Sunday sunset in Flint

What is it that makes autumn leaves smell so tangy? Somebody knows the answer, but I'd never asked myself that before. Tonight, walking back from EVM's offices in the light of a beautiful sunset, I took advantage of my recent breathing improvements -- yes, I really DO have a diaphragm and have been relearning how to use it -- to savor the season's spicy fragrance. Ahhh...this has been a lovely weekend.

Reprise of the Lilies

While Mark Sanford, clearly in a state of wrinkled-forehead manly disarray, is blathering on about how he "developed a relationship" with a "dear, dear friend" and spent five days crying in Argentina, I repaired to the back yard to document this year's crop of lilies. They are right on time compared to last year, when they showed up here on June 21 -- and they've been blooming brilliantly for a few days. Thirty-five of them today. A finer entertainment than prurience and politicos in "serious overdrive." Lordy, lordy.

A Morning with Gilkey Creek

There's something I've been wanting to write about, something that's nudging at me, a bone in my throat, an agitation in my craw. (What is a craw, anyway? Note to self: Google "craw.")*

I begin with little winding Gilkey Creek, a feeder into the Flint River. It has been part of my life for about 25 years -- since my first husband, Danny, and I moved into our house on Seventh Street. Back then I started walking and jogging along the creek and over its three little foot bridges as part of a route through the neighborhood that has continued to this day.

Here's the thing: sometimes I am in denial about the huge chunk of my life that I've spent in Flint -- I don't know why, exactly, except that as I've said before in many other contexts, I never thought I'd stay this long, and sometimes it simply doesn't feel like "my kind of place" -- or the kind of place I thought I'd end up. Going there in my thinking dangerously leads to "it wasn't supposed to be like this," or, "I could have done better..." And thus to a tunnel of self-doubt if not outright self-recrimination, and nothing good comes of that.

But then, there's this little creek that I've been pausing to look at on its many curves and byways when it's crusted with ice in February and gushing with green life in early May; there are sometimes ducks noodling around under the bridge on Brookside. I've noted the way October leaves dapple the water in red and gold; I've delighted in the little rippling rapids at the footbridge by Kensington. This little creek has meandered its way into my daily life, and I've come to count on it. Maybe it's like an arranged marriage, where after years of just living one day after the other, you suddenly realize you've grown fond of the mate conjoined to you by fate.

There's passive aggression in keeping my feelings at bay about a place I've lived in much longer than the whole of my childhood, much longer than anyplace else I've ever lived, for that matter. It strikes me suddenly that one can take out one's individual resentment and disappointment on the land -- by withholding commitment, by ignoring its needs and travails. By simply refusing or failing to notice.

This dolorous line of reflection from individual circumstance leads me deeper: sometimes individual difficulties, unresolved baggage about ourselves, can become something bigger, taking a toll on Mother Earth. If we're not taking proper care of ourselves and unearthing (ohh...untentional but lucky slip...to "unearth" like digging potatoes out of the dirt, a gift, a consequence of our husbandry) thus, unearthing the meaning of our lives, perhaps we also stop paying attention to the natural world that sustains us.

So this is partly an argument for taking care of ourselves -- not just at the superficial "yes, I exercised today," but at the spiritual level -- "yes, I am finding a path to forgiveness, moving on from the griefs and disappointments of the past."

I woke up Saturday, in short, and decided to get up and go to Gilkey Creek, where good-hearted folks not as ambivalent or reclusive as me had organized a Flint River cleanup, including my little tributary. This new, uncharacteristic decisiveness, not without resistance or misanthropy, overall felt refreshing. I thoroughly enjoyed the morning, getting muddy on the banks while tugging out drenched plastic bags ("Toys 'r Us" being the predominant logo in my assigned stretch of creek), shards of styrofoam, candy wrappers -- the usual detritus of thoughtless humanity.

Hmm...that casual little reference just jarred me into insight -- "my little tributary" -- it IS my little creek, as it is all of ours. As I was arguing myself out of bed, dreading having to interact with "people" in my current not-quite-completed rehabilitative state, I thought "you don't have to make nice with the people. But you could care about the creek." That little creek in all its imperfections has given me many moments of pleasure. It's part of the land that was here before us and now, as always, is deserving of our love.

*Craw: a pouch in many birds and some lower animals that resembles a stomach for storage and preliminary maceration of food (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

Today's Flint Walk: "My Lizard Likes Them"

In bright sunshine, I met Helen, a woman I'd seen walking from time to time. (It felt soothingly Old World that we shook hands; she looked like she might be in her 80s but has a fine strong handshake. I will mourn the loss of shaking hands if the flu epidemic forces us all away from simple physical gestures.) Helen was walking her dog Maggie, who Helen said is 17. We stopped to chat on the sidewalk east of Pierce School, looking at the caved-in spot where the big old ash tree used to be until a December ice storm got it.

We started talking about dandelions, which are just busting out all over the yard around Pierce's playground. Helen confessed she actually likes them and feels no need to root them out. The other day on her walk, she said, she ran into a woman with a handful of picked dandelions. "Oh! So you like dandelions, too!" Helen exclaimed. "No, I feed them to my lizard," the woman replied. "My lizard likes them." We smiled broadly at each other. What a great neighborhood!

I recalled how in Ohio's early springs my mom used to pick dandelion greens and cook them up in a cast iron frying pan with a vinaigrette dressing -- it was fabulous. But as I told Helen, I never have enough nerve to pick the greens from my own yard to try this dish, which was one of my favorites as a kid. I keep thinking about the parade of dogs on the street and the raccoons that obviously explore my back yard at night. When I was six and we moved from the country to the city, one of the things my mother mourned was the ready supply of "clean" dandelion greens in April.

I still might try it, though. Helen reminded me I could just wash them carefully. Next week probably will be too late -- the greens have to be young and tender.

Adult Domestic

This may sound odd, but...I'm trying to grow up. The events of the past six months of my life plunged me into a strange new life cycle, in which in fear and panic I regressed and almost collapsed, the architecture of my self seriously compromised. The near loss of one's self is an extreme and frightening thing. If one makes it out of the tunnel alive, as I did, much is changed.

I was just standing out on the back porch in the last light of this gorgeous spring day and thinking something like, "I'm experiencing this differently." The air smelled good. I heard the robin doing that bubbly melody in the mulberry tree. The sky, deep blue overhead and lighter, cerulean behind the western line of roofs and budded-out maple trees, filled me with gratitude. I've seen it all before, but somehow I'm different now; a certain doubt-filled anachronistic naivete and denial has leached away. The words to describe it aren't coming out right; there are poems to be written about this eventually.

Another, similar moment. Today I was out in the front yard, raking. Since we bought this house I've hesitated to bond with it fully for some reason, and that means I've almost never treated its yards, front or back, with the proper care, leaving the mowing and snow removal to a GM retiree who'll do everything that needs to be done for $25 a pop here and there. But today I was raking it myself, systematically and serenely making little piles of dead grass and sticks, leaves left from October. Putting them into the big brown lawn bag, bending, breathing, raking. It felt like an adult thing to do: taking care of my own piece of earth, doing what needs to be done. Most of my life I have not felt like an adult, for whatever reason, as if I didn't have what it takes, couldn't make a convincing case that I met the criteria. But today, raking quietly in the April sun, my life re-arranged by crisis and recovery, I felt peacefully, tentatively whole. Quietly, unsensationally grown up.

Monday Morning Aerobics for Gray Cells

Brain scientists say the secret of retaining memory, if I understand correctly, is to lay down deep paths in one's thick matter between the ears.

I'm trying to dig a deeper vein for two words I like and often can't remember for some reason.

Last week I couldn't think of the name for the red, orange, sometimes purplish flowers that spill over many walls and fences here in SoCal. All that kept coming to me was frangipani, a wonderful Polynesian word which is fun to say and anchored in my memory because, I suspect, it got anchored there during two very intense years of my life. Every time I asked my brain to locate the word for those flowers, it kept spitting back "frangipani, frangipani!" and I kept saying, NO, thanks for that word but that isn't it.

Finally, at an unguarded, relaxed moment the word I wanted popped out: bougainvillea! Whew. The same number of syllables as frangipani, but a different flora altogether. Bougainvillea! Above, courtesy of Google images, is the way they look on a veranda in Zimbabwe. There's a sweet word, by the way -- veranda. Sounds so peaceful and relaxing.

The second other word that often eludes me is the one for the chemical rush one gets out of, say, running a marathon, or, in my more geriatric life, getting to the local rib joint in time for the senior special. I think and think and think and finally, the word magically plops into consciousness: ENDORPHINS! Remembering this beneficent word gives me an endorphin rush. Now I'm ready to start my week, my personal lexicon spruced up. Bougainvillea, endorphins! Hooray!

Roses for a Sunday Evening

My friend Dr. Teddy dropped by last night with the amazing news that her mother, who we thought would have been dead weeks ago, is not only still with us but serenely declared, in her new adult foster care home, "I'm happy." There is a message here -- about the depths of mercy and possibilities not just for a good death, but for a redemptive final chapter. We sat on the back porch sipping our frosty gin and tonics and puffing Sherman ovals (just two each -- we are very particular about our cigarettes, both in quantity and quality) and smiled at each other. It's enough to make us believe in religion.

And Teddy brought these roses, from her garden. They remind me, I told her, of Sunday nights back on Gibbs Avenue in Canton in the 50s, where after the evening service on a summer night like this, the whole small congregation would troop over to Flossie McLaughlin's tiny house on Sherlock Place to see her roses. They were much like these -- prolific and delicate and sweet smelling. These sit on my kitchen table, gently scenting the whole room with nostalgia.

There's one more thing about this photo. I put the roses in a vase given to me 40 years ago when we'd moved from Canton to Akron, a difficult parish my father served for just two bumpy years. As I noted in a blog post earlier this month, my maternal ancestors' homestead was there in Akron -- they had been a prominent family with a big house and a lot of land. We lived across the street from what had been my great-grandmother's house -- a place my mother had visited many times as a child. I went to a junior high school named for my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Thornton. My grandmother, Amy -- one of Sam Thornton's dozen of grandchildren, had married a man from Akron named Austin Vandersall. By the time we moved there, however, the Thornton house was long gone, replaced by a row of tawdry storefronts. The neighborhood was in deep decline and the reminders of my ancestors' prosperous days were fragmented and ambiguous. It particularly affected my mother to be there; I think the street was full of ghosts for her.

Anyway, back to the vase.

It was given to me by a woman named Sarah Russ, who at the time (1962) was nearly 100 but still sharp and engaged. I still have the note she included, rolled up in a drawer. It says, in a shaky script: "Long ago my sister Anna taught a class of little girls in our Sunday School. I think your grandma Amy Youtz, who later became Amy Vandersall, was a member of that class. My younger sister Nellie was about the same age but she was in another class. Here is a vase my older sister Anna gave to her at Christmas. It was just like the ones she gave to the girls in her class. We thought they were pretty. I would like to give this one to you. Rev. A. Vandersall was our minister when I was a little girl. He gave me the nickname of Sadie. I liked him and I liked the name, so I used it for many years. I seldom use it now. But, in memory of him and your grandma, and in memory of my sisters Nellie and Anna, I will sign this...Sadie Russ."

I've always appreciated this small act of kindness from an old woman to a young girl struggling with a depressed mother at a time we were haunted by history.

This is how I define "sumptuous"

...and what fine luxury -- right in our back yard.

The Last Day of Class

One thing I love about academia is that every once in awhile, you get to start over. This builds in an element of optimism and refreshment that is simply not replicable in any other profession that I know of.

I loved my spring semester students: they were grownups, grad students who did what I asked and more. They were wonderful writers, deep readers, critical thinkers. They were talkative and funny and they seemed to bond with each other. I can't believe I get paid for this -- they were great. The class, called "Green Ink: Writing the Earth" took them into substantial considerations of their own memories and relationship with nature, and they read classic essays by Emerson, Thoreau, Fritjof Capra, Wendell Berry, William Cronon, Barry Lopez, Lame Deer, Joy Williams, Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula LeGuin, and many others. They attended and critiqued a conference featuring Whole Communities founder Peter Forbes, whom they found pleasant enough but unsatisfyingly general. They met Michigan poets Keith Taylor, Alison Swan and Terry Wooten. They remembered and examined many experiences with their changing worlds: a lake losing its water in Northern Michigan, a run-in with zebra mussels, a patio that became the focal point of a dying marriage...they were heroic in their writing.

And after class tonight, I stopped by East Village Magazine and had a couple of fingers of Irish with my friend Gary. Two days before the Summer Solstice, the sun took its time setting over our really beautiful blue collar town. I'm very fond of this old burg tonight. Now it's time to gear up for the big shift to the City of Angels.

Birdie 911: Behaving Like a Human

So, taking out trash I came upon a little bird sitting on the walk. Just sitting there, making hoarse little chirps. You know there's something wrong when a little bird doesn't move. I went immediately into "high-voice" koo-kooka-choo, Hey little birdie, where's your mommie? etc. etc. and still the little critter didn't budge, except for a little hop and then another, though his little bright eyes looked terrified. I saw no blood and his wings, folded around fledgling fluff, appeared fully formed. I deposited my bag on the curb and when I turned around, baby birdie was still there, a little puffball, black and white, a nuthatch I think. I bent down slowly so as not to alarm him and just as I did, a big UGLY yellow cat with a half a tail -- one of the feline thugs of the neighborhood -- slithered out from behind my house.

I stood up and hollered, "Don't even THINK about it!" He sneered but moved his evil boniness off behind the garage.

I suspect there was a narrative arc, as we say in the writing biz, in process, but non-human animals don't engage in spoken word to fill the gaps. They don't give a damn about audience, purpose or any other rhetorical niceties. It's all show-not-tell -- they just want to eat. But I didn't want Thug Kat (K seems to suit him more than C) to have this particular baby for dinner right in front of me. I wasn't in the mood.

I went back to the house for a handful of thistle seed and a soft black towel. The birdie didn't go for the seed, but he seemed quite comforted by the towel, and let me pick him up gently and move him to the back of the house, where I thought I'd hide him in some shrubs. At first he didn't like that idea and climbed up my arm. As much as I felt impelled to do an Albert Schweitzer I didn't like the idea of a wild bird climbing up my body, so I nudged him down, reining in my cognitive dissonance, and got him to step off the towel into a branch of the overgrown privet. He seemed at home there and let out a bunch of little mommy calls. Unfortunately I didn't hear a response, though it's common to hear repeated nuthatch spondees on the trunks of old spruce and maple around here.

My neighbor's grown daughter Amy came running out because I'd left the front door open. She wondered what was going on. There've been a bunch of breakins on our street and I think she worried my open door signaled one in progress. It's good having neighbors who care.

No, I told her, only a poor little birdie, maybe fallen from the nest. But by the way, that piece of rhubarb pie you gave me Sunday was fabulous -- still warm, and a flaky crust! She wanted to see the birdie and we located it, up a few more branches. Nuthatch, she confirmed. Big enough to defend himself I think, Amy said. After rhubarb pleasantries, standing around peering into the shrub, we left the birdie there.

What's a person to do? There's no safe place: cats, I know, climb trees. I suspect I held off the cycle of life for only a brief interval. Did I help? I suspect I only helped myself, salving a moment of reflex compassion. On the other hand, I was a human animal, doing what I do, just like Thug Kat doing what he does. It's interesting the universe accommodates both leanings.

Buoyant, Ghostly Weediness at Chevy in the Hole

I just know I'm going to write a lot more about this: 2008 is the 100th birthday of General Motors, and that blessed event, beginning a whole century of exuberant innovation, huge-scale manufacturing, massive migrations from the South, flamboyant Big Money, and the collapse and abandonment we've had several decades to adjust to, occurred right here in Flint.

Specifically, it began at what we now affectionately call "Chevy in the Hole," a huge compound of factories in bottom land of the Flint River just west of downtown.

The site is now a giant brownfield. I find it irresistibly ghostly and haunting.

I took my "Green Ink" students there on a bike tour a couple of weeks ago. Increasingly, it seems right NOT to drive a car when paying tribute to this fallen behemoth. Pausing to catch our breath on Bluff Street overlooking the acreage, we didn't have much to say as we took in the concretized channel of the river and the silent expanse where some of the fights of the 1936 Sit Down Strike took place and where millions of cars were banged out on noisy and oily assembly lines. Several mallards noodled along in the brown water. A red-winged blackbird sailed by. A remarkable single cottonwood did its leafy hula. It really is a cemetery.

The brownfields of Chevy in the Hole are not really brown: there are many green things growing in the cracks and edges. I asked our tour guide, Christina Kelly of the Genesee County Land Bank, what they were. "Just weeds," she said.

My biology professor friend Tracy Wacker, with her usual bracing candor, said "The definition of a weed is a plant growing where somebody doesn't want it to. Looked at that way, none of the plants at Chevy in the Hole are weeds, because nobody cares if they grow there."

This is just the start of what I have to say, but in quick summary, when Tracy and I walked back to Chevy in the Hole yesterday, scrambled around a chain-link fence and poked around in the humid overgrowth on the cracked concrete and the river bank, she called out the names of least 30 different plants: rumex, chicory, bachelor's button, black nightshade, common mullein, curlydock, dogwood, catalpa, coreopsis, lanceleaf plantain, milkweed, dames rocket, buckthorn, bull-thistle, crown vetch. That's about half of them.

One of the most prolific species butting into the ruins is a lusty compound-leafed interloper named, ironically, Tree of Heaven (shown above). It is everywhere. It stinks. The reason is that it contains compounds that keep other plants from growing. Its deep and feisty underground runners make it almost possible to kill -- cut it down, it comes up two feet away. Okay, really, I can't resist this metaphor. I'm chewing on it avidly, like a local betel nut spiking my adrenalin.

But there were also small and hopeful willows, that yellow coreopsis -- a native plant -- and that dogwood. The cemetery is birth to some kind of regeneration -- quiet, slow, shy, fascinating. In the silent breezes there's something to notice. In the persistent weediness, a whisper of history receding, a hint of something lusty and green coming back in its place.

Our Land, Our Stories

What does the power of language have to do with saving the earth? There's a terrific two-day conference at UM - Flint next Wednesday and Thursday, June 11 and 12, addressing this topic. It's called "Our Land, Our Stories" and features Peter Forbes, founder of the Whole Communities movement, and three writers I've helped to pick: poet Keith Taylor, essayist Alison Swan and storyteller Terry Wooten.

Students attend free (catering by Lunch Studio and Good Beans) and for others, both days are $55 or the second day, the one featuring the writers, is $35. Among the panels scheduled for Thursday are "Nature as Muse, Nature as Metaphor," "Call of the Wild: Environmental Advocacy" and my favorite: "Green Grief: Elegy, Despair and Hope." Terry will perform at lunchtime Thursday. Keith, Alison and Terry will discuss "What does it mean to write 'green'?" at a 6-7 p.m. Q&A, and then there will be a reading featuring Keith and Alison at 7:15. It's gonna be a great green day!

The registration deadline has been extended till Monday, June 9, but the reading on Thursday evening is free and open to the public without registration.

Here's the link for more info: http://www.greenartsproject.org/conferences/writing/index.html

Red Flash

This spring red-winged blackbirds seem to have flocked into our neighborhood, uncharacteristically. Grain-lovers, they're more common on fence posts near corn and wheat fields -- their hearty appetite has made them a problem for some farmers. But I love them; I love their call and that splash of red on black. They're very dashing and each time I hear them or catch that flash of red, I feel happy.

Smells Like Summer

Ahh! Somebody's barbecuing chicken tonight. Walking along Calumet, I could smell it for at least five blocks. Red spiricles are uncurling from the tips of every silver maple and the chickadees are making that earnest LOVEyou LOVEyou call from the rooftops. Can true summer be far behind?

My Buddha Loves Scilla Season

He's sat through months of snow, laughing though it all, but his countenance with the little blue flowers in full bloom under the mulberry tree is especially delightful. Happy Spring!

La Luna

My talented young webmaster Shane stopped by to pick something up just as the eclipse last night went into its full glory. He went home and caught the gorgeous lady above. What a relief to savor this beauty on a crisp winter night. Check out Shane's other handiwork at www.gramlingdesign.com. Check out Mother Nature's handiwork again tonight -- no eclipse, but another splendid moon.

Even with Trial Two on the melatonin (didn't stick in my throat this time) my body said "stay awake and watch the moon." It must be something primitive: keep the fire going, see what's happening in the sky. This apparently matters to my subconscious brain.

Tomorrow, full moon over the LA Harbor.

While the Blood Comes Back

Gave a pint of blood for MLK Day today, the first time I've donated my A-pos in decades. It could have been psychological, but I felt a bit light headed afterwards, even after my gulps of Hawaiian punch and cheezits, so I'm stretched out back home, my feet elevated on the Laz-Y-Boy, watching a CSI rerun and looking out the window into the back yard.

And there, abruptly, is a big fat red-tailed hawk, perched on the back of a chair on the porch. No sign of the usual flurry of finches, cardinals, juncos, nuthatches and chickadees. Way to clear the yard, Hawk. I imagine the little birdies all hunkered down, hiding in the bushes and whispering, "shut up, shut up...is he gone yet? Is he gone yet?" He fluffs up and swivels his beautiful head, making me out: he leans in for a better view. I try not to move or make aggravating eye contact from the recliner. After about 20 seconds he lifts off and I breathe again. A light snow starts up, and in a minute or two, the first finch back lands on the feeder -- coast clear. And then a red cardinal in the yew at the window, and then a red-headed woodpecker clambering up the mulberry tree.

Let's just say in the peace of this moment, I feel my blood regenerating, my platelets factory madly manufacturing. I'm glad to be in this world. It's good to be a body among these other bodies, alive in the midst of all this life.

Owl at Night in a Silver Maple

There's no hour of the day or night more ambiguously quiet -- or more lonely, depending on the night -- than 2:30 a.m. I'm restless in my bed when Ted's not here; I pile on quilts, preferring the ancient beautiful one my mother and her friends made decades ago. I buy 400-count sheets and drink decaf green tea before turning in, but still, even with these rituals and totems of peace, I often toss and turn without my mate.

Maybe last night it was the full moon that woke me up. Does the moon seem smaller sometimes now, more imperiled and too easy for humankind to reach? I want to believe there is something we can't overrun.

And in the damp, shiny dark after a day of rain, there was an owl in the silver maples, rare in these parts and miraculous, mournfully who-whooing. Sadness for our brief lovely life overtook me. I got up, pushed open the window as far as I could, hoping to catch even a brief silhouette of the bird, a flutter, a connection in a lonely hour. But all the dark offered was his melancholy call, who-who-who, until 3 a.m. when I fell back into a fitful, moonwashed sleep.

I Blame the Lilacs

Aren't lilacs just too damn sentimental and audacious for their own good, climbing over everything and exuding their promiscuous spring perfume, making everybody feel light in the head and full of anachronous longing? I mean, really.

Yeah, I'm mad. Pruning down my lilac bush for the winter, I was awkwardly wielding the big clippers somebody gave me for a housewarming gift ("Hint hint," I thought they were saying) back when I moved into this respectable, lilac-strewn neighborhood. I reached up, twisted the wrong way a centimeter too far, and pulled a muscle in my lower back.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. So this is what it feels like to be old.

I've come up with amazing new ways to get my legs into my jeans, leaning back on the bed and gingerly sliding a foot in, cussing and aiming for the pantleg from a not-so-pain-free distance. Putting on a pair of socks is a major operation, not to mention tying my beloved New Balance walking shoes or other more graphic tasks of personal hygiene. I have to plan my time, since, for example, the Lehrer News Hour starts out pleasantly enough with Margaret Warner but ends with ten minutes of me moaning and groaning trying to get out of the recliner. Lifting a carton of soy milk off the top shelf of the frig proved perilous, and opening the trunk of my car called out an expletive deleted. I'm a slow-mo woman this week, walking like Montgomery Burns and muttering at every required and ordinary movement.

It'll be good to have my body back again. Was I young once, physically nimble enough to take advantage of the lilacs?

One bird

The flutter of a silver wing at breakfast, and there was a tufted titmouse, one of my favorite birds, perched on the power line just outside the window. We peeked shyly at each other for just a second before he darted away.

Only one, when they usually travel in flocks. Was it just me or was he a little disheveled, a bit flustered around his topknot?

Yet it was a joyful sliver of morning. With this little bird on the list of disappearing species, a heartbeat of hope.