Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Hello, my friends!  Below I have posted the transcript of a talk I gave this past weekend at a celebration of Emily Dickinson's poetry and gardens.  The event was hosted by the Powow River Poets at the beautiful Old South Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts.  At the end of the day, some folks asked if I'd be willing to share the transcript, and I thought posting it here on the blog might be the easiest way to do just that.  Those of you who read my blog regularly may recognize a few lines here from a post I wrote over the summer as I was drafting this talk.  I've included a few of my photos from past posts here with the talk, too.  Again, if you've read my blog for a while, and you know about my passion for gardens, fields, and woods, you'll immediately understand my love for Emily Dickinson.


Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Thank you so much.  I want to say a special word of thanks to the Powow River Poets for this wonderful celebration of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and gardens.   I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday--especially an October Saturday--and you’ll see why in just a bit.

I should begin by saying that I’m not an Emily Dickinson expert.  I’m simply a devoted fan, and I have been ever since I was a kid in the 1970’s.  Back when I was about 9 or 10, I had two summertime obsessions.  They weren’t obsessions that I shared with my friends or anyone else.  These were mine alone.

The first was one that I’m guessing many of you also had and probably still have; I read every single thing I could get my hands on. Magazines, books, cereal boxes—if it had words, I read it.  And somewhere in all that reading, I stumbled upon a collection of verse among my dad’s old college poetry textbooks that included some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. And among those poems I discovered the first verse beyond the nursery rhymes of my early childhood that I knew I had to memorize.  It seemed to me so clever and true that I wanted to put it in my pocket and keep it for myself always.  So I did:

“The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A clover anytime to Him
Is aristocracy.”

These lines embody much that I loved then and still love now about Dickinson’s poetry—economy of line, frankness, and a knack for telling the small but significant truth.  In these four lines she captures the perfect symbiosis between blossom and bee—one of the world’s most essential relationships.  This tiny poem has always stayed with me.  When I was learning calligraphy as a teenager, it was one of the sentences I would write again and again, decorating it with flourishes in the curlicued shape of a bee’s flight pattern.  In the years since then, it’s been a mantra, a touchstone that even now I repeat when I’m working in my garden: “The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee,” I murmur as I trellis the sweet peas or weed among the thyme and rosemary, and again at night as I drift off to sleep, knees aching, hair still smelling of mud and leaves . . . “a clover anytime to him is aristocracy . . . .”

But getting back to my childhood summertime obsessions.  The first was reading, and as you might have already guessed, the second was gardening. I loved spending hours in my mother’s flower garden with my face as close to the peonies, the phlox, and the tiger lilies as possible.  In the garden, my senses were heightened, things seemed more real, and I felt more connected to all the thousands of lives around me than I did anywhere else—connected to the worms in the soil, the butterflies careening among the cosmos, the cardinals calling one another from the branches of our white lilac tree.  I wanted to be near enough to spy on the bees working their dizzy magic, near enough so that the flowers would, as Dickinson writes, “make me regret / I am not a bee” (808).  Beyond the garden was noise and flash and distraction, the next-door neighbors arguing, planes roaring overhead, and the distant wash of cars on the highway—people rushing off to a world that seemed preoccupied with less vital things--at least to me.  There in the garden was the much smaller, more vibrant world that Dickinson describes in Poem 1746:

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
’Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

The garden to me, as a kid, felt like existence at its most essential.  While I reveled in its beauty, I don’t really think I held a romanticized notion about the pretty flowers, because, I saw life and death quite clearly for what they were when I was in the garden.  In fact, I think if you want a child to understand death, you give her a hoe, a spade, and a pair of shears, and you send her out to vanquish the weeds, turn the compost, and deadhead the roses.  Much as Emily Dickinson did in her own mother’s garden when she was growing up, I saw death all around me in the garden—and in some cases, I was even the cause of it, whether I wanted to be or not.  I quickly learned that this was an unavoidable part of being a gardener.

I also witnessed intimately how everything that dies helps to bring new life into the world.  And that many of the plants that died each year had ingenious ways of coming back to life the following spring.  As Dickinson asks, “If a pod die, shall it not live again?” (Prose fragment 18)  Over time as I continued to garden, continued to watch pods die each season and then live again, and continued to read Dickinson’s poems about the gardens, orchards, and fields surrounding her home in Amherst, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit—and isn’t this one of the key reasons that we read (and write) poetry?  Dickinson herself called the poets she read “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul.”

As a girl, I couldn’t put into words what I was discovering about the interconnectedness of life and death in the garden.  In fact, I don’t even think I can now, really.  As Dickinson writes,  “Nature is what we know— /Yet have no art to say" (668).

But she doth protest too much, because she did have the art to say it: When Roses cease to bloom, Sir, /And Violets are done,” she writes,

When Bumblebees in solemn flight
Have passed beyond the Sun —
The hand that paused to gather
Upon this Summer's day Will idle lie — in Auburn —
Then take my flowers — pray!”

Or in “A Bird came down the walk," where she describes the bird that bit an angle worm in halves, “ate the fellow raw,” drank some dew from the grass, and then “hopped sidewise to let a beetle pass.”  She intimately captures in her poems Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw”  (“In Memoriam A.H. H.") with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s sensibility.  At the same time, she also explores the sacred in the everyday.  “I hope you love birds too,” she wrote to her cousin Eugenia Hall. “It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”  And in “Some Keep the Sabbath” (236) that great old chestnut taught in Introduction to Literature courses everywhere, she eschews conventional religion, finding her spirituality in the family orchard:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

For Dickinson the garden embodied immortality. As a girl, she describes heaven in a letter to a friend as “the garden we have not seen.”  And many years later, just before her death, she asked to have her casket carried—by the workmen who tended the family’s grounds—in a circle around her garden, through the barn, and then up through the field of buttercups to the Western Cemetery in the center of Amherst.  Heaven was inseparable from the flowers, the birds, and the bees, which were all parallels to and metaphors for her own life—for our own lives.  That is not to say that she didn’t see them as ends in themselves, but that by seeing and valuing them for their own sake, she came to understand her own existence all the better.  In the garden she found a way to comprehend mortality—and proof of immortality.

When I was a little girl in the garden with my shears and my spade, Emily Dickinson taught me something that I would later come to feel in my bones as true, and it’s that at root, a gardener thinks about life and death always as one. In each flower's race toward blossoming is its race, too, toward decline. I'm saying nothing new, only that when you garden, this thought is always present. In the spring garden I am surrounded by the new growth of runner bean sprouts, the full flush of a climbing rose, and the last breath of a lush peony all at the same moment. My wheelbarrow is piled high with a day's kill: the weeds I pulled, faded blossoms I plucked, lily beetles I crushed between gloved finger and thumb. The gardener must not be squeamish about death. She must recognize its necessity even as she rejoices at the sight of her first ever iris uncurling itself with a flourish from the spear of its stem.  She must also accept its necessity when that iris blossom dies.

It’s a Saturday in October, and the garden is dying.  But it will live again—improbably, miraculously, this coming spring.  Even as it dies, it is living, and it will always live on, as will the iris, the rose, and the jasmine, the Indian Pipe and the clover, in Emily Dickinson’s words.

And so, because she had the art to say it, as well as anyone ever has, and as reverently, too:

“In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—
Amen!” (21)

Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to poem numbers in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, 1999.

Our Backyard Fairy Village

The snow is falling, falling today.  Our world is swathed in white, yet my mind keeps thinking of what lies beneath the snow--the fairy world we built last Fall with our niece.  Right now, the corner of our yard beneath the great Eastern White Pine looks like this:

But in the Fall, the village thrived.  

It all began with a pile of pinecones left by the squirrels for our niece.  We took the hint and went out gathering more building materials in the forest.  It was a rainy weekend, but we knew, just as the squirrels did, that the time was ripe for fairies, and the village needed to be built.

Once we had our supplies and had drawn up our plans--there was nothing left to do but build!

And I do mean build: ladders and swing sets and arbors and roads.  We fashioned street signs and wagons and tables and chairs.  Nothing was left unmade.  

So, as the snow falls and I sit inside finishing up piles of work, I thought I'd share some photos of our handiwork.  I'm not sure who loved building the village more, but I will say that Mr. Magpie is quite a carpenter when it comes to crafting fairy furniture!

"No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populace with fairy armies."

~Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in the Art of Writing

The farmer's wagon above was made from half a gourd.  Mr. Magpie sliced a corncob to make wheels, which he attached to a bamboo skewer.  The wheels actually turned, and we filled the wagon with crops from the fairy farm, including sage and nasturtiums, of course!

The farm is pictured above.  Miss J and I planted cabbage and cauliflower crops (tiny flowers) and Mr. Magpie built a miniature wattle fence.  Dried hydrangea blossoms make wonderful rooftops for birchbark buildings.

Above is the restaurant--totally organic, supplied with veggies from the farm, of course--complete with birch bark table and benches. 

If you climb the ladder, you can go to the fab condos in the pine tree.

Miss J thought of everything for the village, including a hospital, a Senior Center,

pine needle roads edged with pinecone guardrails,

 a school (complete with a swing set by Mr. Magpie),

and even sculptures for the town square.

Among our favorite houses were the ones we made from pumpkins.  I think the fairies loved them, too. I know the squirrels found them delicious.  This one is topped by a little crocheted roof.

This wasn't the first time we'd built fairy houses with our niece, and I've posted about them before, but this is the first time we'd built them in our own yard, and I can say that it is about as fine a way to spend a day as I can imagine.

And the best part of building the village came later that night, when we peeked out our windows.  The fairies had come!

And they'd lit the candles we'd left them with their fairy wands.

"The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers to bed; 'tis almost fairy time."

~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Wild

Summers when I was a girl I'd travel in an ocean liner with my mother and sister to visit my mother's parents in the tiny village of Beaver River, Nova Scotia.  The ship was grand for such a humble destination, but over the years I grew accustomed to the many decks, the slot machines, and the lounges with polished brass railings to grab onto when the seas began to roll, something that happened often in the tempestuous Bay of Fundy.  

My favorite childhood books always had a portal of sorts that led to a magical place: the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, the hidden door in The Secret Garden, the wardrobe in the Narnia books.  Looking back, I realize that on those voyages the sea itself was my portal.  We booked a passage through its waves, carried our bags up the gangway under the light of the moon and stars, and then spent ten-hours tossing and turning,  cradled in the great vessel's hull.       

And when we arrived on the other side of the bay--the other side of the world as I knew it--there was the confusion of customs, the hugs and exclamations about how much we'd grown from my grandparents, and then what felt like a long drive down a road that hugged the coast--the Evangeline Trail in fact.  The destination was a little white farmhouse with a steep-pitched roof in front in the traditional Nova Scotian style.  Here's what I loved most about visits to that house:

• the wood stove in the kitchen where my grandfather cooked pancakes, the smell of which pulled us out of bed before our eyes were even open;
• the dark anadama bread made by a woman down the road--we had it with nearly every meal, but my favorite way to eat it was sliced thick and smeared with butter and homemade raspberry jam;
• the grand old barn behind the house jam-packed with antiques and treasures;
• the fire pond beside the driveway, surrounded in summer by thousands of purple lupine sentinels;
• the old washing machine with the crank handle we turned to wring out the clothes before hanging them on the line to dry;
• the acres of fields and forest, and the sound of the ocean's roar muffled only by the mounds of sea-swept stones piled on the beach.

The one thing I loved the very best, though, was the short dirt road to the beach.  The air there smelled like salt and hay and scrub pines.  The pebbly road satisfied a child's need to make noise with each footstep, counting out the rhythm of our pace as we walked, singing all the summery songs we'd learned on 45's by the Carpenters, John Denver, and Carly Simon.

And then there were the wildflowers.  The road was edged with every kind I knew: Queen Anne's lace, wild sweet peas, rugosa roses, daisies, Indian paintbrushes, lupine, black-eyed Susans, clovers, and buttercups.  There were many I didn't know, too, and for those I invented names like curly purples, whiz-bangers, and tiny starlights.  Every afternoon on our way back to the farmhouse, my sister and I picked armfuls of wildflowers to bring to my mother and grandmother who helped us fill vases and pitchers and jelly jars with flowers for the whole house. 

I seldom have the chance to pick wildflowers anymore--at least not in such great abundance.  I always steal a few roadside Queen Anne's lace each year or a handful of rugosas, but nothing can match the wild and sweet excess of those childhood bouquets.  

I had a taste of that memory yesterday at Jordan's Farm in Cape Elizabeth, where you can pick a large bunch of farm flowers for $4.  They may not be wild, but the feeling of having hundreds of blooms to choose from, the butterflies and bees whirling around me as I cut the stems--it was its own portal of sorts.  I felt that if I just kept walking down that row of black-eyed Susans, I might end up on a dirt road in a place on the other side of the world I as I know it, my arms full of blossoms, my heart and mind full of people long since gone.

The Journey Back to Quebec: Part I, Go on Up to Jackman

Bonjour, mes amis!  I'm sorry I have been away for so long--from my own blog and from yours, too. This is the longest blogging break I have ever taken.  It wasn't expected, but it was necessary. Summer swept me away this year with weekly visitors at our home in Portland, lots of work, and then, at last, a long-awaited journey to Quebec City avec Monsieur Magpie.

We are lucky here in Maine that Quebec is our neighbor to the Northwest.  This means we have a little taste of Europe just a short drive away.  Still, it had been many years since either Todd or I had been to Quebec City.  In fact, neither of us had been there since we were children.  We suspect that perhaps we both visited during the same summer back in the 1970's.  Maybe we passed each other on the same street, no?  A romantic thought, and one I choose to believe.

This year it just felt right to both of us that we make a pilgrimage there to celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary, summer, childhood memories, and life in general.  My heritage on my father's side is French Canadian, and Quebec City is the place where my own parents spent their honeymoon 50 years ago this summer, so what better place to visit?  And what better time to do it?  

When I was a girl, my parents packed us kids into the back of the faux-wood-paneled station wagon, and we headed up to Canada during a heat wave.  Back in those days nobody in our part of the world had air conditioning in their cars, so it was a sticky, grumbling trip through logging towns and the low mountains of the Kennebec River watershed.  Moose country.  Lumber country.  The maple-sap and pine-scented world of my roots.

Then we hit Jackman, Maine, the last real town before the Canadian border, and even my eight-year-old self knew we were at the edge of anything familiar.  Border towns tend to be edgy in more ways than one, and Jackman didn't disappoint with its diners, roadhouses, and ramshackle motels.

And all these decades later, Jackman feels nearly the same.  I won't lie.  For me it possesses a slightly ominous air that was only enhanced on this trip by the fact that when I walked over to take photos of the abandoned train station, a young man pulled up next to the station and stared at me from his car.  He just sat there in the empty lot, watching me, one finger tapping the steering wheel.  I edged as far away from his car as I could as I made my way back to the convenience store where we'd parked, but he never took his eyes off me.  It wasn't until I met back up with Todd at our car that the creepy guy finally drove away.  This, coupled with the motel in Jackman that doubles as a place for all your taxidermy needs, lent our fifteen minutes there a distinct Hitchcockian flavor. 

Once we were on our way, though, our temporary case of the heebee-jeebees disappeared as we sang songs about Jackman to the tune of the Johnny Cash/June Carter Cash song "Jackson," dove back into practicing our French, and tossed around possible plans for our stay in Quebec.  Other than our B&B reservations, we had no firm itinerary, for Mr. Magpie and I are avid travelers, but not very good tourists.  What I mean is that we bristle at itineraries and pamphlets listing the requisite "attractions," preferring to stumble upon wonderful surprises as we go and to strike up conversations with locals and fellow travelers alike.  Quebec, we would discover, is one of the best places in North America to do just that.

Next Installment: Part II, How to Recover Four Years of Forgotten High-School French in Four Days

Promises, Promises

So, I know I promised photos of the hundreds of peonies at Gilsland Farm, and they will be coming soon.  They haven't quite bloomed yet, but in the meantime, here are a few lovelies tucked into an ironstone pitcher in my kitchen.  I processed them using Kim Klassen's "Just Cause" and "Subtly Yours" textures.

We have been enjoying the most perfect of days lately: warm, but not hot, with dry air and clear skies.  It will end soon, this dreamy spell, but in the meantime there's that optimism to cherish.  Tonight as we sat in the stands at a Portland Sea Dogs game, I got the kind of goosebumps you only get at the ballpark or when you watch a baseball movie, like Bull Durham, which I've seen more times than is probably healthy--maybe 108--just as many times as there are stitches in a baseball or beads in a rosary.  Oh my, that opening, when Susan Sarandon walks to the ballpark, climbs the stairs, and steps into the heart of the stadium, and her dreamy voice drawls, "It's a long season and you gotta trust. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball."   

Baseball feels to me inseparable from summer.  Sure, it begins in spring and ends in fall, but its soul is rooted in summer, that season of promises--the promise of long days stretching out into impossibly long weeks, the promise of ten more minutes at the pool, five more minutes on the ferris wheel, three more seconds of a very first kiss.  Never mind that when it ends we'll wonder where it went so fast.  For now, summer feels endless, and that is enough. 

A Sense of Place

The scent of lilacs and the sight of thousands of buttercups sprinkled across a field are so deeply associated with childhood for me that I forget my grown-up self entirely when I encounter them.  Toss in a lily pond teeming with plump pollywogs, and I'm a goner.

Wild turkeys, on the other hand, are something I never saw as a child.  These days I see them quite often.  I suppose this has something to do with how much of their habitat humans have stolen with our never-ending sprawl of Tim Horton's and Targets.  Or maybe there are more of them now than there were 30 years ago.  That's a lovely thought.  Does anyone know if it's true?  

I am lucky.  I live in a port city that is small enough to feel neighborly, yet large enough to be cosmopolitan.  And best of all, it is sprinkled within and around its borders by fields, ponds, rivers, and  marshes.  I've shown you Gilsland Farm before, and here it is again in these photos.  The home of the Maine Audubon Society, this place is simply stunning.  If you visit Portland and love bird watching or just taking walks in a peaceful place, you can drive or bike two miles north of the city center, and suddenly you are in the middle of fields bordering an estuary and home to loads of wildlife, from turkeys to hawks to bullfrogs to osprey.  Oh, and don't forget the groundhogs!

In a few days I will have a treat to share when the hundreds and hundreds of peonies bloom at Gilsland.  For what's a blog in late spring without photos of peonies, right?  In the meantime, I want to thank everyone who wrote kind comments and emails in response to my last post.  I was feeling more than a little shaky.  You all are a boost to a girl's spirits.  Thank you for your generosity and friendship . . . and welcome to new readers and followers.  

Requisite springtime-blogging photos of peonies coming soon!