Author: Judith Fetterley

March 15, 2022

Quaker

I think I’ve been a Quaker ever since my “friends” persuaded me to hurl mud at Mrs Moran’s wash as it hung on the line to dry in her backyard catty-corner across the street from where I lived until I was 10. The friends who had so persuaded my eight-year old self to be mean were long gone by the time Mrs. Moran came tearing out of the house, but I was rooted to the ground in shame and fear. Mrs. Moran collared me and dragged me home to a mother who refused to believe I would do such a mean thing. This was not because I was a goody-goody girl. Far from it, since my three true companions were boys and they made no distinctions between me and them. We wrestled, played football and hockey, made shields of garbage can lids and swords from tree limbs and fought to the death as we knew good Greeks always did.

There was something about my mother’s faith in my innate kindness that led me, right then and there, to vow that in my life I would try to live up to her faith in me. Much later I learned how to articulate this vow: Say and do what you mean, and mean what you do and say, but don’t say or do it mean.

I first encountered “Quaker” the evening of my first day on the Swarthmore College campus as an entering student. Freshman orientation was held in the Quaker Meeting House. I was lonely and scared, terrified actually, but in that simple peaceful space, each ceiling beam and floor plank filled with the spiritual energy of years of silent worship and shared messages, I felt safe and supported. I would return to sit on the steps of the Meeting House many times in the years to come to gain a sense of light when the darkness of depression and despair was deepest. I do not know why it did not occur to me to explore what went on inside the building, especially on a Sunday morning.

I vaguely knew that Swarthmore had been founded in 1864 by Quakers like Lucretia Mott to provide an education to their children consistent with their social justice oriented faith. In accordance with these Quakers insistence on the equality of the sexes, the college was from the outset co-educational. The founders took the name, Swarthmore, from Swarthmoor Hall, the Lake District home of Margaret Fell, co-founder with George Fox of Quakerism. Swarthmore was also committed to scientific inquiry since these Quakers also believed in the compatibility of science and Quakerism. After all, George Fox famously proclaimed his discovery of the fundamental principle of Quakerism: “And this I knew experimentally.” (Italics mine, not George’s, though he may indeed have given the word with emphasis.)

At Swarthmore, I discovered the American Friends Service Committee, founded in 1917 in order to provide young Quakers and other conscientious objectors to war with an opportunity to perform a service of love in wartime. I learned that in 1947 the AFSC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with British Friends Service Council. The prize recognized 300 years of Quaker efforts to do the work of peace in a world where violence seemed to predominate. In particular, it named the work done by the two recipient Quaker organizations during and after the two world wars to feed starving children and help Europe rebuild itself. The AFSC hosted weekend workcamps in nearby Philadelphia as well as overseas international workcamps. Participating in these workcamps, I made a second vow: I would do my best not to contribute to the violence that existed in the world.

After I graduated from college, I moved to Boston and worked for the AFSC in its Cambridge, Massachusetts office. During my time there I attended an international workcamp in Poland, Quakers being one of the few groups allowed to do work behind the iron curtain, and a voter registration project in Jackson, Tennessee. I remained committed to Quaker faith and practice throughout my years as a graduate student at Indiana University. But the moment I moved to Philadelphia to begin my career as a professor, I ceased to attend meeting for worship or to engage in Quaker-based activities. Living in what my friend Rosalie called the Quaker Vatican, I let it all go. It was one of the worst decisions of my life.

Of course, I understand why I did it. If one does the academic job as defined by the tenure process, it is really three jobs in one: teaching, research and writing, and service. Despite the frequent public view of academics as close cousins to welfare defrauders, sitting in our offices popping chocolates, gassing to our colleagues, and occasionally strolling down the hall to chat up the undergrads, I worked pretty much all day every day, except Sunday morning and afternoon, from September until the end of June, nose to the teaching and administrative grindstone. In July and August I worked still harder, writing six to seven hours a day. Sunday morning was my one free time, a time to sleep in or have brunch with friends or call my parents. I couldn’t give it up.

I wish I had. I made some very bad decisions during my professional years. I do not think I was ever mean, but I do think I sometimes lost sight of truth. I do think I sometimes acted without integrity and perhaps even committed a certain kind of violence. Perhaps I would not have done so if my hand had been in the stream and on the rock that is for me Quaker faith and practice Had I stayed connected to a Meeting, I might also have stayed connected to truth, integrity, and non-violence. I would also have had a community outside the academy to ground me and direct me, a community with a very different ethos from that of the academy.

I did not return to Quakerism until near the end of my career as an academic when a personal experience of such extraordinary violence brought me once again to a vow of non-violence. I might not be able to stop others from their violence, but I could control myself and hopefully model a different way of being in the world. And so I returned to Quaker meeting and to my commitment to Quaker faith and practice. As the world seems ever more consumed by violence of one kind of another, I will try this time to stick to my convictions.

Unprogrammed Quakers do not have a creed that one must swear belief to in order to be called a Quaker. Rather we have testimonies, values to which we hope our lives bear witness. Each is, as one Quaker writer puts it, “a pinch on the individual conscience, a religious imperative for each person, a response to what they consider, as a woodworker might say, to be ‘out of true.’”

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March 1, 2022

March

There flashed across my screen, when I checked in on the weather yesterday, the following warning: “March can be unpredictable. Here is what to expect. Storms, floods, tornadoes.” Today the message was a tease: “Will you need to keep your coats handy or can you break out the T shirts and shorts?” OK, weather channel, we get it. March in the northeast is definitely unpredictable and can be extremely violent.

When I lived in Philadelphia and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, March was my favorite month of the year. March ushered in a long, lovely, slowly evolving spring, with something wonderful and new happening every day. I could count on steadily rising temperatures, gentle breezes, and a lovely mix of rain and sun.

Walking to Penn from my West Philadelphia apartment a few blocks away, I watched, in succession, privet opening, forsythia starting to bloom, bulbs popping up, trees coming into leaf. I fell hard for a plant whose name I never knew but whose fragrant pink flowers delighted both my nose and eyes. When I became a serious gardener with territory to cover, I looked this plant up. I learned it had a Latin name, Abeliophyllum distichum, and a common name, white forsythia. I also learned there is a cultivar named ‘Roseum.’ I suspect that Abeliophyllum distichum ‘Roseum’ was my long-ago love. Though apparently hardy to zone 5, I have never seen this plant in any nursery I have frequented. Perhaps it is not up to March in the northeast. Zone envy!

It’s true, at the beginning of every March, I experience zone envy. Because March in the northeast is nothing like March in Philadelphia. Here March is a season unto itself, not truly winter but not yet really spring, wild and warm in fits and starts, unpredictable, moody, rough and gentle, lion and lamb from one day to the next. No wonder Alcott, a native New Englander and as moody as the month, named her alter ego and the heroine of Little Women Jo March.

Still in March, even in the northeast, there is a sense of things to come, a promise of re-awakening. Yesterday, out walking, I noticed a flush of red on the Acer rubrum, aka red maple. Its flowering is the first notice that change is happening. Sara tells me she saw snowdrops last week under the river birch. I anticipate the inevitable thaw that will reveal these tough delicates pushing up throw the snow. A bit of the lamb is expected next week.

The first warm day I will get out and prune. March is the perfect month for thinning and shaping. I will start with the Viburnums, then move on to the red-twigged dogwoods, and finally hit up the Chamacypaeris. Like Michelangelo with his marble, I am looking for the idea hidden in the mass of branches and struggling to release it. I know the comparison with the Florentine sculptor is way out of line, but thinking about “David” helps me slow down and take time. If you rush the job, it is easy to make a mistake. And getting another 15-year-old viburnum could be harder than getting another chunk of marble.

When the temperature drops again, I will turn my attention to all those tasks I should have done in November but didn’t — sharpening my tools, entering last year’s purchases in my data base, finalizing my list of chores for the coming season. And I will wait for the next warm day to start thinning the boxwoods.

This March I have added an additional task to my indoor list: ordering plants from catalogues. Last winter, after reading Doug Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope, I made a commitment to increasing the number of natives in my garden. I soon discovered that many other gardeners had made a similar commitment and that local nurseries were struggling to keep supply in line with demand and failing.   This year I am ordering native plants that will arrive by mail from places like NEPP (Northeast Pollinator Plants) in Vermont and Prairie Moon Nursery in Minnesota.

March 21, the vernal equinox, marks the calendar’s beginning of spring. I am hoping to celebrate the equinox by starting my gardening season on this day, going out no matter the weather to start the work of waking up the garden. Of course, there may be a foot of snow on the ground which will frustrate my plan. But shouldn’t we gardeners here in the northeast celebrate March 21 whether we are inside or out?

New York has its deer hunting season, Minnesota goes crazy when you can first fish for Walleyes, the opening of baseball season is an event of national importance. Shouldn’t we gardeners declare March 21 the opening of our gardening season regardless of the weather? Shouldn’t we demand that this day be taken as seriously and greeted with as much fanfare as that which attends the opening of deer hunting season or Walleye season or baseball season? Shouldn’t there be a ritual throwing of the first pitchfork, accompanied by pancake breakfasts and parades? After all, there are at least as many gardeners in the northeast as there are hunters in New York or fishers in Minnesota or perhaps even baseball fans in both these places.

Occasionally, March is the month of Easter.  One Palm Sunday my 8-year-old grand-niece asked me why we have eggs and rabbits at Easter.  In age-appropriate language, I tried to explain that eggs are a symbol of birth, and that the religious phenomenon of Easter is connected to the natural phenomenon of spring and both are experiences of birth and rebirth.  The egg looks dead until it begins to move and crack and then suddenly, miraculously, a chick emerges.  The tomb looks sealed but suddenly the stone begins to roll away and lo and behold, miraculously, a man thought dead emerges.  The garden seems frozen in place, completely dead, and then suddenly, miraculously, up shoots a snow drop or a crocus.

My explanation of the egg seemed to satisfy her.  I didn’t get too far with the rabbit, though, except to suggest that rabbits are symbols of fertility and that, as a culture, we associate spring with fertility.  Instead, I told her stories about the rabbit that lives under my deck and fills my garden every summer with little herbivores.  But why, I wonder, do we have so much rabbitry at Easter?

My rabbit is back, by the way, though I suspect for now she is only visiting. The deck is frozen solid to the ground. When it thaws, we will see if she digs back under.

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Notes near the end of a project

I have almost finished the final revision of Out in the Garden, my collection of pieces documenting my life in the garden. This past month I took apart the long narrative I had constructed out of what was really a series of shorter pieces and returned it to what I had come to appreciate as its real form– neither pure story, nor pure essay, nor pure sketch, but some weird combination of all three. This mix, I have discovered, is my true genre for writing about the garden. I only tried the longer form because I thought it might make my series of shorter pieces pass for a memoir and so be more marketable.

Relying on an aphorism that in most contexts I find repugnant, I say to myself, “It is what it is.”  By which I mean to say that as a writer you have to find your natural form and stick with it, no matter the market. Most of the pieces run about 2000 words, or roughly twice the length of my newsletter. Some are longer, some are shorter. Some look more like essays and some look more like stories.

I used to tell my doctoral students that the only good dissertation was the done dissertation. Part of me feels that way about this project – it is good because it is done. But if I am being honest, I am compelled to say that I actually like the result of this winter’s labors. I feel that I have found the right form for what I want to say about the garden. Of course, people are more likely to read short pieces one at a time these days and my book meets this need. So who knows, maybe Out in the Garden will get published, maybe it will even sell.

I also feel that I have found the right order for the pieces. Out in the Garden has a coherence now that was not possible until I had the material in the right order. Reading the book straight through, able to keep in mind as I came to each new piece what had gone before, I had fun tying things together by multiple wee cross references. More importantly, I no longer refer to a person or a plant before I have introduced them. A reader could sit down now and read the book straight through in one sitting and not be always scratching their head.

I credit the book’s getting better in part from having re-read Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. She directed me to bring to the revision of each included piece the question, What is the story being told here? To which I added two questions inspired by my current writing teacher, Jonathan Callard: Why am I telling this story, why does it matter? And why am I telling it now? Trying to answer these questions honestly, I gestured towards coherence, clarity, drama, purpose.

What remains for me to try to answer is a response to the question I cannot shake: Why am I compelled to write about my life in the garden in the first place? Why isn’t being a gardener enough? Why do I have to write about it?

The simple, and perhaps most truthful answer, of course, is that I like to write. I love creating a storytelling persona. I love telling stories. I love playing with words. And this answer is more than enough to put the question to rest. Except it doesn’t.

Years ago, when I first started gardening seriously, a friend gave me a copy of Michael Pollan’s Second Nature, published in 1991. I enjoyed it, thought it would be fun to read another book by a fellow gardener struggling with woodchucks and lawns, googled Amazon, then went to the library, then came home and took a deep breath. To adapt Virginia Woolf’s famous question in A Room of One’s Own, formulated upon discovering how many books men have written about women, Do you have any idea how many books there are about gardening written by gardeners?

I am most definitely not alone in connecting the two activities.

Indeed, Michael Pollan himself noted this connection, writing in his Introduction to Second Nature, “As most gardeners will testify, the desire to make a garden is often followed by a desire to write down your experience there.”  Pollan goes on to point out that writing and gardening are “two ways of rendering the world in rows” and so have a great deal in common.

Yes, gardeners may write but do writers garden? Yes, there is Thoreau and his bean field, Stanley Kunitz and his celebrated seaside garden in Provincetown, and W.S. Merwin and his extraordinary palm garden in Hawaii. Still, we should not forget that many writers follow Emerson’s dictum, “The writer shall not dig.” Writers may feel compelled to write about writing but they are not necessarily compelled to garden.

Since I don’t plant in rows and since I see writing and gardening as in fact very different activities – arranging objects in space is not the same as putting words in sequence – I want to probe further. And, as always, I go back to Pollan:

“In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes place strictly on paper and in the imagination. This book is how I’ve spent the last few such seasons in my garden.”

There it is. We write as a way of being out in the garden in winter. Out in the Garden contains a longish reflection on “winter interest” and its importance for the gardener living in the northeast. I have also created a powerpoint presentation on the garden in winter which rivals in its beauty and intricacy anything that a presentation on summer interest can show. I am being truthful when I say that I spend a lot of time in my winter garden, even though most of that time I am looking at my garden from inside the house. But for an equivalent to the sustained and daily engagement that I have with the garden during the gardening season, I turn to writing. This is truly how I, like Pollan, spend the winter season in my garden.

So would I, I wonder, write about the garden if I lived in a climate where I could garden all year long?

Yes, I am sure I would, because in the final analysis writing about the garden is not the same as gardening. No matter how illusory we understand the belief to be, it persists. We believe that by writing down what it means to be a gardener –to feel a small part of an immense ecosystem, to decenter the human and re-center plants, to learn to pray earthwards through our feet and hands — we feel we give it an articulation and a permanence that the garden itself cannot provide. At the end of it all, like Humbert Humbert, we turn to words.

January 18

First Friend

A week ago Monday I zoomed with my first friend, my childhood chum, my world from the age of four when my family moved to 21 Garfield Drive in Toronto until the age of ten when we left Canada for Indiana. Steve.

At one point during the conversation, Steve’s son-in-law came into the room where he was zooming and Steve introduced him to me. “Friends since the age of four,” Steve said, and I replied without thinking, “Set me up for life.” And Steve acknowledged that this assessment was true for him as well.

I do not know what Steve meant by the phrase, but for days now I have been pondering what I meant when I said that our childhood friendship set me up for life. I know it is true. I know I would not be alive today if it weren’t for those early years and first memories. I could not have survived the dark years of college and its suicidal depression, the grief of marriage and its loss of identity, the disintegration of my lesbian “marriage” and its destruction of my sense of trust in myself and others if I had not had the gifts of that first friendship to remember and draw on.

My mother understood how important this relationship was from the start. Standing in line in late August to register me for kindergarten, she heard the child in front of her turned away and the mother told to return “next year when the child is five.” The child had a birthday in October. I would not turn five until November 28. Instantly, my mother lied. “September 28,” she answered when asked for my birth date. Steve’s birthday was September 26. She was not about to let us be separated. I began school a year early.

So what were those gifts that my mother lied to protect.

Creativity. Together Steve and I made the most elaborate set ups, sometimes of our tin soldiers, sometimes of our tin animals, all of whom were carefully listed in our registry of purchases.. Around these set ups we would weave elaborate stories, create entire worlds. My mother treated our creations as sacred. No one was allowed to disturb them.

We learned at school and came home to turn our lessons into games. The Greeks and Romans may never have fought in history but in Steve’s backyard they faced off with garbage can lids for shields and sticks for swords. In these games, we were often joined by my brother, Dan, and Steve’s brother, Jim. I always wanted the Greeks to win but sometimes I had to give the victory to the Romans.

Agency. With creativity came a sense of agency. We were not passive recipients of information and experience. We were actors in our world, we made things happen, we could respond and do. Of course, sometimes this sense of agency took a toll on our animal companions. Needing a “horse” drawn “cart” for one of our outdoor creations, we tied Steve’s cocker spaniel to his red wagon and insisted that he pull it. Not surprisingly Tommy refused, but our sense of agency remained in place.

Centered. With agency came the sense of being at the center of things, not at the periphery. We made a world and I, just like Steve, was at its center. Marginalization – as a girl, a woman, a lesbian – was in my future but a childhood of being central kept me from ever fully accepting my secondary status.

Companioned. Most important of all the gifts, though perhaps the hardest to articulate, was the sense of being companioned. I had two wonderful parents and a beloved brother. But Steve was my companion, my peer, my friend. To begin life with a friend is an incalculable gift.

People talk about the value of being first among equals, but I proclaim the value of being equal among equals. There is you and there is the other, equal to you and without which you could not be yourself. You are in the center but another is right there with you in the center as well.

No matter how lonely I might be in later life, I had a memory, an image, a possibility of companionship that got me through. And a conviction that I was companionable. I had as well the experience of being centered while companioned, of knowing that one did not preclude the other.

With companionship came cooperation, and sometimes struggles, even fights. But also rapid reconciliation because what really mattered is not winning but sharing, hearing the doorbell on a Saturday morning calling you to come out and play.

I still have the tin soldiers and the tin animals; I still have postcards and notes. But what I treasure most is the engagement ring Steve gave me, after first consulting my mother as to color and composition and the appropriateness of the gift. It came, I am sure, from the local equivalent of a “Five and Ten” but it is precious to me. I remember my dad telling me that Steve’s ring was sweet but that I would need to know a lot of boys before I picked one to marry. I remember thinking, “Why should I have to travel all over the world meeting all the boys that exist, when I know who I will marry and he lives right here.” Of course, this was before I realized that I actually wanted to marry my girlfriend.

For years, I have regretted the move that ripped me from my Canadian home and from Steve. But lately I have begun to see the loss in a strange way as a gift. Moving when I did protected my relationship with Steve from the resorting of adolescence that might have broken both our hearts. Already, Steve had been getting grief from the other boys in our class because of his insistence on playing with me at recess and not them. Already my mother had told me that I could not go to the park to play hockey with Steve and Jim and Dan because “girls don’t play hockey.” Already different schools and different paths were being laid out for us. Moving when I did left me with the gifts intact.

And that is what has set me up for life.

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January 4, 2022

The Rabbit

A rabbit lives under my deck. Shortly after I moved into 29 Columbine Drive, I had a deck built. Shortly after the deck was finished, the rabbit moved in. She has been there ever since. That was 24 years ago. Of course, today’s rabbit is not yesterday’s rabbit, but she is still a girl. I know this because she produces numerous babies each season which I find in the garden throughout the summer.

The first time I found a nest of baby rabbits, I was digging a hole for a new shrub when some earth at the edge of the hole started to move. I touched the spot, dug in a bit, felt fur, screeched, then focused on five baby rabbits snuggled in a saucer-like indentation in the ground. I didn’t want them, but I was not about to kill them. I covered the nest with leaves and went back to planting my shrub. I was troubled, though. How many other nests were in my yard?  Words like “plague” and “infestation” came to mind. Later that day I heard a commotion near the newly planted shrub and looked out to see my male cat with a baby rabbit dangling from his mouth. I tore after him, all fears of infestation forgotten, screaming, “Drop it, Bowden, drop it now!”  Bowden, of course, did nothing of the kind. Finally, I covered my ears and let nature take its course, as they say. I could see advantages to this approach.

Every year since the rabbit and I moved in together, I have struggled with my “relationship” to her. Each gardening season I have asked myself, “Can I perhaps this year harden my heart and get rid of her?”  The spring day I put in three flats of pansies in the morning and came back in the afternoon to find every flower eaten and every plant chewed down to the ground, the answer was “yes.”  Had a gun been handy, I would have shot her.

Other times, though, especially summer evenings, when the last light has brought calm to the garden and the plants radiate an energy that calls out one’s higher nature, I have lounged on my patio, the memory of devoured pansies long gone, and watched my rabbit nibbling clover and thought, “How lovely it is to share my garden with other creatures.”

The summer Bowden died there were rabbits everywhere — teenagers, toddlers, young adults, and grandmas, a swarm of feeders all hopping back and forth from their residence under the deck to my garden. They had no longer had any fear. When taking down my newly planted Salvia, they didn’t even bother to look up. When I ran at them, they would move, but slowly and just a slight way off. People talk about homosexuality being unnatural. Nonsense. I will tell you what is truly unnatural: the spectacle of a full-grown rabbit in the middle of the day in the middle of my lawn, stretching out each leg in turn, taking her time, licking herself clean, then lying down for a noon nap, Where has trembling and twitching and “ready to run” gone?

I tried to interest my surviving cat in the job of rabbit hunting, but Toddy would have none of “nature’s way.”  No blood on her white paws. My heart hardened. I called Pest Control. I wanted the rabbits removed.

I spoke with a man quite stressed over rabbits. Apparently the northeast was experiencing an infestation the summer I called. He was not hopeful. He could trap my rabbits, but other rabbits would just move in. I could put up a fence, but it would have to surround the property and be specially built. I could buy a pellet gun, but I would have to shoot to kill. If I only wounded them, they would die, painfully, and most likely under my deck. His advice?  “Go to a dairy barn and catch one of the cats working there. She’ll take care of your rabbits.”

If only Toddy hadn’t waited so many years for Bowden to die so that she could live in cat-free space, I would have followed his advice. But I knew she would never tolerate another cat on the premises, so I made my peace with the rabbit once again.

Then came a bad winter and another change of heart. Standing on packed snow, the rabbit could reach and eat the branches of my oakleaf hydrangea, reducing this much prized shrub to stubble. Still when deep snow apparently blocked off all entrances and exits to the condo under my deck, I looked out my kitchen window at the trackless expanse of white and worried about my rabbit. Would she be able to get out from under the deck? What would she find to eat? How would she manage? When I finally saw a tunnel from the deck to the garden, I was relieved. “She’s alive,” I yelled to Sara. Sara was quick to remind me than only days ago I had wanted to find this very rabbit’s dead body next to my chewed hydrangea.

Then I noticed that my rabbit had headed straight for the Euonymous fortunei, her favorite plant but now buried in snow. With great care and precision, she had pawed the snow away, exposed the plant and eaten it. I was as impressed as I was angry. Such an insistence on preference in the midst of a blizzard and from a rabbit seemed to carry an important message.

But now my deck of western red cedar, lovingly maintained for 24 years, is gone and a new deck of no-maintenance Trex is replacing it. When I asked Drew, the carpenter, if the new deck would keep rabbits from getting under it, he assured me it would. I didn’t realize until I heard his answer that I had hoped he would say that no deck is rabbit-proof.

I don’t know where the rabbit is right now, given that her home is gone, but I guess I hope she will be back. I think it likely, because I suspect she is a powerful rabbit. According to Peter Wohlleben’s The Inner Life of Animals, rabbits live in a strictly hierarchical world  “Each animal,” says Wohlleben, “vigorously defends its rank, and for good reason”: high ranking rabbits experience far less stress than those on the bottom of the social ladder and as a result they live longer and better.

I am sure my rabbit must be high-ranking. After all, for years she has secured prime lodgings for herself under my deck. I conjure up a vision of her, in top hat and fancy suit, driving away the equivalent of rabbit hoi-polloi before settling herself down for a warm and safe sleep.

The new deck will soon be finished. I will let you know if the rabbit returns.

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December 21, 2021

Rebugging

I’ve done it. I’ve taken the plunge and the pledge. No more herbicides, no more pesticides on my lawn or in my garden, ever. I want to be part of “rebugging the planet.” It’s my New Year’s resolution.

Remember how it used to be, driving home on a summer’s night? Your windshield would be covered in dead bugs. “Not to worry,” you could tell yourself, “there are millions more that I didn’t kill.”

Today, it is a clean windshield and definitely “to worry.” According to recent scientific studies, the world’s insects, those “little things that run the world” as E.O. Wilson put it, are on a one-way street to extinction, threatening what one study labelled a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.” More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. “Insect apocalypse”? Maybe. And if so, human apocalypse for sure. Insects can survive perfectly well without humans, but without insects we would die.

The potential loss of attractive and obviously useful insects, such as bees and butterflies, has attracted some attention, but what about the flies and ants and crickets? Or my favorite, the beetle? “There are more than 350,000 species of beetle and many are thought to have declined, especially dung beetles,” writes one reporter. Look, folks, loss of the dung beetle could be a real problem. The Australians discovered this when they didn’t have any to break down or bury cowpats.

The services insects provide, however, go well beyond pollination and cowpat management. As scavengers, beetles feed on dead animals and fallen trees; they get rid of debris while recycling nutrients back into the soil. Other insects create soil health by aerating our dirt. Most gardeners love the big-eyed bug and praying mantis because they control the size of certain other insect populations, such as aphids and caterpillars, which feed on new plant growth. Yes, a bug-eat-bug world is a better than a world made toxic by chemicals.

Do you love birds? Then you need to appreciate insects. The robin yanking a worm out of the ground is one image of early spring. Most birds, however, live on bugs. Baby birds definitely live on bugs. Doug Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope, reports that a single nest of baby chickadees will require 6000 to 9000 caterpillars to fledge. No bugs, no birds.

Of course, there are bugs that do damage to plants we love; they are the ones that get most of the attention and not all of them can be controlled by other bugs. I am prepared, however, to pick Japanese beetles off my Hibiscus and sawflies off my Mugo pine by hand if necessary rather than spray these plants with chemicals. I may even be prepared to give up some favorites if they prove  to be unmanageable without chemicals.

It’s the lawn that poses the real challenge. I know that the pesticides and herbicides applied in massive doses to the urban and suburban lawn are a major factor in the collapse of insect populations. I know that I have to change how I view the lawn. I know this won’t be easy.

I have been waging a battle against ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea), aka Creeping Charlie, for years now. In a sobering interchange this past fall, my lawn care manager put it bluntly: “If you want to get rid of Charlie, you will need to treat the lawn at least three times a season.” Three times? Three applications of a substance that could lead to “insect apocalypse”? O.k. Charlie, you win. I am taking the pledge to become a “rebugger.”

So what does it take to become a rebugger?  Here are the guidelines from the latest issue of Horticulture:

Don’t use pesticides.
Avoid excessive digging.
Don’t be too tidy. Leaves some weeds, logs, leaves.
Include a wide variety of plants and habitats.

I am down with the first two requirements, and I am on a mission to plant more natives each season to increase variety and habitat, but can I really be less tidy?

I frequently give a talk on lower-maintenance perennial gardening. As part of the talk, I point out that the characteristics of lower-maintenance perennials are also the characteristics of many plants we call “weeds.” They are tough, they can take full sun, they don’t need water or staking or deadheading, they proliferate, they come up early and stay up late. So, I tell my audience, the issue is one of aesthetics. If we change our sense of the beautiful, we can enjoy lower-maintenance gardening.

I need to listen to myself. I need to find weeds, logs, and leaves attractive. I’ve succeeded so far with the leaves, having left a covering in all of my garden beds this year and finding the look lovely. But I am going to have to learn to like the look of Creeping Charlie. Of course, I already have plans to take up that part of the lawn where Charlie is most invasive and turn it into garden. This may require a bit of “excessive digging,” but, hey,  two steps forward, one step back is the way it usually goes..

Looking for photos of Creeping Charlie to share with my readers, I made some interesting discoveries that point me in an entirely new direction. It turns out that Creeping Charlie has a long history of medicinal use, though I can find no trace of it in my father’s 1920’s pharmaceutical textbook. The Holistic Herbal (2003), however, recommends it for sinus problems, coughs and bronchitis, tinnitus, diarrhea, hemorrhoids and cystitis. I do get the occasional UTI and I definitely have tinnitus, so ripping up and chewing Glechoma hederacea might not be a bad idea.

I also learned that Creeping Charlie is considered a “wild edible.”  According to those who see it this way, the young leaves, which are extremely rich in vitamin C, can be eaten raw or cooked. The leaves, apparently, have a mild mint-like flavor and can be tossed into salads to add a slight tang. Creeping Charlie leaves can also be cooked like spinach, added to soups, stews, or omelettes. Dried leaves can also be used for tea or even, like hops, to improve the flavor of beer.

Even more astonishing, I learn that Proven Winners, one of the major purveyors of ornamental plants, sells ‘Dappled Light,’ a variety of Glechoma hedera, for use as an attractive ground cover or for growing in decorative hanging backets. Charlie is for sale? People actually buy it? Perhaps I should buy some ‘Dappled Light’ to make my lawn more ornamental.

Picture me, then, next season, sticking to my resolution and sitting on my lawn of ‘Dappled Light,’ magnifying glass in hand. I will be chewing on Charlie leaves and looking for bugs. Until then my plan is to read and re-read Vicki Hird’s Rebugging the Planet (2021).

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November 23, 2021

Neighbors

I met Marc on my walk this morning. He lives in my neighborhood and we are often out at the same time. He wanted to know how I was doing because I looked so sad. I told him I was “taking it hard.” Of course he asked what it was that had me crying. “My ’cross the street’” neighbors have moved away,” I lamented. “How long did you know them?” “Twenty-four years, and I moved here in part because of them.”

When my then-partner’s knees could no longer manage the stairs in our urban townhouse – our kitchen was on the top floor, forty feet off the ground– I reluctantly agreed to move. A confirmed urbanist, I stipulated that at least we remain in the city. My bottom line, however, was light and dirt. I needed a house with a southwest exposure and a flat piece of land for a garden.

Months of searching for a workable site in Albany turned up no winners. Through serendipity and desperation, Marjorie found the perfect site – a corner lot in a new development in the Town of Bethlehem, hamlet of Glenmont. It had a southwest exposure, no slope, a builder who was willing to situate the house to maximize the exposure, and who, a reader himself, would build us a library for our hundreds of books. Still – the suburbs? a development? a new house?  None of this was me.

And then I met Rich and Glenna. Driving in to take another look at the lot, I saw across the street a boy mowing the lawn and a man helping him learn how to do it right. Arrogantly urban, I had some prejudices about the suburbs. I assumed that in the suburbs children were not asked to help with the chores, especially outside choirs. I assumed rich and spoiled and glued to the video screen. Seeing something quite different from what I expected, I thought, “Perhaps I could live here after all.” I introduced myself and so began a connection that has lasted for twenty-four years.

It is a special form of friendship, the neighbor relationship.

It is a gift composed of the daily awareness of presence. Of the quick wave and the brief hello when one is pulling out of the driveway and the other is putting out the garbage. Of the casual meeting while raking leaves or tending gardens. Of the chat about the children or politics. Of the pleasure of talking to people you respect, who share your values, but sometimes think differently about how to realize them.

It is a gift composed of game nights and patio visits. Of dinners, occasional ones and once-in-a-lifetime ones, ones with menus Glenna has prepared pairing offerings of food with offerings of wine, leaving us grateful for the conversation and the cuisine and equally grateful that all we need do, having tasted so abundantly of the wine, is get across the street.

It is a gift composed of hundreds of tiny assists exchanged over years.

We will be away for a few days. Can you pick up a package that is going to be delivered tomorrow and hold it for us?
The tires on my wheelbarrow have gone flat. Can I borrow your bicycle pump?
Do you have good source for mulch?
Hey, Rich, we need some upper body strength. Can you come over and help us lift this window into place?

It is a gift composed of unspoken companionship. Walking the neighborhood in the early morning hours, gearing up for a day of writing, I see the light in Rich’s office already on. He too is up and perhaps working on his “Ms. Money” books, a series designed to teach financial literacy to children.

It is a gift of comfort, a sense of safety that comes from knowing someone close by is there for you in a crisis. The night before I was due at the hospital for knee replacement surgery a substantial snowstorm was predicted. There was no chance that our snow-blowing service would be able to clear the driveway in time for us to get out. I knew Rich and Glenna would get us out.

It is the gift of hopefully giving the same sense of comfort and security to someone else.

It is the gift of a relationship that can neither be duplicated nor replaced.

A week ago today Rich and Glenna moved away, to Maryland. to be near their daughters and their grandchildren. The beige car and the blue car are gone. The house is dark.

When my parents left their home of some twenty-five years to move nearer my brother and sister-in-law, the little boy next door, a relatively new arrival to the neighborhood but a boy with whom my father played cards every day, threw himself on the car and wept. I felt last Tuesday like that little boy.

The day before they moved, Rich knocked on the door and I gladly went to answer, anticipating the pleasure of seeing Rich at the door one more time and hoping for the chance to do a last favor. He handed me the keys to our house. There was a wee note on the key chain that said “Cats.” Seeing it, I was plunged into memory, reminded again of the length and depth of this particular connection.

When Marjorie and I first moved to Columbine Drive, Ricky, Rich and Glenna’s son, the boy who mowed his family’s lawn, took care of our cats when we were away. He learned to indulge Toddy in her peculiarities. She would only drink running water, preferably from the upstairs tub, and she liked to drink a lot. Coming home, I would joke with Ricky and, pretending to be one of our cats, I would croon “Ricky, don’t lose our number.”

I know that aging is an experience of loss. I know more loss is ahead. I know I need to figure out how I am going to survive the losses as they accumulate. But today I just want to cry.

Robert Frost, impersonating a New England farmer, famously said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” I believe that good people make good neighbors. Rich and Glenna are good people. They were good neighbors. I will miss them more than I can ever say.

November 9, 2021

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

November 12 marks the birthday of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was born in Johnstown, New York in 1815 and died in New York City on October 25, 1902, just shy of her 88^th birthday. She was the architect of one of the greatest campaigns for social justice in the history of this country.  No one living in the United States is unaffected by her achievements. So why then are there not statues honoring her throughout the country?  Why is her image not on the back of a U.S. dime or dollar? Why are no airports named in her honor?

I keep in my office a remark of Stanton’s that I found on a post card many years ago and gave to my friend Joan, my companion in the 20^th century struggle for women’s rights: “I shall not grow conservative with age.” We vowed to do likewise, to remain as radical at 80 as we were at 40. While I believe I have mellowed in temperament from earlier incarnations, I like to think I am still as a radical in my thinking and prepared to act in a radical fashion when necessary. Stanton is my model.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was radical in thought and deed.

Consider the following:

She refused to allow the minister to use the word “obey” as part of her marriage vows to Henry Stanton in 1840. “I refuse to obey anyone with whom I am entering into an equal relationship.”  In 1840, marriage was anything but an equal relationship. To imagine it to be so and then act to try to make it so was nothing short of revolutionary. Of course, it was considered outrageous.  I suspect Stanton was served outrage for breakfast, lunch and dinner throughout her life.

Stanton proposed, wrote, and insisted on including the following resolution in the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments: “Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right of the elective franchise.”  Her fellow organizers opposed this, fearing it would make them look ridiculous. Her husband threatened to leave town if she presented it and when she did, he did.

In 1852 she proposed to the National Women’s Rights Convention that women who owned property should refuse to pay taxes on that property until they got the vote. She articulated the concept of civil disobedience for women: no taxation without representation.

In 1854, she addressed the New York State legislature, composed entirely of men, to insist on the right of women to create the laws that governed their lives. Surely Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, the first to hear the words “Madam Vice President, Madam Speaker,” owe much to Stanton.

In 1856 she began advocating for liberal divorce laws. For this stance, her father disinherited her. “To think,” she wrote her dear friend and colleague, Susan, B. Anthony, “that all in me of which my father would have felt a proper pride had I been a man is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.”

In 1866, she became the first woman to run for Congress.  She ran as an independent. She got 24 votes.

She wrote the suffrage amendment that was finally ratified in August of 1920.

As the women’s movement increasingly focused on suffrage after the Civil War, Stanton continued to insist that getting the vote would be meaningless if social, political, economic and legal equality were not achieved as well.  Getting the vote had become a respectable cause; Stanton championed those changes that still caused outrage.

She understood the role of religion in the oppression of women. “Man, of himself,” she pointed out, “could not do this; but when he declares ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ of course he can do it.” She understood that the bible was the work of man and designed to create God in man’s image, not vice versa. In 1896 she published the Women’s Bible, a feminist commentary on the Bible as a man-made document, This resulted in her being censured by the National American Women’s Suffrage Association.  She had become too radical for the movement she started.

She gloried in being older and heavier. She declared that fifty, not fifteen, was the heyday of a woman’s life. When she turned seventy, she gave a talk on “The Pleasures of Old Age.” She never stopped reading, writing, speaking, thinking.

She wanted her brain to be donated to science upon her death to disprove the claims that the mass of men’s brains made them smarter than women. Her children, however, did not honor her wish.

At the end of her life, struggling with failing eyesight, she wrote in her diary, “I say nothing to my children of this great grief, but it is a sore trial, with prospective total blindness. I will then be able to do nothing but think!”

Of course, for Stanton, thinking was everything.  Yes, it should lead to action, to writing and speaking, but she understood that thinking in and of itself was a radical act when the thinker was female. In her extraordinary book on Stanton, “The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton” (2005),Vivian Gornick observes that thinking was Stanton’s primary passion.  It took precedence over rage and resentment and gave her the temperament and the courage to speak her truths and survive the consequences of uttering them. “Come what will,” she said, of the furor her demand for liberal divorce laws created, “my whole soul rejoices in the truth that I have uttered.” To be whole-souled in the love of truth is to be possessed of enormous power, and of enormous peace.

Thinking about Stanton and wondering why she has received so little attention, I think: she has received less attention than her activist companion, Anthony, because in this country we are still uneasy when confronted with “woman thinking.” Philosophy, the intellect, still comes bearded. Far safer that way. For what indeed might a woman who thinks discover? Perhaps the truth.

I had the joyous experience last week of listening as a former student thanked a former colleague of mine in the English Department at the University at Albany for being the first person to recognize her as “thinking.”  This recognition changed the course of the student’s life and, as a result, touched the lives of all the persons she affected as a professional

If I had a fortune I would commission a statue of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to be placed in Johnstown, and I would ask that it represent her as thinker.  Then I would commission another statue and ask that it represent teacher and student, both women, engaged in the revolutionary act of recognizing each other as thinkers.

I doubt this would be radical enough suit Stanton, but hopefully it would make her smile.

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October 26, 2021

The “Farm”

My brother is two and a half years older than me.  That means that I have never spent a minute on this earth without him being on it as well.  What a gift of “not-alone.”

There is also a place I have known since I was first able to make memories.  We called it the “farm.” It sits outside of Richfield Springs, NY, which in turn sits on U. S.  Rte.  20.  Called Western Avenue in Albany where I once owned a house that was backed by it, Rte.  20 was the first road I knew by number and name.  My grandfather called it the “Cherry Valley Turnpike” and declared it to be “scenic.”  What a gift of “roots.”

My dad was born and raised in East Herkimer, a distinct neighborhood on a rise above Herkimer itself and not to be confused with Herkimer.  As a boy, he worked on what he referred to as “Uncle Charlie’s farm.”  This property came into dad’s family in 1867, shortly after the Civil War.  My nephew treasures what Dan and I grew up calling “the Civil War chest,” because it was found buried on the property some time after the war, filled with money.  Perhaps New Yorkers were more afraid of a southern invasion or victory than we have been led to believe.

Each time we came to upstate New York to visit my grandfather, we would visit the “farm.” Roughly 100 acres of woods, the “farm” didn’t look anything like a farm to us.  Still my brother and I could always find the foundation of the barn that had once been there, and, across the road, of the house as well.  We would root around in both for shards of former lives.  We would explore the old apple orchard in the northwest corner or climb down the ravine to the creek that ran along part of the western boundary line or follow the old stone fence that marked the southern boundary.

Dad used to say that the first crop to come up on the “farm” in the spring was stones.  Children were given the job of pilling the stones on a low sled called the “stone boat,” guiding the patient horse to an open edge, and unloading the rocks to make a boundary fence.

Situated on a hillside, with no access to the main road and in a landscape filled with ravines, the “farm” seemed to us an unlikely place for crops other than rocks.   As children we gathered flint stones for starting fires; as an adult, I gathered large flat stones to make paths in my garden.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, however, hops held out the hope of economic recovery for impoverished farms like the one in our family.  Hops are relatively easy to propagate and grow and can also be harvested relatively easily, allowing for a mixed crew that could include women and children.  I have a picture of dad’s uncle Charlie on a horse, in the middle of a row of hops.
The boom didn’t last, and the farm passed on first to uncle Charlie’s sister, Helen, then to my grandfather’s second wife, then to my grandfather, and finally to my father. Slowly, it  turned into forest.  When I decided to go east to college, my dad decided to reclaim the “farm” for reforestation.  Each time he and my mom visited me in Pennsylvania, they would continue on to upstate New York and Richfield Springs.

Under the guidance of a New York state forester, they selected a relatively flat, accessible, unforested part of the “farm.”  They girdled and poisoned the invasive and obnoxious hawthorns that made the area unforested.  Hawthorns come up early and come up fast, first sticking a thorned twig out of the ground, then rapidly shooting up trunk and branches.  They get a head start, grow unimpeded – who wants to eat a thorn? — and quickly shade out other trees.   In this weird area of dead and dying trees, reminiscent of something out of Grimm’s fairy tales, my mom and dad planted tiny white spruces, gotten cheap from the New York State Department of Conservation.  These relatively fast-growing trees would, theoretically, compete with the surviving hawthorns and, once mature, could be harvested for pulp.

I helped.  My brother helped.  Our partners helped.  My cousin helped.  Her children helped.  My grandfather helped.  He cleared a space above the ravine, built a fireplace and some log benches, and declared it our café.  He cleared a path to the part of the property that overlooked Lake Canadarago.  From this spot you can see the island just off the eastern shore of the lake and the fields on the opposite western shore.  In his 90’s, concerned about boundaries, my grandfather strung barbed wire around three fourths of the property.

Of course, the reforestation project didn’t work.  Of course, the hawthorns won and the spruces lost.   When dad turned over the property to my brother and me, we began selective timbering of the “farm.”  To our surprise, the “farm,” when called a “forest,” turned out to be quite valuable and responsible timbering turned out to be quite good for a “forest.”

But just like mom and dad before us, and grandpa before them, my brother and I, as we got older, began to feel responsible for ensuring appropriate succession of the “farm.” None of our children lived in upstate New York and none felt able to take on the responsibility of managing our forest well or of preserving the legacy it represented.

Anxious to keep it out of the hands of developers, I said, “Let’s give it to the Otsego Land Trust.” Anxious to fund his grandchildren’s education, Dan said, “Let’s sell it.” I gave my share to the Land Trust which made it possible for them to buy Dan’s share.  Kate and Meg will get educated and the “farm” will be preserved.

It now has a fine and proper name.  It is called The Fetterley Forest and has been designated “a working forest in memory of Ray and Mary Fetterley.” At the dedication when the sign was unveiled, neither Dan nor I were quite certain what work the forest would be doing but we were happy that it would be cared for and preserved.

Recently we visited our family forest.  We encountered a woman hiking one of the trails, who thanked us on behalf of the many area residents who regularly use the forest.  We read the notebook at the welcoming kiosk and found people had come to our former “farm” from all over the world.  We walked the wide and well-kept trail to the overlook and sat for a long time admiring the familiar view.  We listened to the birds.  We got lost on the way home and it didn’t matter.   The forest was working.