Neighborhoods

It’s Sunday morning, just after dawn. In a few hours, I’ll climb aboard the zero-turn mower and head for the high green seas that our lawn and field paths have become. It’s a simple recipe that got us to this point: a couple weeks of 70+ degrees and sun, two rain-soaked days and no time during the workday to get out and tame any of it.

Until today. The meadow is more prairie than lawn at the moment and I’m already apologizing to the random patches and clusters of wild ranunculus and yarrow that will bend beneath the cutting deck (dialed up to the highest setting) and lay sliced in two by the whirring blades. We console ourselves with the fact that there is still plenty of pollen to go around as spring establishes herself and turns her full attention to all things procreative.

If you’ve not had the privilege of surveying any landscape from atop a riding mower of some sort, it’s a grand and unrivaled meditation, cheaper and more effective than any therapist’s couch-and-office arrangement. Nothing between you and the sky, a tidy-ish trail of serviceable compost material in your wake and that glorious feeling of accomplishment as you’re brushing grass clippings from your sleeves while standing on the front porch. A cold cran-razzberry LaCroix plucked from the door of the fridge puts the exclamation point where it belongs and makes you ask if there’s any possible way to move your retirement date up a year or two (there isn’t, but a lot of dreams unfurl out there in the Great Wide Open).

What pulls me forward, though, to suit up and get out there is more than the satisfying outcome (and “suit up” is accurate—long lightweight pants, a shirt with some manner of sleeves, earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones, safety glasses, sturdy boots, gloves that no thorny vine can penetrate, sunscreen slathered on anything that isn’t already covered, cell phone in the well just south of the cup holder and lastly, a deep sense of anticipation that in a few hours, things will look better). Once in motion, the mower and I glide and occasionally bump through an evolving series of “neighborhoods” connected by the subtlest of ecosystems, each a wonder unto itself.

From the old old goat barn where the mower lives, I back into the slope that eases its way up to the house, shift forward and skirt the edges of the eastern field where the goats used to graze their days into dusk. Open and undulating with this season’s goldenrod, Queen Anne’s Lace and thistle still in their infant stage, the sky just hangs there all blue and sometimes cloud-scuttled, a perpetual invitation to look up no matter what you’re doing. Stalwart and grandmotherly, the land’s oldest mulberry tree leans her canopy over the barn roof, offering her thumb-sized fruit in June to the swallows that nest in the barn’s eaves. A fat groundhog has tunneled its way beneath the piles of wood we’ve collected for some unknown project and we’ve learned over time not to open the door on its sliding track after sunset.

Following the field edge north, I’ll make my way past the pallet-enclosed garden with its raised beds that are more or less weed-free. Raccoons and other night marauders have left the garlic and onions alone but we’ll need to fortify the potato and cabbage rows with tall fences and stern looks. Just past the garden (still looking northward) is an open patch where we used to free-range our meat chickens back in the years when we had nothing else to do after work. It’s now home to a burgeoning mini-forest with volunteer maples and sycamores and we’ve added two Montmorency cherry trees and a curly willow to the mix. A little tricky to mow around but worth the effort, our dear late Copper kitty rests beneath one of the cherry saplings, her headstone a curled-up cat made of concrete, missing an ear. I pass with respect and a twinge of melancholy.

The path narrows as it continues past the white pine-encircled sweat lodge where we tried for years to plant all sorts of different pines and arborvitaes and silver maples on the north side of the circle, but with no luck. They were rejected, eaten and hobbled each spring until we turned our attention to other things and now, suddenly, there are too many sycamore saplings to count, providing our wandering deer with a place to rest their lanky limbs out of sight. They’ve turned it into their own small village and I’m glad for it. Keeps them preoccupied with raising their young instead of grazing on our lettuces and tulips to the south, trying their best to have a season of their own.

Once I’m past the deer village, things start to get more serious and wild as the path slopes downward and the grass thins under the leafy branches of box elders and cherry. Make a left at the first of the black walnuts and now I can no longer see anything remotely human or civilized. I’m in Their Country now, heading west where the foxes and coyotes and skunks all live and move and have their babies and protect them like any living creature does. I straighten up in the mower seat and pay attention. Who’s to say they won’t band together and pile onto this large and snarling machine come to disturb their peace, carrying me away after they’ve turned off the engine and tossed the key into the creek? (The farther I get from the house, the more my imagination runs riot).

But this is where the magic is, dear readers. On walking days, my footsteps rarely stray from this section of the paths and our outdoor roommates get to do things their way. I’ve made it a bit of a rule that when I’m trimming brambles or pulling vines, I keep to the mere fringe of the tree line and leave the lopers behind should I need to venture in further. I come into these wooded sanctuaries unarmed and in peace; my boots and clumsy gait are intrusion enough. A few winters ago, some straight line winds toppled one of the cottonwoods across the path that borders the western edge of the field-turned-woods and I step over each branch (from memory when they’re buried in Virginia creeper and poison ivy). If we ever do get out the chainsaw and finally clear the way for less encumbered future walks, I expect I’ll still lift my feet up and over the ghosts of these limbs out of habit. Muscles have a way or remembering, don’t they…

A diagonal path running southwest to northeast takes me past thick thickets of multiflora roses (from which we now harvest the vitamin C-rich rosehips for tea every autumn) and wild blackberries. When I turn off the mower, the mockingbirds in their wooded grove take up their repertoire of impressions again (blue jay, towhee, woodpecker, oriole. And repeat). Invisible improv coming from the unfolding canopy of fresh spring green leaves, it is enchanting and darn near impossible to get back to the task at hand. At the northernmost tip of this path is a majestic and towering stand of cottonwoods, their seed fluff floating and filling the sky with the feeling of unhurried laziness to which I aspire. I have now forgotten where the house is and feel no compulsion to return, ever. I see the green clusters of unripe wild raspberries and a sea of young plantain—can’t I just live out my days here instead? Sigh…

By now, my ears are feeling the pinch of the noise-cancelling headphones and it’s probably time to finish up this tour and head back to a few conveniences (a shower comes to mind and will be necessary). I’ll do a quick tick-check after I’ve tucked the mower back in its shelter and trudged up the slope to the house. Once on the porch, I’ll turn my gaze to a sweeping view of green velvet that rolls on for acres and watch as the barn swallows pick through the fresh clippings for displaced bugs, relishing the feeling that I’ve accomplished something worthy of the effort. This scene will last until the next round of soaking rains and warm, sunny days pull the grass blades upward again. I’ll dial the cutting deck a setting or two lower and then it will officially be summer.

Choosing Small, Appreciating Humble

We’re about a month out now and I still can’t find adequate words to describe the total solar eclipse that happened in the skies above our slice of the world.

My brother, Mike, traveled from Hawaii for it (and to work on a kitchen remodel job with a dear friend of his) so I took the day off and we drove just forty minutes west from our place to a family farm-turned brewery hosting a watch party in their open-sky surroundings. We arrived early and the field where we parked was already half full. In less an hour, they were turning people away. By mutual agreement, we decided to tailgate the event in the parking lot far from the good-natured crowds with their blankets spread out on the grass and folding chairs unfolded. Official Eclipse Glasses? Check. Water? Check. Ok—bring on the show.

Two days later, I got out my watercolor crayons and a small 3x5” mini canvas and painted my experience of that moment when I looked up safely without Official Eclipse Glasses at a spectacle that has yet to be contained in a sentence or paragraph of the fanciest descriptors (painting is a relief for this writer whose initial go-to is an ever-expanding vocabulary). Georgia O’Keefe I’m not, but I signed the back of it anyway and mailed it to my brother the day before he headed back to the islands. I was so surprised by that simple act of creative gear-shifting that I painted a second one, signed it and now it sits on my studio table reminding me of the day Mike and I turned our gaze upward for the better part of a sunny afternoon in April. The carnitas street tacos we ordered from one of the food trucks there were excellent—we waited over an hour in line for them.

In the days and weeks that have rolled out since then, I’ve asked coworkers and friends about their solar eclipse experience and found that I’m not the only one to go silent, searching for the right words to describe the impact of what we saw. It’s not just me who’s weary of “amazing” and “jaw-dropping” (something our bodies do naturally when we bend our heads back) and all the other overused adjectives our superlative-addicted culture offers relentlessly (see also “stunning”, “awesome” and “incredible”). My brother and I agreed to get back to each other should some appropriate arrangement of words come to mind. Until then, we leave it to “that was great being with you for the eclipse”. and “I’m glad we shared that moment”. Sometimes silence is the most appropriate response, perhaps accompanied by a gentle squeeze of the hand.

Our current situation frequently offers up the chance to reflect on the continuum of grandiose to simple in our lives. I often consider our experience of the two farmers’ markets where we sell our humble kitchen-made granola. One is akin to a bustling street fair in the old downtown section of a suburb north of downtown Columbus. In the summer, we, alongside our nearly 100 fellow vendors, average 4000 - 6000 visitors on a Saturday (as high as 7000 on a peak weekend) and the rain doesn’t deter these stalwart patrons of all things fresh and local. They outfit their dogs and small children in raincoats and hats (I once saw a mixed breed pooch wearing the sweetest paw-fitting rainboots), bring all manner of colorful totes and wagons to carry their purchases, and shun umbrellas as something beneath their dignity. In between downpours, they buy our Blueberry Almond and Vanilla Chai flavors, we swap stories under the shelter of our green 10-foot canopy and reassure each other that we won’t melt. It’s a kind and gentle exchange that boosts us for the restocking granola-baking that the coming week with bring. We are always grateful.

In contrast, the local market just fifteen minutes from our home is a more intimate affair—a good weekend will see maybe 300 pairs of feet walk past the twenty or so vendors who, by market stipulations, must make or grow their table’s bounty no more than 25 miles from the town square. Our customers are neighbors we haven’t met yet and friendly visitors looking for the charm of a slower pace. The local college brings in parents for family weekend activities and they nearly always leave with a bag or two tucked into their student’s backpacks for snacking on in between classes (Mocha and Lemon Blueberry Tahini are favorites). Much to our delight and surprise, this smaller market consistently outsells the larger one and leaves us smiling and scratching our heads a little for their generous support of our small and crunchy venture, now in its eighth year. We’re always grateful here too, and it feels that much sweeter because we’re closer to home. I could see us making this our retirement gig when the time comes.

In between eclipses and farmers’ markets are sunrises that stop me in my ambitious morning-walk tracks to look up and about instead of just down at my feet, middle-of-the-night thunderstorms that mean I’ll be nodding off on the bus ride into work because I chose wonder instead of sleep, and sheer hand-clapping joy at the antics of a skunk family whose little ones tumble playfully down the ridge to the meadow, only to climb back up and do it all over again. How did I get so lucky? I don’t hear music in the background or see angels doing cartwheels across the setting sun (though I’m sure they do most every night). It all just comes and goes in a breath and if I’m paying attention I get to see it, commit it to memory and then walk back up to the house with the day’s eggs in a small-handled bag from the local nursery. Simple stuff, this, gathered and noticed and appreciated.

Until those other words come along, I’m fine with “beautiful”, “breathtaking” and “wow”. That last one will always be enough.

Glue

The mower is in the shop for its spring tune up and the grass knows it.

Dressed in her finest 70’s shag carpet vibe, the slopes surrounding the house and the walking paths through the fields are an uneven and cheerfully rebellious carpet of quackgrass, dandelion (in puffball stage now), lamb’s-quarters, knotweed, wild violets and plantain, with flat patches of creeping Charlie and white clover sprinkled in to distract us from the botanical chaos beneath our feet. I was hoping we’d get another bumper crop of wild garlic mustard this year for making pesto but it’s literally thin on the ground. No matter—the plantain and purslane are edible and we’ve got plenty of nettles to keep us in soups and lasagnas well into the summer. We’ve even got green onions sprouting up in the compost pile. Barbara Kingsolver calls weeds “the gardener’s job security.” We also call them dinner when it’s safe to do so. And we know this: there’s no stopping spring.

It’s impossible not to notice the reassuring effect this land-home has on us when new life is bursting forth in every direction. Our place is landlocked and pretty much hidden from the ribbons of traffic that zoom by on the two-lane road a mile and a half west of our driveway. Were it not for our phones and internet (and the need to slide into that traffic a few days a week for work) and a shared curiosity about what the rest of the human tribe is up to, we’d live an ignorantly insulated life, unaware of the headlines that bring the rest of the world to its knees. But…we are aware, we do read and scroll and feel the sharp edges of a global momentum that seems bent on self-destruction. In the midst of all that, it begs the question—why are we still here, all of us? I can only speculate and wonder, with an undercurrent of fierce hope, the kind that makes you clench your face up tightly, press your clasped and intertwined fingers against your lips and send everything you are outward to an unseen force that must be, must be, watching, listening, standing alongside us.

What is holding us together? What divine epoxy adheres to the jagged brokenness of our life’s pieces and sticks them back together? In my 20’s, I traveled with three male friends to a monastery just outside of Atlanta and stayed overnight (disguised as a man since women were not permitted accommodations. Another story for another time). I wondered about their spartan lifestyle, heard their chants at regular intervals throughout the day. I didn’t see a television in the areas we visited, though I didn’t look for one. In the short slice of time that I observed and participated in the rhythm of their routines, I thought of a life so focused, so contained and driven inward, sunrise to sunset to sunrise again. How could there not be some ripple effect on others in spiraling concentric circles that reached beyond Georgia’s state lines into Florida and eventually into Cuba and Puerto Rico? How many more communities of full-time pray-ers are there in the world? And…how could all of that not be helping, in some way?

Then there are the other less formal and less communal acts of intention and compassion that weave and whisper themselves through our days: doors held open as we juggle sacks of groceries, artists who paint messages on flat stones and leave them on beaches for searchers and fellow travelers to find at just the opportune moment, farmers’ market vendors who give away whatever product is left at the end of the day to local food pantries or a customer who’s short on cash, simple eye contact with someone next to us at the bus stop, held for longer than a flash, a reminder that we’re in this together. Whenever we dig into our recycling to find a piece of something that will keep us from having to run into Lowe’s and buy brand new, we’re helping. Any and all inner work that lovingly tries to tame the ever-churning “figure it out” thought cycle we get pulled into at the expense of our peace…that helps too. And bending down to feed the cats, the dogs, the ferrets, or sprinkle flakes of fish meal and spirulina into the aquarium by the front door. More glue, more adhesive to strengthen the bond between us all as together we rise and push back against despair and insist on love. Shifting one’s view away from the headlines like this is not just a good idea, it’s good medicine, water for parched throats. We mustn’t minimize it or dismiss it as soft, ineffective, Pollyanna folly.

I’m counting on these simple acts of continuance and connection. Just as sure as spring means a shaggy lawn and unbridled growth, I believe in the power of glue.

Join me.

A Day’s Work

From the looks of things, it’s going to be the Year of Apples and Mulberries. I lost count at fifty mulberry trees last year (the rabbits of the arboreal world) and have already cleared a patch in the freezer for the jam and barbeque sauce we’ll make in a few months. The trees that give us apples are a mystery in variety and origin, remnants of a working orchard that rimmed the meadow where the former residents’ dairy cattle grazed their afternoons away. The fruit is an impressionistic red streaked with lime-ish green and face-puckering sour. We have yet to turn them into anything beyond a quick trail snack, tossing the cores onto the walking path for the deer if they want them. Everywhere we look is food in raw form and if we didn’t have day jobs, we could easily make a life of gathering, preparing and storing the land’s bounty to get us through the seasons. It’s time to get out the “Edible Wild Plants” book and dog ear the “Spring” section. For as long as we live, there will always be work to do.

If one of life’s prominent themes is motion, another must be contrast. We wouldn’t appreciate warmth so much if we didn’t know what cold fingers and toes felt like toward the end of a winter walk. Silence is that much more blessedly soothing when it follows the cacophony of the neighbors’ 4-wheeler slicing through the air on a summer Sunday morning. Sweet plays with salty in a dark chocolate almond bar where flakes of sea salt land on the tip of the tongue in that first bite. I’m not thirty anymore (or forty, or fifty…shall I keep going?) and I know it, as evidenced by how much less weeding I can do in an afternoon without noticing any aches in my fingers or knees. Tending to the land spreads out over several days now. When did gathering fallen branches become a full day’s work instead of the warm-up for the after lunch gardening marathons of my youth? Hundreds of thousands of people with whom we share this planet work much harder than I do, no matter what my aching knees say. It’s all relative and I get it, but it’s good for the soul to consider another’s life work, the rhythm and rocks that a fellow human must move in order to survive, to solve a problem, to eat.

For the past thirteen days, first responders, engineers, tugboat and barge captains, transportation officials in Maryland and workers at the Royal Farms convenience store near the entrance of the Francis Scott Key bridge have put their shoulders and hearts to the work each of them must do in the aftermath of a disaster that left empty chairs at six families’ tables. How do they awaken each morning since March 26, knowing—or not knowing—what will be asked of them in the day’s waking hours, and how do they put it aside, if such a thing were even possible, when they finally reach their own driveways and dinner tables? In the days following the September 11 attacks, it was someone’s job to figure out where to transport the debris from the Twin Towers so that it could be sifted, examined, sorted and piled up, one truckload after another, day after day, week upon week. Who bore that burden and finally decided, in a moment of karmic irony, that the Fresh Kills site on Staten Island, the world’s largest open-air dump, would be the most suitable place for such a heavy and unfathomable purpose? Twenty-three years and 600,000 tons of debris later, there are still fragments of lives amid the dust, no closure within reach. No matter what I was tasked with during my time at the American Red Cross in the days and months following that horrific event—receiving volunteer interest phone calls by the dozens, directing a steady stream of blood donors at our doors and guiding community businesses wanting to feed us as we worked ‘round the clock—none of it came close to the weight on the shoulders of that one person who directed the truck traffic at that Staten Island dump-turned-graveyard and crime scene.

Getting up at 4:30a.m. twice a week to catch a bus downtown and support those who advocate for nursing home residents isn’t easy but it’s manageable compared to the hard labor required to harvest sugarcane in India, coffee beans in the mountains of Central America, or direct air traffic in a tower high above the runways of the world’s airports. I have little to nothing to complain about given my circumstance and privilege and I’m aware of that, deeply, for the majority of my waking hours. We all do our part, with a grounded commitment to the outcome, and that mustn’t be minimized or overlooked. It’s just hard not to compare my day’s efforts to someone else’s, a someone whose home has a dirt floor and sheets for windows. Looking globally to my left and right, I humbly acknowledge that I work on easy street and pretty much always have, every day of my employed life.

Let the mulberries fall in showers from the trees. I am up for the job of sorting and washing them, picking off the stems and crushing them into their next life as sauce and jam and who knows what else so that we can enjoy them in the chilly days of winter.

In Baltimore, there are three more bodies to find beneath the wreckage and a bridge to rebuild.