Guilted Environment

Warning--this post has no stats, no links, no proof. Just thoughts, experience, belief. Unfortunately, belief is something easily poo-pooed in a culture that more and more is cynical toward groups--whether that be a religion, a bunch of garden writers, or a corporation. We have good reasons for cynicism; look at our federal government / special interest figure heads. Look at your last girlfriend who left you for a Packers fan.

As the conversation over the National Wildlife Federation and Scotts joining to save wild spaces and get kids outside simmers down into more rational emotion, I feel full of guilt. My own, and others. Am I a nut for believing that we have happier, healthier, smarter people if our home landscapes had more wild habitat and less lawn? That depression and anxiety and ADHD would ease? That our kids, following a butterfly or making mud pies might be more creative, abstract, and fearless thinkers in whatever profession they choose? That they'd be more effective leaders? Shouldn't I just shut up?

Do you remember playing in the mud? With sticks? Do you ever sit and play with sticks now? Grab a piece of mulch and pretend it's a bulldozer? Am I the only one? Maybe I played with my Lego sets too long past high school.

Homeowners are guilted into thinking they need a pristine lawn or landscape. Anything wild is wrong, you won't fit in, people walking their dogs will give you the evil eye. Whole neighborhood associations have policies towards stringent landscape appearances of green earth and bulbous boxwood. Where did this come from? A religious-based fear of the wilderness? The Puritanical idea that nature tests our morality? And if it does, we've failed. In our attempt to exorcise personal demons over class, race, wealth, sex, and intense emotions, we do everything we can to recreate the environment to what we need or want, to what our ideal is, pillaging as we go. We've cut down the forest to make it a savanna so we can see the predators coming at us, but now we are even more wary and uncertain. We are even more afraid of each other (who's the predator now?).

I was just thinking this morning about my Mennonite family, burned and torutred during the Spanish inquisition, forced to leave the Netherlands for Prussia, forced to leave again for Russia, then again centuries later in 1874 for America. Each time they relocated they rebuilt their villages and homes in the same way. They kept their culture close to them, and remade the land into familiar ideals that helped preserve their identity. This is why the prairie vanished so swiftly from Kansas and Oklahoma--a sense of home, not of adaptation or patience. And perhaps a sense of guilt, a built in wanderlust that seems innately human. We are nomadic and it hurts us, keeps us from the world and from our deeper selves. (If you want readings on these environmentally philosophical thoughts, look at The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx, This Sacred Earth by Roger Gottlieb, anything by Lawrence Buell.)

Lawn care companies make us feel guilty for weeds in the lawn, for brown lawn, for not fertilizing and mowing and watering religiously. At the hardware stores it's 50% tools and 50% lawn care products, especially from April to July.

I don't use a drop of chemical anything, and I've only been gardening for four years--I just dove in and went trial by fire. I've created a habitat of mostly native plants, of various sizes and textures and blooming times, and the diversity brings in good bugs who eat bad bugs, insects who feed baby birds, and seeds that feed migrating and winter birds. Everything supports each other. Each year more life rushes in like a broken dam. I know I spend less time in my landscape than my neighbors because I can hear it from inside my house--the guy next door mows 2-3 times per week and waters every morning. The folks across the street mow at least as often, edging and blowing for hours on a once-tranquil Saturday morning, wasting away their weekends. (Do they really enjoy it I wonder? Even when it's 90?)

Maybe you see this as a judgement, but I see it as an opportunity--I spend about 2 days in March cutting down the garden, and that's it for the year. Maybe 1 day I'll top dress with compost. My mulch is cut down perennials. My joy is sitting back on Saturdays, watching the three-dimensional life swoop in and out, crawl around, I sitting in the deck chair sipping lemonade, letting my thoughts take me wherever and grounding me, all the while trying my best to tune out the whirl of fertilizer spreaders, the chug of sprinklers, and the vibrations of mowers spewing exhaust my way. Actually, I don't even go outside on weekends anymore. There's no point--everyone is outside working. I mean relaxing.

My Writing / Gardening Shed

I don't have my mythical 100 acres to restore to prairie yet, but I found the cloister I'd like to build among it. Which one do you prefer?

Just imagine the books I could write and gardens to imagine in my little haven. And these are just some of the designs by a firm in the UK. You can have a green roof if you like, a wet bar, a bathroom. Whatever. If you have $40,000, send it my way? (Actually, one million would be better--need the land and a tractor and geothermal and solar and wind turbine and walkie talkies to contact the wife and ask when she's leaving me since I never walk the 200 feet to the main house to say hello).

NWF in Garden Bed with Scotts

I'm sure most of you have heard that the National Wildlife Federation, promoters of the backyard habitat certification program, have partnered with Scotts of Miracle Gro and fertilizer and insecticide fame. Two programs are key: increasing wild songbirds (by buying Scotts birdseed) and getting kids back out into nature (where they can absorb all kinds of Scotts products). I apologize for my snark. Go read Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home, and Louv's Last Child in the Woods. That's all you need to light a fire under you.

The president of the NWF proclaims lawns as carbon sinks, useful places to help curb global warming. This is a joke. Please, do not dump chemical fertilizer produced with oil from Iran (hyperbole, maybe) on your lawn four times a year, most of which kills good soil bacteria and other life, then runs into our streams and lakes killing aquatic life. Instead, top dress with free compost from your local city. But, that wouldn't make any money for Scotts.

Lawns are antiquated dreams of a 19th century American middle class wanting to have small, private Versailles. And the democratic idea of Olmsted, where lawns create a large park bringing us together, is ludicrous--we have fences, I don't know my neighbors, et cetera. Kids may play in lawns, but they learn nothing about themselves or the natural world, its processes, its lessons. That happens among the brush. It cures ADHD. It speeds a patient's recovery from surgery. We don't need more lawns, we need more habitat, shrubs and trees with berries, flowers with insects--insects that are key protein sources for songbird chicks. In Nebraska, we need prairie like we need love and forgiveness and oxygen. Prairies are carbon sinks.

The best article so far, summing up the outrage, the backlash, and the corporate brush off, is right here. (This post also has links to NWF's Facebook and Twitter feeds if you're so inclined to say something to them.)

Feel free to check out this link about Scotts new GMO lawn seeds that resist Roundup, so anyone can spray willy nilly, and in the process create super weeds. 

Also, Scotts trying to overturn bans on nitrogen lawn fertilizer in Florida during rainy summer months.

Obviously, I don't agree with NWF--who claim not to support all of the Scotts products, and see this as a way to work from the inside out in a company that wants to change (so why don't they?). The chemicals we spew on this planet are immense--we really have no idea. From lawns to gardens to big crops, to the feed in cattle and chicken and hogs, to what we put into ourselves and release into the sewers to be "treated" but is never really gone--Tylenol, antidepressants, estrogen, the gmo food we eat.  When you refinish a bookcase. When you paint your house. Most anything you toss in the trash.

Now the NWF appears to be supporting (and is financially supported by) a company whose basic raison d'etre is "Buy chemicals. They will save you. Have a spider? Spray it. A brown patch of lawn? Treat it." We spray before we think, and NWF tripped up. My garden and lawn pests are treated, often within days, by natural predators, all because I invite in those predators with non-lawn habitat.

I have little to no faith in our government. If we want things to change for the better, whether they be environmental or social or economical, the private sector must do it, must turn the tide and create such an uproar the government may finally act. Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to buy politicians and get stuff done sooner. All I have is this blog. This post. Some anger, confusion, and sadness. Sometimes it gets me hoping through writing, but not today. I am so disheartened. As I will be again, I'm sure. I'm going to go start some liatris seeds.

The Hawk in the Garden

For ten minutes I watched a sharp-shinned hawk try to snatch songbirds from my garden. It was an awesome experience. Guest post with pics over at Wildlife Garden.

Low German Mennonite Sayings

I bet I get about two comments on this post. But it's interesting to me as I might include some of these in the next book. I try to imagine each being quite clever, moving, funny, instructive, even scolding in their day. But were they? And what sayings do we have today that will be thought strange or hard to understand in one or two hundred years? "Like shooting fish in a barrel."

1) Wan du friee jeist,
dan besee die eascht de Mutta.

When you go courting to get married,
first observe the mother.

2) Waa lang lawe well mot Tsemorjest ate
aus en Kjeisa, opp Meddach aus en Kjeenijch,
on Tseowent aus en Pracha.

He who would live long must eat like an
emperor in the morning, at noon like a king,
and in the evening like a beggar.

3) De Kjaakjsche onn de Kaut senn emma saut.

The cook and the cat are never hungry.

4) Aules haft en Enj,
Bloss ne Worscht nijch.
Dee haft twee Enja.

Everything has an end
except a sausage.
It has two ends.

5) Wan’t emm Winta kracht
Can buschelt’t emm Somma em Sack.

When you hear the cold in winter crack
The summer harvest will fill the sack.

6) Dee weet nijch fal;
Dee es blooss hinj’rem
Owe oppjewosse.

He doesn’t know much;
He grew up behind the oven.

7) Onnmaajlich aus Kjielkje ute Kruck ate.

As impossible as eating noodles out of a jug.

I'm not sure what dialect of Low German these are specifically, and Low German has no set standard (likely because it became an oral language giving way to High German). Still, good advice on #1, wouldn't you say?

Macro Orcam

I recently did two things against advice I received: 1) bought a 15x 70mm binoculars and 2) at Christmas asked for and received a 25mm Canon SLR lens tube extender. I'm pleased with both, since I can now see birds much further away (and into neighbor's windows) with the former, and the latter produces such images as the below (click on to expand):


Marble in garden gate



River Birch



Copper bird feeder

Invasive rush

I do need to take these macro shots with a tripod, even on a still day--the images would be crisper, and I'd be less dizzy. I suspect a macro lens would require less fine tuning and hand holding--I'm still trying to figure out aperture and f-stops--but I'm having a good time, especially as it's in the 50s.

Ode to the First Day of School

I'm sure I've posted the poem before, but this is the second half of the absence policy I give to my college students -- it sums up my teaching style pretty well.


Did I Miss Anything? by Tom Wayman


         Question frequently asked by
         students after missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours.

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent.

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose.

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren't here.

The Garden

I wasn't going to be a sheep and do a long retrospective, but I really, really need something good to hold on to, anchor into, and over 4 years now it's always been the garden. Many good things have happened this year (poetry collection accepted, work in Orion and The Sun, radio interview, self published a garden book after narrowly missing a press), but none as evocative and moving as this small world I help along each year--just as it helps me along.

"'What is the world?' [my son asked] What the world is and who we are meant to be within it and how we are to conserve what is good and beautiful and true in the world, and in ourselves; and how we are to forgive and, if we can, redeem what is bad and ugly and false in ourselves and, because of us, in the world--this may be what we're here for." -- Mark Tredinnick

Early March

March

Early April--post cut down

90% of my garden gets cut down each year. It's something that can take me 2 days, or if I savor it, 2 weeks. I savored in 2011. This is all the work I did the whole year, except for mulching the paths.

Our trip to see 500,000 sandhill cranes

Sandhill Cranes one hour west

Early May

May

Mid May

In May I took my wife on a research trip for my next book through Oklahoma, from the NE corner to the SW. Interviewed family, visited bison and prairie preserves, saw the OKC Memorial site, walked the 1894 homestead. I discovered a place I didn't know existed, and came to some measure of peace with one I loathed most of my life. It meant a lot to share the state I was born in with my wife.

Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Oklahoma

Family Homestead, Corn OK

 

 

Black Tailed Prairie Dogs, Wichita Mtns Wildlife Refuge

Garden Tour

In June I was one of several gardens on the Wachiska Audubon Society Garden Tour. In a few hours hundreds came through, and I only wished that I had started my native plant garden consulting business before instead of after, since so many people asked if I did that.

Day Before Garden Tour

Garden Tour, Mid June

Tour Day, Muggy Muggy Muggy

Mid July--My Birthday

July

July

July

Monarchs on Liatris Ligulistylis--raised 200

August

Mantis Cat

Early September

September

Late October

Balanced on a cosmo petal

Golden Smokebush

I also set up an Etsy photograph shop, with a focus (pun intended) on macro shots.

November

November

December

I'm hoping 2012 brings a book contract for any of my mixed genre or straight memoirs, and a good teaching job--somewhere I can put down roots and have long term relationships with students, peers, landscapes. But if not, I have my quasi prairie garden here in Nebraska, whose roots are amending the clay soil just as they work their magic on me. I hope you've had some of that magic, too.

Holiday Poem O' Mine

Today one of my poems, which appeared in American Life in Poetry a few years back.

 

 

Grandpa Vogt's--1959

 

The food is on the table. Turkey tanned

to a cowboy boot luster, potatoes mashed

and mounded in a bowl whose lip is lined

with blue flowers linked by grey vines faded

from washing. Everyone’s heads have turned

to elongate the table’s view—a last supper twisted

toward a horizon where the Christmas tree, crowned

by a window, sets into itself half inclined.   

Each belly cries. Each pair of eyes admonished

by Aunt Photographer. Look up. You’re wined

and dined for the older folks who’ve pined

to see your faces, your lives, lightly framed

in this moment’s flash. Parents are moved,

press their children’s heads up from the table,

hide their hunger by rubbing lightly wrinkled

hands atop their laps. They’ll hold the image

as long as need be, seconds away from grace. 

 

The Future of My Writing

I've decided that, barring a last second miracle, I'm probably going to self publish my 75,000 word memoir Morning Glory next summer. It needs one more swipe of the knife to take some fat off, and then a tummy tuck. But first I'm writing my Great Plains memoir Turkey Red this spring, which should be 90,000 words.

I've had enough editors and agents tell me that MG has promise, and more--it's lyrical, moving, reflective, a good story. My experience self publishing the mini memoir Sleep, Creep, Leap hasn't been a watershed moment, but it has put my work in the hands of over 100 readers--and the responses I've had from them have been positive (I wish I'd hear a negative so I knew what to change, besides making it longer, a common suggestion).  And self publishing is not about making money--with 100 copies I've made $90 between the ebook and paperback versions, just enough to break even with production costs. I don't think I'd have sold 100 copies without making the book affordable.

I'm not sure what self publishing one of my big books like Morning Glory might mean: will it short circuit any chance to have a real press take it? Will it be a waste of time? Will it erode potential to get an academic teaching job? (Obviously, self published books don't get put on a cv or recognized because they've not passed a peer review process--as it should be.) Will it lead to something bigger, or smaller? Am I boxing myself in?

In general I take rejection well--after a few hours--and send out work again right away. Yet too many of my submissions to literary journals are nice ones, encouraging ones, even offers to edit and resubmit, but I don't know how to get over the hump. I had one essay at a very nice journal that "caused quite a conversation among the editorial board" and had a similar response from another. I have an essay about hummingbirds that, 50% of the time, gets a hand written compliment and then a "sorry." Yes, this is par for the course. But I hate golf. If you're gonna keep the horse moving forward you have to change out the dangling moldy carrot for a fresh one. And stop using so many allusions. (Also, please don't read any of this as a pity party or a narcissistic need for encouragement. I'm not trying to whine either--I just see this space as a forum to document my process and life as a writer, which is I suppose pretty much like most others.)

Tell me what you think--would you read Morning Glory?

When a son reflects on a childhood of gardening with his mother, he finds clues to a family lineage built around silences, distance, and forgetfulness. Eventually, his mother begins to openly reveal a past that confronts the author’s own dark nature. In the history of gardens there are great tragedies and triumphs, and in the garden we continue to discover our truest selves.

The day before the author’s wedding, his grandmother is in a serious accident a mile from the church. This event sets in motion a quest to discover the origins of mysterious letters sent from strangers, hints by aunts about their father, debilitating migraines, and the “Anderson” family persona—the ability to swiftly and sternly cut off an offending family member for years at a time for a seemingly trivial matter.

MORNING GLORY: A STORY OF FAMILY AND CULTURE IN THE GARDEN explores the wary and subdued relationship between mother and son, a relationship which typifies our species’ own with nature. As a son grows up learning about gardening with his mother, he eventually earns the right to ask questions about who she is, and who he is in her shadow. Revealing her own childhood of poverty, abuse, and religious fundamentalism, two people begin to understand themselves and their lineage of solitude and depression in a new light—particularly for the son in a difficult and new marriage. As this son looks at diverse cultural attempts to connect place with self, a powerful metaphor develops between gardening and emotional balance, and how ending our violence toward ourselves and each other is synonymous with ending our violence toward the planet. Ultimately, the only way to understand ourselves is to understand the garden, and vice versa.

Ghosts

I was watching a PBS show I taped months ago about the fight for wilderness, about the feds designating vanishing landscapes as wilderness and so protecting them. In the west, the "frontier," it's a special issue where ranchers and ATV hounds love their private access and call it freedom, but it can be destructive to wildlife. Yet environmental groups who sit down with ranchers often find that they are not at odds, but want the same thing just in different ways. What is here is almost gone.

I think about the people that have come before, and that I live on a farmer's field, perhaps a pioneer's, on land once traveled by the Pawnee and Cheyenne and Sioux. On bison range. On prairie chicken booming land. On thick stands of bluestem as far as one could see. These voices barely echo anymore. These are the apparitions we willingly slaughtered.

And then it occurs to me--bison and bluestem are not the ghosts, but we today are the ghosts, searching for our place in the world, our meaning, still as hungry to conquer our fears and feed our desires in the landscapes around us. We are the mirages, the apparitions longing for something we lost or never had, wandering the earth, condemned to find our souls in places that can no longer hold them. This is America on the Great Plains.

James Wright Partay

Well, it's his birthday, though he passed away in 1980. His poetry has been one of my core influences as a writer and a person. And though this poem is often considered one of his greatest--and it is one of my favorites--I don't think it's one of his best as a poem. However, it is one of his best on the level of blowing your mind and making you see yourself through everything else so you can see yourself deeper and truer--and this is what a deep imagist poet, and what a good writer, is all about.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in the green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Labeling Memory

I posted the below on my Facebook wall, but I think I want it here, too, so I can more easily refer back to it as I write the memoir.
 
"When we cleaned out my grandmother's house many years ago, she had labeled all sorts of stuff--belt buckles, souvenir spoons, vases, nicknacks--letting us know who gave them to her and / or when and / or where. But reading a book today that she owned, she scribbled in a margin where she was baptized, on the Washita River, where Cheyenne chief Big Jake camped after allotment in 1892. This is also the same river, further upstream, where Black Kettle's body was found after Custer massacred that Cheyenne peace chief's village in 1868. My grandmother was washed clean of her sins in a river filled with them."
  
I know what the first chapter will be, and I want to write it this very second, but I'm holding off until I gain more perspective from the last of my research. I know once I start writing, I won't stop. It's like a can of Pringles, or so the ads tell me.

I have less than 1,000 pages left to annotate, having completed my reading this week, then I can begin organizing about 100 sources, quotes, and info into topics:


Great Plains flora and fauna
History of Mennonites
History of the Cheyenne
Family stories and anecdotes
Oklahoma history, cultural and geologic
Grandmother's diary
General quotes / possible epigraphs
Etc


You get the idea. This way as I'm writing I can just pull up a word document and quickly dip into whatever source material I need, paste it in, and move on. Nothing is more killer to the writing process than having to stop for any length of time. I even find the space bar and return key very very very annoying and disruptive. You should see the number of folders on my desktop, the amount of books and papers in my office. Being organized, or trying to be, is the only way to approach a messy and large project. And a paper trail may come in handy later on if someone (a publisher? maybe?) wants a fact checked, or some authority calls into question something. I wonder how often that happens to others.

To Structure a Memoir

I'm thinking that, as I write the next book, I'll try to do updates along the way about the process. Not many, since I'll be busy teaching again, but enough to shed some light on the insanity, maybe calm my nerves and focus my brain (this next book is very much a thinking book). After writing two other prose works in the last three years--22,000 and 75,000 words--I feel much more confident going in to what will be a 90,000-100,000 word project. Having a poetry collection forthcoming helps the writerly ego, too.

I've been thinking a lot about structure, and a lot about a common criticism agents and presses have of my work, namely that it's too quiet. I'm not entirely sure what it means, but I presume it's a combination of the following:

1) It doesn't move fast enough
2) Not enough suspense or action or story
3) Not enough zombie sex

I'm a poet who loves language, metaphor, and symbol--these are not loud things like characterization or plot or zombie sex. I've written several poetry collections and have a multi genre garden memoir I self published (this still makes me feel sick, so trained I am as an academic, but I had to try something different). Anyway, I was talking about being quiet, and structure--it's important I have a decent idea of structure once I begin writing in January; I'm not the kind of person who does well editing back in structure, it'll just be a nightmare, like building a house from the outside in. Still, structure, like content, is about discovery along the way and things will change, they must change in order to be the drug writing is.

I have several core narratives to the book, Turkey Red:

1) My discovery of my late grandmother and her family, stories I ignored as a child and am searching out now, and a depression-filled relationship with Oklahoma that this book hopes to cure or lessen.
2) The story of Mennonites, from the Netherlands in the 1500s to Prussia in the 1700s to Russia in the 1800s to America in the 1870s. Who they are. Their forced wanderlust and persecution. Their yeoman tendencies.
3) The story of the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma, their history as a people from Minnesota and the Dakotas to Colorado and Oklahoma Territory, along with the overall stories of Native Americans in the Territory. Their forced migration and cultural dissolution.
4) Great Plains flora and fauna, with a specific look at grasses, black-tailed prairie dogs, Bison, and horned lizards. The extinct ecosystem. The culture of agriculture and manifest destiny.

Obviously, I could interweave each of the four components--with each having their own stories to tell--letting off of one just as a story came to a head, coming back to it twenty pages later, and thus creating suspense. But that feels.... annoying. And if I talk about all four at once it's too much at one time.

I have a diary of my grandmother's from 1950-1953, where she wrote a few lines each day. I'm hoping this will provide a scaffolding and that I can use her brief words as someone about my age (back in the 1950s), perhaps as metaphor or symbol for my life now in my mid 30s.

During research I was worried each of the four areas were too different, or too alike--it depended on the day. Now I see that they are the right balance of the two, enough to give me symbolic legroom and running space to ramble about myself, my family, my Oklahoma, which should tie everything together as I go along. And this book will have more stories than my last big memoir, Morning Glory. But does that make it a collection or a memoir? I think readers are growing toward the former, especially as e-readers develop, which is also why I have a tendency to play with mixed genre works, and sub genres of nonfiction all at one time.

But again, I worry about being too quiet. There's nothing flashy I discovered in my research. No one in my family was in an infamous outlaw gang. No one made a land run. No one killed an "injun" or worked on the railroad or hunted bison or married a Cheyenne or anything "neat." They lived simply. And this is the Great Plains--simpleness, hardness, flexibility, community, unwavering determination and hope. Tornadoes, fires, floods, and locusts. That's not loud. That's why people look out their plane's window and go "huh, squares, I sure could go for some saltines."

I'll write whatever I write. And it may be a colossal waste of time, nothing but a line on a resume or a footnote to some genealogist 100 years from now. It's something to do. It's something I have to do. It's my field to plow, my bison to shoot, my embrace I can no longer give to people, animals, and places I'll never really know until I grow up and look hard into my own shadow, our country's shadow. I don't see how this is quiet.

(And to tack something on--it snowed 3" on Saturday, see below, and this morning it's -3 outside.)

Snowblowers v. Lawnmowers, Case 263, District Court of TDM

With our first few inches of snow comes the end of the brief month were the neighborhood was silent. Gone was the constant drone of a lawnmower, and far off seemed the pulsing vibrations of the snow blower. Since both are pollution hogs, both in regard to the atmosphere / spilled gas and noise levels, let us weigh which is truly the more evil machine in the court of The Deep Middle.

Defendant 1 -- The Snow Blower

-- Its sound is not as smooth or even. It ricochets as the mechanism spins. When the machine hits a dry patch it hums loudly, and when it runs into a drift it gurgles and goes baritone, sometimes being turned off then yanked back on once the chamber is cleared of frozen rain.

-- For some insane reason, owners of snow blowers have no time limit to their practices. Not only will machines be seen idling alone on drives and sidewalks as if they were making a slow run for it, but the machines are employed at any hour: 5am, midnight, it doesn't matter. Theoretically, one must assume, this is because clearing the drive and walk is essential to the business of the house, for example, the visiting UPS men or mother in laws, or rear-wheel drive cars, or unattended toddlers. Clearing snow is an urgent business, one best performed even before the snow has ended so that it can be done a second time hours later.

-- The placement of blown snow seems not to matter the least to the operator. If the snow is shot onto a neighbor's clear drive, across their garage door (open or closed), or into the freshly plowed street, it seems not to matter at all. In some instances, the violent thrust of snow will pass a young tree's path and branches will be snapped off without a notice at all. It seems that an "eye for an eye" law would best negate any of these practices.

Defendant 2 -- The Lawmower

-- There is a summer vigil with these machines, as if a secret neighborhood pact is in place like the guarding of the unknown soldier's tomb. As soon as the 8am mower is safely stored away until three days later when it comes out again, the next mower comes out, and so on until about 9 or 10pm given proper daylight conditions. Let it be said that a neighborhood can never be perfect unless a lawnmower is on its stern, Jeffersonian grid walk across the landscape, all along the watchtower, perhaps with the person operating the machine plugged into an ipod ironically listening to Bob Dylan.

-- Most prefer to mow their lawns during the dinner hour. Is this because they've been cast out of the kitchen by a domineering spouse, or because they despise the power of their neighbors grilling freely and almost heroically on the oasis-like patio next door?

-- Though lawnmowers provide a relatively constant acoustic level of insanity, the ocassional stick, rock, or frog will create an explosive discharge of metal upon metal, and an oft lowering of blade speed to address the problem. Wet lawn also causes a frequent interruption of sound level, and a much longer mowing time. Often, a father will be heard barking commands to an indoctrinated youth: "Damn it, go slower," or "Damn it, you mowed your mother's roses," or "Damn it, you missed the left side of the house why don't you just go back inside and let me finish it since you clearly aren't capable of helping out around here even after we paid for your mission trip to Mexico."

While we can see that both machines are cruel, we must rule wholeheartedly and fairly against the lawnmower, for only it seems to be the true terrestrial leviathan when it comes to destroying an environment. On levels of acoustical nuisance, wildlife endangerment, parental torture device, and noxious fumes which can create cancer and impotence, it seem the more frequently used lawnmower is truly the scourge of our modern world. We, the jury and judge of this blog, encourage the use of rocket launchers, C4, and any and all other violent means necessary to dislodge the rule of both lawnmower and snow blower from our society. Amen.

I'm Ready

Something shifted in me. I know it is not the cornucopia of holiday ads, or the now TWO all-Christmas-music radio stations in town. It is not that the shopping is done. No. It is that there's not one more excuse to go out in to the garden. I've done everything. I prolonged it as long as I could.

I didn't put away all the pots in one day. I didn't pull up all the plant support stakes in ten minutes. I didn't roll up the hoses or better secure staked plants for winter winds in an afternoon. I didn't even mulch in less than a week. Today it will be 54, and the next three days 30s, then 20s, and maybe snow.

But the biggest problem is that my garden is in college--that's the age I think of it as, maybe high school. It can cook and clean for itself, it does things I don't know about, it likely talks behind my back, it parties and gets drunk and french kisses dates. In another year or two I could be an empty nester. How time flies.

In just four years I've made an ecosystem, a self-sustaining individual. There is less and less I have to do in the garden each month. Few weeds, minimal staking, minimal plant moving and even dividing. I putz because I want to, but if anything I might be more of a nag, too intrusive, trying to dress up my garden child in clothes long outgrown and outdated. I have to let the garden go.

I only ask for a good winter. A hard winter. Lots of snow, which my garden captures and holds exceedingly well. Give me the full season, make me hunger hard for spring, the distance between us closing as the days grow longer in January even as the ice holds us down, still, patient and impatient at once like a coiled spring. There is nothing I want more to do each day than look out of my window at the beautiful dead stems piercing the sky, echoes of the future, and know how loved we are when we surround ourselves with the life on this planet.

Dazed in the Pre Memoir World

I had planned to have all my research annotated and in Word documents by 12/1. This clearly won't happen. 12/15 is the new target date. The next memoir is a freaking beast and I'm in no mood to have a foot race with it. As long as a first draft is done by the end of March I will be most pleased. Even after all my notes are typed up, I still have to go and organize them into viable topics and folders, then, perhaps, chapter outlines. At least I know what the first chapter will be. The rest will come as it comes, and that makes writing exciting.

I asked my wife at lunch today who in the world would care to read a book about some guy exploring his family history, lamenting the lost lessons of his grandmother who tried so hard to teach him about his family, but he never listened. Who would care to read a book that says Oklahoma is our apocalypse, a nexus of everything wrong and right with this country, a convergence of greed and hope that reshaped prairie ecology, Native American cultures, and Mennonite German settlers. We never listen. We don't change until we have to. Until it's too late and we have to start over, start the story over that we cut off and killed.

“How will our children know who they are if they don’t know where they come from?” – John Steinbeck

“For in OK all the experiences that went into the making of the nation have been speeded up. Here all the American traits have been intensified. The one who can interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world.” -- Angie Debo

As I'm bringing together literally hundreds of sources I stop along the way to research some question I asked myself in the margin of a book or pdf document, so I spend an hour more researching. At some point, the research must end, because it could go on forever and ever. Just as I'll never know the lives of my family or the true prairie, so this memoir can never be fully researched--in the loss and the absence, the negative space, is the story of our species.

I ask myself--remembering the first draft debacle of my last memoir, Morning Glory, unpublished but much better than it was three years ago--what kind of narrative will drive and sustain this book? My search for myself, myself and America, or just America? I will have stories of my own, then there are stories of my family, of Cheyenne, of Mennonites, of prairie animals and grasses. Will those dozens of smaller stories coalesce into a larger narrative? Will they spiral together and collide, play off one another like metaphors, lead to one point naturally, or will I have to force it to a head?

Obviously a writer has to be careful at this stage--a memoir is a marathon, and the writing is the discovery, and the editing is the real writing. First thing first. Get me a brown paper bag. I'm on a slippery slope, about to slip into memoir writing hyperventilation and coma.

Turkey Red: A Memoir of Oklahoma

Last Fall Images / Imagine the Last Fall

I find the garden much more visceral as I think about this, potentially, being the last autumn here. Or not. You never know. I will go where the door opens. At least November in zone 5 Nebraska still provides breaths of fresh air--one day it's 30, the next it's 60. This makes winter seem more manageable to me, since really, things start to warm noticeably come late February. Just enough winter to make spring worthwhile.

Some winters the weeping bald cypress dies half back. Stinks.

Tossed a bunch of seeds in that black pot. We'll see.

Rare view from the other gate.

I had a surprise call this week from UNL and was offered to teach a few classes this spring. Truly a godsend, both for the money and for the fact I miss teaching. And bringing the research together for my next book is taking longer than expected, so I now hope to begin writing the memoir in January and have it done by mid spring. Really need to have that first draft laid out asap. Isn't this an exciting blog post? Well, this next book will be rich, I tell you, rich like the finest dark chocolate mousse. It's my great American memoir.