GUAVA WELL

Rural life is urbanism with a view. — Lierre Keith

Back in the day when Portland, Ore. was home,  though it was unfortunate that his column was also retired at around the same time I had moved to New York City, but for many years living in the alpine-cool northwest, I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s short column about The Rural Life religiously, and his rustic writings had always fed my soul. He had loved describing the farm from the sentient view of his animals, particularly his horses, and how they could, not only communicate seasonality through idiosyncratic behaviors, but also with the work he had to do to transition his land accordingly, capturing the poetry of that change before the memory was over. Paper in hand while reading and looking out into my small garden, Verlyn could animate my surroundings and made me appreciate life more as directly and morally interdependent with the natural world. I read Rural before I cook, and when I cook (and afterwards gather with my loved ones to eat) I knew that my hand’s imagination had expanded in my mind, and with a "farmer’s" work there was a sacrifice made for beauty.  The winters in Portland when the butterfly bush was dead and the peony buds come out from the same ground; or in late autumn when the Italian plums teem in the tree in my front yard (I preserved them as compote jam with sage for gifts to friends and neighbors alike); and in the summers when the Sauvie Island strawberries couldn’t be better than any of the rest— my “rural life” was lived in my heart. I planted the climbing hydrangea on the chimney wall. I collected firewoods. I never picked the weeds in the grass because I knew in the spring their flowers would turn to cotton helixes and then taken elsewhere by the wind to seed. The four dogwood trees outside my house also bloomed at the coming of spring. (There were four stigmata marks around each petal of the dogwood flower, and at the center was a crown of yellow like a button of cloves.) I think it is literature’s job to make reminiscing like this worthwhile. Mr. Klinkenborg’s farm was in Vermont, if I remember correctly, but his literature, in his words, was his “ground of being” (borrowing the expression from the existential philosopher Paul Tillich). In Maui where I am now, I listen to the roosters at four in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. And the moonshine here is like no other— either the porch has its illumined spirit ad hoc, or an elevator shaft of light was there reaching down from the firmament of night. The equestrian ranches upcountry remind me of the rural life, though absent the bales of hay, yet I wonder how the writer I had always admired has been. Last night I was watching a documentary film about a Japanese small-circulation newspaper going out of business after serving the backroads community for ninety four years. The editor was asked what he was going to do now that his lifelong’s work is over. He mused: “I will look forward to the future— because the ending of writing’s past can finally begin…”  It’s guava season here and this fruit has seeded pulps in its pit to make juice from and I extract this nectar like tea. I may have urban techniques as a restaurant-trained cook cooking at home, but I owe to poetry to always make food well. 

“I live my life in widening circles/that reach out across the world/I may not survive this last one/but I give myself to it.”              (Rainer Maria Rilke)       

A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals. It's a poor substitute for memory, and memory is what I would like to nourish. But if I do give in, this is what I have in mind. I want to count the crows in the field every afternoon. I want to record the temperatures, high and low, every day and measure the rain and snow. If a flock of turkeys walks into the barnyard, I want to mention the fact. If one of the horses throws a shoe, I want to say so, in writing, before I call the farrier; and I'd like to be able to tell from my journal just how many bales of hay I have squirreled away in the barn. It's no longer the writer in me that wants to keep a journal. It's the farmer — or rather the son and nephew and grandson of farmers. — VK