SEASON OF FRIENDS

Vickie and Anne on porch

This summer has been a season of friends, traveling afar to be with them and staying at home to receive them, and the latest visitor was a long-term friend from New Iberia, Louisiana. Yesterday, Anne Simon, author of mysteries called “The Blood Series” — Blood in the Cane Field, Blood in the Lake, and Blood of Believers — sat a spell with us on the small porch facing our woods here in Sewanee, Tennessee. Presently, Anne, a retired district judge, has turned her attention from writing mysteries to telling the story of an African-American woman named Felicité who nursed yellow fever victims in New Iberia during the 19th century, and we enjoyed a good writers’ chat concerning the extensive research she has been doing regarding Felicité.

We sat on the porch “taking the air,” as we say in south Louisiana, and I was reminded of the essay I wrote for Porch Posts (co-authored with Janet Faulk-Gonzales) a few years ago. This morning, I re-read my last essay in this book entitled “The Ultimate Porch:” 

“It [the porch] would be a place to which people brought peace and conversation, laughter, and their willingness to take time out. For me, the ultimate porch would also be a dual haven, in early morning hours offering me a safe place where I could sit in silence, stilling the storm of some past suffering in my mind, or expressing myself in writing, all my senses effortlessly taking in the scene around me, interrupted only by the squawk of a crow bringing me messages of affirmation.

Mostly, I’d want to bring to it my “belonging”… with friends, family, and community… where, as C.S. Lewis said, we all saw the same truth: love. Evening would be the best time for porch sitting, a time like that of an old memory at early dusk when there was just enough light to read by, and my Grandmother Nell and I sat together in a scaling, green-painted swing, reading from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse: “The world is so full of a number of things,/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

In early September, we plan to venture over to LaGrange, Georgia to sit on the new porch of our friend, Mary Ann Wilson, who probably loves porches as much as I do and was laying the foundation for one when we first visited her in June. It’s a screened one overlooking a patch of Georgia woods “in the country,” she says, “a place I’ve never lived.” Every time she writes, she’s on that porch, enjoying a deserved retirement from the English Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, her “roofed-in observation post where she can sit to get a clear view of what’s in the world outside and that allows for amiable company…”*

Moon in a Bucket

*Introduction to Porch Posts by Diane Marquart Moore and Janet-Faulk Gonzales. Illustration by Paul Schexnayder in Porch Posts.

WHERE THE WATERS TAKE YOU

When I returned from a trip out of state, tired and my mind devoid of any kind of poetic thought and found a new book of poetry from Pinyon Publishing in my mailbox, I felt an infusion of energy. Where the Waters Take You by Neil Harrison is that kind of infusion. He speaks to my condition with a voice of lucid tones, writing about the natural world and what his clear eyes see in that world.

However, he is at his best when he writes about childhood, drawing readers in from the beginning of Where the Waters Take You in “The Lost Child,” a simple but complex poem about “an entity of perpetual change,” the child who is eventually lost to the world, “still forming and forever adapting/[to]this eternally unfinished home.” In these lines, the reader gets his first glimpse of an underlying wisdom permeating three sections of absorbing verse.

After reading these powerful and unflinchingly honest poems, I surmised that Harrison is a solitaire and a “poet of place” settled in Nebraska. He acknowledges this sense of place in an amusing poem entitled “Already There.” We enter into this idea of regional verse through the lines “I think we all knew he was going somewhere,/the way he’d take off on his tricycle,/though it’s clear now he was already there./On that big red-and-white trike he’d tear/down the sidewalk as fast as he could pedal/and we knew one day he was going somewhere…on his roundabout way to New Orleans, where/he lived for a time, then faced death so well/we all still believed he was going somewhere./Though it’s clear now he was already there.” The poem reminds me of a friend from Alabama who was always riding her tricycle westward to California to “find herself” and ended up in the South writing nostalgically about The Road Home to Alabama. I also thought of Thomas Wolfe who began writing about his native North Carolina while he lived in Europe.

Harrison’s impassioned elegy about death, “Spring Burial in the Sandhills,” reveals how deeply he plunges, then emerges, bringing us a poignant message that deserves numerous readings: “A carnival helix of the great wild birds/spirals upward far to the west,/winged escort singing you/up from the season of planting and birth,/out of the cyclic skein of time, where/what we here consign to the earth/has already flowered.” 

Another favorite of mine is entitled “Addiction,” in which Harrison uses a bird as metaphor — it could stand as a statement for the current obsession with opioids: “Nothing quite so human as this/quest to get higher than ordinary/on whatever wings come to hand —/food, drink, sex, drugs, some/elusive degree of wealth or fame./Gambling on those hollow feathers/fastened with that ancient glue, the dream,/another hero almost touching the sun/begins to awaken, already engaged/in the all too common fall.” Again, we hear the poet’s voice simple, yet complex, profound, yet funny, speaking of human willfulness and the tragic consequences of addiction.

We watch with Harrison as the outdoorsman performs his evening watch in his native Nebraska in the end poem, “The Evening Watch,” where “down through the ages bison died…as the day winds down, in the fading light/the view of that broken ridge brings to mind/a painting of a man at prayer, long ago,/ three friends fast asleep nearby…and from the river bluffs to the horizon and on/the stacked bones watch with me.”  The poet is alone in a wild place at dusk, and he paints a picture as vivid as scenes depicted in Wilderness Essays by the naturalist John Muir, his “sudden plash into pure wildness — baptism in Nature’s warm heart…” Harrison’s poem speaks of his mystic communion with nature, enticing readers to view the loveliness and the mysteries of the natural world.

Neil Harrison has written several books about the natural world: In A River of Wind; Into the River Canyon at Dusk, and Back in the Animal Kingdom. He is a former instructor of English and Creative Writing at Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska, and at Northeast Community college in Norfolk Nebraska where he also coordinated the Visiting Writers Series. He now resides in Norfolk, and according to Pinyon Publishing, “makes diamond-willow walking sticks, wine from various wild fruits, and excursions to the local fields and streams with his third Deutsche Drahthaar, the Happy Dog.”

More kudos to Pinyon for publishing another banner poet. Available at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

THE TAIL OF MUNCHKIN

Clipped off dill

What a joy it is to plant a herb garden and harvest the herbs to season fresh, home-cooked food! And what a bummer it is to find some of the herbs with their necks broken or the plants neatly clipped off at the base. And the culprit? A Roving Rabbit!

Satisfied Rabbit 

What a good idea my mother had when she cooked rabbit stew in a big black pot in an open fireplace! What better use could one find for these critters that rabbit lovers claim love basil, dill, cilantro, mint, oregano, parley, rosemary, sage, and thyme—all of the plants that we selected for our small herb garden. I'm just sorry that we didn't plant chives because those fat brown bunnies that steal into our garden at dawn and dusk dislike this particular herb. Rabbit lovers tout that melons, apples, peaches, strawberries, and plums are delicious desserts for Peter Cottontail, so I'm thankful we don't have any fruit trees in the yard.

I've read that Hollywood gives these critters the names of stars; e.g., for females: Madonna, Scarlett, and Drew; and for males: Ozzy, Leonardo, and Brad. And for those "rabbitsieurs" who adopt the bunnies and think they're adorable pets: Sweet Pea, Peony, Jasmine, and Buttercup suffice as cutesy names. Frankly, I prefer the more apt moniker of Munchkin.

Of course, these creatures have been immortalized in literature by writers of books for children like Thornton Burgess who placed Peter Cottontail roaming in green meadows and green forests (one of my mother's favorite bedtime readings to us) and Peter Rabbit whose father had an accident and was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor in the Tale of Peter Rabbit. The latter bunny gained everlasting fame with 45 million readers, and his story was translated into 36 languages (do you think it had anything to do with the mention of rabbit pie?).

Maybe people love these little animals because the appearance of a rabbit in the yard or in a dream foretells a favorable turn of events. However, Jung says that if you dream about rabbits, you're experiencing a threat to certain freedoms—he didn't name the freedoms, but I'd venture to say that one of those freedoms is the freedom to plant a herb garden that will thrive without Munchkin nibbling away at those delicious seasonings for stews, soups, salads, and vegetables.

The only consolation I have about Munchkin destroying our dill is that rabbit lovers warn against the bunnies developing digestive upsets when they first taste their paradisiacal fruit. In that case, I hope the dill did its dirty work. I've read that hay is good for overweight rabbits, and I'm thinking of buying a bale of hay to spread on the perimeter of the yard and around the herb beds.

My good friend, Janet Faulk-Gonzales, believes that rabbits live on the moon, a story that exists in many cultures, including the Aztec one to which she is attracted, and I'm wondering if I could entice a crew from NASA to come to the Mountain and capture Munchkin to take on one of their moon voyages. ("The Rabbit in the Moon" is a story Janet wrote in a book she and I co-authored entitled Porch Posts).

Or, better still, I think that my mother's recipe for rabbit stew may be somewhere in my trove of cookbooks. Think of how delicious this stew would be with all those ingested seasonings bubbling in the pot!

THE HEALING PORCH

Porches, large and small, are healing places. I have been an advocate of their use for many years, and this year Janet Faulk-Gonzales and I published a book about the virtues of these places in a book entitled Porch Posts: Memoirs of Porch Sitters.

Recently, I was called home to New Iberia from my spring/summer stay in Sewanee, Tennessee because my daughter Stephanie had to undergo serious surgery. Following her discharge, I returned to Tennessee but was called back to Louisiana because she wasn't recovering well. The past two weeks have been tense ones, but Stephanie continues to improve daily. During the worst of part of her recovery, I retreated to the glass porch on one side of my home and sat, sunning and meditating  "in the passive life that goes on in the porch world," as I wrote in Porch Posts, and I felt myself recovering enough moxy to deal with the problem of my daughter's illness. I also re-read several essays from Porch Posts and decided to share one that I wrote regarding the glass porch that both Janet and I call "the healing porch." The essay is entitled "The Place of Oaxaca Breakfasts:"

"Of all the porches I've enjoyed, the sun porch in my New Iberia, Louisiana home ranks first among favorites. It's a diminutive glass and aluminum structure adjoining the dining room and has been, variously, a breakfast room, a writing room, and a sitting room. Seasonally, a bed of pansies or marigolds, bordered by giant elephant ears, grows alongside it, and at one time a vigorous sago palm dominated the flower bed before we cut it down because it was beginning to overtake the house.

"The New Iberia sun porch is a three-season porch, unused in summer because the Louisiana heat makes it uninhabitable. Even with an air conditioning vent that allows a small gust of cool air to enter and a ceiling fan whirling overhead, it becomes a steam bath from May - early October. However, it's a curative salon and is often used to heal physical and emotional ills like seasonal affective disorder, insomnia, winter colds, and arthritic pains. We diurnal creatures crave Apollo's bright face, and the glass porch allows salutary rays to beam through on most days when my friends and I are porch sitting.

"The porch has been a place of friendship and shared meals, especially "Oaxaca breakfasts," a name given to hours of intimate conversations, literary discussions, and the heightened consciousness that two friends and I felt when visiting Oaxaca, Mexico several years ago. As C.S. Lewis once wrote about friendship, the porch has the ambience of a "luminous, tranquil...world," a place where friends "see the same truth" while conversing, arguing, and amusing each other. It's a site where equals meet and sit side by side, absorbed in mutual interests.

"As a healing spot, the porch has also been a haven for friends who faced the grief of divorce, broken relationships, and family deaths. Like its transparent glass walls, it suggests the fragility of emotional crises.

"One spring, my son-in-law Brad painted the wrought iron trim of a glass-topped table and matching chairs on the porch a brilliant yellow hue, an evocative color that suggested happiness was always nearby for those who come to sit and talk about their problems. When I had to give up the table and chairs to furnish an apartment next door, my daughter Stephanie replaced the dining set with a comfortable lounging chair. The chair she and Brad brought in as a Christmas gift has soft gold cushions, and I believe she chose this color reminiscent of the sun because she knew I wanted to keep the aura of joy that surrounds this favored space."

If you enjoyed this essay, there are other "healing spaces" mentioned in Porch Posts that may give you some insights into the restorative powers of porch sitting. Porch Posts is available online at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.

DEPARTURES

"My soul is constituted of thousands of images I cannot erase...I'm a grainy old, often silent, often flickering film," Charles Simic writes in his book, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks. This line spoke to my condition when I began writing my latest book of poetry, available on Amazon in a few days. Departures is the name of this volume, and a few people have asked me if the title indicates I intend to throw away my pen, or computer, as the case may be, and hang up my poetry hat. The answer is "no," as I'm already settled on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee, working on another volume.

Departures explores the lives and departures of loved ones—parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, an infant nephew, memorable teachers, godparents, musicians, an old friend—the faces of people who have passed on and left their imprint on my life...and about whom I often dream. The book is dedicated to my friend and mentor, Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana poet laureate and author of Megan's Guitar and if you abandon me, who read the original manuscript of Departures.

I know that I just published a book of essays entitled Porch Posts with Janet Faulk-Gonzales, but Departures has been waiting in the wings for some time, and since I had a painting for the cover that my brother Paul rendered a few years ago, the book almost birthed itself and begged to be "out there."

An example from Departures entitled "Sister's Blue Baby:"

the only boy among three girls
was buried in blue satin

in a tiny steel box
that held the porcelain body

and a heart that struggled
against death

before his time;
his crippled valves

leaking a love
never expressed...

and only his mother felt.

I hope that those of you who read my work will take a look at those people whose "points of departure felt...the faces appearing often enough...[have left] enough of themselves with me."

Departures also available online at www.borderpressbooks.com. If snail mail is your preference, send orders to Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee TN 37375, along with $12 plus $4 for shipping.

FOR PORCH SITTERS

While sojourning at Sewanee this past year, I jumped track from writing poetry and sat on the front porch composing essays about one of my favorite subjects—porches. I invited my friend Janet Faulk-Gonzales to contribute some of the vignettes for a book I began compiling because she and I share a mutual liking for these outdoor appendages to homes. At Christmas, I usually give Janet a calendar featuring porches, and we spend a lot of time discussing the virtues of the porches photographed for the calendar.

PORCH POSTS contains vignettes and stories about the "so-called passive life that goes on in the porch world," and features eight whimsical drawings by New Iberia artist Paul Schexnayder, as well as an arresting cover, a photograph of a lovely glass piece done by Karen Bourque, a glass artist who lives in Churchpoint, Louisiana. The vignettes range from descriptions of porch structures to tales recounted on galeries, as the French in south Louisiana call them. The porch settings cover wide territory—from Louisiana and Alabama to Iran and Qatar, but all of these observation posts offer a different view of the world as seen from the vantage point of two porch sitters.

Here are two snippets from the Foreword of PORCH POSTS, the first is from me and the second from Janet:

"The word 'porch sitter' describes, in unflattering vernacular, someone who is a lazy, good for nothing person. However, in more sophisticated settings, porch sitters are people who enjoy their galleries for evening gatherings in a space where they can relax, talk, sip libations, create good memories, and elevate their spirits... My childhood memories include porches of various types and architectural design, ranging from a simple, round concrete floor, painted red, with a slight overhang that my father constructed when we returned from a foolhardy trip to California, to a large one with lacy Queen Anne posts that my Grandmother Nell called her 'gallery'..."

And from Janet:

"For the most part, when we think of porches, we typically think of outside spaces, but I see them as places that hold the point for transitions of all sorts. On the porch, one is really neither in the rain, nor out of the rain; in the night nor out of the night; might be leaving but not yet gone; might be returning, but not yet settled—neither in nor out... At this moment, I can say that the two things which make the porch THE PLACE, whatever its dimension and decor, are its propinquity with the natural world and the fact that unexpected time on the porch comes as close to the still point of presence as any time anywhere..."

Look for PORCH POSTS to appear next month. It will be available on amazon.com, and I will provide a link at that time.