Farewell

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purple carrot flowers on the farm

With some sadness I am putting my blog to sleep. I'd like to think of synch-ro-ni-zing going into hibernation, rather than permanent sleep, but who knows? Most hibernating animals go into the long sleep in winter, but I'm choosing the hottest day of the year in Michigan to tuck this little bird into its nest. (I guess birds don't hibernate, do they?)

I've been at this six and a half years in the best time of my life. I've practiced writing and photography,  and I've made friends with extraordinary people. All is well with me and my family, my grandson is a growing joy, our son will be married in August, and life is very good. I am simply feeling creative energy flowing elsewhere. I may post photos from the wedding here as I did from Lesley's. In any case, I'll keep in touch.

I've started several blogs as my oldest friends know. I reserve the right to start another, which I may do when I begin arranging flowers for the new restaurant of dear friends when it opens. Nina and Tony run The Purple Carrot food truck, which has the best food in town, bar none. They will open the Red Haven restaurant in late August. In the meantime, you can find me on Instagram, the photo sharing app for iPhones and Android phones. My name there is ruthie822.

A few nights ago we watched the 2011 version of "Jane Eyre" and loved it. Mia Wasikowska is my favorite Jane to date. I didn't realize then that I would be saying goodbye to synch-ro-ni-zing so soon or use a quote from Charlotte Brontë's novel to say it:

Then you and I should bid good-bye for a little while?
I suppose so, sir.
And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane? Teach me; I'm not quite up to it.
They say, Farewell, or any other form they prefer.
Then say it.
Farewell, Mr. Rochester, for the present.
What must I say?
The same, if you like, sir.
Farewell, Miss Eyre, for the present; is that all?
Yes.
It seems stingy, to my notions, and dry, and unfriendly. I should like something else: a little addition to the rite. If one shook hands for instance; but no—that would not content me either. So you'll do nothing more than say Farewell, Jane?
It is enough, sir; as much good-will may be conveyed in one hearty word as in many.
Very likely; but it is blank and cool—"Farewell."

It is blank and cool, and I'd rather get a hug from you.

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June bug

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Diane Wakoski preparing to read poetry at The Scarab Club

In Michigan in June we see lots of June beetles banging against lighted window screens and we also see them dead on the sidewalk like pieces of broken brown bottles.

I went inside one very alive beetle this week. Once a golden scarab that could have been the Paris of the Midwest, Detroit is of course now littered with crumbling empty buildings and brownfields, photographed and even relished the world over for its "urban decay porn." But there are jewels in the city that are protected and showcased by loving enthusiasts. James and Kim hosted a poetry reading Wednesday by Diane Wakoski in the heart of Detroit's Cultural Center at The Scarab Club, across from the Detroit Institute of Arts, where Diego Rivera's famous Detroit Industry murals glow. When I walked into the club with Diane, Robert and Heather the space lit by the towering garden window opened me up like a beetle flying to light. Paintings by students from the art school Lesley attended backdropped Diane's reading of her poems about movies.

Afterward some of us had dinner at the Union Street Cafe on Woodward Ave. Listening to James and Kim talk about the club I realized once again how little I know about the Detroit scene. It is alive thanks to the people who believe in its heart and culture.

Here is a poem by Diane that conjures elements of summer and Detroit for me. I have these episodes of inspiration to get inside Detroit. And then I get distracted by my university and country life a couple of hours away.




Inside Out

By Diane Wakoski 

I walk the purple carpet into your eye
carrying the silver butter server
but a truck rumbles by,
                      leaving its black tire prints on my foot
and old images          the sound of banging screen doors on hot
             afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on
             the sink
flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.
Come in, you said,
inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the
old songs that line your hands, inside
eyes that change like a snowflake every second,
inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel,
inside the whiskers of a cat,
inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you
grind the pigments with your teeth, painting
with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting
with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth.
You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside
the veins where my small feet touch
bottom.
You must reach inside and pull me
like a silver bullet
from your arm.

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Father's Day: a case for pushing kids out of the nest

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These orphaned robin's eggs that Don found on the ground while he mowed around the spruce tree are normal in the earth's economy. If everything survived, the world would be overrun. Yet I tend to side with the prey, not the bluejay who knocked the nest out of the tree while he raided and stole eggs. There is a mothering instinct in me that wants the defenseless to be protected, and survive.

It's Father's Day in the U.S., and I am feeling grateful that my husband and father of my two children agreed with Goethe: "There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings." I work with college students, and I witness the growing trend of "Velcro" parents to stay involved in the daily (or hourly) comings, goings, successes and failings of their college children. Truth is that the kids are half of that sticky Velcro and seem to want to be in touch many times a day by text. The roots are strong, the wings not so much. (I couldn't wait to be off on my own.)

There is a fantastic article about breaking up with parents written by Terry Castle, the literary critic and professor at Stanford (Susan Sontag called her the most expressive literary critic alive today). I felt something shift when I read it. She uses literary orphans to demonstrate how strong and resilient humans become when they are forced to survive on their own (so many! "Witness Little Goody Two-Shoes, Pollyanna, Heidi, Little Orphan Annie, Kim, Mowgli, Bilbo, Frodo, Anne (of Green Gables), Dorothy (she of Toto and Auntie Em), Peter (as in Pan), Harry (as in Potter)". The article is "The Case for Breaking Up with Your Parents" in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is long. It is excellent.

Of course we live in times of economic hardship, and some of our adult kids have to live with us now and then until they catch a break. The real point of the article is that we must raise children to think for themselves. Imagine a society of independently thinking people.

Happy Father's Day!
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Summer storm

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William Butler Yeats said,

"We can make our minds so like clear water that beings gather around us, that they might see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even fiercer life because of our quiet.”

I remember one summer night lying in bed at the cottage in the big bedroom upstairs in one of the two double beds encompassed by open screened windows on three walls. I was fourteen, and I had my small FM radio playing quietly so only I could hear it from the nightstand a few inches from my pillow, the only light in the room from its linear dial. It was a hot Michigan night, and a storm was building around us, the way they always did at that place. One storm would come, the clouds would burst, and then another would follow it in a circle of storms. I loved sleeping in that room and waking to the rain on the tin roof, an occasional acorn falling with the rain. Quietly that night when I was the only one awake, my mom and dad in the bedroom downstairs, over the radio came keyboards, thunder, rain and Jim Morrison singing “Riders on the Storm” and I knew the luxury of sound. I did not understand who the “killer on the road” in the song was, or that Jim Morrison had just died of a heroine overdose. I had not yet studied Yeats in college, or visited sites of Dublin's Easter Rising. I did not know much at all, come to think of it.

I still relish the luxury of that emptiness in a thunderstorm, surrounded by a sky brimming with power, and so much depending on how we listen.

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First outdoor blessings with my grandson, 4 months old

1
I have never been a farmer, or farmer’s wife, sweating
fruit lost to hard frost, and livelihood, or praying for rain.
I have never wanted to. (Will you?) We play here.
Our fingers are smooth. But we grieve
our lost plums so soon come. And we will feel
the cold stone in the barn
on a scorching day, and sigh.

2
I have been trying to tell you
about the fanned gusts from hummingbirds.
Look out!
for their ferocious beauty.

3
Are you as warm as I am?
Perfectly?

4
Just between us, we know the
cool cave of solitude
of the mouth
and when to open it.

5
Do you think the bee
was confused when the sage
bloomed plum petals
that look like iris
through needles of rosemary?

6
I wonder when you will first feel
that the road
your tongue takes
out of your own heart’s gate
is one of loneliness?
This is a mixed up place.
For now, join all these birds singing together.

7
Hear the poplars?
They are saying a dappled hello from
Courbet, Sisley and van Gogh.
(See, it isn't always lonely.)

8
This air is a bridge
between us
and all.
All!

9
Creation is what you make
of what you are given
and also
what you are not.
The path in the woods,
and what it passes through.

10
Please feel all this emptiness.
It is absolutely necessary.
May what you give back to it
always be as true
as the small clear stars
of your voice today.


June 2012

It is a hobby farm we live on. We have absolutely not a single apple on our three apple trees, or a single pear on our pear, or plum on our plum. But it is the fruit farmers in Michigan this season I really feel for. The heat in March brought out early blossoms on the trees, and then a hard killing frost in April annihilated the fruit. Pretty much the entire cherry crop has been destroyed, and Michigan is the source of 80% of the world's tart cherries, so you can imagine the impact this has on our state's already wobbly economy. I posted about cherries up North three years ago here.

Here is a minute and a half of video and audio accompaniment out of James's first real outing a couple of weeks ago. I was very moved by the undulations of his tongue, showing that he was meeting nature with it as much as with his ears, eyes and skin. You will hear a small interruption of James's grandpa laughing, then asking me "Where'd Brian go?" and me, grammy, answering, "talkin' to his mom" and you'll see James's grandpa watering his garden. The way James kept gurgling outside when I introduced him to the trees on a walk later made me feel he is simpatico about nature.

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Carpe viam

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Carpe viam

"seize the road"

was Horace's alternative

in space

instead of time

diem and viam

both symbols

of the circle

we live

the simple flight

of stones

seized and thrown

first rising

then falling

to become the road

in the end
(that never ends)

June 2012

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