Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area, 2012: life after death

hemlock skeletons

The last time I visited the old-growth stand of eastern hemlocks at Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area, in central Pennsylvania’s Bald Eagle State Forest, the hemlocks were succumbing to a wooly adelgid infestation, and I figured they’d all be dead in a few years. That was early June 2007. My hiking buddy Lucy and I felt we should go back five years later and see what was taking the hemlocks’ place.

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Protest and survive

the cassandra pages:

Marching with the students last Saturday was a high point in my life of protest: it was absolutely astounding, at 11:00 pm, to see not only this great throng of demonstrators, but the people in their homes, in their cars, spilling out of restaurants, bars and cafes, all cheering, making noise, smiling, waving their arms, encouraging their children to join in. It was more like a parade than a protest march.

Untweeted

A lot has been going on here lately. Had I not been feeling so reticent, I might’ve posted the following updates to Twitter or Facebook.

A dry high: the best weather for brewing.

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The face of an intruder caught in my flashlight’s beam in the tall weeds, pale and out-of-place as a late-season snow.

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The night after the burglary, I sit outside for hours watching fireflies in the moonlight, listening to the deer grazing: slow footfalls, loud chewing.

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A patch of dead grass where the police car had parked with its engine running, leaking coolant in the noonday heat.

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I’ve been actively flirting with disaster. Which is to say, for the first time in years I’ve been driving a car.

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The sky before a violent storm turns green just like the face of someone about to vomit.

Provisions

I wanted so much to be the girl in a red dress bending to pick a blossom in the middle of a field of poppies; or the woman in a blue dress carrying a parasol through it, with a little girl at her side. Any one of them, actually: girl, woman, child. Each one vivid with color, flushed from the noonday heat, coming or going in the benign countryside. I wanted to be the chipping sparrow emerging from the lilac, wings brushed just faintly with scent. But I confess sometimes I do not want the bird to answer the high-pitched cries of nestlings. Not immediately, at least. You think that’s a terrible thing to say? Well, I feel it sometimes. Their cries pursue her asleep, awake. Each tufted button’s a homing device; rows of them, like lights lining the field in an airstrip. I wanted a house of my own leaning against a hillside. I wanted simple wood floors, wide ledges for sills. I wanted air, a light more generous than milk, spilling through every window. Even wild things know about caution. Even wild creatures need to preserve what’s left of the husks they have, for the coming months lean with cold, lined with the twigs of their brittle age.

 

In response to Morning Porch and Morning Porch.

Ouido

From the drainboard, I collect discarded husks for the goddess of garlic peelings.

The saint of innumerable road construction obstacles is my patron for the day.

I do not think the child wished to be destined for sainthood. She walked days and miles with her sister on her back, despite the pebble in her shoe and the crick in her neck. They just wanted to go home.

So who is the saint of frustration, who adorns my heart with scabs peeled open again and again?

Under their rough bark, I see they have grown fruitful, almost competing with the stars. I can only do so much, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t care.

My neighbor offers me the saints of antidepressants and tranquilizers. They have names filled with Ls and Os. They drop into amber-colored vials like tiny porcelain buttons.

The interior votive light of the open-all-night shrine clicks and hums. It dispenses cold water and crushed or cubed ice.

I line up linoleum-cut rubber stamps on the windowsill: nautilus, sundial, chameleon. Reliquaries of my lost selves.

The saints of living by learning as you go would tell you there is no way to teach any of what you want to learn. They carry little musical instruments. They have always played by ear.

 

In response to failure, falling down, & the living hagiography.

Spread Mind

NYRblog:

Manzotti is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting, and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have separated out and stabilized in the words subject and object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.

Lavender

Some days, you do not want
to wrestle with; you do not
want to try too hard—

you know that even an only
steady rain can beat back
the just-purpled heads of

lavandula: and so you set
the pot to shelter under the deck
awning until the mist has risen

from the trees. You wait until
the air has rinsed to clear,
remembering the Old French

lavandre, to wash, the Latin
lavare, also to wash, as you go in
to close your eyes in the bath.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.