Natural Art: Iris

 Rather than braving Thunder over Louisville, I chose to shiver my way around the neighborhood photographing iris

 after iris

 after iris.

 Finally I understand what motivated Georgia O'Keefe.

 

Notes to Myself

Kentucky prohibits the import of firewood from outside of Kentucky in order to prevent the arrival of the Emerald Ash Borer.
This information is outdated.  The Emerald Ash Borer arrived in Kentucky in 2009, first appearing in the counties that form a triangle between the borders of Indiana and Ohio.  Gradually, the insect is expanding its invasion in the state.

 Ash leaf showing damage from Emerald Ash Borer.

 Not every bright green insect is an Emerald Ash Borer.  On the upper left is the genuine article.


If you see an Emerald Ash Borer or evidence of its passing, contact the state entomologist at (859) 257-5838.
******
People who are ill are often angry people.  One reason?  There is energy in anger.  A doctor told me decades ago that people with long-term illness, dire or not, are invariably depressed.  Energy can overpower depression.  Anger is energy.
****
In 2009, Wikipedia said only 3 percent of CFL bulbs were being recycled.  One hopes that percentage has increased now that Home Depot and other locations are accepting the bulbs for recycling.  As we all know, they keep energy usage down but contribute to the amount of mercury, a highly toxic element, in landfills and elsewhere.

The hard-core advertising that convinced us to make the change.

Legislation and public education were strong factors in the switch to CFLs. Would it have killed the educators to inform the public at the same time that the bulbs contain mercury and must be handled properly?  I suppose they didn't want their message diluted.  Get the people to follow the leader before they start worrying their pretty little heads about toxicity.
**** 

Articles to re-read:  Revenge of the Introvert:  How Social Media Is Making Nerds, Geeks, and Wallflowers the Leaders of the Pack by Laurie Helgoe in Psychology Today, September 1, 2010.

Accidental Art: Power Lines

 We watched a power pole be replaced across the street, which led to my looking up at power poles from beneath.

 I asked my compadre if each one is different, and he said yes.

 So far, I find that to be accurate.

 The wires overhead that are ordinarily invisible are quite beautiful when I bother noticing.  Abstract art.

Life is nothing but details.  The object in the photo above that looks like a miniature oil barrel?  That's the previous power pole, cut down to one small section that remains, because keeping it was a safer and also efficient alternative to transferring all of the wires to the new pole.

Thunder over the Ohio River

Saturday is Thunder over Louisville, the kick-off to Kentucky Derby season.  The thunder is two-fold:  the thunder of World War II warbirds and spanking new F-18s in the afternoon and the thunder accompanying what is said to be the country's largest fireworks display Saturday night.  (The same was said about the fireworks over the Hudson River on July 4, 2002, which I watched from the roof of an 8-story building on the campus of New York University.  Which was more impressive?  Well, the NYC folks had two barges from which they were firing; and that night was the only time I've felt a crowd step backwards en masse because the pyrotechnics seemed about to engulf us.

 The question is neither here nor there today, because I'm thinking instead about the best place to go to take photos of the planes in the afternoon.  I was hoping Riverview Park would work, but it seems to be in the lowlands.  I want to be closer to the sky, and God, and mostly the planes on Saturday.  The downtown waterfront is always an option; but I'd rather be away from the crowds.

 I love seeing the barges pass.  Growing up on an island, the freighters were always at a far distance, so I'm surprised each time I see a vessel this large up close.

 Relics nearby.

Ephemera: On Writing

My historic preservation work requires a dedicated file cabinet in which I can sort without inflicting harm on my parents' paperwork.  I have enough file cabinets if only I will free myself from the dozens of file folders (marked TO FILE) that contain quick hand-written notes: a word, a phrase, a sentence, an idea too valuable to pass over.

I'm now going to transfer those quick notes onto this blog so I can pitch the paper and free up a file cabinet. You'll find factoids, dialogue, excerpts, notes to myself, brilliant ideas from other people on a variety of subjects.

Today's subject is writing because the plurality of notes in the first file that came to hand this morning concerned writing.

[Side note: I've cited sources when available.  Otherwise, either I wrote it or I was in the room when somebody else said it, and I thought I'd remember forever who that was.]
*****************************
**"You can say the most radical things if you couch them in the most conservative of terms."

**"The role of the artist is to hold the complexity."

* *    "[I] feel about writing the way a struggling designated hitter once told me he felt about batting:  'I think too much at the plate.  I ought to be just stupid up there.'
      'Just see the idea and hit it' is my motto.  Roy Blount, Jr., Now, Where Were We?, p. 172

**[Probably a summation rather than a direct quotation]:  "A story is a sequence of actions in which a sympathetic character confronts a complicated situation which the [main, sympathetic] character struggles with and then solves."   John Franklin, Writing for Story, the book to read if your plot is a tangled mess. The first time I read it, I understood little.  The next time I read it, two years into working on Grace, Franklin's ideas let me access the rhythms of plotting.
 
*This next statement may be mine; however, if you know an alternate source, please advise:
"What's sensible,
what's wise,
what's prudent,
what's orderly,
what's the normal way of doing things --
but
sensible is not always kind;
prudent is not always merciful;
wise is not always blessed;
orderly doesn't always get the job done."

*******************
And now to the question of whether you should pursue a degree in writing?  Here are four (out of roughly 100) reasons I'm convinced that the low-residency M. F. A. in Creative Nonfiction  program at Goucher College saved my soul as a writer.

*Lisa Knopp showed me what was beautiful about my writing, thus empowering me to write more beauty.

*Leslie Rubinkowski wrote here and there, on, say, page 83 or 104 or page 178 of my manuscript, "This seems rather important. Maybe it should come sooner?"  (Yeah.  Like in the first chapter if not the first page.)  Without her, my book would be slithering around without a skeleton/structure capable of holding it upright.

 *Philip Gerard remarked on the strength of my book's themes but added, "Somehow you have to pull all of these themes together."

 It took two years and 10 or 15 major revisions, but I ended up with a second chapter that fulfilled exactly that requirement.

*Lee Gutkind struggled to mentor me when I could hardly put two consecutive thoughts together the semester during which my husband, who had an aggressive, terminal cancer, underwent a stem cell transplant. His kindness and friendship then and later, when I was putting together the original mentoring program for the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, were life-giving.



By the way, an essay I wrote for my first Goucher workshop in August 1998 became my thesis manuscript and was picked up by Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, in January, 2000, eight months before graduation. The lectures, conversations, friendships, mentors and shared bottles of wine allowed me to write a book I could love, 2003's Grace: A Memoir, which received a Best Book of the Year award from the National Federation of Press Women.

Middle Bass Monday: island residents, 1963

Middle Bass residents, May 1963.  This list either shows the people invited to my graduation from Middle Bass Grade School or the list of people to whom I wrote thank you notes after graduation.

Mrs. Ashley (Clara) was lovely: pleasant and kind.  We'd visit on her front porch in the summer when we delivered her regular order of eggs (we raised Leghorn chickens at the time). She must have had a lilac bush, because the smell is connected to her front porch in my sensory data bank.

Bill Kristoff was a friend of Sonny Schneider.  I remember him showing us, with immense delight, his red MG, in front of Sonny's garage (next to Thelma's house).  (The car had his initials in small block letters on the dash.)  Later he was killed in a water accident.  He was on his or a friend's boat anchored off Catawba/Port Clinton. They were asleep when another boat, never identified, ran into or over them.  Both young men died.

I think it was the Pinneys who invited us down to see Bonanza on their color television set, the first one on the island.  Oh, what a sight. They offered us soft drinks, and our parents chastised us when we got home for having accepted.  It was taking unfair advantage of hospitality for three children to drink soda pop offerings of an elderly couple (if they were elderly; who knows what age they might have been?). We were to say "No, thank you" to soft drinks and request water if we should be thirsty,which we shouldn't be.  (We were, however, allowed to eat the popcorn.)

Who's missing?  Miss Carrie High, who lived across the road from what is now the Middle Bass Inn; who intended to live to be 100; and who fed ginger snaps to Amy and me when we went to visit.  Also, Emma and Andrew Beckstein (Bechstein?), a brother and sister who lived together in a white house on the north shore of the island.

Folking Around

I'm up to my eyebrows in achieving the designation of Certified Community Scholar from the Folklife Program of the Kentucky Historical Society.

What, may you ask, is a Certified Community Scholar? It's a person who has participated in the 7 weeks of intensive training put on by the Kentucky Folklife Program and presented a final project showing the development of a chosen folklife project along with a completed interview and complete documentation.

We meet, the 20 to 25 of us, each Monday evening at the African-American Culture Center, listen to lectures, watch videos, discuss our projects, and eat.   The eating is particularly important, because each dish, prepared by whichever members of the group chose to bring something that week, is indicative of, important to, and/or reflective of the communal life of the cook.  (Last week, for instance, one of the chefs, a woman who moved to Louisville from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, offered up a variety of sausage available only in New Orleans; she said on trips home she buys in bulk and freezes enough to last until the next visit.)  The food is important, because we need nourishment within the rush of choosing projects, doing interviews, detailing the critical elements of the final project, photocopying forms, figuring out how to get the interview onto a CD, writing out descriptions of artifacts and questions we bring to observing them, and regaling each other with stories of success, failures, confusion, delights, and wonders seen and heard.

(I wish you could have been there last week to hear a lifelong church member out of the free church tradition describe what she observed at the first Roman Catholic church service she'd ever attended.  Especially delightful was her description, and the reaction of the Roman Catholics in the class to her description, of the incense that somebody twirled around the church to make it smell good, she guessed.)

A 60-minute recorded interview is tomorrow's assignment. Mine is as yet undone. I've managed to acquire an excellent microphone that plugs into my computer, courtesy of my friend Shanda; and this morning I walked through a couple of practice "Testing one-two-three"s, accompanied by the usual frenzy of "where did the darned thing go?", followed by "why can't I hear it?"  Actually, I could hear my voice, but only with my ear an inch from the laptop's speaker, and only the intonations of my voice, by which I mean not the words. I burned the test recording onto a CD, hopped into my Jeep, put the CD into the sound system and - O, happy day - there was my voice, clear and plenty loud.

With the recording issues settled, I called Albert, my friend and colleague in the Third Friday iterary group.  I did an off-the-cuff interview with him three weeks ago. Now, some time before three o'clock tomorrow afternoon we're doing a follow-up.  For this second interview I'm required to have prepared questions and the recording device.

To come up with questions, I first considered my own desire to preserve the history, lore, and habits of this (or any) literary group in Kentucky.  (The quick answer?  I was an English major. We love this stuff.) Next I wrote out ten or twelve questions that I think future researchers may bring to the study of this particular form of performance art.  Finally, I came up with some questions specific to Albert, and his work, and why he takes part in Third Friday, and what is his last name.

I must take with me a form that Albert and I must both sign allowing the historical society to use this interview in whatever way, shape, or form best serves the public.  Very important, those signatures.  So important that I'm going to stop writing and go photocopy the forms now, so I'll be ready to roll when Albert calls to say he's available.

As an aside, I was interested to see in a video about a well-known folklorist that even the most experienced of us find it unsettling to embark on interviewing a new person. Driving to his destination, he said he wished he could turn around and forget the whole endeavor.  Interesting, yes?  Especially when you know that a famous theologian -- oh, you know the one I mean-- German -- famous - wrote all those books - Barth, perhaps?- said that when he went to call for the first time on a parishioner, he walked around the block repeatedly trying to get up the courage to knock on the door.  As seminarians, we thought it was something special about our profession.

Wrong.  Our timidity wasn't related to our profession but to the human instinct to avoid -- well, what is it we're actually wanting to avoid?  Stepping into the territory of someone else's personal life, whether spiritual or professional or otherwise?  Reduced to its essence, is the problem a fear of the unknown? Ois it something more obscure, some atavistic desire to avoid strangers?

Oh, the mysteries.Oh, the adventure. Oh, the fun.

Tick, tick, tick: the sound / sight of summer

Say good-bye to March, everybody.  Forget that whole "comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb" truism.  March came in like a summer day at the beach, threw a few tornadoes into the works, and then wandered out with eighty degree weather.

My appreciation for daffodils was a bit less than in the previous decades of my life. Used to be, the bright yellow atop the green was the symbol that winter would not last forever; that our reprieve would soon be upon us.  This year, though, we didn't need a reprieve.  We needed an extended series of below-freezing days to freeze the ground deep enough to wipe out the new crop of fleas and ticks and other crawly varmints.  We didn't get it, and the proof that this summer's going to be a mass of insects making life miserable is that I found a tick in my hair last week.

That's right.  I said it:  a tick.  Yep, a Rocky Mountain Fever carrying nemesis, and even if it's not carrying diseases a downright unpleasant visitor in your ponytail.  I retrieved it, set it on the bathroom sink for close observation, and had only a moment to observe its little arms flailing in futile pursuit of my blood before my compadre grabbed it up in a bit of paper and flushed it away.

Do you know the worst thing about ticks?  For three months after finding one, you feel as though at least one is slowly making its way up your body at all times.  That's what ticks do.  They head for the sky, by which I mean the top of your head.

Do you know the best thing about ticks?  Once you discover the first tick on yourself, you are forever permitted to say to friends, families, and loves, "Check my head for ticks.  Please." and they are morally bound, it seems to me and my children, to give you a headrub.  It's almost a fair exchange, unless the tick discovered had actually dug its little snout into you and begun sucking your blood.  Then it's just creepy.