All Saint Paul's Ash Trees Gone in Five Years?

All of Saint Paul's Ash Trees Gone in Five Years?

I'm walking our Lex-Ham neighborhood in Saint Paul with my friend and neighbor Leben McCormick. He's a tree-man who works for Rainbow Tree. I'm a tree-lover who over 30 years has planted ten trees on a lot not bitter than a long postage stamp. When you grow up in tree-swamped Charleston, South Carolina, it's hard to be happy with only one boulevard tree.

Leben and I are making a rough tabulation of how many ash trees we have in this neighborhood area, roughly four blocks from Lexington Ave on the east to the Short Line on the west, and six or seven blocks from Summit Avenue on the north to Marshall Avenue on the south. I guess that half the blocks (like mine) are planted almost exclusively with ash trees, some as wide around as two or three of me. This is a scary revelation, though not one I haven't noticed. Just not thought about addressing.

Recently up and down Summit Avenue, threes in the wide medium I so appreciate have begun sporting green plastic rings. Suspecting this wasn't a good sign (you don't live though the elm tree blitz and not recognize the warning signalt). But Leben is somewhat encouraging. The rings are there to alert us to how many ash trees we have. When I finally have the nerve to go read what the rings say, I find a simple and devastating message: “Ash borers kill trees.” Since the Ash borer made its way from Asia in 2003, thousands of U.S. communities have lost “hundreds of millions of Ash trees” (http://www.emeraldashborer.info/). Take a drive down Beechwood Avenue in Highland to see what a “naked” street looks like without its crown of green.

Luckily, unlike communities in more southern parts of the U.S., we in the Twin Cities have experienced a recent severe winter that has slowed the progress of the borers. Thus, we have an opportunity to protect our canopy of green and preserve its beautiful, cooling summer shade, beautifying our neighborhoods and lowering the cost of air-conditioning.

                       

The treatment against the Ash borer is an “injection” of an insecticide that protects each tree for two to three years. In some cases, trees already infected can also be treated. Once the borer takes hold, however, it will eventually kill unprotected trees. It is better to treat the Ash trees when they are still healthy. At our house, we've been treating our boulevard Ash for a number of years.

Knowing that the opportunity to protect our Ash trees is narrowing, Leben has concocted an offer, which at this point will be available to residents in Lex-Ham. But might possibly be extended citywide. The offer include a 10% discount on treatment of ash trees for groups who treat 10 trees, and 20% discounts for those who treat 20 trees. It seems like the right time to take action while our trees are still healthy.

See also recent article in Pioneer Press

But many many residents will not treat their ash trees. Just as many did not treat their elms. No on the subject of elms, Leben and I identify a recent elm that has been hypridized to have greater resistance to the borer than the American Elm. These trees are about 10 years old, I'm guessing, not at all the lofty shady giants that occasionally still tower over our streets. It's truly an act of charity and neighborliness to treat these big elms. There are a few on my block, and Leben and I find a pair that are almost kissing across the air, so tall as to obscure the sun.

Briefly I consider how these denizens of our lives become neighbors, yes, and even members of our inner lives--of outlooks and inlooks. Of hopes and dreams, beliefs and sanity. I don't want my block to look like a war zone. I want to help protect as many of our neighborly ash trees as I can, with the help of a few friends.

Margotlog: Surviving Trump, Hate, and Rock and Roll

Margotlog: Surviving Trump, Hate, and Rock and Roll

Sometimes when I need a little leavening, I decide that our new president looks a bit like an aging, old-timey rock and roller. Wild hair, upper lip hung over lower, brow furrowed with fury and concentration. Sometimes, when the war he seems intent upon waging on his constituents sends me into an ecstasy of numbness or a spasm of fear, I recall other wars waged on noncombatant populations. I am reading about just such a war, "War in Val d'Orcia" by Iris Origo. An Anglo-American patrician by birth and behavior, the Marchesa Origo became Italian by marriage and sympathy. Buying 2000 acres in a corner of Tuscany, she and her husband turned their skill and fortitute frst to reclaiming wasted land and impoverished Italian tenants in the 1920s and 30s. Then just as they were bringing better management and productivity to these wasted farms, World War II demanded more of them.

Back to Trump: So far, life under Trump has induced numbness, disbelief, ridicule (mostly private), wild hope, and now grief. I am grieving the loss of a leader whose aim is to unite us in hope, who strives to better the lives of our country, while honoring others around the globe, while continuing work to protect and heal a clearly damaged planet. I'm grieving the possibility of a leader who inspires us to better deeds, who urges us to improve the lot of human and natural worlds. I'm grieving the lack of a leader who thinks widely, deeply, quietly, and purposefully. Who does not meet each challenge with an instant Tweet. And now I'm recalling a recent photo of our first Bush president and his wife Barbara, both hospitalized at the same time, now recovering. The photo showed them facing each other in a quiet moment, his chin touching her hair, she smiling up at him, both with inward quietude. I never voted for a Bush, but these people never shocked, dismayed, or terrified me. Partly because theyacted thoughtful, caring, and capable of quiet.

During the intense fighting during World War II, the Origos decided to take in twenty children whose homes near Genoa had been bombed and whose parents either dispersed or killed. It was an exercise in compassion, and a lot of work. The children were traumatized. Some hurt or ill. The Origos hired teachers, established beds and play areas, taught the children to work in small ways on the farm.

What struck me so fully was the contrast between a world gone mad with hate, conflict, destruction and death, and the Origos' daily effort to resist and protect these children, to continue feeding them, supporting their tenant farm families, hiding partisans and other combatants in the woods. Their work was all absorbing, full of incessant demands, challenges, needs. Yet they created sanity. They focused on what they could do and drew others to help them. They did not turn inward in fear or hate. They worked against the worst in humankind by doing the best within the circumstances.

This brings me to one more recognition: the thousands of women who attended the Trump inauguration as protestors were crammed in so close they couldn't march or see much of the ceremony. But as one wrote  in today's StarTribune, being there together in such large numbers was enough. Working together, we can overcome dismay, fear, lethargy. If we can't take fire from a president's words, we must take fire from ourselves.

Margotlog: Larger Fields, Smaller Towns: A Minnesota Dilemma

Margotlog: Larger Fields, Smaller Towns: A Minnesota Dilemma

When I first started traveling north, south, east and west as a writer-in-the-schools, the towns I visited in Minnesota were thriving. This was the 1980s, 90s, and into the 2000s. Some towns were larger than others, but even the smaller towns who joined together to form "consolidated schools" had several cafes, a bevy of church steeples pointing toward the sky, a car dealership, a garage and mechanic, a pharmacy, several barbers/hairdressers, grocery stores (not necessarily huge chains), a dress shop, and what we liked to call "A Five and Dime," which of course was ludicrous since hardly anything cost only a nickle or dime anymore.

Often mornings and evenings, farmers who passed the slack winter days drinking coffee "in town," sat around in booths or stools "shooting the bull," while their children trudged past outside on the way to school, or took the orange school bus "over the river and through the woods." I almost always had a room in a motel on the edge of town. Sometimes, even farmers, married to school teachers, knew who I was, a stranger yes, but welcome, someone to stare at as I, too, entered the cafe, walked past in my mukluks and red down coat, and slid into a booth. What I ordered for dinner has left no memory, but I do remember the rumble of masculine voices, and a waitress, in pink or blue uniform, with a tiny apron across her middle, standing at the end of the booth and taking my order. She knew me as "the visiting teacher." When I told her my name, she'd remember it for every one of the five evenings I ate there.

Sometimes in warmer autumn or spring weather, I'd walk to the town cemetery, hearing echoes of the students' names I was teaching in grades 4 - 6 or 7 - 9. Sometimes, I even cruised back roads, pausing to stare at tumble down barns and houses with their windows broken and doors off the hinges. Barns had their high roofs "stove in," but the walls often stood foursquare, full now of pigeons, mice, rabbits, and who knew what else. Maybe a traveler on foot who needed shelter for a free night's rest, slept in the dirty hay, unable to afford a motel room.

Gradually, this rather nice balance between people and land, living inside an economy of modest scale that yet supported quite a few families, often enough to keep a grammer school going in town, this lovely balance collapsed. First came bigger and bigger machines which required consolidation of fields, then came the sell- off of farm land to those few with lots of cash. Finally the more diversified farming of an earlier era disappeared. As far as the eye could see, acre after acre of corn or soy beans stretched to the margins of small streams.

It didn't take long before the towns began to dwindle. The few farm families with the cash to buy out their neighbors, purchased huge machines to plant the 'row" crops margin to margin of larger and larger fields. These families upgraded their farm homes, expanding into fireside "family rooms," or huge kitchen/sitting rooms. For all necessary purchases, they could no longer trade in towns where their parents and grandparents had lived because the towns were drying up. There simply weren't enough people to support a garage and a drug store, several grocery stores and a pharmacy, a beauty parlor, a five and dime, and a bank.

But these families sitting in the midst of their huge acerage, enjoyed driving bigger and bigger trucks to larger farm towns that still retained the retail services necessary to keep them fed, clothed, healthy, and practicing the "old time religion." All the high school students rode school buses, but still in some towns, there weren't enough children to support a modest grammar school. The children had to be bussed farther and farther away.

Grant Herfindahl, retiring from his job as executive director of The Farm Service Agency/U.S. Department of Agriculture, has seen this enormous consolidation take place. "Many crop farmers grow only two commodity crops, corn and soybears" he told a StarTribune writer in early January 2017. "The number of farms has dropped" (with average size expanding from 400 acres to 2,000). "When I began working in Pope County 20 years ago, there were about 115 dairies, and now maybe there're 30 left. And all of those 115 dairies were cumulatively raising about 6,000 cows. Today we've got new dairies(with) 6,000 cows in one dairy. This trend has been happening for a long time." (StarTribune, 1/8/2017 Business, D3).

This trend is creating a silent environmental disaster, on the par, if not the scale, with what Silent Spring described years ago. Because of the enormous size of the fields, and the main crops, corn and soy beans, needing vast amounts of chemicals to keep them bug free and growing, our Minnesota streams and rivers, the ground water that most of us pump for daily use, is being polluted, often to the point of killing fish, and endangering our health. Weedy margins where flowering plants grow, necessary for bees, butterflies, birds, have disappeared. We have a nationwide crisis in pollinaters. Monarch butterflies who depend on milkweed plants are unable to survive.

Equally as appalling are the caving in of small towns, with their diversified economies. Yes, according to Grant Herfindahl, some farmers across Minnesota have found a middle way--keeping a chunk of acerage planted, but also working jobs in towns. But the norm becomes larger and larger farms; fewer and fewer jobs. And, of course, as jobs in towns dry up, those who used to make a modest living are now poor, and on welfare. Rural poverty is one of our state's growing problems. It is not a happy land anymore. The rural core is dying.

There are some solutions: such as requiring all farmers to maintain buffer zones on their fields. Such areas of native plants help pollinaters survive, and also filter run-off of farm chemicals to prevent polluting neighboring streams and rivers. But though crucial, such buffers do very little for people left by the wayside as their towns are dying. We need to encourage relocation of small factories to rural Minnesota. We need to re-educate people who used to work in commerical establishments for jobs in various e-industries. These are some thoughts, but there is enormous resistance among "big" farmers to the environmental changes necessary to curb poisoning our streams, lakes, and rivers. If we don't legislate compliance, we will be overcome just like our pollinators. We will all eventually become victims of this current "Silent Spring."

Margotlog: Phebe Hanson: a Minnesota Original

Margotlog: Phebe Hanson: a Minnesota Original

Maybe it's not surprising that as we watch friends diminish and lean toward death, their most prominent and loved characteristics stand out. I wouldn't have said this about Phebe even three months ago, which was when I probably last saw her. I wouldn't have thought of her essence like this, but since she died recently at 88, I find myself asking, What were the most formative experiences of her life? And without much hesitation, I find myself answering, having her mother die when she was still a child, and developing a rare disease called Wegener's Syndrome when she was edging toward old age.

Growing up in a small Minnesota town where her father was a Lutheran minister, Phebe developed what I think of as a "giving" personality. She must have been born a talker, but the circumstances that shaped this trait had to do, I think, with carrying around a halo, sometimes tarnished (and thus open to humor) which she wore jauntily to better spill its glow. When her mother died, that glow became even more necessary. The girl's humor drew the world close, not in a frantic way, but with a warm, spirited intensity that united us with her in what felt like a mother's energetic embrace. I've never known anyone else whose quirky, inclusive humor could so quickly make us feel like her pals for life, and darn happy to be laughing with her even as we bemoaned what the world was up to.

"Long Underwear," one of my favorite poems published in her first book, Sacred Hearts (Milkweed Editions, 1985), suggests two somewhat contrary but ultimately sympathetic traits. First there's the getting out of bed early in snow-filled dark, and before anything else, letting her "flannel nightgown/ fall to the floor" while she stands "in forbidden nakedness...over the rush of Satanic heat" from the furnace below and pulls on her long underwear, the underwear she "won't discard/
       until spring melts the stubborn snow
       of my father's caution,
       and lets me wear my legs naked again.
I love that little jab at her father because it's so evident that he is the parent of her life, and she with her encompassing humor must foster within herself a motherliness, not only to warm her, but the rest of us, her delighted readers.

Phebe's much later millstone, the Wegener's Syndrome, caused her at various time great distress. Her vision became impaired, and sometimes her mobility. I wasn't privy to the many manifestations of this difficult disease, but I do know that the steriods used to treat it caused her great trouble from time to time. She had to retire from teaching, she a natural-born teacher of all ages from school children to college students to adults. Yet, it seems to me that the teaching never stopped. She herself became the lesson, a witty, often laughing, sometimes mordant mother to the parts of herself that wouldn't work. That instead of isolating her from friends, the disease somehow urged her to reach out with humor that enlivened us as well as herself.

I know there were bitter, bitter periods. But her struggles seemed to disappear when we stood at her door. We became the company she needed to delight and draw close. We were the necessary others to her wit and insight. It was a most satisfactory embrace. So much so that I almost can't believe she is dead. Yet, just as she herself needed to be reminded, we do too. At the end, the obituary in the Minneapolis StarTribune notes: "As a lifelong worrywart, Phebe often expressed anxiety that she would die, and for many years, family members assured her that she would." We love you, darling friend, We'll keep assuring ourselves that without the claw of death reaching toward us, there'd be little need to relish what we have among us.

Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

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.

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."

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.