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.   

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?

 

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.

She did not last out the winter, and was buried beside her husband high on a hill overlooking a lovely river. “They didn’t have to die so soon,” whispered the chickadees that had nothing to do with lawns and gardens. “They did themselves in,” whispered the rabbits and squirrels, whose cousins near the lake had died, leaving these critters higher up on the bluff, where the soil was too rocky and steep for gardens, where scarcely anyone thought of lawns under spreading oaks and elms, but instead liked to pick wildflowers to honor the graves, some of which dated back to the Civil War.

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.

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.
 

 

Margotlog: Why I Will Vote for Hillary

Margotlog: Why I Will Vote for Hillary

Have you noticed recently how sedate and almost severe are the two most prominent European political women--Queen Elizabeth of England and Angela Merkel, of Germany? Recently I've been comparing them to Hillary Clinton, whom the US press has criticized for her inability to "connect" with the American voters, even as most commentators acknowledge that electing her president is the only sane thing to do, given the choices.

I've been aware, also, of life experiences and standards for correct behavior that apply quite differently to men and women. Such as being viewed as a "cold" female, even as her own husband, whom we all remember as a dashing guy with a big smile and hearty handshake, conducted a flagrant affair with an aide so much younger than he that she could have been his daughter. Shades of ancient Rome.Yet there were enough exonerating snickers about Bill Clinton to let him off the hook--boys will be boys, you know. But what about grown women? What about the wife of a flagrant philanderer?

Hillary Clinton did more than survive the ravages of that scandal. She emerged essentially unscathed and had the integrity and hardiness of spirit to soldier on without much ado. She kept her wits and let the glare of publicity fall where it was deserved. Such is not a scandal that would affect an American male in the same way. We don't elect women to higher office with the unspoken awareness that they may make a sexual misstep and we will forgive them.

I would argue that much of what the press finds "cold" about Hillary Clinton is her canny awareness that however she may be judged politically, she would never, as a woman in public life, be forgiven any tinge of indecency. I wish she would select Senator Elizabeth Warren as her running mate. Senator Warren has chosen to be guarded about her political ambitions. She has not pushed herself forward, and instead let her outstanding qualities burnish her reputation. I'd like to watch the psychological fortitude of two extraordinary woman working together to make the country run straight and true. I'd like to be spared the awkward, embarrassing dance of a subservient male as running mate. I can't think of a single American male politician who could support a strong, empowered female president except perhaps the generous, mature Joe Biden, and we've already enjoyed his good qualities in our current presidency.

One last thing: Until the current middle-east refugee crisis, I thought Angela Merkel was cold and almost too self-effacing. Of course I'm not German, but I'm female, and I grasp the challenge of heading an essentially male-dominated political order, constantly in the public eye. When I have read about Angela Merkel's successes in Germany remind me of Hillary Clinton--they are both policy "wonks," with great capacity for managing details and guiding larger issues toward successful conclusions.

Then came the refugee crisis. Angela Merkel extended the migrants a welcome far greater than was offered by any other European country. Week after week, month after month, she rallied her government, sometimes against severe resistance, to do not only what was generous and humane, but what became politically, and economically risky. This is true heroism. This is an awareness of Germany's debt to humanity for Hitler's decimation of the Jews. This is the hardiness and courage to do the right thing. I believe that Hillary Clinton would do the same. The reasons would be different, but the impulse I am sure would be there, along with the fortitude, compassion, courage, and determination to make the impulse a reality.

Of the three major contenders for the nomination, Hillary Clinton stands far above Donald Trump whose shoot-from-the-hip style is brash, untutored and terrifying. Especially of late, Hillary's Democratic competitor Bernie Saunders has also shown himself mean-spirited, vituperative, and stupid. What could he possibly gain for himself or his party by ranting against his opponent like an ill-mannered teenager?

As every day passes, Hillary Clinton looks stronger and stronger. I applaud her political experience, her stalwart presence, and her proven capacity to adjust her approach when necessary, to keep in sight what is good as well as possible.

Margotlog: Rag Queen: Gender, Generations

Rag Queen: Gender, Generations

  Two high-spirited, deep-feeling, savvy young women start an online poetry magazine. They title it Rag Queen. I submit a poem, after a poet friend, also a woman, introduces me to its existence. After my poem is published, I tell my daughter, plenty savvy herself, that the magazine is called Rag Queen. She exclaims with unalloyed pleasure, “That’s great.” She knows immediately that the rag in question is the monthly rag worn to collect menstrual blood.

     I’m startled. Does her generation of women feel as mired in their femaleness as mine occasionally did?  Is it still outspoken smart-ass to refer to menstruation in public? When did I stop being fixated on my femaleness and become more attuned to the ways gender and generation twine through both men and women?  

   Exhibit: My husband has become softer in body as he’s aged, yet his upper body is still laughingly much stronger than mine. His forearm muscles are rock hard. He lifts weights to help keep them so. But my legs perform better than his. I don’t have ankle, knee, hip pain. He does. My legs are relatively strong, compared to the skinny-minny, other parts of my body. Is this because, since early childhood I walked to school and biked everywhere? Or is it because I inherited my father’s flabby upper body, but my mother’s strong lower one? Through the thirty years I’ve known my husband, he’s preferred driving to walking. Most of his cars are red.

   Exhibit: This mid-April I escaped Minnesota’s cold and took the slow ferry from Naples across sea-green waves to the Isle of Capri. The slow ferry was quieter and less crowded than the “turbo-powered,” more pricey option. Sinking in bliss and fatigue onto a bench on the upper deck, I let go all kinds of imperatives and simply gazed at what was passing on the right: rocky splits of land dotting off from Naples proper, then the bigger island of Ischia, shimmering in the sunlit blue.

   A family of four sat ahead of me. The father was tall and sandy-haired, with a hawk-like nose and long, stilt legs. Moving jerkily around the benches, he seemed almost incapable of sitting still. The dark-haired mother lounged in one place, her soft plump body slowly sliding as she dozed. Their daughters, both tall and willowy, yet acted quite differently. One, like her father, kept on the move. The other, like the mother, sat quietly in place, reading or staring over the brilliant blue. It took me a while to notice that though the daughters both had long, sandy-colored hair which whipped in the breeze, their profiles were surprisingly distinctive—the sedentary one had their mother’s broad, soft features; the active one, their father’s sharper look.

   Eventually the two sisters sat together, talking softly. I sighed with relief. This was the way it should be, I thought. But given how my sister and I have tugged away from each other over the years, such sisterly companionship is not at all predestined.

   Exhibit: Back to literature: The mysteries my husband likes usually bore me after a few pages. He doesn’t show much interest in the psychological memoirs, novels, and poetry I enjoy. It’s a gender divide I tell myself, as is the fact that though far more women read works of all kinds than do men, far more men are published.

     Thank you, Rag Queen co-founders, creative director Marlana Eck, editor-in-chief, Kailey Tedesco, for your energy and aplomb, your friendship that flowered into a garden of female delights. Thank you for publishing men, but putting women writers first.

     Thank you, for letting me interview you via the internet, for insisting, Marlana, that “Women’s stories are SO important. It’s imperative that we let them tell their stories from their viewpoints….Women develop a lot of grit in their lifetimes, and Rag Queen hopes to speak to that.”  

   Thank you, Kailey, for asserting that “I’m not looking for [Sylvia] Plath mimicry…I want confessionals that are eclectic, hybrid, messy in all the right places, strange and professional at once. Give me a poem that can easily transmogrify into its own woman. Give me a sea-witch, or a mushroom fairy, or your Nana on paper.” 

   What woman could resist such an invitation?