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Hunter's Moon

12/31/2021

This essay won FIRST PLACE for Creative Non-Fiction in the 2022 Royal Palm Literary Awards (Florida Writers Association)!!

It was the night of the Hunter’s Moon, and the moon didn’t show up. For that matter, I nearly didn’t show up either, although the tide that eventually pulled me to the shore was emotional, rather than gravitational. More variable, though no less powerful, I think. In the end, hope won out.

Watching the full moon rise on the western shore of Lake Michigan had been a ritual, a touchstone, for my younger daughter and I during the first year and a half of the pandemic. She had moved in with me shortly after the world started shutting down in a panic of uncertainty in early 2020, bringing her job and a knowledge of how to use Zoom with her to navigate the demands of the new digital workplace from a bedroom closet.

My house—a small duplex, really—proved a tight squeeze for the two of us and my large dog, but the nearby lakeshore and some splendid hiking trails vastly expanded our living space during these stressful and anxious times. Both of us took nature breaks at least twice a day, weather permitting, finding peace and refuge amidst towering firs and birches, crashing waves, and meandering forest walks. She got fully into the water nearly every day, whereas I considered myself daring for getting my toes wet at the shoreline.

“Hey, it’s going to be a full moon tonight!” one of us would invariably say. “Shall we?”

And then the countdown would begin, as we kept an eye on the clock to give ourselves the requisite lead time of fifteen minutes to drive to the shore. In heat and cold, snow and ice and shifting sand, we found ourselves standing at the water line, or sitting on a favorite bench, trying to guess exactly where on the horizon the moon would begin to cast its golden glow. As the setting sun turned the skies pink and red behind us, we would sit and talk about nothing, or everything, or just how cosmically lucky we were to be able to be drenched in such awe-inspiring beauty that surrounded us and was within such easy reach.

And then, finally, there it was, a textured golden orb rising from the waves as night fell deeper, casting a path of silver on the darkening waves as it rose higher and higher into the night. They were magical moments to share with a daughter, moments of shared awe, and appreciation, and renewal, and magic of sorts.

But all good things must come to an end so that other good things may happen, and eventually my daughter found a living space much closer to some of her essentials, and moved out. I was happy for her, of course, even as I shed occasional tears as I helped her load up her car before leaving. But the approach of that first full moon after she left was packing a heck of an emotional wallop.

The day arrived, and I spent it in a funk, both because I had lost my moonrise-watching companion, and because the weather forecast had clouds and rain predicted throughout the afternoon and evening. I pouted, and dithered, and hesitated, and stalled. And then, closing in on that fifteen minute window, I caught a glimpse of a little blue sky above among the rain clouds, and grabbed the car keys, grudgingly muttering “why the hell not?” It is a mantra which has served me well over the years even though it lacked its usual devil may care cachet this time.

I parked the car and made my way down the cordwalk from the lot to the beach. The rain had literally stopped just a few minutes before, with the result that both the parking lot and the entire shoreline as far as I could see were entirely empty. The sand, damp and pocked with raindrops, showed no footsteps other than mine.

At first I simply sat on the usual bench in the sand, reflecting on the fact that I was here alone…not just on the beach at this moment but embarking on this next phase of my life as well. It was unsettling, as most new things are, and I took in the expanses around me, somberly, quietly. But sitting still is not my favorite thing to do, and eventually I pushed off from the bench, leaving my shoes and blanket behind.

The lake level had been dropping in recent months, and there were marvelous expanses of flat, wet sand and pools close to the water line as the shallow waves pushed across them and retreated. I rolled up my pants legs and walked in up to my knees, marveling at how warm both the water and the wind felt in mid-October.

On the flats, the surging sheets of water made mirrors that reflected the evening clouds. Channels cut crosswise by tiny streams of water flowing downstream resembled the cross cuts of Irish crystal in the fading light. I was enveloped by the sounds of water and wind and felt part of a much larger, seamless fabric whose patterns kept changing.

The time for the Hunter’s Moon to rise came and went as the earlier rain clouds marched eastward and covered the horizon, while swaths of cloudy skies converged on both ends of the shore. There would be no moonrise for me to celebrate…or to mourn…this time around.

But as I picked my way back across the sand in the fading light and gathered up my things, I was happy that I had gone out looking for the moon by myself. The astonishing beauty that I had found there in its absence was still somehow reassuring to me that this new chapter I was beginning to navigate would still have beauty, and surprises, and renewal, and grace. And as long as the world keeps turning, I know that there will be more full moons to remind me of my blessings.

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Book Report

12/11/2021

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For my entire life, my relationship with books has consisted of reading them and, much later, writing them.

But earlier this year, I've stepped temporarily into a different dimension! I took part in a book making class taught by Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design professor Shawn Simmons at the John Michael Kohler Arts Museum in Sheboygan as part of its "Art Links" programming that aims to keep the over-55 crowd creatively engaged and challenged.

I'm still working on finishing my class project, but want to show off my two "book" covers here. The front is the image on the right, the back is the image on the left. I am so passionately appreciative of the natural world around me, I wanted to really put that on the page. And so I scored some intriguing hand-made paper for the background as a starting point and then began to build. The birch tree on the front is made from scraps of actual birch bark that I've come across while hiking, while the tree on the back is fashioned of paper from a downed wasp nest. Then I cannibalized old issues of nature magazines I found at a thrift store for the birds and animals, and couldn't resist adding an Audubon print of a Barn Owl with his squirrel quarry that I found on a note card. Everything that I love about walking in the woods--the mystery, the birds, the greenery, the coolness of the shade--found its way into these two covers.

While I will still "dress up" the inside covers in the same vein, since I draw so much inspiration from my walks in the woods and my time at the shoreline, the interior pages will largely be blank. And there's a reason for that.

I have found, in the past several decades, once I started writing "from the heart," that a blank page is an invitation. To what? Well, that's the interesting, and joyful, and sometimes scary part. Sometimes these are happy threads of words and feelings and depths and transitions and closure. And other times, well whoa, it can be like lifting the lid to Pandora's box. Childhood traumas, feelings of abandonment, life long fears that go so deep I can't see the bottom, truths that I have been reflexively denying or ignoring to get from one day to the next. So often, as I have put physical pen to physical paper, I will stop and look back, stunned, at the sentences and thoughts I have just set loose from where they whirled like scraps in the wind inside my mind, and think "oh, so that's what I was thinking." And then, like the contents of Pandora's Box, there is no recapturing them and hiding them away and out of sight.

So I have REALLY enjoyed this "book making" project on so many surprising levels. Starting out, I had no idea how much deep thinking this would provoke, or how much artistic meandering and problem solving it would cause my mind to churn through. Because the thing about adventures both large and small is...you never know where they will take you!

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Cordless and Dangerous

7/19/2021

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I had to replace a window blind at my house today, and one of the first things I did was to fetch my cordless drill and charge it up. It doesn't get much use and spends most of its time at the bottom of a closet. But as I opened up the case, I remembered that it was the VERY FIRST power tool I'd bought after my divorce. And of course, I wrote about it! While this may be "from the archives of 2006," that flush of empowerment still holds true today. Enjoy!

The paddock fence was going to have to be fixed, and fixed that day.

It was eleven months after the divorce, in which I got the house, the animals, the big sky, and the upkeep on fifteen bucolic acres of Wisconsin countryside. Eleven months after he took all the power tools and the manly knowledge of how to use them. Now there was a broken board in the wooden fence leaving a space big enough for Babe, my geriatric mare, to sneak through and eat herself to death or disaster in a pasture full of lush green grass. She just couldn’t handle eating around the clock at her age. And the duct tape I’d patched things together with just the week before had proved an impermanent solution. The entire board had finally ripped loose from the end post, screws broken off, wood split, little grey shreds of duct tape hanging consumptively from the soft, splintered pine on the ground.

There was an urgency, real and immediate, to the job. I knew in my gut that if I didn’t do this thing very soon, my horse would end up dead. I had been taking care of her for most of her life, and she was my last connection to becoming a horse owner at the age of 16. She was also the Calamity Jane of horses when it came to health. She dodged more bullets over the years than I could even begin to remember, though one night spent with her in a barn a few years ago at eight degrees above zero when even the vet thought she would be dead by morning was the high-water mark. I could have bought a really good car—a Jaguar, or a Mercedes—for what I’ve spent on her over the past three decades.

My options to get someone else to fix the fence were none. After eleven months of “audition” coffees and casual dating, I still wasn’t seeing anyone seriously enough to ask him to start pounding nails. And while my ex could still be finagled into the occasional household favor, he was currently floating several hundred miles away on a houseboat with my children somewhere around International Falls, Minnesota. No, I was truly “home alone.” I slipped into a yellow rain jacket, found the retractable measuring tape that sat in a kitchen drawer with my potholders, and went out in the last of the drizzle to gather the exact dimensions of the board and the screws my ex used to build the fence twenty years ago.

I drove to the local Menards and went straight for the power tools. All I knew was that I wanted something cordless. More convenient and less likely to electrocute me if the rain picked up again. My first helper was a polite young man about as old as my third child. My whole story rushed out at once, of course, as it usually does when I’m treading water in unfamiliar seas. Divorced, on my own, ex with the tools out of town, need to fix something, totally clueless. He’s probably used to it. Sees a middle-aged woman in the power tools section looking like a displaced refugee, and thinks, “dear God, why me?” We eventually settled on the store brand package of a cordless drill with a 14.4 volt rechargeable battery and a bunch of drill bits and other parts I didn’t recognize. Did he think I’d need a cordless screwdriver too? Not really, he explained, you could do the same thing with the cordless drill. Oh. Well, then.

He stayed on to help me figure out what kind of screws matched up with the old ones. And to find the baling twine. Earlier in the morning, I’d picked my dog up from the kennel, and caught up with Pat, the owner and a friend of mine. She was single too, and a former horse owner, and she got a big laugh at my duct tape improvisation. “Don’t forget to buy baling twine,” she said as I was leaving. “You’d be amazed at what you can fix with baling twine!”

My cordless drill, a package of screws and a spool of twine in my cart, I headed for the store’s lumber yard. Same story spilled out, this time to an itty bitty young girl about half my size with a blonde pony tail. She was delightful. Chatty, friendly, outgoing, helpful to the extreme. She took me under her tiny wing and I followed her through the lumber yard like a puppy. She not only located the exact size board I needed, but carefully checked over each board to find me a really straight one. Carried it around for me until we got to the checkout lane. In between, she opened up the drill’s black plastic carrying case and gave me a tutorial on what I needed to know about using my new tool. She loaded and unloaded the bits, changed the rotation, cautioned me on being safe while using it. She’d followed her dad around a lot when she was little, working alongside him on projects and learning the ins and outs of power tools, saws, many manly and mysterious things. She felt pretty good about it. I felt like a hothouse plant by comparison, but somehow dropped managed to drop into the conversation that I’d gotten a Remington twenty gauge shotgun for Christmas. Female bonding, anyone?

I brought home all the stuff, opened the instruction manual, and knew was in trouble. For all my professional strides over the years—newspaper reporter, freelance writer, prosecutor arguing to the state Supreme Court—our marriage had followed very traditional lines. I baked the cookies and ran the kids and hung the wallpaper, he built the deck and hammered the drywall and set the concrete driveway. Once in a while I’d bring him a glass of cold lemonade if it was hot out. A building project, to me, was a two-layer cake. My tools were nine-inch round baking pans and a hand mixer. My “secret weapon” in most household emergencies was nail polish remover.

I phoned Tom, my go-to guy with all my manly questions—car maintenance, satellite dishes, tools, you name it. We’d met months ago on line, but weren’t dating. He drove a cement truck, and was smart, and funny, and tall, and cute, and sported a diamond earring. I still laugh out loud remembering his e-mails. He, in the middle of watching a NASCAR race on television, was the soul of patience and gave me basic instructions on drilling holes. He cautioned me about not setting the drill to use too much “torque.” Huh what? I didn’t know what he meant, but he assured me that I could break a wrist if I got it wrong. I found the “torque” setting on the drill, figured something in the middle range should keep me out of trouble, and stepped up to the plate.

I had a couple of screw drivers and a scissors in my pocket, my hand saw under one arm, the baling twine under the other, the cordless drill set with a screwdriver head and carried like a six-shooter, and a bunch of two-inch rust-proof deck screws in my pocket. I needed to make a separate trip back for the eight foot board, and as I carried it around, I thought I’d fit right in with the Three Stooges. Many things got bumped into along the way. I took a moment to mentally praise the sheer brilliance of my ex, who apparently knew that he could buy eight foot boards already cut, set his posts eight feet apart, and avoiding all sorts of custom adjustments.

I tried to take the old screws out of the post. The drill battery ran out of juice after the first three. Back to the house I ran for the spare. I used the baling twine to rig a simple scaffold to hold the new board in place, hanging it from the board above, while I position it incrementally to the right spot. Yes, my friend Pat was right—you CAN use baling twine for almost anything!!

The board exactly in place, I took one of the new screws from my pocket, and tried to drill the screw into the board. It didn’t make a dent. Back to the house again, I switched from the screwdriver head to a drill bit. Tired of the round trips, I tested the drill bit out on a piece of firewood in the living room. Sawdust flew, but it worked.

Finally fully equipped, I set to the task at hand. The drill bit peeled right through the board and into the post below, leaving tiny spits of wood in its wake. I could feel the difference in pressure as it ripped first through the new plank of wood, and then grabbed deeper into the softer, old post beneath. I remember the only thing I understood from the instruction manual, and kept the drill bit turning as I pulled it out of the board. By golly, I’d made a real, live, professional-looking HOLE!!! I twisted a screw in with a hand-held screwdriver, and breathed a sigh of satisfaction when it held the board fast. The rest of the job went quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I decided to inspect the rest of the fence. I found that another board has completely broken in half as well, but had escaped notice, hidden by some low hanging pine branches.

Well. No kids around, no bugs flying around either because of the heavy rains, nobody to interfere with another job, hey, I was on a roll. I drove back to Menards, sauntered in the lumber yard entrance, and found the same young girl. We located yet another fabulously straight eight foot board for this second project, and she seemed genuinely happy and excited for me that I was starting to have fun with this. I told her about the baling twine scaffold, and she seemed truly impressed. “That’s really smart,” she says. “I would have probably just wrestled with it myself.” I felt like I’d been given the Order of the British Empire.

Returning to the paddock, I set to work with a hand saw, getting rid of the overhanging pine branches so that I could reach the broken board. There were more branches to trim than I thought, and more work all around than I could have imagined. . The lush, green boughs were each about ten feet long, and heavy as I dragged them away to a corner of the pasture. I was sweating, and getting covered with sap and lichen and sawdust. The mare watched from a distance, her gold coat and white mane gleaming prettily in the afternoon sun as she munched her way through a field of grass and Queen Anne’s Lace.

Nothing went smoothly. One of the old screws broke off in the post, leaving the twisted, spiral stem jutting like a brash taunt to my inexperience. I took the business end of the hammer and bashed the broken screw into the post until the surface was once again flat. Out of sight, out of mind. I somehow felt a whole lot better for pounding something hard.

This time, the board was an inch too long. Or the space it was supposed to fit in was an inch too short. It could be that the old posts have shifted over twenty years, or that the other boards swelled from the earlier rain. I lugged the board down to the second basement that doubled as my ex’s workshop. Nothing useful in sight except for a small vise. Clamping one end of the board in place, balancing the other on a cardboard box, I turned again to my little hand saw and hoped to heaven that I could cut in a straight line. This was WAY different than lopping off odd branches, this required actual precision. I guessed at what an inch would be, and tentatively scraped the teeth across the top of the board. Sawdust scattered every which way, and the saw skittered across the top, directionless, the teeth never taking hold. I tried again. The same thing happened. I remembered that failure was not an option. This time I grabbed the saw handle with both hands, and drew the teeth across the board like I was the one in charge. Amazingly, a notch formed and the blade dropped in a straight line through the pine. An inch-wide strip of wood fell to the floor, leaving an edge that looked straight, and consistent, and premeditated.

One more trip back to the paddock with the shortened board, and the job finally went the way I’d planned…an hour earlier. Baling twine, drill bit, Phillips screwdriver, all feeling familiar, in a final get-it-done-and-get-out rhythm. Board firmly in place, I gathered up the drill, the screwdrivers, the screws, the twine, the scissors, the saw, and dragged them back to the house. As I brought the mare in from the pasture, happy knowing that there was no way she’d getting loose that night, I realized I’d forgotten to cut down the loops of baling twine. It broke up the horizontal lines of the newly fixed fence like an odd little bit of macramé. After a second’s thought, I decided to leave them there. If they ever come loose, birds can use the strands for nesting material. But for now, every time I see them, I smile.

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The Art in Us All

6/30/2021

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Nearly a year ago, when pandemic adjustments were still in full swing and "Zoom" suddenly became a skill to master, I was asked to be the guest teacher for a series of three Sunday morning classes at the First Presbyterian Church of Deerfield in Illinois on the subject of "Spiritual Practice in the Pandemic." My first reaction to the invitation was sheer PANIC--what on earth could I possibly offer on the subject? I'm so non-religious I'd be at risk of smiting from on high! And so on... But after some deep breaths, I finally took some of my own advice to others, which is when the Universe hands you an opportunity, SAY YES!! And so for three marvelous Sunday mornings, in tandem with the wonderful Reverend Suzan Hawkinson, we had some lovely Zoom classes where we talked and shared about life, and kindness, and creativity, and art, and being in the present, and finding God in small things. And at some point in each class, I would share something that I had written in connection with that week's topic, and this is what came out on the subject of Art, after I had wandered through a nearby forest with its mysterious and haunting effigy mounds

Who knows, in the dawn of our ancestors, if we had words before we had cave paintings? What drove or inspired those people, dressed in animal skins and working by flickering torch light, to paint horses and deer and bison in motion on dark cave walls, side by side with figures of hunters and of their own hand prints?

Were these vast panoramas formed first in someone’s imagination and then turned into a project with collective planning, or did they arise for singular reasons to create and to inspire and to make a record of life around them?

Did music come before song? Or did the need to share an experience or a thought lead to grafting words to strings of notes and melodies, with drumbeats echoing the human heart?

It is insatiable, our need to communicate, to exalt, to explain, to show, to share with one another.

There are effigy mounds near my house, raised images in the landscape of deer and panthers. Some were tombs, others were not. They were created by nomadic people more than a thousand years ago, but they still evoke mystery and wonder in their presence.

The language that would have been spoken as they were being built has long been lost but the effort and the artistry remains. Squirrels scamper above them and acorns fall and seasons change as the mounds lay, immovable, under covers of grass and wildflowers and pine needles and branches.

Forest giants—trees a hundred feet tall and more—have sprouted from seeds among them, and grown, and fallen and yet these mounds endure. There have been no live panthers prowling these parts for many years, and yet still they are here, underfoot, if you just imagine.

We are hard-wired and driven in our need to share what we have seen and felt and dreamed. And so we build and we write and we see and we listen, bound together with those that came before us and the ones who will follow, celebrating the human and divine in us all.

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FREE Kindle download of "Lionhearted" this weekend!

4/30/2021

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What do you get when you mix a rescue cat, two mice, a Siberian Tiger and a traveling circus? The latest adventures of Finnigan the Circus Cat, of course, in FINNIGAN THE LIONHEARTED!

Adventure, friendship, daring rescues, and a healthy dose of humor figure highly in my latest chapter book, which takes Finnigan and his friends to the actual tent circus, a magical and thrilling place that they never thought they'd actually see "for real."

While I'm am a big fan of reading books on paper--and of course all the Finnigan books are available in paperback--this Kindle edition is a perfect way to both take the book for a test drive, and share the stories with friends and family.

Download away this weekend, enjoy the twists and turns of this old-fashioned circus adventure, and if you have a minute free after that, please leave a short review!!

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My very first book...and in French!

2/12/2021

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"THE BIRD WHO COULDN'T FLY"

I might be forgiven for thinking when I rounded up my first collection of essays in 2008 and called it Running with Stilettos, that it was my very first book. As far as I knew, my maiden voyage into self-publishing was the very first time I'd done something with the concept of "book" in the process. Blogging had been the first big tech hurdle for me to scale.

HOWEVER...my basement still contains some mystery boxes that have followed me through the decades. And when I was excavating one of them recently, I came across a children's book I had penned and illustrated for an assignment in French class at Immaculata High School in Chicago. I think in the publishing world, this is what's known as "the lost manuscript"!!

I had completely forgotten about it until then, but as I turned the pages I laughed with delight! I really loved going to Immaculata, and loved French class, and remember that "Mrs. Boushay" was our young and enthusiastic French teacher who made learning this foreign language a lot of fun. I only got to attend Immaculata for a couple of years, but I still have quite fond memories. Unfortunately, in the intervening life, I've forgotten all that French, and so the current translation services are now courtesy of Google!!

Given that this little "book" is only twelve pages long, I'm not going to publish it on Amazon!! But still, Mrs. Boushay DID suggest that I publish it when she graded it! So I'd like to share it and the notion that sometimes, what we liked to do as children turns out to be what we still like to do fifty years later. And as I read this in light of my Finnigan the Circus Cat books, I am STILL such a sucker for the little underdog who finds his courage and rises to the occasion!

Once upon a time there was a forest, and in the forest lived a little crow chick. He was pretty, and downy, and very nice, but he couldn't fly because he was afraid.

A bird with a fear of heights? Nobody had ever heard something like that! His parents themselves could fly, as well as his brothers and sister, but poor Zephyr would always refuse to try it.

Really, the only way for him to get down from the tree was for a nice, old squirrel to carry him on his back. Therefore, he usually stayed in the nest.

His mother would bring him his lunches and dinners, because he could not fly and the worms would listen to his noise and hide themselves.

Summer was passing quickly, and autumn was approaching. It was the season for the birds to fly south.

His mother cried and his father threatened, but to no avail. So they left him in the forest to live with the squirrel who had lived in their tree.

Zephyr grew during the winter, and his wings became strong. As spring approached, the squirrel had stopped hibernating and begun to forage.

One day, however, he was seen by a naughty little eagle who had been starving for a long time. During the following days, the eagle would observe the squirrel, its habits, and its companion, the crow which never flew.

So, one day he made his attack, and grabbed the squirrel with his talons, flying higher and higher.

But what's this? Zephyr was flying and he was attacking the eagle! For once he didn't think about himself and his fear. He knew he had to save his friend.

The mean bird perceived that he was outnumbered and fled, dropping the squirrel, who landed in a pile of snow.

But where had Zephyr gone? If one would look at the sky, we would see him soaring and gliding with a happy heart.

"Goodbye," he shouted to his forest friends. "I'm going south to visit my family and celebrate, but I will return!"

"You are an artist, Mary Therese. The grammar--very good. PUBLISH!!

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"I Did it My Way..."

2/6/2021

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Despite the fact we're still in the midst of a pandemic AND the Midwest has been socked in by really cold temps, I was delighted to be featured by my double alma mater, Marquette University, in a short feature about what-all I did with my two Marquette degrees twenty years apart. The first degree was in 1979, in journalism, and then twenty years later, in 1999, I graduated with the law degree. And there is no such thing as a straight line in my career path!

So here's the link to the article, titled "Mary T. Wagner combined her double degrees to chart her own course," posted by the Diederich College of Communication. Thank you so much Marquette!! Had I only known I'd be providing a "pandemic selfie" for a photo (I've been really diligent when it comes to social distancing for the past eleven months) I would have worn makeup when walking in the woods!

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The "real" in Finnigan the Circus Cat!!

11/15/2020

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Some say that “life imitates art,” while others feel that “art imitates life.” I don’t know that anybody would put my Finnigan the Circus Cat children’s books into the category of “high art,” but there is a lot of real running through these books anyway!

Starting, of course, with the kitten himself. Yes, there was a real Finnigan in the family. That’s actually him on all of the book covers, a digital version drawn from a photo of him perched on my shoulder after climbing up my side like I was a tree. Those claws were like tiny needles!

And yes, he was also a rescue kitten. My youngest son and his wife brought him home at Christmas one year, and yes, he was the tiniest kitten I’d ever seen. I got to play with him for the next week and a half before the kids returned to the university, and I was enchanted.

Finnigan returned to my house again as a fully grown cat for several months while the kids did a semester abroad, and that’s where the germ of the “circus cat” thing got started. With his elegant grey and black stripes and long, white legs, he reminded me of a cocky trapeze artist in a leotard from the very start. Having a daughter who is a circus aerialist also meant that the subject of circus arts was never far from hand.

And so Finnigan’s brash, young, boisterous personality got woven into the story and also the art right away. As often as I could, I drew from photos of Finnigan to illustrate the chapters, whether as a wee kitten sleeping in my lap or his lanky, inquisitive “teenager” edition.

But the “real” didn’t end there! When I wanted the image of a sinister looking black car to introduce the arrival of the villains in the second book, Finnigan and the Lost Circus Wagon, I conjured up the front end of a 1964 Chevy Bel Air with a V-8 engine that I’d owned long ago and still miss driving! And when I wanted details of actual, historical circus wagons, I drew from photos I’d taken of the incredible wagons themselves at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

When it came time to write the third book, Finnigan the Lionhearted, I was excited to have a reason to imagine going to the circus for the first time, with all that wonder and innocence! I know that in recent years, the use of elephants as circus performers has been waning, but I was drawing on my own memories here and so there were definitely still going to be some elephants in this circus. Unlikely friendships have been a constant in these stories, and so why not make one between an elephant and a pair of mice!

So whether “art imitates life” or “life imitate art,” Finnigan the Circus Cat has plenty of “life” to draw from. Where the one ends and the other begins…well the magic is somewhere in between!

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A Pandemic Marsh Walk

10/1/2020

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At the tail end of summer, the view from my favorite seat deep in the marsh has changed. There is a seasonal ebb and flow to all the natural areas that I like to visit—shorelines and forests and dunes and prairies—that makes them prettier or more stirring at some times than at others. Sitting in the middle of the marsh in August just hasn’t been something I do. Until now. It’s the pandemic year.

Absolutely everything has gone topsy turvy, so why not this? So I sit on a rough wooden bench, staring at the matted roots of cattails that stand seven feet tall around me like a living cage, and I ponder the changes that have come in all sorts of ways.

The Black River Marsh is a magical place. I know of several hiking paths that run beside it, some of which take me through hushed forests where tall hardwoods spread their branches like cathedral arches, and green and gold reflections glitter on still waters like bits of stained glass.

These places leave me spellbound and grateful when I visit. As the seasons change, the woods and fields are changeable tapestries. White trilliums and purple wood violets give way to blossoming trees, and then to fields of white daisies and yellow coneflowers and Black-Eyed Susans and bright orange Devil’s Paintbrush. Mid-summer, fields of Milkweed in full bloom are covered with clouds of Monarch Butterflies as they flit and court and lay their pearl-shaped eggs on the fuzzy underside of the leaves that the caterpillars will begin to eat as soon as they hatch, starting the dance all over again.

But there is a panorama to be savored right here as well, and my favorite seat at this feast is at the far end of a boardwalk into the watery heart of the marsh.

The boardwalk runs in a loop from a parking lot that’s open just a few months a year. When the lot is closed, it’s a least a quarter mile to hike in. Hence, I had never visited the boardwalk in, say, late March, before this year. But I have more stamina than I used to, and so walking the extra distance doesn’t dissuade me like it once did.

In Spring, from this spot, the contours of the Black River as it bends and flows are clear and wide. The skies are endless. I am surrounded by water on three sides, and the highest things to be seen, rising above the collapsed cattails and marsh grasses, are the mounded homes of muskrats. These are crowned by nesting geese who regard visitors with suspicious glares.

In Spring, I can see ducks and geese swim, and take off, and land in the river. I’ve watched a Green Heron perch on a branch just above the water line, poised like an arrow, moving only by tiny degrees, until there was a sudden, spear-like motion and his beak broke the water, withdrawing with a wriggling silver fish.

The marsh is alive with Red-Winged Blackbirds, brashly claiming the high ground of the few cattails from last year not flattened by wind and rain and snow. As warmer weather sets in, the chittering of Marsh Wrens sounds like a symphony of rusty oil cans. The wrens flit from reed to reed, perching sideways. They are tiny things with upturned tails and inquisitive eyes and an industriousness that makes me feel like a slacker.

And there is the primordial clacking of Sandhill Cranes, elegant, tall birds in colors of smoke and ash and rust. They glide overhead on graceful wings and legs that trail like long, twigs. In flight, they resemble prehistoric cave paintings brought to life. At sunset, the sky can seem like a furnace in shades of crimson and pink and silver. It is breathtaking.

But as they days get longer and hotter, little by little the marsh plants stake their claim. Cattails and grasses and plants with leaves shaped like arrowheads surge upwards. And it becomes harder and harder to see the river itself.

By mid-August I have long since quit visiting the boardwalk and gone to other hiking trails with better views. Until this year. So much is different!

And so I find myself returning again and again, binoculars in hand, smelling like bug spray from head to toe, a hat on my head to protect the newest color experiment of my “pandemic hair” from the sun.

This time I strolled along the boardwalk and viewed a landscape that was tall and green as far as the eye could see. A small inlet where I had once watched a mother Wood Duck and her clutch of ducklings paddle from open water into the reeds was now covered with a solid coat of chartreuse green—duckweed--from end to end. The Red-Winged Blackbirds with their red epaulets no longer stood out like sentinels amid the jungle of profusion.

The wrens were quite muted, the oil can symphony dimmed. And yet…

A big part of my approach to watching nature is pretty much that if you just sit still for a few minutes, something will show up. And so I took my usual seat in the heart of the marsh, closest to the river, and sat down.

If there was a breeze, I couldn’t feel it since the cattails formed a wall around me. If there was a river, I couldn’t see it, even if I stood on my tiptoes. Heat from the sun soaked into my shoulders and the back of my neck.

But there were small rustlings around me in the tall, shadowy stalks. Dark shapes moved in darker shadows, the contours of small birds appearing only in fragments as they moved among the greenery.

There was the splash of a tiny footfall, and then another, in the shallow water nearby. Seen up close, the individual tiny green leaves of duckweed floated and moved on the water’s surface like confetti. It was mesmerizing.

After a few minutes, I finally started back for the car. I stopped here and there to admire the white arrowhead flowers, already past their prime and battered by the previous night’s rain but still lovely.

A quartet of half-grown Marsh Wrens flitted and hopped from the bent grasses on one side of the boardwalk to the other, as funny a set of siblings with their chirps and lurches as the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.” They stuck together and called to each other with single notes. After they had all crossed, I could not see them in the tangle of plants, but I could chart their progress by the quivers in the grasses and their tweets to each other.

Then I heard munching sounds below my left ankle, and looked down. There were ripples in the water, as though something had just ducked for cover. A muskrat perhaps? I had seen them in river during the spring.

Now if I was somehow “keeping score,” well I hadn’t seen a single person during my entire visit, and I had actually SEEN very little in the way of birds or animals while I was there.

But I still felt not alone at all. And in this strange pandemic time, that was much more than enough.

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On Art and Aging and New Stuff...

6/19/2020

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"I’m going to be teaching a fiber arts class at the art center in a few months,” my friend Patty Aker said last summer. “You should get on the list to sign up! And it’s FREE!”

I had absolutely no idea what I’d be getting into. But I adore Patty and I love the word “free.”

At the moment we were chatting and being jostled in a former furniture factory repurposed as an art gallery, during a yearly fundraiser that combines getting original art on 8 x 10 canvases with the frenzied stampede of traders on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange. “Art as a contact sport” is how I often describe it. I look forward all year to both donating my photographs and picking up a few canvases for myself and birthday presents. It’s raucous, sweaty (end of July), colorful and convivial. And I was having a good night because I’d scored two of Patty’s lovely painted silk scarves in the annual melee.

And so I took Patty’s suggestion and tracked down Xoe Fiss, the lovely young lady from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and gave her my card. Months later, I stepped into an entirely new universe.

First, a word about Patty’s art. To say that she paints on silk is to offer that Michelangelo liked to sculpt. Her silk panels and banners and scarves are ethereal washes of color and designs, both natural and abstract. Just as I’ve never stood looking up at a statue by Michelangelo and puzzled “how did he ever get that nostril just right?” I’ve only stared and gaped at Patty’s creations with the same sense of wonder.

Truth be told, I often have to fight back the feeling that I’m an imposter in this community arts organization, showing photographs that owe so much to my smart phone for being in focus, while I am surrounded by people who use their hands to actually paint with brushes, and sculpt, and build, and…create!

But hey, I’ve retired! And I like to try new things and meet new people! And so I found myself on a winter Friday afternoon in a large classroom where Patty was teaching us the fundamentals of painting on silk. Looking around the room at the number of students whose hair was as silver as my roots, I realized for the first time that I was in a class specifically geared toward “seniors.” I did the math. Yes, I indeed was in the “senior citizen” column! No matter, I couldn’t stay twenty-five for ever…

As a starting exercise, we were each given pieces of plain white silk stretched taut over circular frames. We dutifully traced outlines on the silk, choosing from various templates, and then drew over those outlines with a thick liquid that quickly hardened. And then it was time to dip our brushes into pots of paint and then transfer the paint to the silk.

Oh, this was IGNITION!! As the brush touched the silk, color flowed from the tip into the fabric and then meandered and bled and combined as though a sinuous, capricious, living thing. For me, the sight was absolutely mesmerizing. So this was how magic happened! I filled in my circular practice piece. I’d picked what I think was the partial outline of some jointed crab legs. If you turned it upside down, it looked more like a Tarantula floating on a sea of blue.

No matter, it was fun! I proudly sent photos of my silk-painted crab/tarantula to my kids. “How old were the kids in the class?” one of them asked, thinking that this had been done by a second-grader. I suddenly felt like Rodney Dangerfield.

By the time the next class rolled around, we had an official—and much larger—assignment to fill out the remaining weeks. Issued much larger swaths of fabric, we were to come up with one or more symbols that were important to us in our lives and then create small silk banners that would eventually be displayed in an art show. We could use paint, beads, felting, embroidery and other decorative tricks to embellish them, but they all had to be somehow significant to our lives.

I stewed on this charge for days, but finally came up with an idea that combined a Hummingbird hovering between some ferocious waves and a clutch of Morning Glories. I turned to the hundreds of templates in class to find an image of a Hummingbird to trace and work from; worked from a famous image in Japanese art for the waves; and drew the flowers from photos I’d taken with a group of local photographers at the nearby and fabulous Christopher Farm and Gardens.

As the Friday classes rolled on, it was fascinating to see what different forms everyone’s images had taken. Given an assignment of making something as simple as a leaf, we all would have created images as far removed and unlike as the planets. It was an awe-inspiring, and energizing and heart-warming and imagination-sparking.

Eventually, we took a short break so that we students could get better acquainted with each other and introduce our works. The ladies who arrived at my table each showed off and explained their projects. There were images of birds, trees, rivers, and references to happy thoughts—friends, family history, strength, community, nature.

And then it was finally my turn. I held up my silk work-in-progress with the bird and the waves and the flowers and explained “well, this basically tells you that Mary really needs therapy!” They laughed. I was serious.

And so I explained the multi-layered and sometimes tortured symbolism in my design. I love to watch birds, and am enchanted by Hummingbirds with their gleaming throat patches and their wings nearly invisible as they beat so swiftly. But on the other hand, it represented the fact that I have only rarely in my life felt as though there was any firm ground beneath my feat. More often, I have felt myself teetering on the edge of disaster, keeping my anxieties to myself with a brave face, and staying just a few wingbeats ahead of a crash coming up from behind. There are reasons for that, I have come to understand more recently. When I was nine, and again when I was sixteen, the world as I knew it vanished overnight—home, school, friends, security, routine…and in one instance, even a shared language. And apparently it has left some residual marks.

The waves in the picture have their own story. Some of my most cherished childhood memories involve going to the shore of Lake Michigan often with my two aunts, eating hotdogs, searching for tiny shells, and wave jumping and body surfing like a carefree little otter. But Lake Michigan has its deadly, dangerous side, and it can resemble those swirling depths of fear and uncertainty that have haunted me for most of my life.

But again on the plus side! I drew my inspiration for my threatening, menacing, reaching waves from the famous 19th century woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who was about seventy years old when he began his legendary project of creating three dozen exquisite woodblock prints of Mount Fuji. Talk about optimism and second acts! I have found his later-in-life example to be incredibly uplifting.

The flowers, I’m happy to report, were just flowers! I try to keep my face to the sun and find the beauty in the road ahead, so there were no deeper meanings to be culled.

The pandemic rolled in just as we finished our classes, putting all thoughts of art shows and mingling somewhere off to the future. But I was grateful and astonished at the opportunity to learn this new thing, and to realize that for all the words I had written over the years—in essays, in short stories, in journals—this was the first time I had ever taken the contents of my subconscious and disgorged them into a picture! It seemed like a pretty important leap!

Opportunity knocked yet again a few weeks ago, this one driven by the pandemic.

It was invitation for a “virtual” art class via ZOOM through the Kohler Arts Center that was geared once again toward seniors and learning. This one involved polymer clay. Was I interested? Is the Pope Catholic? The thought of learning anything new in a group setting, even one where we all participated from our own homes, was irresistible.

Our little group of five was basically the test case for setting up this kind of class in a virtual environment. Since we couldn’t meet at the art center and use the equipment there, we all were gifted a box of supplies for the project. Our instructor, Amy Mester, was actually located in St. Paul, Minnesota, 300 miles away. We would “meet” virtually for two hours a day, for five straight days.

As the day to start the classes approached, my anxiety level ratcheted up a few notches. Polymer clay is a three-dimensional medium. I am entirely a two-dimensional thinker. I write, typing words on a flat keyboard that upload to a flat screen and print on flat paper. Writing by hand has the same result. I take photographs, which are printed up on flat photo paper. Sketching…same thing.

Looking back on all those years of playing with Playdoh when my kids were growing up, I had shown absolutely no gift at all. Mostly I made little Playdoh snakes by rolling the clay between my hands. Occasionally I tried to pinch the Playdoh into an animal shape, but I don’t recall anything being identifiable…or even able to stand up.

So a few days before the classes I started to binge-watch “how to” videos on YouTube to learn how to work with this stuff. I joked that I felt like Keanu Reeves’ character Neo in the first Matrix movie, getting kung-fu programming uploaded straight to his brain. I was ready…I thought!!

Well, the Matrix had better writers and a longer time to write the script!! Amy’s classes and instruction were incredibly stimulating, and we all watched raptly and imitated her with enthusiasm as she chopped, and kneaded, and squished, and rolled out polymer colors into waves of designs. She showed us quite a few of her earlier projects, and we were mesmerized both by her skill and by the possibilities.

Early on, we knew that “birds” were our class theme. Amy modeled an adorable, small, squat fanciful bird she’d created with a core of crumpled aluminum foil covered with “feathers” she’d made by rolling two colors of clay into a jelly roll and then slicing it. It sounded so easy!!

I dutifully took a sheet of aluminum foil and tried to mush it into a usable shape. It was DOA. I brutally sized up my capabilities of becoming a three-dimensional thinker in the space of five days, and caved almost completely. While my classmates were happily applying colorful slices of polymer to forms, bottles, bowls, and branches, I confessed to Amy during our one-on-one instruction time that I planned to try to make something in “bas-relief.” Sort of a compromise between two and three dimensions. Two and a half dimensions, is how I described it. It was all good.

I showed Amy a sketch I had drawn of a Sandhill Crane. Sandhills are some of my favorite birds, with elegant wings in the colors of smoke and ash and rust, and a primordial call that clatters overhead and in the surrounding marshes, reminding the listener that wild nature exists and is glorious. I just pull over to stop and stare every time I see them, and hope that traffic following behind me has the presence of mind to drive around.

And so I began my magnum opus. First I baked a tile in shades of green and blue streaked with white for the background, and then I started to build the bird. Everything along the way was a learning curve! Clay is sticky stuff, and doesn’t always want to detach from a surface or a blade when you want it to. It stretches, it warps, it breaks, it makes you start over.

I made a roll of what I thought would look like feathers when I sliced it, but the slices looked ridiculously like miniature pork chops and so I picked a different theory of making feathers. Once I’d built the bird and shoved it in the oven, I found that some parts burned to different colors and so I had to buy some acrylic paints to fix the damage.

I finally finished my Sandhill Crane days after the final class had finished and emailed Xoe and Amy a photo, a "virtual" show and tell.

Given the realities of the pandemic, will this ever actually get into a little art show of our “senior learning” art projects? Maybe. Did I train my brain to make three-dimensional art? Not exactly…but I’m happy that I learned as much as I did! Would I jump at the chance to take part in something like this again?

OH YES!!

And I hope you will too.

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