Journal: January 6

4:08 a.m., 1/6/97

Another gorgeous day, breezier and a little cooler than Saturday, but still unseasonably warm. This morning my right arm aches from the work I’ve been doing, but I can now see real progress in the raspberry patch. I have trimmed nearly all of the canes, have walked through places I haven’t been able to get through for years! There are still too many canes, too close together, and everything will come back with a vengeance that is difficult to imagine this time of year. I am trying to remember what it will be like in July, which is when I’ll be having to pick the raspberries, if there are any after the severity of my pruning.

P– came down yesterday afternoon at my request with the chainsaw and cut down several small locusts that had grown from stumps of others that had been cut down in earlier years, or from roots — I don’t know. All I know is that young locusts come back with the persistence of an attention-hungry child. Like the poor, they are always with you.

One last bramble patch remains out of the wilderness that first confronted me down there. I felt a real surge of energy and excitement yesterday afternoon when I called it quits because I remember many years in which I’ve spent the whole winter working little by little on pruning the raspberries and have never gotten this far. I am happy I’ve had a chance to take advantage of these beautiful days to get some work done.

Working on the land is of tremendous value to me — physically and mentally. As I work I think of other times I’ve worked this particular patch of ground. (Yesterday, removing the wire fence B– and I had put up down there, I had occasion to remember that constant vigilance is required, or you lose the ground you gain. If I get the raspberries in shape, it won’t be the first time.) In the three afternoons in a row I’ve been down there working, it has felt to me like the celebration of my 20th anniversary on this land that I wanted to hold last September, but couldn’t, because of the road. Certainly it is a quieter celebration that I had envisioned, and perhaps as a consequence more deep. It is certainly different from what I had expected to feel; it’s not exuberant. I await the fall of other shoes, certainly. In a way, it’s like the celebration of a 20th anniversary with a husband who has been unfaithful, but with whom you have made amends and gone on. Except, of course, it wasn’t the place that was unfaithful, this land that I so love; it was the assumptions I had made, that vast changes would not take place, that changed.

I need to be careful, when I make new assumptions, that they are more accurate. For instance, I cannot assume that if I keep my head down and pay attention only to my own land that I can protect it. If they timber the land around me in the way they have been timbering other land around here, they will leave tremendous amounts of wood on the ground. Only the saw logs will be removed. With the railroad down at the bottom of the ridge, in a dry year, that wood would make great fuel for a fire, with the railroad to provide the spark. It could burn up to my place relatively quickly, and I could lose everything. I’m not going to start worrying about that, as I am powerless to do anything about it. What I must do is to keep in mind that the world in which I exist is dynamic, not static; I’m going to have to learn to focus on the way things come back, not the way they are destroyed, in order to remain joyous, tranquil — anyway, on the positive side of emotions. I remember all too clearly the way I felt in July 1996; I don’t want to have to go through that despair again, and I have far greater changes in the future I’m going to have to grapple with.

Enough of that. I think I’m going to ask my class, as its first assignment, to write about a relationship. It can be a relationship between them and someone or something else; or an observed relationship, human or otherwise. I am going to remind them that they are taking the class to stretch themselves, not to perform, and that I therefore don’t want them to pick the banal or cute — me and my dog or cat. I don’t care if it’s fiction or nonfiction. Two pages, maximum.