The Season Of Birds And Stones by Yelizaveta P. Renfro
The spring after I turned forty, I started master naturalist school, making the forty- mile drive to Goodwin State Forest every Saturday to walk through the woods and learn the words for things. I felt abraded by my life, worn down to inattentiveness and muteness. Three times a week, I commuted an hour north from central Connecticut to western Massachusetts, where I frantically taught four classes, held my obligatory office hour, then raced back south to meet the school bus. On other days, I graded endless essays and did class prep, hauling heaps of papers to the pool for swim practice, the art league for ceramics. I had been a mother for a decade. I had spent a quarter of my life on children. Master naturalist school felt like an es-
cape, a time and place to have my own life when most of it belonged to others. This feels like a confession. There are things mothers are not supposed to say.
What is a naturalist? The lead instructor, a retired school teacher named Juan, posed this question during the first class. My twenty classmates – most older than me, some by two or three decades – tossed out answers. Someone who is curious about the natural world. A generalist, not a specialist. A person who observes and appreciates nature. Juan nodded in encouragement. He told us that the work of a naturalist can be done virtually anywhere, even a street corner. Then he told the story of Margaret Morse Nice, an Ohio housewife who singlehandedly carried out one of the most extensive studies of song sparrows ever conducted in between her mothering and housekeeping duties. Housewife. The word rankled. It felt dismissive. I wanted to know more about this woman who had, nearly a century ago, gone outside to be with birds.
We all traipsed into the forest, following Juan, pausing to consider a young yellow birch, Betula alleghaniensis, that seemed to be elevated on stilts, its roots appearing to cradle something–only there was nothing in their empty grasp. What happened here? Juan wanted to know. These were the kinds of questions naturalists asked. He offered his hypothesis: the birch had originally grown atop a fallen tree that provided nutrients, those elevated roots cradling a nurse log that had since rotted away. My fellow naturalists murmured their appreciation for Juan’s divination, but I kept circling what felt like a more urgent question. Who was Margaret Morse Nice? What was her story?
Mothers & Stones
My mother-in-law, Martha Gilman Hamilton, had died nearly three years before I set out to become a master naturalist. Though my husband Doug and I had been married for a dozen years at the time of her death, I had never met her. I knew her only through stories, through words. I knew she was raised in an affluent Los Angeles family, her father a well-known architect, her mother a society lady. Born in 1935, she was the eldest of three and the only girl. Her two younger brothers became architects like their father, but Martha was sent to Wellesley College, where her mother and grandmother had gone before her. She had aspirations to become an architect, but denied the opportunity, she married right out of college and became a foreign service wife, living in Turkey, Nepal, Malta, sometimes Washington, DC. She directed a house of cooks and nannies and mothered in an exacting and aloof manner.
After the marriage dissolved, she took the children to the wilds of New Mexico – defying the terms of the divorce agreement – where she flipped houses, before house flipping even had a name, using the architectural and interior design skills she picked up from her father. She put her children to work on the properties she bought and fed them easy and inexpensive meals – rubbery liver, ground beef doctored with spices. She was set on finishing the task before her – fledging her six children who ranged in age from preschoolers to high schoolers – as efficiently as possible. She sent her eldest son to a boarding school in Switzerland, her only daughter to Rome. When they reached college age, her three eldest sons went off to Ivies – Harvard, Yale, Penn – and then her daughter went to Wellesley. Just her twin boys remained at home. She sent them on study abroad adventures, one to Japan, the other to Yugoslavia. Finally, they left for college.
Then, she reclaimed her life. She washed her hands of the whole mothering enterprise and maintained only sporadic contact with her children through letters. Her first son to marry selected a wife of whom she did not approve, leading to estrangement; she did not establish a relationship with his three children, which set the tenor for her relations with future grandchildren. By the time my children were born – her eighth and ninth grandchild – she had firmly established herself as uninvolved. And by then, she had become a sculptor and was living in a small village in Mexico, surrounded by her sculptures, pursuing the life which perhaps she felt she had been denied for so long: to be an artist, to live on her own terms. She was inscrutable yet eerily familiar to me: a woman who chose to live out her last days alone with her art, a woman who chose stones over people.
Mothers & Birds
My first foray into learning more about Margaret Morse Nice led me to a book, Women in the Field: America’s Pioneering Women Naturalists, by Marcia Myers Bonta. In a chapter titled “Ethologist of the Song Sparrow,” I read that Nice has been called the “founder” of ethology – the study of animal behavior under natural conditions. In the second paragraph, I came upon this: “Often described as only a housewife with four children, she would tartly retort, ‘I am not a housewife, I am a trained zoologist.’
Mothers & Words
In the feminist classic Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn G. Heilbrun claims that “there are four ways to write a woman’s life.” A woman may tell her own story in autobiography, she may tell it in fiction, a biographer may tell her story for her, or “the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.”
Because the “marriage plot” is the story that historically has been the dominant one available to women, they “have been deprived of the narrative, or the texts, plots, or examples, by which they might assume power over – take control of – their own lives.”
Heilbrun was a wife and a mother and a successful academic, teaching for more than three decades at Columbia. When she died in 2003, Vanessa Grigoriadis noted in a New York Magazine article: “Heilbrun is one of the mothers – perhaps the mother – of academic feminism, laying the groundwork for women’s struggle over the past decades with what they called the ‘patriarchy.’ ”
Heilbrun graduated from Wellesley in 1947, a decade before Martha. According to Grigoriadis, Heilbrun believed that Wellesley promoted a type of woman who “pursued domestic and volunteer careers with a besotted devotion to ladylike attitudes and the mindless cheer of the lower half of a two- person career – for example, ‘We have just moved with our seven children, two dogs, guinea pigs, and the new addition to our family, a large turtle, to an igloo on an ice floe where Dick hopes to study frozen minnows.’ ”
Swap out of a few of the details – six children instead of seven, Turkey or Nepal instead of an ice floe, George instead of Dick – and the story grows eerily familiar.
Stones
I signed up my children for a carving class at the art league. The teacher, an elderly woman named Joan, had been carving stone since before I was born. “My husband of fifty- three years died in February,” she told me at the first class. “I miss him so. I love working with the children. They give me something to look forward to each week.” She showed me the first sculpture she had ever carved – a sinuous, organic shape, polished smooth. “I carved this forty- eight years ago,” she said. “It travels with me to all of my classes.” She taught my children how to use rasps, how to shape the stone to their will. It was slow work, their progress nearly imperceptible from one week to the next. Each class, I would pause and watch before leaving to grade essays. Each week, I imagined my own hands shaping those stones.
Mothers & Words
When Doug informed his mother that we were getting married, she sent me a gift: a copy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. This may seem an odd nuptial gift – the story of a woman suffering a mental health crisis confined to a room by her physician husband who forbids her from writing and generally controls her life until she suffers a psychotic break – but it was meant as a welcoming gesture. Gilman was a relative of Martha’s, appearing on one of the many scrolls of the extensive family tree that reaches all the way back to another literary foremother, Anne Bradstreet, known for being the first published poet of England’s North American colonies. Married at sixteen, the mother of eight, Bradstreet writes often of her role as a wife and mother. As a wedding gift, Doug gave me a Nambe bowl (made in New Mexico) with a quote from Bradstreet engraved on the bottom: “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits.”
Mothers
I had mined the lives of those who had mothered me – most notably, my own mother and my paternal grandmother – and I was weary of deconstructing their stories, searching them for a blueprint, a way forward. My mother’s quest plot was derailed by the marriage plot. She had to give up her quest for knowledge to become a wife, transforming overnight from a confident scholar in the Soviet Union to a reluctant housewife in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. My American grandmother, in contrast, had no plot to her life – she was still a teenager when she was swept up in the marriage plot, becoming a mother at twenty-one. Did she ever want anything else? Maybe, but she couldn’t have said what it was. I’m not sure she ever imagined any other story for herself.
So now I looked to the lives of other mothers, the stories they lived, the stories they told about themselves.
Words
Every Saturday, I followed my master naturalist classmates around as they pointed here and there, asking for the words for things, like wide-eyed toddlers. What is this plant? This plant? This tree? This insect? This bird? It seemed miraculous how learning the name for something made it blaze into existence. Once I learned to see sumac, suddenly its red torches sprung out of the tangle of green everywhere I went. The fiddlehead fern, newly indexed, emerged with its distinct scrolls, and the mitten-shaped leaves of the sassafras waved at me everywhere in the forest. One week, we studied plant succession in a powerline corridor, and another, we yanked buckets of water out of a roaring river and peered at aquatic creatures, naming them based on an identification guide. And yet, so many of the names trickled out of my leaky brain. I was lucky to retain perhaps one in ten. There were no stories to anchor the names to – nothing to gird them into place. I could remember stories, not disembodied words.
Mothers & Birds
After writing her masterful two-volume study of the song sparrow, Nice tried her hand at writing for a general audience, publishing The Watcher at the Nest in 1939. Covering her song sparrow studies but also her studies with cowbirds, warblers, ovenbirds, and mourning doves, as well as her views on conservation, the book was not a commercial success. At the time, it sold 1,006 copies and earned her $206. Still, it’s possible to find copies of it in circulation. In a chapter on observing ovenbirds, she shares some of her fascination with the avian world:
As I watched little mother, I longed to know more of her life. I wished I could have seen the courtship, could have viewed the construction of the quaint little home, and then could have followed the fortunes of the young family after their first venture into the world, and somehow could have known how they found their way on the incredible journeys to South America and back to these Massachusetts woods. A great admiration for this quiet little bird arose in me, for her self-sufficiency, the simplicity of her life unencumbered by the possessions that overwhelm us human beings. Here she was her own architect, her own provider, bringing up her babies independently of doctors, nurses, books, and even her husband, facing unaided the elements and prowling enemies.
Mothers & Words
Doug has always made sure I had a room of my own – at least figuratively. When the children were babies, he was ever helpful and cheerful, changing diapers, bottle feeding, getting up to calm them in the night. Now that they were older, he walked them to the bus stop in the mornings, drove them to activities. But still, he was the one with a nine- to-five office job, which meant he was unavailable much of the day. And I was the one with an amorphous job that allowed me to be with the children, requiring my presence in a classroom twelve hours a week but otherwise seeping into every crevice of my life, filling my waking hours. My Saturdays were a gift, a jewel gleaming at the end of each long week. Every Saturday, as I pulled out of the driveway to go to master naturalist school, Doug would have the children in the yard pruning shrubs, planting flowers. He continued to give me that room of my own in the ways that he could – even when that room turned out to be a forest forty miles away.
Mothers & Birds
Despite The Watcher at the Nest garnering little public attention, Nice undertook the writing of her autobiography, Research Is a Passion with Me, which she did not see published in her lifetime. It finally appeared in 1979, five years after her death.
In the early chapters, she describes a relatively happy childhood in a large family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Born in 1883, the fourth of seven children, Nice showed an early interest in the natural world and learned the names of plants from her mother, who studied botany at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (before it became a college). Nice’s most prized possessions were books on bird identification. “In my teens, however, I often felt depressed,” she writes, adding:
Our parents were old-fashioned and over-protective; my mother perpetuated the attitudes of her parents, while my father was determined to spare us the struggles of his own childhood. They did not believe that their daughters should prepare themselves for professions. To be a “perfect housekeeper and homemaker” was the ideal held before us and how dreary it did seem [. . .]! We three girls all wished we had been boys, since boys had far more freedom than girls did to explore the world and to choose exciting careers.
What was most galling, Nice reports, was the family rule that the girls were not allowed to walk in the woods or fields without a brother. “Our suggestion that we protect ourselves with a revolver met with strong disapprobation.” Still, during her junior year of college at Mount Holyoke, she got both a rifle and a revolver, and she often went armed into the countryside by herself.
Mothers & Words
Over a dozen years, Martha and I exchanged occasional letters – a stiff correspondence conducted in impeccable cursive. I always addressed her as Mrs. Hamilton, my elder, and even her name felt distant and aloof, a further remove – for it was neither her maiden name nor her first married name and the name of her children, but rather it was the name of her third husband. Dear Mrs. Hamilton, I began, though I no longer remember what I wrote to her. She wrote back of the books she’d read, of her small town in Mexico, of her Great Danes, of her gardening successes and failures. Her tone was breezy and detached; it was a correspondence of small talk:
“The excitement in our compound, this week, is swirling around house-wren’s nest in an Aztec mask hung on house-wall across from my apt.,” she wrote on June 25, 2001, a year after Doug and I were married. “Yesterday, for first time, I could hear babies chirping when fed. Previously, there were parents’ marvelous songs and a special curse-sound when our cat is in view. The parents flit into/out the eye-holes and top of head and sometimes perch, momentarily, on ear-ornaments. As long as light holds, they are collecting insects for the babies!”
Mothers & Words
“What matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that,” writes Heilbrun in Writing a Woman’s Life. She continues:
“And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives.”
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, one of Heilbrun’s literary mothers, writes, “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.” And also: “For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.” And Heilbrun adds (nearly six decades later), “We tell ourselves stories of our past, make fictions or stories of it, and these narrations become the past, the only part of our lives that is not submerged.”
In other words, all that remains of our past is words. In other words, all that remains of us is words. But are words enough?
Stones
At home, the children shaped other stones. The rock tumbler was always groaning in the basement, grinding away the sharp edges of rocks found on hikes and travels. The children’s rock collections spilled out of their plastic containers into multiple shoeboxes. When doing laundry, I often found rocks squirreled away in pockets. On our walks up the street, my son always took a single rock from a meticulously landscaped yard where the plants were nestled in iri-descent gravel. Did those neighbors notice that their gravel disap-peared, piece by piece, over weeks, months, into the greedy fist of my boy? Sometimes, despite my careful pocket searches, a vigilante rock made it through the wash and then clattered in the dryer, tumbling among the clothes. This endless shaping and moving of rocks seemed like the elemental work of being human – for hadn’t we always picked up rocks, exerted our will on them? Wasn’t a rock one of the most substantial and satisfying gifts offered up to us by the earth?
Mothers & Stones
We have a binder containing slides and black-and- white photographs of Martha’s sculptures. A piece called Frederick’s Ferret features an inquisitive, sleek animal peering over the top of a human head. It is, according to a typewritten inventory list, made of varied hue soapstone. Most of Martha’s pieces are made of soapstone in a range of colors. Her whimsical forms have titles like Transcendent Koi, Ancient Aerobics, Two Patriarchs Harmonizing Their Minds, and Generic Dreamgirl.
“My deep commitment is to create useful and intelligent art. Specifically, I intend beauty and humor pointed toward healing,” she writes in her artist’s statement. “Collectors who live with my sculpture say they find solace in it: healing, quieting. Stroking the seductive silky stone is fulfilling, and it’s an aid to meditation.” The stones, she writes, tell her what they want to be. “The sculpture shapes come from persistent dreams and from the stone’s suggestion,” she continues. “The subject fi gures affirm – with energy and joy – the strength of our human capacity for lust, commitment, spirituality.” But I don’t see this in her works. They are too abstract for me. I see that she is trying to say something, but I don’t know what it is.
Birds
On the Saturday devoted to birds, the naturalists carried binoculars into the woods. I peered at the darting asterisks in treetops, but I saw little. I’ve never had the patience to look through microscopes, binoculars, telescopes, loupes, magnifying glasses – the images come at me frenetic and blurry. Maybe it’s because I wear glasses, and I don’t want to add more lenses in front of my eyes, which often seem to obstruct more than they clarify. I listened to Juan talk about birds and tried to take good notes. The towhee, I learned, sings, “Drink your tea!” and the barn owl asks, “Who cooks for you?” In my notebook, I dutifully listed the three types of swallows found in Connecticut, the characteristics of the grackle. But at some point, I lost interest in the birds, in the naming of them, in the elusiveness of their lives in treetops. Instead, I wrote wayward questions. What is more amazing – a feather or an eye?
Mothers & Birds
In one exuberant section of Research Is a Passion with Me, Nice describes going on a tump-line camping trip with her fifteen-year-old younger brother Ted: “He had sewed food bags on the sewing machine; he had experimented with drying corn and blackberries; he planned, assembled, and rejected until at last all was ready. We were to carry house, blankets, kitchen, wardrobes, and larder on our backs by means of tump-lines–broad leather straps over the forehead, the pack resting on the small of the back.” They covered ninety miles in two weeks, and Nice had the time of her life. “We had been brought near the primal sources of life,” she writes. “This experience might be thought of as a parable of life; a journey, stripped down to essentials and involving struggle and hardship, to see and to love some of the wonder of the world.”
Enrolling in graduate school, Nice continued her studies, despite her parents’ wishes that she become a “daughter-at-home.” She writes:
My intention on going to Clark University had been to get an M.A. on “The Food of the Bobwhite.” I was so happy there that I decided to use this subject for a Ph.D. thesis; this in spite of strong family opposition, for my parents urged me unceasingly to return again and be a daughter-at-home. In my second year I continued my feeding tests [. . .], and for the early summer of 1909 I had planned to carry out a large series of such tests with baby Bobwhites at the State Hatchery at nearby Sutton. In August there was to be a canoe trip with Ted in “really wild country.”
What happened next puzzled me so much that I reread the section three times. “These plans were changed. Instead of raising Bobwhites, I was married; instead of working for a Ph.D., I kept house.”
Her new husband was a fellow graduate student, Leonard Blaine Nice, who was, by all accounts, a wonderful man. Still, her life radically changed course. “Sometimes I rather regretted that I had not gone ahead and obtained this degree [her Ph.D.], as we stayed in Worcester for two more years until Blaine got his Ph.D.,” she adds. “But no one had ever encouraged me to study for a doctor’s degree; all the propaganda had been against it. My parents were more than happy to have me give up thoughts of a career and take up homemaking, and in every way they helped us in this new venture.”
Mothers & Words
In one letter, Martha wrote to tell me about what she was reading: “Just finished second slow, leisurely reading of The Ambassadors by Henry James – such a deep pleasure, how could I have waited so long? Maybe, to be the right age, myself, to understand and sympathize with Strether. He seems to reflect a lot of my Grandmother’s influence/training on me.”
I was in graduate school at this time, and I started sending her some of my writing. After reading an essay that I had written about trees, she responded: “Marvelously thoughtful and stimulating! I’m deeply concerned by your suggestion there may not be trees after death. I’ve been hoping and counting on pines, palms, buddlia and pachysandra as well as deer, ground hogs, insects and jays!”
Birds & Words
Master naturalist school required each student to conduct an independent research project. One classmate was studying salamanders in a vernal pool. Another was researching the history of local colliers and learning how to make a charcoal mound, a replica of which he planned to erect in the forest for educational purposes. I had no research project in mind, but I regularly walked with my children to a nearby wetland area that teemed with red- winged blackbirds. One afternoon, sitting on a bench while my children sent cattail fluff sailing on the wind, I was struck with a vague fancy that I would become the Margaret Morse Nice of red-winged blackbirds. Or at least I would do my research project on the birds, since here they were, right in front of me.
The next time we came, I brought a notebook and sat down at the edge of the cattail-choked pond to begin my observations. I watched the loud, boastful males flitting through the vegetation, crying conkra-lee! Or perhaps chip- chiree! Or oak-la-ree! I watched the occasional drab female emerge briefly from the cattails, then merge back into the camoufl age. If Nice could devote years of her life to song sparrows, then surely I could devote a few weeks to red- winged blackbirds. While the idea of studying birds appealed to me, I found that I could muster no interest in gathering real data: counting the birds, telling them apart, recording their calls and movements, counting how many times they landed in various locations, discerning which ones seemed to be mated pairs. Showy and pompous, the males darted and preened and cried irk-a-chee! I watched them but recorded nothing in my notebook.
Birds & Words
I came across an old book, Redwings, by Robert W. Nero, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1984. Here, at last, I would learn something about the birds that darted among the grasses and cattails at the pond. But most of the book turned out to be dull, nearly unreadable, detailing endless observations of bird behavior. Only a few sections held my interest. For example, what Nero had to say about the red-winged blackbird’s call:
Anyone who has been near a marsh in spring has heard male Redwinged Blackbirds, but describing their song is another matter. I like what Arthur Allen [. . .] noted in 1914: “The greatest diffi-culty lies in the selection of words, letters, or symbols that will convey a sound similar to that uttered by the bird.” He used concur-ee, kong-quer-ree, and gur-gel-lee as common renditions of the basic or primary song. In my work with Redwings I chose oak-a-lee or oak-a-ree as most descriptive (leaving aujourd’hui for Canada’s French-speaking bird watchers). Ardythe McMaster, a Winnipeg teacher, told me that when she was young her mother always referred to the song as Purple-tea!
Sitting at the pond, I listened to birds trilling their signature calls and tried to discern their true utterances. Konk-la- ree! Honk-a-ree! Tur-a-lee! Kor-a-lee! Get-me-tea! Come-to-me!
Mothers
In 1913, Nice, along with her growing family, relocated to Norman, Oklahoma, where her husband got an appointment teaching at the university. Nice, settling down to keep house, found her early years of motherhood were nothing short of maddening:
In the fall of 1918, with four children aged six months to eight years, in what seemed to be cramped quarters, no one enjoying housework, and much of the time without even a college girl to come in an hour a day to wash the dishes, with no means of transportation but our own legs and the baby carriage, and no free Sunday afternoon for tramps to the river, I was truly frustrated. I resented that implication that my husband and the children had brains, and I had none. He taught; they studied; I did housework.
Mothers & Words
Two months after the birth of our daughter, Martha wrote to us: “Congratulations to the three of you. I’m happy for your future, as first-born has fewer complications and most excitement.” She also reported on her health. “My heart health is back to 120 over 80 and I feel fine,” she wrote. “Gout is a major surprise to me, and hope I haven’t genetically shared it. In any case, it didn’t manifest until I’m 69, so you all have many healthy years ahead.”
Several months later, after I sent her a photo of the baby, she wrote to say our daughter’s “lip-line is gorgeous, absolutely phenomenal, and she seems happy & sturdy. Congratulations on a stage excellently accomplished. Your marvelous quality writing-paper always impresses me.”
Birds & Words
In Redwings, Nero tries to describe female red-winged blackbird vocalizations:
The song itself? Well, it’s not a version of ”oak-a-lee” or anything close to the male rendition. Female song consists rather of a series of chattering, scolding tones rendered in my earliest field notes as ”spit-a-chew-chew-chew.” Beginning with a short rasping sound, the female song then goes off into a series of high, shrill, and rapid notes, slowing and descending at the end. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, read ”spit-a-chew-chew”; instead, purse your lips and give a short chirping sound, staccato. It’s the best I can do.
Other ornithologists–also men–have described the song as “female chatter” that is “harsh and rasping.” It’s the best they can do.
Words
“Before a woman can write exactly as she wishes to write, she has many difficulties to face,” Woolf writes in “Women and Fiction,” an essay that she would fold into A Room of One’s Own. “To begin with, there is the technical difficulty – that the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use.” A woman must take on the task of “altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it.” Heilbrun reiterates this idea over half a century later: “How can women create stories of women’s lives if they have only male language with which to do it?”
Birds & Words
A long, long time ago, sparrow, swallow, and blackbird started boasting. “I can fly as high as the tops of the trees,” said sparrow. “I can fly as high as the clouds,” countered swallow. “Oh, really? Well, I can fly as high as the sun,” replied blackbird, the most prideful of all birds. So, the birds decided to have a contest. Little sparrow went first, flying with all his might up, up, up, but he barely cleared the top of the tallest tree before he grew exhausted and came back to earth. Next, swallow made his attempt. He fl apped and flapped his wings and flew much higher than sparrow, but nowhere near the sun.
I was back at the red-winged blackbird pond with my children, and I had finally written something in my notebook. But this fanciful fairy tale hardly counted as fieldwork, I thought, as I watched my children carrying lances made of cattails.
Mothers & Words
After I sent Martha a copy of Local Wonders by Ted Kooser – with whom I was studying in my graduate program – she wrote to express her appreciation.
Last night I found the book of Ted Kooser’s and am loving it to extent I wish I’d written it. So far, it’s right up there with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, except Kooser does people much better.
Excitement down here is limited to “cho-cho” devastation (small grasshoppers in hordes) & where my Dane’s overnite digging will be. Have you ever heard of a Gt. Dane digging for sport? We’re (2 mornings’ weekly helper & I) laying new sod over all the bare soil that attracts her attention. Her front nails are worn to quick. I keep hoping it’s simple puppyishness as she does so many other puppy tricks: biting hoses into parts; dragging everything of mine outside, including my hard leather glasses’ case! She’d already been bred when she was given to me; they told me she was two; how long will this go on, do you think?
Boston doctors are thinking my problems are temporary & reversible: nerve-groups are pinched by neck vertebras, rather than any damage to my spinal column itself. Hurrah! except they want another test.
Back to our “cho-cho”s: slightly more interesting than health. They denuded a clump of ash-trees of leaves; my 4-y-old honeysuckle is definitely killed, as are most jasmines & all the ornamental citrus shrubs. I’ve even seen them on eucalyptus and lemons, so they’ll excuse the taste of leaves. In this season, they’re mating; so I can count 200 gone from next year’s crop for every pair I squish!
Affectionately yours,
Martha Hamilton
Mothers & Words
I went to college with the intention of becoming a journalist and got my first newspaper job when I was nineteen. But after four years working at daily newspapers, telling other people’s stories, skimming the surface of their lives in the most superfi cial manner, I was worn thin, exhausted. By then, I had dropped out of college, and when I finally went back, I was looking for another path. Edging my way back into academic life, I signed up for just one course: a survey of British literature. I enjoyed it enough that at the end of the fi rst semester, I enrolled for the second half of the sequence. I had taken a yearlong survey of British literature in high school, and much of the content was the same – a whirlwind tour from Beowulf through the present – but when I reached the twentieth century in the college sequence, I was assigned a novel by Virginia Woolf, a writer I’d never read before. When I fi rst opened the pages of To the Lighthouse, I felt (in Emily Dickinson’s words) “as if the top of my head were taken off.” Here, at last, was an invitation into a world of letters, a place for me. Here, in the characters of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, were a mother and a female artist, rendered exquisitely. They lived before my very eyes. Here was a writer who wrote about our internal lives – the great but mostly silent battles that are fought in our minds, every single day. Here was a woman who understood that the small epiphanies of everyday life – “moments of being” – are our greatest gifts, and that perhaps a life is no more than a string of these moments like pearls shining out of the darkness of the “nondescript cotton wool” that makes up most of our quotidian existence. Here were the sentences that crept sinuously, associatively across pages, giving shape to consciousness – female consciousness. Here was an invitation meant just for me: come tell your story.
When I first read the novel, in my early twenties, its message seemed simple enough: one could be a mother like Mrs. Ramsay, giving away all of her energies to her husband and children, or one could be an artist like the spinster Lily Briscoe, who hoarded her creativity and fought against the crushing weight of the patriarchy to create her art. Unmarried and childless, I admired the clarity of the choice presented to me. But of course, it was not as simple as I imagined. The great struggle of my thirties would be to embrace Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe both, to learn how to be a mother and an artist.
Mothers & Words
When my daughter fi rst learned to speak, she was voracious, demanding words, more words. I took to carrying a notebook and recording every word she said. At eighteen months of age, she could say 352 words – or at least that was how many I managed to write down. Indexing the world with her little pointer fi nger, she catalogued and named everything. Car, dog, tree, mom, rock. In her mouth she carried words, in her fi sts she carried rocks. She was equally tethered to both worlds – the cerebral, the corporeal. It had been so long since I had written anything substantial that the list I made of her words felt like my own accomplishment. My creative work was now this child, her acquisition of language my achievement, her expression very nearly my own.
Mothers & Words
When Nice’s children were very young, she, too, counted the words they knew. But she went a step further: she undertook a scientifi c study of the subject. “It was the challenge of the problem – how did the child acquire his language?” she wrote in her autobiography. “The more I observed and recorded and the more I worked over my results, the more questions presented themselves. My small subjects were always with me and each showed a different picture.” She published a few papers on the subject – The speech development of a child from eighteen months to six years, Ambidexterity and delayed speech development, The speech of a left- handed child, A child that would not talk – but her lack of a Ph.D. and professional status stymied her from really breaking into the fi eld.
Birds & Words
Finally, it was blackbird’s turn. He took off and began to fly. Up and up he flew, farther and farther. He flew past the treetops, he flew past the clouds, he fl ew until he became a speck and then disappeared completely from view of the other birds, who were watching from a perch on a tree branch. He grew exhausted, but he kept flying, because in addition to being boastful, he was also very determined. He thought his little heart might explode in his chest, his wings might seize with cramps, but he kept flying. And fi nally, the sun came into view. It grew bigger and bigger, until he was blinded by its light, kissed by its heat, but he just kept going. He flew and flew until he began to feel an unpleasant heat on his wings and shoulders, and then a smoldering sensation. The next thing he knew, he was on fire! Quickly, he stopped flapping and began to plummet towards the ground. Luckily, the wind put the fire out, and his wings and shoulders were only singed, now displaying the markings of the sun: red and yellow. When he finally returned, exhausted, the other birds cheered enthusiastically, for indeed blackbird was the highest flyer among them. And to this day, blackbird – now red- winged blackbird – wears the distinctive red and yellow epaulets that mark his achievement.
“And what happened next?” my children wanted to know, eager for more story. We were back at the pond, and I had read my story out loud.
“And then, red- winged blackbird settled into a quiet life at the pond and lived happily ever after. And do you know what redwinged blackbird says?”
“O- bugger- dee!”
“Oh, look at me!” I replied. “Because red- winged blackbird wants everyone to admire him. He flew too close to the sun and was made beautiful by it.”
Mothers
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the year before Margaret Morse Nice. They were contemporaries, but their lives were radically different. Woolf lived in England, she wasn’t offered the opportunity to receive a college education, and she had no children. Nice was an American, college educated, a mother. Woolf was interested in words, Nice in birds. Still, as contemporaries, they speak to one another, and they speak to me now of an era that seems both a long time ago and just yesterday. As Woolf reminds us in A Room of One’s Own, it was only after 1880 that a married woman was allowed to possess property in England, and it was not until 1919 (in the U.S., 1920) – when Woolf and Nice were already well into their thirties – that a woman could vote.
And it was in 1919, at the age of thirty- six, that Nice began what would become her life’s work: she turned her attention to birds. She started taking one day a month for herself to get to know the birds of Oklahoma. “It is an inspiring experience to have a day for wandering – to be free and alone with nature for a whole long day; to feel unhurried; to be able to search carefully for birds, to be unmolested by considerations for other people.” With her husband’s help, she meticulously conducted a bird census of Oklahoma.
When his job took the family to Columbus, Ohio, in 1928, Nice began her in-depth study of the song sparrow, the work for which she would become most famous. “In child care, male song sparrows are exemplary,” she writes, one of thousands of observations she made about the birds. “They are the sole incubators of the eggs, and after the nestlings hatch, they help care for the young.”
According to Bonta, Blaine Nice “was the most amiable of men. He encouraged her in all she attempted, took care of the girls when she was pursuing research, and was always happy to fi nance her work.”
Mothers & Words
Around the time our daughter was born, Doug’s eldest brother sent Martha a book of questions with blank spaces for her to write down her life story for his children. A Grandparent’s Book, it was called, and she went through it, writing her answers to the prompts, in some cases adding extra pages when she ran out of room, and in others completely ignoring questions that she had no interest in answering. Eventually, copies of the book were made for all of the siblings, and I finally started reading it that spring I was going to master naturalist school.
As I expected, her accounts of her early life speak of privilege and wealth. In one house in which her family lived, she describes “a bedroom for the maids.” In another section on holiday traditions, she writes, “Gilman family holidays were based on tradition of maids in the kitchen cooking elegantly.” She describes horseback riding in beautiful, unspoiled Southern California. “Our father had been in the mounted cavalry in the previous war and he’d remained horse- fond & much later began a Morgan Horse Stud called Green Valley. His great stallion was Tom Boy, so sweet Daddy rode him in several Rose Parades.”
Her architect father eventually built his family a custom home on their forty- four- acre estate “of wild- natural to splendidly- groomed and kept natural- looking gardens and wilds at almost end of canyon toward ocean.” As a young woman, she was “presented to LA Society by the grande dames, called ‘Las Madrinas,’ at a ball for which I can still remember my father’s pride.” The photos I have seen confirm my image of a poised, attractive young woman. But then I come to questions and answers that seem to belie my understanding of her.
Were you a healthy new- born baby?
My mother didn’t nurse me, or later, her 2 sons. I think it wasn’t customary at that time. I never felt cuddled by her.
What are your thoughts about your mother?
My mother was socially expert and athletic, both. I was neither.
What are your thoughts about your father?
My father was a madly successful architect because he really enjoyed people and carefully listened to what his clients thought they wanted. Then he created for their genuine needs.
Do you look more like your mother or your father?
Much more like my father, unfortunately: dark, curly hair, knocked knees, wild eyebrow growth, dark teeth.
Mothers & Words
A month after the birth of our son, Martha wrote to congratulate us. “I am thrilled beyond adequately communicating! We have two 2-daughter families already, & those parents seem to have decided against more children. Two daughters, alone, is my nightmare vision for jealousy/rivalry rather than loving friendships and companionship thru life. I found, also, that boys are sooo much more fun to parent.”
Mothers & Words
In Research Is a Passion with Me, Nice relates an encounter she had while living in Oklahoma: “It was a rich experience to meet and talk with Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman who came to the University at the invitation of President William Bizzell. She gave an impressive lecture on ‘The Fundamental Falsity of Freud,’ saying that he had ‘blackened the face of America.’ ‘Sex is not the life force,’ she said. ‘It is only part of life. It is not essential to individual life but to the race.’ ” Nice calls Gilman “a remarkable woman, brilliant and original, a clear and logical thinker in many fields,” but concludes: “Yet, sadly enough, it seems as if she had been a voice crying in the wilderness, for now she appears to be forgotten.”
Nice was writing her autobiography in the early seventies, just as the second- wave feminists were rediscovering the work of Gilman and many other women. Gilman, I would warrant, is no longer forgotten.
Mothers & Words
What did you want to be or do when you were finished with high school?
That wasn’t a question in my family. I was to graduate from Wellesley before any other life- stage was thinkable or permissible! Wellesley College was lifegoal for me of my gram ‘88 and my mother ‘24, as I relied on my daughter (again ’88?) to go, and I hope my granddaughters will go, too!
What do you remember best?
My parents packaged and sent me over by nite- plane, florists’ boxes of cymbidium sprays from my father’s plants under lath- roof above the corral at Wildacres. They were treasures in themselves, for their beauty, and balm for my homesickness! (Never heard of another college-girl receiving sprays of orchids!)
Were you involved in any extra- curricular activities?
Extracurricular for me was dating at all the schools & towns I wanted to visit; trying to keep sane in such extraordinarily different circumstances from my life around LA. It was far & away most extreme culture shock of my life.
Were you a member of any clubs?
Can’t imagine any Wellesley club wanting to take me.
Mothers & Words
After suffering a breakdown, after enduring a divorce that was excoriated in the newspapers, after sending her young daughter to live with her ex-husband and his new wife (who happened to be her good friend), Charlotte Perkins Gilman fashioned a writing and speaking career for herself as she rode the lecture circuit, spending many years “at large” with no permanent address. In Women and Economics, she writes, “We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex- relation is also an economic relation,” proclaiming that only economic independence would emancipate women. She considered women’s suffrage “such a foregone conclusion that I can’t get all excited over it” – though she was sixty before she could vote. In the utopian novel Herland, she imagined a world with no men where women reproduced via parthenogenesis and the institution of motherhood was radically recast wherein women mothered all children as a collective responsibility. For the first part of her career, she went by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, her first married name. The year she turned forty, she married George Houghton Gilman (who happened to be her cousin), and then took the last name by which she is still known today. Due to this proliferation of names, her biographer, Cynthia J. Davis, calls her simply Charlotte.
In her lifetime, Gilman was attacked for being “an unnatural mother,” among many other faults. In recent years, following her recovery by feminists, she’s been criticized for her ethnocentrism, racism, nationalism, and other vices. She was – as we all are – complicated and contradictory. Davis writes that Gilman “claims to have lived her life according to a plot she had carefully scripted.” Whether that plot was really conceived in advance or rather constructed in hindsight, it gave her mastery over her own story. The title of her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, stresses the active agency that she strived to maintain over her life.
Her life was not something that happened to her, but rather her living was something she actively did.
Birds & Words
Other stories came to me at the pond. In one version, the redwinged blackbirds’ epaulets denote his status as a decorated military veteran, the bravest of the avian world. In another, the birds started out brilliantly colored, red- orange- yellow all over, as beautiful and alluring as the Russian zhar- ptitsa, or Firebird, but they developed a propensity for lying, and each time they told a lie, a small patch of pitch black developed on their plumage, and slowly their colors were obscured until only the dabs of red- orange- yellow remained on their shoulders. In another story, the blackbirds of the New World decided to distinguish themselves from their cousins, the blackbirds of the Old World, by getting matching tattoos. Many stories I started writing but never finished. Some days, I tried to render exactly the sounds the birds made as they chattered, scolded, trilled, tweeted, chirruped, chittered, chirred, trilled, cheeped – but all words, all possible renderings, were inexact approximations of what they actually said.
Mothers & Words
How old were you when you met my grandfather/grandmother?
I think I was 13 and George would have been two years older.
What attracted you to each other?
I was attracted because he didn’t talk a lot, but what he said made very good sense. I can’t answer the reverse.
How long did you know each other before you discussed marriage?
Think I must have been around 19, but don’t much remember, except I was eager to see the world with him!
How many houses or apartments did you live in?
It’s interesting to add them up: eight different places on three continents before we split, I’m guessing.
What surprised you about my grandfather/grandmother after you married?
Your grandfather was able for only one ejaculation per night!
Mothers & Stones
A year earlier, on a trip to Iceland, as we walked on the black sand beach at Vik, my daughter, who was then nine, walked into the surf and was swept up and away from me, just for a moment, until I grabbed her and yanked her back again, and then we kept walking. I picked up an oblong black stone that had been worried smooth by the sea, and I put it in my coat pocket where I rubbed it, over and over. Later, as we dried out and ate lamb stew at a café, I imagined what would have happened if I hadn’t snatched my daughter back from the sea, and I worked the stone, over and over, in my palm. To this day, I carry that black worry- stone from Iceland in the pocket of my coat. To this day, my fingers rub, rub, rub, continuing the work of the sea.
Mothers & Stones
When her twins were teenagers and her other children had left home, Martha placed a personal ad in The New York Review of Books, which eventually led her to her second and then her third husband. Of her second marriage, she writes: “Stu, delightful and kindly to us all, was impotent; so marriage was annulled.” And it was this failed marriage, she adds, that led to her sculpting: “Realized that my sexual frustration needed something hard & physical for me to keep calm and sane. A couple of my untaught pieces expressed something to others, as they sold in Boise, ID and in Ajijic, Jalisco.” It was only after she married Louis that she sought formal training in sculpture, studying with Morse Clary, a disciple of Philip McCracken. Despite remaining married, Martha lived apart from Louis for most of their marriage, moving around the country – Portland, Boise, New York, Philadelphia – while her husband seemed to stay put on his ranch in Washington state. After she headed to Mexico, her marriage was reduced to one of the many correspondences that she kept up with far- fl ung acquaintances.
Mothers & Words
What are the best gifts you’ve ever received?
My children.
Do you believe in God?
Sorta.
What holiday traditions do you hope I give to my own children?
Real celebration, like real prayer, I think, should be internal, unvocalized, and not depending on decorations, foods, or people making trips to be together.
Whom do you love? What do you love?
Louis and my children. I love the world, with trees and animals foremost. Beautiful buildings, bird- songs and good food are important too, and BOOKS!
What talents or abilities have you tried to develop?
My sculpting.
What are your other interests?
Solitude and quiet and preparing my mind.
Mothers & Birds
Besides undertaking her song sparrow study, something else momentous happened to Nice and her family in 1928 that gets only the briefest mention in her autobiography. “A great sorrow came to us that winter in the loss of our daughter, Eleanor, a beautiful courageous child of nine years,” she writes. “In her memory we gave a set of 50 children’s books to the State University Hospital in Columbus and 100 children’s books to the Public Library in Norman.” By the next paragraph, though, Nice is back to birds, and, in fact, by March, she’s banding her first song sparrow and embarking on her life’s great work. For the next eight years, she will devote herself to song sparrows, experiencing great “expectation and frustration, triumph and failure.” I kept expecting her to return to her loss, to devote more words to grieving her daughter, but that’s not the kind of story she’s telling. It’s research that’s a passion with her, after all – or at least that’s the plot she’s adopted. Her most impassioned writing comes when she’s describing her work, as in this entry from Jan. 29, 1933:
I am now spending all my available energies on Song Sparrows – an hour or so outdoors with them in the morning; the rest of the day on writing, except for what has to go for sleeping, eating, getting breakfast and lunch and a little more house work. (Our daughters prepare dinner and wash all the dishes.) I write all morning after coming in, rest perhaps an hour after lunch and then write again all afternoon. In the evening I am now going through all the great Song Sparrow note books, having reached No. XII with ten more to go. I’m finding many important items.
In reading her pages upon pages of exuberant bird words, one might even suppose that she threw herself into the song sparrow project as a kind of grieving.
Mothers & Words
A section of A Grandparent’s Book on work and career is largely blank. Martha writes of working as a technical writer briefly after her marriage before her first child was born. Then she adds: “Haven’t enough courage to be a principal. Have always assisted someone: an autistic child; an elderly woman; a working mother needing after- school care for 2; cleaning good houses; writers needing grammar assistance; office- temps for secretarial help.”
I felt disappointed in her for settling for the supporting role. Her series of sporadic, strung- together jobs gave her no sense of purpose, no greater narrative arc. Her story lacks plot.
Mothers & Words
What does it say about me that I am more interested in the woman who studied birds than the birds she studied? That I am more interested in my own stories about red- winged blackbirds than their actual lives? Could I be more interested in my stories about my children than my actual children? What does it say about me that my words become more valuable than the experiences they describe? Or is it just that the words are the only way I have of holding onto experiences, onto people? If I remake my children out of words, I can keep them forever, just as they are. If I build myself out of words, I will continue to exist.
Mothers & Words
In the “family lore” section of the book, Martha describes what she knows of her grandparents, including the following story about her paternal grandmother:
I can’t guess where Lucy Truesdell came from, as she wasn’t discussed at all until I was 21. I was then told that she had been at Oberlin Conservatory studying her music when her roommate/ best- friend introduced her to my grandfather. They married & had 2 sons. The day my father, the elder son, called to say he had passed his tests for Architecture degree, she shot herself in the head with her shotgun. Even sadder, her younger son, my Uncle Lucius, was the one who discovered her body.
She provides no further commentary on this event.
Birds & Words
In another section of Redwings, Nero describes the behavior of a particular female that leaves male A to breed with male B. “Let’s not call her a fickle female,” Nero moralizes. ” Let’s say instead that she found the habitat in B’s territory more to her liking than the habitat in A’s territory.” Elsewhere, in discussing females, he uses terms like “promiscuity” and “loose behavior.” It strikes me, not for the fi rst time, that the stories we tell about other species are really stories about ourselves.
Birds & Words
Pages of my notebook were filled with red- winged blackbird stories. I had certainly spent at least twenty- five hours – the requirement for our research project – at the pond, observing the birds. But I had nothing that looked like fi eldnotes. And it struck me, woefully late, that I hadn’t told any stories about the females, those drab and dull creatures. I hardly noticed them. Of course, there’s the not insignificant fact that the bird’s common name refers to a characteristic of the male, as does its scientific name, Agelaius phoeniceus, the epithet meaning “red” in Latin. By this very naming, I was taught what to see: the showy wings of the males. What story would I even tell about the females? That they had given up those ostentatious and garish marks to live their lives largely unobserved? That they had sacrificed a life of adventure to be mothers?
After spending weeks walking through forests and poring over lists of scientific names of species, was this small realization of my own blindness all I had to show for it? I began to wonder why I had gone to master naturalist school in the first place. Was it just to escape from my children? Were my Saturday master naturalist classes merely a vacation from motherhood? Like so many other mothers – including Martha and my own mother – I was an ambivalent mother. During their mothering years, they both recognized there were other plots they could be living, and they both grasped them, in the end, but it took the fledging of their children for them to fully come into their own. I didn’t know how not to be an ambivalent mother. The world is full of them. Both the nurturing of children and the nurturing of the self is writ into the human brain, wired into our biology, at cross- purposes. It’s easy to say I would give my life to save my child’s – take a bullet, run into the path of an oncoming car – but the choices are rarely that obvious. The choices are daily, small, carried out over years.
Mothers & Words
What are you most proud of doing?
Escaping to Mexico. To have found the courage to arrange the trip; to subject dear Louis into sending my sculpture stones from his ranch; to locate correct climate for me, a reasonable rental- house. All of this effort and mental activity gives me reason, I think, to be proud to end my life as I wish to.
What was your most exciting experience?
Becoming fluent in Turkish! Understanding people came first, of course. Then I could express myself with degrees of honorifics and nuances. I could go anywhere and do anything I chose throughout the entire fascinating country. Not being mute was liberating of vast dimensions, for five wonderful years. In Nepal there were too many language groups to attempt any; on Malta, many people spoke English. In Turkey I could interact with guests, hosts, people sitting nearby on trains, in restaurants. Of course, I was proud of my fluency, as many Americans don’t bother to learn. Was so fluent I could even tell slightly risque stories at parties and be entertaining.
For me, “was” isn’t appropriate tense. My happiest living is day- to-day down here in Morelia.
Climate is within extremes of So Cal, while I was a child, so with my a- c for sleeping, I don’t fear any seasons. The altitude agrees with me, 7,000+-, so I can walk for pleasure . . . with my neighbor’s old Golden Retriever 3x- weekly for about an hour . . . or alone to visit acquaintances, or get cash from the bank, or on errands to Santa Maria Village. I don’t have TV, phone, or radio so nothing intrudes. I’ve completed my responsibilities to everyone.
Mothers & Words
In the final pages of her autobiography, Nice writes:
It is true that I deplore much in the present situation in the world – basically due to overcrowding – yet for many of the features of civilization I am profoundly thankful: for instance, the comparative freedom of women, the advances in medical science, the availability of classical music over FM radio, the great improvements in photographic techniques, paperback books printed in America, electric refrigerators, electric and gas stoves, frozen foods, and for transportation – the convenience of the automobile, and the marvellous experience of flying over the earth.
She and Blaine both lived to be ninety, dying a few months apart. “She had had a wonderfully satisfying life as a wife and mother, but she had managed to combine it with a career she designed for herself,” Bonta writes at the conclusion of her chapter- long biography of Nice. She got her marriage plot and quest plot both – a happy ending. A life to emulate.
Yet I wonder if the “conventional” parts of Nice’s life – falling in love, losing a child – appear in her writing in only the most cursory manner because she was resisting the marriage plot even as she lived it. The “housewife” narrative and all that it entailed (both joy and sorrow) did not make her exceptional. In defying the marriage plot – lest it take over her whole narrative – she had to suppress those parts of her life. It makes much of her adult life, from the moment of her marriage, seem oddly affectless. I am convinced that she was a warm and loving wife and mother – but she balks at telling those parts. Her life is not the same thing as the story of her life. In every story she tells about herself, the emphatic subtext is always the same: “I am not a housewife, I am a trained zoologist.”
Mothers & Words
Some of the questions Martha left blank:
170 Did you win any academic, social or athletic awards or prizes? What did you like best about summer vacations?
What is the most difficult job you’ve had?
What is the most important promotion you’ve received?
What have been your most memorable wedding anniversaries? What family traditions have you always followed?
What national events have most affected your life? What was the greatest disappointment you experienced?
Stones
After weeks of labor, the children completed their stone carvings. Their teacher Joan invited them to take another class with her in the summer, but it didn’t work for our schedule. Or maybe the truth is that the children were not as enthusiastic about carving as I was on their behalf. Maybe I wanted them to carve stone in order to know their grandmother. Maybe I wanted their sculptures to place in our glass- fronted cabinet amidst the china, so that I could pause there and look upon the shapes they willed onto stone, so I could try to read the stories they inscribed there.
Mothers & Words
“In the past, the virtue of women’s writing often lay in its divine spontaneity, like that of the blackbird’s song or the thrush’s. It was untaught; it was from the heart. But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous – mere talk spilt over paper and left to dry in pools and blots,” Woolf writes dismissively in “Women and Fiction.” Her description makes me think of Martha’s writing – impetuous, chatty, aloof, obscuring more than revealing. Her story is often a string of vapid anecdotes about a privileged life, with little connective tissue. Perhaps it’s that the questions don’t get at her story, don’t give her the freedom to rove, or don’t probe deeply enough. They don’t elicit all she could tell. The writing prompts are the wrong ones. But she also resists many of them, leaving questions unanswered, pages of unfi lled lines.
I feel disconnected from her life as a Los Angeles debutante, her life as a college student at Wellesley in the 1950s. When she claims a chasm between herself with her West Coast upbringing and the young Northeastern women she encountered in college, I don’t have the context to understand. She was immensely privileged and so were her classmates. I see both worlds as exceedingly distant, virtually interchangeable, but for minor geographic variations. I see her full embrace of the marriage plot, and later, what seems to be her complete rejection of it (despite the fact that she legally still had a husband somewhere on a ranch in Washington), but her emotional transformation is absent from the pages she filled. And so, her image in my mind shimmers, refusing to coalesce into a person, her stories full of gaps and elisions, her true self remaining a mystery to me. I cannot conjure her out of the words she left behind.
A debutante and a foreign service wife, she was highly skilled at working a room, at making small talk – to the point that it seemed to become her primary mode of communication. Her children have this gift as well; Doug can chatter about nothing in particular with virtually anyone for hours. I, on the other hand, fi nd small talk difficult and enervating; I am a person who doesn’t speak unless I have something to say. And perhaps this is the difference between us: that for me, words reveal, while for Martha, words serve to obscure, to keep people at arm’s length, to erect the boundaries that were necessary for her to maintain the self she had constructed. She is “chattering and garrulous,” or she writes with “mindless cheer,” or her words are mere “female chatter” because they serve to protect her, to keep her whole, to hold at bay anyone who would place demands on her. I’ve completed my responsibilities to everyone. Nestled there in her cheer and chatter are occasional searing lines, both revelatory and enigmatic, that keep coming back to me.
Stones & Words
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, diagnosed with terminal cancer, “preferred chloroform to cancer,” ending her life at the age of seventy- five in 1935 in Pasadena, California (two months after Martha was born, just a few miles away). She considered euthanasia “the simplest of human rights,” viewing her death as her final work of activism. She was an active agent of her own dying, just as she was of her own living.
Woolf famously filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse to end her life at the age of fifty- nine in 1941. Suffering another mental health crisis, she had left a note for her husband, Leonard Woolf, writing, “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”
Heilbrun once wrote that she would end her life on her seventieth birthday. She waited until she was seventy- seven. “She wanted to control her destiny,” her son Robert said, after her suicide in 2003. “The journey is over,” she wrote. “Love to all.”
Martha sometimes spoke of suicide to her adult children. She would tell them, in a matter- of-fact manner, that she would be ending her life at sixty. And then it became sixty- five. It was a moving target, but the underlying rationale was clear: she would never relinquish her independence. She would control her life to the end.
Her death came swiftly. She went to the hospital one day with abdominal pain and was dead by the next morning. She was seventyseven. Her eldest son, a doctor, flew to Mexico to handle arrangements. There was no funeral service.
Doug planted a blue hydrangea in our yard in her memory. It flourished for the seven years we continued to live in that house, and then we moved away.
Words
I never completed my red- winged blackbird project. I became a master naturalist school dropout. Still, even after the Saturday classes ended, I continued to tag along on the occasional field trips the group organized. One chilly November day, I found myself walking in the woods with ecologist Tom Wessels, an expert on New England landscapes. We were looking at stone fences.
“I call the stone fences of New England the eighth wonder of the world,” Wessels told our group. “I estimate there are 250,000 miles of stone fences in New England, most of them built within a thirty- year period between 1810 and 1840. In mass, they are greater than the Great Pyramids of Egypt.”
Suddenly, I could see the ghosts of people moving over the earth, lugging stones, making their mark on the land, inscribing it with their ownership. Wessels, with his Walt Whitman beard wagging, divined what had happened here. The others looked at him in awe, but as I gazed over the crumbling walls meandering through forest, I felt only despair. By 1900, Wessels explained, more than half of the cleared lands in New England had been abandoned. We paused to peer at the size of rocks in a section of fence; Wessels talked of crop fields, hay fields, pastures, logging activities. He pointed out pillows and cradles in the forest floor. All of these were clues, part of forest forensics, that allowed us to reconstruct the history of human manipulation of the land. He read stories in the rubble, but the only plot I saw was the one of our inevitable annihilation. I imagined Martha’s carefully sculpted stones reduced to rubble, the futility of our endeavors against the tide of time. She forsook human relationships to shape stones, and she wrote the ending of her own story, dying surrounded by her art, beholden to no one. I understood that I would never make such an absolute and selfish choice, picking myself over others, my art over people. I saw that I would live my life in the shadows of ambivalence, as most of us do.
When I arrived home that evening, I took my children’s sculptures out of the glass- fronted cabinet and felt their heft in my hands – my son’s a roan- colored cliff, my daughter’s a crystal- white glacier – and relished their weight, so contrary to my natural medium of words, which are made of air, even less than air. But stones did not speak to me as words did; more importantly, they did not speak for me. They were not enough, and they would never be enough. I would always choose words, as imprecise and inadequate as they are. I had been searching all my life for a language that would express my experiences with purity, with precision, but I always came up against the limits of language. Perhaps this was what appealed most to me about birds: they say exactly what they mean. Birdsong is a pure clarion call of existence. And in my naming of things, in my quest for accuracy and sharpness, perhaps I was striving for that same clarity. This was the whole point in my naming of the natural world – Agelaius phoeniceus, Quercus alba, Ardea Herodias – for in noticing and speaking what was around me, I anchored myself to the physical world, the tenuous, abstract tethers of language securing me to the corporeal. In naming, I took the rasp of meaning to my life and hewed out of it something sharp-edged and recognizable, wrenching from the murky sea of time an utterance all my own, finally crafting a sentence that said something of who I am, making the meaning of my life briefly blaze forth like the red torches of sumac in a riotous forest landscape.
Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of a collection of essays, Xylotheque (University of New Mexico Press, 2014), and a collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Orion, Terrain, Colorado Review, Glimmer Train, and Witness. “The Season of Birds and Stones” is the title essay from her new collection, being published by the University of Georgia Press in 2026.