SNOWBOUND IN PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA

Courtyard with reflections from breakfast room

Ah, sunny Southern California on Thanksgiving Day — three inches of snow already on the ground and predictions of the large flakes to continue all day! Daughter Elizabeth, who lives a few miles away, calls to tell us we shouldn't drive her Jeep to her home as the vehicle has no snow tires. She's sending out a rescue team of grandson Troy Jr. early so we can join the family for Thanksgiving dinner.

I haven't seen such large flakes since the year I lived in northern Maine, and the sight from my upstairs window is lovely — but hazardous. Friend Darrell Bourque wrote that I should remember Chekhov who said happy people aren't disconcerted by weather, and perhaps I'll get another book of poetry from the experience. However, family gatherings don't provide extended space for writing pursuits.

I can envision fields of orange poppies in the desert 'come spring' as snow and rainfall in winter provide needed water for blooms such as that tourists came, in large crowds, to see in this desert locale last spring. Right now, Joshua trees must be celebrating the weather. A few years ago when we visited Palmdale, they had almost perished from a severe drought. My grandson Joel photographed one for a poetry book about trees that I was working on.

Pool side in snow

By nature, I'm a desert person, yet, contradictorily, live in Louisiana Teche country in the winter (25 ft. elevation) and on a mountain plateau in Tennessee (2,000 ft.) in spring and summer. Such are the contradictions of human nature, but I suppose that I'm just peripatetic and would live in an RV if I were a bit younger.

The rescue team is due any moment, but above are a few photos of snow in southern California taken from our motel windows. Happy warm Thanksgiving to readers, relatives, and dear friends in all locales and weather. Most of us are blessed despite the weather!

A COLD SNAP

When the newscaster complains of below freezing temps and ice in the deepest South, I remember a winter in New England and a night when temps dipped to 52 degrees below zero. Isolated in the northernmost tip of Maine near the Canadian border, I dreamed of sunflowers, Confederate Jasmine, summer afternoons on a screened porch napping under the cover of humidity while the north wind howled under the eaves of a farmhouse that never captured warmth. It was the season of plowed roads, snow piled as high as telephone poles, early nightfall, ghostly hours, and lit windows shining on an un-cleared table. The hush of trees without birdsong was almost unbearable.

At 8 a.m., cigarette smoke curled above a drip pot of coffee at a Formica table in the kitchen of my neighbor on the first floor of the farmhouse. The woman, a redhead from Arkansas with a liking for Herbert Tareyton cigarettes and Canasta, demanded we drop cards all morning. A few miles away, my husband, an intelligence specialist, kept watch for enemy planes in a radar shack on the Canadian border and played volleyball in the snow most of the day.

The earth was burdened with snow, so fresh corpses were stacked in the mausoleum to wait for spring thaw. The St. John River froze solid, and our eyelashes iced over when we stepped outdoors. We haunted the post office but hardly anyone wrote, and every morning I listened to my own heartbeat after his boots left the warm kitchen. The oven, having baked a pan of biscuits, stayed on all day. Boredom was a bedtime story for sleepless eyes under a red electric blanket.

The clock on the wall ticked slowly—slower each day until spring finally arrived. Mourners cleared the mausoleum and began to dig graves in the thawed earth. We opened the windows to let in the fresh air of living things. We had survived the winter. In May, we traveled to Massachusetts to muster out of the Army. But before we closed the door to the upstairs apartment, I left a question lying on the bare kitchen table: Why would anyone choose to live here?

After I recorded the above memory this morning, I began preparing for a short trip to The Mountain in Sewanee, Tennessee. The weatherman forecasts temps as low as nine degrees in the area, and I won't be surprised if we see snow on the hemlock in the backyard while we're there.

Such are the contradictions of human beings, for I vowed never to live in a clime where temps dipped below freezing again. At least I haven't ventured into New England to set up house, but friends living here in the mild climate of Acadiana would probably echo my remark about the Maine experience: So, why would anyone choose to live there on The Mountain?

As Mark Twain said, "Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it!"

P.S. The above saying is also attributed to Charles Dudley Warner who phrased it a bit differently: "The weather in New England is a matter about which a great deal is said and very little done."

Note: Cover painting of The Maine Event by my brother Paul who died a few weeks ago. Photo of hemlock by Victoria I. Sullivan.

HEMLOCK IN THE SNOW

Hemlock at 65 Fairbanks Circle,
Sewanee TN

We returned from central Florida to discover freezing and below freezing temperatures on The Mountain here at Sewanee, Tennessee, and this morning thirteen-degree weather fostered snow that has been flurrying most of the day. The tall, beautiful hemlock in our backyard, one of the "redwoods of the East," has a dusting of white on its slightly drooping branches, a graceful reminder that we're surrounded by forests—and subject to severe winters.

The towering hemlock in my yard may be over 100 feet tall and stands alone, a giant tree of pyramidal shape that has escaped (so far) the hemlock wooly adelgid that has been attacking sister hemlocks here on the Cumberland Plateau. The Tennessee Division of Forestry predicts that in the next few years all of the hemlocks in Tennessee counties will suffer adelgid invasions. However, one measure of control that has been suggested is the use of predator beetles, and I'm wondering if those ladybugs that continue to hover about in our garage could be put to use. After we returned from Florida, I found a few live ones setting up house in a bedroom and promptly evicted them, but they persist in other places, throwing out an acrid scent when I disturb them.

Another treatment for control of adelgids that attack hemlocks has been the use of chemical control, but this is an effort that should be coordinated with state and federal agencies— e.g., the National Park Service, the Tennessee Hemlock Conservation Partnership, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Eastman Chemical Company, and the East Tennessee Climbers Coalition.

Meanwhile, I still see nocturnal animals disappearing under the drooping branches of our hemlock in all its unpruned and unsheared expansiveness. It's a hardy conifer and has a long life span, perfectly at home in rocky soil. I hope that it sticks around as long as I live on The Mountain and have threatened to try medicinal tea brewed from its bark but am leaving this to the critters who drink at its feet nightly.

A good friend of mine who has been reading my poetry for decades recently declared that a poem I wrote about the mighty hemlock in my yard was the best poem in my latest book of poetry, In A Convent Garden, and I'm republishing it below to cheer her on in her recovery from a recent surgery:

NOCTURNE FOR A HEMLOCK

Foresters call it a "superlative,"

the 100-foot hemlock tree,

a green cathedral pyramiding in my backyard,

now threatened by the hemlock wooly,

but the traffic I observe

underneath its lower branches

tells me it doesn't have declining health;

I've seen rabbits, coons, skunks, red foxes

emerge from underneath its crown

and wonder if it isn't an all night tavern

where creatures make music,

dance, act out plays on a makeshift stage,

having a desire for entertainment

and happiness not unlike ours,

animals that come out of hiding at dawn

wearing carnival masks,

weaving in the bright beam

of the lighted parking lot,

passing out of view when the world is quiet,

the hemlock keeping their secrets.

A serious matter,

these forest dwellers with nightly passions,

although I sidestep their back rooms,

unwilling to take a look

into the tangled undergrowth

for fear one of them is still there,

leaning on the bar, singing

"Show me the way to go home,"

and I will have to oblige.