Stealing Time to Garden and to Read – and to Think About Horses

Morning light and dew

Stealing Away to the Woods, Too

My gardening time on Friday morning was not really stolen: I earned it by getting up and outdoors at 6 a.m. Digging, planting, watering, mulching, weeding – everything that seemed like overwhelming burdens to my morning-wakeful-in-bed mind turned out to be leisurely, rewarding, meditative activities out in the soft June morning air. “Morning has broken/like the first morning” is the beginning of a song that often comes to my mind on these occasions. It restoreth my soul.

Gardening and reading could be combined, I suppose, if one were to wear a headset and listen to a recorded book, but when I’m outdoors in the morning I want to hear the birds, just as when I read I want to hold and feel the book. There was no time to steal for reading during most of the day at the bookstore. Time to sell books, yes, and time for conversations with friends old and new, messages to leave and retrieve, even a few sallies out into the sunshine, on errands, while David sat in the bookstore, but it wasn’t until after 4:30 on Friday that I had a chance to pick up a book, and I chose was Search Party: Stories of Rescue, by Valerie Trueblood. 

Quite honestly, I began reading “The Mouse” because it was one of the shorter stories in the book, something I thought I might be able to finish before closing time if not interrupted. Naturally, I was interrupted (and that was fine, too, because it’s what I’m here for), but I knew I had my own copy of the book at home and could get back to the story later. In “The Mouse” we meet aging literary critic Lindenbaum and his much younger wife, Sofya, a poet of Russian emigre parents whose own personality or childhood experiences or a combination of the two made her a “difficult” adult. Lindenbaum’s household includes

...pets, birds as well as dogs, and even white mice for a number of years until the short life span of the mouse began to wear on him.

A single mouse appears on the following page. In a flashback to her childhood, we see the girl Sofya locked in a closet by her parents, when on the other side, visible to the child through the crack beneath the door

...a mouse appeared on the red wool and sat up to stroke its whispers, not briskly as a mouse normally does but feebly and dreamily. She felt a rush of pity for it. But was it more than pity? Was it love? The feeling swelled past the mouse – past the fir on its chest made pink by the sun on the rug, the flimsy hands curved, even without a thumb, in the ballet position arrondi, as she knew from forced months at the barre – and on, to things a mouse must know, must live for, passageways, smells, and its own kind, and from there to things unknown to it because it had to be a mouse, a world of things going on somewhere, everywhere with nothing to rule them.

Being plunged so thoroughly into a mouse’s world and just as suddenly pulled out of it again is dizzying. This is not the central incident, but now, re-reading this story I am wondering about its connection to Sofya’s relationship to the convicted accomplice in the assault that resulted in Lindenbaum’s death. Whether or not there is a connection is not for me to say. I will say that this story, slightly over eight pages long, is perfect.

Friday evening David and I were both too tired for yard work, and things were looking orderly enough that we gave ourselves the evening off. I was happy to stretch out on the front porch, by an open window, birds singing to me from the background as I read about John Quincy Adams’ sad presidency.

Corner of snow fence

On Saturday morning I rose an hour earlier -- at this time of year, at the 45^th parallel, the sky at five o’clock in the morning is already lightening to the northeast, and in this morning’s stillness the soft gurgle of our little no-name creek filtered through the willows – and worked on a brief writing project I’ve delayed starting for years, turning next to read the opening chapters of a novel by Maritta Wolff, before going outdoors with Sarah again at six to water gardens and sit quietly with sketchbook, pen and pencils. Crows and chickadees were calling by then, soon joined by robins, then a catbird and an oriole hidden in high foliage in silver maple and popple.

Tomato plants

My gardening this year is so haphazard it hardly merits the name. Tomato plants went into holes dug right in the sod, flakes of last year’s old, spoiled straw snuggled tight up against them, while I found room for squash plants in what used to be a flower garden before being overtaken by grass (plenty of newspaper under more moldy straw flakes put down to give the squash a lead in the competition with the grass) and planted melons in an old wooden box. When the melon vines manifest, I’ll guide them into the squash garden rather than out onto the grass – and hope they cooperate. Hope is the negligent gardener’s most important tool. I should say too that I was inspired this year by Patricia Lanza’s Lasagna Gardening, the latest twist (with many new variations) on Ruth Stout’s old no-work method. Found room for a couple of collard plants at the end of the rhubarb, cutting the latter back to make space.

All day Saturday, though, my mind kept turning to New York, where California Chrome would be racing for the last jewel in the Triple Crown, his owners hoping he would be the first horse to win all three races since Affirmed did it 36 years ago. No filly has ever won the Triple Crown, and only three have won the Kentucky Derby, but something tells me that the fabulous Australian horse, Black Caviar, could have taken the Crown. And I hope you followed the link to see how gorgeous she is!

But – then came Saturday evening, with all cameras and attention on one horse in a field of eleven, and that horse did not win, place, or show. Yes, it was disappointing. I was disappointed. Tonalist was my #2 pick, however, and a beautiful colt, with a story all his own, and he ran a great race to win.

More than California Chrome’s loss, I was deeply disappointed in his co-owner’s inappropriate remarks after the race and disappointed in the press for following up Coburn’s angry, unsportsmanlike jabs at other owners for taking what he called “the coward’s way out,” i.e., running horses in the Belmont Stakes that had not had Chrome’s recent grueling campaign in Derby and Preakness. (I'm not putting in a link to that intemperate outburst.) Coburn knew, taking his horse into the Belmont, that other horses in the field would be fresher. If he thought that made it an unfair race, he shouldn’t have had his horse in it. The Derby and Preakness have never been prerequisites for Belmont Stakes entry, but suddenly one angry, disappointed owner thinks they should be, and in my opinion he’s just wrong. It's easy to be gracious in the winner's circle; a sore loser casts a pall over the whole event. Tonalist missed the Derby because of a lung infection – that’s no reason to disqualify him from the Belmont. Each of the three Triple Crown races has always been a stand-alone event. 

Then, with Tonalist’s owner in the winner’s circle, a time and place for joy and congratulations, an interviewer asked Tonalist’s owner, Robert Evans, what he thought of Coburn’s “coward’s way out” accusation. Again, inappropriate! Not the time or place! Evans had no comment. Good for him!

Was it irony or poetic justice? Call it what you will, but the Evans family owned Pleasant Colony, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner that (I always want to say “who” for horses and dogs!) came in third in the 1981 Belmont Stakes, failing to capture the Triple Crown that year. “When Pleasant Colony lost [the 1981 Belmont], silence fell over his famiily’s [Evans] box.” Silence, disappointment, tears, grief are all appropriate. Calling the winner a coward is not. It’s always been very, very difficult for a horse to win the Triple Crown. That’s why it’s such a big deal.

Owners and journalists interested in “saving racing” need to give the winner his due. Trainer Christophe Clement and jockey Joel Rosario deserve congratulations, too.

Gorgeous horse, French trainer, Dominican jockey, owner whose family was disappointed by their horse's finish in the Belmont 34 years ago -- the Tonalist story deserves attention. 

I was so thrown off my feed by the sour-grapes aftermath of the Belmont that I woke in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. Before going to bed I'd read several chapters of a disappointing self-published novel but didn't need more disappointment in one day, so in the wee, dark hours I again turned to The Adams Family. Picking up the story of John Quincy Adams after what I called earlier his "sad presidency," I was happy to learn (maybe some of you already know this, but I'd forgotten if I ever did know) that JQA did, over his son's objections, follow his single term as president with almost two decades in the House of Representatives, and those years turned out to be much more productive and satisfying to him and more important also to the country. He served from 1831 to his death in 1848, and after anti-slavery petitions had so angered Southern representatives that they instituted a "gag" rule, he fought tirelessly for the Constitutional right of any citizen to petition the government. 

I'm glad Tonalist's owner ran him in the Belmont even after illness kept him out of the Kentucky Derby, glad John Quincy Adams set aside his son's opinion that the House of Representatives would be a come-down for a former President, and glad too that I decided to plant some vegetables, after all, even without the time to prepare a proper bed for them. Not, you understand, that I'm comparing myself to either JQA or Tonalist! Just sayin'.

Unpredictable Flow of Random Thoughts

What accounts for the randomness of thought sequences? Here’s just a snippet of mine this morning:

Small town residents all over America practice a lot of Cargo Cult thinking: If we could just lure enough people here from outside, our problems would be solved! If we build it, surely they will come! Our prayers will be answered!

Every solution to an old problem creates brand-new problems, usually unanticipated or minimized.

Ernest Hemingway would never have made it as a murder mystery writer. Not enough adjectives. Agree or disagree?

If Marguerite Henry were still alive, she would be writing a book about the Australian wonder horse, Black Caviar. How many Americans have even heard the name? And yet this filly won every race she ever won, all 22, including the Royal Ascot in England.

Not only do we hear little Australian news in this country, we hardly know what’s going on in Canada, with whom we share a border from sea to shining sea. What’s up with that? I love Canada! I want more Canadian news!

Please remember that Aaron Stander will be at Dog Ears Books this coming Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. I’ve read all six of his Sheriff Ray Elkins mystery and agree with Elizabeth Buzzelli that this latest one is the best yet.

But before that, it’s Thanksgiving in only three days, and that’s where all our minds are focused. So many blessings, even in the midst of anxieties and concerns. Family, friends, books, dogs, woods, fields, and lakeshore. Love and friendship. Intellectual stimulation and pleasures of the senses. Opportunities to help and give comfort to others. Knowing and remembering that giving as well as receiving is a gift. Soup to nuts. The whole nine yards. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Question Trails

Frost this morning turned dewy as the sun hit the meadow, making for wet walking. Back to books and three short chapters from the end of THE BOOKWOMAN’S LAST FLING, having raced to this point, I find myself in a familiar quandary: whether to dash to the finish or stretch it out, reading a page or two at a time and putting the book down frequently. Bruce was disappointed that there was so much about horses in the story--he would have preferred a stronger book collecting focus--but that was a draw for me. My only disappointment came early on when I realized that the bookwoman of the title was already dead years before the story began. I would have liked to meet a real bookwoman in the Janeway series. But since she wasn’t going to be present in the action, I was glad the horses were, and I’m reluctant to leave the cozy camaraderie of the shedrow, the sweet-smelling stables. My sympathy for book cop Cliff Janeway has increased monumentally since he avowed his love for Walter Farley books at the beginning of this story. John Dunning’s bookstore website is interesting, too.

Taking a break to stretch out the story's ending, I got to poking around online for helpful information to combat the autumn olive scourge (this picture is NOT my meadow, which will never look like this as long as I have breath!) and came upon interesting herbicide news. First you have to realize that Roundup and its sister herbicide Brush-Be-Gone (active ingredient glyphosate) has long been the American agriculture herbicide of choice, not only for farming but for lawns and gardens. A systemic, when sprayed on living, growing plants (weeds or otherwise), it is carried through the plant’s system to the roots, causing death by inhibiting the enzyme necessary for growth. Sounds like just the thing to use on autumn olive, doesn’t it? And a friend of mine swears by it, brushing it full-strength on the trunks he cuts. We might want to rethink reliance on glyphosate, however, for a couple of reasons. One is that its widespread use has challenged some weeds to develop immunity. The "fittest" are learning to survive despite it. Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup, says resistance to glyphosate is not a significant problem, and so far it isn’t; if resistance were to increase significantly, however, farmers would be hard pressed to find a quick replacement, since Roundup has come to have a virtual monopoly on the herbicide market. See full article: New York Times, May 28, 2008 (too long an address for me to get the link successfully inserted here).

Another concern is that because Monsanto has also developed, besides the popular herbicide, genetically engineered plants (“Roundup-ready”) immune to it (so that herbicide can be sprayed directly on the crops themselves without killing them), some say there is an increased level of herbicide now in the food chain. The fear has been bruited about in the law courts but so far decided in Monsanto’s favor. The idea of a systemic is that it goes through the system of the living weed to kill it and that any residue in the soil quickly disappears. What is supposed to happen when the systemic is sprayed on a field of soybeans immune to it? Is it, as the manufacturer claims, as “safe as table salt”? Has all trace of poison vanished before the soybeans are harvested?

Whenever we make ourselves dependent on one crop (e.g., potatoes) or one product (e.g., Roundup) to the exclusion of others, we make ourselves vulnerable. This observation is a long way from answering the autumn olive question (how to rid ourselves of it), but since all things in nature are connected, it’s impossible to say where any “simple” question will lead. This is how it was with THE BOOKWOMAN’S LAST FLING, too. An initial simple question, “What is the value of this private library?” led to questions about missing books and finally to questions of murder. Given the unpredictability of any path of questioning, one might be tempted sometimes to heed the advice of Ogden Nash and “if called by a panther, don’t anther.”

Girlhood Revisited

After a mildly stressful week of hurrying to get cards and packages in the mail, our household morning today featured a four-hour reading-aloud marathon. I’d already been thinking that THE ISLAND STALLION might be a good book to introduce David to the work of Walter Farley, my favorite childhood author, so when he asked this morning, “What are you reading?” and I’d already made coffee, we dug right in. Would I find the same magic I’d found in upper elementary school when my friend Kathleen and I devoured everything Walter Farley wrote?

The Island Stallion has all the makings of a cracking good yarn. There is the romance of faraway islands, one of which encloses a hidden world not seen by human eyes for centuries. As hardly needs saying (given the title), there are beautiful, wild horses. There is danger and more than one near-death experience. Moral dilemmas present themselves, and knotty problems of survival and decision have to be thought through. The passion Steve has for “his” horse (literally, the horse of his dreams) is matched by his friend’s passion for thrilling archaeological finds, and the two friends find themselves in conflict over and over as the adventure progresses.

The wild red stallion’s dominance over his mares is threatened by a challenger (here I admit that racist overtones troubled me), as, similarly, the entire hidden world’s integrity and continuity are threatened by the outside world (if the secret becomes public) and, more specifically, by a heartless brute of a man, Steve’s friend’s stepbrother, whose only interest in wild horses is inciting them to physical rebellion and then subduing them by force. Both Steve and his friend, Pitch, are tempted by the desire to possess permanently what they most love, even as they realize that possession will destroy a priceless world.

Near the close of the story, as Steve is pondering a letter to his parents, he reflects that his father is more likely than his mother to understand his feeling for the wild horse he wants to rescue, and I had to stop and think about that. Not a single female character appears in the book, and the only one who appears indirectly lacks the requisite passion for horses or even the ability to understand such passion. How, then, explain the spell cast over me, as young girl, by this adventure? How explain Farley’s appeal to girls as well as boys?

Well, first, the horses, of course. But there is also, importantly, the way girls identify with horses rather than imagining themselves in the role of owner. This feeling, completely alien to the stepbrother’s urge to dominate animals, is the main character’s feeling, too, so that girl readers can imagine themselves not only as the Flame but also as Steve. This has nothing to do with gender, everything to do with love.

When Steve at last succeeds in mounting and riding Flame, his eyes fill with tears. “No longer did he feel that the stallion was separate from him, that he was riding Flame. It was entirely different now. It was as though he and the horse were one. He was Flame! He thought the same, felt the same! They were running because they loved to run, because this was the way it was meant to be!”

Rough-and-ready boy readers have plenty of heart-pounding vicarious violence to enjoy as Flame battles to the death not one, but two challengers, and the excitement of the many challenges to life and limb are enough for readers of either gender and any age. I found myself defending (in one of our many interruptions to the story to discuss one or another aspect of the writing or the plot) the piebald stallion, described as “ugly,” with his large, heavy head and eyes of mismatched color. He couldn’t help his looks. He was a horse, after all, not a brutal man like Pitch’s stepbrother. The piebald was no more cruel than Flame. All the horses were acting only according to their nature.

--Ah, there’s another, more general appeal to girls in a story like this: What young girl in the world would not want to be smart, beautiful and wild, “conquered” by love but remaining forever untamed? Women, am I right?

It’s another cold night, and the blowing snow is thick. It could be a wild night.