📍STICKY LITTLE LEAVES
Even if I don’t believe in the order of things,
I still love the sticky little leaves as they open each spring….
-Ivan Karamazov
Ivan Karamazov, the second oldest of The Karamazov Brothers is a young adult intellectual trying to make sense in a world that in so many ways does not. He seems to pretty much throw it all under as for logic and purpose, and says he doesn’t want to stick around for long, but he also can’t help but admit that there is something about those sticky little leaves in the spring that he just can’t shake. 1
References to the sticky little leaves appear throughout the novel, which I finished reading this month — themes of which will probably make their way into my postings in coming days — but for now to say:
As we close out this month, it is sticky little leaves season! and I stand with Ivan! I can’t help but to see and to delight in gorgeous goodness unfolding in colorful variety throughout my backyard and in my walks about town.
📍BUT A FEW DAYS IN THE DESERT
Last weekend our family flew to Las Vegas where there were no sticky little leaves in sight. All my 50+ years I’ve lived alongside the color green — and I have long been curious to explore a bit of the desert. As imagined, rock was EVERYWHERE in view there! Where we use bark or plantings in our Pacific Northwest landscape design, they use all varieties of rock, in color and type. I kept thinking of Byrd Baylor’s2 children’s story Everybody Needs a Rock:
Everybody needs a rock.
I’m sorry for kids who don’t have a rock for a friend.
I’m sorry for kids who only have tricycles bicycles horses elephants goldfish three-room playhouses fire engines wind-up dragons and things like that – if they don’t have a rock for a friend.
For some reason, Byrd Baylor’s poetic prose set into southwestern landscapes has stamped deep in me and it was fun to walk these rocky landscapes for myself. 3
📍TIME SLIP
David and I went to a concert at George Fox University one Saturday afternoon mid-month and we had some time to spare before our dinner plans so Ryan took us on a tour through the art galleries on campus. Along the way we poked into classrooms I hadn’t seen in 30+ years. And time slipped. UGH! that statistics class 😬. I really had no idea what I was doing. But a Becky Ankeny literature class in the Hoover lecture hall — that was always a good spot to be.
Saturday afternoon, as we walked upstairs in Hoover, down the hall and around the corner, I suddenly found myself a senior, about to launch into a new chapter. I was standing by the window in a Mike Allen Sociology class, looking out into the spring sunshine and seeing all the sticky little leaves. Why do I have that specific memory?
📌And speaking of that next chapter — I got an envelope in the mail from an old friend this past month. I opened it to find it full of 30-year-old notes and newspaper clippings from our Scott Station Inn adventure. Goodness! I was Ryan’s age back then and running a Bed & Breakfast in central Kentucky with this friend.
Except for the fact that I can still make cinnamon rolls in my sleep, I rarely have occasion to remember stories from those B&B days, so it was pretty fun to find myself holding the scratch paper she and I made notes on as we considered taking the position of B&B managers all those years ago. There’s also an article in the small town college newspaper about us, and a stack of thank you cards people sent after staying with us. Some of the notes are quite detailed - updating us about the lives of people we met along that way. It is interesting to see the positive impression we made in that work (from some people at least - we have this evidence 🙃).
I wish I had kept a journal during that time. I’d love to see my thoughts - I can read between the lines of the newspaper article about us though, and memories come flooding back. We were genuinely good at what we were doing there, practicing hospitality, young though we were.
📌Also sometime mid-March, I stopped at the Woodburn Goodwill and walked out with a really nice hardback copy of Mourning into Dancing by Laurel Lee. Oh Goodness! the Laurel Lee stories, I love to tell. Perhaps one of my favorite (but really there are SO MANY) was the afternoon I showed up a little bit early to class. The lights were off, the room was quiet. I walked in, settled into a desk, and was startled to hear some noise. I looked up and saw Laurel Lee clambering out from under the table at the front of the room where she’d been napping. Oh! she was so perfectly herself. I could go on and on…..what a gift she had for telling a transcendent, true story. It is a privilege to have taken Memoir Writing (and spent three weeks traveling in Ukraine!!) with her!
I periodically bump into triggers that take me back to the day of her funeral - It was a hot Oregon summer day in 2004 and I was making applesauce in mom and dad’s kitchen, listening to Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma on my iPod before heading over to the service in Beaverton. Laurel Lee had a cancer recurrence and was just 58 years old when she died. At her service they showed a video that she had pre-recorded to share with us when she’d gone. I had not seen her in a number of years, but there she was on the big screen that day, grinning her ever-mischievous grin as she looked out at us and said, I don’t know how the postal system is going to work in heaven……4
📍STORIES THAT MAKE A LIFE
I am reading Elizabeth Elliot: A Life by Lucy S. R. Austen. This biography caught my attention when it was published a couple years ago and Kristin Du Mez recommended it. As biographer, Austen works deep within Elliot’s letters and assorted papers and journals to sift out the story of a life, and it reminds me of the work my siblings and I do with the letters and papers left in my grandmother’s trunk — we have enjoyed looking and re-looking through journals and clippings and miscellany of insight into Grandma’s life. A life that holds clues to our own.
In the preface to Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, Austen says - “Elliot was also a lifelong journal keeper. This private writing helped her both to mark the moments as they passed and to make meaning of the events of her life.”
In chapter three, Austen writes —
The letter provides interesting glimpses of mostly small-town America in late 1940s, as well as a window into the interests of the Howard family. Betty’s [Elisabeth Elliot’s] observations about the places she visited deal with the things the home folks enjoyed hearing about — food, scenery, wildlife, and human beings. The Howards loved to observe people, their similarities and differences, and got a good deal of fun out of retelling for maximum effect stories of people whose behavior had struck them as funny.
I JUST REALIZED THIS PIN COULD UNSPOOL INTO A FULL-ON ESSAY. And I don’t want to write that right now. So I’m just going to make 📍Put A Pin In It serve as intended by leaving it here for me to revisit later, perhaps.
But — a couple related notes:
📌My friend Aimee recently wrote a pertinent post — On Keeping a Five Year Journal 5
📌 And I really liked this piece from Dani Shapiro6 in the New York Times — I Don’t Want Anyone to Read My Diaries, Yet I Can’t Burn Them
📌 Something I wrote on my blog a couple years ago — The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt and linked within that is this related post — Telling Stories So That I Might Live
📍OAK TREE UPDATE
March 31. The old leaves have mostly fallen and my watch has turned toward something new—> when will the Sticky Little Leaves appear??
📍RTFD - Rusty the Farm Dog left the farm yesterday for his first “hike” and he thought it was pretty great. He joined our family one year ago, this week. I may make a specifically Rusty posting in the next day or two.
Stay tuned.
The sticky little leaves are a reference to a poem by Alexandar Pushkin— https://www.johnbyronkuhner.com/2010/06/chill-winds-still-blow-by-alexander-pushkin/
I am quoting myself here from a post I wrote about my surprise connection to Byrd Baylor— https://jennifersearls.com/byrd-baylor-a-portal-to-my-childhood-or-a-glimpse-into-my-future/
And reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver stories I read years and years ago. The Bean Trees comes to mind, particularly. I may get a copy for myself one of these days and read again.
Last night after I wrote this paragraph, I came across this opinion piece on Grief in the New York Times : We’re in a New Age of Techno-Spiritualism
A little over a century ago, Thomas Edison announced that he had been trying to invent an “apparatus” that would permit “personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Known for his contributions to the telegraph, the incandescent lightbulb and the motion picture, Edison told The American Magazine that this device would function not by any “occult” or “weird means” but instead by “scientific methods.”
The article I’ve linked is a really thoughtful piece on grief and being human in this age of AI.
In which my Grandma gets a mention!
I read it long ago, but her book Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life remains in my memory one of my favorite books on writing.
You certainly did a lot of time traveling over the last few weeks and also got more out of your Dostoevsky read than I did a few years ago. And you even managed to make brown look pretty in those photos even if I will always long for green and blue landscapes first.
Re: your mention of the specific memory that came to mind from school…I often think about the memories that stick and the ones that don’t. Time with my counselor taught me to trust the part of myself that holds specific memories. When I would talk about certain feelings she would ask…is there an image or a memory that comes to mind? Even if it seemed unrelated the memory ended up adding to the story.