Margotlog: What to Do When the World Upends

Margotlog: What to Do When the World Upends

Over the past few months, I've often felt dazed by disaster, either that in Washington, or close at hand, trying to help our cat Maggie through an uncertain passage that yesterday ended in death. Now that she has been "put down" by a kind and competent home euthenasia service, MN Pets, and we've buried her in the backyard, I find myself thinking about Iris Origo's World War II diary, War in Val d'Orcia. It is probably the best thing she ever published, among a number of other books filled with deep research about ancient or more modern personages. The best because, in her case, the pressure of writing late at night, after bedding down her children and the orphans she and her Italian husband took in from northern Italy, this pressure of catching truth on the fly created a prose that is intensely vivid and at the same time, cleansed of learned citations or long jaunts into the past. She is whispering to us as the pen crosses the page.

Her life at La Foce, the large, neglected property she and her new husband bought in the dry Sienese hills, had already demanded intense effort, to locate and distribute reliable sources of water. To turn what we would call "tenant farmers" toward more modern and productive methods. To rebuild, furnish, and make somewhat more modern the small estate which was crumbling when they first saw it. By the beginning of the war, the Origos had accomplished much. But their first child, a son, had died unexpectedly at age six. Their other two children, daughters, were born as the war tightened its noose around them.

All this is gripping in itself, but it's her calm, rapid accounting that seems the greatest accomplishment. I tell this because with each passing day and each eruption of scandal and shock, I too am feeling shaken. I want to focus on the passing fears, hopes, and efforts of everyday life. Here is my first entry:

* Three streets in my Lex-Ham neighborhood of St. Paul are planted, almost exclusively, with Ash trees. I live on one of them, Laurel Avenue. Every two years over the past decade, my husband and I have paid to have our boulevard Ash treated with a chemical that kills the Ash Borer. Now, with a friend who works for Rainbow Tree Service, I was spending a warm sunny morning going up and down steps, onto porches and stoops, and inserting flyers printed on green paper explaining that without treatment, the Ash trees would die. Then around each boulevard Ash, my friend and I wrapped a green plastic band that explained Ash Borers Kill Ash Trees.

It was one of those calm, blue Minnesota mornings. The sky rose very high and very blue, as blue as Mary's cloak. Quiet and serene, the streets spread around us as calm as the Virgin seated in her protective niche. We worked quietly, our steps audible as I mounted to houses, some quite high off the street. A 100-year-old lilac tree spread its twisting arms across an entire slope.

Finally as I descended from the last houses, I realized that I felt transformed. Under no other circumstance would I have descended these everyday steps from houses high off the street. Under no other circumstance would I have paid homage to trees bordering twelve blocks of neighboring yards.

We live too much on our own "turf." Yes, months of cold and snow don't encourage chatting outdoors with neighbors. But lately, I've found myself talking to dogs. I pause at an alley backyard and pat a small spaniel who has not barked at me at all, but instead stuck his nose through the wide square mesh and licked my hand.

I exit my house and find myself caught up in a short parade of white and brown children. They announce they're looking for their orange cat. Slowly rounding the corner, a lovely young woman with long dark hair and brown-gold skin comes close enough to explain that the children belong to one family. The children help by pointing across the roofs to the far corner of the huge block. There is their house. Caught up in their chatter, and the young woman's easy explanations, I walk with them, promising to keep a lookout for a cat named Charlie. Finally arriving at their house, I recognize it as one that was recently for sale. "I'm the caretaker," the young woman tells me. "I just cleaned all three stories." The children's father works on a rig somewhere far away. All kinds of questions hover just beyond speech. What is amazing is this passle of children, their lovely young woman in charge of them, and the need to find a orange cat.