“Autumn Dusk”….and Happy Thanksgiving!

 

 

It’s Hard To Tell what this photo above is, but the morning brought this weak storm front…and a dark cloud that stretched from the bottom of the horizon.  It transformed Atlanta to the east into a mountain range.  It reminded me of New Hampshire or Pennsylvania.  Quite a sight for the morning, and more spectacular outside my window than in the photo.  But!  A startling and welcome gift for the day before Thanksgiving.  I called around (at before 7am) to neighbors to look to the east outside their doors, and went down to one neighbor, Don to come out with me and gawk at the ‘mountain range’.  Don is a good sport and was as awed as I was.

Thanksgiving is a good time for enjoying the mysteries of Nature….and putting on Copeland’s  “Appalachian Spring”…the music that evokes an earlier, peaceful time when Thanksgiving wasn’t followed by Black Friday.

Peace to my nation in a time of outrageous turmoil, chaos, and Happy Thanksgiving for those of us who still give thanks.

Lady Nyo

And just for the fun of it, pix of my kitchen, and the sacrificial pumpkin from Halloween now to be a pumpkin pie.

By the way, it’s a ‘pink’ pumpkin, though it shows up darker in this photo.

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 This Autumn, a fleeting, transitory season, has brought heavy snows and bone numbing cold across our country.  Too early for this, but here in the South, it was just record breaking temps and rain.

Yesterday we had heavy winds, rain across Georgia and some areas had tornados. When the rain finally stopped, I looked outside and a huge rainbow spanned the sky.  What a visual gift to lift the spirits!  Then the clouds broke apart, their bellies turned pink and a soft blue mingled with the clouds.  Only a scant few minutes before dark fell, but what a Gainsborough moment. 

All week I have listened to the migration of Sandhill cranes, not seeing them, too high up, but hearing their cries. It signals the Winter to come, the smell of wood smoke and a landscape that is swept of fertility, just waiting the Earth to pirouette again.

Lady Nyo

AUTUMN DUSK

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Stuttering winds blow across

Clouds tinted by the failing sun.

Brittle air softens,

Now a faded blue–

Shade of an old man’s watery eyes.

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A late flock of Sandhill cranes lift off,

Pale bodies blending in the

Twilight with legs

Flowing dark streamers,

Their celestial cries fall to

Earth–

A harsh, chiding rain.

.

The trees in the valley

Are massed in darkness

As waning light leaches

Color from nature,

Creeps from field to hillock

And all below prepares for the

Rising of the Corn Moon.

.

Even frogs in the pond

Listen between croaks

For the intention of the night.

.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2014,

“Autumn Dusk” originally published in “White Cranes of Heaven”, Lulu.com, 2011

Thanksgiving, Aaron Copeland and a poem….

A Tom Turkey walking into Thanksgiving

IN THE HOLLOW OF WINTER TWILIGHT

 

In the hollow of winter twilight

The ground of the soul is darkened,

Silent, waiting,

A shallow breath will do.

–

Muted  grey

Floods earth and sky,

Black bare-armed trees,

Skeleton-like,

Now softened in this sullen light,

 To clothe, us too, with longing.

–

True winter has begun

This season of scarcity, silence,

Survival never assured us,

The very thinness of air,

A sharp, searing bitter breath of air,

The inhaled pain alerts us to life.

–

No excited cries of birds,

No rumble of young  squirrels

Turning tree hollows into hide and seek.

–

Only faint tracks in the layered snow

Gives  evidence of life,

Small three-point, delicate prints

As if a creature bounded on tiptoe.

–

There is little left to do

In this darkened ground of  time

But rest before the fire

And fill the hollow of the season

With hope, patience and desire.

–

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2012

 

Thanksgiving, Aaron Copeland and a poem….

It is Thanksgiving, a particularly American holiday. There are harvest festivals the world around, but nothing quite like the combination of elements that go into the American Thanksgiving. I put on  Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring”, and something transforms in the heart.  It is an attitude of gratefulness for so many things. Looking outside to the huge oaks and pecans, I am comforted by the bounty of Nature.  I am part of that Nature. Again, music expands the soul.

It’s a beautiful, cold,  rain filled Autumn.  Copeland is perfect background music for the day’s activities.  Or evening. There is such a poignancy and tenderness in Copeland. It sets the heart and humours in the right direction to get on with the day.

This is a love letter to Aaron Copeland.  For those not familiar with our quintessential American composer, this entry isn’t going to help much, but a couple of cds of his will. 

I have always loved Copeland, but just like most people with a little bit of musical training, didn’t really know much about him or the genesis of his music.  I do now.

Nothing is better than his well-known “Appalachian Spring”, composed as a ballet in 1943 for Martha Graham.  This was Copeland’s third dance score, based on a pastoral about the 19^th century American religious sect, called “Shakers”.  The name came from the poet, Hart Crane, another iconic American ‘composer’.  The Appalachians are in the middle South, mostly mountainous country.  Copeland composed full length hymns of his own, climaxing with the known Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”.

Copeland’s music is very distinctive, and immediately the tonal, chordal qualities are recognizable.  At least to Americans who have grown up with his music.  I could recognize some of the compositional issues, this long, lyrical line, long bow, long breaths with the woodwinds, and the strings…a long, legato, strung together with such delicate phrasing.  Or so it seemed to me. 

I started to search around more for where Copeland’s music originated, because there is always a beginning to things, an influence, usually several or many influences, and in the arts, this is rather common.  I discovered that Copeland, while we think is American music at its best, well, the early influences are rather Germanic. One of his most influential teachers was Nadia Boulanger, who in particular emphasized ‘la grande ligne” (the long line).  This makes sense, and accounts for Copeland’s graceful lyricism.  But even more, he expressed this sense of forward motion, the feeling for inevitability, for creating an entire piece that had little seams…or none at all.

Copeland stated that ‘ideal music’ to him might combine Mozart’s spontaneity and refinement with Palestrina’s purity and Bach’s profundity.  There is more in his line, though, Copeland’s:  there is a regal elegance and an unforced dignity.  The expressive content is more formed on ‘feeling’ than technical points.  This is an amazing freedom of composition, and not usually so facile. 

Copeland spent a lot of the Depression in Europe, especially Paris.  This gave him a chance to explore American jazz divorced from America.  He said that listening to jazz in Austria was like hearing it for the first time.  But jazz, although quintessentially American, was limited for Copland. He used it in the 20’s and 20’s , then turned to Latin and American folk music in the 40’s. 

There are other influences you can pick up in Copeland, if you have enough of an ear…or have heard enough other music.  Stravinsky’s rhythm and vitality is obvious in much of Copeland’s works: jagged and uncouth rhythmic effects, bold use of dissonance, and a hard, dry crackling sonority.

I hear this last in his “Billy the Kid” based on the American gunfighter.  The gunfighter, the quick turns and changes like a paint pony on a dime…these are borrowed from Stravinsky.

But back to “Appalachian Spring”.  Prokofiev’s  fresh, clean-cut, legato line and articulate style is in there, too.

There is a powerhouse of American influence in the 20’s-50’s with Copeland, John Steinbeck, Virgil Thomson,  all composers and writers trying to express the fundamental American sight and sound.

Perhaps it’s easiest to think of Copeland for his optimistic tone, his poly rhythms, poly harmony that reflect the jumpy energy, the forward motion of the American life then, before we became couch potatoes. Even the silences are filled with purpose, expectation and expressiveness to come.  This forward motion again.

Copeland composed on a large canvas with a directness in sentiment, when a time where sentimental music was not pushed away, when it expressed the goodness in humankind and the future.

It will come as a surprise, that this classical “New England” composer, who wrote Western music and New England pastoral ballets was a New York Jew.  His father was Lithuanian, and changed his name from Kaplan.

Asked how a New York Jew could capture so well the Old West? Copland answered: “ It was just a feat of imagination.”

An imagination that expressed the enormous power and scope of a new and throbbing nation.

It’s all in there, a powerful landscape made into the intangible except to the heart.

The leitmotiv of a young nation.

This article is dedicated to my friend, Nick, for all the right reasons.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2014

Happy Thanksgiving!

A Tom Turkey walking into Thanksgiving

From: MEMORIES OF A ROTTEN CHILDHOOD, -PART 7, MY FATHER

My father was a tender man. He came back from WWII, from the Pacific Rim, probably shell shocked, certainly a pacifist.

It was somewhere in the 50′s. My parents had bought their dream house: a very old, and badly- needing- restoration pre-Revolutionary War house. My father, along with my 9 months pregnant mother, moved into this house and began the necessary restoration. I remember my brother and I were bedded down in what was to be the dining room.

Both my parents were biting off probably more than they could chew with this property. There were two barns, a few sheds, and lo and behold! An outhouse. That was the toilet…the only toilet.

My mother, being city bred, and also so heavily pregnant, refused to use that black walnut-built two seater outhouse, and since it was already winter, who could blame her? My father worked nights putting in a proper bathroom, and peace reigned again. Sort of.

(Black walnut is beautiful wood, and since they were surrounded with acres of it, that particular wood was used for just about everything, including the beautiful curving banister in the front hall. My father also tore apart the outhouse and used some of the wood in constructing a cabinet under the back staircase, accessible from the kitchen. It was a great place for us to play hide and seek as children.)

Thanksgiving was coming one year, and my father decided he would buy a live turkey, fatten it up and slaughter it for the day. I vaguely remember going with him one night, when it was already dark and cold, and what I remember was a very large, dark room, lit by a bare bulb hardly casting light on the proceedings. If I remember correctly, it probably was a poultry farm somewhere in Middlesex County, probably in Millstone. Back in the 50′s and 60′s, five miles from Princeton, all of this area was farm country. Very old, English, Scottish then Dutch countryside with huge acreage of farms, dairy and grains.

So my father brings home a live turkey, and with two kids and a toddler, he thinks he is going to make “Tom” dinner.
My father soon realized his now-country- bred children had made friends with Tom and the idea of eating a friend, well, this wasn’t on the menu for us kids.

My mother wasn’t about to pluck or clean a turkey. She was a nurse and ballet dancer and hadn’t education in this. She didn’t like to even touch fish to be cooked.

So Tom went to Ham MacDonald in Rocky Hill. He had 12 children and I am sure Tom served the purpose he was bred for very nicely there.
My father went to his friend in Millstone, Chester, who was a butcher, and got a goose. I think he decided on goose because of the quick disappearance of Tom and he knew any turkey carcass showing up on a plate would have been suspect.

So that Thanksgiving we had goose, which was rather strange because Thanksgiving wasn’t called “Goose Day”.

My father was a tender man. Perhaps WWII and the times made him tender. Perhaps having children made him see life through our eyes. Some men become harder faced with life. I think it was because of his nature. He practiced compassion, even to the sensitivities of children.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2011, 2012

A Thanksgiving Memory…..

1.  

    

   In Memory of Marge.

   My father was a tender man.  He came back from WWII, from the Pacific Rim, probably shell shocked, certainly a pacifist.

   It was somewhere in the  50′s.    My parents had bought their dream house: a very old, and badly- needing- restoration pre-Revolutionary War house.  My father, along with my 9 months pregnant mother, moved into this house and began the necessary restoration.  I remember my brother and I were bedded down in what was to be the dining room.

   Both my parents were biting off probably more than they could chew with this property.  There were two barns, a few sheds, and lo and behold!  An outhouse.  That was the toilet…the only toilet.

   My mother, being city bred, and also so heavily pregnant, refused to use that black walnut-built two seater outhouse, and since it was already winter, who could blame her?  My father worked nights  putting in a proper bathroom, and peace reigned again.  Sort of.

   (Black walnut is beautiful wood, and since they were surrounded with acres of it, that particular wood was used for just about everything, including the beautiful curving banister in the front hall.  My father also tore apart the outhouse and used some of the wood in constructing a cabinet under the back staircase,  accessible from the kitchen.  It was a great place for us to play hide and seek as children.)

   Thanksgiving was coming one year, and my father decided he would buy a live turkey, fatten it up and slaughter it for the day.  I vaguely remember going with him one night, when it was already dark and cold,  and what I remember was  a very large, dark room, lit by a bare bulb hardly casting light  on the proceedings.  If I remember correctly, it probably was a poultry farm somewhere in Middlesex County, probably in Millstone.  Back in the 50′s and 60′s, five miles from Princeton, all of this area was farm country.  Very old, English, Scottish then Dutch countryside with huge acreage of farms, dairy and grains.

   So my father brings home a live turkey, and with two  kids and a toddler, he thinks he is going to make “Tom” dinner.

   My father soon realized  his now-country- bred children had made friends with Tom and the idea of eating a friend, well, this wasn’t on the menu for us kids.

   My mother wasn’t about to pluck or clean a turkey.  She was a nurse and ballet dancer and hadn’t education in this.  She didn’t like to even touch fish to be cooked.

   So Tom went to Ham MacDonald in Rocky Hill.  He had 12 children and I am sure Tom served the purpose he was bred for very nicely there.

   My father went to his friend in Millstone, Chester, who was a  butcher, and got a goose.  I think he decided on goose because of the quick disappearance of Tom and he knew any turkey carcass showing up on a plate would have been suspect.

   So that  Thanksgiving we had goose, which was rather strange because Thanksgiving wasn’t called “Goose Day”.

   My father was a tender man.  Perhaps WWII and the times had made him tender.  Perhaps having children made him see life through our eyes.  Some men become harder faced with life.  I think it was because of his nature.  He practiced compassion, even to the sensitivities of children.

   Happy Thanksgiving!

   Jane Kohut-Bartels

    

A Bittersweet Thanksgiving

This is a special Thanksgiving for my husband and myself….and our son, Christopher Duncan.  He is leaving for the Navy Dec. 8th, and we have to stuff in Christmas before he leaves.

These changes will be enormous.  For his parents, and especially for our son.  He was homeschooled and basically held to the Quaker mold from very early on.  His enlistment into the Navy was quite a shock for us, but he seems to have a plan.  Bill Penrose has shared some of his own son’s history in both Navy and Army and thinks that this is a good course for our son.  I trust Bill in many things, and because he has raised his own two sons well and they are fine men.  I am leaning on Bill here.

So this last Thanksgiving is heavy with our concern, not the least because there is a war going on.  And our son at just 22 seems hardly military material.  He is a thoughtful and gentle young man, who brings home stray kittens and dogs.  He is a computer geek and between classes, is making a pile of money fixing computers.  I wish he would continue his classes but he feels he needs more than what his college is offering.  I can remember the same restlessness at his age.  I solved it with marriage.  For a while.

He took some pictures of our Thanksgiving and I thought they were beautiful.  He is very handy with a camera where I am not.

The day was beautiful; a perfect late fall day where  the temperatures reflected the winter to come, the wind kicked up and clouds scuttled by, white clouds early then tinted a rosy hue as the dusk fell.  After eating I laid on a sofa and watched the wind whip around our huge pecans and live oaks.  There still are leaves on these trees, and in the distance I could see the colorful hues of maples and sycamores.  The trees outside my windows facing north were really dancing up a storm; apparently a cold front was coming in.

The blessings of our small family here, this last Thanksgiving before our only child goes into the Navy, well, we are counting them.  We are fortunate to have our child with us.  Many families this Thanksgiving don’t have their young soldiers  with them to enjoy the blessings of this wonderful national holiday.

The new kittens, Ali and Baba.

The Table

Candle fireplace

The Feast

Thanksgiving…..

Thanksgiving

Well, the economic times stress the vast majority of Americans, but I would think that it also would stress Canadians, Mexicans, and the rest of the world.

Though these times are rather ‘trying’….and in many cases a sense of desperation sets in….there is still much in daily life to be thankful for.  Try breathing.

I have a husband who has asthma.  I think a good breath in and a good breath released is a point to consider.

But the issue of thankfulness is broad and not just tied to the economic ‘place’ we might individually  find ourselves.

(Oh! I don’t drink much at all and a neighbor sent over his famous holiday eggnog and I had a glass!  It certainly has done it’s work.)

I am profoundly grateful.  This year I published my first book, and though it was done in a whirl of angst and trepidation, it got done. I am grateful to Bill Penrose for birthing this difficult and unexpected book.  Unexpected because it was a product of only three years writing.  There was so much in that book that I can see it now as ‘scattershot’.  No central theme, just the kitchen sink of writing, and a jolly gallop it was.

I am grateful for friends who stuck close to me…..last year was what the Chinese call “fanshen”.  A turning over a new leaf.  A realization of growth and discernment.  I am grateful for a man in Montreal who was a royal pain in the ass….but because of his  existence,  I broke free of a lot of issues.  I found a freedom in depending upon myself and not tying my sweet wagon to others.  Things clarified in my life and I realized false gods need to be trampled.

I am grateful for  writer friends, Bill Penrose, Nick Nicholson, Dr. RK Singh, Rose Thorny (and yes you are…) Margie, Berowne, and many others.  They demanded more of me than I thought I had…but the human spirit is caged only by our own doubts.  Poke a hole in that and the spirit can soar.

I am grateful for my husband and especially my son,  Christopher who is leaving for the Navy, Dec. 8th.  It is not something I would wish on him, but he, at a fresh 22, is determined to strike out in life on his own.  His momma here, left with his chores, can only react like a momma, and I can’t give him enough hugs and kisses.  I am smothering him now as I wish I had before.

I am grateful to have this beautiful (restored by Husband) house over my head, and even though the kittens and cats destroy stuff, their little lives are a joy to behold.

If there is a God, he has sent us kittens.

I am grateful  my husband is still working and I know it is a toss of the dice here.

Yesterday I received a well-intentioned email from the Mennonite Church.  We aren’t Mennonites but we have attended their services over the years.  Mennonites in the South are rather in strange places.  I haven’t really figured them out yet, but I think their intentions are good.  Well meant.

However, the email asking me to fast on Thanksgiving to correct a lot of wrongs of the European settlers towards the “Indians” was rather silly to my mind.

I realize as I get older that politically correct issues are rather shortsighted.  I take question at the purpose of this:  Thanksgiving is one of the few Holidays in America  I think has little to do with religion.  At least, for me.

I think of the wonderful communion we and our neighbors have during the fall. Perhaps we see each other sparingly during the summer; it’s just too damn hot to venture outside, except to the garden to weed.

But come Autumn, and we emerge from our houses.  We stand in awe of the riotous colors of Nature, the winds that blow from the north and east and the not so gentle rains that fall.  We marvel at the fast moving clouds, storm fronts that change the landscape below. Dusk’s golden glow upon distant trees, the falling of the sun and the hooting of owls somewhere in the trees, or perhaps it’s the mourning doves, well, we are witness to the turning of the Earth and there is again, an awe at nature’s diversity.

And an awe that we are alive to witness all this wonder.

Each fall there is an exchange of produce or labor from many neighbors on our street.  We get venison from one neighbor, who has hunted each fall for as long as I have known him.  Another family makes up a mess of cornbread and a rasher of bacon and sends it over. In the spring, this same grandmother makes poke salad and I have never tasted anything as good as her poke salad.  It’s a labor of love because you can poison folk by making it improperly.  I would eat Miss Ophelia’s poke  salad any day of the week.

Another neighbor knows I had severe stomach issues last fall and knew I subsided on beets alone for a week or so.  Yesterday he went to the farmer’s market to get beets.  He brought them up and gave me the beets….to be incorporated in our Thanksgiving meal.

There are so many blessings at this Harvest time.  Perhaps we need just to  realize how life brings them.

Perhaps we need more fingers and toes to count.  Perhaps if we look skyward, at the honking geese, the Sandhill cranes that fly almost invisible through white clouds with their black legs like dark streamers behind, their calls falling like chiding rain to us below….

Perhaps if we realize the blessings we have before and above us, we can understand how fragile life is, but how continuous our blessings flow.

Lady Nyo