The Faraway Nearby/Rebecca Solnit (Reflections)/and thank you, Katrina Kenison

Several years ago, my father, a talented gardener, asked me what I wanted most, and I said hummingbirds. A few weeks later, there he was—digging a hole near my front door and planting a trumpet vine.

It's become a monstrosity, since—making the overtaken house look like something straight out of a Grimm's fairy tale. My husband threatens to do away with the vine. I trim it back, faithfully. I say, "But the hummingbirds will come." And this summer they've come in force.

Earlier today I was sitting outside, reading Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby, when one particularly curious hummer came near and stayed long enough for me to take its portrait. It was as if Solnit herself had engineered the scene, or given it to me. I own every single Solnit book. I take great pleasure in them. And I'm pretty sure that she'd find a story here—in the monstrous vine and the sweet visitation, the madly fluttering wings and the stopped heart of the reader who looked up in time.

The Faraway Nearby is Solnit at her most fierce and, often, her most fine. This is memoir intellectualized. It's Solnit reflecting on the gift of apricots—countless apricots—that came her way just as she was entering her final chapters as a daughter. Held within this frame are other stories—of the man who left Solnit at a terrible time, of Solnit's own experience with illness, of a trip taken to Iceland, of a river ride. In-depth investigations of fairy tales and Frankenstein, hot and cold, forgiveness and understanding, surviving and dying bind. You cannot anticipate Solnit's mind. You cannot think, even if you feel as if you are on solid, shared ground (the story of Frankenstein, for example, or the biography of Virginia Woolf) that you know where she is headed. But you can trust that, no matter how far away from her seeming purpose Solnit goes, she will remember where she started from, and she will loop back in, put in another stitch or two, even as she warns against pretty seaming.

Solnit's evaluation of her mother often bristles. Her characterization of Alzheimer's alarms. The old boyfriend doesn't get away with much. But there's so much, so much, to Solnit's intellect, her search to understand, her desire to get things right, her ability to transcend herself, and she's brilliant with those apricots—bracing and authentic.

This abundance of unstable apricots seemed to be not only a task set for me, but my birthright, my fairy-tale inheritance from my mother who had given me almost nothing since my childhood. It was a last harvest, a heap of fruit from a family tree, like the enigmatic gifts of fairy tales: a magic seed, a key to an unknown door, a summoning incantation. Bottling, canning, composting, freezing, eating, and distilling them was the least of the tasks they posed. The apricots were a riddle I had to decipher, a tale whose meaning I had to make over the course of the next twelve months as almost everything went wrong.

I am glad to have read this book. Glad that I fought for the time.

And I am glad, too—grateful—for Katrina Kenison, who was one of the very first readers of Handling the Truth, who was the very first person who put words to it, and who has shared my quest, throughout the years, to write and understand memoir. Katrina has more friends in the e-universe than I can summon a quantifier for. And today she blesses me by sharing Handling with her readers on a blog that—newly updated—has something for everyone. She's even offering a give-away.

That's all happening here. Please take a look.

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From inside the twenty-hour day, a voice or two

The days, oh—they have been something.  Yesterday, for example, began at 3 AM and ended at 11 PM, and included work on a bit of promotional poetry, a stint of science writing, a sudden and intense advertising copy session, a design review of a new think paper, and some finalizing touches on a complex technical magazine story for my Singapore client/friends. 

My hummingbird came near and stayed.

Miss M., my young and so talented dancing friend, sent a note I'll never forget.

My son invited me to dance with him.

I talked to a friend.

I think of all I did not do—the people I failed, the blogs I didn't visit, the messages I still owe, the questions I've not answered, the research I didn't do, the books I neither advanced nor read.


I am, I am afraid, perpetually begging forgiveness.

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My hummingbird gives me, at last, the photos I've hoping for

click on each photo for a larger view 

:)

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My hummingbird consents to a portrait session

The glads are in their last moment. 

My hummingbird doesn't mind.

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Hummingbird (2)

Getting closer, but still frustratingly blurred.

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In which I finally get my hummingbird shot

It's not perfect. I wish it were sharper. National Geographic wouldn't be impressed.

But all summer long I've been trying to capture one of these dear little creatures on film.  I have let the tulip vine grow messy with the hope of a seduction.  I have not brought the glads inside for the same reason.

Hummingbirds are easy, my friend Mike once said.  But hummingbirds have eluded me. I have waited years.

I have a family now.  This one's mate was just a white glad down.

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Birdology/Sy Montgomery: Reflections

I have been reading Birdology these past few days, a book written by my dear friend Sy Montgomery.  Sy and I met years ago (virtually), following a review I wrote of her magnificent Journey of the Pink Dolphins.  We met in person a few years later.  I've read every one of her fabulous books since—Search for the Golden Moon Bear, The Good Good Pig, among them—and counted myself lucky to know this permeable woman who floats among God's creatures—chameleon like, inspirited, sometimes barely breathing, always awed.  Sy swims with dolphins and dances with bears.  She sleeps on the belly of a pig.  She speaks of her border collie, Sally, as if Sally had written a few books of her own.  With Birdology, Sy dances with birds.  She might swim with them, too; I don't know.  I still have two chapters to go.

I am myself a great lover of birds, and so I am loving this book with particular fervor.  In it, we meet the famous Ladies, Sy's crew of intelligent chickens. We walk, with Sy, through a dusky Australian park, hoping for an encounter with the bone-headed cassowary (six feet tall, dagger-equipped, footprints akin to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but Sy's not afraid, so we're not either).  We urge two orphaned hummingbirds on toward life, and learn, in the process, more than a couple of things.  We learn, for example, that two baby hummingbird's together "weigh less than a bigger bird's single flight feather," and that "a person as active as a hummingbird would need 155,000 calories a day—and the human's body temperature would rise to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and ignite!"  We go on a bloody falconry adventure.  (Blood, with Sy, is a rather commonplace sight.  She may have a mass of great blond curls, and she may be fashionably svelte, but don't let that fool you:  this is one tough, bug-bitten, leech-proven traveler.)

I was about to read a chapter about parrots—squeeze it in between client calls—but I thought, Oh, no, why rush this?  So I'm going to take this book outside after my work is done and pick my feet up and hope a hummingbird will visit in the meantime.

(As for the photo, above:  I snapped this gorgeous creature a few years ago while on Hawk Mountain with my friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, her boys, and my own.)

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Work in Progress and the Hummingbird Arrives

After a difficult night, a page was born, and I was scrolling through the book again, as I do, looking for clues to next moves, when from the corner of my eye I saw a hummingbird hanging in the window, as if from a puppeteer's string. I had been waiting all summer long for this elusive bird, my longing pinned to the trumpet vine that my father helped me plant by the front door. But the hummingbird came at me from the north, and she came not alone but with a friend. She was silver bellied and green backed, dragonfly colors, and I did not take her picture, for she did not stay long enough for me to garner her permission. I photographed the screen instead. The moment in time.

Gifts. Each day lived.

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Hummingbird Fantasy

In Siena, in a garden, there were hummingbirds. At Chanticleer, they are suspendered from the air. Once, last year, at Adam's house, they helicoptered in while Adam and I spoke of Philadelphia history and writer dreams.

I've wanted hummingbirds. I've hung a glass feeder, filled it with sugar juice. I've planted a trumpet vine and arranged bright flowers beneath the nest that the robin has built in my rafters.

I've wanted hummingbirds, and yesterday, while slicing zucchini, thick, I looked up through the window, and one was there. Nobly beaked, curiously calm, undecided, I could tell, whether or not it would return.

I had no camera. I had no witness. It was just the red-tipped bird and me.

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Companionable Existence

Early this morning, before the sun rose too high, I dug out the old cat mint and slipped armeria and black chervil into the ground, within the peninsula tip of my garden. Out by the street, I buried the perfect bulb of an elephant ear. By the front of the house a new vine still awaits digging in—red trumpet flowers, a hummingbird's seduction. I want hummingbirds to join my 24 carat finches. I'm glad the robin is back, in her old nest.

The new plants were all collected Sunday, from Handmade Gardens, Michael and Kathye Petrie's splendid Downington, PA, showcase. They were piled into my father's car, alongside all that he had bought to bring back to his own garden-rich home, and on my lap, as we drove away, was a black amarylis, a gift from Michael. This earthenness is something my father and I share—a love of growing things, a companionable existence with birds.

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