The Nature of Writing: Holly Tree

The Nature of Writing: Holly Tree: Every fall the berries appear in spiked leaves of the 30-foot tree my mom planted, little red dots eaten by birds and deer. From the glossy...

Holly Tree

Every fall the berries, little red dots eaten by birds and deer, appear between the spiked leaves of the now 30-foot tree my mom planted years ago. From the glossy, curling leaves, I suspect it’s an English holly, on a watch list of non-natives in the Northwest as a plant to monitor, although not subject to outright removal.

The holly tree was adopted by the Romans and druids, who celebrated it as a symbol of endurance deep in midwinter. Holly continues to be celebrated as a Christian symbol of life after death.

The tree my mom planted lives on years after she’s gone -- at Christmas, I place sprigs of holly mixed with cedar at her grave, which is located on the other side of the mountain from the holly tree. Across the cemetery lawn, a woman cleans a headstone of moss. The Douglas firs surrounding the graveyard still, and then waver in the windstorm that’s coming.

The next day, after hours of cold rain, I wake up to what I'll always think of as Mom's holly dusted with snow, its bright berries popping against a deep and everlasting green.

The Deer Hour

Slowing the car so gravel won’t scatter, I see a buck in the middle of the driveway, his antlers outlined against the woods. Instead of running, he stares at me, as if I’ve interrupted his evening. I stop, and he takes careful steps, not hurried at all, long legs deliberate across the gravel and eye toward the woods.

In this place between urban and rural, the deer, like raccoons and other animals well adapted to humans, thrive. There’s no hunting here, another reason for the deer to linger. Dusk, a good time for them to eat, represents a shadowy, in-between time – not quite day, not yet night.

Humans turn to in-between times for different reasons, many choosing to feed their creativity, particularly writing, in the early hours before the new day or late in a dark velvet night.

The light retreats faster every day now, lending any concrete, daytime task greater urgency. Even a late afternoon hike in the woods catches me off guard one day, with the sun full across the path on my way up the mountain and the forest turning gray on the way down, racing night.

The next day, I walk around the neighborhood to yet another dusk, the moon glowing after a shadowed start. Toward the end of my walk, I spot two does grazing. They’re in someone else’s yard this time, under cover of apple trees.

They don’t move, leaving the next move up to me. I’m the one who drifts across the street instead, leaving the deer to their mysterious in-between, their hour on the mountain. 

Break in the Rain

It’s the rainy season, with clouds so low they hide half the mountain and platter-sized maple leaves layer the ground. Rain has fallen steady for a week, pouring all weekend and tapering to clouds by Monday.

Midweek, I wake up to the sun. It's really more of a hazy glow than gold, but on a freelancer’s schedule, I have the luxury of capturing it when I can. Because it feels so rare, even though winter has barely started, I harness the dog, lace up my shoes, and head up the mountain.

It’ll only be a short walk, I tell myself, much like I promise myself to write a few paragraphs in hopes there’ll be more. My dog dives for the switchbacks, the light-spattered road enticing us just another turn, even though there’s work waiting back home.

We aren’t alone, spotting two other people on the route, one on foot with five dogs spilling over one another. We ask each other if we’re headed to the top of the mountain, replying cheerfully that we’re not, a brief outing good enough. On the way back down, the skies turn gray with insistent drops smacking what’s left of the leaves.

Given the Northwest drought this past summer, the shift to rain is welcome, a return to normalcy. The El Nino winter forecast promises dryer conditions for the North, rain for the South, and warmer temperatures for the West. This means loving the rain alongside the sun breaks, embracing the 4:30 pm, damp-spattered darkness and what it provides the landscape long term. On the last curves of the trail, the dog and I don’t rush, letting the cool drops spot our hair, reassured we’re almost back. 

NOAA Winter Weather

Weather Network Prediction

Salmon Are Home

A few days before my hometown’s Salmon Days Festival, I take a sunny afternoon to pop onto the bridge downtown in what is Washington State’s most visited hatchery. The pink-tinged salmon are what colored leaves are to other geographic areas – a sure sign of fall.
  

On a warm footbridge, I watch Chinook salmon making their way back in water turned shallow by a warmer than average summer. The King County Department of Natural Resources says “Warm waters and low flows have made 2015 a tough year for salmon as they work to return to streams and rivers around Puget Sound this fall.” A hatchery volunteer walks by while I stare at the water. “After it cools off a bit they’ll start jumping,” he promises.

I move over to the holding tank where the salmon glide by, eggs and milt ready for harvest and their journey and life cycle complete. The stream supports both wild and hatchery salmon, the hatchery fish distinguished by a removed adipose fin.

The hatchery, built in the 1930s, is a Depression-era project designed to replenish salmon from the logging and mining that took place in the area. More recent efforts to preserve the creek habitat include removal of a dam, which the state replaced with a series of weirs to make the salmon’s journey easier.

A few others join me on the bridge to take in this upstream journey and the pull of home. In shadow-spotted waters, lines of salmon return to the same place I’ve come back to, navigating the familiar along with challenges to come.

 

Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery

King County Department of Natural Resources

 

What the wind says

In Wisconsin, I walked our dog under a row of pines planted as a windbreak. Instead of stopping the wind, the trees came alive in it, their roar coming from a deeper place.

I looked up at their branches, thick at the top and trimmed, by our neighbor, at the bottom. When not trimming the branches, she often stopped near the trees to pick up leaves and sticks. I took the dog over to say hello.

In a fresh gust, one of the trees lobbed a pine cone at me. Doesn’t it sound nice, I said.

My neighbor, dressed in flannel for the cool fall day, looked around to see what I meant.

The trees, I said, remembering the versions I’d grown up with – Douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar, the wind slipping through them like water, even mimicking the nearby Pacific in their constant sigh.

The sound the wind makes, I said.

She looked from me to the trees. Having lived here all her life, the trees had been a practical constant and something to maintain, something she stopped listening to, just like I stopped hearing a backyard stream and its determined journey down the mountain where I grew up.

Maybe my neighbor considered those pines simply a deterrent to more insistent winds, especially Midwest winter gusts so frozen they coated your eyelashes. The Northwest, too, offered windstorms swaying branches and felling trunks--even last week, a rare summer storm offered winds of 46 mph-- while West Texas fronts heaved tumbleweeds across Highway 84.

My neighbor and I looked up at the branches together. It does make a sound, she said after a moment or two, the wind's sigh filling the space between us. 

Mountains, marmots, and point-of-view

John sees a marmot first on the side of a lower slope in Mount Rainier National Park. It looks like a cat, he says.

A cat? I look at the green slope with a few last purple flowers – maybe lupine – but I don’t see what he sees. I don’t doubt him, but wonder if he’s seeing something else, like a bobcat. It’s what makes a hike, writing, and even a relationship more interesting—not seeing things in quite the same way.

John is steadfast. Well, it looks like a cat.

I squint and stare where he points. Though it's been a dry season, grasses bend in the breeze and the trail is lined by mountain bog genitian, its compact blue buds about to flower. I never see the cat he mentions.

We take a trail that curves higher with tighter turns. Hikers on this temperate day spread out to different routes, our numbers thinning the higher and rockier the slope. We head toward a trail called Skyline for a mountain view I remembered the last time I visited, my view skyward rather than grounded.

Around a rocky bend of the trail, a spot of brown ambles across the mountain meadow. I catch the eye of another hiker – a marmot, she says. The gopher-like animal, thick coated and gray tinged, swims through the last of the flowers and tall grass. It’s my turn to have John stop and look.

John sees the marmot, too – no mistaking our shared vision, even though we'd both describe it in different ways. It’s what I saw before, John says, the cat-like creature he alone spotted.  

The marmot ignores us and heads downhill, unconcerned with four hikers on the trail. The area's rodents, marmots among them, are some of the most productive members of the landscape, according to the park website, taking up residence in the subalpine meadows and co-existing well with visitors, who become part of their everyday. I want to take a picture of the marmot, but I want to watch him even more, the glacier-striped mountain becoming a backdrop for now. 

Heat wave

On a Saturday morning I find a shady patch of grass at Coulon Beach Park and spread out a towel, a magazine, and my toes. The weather out west has turned hotter than usual, into the 90s and both a topic of conversation and a hardship for many residents without air conditioning in the temperate Northwest.

For a local escape, I step into the southern shore of Lake Washington, warm with a hint of cool that's easy to get used to. From the navy blue water, the sandy beach behind me is lined with bright towels, while above me planes fly far enough away to be silent. Temporary as it is, this short swim will stay with me a while, not only in memory but as a cool-off good for the rest of the day, part of the hottest June on record in Washington.

East of the mountains, conditions are more extreme, with wildfires burning and temperatures climbing into the 100s. In Texas, a friend in Austin talks about days of rain and no sunshine in sight, the jet stream driving the rain toward the middle of the country with disastrous flooding events. I experienced extremes of the jet stream from a central perspective while living in Wisconsin, when a persistent winter-time dip brought days of cold and snow.

A rope boundary loops through the swimming area of the park, and once the lifeguards take their posts at noon, it's okay to swim beyond the rope into deeper waters toward the board walk, which a few of us do. I can't feel the bottom, the waves choppier and creating a more demanding swim. One of the lifeguards patrols the area in a rowboat, just to be safe given the distance. In other parts of the world, the temperatures soar, dip, or soak, weather swinging hot and cold no matter the season.

After my swim, I take slow motion steps through the shallow water and head to shore, back to the shade and my magazine. I'm not the only one trading sun for shade under the maple trees. During this particular heat wave, we do our best to cool off. We navigate and swap stories about it, speculating what the next wave of weather will bring and what we can do about it for the future.

Resources About the Weather

The Fourth River Literary Journal -- Call for Submissions on Climate Change

Creative Nonfiction -- Upcoming Issue About the Weather (December 2015)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Trimming Viburnum

With the help of a long-handled trimmer, my dad and I snip the topmost strands of viburnum, the shiny-leaved shrub outside his door. Its name is Latin for "wayfaring plant," though I feel more like the wandering one, having returned to my hometown after twenty-some years away.

There's so much of this viburnum outside the door, it looks like a table of green, one I'm used to walking by without considering the way Dad keeps it vibrant with careful editing a few times a year. Left to its own devices, this enthusiastic shrub will overtake the sidewalk and grow taller than the nearby window. Dad, meanwhile, keeps the best of the plant, its deep green core, and trims growth that doesn't shape the plant as well.

I offer to help and the tool Dad hands me, a long-handled combination of clippers and pincers, is what fascinates me most. While the blade slices the leaves, the pincers hang onto them, not letting go just yet. Like a good editing tool, the blade snips while the pincers simultaneously hang onto the trimmings, filing them away for another narrative or even a different role in the existing story.

We'll recycle the cut leaves, making them part of the landscape as mulch or fertilizer, a good reminder from Dad that what we trim, whether leaves or words, can find a home somewhere else. The established viburnum outside the door, meanwhile, will grow red-tinted in fall, evolving and taking on a new form even while we try to contain it. We'll edit it again in a few months, allowing for growth yet keeping what's best about the wandering plant, for now, in place.