The 4th Sabbath of June

Himself

by Thomas Lynch

He'll have been the last of his kind here then.

The flagstones, dry-stone walls, the slumping thatch, out-offices and cow cabins, the patch of haggard he sowed spuds and onions in-- all of it a century out of fashion-- all giving way to the quiet rising damp or hush and vacancy once he is gone.

Those long contemplations at the fire, cats, curling at the door, the dog's lame waltzing, the kettle, the candle and the lamp-- all still, all quenched, all darkened-- the votives and rosaries and novenas, the pope and Kennedy and Sacred Heart, the bucket, the basket, the latch and lock, the tractor that took him into town and back for the pension cheque and messages and pub, the chair, the bedstead and the chamber pot, everything will amount to nothing much.

Everything will slowly disappear.

And some grandniece, a sister's daughter's daughter, one blue August in ten or fifteen years will marry well and will inherit it:

the cottage ruins, the brown abandoned land.

They'll come to see it in a hired car.

The kindly Liverpudlian she's wed,

in concert with a local auctioneer,

will post a sign to offer Site for Sale.

The acres that he labored in will merge

with a neighbor's growing pasturage

and all the decades of him will begin to blur, easing, as the far fields of his holding did, up the hill, over the cliff, into the sea.

The 3rd Sabbath of June

Elegy for the Personal Letter

by Allison Joseph

I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,

the ink blots and crossouts that show

someone lives on the other end, a person

whose hands make errors, leave traces.

I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant

lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory

or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes

dashed off on notebook paper, edges

ragged as their scribbled messages--

can't much write now--thinking of you.

When letters come now, they are formatted

by some distant computer, addressed

to Occupant or To the family living at--

meager greetings at best,

salutations made by committee.

Among the glossy catalogs

and one time only offers

the bills and invoices,

letters arrive so rarely now that I drop

all other mail to the floor when

an envelope arrives and the handwriting

is actual handwriting, the return address

somewhere I can locate on any map.

So seldom is it that letters come

That I stop everything else

to identify the scrawl that has come this far--

the twist and the whirl of the letters,

the loops of the numerals. I open

those envelopes first, forgetting

the claim of any other mail,

hoping for news I could not read

in any other way but this.

The Bean Town Cheer Club

These are my thoughts on Boston's better attributes.

Books literally lining the streets.

Books: There were bookstores around every corner. Used bookstores, new bookstores, children's bookstores, genre bookstores. The urge to fill my suitcase with 50 lbs of paper and leave my worthless clothes behind was almost insurmountable but I resisted. Oh to have even a tenth of those shops. And they weren't filled to the ceiling with Danielle Steele and Stephen King. They were teeming with good books, but I must note, I found no Wendell Berry. Is this indicative of Bostonian character? Yes. Undoubtedly.

150 beers to choose from and your own mug etched with the author's name of your choice to drink them out of if you put them all under your belt. 

Food: I made a pact, a blood oath, a sacred vow, a promise, crossed my heart coronary blockage be damned, that I would eat good food and lots of it. We would not attend to a chain restaurant of any manner in our nine days in Massachusetts. And we ate some good food. And it was easy. There are small little eateries around every corner in the city. We had seafood on the wharf- scallops, calamari, clams, and shrimp all fried to perfection, sandwiches on par with renaissance masterpieces, Tortellini Alfredo on the north side that makes my mouth water with the memory, Canolis and Lobster and all manner of beer and burgers – a vanilla porter at a great local place in Maynard, and Bukowski’s, a literal hole in the wall of a parking garage and the Mecca of beer drinking, the home of the dead authors club, and author itself of one hell of a burger. And then there was the epic fail.

Walden Grille in Concord – home of the laziest Caesar salad in the history of gastronomic Epicureanism. Sara didn’t like much on the menu so she ordered the Caesar, playing it safe. When it arrived it was a plate, with dressing squirted on the bottom, uncut crutons in that and a full head of of romaine lettuce with three salty anchovies flopped over it.

Yes, one of these.  Surprisingly it was at least clean of dirt.

We laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought it may be worthwhile to ask the waitress for a knife to cut that crap up and a salad tong to toss it but Sara managed with a steak knife and a fork. Terrible meal but perhaps the most memorable.

Like this only without the grating, chopping, and tossing.

All this to say at least they have more local institutions than you can count on two hands and quite a bit of local food from area farms.  Albeit, the ubiquitous non connect with anything resembling soil and grass was quite apparent.  And the prices were astronomical. 

History:  Standing on the old north bridge where the militia stood there ground against the British regulars on April 19th 1775 and reading the inscription on the stone, "I'm not afraid to go, and I haven't a man that's afraid to go," brings a shiver to the back of my neck.  We stood for something in a brief moment.  It renews a certain amount of idealistic hope in your soul to see it.

On Thinking About Wendell

The problem is, my insights are short flashes, followed by melancholy rolling in like thunder.

The Hail in June

Yeah for Gypsy Gardens.

3:00 pm: Received a call from my father that golf ball size hail obliterated the town of Absarokee near where they live and the storm is picking up speed towards us. You may want to cover your garden.

3:01 pm: My sister, who’s visiting us, and wife call and ask where to find buckets and boards. I tell them.

3:02 pm: Leave early from work.

3:05 pm: Text warning to fellow gardeners. Get back comments about an alien invasion and an avant-garde picture titled buckets on dirt.

3:06 pm: It’s a beautiful sunshiny day.

3:10 pm: Get home. Begin assault. For the next hour we bring out sawhorses and chairs and plywood and boards of all shapes and sizes and a sled and cardboard and every bucket I own. I cover the garden and the flowers and then I screw it all down.

4:10 pm: The yard is transformed into a gypsy garden. I mow the lawn for good measure just because I’m on a roll. Dark clouds have moved in from the west.

4:15 pm: The rain starts. The boys are wound up tight as drums. Zander’s giving me minutely weather updates. Storms are exciting.

4:20 pm: No hail yet. Rain’s picking up strength and a good wind moves it around a bit. I’ll admit that if it doesn’t hail then I’ll be a little disappointed.

4:30 pm: The rain is pounding down now and pea sized hail is coming down with it. Torrent may be an appropriate adjective. The gypsy hovel I put on the garden resists the storm.  I think of it as the Argo, Jason's ship consecrated by Athena and given a magical 5 gallon bucket from the sacred shop of Sayer which could speak and render prophecies. Or it may be the two dozen screws I drilled into it. Either way we drink wine and watch the flood commence.

4:40 pm. The window well is filling with water. I watch it in horror. I’ve no buckets left to bail with.

4:45 pm. I empty all my tools out of my tool bucket into a big pile in the laundry room and consecrate it for the cause.

4:50 pm. I’m up to my nuts in ice water bailing like a mad man. Perhaps my metaphor of a ship in a storm was a little too apt.

5:00 pm. The rain lets up. The house doesn’t flood. The garden is whole. All is well.

5:15 pm. Eat dinner. Give thanks.

On Gardening

Returning from some time away to a garden is a most depressing affair. 

Return from Boston

Though I didn't happen to mention it last week, perhaps as much out of guilt as complacency, I just returned from Boston and a much anticipated 9 days there.  We expunged a good amount of jet fuel and endured a lengthy amount of coralling, molesting, marching, sitting, and general boredom to get there and back.  But the time there was well worth it for a number of reasons.  I'm sitting now and thinking about our experiences there and hoping to get some insights about my own place and things in general. 

My first realization was I'm glad I don't live there.  As the saying goes; its a nice place to visit but for the traffic, garbage, assholes, and humid, pungent stink.  There were a lot of redeeming reasons to visit Bean Town but I would hate, loathe and despise living there.  It is the nature of travel for myself that makes me rethink my place and miss it dearly.  I'd be intrigued to hear Wendell talk of his time in New York when he first left home and went to be educated and began his professorship there and how that affected his view of home and place.  He hasn't talked about it at any length that I can remember but I have to wonder if it can be good to leave home and come back again?  Can it be necessary? 

2nd Sabbath of June

Shopping

by Faith Shearin

My husband and I stood together in the new mall

which was clean and white and full of possibility.

We were poor so we liked to walk through the stores

since this was like walking through our dreams.

In one we admired coffee makers, blue pottery

bowls, toaster ovens as big as televisions. In another,

we eased into a leather couch and imagined

cocktails in a room overlooking the sea. When we

sniffed scented candles we saw our future faces,

softly lit, over a dinner of pasta and wine. When

we touched thick bathrobes we saw midnight

swims and bathtubs so vast they might be

mistaken for lakes. My husband's glasses hurt

his face and his shoes were full of holes.

There was a space in our living room where

a couch should have been. We longed for

fancy shower curtains, flannel sheets,

shiny silverware, expensive winter coats.

Sometimes, at night, we sat up and made lists.

We pressed our heads together and wrote

our wants all over torn notebook pages.

Nearly everyone we loved was alive and we

were in love but we liked wanting. Nothing

was ever as nice when we brought it home.

The objects in stores looked best in stores.

The stores were possible futures and, young

and poor, we went shopping. It was nice

then: we didn't know we already had everything.

The First Sabbath of June

Hands by Jack Ridl

My grandfather grew up holding rags,

pounding his fist into the pocket

of a ball glove, gripping a plumb line

for his father who built what anyone

needed. At sixteen, wanting to work on

his own, he lied about his age

and for forty-nine years carried his lunch

to the assembly line where he stood

tightening bolts on air brake after

air brake along the monotonous belt.

I once asked him how he did that all

those years. He looked at me, said,

"I don't understand. It was only

eight hours a day," then closed

his fists. Every night after dinner

and a pilsner, he worked some more.

In the summer, he'd turn the clay,

grow tomatoes, turnips, peas,

and potatoes behind borders

of bluebells and English daisies,

and marigolds to keep away the rabbits.

When the weather turned to frost,

he went to the basement where,

until the seeds came in March,

he made perfect picture frames, each

glistening with layers of sweet shellac.

His hands were never bored. Even

in his last years, arthritis locking every

knuckle, he sat in the kitchen carving

wooden houses you could set on a shelf,

one after another, each one different.

On Household

According to the industrial formula, the ideal human residence (from the Latin residere, "to sit back" or "remain sitting") is one on which the residers do not work. The house is built, equipped, decorated, and provisioned by other people, by strangers.  In it, the married couple practice as few as possible of the disciplines of household or homestead. Their domestic labor consists principally, of buying things, putting things away, and throwing things away, but it is understood that it is, "best" to have even those jobs done by an "inferior" person, and the ultimate industrial ideal is a "home" in which everything, would be done by pushing buttons. In such a "home," a married couple are mates, sexually, legally, and socially, but they are not helpmates; they do nothing useful either together or for each other. According to the ideal, work should be done away from home. When such spouses say to each other, "I will love you forever," the meaning of their words is seriously impaired by their circumstances; they are speaking in the presence of so little that they have done and made. Their history together is essentially placeless; it has no visible or tangible incarnation. They have only themselves in view.

Wendell - Men and Women In Search of Common Ground

I have to decline Wendell's assumption that this is a condition of the industrial age.  The industrial age makes this lifestyle available to all you desire it but it is not the progenitor of the thinking behind it.  This has always been our desire as long as history itself.  The taking and owning of slaves to do your work is the equivalent of major appliance shopping at Sears.  If only they'd had consumer reports at the slave block.  Life would have been so much easier for those poor old timers.    Alas.

Hmm, but it continues. 

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, “mine” is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as “ours.”

This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. Such a household economy may employ the disciplines and skills of housewifery, of carpentry and other trades of building and maintenance, of gardening and other branches of subsistence agriculture, and even of woodlot management and wood-cutting. It may also involve a “cottage industry” of some kind, such as a small literary enterprise.

Wendell - Feminisim, the Body and the Machine

Damn you Berry and your small literary enterprise and your housewifery and carpentry and all of it.  I think even in the moments of achievment, such as the first tiny, dirty vegetable from the garden in July to the finishing touchs on a new bathroom we've sweated and bleed for for two years, we're still stuck in a cycle of macroeconomics that is terribly difficult to break from if only because land itself is astronomically priced and without dirt none of this is really worth talking about.  I'll have to explore more on that later.  Perhaps I'm being over negative because Berry, often enough, strikes nerves and convicts conscience with his measures and presents for myself a world that is both beautiful and dark.  It seems to be something unachievable.  Is this bad?