Violence and Nature

A few days ago, I stood, facing the window, doing my morning qi gong.  As my arms flowed into seven steps a gorgeous dragonfly swooped toward me.  I just had time to register the striking black striped wings, when a bird plunged after it, plucked it off the window and dashed it to the concrete patio below.  Then it neatly severed the wings off the stunned body, and flew up, carrying it’s prize away.  So much for the illusion of tranquility in nature.

The following night a line of violent thunderstorms moved swept across Minnesota.  Waves of water crashing into the bedroom window panes woke me out of a groggy sleep at 4 am.  I squeezed my eyes shut.  I was sleep-deprived from a week of waking up early to the voices of my granddaughters - welcome voices, but early nonetheless.  Maybe if I just lay still, nature would subside.  The wind intensified until the house began to shiver.  Huge rumbles of thunder rolled across my head.  I felt like I was lying under a roller coaster.  Then a huge thunk.  The bedroom door opened.  A flash of lightning illuminated Hallie, her arms wrapped around herself, whispering: “A tree just fell over in the front yard.”  I jerked up.  Followed her out into the living room.  More lightning flashes.  The entire front yard a jungle of tree parts.  Huge branches flung from the locust barred the sidewalk, the 45 year-old-ash’s exposed roots made a wall between us the neighbors.  Its trunk blocked the street.  “At least it didn’t fall on the house,” I said.   On the opposite side of the house, the damage looked light. Until I saw the hot tub lid twisted off its metal hinges, peeled back.  I was grateful it hadn’t crashed through the window.  The maple, my favorite of all the trees, stood lopsided, one of its huge arms twisted off. But it stood.  As we circled the house, the storm began to calm, the rain let up. The worst was over.

As I tried to go back to sleep, my thoughts turned toward violence of another kind.  Earlier in the week, I had written an editorial about my father and how he made it through World War II alive.  His survival hinged on intuitive strokes of luck that had always seemed random to me.  A flaw in the structure of his toes caused the Nazi air force to reject him for pilot training ( almost all German pilots died), he narrowly avoided being recruited by the SS, and when his unit lost their first major battle, he survived to be shipped off to the US.  Narrow escapes from the forces of violence.  

I lay in my safe bed, listening to the rumble of thunder recede, the rain subsiding into a gentle wash,  wondering about nature and human nature.

To read the editorial see the link below.

 http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/212556341.html

What was left of the dragon fly

Lost Pages: Hunger

My grandmother never used a potato peeler.  It was too wasteful.  True German housewives used knives to get thinner peels.  I have never known hunger or war, so I work at my kitchen sink, thick chunks of potato peel dropping from my peeler.  In front of me, my window glows with reflected Minnesota snow, and my American husband chops peppers beside me.  In the corner, a huge refrigerator hums, its belly brimming with food.

Still, I see my grandmother’s potato peels spiraling from her knife.  There were transparent, so thin that her potatoes emerged bumpy, eyes intact.  A mountain of potato peels grew from her knife in her lifetime.  Like every other woman in her East German town, she peeled potatoes to boil every day and grated them for dumplings on Sunday.

Before my parents and I left Germany when I was thirteen, I visited her in Gera every year for at least a week.  I remember sitting on a creaky kitchen chair, swinging my legs, as my grandmother unwound potato peels into a chipped enamel bowl cradled in her lap.  It was summer, and it was morning.  The white net curtains brushed against the panes of the open casement window.  Outside, a delivery truck crashed through the potholes in the cobblestones.  A pot of salted water waited on the table.

Her hand released memory as she uncovered pale potato flesh.  She told me how, during the war, her stream of peels grew longer.  More potatoes, less meat.  Then potatoes were rationed: five pounds per person per week in ’42 down to four pounds by ’44.  In ’45, after the war was over, even potatoes were hard to find.  Her knife stopped for weeks.

She fed her three youngest children two slices of bread each day.  She sprinkled the bread with salt and pepper and told them to close their eyes and conjure up the taste of liverwurst.  Sometimes, she could get a few grams of yeast to spread on top.  Once Gina, who was eight, came home bearing a bouillon cube, a gift from her piano teacher who’d had a package from America.  She made soup for five.

My legs hung still.  I strained to imagine years without cake or sausage.  Grandmother turned toward me, peering over the tops of her bifocals, quiet for a moment.

Then she talked about my father.  When he returned in ’46, well-fed and strong, from his US POW camp, he was twenty-two.  She sent him out on his old bicycle - the tires were so worn that he had to patch them every ten kilometers - to Gauern where her cousins had a farm.  He could work at the farm for a day, harvesting hay or digging turnips, eat his fill at their table, and maybe earn a few potatoes to bring home.  When they didn’t have any to spare, he could steal potatoes in the village fields.  Once he got arrested, but another time he escaped with a whole sack.  They feasted then.  Potato soup, potato pancakes for days.

How could my father have stolen?  She shook her head and bent closer to her knife saying: We would do anything for food.  It was a terrible, terrible time.