In Fall, Singing Two Heroic Herbs of Summer

In September it was time to start a move, and when apartment-cleaning, daily work, a commissioned art work and then the move itself began to overwhelm me I began acknowledging the warning tickles of  a cold. In my midlife I've grown susceptible to bronchial congestion that would bloom into pneumonia if left untreated. Prescription antibiotics in the years I'd been insured would squelch those symptoms within hours, but the leftover cough and residue linger way deep. All in all I find I'm vulnerable to bronchitis after more and more of the colds I catch, though I've never smoked. In fall 2013, doing without health insurance and facing the move and my usual Canadian travels in the month to come, I felt the clampdown of familiar challenge in sore throat and fatigue. My house-mates (not the first but the second set of friends to make the same claim) urged that raw garlic would kill the infection and sent me away to Duluth with two whole bulbs of garlic, suggesting I eat it like pills.

So I gulped the cloves one at a time or broke them over the midday meal, while the infection developed because I couldn't afford to spend days lying down to sleep it off. I must have breathed garlic scent on my nearest co-workers, since whenever I burped I burnt the end of my nose with garlic gas. But the usual congestion never caught hold inside me. This cold instead remained the gentle kind I remember having as a schoolkid, a day or more of sneezes, then a three-days' cough toward the end. I ate up one whole bulb of garlic, then let up when the cough had run its course, and skipped that build-up of bronchial residue that reinforces warnings not to rely on antibiotic pills whenever infection strikes. Now I'm a convert to garlic in no matter what formulas it might be prescribed by practiced healers. What seems true is that the benefit may all be in the timing of when you load your system with it.

A friend and peer in Indiana years ago gave me The Herb Book by John Lust, Benedict Lust Publications ©1974. In this book garlic is ascribed a range of healing properties with beautifully arcane names: anthelmintic (a worm-purge,) carminative (a fart-starter to relieve belly gas,) cholagogue (a bile promoter,) antispasmodic (a spasm and cramp-dampener,) and expectorant (hastening the expulsion of mucous from the breathing passages.)

Part of the mystique that this past summer held for me included my first-ever acquaintance with another much scarcer herb, in some locales considered threatened unless propagated, the native North American queen of the prairie or Filipendula rubra. Nothing I've read so far connects it with any medicinal or salad-making properties, though  it's hard to believe that for all the eons of human foot-travel our ancestral gatherers never collected queen of the prairie or tried it out for whatever health-boosting it might be worth.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/165825104/pink-meadow-wildflower-queen-of-the?

I wanted the painting to honor not just the plant in its wind-swayed weirdness--a rose with a foam-like or plume-like floral structure, its leaves subdividing like the fingers of a spread-open hand but saw-toothed along all edges--but also the day on which I sat before it, with the wind ushering a complex of clouds from west to east into ever new sprawls and pile-ups. Wisps of rain cloud would complement plumes of pink flower. The day was of a distinct cool summer type, and the mixture of plants deepened and wove itself into green and greenish black fibrous shadow. The mixture forced me into abstraction. The queen's precisely developed leaves might only bare glimpses of themselves through ever-differing green-shadow, losing itself into scratchy black-green.

A great share of my joy on that scene came of knowing I would soon be living just down this road from this plant colony of chilly-water fens, within a mile of the middle reaches of the St. Louis River. I would come home there as I did today into the impending autumn, which would yield to the first spurts of winter, the vanguard of cold weather with its walls of drear against the horizons. In these ramparts of dark cloud overhead just now I sensed no menace, but a wink of old tomorrows and yesterdays, gold-trim along edges revealing jolly blue. High, low, openings here, there, and beyond them streaks of rain, smears of snow held way aloft. There was nowhere else I would prefer to be. 

The queen of the prairie painting on the featured card is about earth's profusion of waters, sky-borne and ground-channeled, engendering a profusion of plants and moving lives. Along these very roadsides  caraway, a member of the parsley family escaping into the wild from long-forgotten herb gardens, can also be untangled. Though in a separate family, as a garden escape it seems akin to the garlic, wild or domestic. Every plant I remember finding along this roadside with the queen of the prairie figures in, from the standpoint of art, to the living thatch-work of green through the power of visual suggestion.

A Memorial Testament to a Fellow Forager - Gisela - Who Set an Ageless Example as to What Matters

Here's my tribute to an older girl buddy who was my mentor, friend Gisela Schlueter Terrell who stunned me by dying late this spring, just a few weeks after a last e-mail passed between us. She was a librarian in the first ten years of our acquaintance, at Butler University's Irwin Library in Indianapolis, where a two-year grant had funded the opening of a Rare Books and Special Collections department in what must have been 1979. Gisela had come from the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, an hour or so's drive to the south, to stock and catalogue the new rare book room. Meanwhile I was employed as a typist and file clerk in the main cataloguing department downstairs. Apparently she saw a likely characteristic in me that suggested I needed guidance, as Gisela was a great rescuer and guide where there was any possibility of a mutual benefit. What she saw must have had to do with a colorless propriety that pervaded that bright, white library, designed with row upon row of closely set arched windows, the design of a world-famous Seattle-born architect, Minoru Yamasaki, in 1963.

The rare book room in Gisela's time was way up at the top floor of the building and was not a popular place, long and lavish as it was with ranks and ranks of stacks, ancient volumes and boxed documents behind a locking wooden door. As such it made a special refuge for a naive and impractical girl aged nineteen, full of visions of northern horizons and all manner of romance, however/wherever it happened into her grasp of a situation. The sturdy German-born librarian, with long black ponytails and teasing blue eyes, had skin as brown as ancestors from other land masses, other latitudes documented far back into time. I would talk to her of my obsessions and fears, all very abstract, and she would listen, listen and sympathize or starkly critique me in her dark European voice full of inflections and frequent snorted chuckles. Sometimes she would be swiftly harsh in her opinions, yet unfailingly discreet, as much given to scoffing as to reverence, toward me or whomever and whatever was the subject. Her judgment came of wide experience, since she had been a classroom teacher in Germany, a gymnastics instructor, an orchestra violist and music teacher, and later, in America, had been involved in 1960s political demonstrations. With two or more PhD degrees she was mentally quick in her reasoning and conclusions while gifted with strong intuition, which made her a decisive critic as well as a giver of apt suggestions where art, writing, cooking, plant propagation or a love or friendship were under discussion.

She had a little house with a quince tree, a hammock in the yard, and gardens with beans and rhubarb, root vegetables and cucumbers, strawberries and medicinal herbs such as comfrey. Off in the hardwood forest of surrounding Owen County, Indiana grew pawpaw trees and the occasional persimmon, black gum and sycamore, eastern cottonwood, black walnuts, oaks and maples and tulip trees. Ginseng and golden-seal were two scarce herbs that could be foraged there, which Gisela would harvest sparingly and sell at local marketplaces where they would be shipped off to end-users in Asia. At week-ends down at her house I tasted a green persimmon (so bitter I could taste it with imaginary taste buds seated on my teeth) and breakfasted on guinea-fowl and duck eggs from a neighboring small farm, shared in the task of making butter with a vintage glass butter churn that operated with wooden paddles inside, assisted in the hourly pressing of wild honey out of a section of tree trunk placed on the hearth to loosen the honeycomb that was hardened by December's cold, and later one June heard and saw the only Kentucky warbler I have ever encountered, a few steps away down her county gravel road.

The house, including its few acres of backwoods, was something she had just managed to buy out of earnings from the IU Lilly library half an hour's drive away. This house had only two rooms with a back bathroom, and had a root cellar which, if I remember correctly, Gisela had hand-dug under a few square feet of the main room, opening with a trap door. A rear sun porch with translucent green vinyl siding and roof was more of her own handiwork. Cats lived out on the front porch, which was open sided, but were not allowed indoors; in later years domestic geese gained residency around the entire yard and gardens, which they patrolled with shrill vigilance. In June of 1980 as a guest for my first time I spent the night in the hammock that hung from two trees, hearing no end of whippoorwill cries from the forest floor in each direction. Sultry heat, sung by cicadas with that pulsating intro and ebbing buzz that speaks to me Indiana and equivalent latitudes, a song I've yet to hear in Minnesota where by now I've lived most of my life, made up the soundstage of those summer or early-fall days. The forest's leaves, crisp and darkly green, as long and broad as shoe-soles, encircled the yard on three sides, for Gisela had left the the woods alone where ground for pathways or gardens or a bit of light and air current had not needed claiming.

Some time after I was gone away to study and live in the north, first to London, Ontario and subsequently to Minnesota, Gisela met, fell in ecstatic love with and married the son of a neighbor, Clyde Terrell, among other descriptions a pond-builder with carpentry skills, an appetite for history and back-country lore who owned a bulldozer and wanted release from an unhappy marriage. Gisela, who had known marriage, desertion and widowhood all three, destitution and hunger and a few of the personal dangers that can confront young foreigners who are obviously on their own, helped him with the process of getting a divorce, since each of the new couple had independently longed to move west to the mountains. They lived for a few years together in Owen County, then in the early 1990s left to scout Wyoming and Montana for a homestead. They found land they could buy within the Bighorn Range, in Sheridan County, Wyoming, in the village of Story, where they established a cabin and gardens and kept horses during what must have been about eleven exhilarating though financially challenging years. With the approach of 2005 Clyde, nearing the age of 70, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Gisela, as she told me last year, was 'under no illusions' as she cared for him, driving him to and from Denver for treatments, till his death on Labor Day week-end of that year.

So in this dignified aftermath of a dream pursued, met and lived, and heartbreak, and many mountain afternoons spent alone or with Clyde following trails, at trout streams and in dells below the sheerest of peaks, snow-cooled and re-baked by desert heat, and following many orchestral concerts in which Gisela played her viola for weddings, wakes or reunions, and rehearsals in donated space or lessons given in her living room, I met my old friend again after twenty-one years of irregular contact limited to phone, letter or email. This was on the third of June, 2012, as I followed her printed directions off westbound I-90, past Buffalo, nearing but not yet as far as Sheridan.

The log house where I found her was strange yet familiar, a transformation of the old clapboard shack in Indiana, having the same dark interior, jovial signs painted and hung in bathroom or kitchen, dried herbs dangling from the ceiling, and floor to ceiling book cases. Now, minimized in their midst, was also a computer. In the yard stood ponderosa pines and, out back, well-spaced aspen and narrowleaf cottonwood that provided a flickering shade.

We spent most of one week visiting, sharing evening or midday dinners that included heart of deer and bear meat pot roast (friends and neighbors had traded or given her the wild game, though she shot and dressed a deer per year on her own land for the venison as Clyde had taught her how to do) and taking car trips into the highest elevations of the Bighorn Range, seeing moose and marmot, summer snowpack, mesas, torrents within red canyons and sagebrush flatlands. All alone at the top of a Douglas fir one day I heard the song of an Audubon's warbler, the western version of our yellow-rumped warbler found east of the prairies, impossibly wistful and ringing between rock heights like the sincerest utterance of forlorn hopes.

Once as we hiked a road together I noted that Gisela, who long ago had exceeded my height by a couple of inches, but had acquired a hunch in her shoulders, now stood a tad shorter than me. But her stride made me hurry my fastest to keep up--even though she was nearly seventy years of age to my fifty-two and a smoker who'd smoked little brown cigars for as long as I'd known her. The gardens, the old sheepdog Mya and the attraction of mountain slopes not very far in the distance, a backdrop to all errands into the yard, kept her constantly stepping, striding, stooping, hauling, mixing, toting, bowing, tuning, summoning, often braving spasms of arthritis. She had grown stringy, stooped with constant busyness, on a diet centered around lean meat and her own fruit and vegetables. Her ways were the ways of our forebears on six continents.

In my mind she's a persistent survivor, to the extent that I wonder when if ever I'll accept her as a mortal human being truly dead. From most of what she ever said to me I think she believed she'd live to a ripe old age well beyond seventy, and so, had she lost the desire and outlook to attain great age, especially as a veteran tobacco user? At this stage I expect never to learn how she died, if it was sudden or long premeditated, attended by someone or in solitude, eminently influenced by Clyde's death at the same age of seventy years or coincidentally over and done with by that age.

A book I'm currently enjoying, Old Border Road by Susan Froderberg, Little, Brown and Company ©2010, has in its middle the quotable lines: "And do not the dead surely lay their claim? Perhaps more so than the living....Do as commanded or elsewise live in fear. Girl, I tell you this--death is but one less day to be afraid." And so, with the certain sense that the dead do live on inside those of us who knew them best or longest, I rest and act upon the discernments phrased by Gisela--that life is not easy, that it goes back on you just when you're lifted up by your fortunes, that mullein is safely gathered alongside highways and railway rights of way with today's pollution-control technology in cars, trucks and locomotives, that on meeting a cougar in open country you must simply stand your ground and make yourself look as big as possible.

I remember her AMC Gremlin down in Indiana, its rusting body held together by flowers and caterpillars, raindrops and other beautification painted up and down it in different colors of enamel, and the Ford Fiesta that succeeded it. I remember the days she didn't come in to the library due to car trouble, or the summer day she had to stop at every creek between Indianapolis and the town of Spencer to re-fill the radiator with a bucket. I remember the day we came upon car thieves dismantling vehicles beside a shallow pond in a pasture, and she made me stand aside while she passed them at close range to be sure they saw that she saw. (Later, they murdered her young dog Troll with a shotgun blast at close range, and were subsequently rounded up and flushed out of Owen County for good by outraged rural neighbors who showed up in a group with an ultimatum on hearing of what had happened.)

She was a person as large as all humanity, whose code of ethics and acceptance of other traditions she had pieced together from life-ways variably old and much forgotten, civilized American, native American, civilized and pre-civilized Eurasian--that is my best assessment of Gisela. But by now she's no longer in a position to argue with me...

A Sudden Obituary (a bit Late) and the Legacy in Art and Mountain Panorama

A friend of mine going back thirty-three years died, I just learned over the past week-end by accident, a year to the date that we last saw each other. Before that week in early June 2012 it had been twenty-one years since we last visited, other than over the phone. She lived in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, and was a marvelous teacher, gardener and player of stringed instruments. A music teacher and ex-librarian, she was my mentor, without ever admitting to the decided value of the hugely varied lessons she imparted to me. I'm so far left wondering what could have happened, accident or illness, to have felled this staunch person at an age, 70, that seemed too soon.

Last summer, buoyant with my old youthful joy borne of spending time in the deep countryside with this friend (our acquaintance goes back to those years in Indiana, a state then significantly more rural than it is today) I drove from Duluth out to Rapid City, South Dakota in one long day full of lofty clouds and sun, touring in the car a ways around the Oahe Reservoir outside the city of Pierre as dusk settled. Next day it was on, via the Theodore Roosevelt National Grassland, to Wyoming in that area between Buffalo and Sheridan, where immediately the same day I began to get acquainted with new birds of the Rocky Mountain valleys: the red-naped sapsucker and the calliope hummingbird. The watercolor kit had ridden with me in the car and a profusion of hound's tongue or gypsy flower on sunlit ground (per my friend locally called the beggar's fleas) challenged me to a several-days' botanical painting effort.

The hound's tongue is a weed of pastures, not a native North American herb, yet in its peculiar fuzziness and olive drab overtone, its florets the meaty pink of a dog's dripping tongue, it seems as habituated into the nearby mountain slopes as my friend, a native of Germany, was absorbed into the high elevations of the American West. I found a patch of ground with both sun and shade where I could sit, where a specimen of hound's tongue or Cynoglossum officinale made itself available, and spent four to five days finishing the details in watercolor and gouache. The card front in its photo is shown here, with a link to where it's for sale:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/103227055/blank-note-card-botanical-watercolor?


When I think about that gypsy flower in blossom alongside a sparkling rill beneath a line of cottonwood trees, with magpies' prattle over in the sun's direction and from behind me the flattened little death-knell sound, like a screech owl without the tremolo, that later proved to be the western wood pewee, I think about our car excursions up to the passes in the Bighorns near the Montana state line, where snowbanks enclosed the two paved lanes on either side. My friend, putting in her gardens for the year's food crop, never-the-less took afternoons off to drive me with her to such places as Shell Falls and Crazy Woman Canyon; we saw miles and miles of the changing topography that makes up Wyoming including sub-alpine slopes with whitebark pines, and way below them the red rock chasms, sagebrush deserts and, partway up again in elevation, meadows dampened by snow-fed springs, a-flit with mountain bluebirds the greenish blue of a twilit sky.

I remember her explanations of the sights around us: her elderly Australian sheep dog with the bald and hanging teats and one crossed eye, formerly the property of some unnamed sheep herder who had obviously used her to commercially breed pups and almost as likely had kicked her face at some point near one eye socket. This dog had entered into a new life at the grand age of ten. Her career as a companion dog must have felt to her like a paradise, one old lady rescued and given to another to ease their joint tragedies past into vaguest after-impression. 

My friend explained runaway truck lanes I had glimpsed from the highway in another tragic story out of local news: a young transport driver fell asleep in his cab somewhere high above Sheridan or Buffalo, realized on waking that he'd lost his chance to use the emergency lane and knew he was fated to crash into the town below the heights in order to make his final stop. He dialed 911 and had the local sheriffs clear the whole route ahead of him and provided his speed and location. As predicted, with the main thoroughfare into town fully emptied of cars and trucks, he hurtled into view on schedule, missed a diagonal bend and crashed to his death into a building already vacant, the walls and roof collapsing around him. The local folk took up a collection for his widow and tiny children.

There was the day I spent mostly alone, creeping along the Penrose hiking trail, further teaching myself the local flora like the clematis folk-named sugar bowls, and somewhere along the way finding my first Lazuli bunting singing to the sunny afternoon so much like the indigo bunting of the Midwest. Eventually my friend dialed my cell phone to check that I still answered and hadn't fallen prey to any cougars or armed strangers or dropped off a precipice. One night we splurged like hungry girls with the metabolism of youth, eating three platefuls apiece of Asian buffet meat and vegetables. In her dining nook I ate roast bear and heart of venison for my first time. I learned of treating old bronchial mucous with cups of mullein tea, and vowed I'd forage my own back in Minnesota, as I have now done.

So now, more than a year later, with the western expanses of America a beacon in my memory each day I make my living in the north-central U.S., I have the gypsy flower art image to help remind me of this legacy in the person of a great critic, teacher and humanitarian, who had once beguiled me into thinking she had been born a Romany gypsy, an adoptee saved from one of the orphanages the Hitler regime set up for selective breeding. The gypsy flower might, among other things, stand for the drifter and re-colonizer in people and species the world over. She told me on the last visit that the half-gypsy girl had really been her cousin by adoption.

When I envision the future with its dire impending constraints like unaffordable car ownership and withering summer droughts taking place between floods and consequent washouts along high-country roads like those in the Bighorns, I wonder what will happen to byroads between hubs of commerce and manufacturing. Will patches of old America and for that matter old Europe and other places still flourish, visitable by ordinary folk who yearn over collective memory of them? I tend to think that they will, if at great expense in money and personal safety, somehow--maybe by bus or bike, van, wagon train or foot...

Feeling like a Queen of the Prairie

I am celebrating the great, unexpected good fortune of being able to live in the country again, as I did through childhood, at the urging of good friends an hour from Duluth--and celebrating the concept of summer everlasting in our minds, summer with its weird discoveries or epiphanies from the natural world. Maybe half a mile down the road from my new shared home is this stand, just below the road bank, of a native American prairie plant classified within the giant rose family, called queen-of-the-prairie. It will be in a watercolor which I mean to develop at its own pace.

While we in our fifties or coming into our sixties feel or see our own aging process, a wild and lesser-known plant like this one, especially one this uncommon, coming into its prime just off our shoulder speaks to us of rejuvenation, whether it's individual or community. When I first saw this plant while passing in a fast walk, I knew it by name immediately, though I'd never seen it in the flesh, only in pictures in several wildflower manuals. Some plants and animals are like that, so showily distinctive that some photo in some book instills a lasting memory.

Queen-of-the-prairie is like a pink floss or a foam on top of its pale orangey green stalk. Originating, apparently, in the northern and central prairies of the United States where there's wet soil, the plant has found its way eastward into New England by way of plantings. Down in the grasses below the inflorescence are the leaves, colonial, sharply veined and toothed, deeply lobed and golden-green. What a privilege, to share habitat with things like this that nobody contrived or apparently sowed here, it just came into being by natural process through thousands of years and holds out, where nobody may for the longest time have grazed livestock or mown hay.

Watch for the 2013 watercolor, which continues my line of native North American plant note cards. I'd halfway like to have it done right now, right here to advertise the whole set of works. But every time I get down to business at one of these, trusting a folding chair will protect me from the bite of deer ticks, I have to consciously tell myself that the project can't be hurried or the whole thing suffers. Evolution takes eons; artwork meant for its glorification should take as long as the artist's whole life support system demands, as long as the inevitable mistakes take to be found and overcome, as long as the utmost patience will bear.

I am so full of gratitude, when I stop to think, of all that's been possible and may yet be possible in my time.

Away to California but Back to Mid-Continent - Refinding a Hardy Ephemeral

Better late than never--courtesy of generous friends I was recently able to visit the West Coast for my first time, spending a week in Sonoma County, California. For anyone who has never ridden Amtrak's Empire Builder westward or east along the Canadian border, skirting Glacier National Park in Montana, connecting at Portland, Oregon with the Coast Starlight which climbs up and over the Cascades to chug up or down Oregon and California, it's armchair travel worth the money and the time.

I had never been in California or any of the Pacific Northwest, and never seen a palm tree growing naturally out-of-doors. Occidental, California where we stayed, is in the thick of redwood country and nestles among the hills of the Coast Range. Taking it for granted that in our time the landscape of most inhabited places would still be recognizable to our ancestors a few centuries back, the look of north central California today, take away the grape and olive plantations, the estates and the towns with their ornamental groves of imported trees and flowers, would have been the color, texture and tree outline carried home by the European horseback travelers who first scoped it out as a paradise where they'd make their new homes. Most landscapes must remind a newcomer of places where they'd lived or traveled, but as I made my acquaintance with the definitive trees of this forest, redwood and tan oak, California laurel, interior live oak and Pacific madrone, I knew beyond a daydream that I was on the other side of mountain ramparts distinctly separating me from the Midwest, Ontario and New England, the places I've walked the most. Redwood structures and outlines do not resemble those of any other conifer in my experience.

At Powell's City of Books, the giant used-book store in Portland, Oregon I bought introductory manuals for the trees and wildflowers of California. Especially informative was the older book, Trees of California by Willis Linn Jepson, published by the University of California in 1923. The circular pattern of redwood shoots' maturation into a ring of full-size trees, the centrality of redwood lumber in the history of California's statehood, and the huge diversity of pines and firs to be found if a person traveled inland and northward from Sonoma County are all impressions I gained from that little book with its exquisite pen-and-ink illustrations of cones and foliage drawn to scale in an age before photography could adequately show the hallmarks of trees, herbs, plumage, etc. 

We passed time along the fog-drenched and wind-whipped Pacific Coast, as cold as Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota--counter to my biased expectations. My most vivid plant encounter along those state-owned pull-outs and beaches near Bodega Bay was with outcrops of pink and lavender blossoms, their anatomy so much like the fleabane from Midwestern brushlands but growing squat on the ground, the flowers the width of a little girl's hand. The leaves were three-cornered and fleshy like exotic desert foliage, but I wanted to think of these plants, creeping on the ground in typical adaptation to ever-recurring gales, as members of the composite family which includes the daisies, asters and sunflowers. With the other purchase from Powell's, The Wildflowers of California, Their Names, Haunts, and Habits by Mary Elizabeth Parsons (Dover Publications, Inc. of New York, 1966), but most of all with a tip from my host Barbara who called it ice-plant, and then the internet, I learned that these flowers were of a totally other family called fig-marigold, or Mesembryanthemum, most members of which strayed to America from southern Africa. Ms. Parsons, the handbook's author, speculated that the three species known along the California coast may have taken root without the direct help of human hands.

We car-traveled around the county between the towns of Occidental, Guerneville, Sebastopol, Jenner and Santa Rosa, allowing me the chance to walk and see twelve new species of birds, most of which I wouldn't reliably meet east of the Pacific seaboard. From the bus windows between Santa Rosa and Martinez, the train stop, I saw agricultural flatland, always backed by the hazy storm-cloud blue of the dry mountain chain that lends the Coastal Range its special character, the land as a whole provoking impressions not new but familiar, gathered from book- and article-reading down the years, sealed by awareness of being nearly as far west as possible in the continental U.S.

Sun, as in sunny California of course gives this land its reputation for days and days at a time, baking and cracking mud into tiles, irregular hexagons and octagons, in a wildfowl refuge nearly devoid of ducks, that we passed alongside. Fields adjoined streamside groves between dwellings fenced and tree-sheltered, the evening angle of the sun mellowing the daylight across all this semi-arid backdrop of anonymous settlers' westward dreams of space and moderate climate, lives either chosen or settled for, since the settler had run out of choices on meeting the coast. Though I didn't feel at home,  I was glad to have visited here firsthand, as a validation of so much amassed magazine-reading and almost-envisioned vista through the eyes of novelists like John Steinbeck.

In the weeks just before this two-week trek, back in northern Minnesota I had watched one of the most reluctant onsets of spring ever in my memory, snows arriving like sweepings from some overhead storage loft into the month of May. One significant Saturday hour by hour gave way to a parade of overlapping winter and spring weather drama, yielding everything but a summer thunderstorm. That day I was driving backroads north by east from the town of Aitkin--which the previous day had hosted a rare painted bunting that had blown this way from the Gulf Coast region but likely blown homeward before the night's frigid reblast from the north--to the township of Meadowlands. All this countryside is nearly as flat as river delta; much of it was prehistoric lake bed that contains peat bogs. Stopping at the home and work space of good friends I went wandering toward the St. Louis River where the prior week-end I had been startled by blue-violet petals on the woods floor like a revolt, a freakish kind of blossoming in defiance of persistent freezing. This was the native perennial hepatica or, as foretold by its Latin name hepatica americana, a woodland harbinger of spring in the American heartland, modest like so many cold-tolerant plants, the leaves lobed and purple-splotched, a little bit suggestive of a liver.

As I stood over the isolated flowers they looked mostly the blue of the ever-amassing and scattering storm clouds marking that early afternoon rather than lavender. Any effort to start a watercolor out there would take on the speckles of melting snow pellets so I just took photos and hurried back to the house, the whole mood of the day become one of hurry-hurry, gales from the north overhead roaring in the woods canopy, driving clouds, admitting sun, strewing snow that switched to rain and back to white pellets. Sometimes a deluge whitened out my view from the car between meadows but before I got back among the trees the sun would boom into clarity and raise the outside temperature on the car's readout by seven or eight degrees in scant minutes.

Austere border country of a kind shared between the U.S. and Canada, unlike the fields, gardens or redwood sanctuaries of California, has its parallels in a nation of less diverse human culture with fewer naturalized Eurasian trees and shrubs, a more raggedy, homogeneous bushland that resonates as the Canadian provinces, Minnesota and the Dakotas must with lands in Russia or Scandinavia. Inhospitable fens, cliffs and badlands beckon to some people with a fascination that might compare with the allure of moldy basements, industrial ghettos or warehouses good for the game of dungeons and dragons or photography of failing architecture in all its glory of ideals.

Accompanied on that long midday drive by a CD on the car stereo, Nordic Roots, "An ideal introduction to the vibrant traditional music scene developing across the Nordic lands: incredible playing, catchy tunes, brilliant arrangements and strange instruments playing pre-medieval as well as modern compositions", produced by the label NorthSide in Minneapolis,  I was full of themes that deserved commingling, the hepatica or liverleaf at the center because it showed itself in the vanguard of the coming season of flowers. Infinite yearly cycles, condensed into one day's crippled start at spring  felt represented in that music and in that scene of a struggling herb on the ground, carried home in that vision that became this card image.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/154636427/north-country-note-card-blank-card-with?

Spring, not to be Denied

Sun-lovers move where the sun, in an opinion like my own, overwhelms a typical daytime sky, and in temperate zones they're apt to bemoan every cloudy delay to the green season, often including the rainy spells that signal the buds to open. A few of us, who define ourselves as odd, scruffy, wolvish in our orientation to the wild and natural most of the time, but clad in a stack of shirts, knits and jackets, secretly delight in the shivering of the bare bushes even if we curse the sea-borne winds that bite our hands and make us grab gloves even in May, because a heat-baked outdoor scene to us feels loud as if light from the sun could be heard shrieking or roaring; we have to get away to where the sounds are fainter and movement slower and tentative in response to other movement, sensed or suspected. Still, we cold-weather types freeze and peer, crouched low or standing tall, awed by any number of springtime discoveries. 

Yesterday, these wild cherry buds were breaking open, tight and yellow-green.

Nearby a noise overhead stopped me in my stride--a mechanical stutter like some bygone hand-held tool with a couple of moving parts, something small and steely and something heavier with a grinding clatter. One merlin, small and extra-nimble like something shot out then retracted by an elastic cord, was besieging a crow where the road led between trees and river's mouth. The crow made the low clatter, the falcon jingled. Apart and together, apart and back together, swinging more and more to one side, the siege continued, antics and face-offs a hallmark of  the motives of spring's general awakening.

Later that day, indoors in the call center where I work, I was remembering hepaticas from last week-end, in woods an hour by car to the northwest, isolated whitish blue-violet outbursts from brown leaf litter, barely offset by any first sprigs of green anywhere on the ground or above. The leaves stood apart from from the flowering stalks, old-green with red tinges, lobe-shaped like a liver.

All these seem precursors to the leafburst and the months of summer. Late as this spring has been,  when it arrives we have a menu of items to call to mind, observe, harvest and protect. Here is a set of spring floral note cards for sending your thoughts or for using wherever you can use them.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/96314046/spring-flowers-card-set-of-6-peonies? 

Ruptures or Shutdowns are, Eventually, our Fate

What do I know now? I have lost what I feared all along I was losing, seeing plenty of warning signs, but I waited to see it through. Now I know...this much, and it feels...this bad, and it can only be true that a new period of adjustment will follow, in the knowledge that all over the whole wide world tragedies do hit so many of the most wretched souls in multiples. The earth seethes with the shock and bereavement of all manner of beings, human and non-human, even less noticed than tainted seepage oozing from hidden underground flows.

We almost never read about the evolution of the pain suffered after news stories have covered kidnappings and murders or cases of ravaging disease--how the survivors briefly escape from it and then return, the reconciliations within the mind, the stages and their triggers for fresh starts made for better or for worse. What if there were a separate news bureau devoted to victims' and families' outcomes in the years following after high-profile crises? More usually this is the stuff of private diaries, autobiographies and therapists' notes or even fiction, where it's ever recorded at all.

But in my case I'm talking about heartbreak, much more routine than murder and mayhem. 

O the love relationships that each of us may have sanctified based on rosy conclusions reached and savored like the most exquisite marbles, all in our own private minds! And the writers who have written that they knew a fellow person's thought, could just see it, knew absolutely what would come next, when the fulfillment of that knowledge owed itself instead to well-imagined guesswork. There is no science of what people will do, or how things will turn out in the end, after so many lesser, day-to-day conclusions.

If we felt sure that we read someone's heart, saw the delight in it that corresponded to our own, then noticed it recede or learned that we misread the face and the words, how are we ever to ascertain the degree to which our intuitions about the loved person or the potential for fulfillment as a couple were wrong, or how much the obstacles to a shared future lay more in ourselves or in the other person? And are we safe in trusting our intuitions about new love again?

In  July 1990, another agonizing time, I wrote this poem about the lasting power of infatuation, called  
A Panorama of Loves:

   Stars! Near, immense stars, far, far sown--
   each one, unknown jewelwork of hovering starlets--
   each a beloved, replete in its majesty.
   Forces do breach and strew them, bursting them
   from within, sometimes, off through the gape of stars.
   One star may dazzle another, but does it escape and flare,
   star of its own fate, or smother itself in strange starfire?
   Shooting-stars flee across ages of waiting space--
   breathtaking traces unfurl through their wakes, decades long.

   ©2012

Some time near that same date came this other poem, Grief: The Exile:

   The old boat rises,
   and settles, its timbers controlled by
   the waves that divide them and nails that uphold their oneness.
 
   Why hast thou left me to rupture away from thy pillar?
   Thou couldst have hefted me loose long ago, with thy hand
   unsnagging my anchor.

   The old boat straggles,
   and wallows, the stub of a rope floating
   hopeless to anchor me ever again.

   ©2012

Blessed are a long memory, and better yet a time out sharing between intimate friends, for dicing up and scattering the thoughts that humiliate us or freeze us in a place we'd best be moving beyond. Blessed every bit as much are the tricklings of well-being when we least expected them and can't account for them: thoughts of space and opportunity, or realizations that we pre-grieved for a while so this latest, really, came mostly as plain old heart-ache rather than shock.

Blessed are old, timeless things--how many can this industrializing world maintain, unwittingly or determinedly?--since they reliably gave comfort when sought. The sore thoughts may be at bay now but raw pain, its special loneliness, won't leave till sometime--I trust--we notice that it has departed the way a body ache has healed and gone; we suddenly observe that we haven't been suffering that thing lately.


 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/103302109/encouragement-cards-landscape-photo-card?
 

 
https://www.etsy.com/listing/94873894/botanical-watercolor-set-of-7-large-gift?





































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