THE MIND OF TREES

Early morning here in Teche country is cloudy, one of those somber gray mornings that signals the exodus of fall and the advent of winter (minus the cold temps). If we aren’t careful, we could feel oppressed by the tin color of the sky at 7 a.m. I’m sitting here, looking out at falling oak and pecan leaves and thinking of the winter of my childhood when doomsday talk and arguments at mealtimes were silenced by what I considered to be an inane bit of redirection my father made in the midst of cloudy atmospheres: “Hush now, look at the trees…” We were always puzzled by this cease fire phrase.

The trees in that scenario were tall, cheerful pines right outside the screen porch where we shared meals, and I remember how I looked out at the resinous trees and smelled the sharp, clean scent of pine needles. We’d put down our forks and knives (figuratively speaking), and silence would save the day. Today, I’m in New Iberia, Louisiana where I live near a coulee overhung by water oaks, live oaks, and swamp dogwood and remember my father’s little saying: “Look at the trees.” In retrospect, I figure my father meant for us to observe their wisdom in being silent observers of disagreeable scenes, or, rather, I choose to assign that meaning to his phrase this morning. We’ve had such a long siege of disagreeable political scenes, and psychiatrists have been busy handling victims of stress brought on by the country’s divisiveness for well over a year.

During a session of a self-help course I once took, we were advised to be careful about being a "guy in a diner," a person who often offers opinions just to hear himself talk, and we certainly have had our fill of guys in a diner this past year. However, my father’s words, “look at the trees,” now resound in a room where the television is turned off, and I view the wind ruffling the leaves on my cherished, silent oak and think: It's difficult to be uncivil when you're silent.

Trees peopled my writing when at the age of seven, I wrote my first story that featured a girl who disappeared into a large hole in an oak tree and took up residence. Inside was a room that held furniture similar to the furnishings within the homes of Beatrix Potter’s animals where a table was set for tea. People like Potter and our imminent Louisiana tree hugger, Caroline Dormon (Miss Carrie, now deceased) attributed human and creaturely qualities to trees, but they recognized that their dominant quality was one of being profoundly, wisely silent. The tree in that early story was, for me, a safe place to be. Later, I mutilated a page in my mother's Elbert Hubbard's Scrapbook, scissoring out the phrase: "Silence is a true thing and never betrays" and putting it in a notebook of quotations I liked. 

In A Slow Moving Stream, my most recent book of poetry, I penned a poem about trees inspired by my journey, traveling by car, the length of the Bayou Teche from Port Barre to Morgan City, Louisiana last year. It’s called “The Mind of Trees,” and last week I chose to read it at a poetry reading in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

“The Mind of Trees”

They were drawn to trees

lining the banks of the Teche,

hanging over the brown water,

wide arms stretched out in welcome.

The live oaks, an enclosure

against a world that had exiled them,

palmetto and Spanish dagger growing close by,

cypress in the swamp becoming their homes.

They liked the sturdiness of lordly oaks

and the water meandering past,

sat under encompassing branches,

eating and drinking.

If the trees could talk, they said,

and made up stories

about what the oaks had heard.

The trees outlasted their language.

No matter who came

the language disappeared into English –

French, Spanish, German, Chitimacha.

English filled the horizon,

the patois of each clan,

buried under oaks, words waiting.

The trees absorbed all of it

and when hurricanes felled them

they were cut into logs,

loggers finding stories in their language

imbedded in the rings,

began to preserve what had been lost.

Word by word, they created

an articulation of arriving,

the sound of memory offering itself

from a distant longing. They heard

what they had been told not to hear—

testimonies for their being there.

And they praised the trees

for finding a way without them.

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan appearing in A Slow Moving Stream

A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT WILDLIFE

I saw an armadillo running blindly at the edge of the coulee a few hours ago. He appeared to be scurrying away from something, and I wondered if he had a family waiting for a breakfast of ants, mosquitoes or, God forbid, termites he’d found in some neighborhood structure. He was probably disturbed by the commotion the neighborhood has experienced this week – a new roof went up a few doors down, my neighbor on one side had tree-height hedges trimmed, and three mountains of mulch from the grinding of pine stumps in our yard were whittled down to lawn level. I had already renamed our property “Mount Mulch” and after digging into the mix, our lawn maintenance man gave the mounds a lesser name when he discovered numerous ant piles beneath the ground-up pine stumps. This morning, those crows I had lamented about not seeing were drawn to the noise and came out to talk while I was sweeping the patio. They may have been the villains that chased the armadillo into the coulee.

The armadillo is not exactly my idea of a pet, but I’m fascinated by them. When I lived in Graham, Texas, I remember visiting an oilfield site with my petroleum engineer husband and my daughter, then three, and glimpsing one for the first time. My oldest daughter, Stephanie, had seen all the Beatrix Potter books, but her favorite was the story of Appley Dapply, the mouse with “little sharp eyes.” That day, an armadillo rushed past our car, and she exclaimed “Look at the big mouse!” Stephanie wasn’t far off track with her labeling because armadillos can be as destructive as a pack of rats. They burrow under houses and disrupt utilities, and in bayou country and Texas they’ve been known to spread leprosy if a human touches them or eats their flesh (and some people do consume armadillo meat!). At one time, a center here in New Iberia housed armadillos for the study of leprosy carried out by Dr. Polly Burchfield, an eminent scientist who now resides in Florida and continues to pursue research on this armor-plated animal.

My father didn’t die of leprosy, but he once shot an armadillo and removed the shell to make a basket for my mother, then had her cook the meat. As far as I know, the dish of armadillo had no effect on his digestion. Although my parents lived in the small town of Franklinton, Louisiana, and not in a rural area, my father had this image of himself as a great hunter and shot or trapped animals on the two lots bordering our home – rabbits, squirrels, armadillo, and hawks – and cleaned them for my mother to cook in a black iron pot over an open fire in the living room fireplace. The hawk, by the way, became a hawk pie similar to chicken pot pie. This fare wasn’t served during the time I was growing up, but after I married, I was once treated to my mother’s version of rabbit stew. As far as I know, my father had no difficulty with his digestion and didn’t contract leprosy, but I have no desire to do a taste test on armadillo meat or any of the animals he killed or trapped while playing the great hunter in his backyard (which bordered the Roman Catholic Church and whose members never complained about his pursuit of this outdoor sport, even while Mass was in progress). My father also had beehives and harvested large quantities of honey, at times even allowing himself to be stung on the arm by his colony of bees because he claimed bee stings cured bursitis. In retrospect, I think he must have been caught up in a wilderness time warp.

I’ve written poems about armadillos that appeared in the backyard, but I think I’d have felt more frightened than poetic if I had seen the endangered pink fairy armadillo pass by my window. Talk about an ugly critter! This morning when I glimpsed what may have been a nine-band one running at the edge of the coulee, I didn’t feel very poetic – I only thought about further property destruction, having spent the greater part of our winter visit in New Iberia repairing house and yard.

In a few months I’ll be returning to The Mountain at Sewanee to prepare for the appearance of more wildlife – moles that have created a vast tunnel system in the backyard and have made it a wavering path to traverse, a family of skunks that loves to tear up insulation for nests and bed up under our cottage, and I’ve heard rumors about a black bear wandering around the campus this year. However, during the eight years we’ve lived on The Mountain, no armadillos.

SOME CAT-A-LOGICAL FOOLISHNESS

Yesterday, a slow drizzle of rain fell as I sat at my desk looking out at the pine straw heaped around the base of an old oak in the backyard. A neighbor's black cat crossed the yard and began rummaging in the straw as if he was searching for food. And, then, with that sixth sense cats seem to have, he sensed me watching him and stared back at me. Now, not only am I allergic to animal dander (cats being the worst offenders), I also have just enough Scot blood in me (or it could be the Cajun stream) to entertain a few superstitions, and I get anxious when I remember the one about black cats crossing in your line of vision and causing bad luck. I was hoping to escape the misfortunes that blighted this past year.

The cat and I regarded each other for a few moments, then he went back to his foraging, but I continued to stare at him, trying to will him away from my yard. It was a stand-off, and he won. He looked at me once, began sniffing the corners of the yard, and returned to the pine straw to settle in, even though rain drizzled constantly.

So I did the thing I do when all else fails, I began writing a "snippet" (aka a bit of calculated whimsy) about his invasion. I'll include it at the end of this blog. Meanwhile, I tried to divert my thoughts by thinking positively about this species of animal that has often caused me to develop paroxysms of sneezing, to suffer from swollen, watering eyes, and to lose my breath. Immediately, the face that appeared in my thoughts was that of Beatrix Potter, the Victorian woman who studied the behavior of animals and created enchanting paintings of them in a series of books about rabbits, mice, cats, hedgehogs, and other creatures she often saw in the Lake District of England.  As an adult, I still enjoy the story about an old cat named Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, an anxious parent who frequently lost her kittens, and when she found them they were committing some mischief. However, in this Tale of Samuel Whiskers, "Moppet and Mittens grew up to be very good rat catchers."

My daughter Stephanie has seven cats indoors and feeds as many that hang around outside. At first, the neighbors complained about the band of bedraggled felines roaming their yards, but when they discovered that the mice and rats nesting in their attics and snakes crawling in their yards had begun to disappear, no more was said about the invading cats. Many friends tease me about my daughter making a home for the cat population when I have allergies to them. They say that she probably opened her residence to them to keep out an interfering mother, but in my defense, I relate that cats have been her soul mates since she was three years old, long before I developed most of the allergies from which I now suffer.

Here's the snippet I wrote following the staring stand-off with the black villain that settled in the pine straw in my backyard:

LINES COMPOSED UPON AN ALLERGY TO CATS

Don't come peering in my window,

black cat, back arched, nose twitching

like the dark augurer you are.

If there are mice around

they're out there scavenging.

Plenty abounds in green cans,

unconsumed holiday harvest.

Go away, harbinger of bad luck,

last year's misfortune quota

soared enough for me.

Send another envoy in your stead,

perhaps an orange, striped ball of dander

with bug eyes like Garfield the comic cat,

at least he has a sense of humor,

a quality most of your kin don't possess.

Don't come peering in my window

or scratch on the clouded glass.

I know winter is out there,

but witches live somewhere else

closer to Halloween.

And why are you prowling

in the rain anyway?

Aren't you reputed to be

a lover of comfort?

I know cats don't have insomnia,

seldom exercise,

are model do-nothings;

as Anonymous said:

"Life is hard, then you nap."

So go curl up

on someone else's window ledge...

and take your time doing nothing.

P.S. Scat!