A Grouse, a Fawn & a Question about Existence

I looked out my office window and caught sight of a male ruffed grouse in full display mode. His banded tail stood erect, a flat fan of autumn-hued feathers, perfectly crafted both to conceal and to attract, not unlike the fan of a geisha.

Glossy black feathers formed an areola around his speckled face, a mane of masculine glory that brought to mind tribal masks, Bob Marley’s braids, and mythological griffins. The grouse was a creature implausibly present, strutting one haughty step at a time across the leaf-strewn meadow, three or four females bobbing and weaving some twenty feet behind, courtiers at pains not to disturb the king. He had an unmistakably royal air, theatrical and contrived, every movement designed to convince the observer of his prowess, seduce her with his beauty.


I don’t know how the act was working on the hens who skittered and pecked in his wake—they seemed a bit distracted actually, multi-taskers obsessed with things-to-do—but I must say he had me at hello.

When he turned his head to one side with a dramatic jerk and puffed out his yellow-feathered chest, I couldn’t help but giggle at the come-hither bravado. Patrick Swayze dressed in fabulous, feather-boaed drag.

Workin’ that hat girlfriend, workin’ it hard.

It was the first time I’d seen such a display in real life with my own eyes, absent the photographic editing and sonorous voiceover of a nature show. It was the first time I’d had the opportunity to interpret the grouse on my terms, to make my own associations and draw my own conclusions. There was just the grouse, high-stepping across the meadow below the house, and me, watching. My vision un-blinkered, my mind blissfully un-led by any externally imposed breadcrumb trail of an expert notion of What’s Important to Notice About the Male Grouse.

Faced with new, unfiltered experience, my mind was free to decide for itself. My mind was free to think.

****

One afternoon this past mid-summer, our garden activities were interrupted by a horrible bleating scream, the truly scalp-tingling sound of infant terror. Cosmo had startled a very young fawn from the hiding place where it had been left by its mother, and the babe had run pell-mell into a remnant of rusty barbed wire fence at the forest edge. We, all of us, immediately dropped our tools and moved toward the screams, drawn by the alarm just as urgently as if the fawn had been a human child.
We quickly realized that we knew the fawn and her mother as “residents,” frequent visitors to the Grandmother apple tree, the Spring Road, and the copse of locust just beyond the garden enclosure. As we used my pruners to free the tiny struggling deer, I said aloud: What if the mother doesn’t return? I was near tears, heart-struck by the passionate wailing of the child for its mother. We watched the fawn, so spindly-legged and tiny, yet so fiercely strong, bound away, screaming “Mommy!” just as clearly as if it spoke English or we understood Cervidae, the family to which white-tailed deer belong.

The hollering and wailing of that fawn, so entirely “human” to my anthropocentric ears, forged a bond of commonality: our shared experience of the pain and suffering, the wacky, unpredictable terrors, the sudden, unanticipated mercies of life on earth.

“You are like me,” I thought, as the fawn disappeared into the forest and I knew without doubt that from a nearby yet expertly hidden location, the doe watched all that had occurred.

None of my reading about deer had previously elicited such a progression of thoughts. And nothing about my decade-long experience suffering under the persistence of their appetite for cultivated plants could dissuade me from such insight. The resident deer were no longer The Other. No longer The Enemy of All Things Agricultural. They were neighbors. They were…well, suffice it to say, I couldn’t wait to see if the doe and her fawn came back.

They did. They came back. Along with another doe and her twins. And a mixed-family group that includes a button buck. For four good months now, seldom is the morning that I look out the bedroom window and don’t see one or all of these groups moving up the spring road and across the slope of the ridge. In the early hours, they venture within just a very few feet of the house. The conifers planted along the crest of the ridge are a favorite spot for hanging out, bedding down, and uhm, fertilizing the rocky, hungry dirt. I look forward to the sight of them no less than to the sun itself, illuminating the winter-brown grasses with amber light.

It’s not that I’ve stopped believing in venison as one of the healthiest meats for the human body—and the environment. I haven’t. But I have begun to think about deer unfiltered by what I’d read or seen or even experienced myself in the past. The new experience with the trapped fawn tripped a re-set button of sorts.

Do the deer themselves feel it? Do they sense the change in my intention toward them? Who knows?
I do know this: They're comfortable here, increasingly so, and the sound of my voice does not frighten.

****

In this most consumerist of all seasons, a time during which I myself am very much engaged in peddling my wares, a question simply won't leave me alone: If we are but consumers of the things others tell us to want, but reflectors and repeaters of the information given to us, but conduits for others' preprocessed ideas do we, any of us, really exist?

To live is be a consumer of air, water, food, shelter. I consume, but not because I’m told I deserve a new handbag, or new shoes designed to make me appear prosperous to others. There’s little room for artifice in my world. I consume to live.

To think is be a processor of experience into thought, not a pipe for the transference of other people’s unmeasured ideas. I think because, frankly, I have to think in order to live.

I experience most of my life right here and now, unscripted, unfiltered. No sonorous voiceover, no photographer’s edit to guide me to what’s important. No utility company. I, uhm, pretty much have to figure out what's important for myself. Right now.

Rene Descartes said: I think, therefore I am.

It’s a philosophical assertion much interpreted and debated, to be sure. I prefer to take it at face value.
How does one know who she is until she thinks for herself?

Certainly, she may well prosper in the purely physical realm through the abject adherence to others' ideas regarding what she may or may not think and what she may or may not adorn herself with to reveal her value. Surely, she may prosper as a physical body with no original thought at all. But what of her mind?

Where does the Self that importunes the mind for existence on its own merits, entirely separate from its ability to purchase the newest technology or rubber-stamp the latest social-theology—where does that Self reside?

Mental freedom is perhaps the most significant blessing of life in the wilderness.

But such a blessing is bestowed, much like God’s upon Abraham (or Gene Roddenberry’s upon Captain Kirk) with a corollary curse: to boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before, regardless how manifestly difficult, absurd or lonely the journey.

To live in the wilderness, in 2011, is to plant, pick and snowplow in the face of a culture that says: Oh, for pity’s sake, what are you doing? What's the point? Follow me.

It’s all online. All downloadable. Google-YouTube-able. Easily answerable. Poll-able. Wikipedia-ready. You don’t need to experience in the flesh what you can experience, virtually. It’s more efficient this way, life as the highlights reel of a really intriguing movie. Who cares if the thoughts aren’t your original thoughts, the conclusions aren’t those you were present to make? They’re well-vetted, they’re probably the majority, they’re the ones you would have made yourself, surely, most certainly.
Follow me.

Really? I dunno. Somehow, I remain unconvinced.

I never saw a nature show that came anywhere close to nature reality.

I never valued for long any thought I didn’t earn through living.

I'm the kind of fool who falls in love with a flannel shirt and wears the sucker 'til it comes apart at the seams.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com

Self Reliance

When I was 16, I fell in love with Ralph Waldo Emerson.


You think I’m kidding? Oh no. I would never speak lightly of such passion. Yes, it was 1982. And yes, Ralph died in 1882, but no matter. He had that je ne se quoi that makes a long-dead philosopher irresistible to a teenage girl. Or, at least this teenage girl. I appreciated Henry David Thoreau, but Emerson’s bombast I found, in retrospect, frankly sexier.

In Humanities class, junior year, when I learned that Socrates had said “The unexamined life is not worth living” my god did I love it. I wasn’t crazy after all! These were the days of Deep Earnestness, when I carried a journal with me everywhere. When I believed there was nothing that occurred that wasn’t worth recording and analyzing. Evenso, it was Emerson, my Ralph Waldo, who kicked it up a notch.

Emerson said the things I barely dared think.

Emerson said: “Know thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

Emerson said: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

Emerson said: “Whoso would be a man would be a nonconformist.”

I was certain he intended “man” to be inclusive of “woman.” After all, he hung out with Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott. Wherever Ralph wrote “man” I assumed him to be speaking, unequivocally, to me.

And my favorite essay, the essay that spoke most clearly to the girl who was trying to rationalize the impossibly conflicted external realities of her life with a blooming sense of iconoclasm, was Self Reliance.

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Twenty-nine years later, I can’t help but wonder what ol’ RWE would say if he could see me now.
If we met over tea (a nice aromatic blend of nettle, yarrow, and mullein perhaps) would he give me a “yes, but” when I quoted his 170-year-old words back to him? Perhaps he’d argue that he was, indeed, promulgating an interesting philosophical argument, an intellectual entertainment of the type highly valued in 1841, but that he certainly never intended anyone to attempt to live it. Let alone a woman on an Allegheny mountaintop in 2011. A woman struggling with all the practical survival issues well-known to the 19th century, coupled with something nearly as insidious and unstoppable as a plague of small pox: The expectation of electrons-on-demand, of pumps that move water at the flip of a distant switch, of worldwide communication at the click of a piece of plastic called a mouse.
I imagine his bemusement at the peculiarities of my plight. But even more compelling, I feel his nodding recognition of my struggle with Expectation and its corrosive impact on my sense of Self, even as he lambasts me for it.

I imagine him saying something along the lines of: “The man who stakes claim to a mountaintop and endeavors to carve his life upon that rocky earth would do better to build an Ark and wait for the Flood than expect the solace of regular society to carry him away from the Self he seeks. The valley and the ridge are joined by the land between them, each rod of which, once advanced, cannot be foresworn save by the liar or the fool.”

With all due apologies to RWE, I do imagine him “getting” me.

I imagine him prefiguring the best of the existential authors of the 20th century, when he’d say to me: “Once your Self has claimed its authentic home, celebrate, grieve not. Resist the siren call of conventionality and the safer drudgery it promises. Your trust in conformance is what restrains you, it is the barometer of your Self-defined failure. Leave it behind, as the hair your mother cut from your brow so you might see.”

Unless there really is some chamber of the afterworld where Meeting of Minds (the 1970’s-era PBS series hosted by Steve Allen) actually occurs, I’ll likely never know what words RWE would say to me personally.

I do know that I’d likely not be here today, at Brightside, if I’d never heard the words he wrote way back then. Words that continue to bolster and cajole me even as they irk me. “Yes, but” I want to argue. I want to give him a personal laundry list of grievances. A list so long he’d be moved to…what? Applying a gold star for “non-conformancy” to my furrowed forehead?

Much more realistically, I imagine his hawk-nosed countenance peering at me (not unkindly, oh, not at all unkindly), and after hearing all my woes and sorrows, simply inquiring this: "Who do you wish to be? Your Self? The woman who has endured great suffering to be here, and who is even now carving a life on this rocky earth. Or the woman who now believes she’d been better off never having taken the first journey up this mountain because, well, to be honest, up here it is really difficult attempting to conform to all the expectations of 21st century life?"

“Who are You?” I hear him ask. (Beyond RWE’s voice, I hear the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the Meeting of Minds parlor. Steve Allen looks so snappy in his ascot. Our tea has grown somewhat cold.)

RWE leans back and crosses his legs. He knows I know that he knows I know.

We smile at each other over our tea cups.

One inescapable truth of my life is this: Growing up in post-assassination Memphis with parents who established a hazardous waste recycling business in the heart of the African-American ghetto, I learned early not to define what I was capable of. Which is to say, I learned not to put an arbitrary limit on it. Limits didn’t matter. Coping with the situation was what mattered. Enduring was what mattered.

This is not to say that everything I’ve endeavored since has been a roaring success. Far from it. It is to say I’ve rarely shied from the attempt.

If you’ve learned early on that there’s no point in limiting what you can endure, then there’s little sense in limiting what you can attempt.

Quite literally, trite as it might sound, how does one know what it is she can do until she has tried? And this 45-year-old woman, like that girl who first read RWE 29 years ago, sees little point in living life sheltered from the discovery of what it is that she can do. (Which is not the same thing as saying I don’t have my dead-dog-discouraged moments, or long days and weeks of doubt.)

I also know something else, taught me with incomparable efficiency by my childhood in Memphis, and my later tuition under RWE. And it is this: There is no certificate of competency, no graduate degree, no class grade that would somehow qualify me for living here, at Brightside. No imprimature from an outside authority that would give me special dispensation in dealing with the weather or the wilderness or the wild animals or the manifest difficulties of off-grid life. To be sure, various societal authorities have endowed me with their seal of approval, but unless backed by my personal integrity and my steadfast belief in my ability to see it through, come whatever is required, of what worth is such a seal?

It is worth nothing. When snow is falling and the generator stops working and there is no communication with the outside world short of 15 mile drive, no diploma is gonna bail me out. And no government agency or local utility either. I’m on my own. Left to my own wits, my own, perhaps previously untapped capacities. Capacities I must be willing and ready to tap. And fearlessly so.
This was RWE’s most important point.

What society authorizes you to do is one thing. Societal authorization creates a feedback mechanism which, today, I would call co-dependence. (RWE might call it conformance.) In society, you can only do what you do if you’re authorized a priori from an external authority. Such authority must continue to support you in what you do in order for you to continue to believe you are worthy and capable of doing it.

What you can do by pushing yourself to find out if you, indeed, can do it (regardless what all those outside authorities might say) creates a different sort of feedback loop.

I really don’t think RWE would mind if I call it Self Reliance.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com

Lady Pocahontas Jumps the Shark

The phrase “jump the shark” comes from a scene in the fifth season premiere of Happy Days (1977), when a water-skiing, perfectly coiffed Fonze decked out in swimming trunks and his signature leather jacket, accepts a dare to jump over a shark. In a series whose lifeblood was its gently self-mocking kitsch, this scene was a-kitsch-too-far, at least to some reviewers. Happy Days remained on the air for another seven seasons. Nonetheless, the term came to signify the defining moment when a favorite television show has reached its peak, after which it will simply never be the same. The idiomatic usage of the phrase has since broadened to refer to the moment when any endeavor moves beyond the core qualities that defined its success, and begins a decline from which it never recovers.

Yesterday, as I picked the few surviving (and actually ripening) cherry tomatoes in snow so thick and sticky-wet I could barely see what I was doing, the phrase came to mind. As I wrapped the not-yet-winterized chicken coop in visqueen as an ad hoc barrier against the snow and wind, among other unprintable thoughts that occurred one was dominant, so much so that I spoke it aloud: “Lady Pocahontas, you’ve jumped the shark.”

Allow me to digress as I explain.

Brightside is located in Pocahontas County, a mountainous land of about 940 square miles and 8,700 people. Named after the Native American princess, this county is easily anthropomorphized as she. Lady Pocahontas, as I’ve come to think of her. My fickle, difficult queen.

She is the mother of eight rivers, the hostess of the National Radio Quiet Zone (limited cellphone service is available in only two towns), and a doyenne of darkness. All of the traffic lights here can be counted on one hand. My Lady’s world is one of cloud-slung valleys and mist-wreathed ridges. A world of near-primordial vistas, where one might be less astonished to see a brontosaurus raise its head than an airplane take off. Since the end of vast logging operations at the turn of the last century, mankind’s mark upon her body has been relatively light. And it shows. It shows in the rolling voluptuousness of her skyline, unbroken by human constructions. It shows in the purity of the air that is her breath and the water that is her blood. In the abundance of wild animals that thrive in her lushness. In the deep silence that can be found at all times of day, and most especially at night.

But make no mistake, Pocahontas is no easy woman. Not in any sense of that word.

Even in the valleys, in the county’s three incorporated towns, living with Lady P. demands the evolution of a patience, a kind of self-soothing here-and-nowness not experienced by most Americans since the 19th century. Consider this: wherever you live here, it’s at least a two hour round trip to get everything you need. Sure, you learn to make do without and need much less, but sooner or later, you gotta go. And for most if not all of that drive there will be no convenience stores, no gas stations, no streetlights, no cellphone service, and often no radio either. You’ll only have Lady Pocahontas for company. Which is just the way she wants it. And you do, too, right? Or else you wouldn’t be here.

Well, of course, sure. But within some well-defined metes and bounds. If I do my part, she’ll do hers. I mean, can’t I get a contractural agreement?

With Lady P? (Ha-ha-ha! You poor dear.)

Here’s when I need to confess that I’ve never envisioned Lady P. as anything resembling the mythic/historic figure of the actual Pocahontas, but more Elizabeth Taylor as a neurotic/petulant/viciously self-interested amalgam of Scarlett O’Hara, Cleopatra and Richard Burton’s wife. In mud boots, fashionable winter parka and perfect eye make-up, of course.

This woman ain’t signing nothin'.

Perhaps it will help illuminate the (okay, I’ll go ahead and say it) deep distrust at the heart of my personal Love Story with Lady P. if I admit that it was September 15, the day after I wrote my last paean to her, that she froze the remains of the Brightside garden. Of course, like any well-trained vixen, she left a few come-hither dribs and drabs. A handful of heretofore mentioned cherry tomatoes, a half-dozen peppers, a bushel of sweet mama winter squash. She took all the rest. All the late beans, the last resurgence of zucchini, summer squash and cucumbers, the hard-fought renaissance of slicing tomatoes, the astonishing abundance of spaghetti squash, the mounds of culinary herbs. Frozen as if by Narnia’s White Witch.

As if?

Standing in the ruined garden on September 16, I saw her bat her shadowed eyes and shrug. Not my problem, she seemed to say. But you still love me, don’t you? I know you do.

Within 48 hours, the trees began to color in earnest. Brilliant yellows and reds. The mountainside across Hidden Valley became a living tapestry forming moment by moment, woven by invisible hands using internally illumined thread. One warm evening last week, the ridge was filled with migrating dragonflies, tens of thousands of the insects with their iridescent tails and matched sets of pearl-colored wings buzzed and clicked in the flaming goldenrod and the last of the bright white Queen Anne’s lace.
“She takes, Lady Pocahontas. But she never takes more than she gives. The trick is to be present to receive her gifts. She is always giving. Receiving is what’s difficult.” I said these words last Thursday.

It started snowing in earnest Friday night.

Yesterday afternoon, as I swaddled my chickens in plastic sheeting, I thought, with a wry sort of knowingness that can only come from deep intimacy: Lady P. has jumped the shark, this season is over. Good god ya’ll, there ain’t nowhere up from here. Just a swift slide to winter and, best case scenario, a six-month slog to spring.

As I write these words, snow is falling.

The snows of April were indeed five months ago, a while back, to be sure. Yet somehow the time between doesn’t seem quite enough. Why? It’s not that I don’t like snow. It’s not even that I don’t like winter. I have said many times that the beauty of Lady P. is never so revelatory as in the winter. Perhaps my personal problem, my hang-up, my grief comes from the fact that this simply is not what I was expecting to happen next.

Fact is: I’m not privy to Lady P’s script.

What I call “jumping the shark,” an unexpected and unfortunate season decline, Lady P. calls nothing more nor less than exactly what must and needs happen next.

My expectations regarding what needs happen next? Well, Scarlett would no doubt say something along the lines of: “Fiddle-dee-dee!”

I can only imagine that Lady P. would fully concur.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com

Love, Actually.

I awakened this morning convinced that the eastern towhees have departed. These dapper thrushes with their distinctive call dominate the Summer dawn, their incessant importuning to Drink your teeaa! both cheerleader-like and just a wee bit overbearing given my growing reputation as The Tea Lady. Nevertheless, I came to appreciate them more this season than ever before.

In the rosy bloom of morning, as I lay listening, the long day’s labor not yet begun, I began to learn the voices of individual birds. I began to recognize idiosyncratic variety in a song I once believed rigidly defined. In what I’ll term the “traditional” towhee call, the second note is lower than the first while the third note is higher, and resonates with operatic vibrato. While plenty of these divas spent the summer performing at Brightside, this very world a stage where they modeled their impeccable technique and proved the crystalline clarity of each struck note again, and again, and yet again (Listen to me! Oh yes, listen to meee!), I came to realize that most towhees were less the stars of the show than chorus members, and many of them prone to singing off-score.

As the Summer progressed, a devil-may-care iconoclasm that smacked of Groucho Marx’s insistence that he wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have him, seemed to inspire the majority of towhees to improvise—as if flicking their elegant tail feathers at tradition. Sanctioned towhee song be damned.

These birds began with the highest note, or placed it squarely in the middle of the three-note run, or abandoned the third note altogether. These birds sang buzzy, raspy, flat notes, much more Jimmy Durante than Beverly Sills. One bird I came to think of as the New York Taxi Driver prefaced a quick three notes that neither rose nor fell in pitch with a sound eerily like the “Eh” that precedes Bugs Bunny’s famous “What’s up, doc?”

And now they are all gone. After reaching a peak near the beginning of August, the dawn has become increasingly emptied of song. Crickets now create the prevailing morning music, punctuated by the occasional scream of a blue jay or caw of a crow, the resonant buzz of one of the few remaining female ruby-throated hummingbirds. Sometimes now, so soon, there is no sound at all. In the aching silence that speaks so loudly of the arrival of Fall, I yearn for the babble of bluebirds, the melody of vireos, the sonorous two-note mating call of black-capped chickadees, the irresistible improvisation of towhees.

This year has been dominated by physical labor more than any other in my life. And although most of this labor has occurred outdoors, a concomitant sense of alienation from the natural world has taken root and grown within me, creating a none-too-subtle firewall I imagine as a dense hedge of multi-flora rosebushes interwoven with rapier-like black locust and hawthorn. I’ve come to believe that this unwelcome, uncomfortable, ugly separation evolved as a reflexive defense. Total sensory immersion brings forth but ever-diminishing rewards when Nature herself seems at incomprehensible odds with my purposes.

There’s playing hard to get, and then there’s intransigence and outright hostility. As with any human relationship, these behaviors do not exactly encourage trust.

There exists a tipping point (and apparently I reached it this Summer) when my capacity to extend myself to Nature is simply outmatched my Her capacity to repel my advances. Thus, if I’m to continue to be able to do what must be done physically, I must retreat emotionally. Or so I’ve informed myself, sergeant major-style: Cut the cord! Don’t take it personally! It’s just the weather! Just the woodchucks! Just the drought! Just the rain! Just the blight! Just do your job! After all, it’s not about you, Dawn.
Really?

“It just doesn’t matter.” I’ve said aloud, forcefully, trying perhaps a little too hard to channel Bill Murray in Meatballs as I’ve picked bushels of tomatoes ruined by the drought/rain cycle. As I’ve thrown out, down the hill, another round of cantaloupe scraps, leftovers from the woodchuck’s garden smorgasbord.

It doesn’t matter? Really?

I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps the question is not, in fact, whether or not It (any of It, all of It) matters in some Cosmic Big-Picture, ultimately unknowable, self-justifying Scheme of Things, but why It (any of It, all of It) matters to me.

Why am I here, living what occurs to me in the middle of a sleep-deprived funk as an impossibly difficult, perhaps outrageously ridiculous and entirely illogical life?

There are two sets of fawns I’ve watched grow to adolecence this Summer. There is the contrary fact that from the “worst” garden I’ve ever tended in my life are some of the very “best” vegetables I’ve ever had the joy of placing on my tongue. Quality certainly trumps quantity this year. And within this paradigm I find myself more thankful than I’ve ever been for each homegrown meal. There is the spicy citrus of scarlet bee balm, the musk of yarrow, the sharp green bite of goldenrod, scents that no thorny emotional barrier can withhold. Then, of course, there’s the towhee chorus. And its sudden surcease.

Why am I here?

To paraphrase Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain: “I can’t quit Her.”

Despite Her betrayals of my trust. Despite Her consistent fickleness. Despite the thorny hedge I erected as last-ditch defense against the sorrow of my unmet need. Despite the brutal fact that no matter how hard I try, it still may not work out between us: Nature has flat-out ruined me for living without Her.

Ruint. That’s me.

The truth of my love resonated in this morning’s silence even more than in the aural potpourri of June and July. This far into our relationship, I can’t help but notice Her, even when I don’t want to. Even when I recognize the emotional risk that such acknowledgement entails. She has taught me the meaning of the word “crush” far more fully than any boyfriend.

As I lay in bed this morning, Her early-pink sunlight glistening through the hair on my forearm, I felt Her heat burn through my brittle defenses as through a field of dry oatstraw. I watched matted thorns fall to dust. Smelled the acrid smoke of loss, grief, and forgiveness. I heard, in the empty air left by the towhees, the incomparable sound of Her breath.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com

The Gloves Are Off

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say: “It is yet more difficult than you thought.”
--Wendell Berry, Poetry and Marriage

And so it is in the life of the gardener. So many visions. Not nearly enough time. Even less—yes, even less—understanding with each calendar round.

The essential paradox of living intimately with Nature is that the truth one seeks is actually not contained in the list of facts one acquires, season after season, year after year.


Sure, the raw data, the facts and figures compile and accrue, becoming a sort of transcript, proof that one has showed up to class, certainly, but indicating nothing whatsoever about lessons learned. Tempting as it is to comfort oneself with such a litany of credits, to do so is pure hubris, and every bit as dangerous as Siren song to sailors who have no idea how lost they are, let alone how near the deadly rocks loom.

The idea that the more one learns the less she knows she knows is not a new one. When I learn one fact about nutrient deficiency in tomatoes, I glimpse a world of soil science virtually unknown to me. With every new fact I acquire, I am confronted with the depth and breadth of my ignorance. This is not the essence of the paradox I’m addressing.


The paradox at the heart of a gardener’s relationship with Nature is much more primal, and centers around the idea that every fact I acquire, everything I think I know says more about Me than about Nature. Every item on the ever-expanding transcript amounts to a projection of sorts, a desperate attempt to impose predictable order on a system viewed solely from one, very limited human perspective.


Not that there’s anything essentially wrong with that. I shudder to imagine life without Field Guides and How-to Manuals and Google searches. The challenge is remembering that the acquisition of such human-derived knowledge will only take me so far, and not one step farther, on the overgrown, nearly impenetrable path to truth.


The best brush hog is a mind that doesn’t presume to know, a mind that doesn’t project, but absorbs. A mind that, instead of insisting how it all works, marvels that it works at all.

Such wonder is the fertile earth in which humility grows. And although I’d certainly be lying if I claimed not to derive great pleasure from my tomatoes and snowpeas and unusual squash, the older I become, the more I’m beginning to “get” that the most valuable fruit of my garden is how humble I feel when I sink my bare hands into its dirt.


Of this garden’s many mysteries, I understand nothing at all. Increasingly, I gotta tell you, I’m good to go with that.

Yesterday, as I tied up grape vines gone wild and pinched back tomato suckers run amok in just a few days’ time—how does this happen?—I tried to come up with a metaphor that might convey not just my lack of understanding, but also my necessary acceptance of it. As a tree sparrow babbled at me from the vineyard wires, I came up with this:

Imagine a confectioner who has spent years icing and decorating, but never baking, cakes. Having adorned dozens of types of cakes of myriad textures and shapes, she might begin to believe she “knows a thing or two about cakes.” And, indeed, she does. No way to argue with that. But her knowledge, if she’s honest about it, is only icing-deep. Having never baked a cake herself, she can’t truthfully claim to understand what a cake is. A humble confectioner would be well advised to acknowledge her debt to cakes.

Having never germinated myself, I can’t truthfully claim to understand what a bean is. As a humble-gardener-in-training, I would do well to honor the bean I can never be, and thus never truly understand.
Oh, sure, I can learn a thing or two about cotyledons and seed coats and secondary roots and radicles. I can plant the bean seed in carefully-crafted, nutrient rich dirt. I can kneel with my nose to the ground and search for the delicate bent neck of an emerging stem. I can spray the new leaves with compost tea. I can even speak to the young plants in cheerleader tones: Grow beans, grow! I can implore them lovingly: Please!

What do I understand about the miracle of a seed becoming a plant that bears fruit I can eat and seeds I can plant again? I understand much more about cakes. And, fact is, I always will.

This year I’ve given up wearing gloves in the garden. Not for the sake of knowledge, not even for the sake of understanding, but simply because I crave the feeling of dirt against my skin. The dipped holy water of another context. A physical acknowledgment of my mendicant status. A simple sacrament that celebrates the mystery of life.

Increasingly, I gotta tell you, I’m good to go with that.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com

The Springtime Edge

edge(n), a place farthest away from the center of something.

Eight days ago, I saw my first earthworm of the year.

As I pulled-back the garden row cover, picking rocks that seem to work themselves effortlessly upwards from an endless subterranean supply, I gasped at the sight of it, athletically pink and squirming. A true harbinger of Spring if there ever was one. An omen of good gardening to come and at the same time a literal outlier: A worm out of dirt. I scooped up a handful, dropped the worm in the small hole, and covered him with his earthen home. My god, the dirt felt good against my skin.
 
Eight days ago, bluebirds flew into the vineyard, arraying themselves on post-tops as I last observed October 28. Were these by chance the same birds? Or other birds, to whom "my" Summer residents had spoken? If so, what description spurred longing fierce enough to bring them here, to this mountaintop garden? Was their longing, in the end, so different from mine?
 
I listened to their chitter-chatter, as to a favorite radio talk show broadcast in a foreign language. How I wanted to find myself able to speak bluebird as well as Finding Nemo's Dory discovered herself able to speak whale. Although "Hello pretty birds!" was an admittedly lame offering, I made it anyway. The bluebirds kept right on gabbing from their vineyard perches.

Eight days ago, I felt the heat of the sun through two shirts--no coat. No coat. Those who dwell in less-harsh environments may not appreciate the significance of going without a coat after 105 days of needing to wear one. Think of the feeling you have after getting a long-overdue haircut, or losing five entirely superfluous pounds. Freedom. You know what I'm talking about.

I stood in the warm sun before an overgrown grapevine, weather-damaged from last May's hard freeze, and just looked at it. I took-in its whole measure. Okay, I know this sounds corny, but this is really and truly how I have trained myself to go about pruning. The very idea of cutting back growth on any thriving plant is hard for this plant-lover to handle. In this mountaintop environment, which is profoundly stunting with respect to the height of any plant, pruning is counter-intuitive, to say the least. Yet, it must be done. And not to achieve some cosmetic ideal, oh no, but in order for the plant to produce fruit.

So I look at the plant as it is, today, and I envision it as I hope it will appear when it is bearing fruit. You might say I try to see the fruit-bearing plant within, and then to make the cuts necessary to allow that fruit-bearing plant to emerge. Ideally, with a healthy number of productive canes or branches or limbs.

Make no mistake, I'm no sculptor; however, I was blessed to visit Florence, Italy as a 21-year-old, and to see Michelangelo's "unfinished captive" sculptures in the piazza leading to David. So many years later, after studying the plants and learning the reasons for pruning (and much trial, error, and patience!), I now see each apple tree and grapevine in terms of those only partially-realized human forms that affected me so deeply as a young woman.

Unfettered growth binds the plants on this mountain and keeps them captive. Pruning is the only way to set them free to fruitfulness. Felco shears are my chisel. Each Spring the plants in my care exist on a precipice between what they've been and what they might become. Their known, quite visible past, and the future I imagine for them.


Eight days ago, I felt the Springtime edge. The tipping point toward Summer. The moment from which the days to the center of Summer harvest might reasonably be counted. My heart swelled, for the first time in nearly four months, at the manifest fact of the creative energy present all around me. I walked from the garden to the house to get some more twist-ties for the vines, Cosmo trotting alongside, my mind filled with nothing but the soft-embracing yes of the Springtime edge.

Eight days later, I feel the relentless razor-sharpness of an echoing no.


The rain, hail, sleet, snow and freezing fog of the past week didn't dull the edge so much as render the cutting tension inherent within it. An edge is, after all, neither there nor here. It is the place where uncommitted potential swings in the gusty wind. It is the place where one looks backward and forward and decides, in the still center of her own heart, if she's got what it takes to make it to the center of Summer.

May you know the wisdom of deep listening,
The healing of wholesome words,
The encouragement of the appreciative gaze,
The decorum of held dignity,
The springtime edge of the bleak question.
--John O'Donohue, "For a Leader", To Bless This Space Between Us

Good Question

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
--Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, Mountain Interval, 1920

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.
--Jerry Seinfeld

-----

“I don’t know how you do it,” says a friend from a big city. She’s referring to the whole deal: living five miles up a dirt road, off-grid, no phone. On a mountaintop, a good hour’s drive from a full-service grocery store. “How do you do it?” asks a man whose ancestors settled the ridge above Camp Allegheny more than 200 years ago. He cocks his head and looks at me, a twinkle in his eye. Unlike my city friend, he has a pretty good idea how, at least from a practical standpoint. But much like her, and more to the point, he can’t quite fathom why.

Why would anybody choose to be here? And more importantly, why have I?

-----

As the weather warmed last Sunday, I decided to give poor, patient Cosmo a break from my festival preparations and take a drive to check-out the ice on Shaver’s Fork and then continue over Cheat Mountain to Huttonsville, in Randolph County, where I get an always-reliable cell phone signal. I pulled over just past Cheat Bridge and took Cosmo on a slow roam along the still-frozen, snow-laden river’s edge. At one point, I knelt and put my ear near the ground. I heard sounds much like the un-rosined-bow whine of frozen tree boughs scraping together in an Allegheny wind. The sounds of cracking ice. And beneath that, the bass drum rumble of moving water. The promise of Spring.

The sounds told me a point of no return had been passed. Yes, it would be icy cold again…but not for 30 days straight. Yes, it would snow again…but the snow would not stay on the ground for long. The frozen Earth was moving toward melt.

For about an hour, Cosmo and I rambled along the riverbank. Animal tracks traced back and forth across the snow-covered water. Deer, squirrel, raccoon, and many indefinable others had made the river their short-cut.

There was no wind last Sunday along the Shaver’s Fork near Cheat Bridge. I heard the chicka-dee-dee-dee of a single bird. In an hour’s time, two vehicles passed on U.S. 250.

The snow-crunch of my boots and Cosmo’s happy panting was nothing short of symphonic.

-----

Huttonsville is 30 miles from my door.

I thought about this on the way back over Cheat Mountain. The fact that “normal” for me is driving 60 miles for a cell-phone signal. Trust me, I know every pay phone in Pocahontas County from Marlinton to Dunmore to Durbin. Fact is, most of the time they don’t work. And, frankly, most of the time I don’t care. Because most of the time, I don’t “Do Phone."

But some business simply cannot be accomplished any other way. And sometimes, on infrequent occasion, I just need to hear a particular person’s voice. Email only translates so far. And, perhaps, only up to the point at which diminishing returns accrue.

As I ascended Cheat Mountain and looked out over the Allegheny plateau, I thought about the fact that certain of my friends and relatives still cannot quite grasp the logistical fact that I live someplace where a landline is not possible and cell-phone service is not available. Reliance on pay phones, in America? East of the Mississippi? Nah.

In a world where everyone is constantly on the phone, constantly texting, constantly in communication with everyone else…the very idea of being someplace within the continental U.S. where such communication is impossible is, frankly, unimaginable.

Surely, I must be joking, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough.

Nope.

Last Sunday afternoon, February 13, I passed precisely no vehicles, not one, on my 30-mile return from Huttonsville to Brightside. Three deer crossed the road in the middle of the curve just before Durbin. A red-tailed hawk lifted off at Spencer’s Ridge and sailed down the center of the Pike almost all the way to the Brightside gate, before peeling off to the West toward Arbovale.

When I got out of the car to open the gate, I stopped. At this most-windy of imaginable places, nothing stirred. The only discernible sound was that of the car engine fan.

-----

When I say I’m off-grid, I actually think that’s cheating.

Although I don’t have utilities, or television, or telephone, I do have intermittent internet, which has made me dependent on the most grid-like of grids! And without internet, pitiful though it is, I wonder how I would survive here. I’m not saying I couldn’t survive, I’m just wondering how I would adapt.

OK, I’ll come right out and admit that I become rather cranky when I can’t get an NPR radio signal. Proof positive that I’m a communications addict, pure and simple.

My son, Jake, rolls his eyes. "So 19th century."

But then again, he doesn't live here full time.

-----

Why do I?

Simplest answer: Because I want to be here.

Because, corny as it may sound, I consider it a privilege.

I want to witness this place--all of it--this silence, beauty, and deathly harshness, this unforgiving yet bountiful landscape. This place that demands full attention, always, and punishes anything less. Oh yes. This place will keep you on your toes.

And I want to be kept on my toes.

No, it ain't easy! It ain't no Disney World vacation. No Hallmark card fade-to-mist.

Living in Nature isn't an escape from Life.

No, quite to the contrary, it's Life in-your-face, pure and unfiltered.

What else could be better, given the short time we've got to get it?

-----

If a landscape is destroyed and no one is around as witness, does it matter?

Ahhh, this has been the question of the week.

To be honest, I do think of my presence here as a kind of place-holder. I don't live here "for the greater good," but I do believe my living here, my bearing witness, matters.

In the vast "nowhere" of rural Appalachia that corporate interests, in boardrooms as near as Charleston or New York or as far away as Bejing, might decide to drill or mine or otherwise exploit, I exist. I am real. I have, out of whole cloth, created something that did not exist before. Most important is the fact of my being here. I am witness.

As corporate interests keep "putting up parking-lots" in one form or another, increased is the value of those who not only remember, but hew to preserving paradise before paving. There is an intrinsic value in those who don't just talk the talk, but live it, day by day. Come what may.

I am one of these people.

The road less traveled is less traveled because it is a hard road. This doesn't mean the view from the road isn't worth every difficult mile.

Any Occasion Will Do

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
--From “Solitude,” Chapter Five, Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

This morning dawned a fuzzy cotton ball white. The hours since have passed as an artist’s study in progressively blurred vision. Now mid-afternoon, the air itself has taken on a gray cast, as if all the lichen-laden bark of the forest has bled into it, just as watercolor gray on a too-wet brush bleeds across a page of bright white paper.

Looking out the window in front of my desk, I have the ridiculous urge to dab at it with a piece of Kleenex as I would at overly watery brushstrokes. Quick! Before everything runs together and the whole design is lost.

As the fog thickens, the limbs of nearby trees are increasingly disembodied. Branches seem to float, detached from their supporters. Tree tops are cut off from their trunks. I wonder: if it were up to me to bring the fast-fading scene back to life, could I draw it true? The twist and bend of every finger-like twig. The improbable angle and reach of each branch. Sapsucker holes and lichen dressing. The lone oak leaf hanging on by a proverbial thread.

Even as I watch them fade from my window-framed view, I struggle to recall the red maple, sugar maple, red oak, shagbark hickory, black locust, and black birch stretched down the ridge toward the old logging road we call Wiley Way. If the ash-colored air erased the trees as the shake of an Etch-A-Sketch obliterates a drawing, would I be able to recreate them as they were just moments before?

And so it begins, again: The Existential Angst of Allegheny Winter. Where else, but perhaps Alaska, would your mind tell you that you might possibly be required to recreate the landscape from memory?

Just another form of distraction? Harmless entertainment? Like, uh, going to the mall or to the movies or out to dinner? Sort of, yes, but different. A distraction is, indeed, a beguilement, an amusement, something that draws the mind away from what’s important. The difference here is that, when the view out every window is versions of opaque ashy-white, the mind takes its diversionary tactics very seriously.

I rummage in the bookshelves and pull out Walden.

I read it all the way through about a year and a half ago—the first time since highschool—and with much greater enjoyment. I remember especially the chapter on Solitude, which seems, in my memory, to speak to something I’m feeling, though I can’t quite get a handle on what that is.

Holding the book and staring out the window into the increasingly thick gray-white gloom, I feel argumentative. I want Henry David right here, right now. You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do, Mr. Thoreau.

Alas, he’s not available.

Suffice it to say I’m feeling rejected and dejected, alone and betrayed when I turn to Chapter Five. Thoreau insists otherwise. And what he says makes so much damn sense. Quickly I begin to pull a through-line.

The creative force that animates the trees out there—hidden from my sight within the fog—that force animates me. Yes, me. The creative force is everywhere and thus nowhere in particular. It is sense and sense rendered moot, much the way white light is color rendered colorless.

To focus on particular places, views, seasons or sets of sensory inputs as the necessary precondition, or the “occasion,” as Thoreau put it, for “coming to life” is, well, guaranteed to cause us to spend most of our time in a state of purgatory. Not dead, no. But not exactly alive either.

The bitter-sweet air beneath a copse of evergreens, the morning song of towhees, the visual perfection of a late July garden, new snow under a cloudless sky, even the winter-dark outlines of familiar trees through an office window, these smells and sounds and sights are delightful and delicious.

But if Thoreau had Cajun roots, he may well have called these occasions lagniappes of spirit.

Charming little gifts from the Creator. Seductive and beguiling. The spiritual equivalent of flower bouquets and four-star meals. They reveal certain things about the relationship, to be sure, but not what’s most important. Not what endures.

Essentially, as Thoreau wrote, such “outlying and transient circumstances” are a distraction. And distractions, Thoreau implies throughout Walden, can become awfully addicting. To the point that we come to believe we can’t live without them, that, in fact, if forced to choose, we’d rather have our distractions from life than life itself. (And this, mind you, in 1845 or thereabout.)

Lagniappes are nice. What’s not to like about a beautiful day? (Or any other diversion.) But, as Thoreau makes so clear, beautiful days mask more than they reveal both about the Creator and about ourselves. Bottom line: if the relationship hinges on special occasions, on sensory treats, perhaps it’s not that much of a relationship.

In Chapter Five of Walden, Thoreau quotes Confucius:
"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtle powers of Heaven and of Earth! We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them."

The “subtle powers of Heaven and of Earth,” are, in my interpretation of this passage, the Creator’s Energy, imbued into and thus become an inalienable part of Everything.

I believe this, I do. Especially when it’s easy. When the air is sweet and the sky is clear and faith would seem to demand nothing whatsoever from me. When I kneel in the warm Summer earth of the garden, I am part of Everything and Oneness is not a matter of faith so much as a matter of fact.

During an Allegheny Mountain mid-winter, the situation is quite a bit different. From weather-mandated physical separation, a spiritual alienation easily follows. How quickly I forget to remember we are One. How quickly I fall under the influence of thought-phantoms of separation.

The snow falls, the wind blows, the fog persists. And as each day unfolds, I feel myself more distracted by the absence of the lagniappes upon which I’d grown so dependent. The Creator would seem to have stopped wooing me entirely.

But, of course, such a statement presupposes that all “occasions” of connection with the Creator’s Energy must occur out there, on days when the view through the window is crystal clear. Such a statement assumes that the sight of wind-wizened twigs on the end of a lichen-draped branch imparts more Spirit than the sight of my own work-roughened fingers at the kitchen sink or the keyboard.

After re-reading Walden, I’m quite certain that Thoreau (and perhaps Confucius as well) would tell me I’m mistaken in this. They’d tell me, instead, that the bones of my hands are the trees, and my skin the forest floor. They'd insist that I am, myself, no less cause for wonderment than any other creation. On any occasion. The workman does not leave his work, regardless of the weather.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com

Simple Gifts

Sixty-two days in, and I freely admit, I'm weary of Winter.

The high temperature on November 30 was 54 degrees. The high on December first was 21, a temperature only rarely reached since. December 2010 was the coldest December in Pocahontas County's recorded history.

And then came the snowdrifts of January. Plans were repeatedly canceled and appointments postponed and all manner of projects put on-hold as Mother Nature demanded my full attention. When she gets into one of these snowy-blowy moods, only a fool ignores her. Trust me, Winter on Top of Allegheny suffers no fools.

Winter in the northern hemisphere is officially defined as the period of time between the Winter Solstice (December 21) and the Vernal Equinox (March 21). In addition to being the coldest time of year, it is also, as a kind of hey, let's get all the bad stuff out of the way at once bonus, marked by the shortest days and longest nights! No wonder black bears spend most of it sleeping. Why the heck not?

So, in purely calendrical terms, Winter will be half-over on February fourth. However, since Winter actually began on December first, I'm choosing to think of it as a little more than two-thirds over. Neat trick, huh? Yep. When you spend a lot of time alone on an Allegheny ridge-top, a snow-struck mind uses any trick it can wrap itself around. Ahem. And, just to be clear, the manifest fact that actual Winter weather may come and go well past March 21 is, well, not something I'm prepared to consider right now. So, be a mensch, would you? Don't remind me. Or if you simply must remind me, come up here and do it in person. I’ve got soup!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, on occasion, every-so-often over these past 62 days, I’ve felt myself yearning forward. Leaning into the future as into a strong headwind. Staring squinty-eyed at Spring as if it were a reachable mirage just there, right over there, past the funnel-cloud snow devils whipping up and down the ridge.

As someone who professes to value living in the present, Allegheny Winter truly challenges me to walk the talk.

Nearly every morning she throws this gauntlet: “Be here, now.” And not just when it’s easy. Not just on those rare days when the sun shines in a Caribbean blue sky and the snow sparkles like Swarovski crystal, those days when the beauty of this place enters my blood, rushes through me, fills me with the knowingness of true love.

But on the other days. The days I’d take a one-way trip to the Caribbean and never look back. True love? Yeah, right.

Those are the days Winter grabs my chin in her icy fingers and blows her frigid breath in my face: “Stay with me.” Her voice has a rather unfortunate, snakelike quality that, nonetheless, serves to focus my attention quite well. Such a command conveys a power not unlike that of Robert DeNiro’s character in the Meet the Fockers movies, when he points his index and middle fingers toward his own eyes and then toward Ben Stiller’s.

Some mornings I feel quite willing to salute. Other mornings I’d prefer a gesture just a wee bit less polite.

Either way, suffice it to say, Winter never fails to get my attention.

And it is my attention she never fails to reward. Always when I least expect it. Often, in fact, when I’ve damn near given up.

A bald eagle stands in the middle of the Old Pike just past Spencer’s Ridge. He looks my way, and then lifts off. Two massive flaps take him above the trees and away.

The copper-bright tail of a red-tailed hawk shines like metal captured in a fleeting ray of sunlight.

Chickadees fly from the feeder to the nearby conifers, where they disappear into the cave-like bower created by the lowest, snow-laden bows. Is this, perhaps, where these petite birds shelter at night, during the harshest winds?

Danny, Brightside’s resident nuthatch, hammers sunflower seeds into the cracks in the deck railing, gaining the better advantage from which to pry their innards.

I watch one and then another and then another junco put his feet together and hop backwards to pull snow off of seeds spilled from the feeder.

The Junco Hop.

Did I just see that? I do believe I did.

Winter is teaching me, she is.

No doubt about it, I'm a slow learner, and stubborn to boot.

But, slowly and surely, I'm learning how to unwrap her gifts.

Life Actually

I opened my eyes to a crème-colored sky. Shortcake infused with the faintest blush of strawberry pink. I blinked. The boar-bristle edge of the ridge across the valley appeared as if etched, each tree limb precisely carved and filled with black ink. I blinked again, my vision undiluted by snow or fog or cloud, and felt an upwelling of wonderment akin to what I experienced when I was 12, and walked outside wearing prescription lenses for the first time.

I sat up and looked out the window behind my bed.

After what had, in truth, been only days (although on certain days it surely felt like years!) since the sky dawned clear, my world appeared rendered in the miracle of High Definition. All fuzzy edges remade with Exact-o blade precision. The battleship gray of snow-storm and frozen-fog replaced with an Allegheny Mountain Winter’s true colors: white, black, amber and green.

True colors, shining through.

As I let my eyes take-in the crystalline ridge top scene just beyond the bedroom window, I remembered what Jake would say when he was little and we watched a black-and-white movie. “But it’s not black-and-white, it’s gray.” Back then I completely got what he was saying. Zebras are black-and-white. Penguins are black-and-white. Oreo cookies are black-and-white. The Number 2 pencil-drawn figures on the TV are not black-and-white. Silly Mommy.

But now, his words have a different sort of resonance. To live an Allegheny Mountain Winter is much like finding oneself in an old, “gray” movie.

Except on those rare occasions when it’s not.

This particular morning was one of those occasions. As in the modern “gray” movie, Pleasantville, I awakened to find the gray rubbed off, revealing a startling spectrum of life always present, regardless how hidden.

The deep, dark green of conifer boughs shown to full advantage topped by epaulets of sun-struck, sparkling snow. Amber grasses curved permanently against a wind that only this early morning had found somewhere else to blow. Arcs carved in the snow beneath each tasseled stalk belied their current ease with tattooed proof of the wind’s recent harassment. The sepia delicacy of dried yarrow blossoms, crocheted doilies set just-so among the sofa-like drifts by a fussbudget maiden aunt. A single yellow American Beech leaf, skittering across the brilliant white blanket as if pulled by an invisible string.

And birds. Yes, birds. Not huddled feather-by-wing near the porch feeder, but zooming about the yard! Flitting and flouncing and sassy-dancing. A jubilee of juncos, a cache of chickadees, and my resident singletons: Ted, the aloof, all-business tufted titmouse, and no-neck Danny, a nuthatch with enough personality for a nuthouse.

I raised the window behind the bed and leaned toward the fresh air, which lapped against my face like a splash of spring water. Sight. Sensation. And then, suddenly, sound. Smacking stips and buzzing tzeets and cackling chatters. The high, clear, keew of the juncos intermingled with the throaty, bossy "Are you talking to me?" dee-dee-dee of the chickadees.

Such a mid-winter symphony! And every bird looking so fine. Tail feathers a-zip-pop-snapping. Heads cocked, beaks open. I easily imagined the gleam in their eyes.

That same gleam was in mine.

Sure, another storm will come. The gray film will roll. Silence, save for the sound of wind, will prevail. Subtitle duty will, as usual, devolve to me. And I’ll have to create my own narrative. But this particular morning, I got a reminder wrapped in a reprieve.

Rub away the gray, just scratch the surface—a single scratch will do—and there it is: see it, feel it, hear it.

Life, actually.

Cleavability

Cleave, v: to split with or as with a sharp instrument; to accomplish by cutting; to pierce or penetrate; to adhere, cling or stick fast; to be faithful.


January 12 was one of the worst weather days I’ve ever experienced. And I don’t use that adjective lightly.

Here at Brightside, I’ve suffered through incessant Spring winds that have shaken this unshakable log home to its core. Winds for which “howling” is equivalent to “sighing,” and would be welcomed, ohso welcomed in exchange for the braying, bawling, scratchy pounding of the hounds of hell on every window and door. Winds I simply could not withstand, yet within which I was forced to crawl.

Even fiercer winds against which I could not push open the kitchen door.

Surely I exaggerate? I assure you, kind sir, I do not.

Howling winds? Pish-posh.

Lashing rain? Check. Scouring hail? Check. Punishing heat? Check. Bitter cold? Check. Darkness so utterly complete that I could not see the fingers of a hand pressed palm to nose? Yes, that, too. But only once.

In other words, I’ve had my share of scary, self-admonishing, pull-thyself-up-by-thy-bootlaces moments where “weather” is concerned.

Nonetheless, January 12 was different. Why?

In the sub-zero 40 mph wind, it wasn’t annoyance or discomfort that mattered. It wasn't a case of mind over matter, but rather the matter of life and death. Simply put: This kind of weather could kill me. And I knew it.

All day long, it was as if Winter herself were poking a long, bony finger in my chest, making damn certain I got the message. And trust me, I didn’t need to hear her whispered words to get the gist.

It started when I awoke, continued not just during, but both before and after my time plowing, and didn’t end when I trudged out, through a frigid, windborne snow-cloud, to turn off the generator at 10 pm. Returning to the house, I stopped for a moment and stood as a figurine in a shaken snow-globe. I was, quite honestly, awed to find myself in such a rarified atmosphere, with windblown flakes like diamond shavings upwelling around me, subsuming me. Again I thought of the draw of the deep sea, of falling off an underwater cliff, a sensation every scuba diver knows as equal parts sinking and rising. I looked to the light of the house and walked toward it. I thought of stories I’ve read about the warm-bath-like peace that accompanies the process of freezing.

As I knocked snow off my boots, and pulled the storm door closed behind me, I wondered: How do they know? Those who write of the so-called calm that attends a frozen death. How do they know what it feels like?

And without the benefit of goose-down jacket and Thinsulate-lined boots, without the bright fluorescent light to guide me, would I succumb to cold, just as at least one other person has done, right here on this very ridge top?

How long would I last out here, alone, in the insistent, swirling, icy darkness?

I shut-out the cold when I closed the door, but I took the questions to bed with me.

This weather claims residence in the marrow of my bones. Life simply does not get more intimate than this. This weather pierces, penetrates, and adheres. This weather cuts even as it sticks. It cleaves.

As I lay in bed, I saw again the snow-wake spilling back from the plow-blade as it cut through the pristine bank. The hypnotic fact of a froth of snow brought to life by the application of a sharp instrument. An instrument wielded by me.

Yes, it's beautiful. Beautiful in the way pulling carrots from the earth is beautiful. Killing the plant to eat the root. Destroying so that one might live. At least for one more day.

The analogy is more apt than you might think. The snowdrift, like hunger itself, may be quenched, quelched, held-back today, but it will return with the next wind. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Make no mistake, it will return. Today's plowing, like today's pulled and consumed carrot, has no meaning whatsoever in the future. It doesn't exist.

The thrill of being the first human to cleave a snowbank is as undeniable as it is indescribable. The knowledge that it will reassemble itself behind me is, well, perhaps the nature of Life Itself rendered in momentarily observable form.

And aren't I the lucky one to get to experience such cleavability first hand? Yes I am. I most certainly believe that I am.

In large part, perhaps the largest part, that's why I'm here.

I continue to encounter those who miss this hard, harsh fact of my reason for being, who insist on imagining solitary existence on a remote mountaintop in almost entirely romantic terms. Which is to say, they think of it as a kind of idealistic, quixotic quest, somehow abstracted from the realities of not just modern life, but life itself. One extended Little House on The Prairie vacation. Aw-shucks and Isn't that sweet.

Well, yeah, sure. It's mighty sweet, life without the hassles of television and telephone and utility companies and road maintenance and 911 service. Yeah, it's simpler, being entirely dependent on oneself.

But such simplicity comes at a price.

Every moment here, life cleaves close.

Home

"People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Letter Seven, May 14, 1904)

I spent New Year's weekend back home in Memphis, where I grew up and married, and my son was born, where I lived for most of my life. In the far southwest corner of Tennessee, wedged up against the flat sides of Arkansas and Mississippi.

Memphis sits at the northern tip of the Mississippi delta, a remarkably flat, incredibly fertile alluvial plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Indeed, Memphis has always seemed, in appearance as well as temperament, to belong more to the Magnolia State of Mississippi than to the rest of Tennessee.

This is a discontinuity I've addressed repeatedly in recent years when West Virginians, hearing that I'm from Tennessee, assume a mountain heritage as explanation for my residence on a mountaintop in the Allegheny Highlands. "Oh no, " I explain, "Memphis is not like the rest of the state. Its flat." More than one person has blinked at me in astonishment. "Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong place," I say with a shrug and a grin. Such an absurd comment often elicits the intended chuckle--but I don't actually believe what I'm saying. As poet Louis Simpson wrote: Destiny fits, always.

I belong here. I simply had to spend 30+ years somewhere else in order to realize it. Which is to say that although Memphis is, by virtually every obvious metric, just about as different from where I belong as a place can be, I know I couldn't be here if I hadn't been there first.

Memphis is where I learned to love wild places. As a child, I sought them out--such desire being bred in the bone, native to me, not taught--and found them wherever I could. Undeveloped lot. Untamed backyard. Railroad siding. Drainage ditch. Memphis is where I became a farmer. In a tiny backyard vegetable garden, shoe-spooned between a concrete drive and a privet hedge. Memphis is where trees became companions. Not fixed and immutable features of the city landscape, but cohorts on this journey whose successes were to be celebrated and set-backs mourned.

Memphis is where Nature became something I could not live without.

Memphis is also where I learned to accept that the wounds of opposition create the rawness of possibility. In ever-present conflict, there is a fertility of the possible, out of which anything imaginable might grow, bad or good.

As I flew in from my connection in Atlanta, I had my usual rush of conflicted feelings. Where Memphis and I are concerned there's always plenty to be conflicted about. From the socio-historical: endemic racism, urban sprawl, political incompetence; to the abjectly personal: Hey, I used to live here! And a bunch of people I love still do! But I gotta admit that what overwhelmed me, as I gazed out the window, what drove all the thought-phantoms away, were the trees.

Yes, of course, all the sharp lines and angles of human endeavor, all the insistent geometry of a city was present, but trees were present, too. Present in enough numbers to matter. To have not just a caucus, but a quorum, a vote, a voice.

Look at that! Trees!

"This place has a lot of oaks," I observed with pleasure the following day, as my mother and I drove about the city, visiting family and friends. The rusty-brown of tenacious red, pin and chestnut oak leaves caught and held my attention, drawing my gaze upward and away from the traffic, the lights, the immutable colors and sounds of a city.

Seeing the trees was like discovering a shared memory with an estranged lover. Yes, there was that. Better yet, there is that. Still. A reason for our connection. Living proof.

As a child, I loved to climb to the very top of an immense southern magnolia tree in our neighbor's yard. The smooth-wrinkly bark reminded me of elephant skin. The white blossoms looked like gigantic gardenias set atop thick shiny leaves bigger than both of my hands placed side-by-side. I was scared-safe, clinging to the tree trunk, swaying in a summer breeze, 30 feet up.

I don't recognize you, I thought, as we drove about town. As I noticed all the absent structures, replaced with new ones. The absent open spaces, filled. The asphalt, concrete, brick and mortar. I don't recognize you, I thought, but I know who you are.

Four days later, I walked out of the airport in Roanoke, a big city by local standards, by my standards. But no. Not Atlanta. Not Memphis. I walked out of the airport to a view, not of parking garages, not of buses pulled front-to-end, but of mountains. Delicate Virginia mountains, to be sure, but beautiful, nonetheless. And when I got to the car, I turned around, looked west, and boy-oh-boy did I smile!

That "kiss the ground" feeling? Well, once I was on US 220 and safely past Fincastle, I had it, big time. If I'd been driving my 10th grade boyfriend home in the Plymouth Volare with a plan toward finding a good place to dawdle, I couldn't have been more lit up with happy expectation.

"Home." I said it out loud, and with a chesty rumble. As if daring someone, anyone, to suggest I couldn't or shouldn't. Dare me not to, sucker. "I'm. Going. Home."

If Splendor, Mirth and Good Cheer are the three Greek "graces," then assuredly they all reside in a desired home, and with anyone who finds herself where she belongs. Regardless how incomprehensible such sense of belonging is to outsiders.

"You're goofy," my Mom offered, good-naturedly, when I reported how happy I was to be heading
 west on 220. Heading toward a snow cloud, and an off-grid cabin five miles up an un-plowed dirt road. A place a good two-hour drive from actual four-lane traffic, or anything approaching an actual mall. A place where there are no utilities, no TV, no land-line, and cellphones don't work. A place where my frozen garden will sleep soundly until mid-June.

A place where trees don't share the landscape, they dominate. At least for now. And destiny has marked me as witness.

Home. There's the home you're born into, and the home you choose. Sometimes they're the same. Sometimes not. If you get really lucky, the home you choose, chooses you back.

Lucky me.

Cold by Any Other Name

“It's cold out folks. Bone crushing cold. The kind of cold which will wrench the spirit out of a young man or forge it into steel.”
--John Corbett as “Chris” on Northern Exposure, 1992

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
--from Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

I’ve found myself staring out the window, any window, a lot this month.

Staring empty-minded into snowy murk that reminds me of nothing so much as a current of plankton-filled seawater. A current rushing past the window as it once rushed past my scuba mask. A current so close, a mere arm's length away, but far enough beyond the underwater cliff-top over which I floated to give me pause. Stop my progress, if only momentarily.

Out there, in the colorless abyss, a woman could lose her bearings.

This was the revealed secret at the heart of the water-current’s seductive force. And so, more than once, more than a dozen times in my scuba-diving years, I allowed myself to float forward into that powerful flow. Eyes focused through the plankton swirl to the impenetrable gloom, I allowed myself, if only for a few moments, to be taken.

Taken in. Taken over. Taken up by Nature. If only for a few moments, I untethered my self and let her go.

That was then.

This Allegheny mountain December, I stand at the storm door and trace my fingers along the ice crystals formed on the inside pane. Just beyond the glass, the snow-globe snow swirls, directionless and upended, glowing in the impenetrable gloom.

But I’m not taken in, not taken over. Despite my desire, despite the visions of Caribbean reef fish schooling in my head, I’m not taken up by Nature. Not today, no. Not right now. I remain quite tethered to my self and quite limited by my life on this side of the ice-sheathed door.

Why? Because its just too damn cold.

By which I mean frigid, gelid, polar and bleak. Cutting, raw and rimy. Nippy, snappy, frigorific (causing cold), frosty (devoid of warmth) and frore (frozen). At the very least, folks, its seriously shivery.

So, rather than floating forward into Nature's powerful flow, I pull back. I withdraw my fingers from the frozen glass. I shut the inner door. I stand by the fire and turn my face toward the window. I stare out, as if expecting against all empirical evidence the arrival of a too-long-absent lover. I am Marianne searching the horizon for Willoughby in Sense & Sensibility. Catherine waiting upon Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Scarlett mooning after Ashley in Gone with the Wind. (Well, maybe that's a bit much. After all, it is only December!)

But isn't that the point? Only December. So early in our separation, mine from Nature, so soon this barrier of glass and wood come between us, and already, already, yes, I feel a heart-scouring loneliness no less potent than that of these fictional heroines.

After all, it was just last month that I plunged my hands into warm dirt and felt potatoes snug against my palms. A woman gets used to such things.

Staring out the window, I can't help but ask: How could you? How could you do this to me?

I watch juncos wiggle bird-sized notches in the snow atop the deck railing. They appear absolutely resolute in their commitment to persevere, come what may.

I, being human and Scarlett-like, am nowhere near so accepting.

As a gust of wind sends a raft of roof-snow careening into the birds, my only thought is profoundly parsimonious: How could you be so cold?

Cold. By which word I am referring not only to the absence of heat, but to the absence of sentiment. Make no mistake, there is a coldness to Nature that has as much to do with attitude as it does with temperature. There is an abruptness, an inexplicable withdrawal of obvious signs of affection that puts me in mind of a fickle lover, that causes me to gaze out the window in yearning contemplation of all the many whens and whys she is not about to answer--not now, not ever. There is an absolutism about her that shocks and offends my modern, delicate sensibilities and tempts me to rebellion. My every molecule demands an explanation.

As this long December draws to a close, I know I would be much better served by patience.

Patience is a curious concept. It is essentially, in my opinion, the capacity to endure. Patience is not the same thing as suffering, although it may often contain suffering. Patience is not the same thing as passivity or inaction, although it may require both. Patience is tolerance of unacceptable conditions tempered by the knowledge that better conditions can and likely will occur--but only if you refuse to check out of the scene. Patience is a state of active waiting for the moment to strike. Patience is a state of rapt attention. Wait and watch come from the same indo-european root, which means, essentially, to be awake.

The pace of Nature, it would seem, is the pace that adjusts--on the fly, at a wakeful moment's notice, as required. It neither pushes nor holds back. It is both the current and everything that enters the current. Nature is patience--whole and entire.

Which means, even when she's bitter cold, Nature contains me. And though she may see fit to withdraw her obvious signs of affection for a time, it's nothing personal. Really. It's just something she's gotta do.

I know this, I do. I just forget it sometimes.

This has been one hell of a cold-dark month.

I watch snow flakes blow horizontal across the deck. The snow-topped rail is a barrier beyond which all is milky-murk. Would that I could stand on that rail and cast off to float gently in the flake-tossed air over Hidden Valley and hear the stone-rush of Slabcamp Run.

Even now, inside my walls of glass and wood, I dare to hear the music. Do you?

I hear the song-promise of Spring, buried deep within those frozen notes.