I want to wish a Happy 1st Father’s Day to my son, Quinn, who became a father a week ago. What a bounty of joy to welcome my grandson and to witness my son so naturally assume the role of father. Welcome to the world, Carter Andrew Vesely, and welcome to fatherhood, Quinn.

The Poem I Cannot Write
—for Carter Andrew Vesely with much love from your Grandma Shannon

When you were born,
the vault of my heart swung open,
and all my words were swept away 
in the great torrent of my love.

But even if the dam had not burst—
my best words still eager for release—
what page could hold such joy?

The poem I cannot write is here
in your small ears which curl like fox kits
into this nest of black hair
so dearly like your father’s,

and here in your mother’s eyes 
which cradle you even as you sleep 
in the bassinet across the room.

It is here in the years which take me back
to the day I met your father,
a miracle, too,
who left me speechless and smitten 
and forever changed.

And it is here in the tide of arms 
which pull you onto the long shore of family
stretching deeper and wider than you can imagine.

The poem I cannot write is a locket
which holds a single word:

You.

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life 

In a few weeks, I’ll become a grandmother again when my son and daughter-in-law’s baby is born. For many of us, I suspect that the joy of welcoming a new grandchild is matched only by the joy of watching our children become parents. It’s been nearly 13 years since my grandson, Griffin, was born. This was the last time I spent hours holding a baby. The last time I felt the kind of idleness of rocking a sleeping child and surrendering to the kind of stillness that whispers, “You are right where you’re supposed to be, doing exactly what you’re called to do.” This is the kind of idleness you can own with “confidence, with devotion,” and most definitely with “joy.” And paradoxically, this idleness often results in the “most profound activity.”

Best known for his Christian allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, English writer and preacher John Bunyan claimed that “[i]f we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.” Too often, I’m guilty of seeking “outward comforts” as I reach for my phone or computer, scrolling through posts and videos that invariably lead me down one fruitless rabbit hole after another. When I could—and should—cultivate silence and stillness, I don’t. The images and words that lure me, promising relief from my “gouty” self, tease me with “golden slippers,” which are little more than tantalizing distractions. As they fall away, I’m left with a vacuum that, as Aristotle contended, nature abhors.

Some may argue that, indeed, human nature increasingly abhors a vacuum. In his 1971 novel, Angle of Repose, American writer, environmentalist, and historian Wallace Stegner lamented the many ways we fill our silences:

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

Of course, if Stegner were alive today, undoubtedly he’d substitute cell phones and streaming services for televisions and turntables. Still, his claims that the modern age doesn’t understand—or value—isolation and silence are founded. We walk and run with earbuds, filling the miles with podcasts and music. We clean our homes and work to our favorite playlists. We subscribe to services like Audible so we can work and drive while listening to books it’s unlikely we’ll sit down to read. Nearly a half-century ago, Stegner understood that, even if we didn’t consciously fill our days with noise, the noise would be there nonetheless, filling our silence and assuring us we aren’t alone.

But there are others, like 14th-century German Catholic priest and mystic Meister Eckhart, who caution against rushing to fill the vacuum, for “[n]othing in all creation is so like God as stillness.” American writer and naturalist Annie Dillard agrees. She contends that “[w]henever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song, and dance.” And in an oft-quoted scripture, the Sons of Korah, authors of one of the Bible’s oldest psalms, exhort us to “Be still and know that I am God.” [Ps. 46:10] Even as we fill our lives with noise and activity, most of us know—consciously or unconsciously—that to be silent and still is to embrace what St. Augustine calls that “delightful hidden place inside where we can be free of noise and argument.” I think it’s safe to argue that most of us crave a space “free of noise and argument”—for a time, at least. Without this space and its sacred stillness, we struggle to hear God speak. Without this space, St. Augustine contends, “there is no room for reflection in our lives.” And in this space, American author and political activist Marianne Williamson claims we might “create a world that reflects the heart instead of shattering it.”

The world has always been a heart-shattering place. We lose those we love to illness and death, to distance and hurt. Despite our best efforts, we fail to stave off suffering and scarcity. We push through our days treading water, fearful that if we stop moving, we’re losing. In the process, our hearts shatter from exhaustion and fear and loss. In the face of such chaos, however, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl explains: “You can either panic or pause; choose stillness.” We might argue that this is so much easier said than done. And to this objection, we might do well to remember that Frankl survived four concentration camps, choosing stillness in the midst of chaos and suffering we can only imagine.

Years ago, I chose to “pause” when I walked. This was—and continues to be—one of the best choices I’ve made. I walk in silence. Through the miles, I cultivate the mental and spiritual stillness that too often eludes me unless I’m walking. French painter Henri Matisse understood the power of such stillness, arguing that “[c]reativity requires stillness; it only flourishes in the silence of thought.” As a writer, I compose when I’m walking, for my best words are born “in the silence of thought.” If I fill my time on the trail with others’ words, there’s no room for mine. Over the years, I’ve learned to protect the stillness that prompts creativity.

And soon enough, I will protect the time I have with my new grandson, too, relishing hours in a rocking chair where I can be confidently and joyfully idle, my heart and mind profoundly still. And remarkably full.

image credit: Dawn Scranton from Cornwall, Ontario, Canada, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The all-blue male Indigo Bunting sings with cheerful gusto and looks like a scrap of sky with wings. Sometimes nicknamed “blue canaries,” these brilliantly colored yet widespread birds whistle their bouncy songs through the late spring and summer all over eastern North America. —Cornell Lab, All About Birds

It’s no secret that, for years, I’ve harbored a healthy (mostly!) obsession with the indigo bunting. I’ve crept as slowly and quietly as humanly possible down gravel roads towards the silhouette of an indigo bunting in the tall grasses. Certain that I’ve heard one in the timber, I’ve stalked about my yard, searching tree tops for the elusive bird. When I spotted an indigo bunting on our bird feeder—a miracle that occurred only once—I fell to my knees, fearful my shadow would frighten it away, and crawled across my dining room floor to take a photo of it. After years of hunting the indigo bunting, I can spot them in the tree tops or on power lines—even in the shadows or on cloudy days when the sun doesn’t ignite their signature cerulean blue. I know their song and silhouette. I’m a fan for life.

Paradoxically, indigo buntings, like all blue birds, have no blue pigment. Similar to particles in the air that make the sky look blue, they possess microscopic structures in their feathers that refract and reflect blue light. This is why they appear brown-black until a ray of sun hits them, and they burst into color and become a “scrap of sky with wings.” I was walking early one morning when the clouds parted, and the sun broke through. In that moment, I looked up as I passed beneath a utility wire and witnessed the small, dark silhouette of an indigo bunting explode into an otherworldly blue. I stood and watched until a cloud covered the sun, and the bunting was once again transformed, its brilliance a lingering memory.

That the indigo bunting often appears as another dark-colored songbird, becoming remarkable only in the presence of light, is an apt metaphor for the human condition. Most of us are unremarkable in the sense that we’re simply one of 8.3 billion people in the world, one more living, breathing human. Some of us rise to public significance through our own efforts and talents. Most of us, however, do not. We are unremarkable figures living ordinary lives. Until we come into the light of one who sees us. Until we find ourselves in the presence of one through whom we can reflect and refract the light that’s uniquely and remarkably ours.

For 12 years, I watched my son’s football career. He’d proven himself as an exceptional football player during his high school career and summer camps throughout the Midwest. He’d competed and distinguished himself at a regional football combine in Indianapolis. He was recruited by a Division II university throughout his senior year, fielding weekly phone calls from the coach. In the light of this university program, he was wanted and seen. Until he wasn’t. Several weeks after he reported as a freshman and had begun practicing, he fell off their radar. What happened in those weeks to relegate him to the shadows? I thought about this a lot over the years and finally decided that the coaches simply stopped looking at him. I recalled all the well-meaning advice from coaches and agents: Be coachable. Be tough. Work hard. Show up. Learn from your mistakes. And the implicit message is that if you do all these things, you’ll succeed. In short, you’ll play. Although this is true for some, sadly, it’s not true for many others. You might work hard, play with grit and passion, do and be all the things coaches say they desire, and sit the bench. For if no one is looking at you, you’re just as invisible as you might be if you didn’t work hard, hone your talents, and aspire to improve.

For 4 1/2 years, my son conditioned and practiced—in and out of season—for a total of one minute of collegiate varsity football play. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the courage and conviction he called upon to stay the course. He had the talent and desire, qualities that might’ve shone under a coach’s light. Yet, isn’t his story just another example of the human condition? We are all uniquely and wonderfully made, and like the indigo bunting, long to emerge from the shadows, to be transformed in the light of another’s interest and care.

Over the course of my teaching career, there were so many students who lived in the shadows of my classrooms. Most often, they sat in the back of the room, spoke little, and left class quickly. I checked them off on my attendance list and marked their grades in my gradebook, but regrettably, I didn’t really see them. Oh, I begin to see some as they emerged through their writing. Still, there were others who came and left my courses, largely unseen. I understand that it’s nearly impossible to devote real time and attention to each individual when you’re teaching 150 students per term, but I regret that I couldn’t. There were thousands of “blue canaries” in my classrooms just waiting to shine in the light of one who would see them.

And how many times have I failed to see my loved ones and friends? How many times have I consciously or unconsciously withheld the light through which they could be seen? Too many times, I’m afraid. I suppose this, too, is characteristic of our human condition: the way we often make ourselves the center of our own universes, ignoring and forsaking others—even those we love. And when we do, we leave them as dark silhouettes in the tree tops, as we turn our lights on ourselves in hopes of reflecting and refracting something brilliant.

When I think of the indigo bunting, I recall David’s words in Psalm 139. In God’s light, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” We are “not hidden” but seen. We don’t remain dark, unremarkable silhouettes but instead reflect and refract a holy and transforming light:

¹³ You created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be. [Psalm 139: 13-16]

Just yesterday, as I was walking mid-afternoon, an indigo bunting sheared the airspace in front of me, a cerulean flash that stopped me in my tracks. “Look at that!” I gasped. As I’ve aged, I’ve found I speak the words I used to only think. And I speak them with abandon, not caring if anyone hears me. Because the wonder of an indigo bunting deserves such a declaration. Because when we speak these things aloud, we also bring them into the light. And because there is brilliance all around us, if we have eyes to see and light to shine upon them.

Here’s to all the mothers who perform ordinary, behind-the-scenes acts of love and service. We wouldn’t be who we are without you. And Happy Heavenly Mother’s Day to my mom, Marcia, who braved many high track meets in the most abysmal Nebraska weather. You’re my hero.

My Mother's Raincoat

was nothing but a 2-ply, black 
plastic garbage bag
with a single hole punched through
for her head.

And huddled in the McCook High School bleachers,
beside another mother
who, too, had grown into such a poncho,
she watched the Girl's District Track Meet
below.

It was spring in Nebraska,
and the northwest wind blew in sleet from Wyoming,
pelted the garbage bags
and the cotton sweatsuits of runners
in the infield.

Beneath green sun visors
keeping drizzle from their eyes,
my mother and her friend looked on
and waved.

And standing alone 
at the start of the 440 yard run,
I fumbled to undo the string of my sweatpants.
The lucky beads I always wore around my neck
were not there, and there was nothing
but cold to hold me up.

Until I saw my mother's garbage bag
and remembered that tucked beneath it,
she kept graham crackers and Hershey bars,
chapstick and peppermints.
Underneath all that wind-whipped plastic
were hands that would rub out the cold
and drive me home.

Underneath it all--
and in spite of the sneers from other runners
who laughed long at the sight of two women in bags--
was the mother who, years later, would stand on the front terrace,
curbside, who would wave until
I turned the corner, and she could see me
no more.

Will she ever know the times I circled the block,
hoping that she hadn't yet gone inside,
hoping to see her waving again,
huddled beneath another makeshift poncho,
a single note of clear, green light
falling through her visor.

—Shannon Vesely

A woodpecker’s drilling echoes to the mountain clouds. –Dakotsu Iida, Japanese haiku poet

When I first saw this graphic of a woodpecker’s amazing tongue, I was gobsmacked. For years, I’ve watched Red-headed Woodpeckers bully the songbirds in our yard, chasing them from the feeders as they monopolize the supply of black-oiled sunflower seeds. With their bright crimson heads and long beaks, I’ve always thought them to be sharp-looking birds. But until recently, I had no idea that a woodpecker’s tongue, a unique anatomical feature, makes the species truly remarkable. In her article “Built-In Helmet: How the Woodpecker’s Tongue Protects Its Brain” (AZ Animals), Kellianne Matthews writes that “[t]he woodpecker’s tongue functions as a delicate sensor, a lethal spear, and a life-saving helmet, all at once.”

The woodpecker’s tongue is much longer than its beak, extending back into its skull and even wrapping around it. According to the American Bird Conservancy, “The total length of a woodpecker tongue can be up to a third of the bird’s total body length, although the exact proportions vary from species to species. This includes both the part that sticks out past the end of the beak, and the part that stays anchored in the head. If our tongues were the same proportion, they would be around two feet long!” Many believe the woodpecker’s tongue is a shock-absorbing miracle, protecting the bird’s brain from the force and potential trauma from its pecking. Woodpeckers slam their beaks into trees on average 20 times per second. Whereas some have credited the woodpecker’s tongue as protection from these concussive blows, others claim the bird’s skull bone, which is spongy, acts as a kind of “airbag” for the brain. Still others believe that the size and orientation of the woodpecker’s brain protect it, for even the strongest blows results in less than 60% of the pressure needed to give humans a concussion.

As I read more about this biological phenomenon, I begin to appreciate its metaphorical value. Who doesn’t need some serious brain protection, the type that keeps you from getting concussed and the type that keeps you from speaking or writing unfiltered thoughts? Although I haven’t suffered a concussion, I have suffered too many occasions when my thoughts became words I desperately wished I could retract the moment they were spoken. James the Just, half-brother to Jesus, admonishes us when he writes that all kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison (James 3: 7-8). What if I had a metaphorical, self-regulating tongue that instinctively went to work, covering my brain, taming my ill-formed thoughts, bridling my speech, and buying me time to carefully consider what I wanted to say and how to say it? What if such a tongue could protect me from my worst, most poisonous self?

I fear we’ve become a people proficient at pecking. We do much of this from a keypad as we pound out missives through every digital means. From the anonymity and security of our homes, we peck at a speed rivalling that of woodpeckers. Too often, we immediately voice our outrage in response to digital posts that may or may not be true. For who has time to fact-check or consider the validity of sources? Better to peck, peck, peck quickly in righteous indignation. But what if we all had woodpeckers’ tongues? At the very least, they might delay extreme rhetoric until our cooler heads prevail; at best, they might bridle our brains, giving us the time and desire for the discernment we find sorely lacking in much of today’s discourse.

And what if these metaphorical tongues could protect us from the percussive blows of others, from the slings and arrows of sharp tongues? What if we were shielded from the strikes of name-calling and gaslighting, the jabs of belittling and accusing? What if we never suffered the concussions of such hostility? Now, that would be something.

Just yesterday, a Red-headed Woodpecker swooped in from the timber moments after I’d refilled the bird feeders. As I watched him clear the finches and settle in for a leisurely lunch, I felt as if I could see beneath his feathers to where his amazing tongue looped around his brain and snaked through his beak. And watching him eat, I said—aloud and to no one in particular—oh, to have a tongue like that!

photo credit: Félix Arnaudin

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world. —Robert Frost

Personally, I’m all for being “educated in metaphor.” And I hope, by Robert Frost’s standards, that having schooled myself in metaphor, I’m safe to be loose in the world. My father, poet Don Welch, argued that metaphor is first founded on something’s “thingness, its irreducible, but wonderful value, its one-of-a kindness.” Things must be first valued for their “thingness” before they’re valued for what they might represent. The things of the world, my father claimed, “are the material of surprising comparisons and resonance.”

Perhaps the greatest gift my parents gave me was a love for metaphor, the eagerness to love a thing for its own sake and for what it might represent. What a marvel it is to let things transport you from the literal into the symbolic. Metaphor can take you on a remarkable journey, if you have eyes to see.

A few years ago, I discovered this photo of a group of French stilt walkers. I was fascinated with the black and white images of these men and thought immediately of my own history with stilts. One Christmas, my sister, Timaree, and I received a pair of stilts and a pogo stick. We vowed to master the stilts first. And though our pair only elevated us a foot off the ground, we proudly stomped up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, showing off our newly acquired skills.

In this photo, the shepherds of the French Landes region used wooden stilts that elevated them considerably higher off the ground on what the locals called “Tchangues” or “big legs.” In a September 26, 1891, Scientific American Supplement article, the authors describe their fascination with these stilt-walkers:

The shepherds of Landes… acquire an extraordinary freedom and skill … [the shepherd] knows very well how to preserve his equilibrium; he walks with great strides, stands upright, runs with agility, or executes a few feats of true acrobatism, such as picking up a pebble from the ground, plucking a flower, simulating a fall and quickly rising, running on one foot, etc.

Located in southwest France, Landes is a marshland with few roads, which makes travel challenging. Enter the stilt-walking shepherds, whose unique invention allowed them to travel efficiently by staying above the soggy marshes and, from this vantage point, to keep watch for predators.

In the late 1800s, Félix Arnaudin, a photographer who specialized in Haute-Lande folklore, set out to record the shepherds’ way of life, for he feared that in time, it would be forgotten. In an article from SimilarWorlds.com, the authors describe how Arnaudin captures these shepherds “as tall, ghostly silhouettes on the flat horizon—figures shaped by wind, mud, and patience,” their “balance, a quiet defiance against the elements.” His photographs have prompted others to marvel at these stilt-walking shepherds. In her article, “Rare Photos Of France’s Stilt-Walking Shepherds: Grassland Life From 1843 To 1937” (historyinsider.com), Phyllis Brown writes that although no one is certain about when this stilt-walking practice began, it was first noted in the 18th century. She explains that “[m]oving on stilts allowed the shepherds to match the speed of a trotting horse, making it easier for them to watch over their sheep and cover more ground in the expansive heathlands.”

These men are remarkable enough for their thingness as stilt-walking shepherds. But they are remarkable, too, as metaphors. In them, we can see symbols of human tenacity and spirit, of the desire to literally rise above the Earth to overcome the environmental challenges before us. And through them, we might also see the desire to figuratively rise above the world’s pain and suffering, to elevate ourselves above the muck and mire of life. For what might we see from such a height? What predators and pitfalls might we avoid? Imagine strapping on a pair of metaphorical “big legs” and rising above whatever the day throws at us as we move with ease through the world’s trials. Now, that would be something.

And imagine being a part of the Artemis II crew, looking down at the Earth from space. What perspective might this afford? How might it feel to rise thousands of miles above the Earth and life as we know it? The commander of the Artemis II crew, NASA’s Reid Wiseman, shared his insights:

This was not easy being 200,000-plus miles away from home. . . Like, before you launch it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth, and when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.

As I read Wiseman’s words, I thought of these lines from Robert Frost’s poem, “Birches”:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.

Perhaps the stilt-walking shepherds, like the astronauts of the Artemis II crew, shared this paradoxical desire: to “get away from earth awhile,” but to return to the “right place for love,” that beautiful and painful place we call home. Perhaps, as Frost concludes, to rise and return “would be good both going and coming back.”

He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Matthew 28:6

From an early age, I found myself living vicariously through the suffering of others. My mother recalled that as our family gathered around our big console TV set, and the theme song of the television series, Lassie, began, she would look over at me to find I’d already begun to cry. During each episode, as someone was lost or hurt, I’d be on the edge of my seat, anticipating the impending loss with tears. So, you might imagine how I responded when I first watched Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ. For me—and I suspect for many—the viewing was excruciating, my gut churning, my muscles clenched, and every sinew twitching in response to Jim Caveziel’s portrayal of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. Although I always believed that I would, that I must see the film again, I’ve never been able to bring myself to view it a second time.

I’ll forever hold images from this film in my mind, though, as I continue to live vicariously through them in these days leading up to Easter. They still hold the power—as they should—to prompt the physical, emotional, and spiritual reactions I experienced years ago when I sat in a theater with a cloud of witnesses who filed out in silence. We’d all suffered through a cinematic reenactment of Christ’s suffering, painfully acknowledging that as brutal as Gibson’s portrayal was, it wasn’t real. It could only suggest the magnitude of Christ’s physical and spiritual agony.

Yet even as we vicariously suffered, we knew the glorious end of the story. We left the theater in darkness on that Good Friday, as we embraced Jesus’ assurance in John 16:33: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” We got into our vehicles with our hearts already fixed on Easter Sunday and the suffering Savior’s defeat of death.

As I’ve been walking each day at the nature preserve, I’ve watched a stand of cattails in the eastern corner of the pond I pass. In late March, they’d finally split, their brown bodies spilling pale fibers which fell like powder puffs and dotted the trail. One day, as I passed, the wind teased these puffs into the sky and carried them over the trees and toward the sun. And I thought about this death, the remnants of life bright and airborne now.

I thought about these brown, brittle bodies offering their souls to the wind. I marveled at their ascent. And I felt unmerited joy as I remembered the words of 1 Corinthians 15:55: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

May you be blessed this Easter and always with Christ’s unmerited grace.

Scattering Your Ashes
   --for our father

In late March, 
the cattails stand at the water’s edge, 
engorged once but now split, 
their stalks bent and prone across the earth;

their entrails spilt in ivory puffs
and strewn across my path

where the wind will feather them 
into filaments so fine they will rise 
like vapor over the fields.

Into this tabernacle of death you went 
as the marrow of your life ran out,
your bones quickening to fiber
and sluffing from your death bed
with each shallow breath

so that when the veil was torn,
the moment was soft
but no less final.

But now, your ash fibers rise,
catching the current that will bear them beyond

while on the riverbank below, your children look up 
into the warp and weft of your great ascent.

photo credit: with much gratitude to Nicole Louden, Sandhills Prairie Girl

I love Nebraska because every word is sifted through its great sky. –Don Welch, journal entry, 1997

I left Nebraska in 1979 after I finished graduate school at Kearney State College. I transplanted my life first to Wisconsin and then to Iowa, where I’ve lived ever since. I left physically, but never emotionally. Never spiritually. Nebraska will forever be the home I return to in my dreams.

For years, I bore the brunt of Nebraska “burns” delivered in jest by co-workers, friends, and students in Wisconsin and Iowa: I’ll bet Mrs. Vesely took a Conestoga wagon to school! Hey, I told my husband to drive straight through Nebraska at night, since there’s really nothing to look at. You probably had to mow your sod house occasionally, right? You get the picture. Before each school vacation or break, one of my college instructor friends always told me to have a good time in Kansas. He would laugh and wave me off, gleefully refusing to acknowledge that I was traveling to Nebraska. When I first moved to Iowa and, naively, wore my Husker gear to grocery shop one weekend, I was met with open-mouthed stares. In Hawkeye and Cyclone country, publicly sporting my Husker sweatshirt was tantamount to treason. Over the years, I’ve taken the ribbing and purchased the requisite Iowa college clothing. But I’ve never forgotten my home.

This week, as I read reports of the catastrophic wildfires that continue to blaze across Nebraska, my heart broke. On Sunday, when I asked my church to pray for Nebraskans as they battled these fires, I was disheartened—but not surprised—that most hadn’t even heard of the ongoing tragedy. Even in Iowa, one state away, what happens in Nebraska rarely appears on the radar. As a former student once said, “After all, Nebraska is flyover country.”

To refute this claim that Nebraska is merely “flyover country,” in 1980, my father wrote his poem “Nebraska.” At that time, he claimed it to be “one of many apologias written for the state in the past decade.”  He explained that “if it sinks back into that morass of poems which are unable to keep their heads up, then it will have had at least a small advantage: for a moment it gave me a better definition of the place I love.” His response to those who argue that Nebraska is a good place to be from was to say that “[b]y starting in Nebraska, one may very well get a good interior compass; there is much here which points true north. I would go farther, however, Nebraska is not only a good place to be from: it is a good place to be.” In the 1995 Midwest Quarterly, my father recounted an experience with an “Easterner [who] kept calling the prairie dispiriting.” He responded by noting that “it was the beginning of evening, and there was a fine rare circling of blue. Like an old hawk’s inflection, barely holding us, it was true.” What the Easterner found “dispiriting,” my father found “rare” and “true.” For my father, Nebraska was truly a “good place to be.”

In Every Mouth of Autumn Says Goodbye, my father confessed that “[a]s good as it is to love the world, it’s better to work lovingly hard on the local.” In a 1998 journal entry, he noted that to become a famous poet, you must write about a famous place, providing a better description of that place than anyone else had. If you did this, my father wrote, “your immortality is assured, but you must pick a famous place.” He mused, “Can you imagine a poem written about the meeting of the Loup and the Platte rivers in Nebraska?  I could do it because I grew up in Columbus, where they meet.  Unfortunately, none of the three is famous enough.” Even in adolescence, I was painfully aware of my father’s struggle to publish as a Nebraskan competing on a national stage. For most, Nebraska is neither a “famous” nor a notable place. Submitting a poem about the meeting of the Loup and Platte rivers near Columbus, Nebraska, might be like pissing in the wind. And yet for decades, this is exactly what my father did. He worked “lovingly hard on the local,” ultimately doing his share to bring national attention to Nebraska, as he published poetry and essays, winning several awards and the hearts of many. Could Don Welch imagine writing poetry about the Loup and Platte Rivers, about the sandhill crane migration, about the wind and the prairie and the vast Nebraska sky? Yes, he could.

After visiting Kearney and reading poetry on the University of Nebraska-Kearney campus years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver mentioned the Platte River in her essay “Winter Hours”(Upstream: Selected Essays, Penguin Press, New York, 2016):

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together We are each other’s destiny.  

As astonished as I was that my parents hosted Oliver during this Nebraska visit (and that she actually spent the night in my childhood bedroom!), I was even more astonished that a Northeasterner shared a reverence for the Platte River and the Central Nebraska Flyway, where 80% of the world’s sandhill crane population, along with millions of ducks and geese, converge each spring. Oliver didn’t see Nebraska as “flyover country,” but rather as one of the “unbreakable links between each of us and everything else.”

In his 1997 journal, my father wrote, “I have always been like Thoreau, preferring broad margins between myself and others.” For him and many Nebraskans, the plains offer these “broad margins,” the physical and spiritual space to live “the good life,” as Nebraska’s iconic road signs announce. Years ago, I encountered the prairie photography of Solomon D. Butcher and began researching his journey to chronicle the settlement of the plains. In one of his photos, “Lookout Point Near the Snake River, circa 1890,” the “lookout” bumped up just enough from the prairie that you could call it a hill. What immediately interested me about this photo was that Butcher had drawn in seven trees, two horses, and a man. Into the photo, he inked life where he saw little. Perhaps he believed scarcity wouldn’t sell art to patrons east of the Mississippi, who, like the Eastener my father encountered, might find the prairie dispiriting. Perhaps he loved the land enough to give it a spit shine of life. And perhaps he feared he wouldn’t find an audience of those, like my father, who preferred the “broad margins” of this land. There have always been these folks, however, and there always will be. Where others see nothing, they see home.

I don’t wish to romanticize life in Nebraska, which can be good but hard. I think particularly of those ranchers who face the challenges of unpredictable weather and cattle markets, as well as rising costs for equipment and fertilizer. Today, fires have burned more than 820,000 acres in Nebraska and left more than 35,000 cows with no grazing land. Aerial shots of these fires reveal the devastation. What’s left looks more like a desert than a prairie. There were 24 fire reports across the state on March 12-13, according to the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency. Today, the Morrill fire, the largest, has burned 643, 074 acres and is 98% contained. The other large fires, too, have been mostly contained now. Life for Nebraska ranchers has always been hard, but for many, it will be much harder in the months to come.

As I read about this natural disaster and the challenges ranchers will face in its aftermath, I’m grateful that, for years, Nicole Louden, ranch wife and mother, photographer, and writer, has brought ranch life to thousands worldwide through her photography and posts. Nicole, Sandhills Prairie Girl, works “lovingly hard on the local,” sharing her family’s land and life through stunning photos and poignant posts. Through her lens and pen, Nicole reveals the qualities that mark this way of life: perseverance, faith, family, and hope. In her, my father would find a kindred spirit, a Nebraskan who loves the place she calls home, a “rare” and “true” land where one can find a “good interior compass” for all seasons of life.

This is the land where my father chose to “stick.” In a 1997 journal entry, he wrote that “Wallace Stegner described those who settled the American West as ‘stickers and boomers,’ those who settled down and those who rushed dollar-first along.  All my life I’ve been a ‘sticker.’” Once, as we were standing in my backyard and looking into the timber which surrounds our acreage, he turned to me and said, “Don’t you ever get tired of all these trees?” I chuckled, confessing I’d grown to love the trees and hills of my home in southeast Iowa, and knowing full well that he would always be a “sticker,” preferring the wide, open spaces of Nebraska where “every word is sifted through its great sky.”

As I pray for all those affected by the Nebraska wildfires and pay tribute to all Nebraskans, I leave you with my father’s poem, “Nebraska,” a poem he claims to have given him a “better definition” of the place he loved. It is a testament to his great love for the state—and to mine.

Nebraska

Going west when the sun is going down, following

the highways like light cords. 

*

If Nebraska were the name of a Russian woman,

they could love her. 

*

There would be a certain large-boned beauty

about her.

*

Or, she would be dressed in black and lace.

Her waist would be small,

and she would drag her long dress over a floor into

a study lined with French books. 

She would be a pawn in huge novels of war. 

*

As it is, she is a woman of spare beauty. 

*

Turning away from him so that the fine hollows of

her back were toward the bed,

she said, Why do you do this to me?

Why do you keep imagining me in other

places and states?

And why do you keep assuming our children 

are unhappy?

     Don Welch (1980, The Rarer Game)

Crane migration in Nebraska – Credit: Kylee Warren / Crane Trust

If all the birds disappeared, men’s eyes would starve. —Don Welch (journal entry)

In a letter to friend and fellow Nebraskan Stan Smith, my father anticipated crane time: “It’s in the air. Pretty soon we will hear them before we see them, that long, high yodeling sound as if the sun had its symphony of wood-winds.”  As missiles are launched and stock prices fall, I confess to logging onto the live webcam from the Rowe Sanctuary, a wildlife refuge on the Platte River near Gibbon, Nebraska. Here, you can lose yourself in the chortling masses of sandhill cranes during their spring migration. This refuge is, in the words of poet Robert Frost, “a momentary stay against confusion.” It may be momentary, but I’ll gratefully take it.

My siblings and I grew up loving cranes because our parents first did. When we grew old enough to ask about how our parents met, they regaled us with the story of their first date. While other college students were holed up in vinyl booths of local diners or necking in parked cars, my parents were crouching behind a haystack in a field along the Platte River. My dad said he sprung for two dime cups of coffee and drove my mom into the countryside, where he planned to introduce her to the magnificence of the crane migration, close up and in person. And so began my parents’ annual spring pilgrimage to the crane fields.

After my father’s death in 2016, I inherited many of his books and files. One file labeled “Old Pete” caught my eye. In it was research my dad had collected from Mark Peyton, a Gothenburg, NE resident, regarding Old Pete and the whooping crane recovery and captive breeding program. A wounded whooping crane found near Brady, NE, in May 1936, Old Pete became the patriarch of this recovery and breeding program. Housed at the Gothenburg Game Refuge, 3,000 acres south of Gothenburg, NE, along the Platte River, he was one of 20 remaining whooping cranes in the world and one of only two whooping cranes in captivity. Peyton’s interest in Old Pete’s story was sparked when Gothenburg natives Tot and Pauline Holmes told him that the whooping crane population today owes their existence to Old Pete. From there, he gathered information from locals, biologists, and scientific journals concerning Old Pete’s contribution to whooping crane survival. It was clear my dad was fascinated with this research, for his folder contained copies of Peyton’s work.

As my dad was introducing his poem “White Cranes in Spring” during an address he once gave at the University of Nebraska Kearney, he recalled how, as a child, his father had taken him to Bert Daggett’s place, south of Gothenburg. Daggett ran the city dump, mended fences, and fed the birds at the Gothenburg Game Refuge. At the time my father visited, Bert had a menagerie of wounded and crippled birds, including Crip, one of the few existing whooping cranes at that time, and who, along with Old Pete, was one of the first cranes drafted into the captive breeding program. 

My dad loved a good bird story and came to regard these whooping cranes as heroic figures to be memorialized. In his book Gnomes, he writes of Old Crip:

        For just a moment
	I am 6 and running again with Crip,
	a white crane dangling his hopeless right wing.

	Running ahead of him,
	my hand full of tease bread, his left wing way-high;
	under the blister of a Dust Bowl sky.  

Last year, I made a trip to Nebraska in April and was dismayed to discover I’d missed the cranes. In previous springs, when I’d returned to Kearney, I’d roll down my windows after I passed Grand Island in hopes of hearing the cranes in the fields. Even with Interstate traffic, I could often hear them. Their collective voices, “that long, high yodeling sound,” welcomed me home. My dad wrote that without birds, “men’s eyes would starve.” As would our ears. Entering a field of sandhill cranes is a full-body experience.

For my Iowa readers—and readers unfamiliar with Nebraska’s crane migration—consider a trip to central Nebraska some spring to take in the spectacle. As you look out upon the Platte River, you may be fortunate enough to spot a whooping crane, a descendant of Old Pete or Crip, a stately white figure among the gray masses. Visit the Rowe Sanctuary, where one of my father’s poems hangs in the entry, and where you’ll be graced with all-things-crane. You won’t be sorry.

White Cranes in Spring
                     —for Marcia

There were white cranes that spring
the feathered bowls of their wings
scooping out air, lifting them up
like unstemmed peonies.

Over the Gulf they could only circle
so long as Galveston’s halos
before they broke for the Platte,
a blue braid which runs through Nebraska.

For centuries they had danced on 
corn bones, on the fossilized memories
of nomads, or played contrabassoons
to the winter through the long folds

in their syrinx. In each bird
was a red germ, the unison cipher
of sex. And that spring,
paired up, we too flew north,

following the kissed-out leaves
of the willows, as if for a million springs
we had said the same thing
and were crying it hoarsely.
          Don Welch (1992)


My Mother Visits the Sandhill Cranes

She remembers the first time.
When others were coupling in dark theaters 
or drinking sodas in corner booths,
she knelt along the Platte River behind a haystack 
where her date promised she would be amazed,
where soon his presence would eclipse
the universe of gray bodies that had spread out
before them.

The day was ending,
but the field would not succumb,
the warm earth breathing beneath great wings
which hummed and fanned the flames
of last light.  

They mate for life, he told her,
his hand finding hers 
as the March wind took a corner of the haystack
and blew it towards the river.

When it was finally too dark to see
and they made their way back to the road
where he’d parked his car,
she’d already seen how she would return: 
      
      to this field of a thousand dancing birds,
      to this love with an enormous wingspan,
      to this man.
                                                              
          Shannon Vesely (2022)

I believe in the kind of light which magnifies itself, which gives off a radiance in excess of what we might expect, then stays a victory in a world of loss. —Don Welch, journal entry, 2003

If I were to give a Valentine to the world, I’d give just this: a “light which magnifies itself” and “stays a victory in a world of loss.” This would certainly trump all the Valentine cards I painstakingly taped candy onto and inserted into construction paper boxes we decorated in elementary school. Even the most expensive greeting card and the most decadent box of chocolates would quail in the presence of such light. This would be a Valentine that would keep on giving through whatever darkness and loss life throws at us. Each day, I think about my dad’s words and his steadfast belief in a light that buoys and urges us onward.

And I think about the light in two remarkable women: my dad’s grandmother, Vallie Welch, and my mom’s grandmother, Minnie Zorn. Despite significant loss and scarcity, these women not only persevered but triumphed. When my dad spoke of his grandmother, Vallie, he always noted her “indomitable spirit”:

My grandmother lived her adult life on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, weathering widowhood and the Great Depression among other adversities. By our standards her life was not only meager, it was terribly poor. Having no car, no horse, nor ride-giving neighbors, she walked everywhere she went, including to towns 8 miles away. Yet she was rich in spirit, and her indomitable spirit was as tough as it was sensitive.

As she walked to town, Vallie sang, “You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road; and I’ll be in Scotland before ye.” My dad described her soprano voice floating “over the wheatless fields of the Great Depression until the dust assumed her voice, and even the clods assumed they had been sung to.” In circumstances that defied song, Vallie raised her voice above the hard-scraped earth in a triumph of will and heart. In the face of scarcity, she gave “off a radiance in excess of what we might expect.” As grasshoppers, drought, suffering, and death took her life by storm, she walked on.

Although I never met my great-grandmother, Vallie, I feel as though I know her through my dad’s stories and poetry. In the following poems, my dad memorializes the uncommon beauty and heroism of his grandmother.

When Memory Gives Dust a Face

When dust like flour sifted the road,
and weeds were skeletal corsages;
when horses broke their hooves unshod
with careless grass their only forage,

she sang high songs. And we listened
as we walked to town. No voice
was more enriched by pain. Her tongue
cleaved to love to make it new.

In loss the dust assumed her songs.
And clods assumed they had been sung to. 
          Don Welch (2008)


Funeral at Ansley

I write of a cemetery,
of the perpetual care of buffalo grass,
of kingbirds and catbirds
and cottonwoods;

of wild roses around headstones,
with their high thin stems
and their tight tines
and their blooms pursed
in the morning.

I write of old faces,
of cotton hose and flowered dresses
and mouths which have grown up
on the weather.

And I write of one woman
who lies a last time in the long sun
of August, uncramped by the wind
which autumns each one of us

under catbirds and kingbirds
and cottonwoods, and the grey-green
leaves of the buffalo grass. 
          Don Welch (1975)

Like Vallie, my great-grandmother, Minnie, was a remarkable woman. A German immigrant whose husband and eldest son abandoned her, she settled in Falls City, Nebraska to raise my grandfather, her youngest son. For years, working as a housekeeper for a family there, she spent her days and nights cooking, cleaning, and helping to raise their two children. After she’d retired, she lived for years in an apartment building with a series of blue parakeets. When one Billie Boy died, she replaced him with another. In one letter to my mom, she reported that her most recent Billie Boy was “touched in the head,” unable to learn to talk. Still, she kept busy with other things, she said, like running errands for the “old folks” in her building. The fact that, at 90, she was considerably older and less able than her 60-70-year-old neighbors was entirely lost on her.

Recently, as I stood at the kitchen sink, I heard the familiar thump of my 10-year-old parakeet Billie Boy and turned to see that he had once again fallen from his perch, plummeting to the floor of his cage. Stunned, he looked up and began to climb up the sides, pulling himself up with his beak, rung by rung, until he reached his perch again. Two years ago, he lost the ability to fly, his wings reduced to balancing agents he uses now to right himself when he crashes to the cage floor several times a day. Every day, I expect to find him lifeless under his food bowl, for ten parakeet years is probably the equivalent of 100 human years. Billie Boy, like Great Grandma Minnie, is older than the “old folks.” And yet, he greets each morning with song.

Minnie often concluded her letters with unique postscripts. One that I’ll never forget went something like this: Well, as the old woman who peed in the river said, “Every little bit helps.” I’ll never be exactly sure what this meant to her, but I like to think it was just another way of encouraging us, coaxing us forward with small acts of kindness. For her life was a testament to her claim that “every little bit helps.” As she moved through her life in cotton house dresses and aprons, she glowed with such small acts, an ambient light that stayed “a victory in a world of loss.”

This is the provenance that Minne and Vallie leave us, a legacy of light which “magnifies itself,” defying the darkness. And this provenance seems a fitting Valentine for this day and the days to come.

Provenance

Why do you do this?
my daughter asks.

I’m wiping clean a piece of used aluminum foil,
then folding it into a neat square 
to be stacked with others in the drawer near the stove.
My hands know the way
and make quick work of it.
My heart, too, knows the way
as I remember the words of my mother 

who saves foil still—
as if this is a lesson all must learn,
as if the economy of the world rests on this.

Why do you do this?
As a girl, I asked my mother 
when she patted shiny squares of foil where they sat—
as they always had—
beside assorted pencils and pens, a box of sandwich bags 
and a new roll of aluminum foil,
round and royal, nestled on a throne 
of hot pads.

To make do, she says.

And she tells me of the years 
her mother and grandmother suffered 
though the Depression and both World Wars. 

So, today, I tell my daughter:
We do this because your grandmother and great grandmother
and great great grandmother did this,
because in a world of throw-aways, 
we remember a world of want,
because to make do
is to honor the women we love.

She looks out the window to the yard
as if the lean years wait there, 
crouched and urgent, in feed sack aprons.
       Shannon Vesely (2023)