{"id":3454,"date":"2009-02-20T06:54:45","date_gmt":"2009-02-20T11:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=3454"},"modified":"2009-02-20T09:16:09","modified_gmt":"2009-02-20T14:16:09","slug":"of-time-things-small-and-things-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/of-time-things-small-and-things-green\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Time, Things Small, and Things Green"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Typestick<\/a>From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Moment<\/strong><\/p>\n

Walking the three tiers in first light, out
\nhere so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
\nI watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
\nso many other weeds and wildflowers
\nI don’t know the names for, him saying Big<\/em>, and Mine<\/em>,
\nand Joshua<\/em> — words, words, words. Then
\nit is the moment, that split-second
\nwhen he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
\nand I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
\nheart-weight, pulling me toward
\nthe gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
\nThat moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
\nwhen he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
\nfrom his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
\nand yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into
\nthe faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes,
\nthe miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
\nwhere he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Len Roberts)<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Twelfth Year<\/strong><\/p>\n

That autumn we walked and walked around the lake
\nas if around a clock whose hands swept time
\nand again back to the hour we’d started from,
\nthat high noon in midsummer years before
\nwhen I in white had marched straight to my place
\nbeside you and was married and your face
\nheld in it all the hours I hoped to live.
\nNow, as we talked in circles, grim, accusing,
\nwe watched the green trees turning too and losing
\none by one every leaf, those bleeding hearts.
\nAnd when they all had fallen, to be trod
\nand crumbled underfoot, when flaming red
\nhad dulled again to dun, to ash, to air,
\nwhen we had seen the other’s hurts perfected
\nand magnified like barren boughs reflected
\nupside-down in water, then the clouds
\nmassed overhead and muffled us in snow,
\nanswered the rippling lake and stopped the O
\nof its nightmare scream. The pantomime
\nwent on all winter, nights without a word
\nor thoughts to fit one, days when all we heard
\nwas the ticking crunch of snowboots on the track
\naround the lake, the clock we thought we either
\nwere winding up or running down or neither.
\nSpring came unexpected. We thought the cold
\nmight last forever, or that despite the thaw
\nnothing would grow again from us; foresaw
\nno butter-yellow buds, no birds, no path
\noutward into a seasoned innocence.
\nWhen the circle broke at last it wasn’t silence
\nor speech that helped us, neither faith nor will
\nnor anything that people do at all;
\nlove made us green for no sure cause on earth
\nand grew, like our children, from a miracle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Mary Jo Salter, from Sunday Skaters<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Finally:<\/p>\n

At school we had air-raid drills. We took the drills seriously; surely Pittsburgh, which had the nation’s steel, coke, and aluminum, would be the enemy’s first target.<\/p>\n[…]\n

When the air-raid siren sounded, our teachers stopped talking and led us to the school basement. There the gym teachers lined us up against the cement walls and steel lockers, and showed us how to lean in and fold our arms over our heads. Our small school ran from kindergarter through twelfth grade. We had air-raid drills in small batches, four or five grades together, because there was no room for us all against the walls. The teachers had to stand in the middle of the basement rooms: those bright Pittsburgh women who taught Latin, science, and art, and those educated. beautifully mannered European women who taught French, history, and German, who had landed in Pittsburgh at the end of their respective flights from Hitler, and who had baffled us by their common insistence on tidiness, above all, in our written work.<\/p>\n

The teachers stood in the middle of the room, not talking to each other. We tucked against the walls and lockers: dozens of clean girls wearing green jumpers, green knee socks, and pink-soled white bucks. We folded our skinny arms over our heads, and raised to the enemy a clatter of gold scarab bracelets and gold bangle bracelets.<\/p>\n

If the bomb actually came, should we not let the little kids — the kindergartners like Molly, and the first and second graders — go against the wall? We older ones would stand in the middle with the teachers. The European teachers were almost used to this sort of thing. We would help them keep spirits up; we would sing “Fr\u00e8re Jacques,” or play Buzz.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Annie Dillard, An American Childhood<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From whiskey river: The Moment Walking the three tiers in first light, out here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house, I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow, so many other weeds and wildflowers I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine, and Joshua — words, words, words. Then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,247,599,405,50],"tags":[215,295,1016,1017,1018,1019,1020],"class_list":{"0":"post-3454","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-perfect-moments","9":"category-nature","10":"category-language-writing_cat","11":"tag-love","12":"tag-annie-dillard","13":"tag-len-roberts","14":"tag-mary-jo-salter","15":"tag-green","16":"tag-time","17":"tag-words","18":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-TI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3454"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3470,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3454\/revisions\/3470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}