The pics accompanying are unfortunately not as fine as I’d like, but adverse conditions–high winds for the photo shoot, swarms of biting gnats, a dark work space–conspired against us in all our attempts.  We did what we could under the circumstances, which are always somewhat haphazard at Casa Karamesines.

William and Katherine Morris’ mother Linda actually conducted the interview.  It was a great pleasure to meet the source from whence sprang these two unique and talented blogging associates of mine.  I’ve known William (whom I’ve never met)  for several years now and often wondered where in the world he came from.  At last, more clues!

At WIZ’s companion blog A Motley Vision, I’ve posted, at Katherine’s suggestion, three questions and answers cut from the interview to trim length.

“Look, here’s Fezzika,” my mother said, bending down to point out the Woodhouse toad tucked under the garden stone. We had discovered the amphibian’s house a few days earlier, and I was fascinated by the placement choice. She had dug into the soil under a cornerstone edging the flowerbed beside the main path through the garden. The stone is flat, shaped a little like a boomerang, wide and bent in the middle, providing a convenient entrance and shelter.

The first one or two years we lived here we simply dug plots of soil to plant our garden in and sometimes hired someone to till up an area we chose. But the second time we tilled, my mother discovered two toads that the tiller blades killed. One had missing limbs and made it as far as the surface of the tilled soil before dying. It was heartbreaking that these benign creatures had been injured in our yard where we tried to protect and encourage toads and other creatures.

My mother decided to try things a different way. We went up to a nearby gravel pit and gathered rocks from there, transporting them to our yard. Using these stones we built raised beds to plant our garden in, making an almost-grid around the new flowerbed and then shoveling soil into the beds, mixing manure and compost in as well. With this new approach to the garden, we had no need to till the plot.

Soon after that, toads readily swarmed to the garden, coming out of secret holes at night and hopping through water puddles that the sprinkler left. They squatted in the plastic container of water my mother placed at the south end of the garden, a little “toad spa”. Some nights, there would be two or three toads soaking in the water at a time. When any of the family walked through the garden at night, we had to be careful that we didn’t step on a toad sitting in the path. Oftentimes I went barefoot, partly so that I would feel more easily if I disturbed an amphibian.

Over the six years we’ve lived here, the behavior of the toads in our garden has changed. They accept our garden as an ideal environment, traveling to stop at our water puddles, foraging in our area, burrowing under the black plastic and wandering around the garden. What my mother did not expect was that the toads would begin making permanent homes under the stones of the garden bed. This year, when my mother was in the garden, she realized that one of them—Fezzika—had dug a homey burrow to live in. This toad is an especially large female Woodhouse toad, as jumpy as any other when we walk around. My mother decided that we could name her “Fezzika” in honor of the giant in The Princess Bride because the toad is so large.

She wasn’t the only toad who moved in. Not long after we found Fezzika, we discovered that another toad had similarly excavated a spot under another flat stone in the herb bed. Slightly smaller than Fezzika, it had dug a sideways tunnel against the rock only a few inches away from our lemon thyme. It also seems that some of the toad homes are community burrows. A couple years ago, there was a gopher hole under one of our peach trees. Not only one toad lived in here. There were one or two others, and even a tiger salamander that shared the burrow with them.

Before Fezzika had moved in, the toads had generally only dug into the softer soil of the garden, first in the tilled soil of the old plots, then into the shovel-turned soil in the raised beds. They sometimes hibernated in the beds, and they liked moving in and out from beneath the black weed barrier. We would often find holes in the beds where one had spent the day in a burrow. Our garden was clearly a good environment for them, with plenty of water and insects to support their diet. The only slight downturn was that our cats prowled the garden and sometimes batted at them, but our felines usually left the toads to themselves. They certainly never ate them.

One reason the cats leave the toads alone (besides our chastisement) is that toads produce a gland toxin called bufotalin. This toxin is stored in large sacs slightly behind the Woodhouse toad’s eyes. It’s a milky substance that, if it enters the bloodstream, can cause increased heart rate or other heart problems because it has effects like digitalis, or Foxglove. It also has a distinctly bad taste.

Female Woodhouse toads are generally bigger than the males, and they can be as long as four inches. Once, when I was at a pond with some friends and we were catching toads, I caught a large brown toad that was possibly a Woodhouse. It had the characteristic light dorsal stripe but was a brown color, something I had never seen in Woodhouse toads before.

Just down the street from us is a large pond formed by runoff from the irrigation sprinklers in the alfalfa field above. From March to July, we can hear the male Woodhouse toads in the pond. The males emit a long, wailing call that can be compared to a sheep with a serious cold. The males use these calls to attract the females to ideal breeding waters.

Woodhouse toads deposit long strings of eggs numbering from twenty to forty eggs per strand in relatively still waters. Once these hatch, the tadpoles feed on debris in the pond, gradually maturing as they grow legs, lose their tails, and finally become tiny toads, no bigger than the nail of my little finger. From there, it takes three years for the toad to fully mature into the sizes of those amphibians now inhabiting our garden.

Unlike frogs, toads have a thicker skin that they can absorb water through. When the toads sat in the plastic container of water during the night it was to have a drink through their skin. Once they mature from tadpoles, the toads can wander as long as they like, being sure to stop at puddles and ponds to stay hydrated.

Now that the toads have come as far as digging rock-roofed homes in the garden, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll leave. My mother hopes that sometime we’ll be able to build a pond of our own, a little piece somewhere in the backyard that will encourage the toads even further. They’ve become year-round neighbors for us and interesting creatures to study. Toads eat a large assortment of insects in our garden, everything from flies to slugs, when slugs appear. Their presence is a welcome addition to the garden ecosystem.

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Val K. is thirteen years old and lives in a house in the Utah desert with her family, her carnivorous plants, a dog, five cats, and several toads. In between the times she spends writing, she works on crafts involving building, embroidery, gardening and more and also takes time to read incredibly long epic novels. She spends what is left of her free time writing fantasy stories and has a book written and a sequel in the works.

Gabriel Aresti Jr. for his three poems, “Spring-Eh-Field,” “Nospringland,” and “What the Mormons Taught Me About Spring and More”

Travis Burnham, for his poem “The Morning View”

Tyler Chadwick, for his three poems “Te Kore,” “Pacific: Mateu, Matem,” and “Across the Hokianga (Tanka)”

Harlow Clark, for his found poem “Easter Sermons”

Nani Furse, for her two poems “Spring Outing” and “At the Enterprise Reservoir Dam”

greenfrog, for his spring haiku

Warren Hatch, for his poem “Pruning the Blood Plum Tree”

Arthur Hatton, for contributing his song “You’re Better Than That”

Karen Kelsay, for her three poems, “Handmaidens of Spring,” “In the Sweet Alone,” and “Waiting for Spring”

Lance Larsen, for contributing his poem “Rough Translation”

Mary-Celeste Lewis, for her poem “Happy”

Nathan Meidell, for his poem “Softer Joy”

Alan Mitchell, for his poem “Winter Relapse”

Angela Morrison, for her poem “Sonoran Atonement”

Davey Morrison, for his three poems, “February,” “Like Urban Tumbleweed,” and “You Rustle Me”

Jon Ogden, for his poem “Seasonal Ritual”

Polly Parkinson for her poem, “milkweed”

Sandra Skouson for her three poems, “Beginning to Rain: At Monument Valley,” “Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother,” and “Naming Spring”

It has been an honor and delight to meet and work with each of you.  Feel free to continue to contribute nature-themed work to WIZ and to visit often.  Also, tremendous thanks to WIZ’s readers, to those who contributed haiku to the haiku chain, to commenters, and to all those who participated in the voting.  Come back anytime and throw another log on the fire.

The 2011 vernal equinox arrives Sunday, March 20th.  We’ll be running next year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration starting on or around Friday, March 18th,  so keep that date in mind and plan to join next year’s versefest, either as contestants or non-contest contributors.  Music and other work poetry-related will also be welcome.  The contest will never be a formal affair, its intent being to provide a place for a communal celebration of spring’s arrival rather than apply the starch of an academic event.   Perhaps one day I’ll have more blog members to argue with over choices of winners, but ’til then it’ll just be lil’ ol’ me.  My hope is one day to be able to offer more prizes and other incentives for participation, as per the Navajo tradition of gifting all participants with thank-you baskets and other goods.  Currently, WIZ is on a (very limited) budget, so we give what we’ve got.  This year the poets were the ones spreading a generous and shining banquet.

Excellent work all, and a wonderful show of public interest and support.  As I believe the condition of human language to exert important influence upon the condition of the Earth, I appreciate the creative, engaging, possibility-producing qualities of the words offered here as good acts of stewardship on each participant’s part.  Very heartening.

Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.

This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.

And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work my spade toward summer.

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For Sandra’s bio and other poems submitted to WIZ’s Spring Poetry Runoff, click here and here.

*Contest entry*

to snag the frosty mornings. Mallards will
not light upon the weir, and open skies
remove their lightest blue. The fallow rose
is waiting for the spring–and like my eyes,

discolored branches search for green. I’ll count
the small supernal stars that heaven yields
until the dismal gray has passed, then smile
when May’s sweet-smelling earth perfumes the fields.

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For Karen’s bio and other Spring Poetry Runoff entries go here and here.

“Waiting for Spring” was first published by The Pregnant Moon.

*Contest entry*

_____________________________________________________________

Warren Hatch is an assistant professor of English and Literature at Utah Valley University where he teaches writing in science and technology as well as writing about nature.  His poems were selected by National Poet Laureate Billy Collins to win the 2006 Utah Writers Poetry Competition of the Western Humanities Review.  Collins has said of him, “This poet has an unerring ear and a beautiful sense of how a line should be timed.  I like the way precise verbal description can suddenly switch to a more colloquial line.  This poet has the gift, the light touch, and yet serious ballast on board.”   He has also won the Monk Poetry Award, Utah Arts Council poetry contests, BYU’s Eisteddfod Crown and Chair competitions, and BYU’s Mayhew-Hinkley contest (poetry) and Ann Doty contest (short fiction). His first collection, Mapping the Bones of the World, was published in 2008.  His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, and other journals.

*Non-contest submission*

E noho:
I see hunger squirm beneath
your skin. Break bread. Dip it in butter
heavy as afterbirth. Let the excess glide
across your tongue, drop
into the well of appetite, filled with milk
fresh from the coupled Void. Sidle toward
the breast. Press between her skin and his.
Join the sextuplet gods waiting to suckle,
mouths wide against emptiness,
hunger sliding between lips chapped
from too long in the womb—

ora mate ora mate ora
Ply your flesh
in this orgy of mythologies. Mix spittle
with the grammar of desire
shorn from Adam’s side. Slip on
this red clay like spirit slips on nakedness.
An infant its mother’s breast. Meaning,
the itch always just out of reach. Slide
from this amniotic tide into the metaphor
christened body. Meaning movement.
Meaning legion. Meaning drink
from this cup and we’ll help you forget to

breathe.

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Definitions (from Māori Dictionary Online: http://www.maoridictionary.co.nz/):

Te Kore (pronounced “teh KO-reh”): (n.) realm of potential being, The Void.

Haere Mai (pronounced “HI-reh MY”): (interjection) “Come here!” or “Welcome!”; a greeting.

E noho (pronounced “EH no-HO”): (v.) sit, stay, remain, settle, dwell, live, inhabit, reside.

Ora (pronounced “OH-ruh”): (stative) be alive, well, safe, cured, recovered, healthy, fit; the principle of life.

Mate (pronounced “MAH-teh”): (stative) be dead, sick, ill, ailing, overcome, beaten, defeated, in want of, lacking, overcome, deeply in love; the principle of death.

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Tyler Chadwick lives in Idaho with his wife, their three daughters, and their Miniature Schnauzer. His poetry has appeared in Metaphor, Dialogue, Irreantum, Salome Magazine, Black Rock & Sage, and on WIZ (here and here) and AMV (here and here) and many of his poems and his Mormon Poetry Project can be found on his personal blog.

*Non-contest submission*

Thanks–deep, ever-flowing thanks–to Wm Morris, for helping me open this space and for providing solid support.

Thanks, WIZ readers, for taking time out of your no doubt very busy schedules to while away moments here.  Writing without audience is, if not dead, not as alive as it might be.

Thanks to contributors who have submitted work and helped establish literary bio-diversity for the site.  You have no idea how good it has been to meet you (in an Internet way) and work with you.

Thanks to my family for enduring my distraction with this project, and especially thanks to my son Saul for his tech support and other vital forms of participation.

My hope is that, over the next year, I’ll be able to take WIZ to another level, one that will make more worthwhile everyone’s interest, faith, and participation.   The literary nature and science writing field is burgeoning, including among LDS.  I fully intend to find a way to gather its flowers while I may.

As I started washing dishes I glanced out the same window in the other direction. I can see down the hill if I choose, but also uphill to the woods behind. Two yards over, I saw movement. Looking as closely as I could through the window, I could see a herd of whitetail deer bedded down next to the neighbor’s shed. Each deer was facing a different direction to watch for dogs and other trouble. One had already stood and stretched, and it started gingerly scratching with a hind leg all over, balancing itself like a ballerina as the hoof reached every spot. It reached over its shoulder and licked its fur into place, walked several yards away, and emptied bladder and bowels. As it moved on, it looked for nibbles in the grass. I noticed a couple other white rumps farther up the hill and counted a total six deer that were visible. Meanwhile, another deer stood, stretched, scratched, then groomed in the same way and order as the first one. Another one got up after that, going through the routine. They all had the same sleepy look as early morning commuters or students waiting at a bus stop. I had to go tend to some household duty or other but came back as soon as I could to watch the deer some more. By this time all the deer had performed their morning ritual and were ambling into the tree line. The light changed to a uniform shade that smoothed the sky flat. The day had begun. I felt as though something had awakened in me as well.

When we started home, day had rolled over. The town had glided into shadow that the sandstone cliffs of the Moab Rim west of town cast as early as 4:30 p.m. this time of year. But to the east, straight-on autumn light saturated the landscape.  Golden blush suggestive of ripe peaches deepened reds in any-day-gorgeous sandstones and yellowed up beiges in the Navajo formation. Above the sunlit mesas stood the La Sal Mountains, wearing long, dark beards of coniferous forest, their bald Alpine pates snow-capped.  A ceiling of black and silver storm clouds stretched away into western Colorado.

As we drove through Moab’s premature dusk, my eye shifted back and forth between these zones of light.  Below emblazoned sandstones, cars moved along blue-shadowed highway, the gleam gone off their metallic parts. Only headlights shone here and there. A few vehicles bore cut trees tied to their roofs, presumably procured from the La Sals during family trips into the mountains to find the perfect Christmas tree.  I’ll never again have a cut live tree in my home, but I don’t begrudge folks that still practice it this very old tradition.  We now put up two fiber optic trees. Actually, one stays up year round to amuse my special needs daughter, along with two strings of multicolored lights hung above her daybed.  But my mind holds snapshot memories of the lay of light on unadorned branches and shine tipping needles of pre-decorated evergreens we had in our home when I was a child.  I can see the glass ornaments hanging like red, blue, silver, green and golden toy apples from the tree’s branches.  Strings of lights wrapping the tree in a net of radiant color.  Lightfalls of silver tinsel sending currents of shimmer treetop to floor.  Oleoresinous perfume clouding the room for the few weeks the pine, spruce, or fir stood in the house.

Noticing those trees riding car-top shifted my seeing inward to a recent memory.  Back on November 14th a skiff of snow fell overnight here in southeastern Utah, laying down an inch-thick, shaggy white carpet.  On the morning of the 15th, I put on hiking boots and grabbed my pocket notebook, sunglasses, pen, hat, walking willow and canteen and strode through the snow to Crossfire Canyon.

The sky cleared. The temperature climbed quickly.  By the time I reached canyon bottom, water dripped from trees all around.  At a point where the trail crosses a spring, I turned about face toward the low-hanging winter sun.

Twenty feet away and further, sunlight accentuated snow melting in piñon pines and in Utah and Rocky Mountain junipers lining the trail. As warmth collapsed ice crystals, fat droplets swelled at the ends of needles and beaded up along branches’ bottom edges.  These droplets collected sunlight and with my eye’s cooperation digested it into brilliant colors, mostly topaz yellows and emerald greens with flecks of blue glitter flashing here and there.  On a branch nearer than most of these color-bearing trees, a growing red glint caught my eye.  I witnessed one water pendant form at the tip of a piñon pine’s two-prong needles, flare into a blaze of ruby fire then die down, though if I made the slightest movement the color roared back to life.

Prismatic gleams hung in many of the trees standing to the west side of the trail, but the rubies in that piñon refracted a color of sunshine red I don’t think I’ve ever seen.  It isn’t in coherent rainbows, which by nature run toward the grainy side, being the pointillist compositions of sunlight skidding through countless raindrops that they are.  That section of that one tree was set at the right corner of the angle between the sun and my eyes to produce only red gems.  I watched ruby after ruby plump, quiver, fall out of the light then pop against the ground in a range of tones and tempos.

And it came to me: Those bright blue, green, red, golden glass ornaments that I helped my mom hang—so thin-skinned that when they fell to the floor they shattered with a pop—the baubles I thought designed to accentuate Christmas lights and otherwise add festive notes to the tree—they betoken the rapture of sunlight and snowmelt playing out in living evergreen forests.  It’s a spectacle that the color-loving human eye admits with wild abandon to sensory-sussing depths of the human mind.

Which means that those ornaments are more than just bling for Christmas trees, clinquant to pleasure the human ear and eye.  They do more than symbolize gifts of the magi and invoke other aspects of Christian lore.  They’re all that, plus they invoke the story of the thousands-of-years-old nature-human relationship, especially that of the human abroad in a forest during a winter thaw.  In company with an evergreen tree or tree effigy, these hand-formed globes celebrate the release of water molecules from motionlessness and the rising of warm-season affluence from cold bones of ice.

I stood still, caught up in that daytime son et lumiere.  A Fremont cottonwood tree leaf fluttered down and settled with a noiseless noise (Keats) on my arm.  I took a moment to enjoy its near heart-shape and its mottled yellow-going-to-brown coloration.  I said, “I am not yet the ground,” but let the leaf lie there for as long as I held that position with hands resting atop hiking stick.  I felt my inclusion into the canyon deepen; I learned something of the necessity of my presence in its moment. Then, in a hard act of separation, I let my arms drop and the leaf continue its journey to the soil, put my back to the cosmic gem-smithing and went on my way, thinking, “We should get more glass ornaments for our Christmas trees.”

“And so we shall,” I thought as I emerged from memory onto blue highway outside of Moab.  Yes indeed, we must.