We Moved Christmas, and the Weather Obliged

As we're travelling to be with family far away for Christmas Day, we opted to have our own Christmas here at home this morning, December 17th. It's been lovely. We're even enjoying our first real snow of the year. Mary Oliver's poem is apropos. Here you go:

First Snow

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles, nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain — not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

~Mary Oliver~

Merry Christmas.

Over lunch

Mom: "So Mae, what would you like for Christmas?"

Mae: "A present."

Mom: "What kind of present?"

Mae: "A present I can give to Olivia."

Mom: "And what kind of present would you like to receive?"

Mae: "Maybe a cheeto to eat. And a pirate toy."

Mom: "Why do you want a pirate toy?"

Mae: "So I can be a pirate."

When All You Have Left Is the Dark Night Sky...

A wise young woman once said,

"When all you have left is the dark night sky...

...you begin separating the men from the monsters...

...and the pogo sticks from the puppy dogs."

Quiet Giants

I was just thinking of Alan Jacobs yesterday. Today, Image Journal brought this to my facebook feed. Allow me to suggest finding a quiet half hour, preparing your beverage of choice, and slowly flipping through the Gospel of the Trees. I think you'll come away refreshed.

Here's a peak at what you'll find:

Photo (yes, photo) by Franz Lanting

Trees

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,

To stay in one’s own place;

To stand for the constant presence of process

And always to seem the same;

To be steady as a rock and always trembling,

Having the hard appearance of death

With the soft, fluent nature of growth,

One’s Being deceptively armored,

One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable,

To be so tough, and take the light so well,

Freely providing forbidden knowledge

Of so many things about heaven and earth

For which we should otherwise have no word—

Poems or people are rarely so lovely,

And even when they have great qualities

They tend to tell you rather then exemplify

What they believe themselves to be about,

While from the moving silence of trees,

Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,

Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,

Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,

And perilous also—though there has never been

A critical tree—about the nature of things.

— Howard Nemerov

There's A Place

I've been drawn to this song these past few days as I consider the tremendous energy my daughter Olivia musters to work through all that is encompassed in what we call "1st grade." But beyond that, it seems it might offer a timely word for so many-- right now. Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Gabriel.

(I debated whether to post this live version with Paula Cole or the video with Kate Bush. As you see, the live version won, as I just can't seem to receive the message while watching an awkward 6 minute hug).

Do NOT eat at the Upstairs Cafe

Brett was already seated when I came in, but even as I approached our table, I read his nonverbal cues that I should run out while I still could. Unfortunately, my curiosity made me sit down. Where to begin...
-- the music was way too loud
-- all the food was hard, like plastic, even Brett's spaghetti-- how do you mess up spaghetti?
-- when Brett asked for a fresher order, they brought him sliced pickles covered in cheese-- without a plate
-- I did receive the corn I ordered, but it was in an unopened can, plopped down in front of me
-- when I ordered a doughnut, the chef told me to get my own doughnut
-- the waitress took our order sitting on our table while the chef crawled under our table to retrieve some dropped food
-- the chef squirted mustard all over our utensils, and then when we asked for new ones, the chef and waitress proceeded to lick them clean and then give them back to us

BUT, they do offer free flu shots and storytime at the end of each meal, so I suppose that counts for something. Actually, we'll probably go back again, and again, and again.

Farm

I grew up in a beautiful, suburban neighborhood of ranch houses just south of downtown Nashville. Before it had been such a neighborhood, it had been rolling fields, pastures, and farmland. The area's past still tells its story through the tree lines that once served as property lines. I just missed this landscape by a few decades.

As a child I experienced echoes of the farm life when I'd go to my grandparents' house in west Tennessee. I played in barn lofts and gathered a few eggs, I named a farm cat or two, but I was too young to pick up on all the intricacies of the farming schedule, and most of my grandparents' farming days were in the past. My education to this "way" of life was done through the retelling of stories more than it was through actually witnessing the day to day routine of a farm.

Unknowingly, I grew up assuming working farms were pretty much a thing of the past and were only still happening in tiny pockets of our country. I wrongly assumed most of America was urban or suburban, even though I'm sure I correctly answered a question or two from a map on a standardized test telling me otherwise.

Now we live in a small Ohio town, and I'm never more than a mile or two from a contemporary, working farm. I can buy all our meat and chicken and dairy from any number of these farms (though, financially, I'm still trying to figure out how to swing this), and from May to October I'm less than a 5-block walk to a farmer's market any given Saturday morning. To get to the nearest urban center, I spend 30 minutes on highways surrounded by working farms. My education continues.

In our little backyard, I'm trying to reclaim some of the practices of my grandparents, and frequently, as I'm thinning out the vegetables or wondering what's wrong with my squash, I regret that this wasn't a regular part of my own upbringing, that so much skill and knowledge was lost in the span of just one generation. I hope my girls grow up with an internal awareness of the seasons in a way I didn't. I hope they recognize that their outdoor chores are determined by the patterns of nature, that the changing of seasons doesn't just affect their clothing options. I want them to recognize this cycle as valuable and worth their notice, not oppressive and backwards.

When I first saw the cover of Elisha Cooper's Farm, I was pretty sure this would be a good text to supplement our family's everyday experiences. I'm always happy to find books to enrich our family's story with the stories of others, and this one looked like it might give a bigger picture to the one we're trying to create in our home. Farm follows a year in the life of a family farm, from sowing to harvesting. It goes beyond naming the animals and their sounds to explaining the everyday workings of a farm in a very poetic and intriguing manner.

The tiller turns the soil, "and the fields change from the color of milk chocolate to the color of dark chocolate."

The combine harvester eats the corn: "It bites stalks, pulls them into its mouth, separates kernel from cob in the the thresher inside its belly, burps out husks."

The children return to school and a rooster goes missing: "Did a fox get it? September shows that some things are not forever."

And the pictures are spot on. I'm grateful that these scenes aren't as foreign to my girls as they would have been to me.


My grandparents' farm is still standing, but barely. The animals are long gone, as are most of the family members. There is very little about the farm that I would call "working," but when my 98 year old grandmother looks out the window of her house, the same house in which she was born, I imagine her mind sees moments like the ones Cooper captures in his book. Fortunately, these scenes and the realities they represent are more prevalent in America than my younger self had thought.