the cassandra pages

A Tethered Cloud

We headed back down to Vermont in mid-afternoon, after J. got the first of the two required Canadian inspections on the car that we recently imported, and I did a trip to the fruiterie to buy vegetables and fruit, including the first Quebec asparagus.

Last night he went to a meeting and I went to choir, except apparently I’d missed the message that there wasn’t any. Instead there was a huge thunderstorm, which wasn’t exactly conducive to hopping back on my bike, so I window-shopped in the underground for a while, waiting for the rain to let up, and then rode back to the bibiotheque where I spent a happy half hour browsing in the classical music CD section before cycling home on the wet streets.

 

Our trip today was through storms too: a leaden cloud seemed to be tethered to the car, because it followed us all the way to Vermont. On the flats above Lake Champlain we stopped a number of times to take photos when beautiful light filtered through the dark clouds, shimmering on the fields of tender new grain or polishing the distant aluminum silos and church steeples. We saw two rainbows, several deer, a flock of captive elk, a raccoon, black cows chasing each other around a field (which made us burst out laughing,) an enormous stack of logs, a herd of sweet-faced brown Swiss huddled under a tree, and a flock of newly-naked sheep, recently relieved of their winter coats.

The house is much emptier than when we arrived the last time, and we’re both feeling a huge amount of relief at having a clear path ahead, and a place to go to: in the last few days we found a studio space that looks like it will be just about perfect for us. At 9:00 pm we ate a dinner of salmon, asparagus, and new potatoes, and J. is in the kitchen right now cutting up a half-flat of strawberries that we bought at a farm stand in Iberville: summer has arrived.

Dark Corners and Passing Storms

A post about nature and personal philosophy, for Memorial Day, crossposted to The Clade

Imagine the torpor of a July morning, already humid at 8:30 am. The sun hasn’t reached beyond the tops of the tall pines, so the grass in the village park is still covered with dew that soaks through the toes of our white cotton sneakers. The warm smell of coffee and homemade doughnuts mingles with the musty air inside the old carriage barn, so seldom opened; it’s usually the dark undisturbed home of pigeons and bats. On the concrete floor inside the barn are rows of several long folding tables and more, perpendicular to them, have been carried out onto the grass in front of the tall, dark green barn doors. Piles of cloth cover all the tables, and haphazard stacks of cardboard boxes lie underneath them.

It’s 1959, or maybe 1960, and the wives of the village Rotarians – called “RotaryAnns” in those years - are getting ready for the summer rummage sale. The women lift boxes onto the tables and sort the contents: children’s underwear, pajamas, kitchen towels, shoes, dishes. They have a routine, perfected over the many years this event has been going on; certain items go on certain tables, in a particular order, and different women have their specialty that they arrange, and will later sell to the kids and village women who come to browse the year’s offerings. There’s a congenial banter going on among the women, who all know each other. My mother stands among them, prettier than most, lifting and folding men’s shirts; she’s smiling and saying a few words now and then so as to be friendly, but not really participating in the talk that’s turned to gossip. If I were an observant adult, instead of a child excited and distracted by the change in our normal routine, I might realize how bored she is, not so much with the task as with the other women. Instead, I kneel on the wet grass with my friend Lorry, our arms inside a big box playing with three black puppies who’ll be sold in the auction that will take place here tonight, on a platform under a string of lights, after the rummage sale and parade are over.

There are no men here, although every half hour or so a pickup truck pulls up and two men jump out and unload a refrigerator or chest of drawers or set of chairs someone has donated for the auction, sometimes bringing another box of rummage over to the women. The men wear white t-shirts and kid around with the women, especially the younger ones, but they don’t stay long; the division of roles is well-established and completely accepted. The truck stops at the front of the park before heading out on its next errand; here some of the older women are setting up a bake sale, and they indulgently pass a doughnut or a cookie to the men as they go by.

Suddenly there’s a shriek inside the barn, and then more screams; the women who’ve been working inside come running out, laughing and screaming. I can’t hear what’s going on, but then I see my mother leave her place at one of the outside tables and stride into the now empty barn. In a few minutes she comes back out, holding a two-foot-long garter snake in one hand. The other women stand, slack-jawed, watching her, as she walks to the stone wall that surrounds the park and carefully places the snake on the opposite side. Then she goes back to her folding, without saying anything at all, and gradually the Rotary-Anns, wide-eyed and subdued, filter back to their places and the chatter starts up again.

--

This is the memory that kept surfacing in the days leading up to the recent third anniversary of my mother’s death. At first it startled me, but then I realized it was representative of how I always see my mother: unafraid of whatever lurks in the dark places, able to summon the courage to do what needs to be done, preferably without drawing much attention to herself. She did that literally, and symbolically, all my life, and continues to make it easier for me. In a way it’s odd, because she was a shy person who seemed timid or reluctant about certain things: travel to unfamiliar places, or certain kinds of social situations. But in the world she knew well, the natural world, she was completely at home and refused to tolerate any silliness about creatures or weather or tall grass or pricker-bushes; we were all part of a whole, a natural order of things with its own harmony and grace that called for curiosity, knowledge and respect, but not fear.

She loved to watch thunderstorms gathering in the west and then rolling across the lake where we later lived, the first fat drops making rings on the surface like dozens, then hundreds, then countless rising fish, and then turning the water the color of molten aluminum, and blowing across the surface in sheets that undulated like the northern lights we saw on winter nights. She loved the sharp cracks of nearby thunder, the jagged bolts of lightning, the distant rumbling as the storms passed out of the valley, the gradual light returning to the sky. We always went out to the other side of the house then, and looked for a rainbow. Even though we lost several big trees to lightening strikes close to the house, I grew up completely unafraid of storms.

The concept of nature-as-teacher, capable of imparting a personal philosophy, was already dying out among educated people in the 1950s, even in small towns like my own. Yes, on the farms surrounding it, there were people who lived according to the seasons and had a deep knowledge of the natural world and their place in it, and derived their life’s meaning from that and from their family relationships, where human births and deaths mirrored the countless others that were part of the observed natural order of things. My mother was more educated and better read than most people in our town, but somehow, perhaps as a young girl who spent hours in relative solitude struggling with asthma, she derived solace not only from books but from the world around her. Ours was a family that had moved “into town” from the isolated farm run by previous generations only when she was little, so our rural roots ran deep. Like her own aunts and mother, who had grown up on that rural farm in the early 1900s, my mother knew the names of all the trees and shrubs and wildflowers and delighted in their seasonal cycles; she considered all the creatures her friends, and passed all of this on to me. She called herself an agnostic, or even atheist, but she derived more of her remarkable “inner strength”, as she called it, from these natural sources than most people do from their gods.

When she could no longer go out and walk in the woods or along the lakeshore on her own, we brought her bouquets of columbine, early violets, and the rarely-picked white trillium that carpeted the deciduous woods that she and I had always explored together. To get there, we'd walk across the lawn where every summer we found snapping turtles moving between the river and lake after egg-laying, and where we once spent an entire morning watching a snake swallow a frog.

My father told me, afterwards, that in the last week he’d often found her seated in a particular chair, looking across the lake through the same windows from which we used to watch the storms. “Saying goodbye,” he said, causing tears to fill my eyes, as they still do when I imagine her there.

But this year, as I’ve thought it over again, I’m not so sure. I think, perhaps, she was saying hello.

A haiku from Virginia

Black squirrel in the pine
above crimson azalea --
strange to northern eyes.

The Greening, seriously condensed

Skyscraping white pine
swaying in the stiff breeze -
ear pressed to the bark
I hear its groans,
but my cheek transmits
a rough comfort.

The Greening

A flock of geishas,
green-parasoled,
alight on the maple

Early afternoon on the side of the mountain. I walk around the pond, watching the slowly-swimming small-mouthed bass in the shallows, and a hatch of water-boatmen, all paddling madly like some sort of single-crew race gone amok. The white birches stretch toward the water, their stiffly-pleated new leaves emerging in tufts. A quick skirting around the water's edge, off the path, and sure enough, I discover blossoms on the hidden patch of trailing arbutus, and get my knees wet bending down to smell them.

This was supposed to be a walk for exercise, and I even jog a little as the path heads into the woods, but I keep getting distracted. There are Wake-Robins - dark maroon trillium - and cinnamon ferns unfolding their tightly-curled heads, and the leaves of dog's tooth violets and jack-in-the-pulpits. I take the branch of the trail that goes straight up, walking briskly enough to get my heart pumping; the canopy is still bare above me, but lower down all the shrubs and smaller trees have leafed out, just today, and the cloud of delicate green forms a band through the woods shimmering in the shafts of sunlight. Near the top, I see a deer trail heading off toward the gulley, and veer off into the deeper woods. The trees are huge here: white pine I can barely span with my outstretched arms, large maples, beech, mature birches; the peeling bark is as silver in the sunlight as coinage.

I lean against one of the largest pines and look up the trunk and notice something I've never seen before: as it goes up toward the top, the great swaying trunk moves more and more like liquid as it swings back and forth in the stiff wind. I lean one ear against the bark, and hear the tree groaning.

All my exercise resolve has gone now, and I slowly make my way down the bank toward the stream at the bottom with its little white waterfalls and pools, wandering from tree to tree, conscious of being as silent as possible, stopping often to look closely at what's near my feet and then up and out at the forest's unfolding panoramas that change with every few feet of elevation or distance. It's been a while since I've been in a place like this, and after half an hour I feel as cleansed as a pebble in the quickly-cascading water of the stream.

I hear dogs and voices in the distance, and decide to take a different route back down. From here I can look out over the Vermont hills and see the green creeping up the mountainsides across from me. Near my hand, the maples proffer their little umbrella-shaped leaf-and-flower bundles. I think suddenly of this exact week, three years ago, when I brought maple branches into the house, and my dying mother pored over the leaves and blossoms with our old hand lens, marveling at complexity, at rebirth.

Le Fleuve

We recently rearranged our bedroom and J.'s office are so that the two are more separate; this meant putting the office where the bed used to be. Today we spent the morning at IKEA buying shelving and cabinets, and when we picked up the items that had to be brought out separately from the self-serve warehouse, we realized there was no way they'd all fit into our (small) car. So we rented an IKEA van for $19.95/90minutes, and made a fast trip into the city and back. (No, we're not going to spend the whole afternoon putting the kits together.)

On the way back, the road runs along the St. Lawrence, across from the port with its transatlantic boats and cranes and multi-colored shipping containers piled like so many matchbox toys along the waterfront. A little closer to the city is the iconic Saarinen tower from the Montreal Olympics, and the round stadium with its ridiculous roof and multiple white peaks, always reminding me of a meringue pie. Beyond them, of course, the skyscrapers of downtown Montreal can be seen through the towers of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, spanning the wide river. On the other side of the road are the South Shore suburbs of Longueil: residential streets, small shopping centers, highway interchanges.

It's all very... urban. Very flat. A lot of people would also add "ugly."

But the river itself refuses to be anything but a river, and a wild one at that. I don't have any warm fuzzy feelings about the St. Lawrence; it looks cold, uninviting, and dangerous during every month of the year, full of unpredictable currents and whirlpools, often high, always fast. It's enormous, even here, a long ways from the gulf where it empties into the Atlantic, discharging 4 million litres of water into the ocean every second. Its width doesn't imply a flat gentleness. The Lachine rapids are still rapids, and without the canal that was built to bypass them, Montreal would still be as far inland as one could travel via the St. Lawrence alone.

Although the Vieux Port/Old City area has been developed somewhat for tourism, it's hard to imagine the city turning toward the river for recreation, any more than it does, or for aesthetics. At a distance, yes, the luxury condo-dwellers want the view of the water, but the river itself seems to remain sauvage, a dwelling-place for cormorants and gulls and many types of waterfowl, for the fish that sometimes jump from the swirling depths below the Victoria bridge, for the muskrat, mink, beaver and river otters that used to form the basis of Quebec's fur trade.

Driving along the river today, I saw it has calmed down from its spring flood. The low islands near Boucherville are emerging from the water, and the riverfront parks along the south shore bike path suddenly looked like a place I'd like to visit, binoculars in hand, to look for different bird species. When we first moved here from Vermont, all I could see near the river's edge was industrial, urban ugliness. Now I've either become more used to it, or curious enough to look past the manmade constructs toward the nature that continues to exist in spite of us.

As if to underscore my thoughts, a heron flew parallel to our route for a while today, legs outstretched, before slowing down to land in a reedy spot near the shore. We drove across the bridge, and up the steep slope that was once the bank of an inland sea. I think that's it: to me, the St. Lawrence still feels somewhat prehistoric: even if narwhals no longer swim within walking distance from my apartment, I feel like the river remembers, and maybe even waits.

Pastoral Illusions

"In my heart of hearts I just imagine that compared to the rest of the US, your area of New England is still a unique and fairly remote biotope which to a large extent embraces the values of Thoreau and Charles Ives."

So wrote a friend of mine recently, someone who grew up in the northeastern U.S. and has lived much of his adult life on another continent. I'd been talking about the suburbanization of northern New England and the changes I'd observed in the society over the past thirty years. What follows is my response, but I'm wondering if the phenomenon I'm trying to describe rings true for other people in other regions - or even other parts of the globe. I wrote:

"That was still true when I moved up in the mid-1970s but the 1980s destroyed much of it. Yes, there are still people in northern NE who embody those values but they tend to be aging hippies or tweedy Frost-like gentleman-farmer types, folks of dyed-in-the-wool New England stock, who’ve hung onto their places out in the country and have the money to do that. Yes, I do know a few young back-to-the-land types, or like-minded artists and craftspeople, and it's still possible for them to find a place in rural Vermont or New Hampshire, but they aren't going to find the sort of community and support that once existed here for people who share their values. New initiatives in local agriculture and the use of local food, for instance, do support small growers - some towns are more affluent now and that means more money to support local food and local arts and crafts. Some of this is authentic, and some of it - some local farmer's markets, for instance - remind me of tourist stops, where the "natives" and the purchasers/visitors are both playing carefully-choreographed roles.

The influence of mass media and the mobility of younger workers has created a situation in the U.S. where, it seems to me, a lot of the regional difference is being slowly and surely erased, and those people – good, green, smart as they may be – simply do not have the deep connection with “place” that grounded the earlier thinkers and artists we’re using as examples here. Vermont’s values – independent thinking, progressive environmentally but conservative fiscally – do persist, but they are legislated more than they are rooted deeply in people’s lives because of a desire to remain free of the masses, or to preserve the land because you find it beautiful and nurturing to your soul and want successive generations to have that too. There are plenty of people living in the country because they can afford to “play” at being New Englanders – but a lot of that is phony; they certainly aren’t mending their own fences or building their own stone walls: they pay somebody to do that and everything else. I think, for example, of a rundown farmhouse in a high valley nearby which was bought, lavishly renovated, and turned into a horsefarm by a couple from Texas with oil money. These people also became an aggressive presence in local organizations, quite unaware of the way their values and manners clashed with the local culture.

Suburbia has inexorably crept north from the lower NE states, New York, and New Jersey, and brought with it a whole different set of values – like not needing to be present at town meeting in order to vote on important local issues. Being avid consumers of the outdoors -- skiers, hilkers, kayakers - without knowing much about it. Being unaware of, and disinterested in, local history because you know you won't be there very long. Allowing sprawl because you want the franchise stores. Allowing large condo developments and smaller and smaller subdivisions of former farmland. Everything becomes a practical decision based, primarily, on money and convenience. So I do feel something essential has been lost. I’m not cynical about it, but I am certainly wistful."

What I'm thinking about especially are the influences of mass media and mobility in homogenizing the culture - not only of the United States, but of Canada and other parts of the world. What will cultures look like in fifty years, 100 years? There's no holding change back, and a lot of younger people probably don't see what I do, nor do they seem concerned about what's being lost, but much more about what's gained; convenience, speed, efficiency, practicality, and universal access to goods, services, media, and communication are the values that are now in the ascendant. There is also the more psychological factor of seeking comfort in the familiar - whether that's universal WIFI or the local Starbucks - everywhere you go. These values wouldn't be driving change if the consensus wasn't that this is the future and what people want. In central New York, where I grew up, things have changed more slowly. Here in Quebec - slower still. So I can pretend, sometimes, that the enormous change toward uniformity that I've observed over my life so far is less pervasive and permanent than it actually is, but what's happened in New England is, I think, reality.

I wonder how other readers see it.

Macro

In contrast to the patchwork, it's a grey day here in Vermont, but yesterday was beautiful. I walked up the hill in the afternoon, under a clear blue sky. The valley fell away beneath me - thick stands of dark green pines interspersed by white snow-covered fields and lawn, the houses always less conspicuous in the graphic winter landscape. The temperature had risen to above freezing, and the snow-blanket was melting and running down the side of the mountain: a trickling stream audible under the snow, and drips pinging in the culvert. Even the birds were singing new songs.

A week into it, I'm enjoying my experiments with Twitter and Identi.ca. The smaller and warmer feeling of Identi.ca appeals to me more, and I'm using that as my "home" where the posts first appear, but many more people seem to use Twitter. Like some of the other micro-blog poets (some old friends, some totally new to me) I'm using the medium as a daily seeing-thinking-and-writing discipline. It's good for me, and like most immersions in art forms, it changes my head. I find myself observing myself and the world around me with an eye to distillation, and then sifting through the impressions of the day to find the one that lends itself best to an image and condensed expression. Strung together in the offline log file I'm keeping, they already begin to form a record of these days that quite different from either a blog or a private journal.

Many of us who live in the north have been writing about this time of thaw and opening. I'm enjoying reading other people's attempts to take something so familiar and periodic and make something totally new and surprising from it - not so easy! The other poets I've met have been very warm and generous, which has been an unexpected reward.

I also didn't know about Open Micro, a site where the members post the best micro-poems they find on the net. My qarrtsiluni co-editor Dave is active there, as is Peter of slow reads. I feel like I've dropped into a whole new macro world through a micro opening!

Subtle Shifts

I've been rather scarce around here lately, I know. It's not so much a lack of things to say as a need to be quiet -- I'm thinking a lot, reading, playing and listening to music, working, knitting. Since Sunday I've had a slight cold but it already seems to be departing; more bothersome is the fact that I'm having trouble with one of the dental implants I got almost a year ago. Right now I'm taking antibiotics and trying not to think too much about the possibility of having more surgery. But enough of that.

This week something exciting happened: the light changed. Even though we're in mid-February and the ground still covered in white and the path through the park shining with an icy glaze, we've unmistakably tipped toward spring. There were some perfect days last week: chilly but bright, with a brilliant sun in a blue sky shining on the snow, and it was impossible to stay inside. On my trips to the market, I could actually walk home without worrying that the ruffled red edges of the lettuce in my bag were freezing.

But we all get a little crazy now, tantalized by the light and the ever-so-slightly warmer rays of midday sun, but knowing it will be two solid months of increasingly wet snowstorms, bitter winds, and the unlovely melting and re-freezing of a winter's worth of debris before crocuses start poking their heads through the mud and the parkas start to unzip.

I tend to do what I've been doing: head inward. I've been curled up with the two volumes of von Doderer, in-between the Greek plays I'm reading, dividing my time between 1927 Vienna and ancient Thebes, Troy, and Mycenae. Entering those two worlds has absorbed more of my spirit than I expected; the Austrian book is entertaining but also deep, if you plunge into the characters' heads with the narrator, and the Greek plays are stirring me the same way they always have, as studies of the human condition with all our weaknesses, nobilities, cravings and occasional bursts of greatness and eloquence. They astonish me with their immediacy and perceptiveness; emerging from my book to read the news, it's clear we humans have not changed very much at all.

Winter Weekend: Quebec

 

Sunday.

It’s early morning; J. and S. are down by the huge stone fireplace, drinking coffee; G. is still asleep, and I’m in our bedroom upstairs. I just opened the shuttered windows to find that it’s snowing hard. It’s absolutely silent; we are really on the edge of the wilderness.

The house is in a clearing below a mountain, surrounded by a thick pine, cedar, and birch forest. When we arrived, two nights ago, after driving through smaller and smaller villages, increasingly uninhabited forest, and towering snowbanks on either side, the house struck me a little bit like something out of Pasternak – like the old family house out in the country where Yuri took Lara and that night, wrote the poems about her – and stood on the porch in the moonlight and clapped his hands to make the wolves retreat.

We’ve been here in summer but it’s totally different  – gardens and berries and ducks on the pond. Still kind of a dacha feeling, though. Now there’s easily four feet of snow on the ground and you can't move on the unplowed or unshoveled terrain without snowshoes; G. says it’s been white since the end of October. When S. tried to carry the corpse of a mouse out beyond the compost bin, she fell into snow nearly over her head and had to be pulled out: it's deep, deep powder with no layers of crust inside to hold you up.

Yesterday J. helped shovel the path to the front door; when you peer out the window it looks like a tunnel. There is another essential path they opened – to the woodpile – where it’s necessary to use a sledgehammer to get some of the frozen logs apart. A large sled is used to haul the wood back into the garage, where it thaws and drains before being brought into the house.

The house looks like a French farmhouse, in brick with some stucco; there’s a round turret on the north side and a large cottage garden in front; inside it is Shaker-style, very spare: white walls with light, beautifully-finished woodwork and light maple floors. The centerpiece is a huge fireplace, faced in rough yellowish stone, and since our arrival G. has kept a fire going continually behind the tempered glass doors; it’s very efficient because the stone radiates a lot of heat and there is a system of baffles that direct the heat out into the house. The fireplace also has a brick oven, for baking, to the left of the main chamber.

Yesterday morning when I got up G. was outside in her pajamas, wearing a short coat and hat, boots and snowshoes, filling the birdfeeders. Every time she straightened up she called to the birds with a little whistling sound and before she came in there were bluejays and chickadees and a flock of tiny redpolls waiting in the trees. The feeders are near the windows and as we’ve eaten the long lingering meals that are characteristic of our stays here, we can watch the birds eat too, almost as close as our friends across the table.

We've been listening to Andreas Scholl, reading, knitting, cooking, making brief forays into the outdoors; this afternoon we looked through a beautiful large book on European monasteries, and at pictures of English gardens. That's the feeling here: repose, stillness, reflected light, and an awareness that gently and continually shifts from interior to exterior, both of place and self.

The little woodpecker cocks his head at us, flicking his spotted tailfeathers, and takes a few more pecks at the suet before flying off into the trees.