11 April 2017, early evening
High sixties, cloudy, slight breeze, occasional drop of rain
I return to the wide chestnut tree on Mellon Park's southeast side, back against the rough bark and legs crossed among wood chips. I know, for sure now, that this tree is a chestnut; familiar limp leaves unfurl from knobby buds at the tips of the branches. I remember when I first came here at the beginning of the semester, how impatiently I shivered against this tree's trunk, staring at the branches knotted like my own cold and dry knuckles. Now the soft green leaves spill out like the drape of damp hair.
At my feet, I notice weeds popping up—dandelion and what I've learned to call white man's foot, or broad-leafed plantain. It's a squat forb, a thick-leafed cousin of spinach that grows in any hard-packed, well-trodden ground. The story goes that as white settlers headed west, this weed popped on the cracked wagon trails behind them, a green spread marking their passage.
I recognize, I realize, the plants we label as weeds, the outsiders, those that stand out from the native flora and fauna. Biologically speaking there's no such thing as a weed; it's only a construct of gardeners and ecologists to label a plant that has a leg up in an otherwise fully-functioning system. Or it's simply an unwanted plant. I recognize the dandelion and white man's foot because they've spread their way west as well, content to unfurl webbed and rounded leaves between cracks in the sidewalk and in dirt lots used for spillover parking at high school football games or the county fair. And I recognize the chestnut tree above me because one grows in the yard of my grandparents' farm, planted by human hands, watered by sprinklers as well as summer cloudbursts.
Chestnut trees aren't native to Montana, nor dandelions or white man's foot. Neither, to an extent, am I. I stare at my own white feet scuffed in dirt beside the plantain, calluses still thick from a childhood existence spent mostly barefoot. I remember the rose thorns and glass and splinters lodged in the bottom of my feet, how I wailed on my stomach as my dad worked to dig them out. I never learned, opting shoeless every time I had the chance.
Transplants, transplanted. Despite my first year of graduate school coming to a close, I still feel out of place here in Pittsburgh, some days more so than others. When I first arrived, it was the landscape and culture that stood out as different: humidity and deciduous forests, building after building with blinds drawn down against the daylight, however gloomy. But somewhere that difference shifted, and I became the different factor. Internal versus external landscapes. I'm not unwanted here, a plague on native systems, but I think there's a reason I can so easily identify the weeds, that I identify with the weeds.
My scope in Pittsburgh, especially in my writing, usually boils down to a comparison to home—to the West, to Montana, to Western Montana. I'd like to think I've never hoisted Montana above other places (though nobody's perfect), but I think my main tendency is a challenge to re-situate my perspective. I'm always looking through that lens of home, and I've realized even that lens is something new. I've traveled a lot, skipping across Europe from top to bottom, investigating different places in the US, but even then, even in bouts of homesickness, I never felt the ache of belonging I do today. Maybe it took those half-years of hopping from country to country, state to state with only a backpack of my belongings to instill that unshakeable sense of home. Maybe it was moving here to Pittsburgh, studying in a MFA program that focuses so deeply on the concept of home, that made me fully understand the complexity of my roots.
Nuthatches click above in their own morse code; robins trill and sing in every direction. For a moment the sun warms through the clouds, washing the park in a soft evening glow. To the north, streaks of rain drift down from an overcast sky, and a lone dark cloud hunches in front of the cloudbursts like a sky-bound beaver.
My thoughts are scattered today, leaping from weeds to robins to observation of self and home. But I do feel wholly present in this moment, content enough to simply sit and watch and be. When I first came here I hunched my back against this tree trunk in impatience, wanting only to move. The destination, I realize, is secondary; the drive comes in the movement itself, of seeing the world every second from a different perspective. Motion brings my body and mind in contact with different landscapes, my unshod feet muddied and pricked by stones and thorns. Motion, however falsely justified, brought my ancestors west, a trail of soft-leafed rosettes in their wake. And motion has brought me here, to Pittsburgh, to an environment where I still feel like a transplant.
But how beautiful it is, too, to know the perspective of stillness, to watch the songbirds bustle about their days, the park visitors wind up the paths, the clouds lift from the horizon on their stilts of rain. How easily I forget this viewpoint, back against a tree grown familiar, to sit and watch the world move around me. I'm trying to shake of my own labeling as a transplant, an outsider. I'm trying, like the chestnut tree buds, to let my hair down, to walk these sidewalks without feeling out of place in my Chacos, chugging water from a Nalgene, speaking with a subtle drawl that's recently bloomed (or that I've only recently noticed) in my accent.
I'm not a chestnut tree, nor a whitebark pine, nor a daffodil. My roots aren't clutched into a riverbank or sprung from a grassy lawn. I can move, and while I'm here, I don't want to feel out of place, but in place—sitting crosslegged in the grass when the earth isn't too soggy, watching the city pulse, woodpeckers forage, robins lay claims to territories, kids play, couples picnic, daffodils creep among chives, wind rattle leaves, snow settle and melt, wood chippers bellow, squirrels doze, crows swoop and glide, and clouds darken and sweep the sky a hard, indescribable blue.
I'd like to sit here and watch, just a moment longer.
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Entry 7: Opening
2 April 2017, early afternoon
Mid-fifties, partly sunny, slight breeze
With the ground still damp and grass glossed by dew, I return to Nannette's bench in Mellon Park, where I find the daffodils spanning up towards my feet. Since I was last here, they've quadrupled, if not more, their range on the west-facing slope. Some shoots droop wilted tips, while others look as if they'd just poked through the wet earth that morning. Pale yellow and bright yellow flowers glow against the blue sky half-smeared by clouds. Patches of hollow-stemmed chives fill the gaps between shoots of daffodils; I pinch of a blade and let the sharp smell take me back to childhood summers picking and chopping chives from the yard for dinner of baked potatoes.
A songbird behind me chips out his song, persistent and forceful like someone blowing too hard on a whistle. I crane my neck but can't ketch a glimpse of him; his voice hops along the still-bare branches of the trees. The trees downslope, however, have popped out white buds of flowers like blots and dabs on a painting, and I wish I had brought my tree guide to identify the budding trees.
The sun blares out from behind a cloud and I squint, alternating open eyes as I scribble words onto the page. Today the sky seems bigger, the horizon less crowded by low overcast, and I relish in it, that taste of an endless horizon. Why today? I wonder. The city's canopy remains bare, thousands of branches crisscrossing and layering to a tattered hem of horizon, and there have been blue, open skies before. Maybe, I think, it's an internal projection of landscape. Try as I might I find my internal and external topographies meddling and crossing each other, gray skies shadowing my mind, stress pulling wind hard against my face. It's hardly a one-way street; if anything, there are multiple lanes and wailing horns.
Everyone seems to be out today—runners, bikers, people walking dogs, children screeching across the park. This morning, running in Frick Park, I sprinted down a grassy slope, feeling with every pump of my legs that childish joy of playing outside, of racing among green carpets and letting loose any inhibitions. A fly dive bombs my forehead and circles my legs before buzzing off. I can hear the ground clicking again, the shift of air and water and earthworms settling and expanding into warmer weather. I shake my head to make sure it isn't just water seeped into my inner ear from this morning's shower. Clumps of minerals and bowls of water in your ear, it turns out, sound just the same as ones in the shifting earth. Inner landscapes and outer ones are sometimes indistinguishable.
A white butterfly lifts and dips among the daffodils and chives. Twice I brush off a caddisfly-like insect hell-bent on climbing up my calf. This afternoon feels like the world is exhaling, the canopied city sighing, breathing out that old intake of winter's air and false hopes and suggestions of spring. Everything is opening—earth and insect wings, blossoms and birds' beaks, my own mind and eyes, one at a time. I fear false springs, but today I cling to open sky and budding flowers, the burst of green on the park's lawn, the influx of insects keen on my body. Rain will fall again, and wind rustle warmth from my fingers, but at least the season is opening, the daffodils creeping their claims with confidence up the slope.
A breeze lifts up through the blooming trees and daffodils, filling my own open lungs with the scent of petalled promise. And I breathe out, a little, my own winter of doubts.
Mid-fifties, partly sunny, slight breeze
With the ground still damp and grass glossed by dew, I return to Nannette's bench in Mellon Park, where I find the daffodils spanning up towards my feet. Since I was last here, they've quadrupled, if not more, their range on the west-facing slope. Some shoots droop wilted tips, while others look as if they'd just poked through the wet earth that morning. Pale yellow and bright yellow flowers glow against the blue sky half-smeared by clouds. Patches of hollow-stemmed chives fill the gaps between shoots of daffodils; I pinch of a blade and let the sharp smell take me back to childhood summers picking and chopping chives from the yard for dinner of baked potatoes.
A songbird behind me chips out his song, persistent and forceful like someone blowing too hard on a whistle. I crane my neck but can't ketch a glimpse of him; his voice hops along the still-bare branches of the trees. The trees downslope, however, have popped out white buds of flowers like blots and dabs on a painting, and I wish I had brought my tree guide to identify the budding trees.
The sun blares out from behind a cloud and I squint, alternating open eyes as I scribble words onto the page. Today the sky seems bigger, the horizon less crowded by low overcast, and I relish in it, that taste of an endless horizon. Why today? I wonder. The city's canopy remains bare, thousands of branches crisscrossing and layering to a tattered hem of horizon, and there have been blue, open skies before. Maybe, I think, it's an internal projection of landscape. Try as I might I find my internal and external topographies meddling and crossing each other, gray skies shadowing my mind, stress pulling wind hard against my face. It's hardly a one-way street; if anything, there are multiple lanes and wailing horns.
Everyone seems to be out today—runners, bikers, people walking dogs, children screeching across the park. This morning, running in Frick Park, I sprinted down a grassy slope, feeling with every pump of my legs that childish joy of playing outside, of racing among green carpets and letting loose any inhibitions. A fly dive bombs my forehead and circles my legs before buzzing off. I can hear the ground clicking again, the shift of air and water and earthworms settling and expanding into warmer weather. I shake my head to make sure it isn't just water seeped into my inner ear from this morning's shower. Clumps of minerals and bowls of water in your ear, it turns out, sound just the same as ones in the shifting earth. Inner landscapes and outer ones are sometimes indistinguishable.
A white butterfly lifts and dips among the daffodils and chives. Twice I brush off a caddisfly-like insect hell-bent on climbing up my calf. This afternoon feels like the world is exhaling, the canopied city sighing, breathing out that old intake of winter's air and false hopes and suggestions of spring. Everything is opening—earth and insect wings, blossoms and birds' beaks, my own mind and eyes, one at a time. I fear false springs, but today I cling to open sky and budding flowers, the burst of green on the park's lawn, the influx of insects keen on my body. Rain will fall again, and wind rustle warmth from my fingers, but at least the season is opening, the daffodils creeping their claims with confidence up the slope.
A breeze lifts up through the blooming trees and daffodils, filling my own open lungs with the scent of petalled promise. And I breathe out, a little, my own winter of doubts.
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Entry 6: Carpe diem
17 March 2017, early afternoon
Low forties, overcast, slight breeze
The ground is a muddy, soppy crumble of eager green grass and patches of spring snow. This week's promised blizzard, up to six inches, ended up only a skirt of snow, and now most of it has melted into the saturated earth. I wander carefully up the hill in Mellon Park, testing the feel of the ground beneath my poorly-treaded boots. Sitting down on the hill's crest, like I usually do, isn't an option, unless I want soaked jeans, and I imagine even the wood chips surrounding the park's trees are soggy and damp. So I meander west, spotting a vacant bench above an asphalt path.
"Nanette L. Gordon," the bench's plaque reads, "Raised her family in this park 1928-2016."
I sit down on Nanette's bench, wondering how much this place has changed since 1928. The hill sloping down to the path is the same muddy turf as the rest of the park, but here draping green fingers of daffodils spear up through the tufted grass and rounded blankets of wet snow. Closer to the path, pockets of slumping, bright yellow flowers glow against the gray afternoon. I'm reminded of glacier lilies back in Montana, spring's first flowers popping bright yellow against snowfields trickling sweet meltwater through gravelly soils of granite, quartz, and fool's gold. For fear of giardia, I never drink straight from mountain streams except for places like these—clear, sharp rivulets of the purest tasting water I've ever had, shared by blooming glacier lilies. Soon shooting stars join them, and yellow bells, and buttercups, flares of color against a landscape still dominated by winter's white.
I've been thinking a lot about risk lately, in writing and in life, and these hunched but verdant daffodils remind me of that sharp-edged contemplation. In forth and fifth grade my teacher taught us the phrase Carpe diem, "seize the day" in Latin, and those words have stuck with me ever since, a foundation of thought before yolo ever worked its way into modern lexicon. Carpe diem, I think, staring at the daffodils still edged against snow, risking their paper-thin petals against ripping wind and starry-skied frost for the chance to bloom first, to stretch pale roots into sodden earth among knifes of ice. So why not stretch green leaves through snow to shine sharp yellow against that snow?
I know that this gust of cold, snowy weather across the eastern United States has frozen fruit trees' buds, cutting out a season's crops even before the season began. Anthropogenic climate change means spring is inching ever closer to the new year for many parts of the world, but unpredictable weather means these cold systems still bluster through and shred flower buds and crops. Now carpe diem is each day, every day seized by an unpredictability, a snowball of conditions we cannot control but somehow still catalyze.
Daffodils in Pittsburgh, snowfields in Montana, all suddenly immediate and terrifying. Glacier lilies, as their name alludes, prefer glaciers as well as snowfields, and glaciers in places like Glacier National Park are expected to disappear by 2030, and those in the Beartooth Mountains and elsewhere in the state likely not much longer. Pittsburgh, I've found, is on the fringe of north and south, sixty-five in January and then back in the teens two weeks later, a wild mismatch of data points on a graph. The daffodils, too, are on the fringe of snow, of winter, of a white unpredictability borne from a known yet still debated and doubted source.
I'd like to live like the daffodils, like glacier lilies and shooting stars and trees blooming in spite of it all. Dig in my feet to mud and grit and sopping snow and yell bright yellow into the tumultuous air, that here we are, cold and bright, stooped but growing, windblown and seizing every moment for its sunshine and sweet, clear rain.
Low forties, overcast, slight breeze
The ground is a muddy, soppy crumble of eager green grass and patches of spring snow. This week's promised blizzard, up to six inches, ended up only a skirt of snow, and now most of it has melted into the saturated earth. I wander carefully up the hill in Mellon Park, testing the feel of the ground beneath my poorly-treaded boots. Sitting down on the hill's crest, like I usually do, isn't an option, unless I want soaked jeans, and I imagine even the wood chips surrounding the park's trees are soggy and damp. So I meander west, spotting a vacant bench above an asphalt path.
"Nanette L. Gordon," the bench's plaque reads, "Raised her family in this park 1928-2016."
I sit down on Nanette's bench, wondering how much this place has changed since 1928. The hill sloping down to the path is the same muddy turf as the rest of the park, but here draping green fingers of daffodils spear up through the tufted grass and rounded blankets of wet snow. Closer to the path, pockets of slumping, bright yellow flowers glow against the gray afternoon. I'm reminded of glacier lilies back in Montana, spring's first flowers popping bright yellow against snowfields trickling sweet meltwater through gravelly soils of granite, quartz, and fool's gold. For fear of giardia, I never drink straight from mountain streams except for places like these—clear, sharp rivulets of the purest tasting water I've ever had, shared by blooming glacier lilies. Soon shooting stars join them, and yellow bells, and buttercups, flares of color against a landscape still dominated by winter's white.
I've been thinking a lot about risk lately, in writing and in life, and these hunched but verdant daffodils remind me of that sharp-edged contemplation. In forth and fifth grade my teacher taught us the phrase Carpe diem, "seize the day" in Latin, and those words have stuck with me ever since, a foundation of thought before yolo ever worked its way into modern lexicon. Carpe diem, I think, staring at the daffodils still edged against snow, risking their paper-thin petals against ripping wind and starry-skied frost for the chance to bloom first, to stretch pale roots into sodden earth among knifes of ice. So why not stretch green leaves through snow to shine sharp yellow against that snow?
I know that this gust of cold, snowy weather across the eastern United States has frozen fruit trees' buds, cutting out a season's crops even before the season began. Anthropogenic climate change means spring is inching ever closer to the new year for many parts of the world, but unpredictable weather means these cold systems still bluster through and shred flower buds and crops. Now carpe diem is each day, every day seized by an unpredictability, a snowball of conditions we cannot control but somehow still catalyze.
Daffodils in Pittsburgh, snowfields in Montana, all suddenly immediate and terrifying. Glacier lilies, as their name alludes, prefer glaciers as well as snowfields, and glaciers in places like Glacier National Park are expected to disappear by 2030, and those in the Beartooth Mountains and elsewhere in the state likely not much longer. Pittsburgh, I've found, is on the fringe of north and south, sixty-five in January and then back in the teens two weeks later, a wild mismatch of data points on a graph. The daffodils, too, are on the fringe of snow, of winter, of a white unpredictability borne from a known yet still debated and doubted source.
I'd like to live like the daffodils, like glacier lilies and shooting stars and trees blooming in spite of it all. Dig in my feet to mud and grit and sopping snow and yell bright yellow into the tumultuous air, that here we are, cold and bright, stooped but growing, windblown and seizing every moment for its sunshine and sweet, clear rain.
Thursday, March 2, 2017
Entry 5: Listening
28 February 2017, evening/dusk
Mid-fifties, overcast, slight breeze
Pittsburgh's overcast sky and fade of cloud-clutched sunlight has given the air a screen of flatness, that quality of dusk where everything is visible but nothing defined. I could stare at the billows and cuts in the clouds above, or get down on my stomach, press my chin to the grass, and watch each individual blade tremble with wind. But today I feel like listening.
I close my eyes. The sound of cars barreling past on Fifth Avenue overwhelms until I let that noise settle out: the swish of tires on asphalt and through unstable air, broken by an occasional clip as a car catches a crack or manhole on the street. I usually think of cars as loud chunks of metal, but they hardly sound metallic at all, more a smooth hum of spinning rubber. Behind me, I pick up the second dominant sound in Mellon Park: the robins. Despite a Sibley's guide to eastern birds sitting in my bedside bookcase back at my apartment, I'm still a foreigner to most of the birds here—but the robins I recognize. They trill and cheep; I think of Mary Oliver and imagine their small pink tongues in their yellow-beaked mouths. Surely they know what they're saying.
To my right, a soft jingle of dog tags, and the joyous screech of children in the playground across Fifth. Sirens flare distantly in Homewood, and then a helicopter joins them from above, rumbling from the southeast to the southwest. Its blades chop the air, echoing a deep-throated whir like someone rolling their R's.
Something scampers in the tree above me, and I catch myself before I can open my eyes to look. It could be a squirrel, or larger bird, but no one in any particular hurry to scurry. It scuttles, pauses, and there's a tentative grind of teeth to acorn. Cracking open my eyes to jot these details down on the page, I noticed minute dabs of rain on my paper, and now I feel them, soft pins of water subtle on my skin.
Tssskkkssskkksskkk. Behind me, two bodies of sharp claws scuffle around the rough bark of a conifer, then bound away through soft mulch. Once in a while, the rubber-lined swish of cars on Fifth breaks into the deep grind of a rising engine. Shift into fourth, I think automatically (or manually?), as the vibration hums into the park's hill and settles against my ankles.
The robins continue their songs, and they sound so much like home. Not home as a place, or a period of time, but just that sound of welcome. I lean in on the differences of their calls—some light and looping in well-versed announcements, others sharp in declarations of charisma. There's an urgency in some chirps, a confrontation voiced by the deep-breasted birds singing their strengths into the gray dusk.
Mid-fifties, overcast, slight breeze
Pittsburgh's overcast sky and fade of cloud-clutched sunlight has given the air a screen of flatness, that quality of dusk where everything is visible but nothing defined. I could stare at the billows and cuts in the clouds above, or get down on my stomach, press my chin to the grass, and watch each individual blade tremble with wind. But today I feel like listening.
I close my eyes. The sound of cars barreling past on Fifth Avenue overwhelms until I let that noise settle out: the swish of tires on asphalt and through unstable air, broken by an occasional clip as a car catches a crack or manhole on the street. I usually think of cars as loud chunks of metal, but they hardly sound metallic at all, more a smooth hum of spinning rubber. Behind me, I pick up the second dominant sound in Mellon Park: the robins. Despite a Sibley's guide to eastern birds sitting in my bedside bookcase back at my apartment, I'm still a foreigner to most of the birds here—but the robins I recognize. They trill and cheep; I think of Mary Oliver and imagine their small pink tongues in their yellow-beaked mouths. Surely they know what they're saying.
To my right, a soft jingle of dog tags, and the joyous screech of children in the playground across Fifth. Sirens flare distantly in Homewood, and then a helicopter joins them from above, rumbling from the southeast to the southwest. Its blades chop the air, echoing a deep-throated whir like someone rolling their R's.
Something scampers in the tree above me, and I catch myself before I can open my eyes to look. It could be a squirrel, or larger bird, but no one in any particular hurry to scurry. It scuttles, pauses, and there's a tentative grind of teeth to acorn. Cracking open my eyes to jot these details down on the page, I noticed minute dabs of rain on my paper, and now I feel them, soft pins of water subtle on my skin.
Tssskkkssskkksskkk. Behind me, two bodies of sharp claws scuffle around the rough bark of a conifer, then bound away through soft mulch. Once in a while, the rubber-lined swish of cars on Fifth breaks into the deep grind of a rising engine. Shift into fourth, I think automatically (or manually?), as the vibration hums into the park's hill and settles against my ankles.
The robins continue their songs, and they sound so much like home. Not home as a place, or a period of time, but just that sound of welcome. I lean in on the differences of their calls—some light and looping in well-versed announcements, others sharp in declarations of charisma. There's an urgency in some chirps, a confrontation voiced by the deep-breasted birds singing their strengths into the gray dusk.
The wind doesn't seem to blow anymore, but rather sighs. Dead leaves and blades of grass shuffle slightly in the breeze, and I can hear the earth clicking, faint but tight ticks present even over the rush of traffic. Earthworms, I imagine, wriggling through humus and sharp grains of minerals. Or perhaps the earth always clicks and shifts, and I'm just too visually-bound to perceive it, too overwhelmed by the bold sounds of the world to appreciate the constant ones.
I am learning to love the constant ones.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Entry 4: Outliers
24 February 2017, midday
75ºF (!), mostly sunny, strong breeze
Warm, warm, warm. And maybe—in the moments absent of wind, bathed in sunlight—hot. At least for me. But most of the time there's a persistent wind from the southwest ruffling conifer boughs and loose leaves across the park's lawn. The wind, I think, is the beginning fringes of the cold front expected to slide cool and gray into Pittsburgh tomorrow. Earlier this morning the sky spread above in a great cloudless blue plane, but now watercolor clouds stack across the horizon, uniform and blue-bellied. The heat of this high pressure system, mid-seventies in late February, is loosing its grip already. Low pressure opens the air, carves room for water vapor to expand to billows of white.
Still, what's the norm to return to? I heard on the radio this morning that today is supposed to break a record held in place since 1906. Though a number on a graph is only one of a sky-bound trend, the culprit seems obvious, heavy and hot and thick with carbon dioxide beneath the warm sunshine.
I'd considered doing my best to ignore the beautiful weather. Stick to shoes and socks and long pants, pretend it's not really mid-seventies in February. Ignoring the outliers is one form of a coping mechanism. I'd be hot and miserable, but at least I'd be hot and miserable like the pikas high in the mountains of my home state, or like the residents of Mumbai roasting in an unrelenting heat wave, or like the clay-cracked beds of lakes and reservoirs in the Desert Southwest. Like the polar bears, always the polar bears. I'd be hot and miserable to remind myself that I actually have that choice, that I have an ample wardrobe and central heating and air conditioning and the mobility to get to a cooler place.
But I caved. This morning I donned shorts and my beloved Chaco sandals, which I swore I wouldn't slip on until March at the earliest. Now they rest among last fall's dead leaves, and my bare toes weave into sun-warmed grass. A couple with a baby reclines on a soft white blanket behind me, and their Australian shepherd is keen on chewing on chestnuts. "Drop it!" they yell at her every so often, and I think, as always, there's something metaphorical about that response, the ridiculousness of keeping a dog from gnawing on chestnut husks. Just let her be, I think.
I have to let myself enjoy this weather. Or else I'll be miserable on both fronts: sweating under long pants, simmering at the news headlines every day. I'm not enjoying anthropogenic climate change, not wishing for this outlier to stack up to normalcy. I'll still fight for places and people bearing the brunt of these warm fronts and floods and droughts and inconceivable dumps of snowfall. For our terrifying future. But I still enjoy this moment, this half green park rattling with last fall's leaves, exhaling the smooth scent of humus, flaring in sunshine between shadows of increasing clouds as they skim past. Because, for now, it's still here.
75ºF (!), mostly sunny, strong breeze
Warm, warm, warm. And maybe—in the moments absent of wind, bathed in sunlight—hot. At least for me. But most of the time there's a persistent wind from the southwest ruffling conifer boughs and loose leaves across the park's lawn. The wind, I think, is the beginning fringes of the cold front expected to slide cool and gray into Pittsburgh tomorrow. Earlier this morning the sky spread above in a great cloudless blue plane, but now watercolor clouds stack across the horizon, uniform and blue-bellied. The heat of this high pressure system, mid-seventies in late February, is loosing its grip already. Low pressure opens the air, carves room for water vapor to expand to billows of white.
Still, what's the norm to return to? I heard on the radio this morning that today is supposed to break a record held in place since 1906. Though a number on a graph is only one of a sky-bound trend, the culprit seems obvious, heavy and hot and thick with carbon dioxide beneath the warm sunshine.
I'd considered doing my best to ignore the beautiful weather. Stick to shoes and socks and long pants, pretend it's not really mid-seventies in February. Ignoring the outliers is one form of a coping mechanism. I'd be hot and miserable, but at least I'd be hot and miserable like the pikas high in the mountains of my home state, or like the residents of Mumbai roasting in an unrelenting heat wave, or like the clay-cracked beds of lakes and reservoirs in the Desert Southwest. Like the polar bears, always the polar bears. I'd be hot and miserable to remind myself that I actually have that choice, that I have an ample wardrobe and central heating and air conditioning and the mobility to get to a cooler place.
But I caved. This morning I donned shorts and my beloved Chaco sandals, which I swore I wouldn't slip on until March at the earliest. Now they rest among last fall's dead leaves, and my bare toes weave into sun-warmed grass. A couple with a baby reclines on a soft white blanket behind me, and their Australian shepherd is keen on chewing on chestnuts. "Drop it!" they yell at her every so often, and I think, as always, there's something metaphorical about that response, the ridiculousness of keeping a dog from gnawing on chestnut husks. Just let her be, I think.
I have to let myself enjoy this weather. Or else I'll be miserable on both fronts: sweating under long pants, simmering at the news headlines every day. I'm not enjoying anthropogenic climate change, not wishing for this outlier to stack up to normalcy. I'll still fight for places and people bearing the brunt of these warm fronts and floods and droughts and inconceivable dumps of snowfall. For our terrifying future. But I still enjoy this moment, this half green park rattling with last fall's leaves, exhaling the smooth scent of humus, flaring in sunshine between shadows of increasing clouds as they skim past. Because, for now, it's still here.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Entry 3: Color
6 February 2017, 1130
43ºF—sunny, slight wind
The birds and I agree—the air is tinged too strongly of spring. A rare blue sky opens above Mellon Park, sharpening the bare branches of the hardwoods. A dozen robins skirt and flutter on the grass, puffing dull red breasts, and nuthatches spin and hop upside down on the trunks of the trees. I watch a red-bellied woodpecker cling to a tree's higher limbs. He has a light gray body speckled by black spears, a vibrant red head with sharp black eyes that follow my earthbound wander. The robins chirp; the woodpecker pivots around a branch and flutters to the next tree over.
I settle down on the crest of the hill among soft grass seeping the smell of spring. I know damp mud is pushing through the blades, already blotching brown into my jeans, but at this moment the earth feels more comforting than the softest matress. A soft wind fingers my hair and reminds all of us—the robins, nuthatches, woodpecker, hardwoods, and grass—that it's still February, that it might just snow again in a few days. But the sun drips down warmth, and that blue blue sky above stretches above like a long sigh. On the horizon, it is a grainy, whitish smudge, tinted by pollution, but brightens out of haze to that brilliant blue, sharpest in the north plane of sky opposite the glinting sun.
How do I describe the color of sky? Sky blue falls to redundancy. Not robin egg blue, not azure or cobalt, not royal or ice blue. Just the blue of clear sky, more of an impression than hue or tone. Textured, it would be flat and hard as slate. I would press my palm and fingertips against it and feel no give, no deviation, just bright blue resolve.
I haven't had a moment like this to just sit and think about words to describe the sky. I feel as if I'm lunging to catch up on life, scrambling from one place to the next, sides heaving when I get there, only to leap ahead to the next. I'm caught beneath well-muscled questions with no soothing answers, and in this moment my body loosens to the simplicity of open sky, how shards of smooth sunlight can lift that anxiety away for a moment. I don't want to leave. I don't want to move on with my day cut into buildings away from this airy ceiling which is no ceiling at all. I would like, I think, to settle a little more into the grass and damp earth, then feel myself lifted by that warm sun into the sky's haunt of spring. Trill among the robins, sing my chipped voice with the nuthatches. Drill for good grubs with the red-bellied woodpecker. Not forever, but a moment longer, a sun-stretched hour longer. I'd like to breathe in this wet whisper of spring knowing full well it is not permanent, and for that loving it that much more.
I stand and feel the mud bled into my jeans, smudged against my knees like I'm back in grade school. But I shrug the care away. If anyone asks, I'll tell them: I had to sit and think a long while about the color of the sky.
43ºF—sunny, slight wind
The birds and I agree—the air is tinged too strongly of spring. A rare blue sky opens above Mellon Park, sharpening the bare branches of the hardwoods. A dozen robins skirt and flutter on the grass, puffing dull red breasts, and nuthatches spin and hop upside down on the trunks of the trees. I watch a red-bellied woodpecker cling to a tree's higher limbs. He has a light gray body speckled by black spears, a vibrant red head with sharp black eyes that follow my earthbound wander. The robins chirp; the woodpecker pivots around a branch and flutters to the next tree over.
I settle down on the crest of the hill among soft grass seeping the smell of spring. I know damp mud is pushing through the blades, already blotching brown into my jeans, but at this moment the earth feels more comforting than the softest matress. A soft wind fingers my hair and reminds all of us—the robins, nuthatches, woodpecker, hardwoods, and grass—that it's still February, that it might just snow again in a few days. But the sun drips down warmth, and that blue blue sky above stretches above like a long sigh. On the horizon, it is a grainy, whitish smudge, tinted by pollution, but brightens out of haze to that brilliant blue, sharpest in the north plane of sky opposite the glinting sun.
How do I describe the color of sky? Sky blue falls to redundancy. Not robin egg blue, not azure or cobalt, not royal or ice blue. Just the blue of clear sky, more of an impression than hue or tone. Textured, it would be flat and hard as slate. I would press my palm and fingertips against it and feel no give, no deviation, just bright blue resolve.
I haven't had a moment like this to just sit and think about words to describe the sky. I feel as if I'm lunging to catch up on life, scrambling from one place to the next, sides heaving when I get there, only to leap ahead to the next. I'm caught beneath well-muscled questions with no soothing answers, and in this moment my body loosens to the simplicity of open sky, how shards of smooth sunlight can lift that anxiety away for a moment. I don't want to leave. I don't want to move on with my day cut into buildings away from this airy ceiling which is no ceiling at all. I would like, I think, to settle a little more into the grass and damp earth, then feel myself lifted by that warm sun into the sky's haunt of spring. Trill among the robins, sing my chipped voice with the nuthatches. Drill for good grubs with the red-bellied woodpecker. Not forever, but a moment longer, a sun-stretched hour longer. I'd like to breathe in this wet whisper of spring knowing full well it is not permanent, and for that loving it that much more.
I stand and feel the mud bled into my jeans, smudged against my knees like I'm back in grade school. But I shrug the care away. If anyone asks, I'll tell them: I had to sit and think a long while about the color of the sky.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Entry 2: Noise
16 January 2017
Mid-afternoon, overcast, approx. 35ºF
As I round up the curved pathway in Mellon Park, a grinding bellow pours over the hillside. One of those great rumbling machines swallows tree limbs and spits out wood chips and sawdust across Beechwood Boulevard, and for any south-facing slope of the park the grind of metal teeth against hardwood clogs the air. I can almost feel the give of bark and branch in my own mouth, or humming against my palms. The vibrations of the splitting wood reminds me of clearing trails this summer, not so much the soft ring of a crosscut saw, but more so the incessant drone of a chainsaw. I remember felling a dead pine snag, calculating the depth of the undercut, then the tense coax of the blade into the holding wood, inch by inch into notches of fiber holding the tree upright. My gaze swooped from whining chain to the tree's trunk until I saw that shift in sky, the tree's lean turning to tumble. I yanked out the blade from the holding wood and ran as fast as I could in thick chaps. Fifty feet away, I turned, heart hammering, to see a gap in sparse canopy where moments before the gnarled, mistletoe-bared branches had been. A standing tree, a whoosh of wood unheard over the chainsaw's gargling motor, then a brighter pane of sky.
But that was months ago, and in pinewood. Today, the low-pitched chipper growls through hardwood, which I have never worked with. I don't spend enough time in this area to know the tapestry of its urban canopy, but I can't help but wonder how people who live on that street must feel, peering out their windows, to see a tree there one day and ground to splinters the next. Of course there's a reason for removing the tree—heart-rot, or branches strumming power lines, or simple old age. I'm beyond the mentality of resenting every felled tree, but still I hate the noise.
So I curve back around to a north-facing slope of the park, settling down beside another old oak or maple. Last week I brought a tree guide, hoping to identify the hardwoods standing so patiently across Mellon Park's lawns, but without leaves I stare hopelessly at ridges of bark and decide to wait until spring. Evading the sound grinding wood chips had put me overlooking Fifth Avenue again, which brings its own rumble of rubber and asphalt. It's proving a challenge to focus on the space between the two voices of machinery. Papery maple leaves stick to my shoes and mittens as I settle onto the damp grass. A soft-leafed weed pokes up between blades of grass and leaves, looking something like buttonweed. Beyond Market Square, blue haze smears rises of trees together, and above them thin lines of clouds stack on top of each other against the horizon, as if someone has stretched them out and is pressing down with force from higher in the sky.
I watch a mother push a stroller along the sidewalk across Fifth. Maybe my perspective's all wrong, I think, this urge to observe from above. To the kid in the stroller, the world brushes past in forms of taller adults, high doorframes, arterial spread of branches. I let my spine and head fall back against the grass. The moment I look up, a squirrel scurries across the tree's trunk, and her clawed paws send bits of bark down around me. The sky, despite its overcast grayness, is painfully bright. I have to squint one eye, then the other, searching for the squirrel. How long has she been there, silent as I try to ignore the roar of cars? She's disappeared again, as if her appearance was only to deliver some sort of message I needed sprinkled over me.
Wood chips, bold white sky. The hum of engines endures, but no longer presses against the back of my skull. It's simply there. So is the squirrel, curled into a tree limb's notch out of sight, silver-tinted fur against silver-tinted bark. So is the streaked sky, and green-cupped weeds, and tattered maple leaves. So is the memory of a chainsaw's grind into pine, spitting out shreds of wood into every fold of my clothing. The tree crashed down, but for weeks afterward I shook out fine golden dust from its heart. Tomorrow the wood chipper across Beachwood Boulevard will heave away with its churned meal, but I don't doubt it will leave behind strips of bark and a similar gritty powder peppered upon the sidewalk and lawns. A silent imprint, borne from a thunderstorm of sound.
Mid-afternoon, overcast, approx. 35ºF
As I round up the curved pathway in Mellon Park, a grinding bellow pours over the hillside. One of those great rumbling machines swallows tree limbs and spits out wood chips and sawdust across Beechwood Boulevard, and for any south-facing slope of the park the grind of metal teeth against hardwood clogs the air. I can almost feel the give of bark and branch in my own mouth, or humming against my palms. The vibrations of the splitting wood reminds me of clearing trails this summer, not so much the soft ring of a crosscut saw, but more so the incessant drone of a chainsaw. I remember felling a dead pine snag, calculating the depth of the undercut, then the tense coax of the blade into the holding wood, inch by inch into notches of fiber holding the tree upright. My gaze swooped from whining chain to the tree's trunk until I saw that shift in sky, the tree's lean turning to tumble. I yanked out the blade from the holding wood and ran as fast as I could in thick chaps. Fifty feet away, I turned, heart hammering, to see a gap in sparse canopy where moments before the gnarled, mistletoe-bared branches had been. A standing tree, a whoosh of wood unheard over the chainsaw's gargling motor, then a brighter pane of sky.
But that was months ago, and in pinewood. Today, the low-pitched chipper growls through hardwood, which I have never worked with. I don't spend enough time in this area to know the tapestry of its urban canopy, but I can't help but wonder how people who live on that street must feel, peering out their windows, to see a tree there one day and ground to splinters the next. Of course there's a reason for removing the tree—heart-rot, or branches strumming power lines, or simple old age. I'm beyond the mentality of resenting every felled tree, but still I hate the noise.
So I curve back around to a north-facing slope of the park, settling down beside another old oak or maple. Last week I brought a tree guide, hoping to identify the hardwoods standing so patiently across Mellon Park's lawns, but without leaves I stare hopelessly at ridges of bark and decide to wait until spring. Evading the sound grinding wood chips had put me overlooking Fifth Avenue again, which brings its own rumble of rubber and asphalt. It's proving a challenge to focus on the space between the two voices of machinery. Papery maple leaves stick to my shoes and mittens as I settle onto the damp grass. A soft-leafed weed pokes up between blades of grass and leaves, looking something like buttonweed. Beyond Market Square, blue haze smears rises of trees together, and above them thin lines of clouds stack on top of each other against the horizon, as if someone has stretched them out and is pressing down with force from higher in the sky.
I watch a mother push a stroller along the sidewalk across Fifth. Maybe my perspective's all wrong, I think, this urge to observe from above. To the kid in the stroller, the world brushes past in forms of taller adults, high doorframes, arterial spread of branches. I let my spine and head fall back against the grass. The moment I look up, a squirrel scurries across the tree's trunk, and her clawed paws send bits of bark down around me. The sky, despite its overcast grayness, is painfully bright. I have to squint one eye, then the other, searching for the squirrel. How long has she been there, silent as I try to ignore the roar of cars? She's disappeared again, as if her appearance was only to deliver some sort of message I needed sprinkled over me.
Wood chips, bold white sky. The hum of engines endures, but no longer presses against the back of my skull. It's simply there. So is the squirrel, curled into a tree limb's notch out of sight, silver-tinted fur against silver-tinted bark. So is the streaked sky, and green-cupped weeds, and tattered maple leaves. So is the memory of a chainsaw's grind into pine, spitting out shreds of wood into every fold of my clothing. The tree crashed down, but for weeks afterward I shook out fine golden dust from its heart. Tomorrow the wood chipper across Beachwood Boulevard will heave away with its churned meal, but I don't doubt it will leave behind strips of bark and a similar gritty powder peppered upon the sidewalk and lawns. A silent imprint, borne from a thunderstorm of sound.
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