February is a foothold

Thoughts before the melting time

2/25/26

Late February is a foothold, a path of still-powdery white mixing into mud in the midday sun toward the parking lot. Down off the wooded slope, phragmite flags are waving over the water melting somewhere under snow and ice. Black locust pods dangle off craggy branches. Understory trees full of cedar waxwings near the farm pond, their lemony bellies warming in sun. I don’t think cedar waxwings are a winter bird, but their fluttering and thin song greet me. Yet, I don’t know why they are here this early. I hope they find the fruit they need to stay alive.

The day believes it is winter, so it is, but I know the sap is rising in the sugar maple. I wonder if the red bellied, the pileated woodpeckers have been out courting? I keep looking up in the taller snags and dying trees, too, thinking of baby owls. I want to find a hawk’s nest tucked somewhere in the crook of the tallest oak.

I am reading Wanderlust—A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit and thinking about land in America, how tied we are to private ownership. Pondering British public right-of-ways, Solnit writes, “Private property is a lot more absolute in the United States, and the existence of vast tracts of public land serve to justify this, as does an ideology in which the rights of the individual are more often upheld than the good of the community.” (I cannot help but think that our insistence on “rights of the individual” over “the good of the community” has played a part in setting up the current divisions in our country.) Solnit’s book was written over 25 years ago and with public lands under attack from our own national government, we are no longer promised land that will remain undeveloped.

[Another book I will recommend is This America of Ours, Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild by Nate Schweber given to me by my Uncle Richard, an Idaho resident and retired logging mill manager. I read it during the end of the last Biden presidency, and it shines a light on what it took to save our public land in the West from corrupt politicians in the late 1940s and 50s. (Cameos from FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s advisor and an early mentor of Trump’s) We have sadly, come full circle.]

Our Environmental Protection Agency has become an arm of the oil and gas industry, it seems, with public land being opened for both increased oil and gas production. Also, allowing timbering in protected forests. I read today that Public Citizen is suing the EPA over their repeal of “endangerment finding,” the bedrock of our understanding that climate change is altering our planet. The EPA whose job it is to protect our environment.

I realize the EPA is younger than I am. I remember when it was born. I was 12 years old, and already an environmentalist, of sorts. Back then, we were picking up trash on the side of the road in our rural village, learning what it meant to recycle tin cans (wash, dry, flatten!) and reading Mother Earth News for ideas. My brother ordered worms for the compost bin, likely just a pile of food scraps and dead leaves out past the garage. How earnest we were, like our nation, and how close to solving the earth’s problems then. It’s hard to explain to my 12-year-old self what went wrong over time. Hard and heart breaking.

I am thinking about larger forest mammals that need territory, white tailed deer and coyotes— and buffer zones as I walk past new housing developments I can see through the winter trees. I recently read how quickly we are losing these protective strips of land due to the rapid pace of development, and I see where a farm field used to be, now houses. Can a person be a buffer, I wonder? I want to be one. My body, a buffer against all that is disappearing, all that is being eroded. I dream of my body as vast as a watershed, as huge and far reaching as water, but solid. A kind of earth body, a true Mother Earth.

I see February as cover, protection. I don’t want the month to end because of that, silly as that sounds. As if covered, the ground will stay safe, its inhabitants, too. Maybe in my heart, I am always February, frozen, remembering the past. Huge snow drifts below a farmhouse. As my brother recounts, walking to a neighbor’s house less than a mile away in a blizzard, all four of us, my brother and sisters and me. Collecting a needlepoint one of us left on the bus, according to my older sister. On the way back with the wind coming up, we had to take cover in a culvert below the dirt road and plot how we’d make it home. Do we take the road, probably less snow, but longer, or go over the field, shorter, but bushwhacking through drifts?

Do I remember what we did? No. My brother said he took the road; my sister, that my mom came looking for us in the truck. I do know that what we learned that day, and throughout our childhood was indelible. Pay attention to the earth, and what she teaches us. Take her seriously. Watch her and listen. And take care, of her, of each other.

We are heading into the melting month. Rain in the forecast here in southeastern Michigan. There will be more snow, I hope. I will welcome it. But meantime, I need to get ready for what is ahead, too:

Melting
 
Snow pockets the yard, thin slashes. The way its covering
disappears just after filling in all the edges. No one swoons
 
over slush. I want to bake cake, warm whiskey. Wrap in wool.
Scrape golden fruit raw, fired with cinnamon until the air
 
is autumn again, apples mounding under trees, orchard
buzzing, yellow jacket-billow crazy-drunk with juice.
 
My uncles piling the truck until the tarp is a mountain.
Cinched tight, they drive away and then cider comes—
 
glass jugs for the fridge, barrels for the cellar so we can store
sweetness under wraps for days like this when all the luster
 
disappears, dull moss fleck beneath dirty grey as if we are all
thick sheep and need a scoop of sun to get us through.

Pine Row Press
Spring 2024

I started this Substack almost exactly a year ago. I was envisioning using nature to help me write my way through the world we find ourselves in. I realize how useful this project has been. Writing about fear and anger and sorrow with the woods, water, fields and garden as backdrop has allowed me to just wander some, ponder some and see where my words and worries take me—in a different way than poems do. I have needed prose to sort out the world, and my place in it. You have helped by reading along with me. I am so grateful for that.

I will be reading poems from my most recent book at Serendipity Books in Chelsea, Michigan (119 S. Main Street, Chelsea, MI 48118) Sunday, March 29 at 5:30, a poetry month kick-off with poet friends and colleagues, Scott Beal, Cal (John) Freeman and Dom Witten. Please consider joining us, if you are nearby. RSVP to Serendipity so they know how many chairs to provide!

An afternoon nature workshop with my friend and writing partner, Ashwini Bhasi and later reading with her and Scott Beal is afoot at Book Suey Bookstore, 10345 Joseph Campau Avenue, Hamtramck, Michigan 48212 on Saturday, April 4. Details on my website soon.

Meanwhile, my newest book, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them is nearing a one year birthday at the beginning of April. I would love you to celebrate with me! I will send a signed copy to you if you order through the Contact page on my website. I’ll be planning a special birthday price with shipping as we near April.

Here are two new book reviews I am honored to post: Cal Freeman on Michigan Public Radio, and Shannon K. Winston in Cider Press Review. Wowzers!