one tag for two trees

There was the year she mistook a moose for a horse. Easy enough to do when ploughing through hip-deep snow holding mittened hands with me, trying to stay on the trail her father and brother were breaking up ahead. So intent on studying each pine tree  -- is this the next Christmas tree? -- the shock of a cow moose trailing after her brother didn't seem real at first. At six, the similarities between horse and moose were striking. (Later, in the warmth of our home in the city, we read about a crazed cow moose that had attacked skiers and broken into cabins. A wildlife ranger had to put her down. She had been our moose.)

Then there was the year the keys got locked in the cab. I stayed with the kids in the forest, easily twenty miles from the nearest town. Their father, who I think was born with the ability to hitch a ride from the edge of any wilderness, was actually able to hitch a ride to the nearest sheriff's office and return four hours later with tools to unlock our truck. While he was gone, we stayed warm in our snow gear, trampling through the snow in search of a Christmas tree.

Keep in mind, none of the trees we cut down were keepers except in our own minds. We remembered the trees by their location. Remember the tree hanging from the cliff? What about the one we had to cross the creek to reach? And the tree we got the year the spring froze early, leaving a sloped ice rink?

When we set out to raise our two children, we wanted to raise them hands-on. To participate, rather than to observe.  To do, rather than to have. To be, not only with each other, but to be with the spirit of the land.

Now they are old enough to cut down trees on their own. Now their parents are divorced. And yet.

And yet, they still crowd sans mom into the cab of their father's pickup and drive back into the shadows of the Beartooth Mountain Range. Each year someone forgets extra gloves, or snowboots; sometimes someone can't find the saw. But each year they return with a tree for his house and a tree for mine. I meet them in my driveway, a jacket hastily thrown over my shoulders, sans mittens. We laugh over who gets to have the least-kept tree, knowing someday they'll be coming home with two more trees -- one for each of their own homes.

* letting in some light

Notes While Reading Kittredge

*Who are we to think we can regulate the ways of water? Where did the waterbirds go?

My daughter pulls on mittens, zips into her parka. Tells me: we are going to garden a moss mansion.

*You can lose a life in the work.

We recall our last family vacation. Remember, my son says -- the trees were stunned by salt winds.

*Reimagine desire, power over nature.

Driving to work in two feet of snow this morning I listened to a friend on my cell phone talk about Montana history: Whiskey follows gold. Gold led to brick buildings.

*Useful dreams -- what is this?

I ask Sebastian. He tells me: I don't have one friend who isn't from somewhere else.

*Stories are a thicket to catch the mind from falling.

Lately I've been thinking of a farmer's field skidded in with stones. My ex-husband, the father of my children, grew up picking rocks from his brother-in-law's wheat fields. Every spring he would fill another skid with stones. This is how he knew rocks grew.

*When we wake up, what comes back in the morning?

It's taken me until now to believe him.


***************

* denotes phrases from Who Owns the West, by William Kittredge

sans parade

See the stack of snow on the table? Double it in your mind and then you'll know the depth of today's snow. Thirty miles outside of here, ground blizzards held our countryside hostage. Somewhere -- on my sister's farm, for example, Thanksgiving arrived without turkey dinners. Sturdy as she is, she was glad to have fresh bread in the bread box and cold black olives in the frig. Not being able to get to the relatives for a holiday dinner is something to take in stride, when you are a striding-type of person such as my sister.

When the wind let up, she and her husband booted up and headed out to load bales of straw. In town, lazy after our turkey dinner, we were living the unbooted life, playing games at the kitchen table . . .

until I biffed it as the tea kettle on Pennsylvania Avenue. $1275 for one night in my son's hotel? No favored- mom discounts?!

The bales of straw came to town the next day -- the weather had warmed, the wind had died, the tea kettle was put away. My daughter and her first-graders had plans to be in the Holiday Parade that evening, riding on  a flatbed, singing carols, sitting on straw bales. In return for picking up horse feed for my sister, we got not only a pickup-load of bales but the use of the softest, creamiest, warmest bale-totting gloves in any five-state area. 

Really, that's all I wanted to write about: totting the bales with my daughter, slipping on ice together, holding each other up by the elbow. Fun!

Here's a random sans-creamy-bale-totting-gloves photo to look at while I confess to you: I entirely missed the parade (insert guilty-mom-face-thingy here.)

under snow

If you fish the river, you know snow puts the river out of shape. This I did not know. And when I say know I mean I don't walk around with this knowledge in my head. But having been told this it makes sense that snow on water would change the conditions of living beneath the surface. An avid fisherwoman mightn't let the discomfort of a snow storm keep her from fishing — she waits until the river is back in shape. What goes on below the water line when snow falls?

In other news, my poem about scraping honey from a jar while sitting at a kitchen table among friends on a ranch, waiting out the weather, is due to be published in THEMA, a print journal. I can't share the poem here until after its been published. But I've been wanting to return to said ranch and take photos of said jar and unsaid wood stove and the not-yet-mentioned fence line. My rancher friend tells me if I get out his way we could take photos. But know this, he says, his fenceline is under snow.

water water snow

North and west of here, the front reached my parent's house in time for them to slip out of their house, work their way to the river for this early *morning* shot. When my alarm went off on my Blackberry, I noticed a new email from my folks. I wasn't thinking of snow when I saw the photo, I was thinking more about the water -- webbed feet under water. I got caught up in thinking what it might be like below the surface of the water while all around the river, snow was falling and the temperature was dropping. The geese and ducks seemed immune. (I'd like to have more of that.)

 My parents, on the other hand, were thinking about the snow, warning me the front was just hours from reaching me. Off to work I drove. Mittens, parka, shovel, scraper. Another email came across my phone, this time from a friend sharing a Miss Lonelyhearts quote with me:

What goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock.

That's all his email said. Nothing more, and yet it was an entire gift of words to consider as my day wore through. Later, when temperatures dropped thirty-five degrees in thirty minutes and strong winds rattled the windows in my office, we had a short talk. I had turned on the heater by my feet, slipped into an extra sweater I keep hanging behind my office door. I might have snuck out to the lobby for a cup of hot cocoa, but was too cozy to move.

What were we talking about? Something about travel, and how I'd like to go out to the coast because it matters there when the tide comes in.

 All this water talk. Listen, he said. Your talk of the tide is speaking back to the quote I sent.

I hadn't realized this. When I read his quote, after studying my father's photo, I'd had a flashback of another conversation some time ago: Something something twenty feet below. Not to be indifferent to what he was sharing, but all I could think about was getting home and finding that "twenty feet below" quote in a journal from that time long ago. Before I could do so, the front blew in. At home, I got the dogs in, battened down the hatches. The Blackberry chimed -- this time with a winter hazard text alert.

Crap. I mean, crud! Everyone was safe at home except for my son who was working late. I did the mother thing -- sent him drive safe  good-will telepathic messages akin to the look both ways before you cross the street reminders every parent thinks keep their kidlins safe. Then I found my journals and started looking for that quote.

About the time I started thumbing through journal #3, my son arrived home, safe. But with a story to tell: icy overpass, 180 spins, backing down the overpass, zero visibility.  So yeah. He was glowing from handling a series of near-hits on ice and I was the mother who aged three years listening to the story of how he almost died behind the wheel. (Mother's License To Be Overly Fearful For Her Kidlins). He was perhaps overly confident. (Son's License To Know All Ends Well No Matter What.)

Oy. Hot cocoas all around. (Chocolate soothes the worry-beast within. I am sure that is written in a journal as well.) Once the commotion of his story had passed through us, I flipped through three more pages and found the quote I couldn't remember at the beginning of my day:

We can measure the ebb and the flow, but we can't measure what's twenty feet below the surface.

Ah yes. Webbed feet under water.  Water water snow.  Random random lack of connection. 

And then this, immediately above the twenty-feet-below quote, a quote from my son a year ago in November:  Mom! I am so close to good.

Final bit of random: the Arctic Front is here.



nine doors down from the alley

You are stillness. I am roam.

This is the beginning of a poem I am working on. The rest of it won't  come. And so, this past weekend I went for a drive, looking for moments like these instead:

On one side of the alley, the mixture of sun and shade apparently had been just right (said Goldilocks). The opposite side of same alley, too much sun and not enough shade had finished the berries off (said Sherry who writes about there being too much August and not enough snow).

I was feeling fairly pleased with myself, finding the photo-ops I had hoped for. Autumn here is uncertain, sometimes it wears an exaggerated face. We never know when the Artic Front will blow in, wiping out fall colors.

So caught up with withering and ripe berries, I had my macro-focus going on. This means the batteries  drain ten times faster. And this means not being aware of the background. I had forgotten about the poem I could not write, about the lack of balance in my life (of course I had to bring that up), about the approaching northern front. I didn't think about how I might look to the casual observer: my face two inches from the vines, scrunched down in muddy tire ruts in an unnamed alley (are any alleys named?), two feet away from a collective dumpster.

Eventually I stood up. Stretched the kinks out of my legs, my back, my feet, my macro-focus trigger finger. And noticed what I hadn't found. What had been waiting for me to notice. This was when I saw the doors, and when more of the poem showed up.

 When I leave I’ll do so poorly. Remember this — I run when I am lost. 



sans canoe, sans castle

Catching frogs in a pond, tipping precariously from a canoe. This was what I had in mind when I whined I was in the mood for fun. Something and somewhere outside my daily drive between work and home and work.

Lately, I have the days memorized. I can move through them in my sleep. Nothing here feels new.

In photography class a few weeks ago, we walked into Lab 116 and were greeted by a large photo of King John's Castle in Ireland. Our instructor had a point to make. In our search for the remarkable, we tend to dismiss what is all around us. We've seen what there is to see, we've tasted what there is to taste.  My classmates and I nodded in agreement as he shared his diagnosis with us.

He pointed to the photo of the castle, telling us he grew up two hundred meters from its walls. Only when he moved to Montana, asking where our castles were, did he realize how remarkable his former surroundings are.

Here, castles  are all about hay fields and silos. (Perhaps a sister shepherding with a snake-flinging hoe.)

I haven't the funds to fly to Ireland in order to revitalize the way I see my world, to reboot my own taste buds. In the past, tipping out of canoes was a sure way to reboot.

With this in mind last weekend I ventured out and about, beyond the fields — finding a pond and a pole sans canoe. I walked the water's edges  lined in mud and brittle cattails. I didn't wish once for a canoe — I was too caught up in new discoveries.

releasing aung san suu kyi

When I started my research earlier this year on my third biography for Morgan Reynolds, a publisher of fine YA nonfiction, I wasn't prepared for the sense of grace and humanity I encountered as I read stacks of books and newspapers about Aung San Suu Kyi, a political prisoner of Myanmar (fka Burma).

After Myanmar's recent election, Suu Kyi has been released. What about the thousands of other political prisoners still being held? Will her release last this time? Will she be safe?

found poem from behind my parent's home

During World War I 

there was a railroad  that ran the hill

behind where we are standing now.

We have gotten into taking

an afternoon walk along this old roadbed --

aren't the views great? The Highwoods

and the Little Belts  --they are twenty-five,

thirty miles from us.

The  patches of timber closer in --

those are the graveyards.

seeds over water

First we start with this: Olive seeds over water.

It was my job to keep the pups out of water.

Sometimes it isn't a photo opportunity that takes me out of the walk along the water, sometimes it is a poetry opportunity. Seeds over water, water under sky.

Focus tightens. Sound and distance fade.

chuck sawyer circa 2010

 

Tom Sawyer needn't live inside a book. Remember how he charmed others to whitewash his fence? Remember how it felt to open his book and step inside his adventures? Somewhere nearby he still lives.

When we sit inside our homes and offices, sometimes we get an unnamed yearn. For what we don't know, hence: unnamed yearn. Some of my friends may not call so often anymore because I have become an advocate of going for a walk with a camera. Call me, find out. Tell me the dark is not dark enough, tell me even your pizza tastes like mud and carp. I'll say - get a camera and take a walk. Send me back the photos.

You'll say- but what will I take pictures of? And I'll say- you'll know when you find out.

And so. Over this past weekend someone sent me photos of an area they are so familiar with it was hardly worth the walk. But they walked the walk they always walk, but this time with a camera. They came across The Beaver Plan.

How did they know they came across The Beaver Plan? Because it said so on the back of the diagram  they found. A diagram rolled up in twine with a pencil secured to the bundle. The bundle secured to a log. A beaver-gnawed log. 

  

If any of us had gone looking for this, we wouldn't have found it. Perhaps one hundred years from now we will be reading a book about Chuck Sawyer trapping beavers in Montana, and how one day  his plans were stolen from a secret place. And how two days later the plans showed back up, as though they'd never been gone at all.

upstream from black eagle

Today's shot comes from my father's camera. He emails me around two or three almost every morning with shots from the day before. His words are sparse. What he has to say about this? Upstream from Black Eagle. I know exactly what he means.

In this way, poetry is all around me. And when I say me, I include you, too. We have only to listen to the way we speak. (And then jot it down on a scrap of paper before we lose the beat.)

Yesterday I called the roofer who has yet to reshingle my roof from the tornado incident we experienced in June. I listened to his wife flip through schedules and work orders, looking for detail regarding my house. Oh, you are the triple tear-off. Since then, I've been thinking about what that means. When I look in the mirror, I wonder if others see what she saw in me.

It's not always just about the cadence in our words — our words can also reveal what we see when we look. My sister and her husband have some of their straw for their sheep farm stored on another man's land. Where would these straw bales be? Underneath the main power line where you look toward the Birdhead country...you know, through the chicken wire gate.

the case of the curious horse

Because my sister loves horses, our father sent her this photo first. I'm the daughter he sends photos of land and sky. Only after he caught himself returning to look at this photo again and again did he realize I might also like the photo. But for reasons not involving horses.

My sister focused on the horses. The middle horse is angry and the left horse next to him is merely curious. Dad focuses on how the shadows tell you about the grade of the ground. He sent me the photo after realizing I'd likely enjoy the way water curves against land.

In my photography class, our Irish instructor tells us he brakes for S curves. He will stop what he is doing — even stop his journey if he is on a doughnut run — to take a photo of any suggestion of an S curve. Such formation allows our mind to travel all the while experiencing the very edge where contrasts meet.

Field alongside water. Curiousity corralled with anger. Straight against the curves. Daughter versus daughter. Shadows on warm earth. 

Here's a place to sit while we think about S curves and the curious horse. Photo courtesy of said dad.

Last week my daughter wanted to buy a book, which for this bookmanicmother was a moment dipped in 24K bliss. She doesn't think she likes to read because compared to my sister and me she doesn't read often enough to consider herself a reader. She doesn't think she is at all like us in that regard. We walked into Borders Bookstore with an understanding how we'd just dip in, get the book she wanted, and then dip right back out.

An hour later, we were still in the psychology section. We were dipped in bliss, having discovered common ground between us. We had pulled all but two-three-four books off the shelf. I had four books I wanted to buy (had I mentioned my NoMoreBoughtenBook Vow?) and she had three in her WannaBuy Pile. We agreed to share our books at home having discovered we both enjoyed analysing why minds do what minds do.

In this way I ended up breaking a solemn vow, (a subject for a future post.) But for now I am reading a book about finding my true passion and place in life.  The Element by Sir Ken Robinson tells me much of what I already know and much of what I didn't dare to know. Halfway through the book, I've bent the corners of eight pages.

Somewhere on page 86 or so is a comment about growth. We move towards a dynamic life and away from living a static life when we allow our minds to consider how contrasting things in life share common features, rather than when we consider the differences between these same things.

Such things, for example could be . . . oh, I dunno . . farmland and water, straight lines and curves, shadows and fence rails, daughter, daughter, granddaughter.

click

Very Like A Whale is asking questions. What do we think about Web-Active Poets? What do I think? Nic Sebastain posted her interview with me regarding these very question on her poetry blog.

As much as I do not want the stacks of books in my house to go away (and as much as I know they will never go away), I love-love-heart-love accessing poetry on the web. If you've not yet clicked over to Whale Sound to listen to Nic read, I hope you give it a click. And while you are clicking, this is where you click to hear my poem, At Ruby's Diner.

I'll be back in a few clicks of time to post a post sans clicks.