When I was a child, full of exuberance and heady ideas and more than one shattered dream, my tiny Hungarian grandmother sat me on a painted kitchen chair and said in her heavily accented English, “When you’re feeling down, remember take time to look up, and when you’re feeling good, remember take time to look down”. Being born a city child, her words didn’t make much sense at the time. All I saw looking down were discarded cigarette butts, wads of chewing gum, and fly-blown doggie doo. The only thing I noticed when I looked up was my playmate’s mother framed in the second story window. Grandma was usually a wise woman, but in this looking request I really doubted her judgement.
It’s been over forty years since my grandmother passed away, and almost as long since I moved to rural Wisconsin. Back then, I didn’t know anything about country living, I just knew I couldn’t live another day in Chicago. There had to be a better way to live, but rural life often proved difficult. Low wages, few job choices, and frequent unemployment plagued me for several years. Being often unemployed left me a great deal of time to wander the woods beyond my tiny home, seeking solace in the quiet trees.
Depressed and frightened about my future, I listened to my grandmother’s voice as it echoed deep within my anxiety-ridden brain, “look up! ” Following its command, I saw two red- tailed hawks circling the air above me. I watched them glide along the thermals, spiraling ever smaller, finally becoming an infinitesimal speck gobbled by the greedy sunlight. My spirit soaring, I whispered to the sky my thanks to grandma.
I dallied away another day slowly driving along a narrow highway which cut through the swampy backwaters of Wisconsin’s cranberry bogs. As faster traffic whipped around me my little voice again whispered, “look!” In a long dead tree, like harbingers of better days, perched two magnificent bald eagles, sunlight shimmering on the ruffled feathers of their regal white crowns. I slowed my car, spellbound by their beauty, and I knew then that I would never again be alone, someone or something wonderful was always going to be with me.
Today,I knew what my grandmother had been asking of me. In good times or in bad, ahead of place and time, her wisdom was now appropriate in my life. With her unseen guidance I had discovered my first pale, blushing, wild rose hidden deep within spring’s new grass, within two inches of being crushed by my heavily booted foot. Later that morning, just beyond my own pointing nose, I watched a waif-like ruby-throated hummingbird flitting outside the kitchen window.
In August of my first year of discovery, perhaps drawn by the bright polish on my toenails, a monarch butterfly rested on my big toe for over an hour. Was I a rest stop on his long flight to Mexico, I wondered? By October, sitting lotus style in a late mown field, I had learned to hold my breath in gleeful anticipation of nature’s surprises. A chipmunk fearlessly scampered over and stood up to its full six-inch length. Was it issuing a challenge by coming so close, or was I in the path of his lair and he had simply not been paying attention to his surroundings. It didn’t matter, I was his audience, and he was my personal entertainment. If only I could only have read his mouse-like mind, this brave six inch black-nosed Schwarzenegger wanna-be.
One afternoon, a confused nuthatch flew down and actually perched for a brief moment on my shoulder, until my expelled breath blew him away. Several times, a field mouse has scampered across my living room rug and paused while I knelt to stroke its tiny back. It has happened so many times through the years and yet I still have no answer for it. They seem to be waiting patiently, pink nose scenting the air, while I slowly rise, grab a can, scoop them up and return them, unharmed to the yard. I like to think they know I’m here to help. I haven’t the heart to kill a mouse after stroking its back.
In November the Aurora Borealis finger-paints the midnight sky in sometimes soft, sometimes garish palettes, but they are no competition for the artistry of the dying storms of summer afternoons which dilute the colors of the setting sun into pale watercolor washes that eventually slide beneath the western horizon, pulling down a curtain of stars to twinkle till dawn.
Winter nature throws her heavy snows over the pine trees, draping laden boughs like melted candle-wax hardened over a raffia-wrapped Chianti bottle. With great snow-quilts she hushes the countryside for sleep. On rare December winter mornings following a foggy evening, I’ve found hoar-frost hugging bare twigs of willow and dead blades of goldenrod like silvered pipe-cleaners in the crisp bright air of mid-morning, stalagmite branches of tall trees held aloft like glistening fingers covered in diamond rings, teasing the value of the mere turquoise gem of the morning sky.
By choice, or by chance, country dwellers do have an advantage over city dwellers. When I take the time to look up and look down, there is usually something very beautiful awaiting my senses. Although grandmother is gone her wisdom and her priceless legacy lives on. She knew that the world was a sometimes difficult, but always beautiful place to be, if only we would all take a little extra time to look up and to look down.
Originally published in The Inditer.com c.1998. The Inditer was one of the first online ezines, long before blogs, newspapers, and what we now know as everyday life on the web. The entire collection of tne The Inditer is archived in the Library and Archives of Canada
Charly Makray-Rice Photography – Viewbug.com
Daily Post Photo Challenge: Looking Up
The Road Less Paved 
Oh, so much in your words. I’ve gone out of the city (300,000 inhabitants) to something of the country as well, at least I’m surrounded by farms. There is always something. When my family first googled my new address and proclaimed that I lived “in the middle of nothing”, I knew better. I think more and more people do. Beautiful introduction to you, as are images.
Funny isn’t it. City people think there is NOTHING to do in the country, yet we can see the stars in the sky at night, listen to night birds, frogs, and insects. We’re never alone, the owls, coyotes, crickets, and mid-July, the cicadas, tree frogs, and lightning bugs keep me company. I wish I could erase the distant drone of the trucks on the inter-state and sound of oily tanker cars from all more frequent rail line. In the city it was sirens all the time, police, fire or ambulance, and traffic bouncing through potholes in broken asphalt. Those were the true signs of summer in the city. Love talking to country lovers.
And nightingales. They truly sing at night, who’d figure. And nutrias, but they keep to themselves. Toads come to enjoy dog’s water. The main road is not too close, but the sea is closer than I could hope for, about 10 minutes with the bicycle. Lovely to find you and thank you for the follow. 🙂
I miss Whippoorwills. A night bird that sings over open land. Although we’re only twenty miles from our last home, we’re next to woodlands. They prefer open grass or prairie. We don’t have nightingales, unfortunately. I also think we have a Coo Coo in the neighborhood, but haven’t confirmed it yet. Yes, it sounds like the clock,
Lovely photos to accompany your beautiful words.
Do emoticons work on here? 🙂
Your grandmother sounds wise.
I’ve never seen a cranberry bog and I did not realize Wisconsin had them (take that, New England). Where are these bogs?
Most of the bogs are now man-made. They’re in, what is known in Wisconsin, as the central sands area. Except for the earthen dikes, and the small dams to control the water during harvest,they look more like large weed clogged beds in shallow lakes, minus the water. They don’t add water until the harvest. Wisconsin produces more than half the cranberries in the world. That’s a lot of pucker power. If I’m correct, the white cranberry was developed here, at the U of Wisc., Madison. They still have an active ag department working on new varieties. The oldest beds were set up on, or close to Ho Chunk lands, Native American homes. Back in the days when the harvest was still done by hand, their people made up a large portion of labor. Their remaining lands were on well shaded, small wooded lots. Wisconsin Cranberries