MORE NOTES ON WINTER

Backyard at dusk, Sewanee

Slowly, ever so slowly, the quiet snow is melting on The Mountain, and its white luster subsides. Still, the air is sharp, and the sun struggles to appear, reminding me of its struggle to shine as it did when I lived in New England fifty years ago.

Today, we went to lunch at Crossroads Restaurant with our good friend, Kathy Hamman, editor and co-publisher of Plateau Press in Sewanee, Tennessee and shivered in the huge barnlike place that was once the site of Sewanee Cleaners, huddling close to a woodstove and warming ourselves on lentil soup and Chinese Oolong tea—delicious wintry pleasures.

When I reached home following lunch, I had an impulse to listen to "Songs From Liquid Days" by Phillip Glass, an album that Glass put together with lyricists Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson. I was drawn to listen to a piece called "Freezing" with vocals by Suzanne Vega and Linda Ronstadt, which ends with the words: "And now I'm freezing/Freezing." The lyrics seemed compatible with the below freezing weather outside my window.

I had been reading E. B. White's account of a trip to China Lake when he, his wife, and young son were stranded in a village in New England during a snowstorm sans nightclothes. White had chosen to sleep in sweater and socks, his wife in a coonskin coat, and his son in a suit of "heavies" with a sweater on his legs. White wrote that his wife arose in the night and told him that it was impossible to sleep in a coonskin coat. I laughed aloud, as I had awakened, perspiring, in pajamas and a long-sleeve fuzzy bed jacket last night, while the temperatures dipped to eight degrees outdoors.

This morning, there were animal tracks on the snow-covered drive and in the snow piled on our front porch, and I wondered what freezing critters had come to visit, looking for warmth and finding inhospitable hostesses. We've sealed off the crawl space under the cottage that skunks inhabited last winter; boarded up the entries to the attic where chipmunks once snuggled down for the season; the deer have been culled, and, in general, our wildlife population has diminished for the duration.

Life's problems seem minimal when we look out and see icicles hanging from the roof. Our thoughts are reduced to the major problem of keeping warm, and we dream of warmer climes like the Caribbean tropics, of being at peace with winter storms.

Monday we'll return to "tropical" Louisiana that has also been assailed by Arctic storms—a place where temps are usually sultry, but where my son-in-law jackknifed his van on icy Darby Lane yesterday morning. Schools in New Iberia have been closed, and State offices have been shut down for three days. We hope for forty and fifty degree weather and for the balm of sunny days upon our return.

With the country swathed in cold and ice, I reflect on Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice:"

"Some say the world will end in fire.

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if I had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction, ice

Is also great

And would suffice."

Wherever you are, stay warm and well. As another poet said, "If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

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.

EXPLORING FLORIDA

The tranquil scene above depicts the kind of Florida trips we usually make to the Sullivan home located on Silver Lake in Frostproof, Florida. The home is set on this site that allows for perfect views of tranquil sunsets and a shimmering lake—breathtaking scenes conducive to visual relaxation. If I were choosing a site for a resort and a golf course, this lake setting would be an ideal one.

However, after spending a few days at this location, four of us set out on an exploratory trip searching for serendipity and an atypical Florida site. We had heard that we could find a moderately-priced lunch at a 100 million dollar resort about thirty miles west of Frostproof, near Fort Meade, Florida that lived up to its intriguing name, "Streamsong."

We drove west on a two-lane highway lined by palmetto scrub, small ponds, and mounds of discarded materials from phosphate mines, weaving our way beside dying orange groves, cattle-grazed land, unnoticed for many years, and through scenery that we called "the boonies." It was reclaimed mining territory, and within an hour we had entered a 16,000-acre site, last mined in the 60's, where two 18-hole links style golf courses had been carved out of huge sand dunes left behind by the original mining operations of Mosaic Phosphate Company. Our first response was one of incredulity when we viewed the particularly stark and undeveloped setting -- or so it seemed.

The place was remote, and when we saw the huge 216-room lodge looming ahead, we were amazed at the architectural dream that has become a global destination for golfers and those who like to stay in buildings that reflect the natural environment. I didn't take a photograph of the six-story lodge because it was a gray day, and the innovative design of the building didn't particularly appeal to me, but I was told that the lodge wasn't just a product of artistic sustainability, it had been hailed as an extraordinary piece of architecture. To me, the building had an institutional, stronghold aura—even the turret on the roof resembled a guardsman's post, but the design has been heralded as "bold and audacious."

We lunched in one of the three restaurants within the lodge, the "P₂0₅" (chemical formula for phosphate), which featured Floridian comfort food including chicken pot pie and fried grouper, and were told we could visit the grotto-style spa if we wished. We declined that invitation, as well as an invite to enjoy the "infinity" pool. The concierge informed us that Streamsong's two golf courses have been ranked among Golf Week's best golf resort destinations in the U.S.

Streamsong, a destination set in a remote area halfway between Orlando and Tampa, may not have been our idea of perfect serendipity but we agreed that it could be a place to escape the stresses of post-modern living and to re-connect to a natural environment indicative of pastoral central Florida.

As I said when I began this blog, the scenes on Silver Lake (shown in the attached photos) appealed more to my sensibilities. However, for golfers who like luxury and minimalist nature in one package, Streamsong offers a unique experience off the beaten track.