Stopping by Woods, with Robert Frost

Stopping by Woods, one of Robert Frost's finest poems, is full of marvels:

'Whose woods these are
I think I know. His house
is in the village though."

So the first stanza runs through my head, as snow drifts and cascades outside my window.

"He will not mind me stopping here
to watch his woods fill up with snow."

Creating a world, in poetry or prose, requires forgetting the present and
drifting back into a time past or time imagined out of all previous experience.
It requires the shock of surprise or demonic terror.

* * *

I am standing at the top of the front steps of the Old Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina,
where my sister and parents and I spent, oh, perhaps, 5 or 7 years before my mother rebelled
and insisted we move over the Cooper River Bridge to a small town of Mount Pleasant.

At the moment, I have walked into the dim Old Citadel hallway, where I
can see all the way to the other end. It's the doorway outside to the cobblestone parking area. Our first-floor apartment looks out onto that area, with its scraggly trees, locusts I think. And where I wait for my father's car to nudge into its slot, and my father, in his Citadel uniform, to trudge on his flat feet toward out kitchen door.

But that is not really my story. Instead, in that dark hallway full of swirling years, I recognize my mother, and her combination of hard work and dreamy fantasy. I could never have entered her head, not with any accuracy, in that hallway darkness. But I remember its features and energy:

She has helped my sister and I mount the tall steps to the train called The Empire Builder. After hours and hours, changing trains several times (especially memoriable, the huge train station in Chicago, with its gleaming curved roof, where glass shapes sparkle, and distant voices call out in ragged
sounds the arrival and departures of trains.

* * *
She knew about snow. A photo of her holding me when I was probably five months old confirms her
undaunted treck home to Hankinson, North Dakota. Her Swedish mother was dying: Mama Max, the
beautiful statuesque grandmother whose death introduced me to snow. And now to darkness, the form of darkness that must be trusted to take us into the unknown, making steps as we go. Steps that will become filled with snow if we try to retrace them.

That is why I write. Not just to find my way back (which is sometimes difficult) but to enter the world of my Swedish grandmother, with the precision and courage of the mother who somehow fell in love with an Italian-American from Pittsburgh, and packed the boxes for their descent from the north to Charleston's Old Citadel, where the marvel of people with brown skin first confronted me.  

Margotlog: Sponsoring Critters for the Holidays

Margotlog: Sponsoring Critters for the Holidays

I wasn't a farm girl at all except for the yearly trek with my mother and sister on old-fashioned trains - "clickety clack, I'm taking you back." In my case, this meant going north from Charleston, South Carolina, where my father took a job teaching history at The Citadel, and changing trains at least twice before the "local" landed us in her hometown, Hankinson, North Dakota.

Desite my father's soft skin and uncalloused hands, he took to wearing a Citadel uniform as if it was his native garb. Oddly, it helped that he had all the anxiety of a first-generation, born-in-this-country immigrant, yet with the flair of a dandy. Until he was older and developed a "paunch," he cut quite a figure in his uniform.

There are photos of him as a young man, before the Citadel, when he was getting a master's degree
at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh. One of my mother's few stories about their meeting described him leaning across her library desk--she was fledgling librarian. He was so insistent, with his brown eyes and head of dark hair, his musical voice, and soft hands--well, she succumbed, and went out with him.

Some quirk of fate not only married them but moved them from Pittsburgh to Charleston, South Carolina, where my father found a job teaching history. In my dim memory, we were the only Italians for miles around, except for Leroy LaTorre, my father's dear friend. They met, not at The Citadel, but in a Masonic Lodge.

There were also occasional Citadel cadelts whom he invited to dinner. He had learned from his mother and her sister, Aunt Josephine (adorable, short, cute little laughing woman) how to make delicious spaghetti. My mother never made noodles from dough, but it didn't take her long to master what was a very simple recipe: thin noodles, a tomato sauce composed of fried onions, one large can of whole tomatoes, a few small cans of tomato paste, and then the spices and some sugar. My father made sure the grated cheese was first quality, bought from one of the few Italian delicatesins in Charleston.

What does any of this have to do with critters? Well, my father insisted that we have a dog. No home was complete without one. We started with a rather tall, stiff-eared hound named, of course, "ROVER." Somehow this sequed to the little Easter chicks my sister and I acquired at Easter. Their soft feathers were tinted pink, blue, green. Eventually, when they started to crow, we gave them to the family next door. Of course, Rover got a bone for every holiday, wrapped in butcher's paper and eaten--certainly not under the dining room table, but OUTSIDE in the back yard.

Though my sister and I got a kick out of Rover, it was the little Easter chicks that taught me the most about animals. Within a month to six weeks, they had lost all their adorable pink/blue/green fluff and acquired regular feathers. Did any of them hang out with us until they crowed? '

No, I rather think we made a pact with our neighbors behind us whose large lot contained chicken coops. It was a rather sad family, if I remember correctly: a grandfather, a mother who worked somewhere in Charleston and unlike my father who drove the family car every morning in a mad dash across the roller-coaster Cooper River Bridge to the Citadel, she took the bus to wherever she worked.

Needless to say, she was gone workdays from early to what seemed to us, quite late, since our father sometines had only morning classes and would appear at home in mid-afternoon where he retreated to his study to correct papers.

Now, in Saint Paul, my husband Fran and I have a cat. No one anywhere near keeps chickens. It's probably outlawed in the city of St. Paul. But neighbors nearby have dogs, and now with Thanksgiving approaching, I am confident that almost every family will sit down to a Thanksgiving meal. To help others less fortunate, I give money at this time of year to Heifer International.

This year, I'm sponsoring one share of 3 Schools of Fish, one share of an Alpaca in honor of my friend Jo in FLorida who takes me to see an alpaca farm when I visit. One share of a goat, in honor of goats at my North Dakota grandfather's farms that used to nibble at us. One share of tree seedlings: One of my few contributions to global warming are the trees I've planted in our postage-stamp yard. They are huge after our many years of living here. I'm also including one share of rabbits, one basket of honeybees, one flock of chicks, and some ducks and geese.

It makes me happy to help others who will benefit from these animals. We have so much to be thanksful for.  

Margotlog: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Margotlog: Nothing Gold Can Stay

It is a most glorious, glimmering morning, with maple leaves turning from green to gold, and I am
remembering Charleston, South Carolina, as a girl where it seemed to take a lifetime for leaves to turn color and fall. Not that I cared, but now, so much more is at stake.

 I stare out at the glimmering maples and elms, oaks and aspen. The phrase "Nothing Gold Can Stay" runs through my head. Beside my desk, the sun on a mottled plant (brought inside with the earlier cold) shows delicate, trasparent, purple-pink tongues.  At the tips of thin branches, green sprouts as sharp as needles. Here's to you, Robert Frost with your "Nothing Gold Can Stay!"

It's not that I expect immortality, yet midway along the desk, a cactus busts into  grotesque red-gold hatchets, each tipped by a pink tongue.

I stare and stare, wondering what I've done to deserve such flowering. Then I recollect fall when the sun is much lower in the sky, hot to get in my windows. Brazen Hussy! Watch out or I'l fry an egg on you.

Margotlog: How "Weeds" and Dirt Can Save Birds, Insects, Us

Margotlog: How Weeds and Dirt Can Save Birds, Insects, and Us
Our neighborhood in St. Paul is far from the suburbs. You can tell, sort of: Some of us, me especially, do not douse our postage-stamp yards with chemicals to "enhance" the growth of grass
and kill those devil "weeds." Turns out, according to many rather dire reports from arborists and
ornithologists, the glorious, manucured, "one size fits all" LAWN is killing birds, not to mention hordes of insects which birds need to survive.

Imagine you are a blade of grass, or horror of horrors, a flat-leafed weed. The beauty of your simple relation to mother earth is that you have all sorts of leafy relatives of the dandelion or other broad-leaf variety. The soil formed by your seasonal decay is not "polluted" with chemicals thrown on your heads by humans who, for some god-forsaken reason, think one-size, one height fits all.

Let me remind those crazed lawn-growers: The modern lawn came into being in the English countryside, centuries ago. That countryside was "manicured" by sheep who nibbled greens close to the ground--a type of mowing, you could say. Nothing wrong with mowing or sheep; in fact if we in our small or larger green spaces employed sheep to nibble down the growth, there are very good chances that NO CHEMICALS would be strewn among the clover and dandilions. Such nostrums would eventually KILL the sheep.

Consider this: chemicals thrown on lawns eventually run into sewers which will sooner or later spill into water treatment plants, or simply run off into streams, lakes. The worms and seeds that manage to live among the chemicals will transfer that toxicity to birds. No wonder, according to many recent assessments, many formerly common American birds are becoming scarce. Guess who's the culprit?

Humans! For some reasons, hundreds of thousands of humans--be they lawn owners or farmers dousing their crops with poisons to kill off various borers--have concocted such a stew of death that the birds via the insects and seads they eat are becoming scarcer and scarcer.

Here's my home method: I DO NOT USE HERBECIDES or any kind. I let the Creeping Charley and the various sprays of taller weeds have their place. Yes, I plant some flowering glories that appeal to me. Some are perennials that return year after year. Others I dot through my various "beds" for color, charm, variety. On my backyard deck, I plant flowers purchased from Mother Earth Gardens. These do a fine job throughout the summer of dazzling my eye and sating my desire for vibrant flowers.

BUT in the so-called lawns, front and back, I let grow whatever wants to grow. Some years if the growth gets too tall, the lawn-mower "cuts its hair." But mostly, what is tall and flowery is a sight to behold. What is short and weedish has more than its place. And

THE BIRDS I FEED at the bird feeders and water at the bird baths, do not seem to die from the experiment. Am I missing certain worm eaters? Probably. But I do what I can. That's what we all should do!

A White Squirrel in the Rain

A White Squirrel in the Rain

A beautifully white squirrel that often comes into our yard has a horrible deformity in its hind legs. It drags them as it pulls forward with its front legs. For perhaps a year, it's been part of the squirrel/bird congregation that appears early in the morning when I open the garage door and spread sunflower seeds in a trail to the right of the garage, and then straight ahead under the tall maples. Finally I fill the bird feeders,

The white squirrel has come to recognize me. I speak to it softly: "Don't be afraid," I croon, keeping my arms close to my body and slowly pulling up the door to the garage. "Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you." 

Somewhere, I gathered the notion that white squirrels (as different from gray squirrels) are deaf. This does not surprise me as I puzzle what could have happened to this small creature. If it's deaf, it could not hear a cat inch toward it, or the cry of a hawk as it perches in the Elm behind the house behind us.

Sometimes the white squirrel appears in sunshine. It almost always has the company of blue jays who are excellent buglers of trouble. Gray squirrels pay it no attention. A few times, I have come close enough to see that one of the white squrrel's hind feet seems eaten down to the bone. The other, though lacking muscle, is covered in the white fur of the rest of the body.

My heart is full of sorrow. I take deep breaths. But my determination to help the creature I so admire moves me forward. As I open the garage door, the white squirrel pulls itself under some leafy plants. It seems to be waiting for me to finish my sowing of seeds. I wish it well, and return to the house as silently as I can.

One late summer morning I watched as the white squirrel left the open area with the seeds. It headed, slowly toward the corner of the tall wooden fence that separates us from the neighbors behind and to the side. In that corner it slipped between the slats of the fences, then after a time, reappeared at the top of another fence limits of yard behind us.

Reaching the top of this wooden fence, the white squirrel was only a foot or two from the trunk of the neighbor's huge elm. With minutes of consideration, the white squirrel somehow propelled itself across the distance. I caught glimpses of its front paws pulled itself up the huge elm, and out of sight.

I felt as if a part of a mystery had been solved.

A Sudden Hush

A Sudden Hush

     Bare of greenery, Munich’s art museum, the Alte Pinakothek, fronted an empty field, its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in tan-yellow stone. Inside, a double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say, to the Art Institute of Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and monumentalized with caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her worth and didn’t need to rouge.

     As long as I can remember, my mother, sister and I have worshiped at museums. My father, on the other hand, preferred religious and historical sites, but my mother made sure we girls poked into major U.S. museums from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to Washington’s National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago.

     Bare of greenery, the Alte Pinakothek fronted an empty field, its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in tan-yellow stone. Inside, a double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say, to the Art Institute of Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and monumentalized with caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her worth and didn’t need to rouge.

     It was the sudden hush that impressed me most. On the curb, we’d say good-bye to my father and his dithers about cleanliness and proper attire. Climbing what seemed like hundreds of steps, we entered a quiet that descended like the stroke of a bell. Nobody bothered us. All was reserved and anonymous. Nobody cared what we wore or how clean we were as long as we didn’t touch anything. Even my sister, who usually whined and had to go to the bathroom, followed without a peep.

     Our mother wore a distant, peaceful look that I recognized from the beach when she walked into the wind. Later I would call this her “Blue-Twilight” look from her stories of skating in North Dakota. Shadows deepened, and she spun in tighter and tighter circles on a frozen pond. Ice-skating was unheard of in Charleston, and my father didn’t dance. But you could pretend you were skating over slick museum floors. The light that shone from paintings was strange and compelling in its own right, blue as the twilight snow in my mother’s stories.

     My tastes like hers ran to the Impressionists. I was hypnotized by light flickering over a young woman reading on the grass. Or color breaking like waves, splattering a boating party. Small figures on a Greek vase called me to attention. Once I slipped into a vase beside oxen pulling a wagon, their right feet raised for the next step. A dancer with rippling skirt shook her tambourine. Listening to that silent music, I fell into a trance that carried me around the belly of the vase

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

It's no surprise that I'm often dazzled or stunned by the role that race places in U.S. history. As a child, I'd clench my fists as my father, the history professor, rammed over the loud, metal connectors and onto the roller-coaster bridge, crossing the Cooper River into Charleston, where he taught at The Citadel.

My father, the fulminating racist with an Italian last name, would turn to yell at me and my sister in the back seat. As if it was his job to terrify us with the history that didn't belong to us at all. I was terrified, all right, but not by the likes of Andrew Jackson or John C. Calhoun. I had every belief that within seconds, the car would plummet through the narrow metal bands protecting us from the Cooper River below, and down we'd fall to be obliterated in our casket of metal.


It's no surprise that, years later, living as far north as I can get before hitting Canada, I'm still deeply agitated by U.S. racism and the history that extends from it.

Item 1: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm one of thousands, maybe millions who find this novel of an Alabama family without a mother, but with a stalwart though often tired father Aticus, to be deeply familiar. For me the familiarity and the differences come in the threads that bind white people to black people, and more well-off whites to poor white trash.

Down the street in Mt. Pleasant (which was a new town being foisted on a much older village) a friend in my class would meet me to walk toward General William Moultrie High School. She was thin and beautiful, with pale yellow curls and a shashay that brought the boys to a dead halt as she passed. My North Dakota/librarian mother was the doer in our family. She had altered the plans for our two-story new house with the help of the contractor. My sister and I each had a second floor bedroom to herself, a luxury to my friend, whose slanty-roofed, "dog-trot" house was so weathered its boards had turned gray. She never asked me in to visit in a bedroom that belonged to her. It didn't take me long to decide that she had no such bedroom. Her family was poor, and we? Well, with "Papa Max's money" from North Dakota, my mother had built a modern home, taking advantage of the beautiful half-acre lot with THREE giant magnolia trees she'd bought. We even had a huge window airconditioner in the dining room that also cooled my father's sliver of a den.

The fact that he taught at The Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina may well have helped fuel his racism. After all, anyone who was introduced to him, heard "Leonard Henry Fortunato." The "Leonard Henry" weren't so outlandish in South Carolina in those pre-civil rights days, but FORTUNATO? Whoever heard of such a name or how to pronouce it? With a few more years under my belt, I learned to say to those meetng me for the first time, "It's FORTUNATO like FORTUNATE." This seemed to quiet most of them.

Was I fortunate? Let's say I was confused, during those years. Confused and desperate to fit in. I didn't have the kind of pedigree that Scout and her brother had in To Kill a Mockingbird, growing up without a mother (who'd died when they were little), but with a father respected as an admirable lawyer. They also had Calpernia, a wonderfully tart and efficient and caring African-American woman, who in many many ways took the place of their mother. I say that with all due respect to the racism of Alabama and South Carolina. But even with my rather myopic Northern/Southern eyes, I saw that the friends I'd acquired during my early school years at the private girls' school Ashley Hall, even these girls whose families lived "South of Broad" in Charleston proper, even they had African-American women in their kitchens, cooking and no doube, like Calpernia, standing in for their mothers, never to spank then as my North Dakota mother did my sister and me. But to "set them straight."

It was my father who suffered the most, I think now. He somehow had to produce the right racist attitudes to fit in as a white man during this truly problematic period of change in Charleston (and most of the south). Thus, he became a rabid racist, lifting his hands off the wheel as he drove way too fast over the Cooper River Bridge, until I had to protest: "Daddy, keep your hands on the wheel! You'll kill us!" But he was in the middle of a rant: "I want you girls to understand. You cannot trust any of these darkies." Yes, that was his word: "darkies."

"You never know when they might come after you!" It took me more than a few years to understand he intended us to be terrified that black men might rape us.

If my mother was in the car with him, she'd talk back: "Leonard, keep your hands on the wheel, and stop that ridiculous talk." She'd glance at my sister and me in the back seat. "We don't know any Negro men like that," she would sometimes conclude. It did nothing but turn his wrath on her. And for the next twenty minutes, he'd yell, and rant, and lift his hands off the wheel, until my sister and I were yelling at him: "Daddy, keep your hands on the wheel. The car's going right over the railing and into the river."

Margotlog: More Than Ever, We Need "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Margotlog: More than ever, we white folks, north and south, need Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I've been listening to the disks for the past few weeks, or maybe as long as a month, as I lie on the bathroom floor before going to bed, and soak my eyes with warm cloths. I listen to a wonderful reading of Scout and Jim, and Aticus, the family in Alabama, and their wonderfully tart-talking household helper (she's brown-skinned, but an absolutely integral part of the family, and in a moment I'll remember her name!), all of whom take me back to the South Carolina of my youth.

We had no brown-skinned household helper. My mother Maxine from North Dakota couldn't imagine needing help. And my father, the sometimes warm-hearted and other times fulminating racist,  Leonard from Pittsburgh via Italy, kept up a running display of "northern" attitudes. I did not yearn for a black woman in the house, though many of the girls in my all-white school had a brown-skinned helpers. Yes, they were paid, as was Calpurnia, Scout and Jim's "mother-substitute."

I say that with all sincerity. Their mother had died before the book begins, and Cal as they call her, is more than a presence in the kitchen. She is part of the family as were the brown-skinned women who worked for the families of friends I made at the fancy all-girls' private schools where my mother insisted my sister and I attend. Sometimes when I visited these privileged girls (my mother's father, Papa Max, sent money from North Dakota to pay for our private school education) I felt uncomfortable at the way the grown-up white women talked down to these women who cooked, helped raise the children, kept the house clean, and no doubt, like Calpernia, sometimes verbally disciplined my friends.

To Kill a Mocking Bird is extraordinarily in the way Harper Lee characterizes the family and neighbors, and even the mad dog that for a long, trying afternoon stumbles around in the dust until Mr. Heck Tate, the sheriff, brings a loaded shot-gun and insists that Aticus shoot the stumbling animal. This and other hints tell us that Aticus is more than competent. He is the hero of the story, and the children are his chorus, as they struggle to grow up (their mother has died), begin to discern the layers of society, including the disgusting white father (years ago we would have called him"white trash") who brings charges against a black man for "having carnel knowledge" of his pathetic daughter. Turns out, the father, a slovening, n'er-do-well has been raping her, and now tries to pass off the horror on an honest, kind "colored man."

This trial is in many ways the culmination of the racist society, but for me, the book's heart and soul reside with Aticus and the children and Calpernia--with the day-to-day functioning of their household, and of the mysterious family next door, with its aging pathetic son. And also the white woman who's lived alone for decades, drinking herself into a fury, so we learn as the children come to hate her and Jim ruins her peony bushes in a fury at her tormenting. Yet, there is redemption: just before she dies, she with the doctor's help weans herself off the alcohol that has soothed her deformities. 

There is no stereotyping of black people versus white people. Each character is absolutely and continuously made individual and present to us. In my opinion, To Kill a Mocking Bird is one of the finest pieces of literature written by an American, in company with Melville's Moby Dick, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and hundreds of others (usually only a single work among an author's output).

We need To Kill a Mocking Bird not for the horribly sad ending, but for the daily interaction of people in the south, mostly white people, but in one memorable chapter, when Calpernia takes Scout and Jim to "her" African-American church, in a rendition of different ways of redeeming what can't be helped, and offering a welcome to all who come in good faith.

This is open-hearted book, true-to-diverse kinds of talking and living, as it offers a hand even to the most isolated. Truly, an American original that belongs with the very best of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and so on.

Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

Margotlog: Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

John Ruskin, the 19th-century British art critic and historian, is said to have complained that most American and English tourists to Venice will "dash through the  Basilica di S. Maria della Salute,"  paying no more heed to the gems by Tintoretto and Titian than they would to clothes on a line.

Determined not to be such a dolt, I spent hours a few days after arriving, getting into a slow moving vaporetto (rapid only in comparison to a row boat), and making my way with others crammed on board to the Campo della Salute. Another visitor, a well-dressed woman who spoke with a Southern accent (she was African-American) admitted as we paused in the huge campo that she had not much idea what we were supposed to see. In another minute, a friend stepped from a nearby building that announced itself as the "Peggy Gugghenheim Collection." The woman waiting suggested that I join them, but when I explained that I had promised mysef to see the Salute, she nodded and disappeared.

The church was dim and lofty. Chapels held huge paintings, some so high up that I had to crane my neck and shift about to find the right angle for discerning their subject matter. After several turns around the church, with careful study of the art and the artists' names, I became comvinced that I had seen only one Titian.(Maybe modern scholarship had changed the attribution of others?) So many paintings depicted figures in flowing robes ascending into the heavens that the message seemed to be: we all should be full of bliss or awe. But I'm afriad the paintings struck me as old, difficult to see, and repetitive.

The next day's "misty, moisty weather" kept me much closer to Hotel Boccassini. The wind off the lagoon which stretched a far distance, was brutally cold. I held tight to my hood, and to the railings as I forced my way up one steep bridge after another.

It had occurred to me that when I'd visited Venice years before, I had entered a church not far from were I was staying now. It was the Church of Santa Maria Assunta dei Gesuiti. Reaching it again, I was reminded that its imposing marble facade faced a rather narrow strip of open space--nothing like the Salute's command of an enormous espanse of the Canale de San Marco and from there onwards to the Adriate.

Carefully ascending the wet steps, I forced myself against the wind and through a heavy iron door. A few other visitors moved in the vast church, yet I felt as if the dim church belonged only to myself.

"Founded in the 12th century and reconstructed in its current configuration in the 18th century, the church of Santa Maria Assunta has the typical plan of the Jesuit order, and an imposing Baroque facade. The interior decorated with white and green marble inlays on walls and gilded stucco work is absolutely unique in Venice." So described a brochure.

Titians and Tinterettos seemed to be everywhere. The first, "The Martydom of San Lorenzo," by Tiziano Vecello (Titian's true name) pushed the martyr being burned alive over glowing coals, into the lower third of the painting. High in the darkness, like dying coals, came a hint of the divine.This, I told myself, was what Ruskin's adulation of the Salute church had promised. Here, was that sudden adulation confirmed.

Baroque art is perhaps harder to appreciate from our contemporary perspective than, say, Impressionism which has its feet on the ground, and the charm of children rolling hoops in a park. Trying my best to be elevated with the truly magnificant figures--some simple, others in long flowing gowns with cherubs and angels circling on high--soon in the semi-darkness, I began floating, the cherubs and angels almost guiding me into another realm of flying, and adoring. 

Margotlog: Horrific Degradation Looks So Appealing

Margotlog: Horrific Degredation Looks So Appealing

This past weekend, I stood in front of two large photographs in the Weinstein Hammons Gallery, 908 West 46th Street, Minneapolis. For a few moments, I thought I was seeing rather benign, large-scale but odd images of the Earth. Not the entire earth, but segments: one looked like a huge mountain with blocks cut out of it. The other was of a bulldozer, creating long connected ribons of sand. The ribs took the shape of a fan, except that in the midst of them sat a bulldozer in bright yellow, casting a tiny shadow of itself. At the edge of the sand that hadn't yet been disturbed sloshed a liquid element of vibrant green. I could see little wavelets at the right edge of this watery element.

Turning to the young assistant at the museum, I requested what information existed about these two photographs by Edward Burtnysky, an artist unknown to me before. She brought me a three-fold explanatary card, titled "Anthropocene," with information that the term signifies our current geological epoch. The previous one, the Holocene, "started 11,700 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded." Now geologists believe that we as the Earth's inhabitants have left that era for the "Anthropocene," which refers to the "indellible marks left by humankind on the planet."

The photographer, Burtynsky, also writes, that he is concerned "to show how we affect the Earth in a big way. To this end, I seek out and photograph large-scale systems that leave lasting marks."

Finally I began to understand. Yes, it is a beautiful image, this fan of shadows and sun-streaked ribs, with puffs of sand at its edge. I could almost imagine Madame Karenina, deploying her fan as she flirted with Vronsky on a dance floor. But this was "near Lakeland, Florida," USA, in 2012. Note: Madame Karenina threw herself under a train. The tailings from phosphorous mining poison the water into which they slosh.

The other image hung beside the one from Lakeland, Florida, captured an enormous mountain from which blocks of marble were being excavated. Centuries ago, marble was mined by slaves. Michaelangelo carved his "David" from a single block of marble. Later slaves used metal chisels and wooden wedges "inflated by water." It took me a few moments to understand why the wood wedges needed to be inflated. Then I imagined that if the wood was water-soaked, it would be more maleable, less liable to crack and break.

Next, in the 18th century came explosives which left huge piles of waste called "raventi." Yes, probably an Italian word that means refuse, so much amazing marble sculpture originating in Italy. Now, since the 1960s, trucks and excavators cut helical slabs, eliminating the waste caused by using explosives.

The owner of the quary, at 63 years old, says what has been taken "is as if I plucked a hair from a pig." The mountain has been worked for 3000 years, but its capacity still seems limitless.

Both of these "excavations" can be seen from space. This impressed me, suggesting just how vast they are. "Life in the Anthropocene" prompts us to consider how profound and lasting have been human changes in Earth's systems.   

Egg Rolls on Sunday or I Had to Leave the House!

Egg Rolls on Sunday

I had to leave the house, and so I drove to Vina (about three miles away from home to a shopping area near Ford Parkway) where I ordered two, then another egg roll, making three, and ate them all in one fell swoop.  I had to leave the house, and not be overcome, as I'd been for some weeks by the insulin treatments for Julia, our adorable black and white (no not Julia the Terrible or Julia the Magnificent but Julia the Purr-Queen). My only other acquaintance with diabetes, if memory serves, wafted toward me as a girl when my mother took me and my sister on the train, from South Carolina to North Dakota to visit her father.

Twice a day, a nurse appeared in a starched white uniform with little crown on her head and took him into one of the two downstairs bedrooms where, my mother said, "She gave him a shot." He was old and square, with wisps of white hair across his reddish head. My mother adored him, or so it seemed, from the amount of time she spend cooking "from scratch" oatmeal he liked, frying bacon and eggs, and dousing his dessert coffee with cream and sugar.

Julia is an adorable cat, pliant, warm-hearted toward us, and now almost willing to be subjected to twice daily syringes of tiny amonts of insulin. I sit with her in "Fran's chair," a large recliner, while he gives her the shot in the loose furry skin at the back of her neck. Now that we've been doing it so long, it seems almost routine. But there's the weekly "test day" when in four-hour increments, a drop of her blood has to be extracted by a poke to her ear (which makes her flinch from surprise and pain, and poor Fran, my husband, flinch at the horror of hurting her).

I had to leave the house. I had to get away from the inexpressible desire for all this to end, even though my part in it is rather minor--my hands not sufficiently strong enough to extract a drop of blood. Oh, poor darling cat! She seems to have learned that we don't want to hurt her, that hurting her is hard for us (but of course harder for her).

When I returned, she came to the back door to greet me. She was so willing to be patted and have me fluff her fur "the wrong way" from tail to neck, that I almost broke down. She held no grudges that the day before, we'd held her down on a towel while Fran pierced the edge of her soft black ear as we whooped for a drop of blood. It was not fun, perhaps worse for us since we knew it was coming, or maybe because we are not as loving and joyful as she is, has always been. She is the best cat ever, among the dozens of cats (dozens? Well at least a dozen.) whom we have loved, and cherished, until it was time.

We dread that time. And have no idea when it will come. Maybe that's the worst of all. No, the worst of all is perhaps this: that I had to leave the house for the surcease of three egg rolls.

Margotlog: Brightness Falls from the Air

"Brightness Falls from the air," wrote Thomas Nashe, ages ago. Yet, he might have been staring out our windows at the extraordinarily bright blue sky threaded with branches licked with white. With every motion of wind, "Brightness falls from the air."

A few hours ago, I stood enthralled at the kitchen door, dolled up to go shovel, but unable to move, the beauty was so breath-taking--the brilliance of light, the high, brilliant blue of sky, and this tracery of branches that have been dark and drear for so many months. It is a panorama of bliss--flowers of snow waiting for the wind to pluck, showers of silver dissolving before anyone could spend them.

It has been one of the longest winters I can remember, here in the cold and dark heartland. Certain things have been fearsome: numero uno: our dear and only cat Julia has declined. Black and white, friendly as a chirrupping grasshopper, yet losing fur on two legs, and slowly subsiding--into what? Not death, not that, when we two humans who love her as our child, need her warmth, her friendly licks, her occasional sillyness. High in that category: the love-affair with the red holiday ribbon, somehow left to its own devices from some holiday package, and soon adopted as Julia's maybe kitten. She's been carrying that ribbon in her mouth up hills and down dales for weeks.

When we first knew her, she was recovering from the loss of a baby (she only a teenager), and a somewhat botched hysterectomy. Yet she recovered and seemed primed for a long and happy life.
Yesterday after blood work at the vet's, we discovered she has feline diabetes. She's lost weight, so say the vets, which we didn't notice, dropping a pound and a half in nine months. She pees enough to water the garden at Como Conservatory. She eats enough to foster a small horse. These are not good signs.

Of course we will give her insulin--but that passage has yet to be maneuvered. Come tomorrow and the next few days, we all three will be initiated into the use of needles, the necessity of regularity, the hope against hope that our darling pal can remain with us for months, years, the rest of a lifetime.

*** Here is Thomas Nashe's poem:

 

Brightness falls from the air?

"Brightness falls from the air" is a line from A Litany in Time of Plague, a death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe: 

 

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;

This world uncertain is;

Fond are life's lustful joys;

Death proves them all but toys;

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made,

The plague full swift goes by;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,

Worms feed on Hector brave;

Swords may not fight with fate,

Earth still holds open her gate.

"Come, come!" the bells do cry.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness

Tasteth death's bitterness;

Hell's executioner

Hath no ears for to hear

What vain art can reply.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,

To welcome destiny;

Heaven is our heritage,

Earth but a player's stage;

Mount we unto the sky.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

When you've taken a dear friend to the airport with only a three-quarter moon and a few stars in the sky, when you drive home alone through night-enveloped streets, it helps to sing: "Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been, Charming Billy?"

Darkness is the mood of inspiration. Suddenly, you're singing with the voice of your mother or father, ages ago in Charleston, South Carolina, with clacking palmettos in those long, languid summers. "I will be true, for there are those who trust me..."

And you're back at Girl Scout camp in the "foothills" northwest of Charleston, and Meta, the Scout of all Scouts, who stands at least six-foot tall in her sneakers, and sports long rippling golden hair, Meta is singing: "In a cottage in the woods, by the window a little man stood. Saw a rabbit running by..." 

You, suddenly, have become the rabbit--ears erect, nose twitching. And you're remembering a recent holiday including the kid-clan of your husband's grand children. Decent, the hard-working parents,  more than decent, inspired perhaps, but failing in one respect: the oldest kid, a boy about 13 wanted a pet. His parents who both work hard at jobs and at the even more demanding business of parenting, have allowed a small lizard, a gecko.

Darkness returns, and I am home again in South Carolina, with our first puppy, who lived with us for maybe three months before the little black and white charmer died in the night. My sister and I were heart-broken. Kudos to my parents, especially to my finicky Italian-American father, Leonardo, who refused a cat. "It will jump up on the table and that will be the end of it!" he thundered. Yes, thunder. His voice had a range from sweet morning dew to thunder and lightning.

We sang opera, my sister and I, dressed in our mother's fancy nightgowns, which she never wore in our presence. But then, my parents had been married eight years before I, their first child, was born. It was the Depression, after all, and both of them worked.

Singing in the dark of that 6 a.m. drive from the airport home, I find myself giving voice to all the joy that substituted for "things" in our Old Citadel lives. Wearing our mother's fancy nightgowns, listening to recordings of Lily Pons singing excerpts from the finest Italian operas, we girls discovered how fortifying it can be to gave voice to our own, immediate presence in a world that would open from fantasy to reality. My sister becoming an opera singer, and I? Well, poets are writers of songs too.

Frozen Pipes and the Death of a White Squirrel

Frozen Pipes and a White Squirrel

It's been polar here in Minnesota, land of ten thousand frozen lakes. Wind-chill well below zero and temperature an eager competitor. For the first time in 20 years, the pipes to our kitchen sink froze. Yes, they are close to an outer wall, but so are the pipes directly under them in the basement. To reach those lower depths, I had to wear a down robe AND my down coat, plus thin plastic gloves with heavy gloves over them, just to reach the cat litter box at the bottom of the basement stairs. Why the cat, who is mistress of two other cat boxes on the warm second floor, insisted on doing her business in such depths of cold is a miracle of feline sagacity.

For the past two days, I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen, first rinsing dishes in a little bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, then filling the tea pot and heating water on the stove to wash dishes in the frozen sink. I could have lugged the dishes upstairs to the bathtub, where warm water still gushed, but somehow the kitchen process seemed important. I told myself the warm water exiting the kitchen drain JUST MIGHT help thaw the frozen pipes.

Eventually, I asked husband Fran to drive me to the pharmacy where I purchased a heating pad. Walking home, I felt very proud of my hardiness, giving most of the credit to my North Dakota mother. Of course, I looked like a walking blimp. In her North Dakota hometown, children walked to school, their legs bound in multiple leggings, bodies stuffed into coats, cloaks, and mufflers, and their hands in double mittens. Their heads were wrapped in so many scarves, the children themselves were virtually unidentifiable. Luckily, there were only 10 children in her class, all perfectly familiar with each other, wrapped or unwrapped.

These days, we Minnesotans with well-heated homes and cars have it relatively easy, except for the people somehow bereft of decent housing who try to survive 20-below by running a car motor from time and time and hoping the numbness they start to feel isn't frostbite. This morning, as the temp rises toward 19 ABOVE, there's a sad StarTribune story of a homeless man who did just that with his pal of a dog. He himself was rescued by the police and taken to a shelter and from there to a hospital. The dog, finally found, appeared to be fine.  

Yes, at 20 below, stray dogs can survive for a time, as can most critters in my back yard. I work to help them, with a heated birdbath, which I fill every morning. On my multi-armed bird feeder pole, I hang suet and a sunflower cakes, and feeders filled with sunflower seeds. Finally I spread sunflower seeds and a mix of smaller seeds on two long pathways in the yard.

Mid-afternoon yesterday, I looked out the broad picture windows in our second floor bathroom to find an enormous red-tailed hawk bending over something white. These figures were was stationed in a leafless elm tree just behond our yard. Even now, as I write this, my heart starts beating erratically. The spill of white might have been the feathers of a dying pigeon, but as I stared, a white leg and tail appeared, splayed over the limb--it was "our" white squirrel, the only white one we had among all the other grays. Perhaps an albino, perhaps with hearing or eyesight loss, yet it staked out its spot every morning for munching seeds. A familiar member of the yard, and as welcome as the red-chested nuthatches, the red-bellied woodpecker (who seems twice as large as the little nuthatch), and the hairy and downy woodpeckers, the blue jays, chickadees, cardinals, finches, juncos and even a few crazy robins who left, I assume, the minute the temperature began to drop.

I couldn't tear myself away from the window, tears in my eyes, as the huge hawk, with its rear end lifting and falling, pulled at the squirrel body. This "winter kill" was happening as I watched, and the hawk was taking one of the denizens of my yard whom I'd come, in a mild way, to love. From time to time, the hawk would pause and turn its profile. The beak and nasal area were smeared with blood. It was making a meal of the white squirrel. It was devouring a creature I had come to love.

I know it's somewhat insane, to become protective and possessive of a wild creature. But I did love the white squirrel, and I did not love the hawk, though it was impossible not to admire its huge body, puffed out in the cold and the rigor of its yanks. But the hawk was an interloper and the white squirrel had gamely visited the yard for food and water, winter, spring, summer, autumn. It was the only white one. Would I have been as sad had the hawk begun to eat one of the grays? I might have been mesmerized by watching one creature devour another. But I doubt that I would have continued to feel the loss.

Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter!)

Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter and Summer)

Ok, I've tried everything aside from moving back to South Carolina where I grew up, and where, LET ME REMIND YOU WARM-HEARTED RESIDENTS, there was SNOW during one of my holiday visits to my parents, years ago. YES SNOW! With all the city's bridges, glazed to ice, getting to the airport was strictly for seasoned S.C. drivers. I bit my tongue and clenched my fists as the taxi-driver, with nonchalance, kept looking over his shoulder to deliver yet another bon mot.

Now over the last few frigid Saint Paul weeks, the heated coil that has worked to keep bird bath water liquid for two years now has given up. No frilly waves as a strong wind soars over the back yard. No beaks dipping for a drink.

I do love to watch the birds--winter, summer, spring, fall. They are my soul mates, whether they know it or not. Every day I praise them silently, these brief and joyful reminders that some can fly, and not only in giant jets. I don't want to be Icarus and have my human-made wings melt as they approach the sun, but I love to watch birds congregate--over seed, grass, flowers, and yes, all year long over liquid water.

But in our frigid winters, this inevitably becomes a challenge, and not a cheap one either. The heaters I use cost nearly $70 each. This is more than I spent for any Christmas present except my husband's neon green "Warm Things" robe. Am I throwing around brand names? Can't help myself: this is the best robe either of us has ever worn. His neon green, mine forest green. His a woman's Extra Large because the guy robes weren's nearly as warm, and neon green because when I got my money ready to order a woman's extra large, all the somber colors were used up.

Lately also, due to construction noise in the neighborhood, my bird visitors have declined. Only in the twilight do the deep red male cardinals come to the feeders, and the tan-red females forage on the ground. Occasionally a sassy blue jay barges in, no fear except for a fast exit. And the rosy finches that bear up under the cold also come to the feeders only the twilight, when from my kitchen window they look like sparrows.

Off and on, I've considered in my frustration stomping around the neighborhood, yelling at front and back doors, "Your noise is bothering the birds." But this is Saint Paul. We don't dare get too "fresh" with our neighbors, though this past summer, I chastized my near neighbors for "adopting" a mostly outdoor cat who loved leaping into my yard and startling the far greater number and variety I so loved to feed. My neighbors are dandy people, cat people, like me, but not bird people.

I became truly rancorous and even bellicose because eventually they stopped feeding this feline wanderer, and the critter appeared less and less. I was grateful, very grateful, but would not want to go through that angry trauma again. So now, I try to keep my mouth shut and let Robert Frots's motto: "good fences make good neighbors" suffice.

Finally and totally out of my control, I spied a hawk way way up in the bare brances of a wide-flung elm.It kept leaning over and tearing at something it held in its claws. Even with my binoculars, I couldn't see what the victim was, but the bird itself was unmistakeably a Peregrine Falcon. Looking it up in the bird book, I read: "feeds entirely on other birds." Yes, our Audubon friends have helped restore the Peregrine Falcon. I will just have to curb my selfish desire to be in charge of every single winged beauty. Bird depredations on each other are completely out of my control