the narrative thread

Texas may be known for many wild things, but the best, by far, are its wildflowers. Every spring from early March through April, highways and hillsides in Central Texas and the Hill Country are blanketed in blue and pink. More than just the official state flower, the Texas Bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) has become THE iconic symbol of Texas, reproduced on t-shirts and souvenirs, notecards and dinner plates, and painted, photographed, woven and stitched by everyone from professional artists to school children. A maroon hybrid called Alamo Fire (Lupinus texenis—Fabaccae) was even developed for cultivation by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service in the University’s school color! (Available from www.wildseedfarms.com ) That just shows how far those Aggies will go for all things Texas!

These days, traditional bluebonnet seeds are sold in nurseries all over the country, though I can tell you from frustrating experience that they rarely grow. That’s probably because indigenous wildflowers need most what home gardeners don’t provide: native soil, some neglect and a drought. Lady Bird Johnson understood the advantage of local conditions when she encouraged President Johnson to get the Highway Beautification Act* passed in 1965. Today, over 50 years later, the explosion of color all along Texas highways owes its profusion to what is unofficially called “Lady Bird’s Bill,” and to the 30,000 pounds of native wildflower seeds sown by the Texas Highway Department each year.

Bluebonnets may be the star of the show here, but certain other varieties have strong supporting roles: my favorite, the Indian paintbrush or Indian pink (Castilleja indivisa) is similar in size and shape to the bluebonnet, but is a strong pinkish orange. Often the two flowers grow together creating broad swaths of vibrant pink and blue in the landscape. Then there is the delicate pink primrose known as buttercup (Oenothera speciosa), which only blooms for a day; the joyful Indian blanket commonly known as firewheel (Gaillardia pulchella), with its starburst of red, orange and yellow; the happy little coneflower or Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera), with its high crown and broad red-and-yellow brim that resembles a sombrero; and the beautiful, fluttering white Prickly poppy (Argemone Mexicana), which you dare not touch, and which the cattle will avoid even in a drought!

Such floral abundance has always provided ready Easter decorations in Texas. When I was a little girl, Easter preparations began in earnest when Lent was over on Holy Saturday. First, we dyed Easter eggs, always in solid colors and always too many. Then we would head down to Coleto Creek way out in the country toward Fannin to go “Easter flower pickin’.” We carried small buckets, bottles of water, and scissors for clipping, and my Mother would find a spot to park off the side of a little dirt road near the creek. Treading carefully and watching for snakes, we sought  patches of profusion, where we were sure a bucket or two of flowers wouldn’t be missed and wouldn’t impede the proliferation of seeds for next year. Sometimes we’d have to move the car once or twice to get just the right mix. My grandmother, already elderly even when I was small, usually stayed in the car, managed the buckets and water, and complained about the heat.

Back at home, we’d lay out newspapers over the kitchen table where we cut and trimmed all the flowers and got rid of all the bugs. The blooms were sorted by type and condition; the longest, prettiest ones got arranged into one of my Mother’s prized milk glass vases. The smaller, shorter blossoms got woven in with long grasses, which I gathered from the vacant lot next door, and shaped into round Easter nests in front of the fireplace. By the end of the day, spring had come to our house. All we had to do was wait for the Easter bunny.

Interesting how childhood traditions endure and adapt. When I was a newlywed, my Holy Saturday Easter flower pickin’ meant picking out plants and flowers to bring home from a local flower shop, since there were few wildflower-coated hillsides in New York City. Pink and yellow tulips replaced bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush on the dinner table, and a tall, white potted Easter lily had pride of place in the living room. Later, after our son was born and we were living out in the suburbs, Easter flower pickin’ meant cutting some of our own home-grown tulips and daffodils, supplemented with an Easter-flower family field trip to one of the large local nurseries nearby. We still dyed eggs on Holy Saturday and built Easter nests, but with faux grass (less messy).

Now living in Texas again, I eagerly welcome the explosion of wildflowers in the spring and can actually pick bluebonnets myself on my morning walks down a little side road where I live. Easter is somewhat late this year, and the wildflowers have pretty much peaked, but I still have one last cluster of bluebonnets on my kitchen table. I will have to purchase assorted flowers for Easter arrangements, but come Holy Saturday, I will again dye eggs, make a nest for the chocolate bunnies, and begin to prepare our traditional Easter dinner of baked ham and scalloped potatoes. I won’t have to wait for the Easter bunny however, not because I am too old, but because I am the Easter Bunny.

HIP – HOP.

*Note: in the interest of  “factual” information, the Highway Beautification Act was formed to control billboards, advertising and roadside junkyards, as well as to implement native landscaping along highways in all 50 states. Lady Bird Johnson, herself a native of East Texas, was passionate about preserving natural landscapes and cultivating native plants and flowers. In 1982, she and actress Helen Hayes established the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas, Austin, a 284 acre native plant botanic garden and resource center for conservation and education. www.wildflower.org

I am a writer, so I write. Everything. I make lists, jot notes, keep a journal; I pen letters, copy directions, record major events. And yes, I write down New Year’s Resolutions, every year. And then, at the end of every year, I go back and review and see how I did. This year I did pretty well; I actually accomplished almost all of them.

There is something about writing things down, speaking them out loud, putting thoughts into words that makes them real and ingrains them into the subconscious. I have noticed, in more years than one, how prescient I’ve been in anticipating the challenges of the year to come and in formulating goals to meet them. And I have, in fact, often met those goals. Self-help gurus tell us to visualize success; a writer would suggest putting success into words.

In all the years I taught public speaking and English, I always used the example of the “we have to talk” preface with my students to help them understand the power of verbal expression. You know how it is: when you feel a relationship is going south (whatever that relationship is) and the anxieties and resentments nag at you, it is only when you finally vocalize the the problem, “talk about it,” that the situation becomes real and the issues can be examined and resolved — for better or worse. Young people especially relate to this, but so do those in troubled marriages or difficult work situations. People don’t read each other’s minds; you have to say something.

So, if expression concretizes  feelings and ambitions, then writing resolutions is a good thing, as is writing angry letters you don’t send, or writing memories of the past to pass on, or writing though problems to try to solve them, or writing down moments to cherish and remember.  Writing. It is a lost art in our 140 character twitter world. Too bad. People don’t seem to have the time or the attention span that contemplation demands, much less  the language skills that written expression requires to be effective. Sound bites and slogans may sell a product, or even a person, but they don’t create meaningful discourse.

According to some, one way to ensure successful New Year’s Resolutions is to “resolve small.”  In other words, scale back: don’t resolve to lose 50 lbs., but try for 10 or 20; don’t aim to pay off all credit cards, but endeavor to reduce debt by half and incur less going forward. You get the idea. As we get older (as I am afraid I am), we gain a broader perspective about New Years and resolutions in general. We realize that it is the awareness of our intentions that matter, not so much the tally of success or or failure.

In spite of the ways people have tried to rationalize all the angry, hateful words of the recent presidential campaign, and regardless of the apparent lack of collective concern about our  being in a “post truth” world, words DO matter. Once a thought or feeling has been expressed, you can’t really take the words back; they are there, forever, even if you apologize. They might be forgiven, but they probably won’t be forgotten.

In the end, you are only as good as your word, and the words are all we have — or all we have left. They continue to speak long after we are gone, to impart wisdom and insight, fact and folly, through the books, articles, letters, transcripts, plays and recordings in which they reside.

If only we resolve to listen …

Four months into WWI, in early December of 1914, Pope Benedict XV called for a temporary Christmas cease-fire between the Germans and the British then fighting on the Western Front. The warring commanders refused, but late on Christmas Eve, the soldiers themselves created a spontaneous peace. With the no-man’s land between them only a few hundred feet wide, soldiers could see, hear, and even smell each other. So, when the Germans started singing Christmas carols, and then emerged unarmed calling out “Merry Christmas” from the trenches at dawn,  men from both sides came together. They exchanged small gifts, sang Silent Night, and according to some reports, even played a friendly game of soccer. “The Christmas Truce of 1914” was the only such example of chivalry in WWI, which ultimately became one of the deadliest conflicts in human history (38 million casualties, 18 million deaths).

Calls for cease-fires in wars since haven’t worked out too well, not even for humanitarian reasons, much less religious ones. For one thing, the nature of war itself has changed. Air strikes, bombs and drones have depersonalized combat, world-wide terrorism has decentralized the battlefield, and unfamiliar adversaries in unfamiliar places have dehumanized the enemy. So many wars — civil wars, gang wars, drug wars, tribal wars — there’s something for everybody almost everywhere, so that even ordinary people just trying to live their lives, civilians not soldiers, are forced to fight or flee.

That the story of “The Christmas Truce of 1914” endures is a testament to the power of hope; a hundred years later, though, it seems to be the hope of power rather than the power of hope that most often prevails. Witness Aleppo: the failed cease-fires, the thousands killed and displaced, and the thousands still stuck in a war-torn country. This Christmas of 2016 delivers not a truce, but “a complete meltdown of humanity,” according to one UN relief officer. The real tragedy of Aleppo is that after four long years, the world has grown weary of the conflict, and wary of the refugees it has created; the travesty of Aleppo is that we still have people, even people who aspire to positions of power, who have to ask what Aleppo is.

For those everywhere who have grown accustomed to the sounds of gunfire and the ravages of violence, a silent night is a fearful night, full of unholy threats. But for me and my family, who are fortunate enough to sit right here right now in front of our lovely Christmas tree, surrounded by comfort and safety and love, the silent night is a gift of grace, a song to be sung at midnight.

If the worst thing about Christmas is that it comes too soon, then the best thing about Christmas is that it comes at all — because in so many places in the world, it doesn’t. Let us be grateful, then, and let us pray that the calm and the bright will find the darkest corners of the earth.

Here’s what’s wrong with Christmas: it comes too soon.

I know, I know, not for children, and not for those earnest holiday celebrators and decorators, those invested in commercial profits, and those for whom the holidays mean being transported to the nostalgic realm of Christmases past, whether those memories are real or not. But for the rest of us, cynics and otherwise, those of us without small children and without any illusions of former firesides and Hallmark family moments, Christmas comes too soon, with way too much stress and way too many expectations.

It starts, of course, with the retail establishment, which has Christmas decorations on display by Halloween and discounted by Thanksgiving. You begin to feel consumer pressure: What is your decorating theme this year? Are all your lights from last year in working order? Will you have enough paper plates, holiday napkins, candles, tinsel, wrapping paper, bows, ribbons, garlands …the worry grows. You have to order your turkey (or prime rib or leg of lamb), or make your holiday reservations in time. Once you’ve gotten your gift shopping done, the USPS urges getting your packages in the mail. Then there are the television and newspaper ads, building momentum for holiday events: Christmas Ranch, Festival of Lights, and other local celebrations. And let’s not forget the internet, with its assaulting sales pitch for holiday specials — and these from retail websites to which you don’t even subscribe! And over it all are the regular reruns of the classic holiday movies: Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, Holiday Inn, and the various incarnations of A Christmas Carol. Whew! How can you possibly avoid the pressure?

It’s too much.

Here in South Texas, where most people don’t get real trees and favor yard decorations by Walmart, if you don’t get out to the nursery early — like right after Thanksgiving — and get your real tree tagged, you lose. And so we did on December 1. We are now in the process of putting it up. It’s early; the tree, a beautiful Nordman fir of 9 feet, will be dead by Christmas, but no matter. We still cling to our “real tree” commitment and we still love the feel and smell of a real tree and the sight of a majestic fir decorated in tiny, hand-painted bronze lights (that’s yet another story, but let’s leave my own compulsions out of this). Our son has to help us get it loaded into his truck and get it inside our house, of course, and the time will come when we can no longer manage this great arbor undertaking, but we’re not quite there yet. (I shudder to imagine the guilt and regret when we have to resort to a fake tree.)

And that is my point: people undertake so many traditions and try to live up to so many expectations during the holidays that when they finally recognize that those standards are untenable,  and maybe even unreasonable to begin with, the seeds of depression and loneliness are sown. It is not surprising that more suicides and deaths occur during the holidays than in any other time of year. When your life doesn’t match media images, however unrealistic those images are, you are bound to feel somehow lacking, and sad.

The holidays in San Antonio begin on Thanksgiving night, with the lighting of the tree at the Alamo and the illuminations along the Riverwalk and the River Parade downtown. It is festive, but somehow also non-commercial, inclusive, contemplative, lovely in a distinctively San Antonio way. The “Saga” of Texas history projected on the face of the San Fernando Cathedral (photo above) illuminates the cultural context of our heritage all year round, not just at Christmas. In an odd way — yes, a nostalgic way — it all reminds me of Christmastime in New York, of the lighted angels with trumpets along Rockefeller Center Plaza, the live-animal nativity scene in the Radio City Christmas Show, and the tiny tree lights and holiday menus at Tavern on the Green. Even in a big city, you have to get beyond the noise, beyond the commerce, and beyond the stock images and clichéd greetings to the quiet, the calm, and the beauty of this time of year that we can all share, whether we’re Christian or not.

So I am going to ease into the season this year, and claim my bit of quiet contemplation. We don’t have any big plans, no big company, no big events planned, and I’m glad. I would be foolish to dream of a white Christmas here in this climate, but I can dream of  “…a long winter’s nap,”  and maybe a bit of enlightened rejuvenation to come for the New Year.

Thanksgiving is our most adaptable, most inclusive national holiday. It is celebrated by everyone who lives in America (whether they are descended from the Pilgrims or not), it has no particular religious or political connotations (beyond the debate over whether Native Americans really shared a meal with the first settlers), and it has not been totally coopted and commercialized by retail madness (unless you count the last-minute scramble at the supermarket). Beyond the common conventions of a day off, a big meal, and the Macy’s parade followed by football, people are free to adapt their celebrations, even their menus, to suit their own tastes and styles.

In the early days of my marriage when we lived in New York, we did the obligatory trek out to my in-laws. One year we missed the dinner entirely because we were sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway. After that, we moved across the country away from family and  Thanksgiving became a quiet dinner with friends.

By the time we moved back to Connecticut a few years later, the older relatives were ready to pass the drumstick, and so Turkey Day trotted out to our house because we could accommodate the crowd. Of course, everyone still had to have, and therefore bring, their traditional family favorites; after all, what does a a relocated Texas girl know from pickled herring, creamed onions, and mashed potatoes with turnips?

Apologies to those few remaining family members who might read this, but a couple years of that production — the three days of prep work, the iffy weather, the clean-up that took another three days — prompted us to search for a new tradition of our own. We decided that we would henceforth “go away” for Thanksgiving.

As it happened, we had good friends who had a vacation home on Cape Cod and spent most of their holidays there. “Why don’t you come up to the Cape and spend Thanksgiving with us?” they asked.  And since Plymouth, the historic site of that first Thanksgiving with the native Wampanoags in 1602, lies on the Northwestern corner of the Cape, and since the cranberry bogs of Cape Cod are world renowned, producing 67 percent of the total cranberry supply, what better place could there possibly be to celebrate Thanksgiving?

Now most people go to the Cape in the summer, as we had done once before. The Cape’s year-round population is about 200,000, but it swells by roughly 2.5 million “summer people” between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  Ah yes — this storied place in the American imagination, associated with the whalers of Nantucket, the moneyed rich of Martha’s Vineyard, and the Kennedys of Hyannis, becomes a nightmare of outrageous hotel rates, long lines at restaurants and attractions, and stand-still traffic along Route 6 from late May to early September. This is what we remembered from an August visit.

But as we discovered, the Cape in late fall is a totally different experience, magical and more beautiful in the equinox than in the summer shine. The light reflected from the Ocean, which artists have long admired, still shimmers and reflects the fading colors of fall, and the moody mist of the Atlantic floats over the seashore like a dream. You are free to enjoy it all, to walk the beaches in early morning, to dine by the fireplace in the country inns, to shop the quaint stores in Chatham or the galleries of Provincetown, because the big crowds are gone, the locals are friendlier, and the hotel rates are reduced. Cape Cod is the perfect Thanksgiving venue.

We stayed in several places there over the years, but our favorite was always The Chatham Bars Inn (photo above). Begun as a semi-private hunting lodge in 1914, it is today a much- expanded grand resort, but one that retains its New England character amid Chatham’s 18th century charm. You can still play croquet on the lawn here, or you can go fishing, hiking, biking, sailing, or whale watching. And you can have the most bounteous, elegant Thanksgiving dinner  in a sparkling formal dining room facing the Ocean, whether you are staying at the Inn or not.

Our first Thanksgiving at the Chatham Bars was in 1987, the very first season they began to remain open year round, and our very last Thanksgiving there was 20 years later, before we retired and relocated to Texas. To say that I’ve missed New England in the fall and Cape Cod at Thanksgiving is an understatement.

Somehow the annual Turkey Trot in nearby Cuero is hardly any consolation, even if they do claim to be the “turkey capitol of the world.” Come to think of it, though, I’ve missed that too, since it was held in October.