Place 3: Building my Vocabulary

Tuesday September 22, 2009 3:34 pm


After an intermittent drizzling rain for most of the day I was expecting the clearing to be different this week though I wasn’t sure how. But the most striking changes that greeted me when I entered the cemetery weren’t caused by the rain. The leaves have started to fall and the change seems so sudden, almost sad. Silly of me to think I’d come to know the place so well I could anticipate its changes. Maple leaves line the edges of the empty asphalt paths; some newly-fallen: three chartreuse veins against a mottled flame background; some damp and curled, uniform brown like a resilient paper bag. The air is wet and heavy and moisture rises from the grass like invisible steam, my body slicing shapes through it as I walk. Soggy grass clippings cover the hillsides and I breathe in the strong sweet smell of freshly cut grass.

The colors in the clearing are more varied and vibrant against the overcast background, the paper-white sky. A quintessential Pittsburgh sky that I’ve always appreciated for its effect on the colors. Rocks and pebbles lining the ground of the clearing are impossible lilac, coral, cobalt, turquoise, amber, sage. The leaves of the trees and vines and grasses are a million shades of green and yellow and orange and red. I take pictures but they don’t do anything justice.




There’s only so much a camera can do: record, reproduce, in a limited way. It cannot describe. Reading Ed Abbey’s book reminded me to just sit and describe, to meditate on the landscape – a continuation of last week’s task but with a different approach. In Landscape and Nature Lopez advises focusing on the landscape, rendering it authentically, and that will become the story; that is the story.

Through attempting to render this place in words, I have realized the necessity of having a vocabulary in the natural world in order to describe it, in order to communicate it to other people – and that I lack that vocabulary. Becoming acquainted with the plants and animals and rocks that live here, not only their names but their histories and associations, with help to reveal the story of this clearing.

A great sprawling elm tree delineates one boundary of the clearing, reaching its long downward-curving branches out across the marble slab logs. According to Norse mythology, the first man was an ash tree and the first woman an elm. Looking at this elm tree – graceful, slender-limbed, welcoming, slightly sad – that thought resonates. The great elm is losing its leaves, and they decorate the ground beneath it, blazing gold against purple.

Three crisp, smooth trees stand in a slightly curving arc between the elm and the entrance gate, with maybe ten feet between each tree and the next. I think they are ailanthus trees although they don’t seem to give off the unpleasant odor I’ve read about them having. The canopies of these trees are interwoven with a tenacious vine of some kind with roughly heart-shaped leaves, perhaps an ivy.
Looking around this clearing at all of the trees, vines, grasses, stones, soil, flowers, the largely unseen birds and invisible insects, the task of identifying it all, describing it all, seems overwhelming, consuming. For the first time since I started coming here, I haven’t thought about why I chose to come to a cemetery – I didn’t even remember I was in a cemetery until it came time to leave my clearing.