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Headline: WOODLAND TRAIL YIELDS MORRELL
This morning I joined the ranks of Morrell finders. I was walking along the Woodland Trail with my dogs when I saw this sponge mushroom right at my feet. One more Nike footfall and splat, I’d have flattened it. I was so excited, perhaps not so much for the mushroom itself but rather the delight of the unexpected; a little windfall’s sudden appearance.
While cooking together in a friend’s kitchen:
B: “I noticed the other day, that my daughter J. wipes the inside of a cracked eggshell. She runs her finger around it wiping all the white of the egg out of the shell.”
Me: “Oh?”
B: “Yeah. My mother does the same thing and I realized I do that too.”
Me: “Really?”
B: “So I asked my mother why she does that.”
Me: “What did she say?”
B: “She said she did it because money was so tight with so many mouths to feed that the food had to stretch as far as possible. Couldn’t afford to waste any part of the egg. Had to make sure they used every bit.”
Me: “That’s something.”
B: “Stuff you learn to do in hard times.”
Me: “Interesting, it’s not hard times now, but that habit remains?”
B: “Yeah, all the women in my family still do that to this very day. The Depression really effected people in some lasting ways.”
Me: “For sure.”
I was thinking about hands. My grandmother’s hands always smelled like whatever she had been cooking or else of garden soil. My mother has long, tapering fingers that were today covered with the purple paint and glitter from her preschool classroom. Once I shook the hand of an Amish man, a well digger, and in every callous I could feel his laboring as he pick-axed and shoveled through soil to find water. My friend Carole, after a challenging cross-country relocation, was unexpectedly touched on her hands by a neighboring congregant. It was during the Our Father and she was moved to tears right there in a pew. Once during heartbreak, a McDonald’s clerk accidentally held onto my hand to keep change from slipping and I felt that rush to tears too. Though it would sound more sophisticated or dear, I think, to say I had such a reaction during the Our Father rather than during the exchange of a fast-food breakfast burrito. Today, an old man I know who has struggled to overcome serious cardiac injury and depression, greeted me in the post office. He held my hand for a moment and I felt such a connectedness to him. Because I know how hard he worked to get where he is now, successfully living with cardiac disease and finding ways to enjoy his life-- including flying planes with the accompaniment of another licensed pilot! What stories are in our hands.
Having published my thesis work on Flannery O'Connor, I thought how nice it would be to have a framed autograph by her. What would she have to say if she knew that an envelope with just “F. O’Connor” is selling for $6,000?
My mother and I searched and scoured for an antique dresser and finally found the perfect one. It is walnut and has carved leaves for handles.
I had the opportunity today to meet with a PhD Archeologist from Iowa who examined a stone work piece I possess. When I was a little girl, I found it in the upturned soil recently tilled for planting our garden. The archeologist was delightful and explained about the culture from 7,000 BC and told me about my piece, it was a knife. Fascinating to feel the history behind my own history. There is the personal history of my little redheaded self tagging along after my dad and finding the stone knife in 1969; there is the history of the farm as it belongs to my family, and then there is the history behind all of that, one not constricted and tidied by titles, deeds, and beyond the reach of personal or deliberate memories. A history that existed nine thousand years ago and left a tangible remnant I can fit in the palm of my hand to tell some story to me – and that is a powerful notion to think on.
Purchased and planted my first Lithodora today. Lovely color and texture.
I heard the weather for today; a downpour with the anticipation of thunderstorms. Spring kind of weather –powerful and intense! I hear a robin singing from his tree perch this morning in the pitch dark as I type. I admire that ability to sing in anticipation of the dawn when everything around is dark and stormy as feathers themselves are drenched by rain and ruffled so by winds. Yesterday, I heard the rustling of birds in the wall behind the picture in the bathroom as I was taking a bath. Gabriel listened with cautious intend to the fluttering of wings inside the wall. Dash lifted only an eyebrow while Thomas seemed unaffected by bird presence as he curled upon my yellow towel strewn on the floor beside the tub as I soaked. “I think they must be building a nest” I said aloud to the dogs. Part of me is aghast that there are birds inside the walls and part of me is charmed in some strange way. I know they are just starlings, “pests” in the bird world, but I feel like the house itself is extending a kind hospitality. And mostly they feel like company. I suppose then I could argue that I could extend a similar feeling to the Porch Cats, but I am not charmed by them. Perhaps if Emily Dickinson had instead written “Hope is the thing with fur that sits upon haunches in your soul….” rather than the "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all"; then perhaps I might feel differently.
Letter to my mother:
“Did you wake up to all the storming at 4:00 this morning or were you already awake by then? I was awakened and sleepy-eyed because I stayed up late reading that new Wendell Berry book I got from the library on the day we went to Harrison together. In this latest volume entitled “Window Poems” he writes about, in particular to my interest, a flood. I meet Mr. Berry again with that same experience of happening upon a stranger who speaks your language while traveling in a land amidst the absence of your own mother tongue. At last you can both understand and be understood: you become strangers to one another no longer.
I am beginning to know The Flood, Fressa’s flood, know it like it was someone having once been introduced to, I can never forget. I can see it, hear it, and even smell it. It passes before me and through me never as The River but always as The Flood; its deep, dark power and ongoingness the centerpiece of narrative. Sometimes I am caught in nervousness like a willow standing low on the bank as the swift current throws and folds debris, DOUBTS, around me. But Fressa has become so real that I feel the tense premonition of the river’s savage night even as I write curious and happy details of her life. It’s coming and I know it –whole trees, her favorite tree flying by in the current, all bearing down and rising. It’s coming and I know it –I am writing my first novel.”
I slept somewhat better last night. I say “somewhat” because last night, Gabriel fell off the bed, spectacularly. He landed on the white rocking chair knocking it over in the process of falling. It seems he realized his plight as he went over the edge of the bed and in the scramble to stay on the mattress collided with the rocker. He upset the rocker, the pillows on the seat, and sent my charging cell phone and one plastic dog bone to the floor with loud clack and clatter before landing kurplunk on the floor himself. It was a great spectacle of noise in the dark that has left Gabriel with a little shoulder limp this morning. I have given him some extra me time and a massage that seems to be righting his world for him.
