Cutting a Pattern for the Perfect Autumn

      Season-makers, I think, should work from patterns. Variations from year to year would be allowed, but if the tailors would use patterns, they could cut the seasons according to what we already know is a perfect fit. My suggestion is that the tailors take this autumn as the pattern for all future autumns, since it is as near perfect as they come.

      Consider, for instance, color.

The tailors this autumn have eschewed the washed-out blandness of some years, pale, uninteresting fabrics, in favor of vividness and sharpness.

They have shunned the monotony of last year's yellows in favor of a rich variety of hues and tints. We don't have to dig deep into our vocabularies to describe the trees. We can take one look and shout, "Red! Yellow! Bronze! Orange! Pink! Burgundy!"

and then if we want to get closer, we can lean in and whisper, "Cinnabar. Magenta. Amber. Terra cotta. Russet. Mauve. Ferruginous."

      Next to color, the most important consideration for a perfect autumn is rain. A long autumn of dry days is wearing on the nerves, since we are never far from the thought that without winter water we face summer drought. Our spirits begin to dry up. We lose the spring in our step. We languish in gloom even under bright skies. On the other hand, an overly wet autumn doesn't give us a chance to breathe. When it rains too long our spirits are dampened. Our step becomes weighted. We peer at the sky as though from under water, looking for that blue that will give us a chance to come up for air. This autumn, which, as I say, should serve as the pattern, has given us a dash of rain now and then, every once in a while a good hard downpour to promise a strong, wet winter, and plenty of balmy, sunny days when we can breathe deeply and swim happily in autumn air.

      Temperature is perhaps the most temperamental element of all, and tailors could maybe make some adjustments in this autumn along these lines. It's easy to spoil the whole outfit by getting things either too cold and dry or too warm. Colored leaves go with cool weather like scones with tea, and cheese with wine. Autumn should be crisp, with nights cold enough to sweeten the apples and days just cool-tipped. This autumn has been a little too warm for the perfect pattern piece. Frost hasn't even killed my zinnias yet. The overall feeling isn't bad, day and night, but adjustments would be in order.

      The night sky of autumn is important, too. It should be keen and lustrous, something with an edge to it, something tinged with excitement or desire. Imperfect autumn nights – too warm, too wet – seem a little warped, the stars globbed onto the sky with glue. Autumn nights that serve as the pattern have a crescent moon and a scattering of stars cut out by a precision die and incised into the sky.

      So there you have it. That's how autumn ought to be, so let the pattern-makers take note: for color, rain, and night skies, (not quite for temperature), this autumn is a perfect fit.

Eulogy for my sister Linda

My sister Linda, a year and a half older than I, died on Oct. 13, from Lewy body dementia. My post this week is my eulogy to her, dedicated to her memory.

Linda Rose Stephens, 1943-2017

            Linda had our parents to herself for a year and a half, but I know, by extrapolation from the person she was in later years, that she was not jealous and angry when I arrived but generous and loving. I adored my older sister. We played dress-up together, had a wedding for Raggedy Ann and Andy, explored the woods like little elves, climbed the mimosa tree like monkeys. Dad's nickname for Linda was Monkey. When Linda went to first grade, I moped so much that Mom and Dad put me in kindergarten, but Linda shared school with me. She taught me to read. For twelve years I followed her through school. At the beginning of every school year, teachers would say to me, "Are you as smart as your sister?"

            When Linda was a senior in high school, she wrote in my yearbook, "You have been my roommate for so many years it will be hard to break a new one in." We angled the heads of our beds in a corner so we could whisper late into the night, commiserating about the girls who snubbed us and mooning over the boys we loved. Linda handed down her clothes to me. We participated in church youth activities together, played in band together (Linda on clarinet, I on drums), were in the same Girl Scout troop, camping and canoeing and doing good deeds. Linda learned to sew through Girl Scouts and was a fine seamstress. It was through Girl Scouts that she learned about occupational therapy and decided to make that her career.

            The summer before Linda's sophomore year in college, a man in our youth group at church asked me if Linda could cook. She couldn't, but he married her, anyway. Consequently, maybe, the marriage didn't last, and Linda moved back to Atlanta to raise her two boys and create a sparkling career. I have always had the greatest respect for her for doing both things so well.

            I knew Linda as a sister and a friend, but not very well as an OT. I remember when she got her Masters degree, and I was vaguely aware of her leadership in the Georgia Occupational Therapy Association. Linda was never very good at blowing her own horn, and I understood how good an OT she was only when I witnessed her at work. I was so impressed with the way she handled the kids and, especially, with how much both the kids and their parents loved Linda. They thought the world of her.

            Linda's happiest adult years were those with Bruce. She relaxed with him. The sharp edges blunted. She enjoyed life's pleasures. I am grateful to Bruce for providing that for her.

            The last years were a painful degeneration.

My siblings at my new house, 2010 (L-R: Sharon, Laura, Lee, Linda)

 It broke my heart to find her less and less cogent each time I visited her, all that intelligence and sweetness rotting away by her disease. I felt so far away and useless at my home in Oregon. I sent her cards twice a week until, last spring, even those became useless. All I had left was thoughts and sorrow.

The sisters at the first nursing facility Linda was in, 2014 (L-R: Diana, Linda, Sharon, Laura)

            I am inexpressibly sad to have lost my sister. There is a hole in our midst when the siblings get together. It is hard to think of us as four instead of five. I know now the truth of something I said in an essay many years ago, about seeing a V of geese flying south: "Flying exactly, symmetrically in its place among the seven dark gray silhouettes, but barely distinguishable against the pearl-grey clouds, was an albino goose. Keeping up wingbeat for wingbeat in the rhythmic pulse of flight, it was like a negative of its neighbors, like a placeholder. It must be like that to have a beloved companion die: an emptiness in the shape of that person where that person had once always been."

            There will always that emptiness now in the place where Linda had once always been. She is that albino goose in the flock of our siblings.

2012. L-R: Diana, Lee, Linda, Laura, Sharon

 I am going to miss my older sister.

2009 (I am in front, Linda behind me)

Whisperers of the Forest

             We don’t have to go to the extreme of Jains, who wipe the ground in front of them to avoid stepping on bugs or spiders, but it does matter how we treat the creatures of nature. Catch-and-release fishing, for instance, might be a good start towards treating wild animals better, though some animal rights fanatics point out the cruelty of even that sporting method. John McPhee, a fanatical fisherman who has written a book about shad fishing, gives their arguments in that book. Then you expect him to defend the sport he loves. Instead he says, somewhat shamefacedly, “They do have a point.” Perhaps, he says, generations years hence will be aghast to think how we treated animals.

             I have long been neighbors with wild animals, having lived for thirty-five years on the mountain, not at the edge of nature but in its lap, not on the margins of the woods but in the forest itself. I allow wasps to fly in and out of my open windows along with butterflies. Yellow jackets, though, are bullies and deserve to be knocked out of the way with my hand if they're hovering while I eat lunch on the deck. I can almost but not quite understand what the raccoons are saying when they warble to each other through the woods at night. I miss the porcupines. I haven't seen one for decades. I love the blue-tailed skinks disappearing with a flash of cerulean under the front step. I would like to see more snakes in my yard. Contrary to iconography, I consider snakes good omens for the land.

             Once I was on a hike with a ten-year-old boy who found a snail in the middle of the trail. Afraid someone would step on it, he stooped and picked it up. Though snails usually retreat into their shells at the slightest sign of danger, this one stayed fully extended in Condor's hand as Condor stroked and petted it with one finger. The snail seemed to be in sensual heaven, even turning on its back, like a dog, for more petting on its belly. Condor, the snail whisperer.

            One summer day I was sitting on the bench under my cherry tree when the bear walked by (my bear, Mr. Bear) through the woods behind me. Stately and huge in his shaggy coal-black mantel, he ambled om past, then scrambled up the hill. If he knew I was there, he didn't care. That evening three does and a pair of fawns galloped under the plum tree, frightened by some unseen danger in the woods. Later, at dusk, on an errand outside I heard my barred owl on the path just behind my house, very close, very loud. Early the next morning a fox stepped on the path in front of the house and stood there barking. Did I have a whisperer's connection with these wild animals who called my home their home? I had talked to each of them, whispering my thanks. I wouldn't mind being the bear, deer, owl, and fox whisperer of the forest.

Murmuration in the Park

      A group of starlings is a murmuration. Murmurations flow and swoop in aerial dances, individual birds communicating by anticipation, like a line of chorus girls, each knowing when to lift her leg at the precise rhythmical moment. Dancers of all traditions communicate in the same way. Whales in pods communicate.

     With that inspiration, a performance troupe called Lelavision (my son and daughter-in-law, Ela and Leah) created Interspecies Communication, both a sculpture, conceived and built by Ela, of a starling with movable wings, flying over a truck-bed whale, and a community event, a gathering of dancers and musicians of many traditions, conceived and organized by Leah. This murmuration took place in Duwamish Waterway Park in Seattle last weekend, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

      I arrived the day before the event to help assemble the sculpture, which had been packed in pieces onto a Mitsubishi flatbed for travel. It was after dark when the forklift raised the bird, with its sixty-foot wingspan, into the air and lowered it carefully atop the thirty-foot poles bolted to the truck at the back of the cab.

It glowed and glittered in the floodlights, its two hundred smaller birds, lined up in the open-frame wings, twirling and twinkling in the wind.

       The next day the whale was assembled over the truck (head on the cab; tail drooped down the back end),

and at 3:00 two men from a yoga institute in Seattle, one dressed in white with a tall white turban, started the event with a gong and a drum.

Then the president of the Duwamish tribe, on whose land the park had been established, accepted tributes. After that the murmuration swirled and swooped: an Indian mudra dancer in bright fluttery scarves and skirt; dancers of the Japanese Butoh, in white-face make-up, black pants, and white tunics;

a gaggle of children dancing with miniature movable-wing bird sculptures they had made; a large black woman in a high black turban drumming and singing for the Interplay dancers (one of whom danced in bright yellow rubber boots). The dancers were on the grass, the musicians on the back of the whale, the audience facing the river and a swoop of crows over the Seattle city-scape beyond it. Above everything rose the sculpture with the bird's long beak pointing into the distance and the smaller birds in its wide-spread scalloped wings whirling and twinkling against the black clouds that threatened but never produced rain.

        Then Ela, on the stage, started playing his smaller sculpture-instruments, recording their music in a feed-back loop. Behind him Leah pulled a strap hanging from the body of the bird, down and up, making the bird’s wings wave. As the music swelled orchestrally and the bird flew gracefully thirty feet overhead, Leah, dancer and aerial artist, pulled herself into the strap, letting her acrobatics and rhythmical movements keep the bird flying, wingbeat by wingbeat.

Somersault by arabesque she hoisted herself higher and higher until she was just under the body of the bird. Ela left the music to loop along by itself and climbed onto the top of the whale’s head. Muscularly, he and Leah pulled themselves into the open framework of the bird.

They lay down in the body, their arms outstretched like wings. Because they were in the sky and the bird's wings were flowing, the impression, movement by movement, was that the dancers, too, were flying: dancers, bird, whale, and audience in an interspecies communication. Finally the dancers stood upright in the body of the bird,

their arms straight overhead, flying over the trees, through the sky, and on to unknown heavens, their silver-gray and sequined outfits sparkling like the inset twirling birds against the dramatically dark sky.

         Back on the ground, Leah led us all in a communal dance: “Walk. Come on. Everyone can walk. Run. Spin,” and so on, until most of the audience was running and spinning and dancing. Then she had us join hands and led us in a spiral, into the center and back out to a circle. 

        After more dances, and recitations by Seattle's poetry-slam winner, and fabulous nonsense-word singing by a Seattle artist, Ela invited the audience-participants – anyone who wanted to – to climb up the whale-tail ramp and pull the strap to send the bird a-flying. It was surprisingly easy to do. Little children, hardly tall enough to reach the strap, could pull it.

The trick was to listen to the bird's communication of movement, to find its graceful, meditative rhythm – the pull-and-let-go, the beat of the twinkling wings. 

       As twilight darkened into night, we ate grilled hot dogs and continued the murmuration in smaller groups. Green and purple lights came on the sculpture. The wings twinkled with subtle color, no less aerial than those of the planes flying over our heads to a landing at SeaTac airport.

       The next day we disassembled everything, loaded the bird and the whale onto the truck,

and Ela drove it all home to await the next murmuration in some other city at some other time. If it comers near you, don't miss it.