Photo/Text 8: Winter Bloom

Starting from a place of dirty snow and incessant talk of wind chill, you board a plane and emerge, half a day later, in a tepid place that confuses your senses, a place of plants in strange winter bloom. At first, your winter-hardened self recoils from the alien landscape, from roses and bougainvillea, jade plants and birds-of-paradise. You walk from one botanical specimen to the next, as on a movie set, marveling. When your skin relaxes, no longer steeling itself against cold, you don summer clothes and sit in sunshine. The locals, sealed up inside, seem impervious to the miracle of warm winter; no one else’s bones are starved of warmth. Yet you were once one of them, believing winter was but a milder form of summer and not a different species of season altogether, a gray season with teeth like a wolf. You moved from this place nearly fourteen years ago, trading year-round bloom for winter, for the wolf, and you would not trade it back. Never again do you want to be immune to blooming. Heading back on the plane, stepping back into winter, you welcome the terrific chill that claims you, sinking its teeth in your flesh.

Christmas List

The eight-year-old goes to see Santa. After some small talk, he asks her what she wants for Christmas. She replies, “A ball of yarn.” He asks what for, and she explains that she is learning how to make yarn bracelets. He asks her what else she wants, and she replies, “Nothing. Just a ball of yarn. That’s all I want.” Santa presses her, insisting there must be something else. She maintains that there is nothing else. Santa presses on. Does she like dolls or video games? Clothes? Stuffed animals? “Just a ball of yarn,” the eight-year-old concludes firmly.

I am watching this exchange, and I am tempted to chastise Santa. Instead of suggesting there is something wrong with a child that wants only a ball of yarn for Christmas, why not praise her for knowing her mind and for not being greedy? A ball of yarn is enough for her. How many of us can be content with so little?

The line is long, and publicly chastising Santa seems a questionable approach to take. So I bite my tongue. As the eight-year-old comes back over to me, her five-year-old brother approaches Santa and begins the small talk.

“Am I supposed to want more than a ball of yarn?” the eight-year-old asks, clearly exasperated.

“No,” I tell her. “That’s perfectly fine.”

“I mean, I like to give presents more than I like to receive presents,” she explains.

The five-year-old is laying out his list to Santa. It has three items. 1. A Lego set. 2. A bow and arrow. 3. An Egyptian mummy. Santa seems more pleased with this list, though he is not sure he can fulfill the mummy request. “Well, an Egyptian mummy kit,” the five-year-old clarifies. “I guess the mummy doesn’t have to be real.”

Later, the visit to Santa over, the five-year-old says, “I don’t think my Christmas list is long enough.”

“Why do you think that?” I ask.

“Because all the kids at school have like a hundred things on their lists, and I have only three.”

The eight-year-old chimes in. “You don’t have to be like all the kids at school,” she says. “Three things is enough. It’s plenty. Besides, if you had a hundred things on your list, you’d never get them all anyway. And you don’t even want that much stuff. Trust me.”

I am certainly biased, but I’ll say it anyway: she is the wisest eight-year-old I have ever known. Instead of a Christmas list, she wrote this letter.

A Book and Its Cover

Even though I doggedly believe in my books long before they are published, long before any editor has expressed even a remote interest, somehow I still doubt that my books will ever be physical objects in the world until I see their covers.  The cover of Xylotheque: Essays features a photograph that I took at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, well after all of the essays had been written. In fact, the weekend before my final manuscript was due at the press, I took a copy of it, along with my camera and a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, to Concord and to Walden Pond where I finished the book. And so, even though none of the essays are about Concord or Walden—since I had never before been there—still, the book was influenced by that place. And so I think it is a fitting cover image.

Page Proofs

For so long—could it really be years of your life?—you, alone, have believed that the book is a book. Despite all evidence to the contrary—the scrawled-over manuscript pages that screamed hopeless, unfinishable pipe dream, the slippery words that you moved and added and omitted until you no longer understood their sense, and most especially the editors (a dozen, maybe more) who turned your work away, declaring it most decidedly not a book—you have continued to believe in your book’s essential bookness. The words, the paragraphs, the pages deserved to be wedded, bound together beneath a common cover. This was your stubborn, solitary belief. And though for years no one believed in your book—with the exception of a small handful of friends who share your lunacy—you kept sending it out into the world, hoping to infect someone with your lonely dream.

And one day—when, if you have to be honest, your unflagging belief had started to rub away—it happened. An editor called with good tidings. And now—now that you hold page proofs in your hands, now that a cover exists—you marvel that so many others are in agreement with you and your madness. A team—production editors, copyeditors, peer reviewers, writers of blurbs, graphic designers, marketing reps—a whole platoon, it seems, is now on your side, working to finish what you started years ago, confirming that intense, private belief you’ve kept for so long: that what you have created is a book.

Photo/Text 7: Offerings

They have brought me acorns, quinces, rose petals, catalpa pods, seashells, beads, bookmarks, broken coconut shells, folded notes the size of teeth, bluets pulled up by the roots, paper hearts, sheets of birch bark, leaves from many trees, fistfuls of dandelions, green tomatoes, chestnuts, plastic bags bursting with pine needles, branches with and without foliage, twigs, samaras, drawings, clay sculptures, sharpened pencils, unsharpened pencils, pumpkin stems, broken pens, the springs from pens, dead batteries, paintings, blocks, tiny wheels from lost cars, erasers, buttons, chalk, nailed together planks of wood, puzzle pieces, milkweed pods, hickory nuts, robin’s eggs, feathers, liquidambar seed pods, rocks, pieces of asphalt, uprooted seedlings, dead June bugs, living ladybugs, butterfly wings, speckled eggshell fragments, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, sticky candies, too-small paper crowns, snail shells, ants, paperclips, screws, washers, lengths of twine, ribbons, pen caps, twist ties, macaroni jewelry, cattails, and just last week, three crabapples. “Is it OK,” I asked them, “if I just photograph the apples, and then we’ll leave them here for the birds? By photographing them, it’s like I’m keeping them forever.” Uncertain, they acquiesced, but as we walked away, they cast regretful looks back at their offerings.

Ginkgo biloba

For three years, I’ve been going on tree tours alone, and my daughter has been asking to go. Finally, this past weekend, I took her on her first tree tour at the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs. Except for one other eight-year-old, the attendees were all adults—many older than me. A number were devotees of Ed Richardson, the grand master of trees in Connecticut. (I’ve written about him previously here and here.) But this isn’t about Richardson or the trees that he talked about; this is about my daughter looking at trees.

At each tree that the group stopped at, my daughter would listen for a minute or two to Richardson’s wavering voice, but then some other tree nearby would catch her attention, and she would wander off, armed with her camera. (For the record, she took 102 photos during the two-hour tour, and I took 89.)

 

UConn’s arborist, John Kehoe, was on the tour as well, and my daughter asked him about seeing a ginkgo tree. Serendipitously, we were at that moment standing about thirty feet away from a blazing yellow gingko. Kehoe pointed at the tree and told her to go get a leaf. She came back with one, beaming. Into her pocket it went—along with an assortment of other leaves, acorns, and cones. Her pockets swelled with treasures; her camera filled with photos.

Later, Kehoe pointed out another ginkgo—this one completely green. She collected another leaf sample and asked the tree expert why one tree was all yellow, the other all green. I didn’t hear Kehoe’s answer, but later she explained to me that it was because the green tree was older, more established, with a more extensive root system. (Yes, she said established and extensive. She pays attention.)

She also asked where the biggest ginkgo in Connecticut is, and Kehoe told her it is in Hartford. Later, I asked her why she liked ginkgo trees. “Because there are no other trees like them alive today,” she told me. “They’re dinosaur trees.”

Later still, apropos of nothing, she said, “You know that champion ginkgo tree in Hartford? I want to go see it.”

Photo/Text 6: Outdoors

Take them outdoors. Lead them up mountains. Let them chill their flesh in icy lakes. Tell them the names of trees and flowers. Show them the ever-shifting dome of sky. Put rocks older than multi-cellular life into their hands. Look for birds and marmots, bees and moose scat. Allow them to be drenched in sudden cloudbursts. Take them to snowfields and waterfalls. Let them climb high into trees. Push them to feel the competence and limits of their bodies. Show them a maimed butterfly in its final death shudder. Read with them the Braille of tree bark and moss. Search the sky for signs of change, for new colors and clouds, for turns in the weather. Listen with them to the wind and night noises. Study the stars. Remind them that they too are animals. Place them not at the center of the frame. Help them feel their smallness in the universe. Guide them towards the promise of themselves, towards what they may become. Show them how to feel in their brains and in their bones these places that are all we have.