Turkey Vulture

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My leather clogs are soaked with dew and yesterday's rainfall through to my socks, and my backside is damp from the roughhewn rain-sodden bench, which is unsteady on the soft ground of the meadow. Low sun shines on my back and on the path’s thick wet grass that needs mowing. In October, the mower forgets his way through goldenrod that have lost their stars. White and yellow moths have flown away. Bees have no flowers to woo and have disappeared. The fire of sumac is flickering out, flame by flame. Yellow leaves on the tallest poplars around the pond applaud the parade of clouds marching past. Oh look! They have never done that step and roll before. Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap. Some in the meadow are falling asleep, unimpressed, while the chickadees keep fee-beeing and squeaking their high pitchpoints, and tree swallows treet their trits then swallow them in gurgles.

What have I come here for? Where is my place? A tippy bench at the center of things. So like a human. It takes long to quiet, shoulders hunched, hands warming under my thighs. Ah, just relax, kid. You think too much.

I don’t hear him coming, no treets, sqawks or screeches, but a shadow betrays him, like my brother’s thumb-hooked hand silhouette on the projector screen. I’ve seen them for days, since the neighbor bow-shot a deer and gutted him, leaving the entrails for wild animals in the field. I have seen them from the kitchen window, perched in the highest poplar branches like hunters in blinds, patient. But this morning, they are six-foot kites crisscrossing a gentle sky, scouting. Silent as arrows. He, my personal turkey vulture, could be scoping me, in my black crow hooded jacket, still as death. But I do not imagine this is so. Instead, I am certain that he is showing me how to scout, scope and scavenge. Why else does he arc over the pines and back under the sun, like a slow motion boomerang? Why tip and turn just there where the cloud parade ends, showing off the flourish of his wing-tip baton? What possible reason could he have for spreading his wing feathers like a sumac branch directly above me, floating down so close I swear I can feel him tap a message of longing on the wind’s drum? If he does not mean to demonstrate the silent way of seeking sustenance, why are we here?

You can listen to a podcast reading of this piece here.

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Ode to Autumn, by John Keats

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John Keats needs no image support for his poem to autumn. I revel in his lines, the hair of autumn soft-lifted by the winnowing wind, as beautiful as any written anywhere. Nothing needs to be said, and my photos aren't necessary. But I also overflow with love for autumn, in Michigan. The images I share below the poem are from previous years, some here at the farm, some on my drive to work, and some at the lake where my family has a cottage. Wherever you are, I hope you enjoy the onset of autumn today (even if in Australia and New Zealand, and you are in spring!).

Ode to Autumn
by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.


~ John Keats, from Endymion

The Season of Falling

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It is the season of falling.

Falling down. Falling apart. Falling in love. Falling into step. Falling by the side of the road. Falling out. There must be more falling idioms I'm not thinking of.

Pears are falling. Leaves, tomatoes and sunflowers too.

One of my treasures is a poem by James Dickey called “Falling.” This is the same James Dickey who wrote the 1970 novel Deliverance and also the screenplay for the culturally significant 1972 movie of the same name. At six pages in his book Poems, 1957-1967, the very last entry (I love that), the poem "Falling" is too long to post here. But please read it when you have a few minutes and if you are interested, here, because what Dickey managed in "Falling" is beyond what I can imagine having the skill and inspiration to do. He took a tragic prompt from a New York Times news story, of a stewardess who was sucked through the door of an airplane that suddenly opened in flight, and wrote a six-page poem describing her descent to earth. Six pages. On falling. I almost can't abide its frightening content, while at the same time coming back to its beauty and craft again and again.

. . . with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat

The undying cry of the void    falling    living     beginning to be something

That no one has ever been and lived through      screaming without enough air

Still neat    lipsticked    stockinged     girdled by regulation     her hat

Still on . . .

It's shocking, how a writer can connect us with an imagined experience. My friend Inge said over her Pinot Grigio this week that novels are about loss. She explained that while novels may be sad, or tragic, when we read them we find solace that we are not alone in our own losses and sorrows. I feel that poems are like this too. There are ways to find beauty in loss, in the shared experience of being human. Sometimes pages of a book are the friend we turn to, when we don’t want to explain anything, when we just want someone who understands, even someone fictional.

In spring, the natural world rises. Tiny, thin sprouts and foal legs sway in a breeze and in a few weeks become strong with fiber and bone. In autumn, part of Nature retreats. Even though trees and plants become still as they cycle into dormancy, life is ongoing, keeping on, in a needful rest. If I can, I always want to live where the seasons contrast in extremes. Maybe I see in that a comfort, that I too have wide variations in my self, differing needs in different seasons, be they for an hour, a day, or a year.

What falls, goes into the earth and becomes one with it, even nourishes and feeds it. Decay is as beautiful and life giving as tender green shoots. What we lose is still in us, and can nurture if we let it. Falling . . . living . . .

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taming a wild dragon

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'Flying Dragon' Hardy Orange (Poncirus trifoliata) at Beal Gardens

I should have taken her picture. (I want to get bolder snapping people.) The college student kneeling at the foot of the Flying Dragon Hardy Orange tree is one of the "slave laborers" in the Horticulture program, and weeding campus gardens is part of her curriculum. When the weather entices, Inge and I head out Fridays at lunch to sit on a bench by a fountain or walk one of the most beautiful campuses in the world. I watched the kneeling student's gloved hands picking at leaves and tiny weeds in black soil and recognized my garden clippers sticking out her back jeans pocket. She flashed us a smile, obviously enjoying her work.

I learn best from watching and imitating, and the student tidying those beds inspired me to put our own beds in order at the farm before winter. In July before the wedding my niece Jennifer worked long, hard - and she said "enjoyable" - hours on the veggie and flower beds to shape and beautify them: ha, wedding weeding. It would be a shame to let them run too far amuck.

Fighting the grass whose roots are bound with my poor iris rhizomes will never end (photo below). I was too lethargic to tend to these ruffley pale iris in their previous bed, and the grass did what grass does, shooting roots far and wide under the iris, herbs and daylilies. Now I pay the price, like I did Saturday in another weekend of warm sun, tediously pulling thin blades and roots, making my carpal tunnel weakened wrists ache.

But yikes, I won't get carried away and manicure the farm with its rustic barns to look like Versailles. I don't just love tended iris, tulips, peonies, columbine, sedum, black-eyed Susans, coneflowers and the like. The wild natural beauty of goldenrod, Timothy grass, Queen Anne's lace and sumak in the meadow - maybe not quite as wild as a flying dragon! - is where I go sit to soak in Nature. One day if the whole farm becomes naturalized, will it be by choice, or because of my laziness?

Nature never stops working - it's the ultimate example. But my hat's off to two women of a younger generation for motivating me to get off my butt and take care of all those sweet plants that I depend on in the spring to pull me out of the dormancy of winter.




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a rare November weekend

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Autumn sun and a light wind from the south carried the weekend up to seventy degrees (21ºC) and blue skies after a few weeks of cold weather (30ºF, around 0ºC). Towels whipped in the wind. The last of the garden peppers went into white chili (with turkey Don raised, white beans, onion, garlic, cumin, homemade chili powder from our neighbor's friend (we'd run out - thank goodness! wow was this good stuff), cilantro, lime juice and chicken broth, no tomatoes - save those for red chili).

Rosemary and parsley puffed out like it was August.



Beverly and Berta wondered where the cold went.



Don even let the turkeys wander outside their fence a while, but it didn't last long. He remembered how dumb they are, worried they'd head toward the road and penned them back up.

Floozie found a rock and wanted to brood. Wow, she looks big all of a sudden, as fluffy as the parsley. She used to be such a skinny squirt. A nosy one. (See sidebar toward the bottom.)



Spearmint, peppermint, ever-ready strawberries and frost-flattened rhubarb kept two other garden beds alive and green with red trim. Don had transplanted the foundering rhubarb here where it looks to be thriving now. I tasted a chunk of pink rhubarb stalk, thinking I'd make pie, but it was tasteless. I used to eat rhubarb raw when I was a kid from a patch in my parents' backyard - crisp, gritty, juicy and SOUR. We will have to wait until spring for this plant to grow fresh tasty stalks. Save room for warm strawberry-rhubarb pie a la mode in June. Something in the pairing with strawberries eliminates rhubarb's gritty feel on your teeth.



The lumberjack chain-sawed dead wood by the pond, which I later stacked in the corncrib. So far the forced air furnace has hardly kicked on in spite of cold weather the last few weeks because the wood stove is efficient and keeps us cozy. It will be cold again soon enough.



What can be said - except Hallelujah, Praise the Lord and pass the sour cream (for the chili), and butter and honey (for the cornbread)!



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lost-and-found trick-or-treater

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With the help of friends, owners of a house in our current town carve 100 jack-o-lanterns every Halloween

I don't know how the olfactory organ manages it - the blessed nose - the way it skips decades like a stone on the surface of water and brings back October thirty-firsts from forty years ago in a nanosecond. I just know it works.

On the drive home from the university this week in the early evening dusk, if I smell burning leaves from someone's yard, instantly I am walking fast in that I-will-not-be-overly-excited-and-run walk that trick-or-treaters commence from their own porch into a dark but streetlit Halloween night (unless you're my husband as a boy and you just full out run door to door, pillow case slung over your shoulder to be stuffed with as much candy as you can carry, go home, dump it out on the living room floor, and go back out again, running).

For blocks and blocks my small town neighborhood angled off in rows of sidewalks covered in crispy brown leaves, lined with beacons: porch lights inviting me and hundreds of other kids to walk up to a friend's or a stranger's door, reach a hand into a big Melmac bowl and help ourselves to candy - politely take one, or impolitely grab a handful - to what I hoped would be Snickers, Reese's peanut butter cups or sour apple bubble gum, but please no Tootsie Rolls or apples.

We were little fishermen docking for a few seconds at ports of call, lit like lighthouses, where we filled our nets with what the neighborhood sea had stocked.

One Halloween, I was lost at sea.

Little Ruthie got invited to go trick-or-treating with a grown up friend of an older sister. Was it the year Nancy sewed me an 18th century Martha Washington costume complete with black lace mask, shawl and fingerless gloves, white wig dotted with blue satin rosebuds, and lovely draped blue satin garniture hanging from the waist? Impossibly, I managed to go off with Charlene and have a blast without either of us informing my parents. Have you ever seen a police car parked in front of your house, complete with spinning red and white lights? Whatever fun you were just having disappears like a wave seeping into sand.

But no doubt, the catch I emptied onto the carpet, sorted into piles of keepers and undesirables, then eaten a few a day, mollified my guilt into mid-November.
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blasphemy

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The trees of green, orange and red that line my drive to work thirty minutes each way five days a week, as well as the sumptuous light that rises behind the green barn each morning, have filled my sight with eye candy. Filled up past capacity, over-saturated. All that bending of apple boughs, swelling of gourds, plumping of hazel shells, angled light brimming over, clouds blooming, and twittering swallows that Keats wrote of in his Ode, frankly have me gasping for the bare bones of winter. Don't show me one more beautiful leaf on your blog, I beg you -- I'll explode!

I try to live in the moment, but I'm longing for less opulent ones. I covet the next season, looking over the fence toward not greener grass, but whiter. I can't take any more of this beauty I tell you. Even this shiny Beetle I saw two weeks ago the same day I stopped to take pictures of a patch heavy with pumpkins as far as the eye could see maxed me out with its allurements. Do I want to hop in and ramble down Route 66 on a two week road trip? Not really. I'm riched out!

I want smooth flat crispy snow fields with a spike or two of corn. I want bare black trees lining them. I want to come home and after supper I want the glowing family room window pulling me back to the house from the corncrib with an armful of firewood.

Come here wind, blow away all this color. I want to go inside and hibernate.
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simple sudden October

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Impulsively, I have to show you the morning, driving out of the farm and across the county on that old meridian road. It stops me sometimes.


Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote yesterday -

A day isn’t just a standard measure,
all the same size so each fits on a calendar page.
A day is a period of light, an astronomical event.

I will respond to your comments in the last post soon.
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dishes

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With the onset of autumn, I remember that I have china. "The Holidays" are around the corner with all that feasting - the first being Thanksgiving in November when we'll welcome Don's family to the farm. I will be digging into the china cabinet for bowls, cups, plates, pitchers and platters to serve mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, coffee, and pumpkin pie.

I collected the cups and saucers, above, from different antique shops because I loved the rosebud handles. Once I fell for the first set, it was not easy to find more. This was before eBay.

This egg cup is a good excuse for making soft boiled farm fresh eggs Friday morning after Thursday's Thanksgiving feast. My set of Spode buttercup belonged to Grandma Olive, then my mother, and now to me. When I pull them out, I feel I am touching my women, and their hands are now my hands.

No matter how humble the home of a woman is, she feeds her family on dishes. On special occasions she will spend extra time chopping, mixing, cooking and filling her best ones with feast-worthy delectables. If her mother used those dishes before her, their value goes deeper. And if her mother's mother used them before her, serving food in them is an even greater joy.

Every ladle of food - from the thinnest soup to the heartiest meat - becomes food for the soul as well as the body when family and friends come together and multiply memories and generations through celebration.

My sister Nancy gave me this Irish Belleek butter dish that looks like an Irish cottage. It is so lightweight, it feels like you are holding a seashell. You can tell it is European because it is square, not oblong, for the European shape of packaged butter. I cherish it as a gift from my sister as well as for the link to Ireland where I have fond recollections and connections.









Everyone in the world deserves to eat well, to live well. In photographs of the world's poorest communities, I have seen blue tarp shanties set up with style, neatness and grace. There is an instinct within us humans, in women especially, to nurture the family. This nurturing is for the body, the soul and the heart. When she feels her dishes are beautiful, the food is appealing, and that she is bringing her loved ones together at special times to create new memories and remember old ones, it is worth every chop of an onion, each whisk of butter and flour for a roux, all the stirring of thick batter for cake, all the rolling out of pie dough for custardy pumpkin filling, the kneading of bread dough for yeasty buns, and every heartfelt anvil of stress over the possibility that everything won't get done or taste delicious. There are many men, like Don, who also feel these instincts and spend hours in the kitchen out of a desire to nurture loved ones.

What follow are from a big heavy wonderful book called The Way We Live by Stafford Cliff with hundreds of photographs by Gilles de Chabaneix, showing how people live around the world. I chose some pictures of people preparing food, as well as dishes.

Romania


Bangkok




Sweden



Provence



Sweden

And this final photo is not from the book but was taken by rauf near Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India. When I saw this at his post in February I was so touched I had to stop and be quiet. This is a mud hut, and the woman of the house designed and built the wall mounted dish rack herself.