Hands of a Gardener, Susan Lesser

Susan Lesser read this piece on Saturday, April 27, 2019, as part of the Tompkins County Public Library Readathon fundraising event.


I hold my hands in front of me and sigh. I have the hands of a gardener. The reason I do is because is I have an alarmingly large garden, a series of gardens really. There is the peony row, the perennial garden, the vegetable garden, the herb garden, the raspberry patch, and  the red and white garden down at the end of the lawn which isn’t really only red and white. Closer to the house you will find a couple of sincere hydrangeas and irises under the dining room window, azaleas and Lenten roses stand in front of the kitchen windows. Behind the garden shed is a secret garden that is so secret nothing is planted there, but we need to pull the weeds between the paving stones anyway. I could go on.

As soon as the ground thaws in the early spring, I am down on my hands and knees, digging in the muck, moving the Hidcote Lavender to the back of the herb garden and the common thyme to the front, pushing the shrunken pea pellets into the ground that is still splashed with lingering spots of snow, and removing last year’s canes from the raspberry patch.

I start out with gloves, gardeners’ gloves with thick bits where the designers think I might need some protection. I put the gloves on, honest I do, but very soon something happens and the gloves come off. I will find them later, soaked with rain, under a rhubarb plant. I want to pull out the early weeds, the dandelions and the invasive Michaelmas daisies with my bare hands. I want to wiggle my fingers into the mud to find the roots, to follow them and tug them out. My tiny lettuce seeds, like pepper from a shaker, need a warm hand to pull the earth over them and tuck them in. No gloves. Throughout the gardening season, it is easy to see my hands are the hands of a gardener, testimony to my hours in company with living growing things.

My fingernails are ragged and require repeated vigorous scrubbing, and much clipping. There are scratches where I tangled with a climbing rose in an attempt to prune it back. Roses are at once one of the loveliest and most vicious of garden denizens. There is a pinkish rash on my right palm from a misguided attempt to pull a rogue stinging nettle that was camping next to a Plantain Lily. Some days my knuckles are swollen from gripping the orange-handled trowel so tightly for so long. And totally yucky are the occasional gluey remains of a squashed slug, accidentally sacrificed as I weeded out the lettuce row. Slug residue does not wash off as easily as I might think; it will require scrubbing with the sturdy brush I keep under the sink. I am no fan of the garden slug, neither its name nor habit. However, when in my probing of the welcoming earth, I come upon a common garden earthworm, I am careful to treat him gently and move him to a soft spot of turned soil, out of reach of my trowel.

There is a story in my hands, not the sort a palm reader might tell, but a story just the same. It is a story of seasons and growing things and touching the earth we live on, live in.

==

NOTE: This piece appeared, in a slightly different version, in the journal GreenPrints, No. 117, Spring 2019

Watch Pocket, by Tina Wright

Tina Wright read this memory-piece on Saturday, April 27, 2019, as part of the Tompkins County Public Library Readathon fundraising event.


Some blue jeans have a little pocket on the top of the right front pocket and when I told someone in the family, younger generation, that it was a watch pocket for a pocket watch they said, I wondered what those were for (…good for loose change too.) I got thinking about pocket watches when a kid at work the other night talking about batteries in his wristwatch laughed when I told him I used to have wind-up watches and he gave me that you are a dinosaur look.

My first pocket watch said Little Ben on its face beneath a cracked plastic cover (smashed when picking stones). The Big Ben version was the alarm clock in my parent’s bedroom—with the big butterfly wind-up key—and when my sister and I heard it ringing in the morning from our bedroom down the hall, we pretended we were sleeping and waited for dad to pound on our door and say wake up, time to milk the cows.

I loved my Little Ben in its watch pocket, the brass back reflected the sun and felt cool and sweet in my hand. I set its time by the daily fire whistle five minutes to one that blew in the village of Moravia. Sometimes when we heard the siren in our hayfields miles away, we knew we were late for lunch.

One day we heard the daily whistle around the usual time and it kept blowing for many minutes letting the volunteer firefighters know that a fire had rudely started at a very inconvenient time, just when the daily whistle sounded. So it blew and blew to say hey Moravia this is a real fire!

The Formula for a Forever Life, by Barbara Anger

Barbara Anger read this poem on Saturday, April 27, 2019, as part of the Tompkins County Public Library Readathon fundraising event.


First thing in the morning
Awake to gratitude.

Squint if it’s a gray day.
You may feel the sun
   Inside
   You.

Feel the vibrations of
   A prayer
   On your lips.

Feel the air on your naked body,
Put on something comfortable to wear.
Don’t mind
    The old stains
    Down the front of your shirt.
    The frayed cuffs of your pants
    Or the tear along the seam.
Please just let your elbow scrape through that hole.

Put on your old shoes
    That hold the shape of your arch
    Inside the definition of each toe.

Go out into the air
    With a twirl
    Find a spot
To stick your fingers
    In the rich darkness
    Of the soil.
Let the grains of dirt and sand
    Run
    Through your fingers.
Feel its moisture.

Then remember
You collected milkweed seeds.
Find them on the top shelf
    Of your cupboard.
For a moment
    Feel the silky
    White feathers
Still attached to the seeds

Grab a trowel
Dig deep and wide
Enough for each seed
To sprout
Upward and out
Reaching the sun
Till at the waning of summer
It calls to the monarchs,
“Here I am.
Come find me.
I will help you live forever.”

Typewriters, Sue Norvell

Sue Norvell read this piece on Saturday, April 27, 2019, as part of the Tompkins County Public Library Readathon fundraising event.


Ah, the typewriter. Really, a brute of a machine. They were heavy to carry.

They required strong hands and fingers to depress the keys smartly enough to make that oh-so-satisfying [snap]  as the metal arm swung up and out to print the letter 't', [clack]  as the ‘h’ hits the paper,
then [...tap, WHING!] as the letter ‘e’ ends the line.
The bell dings, saying, “whiz the carriage back, begin anew."
[Whizzzz, clunk.     Clack snapa tap tap  snapa tap tap…]

Your fingertips are cupped by the metal ridges running ‘round the keys.
They fit each other: the letter B and the left index finger, [snap]
the S and the right ring finger, [snap]
reach up for an I,
down for an X, [tap,tap]
then stretch with the thumb for the space bar —

(double space at the end of a sentence, please!)
[whunk   whunk]

Remember how the the shift keys worked? No auto capitalization here!

Depress the key, the carriage rises, [bump]
capital B hurries to begin a new complete thought [snap]
The carriage drops again for the lower case ‘e’ [thud, snap] and you’re off:

[Bump snap thud  snap snap tap-a tap,  clack tap-a-tap snap ….  whunk whunk]

You say your prose is fading? The poem’s vanishing? Or worse, never making it to the page at all?
The ribbon needs replacing!
Now, of course, the stains and odors on your fingers need vigorous cleaning,
or your work will be smudged.

“How many carbon copies did you say?”
One mistake, many layers.
[Crinkle, rub, rub,  crinkle, rub, crinkle, rub…. mutter, mutter... cuss, cuss, cuss]

Whew.
Finished.
Roll the paten, free the paper
sign it:   “Henry…”
address the envelope,
fold the letter........ lick lick lick.  [STAMP]

DONE!

But now remember, typewriters did not lend themselves to impulsiveness
nor did they limit characters available
for either reasoned, rational thoughts
or nasty, rauchy rants

The effort required insisted on intention, allowed for more reflection.
Perhaps this machine’s finest hours were in the rash letters left unshared,
the insults never sent

Lets us consider this blessing: there was no “send” button.

The Elephant Vanishes, by Stacey Murphy

I meditate on the removal of obstacles
and the Universe appears —
a great golden elephant
in a green, wooded glade
carefully picking logs off the path before me
moving them aside gently:
hesitation, gangly and thorny;
lack, hollow and brittle;
distraction, thick and heavy.
With one look over her shoulder and a playful flip
of her tail the elephant
winks and she vanishes.
It is up to me to move forward.

Full Upright and Locked, by Jim Mazza

There is a moment when ...
you have buckled in, placed your tray table into the full upright and locked position, and listened to the safety message about exit doors and unlikely events (such as a water landing), how to inflate your life vest by pulling on the tab after you exit the aircraft or by blowing into the small red valve (should the life vest fail to inflate) and how the little beacon light will illuminate automatically.

There is a moment when ...
the captain says over the loudspeaker "We are #3 for take off" and "Flight attendants please be seated" and we are reminded to keep the window shades up during take-off and landing.

There is a moment when ...
the child in the row behind you has stopped kicking your seat and the guy next to you has finished his dripping hot-sausage-and-pepper-and-onion submarine sandwich brought onto the plane in his carry-on, and the arm rests are lowered.

There is a moment when ...
the plane moves toward the runway and waits, and then moves forward again and waits, and then, finally, makes a turn onto the runway to wait again.

There is a moment when ...
sitting at the end of the runway it seems everyone, for a split second, has stopped talking — although the baby in Row 29 is still crying.

There is a moment when ...
in the near silence the plane is perfectly still but its power and throbbing desire to hurtle down the runway is obvious and all around you.

There is a moment when ...
there is absolute peace as you realize that the adventure is afoot and there will be memories and photos and writing-filled travel journals.

There is a moment when ...
the pilot releases the brake, the engines roar and the plane speeds down the runway — and it is a moment of light-headed happiness and full-on joy!

Warm Recollections of my Father, Prompted by Mary Oliver’s line “It was a long time ago that…,” by Saskya van Nouhuys

It was a long time ago that my grandmother died. My father was a teenager. Soon after that he went to boarding school which must have been lonely, though he wouldn’t admit to being lonely. He takes pride in his solitude. After leaving he didn't live with his father again until much later, when I was five years old. While we lived in my grandfather’s house I woke up early to sit, watching him do his morning yoga. 

It was a long time ago that my father, in a fit of rebellion, dropped out of graduate school at Columbia and moved back to California to teach writing at Stanford University. He lived a beatnik life, met my mother, and played an unstructured croquet game that lasted days and spread over the front and back yards of a whole neighborhood.

It was a long time ago that my father taught me how to ride a bike at the park. After losing interest in guiding me awkwardly as I tried to balance he retreated to the tennis court with his friend. Between shots they yelled pointers and made encouraging gestures. Gradually I figured out how to ride on my own.

It was a long time ago that we had a yard with a lawn that my father mowed. In one corner was a navel orange tree that seemed magical because the oranges from it had no seeds. It became even more magical after my father explained that since it had no seeds it must be the only one, and there would never be another, because trees grew from seeds.

It was a long time ago that my father made scrambled eggs that were too spicy for the family breakfast on Saturday mornings, and then went off to play tennis with my mother, and then came back and made espresso with her, and then worked in the garden while listening first to the baseball game and then later, in the afternoon, to the opera, on the transistor radio that he carried from spot to spot in the yard as he worked.

It was a long time ago that my father and I painted rainbow stripes in the tiny downstairs bathroom of the house I grew up in. When we finished it was entirely striped, all four walls, the door, the floor, and the ceiling.

It was a long time ago that I sat on the stairs eavesdropping on the adults in the living room where they gathered every Tuesday night to discuss their dreams in “dream group.”  One morning my father told me he would fall asleep on his side with his arm up. Then when his arm fell down he would wake up and remember the dream he was having at that moment. He explained that it was a way to remember dreams you otherwise wouldn’t know about. I tried it that night and many after, but failed. I still try it now and then.

It was a long time ago that I helped my father build a darkroom in the garage. Then he taught me how to use it, and I had a quiet refuge where I could go as a teen and in the dim red light expose images on to photographic paper, bathe the paper in a sequence of trays of chemicals, and watch as the image took form, and fixed.

It was a long time ago that my beloved cat died, the one who was born in our yard and slept with me every night. My father said tenderly, with tears in his eyes that I knew, even then, were for me, not the cat, “Mewer died.”