Poem of the Week: Prairie Restoration

Prairie Restoration

I have seen the end of the world

Covered in pavement

as smothered soils bereave

the crawly things of night

diesel engines roar towards collapse

and tumble off the laps of mechanical gods

made slick by the oil of decomposed titans.

I have seen the rebirth of Eden

delivered by weeds

as hungry songbirds answer

the spindled firecracker's whistle

mice scurry out from the cracks

and devour the scraps of mechanical gods

erased beneath the vermiculite of smashed glitter.

10.06.2009

Fall in the Prairie Bed

Fall is an under-rated perk of a garden. Sure, the blossoms get all of the hype and attention, the imagery of supple youth and untapped virility. Summer gets the glory of bold colors and the steady buzz of the industrious insects. But something different happens in fall.

Labor Day has come and gone. The garden shops are full of pansies and mums offering one last chance to blast oranges, yellows, purples, blues, and deep reds. It you're lucky the snowfall of sweet fall clematis is somewhere in your sight line, and the curious peaks of fall crocuses are staking out their spots among the the falling leaves. But you needn't rush out to find new beauty to add to your garden. It may already be there.

Four years ago, when we moved into our home, the south side of our land, all along our foundation line was desolate. Hordes of feral cats had worked at turning the sun-baked earth to dust. Then, they'd turned the dust to their own latrine. Transforming that area into something different was a priority. Knowing that it received full sun and was a little dry, we wanted to make it a prairie bed, filled with coneflowers, black-eyed susans, a few grasses, and milkweeds. I hauled off about 500 lbs of dirt, and amended the remaining soil with compost, peat, and mulch. The following spring, planting began. Four years later life has returned.

It's too easy to let death pervade thoughs of the fall garden. The pollinators are mostly gone now from my prairie bed. A few black-eyed susans cling to their blossoms, which are wilted and faded. But mostly now, the tone has shifted to the minimalist clarity of seed pods. The coneflowers are like porcupines spiked atop skewers, the grasses are heavy with grain, the milkweeds are topped with seed filled pods that will soon explode releasing marshmallow parachutes to the wind.

This isn't death. It's nature's brilliant pragmatism, stripping away the superfluous, so that the next generation can thrive. Visiting chickadees and goldfinches don't find their coneflower-seed-dinners masked like hot dogs wrapped in parchment. It's bold, edgy, presented on a stick, stable enough for a casual sit down meal, but sensible enough for quick snack on the go! The milkweed parachutes don't need to fear becoming entangled in the twisting tentacles of the nearby native liatris. Their pods will open like a Lunar Landers, giving them a platform from which to launch themselves across my neighborhood. It's a strategy of aggressive native re-introduction, and it has worked. Milkweed now grows in every one of my flower beds, from sun to shade, and from wet to dry.

There are gardeners who see the fall as a time of slashing and mulching, digging for new bulbs, and wrapping delicate exotics in organic sweaters to protect them from the harsh months to come. But in my prairie bed, the party rocks on. It's autumn. Dessert is being served. This bed ain't ready for bedtime quite yet.

Cutting a tree

It was a bad tree.

There was no debate about that. It was a silver maple. That is arborist-speak for four seasons of trouble. In spring it shed terrible red berries, then flooded the yard with helicopter-shaped seed pods that filled every garden and germinated at a rate somewhere around 98%. In the summer it hardly cast any decent shade, and its ragged leaves were prone to insect attacks that left them riddled with leaf galls that made it look as if it had contacted some terrible dermatological ailment not seen since the Crusades. In fall the leaves turned a pale yellow, fell, and would quickly compact making them useless as mulch. In winter, its branches and bark snapped off like icicles littering the yard.

Those weren't its only flaws. The silver maple is a notoriously fast growing tree, and our had the audacity to take up this trait with both of its trunks. It sent one straight towards the my neighbor's telephone line, and another towards my cable and power lines. It quickly became not only a bad tree, but a dangerous tree to boot. It had to go.

So, Saturday afternoon, armed with some rope and borrowed chain saw, my father in-law, my neighbor, and I, directed mostly by my wife and mother-and-law, endeavored to take that tree down. It wouldn't be a huge job, but it was more than any of us would have preferred to do. But it was a job that simply had to be done, the same as going to the dentist or filling out those forms around April 15th.

There also was no real emotional tie to this tree, not for us. It was here when we moved in, and it had been a nusiance ever since. On his first visit here, one of my uncle-in-laws suggested we "prune the (expletive) thing, about two-inches off the ground, and be done with it." For much of the last three years we'd regretted not doing just that.

This isn't to impugn the entire being (if you subscribe to the belief that a tree is a being). It did have some good qualities. I fed the goldfinches thistle on that tree. And they, in turn started a thistle farm in my back garden bed. During the cicada summer of 2007, it was host to thousands of 17-year-cicadas. Now, hundreds of their offspring are likely getting their last sips off of that tree's roots. Our son loved that tree, the way young people do, for its height, and its ragged, weedy majesticness.

But a strange thing happened as we began cutting and snapping away limbs. It demanded its place in the yard. With each piece that disappeared from the sky, taking its spot littering the lawn a woody corpse, a bit of emptiness opened above my land. Instantly, it was missed. Increasingly my yard become more and more open, more naked, more exposed. I suddenly had a view of my neighbor's garage that I never really wanted, and the powerlines that line the alley came into sharper view. My neighbors suddenly received a clearer view of my yard as well. I too, was stripped.

That tree, the bad, dangerous tree, had managed to make itself missed.

As I worked Sunday to clear the yard, burning most of what could not be cut and stacked, more than one bird flew by to give me an earful. The sparrows came first, then goldfinches, and finally a lone black-capped chickadee. Each of them wanting me to know my action was too totalitarian for their taste. A squirrel chattered at me from the alley. Even Moxie, my terrier, wasn't sure what to make of the stump. "The tree. It's not tall anymore," my son told me.

That tree will be replaced. We have big plans for the space. We see fruit trees. Three will be able to go where that one went before. The birds, I'm sure, will appreciate the new trees, as will the pollinators. I fear the squirrel will like them as well, and Moxie will welcome the return of the squirrel. In time, they too will grow and obscure the garage and the power lines, they will become our new green fence, the new distraction to draw our sight up towards the sky. In time, the bad tree will fade, like the hole that has been made by its absence. But for now, I'm missing it, even if it was a bad, terrible, dangerous, no good tree.

A Silver Set

Along the shelves in my office are treasures that I've accumulated over my life. These range from a paper crane a colleague gave me when I worked as the environmental reporter at the Island Packet, to a foam pig emblazoned with the Web address of the American Veterinary Medical Association. There are other treasures as well, things of greater weight and significance, things that were passed down from family members who are no longer here. There's a brass burro paper weight that my great uncle John, an Irish Christian Brother, brought back from Peru. I have a small ceramic teapot my grandmother picked up during a trip to Ireland in the 1960s, and cranberry glass pitcher she used for iced tea in the dog days of the Red Sox season, back when no one ever thought they'd win the World Series.

Then there's set of silver, a mug and bowl. The mug reads simply "Laurence March 5th 1922." The bowl reads "Baby Laurence March 5th 1922 From Adolph S. Ochs."

Being silver, these items are incredibly suceptible to the chemical reactions caused when my curiosity leads me to reach out and grab at their glow. The oils of my touch accelerate the process of tarnishing, by which silver sulfide blankets their shine with black, leaving the set looking every minute of its age of 87 years.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to shine them up. Polishing silver is not something I've often had to do. Like most of us, I eat with stainless, throw my setting into the dishwasher and let the Jet-Dry do the hard work. I also don't own much in the way of silver jewelry. So, I was amazed what happened as I began wiping away the years of neglect from the set.

Laurence was my grandfather. He was born in New York City in 1922. His father was businessman who worked for a large department store. His job was to find the best textiles and fabrics in the world, negotiate a fair price for them and have them shipped back to the United States where tailors and seamstresses would turn them into the clothes worn by the beautiful. His mother worked as well. She was an assistant for Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times. But she did more than take messages. My grandfather told me that Ochs considered her the bets accountant he had on staff, and so whenever the books were being checked, they were always double-checked by my great grandmother. What I do know is that she must have been important to him, because when her first son was born, he ordered a set of silver for the boy.

As I polished it yesterday I couldn't help but to wonder the pride the family of immigrants from Ireland must have felt when they held that mug and that bowl, engraved with the name of their baby boy and the name of the most powerful man in newspaper publishing in time when newspapers were king. With each stroke of polish, I felt a connection to the relatives I never met.

I thought to about the set's journey. From New York it went to Atlanta. My grandfather was just a boy when his father was hired by a department store in the south. He had to take the job. He'd been given a salary that allowed him to hire the family a servant. It was young black woman who lived in a shack that was built in their back yard. In the shed, she kept all of her belongings, which included a phonograph, my grandfather remembered. It was there, in one room with a packed earth floor, that she called my grandfather so that she could play him a record. It was "hot music," he told me. "It was Louis Armstrong."

I wonder if my grandfather's first American dance teacher ever cleaned this silver set. What might she have thought as she held this piece that tied her employers, brand new Americans, to a social class that excluded her?  As I wiped away layers of tarnish, it seemed its whole history was being uncovered, like a paleontologist unearthing long forgotten creatures, the stories passed on to me and buried by the daily routine were suddenly bursting forth from the set, with a gleam I'd forgotten. Where did this set stay when my grandfather, then a Catholic priest, returned to the south with a printing press in the summer of 1963? Where was it when he took off his collar and he tucked into a drawer for the final time? Did he polish it that night? Did he wonder what had become of the boy whose birth had captured in tarnished silver?

Inheritance is powerful. It's layered in the expectations we have for ourselves, knowing that path our genes have travelled. For me, it's layered, as well, in being a journalist, knowing that the first generation of my family was celebrated by a titan in American journalism. It's layered in knowing the hands that have held what I must painstakingly shine to keep brilliant.

When I finished, I took the set, and returned it to my shelf. Its story must continue.

Poem of the Day

A fresh new poem. Enjoy.

BNSF 1273

Gathering in the entrails

of the city, they wait

Buzzing barely audible

Above the rumble

of things progressing.

Waiting to unload

the reserves of the day

Into pint glasses

Tightly laced Asics

and tantrums

that keep neighbors appalled.

Text one more message,

Flip through the sports page,

Feign total deafness

Just a little bit longer

'Til the track gates draw open

Then, Spring!

copyright 2009. All rights reserved.