Fairydiddle Strawder

I was nineteen years old. After hearing Kennedy say “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, and also, after my brother John joined the Peace Corps, I felt I had to do my bit. It seemed the right thing to do as well as the most exciting thing I ever did.

After a few weeks of training in Ossawatomee, Kansas at the Mental Hospital there, we were sent to West Virginia.

I remember none of the training. I remember having a lot of fun with new people from all over the country. One of the fun things was riding pillow slips down the laundry chute at the institution. I also remember a patient, a young black man who walked around exposing himself to us. This was remarkable as he was, as one of my Vista compatriots said “hung like a horse.”

I didn’t know if this was true as I was still a virgin at the time.

This was a really scary time for me as well as being exciting. I had never been around the chronically mentally ill and some part of me felt like mental illness was catching. A very high anxiety time.

In West Virginia we lived for a week or so with a family in the coal mining area which was down South. It was bleak and uncomfortable.

The highlight was a bluegrass concert with the locals playing the hammer dulcimer and singing. Lovely.

Where I was eventually stationed in West Virginia was a revelation. I was stationed with a very old young woman, Laurette Marsh, in a small town called Franklin. This town was in the Eastern Panhandle, which is a jutting arm at the top of the state that goes toward Maryland.

What a beautiful little town it was(still is I’m sure) in the Monagahela Mountains. Our first night there we stayed in the Franklin Hotel which was an old hotel with high ceilings and bare floors and a toilet and bath down the hall. I had a bath in a clawfoot tub with a view of the stars out of long double hung windows that first night. It was delicious although the hot water ran out.

Some months later I would visit the only doctor in town who had his office on the first floor of the Franklin Hotel. He would sew my finger back on, the one that I lost when I jacked up my car in the mud at Did Strawder’s house.

I can’t remember at what point in my posting I met Fairydiddle (Did) or who introduced us.

I drove out of Franklin towards Elkins and then turned off to Circleville. Up a holler in Circleville, we parked our car and hiked in over a bridge. There on the side of a mountain in a very traditional looking ranch house was Did’s home. There was a very rustic barn which housed Did’s two sows, goats and many chickens, and Did.I am not quite sure that I remember this correctly, but, I believe Did’s house was painted a deep and horrifying pink the color of someone’s throat. On the inside, it was unfinished. No whiteboard, no decoration, just bare lathe and plaster with newspaper for insulation.

Did had running water in the house and a pink bathtub which she used for storage. What a cockamamie house. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and her kitchen was dark and drear. I was trying to remember if Did smelled but I don’t think she did really. Kind of old person, musty, dusty, crusty smell I guess. You got used to it.

Her house was unimaginable, but the minute you stepped outside you knew why she stayed there. It was a place created for dreaming and storytelling. Isolated, timeless; this place created human creatures so unique, so out of my ken that I was entranced, repelled and delighted all at the same time. She was ouselves from hundreds of years ago.

She was born and raised on this mountain and as a child she was fast and agile and danced on the rail fences down to Circleville. They nicknamed her Fairydiddle because of that.

There was something otherworldly about Did. She lived alone high up in the mountains with her animals and her stories and the wild terrain around her. She was self-sufficient in a way few of us can imagine anymore. She was crafty, and strange and she cackled (she did) and I couldn’t get enough of her.

P.S. In West Virginia the term fairy diddle refers to a near-mythic creature, a kind of enchanted tree squirrel.

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The Blame Game

Some millenials blame baby boomers for ruining the world and setting them up to inherit a world in ruins.

Yes, well, the world is in ruins:  environmental destruction, pollution, unfettered growth, wars, famine, racism, sexism—the whole gamut.

I would like to put forth an idea.  Humans fuck up the planet.  Human activity despoils our planet.  Whatever we do, we have impacts—positive and negative.

The world is in ruins because we live here.

Some of us aspire to more.  Some of us hope to do better, to leave a lighter footprint.  Some of us don’t care as long as we get ours.  Some of us do care and try to alter our behavior to help the planet.

The baby boomers didn’t ruin the planet any more than the millenials.  It is the nature of the beast.

If millenials can figure out how to change themselves and all the billions of people living on this planet, then I exhort them to do so.

Blame is a never ending game we play with ourselves to avoid responsibility.

 

Know your bone

“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”  Annie Dillard.

“Know your own bone.”  Thoreau

I found these quotes in Annie Dillard’s Abundance.

And what an abundance there is in her writing.  It is lush, learned and  her language so exactly captures whatever she is describing that it sometimes takes my breath away.  She is like that wonderful naturalist, David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen, who describes over and over the same area at different times of the day and different days of the year.  You are walking in their boots, in their life, with their eyes and nose and ears and mouth.

Dillard is uncanny.  Isn’t that a great word?  Uncanny obviously derives from canny meaning “to know”.  Canny came to mean shrewd, and attach to folks who were particularly shrewd in business. Uncanny, strangely enough, came to mean strangely enough, that is, a bit witchy, a bit supernatural.  That’s her for sure.

Then there’s the “know your bone” quote which has nothing to do with self abuse and everything to do with a dog and his bone.  Know the thing you love, bury it, dig it up, chew on it, bury it somewhere else.  Explore the focus of your delight, in depth, with passion, with your entire being—know your own bone.

What a delight.  And because I choose not to illustrate this post with pictures of Annie or Henry David, I give you this:

So perhaps I am writing this because I have just spent two days in my garden looking, smelling, tidying (but not too much), pruning and just being.

I sometimes think that giving up my various gardens has been the hardest thing of many things I’ve given up, but I know that’s a bit of an exaggeration.   However, my gardens have been bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh; an engrossing collaboration between what nature gives and doesn’t give, what I have inherited from the property I have had and me and my shaping, reshaping hands.

The thing I love about this whole process, this whole creative gyre, is that nature speaks back.  Some plants work, some don’t.  Some compost breaks down, some doesn’t (not in my lifetime anyway).  You are given a given (soil type, climate, orientation, the whole  meta deal.  Within that larger given, there’s the unique, small bioclime that is yours and yours alone;  rain, too much, too little, sun, too hot, not hot enough, pests, scab, on and on.

You have to keep adjusting.  It’s an elaborate dance to music you sometimes don”t understand, with a partner you meet anew each year.

I think I know my bone.

 

 

 

 

 

The Thirteenth Fairy

She’s always fascinated me.  Twelve good fairies were invited to Briar Rose”s christening and she was left out.  There was a good reason to leave her out.  She was a nasty piece of work.

The implication in the story was that if they had invited her, she may have softened a bit and brought good wishes instead of a curse; but, I don’t think so.  I think wherever she went she brought trials and tribulations.  She also brought a good story.

Good stories need bad news.  Good stories need conflict, tests of one thing or another (your character, bravery, intelligence, whatever).

The thirteenth fairy was a necessary evil;  her evil spins a million stories.

 

 

 

 

The Russians are Coming

Mention blackberries to people who don’t live on the west coast and they will probably picture big beautiful luscious berries.  Mention them to me and I think of the wild blackberries that grow around my little house.

What if the blackberry, the wild Russian blackberry is a part of a sinister plot to overtake the western United States?  How clever, how cunning, how Putinesque.

Consider this:  some of these canes grow 10 to 20 feet.  They invade every part of my flower garden, the vegetables and the trees surrounding my yard.  They climb up alder and pine,  fir and cedar and then arch down dramatically, cascading canes of torture.

Attack them, attempt to tame them and they fight back, viciously.  Cut them down to the ground and they will go underground a bit and pop up in Spring somewhere else entirely.

We are not prepared to face this incursion.  I don’t want to use round-up as that will poison the soil.  I am, after all, a west coast liberal pussy, not a knuckle dragging troglodyte from Siberia.  I want to be kind and sensitive but I want to rip this scourge out by the roots and damn them for all eternity.

You probably think I’m over reacting, but if you could see my wounds–they ripped out my hair, attacked my arms, left welts on my ankles and reduced me to a itchy, quivering mass.

I went out today to attempt a ceasefire.  The canes had overtopped our eight foot fence and entered the compost bin.  They were a half an inch thick and more, studded with cruel thorns that tore my gloves and ripped my jeans.  One rogue thorn implanted itself in my shoe.

The compost is my Maginot Line.  No farther.  No appeasement.  WAR.

Now I know about dispersal of seeds, of sticky pods that attach themselves to fur, but what the hell is going on with these thorns.  Each living thing (including us) seeks to propagate, but, this is overdoing it.  They want to obliterate us, lash out and wound us and then obliterate us.  They are friggin’ evil.  If we keep ignoring them they will attack us as we sleep and bury us.  Remember the Axis of Evil.

I lay in bed next to Rob warm and cozy.  But only for tonight.  Tomorrow I take the war to them.