April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
These are the memorable first lines of Eliot’s seminal long poem. It was the focal point of my senior essay in a modern poetry seminar, in the autumn of 1972, coming as it did on the 50th anniversary of its publication. Little did I know what resonance it would have a half century later.
It has been over a year since I posted anything of significance here, but not for the lack of want or thoughts I had hoped to share. Shortly after that last post on March 26, 2023, I traveled to Ohio to help my mother celebrate her 98th birthday. It was a pleasant visit until the day it was time to return home when I woke up feeling very much under the weather. We immediately hit the road figuring it would be better to be close to my doctor should something come of it. What a fortuitous decision on my part!
Two days after returning home I collapsed and could not get up. SallyAnn called the EMTs and the next thing I knew I was in the back of an ambulance and on my way to the hospital attached to tubes and monitors. After some time in the emergency room, I was moved to the ICU where I remained for three days. I did not feel terribly bad, but I had a sneaking suspicion it might be serious. It was. My kidneys were beginning to shut down as the result of a nasty blood infection attributed to my chronic lymphedema in both legs dating back to late 2017. I would spend the month of April and half of May 2023 in the hospital and rehab, thankfully avoiding dialysis as my health slowly improved. I eventually returned home to several weeks of additional physical therapy, happy in the thought that my life had been given back to me thanks to the wonderful care afforded by the doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and a dedicated hospital staff.
I had planned to write about this after settling in at home, but I could not steal myself to relive those days of uncertainty. It was just nice to be home again, sitting up and getting back to a normal routine. I relished the mundane as I focused on my full recovery while returning to my various projects. By late July I felt well and strong enough to return to Maine for our annual summer hiatus. Little did I know at the time what restorative powers emanate from fresh sea breezes.
We returned to Monhegan Island situated twelve miles off Midcoast Maine. We had been doing this since 2000, and it seemed that two weeks on this small, quiet island was just what I needed. And SallyAnn, too, after all I put her through that spring. We spent two delightful weeks on this barely one square mile of paradise, and home to less than 100 souls far removed from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. Monhegan has long been a destination for artists – the Wyeths, Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, Andrew Winter, Reuben Tam, George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, James Fitzgerald, just to name a few – and art lovers, and there are ample opportunities to enjoy all the island has to offer. SallyAnn enjoyed combing the small beach looking for sea glass for her jewelry creations, and I was always in search of a quiet and out-of-the-way place to read and write while soaking in the dramatic land- and seascapes that have drawn so many artists and writers to the island.
After several weeks in northern New England, we returned home healthy and in a good frame of mind. Even with my somewhat limited mobility, we both immensely enjoyed our summer escape from the heat and humidity of Washington, DC as we looked forward to the onset of autumn and cooler weather. In October we returned to Ohio to help a dear college chum celebrate her 70th birthday, followed by a return visit with my mother and sister and her family. Thankfully, that visit ended on a much better note than the previous one. Then came the holidays during which I tried very hard to get into the spirit of the season knowing I had so much to be thankful for. 2023 didn’t turn out too bad after all things considered.
We spent January and February in Florida with some side trips into Georgia to visit family and friends. It began with two lovely weeks at an oceanfront condo on Crescent Beach, south of St. Augustine. I have never spent that much time in this area of the state, although SallyAnn has, and so we discovered and re-discovered all that it has to offer – a wondrous variety of local seafood, the ability to cruise the wide beach expanse in one’s automobile and staying just a few hundred feet from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ beach cottage where she wrote many of her stories. There was also the former colonial Spanish Fort Mantanzas, as well as the colonial sites in and around historic St. Augustine, one of the earliest European settlements in North America. It was a relaxing visit, and I had an opportunity to finally begin assembling the manuscript for Aspiring to a Full Consent: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2024, which I hope to see in print by the end of the year.
After our time on the Atlantic coast, we headed inland to spend a month in a quaint cottage in Evinston. This tiny hamlet on the western shore of Orange Lake is situated on the edge of Paynes Prairie and the Great Alachua Savanna just south of Gainesville. The English naturalist William Bartram visited this region in the 1770s when the main inhabitants were bands of Seminoles. He recorded his observations in The Travels of William Bartram (1791): "how the mind is agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world. On the first view of such an amazing display of the wisdom and power of the supreme author of nature, the mind for a moment seems suspended, and impressed with awe." I find it difficult to argue with his impressions over two centuries later. Once a center of Florida’s citrus industry, this region is now known for it cattle and horse farms. My late her-in-law ran cattle on Paynes Prairie when he was young and continued to work at several cattle ranches throughout central and north Florida. The largest cattle operation in Spanish Florida, Hacienda De La Chua, operated here in the late 1600s.
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It was a very relaxing month exploring the many back roads in this region in addition to outings to the Gulf Coast and Florida’s Great Bend country, reliving memories of time spent here in years gone by. Ms. Rawlings’ farm at Cross Creek, the inspiration for her novel The Yearling (1929), was only eight miles from the cottage . . . half that as the crow flies. We visited the Alachua Sink on the southern edge of Gainesville. It is the deepest of Paynes Prairie’s sinkholes and acts as a conduit for water entering the Florida aquifer at a rate of up to 6 million gallons per day. Upon visiting the Alachua Sink, Bartram was amazed by the number and size of the alligators, "so abundant that, if permitted by them, I could walk over any part of the basin and the river upon their heads." You can almost say that even today. The gators share the sink with a rich variety of bird life – egrets, Blue Herons, Sandhill Cranes, various hawks and vultures only to mention a very few.
We returned home to Maryland in early March, visiting friends in Atlanta along the way. We spent time examining the museum at the Carter Center and the nearby historical sites associated with the life and career of Martin Luther King. We also wandered the downtown campus of Georgia Tech where my father received his degrees in engineering after the war. He and my mother moved to Chicago in 1951 shortly before I was born and so I have always felt a kindred spirit with this dynamic southern city. Our very satisfying winter adventure concluded with a visit to Asheville, North Carolina where I lived for a few years when I was a boy. I always enjoy a return to my old stomping grounds.
The spring passed without serious incident or illness. A year after my hospitalization and recovery, I remain healthy, and I continue to move forward with what I can only hope will remain a life well-lived (save a brief Covid relapse a couple weeks ago . . . nothing quite as bad as the first bout in late 2022). And now we are preparing for yet another summer hiatus on Maine’s Monhegan Island and elsewhere in northern New England during which I plan to finally complete my first novel, The Skunk Compass of Compass of the Big Magalloway. Wish me luck!
In return, I wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous summer 2024.
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