CATHARINA COENEN ON “CONNEAUT”
Twenty years ago, during my first March in the snowbelt, I asked my students whether it was going to keep snowing all the way up to Spring Break. They stared, then said: You don’t understand. They said: We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t keep on snowing too much after Spring Break.
I am a botanist. Where I grew up, March lives well past the snowdrops, past the crocus, way past the ivy’s tiny yellow blossoms feeding bees along thousand-year old sandstone walls. Where I grew up, March hails the primrose, the coltsfoot aglow beside the roadside ditch, the scent of violets. Forsythias beam yellow sunshine through any rain or gray.
Like Pennsylvania’s hemlock groves, who feel heat rushing towards them as the climate shifts, I feel displaced. Except I’ve shifted into cold.
Last year, I signed up for a poetry webinar because, where I live now, March means snow.
I signed up because March is snowy and months and months away from my summer conference with the International Women’s Writing Guild. In March, I miss a world that isn’t icy white. I miss my conference teachers and my friends. I miss shared words.
Last March, for four dark Sunday evenings, women writers beamed at each other from a screen. We scribbled, laughed, and frowned.
Together, we read: All night I woke to rain on a strangers’ windows. [i]
Together, we read: Home is the place we head for in our sleep. [ii]
We read: We walked five blocks
to the elementary school,
my mother’s high heels
crunching through playground gravel. [iii]
We read: I’m not from around here
I’m not from around here. [iv]
Through March, I walked along the marsh, beneath leafless maples, and through hemlock groves. I walked by last year’s cattail stalks, red osier twigs aglow against the gray, frozen ditches, frozen ponds. I walked, asleep, awake, words snoozing under snow, words crunching gravel, words wriggling under last year’s leaves.
I knelt to watch skunk cabbage blossoms melt their way upward, through the ice. Back in class, I lectured on the uncoupling of electron transport by an enzyme in the maroon flowers’ cells, how mitochondria give up energy as heat, so that the skunk cabbage can advertise its corpse-like blooms to flies well before any other flowers are awake.
Where I come from, the sweet March violets are transplants from Iran. Forsythias are from China.
I wondered what it takes to be from here.
[i] From: When I Was Straight by Julie Marie Wade
[ii] From: Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich
[iii] From: My Mother Goes to Vote by Judith Harris
[iv] From: Hotel Days by Michael Dickman