The Place Where the Hollies Grow

I should have gone home this weekend. The thought of going stayed in my mind all weekend. Friday night, I knew I was too tired for the drive. Saturday morning was full of bad dreams, vivid and ugly, and the rain was coming, all day Sunday, so I did my chores. My share of the work, which is rarely done. Mowing, hauling. Truly work, nothing interesting about it. Saturday night, I couldn’t sleep and then fell asleep so late, I couldn’t get up in time to hit the road. So I did not go but the reports from home were ok. A steady rain cheated me of the Sunday I wanted. Cleaning the flower beds, checking on the currants. Weeding in the old flower garden.

 Wild white yarrow dominates the field. The apple tree which scared me by shriveling is coming back. I didn’t know what to do for it. I planned on calling the extension agent for advice but I guess it was just a late, hard frost. I gathered some seed, wild hyacinth and shepherd’s purse, just before the rain began. Early, Saturday evening.

One of the last trips home, dad showed me the place where the hollies grow. He thinks it was from the old holly by the house. Burned in the fire but spread maybe by the birds to the hill behind the house. He remembers the hill as a boy, cleared of trees, a place for grass and cows. Now it is a young forest, with seventy years of growth, and in one place on that hill, the hollies grow, and somewhere he could not find, the persimmons. Now I know that place too. A good-sized tree with fifty younger ones growing up around it, in assorted sizes, mostly tiny, like the ones I took. I have watched the stronger one for more than a month and was rewarded this week by two, tiny leaves.  

Rocks and Hard Places

The sky is blue. So they tell me. Do you see it too?

Nothing but work in my life these days. I gathered one more bag of weeds from the empty space and uncovered some old brick and ivy and some common mallow. I like that plant. Weed, noxious and invasive. So they say. But the leaves are pretty-shaped and you can see the mallow in its flower.

On Derby Day, I walked out my back door to find a big branch of my old tulip poplar on the ground. Took down a branch of my white pine with it. Covered with flowers, budded and blooming. I’ve never seen so much of that up close. I gathered it and the baby pines. Together, so much beauty. I took them to a neighbor and to two restaurants in town but so much of it was left, wasted, on the ground.

The himalayan musk is blooming. When it was a younger plant, the roses hung over the road and swayed when cars went by. Now, I can’t reach any of the blooms because it’s climbed over twenty feet, high into the sycamore’s branches.

I continue to transplant from the home place. A few wild iris. Flags, most likely. I hope for them. Next year. Dad’s neighbor gave me a minty looking plant that she could not name. Smells like lemon pledge. Probably lemon balm. I planted them by my back door where I can touch them and smell them when I leave the house. She gave me another unnamed. Her mother’s flowers. My button flower, her mother called it. I loved it instantly but nearly killed it because I hadn’t time to plant it. Small, yellow flower the size of a button. Faintly, like a tiny strawflower but not stiff. Glossy, yellow petals, unfolded into a shape similar to a mum. I’m searching for it.

 I hope to get home before the sun goes down. I hope more to find that the wild hyacinth still has seeds for me to gather.  

Weeding

I weeded carefully. Around the one tulip, past blooming, color unknown. I removed all the old poke and the new and some of the hemlock. It’s important to be careful. You never know what you might find. There is a plant which resembles spiderwort but I cannot tell. I weeded round and left it there. I left the fleabane. I found some ivy. I filled one large bag and stopped. I can barely see what I have done but tomorrow is another day.

The air is good and cool. I could sit here forever. I read an essay this morning, Of the Coming of John, by W.E.B. Du Bois from the The Souls of Black Folk. I found this, unexpected, there:

“He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sand and the sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising only here and there in long, low islands.”

Poetry.

Snakewort

After dark when I got home and I could smell something big somewhere in the field. A large animal but not something dead. Maybe something roaming. It was gone this morning and everything smelled fresh and clean down the driveway. I stopped to pull up a tarp I had lazily left there over winter and uncovered a pair of snakes. As wide as a waterhose, coiled, both at least three feet long. Scared me senseless. Like a copperhead but brown. What were they? I couldn’t think. A mated, mature pair. I should have killed them but I let them be.

My mother was always so afraid of snakes. I remember our elderly neighbor coming over to kill rattlesnakes for us when I was a kid. I never wanted to hurt them but they scared me too. Dad always said the only good snake was a dead snake and it didn’t matter what kind. Big, little, green or brown. Last weekend home I was weeding around the peonies barehanded and dug up a ground snake. Small, maybe four inches, dark black, with a bright orange underbelly. I thought at first it was a dark worm till I saw its head and then it’s belly. Dropped it and crawled backwards fast into the yard. Dad knew right away and while I was dithering and wondering what kind it was, and what to do, he killed it. I had fears of a nest of them and could see them in my mind, crawling up between my fingers. I buried that bed with inches of mulch and left the peonies to fend for themselves for awhile. All spring maybe. Summer too.

I was chased by a racer as a kid. I can still see its head moving above the rows in the garden. Funny, how it chased me running the opposite direction. My mother was chased too. She never got over it. She was a little girl and their chickens nested on a hill behind her house. Her job was to gather the eggs. Nests and eggs equal a perfect places for snakes. She reached for an egg and uncovered a snake. She ran down the mountain and the snake chased. Head up and fast. She was small, about six, and she tried to jump over a barbed wire fence to get away from it but she didn’t make it. She got caught on a barb. Tore into the inside of her thigh. No stitches or doctors then and that scar is ugly and wide, still.

My grandfather heard her screaming. He killed the snake. My father killed the snake. I should have killed them too.

Me & the Mourning Dove

Me & the Mourning Dove

There is an empty space behind the building where I work. It lies between two buildings and might have been a small garden once or a courtyard. Now it is full of weeds and cigarette butts. Fleabane and poke. A place for the homeless. For me and one mourning dove.

Work got too much and I decided I’d better change the bulb on the stairwell to the fire escape before we were all killed stumbling up these steps in the dark. I opened the door and realized I’d never been out here before. Three years in this place and never looked before. One tulip past blooming. A day lily and a bush with mitten leaves that I cannot name. There is a neat stack of old brick which I’m sitting on. But mostly weeds. My wireless is working.

I may sit here for awhile.

Evening Song

I bought her book for this one poem she read out loud.
A lulling voice, warm and soft:

 Evening Song

This time of day the sun hangs west and low
and makes a yellow puddle on the grass
between the cedar and the Biltmore ash,
such slanting light the only God I know.

And why not God, who once could be the rain,
or else the thunder, or the lightning blow
that topped that ash tree twenty years ago?
The shrapnel broke the kitchen window pane.

I want a quiet, undemanding God,
a yellow light, not one that blinds, to see
the things I have to see when I’m alone:

Mother now has lost the will to read,
asking only to lie warm and free
from pain. The old cat curls around its bones.

        Sherry Chandler, Weaving a New Eden
                      April 10, 2012, Great  Writers Series

Red Trillium & Wild Hyacinth

are blooming in the old garden.

Change and loss was what the brook cried
That she heard in the night–but she kept snug
With crow-wood for kindling, and the sun shone good
Through the tops of the pines, and her plants
Didn’t fail her  . . .  . 

 Jean Garrigue
        After Reading The Country of Pointed Firs