The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July. –Henry David Thoreau

This is a juvenile eastern (red-spotted) newt. You may be thinking what an odd picture for a post on bounty. You may be expecting a more traditional cornucopia or Thanksgiving table laden with all the seasonal favorites. But earlier this fall as a fellow writing resident and I were walking Tewksbury Hollow Road in northeastern Pennsylvania, we looked down on the gravel road to find a red-spotted newt making his way across. As like-minded bounty hunters, we stopped and stared at the 3 1/2 inches of scarlet glory below us. Oh, it’s true that bounty and plenty are most often kissing cousins, but bounty, like the best gifts, can also come in the smallest packages. And bounty, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.

American Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, testified to this truth in his writing and with his life. He proclaims the thinnest yellow light of November is equal in value to the bounty of July, and in so doing, reveals his willingness to see beauty and bounty in almost everything. Not only would Thoreau marvel at the newt as he made his way into the forest, he would write pages about it, commemorating it as bounty in its purest form. Most famous for his book, Walden, a reflection of living alone in a simple cabin in the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau understood that bounty may be everywhere, but one must intentionally seek it. He writes:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…

Perhaps because almost everything is so accessible now, quickly and often with just the touch of a keystroke, we may think little about the intentionality of bounty hunting. We’ve come to expect that people and things will come to us–physically or digitally. We wait expectantly more than we seek and suck out all the marrow of life. I’m afraid that if Thoreau was our life-coach, he would find that many of us aren’t living deliberately, for we haven’t yet come to know–or have forgotten–that living is so dear. If grades were given, I expect Thoreau might offer us a generous C and comment needs improvement. After all, here is a man who sought to rout all that was not life, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, so that he might live bountifully. I suspect that he’d lament our mediocrity and passivity.

In his poem, “To the Holy Spirit,” Wendell Berry writes:

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,
Who in necessity and in bounty wait,
Whose truth is both light and dark, mute though spoken,
By Thy wide Grace show me Thy narrow gate.

Paradoxically, the gate into bounty is often small and narrow. When we think big, God offers us a baby born in a stable rather than a warrior king. When we think more, Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein writes:

Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the concentration camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend. [All But My Life]

As I review my grocery list for our family Thanksgiving dinner, I’m painfully aware of the contrast between my world and one in which my entire possession is one raspberry that I give to a friend. I’d like to believe that I’d see bounty in a single raspberry, but I’m afraid that, living generally in abundance, I’d struggle. For those who know real scarcity and who struggle for their very survival are most often those who find the narrow gate into grace and bounty.

It goes without saying that bounty may also come so generously, so abundantly that it takes our breath away. That is, it may be gargantuan. Traveling up the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park, I could scarcely take in the majesty of creation. Here was bounty in its super-sized form, and the wonders just kept coming as we traveled to the summit. Likewise, the sheer force of love and familiarity often overwhelms me at family gatherings. In these moments, bounty takes the room like a tsunami, leaving glittering shells of gratitude on the shores of our lives.

Seeking bounty–in big or small packages–is a lifelong endeavor, one that might produce even greater fruits through intentionality and reflection. As a rookie bounty hunter, I’m writing my own improvement plan: one that involves daily reflection on the red-spotted newt, one I think Thoreau would approve.

When one hand isn’t enough

to hold a hedge apple
or all the lemon luster of the hour, 
you need two hands—
fingers fused and heels pressed hard into the other—
to hold the day.

For one hand is rarely enough.
One hand cradles parts and starts
drawing itself up as large as it can—
larger even than it thought possible—
but never large enough. 

One hand can hold the corner of a smile,
catch a single tear,
nest a word or two.

But you want more,
and your two-handed gluttony
is a thing of real beauty,
a chaste and fitting bounty
for one who loves the world so,

for one who wants the sun and moon,
the seed and bloom,
the greening, growing grace of this day
and the next,

for one who walks the earth
a two-handed supplicant. 

When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.
― Elie Wiesel

Recently, I presented at a teachers’ conference held to commemorate the life and works of my father and to offer ways through which my father’s writing might be used in K-12 classrooms. Needless to say, there was considerable witness made to the enduring legacy of my father’s work as poet and teacher. Former students and colleagues, family and friends testified to the influence that Don Welch had–and continues to have–on their lives in and out of the classroom. To be in the presence of such witnesses was truly humbling, for it became evident that the father and teacher I knew was also present in homes and classrooms all over the world. Those who’d listened to my father were passing it on to others. In the sanctuary of a witness, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, you equip yourself to deliver what you’ve learned to others. The witness becomes a witness becomes a witness. And so it goes.

In his 2005 address to the United Nations on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel opened by confessing the challenges facing those who’ve witnessed things so unimaginable, so horrific that words fail them:

When speaking about that era of darkness, the witness encounters difficulties. His words become obstacles rather than vehicles; he writes not with words but against words. For there are no words to describe what the victims felt when death was the norm and life a miracle. Still, whether you know it or not, his memory is part of yours.

Though words may become obstacles, as Wiesel contends, and though they impose limitations–as all words necessarily do–on suffering and despair that are genuinely limitless, words remain the primary means through which we bear witness. And when those words have been carefully chosen and conscientiously crafted, the witness evokes in us such urgency and conviction that we’re forever changed. Wiesel’s words in this address, as well as in other speeches and writings, move us to remember and to become active witnesses to what we’ve heard and read. He concludes his address with these powerful words:

And now, years later, you who represent the entire world community, listen to the words of the witness. Like Jeremiah and Job, we could have cried and cursed the days dominated by injustice and violence.

We could have chosen vengeance. We did not. We could have chosen hate. We did not. Hatred is degrading and vengeance demeaning. They are diseases. Their history is dominated by death.

The Jewish witness speaks of his people’s suffering as a warning. He sounds the alarm so as to prevent these things being done. He knows that for the dead it is too late; for them, abandoned by God and betrayed by humanity, victory came much too late. But it is not too late for today’s children, ours and yours. It is for their sake alone that we bear witness.

Ultimately, we bear witness, as Wiesel contends, for the sake of our children and future children. We sincerely hope that our witness will help ensure that their lives are better and safer.

As effective as words often are to those bearing witness, there are other tools. In Walking on Water: Reflection on Faith and Art, American writer, Madleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time), writes:

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”

I think my siblings would agree that we grew up in a home where our father and mother witnessed daily through the way they chose to live their lives. Truly, they lived in such a way that their lives would not make sense if God did not exist. My mother is the human embodiment of Christ’s compassion and mercy. She’s an unfailing advocate for the least of these, the handicapped and poor, the grieving and suffering, the invisible and forgotten. For years, we watched her love our neighbors–both literal and universal neighbors. We witnessed her work as a community advocate for the handicapped and for those suffering from and surviving breast cancer. Year after year, she was God’s hands and feet on earth as she carried this witness into our community. Largely housebound now, her witness is nonethless powerful. She writes encouraging messages to literally hundreds of people. Facebook Messenger has become the primary means through which she witnesses, and what a powerful witness it is.

And as powerful as my father’s words are, his life, too, became the kind of witness that changed people’s lives. As an undergraduate and graduate student at Kearney State College, I lived for the precious moments I could spend alone with my dad in his office. During these visits, I didn’t have to share his attention with anyone, and through our conversations, I learned more about how to live a good life than I learned about how to improve the essays I was drafting. And perhaps more than anything, I learned the immeasurable worth of offering your undivided time to another, of making another feel as though he or she is just that important to you. I watched my dad give this gift of undivided time and attention to so many others: colleagues, family, friends, students–past and present. When he was dying and these people came to bear witness to his influence on their lives, I saw how the time my dad had spent with each of them had shaped the people they’d become.

English art critic and essayist John Berger writes of the photographer’s role as witness:

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Berger’s insights into the choices that good photographers make have broader applications, I think. We don’t bear witness to everything that happens, for if, as Berger argues, everything is worthy of witness, our witness would become meaningless. I’ve watched my daughter photograph individuals and groups, places and things, and I’ve seen the care she exercises in choosing what to shoot. Today, anyone with a smart phone can point and shoot. And the quality of these photographs is surprisingly good. Still, good photographers make careful choices about what to shoot and how to frame their shots, for they want these photographs to bear witness to a particular emotion or state, an atmosphere or attitude. They want their photos to be much more than technically good; they want them to be emotionally and spiritually good, to move audiences to think and feel as they look at their images. They want their photographs to bear witness to the noteworthy people, places, and events that they’ve chosen to record. And perhaps above all, they want their photographs to bear witness to what we abhor and what we cherish, to what we must destroy and what we must keep, to what we must change and what we must preserve. Their photographs can become a powerful historic witness in much the same way as words, spoken and written, can.

American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson understands that at the very heart of witnessing is the responsibility to speak the truth. He writes:

Speak the truth and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

In the sanctuary of a witness, the truth lives and moves through words and deeds. Many of us are blessed to live among those who witness with their very lives. And the least that we can do is to bear witness to their witness.

We’re built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

I confess to being a connoisseur of all things bittersweet, melancholy, and poignant. I take great joy as I weep during Hallmark commercials or tear up when my grandson takes my hand. Recently, I watched all 2 hours and 13 minutes–for the fifth time, but who’s counting–of the 1994 film, Legends of the Fall, just to cry at the scene where Tristan (Brad Pitt) kneels, sobbing, at the grave of his brother. After both brothers enlist during WWI, Tristan vows to watch over and protect his younger brother but ultimately fails. Tristan watches helplessly as his brother calls for him, wandering blindly in a mustard gas fog before he’s finally cut down by machine gun fire and takes his last breaths draped over a barbed wire fence in No Man’s Land. The bittersweet quotient in this scene is wonderfully, painfully off the charts.

In Susan Cain’s 2022 book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, she writes:

This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.

Some may argue that there’s nothing new about the pairing of light and dark, bitter and sweet. Still, as Bilal Qureshi maintains in his New York Post article, “In a relentlessly positive culture, a defense of melancholy” (April 8, 2022), we should seriously consider this celebration of the “melancholic” disposition in a culture fixated on relentless positivity. For better or worse, we’ve collectively become positivity junkies, plastering encouraging posters on our walls and subscribing to apps that provide daily doses of optimisim and encouragement. Our playlists are often filled with upbeat melodies to which we can dance with abandon in our kitchens and sing at the top of our lungs in our cars. Our classrooms promote positivity mantras which our children happily learn. But Cain understands that in a world increasingly designed for extroverts and positivity-pushers, there are introverts and melancholics as well. Her 2013 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, testifies to her desire that we also celebrate the quiet, contemplative, melancholy individuals around us.

While Cain discusses the bittersweet, she repeatedly refers to the paradox of tragedy. She explains that while we don’t actually seek out tragedy, we do like sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. This paradox is revealed, she claims, in our penchant for elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. Consider the appeal of a good, melancholy ballad. Or consider the juxtapostion of a tender baby’s hand nestled inside a gnarled elderly person’s hand. Here, the sweet and the bitter occupy a geography of beauty and sorrow. Here, as Cain writes, we cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending.

As a child, I loved to watch the television series, Lassie. My mother likes to remind me of how each week when the first notes of the theme song began to play, I would tear up in anticipation of what was to come. Even then, I loved how the bitter would befall Timmy or another character, and then how Lassie would return everyone to the sweet, guaranteeing a poignant resolution.

Last month when I spent three weeks in northeastern Pennsylvania on writing residency, I spent hours of each day rereading my dad’s books of poetry, going through his journals, leafing through file folders I’d found in his desk, and reviewing the small notebooks he carried as he walked the streets and alleys of Kearney, Nebraska. And each day, I felt as though I were dragging myself back through the days I’d spent with my dad before he died, as though I were reliving the beautiful agony of those last weeks. As I read, I cried and occasionally talked aloud to myself saying things like, “This is so good, Dad, so very, very good,” and “If I had just one more hour, maybe just a few more minutes, there are so many things I’d like to say and ask.” This is territory of the quintessential bittersweet. In the words of singer/songwriter John Mellencamp, it just hurts so good.

In describing our response to the bittersweet, Cain writes that [i]t’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. I like this so much. The world we live in is deeply flawed and stubbornly beautiful, and our days, as the Arab proverb proclaims, are those of honey and onion. Ultimately, Cain proposes that we embrace the bittersweet more, that maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. She already had me at embrace. I’ve been embracing the bittersweet for as long as I can remember, and I couldn’t stop now if I tried. For the cattails have burst, and the milkweed pods are spilling their floss. And there is such beauty in their dying.

Cattails
for my father

The cattails have burst
along Tewksbury Hollow Road,
entrails slipping from their soft bellies
like stuffing from a worn divan.
In early autumn, the breeze carries them away—
piece by piece, heart and soul.

Beside them, thick stands of goldenrod
thumb their noses, flaunting plumes
the color of egg yolk.

When I round the corner where a meadow stretches
expectantly towards the treed hills beyond,
I have the foolish urge to stuff their organs
back into the brown bodies
which have borne them for months.

Because aren’t the days still warm enough,
and haven’t the maples only just begun to turn?
Because shouldn’t bodies be brawnier,
matching spirit with good matter?

Tomorrow, I fear this whole stretch of road
may be a mortuary, the spent lives of cattails
lining the ditches, the shade of hardwoods 
casting their pall. 

Tomorrow as I walk,
I’ll think of you in your death bed;
I’ll remember finding you so still
as I put my hand upon yours
which was already fingering a finer air.

along Tewksbury Hollow Road, Auburn Township, Pennsylvania

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

I really like the fawns, he said, especially the fawns. I was walking down Pennsyvlania Route 6 to the intersection and was just about to turn onto Tewksbury Hollow Road when he pulled up beside me. He idled there in the center of the road, an older gentleman who leaned out from his open window into the morning air. His pickup had some serious battle scars, and its antenna hung unnaturally from the hood like a dislocated limb. It took me a few seconds, but then I realized that he must’ve been watching me watching the deer that had come out of the trees to graze in the clearing yesterday.

Did you get a good picture of them? he asked. And it was clear that he’d seen me photographing a doe and her fawns about 300 yards from the road. I did, I said. And though for a moment I wondered if I should be wary–after all, here was a strange man who’d been watching me and now sat idling in the center of the road–I began to tell him all about the deer in southeast Iowa, about the bucks I’d seen walking across my back yard last fall. And when he motioned up the big hill to the south and told me that he lived way up at the top in the house with all the stacks of cut wood, I found myself wondering what it would be like to ride up with him and to look out over the hollow from such a magnificent vantage point.

These are the perks of a good walk. You see things. You meet people you probably wouldn’t otherwise meet. You hear your feet on the road and fall into a rhythm as familiar as your own heart beat. I suspect that if there was a charge for all these perks, we probably couldn’t afford them. They’re that precious.

During the three weeks I spent in northeastern Pennsylvania, I walked daily along Tewksbury Hollow Road. Each morning, I set out from my lodgings, but, as John Muir writes, I was really going in. Into a world where fields of goldenrod flanked the road; where a great blue heron stalked the perimeter of a pond covered in algae; where the rain brought spotted red newts onto the road and sent the stream–previously just a trickle–crashing over the rocks like a full-fledged river; where the hardwoods arched over the road in a canopy so dense that I walked for yards in near darkness; where the cattails had burst, and the milkweed pods had just begun to spill their milky floss; where deer dotted the tree line, and somewhere, deep within the forest, black bears slept. Each day, I was walking into another world, and I marveled at the new things I encountered there.

In his essay, “Walking,” American author Henry David Thoreau writes: I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. I confess that there were days I walked down Route 6 and onto Tewksbury Hollow Road bodily but not necessarily spiritually. My body struggled with the humidity and with one wicked hill that literally took my breath away and often caused me to stop, mid-hill, to regulate my heart which was hammering against my chest. During these moments, it was challenging to be there in spirit. Still, there were more times when my spirit grabbed me by the hand and pulled me down the road. Even now, weeks after I’ve returned home, I walk the road in my mind. As I mind-walk, I see each bend, each sunny field, each tree stand, and cabin.

Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking, examines the many benefits of walking. She writes:

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett’s] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

Oh, to be taken out of the social sphere and ushered into the larger, lonelier world where you are free to think! This is it, exactly. A good walk opens up real space to flex your mental muscles. It pays no heed to your reputation or attire. You can be unabashedly yourself. You can make unfiltered exclamations when something catches your fancy. Will you look at that! I often say to no one in particular. There’s no etiquette about this sort of thing on a good walk. And truth be told, most drivers or passersby who might be alarmed if they saw you talking to yourself are probably texting or scrolling through social media, so they won’t register an occasional Oh, wow!

You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. J.R.R. Tolkien is keenly aware that a good walk has the power to sweep you off to places you’ve only imagined. Or perhaps to places you’ve never imagined. I’ve been so wholly swept away that I lost complete track of where I was and how I got there. For minutes or hours, I’ve walked into great tales in which, as heroine, I met every challenge and vanquished every evil handily. I’ve been swept into other ages and other places, and all this sweeping became, in the words of poet Robert Frost, a momentary stay against confusion. I gratefully let myself be swept into all sorts of worlds, and as I walked on, the miles kept the pain and terror of this world at bay.

On my very last walk down Tewksbury Hollow Road, I met a man I’d seen walking a few days before. We met in a sunny spot of the road where the morning sun burst through an opening in the upper story of the poplar and oak trees hemming the road. For 15 minutes, we stood and talked about all sorts of things. As if we’d been friends for years. As if we’d expected to find each other at this very time on this very road. As if the bounty of the day depended upon our meeting. A great walk can really deliver the goods.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.
― George Eliot

On my 16-hour drive to northeastern Pennsylvania to attend a writing residency, I listened to half (yes, there are actually 32-hour Audible books!) of George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch, a novel I’d read in graduate school when I was thrashing through one Victorian novel per week. At its heart is Dorothea Brooke, a woman who desires a life of more significance, a life in which her appetite for beautiful and good things would be sated. Early in the 880-page novel, Dorothea marries an older scholar, Edward Casaubon. Initially, she sees her marriage as the fulfillment of all she’s longed for, for she hopes to learn from her wise husband, to serve as his secretary, and thus, to contribute something intellectually meaningful to the world. In a short time, however, she discovers that she’s yoked herself to a man whose life’s work ultimately puddles into pathos. He suffers from fragile health, spends their honeymoon cloistered in a series of Roman archives, and, worst of all, shares little time, thought, or love with his new wife. It is not, sadly, a marriage made in heaven.

And yet, in her article, “Middlemarch and Me, What George Eliot teaches us” (Feb. 6, 2011, The New Yorker), Rebecca Mead explains how Dorothea defends her husband as she insists that [f]ailure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure. Mead argues that Dorothea promotes an idea central to much of Eliot’s work: that individuals must make their best efforts toward a worthy end, but it is the effort toward a goal, rather than the achievement of it, that makes us who we are.

Author Virginia Woolf believed Middlemarch to be one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, and Mead elaborates on this, claiming that it’s also a book about how to be a grownup person—about how to bear one’s share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness. In youth, we tend to point our longing towards the future, believing–or at least hoping–that when we grow up, what we longed for will be realized. And though the act of longing isn’t the exclusive territory of grownups, it’s often felt most deeply as we age, as we realize how little time and how few opportunities to satisfy our longings remain.

But lest I lapse into maudelin musing, I have to say that hope and joy can live companionably with longing. In her novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson writes:

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, our very craving gives it back to us again.

I like the notion that our longing, our very craving for something might give it back to us again–or simply give it to us. In my father’s poem to mother, “On Your Birthday, Remember,” he writes that:

For some a remembered hand
can be almost as real as any
made of flesh and blood.
Just so your hand in mine,

brought back by love. 

Herein lies the sweet meat of longing: that your hand in mine might be brought back by love, that, as Robinson contends, to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. Miles away from my grandchildren, I long to sit with them on the screen porch. Today as I sit in my small room listening to the rain, this longing for their presence all but makes it so. 

In his 1941 sermon, "The Weight of Glory," theologian and writer, C. S. Lewis writes:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Lewis writes of what we truly desire, the country we have never yet visited, a life and place beyond the temporal. And I take heart in his claims that the beautiful, good things we've discovered in books, art, and the natural world are but good images of our real desires; that it's the longing for these things that spiritually blesses us, reminding us that we're made for much more than this life and this world. 

For those of us, like Dorothea, who long to contribute something of significance and real value to the world, we might take heart in George Eliot's parting words from Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

We may have lived largely hidden lives, may have yearned for so much more, but the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon us and our small contributions, upon the silvery threads of our longing which pull us along and point us toward home. 


Fawn, at Six Feet

A rosebud of ache
bruises the dawn as you call 
to your mother.

Six feet from me, alone,
you stand your ground,
a silver tremor running along
your back.

Neither of us moves.
Our shallow breathing worries the air
between us, and the distance
can’t find its voice. 

The pansies at our feet have fallen
over the edge of the terrace,
and their violet heads drowse
on the grass below. 

But we don’t see them.
We have eyes only for each other. 

Will you close the gap,
gentling your busy tail,
quieting the injured bird who lives
in your throat?

I imagine it so. 
For then I’d take you in my arms
as the maple of your longing
runs clear and sweet into the day.
I’d breathe my finest words into your ear:
all will be well.

And when your mother stands—
expectant—in the clearing beyond the gate,

I’d set you right again 
and point your lovely ache toward home. 

The Coal Palace, Ottumwa, IA, 1890

If I should attempt to interpret the lesson of this structure, I should say that it was an illustration of how much that is artistic and graceful is to be found in the common things of life and if I should make an application of the lesson it would be to suggest that we might profitably carry into all our homes and into all neighborly intercourse the same transforming spirit. –President Benjamin Harrison, Oct. 9, 1890

Although President Harrison was undoubtedly the most famous visitor to the Coal Palace in Ottumwa, Iowa, he was one of thousands who visited the medieval coal-clad castle, the brainchild of three prominent locals: Colonel Peter G. Ballingall, Calvin Manning, and Henry Phillips. When I first moved to Ottumwa decades ago, I recall seeing a photo of the Coal Palace. I was smitten, absolutely gobsmacked. A 230-foot long structure with turrets and a central tower rising 200 feet, all veneered with local coal, this was the stuff dreams are made of. At least for me, for whom both architecture and fantasy have been lifelong passions.

When I was in Italy, I stood before the Duomo in Florence, sorely amazed. But then, I felt the same fascination with all of the other cathedrals and castles I saw as we traveled throughout Europe. I kept asking myself–sometimes silently and often aloud–how could they have made these exquisite structures? Looking at an old sepia photograph of the Coal Palace, I wondered the same thing. How in the world did they build it?

Charles P. Brown, the architect who’d designed the first Corn Palace in Sioux City, was hired to design the Coal Palace. In the last decades of the 1800s, palaces sprung up from the prairie all over the midwest. Made of all sorts of natural materials like hay, bluegrass, alfalfa, flax, sugar beets, and corn, these palaces were built to advertise the bounty of the prairie and to attract visitors to the middle of the country, a region largely ignored by tourists. There were at least 35 of these palaces built in 24 cities. It goes without saying that these palaces were generally fire hazards and vulnerable to weather and time. They were also expensive, and some of their investors failed to break even. After erecting its fifth corn palace, Sioux City called it quits. Mitchell, South Dakota, however, carried the tradition forward and committed to making their corn palace a permanent feature in their town. Long after the other midwestern palaces had been razed and interest in them gone, the Mitchell Corn Palace remains.

But the magnificent Coal Palace, built on a site that I drive by frequently! If only, it, too, had become a permanent feature, a legacy to the local coal industry of the time and testament to the vision of an Iowa architect and local investors. If only I could take my grandchildren there and lose ourselves for an afternoon in the medieval wonder right in our backyard. If only the ebony turrets still rose up from the Des Moines River banks. Palaces transport us from our ordinary lives and dwellings to places only our imaginations can take us. They draw us in; they make us wonder.

The facade of the Coal Palace was constructed of a variety of coal, including bituminous coal (nut and pea) and vitric coal, from ten surrounding counties. The structure was, indeed, impressive. In 1890, The Ottumwa Courier reported on the the artistry of the palace:

Aloft in the main tower, a ‘hanging garden of Babylon,’ with richest contribution of the tropics, with a frieze of classic figures in relief round the entire building, carefully and artistically chiseled out of bituminous blocks which make ‘light, heat, and power.’ With flagstaffs on the various turrets proudly waving the pennant of the various countries which the palace is to represent, and with the undisputable evidence of Uncle Samuel’s higher authority even over the rich feudal baron, King Coal, from the Stars and Stripes waving from the staff of the main tower—a new flag with 44 stars in the field of azure.

As night fell, the arc lamps in the palace towers and colored electric lights illuminated the Coal Palace, making the scene more splendid than any illuminated castle of the rich barons of the middle ages, according to the Ottumwa Courier.

If the facade was impressive, however, the interior would’ve taken your breath away. The central tower held an observation gallery and dance floor, which could be reached by stairs or by elevator. In the central hall, one could find a large auditorium with an estimated seating capacity of 8,000. Behind the stage–this is the part that really gets me–was a waterfall which fell 40 feet into a little lake below. Lit by 700 lights which threw rainbow colors into the falls, it was surrounded by miniature boulders and live fir trees. A suspension bridge spanned the little lake which required 1,600,000 gallons of water daily. And beneath the main floor, visitors could actually be lowered into a miniature working coal mine where they could observe the coal-mining process as real miners worked.

Sadly, the Ottumwa Coal Palace–like most of the midwestern palaces–was short-lived. Opened in 1890, it was closed and razed in 1892 when interest in and enthusiasm for the palace died. Still, it stood for two glorious years, and its opening was celebrated in The New York Times. Above all, perhaps, it’s a reminder of–in President Benjamin Harrison’s words–how much that is artistic and graceful is to be found in the common things of life. I spent some of my happiest childhood hours imagining palaces all over the Rock Garden of Harmon Park. They lived among the rocks and trees, the wildflowers and moss-covered ponds. In that season of palaces imagined among such common elements, I discovered other worlds and found much delight.

For me, there’s something particularly poignant about late summer. The world becomes a bit crispy, the grass reduced to brown bristles that crunch beneath your feet, and the spiny heads of spent coneflowers giving up their last breaths. Nights are cooler, the sun goes down earlier, and the lushness of summer lingers only in the memory. Every year at this time, I feel the regret that comes with the end of summer. I know it will return, and I appreciate the change of seasons. Still, I grieve when I put away my shorts and flip flops and break out the jeans and jackets.

But in spite of the brown that’s begun to consume what greeen is left, late summer has a heroic quality to it, a refusal to go gentle into that good night. As I age, I see evidence of this refusal all around me. And it’s remarkable.

Late Summer Chicory

The sunny trefoil has given way to dust,
and a slim stand of Queen Anne’s lace 
wilts near the tree line.

But wild chicory throws down a gauntlet to drought,
straddling cracks which snake along the scorched earth.
Their blue-violet mouths open to the day’s heat
and drink deeply.
They say, bring your worst:

    your chronic sun;
    your winds which flay the topsoil 
    from the fields;
    your searing days and smoldering nights.

They wipe their brows, stand sentinel
in a land which browns with certainty.

Is it any wonder that I love them?

That of all the blossoms in the world,
I choose these periwinkle flowers
which I would string and wear like fine pearls;	

that as I drive to town,
I let my hand float on the air,
blessing miles of blooms which line the road;

that a fragile, fickle world
quails before such blossoms
with backbone.

Today, when I look in the mirror 
where death lies fallow but eager,
my eyes are zealots who cry,
bring your worst.

Pool side is my best side. –Unknown

Our backyard pool–by any stretch of the imagination–is humble. It’s a 15 ft. above ground pool from Walmart that we’ve had for three years. We bought it during the pandemic when pools were nearly impossible to find, so we felt we’d struck gold when we located one (there was literally only ONE) in Des Moines. We counted our lucky stars as we drove home with our new pool in the back of the truck. Since we bought the pool, we’ve added a pool deck, a cement base and stone surround, and dug it into the hillside so that when you’re floating in it, it’s almost like an infinity pool. Beyond the pool edge is a span of timber–green as far as the eye can see.

I’ve come to love the pool as much or more than my grandson, Griffin. We’re faithful pool users, logging more hours in the water than I can count. Sometimes, we swim twice or three times a day because we can. There is no trip to town involved, no tickets to buy, and no line at the concession stand. Here, the snacks are plentiful and free, just inside Grandma’s house. So, what’s not to love?

Each year, Griff and I wait in anticipation for the pool to go up. And each year, he gets in as the pool is being filled with water from the hose so cold it’s numbing. But he insists that it’s not so bad, that it’s worth blue lips. This past summer, he and I have spent almost every afternoon in the pool, and during those hours, I’ve come to know and love him even more (if that’s possible).

We shared afternoons of bull riding during which he flails around on a pool noodle-become-bull, as I count down the 8 seconds, and make the buzzer noise. I’m also in charge of providing the play action for each ride. We’ve shared afternoons of sea exploration during which he dons his scuba mask and scours the pool/ocean bottom for a variety of creatures that he retrieves and deposits on my floatie. Again, I’m responsible for identifying and counting the creatures he captures. We’ve spent afternoons during which my floatie is a race car, and he’s the mechanic who gasses and tunes me up, and then speeds me across the diameter of the pool. We’ve spent afternoons during which he performs an array of tricks, from handstands to sommersaults, on which I score him. I admit that I’m a generous scorer; he always earns at least a 9.

One afternoon, however, he flipped off the back of his floatie into the pool and emerged saying, Well, I’ve been to heaven and just saw my Great Grandma Lois. Really, I said, that’s pretty amazing. Yeah, he said, well, I going to make another trip. He flipped into the water and lay submerged on the bottom for awhile. When he surfaced, he announced, I’ve just seen your Dad. He’s working at a pharmacy. He’s working at a pharmacy? I wanted clarification to be sure that I actually heard this. Yes, but he’s still writing poetry, he said. While he works at the pharmacy? I asked. And after he gets off work, he added. There was something in his eyes as he recounted his visits to heaven, something soft which suggested that he understood how important and comforting it was that he report back on my dad. Although the entire conversation was imaginary–and comical, to be sure–it also testified to his belief in a heavenly home after death. At nine, he’d clearly thought about this and wanted to reassure me that my dad was doing well selling Pepto Bismol and Tylenol at some pharmacy beyond the pearly gates–and writing poetry, of course, in the break room.

When I recently told Griffin that he had 10 swimming days left until school started, he said, Wait, what? 10 days, are you sure? His dismay only matched mine. We have just a few last days in the pool together until another school year begins, and we take down the pool for the season. I’m painfully aware that I have precious time left when he’ll want to hang out with his grandma in a pool that’s only 3 ft. deep. And I’m aware that he won’t always want to tell me the kinds of things I’ve learned this summer, that as he enters his teenage years, I’ll often be met with stony silence and the obligatory yes/no answers.

But I will take every minute, every pool-filled afternoon, every confidence he offers. For in the sanctuary of our pool, we’ve lived a thousands lives and have seen the world in our 4,646 gallons of chlorinated water. We’ve ventured into the areas of philosophy and theology, as well as learned a thing or two about the best way to do a back sommersault. Best of all? We’ve lived it together. Our pool has, indeed, been a sanctuary. There are approximately 270 days until that wondrous day next May when the pool goes up, and the floaties come out. It goes without saying that Griffin and I will be faithfully counting them down.

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

Disclaimer: In school, most of us had to memorize the difference between a metaphor and simile, and we’re painfully aware of the differences. For the purposes of this post, however, I’m using metaphor generously to include all comparisons–even those that use like or as (Please forgive me, Miss Gilpin!)

Consider metaphor’s elixir in matters of the heart. I recall a story my dad once told me about a high school basketball player he coached and taught. He noticed that this young man was habitually hanging out at the locker of a particularly pretty coed. When he asked him about his prospects with this young woman, the young man shook his head dejectedly and admitted that he’d repeatedly struck out in his requests for a date. My dad said, I’m going to suggest something–now hear me out. Open the literature anthology we use in class (the book, my dad admitted, he’d never seen the student open), choose a poem you like, copy it, and give it to her. The student didn’t say aloud, Are you crazy? but his face said it all. Still, the next day during English class, my dad saw the student crack open the book, thumb through the pages, rip out a piece of notebook paper, and urgently copy from the page. Then he folded the paper into the smallest square possible, and sent the note on its way through eager hands all the way to the front row where the young woman sat. Seconds ticked by as she unfolded the note and read its contents. Then she whipped around in her seat so violently that she almost threw herself out onto the floor. She looked back to the young man with utter adoration. A date was surely in the works, my dad thought. Later, he asked the student what he’d copied from the text. Something about her being like a summer’s day, he said. Something like that. He’d copied Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18 which begins: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate. He chose a good one, my dad told me, a very good one. And he confessed that he signed the poem with his own name. Lucky for him, the young woman didn’t know her Shakespeare! Ah, the power of metaphor to bring two star-crossed lovers (or at least two ill-read high school students) together!

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. This metaphor comes to us compliments of John Updike in his novel, Rabbit, Run. And what a metaphor it is! Their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. Wait–what? A leaping starfish? Realists may scoff and question the whole comparison, arguing that anyone knows starfish can’t leap. But poet Jane Hirshfield argues that [m]etaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind. Leaping starfish may not sit right in our logical minds, but they live gloriously in our imaginations. And often in our memories. Thanks to John Updike whose metaphor I’ve come to love, I can’t look at a pair of locked hands without seeing them as starfish leaping through the dark.

One who truly understands the power and worth of metaphor, Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa writes:

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.

Take for instance, biblical metaphors, which bring the spiritual world of the divine into the physical world of the ordinary:

We are the clay, and You our potter; And all of us are the work of Your hand. —Isaiah 64:8

I am the good shepherd, … and I lay down my life for the sheep. —John 10:14-15

I am the vine; you are the branches. —John 15:5

These metaphors live vividly, indeed, and take on their own personalities: God as potter, shepherd, and vine, and humans as clay, sheep, and branches. Or consider the infamous words of Elvis Presley: You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog / Cryin’ all the time. Or the timeless lyrics of Rascall Flatts: Life is a highway / I wanna ride it all night long. Singer-songwriters depend upon metaphors to live vividly and take on their own personalities, to console and enlighten us.

We use metaphor confidently in common speech. When we say that he’s a late bloomer or she’s a real thorn in my side, we do so with complete confidence that those listening will understand. When I tutored non-native English speakers, I became painfully aware of just how often we use such metaphors. The teacher is a bear? one Japanese student said with horror in his eyes. No, I reassured him, not literally a bear. Then I set out to deconstruct the metaphor for him, in hopes that he’d go to class the next day without fear of being mauled or eaten.

And what about bad metaphors, the kind that are so bad that they’re good? Here’s some of my favorites from actual student (not mine!) papers:

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling-Free.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. (Wait–isn’t this one of those overly complicated math story problems?)

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

How I love a good, bad metaphor? They’re much like bad jokes. You wait for the punch line, and when it comes, it’s delightfully awful. As one of my former students so convincingly argued: You have to at least give me credit for effort. Clearly, there’s effort behind these bad metaphors, for it obviously took some thought to settle on a comparison of a warm laugh to a vomiting dog.

In Alvin Journeyman, Orson Scott Card writes: Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. I learned this lesson early and well from my father who claimed that [n]othing enriches our wooden lives like metaphor. And he could pack a whole lot of truth in very little space, presenting an exquisitely lean metaphor to carry some downright heavy wisdom:

Don’t think that a small vessel like a poem can’t be a freighter.

Gossip is a form of skinning.

Revelations are like stones dropped into the palm of a blind man.

A breeze is the tenderest habit skin can wear.

Speed reading is like trying to kiss a girl who’s driving by in a convertible. All you get is a hint of her pucker.

In bureaucracies sour cream rises to the top, followed by foam.

Marriage, like the sun, should be the longest form of love.

Those who feast upon memories occasionally eat the best left-overs.

Both Robert Frost and my father were right about metaphor. We must be educated in it if we are to live beyond our wooden lives.

for Quinn and Lindsay

. . . believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

To say that I was smitten is the grandaddy of all understatements. I was wholly, unabashedly, wildly smitten. As they placed my new son in my arms and our eyes locked, I held the tangible love I’d only imagined in the weeks before our adoption. It goes without saying that I was smitten with all of my babies, but with Quinn, there was an urgency tinged with desperation that wormed itself through me. He would be the last baby I would ever have, the last late night feedings I’d ever give, the last baby baths and stroller rides, the last chest-to-chest rocking sessions.

I was no stranger to the changes that occur when babies become toddlers become children, for my three daughters had prepared me well for these transformations. As inevitable as these changes were, I admit that I wasn’t always crazy about them. Initially, that is. But then, like most parents, I learned the marvels of the next stage–and then the next. I learned that there was nothing wrong with briefly mourning the stage that was ending, but that I’d better buckle up quickly for the next stage. It was coming whether I liked it or not.

I was blessed to be able to work part-time until Quinn went to school. He went with me everywhere and unwittingly became an ambassador for adoption, as strangers stopped me to ask such questions as: Are you babysitting? Are you a foster parent? What does his father look like? Quinn let them touch his hair and make googly eyes at him, while I answered their questions. People were generally kind–just curious. So, from the time Quinn was a baby, he was becoming a people person, an individual who rarely met a person he couldn’t talk to and didn’t like.

When I was shopping one day, a clerk walked all the way across the store to ask me where my little buddy was. School, I said, he started kindergarten this year. She nodded knowingly but not before a look passed across her face, a look that reflected exactly what I was feeling: if only I could turn back time. Sometimes I can hear echoes of Power Rangers’ battles being played out from the backseat of my car, and I can still remember the feel of his hand in mine as we crossed the street.

Through each season of change, I learned more about myself as I learned more about him. I learned that when he carried the ball during football games, I would run–figuratively and sometimes literally–along with him. Once during a middle school game during which the spectators were standing on the sidelines, I broke free and would’ve crossed into the end zone with him, but blessedly I came to my senses. (Can you imaginethe headlines? Quinn Vesely and his Mom Score Final TD!) With every yard we (and I say “we” intentionally) pounded out, I learned that there was simply no way that I could be a passive bystander in my son’s life. For better or worse, I felt every victory and every loss–athletic and otherwise–almost as keenly as he did. I still do.

This week, Quinn will marry Lindsay, a wonderful partner who makes him very happy. And this change, of course, makes us very happy. Still, even though he hasn’t lived at home for years, there’s something particularly bittersweet about the fact that he never will again. But I take solace in poet Ranier Maria Rilke’s claim that there is a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, a love so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. My children have given me an inheritance of great love, and it travels from Montana to Iowa to Pennsylvania surely and miraculously, traversing miles and months in a blink of an eye.

Change is in the air this week as we prepare to celebrate Quinn’s marriage to Lindsay. When two become one, the change is sacred and oh so wonderful.

Congratulations and all my love Quinn and Lindsay