Volume 1, Number 2
September 7, 2003

Sunday morning, just before noon. Already the sun is high in the sky and hot; a plane buzzes overhead while I sit on the porch writing. It is a gorgeous late summer day: the grass is fresh and green, the sky blue and clear. It’s a baseball and hotdogs kind of day, filled with shouting children whose exuberance is only heightened by the fact that they are back in school, their freedom a prized commodity.

Overhead, another plane: the sky is full of joy-riders, weekend wingers, who cram in as much sun and sky as they can before heading back to work on Monday. Now that Labor Day has passed, such free, sunny days are few. Although there’s still plenty of sun and sky to go around, in the back of everyone’s mind is the realization that fall and then winter isn’t far off: we need to squeeze as much out of these remaining summer days as we can. The day is brimming with fun and frivolity, but I can sense a note of desperation: live it up now before it’s too late.

And so I sit here writing as my own way of living it up, a vicarious life of noticing other’s joys. Writers live twice, Natalie Goldberg notes, because we live and then record that living, replaying every moment and detail at the tip of our pen. And yet, the converse is also true: writers live not twice but only one half the life that others live, for while others are flinging themselves full-heartedly into life’s joys, we writers hang back and watch, observant. The act of noticing gives life depth, but it also requires a contemplative stillness that dulls even as it sharpens: in noticing the complex beauty of the trail one treads, one misses the speed of the chase.

And so a plane—yet another—buzzes overhead: what does its pilot notice, and what does he ignore? What goes unseen, unnoticed, in the thrill of flight? Each choice to notice one thing involves ignoring another: look up to see waxwings and fail to see a caterpillar; turn to consider an aster and miss the hawk circling overhead. How much of my life have I missed by having my eyes fixed on a book, the blank page before me, and yet if I did not sit here to write, what if anything would I notice?

The only way to know a place (the only way to feel at home, I think) is simply to notice—to spend time noticing—to open wide one’s expectation so that even tiny details filter in. For it is by noticing that that we become inhabitants of a place: it is by noticing that we become accustomed to the here-and-now, finding our place in what Gary Snyder calls our Earth House Hold. Only connect, E.M. Forster advised, but he was wrong: connecting is too difficult, too mysterious, and therefore too risky, for how do you accomplish it exactly? So I say it’s simpler, much simpler: forget connection, and only notice. Only notice the parade of details before your window, your very eyes, in each moment; only notice, and connection will happen of its own accord.

Each day is a collection of random moments, each utterly unremarkable, each as faceless as the next. As a writer, I long to collect these moments, considering each as individuals named and known. And so writing becomes a kind of scrap-booking, a frugal crazy-quilting of random scraps stitched together with care, in time. Writers, like children, are natural collectors, picking up and cherishing all sorts of meaningless but dearly loved bits: feathers and pine cones, stamps and coins, baseball cards and bottle-caps. Writers, like children, are not dissuaded by the uselessness of hoarded ordinaries; instead, we cultivate a collector’s sense, trying to capture mundane moments on a string of words.

Since moving to Keene, I’ve been noticing trees. Our house in Hillsborough was surrounded by trees, an entire forest’s worth, so I tended to ignore them, just as one overlooks faces in a crowd. In Hillsborough the trees were many and tall; too often they blurred into an anonymous mass of barky trunks. Here in Keene, though, I have been noticing individual trees: the mountain ash on Water Street, the elm behind Armadillo’s, the shagbark hickory near the post office. On some days I note and collect individuals of a single species—the purple-leaved maples, for instance, on the way to Colony Mill—and on other days I seek variety, relishing the tangle of sumac, walnut, and ash leaves, all compound, that cluster above the grassy field on Myrtle Street.

The other day I noticed, for the first time, a group of five saplings planted on the bike trail where I walk the dog each morning. How many mornings have I passed these same trees—how many times has the dog watered them? Yet only the other day did I notice them, their existence shimmering into consciousness as if newly created. Thinking they were basswoods, I filed their image with others I’ve collected: the basswoods in front of the bank, or in front of the Railroad Tavern, or the mighty basswood in front of Elliot Hall. From a distance, or in a hurried and distracted glimpse, these saplings look like basswoods: their leaves are dark and heart-shaped, their crowns trimly shaped and ovate.

And yet over days of looking closer, I’ve discovered that these are not basswoods, not lindens, not cherry, oak or maple: in a word, I have no idea what these five planted saplings are, for I can’t find them in any tree book. Tantalizingly, these trees that I’ve only recently noticed have since multiplied and spread, all but taking over the town and, with it, my consciousness: everywhere I look there are more of them, mid-sized mysteries, planted ornamentally, with heart-shaped leaves and oval crowns. Their fruit, so utterly unlike a basswood’s, is a pea-sized pome; like a tiny greenish brown apple, it dangles from a long single stem. The other day I plucked one of these fruit to bring home and dissect, but it refused to give up its name with its tiny white seeds.

I could, of course, ask someone about these trees: they are planted everywhere, including the town square where they’ve replaced American elms decimated by Dutch elm disease. But that somehow seems like cheating; it’s too impersonal to ask someone else to introduce them to me, to tell me their name. Instead I will continue to notice as they remain green while the basswoods have begun to yellow: what color, eventually, will my mysteries turn, and when? After winter has stripped them bare, and after spring has brought tiny sprouting leaves, perhaps (if I continue to notice) they will show me their flowering face, and with it reveal their name.

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