Goodbye, tree.

The box elder is coming down.

After a series of storms that have left its limbs broken, hanging and scraggly, the 50 foot box elder tree that hides between our garage and the neighbor's fence is coming down.

Sure, last year it dropped thousands of seeds all over our yard and clogged the gutters. Ok, the summer before that, it drew thousands of box elder bugs to our yard, and an entire side of the house turned red and black, blanketed with their soft little bodies. And, all right, some of them snuck in the windows. Yeah, and the whole thing is probably a hazard, ready to clunk down on the garage in the next wild windstorm that races through town.

It's just that it's such a pity to cut down a tree, especially on the prairie.

As a friend said the other night: the best times to plant a tree are 40 years ago, and today. It's time to think about planting.

The book sale

Thursday morning:
Library sale, all weekend, starting today. Books $1 per pound.

Oh, yes.

Rang up the mammy, agreed on a meeting time, and hurried into my clothes in the icy morning air that filled the upstairs rooms of our house. The earlier post from this week was about right - yesterday, sleety rain came, covering the sidewalks, handrails, picnic tables,  leaf piles left too late, all in an glassy layer. The trees looked heavy by mid-afternoon The sky has been a low, slate gray since early this morning, and if not for the wide roads, you might think you were on the shores of the north Atlantic. 

So heavy socks it was, a sweater and wool coat bundled round me, scarf up to my nose, and I fairly ran out the door, down the street, hopping over the streams of wet leaves laying in the gutters. Nobody else raked, evidently.

Just a few streets over is the library, where many adult bookworms of today spent their precious summer hours as children, curled up in a beanbag chair with The Boxcar Children or Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the meeting rooms, downstairs, a line of middle aged women was coming out the door. I spotted a friend's mother and said a quick hello before heading in. It was after 11, which is the lunch hour, officially, in North Dakota, and is the time when many people 'get stuff done.' The bibliophilic crowds were there, all right, nosing through the boxes of books laid out on long banquet tables. I headed into the fiction and non-fiction room, buoyed by the thought of new books and a winter filled with long stories by the window.

Immediately, treasures surfaced. A book of American short stories. David Sedaris. Rebecca. Folk songs as played by Pete Seeger. Chocolat.  A Passage to India. Julia Child's My Life in France. A volunteer walking through the crowded room spotted the growing stack in my arms and offered me a blue cloth bag with a tree printed on it. As I walked about the room, the bag grew fuller and fuller. Jodie Picoult and Jacob Have I Loved joined the others in the blue bag, and I had to put it down from time to time to keep the handles from cutting into my arms.

The mammy wandered by, and we shared our finds, plotted a coffee for after we finished.

I found Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' and Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' in the fiction section. Might be an indication of the politics of whoever was in charge? Let's assume it was a second-thoughts buyer who left them there. 

One book stood out, with gilded page edges and gold lettering on the front. Magpie bait. I cracked open the cover, thumbed through the pages to see what it was, exactly. 1906, gorgeous illustrations, and pages framed in flowering vines. 

It had to be bought, if just for the beauty of it. 

We laid our purchases on the scale, and paid sweet little for them. $7.50 for ten books. That's a frobisch.

In the line, a dark haired woman heard my mother's accent and snagged her into a conversation. This lady had just come back from her father's foreign birthplace, and wanted to talk with another north islander. She was very pleasant until a moment before we said goodbye, when she launched into a critique of immigrants today... reminded me of an older person's 'kids today' speech. The current wave of immigrants into the United States made her heart hurt, she said, with their insistence on clinging to their language and traditions, those people who don't become citizens immediately, those people who come here on work visas and then go back home because they can. Yes folks, you read right - she was complaining about legal immigrants.

My mind went to the Nepalese and Bhutanese refugees I taught in Grand Forks, who are trying so hard to eke out a living in the northern Red River Valley, illiterate refugees in their later years who spent seventeen long winters in mountain refugee camps, ghosts in their own parents' country; who take buses back and forth across the towns each day in the bitter cold so that they can take basic English classes, so that they can improve their job prospects, so that they can feed their children and move their lives into modern America. Why shouldn't they hold fast to their language and traditions? It's all they have left of their old life. I thought of my mother, who waited twenty years before becoming an American citizen, because that - waiting - was her choice.  I could scarcely stop the glower from creeping into my eyes.  What can you say to a person who says things like that, publicly and proudly?

At the same time, across town at the park, my husband was  in conversation with a woman from the Czech Republic, who was there exercising her dog.  Some of the other Americans who came into the park ignored his hello. She was glad to talk.

It makes me angry when people speak of immigrants disparagingly. I came to immigrate in a place of privilege. I am Irish American, which means that I'm a white, English speaking, educated, dual passport holder with an easily pronounced name. Those are the reasons that I'm accepted effortlessly when I go to Ireland, or when I'm in the United States. I know that I've had it very, very easy.

But it's so easy to throw less convenient immigrants under the bus, it's easy to imagine that your own foremothers adapted to the American way of life immediately, that they learned English quickly, and didn't bemoan anything whatsoever about this country. But that can't be the reality. They were not beyond the human tendency to hold fast to the comfort of familiar things.

Look at how immigrants moved in pockets: they settled together, in places where their language and culture could be supported and survive, where they could pass traditions on to their children. Just look at all the German speaking grandmothers in North Dakota. The Ingas and Arnes of the Red River Valley. Our state paints a portrait of bordered homogeneity. 

Of course they struggled, and they missed their homes with an ache that can't be understood without making the same permanent trip across the sea.  Their grandchildren still steadfastly cling to language and tradition and culture, remembering that they are of another country as well, one that they've never set foot in. This dark haired woman, neither German nor Norwegian, who spent eleven 'magical and charming' days (her words) in her father's country, who was so proud of his poverty and struggle as an immigrant, had sadly missed the irony of her prejudice. 

My mother and I, immigrants both, went upstairs for our coffee, and felt a little sad without really knowing why.

Autumn on the prairie

It’s autumn on the prairie. In the last few weeks, the cottonwoods, elms, maples, have all turned from green to yellow, orange, and red. It’s a short-lived burst of color out here, and the leaves soon drop to the ground, covering every browning lawn in a blanket of gold. Driving through Bismarck takes a little navigational know-how if you want to take full advantage of the season. The old neighborhoods have wide avenues lined with American Elms, their branches arching over the streets and interlacing far above the cars and bicycles, forming a cathedral ceiling for those passing below. Look up and you’ll see blue sky peeking through the gaps, and at the right time, the sun turning each translucent leaf into a tiny pane of stained glass. It’s like Harry Clarke designed it himself. If you take the right route, you can keep going through leafy tunnels much of the way across town.

The ever-present North Dakota wind is doing its part, too, gusting now and then, sending a swirl of leaves skittering over the roads, or prompting a shower of leaves to fall, snowfall-like, over the houses. Children jump into leaf piles, scattering, and parents moan that they’d only just finished raking the whole yard before a new layer fell to the ground.

This has been a dry September, and the leaves, once they've finished rustling in the wind, are satisfyingly crunchy underfoot. A fine dust blows through the air, a product of dry leaves ground into nothingness. The soil is sending up dust, too, and allergies have been predictably rampant.

Fall is the season of the church supper out here. Country churches unfailingly host a community meal, often served on picnic tables in the field outside, with mountains of roast beef, mashed potatoes, sweet yellow buns, seventeen different kinds of pie, and coffee that flows unceasingly from huge silver vats manned by elderly women. Bingo and horseshoes serve as entertainment, though be wary of trying to beat any man sporting a cowboy hat – he’ll know his way around a horseshoe throw. There’s almost always a thrift sale with a baked goods counter set up nearby: whatever you do, don’t pass up a slice of eggy, sweet, creamy kuchen, especially if it was made by someone’s grandmother. 

With all the beauty of autumn, there is the knowledge that at the end of these bright, colorful weeks, we will find winter. Winter here is often harsh, frigid, bitter, and by the time we’re in the dark depths of January, seemingly endless. Does anyone look forward to it? Best to enjoy the gorgeous days we have now, with the sun warming the leaves, raising up the smells unknown to any other season.

Percy Bysshe Shelley had the right idea, to approach the chilling of the year with an optimistic note: to remember that if winter comes, spring won’t be far behind. 

610. Ode to the West Wind

I O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou	5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill	10
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
II Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,	15
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head	20
Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,	25
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!
III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,	30
Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers	35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know	40
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share	45
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed	50
Scarce seem'd a vision—I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd	55
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.
V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,	60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,	65
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?	70

A big shout out to the publishers of Soundings, as well as Miss Harte and her Leaving Cert English class of 1998. We never covered Yeats in time, so some of us missed out on valuable points, possibly a place in medicine at UCC, but look at us all now - we're fine. Totally fine. 

Into the West

 We left by 9 am and rolled out of town in the orange glow of an autumn morning, heading west. We crossed the Missouri River, passing a flatbed truck piled high with hay bales. The fields on the west side of the river that divides North Dakota in two were the bright gold of early fall. Tall, fat jellyrolls of hay dotted the landscape, topping small hills or set in glacial depressions, like they had become stuck there. The sky above us was blue, blue, blue, except for the little puffs of white cloud here and there. Rolling yellow hills for miles and miles and the hard road in front of us.

We turned off the interstate at Beulah and the road rollercoastered onward. Sunflowers, dry, hanging their black heads in droves along the road, their leaves drooping as though they’d just missed out on something big.

To the left of the road was an old red barn, with white letters that announced ‘The Ideal Farm.’ It certainly looked ideal, tucked into a hillside. A white, broad front porch and a window nested in the eaves – maybe from the 1920s? Trees shaded the yard, their leaves turning from summer green to yellow, and a pond curled around the property, tapering towards a cottonwood. A black bull lay warming itself in the morning sun, lines of muscle visible beneath its skin. Up and then down a sharp hill, we went into Beulah – coal mining country, power plant country, cowboy country.

Main Street Beulah is full of shops, bustling with cars and pedestrians, a sure sign of a town untouched by big box stores or shopping malls. Two cars in a row had dogs that stuck their heads out of windows to woof at passers-by. A sign of the nearby oil boom, once empty lots now hold RVs, an occasional Airstream trailer, sometimes a real honest-to-goodness trailer.

At the Country Kettle restaurant downtown, a help wanted sign sat in the window. Concrete grain silos ten stories high loomed over the road. The train tracks sit behind it, and the trains rumbling through town send vibrations that move right up through your legs and shake the bones in your chest.  Inside the café, the tables were nearly full. A grey-haired man sat in the sunshine with two white-haired people. His t-shirt boasted ‘oil field scum.’ His narrow face was deeply lined and he let out a curse word or two at considerable volume. At the next table, a young woman cradled a sleeping newborn. The waitress left a carafe on my table – the coffee was good and strong. I drank it black and eavesdropped as people leaned across tables to talk.

“How many grandchildren do you have now? Is it fifteen?”

“Well, I sure hurt my hand bowling last week. Look at that finger! It didn't always bend that way.”

“The special today is fleischkeuchle. It’s a steak wrapped in pastry and fried. People around here like it. It’s different.”

“What do you hear from your mom these days?”

“Well, my Vernon, he’s a picky one. He eats toast, French fries, chips… oh, and steak, of course, and ribs…”

After three cups of coffee, a walk around town brought me to flat fronted shops. I wandered around a bit in a dollar store that stocked tomatoes, zucchini and squash, piled on the floor beneath the 99c greeting cards. 

An old car dealership sits crumbling at the end of Main Street, just before the houses start lining the road. A Chevrolet sign is still out front, and concrete parapets on the roof spell out Oldsmobile. Inside, it looks as though dripping water has ruined the roof and ceiling, caused the tiles to drop down onto the showroom floor, where they sit, crumpled from the fall, next to an old maroon sofa and chair. In front of the plate glass window, a dead bird lays on its back, drying in the sun.

The husband’s interview, the reason we came to town, lasted for two hours, and I spent the time walking around Beulah’s dusty streets, over the train tracks, past the new gas station and houses with neatly trimmed lawns. One house looked the way my neighborhood in Bismarck used to – an old bungalow with a huge elm tree arching its branches over the yard, a layer of dust covering the steps, and an old wire fence tracing its way around the property line. Old Dakota style, maybe a hundred years old, and it made me miss the houses that stood where the hospital parking lots are now.

Once we got on the road (after stopping for knoephla soup in a tiny café near the highway), I kept noticing the dust. It went from yellowish brown to scoria red pretty quickly. We rolled past Dickinson and the natural gas flares burning next to the highway. We saw oil rigs nodding on farmland, trucks and semis barreling past, a huge metal sculpture of geese over a sunset. As we aimed westward, the landscape changed from rolling farmland to the cut lines of buttes striped with black lignite coal, bluish gray bentonite, yellow and red scoria.

Why the romance of heading west? Don’t you feel it when you hit the road, heading west from anywhere? Maybe it’s all tied up in old western movies, in the line ‘go west, young man,’ in the idea that the frontier is still out there, dusty and wild and free. I even felt that way whenever heading west in Ireland –to Kerry, Galway, Connemara or Donegal – a surge of excitement in the chest: a feeling that, as the landscape becomes more rugged, so do I.

Badlands, and Medora – dusty. Dust on the car, dust on your legs, dust in your nose. Oh, and there are the cowboys, strolling down the street. Oh, and there’s a rattlesnake, crushed dead on the road by a passing car. We’re in the west.

A surprise in the laundry room...

I found a dead bat in the washing machine the other day.

That’s right, a dead bat. A bit mummified, really, and quite, quite dead.

Earlier in the day, I had been looking around the storage room in the basement in our hundred-year-old house, digging through boxes that had once belonged to my husband’s old roommates, who have all moved on to their own adventures in homeownership. I was looking to see if anything was worth keeping. Something caught my eye that I thought would be good for our pup.

We only recently got a dog – just three weeks ago, actually. She’s a good dog: seems very smart, mostly obedient, though she likes to jump up on unsuspecting people, worryingly, often the elderly. Anyhow, she sleeps in a kennel – if she didn’t, she’d be in bed with my husband and myself, which, as you know, would have us end up squashed together on the far end of the bed while the brazen hound takes up the middle. So, to keep her comfortable in the kennel, we’ve put in an old pillow, a comfy old blanket, a few of her toys in an attempt to make a nice doggy comfort space.

Righteo now, don’t forget about the bat. While digging around in the storage room, I came across a box with old books, childhood knickknacks, and a frayed blue towel, presumably all from ancient roommate times. Looking at the towel I thought to myself, gee, this would be great for the dog to slobber on instead of the couch corner. So I pulled it out, popped it into the washing machine with a few blankets that needed a freshening up, and went on my merry way.

Guess where the bat was?

My suspicion is that it was on the old, raggedy blue towel. Somehow, I didn’t notice it when I pulled it out of the box, or when I put it into the washing machine.

When the wash cycle was finished, I went back down into the basement, folded the dry clothes and started lifting the wet blankets and towels from the washer into the dryer. Something strange was at the bottom of the wash tub – something dark and rumpled, with a few sticky-out bits, like the top of an eggplant looks a few hours after being cut off.

I poked it with my finger.

Squish.

Oh no, I thought: that’s not an eggplant top. Realising that it might be something that once had a pulse, and praying that it hadn't survived the spin cycle, I pulled a clean dusting cloth out of the pile on the dryer and slowly, gingerly even, picked up the rumpled dark thing.

I turned it over, and ah! It had a face! A fuzzy, tiny face with slightly chubby cheeks! Slightly chubby, mummified cheeks.

The dog was standing right behind me, as she always does, little shadow that she is, and was looking up at the thing in my hand, head cocked to one side, ears perked up with interest. I assumed, of course, that she wanted to eat it, being a dog that will eagerly eat horse poo.

I took a slightly closer look at the thing without actually bringing my face closer to it – was it a mouse? No, those arm bones were much too long and papery looking – that was a bat, and it was (eek):

        a) in the house

                      

        b) in the flipping washing machine

Pinching it between my thumb and forefinger as far away from my face as possible, I dropped it into the trash bin along with the used dryer sheets, lint, and the remnants of the ‘I’m single, not desperate’ mug I’d accidently knocked off the counter with a broomstick a few weeks ago. And out with it to the trash can in the alleyway. In went the bleach to the washing tub, along with the now definitely unclean but clean-smelling laundry.

I’ve never found a tiny, creepy animal in my home before – and I’ve had a lot of homes. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. There was the time when a squirrel came in through the skylight of my yurt in Idaho, ran a panicked circle around my roommate’s legs, and beat a path out the door. That was really only for a minute or so. It hadn’t set up residence, and it certainly wasn’t there long enough to become mummified.

Mummified! That brings us back to thought of how it squished a little when I poked it. I think it might’ve become rehydrated in the wash.

Ew.

My sister in law once had a family of skunks set up home beneath her porch in college. That was probably worse than this. Skunks carry rabies, too, and with them comes the danger of them spraying the whole place with their foul odor... and if they’re living under the porch, there’s probably a good chance that they’ll scurry into the house while you’ve got the screen door propped open on moving day. Just imagine that for a second. 

I suppose my dad has caused a few creature-in-the-house near-misses himself. My father has what you might call an affinity for squirrels, a desire to bond with them and develop lasting human-rodent friendships. He loves to feed the neighborhood squirrels, and has even attempted to train them to eat from his hand as he crouches down on the ground nearby. Yes, he's retired. About four years ago, he started laying a trail of unsalted in-the-shell peanuts along the top of the garden fence, with the last peanut set just outside the front door. The result was this: arriving to visit my parents and coming face-to-face with a squirrel, perched on the fence mere inches from my nose, a squirrel now totally unafraid of human contact. One day, while home from his faraway job, my older brother opened the door to find a squirrel, upside down, suspended by its claws from the screen. That was not something that my mother had ever hoped to experience. By the end of that winter, all of the trained squirrels had since died without teaching their offspring to trust the white-haired man on the corner.

Well, no more bats have shown up since the fuzzy cheeked, mummified squashy thing emerged from the washing machine three days ago. By now it can be filed under ‘just another horrible story to tell in the pub.' 

Hopefully.

In praise of the farmer's market

On a Saturday, one of the best places to be in any town is at the farmer's market.

Fresh corn spilling out from a truck bed; bags and bags of cucumbers ready to be brought home and drowned in vinegar and spice; tender zucchini, yellow and green; shallots folded in their papery skins.

Today in Bismarck, vendors were bundled up against the wind and momentary cloudbursts. Market umbrellas were gripped tightly, threatening to turn their holders into a prairie version of Mary Poppins, and some came very close to blowing right across the tables. Coffee and talk were flowing as locals hunted down the summer's garden treasures.

There is such a short window of time on the northern plains when people can grow vegetables, little more than three months, sometimes less, so everyone knows to make the most of it. A truck bed mounded full corn is emptied in two hours; tomatoes (if they're ready) disappear into shopping bags as the buyer gasps their delight with finding them at all so early in the season. People talk of canning, and the taste of homegrown fruits in the middle of a January deep-freeze.

The question, 'what do you do with that?' passes between everyone's lips: kitchen conspirators, all.

Summer scene - July 21

The scene on Saturday evening as Bismarck people meandered north and south on 3rd street, just up the hill from the town center. The sun was low in the sky, streaking it pink and yellow. Humidity floated in windows and clung to t-shirts, hair, skin. The elm trees cast long shadows across the high school's soccer field, where, in the shaggy summer grass, a group of teenagers were playing soccer. Flashing in and out between them were two white figures: nuns, their ankle-length habits billowing behind. Rope belts swinging with every jogging step, veils streaking out, smiles wide on their faces. Nuns sprinting after a soccer ball, tackling gangly kids and causing sudden joy to stir in every person who had the fortune to look their way.