Seasons – Page 4 – Grace Mattern

August 8, 2015

What Comes and Goes

Garlic is small this year, each bulb I pull half the size of last year’s. It’s not from the dry summer — I irrigate my garden with timed soaker hoses, and my onions are their usual hearty balls of tang. Was it the harsh winter? The many cold nights this summer?

Apples are outrageous, my trees dotted with fruit, branches hanging lower and lower as the apples plump and pull with their weight. Last year there was hardly an apple, the two previous years were like this one, an apple bonanza.

My potato plants were hearty and healthy with no pests. Yet when I dug under the mulching hay last weekend to find potatoes for dinner there were hardly any spuds. Are there more further down the bed?

Wild blueberries are sparse, lakeside bushes mostly bare.

I have two eggplants on the four I planted — one is two inches long, one an inch. Two years ago my plants were dripping with eggplant, we had grilled eggplant for dinner every night, I filled my freezer with eggplant.

The farm where I’ve picked peaches the last two summers has none this year. No peaches. The buds froze in a late cold snap, a whole orchard empty. But the area where Chris lives is full of orchards and I’ve brought home two big boxes of peaches for a ridiculously low price and filled my freezer and now a friend is filling hers.

Strawberry picking in June was the best I’ve ever done — the low plants bent with the sweetest and cleanest berries I’ve ever picked. More in my freezer.

Today it’s blueberries. There may be few wild berries, but Berrybogg Farm is loaded, bushes so laden you can pick pounds in minutes. Which I did yesterday.

Bounty comes and goes and the reasons are mostly a mystery. I’ll be making applesauce in a few weeks and loading apples into my friend’s truck for his cider mill. My onions will last well in to the winter and I’ll run out of garlic. I’ll be making smoothies with peaches and Emilio will eat frozen strawberries for breakfast when he comes to visit. I doubt my potatoes will last until Thanksgiving, which is my goal every year, to mash my own potatoes.

But I’ll have what I need to make blueberry pie, which has always been Chris’s job, superb pie maker that she’s been. This year I’ll be rolling the dough and concentrating on gratitude for the bounty that is, while honoring what has passed.

What else can I do?

April 30, 2015

Maple Flowers

David and I spent the weekend in New York and the streets there are lined with flowering cherry trees, crab apples, forsythia, magnolias. Some hardwoods had tiny leaves emerging from their buds, lighting up their crowns and making the world feel softer. The splashs of color and blossom were delightful; the evidence of spring growth was reassuring and made me happy.

Then home, to tighter buds, grayer days and temperatures that have me wearing wool again when I sit at my desk. But from that desk I also look out the west window to some branches of the maple tree in our front yard, and every day I notice how much bigger the buds are on the tree, how the balls of red brighten the landscape.

Two days ago I went out to examine those buds and realized what I’ve been looking at are flowers, not buds. Really gorgeous and even trippy flowers. Balls of fuzz puzzling enough that David and I spent a good bit of time reading online about maple buds and blossoms. We learned a lot.

Maples have both male and female flowers on the same tree, the male with the sperm needed to pollinate the female. As the leaves start to emerge so do the seeds, wrapped in the papery-winged helicopters I stuck on my nose as a kid, peeling open the seed pocket and using the bit of juiciness to make it stick. The seed pods — samaras — are shaped so they spin in wind and can travel, sometimes a long way.

Yesterday we were in Portland and there were no flowering trees, though the magnolias looked ready, long flutes of bud with just a slip of blossom showing on a few. I missed the clouds of blossoms we’d seen lining the streets in New York. Spring in cities can be so pretty, I wanted to see it again.

We went down to the waterfront and in the parking lot saw some maples flowering. I went to get a closer look, these flowers tamer and less flamboyant than those on my tree, fewer stamens, less fuzz. Today it’s gray again and not particularly warm, but the maple flowers are still popping and pollinating and getting the whole spring thing going. Here it comes.

April 22, 2015

Quantifying Spring

Yes, April can be a cruel month, with its tease of warm, sunny days followed by raw rain and wind that whips away any heat I manage to absorb from the sun. But there’s steady evidence that the season is, indeed, changing.

A week ago I looked out the kitchen window and saw that the garlic was up, four faint lines of green in the garden bed, shoots rising from the cloves I nestled in to the soil last fall. Also a week ago my sister Chris and her husband Jon came for an unexpected visit. It was a clear day, but the wind was strong and chilly, and when the sun shifted so the back deck was in shadow, we moved to the front porch. The porch was too windy. We tried the bit of lawn below the stone terraces, a low spot where the wind is blocked and the sun is strong.

Sitting in a circle chatting, I noticed how much taller the chives were. I’d raked last year’s dried foliage off the clumps on Saturday, hoping to use some snippings for the dinner I was making that night for friends. But the shoots were too small. Now they were tall enough to cut and I wondered how fast they were growing; it seemed like they’d sprouted inches in just days.

So I measured both the chives and the garlic, two days apart. The garlic grew an inch and the chives grew two. An inch a day. Solid evidence that summer is coming. A few gray days, a raw day, a day of hard rain, doesn’t stop the seasons from following their course. When I feel a bit off course, I look out at my bed of garlic, green growing every day. Growth I can measure.

March 16, 2015

Snow Surprise

This morning I woke to a new winter coat on the grime, the real dirt of living that’s been etched on snowbanks everywhere for the last week now hidden in a fresh, if wet, three inches. I’ll take it, as long as it melts fast.

Driving home from Long Island yesterday afternoon we expected snow showers at the end of the drive but it wasn’t predicted to amount to much. But by the time we got near Concord there was a steady, heavy snow that whipped into our faces when we stopped at a rest area. Still, the snow was melting on the road, which was wet like it was raining, no problem.

Until we climbed the Chichester ridge to the east of Concord, headed to Northwood. Suddenly there was snow on the road at the top of the hill, and a good bit of it. Three inches at least, and dense and sticking to everything. The last 10 miles of the drive turned in to a slow moving train of cars as we all crawled along the slick road, snow still swirling. The car splashed up mud as I turned in to the driveway, but otherwise, uniform white.

It was a bright morning so I got out on the snowmobile trail to ski early, before the sun could warm the snow to too sticky, before the melting began. There were spots of sticky snow, but there was also fresh powder on every branch and needle and twig, a wonderland of white again, a glimpse back at a spectacular winter of snow. And then I was gliding along the tracks, maybe for the last time this year.

February 15, 2015

Wind and Snow

Clouds of loose snow blow across the fields and past the house. As long as there’s any dry snow in the world to the west of me, it makes its way past my windows. Every path I shovel gets packed with hard, dry drifts that lift like bricks as I shovel again.

We came home late at night two weeks ago after a windy storm and a snake of drifted snow curled out of the walkway to where we parked the car. I stepped over the first, knee-high drift on my way to the porch to get a shovel The next ridge was waist high and I plunged up to my thighs. It was impossible to tell from our yard how much snow had fallen in the storm. It was all drifts and mounds and long lips along ridges of white.

Our ski tracks across the field filled in this morning in the hour we were out. It wasn’t snowing, just blowing. We’d skied though woods to the edge of another field where the wind had sculpted pockets around the trees where we stopped.

Now gusts grab chunks of packed snow from the roof and fling it down into the stream whipping through the yard. The whistle and whisk of the wind turns into a long murmur and then a slap, slap, slap and bang as the shovels on the porch slip around.

The maple in the yard loses another dead branch. The hills in the distance are foggy with their own wind storms and above it all the sun has come out, last night’s storm has swirled itself out to sea and here on the edge of the great circle the wind keeps turning the corner and scrubbing my world.

February 8, 2015February 9, 2015

Another Story

A flock of robins has been flapping around my yard this week, lifting off from the maple outside my study window to fly to the garden and pick at shriveled globs that used to be apples, still hanging from bare branches. They’re also eating the berries on the barberry bushes, leaving bright red splotches of bird droppings in the snow under the maple tree. Puffed up against the frigid temperatures and wild wind, as if making their feathers into bulky coats, their orange breasts are a welcome touch of color in the monochrome landscape of bare trees, white pines harboring darkness under their boughs and snow.

Anyone who lives in the southeastern part of New Hampshire knows that snow and snow and then more snow has been our story for the last couple of weeks. I went to a Martin Luther King Day Commerative at the University of New Hampshire last week, to hear Natasha Trethewey deliver the Commerative Presentation, which turned out to be her talking about how she came to write her poems, a selection of which she then read. Stunning. And encouraging to realize a woman of color could be so highly celebrated, even appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, for writing direct and accessible poems about our country’s history of racism and power imbalances.

So what does that have to do with robins and snow? One of the speakers before Trethewey said that courage has been called the willingness to tell your story wholeheartedly. That got me thinking about stories, in particular my story, or stories, as I think about the next steps in my writing projects — getting back to my novel to get it in shape for readers, and then reengaging with my memoir. I was at a meeting a couple of weeks ago and we were discussing someone who had mentioned she was writing a memoir.

“She’s writing a memoir?” a woman at the meeting said. “As if her life is that interesting.”

“I’m writing a memor,” I said and the woman replied with something about my life being interesting enough to write about. She was covering herself, because she hardly knows me and has no idea what my story is, or what part of my story I’m putting in the memoir.

And it also made me think about this blog and the blogs I follow. They tell stories, some large, some tiny, the most successful translating some part of a life into a narrative interesting enough that others want to read it.

So what is today’s story, or the story of the last couple of weeks when I haven’t managed to post anything on my blog? I’ve been busy being Mimi to another new baby.

I’ve been working on both volunteer and consulting projects that always seem to chew up more time than they should. I’ve not been writing much (as evidenced by the lack of blog posts) but I did go to a party with bigger-than-life-size super hero balloons and spent time batting Spider Man up in to the air to float above me. That was a first.

I’ve been skiing every day I can and shoveling snow every day I have to, which has been most days.

I’ve been watching the robins try to make it through this very wintry weather and anthropromorphisizing their regret at not having migrated this year. Does this make a story? It’s made for a very full couple of weeks anyway.

December 3, 2014

Sex

No, this isn’t a post about sex, or not exactly. “Sex” is the title of a poem in The Truth About Death, which I thought about today because I walked out to the rock featured in the poem, the rock where I’ve built cairns since Eric died, and it was another icy day, like the day almost eight years ago when I first wrote it.

There’s a poem called “Talk” in the book with the lines:
The more universal, the more silence –
death, drugs, sex, money. I talk.

So there is a poem for each of those topics — Death, Drugs, Sex, Money. I don’t know that anyone has ever noticed that, but it was very intentional on my part. Truth telling was my mission in writing the book and if a topic was difficult for people to talk about, I wanted to open a door to the possibility of talk that could lead to truth.

The truth about today is that the poem came to mind not because of sex, or how Eric’s absence continues to inhabit the world, especially on a day when the fog coming across the pastures like an enormous animal grazing on sleet is so thick it makes the nightlight in the hallway outside my study flicker on and off, as if it can’t decide whether it’s night time after all, but because of the ice lace on everything as I walked to the rock. Every twig, bud, bush, branch, berry, weed stalk and blade of glass sticking through the crusty snow like the white whiskers on an old man.

So, the poem. Probably the other three by the end of the week.

Sex

I walk to the rock we used in the years the house
had packs of children coming and going
in unpredictable waves and the two mile walk
across the open meadows of the ridge
and into the woods along an old road overhung
by hemlocks, rising into oaks and maples,
was just far enough, to the rock with a ledge
just the right height, a condom and tissue
in your back pocket. Today I start a second cairn,
an ice storm makes lace of the blueberry stems.

October 16, 2014

Back At It

Returning from long travels, there are many ways in the last three weeks that I’ve thought about being back at it. Back at my desk, writing. Back in the yard and garden, pulling out wasted plants and tidying the beds. Back in the car, going to visit with family and friends. Back on familiar streets and dirt roads as I continue training for the NYC marathon.

And back to the always surprising beauty of autumn in New Hampshire because the trees are back at it too. My favorite is running down a road transformed into a tunnel of color by the crowns of trees, yellow and orange and red, leaves knocked loose by wind showering down around me. Even though I know this pocket of glory means the trees will soon be bare and I’ll be back in a gray world, with little light and color, I relish it while it’s here. Maybe even more so because I know it’s passing on.

Here’s a poem from 15 years ago, which makes it clear I really am back at something I’ve written about before.

Center

The bluejays are busy
in the diminished sunflowers,
flopping over bent heads,
flapping as they gorge
on blisters of seed. Crows

cross the yard, ceaseless
feeders. Cricket shrill
encases the globe of air
where we sit, trees
in their revised colors

ringing this kernel
of glory. We stay still
for many moments, daring
to let time pass, to let
what unfolds also uncrease.

May 18, 2014

Bluets

Bluets are blooming, salting the grass with clusters of their pale blue blossoms, another reminder of how this season conflates renewal and loss for me. “I know you haven’t been able to get outside much for the last few weeks, so I brought some outdoors to you,” a friend said to me the day of Eric’s funeral.

My friend is a clay artist, and had made a tiny pot, dug up a clump of bluets and packed them into the bowl to bring to me. He was right. Eric’s illness and death had been so fast, and taking care of him so all consuming, the opening of spring happened without me having time to notice.

I kept the small patch flowers on my windowsill for a few days, and when the flowers faded, I kept the pot. The small empty well of brown clay was sad and sweet and comforted me, thinking of my friend’s thoughtfulness, and how right he was to know I’d missed the outdoors.

When the pot got knocked off its shelf a few years later and broke, I was sorry but not upset. I had the memory and the association of the bluets, that still comes back to me every year. The Truth About Death holds the bluets too, as one of the final images from that year of grief, that season that comes and goes.

Anniversary II

Someone is being buried, cars clustered on the road
by the cemetery, brilliant like the day your coffin rocked
in the haul, the cemetery men jiggling a stuck strap, rocked
as if in your boat, we’d dressed you for kayaking, swinging
paddles in the pivot of your hands. I’ve stayed organized, ready
for blackness, speed the answer, no question. The grass is longer,
dandelions will be next. I found stones in a box on your bureau.

I was dazed, I was sitting in the funeral car, the scary center,
a friend ran to get me water when I asked, the clearness
of water, the green gleam of lake water over white sand,
the coves we found and rocked over, passing fruit and Scotch
across our boats, parallel, holding each others paddles,
face to face. I move too fast, bruise my hips, keep
moving. You told me never to leave you alone again.

I bring the stones to your grave, one white, one a perfect black
circle, I slept with them in the pocket of your father’s shorts,
found them on the sheet this morning. Birdsong from a maple
budded red like at home, bluets in the grass. I’m living
on ink, fire on the paper for the millisecond before it dries,
sunlight on water, the constant flow and flash, the center,
going through the door and never coming back.

May 12, 2014

Disappearance

So much appears in spring, it seems counter intuitive to think of it as a season of disappearance. Trees are full of blossoms, from the silky petals of magnolias to the rows of white cherries that line roadways and sidewalks. The buds of the maple in my yard are like small flowers, red bleeding in the veins of tiny green leaves. The crowns of hardwoods on the hills to the south soften as rose buds break open to the chartreuse of new growth.

David and I went for a hike yesterday and the branches of bushes and trees were covered with specks of leaves, a slight fuzzing of the views we could still catch as we climbed. By the time we walk that trail again, the views will be gone. A riot of leaves will have filled in all the spaces that let in some distance, and there will be walls of green wherever we look.

Sitting on the back deck in morning sun, we can still see the neighbors’ yards and the road on the other side of the brook. Soon the apple trees beyond the garden beds will fill in and the trees along the brook will make a privacy fence for our back yard. The road and neighbors’ yards will disappear, and so will we.

Like everything, spring is a paradox. The green world expands, and our views constrict. As I say in one of my poems, that’s “the nature of nature.”