After a long morning chain-sawing for the trail at Prefumo Creek helped by four students at Pacific Beach High School getting Community Service Credit, I attended a workshop at the farm this afternoon.

https://www.universe.com/events/winter-crafting-skills-series-poetry-workshop-tickets-XZ0FNH

Caroline has been a part-time staff member for a couple of years—a reserved sylphlike presence who’s shown interest in dried flowers, sheep, tanning hides, and making teas.  I learned recently she was a birth doula, nanny for Shane’s baby, extensive traveller.

She wouldn’t take the offered payment from me.

The event resonated with my recent activity to prepare a script for a ten-minute performance of the start of Shakespeare’s Sheep Shearing Shindig in Act4 Scene 4 of The Winter’s Tale  that I’ll propose as part of the program for City Farm’s Sheep Shearing Shindig coming up in May.

Six others attended the two hour session, 5 women and a man, ages mid-twenties to mid-thirties. All gave evidence of commitment to introspection, journaling, reading and writing poetry, probably greater than mine.

Caroline let us know that she’d been to college and graduate school and wrote and published.

At the start, as we sat at tables under the Pergola, she served tea and fresh bread she’d baked and described the workshop’s format: she’d provide prompts, and time for us to write in response at different sites on the farm along with invitations to read poems we’d brought.

I’d printed out Wendell Berry’s, “The Man Born to Farming,” from his  Farming A Handbook  a collection which influenced our decision to move from New York City to an old homestead we bought at the end of the road in British Columbia in 1970, where Jan and I stayed for nine years.

The Man Born to Farming

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

I was eager to read it to the group and to affirm the continuing truth of his prophetic  pastoral vision, manifested here at City Farm.

When Caroline asked each of us our connection to this place and what motivated our attendance at the workshop, I tried to keep it short, but my veteran involvement with the Farm and its link to my lifelong personal and professional literary engagements wouldn’t let me.

I’d printed a set of four pictures of the sheep that Caroline and three other staff members had slaughtered yesterday, my favorite of the flock, imagining it would inspire me to write during the workshop,

but there was no opportunity to take it out of my pack.

Caroline’s first prompt was to write without lifting your pen about last night’s sleep or a dream. It struck a note:

Sinking into the topper on my hard mattress, grateful for the fatigue and its support that floats me away, and when thoughts about the past day and the morrow crop up demanding attention, counting breaths passing in and out across the anapana spot—what’s left of my abandoned meditation practice—and knowing that by number eight I’ll be gone, and again after the midnight pee, greeting that trusty ritual, this time only up to four, grateful that this is all that’s left, no forcing or aspiration, but only an embrace of what’s not here and what is.

Next prompt involved walking to The Lookout—a location I’d selected and built up years ago, now rarely used except by shitting blackbirds– and to write inspired by its open view of land and sky.

Two mountain ranges surround us,
two watersheds converge in the creek
that fills and drains our life-rich home,
the brooks and springs marked indelible
by green explosions interlacing out and up.

The next prompt was to look at the sheep in the pen nearby and write of your connection.  I used up most of the brief time to get a sweatshirt from my car.  I observed only

Two flocks exchange stares.

Then we went to Plot 1, the immaculate regenerative vegetable garden, to look at a single plant  or creature

January peach blossom two months too early
to meet its welcoming Spring,
petals as pink, pistils and stamens
as swollen as if it had a fruitful life ahead
despite the canker that leaves last season’s
dessicated twigs and flowers on the branch.

Back at the Pergola, Caroline read a poem by her professor and mentor who died young. It started with “Write a question: Yes.”  Write a question was the prompt.

How Long Still?

Richard Stiehl in France I learned last night, died at 97.
Marilyn across the street last week at 93.
Rick in Lund at 75.
Beethoven 57, Shakespeare and Napoleon 52, Mozart 34.
Wendell Berry alive today at 90. I at 82.

Sheep and Schubert

Lambs born Mother’s Day 2014.  Franz Schubert born 1797

I was looking forward to the regular Sunday Creek Freak work party at the Restoration and Enhancement project.  In addition to the four steady College Corps Fellows–including Kennedy, whom I’d seen in a fine performance of a bizarre play at the Spanos theatre the night before, plus grandson Lucas–two new volunteers had signed up.

Late in the previous week the unfinished tasks of moving tree trunks into position together with Josh and his Skid Steer and starting the contracted maintenance program of weeding the plantings, along with testing the irrigation system, were completed.

Earlier in the week the first field trip along the creek project led by Creek Lands Conservation took place, involving 60 fifth graders bussed in for three hours.

I’d been anxiously working toward these outcomes for months.

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On Friday the 28, Jan and I visited the Reis Family Mortuary on Nipomo Street to complete the pre-arrangements for “immediate burial” in the gravesites we purchased last June in the SLO Cemetery. This is the bottom of the line selection. It includes transport and storage of the remains until the grave is dug, delivery to the cemetery, cotton shroud, cardboard box and death certificate for $1845 each, in keeping with our choice of green burial.  One option we added was permission to have a witness at the interment for an additional $250. Had we gone with the mortuary affiliated with the cemetery, the price would have been $3250.

The mortuary is located near the center of town in an attractive neo-colonial building.

LisaMae, the amiable Salesperson, made the lengthy process of filling out forms, upbeat and casual.  As it concluded, we were greeted by a gentleman in jeans and suspenders with a missing lower tooth, who introduced himself as Kirk, the son of the former owner. Though we both felt heavily in need of afternoon naps, Kirk insisted we tour  the museum his father had created. He led us down two flights of stairs, not into a dark crypt but  a riotous display of memorabilia–newspaper front pages going back to the 1930’s glued to the walls, collections of hash pipes, dolls, model trains, and bumper stickers–stored in three rooms connected by vault-like refrigeration doors, relics of the dairy operation which had occupied the site in the early 20th century.

Over the weekend, Jan’s brother stayed with us, two weeks after the memorial in Long Beach for his wife, who died recently after a year’s ordeal with brain cancer. I drove him to the RR Station at 5:00 am on the 31st and then went to the farm to tend the new lambs.  I came back home with a pumpkin and felt an unexpected need creeping over me to do something for the holiday. I emailed friends living nearby with an invitation to stop by for a drink while trick-or-treating with their kids and  set to work carving the pumpkin with the saw on my Leatherman, stuffing a warty squash in the hole for a nose.

As the afternoon darkened, I felt an urge to visit our burial plots just across the freeway. Since I expected she’d never been there, I invited my co-worker, K., to join me for a Halloween excursion. Hesitantly she agreed.

On the way, I delivered what had become my spiel about the place: its location between Central Coast Brewery and the Sunset Drive-In adjacent to a littered hobo highway, its use extending back to the Civil War, its inclusion of many SLO City notables, its Jewish and Muslim sections. We parked on Elks Lane and walked down the main thoroughfare toward the bizarre Dorn pyramid. I pointed out the sites close to it that Jan and I had purchased in January.

At the top of the serpentine outcrop on which it perched, I recounted the tale of  the husband who built it as a memorial for his wife and daughter after they died in childbirth with the intention of eventually joining them but soon afterward moved to San Francisco, started a new family and never returned.  I recollected being there 30 years earlier with students in my Shakespeare class who had chosen it for the location to video their performance of the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet.

Walking back to the car, I declared that this place felt comfortable to me because at my age death seemed  a natural and sometimes welcome prospect rather than the tragedy of dying young.  I’ve had the time to live out my opportunities and choices.

On the return drive, K. was quiet. I worried that my pressuring her to go there might have awakened the pain I remembered in her voice when she spoke about her father, who died when she was a teenager.

Back at Citrus Court the setting sun put on a florescent pink lightshow. I set the jack o’lantern onto the transformer in the front yard, moved up the slider bench for a ringside seat and poured wine for Jan and me.  As the streetlights came on, the Court awakened with costumed revelers.  First were our immediate neighbors, dressed as ’70s hippies, carrying their 2 year old, severely autistic child, who made an instant of smiling eye-contact, then turned away.  Then a group of costumed young couples and children paraded by carrying their own drinks. Other families, including a laughing grandma in a wheelchair, stopped to say hello.  Older kids dressed as media characters I couldn’t recognize, filled both sidewalks. The joyful street life recalled trick-or-treating in the poor New York district we lived in until I was eight.

Next morning at the Farm I was greeted by Miss J., the Waldorf outdoor school’s teacher. She asked me to look at the altar she’d created inside their little geodesic dome to observe November 1, Dia de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead.

Her bright display of flowers and food, colored cutouts, and photographs of departed family members brought a shock of recognition. I’d forgotten that this was the holiday of jolly mourning, the mood which  stirred me into activity yesterday afternoon.  I’d forgotten that in the corner of my study I kept such an altar year-round on an antique washstand containing the ashes of my parents.

The 1950’s wedding portrait of Miss Jewel’s grandmother and and grandfather completed the epiphany:  combining festivity and grief, we find a bit of what’s beyond our grasp.

Postscript

Thanksgiving Day morning November 24.

Getting up early after a wakeful night, I look for something to do before it gets light enough for my holiday farm chores and randomly browse this blog.  Noticing “Lund Retreat 2007,” an unremembered occasion, I open the 7-entry set, and take some pleasure in the prose and the awakened reminiscence of that autumnal solo excursion to the place which, fifteen years ago, I still regarded as my true home.  The third entry is dated October 31 and chronicles a visit to the Uhlman’s house, where Ronnie said she assumed I knew the answer to her question about the proper Jewish ritual for unveiling a gravestone the first year after interment.  Slightly shamed I told her I had no idea and changed the subject.

Back at Knoll House I happily answered Jan’s phone call.  She mentioned she’d been grieving for Henry on this Jahrzeit of his death in 1995.  With a flash it came back: Halloween in the nursing home, the staff in costume, the arrival of the mortuary attendant who identified himself as “Neptune,” and all that followed– an event recorded twelve years earlier so as not to be forgotten, but nevertheless forgotten on that very day.

Reading that as the light comes up this morning, there’s another flash.  The memory that was lost a few weeks ago, despite the mysterious impulse and visit to the cemetery and contemplation at the shrine behind me and despite the next day’s surprise recollection–that purpose of the Jahrzeit was still unrealized…until now.