December 4, 2009
Friday

. . . The trees, anyway, are
   miraculous, full of
angels (ideas); even
   empty they are a
good place to look, to put
   the heart at rest — all those
leaves breathing the air, . . .
                 — Mary Oliver, b. 1935
                     from “About Angels and About Trees”
                      American poet

A few days ago I declared that recoding and posting links to my December 2004 work would be part of my Advent practice. Already I hit a snag in that plan. I did not post on this day, nor on the following day, in 2004, even though I’d become a member of the Holidailies community. Yet I want to follow through with posting something from my archives.

The choice of the piece I wrote for this date in 2005 seems appropriate. I’d found a ritual adapted from a Native American tradition of creating pictographs of their activities and an oral history to explain them. I had plenty of pictures from the year, having acquired a fine 35mm SLR film camera just after Christmas. I took a course in how to use it, shooting practice frames of scenes and subjects I would not otherwise have taken the time to look at so closely. It accompanied me on my first trip to Wyoming and my fourth (in this century) to Vermont.

The image I chose to represent January, seen above, is of three trees on a 290-acre property then (and still) known as Stray Winds Farm I’d photographed in January of 2005. In October it was sold, in nine pieces, to several parties, all of whom had plans for its development.

The property contains three public roads, so it is easy to drive through it, even though to do so usually means taking the long way between where I live and the places farther east where I shop and see the dentist and work out at the gym. I resolved to take that long way whenever practical and for as long as I could. “I figured I had at least a year before anything would take place to change the landscape,” I wrote. “Developers need time to submit plans to the township and seek permissions and make other arrangements.”

It’s four years now since the sale of the property. Most of it is still intact. The original farm house and barns still stand, and only one new house has been built. (The trees pictured are beside the large barn and across the street from the new house.) One large section somewhat removed from the old house and the new one has been fully developed as the site for the new worship space for Saint Margaret Mary Catholic Church, and I’ve gotten used to the way the road there has been widened and the countours of the land reshaped.

It’s four years since I wrote that piece, in which I confessed to being concerned with change and with trying to hold on to “things that might not always be there.”

Mary Oliver’s poem is, on the surface, about angels and about trees. Its deeper concern, however, is with “beloved ones” whose presence we no longer can enjoy. “Where are they now?” the poet asks. A question to be pondered on a Friday afternoon as I look across the water to trees that have stood exactly where they are, and apparently as they are, since I was a child, and try to put my heart at rest.

From the Archives
December 4, 2005 — Winter Count – January: In looking through my pictures and my notebooks from last January, I realized that much of what I was concerned with was change, and trying to hold on to things that might not always be there.

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