thinking out loud silently

This spring I came across May Sinclair’s The Dark Night (1924), and I adapted her poem to speak of the love of O and W.

Their love is woven

Of a thousand strands—

The cool fragrance of the first grass,

Sunlight through the leaves of towering trees,

The smell of snow before it falls,

The pungent and earthy smell of timothy, orchard, and teff;

Songs of birds, songs of great poets;

The leaping of the red squirrel in the tree, the rabbit in the barn,

The running of the stream,

The commotion of stars and clouds in the high winds at night;

And dark stillness. Russet calm.

A blaze that calls, ears that speak,

He holds her without hands throughout the night and the day.

Their love is made

Of the South Wind and the West Wind,

And the soft falling of rain;

Of white April evenings;

It is made of dapples,

That shimmer as the clouds do;

Of horizons before and those behind—,

The dark sea-blue of the west, thin sky-blue of the east,

With sorrel velvet between.

Here is the original and my adaptation:

As another winter approaches, I am reluctant to accept it; I literally thank the days when the weather is warm enough to unzip a jacket, take off a sweater, not wear gloves. But the winter is coming. It will come. It will be cold. I watched the shift in the leaves this year. In the first weeks of November, as the sun would sink low, it would gild the leaves. It was beautiful. But then came a really warm day (that I loved) and the next was cold and wet and windy and the contrast of the two days seemed to defeat the last strength of the leaves, and they fell. Late in the second week of November, the trees were bare and then the days were shorter and my walks had to be earlier.

On some walks, the late sun and the clouds conspire to delight me with a spectacle of colors and contrasts. Against the blue, then pink, then orange sky, the trees, bare, appear and they are beautiful. When I was eighteen, I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, and one of his observations stuck with me: “the trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them.” In my mind, however, I had shifted the language to the “trees were beautiful when you were reconciled to them,” and those words have sustained me for more than forty winters. Looking at the bare trees, this Californian has admired their architecture, their bones, their sculpture, but recently I’m looking more closely at the trees, and I see more than their bold shapes and lines.

As the days have gotten shorter, the air has gotten colder, my mood grows dimmer, yet I have seen what I had not seen before. When the leaves are gone, when the colors are muted to browns, beiges, and grays, silent power builds. First I noticed the magnolia. Small gray purses emerged along the branches, and they grew, wrapped in fur. Then I noticed the lilac, at the ends of the lines of thin branches, dots of dark carnelian appeared. The trees, to my first impression, were asleep, or dead, but they are not; they are alive but have slowed down; they take in the sun and warmth that I so appreciate and slowly, subtly make plans for brighter days. The trees in winter are beautiful when I am reconciled to them.

– Alexander Posey (1910)

Above the refrigerator, in a cabinet barely accessible unless you take out the step ladder, Easter resides. If I want to be religiously metaphoric, it might be a tomb, from which, once a year memories are resurrected.

Four dozen-cartons hold fragile shells, painted and drawn and dyed, hollowed out years ago and filled, for so many afterwards with Cheerios, nuts, jellybeans, and chocolate. Open a papier-mâché egg to find another inside and inside that a fuzzy chick with wonky wire legs. As the plastic grass falls out, so does the past.

Easters then were like Christmas eves, but outdoors and in the daylight, and we went to church before, not after, the events at La Vista Place. The cast of characters for these included as one might expect, aunts, uncles, cousins, but there were also “aunts” and “uncles” that then and even now I didn’t understand who they were or why they were given the moniker, as though they were related. As teens we privately dubbed one “creepy Frank” — his hair and mannerisms unnerved us as we were conscious of our own hair and mannerisms and I wonder if in our apprehensions we were cautious or just cruel. Perhaps we didn’t really know what to make of “Frank” as the rest had more fanciful names: Ulric, (2 of those), Evelyn, Bannister, Willis (2 of those), Eugenia, Stuart, Lourinda, Georgianna, Alma. For a while there was a Nancy, but her normalcy did not last in marriage to the eccentricity of Bannister (but that’s long and sordid story). We had some Biblical names too: Martha, Judith, Paul—but certainly nothing too Catholic among the family; here if there was a Jesus, he was a gardener and Maria would be a housekeeper.

There were five of us children, dressed in absurd outfits—crisp dresses with new, white Mary Janes and a peculiar hat and/or pocketbook for the girls and ill-fitting suits or sailor suits for the boys—these costumes, worn likely just once—were memorialized on Kodachrome that over the years has aged so that not just our dresses are yellow.

But we were stars in a moving picture show. Grandpa captured it all on 16 mm film, first in black and white and later in scratchy color. Before there was video and streaming and tiktok we had moving pictures and could subject family and friends occasionally to watch, but otherwise the celluloid lay neatly coiled in silver boxes, stacked in the hall closet, remote memories accumulating for later generations to likely assign to the heap. But if you were to find the means to project these crinkly images on a screen, you would see five children, feverishly looking in hedges, under rose bushes, amid the fronds of ferns, along the crevassed curve of the driveway curb to find hollowed out eggs, painted like stained glass by Lourinda, filled with Cheerios and jelly beans. You’d see bodies converge and diverge, in herky jerky motions of erratic action exaggerated by the medium; you’d see heads turn in response to a voice calling that you can’t hear. And then you’d see a shift in focus, an intensity of search that meant it was time for the highlight of the hunt: gold and silver, hard boiled and spray painted. Harder to locate, adults could join this hunt, for it took years of practice to succeed and the prize sweeter than treats: $20 for the gold, $10 for the silver.

I remember one year finally finding the gold, and after that it seems the memories at La Vista Place vanish. We had grown up and then grandpa died.

When we really grew up and had our own children, the tradition was reborn. And now those children too have grown, and so those cartons of eggshells wait, like the circular tins of celluloid, for the promise of resurrection.

It’s that time of year when we read “Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” and we reflect upon our own places of solace and reflection. Last year the Pacific showed me the peaceful beauty of her name. 

Digging through a decade of digital files I found this 100-word piece I wrote in 2011. The prose feels a bit compact to me today, but here it is: 

Solimar

Daffodils and Dandelions 🌼 harbingers of new life

Electricity ⚡️ restored after a storm

The hail storm came out of nowhere as they do in Colorado in the summertime. I was eight years old or so and my family was visiting friends who had moved to begin a ranching life in Colorado, away from the social life, parties, and country clubs of Pasadena. My older sister and a few others in the group were on horseback. I was deemed too small and was in the Jeep with my parents and Mr and Mrs Dulin. I recall looking at the mountains and meadows that opened up in the valley and then suddenly the sky became very dark and the wind emerged and then came the hail and it was tremendous. I had never seen anything like it, and I’ve never seen anything like it since. Frozen golf balls hit  the jeep; the tin reverberated but withstood the assault.

I remember the concern was for those who were on horseback and how to find some shelter during the storm. The animals were fine; the quarter horses understood the natural world, so the concern was for the children on their backs. The jeep drove ahead to a rancher’s cabin. To my eight-year-old mind the cabin appeared out of nowhere, but I understand now that the Dulins of course knew that it existed and it had probably always been the destination for the afternoon. 

The cabin was like the set of True Grit or some Cohen Brothers western. Worn but sturdy. A table and maybe a remnant of a chair or two. There were rough cupboards or maybe crates attached to the wall and perhaps even an empty tin can. And the calendar. Hanging on a nail, the year was 1930 something. Just like in a movie, a movie I hadn’t yet seen. 

Almost as soon as we arrived at the cabin, the hail storm had moved on. The horses and riders were fine; the only evidence of what had occurred were a few dents on the Jeep.

Apples - David’s & stock I own provides possibilities

Accord - air to breathe without a mask

Ability - the ability to walk without crutches

Agility - always working on this — in mind and body

Bobo !! ♥️

Body’s ability to recover

Buckets of grass, hay, water

Boys - having the boys here, bringing us together, the nonhuman boys too

Cats

“We are all becoming shades. ... His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”

Yes. This is the feeling I’ve had so often in the last two months, November and December of 2020. Physically hobbled, I have turned inward. And wondered. And cried. 

Connie passed. Then her brother Jim. Yesterday Annie’s father. Soon we will all be shades. 

My own identity has been fading out; the place where I spent so much time to has dwindled and dissolved, yet I feel curiously both more sure and less steady. 

In November’s dreariness, my mind sang: “The color of the sky as far as I can see is coal grey. / Lift my head from the pillow and then fall again. / With a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather. /A quiver in my lips as if I might cry.” 

The world is weary. The covid-19 pandemic rages and mutates and heeds not the hubris of humans. The US political pandemic is in a new phase, perhaps rounding a corner, but the scars of the disease will linger. 

Sweet Connie is dying, slowly fading out of this world, her sons at last allowed to see her, talk to her, hold her hands. 

My body mimics my emotional instability; disjointed, with less than two legs to stand on.