Literature and Lanscapes

        In the library to find some poetry by William Blake the other day, I passed an irresistible book on a new-books shelf called Literary Places. Its cover—copper-shiny lettering over a painting of a red-roofed Greek city at the edge of a blue sea—was as enticing as its title. I took it home, of course.

        What a wonderful book! Its premise—that to travel to a place made vivid in fiction is to relive that book in that place—is the same as that of my first lecture for the Oregon Council for the Humanities' Chautauqua Lecture Series, "Swedish Literature and Landscapes." I chose novels and poems in which the Swedish landscape is as significant as the characters, such as Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants, set in Smaland, and, most strikingly, Gösta Berlingssaga, by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and the first Swede to win the Nobel Prize in literature. That novel's vividly evoked Värmland is the perfect backdrop for such a wildly romantic tale of 18th-century Sweden. Driving through it in the summer of 2015, I could easily imagine the wolves running alongside Gösta's sledge as he carried away the beautiful Anna Stjärnhök. I could see the Burlita Cliff, where Major Fuchs refrained from using a silver bullet to kill the great bear so the sexton could do it and thus win the hand of the lovely Fröken Faber. The novel's dashing romanticism, its bargains with the devil, the loves lost and won, the cavaliers so goodhearted and so worthless, the struggles to do right in a world where passion and human weakness work against the desire to do the right thing—such tales are rightly placed in such a landscape.

        How could Sarah Baxter, who wrote Literary Places, have left out Gösta Berlingssaga? How could she, in fact, have left out My Antonia, in which the characters' lives and personalities are formed by the Nebraska prairie; or Jack London's The Call of the Wild, a novel in which landscape is character if ever there was one. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's young adult novel, The Yearling, depicts the Florida landscape in so much detail that my son and I made a relief map of it, placing the house, the bear hunt, the swamps and roads and fields of the book exactly in place. Albert Camus's The Stranger is so intricately involved with the landscape of Algeria that Camus described Mersault, its protagonist, as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture" because he is so much a part of Algeria. The cities and deserts of North Africa are so well depicted in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky that they become characters themselves, powerful forces in what I found to be a horrifying work of psychological terror. How could Liertary Places have left out these significant landscape-and-literature books?

        But that's the way with book lists, isn't it? Someone is going to have some favorite that the list-maker omitted. Baxter did include many books I would have included, the omission of which would have been egregious according to anyone's list: Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (Paris), Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend (Naples), Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (London), Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (Columbia, though I would have chosen 100 Years of Solitude instead), and, above all, James Joyce's Ulysses, with its descriptions of Dublin so detailed I could walk Bloom's entire day's journey, from book's beginning to book's end, when I was in Dublin in 1967; and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, a book whose characters could not be imagined anywhere except on those wild, windswept, cloud-glowered moors of northern England.

        You're probably wondering how I could leave out your favorite landscape-and-literature book. My reason is no doubt also Baxter's: There is a limit. One has to stop somewhere.

Swallows in Chimneys, and Yet the Skiing Is Good

          A friend who lives on the Oregon coast posted, earlier this winter on Facebook, a photograph of a bird at his bird feeder that he said was a winter bird he doesn't see there often. "Is this a cooling trend?" he asks, tongue, I think, in cheek.

          In early January, my husband, who owns Home Comfort, a stove store in the Rogue Valley, was installing a new stove in a customer's house and found in the chimney a new swallows' nest. Swallows are protected birds during mating season, so their nests cannot be disturbed. The installation had to be postponed. The customer was fine with the delay. Let the birds raise their young, they said. When the babies fly away would be a good enough time to install the new stove.

          But swallows nesting in January? Didn't they know it was still winter? What were they thinking, that pair of swallows, starting their family in January?

          Is the trend towards warmer winters? Or is there a cooling trend? Think about the snow we had in the Rogue valley at the end of September. September? (And birds nesting in January?) With such a beginning, I looked forward to a wonderfully long cold winter, skiing every weekend and wearing my beautiful wool sweaters and lovely scarves.

          I sulked, then, when that promising beginning was followed by a long warm autumn. What happened to the cold winter I like so much? A snowfall just before Christmas seemed to promise its beginning, but then the temperatures rose again, and I pouted and fretted and complained again. A foot and a half of snow at my house in January sent me into ecstasy, but it melted all too soon, and we were back to autumn (if I'm being optimistic) or already welcoming spring (if I'm pessimistic).

          Somehow, though, in spite of too-warm temperatures, the skiing has been fabulous. 

On Lollipop Loop, at Fish Lake, Oregon (I'm in the red hat.)

The temperatures at higher altitudes have been just low enough to make rain down below snow up there, and the snow has been just enough on the weekends to make a soft cover over a hard-packed base. 

            There have even been days cold enough for me to wear my Uggs.

          A few weeks ago the temperatures dropped into the low twenties. Oh, it was beautiful! The trees were frosted white. Each branch, and each twig on each branch, was etched into sharpness. The fields were white. The hard grip of Old Man Winter was upon the land. Remembering that the snow didn't start till February last year and that even at that late start, we had plenty, not only for good skiing but also for summer water, I remained hopeful.

          Hope is rapidly waning.

          Is there a cooling trend or is there a warming trend? Winter birds show up on the Oregon coast as they used to do, but swallows build nests in January thinking it's spring already. It snows in September, then acts like spring, then turns ice-cold in February. What are we to make of such contradictory evidence?

          (1) We can admit that weather is not climate.

         (2) I can set aside my petty responses, realizing that for me cold weather is just a matter of what I like, not, as for native people of Alaska, for instance, a matter of life as they know it.

          (3) We can leave the predictions and interpretations to people who know a whole lot more than we do. (They say the globe is steadily and rapidly warming.)

          (4) I can like what I get, since both snow and warm, balmy days are beautiful.

Valentine's Day

          The first Valentine's Day that Mike and I spent together after we were, I thought, securely sweethearts fell on a Monday, a night I was already spending at his house on a regular basis. 

          All disappointments come from expectations, so I'll admit that because I was looking forward to some small recognition of our sweetheart status, I was equally dismayed when nothing seemed forthcoming. Finally, I mentioned that this was Valentine's Day, somehow adding a subtle hint about Valentine gifts. 

       He was nonchalant and dismissive. He said he thought Valentine's Day was just some commercial trick, another way to make people buy things, and that it didn't deserve any attention.

          I was stunned. I said—well, I probably wailed, "I think it's an opportunity!"—an opportunity to say, "I love you," to recognize each other as sweethearts. "Don't you think of me in that capacity?" I asked—or, probably, wailed. 

           Oh, yes, yes, of course, he reassured me. But he hadn't thought it was necessary to give me something for Valentine's Day to say so. 

          I didn't say anything more, and we went to bed together as usual, but I was still upset. I was probably repeating the "opportunity" line, until finally Mike said, defensively, "But you didn't give me anything."

          "Oh, but I do have something," I said. "I didn't give it to you when I realized you didn't have anything for me because I didn't want to make you feel bad." But since I had already made him feel bad by being upset, I got out of bed and brought him his present: a wedge of Rogue Creamery's Rogue River Blue cheese, at that time one of the top sixteen cheeses in the world (and now judged number one, the best blue cheese in the world) along with a copy of the essay in my book Wisdom of the Heart that talks about chocolates and cheeses and ends with this paragraph: "Chocolate speaks for the heart. 'I love you. See? I brought you chocolates.' But any good food can speak for the heart. Maybe a wedge of Rogue River Blue would work as well. 'Here, sweetheart. Have a taste. C'est mon coeur qui parle.'"

          "It's my heart that speaks," I translated as I read the essay to Mike, there in bed. It was my heart speaking to him through my Valentine's Day gift, taking advantage of the opportunity that Valentine's Day gives us to let our hearts speak.

          We were reconciled, then, and fell asleep with love in our hearts. 

          You can be sure that Mike has never neglected Valentine's Day since.

          And, of course, I've built a box around myself because there's no way I can neglect Valentine's Day, either, after making such a big deal about it the first time. But that's all right. I like having an opportunity to do something special for Mike, something that is a voice from my heart. Tomorrow night he's coming over for dinner. I'll spend the day preparing: cooking, setting the table with my Provencal tablecloth, lighting candles, dressing in a black lace skirt with a black top and a red silk scarf. Mike will arrive with wine. I'll serve figs and arugula wrapped in prosciutto for hors d'oeuvres and, for dinner, pork tenderloin with carmelized pears, a three-cheese baked spinach, and wine-braised olives. For dessert, I'll set before him a mousse-filled chocolate heart, a little heart-shaped sandwich of white and dark chocolate filled with luscious chocolate mousse. When Mike says how beautiful everything is and how good the dinner, I'll say, "Yes, sweetheart. C'est mon coeur qui parle." Then I'll give him my present, which is the same thing I've given him for the past three years: a hardbound book of my love poems to him. Here is the last poem in this year's book:

Valentine Book of Love Poems, 20920

Bigger than ever
is this year's Valentine Book of Love Poems.
No wonder.
Fear of losing you to cancer spurred love into writing poetry.
The sunshine explosion of "cancer-free"
was a bigger reason yet.
Your placing a diamond ring on my left hand
set my pen scribbling at a zany pace.
Our wedding and honeymoon alone
were reasons enough for a hundred poems
and the fraction of those that emerged on paper
were as big with love as all one hundred.

Bigger than ever
were the reasons
to write love poems this year
but the biggest reason of all
is my love for you:
constantly growing
bigger than ever.

Giving the Law a Wink

          Having finally finished knitting a very complicated sweater,

I was ready to begin an easier project with some gorgeous, hand-dyed, lavender yarn. For it I needed 32-inch size-8 needles, so I went to the knitting store and bought some.

          Then I made a swatch, a little square of knitting that determines if you need larger or smaller needles to make the pattern fit. If you have the number of stitches the  pattern calls for within that square, you're fine. If you have fewer, you need larger needles; if more, then you need smaller needles. It turned out that I needed larger needles.

         No problem, I thought. I had the receipt, so I would just exchange the needles I bought for the needles I needed.

          Not so easy.

          "I don't accept returns on needles," the owner told me.

          But I had never even opened the package! Why couldn't I just leave this package here and take the right one?

          Because, she said, it was a health code matter.

          Health code?! For knitting needles? The absurdity floored me. Do they think we lick the ends of knitting needles or that the cats might chew on them? Might we have cleaned out our ear wax with them? We return clothes we changed our minds about, fixtures that didn't fit, tools we don't want, after all. We return what we bought at a store and what we bought online. And I couldn't return knitting needles that were not the ones I needed?

          No, I couldn't.

          My irritation was showing, and I began to feel like a difficult customer, so I tried to make up for that by complimenting the owner on her scarf. She unwound it from her neck to show to me and told me where to find the free pattern. We chatted for a few minutes; then I left the store with both pairs of knitting needles.

          But I was still seething. Trump cheats, lies, breaks laws. He endangers the whole country, and Congress just winks an eye. Although there's nothing unreasonable, dangerous, or unhealthy about making an exception to the rule about knitting needles, it couldn't be done for me. Something seems out of whack.

          One Christmas season, years ago, when I had been living on the mountain for many years already and was known by the folks at the Applegate Store, which, in those years, had a post office, I received a notice in my mailbox that I had a package at the store. The day before Christmas I stopped there to pick it up. When I gave the man behind the counter the package slip, he said, "Sorry. The post office is closed now."

          Well, yes, but he knew who I was, and the package was obviously a Christmas present for me and my child; couldn't he, in the Christmas spirit, just go into the back room and get it for me?

          No, he couldn't. Rules are rules.

          Did he think Uncle Sam was standing behind me? Did he think I—or anyone—was going to report him to the police? Was there anything wrong with giving a poor woman with a child the Christmas present waiting for her in the next room?

          I believe in obeying rules. Most are made for good reasons. But maybe sometimes a rule just simply isn't applicable in a particular case. Is there anything wrong, then, in giving it a wink and acting human to human?