Life is Good

The atmosphere outside is heavy with moisture and an incoming low pressure system. It's hot and humid, but the wind, which blows from every direction, has a chill to it, and it tears the yellowing leaves from the ash trees. Many of the wild apples have already lost most of their leaves, and their bare branches hang heavy with yellow, gold, and green fruit. I'll pick a few sour, mealy apples to make Curry a pie for his birthday next week, but the rest will fall to the ground and rot or feed the deer through the winter. We still have jars of apple butter we made two years ago on the shelves.

The staghorn sumac have taken on their Christmas appearance--half red, half green--but the oaks, the beeches, the hornbeams, even the maples, are still green. I recite their names like a spell to keep summer around a little longer. But in the understory the Virginia creeper has turned crimson, the wild sarsaparilla has faded yellow-brown, and the false Solomon's seal is weighted down by clusters of scarlet berries. Bumble bees nose in the last of the asters, the wild wind tosses grasshoppers and sulphur butterflies, and I hear a late cicada among the crickets, but there's no denying the truth: fall is here.

I have a cozy, brown wraparound sweater that I'm not allowed to wear until after the first frost and my favorite chartreuse teapot I can't use until it's snowed at least once. These are my talismans, or perhaps my bribes. If you don't run away to the desert before winter, you may wear your sweater, drink your tea. And then, wrapped in warmth inside and out, you can look out on the falling snow and remember summer, when everything was so easy. Only it's not always easy in summer, is it? What with the black flies, deer flies, horse flies, and mosquitoes. When it's too hot and humid to move. When you have other obligations and can't be outside witnessing every flower bloom and bird hatch and insect buzz by. It goes by so fast, and I miss so much.

This morning I was salvaging the last of the peaches, cutting away the bad parts and putting the rest in my cereal bowl, and I got a bit of mushed peach on my shirt and it reminded me of baby food, and that brought on the most unbelievable wave of nostalgia, even though my kids hated baby food. In fact, getting them to eat anything other than the gunk behind the radiators during their first few years of life was one of the greatest challenges of my parenting journey, right behind potty training and teaching teenagers how to drive (my current phase of motherhood).

This is what people mean when they tell new mothers, "Enjoy every minute; it goes by so fast." Only it's not impossible to enjoy every minute of motherhood, like all those times you peeled and mashed peaches, scooped the sweet goodness on a tiny, silver spoon, and held it to pair of clamped-shut lips, any more than it's possible to enjoy every minute of summer, like that time you were drenched in sweat, covered in dirt, and swarmed by mosquitoes because you decided to transplant perennials from your neighbor on a 90-degree, 90-percent humidity day. But after you were done with the plants, you went and swam in the pond and then lay down in the hammock with a popsicle, and life was good. So very good.

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World of Wonders

I've started a new project on Instagram--a #bookstagram series combining to of my favorite things, books and Fiesta dinnerware, #bookfiesta. Once or twice a week I pair a book I've recently read and loved with a complementary piece of Fiesta. I love the juxtaposition of something totally frivolous (my dish collection) and something deeply consequential (really good books). I also love picking our the dish that will go best with a beautiful cover design. And I love sharing what I read with the world. 

Today's post is of World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, alongside a p86 (that's produced after 1986 for you Fiesta ware novices out there) rose individual creamer, and some white lilacs. It's extra-special because I also reviewed the book at Literary Mama for this month's issue. My review begins:

The axolotl is a pink amphibian with dark eyes, feathery gills, and a disarmingly human-like smile. One gazes serenely from the cover of World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, lovingly painted by illustrator Fumi Mini Nakamura and tucked in among a colorful collage of magnificent plants and animals, some familiar (flamingo, narwhal, monarch butterfly) and others unknown to me (potoo bird, ribbon eel, southern cassowary). The axolotl’s cryptic, pink, Mona Lisa smile amid this kaleidoscope of wild creatures is an irresistible lure inviting readers to pick up the book and behold the wonders held within.

You can read the rest of the review here, and you can follow me on Instagram @andrea.lani.

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Faith in a Seed

"Deep within the arboretum across the street from my office, along the edge of a field of raggedy wildflowers, sixty American chestnut trees grow in four neat rows. The trees were planted fourteen years ago, on a sunny but cool morning in June. My husband worked at the arboretum at the time and invited teams of draft horses to plow the furrows into which he planted the knee-high whippets just dug from their nursery beds. I took our infant son, Milo, to the arboretum that day, to watch the enormous horses draw plows that peeled back wide strips of sod, to see his father lower tiny trees into the ground. Milo, two weeks old at the time, snuggled deep in a front pack, his still-wobbly head asleep against my chest. Neither horse nor tree made an impression on his newborn mind. I might have forgotten the day myself, if not for the momentousness of it being our first big outing after his birth, the connection of his father to the event, and the proximity of the arboretum to my workplace, allowing me to return and visit the chestnuts years later."


So begins my essay, "Faith in a Seed," which took me years to write and even longer to get published (this is, unfortunately, my process—slow writing). Still, I'm thrilled that it's found a home in a very local publication, the 2020 issue of Sprire: The Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability. You can read it now, here, if you're so inclined, and while you're there, check out the other offerings in the issue. And please do come back and let me know what you think in the comments.

Monarch Summers II

In late summer, my children and I search for caterpillars. The milkweed is thigh-high at this time, with fragrant mauve flower clusters swelling into rotund seed pods. When we see leaves that are missing great chunks of green flesh, we peer underneath of them, hoping to find a fat yellow-, black-, and white-striped caterpillar hiding there. When we do find one, we bring it home and place it, along with a good handful of its milkweed host, in our butterfly jar, a bulbous vase of blown glass, to complete its cycle of eating and growing and transforming into a monarch butterfly.

So begins my essay "Monarch Summers" which was published last fall in the journal Snowy Egret. JUST in case you didn't order a copy of that print-only journal, you can now read the piece at the website Nature Writing. I'd love to hear what you think.

Solo

Saturday afternoon. C is making syrup. Again. Still. E and Z run around outside, "helping." M is in the basement, making music.

I've gone round and round, written and rewritten and rewrittenwritten an essay a zillion times. I'm not quite ready to hit "submit," but I don't want to look at it anymore. I'm sick of the inside of my own head, and the inside of my house, and sick and tired of hiking the same old same old trail to the same old same old river.

I hop in the car.

"Where are you going?"

"Hiking."

"Hiking? Alone? Where?"

"I haven't decided yet."

I drive to a place that, according to my guidebook, I haven't been to since 3/14/04. Which is proof that it's not always snowy in March. I follow the first loop trail I come to, along the river. I wonder, not for the first time, to be the "mother-nature writer" whose kids don't want to hang out with her in nature anymore. I pick up a stick on the ground that looks like a magic want and cast spells and charms as I walk along. "Wingardium leviosa."

I practice the focusing questions that John Muir Laws recommends in his life-changing book The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling: I notice. I wonder. I remember. I notice moss, lots of green moss. I wonder what that lemon-colored lichen is. I remember walking here 12 years ago.

I finish one loop and make my way to another. There are people taking photos by the falls. A wet dog that does not honor personal space. More people on another branch. I run into a friend by the kiosk, also tired of her same-old trail, out for a big adventure. We chat for a while and go our separate ways; she to finish her loop, me to return home refreshed, renewed.

A Place in Mind

"On New Year’s Day of the first winter we lived on our land, I put my son, Milo, into a little blue backpack and took him for a walk in the woods. The day was warm––topping forty degrees––and sunny. Melting ice dripped from the eaves and the softening crust of snow yielded to my footfalls."

I'm super excited that Northern Woodlands magazine picked up a short piece I wrote about a tree and an onterested in trees or wildlife or nature or silviculture or conservation, I'd recommend you subscribe. The magazine is always full of interesting things about this neck of the woods.

I'm super excited that Northern Woodlands picked up for their Winter 2014 issue a short piece I wrote about a tree and an owl and a little boy who has grown up very fast. Unfortunately, it's not available online, but if you pick up a copy of the magazine, flip to the inside back cover, and it'll be there in the "A Place in Mind" feature. And if you live in the Northeast and are interested in trees or wildlife or nature or silviculture or conservation, I'd recommend you subscribe. The magazine is always full of interesting things about this neck of the woods.

A Golden Nest

In The Blue Jay’s Dance, Louise Erdrich describes a bird nest she found that holds hairs she combed from her daughters’ heads. Perhaps inspired by Ms. Erdrich, or maybe driven only by my own reluctance to throw away anything that can biodegrade, I've always tossed bits of my children's hair outside, rather than in the trash. In my essay, Memento Mori, I wrote about how I imagined the birds finding these sweepings: "After I trim their hair, I sprinkle the clippings off the deck and into the yard, in hopes that a bird will pick up the strands and weave them into a golden nest." 

But never did I really think I'd come across one such nest, until last weekend, when C brought me this:

He'd found it lying on the edge of the driveway, where it must have blown down from the branches of the pine tree or the apple tree above. The whole inside of the twig and grass and pine needle nest is lined with golden hair. A tiny feather clings to one edge and a long, white horsehair springs out the other side.

Erdrich writes of her daughters' hair nest: 

Now, as I am setting the nest on a shelf in the light of an eastern window, our middle daughter’s blond hair gleams, then the roan highlights of the rich brown of the eldest’s and perhaps a bit of our baby’s fine grass-pale floss…. 

It is almost too painful to hold the nest, too rich as life often is with children…. I see that bird alone in the nest woven from the hair of my daughters, and I cannot hold the nest because longing seizes me. Not only do I feel how quickly they are growing from the curved shape of my arms when holding them, but I want to sit in the presence of my own mother so badly I feel my heart will crack. 

Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time’s chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem...how to let go while holding tight.

I love Erdrich's writing, and I love that my children's hair warmed a baby bird as it grew up in our own front yard this summer. I love the weaving together of hair and twigs, motherhood and nature, and the gorgeous, heartbreaking impermanence of it all.

About Place

I'm excited to share with you my essay "Catch 22" in The Future of Water issue of The Black Earth's Institute's About Place Journal. 



This is an essay that I've been working on, in different guises, over the last couple of years, and I'm pleased it's finally found a home. Though now that I've been away from it for a couple of months, I see more things I'd like to change. Isn't that always the way?

Anyway, if you'd like to read it, you can go here. And then check out some of the other wonderful pieces in the current issue.

The Place Where I Live

I've been working on, and submitting, a few short nonfiction pieces that combine nature-writing and mother-writing. The first of these is up on Orion Magazine's The Place Where You Live feature.

If you'd like, go here to read about my little corner of the world.