Tag: Mary Oliver

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Taxes

Doesn’t it seem rather uncivilized and frankly ugly that income tax reporting happens on April 15th? Or in April at all? In the middle of spring?? It does to me.

Who wants to think about money and expenses and unreported tips and foreign income and grantors and transferors when one should be traipsing through the wildflowers? Not me. Okay, taxes are one of those “get to” things I wrote about earlier, because if I didn’t have enough income to even report, I’d be pretty darn poor. However, why couldn’t this heinous task be set for, say, November 15th, after which we’d celebrate Thanksgiving, being thankful for all we have, including income?

My sister, a CPA, has been my tax accountant for many years. She did this for me out of love, in exchange for a few greeting cards and perhaps a box of chocolate covered pretzels (which I often forgot). Now, however, she’s retired. A local friend agreed to take me on as a client. I asked him for a deadline for all my info and materials and he suggested March 15th. Okay. But then he stretched that to the last week of March. Uh-oh. Never remove a deadline from a deadline-dependent artist type who hates numbers and figures. Now I’ve hardly begun. The pile of papers on the dining room table grows more menacing by the day.

I like to think that Mary Oliver and I would have been right in step with each other, with regard to taxes. She wrote a poem titled “Percy Speaks While I Am Doing the Taxes.” I’ve copied it for you, below. Surely she, like I, would like to have simply tossed all her receipts into a box and handed that over to the hapless accountant. “Do your worst, fine fellow! I can’t be bothered. I have spring to attend to.” Surely she, like I, would so much rather have been out in the woods somewhere with a small dog, sending love and kisses to the baby wildflowers, tiny shoots of green, and blue blue sky. As my sister, too, would rather have done for all those years. Now she is released from my 1040, Schedule C, Business Use of Home, 1099, etc., etc. Whereas I will ever and always, in Just-spring, have a pile of papers on the dining room table, mocking me.

I add now, to my list of desired household employees, in addition to the“dreamy-eyed gardener,” a bright-eyed, cheerful bookkeeper.

Percy Speaks While I Am Doing the Taxes – Mary Oliver

First of all, I do not want to be doing this.
Second of all, Percy does not want me
to be doing this.
bent over the desk like a besieged person
with a dull pencil and innumerable lists
of numbers.

Outside the water is blue, the sky is clear,
the tide rising.
Percy, I say, this has to be done. This is
essential. I’ll be finished eventually.

“Keep me in your thoughts,” he replies. “Just because
I can’t count to ten doesn’t mean
I don’t remember yesterday, or anticipate today.
I’ll give you ten more minutes,” and he does.
Then shouts—who could resist—his
favorite words: Let’s go!

If you’re looking for my cards or art, you’ll find all of that on my website. If you enjoy these letters, feel free to forward this one to anyone you think might like it. And if someone forwarded this one to you, you can sign up here to receive the letters right in your Inbox. Finally, you’ll find past letters and poems here.

Thanks for listening,
Kay

P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the “merry thoughts.”

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Astonishing! Spring

Spring is upon us and I think just about everyone has a feeling of buoyancy once Vernal Equinox arrives. Even though here in mid-Missouri only a very few trees have buds on them, we all feel that little buzz of excitement, knowing that things are happening. Within those branches and down in the damp earth many tiny bits of thing are very busy doing whatever it is they need to do in order to pop out, to spring! Those mechanisms, those mysteries of growth and emergence–bud, leaf, blossom–are known only to the few who study such things, and I am not one of those, not much of a studier. I am just happy to look and love and maybe imagine the tiny goings-on.

“Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.”

― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

Now the grand adventure has begun. Oh, the looking, the searching, the joy of discovery on our little expeditions into yard, garden or woods! We look for the first this, the first that of the season and the first ever this or that. I remember so well when I saw my first Shooting Star–not a thing in the sky but a wildflower–on a trail called Shooting Star. I was with my sister, who was visiting here in search of birds and anything lovely. I’d always thought that trail was so named for sightings of the celestial type of shooting star from the bluffs there. No. The bluff was full of wildflowers. Shooting Star is one of those wildflowers I’d seen in my book and always wished I’d find in the wild. In person, as it were. And then, that April, my sister and I saw it together.

Just before official Spring, I’m casting my eyes to the ground on familiar woodland paths in search of the wildflowers whose whereabouts I have come to know. The east side of a certain hill is the first place I look with camera and mental notebook. And I am not disappointed. Shyly, they begin to show themselves. Tiny, delicate False Rue Anemone leaves, barely out of the ground, are my first reward. Toothwort leaves, too, and pretty soon a tiny row of buds hanging on their stems like socks on a laundry line. They will open by afternoon, I think. But I am a morning treasure hunter, so I will wait for the next day. I get a little burst of excitement with my first Trillium, first Blue-Eyed Mary, first May Apple, one after the other and another. I write these things down in notebooks. Yes, I count myself lucky.

Here’s a lovely Wendell Berry poem that I like to read every spring. I love every bit of it (though my feelings about outhouses are mixed) but I love especially his list of sins, for they are similar to my own.

A Purification

“At start of spring I open a trench
In the ground. I put into it
The winter’s accumulation of paper,
Pages I do not want to read
Again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the suns, growth of the ground,
Finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise,
have been inattentive to wonders,
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse,
of mind and body, I close the trench
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.”

― Wendell Berry

The old escapes into the new. What a lovely phrase. I hope this spring finds you hopeful and as he says, “happy enough.”

If you’re looking for my cards or art, you’ll find all of that on my website. And if you enjoy these letters, feel free to forward this one to anyone you think might like it. Finally, you’ll find past letters and poems here.

Thanks for listening,
Kay

P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the “merry thoughts.”