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View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 3, 2009

 

Groundhog Day and the temperature is sinking again, though there’s more light, brighter sun to give the illusion of approaching–so far away–spring.

The horses, the dog, and everyone I know are getting restless with the return of deep cold. Every afternoon around 4, as the sun slips behind the hill and the corral sits in pale blue light, Mattie and Sam play a game where they walk around their fenced areas (they each have half a corral, separated by metal portable panels) until they meet at the fence. The first one to reach the fence stretches his or her head over the top rail, open mouthed to nip at the neck or rump of the other. If the first horse makes contact, the other kicks at the fence, making a satisfying crash, then they both trot away, circling back at a canter and crow hopping till they get back to the fence where they go back to an oh-so-casual walk. I watched them do this for a half hour today.

The groundhogs didn’t agree on spring, I hear, and one even bit the mayor of New York on the hand. In another blog, I found a history of the holiday, Candlemas, a vague predictor of spring–but like the celebration of the solstice, an important marker for our hopes. I remember spring in Pennsylvania, growing up. About now, the ground would still be frozen, but towards the end of the month, it would tend toward mud. By March, there would be green in the lawns and pastures, and crocuses, with daffodils and tulips not far behind.

But here, spring is an abstract concept. In six weeks, mid-March, we will be nearly in the same light cycle as anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. For a few weeks, we all feel in synch with the places in the lower 48 many of us grew up in, except for the deep snow, the continuing cold, the possibility that we could still hit 30 below. Still the light glitters off the long-frozen crystals, birds flit between the trees, or cluster around the birch seed dusting the white ground, the ice carvers arrive for the annual competition, and the long-distance mushers return from the Yukon Quest, scraggly-bearded, hollow-eyed, triumphant, and ready to go out again.

But knowing that, somewhere, real groundhogs stir beneath the corn fields, imagining green shoots, gives me permission to look at seed catalogs for real and to imagine, again, what luscious things could grow in our short, intense season.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 1, 2009

Groundhog Day

More light now. The horses have time to doze in the sun without having to move as much to keep the light on their coats. We missed the deep cold we were scheduled for; we look at each other in the Post Office or at the grocery store or across the kitchen table and say how grateful we are that it’s only 20 below.

The town where I went to high school, Quarryville, Pennsylvania, had a social club, the Slumbering Groundhog Lodge whose members marched in local parades wearing choir robes and top hats, beating a bass drum, and proudly carrying a well-preserved stuffed groundhog. Every February 2, the Lodge went out in the corn fields to the official hole of Marmota Marmot (the official groundhog) and waited in the dark for the groundhog to appear. Every year, the local paper would report on the event-at 5:40 am, the groundhog would poke its nose out of the hole to see what all the fuss was about; a blinding flash of light would come from unexplained sources; the groundhog would duck back in the hole; and there would be six more weeks of winter. If the groundhog, for reasons known only to him, stayed above ground, it would only be six more weeks till spring. After the event, the Slumbering Groundhogs would trek back to their lodge to refill their flasks and warm up and report the news.

The Groundhogs had competitors, however, who believed that the only true sign of spring was the singing of the bull frog in the spring: The Singing Bull Frog Lodge. They wore green choir robes and would plan sneak attacks on the Slumbering Groundhogs in their lodge during the long winter months. Their reports of spring’s arrival were also reported in the paper. By then, of course, it was obvious to everyone-gardens and fields were tilled and seeded, the cows and horses were spread out, nibbling at the pastures, flowering trees-remember them?-were flowering.

Here in the Interior, the ground is somewhere below a couple feet of accumulated snow, fine and light on the top layer, packed densely as glacier ice close to the ground. We have no groundhogs. We have ground squirrels, regular squirrels, and voles. The ground squirrels hibernate; the tree squirrels live in the trees in nests made of scavenged material such as pink fiberglass insulation. The voles borrow in the hay barn, where they stash bits of dog food, bird seed, horse pellets. February 2 comes and goes, and if any of these critters pokes its head out, an owl may be the only one to know.

We putter on through winter, shoveling the driveway, chipping horse manure out of the snow and piling it, chopping wood for the stove, picking ice balls out from between the dog’s toes. But we hear the groundhog’s report-even if it’s the false groundhog from Punxatawney-and remember spring. I’ve bookmarked the garden seed sites; I’m saving yogurt containers for the greenhouse. Either way, I’ll be ready.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 30, 2009

About dogs-for Glow:

The cold weather we dreaded hasn’t materialized. Tonight, when I went out to feed the horses, snow fell in fine white flakes through the floodlight on the peak of our house. Sam had a thick fleece of it along his back. Mattie, who had been in the shed, had a light powdered sugaring along her back and rump. The dog dashed around in the soft new snow, kicking it up behind him, rolling in it, nesting down, watching me cut open a new hay bale, waiting to see if I would feint his way so he could leap up and dash around me in long loops.

The dog is a young, nearly year old Standard Poodle pup. It surprises people who know me to learn that this is the new dog in my life. The dog before him, Kermit, my companion for 16 years was a mixture of three breeds: Shepherd, Corgi, and Lab–all big body, big bark, short legs. He had a talent for shedding on three twice-a-year cycles, one for each breed. He was hard headed, but my dog to the core. He had claimed me at the shelter when I wandered in full of skepticism to look for a dog. I was about to walk out when I saw a yellow dog in a pen, looking at me with recognition and urgency. I asked to see him; my guard was up. Then I felt his ears, the softest fur I had ever touched. I came back for him the next day and spent sixteen years trying to discern what that look was telling me.

I don’t know how to write about dogs the way I do about horses though dogs seem essential to a good life. Without one, there’s an empty space in the house, and it’s hard to know when strangers or anyone else drives up to the house without the barking. Dog training is a precise but playful activity, not edged with danger like horse training. A dog is an animal of manageable size: a head on the lap, a paw in the hand, a quick jog side by side–none of this is easy with a horse.

Tonight I took the poodle, Jeter, to get the last of a round of shots. He was ecstatic to go to the vet and, when I dropped the leash, ran from the car all the way up the stairs and sat waiting eagerly at the door of the vet’s office. He’s a shaggy mound of brown fur, still in his puppy cut, and he wiggled from tail to head as he greeted the attendants in the clinic. He has a habit of standing on his hind feet to hug people he hasn’t seen for a while (even if it’s me coming back from feeding horses), so he embraced all the humans in the clinic. There’s a toy poodle in the clinic, left there by former owners, now the clinic dog–a distant cousin, the size he was when he first came home with us. Jeter sniffed this dog then play-bowed to it hoping for a romp. She sniffed at him, then ducked under a chair.

When I posted the excerpt from the horse book yesterday, I wrote that dogs lie–that was Kermit, who never felt that he had been fed recently enough or been out on enough walks. But this young dog is eager, straightforward, gentle, earnest. Kermit always seemed ready to pick up a conversation left over from some previous life, as if he had been dropped suddenly into a dog’s body and wanted anyone who would pay attention to know about it. Jeter seems to love to be a dog and to bring us with him into a world of play: flying snow, wayward sticks, a game of tug now and then, and long walks. And he’s been running up on the hill where Kermit’s grave is, where the irises and delphiniums will blossom in the summer. Maybe he knows more than he lets on.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 23, 2009

Last night, a visit from my friend Joe Enzweiler (see the link to his website) to talk about poetry, life, and the writer’s discipline. Joe recently had a poem read on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and we talked about how this might affect his work. Joe is a cabin-dwelling poet, not quite off the grid. He lives in a spruce log cabin he built himself 30 years ago, tucked away in a stand of birches. He has a rotary phone and a manual typewriter, though he was recently given a laptop and has become curious about the internet. But mostly he’s a pen-and-paper writer.

I’ve known Joe since I arrived in Fairbanks from the Pacific Northwest in the late seventies. I joined a writer’s workshop at the university, all young hotshots with big ideas and some gift with language. Joe and I have stayed friends since then, and he has dedicated himself to the writer’s life more profoundly than anyone I know who doesn’t have a university writing program job. Every morning, he rises with the sun (around 10 am, these days) makes tea, and sits by the window and writes. His Manx cat, Little Man hops on his lap to watch the redpolls and chickadees feed outside the window. He gets up from time to time to stoke the wood stove, his main source of heat. At some point, he leaves the house and takes his bow saw and clears small trees from the woods around his house. He cuts the wood into fireplace lengths and hauls it back to his house where he stacks it under his porch. All around the house there’s a mosaic of alder, spruce, birch, and willow stacked with the round ends out. Small wood, but good kindling and plenty to keep him warm and writing all winter.

In the summer, Joe builds things–decks, saunas, sheds, fences–as meticulously as he stacks wood or crafts poems. He loves to stack stone and has built stone walls for his brother in Kentucky and for many friends here.

In the winter we meet for Poetry Thursdays. They keep me focused on the task at hand and give him an audience for his current projects. He’s agreed to let me post a poem on the Poem of the Day page.

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And the Horse (excerpts from a work in progress)

January 23, 2009

Fear and the Horse

To learn about horses is to learn about what we fear and how much fear we can embrace. Think of it–a half-ton of muscle and bone, in personality more like a deer than a dog–and we propose to walk beside it or sit on its back. In the wild, a horse, by all rights, should fear us and we should fear it, too.

And many do. When strangers approach Mattie, I can see the level of their fear. They step back when she reaches her large head forward to sniff their scent. They are awed by her sixteen-hand size, her black coat, her noises. The image of the horse is one of compliance, grace, speed. The reality is an animal only partly tame–like a cat in some ways–whose psychology somehow allows us to work with it to form a braver more powerful team than either would be alone.

Because horses have such good memories, they remember things they fear for life. Horse people tell stories of the horse afraid of men in cowboy hats or of lawn chairs or of anything blowing along the ground. One of the puzzles of working with a new horse, especially one that has an unknown past, is to discover what it fears and to find a way to comfort it with the presence of the rider or handler. This is more easily written than done. A dog trainer once told me that it takes twenty-five repetitions for a dog to develop a learned habit–for that’s what training is–and fifty to seventy-five for a horse. A horse who is truly fearful can be in retraining for years. And all it takes is one bad experience to set it back into fear again, for the memory of fear is stronger than all that training.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 21, 2009

Temperatures dropping again. It’s a challenge to keep the horses comfortable with such radical fluctuations–from 50 below to 50 above last week; now back around zero and dropping to 20 below by the weekend. I blanket them with heavyweight blankets when the temperatures head to 30 below, trying to time it so that I do it before the temperature point where my fingers get too cold to manipulate the buckles but not before the blankets would keep their thick coats from doing the job they do so well.

Yesterday, Sam, the watch horse who insists in standing out of the run-in shed in any weather, was shivering when I went to feed him in the morning. He had stood out in the snowfall the day before and had had small drifts of it on his back, which turned to glaciers, stuck to his thick coat. If he were willing to spend time in the shed, like Mattie does, the ice would have never formed or would have melted and dried. But there he stood, coat thick with ice, some of it melted and wet to his skin.

I blanketed him with a fleece blanket liner to wick the melting ice away, and he looked happier. I saw him later, standing with his head over the fence, looking for dog walkers on the road below the corral, the blue fleece on his back frosty from where he had rolled and from the moisture wicking out of his coat. I took it off later in the day to keep his coat from packing down and making him colder and found that the ice had melted off his back and reformed down along his belly. I thought of putting a quilted blanket on him, but his back was dry and I knew that, if our temperatures really drop, I’d need to keep that blanket in reserve.

Today, his coat is dry. The sun is a little brighter than yesterday as it makes its slow progress back up our northern sky. Mattie stands sideways to it, soaking in what heat she can with her black coat. Sam, a white horse in the snow, is back at the fence, moving a little at a time to stand in a triangle of light, moving as it moves.

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Dancing in the North

January 21, 2009

(I’m going to branch out in the weeks to come and write some short pieces on life around the North Star Ballet studio as the kids prepare for this year’s ambitious performance of Firebird.)

Finally, after a long break for the holidays and the deep cold followed by a thaw and black ice, I made it back to ballet class last night. For years now, my weeks have been bracketed by Sue Perry’s adult ballet classes–Tuesday and Wednesday nights. In the closed world of the studio, we relive our past dreams of dancing. Some of us have danced on stage; some have never had a dance class before we walked through the door. But in class, we are moving toward a mutual goal–to become that ideal of lightness and grace that we imagine dance to be, to defeat gravity where it overtakes our bodies first–arms, legs, back, bellies.

I had been dancing for some time before I met Sue, but I started as an adult and adults progress through the forms of ballet at a different rate than children do. My son and I started together, me at 34, he at 5. Now, he is a free-lance dancer who has performed in four countries; I’m a permanent adult intermediate dancer. When I walked into Sue’s class, it was as if I had started over as she systematically took me back to the good habits I should have developed in the first place. Sue, however, treats each adult as if her or his potential is unlimited and as if whatever level we ultimately reach is a level worth reaching and worth working hard for.

Last night, I noticed how my right and left arm move differently. I was dancing at the front of the class and watching my port de bras in the mirror when I realized that my left arm–my writing arm–moved back down through the arc of the movement faster than my right one, which stayed floating longer. Try as I might, I couldn’t get them to move at the same rate and still concentrate on the echappes that we were doing. I realized that this is also a problem for me in riding: one side of my body reacts faster than the other; one side stays in balance better than the other and it makes the horse move stiffly to balance me out.

It’s like this blog–to me, all the things I’ve listed in the heading are connected, and each is an art in itself. As I read around the blogosphere, I notice others working on the interrelation of the arts–and we each have a different set of arts to interrelate. More on this in the days to come.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 20, 2009

This morning we fed the horses in the dark, as usual, then made coffee and scones and watched the Inauguration. Our friend John came over and we made an event of it–gathering at 7:30am, sleepy still, but sweetened by honey-buttered scones and the joy of the crowd on the screen. After the speech and the hoopla–and after Bush’s helicopter took off for the last time from the White House lawn, we sat and talked and sipped warm coffee as the windows gradually lightened. My son, the dancer, called from New York; I’ll call my brother later today. Now the sun is up above the edge of the ridge; the fresh snow glows with creamy light; everything sparkles and seems new.

We talked about the dark of the year and how it affects us. John is here for his first winter and he’s feeling a bit ragged and sluggish. We assured him that this is part of winter in the far north: the dark and cold settle in together, our blood thickens, we go into a kind of mental hibernation even though we go about the motions of daily life. The difficult time comes when the light begins to return and our energy builds, but the snow is still thickly spread across the ground, the ground itself frozen solid, the deep cold still possible for months to come. It’s friendship that brings us through. When despair creeps into our hearts, a conversation or a good laugh can stave it off for a while. Or it’s our animals. When I need grounding, I go out to the corral and brush Mattie or detangle Sam’s mane–even when it’s too cold to stay out long or too slick to longe or ride.

Still, in the light shining now across the corral–the horses standing still and sideways to it, absorbing every ray they can, storing up energy for the rest of the sunless day-I can feel my own reserve of energy, hope, optimism replenishing.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 18, 2009

More news from the psyche.

Still warm, by Alaskan standards. For a few days, temperatures lifted to around fifty above–for some, a hundred-degree rise in two days. Walking across campus, I felt a puff of warm breeze on my face–unfamiliar breeze, unfamiliar warmth. The lightness this brings to everyone’s mood is remarkable. How can temperature alone make such a difference in all the little troubles we carry? Yet, shedding coats, hats, mittens, even for a few days, we move more fluidly in the world, and spring seems possible.

By today, light snow, and temperatures back below freezing, but still warm, for us. As I write this, I’m thinking of the people gathering on the Mall in Washington, DC, and the change of mood and energy so many of us feel at the approach of Inauguration Day. While it’s not my intention to make this a political blog–there are too many good ones already (see Mudflats in the Blogroll for an Alaskan example)–the changing weather here seems to parallel a change of what? Mood? Politics? National intent?

It’s been a long dark journey through a kind of national despair for the past eight years, when the public dialogue has been driven by fear and impulse rather than reflection and reason. Horses can be made dangerous and frightening by humans who react around them out of fear–perhaps that’s also true of a nation. And horses can be calmed and rehabilitated by a calmer, reasonable presence. Perhaps we all long for that, as well. It’s a lot to place on one human being, to calm and redirect the restless herd of our national psyche, but, as I’ve said to friends here, an election isn’t about one person, it’s about us and who we want ourselves collectively to be. So, as light progresses here, we’ll watch to see how light can be progressively shed on us all with the turn of the political season. I wish for Obama all the best tools of horse and dog training: to be calm, attentive, clear-headed, non-reactive, and to lead by reward and praise rather than by punishment and fear.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 15, 2009

Finally, warming weather, and, as if to overcompensate, spring-like weather. Here in the hills the snow is melting. There’s a constant tick of dripping water from the eaves, with the occasional rush of snow sliding from the roof. The horses, now free from their blankets, play the bite-y kick-y game through the fence: Sam reaches through to bite at Mattie’s neck or hocks and she swings around and lets loose at the fence beside him. They trot around and have a good laugh. Then they do it again. Because the fence is metal, it sounds like they’re playing an all-percussion New Music piece-silence, CLASH, the staccato of hooves, silence, with a few high-pitched squeals thrown in.

I’ve been thinking about this blog and my purpose for writing it. What do I mean by a virtual writers/artists/horse lovers’ retreat? What can I offer to you, dear reader? I’m posting links that are interesting to me and fit with my evolving sense of vision for this blog. I’ve posted a few poetry prompts, as well, though no one has posted a poetry response, yet (except me). An artist’s retreat–Yaddo, McDowell, etc–is a place to retreat to work on art, but also a place of connection, interaction of the arts. So, I guess that’s one hope I have here: to connect artists of different genres, to stimulate inter-arts connections, to kick-start ideas.

And where do the horses and gardens come in? In a literal place, they would be part of the scene-a horse rescue/retirement facility, an organic garden, a community table. This is part of the vision I haven’t explored here yet, except to write about my own horses and post a few horse links. I’ll write more and explore this more as I go on.

So, dear reader, I pose the question to you: How can this site serve you as artist, writer, dancer, horse person, gardener? How would you like to link to others? What can be done here that will feed your art?

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