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February 9 seems early, even for hellebore.
 

(Always) More Garden Thoughts

 

Other than a few remnant patches here and there, our snow melted and evaporated, leaving bare, squashed grass, weeds, and last autumn’s fallen leaves, a tired palette not at all brightened by a string of grey, overcast days. Cold wind didn’t help, either. During an unseasonably warm spell, my sturdy hellebore dared to put forth blossoms. Will they survive, now that the temperature has gone back below freezing at night?

 

Friday was busy in the bookstore, Saturday not, but a cheery surprise awaited me at the post office: my seed order had arrived! 

Small packages hold big dreams.

It may not look like much, but my kitchen garden is small, so I tried not to get carried away, because besides these packets I’ll be starting tomatoes from seed and, as usual, buying other plants as my budget permits. Oh, frabjus joy! Another year of gardening! More planting and weeding and watering and pruning and moving things around in the endless search for the right placement for all -- the doing as rewarding as the results, if not more so.

 

Seeds to start indoors --

Six weeks from last frost date. As I see it, that means it will be mid-April when I’ll have to rearrange my home office to make way for seed trays and pots in the big south-facing window. Meanwhile, at the bookstore, the big pot of parsley continues to thrive, as do geraniums, asparagus fern, and citronella. Citronella has small pink blossoms! Not showy, but still, it’s cheery and encouraging at this time of year to see any kind of blooms. The citronella will go back outdoors for the summer, but perhaps I should break off some leaves now to take home and deploy as mouse repellant? Because a couple of those little devils made uninvited indoor appearances recently....

 

 

More Book Thoughts

 

Since my last blog post (which was shorter than usual, with not a single picture of my dog), I’ve continued to think about Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, The Waters, in connection with Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. A novel is fiction, a memoir nonfiction, so that’s an important difference, not to be forgotten, and there are others. For example, The Waters puts a woman in the driver’s seat, as it were: Hermine Zook, the healer, dominates the island as well as the hearts and minds of her daughters and granddaughter. Westover, on the other hand, despite relationships with her mother and sisters, is ruled over (as are the mother and sisters and brothers) by her father in more ways than one. Her brothers play major roles in her life, as well -- for better or for worse.

 

As for similarities, here I’ll quote what I wrote a few days ago: “Yet in both stories, unlike as they are in so many ways, there is a family isolated from its own surrounding community, as well as from the larger world; a young girl, hungry to learn, who is kept out of school; a mother who knows herbs and how to take care of babies; and violence, an omnipresent threat, that breaks out from time to time without warning.”

 

Continuing to think about both stories, the fictional and the actual, has led me to watch several interviews each with authors Campbell and Westover. (I’ve linked two here, and you can find many others by searching online yourself.) One thought since my last post (this came from the linked interview with Campbell) is how important choice is to the women we meet in both stories. As in life, much happens that was not chosen by Tara or Hermine or Rose Thorn or Donkey, but in other moments and situations they did make choices, sometimes considered for a long while beforehand, but not always. Sometimes impulse gave voice to feelings that had been simmering unrecognized beneath the surface until the moment they burst through. 

 

Tara’s father made many choices for her before she became strong enough to know what she wanted for herself, and the same was true of Donkey, with her mother and grandmother deciding her fate for years. Is personal growth is a paradox or a feedback loop? It is only by making choices that we become ourselves, and at the same time we have to gain knowledge of ourselves in order to be strong enough to make choices that we need to make.

 

(Campbell seems to be having a wonderful time with her book tour travels and visits, and she has certainly earned every bit of the attention she’s getting. Also, as she herself notes, it doesn’t make sense to spend years working on a book and then not do everything possible to get it into readers’ hands. Westover’s memoir was a sensation when it first appeared in 2018, and she was a national phenomenon, appearing everywhere, so if she has chosen to disappear from the public eye for a while, as it seems is the case, one can hardly wonder at that decision.) 

 

The question of home, like that of choice, looms large for Tara in the memoir and for the women of M’sauga Island in the novel. Molly and Prim have left the island to live elsewhere, and Molly wants her mother and Donkey to move off the island, too, but Hermine would not be at home anywhere else, and the four adult women are “more themselves” when there, together, the author tells us, even when they are at odds with each other. For Hermine and Donkey, the relationship to the natural world in which they live is as important as Rose Cottage. But Donkey needs a larger world, one that includes school – and boys and men.

 

Tara Westover had to leave her mountain home to go to school, and she wanted to go much more than she wanted to stay, and yet the mountain pulled her back over and over again. In “the end” -- of the memoir, that is, which isn’t “the end” of her story, of course, since she and family members are all still alive -- she had to lose half her family, including both parents, in order to be true to herself. It was interesting, however, that in one of her appearances (on a podcast called “Mormon Stories”), two of her aunts and a cousin showed up to support the decisions she had made.

 

Q. If Tara Westover were to read The Waters (and I hope she will), would she think Campbell romanticized rural isolation and the life of a child kept out of school and away from doctors, despite the violent incidents that take place in the novel?

 

Q. If Bonnie Jo Campbell were to read Educated (and perhaps she has), I’m sure she would point out differences between the Westover family and the Zooks, but would she also see parallels in the strength that both Tara and Donkey needed to make their own way in a larger world?

 

I keep searching out interviews with both authors and will continue to think about their stories, I’m sure, for a long time to come.

 

 

More Dog Reports and Thoughts 

 

Two years ago I often called her "Tiny Girl."

Sunny and I have been to the dog park in Northport a couple times in the past weeks, and she has made some new friends, human and canine. The last time we were there, she was one of four dogs (about an ideal number, as far as I’m concerned, at one time), the others a hound named Gilbert (who chases soap bubbles) and two Labrador retrievers, but Sunny Juliet was the only one of the four with any interest in chasing tennis balls. I thought of my sister saying that their Labs have never been big on chasing balls, and for the first time it occurred to me that while Labs are “retrievers,” they are bird dogs, and the hunter does not throw a bird for the dog to bring back! Ah, but then I remember a friend’s golden retriever, who would chase and bring back tennis balls for as long as anyone could be persuaded to throw them, so – small sample, no conclusions here. Any thoughts on this burning question?

 

As for why a dog like Sunny, bred for herding, would care for tennis ball play, I have no explanation, and neither can I venture a guess why she behaves like a terrier – dig! dig! dig! -- whenever she senses a mouse or mole in a pile of brush or underground. 

 

Oh, and then there is her fascination with wild animals that take refuge in our old, ramshackle barn! Birds and feral cats and skunks, you name it. Sunday morning she had a mild skunking, what I call a "skunking-at-a-distance," i.e., not so strong as to bring tears to human eyes but still not a smell I would want on my bed, so out came the Dawn detergent (2 T), hydrogen peroxide (1 quart), and baking soda (1/4 cup) for a deskunking bath (need to renew those important supplies), plus a strip of bacon to lure her into the bathtub. She was not eager but didn’t make a big fuss, thank heaven. Important note: The deskunking mixture must not be mixed up ahead of time and/or ever stored in a closed container! But if you have a dog, it’s a good idea to have the ingredients and recipe on hand.

 

Afterward, she was full of smiles and wiggles and so much energy that I gave her three of the calming treats that would have been helpful, maybe, an hour earlier. Supplies have since been restocked, but I do have to hope that Sunny won't go back for more skunk experiences any time soon!

None the worse for her experiences!

 

Early Morning Musings

Today's books

 

“Early,” in this case, would not be when I woke at 4:30 a.m. but when I came back indoors at 7 after driving a red bag of garbage (“Red Bag of Courage,” the Artist used to say) out to the highway for pickup, which could only be done after the windshield and rear and front windows of my car had been scraped free of the night’s hard frost. Since my loving nighttime and morning companion (canine) is speechless and illiterate, there’s no point in sharing all my thoughts with her, especially when I’m thinking about books I’ve read, so I’ll put them out here.

 

The latest book I finished reading was one I’d read before but hadn’t remembered reading until about halfway through, at which point there was no stopping, because Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is not a book you put aside before reaching the end. My recent re-reading of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, The Waters, was a different kind of second reading. As the first had been only a couple of months ago, I had picked up the book again not by accident or to remind myself of what happened to the characters, but rather to luxuriate, more slowly this time, in that lush Michigan-fictional world.

 

Nonfiction/fiction. Mountain/waters. Brothers/sisters. Yet in both stories, unlike as they are in so many ways, there is a family isolated from its own surrounding community, as well as from the larger world; a young girl, hungry to learn, who is kept out of school; a mother who knows herbs and how to take care of babies; and violence, an omnipresent threat, that breaks out from time to time without warning. 

 

I wonder if BJC has read TW’s memoir and if TW has read – or will read – BJC’s novel. What would they have to say to each other about their respective lives and books? Have you read both books? What do you think?

 

My rural world

Change, the Only Constant

The night pasture was a small piece of land. Much of it had been cleared once, then taken out of cultivation. As the years went by, we used that pasture less and less. At first the wildflowers were better than ever. Then the protected land began to change. I watched it, puzzled. I had not realized how the land, if left alone, begins moving back toward some inevitable destiny of its own.  

Goldenrod crept into the open land, beginning to cover the hillside with bright yellow plumes that moved in waves with the wind. A year or two later, black raspberry vines began to replace the goldenrod. Hazel brush moved out from the edge of the trees to compete with the berries.  

Most of the wildflowers were gone from the hillside by the time the scraggly sumac trees began to grow there. In a few more years, the poplars, with their restless singing leaves, had started. Soon the young oak trees began to spread out from the woods….  

-      Ben Logan, The Land Remembers

 

I think we in northern Michigan are now in the season Tom Springer, in The Star in the Sycamore, calls “between the raspberries and the goldenrod,” but I’ll have to re-order that book to find out, as the first copy I had in the store sold before I could do much more than look at the table of contents. On that first glance, however, I very much appreciated Springer’s observation that four seasons hardly seem adequate to describe a year in nature. I have always been skeptical about calendar divisions, sensing much more intersection and gradation and seesawing between the seasons than twelve months divided into four can possibly suggest.

Ben Logan’s memoir is divided into four seasons, but he is aware of finer distinctions, writing, for example, of fall that it 

 

…does not seem like a true season. It never settles down into a steady sameness of days the way summer and winter do. Fall is a time of change, an end of the growing season, a preparation for the season of cold and snow that is coming. 

 

It’s a rare Michigan August that fails to bring mornings that feel like September, mornings with the scent of leaf mold and fungus on cool, humid air and the first maple or sumac leaves turning red – ahead of schedule, we can’t help thinking, but nature isn’t going by our calendar.

The Land Remembers is set in Logan’s boyhood Wisconsin, on a ridgetop farm called “Seldom Seen.” The work he remembered was hard and never-ending, winter blizzards serious, crops always uncertain, but his memoir is a joyful one. His father, an immigrant from southern Norway, was still farming with horses when Ben and his brothers were boys, and their mother, who had been a schoolteacher before marrying, clearly enjoyed continuing to teach her own brood. The Logans on their family farm grew corn and oats, kept and milked cows, made hay all summer long, and in the winter they ate from the bounty of their land – chickens and eggs, milk and cream, garden produce (root cellared in sand, as well as canned), fruit preserves and jams, and berries and nuts gathered from the wild places around them. 

Explanations of the workings of different farm machinery and equipment in that time period, as well as his father’s careful choosing of seeds to save for the next spring’s sowing, made this memoir, at least in my mind, a kind of parallel to Ben K. Green’s Wild Cow Tales. That is, both books are reminiscences, the memories rural, and the way of doing things then largely been left behind today. More’s the pity, one cannot help thinking. While much of the work was physical and very hard, its rewards – for those who loved the work, that is, as did the Logans -- were satisfaction in visible results, family solidarity, and closeness to the earth. 

I don’t remember the name of the earth science teacher I had my freshman year of high school, but I always remember something he said on the first day of that class: “Change is the only constant.” Another memory from that subject, that year, is that when the teacher asked how many students lived in houses heated with coal, mine was the only hand raised. My parents considered themselves very modern when they had a stoker installed. Before that, I remember shoveling coal into a monster basement furnace at home (and standing in front of the open door envisioning, in the flames, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego). I also remember visiting grandparents in rural Ohio who still relied on an outhouse and a hand pump rather than modern plumbing … and I remember 4-cent first-class postage stamps … the amazing miracle of the advent of lightweight transistor radios and our family house before it was invaded by television and when we still had a party telephone line, and I have fond memories of doing dishes by hand (as I have always done and still do), singing rounds with my mother and sisters as we cleaned up after dinner each night. 

My parents are gone now, the family home sold, and my grandparents have been gone even longer. Do any siblings still sing together while doing chores? Is there an American home in the Midwest heated by a coal furnace? How many of us regularly exchange written letters with friends and relatives elsewhere? American life has changed from the mid-20^th century to now.

I wonder if the reading of memoirs and biography, like the reading of history, is something we develop an appreciation for as we grow older, when we have accumulated a rich trove of our own memories and are looking backward to try to make sense of our lives and understand our society. Certainly, life is always changing for all of us. The world is changing, constantly, every day and from year to year. 

Recently in the mornings I’ve been looking for cardinal flower, thinking it should be about time to find it in bloom. A friend who grew up in Leelanau County told me that roadside ditches used to be red with cardinal flower in late summer, back before roadsides were regularly sprayed and mowed. Now it is a treasure in certain wet, off-road pockets, but I haven’t found it this year in the very place it was last year and the year before.

The corner of M-22 and Jelinek Road is being taken over by the dreadful autumn olive. One year, long ago, that corner was planted in wheat. I think it was in wheat only that one season, and yet I’ve never forgotten it as a wheat field. My own meadow was once a hayfield, one year a cornfield. Will it be woods someday in the future -- again, that is, as it doubtless was before ever there was a farm here?

Change! Where will next summer’s morels and blackberries and ash seedlings and cardinal flowers appear? Will we still be wearing masks in public places to stop the spread of coronavirus? The only thing we can count on is that there will be changes as we move from ephemeral present into unforeseeable future.

 

Book Review: CASUALTY OF WAR: A CHILDHOOD REMEMBERED

Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered, by

Luisa Lang Owen

College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press (2003)

The early chapters of Luisa Lang Owen’s memoir are an idyllic pastorale. The writing, rich with sensuous detail, transports a reader to a rural village in pre-war -- pre-WWII, that is -- Yugoslavia, Potiski Sven Nikola, as the name appears in one of its many spellings, depending on the language used to give the name. (I select this one to use because it is easiest to manage with the alphabet of my native English.) The story of Luisa’s childhood begins with an early memory of her mother, moving out from there to other family members, and finally taking in the greater village, for the village was as much a casualty of war as the author’s childhood.

Several pages in the beginning of her story dwell lovingly on trees – the sour cherry tree in grandfather’s garden, the blue plum tree, a sweet cherry tree in a neighbor’s garden, the sweet apple, the apricot, the mulberry – each one an individual.

Our plum tree not only had a collective identity; it was itself and not interchangeable with any other trees of its kind. It was something larger than its name or anything one could say about it. Like every tree in the garden, that which it was could not fit into a name.

There were also in the village “misplaced” trees, trees that “did not know how to belong,” those we would now call non-native species, but such were rare. Most trees in the village belonged, as did every inhabitant in the child’s eyes, regardless of ethnicity or religion, all of the villagers rooted in the earth, or what the author calls the “sacred ground.” Owen begins by describing the trees, using them as an introduction to the people and their larger surroundings.

[The trees] were part of our lives. Around them children would play games until late at night, and under them people would sit on benches and talk late into the night.

“I was aware of a feeling I could not name,” she writes, “which felt like belonging.”

Owen’s family were ethnic Germans, but the little girl learned to greet everyone in her village according to their own language.

In conversations with people from different ethnic groups one accommodated according to the language skills of others. Simple words and gestures expressed our shared experiences quite well even among those who did not speak each other’s languages.

There were Catholic and Serb Orthodox churches in the village and a small house that served as the Lutheran prayer house. While there was no synagogue in the village, there were a few Jewish families (the “lady pharmacist” was Jewish), along with Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, Slovaks and Gypsies. No one was a stranger. In this the people were better integrated than the trees, it seems, for the child does not recognize any of the human inhabitants as “misplaced” during the early years of her own life.

Nearly everyone within its orbit lived in the village, even those who farmed or worked on the farms.

In summer people left the village hours before dawn so that the early morning light might find them at their destination ready to work. The wagons returned late in the evening, bringing the smell of hay with them and raising the dust on the road.

That dust on the roads and on the village streets! Like the people themselves, “[t]he earth was at home in the village.” In the streets it was “soft warm powder, ankle-deep, so friendly to bare feet.”

I had a very visceral and personal feeling for these early pages, for the soft dust and fruit trees and gardens that brought back my own grandmother’s poor suburban homestead on the edge of Springfield, Ohio. I recall vividly, even now, the soft grey dust of my grandparents’ road that felt as gentle as talcum powder to my bare feet, and I relive again my joyous delight in being allowed to spend every day barefoot in that poor neighborhood where many of the other children had no shoes and where I was permitted to climb, like a monkey, all the fruit trees in the backyard and ordered to come down only when an oncoming storm began to throw the branches about, quite deliciously, tossing me as if I were on a boat at sea. My grandmother’s chickens and my feeding and egg-collecting tasks; an old outhouse surrounded by hollyhocks, reached by means of a grapevine-covered brick path, the bricks laid in a herringbone pattern; a ragged pony belonging to neighbor children; dogs friendly and otherwise.... 

Eighty pages into Owen's story the tranquil cocoon of her rural village life begins to unravel, never to be mended. Before getting into disruption, nightmare, and tragedy, however, I want to pause to remark on what gives this book such power.

The author’s story, however it were told, would be interesting, even compelling, but the way she tells it is fascinating, riveting and, despite the nightmare chapters, in many places quite magical. We see the village as it was in the 1930s, described through the eyes of a child. Owen’s remarkable memory for detail is central to her enterprise, but her writing goes beyond objective factual description, recalling for us how that lost world felt and smelled and tasted to her, and then she goes beyond that, as well, animating the whole. Trees, for example, have as much personality as human beings. One sweet cherry tree is noted for its “generosity,” while another is “pinched and proud.” Houses, rooms, and the least small object are presented with feelings and attitudes and personalities of their own. A chocolate rooster wrapped in foil is “conscious of being watched.” When the little girl gives in to temptation and eats the chocolate rooster, experiencing immediate sadness for its absence, the rooster’s mate, the foil-wrapped chocolate hen, “shifted her position and turned her head from side to side as if to get a better look at the cause of my dismay.” A large corner house in the neighborhood “extended its familiar look like an invitation.” The animation of an entire life-world continues throughout the book, but in the beginning it is particularly effective because it draws a reader immediately into the child’s perspective, into her sense of herself at the center of her world.

Then one spring adults lower their voices and begin speaking in hushed tones of war. Tension builds in families and between ethnic groups.

I soon noticed that people changed and became distant; some were unfriendly. They did not smile and they greeted grudgingly. Instead of being themselves, they suddenly became Serb, German, Hungarian, Slovak, Jew, and Gypsy.

They put on, she says, “the mask of generality,” which I read as an impersonal, distant facial expression. The girl wonders if the people with those faces, avoiding eye contact with others, have not already lost themselves. Certainly, they have lost their feeling of belonging together, the feeling of village integrity, and in that greater loss it is inevitable that the child will eventually lose her innocence. Is it possible to be innocent and to feel one does not belong?

Soon men are called up for the armed services, Jewish families disappear overnight, and a little girl who always greeted her in Hungarian vanishes along with the others.

Her empty house, turned inward, like all the other abandoned houses, bore a reflection of the missing. But such houses were no longer part of anyone’s home, and not even the carelessly drawn star could claim them. Like accusing monuments to the violence that diminished us, they recalled the lost integrity of the village.

Luisa’s parents argue. Rationing goes into effect. An uncle disappears, captured and tortured for a month, escapes and returns home, crying out every afternoon, as if from a nightmare, from the pain of his frostbitten feet. In the fall of 1944 ethnic Germans receive warnings to flee, and half of them do, but no one really has any idea what to expect, whether it is better to stay in familiar surroundings or flee before invading soldiers. Luisa’s father, a blacksmith, was conscripted long before to shoe horses for the German army, and no one has heard from him.

Outsiders are in control. Russians come first, invading the village as conquerors. Women are afraid to sleep in their own beds and seek overnight hiding places with their children. Radios are confiscated, as is livestock. Then the fearful Russians depart, leaving Serbs in control of the village. Luisa’s family, as ethnic Germans, lose all rights to citizenship and property. There are public executions. Finally, in January 1945, when the girl is nine years old, her family and other ethnic Germans remaining in the village are ordered into farm wagons for deportation. They have no idea where they will be taken or what fate awaits them.

Luisa’s mother and grandmother, grandfather, great-uncle and –aunt struggle to remain together. It is the beginning of a three-year nightmare, lasting until 1948, an experience of brutality, forced labor, starvation, and – for many – death. Luisa’s ability to speak the language of their captors comes to the family’s aid more than once, as does her knowledge of Serbian folk songs, but straw on the floor of an empty, unheated building makes a poor bed, and a single piece of bread begged from a house with plenty does not go far to feed five people. Whenever groups of people are separated and moved, as happens several times, there is terror greater than that of starvation. At one point her mother becomes ill, seems ready to die, and refuses to open her eyes or leave her bed for days, but somehow during that speechless time the strong woman regained her resolve and went on, doing everything she could to keep her family alive.

I will not attempt to cover here the three years in the concentration camp so vividly described in Luisa Owen’s book. As in the earlier chapters, those nightmare years, too, are recalled from the perspective of the young child the author was at the time. With a child’s instinctive hunger for information, all the greater in this situation where survival depends on it, the girl observes everything and everyone around her. She has lost her innocence, her sense of belonging, her village, and any possible feeling of safety and security, but she and her family are determined to out-wait the nightmare, hopeful (if not sure) that it cannot last forever.

Any story of survival, because the teller has obviously survived, is positive in that it is an escape from death. The author of Casualty of War eventually came to America, achieved university degrees, became a professor of art education, raised a son, and now delights in grandchildren. These sources of happiness were surely not dreamed of by a little girl in a concentration camp under Tito’s reign of terror.

And yet, the losses always remain, as much a part of life as everything gained.

Longings for the past would often emerge unexpectedly. On weekend rides in the country, for instance, I would want us to stop at a farmhouse; I wanted to meet “real” people, and I was convinced they would have sheep cheese and yogurt for sale. On late autumn days, the crisp air would conjure familiar scents, the excitement of a disznótor [pig slaughtering, followed by sausage making]. Though such memories were comforting, invigorating, they informed, at the same time, that the feeling of home was elsewhere and far away.

Reading this book, I had a strong, painful sense not only of a world lost but of similar thefts of childhood being exacted throughout our world today. Owen’s writing ensures that whatever she describes will have great impact. It is also true, however, that the context in which one reads a book affects one’s reception of it, and the splintering of one integrated Yugoslavian village into religious and ethnic groups who can no longer trust each other – to me, sadly, that reads like a microcosm of much of our world of 2014.

Does it, or does it not, “take a village to raise a child”? The child in this book survives years of unspeakable brutality and horror, thanks to her immediate family, but the secure feeling of belonging, of being part of a meaningful whole, is never regained. In our own small village of Northport, there are those who feel secure in their belonging, those who hold apart, and those who feel “misplaced,” despite their best efforts. I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that we are immeasurably fortunate to be here.

[Note: the author is the mother of Erik Owen of Northport.]