Stopping by Woods, with Robert Frost

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margotlog: Sponsoring Critters for the Holidays

Margotlog: Sponsoring Critters for the Holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margotlog: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Margotlog: Nothing Gold Can Stay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A White Squirrel in the Rain

A White Squirrel in the Rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sudden Hush

A Sudden Hush

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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