botanizing

Amsterdam arrival

There was rain last night and soft thunder. I woke vaguely, hearing the curtains ruffle and the rain filtering to the street through the trees just outside my window.

The light was diffuse early, lacking the sharpness that we anticipate from the beginning in the West.  Smoke rose from a chimney across the street from my hotel room.  The black smoke puffed, attenuating to a stream of thick and thin, bent low and away from the chimney in the breeze. 

Yesterday, after arriving, I wandered jet-lagged in the Rijksmuseum, trying to focus on the paintings, but mostly trying to stand despite my sleepiness.  When I sat in the galleries my eyes closed, and I slipped swiftly toward sleep.  Then I would walk again. 

Later I drifted to the Museum Plein, where I had tea.  Others were having coffee or ice cream at makeshift cafes.  People strolled and smoked.  A scruffy man in a heavy brown coat rinsed his hands over and over in a drinking fountain.  He moved out of the way, making a welcoming gesture with his clean hands, when others approached.  He came back to rinse his face, then swished the stream of water over his bald head.  I watched tourists flow from the museums.  Some were those I had moved among in the Rijksmuseum, alternating space with them to read the painting labels or stand close for details.  Couples passed with strollers.  Girlfriends were photographed by the pool or by trees. Bicycles passed by.

Dickinson’s Windows

South light of winters would have lain on Emily Dickinson’s small sleigh bed.  Her bed offered itself to both low south and late west light.  There were windows on each of those walls of her corner bedroom. Her small writing table stood angled between those two windows.  I have not thought about Dickinson and light.  They do not seem affiliated.  I have wondered about the values of her windows.  They were portals to spy on arrivals, allowing her moments to decide whether to remain hidden or to descend to conversation. Dickinson could ‘play’ from the windows, dropping sweets and surreptitious notes.

When I think about her windows, it is her mirror that comes to mind. A small mirror hung above her dresser, and I wonder whether she was too tightly framed by it.  I doubt a tiny mirror could have held Emily Dickinson’s ecstatic vision.  Seated at her writing table, however, she could have looked to the windows, eyes flitting to give a quick glance to south and west, to catch her own face in quarter profile in each window.  In her windows, Dickinson could have seen herself reflected against the outside world. She could see herself in the world without entering it, her face poised against leaves and the town, providing a cautiously distant perspective, a sense of self kept at reflective remove from wearying conflicts.

Below her mirror, Dickinson had hung pictures of George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  She could capture her face in the mirror, then look down to her mentors, and up again, holding the shapes of their strongly outlined faces against her own in the mirror.  Her hands could be on the chest below the mirror.  She could reach down to the bottom drawer, where she had collected her own poetry, miscellaneous sheets as well as sheaves bound by string.

There was a large mirror over the fireplace in the Dickinson front parlour.  On my tour of the house there were several other people, including teenage girls who seemed to know Dickinson quite well.  When we were in the parlour, a lovely young woman, who was perhaps 16, asked the tour guide whether Dickinson had cared about her looks and how other people saw her. The guide could have told us about Dickinson’s tiny mirror, her reflective windows, and how she gazed at the pictures of Browning and Eliot, but these were not part of her answer for the young woman. After the guide’s answer, the young woman turned toward the parlour mirror.  She looked intently at her own face.  Here she was.  Her gaze was self-reflective, but the strong look connected to Emily, to questions of self and place in the world, and to wariness at the questions of the world’s gaze.  The young woman looked in the mirror as if looking through Emily’s windows to find the poet.

*   *   *
For RT, who shared her observations and put Emily Dickinson on our itinerary.

Wheat Changes

Last night was full.  Fall had slipped into summer.  The air had the edge of chill.  I would not have called the air crisp because crisp air would have been thinner.  Last night’s air was full, smelling of wheat harvest.  I think of this as chaff air filled as it is with the detritus of harvest, the scents of crumbled brittle stalks of dried wheat, papery glumes, and the dust of growth and fruiting.  The wheat fields, so recently green, so quickly turned ochre, have been shorn.  The hills have a stubble cut.  Combines without their headers travel down the roads.

I anticipate the convergence each year of fall’s tentative steps into the summer night just as the night air thickens with the scent of chaff.

* * *

On my evening bike ride, I pass a square-angled grain elevator.  Through most of the year the elevator is quiet, although its sheet metal skin creaks in the wind.  It has been dusty by the elevator for the past couple of weeks.  Trucks have been unloading harvested wheat.  A milky tan dust blows from the wheat as flows from truck to elevator.

The elevator smelled a little odd when I rode past this evening. I thought of fermentation.  Tightly packed wheat, still a little moist, breaking down its sweet sugars in musty biochemical reactions.

When I turned at the far point of my ride to return, I could see a tall plume of smoke in the distance.  I didn’t recall the smoke when I had left town.  There is roadwork near my ride, and I assumed the smoke was from demolishing a hillside or the grinding of gravel.  As I neared town on my return, I could see the smoke was coming from the top of the grain elevator.  Then acute spikes of flame came from the top of the elevator.  The smoke darkened.  A fire truck ladder had been lifted and a weak stream of water curved to the side of the elevator.  That stream of water strengthened, shooting up toward the flaming top of the elevator, but looked weak against the surging flame.  Flame ripened—an awful orange—at the bottom of the elevator.  The smoke continued to darken and swell, twisting around, a sad shroud, enveloping the old elevator. 

I have always enjoyed the old grain elevator.  I like its character.  Now, everything has changed.

Here comes the sun

“What would you do if I sang out of tune?” John Lennon* sings as I walk into the video store.  “Would you stand up and walk out on me? Oh . . .”

“Just this one today?” the delicate young woman behind the counter asks.  She has a globe of Art Garfunkel hair.  “Phone number?”  She wears a green tee shirt that says ‘The Beatles’ above a cartoon-like picture of the band.  “Four thirty-one please.”

Then that light guitar lead, like glimpses of sun between branches of a tree, pops sharply:  “Here comes the sun . . .”

>  >  >
*See the comment below from Ford, who points out that it's really Ringo Starr singing.

If I had told the story in its fuller details it would have started like this: 
I was exhausted from fairly nonstop work over the past few days on my upcoming talk on hydrangeas, and on my way home from grocery shopping I stopped at Video Quest, a small, privately owned DVD place, for a film that would take my mind away from the talk.   When I heard “What would you do if I sang out of tune?” playing a little too loudly - sort of stridently - in the store, I was pleased.  The song was like an old friend.  Beatles songs are like old friends.  The song seemed odd, however.  I didn't recognize the voice as John Lennon's, and I wondered who the cover was by.  But there were other songs, and then came "Here Comes the Sun," and I knew they weren't covers.  It had to be John Lennon, I thought.  I thought I'd simply lost track of his voice.  But it wasn't just voice, I've apparently lost track of the Beatles.