Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities.
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I think it was blogger Albert who recently introduced me to the American Life in Poetry site. I found a poem by Dana Gioia posted there: “This beautiful poem remembers his first son, Michael Jasper, whom Gioia and his wife Mary lost in infancy.”
In images that describe familiar things of our embodied life the poet conveys the mystery of God — and the mixed emotions we have about the things He does. For example,
Keeper of the small gate, choreographer of entrances and exits, midnight whisper traveling the wires.
You can read the whole poem on the ALP site; it’s easy to find there if you put the title in the search box at the top right of the page. The title is Prayer. And if you’d like to hear composer Morten Lauridsen’s musical setting, this site posts both the poem and a link to a YouTube video of a choir singing it.
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson once declared that language is fossil poetry. Many words that we use carelessly have, embedded within their amber-like exterior, the remnants of long lost perceptions and intuitions. When received thoughtfully and with some delicacy, words have the capacity to allow us to travel back in time, to imagine how and what the world meant to our ancestors. But unlike the insects, or dinosaur DNA fixed in amber, the meanings within words are changing, evolving, as human perceptions change.”
-Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, introducing his interview of John Durham Peters about his new book, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.
I listened to this interview and have ordered the book, though I fear it will be above my head, like clouds. The author was not hard to understand when he was talking, and he spoke of so many things that I would like to “hear” him discuss further, after I get the book and can read the words on paper, and flip back and forth and underline a phrase here and there of his meaningful prose. How can I resist a book that contains all together in its title the words Marvelous, Philosophy, and Clouds?
It was fun to be in a different climate zone with lots of plants I’m not used to. All my cousins appreciate my love for the flora of their world. Elise has this huge tree in her little back yard, a pawlonia or Japanese Empress tree, which I remembered from three years ago. I took a picture of a small portion through my bedroom window.
Renée and I walked in the woods twice in two days. Even the rotting leaves smell different in her woods from the ones at home. A different recipe – and the aroma is delicious.
There are also a greater quantity of leaves than I’m used to, what with all the deciduous hardwoods. In the middle of one woods our path ran alongside a clearing where leaves collected from neighborhoods are dumped into big piles for composting. In my part of California the disposal companies might make mulch from the contents of the green bin, but leaves are just a small part of the mix.
Many of the trees were already bare, but birches and Japanese maples were still colorful.
And an invasive species of euonymus that is pink right now. It’s called Winged Euonymus because of the little rectangles sticking out like flags along the stems.
Renée is such an accommodating host that she was willing to go down to her garden just to pick greens for our breakfast — in response to my answer about what I usually eat. We did this again for dinner, and I took pictures of her garden.
< One of the things she grows is Kalettes, a cross between Brussels sprouts and kale. We enjoyed lots of those in our stir-fry!
On my last day in Pennsylvania, my cousin drove me to Longwood Gardens, a property of over 1,000 acres with several conservatories that make it possible to grow exotic plants all year. Right now they are having an amazing chrysanthemum show.
It was novel, the propagating they do with mums, such as grafting 100 varieties on to one stem. That plant was more freakish than beautiful; maybe it had also passed its prime. The 100-bloom domed plants were prettier:
They have an intricate system for supporting the flowers in such a strict form.
In 1906 Pierre du Pont purchased the land that has become Longwood Gardens. Previous owners had been farmers, and by 1850 the arboretum they planted had become an expansive collection covering 15 acres. Du Pont bought the 202-acre farm in 1906 to preserve trees that were in danger of being cut down. Then he proceeded to restore and develop the gardens, to grow fruit trees and plant a long Flower Walk, build a chimes tower, install fountains… many features that we didn’t have time to see on this visit, given the early sunset of November.
When Pierre du Pont died in 1954, the Longwood Foundation that he had put in place made possible a transition from private estate to international treasure. Trying to find if there was a connection between Kate’s Dupont Circle neighborhood in D.C. and this gardener, I did discover that Pierre was the grandfather of the Civil War soldier for whom the traffic circle was named. It is fascinating to read about this large and prosperous family through the generations.
sea oats
I loved the orchids, and the mandarinquat tree, and hanging gardens and succulents. Of course I won’t show you pictures of everything. But this Silver Garden was an especially lovely and soothing display.
I must end my travelogue; though it seems incomplete in that I have had to leave out lots of experiences I might ramble on about, it is also a little too delayed for me to want to delve any more into those events. Now the pink leaves are no doubt fallen, and soon snow will be covering them along the forest paths. I came home and have returned to my everyday life that is never the same from one day to the next, so I will get back to writing about that.
On my last day in Pennsylvania, my cousin drove me to Longwood Gardens, a property of over 1,000 acres with several conservatories that make it possible to grow exotic plants all year. Right now they are having an amazing chrysanthemum show.
