Alice Walker and The Color Purple -- Boy, It's Hard to Remember to Spell American

This is so cool. It is grey, chilly, damp today in southern Ontario. It’s not supposed to be, at the end of May, but it is. And The Weather Network SAID it was 19C today – but it sure didn’t feel like it. I felt about appropriate to the weather, and I took my camera out to walk the South Shore Trail and see if there were any trilliums left. If not, what there is. I didn’t make it to the trail though – when I woke up this morning I got a bad cramp in my left leg, and it took me a while to realize it was still bugging me. All I knew was, walking was uncomfortable.

The only cheerful thing was a house with wisteria. Not the deep purple kind I love best, but wisteria nevertheless. First I’ve seen this year. Somehow, as I walked into the village and back, I started to think of Shug Avery telling Miss Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple that she thinks God just wants to be admired. Then I started to notice how many purple flowers there are today – lilacs, irises, periwinkle, violets, pansies, columbines, wisteria, tulips. I ran out of memory or battery on the camera before I got to the lilacs – got to smell them though.

I started taking pictures of all the ones I could. The woman at the wisteria house came home from work while I was taking pictures – I asked her if she minded, and she said no. She said, they’d never been as good as they are this year, and she doesn’t know why the one branch in particular was so spectacular. The woman at the Brew-Your-Own-Wine-And-Beer store came out and asked if I was a professional photographer, and I said no, just taking the pictures to make myself happy, and did she mind? Nope. She even offered to come and take MY picture in HER garden!

Then a man with a dog stopped to talk, while I was taking pictures of the hidden purple pansies – it wasn’t his house, it was his friend’s. He said her garden is whimsical. He lives around the corner. His wife had passed away last summer, after more than 40 years. He’s a photographer, and gave me his card so I could see some of his work online. Wow! He’s a PHOTOGRAPHER. Me – I’m making myself happy and learning how to use my new camera. We talked about living alone after decades of marriage, and the difficulties of cooking and eating alone. He has a very nice dog, too.

Then I came home and SAW my pictures. They made me very happy. I wanted to share more of them than I can easily on the blog, and I wanted them big, on a black ground. There was no help for it – had to be PowerPoint. I hate PowerPoint presentations at seminars, in school, in church … And, I’ve never done one. But I DID today, and I did it myself, without asking for help. Then I wanted to upload it here, and found out that’s not as easy as picking up a video from YouTube. I followed links to several sites that are supposed to help you make your PPT files embeddable – one’s not taking new subscriber’s, one didn’t work, one I’d have to start from scratch … Ugh. But I was happy, excited and persistent, and VIOLA!!! Here they are. Well, some of them. I took about 60 – I’m not making you watch them ALL. I won’t be test-driving this til I’ve published – if the pages advance every five seconds like I set them, it should take about a minute.

So -- I met three new people and one very nice dog. I learned two new things. I not only stopped to admire the colour purple, I went looking for it, and I'm sharing. I don’t think God’s gonna be pissed off with us today.

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Amaryllis

On February 14th, a friend in Tennessee sent me an article on Ted Kooser’s Valentine poems. She’d heard him interviewed on NPR, and reading some of his Valentines. I loved them, and I’d been given some book store gift certificates for Christmas, so I ordered the book with the collected poems. (The site hasn't been updated since 2005, so the book's not shown.)

The more I read his poetry, the more I loved it. Right now, I’m reading his Delights and Shadows (2004) and also The Home Poetry Repair Manual (2005). You know the way the information age takes you places – today I found “American Life in Poetry”, a weekly newsletter, with a poem, and Kooser’s very short introduction to the poem. I’ve been reading back issues (not all 162 of them) of the newsletter, and I subscribed to it.

Column Number 84 is a poem called “Amaryllis” by Connie Wanek of Duluth, Minnesota.

Amaryllis

A flower needs to be this size
to conceal the winter window,
and this color, the red
of a Fiat with the top down,
to impress us, dull as we've grown.

Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb
half above the soil
stuck out its green tongue
and slowly, day by day,
the flower itself entered our world,

closed, like hands that captured a moth,
then open, as eyes open,
and the amaryllis, seeing us,
was somehow undiscouraged.
It stands before us now

as we eat our soup;
you pour a little of your drinking water
into its saucer, and a few crumbs
of fragrant earth fall
onto the tabletop.

My Mum’s birthday was November 6^th. Every year, I’d buy her an amaryllis bulb for her birthday. She would plant it in an 18-inch long terracotta planter shaped like a camel, lying down – the flower would grow where the hump oughtta be. It would bloom by Christmas. Mum loved them for the same reasons I didn’t – they’re huge, and bright red and ostentatiously flamboyant. That’s how she liked things. I like things smaller and quieter, modest and reserved. African violets. Forget-me-nots. Nicotiana. But I bought them for her, the reddest ones, at the supermarket.

Except, in 2006, it was different. Her cancers were diagnosed on September 21^st. Thursday. On the weekend, my sister said to me, “She said the doctors said months. Christmas?” I said, no, not Christmas. “Her birthday, if she can start to eat.” So, I bought the Amaryllis bulb early that year. A friend had taken me to the Mum Show in the greenhouses in Gage Park, Hamilton. A commercial nursery had a table there, with much fancier, more expensive, bulbs than I usually bought. I bought one with red and white striped flowers. I gave it to her right away, hoping she’d see it bloom.

Well, she didn’t. It bloomed about 10 days after she died. Two stalks, four blooms the size of dinner plates at the top of each one. They looked obscene, sitting there in the middle of the dining room table, while they were still two green, growing shoots. I was there the day they bloomed, and my aunt too. I sent it home with her in her car. It bloomed for a very long time.

I’m only writing this because the poem made me cry. She didn't believe in God. The day before her birthday, she asked me if I still believed in an afterlife. I said yes -- no other matter or energy just disappears. I asked if Burnie, her second husband and the one she loved best, had believed in an afterlife, and she said she didn't know; they'd never talked about it. I told her that a few days before he'd died, I'd been sitting in bed with him, both of us drinking diet Cokes I'd smuggled in. (He was on restricted fluids.) That I'd said, "I'm going to miss you, Burnie," and he'd said he'd miss me too. I think that sounds like he was expecting to be somewhere he would.

In the last few days, we told Mum it was okay to go; that Burnie and my brother Steve were waiting for her. I do believe she heard, and I do believe they were waiting for her, with all my heart.

Sunday Afternoon Expedition

It didn't feel like spring at the time

These were taken Friday. It DIDN’T feel like spring. At 5 in the afternoon it was 3C degrees, foggy, windy and trying hard to rain.

Friday didn’t start off auspiciously. I was the last of five in the house to get in the shower, and someone had started a load of laundry by then. Shower started off tepid, and got cold very fast. Well, it was awful, but it was short. I was getting ready for a 10 o’clock appointment, and got a call saying, “Could you come at 11 instead?” Bliss. I returned the call to let them know I’d got the message, and they said, “Would it be okay to put it off til next week?” YES! I got back into bed and slept for a couple more hours.

I hung around in my robe all day – I wasn’t going out in that. Until there was a real, honest-to-Pete crisis – I ran out of coffee cream. Urgh. Since I was going out, I took my camera. I bought myself a cup of coffee and a salad, and on the way home, passed a house that has a very pretty garden, in garden season. Lots of periwinkle on the front lawn, instead of grass – no mowing, and does well in shade. So, here you are.

Happy Easter!!!

One day in the fall, I was having dinner with my Auntie Jane, in the hospice. We weren’t sitting where we normally did, and she didn’t like the new spot – she could see bare-branched trees out the window, and didn’t want to think about winter.

I told her that I don’t believe that when we die, we are erased – that something continues. That the trees would have leaves in the spring, and we didn’t know what her spring would look like.

Spring comes in fits and starts in southern Ontario. It was bright, sunny and melting here today. We usually get at least one blizzard in April though. This afternoon I took these photos, at a friend’s house, on a south-facing lawn. The house across the road still has eight inches of snow on the lawn.

In God, all things are made new.

Growing pains

Last year, I spent a lot of time with my Auntie Jane. She had had breast cancer about five years ago, and it metastasized into her liver. The chemo really did slow down the rate of growth of the tumours. It also gave her peripheral neuropathy, and she progressively lost feeling in her feet and hands in the months before her death. She couldn’t walk, hold a fork sometimes, turn pages in her book. She couldn’t read her Bible, because she’d tear the pages as she tried to turn them.

When she was still able to read, she borrowed a book from her oldest sister, my other aunt. One day last May she asked me to copy a poem out of the book, and e-mail it to her daughter, who lives two thousand miles away. I guess this is the right place to say, we have a family of compulsive gardeners. The book she found this poem in is called "The Shape of a Year", by Jean Hersey. I believe it was published in the mid-1970’s.

The seed that is to grow
must lose itself as seed;

And they that creep
may graduate through
chrysalis to wings.

Wilt thou then, O mortal,
cling to husks which
falsely seem to you
the self?

-- Wu Ming Fu
12^th century poet and philosopher

And the frontispiece of the book has this:

If your true nature
has the creative force of Nature itself,
wherever you go
you will see all things
as fishes leaping
and wild geese flying,

-- Zen philosophy

Last year, on April 15^th, I moved out of the place I’d lived in for 12 years with my husband and our adult son, into a room. It’s a university neighbourhood – the houses almost all have basement apartments, 3 bedrooms, share the kitchen and bath. I don’t have roommates and I love the family upstairs. And, I’m a grad student. A friend in London, England told me on the weekend, all his daffodils are blooming. I cried. I miss my garden.