A Deep River Year - 2017

"You can't go home again," young Thomas Wolfe entitled his classic novel. He elaborated that we can never return "back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." I have found that to be true in so many ways. The last time back in my home town, I drove past the spot where our house once stood on a... lovely street lined with tall elm trees. The trees are gone, thanks to the blight of Dutch Elm Disease, and the house is too, due to the need of a nearby college to have a parking lot. 

Other things are gone, too, perhaps more ephemeral, but nonetheless sad for me. I can't for the life of me find one of those playground merry-go-rounds--the kind with bars to hold on to as some big kid races around the outside trying his best to spin somebody off into the dust. It was joy on a summer day to ride with friends, hair flying. Presumably insurance liability concerns have done away with those things. And try to find a pick-up neighborhood baseball game in the summer. The diamonds are empty once school lets out presumbaly because there are no adults to organize the games. Parents don't want their young kids riding their bicycles around town unsupervised, where mischief and delight can happen. I could add to the list nickel ice-cream cones, black Switzer's licorice, double-feature movie matinees--and don't forget drive-in theaters where you could get a whole carload of people in for a dollar on "buck night," and for free on other nights if you could fit them in the trunk.


Missing

We still let the milkweed stalks grow
at the edge of the yard,
and now they are full of great
purple clusters of flowers,
scenting the afternoon air
and waiting futilely
for just one monarch butterfly
to come and rest.
Those orange and black winged creatures
once filled our summer world,
but they are missing, now.
And where are the swooping bats
which once dived through the dusk
for green apples tossed upward
by laughing children?
I long for the buzz of honeybees
on fields of clover,
and the magical flashing of fireflies
as we raced to collect them in jars
so that they would flicker golden light
into our dark bedroom dreams.
They all seem to have gone, somewhere,
except in the museum of my heart,
where still children fly in circles
on spinning merry-go-rounds,
and butterflies rise on the breeze,
and nothing good is ever lost.

--Timothy Haut, 2017

A Deep River Year - 2017

Today is Midsummer Night, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. It's the day when the sun reaches the northernmost point on the horizon before slowly moving southward again to its low place in the winter sky. I've always thought there should be another name for this day, since it is not really the middle of summer. That presumably would be in July, when this spot on our planet sometimes feels like a tropical place.


But this day in June has had an almost mystical place in the world's calendar for centuries. Around the cultures of the North, this day of the Solstice has been celebrated with bonfires and the blessing of waters, with customs and rituals that hoped to ensure that the sun would continue its life-giving presence for another cycle. Some of those customs still are observed. One Norwegian custom is for girls to put flowers under their pillows tonight with the promise that they will dream of their future husbands. In one Latvian town, the practice on Midsummer Night is to run naked through town at three in the morning, with beer for everyone at the end.


My celebration will be simpler, but perhaps no less joyful. I will go out in the back yard, or maybe in the field across the street, and wait for the stars to come out. I will hope to see a few bats flutter across the peach-colored dusk, and then the lightning bugs will begin to flicker in the treetops. It would be nice to catch a scent of the sweet peas in my garden as the world stills and the wind chimes ring softly in the evening breeze to celebrate the Solstice light. So what if this midpoint in the year means that we are moving toward the lean days of winter again! This is a day to savor, to feel, to hold close to the heart. Maybe to run naked at three in the morning.


Midsummer Night


We ride the Great Wheel of Time,
 spiralling through seasons and years
 around a golden star.
 And here, again, on the longest day
 when light lingers against the shadows
 we will fill ourselves with its flame,
 set a lantern glowing
 with sweet memories of celandine and clover,
 fireflies in the dusk
 and crickets singing love songs
 to the moon.
 On this shortest night
 it would be good to stand
 in a broad and grassy field,
 looking up at the glittering sky
 as we begin again the great journey
 toward our little winter.
 And this will be the benediction,
 that through every cold, dark passage--
 even to the edge of doom
 when this bright star is stilled
 and summers are no more--
 this memory, this hope, this fire
 of one summer night
 will endure
 as the bright and blessed glory
 of our moment
 in the vastness of all that was,
 and is, and ever will be.
--Timothy Haut

A Deep River Year - 2017

Father's Day is a yawn in the middle of the Hallmark year. Someone must have figured that dads needed equal time with mothers, but there is little zeal in most of our celebrations. When my son asks me what I want for Father's Day, he knows I will answer "world peace" and free him of the responsibility of buying me a tie or a mug to mark the day. What I truly desire is time: time to hang out with my children and grandchildren, to listen to them reminisce or dream or laugh or solve the problems of the world together.


I don't think my father had much of a chance to do those things with his father, who spent most of his waking hours in an overstuffed chair in his living room, its upholstery blistered by cigar ashes and stains from spilled beer. My father never had stories to tell of playing catch in the back yard, riding on his father's shoulders, fishing together from the levee of the river, or working on projects in a basement workshop. He does remember his mother sending him down to the tavern on the corner to collect the old man before he spent all of the weekly paycheck. So why did my own father turn out to be such a good man?


e e cummings said of his own father that "joy was his song and joy so pure/ a heart of star by him could steer." My father's gift was his joy at caring for people, holding them in his heart, making them better than they were because he loved them. He worked at it, this love. My father lingers on the edges of my remembering, with his tongue clenched in his teeth and sweat on his face. He sucked lemons and thought them sweet. He and I would pick tomatoes on hot summer days in our enormous garden so my mother could cook them up in quart jars for the winter. Standing in the sun, we would bite into tomatoes together so that the juice would soak into our shirts, and we would be son and father forever. He loved his roses, growing them so he could give them away to strangers who needed something beautiful. He forgave the roses their thorns, just as I imagine he forgave his father's.


My Father's Rose

Every June it appears,
 one blossom,
 one rose,
 my father's gift.
 Some morning
 It will be there
 when summer slips in:
 a perfect blossom,
 rising like a flame
 amid the garden's green
 pink as a perfect sunrise.
 I will look for his footprints
 in the wet grass,
 listen for the rustle of movement
 in the forsythia
 at the edge of the yard,
 his certain presence.
 It will be goodness I feel,
 his gift,
 the thing as true and fleeting
 as a blossom.
 He saw the awful, stained world,
 the one that breaks our hearts,
 but he made it give back roses.
 They are still blooming
 this sweet June,
 and today I find
 an autograph of joy
 to celebrate my
 father's day.
--Timothy Haut

A Deep River Year - 2017

Yesterday I mowed the grass under a warm June sky, feeling the golden sun overhead for the first time in days. The long, wet Spring has made for a lush green world, and the grass was nearly knee-deep in places. So out came the gas mower, which chugged to a roar on the second pull of the starter rope. It was satisfying to make long parallel mower tracks up and down the back yard, and to whack into submission the miscellaneous weeds that pass for a lawn out by the front fence.


I have cut grass almost all my life. As a boy, I mowed our yard, as a duty. But a pair of sweet, white-haired ladies who lived in the big house next door offered to pay me to do their lawn. They couldn’t always pay with cash. Sometimes their reward was cookies, and once they paid me with a crank-operated phonograph console that had a drawer full of ¼” thick records, that crackled with ancient song. But cutting grass was almost its own reward.


Long ago we had a push reel mower, whose clickety-clickety sound seemed a more fitting companion to the summer sounds of birds and insects and wind in the trees. However, when it hit a hidden stick in the lawn, that old mower came to a lurching halt, as the blades bound and sent the metal handles of the contraption into my ribs. But always the finished product gave a happy sense that I had, for a moment, brought a little more order into the chaos of the world. And, ah, the smell of cut grass!


June


O, June,
 warm, full of golden light,
 rich and dripping,
 wet after rain,
 fulfillment of winter's promises
 and sweet as a strawberry moon:
 I would rest in your soft arms
 and fall asleep
 as fireflies dance at dusk
 and roses on the fence
 breathe a soft sigh,
 and all around is the scent
 of honeysuckle and clover.
 Or just this would be enough:
 to offer one small prayer,
 a gloria of gratitude,
 as the incense of new- mown grass
 rises like a blessing
 through the window
 of my dreams.


--Timothy Haut

A Deep River Year - 2017

They are here, everywhere. They are Gypsy moth caterpillars, little hairy things that hang by long silky threads and chomp their way through the tall trees that are New England's glory. A few days ago I sat back in a dentist's chair for my semi-annual cleaning and noticed that the hygienist was distracted by several little worms crawling up and down my shirt.


Last year was a bad one for the destruction and defoliation caused by these creatures.  Our hope was that a wet Spring would create a perfect climate for the fungus which is one of the few natural enemies of these caterpillars. But there still seem to be a million of them around. That can happen when just one female moth lays up to a thousand eggs in a summer. It's hard to get rid of them all. And when the little things start to crawl up the trees to feed on the leaves, they seem to be everywhere. They slip down from the eaves of our barn on those little threads, blowing in the breezes onto our clothes and hair--and if we're eating outside, onto our plates. When they are up in the treetops, they sound like a constant, soft summer shower, raining their little black droppings down from on high, too. And recent medical reports indicate that a lot of folks are breaking out with welts on their skin--allergic reactions to the caterpillars' hairy backs.


It all started in the mid 1800's when some hopeful entrepeneur in Massachusetts thought that these caterpillars might create a silk industry in New England. A few of them placed on a windowsill blew off in the wind, and the rest is history. So it goes, that often our biggest problems are of our own making. And often, they are harder to fix than they were to create in the beginning. Of course, it's a matter of opinion whether Gypsy moths are evil incarnate. They are just a part of nature, perhaps misplaced. For them, it's just about survival. We, who squish them with our thumbs, may be the evil ones. I do it anyway.


Gypsy Moths


It may not be
 that the world will end
 in fire and tempest.
 Listen to the worms
 up in the trees,
 chewing their way
 to the Apocalypse.
 But perhaps they wriggle
 gratefully
 toward the treetops,
 giving thanks for the gifts
 they are about to receive,
 and praising a kind Creator
 for all things green.
 And we, the wise ones
 who build armories
 fit to destroy the world,
 who leave our poor
 hungry on the streets
 or poison the very earth
 that feeds us,
 we name as bane and baleful ill
 these little worms
 who only wish
 to live.


--Timothy Haut

A Deep River Year - 2017

I awakened to the patter of rain on the window, a soft shower that followed me through my early morning walk. The world seems unusually green on a gray day, and the leaves on the burgeoning trees glisten in the morning light. I am glad to be alive, smelling the wet earth. But these inclement days sometimes have another effect. For some of us, this weather is soporific. The rhythm of the raindrops and the dim light make us want to find a comfortable place to sit, or even lie down, and drift into dreams. For others, these days are depressing, hanging like a storm cloud over lives that are shadowed by troubles, loneliness, or fear.


A friend recently told me about his wife, a kind and good woman suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. She is in the stage of dementia in which she is aware of her forgetfulness, fearful of what might happen to her. She has occasional trouble finding words for things, and spends time hunting around the house for objects she has misplaced. She is reluctant to leave her house because she has difficulty maneuvering in unfamiliar places or conversing with people whom she doesn't recognize. But one symptom of her condition is a desire to go through old photos of herself and her family, as if to reinforce, as long as possible, the precious memories of her life. She is determined not to lose her self.


As we come to Memorial Day weekend, we take time to remember not only those who have died in service to their country, but also all those who have been important to us. We place flowers in cemeteries and pause, for a moment, in remembrance of all fragile and fleeting gifts: the people we have loved and lost, old songs and treasured words, nighttime laughter and the memories that rise as dreams in our sleep, and a thousand sweet mornings scented with earth on rainy Spring days.


Forget-Me-Nots


Blue as sky
 they cling close to earth,
 forget-me-nots of Spring.
 We stoop to touch them,
 remembering all that we would not
 forget:
 the teacher who once kept a bouquet
 of the tiny blossoms on her desk,
 those distant days when we discovered
 our world and who we were,
 the house to which we always came home,
 the maple tree in the yard
 flinging its helicopters in the May breeze,
 the crimson geraniums on the graves
 in the country cemetery where
 spirits floated over fields of growing corn,
 and this day,
 this sweet, sweet day,
 blue as sky.


--Timothy Haut