As I Walk Through The Valley OfI was recently in conversation with another about some of the strangeness that is this place, the wild and lovely layers of history and use that still mark the landscapes around here. There are books about this, many: there are discussions of geography, history, civil planning (or lack thereof!), all the ways in which the twisted rumpling of earth around here has been nudged, spent, and managed. All of these academics are fine, but it is also true (so claim I) that we are all living in an extraordinarily beautiful place, and one of the blessings of our hills and valleys is that we are incapable of letting the broad smash of urban crush rob the land and waters of their aesthetic. If we tried it, it would all fall down the hills. You don't have to take my word for this; all that's needed is a walk.
So today I put on shoes, checked the stove, locked the house, and ambled. I wound my way down the valleys to the water. We have a growing network of converted rail beds, here, and I was able to make much of my journey using those. It was with a grin that I passed under one of the remaining sections of a pedestrian bridge; a very long time ago, I ended up on the middle of that somewhat by accident, and it wasn't until I had strolled over a major highway and up a hillside of crumbling stairs did I learn from the sign at the top that the whole thing had been condemned for safety purposes.
There is something to be said here for the Hot Metal bridge; it's worth looking that one up, should you not know why it's called so (and it is easy not to, these days). One hint, that I should think Mrs. Compass would appreciate: the bridge has a grade. It should be simple to puzzle out which way it rolls. It is also a marker of an unrelenting, nearly decadent practicality that it was the bit of the bridge designed to carry the heavy, snarling, hellish cauldrons of moving steel that has been converted to take the light feet of running shoes and the wispy hum of bicycle tires. It does not sway, that bridge.
Never mind all of that. This afternoon, a crisp breeze tumbled down the river valley, playful and looking for kites. It tasted of the mixture that is this place: hung with arboreal scents, the clean taste of river air in spring, and undertone tang of bitumen, paints, machine oils. The sun played at hiding behind clouds, putting down pools of cool shadow on the surrounding hills and distant buildings, sending strong light in between. I bought a book about stairs, and then considered the trail, scrambling on behind a parking lot, leading who knows where, disappearing into the mulberry trees downriver. It was not a day to turn that sort of thing down.
So: keep going. I am getting better at recognizing the plants that live in the sideways. I saw a hawk, lazy in the constant air. The river was laden with boats, the quick snapping slaps of the chop against the fiberglass shells of jet-skis; the more stately progression of larger boats, top decks spread with young women and men all turned to the sun; the muffled, giant grumble of the engines in tugboats, furious power bound in the gentle graceful shove of an acre or two of low-slung coal. There is history there along that trail, with helpful signage to mark the places where things happened, and it is sobering how much did on what is now anonymous stretches of parkland and semi-parkland. There is ample secret history as well. Small paths and steps fell from the side of the trail to lead down to the river: utility landings with strict signs in red, old and forgotten access to moorings long since gone, places where feet fell often enough to keep the weeds down. I did not follow them; I will save them as mysteries. I will look for them again, later. Some of them may still be there when I do.
I am old enough now (and soon be even older) to have had unpleasant things happen to me, lo these past four years. Reminders are mixed into the days, and for whatever reason in recent ones there have been several. It is not as bad as all that; it is rare now to wake up crying, or screaming, or both. So much of it is out of my control, and I am careful with what little of it that is. So: keep going. The simple exercise of putting feet forward is a great help.
I thought myself clever; it is good to have a plan, and my plan was to walk a ways and then take a bus to return home, perhaps to tea under the trees at the little table. I had forgotten that the current configuration of the roads on the other side of the river threw wrenches - the routes I had expected were not there, greyed out on the signage. It was not vexing - the day was still beautiful, the wind was still light, and air was still layered and sweet. It was the last hill that made me tired, but not too tired for tea.
It is good, from time to time, to be reminded that we are capable of more than what is easy.
HeatSummer has descended with a snarling, heavy ferocity. By day, it has been by turns photo-bright outside, light fit for surgeries, then mellowing into a numb shimmer whenever a helpful cloud steers itself in front of the sun. The nights become desperate, nervous, struggling, the air too close until the breezes chase it away, or the air conditioners exact their noisy, mercenary release.
(So far, the air conditioner is yet idle.)
If not done with careful attention to local conditions, tending to the greenery can be a punishment. I have spend spending only slices of the days out in the beds and plots, keeping the shrubs and grasses in check. The seedling rig in the cellar is off and dismantled; the pots have a better home on the porch now, and it is easier to keep up with the rigor of water. The Aneheims look strong, and there are several paste tomato seedlings that might like to jump to larger containers soon. The squashes and melons are beginning to find their feet out in the beds, and I have managed to take nearly a meal of peas. New in the ground are sweet potato plants, and I've no idea how they will like their bit of the earth, but we each will see, we each will see.
There are better ways to do batter with the heat; I have found two of note that involve fruit.
One is simply that: fruit. It is the season for this now. Cherries and plums are appearing in the markets, heavy with sweetness and easy to eat by the handful, hucking the seeds out over the porch railing into the shady depths of the boxwood. There are grapes, too, eaten from a cold glass bowl, a shallow pool of water at the bottom to pull heat from the tips of fingers. It seems that grapes are ever in season, these days, but the ones in the market now are a little more honest. The strawberries are coming in waves; any given evening I can scrounge in the long grasses and the feverfew, rooting careful for the bits of deep red hidden there, little fragile berries warm and bursting with sweetness and perfume. Some nights they go under sugar (I need to buy more sugar), then over ice cream or yogurt; some nights they are eaten right there on the hot steps of the front porch. I will buy heavy cream both for biscuits and topping, too, and before long I will sit with a proper dessert before me.
The other find is a bottle of mulberry syrup, pulled from the shelves of a shop stall resonating with the Levant. I had seen it before, but kept forgetting to purchase one - this time, I managed to carry, pay, and take it home. The ingredients list is simple: mulberry juice, sugar. The preparation is simple, too: put a touch of syrup in the bottom of a glass, then fill the glass with cold, cold water. If poured from sufficient height, the drink will not even require a spoon. Take the glass to a comfortable chair, and be still; it is quite refreshing, and makes a happy close for the evening, warding away the press of the night air.
Our hands found each other's on the table, somehow; one of mine in hers, one of hers in mine. I said to her: "I do not want to stop talking to you. I do not want to stop listening to you. Your body makes my body sing." It was surprisingly easy to say.
The twilight was rich with indigo tonight, birds falling quiet as it deepened. Bats rule the airspace over the gardens, now, taking over where the birds left off to pluck lunch from the air with harrowing turns, leaving behind only mad flutter. Porch chimes shrug and shake distant in the breezes, and the maples make soft noises as the thick leaves shuffle and touch.
Rest. There will be more tomorrow.
ReadyThe walk home was soupy, thick. I took trail to a local market, then rambled back home on back alleys, bag over my shoulder with five pounds sugar in. There is an ancient device, refined and made modern because it is still useful, set up and used to measure an angle across both the vertical and horizontal, and with many of them (along with a bit of geometry, perhaps on the back of a drum) one can make useful triangles. I spent most of the walk back on an alleyway named after one of those, stopping from time to time to admire back gardens, tucked into hillsides by houses, otherwise utterly hidden except from the surprisingly thin and twisting roadway. I waved to people on back porches, and they waved back to me.
It is nice to be able to live like that. This is an urban setting, to be sure, but up on these hill tops we do that, here. Earlier I rambled back out, to post a letter (borrowing a pen along the way to fill in the neglected return address portion of the envelope). On the return from the post box, I joined the eager, loose queue of people at the window of the ice cream shop. The walk back up the hill was a sweet one. I'm glad I went when I did; storms come for us now, grinding up the valley.
There are empty places on the dial of the shortwave radio, spaces filled up with the busy crackle of our world, our skies, our sun. There is utility in this, even in this. I have the radio so tuned now, and even though the bright bolts are not so near, I can hear them there in the speaker, sharp cracks of static, sometimes in sync with a gentle flash, still yonder yet.
In the darkness of the porch, we sat side by side. We watched as the ambulance drove down the hill from the firehouse in the distance, siren ringing in the night, red and white light stabbing at trees, in somber haste, an important errand. I pointed: "They are off to do their good work." She was leaned forward in her chair, arms and legs pulled tightly in, eyes ahead and still. "Someone is already dead," she said. I did not find comfort in that. I did not understand it at all.
I have picked up the phone twice tonight to answer it, but only for a bad connection, an incorrect dial. One of the nicer things about learning a new language is using it, and I answer the phone with words used by people a third of a world away. The words make little sense without the story of how they came to be, even after translation. I never have had anyone interested enough to ask. They beg their pardons. They go.
I hear low, loud sounds in the distance. Pronto.
The Promenade CallsOne of the nifty things about this place is that it is being cleaned up a bit. For years and years, the earth underneath has supported industry here, and although they were not the cleanest it must be said that they were, in their time, frightfully important. Through draw and whim, all of that is largely gone now, even as the memories linger on. There is much talk and service these days in the world around toward the manner of how we are custodians of the places we live; here, I think, it is a little different. The people here have a good memory of just how bad it was, importance aside, so as the waters run cleaner and the soils are scrubbed, there lurks a consensus that the job should be done well, and it should bloody stay that way.
There are benefits to this. Slowly, the watersides are coming back as a place to work, play, and travel. There are many examples of this, but a recent favorite is a small eatery on a small island, where one can sit outside in the evening air over the water, taking in the lights, the boats, the sounds of the band playing over in the grotto. Being on a trail, there are happy collisions: dancers in pretty summer dresses moving for each other on the patio, rubbing shoulders and exchanging pardons with tired cyclists, dressed reflective. This little corner of the island teems with light and sound, while the rest is strangely quiet at night, the calm primness of the heavy weight of an HOA agreement, stoic and stern against all the forces of nature that must batter them so in the winters.
We do not live like that up here on the hill. This evening I pulled a hundred plants from in amongst the strawberries: feverfew, the stuff that isn't lamb's quarters, one lone locust seeding, other things. Down there were treasures: more strawberries. It was quick work to pull another quart, each ripe, some with red too deep to be true. Some of these I washed and tucked away; the others I washed and put in a box, the bring them up the street and up the stairs to a neighbor, sitting on her porch in the breezes. With gift given, we got to chat a bit: trade histories, tell stories. I am glad to live in a place with porches like that.
It is cool on my own porch, now; sleepy fireflies yawn and glow in the twilight.
Water Is Greedy For DownI have known people that do not know how to tell time by an analog clock. I do not think this tragic, merely strange - the graceful arms of analog clocks are an engineering solution no longer needed in this country, passing gently into anachronism and fashion. There are, after all, plenty of digital clocks around. They are both their own cause and cure.
It has been days of stormy evenings. I have made a point to set a tuner on the shortwave to point to an empty band. In most times, the radio only reports a gentle hiss. When lightning strikes, the radio wakes, singing a crackle in perfect time with the light outside the window. The radio can find lightning farther away that I can see it. It is impressive and in some small way beautiful to hear lightning sing so. I mentioned this mechanism to a younger acquaintance, and that any AM radio would neatly do this trick, and his reply was this: "who has a radio these days?". He had a point, if not a lamentable one.
There are many rooms in the house with two doors; the kitchen is one. She left me to tend to the onions in the skillet on the stove, disappearing though a doorway into the dim hallways, eager to explore. Some minutes later I looked up to see her peeking around the frame of the other one, watching me: half of a smile, soft and shy, one pale eye, bright with light, half of a face, filled with fitness.
A peek beneath the spreading leaves of the raspberry bush this morning showed a surprising number of little fruits, still shrunk and green, tiny baubles of promise. There was, too, one singular fruit, a gentle and tempting red. It fell away with a touch into my fingers, warm. I ate it standing in the yard, with summery sun, remembering that this was what they are supposed to be.
Hey, Chris: There's Probably A Poem In Here, If You DigConsider dumpsters. More often than not, when encountered in the wild, they are already somewhat full of whatever it is they are there to carry, nearly always fulfilling purpose. They, too, are more often than not filled with the debris of construction in reverse, laded up with the trappings of things previously built, cleared out and cut up and tossed with little ceremony into a big box to become memory. We do this to make room for new things; some day, too, all that we do today will take the place of the things that they took the place of. Note, too, the amount of it all: it says many things when one has need of so large a refuse bin. A lot can be seen in the nature of a trash can.
Consider...dumpsters. The things themselves. They are massive, stout, built to take tremendous punishment, and often carry the tells of such suffered. The lines of them should be arrow straight, but they are not: with care, place an eye on the lip of one and look along, to see the warp and wave where things large and heavy once crashed down in moments of bad aim. With care, run fingertips over the dents and dings that make a landscape of the panels of cold steel, with more care in the spots where something has managed to punch through, introducing new topology, letting in light. I think it would be strange to see a new one, shiny and perfect and straight. They are brave things, dumpsters, with long shoulders weary from their time. A lot can be seen in the nature of a trash can.
Place a young child in the front yard, looking up at the long horizon line of the dumpster, hulking in the driveway, forcing the family car ignominiously into the street to part under the elm that grows between the sidewalk and the pavement. The dumpster is there to receive the detritus of the remodel. The child cannot see in, for they are not so tall, but somethings heave up into view, piled on other things. The child can see half of the sink, tipped up into view, the sink where they brushed teeth and washed hands before sleep. The child can only wonder at this new place for this familiar fixture, perhaps not knowing that it would soon be gone, too. The parents are happy to finally get rid of the lime green enamel.
The fireflies surprised me tonight, in the back yard: a small storm of soft green light.
8:24One of the great fears with words and long projects is that the engine that makes them will change so much from the start to the finish that those first timid lines will seem incomprehensible strange to those that pile on for the finale. This has already happened a number of times on the long projects. From one view, what seems to be happening is that the vast sense and senses that pour in from everywhere do their good work: to bolster, to illuminate, to tear down to bring up, infinitely. So, too, does the engine change with age. I have so little control over it. It's frustrating.
"Did you mean that, what you said about singing," she asked. "Is that a line? Something you tell all the girls?" I do not know if it mattered what the answer was, even though the answer was no.
The process will always be laced with change, though: it is in some ways nearly a sad thing to pin the words down to paper, fix them there, keep them still even as they ring in their own way. It is, after all, what they ask for. So: keep going.
Oh, CelesteLet us walk out into the night; let us wander through the evening, under streetlights just waking up to the notion of twilight, the stops lights gaining strength against the indigo sky. Let us dodge the children using us carefully as screens in their game of hidden and sought. Let us go see bands.
So there, at the little festival, there was a pretty good time. I only managed to make it there for the very end of Ms. Hatfield's set, but she seems in quite fine form, and I am sorry I missed it. I got to spend a fair bit of the Wilson Twins' set in good conversation with Mr. Tinerant, but the sisters made good music, and that cover they do was lovely. Then, with the light draining out of the sky, the Old 97's came to play, carrying their weight in yowl, blister, thump and snare.
And there in the crowd, I found a story. Some ways in front of me, each seated: a young woman, a young man, his foot tapping too fast to be part of any music. The music has her, and she stands to dance, dances around him, next to him, dancing playfully into him to get him to feet, to join her, there on the lawn. Her efforts are for naught, but she dances on anyway. After some time, she sits back down, arm over the back of his chair, letting her fingers dance on the small of his back. He reaches his own hand behind, and I prepare not to notice a secret comfort of fingers, a small private tenderness. He knocks her hand away. I could have written her a note with a truth on it, then, left it with her before leaving, even as it would have been misunderstood.
I didn't do that, of course. That would have been rude, and the night had little use for rude. I moved up and in, into the knots of people dancing by the front of the stage. The pistons were firing up there, these four men together in music, the lyrics pouring right out of the top of Mr. Miller's head. We cheered and clapped against the great swallowing sky; they gave us more, we did it again.
I hope we did them well.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Mail accepted for the bears in the basement. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.