Rocks

In Memoriam.

“Rocks” is a reference to the Jewish custom of leaving rocks on someone’s grave, in remembrance. “Rocks” is a place to re-member those whom I have loved or admired, or who have done good service in Thee Old Cause. (I am not Jewish, although I feel an affinity with Jews and if I had to choose a religion I would be a Jewish atheist.) I first learned of this custom from the movie, Schindler’s List, in which the survivors and their families lined up to place rocks on Schindler’s grave. It has always stuck with me.

Today, on the hunter’s moon, October 2018, I’d like to remember my professor, Arthur Clements. I took a course with him in fall 1993 that wrapped together Medicine, the New Physics, Mysticism, Poetry, and damn–D.H. Lawrence! I’d never read Lawrence before, and we didn’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover either. We read The Man Who Died. It was a great class. He was both fierce and compassionate–if you didn’t read the material, he might kick you out of class, but if you did he would listen to you, even if you said strange things, and take you seriously. I contacted Art in 2003 because I was writing again, and we talked a few times on the phone. He was dying of cancer then. In the spring of 2004 I got an email from his companion–that is what he called her, which seemed to me both cozy and maybe a little distancing for a lover–asking me if I would be willing to speak at his memorial, that he had wondered if I would in his last days. So I wrote the following piece and drove to Binghamton, where I stood, and shook, and read. One last lesson.

Art and Life

I took one of Arthur Clements’ classes in the fall of 1993, my second semester at Binghamton University. It was not an easy class, and I regard it as formative. I am still learning the lessons he laid out for us then, for, as so often happens with a good teacher, I understood what he was talking about while there, in his class and steeped in the material, but it has taken me years to apply it. I am still weaving it in, and I suppose I always will be—because the subject Art concerned himself with was far more than academic; it was Life.

Allow me to give you an example. Our final paper was to be 16 to 20 pages, discussing the works of Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Galway Kinnell. We were to “find a theme tying them together—what is common, what is distinctive, and how they distinctively express what they have in common.” A difficult task indeed—one which I worked very hard to fulfill. On the last day of class, before we handed our papers in, Art told us we had a choice: we could tell him not to count our paper, in which case he would automatically give it an A, or we could tell him to make it count, in which case we took our chances on the grade it received. I still remember the mingled fear and hope of that moment when I gave up a guaranteed A in favor of an honest appraisal of my work.

This is what I am grateful for—he took pains to elicit the very experience of being awake and alive that we were studying in these authors. He tried to show us that every moment we have a choice to either make ourselves comfortable or take the opportunity to push our boundaries, defy convention, give up the standard measures of success. “The object,” he once told us, “is to live intensely, feel intensely, love intensely—happiness is not a state of constant comfort and ease of soul.”

It is therefore with conviction that I can say to those who are feeling pain in the wake of Art’s passing: he would want you to embrace that pain and see it for the gift it is—another opportunity to experience the fullness of life, here and now.

April 2004

Arthur Clements

“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.” ~Rumi

10yrldl3g$

Let’s pretend we are 9, at most 10,
And we’ve just done
With a game a bit more dangerous than our parents would allow—
Had they been near. 

It’s been frolic and pain, and one close call too many,

So I’ll punch your arm
And you’ll punch mine
And each turn for home
On scratched, mosquito-bitten legs.

Mom and kids around a campfire, with trailer in background.

April Hike

There ain’t no fuckin’ around at Mohonk when the weather gets good. If you are arriving at 10am on a Sunday you may be too late. Lucy and I were too late for Trapps Trailhead, but lucky for us we were heading for Coxing and that was still open.

Today was the kind of day no one can fault. Flawless. Magnificent. 60 degrees and clear sun all around. I got out of the car and took off my jacket, took off my fleece (the layering habit of what seemed an interminable winter), and unbuttoned the flannel shirt I intended to keep. Donned my safari hat to keep the sun out ‘ma eyes, and we headed over to the map, where, I see, there are other dogs freely wandering. This is always problematic because Lucy, my kooky, loving dog, does not get along well with others of the canine persuasion. She loves or is indifferent to humans by turns, but other dogs are near always trouble. When we encounter them she goes on short leash, and if we can avoid the dogs we do, even if it means bushwhacking off trail a bit.

Oncet I had a Golden Retriever–sweet and mellow. I could let her off leash in the woods and she’d never go more than 100 feet or so from me, and although she had been attacked in the woods by a couple of German Shepherds when she was a pup, and sometimes drew a growl from other dogs on trail, we mostly just passed on by other hikers and other dogs without incident. So I understand the attitude of people with mellow, off-leash dogs. “Oh, my dog would never hurt another dog.” “My dog never causes trouble.” Thing is, when we get your dog and another, unknown dog in proximity, there are now two, and that means unpredicability.

Lucy (on short leash) and I get up to the map so I can figure where we are going–never having hiked here before. I’m looking at the map when something makes me turn to the left. One of the loose dogs has come up to Lucy, and Lucy is quietly straining on her leash to smell him while the other dog’s head is cocked to the side and his eyes are rolling, like a horse shying. Then Lucy lunges at him. I have a good grip on her and back slowly and calmly away. The dog immediately follows our retreat, and I say calmly to the general crowd, would you please put your dog on leash? A man steps forward and calls his dog, which turns and goes to him, but he does not put him on leash. I apologize to the man for Lucy (because that’s what you do) and turn back to the map.  A moment later I hear another man say sweetly to the dog, “Were you causing trouble Bentley? That doesn’t sound like you!”

Now, I am surrounded by a bunch of people who appear to be serious hikers with lots of gear, lacing up and shouldering big packs. A bunch of type-A, weekend-warrior hikers (the two men with Bentley are lawyers by the sounds of their conversation) and two loose dogs. I’m just a hippie woman in jeans and flannel looking to get alone in the woods, and am feeling pretty prickly by now. I turn around to look in the direction of the man who spoke to Bentley, but a kind of calm runs over me and I decide not to engage. I turn back to the map and decide to cross the road, in the opposite direction from where all these people are going.

On my way across the parking lot I see the other loose dog following its human toward the bathrooms, right in our path. This man bends down to his dog and tells it to go back over there (pointing away from where Lucy and I are headed), which it obediently does. Then he stands up and looks right at me and gives me a big, beautiful smile. A conspiratory smile that tells me we both get what just happened with Bentley. Then he turns and jogs toward the bathroom, his own flannel shirt flapping behind him. His smile–his beautiful, understanding smile–made me spend the next few minutes blessing this man and his family forever and ever. Thank God for smiles from strangers. Thank God people still see and hear and love and care for strangers.

(The leash rule is there for a reason–and it isn’t because your dog isn’t sweet and mellow. It’s because not all dogs are sweet and mellow in all circumstances. It’s also because dogs can be unpredictable in the woods, and for one to run off here, in the wilderness, is asking for heartache.)

Lucy and I cross the road, and I’m talking to her, saying, “Do the other dogs not like you, Lucy? I’m sorry, baby. I like you. I think you’re the best.” Poor girl. She just doesn’t know how to be with other dogs. For the first two years of her life she was with an elderly man who did not have the strength to take her out. When I first started taking her out, she was attacked by dogs we met on three occasions, and since then she has been on the offense. And always on leash.

A little ways in on the other side of the road, I see a placard on a stand. Here is the stone foundation of the Enderly barn. The placard has an artist’s rendering of how the barn may have looked back in the day, and it reminds me of the Laura Ingalls-Wilder books. It puts me in a mood, standing there, knowing that this place used to be a homestead. We walk further on, another 300 feet or so, and come upon another placard. Here is the foundation of the Enderly house. Another artist’s rendering reminds me again of times gone by, when people were largely self-sufficient. A hard life in many ways, but at its best steady, slow, mostly peaceful, balanced. Before crossing the bridge, we came upon a map of the entire homestead, which included a large garden, a sawmill next to the stream, a root cellar, and a burial ground. The kid in me sings. My imagination is fired up with the notion of living there, in cooperation with and at the mercy of Nature.

The woods are shining with light. We walk along a large stream and cross over into the Minnewaska State Park for a bit, finally coming upon a restored cabin–the Van Leuven Cabin. Panels say that when there was an illness or emergency, the residents would light a lamp and put it in the window to call for help from their distant neighbors. It reminds me of my favorite scene in The Lord of the Rings–the lighting of the beacons to call for Rohan’s help. Such a system depends, overall, on an agreement to come to one another’s aid, and trust that those in the distance are both watching and willing to come to the rescue. A trust that despite their differences and their individual rights, all parties are better off when they work in cooperation, pooling their strengths. A very different world than we live in now, where the seeming norm is to watch out for one’s own and leave the rest to whatever befalls them.

These strong, resilient mountain people lived a hard life and understood that they needed others to help them at times, and others needed them. They understood that sometimes one is up and the other is down, and sometimes one is down while the other is up. This is the essence of community. This is why people agree to give up some of their freedom in order to ensure that they and everyone else has a better chance to do well and live in peace in this world that is full enough of danger without all humans add to it.

∞ ∞ ∞

This way of life is long gone. We have, most of us, lost the knowledge of how to be self-sufficient–let alone the opportunity try it out, because the land and resources have all been taken and sold back to us, rented back to us–and now we must depend upon earning money to buy the things we need. But like the dogs I have written about here, not every person is born and raised in an environment that supports their successful entry into the system. And all of us–I don’t care who you are–all of us are directly affected by the systemic violence that oppresses certain groups and privileges others. Our ancestry, our membership in one (or a few) of these groups makes it much harder to fit in, to convince others to give us the money everyone needs. It becomes a popularity contest. A struggle to fit in rather than a question of the value you can add to the community as an individual.

Right now, in our world community, millions are desperate. Perpetual war, based on greed, decimates families and rich cultural histories. Our relatives, the animals of the sea and air, cry out to us, dying with stomachs full of plastic. Everywhere fires are burning, water is polluted, food is contaminated with poison. Here in the United States we can still turn away, not see, not feel. We can still watch our favorite shows and go out and buy more stuff and follow the next trend, but the future is on our back stoop.

The beacons are lit. Your assistance is requested. Are you watching? Will you accept the call?

I didn’t plan to write for International Women’s Day, but

Today I overheard a group of women discussing their diets, among other things more important, such as menopause and perimenopause. I wasn’t intentionally listening, it was just one of those blank spaces in my own rhythm of eating and browsing on a tablet. These women have bodies like the paleolithic mother goddess, and would have been chosen over their skinny, flat-chested sisters back in the day.

It made me wonder what would happen if they just totally embraced their goddess heritage, honored it, loved it? I mean, take care of their bodies just as they are, eat good food, get enough movement, sleep, water, and not buy in to the image of perfection that is broadcast incessantly at us. I wonder what would happen upon this tremendous freeing-up of psychic and soul energy?

Venus of Willendorf

Venus of Willendorf (Source: Wikipedia. Yes, I have donated, but only once so I’m due again. Thank you Wikipedia.)

Re-entry

I’ve been disconnected from computers and the internet for two weeks, which I spent in the mountains, hiking, worrying about vegan food and then saying fuck it I’ll be mostly vegan and throw in some eggs from pasture-raised chickens and some cheese from pasture-fed cows, sleeping, reading, and consuming a fair amount of wine. I finished two books and started a third (The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Let’s Speak English by Mary Cagle, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, respectively), and found out my favorite time to wake up is actually 9am, not 5:15.

It has been a very wet spring and summer here in New York State, and in the Adirondacks that means mosquitoes. Devout and fanatical and swarming. Any venture out of doors, for even the smallest amount of time, drew an instant posse of bloodsucking vectors, which meant that I had a choice: either become their feast or submit to DEET. I did try the non-DEET, “natural” stuff, which smells almost as bad, but I had to spray it every hour or so, and there was always the feeling of being watched…they fly near enough for you to hear ’em, letting you know it’s only a matter of time before they land again.

So I am out in the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness, hiking miles and miles through mud and over stones and up steep inclines smelling like Deep Woods OFF and sweating through all my clothes and backpack too. More than once it occurred to me that many people would question why I want to do these things. What is the draw? In the midst of these hikes, I dreamed about showering and settling in for wine and a good read. I stumbled on tree roots and worried about getting caught out there, no phone reception and a broken ankle and one ibuprofen and a decent amount of water but not that decent….and I wondered why I do this. Why I keep coming back for more. And other than the beauty, and the peace I feel in the woods–the sense that my little self, with my little story and my little worries are, well, little in the grand scheme of things–I didn’t have an answer.

Then I took a hike–not a very long hike, not even ten miles–and I found out why.

When I opened the register to sign in (it might save your life!), two pictures of timber rattlesnakes greeted me: the yellow phase and the black phase. Timber rattlers are present in these here woods–stay on the trails and be careful when approaching rock ledges where they might be sunning themselves. I’m thinking, This is cool. Second time this summer I’ve been in a place where timber rattlers are supposed to reside. I’m thinking I’d like to see one. I sign in and Lucy, my intrepid Black Labrador, leads the way into the woods.

And we are merrily trotting along in the fullness of our early-hike energy. There is a grass that looks like bamboo, except it’s only a foot high. Curious. A long plank bridge takes us over a marsh, opening up a view of blue sky and massive cumulus clouds. Lucy manages to step through the cracks between the planks only a couple times. We walk alongside a large stand of white pines planted by the CCC back in the 1930s, when the American president gave a shit about the American people. The trail swings to the left and becomes darker, more foresty, and we dig in to our hike in earnest.

I get in a bit of a trance when I hike sometimes–one foot in front of the other, over and over, does that to me. I was falling into this trance as I pushed my legs to carry me up a hill when suddenly I heard, live for the first time, the unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake. It took me a fraction of a second to focus where it was coming from and there is my Lucy, nose to nose with a big, coiled rattler. She had obviously not seen it until that moment, and luckily had no Lucylike ideas about chasing it or barking at it. For once–for, I swear, the only time in our relationship, she let me slowly pull her back, drawing her in like an empty fishing lure on her leash, until she stood next to me. Still clueless. We stood there together for about two minutes looking at it. It was in yellow phase, but dark and very well camouflaged, and it was right on the trail. It was coiled, its triangle head held high, and as big as my forearm in the middle. It never stopped rattling, and this was spooking me, a lot, so I looked around for a way to continue onward. Because yes I thought about turning right around and heading back to the car, but that isn’t why I was here. Why was I here? To go hiking, dammit. So we picked our way carefully through deep leaf litter off trail, looking for more rattlesnakes the whole time, and came back to the trail a safe distance on the other side. I looked back once, still amazed and filled with adrenaline, then we went quickly on our way.

∞ ∞ ∞

This has been a very difficult year. I don’t need to say this, really, because it has been a difficult year for a lot of people. But other than the massive dying off that occurred among the keepers of our culture during 2016, other than the gobsmacking political circus and the hope that flamed bright for Bernie and the defenders of our waters only to be doused by the same old bullshit: business as usual, power and money over life and love and all that really matters. Other than all that, and the ever-increasing evidence that yes, climate change is not only real, it is happening right now–other than these very big things, in my own little life, in my own little story, I have been having a difficult year. In fact, this vacation was deeply needed and looked-forward to for this reason. I needed a complete break from everything.

Hiking does this–it puts you back into your body. And the hiking had been doing its job well. Other than a couple of disturbing dreams, I had let go, for the most part, of everything that had been weighing on me since last October, and immersed myself in physicality, simplicity, and a bit of hedonism. Maybe it was the rattlesnake, or the adrenaline coursing through my body as a result of its appearance, but my mind soon picked up every worry and pain from the past year and worked me up into a full-blown panic attack. I was in the woods, with no possibility of contacting anyone, and I was sure my whole life was imploding at that moment.

To give an idea about how it is possible to believe something like this, even in the face of facts that prove otherwise, a little story. My kitty-corner neighbor at work, Alex, popped his head into my office a couple of weeks ago and asked, first, if I was OK (we’d had some hard news a few days earlier that hit me very hard), and then whether I am afraid of heights. To this I said yes, but I like to push my boundaries. So he excitedly took me into his classroom, where he and a couple of students had taped a wooden plank to the floor. They were there with Aaron, our neighbor across the way.

Alex tells me to stand in front of the plank, and that I am to jump off a building in virtual reality. I put on a headset with goggles, which showed me a city street, with a car stopped at a light–I could see across the street to a tree, maybe a park. It was cartoony, like a video game. Alex gave me earbuds, and handed me two paddles to hold in my hands. I could now hear the sounds of the city, and birds. He told me to look down to the right and push the top button. I did this and doors closed on the city scene. Elevator music was playing as I watched light move in the line between the doors for a long time. A long time. When the doors finally opened again, I was on top of the building. A flock of pigeons flew by, giving me vertigo. Alex told me to step out onto the plank, which I could see in virtual reality, and jump off. Whoa. I knew this wasn’t real–I knew it. But it was all I could do to step out on that plank. When I did, wind started blowing (he had one of his students turn a fan on). So I’m standing there in the wind, looking down maybe 30 stories to the city street below, and all of it looks like a video game, but my senses are completely fooled. I edge my way out to the end of the plank, determined to do this because I know it isn’t real. I ask Alex, “Do you die in real life when you die in a dream?” Ha ha. After a few whiny moments, saying I don’t think I can do this, I stepped–not jumped–off the plank, and almost fell when my knees buckled in surprise, finding the floor just where I knew it would be. The scene around me still said I was falling from a building, but my body knew better–the illusion had popped.

∞ ∞ ∞

On this hike, my mind conjured all the horrible scenarios waiting for me upon my return to normal life, and completely fooled me into believing that they actually were occurring at that moment. And instead of going back to try to fix everything, I was hiking farther and farther out into the woods. I kept on, to finish what I’d started.

We stopped on the shore of Lake George, where the waves from boats and the rising wind drove Lucy crazy. I heard her make sounds I’d never heard her make–at first I thought she was hurt, but then I realized she had never seen waves and she kept trying to bite them and catch them but they eluded her, making her more frantic. The more she tried to get those waves and couldn’t, the harder she tried, and it frightened me. Then, on top of everything–the snake, my mind-illusions, and the dog being freaky, those cumulus clouds had turned dark and threatening. Thunder rumbled close, and I knew we had to run for it but I knew we wouldn’t make it.

Lightning flashed, thunder boomed, and soon the rain came. I donned a poncho that kept the rain off me but made me sweat through everything twice over. I trudged along, watching Lucy ahead of me and knowing that we would eventually make it back to my car if I just kept putting one foot in front of the other. And as I clambered through the pouring rain, scared that a tree would fall on us, I clambered through the nightmare program my mind had cooked up for me, lived through scenarios I thought would kill me–mentally kill me and drive me to escape in some permanent way–and found that I could bear up as long as I kept low to the ground.

We kept going, steady and strong. We marked the place where we’d seen the snake–Lucy stopped and told me the exact spot, and I thanked my good girl. We made it across the plank bridge, where we startled a blue heron from its hiding place, past the white pines, and the bamboo grass, and the sign-in station. We walked out of the woods and onto the road, and to my car, and then, as if it were all a dream, I knew that everything I had been imagining wasn’t real. All was well, but if it wasn’t I knew I could handle it, as I had been handling it all these months, all these years, all my life.

Life is an ordeal. Hiking is an ordeal. They both push you to the limits of mental, emotional, and physical endurance, and through this you build in yourself the knowledge of your own strength. I love the beauty of the woods, I love communing with the trees and the wind and the animals. But I hike because it pushes me to know what I can bear. Going out is often joy and discovery, and sometimes difficult choices about whether to continue on a path, but it is the return that makes you burn, and shows you your true mettle. Even though you have no other choice but to keep on walking.

Lucy tilting at waves

A Taste of Wild Raspberries

August 2010.
For a long time I have largely avoided writing because I had done it so much I began to feel it got between me and experience, the way cameras and video recorders can get between you and watching your child grow up. The recorder, the reporter was always there, translating experience into simile and metaphor before I’d had a chance to taste, let alone digest, what was happening. But writing has been my main mode of digestion for most of my life—to make sense of the exchange between my inner world and the outer world, to extract nourishment from the meanest and the most expansive movements of these worlds.

Today I walked in the fields and woods of Thacher Park, the first time in many weeks because I have been so busy—busy-ness, busy-ness, busy-ness and I no longer have my sweet joyful dog expecting and needing me to take her for her weekend excursions. And myself, though I need these walks as much as she did, myself I can put off and deny in the face of work that must be done during the precious little time I am not at work, at The Job.
Every time I go to Thacher Park now, since Heidi died in May, I weep a little. Sometimes quiet, tears rolling down my face for brief moments before the wind in the trees or birdsong or the peace of the place soothes me and I walk on. Sometimes I stop and gasp with sobs, seeing her smiling face looking up at me with joy and adoration. Never for long, though. I think the disinterested benevolence of those woods has much to do with this, but I also know that it is because I am slowly digesting the enormity of her absence. Like a snake who has swallowed an elephant.

Heidi had been sick for a year and a half at least. She started throwing up after meals months before emergency surgery to remove her spleen and a tumor the size of a navel orange. We didn’t know whether it would be worth putting her through the pain at the time— the vet gave her two months tops post-surgery—but we could not bring ourselves to euthanize her then, when the last time she had seen us was in the examination room and I could not stop crying and holding her. So damn the expense, and the pain of recovery, and the dismal prospects. We gave the go ahead, and brought our doped-up girl home a day later, wincing at her slow movements and the twenty-seven shining staples along her shaved belly.

Two and a half weeks later, on a mild March Saturday morning, I coaxed her into the back of my old Ford Escort wagon and we went to get those staples taken out, picked up my friend Eileen, and went to Thacher Park to walk through sloppy mud and melting snow. It was a bit too much for her, those two miles or so of trails, and she lay down on the drive home instead of holding her pretty head up for me to see in the rearview mirror. Heidi spent the day sleeping and I felt guilty for having pushed her, but Sunday saw us back up there in the woods, for a shorter walk this time, and she was a little better. A little stronger.
Every weekend after that we walked in the woods, as we had been doing since autumn 2002, when I sought solace after an ill-conceived foray into law school. Every weekend I said good-bye, letting Heidi lead me wherever she wanted to go. We walked every trail we had ever walked, and even found new ones. Every step was precious, every time perhaps the last time we would walk this way together.

Spring bloomed, summer ripened, and August offered me wild raspberries for first breakfast three yards from Beaver Dam Road—the small ritual I had observed for years made sweeter now by the question of her presence, the ever-present last-ness of each ramble. But Heidi lasted. Longer than the vet’s prediction, longer than my most hopeful hopes. We walked through autumn, then winter, until I fractured my hip in January and was forced to stop for weeks, each one passing interminably as I let Heidi out to throw up in the backyard after every meal, wondering how much longer she would last, each weekend passing irretrievable.

We walked again, and again, and spring came again, and we passed the anniversary of Heidi’s surgery. She remained joyful and always willing, eager to go on our rambles though slowly starving to death, throwing up more and more often, until one Thursday night in early May she couldn’t stop. Every twenty minutes all night long we ran a slow race to the back door, and by dawn I knew the time had come. Even though I knew she could continue this way for weeks, or maybe months, longer, I didn’t want her final days to be lingering, didn’t want her to die when she could no longer go up to her Place, the woods.

Friday morning I called in sick, then called the vets and made the appointment for Monday evening. Dr. Jarvis would come to our home to spare Heidi from having to spend her last moments in fear. I allowed myself a few tears, a moment of tears, then vowed not to cry, not to mourn—not this weekend, not our last weekend—and then we went to Thacher.
Twice a day that weekend we went to Thacher, except Sunday, when I could not coax Heidi from her spot on our bedroom floor in the morning. I went alone, thinking I must get used to it. I walked fast along the trails, escaping the fact of her absence, which sat inside my heart like a great, heavy stone, and then I saw, sitting on top of a boulder, a large rock. It called to me. I lifted it and felt its weight as I walked back to the car. Heidi’s headstone.
Later that day my younger son accompanied us to Thacher, then Heidi and I went again on our own Monday morning, and Monday afternoon my older son, Heidi, and I climbed the Long Trail up the steep hillside across Beaver Dam Road. We stood and looked down at the valley as the wind gusted around us. And walking slowly down, down to the car it really was the last time.

Heidi died on her soft, red flannel sheet, in the grass under the old cedar tree back of our house, with birds singing and the westering sun shining in her golden red hair, all of us around her, petting her and telling her what a good girl she is.

And I did not dissolve into tears as I thought I would. All the holding back I had done that weekend really had turned my grief into a heavy stone that filled the whole of my trunk, both solid and cavernous at once.

Today it is August 28, and I have missed many weekends at Thacher Park. So much can get between you and life. I stopped writing because I wanted to experience without the reporter constantly interpreting. And this is really valid, except I think about how often I have been filled with gratitude to my former selves for setting down in words their experiences, so I could read them and taste those moments in their immediacy once again.

Today I passed by the wild raspberries, hoping to find a few lingering berries at the end of their season, but the clusters had been picked clean by birds and other hikers. I found a few broken berries on one cluster and picked them, held them in my hand for a moment then popped them into my mouth—more crunch than sweetness. Faint regret for allowing busy-ness to come between myself and this small, yearly ritual, but I swallowed and walked on. I started thinking about writing, about the taste of wild raspberries in August, and saw with reluctance that the reporter was back and the trees were passing by unnoticed as words strung themselves into sentences in my head.

Midstep in my thoughts I was arrested by the sight of a perfect cluster of raspberries just off the path, a long way from the bushes I usually visit. Red and fully formed they hung there before I reached out and gently pried the caps from their heads. I held them in the palm of my hand, wondering at their perfect forms as the reporter in my head said, “how like the faintly ridiculous bathing caps those lovely water-ballet ladies wear.” Then I ate them, one at a time, savoring their perfect sweetness as I walked slowly on.

Miss Heidi

Miss Heidi, the Fluffernutter

How I Became a Leftist: Phase I

I was born into privilege—from a long line of Republicans on both sides of the family. We hated the Democrats, we hated Jimmy Carter, and my brothers and I, on long car rides, would try to outdo one another finding the meanest, lowdown shacks and say, “That’s Jimmy Carter’s house!” We didn’t know anything, of course, about politics. It was just something we picked up, something our parents laughed at, thought was cute.

That was when we lived in Texas. I was 6 when we moved there from California—just that age when you get really good at your body—running, riding your bike, swimming. All that good body stuff. It was 1974 when we moved there, and we were encouraged, forced, to play outside unsupervised. One of my mother’s signature lines was, “Go outside and don’t come back in until dinner!” I had a mile-radius roaming ground easy, with my bike, and I did everything. I explored the woods, found an ancient burial ground, caught lizards with their long, toothless mouths and put them on green leaves to see them turn green, brown leaves to see them turn brown. I dug clay out of our yard and made pots to dry in the sun. I melted my Crayons onto leaves with a magnifying glass, loving the drops of color so much I just wanted to eat them or something…something I couldn’t quite imagine.

When I was ten we moved to a small town in Upstate New York. I was a sun-tanned, gawky kid with a Texas accent who wore sneakers with skirts so I could run around at recess. It started right away. “Yvonne is a pest! Kick her in the chest!” This was recess now. A group of girls would walk around behind me chanting this, and I had no clue how to deal with it. I limped through the end of fifth grade and entered summer, thinking they’d forget about me over the months.

But sixth grade was worse—more girls joined in the fun, including my new best friend. She was my friend, but also the other girls’ friend, and so I was tied to this group somehow and I couldn’t escape. I still look back on it and wonder at that. I had no power to leave, find other people to hang with.

Seventh grade was worse still, because we moved to junior high and boys joined in with the girls. It became very focused on my body, which they picked apart with precision, but mostly focused on my chest—my flat, pubescent chest. I remember once, standing in the hallway outside my English classroom, all of them sneering at me, picking at me with their words, until one of them said, “What you got there on your chest? Mosquito bites? Why don’t you put some Band-Aids on those mosquito bites?” Everyone laughed, and it was too much, I couldn’t hold it in anymore, and I started crying, right there in front of all of them, showing them how much they’d hurt me. Hot, shameful tears.

I endured this daily onslaught at school for 3 ½ years, from the time I was ten until the night before I turned fourteen, when me moved once more.

On the dark car ride to the new town, I swore I would never allow myself to be stepped on like that again. I asked to be put back into the 8th grade, even though I’d finished one quarter of 9th grade—just so I could hide my skinny, flat-chested body among a younger lot. When the prep-girls tried to make friends with me I withdrew from them—I didn’t trust groups. I made two good friends, Tracey and Mary, and went about building my life again, being a kid again.

One day, Mary and Tracey and I were marching arm-in-arm down the empty corridor after school, chanting some silly nonsense over and over at the top of our lungs to hear the echoes. We turned a corner and met the toughest girl in the school and two of her lackeys. Diane yelled at us to cut the crap, and without thinking I yelled, “No!” Diane said, “What did you say?” and I repeated, “No.” Tracey grabbed my arm and whispered, “Shut up!” Diane said, “Come over here and say that.” So I extricated myself from Mary’s and Tracey’s arms, walked over to Diane, and told her to her face, “NO.”

There was an instant of pause before Diane said, “You’re lucky I’m wearing a skirt today or I would beat the crap out of you.”

And that was it. I had stumbled upon a great truth in life: you can change. You can face foes and your fears and limitations and overcome them.

Return

The monarch winters in Mexico
After its autumn flight south from Canada and the upper States.

It takes three generations to fly north again, but they know the way.
Three journeys, three deaths, three births—
Before the fourth generation, born in the north, at the end of summer,

Makes its way along the belly of the world
To gather in ever-larger clouds of shimmering orange

And settle on the butterfly trees.

Milkweed at Lake Moreau, 2016

Milkweed at Lake Moreau, 2016

Ugly Duckling

Now I float upon the cool water,
My webbed feet gently keeping me true
As I breathe and come to.

Here I am upon the calm water~
The ungraceful dance,
Frantic footwork to be what I am not,
Is over.

In the distance swans take flight~
Recognition leaps in my heart
And my wings give a sympathetic shake.

Now, here, I am what I am.
My webbed feet paddle the cool water,
Moving me forward, swift and sure

Until yearning meets with knowing,
And I unfold large, beautiful wings
That carry the drumming of my heart
Across the years and vast deserts I have traveled.

In a moment,
Through a flurry of sun-kissed water,
I am airborne,
Flying to meet my mates.

Sherman

Sherman Treebeard

Waking

The fear of letting go sits on me like a yoke.
Head bowed forward I pull
The weight of our history through the earth;

Roots snap, rich soil is laid bare,
Exposed to seed it cannot refuse.

But my glazed eyes come alive again,
And again.

I see the world;
I breathe its scent into my nostrils—
It flowers in my brain, opens my heart.

And the yoke, it is a fly on my skin.
I twitch a muscle and it takes off, lands again.

All the while the world is there.
(All the while the world is there.)

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