february at fernwood

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February 8, 2018

I’ve come to think of February as a trickster.  Nearly every year since we’ve lived at Fernwood, February has presented us with a false spring.  The weather warms, the trees bud out, our hopes rise with the green leaves of my daffodil bulbs.  I have to keep reminding myself it’s all a farce, that the cold is returning, the rains are coming back, we still have all of dreary March and then April before we can plant and grow and be sure the sun is returning.   Hard to do when even the trees and plants are fooled.  It seems everything is eager to push towards the light.

In our woods, the miniature world rules.  Mosses are greening up, tiny mushrooms emerge from under decades of pine needles, the wild ginger rolls out a carpet of hearts, the first of the flowering currants are suspending their small bouquets from thin branches.  I spend most of my time in the woods kneeling over one tiny miracle after another.

The ground is very soft still in February and yesterday I followed a set of clearly marked deer tracks for awhile.  They follow the same path we do, it seems, along the road that someone used once to haul away the old growth trees, then up along a ridge and into the bracken below the younger forest.  When the kids were little the trail there was worn smooth by constant travel.  Now it’s grown over again,  cluttered with wind-fall branches and the new plants sprung up since our neighbor logged the woods behind us and let more sunshine in.  A blessing, and a curse, for now we have the tiny wild roses and false solomon’s seal as a carpet, but we also have to watch for poison oak, which slips in fast and persistent.  Every year I tell myself I will walk these woods every single day and clear this trail again, but I never have yet.  Even now as I write this I am making the vow again.

*

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Today we are waiting for the birth of our third grandchild.  He was expected already, but he is taking his time arriving, so we have shifted our plans, canceled our Air B&B reservation for this weekend and made another for later in the month.  Now we have an unplanned weekend ahead and I’m already filling it up with work – namely fencing in the rogue geese who have taken to standing at the back door and honking into the kitchen while I cook as if *I* were the one who was trespassing.  Unlike the silly, happy ducks who are happiest when left alone with their plastic wading pool and a few slugs, the geese need a firm hand and some clear boundaries.   Fencing it is, then.  When we first started having this issue with the geese I felt frustrated with myself and a little helpless, as if I was going to have to spend the next twenty years shooing them away from doors and cleaning up their messes and despairing that I’d brought them home in the first place.  Then I realized I am the boss here and I can solve this problem and when I stopped feeling overwhelmed, the solution made itself obvious.  It surprises me how often I have to remind myself that I have agency in my own life.  Many women were raised not to change things, but to endure them - and taught that this was our spiritual work - and we have to constantly remind ourselves that we do have choice and power, even in such small things.

*

I am in the mood to conquer my demons this year.  I decided to give running a try again after many, many failures and this time, it’s working.  Running in February means cold mornings and often, rain, but it’s wonderful when your body begins to warm itself and you come home feeling strong and alive and proud of yourself for pushing beyond what you thought you could do.   My children, who are both runners, taught me to go just beyond the point where I want to quit and do a little more.  “The mind wants to quit before the body does,” and, “Meet your edge,” says Adriene Mischler, who also teaches me yoga every morning.   I am beginning to understand a kind of body language I didn’t understand before.  When the body learns a truth, the mind and spirit can learn it too.

I’m writing pretty regularly now as well.  One of the keys to this, I find, is holding everything loosely.  I don’t know what to tell people who ask where the writing is going to go and what I’m going to do with it.   For now it’s about showing up and working and sharing bits of it as I go.  I’m working on bigger projects as well and I am hoping the path for those projects reveals itself eventually because I’d love to share them too.  But for now I hope you enjoy the short stories as much as I enjoy writing them for you.

I remember hearing years ago that we should live with an open hand, and I like this image for orienting a life.  There is room for reception and room for releasing and there is the possibility of emptiness as well.  Last week in my journal I wrote, “cultivate empty space within,” and “you don’t need to always be full.”  I was writing about food - *sheepish grin* - but it struck me as I wrote it how it applies to so many other things.  For instance, it’s okay not to have some grand life plan that you are pushing toward.  We needn’t be always stuffed to the limit with knowing and trying and working ever harder.  Chances are I’ll get to the end of my life and never have accomplished anything worth marking down.  I’ll just be a nice old lady with an armful of grandkids, some stories in the attic, a pair of bossy geese, and a library of well-loved books.  And what a privileged life that would be.  We get so muddled up with ambition we forget what real success is.

The demon of having to prove your worth – that’s one I’d like to crush for good.

*

Well, the morning has gone and soon Jacob will be here for the rest of the afternoon.  We’ll take advantage of our false spring and walk down by the river.  The Canada geese are there in flocks now.  I never know if they are coming or going or if they even leave for the winter at all.  They are forever flying one direction and then another and hunkering down in farmer’s fields.  I know when I see them flying over in great, long V’s I feel happy and glad to live in a world populated by creatures above and below and all around.   When they pass over I think of the great flocks of birds that Lewis and Clark saw on their journey and think of a world of such abundance the pioneers thought they would never come to the end of it.  They did of course, and those birds and beavers and other creatures are long gone now,  but I hope that one day we all might come to our senses and live less like occupiers and more like fellow neighbors, each working for the other’s welfare as nature designs her ecosystems to do.  I’m an optimist like that, and besides, nothing bad ever came by hoping.

Take care of yourselves, friends.

Love your people.

Peace keep you,

tonia

“We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places in the world of Nature. We seem to have no idea that the absence of such relationships, almost everywhere in our country and the world, might be the cause of our trouble…”~ Wendell Berry, The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

neighbor

The neighbor had his gun.  Alice watched him put it into the glove compartment of his minivan while his wife was helping the children into their seats.  He carried it with them whenever they left the city – for protection, he’d said one afternoon last summer when she’d been walking past and he’d come out of the house carrying it.

“Protection from what?” she asked, a little stunned to see it in his hand like that.

“Don’t you watch the news?” he said and turned his back on her.

Ever since, she’d kept her eyes on them.   They were a strange couple, private, reclusive.  The children were a little strange too, pale, dark-haired creatures that barely ever saw the light of day.  If they did come out into the yard, the mother came too, sitting on the porch with a book in her hand, talking to them in her soft voice while they organized piles of trading cards or picked dandelions apart with their fingers.  The oldest one, a boy, had received a bike for Christmas and sometimes he rode it in a wobbly circle around the perimeter of the yard.  Alice watched from her living room as he learned to ride it, assuming he’d take off down the block when he had it mastered, but he never did.  He just came out occasionally and made the circuit of the yard, unable to get enough momentum going for a smooth ride, walking the bike back to the garage after a few minutes effort.

Today the children were waiting in the van while their parents traveled back and forth from the house to the car with blankets, a cooler, the badminton set.  Alice put a leash on Daisy and went out for a walk.   When she got to the street, her neighbor was putting plastic bags of food into the back of the van.

“Nice day for a picnic,” she said loudly.  He turned and gave her a nod.  She let Daisy wander into their yard, so she could have an excuse to talk to him.

“Going somewhere fun?” she asked.

“Just out to Hopper,” he said, slamming the back hatch. “My brother’s kid is having a birthday party at the park out there.”  He was a big man, with a full beard and thick arms.  He crossed them over his chest while they stood together which made him appear even bigger.  The bulk of him was intimidating and she couldn’t help thinking he liked to make people aware of it.

“Hopper’s a nice little town,” she said, pushing the button to reel Daisy’s leash back in.   “It’s good to get out of the city sometimes.”

He scowled.  “Bunch of idiots out there.  Place is getting taken over.”

She’d heard this from him before.  His work at the water plant was being taken over by females.  The school his kids attended was being taken over by illegals.   She didn’t know what was going on in Hopper, but she understood the idea.

“Well, the park should be fun anyway,” she said, waving to his wife as she came and stood beside them and scratched Daisy’s head. Natalie was pretty, long-haired and delicate with grey-green eyes.  She looked like she could be in a Waterhouse painting, crimson-robed, draping her long, smooth arm into a lilypad pool.  Alice smiled at her.  

“It will be nice for the kids to be able to have space to run and play.”

Natalie nodded and smiled politely and Alice took that as her cue to say goodbye.  She‘d walk down to the park, let Daisy chase squirrels for a few minutes.  She’d almost reached it when she saw the minivan go by.  What was it like for those children with parents who were so defensive about the rest of the world?  Her own kids had grown up in the neighborhood and had the run of it, riding their bikes up and down the streets until the sun set, playing ball in this very park.  She thought of the boy on his wobbling bike and felt a wave of compassion for him

.Later that week, when the neighbor was gone to work, she went across and asked Natalie if the children could come over and help pick her grapes.

  “I’ll be with them,” she said, when Natalie stood up to come along.  “You could get a little alone time.”  Natalie hesitated, but after giving the children some low-voiced instructions, she agreed.

Annake and Beth, the younger girls, and the boy, Aiden, followed her across the street and into the house, hesitating inside to look at her things with solemn eyes, taking in the art work, the baskets of yarn, the drawing table.   She offered them cookies and cups of milk to help them relax and then showed them the backyard garden and the grape arbor she’d had built.  She told them to go ahead and go under the canopy, which they did hesitantly, the girls clinging to each other’s hands.  She stood outside and listened as their whispers turned to happy chatter.  It was cool and dark in there, a space that longed for children.  When they had come back out again, grape leaves clinging to their clothes and hair, fingers sticky with the grapes they’d eaten, she showed them how to choose the ripest bunches and cut through the stems, lay them neatly in the basket she’d brought from the house.

After they finished picking enough grapes, she brought them back inside and they made juice, pulling the fat grapes off their stems and cooking them down in a big pot.  Annake poured in the sugar and Aiden stirred it with a wooden spoon while she and Beth wiped the counters clean.  They were eager learners, quiet and attentive, willing to work.  After a couple of hours, Natalie came to check on them.  Alice gave her a bowl of grapes and poured some of the hot juice into a bottle for her to take home, told her that the children had been a great help and she meant it.  Standing side by side, she saw how Aiden and Natalie had the same frail air, the long limbs, the unusual beauty.

“There will be more grapes in a few days,” she said, surprising herself.  “Would you all like to come back?” And they did, picking the grapes until they were gone, then the figs, then helping her tidy up the garden, harvest what was left of the late summer produce.  Natalie often came with them, sitting on the back steps with her book in hand while the children talked and worked with Alice.

The children were back in school by this time and they chatted to Alice about what they were studying, their classmates, the elaborate rules of the playground.  Aiden was lonely, she could tell, but Beth and Annake seemed to fit in fine.  Only once did they complain about a teacher – that was Beth, who had begun second grade and was dismayed at the amount of writing the teacher, Mr. Lasko, expected from her.  Annake, who was in the fourth grade, and the most outspoken of the three, said matter of factly,

“It’s because he’s a Jew.”

Alice was so taken back she nearly dropped the bowl of beans they’d been picking.

“What does that have to do with it?” she asked, a little sharply.  Annake’s face took on a sullen look.  She was most like her father, Alice realized, intelligent, but quick to blame, quick to be defensive.  She was about to say something more when Natalie left the porch and joined them.

“Beth,” she said gently, “tell me something about Mr. Lasko that you do like.”  She began to help Annake with the beans.

“He doesn’t yell,” said Beth after a while.  “And he doesn’t let Nathan Banner take cuts in the lunch line like Mrs. Perry did.”

“Does he still have the prize jar if you finish your homework during the week?” asked Aiden.  He was deadheading the flower border and there was the peppery smell of marigolds in the air.

Beth nodded.  “It’s mostly just stickers and candy though.”  She twined a bean tendril around her finger and pulled it out to examine the spiral she’d made.

“I like Mr. Lasko,” said Natalie, and she smiled at Annake before looking at Alice.  Not frail, Alice realized, there was strength there.

After that, she began to notice all the ways Natalie worked with the children, redirecting their conversations, listening to what lie behind the words, bringing them to the conclusions she wanted them to have.  It was done so neatly that the children barely realized they were being guided.  For the first time she considered what Natalie was up against every day, and how she resisted it.  The children were remarkable, really, when she came to think of it.  She thought of Aiden and his bike. He was carrying the bowl of beans into the house and she watched him with a surge of affection.  There was persistence in them, a kind of defiance she hadn’t known to look for.

She stood and wiped her hands on her jeans, said, “This looks good.  Shall we be done for the afternoon?” They gathered up the tools and put them away, coiled up the hose, locked the garden gate.  About this time of day their father came home, and the children were always anxious to greet him.  He was not unkind to them, she’d learned that much at least through their conversations.  They washed their hands at the spigot, trailed out through the backyard gate and across to their own house.   Natalie followed behind, turning at the edge of the yard to say “thank you” as she did every time she came.    Did she realize what Alice had thought of her and the children all this time? Probably, she decided with some dread.  She thought of the first afternoon she’d invited the children over and imagined what Natalie had said in that low-voiced conversation:  

“Mrs. Inman is very kind.  What a nice neighbor to invite you all over.”   Alice’s cheeks grew hot.

“Thank you,” she said quickly, pushing the gate closed.  “It’s been so nice.  Really.”

Natalie stopped and asked, “Would you like to come to dinner sometime?”

Alice hesitated, imagining eating dinner in their house, her neighbor’s heavy presence across the table, the inevitable discussions that would make her burn and have to bite her tongue, and she began to make an excuse, find some way of permanently delaying it, but then she caught Natalie’s gaze and she understood what was being offered, what was being asked.

“Yes,” she said, gladly. And she meant it.