Monthly Archives: March 2016

Annelids

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This is my compost pile, early spring. See those redworms? Eisenia fetida: the squiggling workhorses of the compost heap. We used to call them red wigglers. They are earthworms that don’t actually live in the earth but on it; they ingest plant matter and the result is worm castings, which make for excellent garden compost. A pound of redworms can eat 3.5 pounds of food waste per week.

I have every reason to believe that the worms pictured above are descendants of an adventure in vermiculture dating back to 1996 or ’97, when I purchased one pound of redworms as a science project for my children (as well as a way to get my rather lethargic compost pile working more efficiently). Since I always “start” my next heap with the not-fully-composted remainder of the previous season’s detritus, I am reasonably sure that some of the redworm egg casings get in the mix.

My son was young enough in 1996 that he does not recall the redworm “farm” we kept in the house one late winter and transferred to the compost heap in spring. He doesn’t even remember where the pile was at our former residence. But he does, somewhat grudgingly, help me turn this year’s pile onto a big tarp and spread the finished stuff onto my vegetable patch. (He’s a bit squeamish. The worms don’t bother him, but the millipedes do.)

And he enjoys stopping by the garden fence and reaching for a ripe cherry tomato straight off the vine in summer.

For me, the turning of the heap in early spring is one of those rituals that signals the arrival of pleasanter weather and new fragrances.

I have not been writing much poetry lately; life has been distracting. The ideas are nevertheless mixing and stirring, I hope.

 

 

Landscape, personal place

I’ve been enjoying Rachel Solnit’s prose lately, most recently her book As Eve Said to the Serpent, some of which derives from art criticism but which is also the kind of multidisciplinary approach to observing the relationships between things that intrigues me. What she notices about the environment, about art that engages with or alters place/landscape, and about environmentalists themselves piques my own inquisitiveness and gets me asking questions I might not otherwise have come up with. Place, particularly the personal “environment” that shelters, inspires, or calms me, is something I consider frequently.

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[one of my happy places]

Perhaps that’s because I am by nature an introvert; perhaps it has to do with being a poet. The personal aesthetics of place–a room or a landscape–exert significant effects upon my frame of mind and mode of thinking.

Why is that?

Maybe there is an evolutionary reason for the need to find a favorite spot, a hide-away, a happy place. We may still possess that ancient urge for security, the cave or treehouse we can use to hide from predators or from the weather.

And landscape itself can be a secret place, or a sacred place. A wide expanse of openness means it is easier to observe predators prowling in the distance, giving the prey animal time to flee. Or to explore, to survey, to run embracing what is far away and only imaginable.

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Neolithic stone circle, Castlerigg, Cumbria, UK

~

C.D. Wright: “What landscape is: not a closed space, not in fact capable of closure. With each survey the corners shift. Distance is the goal; groping the means.”

Jargon

Having just spent some time in Scotland, encountering Scots accents and language, and having read Kathleen Jamie’s book Findings while on my trip, and having visited castles and a distillery (even though malt whisky is not something I drink), I find myself thinking again about words. In particular, specialized words–those used by the ancient crafts such as beer-making, by vintners and distillers, weavers, farmers, and builders of defenses, ships, and of cathedrals, architectural terms and words specific to a trade: jargon.

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Barley. Glengoyne Distillery, not far from Glasgow.

Jargon, the word itself, comes from the French. As per the Online Etymology Dictionary:

jargon (n.) Look up jargon at Dictionary.commid-14c., “unintelligible talk, gibberish; chattering, jabbering,” from Old French jargon “a chattering” (of birds), also “language, speech,” especially “idle talk; thieves’ Latin” (12c.). Ultimately of echoic origin (compare Latin garrire “to chatter”).

From 1640s as “mixed speech, pigin;” 1650s as “phraseology peculiar to a sect or profession,” hence “mode of speech full of unfamiliar terms.” Middle English also had it as a verb, jargounen “to chatter” (late 14c.), from French.

One of the things I like best about taking tours of and reading books about distilleries or castles and the like is the chance to savor those unusual and often strangely lovely-sounding special terms. The lyne arm. The tun. The potstill, the draff, the spirit safe. Wort and wormtub.

And there’s the donjon, the voussoir, the queen-post, the feretory…in addition to all those buttresses and gargoyles and portcullises. Not to mention the terms, many of them archaic, associated with the making of tapestries and the cooking of meals and the husbandry of sheep or falcons or cattle.

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Or the laying of stones for roads or masonry walls, for the engineering of moats and the design of crenellated defenses. So many words, and only highly specialized historians know them today; whereas once, the mostly illiterate men and women who did the work used the language of their trades.

It’s still true today–perhaps more than ever–that jargon is used among the people in a given industry, computer tech or realty or politics. I suppose those words will as surely fall out of use, or evolve in their meanings, and perhaps more rapidly than the jargon of yore.

Obscure terms, highly specialized in their function as means of communication. Sometimes, quite beautiful to know.

 

 

Siesta, lacuna, pause

I am preparing for travel, and then I will be away from my computer for about a fortnight; and then, I shall be recuperating from my travels! For the first time in quite awhile, I am taking a rest from blogging.

Though I fully intend to get back to these pages after my return. There is nothing like a journey to invigorate, to inspire reflection…the clichés about journeying and questing are well-earned. Another part of the journey that is less celebrated, however, is the need for pause and the space between journeying and being home (or at journey’s end–which may not be home).

One activity I’m sure I’ll be doing is walking, and some of that walking will be along the paths of Windermere. Perhaps I will even encounter “a host of golden daffodils”–it’s about the right season for that.daffodil photo Ann E. Michael

Maybe I’ll read Gloria Steinem’s latest book, My Life on the Road, as I travel. She’ll make me feel like quite the amateur.