Meditations. Books for My Children

Burning Book, Brian Kershisnik

I never feel more alone than when I finish a book I loved. I prowl, I chew on my fingers, I pick things up and toss them about. Sometimes I cry a little. Or a lot. I don't want to even see people who haven't read that book. I feel like I'll never want to eat ever again but sometimes I just do, anyway, to distract myself and to dull a longing that is sort of like, and not at all like, hunger.
So alone because I want to have shared it, worked through the book with another human, though that's not possible or practical considering how much and at what speeds I read. I want to talk, argue and remember, prognosticate and review and sigh and I'm nearly lonely enough to bleed from it for a while. Till I get myself into another book. That deadens the disconnect and I forget.

I could avoid most all of this by immediately placing the book in someone's hands and making them go off and read it so they could talk to me. And I used to do that.
I used to recommend books to people.

I used to read a book and, if it had been a good book or if I felt it was asking for a specific person and I thought I knew that person, I would take the book to them and admonish, nay, command them to read, my assumption being that if it was good for me, it would be good for you.
To my astonishment and dismay, this caused trouble, over time. Not everyone agrees with my choices, which really is fine by me. I don't actually care, though I may choose to mourn, a little, for their loss. On my planet if you don't like a book I like, after a minute and rousing examination of our separate opinions, we go our several ways like gentlemen and forget about it. But on this planet people sometimes get annoyed if they don't like the book they think I think they should read; they sometimes get angry and they sometimes get offended. Sometimes they tell you their estimation of you is forever altered and they never want to play with you again.
I finally, protectively, made a rule to never recommend books, ever. And except under very special, occasional and unusual circumstances I cling, limpet-like to that rule,
And yet, as now, I am finishing an exceptional book, racing the downward arc of narrative and at the same time braking, leaning back, knowing that you can only read a book for the first time one time and after this is over, it is over forever, trying simultaneously to sprint and to savor, I find I instinctively begin scanning my interior landscape for someone, a friend, a reader, a beloved human who will not, I think, yet know this book. I cannot feel a book that has cleaved (and cleaved to) my soul is finished with me till I have hastened at its behest, clasping it against my heart, to press the book against another beating heart and say, read this, stop what you are doing and read this, drop all the lesser things and read this book this book this book and then talk to me, talk to me. But I don't do that anymore. I say, "yeah. I think I read that. I'm not sure," carefully scanning the other face for hints, clues and signs before I give any more answer. Almost no other time do I feel so keenly the sharp hard pain of living a careful life. The dreadful losses suffered where Caution rules as regent in Honesty's kingdom, Honesty being held captive by Fear, Failure and Fatigue.

Webster's tells us recommend, from the Latin re-, and com-, from cum intensive, and mandare, to order, literally means to order back or commend strongly, and the example given, no kidding, is as to recommend a book. Therefore, if I recommend a book, I am not merely marking its existence, observing that, here is a book, persons may or may not enjoy this book but this is not for me to say. No. If I recommend a book I am so much more than offering it as a possible good time. (for a good read call...) I am advising, enjoining, exhorting. That mandare in recommend is to entrust to, to commend; to put in one's hands, commit to one's charge, as in Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
Into your hands, this book...no.

However.
For reasons I determined to hammer out a list, a list I will amend and alter as I grow up and continue reading. This is not a list of books to placate the people who ask me (as if someone who reads a lot would know just what you were in the mood for next. pfft.). I drawing up this list for my children, a sort of last will and testament of my book legacy, should that inheritance ever interest them. Anyone can see it but is is for my kids. These are books to which I have returned repeatedly for study, for refreshment, for delight, for wisdom and for sorrow. It will not be exhaustive because I forget. It will be eclectic because. You will not understand all of it and will disagree but comfort yourself with the knowledge that it wasn't made for you. I wish to point out here that I cannot receive less than full marks for stating my own opinions. These are all, every single one, books I went back to and back to, to read again. Scriptures are a given.
Study
These books are tools. Tools should be both useful and beautiful. They should work well in more than one capacity.
*A Good Dictionary, and a Good Thesaurus
Vital. I recommend you invest in good ones, I have several including the OED in one volume. That's a bit excessive, but for me it is not unlike a big game trophy in the library. And it comes with the coolest mystical magical magnifying dodad! (Now, let me say here, at the very beginning, that all the resource information is available on line. Of course it is. But this is my list and I am talking about books. With pages. I like pages. Enough said.)
*A Good Atlas
For years we have used and loved The Great World Atlas from the American Map Corp. I taught my children geography and earth science from it. And I don't know where on the world anything is.
*Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
I use it all the time.
*Timetables of History, Bernard Grun, based upon Werner Stein's Kulturfahrplan
History works best for me when I can spread it out like a map.
*Compact Atlas of World History, Random House
This is a tiny volume. Most often, it's all I need to know.
*Understanding Paul, Richard L. Anderson
This would be the Apostle Paul. What can I say? It helps me.
*Making Sense of the Doctrine & Covenants, Steven C. Harper
I actually had a sort of unusual experience with this one, something a friend once called "shopping with Jesus." I had a very specific need and went, blindly, straight to this book. It is a new best friend.
*The Language of Flowers, Kate Greenaway
I was so fascinated by this as a child, the idea of communicating desperate vows, taunts or even threats with boutonnieres and bouquets. I longed to have a lover who would send me flowers and know what they meant--even, perhaps, engage in a conversation!! I got over it. I still think about it though when I see certain floral combinations. Hmm.
*On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Harold McGee
This is a wonderful and very serious book. If you want to know how bread stales, the timeline of fruit importation in western Europe, the comparative water, protein, fat and carbohydrate content of, say, acorns, coconut and pistachios, or why on a molecular level we have ice cream in the first place, McGee's tome is for you.
*The Postage Stamp Garden, Duane Newcomb and the Sunset Western Garden Book
This is where I start.
A Dictionary of Costume and Fashion: Historic and Modern, Mary Brooks Picken
Do you know what a pelisse is? A parure? A peruke? Do you want to? I do.
*What People Wore, Douglas Gorsline
This is not an in depth text but is quick and easy to use. I always go here first.
*The Stitch Directory
is missing. This has been a terrible problem for a while. I'll update later, when I find it.
*The Betty Crocker Cookbook and The Martha Stewart Cookbook (with the blue spine)
Whenever I need a recipe I go to these first and compare everyone and everything to them. If I could only have two cookbooks (horror!) I would choose these ladies.

Nonfiction
*All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
*Tisha, as told to Robert Specht
Just read this to my youngest, 11, she loved it. I softened but did not skip the swears as I read.
*The Beak of the Finch: a Story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathan Weiner
This book about on-going evolution in the Galapagos Islands is gorgeously written. Also, the greatest testimony I have ever read of the reality of a loving, observant Heavenly Father, constantly involved, constantly aware, constantly adjusting out of care and concern.
*The Outermost House, Henry Beston
And here it is folks, the book that, more than any other, caused me so much trouble I stopped recommending books. It is a classic, beautifully, wondrously written. It is a record of observations made in a year the author lived alone in a tiny house on Cape Cod. Here is a sample conversation between myself and someone who tried to read this book because I told them it was my favorite book ever. Ever.
Them."Do you know this is a book about nothing?"
Me. "What? What do you mean? It's not about nothing, it's about--"
Them. "It is too. It is about nothing."
Me. "No it's not!! It's about everythi--"
Them. "No. Nothing happens in this book."
Me. "Wh--!!"
Them. "Suzanne. Nothing happens. There's a chapter about SAND."
Whatever.
It is possibly my favorite chapter and I couldn't care less if you never read it. Your loss. Your eternal loss.
*Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao -tzu
Dazed and urgent, trailing this book, Noah came and found me to talk about a bowl defined not by what it holds but by its emptiness. Formative moment for a boy who Does Too Much, and his mother who is Trying To Hold Emptiness. Hmm. Time to read this book again.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Conrad
Stories. Think about stories.
*Generations: the History of America's Future, 1584-2069, William Strauss & Neil Howe
Utterly changed the way I see stuff. Really.
*The Battle for Christmas: a Social and Cultural History of Christmas, Stephen Nissenbaum
A little word of warning to the faint of Christmas spirit. I read this book, read or told most of it to the painter, read it with Noah, read it again. I think it's important. I'm one of those people who want to know where traditions come from, what they really mean. At the end of the first read, I didn't believe in Christmas anymore. I didn't believe in ANYTHING anymore. Christmas, you see, really does come from a store. By the end of the third read I decided that everyone had always just been making Christmas up as they went along and I could certainly do that, too. Remaking this holiday is our only real Christmas tradition, so I got to have any sort of holiday I wanted. And I'm much happier now in my celebrating than I've ever been. But proceed with caution because maybe you don't actually want to know. Don't say I didn't warn you.
*Wide as the Waters: the Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, Benson Bobrick
I loved this much, much more than Wide as the Waters, but that is a good companion piece.
*A History of the American People, Paul Johnson
Everyone needs a good American history, this is the one I like.
*Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham
This is such a, well, cool book. Very lucid and compelling. Not a quick read. You may want to skim the fossil record bits. Big bits, those. But such a worthwhile read. One of those books that makes you strike up conversations with people you don't even like just so you can inform them humans can have larger brains than monkeys can because we cook our food. Incredible, huh? (cooked food=softer food=smaller jaws)
*The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, Paul Collins
I confess it. I cried. At the first story of two friends, old men, the only people still living who worked with Shakespeare, going about to gather up copies of their friend William's plays for publication in a single volume that would come to be known as the First Folio. Collins gives a list of plays not much regarded at the time and out of circulation which these two carefully tracked down, plays which would probably otherwise have disappeared forever. I read the names of the first two plays to myself, paused, thought how interesting and instructed the painter to listen as I read the list to him aloud. I began again and got only as far as the third play. A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Taming of the Shrew. The Tempest. My world trembled and shimmered. What if...what if..? I had found myself sobbing suddenly and unexpectedly the summer before, standing in Shakespeare's birthplace, looking at a copy of the First Folio in its little upstairs niche. My family sweetly wandered away and let me cry alone. In heaven I'm finding those two men who toiled through the bookstalls of London, lovingly seeing to the plays their friend had never seen to himself. What if...what if..?
*The Thirteenth Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire and Phosphorus, John Emsley
Not everyone is blown to bits at the elegance, the usefulness, the prophetic wholeness and utter rightness of the periodic table. I am. If you are, or if you think you ought to be, this book is not to be missed. It's not to be missed anyway, but that is, of course, up to you. Also, if you've ever wondered why you were taught never to play with matches. It may not be for the reasons you think.
*Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindberg
*Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Just write about one brick...still changes my life. Still.
*How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen
*A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis

Stories
You may see here books you think of as being for children. I think an amazing story is for people. Some of these books are called Fantasy. I will not label those as such in case you have an unreasonable allergy and, if you knew, would avoid them solely on that ground. This list is arranged in what to me is an order: if you know and like one book, I think the chances are reasonable you will like the ones listed near it.

*Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Susanna Clarke
Currently sitting at the top of the list, and there for a reason, but also sitting alone.
*Watership Down, Richard Adams
This one also sits alone; I've never read anything quite like it. If you've read this and liked it, The Private Life of the Rabbit, one of Adams' sources, is very well written and interesting and nearly made it on my nonfiction list on its own merit.
*The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia A. McKillip
*The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis
Especially The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
*Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Two Towers is my favorite.
*The Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula K. LeGuin
I love The Tombs of Atuan best and recommend (and this is a recommendation) that no one read beyond the original trilogy. Life is short.
*Dragonsong/Dragonsinger, Anne McCaffrey
Personally unmoved and finally annoyed by the rest of the series.
*Abhorsen (series), Garth Nix
*The Dark is Rising series, Susan Cooper
Though I don't love the last book and skip it when I read these to my kids. Nobody notices.
*James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl

The Glassblower's Children, Maria Gripe
Oh, I love this fairy tale and oh, it's out of print and oh, I wish you luck should you desire to find it.
*The Pink Fairy Book, ed. by Langston Hughes
These are all good, Pink is the one I owned as a child.
*Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Robert C. O'Brien
*The Tough Winter, Robert Lawson
This is the second book, after Rabbit Hill. My mom never bought the first one. Go figure. So I read the first book as an adult and like it but don't love it, though it is just as good. I like difficult tales about winter and hardship. Let's pretend like this is our winter cave and our parents are dead...
*Puck of Pook's Hill/Rewards and Fairies, Rudyard Kipling
Wonderful children's books that children may have a bit of trouble wading through. I would suggest these as read-together books. Very worth it.
*The Children of Greene Knowe/The Treasure of Greene Knowe, L. M. Boston
I don't love the rest of the series.
*Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
I have recently been informed these are not books for children. Hmm. They were when I was rereading them. If you know and love Alice already, you might like to dip into the facsimile edition or The Annotated Alice put together by Martin Gardener. I like to dip into them.
*The Penderwicks/The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Jeanne Birdsall
*All of a Kind Family, Sydney Taylor
*Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
This is the only one of Alcott's books I like. There, I've said it. I didn't know growing up I was reading an edited version. It worked really well for me.
*Caddie Woodlawn,
*Anne of Green Gables series, L. M. Montgomery
In all honesty, I lost interest after Anne and Gilbert ironed out their misunderstandings in a matrimonial way.
*The Secret Garden/ A Little Princess, Frances Hudgson Burnett
*The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken
This is a long series. Noah got further than I did.
*Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson
*Mandy, Julie Andrews
*Adopted Jane, Helen Fern Daringer
*Up a Road Slowly, Irene Hunt
*Strawberry Girl, Lois Lenski
*To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
*The White Witch of Kynance, Mary Calhoun
*Quest for a Maid, Frances Mary Hendry
*The Island of the Blue Dolphins
*The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare
*Calico Bush, Rachel Field
*Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
*Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
*I Capture the Castle, Dodi Smith
*A Room with a View
*North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
*Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
*The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
*Gilead, Marilyn Robison
*The Madonnas of Leningrad
*The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
*A Child's Garden of Verses

*Fun and Nonsense

Authors
This list caused me the most grief. In order to be here I have to have enjoyed everything I have read by these people. I will say candidly that not all their works are of equal strength, but if I see one of their books in a library I check it out; if I find one in a used bookstore I buy it. For some of them I have listed an obvious favorite. Or two.
*Hans Christian Anderson
*Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter, These Happy Golden Years
*Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company
*Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness, The Kite Rider, Pirate's Son
*Claire B. Dunkle, By These Ten Bones, Hollow Kingdom Trilogy
*Terry Pratchett, Winter Smith
*Diana Wynne Jones, Homeward Bounders
*Agatha Christie
*Meindert De Jong, House of Sixty Fathers, Journey from Peppermint Street, The Wheel on the School
*Jane Austen
*Robert Frost
*William Butler Yeats
*Emily Dickinson
*William Shakespeare
*Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
*Henry James
*Edith Wharton
*H.E. Bates
*P. G. Wodehouse
*M. R. James
*Gene Stratton Porter

So, there is a list of my tried and true, sturdy, trusty bookfriends. It will change.
I'd love to see your lists.

I recommend we all read.
What you choose is your own terrible responsibility.

Man With a Very Small Book, Brian Kershisnik

Help. The Second Part.

A man and a woman stand in the foreground of Descent from the Cross, waiting to help. The man's arms are stretched out, the painter has given him a cloth to hold. Very ordinary, no more than what is needed. What, at this point, can be done? The work of it; lifting the poor, broken son, cleaning, wiping, combing, wrapping, positioning in a semblance of living comfort, shift him gently. Hurrying, hurrying, as the sun strides away, turning from this day's misery, flinging itself over the horizon and dragging all the day's terrible work with it. These people, this family, are coming back after the Sabbath to unwrap, to touch and linger, to work without hurry, to settle him, sleeping, with all their love and all their care and all their time. They leave him in darkness but they are coming back, they will see him, once more, soon. And they are right. But before they see him, someone else will have freed him from their careful bindings.


Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
John 20:6-7

I always wonder about that napkin, folded and set aside. Careful, deliberate. Tidy. I am thinking about angels.

I struggle getting to church on time. Arriving early is what separates general authorities from me. Also, being nice. But definitely arriving at church on time. Sometimes it has felt like a qualifying task from a wonder tale. Gather these feathers from the wind, carry this mountain of grains in your palm, fashion flower crowns for the Queen and all her bees. Pick up your family and carry them on your head to church and do it in less than no time.
A monstrous task.
When my youngest child was about two or three, this failing in my life loomed like a rockfall across a mountain path. The rockfall seemed too deep, too tall, I could never remove it. For years I had negotiated it, climbed up and around and over it. I could do that, just, but it was wearing, made me dirty and too tired. Worse, the stupid pile seemed to be growing each week, spreading till it felt dangerous lugging my children up and across my enormous rockfall. My spirit wore thin scaling my pile of boulders, fighting on Sunday morning with my children, fighting with the painter, fighting with myself. Fighting with Everyone.
I considered skipping church.
I considered skipping church till my kids were older.
I considered skipping the first part of church (intentionally, I mean).
I considered.
With a heavy heart, I marched myself up to my rockfall and began considering my rocks.


It might seem simple to someone on the outside, someone of, say, an engineering frame of mind. Rocks have to go, can't use the road with rocks all over it, rocks have got to go, get those rocks out of here, what you want to have rocks for here in the first place? It may seem simple from the outside. It was as hard as the hardest thing I have ever done.

Drink the ocean whole, run without stopping till you reach the castle beyond the sea, swim beneath the waves till you find the fish that swallowed the ring.

I pondered my rocks. I forced myself up close to them, close enough to name them by their names. I took a Sunday to observe my failings, free and in the wild. On Monday I began to get ready for Sunday. Rock, rock, rock, rock. It took the whole week.
It's not that rock removal is Herculean. Hercules' tasks were doable, they simply required heavy machinery. My rocks, for me, were both heavy and paradoxical. I had to admit things, confess fault, remove licence, apply discipline. Close your eyes. Now do you see? How'm I s'posed to see with the blast shield down? But I kept my eyes closed and saw a lot of things. I took care of them, grimly, day after day and one day it was Sunday morning and we were going to be on time for church. Damn it.
Spin straw into gold, make bricks without straw, lay down your life to find it.


For want of a nail...

I couldn't find the white tights I had purchased, new, to fit and to be clean so there would be two pair and I could always find them and one wouldn't be in the wash and I had put the tights in the drawer but they weren't there--they weren't!!--they weren't anywhere and the whole thing, the whole week's work, lurched, stumbled, shuddered, stopped, ground down right there and I was stuck, skewered, hanging onto the drawer that was so unbelievably empty and we were going to be. Late. I hung there and felt myself collapsing on the inside into that empty space in the drawer, held on, clenched, the sides of the drawer and really felt every good solid true thing sucking down into the dark place that was never going to be--wait!-no,why-please!--brand new white tights I truly, factually, had put there myself.
It probably sounds silly from the outside, but you have to understand, I had been running to win, running for the crown, I had run till I couldn't run anymore and I didn't have a backup plan. We weren't going to make it, at all.
It probably sounds silly, from the outside.

Take back the ill you have done, fill the time you have wasted, restore the trust you have lost.

I can't. I can't do it. I prayed. Dear God, I tried, I tried so hard but I can't. God, help me, don't let this happen to me and to the children I'm trying to teach. I can't do it. And I know this is my fault, but I don't know how it happened and I don't know what to do now. Help me because I can't fail. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I will never try again.

And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
Luke 22:43

Different people get direction in different ways. I sometimes hear words in my head. These were very clear. Look in the back of her sister's drawer. They aren't the tights you're looking for but there is a pair there that will work. And they did. Clean. And white, a perfect fit. We were not early, but we were on time.
It was as good as the best miracle of my life. It was stunning. And cozy. I had an angel working with me who knew where the tights were.

familiar, a. [ME. famylier; OFr. familier; L. familiaris, of or pertaining to a household, domestic, from familia, household, family.]
Webster

I close my eyes to see impossible things are not accomplished according to any plan of mine. I never found those tights. In Hades there is an imp cavorting about in a small pair of white tights. I shall not dispute them with him; I can't imagine they are, by now, in very good shape. Anyway, we had sufficient. If my familiar angel can restore to me tights I never had, what impossible thing shall be beyond my believing? Feed them all with five barley loaves and two small fishes, bread from the sky and water from the rock, light to those those that walked in darkness. The people on the painter's canvas patiently waiting to undertake their grim work don't yet understand; it's not just the end of the world, it's that the world has ended.


Raise the dead.

How can I keep from singing?


Noah's photos

Stories. Where the Flowers Bloom Forever

My grandmother's house is still there, but it isn't the same.
A plain wooden cottage,
a patch of brown lawn,
and a fence that hangs, standing and sighing,
in the Seattle rain.
Judy Collins, Secret Gardens

I went walking this morning in a gap between rainstorms. On Ash Street I swung out in an arc to avoid getting drenched by a big swath of lilac hanging, dripping, over the sidewalk and then swung myself back to smell the flowers. Pale purple, the ones most common in the places I have lived. As long as I don't put Texas or California on the list of places I have lived. So, these were the pale, softly purple lilacs that seem of all the lilacs to have best thrived where the Utah pioneers planted them. I had to approach them carefully; each tiny quatrefoil was brimming with rain. Wanton sniffing might drown me. Lilac is my favorite flower for smelling, I think, and polite, too, the bushes hold out arms filled with blossoms at just the height for most any nose. Grape hyacinth, too, mock orange, stocks and certain roses. But none of those are evocative the way lilac is evocative. And you have to pick grape hyacinth, or lie down in the grass, to smell it.

Spring time in Kanosh smells like newly turned fields and the sun on lilac bushes. And dust.

When my parents fled from San Diego to Kanosh we lived at first in a house my grandparents owned. My grandpa, born in Kanosh, planned to retire there so when Ida Cummings' house came for sale, he bought it and my parents moved into it while they looked around and decided what to do next. Ida's garden was right outside my California city child's experience, complicated and mysterious in design, lovely but hiding its beauty in overgrowth, a gardener's garden neglected after years of careful tending and running to stealthy abandon as the gardener aged. And died. Ida died and we went to live in her house till it was time for my grandparents to come there. It was summer when we came and I had no friends so I moved straight into the garden.

I hadn't read, much, yet, so I had no storybook gardens in my interior world with which to compare this new old garden. I hadn't been to Europe or looked at picture books of English cottage and kitchen gardens. In California people had a front yard and a back yard. My mom worked hard on both, I'm sure, though I only remember the back yard with any clarity. In time her yard would have become a garden, but the housing development still had a recently-scraped feel to it. This Kanosh house didn't sit in a yard; a yard is either shell-shocked land around a too-new house, or, a yard is a place in which to contain or corral stuff, not a place you nurture, nourish, and fill with intent. A yard is for cows, for lumber, for useful things like gravel and scrap metal. A yard is for a slavishly even, unnaturally green, severely domesticated grass plot and two identical bushes, one on either side of the front door. We name such a yard after the most important thing in it, the entrance to the house. Front Yard. No yards at Ida's house. Ida's baby was a garden, big and multitasking, as Utah pioneer gardens are. And it was wick. Aye, that it was.

I think, once, it might have been a masterpiece.

I drive by with strangers and wish they could see what I see,
a tangle of summer birds, flying in sunlight,
a forest of lilies,
an orchard of apricot trees.

Given such an amazing early influence some people might have felt desire stirring within them to learn about gardens of this period, which plants were readily available and which were exotic and hard won. They might have wondered how Ida kept it all watered, weeded and going while raising lots of children, acting as a pillar of both the church and community, bottling all the fruit from the orchard just west of the house, growing a vegetable garden for all of them as well as the necessary pigs, chickens, cows and horses. Without electricity or indoor plumbing. They might have at least asked Ida's descendants, still living in Kanosh, about these things. I could have talked to them at church. Sigh. Acquiring knowledge is the calling of a scholar, not a slacker, reader and dreamer, a stroller and sniffer of other people's lilacs. It may be too late for me. I just like to look at things and wonder about them in my head and then make stuff up. I don't want to look at your historical documents, thanks. Actually, I do want to look at them, but it won't occur to me to wonder if you have them and even if I knew you did, I would never, never ask out of respect for privacy. Mine.

Even slackers have their inly guarded, painfully secret passions, and I confess I lost myself completely to that garden. I will truly never love that way again.

The house was a large one, by the Kanosh standards of its time, a Gothic farmhouse with three gables across the front and porch that was also a balcony made of white painted wood which I thought very fancy, when I was little and first living there. Actually, the wood was no longer white but it once had been and enough paint chips clung to the grey wood for me to fill in the whole picture. I wondered if the family had some pretensions. I don't know, you could ask around in Kanosh. People would remember. Next door, west of Ida's and on the other side of the orchard, was a red brick house, not nearly as old, with a basement and with ceilings of normal height so it was closer to the ground and humble. I assume the Cummings owned both lots and one of their sons built his house just the next lot over. In that house was Leila.

Great-grandfather's farm is still there, but it isn't the same.
The barn is torn down and the fences are gone.
The Idaho wind blows the topsoil away every spring.

I don't know if that's how she spelled her name; that's how I spelled it in my childmind and that's the way it will be here. If you wish to have a more accurate description of Kanosh, its denizens and environs, I can direct you to a history written by my grandfather, whose favorite grandchild I was not. She lived in the little red brick house alone because her husband had died and her children were gone, so you can see how fearfully old she was, even then. Everybody was fearfully old then, especially everybody in Kanosh. I don't know where they stored all the old people in San Diego but I never saw any. In California you had to drive miles and hours to get to your grandma's house but in Kanosh you could knock on any door in town and a fair approximation of your grandma would bounce right up and open it. Leila seemed tiny and frail to me, too thin and somehow wispy. She was very small and I was going to be very big and it was as if that scale was set between the two of us when I was seven and we first met. She was pale; I could see the veins under her skin. She was pretty, I thought, with large eyes. She was gentle, so gentle, and loving and kind and quiet. These are things I never have been and I wondered mightily how she managed them. She laughed easily; it's possible she was not entirely sure of herself, but that's a very adult thing to think about. She used to laugh, no matter what you asked her, and say "Well. I don't know." Which was not true as she was old and good and knew everything. I thought her hair was long for such an old lady, down to or past her shoulders, and it was dark and stayed dark. I don't know if I touched it up with my memory or if it was touched up in some other way or if she simply retained the power of hair-colored hair, but this long dark hair made her look younger to me than I thought she could possibly be. Young and old, like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Past, and with strong, strong hands, too, like the Ghost's, because she was also a gardener.

The garden I lived in was distracting and brambly, it had huge trees as tall as the tall old house, it kept secrets and memories to itself, it was dark with shade and oldness, while across the white (same sort of white as that front porch and balcony) picket fence at the edge of the orchard, Leila's garden was sunny, busy, wildly colored and factually magical. Birds shot briefly through the air in my garden and sat around on branches and roofs singing and tweeting; I know bees must have come in droves because the trees poured out fruit. In Leila's garden they lingered, reveled. Leila's garden hummed, twitched and spun with birds, butterflies and bees. She had all of her own and a chunk of everyone else's share. I would sit in the tree house or in an apple tree on my side of the pickets and watch her working and talking to herself in her garden (like a vulture child I was, yes, very like). She wore a shady sun hat (which, if you viewed her from above, covered the top parts of her face) and flowered gloves. Those were delightful to me. I admired and coveted them chastely. I wondered where on earth she had gotten them as I had never seen anything like that for sale. I made her a possessor of subtle and arcane knowledge and wished myself to someday be such a garden shopper, able to sally forth and purchase flowered cloth gloves casually, with off-hand (no pun) elegance as though to me it were a thing of every day. Such were to me the hard won secrets of the master gardener. (I still believe in the esoterism of shopping. Gnostic shopping. I await enlightenment.) Leila in her garden was an American flower fairy, insubstantial and eternal, working the craft with clippers and a trowel and I wanted to be her. My mom was the gardener who gave me my foundation, nearly all my practical understanding, but she couldn't initiate me into The Mysteries. She was already my mom so she couldn't become my fairy gardenmother. Those are the rules. You can look them up.

I still see the ghosts of the people I knew long ago.
Inside the old kitchen they bend and they sigh.
My life passed them up and the world in its way passed them by.

I visited Leila in her kitchen as often as she was in there when the fit took me. She had made us free of her house from the beginning, so long as we knocked at the door and she answered. The broad, deep bottom drawer in her kitchen she kept filled with toys that had belonged to her boys but were now for her grandchildren. My mom protested our numerous visits at first out of politeness and then against Leila's inevitable loss of privacy and freedom as we encroached and conquered but Leila protested back that she liked having us around and that we were good children. This was true. Being made welcome in people's houses is one of many honors afforded the well-behaved. There are drawbacks too, of course, but I can never remember what they are. The worn toys in her drawer were utterly unlike ours. A strange double wire handle with two arcing prongs and a red wheel on a silver spoke that rolled magically along first the bottom of the wires, then, with a flip of the wrist, along the top. One thing Leila named Slinky (I had honestly never yet seen one) and another she called Hoppy Taw. (That one I understood as soon as she started to explain and was disoriented to realize true hopscotch required equipment. Hoppy Taw went into the imaginary basket of wonders that held those flowered gloves.) I first played jacks on Leila's kitchen floor. (I think my mom felt bad about some of this, she got me my own jacks right after I came home stricken with awe at Leila's Tour of Mystical Toys of the Ancient World. Or perhaps she hoped similar toys of my own might fill my longings and afford Leila some peace. Right.) The most numinous antique toy of all Leila's kid's stuff was a rectangular box, not deep, red plastic frame, smooth white screen of sorts, stylus hanging from the side with a small metal tip. Etch-a-Sketch was written on it in a font my bones told me had been popular before my great-grandfather was born. I loved it. It seemed the sort of instrument of diversion and illusion Columbus might have smuggled onto the Santa Maria to pull out, presto and behold, when the cabin boys and crew muled and pined, fearing they would die without ever standing firm on dirt again, enclosed and enmeshed in that bottomless desert of ocean. Look, men, not out across the water but here at this box, this window. Here I can read the words of your fate, wondrous enough, but, see, now they vvvvvanish! Shazam. I used to hunch over Etch-a-Sketch on Leila's kitchen linoleum, wondering what would happen if one day it began to write on its own, message bubbling up from beneath the plastic, what I would do, what the words would say, whether I would be able to read them, what Leila would think of that. "Well. I don't know. Land, that hasn't happened for years. Hand it here."

Does Columbus seem a world away from a Kanosh garden? He wasn't. His toy, his device of enchantment and quite possibly navigational orienteering was sitting in Leila's deep drawer waiting for her grand kids, and her garden was right outside the kitchen door, probably six feet south of that drawer. A dense, deeply developed strip of mature perennials, five or six feet deep, ran between her driveway and the picket fence that bounded Ida's orchard. Another similar bed across the front of Leila's lot behind another picket fence. Vegetable garden (I little cared, then, for that) on the west. Grass, berries and fruit trees in the back sheltering between the house and a fence bisecting the lot, separating Leila's bits from what would have been her husband's part for animals and for outbuildings and pasture and just for having. Acre and a quarter. Small, densely plotted feminine garden near the house; largely and loosely masculine back lot. Mormon pioneer town.
And that was it. Not like Ida's big and imposing ruin of a place. Very small garden, really, all that riot of color and growing, that continuous bloom ("Bachelor's buttons and those are snaps. That's columbine and peony. Mother's roses. A start from that lovely dark lilac"), all Leila's art, knowledge and craft contained primarily in two small strips. How can I measure a garden from memory? How big is the world? How big does it need to be?

But most of all, it is me that has changed, and yet, still I'm the same.
That's me at the weddings, that's me at the graves,
dressed like the people who once looked so grown up and brave.

Some friends of mine who cared deeply in a very different way about gardens bought Leila's house and didn't want those flowers. They told me and my sisters we could take all we wanted. Sweet william, pinks, lady's slippers, fernleaf peony and a start of the lovely dark lilac and another, not as dark but so richly scented, growing now in the garden at Zella Allen's house which we bought, the painter and I, where the painter lives while he's painting. One day I was at another house, Dorothy Paxton's house, waiting with someone, looking at Dorothy's flower garden with a new person who had bought that old house. I saw fernleaf peony growing near the walk, not blooming yet, buds still tightly closed dark green fists, but unmistakable. "Oh," I said, "I grew up with that flower. It was in the garden when we came."
"Yes, all the flowers in here are so old fashioned. Those would be from Ida's house. All the family has the same starts in their gardens, from her. Maureen and Leila, all of them..."

I'm not listening anymore because behind my eyes I'm seeing something new, a genealogy of flowers traceable through mothers and sisters and in-laws and gardendaughters. Once you knew to look you could see where the connections, the lore and love, were carried from plot to plot, invisible ley lines, gardening paths meandering from peony to pink to peony. I'm not trying to decipher it, just watching it flow from home plot to home plot on the map of Kanosh I have carried inside my head since the summer of my eighth year. I remember on Memorial Day at the cemetary a pile of dark red rose petals on a pioneer grave, matriarch and patriarch, and ribbons of dark red petals spreading out across the grass to the graves of daughters and sons, from those graves to others further removed. Blood red streams of petals in a flower web reaching out and out from the first planting in that family's first garden in this tiny frontier town. Roses bloom almost indestructable, grape hyacinth spreads out and out, lilacs twist and thicken in their wood and hold out sprays of soft, richly scented purple to gladden and sadden passersby. I cut Leila's flowers in my garden and leave them on her grave.

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.
I see willows bending,
the season is spring
and the silver blue sailing birds fly
with the sun on their wings.

Secret gardens of the heart
where the old stay young forever.



Noah's photos

Help. Familiar Angels. The First Part.

Untitled, Angels; Brian Kershisnik

deposition, n. [OFr. deposition; LL. depositio, a laying or putting down, from L. depositus, pp. of deponere, to lay or put down.]
Webster's Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged

The Son of Man hath descended below them all.
Art thou greater than he?
D&C 122: 8

The painter is working on a large canvas. It consumes and absorbs him. He works on other things, too, he always does, but this large painting is the core, the nut, the meat, of where his thought and intent are right now.

Descent from the Cross

I'm thinking and thinking, these last days and weeks, about help. Given and received. How we ask for it, or ask to give it, why we sometimes refuse, whether we would know it, for sure for sure, if we fell over it.
Into it.
For ease of thinking I debate, decide, divine, and divide help into two types.

The painting splits between two crowds, one on our earth's ground and one in its air, which hinge at a central dead and bloody body, awkwardly reclining, extended, by the efforts of the crowd on the ground who are lifting it up from below so that the legs swing forward and the whole thing, the whole composition, folds, creases, at the hands still nailed to a cross. Everybody, in the air and on the ground, looks to be holding their breath, being as careful as they know how to be. Dissolving into sorrow or stepping forward to work, to the task. Still, it doesn't look good. It looks like it's just as well he was dead for this part.

From my memories I tease out one sort of help that anyone can give.
And would.
In Manhattan, across the street and kitty corner from us, a group of people wait for a bus, among them a man in a wheelchair. My focus, my gaze, will be on these events only because I'm interested in the building behind the people. Bus pulling toward the corner; as it does the wheelchair also pulls out of the crowd and turns toward the bus. Getting in position? Going on the bus first? I don't know enough of buses or wheelchairs to properly understand what I see but in less than an instant, quicker than I can organize the frames of this little movie I'm watching, the chair stumbles, sort of staggers, maybe the wheel goes off the curb, and the chair tips, falls into the path of the bus still moving forward, still heading to stop on top of a man suddenly separate from his wheelchair, suddenly lying in the street.
I have taken the step to run, dropped my small girl's hand, drawn a great breath and lifted my other foot for the first true running step to sprint across all those lanes through all those cars. That strange moment; foot jerks and hops back and forth between air and pavement while eyes and brain hold a conference. The cease and desist order nearly sprains my ankle. Never, never make it, I'll be dead, nothing, nothing I can do... and people are coming from everywhere. So many, so fast, I don't see them come, they are acting and thinking and helping while I am saving my own self from accidentally falling headlong into the traffic kitty corner and across the street. Stopping the bus (how?), re-directing traffic, helping the man up, checking him all over, righting the wheelchair, gathering up his scattered belongings, putting him and all the waiting people on the bus, directing the bus back into traffic, picking up their own discarded possessions, walking away, getting back to whatever. Not looking back. Don't thank me, anyone would do it. Done and over, just like that. Nothing like as long as a minute. The first sort of help. All it takes is being present and human.

There are crying people in the air and on the ground who turn to each other, touch and nuzzle, reach out to stroke hair even from air to earth. The women, especially? The crowd on the ground set their teeth, their hands, their shoulders, to a task that should have been an occasion, a job that should have been a ritual of lingering and loving, fond remembrances, shared comfort in a life well and fully spent. This body should have grown up and gown old through a lifetime of stories; there should have been laughter here, too. Not grim, not hurried, not like this, quick and brutal in the gathering darkness as the sun sinks and flames behind them. The crowd in the air press as close as they are able, torn between the agony and terror of this suffering, this grieving, this dying, and the solemn weight of witnessing history twisting on its axis. The mills of God grinding, unbelievably, to a stop, silent for this moment before they turn back, begin to rumble and grind the other way. This horror is the culmination of our most desperate, private, scathing hopes. A dead man birthing our souls' delight. It's the end of the world.

In the emergency room with my first miscarriage. It's an off time, no one needing assistance, the rooms are silent, sterile, no other hurting humans to bring pathogens even by breathing. My baby is dead. Word spreads. Nurses come to hold me, to stroke my hands and hair, make sure I have enough pain killers for my body, assure me my heart will not be always broken. They enclose me, they are intimate. These are my sisters because they know. Every one of them standing around me tells me about her lost babies. Every one. We are a clan. They stand by me for hours till it is all over and they practically carry me to the car. You will be ok. It will be ok.
Second miscarriage the nurse gives me morphine. She is busy, comes and goes. I hear through the drug haze another nurse asking, "Is she bad? Is she ok?" and the answer, quick and curt. "She's fine. A miscarriage."
Third miscarriage. I am alone in my house and this is a much later term baby, someone I knew from ultrasounds who has unaccountably fled, leaving a tiny ghost in my body. A poltergeist, wrecking havoc. I push my head against the wall and whisper to God. Feel myself known and safe and surrounded by sisters who know. Hands on mine. Keep my eyes closed because I don't want to know if I can't see them. You will be ok. It will be ok.
My last child's birth. "Oh," the nurse says, reading my chart,"you're three for six. Right?" She looks up, smiles, squeezes my hand. "Me too."
This is the other sort of help; giving this help requires experience, expertize. I aim to remember this whenever God lays before me a way of suffering. This is for study, so now I know. Now I can help. Sometimes in order to be of real help it is required that we study, know intimately.

The painter talked to people who would know about how a dead body looks, how it would move if moved. He puts tools in the bottom half of the painting, among the crowd on the ground, scattered between feet, tools to use for getting large nails out of human hands and feet.

I saw a girl once, in the student health center, quiet and calm, holding one hand in the other with a napkin lying loose over the cradled hand. I was there for blood poisoning (not for the first time. It's a problem I have). When the nurse came to call me, the girl's companion stood up, nervous and fearing to be rude but worried and driven by unease. "Please, could you see my friend?" The other girl, hands lying one atop the other so oddly, demurred. "It's alright, she was here first--" but her friend cut her off, forcing assistance. "No, I think you need to look at this, first, she has a key in her hand," and lifted away the napkin. I barely had time to reflect with knee jerk irritation that blood poisoning isn't exactly a stroll through the flower show and to wonder, key in her hand? is that weird or just weird? before I saw that she did have a key in her hand. In the center. Right through. Sticking out above and below her palm. Some strange, detached, observant part of me said get a close look. Remember this, it's a central image, it will be important later. As the nurse took her quickly away, running almost while the odd girl with her odd predicament still demurred and protested the gravity of her situation, I thought what on earth are they going to do? Who helps somebody like that? I'll bet they've never seen just this thing. What tools do you use to rescue a hand in such a danger?
Not knowing keys, but knowing hands.

I saw a man in Kanosh working on his car just outside the general store, hood of the car up, head close to the engine, hand resting on the edge of the car. Saw the wind blow the hood closed, saw him jerk his head out in time, saw the hood close and the lock catch and bind through his hand, saw him trapped. Saw people coming from everywhere.
First sort of help. Be human.
Saw them trying to open the hood which stuck. Jammed.
Saw a man running to his truck parked on the next block, throwing himself around it to grab his large tool chest, saw him running, urgent and awkward, the tool chest slamming his legs and him running, gasping, back up the street past the store where we watched from the window.
What on earth, I wondered, is he going to do? Can he possibly know how to solve this? Does he have a plan? A tool for this use? This doesn't look good. I decided not to watch and walked home. I had no experience.
The second sort of help. Know what you're doing or stand out of the way.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities;
but was in all points tempted like as we are,
yet without sin.
Hebrews 4:15

The painter thought about it, talked about it. How do you get spikes out of a person and preserve the person at all? What would they have used, been thinking? Did someone start planning for this ending at the beginning? Did someone run to their shop, their shed?

Descent from the Cross.

I try to stage it in my mind. This is how I see things. Make it a play, make it concise, consistent. People are basically the same, world without end and time after time. How would they act? I push them around with my thoughts, rearrange them for maximum impact, suggest motivation. I am moving a painted figure in the foreground, rocked back into an arc, body tense with effort, his shoulder under the descending top crosspiece, bearing so much of its weight and of the man still fastened to it. There is a pry bar lying at his feet. Realization washes across me. Woman, over there. Man, here. Mother. Brother. Carpenter. Tools.
Family.

familiar, a. [ME. famylier; OFr. familier; L. familiaris, of or pertaining to a household, domestic, from familia, household, family.]
Webster

This would be a man familiar with tools. Father raised him to this work, to this task, shape, hammer, sand, cut, and maybe he's never done precisely this thing but he knows the wood, knows the nail.
Knows the man nailed to the wood.
Brother. Mother. Father. God. Family. Anyone near could lend a hand, anyone would try to help with the poor broken son. Anyone would gently support a leg, hold the weeping, stroke the hair, but hand over the pry bar to the one who knows.
It's your family who knows how to take apart wood, get the nails out of you; those who know this become family.
Anyone can call 911. We're primed, we've got this. The surgeon hands off his cell phone to take up his scalpel.
Two kinds of help.
I'm not going to think about people deciding not to be human.
I remember a neighbor, a nurse, working fiercely to save a life and never recognizing till the end the horribly sick man was his brother.
I think of a story, a friend standing between the living and dying, between fire and water, watching death make off with one of her family while the jaws of Hell stretched wide after the others. All the human people working desperately, hopelessly.
And the air around them filled with angels. Or so I have heard.
It's the end of the world, don't stand back, do what you know.
Be human.
While Walking; Brian Kershisnik

I have been aided by angels who happened on the scene, the closest people at hand when terror came.
I have been sustained by brothers and sisters, seen and unseen, who came because they had studied this pain, knew, from the inside.
I have seen people wracked by circumstance and blind chance.
I have seen people hammered by trials constructed, from the ground up, to fit them. Snug as a coffin.
I will tell you what I believe.
For succor in our most shattering, exquisite, personal trials, they don't send just anybody. Those who fly to our aid were chosen. Because they know. It is so on earth where they are seen. It is so where they are not seen.
We observe it in our lives lived on this earth's ground. Some help has to have labored, studied, suffered sufficiently that it knows what to do. This is a comfort, to me. Believe I'll take care of you like one of my own.
This is family.

And he looked round about
on them which sat about him,
and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!
For whosoever shall do the will of God,
the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.
Mark 3:34-35