LOVE OF PLACE

Land Blesses and Embraces Sister's Ashes

2008-03-08T04:07:00.000-08:00

On August 16, 2004, my sister Julia Ann Thompson was killed in a car crash, at 61.

On August 30, 2004, 6 p. m. friends and family held a memorial service of overflow proportions at the First Unitarian Church, Alton, Illinois, and there was a later service in Pittsburgh.

Julia's 65th birthday is March 13th, 2008.

Julia has been lightly resting in a family linen closet during the intervening years, something like three and a halfish years.

Today, we bury her ashes on the land where she grew up. Her remains will rest in place...on the place where she rode horses, walked, laughed, loved, cried, wrote poetry and physics formulas... she will rest, most beloved, and yes, in great natural peace.

Julia was a worldclass physicist who taught at the University of Pittsburgh and was known as a great innovator there. She had been principal investigator on experiments at BNL, CERN, Fermilab, and Novosibirsk. She also founded Research Experience for Undergraduates—Focus on Minorities--to encourage minorities’ participation in science. The Julia A. Thompson Memorial Fund, Associated Bank, 104 Homer Adams Parkway, Alton, IL 62002, supports increased participation of minorities in the sciences.

Evergreen Heights, our ancestral land, founded by my renowned horticulturalist greatgrandfather Riehl in the 1860s, nurtured all three of my father's children: Julia, Gary, and myself (Janet). I rejoice in the feeling of the land now embracing my sister's ashes and nurturing her as she goes where we cannot.

Rest in Natural Great Peace, my dearest heart.
Rest and reach into the great beyond.
Reach, and find, and rest again.
Rest again, and again, and again in Natural Great Peace
my dearest heart
and find solace in all these places of land and of sky
find solace in the places which cannot be named or known before time.

Marj Casswell's "A Place to Come Home To" Articulates the High Cost of Settling

2007-09-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

Humans, even nomads, are settlers at heart. We want a place to come home to, a hearth to warm our hands around, and other humans to love us. Marj Casswell in "A Place to Come Home To" tells a story of these ordinary yearnings and the high price they exact from us.

In the opening frame of the novel a 40-year-old woman returns to her father's house where in her girlhood their rich Virginia tobacco farmland stretched in every direction. Time and change have intervened. Her mother and the land are gone, but six diaries from the year she was ten call out to her when she revisits her old room. The ending frame ripples through the years between ten and now, interpreting her life through the insights gained in her reflection the diaries have brought.

While the opening and closing frames give us a sense of context and the passage of time, the guts and heart of the book lie in the 38 chapters between these frames, as all revealing photographs do. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from these diaries written in the summer of 1956 when everything changed and the gravel pit came. The diary excerpts serve as epigrammatic themes for what lies ahead in each chapter. I read the book twice, and on the second reading, I began to title the chapters to keep better track of the ebb and flow of the book's action and interludes.
"A Place to Come Home To" is both a coming of age story for 10-year-old Meredith (Merri) Coopersmith and a losing of an age. On an intimate canvas Casswell paints the sweeping story of the loss of the family farms and the end of an era. No more will there be a time when the small family farm is a viable way of life.

Both within the Coopersmith nuclear family and extended family we see how land exerts its pull on some and how the pleasures of the city call others. Yearning, hard work, and even strategy cannot save the farm or even the innocence of the community. The gravel pit opens its gaping yaw and swallows up farm land that later will, in turn, be swallowed up by housing developments.

Casswell shows the turbulence inside normalcy. As the world around her changes, the rules around her change, curtailing her adventures on the farm. But her curiosity cannot be held in check. I feared something terrible would happen to Merri in the gravel pits.
Instead, we're shown in delicate and realistic detail the emotional and spiritual development of a young girl facing family and community conflict and dissolution of life as previously known. We are let inside the interior world of her imaginative daydreams and fantasies. Her parents love her and take good care of her, yet in spite of that, she feels the tension present in their marriage and wants to make it better for them in order to stabilize her world. She carries an adult sense of responsibility that alters her childhood, in spite of her Aunt Elizabeth's efforts to give her a childhood without cares back to her.

A thread of settling runs through the book--both the positive and negative conations. Merri's ancestors come to the land as settlers and set up a lumber mill. But, in a kind of fall from Eden, the first settling occurs: "they had to sell off most of the land with trees...because they needed money to live. That's when they went to growing tobacco. Everybody around here was [growing] it," her Uncle Lowell (who carries the spirit of the land) explains to her.

This selling off the resources of the land for cash becomes a precursor for the gravel pit contract that brings evil things into a young girl's world. Each generation has struggled with how to make a living off the land. Arguments have sprung up in each generation. There are those who want to husband and steward the land and those who are just desperate to make a go of it. As a result there's a slow decline of the land, and a sense of decay and struggle, despite the wish to restore what's been lost and the honoring of hard times to save a legacy.

The tension in the Coopersmith marriage between Ted and Ellie springs from these differences, as husband and wife want different things. Ted, working a job in town so he can stay on the farm, is sober and focused on labor. Ellie, a good mother, but a city girl at heart yearning for music, dancing, flower gardens, and good times. She's a city girl transplanted to the country, and the transplant didn't take. She's lonely. Ellie finds her husband boring, but has settled down into the marriage, if restlessly, and after a costly error. In this case she settles for a lack of vibrancy in relationship in order to avoid divorce and dies six years later. And Ted settles into his workshop, a world where there are things he can fix and do something about.

Casswell writes of subtle shifts through thematic explorations more than a novel driven by action and plot. This is a quiet, thoughtful and reflective story punctuated by lyrical passages of the workings of nature and a child's delight in the freedom of exploring the outdoors.
"A Place to Come Home To" gives us a big story in a small package. Its over-riding theme is that time moves on and we must change with the times.

Visit Janet Grace Riehl's blog "Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century" at http://www.riehlife.com/ for more thoughts and information about making connections through the arts, across cultures, generations, and within the family. You can also read sample poems and other background information from "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" on Janet's website.

Excess Bounty

2007-08-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

My morning walk reminds me that my front yard is looking like a blowzy lady after a hard night. The lavender is swollen and huge, the blooms finished but the but the spikes still raised to the warmth. As the sun creeps over the fence, a few bees visit to savor the last opportunities before they move on. The other plants, the blooming potentilla, the heather, the daylillies are all spread in an unrestrained sprawl. At the foot of those, the ground cover is blanketing the ground, some growing right over the top of it's parent plant.

The back yard is no different--the dahlias in bloom crowding the shrubs, the squash tendrils exended over the onion rows and under the fence, the strawberry runners spilled out over the raised walls of the bed and the tomato plants extended far beyond their cages. This mild summer has outdone itself in abundance, making it impossible to believe the part of my surroundings I'm responsible for will ever bear a semblance of neatness again.

My neighbors with their manicured lawns probably shudder and try to imagine what I find attactive in an abundance of plants, blooming or not. Soon I'll need to get busy and trim everything back but for a little while I can pretend I live someplace else, with fewer rules and less restrained.

www.Jo-Brew.com http//jo_brew.blogspot www.thecreswellchronicle

Crossing a wolf's trail

2007-08-22T19:58:00.001-07:00

Earlier this month, as my husband, Richard, and I headed north down the Blue River from Silverthorne, crossed the Colorado and passed through Kremmeling, and then wound up Muddy Creek toward Rabbit Ears Pass, I was thinking about wolves.

We were crossing the likely path of one of Colorado's most controversial recent immigrants: Wolf 293F, born in 2003 to the Swan Lake Pack in northwestern Yellowstone National Park and killed in June, 2004, while crossing I-70 west of Idaho Springs, some 420 miles from her natal home.

What was she doing? Searching for what drives us all: love and fortune.

Wolf 293 was just a pup in January, 2003, when biologists attached a radio collar to track her movements. She spent her first year learning wolf ways with her siblings. She was a year old when she was last located by radio telemetry near Mammoth Hot Springs in January, 2004. After that, Wolf 293 vanished from contact until she was found dead in Colorado nearly six months later.

Apparently, Wolf 293's natal pack had no room for another potentially dominant female, so in her second spring, she struck out to find her own space - a territory and a mate.

Before Wolf 293 ventured into central Colorado on her quest, the last known wild gray wolf in the area was killed in the Conejos Valley in 1945, the victim of a culture that fervently believed that predators like wolves, mountain lions, and grizzlies were evil, symbols of a wild that needed to be tamed to make the world safe.

We still fear wolves, even though for the past century, no cases of healthy, wild wolves killing humans can be substantiated. That they will kill unattended livestock is no question, but then, so will domestic dogs. Wolves are in fact the ancestors of the pet canids we dote on, from teacup poodles to Great Danes. Some fourteen thousand years ago, we befriended the same wolves we now abhor, offering them space at the campfire and scraps in return for companionship and devotion.

Unfortunately, our "tame" companions are not as discriminating as their ancestors: our pets kill an average of thirteen people and untallied numbers of livestock each year. What does it say about us that we harbor pit bulls, but we cannot tolerate wolves?

Like them or not, we may need wolves to restore the health of our landscapes. Without wolves, elk populations have exploded, stripping ecosystems bare as they eat themselves out of house and home, destroying habitat for trout and songbirds and cattle as well, and setting the stage for devastating epidemics like chronic wasting disease. In the decade since wolves' return to Yellowstone National Park, elk populations have stabilized, cottonwoods, willows, and aspen have re-sprouted, and landscapes are healthier for all. (And they've spawned a boom in tourism: wolves are the number one species visitors to Yellowstone ask to see.)

I imagine Wolf 293 on her journey, trotting steadily south along the flanks of the mountains, edging around open basins, and stopping each evening on some ridge to broadcast her yearning calls. She stands, tips her muzzle to the sky, and hurls that rich, full-throated howl across the landscape: "Ooooooooooooooooooo!"

Then she listens, ears pricked forward, swiveling to catch any response. But there is no answering call.

She trots on, hunting, resting, but driven to search for more: home and family. Finally, she is hit crossing the river of traffic on I-70. She drags herself off the highway and dies, still alone.

As Richard and I wound through the sagebrush-clothed hills of northwestern Colorado, I thought about Wolf 293 and her quest. And I wondered what it would take for us to welcome wolves, and the wildness they represent, back into our lives.

A longer version of this essay was published as "Wolf 293" in the anthology Comeback Wolves.

Susan J. Tweit
http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com
http://susanjtweit.com

The Morning After

2007-07-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

A night time thunderstorm, one with a deluge of rain, cooled and cleaned our air, giving us a morning when we can draw in deep breaths as we gaze at the clear blue sky broken only by the occasional puffy cloud. No haze yet.

It's said Native Americans did not live in this lush valley of the Willamette River but in the hills above. They visited to hunt and fish but didn't stay. They understood the illness that came from the stagnant air filled with pollen and moss spores but we assume we are somehow able to survive the breathing problem. There are a lot of other benefits to making our home in this moderate climate of abundant growth.

My home place in Oregon is in the valley of the Willamette River as it makes the long curve out of the mountains and begins the journey north to join the mighty Columbia River on the Washington State line.

Our valley is fertile and green with a rich variety of crops. Heading north, the freeway passes through hay fields, past pastures with grazing cattle and sheep, and along hillsides covered with vinyards. On picturesque old highways covering a similar route, a passerby would find truck farms, hazelnut orchards, mint fields, nursery stock and huge fields of grass being grown for seed to supply golf courses, ball fields, and lawns everywhere.

Those are the fields surrounding the newly built mansions of the grass seed farmers. The young men who own their own airplanes and lease the land from the family farmers who can no longer make a living.

Yesterday they began to burn their fields, an annual event that goes on for weeks. It's true, they aren't allowed to burn as many acres as they did a few years ago and it can't be at their convenience but it only takes a slight shift in the wind to leave nearby communities gasping and choking for all the weeks of the burn season.

This was the year our legislature made huge strides in coloring Oregon green, requiring our three largest utilities to obtain twenty five per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025 with emphasis on solar. (We have the perfect place for solar in the lava waste lands of the eastern part of the state.)

They passed a basketfull of other bills, updates of the bottle bill to include plastic, an incentive package for develpment of alternative fuels, increased funding for the Envioronmental Protection Agency to monitor water and air pollution, a moratorium on drilling for oil, gas, or sulfur off the Oregon coast, a program requiring manufacturers to provide free recycling for computers and televisions and last but not least, authorization to clean up toxins in our Willamette River.

A good start, long delayed. To my dismay they stopped just short of eliminating the grass seed field burning. Admittedly, not as important in the big picture as the steps they did take but miserable for the unwise humans who have made their home here.
www.Jo-Brew.com

Stewardship

2007-07-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about the concept of stewardship, specifically stewardship of this benighted and beautiful blue planet. What does it mean to be a steward of a place, a community, of this planet?

According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the word steward comes from the Old English words for ward or manager and house. A steward is thus someone who manages or tends a house, and stewardship has its roots in caring for home. If we think of Earth as the home of our species - and it is in fact as far as we can tell the only home our species has ever known - then how we manage or tend that home is a critical factor in the survival of our children and their children, of the genes that carry our species into a future we won't know. That makes stewardship pretty important.

But what is it? How can we be good stewards of our planet? Stories about being green are all over the popular media these days and web sites from Live Earth to Audubon and even Oprah have sections with tips on how you can be "part of the solution." Changing your household lightbulbs to compact fluorescents will indeed save energy and that means less CO2 added to the atmosphere, a very good thing. Driving less is good too, both for you and the planet. But it seems to me that stewardship is more than just buying new lightbulbs or walking more. As the original meaning implies, it's a commitment of sorts, a commitment to managing our own lives' and our species' impact on Earth.

I think stewardship is based on sharing. It means acknowledging that there are a lot of us humans and our impact on our home is huge. And it means having a new vision for our lives that springs from making space for the other lives around us, whether we ever see those lives or not. It seems to me that stewardship means joining the community of the land, the web of living beings who together green and maintain the ecological and spiritual health of our home, this planet.

When my husband and I adopted our 2/3 of an acre of decaying industrial land on the wrong side of the former railroad tracks in our small town, we vowed to restore the native mountain bunchgrass prairie. Ten years and lots of weed-pulling, spraying, and burning later, our new house looks out on a front yard awash in scarlet, blue, yellow, and purple wildflowers and buzzing with the wings of hummingbirds, butterflies, and native bees. (The same bees that pollinate the heritage tomato plants in our kitchen garden, ensuring huge yields.) We'll always have weeds to pull, and we'll also always have the joy of knowing we took the place in the first photo and turned it into the second photo.

Stewardship is about nurturing the community of the land, not just one species. It's about belonging to this blue planet with every fiber of our being, every choice we make in our lives. Welcome to life on Earth!

Susan J. Tweit
http://susanjtweit.com
Read the whole essay on my blog, The Community of the Land at http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com

Our Home in the Ozarks

2007-06-30T13:41:00.000-07:00

There are plenty of things we can all do to preserve this precious land that nurtures us. We're doing our small part, as best we can.
Those of us who live in Arkansas are considered southern. We are also western because of our history (Judge Parker's Court and the new U.S. Marshals Museum soon to be built in Fort Smith) The history of the Cherokee, Marcy's trail drive and cattle drives also qualifies us as western. Not to mention the Butterfield Overland Mail Route that cut through our corner of the state. And, oh, yes, there's Jesse James and Belle Starr, stage coach and bank robberies. And the men wear Stetsons and jeans and boots and drive pickups.
My husband and I own ten acres 21 miles south of the booming NWArkansas metroplex that I'd gladly put a stop to if I could. I suppose it's good for this impoverished state because there are jobs galore. Land values have soared and that's making it hard on the natives who've owned land here for generations. Thank goodness property taxes for owners over 65 have been frozen or we might have to give up this life we treasure.
The new Interstate is six miles west of us. Both out of sight and out of mind. We have a live creek that runs through the lower six acres of property far from all that hubbub. A few winters back a family of industrious beavers decided our creek would make a good home. We were treated all that winter with their antics as they harvested many of the small saplings and built a dam. It grew until quite a lovely pond backed up behind it. Since the creek is in the low point of the property, these little beavers created a deep hole of water. I remember one cold day, when glistening icicles hung from bare branches, we made our way down to take a look. It was truly a wonderland, the bright sunlight reflecting in the ice and the crystalline water. That spring heavy rains came, as they often do, and soon washed away the dam. But for a short time we were privileged to enjoy watching these little animals do what they do so well. We do have hay cut off this six acres. In the valley a deep well drilled down into an aquifer supplies water for two households.
Our home is on the opposite side of the road, halfway up what we Ozarkers refer to as a mountain, on another four acres. Behind our house, the land climbs and butts up against the Ozark National Forest so a great quantity of wildlife often strays onto our place. We do keep a lawn mowed around our house, a buffer zone of sorts against rattlesnakes and copperheads. A short walk through a stand of tall pines is my daughter's home, but in the summer the house isn't visible because of the trees. Where the property heads up the mountain out back, we've left it wild. The terraced incline is covered in shaggy bark hickory, walnut, oak, and some cedar and pine as well as an abundant undergrowth which is a fine habitat for birds and small animals. As a result, of course, we have occasional visits from small black bears, plenty of deer and coon, possum, armadillo and the like.
Once we kept a few head of cattle and hogs, butchered our own meat, milked our favorite old cow daily and I kept a Tennessee walker for riding. We grew a big garden and canned and froze most of what we ate. My health will no longer allow that kind of labor, but I still miss it. I am grateful for the modern conveniences that allow us to remain here on our land where I can listen to the songs of birds and watch squirrels frolic through the trees. Where I can write in a serenity only the country can offer.
The photo is the beaver pond looking toward the creek down below the dam.

Belonging to The Community of the Land

2007-06-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month I gave a welcome talk for a conference in Texas. The topic: “the community of the land,” a phrase I’ve begun using in preference to “nature,” a word that has somehow come to connote a separate world -whether alien or utopian - to which humanity no longer belongs.

The phrase “community of the land” was inspired by Aldo Leopold, author of Sand County Almanac. Leopold, a wildlife biologist, spent a lifetime outdoors observing the relationships between plants and animals (including humans), and the land.

He came to realize that what was important in nature wasn’t individual lives or even individual species. It was the whole messy package, the steaming stew of interactions between plant and animal and landscape, between soil-dwelling microbe and root, root and tunneling rodent, rodent and soaring hawk, and hawk and the soil it decays into that created this living, breathing Earth.

Leopold summed up his credo: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to encompass soils, waters, plants, animals or collectively: the land.”

The phrase “the community of the land” reflects the fact that landscape is not just a scenic backdrop; it is a vibrant, interrelated community to which people belong.

The piñon pine - juniper woodlands above Salida, for instance, are not static. They are constantly changing, shaped by the relationships between all the lives that inhabit them.

Like the legions of microscopic and macroscopic fungi, springtails and worms that live, eat, reproduce, and die underfoot, and in the doing, cleanse the air and water that pass through the soil and keep it fertile.

These tiny lives enter into partnerships with the piñons and junipers, the oaks, blue grama grass and the wildflowers that briefly splash the hillsides with color.

These plants in turn feed hosts of insects, from seed-gathering ants trailing in lines across the soil to native bees and butterflies sipping flower nectar. And birds too, like the piñon jays on whom the trees depend to carry their fat-rich seeds to distant jay-caches where uneaten seeds sprout new groves of piñons.

The warblers and flycatchers that pluck insects off the branches or out of the air, the circling hawks that catch the rodents and snakes, the deer that munch on succulent plants and the mountain lions that munch on deer.

And the people that cut the trees for firewood, clear patches for houses and roads, and whizz between the trees on mountain bikes. This whole web of relationships is what animates the landscape and gives it the characteristic colors, smells, shapes and sounds that we recognize as piñon-juniper woodland, the dwarf “forest” that cloaks our hills.

Why care about the community of the land? Because it is our oldest home, the place where our species was born and shaped. Because it is the earth we depend on, the planet that provides us with the air we breathe, the water that floods our cells, the food we eat and the raw materials from which we make the stuff of our lives.

And because it is the home of our hearts and spirits. Reconnecting with the community of the land, that living web of interrelationships between species large and small, obvious and obscure can restore our sanity, our balance and our hope for the future.

Some believe our power and technology have liberated or alienated us from nature, the great network of life that still shapes this unique blue planet. Not so.

There is a place for us in nature, if we’ll take it. It’s risky, but it allows us to exercise our species’ greatest talent: love.

Love is the gift we bring to the community of the land. And it’s what allows us to truly belong to the only real home our species has ever known.

Copyright 2007 Susan J. Tweit

http://susanjtweit.com
http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com

A Rock with Wrinkles

2007-06-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

If there’s one thing a glacier does very well, it is to grind along the earth’s surface and pick up rocks. Of course, when the glacier melts, it drops all those rocks and that’s just what happened here. So when I unearthed this one in particular, no one could understand why on earth I thought it noteworthy. Gray and white, about the size of a football, rounded from the glacier and pitted from its time on the beach of glacial Lake Columbia, the rock shows its recent history plainly.

A schist, it is and not native to these parts. The glacier probably carried it hundreds, maybe a thousand miles—but then all of the rocks hereabout made the same journey. By no means would someone exclaim "What a pretty rock!" for pretty it isn’t. But it sits on my rough cedar workbench where I retreat to work in the shade on hot days. It has a place of honor for a simple reason. It is a rock from the very beginnings of this planet and in its lines, tells an incredible tale.
Schist is only formed miles below the surface of the earth where heat and unfathomable pressure compress rock obliterating its origins. That is where my rock began its journey billions, not mere millions, of years ago. It is from that time mere humans call Pre-Cambrian.

The white lines are quartz intrusions. A sudden force, probably a massive earthquake, shattered the rock allowing liquid magma from the mantle to penetrate the fractures. Slowly, slowly the whole mass cooled and the quartz and the schist became one, bound solidly together. Tracing the lines of quartz, one sees this one being crossed by that one, then another crossing both. The lines on the rock’s face tell of being shattered five times. Five times crushed, and five times made whole again with molten rock.

The lines on its face show its history, not unlike the lines on a human face. My rock has wrinkles.

But my rock didn’t stay buried miles below the surface. After earning its wrinkles, the slow process of uplift raised it. Everything above became a mountain range, rising and being eroded down, then rising again until at last my rock was in daylight. Billions of years in the darkness, then joining the surface where sunlight and fresh air touched it. Free at last? Fat chance. Along comes a great glacier encasing it in ice, grinding it down smaller with each mile, and then dropping it on a beach where it is buried in sand for another 10,000 years.

I suppose there is a metaphor in there somewhere. But each day I see the rock on my bench and smile. Billions of years is a very long time. My rock earned its wrinkles, and touching them is as near to eternity as a mortal can stand.

Where in the world am I?

2007-06-12T17:23:00.000-07:00

I led a workshop this weekend called "Personal Mapping," in which I asked the participants (all women, attending a conference for writing about place) to make maps. We located our places, past and present, on a map of the United States and sketched a quick map of our communities, finding places for home, work, recreation, shopping, learning--all the many different things we do on all the many days of our lives in all the many places we occupy on this planet.

As we looked at our maps and talked and shared our feelings and perceptions about our places, I realized all over again how basic these understandings are, how important it is to know where we are. Without knowing this, we don't know how we've been, where we're going, or how we fit into the landscape, into this world of place and people and principles. "What culture of knowledge allows me to know what I know," Stephen S. Hall asks, "which is often another way of knowing where I am?"

Take me, for instance. I live on 31 acres of land in the Texas Hill Country, northwest of Austin, at 30.74 North latitude and almost dead on the 98th Meridian, that “institutional fault line” that Walter Prescott Webb describes as the great divide between the wooded east and the arid west. MeadowKnoll (our name for our home place) is located at 1100 feet above sea level on the northern segment of the Edwards Plateau, where the Balcones Canyonlands and the Lampasas Cut Plains (an extension of the Southern plains) meet and overlap. This fortunate location, straddling two distinct ecosystems, is known as an ecotone, a transitional zone between two distinct natural communities.

Fortunate indeed, for MeadowKnoll has the live oaks and cedar elms and pecans and birds common to the Canyonlands, and the post oak and Spanish oak and hackberry and grasses and forbs that are found on the Southern Plains.The thin soil is calcareous, weathered from the hard limestones and marly clays that were deposited in thick layers by the Mesozoic seas and spangled with the fossil remains of the ancient sea creatures—Exogyra texana, gastropods, clams, the occasional knobby sea urchin—that we often find as we walk through the fields and along the lake.

Where in the world am I? I'm home. This is page one of my personal geography, the place I leave my heart when I'm on the move, home port for sallying forth to explore distant ports of call. Here, I know where the sun rises and sets at the solstice, where north and south, east and west intersect in my psyche. I know when the hummingbirds will appear, heading north (March 15 or thereabouts), and when the monarchs, like so many shards of stained glass, will flutter through our woodland on their long trip southward to Mexico (October 15, more or less). My place. My map. My private atlas of place and time.

30.74° North latitude, 98.05° West longitude. This is where I am.

Where in the world are you?

Susan Wittig Albert

http://susanalbert.typepad.com/lifescapes/

Wandering In The Shadows of Time

2007-06-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

On a lovely day more than thirty years ago I drove south from my new home in Winslow, Arkansas, intent on revisiting my childhood past. Though Highway 71 had changed a lot, I had no trouble at all recognizing Old Creek Road. Back in the early days it was rutted and narrow and meandered through the remote hollow where more than a dozen families lived. I turned off with some reluctance. This would be hard, for what I had always known was gone. Deep down in the valley where the sun only shines a few hours a day, I caught first sight of the glistening waters of Lake Shepherd Springs and pulled over. For a moment I couldn’t drive across the neat mound of rock and dirt that held back the lake, but could only sit there and gaze through the glare of my windshield at all that remained of home.

I saw the great gnarly cedar that once lived in the back yard of my childhood. Scattered at its feet were masses of jonquils nearly finished blooming for another spring. Beneath the cedar once grew a climbing rose, red as blood when it bloomed. Moving the tiny grave of my baby sister must have killed the rose.

I sighed and nudged the car forward. Shards of brittle sunlight sparkled off the water and brought tears to my eyes. Gathered in the hollows, the lake covered the fields where my father and grandfather once plowed the rich dark earth to raise beans and okra and tomatoes to feed us.

A rush of water roared over the spillway, tumbling around boulders as big as houses. They lay scattered below where they had come to rest when dynamite blasts tore great chunks from the mountain and destroyed the path where I once walked hand in hand with my mother on the way to grandmother’s house.

But we left this place long before the dynamite and the moving of my baby sister’s grave. Our course was already set on a different life out in the world, away from the poverty and the simple Ozark cradle that was a peculiar kind of childhood for all of us. My brother, my mother, my father, and I left behind tiny pieces of our hearts and souls, buried with the two little ones who found the going much too tough and gave it up.

I parked and climbed out, strolled gingerly across the hallowed ground, and sat for a time on one of the picnic tables embraced by what was once my entire world. Turning from the lake, I pictured the log house built by my father, the rock chimney I once believed pierced a hole through the blue of the sky.

A breeze off the water stirred the yellow blooms, and their lingering, sweet fragrance soothed me. My mother planted those bulbs deep in this soil nearly sixty years earlier, and everyone knows the power of a mother. They have endured; nothing can destroy them, especially not those whose turn it is to enjoy this place, who came to hunt and camp and fish and chase their children from the thickets where copperhead snakes lie in wait.

While we chose to wander afar, those who remained out here in this wilderness of the Arkansas Ozarks lost their land too. For many of them the loss meant more than being deprived of something they had already left behind. Over the next few months, my goal to interview them would lead me along many roads and byways to a re-connection with my roots.
Velda Brotherton
www.veldabrotherton.com

"Gated Community," a poem by Janet Grace Riehl on coming of age in a hilltop kingdom

2007-06-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

GATED COMMUNITY

by Janet Grace Riehl

(from Sightlines: A Poet's Diary)

Three gates protected our hilltop kingdom.
One at the bottom,
just past the No Trespassing sign.
One at the top,
just short of our house.
And, the gate that barred the back way,
Our winter escape route.

If you belonged to the place,
then you possessed the keys to the kingdom.
Invaders lived to regret it.

Sometimes the lower gate remained open.
Joy riders got a jolt
when they zipped up the road,
ready to explore
and found the upper gate locked.
It's a long way down when you're backing up.

As for the back gate,
adventure-seekers, who couldn't fling it open,
saw it as some kind of affront to human freedom.

Lovers liked to park in a shaded nook
just off the gravel road
six-inches away from our back gate.
My introduction to sex
was a naked couple dashing out of the woods,
startled.

Some folks brazenly trekked in.
One bunch of scoundrels topped a good evergreen
just to take home an ill-begotten Christmas trophy.

A troupe of teenagers crouched below the pine row.
Tucked their tails and ran when their jig was up.
Their abandoned cache of imported booze
Introduced me to alcoholic spirits.
My parents lined up six bottles
in back of their closet
right behind the shoes collecting dust bunnies.

Why my tee-totaling parents
didn't pour it down the drain
is still beyond me.

This dark bar stored my secret treasure.
I developed a taste for Grand Marnier,
doled out one thimble at a time,
nervously watching the level go down.

Thieves slipped through
our security system one night,
set to siphon gas from our 300-gallon barrel
supplied by the Farm Bureau.

Mother sensed them first.
Sat bolt upright on the back sleeping porch.
"Erwin, wake up!"
My father slipped down to their car.
Calmly pulled the keys out of the ignition.
A neighbor arrived with an unneeded gun.
Pop scored a flash photo of our gas hose in their gas tank,
license number prominent in the composition.
Road blocked on both ends by other neighbors.
The gas gang stood stock-still
quaking until the sheriff to arrive.
Caught red-handed, they went straight to jail.
Do not pass Go.

Gates swing in
and then swing out.
I hightailed it to foreign parts:
Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Wild West.
But, I still carrykeys to the kingdom.

Writing in the Ozarks

2007-05-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

With the windows open the wind moves about in my office, carrying scents of spring rain. Thunder rumbles over the surrounding mountains, now laced with new green for yet another summer. There is no traffic, no noise to distract me from writing. Sometime during the day, a train will pass a mile or so away, hooting for the crossing in our small town, then disappearing into the tunnel and on down the rails toward Fort Smith and the Arkansas River.
Yet, we write about people, don't we? So once a week I venture some thirty miles north on our Scenic Highway 71 to sit amidst a crowd of writers, all chattering about the places where they write. Then we grow quiet for the clock hands have reached 6:30. Time to get serious. Time to go to work, exposing what we've written and waiting for comments that will either bolster our egos or tell us we have far yet to go to become a published writer. One by one, those who have brought their five pages, pass them around and we begin.
By nine o'clock, each one has been reassured, they are on their way to becoming authors. And we get in our cars and travel home, some having come as far as a hundred miles. This is only a part of the writers life here in the Ozarks. We are inspired by the serene beauty of our surroundings and we put words to paper, knowing we have one of the best places in the world to create.
Velda Brotherton
www.veldabrotherton.com

A favorite landscape quote

2007-05-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite poets is Rainer Maria Rilke, a German who wrote at the turn of the last century. In his book Love Poems to God he penned : "I describe myself as a landscape studied at length and in detail...or like a word I am coming to understand." It always reminds me that landscapes are both persevering and changing and that the closer we look into them, the more we discover about ourselves. I loved the pink sunrise. I'm still working on adding photos. Most of all I'm home from several days of city travel and leave again in the morning; but can draw refreshment from my place of belonging here along the river. I hope you all have a place that feeds you with its presence. Jane www.jkbooks.com www.janekirkpatrick.blogspot.com

More pink

2007-05-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

Other than pink sky, can anything be lovelier than a pink flower?

Nobody sees a flower really--it is so small it takes time--and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.--Georgia O'Keeffe

The Land of Pink Sky

2007-05-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

No matter how homely the landscape gets, a pink sky will always redeem it.