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July 27, 2005
Peace
Posted by pavel at 4:27 PM | Comments (2)
July 19, 2005
Answer July
On occasion in the heat of mid-summer, the whole of my childhood can be brought abruptly into the present by the smallest details of memory: a momentary glimpse, a touch, the heady smell of summer evenings, the buzz of cicadas in a forest of newly sprung goldenrod. Among these many intimate signposts are the tiny pale yellow crowns of the diminutive chamomile, pineapple weed (Chamomilla suaveolens) bursting from the gravel in front of my family's mountainside condo. While I played endless games of fetch and chase with our family's old dog, the distinctive aroma of these dense flowers permeated from underfoot and became for me the smell of summer. As they poke their pale heads through the gravel around our driveway these July days, I can't resist plucking a head and crushing it between finger and thumb to release the memories contained within.
...in vacant mood, one sultry hour,
Resting my eye upon a drooping plant,
With brow low-bent, within my garden-bower,
I sate upon the couch of camomile.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As we pass the midsummer mark of Bastille Day, I have found that taking Orion with me has become a similar way to revisit places from earlier years with a new guide. It seems we have spent more time out of doors than in, hiking, climbing, swimming, or just exploring the yard and garden.
On a recent hike with Orion, his first visit to the schist-strewn alpine tundra above treeline, he mostly stared wide-eyed at Pika and Pemi as they explored the dwarf spruce (above which he towered!) and the many cascades of the Ammonoosuc River we crossed. At the top of our tramp, the wind picked up, and though not yet familiar with mountain winds, Orion would face into the wind and smile broadly.
On our way down, after many hours on the trail, we stopped to rest at Gem Pool. Jen and Orion sat on a flat rock surrounded by water, warm in the magic of a summer evening. "Do you want to take a picture?" Jen asked.
Not this time. I was more than content to watch Orion sitting in Jen's lap smiling and laughing, water falling languidly into the pool behind them, everything green and gold and light.
I wondered then, and at many moments in the past weeks, as I share some of my favorite places and memories with my son, which ones he will keep close to his heart, which smells or sounds will draw him back from adulthood to an experience from decades earlier. If he has trouble remembering, I hope that I will be able to remind him.
Answer July Emily DickinsonAnswer July --
Where is the Bee --
Where is the Blush --
Where is the Hay?Ah, said July --
Where is the Seed --
Where is the Bud --
Where is the May --
Answer Thee -- Me --Nay -- said the May --
Show me the Snow --
Show me the Bells --
Show me the Jay!Quibbled the Jay --
Where be the Maize --
Where be the Haze --
Where be the Bur?
Here -- said the Year --
Posted by pavel at 11:34 AM | Comments (3)
July 1, 2005
Moments of Glad Grace
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight 's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats
I returned on Monday from several days away (at the biennial ASLE conference) to find that I had been gone much longer than I had thought.
The field across the road had grown into a thicket of flowers -- apparitions of Vetch, Hawk Weed, shoulder-high Meadow Rue and Queen Anne's Lace -- the night air heady with their ghostly fragrance. The sky was clear, and, though my bed was calling me after my long trip, I watched as cascades of lightning bugs tumbled across the meadow seeking one another in the darkness, pooling only briefly in a dance of constellations. Even though Orion's constellation is guiding people elsewhere this season, the memory and strength of his stars surrounds me even here in our overgrown meadow.
Orion, too, has grown more than I could have expected in a week. He is regularly munching on root vegetables and peas, with the aid of two new (sharp!) teeth. In every hour of absence, I cherish the moments of presence all the more. In my free time, learn'd astronomer-inspired wanderings at the conference, I visited the Oregon coast one afternoon. I think I was looking for something there, in the dunes and sand and wind. I sought my goal in a sheltered cove where the Siuslaw River enters the Pacific. There, behind a jetty lined with driftwood, I found graying, wind scoured logs larger in girth than almost any living tree I had seen in the Northeast. The gnarled trunks, some thirty feet long, gray from their years in the sun, were maps of (and to) places I had not been and did not know. I traced the whorls, ridges, and valleys with my palm, trying myself to find a purchase in this place so far from home and family.
One trunk with its base exposed -- apparently submerged in the high tide, but now bare and visible -- revealed within the concentric ridges of its uncountable growth rings the vestigial sapling of the great tree's early years. Solid, spindly branches radiated out from the heartwood, trapped inside, but preserved by the outward growth of decades, perhaps centuries of rings. I think I found what I was seeking in the maps and metaphors limned by these ancient trees -- a guide to the way home to be with my own sapling before he grows up too much more.
Posted by pavel at 11:03 AM | Comments (5)