Lifescapes

Bridal wreath and aspirin

[This is a pre-posted entry: see the April 4th blog for an explanation. If things are going as planned (I certainly hope they are!), I'm heading north into North Carolina, with events in Charlotte today, Gastonia and Salisbury tomorrow, and Sylva and Asheville the day after. You can read about it here.]

Bridal wreath and aspirin. The Bridal wreath spirea (Spiraea cantoniensis) that grows along the creek is blooming just now, mounds of white blossoms spilling over the green bank at the foot of the cypress tree.

I love this plant for the purity of its blossoms, the white grace of its arching branches, and for its interesting history. Willow (Salix sp.) is widely known to provide a good natural remedy for headaches, fever, and muscular aches. In fact, it is the source from which aspirin (salicylic acid) was derived, back in 1828. That’s when Johann Buchner, professor of pharmacy at the University of Munich, chemically isolated a minute amount of yellow, needle-like crystals, which he called salicin. His discovery didn’t encourage people to abandon willow as a pain-killer, though, because salicin (the word was coined from the Latin salix) upset the stomach and left a bitter taste in the mouth. Ten years later, it was learned that the herb meadowsweet (Spirea alba, now called Filipendula ulmaria) also contained salicin—as does Bridal wreath and other Spiraea. The extraction process was improved, salicin was "buffered" with additives, and a compound called acetylsalicylic acid was produced, which had fewer negative side effects. It took more tinkering, but on March 6, 1899, the Bayer Company was ready to apply for a patent. The new drug was to be called aspirin: a for acetylsalicylic and spirin for Spirea. Think about that the next time you see one of these beautiful plants gracing the landscape.

Reading Note. "Traveling to a strange new landscape is a kind of romance. You become intensely aware of the world where you are, but also oblivious to the rest of the world at the same time. Like love, travel makes you innocent again.—Dianne Ackerman

unseen singers

[This is a pre-posted entry: see the April 4th blog for an explanation. If the tour is going according to plan, I'm in Culpeper VA today, Roanoke tomorrow, and Richmond the day after. And with any luck, I haven't lost my voice--yet. If you can join me at any of these stop, the details are here.]

Unseen Singers. One of the pleasures of inhabiting a place for a long time (it's hard for me to believe, but we've lived here for almost 20 years) is that you don't have to actually see something to know that it's there. This morning, as I was walking with the dogs to the lake, I heard a mockingbird, a cardinal, a titmouse, a bob-white marking his territory, several martins chattering about breakfast, a mourning dove, and a wren. After lunch, walking around Cypress Meadow, I heard the the spilled melody of an indigo bunting and the season's first yellow-billed cuckoo, the bird that heralds the beginning of our summer. My mother, who grew up in Missouri, called it a "rain crow" and insisted that every time it sang, rain followed. (Maybe there, not here.) I've lived at MeadowKnoll long enough to have met each of these birds and watched them sing their songs; now, I have only to hear them singing to know that they're there, celebrating their residence in this place just as I do, hidden away in the tops of trees or deep in the grass.

Speaking of birds, my brother John writes from Florida with this optimistic observation: We enjoyed a visit from mama and papa sandhill crane this morning. They were escorting a pair of chicks--each about 15 inches high--still wearing their yellow pin feathers. Looked like a couple of Easter peeps on steroids. They must have hatched nearby, because they didn't appear to be ready to fly....With all the bad things going on in the world, it's good to see that life in nature still goes on.

And speaking of life in nature, I offer for your contemplation this tidy little plant, a staghorn milkweed (Asclepias asperula), a favorite host plant of Monarch butterfly larvae.

Reading Note, from Paul Gruchow's Grass Roots: The Landscape of Home:

To inhabit a place means literally to have made it a habit, to have made it the custom and ordinary practice of our lives, to have learned how to wear a place like a familiar garment, like the garments of sanctity that nuns once wore. The word habit, in its now-dim original form, meant "to own." We own places not because we possess the deeds to them, but because they have entered the continuum of our lives.

yellow rose

[This is a pre-posted entry: see the April 4th blog for an explanation. In the real world, I've been tootling around Pennsylvania for the past two days and will be here over the weekend. If you're in Bethlehem, West Chester, Mechanicsburg, or Jamison, I'd love to see you! For details, go here.]

Yellow rose of Texas. Isn't she splendid? This climbing rose pretties up the dog kennel, familiarly known as the "Puppy Palace." No puppies--we have two black Labs and a blue heeler--ever had a prettier kennel, draped as it is with yellow roses. And no yellow rose ever had such congenial companions.

This one reminds me of the yellow rose my grandmother grew beside the back porch on the home place.

Reading Note, from Paul Gruchow's Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild:

Where I grew up...people had home-places.... The home-place was the settling place, the one your forebears had come to from the old country; the place where, for better or worse, they had concluded to try their fortunes; or it was the final stop in the family's wanderings, the place where luck, or money, or resolve had run out, where one made a last stand.

first flowering

[This is a pre-posted entry: see the April 4th blog for an explanation. If today is really April 17 (is there any doubt?) I'm in the Dayton OH area.  Tomorrow must be Cleveland. Picture me driving. To see where, go here.]

First flowering. Somehow, a plant's first flowering always strikes me as important--a debut of sorts, a day to show off, to strut some pretty wonderful stuff. Here is the very first blossom on a young purple clematis that I planted in an inhospitable place. That is, it was inhospitable until last summer, when I planted a Powis Castle artemisia on the west side of the clematis, to shade its roots and shield it from the sun on hot August afternoons. Sometimes you don't have to move a plant to give it what it needs to be happy--just a little companionship will do the trick. Although in this case, a large rock would have been as good a companion as the artemisia, and perhaps better, since a rock wouldn't compete for water. Oh, well. Hello, Clemmie. Welcome to the world, you pretty thing!

Reading Note, from Sue Hubbell: "It begins to make me dizzy even trying to think of taking a census of everybody [plants and animals] who lives here; and all of them seem to have certain claims to the place that are every bit as good as and perhaps better than mine."

nomad thoughts

[This is a pre-posted entry: see the April 4th blog for an explanation. In the real world, if things are going according to plan (if I haven't gotten irretrievably lost somewhere on the Tri-State), I should be zipping down to Wauconda IL today, then dipping around Lake Michigan and back up to Muskegon MI tonight. Tomorrow, the lovely Frenwood Botanical Center, near Niles, MI! For details, go here.]

Nomad thoughts, on a bright, clear morning when the world seems new and everything is on the move.

David Quammen, "The Miracle of the Geese," from Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature: "Listen: uh-whongk, uh-whongk, uh-whongk, uh-whongk, and then you are wide awake, and you smile up at the ceiling as the calls fade off to the north, and already they are gone. Silence again, 3 a.m., the hiss of March winds. A thought crosses your mind before you roll over and, contentedly, resume sleeping. The thought is, 'Thank God I live here, right here exactly, in their path. Thank God for those birds.' The honk of wild Canada geese passing overhead in the night is a sound to freshen the human soul."

John Hay, "Living with Trees," from The Undiscovered Country:
"Under the full moon, the ground is a network of intricate shadows, meticulously drawn. The trees seem to move across the fluidity of light, extending electric arms and fingers. Their trunks are braced against the wobbling, racing planet. They seem to lift me with them in a sailing of their own.... We wait, and we move out at the same time. It is not only the long-distance migrants who make daring leaps into the unknown."

Wendell Berry, "The Journey's End."
"Where I am going I have never been before. And since I have no destination that I know, where I am going is always where I am. when I come to good resting places, I rest. I rest whether I am tired or not because the places are good. Each one is an arrival. I am where I have been going."

writing a series

[This is a pre-posted entry: see the April 4th blog for an explanation. In the real world, I should be in Iowa today, for a visit to the Hiawatha Library and an appearance at the Marion Friends of the Library dinner tonight. Tomorrow, Minneapolis! For details, go here.]

About writing a series. Somebody emailed recently to tell me that she didn't like Bloodroot because Ruby wasn't in it. Well, drat. Sometimes I wish that readers would stop to think what it means to write a series. I am NOT going to write the same book over and over again. And if I had to repeat the combination of characters in the same setting book after book, I'd never be able to continue the series! I couldn't do what many series writers do (the same book over and over)--it would drive me crazy. So there will be more books in the future with a variety of characters and setting--just to keep MY interest and creative energies alive and flowing.

One more thing that needs to be said here. Writing a long-running series is a long-term commitment, and it means that the writer has to give up other writing opportunities in order to work on the series. It's like a soap-opera actor who works for a couple of decades in one role, and turns down other projects in order to stay with the series. The actor is probably doing it for the same reasons I'm writing series mysteries: she enjoys the work, she likes the characters she's working with, and she appreciates the financial security she's found in an insecure business. She's practicing her craft and getting paid for it; she gives up experimenting and playing around and doing lots of other wild stuff. Like the soaps actor, the series writer opts for stability instead of wide variety. And like the actor, the series writer has to find ways to stay fresh, stay creative.

I do it by working in different series, in different time periods (contemporary and Victorian/Edwardian), and in historical fantasy (the Beatrix Potter books). And I also try to vary the China Bayles books, by working in different tones (sometimes comic, sometimes deadly serious), in different settings (Mississippi, Indigo, the monastery in Rueful Death), and with different character ensembles. I HAVE to do this! If I had to keep China in Pecan Springs and have Ruby and the whole gang doing their thing in every book, I'd go stark raving nuts.

[There's more about writing a series on my Amazon blog. To get there, go to Amazon.com and look for my Bleeding Hearts page.]

Reading Note, from May Sarton: But have the courage to write whatever your dream is for ourself.

home to the heart

[This is a pre-posted entry: see the April 4th blog for an explanation. In reality, if the tour is going according to plan, I am taking the day off to visit the Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill, in Kentucky. Tomorrow, I'll be in New Albany IN and Louisville, KY. For details, go here.]

In Landscapes of the Interior, Don Gayton writes "A poet friend of mine has a theory about children. She says there is a period in their lives when they bond with a particular home landscape, and the image of that landscape stays with them through their lifetime, as a profound psychological imprint"--a kind of primal landscape of the soul's home. I believe there's something to this theory, and I think of it often.

The landscape image of "home" that I carried with me through most of my life is what my mother always used to call "down home" (as in "we're going down home"). Down home for her was Polk Township, Sullivan County, Missouri--a green and rolling landscape of fields and woods, where her great-grandfather built a log house in 1850, and where she was born in 1909. We went there in the summers, in the 1940s, when I was a small child, Mother and my brother John and I. I thought it was the most beautiful place in the whole world and I used to dream of those fields and the creek all year round. I loved the old farmhouse, too, although my adult self knows that it was drafty and inconvenient (there was no running water back in those days) and must have been the dickens to heat in the winter. I loved the garden, too, lush with tomatoes and green beans and peas, and the chickens--oh, yes, the chickens, those glorious roosters and hens. And I can still remember the way the light from the setting sun fell like a blessing across the fields.

When I first saw the place where we live now, northwest of Austin TX, I felt the same strong sense of "landscape kinship" with it. Bill bought five acres here in 1974, built a weekend cabin, and came out whenever he could get away from his work in town. When we met in 1985, he brought me here, a bit diffidently, not sure he wanted to share. I think he'd brought other girlfriends, and they hadn't enjoyed it. The cabin was primitive, the road was unspeakable, and the landscape lacked the dramatic beauty of other Hill Country landscapes.

But it was love at first sight for me: the green meadow rising to the south, the woods along the creek, the meadows full of summer flowers. I used to wonder sometimes whether I married the man or married the land--but of course it was both, because he was a man who loved the land too. But I think at the heart of it was the thought of coming "down home," as my mother would have said. I've seen many other beautiful landscapes in my life (among them, my grandmother's Missouri farm), but nothing that quite speaks home to my heart the way this small scrap of Texas does.

Reading Notes by Barry Lopez, from Crossing Open Ground:

I think of two landscapes--one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see--not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution. . . . The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. . . . The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.

tour blogging

I debated whether to take a laptop and blog while I'm on book tour, but decided against it. I'd have to buy a new laptop and load my stuff on it (if you've ever done this, you know what a chore it is). And of course, if I had a laptop, I'd have to answer my email (another huge task). So picture me sinking into a hot bubble bath at the end of a long day of driving and speaking and book signing, with a double gin and tonic at my elbow--rather than hunched over a computer, blearily blogging. (Yes, I know: I could blog by phone. I gave that idea up, too, for similar reasons.)

But fear not. I'll be with you here in virtual reality, since Typepad allows me to pre-post entries. While I'm on book tour (April 1-May 7), I'll be maintaining a virtual presence on this blog by posting some of my favorite entries from earlier years, photos, and other items of note. Check back every few days to see if I've posted something for that day, or better, sign up for one of the feeds.

Today is Tuesday, right? I'm scheduled to get on a plane, fly to Chicago, rent a car, and drive to Indianapolis. Why not just fly to Indy, you ask? Good question. The answer: for a direct flight, I'd have to leave impossibly early or impossibly late. And it's actually quicker to drive to Indy than to wait for the next connection out of O'Hare. Go here, if you're interested in what I'm doing for the next couple of days.

Reading Note, by Ray Bradbury:

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must . . . write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy head . . .

hurry hurry rush rush

I'm getting ready to go off on book tour. But there's still time to enjoy the Indian paintbrush, one of the prettiest little flowers around. Most people like looking at big fields of them, appreciating the sweep of color. I'd rather get down on my knees and look at them up close, where I can see that the scarlet "flowers" are really bright-colored leaves surrounding the tin red and yellow flowers. The paintbrush is partially parasitic, since it must establish itself on the roots of grasses in order to grow--and like any good parasite, it has its favorite grasses. (It seems to love the curly mesquite grass in our front yard.) Native Americans made a tea of the bracts to treat rheumatism and used it as a contraceptive. In some tribes, the leaves and bracts were mixed with bear grease to promote hair growth. And of course, the hummingbirds adore them. There's nothing prettier than a ruby-throat dipping his long bill into the scarlet cup of a paintbrush.

Reading Note. "If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change."--attributed to the Buddha