Reading: Thomas Pakenham, Meetings with Remarkable Trees; E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle

Moving: Nada

Listening: about native and introduced species of trees in the British Isles.

5 February 2000: Nisou and Trees

I called DEDBG this morning. That made both my year and us both sad.

We didn't talk long when I called her at Charenton in December, and before that we've talked on her other trips home and on New Year's Day 1997, but we haven't seen each other since her wedding in 1996, and we don't talk often. So today I would call.

I woke after eight, extremely late for me, and while I was showering and putting things to rights the phone rang. It was exactly nine o'clock, which meant one of my parents, so I answered the phone exasperatedly, unenthusiastically, almost saying "What!" A woman's voice at the other end: "Is this the Eagle Hardware?" Immediately I was contrite and my tone softened considerably--probably into The Quiet Voice--as I said, "No, it isn't."

That was all the wake-up call I needed, though. I called DEDBG before there could be further interruptions.

We couldn't talk about everything in the hour before serious guilt about the phone bill set in, but we made a good stab at it. DEDBG's voice was thick with laughter: "Oh! I remember what I wanted to ask you--has TJZ talked to you about how you feel about inviting SEBB to her wedding?"
"Me!" I exclaimed. "I don't care; I've been wondering about you!"
So we're indifferent. Well, she claims indifference. I claim curiosity.

Most of the conversation was more serious than that. On very few explicit clues she guessed at a few of my motivations for actions and inactions. I flared into indignation about things she's been going through and made my usual completely unhelpful comments. It was a good talk. We both choked up saying goodbye, or not saying goodbye. My Nisou.

Then I scampered out to the post office (mailing presents) and the library (returning all but one of last week's books) and REI (to rent snowshoes for HAO) and the framing store (for CLH's Christmas watercolor). I asked the postal clerk if they sold envelopes for book class and he pointed out the padded envelopes on a far wall. I picked one up and slid the book and card inside. "That wouldn't be a letter, would it?" he asked. "Oh no," I told him, wide-eyed. He smiled. Also I took a couple of pictures of stuff around town I've wanted to document. And I vacuumed and neglected to put clothes away and stuff like that until, just at noon, Blake took off from the desk where he'd been exploring and landed on the floor several feet away, minus a feather.

A blood feather. A brand-new, fresh grown, not yet clipped wing feather, with bright red blood in the rachis.

I seized it and examined the tip. It seemed closed, but it was possible the follicle was bleeding.

I shoved him in his pet taxi, shoved my feet in bluchers, grabbed wallet and phone and not my keys. Where are my keys? Where? No time. I dug the spare car key from my jewelry box and seized the spare house key from the basket by the door and was gone. Meanwhile, Blake was chattering in his taxi--he loves car rides.

The African Grey is a mile away. I don't always like the proprietor, Karen, but she knows birds. (When we took DMB there, Karen was feeding a clutch of new-hatched bappies: grab the bird, wait till it gapes its beak to beg, and plunge the syringe full of green bappie formula. DMB asked how she could tell which she'd fed and which she hadn't yet fed. Karen said, "Oh, I know all my babies." Patently untrue. No one except parent birds can possibly distinguish between one unlovely unfeathered dinosaur bappie and another. She--and anyone with an observant eye--could tell whether she'd fed one or not by whether its crop bulged greenly through its near-transparent skin like the breast of a ruffled grouse, nearly tipping the baby over, or whether the prickly nestling looked sleek and scrawny like Ferdinand the Duck in "Babe." Dishonest to customers, but she knows birds.) Karen handed the ringneck parakeet she'd been grooming to its parent and picked up my son. She examined Blake's left wing, which was fine--if he'd been bleeding he'd've bled all over his side and in his pet taxi by then--and while she held him in the towel, he dropped another clipped wing feather, and when she released him and he scurried to her shoulder, escaping the indignity, and shook himself vigorously to resettle his plumage, he dropped a crest feather.

I already knew he was moulting--he started shedding feathers seriously earlier this week--but I'm not used to his dropping spandy new feathers with uncoagulated blood in them.

Snake's lunch indeed.

I got books from A Common Reader today. I was expecting a priority mail package from somewhere else, but I was delighted to get my new books.

Meetings with Remarkable Trees is fantastic. The author/photographer's tremendous revernence for trees of all sorts shines through every shot. The book has photographs of sixty trees in the British Isles--natives, shrines, travelers, fantasies, and survivors, he calls the trees. (Brit-like, Pakenham uses two ls in his "traveler" and no serial comma, but this is me talking.) Every tree (or stand of trees, as in Burnham Beeches common) gets its own two-page spread, so every time I turn a page I gasp in awe and love and reverence.

Also I finally bought my publishing professor's Within This Wilderness. And RDC wants me to read Delirium, which I gave him for Christmas. And I bought Dr. Seuss Goes to War when we heard Douglas Coupland, and Mary Queen of Scots has only just married James Hepburn Earl of Bothwell so I have more than half of that to go (last week was a break for children's books), and I'm only 150 pages into The God of Small Things, and I'm rediscovering The Enchanted Castle, so I'm surrounded by a surfeit of reading. I might parcel the treats of Meetings with Remarkable Trees out over the next several days, though.

What I particularly like is that Pakenham has gone through some trouble to learn the history of the individual trees that he photographed. Yet another remarkable thing is that the histories of these trees are often known, even if the individual is 400 years old, because lots of them survive only because they were planted in the parkland of some titled body. The land and the trees thus have been safe against enclosure and modern development. The acknowledgements to private people (and not Cambridge colleges or the Brit equivalent of the DEP) are mostly to hyphens and titles: first names like Julian and Phillipa, titles like Lord and Lady Cavendish, the Earl of Mansfield, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, and surnames like Hutton-Bury, and Steuart-Fothringham. Steuart-Fothringham? Wasn't he in a P.G. Wodehouse story? So anyway, when nonnative trees were imported from North American (southwestern Connecticut's tulip trees, Monterey Cypress from (guess!) Monterey, California, cedars from Lebanon, records and accounts exist of their purchase and planting and nurturing. Pakenham found Wordsworth's Lorton yew from the poem "Yew Trees."

This is the best book I have ever had the pleasure to own, discover, peruse, treasure, and display to less thrilled persons. I've always wanted to go to the Lake District, partly for my favorite poets and partly for Swallows and Amazons, and now I want to go for my trees as well--like anyone with as anemically blue blood as dukes and earls would allow a third-generation daughter of an Irish criminal on their land.

In my brief sketch of me, I say that if I were religious I'd subscribe to an earth-worshiping faith. I take it back. I already belong to a tree-worshiping faith, of my very own.