I have been reading Sebastian Matthews’ book, In My Father’s Footsteps: A Memoir, about growing up the son of the late poet William Matthews. I was fortunate to have William Matthews as my thesis advisor at the University of Washington. Years after my graduation from the program in creative writing, I edited a book about writers’ journals. Of course, I asked Bill Matthews for a contribution, composed of a sample journal entry and an essay on keeping a writer’s journal.

Half way into Sebastian Matthews’ book, which is rich with his father’s words and wit, I go to my shelves and open The Writer’s Journal: Forty Contemporary Writers and Their Journals to the pages with Bill’s contribution. He starts his essay by stating that the notebooks of adored teacher and poet Theodore Roethke were not scrapbooks to “preserve something of the past, but a collection of scraps that yearn to be changed from the illusionary current form into something else, something future.” Matthews writes that Theodore Roethke weeded his notebooks each year, “throwing out what no longer sparked. A few entries survived a dozen or more such cullings before Roethke put them to some use we can identify from his poems.”

Roethke’s sifting and saving aside, Matthews proposes that the real hope of a writer is that the scraps a writer comes upon and saves “might be changed, as fire converts matter to energy,” or as in the work of “leaf mold on the forest floor.” As I read the metaphors strung so closely together, I thought about how the heat of fire is so different than the moist decaying of leaf mulch, about the searching Matthews was doing to find the right metaphor for what he’d experienced so often in his writing process.

Further considering the transformation he is describing, Matthews writes that if we record something in a journal and come back to it later, it no longer has the context we took it from. It stands alone and we can work with it, asking, “What could I make from that?”

And he hurries on, riffing as in the jazz music he so loved so much. Matthews wanders in his imagination until he thinks a journal could be “a kind of negative journal, a blank space into which no scraps are placed for fear that the shape those scraps are now in…will prove an obstruction to their conversion.” And he asserts, ending more with fire than leaf mulch, that “the bright, unmarred sheet of paper, which might otherwise become part of a journal, represents the future’s blind glare of potential.”

Weeding. Fire. Mulch. Glare. What can I make of this? Wondering, I get up from my desk.

I check on my new berry patch, where the plantain, chamomile, trailing blackberry and dandelions I turned with the soil in April are breaking through and flourishing again amidst the strawberries I planted. From four plants, forty more have sprouted, long runners everywhere, and from their many joints new leaves sprouting, stems taking root.

 But each day I have been putting off weeding.

I stand with a hose, watering the patch. I am on fire to write an essay or a poem, but I think about water, not what sparks but what permeates the soil carrying the fertilizer I’ve put on the bed further toward the walls of the plant roots.

My mind wanders to other strawberry times. I remember visiting my daughter Emily in France when she was an exchange student, the abundance of strawberries served each night with cream at her three host families’ dinner tables. As I watch the hose water fill gullies in the soil, my mind springs forward to the visit my husband and I made to Japan when Emily was studying there. She warned us that in Japan at a table with others, you are never to pour yourself a drink. You must instead be watchful for whose glasses are empty and fill them, yours being watched over by others. She said at first this is tiring, looking for how you are supposed to serve others, but then the custom makes life easier, without effort on your part, others are serving you.

Some of the hose water sprays into the “holies” across the front of my in-style yellow plastic shoes. Despite the day’s brightness, I am not wearing sunglasses. It is too early to experience glare. But I am on fire to write. What scrap will I work from while I wait for the pouring? What scrap will allow me to go deeper into the soil, without putting the fire out?

Glare. Strawberries. Writing. Matthews’ says that white glare is the color of writing just before it hits the page. Perhaps the poem or essay is writing itself inside me. The leaves of my strawberry plants deepen their green now that the white flowers and red berries are gone.

Red. The bombs bursting in air. The glare in our hard-to-sing national anthem, its difficult range of an octave and a half. To write, one must be in touch with the ground and the glare, the range of what’s between. One must let one’s inner sight trickle down toward all that is vulnerable.

****

When my son Seth was a junior at the University of Colorado, his friends came to the kitchen in a converted fire station he shared with three others to work with hops and yeast and recipes downloaded from the Internet. Every Sunday evening, they sterilized jugs called carboys with iodine and siphoned week-old brew from one carboy to another to keep it from too much contact with sediments. They tasted and took readings of how the yeasts performed. They logged the sugar content and the ingredient amounts and re-jarred and labeled the yeast that had settled out. They bottled batches that had brewed for two weeks. They were pleased with all the apparatus they had gathered–strange corks for carboys topped with see-through tubular mazes, shiny copper tubing for handling the heated brew, and a gizmo they attached to their faucet to spray water deep into bottles and get them clean. They harvested pumpkin beer, oatmeal stout, and porters.

Between Sundays, Seth was an architecture student. Once, he was on the front page of a local newspaper along with three other flannel-shirted Boulder boys. The paper ran an article about the young men’s studio project. It was a design for a mixed use, medium density hamlet with varied housing choices in a prairie town, where development had so far only meant unfriendly four-lane highways for collecting, what the architecture students called, commuter run off.

The locals lobbied against the project for fear of too many people coming to live in the hamlet they’d designed. Their beer was delicious. After the city planning commission meeting, Seth couldn’t decide whether to devote himself to beer or to architecture. He thought if he started a microbrewery somewhere with the attendant designer pub food restaurant and gave it five years, he could go back to graduate school in architecture, do three years of professional apprenticeship and still be only 31 years old.

That’s how old I was when Seth, aged six, said if he could, he would build me a house on wheels and drive me around so I could write and write. In all the years since he was born, I’ve explored feelings and words like neighborhoods, refusing the fast lanes that blast away the nooks and crannies of soul work. Writing well is a slow, cumulative thing. A brewing.

This April, when I saw my four-year-old grandson’s fingers in the dirt putting the strawberry plants we just bought into the ground, I thought of Seth, dead now almost seven years, as the boy he was in the garden, his pockets full of snails and twigs. In May, my grandson was off to Lego Land with his younger brother and parents, more his style, but the strawberries are something he remembers planting. Next spring, when the flowers are there, when the berries start and once again when they ripen, he’ll visit with his brother, notice the volunteer red poppies and the pink ones I do not weed away, like crepe paper over the strawberries and their runners, a party or a pageant.

But now, I break a yellowing leaf from the strawberry plant it is dying away from. I bury it in the earth, and I stay on my hands and knees to begin pulling plantain. When I see sorrel, a newcomer-weed to this patch, I reach for its long elastic roots.

William Matthews mused, “Some writers don’t need journals because they have wastebaskets.” My wastebasket is empty. My journal is on my computer. There amidst the low-growing green the tall volunteer poppies offer seeds for another patch of the ground I am wandering.

****

The woman who was my son’s fiancé is getting married in September. Over this past weekend, Kristen introduced us to the man who will soon become her husband. We are happy for her, and happy she wanted us to meet him.

“I can’t get over this idea,” she emailed this morning, “that it might just not happen for some reason, and even if it does that marriage doesn’t mean permanence.”

So this is the scrap that’s been at the heart of this essay, the words I am moved she shared with me.
I re-read the rest of the email, linger over Kristen’s description of an antique oak English pub table and chairs we gave her years ago: “The table is due for a refinishing and needs a little work to get rid of a wobble.” She adds that the glue she has been using works only for a few months.

I go back outside, continue weeding, making space for even more new shoots, knowing for both of us one garden will always grow in the center of another.

Weeding. Water. Mulch. Fire. Glare.