Fall is a time of transition, and this year, transition feels hard. The day this is published, November 10th, is the one year anniversary of my father’s death. I am exhausted by the vitriolic lead up to this year’s election, which has left so many people at seemingly irrevocable odds with one another. Now, I’m reaching for some beauty and light, and I’m finding it in art, creativity, the generosity of animals, and the beauty of wild places, which give me the inspiration to keep writing and loving. Here’s what I’m turning towards. I hope you’ll explore what speaks to you.
At the beginning of September, I spent a week by myself at my family’s cabin in the Red Desert. It was a self-designed writing retreat, and I walked for two or three hours each morning, wrote the rest of the day, and took another shorter walk in the evenings. I usually picked up my writing again for an hour or two after dark. I also played several rounds of pasture golf on the “course” my dad designed way back when I was a kid, which consists of nine four fairways with a bush or fence post serving as the flag for each one.
I wasn’t totally off-grid since I could find cell service in high places and send “all-is-well” messages to my husband. My brother acquired a solar panel for the cabin this summer, and being able to charge my laptop was a game changer. As much as I’d like to be an old-fashioned, pen-and-ink writer, I write more deeply and effectively on a computer, especially during revision, when I’m often moving large blocks of text around like I’m rearranging furniture.
I didn’t see another human being while I was there, though I had my good dogs, Snips and Djinn, with me. I did encounter multiple small leks of sage chicken, lots of antelope, (I know they’re technically grouse and pronghorn, but I grew up calling them by their informal nicknames), an immature golden eagle, many mule deer, and several herds of wild horses. I also heard a meadowlark, which I’m not sure I have experienced in September before. None of these fellow desert lovers were sparkling conversationalists, but I feel like they each told something with me important anyway.
I soaked in the place, reflected on wilderness, and mulled over scenes and stuck-points in my novel-in-progress. By the last day, during my final round of golf, I realized I was engaging in rather lengthy conversations with myself, so it was probably time to rejoin society. But, truth be told, give me my husband, my son, and my horse out there and occasional visits from family and friends, and you might never see me in town again.
More than any of my writing insights, that’s what I came away with, the deep and certain knowledge that I can always find my way to my truest home.
I wrote this poem the day before we spread my father’s ashes. The next day, before we gathered for that ritual, I walked the Sweetwater River and came up on a bull elk browsing on the far bank. Call the timing what you will – beauty, perhaps?
What Does It Mean to Be
A husband, a father, a brother, a friend? Or an antelope, an elk, a red-tailed hawk, a horny toad? Or a penstemon, a paintbrush, a prickly pair, a limber pine? Or flame flickering willow, water over stone, wind through sage, granite against sky?
What does it mean to be, to have been, to continue in the quiet of bedrock, the whisper of air, the sweep of rivers, the lift of ash, in us, through us, and on?
and the sling digs into my collar bone on cold days walking
the woods, ducking beneath pines, stepping over deadfall.
My friends call it a relic, me brassbound—so many
upgrades have been made available in gear in the years since
it was minted. Composite stocks and carbon fiber barrels
come light, innovative calibers precise.
But this honeyed wood and blued steel speak
to my heart and other important matters. Legacy,
for one. Joining a family, too, the day they said,
“Granddad would have wanted it to go to you.” It looks
right on the gun rack next to her .270, which he likewise left to her,
and the .30-06 that belonged to her mother before.
Somethings change, have to if they’re to go on—evolutions,
a frontline scope, a silicone harness—but I’ll carry it as long as I am
strong enough, will pull the trigger—I savvy the subtle slack—
will make the killshot necessary to bring home sustenance
I know was taken with care. In doing so, I’ll fill also
myself with hours moving quiet, hoping to scent
the musk of elk, to hear the crack of branch.
This rifle, I’ll lay it down then, press
my palm against yet warm hide and give
my thanks. Then I’ll shoulder it again, heft my pack
laden with quartered meat, and walk on.
It’s good, I think, to carry such weight, to feel it in the sinew of our backs,
the long bones of our legs, the soles of our feet, until each step
becomes a meditation on the circle of the world, and our place in it.
~For Rob on his 40th Birthday, August 5th, 2024
*I would also like to apologize for sending my last post about Joe Wilkin’s new novel, The Entire Sky, out twice. I changed my regular publishing schedule to get the review out before his book launched, and it caused a glitch with my newsletter platform. I now am aware of the issue and hope to avoid the same mistake in the future. Please know I appreciate you signing up for my newsletter very much and want to avoid inundating your inbox.
The arrival of summer comes with changes in schedules and routines — my son is out of school and in a summer program part time and with me and family friends on the off days, we’re eating dinner and staying up later as we try to squeeze in as much outside time as possible, swimming has given way to hiking, and my horseback rides have grown longer as I explore the surrounding country instead of utilizing the arena. I’ve transitioned from a deep focus on my novel to running my summer class, and, now, as the course wraps up, I’m preparing to switch back to writing. We’re traveling more while the roads are good and while the camping season lasts.
All of this shifting has me thinking about time, as does my tendency to try to fit as much summer into each day as possible. I find myself in a push-pull between relying on my watch and calendar and wanting to throw both away.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with watches and clocks, and this ambivalence has increased since I switched to a smart watch.
In ways, it is amazing. With the touch of a button (or rather, an app), I can view my calendar, set an alarm, set a timer, or start a swim workout and follow the lap intervals set for me. I can view data that tells me how I used my time, how productive I was, how many times my heart beat per minute.
If I carefully frame how I interpret all this data, the watch helps me. It verifies that I indeed do a lot. If I close those rings or hit those step goals, I feel satisfied, motivated to continue. Calendar reminders offload the pressure of keeping track of appointments in my head, can ease that vague sense that I should be somewhere doing something by telling me specifically where and what. I feel good when screen time is down and time riding, swimming, hiking, and writing are up. I am proud when my swim app congratulates me for shaving a few seconds off my average one hundred yard freestyle time.
But here’s the problem: my watch, or rather the attention I give it, puts me on time rather than in time. I begin to focus on what comes after this task, how this hour leads into the next, on what I can get done in a fifteen minute quadrant between turning off my activity tracker for yoga and starting a timer to remind me to look away from my computer screen every twenty-five minutes while I work.
When I’m in time, the world feels different. Slower sometimes, but not always. If I leave my watch at home when I ride Scout, I sink into being with her. I notice when we’ve accomplished something meaningful, or I notice that the wild irises have bloomed in a lacy white and purple blanket across the hay meadows. Without my watch and with my phone silenced, I experience my hikes differently. I don’t over-stride trying to get back to the car, I hear meadowlarks and say hello to bursts of yellow wallflower and purple penstemon, remember to breathe, to smell the sweetness of blue-stemmed wheat grass mixing with sage. I can play action figures with my son in the yard and settle into his imagination while feeling the cool grass beneath my fingers, the softness of the earth beneath my feet. I can get lost in writing, move completely into the story.
As a (mostly) functional adult in modern American society, I can’t forgo clocks and calendars all together, but I’ve been wishing I could. I want to be in time, not on time, to be in the flow of it, to get swept up and caught in eddies and turned around before drifting on. Perhaps if I did, I would feel the shifting cycles of the earth differently, would not measure my life in minutes or count the number of summer weekends and lament how few they are and how much I won’t get done before school starts.
Perhaps I could move through the seasons with joy, greeting the wild flowers and birds in spring, the shock of cold river water in the heat of summer, the blaze of aspens in fall, the muffling of snow in winter, and could find peace in the ebb and flow of this great circle. I wonder if I can make this leap while still keeping my commitments to other people, if I can honor both my son’s pick up schedule and the wind on my face as we ride our bikes home. I hope so. I aim to try.
In Wyoming, spring can feel more like a series of allusions and suggestions than an actual season. March and April in particular seem to be uncertain if they belong to winter or are the start of something new. Thus, I always look for assurances that spring is here, even if the forecast calls for the imminent arrival of more snow:
1. Red-winged black birds: In March, the red-winged black birds begin calling from the trees, power poles, and fences at the barn where I keep my horse, Scout, which is in the Little Laramie River valley. I also hear them and sight them along the Laramie River where it winds through town. With a trilling whistle that sounds like “okalee” or “conk la ree,” these birds summon spring. https://youtu.be/hrgGTvzuA1I?si=Dx28kLfGA53i4L0Q
2. Wearing Sandals in 45 Degree Weather: If the sun is out and the temperature rises about 40 degrees, we Wyomingites convince ourselves it is shorts-and-sandal weather, or at least sandal weather. Are my toes cold? Of course, but I can imagine the insinuation of warmth.
3. Summer is Already Booked: In a state where many of us love to be outdoors as much as possible, we also are forced to cram twelve months of warm-weather activities into about four. By mid-April (if not sooner), my email and text threads are full of inquiries and responses regarding summer plans, and my calendar reminds me that there just aren’t that many weekends in June, July, and August.
4. Whispers of Green: In our yard, the cinquefoil and flax are among the first plants to start showing a little green. It creeps up from under the gray-brown thatch of dead leaves left from fall, tiny shoots of new growth, and I have to search for it at first, bending low to the ground as if to hear a secret.
5. Wedding Invitations: Especially if you’re somewhere in the age-range of 25 to 35, or if your kids are, you can bet your mailbox will be full of wedding invitations this time of year (see #3.). Winter weddings in Wyoming are beautiful, but not as common as summer nuptials thanks to wind, bitter cold, and blizzards that close major roadways.
Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash
6. Meadowlarks: This year, I heard my first meadowlark on April 3rd. These yellow-bellied, brown-backed, fence-post and sagebrush perchers are my favorite bird, and their fluting, plaintive whistle reminds me of time spent on the Laramie Plains and in the Red Desert as well as of my father and grandfather, who also held a special affinity for their song. Though they’re the state bird of five other states (Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Oregon), they will always call my heart to Wyoming in spring. https://youtu.be/fRgU4xS06sM?si=ewoeoRV1bebpe4ba
7. Ill-Planned Excursions: Desperate for nicer weather and an opportunity to get out “into the hills” (as my father always put it), the first run of sunny, low-wind days always tempts me to go for a drive, hike, ride, or run into higher country, which usually ends when I encounter enough snow to force me to turn around. (I am learning though — when I was in my twenties, these adventures resulted in getting stuck more than once.)
8. The Horses Start Shedding: I used to warn them that more snow was sure to come, but it turns out that shedding is triggered by longer daylight hours more than rising temperatures. There is something deeply satisfying about picking up a brush and combing loose hair off a horse’s neck until it begins to pile around your boots. Then, there’s the moment of placing your palm against a soft, sun-warmed, summer-sleek hide.
9. Nocturnal Ranchers: Once calving starts, the early-rising ranchers I know start monitoring heifers and cows around the clock. Spring is the season of renewal, and no one understands that better than those who live close to the land, whose days are shaped by its cycles. As wobbly-legged calves emerge into pastures and fields, the lowing of their mothers joins the medley of an awakening land.
10. Riparian Air: It comes unexpectedly, those first hints of water against warm stone, twining through growing things, carried on a warm breeze. Can you smell the color green? It is the scent of spring.
Grief is like a stone dropped into a slow autumn river. First, its entry, the splash, the circular ripples reverberating out and out and on. Then, the repose. Water moves around it, yields to its edges, creates new eddies, turns it now and again. It rests amongst other rocks, shifts in texture and even shape with passing currents and years, becomes part of the stream itself, bits of sifted silt refracting sunlight, settling to bedrock.
Perhaps a meditation on past and present, the grain of rounds leading to the stroke that splits them clean. Is tracing the knots and whorls like reading a fortune of how they come apart and how they cleave together?
Or perhaps a meditation on form and function, the swing of the maul both power and grace. You feel it, rising and falling like your breath in the cold, the slide of sinew and muscle under your coat, the wood warming already your skin.
Or a meditation on enough and plenty, on stocking and stoking the rack, on tending a house until a sense of home fills the air. The radiance of flame, different than the blow of a furnace, releases all the years of growth, like branches reaching skyward.
And how that means generations, your father’s swing and motion now your own, becoming our son’s as he carries an armload inside and helps me lay the fire. Which is all to say, a woodstove and its heat are simply beauty in the end, and love.
I initially wrote this poem as a Father’s Day gift for my husband, Rob, and he later had a version of it tattooed on his leg along with an image of the log cabin in which he grew up. Todd O’Hare of Rolling Tattoo in Laramie did the ink. His work is fabulous (and I would know – he’s done about ten tattoos for Rob and one for me, so I get to enjoy his art every day.) Check him out here: https://www.rollingtattoo.com/todd-ohare.
The darkened sky above and clouds along the eastern hills. The sun a silvering at that rim, the bellies of the clouds lit from beneath and the dark yet above. Then the dark giving way to the land, and the land blue and gray for one slow moment comprised only of heartbeats and breathes before a warming gold blooms down the fence posts and out across the plains.
