A Thursday Picture and Poem

Photoshopped photo taken in Colorado last summer

Summer seems to have arrived early here in southern Wisconsin, and I have been working outside digging in the flower beds and borders, and scrubbing  a year's gunk off the deck.  A word of advice - never build your deck around a maple tree.  Between the staining from rotting leaves in the fall, to all the little red flower-bud-thingys in spring, to the little brown seed helicopters that litter everywhere and sprout in the eves, it's just once darn mass after another.  I am whupped.  Tired.  Sore.  And I still need to get a flat of pink and white impatiens planted before they die in their little black plastic six-packs.  I'm headed to Door County tomorrow to see if I can get a watercolor juried into the Hardy Gallery, and to visit my aunt and sister-in-law.  So, I need to plant this afternoon.

But - I have been wanting to share a poem that a member of the Thursday painting studio gave me.  Here it is:

Monet Refuses the Operation

by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no halos

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, and affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as an-

   gels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I call the horizon

does not exist in sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of be-

   ing.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors; fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

The Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

a fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don't know each other,

as if islands were lot the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touch-

   es,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists of passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that is would take long streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor with-

   out end.

Looking For Lace

Lace maker, Burano Italy, March 2010

Although I am not a person who especially likes or wears lace, I admire it.  I was fascinated by the women in Italy who make handmade lace, toiling for a year to create a table cloth, or maybe a bedspread.  Cat people like me don't have lace bedspreads.  Anyway, our local library has started a contemporary fiction book discussion group, and the first title I read for it was The Lace Reader, by Bruonia Barry.  Set in contemporary Salem, the novel features a circle of women who make lace, and who learn to "read" it - much as one might read tea leaves, or palms.  There's more to it of course, an unreliable narrator who returns to Salem after the death of her aunt, and discovers there are many questions to be answered about her own life.  Each chapter is introduced with a selection from the fictional "Lace Reader's Guide."  This one at the beginning of Part Two appealed to me:


There is lace in every living thing: the bare branches of winter, the patterns of clouds, the surface of water as it ripples in the breeze . . . . Even the wild dog's matted fur shows a lace pattern if you look at it closely enough. 


That little idea sent me out to my spring garden to look for lace.

Mementos, 1

by W.D. Snodgrass

Sorting out letters and piles of my old

    Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards   

That meant something once, I happened to find

    Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,   

Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard

             Who has turned up a severed hand.

Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand

    Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender,

In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies

    That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned   

Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,

             And our ideals came easy.

Then through the war and those two long years

    Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks   

Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried

    This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,   

Prove it had been, that it might come back.

             That was before we got married.

—Before we drained out one another’s force   

    With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret

And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce

    And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,   

I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,

             I will find that it’s still there.

John Alexander Pierce

Family history concerns grab me every now and then and take up all my available brain space and time.  When I found the old ledger of my great great grandfather, John Alexander Pierce, with records of his flour mills in Troy and Genoa, I spent a couple days reading, thinking, and then taking the old book to a bindery in Madison to have a new spine attached.  

The accounts are written in a couple hands, begin in 1880 and continue to 1910, though those are clearly written by his son, George Edmund, my great grandfather.  There are egg and butter accounts that have nothing to go with the mills.  There were loose papers inside too - tax receipts, and hand written treasurer's reports from the Sugar Creek School District #4.  All are destined for the historical documents collection at UW Whitewater.

The internet, besides being a black hole of time, is also a gold mine of otherwise hard-to-find information.  I found an e-text of the 1882 History of Walworth County, and this biographical sketch of J.A. Pierce:

J.A. Pierce. farmer and mill owner, resides on section 9; has land on sections 2,3,9,10, 16 and 21, Sugar Creek, and other tracts in LaGrange, Troy, an Bloomfield, of this county, aggregating 1,000 acres.  He has two flouring mills, one in Genoa, with four run of stone; capacity, fifty barrels per day.  The subject of this sketch was born in Williamsburg, near the River St. Lawrence, in Canada West, Dec. 11, 1816; is the son of John and Maria A. (McFarling) Pierce.  He came to Wisconsin in 1845, and settled on Sec. 9, Sugar Creek, Walworth Co., where he  still resides.  He commenced in a small way , with limited means, and has since accumulated a large property.  In 1857, he bought the mill at Genoa Junction, and in 1869, bought the mill in Troy, situated one and one-half miles from East Troy, and three miles from Troy Center.  He was married in 1847 to Miss Mary Chambers, daughter of William Chambers of Geneva, Wis.  They had five children -- J. Albert, Eliza, George E., William Austin and Guy R.  The oldest, J.A., married Anna High, and lives in Eden Dakota.  Eliza died in childhood.  Mrs. Pierce died in January 1870.  Mr. Pierce was married in Geneva, April, 1871, to Hannah Morehouse, his present wife, daughter of Henry and Mary Morehouse.  Mrs. Pierce was born in England.  Though not an office-seeker, Mr. Pierce served his time as town clerk several terms, two terms as assessor, and has been Clerk of his School District, No. 5, six years, was president of the Elkhorn Bank, Elkhorn, Wis., from 1857-1861.  Mr. Pierce, in 1853, imported from Canada the first wheat that was sown in Walworth County, viz., Scotch, Fyfe, Canada Club, and China Pearl.  He also, in the same year, introduced and successfully used the first automatic self-raking reaper ever used in Wisconsin.  He also introduced the first grain sowing drill in Walworth County, and from its continued use he attributes much of his profitable success in raising wheat.  Mr. Pierce feels keenly his disappointment of the Air Line Railroad failing to come to time by not furnishing him the long promised railroad, which has been for many years graded through his farm in Sugar Creek, on which was to have been a railroad station and depot, which inevitably would have resulted much pro bon publico, although he does not despair of yet attaining in the near future the consummation of that desirable project. 

The railroad was never built. 

I was interested that great great Grandpa Pierce was an agricultural innovator, experimenting with the newest technology of the time, since my dad and brother both sold farm equipment.  I was also interested that JA Pierce grew wheat, since many of the German and Scandinavian settlers in the area were mainly interested in dairy - as were my grandfather and father.  At one time, Wisconsin was the sixth largest producer of wheat in the United States - but the crop depleted the land, and it fell from favor.   My maternal great great grandfather in Washington state also raised wheat.

Even Facebook is a source of family history information.  A former classmate grew up in the house that JA Pierce built in the 1840s.  The building is torn down now, but a quick request to my friend resulted in a photo of the old homestead for my files.  

How cool is that?