What the poplars say

There is a Lombardy poplar, golden-leafed and swaying, in the southwest corner of my picture window view here in West Seattle.

I cannot consider this tree without remembering the long line of poplars leading to La Loggia in Montefiridolfi, my steps along a crushed gravel path, the olive groves and Sangiovese vines stretching out beyond the horizon of the villa’s gardens.

And, another line of poplars in Happy Valley, out on the Olympic peninsula, where I lived with my husband in a little farmhouse while he worked as a backcountry ranger, and that November morning I went out to get the mail but instead sat down on the front porch watching a herd of Roosevelt elk in our yard eating Gravensteins from the trees and grazing along the fence line over which they’d easily jumped.

There’s a particular sound that wind makes in poplars, which I could close my eyes and recognize anywhere. This August, contemplating oil painting, I sat on the edge of the pond at Hunter Moon Homestead, listening to the birds and wind in the late summer leaves, and finally learned the name: psithurism, or susurrus, from the Greek for whispering.

I’m rereading The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, noting what I’ve underlined before (still feels true) and now putting stars in the margins near passages I keep forgetting: Resistance, by definition, is self-sabotage and the working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. Last year, I met a beautiful conservationist in the English Lakes District (her head surely filled with susurrus) who longed to write poetry and wondered what might make her a poet. Writers write, I said. That’s it. Not original, perhaps cliché, but if it were easy to be true to our art, we’d all be doing it. I need help remembering this myself.

Those poplars make me think about the two women I have been—the one watching the elk, wondering how to love someone who had the kindest heart and lived with alcoholism and five children, and the other, on another precipice of her life, learning about her unknown family roots, embarking on a grand Italian adventure.

How can a single life hold so many contradictions?

Today I notice, not for the first time, how after fourteen years of never taking for granted the rippled Puget Sound and the snow-dusted Olympic Mountains outside the bungalow, I’m losing my view. The poplars and giant red cedars, scruffy-barked Douglas firs—even some other unnamed deciduous trees seemingly lit from within—are steadily growing up above the rooftops below, rising to obscure the water line and the first set of hills in the distance. If I live here fourteen more years, everything will be changed.

I’m struck with the idea that all my life I’ve been in search of the beautiful vista out there, when the poplars’ susurrus whisper is something only to feel in here

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