Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

Makes me happy – our new solar panels have produced approx. 42% of our electricity since September. We hope the panels (Sharp 2.7 kilowatt array, Fronius inverter) will meet 55% of our electrical needs each year.  

Debate on how to calculate actual production involved a mathematician, a physicist, and a master electrician. The English major was clearly over-simplifying the math.

I’m learning that solar harvest, like a garden’s, is seasonal.  January’s production was discouragingly low.  March, with many snowy days, has been a surprise. The system often produces at capacity at mid-day. Fall and spring may be our top-producers. While folks in more temperate, low-lying parts of the country are planting tomatoes and ground cherries, feasting on spring peas, we harvest the sun.   

The panels were expensive, even with utility rebates.  At least this investment is outperforming the stock market.   

Last year, in early June, we visited Pearl Lake near Steamboat Springs.  We stayed in a cabin on a small ranch, where the boys could feed ravenous baby lambs with bottles, or watch a bedraggled, grumpy peacock strut in his stall near the horse paddock.

 A storm moved in the afternoon we arrived, bringing microburst winds through the canyon, toppling old growth Ponderosa pines (just missing the cabin roof), and dumping nearly a foot of wet, fluffy snow.  I sat by the crackling fireplace, reading scrapbooks about the ranch and local history.  One told the story of Minnie Pearl Hartt, PEO member and “prizewinning fisherwoman,” who donated part of the family’s sheep-ranching spread to the Colorado State Park system, including the lake that had been named after her.  A smaller pond had been reserved for Minnie to fish, nicknamed “Mini Pearl Lake”. 

The next morning, the snow had stopped, and we drove to Pearl Lake.  Heavy snow dragged the tops of laden aspen trees to the ground, and coated pines with globes of white.  We were alone in the park as we walked the path to the lake, through a tunnel formed by bent aspens, like walking through an arch of swords at a royal wedding.   

The forest was still, except for chunks of soft snow plopping through branches.  Quick-melting snow dropped from treetops, and limbs would shift upwards with a crack as they were liberated from the weight.  The rapid melt sounded like artillery.  We grabbed trunks of bowed aspens lining the path, and shook off some snow, just to hear the swish of leafy branches snapping back to full height.       

Fog and cloud had settled low, obscuring the mountains ringing the lake.   But when we returned the next morning–snow melted, weather warm enough for shirtsleeves, forest floor nearly dry–all the trees stood tall and green.  Skies clear, sun shining, we saw Pearl’s legacy.   

    The calendar changed from February to March while I was in Oxford, MS.  The season changed to spring, right before my eyes.  The first night in Oxford was chilly with humid cold that seeps into the bones, past fleece layers and gloves.  By Sunday lawns were greening, tidy quilts of pansies appeared in beds, a bright red bird (not a cardinal, but what?) sang in the tree outside my hotel window.  That afternoon my flight would land in ice-coated Denver.  I’d make the long drive home on treacherous roads, dodging accidents.  It would be months before I’d see daffodils again.         

Springtime in Colorado is more a concept than a season.  Winter tends to move right to summer, with alternating patches of both in September or May or July.  When I was a girl, my teacher put up calendar posters with daffodils and grass for March, flowers blooming irreverently all over April.  I’d look out the classroom window at the dusty, brown brown brown playground outside, the April-bare trees, and daydream about the Easter dress my mother was sewing for me.  That Sunday I’d have to choose: wear a heavy sweater over the yellow checked seersucker, or wear my scratchy old Christmas dress to church.         

Why couldn’t otherwise smart teachers get the seasons straight? Those dumb posters were a full two months ahead of Colorado’s spring. I’d never hunted Easter eggs without a heavy winter coat. 

“There’s experience and artifact.”   Participants in the manuscript workshop scramble quietly to jot these opening words from Dinty W. Moore.  We’re sitting in a spare, tall-ceilinged conference room in the new Journalism building at the University of Mississippi.  Some of us live within a few hours’ drive of Ole Miss, others have traveled much further to attend pre-conference writing workshops at the Mid-South Conference for creative nonfiction.   

Ah, I think, I have lots of artifacts to write about.  Sea glass from a Maui beach, photos from last summer’s camping trips in the mountains, my kids’ artwork, Roman-era tiles from Caesarea in Israel, the old pewter teapot from Ireland.   

But this is not what Dinty means.  Artifact is not stuff.  It’s the so-what. In writing essay or memoir, it’s not enough to describe personal experience with craft and wit.  Artifact is what is made from that experience, the switch to writing experience in a way that will benefit the reader.  If experience prods the initial impulse for writing, artifact asks, Who cares?  

Dinty says he’s a “bear” about revision.  By draft #28 or #30 or so, he says he should be able to articulate what question he’s answering.  My short pieces are critiqued at the end of the day, and by then, I’m concerned I haven’t done near enough work with the so-what.  In the workshop we’ve been awash in experience, most of it beautifully written, and for me the better work that emerges from the group stands out from the others because of well-considered insight we can take with us.   

For the rest of the conference, I will hear a little voice in my ear asking, What’s at stake? Who cares?, like a dogged tune, what my aunt calls an earworm.   Despite the parroting repetition, this is one refrain I don’t want to chase away. 

I’m reading the first entry on the blog of a friend, Kathy Rhodes, whom I met last month at a creative nonfiction conference at Ole Miss.   

 “Why am I here,” Kathy asks, “when I’ve go so much to do elsewhere?”  

Though I don’t edit a journal or craft the Great American Southern novel, my list of obligations is nearly as long as hers:  run a business, raise a family, manage a household, volunteer, teach, care for an old dog and other arthritic family members.  Why add a blog to the mix? 

Tough question.  But at the deep-down core of things, I know I have to write.  Despite the sneaking suspicion that I might choose writing ahead of, say, running payroll or making dinner, this blog may be a good place to give that inner writer some space to play.