Monthly Archives: May 2025

Back in PA

Last year at this time, I had covid and was languishing in bed, unable to tend to the garden. A regional drought meant I really should have been watering the new plants; and it also kept the weeds firmly rooted, fighting for dominance in the vegetable patch. This year, I timed a trip to New Mexico just when I ought to have been harvesting spinach and planting out tomatoes, beans, and squash. Oops. And then it rained buckets the whole time I was away (much-needed rain, but…). Therefore, the garden situation was not ideal. But garden situations seldom are ideal because Nature does its own thing regardless of my plans.

At any rate, eastern Pennsylvania finally moderated its weather enough that I got the weeds and the seeds and transplants more or less under control this past week–“control” being a general term subject to, well, Nature. The peonies bloomed gorgeously on schedule, as did the nefarious multiflora roses and Russian olives that plague the hedgerow. The catbirds and Eastern kingbirds are back; the robins’ first brood has hatched; the orioles are insistent in the walnut trees and brilliant in the garden, chasing the barn swallows. I’m not doing much writing, though I drafted one or two beginnings of poems. Outdoors takes precedence–not that I can’t write out of doors, I often do so. But poems can wait in a way the garden cannot.

And, speaking of poems (and Pennsylvania), I returned from my trip to find this Keystone Poetry anthology awaiting: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09990-3.html–the followup to 2005’s Common Wealth anthology, also edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple.

The new anthology, 20 years after the initial one, has poems by about 180 poets–yes, I am one of them–covering the corners and the center of the Keystone State. I like it even better than the first collection, and it is clear the editors learned much from the experience of curating poems and creating a cohesive “experience” of the regions. Granted, since I know both of the editors personally and appreciate their poetry and their visions, I may be biased. But that’s okay. Objectively, I truly get how huge an undertaking this was and how well it has turned out. For educators, there is a section at the close of the anthology full of suggestions for reading, writing critically, and writing creatively based on this anthology, and even in comparison with the previous one. As both editors are college professors who teach creative writing and critical writing, these appendices are well-thought out and worthwhile.

I miss the aridity of New Mexico, which seems to benefit my overall health. And I miss my daughter immensely. But springtime in eastern PA has many compensations, not the least of which are blooming even as I write.

Plan B (reading)

While I was traveling the high-altitude desert regions, my home valley got its much-needed rain. And the rain continues. And continues. My plan was to get to work on my gardens as soon as I came back, to weed and plant out seedlings. Well, it’s a bit too wet for that. Also chilly and humid and sea-level, and therefore my physical adjustment has been a bit …bumpy. So, Plan B.

The Plan B default for me usually entails spending “down time” reading, writing, or housekeeping, though visiting the library and meeting friends for coffee fall under Plan B, too. Today, since I feel lousy and have a spate of brain fog, reading has been the choice. I still have a few books on the bedside pile that I haven’t gotten to–mostly poetry collections I bought at AWP at the end of March. But also there is Ocean Vuong‘s heartbreaking and beautiful novel-that-reads-like-memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that I finally got around to reading, and a back issue of Rattle Poetry a friend gave me–one that was largely devoted to haiku and related forms–that featured a fascinating interview with Richard Gilbert (thank you, Lesley S!). On the poetry-only book list, I read January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road, Julie Kane’s Naked Ladies, and Ross Gay’s first collection, Against Which. All quite useful to me in times when I feel bleak and physically frail–there’s humor, sorrow, and bravery in all of these writers’ poems. Though I’m too foggy-headed to write mini-reviews at the moment, I encourage my readers to check these poets out.

Perhaps my next post will be about the lovely time my friend and I had in northern New Mexico, visiting my daughter and Santa Fe, including my opportunity to see Bandelier National Monument again and ponder its environments and history. A trip like that takes some time for me to “digest.” But it was wondrous. And so is a day at home to recuperate in my favorite way: reading.

Not a brisk pace

Recently, a physician I see (for fibromyalgia and related conditions) suggested that I need to walk more often because “walking is the best exercise for you and will give you more energy in the long run.” The advice surprised me a little; I love to walk and, except when the weather is very cold or super wet, I walk most days. It turns out that what she meant is that I should be walking for 40 minutes or so “at a brisk pace.” When I asked her to define what she considered a brisk pace, she said two or three miles an hour.

This poses a slight problem for me because while I am happy to walk around my yard, woods, and neighborhood for 30-40 minutes almost daily, I can’t say I do it at a brisk pace. I get distracted and stop to look at things. Bugs. Worms. Toads. Birds. Flowers. New leaves. Nests. Spiderwebs…I loaf along, as Whitman claimed to do. Some days I start out with good intentions to keep up a lively pace, maybe even to the point where I can feel my heart rate going up. And then–was that a redtail hawk overhead? Did I hear an ovenbird? Oooh, the Solomon’s-seal is in bloom!

Today–the walk was very wet, as we’ve just had about 3″ of rain–musing on my not-exactly-exercise ambulations, I thought of this Mary Oliver poem.

Walking to Oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

by Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,
not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled–
I’m wading along
in the sunlight–
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead–
I can see the light spilling
like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon–
and, so far, I am
just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.
I don’t know where
such certainty comes from–
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind–
but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth
with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines
against the hard possibility of stoppage–
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

~

At my place, it’s feeder creeks I hear and think I may visit, not ponds, but I identify with the mood of this poem. Walks offer me that joy, that unfurling of leaves, ferns, everything…time to reflect and feel gratitude. If I don’t do quite as well by my heart and muscles as I ought to, maybe my psyche or soul will compensate. If I loaf, it’s a purposeful, sweet loafing, the kind of activity that poets tend to do; it gives me energy of a non-physical sort. (And I think Mr. Whitman would concur.)

Walt Whitman in mid-life, probably a bit younger than I am now.

Changes & alterations

We built our house here about three decades ago. At the time, I was young and excited about landscaping the place; although I had been growing our own vegetables for years by then, I was fairly new to ornamental gardening. I made mistakes; I underestimated the speed at which shrubs and trees grow; I thought I could keep a handle on invasive species; the world of various bark beetles and aggressive vines was new to me; and I had no idea how hard it would be to manage almost seven acres without, say, a team of landscapers.

Or how rapidly an environment alters when the climate changes, and when cornfields and early-growth wooded areas become housing developments, parking lots, and streets. I have learned a great deal and much looks different now than thirty years ago, but the swallows still return to my garden between April 26 and May 6. My land contains fewer efts in May than it used to, but the gray frogs, spring peepers, wood frogs, and toads make their usual frenzied chorus at mating time each spring.

~

Recent changes have come from the emerald ash borer, which has decimated, or worse, the green ash native to this valley. The huge trees have come crashing down during the past 10 years, making hard work for us even if it does provide a bit of firewood. Cutting, splitting, stacking hardwood isn’t a task I’m much good at anymore. Thirty years ago, maybe…and there does not seem to be any good that comes of this tree loss, which I’ve been mourning each year as we have less and less of a woodlot treeline above the hedgerow and see more and more of the neighboring subdivision.

But on my damp, early-morning walk today, I perceived some changes that I should have expected and that offer a glimmer of hope for native trees and shrubs–despite the proliferation of Russian olive, multiflora rose, Amur honeysuckle, mugwort, wintercreeper, Asiatic bittersweet, mile-a-minute weed, and more colonizing invaders than I can tick off in one blog post. There, beside the tractor path, along the edges of the hedgerow (for edges are where things happen most quickly), I observed more tree saplings than in past years. With the vase-shaped, leafy arcs of green ash absent, sun reaches further through the thickets. And there I spot horse chestnuts starting to push up, tiny walnut trees, oak trees of differing species, “baby” hickories and maple varieties, along with understory’s smaller shrubs and trees like amelanchier, ironwood, redbud, buckeyes.

Granted, most of them won’t survive to maturity, but some of them will–gradually re-making the woodlot unless other disturbances undo the renewal.

I won’t be here in another 30 years to find out, but I find hope in these saplings. I’m also happy to see that the little woodland and field wildflowers such as false Solomon’s seal, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild violets, and mayapples remain. And though I find myself swearing inwardly at the way the Russian olives grow massive along the property line and the invasive bittersweet sends thick tendrils coiling up into the trees, it’s not the fault of the plants that they got here. Humans brought them to North America, and the plants–like European colonists–became a bit too successful in their new homes, pushing out what was here before their arrival. Am I any different, really, than the dandelion or the honeybee? My ancestors came to these shores not so long after those species were imported with earlier “settlers.”

~

The rain we’ve been getting means I haven’t been out weeding in the vegetable garden. After I take my walks, I come inside to dry off and do household chores, or make soup, or work a little on my poetry. I feel excited by a little writing project I have recently given myself, and I’ve also been playing around with drafting prose poems. Next week, I head to the high desert again for further inspiration and a chance to travel with a good friend, visit museums, and spend some time with my daughter. When I return in mid-May, the gardens, the meadow, and the woods will already be much changed.

Correspondences

Dear Beejay,

Remember how we used to correspond by email every week? Sometimes more often. You, the best correspondent ever, though we never wrote paper letters–in those pre-internet years, we’d lost touch, moved too often; no postal mail from you until, once we were connected again, you sent me a birthday card. And tomorrow is your birthday. So here’s your birthday email. You see? I didn’t forget.

It remains dry here. That spate of rainy days in early April? Over with and barely a half an inch since then. I’m watering my veg garden daily. Today I sowed another row of spinach. The first and third sowings are doing well, but the second sowing didn’t germinate–can’t figure out why not. The lettuces and other greens are looking good, and the strawberry plants are in bloom. I even took a chance and planted some zucchini seeds. The task of thinning lettuce and carrots is indeed tedious, but it is a lovely day and the air is mild; and frankly, thinning carrots is less tedious than sending poems out to literary journals, I know you’d agree.

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. It comforts me somehow, even when the poems are sad or angry poems (that seems to reflect the times, which poetry can do). Your own writing, who has it? Does it exist on some hard drive somewhere? You always were excellent at organizing things. A talent I envy and do not possess.

Anyway, I did a bit of weeding to prep for the tomatoes and peppers when the seedlings are ready to transplant, but I got a late start on them and may not even move them to the garden until after my trip to New Mexico. Right now we’re getting pollen blow here. I expect your pollen blow was over two or three weeks ago, and that the azaleas are past their showy bloom time down there. I know how you love azalea season. And the beach–I guess you won’t get there this year.

I do find myself, at odd moments, wondering about your cats. When our lives were routine and there was nothing of interest to write about, we could always turn to cat anecdotes. Today, my Nessie joined me in the garden while I was working on the carrot patch. The catnip plant in the herb bed has leafed out quite early, and Nessie stretched his whole lean body over it and lolled himself into a snooze-fest, exposing his white belly. You would have laughed. You always called tuxedo cats “Holsteins.” I’m insulted on Nessie’s behalf.

When a person we love dies, I guess there’s an impulse–almost an instinct–to memorialize them, at least among those of us in “Western societies.” Or maybe it is a human impulse, I can’t say. I have written too many poems of elegy, and there will be more; but sometimes, it takes awhile before I feel I have the right perspective or frame of mind to write about them, or about my feelings of loss. Today, so much reminded me of you, Beejay, that I had to write something. If not a poem, then an epistle–the way I used to write to you, of ordinary things, the garden, cats, seasons, poetry.

Happy birthday, wherever you are.