Monthly Archives: February 2016

The View

Signs of Spring

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In my recent rant about loud in-store music, I almost added the descriptor, tacky. Almost. I know a class of once-upon-a-time college sophomores who would think that’s rich, coming from the guy who tried to teach them about economic growth using Steve Earle’s song, “Hillbilly Highway.” They were, unanimously, not-amused. Our different tastes in music were seemingly unbridgeable.

I like to think of my musical tastes as moderately eclectic. Yet if you scanned my library, you would find more than nine-tenths of it in the category called Americana, with only brief smatterings of blues, ancient rock, classical, Taize hymns, movie scores, etc. Of hip hop or recent pop and rock, I am in total ignorance. While I was enthralled by Ann Patchett’s novel, Bel Canto, and have read it more than once, my knowledge of opera barely goes beyond Elmer Fudd’s Wagnerian, “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit.”

So I am intrigued by a review of the musical, “Hamilton,” in a recent issue of The Economist. A hip hop musical about Alexander Hamilton that can be praised by both Barack Obama and Dick Cheney? The reviewer finds in the musical a hopeful statement about where this country came from and where it is going, a vision of an inclusive nation, despite current trends toward exclusiveness. A bridge builder.

Crocus After Rain
Crocus After Rain

To judge from the current presidential campaigning, this is “the winter of our discontent.” Deep discontent. A mood of anger and distrust and fear and exclusion. An us-vs-them, zero-sum victimhood of despair that sees walls as solutions. And yet, James Fallows’ article in the March issue of The Atlantic (“How America Is Putting Itself Back Together”) chronicles dozens of stories to the contrary at the local level in communities all across the country—stories of cooperative action and partnership and initiative and welcoming the newcomer, stories in which distressed communities are turning their fortunes around and moving in positive directions.

What has this to do with my parochial musical tastes? I could argue—with some justification—that taste is taste. That overcoming innate preferences is infeasible if not impossible. But, deep down, I suspect that more than taste is at stake. If I listened with an open heart, I could learn at least to appreciate, if not enjoy, what others see in hip hop and opera. I wonder, then, if my too-ready dismissal of other genres as uninteresting is perhaps, at the least, emblematic of the same attitude that dismisses otherness, demonizes the alien, acquiesces in the building of walls.

Upland Chorus Frog Singing in Nancy's Pond
Upland Chorus Frog Singing in Nancy’s Pond

By the calendar, it is still winter. And yet, this week I see signs of spring all around. Crocus are blooming and dogwood buds are swelling. Flocks of robins visit our yard and the upland chorus frogs are calling and mating in Nancy’s pond.

Mr. Fallows sees signs of spring. The author of “Hamilton” sees signs of spring. May we seek an end to the winter of our discontent. Let me see—no, let me BE— signs of spring. Let me build bridges, not walls.

The View

‘Whale Song’ in the Gold’s Gym Pool

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I was doing my usual after church swim one recent Sunday when I heard singing. I looked toward the spa and therapeutic pools and saw no one. Nancy was the only other person in the lap pool, and her head was underwater. I briefly thought of whale song, then kicked off for another lap. Still the strange music. Given the acoustics of the pool area, it had lots of reverb, and no apparent directional source. At the end of that lap, I stood and waited. Nancy came to the end of her lap and emerged to move her lap counter. The singing stopped. Then she re-submerged and kicked off, and the singing started again. Nancy swims with a snorkel. She was singing through her snorkel! The Taize’ hymn, she later told me, that we had sung earlier that morning. Singing helps her relax into a smooth un-rushed rhythm, she said, to feel at one with the water.

Swimming as a form of working out is relatively new to both of us. We both learned to swim as kids; me with some lessons, Nancy less formally taught. But neither had ever swum laps nor gotten comfortable with that head under the water thing until several years ago. When Nancy’s hip problems began to render her infirm on land, she joined the gym for access to a pool where she could get weight off the joints, and stretch and exercise without trauma. I joined, too, in support of her and in acknowledgment that my exercise-at-home strategy was not working. While she was in the pool, I would use the treadmills and ellipticals and rowing machines and resistance equipment.

Gradually, Nancy began to swim laps. She would watch the strong lap swimmers, ask questions, and watch instructional videos. She developed excellent form and respectable speed. And she began to ask me to join her in the pool. Reluctantly, I did.

I acknowledged my thin skin a few posts ago. I hereby do so again. Nancy would occasionally make a suggestion on my swimming form, and each time, I bristled. Sulked. Resisted. And then gave it a try and found she was right.

Nancy still has better form than I do. She swims her thousand meters faster than I do. She looks better in a swimsuit than I do. But I have come to enjoy swimming as my regular exercise. I started by swimming in lieu of a dry workout maybe once in three trips to the gym. Then twice in three. Now it is nine times out of ten, or more. Sometimes, maybe often, I feel at one with the water. And, inside my head, I sing.

The Arts

7 Words

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There is a new page showing on our top level menu, entitled “Meditations on 7 Words.” While we are still six weeks away from Good Friday, I have taken yesterday’s beginning of Lent as an occasion to collect the Good Friday meditations I have written over the years and publish them there. I invite you to read them.

And if you are interested in a series of meditations for each day of Lent, you might check out this booklet, a collaborative effort both in its writing and its illustration. Nancy has taken a collaborative art project that she helped design for a retreat last summer and reconfigured and repurposed it to illustrate these meditations written by fellow parishioners.

The View

Let’s Go To The Woods!

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Behind our house is a deep wooded cove running the length of our street and separating us from the rear neighbors by about four hundred feet. Our side of the cove is almost ravine steep, while the far side is gentler, so the wet weather stream that carved this cove is nearer our street than it is to the street behind us. Our property line, while near the horizontal midpoint, is well up the opposite slope.

We have almost no back yard; the woods of our cove come nearly to the back of the house. From our rear windows we watch deer, squirrel, chipmunk. We hear, then see, the pileated woodpecker flashing tree to tree. We hear owls. We watch the progress of the seasons, noting the specific day on which the spring leafing-out suddenly hides the houses behind us. We watch the stream braiding across the flat cove bottom during and after a heavy rain.

From my second story study window, I can see the forest floor littered with downed trunks. We have lived here a quarter of a century, and most of the deadfall still visible has fallen during our tenure. I remember those trunks as standing timber, and they tell much of the history of our association with these woods. A few are oaks, killed by lightening. Most are pines, or the victims of pines.

When we moved here, pines represented a small but noticeable portion of the canopy. Most have fallen, their roots simply unable to keep them aloft. We had an arborist on site shortly after one fell and he affirmed that the tree had been healthy. I don’t know if it is their natural life cycle to get tall and fall, or if perhaps the maturing hardwoods around them change their roots’ ability to grip the soil. For what ever reason, one after another of our stately and seemingly healthy pines has fallen. We had the few that remained preemptively cut down to control the hazard.

In one notable case, a falling pine lodged in a white oak. It was a wet season and, before we could have the pine removed, it had pushed the oak into a large tulip poplar, which itself then leaned farther. Ultimately, that pine pushed down six sizable hardwoods in a line stretching two thirds of a football field from its base and spanning the bottom of the cove.

The back of a neighbor’s lot was once mostly pines, until pine bark beetles killed them all. On one not-notably-windy day, Nancy heard crash after crash from that part of the woods. Later investigation showed that the dead pine trunks had nearly all fallen or been snapped off high up, like some cultic mass suicide. The forest floor was littered with newly downed trunks. Most frightening were the trunk sections that had done a 180 or even a 360 in their descent, diving stunts that left fifteen foot sections planted upright in the soft ground.

Those woods have always been a playground for us. That first year, we built a “fort” at the bottom of the cove for my two boys to use—a two-story affair topped with a tarp in pup tent configuration. Straddling the stream bed, its first floor was two feet above the ground level, reached via a drawbridge from the steep side of the cove. Occasionally my sons would sleep out in the fort. I remember one night all four of us were on its upper deck, watching a deer just below us coming to the stream for a drink.

When we moved in, there was just one path down into the woods from our yard. It went straight down the slope. That was convenient for dragging the lumber for the fort down the hill, but misery for coming back up, not to mention the erosion potential. So we soon began laying out alternative routes using switchbacks. Over the years, various tree falls have necessitated slight alterations, but our original paths are still largely intact.

We use these paths almost daily. Mona and I take long walks on neighborhood streets more days than not, probably logging 400-500 miles a year. But even after a three mile morning walk, she will typically get restless in the afternoon. “Let’s go to the woods!” I’ll say, and she’s alive with anticipation. She will take off down a path, scaring up squirrels, chipmunks, occasional deer. In the woods, she can be free of her leash, roaming freely. She never strays, always staying within eyesight.

Pumpkin, our first dog, I also associate with these woods. She was a skinny stray, abandoned and hungry, watching us build the fort. She was pumpkin-colored, and came to us at harvest time. After we’d adopted her and filled out her ribcage, we had to keep her on a leash in the woods. She was a runner, liked to come home an hour later after a good roll in deer scat.

Twenty-five years of these woods. One dog’s lifetime, and more than half of her replacement’s likely lifespan.

Mona and I used to walk some of the downed tree trunks, ’til the good ones rotted too much for safe footing. I slipped off one of the huge rootballs once. Wet weather. It crumbled underfoot and I ended up flat on my back in the watery hole from whence the rootball had come, briefly stunned, wet and cold. Now I carry my cell phone, and think of my age before embarking on acrobatics.

Nancy, too, uses these paths often. With camera in hand, or just with Mona. We wage a one-family war on poison ivy, English ivy, vinca minor, privet. We gage soil moisture by where the dry stream bed becomes wet, enjoying watching water boil up through small underground passages. We scratch through the gravel beds newly deposited after a major storm.

Over a quarter-century, with near-daily familiarity, you notice changes. Falling trees open up the canopy and then it closes again. The understory changes. Small plots of various ferns and trillium wax and wane with the changes overhead. The past several years have seen our Mayapple area expand ten-fold. Our one patch of bluet shrank to nothing as the canopy closed. It will be interesting to see if it re-emerges this spring; we had to have a large, lightning-damaged white oak felled, re-opening the old bluet site to the sky.

I called the woods our playground. Exclusively ours, it seems. Once in the woods, several acres of forest are open to our enjoyment. None of the neighbors seem to know they exist. We’ve never encountered another person in this playground. In twenty-five years, I’ve heard children’s voices down there only a handful of times, with the exception of my own boys. Seen evidence of children’s play even less, except for paintball hulls, mostly shot from the “safety” of a back deck. Even our youngest had little interest in playing there. This is more than surprising to us. Both Nancy and I grew up spending many happy hours in our own wooded playgrounds. The alleged “nature deficit” of today’s children seems real in my neighborhood.

Time and weather took their toll on our fort, and no one was using it anymore, so we removed it. The corner poles and some of the better flooring got repurposed; the rotted stuff hauled to the landfill. Today, the only evidence of the old fort is a small bench fashioned from part of the drawbridge substructure. I think we have been good stewards of our small piece of nature. We’ve intended to be. We will probably walk those paths until our bodies give out, and then watch from our windows.