You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
When the river herring run from the sea into freshwater streams to spawn a new generation, the cormorants tag along, along with a cloud of fishermen.
The herring, which include the alewife variety, are part of New England lore. Look closely here and you’ll see them crowded in under the shade along the river.
As I said at the time …
It took eight springs in this household before we were finally greeted by a sequence of designed abundance. First, the pussy willow cuttings. Then the succession of flowering: snow lily, crocus, hyacinth, daffodil, forsythia, marsh marigold, tulip, forget-me-not, sweet woodruff, rhododendron, iris, mountain laurel. Accompanied by asparagus, rebounding after a season of root virus.
That’s not to say that any of it’s as orderly or magazine perfect as my wife would like. One neighbor jested our style’s too organic for that. Actually, it’s more like our budget.
Still, it’s quite an improvement over what we encountered when we first moved in and discovered most of our property was wet clay and neglected. Some portions had been landscaped with black plastic covered with gravel, which only worsened the water problems – extending to our cellar. Other portions were heavily shaded, with several nasty box elders and then a dead elm to be taken out.
While most of the garden has been my wife’s project – leaving to me the actual construction of raised beds and pathways, as well as the composting – I lay claim to a few exceptions: the asparagus bed and two small, heavily shaded panels behind the lilacs. The latter, each about forty square feet, are separated by a wood-chip passage. In our first year here, I shoveled off the gravel and dug up the plastic on one side of the pathway and began our attempts to plant ferns in the beds. Later, I dug up the pathway itself, removing the plastic and replacing the gravel with wood chips. The other panel would follow a year or two later.
I envisioned the footpath leading between two lush expanses of fiddleheads – woodland greenery right at home. A taste of deep forest.
The reality was that nothing wanted to grow there. We enhanced the soil repeated. Bought a few commercial fern varieties, which never quite caught on. My wife stuck in some other plants – lilies of the valley, wild ginger, lungwort, jack-in-the-pulpit – and they’ve taken hold. We transplanted ferns from the woods behind our best friends’ house at the time. Next year, I dug up more from along my commute, as well as the first of several seasons from another friend’s forest. Even so, come springtime, squirrels or slugs would mow down the rising green scrolls, while the surviving fronds remained tenuous and “went down,” as they say, earlier in the summer than I would have liked. In other words, forest undergrowth is hardly as natural as it would appear.
But this spring was different. In the older bed, the ferns came in thick and gorgeous – and after a few of the first fiddlehead stalks were leveled, we encased the plants in chicken wire to ward off predators. It worked. In the newer bed, which still has plenty of room to grow, one can see progress. “It’s where the other bed was last year,” we say, meaning we expect it to catch up. No, it’s not the uniform deck of fiddleheads I expected, nor is it the waist high ferns of a forest where a friend lived last year. Rather, it’s a celebration – at least six varieties (we’re not technical; fern identification is quite tricky) – with Rachel’s other plants and a few star flowers and Solomon’s seals thrown in.
* * *
What fascinates me is the variety of the fronds themselves, and how they now spread through in the bed. Some are fine-toothed, while others are broad. Some are bright green, while others show more blue or red. Some shoot upward, while others spray outward. If some are finely etched, others are painted with a broad brush. There are degrees of delicacy, fragility, and geometric interlocking arcs and angles. While the asparagus comes to replicate a tall fern with its feathery fronds, it spikes from the ground, unlike the uncoiling fern stems. This unfurling, in fact, seems to suspend time in space, especially in a few precious weeks when spring is taking hold. There’s something modest in the way ferns float only a foot or two above the ground or the way they crowd in along a wall or fence; something amazing, too, when they take hold in a boulder or cliff. When I gaze at my two fern beds, I must acknowledge that despite all my labors, this is what I have, or at least what’s survived. It wasn’t the plan, exactly. Maybe that’s what makes it all the more remarkable in my eyes.
A bigger question asks just where my fondness for ferns originates. I don’t remember them from the woods in my native Ohio or boyhood backpacking along the Appalachian Trail. I acknowledged them in the glen at the back of a farm I inhabited while living Upstate New York, and later at the ashram in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. I do remember being stung by the scorn of a Californian while hiking in southern Indiana, and then being enchanted in the array within rainforest in Washington State. Returning east, I kept Boston ferns in my apartment windows, vowing if I ever owned property again, I’d have ferns.
So memories and associations fit in here. Tastes of the past, and souvenirs of discovery. A reminder, too, of how forest touches my soul. My wife is moved more by flowers. I, by the gentleness of ferns.
As I said at the time …
In these reflections on Quaker practice, I’ve tried to avoid overt theology. Leave that for messages in worship or for “nuts and bolts” workshops. My focus has been largely on ways our faith comes together in community and some of the quirky sides to that.
This time, though, I want to remind us that the foundation of Meeting is our experience with the Divine – by whatever name we use, or however personal or transcendent the relationship. What is often seen as a tension between peace-action Friends and contemplative ones – or universalist and Christocentric, depending on the particular discussion – can be turned on its head: in Beyond Majority Rule, Jesuit Michael J. Sheeran argued “the real cleavage among Friends is between those who experience the gathered or covered condition and those who do not.” How astute!
There’s a difference between Quaker culture and Quaker faith itself. Since most of us in Dover Meeting weren’t raised Quaker, we’re not steeped in the culture, but we’ve adopted it, to whatever degree, in our own lives all the same. (Or at least like to think we have.) It’s more subtle than it was in the days of Plain speech and dress, but it’s there all the same. The faith part, of course, is at the heart of our worship.
We can ask ourselves if we were led to Meeting more by the culture or by the faith, and then ask how one activates the other. Jim Wallis, the evangelical editor of Sojourner, sees social action arising from the faith as an imperative. In a similar vein, one might see how central the Peace Testimony is in the teachings of Jesus, and how hollow the Christian message is without it. One lights up the other when the culture and faith move together.
Using the language that’s come to represent my experience, this is what happens with Christ amongst us. How do you express it?
Physical exercise has never been high on my list of activities – at least until I discovered hatha yoga a year after I graduated from college. From the time of required elementary-school gym classes, or phys ed as they became known in high school, I found the experience largely tedious – there were always better things to do. And calisthenics were simply mind-numbing. As for that lap around the track? The teacher who told a student it was good for a broken leg – true story, I was there – convinced me the male authority figure we were dealing with was an idiot. Or just insane. Yes, I did enjoy hiking and bicycling but they fell outside the sphere of “exercise.” Ditto for the contradancing.
The major exception was my first winter after college as I swam regularly at the local university indoor pool – a privilege that came through my roommate’s girlfriend, who happened to be the chief lifeguard. This was just before taking up yoga, come to think of it. (The school wised up later and started charging “outsiders.”)
And then? Well, I tried several times to get a regular routine going, but nothing ever took hold. And then when I retired from the office and changed medical plans, my new doctor began encouraging … maybe not running the way he does, but something cardio-vascular. Oh, my.
Tick-tock to last Christmas, when my beloved elder stepdaughter gave me a yearlong pass to our city’s indoor pool. Meant having to go through some hoops, of course – the whole matter of scheduling, locker rooms, gear. (I’ve always had to use nose plugs – my sinuses are horrible – so where do you find a new pair in January?)
Let me say, the first month was embarrassing – three laps just three times a week. And then Doc insisted it be daily, or in my case, five times a week. What happened to the two dozen lengths or more I used to do without pausing? These days, I could barely breathe.
Three months later, it’s up to nine laps – a quarter of a mile – but I do have to pause every length or two to catch my breath. But it’s getting easier, generating less resistance. I’m still not getting much sensation of flying, something I used to appreciate, but it’s coming. Or even a feeling of being one with the water.
But, hate to admit this, I miss the feeling on the days I can’t go – the weekend, mostly, when the available hours don’t match mine.
And then there are the casual conversations with fellow swimmers. Nice to know I’m not alone after all. As for the embarrassment? Ah! Not anymore. We just keep plugging along. Or I just say I’m trying to keep my physician happy. Not that it matters.
As the largest city in northern New England, Manchester was built on the water power captured at the Amoskeag Falls in the Merrimack River.
So there we were a few days ago, finishing our Chinese dinners before dashing down the street to choir rehearsal. After cracking open my fortune cookie, rather than reaching into my pack for my eyeglasses, I asked my companion if he’d read my little slip to me. (Ah, the joys of getting older.)
After he recited my fortune, I replied, “You’re making that up, right?”
I was rather impressed, actually, and he does have a great sense of humor. Not bad for improv.
“No, here it is. You read it.” Which I did:
You are a lover of words someday
you will write a book.
As I said at the time …
Greetings again from this old mill town along the Merrimack River.
There is still a special feel to an octavo-size, typeset journal – a unity of design and purpose carried throughout – even in this era of desktop design and photocopy wizardry. A major challenge, whether it’s in shaping a literary journal like yours, a daily newspaper, or even an old-fashioned country dance, is simply: what can we do to make our own locale distinctive?
An example: a few years ago, the New England contradance scene was becoming generic: you’d drive for miles to a village town hall only to find the same faces and same pieces you had faraway the week before. Fortunately, that seems to be changing as different callers, musicians, and promoters are striving to put their own distinctive signature – and a local stamp – on each venue. So there’s your challenge!
I’m struck by the fact that even familiar voices from our round of journals seem to sound different in varied locales. If you’ve ever been around paintings, as I was when married to an artist, and seen a piece go from her studio to our living room to an art gallery to a major museum, you would be amazed how different it appears it each setting. Publishing is the same.
My fondness for asparagus arises in the years I lived in an orchard in the Yakima Valley, where, thanks to an earlier agricultural disaster, asparagus seeds had gotten into the irrigation water and spread everywhere. The green sprouts were often touted as “Local ’Grass.” As a consequence, we had about a month when we could take our knives and, being careful to avoid areas of pesticide use, return with a basket of stalks for lunch or dinner. I learned to glut out in season, realizing it would be another year before we’d indulge again.
Now that we have our own asparagus bed and repeat the ritual, albeit on a smaller scale, we’ve also come to regard the damage asparagus beetles inflict as well as the miracle appearance of lady bugs to the rescue. That, in itself, has convinced us of the value of organic farming.
As for Shiva, he’s the horny Hindu god of creation and destruction, and he wields a wicked blade.
Trying to convey the experience of living in a desert to those who’ve known only moister climates often feels futile. It’s simply mindboggling, especially as you move away from the insulation of modern conveniences like air conditioning, automobiles, or even sunglasses. In its raw nature, this terrain is often life-threatening.
I’ve regretted not having a camera to record what I observed there, but one colleague from those years – another Ohio flatlander who relocated to the wet side of the Cascades after our journalist team was forced to scatter – has captured its essence better than anyone else I’ve come across.
Here are some of Kurt E. Smith’s images over the years of the land I call Katonkah Country. He has much more on his Seeing Small blog, which comes highly recommended. What he captures is sometimes enormous.
~*~
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Jnana's Red Barn 