“Hepatica,” said Beth: “probably my favorite flower of all.” I’m beginning to see what she means.
I don’t have time to write today, so these pictures will have to suffice.
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Three short poems to inaugurate a new pocket notebook
ravens
climbing into
each other’s sky
circling crying
out
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above the road bank where
the hepatica has just come into bloom,
the corpse of a porcupine
carrion beetles clamber
through the quills
butterflies cluster on what’s left of its mouth
a hole spanned by the long, curved
railings of its teeth
& down below, the pale blue blossoms
swaying on their stems
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On Easter morning, I took a plastic
envelope of ale yeast from the refrigerator,
placed it on the floor, & brought all
my weight down on it
to break open the enclosed packet of nutrients.
Within hours, the envelope had swollen up
like a sheep’s stomach
with afflatus from the resurrected yeast.
Now I will feed it malt & honey
& bitter herbs. It will pass
this brew through its multitudinous body
& turn it into beer.
The empty tombs of its spent cells
will drift to the bottom of the bottle’s
brown sea.
A short course in Pennsylvanian
In Pennsylvania, all the railroad tracks are named Beth. Sure, there’s a prosaic reason for that, but why dwell on it? No one wants to hear the real story behind such notorious Pennsylvania toponyms as Intercourse, Jersey Shore, or Hairy John Picnic Area, either. One writer I know got an entire chapter of his memoir out of a visit to Panic and Desire – neighboring hamlets in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania.
We have our own way of doing things. Up through the first few decades of the 20th century, until the state began to enforce an English-only campaign in the public schools, a significant proportion of the rural population spoke a dialect of German – so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Amish still do. Some of those old German dairy farmers were so obsessed with cleanliness, they made their barns round so there wouldn’t be any corners to sweep out.
Whether you need your horse shod or your teeth floated, we can redd it up.
We take hunting camps pretty seriously, too. The hunting camp tradition dates back to the Indians – hence, I suppose, the fake-Indian names given to many modern camps. The difference is that the Indians took their entire families out into the woods for a couple months each fall; white hunters have always preferred to do the male bonding thing, playing the Indian as imagined by Daniel Boone.
The capitol building in Harrisburg has a striking green roof – just about the only thing green about the current legislature. These days, politicians pay lip-service to conservation while turning their backs on a rich environmentalist tradition that includes such visionaries as William Bartram, John James Audubon, Rachel Carson, Howard Zahniser, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard.
The capitol reminds me of those domes of moss you can find out in the woods. Which is appropriate, really, considering what “Pennsylvania” means in Latin. The region was famous for its forests long before William Penn came on the scene, in fact. As early as 1632, an Englishman named David DeVries, sailing north on the Delaware, claimed that the ground fires set each fall in the forests to the west gave off a distinct, medicinal odor:
The 2d, threw the lead in fourteen fathoms, sandy bottom, and smelt the land, which gave off a sweet perfume, as the wind comes from the northwest, which blew off the land, and caused these sweet odors. This comes from the Indians setting fire, at this time of year, to the woods and thickets, in order to hunt; and the land is full of sweet-smelling herbs, as sassafras, which has a sweet smell. When the wind blows out of the northwest, and the smoke is driven to the sea, it happens that the land is smelled before it is seen.
(A.C. Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 1630-1707, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912)
These arborglyphs were made by insects, but up through the early 19th century, arborglyphs made by Native Americans, as well as by some groups of Europeans, were a common sight. The Pennsylvania German Romany people known as Shekener, though prone to use dead trees as signboards, brought with them the old European reverence for such species as ash, beech and oak. According to the folklorist Henry Shoemaker,
They venerated, if not worshipped, trees and resented their being cut down and mutilated. They only burned dead wood, or the wood from fallen trees. They would not cut a green tree except a pine under any circumstances.
Of course, even fallen trees can sometimes seem to possess an active intelligence. I took these shots yesterday on my way back from Harrisburg, in the state forest named for the founding father of Pennsylvania’s 2.1 million-acre state forest system, Joseph Trimble Rothrock.
Central Pennsylvania is world-famous for its brook trout. Two U.S. presidents – Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter – were in the habit of helicoptering in for a weekend of trout fishing. Personally, I don’t understand the catch-and-release concept, but fly fishermen seem mostly harmless, and they tend to be staunch conservationists. If you want to tie flies that really speak to the fish, you have to learn what they like. And what they like is wilderness. The brook trout is a fish with extremely limited tolerance for roads, construction or clearcutting in the watershed – anything that might raise the water temperature a couple of degrees, or contribute more than a smidgen of silt. Jimmy Carter learned the lesson well: he signed laws setting aside more land as wilderness than any other president, and has continued his activism to the present, advocating the creation of an Arctic National Monument in place of the beleaguered wildlife refuge.
Trout streams tend to have names like Standing Stone Creek, and if you stand still as a stone and listen, pretty soon you’ll swear they’re trying to talk to you: a strange mix of whispers, maybe something in Romany, or Shawnee. What would it take to become fluent, I wonder? Given a course of total immersion, might I learn at least some form of glossalalia?
Bizzy
Pointer
What’s out there, boy? What’s out there?
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That’s just a garter snake, boy, don’t worry ’bout him. See that tongue of his? That’s like your tongue and sniffer rolled up in one.
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‘Course, he don’t slobber much.
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You sniff everything, dontcha, boy? Bet I know what that reminds you of.
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Good boy! That there’s a mourning cloak butterfly. If she looks a little beat-up, that’s ’cause she spent all winter like that – same cloak. Now hold real still while I get a shot off…
Byzantine
Meet Stachys byzantina, popularly known as lamb’s ears, lamb’s tails, lamb’s tongue, woolly betony or woolly hedgenettle. It’s a native of Iran, Turkey and the Caucasus, though long naturalized in Western Europe and North America, like other Caucasians – apples, for example. It belongs to the mint family, but makes an indifferent tea. Even so, the leaves are the attraction; the blossoms are small, nondescript, pink or purple things, nearly lost among the flower stalk’s silver fur. It needs full sun, and likes a dry, light soil, but will grow nearly as well in damp clay. It attracts hummingbirds, and at dusk in midsummer, the hummingbird sphynx.
Stachys byzantina is a hardy perennial, grown as a ground cover. This time of year it forms one of the few patches of green on the bare ground of my garden. “The leaves are often retained quite late into autumn or winter in mild areas but the plant is not properly evergreen, and the foliage falls eventually to be replaced by a fresh crop in spring,” says the BBC, but many other gardening guides do call it an evergreen. Cultivars have names like Big Ears, Helen Von Stein, Primrose Heron, Silver Carpet. The last-named cultivar has been bred not to flower at all.
Surrounded by champions of scent and color, S. byzantina appeals to an earthier sense: few garden visitors can resist bending down to stroke its ears, or tails, or tongues – whatever they are. Rain beads on them like pills on a wool sweater. In early spring, when new growth crowds upon the old, silent tongues wagging in all directions, the colony seems Byzantine indeed. Let it get out of hand, and you’ll never see the ground again, though occasionally a blade of grass may intrude upon its woolgathering. It shares a genus with Chinese artichoke, wood betony, and woundwort.
Onion snow
UPDATE: Apparently, the term “onion snow” isn’t as widely known as I’d thought. Here in Central Pennsylvania, it’s a common expression for an early spring snow that comes right when the onions are sprouting in the garden. The dark green tops of wild onions are also highly visible around field edges at this time (and in centuries past, were mixed with other early greens for a welcome antidote against scurvy).
We also have a term for the occasional, heavy, wet snowfall of mid-April: that’s a sapling-bender.
An onion snow goes well with tea, I’m told.
But I had it with my coffee; it was all gone by 3:00.
It melted in the mouths of daffodils, & didn’t even turn their lips blue.
Snow & a cold wind bring out the blush on the ridgeside.
Pussy willow & red maple blossoms wear wool caps for a reason, it seems.
“Abstract expressionism” is such a stupid expression, isn’t it? I mean, if you can picture it, it obviously isn’t abstract.
I suppose it might be possible to see the world without imposing representations on it. But why would you want to?
Phoebe! says the phoebe. It’s hard to argue with that.
In praise of gray
When Natalie d’Arbeloff changed the design of Blaugustine this past October, I left the following comment in praise of her new backdrop color:
Gray – oops, I mean grey – is always my favorite sartorial choice, though of course it doesn’t look good on everyone. Here, it definitely works for me – or maybe I’m just happy to see such a color-drenched blog vindicate my belief that grey need not be synonymous with drab. One can choose greyness as a worthy destination in its own right, not simply as some compromise between the extremes of black and white – which are in reality never “pure,” but must always contain some slight admixture of grey if we are to perceive them as other than blinding light and blind absence of light. In a certain sense, we might even be justified in saying that it is grey that approaches “purity”: pure pigment, cosmic dust, the gray matter/mater from which all else emerges.
Natalie replied,
I wholly agree. It is a beautiful colour in its own right and sets off the primaries wondrously. A grey sky, for instance, makes other colours luminous. And there is an infinite variety of greys.
“I don’t know about wearing it, though,” she added. “You’ve got to be tall.” Like a beech tree?
Black and white are always relative; it’s contrast that delights the eye. Or so my experiments with photography have led me to suppose. The following picture of an old, weathered stump of a black locust tree is the only one here actually taken under a gray sky. I think it has a little of that luminosity Natalie mentions – though again, the contrast with the yellow and brown of the background seems to play some role in bringing that out.
As Pennsylvania’s numerous fieldstone barns and houses serve to remind us, gray works well in architecture. Paper wasps (as in the first photo above) might agree. I see more and more wooden houses painted various shades of gray, too, and have flirted seriously with the idea of painting my own house that color (it’s currently white, matching the other buildings on the farm).
One reason I chose my current blog template was the presence of this very light gray behind the main text column.* In books, too, bleached white rarely looks as elegant as a page with some color in it. To be gray, it seems, is to be sturdy and full of years. I think there might be something to that metaphysics of gray that I cooked up on the spot back in October, when gray November still loomed ahead, and white snows made luminous by gray skies.
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*Refers to my old site.
News briefs
On Monday afternoon, the first coltsfoot opened in the middle of the driveway – the earliest wildflower in Plummer’s Hollow.
Spring comes to Blogistan. Leslee returns from Mexico, Karrie digs out from under a mountain of work, and Jarrett emerges from hibernation:
The rainforest winter is always claustrophobic — grey skies so low they seem to press us into the little grooves of our scurrying. At other times (and a bit further south) I’ve thrived in its indoor pleasures, but here it overwhelmed. If I’m fated to have another winter here, it will have to be under a skylight, I think, where I can hear the rain in its gentleness and capture any hint of actual light.
Paula visits with springtime ghosts.
“Tell me about camera, Uncle. Camera obscura, camera lucida.” The ghostly face wrinkled. A smile, perhaps.”Camera,” he explained, “is from the Latin for vault. As in I am lying in camera. There are light rooms and dark rooms. Rooms with and without doors. Do you understand?”
My uncle handed the camera back and wafted off toward the river.
Meanwhile, in her temple in South Korea, Soen Joon ponders more earthy spirits:
I’m quite fond of the kitchen god, despite having grown up in a godless kitchen. We had a little God (“Come Lord Jesus, be our guest…”) right before we ate, but compared to this kitchen god, offered rice each day, greeted respectfully in the morning by us all, flowers arranged for him by the kitchen bosalnim and even money from time to time, it looks to me like Jesus got the short end of the kitchen-god stick.
I guess we are what we worship. In northern Alabama, spring fever is taking a most peculiar form:
Everywhere we went, my husband ogled piles of dirt. “Look at that dirt! That’s good dirt. Where do you think they got that dirt?”I feared he’d have a wreck and I’d be left tearfully explaining to police officers that dirt envy did him in.
Down in the boggy corner of the field, Indian hemp is still working on scattering its seeds.
513 years of mellow flavor
Christopher Columbus, log entry for November 3, 1493 (translated by Samuel Eliot Morison):
These islands are inhabited by Canabilli, a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call them anthropophagi [man-eaters]. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians to supply flesh; this is their booty and is what they hunt. They ravage, despoil, and terrorize the Indians ruthlessly.
Excuse me while I spit.