Category: wind

Leaves and Bounding Fruit

barnstormingblog6 Comments

frontyard1

walnuthull5

mistyfrontyard

My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood – an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don’t do
anything.

What my mother and I both know
is that we’d crawl with shame
in the emptiness we’d made
in our own and our fathers’ backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.
~Mary Oliver from “The Black Walnut Tree” from Twelve Moons

 

We bought this old farm twenty five years ago:
the Lawrence family “Walnut Hill Farm”~
a front yard lined with several tall black walnut trees
brought as seedlings in a suitcase from Ohio
in the ought-1900’s.

These trees thrived for 80 years on this hilltop farm
overlooking the Canadian mountains to the north,
the Nooksack River valley to the west,
the Cascade peaks to the east,
each prolific in leaves
and prodigious in fruit.

The first year we were here,
a windstorm took one tree down.
A neighbor offered
to mill the twisted trunk for shares
so the fallen tree became planks
of fine grained chocolate hued lumber.

This old tree lines our kitchen cupboards,
a daily reminder of an immortality
living on in a legacy left behind~
sturdy while imperfect,
so beautiful to the eye and the heart.

 

 

walnuthulls2

hulls

morninglight3

barewalnut

blackwalnut

Called to Make a Comment

barnstormingblog7 Comments

sunrise10415

sunrise102151

And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
~Mary Oliver

Some mornings it is impossible to stay a silent observer of the world.  It demands a response.
The overnight wind and rain have pulled down nearly every leaf, the ground is carpeted with the dying evidence of last spring’s rebirth, the dropping temperatures robing the surrounding foothills and peaks in a bright new snow covering.

There can be no complacency in witnessing this startling transition in progress.   It blusters, rips, drenches, encompasses, buries. Nothing remains as it was.

And here I am, alive.
Awed.
A witness.
Called to comment.
Dying to respond.

septembermapleleaves

walnuts

bakerwoods

wwupacview

 

Brought Together By the Lights

barnstormingblog2 Comments

image

I awoke to eery inky darkness this morning around 5 AM. No digital clock numbers shining red, no nightlight illumination. Just black. The wind and rain storm yesterday that hit Puget Sound and the Washington coast left us without power, and a quick scan out the windows informed me we were not alone waking in the dark this morning.  The closest lights in the horizon were the Canadian border cities ten miles away gleaming bright.

We were caught unprepared on this one.  The flashlights, of course, were not where they were supposed to be, and the candles were stuck deep in cupboards after Christmas.  The generator, unused for too long, won’t start.  Our little bit of battery power for computer and phone is rapidly diminishing. When an Amish acquaintance from Ohio called me and I lamented about how completely unAmish I was in my dependency on the power grid, he chuckled and asked me if I had my oil lamps lit yet.

We are nearing 20 hours since the power went out, the storm long past, but sit with 200,000 other homes waiting to be “turned on” again. It could be awhile. It is just for these kinds of situations on the farm that we have a small generator that we use sporadically to pump the water to the barn and keep the freezer and refrigerator cold. No such luck this time.  Good thing it is a warm time of year (except for the freezer stuff).

Our children always celebrated our power outages. It is high adventure, an escape from the routine, and even in their teenage years, they cling closer. They are all gone but I remember past power outages when we cleaned barn with the help of flashlights, cleaned house together and folded clothes in the dark, guessing the color of the dark socks, played piano and sang together and read lines in my son’s high school musical, helping him to memorize his part. We played games and laughed more than usual. We were drawn together by necessity as well as by choice. There was one good light in the kitchen, so there we sat encircled together, connected by a candle, when so often we are flung apart by the busyness and bright light of the world.

Last night we revisited those times as we had previously planned to have five neighbor children over for several hours to hang out and eat dinner.  The barbecue worked, we ate canned fruit and green salad and finished off all the ice cream before it became soup. They found our dark house unique with books by flashlight, playing piano and watching cartoons by iPad.  As they headed home last night to their generator-powered house, I wistfully hugged each one, remembering those family storm days not so long ago.

I am hopeful about the thought of the power returning sometime soon. Our children used to say a no power day was one of the best Saturdays they remembered in a long time. I have to agree. Maybe we need to take a hint and shut off the electronics– the phone, TV, computer, and just sit down together more often, sharing ourselves inside a circle of light. It is far more memorable, and in a dark house battered by a windstorm, far more enlightening to the heart.