Companions in Our Isolation

We are not “birders,” the Artist and I, but here in Arizona on our annual seasonal retirement (scheduled to end in May, but who knows right now, given the current world situation?) we pay a lot of attention to birds. The hawk that swoops in front of our car and settles with beating wings on a mesquite tree by the side of the road, the droll little roadrunner, the “confiding” canyon towhee, and all the rest. But I told the Artist the other day, as we sat out watching birds, that every time I see the bright red male cardinal, I am carried back to my graduate student apartment in Cincinnati years ago. 

It was one more evening alone, studying in a one-bedroom apartment much roomer than necessary for someone with almost no furniture. My few clothes hung in a luxurious walk-in closet that could have housed, I often thought, an entire refugee family. Few clothes, little furniture — and yet I felt unbelievably fortunate, for in my first year of graduate study I received a monthly fellowship check which, thanks to frugal living and cheap beans and cheap beer the last week of every month, covered my living expenses. And all I had to do to earn that check was read and write: my obligation coincided with my chosen work. Heaven!

But the scholar’s heaven could be lonely, too. 

I think I must have been holding my awareness of loneliness at mental arm’s length for quite a while, because when a tiny red mite appeared on a page of my book, I was struck with inordinate delight: another living creature! Charming! Fascinating! A companion in my evening solitude!

If you search online for information about bright red clover mites, tiny creatures each smaller than the head of a pin, you’ll turn up all manner of pest control results, although everyone admits that the clover mite is harmless. It isn’t poisonous. It doesn’t bite, anyway. And even if it invades en masse, the invaders won’t live long indoors. 

Well, easy for me to say, maybe, because for me there was only the one. One tiny, tiny creature the brilliant color of a cardinal. What happened to it? I don’t remember. How long does a clover mite live, anyway, in the best of circumstances? That minuscule receptacle of life achieved a kind of immortality, though, because even now, years later, every time I see a bright red cardinal I remember with fondness that other, much smaller, long-ago, anonymous visitor.

The following day, when I shared the story and my response to the mite with another graduate student, expecting him to laugh, I was surprised and gratified when he shared a similar story. For him, a spider had provided companionship during a long evening of solitary study. A memoir called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, tells of how much a small creature’s presence meant to one woman confined to her bed by a mysterious illness, and Barbara Kingsolver, in High Tide in Tucson, tells of a hermit crab she inadvertently brought back from a Caribbean vacation and the efforts she and her daughter made to keep it alive.

Other living things! They mean so much to us, these our fellow passengers on spaceship earth, perhaps especially when our socializing with human family and friends is necessarily limited. 

While those of us who share our homes with dogs and/or cats — or birds, fish, or reptile pets — know better than to take their companionship for granted, ever, I’ve been thinking of how much comfort and companionship we gets from plants, as well as from animals, during these days of staying home and “sheltering in place.” When I first shopped, as advised, for a possible two-week quarantine — how long ago was that? — one of the impulse items I added to my cart was a little $4.99 plastic pot containing a clump of three small succulent plants. The souls as well as the bodies of our household require feeding, I felt. And I don’t even know the name of this succulent plant. Maybe it’s some kind of hybrid. It doesn’t matter. I had bought the beautiful round clay planter at an estate sale, and the planter begged to be filled. A rusty piece of found industrial iron added height and variety. 

I can’t tell you how much I love looking at my little pot (it is right here beside me now) and inspecting the largest of the three small plants to see if it’s any closer to flowering than it was the previous day. On warm days it lives outside, but with the threat of freezing overnight temperatures (and we did have a hard frost that night) it came indoors, taking priority over stacks of books and magazines (can you believe it?) on the little table between our reading chairs. And actually, carrying the planter outside and back indoors increases my feeling of relationship with the plants in the pot. 

When the Little Prince in St.-Exupery’s story of the same name discovers that the rose he tended with such dedication was not, as she claimed to be, the only rose in existence, at first he felt hoodwinked, as if he had wasted his time caring for her. He is set straight (was it by the fox? I don’t have the book at hand) thusly: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” 

The other day my hiking partner neighbor, after we had been out in the foothills with our dogs for a couple of hours, asked me if I would like a planter of mint. Sarah and I continued home, and Therese left the mint outside her gate for me to pick up with the car later. So now, when the Artist and I sit behind the cabin watching the birds, I also gaze fondly at a planter filled with healthy, vibrant, bright-green mint. My friend had advised me that I should water the mint when I got it home. Oh, good! The mint needs me! Responsibilities of caring for animals and plants that share our lives, like the responsibilities we have to each other, create bonds. 

Is it time to put another suet cake out for the birds? I’d better check....

…I thought I had finished a draft of this post, and then I looked online for other quotes from The Little Prince. When I got to this one, my skin broke out in goosebumps: 

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well….”

He loved his desert, I love mine. 

I ask you, what does it matter if the imaginary cat in the box is alive or dead? What matters to me is whether or not the sheep has eaten the beloved flower…. Books are also our companions, and The Little Prince gives us, in fantasy form, another example of an everyday hero, along with an ethics of care. Be well, stay safe and healthy, my friends!

There Are No Small Meanings, Only Small Minds

Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. – Elizabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Confined to bed by a mysterious illness and unable even to sit up, Bailey became fascinated by a small wild snail brought to her by a friend in a clay pot of woods violets. Observing the snail gave interest and focus to her interminable hours of solitary confinement and forced inactivity.

In solitude very far removed from that of Bailey’s sickroom isolation, I was studying alone one evening during my first year of graduate school in a small, almost empty apartment in a strange city. The minimal furnishings of my monkish space consisted of a wobbly-legged dinette table, two wooden chairs, a low coffee table holding my typewriter (I sat cross-legged on the floor to type) and, in the bedroom, a futon on the floor and cardboard boxes, on their sides, open end out, holding books. I was lying on the carpeted living room floor when a tiny, bright red mite, smaller than the head of a pin, appeared on the page I was reading, moving purposefully across the lines of type. Had I pricked my finger with a needle to draw blood, the insect would have matched that blood in color. Another living being! I was so pleased! The next day, as usual, I walked to campus. When I told my fellow students about the mite, they all understood.

Bailey’s situation was prolonged and extreme in comparison to mine, and her snail was more than a moment of cheer. It was quite literally her lifeline. Later in her recovery, she wrote of the snail to her doctor:

Watching another creature go about its life . . . somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in life mattered, so I kept on.

Along with a highly personal odyssey of immobility (if I may call it that), the author explores natural history and poetry, tracing what others have discovered and noted in the miraculous complexity of this one small, inconspicuous wild creature. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a jewel of a book, destined to become a classic.

Wild snails in my neighborhood would do well to continue their hibernation a bit longer, but I have chosen today’s images (photos taken Saturday afternoon) with snail scale in mind. Perhaps a note on today's heading is appropriate here, as well, although anyone who has spent time in theatre will recognize the allusion. In the world of stage and greasepaint, one is often reminded, "There are no small parts, only small actors." Never a star, I drew strength from those words.

Of Mice and Men

What’s with me lately? Why are so many of the books I pick up not even from the most recent turn of the century but the one before my parents were born? John Burroughs, born in 1837, began keeping a journal at the age of 17 and continued until his death in 1921 (age 84). In addition, he wrote and 23 books of essays, three of them published posthumously. He lived on a farm in the Hudson River Valley and raised grapes but lived primarily by writing. Burroughs, along with Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman (he admired all three), preached a gospel of closeness to nature:

Let me work all day in my garden, the next day ramble in the fields and woods, with a little reading, and the third day I can give myself to literary pursuits with a new freshness and vigor.

- Journals, April 5, 1867

When he is telling of what gives him joy, or when he tells of some small event in a quiet day--such as bringing home in his pocket a cold, motionless mouse, making for it a nest in a bucket and bringing it back to life before releasing it again to the wild—he is at his most charming, but there is another side to Burroughs, the rush to form a hasty opinion and then state it as if it fell from God’s own mouth and he just happened to make the catch.

Religion, he says “is a sentiment, like poetry or art; ...not a universal gift.” I sense a kernel of truth there, but the pontificating expression grates on me. What does it mean to call poetry or art a “sentiment,” anyway? Religion, poetry and art nothing but feelings? Yes, one must have a feeling for poetry to appreciate it, but the feeling alone, though it may be one sort of “gift,” hardly makes a poet. And can Burroughs stop there? No, he must go on to say that what he calls this “sentiment” of religion “belongs to women more than to men, though the finest specimens of it are men, as in every other field... [my emphasis added, as if you couldn’t guess]. Meaningless, maddening, unsupported generalization! Yet one hardly knows where to aim an objection, since B. never made it clear what he was talking about in the first place.

In general, what annoys me most about these journals is a lack of wonder, an overabundance of certainty and the way he fell, time after time, to the temptation of sweeping, general statements, as if pronouncing Truth with a capital T. But there were other things, too. Little, niggling, jarring notes. For example, many writers I know live alone, and some of them live in the country, so when I reached the following passage I began to mark it mentally for an old friend:

I wonder [he wondered! Read on—did he really?] if there is another so-called literary man who spends his time as I do—in the solitude of the country, amid the common people. Here I sit, night after night, year after year, alone in my little Study perched upon a broad slope of the Hudson, my light visible from afar, reading for an hour or two each evening, and then to bed at nine. No callers, no society, no proper family or home life. Not in years has a person dropped in to spend the evening with me.

Well, but then he says that “Julian comes in” from time to time, and instantly I wonder, Who is Julian? He writes that in the morning he, the writer, may “lend a hand in getting breakfast,” and I recall (looking back, to make sure, to the list of important dates in his life that the editor has thoughtfully provided in the front of the book) that Burroughs married in 1857 and that his wife survived until 1917. No society? John Locke would have seen it differently! The shadowy Mrs. Burroughs turns up only on rare occasions, in a sentence or an enigmatic phrase such as when the writer mentions he might “lend a hand in getting breakfast,” but where there’s a wife.... I wonder! And yes, a short search turns up the fact that Julian was, in fact, his son.

“No proper family life” could mean any number of things. The marriage might have been unhappy. Perhaps the writer felt that his wife was not his intellectual equal. If you follow this link and read of the disposition of Burroughs’s estate, you’ll find another surprising revelation about this "solitary" life in the country, a revelation that answers, for me, another question I’d had when, after noting the almost complete absence of the author’s wife and son from his journal, I turned back and saw that his editor had been a woman. I’d wondered what she thought of the author’s pronouncements on women and the invisibility of the wife in the journals. Turns out his female editor was also his “longtime secretary and mistress,” who upon his death received as long as she lived all the income from his writings. The wife, I should note, had predeceased Burroughs, and Julian, the son, inherited all of his father’s not inconsiderable real estate. (The farm remains--at least, as of 2004--in the family.) Perhaps in the unedited journals the wife appears more fully--then again, perhaps not. My point is only that a life with wife, son and secretary-mistress is hardly solitary.

We all know by now that Thoreau’s little cabin was not far from town and that he didn’t live in it very long—two years and two months, by his own account. Still, he did live there alone, and no one has ever questioned that he built the cabin and planted his beans himself.

What put me on the trail of David Grayson? Probably nothing more than that I had Adventures in Contentment on the shelf between Burroughs and Thoreau. Long before the hippies of the Sixties, Grayson wrote (using these very words) of “dropping out” of the race for success:

One morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me at that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. So vividly the memory came to me—the high, airy world as it was at that moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows—that the weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many years. Then I thought of sitting in quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood behind me rising still, cool, mysterious....

I remembered that Grayson was a pseudonym but nothing more than that. Beware research and the shattering of illusions! David Grayson was none other than muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker, and the retirement of “David” to the country with sister “Harriet” (as housekeeper, naturally) was a complete fabrication. Like Burroughs, Baker had a wife; unlike Burroughs, he didn't even live in the country. Baker stayed in the rat race, and he and his wife lived first in a Chicago apartment, later in a suburb of Westchester County. In fact, Baker liked the suburbs, admitting to his bride that he had had to revise his opinion of them when they settled in their home. Follow this link to read more about this writer’s relationship to women, how he wrote about women, and how women responded to his writing and speechifying.

Heaven only knows I am not opposed to marriage, and the suburbs are fine for many people who find that way of life congenial. Marriage and suburbs aren’t the problem for me. It’s that the idea of these men building myths of themselves so at odds with the reality of their lives makes me suspect almost every other sentence they wrote. Give me Thoreau! Give me Anne LaBastille! Give me Harlan and Anna Hubbard! Give me Wendell and Tanya Berry! I don’t need rugged, solitary individualism in a man before I can respect his views on nature. I do need honesty.

Here in our old farmhouse, with the winter's first snow lying all around, David comments, "It may be too soon to say anything, but I haven't seen any mouse activity yet." I tell him it is indeed too soon. The temperature is barely below the freezing mark. When the thermometer plummets, those mice will be running for shelter and all the peanut butter and crumbs left on the counter! "Here, mice! Your banquet table has been spread!" David thinks I'm kidding. Here's how our attitudes break down: We both think mice are cute. We don't want them in the house. He is the eternal optimist, thinking that this year they won't come in, while I am on perpetual sentry duty, scolding and banishing crumbs. We live in the country, in company with one another and Sarah. That's enough. The mouse chorus can get cozy under the snow.