Rain! Glorious Rain! I was beginning to think we'd never see it again. I can almost hear my lawn sighing with relief.
Utter downpour today, and so welcome. Whatever Christian or Pagan gods you worship, thank them for me. From the bottom of my dry little roots, I am grateful for the rain.
The downpour did make driving to and from my aunt's house something of an adventure, but it didn't matter... it was RAIN.
Easter. I'm not a big fan of easter. I'm sure I've mentioned that before. I love my family and enjoy other holidays when we all get together. I have no idea why I'm biased against Easter. But it's something of a chore. I have always considered opting out. But my mother would be quite put out with me, and really there's no good reason for it, so I go.
It's one of the few times during the year that I see my grandmothers. I hereby vow to make an effort to see them more. Each time I do see them, they hug me tight and tell me they think of me often, and I believe that they do. So I told them each that I will call them next week and set a date to have each of them over individually. I don't know why I haven't. Inertia, I suppose. Laziness? Maybe that's closer to the mark.
But I'll remedy that. I will.
In the meantime... it has rained virtually all day. I would love for it to continue to rain all night. What's better than sleeping through a rainstorm? When I was a kid, we spent a lot of weekends at my uncle's farm in St. Louis, Oklahoma. I slept upstairs, at one end of a long room that ran the length of the cabin, next to a window. The roof met in a peak overhead, and though the entire interior roof was finished in cedar shingles, the outer roof was corrugated tin. The rain was wonderful up there. Particularly when you could open the window and smell the air-- cow manure and grass and creosote and sun-heated dust and rain. It's a combination that says Oklahoma to me.
At night I would lay in my bed with the window open and listen to coyotes howling, or the low drumming of the oilwell pumps scattered around the property. In the morning it was cows lowing and birdsong. If I could bottle and sell the sense of peace and well being those smells and sounds imparted, I'd be a wildly wealthy woman.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Trees I Have Loved
Earth Day! It's actually kind of pity that we felt it necessary to name a day to remind ourselves that we're indebted to and dependent upon the planet we live on. But I guess it's a positive step. Today I'm thinking about the bits of Earth that I have lived on, known and loved in my lifetime. Here's a composite picture of the mighty, mighty maple tree that grows next to Bob's house. It is my favorite, favorite tree in all of Norman.
I'm an Oklahoma girl. I guess you are always embued with the natural spirit of the place you come from. My ex husband is from El Paso TX, and always had a special affinity for the desert, which to me always looked forbidding and abandoned. But the wide open sky, red rock and scrappy trees of Oklahoma will always feel like home to me. There's something so tough about the desert. It's a hard place, because it has to be. Oklahoma's tough, too, but not as hard. Here the land ... and some of the people ... have a sort of self-deprecating "aw shucks, nuthin' much" attitude that hides a wealth of wonder.
As Oklahomans, we know that our environment doesn't have that much of a dramatic nature to distinguish it. Our land is flat, but not as flat as Kansas (which some students at MIT did a study on a few years ago and determined that it was, in fact, flatter than a pancake). We've got a lot of rivers, but not a lot of big, impressive rivers. Some of them flow mostly through a layer of sand, or dry up completely in the brutal summers. Our mountains are short, lumpy and really, really old. Our lakes are mostly manmade. Our trees are largely scrubby, twisted and not much to look at.
Yet the whole adds up to a landscape that is incredibly diverse, if unassuming. Salt flats and sand dunes, piney woods and desert scrub, granite mountain and tall grass prairie. None of it with the sweeping drama of MGM, but something special, nonetheless.
When I was in school in North Carolina I was amazed at the forest. All those trees! And their trees grew so much taller than our trees. Trees of the same species would be twice the height in NC as in OK. I guess with ample water, and without the wind raging up from the southeast all the time to keep them hunkered down, North Carolina's trees felt free to just stretch out and keep on stretching. I loved to walk in the woods there when the wind was blowing hard up above. Below all was peace, but you could hear the wind rushing through the canopy above, and if you placed your hands on the trunk of a pine tree, you could feel it sway, all the way to the roots.
In Oklahoma I was always partial to the scrappy blackjack oak. post oak. scrub oak, Crosstimbers... they go by many names. Pioneers hated them because they were virtually impassable, with an understory thick with greenbriar and venomous snakes. They're useless for timber, and a little bit funny-looking, with their twisted branches like crooked fingers and their black bark and dark, tough leaves.There was one on my uncle's farm that grew a little way out into a pasture by itself, where a big owl lived. If you were lucky you'd hear it, or maybe even see it swoop overhead when you went walking at night near the tree. The tree it roosted in was a dense, squat thing, black against the sky and scarred with broken limbs, scabbed bark and dead patches, but still hanging on. I always thought it looked old and wise. I wonder if it still stands.
On the outskirts of Norman, there's this tree I've been watching for a year. It was dead when I met it, last November, but dead in a pretty striking spectacular way: black arms against a cloudy sky, and full of crows. I went back in March and it was much diminished, limbs broken and collapsed, the bark stripping away to reveal the gray wood underneath. Today I went back and it is almost completely without bark, though it doesn't seem to have lost any more major limbs.
When I was a kid, my dad planted a willow tree outside my window. And as it grew, he carefully trained a few of its branches to make a comfy seat for me. By the time I was nine or ten, the tree was big enough to climb, and I spent hours in that leafy seat, reading books or just being with the tree. Then one year I broke a branch, swinging from it, and the tree got sick. Beetles or disease got to it, and it began to die. Finally, my dad had to have it cut down, and I couldn't watch. After they carried it out, all cut to pieces, I went out and sat on the stump and cried. I felt like I had lost an old friend... and worse, that I was somehow responsible for the tree's death, because of that branch I broke. That I had betrayed my tree in some way. I still have a strip of my willow's dried leaves pressed in a scrap book in a box in my garage, and pictures of my tree in its last days before we cut it down.
I wish I could have planted a willow for Grayson, that he could be climbing and loving now. We did plant a sycamore at the house on 20th street, but even though it grew fast, it was still not big enough to climb when we left. Maybe soon we'll be able to plant one together.
Anyway, it's Earth Day. And I'm thinking about trees.
I'm an Oklahoma girl. I guess you are always embued with the natural spirit of the place you come from. My ex husband is from El Paso TX, and always had a special affinity for the desert, which to me always looked forbidding and abandoned. But the wide open sky, red rock and scrappy trees of Oklahoma will always feel like home to me. There's something so tough about the desert. It's a hard place, because it has to be. Oklahoma's tough, too, but not as hard. Here the land ... and some of the people ... have a sort of self-deprecating "aw shucks, nuthin' much" attitude that hides a wealth of wonder.
As Oklahomans, we know that our environment doesn't have that much of a dramatic nature to distinguish it. Our land is flat, but not as flat as Kansas (which some students at MIT did a study on a few years ago and determined that it was, in fact, flatter than a pancake). We've got a lot of rivers, but not a lot of big, impressive rivers. Some of them flow mostly through a layer of sand, or dry up completely in the brutal summers. Our mountains are short, lumpy and really, really old. Our lakes are mostly manmade. Our trees are largely scrubby, twisted and not much to look at.
Yet the whole adds up to a landscape that is incredibly diverse, if unassuming. Salt flats and sand dunes, piney woods and desert scrub, granite mountain and tall grass prairie. None of it with the sweeping drama of MGM, but something special, nonetheless.
In Oklahoma I was always partial to the scrappy blackjack oak. post oak. scrub oak, Crosstimbers... they go by many names. Pioneers hated them because they were virtually impassable, with an understory thick with greenbriar and venomous snakes. They're useless for timber, and a little bit funny-looking, with their twisted branches like crooked fingers and their black bark and dark, tough leaves.There was one on my uncle's farm that grew a little way out into a pasture by itself, where a big owl lived. If you were lucky you'd hear it, or maybe even see it swoop overhead when you went walking at night near the tree. The tree it roosted in was a dense, squat thing, black against the sky and scarred with broken limbs, scabbed bark and dead patches, but still hanging on. I always thought it looked old and wise. I wonder if it still stands.On the outskirts of Norman, there's this tree I've been watching for a year. It was dead when I met it, last November, but dead in a pretty striking spectacular way: black arms against a cloudy sky, and full of crows. I went back in March and it was much diminished, limbs broken and collapsed, the bark stripping away to reveal the gray wood underneath. Today I went back and it is almost completely without bark, though it doesn't seem to have lost any more major limbs.
 |
| November 2010 |
 |
| February 2011 |
 |
| Today |
When I was a kid, my dad planted a willow tree outside my window. And as it grew, he carefully trained a few of its branches to make a comfy seat for me. By the time I was nine or ten, the tree was big enough to climb, and I spent hours in that leafy seat, reading books or just being with the tree. Then one year I broke a branch, swinging from it, and the tree got sick. Beetles or disease got to it, and it began to die. Finally, my dad had to have it cut down, and I couldn't watch. After they carried it out, all cut to pieces, I went out and sat on the stump and cried. I felt like I had lost an old friend... and worse, that I was somehow responsible for the tree's death, because of that branch I broke. That I had betrayed my tree in some way. I still have a strip of my willow's dried leaves pressed in a scrap book in a box in my garage, and pictures of my tree in its last days before we cut it down.
I wish I could have planted a willow for Grayson, that he could be climbing and loving now. We did plant a sycamore at the house on 20th street, but even though it grew fast, it was still not big enough to climb when we left. Maybe soon we'll be able to plant one together.
Anyway, it's Earth Day. And I'm thinking about trees.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Kobi Returns and other night adventures
Last night as Bob was leaving, Kobi and Roxy streaked out the front door into the night. Within 15 minutes or so, Roxy came back, but Kobi was still nowhere to be found when I locked up and went to bed. I don't like to leave her out like that, but I know it's silly to wait up or go looking, and she'll come home and i'll find her waiting on the front porch in the morning.
At 3:30 I woke up and got up to check the front porch, figuring maybe she had scratched at the door and that's what woke me. No Kobi. I checked out back. No Kobi. A little worried, I went back to bed. Tucked my feet down under the covers and.... there she was.
My little dog had come home in the night, climbed the fence into the back yard, come into the garage through the doggie door, pushed open the door to the kitchen, let herself in, and put herself to bed. Clever girl.
After a chilly and gray day, the evening turned warm and moist and wonderful tonight. I went for a walk and smelled the trees and watched mockingbirds swooping through the evening air. It reminds me of something, somewhere else, another time. It reminds me of North Carolina, I think: the smell of the trees. I remember certain evenings there, standing in the forest, which was everywhere, all around and through the town of Chapel Hill, and smelling the trees. One night in particular I was at a party at somebody's house out in the woods. It was October. Just beginning to chill. I was with a group of people and we decided to go on to another party, so we all went out onto the deck to load into our cars. There was a guy in the group and we were doing that subtle, complex ritual you do at the beginning of a new relationship, when you know there's a mutual attraction, and you're both trying to engineer a way to be close, to touch, to share something. He was walking just behind me, and as we stepped off the deck he said "look at the stars!"
I looked up, and I had to look waaaay up, through the sharp ring of pine trees that circled the house, that circled the black, shining piece of sky straight above us. It was alive with stars. I leaned back and he let me lean on him, and that moment – with the holy brightness of the stars and the ring of black trees, the smell of the forest, the cool of the autumn air and the warmth of him at my back... that moment was one of the best moments of my life. Just then.
I think of it sometimes when I smell trees.
At 3:30 I woke up and got up to check the front porch, figuring maybe she had scratched at the door and that's what woke me. No Kobi. I checked out back. No Kobi. A little worried, I went back to bed. Tucked my feet down under the covers and.... there she was.
My little dog had come home in the night, climbed the fence into the back yard, come into the garage through the doggie door, pushed open the door to the kitchen, let herself in, and put herself to bed. Clever girl.
After a chilly and gray day, the evening turned warm and moist and wonderful tonight. I went for a walk and smelled the trees and watched mockingbirds swooping through the evening air. It reminds me of something, somewhere else, another time. It reminds me of North Carolina, I think: the smell of the trees. I remember certain evenings there, standing in the forest, which was everywhere, all around and through the town of Chapel Hill, and smelling the trees. One night in particular I was at a party at somebody's house out in the woods. It was October. Just beginning to chill. I was with a group of people and we decided to go on to another party, so we all went out onto the deck to load into our cars. There was a guy in the group and we were doing that subtle, complex ritual you do at the beginning of a new relationship, when you know there's a mutual attraction, and you're both trying to engineer a way to be close, to touch, to share something. He was walking just behind me, and as we stepped off the deck he said "look at the stars!"
I looked up, and I had to look waaaay up, through the sharp ring of pine trees that circled the house, that circled the black, shining piece of sky straight above us. It was alive with stars. I leaned back and he let me lean on him, and that moment – with the holy brightness of the stars and the ring of black trees, the smell of the forest, the cool of the autumn air and the warmth of him at my back... that moment was one of the best moments of my life. Just then.
I think of it sometimes when I smell trees.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)