Bi-Weekly Topic for Oct. 1, 2004
My green and ivy days
By P.
In a big square window of my second apartment, there hung a huge Swedish ivy.
Facing south in the unobstructed sunshine of a third-floor view overlooking the railroad tracks and a broad, open tract of pavement that had been abandoned first as a railroad terminal and again as a parking lot, it thrived -- gloried, even. The long tendrils of scalloped green leaves must have been three feet long.
Naturally, in such an apartment, the air was rather cool, and I kept the plant well watered. It was a truly happy ivy, and I named it Olga.
Olga was a gift from my sister, in honor of my moving into my first unfurnished apartment. The place was (a) cheap and (b) most convenient to everything I might need downtown -- just across from my office and a little pizza place; down the street from such necessities as drugstores, and the discount store was conveniently placed beyond the parking lot. Not that I had any money to spend, for my pay was low and a lot of it went into rent and heat. I wore my hair long because I couldn't afford haircuts.
The apartment was big, though -- half the top floor of a commercial building. As a fire exit, I had a door in the kitchen that had been trussed up in plastic, duct tape and insulation to keep noise and smells from the other apartment from coming through. If there ever was a tenant back there, I never knew. I didn't worry about it, because I expected the building across the street that housed my office to burn first.
In fact, neither of them did, but the old hotel that housed the office later became a real estate agency and the brick facade just outside Olga's window collapsed in the 1990s. I think they tore down the building after that. The bricks would have landed on a greasy-spoon diner with an arched roof that huddled against mine -- I wonder what the patrons made of it.
I liked the flat I had because it had central heat. The one before it had an antique space heater that I didn't trust. I could live with cold, except at bath time -- the place had not a shower but a tub, and that located against the outer wall of a huge, unheatable room with big, sunny windows that frosted up in the winter. I often cadged showers from my friends. Fortunately in those days I spent a lot of time running around the countryside and, while I probably got dirtier, I didn't smell any worse than the farmyards I was visiting. It was a lush and green time -- green in all its senses, for I surely was, too. I labored happily with the idea that I was making a difference in the world around me, and I was proud of what I did. I suspect now that I was so green I had no idea of what I was doing, but I plugged away at it with enthusiasm and no thought for the time clock.
An older woman I got acquainted with tried to set me up with her daughter, saying she liked my innocent enthusiasm and idealism. The daughter probably thought me a complete geek, but was nice enough about it in a conversation we had on the back porch: She confessed she had no interest in me -- I, rather surprised it was an issue, acknowledged that I had no interest in her, either, and that was that. Mom lost interest, too. It was just as well; she was rather overwhelming.
In my spare time I rounded up furniture -- a secondhand bed from home, tables and chairs from garage sales up and down the valley. At the time, a lot of folks from my grandparents' generation were unloading traditional wooden chairs, tables, cupboards and whatnot, and there were great bargains to be had in antiques. They were quite unfashionable and cheap. The chairs in particular creaked, and a small dinner party I had, just under Olga's window, was a symphony in groaning, wobbling wood. I still have quite a bit of that, though it lives mostly in the cellar, waiting to be refinished.
A couple of times I cut the ivy back a little and replanted the cuttings, to make it thicker. I remember talking to a woman who told me I had to be ruthless in trimming plants, to keep them thick and manageable. Indeed, she had a lovely coleus on her desk. I couldn't bring myself to be ruthless, but I paid a lot of attention to my ivy.
This blissful, hard-working time lasted less than a year. I moved on to a different post -- not really a promotion, more an opportunity to do more work in another place. I moved again, repeatedly, for a while.
Olga didn't like moving. Her subsequent windows faced sometimes north, sometimes east, and seldom enjoyed the daylong, full sunlight she enjoyed in her first window. Scalloped leaves turned yellow, and the stems grew bare and ugly. I trimmed and rooted some to try keep the plant full. The trimmings even became a second pot. The original pot eventually died out. Over time, I lost a good deal of green, too. Now, 30 years later, I still have the clones, which get a filtered sunlight in a southern window and survive without particularly thriving. Much battered; more confident; less innocent and quite a bit less idealistic, I suppose I have fared better than the plant. I really owe her (them?) a repotting.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Ivy.html
Change Of Scenery
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Plants In Place.
They've started to cut the corn. When I returned home in the evening, the edge of the field near the road was down and the harvester had just started cutting a swath into the interior. Before we settled in to listening to baseball for the evening, Pica and I walked up the road to the levee. Pica mentioned that it would be time for the coyotes, and on cue, they started howling. Several of them. Two trains were passing, and as is their wont, the coyotes howled at the trains. Walking back to the house, we saw one of them trit-trotting out into the alfalfa field to the south, looking in fine fettle. They know there's feasting to be had once the corn is down. The crows meanwhile will get their own surprise. Two of Pica's coworkers brought down a fancy new live trap to catch crows as part of ongoing research on West Nile Virus. The trap is right now near the English walnut tree in our yard, but will be moved out into the field once the corn is down.
And soon we'll have our view back.
Posted by Numenius at October 1, 2004 11:02 PM | TrackBack
Comments
it's amazing to hear about coyotes. They are just a fantastic part of cowboy movies to my anglised experience. It must be amazing to hear them at night.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at October 5, 2004 12:53 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/10/01/change_of_scener.html
A-mazing
By Hoarded Ordinaries
Today was a quintessential New England autumn day. Temperatures were mild, the sky was richly blue, and the landscape glowed with earthy colors: red, yellow, orange. On this quintessentially New England day, I did something that felt quintessentially Midwestern: I got lost in a corn field.
The Stonewall Farm has designed a corn maze on their White Brook property here in Keene: a chance for this non-profit educational organization to broaden their outreach (and fund-raising) during a time of year when everyone’s thoughts are turned towards corn, pumpkins, and hayrides. Although I hail from Ohio where cornfields are plentiful, I’ve never walked through one much less navigated a corn maze. The maze, I read, features over a mile and a half of meandering trails. “The journey from beginning to end,” the Stonewall Farm website assures me, “should take you anywhere from 45 minutes to 1-1/2 hours or more to solve.” Apparently I’m on the “slow-poke” end of the corn-maze spectrum since it took me nearly 2 hours to learn an essential life fact. After 20-some years of schooling and the completion of a PhD, I am (just barely) smarter than 4 acres of corn.
The Stonewall Farm corn maze has been open to visitors for several weekends now, but this is the first weekend where I’ve been in Keene to check it out. Its meandering trails were muddy from all the rain we’ve been getting in the (repeated) aftermath of Hurricane Whoever, so navigating the maze offered more than the usual number of challenges. I’ve always thought that I had a good sense of direction: I can navigate a woodland trail with the best of them, especially if I have a good map. But corn mazes are mapless, and cornfields in general lack easily recognizeable landmarks. Believe me, it’s very, very easy to get completely disoriented and a-mazed in a corn maze…and therein lies a great opportunity for fun and edification.
Never having been to a corn maze before, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I’d seen in the movies hedge mazes with meandering pathways delineated by tall groomed shrubbery, but the trails in a corn maze are much narrower. At all times in a corn maze, you can hear disembodied voices of people on different paths than yours; at times, you can hear the radio playing at the end of the maze, your ultimate goal. But even though you can hear voices and music, you have no way of knowing how to get to these sounds even though they seem to be imminently close at hand. In a word, part of what’s a-mazing about a maze is the way it leads you to distrust your senses: when you do come to the finish point, you are naturally surprised because you’d given up all hope of being anywhere near it.
Both labyrinths and mazes have been used as metaphors for the spiritual path. As Rebecca Solnit notes in her delightful book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, labyrinths and mazes are distinctly different, each with their own theological import. Labyrinths like the famous four-quadrant pavement maze inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral represent the individual’s journey toward God. Spiritual aspirants walked these wending pathways as a kind of site-centered pilgrimage: if you couldn’t afford a trip to Jerusalem, you walked a miniaturized version of Christ’s Via Doloroso by patiently pacing the path toward a labyrinth’s center. Labyrinths are “unicursal” in that they offer only one path that folds intricately upon itself. You can’t get lost in a labyrinth: as long as you have the patience and endurance to keep walking, you will get to the center, your goal attained. As such, labyrinths represent the gradual inevitability of God’s grace: unless you turn around or stop walking, you will eventually reach God at the end of your wandering, guaranteed.
Mazes are different. Whereas labyrinths, Solnit notes, represent “an inflexible route to salvation,” mazes symbolize “the confusions of free will without a clear destination.” In a maze, you can get terribly and even terrifyingly lost: after a while, all intersections start to look alike, so deciding between left, right, and straight can be a disorienting proposition. Part of the fun of today’s corn maze lay in finding (and repeatedly re-encountering) various signs and trivia questions that maze workers had planted throughout: with such signs as landmarks, you could make some attempt at orienting yourself upon realizing that, yes, you’d been to this particular intersection before. But unlike a labyrinth, which merely requires patience and durable shoe leather, a maze demands that you keep your head in order to reach the finish. If you choose your turns poorly, you can circle and re-circle the same ground in maze, walking and re-walking the same pathways without getting in any way nearer to your destination. Mazes, in a word, represent stuckness, the way we can get mired in the same old muddy paths time and time again.
Whereas labyrinths represent the inevitability of God’s grace, a maze seems very “Zen” to me: although it helps to keep your head in a maze, ultimately you can’t “think” your way to the finish line since the dead-ends and re-doublings of a well-designed maze serve to confuse your rational thought. Any given turn in a maze might take you on a time-consuming, dead-end detour; any given turn in a maze might take you on a time-consuming, finish-finding foray. As Solnit again notes, the “moral of mazes” is that “sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you’re farthest away when you’re closest, sometimes the only way is the long way.” In my case, after trying to think my way out of the Stonewall Farm corn maze (and only succeeding in returning to the starting point twice for all my effort), the way I found the finish line was by consciously stopping all attempts to find it. Instead of trying to think or decide which path was “best,” whenever I came to a fork, I took the right-most branch; if that led to a dead-end, I turned around and took the next right, and the next, and the next. Zen Master Seung Sahn has an oft-repeated bit of advice for his students: “Only go straight, don’t know!” In my experience navigating the Stonewall Farm corn maze, I learned that “only go right, and watch out for mud” worked just as well.
Although I felt a bit foolish when I arrived at the finish point to discover that it had taken me over an hour and forty minutes–much longer than even families with small children–to navigate my way from start to finish, I can say I have a deeper appreciation for corn fields now. Never having gotten lost in a maze much less a cornfield before, I had no idea how lovely the sound of wind soughing through stalks can be. For all the sounds I heard of families shouting out to one another (”Hey, guys, come this way!” or “Joey, I’m over here!”), I never once heard a whiny-voiced kid ask “Are we there yet?” At journey’s end, there was a bell to ring, cheers from maze workers, and hayrides for tired tykes. Perhaps an ample hay-filled wagon pulled by sturdy steeds is an apt metaphor for heaven itself?
In its own meandering, roundabout way, this is my contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic, Plants in Place.
Posted by Lorianne under Uncategorized
Comments
Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/10/03/a-mazing/
October morning (tone poem)
By Via Negativa
Out for a walk before breakfast, I quickly miss my hat. The sky is clear, & as the light increases, the leaf color in the understory grows more & more distinct. Whenever I pause, the clouds from my breath rise straight up. It's as if I'm sending smoke signals - but what is the message?
Just as I reach the top of the ridge, the sun comes up. There's a sudden honking of Canada geese from somewhere a mile or two away: a small, local flock, I imagine, has just crossed paths with the sun at this very same moment. I look carefully to the right and left of the growing blaze of light above the horizon. The valley fog forms a parallel ridge system: ghost mountains, thrown into high relief. When I turn away, blue dots appear in my field of vision on either side of wherever I focus my gaze.
The sun at sunrise doesn't rise; it descends. From the crowns of the oaks it seeps down limbs & trunks. I follow the moss-covered trail between shining columns, wade through streams & pools of soft, golden light. Saplings already in their autumn colors seem lit up from within. I feel as if I've stepped into a Maxfield Parrish illustration.*
To the west, the mountain's shadow draws a straight line across the fog. Below in the darkness: a train whistle, cars on the highway. Above: a layer of white. Then the crest of the Allegheny Front shining in the sun. Then nothing at all.
By the time I get back, the sun's halfway down the field. Fog streams from the barn roof. A nuthatch taps in the top branches of a walnut tree.
*
Western Pennsylvania botanist and photographer Paul Wiegman, in a post to a botanical listserve, writes:
The color change is beginning at the highest elevations of Allegheny Mt., Negro Mt., Laurel Ridge, and Chestnut Ridge, and the lower elevations are still green when viewed from a distance. From within the forest the changes are low to the ground with the ferns and herbaceous vegetation, and some of the understory trees.
Given these two notes, it appears that fall starts from the tops of the mountains and creeps to the lower elevations at the same time it begins at ground level and slowly rises into the canopy.
*
Cold October morning.
The katydids get started
well before noon.
*
A chorus of chipmunks
up & down the ridge:
mine mine mine mine mine mine mine.
*
Cold morning.
A forest full of spiderweb silk
& only the sun to trap.
*
"All this, here, overpowers everything," Tom Montag wrote yesterday. "When you see just how beautiful the world is, all of a sudden it swallows you up and there is nothing left of you to send home. The place takes you and you're gone. All we can write are love letters or suicide notes."
He's talking about watching the waves at Keweenaw Bay on Lake Superior. But it could be almost anywhere, I think. And what if one is already at home? To whom should we address our letters then?
*
Earlier, as I sat outside drinking my coffee, I noticed that the first hole had appeared in the wall of foliage across from my front porch: a small spot of pale blue among the yellow poplar and birch leaves. In a few weeks I'll have my view of the horizon back.
But it's folly to think that when the trees are finally all bare, things will become - you know - somehow clearer. Because isn't this how one pictures a revelation? Brilliant. Brief.
In between there's green, there's brown, there's November gray. And yes, for you fans of clarity, there's baffling white.
*
This morning it seems
suddenly remarkable
how every shadow leads
to a particular bush, to some
tall trunk. I stand
like a tracker lost among
a profusion of paths, squinting
into the sun.
__________
*E.g. (That would be me on the left.) Amid much awfulness, "Dream October" actually isn't too bad.
This is a contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Plants in Place.
garden-variety volunteers
By alembic]
This post is for the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic Plants In Place:
If pixels could emit odors, you would be greeted here at alembic with the stale air of neglect. No one has been here to fling the doors and windows wide open, to shake out the rugs, move a bit of furniture about, or to plop fresh flowers into the grand vases of language to brighten up this space of the public discourse. Not that there aren't any signs of life here.... With my absence, a few vermin did feel emboldened enough to scrawl spam graffiti all over the antechambers of comments.
I am working lots, but not too efficiently at that, it seems. Then again, it may just be that the pace has quickened, or that the demands have grown in number, and the expectations in proportions. Half the work I am doing these weeks is not for pay; it's all volunteer. Like half my garden.
The liquidamber seeking shelter near the house, the oak sunning itself on the steep slope rising from the back of the garden, the holly tree springing up from a cluster of azaleas in semi-permanent shade, the rampant star jasmine with its tendrils hooking on to whatever will support it, the as-of-yet sparse climbing roses scaling the fence, the seasonal freesias, more timid with their scent than their commercially cultivated relatives ' these are some of the plants that have showed up for volunteer duty in my garden over the years we have lived here.
Consummate volunteers, they need little from me in terms of care and feeding. Every Saturday, come rain or shine, my neighbor's gardeners strap on all sorts of tools and implements and race through her garden, snipping, culling, and blowing up a storm (not to mention exhaust fumes) with their leaf blowers. No plant that wasn't in the original plan survives in her garden.
I envy her the clarity of vision and the determination to stay the course, as far as her garden is concerned. (Odd, or maybe not so, that I should have dreamt that she was giving a fundraiser party for Bush....) My garden is unfolding, in spite of my intentions, it seems. For this, a few birds ' and who knows what manner of insects ' have been grateful, judging by the number of nests that get blown out of the trees and the very bushy bushes with the first new big windstorm of the year.
I know that this haphazard unfolding of greenery, volunteer though it may be, will, at some point change from a picturesque seediness into an anarchy in which the ivy, buoyed by the numerous roots that it can shoot into the ground as well as into the air, will choke the life of variety out of my garden -- plan or no plan.
Indulgent as I am of the changing order of plants in my garden, I make sure to keep my pruning shears and hedge clippers sharp as they can be ... just in case!
Posted by maria at October 06, 2004 08:19 PM
Comments
Up here, it's a constant battle to beat the wild jungle back -- it will overtake anything in its path, during its short-lived rule on the topography, on top of the permafrost. It defies logic, how we can be like field workers out with our machetes, hacking, hacking away, just to have to turn around and do it again the following month. Such is its desperation I guess, to make a name for itself in the brief time span of "not-winter."
I love freesias. I buy them all the time at the grocery store, they are so fragrant and happy to be. But that liquid amber looks kind of threatening, as the page said it will lift up concrete porches and drop spiney, sticky fruits that must feel just lovely under bare feet. I bet the sunlight through the burgundy leaves is quite striking, though.
Posted by: Kate S. on October 8, 2004 05:46 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041014111143/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000432.html
Oct 3, 2004 at 10:18 pm
Sounds like my life. Hmm, so mebbe I should just keep turning right?
Oct 3, 2004 at 10:55 pm
You could as well turn left — as long as you did it consistently. I wonder if you could build a maze that required folks to consistently turn left, then right? (wondeful essay!)
Oct 4, 2004 at 5:07 pm
Leslee, I’m not sure if turning right, left, or straight is the answer…but I certainly know what it feels like to be lost & mired in mud! I think the moral of the story is to just keep going!
P, I too wondered about maze design as I wandered: I’m sure there are many sorts of directional algorithms that govern the turns & twists of an “average” maze. In my case, I think you’re right: I just needed to do *something* consistently vs. trying to choose the direction that “looked right.” But I’m sure there are mazes out there that are purposefully more complicated than the one I tried!
Thanks for the comments!
Oct 4, 2004 at 10:10 pm
We were JUST talking about this maze this weekend.
Oct 5, 2004 at 12:04 pm
Seasons and cycles
Autumn Leaves
Oct 7, 2004 at 11:52 am
Excellent essay! I’m abashed now to learn that I have been confusing labyrinths with mazes all this time.
It’s interesting that “amazed” has a neutral or positive connotation, while “bewildered” seems inescapably negative. In the folk-mind, i guess wilderness is the most dangerous kind of maze. (Think of the Wild Wood in the *Wind in the Willows*.) But in the King James Bible, wilderness, too, is a type of labyrinth as you describe it.
“Bewildering Grace, how sweet the sound . . . “