Saturday Evening Poetry

I’m here at my desk in our little cottage tucked in among the trees. I’m wearing pj’s and an old cardigan sweater while I munch lasagna and salad from a local Italian restaurant and listen to folk music on the computer. Tom is in the other room watching television and flipping back and forth between NASCAR racing and Olympic curling, two things I can leave more than take; so I’m free to sit here and write.

It’s been a difficult week of too much work not done, too much worry about my sick mother, too many visits to accountants, too much ice and snow, and a touch of stomach flu. It’s the very last few days of February and I’ve reached the end of my tolerance for winter, I simply can not wait for it to be gone!

But tonight it’s warm and cozy in the house, most of what bothered me during the week is behind me, and we have nothing pressing to do, nowhere we need to go; leaving me free to “jammie-up” early and contemplate poetry.

I’ve been thinking lately about my life and how I am perhaps not doing the most ideal job of managing it. I still feel so frantically overwhelmed much of the time, I waste too many of my hours in the company of people I don’t care about, doing things I’m not passionate about; leaving too little time for my life’s desires; to see people I long to be with.

Tonight, in my quiet den, I’m writing about the western National Parks that we have visited. When I give myself time to think about those places, I remember the sense of peace I feel whenever we are there. Certainly much of that calm probably comes from having no list of chores and priorities, but a lot comes from the great expanses, the far off vistas that make it nearly impossible to feel closed in. That make issues like deadlines, meetings and a parent’s mortality seem manageable some how, as if they will all fall into place in God’s good time, without further bruising my soul.

One early evening last May we were spending time in Arches National Park and it was raining off and on. Arched over Balanced Rock, in perfect contrast to the navy blue sky, was a rainbow. I stopped to talk to a ranger for a few minutes. She said that Arches was not always as perfect as it was that evening. It could be very hot and many rescues of over-come hikers were needed during the summer season.

But not that day.

“Today is a good day to be a ranger,” she said.

On the road outside our home, cars travel by occasionally heading off for perhaps a more exciting Saturday evening. But inside I sit and contemplate poetry. I decide to take that ranger’s bit of advice and apply it to my life. It won’t always be easy. It will get very hot and many rescues may be needed.

But not this day.

Today is a good day to be a writer.

Chasing Hemingway's Shadow

Thirty years ago when my husband Tom and I were on our honeymoon in northern Michigan, we stopped in to a bookstore in Petosky and saw a shelf of books about Ernest Hemingway. It turns out that Heminway's family had a summer cottage in the area and he spent every summer for the first 22 years of his life there.

I minored in American Literature at a Michigan university, and somehow I missed this information. But this started a fascination with this author that has lasted all the time since. From that point on I always felt a kinship with him, although we simply could not be more different.

Obviously he's a man, I'm a woman; he was born at the start of the 20th century and I was born in the middle; he traveled the world starting at a fairly young age, I've never been out of the United States (except for Canada, and I'm not sure that counts); he was a literary genius and I'm ..... well, more on that later.

I have a collection of about 40 books about Hemingway and it grows every year as people continue to write about him. But despite all that, just a few weeks ago I discovered something amazing that I had never heard before.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY RECEIVED THE PULITZER PRIZE ON THE VERY DAY I WAS BORN - May 4, 1953.

Is this some kind of sign?

It has been my wild-eyed dream that I receive the Pulitzer Prize for my work. Ever since I first heard about it, which was probably when I first started studying journalism nearly 40 years ago, I've been wanting to be on the receiving end of one of these prizes.

Not for fame and fortune, because most people who receive them have neither, but for the acknowledgement that my writing is good, that I'm special at what I do, that this brain I have struggled with all my life - fearful that it's just not smart enough - is capable of being extraordinary!

Although I'm happy and content with my life, sometimes in my dark moments it's hard not to feel like just an ordinary person, leading an unremarkable life in a small, unimportant town. Why would anyone be interested in my work? A Pulitzer Prize would negate all that.

I would have to travel to New York City. I would have to buy a fancy outfit. I would feel incredibly shy, nervous and tongue-tied. All the sophisticated people would think, "how quaint, it's hard to believe there are still simple, unspoiled people like her in the world."

Then I would return to my small town, my beloved family, my cozy writing studio in a renovated box factory and I would be content to carry on, knowing that at the end of my days my obituary will carry the words, "Pulitzer Prize winning author," just like my buddy Ernest.

Pie for Strengh

Photo by Tom Tackett

This is an essay for my National Park Project:





Pie for Strength- Glacier National Park, June 2005

The crust is golden and flakes like shale when flicked with the tip of the fork tines. The filling is thick, but still juicy; sweet, but still tart; it stays in place within the wedge and doesn’t spill out onto the plate.

And best of all, the true sign of a perfect piece of pie, the edge crust – the part that’s tweaked and fluted and runs along the perimeter of the pie pan, is divinely edible. It doesn’t have to sit on the plate like some sad, abandoned orphan after the rest of the pie is gone. It is flakey, tender and tasty in its own right and can be used to sop up the very last remnants of the filling juice left along the edges of the plate.

The Park Café doesn’t seem like it would be special, it’s just an unimposing white clapboard cottage with a small wrap-around porch. It sits off the main two lane road running to St. Mary, a small town just outside the east entrance to Glacier National Park in Montana. Next to it is a gravel parking lot, but right away we could tell parking was a pretty casual affair – just pull in the best you can and try not to block anyone else.

When we stepped inside we were immediately in the dining area, which was just one room with perhaps a dozen tables of various sizes and a small lunch counter with five or six stools. The first time we visited it was breakfast. We had to sit out on the porch because all the tables inside were full. I ordered three-fruit French toast, but I had my doubts, a lot of times restaurant French toast is a soggy, limp, squashed disaster. So, I was surprised when the plate was served and there were three slices of thick hand-made bread grilled to perfection and fresh fruit, not the canned pie-filling gook, but real fruit – strawberries, bananas, and huckleberries; one fruit to each slice of bread. And it was amazingly delicious!

Over the course of the week we stayed at Glacier, we returned to the Park Café six or seven times. We worried at first that the help would think we were stalking the place – but soon figured out that wasn’t an issue. For one thing, everyone was too laid-back to notice how often any one person came and went, and for another thing, we rarely saw the same wait staff twice. We found out later that it was a popular place for young people who loved Glacier to come work for the season. They would work for a while, and then have time off to head into the mountains.

Although the food was unusually good, it was the pie that kept us coming back, and indeed, was their trademark. On any given day they had a dozen varieties. I got something different each time we went, and even though I prefer fruit pies, I sampled lemon, pecan, and chocolate with an equal amount of ecstasy.

I could picture the pie bakers in the back of the small kitchen, coming into work in the early dawn hours. “Hhmmm,” I imagined they would say. “What should we make today?” And they would look at the recipes, handwritten on little cards, stained from many years of use, and they would pick out twelve or thirteen different varieties, depending on the fresh ingredients they had available that day. Then they would commence to mixing and rolling dough, chopping fruit, cooking fillings; all while watching the sun slowly rise over the mountains, staining the snow peaks with light.

One day we had finished lunch and I was eavesdropping on the diners around us while I waited for my pie to come. There was a young couple there with a crowd of people who all seemed happy and chatty. As they were leaving, they ran into one of their college professors, an older gentleman who had just come in. They told him they were getting married the next day in a meadow on the mountain and invited him to come. As they talked, telling the professor all about their wedding plans, the young girl’s mother finished paying the bill and came up and was introduced.

The mother looked distracted, but happy too, as if she was in the center of a slightly befuddling, but joyous maelstrom. This was in mid-June and I remembered with a jolt that our oldest son was getting married in a mere eight weeks. In the isolation of vacation I was able to move that right off my radar screen. But, once we left the mountains and returned to Michigan, I would probably be a lot like that mother, who was smiling and talking but looked like she had a mental list she was ticking off in the back of her mind.

My pie was set before me on a real plate with a real fork – no plastic or, God forbid, foam anywhere in sight. “Pie for Strength” is their motto and, as I took the first bite of this concoction called “fruits of the forest,” I figured I could use all the strength I could get for the days to come.

Winter thoughts

I realize that if I'm going to be successful at this blogging thing, I'm going to have to write more often and also tell people about it so they can look once in a while - if they want to. So, that is certainly one of my goals for this year.

Here's the writing I hope to accomplish in 2010:
Novel - finish the first draft of a novel : working title "Copper Kettle Bakery". This is about one-third done right now.

National Park Project - I'm writing a series of poems and essays about nine Western national parks and two reservations my family has visited over the years. I plan to combine them with photos by my husband (a landscape photographer) and self publish this early next year.



Full Moon Writing - I belong to a quartet of women writers which last year took on the project of writing about each month's full moon (they all have different names). I decided to write memoir essays, but the other women wrote poetry, essays and fiction. We're done with the writing and now we are revising and working on layout. We plan to self-publish this by the end of July. Much more on this project later.

Short Stories - I have several of these in the hopper -just need to polish them up and send them out (can't get published sitting in a drawer!) Would like to send out one a month throughout this year.

Poetry - During the month of April (poetry month) I'm going to write a poem every even day, and during October (my favorite month) I'm going to write a poem every odd day. I did this in March last year and felt very creative and productive by the end of the month, even though I had to push myself to do it and ended up writing three poems about my cats!

All this should certainly keep me more than busy - especially since I have an interesting new job, I run the writing programs at a local arts facility (more on that later too), and I'm a new grandmother. But, it keeps me busy and happy and feeling more creative than ever!