“You might frequently say of a poet away from home that [s]he was as mute as a bird of passage, uttering a mere chip from time to time, but follow him to his true habitat, and you shall not know him, he will sing so melodiously.”
                                            The Journals of Henry David Thoreau, March 25, 1858

      Home-home this weekend, my parents’ home, the one my father built shortly after he came home from the war, the one I was brought back to after being born in the hospital, where all three of my siblings were brought. I think not many Americans have this still in their lives. I slept the best that I have for weeks, as did Mom, who has had difficulties in sleeping since Daun died. 
       Then Sunday, after a Saturday of shopping and cooking, we had an open house for the relatives to see Daun’s daughter, now 6 years old and thriving under the care of my remaining sister and her husband. On both sides, the family has aged a lot, and it was strange to only have few children and only one babe in arms there, and that not a relative. Still, it was a good afternoon, good to see the aunts and uncles and to talk to the cousins our age.
      Today it was incredibly beautiful, warm all morning. Finally, at noon, I walked out to get some exercise, something I haven’t done and am feeling the lack of. I walked around the field near the Everett covered bridge, then hiked up the wooded hill (rather than the road) to the Center and back home, wearing a light velour jacket.
      I do have trouble writing poetry away from home—and I have been so much away from home the past 3 years, don’t clearly or fully have a home yet. A part of me rebels still against considering New England home. On the  one hand, it is where Paul is and has been two years, and  I want to call it home, but it isn’t yet. “There are no buckeyes in New England,” I came across in Thoreau. (Everyone tells me there are but called “horse chestnuts.” Are they new there or did Thoreau not know if?) And, on the other hand, it isn’t as if Findlay ever felt like home or that I still have a home there.
      I do think I will warm up to here in another week—so like me to get comfortable once the experience is over half over. 
 It has clouded over again, now at 4:00. Every day  has had three kinds of weather—if not climate. Tomorrow night is the night hike, with me outside as the moon again, so I am hoping again for good weather. Last week, the full moon, began cloudy, but cleared, with the moon rising higher and fuller every minute.
 
 

Wednesday, 26 March 2003

      The world of commerce is too much with us. Both Paul and I have had a week rife with estate crises. Neither of us has the personality or experience to be an Executor, especially in the two estates we’ve been handed. Having spent most of our adult lives with very little money and property (we are short form 1040, as Paul says), it is mind-boggling to have money to manage which isn’t ours ethically only legally (which our accountants do get), but half the yahoos we deal with think we are just raking up and raking up into big piles of interest. I remember early on, trying to find info online on how to proceed as an Executor, looking at books on the subject. It is like looking at a recipe for chocolate mousse and having the ingredients for wacky cake. I spent the morning calling four people and institutions in a current estate crisis, then trying to get to a fax machine, which are not exactly behind every tree in the National Park. 
      Last night we had rain which turned to a thunder storm, and so my moon show got moved indoors as they call the Night Hike off when there is thunder. I have given up on wearing my beautiful white and silver, feathered Mardi Gras mask, as it seems too devoid of personality (as Beth reminds me the masks erased the individual in the Greek drama) and now am sporting an even bigger moon tattoo on my naked face than last week. It has been interesting telling the kids the Spanish folk tale about the aqueduct, working in the idea of a solar eclipse. Sixth graders in Ohio had three questions on eclipses on the Ohio proficiency exam, which I hate, but which I have used in my storytelling to them. I think of myself as running interference on that exam, bringing the wonder and awe along with the knowledge they learned. 
      Today while I was on the phone, looking out the window, I saw the sleekest, most clearly marked robin I have ever seen in my life. He was like a poster child for we-be-perfect bird examples. He was even stabbing worms out there. Speaking of the wildlife, which I continue to be pleasantly undone by, I had noted that for several days, we hadn’t heard the peepers. I asked everyone, “Have you heard them? Are they done?” Then, last night, during the night hike, the peepers were so very loud that I could barely hear the people on the trail with me, unless we stood close and raised our voices. I had just found Sam Hammill’s article on making a broadside for Ruth Stone’s poem “Mantra” which has the lines: “When I forget to weep,/I hear the peeping tree toads/creeping up the bark.” I imagine the tree toads here gathered in a big circle in some lowlying lovely area of some bog, arms wrapped around each other, peeping their little froggy lungs out, something like “Viva la company!” (no pro- or anti- French statement intended. No, let that stand as my one pro-French pun for the week, as people pour good French wine down the drains to make some lunatic point.) The peepers' song echoes in a watery way. I have not yet forgotten to weep. The hurt is too close still.
 
 

Sunday, 30 March 2003

      Friday, we had incredible spring weather, highs of 70 or 75 degrees, so warm the Friday staff meeting was outdoors. Then Saturday, there was what Thoreau calls a “spitting snow” by later afternoon, early evening. This morning, when I got up and went to the living room, I laughed and then opened the bedroom windows: there were fat white flakes coming down. None of them have settled, but it is a chilly day. We walked for an hour and a half and my nose ran like a cold faucet the whole time. 
      Paul was here with me this weekend, and we commiserated with each other on working within bureaucracies. The worst parts of the National Park job remind me of the worst of the Fulbright professorship I had in 1992. As with the Fulbright, I am working with a nonprofit with connections to the federal government, am surrounded by employees from each. It isn’t clear who is in charge, so whoever I ask or whoever tells me, someone comes along to contradict, correct, or scold. In addition to all that, this is a spoken culture rather than a written culture, so there is no paper trail. When I was describing the situation with Paul, we decided that my life has become like N!ai, !Kung Woman, and I am very comforted by that analogy. Diane! Kung Woman! I may start making a lot of clicking noises in the back of my throat. 
      As with the Fulbright, the best part of the National Park work is the students that come through here and my colleagues, the interns and park rangers who lead the kids. (In Nicaragua, in addition to my students, it was all those wonderful Americans, like Beth Brits, and Australians—as well as that one great Peruvian-American. MacGregor O’Brien MacGregor). I began some new poems this week with students from Brecksville-Broadview Heights Middle School. A boy named Tom stunned his teacher when he wrote this poem:

CATTAIL POND

Cattails, carrails, cattails,
all in one pond,
you look in the water 
and what do you see?

Not your reflection
or things behind you
but in its innerself
you see another world.

In this world you see
only the coolest animals you can be:
newts and salamanders,
fishes or frogs.
Oh how we love this pond,
Oh how we love this pond.

      Is the “other world” in the pond’s “innerself” so very Transcendental? Everyone asks me if I am editing the kids’ poems, but I barely touch them, they seem to flow out of them like water.