Ephemeral Spring

Crabapple Blossoms

Dear Reader:

So we’ve had one of those kind of springs. An overcast, rainy, drizzly, foggy, chilly, turn-on-the-furnace, will-the-sun-ever-come-out, I’m-gonna-stick-my-head-in-an-oven-if-it-doesn’t-clear-up-soon spring. Despite the lack of sunlight, I fell in love with Spring this year. The beauty overwhelmed me.

The budding leaves on the trees glowed neon green. Every window in my house framed dazzling squares of bright, yellowy-green glaze, and every trip into town offered views of wide, verdant expanses from the ridges overlooking lush valleys of oak and maple and birch and beech trees budding out after a long, snowy winter.

My Reiki instructor reminded me that green is the color of the heart chakra, the energy center that corresponds with compassion, unconditional love, forgiveness, faith, receptivity, and acceptance. Either all that green was feeding my heart chakra, or my heart chakra was so energized I was drawn to all that green, or perhaps the energy and the color and the season were all just aligned for me this year so that despite the rain and gloom I was able to feel hope and love and faith for a brighter future.

Later in the season, the light color will deepen into emerald and forest and moss, but this early spring . . . well, it was all golden-green, the color Robert Frost wrote about in his short poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Award-winning poet, Dana Gioia, wrote an excellent essay about Frost’s 1923 poem. In the essay,“On Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Gioia contrasts this type of short poem with more the formalized forms of sonnets and epigrams. He talks about the construction of the poem, simplicity of the words Frost chose to use, and the movement from nature themes to philosophical observation about the passage of time.

Exuberant Rhubarb

This poem could be depressing, like the rainy weather, a note on the ephemeral qualities of youth giving way to duller attributes. Okay, true, but here’s the thing about life–it goes in cycles. Yes, this rainy yet somehow bright green spring will yield to summer and heat and dust and shady spots beneath the mature leaves of the trees. And, yes, the leaves will dry up and fall in autumn, and the branches will seem bare and dead through another long winter, but then . . . Spring, once again!

Lamium Maculatum

Nowhere is this more apparent than in my perennial flower beds. Year after year, these plants die back in the fall and then come back to life once again in the spring, bursting out of the cold wet ground and spreading themselves up and out to catch the fall of rain and (theoretically this year) the rays of sunlight.

Most of these plants are divisions from friends’ and my mother’s flower beds, and because I’ve never been too interested in the science of horticulture (I’m more interested in having pretty gardens) I rarely even bother to find out the names of the plants. A quick search this morning for “purple flowers ground covers” brought up pictures that seemed to match my bunchy cluster of purple flowers with heart-shaped leaves that grows on the north-east side of my front steps. If I’m right, this is Lamium maculatum, a ground-cover than does well in partial shade. It has come back bigger and better than ever each year. I highly recommend this hardy perennial if you are more of a putterer and less of a horticulturalist in the garden.

Another Lamium

This is another Lamium, with the more characteristic dark-rimmed silvery foliage and pink flowers. I love the way it looks against the rock, so delicate and pretty.

Trillium erectum

Meanwhile, out in Nature’s garden, otherwise known as “the woods” or “the side of the road,” this red Trillium briefly blazed like the red star she is. My friend Sandi (check out her Waughtercolors artwork on deviantART) and I noticed these beautiful ephemerals while on an early-morning bike ride one cloudy-but-not-quite-rainy spring day. Spring ephemerals are woodland plants that bloom and go to seed very quickly. Like Frost’s spring gold, they quickly fade to something less spectacular, but while they are here, oh boy! Beautiful. And maybe all the more appreciated because of their ephemeral quality?

Like youth and poetry. For me, a poem is an ephemeral thing, capturing a brief moment in time, a fleeting feeling, an impression.

When I was newly graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington, I got it into my head to write a sonnet sequence. I was inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.
I was young. I was in love, newly married. I wanted to chronicle that time in my life. So I wrote 48 poems. Three are lost. I think I sent them to a magazine and when they were returned in my SASE, I failed to put them back in the pile. I didn’t know back then that my urge to create poetry would fade, like the browning blossoms I wrote about that spring in 1992. Lately, though, that poetic part of me has regenerated, perhaps part of a creative cycle like Gaia’s seasons?

Anyway, most of the sonnets are horrible (I keep them for sentimental reasons), but I’ll share one not so horrible one that seems appropriate to the season. Enjoy this brief season, Dear Reader. Summer is right around the corner.

A FEW BLOOMS BROWNING

I

I used to climb into the apple trees,
their white-pink blossoms browning in the heat
of waning spring, and dangling dusty feet
and toes in childish peace among the leaves,
I began to dream of love. The breeze
that swayed the branch was new and sweet
with whispers I would blow to meet
the wind. How easily it was to please
the innocence of me until I sighed
another moment at the solitary sound
a songbird made upon an upper bough.
Weighted with the song, I sat and cried
because that sad and sudden beauty tore
from me the child that I had been before.

Town-Love

Baby & Me

Dear Reader:

Spring has brought daffodils to my flower beds, leaves cluttering my lawn, owls hunting for peepers in the boggy places, and a chance for me to bottle feed a baby goat at Downhome Farm (isn’t that the cutest white baby goat?).

Spring also brought me back to 1987, freshman year at the University of Maine at Farmington, the season I took my first (and only) poetry class, ate Gifford’s ice-cream for the first time, took beginner rides on the back of a motorcycle, and began the slow process of falling in love with the man who would eventually become my husband.

And I DID fall in love. With the town. I’m still smitten.

This month, I drove up to UMF to meet my college roommate and two of our friends from down the hall in Scott South, the all-female dormitory where we ended up freshman year–me because my parents wanted to protect me from co-ed distractions and the other three by chance, I think. We lived on the first floor, not a bad set-up, and because we were the only all-female dorm, we also had the only co-ed bathroom on campus (for the visiting boyfriends to use). Oh, the irony.

We were to meet in the Gifford’s Ice Cream parking lot. Arriving early, I grabbed a cup of coffee at a new cafe “overtown” where a pizza place used to be, walked around the block to stretch my legs, admired the gazebo still standing in the tiny park. I drove back past the big, old Main Street houses, now repainted and divided up into apartments, and parked my vehicle in front of Giffords to watch the traffic turning onto the Intervale Road. There were kids playing tennis on the courts beside Hippach Field and a group of Little League players trying out the baseball diamond where my father and uncle played for the Farmington State Teacher’s College team in the mid 1960′s.

(Farmington State became UMF later on, but it still remained primarily a training college for future educators. Now it presents itself as “the liberal arts college of the UMaine System.” Once there were first-generation-to college Mainers wearing sweatpants and L.L. Bean boots to class. Now, it’s topless parades to protest inequality for women. No matter. It’s still UMF. The “Beach” in front of the main dining hall may be called something else now, but it is still the same old hangout. There’s a great athletic center with a pool, indoor tennis courts, weight rooms, and the like. The library has been slightly remodeled. A beautiful education center was constructed where the little white psychology building used to be, and I hear a new art gallery is going in. It’s all good.)

Down to Giffords, I stared, dreamy-eyed, at the yellow Victorian Chester Greenwood mansion high up on the hill overlooking the Sandy River. I gazed at the square, brick campus building, remembering Alice Bloom’s booming musical rendition of a poem by Blake, remembering watching THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY on Sunday movie night in the auditorium there, remembering the buzzing of a lawn mower and the scent of fresh-cut grass while trying to pay attention during Russian history class my final spring at UMF.

I glanced over at the golden arches of the McDonald’s where a bunch of us used to walk after a Wednesday evening children’s lit class. Remembering. Remembering. Remembering and missing the Farmington Diner where my parents met, where my husband-to-be treated me to giant platters of fried clams and french fries loaded with ketchup while we listened to lame eighties hits on the individual jukeboxes situated at every booth. “Lady in Red” and “Lean on Me” and “Maggie May.”

Heart-bursting love for everything.

I rolled down my window and sniffed . . . yes, Farmington has its own scent, probably something to do with the river water but maybe also the farmland surrounding the town and once in awhile, when the wind is right, a whiff of the paper mills in Jay. I recognized this smell. It was the smell of home. Or of a homeplace.

I have family roots deep in Farmington and the surrounding towns. While I was growing up, my grandparents lived here, in a white-sided farmhouse built by my grandfather’s father out on Rt. 4 in West Farmington, on an embankment next to a cornfield beside Temple Stream. My parents took my sister and me to visit often, and for two years of college, I rented a room in the house, sipped camomile tea out on the granite steps, typed up college papers in the old, screen porch office at the front shaded by big old oaks that dropped so many acorns it hurt to run across the lawn in bare feet.

My grandmother’s family tree goes all the way back to some of the first settlers of the area, the Butterfields, who built homesteads up on Porter Hill. My grandfather’s family goes back aways, too, though I don’t know as much about them. My mother grew up here. My parents met here. I met my husband here. I dream of moving back, someday. Maybe.

Bill Roorbach's Book

Mostly, though, I just want to continue to love this town with its human-scale Main Street shops, its steepled churches, its college campus, its river. Others have moved here and felt its magic pull. On our recent visit, my friends and I ducked into Twice Sold Tales, a wonderful used bookshop housed in part of the old Newberry’s five-and-dime store, and I picked up Bill Roorbach’s memoir, TEMPLE STREAM. Professor Roorbach came to UMF to teach just after I graduated, but I enjoyed his first memoir SUMMERS WITH JULIET and wished I could have taken a class taught by him.

With the new book, Roorbach had me at the title, but I was impressed on every single page. Funny, insightful, informative, and warm, TEMPLE STREAM made me fall in love with the area all over again. Thank you, Mr. Roorbach.

The visit, the spring season, the memoir all worked a kind of magic and inspired me to write a new poem. I will leave you with the new, spring-inspired poem plus an old, winter-inspired poem written back when I was in college. Both are about the Sandy River in Farmington, Maine. Happy Spring, Dear Reader!

WINTER WATER (old poem)

It is not black
but deepest blue
piercing the whiteness
of snow crusted over
a somnolent river . . .
Chilled blue
water gurgling beneath
that hardened surface, I imagine . . .
Walking this bridge
from there to there
and wondering how it would be
to be a stone
rolling on an icy current,
opaque whiteness for a sky . . .

January, 1990.

and

POETRY & FARMING (new poem)

There is something
about this town
that invites
poetry & farming.

Town born of a river
rushing thick in spring
with sticks
& mud & thrown-away
stuff like bottles, rubber tires,
cardboard, rags.

Does the rushing & roaring
of the water seep
into the brain cells?
Permeable membranes susceptible to river notes,
gurgles like syllables,
voice of water whispering
“This and This and Thus” &
“Write it Down! Remember!”

After the floods in spring
the river draws back
gifting the plains
with organic riches, minerals
dredged from the riverbed or scraped
with a scour of deep ice.

This river made
lush green fields shot through
with meandering streams
like fool’s-gold threads. In later Spring,
swaths of pasture grass are dotted
with buttercups & milkweed & vetch.

The dairy cows lie beside
the water, listen
and chew while their udders fill
with sweet, white milk.

April, 2011

Like Memory

Wishing and Waiting

Another new poem. Hmmm. Has my muse decided to get off her chaise lounge? She must be fat and lazy after 13 years lolling about in her silk negligee, smoking her Gauloises cigarettes, and drinking all the good Champagne bottles down there in the cellar (see Stephen King’s thoughts on muses and their living arrangements in basements), but I dare not diss her. I wouldn’t want her to get angry at me and go back to bed for another decade.

LIKE MEMORY

Where are the heirs of the dignified farmers
of old; dirt and seed
pressed into the corrugated, molded soles
of steel-toed boots, earth beneath
fingernails, and round yellow callouses
on the palm of hands familiar
with the hoe and the rake and the gears
of heavy equipment out in the barn?

Where are the daughters of farmers wives,
jam bubbling and popping on the stove,
while a cheesecloth drips whey
into a bowl, dull tin biscuit cutter
with the ruffled edge pressed down
into the resilient dough on the board,
and the push of cold, soaked clothes
through wringer washing machines in the kitchen?

Have they passed now
into a forgotten time, never to return and leaving
behind dry, empty husks
like corn stalks shaking in an autumn wind?
Like chaff scattered and crushed
beneath a rough heel?

Or are the farmer and farmer’s wife sunk deep
into the skin? Hiding in the bones
and muscle, the very living cells, the twisted
ladder of DNA, coursing somehow in the veins,
vessels, holding onto knowledge
until a time when need ignites
some inherited, instinctual knowledge
of soil and seed and whey and sugar
boiled to sweet, viscous jam,
red and vital like blood,
like memory?

Poem For My Daughter

ADMIRATION

I would prefer you wear
preppy plaid skirts and sweet
button-up blouses with little
round collars; sensible
shoes to cushion your feet
and warm sweaters to drape
over your cool shoulders.

But you like snug
tee-shirts printed
in complicated designs, tiny
skirts worn over footless tights,
skinny jeans, some with rips,
wide belts; glittery
jewelry wrapped around your neck
and ballerina slippers

So thin and hard
they must hurt
your heels. Every day
you create yourself from a palette
of cotton, glitter, and strands
of plastic neon-colored hair
clipped on
and fingernail polish in every color.

I’m awed by your persistence
and your capacity for hurt
in pursuit of image.
To me you’d be beautiful
in any sort of clothes . . .
even wrapped in lengths of silk
even plain dark wool
even rags.

For all the daughters trying to fit in, trying to figure out who they are, trying to make a splash and just trying to get by; And for all the mothers trying to understand, trying to figure out who they are, trying to make a stand, and just trying to get by. Blessings to you all.

January Sonnet

JANUARY SONNET

At noon, I tromp across a pristine field

of white; new snow fell silently last night

to startle me again. It is a shield

of crystal, cold and alabaster light.

No school today (although I’m through with school),

explains the voices shrieking down a hill

behind this row of trees. I sit. A pool

of shadow from a fir, the sudden shrill

a blue-jay makes to answer back

the sound a plane inscribes upon the sky:

It is the noon of winter, too. This stack

of wood I sit upon sinks inch by

inch, storm by storm. I fall into the snow,

an angel, like those winters long ago.

Community and Family Elders

Dear Reader:

I’ve been thinking about my grandparents lately.

My grandparents were farmers. They were other things–journalist, mechanic, painter, carpenter, photographer, County Commissioner, Mason, Granger–but they were farmers, too. My grandmother’s parents had a farm, sold vegetables. My grandfather worked one summer for her father, and that’s how they met and began dating. (I want to use the word “courting,” but it seems too precious and silly.) I recently read in one of my grandmother’s diaries that when he asked her to marry him, she made him wait for an answer. I wouldn’t have guessed that. I wouldn’t have guessed she kept a diary, either. She never mentioned them, and they only turned up after her death. They’d been hidden in her vast accumulation of stuff for, wow, over sixty years. She’d probably be mortified to know I read them. (Note to self: burn old diaries.)

Even though they moved on to other careers, my grandparents continued to cultivate an extensive vegetable and fruit garden on the floodplain of Temple Stream which ran beside their house. In the summer, my parents would load my sister and me and the dog into the car, and off we’d go to Farmington to pick Bampy’s strawberries in the front garden. The next month we’d scratch up our arms collecting the heavy, red globes of raspberries from the patch out back by the old shed. Come August, we’d drive up for a corn feed–eating ear after ear of fresh, sweet corn just picked and quickly boiled and slathered with butter. Corn has never tasted so good since.

In the fall, my grandmother put-up jar after jar of vegetables, some of which went to the Grange exhibit at the Farmington Fair. She did this canning in between stints at the typewriter–later, the computer–writing up that day’s news articles for the Lewiston Sun or the Frankling Journal newspapers. She made jellies and jams, too. My grandfather did the planting and hoeing and weeding.

Lettuce was big at their house. We’d eat it sprinkled with apple cider vinegar and sugar. Beet greens were boiled for a long time and served in bowls with butter, vinegar, salt and pepper. There were green beans and wax beans and broccoli sometimes. Cucumbers for eating and for pickling. In the fall, squash. One year, I remember them putting up a barrel of sauerkraut, but I don’t remember the sourish stuff being served much. When did they eat it? I wish they were still here so I could ask.

My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and knew how to make-do. Nothing was thrown away.

Nanny’s mother used to sell butter in town. My mother recently unearthed a wooden cheese-maker (with an ancient box of rennet included) in the varied and voluminous pile of Nanny’s “stuff.” My grandmother knew how to make homemade cottage cheese. One year when she was getting on in age, my mother and I went to her house and cleaned the kitchen. I turned up my nose at a carton of milk left out on the counter and dumped the lumpy, sour mess down the drain. Awhile later my grandmother asked, “Where is my cottage cheese?” She’d been starting the lacto-fermentation process in that milk carton. I felt bad about it. Now I feel irritated that I didn’t ask her to teach me what she knew about curdling milk into cheese.

I’m struck by the disconnect. Sometime between my great-grandparents’ time and my own, we lost the knowledge, the ability to produce things for ourselves. It’s been a gradual loss of knowledge, but if I had to put my finger on when everything shifted, I’d guess it was with the advent of the car and the discovery of oil. Tractors changed farming. Oil-derived fertilizer changed farming. Almost overnight, it seems, the small family farm no longer made sense.

My grandparents left the farm for jobs in town. My grandmother worked as a telephone operator. My grandfather got a job with the John Deere retailer. Even with three children to rear, my grandmother started and maintained a journalism career that spanned fifty years. My grandfather became a County Commissioner. They both were active in various fraternal organizations, rising in rank to the top posts. They were members of the Baptist church. They grew a garden. My grandfather did great carpentry work. My grandmother knitted and crocheted and tatted. But these activities were hobbies, not necessities. The world had moved on.

Their children, my mother and aunt and uncle grew up in the fifties. They grew up with big cars and black and white television. The big war was over, the space race was on, and the country enjoyed a wonderful period of plenty. Some craftmanship was still practiced, though. Take sewing, for example. My mother went to college to be a home-economics teacher. Growing up, I wore clothes she cut and sewed up for me. I loved the bag of scrap cloth and tried to make clothes for my Barbie dolls. She taught me to sew. She taught me to cook, too. My parents always had a garden, canned and froze vegetables, and picked berries for jams. There is nothing better than the June smell of strawberry jam boiling and bubbling in a large pot on the stove.

But in our family, neither of the two generations preceding mine kept chickens or goats or milk cows or horses. Some families did. We’d go to the Farmington fair every fall and watch the teams of horses pulling concrete blocks through the dirt. We’d watch some of the 4-H goat, pig, and cattle shows. Some kids my age were practicing their animal husbandry skills.

The knowledge hasn’t been lost. Not completely. Not here in Maine. Not yet.

Recently, my friend Sandy let me borrow a few FOXFIRE books she’d picked up at the library book sale. These books are compilations of articles written for a magazine of the same name founded in the 60′s, the brainchild of a teacher in Appalachia who was desperate for some way to engage his English students. They students interviewed community and family elders about the culture, traditional crafts, life skills, and stories from the region and then wrote them up into articles to be published in the magazine. Here is a link if you want to explore this further.

I was fascinated by the articles, the instructions (sometimes detailed, sometimes scarily vague) for making soap or medicine or wooden shingles for siding a house, but it got me thinking: who in MY community knows the old crafts and skills necessary for living in a lower-energy world, the world of my great-grandparents who worked a farm for their living? Crafting has enjoyed a bit of a revival. Enthusiasts practice spinning and knitting, pottery and cheese-making. There are herbalists with extensive gardens and woods-knowledge about the gathering and use of wild, medicinal plants. Kids still show livestock at the agricultural fairs. Their fathers still train teams of work horses to pull cement blocks. Some people use horses and oxen for farming and wood harvesting. Bee-keeping is gaining popularity. Chicken coops are popping up in suburban backyards. I’ve seen more garden boxes and raised beds rimming front lawns this summer. Some knowledge has been retained . . . but is it enough? What have we forgotten? What have we forgotten we’ve forgotten?

We might want to consider surveying the community and our individual families to discover who knows what. One individual cannot master every craft and skill necessary for survival, let alone comfort, in a world with less energy than the one we enjoy now, but if enough individuals make a point of learning one or two basic skills, communities will have a knowledge base from which to draw. Skills should be taught to our children, as well, so their generation will be equipped for the whatever future they find themselves in. Perhaps every community should engage in FOXFIRE-like projects, recording the lore and knowledge of the elders who are still with us. In the end, knowing how to milk a cow by hand or how to dig a well without power equipment may be more important that how to run a computer system or an espresso machine.

In conclusion, I’ll share a couple of poems inspired by my grandparents, Stanton and Barbara Yeaton of Farmington, Maine. One I read at my grandmother’s funeral a couple years ago. The other I read at a Grange meeting when my grandparents were both alive. They were an inspiration then, and the memories of them inspire me still.

INTO GRANDFATHER’S GARDEN

Should I leave the white house–
green shuttered windows filtering the sun–
and the solidity of old, solid farmhouses?
Should I cross the sandy drive
on tender feet,
painted toes dusted and losing gloss?
Should I feel the grassy wetness,
morning lawn,
sloping downward
toward
my grandfather’s garden?

There the silly, white moths
dip and float and duck
among the pea-blossoms.
They tumble through tendrils,
soft green leaves,
the pretty blossoms
that could be moths if they would fly.

There the earth is dry
and crumbly and my foot sinks
as if it, too, wishes to be planted.
Oh, such order!
Each row straight, and spreading
checked by heel and hoe.
Small peas then tall peas;
shiney, leafy beans
then squash; squat hills of potatoes;
spikes of onions; feathers of carrots;
feet!

I’ll plant them deep in earth,
toes cool in underdirt warming
swiftly to ankles
and me–aboveground.
I’ll let the worms kiss my skin
and converse with white moths
flirting with my hair.
The rain will wash
my fingers
outspread like leaves and the sun
will nourish me.

In autumn, then, I’ll have grown
to outrageous perfection.
What a specimen I’ll make
at country fairs!
If only I would leave
the house and cross the drive
and slip my feet into the earth–
into Grandfather’s garden.
–1990

THE PASSING DOWN OF A RECIPE

Standing in the kitchen
watching, stirring, testing
my gradmother glows in her knowledge
of life’s important things:
marriage & children & gardens & news;
the program for tonight’s Grange meeting
& how to make mint-apple jelly.

There on the windowsill, the wee jars gleam
ignited delicate green by the sun.
And there Nanny stands in an apron–
passing down a recipe.
She learned it from her mother,
how to boil the peels, the cores,
nothing to be wasted,
sweetened with sugar and mint.
“Recipes are family things,” she says.

She dips a silver spoon
into the smallest of the jars.
“You taste it,” she says.
She lifts it to my mouth.
“It’s good,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “Of course it is.”
–1989

And there is this poem I wrote after my grandfather’s death.

IN MEMORIUM

A poem about cycles–
how we age
into our parents, then
our grandparents. They are gone,
or going now
a little at a time,
breath by breath
as we are.
And we begin to wonder why
the first wrinkle,
hair without color,
pre-arthritic throb in the joints,
death?
Why death
when there is spring-moist earth
to plant with bright dahlias
and pole-beans?
When there are freshly-cut boards
to plane and smooth
and fit together in sharp angles?
When people love you?
But if there were no death, no harvest,
no dropping of the brown petals
to nourish the spent soil,
there would be no life
in the beginning.
It might nice
never to have pedalled these cycles,
to have enjoyed some other awareness . . .
but then again
to have lived
to have LIVED!
–1992