Rocks & Roots
Donna Salli
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Wonder: A Staircase Built of Stone
I took the photo above in eastern Finland. It was late October, and I was at a country home not far from the Russian border. 50 miles or so. It felt surreal to be there, knowing the fraught history Finland has with Russia. But it also felt like home. That staircase built of stone was part of an old root cellar. My mother’s Finnish immigrant father constructed a staircase identical to it, to connect the basement of his Michigan farmhouse to the yard. He dug the basement a good while after the house had been built. I’ve often felt wonder about that—the logistics of it, the progression of his thinking and efforts. It makes me think of the progression of my own life. I’d like to understand, I mean really understand, what this life is about.
The How and Why: A Mystery
My sister Doreen and I are poets. Recently, without discussion, 650 miles apart, on the exact same day, we each wrote a new poem. Something in the way our country has been changing is driving poets to pick up their pens. In this essay, which we’re writing together, we’d like to share the poems we wrote so unknowingly and mysteriously on that day, to explain the how and why: how it is we wrote them, why we see the things we wrote as mattering to more than ourselves. We live, after all, in a large community called the United States, made up of smaller communities with their own integrity and cultures. How do we live good, honorable lives as individuals? How do we turn outward and live with concern for the group? Poetry is a way of thinking about those things—it’s one part language, nine parts nuance. …
Through a Glass, Darkly: On Buses, Borders, and the Color Blue
I love this picture. It has that lovely blue cast to it. I was on a night bus, alone. The driver and other passengers had gone into a convenience store. Tired, only minutes from my hometown and the family farm, I snapped a picture of my reflection in the window and texted it to my husband, so he’d know I was almost there. You see, he worries. As he often will, he enlarged and cropped the photo and sent it back. The image in the window, with a light pole and tire rims beyond the glass, seems to hang outside the border of this world. It’s a landscape where you wouldn’t be surprised to see an angel, dropping in to help. In that moment, I thought of 1 Corinthians, the verse that says we see “through a glass darkly.” In other words, we don’t see. There’s so much trouble now, with neighbors, friends, even family turning against one another, arguing, among other things, over immigrants and how we should control our national borders. I sigh as I say it—we sure could use an angel or two. Sometimes I wonder if a day will come when humans just stop helping each other. …
Damn Hard Work: Christmas, 1953
I’d worked three days, writing the essay. Three days of reflection on the ways in which the people in this family picture had shaped me. Yesterday, I shared the draft with my husband, as I always do—and he basically said (though trying to be kind), “Who cares? So—it’s your family. I can’t see what the point is.” I can’t say that his response surprised me. Bruce is a writer who worked as an editor for a literary journal. He speaks aloud what my own writerly instincts are whispering. “You should write this for the New Yorker,” he said. “That audience.” Well, I figured I should just bury the corpse and be done with it. “Okay,” I said, “I’m going to go out and lie in the street now and wait for a car to run over me.” I was laughing, painfully. He was laughing, having been in the same position many times, and at my hands. It’s morning now, and I know exactly why I’m writing this essay. It’s about family, yes—and, because of what I know about my own family’s history, it’s about immigrants, and poverty, and the damn hard work of building a life—the damn hard work, too, of writing something worth reading. …
Tracks
I love this picture, rocking my button of a purse, my cute little hat. I look ready to make tracks on my trike, parked there behind me. I’m in my seventies now, and I’m thinking hard about my life—looking back, and of course wondering what time I have left. Have you ever been on a train as it crawls through a switching yard? Tracks go helter-skelter, crossing one another, this way, then that. At different junctures, I’ve turned down a new track—because I wanted to, at other times because I had to. As a writer, it seems natural to me to think out loud about my experiences. The poet Emily Dickinson said, presumably about herself, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Her approach to life rings true for me. I think we’re born to figure out who we are, and why we are—unpretentiously is my preference—and to honor and respect other people in their searching. …
What Is It, about Birds?
There’s an idea that things come in threes: unfortunate happenings, maybe, or if you’re spiritually inclined, messages from the divine. I’ve had three startling encounters with birds—starting with a flock of pelicans many years ago, and now suddenly, after a very long lull, two encounters in the last few months that rather shook me. I’ve been asking myself, What is it, about birds? I can’t dismiss the thought that they’re saying to me that there’s something I should be doing, besides wondering. …
