In a February Mood

There comes a point, after weeks of ungodly dark and dreary days, unbroken by any hint of sun or warmth, when one's own company wears thin.

It takes a lot to break me down, probably because I now have something concrete against which to measure any sadness, especially the slight, niggling sadness brought by dismal weather. So what. It's gray for months on end. My friend Hank said that bad weather looks worse when you're looking out the window. Get out in it. It takes a surprising amount of fortitude to go out, looking for adventure, when the light is as flat and dull as a mall parking lot.

But we do go out. We have to put some miles on the dog, and on me. I decided to follow my nose and pick a road I'd never been down (or, in this case, up). 

It's not hard to find those around here. 

To get there, we walked past this old jewel, moldering in an overgrown field. I've paid several visits to this house, but they've been in summer. I like to poke around abandoned places to see what denizens of their gardens have survived the neglect.

You can't kill a ditch lily, even if you try. Ah, this was a beautiful day at the old place, a not-February day. I had fun snooping around the foundation and outbuildings. Just the reflection of a blue sky in the window cheers me.

But now we are here in February, in the weeks before the woodcocks get back, and this is what we get: gray and brown and wet and not much else. Living here, I realized as I gazed at it this evening, would have been problematic even when the place was tended. Whipple Run lies between the house and the road, so you have to ford it to get out, and ford it again to get home. Not a big deal now, but let it rain torrents for a few days, and you've got a situation on your hands. 

Water will do what it will. It seeks the lowest point. Thus, what was once a driveway is now a streambed. We have a way of inviting water down our paths. We grade them until they're lower than the surrounding land, and water will always oblige us,  running in to take the low road. 

My boots were not up to the fording, so we walked on. 

Mood:

Ah, February, you old, cold, wet blanket. Are you trying to outdo your nasty sister January? 

I wonder what's up this road? 

First there was a pool with a nice sandbar, a little oxbow backwater. I scanned the muddy trunk of the drowning tree and found what I was looking for: mustelid tracks.

Hoping for otter, I settled for mink. Mink will do.

A light rain pattered on the surface of the water. We pressed on anyway.

Turns out there wasn't much up this road but woods, which was fine with us.

When I got to the top of the hill some messages came in on my phone. 

 Phoebe had rented a little smart car on La Gomera for the weekend and done some exploring. While I trudged down a muddy road in Appalachia, gazing at a house bound only for rot and ruin, she had made a pilgrimage to find a wee chapel she'd once spotted from far below. 

She was not disappointed. There it stood, sharp as an amethyst in the clear Atlantic sunshine.

And the climb up there had looked like this. Oh, what I'd have given to take that hike with her!

And she and Oscar had ended the day like this:

Oh, to be young and in love. 

I'll take middle-aged and still alive, with everything more or less still functional, because it's what I've got.

What is it that keeps us in place? Why do I choose to live in a place that weeps all winter long? Why does my daughter choose to live in the sunstruck glow of a rocky island, the sea all around her? That second question needs no answer.

Why does it not occur to me to leave, to strike out for someplace new?

I search for answers, and find I don't want to leave here. I'm scratching and clawing away at my house, throwing out what I don't need (nearly everything); trying to get it back in repair, so I can stop worrying about the rot and malfunction of it all, and enjoy it instead. It's a goal. The old furnace seems to need about a grand a year just to keep running; I've replaced everything you could replace on that damn thing.  I'm having new siding put on the tower, rooting out the wall rot on the north side (and wherever else it comes up.) Braced for the worst.

 I love working in my studio, starting new projects, watching for my old jay friends, and dreaming of seedlings coming up in only a couple more months. And then it will be garden time, and there's no place I'd rather be in garden time. And just as it's garden time, I'll take off on a book tour (see left sidebar of this blog). So there are things to look forward to, and boy do I look forward to them.

I'm choosing to vary my life with travel, to give myself enough outings to counter the sameness of remaining in place. I feel the press of time, the impermanence of my stay on this earth.  I have become one of those women who travel more, because they suddenly can. But I also travel more because I need to. I get so much more out of it than ever before. 

I'm trying to be kinder to myself, knowing that I'm still grieving. Something like this doesn't go away in a year. It becomes part of you, and it colors your outlook, not necessarily in a bad way all the time. It makes you grateful to be here. It makes you so happy to feel joy again, when it happens. It makes you expect less of life, having seen how easily it can be grabbed away. So when something good happens, you're just bowled over that it was so good. And when bad things happen, you measure them against the mother of all bad things, and they don't look that bad to you. Still, you're always looking over your shoulder, and I don't expect that to change. You have to keep an eye on something that big.

As the anniversaries, big and small, portentious and life-changing and merely depressing, parade by in my psyche, I find myself walking over to gaze at the house where Bill lived for a short time, where he grilled and laughed and played music, then suffered and died, finally leaving the suffering, and us, behind.

 I don't know what I expect to find by going over there. There's nothing I'll get from it but little  shards of memories, the sharp ones that dig in. There's no one to tell me I should stay away, so when I'm drawn there, I go. The place seems so much smaller, so diminished, without him in it. And he's not there. I sense nothing of him there. 

But I keep going. I guess I'm looking for a connection, the same one I'm looking for when I walk to his grave each morning. What doesn't seem right to me is that there should be nothing of him left here. The kids struggle with that, too, that feeling of being left alone. He had such a big soul, such a huge appetite for life, that it seems there should be a trace of that still around. Seems like he should be tossing the treetops on a still, wet day.

 Nothing moves, and not a bird sings. 

Marietta, Ohio-My Beautiful Town

Sometimes it feels to me that my life is nothing more than an unending search for beauty. I don't know anyone else who spends more time at it. It's really too bad my aesthetic quest doesn't pay, because I could be a billionaire. But then I probably wouldn't keep roaming around, searching for beauty. 

A semi-pro aesthetician like me does very well living near Marietta, Ohio. This little-sung brick-streeted town has a lot going for it. More and more I hear people literally go into raptures about Marietta. That didn't used to happen, but a lot of good things have taken place here since I came here in 1992.

I spent a gorgeous golden November afternoon gabbing with friends at the Local Artists' Show and Sale at the Lafayette Hotel. Then I walked down the levee to visit Mr. Lonely. After that, I crossed the Harmar railroad bridge. 

The new railing smelled sweetly of pine, shone in the late low sun, and lured me onward.

I always stop to consider this amazing sycamore limb. It just goes on and on. I take its picture, and always fail to capture its beauty.

I stood, dumbstruck. 

The river was like glass. Our beautiful "new" Putnam Street bridge sent a graceful reflection across the Muskingum.

Looking downriver, the Williamstown bridge crossed into West Virginia, across the mighty

 O-hi-o-se-pe. 

I crossed into Harmar Village and looked back toward town. Man. Beauty everywhere.

There was an InstaMeet last Friday, a tour of historic Marietta for people who like to post photos of Marietta on Instagram. I should have gone. I need to meet some more people in the area. Most of my friends live in my laptop, and I'm alone too much, I know that.

It would be nice to share this magnificent specimen of Magnolia grandiflora, for instance.

 

How it's survived our northern winters, how it throws dapples on that white house with its huge hard evergreen leaves. All those things. A miracle. It's so old its bark is shaggy and strippy, like a hickory's. And I love the homeowners for putting up with its terrible clattery drifts of fallen leaves, year round, for it has a tropical tree's habit of shedding leaves pretty much all the time. Clack, clack, clack. And they don't rot. I know, because I lived with a southern magnolia as a kid in Richmond, Virginia, and I hated raking those leaves. So much. But far more than that, I adored its huge white blossoms, the soft-winged orange soldier beetles that clambered around and coupled inside them, and I can still reconstruct every molecule of magnolia perfume in the back of memory's throat. Aesthetician from an early age. 

All these things came back to me as I gazed at the magnolia, rara avis among trees.

I walked a bit and came to Found Antiques, now home of Passiflora Studios. Quiet now, because wedding days are past. But soon enough they will start again. Phoebe worked here from time to time, and I loved to visit her. My, that's a nice blue farm table. But I don't need a table.

As I drove slowly home, I stopped at some favorite trees.

A gingko, throwing off her dress, setting the place on fire.

Throwing perfect little fans like gold coins to the ground below. How soon they lose their lustre!

The mighty twin sycamores of Second Street never fail to stop me in my tracks.

I get out to worship and record them here, most every time I pass. 

I wish there weren't a car in this shot, but it does give you some sense of scale. They are mighty, mighty trees. And people drive by them all the time. See, I can't. Stopped by the aesthetics of it all, footloose and frozen, too. Must say it's good of that sugar maple to kick in with the flamethrower, a meet backdrop for such a titanic tree. 

I headed home on the backest back road I could find, a new one for me, but already beloved for its cattle, its colors, its farmsteads.

The initial rollout, so tantalizing. Come along. I have something to show you...

Cattle set afire by the low sun.

The way that cherry-red pickup sits like a ruby in all the weathered wood; the maple dumping its color everywhere; the last sun stroking the gravel ridges.

A silo, such a rare thing anymore. Who has livestock, who needs to store feed? They are all dying out, the small farmers. You have to hit the dirt roads to find them.

Foxtail grass and a landscape straight from Grant Wood, gumdrop trees and perfect valleys.

My father would have slowed down to eye this tractor, that Chevy pickup, that barn. I, his daughter and made more of him than anyone, do it for him. 

A redtail crosses, of course. 

And the Graces stand naked in a row.

Ferberizing the Heart

I have to drive by two clearcuts now, to get to most of the places I want to go.  "I have to drive by two clearcuts." I realize that this is a first world problem. The Internet world being what it is, I'm glad that I get to be the one who's calling myself out on that faintly ridiculous statement, which, when taken in perspective with what my DOD called "real problems," sounds suspiciously like whining.

But as my personal shaman Shila says when I apologize for the occasional prolonged wail of despair directed her way, "Your problems are yours, and they're big and very real to you, and you get to voice them." That's called true friendship. I feel emotionally safe with Shila, and she with me, so when we share our worries and woes, we know the other isn't going to pooh-pooh it all or sweep it away as if it never mattered.

I've figured out by being a parent, and having had to Ferberize my babies to go to sleep by themselves**, that we all teach ourselves self-comforting behaviors. Some of us do this differently than others. Some cling to other people, try to find someone who can make them feel safe when the monsters come around. Some drink or eat more. I figured out years ago that pouring a depressant over one's sadness just makes it worse. Eating, well, yeah. That one is harder to quit doing. Some of us keep an actual written list of places and hikes that fix us, and refer to it frequently when feeling lost, at sea, beset or lonely. Some of us keep a stable of trees that we visit, like some kings once kept horses, which work on this or that emotional knot, and soothe us just by existing.

** The Ferber method, or Ferberization, is a technique invented by Dr. Richard Ferber to solve infant sleep problems. It involves "baby-training" children to self-soothe by allowing the child to cry for a predetermined amount of time before receiving external comfort. (Wikipedia)

Just as I must drive by the two clearcuts to get anywhere, I remind myself that I also must drive by the Three Graces. There is a little gravel lane, ironically enough what we call an "oil road," that leads right up to them, so I can swing the car in and document their beauty in every light and atmospheric condition. Since those change by the minute, not to mention by the hour and day and week and month, I will never be finished documenting their singular beauty. 

The oil road leading to the Graces terminates at a derrick, that pumps a shallow well, and this reminds me that the current occupation by oil and gas men is not the first for my oil-rich area. I'm told it is the eighth, the last one being in the mid 1970's. And each time, there were people, doubtless, who felt as we do about being overrun with people from points unknown, who don't know or apparently care about what was here before they got paid a lot of money to obliterate it. Who gather at long tables in every restaurant and haw-haw louder and drink harder than we locals can afford to. Most drive pickups, the supervisors' trucks being white; the workers' being some other color, and some have stickers that say, 

"Oil Field Trash--And Proud of It!" or "Wife of Oil Field Trash--And Proud of It!" 

It's a thing, and we notice it. Bit of a red flag, at least for me, when people go around referring

 to themselves as "trash." 

 They'll come in, make their money, cut a bunch of forest, drill a mile or more down, then leave, in what will perhaps be an eight-year term of residency, if that. They'll stay until the currently available technology for drilling past a mile into the shale takes all the oil it can, which is more than the prior technology could eke out. This little gravel lane to the Graces is a remnant of the 1970's occupation, the one that built our modest ranch house in a housing boom, and put three shallow wells on what is now our 80-acre property. And amazingly, it survived all that. 

So in some sense, I am here in this house, on these two 40-acre parcels, because of an oil boom. I gaze at the Graces and think these thoughts.

And then I drive on, to the bridge over PawPaw Creek, the place where Liam's fossil was found. 

When I get to Germantown Road, I always forget that I need to go right, not left, to get to one of my big medicine healing spots. 

So I take the wrong turn to the left, and I haven't gone 100 yards before a beautiful redtail stalls in flight and tumbles down like a huge buff and cinnabar leaf to land in the lane right in front of me. Objects look much farther away than they are with phone cameras.

 He stands his ground as I roll slowly forward, looking for any small creature, any reason he might have landed on the pavement. There's nothing. He's just standing there like Horus, at attention.

This is not the way to your healing road, he seems to say. You need to turn around.

I'm right on top of him, and still he stands, gazing at me. I'm smiling hard at this point, as I realize that I'm going the wrong way again, and this hawk, well, he's just staring me down.

A pickup truck approaches, and the driver slows to a crawl as he takes in the tableau of me, grinning like a fool, looking at a hawk who's looking at me. 

He pulls up right alongside the bird before it leaps into the air, clears his roof, and flaps off. "What was that?" he asks, and I suppress my first response: "You're at least as old as me and you don't know a red-tailed hawk when it flies up in your face?"

Instead I say, "Red-tailed hawk. Adult. I stopped because I didn't want him to get hit, and I wanted to see what he was doing."

He smiles at me and I feel compelled to say, "My father sends them to me." 

He looks puzzled, so I hurry on, telling him that my dad died in 1994, but he sends me hawks, routine hawks, or hawks in strange and sometimes outlandish situations like this one, to let me know I'm accompanied. That he's watching, and protecting me as best he can. Maybe even guiding me. Telling me I've made the wrong turn again! Or just saying howdy. Whatever he's doing, I'm down with it. I'm comforted by it. Hawkspotting is another of my adult Ferberization techniques. I don't say all of that, of course, but I almost do. I kind of condense it down, but he gets the gist. And doesn't roll up his window and take off.

Yep, I'm pretty much a raw nerve ending lately, telling little bits of my life story to complete strangers who I swiftly appraise by such traits as "Sensitive enough to slow down for a grounded hawk" and then deem worthy of confiding in. 

What have I got to lose? I've made friends that way. Good friends. If I've learned anything about myself, it's that I am not a fearful person. I am trusting. I start off relationships by trusting people, and they pretty much have to beat that trust out of me before I'll believe anything but good of them. 

We bade each other goodbye and I turned around to go the way I was supposed to in the first place, before the hawk tumbled down.

Soon we were there.

It is no accident that the clouds were just superb. I go to this road when the clouds are just superb, because I have a panoramic view from the ridge. There are other places I go when the clouds are not superb. Chet Baker is looking and sniffing and thinking how nice it will be to get into that habitat. I'm feeling thankful to have him along for the adventure, and thankful that I can choose such places for solace, and take this good friend along every time.  Don't miss his reflection in the mirror while you're ogling those mare's tails.

A faithful reader messaged me after my last, admittedly disconsolate post to ask if Chet was still with us. Oh my goodness yes. And good for a 5 mile trot any time I suggest it.

We got out of the car, and I squinted over to the next ridge. Right where the trees get thin, that's where we were going to go. Thin trees mean a great view. But we wouldn't go straight across the valley. We'd take the long way around.

Through the richly colored hallways of autumn

and its softly glowing rooms

we would descend into the beech-laced hollow

which a shaft of sun would light, and my heart would lift, because it had to. I have to keep walking. My dang heels hurt too much to run lately, but walking works, too.

All is not lost, the trees would tell me. You have this day, this road, these trees, your legs and your aching heels, and this little black dog to lead the way. Use them.

As I'm writing, it's another day, just such a perfect day, and I will have to go back out again for some more leaves and sky and miles. First I must do some work, work other than this kind of writing, which isn't so much work as it is Ferberizing, working on the hard, scarry knots in my heart.

We climbed the road toward Buddy's house, beautiful relic that it is, monument and museum to all that once was.

Thank God for these dirt roads, and shameless antic shagbarks that throw off their yellowing clothes at the first hint of chill. Some like it cold! The great oak looks on and chuckles. She's keeping her coat on until at least January.

All is not lost. So much beauty remains. It's up to me to seek it out, do my tiny part to appreciate and protect it and drive by the clearcuts as fast and straight as I can, keeping my wits about me enough to watch for the messengers along the way.