Author Archives: Ann E. Michael

Other forms of gleaning

Of the many tasks that lie before me as I work toward restructuring my routine, the past drafts pile must be the most engaging long-term project. Other kinds of odd jobs can be done in brief segments; it doesn’t take more than half an hour to clean out a drawer or closet, throw laundry in the washing machine, or cut back the ornamental grass for the season. Even a big job, like uncluttering the attic, can be done bit by bit once we get the motivation. Those tasks don’t require much critical thinking, no analysis beyond “Do I need this anymore? Can I get rid of it? Can I consolidate it with other items of its kind? What will take this stain off?”

While I can’t say I love organizing and clearing out stuff, it is not really taxing work. Just tedious.

Sorting through the drafts pile isn’t tedious, but it’s monumental and a bit intimidating. The pile of poems dates back as far as 2001 and is made up of probably two reams of paper. It includes hundreds of fairly terrible poems and, if I am lucky, maybe 80-100 poems that have the potential to be meaningful, beautiful, or at least not embarrassingly bad. This pile’s the result of 20 years of procrastination, lack of time, lack of motivation, and generalized disorganization. I admit it! Now I must roll up the proverbial shirtsleeves and get to work: work which requires analysis, criticism, revision, sorting, culling, and–that precious commodity–time. I find I’m unable to accomplish much if I attempt the work in small bits, (though I do break it up into sections, more or less). If I don’t spend at least two hours at a go, I get distracted and indecisive. I read each draft carefully, several times, to assess.

So we’re looking at weeks and weeks here. Maybe months and months, though I hope not.

The way I choose to understand the process is as a type of gleaning and sifting. I’ve got the harvest in–a big pile of poem drafts, maybe ur-poems, maybe seeds of poems, maybe crap. My efforts help me to decide which ideas are interesting, even if the poems themselves are not pulling the weight of an intriguing possibility; which lines and images are worthwhile, even if they don’t operate too well in their current context; which pieces suffer from thoughtless lineation, weird syntax, clunky form, form that doesn’t suit the content, and the like; which poems are far too wordy or else missing vital words for clarity; and which poems are basically not worth putting any effort into because: Boring! Obscure! Derivative! Sentimental! Awkward! Meh! What was I thinking?!

And then, every once in awhile, I find a poem I like and had forgotten about, one that only needs a bit of appropriate tweaking. Eureka moments while wading through my own creative work.

Yes, I should have been doing this sort of gleaning and sifting all along, the way I did when I was first starting out as a poet, 45 years ago. It probably would have made things easier. I notice myself noticing myself, though…noticing my changes as a writer, my little obsessions and my past enthusiasms glimmering in the work, noticing the different ways I have approached Big Themes and smaller ones. There may be something useful in that offshoot of my major poetry drafts excavation. Who can tell?

~

The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet, 1857; image, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Local libraries

There are two local libraries near my house, and the campus library at the college where I used to work. And yet, until just a couple of months ago, they were rather underutilized by yours truly. I had developed into a bit of a book hoarder. I had enough disposable income to purchase books, and as a writer myself I felt an obligation to buy books–from the authors or their publishers when possible (some books are out of print and then…Amazon or ThriftBooks). Buying books helps to keep authors and publishers afloat. Win-win.

I’m now on a fixed income, however, and also have much more ‘free time’ because I have stopped working 40 hours a week. I can get to the libraries at ten a.m. and browse the stacks and ask for interlibrary loans. The first time I borrowed from the library in town, I received a receipt that said: “You checked out the following items,” followed by the due dates of each item, and then this cheerful little notice: “You saved $65.96 by using your public library!” Look at me, the savvy saver.

Maybe libraries have been doing this for awhile and I never noticed because I haven’t been using them. But I thought it was an amusing reminder. I guess it also serves to let people know they ought to donate money and books since, after all, they are saving so much by opting for the library. And so, while I slowly cull my own shelves for –er– “downsizing” purposes, I’ve been borrowing weekly from my free public libraries, one of so-called civilization’s greatest boons. I am sorry it took me so long to return to the safe and welcoming space of a public library.

ann e michael
The South Whitley Library as it was in 1967, with my grandmother in her Story Lady attire.

~

In most public libraries, the hardest books to locate are small-press poetry titles; but the campus library has a good selection of those and, as a former employee, I can drive over there when searching out poetry collections. This means that I will still purchase the occasional new or hard-to-locate poetry books by writers whose work I feel I simply must possess. It’s a big challenge to get over that hurdle of needing to own books, though. A series of full bookshelves feels somehow comforting to me. I’d much rather divest myself of clothing, shoes, jewelry, electronic devices, furniture, craft supplies, maybe even artwork or gardening tools, than part with my books…especially the poetry collections and the philosophy texts.

I’ll keep those for now. But I will also return this $65.96-worth of books to my local library and borrow another $66-worth of books in their place.

~ And in the happy news department, P.S. see below! The issue should be live soon. Amazingly, this is my third Pushcart nomination this year. The last time I was nominated for this annual prize was 1997. So, kinda gobsmacked…and grateful.

Practice

I have been reading novels, which affects my state of mind, makes me dreamy and distracted, foggy-headed, and full of the conflicts in their plots. Or maybe the weather is what does it–too much lovely late autumn sun and not enough rain, which feels “off” for our region; and once the rain finally arrives, it is a dour and chilly dousing I have to convince myself to feel grateful for. Likely the news cycle has not helped my mood. My nine-year-old self emerges from a distant past, crying, “People are so mean!” My parents can no longer sit down beside me and offer comfort.

Time to switch to the poets. I’m finally getting around to reading Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, a collection that’s been on my to-read list for far too long. The very first poem, “The Bull,” startled me into reading it twice. “I reached–not the bull–/but the depths. Not an answer but/an entrance the shape of/an animal. Like me.” Enough to jolt me out of my fiction-induced haze, especially on a day like this one when I feel the anxious dreamy child in me more than I wish. The prose poems later in the book intrigue me, as well: a very different prose than is found in most novels.

~

“People are so mean!” –I said that often when I was a child. People were mean to me and mean to each other. The news was full of warfare and protest. Grownups were mean, kids were mean, teachers were mean. I had a few complaints, but I also possessed the clueless narcissism of a child. Needless to say, I was not one of those precocious, old-soul children I sometimes read about in books. My siblings could have pointed out a few examples of my own meanness. And I was too much of a coward to stand up for others who bore even more teasing than I did, or to advocate forcefully to right wrongs. As a result, I always feared that my life has been rife with sins of omission.

I wrote the following poem two years ago. I must have been in a similar frame of mind.

~

In Which I Give Myself a Scolding Concerning Compassion

While pruning the quince with its
	twisted thorny syntax of greenwood
	I reflect on errors, mine,
	in the arena of compassion—
the quality and behavior I value most
	and in which I am deficient.

Empathy I’ve got, but compassion requires
	motivating force toward good
	and needs, in my case, practice.
I haven’t practiced enough. I feel the prick
	of quince or conscience through
	my gloves damp from autumn drizzle, 
disentangle stems’ inventive turns, toss cuttings
	on the ground. I disappoint myself.

Perhaps meditation would avail, yet
	I’m incompetent at meditation
	though my friend in her monastery
	by the frigid bay once told me
everyone is bad at meditation for the first
	ten years or so.

Lopping off twigs and branches I imagine
	her sitting on her cushion while
	icebergs converge in saltwater cove
	a wash of pale gray during the short-day
months while she practices one kind of compassion.

My friend who always stops to help a stranger
	change a tire or rescues a loose dog
	from the side of a highway practices 
another form of compassion.

I lack it—that immediate impulse of outreaching,
	kindness. It strikes me as a flaw, the log
	in my own eye it took me years to see.
	So when the late-season mosquito
lands on my forearm to sup perhaps its last
	nourishment, I refrain from flattening it—

a microscopic act of compassion in a world so needy,
	but perhaps a start.
~

Promotional

I keep forgetting to mention a few nice happenings regarding my recent book, so I may as well stuff them all into one post here in case anyone is interested. Have I mentioned how much I hate doing promotion for my poetry? Why yes, I believe I have. And since these days I feel no career ambitions related to my work anymore, why does it even matter?

I think there is an answer to why it matters. Sort of an answer, anyway–that without some form of prompting to the World at Large, my poems will be reader-less. A sad fate for a poem or book, and a common one. I don’t write just for myself: I keep a journal for that. I write as a form of communication, a way to connect with a reader I may or may not know.

Sometimes no one connects because the poems don’t work for them. Sometimes no one connects because no one knows the poems exist. The first lack is unavoidable–there is no kind of artistic creation that works for everyone. The second lack I cannot do much about, but I can do a little. Hence, this post.

Some months ago, a current student at one of the colleges I attended called to ask a few questions about my new collection. I did not expect it to be more than one of those “here’s-a-thing-an-alumna-did” paragraphs, and no one got back to me to make sure the piece is accurate (and, yes, a fact or two are incorrect and no, I didn’t say I believe “anyone can write poetry because anything can be poetry; people just have to look for it,”); but it’s a nice little promo bit all the same. Link here.

Then, Michael Escoubas of Quill & Parchment reviewed The Red Queen Hypothesis. Somewhat to my surprise (I don’t think of myself as very “edgy”), he writes, “Michael’s latest collection is edgy; chock full of poems that challenge everyday assumptions about life.” He does recognize that often what I try to do in poetry is exactly that: confront assumptions, observe from different angles. Less surprisingly, he adds that my poems are “sensitive to analogies between the natural world and human experience.” Um, that would be me. That review can be found here.

I know that in a previous post I mentioned Lesley Wheeler’s generous mini-review of the book, which can be found here; she’s an especially insightful reader. I’m thrilled that she writes: “Michael’s second full-length collection is meditative, witty, and smart, with a scientific and sometimes philosophical bent. Also like her blog, it’s closely observant of the more-than-human world in flux…The Red Queen Hypothesis suggests the advantage of sexual reproduction, and there are plenty of seductively “soft persuasions” in this collection. Like the “Stew Cook” speaking to her beloved, this is a book to “fill nooks with aromatic hours.” Shout-out to all the tasty slant-rhymes amid a profusion of traditional forms.” Thank you again, Lesley!

Another little thing to celebrate is Highland Park Poetry’s nominating my poem “Game” for a Pushcart Prize. By the way, that poem appears in The Red Queen Hypothesis!

Finally–or maybe, down the road, there’ll be more to add to promotional posts–I have been getting out and around to readings a bit, in person and virtually. The latter is easier, since many readings are in the evening; these days, I am not too terrific most evenings thanks (ha! as if!) to fibromyalgia fatigue and symptoms. But I do enjoy in-person events and have been glad to read at the Easton Book Festival, at Nowhere Coffee in Allentown PA, and at Bethlehem’s Sun Inn, to mention a few. I was featured in a Mad Poets “OK Zoomers” online reading (love the pun) virtually and will be participating in a group launch of Inlandia‘s most recent issue online on November 19th (info below).

That’s about all the energy I can spare right now for self-promotion. And no, I don’t use Instagram or Tik Tok or Substack or YouTube, at least not yet, so this is all I got, folks. Thank you for bearing with me. Less promotion and more poetry and philosophizing and nature/gardening next time.

If you join the Inlandia event–make sure you account for the time zone! That’s 1-3 pm PACIFIC time.

Untethering

I’ve read many memoirs and non-fiction books about cognitive decline and living with a beloved person who has a neurodegenerative condition; from Oliver Sacks to the recent biography of Terry Pratchett and many of the books we’ve read in my “morbid book group,” information in these texts connects with the personal emotions involved in deeply complicated human ways. There are also quite a few poetry collections themed around this type of loss, and I ought to compile a list one of these days, because poetry has been helpful to me as my family and I contend with elders dealing with forms of dementia (and there are many forms). That fact has led me to wonder whether readers even need another poetry collection centered around cognitive loss. Since so many of my poems during the past four or five years intersect with or explore that topic, I have considered making a manuscript of them. I hesitate. Too much sadness?

Yet while the circumstances that evoke such poems are usually sad, the disease progression differs, as do the personalities of the persons with cognition loss and the personalities of their loved ones. Perspectives on the persons and the diseases also vary a great deal. Similarities exist–enough to make a reader feel recognized–but situations and value systems mean there are as many ways to write about dementia as there are to write about anything else. My mother-in-law and my mother both were diagnosed with the same thing, vascular dementia, but their living situations, support, and the ways they responded to the aphasia and the cognitive effects create two different stories about the disease.

These days, my mother sometimes seems unmoored from the present moment, but not absorbed in memory either–just kind of lost in the ozone. Self, language, memory…sometimes they slip away from her physical body. In this process, though, she has things to teach me. Just as my hospice patients do, and as their families do, by helping me to widen my understanding of human beings and how we get by in the world. Or how we flounder differently from one another. Or how we rescue one another.

Adiamo unmoored photo: Thane Grauel, 2023

I take this gradual loss into myself–that’s what most of us do–and it’s hard, it’s painful to keep myself open to learning and love when what I first notice is untethering and loss. But yesterday when visiting my mother I noticed she has a cobbled-together notebook in which she sometimes writes (in tiny, indecipherable script). Some pages she had divided into three columns, some have scraps of letters or newspaper clippings stapled to them. Are her pages a record, or a practice? She cannot tell me. Yet it was kind of amazing to realize she does this with apparent intent. She has her reasons, if not her reason in the classic sense.

For all that visiting with her generally means a slow amble down the hall or sitting beside her while she sighs, eyes closed, drifting–despite the emptying hours–she is a Self, and she interests me. So I grieve the loss of who-she-has-been and anticipate the sorrow I’ll feel when she dies, but not everything either of us experiences is sadness. Of the poems I have read about losing a beloved person to neurodegenerative conditions, the range in scope covers a vast continuum of human existence, from misery and resentment and sorrow to revelation and even joy. Why would I avoid the full experience life offers?

Some awe

In 2015 (I think), I posted about the University of Berkeley’s professor Dacher Keltner‘s studies examining the experience and emotion of awe. Now he has a book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The subtitle’s unwieldy and promises a little much–I’m sensing a publisher’s or publicist’s input there. Keltner’s a psychologist, not a popular self-help author, but whatever…

The ways scientists attempt to study human emotions amaze me with their inventiveness. How does one conduct empirical experiments on anything so wildly subjective? (And honestly, I question whether empiricism is always as objective and reliable as scientists believe it is–though we haven’t developed a better method yet.) This book answers some of my questions about the “how” of studying emotion, which includes a good deal of physiology; after all, human emotions are based in human bodies. Qing Li’s book on forest bathing touches on some of these methods of study as well. Blood pressure, heart rate, breath rate: those can be measured, and there’s exhaustive research that shows how such aspects of our physiology connect with feelings of well-being, even before looking at the roles hormones and neurotransmitters play.

But what about awe? Isn’t that usually a feeling that takes your breath away? That might raise the pulse, that might be fear as easily as joy? Keltner writes about the line between fearful shivers of the Halloween-night kind and goosebumps that appear when humans feel awed. Also our tears–of joy, grief, physical pain, and those tears that we feel when we are “moved” by an act, a place, a work of art. He cites Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photos of tears, which I was happy to see mentioned because I love her work (a poem about those photos appears in my book The Red Queen Hypothesis). He cites Ross Gay’s poems and prose poems/essays of joy and gratitude, in books I happen to love. And Keltner offers an anecdote about poet laureate Robert Hass and the “whoa moment” that arises in “myriad cultural forms.”

Among those forms is poetry, and here’s where this text got me considering what I love in reading poetry and what I may be aiming for when writing it: the term he uses is everyday awe.

Deep awe–I’m not enough of a genius with words to create a sense of deep awe with a poem, though I admire the geniuses who have been capable of such art. But everyday awe? That’s a feeling with which I’ve been familiar since my childhood and which I have never lost sight of. For me, it arises from my favorite pastime: observation. The fog-mantled tent-spider web in tall grass, the sparrows sipping from city-street potholes, the toddler showering his baby sister with dandelion flowers, the smell of honeysuckle early in June, or campfires or cinnamon. Sea spray in my face. Sand in my shoes. The way my mother’s 90-year-old skin stretches and smooths when I stroke her arm. Skunk cabbage unfurling with the morning sun behind it. These things I can write about; the words are everyday words, and this is my everyday world. That, for me, is where the art of poetry and the experience of living intersect.

Alien

Last week I attended a local book festival that offered a day of independent and small press books (Easton Book Festival) and came away with Lanternfly August by Robin Gow. The poems fascinate me on a number of levels, especially as I love poetry that interconnects with science–biology in particular–and with the diverse experiences that make up a human life.

But first, some context or references. Gow hails from eastern PA, from a rural area north of me, and now lives in Allentown. This region of Pennsylvania was port-of-entry for the spotted lanternfly, a recent scourge for gardeners and landscapers, that made its way from Asia–where it feeds on Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven). Well, in fact, it did not “make its way” here; it was brought here, inadvertently I assume, through global trade and human intervention. It isn’t the lanternfly’s fault that it is an invasive species. It is human beings’ fault. What if we were to view the lanternfly from other perspectives? What metaphors might it offer us, particularly about being alien, the Other? This is one way to read Gow’s collection.

Gow, who is not yet 30, identifies as an “autistic bisexual genderqueer person” but says they didn’t come out until college. Life in rural Pennsylvania as a person with autism and a sense of being different in terms of mind and gender? There have to be feelings of alienation, or of feeling like an alien. Gow also writes for YA readers, where compassionate understanding of how it feels to be part of, or left out of, peer groups matters; in the lanternfly poems, readers get a sense of empathy even for this damaging leafhopper. That amazes me, and I appreciate it deeply.

When the bugs first appeared, I read as much as I could about how to discourage them from our trees, how to trap them and what their various stages (egg masses, instars) looked like. Mostly I was bent on eradication, with a bit of resignation in the mix–see this post from 2018. After we got them reasonably under control here, they began to move north and west, just as the brown marmorated stinkbugs did shortly after their arrival in 1998. Both insects feed on sap or fruit. They are foreign to our shores but find much to suck upon here and have damaged fruit crops and trees. Although some people find them beautiful–they are much prettier in flight than at rest, brightly translucent red with the sun behind their wings, and their second instar stage resembles ladybugs–they have gained the reputation of being a Bad Bug. Gow writes:

When I called you “host” I meant,
“I love you in a ruinous way.”

That’s from the poem “Third Instar.” In the poem “First Instar,” the speaker wonders how long before “this becomes wreckage? I don’t even know yet what I am.” The creature could be some type of cryptid, developing into something no one can explain or understand. Society offers solutions that don’t necessarily work–ways to eradicate the insect demonstrated on TikTok, laid out on government websites, posted on Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s pages. Also the inquiry, in “Home Remedies,” of totally re-imagining one’s body: “Have you tried becoming a different species? Have you really given mammals a try yet?” Wry humor, of a bleak but wildly intelligent sort, pervades many of these pieces. In “Stop the Spread” (pandemic/plague allusion definitely intended):

...I cannot stop myself
from lanterflying: verb meaning to exist ardently
despite not belonging. How did I become so contagious?
Spores, like fireworks, floated from my gills.

I’m not really writing a review here, just sharing my enthusiasm; otherwise I’d have written about the varieties of form/text/layout Gow employs and the structure of the collection, and much more. Anyway, this is the reason I love going to conferences, seminars, readings, small press, and literary events–always something new to me to explore and learn from. Gow’s poems have helped me to develop a kind of compassion for “alien invasives.” The parallels to how society treats its Others–those aliens and distraught foreigners (not colonizers) arrive almost inescapably from the collection. That those who do not fit in nonetheless have value and need appreciation and respect comes through as given. There’s deep heart in these poems.

A bit of awe from me to this poet. (I happen to be reading about awe right now, which may figure in my next post). To find out more about Robin Gow: They have a website with a daily poetry blog at https://robingow.com/dailypoetry/, definitely worth checking out, and their books are listed there.

Once again, ambition

Dave Bonta, he of the Poetry Blog Digest, Moving Poems, via negativa, Dave Bonta blog, and more, recently posted a thoughtful essay about personal poetic ambitions vs. careers in the poetry field (see https://davebonta.com/2023/10/ambition-without-careerism/). The link’s here because I encourage you to read it! It is a topic many of us poets return to occasionally, especially when we find ourselves wondering things like why bother and who cares whether we write or not or whether we ever get any good at writing poetry…and whether poets should be paid better, or at all…and whether or not poets benefit by being attached to universities.

In fact, when I read Dave’s post I immediately recalled having written similar ideas, though from a different perspective, on this very blog some years back–and probably more than once. The concept of ambition in poetry, and how one defines that word in relation to poetry, is something I first encountered in Donald Hall’s 1988 book Poetry and Ambition–still in print from University of Michigan. I read this book of essays in 1991, in between changing diapers and coordinating naptimes for two children under the age of four. It was difficult to feel ambition about career at that time, and a career in poetry was ever a pipe dream; but the notion that a writer could feel ambitious about the work she might be doing in learning about and endeavoring to craft really good poems, even should she fail most of the time, felt encouraging to me. I recommend this book, as there’s also a good deal one can find to disagree with in it, and debate is useful for thinking.

Fast-forward to today (time does seem to move in fast-forward), and I find myself retired from a career on the fringes of academia, where I taught composition to students less-prepared for college and ran the writing center at a university. But I did not teach poetry or creative writing and was staff, not professorial/tenured; so the need to be career-ambitious through poetry was null. That suited my personality well. Maybe too well. Yet somehow I managed to get a reasonable amount of my work published (see the sidebar of this page) and to get several chapbooks and books into print (see the My Books tab here). I had my own form of ambition.

What now, I wonder? I have so much work to revise! Recently, I submitted an experimental, historically-based chapbook to a publisher, and I’m working on getting a new book of older work, though not as old as The Red Queen Hypothesis‘ poems, into print. Will I spend the next few years just catching up? Possibly. Is that “ambitious”? Nah, just means I wasn’t ambitious enough to get to it earlier!

Poets, horses

My local public library’s poetry section is on the sparse side. However, after renewing my card today, I felt determined to borrow a poetry book. I considered taking out one of Louise Glück’s collections, but I already own copies of the two on the library’s shelves (Wild Iris and Meadowlands). I chose Maxine Kumin’s 1992 book Looking for Luck instead. When I returned home, I learned that Glück has died (age 80). There will be time to return to her books and to seek out her most recent collection, which I have not read; but hers is a voice readers of poetry will miss.

One thing that her poems do is to face, without shying away from, sorrow or grief. They seldom offer sociably-conventional consolations. The consolation is in the spare beauty of her observation, her control of language. That is difficult to do. When I write from despair or deep grief, I find I want to bring some kind of–call it hope?–into the last few lines. I wonder whether I’ve a tendency to want to comfort; maybe my readers, maybe myself.

I haven’t gotten very far into the Kumin book yet, but it’s clear that this collection includes numerous poems featuring horses, one of Kumin’s lifelong joys (she and her husband raised quarterhorses in New Hampshire). Her poems have taken me back in time, so to speak, to when my daughter was learning to ride. I have had a sensible regard for horses’ size, prey instincts, teeth, and hooves from early childhood–not quite a fear of horses, but pretty close–so when my then-tiny nine-year-old expressed an unwavering and stubborn interest in riding lessons, I held off until persuaded to let her “just try it.” Of course she knew what she was interested in, and of course she loved riding, despite frustrations and beasts who didn’t want to cooperate and being pitched off and stepped on while I watched and encouraged and soothed, swallowing my fears for her safety.

Equine grace, strength, personality did not quite win me over; I’ll never be much of a rider myself. But contending with horses and learning to love and commune with them was good for my child, and reading Kumin’s poems brings back how human animals can have relationships with other animals. I never quite got over horses being an “Other” for me, but observing how my daughter loved being with them inspired me to write quite a few poems of my own [see my chapbook The Capable Heart]. Reading Kumin’s work takes me to a familiar and important place in my own life.

There & back again, with weeding

I have traveled to the American Southwest and back again, over a fortnight away from the humid valley where my gardens languished toward autumn, pounded by rain, while we were gone. For two weeks, we lived among the terpene-scented (pinene, not cannabis…though we did notice cannabis when in downtown Albuquerque…) environment of the Sandia Mountains, where humidity is “not a thing.” I embraced my beloved family members, not quite often enough to make up for the distance between us, but enough to feel contented for awhile. And we explored some of the northwestern/north-central parts of the state that we haven’t seen before and were awed. I have not yet tired of the geology there. It’s easy to imagine New Mexico as the benthic floor of an ancient sea!

En route home, we encountered flight cancellations and re-routing, which is practically to be expected (our checked bag arrived 20 hours after our arrival in Albuquerque, also not an unsurprising development). I hear many complaints about air travel these days. I may even have added to said complaints. While it may feel almost as inconvenient, unreliable, and uncomfortable as traveling by Conestoga wagon, you must admit it’s much faster–even if it doesn’t seem that way while you’re waiting for the bus to the economy long-term parking lot at 11 pm. If my beloveds had taken Horace Greeley’s advice in the 1850s, I might never have seen them again. So, I am grateful. Even to American Airlines.

~

Upon a (slightly delayed) return, I found that the valley in which we live had experienced considerable rain but mild temperatures; as I expected, the garden weeds were thriving. Some of that is fine with me: annual weeds can go crazy in October and I don’t mind. But the perennial vines, little shrubs, and weedy biennials and perennials? I dig those out in fall, along with the tomato vines, sunflower and corn stalks, and amaranth plants. That has been my job upon my return; and the cooler weather, with soil moist from all the rain, has been a boon. I have to admit that adjusting to the lower elevation and the higher humidity has put some strain on my ol’ body. But we did a good bit of hiking and walking in the Sandias and Bandolier and Jemez, so I was somewhat prepared for the workout.

My beloved doesn’t understand my enthusiasm for “putting the gardens to bed for winter.” It seems like boring, hard work. Yet I don’t clean everything up–I always leave cover for bees and other creatures that need leaf litter and old stems in order to winter over. However, taking down the stalks and cutting back the peonies (etc) feels satisfying to me. I work in the cooler weather and sense the difference in the air. I recognize the annuals are dying and the perennials are going dormant, the trees let go of their coloring leaves; walnuts, oaks, and hickories seem to fling their mast upon the earth with every gust of wind. There’s nothing sad or somber about the changing of seasons. Winter must arrive in order for spring to do its thing. I like to think of daffodils, muscari, and irises huddled quietly in soil and taking much-required rest before the warmth unthaws the earth. I feel the same.