The Rain in Spain - or Arizona

The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree.
It falls on the umbrellas here
And on the ships at sea.

Some of my favorite nursery rhymes are those I learned as an adult, when I became a mother and allowed myself to indulge once again in childish pursuits. And a lovely wet day like today certainly tempts me to out and stomp in puddles!  The  weather prediction for today was strangely specific: rain by noon and clearing by 5:00.  The rain arrived precisely on time but hung around a couple of hours longer than expected.  We'd driven down to Tubac, about 50 miles south of Tucson, and when we started home at about 5;45, a dark curtain of rain completely obscured the hills to the north. By the time we got to Tucson (after a shopping stop halfway), the rain appeared to have just stopped; the gutters were still running.  This picture wasn't taken today, but the snow on the mountains earlier today looked just as it does here.

 

When the desert smells like rain, there's nothing that can compare.  Metaphors and similes are inadequate, flabby and weak. Still, some of us can't help trying.  This is something I wrote a couple of years ago, when a hard summer monsoon left the normally dry Santa Cruz River running  hard and muddy.  I'd forgotten about it until the recent rains and a morning spent perusing old files brought it to the surface, rather like some of the things I saw floating down the river that day.  Today's rains, and those in recent weeks, have been gentler female rains, and the gardens are appreciating them.

 AFTER THE STORM

An inch of rain has fallen since last night,
and still it falls
like silver from a jackpot. 
If I close my eyes
I smell forest
and the sea by my old home,
resin, salt, cattle in long wet grass,
and just outside the door,
buttercups up to my knees. 

Today the desert feels like that,
as if its starved soil could be rich and black,
its splintered fences  overgrown with berries.

Today the river’s bleached baked channel
runs full, as once it did,
when women did their washing there,
when children tumbled on its banks
and startled silver minnows in the rushes,
before clumsy upstart cities
sucked up the water,
before freeways,
when there was no sound
save for the sighing river,
women’s voices,
children’s laughter,
warm soft winds in trees and rushes,
the short sudden flutter of wings
and the burbling call of quail.

 

This is what I saw from my backyard about a week ago, a pale rainbow in a still-gray sky, fences dark, soaked with rain, desert trees with just a few leaves from last fall and new leaf bumps ready to pop out in spring green.  And then I looked down and saw the pot of gold not quite at the end of the rainbow.

 

These cheddar cauliflower heads are twice as big now; I plan to harvest the biggest one sometime this week. I've never grown cauliflower before, but its cousins--kale, bok choy, broccoli rabe--have all done well so this year I got brave, and it seems to have paid off.  We'll get about 6 heads from the 25 seeds in the packet, enough to claim success, I think. Certainly enough to try again next year.

the loveliest time of the year

This is my favorite time of year, because of the weather here in southern Arizona and because, for another four days, I'm still on winter break. I love being at home, engaging in the gentle art of puttering.  We've had some rain and more is predicted (though today it's been sunny), and I can see the effects in my garden: nasturtiums that I feared might never germinate are up and looking healthy, the slow-growing fennel is finally showing its distinctive ferny leaves, the second row of mesclun is tall enough to begin cutting, and the roses I recently transplanted are budding.  Because we had so little rain earlier this winter I don't expect many wildflowers, though.  Our first winter here, 1992-1993, there were fierce rains in January that resulted in severe floods.  That seems like so long ago; our world and our climate have changed a great deal since then.

    Still, I am grateful for what we have, for example, the kale I picked this afternoon.  I love kale, both for its beauty and its vitamins; it's as decorative as it is healthful.  My favorite kale to plant is the "mixed wild garden kales" from Nichols Garden Nursery (http://www.nicholsgardennursery.com/) - it's like a bouquet in the vegetable garden with the variety of colors - some all green, some silvery, some with purple veins and stems - and leaves - some deeply fringed like delicate lace, some sturdy and solid.  You can see a little of the variation in this photo, where the vase of kale leaves is flanked by a pair of ceramic geese my daughter bought for me when she was in seventh or eighth grade. Anyone who has raised a daughter will remember the difficulty of those years, and yet I also remember moments of delight and communion punctuating that early adolescent stress, and every day, when I look at these geese who still live on my kitchen windowsill, I remember the love and closeness we have always shared.

      Today I also baked corn muffins to go with tonight's soup, in a pan that was on sale for half price at Williams-Sonoma a couple of weeks ago.  The recipe that came with it was for a dessert-type cake, but I love the way my cornbread recipe (which can be found in the post from 10/21/09, "Soup of the Evening") turned out in it,  especially the honeybees - after all, they are the right color.  I baked them at 375 degrees (25 degrees lower than usual) for 20 minutes.
      Such simple pleasures really are, as it said on a dishtowel I saw many years ago, "life's treasures."  Although I now live in the sunny southwest, at this time of year I remember snowy Idaho winter days when we wondered how long it would take the snowplow to get to us in our house near the end of a dead-end street. I remember the smell of soup simmering on the stove and of bread baking, and games of gin rummy at the dining room table (at the tender age of five, my daughter was already a natural card-shark) along with bedtime stories and the rest and relaxation that winter offers us, along with the anticipation of spring.  Sooner than we may imagine, new life will burst from the ground.  Let us rest, though, while we can, so that we can greet spring's green awakening with enthusiasm and joy.

The Silent Woman

Being "a little under the weather" on New Year's Day has now stretched out to a week.  Sore throat and no voice, but aside from some tiredness, I feel okay.  No fever or flu symptoms or anything like that.  I did make a big mistake by continuing to talk, but I had a good reason--a friend out from New England. We're only able to get together once a year or so, and since I wasn't contagious I couldn't pass up the opportunity.  And what do friends do?  They talk - and talk - and talk.  By the time she left I'd really done a number on my vocal cords so now I'm following the orders a laryngologist gave another friend and not talking or even whispering at all.  I write notes if I can't make myself understood with sign language and Joe gave me a whistle for when I need him and he's in another room.
       The quiet is really rather nice.  Restful, conducive to meditation.  It's just the two of us here, now that all the holiday visitors are gone, and my silence  has led Joe to whisper when he speaks to me. It reminds me of when my daughter was in kindergarten.  She had a lovely young teacher, Miss Booth, who spoke very softly, so all the children tended to speak softly too, and her classroom was a peaceful, happy place.
      My temporary silence feels rather liberating, perhaps because I know it's temporary, and so I am savoring it, but silence, both literal and figurative, is not a respite for many others who suffer an enforced silence to which they can see no end.  A few days before Christmas we were at the market and on the way out a young man stopped me and handed me a sheet of note paper laminated in plastic.  On it he had written his story, which began with these words: "Please read this.  I cannot speak."  He had printed it out, laboriously, to make sure it was legible, and what he wrote seemed factual, not filled with overly emotional language, and all the more powerful for the writer's restraint.  His muteness (he was not deaf) is due to a physical condition; his landlord sold the building and the tenants were forced to move; and like another 85,000 people in this country last month, he'd lost his job.  It sounds melodramatic and made up, perhaps, but somehow I believed him.  I read it all the way through--he'd written on both sides of the paper--and looked up to see tears running down his cheeks.  He seemed ashamed.  I gave him some money--I wished I could have given more.  When I got to my car I looked back.  He was trying to show his paper to another shopper who shook his head and walked away, just as I have said "I'm sorry," and walked away from panhandlers.  But those other panhandlers, beggars, people in need--whether they needed food or shelter or booze or drugs or whatever they wanted the money for--had voices.  They could get another person's attention, even if only for the seconds it took that person to process the situation and reject them.  To be voiceless is, for the most part, to be invisible.

       Women, of course, have been effectively silenced by various societies for centuries, and still are in many places.  The famous tavern sign may be a source of amusement today, but a few decades ago the women's movement pointed it out as symbolic of an attitude that supported repression. Whole populations, no matter how loudly they weep and wail at home, go unheard by most of the world today.  During the years of genocide in Rwanda, for example, almost none of my students at the university even knew that nation existed, much less what was going on there.  More recently, in the context of teaching how to construct an argument, one of my classes was discussing the local issue of whether water tanks should be left in the desert to try to prevent the deaths of illegal border crossers, another group of people who seem to have no voice, at least no voice that anyone listens to, either in their own country or in ours. A young woman sitting right in front of where I was standing started to pass a note to her neighbor but I intercepted it.  It read simply "Let them die."  I kept silent then because I didn't trust myself to control my reaction.
        Silence can give one time to think.  A character in a film I saw recently said that things become clear in the quiet. If my silence was permanent, I know it would become a burden, but right now I treasure it.  I don't want to turn on the TV or radio.  I even appreciate this brief vacation from conversation, or perhaps from having to contribute to conversation.  I can listen more carefully because I am relieved of the responsibility to reply.  And yet I know that people have the responsibility to reply to others, and that to reply responsibly, first we have to listen, even to those who seem to be silent.

Happy New Year!

The first day of 2010 has been a good one.  I'd been feeling a little under the weather until I figured out it was due to allergies, and so I took the proper medicine last night and woke up feeling much better, well enough to resuscitate my inner Martha Stewart (just a little) and make the traditional New Year's Day lentils with Italian sausage.  I used to make Hoppin' John, partly for the good luck and prosperity it promises and partly to honor my Southern heritage (of my four grandparents, three had roots in the South, in North Carolina, Alabama, and Missouri).  But although I think I make really, really good Hoppin' John, and Joe likes it, he's not all that big a fan of blackeyed peas.  So some years we honor his heritage, since in Italy people eat lentils on New Year's Day for prosperity in the coming year (lentils look like coins, after all). I found a simple recipe in The Romagnolis' Table, a wonderful cookbook from the 1970s which I'm sure is out of print now. Here's my adaptation of the Romagnolis' lenticchie:

Pick over and wash 1# brown lentils and put them in a biggish pot with:
1 chopped onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 large carrot, chopped
1 large stalk celery, chopped
4 plum tomatoes, peeled and chopped
several good grindings of pepper
8 cups water or stock

Bring it all to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook 45 minutes to 1 hour, till lentils are tender.  If needed, add more stock or water. When done, season with salt (start with 1 teaspoon and add more to taste).
A sausage, some cooked greens dressed with garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, some good bread and a nice glass of wine - it's a good way to begin the new year!

I wish you all, most sincerely, a year filled with joy, love, peace, justice, and prosperity.

But my new year really began yesterday, with a phone call from a dear friend I hadn't communicated with in months.  She moved away suddenly, I didn't know exactly where, but I knew life wasn't treating her well, and so I worried, tried unsuccessfully to reach her, and worried some more.  Before she left she gave me some of her plants, three roses and several pots of coleus.  When the cold weather threatened I took cuttings of the coleus and potted them up as a mixed "bouquet."  The roses have done well, too, though I left them in their pots for a few months, trying them in a few locations before putting them in the ground.  Now they're beginning to bloom again.  This is the first blossom.

In this picture there is also a statue of Kuan Yin, the boddhisatva of mercy and compassion, "she who hears the cries of the world." She must have heard my friend's cries. It was such a joy to me to hear her voice again and to learn that, yes, things have been terribly hard, but they're getting better.  Winston Churchill said, "When you're going through hell, keep going," and that's where she's been and what she's done, and in the process she has learned to find some peace within herself when it seems there is none to be found anywhere else.  But it has not been and is not easy. 

I love this rose, not only for its radiant colors, but because every time I look at it, I see my friend.  Plants are a special kind of gift because they are alive and because they keep growing, unfolding their individual, special beauty, and enriching our lives, as friendship does. But life can be so hard. Often we don't get the nurturing and nourishment we need.  Sometimes life rips us up by the roots and we have to struggle to replant ourselves in inhospitable soil, and the pain and effort may seem to require more of us than we can give.  I admire my friend so much for keeping on, for following Eleanor Roosevelt's advice: "You must do the thing you think you cannot do."  Because we can do those hard things.  In spite of drought and poor soil and lack of nourishment, we can bloom again, and again, and again.  And every day can be the beginning of a new year.

Hawk, fallen

A few days ago, Joe and I were walking and on our way home, just around the corner from our house, we found a dead zone-tailed hawk lying at the edge of the sidewalk. It hadn't fallen there; someone, I think, had picked it up out of the street and laid it there gently, respectfully.  Its wings were folded and it looked peaceful, almost alive, except that its crimson eye was beginning to cloud over.  It was so beautiful, even in death. We stood and looked at it for a long time, wondering if we should do something. It seemed wrong to think of taking it into our yard to bury it, though we probably would have buried it in the yard if we had found it there.  Finally it seemed right to leave it where it was, for others of nature's creatures to do what was natural.  I have a friend, a poet, who heard something hit her window one night and went out the next morning to find a dead hawk.  She cut off the feet and hung them up as a talisman. I thought about that, or about pulling out one of this hawk's gorgeous tail feathers, but I couldn't.

A couple of days went by. I was busy with other projects and didn't go walking.  Joe reported it was still there, undisturbed (the eyes were gone, but that always happens quickly).  We decided to take it down into the wash, not to bury it but to place it in some more sheltered spot among the brush and trees there.  We would have done that yesterday, but when we went out it was gone, with no sign it had ever been there except in our memories, and in the memory of that good person who first laid it where we found it.

I wonder how it died, how it fell from heaven to our suburban street. That species is uncommon here at the best of times, and this time of year it shouldn't be here at all. We are fortunate to have as many raptors in our area as we do.  I've written of some of them before--the red-tailed hawks that we see often, the family of Harris hawks that used to live in a neighbor's huge, diseased pine tree until the people cut it down, the lovely little kestrel that sometimes appears on the power line at the corner of our street. I'm sure this magnificent bird wasn't hit by a car, like the doves we see so often.  Did someone shoot it?  We didn't hear anything.  Was it a sudden spasm of the heart?  Or did it, like Icarus, fly too close to the sun?

Baby birds fall from their nests and we try to put them back, to save them.  It never seems to work. Sometimes we see smaller birds lying dead, and I always wonder why.  Predators take away their prey and consume it; they don't leave it lying whole and perfect like the house finch I found in the garden once.    Maybe we're not supposed to know how or why they die.  I'm okay with that.  I don't need to know everything.  Knowing wouldn't make the sadness any less, nor does my ignorance diminish their beauty or the sense that we are blessed to be witnesses to nature at any stage of life, even the end.  Living or dead, they touch us.  They are part of us.  When we see them soar, our spirits soar with them, and even though I never saw this particular bird in flight, in my heart, our spirits soar together.

Invictus

We're going to the movies later today, to see Clint Eastwood's latest project, Invictus, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as the captain of the South African rugby team.  I fully expect to be moved and inspired; the trailers alone have almost brought me to tears.  But I don't want to write about the film, but rather the poem that serves as its title.

     I think I must have been about twelve when I first read "Invictus," and its power was immediately evident to me, even then.  Children so often feel powerless, and the junior high school years can be so painful. I don't even remember much about mine except small, disconnected bits and pieces. I certainly didn't enjoy them, though I don't think I was any more miserable than many, perhaps most of my peers--but I was miserable enough.  And so I often retreated into books for escape, solace, and inspiration.  I found all three in Louis Untermeyer's A Treasury of Great Poems English and American, the massive (nearly 1300 pages) poetry anthology that had been the text for one of my mother's college courses.  I still have it, with its yellowed pages, its spine reinforced with duct tape, clad in a ridiculously bright spandex cover that makes it stand out from the more sober shades on the covers of the other volumes of poetry on the shelf.  Through this wonderful collection (and Untermeyer's always fascinating commentary on each poet and his or her work) I met many friends, among them William Ernest Henley, who wrote "Invictus."

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods there be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishment the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Brave words, strong words--I memorized them right away and they have come back to give me strength and courage during dark times.  At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I'd say they have shaped much of my response to life.

     But my hardships could not begin to compare with Henley's.  He was, to use a politically incorrect word but probably the one Henley himself would have used, a cripple.  Due to a tubercular disease of the bone, one leg was amputated when he was twelve or thirteen and doctors later recommended amputation of the other, but after long treatment by Lister (the father of antiseptic surgery) that leg was saved.  A man of generous spirit, he became a magazine editor and discovered and nurtured many younger writers, though he drove himself so hard that at one point he thought he had extinguished his own poetic abilities.  He was mistaken, and some of his later poems are among his most beautiful.  Tragedy returned, however, when the death of his five-year-old daughter finally broke his spirit.  He died nine years later at the age of fifty-four, leaving behind many poems, but especially this one that has inspired so many readers.

     Henley was imprisoned by his physical disabilities, but for the most part he overcame "the bludgeonings of chance" to live a productive, if too-short, life characterized by talent, hard work, kindness, and generosity.  Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robbin Island for twenty-seven years and managed to remain "bloodied but unbowed," inspired, in part, by Henley's poem. He emerged to lead a nation and to work for unity, when many others would have preferred to take revenge for all the years and cruelties of apartheid.  I imagine that thousands of others like me, unknown and unlikely to be remembered except by those who were close to us, have also called up Henley's words as we faced our own, individual dark nights of the soul.

     I wonder if "Invictus" could even find a publisher today.  It is, perhaps, too emotional, too florid to be considered "cool."  It is powered (and I use that verb deliberately) by obvious, muscular rhyme and meter; I feel my fists clench and my jaw tighten when I read or remember it, because these are the appropriate physical reactions to threat or pain or "the fell clutch of circumstance." We fight back or, like Mandela, we hold on to the values that sustain us.

    Students today don't seem to pay much attention to poetry.  I've had students tell me they never read any poetry in high school, never wrote papers on literature, and certainly never memorized a poem.  My teachers made us do all those things and I think we were the better for it.  I remember having to memorize Bryant's "Thanatopsis"--I didn't much like it but it's there if I need an example of iambic pentameter.  My paper on Lord Byron turned into the soap opera chronicle of his love life, but Mrs. Whittemore recognized the work I'd put into my research and gave me an A anyway; probably she enjoyed the story too.  We read Macbeth aloud in her class; it was wonderful.  Mostly, however, I remember the discoveries I made on my own, when I escaped from "this place of wrath and tears" into the words of others who had faced the same trials and worse and who gave me, in their words, tools to help me face my own world and perhaps reshape it into a more friendly place.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I can smell bacon cooking, which means Joe's up to something in the kitchen, and that's generally a good thing, especially when I'm tired and don't really want to do anything except putter here on the computer or go back to bed with a good book.  Yesterday was the first day off after the end of the semester, and I am looking forward to rest, relaxation, gardening, painting, reading, watching movies, cleaning up my sewing room, various crafty or needlework projects - not in any particular order. Yesterday we went to the Fourth Avenue Street Fair, an early dinner with friends at a new Korean restaurant we'd all been wanting to try, and then to the Reid Park Zoo for ZooLights, the annual Christmas festival.

It was lovely, just cold enough to justify bundling up a bit but not cold enough to make anyone uncomfortable.  There seemed to be more lights than in past years, and it was truly beautiful.  The animals weren't out; they were tucked away in their "night houses" (I learned about that when our oldest grandson attended a special "junior zookeeper" program), but there was plenty of entertainment, free hot chocolate, and Christmas cheer to keep everyone happy.

But back to the bacon. A few postings ago I mentioned a wonderful salad I make several times when I have frisée in the garden.  This is what it looks like:

The frisée has enough body to stand up to the hot bacon dressing, while the sautéed apple slices and red onion add sweet and rich layers of flavor, and the poached egg finishes it off perfectly.  I don't think that's what Joe's making now, but whatever it is, it smells good!