Prairie Notes

"Splitting 18" long rounds from a beetle-kill
pine tree we felled
so it wouldn't smash a shed..."
– Snyder, from "Gnarly"










What is now recognized as the world’s oldest prairie restoration was historically an oak savanna. Shortly after the area was settled in the 1830s, the central and western units were put in to cultivation and remained in that state until 1920. Parts of the eastern unit were occasionally cut for hay but were never plowed.

"one thing to see prairie from road"–
lead plants mix up with the tussock sedge,
wild witch burr oak limbs
could hold lanterns down the ground
so low the fingers fall–
"another to have your knee in it"

I ask have you ever seen an owl
in here? Picture the screech or the barny
naturally still poking up out 
that old hollow of a fence line oak.
"all my years here, never a one,
but heard them, plenty of mice."

Toss in the bucket big set of loppers
and pull out the pruners,
click the teeth to test 
and start skimming across the dogwood
and into a patch of multiflora rose,
thorns, the razor thin types, line the branches
and as they tumble
you gotta watch them from
falling on your head,
as the field at B1 opens back up
we scuff out leaves
find dirt again
toss a few seeds weighted by bark chips

"never once saw
a single one of these seeds
I kid you not"

someone pulled out the Triclopyr 4
and learned to use it

"But the prairie, despite the early coming of spring, was still mainly clothed in the brown and severe dress of winter. The prairie is late sleeping and late-blooming."
–Paul Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year










April 27

I have learned that there is the prairie from the outside and the prairie from the inside; one is a vantage point that that we can see from the road or along the trails that are often provided us through some of the remaining remnants or those that we have chosen, fortunately, to restore; the other view is something far more intimate, through its very raw center, where the stalks and thistle, the grit and pollen – on a bad day the biting chiggers – lost their status of display and become something more like work mates, close in proximity, each plant or sedge showing you their distinctive character. I learned this last year in a monarch monitoring class at the Arboretum where we were eventually allowed to plot monitoring lines directly through north end of Curtis prairie. As we walked and kept our eyes on high alert for the activity of both milkweed and butterflies, I realized it felt a little like parting a sea of diversity, sometimes actually keeping my hands up above the belt line pushing away goldenrod and Big bluestem. Stop and stand here for a moment and it feels like history finally reveals itself, or at least the natural history of the prairie zone of habitat that had stretched all through this corridor of the midwest: minnesota, wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa. We see from the center of the prairie with eyes that would have far more in common with previous generations eyes than our own, which, I believe, are for more often beset with a kind of longing for what they know should stand where the vacant lot now exists. We know this because, as 'get inside' the prarie, and as the sounds of the highway hopefully fade, and we are surrounded by a kind of growth that comes from deep remnant wells of soil and nutrients, and that shoot up a colorful display of useful plants (we hope, for pollinators!) our eye and mind and spirit, I believe, know it...we understand the diversity of the growth and display. It is not a shocking spectacle, but more likely something we sense we deserve! Today we have replaced the wildly vast features of the organic prairie with digital screens, and have certainly tried our hardest to diversify those colors, turned them useful, touchable, shiny, and responsive. The old prairie in technicolor. And yet there is no comparison. For underneath our prairie path is the entirety of earth geology, glaciation or not, the gradual accumulation of inches upon inches of dense and beautiful topsoil, the evolution, naturally occurring, of plant pairs or full communities. It is out of our hands, it is alive, and it is mystery in the fullest, deep, rich, wild, pulsing with growth, and creativity. I always bring this up because of the numbers that we confront: we have relatively few acres of real prairie left as as, of course, the screens artificially increase; and yet it would be the prairie itself, in full singing bloom, bouncing with bees, flitting monarchs, twisting in all shapes and colors and capturing a slight breeze that tussles and itches a sort of inborn understanding of such a chorus that would, could and should stack up to the power of the iPhone. I don't think there is any need to toy around with the claim that it is the technologists of the earth that has up to this day won out. How do naturalists take back a few minds? There is one way – gently assist as many people as possible into a bike seat, or car seat where necessary, and drive them to a blooming prairie, and ask that they walk around its edges for a moment, just a moment really, that is all it will take, and then, when the time is right, have them take fifteen steps carefully inside the a small stand of dogwood, sumac, goldenrod, lazy susan's and milkweed. When they stir up their first monarch and as it flits lazily up and around their head, and they see that majestic stained glass wing tandem, hope that it might land on their shoulder to which they can claim a new friend. When they are home later that night, just a generations prior have ousted the edges of prairie to turn them to parking lots, the iPhone this time might get imaginatively inched off the table into some dark drawer, cast out of favor for a few days.

No More Rain

"but the trees have risen one more time
and the night wind makes them sound"
  –WS Merwin, from "Rain at Night"










By the time the call
comes we are no longer wet
but that the final snow
has sprout the purple daffodils
the earth sodden
the warblers hang by open branches
like brown berries
and see now that it is a battlefield
of cornstalks along river
footpath
and we have called for no more rain
no more shrouds
of mist that hover over the bluffs
in plumage of blown sheets

barbed wire fences
sag in the marshland ponds
wounded and limp
where underneath the bull
frogs proudly dive deep
under its posts
and chant for the streams
to overflow

No more rain to flow no more rain
says in the letters that cross
over the eyes of the artists
who pass by and see the coming
dappling of the jack in the pulpit
the meadow marigolds
the reflectors that spangle
across the grackles
wings

and when the crickets
will sing from on top of the flood
the coming every night
again

and we meet at the confluence
of song and time and the sun
that blinding eye is never too late

And Then the End of April

"I could see the ocean. Far out it was shaking with light, and boats with their white sails full of the invisible wind moved back and forth. All along the shore the water rolled and rolled its bales of silver." Mary Oliver, from "Roses"







By the end of April what have we not given up? The hand of the eye finally lost touch with the dead year and it glacially glides away off into the river, imperceptibly as years. We drive by an old familiar park. It is a photo album of memories, a descending hill here, brown by leaves, scraggled and dashed by black limbs, and little drumlins, where, up on that ridge or that, we learned to ride three-wheeled scooters with funny helmets on our heads. Old shelter there unused as always but it still breaths like aged lungs. Once in awhile an old man here comes with his wrist tied to a leash and sits out on a picnic bench to wipe along the wood of the sun. He has been coming here for forty years, used to be with his wife, and those same grandaddy oaks reached down to monkey bars and click their fingers nails in the wind across the metal – yes, he could still hear that and the sound, in his album, stayed there on that page for decades. We stand a ways from each other and send each other a blue frisbee. Crickets come to trust our presence and the earth comes alive from under the beige blanket of spring. You run with legs as long as some of the limbs stabbed there in the ground. A few tennis balls bounce like lemon drops over the fence below our ridge. Traffic never stops. The great river in the distance settles down and sits in swirling coves wondering what might be coming from behind and ahead.

Hike-a-day Plus Vitamins

"Some People worship nature. Others consider such worship blasphemous. Most of us are less direct; just beyond the veil of rain, we feel a presence for which we have no name. Or no presence at all, except beauty and terror. Whatever form wonder takes, nature gives us, at the very least, kinship." – Richard Louv, "Vitamin N for the Soul"

4/22

Poor spring weather can always become a hindrance to heading outside for no good reason other than just getting outside. When it is nice outside, and the long lines of good weather walkers begin march along the sidewalks and the bridge out here across the street, we know that it is far more pleasant and easy to slip on a pair of shoes, destination be damned, and just walk around the block. The vitamin D feels at these moments as though it is veritably seeping through our pores; sometimes you see the early spring scenes of folks doing nothing but sitting on the stoops of their front porches with eyes closed absorbing something that has been mostly unavailable for many months. Like plants and flowers, I suspect, the human organism really a creature of either organic growth or hibernation. Do we know of any extra vitamins that we absorb as we sit inside our living rooms throughout the winter months? It doesn't seem so. The trick is to figure out how to yank oneself outside despite the weather. After days of dark quiet in April, it can sometimes be very shocking to the senses to head out on that same exact walk during hours of the day that are raining, cold, sunless. In contrast to the silence, even the raindrops hold out some new sounding chord; the wintering bird, or the just barely arriving, do still make their shrill sounds from somewhere off in the distance; as you walk along the river, here anyway, the flap of a canvasback along the top of the water is almost always present. Walk along the paths of the conservatory marshlands and look left or right to the naturally occurring drumlin ponds and you will see others quietly streak across the surface; a pair of cold cold geese dip their beaks into ice water. A hike a day is, whether we want to think it or not, like taking vitamins. The fact that we 

don't do it is just an indication that every person already knows: it doesn't truly matter what is good for us, or what we even know, through raw experience, we need – we only on rarer occasions will do it anyway. If we heed that instinctual awareness and yank ourselves out of the house out into a 30 degree day that has no prospects for sun, we return and say to ourselves, 'that was worth it.' But do we do it again, again? If we take a vitamin D supplement once because we know we are lucking sunshine in our day, will that absorb and assist in our bloodstream? Of course not. Give it a month, then we will be able to tell that we are on a regimen. Same with hikes. The only thing that we can think of that would be consistently good for us, the hike, we might think, should be regimented in the same way as a vitamin. Two days ago, driving back from a workout facility, I felt the itch for a vitamin N (nature) and temporarily wrestled in my mind whether I wanted to drive the extra ten miles to Governor Nelson State Park, a very nice local lake park that is also a great example of native oak savannah. At the last moment, I took the necessary right turn and drove to the park, parked in a parking lot that empty except for one other car, then took the mowed path around the rolling prairie hills of the oak savannah that was lit like a beige bonfire by spring sunshine. The burr oaks were leafless and charcoal black, lining the path, ancient, but seemingly guardians, holding underneath their deep trunks often a bluebird house, some with young eyes peeking out of the front holes. There was a slight breeze and it rustled through all the desiccated marsh grass. Because there was no one else on the path, and because traffic relatively low along that stretch of the highway that parallels the 

Park, it took virtually no work whatsoever to imagine this oak savannah from another epoch of Wisconsin history, when this would have been a predominant scene pre-pioneer. The same psychic muscles that we use when we read our history - the ones that are able to match up facts and imagination – are used when we consider natural history. The trees are not just current marks on the landscape but, almost eerily, of course, much older than us, the dominant living features, and make our own brief journey not just along this particular path, but along our own paths in life, seem awfully transitory. That brief reckoning with self and our truest elders, the savannah itself, is, let's face it, impossible to reveal from the couch. The couch and our gadgets are in many ways sycophants of ourselves, always teaming up to show us our temporality and the supposed import of our modern hours as they relate to....the very technology we have in our hand! It is the self-referential loop, and it constructs very little except for an insulated notion that this is enough, this is plenty, and that we should be able to move through the rest of our days safely with phone in hand. The oak and the grass, the marsh and dead leaves, are us, and we see ourselves inside it whether we allow for the full thought or not. The vitamin here is something then that does tinker with the soul; for the soul is all of the humanity coiled up into a bundle. The past, the history, the senses, the experience, the future, the love of fear, the hope and the reckoning, all is soul. Vitamin N can sound something like a ploy or something out in left field, but that is only the surface and immediate thought of someone who is not allowing themselves time to take a brief look into their very own experiences. It's a kind of knee jerk self rejection not to accept that there is such a thing as vitamin N. As I walked back to my car, a little soulful urge had quickly come on me; just as two hours ago there was a little urge to keep my car on the path back home, to engage back into my routine, I now wondered what it would be like if I never had to go back home, but could walk back up into the contours of the bright prairie and figure out how to be human again.

Song of the Geese

"Without daydreams
About red dust, in the pale sun
I'm peacefully at ease, or among moss
And flowers with a staff and clogs,
Or in the wooded shadow
Near an incense lamp."

Huai Ku, from "Living at a Monastery, Send to Chien Chang'






Last snow
of the season collects along the bent grass
of city marsh
not a person in sight but footprints
show their absence.

With the sun an open box
of shining diamonds in all directions
there's no need
for daydreams of coming seasons,
my two feet placed
firmly sunk in the cold mud,
the air vibrates
two geese honking past.

Tonight
I will walk to the front doorway
of the house
and look out across the street
to the velvety shadows
of the Yahara river
where tomorrow flows.

"Belly full of grain, sail down this way,
Saintly grey bell of pigeon." – Francis Ponge, from "The Pigeon"









Spring Goose



And there are a hundred ways to interpret the late spring goose,
as it rides its little airways along to a landing
on a pond that is skirted by last night's blizzard snow
seven to ten inches deep
it is the palpable small airplane
but today all is melting
little beards of white along every tree and the tufts of marsh reeds
matted down
like beige blankets, holding the patterns of last night's city deer
the geese are straight lines
drawings on a board
sincere
so succinct really in the way that they hold their distance
from one another
just the two of them and know each other but speak in long cries
when you watch another along the bay
it has been dipping its beak
and this one has caught a long reed across its back
and when it rises back up out of the cool water it is empty
I hear two others from the other side of the pond
the oaks that surround have been dead for ages
long limbs that reach out
and like the last clutch of the palm might have asked
that only one for its sake one more time
the goose scoots across the fragile glass like water
and sound the strange prayer

One Summer for Professor Adams

"Father Brown was silent; then he started a little, almost as if he had been nodding over the stove, and said: 'I beg your pardon. Yes...Absence of method...Absence of mind, too, I'm afraid." – CK Chesteron, from "The Secret of Father Brown"








1.

This would be the first full season that Professor Adams would be on his own since he was a boy; it was April, the cruelest month, he couldn't help but always say this to himself when he thought of the coarse weather, and he looked forward to some of the very things of his own boyhood – fine long days full of sunshine and the sound of the ducks across the street along the Yahara River skimming across the water as they landed. Quite nice, actually, he thought, that this particular band of ducks over-wintered here, as the flow of the river never quite allowed for a full freeze, and those various waterfowl became the only animation in the sky. Soon, here, there would be children to teach, and for that he was exceedingly tickled, for he never really was quite cut out for professorship, a very closed and solitary existence really that rarely showed itself to live on the same plane as reality or for that matter the rest of the people alive. He had always seen himself, somewhat ironically, as something more of anti-intellectual, maybe a third grade teacher, watching over kids, reading them books, looking out the window along with them. Yes, that was it! That was how this all happened, his little experiment in a neighborhood school; now, if only others around the nearby blocks might agree. He had been thinking these things the day after a 48 hour long snow which had newly laced the soon to be classroom of his courtyard with half a foot of soggy snow. He bent over to shovel but it was the kind of ice that had essentially sealed itself like a gum of sorts to the concrete slabs. He looked up over the withered grasses still griping against the wind along the planting boxes and could see an image of a long line children coming in for lessons. It's never too late, he said to himself, and began to flush out in his mind the first week of lesson plans.

On the Yahara

"The great spire burst upon us so dramatically,– a smooth, swelling, mountainside, and then, presto!– this amazing picture. We had been ascending only the shell of a vast and irregular amphitheater from out of the middle of which, a thousand feet below us, this arrogant tower sprang, to rise a thousand feet above." – Halliburton, from The Glorious Adventure




2

What it feels like to walk out of the school is something that not every kid gets a chance to experience – Cory knew this as she walked out over the bridge and looked down on the water flowing in big gurgles, but there was somewhere to go, that was the key to it all, as she knew, and thought of the giant oaks that lined the river as something like friends, guards, whatever you will, and sure felt far more at home outside of the building than inside. Before she even got to Grandpa's, she knew exactly what the scene would be like. There were always things happening at Grandpa's, really a little shop of adventures, as Grandpa had always "wanted to turn this house into a restaurant," as he called it. He woke in the morning with a cookbook in hand, made out his two-dish menu, and headed off by bike to the grocery store, his saddle bags big enough to hold at least four bags, and when he returned he cooked for the rest of the day. "Cory, you will be in charge this summer of the roof top garden," in fact, was the very first thing that he said to her the first day she arrived in the dead of winter. "It's snowing out," Corey said, as she had been looking around the 'restaurant,' every corner stacked with small mountains of books, little plants of herbs in the front windows of the porch. "Well we solved that little problem a few years ago." Cory wasn't entirely sure who 'we' was, as grandpa was famously allergic to all animals, he could "barely eat em without sneezing," he would say, smiling, as he hunched over his cutting board at the counter which was the only spot on the 'restaurant' that was completely immaculate. "Let me show you our little greenhouse upstairs," he said, swiping his flat hands together and setting down his chef's knife on the board. As they walked up the old wood staircase, Cory could begin to smell a strange scent – something that had never smelled before, something sweet, like a rose, something like far more bitter and earthy.

On the Yahara

"To make the setting truly a poem the full moon rose over the pine clad summits that walled us in, and glowed upon our campfire, revealing the stilled herds upon the hillside and casting fantastic shadows among the rocks that might have been Pan and the Centaurs joined in their nightly dance."  – Richard Halliburton, from The Glorious Adventure: Through the Mediterranean in the Wake of Odysseus




1

Cory looked out the window of her 6th grade classroom up on the very top floor and all she saw was snow flakes the size of cereal shooting down sideways across the frame. Wouldn't have been so bad except it was mid April. Living along the Yahara River at Lake Monona they had already seen beautiful open water, blue as sky, ducks landing and wobbling from the river over to Mr. Towerd's house on Riverside. Plans for the summer had already taken place. In two months her and grandpa would be up on those mountains that he had been talking about for the last few months. Cory moved in with Grandpa temporarily and her life had most certainly changed. For one thing, she looked forward to open water again and for another she looked forward to mountains and saw pictures of what grandpa called the "Alpine Staircase" and thought that maybe it was a magical place full of strange green lands, not like here, in this classroom, surrounded by loud boys talking about loud music and strange games they played in their basement.

Cory walked right of the classroom that morning and she figured, looking back over it some months later, that that was the start of it all, the start of her picking her own 12-year old life right up off the ground and carrying it over to where it needed to be. She left her iPhone in her locker in her bag because she wouldn't need it anymore. Mr. Hanson had been out of the room for a minute. Shana and Sadie were talking over by the radiator and the boys didn't notice a thing. She walked right out into the hall, down the three sets of stairs and out the front door. That was it. The snow hit her directly on the face but it felt much more interesting real and live than it had watching it in the window.  From the very corner of the Koeble-Holder School, she could actually see grandpa's house. What was it she knew right at that very moment? How to explain it? It went something like this, so very hard to describe at 12 years old, but it was there alright, it was there. Grandpas house would be school from here on out. She would be the teacher. That's all there really was to it. She was learning things just walking out the front door. The old riverside oaks were tall and leafless still, covered in a thin white beard of snow at the elbow of the limbs. As she crossed the bridge to the other side of the river, she could hear those big wide flakes hit the river and watched them as they floated for a mere second across the top then fade into the green of the river.

Notes on A Midwestern Table

"If Midwestern cooking has been hard to pin down, I think it's because our best food has always been a celebration of this large, dynamic, plain-spoken place. Like the food, the vast interior of this country may seem ordinary to outsiders looking in, but it feels privately epic to those of us who live here." – Amy Thielen, from The New Midwestern Table








For all of us who have been cooking here in the midwest, I guess it seems fair that we all have earned the right to try to define our culinary culture. Thielen's trajectory might have some similarities to our own, but then again, maybe not – she speaks of a deep cooking culture from her home area in upper Minnesota, which was so strong that not only could she take some of these techniques and background to cook alongside some very prestigious chefs in NY city, but most importantly that tradition drew her back home but with new insight and mission: how apply new understandings and techniques learned to old recipes? Many of us continually go through these same cycles in our cooking, but obviously not to the same level as a James Beard award winning cookbook as our result. We might cook from any number of sources or, like so many families, just wing-it night by night. If anything, midwest cooking, like any other area of the country for that matter, if limited by time will become a plate of simply cooked meat, a potato, a green bean. Even this can be a stretch. Let's face it – take out, restaurants, granola snacking, all vie for position of top slot in many folks' day to day cooking. I've written about this so many times, but it bears repeating over and over again – cooking at home isn't really about just the cooking at home. It is about a plan, a mission, a pause in each day to get groceries, a priority to stand in the kitchen for an hour despite all other responsibilities (or wish for the lack of responsibilities), and then that is only the beginning. Who will be available to come to the table? Will some of the well-cooked meal save, serve as a leftover? My goodness, will anybody help with the dishes? Oh yeah, one last question: did anybody really like this meal? When we define midwest cuisine, then, it's not just a genre of food that we are trying to figure out – it's more about the lifestyles that surround the cooking. This is exactly one of the prime take aways form Thielen's great cookbook. She spins us a family narrative which we come to realize very early on that is highly motivated by a food culture that has preserved recipes the likes of home made braunschweiger, for example, or a white fish tapenade of sorts. Recipe after recipe hold dearly several things at a time: certainly a nod back to grandma's recipes, certainly an indication that her family is a very captive audience for the often communally driven meals, and an open curiosity at how those traditional recipes become modernized and yes, a bit more sophisticated. In all, though, despite the fact that this new midwestern cuisine is traditional-modern, and that much credit is given to certain heritage roots along the way, it is time itself that makes midwestern cuisine. It is the very hours in the day that will or will not allow for a kitchen garden; allow for access to a pure butcher (her family is in the meat business); allow for the dividing of the day between work and food; a willingness to show children that they are a part of the food process, and so on down the line. Without these devotions, midwestern cuisine fades very quickly to access to the nearest Culver's. And doesn't this make sense? Culver's is midwestern cuisine, is it not? Red meat, potatoes, yes, even green beans. But available in a drive through form. And if Culver's is not the choice, but that we provide ourselves with enough time to cook, do we pull out third generation recipes, or do we reach for the weeknight recipes found in Food Network Magazine, good recipes, to be sure, but by no means leaning toward midwest cooking. There are many reasons that midwest cuisine is nearly impossible to pin down, but this tendency toward sampling mass appeal recipes has got to be a big part of it. I have been cooking in the midwest for twenty years, tried hundreds upon hundreds of recipes, but as I go through the New Midwestern table, I realize that virtually nothing except maybe an offshoot of the chicken and wild rice meal, looks particularly familiar as a staple. Shame on me. Surrounded by the land of world renowned cheeses, how often do I drive down to Monroe Wisconsin to Baumgartner's to at this "kindly place, made with love, kindling fond memories of all the cheese sandwiches of my childhood." Thielen has provided us with a potential new sense of ownership for food that might call midwestern. If we used to rely upon the great grandmother's recipe index cards to seek out some secrets, we now have this book, written by a stranger, but who still holds onto time as if it were all precious and purposeful to devote to the kitchen.

"Flowers bloom in spring wind. They never refuse.
And trees never resent leaf-fall in autumn skies."
       – Li Po, from "Sunlight Chant"










Scenes from an Interstate


A hidden river flows through the city
in a rush to move through the noise

we stand at a small bridge graffitied
by images of sunshine and community

the valley here holds windowless buildings
like gravestones on beige hillocks

so bare in springtime that the marsh
reeds rustle as loud as the passing traffic

she says the wild salmon will soon run
few others will stand here in the sun

as they swim up the brown shallow river
from Lake Michigan bright as pink glass

nearby cars will descend onto ten parking lots
for a game with a dome that closes

"Lucky I am
to go off to my cancer appointment
having been given a bluebird, and,
for a lifetime, having been given
this world."
      – Ted Kooser, from Winter Morning Walks






april 4

cool afternoon but sun ablaze


Unexpected april snow has turned
the black river bay ablaze.
The city two halves–
yards radiant white lamps below,
beaming back to a cloudless dome a pure baby blue.
As we walk along the road
toward the main channel,
we stop to watch in the iceless bay the bald eagles
one by one take their turn
leaping from their stiff oak limbs
to circle low a hundred swimming pelicans,
fanning them up and away,
wings like tissue burning to ash above a campfire.
Seagulls descend in their place –
a brief swirl of white smoke lingering
along the shoreline beach.

Early Summer Reveille 

"Away then to loosen, to unstring the divine bow, so tense, so long. Away, from curtain, carpet, sofa, book – from 'society' – from city house, street, and modern improvements and luxuries...." – Whitman, from Specimen Days








Matters but little by April when the sun is a spray across the daylong landscape despite the cold – crisp, final snow, built by wide swoops across the bayside below but to melt by the time the day is out. White of fresh April snow, white of the band of white pelicans that has reached up to summering grounds, we watch from a window and forget about the walls, as they pump their white hips up and down and scoot across the surface of the crystal waters. White of the bald head of the eagle as it swoops down the leafless oaks at the edge of the grounds, wrapping their wide prehistoric wings against the scene as if batting away the wind, pelicans scuttle up, afraid by the moment, but only a moment, and barely move their carrot length beaks to the trouble. White of the seagull as it pecks along the beach for dead white fish, white of the eyes, white as cotton clouds that will never reach the ground. I see summer and it is white like fire like the wind of the arctic but warm and never seen.

"Look at that house, I said, it looks like Mexico.
Rachel and Lucy look at me like I'm crazy, but before they can let out a laugh, Nenny says: Yes, that's Mexico all right. That's what I was thinking exactly."  – Cisneros, House on Mango Street







Volleyball


There's only two sand volleyball courts in the city, as far as I know. One of them happens to be at the park right across the street. It took Cory and I awhile to get used to walking over all by ourselves, especially at night, all the shadows and new people. All that water that comes down the river and hits up against the waves coming into the shore make huge waves and they splash up against the rocks that sit there at the edge. At night they feel and look a little like boats crashing into the shoreline and can take your breath away. During the bright hours of the day, we walk along that same edge, where trees are dipping down into the water, and beavers live there under the rocks, and it is far more fun to watch as we walk toward the volleyball court at the far end of the park. Corey could care less about volleyball, but it's a good way to get out of the house she says. "You run down to the canoe rocks as fast as you can, and I will roll you the volleyball." There were always ducks along this stretch of the park, flying into the shallow shoreline or walking up across the grass looking for whatever it is there to eat. "Bowling for ducks," she would say, and I took it serious. "Don't even think about it," I would yell, and Corey would, sure enough, roll the ball in the direction of the duck crossing, never quite touching. The jungle gym here was always full of kids. The houses across the street stood facing us, and the lake, like a large and colorful fence by its own right. Even though we were new to the yellow house, we knew it was right along the edge of these and felt comfortable that if we had to we could make a mad dash back. Sometimes we would stand at the volleyball net and hit a few balls back and forth, but sometimes not. Instead, we walked the lake and looked out over the blue edge thinking it was a sea right here in the middle of Wisconsin.

Riverside Drive

"Benny and Blanca own the corner store. They're okay except don't lean on the candy counter." – Cisneros, "House on Mango Street"









Yahara River

We moved to the yellow house so that we could 'live on the river' we were told. We were told that this was a great cut across the isthmus and used to be more zig zag and held catfish the size of teenagers. We can see it from outside the front windows at any time, a little layer of velvet usually flowing into Lake Monona in big waves. Sometimes, if you squint, you can forget about the street out front and it feels like the house itself is floating along the Yahara, it is so close.  It took Corey and I a year to trust it over there, so close, and brand new people walking along the path at the shore of the park. People from all over the city come to the bridge at our intersection to take pictures from the top looking down onto the green water in summer. "Why is it green?" Corey asks to this day. There are days in the summer when dead white fish float down the river all the while kids from the school down the street are jumping off the next bridge down into deep water. "It's green because it has stuff in it from farms, chemicals," we were told. "You don't want to open your mouth if you fall in," dad has said many times, and so when we get on the paddle board we stand there right in the middle of the board, stick straight and solid, not wanting to touch a thing. We chase green headed ducks around the shore line from kayaks. Out in the open water of the lake, fisherman in their thin tin boats nose in from the middle of the lake and anchor. In the winter, when the lake is a giant white and gray mirror, there are fifty huts that dot every side of the lake, sometimes smoke puffing up out of them. We can walk as far as we want to, looking back into our neighborhood, and we see the yellow house there afloat at the corner, shining like the sun.

Riverside Drive

"But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It's small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you'd think they were holding their breath." Sandra Cisneros, from The House on Mango Street







Yellow House


A yellow house is always a part of the sun shine, dad had said one day, years later, and I think he was right. No matter from what direction, there was a mural of the sun against the side of the garage wall and it seemed to absorb the light of the day and shine it back into the house. When we walked back home, up over the old bridge, and came down toward it, the house shone bright on the corner as if it were plucked out of the Tuscan countryside. We might have spend time in those days dreaming of Italy without even knowing it. Everything that I write about the yellow house now is not the way I thought of it back then. The whole thing had to sink in. The suburbs where we came from, and lived for years, were wide and clean everywhere. My brother 'little' Charlie (the name came to him because he was number three, the youngest, my sister and I the oldest) had a back yard all to himself. It was Corey and I's job to watch him during the day and all we had to do was watch him for hours from the back deck while he ran across that big lawn and up the steps of the brick wall in the back. The yard continued to grow and it stretched all the way up into the bluffs where there were trails and what was called the Garland Meadow. Somedays we would bundle little Charlie up and walk up through the brambles up into the wide open field and just sit in the beige grass in spring. Nobody ever forgets the sound of wind through the crisp grass. The meadow came to remind me of the yellow house. It was like a yellow lake and off in the distance the ring of giant houses were quiet also. We knew there were other children in almost all of them, but we rarely saw them. The house across the street had its own basketball court as a basement and we only saw Chelsea, our neighbor, once a day, as she got into her dad's truck for another league practice. There in the suburbs, I will always remember, it always looked more beautiful from high above in the small little cove of pines that lined the back yards before the bluff.