Emily's garden

As you probably know, I’m a real Emily Dickinson fan.

I’m not exactly sure when it all began, but my guess is it started with Mr. Hemmert, a favorite high school teacher of mine I had for both sophomore and senior years. It was during time in his classroom that I realized I connected with literature and the humanities a whole lot more than what I thought I was supposed to, math. During that last year at Carroll High School, when we were all attempting best guess career decisions, I applied to colleges as an engineering major. But even by the time graduation rolled around, I had a bad feeling about that choice. When I got to college and filled out first year paperwork, I told Wright State I wanted to be an English teacher. They didn’t seem to mind. And so it was.

I remember, too, a day when Mr. Hemmert stood before us and read an original poem of his. I was rapt. I want to say it was a piece on the death of a kid in Vietnam who we all knew, a class leader who had graduated only a year prior. Maybe. What I do remember was realizing that poetry wasn’t just an academic exercise for educating those of us in the student seats. This man who I respected as much as my own father, expressed himself in the magical cadence and rhythms of verse. I could do that, I remember thinking.

I remember, too, an aphorism Mr. Hemmert had posted in his room. He, or somebody he commissioned, had carefully calligraphied a number of ideas to, perhaps, ignite some spark within his charges. I remember none all these years later, save one. It was from Emily. It was a paraphrase of the following, a note Ms. Dickinson wrote to a mentor of hers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Well, as you probably also know, I made teaching a career. While spending some time promoting history among the unwashed, my first love was literature. Years later, in graduate school, I rediscovered Emily under the tutelage of Jim Hughes, a Wright State professor/poet I’d had the good fortune to study with in undergrad. This part of the story gets really interesting and did, indeed, lead to a deepening of my appreciation for Emily. It was during this time that I began writing poetry in earnest, and on one mystical trip to Maine, found Emily connected to so much I could not believe it. When I told Jim Hughes, he wasn’t surprised at all. But that whole story would take a book to retell. Trust me, I’m still working on it.

So it was with great interest that I heard about an exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden this spring called Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. My first knowledge of it was from a former student living in The Big Apple who somehow found my email address. Within a few days I found a couple of other references to the Emily show in the New York Times online. It took me another day or two to figure out that I should actually go to the Bronx to witness the exhibition for myself. Just got back last night.

You know that book I mentioned a paragraph ago? Well, its main focus is on Mabel Loomis Todd, a Washingtonian/New Englander who bought most of a Maine island in Muscongus Bay over one hundred years ago and with her family, used it as rustic summer camp for many years. After she died, her only daughter turned the place over to the National Audubon Society, and in 1936, opened the Audubon Nature Camp on the 300+ acre island. By the time I got there in 1981, it was called the Audubon Ecology Workshop.

I felt a tingle up my spine and the spirit moving back then when I looked at Mrs. Todd’s picture hanging on the Fish House wall and recognized her as -- get this -- the original editor of the Emily Dickinson poetry. On the way to Maine I took it upon myself to stop by Emily’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and by the time I got to Maine a day later, found they both were connected. Small world, indeed.

I learned not long ago that when Emily died, her neighbors did not know her as a poet. A few short pieces had reached publication during her lifetime, but the work of getting the Dickinson poetry in front of a larger audience fell to Mabel Todd and the aforementioned Thomas Higginson.

What her neighbors did know about sequestered Emily, was that she was a darned good gardener. She had a special thing for roses. And that is, in part, what I want to present in my book. The other big piece of the book is to portray Mabel Todd as a sister nature lover. Emily had her flowers and poetry. Mabel had her all important editing and summers on beautiful Hog Island.

Much has been written about Emily and Mrs. Todd. Nobody has connected them as Nature’s people. Sounds like a fine non-fiction book idea to me.

Today’s elder idea: I was reared in a garden, you know.

In a letter from Emily Dickinson to a cousin. (1859)