Making Myself Marvelous

I have been trying to dance on stilts for a number of years.

I have been attempting to walk the bomb-pocked streets of the little Olde World on my fingertips.

I've been entertaining a lethargic thought.

My aspirations have retreated into a silence so complete I've had to have my hearing tested.

You can imagine how tired I am.

Still, stuff gets done. Like the amazing editors at Doubleback Books who have re-ushered my first chapbook back into the world of the reading, seven years to the month after it first appeared. 

Yes, that's right: "In the Voice of a Minor Saint" is renewed & improved and completely free online.

Think of the forests we have saved by working together in this way. 

Woot!

tiny kingdoms

A tree is considered too huge and unruly to bring indoors, unless you choose the docile bonsai. We have four bonsais in the house, in various stages of surrender. Tending them is an exercise in patience, but also a show of power. We love them because they’re beautiful. We love them because they make us giants.

spring&all

the chest
the pretty chest
the pretty chestnut
tree

Maple

Two nights ago we had a big thunderstorm. The whole night it seemed the sky was more often lit up with lightning than dark with night time. But most impressive was the thunder, the loudest I’ve ever heard. Like giant bones breaking. Like boulders hurled at concrete. But the next morning, all along the sparkling sidewalks, there was no real damage to speak of.

Last night we had another storm of strong wind and rain. It sounded like we were swooshing around in a washing machine. Not much thunder or lightning, and yet this morning when I took the dog out, fat branches were downed all over the park, and even trees. One that the dog and I visit often was wrenched out of the ground, its roots severed, leaving a soupy black grave. It was sad, I told the dog, and so improbable. I’m going to miss that tree.

song of the day: As

and there in a wood

I've had some time off, which means walking the dog. On one of my many journeys through the park, I was naming the trees (Octopussy, General Grant, Burgermeister Meisterburger, Frau-Frau, Funeral, Scarface...), and it occured to me that the famous Bong Tree of The Owl and the Pussycat fame must be the Baobab.

"They sailed away
for a year and a day
to the land where the Bong tree grows.
And there is a wood...."

Don't ask me why I had this revelation on a frosty grey German day. There wasn't a Baobab in sight. But recently I’ve been leafing through a book called Remarkable Trees of the World, which features a number of fabulous Baobabs. It's also called “the bottle tree” (and you need a bottle to make a bong, right?). It's also called “the monkey bread tree,” “the cream of tartar tree,” “the chemist tree,” “the sour gourd” and “the lemonade tree.” And get this - there's a place in Tanzania called Bong'wa where this tree grows. Tanzania is a coastal country, thus reachable by peagreen boat. I know I've sometimes taken the Owl & Pussycat thing too far, but I'm sure Edward Lear couldn't resist slipping Baobabs into his poem, disguised as water pipes.

This photo shows Baobab alley in Madagascar, which, as you probably know from playing Risk, is an island off the eastern coast of Africa that split from the continent 160 million years ago. Since then you've had to sail there, although of course these days you could also fly.

There are different species, but mostly Baobabs are famous for just being weird and difficult to climb. You can see more here & here. And here are a bajillion more.

Daphne

When my kids were little, I told them everyone in the world has their own personal tree somewhere. I don’t remember why I made this up. Maybe I was trying to get them to look more carefully at trees. In any case, the idea of having their own tree intrigued them, then seemed to start gnawing at them. What if they never found their trees?

Eventually I tried figuring out how many trees there are in the world (approximately, of course, since right now the parks department is uprooting a diseased elm, developers outside Saginaw are bulldozing a few acres, the Christmas tree growers are replanting, etc etc). I started at the corner park, which is fairly modest, and got to fifty-three, but then gave up when I came to one of the pathways in, which is crawling with trees and tree-like bushthings that I don’t know if they qualify or what.

I can only conclude that spread out over the face of the earth are five trillion trees, give or take a few. So, the chance any of us would ever find our trees seems remote. Luckily in the seven years or so since I had this brilliant idea, the kids appear to have forgotten it completely, and moved on to finding other important stuff of the teenage variety, like a boyfriend who calls when he says he will.

But I haven’t forgotten the tree idea. It’s romantic and quixotic, and I am in fact always on the lookout. I will let you know when I find my tree. I hope it will be an Laurel or Oak or something flowering, but I’m afraid it may turn out to be a bushthing.