Of Green Stuff Woven: Confessions of a Conservationist Cleric Cathleen Chittenden Bascom Iowa State University
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Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2017 Of green stuff woven: Confessions of a conservationist cleric Cathleen Chittenden Bascom Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Bascom, Cathleen Chittenden, "Of green stuff ow ven: Confessions of a conservationist cleric" (2017). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 17146. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/17146 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Of green stuff woven: Confessions of a conservationist cleric by Cathleen Chittenden Bascom A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing and Environment Program of Study Committee: Charissa Menefee, Major Professor Susan Yager K. L. Cook Alex Braidwood The student author, whose presentation of the scholarship herein was approved by the program of study committee, is solely responsible for the content of this thesis. The Graduate College will ensure this thesis is globally accessible and will not permit alterations after a degree is conferred. Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2017 Copyright ©, Cathleen Chittenden Bascom, 2017. All rights reserved. ii A child said “what is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands… I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrance designedly dropt, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, “Whose?” – Walt Whitman , Leaves of Grass iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT iv CHAPTER 1. SIDEOATS SANCTUS 1 CHAPTER 2. BLUE DENVER LAWNS 10 CHAPTER 3. JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE 13 CHAPTER 4. FISHSCALE SEDGE 25 CHAPTER 5. EDELWEISS #1 30 CHAPTER 6. EDELWEISS #2 39 CHAPTER 7. PRAIRIE SAGE 48 CHAPTER 8. WINTER WHEAT 59 CHAPTER 9. FOXTAIL 65 CHAPTER 10. SHOWY GOLDENROD 72 CHAPTER 11. JOB'S TEARS 82 CHAPTER 12. CANNABIS 95 CHAPTER 13. PURPLE LOVE GRASS 105 CHAPTER 14. SNOWFIELDS 111 CHAPTER 15. PRAIRIE DROPSEED 117 CHAPTER 16. INDIAN GRASS 128 CHAPTER 17. PRAIRIE SMOKE 138 CHAPTER 18. BIG QUAKING GRASS 144 CHAPTER 19. SWAMP AGRIMONY 155 CHAPTER 20. HARE'S-TAIL GRASS 166 CHAPTER 21. WHITE LADY SLIPPER 175 CHAPTER 22. CROSS-LEAVED HEATH 189 CHAPTER 23. SWAMP MILKWEED 196 CHAPTER 24. SHOOTING STAR 202 CHAPTER 25. THE GLEBE 208 CHAPTER 26. DUST TO SAN DAMIANO 221 CHAPTER 27. PRAIRIE PHLOX PHOS HILARON 230 CHAPTER 28. OBEDIENT PLANT 242 CHAPTER 29. PEARLY EVERLASTING 245 iv ABSTRACT In a braided narrative, Of Green Stuff Woven follows Brigid Brenchley, the woman dean of an Episcopal cathedral as she decides whether or not to sell the church’s restored urban prairie to hotel developers. The protagonist’s spirituality is intimately tied to the creation, symbolized by the prairie. As the story unfolds, she witnesses the suffering caused by a flood event in her city, and she becomes convinced that humans are agents in such climate crises. On the other hand, the cathedral building and its bank accounts are in shambles and the hotel money is a possible solution. The significance of her dilemma is enriched by memoir-like chapters that weave across the novel’s main plot, revealing how the land and the grasses came to take on such meaning for this 21st-century cleric. The fragility of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem and the fragility of liberal Christianity are together probed in this novel, which concludes that, though threatened, both prairie and a prayer life are ultimately resilient. 1 CHAPTER 1. SIDEOATS SANCTUS Plant Name: Side Oats Grama More diminutive than many of our prairie’s grasses, side oats grow two to three feet tall with many short spikes attached on one side of the zigzag flower. Its asymmetry is striking and pleasing – and you can pray it like a rosary. For these reasons, we have planted it near the garden benches. --Note from Dean Brigid Brenchley’s Prairie Journal Ten Days in September, Des Moines, Iowa: Tuesday Morning My life has always been tangled up with the grasses. My life has always been tangled up with greenback dollars. But only recently have they become inextricably twisted together, like the “rats’ nests” my older sisters used to brush out of my auburn childhood locks. And only recently has the ravel involved a lot of people beyond myself. Holy, holy, holy… I sit on a garden bench and my hand cradles a wire-thin stem of side oats grama grass. My right thumb and middle finger press together around the first small seed – like nature’s rosary. These kernels of side oats are in size and hue like the wheat grown on my grandparents’ farm in Kansas. Holy, holy, holy . The words of the ancient Sanctus (first penned by Isaiah the prophet) form themselves inside me. I mouth the words. As a forty-something woman priest, dean of an Episcopal cathedral, people cut me a lot of slack about talking to God – even outdoors. I picture myself behind the marble communion altar inside the church, trying to stand tall in a former male dean’s chasuble, its brocaded seams hitting wrong on my frame. When interceding for a couple hundred human-beings, as we all chant together holy, holy, holy, I am often overtaken by life’s mysteries: the lines of each face, or the stories behind each pair of eyes. 2 But this morning as I sit half hidden in tall green strands, the holy mysteries are equally, if not more, evident to me in the grasses and forbs that move in the breeze all around me. Only lately have I been committing them and their distinctive characteristics to heart, the way I once memorized favorite prayers or spiritual teachings… bluestem, switchgrass, liatris, lady slipper… their names taste sacramental on the tongue like good communion wine. St. Augustine writes that we are only fully human when we’re engaged with the natural world. Some people dive into the vivid layers of fish swimming in the coral reefs. Some people count birds on Christmas, noting each call and wing and colored breast. For me, it’s the prairie grasses. Above my head, the tallest buildings in Iowa clamber upward in granite and corten-steel. Behind me, the squat stone cathedral, with our bells on the hour and radiant windows, sits like a historic anchor. Across 9 th Street to the West, resides one of our nation’s large insurance corporations. But stretching north and east is nearly three acres of tallgrass prairie, covering a square city block. Exactly why we have this much land downtown and why we’ve kept it for over a hundred and sixty years – remains a bit hazy to me. In my five years as dean, no one has given me a precise answer. Complicated legalities, they say. Wishes of the original benefactor, they respond, shrugging their shoulders. That’s all I know. Of course, St. Aidan’s lot has seen many incarnations: a lumber yard in the 1800’s; brick tenements after 1900; then rental parking since the 1960’s. Faced with dwindling parking profits, and a dangerously pot-holed lot, the prairie restoration project was my vision. From the corporate plaza across Center Street, comes a double-whirring: a tiny John Deere is eating the lawn like a mechanical goat, but louder. A bill-capped man blinks inside the plexiglass like the goat’s eyes. Nearby in a circle of too-white, salt-like rocks, a lemon vested 3 worker also whirrs away with a petroleum-powered weed-wand removing grass from between celosia and canna lilies. On the carpet-high grass the men look god-like. On the other hand, where I am the spiderwort opens shoulder-high, and the Indian grass grows higher still, and I am reminded that I am small. Within our prairie’s tiers of plant life bird sounds emerge from different strata: purring down low near the butterfly milkweed; swooshing of wings wave across purple coneflower and wooly verbena; in-out-in-in a colony of wrens negotiates their wren penthouse high on a pole. Unlike the relentless sound of the machines, the prairie murmurs a rhythm that includes pause and silence . An auditory oasis. So, yes, we’re restoring a small prairie smack in the center of the financial district. We’ve peeled off the dilapidated asphalt and planted species that filled Lewis and Clark with awe when they entered Iowa. Plants which, now, are nearly extinct. Plants that, we believe, are holy. Merlin, my administrative assistant, and close friend, pulls his unreliable vintage Mercedes into the spot labeled “Secretary” (we reused earlier signs.) Obviously, the cathedral had to keep some parking, so we chose a permeable paver system to capture runoff. Merlin likes this particular spot because it’s near an unmarked door in the stone and through which he can nip in and out from the back of his office – to clear his head, avoid a particularly sticky parishioner, or have a smoke. Merlin’s full, legal name is James Anthony Merlinske. But since doing an off-Broadway The Once and Future King, Merlin has stuck. Now, as a favorite character actor in our local scene, in Des Moines everyone knows him as Merlin.