Longing and Belonging:
Memoir of an Artist’s Life, Volume 2
In this second volume of An Artist’s Life, once again, the sudden layoff of my partner is the story’s trigger as I’m forced to leave my home and garden of thirty years. I tell myself it’s change that brings evolution. A benefit that, at times, I am wary of claiming. What happens when you are forced to leave a place where your identity is so deeply entwined?
I search backward, looking for patterns and connections. The fingerprints of the past are both softened and intensified when viewed through the shifting lens of time. The emotional baggage of experiences, not just the facts, are the guideposts. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the illuminating through line, but it’s seldom linear. Poetry becomes the perfect vehicle to express the complex intermingling of grief, love, beauty, and belonging.
The Company You Keep
You ask me about my childhood?
Willows and river and swamp
Canoes and woods and wildflowers.
Memories you ask?
One day one month one season blur.
When winter breaks
I search sun-dappled spot on south facing wooded slope
for hepatica, wood trout, and spring beauty.
Dutchman’s breeches and squirrel corn
whose flowers can only be pollinated
by long tongues of bumblebees.
I crouch by vernal pond
as pairs of trilling toads lay long strings of eggs with black dots
and croaking frogs produce gelatinous globs
that go from round to oblong
sprout tiny arms and legs
lose their tails
hop away.
Oasis dries and disappears for another year.
Skunk cabbage is bright beacon in swampy patch.
Rotting flesh odor attracts early flies and beetles.
They gather on yellow spike tucked within the purple hood-like spathe.
First food of the season for emerging pollinators.
Which came first?
The scented-bloom or the hatch?
Synchronous dance dictated by evolution.
Dappled light lights forest floor,
ephemeral flowers burst into bloom.
A short window of reproductive urgency
before canopy fills with broad green leaves
and consumes the rays of sunlight.
Pale dogwood, witch-hazel, and hornbeam bloom at border.
Understory fills in the spaces.
No dolls for me,
or coloring books with dictated lines.
I build terrariums habitats
for silver-dollar sized turtles
purchased at the dime store
for fifty cents.
Turtles are eager for offerings I gather from fallen logs.
Bark falls off,
revealing colonies of centipedes and pill bugs.
Beetles carve elaborate hieroglyphics.
Carpenter ant workers race to relocate plump white eggs.
I replace wooden covering
roll log back into leaf litter depression.
Turtles will eat dried flakes after all.
Beech tree bounty of triangle-shaped nuts
are sought by squirrels
who race up and down thick trunks,
race in and out of the canopy,
chase competition from their territory.
Neighbor boys with BB guns hunt unlucky ones who wander off protected land.
No wonder our canopy is premium real estate.
I swing from wild grape vine as thick as my wrist.
Vine dangles from canopy top
In autumn
clusters of small seed-filled tart fruit appear.
Golden Field Guides used to travel in my pocket
But no longer necessary as I know their names.
I am tutored by nature twelve months of the year.
Two-room church school is miles away.
No worries.
My best friends are here.
Let’s talk
I’ll tell you about my day
while I observe yours.
Vernal pond and I have conversations
about living and change and difficult things.
It doesn’t have a mouth
and yet we commune.
Seasonal Prompt
Husband died at first of autumn
when the seedheads formed
and the leaves turned fiery red and orange.
His body,
like the flaxen wheat and ripening grapes,
fulfilled its mandate,
ready to be subsumed by life cycle’s next phase.
Perhaps he would have preferred going to sleep when winter came.
Hibernating like a fat bear in the woods and not waking up.
I think I would like that.
I could never leave in spring.
Promise of rebirth
counteracting whatever ailed.
Resist the call of the spring peepers and house wrens?
Return of the red-winged blackbirds?
Please let me rally.
And summer?
Fledglings flying
corn stalks growing
Monarch butterflies on the milkweed.
How could I miss that?
As if one could choose.
I think he stayed as long as he could.
Survivors
After summer thunderstorms pass
Earthworms surface
to migrate and mate.
Wet weather enables quick travel without drying out.
Flooded soil reduces oxygen.
Raindrop vibrations sound like predators on the hunt.
Whatever the reason, worms are stranded on sidewalks.
Enough reason to rally a search-and-rescue mission.
Let’s go, I say, as we are released from indoor confinement.
Armed with empty cottage cheese containers
girls zero in on struggling invertebrates.
Their intervention saves them,
a close escape from sun desiccation
or robin’s sharp beak.
Cries of ‘there’s one’ fill the air as we circle the cul-de-sac.
And so, the earthworms and I survive another day.
Perhaps after lunch, we will find an ant hill to observe.
Offer leftover crumbs from lunch,
And watch the ant highway form to swarm the prize.