Third: The Pear Tree

My grandfather always woke up early, usually between 4 and 5am, and that morning was no different.  I don't know how long he'd been awake when he shook my brothers and me and we rolled out of our sleeping bags, but it was still dark and there was a fire going in the ring of rocks in the middle of camp.  We sat for a few moments -- rubbing our eyes, listening to the music of the creek on the other side of the willows, drinking the hot chocolate he had made.  Then we tied our shoes and he stirred the fire down and we walked out of camp, leaving our grandmother still asleep in the motor home.  I was probably twelve years old.

He led us to an old dirt logging road, which we turned onto and walked along.  The lift of the mountain was on our left, the meadow through some pine trees on our right.  After about a mile, the trees began to thin, and the meadow opened up, and there, on the edge of the road, were two pear trees, which my grandfather walked right up to.  They were not nearly as tall as the pine trees, but they were tall enough to be old, and they looked wild and overgrown, not at all like the carefully pruned apple tree in our backyard back home.  In the dim light of dawn I could see the yellow fruit hanging from the live branches and littering the ground.

After a moment we continued on our hike, down the road and into the day.  But something about those trees, how they looked and where they were, stayed with me, and I've had a fondness for pear trees ever since.

***

Years later Lori and I bought a house, and couple of years after that we planted a pear tree in the backyard, in the corner where the patio roof meets the roof edge that hangs over our bedroom window.  If you look at the photograph at the top of my blog, you'll see that the pear tree is what frames the left side of my hexagon of sky.  Here is a photograph taken today of our pear tree, still with many of its leaves, some of them turning reddish and yellow and brown:

This tree is a fascination, like an old friend and a beautiful stranger at the same time.  In the spring the white buds come first, then the full blossoms, then the first fragile leaves near the flowers, then more leaves to fill out the rest of the tree.  One year, just as the tight balls of blossom potential were about to burst full, I wrote this haiku:

All night, pear blossoms

like pale paper lanterns

waiting to be lit.

Out of the sparse winter, the cold air and the low southern sun, tree branches harsh and bare, the spring makes something apparently, ineffably light.  A few months later, some of those blossoms have become pears, hanging heavy in the stillness of a September afternoon.  As I wrote in my field notes for Saturday, September 27, "Right now they hang heavily, like church bells waiting to ring, bombs ready to drop.  Their scale of time is different than ours, which makes them dangerous."

***

This year we had the most pears ever, somewhere between forty and fifty, if you count all the full, beautiful ones as well as the small and malformed fruit.  Here is a picture of a pencil drawing I made in my field notes journal, on Saturday, September 27, 2014, of a branch of our pear tree, the same branch that defines the lower left border of my hexagon:

Here is a picture I took of that same branch:

That branch has now lost all four of its pears, and, relieved of that weight, has sprung back higher into the air, even changing the dimensions of my hexagon of sky.  This tree and the world it shapes are never the same day by day.

***

Below is a picture of a single pear in the rain.  When I took that photograph three weeks ago, there were still over forty pears on the tree:

Less than two weeks ago, on Tuesday, October 7, this is what I wrote in my field notes:  "Over the past three or four days, two or three pears have fallen,  I brought them in to sit on a plate on the counter and continue to ripen.  One of these was from the branch I drew.  First thing this morning there was another on the ground, and mid morning another, so I went out and hefted the ones I could reach, and several more came off in my hand.  I filled another plate on the counter, there are now sixteen that have fallen, somewhere between 20 and 30 still on the tree."

Here are some of the bug-eaten and malformed pears that have fallen:

Here are the pears we're hoping will ripen into sweetness:

Here are the last two pears that never grew but still hang on:

Here is the last full pear left on the tree, Saturday, October 18, 2014:

Soon it will fall and the leaves will fall and the cold sun will shine through the thin, gray branches of the winter tree,

***

When I think now about the two pear trees I saw with my grandfather and my brothers at the edge of a meadow in the mountains, what occurs to me is the idea of someone trying to make a living, to make a home.  Those pear trees were not there by accident.  Someone planted them, someone with dreams of building something, putting down roots, farming the land, raising cattle, an orchard, a hay barn, children.  In the history of civilization, domesticating fruit trees and planting them near our homes may be among the most civil things human beings have ever done.  But let us not fool ourselves into thinking we have tamed them.  These trees have wild hearts and minds, which you will see if you watch one season after season.  And sometimes, one or two of these trees will go on living long after you've lost the ability to watch them, growing wilder and wilder at the edge of a meadow in the mountains, sharp and dead and unruly branches sticking out among the living, ripened fruit waiting for deer and bears and skunks to find, decomposing pears sinking slowly back into the soil, your hay fields choked with brush, your barn collapsed into dust, your children gone away, your farmhouse taken back by the land, your actual body that once ate pears now nourishing the earth by its own meager means.



Second: Orion the Hunter

There are maybe three heavenly bodies that I can confidently identify, which are the moon, Venus, and Jupiter (and now Sirius -- four; more on that in a future post).  There are five constellations.  They are the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, who I learned as a child, including that neat trick involving the North Star* (five heavenly bodies; I forgot about the North Star).  Cassiopeia and the Pleiades came to me later.  But Orion has been with me since childhood as well and has long been my favorite, an old friend on cold, clear winter nights, a source of mystery, something big to remind me I'm small.

*Here's the trick:  If you find the two stars that signify the side of the pan (the dipper) opposite the handle on the Big Dipper and follow the line of those two stars in the direction from the bottom of the pan to the top of the pan for approximately five lengths of the line segment those same two stars make, they will lead your eyes almost perfectly to the star that is the tale end of the handle of the Little Dipper, which is the North Star.  And then you will know where you are.

I was quite surprised, then, to find my friend Orion in the dark morning sky, in August and September and now October, as I stood outside on the edge of the patio and waited for the dogs to make their rounds.  Here is a picture of a drawing I made in my field notes journal on Monday, September 22, 2014.

 

That morning I wrote, "Centered in my circle of sky is the constellation Orion the Hunter, as though he was placed there on purpose.  In the coming days, I believe he'll be moving west."  It makes logical sense of course for Orion to be there where he's been in the southeastern sky.  Every morning he is a little further west, now nearly out of my sight behind the leaves of the birch tree, especially if I happen to be out there closer to 6am than to 5.  So every morning it's a little earlier when he reaches that point in my hexagon where I first spotted him when school started in August, even if I'm not there early enough to see him.  Soon he'll cross midnight and it will be not morning but night when he's in my designated section of sky, and by December or January it will 9pm or 8pm and so on until he disappears in the springtime, washed out by the light of the sun.

 

I found the star map below from a fantastic website called Stars that is the creation of a retired University of Illinois Astronomy Professor named Jim Kaler.  The chart probably has too much information in it, but I hope it corrects my drawing and puts names to some of the elements.  There are some pretty famous stars in Orion, such as Betelgeuse, Rigel and Bellatrix.  Stars, shapes, names, figures, stories:  it seems like we've been writing our ideas across the night sky for a long time, turning these random collections of dots of light into characters and mythologies.  As Ted Kooser suggests in his poem "Starlight,"** when we look at the stars we are looking into the past, since the light we see has taken years and decades, traveling at the speed of light, to arrive in our vision.  But we are also looking into the past of our own species, those ancient tribes and cultures who wrote their own sort of graphic novels on the dark canvas overhead, Orion the Hunter stalking his prey across the winter night.

 

Every time I see Orion, I am somehow young again, a child and in awe.  There is so much more to learn.

 

 



**Starlight

 

All night, this soft rain from the distant past.

No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

 

--Ted Kooser

First: Introduction

I started out calling it my square of sky, changed it to circle, and now have changed it again -- to hexagon -- my six-sided figure of sky.  This is not a perfect geometry.  What matters is that my view is from the edge of the patio in my backyard.  It is framed by the pear tree on the left, by the birch tree on the right, by the maple briefly, and by the neighbor's flowering plum at the bottom.

I am starting this blog as part of a two-school, six-class project.  We have variously called it The Observation Project, The Nature Project, Art Colliding with Knowledge, perhaps others, and I'm still not sure we've settled on a single title.  But the idea has to do with observation, close observation, with paying attention, with detail, with discipline, with discovery. Early in our thinking about this thing, Lori, my partner in crime, said something like, "In order to write well on a particular subject, the writer must know that subject well."  So we decided to give our students such an opportunity, to come to know through observation and repetition and curiosity and research something worth knowing and saying.  And since we are asking our students to select a subject and observe it closely over time and write about it in daily, weekly, and cumulative formats, it seems only fair that we participate as well.

As example and preparation, we have read "Owls" by Mary Oliver, "Living Like Weasels" by Annie Dillard, and "A List of Nothing in Particular" by William Least Heat-Moon, all close observers and accomplished, curious writers.  I'm not sure any of us can hope to be as accomplished (though my students constantly surprise me), but we can certainly endeavor to look and to listen and to wonder.

As for my project, I will be observing my geometry of sky for a few moments each morning, on school days in the dark, on other days in the early light.  Already I've seen the moon, Orion the Hunter, a meteor, smoke, clouds, birds, planes, sun, rain, and a bright star low and left from Orion that I've just discovered is Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major, the brightest stellar object in our sky.  How did I not know this?  I will be watching and listening, breathing and sniffing, inhabiting that space and recording what I learn.  Here goes.