Grief Assuaged by Nature

 

In August, my dad died.  I spent a few hours processing the news, but all I felt was an emotional maelstrom and a physical need to go outside and DO something.

So I harvested saskatoon berries. 

Berry picking has always been a calming and meditative activity for me.  It engenders feelings of gratitude at the reliable plenty of a summer’s harvest.  

 Today though, my mind was whirling with images of my dad and my siblings as I plucked the fruit.  In the process, the berries soothed my knot of grief.

I remembered when I planted these six, spindly little seedlings a decade ago. Every year, I worried when the springy boughs bowed below the snow, wondering how they would fare the following spring.  Some branches broke.  Of those, I taped and splinted a few.  Some benefited.  Others didn’t.  I pruned low branches girdled beneath our deep snow by hungry voles.  I mulched in the fall and fertilized in the spring.

Of the six trees, two are tall and prolific producers.  Three are middling, and one is the runt of the group.  

Since each tree has grown differently, I have lots of “woulda, coulda, shoulda thoughts” about my interventions. What if I had planted them elsewhere and farther apart?  Some trees hog the sun, grow taller and stronger and their boughs whip the narrower branches of an adjacent tree, which becomes stunted.  What if I had pruned them better, earlier?  Now such intervention on some major limbs might kill the tree.  What if I had watered them deeper?  What if?

All of us who are children, as well as parents, co-parents, step-parents, and siblings contemplate such what ifs.  It is hard to step out of a family or community and view it from outside.

As I gathered the berries, I reached for those of the darkest blue hue, heavy and round with juice.  Since the berries do not all ripen at the same time, I leave those that are purple or red that need additional time to mature more slowly in the sun. 

Some berries grow in ideal locations – plenty of sun, protected from the wind, with room to grow, well separated from others. 

Some are physically deformed by birds that pecked part of them.  A few look fine, but skinny larvae burrowed inside and rot the interior.  In thick clusters, a single berry in the middle is always desiccated and surrounded by a gray fluff of mold, which taints the berries surrounding it. It did not have room to grow so it died and infected those surrounding it.

Each tree, each berry, each season, teaches me a different lesson.      

That day, different from a decade of other harvesting days, my mind viewed this line of trees as a community, each tree as a family, and the berries as individual members of that family tree.

My dad has died.  The saskatoons consoled me because I observed among those trees and branches, life experiences that illuminate my own.  

 I can’t hug my dad.  But I can stroke these branches and think about his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren who will grow toward the sun, strong and resilient.  He was a strong tree with, like all of us, some weak branches.  He has many progeny, who will blow and bend with the winds of the future.

We have a bench along the lake shore with three stone cairns as memorials.  When I retrieve his ashes, we will build a fourth. 

       

Lessons from the Brevity of Autumn

 

Some people find autumn and winter depressing and prefer spring and summer. 

I am not among that group.  To me, the brevity of a gorgeous, Alaskan fall is a very visible message to appreciate each day, each morning, each rapidly changing view.  Part of the reason is psychological: Because THIS WILL NOT LAST, so enjoy it.  Part of the reason is practical: the changes of fall and winter contribute to the fecundity of spring and summer.

Sometimes, we need to be hit on the head with important reminders like this.  Autumn does both.  It feels transient but it is benefits are long lasting.  

Sadly, I have two friends whose cancers have metastasized.  Both are using phrases like, “I will never see X or Y again.”  I think of them as I watch the leaves drop to the ground.  Is this their last autumn? Some of us know when death is right around the corner, but others are caught off guard.   We are lucky who enjoy a springtime youth, a summer’s middle age, and transitions to autumnal and then winter’s old age.  Not everyone does.  Fall drives that message home.  

So I luxuriate in the beauties of the season.   I stare in awe of electric yellow birch and larch trees (the latter is the only conifer that sheds its needles), framed by purple mountains.    I inhale the earthy aroma of high bush cranberries and the tannic scents of crispy leaves as my boots shuffle through the accumulating piles of red, orange, yellow, and brown that  flutter gracefully to the ground.    I harvest rose hips and berries and potatoes and horseradish root.

Besides the beauty, this annual blanket of fall leaves is as important to the ecosystem as elders are important to younger members of society.  The skirts below trees and bushes blanket them from cold and add biomass to the soil.  The leaves deter weeds.  From the trails that do not need the leaves, I rake piles to strew over my vegetable and flower gardens as mulch.  Over the winter, the leaves break down under the snow weight to lighten the soil the following year.   Voles and insects burrow beneath the leaves for protection from winter weather.  With so many benefits of autumn leaves, I don’t know why anyone rakes them into a garbage bag to be carted off.  They are valuable to every plant and critter in your yard.

Looking upward from the lake shore, I see termination dust (initial snow) coating the cap of the 4600 foot mountain west of our lake and draping the 5000 foot mountain range to our north.  Each 1000 feet of elevation is about 5 degrees cooler than below.  So after each rain or fog here, we watch the snowline creep downhill until it envelops us, too.  The natural world is our thermometer and barometer.  Mine is beautiful.

October 10 we awoke in the dark to the sound of hundreds of geese, swans and cranes vectoring south.  In the early morning light, we saw a flock of a hundred or more geese resting on our lake.  They huddled so close to one another that they looked like a bright white island. I don’t think my dog, who gets very excited about individual water fowl, could even interpret what that mass was.  The timing of their flight south was clear when the light lifted and we saw the first dusting of snow in our yard as well as deeper incursions on the mountain tops.  These huge migratory departures in fall and  arrivals in spring punctuate our year more decisively than any calendar date.

In this short and dramatic season, I know that some morning later this month, we will awaken to a black and white world.  Technicolor autumn will disappear for a year.  For others, this is their last season.  So, for me and for them, I savor every image of these last few days of evanescent beauty. 

In Nature, Nothing is Straight

 

When I fly into a city, what strikes me most are all the straight lines: long grids of streets and highways bisected at neat 90 degree angles, set with rectangular buildings, miles of telephone wires and railroad tracks.   This is especially striking in flat terrain, like Phoenix and Houston.  

Civil engineers can feel rightly proud of their profession.  They have transformed these landscapes into humanscapes, capable of providing transportation, communication, electricity, water, and housing for millions of people.

Alaska, of course, is not like that.  Our land is too rugged and our population small.  Our biggest city, Anchorage, has a straight grid of streets (numbered and lettered), but for only about 270,000 people before it runs out of room, between the mountains and the sea.  Because of both the land and the population outside this one municipality, we have only three numbered highways.  Many of our homes and communities are accessible only by marine highway (ferries) or, like mine, by small airplane. 

Personally, I think this is marvelous… 

Because there are no roads or electricity or other humanscape where I live (other than my own habitation structures), I am alert to the fact that in the biological and botanical world, NOTHING natural is straight.  Everything is curved, and for practical reasons. Curved surface areas of leaves and tree trunks receive and shed more sun and precipitation.  Mountains are shaped by ice, wind, and rain.  Circuitous streams and rivers and bogs capture and carry more water.  Nothing in human and animal bodies is straight either.  Think of the walnut curves in our brains, or the elliptical nature of our intestines, not to mention the vascular system.

To me (and I bet some psychology grad students have documented this), curves are more calming and attractive than straight lines. 

 

Speaking of psychology, we use terms like, “Life throws us a curve ball.” We never say that “Life throws us a line drive.” 

I wonder if physically and psychologically, we are more naturally, positively attuned to curves than the straight lines in benches, seating arrangements, buildings and roads. 

…    

When our float (or ski) plane rises above our lake in the Alaska bush, bearing my husband, dog, and me to anyplace else, I love looking down from 1200 feet to survey the natural landscape.  Because we have no pollution here, I can see much farther (from the ground or in the air) than in cities (even from our previous 17^th floor condo in a high-rise in Houston, TX.)   Here, I can see the Alaska Range, with Denali its pinnacle, about 200 miles north.   Whether summer green or winter white, every path of water, every beach, every stand of trees and plant life is sinuous.  Every mountain range, too.

As a result, my eye, like those of search and rescue spotters, is automatically drawn to those occasions of “what does not fit” in this view.  What stands out most is a straight line and something unnaturally shiny.  This is usually a bit of cabin roof line, flashing in the sun, or the gunnels of a metal boat or the long edge of a private plane’s wing in glossy yellow or white.

Aloft from our lake,  how long does it take before I see my first hint of human construction?  After ten minutes, I see a sliver of silver roof line. The roofs of these older cabins were creatively “shingled” with used fuel oil containers.  The shiny metal was cut, flattened, and nailed onto wooden roof planks or plywood.  Good repurposing.

In twelve minutes, we peer down at a river lined with cabins set five acres apart on a bluff.  Depending on the fish runs, we see 6 or 10 motor boats, but none today.  The braided river winds slowly south around sandbars and downed trees, carrying glacial silt from the Alaska Range to the Cook Inlet.  The name is Susitna.  In the Athabaskan language, the –na denotes a river and the –susit apparently refers to the glacial silt suspended in the river, turning it a milky color. 

Over the ensuing ten minutes, I see increasing indications of population:  asphalt roads, wooden telephone poles, cleared properties populated with vehicles and buildings in various states of use, repair, and functionality. 

We glide onto a lake adjacent to a major road and taxi to shore.  I open the gull wing passenger door, wait for my husband to stop the engine (which turns off the propeller), and drop down to the float, scoot under the diagonal struts, pick up the tow line, and jump to shore, less nimbly, I must admit, than a decade ago. 

After we secure the plane, we venture out to city errands in a vehicle we store there.  For the first time in many months, I open my wallet (often) for services, like a dentist or purchases we cannot grow, like citrus, coffee, and chocolate, and modern day conveniences that we cannot make, like hoses and gaskets and coaxial cable.  After not thinking about money for many months at home, it seems to me that in a city, that is foremost on my mind.

Even here in Alaska, with its gorgeous mountains, forests, and streams, my low view along the road is of really unattractive strip centers and parking lots.  My olfactory and auditory senses are assaulted by the sound and smell of vehicles on the road.  In a doctor’s waiting room or a restaurant, I feel awkward, almost embarrassed, by how close people are and how we can overhear conversations.  But people on the road do not seem to mind these noises and smells and lack of privacy.  They are used to the population density and its intrusions. 

My home is different.

Here, if I want to hear a human sound, I have to make it.  Only one other couple lives within many miles of us, and they tend to be quiet, too.

When I return home, and walk among the plants and woods of my property, along sinuous (of course) paths among berry bushes and spruce and birch trees, I notice that I breathe deeper than I do in a city.  Partly, this is because everything smells so good.  I inhale whichever berries or flowers are peaking, as well as the spruce, clover, and sweet grass.  And partly. this deep breathing is a sign of contentment and relaxation. 

When people are stressed out, we tend to breathe more shallowly. 

I acknowledge that some urbanites freak out in nature (we had a dear friend from Mumbai who had a panic attack out here the first day due to the silence and openness. It was totally unfamiliar.  No straight lines.  No cars and honking and crowds and the smells that emanate from all of them.  She had to fly back to the “big city” of Anchorage the next day and then to a city of many million people that felt  more comfortable to her.

Cities with infrastructure are impressive social and physical constructions where populations grow and develop culturally significant arts, technologies, and skills because large populations support specialization.  I enjoyed living in cities for decades and, because I no longer do, I respect all the hidden requirements that make them work (like sewage and water treatment and electricity, and traffic lights). 

But for more than a dozen years, I have chosen to listen to different sounds, see different lines, smell different scents.  These years living in the woods have changed me.  I have a deep sense of belonging here that was lacking in all those straight places, that lead... where?

Dog Days of Summer (where does that evocative phrase come from?)

 

The most urban of urbanites, who would not be caught dead beyond the highways and high rises of their favorite cities, may well evade many aspects of the natural world.  But one powerful aspect of Mother Nature, weather, imposes its will in even the most human of man made environments. 

Bee hive check for population and production

 

For many readers,, weather determines the clothes we wear, the design of our homes (we hope) and the utility bills we pay.  But for all history and even today, weather determines feast or famine, and death by freezing cold or excessive heat and all sorts of  disasters, like hurricanes, flooding, and tornadoes.

So it is not surprise that most religions have deities not only of weather, but of particular aspects of it, like storms, sun, rain.  Nor is it surprising that the constellations, which we see at particular times of year, are associated with the weather of that season.

I love researching the etymology of evocative phrases.  “The dog days of summer” intrigued me to find the best description to share with readers.

Below is a well written article from www.dictionary.com that explains this term that dates back to the ancient  Greeks.  Can you guess why?  Read below.

July 15, 2015 article, no author identified

Origin of Dog Days

It’s hot again, up in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s that time of year when the sun shines its most unforgiving beams, baking the ground and, indeed, us. It’s the portion of summer known as the hottest time of the year. Or, more delightfully, the dog days.

 

Contrary to common conjecture, the dog days do not take their peculiar name from weather that “isn’t fit for a dog,” or heat that is so extreme it drives dogs mad. These folk etymologies shrink in comparison with the actual background of the phrase, a story of astronomical proportions.

 

The dog days, in the most technical sense, refer to the one- to two-month interval in which a particularly bright star rises and sets with the sun, shining during the daylight hours and staying hidden at night. This star is known by three names: Sirius, the Dog Star, and Alpha Canis Majoris. Apart from being the most prominent star in the constellation Canis Major (Latin for “Greater Dog”), this heavenly body is responsible for the origin of the expression dog days, a phrase that has endured through millennia.

 

One of our hives swarming in mid-July

Classicists and astronomers will know the Dog Star as Sirius. The earliest record of this name comes from the Greek poet Hesiod, in Work and Days, written in seventh century BC. Meaning “searing” or “scorching,” Sirius encapsulates the Dog Star’s unusual brightness. Additionally, in Greek mythology Sirius is the name of the dog of Orion (a mythical hunter who has a constellation of his own adjacent to Canis Major), which further reinforces the Dog Star’s historical associations with canines. This tradition continues in the Harry Potter series; Sirius Black’s Animagus form is a large black dog.

 

The Dog Star’s connection to dogs was not only maintained by constellations and mythology, it was boosted by the fact that dogs seemed to take the brunt of the dog days. They suffered from the heat more intensely than humans seemed to, and were at greater risk of madness.

 

The English phrase dog days, which entered the language in the 1500s, is a direct translation from the Latin term caniculares dies, which refers to this specific seasonal phenomenon and is modeled after the same term in Hellenistic Greek. It is also from Latin that we got the word canicular, which refers to the Dog Star, as well the precursor to the expression dog days: canicular days.

 

The Dog Star, being the second brightest star that can be seen with the naked eye, did not escape the attention of ancient astronomers. Nor did its annual disappearance from the night sky and the corresponding influx of heat. Initially, ancient Greeks blamed the Dog Star for the sweltering weather, assuming that its brightness paired with the sun manifested in the hottest days of the year. This belief was debunked in the first-century BC by Greek astronomer Geminus, but the significance of the Dog Star remained untempered.

 

About 100 potatoes, various varietals

In ancient times, the dog days would have roughly corresponded to the summer solstice. Due to precession, however, the days have fallen later and later in the year. The exact dates of the dog days depend on your latitude, but by today’s estimation they begin on July 3 and come to a close on August 11.

 

Humans have been griping about the weather as far back as written history reaches, and the dog days were an important time for all. The Ancient Greeks and Romans, in particular, had grim feelings for Sirius, associating it with an outbreak of insufferable heat and fever. Civilization has long credited the objects in the sky with influence over the earth and its inhabitants; if it’s not the Dog Star cursing you with sultry summer heat and madness it’s the moon driving you to lunacy. It seems you can’t win when it comes to the celestial bodies. (end of article)

 

The heat conveyed by the word choice, Sirius, and the phrase, dog days of summer, may sound cute to someone who can retreat to a shady interior cooled by air conditioning.  But for thousands of years, including today, a scorching end of the growing season means that food crops bolt and die before the optimal size and condition for harvesting.  Fruits shrivel and drop from the trees.  Shallow rooted plants, even perennials, can die. Honey bees will swarm because the hive gets too crowded and hot and they need "to thin the herd." Normal irrigation is inadequate and additional water may be unavailable when rivers run low and warm, which can kill fish, as well.  

People dependent on the food they grow fear weather outside a fairly narrow range for optimal growth.  Too much heat, too much rain, too late or early a frost all result in a winter of food rationing and hopes for an early spring.  This is why so many first people were nomadic and did NOT settle down to year round agriculture.  It was unpredictable.  It seemed more prudent to travel to places with robust seasons of hunting, trapping, and fishing, with the bonus of gathering and preserving plant materials in each of those locations.   Still, in many far North American tribal languages, the period around the month of March was called “the month of hunger.”

Brassicas, potatoes, beans

The beauties of nature and its beneficent creations are awe inspiring.  But so, too, are is its mercurial powers of destruction.   Even people who live in cities experience the devastation of tornadoes, hurricanes, and “snowmaggedons.”  But it is people who grow some of their own food who understand why an evocative phrase like “the dog days of summer” could strike visceral fear in those who experienced that weather.