Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born
In the dark, waking hours when I'm up with the cats, William Butler Yeats' famous lines written September 25,1916, in the Irish/English turmoil, move slowly and repetitively through my thoughts, "All changed, changed utterly,/ A terrible beauty is born."
If I ever knew, I've forgotten the circumstances that led this greatest of 20th-century Irish poets to write this longish poem, "Easter, 1916," though along with others in this volume from my graduate school days at Columbia, this poem is full of minute jottings, paring from the lectures of William York Tindall, now also, no doubt, "changed in his turn."
With Yeats' calm turnings of an almost biographical nature:
"This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force..."
Yeats offers lines exquisitely modulated with sorrow. He suggests an enormous upheaval even as he casts what feels like the ultimate quietly across our path:
"What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may yet keep faith..."
A lot of us this November 2016 are sliding around as did Yeats in dark, yet imagined uncertainties, grasping for names, for what has happened and yet will happen:
"For what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDouagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse...
Can we ever understand enough to grasp what this election of a man called Trump may have done to us? Glimmers there will be, perhaps a cataclysm, but for now, there is foreboding. We are mourning, and listening to the wind in the trees, as cats meow for their food in the dark.
Monday, November 21, 2016
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Margotlog: My Grandmother and the Election
Margotlog: Stunned - My Grandmother and the Election
Like many of us I went to bed after voting Tuesday, thinking I'd wake up to "Hillary Clinton as President." The result unnerved me so much that I walked around the rest of the day stunned. Passing a few very quiet souls downtown and in my Lex-Ham, St. Paul neighborhood, I hazarded a "How are you?" Their looks said it all. "Surviving," I told a few who beat me to the question. "Surviving."
Over the last day and a half, I've also been writing suppositions and tidbits about my North Dakota grandmother Augusta Olein. The only child of North Dakota Swedish immigrants to be born in this country, Augusta had a quiet graciousness about her. The few photograhs that remain show a stately, white-haired woman with a bit of jewelry or lace at her neck. It's her handfull of letters that suggest quite a bit more.
She writes to "Mousie," the young woman who will eventually become my mother. Augusta's loose-limped script spreads across white envelopes, to a Minneapolis address on 13th Avenue, near the University of Minnesota. It's Feb or March or May of 1928, on the cusp of what will become a full-fledged agricultural, then worldwide depression. Augusta notes that "the teachers haven't been paid." She's talking about the two teachers who rent rooms in the family's large North Dakota house. When Augusta's last children, my mother and her twin brother, went off to college, the house felt so empty that Augusta had a nervous breakdown. Not only did she then start taking in teachers as boarders, but eventually my mother's twin brother, Bud, returned to live at home and work for his father's many enterprises.
Augusta writes about expenses: "Buy a new dress," she urges Mousie. "Get a color you like. Spend as much as $35, but if you can find a nice one for less, that would be dandy" What I hear is the indulgence of a beloved daughter by a mother who now has a small income of her own--the two school teachers' rent money. I don't know what kind of dress Mousie bought, but I do hear that Buddy, her brother, brushed his hair before leaving for the train to visit Mousie in Minneapolis. He wasn't giving up on returning to college yet. "Bud put his comb and brush back on the kitchen shelf where the usually sit," writes August. "I hope he could comb his hair before the two of you set off together. Have Bud buy a comb at a drug store, if you can."
There is so much we may never know about people whose choices affect us profoundly. I was so sure that Hillary Clinton would be the choice of a majority of American voters. So sure that I did not pause to consider what drew so many to support Trump. There were a few hints: My husband's brother who has never had much money, and now lives quite happily in a Baton Rouge black neighborhood, said to me a few days before the election, "I'm going to miss Trump."
"You can't be serious," I protested, thinking of Lester's early agitation for equal rights, his summer spent in Mississippi participating in voter registration drives, his lifelong love of Black Music.
"Yes I am," Lester insisted. "I'm not going to vote for him, but I find him very entertaining."
This I dismissed as a very back-handed compliment.
Today, I'm calmer and more resigned. I've also begun to ask that crucial question: what do so many people want that they think Trump can provide? There are probably a million and one answers, some of them negative--the many ways that Hillary gets stuck in people's craw. But an article in The Nation written by a Brit who survived Brexit made me recognize what I had previously slid over: Millions of people are not making it. As Gary Younge says about the calls to "Remain" in the European Union: "From Tony Blair to David Cameron, people who had stiffed working people in a range of ways now insisted they alone could save them" (Nov. 14, 2016, p. 10). "The people" weren't having it.
I imagine Fran's brother Lester, joining Trump to thumb his nose at Wall Street, where Lester has absolutely nothing at stake. I imagine a former school teacher in the middle of Minnesota cheering. She's been living on around $1000 a month, and supporting a retarded daughter and her infant son. There's the displaced Iron Range workers who want what most of us environmentalists hope fervently to prevent--a revival of the mining industry.
I don't for a minute think Trump is a life-saver, but he's a real alternative to a status quo from which millions of Americans are not profiting. If building a wall between the US and Mexico means anything beyond xenophobia, it means keeping the jobs available for native born workers. Ditto for NAFTA. If you aren't making enough to live on, it sticks in your craw to hear that some jobs that could be performed here are being purposefully shipped overseas or across the border. Plus, it's one belly laugh after another to hear Mr. T. disembowel the privileged, shimmy up to women who can't resist him, and blow hot and cold about the power elite. It's enough to make a white, mad dog laugh. It's enough to drive droves of white men to be outright gleeful and mean about the one sure sense of power they have--They are not Mexican or Somali or Syrian. They can out-shoot, out-mock, our-strip most women alive. Hatred or denigration of women is one of a negledted white male's most cementing certainty. That, and the confidence that he's "carrying."
It's enough to make a body weep, if it doesn't drive us all to drink.
Note: this morning, as my husband and I slowy made our way through the StarTribune, we found toward the back of section 1, four full-page ads for liquor of all kinds. This is unprecedented. "Yup," says the Man of the House to the three cats and one woman, "Yup, they'll be boozing tonight."
He's probably right. Some boozing out of desperation; others out of "thank God, there's finally hope."
Like many of us I went to bed after voting Tuesday, thinking I'd wake up to "Hillary Clinton as President." The result unnerved me so much that I walked around the rest of the day stunned. Passing a few very quiet souls downtown and in my Lex-Ham, St. Paul neighborhood, I hazarded a "How are you?" Their looks said it all. "Surviving," I told a few who beat me to the question. "Surviving."
Over the last day and a half, I've also been writing suppositions and tidbits about my North Dakota grandmother Augusta Olein. The only child of North Dakota Swedish immigrants to be born in this country, Augusta had a quiet graciousness about her. The few photograhs that remain show a stately, white-haired woman with a bit of jewelry or lace at her neck. It's her handfull of letters that suggest quite a bit more.
She writes to "Mousie," the young woman who will eventually become my mother. Augusta's loose-limped script spreads across white envelopes, to a Minneapolis address on 13th Avenue, near the University of Minnesota. It's Feb or March or May of 1928, on the cusp of what will become a full-fledged agricultural, then worldwide depression. Augusta notes that "the teachers haven't been paid." She's talking about the two teachers who rent rooms in the family's large North Dakota house. When Augusta's last children, my mother and her twin brother, went off to college, the house felt so empty that Augusta had a nervous breakdown. Not only did she then start taking in teachers as boarders, but eventually my mother's twin brother, Bud, returned to live at home and work for his father's many enterprises.
Augusta writes about expenses: "Buy a new dress," she urges Mousie. "Get a color you like. Spend as much as $35, but if you can find a nice one for less, that would be dandy" What I hear is the indulgence of a beloved daughter by a mother who now has a small income of her own--the two school teachers' rent money. I don't know what kind of dress Mousie bought, but I do hear that Buddy, her brother, brushed his hair before leaving for the train to visit Mousie in Minneapolis. He wasn't giving up on returning to college yet. "Bud put his comb and brush back on the kitchen shelf where the usually sit," writes August. "I hope he could comb his hair before the two of you set off together. Have Bud buy a comb at a drug store, if you can."
There is so much we may never know about people whose choices affect us profoundly. I was so sure that Hillary Clinton would be the choice of a majority of American voters. So sure that I did not pause to consider what drew so many to support Trump. There were a few hints: My husband's brother who has never had much money, and now lives quite happily in a Baton Rouge black neighborhood, said to me a few days before the election, "I'm going to miss Trump."
"You can't be serious," I protested, thinking of Lester's early agitation for equal rights, his summer spent in Mississippi participating in voter registration drives, his lifelong love of Black Music.
"Yes I am," Lester insisted. "I'm not going to vote for him, but I find him very entertaining."
This I dismissed as a very back-handed compliment.
Today, I'm calmer and more resigned. I've also begun to ask that crucial question: what do so many people want that they think Trump can provide? There are probably a million and one answers, some of them negative--the many ways that Hillary gets stuck in people's craw. But an article in The Nation written by a Brit who survived Brexit made me recognize what I had previously slid over: Millions of people are not making it. As Gary Younge says about the calls to "Remain" in the European Union: "From Tony Blair to David Cameron, people who had stiffed working people in a range of ways now insisted they alone could save them" (Nov. 14, 2016, p. 10). "The people" weren't having it.
I imagine Fran's brother Lester, joining Trump to thumb his nose at Wall Street, where Lester has absolutely nothing at stake. I imagine a former school teacher in the middle of Minnesota cheering. She's been living on around $1000 a month, and supporting a retarded daughter and her infant son. There's the displaced Iron Range workers who want what most of us environmentalists hope fervently to prevent--a revival of the mining industry.
I don't for a minute think Trump is a life-saver, but he's a real alternative to a status quo from which millions of Americans are not profiting. If building a wall between the US and Mexico means anything beyond xenophobia, it means keeping the jobs available for native born workers. Ditto for NAFTA. If you aren't making enough to live on, it sticks in your craw to hear that some jobs that could be performed here are being purposefully shipped overseas or across the border. Plus, it's one belly laugh after another to hear Mr. T. disembowel the privileged, shimmy up to women who can't resist him, and blow hot and cold about the power elite. It's enough to make a white, mad dog laugh. It's enough to drive droves of white men to be outright gleeful and mean about the one sure sense of power they have--They are not Mexican or Somali or Syrian. They can out-shoot, out-mock, our-strip most women alive. Hatred or denigration of women is one of a negledted white male's most cementing certainty. That, and the confidence that he's "carrying."
It's enough to make a body weep, if it doesn't drive us all to drink.
Note: this morning, as my husband and I slowy made our way through the StarTribune, we found toward the back of section 1, four full-page ads for liquor of all kinds. This is unprecedented. "Yup," says the Man of the House to the three cats and one woman, "Yup, they'll be boozing tonight."
He's probably right. Some boozing out of desperation; others out of "thank God, there's finally hope."
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Margotlog: What My Cousin Said
Margotlog: What My Cousin Said
Let's call the oldest of my North Dakota cousins "Ellen." It's not her real name but Ellen captures her gentle though furiously active spirit. Four years older than I, Ellen knew our grandmother, Augusta. We're been talking by phone--she at "the cabin" touching the North Dakota border, I upstairs on the third floor of my St. Paul house, with the spruce spire ascending across the front windows, and the maple brushing the back with its soothing fingers. It's the end of summer, and windows elsewhere in the house are open. I can hear the wind.
As Ellena and I talk, I'm kneeling on the landing of the third-floor. We were going to meet at "the cabin" but my car didn't cooperate. Thus, this call, weeks after we intended to see each other. Her voice is so distinctive I feel as if I could reach through the phone and touch it--it has a slight prairie twang, and the words come rapidly. Ellen has raised three children and now has (can this be right?) fifteen grandchildren? Her life is full of family; mine hardly at all, though there is family to be had. It's just mostly by association with Fran, my husband. His grandchildren occupy much of his free time, almost none of mine.
Instead I find myself occupied by the past, especially prominent on this third floor, with my grandmother Augusta's painted bureau which is very hard to open, as if the old wood resisted any attempt to delve into its interior. I have to pull very hard to unstick a drawer. The interior shelves in the top half, hide behind two engraved doors, which rattle as I struggle to pull them apart. Inside is a swatch of emboidered satin, pale taupe with green, gold, and touches of autumn leaves. Also folders of old photographs, and the packet of letters August wrote to my mother during her last year at the University of Minnesota, 1928-9.
Ellen and I have launched into a discussion of our grandfather's death--Papa Max. If I remember correctly, he died in his late 80s, after living alone in the big house "in town" for at least a decade. It was during that time that I came to know him, the old man with the ring of white hair around his reddish pate, the bright blue eyes, the thick fingers with thick nails, and his paunch covered by a black vest, often slightly soiled . He seemed to have no harm in him. When he fed his canary Sweetie Pie little bits of toast, she twittered, and he spoke to her in German. Then he seemed like a benign ancient tree, part of the family landscape, still upright, still making low music with what was left of his life.
What Ellen said concerned his funeral which was held "at the lake." The lake, small in this case, was named after the wife of perhaps a town founder. Lake Elsie. What a pleasant lake to live beside in the "old Hankinson" house, built by the early entrepreneur who'd brought the railroad to the town that held his name. My uncle and aunt, Ellen's parents, had moved out of town to the lake, and into this truly grand house with polished walnut everywhere--it created the essence of the interior; whereas, turrets and small and large porches defined the exterior facade.
I wasn't there for the funeral. Only my mother attended from our family, after all so very far away in South Carolina. But my mother's twin brother Buddy and his wife Leona, and their four children certainly did attend. The funeral took place in their house. Buddy, by this time, looked like a younger version of Papa Max--stout and short, with a ring of white hair around his head and dancing, or snapping blue eyes. He had given up college, I was to learn years later, in order to take care of their mother. I would need even more years to to understand why.
Uncle Buddy and his family had prospered. Clearly they had far more wealth than we did, or so it would appear to me when my sister and I visited. My mother often mentioned trying to make do "on a professor's salary," meaning my father, though he worked hard, wasn't getting rich.
Let's call the oldest of my North Dakota cousins "Ellen." It's not her real name but Ellen captures her gentle though furiously active spirit. Four years older than I, Ellen knew our grandmother, Augusta. We're been talking by phone--she at "the cabin" touching the North Dakota border, I upstairs on the third floor of my St. Paul house, with the spruce spire ascending across the front windows, and the maple brushing the back with its soothing fingers. It's the end of summer, and windows elsewhere in the house are open. I can hear the wind.
As Ellena and I talk, I'm kneeling on the landing of the third-floor. We were going to meet at "the cabin" but my car didn't cooperate. Thus, this call, weeks after we intended to see each other. Her voice is so distinctive I feel as if I could reach through the phone and touch it--it has a slight prairie twang, and the words come rapidly. Ellen has raised three children and now has (can this be right?) fifteen grandchildren? Her life is full of family; mine hardly at all, though there is family to be had. It's just mostly by association with Fran, my husband. His grandchildren occupy much of his free time, almost none of mine.
Instead I find myself occupied by the past, especially prominent on this third floor, with my grandmother Augusta's painted bureau which is very hard to open, as if the old wood resisted any attempt to delve into its interior. I have to pull very hard to unstick a drawer. The interior shelves in the top half, hide behind two engraved doors, which rattle as I struggle to pull them apart. Inside is a swatch of emboidered satin, pale taupe with green, gold, and touches of autumn leaves. Also folders of old photographs, and the packet of letters August wrote to my mother during her last year at the University of Minnesota, 1928-9.
Ellen and I have launched into a discussion of our grandfather's death--Papa Max. If I remember correctly, he died in his late 80s, after living alone in the big house "in town" for at least a decade. It was during that time that I came to know him, the old man with the ring of white hair around his reddish pate, the bright blue eyes, the thick fingers with thick nails, and his paunch covered by a black vest, often slightly soiled . He seemed to have no harm in him. When he fed his canary Sweetie Pie little bits of toast, she twittered, and he spoke to her in German. Then he seemed like a benign ancient tree, part of the family landscape, still upright, still making low music with what was left of his life.
What Ellen said concerned his funeral which was held "at the lake." The lake, small in this case, was named after the wife of perhaps a town founder. Lake Elsie. What a pleasant lake to live beside in the "old Hankinson" house, built by the early entrepreneur who'd brought the railroad to the town that held his name. My uncle and aunt, Ellen's parents, had moved out of town to the lake, and into this truly grand house with polished walnut everywhere--it created the essence of the interior; whereas, turrets and small and large porches defined the exterior facade.
I wasn't there for the funeral. Only my mother attended from our family, after all so very far away in South Carolina. But my mother's twin brother Buddy and his wife Leona, and their four children certainly did attend. The funeral took place in their house. Buddy, by this time, looked like a younger version of Papa Max--stout and short, with a ring of white hair around his head and dancing, or snapping blue eyes. He had given up college, I was to learn years later, in order to take care of their mother. I would need even more years to to understand why.
Uncle Buddy and his family had prospered. Clearly they had far more wealth than we did, or so it would appear to me when my sister and I visited. My mother often mentioned trying to make do "on a professor's salary," meaning my father, though he worked hard, wasn't getting rich.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Margotlog: Late Summer Alley Walk
Margotlog: Late Summer Alley Walk
All things are new and beautiful, depending on the light. Today, at noon, with soft overcast skies, colors along the alleys sing "Zinnia" orange, deep red, magenta, pink. Sturdy and hairy, Zinnias clump, taller than umbrellas in a stand. I pause to inspect bees hovering and pausing in their centers. Frost will darken the flowers, erase their colors, but now, mid-September, I edge away from frost. Zinnias right now are as good as they'll ever get.
Walking is the only way to take nature in; otherwise, it whizzes past in a churning haste. Just now, I caught the oldest cat sipping out of the toilet that somehow was left running. Quick, close the lid.The wind has picked up, fluttering the boughs of ruffled locusts outside my study window. I've come home just in time.
Yet I'm still walking toward the alley, toward the corner house where I used to find an old man outside. His tanned face under crust of bright white hair smiled appreciatively--we had cats in common. I bent to pat his "Blackie" who twined around his legs as I congratulated him on his yard which was, and still is, a model of correctness, unlike mine overshadowed by trees, the boulevard rampant with goldenrod, brown-eyed Susans and something tight and purple in a spire, whose name I can't remember. Anyone who knows is welcome to say so.
The point today is to filch huge raspberries, come to fruition in a second ripening. But the owners have stopped harvesting, leaving canes heavy with fruit. As I pass, my hand reaches out and I unhook a berry from its stem, pop it immediately into my mouth. The warm juice rushes around my teeth and down my tongue. I pop in another, and another. Still walking so I won't be accused of loitering, I eat berries in open air, almost on the run, berries that belong to the warm day and the plant's desire--well they're memorable, maybe because filched, warm, lucious, and huge.
It's been an almost perfect summer, with more than enough rain, and plenty of sunshine. Now as the days shorten, I gather up a bouquet of memories, hoping they'll stay fresh in the dark. Some think we store up summer memories to feed us a long time, akin to a pantry stocked with honey, squash, and other eatables for winter. But somehow it doesn't work that way for me. I need a daily dose of outdoors; otherwise, I'm cranky, dislike the world, wonder what's the point.
So, a hurrah for Laura and Mary, and dog Jack, for baby Carrie when she comes along, and for the most simple yet engaging parents I've ever encountered on the printed page. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about woods and prairie not unlike those here in mid-south Minnesota. We have oak groves, left over surely from pioneer days, huge towering, wide-hearted trees that stud a small pocket park on my way home. Only a few oaks rise in yards on our street; none are left on the boulevards. Each time I pass one, I tip back my head and look up as far as my eyes can see their delicious, quirky branches and lobed leaves, almost like fingers. Who says we aren't all related under the skin?
All things are new and beautiful, depending on the light. Today, at noon, with soft overcast skies, colors along the alleys sing "Zinnia" orange, deep red, magenta, pink. Sturdy and hairy, Zinnias clump, taller than umbrellas in a stand. I pause to inspect bees hovering and pausing in their centers. Frost will darken the flowers, erase their colors, but now, mid-September, I edge away from frost. Zinnias right now are as good as they'll ever get.
Walking is the only way to take nature in; otherwise, it whizzes past in a churning haste. Just now, I caught the oldest cat sipping out of the toilet that somehow was left running. Quick, close the lid.The wind has picked up, fluttering the boughs of ruffled locusts outside my study window. I've come home just in time.
Yet I'm still walking toward the alley, toward the corner house where I used to find an old man outside. His tanned face under crust of bright white hair smiled appreciatively--we had cats in common. I bent to pat his "Blackie" who twined around his legs as I congratulated him on his yard which was, and still is, a model of correctness, unlike mine overshadowed by trees, the boulevard rampant with goldenrod, brown-eyed Susans and something tight and purple in a spire, whose name I can't remember. Anyone who knows is welcome to say so.
The point today is to filch huge raspberries, come to fruition in a second ripening. But the owners have stopped harvesting, leaving canes heavy with fruit. As I pass, my hand reaches out and I unhook a berry from its stem, pop it immediately into my mouth. The warm juice rushes around my teeth and down my tongue. I pop in another, and another. Still walking so I won't be accused of loitering, I eat berries in open air, almost on the run, berries that belong to the warm day and the plant's desire--well they're memorable, maybe because filched, warm, lucious, and huge.
It's been an almost perfect summer, with more than enough rain, and plenty of sunshine. Now as the days shorten, I gather up a bouquet of memories, hoping they'll stay fresh in the dark. Some think we store up summer memories to feed us a long time, akin to a pantry stocked with honey, squash, and other eatables for winter. But somehow it doesn't work that way for me. I need a daily dose of outdoors; otherwise, I'm cranky, dislike the world, wonder what's the point.
So, a hurrah for Laura and Mary, and dog Jack, for baby Carrie when she comes along, and for the most simple yet engaging parents I've ever encountered on the printed page. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about woods and prairie not unlike those here in mid-south Minnesota. We have oak groves, left over surely from pioneer days, huge towering, wide-hearted trees that stud a small pocket park on my way home. Only a few oaks rise in yards on our street; none are left on the boulevards. Each time I pass one, I tip back my head and look up as far as my eyes can see their delicious, quirky branches and lobed leaves, almost like fingers. Who says we aren't all related under the skin?
Saturday, September 3, 2016
Margotlog: Round Up
Round-Up
During the last month, I’ve been sampling random chapters
of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. My studio mate,
photographer Linda Gammell, has the book here in our studio as she prepares for
a show of native prairie photographs. My mother, who grew up in North Dakota,
read the Little House books to my sister and me years ago. Now, I’m enjoying
rereading this one, at how the story holds my attention, simply told, though it
is.
In an earlier volume, Wilder described “The Little House
in the Big Woods.” These woods which stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the
flat lands of western Minnesota and the Dakotas. And where the woods stopped, a
river of grass began. This green river has of grass has flowed through the
middle of North America for millennia. As snow flattened the grasses over the
centuries, and the grasses decayed, the soil of these prairies became the most
profoundly fertile soil in North America.
We
make do with what we have. And sometimes we make “big.” Minnesota’s corn and
soybean enterprises stretch for miles over former prairies. My guess is that
they stretch for hundreds of miles in all directions. And of course Minnesota
soils are not alone. There’s Iowa and Nebraska to our south--flatter and
warmer, prime soil for corn, alfalfa, and soybeans.
This
would all be dandy if it weren’t for one thing: for years farmers have been
using, a deadly herbicide called Round Up, made by Monsanto. Today, farmers
plant genetically altered seeds that are protected from Round Up. Then they
spray Round Up on their plants and soil. Round Up kills everything that isn’t
corn or soybeans.
It’s
as if an enormous genii stood over the Big Woods of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little Houses and sprayed gigantic hoses full of a leaf killer. Within days,
the oaks and maples, the ash and tupelo trees would all shed their leaves,
denuding the canopy and depriving animals of food like acorns, and insects that
depend on trees for food, and animals that need tree cover for protection from
the bigger and fiercer. It’s as if in one fell swoop a gigantic silence and
famine hit the land.
I’m
no Rachel Carson, America’s finest environmental writer. Her book Silent
Spring warned of such a silencing and deadening from another era’s wanton
use of DDT. Now we’re wantonly applying a broad leaf herbicide that eradicates
plants crucial for many insects.
Take
bees. More and more evidence is accumulating that even if plants survive Round
Up, they’re tainted. Bees that draw nectar from such tainted flowers lose their
ability to reproduce or to navigate that life-saving “beeline” to their hives.
It’s as if they have been hit on the head and can only stagger around.
Also
Monarch butterflies. The Sierra Club, mounting a large campaign to outlaw Round
Up, estimates that in the last 20 years, 90% of all Monarch butterflies have
disappeared. I assume that this means they’ve died or never been born. Gone,
Kaput, Fini! Not only is this a loss of one of nature’s most beautiful
creatures—the fluttering gold of autumn passing gently among our flowers. But
like the loss of the bees, the Monarchs’ decimation means doom to plants that
monarchs have historically pollinated.
But
we can’t blame only the farmers. Lawn-lovers too use Round Up. Since lawns are
almost entirely built of thin-leafed grass, anyone desiring a lawn so uniform
that it looks painted onto the soil can use Round Up. Such lawns grow not a
single broad-leaf plant—think dandelions, clovers—whose flowers attract and
feed bees and butterflies.
Round
Up can also directly threaten human life. An old couple I used to know had
maybe six or seven years together at the ends of their lives. They found each
other over a bridge table, and happy to have love in their old age, bought a
nice bungalow on the outskirts of a prairie city. Being nice, accommodating
folks, they wanted their lawn to look as nice as everyone else’s. Like their
neighbors, they used Round Up liberally, for one, then two, then three seasons.
In
the fourth season, the old man began to sicken. He began to totter and slur his
words. “Stroke,” whispered his daughter and son-in-law. His skin began to
slough off. He stopped eating. Within three months he was dead.
His
widow, mourning him, stayed on another couple of years, spreading Round Up on
the lawn just as her husband had done. She’d been the younger of the two, full
of laughter, a hearty, jolly sort. First her skin turned pale, then gray. Her
hands began to shake. She became unsteady on her feet. “Make sure she’s eating
well,” doctors advised her children. “Let’s have a look at her if she doesn’t
improve.”
When
they opened her up, her stomach was riddled with cancer. Quietly, without
telling her, they sewed her together. “You’ll be right as rain soon enough,”
the cheery doctors told her. It did rain, and the Round Up she and her husband
had for seven years lavished on their lawn, once again seeped into the soil and
into the water, which, once again, ran into the lake.
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Margotlog: Hillary and My Foremothers
Margotlog: Hillary and My Foremothers
Driving away from Terminal 2 at the Minneapolis airport early this morning, I passed the acres of white crosses that represent Minnesota's military dead. Out of the blue came a sudden memory of my father's first cousin Eleanora, who lived virtually her entire adult life after her husband Dick was killed in the Pacific just before the end of World War II. She was only twenty-one. For years and years afterwards, she and her sister Sadie worked in Washington, D.C.--Eleanora as a nurse for various government agencies, and Sadie in the Office of the President. When I was old enough to visit on my own, they became my extended family, hosting me as a Baltimore college student, inviting me for years afterwards to various Washington apartments and eventually to their assisted living residence in Dover, Delaware. They were the most joyful women, and some of the most accomplished, I have ever known.
My own mother was quite accomplished in her own right--she liked to brag about being a librarian in Pittsburgh for a decade, "BB," before babies. Later, when my sister and I could fend for ourselves after school, she went back to library work, first at a nearby highschool, then across the roller-coaster Cooper River Bridge that linked our suburban Mount Pleasant home to Charleston, South Carolina. She took the bus because she never really learned to drive. Later when my parents moved across the other of Charleston's two rivers, she often got a ride from my father, since her commute coincided with his teaching at The Citadel. I have learned to love my mother, to appreciate the subtleties of her nordic intensity. But that affection came when she, as Emily Dickinson wrote of her own mother, depended on us, not before.
Last night as I listened to Hillary Clinton accept the Democratic Party's nomination for President, I heard echoes of my foremothers. Hillary talked about her mother's impoverished childhood, and the hand-outs of food given her mother as a child. She talked about her father's printng business and how hard he worked to make enough to support a family. My own mother's father did quite well--first as a postmaster in their small North Dakota town, then marrying the daughter of a furniture store owner and eventually acquiring the store, and finally during the Depression buying up farms for unpaid back taxes. In many ways, my hard-working North Dakota grandfather lived the American Dream--he worked hard and was eminently successful, finally becoming the town's s mayor, "raising the roof" on the cottage and expanding it until the house I knew as a girl awed me with stained-glass windows, burnished staircase, and columned rooms.
Yet there were undercurrents--her father beat the much younger, Swedish immigrant teacher who became his second wife. Perhaps he did not beat her at the beginning when she was giving birth to their four children, but afterwards after the children had grown and moved away. She must have been depressed and wept for hours. This is the undercurrent that (I suspect) created the harshness that frightened me in my own mother, along with her determination to get things done, no matter what the consequences. Not that she broke any laws, but she ignored some unspoken contracts of civility and kindness. She also married a charming, but volatile man who needed "managing." This meant that the tension between my parents revolved around power and respect--my mother could be snide and dictatorial. I understand now why he often yelled his resentment at her.
When we elect a president, we enter into their histories and psyches. Some grow remarkably in office, rising to challenges with a fairness and strength that awe us far beyond what we expected. Others seem to shrink, decay, go bad. The trick, I think, is to listen for several things--an awareness that for those in need, government policy can give them a leg up and that it is up to a president--Eisenhower, Johnson, Obama--to craft initiative and support policy that make sure chidlren have enough to eat so they can concentrate in school, adults have jobs that help them reach their potential, and the rights to organize and vote are protected. These are the bedrock on which this country must rely if our "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." is to remain a democracy.
As Tolstoy writes in the opening of Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way." Democracy depends on happiness for the greatest number of people to the widest extent possible. Listening to Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech a few nights ago, I heard her personal story give meaning to these national goals. She also has amended and reframed some earlier ideas and adopted new ones. Such ability to bring new emphasis and initiative into play strikes me as crucial if a leader is to grow in response to changing challenges. Though she is no more perfect than any of us, I was struck by her range of care and precision of planning. Struck by how she honored her family's struggle,and dedicated herself not to hate or divisiveness, but to building individuals, families, communities and country stronger, with honor toward all and rancor toward none. This sounds like Lincoln, surely a great model for any pulic servant. But that she spoke in a woman's voice, from a woman's perspective still gives me the chills. It is time we elevanted one of our most dedicated public servants to our highest office. It is time we had a woman as resilient, capable, informed, and inspiriing as Hillary Clinton for president.
Driving away from Terminal 2 at the Minneapolis airport early this morning, I passed the acres of white crosses that represent Minnesota's military dead. Out of the blue came a sudden memory of my father's first cousin Eleanora, who lived virtually her entire adult life after her husband Dick was killed in the Pacific just before the end of World War II. She was only twenty-one. For years and years afterwards, she and her sister Sadie worked in Washington, D.C.--Eleanora as a nurse for various government agencies, and Sadie in the Office of the President. When I was old enough to visit on my own, they became my extended family, hosting me as a Baltimore college student, inviting me for years afterwards to various Washington apartments and eventually to their assisted living residence in Dover, Delaware. They were the most joyful women, and some of the most accomplished, I have ever known.
My own mother was quite accomplished in her own right--she liked to brag about being a librarian in Pittsburgh for a decade, "BB," before babies. Later, when my sister and I could fend for ourselves after school, she went back to library work, first at a nearby highschool, then across the roller-coaster Cooper River Bridge that linked our suburban Mount Pleasant home to Charleston, South Carolina. She took the bus because she never really learned to drive. Later when my parents moved across the other of Charleston's two rivers, she often got a ride from my father, since her commute coincided with his teaching at The Citadel. I have learned to love my mother, to appreciate the subtleties of her nordic intensity. But that affection came when she, as Emily Dickinson wrote of her own mother, depended on us, not before.
Last night as I listened to Hillary Clinton accept the Democratic Party's nomination for President, I heard echoes of my foremothers. Hillary talked about her mother's impoverished childhood, and the hand-outs of food given her mother as a child. She talked about her father's printng business and how hard he worked to make enough to support a family. My own mother's father did quite well--first as a postmaster in their small North Dakota town, then marrying the daughter of a furniture store owner and eventually acquiring the store, and finally during the Depression buying up farms for unpaid back taxes. In many ways, my hard-working North Dakota grandfather lived the American Dream--he worked hard and was eminently successful, finally becoming the town's s mayor, "raising the roof" on the cottage and expanding it until the house I knew as a girl awed me with stained-glass windows, burnished staircase, and columned rooms.
Yet there were undercurrents--her father beat the much younger, Swedish immigrant teacher who became his second wife. Perhaps he did not beat her at the beginning when she was giving birth to their four children, but afterwards after the children had grown and moved away. She must have been depressed and wept for hours. This is the undercurrent that (I suspect) created the harshness that frightened me in my own mother, along with her determination to get things done, no matter what the consequences. Not that she broke any laws, but she ignored some unspoken contracts of civility and kindness. She also married a charming, but volatile man who needed "managing." This meant that the tension between my parents revolved around power and respect--my mother could be snide and dictatorial. I understand now why he often yelled his resentment at her.
When we elect a president, we enter into their histories and psyches. Some grow remarkably in office, rising to challenges with a fairness and strength that awe us far beyond what we expected. Others seem to shrink, decay, go bad. The trick, I think, is to listen for several things--an awareness that for those in need, government policy can give them a leg up and that it is up to a president--Eisenhower, Johnson, Obama--to craft initiative and support policy that make sure chidlren have enough to eat so they can concentrate in school, adults have jobs that help them reach their potential, and the rights to organize and vote are protected. These are the bedrock on which this country must rely if our "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." is to remain a democracy.
As Tolstoy writes in the opening of Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way." Democracy depends on happiness for the greatest number of people to the widest extent possible. Listening to Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech a few nights ago, I heard her personal story give meaning to these national goals. She also has amended and reframed some earlier ideas and adopted new ones. Such ability to bring new emphasis and initiative into play strikes me as crucial if a leader is to grow in response to changing challenges. Though she is no more perfect than any of us, I was struck by her range of care and precision of planning. Struck by how she honored her family's struggle,and dedicated herself not to hate or divisiveness, but to building individuals, families, communities and country stronger, with honor toward all and rancor toward none. This sounds like Lincoln, surely a great model for any pulic servant. But that she spoke in a woman's voice, from a woman's perspective still gives me the chills. It is time we elevanted one of our most dedicated public servants to our highest office. It is time we had a woman as resilient, capable, informed, and inspiriing as Hillary Clinton for president.
Monday, June 27, 2016
Margotlog: Urban Foresters Take a Look
Margotlog: Urban Foresters Take a Look
There was a gaggle around the boulevard ash tree as I stepped down the driveway. "We're from Rainbow Tree," they told me, "checking to see how your ash is doing." Couldn't be better, as far as I was concerned. Treating my ash for the borer that's spreading destruction slowly westward has become my priority --every two years, going on twelve now.
I love shade! My essay "Eight Species of Shade" chronicles how when we first moved to this St. Paul city lot in 1985, only the boulevard ash offered any kind of shade. Otherwise, grass, front and back, did nothing to soften the lines of the clunky old house, nor offer any measure of shade to capture summer light and send it flickering into "green thoughts in a green shade" (Ben Jonson, "To Penthurst"). Over the next three years I begged, bought, or otherwise acquired five spruce sprouts, four silver maple fledglings, a decent sized golden locust, several foot tall white pines, a Russian olive, a flowering pink crab, and miscellaneous other self-planted offerings.
Caring for trees made me a sharp observer of other green growth: such as lawns, and what seemed to be a sudden decline in our winged insect messengers. Neighborhood residents were beginning to plant broad-leafed varieties of green in their boulevards. I followed suit, with hostas and lilies. I dug up some goldenrod and golden glow from the Ayd Mill Road walk-along and transported it a bit west, Ditto with violets found elsewhere on the property, and Virginia Water-leaf which re-established itself once mowing stopped. Slowly what had been "turf" became populated with broad leaves and some flowers. I heard the message against pesticides and herbicides and vowed never such killers would touch my green. (Note: honey bees, butterflies especially Monarchs are in sharp decline due to slow neurological poisoning by chemicals containing neonicotinoids.)
As the Rainbow Tree gaggle a studied the ash tree's broad, green branches. and checked its root flanges for the places where the ash borer pesticide had been injected, they pronounced it a very healthy tree. "It's beautiful ," said one of the urban foresters, as we all surveyed its rich and lively green. My heart soared into its branches where I preened and chirped.
"You're doing just right with these broad-leaf plantings around the base," said another. "Grass doesn't make the best bed for trees.It's best to plant like a forest."
I pondered that as another stepped up to explain--"Think of all the leaves that accumulate around the base and spread wide under forest trees. They decay and form mulch which helps to absorb and retain moisture. Plus leaf mulch like your plantings help to keep the soil cool. This means trees are much less likely to dry out during heat or suffer because they're unprotected from extreme cold."
For the rest of the day as I walked around the neighborhood, I inspected the base of oak and hackberry, some maples (the sugar maples are dying due to warmer temperatures, but there's a very nice hybrid being planted in the neighborhood), and the many, many ash trees that dominate St. Paul plantings.
Not everybody can afford to treat their boulevard ash every two years, but it doesn't require much outlay of funds to plant a boulevard and yard garden with broad-leaf perennials. In fact, many times throughout the spring, summer and early autumn, I walk past little mounds of dug-up hostas and lilies, offered quietly, free-of-charge to any gardener who wants to give them a home.
There was a gaggle around the boulevard ash tree as I stepped down the driveway. "We're from Rainbow Tree," they told me, "checking to see how your ash is doing." Couldn't be better, as far as I was concerned. Treating my ash for the borer that's spreading destruction slowly westward has become my priority --every two years, going on twelve now.
I love shade! My essay "Eight Species of Shade" chronicles how when we first moved to this St. Paul city lot in 1985, only the boulevard ash offered any kind of shade. Otherwise, grass, front and back, did nothing to soften the lines of the clunky old house, nor offer any measure of shade to capture summer light and send it flickering into "green thoughts in a green shade" (Ben Jonson, "To Penthurst"). Over the next three years I begged, bought, or otherwise acquired five spruce sprouts, four silver maple fledglings, a decent sized golden locust, several foot tall white pines, a Russian olive, a flowering pink crab, and miscellaneous other self-planted offerings.
Caring for trees made me a sharp observer of other green growth: such as lawns, and what seemed to be a sudden decline in our winged insect messengers. Neighborhood residents were beginning to plant broad-leafed varieties of green in their boulevards. I followed suit, with hostas and lilies. I dug up some goldenrod and golden glow from the Ayd Mill Road walk-along and transported it a bit west, Ditto with violets found elsewhere on the property, and Virginia Water-leaf which re-established itself once mowing stopped. Slowly what had been "turf" became populated with broad leaves and some flowers. I heard the message against pesticides and herbicides and vowed never such killers would touch my green. (Note: honey bees, butterflies especially Monarchs are in sharp decline due to slow neurological poisoning by chemicals containing neonicotinoids.)
As the Rainbow Tree gaggle a studied the ash tree's broad, green branches. and checked its root flanges for the places where the ash borer pesticide had been injected, they pronounced it a very healthy tree. "It's beautiful ," said one of the urban foresters, as we all surveyed its rich and lively green. My heart soared into its branches where I preened and chirped.
"You're doing just right with these broad-leaf plantings around the base," said another. "Grass doesn't make the best bed for trees.It's best to plant like a forest."
I pondered that as another stepped up to explain--"Think of all the leaves that accumulate around the base and spread wide under forest trees. They decay and form mulch which helps to absorb and retain moisture. Plus leaf mulch like your plantings help to keep the soil cool. This means trees are much less likely to dry out during heat or suffer because they're unprotected from extreme cold."
For the rest of the day as I walked around the neighborhood, I inspected the base of oak and hackberry, some maples (the sugar maples are dying due to warmer temperatures, but there's a very nice hybrid being planted in the neighborhood), and the many, many ash trees that dominate St. Paul plantings.
Not everybody can afford to treat their boulevard ash every two years, but it doesn't require much outlay of funds to plant a boulevard and yard garden with broad-leaf perennials. In fact, many times throughout the spring, summer and early autumn, I walk past little mounds of dug-up hostas and lilies, offered quietly, free-of-charge to any gardener who wants to give them a home.
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