Place Blog #2- The Only Human in the Park

I am grateful to be the only human at the park today. The rain is slow but heavy as it hits the ground and the pond. I find the only dry spot at the back of the stage used for summer concerts and plays. Little Sugar Creek is moving with purpose and climbing the banks as I sit here. It rushes over rocks and I hope the rain continues it's slow pace. I would prefer not to get caught in a flash flood with a lap top and my husband's jeep.

The mallards are active today. They scurry against the current, poking at the banks where leaves and debris have collected.  They're mostly sticking together, the ducks -three females and five males. One male stands off to the side of the creek about fifty feet down. All I hear is water. My fingers grow numb and breath surrounds me. I wish I had a home to go to and hunker down in. It must be teetering on the edge of freezing rain. Visiting on another day would have been wise.

The birds are getting more active. I saw several Cardinals on my walk in, a lot of finches and smaller birds, and one red crowned bird I couldn't identify. I know it wasn't a woodpecker; it was too small. I had never seen this bird before. His frame was slight, his feathers washed in shades of brown -all save for his head which boasted a brilliant ruby cap. Somewhere close by, a bird says "chirp-y chirp-y" in quick successive beats. A crow calls from the top of a pine tree. If I only had a blanket and a cup of coffee, this would be a perfect reading spot. I read on the stage at the park in the rain. Sounds right. Sounds good.

The rain comes faster now. There's a squirrel in one of the Willow Oaks alerting me to movement. He sees the couple and their dog before I hear them. We watch them walk past. Their voices seem to loud. I stop. The squirrel stops. The pass, moving in shepherd sized strides on grass that's just showing a hint of green. In two weeks, we'll be able to see the tops of tulips coming up around trees and flower beds but today, it is cold and I can't feel my fingers moving. I wrap my fists in my sweater. I wish my coat wasn't at the dry cleaner's. The squirrel moves again; he and the birds just want me to leave. I think of my last birthday; we spent it here, eating cupcakes on the hill across the pond, sunning ourselves like madmen without spf, amazed by buttercream, dreaming of words and possibility.

Nature Blog- Prompt #2: Bending Limbs

I’m listening to The Decemberists today, thinking of places I’ve had to say goodbye to. The song I’m listening to says, “There are times life will rattle your bones and bend your limbs.” It’s appropriate in this time in which I suffer from a lack of rootedness. It’s a time of storms. Of weakness. Of resilience. I’m working in coffee shops, listening to steam hiss and alternating between green tea and coffee. I’m jacked up –a trend in my day-to-day life that has stretched on into years. I’m not a person who sits in repose often and I find myself longing for the attachment of my youth. The constant I had to say goodbye to a few years ago –my grandparents’ home and its own little ecosystem.

My parents divorced early and my mom relied on my grandparents as afterschool and summer caretakers.  As children, my brother and I spent a lot of time traversing their neighborhood, and more often than not, I was barefoot while I did it. There were countless stings. Yellow jackets, honey bees, hornets. There were scuffs and scrapes and stubbed toes. I walked the hot asphalt of their street.  I developed some serious callouses. I’d hurt myself and my relatives would bind me with home remedies. My grandma would strap a raw potato to a splinter at night and come morning, that sucker will have worked its way into the spud.  Running, skating, biking, climbing. Dogwoods. Tulip trees. The magnificent Willow Oak in their back yard supervised a gaggle of neighborhood kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. Pop worked his earth alongside us.  He would pick tomatoes when they were still a little green and place them in windowsills all through the house so they were all peppered with red. He’d tell me to be careful picking the squash; it was known to be prickly. He taught me to throw food scraps into the garden, said they’d decay and feed it. He staked pink peonies in between vegetable beds, let a hydrangea bush my grandmother’s mother had planted get as big as the carport. He filled a tree stump out front with dirt and mulch and planted cactus and marigolds in it. Many a Star Wars action figure had adventures there. We played Flash Gordon there. When we moved over the years, my grandparents stayed. They had history, place, permanence.

Some years later, an ice storm hit. The Willow Oak had been weakened by Hurricane Hugo back in the 80s and it split like a toothpick.

Some years later, my grandpa’s mind started to wander. He died on a Friday in June.

Some weeks later, I picked the last of his vegetables.

My grandmother wanted to stay in the house even after his death. We watched her rake gumballs, pull weeds, put peonies on her kitchen table, and use the corn and okra they’d put up. She wanted to stay there another fifty years but it got to be too much for her to take care of on her own, even as small as it was. Her age.

Some years later, sitting here thinking about rattled bones and bending limbs, I’m thinking of driving by if for no other reason than to see the size of that blue hydrangea. 

Place Blog #1-Gathering Information

My life is chaos right now. I have no center. I am in the process of moving from South Carolina back to North Carolina, taking three classes for grad school, and trying not to be a neglectful wife and pet mom. The pack needs tending to. So do I. For my place, I chose Freedom Park in Charlotte, NC because I’ll be living in the area in a few weeks and because it’s a place deeply entrenched in my memory.

Yesterday, I packed up Desmond, the Border Collie, and a notebook and took the hour drive into Charlotte.  It was 58 degrees –the first day in months that reached that spring like temperature. The park was sure to be crowded. The winter weather here is fickle. Last week, there was six inches of snow on the ground. We spend our winters down south in a constant state of confusion.  I wondered if there was a word for false spring.

 I looked at this first trip as an information gathering mission. What was there that I had never paid attention to? What didn’t I know? I had no particular area of the park in mind for my place so I opted instead for a few spots. The first was under what I now know is a massive Willow Oak by the man-made pond

I sat on a tree root. Before I could even get my notebook out, Desmond relieved himself. I took my biodegradable bag and scooped it up with a bunch of leaves. I tried to get Desmond to settle down but he was so excited after being cooped up for the past few weeks that he paced around me for a good twenty minutes.  My hands were a bit shaky, too –a touch of anxiety is ever-present.

The tree’s bark had deep crevices, leaves had collected in the valleys. After some gentle digging, I could see the coffee colored earth beneath. There were acorn remnants and pecan shells. A squirrel had been there. I wasn’t sure what kind of tree I was sitting under but I knew it wasn’t a pecan tree. I thought it was some kind of oak but the leaves were long and narrow. I knew oak leaves didn’t look like that but I couldn’t remember how to describe the leaves. Alternate? Opposite? Simple? I didn’t know. I walked around the tree to the sound of geese warning Desmond from the bank across the pond. His pacing increased. There was a band around the tree with some kind of goop on it. I knew it was meant to protect the old tree from some type of insect but again, I didn’t know what kind. Sitting there, writing in my journal, a twig that had been stuck in the glop of the band fell on me. I thought maybe I should have sat on the bench. A smoking man with greased back hair watched me examine the stick and wipe the strange substance on my paper, my pants, leaves, the tree. So much for relaxing in nature. I took a deep breath and decided it was best if we walk the trails. Get out some of this excess energy, especially since a large male goose who’d been warning us had now jumped into the water and led his burly gang our way. We stopped and had a staring contest. Desmond lost; he cowered behind me. Eventually, the geese figured I was okay and swam off. We kept walking.

On the trails, I tried to pay attention to trees and the creek. Little Sugar Creek is known for causing flash floods. I snapped pictures of trees that stood out. One was an evergreen, tall and stately with stringy bark. Another was severely knotted; it was stressed, too. Another was hollow; I wondered if it had the same kind of fungus that long leaf pines got. Red heart? I thought of the ecosystem it created. In a nearby tree, a woodpecker pecked. Tap,tap,tap,tap,tap. I couldn’t find him. I did, however, stumble across a stoic Blue Heron. He stood alone, one foot in the creek, one tucked. His eyes were open but in the five minutes I watched him, he never flinched. Here’s to hoping I can be more like the Heron on the next trip and here’s to hoping we meet again.

After I got home, I did a little research on trees and tree banding in Charlotte. According to the City of Charlotte, the Willow Oak accounts for 16 percent of Charlotte’s 160,000 street trees. Tree banding is encouraged by the city in order to protect Charlotte’s canopy from canker worms, which are a huge issue in the area, especially with Willow Oaks. I plan to look into this further but here’s some further reading if you’re interested.

Canker Worms:

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/O&T/trees/note153/note153.htm

Willow Oak: 

http://www.ibiblio.org/pic/NCTrees/willowoak.htm

Nature Blog Prompt #1- There Were No Plantations

Growing up in Charlotte NC, I viewed the world from the bed of a cobalt blue Ford pickup. There were no plantations. There was no swinging Spanish moss. There were no great expanses of sky. There were no sweeping prairies or mountains. There was no pine barren or marsh with a smell to catch your jaw. There were no deep forests.

Family legend told that my grandpa, whom we called Pop, had bought the blue Ford without telling my grandmother. I heard her tell time and again how she’d been so mad she could have spit fire, earning her reputation as a red head. In the thick of the argument, she had heaved her wedding ring into the yard. She and her neighbor crawled under the shade of a massive oak that had been cut down by the time I came along, feeling the tickle of the grass plagued by clover and relishing its coolness in the wet heat of a July night.

Charlotte is a town built on a crossroads, two intersecting Native American trading paths, known now as Trade and Tryon Streets.  The landscape rolls gently and lies half way between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. When a tourist visits North Carolina, it’s usually not to visit the “piedmont” or “foot of the mountain.” As a girl, once I’d traveled to those parts East and West of my hometown, I harbored a sort of longing to be with the mountain people or the people who lived “down east” as we say it. I longed for forest and sea.  But this land has its beauty. It has its trees and when not hitting pockets of orange clay, has fertile soil from which one can grow corn, cotton, and tobacco easily. Crops with troubled pasts. Growing up here, one has a complicated relationship with the land, its history, its scars. I’ve known many born and bred here to hate it so much they had to leave; they couldn’t swallow the shadows still visible from the periphery. Then there’s the other half, older generations mostly, that cling to outdated ideas about what this place is supposed to be and who it’s made for. I stand somewhere on the edge, just coming to terms with the fact that I may be forever settled into this town.

Early European settlers were Scotch-Irish, Quaker, and German. Native American tribes in the area included the Eastern Band of Cherokee, Cheraw, Waxhaw, Saponi, Waccamaw, and Catawba. From what little I know of my ancestry, I can tell you that I am part Scotch-Irish, Cherokee, and Welsh but most of my people were poverty-stricken and kept poor records.

The town’s first boom came in the late 18^th century when gold was discovered here, sparking a gold rush that predates California’s. The town didn’t really grow until after the Civil War when it became a hub of cotton processing and textile mills boomed in the region. My great-grandparents were farmers in North Mecklenburg County, in what is now known as the University area. My grandparents started out farmers, moved to working in textile mills, before my grandmother finally wound up a beautician and my grand-father a school bus driver. My history and this landscape is not exactly what one would call southern pastoral.

Yet, it was rustic and of the earth. Like the land itself, the culture here is balanced; it is a blend of the rural with the urban. In their tiny back yard, my grandparents grew corn, collards, tomatoes, okra (which thrived in the heat), string beans, cucumbers, and summer squash. They canned and froze their harvest. They made chow chow, which sat like jars of confetti on the counter. They couldn’t pay me to touch it but I saw my grandpa eat it straight from the jar, his leathery fingers scooping the red pepper, corn and onion concoction.

No matter what I do, where I go, or how hard I fought it, I’ll always see the world from the back of Pop’s truck, the heat of its ridges still burning into my back and feet –somewhere beneath the surface smelling tomato vines and tasting salted cucumbers, thinking of my grandma searching for that ring.