North Carolina

XIII and XIX

/ Fran Haley / 12 Comments

One recent early morning, I sat down at the kitchen table to write some poetry just as my husband turned on the TV. I caught the word cicadas.

I abandoned my laptop to come watch the segment:

“2024 is going to be a banner year,” announced the newscaster, “a rare co-emergence of two periodical cicadas: a seventeen-year brood and a thirteen-year brood…

A chart appeared on the screen:

Brood XIIIBrood XIX
Emerges every seventeen yearsEmerges every thirteen years

“They make the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard,” said a second newscaster.

“Said no one ever,” joked the first.

The whole news crew burst into laughter.

“But it IS a beautiful sound!” I said to their guffawing faces.

I know the sound is a harsh rattle. Loud. Discordant. Metallic. Strange.

I don’t expect everyone to like it.

I’ve loved it since I was a child.

I wasn’t aware I loved it when I spent brutally hot summers deep in the country with my grandparents, where an old dirt road and a ditch were all that kept their yard from being swallowed up by a towering deciduous forest. From those dense, mysterious depths emanated a deafening buzz, hundreds upon hundreds of cicada-songs swelling and subsiding in synchronized rhythms, the background music of my happiest childhood days.

Time passed. As my grandparents grew older and my visits rarer, I’d realize the meaning of the rhapsody. Cicadas play love songs with all their might. They know their time is short.

At nineteen I was hospitalized with a high fever. My father and mother both accompanied me, clearly concerned about my condition. They sat by my bedside while I lay shivering under layers of blankets, too tired to talk, to move, to care about anything. Afternoon melted into night. It was winter. The heater in the room kicked on with a buzz so like the cicada chorus of my childhood summers that my shivering eased almost instantly.

They’re calling me, I thought. The cicadas. They’re taking me to Granddaddy’s and Grandma’s, and I’ll be safe there.

This flooded with incomparable comfort and indescribable joy.

Then… if I’m dying, it’s okay, as long as there are cicadas.

And I fell asleep.

When I woke in the morning, my fever had broken.

I didn’t know, at nineteen, that cicadas are a symbol of resurrection and immortality. I didn’t know the many legends and lore surrounding the insects, such as the myth of Aurora, goddess of the dawn, doomed to fall in love with a mortal who inevitably grew old. She obtained immortality for him without thinking to secure eternal youth. Soon there was hardly anything left of him but his voice, continually singing his lamentation and love, so she finally turned him into a cicada.

Note: Aurora is the name of my grandparents’ hometown, where I spent those childhood summers steeped in cicada song.

Back to the present…

After that news segment, I had to do a little research.

Scientists say that these perodical broods, XIII and XIX, haven’t coincided since 1803 and won’t do so again until the year 2245.

They’re calling this a “cicadapocalypse” of maybe a trillion bugs…but not all in the same place (in case you’re thinking biblical plague). One’s called the Northern Illinois Brood (XIII) and the other, the Great Southern Brood (XIX). If my calculations are right, this brood appeared the summer that followed my sickness at nineteen (same as the brood numeral). I got married that August, when they would have been in full throttle. The time before that, I’d have been seven and hearing them at my grandparents’.

On the day the segment aired with newscasters poking fun at the sound, I happened to be taking part in an Open Write at Ethical ELA. Host Leilya Pitre introduced the Naani poem form, which orginated in India: four lines consisting of 20-25 syllables total. The poem isn’t restricted by theme, subject, or metric pattern. Leilya challenged participants to scroll through social media or the news to find four phrases to make a Naani.

My lines had just been delivered to me, before I even read the prompt.

Once again, the Magicicada were at work in the background rhythms of my life.

From This Morning’s Newcast

Brace yourself:
the cicadas are coming…
the most beautiful sound
I’ve ever heard.

—I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait for cicadapocalypse.

Cicada vunerable after metamorphose. Joi. CC BY 2.0

‘Saint Francis with cicada’ – modern bronze statue by Fiorenzo Bacci – Friary of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Assisi. Carlo Raso.

Legend has it that Saint Francis heard a cicada chirping in in a fig tree and called it to him, saying “Sing, my sister cicada, and praise the Lord thy Creator,” and it obeyed, sitting on his hand.

*******

Composed for Day 3 of the annual Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers.
Q: What’s YOUR favorite insect? Why?

Fallow

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

Halfway between work and home
I noticed the field.
How could I not, such vibrant green
popping against the panorama
of brown grass and tired trees
giving way to winter.

I needed this shot
of unexpected freshness
after these first days back
to full-time work
with my husband at home
in the middle of a slow recovery
from spinal surgery.

The waning afternoon light
slants gold across the green
and there, there,
clear as day, two deer
graze, gilt-edged
and peaceful
and perfect

as if it isn’t hunting season
as if carcasses of their kindred
aren’t lying mangled by the roadside
within their view
as if the long in-betweenness of
hours and days and seasons
and breaths
is no consequence

as if all that matters
is this field left fallow

for their sustenance

and now
mine.

NS-01036 – Whitetail Deer. archer10 (Dennis) CC BY-SA 2.0

Whitetail Deer.TexasEagle. CC BY-NC 2.0

Screenshot

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

Usually it’s the sound of cicadas that stirs my soul, their rattling courtship-chorus reaching a feverish crescendo in late August. Summer hits its brutal zenith just before it begins to die. Interesting how August means to increase.

On the last Sunday of August, it’s not the sound of cicadas which captivates me.

It’s the sight of one clinging to the screen in the kitchen window, early in the morning.

So still that I wonder if it’s dead.

I am tempted to go out and see, but I don’t. Let it be. If it’s dead, it will still be there after church and I’ll save its body to show the granddaughters. Cicadas are big insects that evoke terror in many people; I do not want the girls to fear them. The antidote to fear is understanding. Study. Fear not. Maybe even learn to love.

I take a photo instead.

It is a dark morning, like the one in the sermon text for this day, Mark 1:35: Jesus rises “very early in the morning, while it was still dark” to find a desolate place to pray. He’d spent the previous day healing the sick, including Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, and driving out demons.

When I return home, the cicada is gone.

Not dead.

All I have is this snapshot of it resting alone in a quiet place on the grid, with the crape myrtle by the old dog’s grave blooming in the background.

I could write an entire book, perhaps, on the symbolism and metaphor here.

I settle for a poem.

Clinging to the grid
In respite from work
Crape myrtle abloom
August’s crescendo is the last
Defying death in the wings
As love drives resurrection

The cicada and crape myrtle are symbols of life, longevity, immortality, and resurrection.
Summer is dying, but only for now.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the weekly Slice of Life Story Challenge

Fibonacci poem: Hey, Ancestors

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

On Day Two of July’s Open Write at Ethical ELA, host Mo Daly invites us to write a poem in Fibonacci sequence: six lines with syllables of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.

The Fibonacci sequence appears over and over in nature, from shells to flowers to trees to our own DNA.

Maybe that’s what led to this double-reverse attempt…

Hey, Ancestors

composed after a trip
to the home place

Come
sit
a spell
on the porch.
I want to know you.
Tell me the stories of your life.
I don’t mind your being a ghost.
Just (if you please) try
not to rock
your chair
too
much.

Old rockers. Poor Ole Rich. CC BY-SA 2.0

Sun-kissed summer: Spiritual Journey

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

And so it comes to pass, at long last, that I return to the site of my sun-kissed childhood summers.

My ancestral homeplace in eastern North Carolina. Literally the land of my fathers: My dad, my grandparents, my great-parents, my great-greats were all born within a small radius of a tiny town and crossroads that were old long before my appearance on this Earth.

Thus began my fascination with Time.

In the bend of a dirt road stood my grandparents’ home, where my father grew up. My youngest aunt was born here in the same room where her father, my Granddaddy, would die fifty-three years later at 92. He wanted to die at home. He did, peacefully and “full of days,” as the Scriptures say of Abraham, Isaac, and Job: After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days (Job 42:16-17).

Likewise, my grandparents saw four generations. They lived to see my children. Incidentally, Granddaddy had a brother named Job who died in the 1920s (he drowned, if I recall correctly; this is a coastal area).

So it was that I grew up on stories of the old days and ways, a little city girl mesmerized by my deep country roots. In my time the once-thriving community was already history; nature was reclaiming the unpainted houses, one by one. Some were still visible through the woods (an early memory: a cypress shingle roof in the treetops, if you looked just right) and others were in various stages of falling down with yards still mowed by descendants.

On this return journey a few weeks ago, I discovered that my grandmother’s homeplace from the early 1900s is being swallowed by the forest:

A terrible jolt, as I can remember it having a hedge, a lawn, a porch swing, a screen door. I remember the layout inside and my great-uncle living there, tending to a patch of sunflowers.

And I knew, prior to this journey, that my grandparents’ house, which stood on the corner a little farther on, is gone.

This story is a little different, however. Instead of the forest reaching its veiny green fingers to reclaim its own, a young couple has built a home right in the middle of what was once my grandfather’s garden. I can’t help thinking how Grandma would marvel at the beauty of this new house and its lovely landscaping.

All that remains here from the enchanted summers of my childhood half a century ago (and from time before me) is the pumphouse, one of Grandma’s crepe myrtles (now wistfully draped in Spanish moss, which never used to be in these parts), and the sidewalk that once led to the front porch of Granddaddy and Grandma’s home:

As a teenager I wrote a song about a sidewalk. Haven’t thought about it in ages:

Where does this lonely sidewalk lead?
You think by now I’d know
Footsteps into yesterday
That’s where I want to go…

I had no idea, then, that only the sidewalk would remain in this place I loved so well, where I used to play outside in the sweltering bug-infested heat, where Grandma would sit at her piano in the evenings to have me sing old hymns with her as Granddaddy listened from his recliner, where I felt loved and wanted and sheltered and that I belonged…

The old dirt road remains, too, of course.

There was another dirt road branching off of it here in the shadows to the left; it once led, Grandma said, to a two-story antebellum house with a double balcony. I could hear admiration for that house in her voice. In my childhood the road was just two tracks through grass and thickets. The path faded more and more with every passing summer. Now you would never know it had ever been anything but woods.

From this vantage point, my grandparents’ yard is on the right, and to the immediate left is an old family cemetery. Not my family’s, although I walked it often with Grandma over the years. When I was a child, I was afraid ghosts would come out here at night. Grandma assured me they would not. She offered this dubious comfort: No need to fear the dead. Fear the living.

When I wondered at the graves of so many babies, she said people just didn’t know what to do for them when they were sick.

It’s clear how much the children were loved and mourned. This tiny cemetery remains painstakingly tended and strangely outside of time:

Hello again, baby Leafy Jean and big brother Leon Russell.

These siblings died a month apart in 1917. Grandma was born three months after Leon, almost a year to the day before Leafy, in the soon-to-be obscured homeplace just around the bend of the road.

Four-month-old twins Audrie and Aubrie died a week apart during that same summer.

The greater wonder, in its way, are the children who survived disease and mothers who died giving birth to them, which almost happened to Grandma: her mother delivered a stillborn baby three months before she was born. My grandmother was a twin. Grandma journaled this because I asked her to; in her writings, she says several women in the community who recently had babies helped nurse her while my great-grandmother was so ill that she “almost didn’t make it.”

—Why am I just now realizing that Grandma’s lost twin would have come around the same time as Leon Russell? Could his mother have been one of the women who preserved my newborn grandmother’s hungry life? if so …imagine saving someone else’s child and losing your own…

So many mysteries in this place. I’ve always felt the pull.

Over fifty years after I first walked this cemetery with my grandmother, I’m awed by the good condition of the headstones. I halfway expected them to be eroding into illegibility — after all, these people’s earthly homes have long since crumbled. No greater mystery than Time…

I cannot linger here, ruminating, for there’s another place to visit. Really just a good walk “around the horn” to the church, a journey I’ve made many times.

This was once the heart of the bustling farm community. The church was built on land given by my grandmother’s predecessors. Her father, mother, brothers, and other family are buried to the right of this crossroads.

Granddaddy and Grandma are buried in the churchyard, to the left.

Such a beautiful little resting place, presently bordered by a lush cornfield. An old live oak felled by a hurricane in recent years has been replaced by a new one nearby.

Grandma would be so pleased to see how well-tended everything is.

There’s even a new footbridge over the ditch at the churchyard, for easy access to the little community center across the road. This building stands where Grandma’s three-room grade school used to, she said in her journal.

Here’s where old and new converge most for me, where Time is most relevant and paradoxically elusive. The spirit of this place is old; my own memories are growing old.

My father as a teenager, in the churchyard

I am the keeper of memories older than mine.

But I came for the new.

I brought my granddaughter, you see.

All along the journey, I told her stories. Of the old days, the old ways.

I brought her to dig for fossils at the Museum in town (which is where the phosphate mining company sends its rejects now, instead of scattering treasures on the old dirt roads).

We found a bit of coral skeleton, shark’s teeth, and some bony things I’ve yet to identify:

Making new memories from the old… even from the ancient, from time before recorded time.

As we were leaving, I discovered that the old library in this old, old town looks the same as it did five decades ago when Grandma drove me to pick out books to read at her house in the summer. I halfway expected to see her coming out with the armful she had to help me carry…

And I think this is used to be, or is at least near, the butcher shop where Daddy worked as a teenager.

There’s so much more to be said about memory, legacy, endurance, overcoming, and family… about the whole spiritual journey of life. The greatest gift my grandparents gave me, beyond their unconditional love and their stories, is that of faith lived out. I learned long ago that eventually there comes a homecoming so bright, so glorious, that all the former shadows are forgotten.

I expect I’ll recognize my little corner of Heaven, having had such a foretaste here.

Until that time, I carry on in the footsteps before me, praying I walk even half as well.

My now, my tomorrows ❤

From Everlasting to Everlasting: A Prayer of Moses

Lord, you have been our dwelling place
    in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
    or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
    from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

You return man to dust
    and say, “Return, O children of man!”
For a thousand years in your sight
    are but as yesterday when it is past,
    or as a watch in the night…

Let your work be shown to your servants,
    and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
    and establish the work of our hands upon us;
    yes, establish the work of our hands!
Psalm 90: 1-4;16-17

*******

with thanks to my Spiritual Journey friends who write on the first Thursday of each month
and to host Carol Varsalona who posted this reflection and question for July:

Pause and praise God for His wondrous gifts! 
What are you rejoicing over this summer?

/

Bluebirdology

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

This spring, a pair of Eastern bluebirds raised a brood in a birdhouse on the back deck. From the windows I watched the whole process. I learned much from my avian teachers.

Bluebirds are curious; they want to know everything, including what humans are doing. When the finch nestlings died a couple months back, necessitating that I dispose of the nest, Mama and Papa Bluebird sat side-by-side on the fence, solemnly watching my every move. Bluebirds are all about family. Their fledglings stick around. When this first brood left the next, the parents became fiercely territorial. They attacked the kitchen bay window and cars in the driveway. No matter how far down the driveway my husband parks, they still take over his car; I even saw the father bluebird killing a worm on top of it one morning, like a mighty hunter on some holy mountain. I wondered if that worm was a meal for his children; the parents continue to feed them for a while after departing the nest.

Lesson One of Bluebirdology: protect your young at all costs.

Mama Bluebird takes over the hummingbird feeder, frequently looking in the kitchen window: What are those humans up to?

Papa Bluebird in all his blue glory, patrolling the fence.

The baby bluebirds are juveniles now, and over the last few weeks I’ve seen three or four them at any given time in the grass or lined up on the fence.

Lesson Two of Bluebirdology: Persevere.

One of the juveniles getting its own breakfast worm: Ta-daa!

What I find most remarkable is how the juveniles help to prepare for the next brood. I watched Papa Bluebird carry new nesting material into the birdhouse; in a moment, here came one of his children with a bit of straw.

Lesson Three of Bluebirdology: Teach your children well; survival is a community effort.

This weekend my seven-year-old granddaughter and I watched Mama Bird sitting on the fence watching us through the window, when out of the blue came Papa Bluebird. He landed beside his mate and fed her an insect in his beak. “They look like they’re kissing!” exclaimed my granddaughter.

They did. It was a sign, for sure…

I suspected, with the recent activity around the birdhouse, that new eggs were on the way. Here’s the thing: That birdhouse has only one little opening where the birds enter and exit. No way to peek in and verify anything or even to clean out a used nest.This is where the plot really thickens: My husband and I are about to embark on much-needed deck repairs. I needed to know: What’s in that birdhouse? If it is an active nest, by law we cannot disturb it. And if there are eggs… well, to me that makes it a sacred place. Not to be desecrated.

And so I bought a little endoscope and ran the wire camera into the birdhouse.

There are four bright blue eggs in a bed of pine straw.

I am not sure when they were laid. It could be a week or two from now before they hatch. Then it will be about three weeks before this next brood fledges and begins to fend for itself (I am imagining a whole army of bluebirds on the offense at that point, with Brood One still in the wings).

The deck repair will have to wait a bit, alas… not sure how I am going to explain this to my husband or our builder but I will take my chances with them over the bluebirds. In honor of life.

Heeding Lesson Four of Bluebirdology: There’s no place like home.

One of the juveniles still hanging around its natal home.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Happy Birdday

/ Fran Haley / 7 Comments

Was there a childhood birthday when you woke up excited beyond description for what you hoped that day would bring? It was like that when I turned six. I couldn’t wait for my father to take me to the store where I’d pick out my first pet: a parakeet. I’d begged and begged for one. I was enchanted by birds then, and I am exponentially enchanted now, which is why I woke up so excited last Saturday.

It was to be a day filled with birds…more than I could even count, although I had to try.

Global Big Day, you see.

World Migratory Bird Day, to be more precise, a global celebration occurring on the second Saturdays of May and October. As defined on the WMBD website: World Migratory Bird Day is an annual awareness-raising campaign highlighting the need for the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats. It has a global outreach and is an effective tool to help raise global awareness of the threats faced by migratory birds, their ecological importance, and the need for international cooperation to conserve them.

In the common interest of science, conservation, and celebration, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology invites bird lovers around the world to count all birds seen or heard on Global Big Day and to enter this data in official checklists.

And so I joined Team eBird with my friend and fellow blogger-poet, Kim Johnson. She’s in Georgia, I’m in North Carolina, but we are birds of the same feather in countless ways, equally excited for this bird-counting day.

It began when I woke up to birdsong early Saturday morning. Lately it’s been a mockingbird, which, I’ve learned, is usually a male singing while the female incubates eggs.

This day, however, the dawn singer was a robin.

I threw on my robe and went outside to start my count as the earth swelled with bird chorus.

Here’s what Merlin Sound ID (a Cornell Lab app on my phone) told me I was hearing out front and on my back deck:

There are also some regular bird friends whose voices aren’t in this mix. Back in the house, a fluttering at the window…

My male ruby-throated hummingbird visits periodically throughout the day, and this day was no different; he arrived early and was off in a flash. I added him to my list.

Then there are my eastern bluebirds.

They’re a mated pair which nested in a birdhouse on the deck before Easter, attempting to be as furtive as possible, until the first week of May when they went stark raving territorial. The female flew and flew at the kitchen bay window. Both of them became obsessed with cars in the driveway; one morning I watched the male killing a worm on top of my son’s car. I am still not sure what prompted the sudden change in behavior, but I suspect their babies fledged and flew, resulting in fierce protectiveness of the habitat. All I can say with certainty is that these two birds believe they reign over the kingdom of my yard.

Because they do.

His Majesty

Her Royal Highness, taking over the hummingbird feeder

Never fear, Bluebirds Dear; I added you both to the list. And you don’t know it yet but I bought a “snake” camera to check your nest in the birdhouse, to see what exactly is in there. More on that later…

Other birds awaited on this Global Big Day. Off to the lake I went, in hopes of seeing eagles.

I didn’t see any. But I did see two great blue herons, separately, standing still as statues, as elegiac as poetry, in all their strange and ancient beauty.

They remind me that birds are the last living dinosaurs.

One of the two great blue herons

Over at the dam, a giant nest is protected by government fencing and two fake owls, which don’t seem to bother the two nesting ospreys at all.

One of the two ospreys

After duly noting the ospreys, I made a note to self: Get a good digital camera ASAP. The zoom on the phone can only do so much.

The trip to the lake yielded over thirty species of birds. In addition to those I noted at home, Merlin Sound ID picked up scarlet and summer tanagers, pine warblers, a Swainson’s thrush, Eastern phoebes, brown-headed cowbirds, white-breasted nuthatches, Eastern wood pee-wees, red-bellied woodpeckers and downy woodpeckers, Eastern towhees, chimney swifts, ovenbirds, and the American goldfinch.

Then a huge bird fell straight down from the sky and landed in the brush few feet in front of me.

A red-shouldered hawk. With its beak it grabbed a little snake I’d have never seen otherwise. And then the hawk ran—yes, ran!—into the woods.

I added the hawk to my list as I headed back to the car, exhausted but elated with my bird inventory. I was pretty much done.

But the hawk wasn’t done with me yet.

A little farther down the wooded path, a sudden loud “screaming” of birds— an unmistakable warning of danger, as the hawk sailed by to land on a low pine branch.

I stood as still as I could, videoing that bird for over two minutes while he cocked his head, observing me (does he have a checklist, too?). Smaller birds clamored all around the whole time; some were quite near the hawk, almost like groupies. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hawk long enough to see exactly what the other birds were; Merlin later told me “robins.” Really? I have read that robins are the birds whose warnings make all others take cover but I have never heard them so loud, in such stereo sound. I’d already counted robins, fortunately…then just like that, the hawk took off and the wild screams followed right after him…Elvis has left the building.

Wild.

The red-shouldered hawk, celebrity of the day

Back at home in the evening my family gathered ’round to celebrate my birthday… even more bird-wonder in this day!

Books on birds and birding

Books to share with my granddaughters, ages seven and eighteen months

Finch earrings from my son

I settled down to bed that evening, counting my years, counting my birds, counting the many blessings and love in my life….all in all, the happiest of birddays.

I opened one of the new books, The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human, to read the opening sentence:

Imagine what might happen if birds studied us.

Imagine? There’s no need to imagine...

I know without question that they do.

His Majesty, looking in the window

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the weekly Slice of Life story writing challenge
to Kim Johnson, for always inspiring me
to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for its amazing mission
to all who help protect birds

and to birds, for all the awe
and the lessons we need to learn
about tending our Earth

Science poem: Existential Dance

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

For Monday’s VerseLove on Ethical ELA, host Brittany Saulnier extended this invitation: “Today, write a poem inspired by science and perhaps, whimsy…The challenge is to ensure the reader can simultaneously glimpse the scientific concept you were inspired by and a universal truth.”

As always, my thoughts turn to nature. It is always teaching; are we heeding its lessons? Nature’s messages don’t come on words but from its own rhythms and coding. I write much of birds. It is said that they are they last living dinosaurs. Maybe even now they are the impetus, in their always-inspirational way, for my digging deep to see what I might find…

Existential Dance

sea and earth
earth and sea
complicated
choreography

streams of movement
building higher
freeform deposits
wetter, drier

life rising, falling
layer on layer
it’s all timing, timing,
the dragon-slayer

everything alive
to remain, must eat
until nothing remains
but remains under feet 

strata with volumes 
lined on a shelf
stories kept secret
unto itself

sea and earth
earth and sea
consolidated
choreography

streams of movement
releasing the store
freeform deposits
washing ashore

when miners come
millennia later
scratching their heads
no translator

for what they’re seeing
drawn from the earth
looking for phosphate
to be stunned by girth

of ancient teeth
from a creature long gone
scientific name:

Megalodon

(meaning “big tooth”)
—what great irony
this turns out to be
last laugh of earth and sea

monster-shark teeth
unearthed in a way
with a side effect:
workers’ tooth decay

everything alive
to remain, must eat
until nothing remains
but remnants…of teeth

sea and earth
earth and sea
conspiratorial
choreography

Carcharocles Megalodon Tooth. 5.4 inches long, 4.4 inches wide.
Excavated from Lee Creek Mine, Aurora, North Carolina, USA.
Public domain.

My grandparents lived on the outskirts of tiny Aurora, North Carolina, home to the largest phosphate mining and chemical plant in the world (miningtechnology.com archive). In the 1970s, prior to the establishment of the Aurora Fossil Museum, “rejects” or unwanted gravel material from mines were scattered on the many dirt roads around the area. As a child I walked in these rejects along the old dirt road by my grandparents’ home, finding bits of coral skeleton, shark’s teeth, possibly some Megalodon teeth, and fossilized eardrums and vertebrae of log-extinct creatures. Now visitors can dig through this material in the fossil pits at the Museum, which will host its annual Fossil Festival May 26-29.

The April 2023 edition of Our State Magazine contains an article by Katie Schanze about Aurora and its fossils: the area “produces the most prolific fossil record of Miocene (2.3 million to 5.3 million years ago) and Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago) marine life on the Atlantic coast.”

It was by chance that I stumbled across references elsewhere stating that one of the detrimental effects of phosphate mining is tooth decay from prolonged exposure to fumes of chemicals used in the process. What irony, I thought, tooth decay caused by mining something used as fertilizer to grow food, while simultaneously finding preserved teeth of one of the mightiest sea predators ever to have lived…which likely went extinct due to loss of food.

*******

with thanks to Brittany Saulnier for the poetic inspiration on Ethical ELA
and to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
and Our State: Celebrating North Carolina, Vol. 90, No. 11

Ode to menthol

/ Fran Haley / 16 Comments

In the season
of sickness,
of a rattling
in the chest
that lingers
and lingers
and lingers
I seek
your healing power
O my elixir

none other will do
as well as you

your name
is not always recorded
on cryptic inscriptions

but I know
it’s you

nothing else
has that
distinctive
burn

Alas, you have become
such an elusive elixir

I search high and low
(on the shelves)
just to find
you’ve vanished

leaving no trace

it befits you,
vaporous thing
that you are

I cannot entertain
the notion
of orange
or honey
—fie!

These cannot
open passages
like you.

I wonder
what on Earth
I shall do

but wait…

memory stirs
like ghosts
like tendrils
like vapors, yes…

my own father
pouring your
precious substance
into a little silver tray
and plugging in
the vaporizer

there I was
suffering child
surrounded
by a steamy cloud
tinged with your
cool fragrance

sputtering
sizzling
on through the
long, long night

(you’re no cure-all
for childhood asthma, btw
but I’m not dealing
with that
anymore)

and speaking
of clouds…

back there
in the shroud
of Time
where sits
my father
and
my mother
puffing
puffing
puffing
on Salem cigarettes
there, the
telltale green carton
indicates your presence

I can still smell you
on the foil
of those packs
and in the
smoke ribbons
curling in the air
(aside: salem means
peaceful
complete
safe
perfect)

—what a cool operator
you are,
alternately healing
and stealing
breath

but then…

far back
so far back
I find you
at your purest,
perhaps

sick child
that I was
struggling
to breathe
(yeah, it’s a theme)

my grandfather
going to
his medicine cabinet
for a little
cobalt-blue tub
my grandmother
unscrewing the
aqua lid
and with one finger
slathering a good dollop
under my nose

(which now
no one is
ever
ever
ever
supposed to do
although clearly
I am alive)

and it is this memory
these moments
that are salve to my soul.
balm to my spirit

and so I come
to find you
like a miracle
in my own
medicine cabinet

whereupon I slather
my own self
up good

relishing your
mint-oil fire

your vapors
like a blanket
of love
enveloping me

breathing
breathing
Yea, with
a little
more ease

until this
lingering
lingering
rattle

evaporates
at last…

O, my elixir.



Fun facts: Vick’s VapoRub was invented in 1894 in the North Carolina county next to where I live now. It was originally called Vick’s Magic Croup Salve. From the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources: “The salve in the blue jar is made of menthol, camphor, oil of eucalyptus and several other oils, blended in a base of petroleum jelly.” The creator invented it to cure his son of severe croup…which it did. Spanish flu killed the inventor in 1919 but, paradoxically, that pandemic drastically increased demand for his product. Oh…and guess who worked at the inventor’s drugstore as a teenager? O. Henry.

My ode, however is to menthol, not just Vick’s, seeing as I had to include my parents’ Salem menthols in the mix. I was an asthmatic child, my first attack occurring at age three months. As I grew, I often begged to stay with my grandparents when I was sick; they slathered me with this old remedy, hence my great affinity for VapoRub. Accordingly, my grandparents are ever-present in the healing power of that clean menthol burn…nowadays I am not troubled with asthma but when I feel a cold coming on, or, as in the present moment, trying to shake the rattling cough after a cold, Vick’s DayQuil with VapoCool is my go-to. It works, to which widely empty shelves attest. I finally had some delivered by Instacart (had to show ID, of course) so I can continue burning the rattle out of my chest…it’s the best thing I know of, outside of a certain homemade “recipe” made by one of my old-time church members from the country…not exactly sure what was in THAT jar, but it would’ve surely burned this stuff out long before now… that, however, is another story for another day.

Here’s to the healing power of menthol.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge
and to Kim Johnson,
whose series on Epsom salts convinced me that I really, really should write about menthol
(which, yes, can occasionally be dangerous, so use with care)

March snow

/ Fran Haley / 18 Comments

haiku story

gray Sunday morning
in spite of springing forward
it begins to snow

first time all winter
big white flakes now descending
on riotous blooms

purple-pink redbuds
bright yellow forsythia
pollen-laden pines

suspend certainty
while birds rush in, unafraid
of crystallized grass

momentarily
melting away in soft earth
—seems a sheer delight

to countless robins
hopping with newfound vigor
and the cardinal

on a blood-red blaze
toward the bare crape myrtle
where his mate awaits

and dark-eyed juncos
living up to their nickname
ground-flitting snowbirds

while papa house finch
forages in the clover
on the old dog’s grave

for seeds he’ll carry
to mama finch on the nest
incubating eggs

bluebird on the gate
ruffles his blue-flame feathers
in exultation

two crows come and go
strangely silent, for they know
the benediction

Carolina wren
hidden somewhere in the pines
sings Holy Holy

the earth’s aflutter
with myriad wings and things
returning blessing

in spite of the snow
life springs forward, brightening
gray Sunday morning

2020-0417_CentreCoPA_WestMain_Eastern Bluebird in the snow -01. amOBX. CC BY-NC 2.0.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge