A Forty Year Story

May 1, 1981 After I’d written the second part of this, I found the first and put them together

I want to write the story of my Persephone, her seasons, her fears, her cycles, her rhythms. I want to write her story through the eyes of this woman who is growing and unfolding inside of me. Her tale symbolizes not only the seasonal patterns and changes in the natural world, but

within woman also. I believe in heroes and heroines, in their stories of courage and struggle, suffering and reawakening, for they can provide models, or glimmers of hope, or release in tears for one’s own insignificant or overwhelming difficulties.

Now, in the spaces between gardening and family stuff, I am a local environmental crank, speaking out on behalf of all the creatures who can’t make it to the public hearings: the hawks, the owls, swallows and the eagles of the valley, especially the Trumpeter swans. When I decided I had to pull myself together before I yanked myself apart, I began to keep a nature diary and began to draw what I saw. And here I found her, Persephone. The myth is me, and I am she. She is all woman, and all women are me and we are one. We are made of the same bones and flesh and blood and muscles, veins and fingers, yearnings. Only the facts are different. Our facts are what we have to contend with; our facts become our crosses to bear. Our burdens may differ drastically, but stripped, singular, we are linked by our humanness. We are one. One. And there has to be hope.

Let me tell you this story in words and illustrations. It is a story of winter darkness and salty tears, of summer skin and the warm licking of pleasure, of loneliness and escape, anger and the serenity of solitude. The questioning never stops. It will never stop, for this is life, my life, these are our lives, budding and blossoming, fading, dying, crumbling, and blowing away, to bud and blossom again, just as fresh, just as clean.

May 1, 2021 forty years later to the day

Where could spring be anymore flowery or bowery than here in Skagit Valley? Everything is in bloom at once. And early, too, apples trees and purple lilacs, heather and candytuft. One’s eyes can hardly take it all in, bleeding heart, rainbow striped acres of tulips, rhododendrons from the palest whites through the boldest reds, those ruby red giant rhodies that engulf small houses, planted fifty years ago that a person must now crawl to the front door just to get under the branches. Forget those pruning shears, this is blossom heaven. Forget Japan or Washington DC, this is cherry tree paradise and tangled against the soft yellow green of maple blossoms are the wild plum trees thick and billowy pink. When the wind blows the soft petals it’s like a wedding.

What a hike at Washington Park the other day, by the bay outside of Anacortes, along the high coastal trails where the soil looks like chocolate, the rocks as white as filberts. On the south side and to the west, the San Juan Islands come into view, blue blue hazy in the distance. I wish you’d been there with me, to smell the salty air and watch the breeze riffle the gray water on the channel below by Burrows Island. Two herring gulls flew in formation and glided gently to the surface of the rippling water, still in unison, still in unison, was it their wedding day?

Often I hike there to watch the seasons change, especially from late March through May for then the tiniest wildflowers bloom. There used to be so many more, but this year, what a surprise, I found 27 Calypso orchids, they aren’t very big, they’re tiny really, like some rosy pink fairy slippers which is actually another name for them. And four Shooting Stars, even more delicate. How they weather the wild wet winter, the deer hooves and nibbling is anyone’s guess, but just four shooting stars this year, Dodecatheon, they’re in the Primula primrose family. There used to be dozens there and chocolate lilies, too. I told a friend I’d seen them, the shooting stars, and she said, “You didn’t hike at night, did you?”

No, no, they are sweet, rare little wildflowers, not meteors, silly girl. There was also quite a bit of creamy white Death Camas in bloom, but only two Blue Camas plants at the top of the bluff. In Idaho once I saw several huge prairies of blue camas; Native Americans, the Shoshone and Nez Perce used to dig their roots and bake them slow and low in earth ovens. I wouldn’t do that now, they are too rare, too precious.

I continue hiking and pass the big glacial erratic, the stone where young King Arthur, known to us as the Wart thanks to T.H. White, in his Once and Future King, struggled to pull out the sword, Excalibur, so long ago, or was it just yesterday? It’s a mystery, how the myth of time moves in and around us, weaving its tentacles into our imagination. The wound in the rock still weeps and seeps a dark dark red….Do you suppose this is the passage where Persephone slips in and out at the vernal and autumnal equinox?

There the trees, the Madrone, the Arbutus, are twisted and yearning against the weather. The rust brown bark peeling back curls as thin as paper exposing the equine muscles of the thick tree torsos yellow worn and leathery. “There’s comfort in a horse’s lean brown thighs.” I think of that line as I climb through the narrow passage of lichen crusted rock the trail tangled with branches of gray geriatric Juniper, but try as I might, I cannot find the poem. Was it Longfellow? Joyce Kilmer? “I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree.” Can’t you just hear those boys in the seventh grade? “A tree whose hungry mouth is prest against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.” And they are still howling in the back row, “There is no frigate like a book.” Oh, dear Emily, Emily…..

It’s the dickens I tell you, trying to remember what is past and what is present, which poem is which, one spring rolls into another on a field of bloom, a forest room of sprouting nettles and the tiniest star flowers, the spotted coralroot, oh, I didn’t miss it this year. We once made nettle soup, wearing thick gloves we gathered the prickly greens from earth’s flowing breast, oh my, and snipped fiddlehead ferns to make a most oxalic soup. My soup wasn’t very good, but in Maine, by the light of the moon, the loons were calling, whooping one another in ecstatic joy across the misty dark lake and I was served the most delicious soup and green green green it was, those spring fiddleheads. That was quite a trip.