Last night it rained torrentially here in Keene, after a day of drizzle and damp. Early this morning when I walked, the grass was soaked through with rain and dew, as were my sandal-clad feet and rolled-up pants-legs after I’d cut through the cold, tall grass at the end of our street, roadblocks and yellow caution-tape be damned. The woods along “my” shortcut were dripping with wet, green leaves as a tropical cloud of mosquitoes and black-flies descended on my bare arms and around the dog’s head, halo-like. This, I recalled, is why sane folks don’t hike in New Hampshire in May: even when vegetation hasn’t overgrown your path, your way will be marred by blood-sucking insects, your view shrouded by an impenetrable veil of green.
Downtown Keene is green beyond belief these days. Not only are the trees in Central Square in full leaf, nearly hiding the Congregational church spire, but city maintenance crews are laying new sod along the sidewalks. Everywhere you look downtown, the grass-covered ground is an alarmingly artificial shade of deep, velvety green: a shade out of a horticultural catalogue, not what you’d expect in a state that grows granite. Keene is a particularly fastidious town, taking pride in her impeccably landscaped civic spaces, but I prefer the pale, muted shades of natural grass and ground over this trucked-in, carpet-like lushness.
Back in March and the early days of May when the trees were bare, I craved chlorophyll like a drug denied; in those gray days, I zeroed in on the smallest sprout or spot of verdure with a laser-like intensity, envying those animals that graze on green. These days, though, I feel somewhat overwhelmed by Nature’s fecundity, by these leaves that have seemingly sprouted overnight to crowd and choke my view with a claustrophobic intensity. How quickly the bare, hard-frozen ground erupts into foliage; how quickly a tame, trimmed garden overflows its borders, lapping up space like an insatiable green flame.
Apparently I’m alone in my alarm. Yesterday the dog, giddied by the lure of spring, stood in belly-high grass and grazed, picking off the tops of some sort of palmately divided, cinquefoil-like leaf. Usually the dog nibbles plants only when he’s feeling sick: he’ll sniff then nibble a particular kind of greenery which makes him vomit, a natural cleansing purge. But yesterday he showed no signs of distress nor did he get sick afterward; instead, he tore off and swallowed leaves as if for sheer delight in their lush spring freshness, his own ritual of vernal absorbtion.
I should know better than to fight against fecundity: when feeling overwhelmed by time and and her vegetative rush, I should surrender to that force and go with the flow. The force that fuels the flower is formidable but temporary: plants rush and choke because they know without sentience that their days are numbered. The weeds that seem so strongly defiant in May will wither and freeze in a matter of months; their green stampede toward the sun is as much an act of desperation as it is a march of joy, spurred by an urge of only limited duration. Like panicked movie-goers racing out of a flaming theatre, plants rush, tumble, and crush their way toward light, any light, heedless of any and all signs and barriers. They’ve only a handful of months into which to cram their entire leafy lives, these weeds and greenery; stand back and watch your step lest you be overswept by their chlorophyllic furor.
May 19, 2004 at 7:04 pm
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
–Dylan Thomas
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May 19, 2004 at 10:28 pm
Gol-ly, Lorianne, you’re as bad as my mother used to be! I’d be all excited about it being summer and she’d be saying things like, “Well, after the 4th of July then it’s August and the summer will be all over.” You’ve got the damn weeds already desperate to ward off the freezing weather to come! Winter’s long enough around here, let’s not even think about it!
But I’m teasing you. Yes, it is overwhelmingly green around these parts right now. I can’t even remember it ever being quite so pervasively green. Verdant fecundity indeed. (BTW, I swear by Avon’s bug guard spray.)
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May 19, 2004 at 11:12 pm
Fecundity is another of my favorite words…and I didn’t understand the fecundity of spring until I got to the East Coast. Verdant, lush, fecund, deep…the words suck you in, like an overgrown path. I hope you can into the flow!
Andi
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May 20, 2004 at 2:17 am
Lorianne-
Wow!
The POP I’m about to write seems pretty easy after reading that wonderful prose..and you spit all that out before class today?
So far, I’m enjoying your teaching, and now, your writing.
By the way, check out the lyrics to Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream.” It’s kind of like an “automotive” version of walkabout. Although not quite as obvious as Walkabout, there is a definite link between travel and self awareness in the song.
See you in class tommorow.
Andy
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May 20, 2004 at 3:27 pm
I was delighted when I began reading unedited Old English texts, and found that people have been confusing “lie” and “lay” since the 6th century (at least). (It was “lecgan and licgan” then, if I remember right.)
There used to be a whole set of verb-pairs like that, where the one verb meant “to do X” and the other, with a just a change in the root-vowel, meant “to cause X to be done.” The only other common pair I can think of is “sit” and “set” — “to set” is to cause something to sit; as “to lay” is to cause something to lie. One pair I really liked, which didn’t — alas! — survive, is gangen and gengan. “gangan” meant “to go”; “gengan” meant “to cause to go” — and it was the verb you’d use for riding a horse. Like most of these pairs, though, the sound and meaning were too close, and the meanings gradually collapsed together. Only the single verb — “to go” — survived.
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May 20, 2004 at 3:28 pm
(You can take the boy out of academe, but you can’t take the academe out of the boy)
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May 20, 2004 at 4:02 pm
I know what you mean. Here in Florida stuff GROWS. It’s nice to have our favorite plants but sometimes I feel beaten up by all the maintenance required to keep these plants from TAKING OVER.
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May 20, 2004 at 7:25 pm
Thanks, Dale, that’s actually a very helpful way to think of the lay/lie problem. Set/sit. Interesting.
Re: greenery taking over. I recall the one time I was fortunate to go to Hawaii, in the eastern part of Maui and similarly the eastern part of Kauai where it gets lots of rain, the greenery is so lush – and the plants look are like the houseplants where I live only gone totally wild and enormous in the tropical climate. There’s a place for you to go, Lorianne! You could walk around an entire island or two. 🙂
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May 21, 2004 at 7:34 am
Kurt, that’s the exact DT line that I have in mind whenever I mention “the force that fuels the flower.” I never can remember the exact wording, so my phrasing is a bastardized version. The flipside of fertility, of course, is old age & death: the Mother Goddess is one in the same with the Destroyer Goddess even though we tend to prefer the former over the latter.
Leslee, I giggled at your mention of your mom’s similar outlook. I think old folks are more prone to such worrisome looking ahead…and I was born with an old soul! One of my favorite parts of Annie Dillard’s *An American Childhood* is when she talks about going for weekend getaways in the country with a friend’s family. Even though she was young at the time, she always was acutely aware that each minute of fun in the country brought her that much closer to Sunday night when they’d go home. It’s a very “grown-up” sentiment to look forward to the end of things, and I like AD have done it since I was young.
(Does Avon’s bug spray have DEET in it? I always swore by Skin So Soft *until* they started putting actual insect repellent in it. I have chemical sensitivity issues, so I don’t like wearing DEET & other chemical repellents…guess I should find an Avon Lady to answer my questions!)
Andi, I’ve never been the same since reading Annie Dillard’s chapter on “Fecundity” in *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*: she talks about how fertility is a threatening thing, the “dark side” of nature. Very un-Disney! This always made sense to me, and this year it really drove close to home. Since we were in the Midwest when the trees came into leaf, it literally seemed like the landscape was gray & bare one day then leafy & tropical the next. Very disorienting, like seeing a gray nun transform overnight into a go-go dancer! 😉
Hey, Andy–thanks for stopping by & commenting. I’m surprised you have time to read my blog in addition to all the assigned reading for class! Yep, I wrote this essay before heading off to class: I *try* to write & post something everyday, although sometimes I skip a day. But I think that the only way to get better at reading & writing is to *do it*, so this blog gives me a forum to practice, practice, practice.
You’re right about Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream.” Although I’m usually not a big TP fan, I had a student once write a wonderful paper about the song. (I used to teach a freshman-comp version of this course at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, so one of the assignments was to write an essay about a *song* of the open road.)
Good to hear you’re enjoying the class & the blog…
Dale, how fascinating to hear about the Old English ancestry of the lay/lie confusion! I’m usually super-careful about getting the terms right (and about correcting my students!), but occasionally one slips under the radar. It makes sense that such subtle word differences would eventually fade away: if common folks can’t remember the distinctions, it’s only a matter of time before the distinctions aren’t made at all. I wonder if lay/lie will eventually die out? And I wonder, too, why people seem (?) to have fewer problems with sit/set?
(I chuckled, too, at your remark about “taking the academe out of the boy.” How true! We’re doomed!) 😉
Denny, down in Florida you know all about lush fecundity! I always laugh when I read John Muir’s account of *walking* to Florida from Illinois. The whole purpose of his walk was to look at flowers, so he’s overjoyed to find all sorts of new species when he gets down south. But when he arrives in Florida, he’s overwhelmed & disoriented by the lush fecundity, the briars, and the insects: suddenly, “friendly” Mother Nature seems alien & even threatening to him. To make matters worse, he’s disappointed to find that the places where he planned on walking are actually impenetrable swampland: after boasting upon setting out that he wanted to walk the “wildest, leafiest, least-trodden way,” when he gets to Florida he stops walking and hops a *boat* to his destination! 😉
Leslee, a Hawaiian getaway sounds sublime: I’m sure the botanist in me would go nuts! Somehow I think I wouldn’t be so alarmed by extreme lushness in Hawaii: I’d be expecting it to be green & tropical, so it wouldn’t be a shock. Here at home, though, it just seems odd to see greenery sprouting out of places that were gray & FROZEN for so long: it’s a total about-face. I suppose traveling to/from Hawaii from the Arctic would be similarly disorienting.
As always, thanks to everyone who stopped by & took the time to comment!
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May 21, 2004 at 12:31 pm
I think the main reason people have a harder time with lie/lay is that the past tense of “lie” is (in modern English) the same as the present tense of “lay.” If English teachers would let it alone I think the verbs would collapse together within a generation. (My wife, who once taught composition at Yale, confuses the two in casual speech.)
There are dialects, of course, in which the sit/set distinction has already disappeared. “Come on in and set a spell!”
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May 22, 2004 at 6:49 pm
Dale, I’m assuming (?) from your comment that Old English forms of lay/lie don’t have the same confusing conjugation woes that the modern forms do? I wonder, then, how/why the modern conjugation evolved…it just seems strange that the past tense of “lie” is “lay”…
It makes you think that there’s a perverse Grammar God up there in the heavens who delights in tricking mere mortals… 😉
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