Fancy Script

long, hand-written letter arrived this week from my Aunt Betty who lives in Amherst, New York.  First, she apologized for being such a “dinosaur” as to write a letter and mail it – for, she explained, her granddaughter told her that no one, absolutely no one, did that anymore. She went on to tell me all the newsy stuff, in storyteller’s prose, about the extended family – stories she would have given my mother if my mother had been alive to receive them. That is what they did, these sisters – ever since our family moved from the homestead in Upstate New York to the mountains of North Carolina in 1965 – they wrote letters, stuffing as many weighty words into one envelope as a single postage stamp would allow.

Aunt Betty’s familiar handwrit- ten envelopes would arrive at our house weekly, usually around Thursday. This was an event; my mother would save the letter for a special half-hour when she could sit on the porch or at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. The long letter would be written on pastel stationery, front and back, pages numbered. I loved Aunt Betty’s letters – then, as now – for they contained news of my many cousins, curious gripes about my Uncle Don, stories of Uncle Harold’s new tractor or Aunt Mary Jane’s new imagined illness, this and that, always a word or two that summed up the well-known eccentricities of one family member or another. I especially enjoyed reading about their cousin the priest, “Father Don Hebeler,” and his annual trips to Germany where he had been assiduously researching and compiling the Hebeler family tree from its origins in the “dorf” called Heubuhl in Bavaria. His work dated to the year 1600, stopping then only because of a church fire which destroyed all family records prior to that year – a church that had been built in 1280, he wrote.  Father Don would handwrite or type his annual findings and impressions to Aunt Betty . . . who in turn sent them to my mother . . . who in turn crammed them into boxes and sewing baskets along with other letters . . . which in turn came to my possession when she died 18 months ago.

The only time I am likely to shed tears for my mother is when I see her handwrit- ing – as in, when a recipe that she wrote falls out of a cookbook, or when an old letter or card swirls from a novel which I read long ago -- having been used as a handy bookmark at the time.  Last year, while sorting through old books, I found a postcard from my mother, dated 1981, from the Peace Bridge leading to Niagara Falls, in which she thought to pass on her procedure for making sauerkraut – Kraut - wash, core, shred 40 lbs. sound cabbage – that’s how the postcard begins. I remembered . . . after my father retired, they would visit relatives in Upstate New York every fall, driving home by way of Canada to fill the trunk with “sound” cabbage.

That’s how I come upon her handwriting these days – or, it comes upon me, as I like to think – for I’ve noticed several times that the message on the card seems oddly apropos to a thing I’ve been thinking of – as in, making sauerkraut – and both the timeliness of the message and the familiarity of the handwriting, not to mention the way it falls to my lap, will trigger a few unannounced tears. Handwriting seems to carry the essence of a person, just as a worn shoe, or a familiar voice or gesture. My mother’s handwriting never changed in all the years I knew her, and so I thank my lucky stars that I had the subconscious foresight to plant those handwritten items into books and drawers so I could find them hence – 10, 20, 5 or 3 years later – now, when I’m paying more attention to what she said than I did at the time.

And isn’t it that way with most letters – how we value them more when the author is gone? My Aunt Betty, newsy as she is, told me in her recent letter about her volunteer work at the Amherst Museum where she has spent months deciphering and typing the “fancy script,” as she calls it, of a man who lived in Amherst from 1813 to 1821. She writes: “He speaks of Buffalo as a place unsafe because of the Canadians who were unhappy because of the War of 1812 . . . of how the building of the Erie Canal should help the economy . . . poor man, a carpenter, had to sell his horse and buggy to get money to build himself a shop to work from. He reminded me of some young people today because he was always writing home because he always needed money.” He married and they had a healthy baby, Aunt Betty said, but then his wife died of typhoid fever and he begged his parents in Connecticut to raise the baby. “It took him several years before he could find someone going to Connecticut to take the baby to his parents. In the meantime he had to find care for her and sell his shop and unfinished house to finance it. In the end, he moved west and died. His lawyer wrote the last few letters.”

Nothing seemed to turn out right for the man, Aunt Betty said.  I felt so sad hearing about his death; I might have half way believed he was one of our relatives whom Father Don Hebeler had unearthed in Bavaria – the way she wrote about him. At least he left letters -- and at least Aunt Betty is taking the time to decipher his fancy script and to understand his lifelong struggles.

I replied to my aunt today, in letter format, and told her I think the man’s letters are fascinating – and that I didn’t think she was a dinosaur at all. I wanted to tell her what I read in the newspaper – that cursive writing is no longer taught in elementary schools; that they teach "keyboarding" instead;  that in less than 100 years, it’s believed, no one alive (save for scholarly types) will know how to write in cursive. I wanted to comment about the post office considering a five-day mail delivery . . . and so we should write more letters, Aunt Betty!  But then I changed my mind, for – I’m learning this now – that is not the stuff of the proper newsy letter.

In the Making

I’ve added a tall lavender candle to the ritual of writing in the early morning – for isn’t writing a ritual just as morning prayers, or the bath, or the cup of tea for some? Ritual makes something more than what it is, assigns meaning to even the simplest of tasks such as washing clothes, or mopping a floor, or baking bread – otherwise it’s just rote work that has to be done – the tending of belly and beast.  A human might go crazy with the tedium of rote work all their lives – and that’s what housework or factory work or office work can be.  But to create a ritual is to make the ordinary more than what it is, to elevate it to the spiritual – the creative.  Because my life has been ordinary beyond choice or reason, I understand that the most commonplace, tedious work can be made into something more than itself, more than the physical scrawl.

For years I had to make games out of folding clean clothes – creating category, assigning priority, making order out of chaos, placing color next to shade – a neatly turned pile might inspire the will to bake a new bread, which might in turn create a poem – and, odd to say, but . . . folding clothes, like baking bread, is a very creative warm-up time for me now, a time when thoughts turn from chaos to order, words stack one atop another.  Something reorders and aligns itself in the brain when the body creates physical order in its environment.  I’ve never bought the idea of a messy desk as the sign of a creative person.

Three years ago, I attended a lecture and demonstration on the art of the tea ceremony. This was at the University of Richmond where I was working to attain a teacher's license so I could have meaningful and real employment as a high school English teacher. The Asian woman, a professor and guest lecturer from another university, had written a book on Asian craftsmanship and ceremony – though I can’t recall the title, or her name, just now.  It took me three years to learn to make a decent bowl of tea, she said, while the audience laughed and began to love her.  I know she said this because I took notes that evening, and wrote a long poem about her in the wee hours of the night when I couldn’t sleep . . . The tea ceremony for three or five friends might take six months for which to prepare, she told us.  The bowl of tea is not the subject of quenching thirst or of warming bellies and hands – it’s a method of transformation for the preparer as well as the partaker.

I’ve always been what people call a tea drinker – for it seems people and nations are categorized that way, as tea drinkers or coffee drinkers – and so the next morning, having not slept well as I’ve already said, I opened the kitchen tea cabinet to find my life in disarray.  For thought is influenced by vision, she said.  I emptied out the cabinet and threw away the old stale teas and organized the worthy teas; wiped out the stray leaves and crumbs that had somehow invaded or migrated there – stray thoughts, interruptions, she might have said.  And then I found the small green canister of matcha tea, bought long ago to make green tea ice cream for my family – but had never gotten around to it – and that spoke volumes to me – and so I opened the vacuum sealed tea packet and began to breathe in the verdant ground tea leaves – each smell and sound has significance, she said – and began to make the tea according to how she showed us at the university classroom – a bowl hand turned beyond the house is best, she said, and rocks polished by rainwater to cleanse the mind, and the wearing of a summer robe . . . but I did my best, taking the water’s temperature, using a rounded bowl, swirling counter-clockwise . . . and clearing extraneous thoughts from the mind – perhaps a lifetime to make a proper bowl of tea – and, as I sipped my bowl of tea – and I’m not inventing this: I suddenly really saw the smudgy kitchen window and the streaked kitchen cabinets and the cupboard doors that hadn’t closed properly in years because of warped thoughts or intentions – I mean, because of humidity or something – and the drawer of mismatched spoons that ground sawdust onto the contents of the bottom cabinet each time I opened or closed the drawer – wearing me down – I mean, the drawer, being worn down – invasions of privacy . . . crumbs . . . the disorder of mind, the straying of purpose . . . I might never have a friend over for tea, I thought.

Since that cup of matcha tea three years ago, I’ve bagged the idea of teaching high school English (although I did get the license and taught one semester),  have claimed an alignment with the thing I’ve always wanted to do – although I can’t prove it's a “marketable” choice – and it suddenly becomes clear today as I sit here with a cup of tea and the new candle flickering sprightly:  isn’t it odd that the kitchen was renovated since that epiphianic day?  The new cabinets are made of lyptus wood, one of the hardest woods on the planet – because I  will not be worn down again – and the cabinets and drawers have a kind of device that makes them close silently – for sound and smell are significant.

I began to write this morning about the lavender candle as an added ritual to the physical act of writing . . . but somehow that small thing turned into more . . . perhaps a lifetime, her voice still echoes, for the making of a bowl of tea.

Distressed Jeans

I needed some comfortable, familiar jeans for writing, and so yesterday I bought some good old-fashioned Levi’s 501 jeans – “original style,” as the young man with heavily tattooed forearms thought to inform me, without looking up, as he ran the credit card through . . .

I had to bite my tongue, tell myself it’s not the sort of thing he’d be interested in hearing any more than my own children would – about how my first “original style” jeans lain at the bottom of my father's swimming pool one summer back in 1974, looking eerily like the bottom half of a dead body – and of how my father would swim obliviously above them twice a day, early morning and again at dusk.  I was waiting for the chlorine to fade and soften them – and I’d jump in the pool weekly, take them out to inspect, wash, dry, and see if time had done the job of speeding up time. If they still had that cardboard feel, could still stand up like a paper doll, then back into the pool they’d go.  By August, they had the "right" kind of look to them, and I was ready for my first year of college.  I wanted to tell this young man that my mother was in dismay as to why anyone would do that to new jeans, she having been raised on a farm, etc. etc.  But -- I had no interest in her stories at the time, so why would this young man want to hear my story as he ran my credit card through without even looking at me?

But then I came home with my new jeans and went straight up to the attic to haul out one box of saved, sentimental clothing where that first pair of 501s still stayed – only a remnant of what they’d once been, having been hacked off to make short-shorts sometime after college – and isn’t it funny, I thought, that here is my second pair of 501’s – the pair that took me 10 busy years to soften up and fade the way I like them – the pair that went through the births and nurturance of three babies – always this pair of familiar jeans I’d put my feet into before stepping onto the wooden floor for a full day and evening of child caring and house caring – that denim, so faded and soft now, like a swatch of baby blanket worn through to its very threads.  I saw two clearly worn spots on the backside, thin as fine linen, just where the sit bones would have hit when that odd moment came to sit down – goodness knows, I didn’t sit much in those jeans except to nurse babies, I thought – maybe it was the deep knee bends that somehow strained the bottomside too, the stooping down and bending over to pick up toys or towels or crying babies . . . maybe games were played while sitting on the floor or scuttling across a rug.  And the color, I thought – I’m sure they were a dark hue when I bought them, just like the first pair I bought before college – because I don’t think "pre-washed" or worn-in jeans existed before my children were born.

So goes the attic reverie . . . of how indigo blue can be scraped away to reveal pale-eyed blue – and of milky white threads that bare themselves on cloth just like thinning grey hairs on a head or as weakened blood vessels show through a woman’s skin after all the family is raised and all the work is done and there’s finally time to sit down for a reason other than to nurse babies or read the children their books . . .

I show up for writing today, wearing a new pair of Levi’s 501 jeans – my third – and for once they are pre-washed and pre-softened (what is now proudly labeled, "distressed") because who has 10 years to soften up a pair of jeans anymore? . . . And so I'll sit at this kitchen table with notebook and pencil to do the job of writing today about a young man with swirling tattoos of deep indigo pierced upon fair young forearms that  never lifted a baby much less a lifeless body from the bottom of a turquoise pool – such distress, she writes . . . that can’t even look up as it hands over the bag of jeans . . . .

Harbingers

As I reluctantly sat down to write this morning, I glanced out the kitchen window and noticed an ice sculpture rising from a frozen pond of water in the bird bath. Though open to interpretation, I proclaim it to look like a glass bird, its wings folded meekly behind, perched on the bath water – its delicately shaped head, dovelike, looking away from me and toward the bush nearby.  Only after taking the picture did I notice the real-life yellow rumped warbler on a branch to the left, posing either in the same befuddlement as I, or in pride and presentation of his secret artistry -- which one?  I traipsed outside in the 20-degree temperatures, camera in hand, to investigate the apparition . . .

Some mystery of science was at play during the night or early morning hours, in which a bit of water rose up from the birdbath and began to freeze, and then another drop or two followed (pushing upward?), and that began to freeze – I suppose that’s the way it happened. I don’t see any reasonable source from above that might have dropped water down on the frozen surface in order to create this ice sculpture.  

The science of it eludes me; I can’t begin to comprehend, much less explain how such things happen. I secretly resort to a mystic explanation – though I think mysticism can have reasonable, scientific explanations without being minimized or disqualified in its significance to the individual.  Am I the only person who “sees” the shape of a perched bird rising from the birdbath?

I like to think that science and living nature and mysticism and everything understood and not understood have come together today to provide this odd little shape of a perched glass bird in my birdbath. And – call me crazy if you will – but I like to think that the shape is there as a gift from the birds, their way of saying thank you for feeding us through all these frozen, snowy weeks so that we could survive to be here at our traditional mating time in the middle of February.  The temperature will rise to nearly 50 degrees today, and so this bird shaped ice sculpture will be gone by the time I finish my daily writing. Already, I look out the window (a few hours later) and notice that the disc of water in the birdbath has begun to melt and float within itself -- causing the glass bird to rotate leftward, rightward, leftward -- like a watchtower guard . . . 

I also like to think that this “apparition” is a harbinger of writing ideas to come -- maybe a herald to corroborate the message in my daily horoscope which I read in the newspaper today:
“A creative idea you put to rest should be reinstated. If your intentions are honorable, you can start anew.”

Seeing Pasternak in February

February.  Take ink and weep,
write February as you're sobbing . . .

. . . while black Spring burns deep
through the slush and throbbing. ("February. Take Ink and Weep")

Rouse your soul!  Make the day, foaming.
It's noon in the world.  Where are your eyes?
See there, thoughts in the whiteness seething,
fir cones, woodpeckers, cloud, heat, pines.  ("Sparrow Hills")

And it's suddenly written again
here in first snow is the spider's
cursive script, runners of sleighs,
where ice on the page embroiders. ("Winter Nears")

Snow all through February,
and time again
the candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.  ("Winter Night")

Snow is falling: snow is falling,
not snowflakes stealing down,
Sky parachutes to earth instead,
in his worn dressing gown.  ("Snow is Falling")

How many sticky buds, candle ends
sprout from the branches! Steaming . . . ("Spring")

That's why in early spring
we meet, my friends and I,
and our evenings are -- farewell documents,
our gatherings are -- testaments,
so the secret stream of suffering
may warm the cold of life.  ("The Earth")

Thank you, Boris Pasternak, for the beautiful poetry that lets me see . . . before writing.

That One Wing, A Tribute

Yes, birds were in a flurry last week before Virginia’s second snowstorm of the season – and yet they maintained admirable cooperation and a systematic seed-and-nut gathering routine. This week – impending bad weather once again – there’s something different about the flurry, and I’m not sure how to read the signs. They’ve lost their peace; they are frantic.  Heads are turning abruptly, hops are stiff and tense, flight is recklessly rapid – there’s aggression in the air. The smaller birds are just as mean as the larger birds – pecking at each other, even at their own kind, possibly their own mates, in the acquisition of one seed or nut. Hurr-ee! Hurr-ee!

For months I’ve observed this one large, peaceful, and solitary yellow bellied sapsucker perching himself against the bark of a tree closest to the window near my writing spot – not to mention closest to the suet feeder which he savors at the rate of one cake every two or three days. I'd begun to call him my mascot.  Last weekend during the snowfall, and as I was writing, he found his usual spot not far from the suet, fluffed up his feathers, and hunkered down – unruffled by snow as by the flash of my camera. He has been the most trusting and unhurried of all birds at the feeders. This is the bird who knows – when I rap on the window in my own fit of aggression to scare away hordes of starlings who rob the feeders in planned descent – he’s the bird who knows that I don’t mean him: “Not you, Mr. Sapsucker,” I sometimes say once the starlings have lifted and gone elsewhere. Though he is closest to the window, and in direct line of my rapping, he never flinches one wing at me but rather lifts his red-capped head to pause patiently beside the suet cake – “I can’t eat while you’re rapping,” he might be saying. Then I apologize to the sapsucker – “Not you” – and he slowly resumes the nibbling of his tasty, nutritious treat – and I go about my writing. That’s our routine.

What will I do now? – my mascot gone.  Unbelievably – this trusting, plodding character – downed and eaten alive by a red shouldered hawk.  I had looked out the window just as a hawk was plucking feathers from a large bird -- like what I imagine an old woman would have done to a rooster meant for an angry soup in times gone by.  I suspected . . .
. . . meanwhile, the hawk’s mate sat perched in high branches, shrieking the only two syllables he (or she) knows, kee-yer! kee-yer! – which sounded more like a warning to all would-be do-gooders like myself – Keep 'way! Keep 'way!

Variegated feathers and a stain of pink sullied the white snow – grey downy feathers, meant to keep in warmth and kindness, were suspended briefly in the thick winter air. I made an obvious presence at the window -- but knew it was best to let the job be done completely rather than half-way.  I saw the hawk, at times, looking straight at me between shreds – his mate’s cry beginning to sound more like a challenge and a threat, Come 'ere! Come 'ere! – and I remembered a few years ago when a workman told me about a hawk that had tried to snag a Chihuahua from his parents’ back yard.

Five minutes later, neither bone nor beak remaining, the aggressor’s mate swooped down gleefully from his perch and gently nudged his mate, this time mumbling something that looked like, Enuf, enuf a'ready, let’s get outa here . . . and they flew in tandem to some unknown place.

Writing stopped for what has turned out to be three days -- though I can't entirely blame the loss of my mascot.  I went outside with trepidation and a shovel, all the while noting feathers that were perhaps “too grey,” “too dark,” “too small” – any reason to hope the victim had been anything but my friendly sapsucker – but that one intact wing could not be denied – that one wing that never flinched – and now this:  though it be three days – the uneaten suet cake at my writer’s window.

All That Commotion

I could have predicted Virginia’s second big snowstorm of the season – let’s pretend we’re not inundated by 24-hour weather forecasts – I still could have predicted it yesterday from my kitchen table as I looked outside and saw how eagerly my birds had emptied the feeders for the second time in one day. I usually fill the feeders once a week in winter time, which keeps at least two dozen varieties healthy and convivial. They moved so quickly, so bravely – the smaller birds alongside the larger ones – and made so much commotion in the task of shoring up their little bellies for – something! – They seemed to scream this word all day long.  Something!

I sat on my own warm perch in this kitchen, sorting through piles of clutter – my effort to sort out the old and make space for the new. I flushed out 15 years of writing “ideas” stored away in drawers, cabinets, and boxes – scraps of paper, half-filled notebooks – all those many things I didn’t have time to write but wanted to save for another day. Clearing clutter can never be done by plan – the spirit must arrive and move one to the task – and the spirit never announces itself, can’t be predicted, unless in the voice of dull uneasiness, muffled commotion from within, or restlessness from beneath the rubble of – something!

Many of these ideas have passed their prime; much of it is not really “writing,” just anger scratching away, pen against paper – and that is the stuff to get rid of in order to make way for the new – and then there were those few good seeds. I’ve taken those seeds out of hiding, replanted them on new piles, and put them in new drawers . . . for another day . . . and then I noticed the empty feeders . . .

I read many years ago that one feeder will host about 200 birds, some of which will not fly south for the winter, having been convinced of yearlong staples right here at the summer home. Such a person who disregards her winter feeders for even a short while may inadvertently cause the death of hundreds of birds – more so if she is prone to host, and neglect, many feeders at her home.

I enjoy filling the feeders, usually in the quiet of early morning, noting birds’ seasonal preferences and what they often leave behind – someone doesn’t like raisins, I might think aloud – or, someone was inconsiderate right here at the feeding station, probably a starling . . . only Dixie, the neighbor’s dog, can hear me. Yesterday afternoon, however, I am sure the birds heard me too – for no sooner did I return to the house, attend to the window – but to witness a descent of bluebird, finch, wren, tufted titmouse, cardinal, nuthatch and more – as though they’d been waiting for me – watching me as I trudged and filled and cleaned for them. From that perch in the sky, someone watches me!

The last time it snowed, I saw one odd goldfinch, probably a youngster or old man, who had puffed up his feathers and tucked in his head so as to look like an old tennis ball – olive green with streaks of dirty yellow – and he had nestled himself on a bed of sunflower kernels at the kitchen window feeder. I gently tapped on the window, fearing the worst – no response – after an hour-long nap, this trusting bird poked his head out, nibbled a bit of warm seed from beneath him, and lazily left me to wonder at the habits of birds.

Madame Bluebird is the one I most admire – and I hope she admires me – for she has the face of a very intelligent dolphin. She will direct her face at me in wonderment and gratitude from her spot on the window feeder where she’ll delicately swipe one seed at a time. She’s very careful and a bit skeptical too – I’ve seen her cock her intelligent head to the side as though to say, But why do you do this? In the springtime, she’ll repeat this routine dozens of times – and I know that every morsel she gathers goes straight to her nest of babies. I want to tell her that by autumn her babies will fly away and she’ll have time to write that book of hers! Sometimes, from that look on her face, I think she has plenty to tell me too . . .

These are the days which greatly advantage earthly people.
The others are full of vain noise, ineffective, and produce nothing.
Every man will have his favorite day, but few know about them.
A certain day is sometimes a stepmother, sometimes a mother.
But that man is fortunate and blessed who, knowing all these
Matters, goes on with his work, innocent toward the immortals,
Watching all the bird signs, and keeping clear of transgression.

(Hesiod, “The Works and Days,” lines 822-828)