final coat of yellow paint, my father proudly bore the table into the kitchen, setting it down next to the sink. It was nearly the perfect height. A shim stuck behind one of the legs countered the general wobbliness, and the canary yellow paint brought what I hoped my mother would think of as a bit of sunshine to brighten up her work space.

She looked at my father with wide eyes. Her hands flew to her cheeks as she examined his craftsmanship. Then she turned to us and with undisguised pride said, "Just look what your father has made for me!" And, as she turned to the sink, "Ask and thou shalt receive," muttered sotto voce so only I heard.

That table stood by the sink until both of my parents passed away and my sister, who inherited the house, had the kitchen remodeled. At my request, she saved the table for me and it made its way to my Vermont log cabin where I painted it white, covered its top with serviceable red and white plaid contact paper and stuck it near my own sink. It followed me back to the house of my childhood when I returned to Massachusetts and again to the cottage when I moved here a dozen years ago.

Today it's again being painted, a soft white to blend with the decor in my living area. As I peeled the old contact paper from its top and sanded the chipped paint on the legs, revealing for the first time in years its original color, I remembered the table's beginnings. Like my father, I'm no handyman though I enjoy reclaiming old things for repurposing. People often say to me, "You are your mother's daughter," when I do something they think is particularly witty or clever. Today, replacing the lost shim and catching paint drips that slithered down over Dad's old paint drips, I realized I am my father's daughter, too.

Daybed with trundle replaces old sofa.

And So To Home

Morning saw us stowing our cooking gear for the last time. After a hike along the Obsidian Flow, 1.1 square miles of black glass rock and gray pumice left behind from an eruption roughly 12,000 years ago, we headed west toward Eugene and the way we'd come a week earlier.

Black glass obsidian and pumice as far as the eye could see.

I've hiked small bits of the Appalachian Trail that runs from Georgia to Maine. Now I can make that same claim about the Pacific Crest Trail. We walked a wee portion of it on our way into the forest to view Charlton Lake, a secluded wilderness campground. This whole trip centered around sharing B's favorite places. It makes living so far from my boy a tad easier when I can place him in the surroundings he describes in letters and phone calls.

Pacific Crest Trail

Ponderosa Pine

The forest was quiet, our footfalls silenced by fallen needles. Ponderosa Pines soared into the early morning blue and sunlight slanted through their trunks, making the woods a cathedral of light and occasional birdsong. The lake itself was small and surrounded on all sides by forest and mountain peaks. It was the most peaceful of places, remote, isolated, uninhabited. I could have stayed there forever.

Remote and beautiful Charlton Lake

The road home took us past the site of the 2003 Davis Fire that consumed 21,000 acres. Ten years later the area is still one of vast devastation. Dead trees stand like sentinels guarding a wasteland.

After 10 years, the desolation is still palpable.

Just before our final descent we rounded a corner. This is how I will remember the trip, this enclosed view of forest and volcanic peak promising astounding treasures if one only dared look beyond. I doubt I would be hardy enough to have made the trip west that the pioneers braved but oh! how their hearts must have soared at such beauty before them.

Yesterday, Tomorrow

My day started with a walk before breakfast. Almost all the songbirds have departed; the mornings belong now to the crow and the jay. Several crows rose in a black cloud from the field as I passed, yelling and scolding as they settled into the branches of a large oak. Overhead three geese winged their way into the sunrise. Their undersides turned silver in the light.

Across the pond the trees are changing their green dresses for brighter colors - red and orange and vibrant yellow. They stare at their own reflections in the water and dance when the wind blows. Chipmunks are busy in the underbrush. One races across the road in front of me, his cheeks bulging.

It is good to have a day with absolutely no responsibilities. I walked until my stomach made my thoughts turn to food, then retraced my steps. Once the breakfast dishes were cleared and the floor vacuumed, I gathered up the dozens of catalogs that had accumulated while I'd been on vacation and sat on the outdoor swing to peruse and dream.

An afternoon nap after lunch seemed a good idea so I stretched out in the sunshine and dozed. I ignored the weedy gardens, the unpainted radiators, the cupboards and fridge and windows in need of washing, and idled away the afternoon hours with a good book and another mug of tea.

The day ended much as it began. I took a walk. Along the way I set free a hundred milkweed seeds. The geese returned from their foray into the cornfields. This time the setting sun turned their bodies to gold.

The light leeched slowly from the sky until full dark hid even the closest landmarks. Now the moon rides silently amid the stars and my bed beckons.

Perhaps I shall repeat today tomorrow.

Travels Resumed

First glimpse of Crooked River

Down out of the Painted Hills we drove, following a curving road through towering cliffs of basalt. We turned a corner and there below us was our first glimpse of the Crooked River, 155 miles of twisty-turny water that eventually empties into the Deschutes River. We stopped to walk along the near shore. The river was speckled with fishermen in waders; the cliffs were speckled with rock wrens. The air was still and warm. Except for the occasional car or motorcycle, no sounds but the calling birds and the music of the water broke the sleepy silence.

Castle Rock looks like an imposing fortress.

Back in the van, we drove past rock outcroppings with names like Castle Rock and Chimney Rock, crossed the Bowman Dam built in 1956 for irrigation and flood control, and headed for  the Lava Cast Forest where we hoped to camp for the night.

6,000 years ago, the Newberry Volcano erupted, spewing lava through the forest that lay at its feet. The lava began to cool and harden before the trees had been completely burned, creating casts of stone where trees had stood. We walked the interpretive trail as the sun was setting. Never have I been in a place so quiet, so eerie.

Camping was no longer allowed there so we headed to LaPine State Forest where we found a place to spend the night. The next morning we headed for Paulina Lake, one of the two lakes formed in the Newberry Crater from 500,000 years of volcanic activity. Here we set up camp for an extended two day stay.

Paulina Lake

With a mug of steaming tea in one hand and a book in another, I settled into a camp chair while Bren went for a swim. He ducked under and came up sputtering. "Colder than I thought!" he exclaimed clambering out onto the rocks along the shore, and then, "Hey Mom! Come look!"

Imbedded fossils

 Imbedded in the long flat rocks were bones, fossils of some long dead animal. We walked along the shore looking for more. Little striped chipmunks scampered all around us, chittering and sending up puffs of dust on the hardscrabble path.

We eat well when we camp. Supper was a splendid soup made from leftover vegetables and grilled cheese sandwiches made over the fire in a square pie iron. We sat with mugs of tea and s'mores, watching the sun set over the lake. The air cooled, the birds called goodnight, and we slept the sleep of the just, knowing tomorrow would bring another adventure.

Sunset on Paulina Lake