Oyster shells, closeup

Looking down, my feet slowly pace the labyrinth at Harmony Hill, Union, Washington. Made by oyster shells successively placed ten inches or so apart, the path spirals under a towering coastal hemlock, Tsuga heterophylla, with narrow feathery glistening green needles. In the grey autumnal morning I notice someone has placed along the way halves of a giant brown bivalve resembling a granddaddy mussel. Intrigued, I study their triangular shape, pointy joins, dull bronze exterior with flattened spines like tiny upended slats along the wider ends, their pearly blue-brown nacre interior. At the center several intact mated shells lean upright against the massive brown bark trunk. Few, they stand out! Where did they come from? Their thinness and fine spines toward the outer third suggest warmer waters, but Atlantic or Pacific? Who dared add these outsider shells like syncopation to the chunky blue-white natives?

Looking out, mist clouds the view to Hood Canal, Olympic mountains, world beyond. Looking up, strong branches radiate thickly from the great trunk and obscure the sky. Amidst foggy light, grey salt air, pliant chocolate humus underfoot, raindrops ping on nearby foliage. Acer macrophyllum, big-leaf maple leaves have drifted face down, their strong ribs and stems on top. What life do they shield like tents underneath, like buffalos decaying into the prairie, or whale carcasses on the sea floor?

This place in nature embodies the Chinese character 王, wang′ for king. Like the ruler, the central tree mediates among earth, society, and heaven. Mapping the same character, the Ming Dynasty architects of the Beijing Temple complex aligned along a single axis the Altar to Earth, Hall of the Ancestors, and triple-domed Temple of Heaven. To retain the Mandate of Heaven or the right to rule, expressed in freedom from disasters and harmony in the realm, the emperor worshipped in rituals set seasonally and consecutively from the bridal-cake Altar to Earth, through the single-domed Hall of the Ancestors enclosed in a circular “echo” wall, and finally, into the monumental three-tiered Temple of Heaven. Outside, the sentinel hemlock recalls the four giant pillars inside the Temple of Heaven. Restored in the 1920s, such ancient evergreens of great girth from coastal Oregon replaced the semi-millennial originals. Today, east and west of the Pacific Ocean, living and built trunks hold up the dome of the sky.

Looking in, the creators of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France provided a peaceful diversion from crusading. Monks laid the path in stone in the floor toward the back of the nave. Early pilgrims traced the same path, progressing on their knees.  Here, outside, I wish the narrow paths were wider, the diameter of the labyrinth and its walk, ever larger to embrace the whole earth, humankind, nature, the massive tree stretching to the sky—pointing into deep space: the Great I AM.

Looking after. Faith and poet Rainer Maria Rilke teach to question and be patient for  answers. My inquiry about the unusual shells brought the information that a visitor involved in the care of cancer patients had placed them. The edible Atrina rigida or Stiff Pen Shell, also called Pearl Oyster, is native to the Gulf of Mexico and abundant along the West Coast of Florida. Its reddish bronze color,  elongated asymmetrical triangular shape and irregular rows of more delicate spines toward the end contrast to the grey-white and bluish tones, chunkier bumps and ripples of the stocky Hood Canal mollusks. Both species live in salt waters over which the sun sets.

The metaphor of cancer dances on the edge of my imagination. Like these odd Floridian Stiff Pen Shells, cancer cells turn up beyond normal boundaries. Living, some grow and travel more aggressively than others, none know when to stop. Cells go rogue. What accounts for the increasing incidence of cancers? How have we heedlessly and arrogantly introduced new chemicals, upset natural equilibria, waged war within and among ourselves? What therapies can we devise?

Love made the labyrinth and the welcoming havens. The labyrinth is not a maze. In treading our journey, we can lose our way, but are never lost.

S-N: Altar to Earth, Hall of Ancestors, Temple of Heaven, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China, Reign of Yong Le Emperor, Ming Dynasty, 1420 C.E.

Temple of Heaven ink and watercolor sketch by Maria Coryell-Martin, Beijing, 8/16/04

“To you I lift up my eyes, to you enthroned in the heavens.” -Psalm 123.

Looking North across Hood Canal, The Brothers Peaks, Olympic Mountains, in fleeting November afternoon sunshine.

Heartfelt thanks to St. Andrew’s House and Harmony Hill, neighbor retreat and conference centers in Union, Washington.

Can’t Bust ‘Ems

Recently I have been wearing my vintage denim Can’t Bust ‘Em overalls to uproot dandelions while the garden soil is still moistened by rains. See my previous post for my history with the cheerful edible and invasively prolific “Dandy Lions, Lions’ Teeth.”

The overalls date from my radical feminist days learning and teaching auto mechanics, writing minutes for Aradia Women’s Health Clinic, and counseling for the nascent Women Studies Program. All B. C., before children.

Between September 2006 and December 2008, we moved to Washington, DC, so Seelye could serve as Program Manager for the Cryosphere at NASA Headquarters. As trailing spouse, I searched out local farmers’ markets and organic grocery stores for nutritious foods to support the more intense and travel-filled life there. I attended liturgically conservative and socially diverse and welcoming All Souls Memorial Church on the other side of the Zoo from our posh rental in Cleveland Park. We chose it for the indoor swimming pool, the tree-dense neighborhood across the Klingle Bridge from the well-used public library, and easy Metro commute for Seelye. I volunteered in the Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage at the National Cathedral, and I joined the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. While we were away, both children invited their beloveds to live with them in our Seattle home. Carl and Sarah married on July 20, 2008, in our garden. Maria and Darin married on September 20, 2009, on the 900’-long former ferry dock at Indianola, Washington.

For Halloween in 2006, the National Zoo transformed pocket parkland into mock cemeteries. The tumbled tombstones named real lost species. After 35 years in 2007, Aradia closed its doors, hammered by rising need, high costs for security, and dwindling funds for reproductive health care. To transform my sadness and root myself in DC, at  the Writer’s Center Sara Taber’s course, “The Writer’s Toolbox” resulted in my ongoing Gentle Writers support group, my auditing the Radcliffe seminar, Writing Past Lives and Gender in June of 2007, and subsequently, my joining the Washington Biography Group. Proximity to New York catalyzed my resolve to obtain and proofread my father’s narrative of 1960 for the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. Only one reel of his voice survives. It is a gripping story of his formation as a scientist, his life as a chemist on the Manhattan Project and his views on the post-war politics of the scientists striving to keep civilian control and peaceful uses of atomic energy, and still germane. Now preparing the aural transcript for publication on the web challenges my computer competency, stretches my comprehension of science, and deepens my respect for  history, human frailties, ethics and scholarship.

Thanks to Seelye’s work in August 2008, I traveled with him to Ilulissat, Greenland, my first trip north of the Arctic Circle. A year later, we visited our son Carl and his spouse, Sarah in Singapore and continued south to visit friends from our DC apartment building in Sydney and Canberra, Australia, my first trip south of the equator.

With the potential demise of polar-orbiting satellite, ICESAT 1 from August of 2008,  NASA administrators asked Seelye to develop ICEBRIDGE, employing aircraft to survey the Arctic sea ice, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the most rapidly changing regions. ICESAT II is due to be launched in early 2016. Currently the majority of our orbiting earth observing satellites are working beyond their expected lifetimes.

Ice sheets press into glaciers. Glaciers form tongues and ice shelves as they reach the sea. As a linguist, I pay attention to glacier tongues. In our lifetimes, the retreat of the Ilulissat Isbrae or Jakobshavn glacier tongue is shocking. (See Dr. Waleed Abdalati’s slide below). The iceberg that collided with the RMS Titanic likely originated in that glacier, resulting in the gift to Harvard of Widener Library. On February 26, 2010, as our expeditionary-artist daughter, Maria and Seelye prepared their respective Art from High Latitudes and ICEBRIDGE exhibits at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle for Polar Science Weekend, the Mertz glacier in Antarctica in a collision with an iceberg lost the  area measuring roughly 50 miles long by 30 miles wide, 75% of its tongue.

Worldwide, glaciers are experiencing rapid changes with unpredictable outcomes. Seelye worries about creeping sea level rise. I worry about the scales, the modes of grasping truth, how to exercise compassion and maintain balance, serenity. We seem to have learned little from the financial meltdown, the speculation, the greed, the cruelty of monopolies and the subversion of the Constitution to prosper corporations above persons. While my personal life is full of love, health, nutritious foods, meaningful work, deep and sustaining friendships, I tremble for the fragile planet, for the rate of species loss, for the heedless mining of groundwater, for loss of courtesy and respect in public discourse and conduct.

The exuberant abundant dandelions, spreading exponentially, pose questions. What is enough? What are the right actions? I’m not sure anymore that we “Can’t Bust ‘Em.

***************

Postscript. Maria observed that my conclusion is uncharacteristically pessimistic. Occasionally, Seelye crows that in the evolutionary sense, we are finished, done! While true, upholding truth as we understand it, and encouraging our young motivates me to keep learning, writing, loving. In DC, a Dutch friend lent me her copy of Professor Jürgen Pieters, Speaking with the Dead, (Edinburgh, 2005) from which I learned two wonderful affirmations. First, Machiavelli would spend his evenings by dressing up, entering his study, and conversing with his mentors, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, vivifying them in his imagination to refine his own writing. Second, as a Chinese Language and Literature major, I have a sketchy grounding in history of Western thought. When my Gentle Writers confronted me, “Julie, you’re a poet!” I was shocked. “Not I, my mother was a poet.” In Pieters book, Aristotle’s definition of poetry as not metrics or form, but evocative power of language helped me understand their meaning. So maybe we can put on our “Can’t Bust ‘Ems” even if we can’t read the buttons without glasses, and they are worn and holey, and we can do our best to inspire, encourage, and work however we can. As my father often quoted, “The motto of Caltech is (Gospel of John): “The truth shall set you free.” As my friend Jill advised in our youth, “Let’s have a cup of tea with our dragons.” A very tasse.

Image courtesy of W. Abdalati

Seelye, Julie, Maria and Carl Coryell-Martin on Mt. Patterson, Methow, WA 27 March 2010 by Darin Reid

Corning Stove, January 1975 - present

She Kept the Stove Top Clean

To savor life some suggest the exercise to write your own obituary. As if preparing for death highlights what is important in the present and what survives.

When Jack Marinsky and Larry Glendenin discovered element 61, a rare earth, in the reactor at Oak Ridge in the spring of 1945, they approached my mother to name it. She invoked Prometheus, saying, “Like Prometheus, you have stolen fire from the gods and mankind may suffer for it.” Thence the name, Promethium. Prometheus’ punishment was to be chained to a rock and to suffer daily attacks of an eagle eating his liver. From his daring, humankind benefitted. Taming fire enabled survival in cold places and developments in agriculture, gender roles, and cooking.

Remembering them all, in my turn, I invoke Hestia, hearth-tender for the gods on Mount Olympus, for me, just out of sight past the bicuspid Brothers to the west in the State of Washington. My hearth is not a natural fire, dancing over kindling or coal, but a space-age Corning ceramic cook-top and oven. The late burly chef James Beard who made a tiny 33-1/3 rpm vinyl record to accompany the manual called it “a cooking appliance.”

Newly pregnant with our firstborn child, we bought the cooking appliance in January of 1975, in order to stop squabbling about who would clean the tricky spiral coils and readily burnt saucers of the original electric stove in our kitchen. The salesman glowed about the toughness of the heat-strengthened ceramic surface and urged Seelye to drop his bonafide Swiss Army knife from as high as he could reach above the demo model. He did. No chip, no crack. Moreover, the self-cleaning oven proved well-insulated, with a see-through window and light to illumine the capacious interior.

The smooth glossy white surface sold us. To clean: simply wipe it with a paper towel and Bon Ami or Corning cleaner whose oxalic acid component does not scratch the ceramic. Occasionally use a single-sided razor blade to scrape burnt deposits. The top can hold a liter of spilled fluid, too. When cool, it serves as a counter, making space in a two-fanny kitchen for unloading groceries, rolling out pie crust or kneading bread. Bright lights indicate when the burners or “tempassure” units, are at the designated degrees Farenheit; when cooling, HOT; or when completely cool, OFF.

The clock with digital display, accomplished by rolling plates clicking in place to form the numbers, controls the self cleaning, timed baking, and a plug-in outlet for other appliances like a coffee maker or crock pot. With age the mechanism turning the plates has worn. We are now using the third replacement clock. Since the price of that idiosyncratic part has risen like college tuition we use exterior timers and set the clock after power outages or seasonal changes, by throwing the coupled circuit breakers downstairs in the basement. This requires complicated arithmetic. We console each other that the aging of the cooking appliance delays our own by requiring  mental agility to calculate to the minute the correct time! Thanks to the Babylonians for base 60 math.

A key feature of this modern hearth is that three of the four circular heating elements contain at their center a ring with imbedded thermistors.These insure that the the temperature on the bottom of the flat pot matches that selected on the dial. Because  these “tempassure” circles require direct, full contact, a warped, footed, or charred pan will not heat well. Properly employed and cleaned for optimum heat transfer these units allow dependable simmering and no boiling over. The fourth circle, larger of the two sizes, functions like a regular electric coil, pumping out heat on low, hotter and high settings. It takes a long time to cool. The designers of this post-Sputnik stove, however, failed to plan for cooking stir-fries in the ancient spun-steel round-bottom wok. Slower to come to breathe, woks work, but not like over a hot gas fire. But then, new pilotless gas stoves cannot hold a low simmer like this one.

Too, I know the inventor of its catalytic converter which cleans the exhaust during the self-clean cycle. Chemist Henry Petrow once asked me if I smelled yeast at the end of the self-clean cycle. He explained that it would have exponentially expensive to catalyse the exhaust through two more steps, to alcohol and to water. “Yes,” I replied, but it feels natural to have a yeast smell and preferable to the intermediate step, alcohol, signaling the end.” Alcohol does not have happy associations in my family, yeast does. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast…”

I love this stove. I love the man who bought it with me and shares the care, cooking, and cleaning of it. It makes for joy to think of all the meals, parties, soups for the well and sick, bread, pumpkins, turkeys, roasts, play dough sculptures, cookies, science experiments that have changed phase in its embrace. I delight in the calculations for timed bake, timed self-clean, and resets for power lapses and seasonal time change. Fall back, spring ahead.

My father wrote and I approved for my mother’s grave stone,

Grace Mary Seeley Coryell

14 September 1914 – 5 May 1965

Beloved Wife, Mother, Poet.

Although I cherish the words “Belles Lettres,” and I would prefer to be cremated and nourish “flars,” and maybe have some bone bits sprinkled in the ocean like my father’s in the Pacific, I could do worse than have my heirs write,

Hearth-tender, She Kept the Stove Top Clean.

Maria tending the wood stove, Twisp, WA, October 2009

]]> http://www.juliecoryell.com/uncategorized/she-kept-the-stove-top-clean/feed/ 0 http://www.juliecoryell.com/uncategorized/a-mother-ghost-story/ http://www.juliecoryell.com/uncategorized/a-mother-ghost-story/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:18:13 +0000 Julie Coryell http://www.juliecoryell.com/?p=170

Grace Mary, Julie and Fluffy Coryell, 27 Independence Ave., Lexington, MA, ca. 1950

My mother, Grace Mary, loved Halloween. When I was little, she crafted memorable costumes for me. The first costume I remember was simple and characteristic of my mother’s humor. She transformed me into Gus the Ghostwriter from Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby and Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley cartoon books, popular during World War II. She covered the toddler me from head to toe with a simple sheet, cut out the eyes and embroidered black cotton glasses and belted the outfit with a lightweight chain just like the nearsighted comic anxious Gus.

When I was four she made my favorite, preparing it over several weeks of delicious suspense. First she soaked an old pair of footed one-piece pajamas in spent coffee grounds and hung them on a line in the basement to dry. A dear friend of the family, Hazel Lumbert, my father Charles’s former secretary the year he wrote the PPR, provided a realistic painted molded-rubber mask for the outfit. Lastly, she enlisted my help to cut out and color four cardboard flaps to disguise my gloves and shoes as …paws. Came dusk she dressed my wriggling animal self as a wonderful wolf!

As I set out on all fours to prowl around the kitchen, the back doorbell rang. Mr. Luongo was delivering fresh laid eggs. My mother opened the door to greet him. When I appeared around the refrigerator as a wolf, he almost dropped all the eggs. Because my mother had so skillfully engaged me in the process of making the wolf suit, I relished the power of being scary.

Not too much later, she turned me into the Easter Bunny with the hallmarks of Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit: red vest, perky ears held upright by stuffed Kotexes, a prominent gold watch, and white gloves. As Gus was a scared ghostwriter, her creation of me carrying offerings to our neighbors of painted eggs on a silver tray celebrated Easter in a secular way with literary elegance.

I believe now that her energy and imagination at work for me was spiritual. She taught me the real meaning of All Hallow’s Eve and that the spooky celebration heralds two days of honoring the dead, first saints and then all souls. As the early November days passed, my mother would grow sad. She was remembering her mother, Grace Louise, who in 1900, married Frank Seeley and moved from prosperous Leavenworth, Kansas, to the isolated boom mining town at 9,400’ of Goldfield, Colorado, above more famous Cripple Creek. In 1902, Thomas D’Entremont Seeley was born. Because of the altitude, threats to health and difficulties for children, the family moved to Colorado Springs. Frank Seeley, Jr. was born in 1908. My mother was born during the Battle of the Marne, on the Feast of the Trinity, September 14, 1914.

I know she had fun growing up zestful for horse riding, camping, hiking, making and cooking over fires. Her older brothers teased her devotedly. They told her to dig a deep hole in the back yard and she would reach China. She loved a big white stuffed bear named Snowball. She and her pals loved to visit the Chinese curio dealer in town. They would knock on the screen door and ask if they could enter, announcing, “We smell punk.” The storekeeper would invite them in, “You sit in the corner and no one will notice.” All my growing up my mother delighted in spontaneous witty wordplay: puns, repartee, telling quotes.

In her high school years, Grace Mary deepened her love of language. She wrote poetry and formed a writers’ circle. With her lifelong friend, Joanna Jolly Ritzman she supplied all the senior quotes for their yearbook. Although both of her brothers in turn went to nearby Colorado College, the Great Depression was gathering, so that by her graduation in June, 1932, there was no money for her to attend college. By documenting in her book The Invisible Scar the Depression era loss for women in opportunities for education, employment and vocation, Caroline Bird has helped me understand Grace Mary’s lasting sorrow for her lost chance.

I do not know what my mother did for herself after graduation beyond writing, cooking and homecare for her family. Before their marriage, 2 December 1937, she had published thirteen poems, more than my father had papers in print. She did have a well-loved black and gold-trimmed Remington portable typewriter that was only replaced by a snazzy Olivetti Lettera 22 teal blue portable when I was in high school. It is indelible on my heart that on the afternoon of November 4, 1932, eighteen-year old Grace Mary and sixty-year old Grace Louise went shopping together. They arrived home, and Grace Louise starting coughing. Grace Mary held her but the coughing would not stop. Within 15 minutes, Grace Louise died of a collapsed aorta in her daughter’s arms.

Knowing this story and impatient with my own sorrows, in her 19^th year, my daughter Maria exclaimed to me, “You carry your mother around like a dead ghost.” I do. I do. I have felt it a duty and a love to make vivid to my children the dear and the good about my mother, and her woundedness. As my suitor, their father fell in love with my mother, her humor, her cooking, her hospitality despite her deadly addiction to alcohol and barbiturates. And I miss her. I long for her witty and comforting mothering that shone through the bad periods of our life together. Above all, I have tried to keep healthy, to understand her illness and grief, my own vulnerabilities, and to propagate in a hungry world, the nurturance and love for her child, that I always felt in her company. Holy ghosts and Holy Spirit.

Our mantel at The Kennedy-Warren in DC. Evening Ice in Antarctica by Maria Coryell-Martin, October 2006.

The legendary giant Paul Bunyan once overwintered in a lumber camp in northern Minnesota. It was so cold the lumberjacks’ cuss words froze midair. Tough living, rough language. In springtime when sunshine warmed the air, the words all thawed and assaulted their ears!

Likewise, reentry to our home in Seattle after two plus years in Washington, DC, suddenly highlights every item stored, shipped, lost, found. “Do I need this? Do I use this? Do I love this? These questions of organizers in the business Empty Your Nest founded by our adopted sisterperson now residing in Berlin, Germany, echo relentlessly in my ears. And, is there a friend who would enjoy this item? Is it recyclable or saleable and at what cost? If I toss it, what life awaits in the landfill or at sea?

Feeling at sea myself, queasy with responsibility, awareness pressing on my conscience, I reflect that paralysis is not helpful. As Seelye has continued to work on the cryosphere for NASA, I remind myself that upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the space shuttle routinely loses protective heat tiles. Prepare for fatality, expect friction, ride the ride.

Coming home, I notice that trees are taller and elders, shorter. Our cat sleeps more and bosses us more authoritatively. Government has poured more cement, especially around highways. Life and place are both familiar and new. It seems imperative to live into our aging differently than our parents and boldly to extend “the examined life” into our footprint on the land and ecosystem.

In the financial meltdown, amidst species loss, swine flu threat, so many changes seem logical, if unanticipated consequences of past policies. I stick to the simple, the concrete. I seek first principles. There is no going back. This Earth is our home, and faith, a refuge.

When she wrapped me toga-style in a towel from my bath, my mother taught me, “Friends, Romans, and countrymen, let me lend you my ears…” Jesus said, “Let those with ears, hear.” What are we hearing now? Can we begin the deep conversations needed to respond, creatively, honestly at the fundament, the very root? And what of the branches, the evolution, our future?

Fatimata's house, Karal, Mali. Walnut ink on tinted paper by Maria Coryell-Martin, February 2005.

Chinese figurines, Tang style at the Weizmann Home, Weizmann Institute, Rehovoth, Israel. February 2008.

Roman ruin at Masada, Israel. Tristram's Grackles. February 2008.

Magnuson Park Dandelions, Seattle, April 2009

Spring is fulling, the ground, still moist. Woolens beg for washing to withstand hungry moth larvae soon to invade closets and cupboards. Welcome sunshine emboldens myriad yellow Compositae family Taraxacum officinale flowers that dot garden beds and carpet the lawn. Left to seed, each head can produce hundreds, maybe thousands of offspring. Mulling my computer, the economy, and the dandelions, big numbers engross me.

Determined, I address the task of hand-pulling or dousing them with five percent vinegar. Although in a week, I have spotted only one head gone to seed, time presses. What can one woman do? Purportedly introduced to her medicinal garden by pioneer nurse Catherine Broshears Maynard (1816-1906) in the early days of Seattle Alki, meaning by and by, now they penetrate everywhere. Edible, the young greens can be added to salad, the roots roasted, and the flowers fermented into wine. Still, neither the slow cooking movement nor the pangs of poverty have sparked harvesting them for food or drink.

This week, Seelye is surveying by airplane the ice extent of the Arctic Ocean and Greenland ice sheet to assess multiyear and first year ice. As I poke, pry, uproot each plant, I consider its age and extent. Often the wily plant releases its surface green leaves and stems to preserve the root below, like a salamander shedding its tail to escape capture. The older the plant, the more entwined with grass, moss, other plants the roots grow, resembling sexy ginseng or carrots, creatures with fanciful underground legs, some hairy, some smooth. Occasionally, the complete plant yields neatly to my tug. Multi-year dandelions and first-year slim-jims.

Lao Tze asked, “What is the usefulness of the useless?” I ponder. Why do I do this? What can I hope to achieve? Last week I worked so hard, I broke a blood vessel under my wedding ring. My finger and hand numbed and tingled. I ached in my armpit and across my chest. I called the consulting nurse who went into high gear to ensure that I was not having a heart attack. Not breathless, not nauseated, not dizzy. Good. Yes, weary, sore and feeling depleted. Grateful to have health insurance, and embarrassed at the scrutiny, during my wait to see the doctor, I rested! The young doctor validated my reading of my body. Catch and release.

Now in my hunt for these lions, I proceed more mindfully. Shorter sessions, with a new long-handled weeder allow me more angles and exercise, even standing up! I experiment with delivery and quantity of vinegar. I lie down and drink water more consciously. Clever plants – when mowed, they grow back with shorter stems! Tempted to poison them, the view of Lake Washington squelches that thought. I seek help, reinforcements.

Lions’ teeth, they have their place in the universe. I cannot escape their presence. I would miss never seeing a single one. These sun-savvy dancing legions clamor: in my home, garden, neighborhood, in my skin, heart, bones, and in my family, genus, species – how I live matters.

Happy Earth Day!

Northwest Invasives. Horsetail, Dandelion, Ivy, Himalayan Blackberry

This poem draws on classic Chinese poetry composed of characters brushed in parallel vertical rows combined with my love of anagrams and Scrabble. In the midst of multiple computer woes, expressing myself trumped stressing myself.

Window, Row House 2100 block Calvert St., Baltimore, MD

“From the Greek nostos, to return home and the Old English genesan, to survive,” the word nostalgia also denotes a “wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” Pilgrimage refers to “the journey of a pilgrim or wayfarer especially to a shrine or sacred place and the course of life on earth.”        [Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition].

Before returning from Washington, DC, to Washington State, Seelye and I retraced the neighborhood haunts of our courtship and first married life in Baltimore, MD. As now, we lived then on a threshold between university life and science, family and faith.   Despite cloudy windy cold weather that warmed with the day, the Sunday morning drive sped us first to the Baltimore Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation, the seat of Maryland’s fourteenth bishop, Rt. Reverend Eugene Taylor Sutton. As canon, Eugene had signed me up as a volunteer in the National Cathedral Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage, November 28, 2006. On June 28, 20008 the National Cathedral filled with witnesses to the joyous consecration of this prayerful, bold-hearted bishop. As Bishop Claggett, Maryland’s first and first to be consecrated on American soil, was a slaveholder, Bishop Sutton’s call, with the election of the forty-fourth President of the United States, heralds a deep healing in our country.

Lacking a transept or crossing, the small, narrow Gothic Cathedral of the Incarnation teems with children and manifests careful loving intense use. To the right of the entrance the poignant chapel to Children of the Light, names the murdered youths of the city, thirty-five to that date. Two more the next week. A banner bearing bells and a satin ribbon for each teen or child drapes over the stair rail leading down to the Peace Chapel, Columbarium, and undercroft. There the dark wood floor is newly painted with a beautiful blue labyrinth. Everywhere the eye sees pictures, icons, windows, sensing the spirit of mindful, whole-hearted occupancy, and history.

Next we approached Johns Hopkins University, retracing Seelye’s old running route along San Martin Drive. Everywhere new buildings! Finding a parking spot near new Decker Court, a map pointed us to Latrobe Hall. The familiar end doorway allowed a glimpse of the same hallway leading in the past to the Hydraulics Laboratory. There Seelye had built wave tanks, paddles, stratified water with 100-pound bags of salt and prepared his thesis.  Satisfied about the science, we could not find our way to St. Paul Street.

Few people braved the cold wind, but an angel appeared: a Nigerian-born security officer guided us through the 1963 familiar walkway, past the Merrick Barn theater to the entrance at 33rd Street. Two blocks east and turning south, there was our same rear porch with the trash chute, the courtyard with the lion head fixed to a new longer, wider green-painted wall, and a new wooden gazebo visible to the rear. Today the entry sports a handsome black iron grill gateway; flower pots fill the right side. The entry doors are painted red! Maroon awnings over each side of the gate and a big sign all announce St. Paul Court Apartments. The old A&P across the street is now an attractive independent Eddie’s Market. Next we strolled around the block along Calvert Street, noting that the alley where we rented our garage for $10 a month, is new built, but plenty of similar ones survive. Along Calvert Street I noted and photographed the sign depicted above: Nostalgia.

Returning along 31st Street to St. Paul we happened into Donna’s Restaurant on the corner for a tasty colorful lunch in a warm place. Waitress Julia arrived only two months ago, but enjoyed our story and attended us cheerfully. An intense happiness infused my partaking of the meal with Seelye. Communion.   We walked past Seelye’s bachelor apartment, a studio with bay window on the ground floor of number 2125 St. Paul Street, around the block of gorgeous stone buildings and across St. Charles St. to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

A student of my father’s from California days, then a crystallographer at JHU, had given us membership as a wedding present. How we enjoyed trips there and renting pictures from the rental gallery. Now the City of Baltimore subsidizes BAM and the Walters Art Gallery so admission is free! To browse the uncrowded galleries ’twas very heaven.” The European paintings (remembered as inferior to the Boston Museum collections) sparkled, the British landscape drawings and watercolors lured, the Cone collection, remodeled in 2001, simply shone. Two independently wealthy sisters who mostly purchased directly from the artists and their travels, formed the single largest collection of Matisse works. Benefactor Joseph Epstein’s collection of European paintings struck me as choice. And, since our time, a trustee has donated eight exquisite miniature rooms. The New England sea captain’s salon has a tiny telescope a little rounder than a toothpick, pointed out the window. Squinting, you can see light through it! The one room of Chinese art is spaciously and informatively arrayed. Small, but distilled pleasure.

Such a car ride offers time for a particular intimacy: one does not look the other in the eye. The freedom from interruption fosters rumination and sharing thoughts.

“We may not have as much money for retirement as I hoped,” Seelye observed.

“Yes, my nest egg has dropped by a third. I have been thinking and praying about getting older. We have been blessed by wonderful experiences and travel in life. Three things money cannot buy: time, health, and friendships.”

Which brings me to fibrinogen. Created in the liver, the plasma protein circulates in the blood. When clotting is needed, with the catalytic action of the enzyme thrombin, fibrinogen forms the insoluble fibrous protein fibrin, forming clots. The molecule fibrinogen has served me faithfully as metaphor for friendship, especially created in response to life’s inevitable losses.   As we prepared to marry, my mother died, and Seelye found our first apartment, applying in choosing his love for tall ceilings, windows for light and air, wood floors, workable kitchens and inviting bathrooms. Mourning my mother, that first summer in Baltimore, until we furnished the spare apartment, I suffered shin splints. I taught myself to plan, shop, and cook delicious and nutritious meals. Where my mother knew Prometheus, I invoked Hestia.

My father used to call me his little duck. In the 1980s I found in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a carved Chinese miniature ivory “looking-back” duck. Later, dropped from the mantel, the duck lost its head. Looking back is salutary on occasion, but not a way to live.   “Seelye,” I said in the car driving home, “we could not know our journey from 1965 to today. No more can we tell what lies ahead. Beyond money, we can take care of our bodies, our minds, our spirits. As Palestine Patriarch Miles Sherrill used to intone, ‘Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be’.”

Seelye and Julie,  3120 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, MD. November 16, 2009

Culps Hill, Gettysburg, PA. Neither did the bag witness the battle, nor the combatants know plastic.

Motel, Baker City, OR. The accumulation of plastic from 6 days on the road, DC to Seattle 10/08

It’s the numbers, expanding large and small: giga- to tera-, nano- to peta- scale. Physicist Hans Bethe explained that shopping between the world wars in Germany taught him the value of big numbers. He would bicycle to the shops for the items his family needed. Gradually, steadily it took the capacity of his handlebar-mounted basket to carry the stack of inflating Deutsches Marks to pay the merchants. Orders of magnitude, times ten.

According to the website http://www.reusablebags.com, “Well over a billion single-use plastic bags are given out for free each day.” They form an incoming stream to my household in the form of grocery and farm market goods, dry cleaning and laundry bags, shipping bags for clothing and medications, book and miscellaneous purchase-carriers from garment bag-size, to bubble wrap-liners and Styrofoam chips or peanuts. Then, too, the difficult-to-substitute containers for yoghurt, and drinks, the quart and half-gallon boxes and jugs all labeled #5 or #6, are not currently recyclable, and so expand the trash.

Down the chute, but not out of mind. Truthfully, it is my mind, my serenity that feels threatened.

With the inevitable rise in petroleum prices due to production reaching the long-heralded and long-denied peak oil, and for living in a fifth-floor small apartment in the Capitol City, I have begun to question how to reduce this tide of incoming one-use plastic? How to educate myself and others to analyze the true, lifetime costs of production, product, and disposal. Plastics are eternal.

In The Upside of Down(2006), Canadian scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon helpfully defines the energy return on investment, EROI. The rise and decline of a civilization or nation state correlates with the ease of marshalling energy. For the Roman coliseum and the aqueducts, engineers mobilized a well-fed labor force to build ingeniously designed and precisely crafted arches, stones, tiles and bricks. The agrarian economy produced the high quality calories, food for laborers and animals to build and maintain such works. However, “locked into a food-based energy system, as the Roman empire, expanded and matured; as it exploited, and in some cases exhausted, the Mediterranean region’s best cropland and then moved on to cultivate poorer lands; and as its grain supplies snaked farther and farther from its major cities, it had to work harder and harder to produce each additional ton of grain.” (P. 55)

In our time, petroleum yields three great essential energies: chemicals including fertilizers, plastics, and fuel. Farmers choose to use manure-based fertilizers with some dangers of pathogens persisting, and still requiring fuel to heat, transport and distribute, or chemical fertilizers. Farmer Eddy Rankin of Twin Springs Fruit Farm, Orrtanna, PA, reports that last year he paid less than $360 per ton of 19-19-19 (NPK) fertilizer. Now it tops $1000, a three-fold increase. To protect soil fertility and crop yields, he and his partners continue to apply the preferred fertilizer, and only modestly raise prices at the stand. Does this price increase herald a change for energy return on investment, EROI?

At the time of sale, producers of the corn crop face three choices: feed people, feed livestock, or feed fuel tanks. Purchasers compete. Heifer International reported in 2008 that the proportion of annual greenhouse gases in the United States is 18% from producing livestock for meat compared to 13% for all forms of transportation. These choices explain why food costs have risen, will continue to rise, and illumine the widening gap between rich and poor, well nourished and starving. Again, the numbers are staggering and hard to comprehend. Furthermore, the income gap between billionaires and poor people is so great that compounding increases will fail to reduce the gulf for generations to come (Homer-Dixon, 2006).

At the Republican Convention the cheer, “drill, baby, drill” roiled the crowd, hot to open the last great North American wilderness in Alaska to resource exploitation. Too many Americans do not yet grasp the idea of energy return on investment. Furthermore, Elizabeth Kolbert quotes “The Department of Energy estimates that there are eighteen billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in offshore areas of the continental United States that are now closed to drilling. This sounds ample, until you consider that oil is traded globally and that, at current rates of consumption, eighteen billion barrels would satisfy less than seven months of global demand. A DOE report issued last year predicted that it would take two decades for drilling in restricted areas to have a noticeable effect on domestic production, and that, even then, ‘because oil prices are determined on the international market,’ the impact on fuel costs would be ‘insignificant’.” (The New Yorker, Aug. 11 & 18, 2008).

Who will ask, “Is it worth it?” What about species loss as the Arctic Ocean shrinks and habitats change? What about rising sea levels? Since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we are slightly more sensitive to the power of nature, and newly appreciative of wetlands. Still, half the United States’ supply of oil passes through the ports of Louisiana (NPR, All Things Considered, 5 September 2008). Can we afford to abandon the drilling platforms, refineries, and transfer points of the Gulf of Mexico to exploit and maybe exhaust the Alaskan coasts?

Living in Washington DC, I have searched for food sources like Puget Consumers Cooperative in Seattle for local, organic foods. I carry a handy nylon bag and extra clean plastic “T-shirt” bags while shopping. I wash, dry, and reuse every possible plastic bag. Following the example of my daughter and my website designer, I carry a sealable plastic 12-ounce thermal cup, especially on airplanes. We avoid restaurants serving on Styrofoam and plastic. Remembering the one billion plastic bags handed out free worldwide per day, I talk with merchants as I unfold my recycled bags.

Nonetheless, the waste stream appalls. Because the air pollution controls are looser than in the United States, some “recycled” items go to Asian countries where they are burned. We eat meat as a condiment and pay attention to the source and species of our seafood. We combine trips and limit our use of the car. People can sign up for Terrapass and purchase carbon credits for travel expenditures.

“Little drops of water, tiny grains of sand, make the mighty ocean and the spacious land”goes the song learned in first grade… the numbers… the math. Plastics are eternal. We Homo sapiens are mobile bags of water with about 15% other chemicals, that somehow embody a mind, a spirit. Can we govern ourselves, reign in our desires, understand and meet these sweeping changes? Can we imagine life as other living beings live, whales and elephants, tuna and turtles, bacteria and in-between viruses? And live as though the future matters? I hope so, I pray so, I write so.

L. View of Little Round Top, Gettysburg, from Twin Springs Fruit Farm, Orrtanna, PA

R. Greenhouse, opposite direction

L. Julie and Eddy Rankin with fresh-picked apricots, July 4, 2008

R. Shogo Hayashi and Seelye buying from Martha at the TSFF Saturday Market

All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church, Washington DC

Seelye’s parents gave us a rounded black dowager Peugeot 403 sedan for a wedding present. I was hit from behind in the Arboretum, a blow that creased the roof, flattened the front right tire on the stone curb, and crumpled the trunk. Though the steak and clean laundry within survived intact, I replaced the totaled car with a larger white Peugeot 504 sedan. I thought of the car as Snowy, after Tintin”s dog, Milou, translated into English. While sporty to drive, the model year 1973 proved to be an idiosyncratic mixture of parts and the car difficult to maintain. For example, when they failed the armature, motor, and electrical parts for the vital windshield wipers came from three different manufacturers in France and Germany. Luckily I found a great mechanic and learned to listen to him with the attention I soon paid to our pediatrician.

With the advent of children I remembered my ancestor of Coryell’s Ferry, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from New Hope, Pennsylvania. He ferried folk, goods, and General George Washington, who gave him his fishhook collection in gratitude. It is no longer on the map or GPS because after the Civil War, a senator Lambert changed the name to his, Lambertville. By 1986, however, the Peugeot (Puget) ceased to be reliable for carpooling elementary and preschool classmates of Carl and Maria. While it sat at the shop during Thanksgiving awaiting a new radiator, after Carl and Maria snacked on popping candies that drifted below the seats on a summer road trip to eastern Washington and Mt. Rainier, a rat ate a hole in the upholstery. Even mended, ever after Maria refused to sit on that side of the backseat, even in the next car!

Methodically, even overbearingly, I set about researching a replacement with a view to mechanics, economics, and feel. During the same week I test drove the Volvo 245 station wagon with the option of a third seat for two children up to 100 pounds, a woman driver of the 244 sedan turned a corner in downtown Seattle, beside a flat-bed truck carrying cement panels for a skyscraper facade. As they turned in tandem, some panels slid off the top of the load onto the roof of her Volvo, flattening the top of the car. The roof lowered slowly enough and only far enough to permit the driver to crouch in the leg well and stretch over the gearshift onto both seats. While it took a couple of hours to extricate her, she emerged uninjured. Of the strength of the steel-protected passenger cabin this was powerful evidence, enough to overcome the contrived advertisement Volvo later withdrew that depicted a Volvo sedan holding up a small truck on its roof.

So with Seelye’s help, I traded in the Peugeot and purchased the Volvo 245 outright at the equivalent cost then of one full year of college, room, board, and tuition. Not luxurious, but practical: with automatic transmission, wheel hubs for snow tires, a locking gas cap, and third seat folded under the cargo bed in the rear. My father used to say to me, “Have a little faith, Julie.” I chose his and my favorite yellow flax color and thereafter drove the slightly underpowered “stately tank” with pleasure and confidence. No buyer’s remorse at the expenditure, which exceeded the down payment on our house. The next largest check we wrote when Carl himself went to college. A work horse, a Percheron, of a car.

Now my Volvo is the age of majority. I am reminded of my high school foursome date with Rick Saulnier to hear Joan Baez sing in Kenmore Square, Boston. He drove into our driveway in Lexington, courteously greeted my parents, and seated me in the middle of the front seat for the drive to Brookline for the other girl. As I complimented him on his cared-for chariot, he said, “I call her Shasta.”

“For the mountain or the daisy?”

“Neither, she’asta have new shocks, new tires… always something.”

The car, like faith, needs renewal. What is the responsible ecological and economical course? How to evaluate the true costs? At the time of purchase, Beth in the dealer’s service department (a pioneer to have a woman in that responsible position then) educated me that to buy the car in replacement parts would cost 10% more than the purchase price. With time, parts would be harder to find. And who could predict the currency exchange values for a foreign product? Should I fix it, sell it, donate it? Prudent use of a car is still necessary in hilly Seattle.

Buddhists vow: “I believe in Buddha, I believe in Sangha, the community, and I believe in Dharma, truth. Dharma gates are numberless, I vow to enter them all.” Thus what to do with my car is a gateway to new thinking in the era of climate change, and a metaphor for my own aging. “She’asta.” Mountain, flower, deed.

Julie Coryell”s Ferry. L. by Maria C-M, 8/08. R. 20 July 2008. Just married in the Seattle homestead garden! Sarah Irene Starkweather and Carl William Coryell-Martin on way to Kenmore Air seaplane (watermer) ride to their honeymoon in Victoria, B.C.