A Walker in the Suburbs

We were still knee-deep in the pandemic when I left the world of paid employment to “write, study and travel” — as I phrased it in the farewell note I sent to colleagues. Five years later, I wonder if I’ve lived up to that self-imposed to-do list.

Have I written? I could blog less and pen longer pieces, but I haven’t been idle. I’ve published essays, embarked on book reviewing, and written a book proposal.

Have I studied? I’m on break this year, but in late August I plan to start my final year of master’s work, culminating in a thesis. So a checkmark there, too.

Have I traveled? Never enough, but no complaints!

There was, however, a subtext to all these tasks — to shake free of the 9-to-5 shackles. I’m still working on that one, still driving myself too hard, pushing myself for no good reason except that’s what I’ve always done. This post is evidence of that!

Caring less seems a funny goal for the next five years, but maybe it’s the one to pursue!

(Packing up my office in July 2020. Still months of full-time work ahead of me, but all of it at home.)

We’re in the waning days of National Poetry Month, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. At the writers conference I help plan, we are devoting two panels to the genre.

I’ve been thinking about poetry lately. I think too much to write it well but when I’m under its spell my prose is closer to where I want it to be.

Why is this? I’m not sure. But maybe poetry is the written word distilled to its purest form.

What is it about a vista that appeals to us? The balance of color and texture, of breadth and height? Is it familiarity? A place that reminds us of a yard or a hillside we knew long ago?

I was thinking about this while on a walk yesterday. I took that route because of a specific vista that I knew I’d see from it. But more than halfway through my stroll, I realize I’d missed it. The view I was remembering was from a winter vantage point.

I love the green profusion we have now. It’s most welcome, especially when it’s hot outside. But with it comes a narrowing of vision, a lack of perspective. The new growth cocoons us, keeps us from harsher realities. And that’s fine with me. I’ll accept that trade.

I’m a morning person, so what I’m about to say should be taken with a grain of salt. When I woke up today, all I felt was gratitude. This is not my usual pattern. Typically, my gratitude is mixed with a goodly amount of anxiety: What needs doing? Who needs help? Where should I begin? I let to-dos dominate my earliest waking hours.

I have fantasies of rising mindfully, moving from bed to yoga mat, stretching and saluting the sun. From there to longhand writing, no keyboard. Posting can wait, emailing, too.

This is not what usually happens, of course. And it’s not what happened today, either. But what did happen was a wash of gratitude, an awareness of time passing, but also of my presence in it.

This didn’t last long. The checklist raised its hand, demanded attention. But for those first blissful moments, I was aware only that I had awoken to a new day. And that was all that mattered.

I write this post from the room that was once for dining, then for playing, and finally, given over to a much-loved doggie. It’s a room now dominated by two bookshelves and a large aviary bird cage. In the cage are two petite parakeets. (Are there any other kind of parakeets?)

They chirp merrily as morning sun floods the room with light. It is a pleasant way to begin the day and is why I once tried calling this the morning room. But that was too highfalutin a term and did not stick.

I observe the budgies. They are flitting from perch to perch, nibbling on a collard leaf, bobbing and feinting. Cleo has Hoffman coming and going. He dances to her tune. She’s the older woman, and he struggles to win her affection.

He warbles and chirps and cocks his head as if to ask, what do you think of that? Most of the time she can’t be bothered, but she provides just enough encouragement to keep him going.

Which is all to our benefit. He fills the house with song.

(A photo of Bart, one of Hoffman’s predecessors, similarly colored, though suffering from a rash at the time.)

Speaking of warmth without shade, I just finished reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which explains that we are living through an “extinction event” caused not by an asteroid or volcanic eruption but by homo sapiens. Consider these facts Kolbert presents:

“Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.”

Most of all, Kolbert writes, citing Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen, who named this era “Anthropocene” to indicate that it is shaped by humans, we have changed the composition of the atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has increased by 40 percent in the last 200 years.

All of these changes are happening faster than our world can adapt to them. So, despite the noble efforts we’ve taken to save individual species or to rid our forests of knotweed or other invasive plants, the fact is that the world we’ve created is changing the planet on which we live. Here’s Kolbert again:

“When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda. To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity, though, of course, modernity is its fullest expression. Indeed, this capacity is probably indistinguishable from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness, our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete complicated tasks. As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world.”

The Sixth Extinction was published in 2015. The situation has only become more dire since then.

(Dinosaur footprints from the coast of Portugal.)

The Easter Bunny hopped in a day late, weather-wise. He arrived on Easter Sunday, but he missed Saturday’s blue skies and 85 degrees.

Instead, he ran into rain, wind and clouds.

By the end of the day, though, the sun made an appearance and a stiff breeze dried out the lawn so the kiddos could romp and play after dinner.

It wasn’t a picture-perfect Easter Sunday. But it didn’t have to be!

I wonder if April Fools pranks are on the wane, given the April Fool’s-esque quality of our country, its policies and discourse, its upside-down and inside-out craziness. Wars and bombings. Ballrooms and arches. The abandonment of kindness and decency and statesmanship.

Where’s a good prank when you need one?

Not here, I’m afraid.

But it’s a new month, a fresh start. Always something to celebrate in that.

It’s April! No fooling!

Enough weather posts for a while. I’ve read some great books lately. One of them is James Rebanks The Place of Tides.

My first Rebanks read was The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a paean to the placed life. Rebank’s family has been raising sheep on the same parcel of Cumbrian land for six centuries, and he uses this deep attachment to muse on the importance of rootedness. Like my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, Rebanks is both a farmer and a writer. One role sustains the other.

Rebanks expands his horizons in his most recent book The Place of Tides, which chronicles the work of Anna, a Norwegian “duck woman” who preserves the ancient tradition of housing eider ducks on remote islands near the Arctic Circle. After spending a season with Anna, Rebanks writes, “a new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.”

Rebanks admires Anna’s fierceness, her devotion to the eider ducks and the ducks’ trust in her. Anna’s efforts are keeping a tradition alive. In Anna, Rebanks finds a way out of his own confusion and doubt.

“Anna asked me if I would write a book about her and what kind of book it would be. I answered that I wasn’t sure, but that if I did, I would write about her work, her island, her family’s story, and her own life. I told her I could never know the whole of her, another human entirely, a woman, and someone from another culture to my own — such a thing was probably impossible, but if I did write an account, I would try to make it as true as I could. I explained that I was trying to see the world through her eyes. I would probably try to make of her life a kind of fable. I asked if that would be OK, and she said yes.

I am only the storyteller. She is the story.”

(The North Sea viewed from the Orkney Islands, about 350 miles from Anna’s home on the west coast of Norway.)

Schools dismissed early. County courts closed. Yet the feared tornados did not arrive. A little after 7 p.m. I slipped outside for a post-dinner walk, making my way through the humid dusk.

The storm warning had ended and a high-wind warning had yet to begin. The jets were not yet flying low over the neighborhood. I could hear the owls hooting in the woods, could see the yellow glow of lamplight from houses across the street.

It felt like an achievement, getting outside on this wild weather day. It felt like I had accomplished something. The most elemental of all accomplishments — moving through space — but sometimes, that’s enough.

(No rainbow last night, but the day before St. Patty’s Day, you’d better believe I was looking for one.)