writewrite

I took the photograph, below, over two years ago while standing inside the EG Hill greenhouses during the days the houses were being torn down after years of disuse. It was February, I think. Cold, wet snow blowing through the broken glass roofs, the place barren and silent. This photograph is of the doors I, and many many countless other workers used to walk through on our way to the north houses. Houses seven through two, if I remember at all right. I probably don’t. It’s been a long time.

The doors were never as battered as this photograph, nor was the aisle beyond ever cluttered with debris. We swept every day, twice a day. But the doors were green. Green doors. I remember bumping the front of my cutting basket against those doors every morning in the cool dark before dawn; the doors were like barroom saloon doors that flipped open when you leaned against them. I will never forget the sound of the doors, wooden, that impact of door on metal basket like an old baseball bat, almost like that. Then they flapped open, and you were through. They slapped shut behind you, once, then stopped. The day had begun.

I still have the dead rose a demolition worker handed to me that February day.

Keep this, he said. This used to be a beautiful place.

So it was.

Hill Floral Group, in Richmond, Indiana, is closing for good. Read the news story about it here LINK. This is the end of an era for Richmond, Indiana, once rightly and proudly known as the “Rose City.” No more. What is Richmond now? Hard to say. Strip malls and Wal-Mart, fast food and warehouses. The interstate. The flyover zone. It’s a sad day for Richmond.

It’s predictable: I’ve been back in the Midwest for about thirty-six hours, more or less, and right about now homesickness sets in, the way a bad cold sets in. Just settles down, weighty and immovable, here for week or two or three. And there’s nothing to do but wait it out. Happens every time.

Homesickness is the affliction you can’t talk about. If you might say to someone — a friend, a family member, a co-worker — that you’re homesick, at all, it evokes predictable responses. One, from the people back home, that place you long for: come back, they say. Come back. And that siren call is sweet, and you think about it maybe more than you should, but the notion of coming back (because they mean now, not sometime, but now) is a bit absurd when there is no back to come to. You don’t live there. You live here.

The second response comes from the people where you live, which is here, not there: we’re sorry you don’t like it here, they say, that you don’t like us. And then they get a little morose, won’t talk to you for awhile. You try to explain, that’s not it, not it at all. Homesickness is not about disliking one place or liking another place more. It’s not about saying here pales in comparison to there. That’s not it. But they take it personally, and so you stop trying to explain too much.

And then, of course, your friends. Tell them you’re homesick and they’ll do nice things to make you feel better. Distractions, really, and it’s very nice of them. But there are only so many trips to Target one person can make in any given period of time. That’s pretty expensive therapy.

Homesickness, if you trivialize it, is a maudlin desire to be somewhere in the past, a pretty place you have artfully and selectively remembered, editing out anything that offends the senses. I suppose. That’s not my homesickness however. I am homesick, I miss, the land of New England. The way the roads twist and turn through woods and fields. The way the light comes through the leaves, dappled, shimmering. The way the sky gets a brilliant blue on hot summer days, a blue so clear you could swim in it. I miss how people speak, not that accent, but the way people engage in conversations with a kind of aggressive curiosity. New Englanders, and the occasional New Yorker, say what they think. If you’re from there you know it’s not rudeness; rather, it’s like taking a big stick and nudging at truth, getting it to poke its head out. Truth, of course, in the form of a snapping turtle.

Homesickness is also about missing the small things. Like real iced coffee. And people who understand that iced coffee is a brilliant drink, not something weird inflicted on hot coffee. Think about it: if you drink down a big glass of iced coffee on a hot day? Suddenly you are both cool and wired. Sweet. And of course, homesickness is about missing the lovely Red Sox, the town signs with the date of incorporation (Concord in 1635), sandpipers, purple loosestrife, fresh fish, all that.

This particular bout of homesickness will be alleviated by one thing only, and it’s not Target. I always tell my students, when they are beleagured by something — an idea, a memory, a worry — to “write about it.” Whatever “it” happens to be. And writing not as therapy, not simply moaning and groaning on the page, but writing to understand what it is that’s pestering you, and why. For once, I think I’ll listen to my own advice.

Yesterday, my brother and I spent the better part of the day in a canoe, on the river, fishing. We started in the middle of the day, an absurd time to fish. It was hot. 90 something or more. Barely a breeze. Barely a cloud in the sky. Dan and I put in at the Lowell Road bridge in Concord, then paddled upstream on the Assabet. The river was profoundly low, the river bottom sometimes inches away from the underside of the canoe. Thousands of jittery insects danced along the smooth surface of the water. A sandpiper fretted along the sandy bank. Somewhere along the way, a great blue heron took off, right beside us, flapping slowly up and away.

We paddled along until we reached a bend in the river, and a very small set of rapids. Very small, one we could probably have handled just fine if the water were high enough. As low as the river was, however, there would be no passing but portage. So it was here, perhaps an hour’s worth of paddling, that we turned around. Dan, who has fished the rivers of Concord often enough to know where the good spots are, suggested we try fishing right there. We did, shaded by some enormous trees, casting our lines into the shade, near the bank.

“It’s so hot, we probably won’t get anything,” Dan said.

For a long time, he was right. We didn’t. In that time I did have a chance to remember how to cast. At first I tried to manhandle the rod like a tennis racket, as though I could whack the lure exactly where I wanted it. Bad idea. The lure went about straight down. Then I tried something which must have resembled a golf swing. Yet another bad idea. I missed Dan’s head by less than a foot. Several dozen casts later, I finally remembered how to fish. It’s like any other physical act: your body knows what to do, and your mind has to get out of the way. When I finally got that, I could cast. The lure soared out in a sweet arc and landed where I wanted it (more or less). Again and again.

It occurred to me then that fishing is like writing. You have to get out of your own way in order for the words to come. How nice, I thought. A metaphor, here on the river. So I offered it up to Dan.

He kind of snorted, not unkindly, and said, “I think a lot of writers have said that fishing is like writing.”

“Or writing like fishing,” I said.

“Either way.” He added: “I’m pretty suspicious of metaphor anymore, anyhow.”

“Yeah.” I cast out my lure, watched the arc, the satisfying plunk into the water. The ripples widened slowly out across the calm calm river. And then I tried to remember the poem, the one I remember now, “I’m Explaining a Few Things,” in which Pablo Neruda writes about the Spanish Civil War, the atrocities, the horror. He writes:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings-
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black frairs spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

I offered up what I could remember of the poem to Dan. He nodded. “Sounds about right,” he said.

We kept fishing, mostly silent, watching the river, the sun, our lines. We drifted into the sun eventually, the shade where fish might rest now out of reach. We picked up our paddles and began to move back upstream. As we passed the huge homes that front the river we could hear lawn crews with their mowers, leaf blowers, string trimmers, all at work. One lawn had a pair of giant cast iron dogs. Another house had a real dog, chained to a tree, a blue barrel on its side for his shelter. This same house also had peeling paint, a garden of corn, squash, tomatoes, and an overgrown lawn. It was the exception. All of the other houses we passed were immaculate, enormous, profoundly devoid of signs of anyone living there but lawn crews. How my own home town has changed.

We stopped to fish at another shaded spot, tree branches hanging about two feet above the water. Caught in those branches were masses of dried pondweed, river muck hardened to bleached beige clumps.

“Wow,” I said. “Look how high the river was.”

Dan looked and then said, “Yeah. If we had been here then we would be under water now.”

Sometimes my very bright brother says very stupid things. I pointed this out to him.

“What?” He feigned hurt indignance. “I’m right!”

And then, we both cracked up, laughing like idiots on the hot hot river.

By the end of the morning, we had actually caught some fish. A handful of sunnies each, a calico bass for me, and a couple of little smallmouth bass for Dan. All were thrown back in, nothing big enough to eat, and nothing in the river edible anymore. We packed up the canoe and gear, and headed into town for something to eat, a long cool glass of water.

More on the river trip soon…I am being kicked out of the library with wifi…

The men in my family love to fish. Fly fishing, spin casting, blue fishing, catch and release of the PCB laden fish that populate the Concord River, paddling at dawn on a pond or river anywhere. My brother once went salmon fishing in Alaska. My dad often went fly fishing — where were we — I don’t remember, but I remember the hip boots, the river, and the soar and snap of the fly above the water, again and again. My Uncle Lee is the most avid fisherman of them all. He lives with my Aunt Pam outside of Philadephia and has for more than twenty years owned a cabin in Canada where he, and Pam, and my five cousins have gone every year, many times a year, to fish.

There are many fish stories, of course, and when fishermen visit with one another fish stories get traded about. Who caught what, how big it was, how really big, how interesting it was to land the fish, how very very big that fish really was. Fish tales are a bit of a cliche, I suppose. But over the years, listeting to these men tell their stories, I’ve learned something about men, and not a little about stories, but most of all this: the best fishermen tell the shortest stories.

Last night, around a table outdoors, there were at least five fishermen, including Uncle Lee. Fish stories in the air. What kind of bait, what time of day, what kind of fish, where (but never exactly where) they’d fished. Uncle Lee smiled and listened, nodding, occasionally saying “yup” in that Harper way that is an answer plumbing depths understood but unspoken. I might have asked him what he caught up in Canada year after year, but knew the answer I’d get if I did: A shrug. “You know. Trout. Pike.” Another shrug. Short story.

In Uncle Lee’s basement there is another fish story. Yesterday, we got a tour. In the basement, tank after tank of tropical fish. Maybe about a hundred tanks in all. Not pretty hobby fish well lit with little statues of divers and sharks and castles. These tanks are serious. A cleaning and water changing system links all the tanks to a central charcoal filtration system; another system runs a twice daily change of ten to fifteen percent of the water. The tanks are labeled with who is what, where they came from. There are tiny tanks for the babies; huge tanks for the angel fish the size of my palm, one very large tank with a six inch pickerel lounging about on the bottom, eyeing a school of nervous smaller fish.

The basement muttered with bubbling air filters, the air itself damp and tropical. Aunt Pam shook her head, pointed to the washing machine, as rusted as an old abandoned car. “It’s very damp, as you can see.” Uncle Lee just grinned, shrugged. Then he pointed out one tank, the third row down of five, in a wall of about thirty tanks. “Look at these guys.” He pointed to a school of tiny fish with glowing blue eyes, skittering just below the surface of the tank. Beautiful fish, sliding back and forth, trolling for bits of food. Aunt Pam, who had come down to the basement with us, bent down to look too at these tiny luminescent fish. “It’s too bad these aren’t where you can see them better,” she said. And then, a brief conversation about moving the tank, adding a new fluorescent tube to get a better view, maybe adding another tank, maybe not.

“Just leave me a path to the washer,” Pam said.

The rest of the tour was outdoors: Pam and Lee’s garden, her butterfly and rose bushes, their raised beds of tomatoes and beans, Pam’s greenhouse of cactus and orchids. Fifty years of fish, and plants, a piece of land.

*****

Today we head north. Then tomorrow, if the weather holds, a day on the Concord River, an evening fishing at Walden Pond.