Who is telling me a story?
Whose legs wore the paint so thin on that rounded oak edge?
Who sat for breakfast in these chairs?
Who listened to family stories?
Now that our histories are linked by chance
I want to know who you are.
I’ve been working out in my back yard where the forsythias have leafed out after the blooms have faded and these two chairs have weathered two more years outside in the weather. The two painted chairs were plant stands at the ends of my driveway; the unpainted chair fell to pieces and, any finish on its surface washed away by weather, is headed to the bottom of the compost bin to decay like any wood, and one day become a part of my garden.
I remember this poem when I look at them. This year I decided it was no longer in progress. I thought of many more questions as I considered making changes but the ones in this poem were the first ones that came to mind and I’ll go with that.
I have a fondness and also a certain protectiveness for older things that have been discarded. I’m always pulling chairs out of others’ trash, seeing they still have some use, and I don’t want them to spend the end of their useful lives in a landfill. I’ve often used them in my house for a while, then when their joints begin to loosen and paint begins to peel, they have their next life in my garden, often for a decade or so, as decorations, plant stands, even actually sitting places.
Cleaning out under my deck this spring I knew I had about six of them under there, and I’d blocked them in with garden hoses and such. Time for them to get back to work. I decided this was a great spot for these three chairs to at least spend some time, and after I’d walked back to my work area and turned to look at them, these three old oak chairs, their loose panels, peeling layers of paint in colors through the decades, the front edges worn smooth from legs, started telling me a story. So I wrote a poem.
Actually, I recorded my thoughts on my phone, and this little poem is exactly what I recorded. I find I often do better speaking my thoughts as notes than actually trying to write things in moments like this.
Spring rises from flattened earth in green rosettes of energy pushing stems of blossoms toward the light.
Toward the light.Spring beauty
Every storm pushes ahead of itself a wind that tells you its name. It whistles through the branches and moans in the treetops.
Wind in the trees
I took a couple of quick walks along the trail and into the woods between errands on the first warm and inviting days. At first it was all practical, looking for the first spring ephemerals, but as always the sensory experience of nature edges away the practicality and loosens my creative senses. I found only one flower not quite opened the first visit to all my favorite places for these first flowers, but a week later everything had opened up, shades of green and yellow, flowers, the sound of running water and spring had been unleashed.
So overwhelmed with looking and listening and walking, scenting mud and moss and a mixture of last year’s detritus and this year’s fresh beginnings, and feeling the wind on my face and tugging on my hair and the water on my feet that I couldn’t form a coherent group of words.
I only came up with two and gave myself a few days to let them simmer to see if anything more would develop. Not really, but I loved them and wanted to share the experience.
It is early March and I am planting peas. The wan spring sun is finding its heat and lays like a warm hand upon my back as I work. Signs of approaching spring fill my senses in the mild air on my skin, the scent of damp soil and the shrieks of children as they run in frenzied circles of freedom, much like the birds swooping and circling above whistling their mix of songs.
We have passed the first intoxicating days of air that does not bite, endless sun warm enough to melt the last snowfall into a composition of dripping and trickling, soften the soil and make one’s blood run with the abandon of a stream overflowing with spring thaw. The dawns have come noticeably earlier and the muted indigo dusks have lost the sharp quickness of winter and softened to a moist lingering evening.
Perhaps it is the phase of the sun or the moon, the proximity to the vernal equinox or some eternal voice that speaks to those who will listen about the time and season of things, or my own impatience to join in with the cycle that has been going on without me for a few months. Whether it is any of these reasons or all of them or none of them, I awaken one day in March every year with the knowledge that this is the day to plant the peas. It is as clear a yearly anniversary for me as any holiday, and can never be planned.
This particular morning, awakening with this revelation, I reviewed the process of planting and imagined once again the garden I had been planning since the previous autumn, fed my cats and stepped out onto the deck with one or another of them and my coffee in hand as the sun lifted above the horizon. I listened to what the birds said in their morning song, closed my eyes and caught the scent of a chill early spring morning to find its opinion, and felt the warm sun wash assurance over my face and thereby determined that, yes, for whatever reasons, this day was right for both me and the peas.
I sorted the packets of peas out of the basket of seed packets, found the jars reserved for this purpose and filled them with warm water, opened the packets and counted the peas into the jars, taping their names around the jars to keep them sorted. The peas would soak for a few hours, welcomed into this world with a gentle bath, softening their outer layers and awakening the seedling within.
Seedlings are growing under lights in my basement, but at this stage they could be houseplants for all that they represent food. Planting the peas is the real thing. Putting seeds in the ground is an act of faith and trust that both you and nature will do your parts, that neither will you plant your peas under the wrong conditions and expect them to survive nor will nature scramble the seasons and instead of turning toward summer, turn back toward winter and eliminate the growing season. It is a promise to honor the needs of the seeds you sow, and so be rewarded with their provender.
Going about my daily business of checking the e-mail and the fax and making and returning a few phone calls, I was really only biding my time until the sun warmed the area of the garden where the peas would be planted. In early afternoon I dropped everything else and changed my clothes, preparing to break my own dormancy, clear the debris and decay of inactivity and begin to set my own seeds for another year of activity.
I had fondly reviewed each step of the process of planting peas while I completed the other necessary responsibilities of the day, and the outline of my task for the day was clear, but it was also leading me to visions of the garden to come and my excitement was building. Dressed in a flannel shirt over a t-shirt, jeans and rubber gardening clogs, I opened the basement door and burst outside, the first of many days I would do so. I chose my tools and moved everything to the long, narrow planting bed along the fence. This bed gets full sun nearly all day and has the best drainage for spring planting, and as they grow, the peas can twine their tendrils through the fence wire, giving the plants themselves the maximum amount of sunlight on their leaves and making the mature peas much easier to find at harvest time.
A slight breeze rustled dry leaves stuffed into corners of the garden and caused bare branches to click and rattle together. The earth’s crust looked dull gray-brown and callused with winter debris and clumps of frostbitten soil heaved up as the soil froze and thawed through the cold, but as I cleared away and turned under a winter’s worth of last year’s remains from its surface the moist soil beneath looked as rich as chocolate cake. As I applied my spading fork, gently pressing, lifting and turning forks full of soil to loosen it for roots to sprout and stretch an early robin followed close behind me. She ignored my polite question about her health and comment on the weather, intent instead on being the first to grab the fresh treats upturned by my work.
While the robin, joined by others, continued diving at creeping soil dwellers startled by their abrupt turn of soil, I rolled the wheelbarrow to the compost bin. I lifted the layer of tangled plants and autumn leaves to expose the fine humus beneath, last year’s garden trimmings and kitchen vegetable scraps recycled by nature to fertilize this year’s harvest. The robins hardly noticed my approach as I wheeled the barrow back to the bed and only moved a few feet up or down the bed as I began dropping forks full of compost over the soil and turned it under in another pass with the spading fork.
The steady work warmed me, rinsing the winter’s cold and stiffness from my muscles and bones, and already I felt stronger, more balanced, with more purpose to life than when I had awakened that morning. Even though little puffs of cold air still rose from shadows, working under the warming sun I found I could stand for the first time in a t-shirt, letting light breezes brush my arms, imagining what, in just a few months, would feel like unbearable heat, and this barren landscape of a backyard garden would be a humming, buzzing, lush tangle of growing things.
My cats divide their time among prowling the yard, inspecting in every corner and under every shrub for messages from other animal visitors to their yard, helpfully supervising my work, watching with narrowed eyes, then walking down along the furrow to check its precision, and napping for the first time in the warm spring sun on a bed of dry leaves. Cookie, Namir, Stanley, Sophie, Moses, Allegro, Kublai, all my garden companions through the years join me for this annual event as I watch the ones who approach me for pets, and fondly remember the antics and habits of those who are here in spirit.
Then it was time to draw the furrow, one long, straight row all the way down this narrow bed. As the furrow grew I remembered pea plantings from previous years, envisioning little sprouts in the soil, dainty white blossoms all over robust vines, delicate tendrils reaching out and upward, fluttering leaves creating a complicated pattern in shades of green with sunshine and shadow. As the last act of preparation, I got three thick, short twigs and, visually dividing the bed into four parts, one for each variety of pea, I placed a twig as a divider.
In the kitchen, I put the jars of soaking peas into a little basket then took them down to the garden while trying to decide in which order I should plant them. I plan my garden pretty thoroughly, but always allow for some last-minute decisions. I could stand there all afternoon debating with myself the best order for planting the four different varieties while grackles and blue jays kept a running commentary on my activity and everything else around, their squeaks and whistles and pops thrown from one to another from tree to tree and sometimes joining together just to make noise like a crowd of boisterous people. I know there is no need for change in what I had planned. Everything was ready, and it only remained to actually put the pea seeds in the furrow.
My fingers slightly apart over the top of the first jar, I held the jar close to the soil and walked along the bed in the first section, pouring the peas’ soaking water into the furrow, then filled the palm of my hand with some actual pea seeds. The peas, softened, warm, nearly hummed with life as I pushed them around in my palm. Carefully balancing my handful of pea seeds I dropped to one knee at the end of the bed. Taking one pea seed and then another in two fingers of one hand from the palm of the other I placed them one after another an unmeasured inch apart as if offering a gift. Creeping along on one knee in a seemingly ancient ritual of supplication, I continued down the bed, planting each of the four varieties in the same way, suppressing the surges of my inherent impatience borne of a life adapted to automation, with the orderly, sustained labor itself, letting the job take the time it needed to take, enjoying the activity, enjoying the travel without concentrating on the destination.
Now the pea seeds stretch like a strand of irregular freshwater pearls, pale green in their rich brown velvet bed of nurturing humus, plump from their soaking, fully awakened and ready, as I was this morning, to rejoin the cycle that has been turning while we have been dormant. Each one contains the ability to sprout, sink roots down into the soil and push cotyledons up through it, grow leaf after leaf, branching, reaching and climbing, its intent to give life to potentially hundreds of progeny. These peas have so many odds against them in the immense challenge of bringing new life into the world and the responsibility of carrying on their species, and yet their only defense is to stand there and take whatever is spent on them and do their best to fulfill their biological obligation. Surely after so many generations of being tossed into the soil and left on their own they have learned some organic equivalent of fear, yet they show no concern at their position but seem excited, eager to get on with the process.
I know it will snow again this season, the soil will freeze again, clutching around each tender seed, the rains may fall too much or too little, the heat may rise to an unusual summer’s pitch earlier than is expected, all of these things and more have happened in other springs; the conditions for life are never perfect. And suddenly, as every year, I feel a rush of protective love for these brave little peas, and that bond between a grower and the growing thing is formed, and I know, and the peas know, and everything else I will plant and nurture in this little space I call my own, that I will keep my part of the bargain and protect and support them in any way I can, and they will do their best with what is given them, and in the end they will gladly give and I will enjoy whatever gifts they have to offer, be it nourishment or visual delight or practical necessity.
Birds flying overhead cast moving shadows across the warm dark earth as I work, their paths crisscrossing as if to bless my activity as I move back along the row with my hoe, gently piling loose soil over the peas, surrounding them with all the nourishment I can give them, and then again as I return with the watering can, soaking the bed from end to end in my final act of planting before I leave these peas on their own.
A haze of high, thin clouds has formed on the southwest horizon, dulling the sunlight with a gossamer veil. I can once again feel the chill of winter and put my flannel shirt on over my t-shirt, gather my tools together and begin putting things away. Still at its lower winter angle, the sun will soon fall behind the tips of bare trees, then behind rooftops, then behind the silhouette of the edge of the earth, bathing this newly-turned bed full of pea seeds in the soft lavender of an early evening in late winter to be followed by the encouraging glow of a waxing moon.
Later, when the lavender twilight has deepened to an indigo dusk, the moonlight faded behind clouds then dissolved into a cold blue-black night velvet with moisture, I will hear the first few raindrops tap against the roof and windows, weighted with sustenance gathered from the earth in this thaw. As the drops are joined by more and yet more until there are no more individual drops, I will imagine each drop washing the soil down around each pea, pressing it ever so gently into the hand of its mother, who will cradle it, giving it the divine spark of its new life.
And I have once again passed this anniversary and rejoined the cycle.
Because that’s what I did over the weekend, on a day just like what’s described in my essay.
~~~
In 2003, a group of us had founded a community development organization among business owners in town to help build up foot traffic and interest in Carnegie. I handled arts issues, and later flower planting, but for those first two years I really wanted to pull together all the creative efforts around town, three galleries, historical society, various artists, church choirs, and writers hidden among it all.
While planning quarterly gallery walks and encouraging businesses to stay open for the guests who would visit, I also decided to found a writers’ group to meet at Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall. We met once a month on Saturday morning. I had no experience in this but decided we needed one, and if I couldn’t guide it perhaps I’d attract someone who had more experience and could take it over.
At the end of 2003 I suggested we have a reading, each of us reading one or two pieces to whoever showed up to hear us. Then, after finding small books like this in bags of free books I suggested we all contribute one or two pieces of the writing we’d shared and I’d design and have a little folio book printed. We could sell them to help raise funds to pay for the printing and keep our group going.
And so we did. We had about eight people participate, and about a dozen gathered at a gallery to hear us in January 2004. I wrote this piece for that event and included it in the first edition of our book.
We continued meeting through 2004 until the catastrophic flood from Hurricane Ivan in September. We only missed one meeting and had another reading and another folio book in January 2005. At that point I felt I had to hand the organization over to someone else for new challenges with family member health and helping to clean up after the flood. The group kind of drifted, then quit meeting, but I am still thrilled for the two good years we had, and all the amazing stories and writing we shared.
Four years ago who would have thought Ukrainians would still be suffering under bombardment in Putin’s military invasion and continued attempt to own Ukraine? He wants to take the world back to previous centuries of continuous warfare of one country against another, not stopping until enough people have been killed, killing whole generations of youth in both countries.
With their innovations Ukrainians have changed the way battles are waged with drone warfare, but the bombs still fall, now from drones instead of planes and ships and on the battlefield.
Ukraine cannot and will not give up because she is a sovereign country and the land and all that is in it belongs to Ukraine. Ukraine cannot and will not give up because that would mean consigning a portion of her population to Russian rule.
The Ukrainian people are intensely creative as artists, musicians, writers and performers who turn their feelings into art. I feel that creativity is my heritage for all I do today.
I actually took the reference photo for this while walking on a local trail in 2020, but even then I wondered, as I always have, why one of the places I have always sought has been an open field of ripe grains with a big blue sky above.
I had intended to paint from the photo I’d taken in 2020, but I had no time for painting that year. But when the war began in Ukraine I knew the time had come and I painted this at the end of March 2022, a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it or even what I’d title it, but it was such a strong visual I practically had no choice but to paint it. After a few weeks and the war continued on I decided I would title it by the phrase that began and/or ended all remarks from Ukraine, and a phrase I’d heard growing up among second generation Ukrainians: Slava Ukraini, Glory to Ukraine.
A heritage stolen from me
The Ukrainian people are intensely creative as artists, musicians, writers and performers who turn their feelings into art. I feel that creativity is my heritage for all I do today. But I will never know my Ukrainian ancestors or their lives because the areas where my mother’s parents, both orphans, emigrated from were torn apart in WWI, starved by Stalin then torn apart again in WWII, then hidden inside the USSR until 1991 when Ukraine gained its independence. My aunt, their daughter, traveled several times to the approximate areas they came from but was always uncertain about the people she’d met being actual relatives. Today on ancestry sites the best I come up with is fourth and fifth cousins who all seem to be dead ends in trying to find family.
But still, from the time I was very young, before I even had any concept of country or heritage, that field, that big blue sky, somehow spoke to me and let me know where I somehow belonged.
Where did I see that field? In my thoughts, I’m sure, but our homes were built on an old farm, the center of which still existed across the street from us. Beyond that was a hillside pasture, golden grasses as tall as me in summer, and the blue sky above. As soon as I was permitted to leave the yard I was there, and spent hours there in all seasons with the wind and the wildlife. I felt it was infinite, yet it was surrounded by homes and roads.
Strength and Independence
1911, my grandmother on the right in the darker dress, as a young teenager soon after arriving here.
My mother’s parents emigrated from Ukraine and while I never had the chance to get to know them I have always felt a connection with the country and her people.
In 1910 my mother’s mother, Paraskewia Swentkowsky, on the right in the dark dress in the photo above, emigrated to America from what was then called Ukraine. She came from a village near Lviv, in an area that in any given minute in that era between Czarist Russia and WWI could have been ruled by Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Austrians or Germans.
If not for the courage of that young teenager sent over here for a better life than what that turbulent country in that violent era could offer, I, or some version of me, might be in the midst of a Russian invasion right now. That is, if we had all survived being in the stomping ground in WWI, starved and slaughtered by Stalin before WWII, being stomped on again during WWII, and living imprisoned in the USSR until the early 90s when the country broke up and Ukraine finally became an independent country.
She had lost both parents and as an orphan been moved around from one relative to another on the small plots of land they farmed. As a young teenager someone packed her off to the land of opportunity, alone, to meet up with a few relatives who had already emigrated. I know nothing of her life before she emigrated aside from that legend, and nothing of her journey, except that she had had her long blonde hair shaved off at Ellis Island because of lice, and it grew back in strawberry blonde. That was apparently a more interesting detail to my mother than how a 13-year-old got from Ukraine to Carnegie, PA to join up with distant relatives and start a new life, not speaking English, with no education, and probably very few skills that matched with jobs in this land so very different from the one she’d left.
But she did, and lived as full a life as one could live in America in the aftermath of WWI, the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, WWII, and the Happy Days of the 1950s. She died when I was very young so I never got to know her or hear her stories.
But I know that Ukrainians, and Poles, the other side of my family, having lived through generational traumas of wars and famines for centuries, are strong and determined people, and have fought for their independence as individuals and as nations every time the invading force looked away for a moment. As they watched this act of war become a reality, they could have looked at the overwhelming monster coming to stomp on them and either run away or capitulated, but they did not. This act of war will not end well for anyone, but my bet is that the Ukrainians, especially with the support promised by the rest of the world even without the United States now that this administration has found it not in their interester (though it is still fully in the interests of we the people) will have their freedom, and their country, at the end.
Some of my thoughts over the years from when it all began…
I drafted the poem on the trail on a Saturday in early March, what happens when I come face to face with nature on a trail feeling the earth beneath my feet and the sun and breeze filling my head and my thoughts. I have been singing the song since the invasion began and was singing as I walked along, and every so often wrote another line of my thoughts.
Someday They Will Sing
where have all the flowers gone,
long time passing,
young ones have picked them,
every one of them
gone for soldiers,
returned to graveyards
everyone,
and graveyards gone to flowers,
long time ago,
and again and again
and again
when will they ever learn,
why did they never learn
(#SlavaUkraini, and for all other people oppressed by war.)
The song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” was inspired by a traditional song of the Cossacks, Slavic peoples who lived in rural regions of both Ukraine and Russia, though the source of the song is Ukrainian. Pete Seeger adapted some of the lyrics and wrote the first three verses in 1955, Joe Hickerson wrote the rest in 1960.
It once was that men marched off to war while women stayed behind and tended the flowers in the graveyards, but I have heard a few folk singers (can’t remember) who have sung lyrics updated to reflect that young women become soldiers as well as young men, in fact, young people of all sorts become soldiers. With both society’s norms and folkways and beloved folk songs, breaking the mold can be difficult, but I could finally feel an update was natural.
I watch the creative soul of Ukrainians in this fight, so many musicians, artists, poets, writers, playing piano at the borders, making art to describe the conflict and their opposition, making Molotov cocktails instead of beer, a brass band of soldiers standing in fatigues to play the Ukrainian national anthem around the spot where a Russian missile hit, and the least I can do is awaken my own, possibly my inheritance from my Ukrainian ancestors, to reflect my support.
When I took this photo it was not lost on me that the sky is blue at the top and yellow at the bottom, and as I searched for a metaphor the 1969 anti-war song came to mind:
Day is Done
Peter Yarrow -Silver Dawn Music – ASCAP
Tell me why you’re crying, my son
I know you’re frightened, like everyone
Is it the thunder in the distance you fear?
Will it help if I stay very near?
I am here.
Refrain:
And if you take my hand my son
All will be well when the day is done.
And if you take my hand my son
All will be well when the day is done.
Day is done, Day is done
Day is done, Day is done
Do you ask why I’m sighing, my son?
You shall inherit what mankind has done.
In a world filled with sorrow and woe
If you ask me why this is so, I really don’t know.
(Refrain)
Tell me why you’re smiling my son
Is there a secret you can tell everyone?
Do you know more than men that are wise?
Can you see what we all must disguise
through your loving eyes?
Black velvet draped land yet colors awaken from deepest soot through cool blue through violet to magenta yellow glaring white waits for that moment last sliver of sun on the horizon laughs with warm colors in that dark sunset
I don’t want to be
colorblind,
I want to paint
what I see,
the colors of our faces
like flowers,
not different
but tones of each others’
faces
as we turn toward the light,
we blend so beautifully.
The illustration above is a sampler of all the shades of pastel I’ve used while painting portraits and sketches of people of all different “colors”, skin tones and ethnicities. All of them appear in all skin tones. Tell me, who is “black” and who is “white”? And what does “colored” mean?
In truth, we are all “colored”. Each of our faces has the darkest and lightest tones and all those in between, and even some colors we’d be surprised to find in skin tones. I can tell you that all the colors I smudged there have appeared in the highlights and shadows and mid-tones of every face. It largely depends on where you are standing in relation to the light.
Some people have suggested that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of black children and white children going forward hand in hand, the ideal of seeing a person not for the color of their skin but for the content of their character, had the goal of a “colorblind” society. That’s a noble ideal on one hand, where we just don’t notice the color of a person’s skin in any situation and go on from there.
But does that truly bring justice to wrongdoing and change society in a way that makes the injustice people have suffered because of that color unacceptable? To suddenly begin to ignore the color of a person’s skin and jump immediately to integration is to jump right over the injustices done to people because of the color of their skin. It’s also ignoring an essential part of another person, shutting the door on a section of their life, a part that makes them distinctive. King did not use the term “colorblind” in any speech or written document, but his point is described by historians as a more “color aware” society where we recognize our differences, celebrate them and thereby heal through those very differences among ourselves.
When I create a piece of visual artwork I look for what makes the subject inspiring to me, what makes it distinctive, what makes me excited to share it with you. I like contrasts, I find what makes my subject different in its class, what makes it stand out from its surroundings. It’s my joy to find and share “the extraordinary in the ordinary”. If everything I painted looked the same, what need would there be for artwork?
Looking at people has always been like looking at a field of flowers for me—I find it hard to settle on one before I skip to another while I enjoy the visually exciting effect of all those different colors and shapes and heights and structures. Then I can can pause on each one and get to know each in its own unique detail.
When I rode the bus, long before I painted anything let alone a human portrait, I quietly studied all the faces around me for color and shape and texture, eye color, the hair that framed it, accessories and jewelry, and was often started by a stern expression of someone who didn’t understand why I studied them so intently. I was just looking for the things that made them unique and beautiful—not in the classic sense of beauty but in the classical sense, in that beauty is truth, in being true to who we are inside showing that on the outside, like the flower in the field that can’t help but be what it is.
If we are colorblind, we intentionally ignore some of the fundamental differences that make each of us irreplaceable. That denies a basic part of our personal existence and of human existence as a species; it denies a portion of our very identity as an individual.
That takes an awful lot of effort. Why not admit to our differences and get to know each other in full, and find the beauty in each of us. We have always been and will always be different from each other and might as well get used to it.
My garden waits under a blanket of spring
gently rippled snow comforting the earth
drowsing buds protected undercover
will burst and pour forth
hot, humid mornings, big yellow spiders, baskets of green beans
this heavy cover now protects, will melt and nourish.
When I look at my garden, surprised at all its hillocks and gulleys remembered full of life and covered so deeply and densely with growing things, I wonder how the miracle ever happens again that I have baskets of beans and tomatoes just a few months later when all seems frozen and gone. It’s really not. As one of those ironies of nature where unrelated processes fit together like a puzzle to make a whole ecosystem, it’s the icy blanket of snow that would seem to smother and freeze and end the potential that actually keeps the spark of life warm.
What’s left behind after the flowers have faded, dried, their petals blown away…new life. The seeds for next year, enough to feed some birds, enough to house a few insects to overwinter, tucked in and protected from winter winds, little spider sacs that will bloom with baby spiders when the spring sun washes what’s left. Some seeds have scattered in autumn winds, others fall to the ground under snow, each one packed with the chance for life to swell and burst with spring rains, push roots below the soil and sprout leaves above, and next summer a little cluster of Queen Anne’s lace plants will welcome the summer sun and nod in the breezes, lie down in the storms, and open clusters of tiny white flowers to lure an insect to pollinate, then when flowers are finished and blown away to stand there in the blast of winter and carry on its tradition.
Well, that was fun. I was only intending to add one or two sentences but I went on and on as the story developed in my mind, and decided to leave it, unedited, so it’s a…story? Essay? whatever…in progress.
“In Progress”
I’m calling this “in progress” because, rather than waiting until I had the chance to work it over a few times, I would give it my best rewrite while the experience was still fresh. I like to do that with poems and a quick, brief essay can have the same treatment. It’s part of what I do to encourage myself to write, not trying to make everything perfect before I present it but giving the drafts themselves attention.
About the Photo
Sometimes everything looks like a 1950s horror flick on black and white film, especially using the old original 50mm lens.
This photo was taken with Kodak 400 ISO black and white film using my 40-year-old Pentax K1000, on one overcast winter day, January 14, 2020. I used the scans from the company that developed them just as they came off the roll of film, no adjustments at all.
I mentioned to a friend that I’d considered getting my hands on some black and white film to use in my old Pentax K-1000 for my Christmas walk on the trail, but I couldn’t find any to purchase anywhere, and had no idea who developed it now. There is nothing like black and white film, and it’s been years since I’ve used it. He mentioned he had a few rolls and he’d give me some, which he did, and I waited for the right moment to load it in my camera and head out the door.
Today is the 7th anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, PA. I’ve lived in the South Hills of Pittsburgh all my life. I’ve long recognized our city’s and region’s shortcomings in integrating and welcoming people of other races, ethnicities and religions though for two centuries we’ve been settled by people from nearly every country and faith on the globe to find jobs in our industries: mining, steel production, glassmaking and more, establish farms, open businesses and add their part to our big small town/little big city. Still, I have personally heard and witnessed and called people out for their anti-semitism, even today,
But a shooting this horrific, walking into a synagogue with open doors on Shabbat, looking senior and geriatric worshippers, some of them Holocaust-era survivors, in the eye and shooting them with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a semi-automatic pistol, all over the buildingfor about 20 minutes…but you never think this will happen in your community, until it does. It still shocks me today, in 2025.
We should always be shocked at even anti-semitic remarks. We would hope that a shooting this horrific would cause some to think twice when they deny anti-semitism in this country. Instead it’s only increased nationwide, worldwide, in the past seven years. I don’t have an answer for how to stop it, except that I will always call someone out for anti-semitic remarks or dumb jokes, which some jagoffs use to get their hateful opinion out there while telling you they’re just joking. They are not.
Here is what I wrote seven years ago after the shooting…
Many of you may know I live in Pittsburgh. This weekend our community suffered a horrible traumatic mass shooting at a synagogue in a city neighborhood, killing mostly elders at Saturday Shabbat. I am not Jewish, nor do I live in that neighborhood, but I am crushed by this hatred. As a city we are still reeling from the shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue, about 20 minutes from where I live.
Squirrel Hill is a vibrant and diverse neighborhood but its inclusivity was patterned by the Jewish immigrants who settled here generations ago. It is as one reporter called it, literally “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” because this was where Rogers lived.
Pittsburgh is a big small town and for all the various segregation we’ve suffered in the past this one neighborhood was like magic in its diversity, seeing families walk to Shabbat in long skirts or hats without fear of retribution, and buildings with Hebrew text, as well as find Vietnamese restaurants, a real French bakery run by a person from France, a gallery with African art and more services for many ethnicities, mixed with national and international students from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh who live in rented apartments there.
On the street you can hear any language at any time. Children walk to school, and play in the parks. People are out on the streets walking to and from the last movie at the Manor Theater. Everyone talked to everyone else. I am not a city person, but I enjoyed this neighborhood with its quiet neighborhoods of tree-lined streets and beautiful houses, galleries, performance spaces, shops.
Vigils have brought us together, all races and religions; we are right at the door in times of need.
Hearing the news
I was trapping kittens in a TNR project on Saturday when this happened, with moderate to heavy rain all day I was in and out of my car as I set and checked traps and got back in to warm up and dry off. Any news I heard was disjointed until three of the four kittens were trapped and moved inside, and I settled into my car for a snack while watching the last trap. Finally hearing the full story, shocked, I forgot my food and got on my phone to look up the news. I did manage to get that last kitten trapped and inside while the group of us working on this shook our heads and tried to express how we felt about this, the fear of knowing someone like the shooter had been in our midst.
The next day, full of local and national and international news, I posted this on Facebook:
Look at the ages of the victims of the Tree of Life shooting—the youngest 54, the oldest 97—Rose Mallinger, who lived in Europe during the Holocaust, to be killed in this country known for freedom, in a neighborhood where generations had known safety in worship, this elderly worship community ripped apart, their daily security, and no doubt several long-time friends, gone, children and grandchildren losing a generation in a way that will always be a painful memory, another chapter in their family’s history. Remember these people, never forget that the fingers of hatred grip and strangle more than those who died here.
Complacency is complicity, never let hatred take hold, even in a single word.
Joyce Fienberg, 75, of Oakland
Richard Gottfried, 65, of Ross Township
Rose Mallinger, 97, of Squirrel Hill
Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, of Edgewood
Cecil Rosenthal, 59, of Squirrel Hill
David Rosenthal, 54, of Squirrel Hill
(Cecil and David Rosenthal are brothers)
Bernice Simon, 84, of Wilkinsburg
Sylvan Simon, 87, of Wilkinsburg
(Bernice and Sylvan are husband and wife)
Daniel Stein , 71, of Squirrel Hill
Melvin Wax, 88, of Squirrel Hill
Irving Younger, 69, of Mt. Washington
The memory today, Stronger Than Hate
Stronger than Hate yard sign in Pittsburgh.
I still see the signs in people’s yards, and we still talk about it, especially now. The shooter was sentenced to life in prison. Jewish congregants in Squirrel Hill went back to services in synagogues other than Tree of Life long ago, but synagogues and other Jewish facilities all over the area increased security and have maintained that since then. I still hear intentionally provocative anti-semitic remarks and the dumb jokes the jagoffs think makes them clever. Tree of Life has largely rebuilt, determined to reopen.
Be that candle in the darkness. It’s a small move but something we can all do is let others know that anti-semitism isn’t cute or clever, and it’s not accepted. It may not change that person in that moment, but enough countering of remarks, signs, graffiti and more personal acts on a personal level can only help to cast doubt in the perpetrator’s mind. Do your part, call it out, don’t let anyone get away with even a simple act. Put your support behind your community to help stop radicalized people like the shooter before they get started.
Here are a few articles from 2018 about the neighborhood, and fundraisers, which also tell a story:
It’s a cool and dark and undecided day and I am unsettled.
It’s trying to be 72° and sunny in October, obedient to the forecast. Yesterday was just as undecided, starting clear and sunny and heading toward warm but heavy overcast unexpectedly slid across the entire bowl of blue sky as if some unseen hand had pulled a blanket over us. Though the sun tried to peek around and through the clouds the overcast was absolute. The light dimmed, the leaves no longer fluttered in dappled sun, the birds no longer sang to each other from tree to tree, the temperature cooled at the beginning of what had been forecast to be a perfectly sunny and mild October week. No storms, not even rain, just a low gray sky and dank light. Today dawned just as dim and dark as the evening had ended yesterday.
A distant Nor’easter rolling up the east coast pushed the edges of its cloud cover all the way to Western Pennsylvania to dim these precious days. I feel unsettled because of it, because I have more energy on sunny days, I have much to do that I will enjoy doing, instead I am left with all my sunny day energy in this uninspiring weather, unable to do what I’d planned. And the second day of it felt foreboding, an unwelcome change that might be permanent.
But now I see lighter areas in the overcast, even bright areas, which means the clouds are thinning. Hazy areas of blue open up above me, with the promise of more to come. One wan beam of sunshine has reached down to my garden and briefly touched some scarlet and orange Virginia creeper leaves and changed everything.
When I decided to start recording my thoughts ten minutes ago all the sky that I could see was completely overcast, my back yard just as dark and still as it was yesterday. I had been moved to bring my coffee out to the garden and walk around the brick paths and look at my vegetables, something I do for necessity, fun and self-calming. The words came and started to form sentences so I decided to record my thoughts into voice to text.
But during the minutes I recorded my draft of the essay above the brighter areas in the clouds appeared and I looked up to see a spot of blue above my head. Over the next hour the overcast dissipated and all trace of clouds disappeared entirely, the temperature rising to a sweet 72, birds singing again, trees lightly swaying with the breeze, sounding like distant waves.
Changes come, in their own time.
“In Progress”
I’m calling this an “essay in progress” because, rather than waiting until I had the chance to work it over a few times, I would give it my best rewrite while the experience was still fresh. I like to do that with poems and a quick, brief essay can have the same treatment. It’s part of what I do to encourage myself to write, not trying to make everything perfect before I present it but giving the drafts themselves attention.
Here is the draft I recorded into my phone, saved as a text file. I like the simplicity of it but I didn’t think it caught my perceptions and reactions in a way that made the point about indecision, which was what inspired me to explore why I felt so unsettled. I may change my mind about that and edit:
It’s a cool and dark and undecided day. It’s trying to be 72° and sunny in October. Yesterday was the same, the bigger surprise because it was to be a perfectly sunny and mild October week. Instead a distant Nor’easter on the east coast has pushed the edges of its cloud cover all the way to Western Pennsylvania to dim this wonderful day. I feel unsettled because of it, because I have more energy on sunny days, I have much to do that I will enjoy doing, instead this weather has made me decide to do other things. Yesterday was a nearly uniform gray low cover of clouds, still, even the birds were quiet. Today I see some very light areas in the clouds which means they are thinning, and there are some hazy areas of blue moving in above me. One wan beam of sunshine has reached down to my garden and briefly touched some scarlet and orange Virginia creeper leaves and changed everything.
When I decided to start recording my thoughts just now, this guy was completely overcast, and my backyard just as dark as it was yesterday, but in the 5 minutes during which I recorded the paragraph above the brighter areas in the clouds moved in and I looked up to see a spot of blue above my head. Change is come, in their own time.
The painting is “The Last Bale, pastel, 7″ x 16″, 1996” by me. It is not my back yard, I painted it en plein air, standing in the field at a friend’s farm on a sunny and warm November afternoon in 1996 when, once again, a heavy overcast came from nowhere and blanketed everything. It wasn’t the sparkling afternoon I’d enjoyed with photography, but I decided to make something of it anyway. That sort of overcast doesn’t always make me feel unsettled—often I like it, and in this case catching that uncertain light and skies when the fields are spent, most leaves have fallen, and one round bale was left out in the field was more descriptive of that time of year, of the end of a year of farming, than a bright sunny day.
