Grandma Marie is a founding member of the Knit-Wits. They turn out hats, sweaters, scarves, and socks. They turn up for canapes and cocktails, a little discreet dishing of those not there, complete with embroidery but just around the edges, building up the local gossip row by row. Here’s the thing: we learn from each other how to make it new.
In storytelling, too, there needs to be a looping back, complications that only appear to be tangles. Details are key; so are color and contrast. Without some holes, there is nowhere for the attention to catch hold. But, ladies, let’s remember— vary that pattern but don’t make it up out of whole cloth or improbably sticky yarn. Leslie Schultz
It is a shame to waste these precious drops, to fling water like pearls of rain onto sand.
(On the other hand, flow is everything.)
Long roots filter out rank poisons. Water carries them back into the making dark. (Rejection or chagrin are perennial, self-sowing.)
Depending upon conditions, select with care.
For sun: asters and black-eyed Susans, coneflowers and yarrow, blazing star and prairie dropseed, even Blue Heaven little bluestem.
(Read! Read! Read! The blaze of tradition shines forth and nourishes.) For shade: columbine and wild ginger, wild geranium and Solomon’s seal, pachysandra and dead nettle, bugleweed and red twig dogwood, wild hosta and cinnamon fern.
(The coaxing practices, the lattices of form and habit.) Finally, perhaps a rain garden? Something to catch what spills in?
(The index cards handy. The pencils sharpened.)
“A garden,” said Stanley Kunitz, “ is a poem that is never finished.”
He knew a thing. Or two.
Leslie Schultz
Today’s poem is inspired by a perennially favorite text, The Northern Gardener: From Apples to Zinnias–150 Years of Garden Wisdom by Mary Lahr Schier. Two years ago, that handy and beautifully written compendium introduced me to a new word and inspired a poem, “Cotyledons,” about those first two tiny green leaves thrust up by a sprouting seed. This year, the chapter on “Xeriscaping” inspired a poem.
The photographs here of plants were taken on Earth Day, 2020 at the nearby McKnight Prairie Remnant,seven miles from Northfield. This thirty-five acre piece of land is the epitome of xeriscaping with native plants and is cared for by Carleton College. Tim and I were able this year to visit early enough to see, for the first time, the pasque flowers blooming.
Window If eyes are windows to the soul, then do panes of glass allow us to pass into the spirit of a house, a ship, an old barn?
One cavernous space, now a wrecked cairn of splintered wood once stood against snow and wind at the home place
where my husband was born. Though now disappeared, like a rejected draft, torn, carted off, I recall its cool majesty on a hot day; the scents of long-ago cut hay
mingling with motor oil, alfalfa, and old timber; the way its echoes would change the timbre of my voice to undersea splendor; and the way the sun poured
like transcendent, light rain from the high window above the always-open door. Unprepossessing from outside, the barn held an ample store of quiet dignity inside.
Leslie Schultz
The real-life orientation of this photograph is a quarter-turn to the left. This barn at Red Oaks Farm, where Tim and his siblings grew up, was long, like a semi-circular stand of wooden hoops or like a stand of juniper, low against the wind. Recently, it was the wind that did it in, flattened it like a cardboard box. Somehow, though, it looks right to me this way, and so the print I keep on my desk has this orientation, and it was the inspiration for today’s poem. Here are some other images of that now-disappeared landmark.
Priming the barn at Red Oaks (Photo: Leslie Schultz)Photo: Marea Mohr (April 2019)
Thinking about windows this week makes me smile because so many people (in Northfield and probably in every city) are placing stuffed toys in their windows to cheer children lonely for their friends. Walks with their parents in the spring sun can turn into a bear hunt or toy safari. I started participating before Easter, and just recently found one a bear large enough for a child to see easily from the street. (It was one that Julia was given by Mary Alice Sipfle at my baby shower, and it was a great nighttime comfort for our daughter, twenty years ago, when the two were the same height.)
Yesterday, because my door was open, I saw a flash of tiny red sundress–like spotting a cardinal for just a moment–and heard a small voice say, “Look, Mama! It’s a BEAR!” A girl, maybe three years old–about as high as an American Girl doll, come to think of it–was walking beside her mother (who pushed the stroller). The mother was wearing a flowered sundress. Both of them looked so peaceful and connected to each other that it made me feel a little bit nostalgic. (I am prone to that these days.) I am glad I happened to overhear that snippet of conversation, because I was thinking that our street seems to be mostly construction workers grinding old asphalt these days, and that maybe the bear looked a bit ludicrous and woebegone.
Today, I think I will open the cupboard under the eaves and see if there isn’t a friend in there who could join the bear in cheery sentry duty.
Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday! LESLIE
Though this year my poem for April 23 is not inspired by William Shakespeare, of course, on his 404th birthday, he is on all of our minds! If you are looking for a short, lighthearted birthday waltz with the Bard, take a look at this video from the Great River Shakespeare Festival called “Shakespeare’s Test Kitchen” or watch along as at 9:20 CST 154 actors participate in a marathon reading of the sonnets. (Thanks to GRSF for the image above!) Here is information about how to participate–though you might have to type in (rather than click on) the links below, as I copied them from an email.
Sonnet Marathon with LinkedInOur very own Doug Scholz-Carlson is taking part in the first ever #LinkedInShakespeare Sonnet Marathon today, on Shakespeare’s birthday! He will be one of 154 actors/readers reading all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets LIVE, to #supportthearts.
At 9:20 CST, Doug is dedicating his reading of Sonnet 149.
To get a FREE ticket and reminder, or to donate to a bonus fund that will go to one of the 154 organizations represented, go here: bit.ly/LISHAKESTIX
Though theaters are dark, people are still bringing the light! Join us!
And don’t forget, for all of you who enjoy the sonnet form, to consider submitting a sonnet or three to the annual Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, also sponsored by the Great River Shakespeare Festival. You have plenty of time–the deadline is June 1!
Not so long ago, I heard her tell the story. We were at her kitchen table in the old farmhouse near Madelia. Was she making bread? Just Estelle, her daughter, Julia, and me. And Maggie, the black dog, on the wooden floor.
Maybe I had mentioned my teen-age tale, the thrill of climbing the Tour Eiffel, then gazing out over the rainy rooftops of Paris? Estelle kept kneading the flour, then gestured out the window. “When I was three, I climbed to the top
of the windmill,” she said, dividing the dough into loaves of bread, patting them into their metal pans. She was playing. Her father had turned away, then turned back, saw her, hand
over hand, ascending the steel frame of the high Aermotor. He followed, without a sound, fearful she would turn around, panic. Oh, if she fell, like a falling star! But her gaze was far
off over the flat cornfields, watching the grey sky shift, form a rainbow, shimmer like ribbons, over the blue silo. She barely noticed her father’s arms or felt her feet touch the safe ground.
