Margotlog: Empty Water

Margotlog: Empty Water

     As the family car drove past the beautiful blue-green lake, the boy wondered why no one was swimming in the lake. Why no ducks or geese paddled its rippling surface. Why no cat tails swayed along its shores.

     "It's the mine," his father said. But the boy saw no mine, or at least no buildings that might cover a mine shaft. Mines were dug deep into the soil, he believed. They went so deep they hit rock which had to be chiseled away. Deeper and deeper went the mine into rock, until it reached coal, when it stopped. Miners wearing headlamps were lowered in rickety elevators far into the ground, there they extracted the coal. When miners and coal came to the surface, the miners' faces looked black as if they'd bathed in coal dust.

     There are mines in Minnesota but not coal mines. I was about to find this out first hand. The day began quietly as I sat in the dark before a huge picture window. I'd brought coffee and notebook to a long table before the window. Slowly as I came awake, the sky brightened. Clouds touched with vermilion lifted into the dark above a gradually brightening layers of blue, red, pink, and gold. The sky was intensely beautiful, and empty except for a crow flying past. Below tte sunrise rippled the huge body of water we call Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world.

     Later I met a fisherman named Sven. By the time I arrived at the solid, spacious fish house, he'd developed a rhythm, lifting a herring from a wet bag, slapping the rather stout silver fish on a cutting board, chopping off its head, slicing down its middle and scooping out its innards. He checked the lungs to make sure they were dark red. If they were white, it meant the fish had been dead too long. Such fish he flipped into another bag. "For the gulls," he said and smiled at me. Outside in the shallow water, gulls called and lifted and settled, pushing against each other, eager to snatch up the discards.

     Once the inedible parts were sliced away, Sven daintily filleted the pink flesh--a surgeon of herring for restaurant patrons up and down the North Shore.

     Sven had a comfortable face gray-bearded face, and easy-going ways. He introduced me to the wide wooden rowboats herring fisherman row out into the lake. There they anchor nets which they check the next day or two. Drawing a length of net into the boat, they toss the herring stuck in the net into pails of lake water, and draw another segment of net forward. Their boats are deep as refrigerators, and curved as melons. Their ribs are stout as oak branches. Sven's grandfather made many in his time. The newest one Sven showed me was still golden in its stout elegance.

     "We couldn't fish for herring when Reserve Mining was still dropping tailings into the lake," Sven recounted. "Herring don't tolerate murky water." Now that the mining has stopped, herring have returned. "They'll never be as many as before," Swen said.

     That's what worries many of us about the newest proposed Poly Met mine near the North Shore of Lake Superior. Poly-Met implies many, poly, metals, met. Poly-Met wants to copper and nickel out of sulfide-containing rock. The water used in the mining operation would be dumped. Lately the Sierra Club estimates that it would take 500 years for natural processes to clean flowing water of sulfide pollution. These waters would include the Boundary Water area and the St. Louis River which runs into Lake Superior, not to mention groundwater, of this highly toxic sulfide pollution. Poly-Met needs state approval to begin this mine.

     Though proponents argue that the mine proposal has passed all kinds of environmental reviews, that it will bring hundreds of jobs to a depressed area of the state, the counter arguments have, in my opinion, far more weight:
     * once Poly-Met (run by a Canadian company) is established, the number of jobs will decrease...
     * Poly-Met will be mining a rock that contains sulfide. Sulfide pollutes water--water deep underground, water in rivers, lakes, streams and in Lake Superior. Sulfide pollution takes hundreds of years to dissipate. It essentially is permanent for any foreseeable future.
     * Such a mine would be an environmental disaster for any location, but this Poly-Met mine would be situated near the St. Louis River which runs into Lake Superior. Its sulfide pollution would seep into ground water which feeds a vast network of lakes and streams and potholes throughout northeastern Minnesota and the contiguous part of Canada. Vast segments of forest and many towns would find the water that makes life possible so polluted that, as Rachel Carson's opening to The Silent Spring foretold, all would be quiet. All birdsong and spring peepers, all children's singing and shouting, all creaking of fisherman's oars, all yelping of wolf pups and snorting of does and stags. Children would develop intestinal trouble, Many would die young. Mothers would abort fetuses. Fathers would find themselves wheezing when they lift something heavy.

     Environmental disaster has only one other name. The surface of it can be quiet, and peaceful, even beautiful. But it is silent because so much that was once alive is now dead.

Please note: If you want to oppose the PolyMet mine, here is a link to take you to a site for that purpose.

            

Thank you for taking action to oppose the proposed PolyMet mine. Please tell your friends and families to also make their voices heard by visiting our comment page or forwarding this email and asking them to click on this link to submit their comments.

 

Sincerely,

Jon Nelson and Kris Wegerson

NMW Co-Chairs

www.nmworg.org

Margotlog: A Certain Slant of Light

Margotlog: A Certain Slant of Light

In third grade, when I couldn't see the board, I got glasses. Suddenly every hair, every whisker on our cat shone. I spied dust on the chalkboard erasers. My mother developed wrinkles.

I needed a pair of eyes, properly adjusted. It was a quintessential transformation, but not permanent, only intermittent. Since then, I go through the days with adequate sight, until a certain slant brings me to a halt.

A few moments ago as I stood at the wide upstairs window onto our backyard, the sun caught fire in the yellowing maple. The yellow gained intensity from a feathery green pine behind it. Higher up, the naked branches of an elm scratched the pale sky. Two jays lighted there, wings ablaze with lapis lazuli.

 A rare lucidity was being made plain.

I am in love with the arrangement of words, and their capacity to bring an imagined world to life, full of motion and clarity. The light falls on a scene, I watch transfixed. Beings flit about, gathering essentials.

Lately I've been listening to an exceptionally fine recording of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett. This is the third time I've enjoyed this very fine book, read by a woman who renders masculine voices brilliantly--from Karenin's brusk, reserved suffering, to Vronsky's rather slapdash encounters with life, to Levin's self-critical, yet often ebullient love for what exists outside himself: people, dogs, the land. I suspect that Tolstoy's women, despite being well differentiated, from shy Kitty to upright, long-suffering Dolly, to Anna herself, are displayed more fully in their actions than in their inner and outer voices.

Yet overall, Anna Karenina is the most illuminating, the most clearly realized piece of literature I've ever encountered. A clear, gentle light opens first this, then more of it, then slight actions, then emotions, strong or submerged, then encounters quiet yet building in intensity, until with a gentle turn of phrase, this scene, this revelation slows, the chapter ends and we begin again.

It is my kind of bliss. Not Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas with their pell-mell, inside-outside word play, not even Emily's quiet exquisite knife-blade. But a world brought into the utmost, unfolding clarity. It makes me shiver and stand and stare, or close my eyes and listen to each breath, each scrape of the pen. 

Margotlog: The Dark Days

Margotlog: The Dark Days

It might as well be November today, October 25--the sky is gray, the trees though still green and gold and brilliant red are silent and no birds sing. In fact, as is usually the case as the season turns, many birds stop coming to our feeders. Even those who remain here all winter, seem less hungry. I read in the paper that this is the time when they change their feathers (like us, changing our wardrobes), and become more quiet.

Yet a few days ago in sun, the feeders were swarming with all kinds of birds--woodpeckers (more about those in a moment), chickadees almost flying into each other to get to the pole feeder with its four sites for food, nuthatches, and finches too, swarming around the long, fat tube feeder with its openwork access to seeds.

We have a new woodpecker, a ladder-back, red-bellied woodpecker. This ladder backed woodpecker has a wide stripe of red all the way from its forehead down the back of its head. It's identified as having a red belly, but I don't see that. This is a big bird, 8 inches to our more common Hairy at 7.5 and Downy, at 5.75. These two frequent woodpeckers, who are almost identical with black and white patterning and red spots at the back of their heads, take turns swooping toward the suet and fruit/nut cakes. The Red Bellied glides more than swoops, and has a softer "chuck"; whereas, the two black and white critters almost caw, they're so loud.

Attitudes toward birds vary so much, from almost complete inattention, to dislike--"they poop on my deck, etc" to my kind of fascination. I like them around, feed and water them, mourn those who die, enjoy using the binoculars to sight a bird in the trees, and on vacation like to identify different birds from those at home--like storks in South Carolina or curved-bill thrashers in Arizona. But I don't want to go on birding trips with "life birders," those people who start life lists and make it a point to check off finding the truly rare ones.

"My" birds are a part of my home, which I've extended into front and back yards with trees and bushes, and bird baths and a growing love of what are disreputably called weeds. To me they are among the most fascinating plants. In fact, this year we've had an array not found before because Fran has stopped mowing. We've let creeping Charlie become our grass, and now, lo and behold, all kinds of plants I've never seen before are cropping up.

Here's one to help me identify--it's low but not too low, maybe grows a foot off the ground. It's leaves are startlingly lobed--not sharp like a maple leave, but long and smooth-edged, like a glove for ten lizard-appendages; the stalks are very prickly, and the flowers are soft yellow and open  like small poppies. When they die, the seed pods that replace them are very prickly. What could this be?

A friend who has kept a beautiful, though very tidy garden for years recently admitted that she's stopped cutting down her dried stalks. "I've heard leaving them is better," she says. She means, I think, that we now understand the crucial interrelation between insects, native plants, birds, and probably native mammals (not, roaming cats!). A friendly family down the street, with a tiny house and two adorable tiny children, recently asked if they could harvest some of my milkweed seeds. Since I planted the boulevard years ago with native plants dug out of an abandoned ox-cart route, I have an ever increasing garden of milkweed, golden-rod, and maybe other plants native to this region. The Wild Golden Glow (in the Rudbekia family) I transplanted to a sunny spot beside the house bloom profusely, and then die back to clacking sticks topped with seed clusters.

Yesterday I watched two chickadees eating the seeds from these spiky clusters. It was a confirmation so moving I had to stop. Slowly, I and others are learning how much better our environment is if we allow as much that is native to the area to remain. Yet I too love the neighbor's monkshood, with its brilliant stalks of deep blue, purse-like flowers. Maybe monkshood is native to Minnesota. I'll have to look it up.

Margotlog: New site for reading my blog

Dear Friends and Readers,

I have a new website

margotgalt.com

You can now access my blog via my website. Simply type in the address above

into your browser, and it should bring you to the site. You can comment as before. I so appreciate

comments. My most recent entry is fairly recent, and doesn't appear on this site.

Let me know what you think about this change.

All best, Margot

Margotlog: My North Dakota Grandmother Augusta

Margotlog: My North Dakota Grandmother Augusta

When my sister visited from Boston last week, we dragged out the family albums and letters. Really, it's only one side of the family that's represented, and only one letter writer--our North Dakota grandmother, our mother's mother Augusta. We knew her not at all. But we knew the town of Hankinson, North Dakota quite well because our mother Maxine took us there, summer after summer, to stay in the big house where she grew up. It's still there, the house, being renovated by an enterprising family, after being broken into apartments, and generally neglected for years.
     But that's another, more recent story. What my sister and I found, or more truly, read for the first time were a sheaf of letters written in our grandmother Augusta's fast, open hand  during the winter and spring of 1928, the year our mother and her older sister Elinor lived together near the University of Minnesota. Their address was 1312 7th St SE, Minneapolis.
     Sometimes Augusta addressed the letters to Elinor Maxine Wipperman, no comma between the first names, certainly no zip code. Each small envelope contained two, maybe three pages written on both sides of somewhat yellowed paper. Each sheet, not even as wide as my stretched out hand. But the pages are still intact. It was 1928: My mother was a junior at the University, her older sister Elinor a senior.
     Augusta addressed my mother not as Maxine but as Mousie. Despite being shy, our mother would be the in-coming president of her sorority, Phi Omega Pi. She was making very good grades. But she was Mousie, her sister the older, less pampered Elinor.
     You would never know from these letters that a handful of disasters had struck the family: Augusta suffered a nervous breakdown, the first or second year my mother went to the University. There's enough family lore to explain that without her children, she fell into depression and had to be hospitalized. There's also the whispered implication that her husband, my grandfather, at least 10 years older than she, beat her, probably trying to "beat some sense into her." Maybe she would not stop weeping.
     The sprightly, loving tone of these letters gives a lie to such a tale, but I heard it in whispered conversations from my mother, though she never implicated her father in any way. I heard about that from my cousins who grew up in Hankinson. Their father was my mother's twin brother, Bud to our Mousie.
     My mother idolized her father, a self-made man who'd come from Milwaukee to take a job in a mercantile establishment, married (his first marriage) the owner's daughter, and in time owned the company. He later acquired a handful of rental properties and quite a bit of farm land outside town, around Lake Elsie.
     My mother's family was well-off by the time she was born. Years later, I experienced "Papa Max's house" as a mansion, but it wasn't that. Rather a well-built, spacious two-story prairie home with a full attic. Its shadowed rooms were lined with gleaming walnut woodwork, the upstairs bedrooms papered with cabbage roses or iris, a different design for each daughter's bedroom.
     By 1928, the agricultural depression had preceded the stock market crash of 1932, and eaten into the well-being of local business. In one of her 1928 letters August comments that it was 100 degrees that May afternoon, but she had to bake a turkey because a farmer had come into town wanting to trade it for some flour. The turkey had to be cooked or go bad. "I served it cold with potato salad," wrote Augusta to her daughters the next day. "I plan to make 'chicken salad' tonight."
     It's clear August was in charge of the household, and her mothering extended to the University and advising her daughters about clothes. "Mousie," she would write, "when you come home to keep house for Papa, bring a warm sweater--it's sometimes chilly in June. But buy a nice new voile dress in town, something peachy, and a pair of cotton knickers too."
     In another letter she will make Mousie undies from "Papa's wedding suit...nice fabric and the silk lining is lovely. The suit is too small for him now." Even in our tight times as the professor's "girls" in South Carolina, our mother never considered taking apart an outgrown suit to make us undies. This difference hints at Augusta's need to contribute to her daughter's wardrobe in the most satisfactory way possible, using fine fabric and her evident skill as a seamstress. She could make what was needed for practically nothing.
     Times were tight, but not that tight. Augusta would soon leave on the train for New York, "going east," as my mother used to say, to visit one of her older sisters, the one she called "Aunt Lena." What Lena was doing in New York I have no idea. But many of Augusta's May letters describe intricate plans for her train trip east. Mousie is to get on the Soo Line train in Minneapolis and ride with her mother to Saint Paul, where they'll "have a lovely dinner in the station." That would be Union Station which was beautifully renovated recently, perhaps to its original glory as the Twin Cities' railroad hub, where my sister, mother and I would also change trains years later, heading to North Dakota after our three days and two nights from South Carolina.
     It touches me to hear how precise and insistent Augusta is about seeing her youngest daughter. If Mousie can't meet her on Monday, then she'll change her departure for Sunday. "You are to slide through the turnstile and some sit with me," August directs. Or, "I'll be on the observation platform when the train pulls in, watching for you."
     I assume that this trip of six weeks to see her sister in New York would be therapeutic. She will not be lonesome, but active, involved, going to sit on the beach in her green sweater. Beach? This is not the New York City of skyscrapers and busy traffic I've envisioned. Perhaps beach means Long Island or Coney Island. No letters remain from Augusta's trip to explain.
     She died when I was three months old, dying at home from stomach cancer. I know the small narrow room the family created for her illness, downstairs beside the front bedroom where Papa Max slept when we visited years ago.Even as a child, I sensed something closed and secret in her bedroom with its narrow cot and toilet. Standing in front of the dressing table mirror, I brushed my heavy dark hair with Augusta's soft bristled brush on the dressing table. The brush did nothing but glide across my heavy hair. It was hard to open the warped drawers of the tiny table. But the sense of her gentle, dusty presence remains with me. I wish I had known her alive, though the letters are probably the next best thing.

Margotlog: Sitting on the Porch with Cats, or Maybe a Dog

Margotlog: Sitting on the Porch with Cats, or Maybe a Dog

     No matter how depressed I get, summer season only, there's an instant remedy--lifting one of our two (out of three) cats who'll tolerate a sit on the back deck, and carrying her (they're all hers) out with me. The deck itself stands rather high off the ground. The bench at the back of the deck (there's no roof or awning except the towering silver maple) at this time of year is wreathed with flowers--red hot pokers, purple pansies, yellow and gold marigolds, petunias (always some of the only kind that smell--midnight blue) and various spiky white and pink things whose names I forget the minute they're potted.

     With Julia, the black and white, lying at my side, my hand stroking her from ears to rump and flicking off the gathered fur, I stare into the deep backyard, trying to make out what birds are on the mid-way "fountain" feeder, meaning arms that rise up like fountaining water, and carry with them various kinds of bird feeders. The two types of familiar woodpeckers--downy and hairy--push themselves up and down the center pole--don't ask me why--then flit to the suet and fruit cakes. Chickadees with their chick-a-dee-dee, undulate from the dying apple tree--kept especially for their staging area--snatch a seed from the round "just for them" feeder, and undulate back. Arguing finches--gold and purple--land in groups on the sunflower feeders.

     Yesterday, Julia and I (she's named an honorary bird watcher) followed an intensely yellow goldfinch fly in, grab a seed, fly back to the apple branch where it met its wing-fluttering, whining offspring, who did not let the parent out of its sight. If the golden glow of the parent sped to the feeder and did not return within a minute, the gray-brown child followed, perching on the top knot of the feeder, doing its wing-flutter beg.

     Are these creatures my real family? Or is their ability to charm and delight a factor of how little I resemble them, but how much I love them? Probably the second. How I came to the cat thing is not a surprise. When I was in first grade, I "rescued" a meowing baby tabby cat as I walked to school. Carried him to my teacher who had the sense to call my mother rather than insist I release the varmint outside. And my mother had the sense to walk herself and my smaller sister the seven long blocks on foot from the Old Citadel in Charleston, S.C., where we lived, to the three or four houses that the lower school of Ashley Hall used for early grades. This kitten grew into a cat, but didn't live long, as I dimly remember. Still he was my cat, my first rescue.

     These days with "rescue" animals all around us, we are familiar with the obvious human (or maybe American) need to do right by wounded, lost, defeated, abandoned animals (usually domestic). But in the 50s when I was in school, such an idea did not exist. We might take in a vagrant cat or dog and make it our pet, but we did so as individuals. We could not join a group dedicated to such activities, as has my neighbor, a single woman with a house of her own, who has left corporate America to write for a rescue organization. Now she works at home with her two rescue dogs and various puppies she fosters toward new owners.

     Yet my mother, who was far from sentimental except about Italian tenors (she married one), seemed to grasp my need for that cat I rescued. But she never fed the birds, though she appreciated the cardinals who sang in her Charleston back yard, the fifteen years she sat every evening with her "Chummie," a low-to-the-ground mutt, with crinkly fur and an entirely friendly manner. The fifteen years she lived alone after my father died. I do not live alone, but I need to foster, feed, watch, enjoy the birds I can draw to my yard, and we humans in our house love our three cats, even the ever timid Tilly who would fight any attempt to take her outside for a sit on the back porch.

Margotlog: Summer Bliss and Summer Blah!

Margotlog: Summer Bliss and Summer Blah!

Here in fly-over land we've had a beautiful spate of clear, sunshiny days, low humidity, fresh breezes. The last few days especially, the sky has looked like a clear polished gem winding us around a god's finger. Monarchs arrived earlier than I've seen in years, flitting among the huge stand of milkweed populating our patch of boulevard. For a brief moment, I imagined the world was saved. Farms worldwide had outlawed neoniconicides, and soon all would be well with bees, butterflies, not to mention those of us on two legs who depend on water sources and soil and air.That fantasy dissipated as I walked down the block and found two car/trucks idling their engines as the occupants stood outside and gabbed. Where were the environment police?

Out back, high clouds of green have taken over the sky. I dream up into them, remembering "green, how I love you, Green" (Neruda) while beside me Julia hums her own purr of pleasure. From the bird feeders we catch chickadees' deep-in-the-throat gurgle, and gold and rosy finch chatter, and the squawks of many many woodpeckers stabbing at suet. Truly I've seen more downy and hairy woodpeckers than ever before at our summer feeders, while the dozens of finches pile onto the open-work sunflower cage like starving immigrants just off the boat.

I've been listening for birds that hide in the shrubbery--cat birds and wrens. They're back, just not where they were last year, but within range of my feet. Once I saw four wrens slice across a nearby alley and into a bush, chattering up a storm. They're so sassy, these little mites, but also hard to pin down, with nothing of a robin's sedate saunter from yard to yard.

No one has died, no one was struck by lighting, no one ran out of gas on the freeway. The daughter, for her birthday, is going to Sicily in October, on her mother's dime, and I, the mother, could not be happier. At first she and I talked about going together, but when I saw her excitement, meeting her friends in Western Massachusetts, I knew instantly who her companions should be. "It's a trip of a lifetime," she just wrote me from Minneapolis. Well, maybe not of a lifetime, but of this moment. She works so hard, and she's such a good "mom" to two dogs and two cats, not to mention such a good daughter to divorced parents. It's time to get away, so far away that until a few months ago she had never hear of the town where her tour will be based--Taromina, on the west coast of Sicily, above sun-bright sea with a real volcano rising in the distance--Mt. Etna.

But not all sudden visitations are so happy. Four days ago I woke with such agony in my eyes I felt sure they'd split open. The "layers of my cornea had come unstuck." This has happened before, enough times that every night, I apply eye ointment and every morning use artificial tears to help the lids open without dislodging the fragile layers with their bursts of pain. But this pain was not a burst. It was an eruption--wave after wave. I walked around with my head down and begged the gods for mercy. Next day the eyes were red, lids swollen. Pink eye. Common disease of kindergarten. Had I shaken the hands of any kindergarteners?

The nurse at CVS Mini Clinic knew just what to order. Now three days later, hours pass and I'm only minimally aware of being somewhat challenged by light, or wind or  fatigue. Imagine a staple being suddenly driven into the eye, and you have the agony that was mine, but now has passed. I won't wish it on anyone. Except to wonder who wished it on me and spitefully plan ways to return the favor in spades once I find out.

Margotlog: Secrets Told on the Lagoon

Margotlog: Secrets Told on the Lagoon

It takes a while for essential moments of a trip to become apparent. After returning from Venice six weeks ago, images of standing in the bottom of a vaporetto with my friend Chris, crossing the lagoon from Torcello, have come occasionally to mind. Now I know why.

Early this morning I found a gasping Polyphemous moth deep in the back yard. It lay on the ground, its wings rising and falling as it tried to lift. A beautiful, large moth, wide as my hand, its light brown body flounced with white, and two huge eye spots staring from its lower wings. I helped it into my hand and released it into the air. It fell back. The best I could do, then, was to settle it in a tall stand of mint. When I couldn't find it again, I knew our time together was over.

I don't see my friend Chris often, though she may be the earliest friend I have in Minnesota. Our first husbands were medical interns together, and Chris coached me on breast-feeding. And I? What did I give her? Continuation, perhaps. A link with earlier years, and the best, almost unqualified support anyone can give anyone else. Since she has lived in Michigan for many years, we don't see each other often, and there have been been long periods when we only exchanged Christmas cards. Now that we're older, we try to see each other more often, knowing that time is precious.

So we took the chance to visit Venice together. She knew I loved the city and her grandson had told her she must see it. Sharing a large room together, in a former convent not far from San Marco, we came to know each other's bodies more intimately. She's had both breasts removed. I watched her dangle a wonderful padded bra then turn her back and put it on. It doesn't matter if she wears it. She's learned how to dress to mask herself as a no-breasted woman. But it was a mark of our ease with each other that she showed the bra to me, though not the scared flesh where the breasts had been.

We visited Torcello because I said we must. This magical island in the lagoon lies quite far from Venice proper. It's magical because it's largely unpopulated, wild and golden and studded with trees, with a canal of course, and rose bushes beside cafes, and several expansive, low-lying, ritzy establishments. The earliest inhabitants of Venice settled on Torcello and when malaria drove them away, they left behind their 11th-13th-century basilica which most visitors now come to see. It is the oldest remaining church in the archipelago, filled with dusty, golden light, and mosaics that curve into its dome and send the fixed stares of saints and the Madonna down on us below.

Returning across the lagoon to Venice, Chris and I stood in the shadowed bottom of the boat, our hands around a pillar. How we got started on the subject of her breast cancer, I don't remember. But soon she was launched, talking about possibly being affected by a chemical called PBB. As the boat ploughed the gentle waves, she gave me a skeleton of a horrible truth. Between 1973 and 74, a Michigan chemical company unwittingly put PBB, a fire-retandant chemical, in bags that were shipped to feed mills where it was mixed with an animal-feed supplement. The cows that ate the feed almost immediately became ill--"gaunt and weak. Their hooves grew to ghastly proportions. Abscesses developed, and their hides went thick and elephant-like" (Robin Erb, Detroit Free Press).

Chris told me that milk, eggs, and meat for the state were soon contaminated by PBB. Eventually when the cause was identified, thousands of cows directly poisoned by the chemical, were shot. Many farmers lost their entire herds. Chickens, pigs, and sheep who'd eaten by-products from such cows were eventually also put to death. Burying this huge die-off of animals was not always done in ways to protect local water supplies or soil from contamination.

PBB is an endocrine disruptor--it causes cancers of many kinds but especially in organs like breast, thyroid, and uterus that produce or are affected by hormones. "The cows' hooves were curved up like rocking horse bottoms," I remember Chris saying. "They could hardly walk. And many calves were born dead." We had talked about how breast and pancreatic cancer occurred within generations of her family--her mother had died of pancreatic cancer and her grandmother from breast cancer. Her sister had the gene for breast cancer, and later developed the disease. Though Chris didn't have the gene, she had breast cancer, and for the first breast, a radical mastectomy. When it recurred two years later, she had the lumps cut out, chemo, radiation, and tamoxifen. Later when lumps also developed in the second breast, she got tired of having them cut out, and had the entire breast removed even though the lumps were precancerous.

In the semi-darkness of the vaporetto, standing together clutching the pillar, I felt overwhelmed and horrified by her suffering and courage, and by this environmental disaster, so insidious and unrecognized, so ugly in its manifestations for the cows who were the first to ingest the chemical, for the farmers who all of a sudden found their herds deformed, weak and ill, as if a malign genie had spread a poisonous but undetectable dust over the land. In many ways what happened was exactly like that--malign, incomprehensible, coming out of nowhere, and lethal.

Thinking about it, still makes my chest constrict and stomach hurt. Decades have passed. Michigan, which is not a wealthy state, has turned over the monitoring of people affected by PBB to researchers at Emory University, in Atlanta. Finally there will be a federal clean-up of the factory site where PBB was manufactured. Citizens who live in the small Michigan town near the former factory find dead robins in their yards every summer. The ground where the poisoned animals were buried is still itself full of poison..

And my dear friend? I consider her a lucky survivor. I think she does too. There is no direct evidence that her cancers were caused by PBB, but it's possible that her children grew up drinking milk contaminated by PBB. She hopes they will continue unscathed. Many of the children born to farmers whose cows were directly affected with PBB, these children, and some of the farmers themselves, died what we would consider an early death--in their 40s from leukemia or 50s from lung disease or thyroid cancer. Losing a child, after losing a herd and thus a livelihood, seems to me such a burden of loss, grief, and anger as to be almost insupportable. It is hard not to feel that no redress will ever be enough for such toxic negligence. Only a hope for forgiveness.

Dear Friend in Romania, thank you for telling me how you located my poem "Translate," via italianamericanwriters.com/Fortunato.html "Translate" is one of my favorite poems, but not one I revisit often. So this has been a welcome reunion, poet and poem. It's also a delight to hear that you have included it in your undergraduate paper on English/Italian writers in the United States.

The " blue-eyed one" in the poem is a friend who like me was studying Italian. That's why I included the litanies of Italian words, to suggest our effort to learn the language, and free ourselves from fear about all kinds of other things, notably about our potential power to change or  "speak in our key."

"Key" here is first a musical key--I was urging us to make our own music, not play the tired old tunes of repression. But key also unlocked parts of ourselves that were repressed or denied by the dominant, male culture. Some of this language sounds outdated now that feminism, in its many guises, has helped alter attitudes in the U.S. But when I wrote this poem in the 1980s, feminism in the U.S. was only beginning to take hold. Revolution of this kind takes a long time.

The poem was written during the years I was in my first marriage when I was attempting to break free of certain gender restrictions on action, speech, achievement, enjoyment, mistakes. Caution and constraint can be extremely limiting, and during this period of my life, it was my connection to other women who were mothers like me and also trying to claim their own emotions, ideas,and power to act--as I say, only through my connection to other women did I grow to trust myself and take leaps into independence. Those leaps were painful and jarring and, like my divorce, led to breakage.

For students and young woman today, I suspect such restraints are not so limiting, but that surely depends on place and culture. When I teach immigrant young women, especially those from Asian and African countries, I find them hampered by uncertainty as to how to voice their own ideas. Some of this hesitation is undoubtedly related to their general uncertainty as immigrants.

I do want to talk to you and ask you questions about your town or city, your studies and about your country. Am I right that there are many Italian-speaking people in Romania?

Before we set a time to call, please tell me what town you live in, so I can look it up on a map.

Also sketch in a little about yourself--age, activities, family, neighborhood, interests, talents, etc. I'm very curious to know you better.

When you think of me, think of a medium-sized woman, in a medium-sized city, with tree-lined streets, and one of the largest American rivers, the Mississippi, flowing through its downtown. That is Saint Paul, the capital of Minnesota. It is a lovely city with a beautiful, serene cathedral where I often stop simply to find my spirit rise into its welcoming dome and hover with the circle of soldier-saints, my favorite of which is clothed in green.

What soldier saints are doing in a Midwestern American cathedral probably has to do with the spiritual battles we all must fight, no matter what belief system we embrace. But those soldiers also link us to early days when Minnesota was a rough territory, populated by hardy settlers who could survive sub-zero (centigrade) winters and baking hot summers, with a few plagues of locusts thrown in. Minnesota also has a substantial population of Native Americans, some of whom have enough money via casinos, and some of whom do not.

Now I'm going to include the poem you're writing about, "Translate," for the simply joy of experiencing it again.

With all best wishes, Margot

 
TRANSLATE

1.
We played like children
scales on the keyboard
practicing Italian
subjunctives and dreams,
missing the flats
F sharp in G major,
the difficult plurals
da capo, staccato.
You told about failure,
long legs on the pedals,
you spoke in Italian;
long hair down your back.

2.
I have lived with husband,
marito, marito
who married again,
sposato, espoused
a woman he knew
prima, prima
he began making a garden
giardino, unsown.
I have painted the walls,
muri, muri
I have painted the walls,
grigio, grey.

3.
Last night we talked
without looking down,
your blue eyes sharp,
you played all the notes,
you spoke in our language,
you said it in English,
I learn to be single.

4.
Not lost in the courtyard
perdito, perso
chasing the sky
cielo, cielo
tramps in the garden
giardino, giardino
with outstretched hands
mano, mani
No longer the girl
stumbling, running
who could never be good
buona, bene
followed by tramps
with pockets bulging
followed by tramps
with misplayed scales.

5.
No! I hear you
in the language itself
pull the egg
from the snake's mouth,
pull words from the son,
frame daughter's slammed door.
I hear you, amica,
understand all the notes,
speak in our key.

 
From THE ANNUNCIATION, Copyright © 2001 by Margot Fortunato Galt. All rights reserved.

Margotlog: Our Flanders Field

Margotlog: Our Flanders Field

     For the British, the deaths in World War I struck hard. In that "war to end all wars," some in British coastal towns could see the flare of mortars and hear the firing of guns in Belgian. In that war of attrition, men dig into trenches equipped almost like houses with cots and kitchens. For weeks, months, years, British and Belgians dug in opposite their German enemies. The soldiers could smell each other's cooking, hear occasional voices raised in agony or song.

     I imagine there is a double horror of war fought in such close proximity: fear for one's own agony, coupled with disgust and fear at the agony you cause. Erik Marie Remarque's quintessential war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, (193?) tells it best--the young German students conscripted to fight a war they don't understand, and don't want, who in mud and fear become crazed with waiting, until they rush over the tops into blind hatred and enemy fire.

     Of my father and his three brothers, only the youngest, Frankie, went into combat in World War II. Whatever bloodshed he witnessed as he recovered from malaria in North Africa, once he was sent to Naples, his service became the rollicking events of an urban cowboy. He shooed whores into American officers' beds, requisitioed donkeys, bread, and wine. Since he spoke formal and dialectical Italian, he hinted that he's been part of an American/British contingent to urge the Pope to speak out against the war. Yet, even Frankie came home a changed man, refusing to visit his wife and daughter, divorcing and marrying a New York lawyer he'd met in the Army.

   My father, called the "professor" by his more he-man brothers, was excused from combat because of poor eyes and flat feet. Instead he did war work at Kabuta in Pennsylvania--who knew what was being manufactured there. In the worker's cottage where we lived, my mother's tales created my first memories--of a doctor leaning over me as she held me down on the kitchen table for him to pierce my eardrum and let the pus drain. "Snow up to the top of the windows," she would say, turning my early memories into scenes from her North Dakota childhood, and making me a prime reader later of the Laura and Marie books.

     It's been hard for me to bring war inside the family circle, that is, until this spring when I taught three veterans in a mid-level writing class. One never went overseas, one was a helicopter pilot in Iraq, and one spent a decade in the service, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The two who saw active duty both came home with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Now as I drive my husband to the airport a few days from Memorial Day, my husband, the Vietnam draft refuser who spent 18 months in a federal penitentiary rather than escape to Canada or fight in Vietnam, my husband who does not talk about war, any war unless prodded, my husband who has his own kind of scars from his prison experience--he's on his way to play Scrabble in San Jose. But as I pause to study the rows of white crosses in Fort Snelling National Cemetery, I think of my three students, one who proudly described walking with his veteran grandfather among the rows of crosses, anticipating about his own burial there, who came home from Iraq, after flying the wounded from battle to hospital and could not shake the screams and terror from his memory, and the third who eventually trained U.S. soldiers to take their places in Afghanistan, surely one of the strangest wars American soldiers have ever fought.

     These two wrote about returning home with a sense of terrified emptiness, becoming easily agitated and losing emotional control, of being unable to look for work or keep their hands from shaking. This is service that saps life for years after the battlefield. With help from the Veterans Administration, each man has found ways to help himself recover--talk therapy, hard exercise, weeping, writing, working with other vets. Whatever else I may think of President Obama, and I'm largely a supporter, I honor his efforts to keep the United States out of active combat in the implosion that is the near east. I honor this, even as I'm horrified at the hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the breakdown of civilized decency. It is very hard to tell what will happen there, and what we may be called upon to do.

Margotlog: Across the Racial Divide

Margotlog: Across the Racial Divide

When I was growing up in South Carolina--before contemporary civil rights, before Martin Luther King, Jr., before busing, white fight, and the recent police violence against black people in many U.S. cities--I lived in a block-long, castle-like fortress that was built to house the military academy that became The Citadel. My father taught at that college, which had moved north of downtown Charleston, to a lovely site on the Ashley River. Charleston, in its amusing sense of self, used to brag that its two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, came together to form the Atlantic Ocean.

I was a kid who walked to school, to an elite, all-white-girls academy called Ashley Hall. But I walked through neighborhoods where many black people lived. An old granny sat every day in her yard, her hair in a turban, a pipe between her lips. Above, on a long porch, little black kids, too young for school, looked down solemnly at me, as I looked up solemnly at them. It would never have occurred to me, or I suspect to them, that we might speak to each other. But we saw each other every weekday, and I wondered why they didn't have shoes, and why the old granny sat outside and smoked a pipe. I'd never seen a white woman smoke anything at all. As I say, I was very young.

My parents had come from the north, my mother from a tiny town in North Dakota and my father from Pittsburgh, where they met. Initially when we arrived, they had nothing to say about the dark-skinned people we called Negroes. I didn't grow up with a black woman who cooked or cleaned or took me and my sister to the park. My parents knew nothing about the intensely connected ways of Southern blacks and white. But first in my walks to school, then from our Old Citadel custodian, Shorty, and later from riding the city buses, and arguing with my father as civil rights heated up, I learned quite a bit about the complicated, often disheartening, and infuriating, and sometimes simply human ways that black and white people interacted.

Let's say I gathered a satchel of images and voices, attitudes and surmises. Only a few black people actually spoke with me--Shorty came by our apartment to fix a water faucet. He doffed his soft fedora, and with a polite, "Yes, Mrs. Fortunato, yes, ma'am," he entered our kitchen with his tools and stopped the drip. He also took our colored Easter chicks down to his farm on Johns Island when they lost their pink or blue down and began to grow white pin feathers. "Can't have a chicken crowing in the house," my father informed us. Shorty touched the brim of his hat and kindly carted the growing chickens away. We considered it a favor. He probably did too.

Later when I was allowed to go home with some schoolmates from Ashley Hall, I met their "colored maids." These were uniformed women with strict requirements for hand washing and sitting at the table to eat our snack. They bustled like my mother in our Old Citadel kitchen, and they corrected my friends when they got boisterous. Their voices had authority, and my friends obeyed.

Even later, I sat in the back seat of my girlfriend's car while her boyfriend drove us to visit her former cook, now too ill to work. She and her family brought this woman boxes of groceries and, if I remember right, paid for her doctoring. They treated her almost like family, thought she clearly lived a different life, in a small house with a dirt yard, and her daughter's children swarming in and out with questions and childish troubles. This was not the lovely, serene house near the Battery at the end of Charleston where my friend lived. In fact, other than the slew of kids, the old cook's house was more like our own rather cramped dwelling, now that we had moved across the Cooper River to the small town of Mt. Pleasant.

Recently, I've begun to harbor a theory about race in north and south. It goes like this. In Southern towns where white families hired black men and women routinely, where these daily experiences of interacting taught them a range of shared emotions, from irritation to appreciation to obligation and resentment, it was harder to categorize the other race as the enemy, or as hateful. Daily interaction proved time and again that individual connections were rich, valued, and human. Yes, of course, there was racism. The city buses were segregated, and the same black women who worked hard in white kitchens were forced to trudge all the way to the back of the bus, passing me with an empty seat beside me, ashamed and baffled at a system that could extract such indignity from decent, hard-working women.

White people in many Northern cities, like Ferguson, and more recently Baltimore, and including Minneapolis/St. Paul, have systematically moved out of contact with black people. The phenomenon is called "white flight" and it accounts for the acres of white suburbs, while the core cities have become increasingly black. The race divide that did not exist in the Charleston of my childhood has fostered several generations of white people, including many police, who have not grown up knowing black people in a regular, everyday way. The teachers in schools are mostly white, and though they teach black students, they do not understand how their students' extended families work, how clan systems and churches take care of what in white culture is managed within a tighter family circle. I venture to guess they can't "read" black behavior, nor fully understand what black students say.

What they do know is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear engendered by racism, hardened by their black students' poverty. It is very hard to be comfortable when you're teaching students who are intractably poor. You can't grasp some of the essentials of their lives--the fast moves, the shifts from a parent to a grandparent, the ways black boys and then men make up for their degraded status via violence. Because along with "white flight" have gone jobs. Companies have moved from the center of cities to the peripheries. 
It is harder and harder for black people caught in poverty to make their way out.

A very clear example is what happened in Minneapolis. About twenty years ago, I began hearing that when the steel towns in the east went bankrupt, leaving black men without the good jobs that had made it possible for them to support families, single black women moved with their children from Gary, Indiana, to Minneapolis, because there were generous public services here. That may have been true, but the communities they created, in North Minneapolis, for instance, have not been able to support their children and grandchildren. There is growing poverty and anger. Growing distance. It makes me sad and troubled. It makes me wish we could reclaim some of what was generous and interactive about southern life when I was growing up, what is now, an increasingly long time ago.

Margotlog: For the Love of Julia

Her tongue is warm and rhythmic. We’re sitting flank-to-flank on the back- deck bench, my hand on her back to keep her from sprinting off, though she shows no sign of wanting to because, instead, she’s laving my arm with her insistent pink tongue. What other creature in the world loves my salt enough to clean it over and over from the back of my hand, wrist, lower arm?

“Don’t let that cat lick you,” my persnickety father used to warn. “Who knows where its tongue has been.” Well, there is that. I don’t let her lick my face, at least not more than a few swipes.

Julia, herself, is quite sleek. When either of her human companions steps out of bath or shower, Julia is there, waiting to be “wetted.” She gets almost dripping wet and immediately dries herself with her tongue. She doesn’t have to wet herself. We do it for her. And she returns the favor. This has proved an easy way of getting Vaseline into her.

Julia hacks. For maybe the first five years of our residence together, she hacked up globs of hair and food. Hairballs. Even vets recommended Vaseline. Our other two cats reluctantly lick if off their paws. Julia takes it from the side of my arm.

A year ago, the hacking changed. Instead of bringing something up, she crouched down, head extended like a snake, and wheezed. Asthma? In a cat? The vet had to do an x-ray. The only remedy was steroids. Already she was plump. Steroids would have made her fatter. We tried a diet.

 Almost impossible. She loves to eat, or let’s say, she doesn’t wear off her food. I’m afraid the asthma is slowing her down, but she was getting fatter even before.

Julie spends the night in bed with Fran. Or rather on the quilt Fran throws over himself as he sleeps in his recliner. Bad back, recliner bed. After several years of this, he doesn’t sleep well if she isn’t there to warm his knees. “For the love of Mike!” my father used to swear. I’d say, “For the love of Julia.”

Beautiful, sleek Julia. Even strangers meeting her for the first time comment, “Tuxedo cat.” Or “Kitler.” This bestowed because of the white that starts at the tip of her nose and swags down her cheeks and onto her chest, with a spot of black right above her mouth—Hitler’s moustache. If any of our cats were a killer, it would probably be her because as far as we know, she is the only one who ever knew the outdoors. But in cat years, that was long ago, and probably in cat leagues, far away.

Puss in Boots, she is also, with her four white paws below the sleek black tuxedo. A fancy-dress, ready-for-the-ball cat. Now we twirl together in a slow dance of sprightly, warm affection, until she excuses her and heads toward solitude.

Margotlog: Low Level Hum

Margotlog: Low Level Hum

There was expectation to the evening, a low-level hum of overcast sky and awkward bird call. At first I was going to walk the neighborhood. But along the drive, shoots were being strangled in last year's leaves. Pawing aside and tossing the the brown between my legs onto the drive, I uncovered more bright blue Scylla. When I looked up, two girls sped past, one with red glasses.

There's a random heart in me. Leave enough leaves with insects for the birds to eat. Leave enough of last years leaves, wet below the surface, keeping the soil moist against a drought.

After raking and carrying bundles to dump under the backyard pine, I set off. Couldn't go down the first alley--no enormous cottonwood tree curved against the sky. Nor the second one either--it ended beside a big apartment building. The third took me across two-lanes of traffic at Lexington and into familiar territory. A low-level hum of interest--to see the backyard behind the small house where my daughter and I had hunkered down, our first years in Saint Paul. 

For months, even years at a time, I do not think about the house, even though it's only eight blocks away. Mounting the alley heading toward it, I passed the huge landmark of a tamarack just retrieving its needles. Two heavy bodied crows swept above my head and settled in its top.

 Fragments of those three years kept time with my steps. I remembered my hands resting on a white sheet--so thin and white, they seemed almost insubstantial. She and I had had a hard time before we broke away. My hands said something about being worn down almost to the nub.

There was Easy the cat. No, Easy came to us when we still lived in the big duplex with the man who was sometimes my comrade. Our cat, the one we adopted for our little house, came from the basement of an antique shop on West Seventh. I can't remember her name just now, only the calico splotches of her, and her pee on the left-over carpet in the basement.

A huge snowfall our second year caved in the decrepit roof of the garage, allowing us to get enough insurance to rebuild it. Now I am about to pass the garage with its tangle of unkempt branches. The current owner has done nothing to enhance it. The roof still holds, and the outside walls remain a patchwork of siding. A scarecrow of a garage with a fine felt hat.

Do I really want to turn the corner and walk past the house which faces William Mitchell Law School? When we would walk out the front door toward Grand Avenue and its tantalizing clothing from Scandinavia, we would be putting a good face on our lives. She, beautiful even as an early teen, got a job in that Scandinavian clothing shop, and I, a easy moving skirt which I don't wear anymore.

Now that I'm passing the house, I remember that the front yard has lost its enormous silver maple. That tree dominated the low roof, and had the odd effect of making both itself and the small house seem to touch the sky.

I notice as before the curved window in the attic. Behind that front attic were two small rooms, and a tiny window out the back, like a ship's porthole, which gave me the sense of being at sea. In some ways we were at sea, unsure of land, trying to keep afloat in the tiny boat of a house, on a spinning ocean of a planet, in widening washes of space.

Margotlog: A Panting Junco and Silkwood

Margotlog: A Panting Junco and Silkwood

     This morning in my usual way, I flung on a coat over my robe and went to the backyard, planning to spread seeds for the birds. There in the driveway where I'd been throwing handfuls of seeds all winter hunched a small gray-black bird. It was panting.

     In the last week the air has been full of juncos, twittering in their more musical way than the sparrows' insistent, mindless chatter. I'd never seen so many of the dark males before, so dark as to almost black, but identifiable immediately when they flew, spreading their tail feathers and showing off the strips of white on either side.

     Poor little bird, I thought, as I stood there in the chill drizzle, watching it pant. We had silhouettes of hawks on all our windows facing the back yard, but still it may have bammed into a window. Other than its panting, it didn't move, just hunched over its legs, keeping warm. Deciding to wait before doing anything, I returned inside, read the paper, drank a cup of coffee. I still hadn't fed the birds. But there were distractions. I confessed to my husband that I'd been feeling lonesome lately. I wanted more company, I wanted to host a dinner party. He wasn't opposed, just not eager. Odd how we have changed as time passes. I'm more forgetful. He is less social. Babysitting his grandchildren once a week, and playing Scrabble at least that often, he doesn't seem to need more contact outside the home.

     Throwing on my coat again, and stuffing my feet into boots because it was drizzling, I went out again to watch the panting junco. It had moved maybe three inches to another patch of seeds. Still hunched into itself, still panting. I decided to take action. Don't ask me what triggered the decision. I knew what to do since for years I've been taking injured birds to the Wildlife Rehab Center on Dale, north of the freeway. I even took a bat last February when I returned from a writer's retreat at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, only to discover the next morning, a bat in our Saint Paul sink. Yes, it could have come from our own stash of bats in the attic. But this bat was in the kitchen sink. Hydrophobia! I thought terrified. Within minutes, Fran had captured the bat and put it in a cooler, I had clothes on, and was in the car driving north on Dale. I arrived a half hour before the Center opened, and walked in a woodland, hoping the incarceration in the cooler wouldn't kill the bat. A week later, a report came: it was normal and would be kept until the weather was warm enough for its release.

     Recently Fran and I watched the movie Silkwood, directed by Mike Nichols. We were probably inspired by Meryl Streep's nomination for an Academy Award, and memories of seeing her luminous, intelligent performances in other movies. But I think our motive this time was more about the facts, the real life on which the movie was based. Silkwood is a bio-pic about a real woman who worked at a plutonium pellet fabricating plant during the 1970s. The movie chronicles her transformation from a flighty, friendly, humorous sort to a no-holds-barred activist.

     The transformation is halting--she becomes disturbed hearing a co-worked scream as she's being treated with a corrosive substance to "clean" her from a "spill." She begins to notice slipshod practices that endanger herself and others. She is "picked" by management to be part of a surveillance team largely, it turns out, so management came keep an eye on her. Her home life with lover and roommate begins to fragment. She is not dependable in old familiar ways. She contacts the Atomic Energy Committee in Washington and is flown there to give testimony. She presents her fears and findings to a group meeting of workers, hoping to unionize them. Ultimately, she is killed on the road at night. We're sure it's inspired by the company.

     Reading about the real life aftermath, we learn that her friends and children sue the company, and the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. The company must pay a large sum of money. Ultimately the plant is closed. Yet, there's a sense at the end of the movie that she has given her life to help protect others. Maybe this is exactly what she was doing in real life.

     The element in the movie that most interests me is Silkwood's slow built-up from awareness to taking action. It's this hiatus that I experience almost every time I put my body in action to help another being. Of course I'm not risking my life or job. The stakes are smaller. Yet every time I have taken a bird or yes a bat to the Rehab Center, my own needs and plans become, at some point, hugely secondary. I cannot NOT take action.

     This morning, as I asked Fran to help, rushed to get dressed, readied a basket where I've taken birds before, and selected a small towel to throw over the bird so it could be captured, I flitted from this to that, not finishing one thing, finding I'd left a crucial piece somewhere, imagining opening the car door before capturing the bird, seeing myself on the road with the wicker basket beside me, seeing myself carrying it into the Center and plunking it down, and hoping the small junco would live.

     Luckily when we went out with the basket, the bird took a hop, flew a few feet, then lifted higher and arrowed between the garage and wire fence, where there are with lots of sticks, a safe place for a small bird who may not be panting anymore. 

Margotlog: Because I Stand by This Window

Margotlog: Because I Stand by This Window

In the last week, the Christmas cactus by the computer has grown bright green shoots two and a half inches long. The light is changing, lengthening, and the wind is whirling. Long sticks of trees across the street sway like dancers in a sea-sky with clumps of clouds and splashes of blue.

Out the back window onto the backs of houses, I stare into feather-dusters of dark green white pine, and beyond, the twisted high vaults of the neighbor's elm. These are my trees, I belong to them, and to the gnarled, dwarfed crab apple which soon will die, yet still takes its awkward stance by the fence.

What does it take to fall in love with the physical world? To know a place as an extension of oneself? To let the gaze expand from inside through the glass to the outside world, where daily I spread seeds for the birds, spill out the used bird bath and refill it with warm water. Yesterday evening six morning doves lifted off in irregular pairs with a whirr of wings. My doves, I said to myself, not to possess them but to let them own a part of me.

Last spring after our brutal winter of heavy and continuous snow, first one, then the other of a dove pair found their way to the seeds in the back yard. One seemed to have a bulge at one side of her breast. I was afraid she was injured. But what could I do? Their lives must be lived in danger, as are ours, only different.

Gradually she recovered, if indeed that was what happened. Maybe she was already carrying eggs. Truly I could only guess--today six doves, the next day, none. Have they all six died? I am not in charge, nor do they owe me anything but their soft mournful calls, their soft gray pliant shapes which suddenly open to a fantail edged in white.

The doves take me back to childhood visits in North Dakota. We did not have morning doves in South Carolina, at least not in my cityscape. Only pigeons. But as I lay in the quiet upstairs bedroom of my grandfather's North Dakota house, I heard the coo-coo and was told it meant rain. Listening as a way of knowing oneself in a moment in space.

Wallace Stevens, the great 20th-century American poet, wrote, "The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world." So I am not poor, counting over my riches, in this fading light of a blustery late March evening.

Margotlog: Key West: What to Tell a Housebound Friend

Margotlog: Key West: What to Tell a Housebound Friend

First, it's an island at the end of a chain of islands called the Florida Keys. Key stands for Cay, which I think is Spanish or Meso-American meaning small island.

Second, and here you can imagine me actually speaking to her by phone, though she's not far away, only West St. Paul. I make my voice to be clear and encouraging. She spends her days fighting acute pain. Today, she's "fallen off a cliff," by which she means, a movement has created a surge of agony. She wants my voice to take her out of pain's narrow confines. She wants description.

"I liked one place best," I begin. "The butterfly garden. The warm, enclosed garden is full of plants butterflies love. I recognized mint and milkweed. The paths are full of huge blue Morphos, as wide as my hand, fluttering, iridescent blue. As if some hand had cut sky cloth into scintillating shapes. How long do they live? I asked the butterfly keeper. 'Five days,' he said, 'and they don't eat at all.' That made me sad, but also amazed that there could be such die-off and yet so many here, fluttering against the glass, sipping water, even one briefly resting on my shoulder. But this is the Morpho's time-tested way. 

"I don't see many Monarchs, I told the keeper. How come? We both knew almost without speaking how imperiled this once iconic North American and Mexican orange and black butterfly has become. 'We've chosen not to bring them inside, but leave them where we hope they'll flourish.' I understand I tell him. Why less than fifteen years ago when I was driving down Highway 35 from northern Minnesota, such swarms of lazy flying Monarchs crossed in front of me, I had to slow down to keep from hitting them. Now I'm lucky if I see a few up north, and a few here in my St. Paul garden.

"'Do everything you can to help,' he said. 'Here we're working with farmers in Oklahoma and Texas to leave margins around their fields for wild flowers. That's where the Monarchs find the milkweed where they lay their eggs. Oklahoma and Texas are the last stops before Mexico where they can start a new generation.'"

As I talk, I try to recollect the colors and shapes of the garden's other winged beauties--some long and narrow with red in their centers, and black and white on the margins of their wings. Some broad and jagged with yellow and brown zig-zags, and the edges of their wings crisped. Some sedately black and white. Some entirely one color, like a North American bright orange, oblong butterfly, quite pretty against the green. I describe this to my friend, the wounded artist, who is practicing what it looks like in her imagination.

In this plethora of winged creatures, birds have a place too, but the biggest aren't flying. They're three-year-old, hot pink flamingos, "rescued" from a breeder in Ontario, Canada. Not named Rhet and Scarlett, but could be. They're honking from their pool in the midst of all this fluttering and chirping. Scarlett tries to climb out, but slides back off the slippery rocks. I don't want to come face-to-face with her on the path. Yes her beak curves downward in a most peculiar way, but her neck looks strong enough to deliver a blow. Stay put, you two, I telegraph as I pass, going around twice to enjoy the fluttering marvels again.

Several days later, flying home, I study a patchwork of fields, probably in Iowa or southern Minnesota. Trees fur areas around small lakes or along waterways, but all other fields go straight to the margins, none with a border of wild plants. Fifteen years ago when I was on the writers-in-the-schools circuit, I interviewed farmers in southern and northwestern Minnesota farming communities. The towns were experiencing a strange gasping for breath, as if all the red corpuscles were draining away.

Jobs were disappearing. Young people leaving for more populated areas. Smaller farms were being bought up by large operations, not necessarily owned by single or related families. The consolidation, I heard again and again, had everything to do with wanting to plant only one or two crops, soy beans and corn being the favorites. And using big machinery on these fields.

What had been a system of diverse farming--some cows, some pigs, fields of grain and beans, rotated to help enrich the soil--was being replaced by a "corporate" model. Profit ran the business, as much profit as possible. Plant every inch, out to the margins. Plant Genetically Modified seeds, which grow plants that will withstand herbicides and pesticides like "Round-Up" by Monsanto.

I was watching an ethic of responsible farming being replaced by a drive to take everything possible, the devil take the hindmost. Of course there were exceptions to this, but as you'll find by watching the lively documentary "King Corn," the results have been such enormous yields that granaries stuffed to capacity and  overflow corn mountains are fueling another problematic practice, the fattening of beef in feed-lots. Not only does this create enormous pools of organic waste, but it puts fat on the beef which, of course, settles around our middles and in our arteries and organs. 

Such excess not only kills the Monarchs, one of our summer beauties who in a series of brief generations sends its progeny to overwinter in swarms. But it ultimately damages bees, water, air, and us.

As Rachel Carson wrote in the 1962, a "silent spring" awaits us, though not this time through the action of DDT, but through a more complex combination of excess and poisoning which inexorably will damage our own health and the creatures who share this small planet with us.

Margotlog: Luxe, Calme, e Volupte

Margotlog: Luxe, Calme, e Volupte

This line from the French poet Baudelaire (1857) is one of my favorite resorts to describe wafting on warmth and joy. All is ease--luxe, calme. All is indulgence--volupte.

It's rare to feel such untroubled ease in the midst of a Minnesota winter. Yes, the black and white cat caught in a sunbeam expresses sparky charm in her brilliantly lit spray of eyebrow whiskers and the warmth of her sun-drenched fur. But outside though sun reigns, we know from experience, the wind is brutally cold, and the car might not start.

Yesterday there was reprieve, the second of two warmer days. The sun was high in the sky which was blue as forget-me-nots. Bundled up visitors to the Como Conservatory soon shed their wraps. My friend Nordis had come from St. Louis Park to pick me up. More luxe. I hate driving, but especially in winter. Yet our destination was close. We found a parking space outside the wildly eccentric new, glass-roofed wing of the Como Conservatory, and soon were swaddled in rain forest moisture and warmth.

There was a bench just inside the entrance to Tropical Encounters. A pleasant-faced woman sat at one end, scanning the high trees and apparently listening. Bird song surrounded us. I sat down. Nordis sat down. Soon the three of us spied a plump yellow finch, so identified by the most charming young docent, with wide blue eyes and cascades of rich brown hair. "Oh, I saw something blue." She identified a blue tananger. Soon she handed us a thick-paged flip chart of rainforest birds brought to spend time in this crystal palace..

I had been so sick. Off and on since mid-December, with sinus infection, heavy cough, stomach flu. Trying to revive roller skating at a grandson's roller rink birghday part, I was blindsided by a faltering kid. Splat. On the right hip injured years ago when Fran and I spent 12 hours scarping paint off stucco to ready my little house for sale, I had traipsed around for five days, from class to class of a writing residency, training the cord for a heating pad. Now, I lay in the warmth of electric blanket. After a two weeks, each step on the hurt hip still led to a wince.

Oh, the joy of forgetfulness, immersion in beauty, green and warmth. We sat and sat, talking about rain forest adventures, theirs, not mine. Spying more birds in the many storied glass palace. Warm, at ease, voluptuous.

The first year I moved to Minnesota, my then husband and I went to see the sled-dog races on lake Como. The right thing to do, we thought--try and fit in with the natives. I wore my New York wool coat and silk-lined, knee-high boots. Yes, there were socks, probably two layers of socks. And heavy mittens. No doubt I wore jeans and a sweater under the coat--good for New York winters.

Within twenty minutes, the cold wracked my fingers and toes with such pain we had to leave. Frostbite, which would recur for years until I learned to layer, to buy heavy, rubber-soled waffle-stompers, a down coat well below my knees, two hats, three sweathers, three socks, several long scarves up to my eyes, and a wool hat under a down hood.

I could walk from the car to Como Conservatory in minus-20 windchill and survive without excruciating ache in fingers and toes. But that first year, I also discovered the surcease from pain available with deep draughts of moist green air. The antidote is still the next best thing to waking up to breakfast on a lanai in Kauai.

Margotlog: Sudden Tears

Margotlog: Sudden Tears

     The Russians are particularly good at this--an upwelling of tears at the turn of a head or sliding into a car. Today's snow and high clouds make me think of a Chekhov troika pausing in a stand of thin trees which whisper above their blanket of snow.

     Maybe the illness of last evening and this morning has roused them. Last evening, Fran lay white-faced and sweating under heavy winter wraps as we watched another episode of Jeeves and Bertie. I kept saying in a quiet way, "Maybe you shouldn't go to Phoenix." Before going up to my own bed, I left an empty plastic waste basket beside his lounger/sleeper. He vomited twice during the night. Mid-morning, the trip canceled, he came upstairs to sleep under the electric blanket. Now, hours later, he still sleeps.

       All of a sudden, with groceries in the trunk of the car, I am weeping for Eleanor, as if she had just spoken my name and risen from the lunch table to take me upstairs. Outside it would be a chilly November day, and later I would drive a rental car from the assisted living apartment where she lived, across dormant fields lightly touched with snow. When I turned left toward Bombay Hook, a flock of snow geese would rise white-winged into the air.

     But I am stopped at a corner beside Feist Veterinary, proceeding toward the two stop lights on the route home. My cheeks are wet with tears. Can this be her birthday, Feb 12? She would be 98. A woman who laughed and filled a life with good work and friendships. She was helped by a companionable younger sister, and their adorable mother.Yet her husband was killed when his troop ship was torpedoed in the Pacific, and their son, born a few days after I was, did not live more than a week.

     After both my parents died, I took to visiting her more often in the Delaware assisted living. I sat opposite her curly white head, bright blue eyes and freckled skin, so unlike the smooth olive of our Italian relatives. Behind her chair, hung a Gauguin print--surely his Pacific Island paradise, yet not with a shore and curving palms, and a woman with languorous hair. This was full of odd shapes in oranges and gray blue, citron and purple--a intensity over something I could not quite make out. It might have been the shape of her life.

     And now I weep for her intense love and humor, her wails of frustration and flash of rage. For her armature was fully charged, unlike my mother's which wounded suddenly, which pretended calm. So much to love when it is fully expressed, when there is warmth to the touch, when the heart is open.

Margotlog: Emily's Angleworm

Margotlog: Emily's Angleworm

     Though I supposed myself a serious graduate student, studying 19th-Century American Literature at Columbia, it now comes clear that I took away only one snippet from what that century had to offer--Emily Dickinson brief remark:

A little bird walked down the path
it did not know I saw

It bit an angleworm in half
and ate the fellow raw.

     Yesterday I wrote this on the back of an envelope, just to make sure it didn't slither off into oblivion. The occasion was not pure whimsy, but a glimpse out the back window at a shape looming in the bare elm. Hawk!

     The huge bird swiveled its head, somewhat disdainful as wind tufted its feathers. On the ground, under the wide branches of the white pine, gray squirrels kept eating seeds. Not a sparrow or chickadee in sight.

      I consulted the Sibley Guide to Birds. Hawk, yes. But precisely what kind I couldn't tell. Dark back, long tail, paler front. Could have been any number of juveniles or females. I didn't think it was an immature bald eagle, though it seemed huge against the gray sky..

     The next time I looked, a squirrel had inserted itself onto the other end of the branch and was advancing toward the tall, still bird. Stupid squirrel. Frisking, frolicking. Courting danger, I thought. Squirrel ran right toward the towering bird who looked down its nose at the annoyance. What the devil? I thought. Doesn't it know any better? Squirrel advanced, bird hopped an inch away. Squirrel skittered. Paused. Advanced.

     Lifting its regal shoulders in an almost audible "Well!" the hawk spread wide dark wings, soared low into the yard, inserted itself between the houses, and was gone, leaving behind the chance to eat any darn thing raw.

     This morning the wind blew bitter. I left for an appointment and returned. Squirrels eating, Birds invisible.
Too cold, I thought and hurried inside. At the window maybe twenty minutes later, expecting to see nothing, I found a regal, orange-chested Cooper's Hawk (unmistakable) holding to the ground a splay-winged pigeon. "Come quick," I called into the house. We both saw it. I put my nose in the book. Fran said, "It's squirming. Must be still alive." I looked up. Raw prey and predator were gone.

     The back-yard dusted itself off. An hour later, it was full of birds, as many as could stand the fierce wind before rushing for shelter in the spruce. It didn't matter what we saw. So there, Emily, with your flouncy fella raw.

Margotlog: Minnesota's Trumpeter Swans

Margotlog: Minnesota's Trumpeter Swans

     In that dreamy mode when the mind brings up images as if from the deep, I imagine the swan as a ballerina, arching her beautiful long neck as she takes flight on her toes, her arms like slender graceful wings. Beside her, riding the air, two huge white birds, their white necks and black beaks outstretched, skim the water, put down black webbed feet, and fold their white wings--tents of clouds, gliding to a stop.

In the ballet Swan Lake, the swan dies, leaving her human lover aching with grief. In a daily cacophany of birdland on the winter Mississippi River near Monticello, Minnesota, our own ballerinas of the air hold up their regal heads, paddle upside down searching for food, mix with almost grown, gray cygnets, and receive the applause of an astonishing amount of corn.

Every day throughout the winter, in this theater of the swan, a generous couple, aided by swan lovers from miles around, feed around 500 swans, mallard ducks, and Canada geese. The menu is around 1500  pounds of corn a day. It is an astonishing sight, especially since the trumpeter's come-back has been conducted largely by the same species who almost eradicated the bird in the first place.

In 1989, when Minnesota's "bring back the trumpeter" effort first took flight, I wrote a long article for Minnesota Monthly (March 1989)--"Bringing Back the Swain." There had been two decades of work to protect and help repopulate a small number of swans in Hennepin County, Big Rat Lake, Carlos Avery Wildlife Area, as well as several lakes in Becker County, near the western edge of the state. Trumpeters used to be plentiful throughout much of the continental United States but they were an easy target for hunters--their heavy body (up to 35 lbs) and slow take-off and landing with their nine-foot wingspans--"like a 747," early wildlife workers like to say--had left their numbers so small in the continental US as to predict extinction.

Then in the 1980s, thousands of trumpeters were discovered in Alaska. In an amazing effort, funded in part by "the chickadee check-off" on state income tax forms, Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources and Hennepin County Parks--aided by "citizens for swans" in the Trumpeter Swan Society--worked to repopulate Minnesota with its glorious native swan. DNR's Carrol Henderson flew to Alaska to collect (sparingly) the trumpeter eggs--the size of nerf footballs. Steve Kittlesen tended incubators, turning the eggs as a parent swan would, and hastening the hatched cygnets into swimming pools. He quipped it was a darn good think he didn't have to teach them to eat.

There were some sad set-backs--a mink got into a brooder building and killed all 31 newly hatched cygnets. Replacements of this expensive stock came from the Minnesota Zoo, private growers, a research station in Manitoba, and Hennepin parks. "The better way...would have been not to let the [trumpeter] disappear in the first place," Kittleson said. But the habitat and the financial support and the eggs were available. Fully grown trumpeters were flown to small puddle lakes near Fargo-Moorhead, to try raising families. Goofy things happened: one bird couldn't be herded to water for 90 minutes. One kept heading to the road to watch the cars.

The following summer, 15 free-flying pairs returned to Detroit Lakes, joining 42 newly released birds. Over the winter, some birds discovered open water on the Mississippi near the nuclear power plant at Monticello. Others spent the winter south in Iowa and Missouri.

One of the best reclamation efforts was reviving Swan Lake near St. Peter, bringing back its original grassy, reedy form. A huge lake with many small bays, Swan Lake used to be home to many trumpeters long before Westerners arrived. "Named Manka tanka ota menda, or Lake of the Large Birds by the Dakota, the lake was a summer hunting ground for Chief Sleepy Eye" (Galt, 1989). When I wrote the 1989 account of these efforts, there were predictions that someday 150 birds might live on Swan Lake. The DNR hoped to establish a free-flying flock of 30 breeding pairs, and 300 birds to add to the Hennepin Parks flock of 100.

No one could have imagined that today, in 2015, an estimated 2500 trumpeter swans live in Minnesota. They mate for life and raise their fluffy gray cygnets in small prairie pot-holes. Some surely try out spots in Canada, and Montana. Each year a number of trumpeters and other water fowl sicken from ingesting lead from hunter's bullets and fishing sinkers. The lucky ones are treated at such places as the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Saint Paul.

But overall, the present numbers and health of the world's largest and, for me, most beautiful water bird is nothing short of miraculous. A few days ago as we stood in a chill wind watching the "man who feeds the swans" spread splash after splash of corn among the noisy, stately, pushing, eddying throng, I thought how wonderful when humans take to their hearts another form of life, and protect and nourish it. Young and old, hale and feeble, came to watch the swans enjoy their food. And not only that to appreciate the on-going effort, the care and desire to continue feeding and helping the trumpeter through the winter.

Of course only a fifth, at the most, of the summer trumpeters hang out in the warmed water below the Monticelli power plant. But at this moment, I can't imagine asking for more. This ballet of the air and water, of human and big white bird is a continuing love story.

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To enjoy watching trumpeters in the winter Mississippi, here are directions from the Twin Cities - take 94 west and exit at the first Monticello exit. Up up the ramp at the stoplight, turn right. You will be on Hgwy 39. Go 1/4 mile and turn left onto Mississippi Drive. The park is about 500 yards, and is clearly marked with parking for handicapped and others. There's a path down to the river. Each day's "feeding" is at 10:30 a.m. Make a donation if at all possible.