Filed under: Art of the Day, Writing | Tags: Cave Hill, Cemetery, COllage, Dianne Aprile, Haiku, mental health, pandemic, The First Bloom
I have loved Cave Hill Cemetery all my life. I grew up a few blocks away and have been exploring it now for decades. It’s close to downtown Louisville, but is hundreds of acres over rolling hills, sinkholes, an extensive cave system, a rock quarry and a few lakes fed by springs. It is an arboretum along with being an historic cemetery and the final resting place of over a hundred thousand souls. Some are known names like Muhammad Ali, George Rogers Clark, Colonel Sanders, while others are names long forgotten like hundreds of women and children cast away by society, and thousands of men thrown into the teeth of the Civil War. There are endless stories at Cave Hill. A few days ago I took a long ramble there, thinking my thoughts and feeling the presence of a friend long gone. I chanced upon a tree by the lake that was actually blooming- so early! So unexpected!
That evening I took part in a workshop on Zoom called “Writing with Scissors” facilitated by the delightful writer Dianne Aprile. In it we explored a few forms in which we could combine collage with writing. Creating collages is deeply comforting, something about the action of cutting and pasting is healing. Unexpected relationships emerge, the sum always greater than the parts. I wrote a Haiku about the morning’s walk at Cave Hill and created a small collage triptych in the form of a little book.
This is the front:
It opens to this:
Then fully opens to this:
The back of the above page looks like this:
The day was a balm. It’s been a year of walls closing in, anything that opens them up is a great blessing.
Sitting at the dining room table, listening to the Sunday sermon, playing Solitaire, Mr. Darcy’s low growl draws my attention to the window. There he was- a Great Blue Heron standing on the edge of the little fish pond with at least one of my largest goldfish in its deadly beak, bright orange, the only color in the winter gray morning. I make sure I’m muted, race to the door and fling it open shouting and waving my arms. The heron doesn’t drop the fish- oh lord, are there two of them in his beak? Little troubled, the bird opens his massive wings and lazily takes to the sky. He leaves his calling card- the floating white film of his excrement on the surface of the pond. The other fish are in clear sight at the bottom of the pond, unmoving and undisturbed by the sudden attack. The winter makes them stupid and slow. There they wait to be plucked out of the water and there is little I can do about it. I have tried many things. The herons keep coming and I keep shouting and waving my arms and sometimes I cry. Why do I care so much?
The heron will always eat fish. And I will always hate it.
When I finish teaching my Sunday school classes, I try again. I always do, even knowing what I know. I try again. I haul out the pinwheels, the sparkling string, the tomato cages. The cages- four of them- are turned upside down and placed in various spots around the pond, their leg prongs pointed to the sky. The pinwheels are pushed into the ground around the perimeter and the string is stretched taut from one to the other, crisscrossing the pond. Perhaps when there is wind, the whirling pinwheels will be enough to discourage the Vikings from landing. Perhaps the fish will seek refuge in the tomato cages, the heron unable to penetrate the geometry of wire angles. Perhaps the strings will entangle the intrepid pillagers unconcerned by the other defenses.
It looks ridiculous, of course. A sad little circus trying to look brave and hearty. It’s all I can do, so I do it. The fish come under my protection, being here in my pond. I am the caretaker here and those winter fuddled fish, orange as traffic cones, are not fair game. There are creeks and a mighty river not a half mile away. There, it is natural that herons should hunt and feed, here, it is pure theft. Tiny murders are still murders after all.
Does anybody ask the fish? This just now occurs to me. I assume that they don’t wish to be skewered and swallowed. Perhaps it is all for nothing and they care far less than I do. And just how many have I taken under my protection, looked after with care and tenderness, that didn’t want to be there? Never asked to be there? I know at least one. Perhaps you’re reading this now. Yes, you nod your head, there was at least one.
The Fox at Dawn 