First of all let me acknowledge, this Canadian Thanksgiving Day, that I have so much to be grateful for. Paul and I have just returned from a three-day getaway into the interior of our province, the Okanagan specifically, where there was abundant natural beauty everywhere. I’ve already posted photos on Instagram — red apples ready to harvest and red Kokanee swimming upstream to spawn. Blue skies and golden leaves and tawny undulating hills rolling into dark-evergreen mountains. . . .
On the hillside of Naramata, sloping down to Okanagan Lake. . .
A collection of vintage farm equipment fronting the orchard beside the Fruit Stand we stopped at, somewhere around Keremeos. . . .
Such a particular landscape — I love the difference from our Coast (although I’m so grateful for our more moderate temperatures, to be honest)
Passing through the mountains on the way home (so grateful, now, that we missed this week’s snowfall!)
Back home, I’ve been for walks in the rain and my iPhone camera twitches in my pocket needing to snap shots of drops glistening from dangling chains of dark purple berries . . .
And although we ate our turkey on our own, just the two of us yesterday evening, the bird was delicious as were the beets and the baked Kuri squash and the mashed potatoes and gravy and my dad’s sausage stuffing (still recalling him, both in the making and in the eating, twenty years though he’s been gone). My apple pie, with just a dab of ice cream. . . Leftovers for days, something else to be grateful for, sandwiches and soup perfectly suited to the Fall’s stormy weather. . .
We’re too many here in town to gather for dinner, nine of us (and if we can’t invite both little families, we can’t invite either). . . only three more than the suggested “bubble,” but those bubbles are meaningless anyway, now that the kids have resumed–thankfully–some of their activities: dance class, school, sleepovers with best friends. . . We missed being together on Thanksgiving, but we had FaceTime chats with our Island City crew and with our Italian famiglia.
From the Island, the Five proudly shared the French she’s learned so far: the magic-key sentence that gets her permission to go to the toilet; how to ask someone how they’re doing; and the way to wiggle a hand when answering that you’re doing so-so: “Comme ci, comme ça.”
From Italy, the Six showed the new vacancy in the front of her mouth. We’ve lost count of how many teeth she’s lost so far, but she tells us it’s six. . . The new “adult teeth” are crowding in now and as ridiculous as that description seems — “adult”?–there are intimations already in the changes to her smile, a hint of change at the jawline. . . Fluently, effortlessly bilingual, she’s rarely keen to speak Italian to us but recently she’s been willing to check (and correct, ever so kindly) my pronunciation. I’d just learned the delightful Italian word for “puddle” — pozzanghera — Out of context (and, I’ve since discovered, because I put the stress on the wrong syllable), she frowned at first, wrinkling her forehead. But when I explained, she brightened and nodded encouragingly, and when I tried out a sentence with the word Sono molte pozzanghere sulla strada oggi (There are many puddles on the street today), she left pozzanghere alone but got me to repeat strada with more roll to my “r” and more stress on the first syllable. Gratitude.
If the storm winds abate this morning and the sun manifests, as the weather forecast suggests they might, we’re hoping for a walk in the woods with some of the local gang and perhaps a dog or two. If we make up some turkey sandwiches we can have a Covid-19 open-air Thanksgiving Picnic. Not sure that will be a tradition I want to foster, but if it happens today I’ll be grateful. If it doesn’t, well, I will muster Thanks for turkey soup and a mystery novel . . .
But. . . . You didn’t suspect there was going to be a But? Honestly, I’d almost forgotten that plan as well, and then, proof-reading my post, I remembered that I began by acknowledging all I have to be grateful for, this Thanksgiving. . .
But. . .
And I remembered that I’d started the post thinking of the Donald Hall poem I intend to share with you, as declared back inthis post, triggered by another poem of his that my daughter had sent me. . . However, when I reached for my copy of Hall’s Old and New Poems (which copy I bought in 2011 at the iconic City Lights bookstore in San Francisco), I had to first lift my open copy of Louise Glück’s A Village Life. And given I had that book off the shelf and open because Glück was just awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, I’ve chosen a poem of hers instead.
You can read more about Louise Glück and her poetry here, but let me just say that she doesn’t write poems that easily fits into the theme of Thanksgiving. There’s beauty observed in her writing, yes, but there’s always the darkness of reality and of myth as well. Her writing, especially in A Village Life, is almost conversational in its rhythms, plainspoken, the diction easily accessible; it seems to fall between lyric and narrative, the descriptions of quotidian and seasonal, cyclic phenomena sketch narratives that somehow invite and alienate at once, pointing to the mythic, the numinous. . .
No Hallmark turkey dinners. . . .
But she gets at what we’re holding at bay, with those dinners, especially in this poem. . .
HARVEST
It’s autumn in the market–
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They’re beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth–
Inside, they’re gone. Black, moldy–
you can’t take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.
Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around died lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.
Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.
At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.
The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground’s so hard the farmers think
it isn’t worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?
And then the frost comes; there’s no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.
I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.
What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.
Again, this poem, “Harvest,” is from Louise Glück’s A Village Life, published in 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Congratulations to her for winning the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature. . .
and gratitude and thanksgiving for Poets and Poetry! (yes, even when they/it make us uncomfortable for speaking truths we’d rather not see).
So here we hover, between the grateful-celebratory and the holding-at-bay-of-darkness, doing our best. The wind’s blowing here this morning after last night’s storm, but the sun is shining and I have hopes for a few more of the figs to ripen before frost hits later this month. The tomato vines will get pulled out of their containers today . . . mildewed as they are, there are still a few sweet cherry tomoatoes I’ll pop in my month, and there are five good-sized apples I’ve left on the little tree outside the window, just so that I can watch them grow a bit rosier each day. . . But knowing that if I’m not careful to pick them in time, wind will blow them to the ground and bruise their sweet flesh. . . Intimations of mortality and all that.
Enough. I’ve been here a few hours now and that’s reason enough to call this a conclusion, however unsatisfactory. Especially since I spent another few hours yesterday and posted my September Readingover on my book blog. It was a month full of absorbing, entertaining, thought-provoking, moving, and amusing reading, and if you’re looking for something to curl up with as the chilly weather settles in, I have a few recommendations.
Breakfast calls. . . do indulge me with your comments, please? I will be most grateful. . .No prompts from me today, except those you find in the post. Poetry, Gratitude, Glück and the Nobel Prize, Family Gatherings (in the time of Covid-19). . . et cetera.
xo,
f
Even though reading and writing poetry has been part of my life for almost 4 decades now (and I'm almost 50…), I keep forgetting. I forget that poetry is the place where people are talking about all that we are living in, breakfast, puddles, rotten tomatoes, autumn walks, fathers who died 20 years ago, the politicians who are haunting us, our grandparent's nightmares – all of it. Just pulled Fanny Howe off my shelf. Do you read her? And you remind me to go find Jane Kenyon, wife of Donald Hall, and a long-time beloved. Thank you, Frances.
Your Thanksgiving sounds as perfect as circumstances allow.
Love that poem. She really captures something here about the undercurrent of Fall. While I've always felt like Fall is a fresh start of sorts (a holdover from childhood school calendar?) there's also that sense of foreboding and…mortality that tempers it. Of course we don't experience the kind of winters where everything shuts down. Our cycles are much more muted. (Maybe that's why so many people who move to California from other more seasonal parts of the world express such a sense of disorientation or unreality.)
Anyway, a belated Happy Thanksgiving, and I'm looking forward to better times when I can come visit you again.
Happy Thanksgiving, Frances. We had planned an outdoor celebration – yesterday – when it poured rain. So we, although over the recommended 6, decided to careful celebrate indoors. We assigned seating to the adults in the living room by couples and ate dinner on tv tables. When in the kitchen masks were required. The children were free to roam about. No hugs (big sigh), although I did cuddle the 16-month old who begged with a smile to be picked up by Nana. It felt weird and I wonder sometimes, what the point is when three of the grands are in school, and I interact across learning groups with about 80 students. Still, it was lovely to be together.
I like Gluck's poem for its honesty. It's easy to see the beauty of autumn and forget that everything is dying, as we all are. And to contradict her negative portrayal of autumn, I find, as she does, I think, beauty in the winter and in the quietness of sitting in a window watching the snow fall and calm descending.
It's so lovely that the sun is out here again and it seems we are in for more sunny weather for most of the week. Enjoy!
What an amazing poem. The opening stanza rolling us through the beauty of fall (round… red…rare) until we trip on that line break and are forced to look more closely, acknowledge our instinct to give some less final meaning to the dried, died and dead.
Thank you for this. And Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian friends! I'm imagining our American Thanksgiving this year will be much like yours, just the two of us and a host of Facetime calls.
I love your Italian lesson with the Six – so charming. I hope you and the locals will be able to do your open-air Thanksgiving together – turkey sandwiches are my favorite part of the bird anyway.
My poetry reading right now is a book called "Lisbon Poets," 6 poets in the original Portuguese with English translations facing. It took me a couple of days to figure out the best routine – I now read the poem in English, and then in Portuguese. With the English already in my mind, I can understand quite a bit (years of Spanish helps), I'm happy to report.
I'm also happy to report that the visa servicing peeps in San Francisco have re-opened, and we have an appointment on the 29th! Forward progress at last. So we're scrambling to get updated documents (husband had a nice chat with Services New Brunswick on Friday to get a fresh copy of his birth certificate in the appropriate format), and update our timeline for the move. Something to be thankful for.
Happy Thanksgiving Frances,to you and Pater! Family's picnic in the park or woods sounds great to me,these days…
I'm not familiar with Louise Glück's poetry but like Harvest,so present-day and so eternal….
Dottoressa
Happy belated Thanksgiving, ma! We too ate a special dinner alone. We decided to dress up a bit (shoes instead of slippers, trousers instead of jeans, a bit of makeup for me). That change from the usual mitigated the echoey feeling.
I am of two minds about Glücks's poem. I admire her skill in summoning the reality of decay which she ascribes to the harvest. The contraction of summer's largesse is acknowledged, and she is referring to the entire cycle of life. At the same time there is a depressive quality very different from my own experience of the market stalls so close to my home. I find they lift my spirits every time.
Many years ago when I left home, I befriended a Canadian girl – we were besties for years – and, knowing that she would be homesick, her mother sent her a large box of apples from the Okanagan valley. I had never seen the like. A few years later, visiting her family on Vancouver Island, the sitting room had a large wooden bowl, filled with the fruit. The smell was astounding. On our way across Canada, we drove through the valley. It was a September sight worth seeing. Enjoy all the sandwiches and soup.
Beautiful countryside photos and a nice get away for you and Paul. Like you say, Hallmark Thanksgiving will be lost this year. Maybe next year? Sounds like your Italian is being perfected by the little Italian princess. Precious.
Chepkirui: I find the same thing, but I've deliberately kept the poetry shelves most visible and accessible and that helps. I don't know Fanny Howe yet (years teaching Canadian Literature limited my focus), but I will pull my Jane Kenyon off my shelf when I'm done here, thanks to you.
Susan B: Yes, it's the mortality for me. I've long had the sense that winter is when people die, even though that hasn't been especially obvious in bereavements I've experienced. And oh, big yes! when we can get together again — someday!
Lorrie: Your celebration sounded perfect! I thoroughly understand your skepticism about the value or logic of bubbles for those who must be at school (teachers and students). Glück's work is often characterized as bleak, but to me, there's the undeniable beauty that you've noted. and truth. . .
Belle: Succinct, analytic appreciation! Belated Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours xoxo
Carol P: This is wonderful news! I hope this next stage goes smoothly and even quickly. Does one of Fernando Pessoa's many personae feature among those six poets? If I had more lifetimes, I'd love to learn Portuguese. I found I could read it enough to get the gist, relying on closeness to Spanish, but I was surprised at how the pronunciation eluded me, how different it sounded from what I expected because of that rich Arabic influence.
Dottoressa: I think you'd like her collection Village Life (which, to be honest, is the only work of hers that I know). It seems to be set in a small pastoral village, dying out as a way of life, somewhere in Italy, I think. . . She won a big Canadian prize (Griffin Poetry Prize) in 2010, which is where I learned of her, and then seeing a woman win the Nobel Prize for Literature, I wanted to celebrate her.
Your Okanagan photos bring back so many memories. Those blue skies, the road twisting through tree-clad ravines, the absolute other-ness of those dry fields and scree-covered hills.
How lovely to be part of your grandchildren's language-learning. Six-in-Italy is SO lucky to be growing up effortlessly bilingual. That French drama Ainsi Soient-Ils that I mentioned has a fair bit of Italian in it, during the scenes of byzantine Vatican intrigues. It is such a beautiful language. I have the same visceral reaction to it as I do to French, of feeling that it makes my heart sing, but bizarrely for someone who loves languages I have a negative reaction to Spanish. It's the only language that has ever done that to me – it makes me feel agitated and wanting to distance myself from it. Very very weird, very very instinctive and very very unfair to lovely Spanish speakers everywhere.
I didn't know of Glück before the Nobel Prize. I really appreciated this poem, descent into darkness and all. It reminded me of my favourite poem – Automne Malade, by Apollinaire. I first encountered it in an end of term French test in final year of secondary school. We had to write a critique of it. I was so stunned by the poem that I remember sitting in the exam setting feeling as if my whole world had shifted. And in writing the critique I felt as if I was writing a love letter to the poem. Maybe that's why I got an A++ for the exercise, which earned me weird looks from my classmates! So glad that a woman has won the Nobel Prize for Literature but feel that Ursula Le Guin was unjustly overlooked in her lifetime.
Our October has been unrelentingly wet so far, and the garden is sodden and the burns off the hills are running full and dark with peaty water.
When her Nobel was announced I happened on one of her poems about the end of a marriage (I think) that was so vivid I had to close it up. Now I wish I'd kept the link. I find more and more that if I am to feel thankful, I must incorporate loss and the end of things into my identity.
Duchesse: Good for you! We didn't even dress up, and I'm afraid we ate in front of a screen, watching a French police drama (Spiral/Engrenages). . . But we did have turkey with all the trimmings. As for Glück's poem I agree that our local Farmers Market is a joy even now. . . and I hardly need to defend a Nobel Laureate. I will say, though, that there are plenty of other poets who celebrate the joys. Fewer who delve into the darker realities with such clear-sighted observation.
Annie: Those transatlantic crossings make me very happy — wonder what it would cost to send that box of apples now, and whether they'd arrive. . . I'm delighted that you, too, have experienced the Okanagan in Fall (this was the first time for me!)
Susan: Yes, she sent me a voice mail message in response to one I sent her the day after, hoping my pronunciation had improved. Her message? Bravissima! 😉
Linda: How interesting, that visceral reaction you have to Spanish. I studied it for two years at university way back in the earliest 70s, and I quite liked it but have forgotten so much. I refresh a little occasionally, but it's too risky to mix it up with my French and Italian right now. I already find myself saying "Si" instead of "Oui"!!! I'm going to see if I can find that Apollinaire poem. I haven't felt that intensity in writing about a literary text for some time, but I know what you mean. Apparently, Glück is the 16th woman to be awarded the Nobel in Literature, but yes, there are still writers we could wish acknowledged as well. I note that there's only been one woman of colour in the long list — Toni Morrison. . . No Asian women. . . Progress comes slowly, apparently.
Lisa: Oh yes, this is a dynamite notion: "if I am to feel thankful, I must incorporate loss and the end of things into my identity." (raised Catholic, although mostly lapsed now, I had this built in and reinforced from the beginning. The lapsing means it wavers regularly. . . )
Happy belated Thanksgiving to both you and Paul. Your meal sounds like ours. A dinner for 2, in a tone of subdued grandeur. Small portions of the usual menu steeped in family traditions. But we did take the time to light candles and set the table as if company was coming. A year to remember as we too practise social distancing from our active adult kids and grandkids.
A beautiful poem to and this : " Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves. "
The wind and rain blew branches and leaves against our bedroom window in last night's storm and I spent a few hours listening to the alarming noises, resisting the urge to get out of bed. Thinking of our newly planted trees in the front yard and wondered if they were hanging on for dear life.
The descriptions of the Gkids are precious for the memory of this year.
Another reminder to keep poetry handy.
Sandy: We didn't even manage subdued grandeur (I like that phrase very much). But wow! Paul made up for it by eating much. Very much. . . He has a strange metabolism 😉
Ah, the fall storms. We're so glad we don't have to get up in the wee hours to go check on the boat anymore (and by "we," you know I mean "he" 😉