Same Old Love

NFL football. Divisional playoffs. Top-seeded Detroit Lions, following a franchise-best 15-2 regular season record, host the Washington Commanders. It’s Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday. I had to fiddle around for an hour to get viewing options to work, as Sling Blue disappointed, then Fubo seemed fubar, and then finally I could dial in via a YouTube TV free trial (streaming medley relay can be such a drag!). Ford Field, bluelit and roaring. Despite being favorites, the Lions lose, 45-31. A two touchdown margin. No shade to the Commanders, but I do think it’s apt to say the Lions lost more than that the Commanders won. Detroit turned the ball over five times. That’s too many. Notwithstanding sixteen players on injured reserve, the Lions defense pressed again and again, aggressive style reduced to too many big gain giveaways, wide open receivers, running lanes the berth of a country road, all while committing fewer errors. Good on the Commanders for doing what they had to. But about those Lions:

I’m from Michigan. I grew up with the Lions on TV most Sundays, CBS 9 out of Cadillac because we didn’t have cable and nobody I knew had cable, though satellite dish receivers were coming on by the late 1980s. Adjust the antenna and Wayne Fontes comes to mind. Monty Clark. James Jones and Gary James. Chuck Long. Coaches and players from around the time I was 10, 11, 12. The refrain was “same old Lions,” after a loss, which was most of the time. From the time I was 10 until I was 14, the Lions season total wins amounted to this: 4, 7, 5, 4, and 4, with double-digit losses every year except 1985, when they finished 7-9. I suppose there is nothing special about my fandom for the Detroit Lions. In fact, around that same time, I took a stand, shifted my affinity to the then-and-only-briefly-ascendent Cleveland Browns (who, arguably, became the Baltimore Ravens a few years later in 1995). There was that subscription to the tabloid-paginated Browns Digest, with its full-color posters accompanying each issue, and there was that Browns bomber jacket, shiny in a way that was singular and rare in my school’s one long hallway joining together the middle school and high school. The digest and the jacket were splurges, probably two of the most expensive gifts my parents footed in those years, and the jacket especially was such a curious choice in retrospect because I wore it proudly but also took an impactful amount of crap and scrutiny and teasing for wearing it. At the scale of school experiences, which in those days were the main hub of socialization, that Browns jacket galvanized a deeply personal knowledge about community, belonging, testing alternative gravities akin to centripetal outsiderness. I could be making too much of it; I could also be making too little.

All the while, the Lions were still there, patterned results. I kidded that a Lions-Browns superbowl was my dream. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve marveled in moments at how far out of reach that ultimate matchup continues to be (forgiving, of course, the warp-wobble-weirdness of the Browns becoming the Ravens followed by the Browns rebeginning, a classic gone-noting where the gone comes back). As I watched on Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday, I felt disappointment. Dan Campbell is different. Wow, what heart. The disappointment is not for me but instead, somehow, it’s almost but not quite in that orbit of a solastalgia variant, growing up with the bookends of pigskin-headed rowdiness and shambling commercialism, where the s-o-l is “same old Lions.” A high anticipation, high expectations loss carries me back, reminds me of a time when to root for the Lions and to know serial disappointment as a regional phenomenon was also to feel a peninsular place, the ground underfoot, hold something. This is here, where I am from. Winning by contrast is easier, emotionally. But losing and knowing the aftermath of losing, long losing, its accrual too touches feeling even all these years later and from 500 miles away–in such a way that I wanted to note, here, in a low key entry. Carry on and go back to what you were doing and no big deal just a flit.

Coaches and players revolve, leave, turnstile churning, and change is skipping afoot after a 15-2 season with an early exit from the playoffs. This team’s coordinators are going elsewhere to become head coaches (OC Ben Johnson to the Bears is yesterday’s news). Yet this season wasn’t without its rewards. I’ll be pulling for them again next year. Wearing from time to time the Lions sweatshirt Ph. gifted me this past Christmas, knowing what losing knows, knowing its affective rinse as reaching long before me and far around.

Decay Curators

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash.

A couple of recent conversations led me promisingly to Caitlin DeSilvey’s work from around 2017 related to her book, Curated Decay: Inevitable Loss and Other Opportunities. Although the book itself hasn’t arrived yet, I’ve learned from reviews and by watching Desilvey’s 2018 Handbury Historic Preservation lecture at UVa that historic preservation scholars consider her work postpreservationist, in that it keys on the cyclical generativity hinging decay to renewal and renewals again to unavoidable decay. I especially appreciate about Desilvey’s research that it accords with gone-noting as I have been studying and otherwise coming to terms with it in recent years, and so I thought I would highlight just a few more points from the lecture and consider their implicit connections to more than aging structures and their contents (e.g., sheds pulled to leaning and their rusty, or dusty inventories).

At one point DeSilvey says, “There is always a politics to loss.” I remember vividly a question posed to me after a talk I gave a few years ago that suggested gone-noting should strive for more causal and jurisdictional attribution. In other words, when a journal, listserv, conference, publisher, or other so-called structure of disciplinary participation lapses, gone-noting its lapse and marking it for possible renewal or repair is sort of like again and again bowing to “graceless turnover” (North) but without bringing us up close to root causes. Certainly politics play a part in loss, though such politics are not neatly codified nor attributable to individual actors. These do not tend to be a megaphonic politics of campaign texts, candidate yard signs, or bumper stickers. The discontinuation of EM-Journal years ago at EMU may serve as one simple example. Although its short run was successful if judged by its accomplishments, like 1) publishing period issues of student writing from first-year writing and across the disciplines; 2) featuring writing from selected senior capstones in economics and anthropology, which in turn were used instructionally, and 3) apprenticing graduate and undergraduate students to developmental, technical, and copy editing and related publishing workflows, it could not gain even modest support from administration. We had included a sunset clause in the charter (owing, notably, to advice I’d once heard Bill Hart-Davidson give), declaring an end if after three years it did not have modest support, and in 2014, the journal shuttered, lights out. To return to the point about the politics in any loss, it would be challenging to locate tangibly the executors of those politics. Tempting as it might be to link them to individual decision-makers, in retrospect I see it more as a case of running decisions through the befuzzed filters of austerity and agentic shift, with the agentic shift pointing to managerial spreadsheets and the budgets sort of articulated therein. In far too many cases, considering the ends of writing program related things (albeit in my limited experience), the politics of loss owe to an lossy economic surrounds. With this example, I am led again to a scale question I have not resolved just yet, about the scales of gone-noting, about big gones and little gones, or perhaps about gones whose discontinuation affects the polis within the political as distinct from the oikos/house within the economic. Some gones are planets; other gones are lint.

This all leads to another keen turn of phrase in DeSilvey’s presentation, “continued ruination as management.” The phrase strikes me as worthy of return, especially given the repeated pattern of how we (in public systems) frequently aw-shucks in the faculty lounge about declining state appropriations, longing for creative and resourceful workarounds, commiserating about how tough it is to do the same (sometimes, more) with less. We do not as of yet have in higher education Officers of Continued Ruination any more than Officers of the Encouraged Parrhesiast. Change takes time; titles don’t always keep pace, and the regents know we cannot afford more administrators but perhaps we can do with just one more fiscal bard whose song sings of infocratic spreadsheets. Formula fed, resulting tabulations are never enough due to new construction and despite gainful investment profiles, stacked endowments, cheddared hedge funds, and superlative credit ratings.

DeSilvey turns to personal stories to contextualize the permission she extends to using palliative metaphors for buildings (around the 25 minute mark of the lecture, specifically). In a few cases, I have noticed others commenting on academic programs, departments, colleges, and even entire university systems using palliative metaphors, implicitly extending care ethics and related public health, healing, and medicinal ethics to institutional entities. The same for the field: a journal on its last breath, an unwell conference or organization, a hypersomniacal listserv. I take from DeSilvey’s go-ahead that the palliative predicts a gone-going arc, that it scores pronoiacally an alignment of setups more aptly figured as breakdowns. The use of palliative metaphors notes a decay path. I can’t quite come up with the right word for this. It’s not the same as a chreod, or canalized path, but it does seem linked to -hodos, or pathing. Rot, decomposition, half lives: these terminologies name something similar, yet I would like to have a term that is chreod-like while denoting decay curation. For now, composting will do, I guess, though compost hearkens to organic breakdown. In the context of a budget committee I have served on, I once heard an institutional/organizational variation of this called “reduction exercise.” I’m going to hold this detail open, wait on the word, and imagine that doing so will bring along a name for ‘chreod gone to decay.’ Possibly ‘atropheod,’ for wasting path.

My last highlight, for now, from the lecture holds onto the notion of ruderality, or the plant species who root first and participate in the reclamation of disturbance zones. Ruderality (from rudur, Latin for “rubble”) considers what grows amidst interruption, what roots within-across entropic landscapes. In the previous EWM entry, I mentioned the Spanish needles showing up with yellow-flowered force all along the embankments where I live here in SW Virginia. Their seeds attach to everything, and evidently, this assures for them a formidable expansion, especially in places subjected to bulldozing within the past decade. I wonder, too, about the interruptive landscapes that are not terrestrial/biospheric but that instead track toward what Han calls the psychospere. When attention structures are bulldozed, as can be and oftentimes is the entropic case with streaming media, social media, and especially email, what grows there, what reading and writing are possible, what roots relational and holds, substantive enough to accrue memory or meaning. I suspect I’ll be holding onto ruderality as a model for thinking about aftermaths and what rustles hopeful in anything noted as gone.

Where Are You?

Big Sweetie.

This morning, the second morning since the Wednesday late afternoon incident, upon opening the coop door, the flock descended the ladder and settled in pretty much as they usually do, Bitumen and Lightfoot at the feeder, Tiny Honey who is rebounding from her molt heading straightaway to the water, and the others kicking walnut tree detritus and leaning in for the scratch grains mixed with layer pellets, a half cup of which I scatter every morning to ease traffic at the feeder. Keeps peace. Their eyes have been up and searching, noticeably scanning for signs of return since the Wednesday late afternoon incident. This was apparent late yesterday, when I hurried home after teaching to share a few minutes with them before they tucked in, to play the xylophone cover of Shake It Off so as to warm their crossover into the dreamscape. Although I didn’t know it at the time, A., driving separately because it was undecidable for the first half of her day whether she would go to campus at all, happened not to be long behind me. The hens were almost all inside the coop when we arrived at 5:42 p.m. ET (sunset being 5:45 p.m. ET). Only Fluffy-foot, the head hen, was visible there in the coop doorway, posting up as she does for one last look-around before going in for the night, but when I emceed the Taylor Swift tunes, she doubled-back, down the ladder again, and soon after her followed Bitumen, then Lightfoot, then Cinnabon. Everyone can stay up a few extra minutes at times like these, linger for a few plinks, elongate the softly transitioning dusk. Tiny Honey stayed in; her January molt has accompanied a tendency to rest, to hold spacetime with the eggs, and so this was nothing out of the ordinary, her settled reserve. 

Different this morning, the second morning since the Wednesday late afternoon incident, was that after opening the door, setting down food and water, as we walked back toward the house, there came a sharp bird call from the vicinity of the run. Was it from the trees above the run? From one of the hens? Once, twice, again. Three or four seconds between each call. And this was a new sound; a sound I hadn’t heard before: an intense callout expressed so as to travel the holler’s uneven landscape, a sound for finding, for carrying, for bringing back.

Back at the house, I read this, an excerpt of an excerpt from Melissa Caughey’s book:

Still, for days after a hen dies, it is not uncommon for those who were closest to her to mourn the loss of their friend. From the safety of the coop, they call out, using the same sound that means “Where are you?” when they are free-ranging in the yard and can’t find a missing member of the flock. A grieving hen avoids interacting with the flock and sits in a corner with puffed-up feathers like a chicken that feels ill.

And so it happened, on Wednesday afternoon, a Cooper’s Hawk attacked and killed Big Sweetie. The chickens had been out of their run for 90 minutes. Big Sweetie was creekside, curating the muddy banks with Lightfoot and Cinnabon when the raptor made first contact. The offshed feathers tell of an encounter that started on one side of the creek and continued to the other, where A. found Big Sweetie moments later, fatally injured, likely a broken neck or back, as the hawk exited the scene. I wasn’t at home, but A.’s messageless call at 4:50 p.m. ET, near the end of the writing group session I was on (from my campus office), let me know something was not as it should be. There are known risks in free-ranging, especially in mid-late winter, but so too are there deleterious impacts for always and only ever being cooped up. This is not to rationalize away the incident but to take responsibility for caring for vulnerable birds under conditions of a sometimes-predative surrounds. Rather than go long with forensic redescription, though, Big Sweetie deserves a few more eulogistic words.

One of the Wonder Hollow Six, she and her small flock came home from the Radford Rural King in a small cardboard box on April 18, 2023. We’d sought a pair of Cinnamon Queens, a pair of Black Sex-Links, and a pair of Calico Princesses that day. As entropy would have it, with the last pair, we ended up with one Calico Princess, Big Sweetie, and one Buff Brahma, Fluffy-foot: Rural King bin sisters, if sisters from other mothers. Calico Princesses tend to have a shorter lifespan (~3-4 years) than the other breeds, a fact we learned only after bringing them home. Big Sweetie quickly distinguished herself. She was in those especially formative days the biggest and the sweetest, easy to find during that stage when chicks are all down plumage, befuzzed and nonstop peeping. The other chickens grew and eventually caught up with her in size, but never in sweetness. Her sweetness was observable in her seemingly caring deference to the other birds, a conflict-averse friendliness, a palpably joyful regard for human attention, an implicit jolliness. A. identified her quickly as her favorite bird of the six (as Bitumen is special to me, Big Sweetie was and is to A.; what can explain how such a feeling forms?). 

Ten or twelve weeks ago, when Craigs Mountain neighbor H.’s on-the-loose but thankfully slow dog lumbered with a drooling hoggishness through the holler, all of Big Sweetie’s commatriots darted with astonishing speed to the woods, but Big Sweetie, even as she was evidently terrified, rather than running—freeze!—went into statue mode, standing still-still in the tall grass, as if seized by the threat. Nothing happened. And yet, this confirmed an understanding that Big Sweetie was not in the same way as her sisters equipped with a flight response. It was as though because her disposition was deeply defined by friendliness, joy, and curiosity, there was nothing left over for capacitating fear.

Wonder Hollow Six (left to right): Lightfoot, Bitumen, Tiny Honey, Big Sweetie (front center), Fluffy-foot, and Cinnabon.

I have a hundred more anecdotes: about how she was, we think, the first to lay an egg, and how, thereafter, she would linger in the run when each of the other hens laid their first (few) eggs in September and October, companionably close-by but not over-bearing, proximally supportive and being in such a way that hints at the calling of an avian doula, were there such a thing; about how she wanted so badly to be able to perch but didn’t have the flap and spring coordination of Bitumen, Tiny Honey, Lightfoot, or Cinnabon, and still she tried and tried and tried until one day she reached the roost; that night she sat on the roosting bar for 30 minutes after dark, extending her accomplishment, holding onto the moment all for herself (and for A. who photo-documented it from the window) after the others had gone inside the coop for the night; and about what a friend she was, like the day—which just so happened to be the first day of classes last fall—when she went deep up into the pine woods with Lightfoot and Fluffy-foot, the three of them would not—golldammit!—come for calling nor for the irresistible rattle-shake of mealworms in a plastic cup, so I had to climb and navigate bramble and sweat (before leaving for work) only to nudge them from their holdout. The thing was, while the other two birds were entranced in a forest floor dust bath, Big Sweetie was just standing there, along for the joyride. 

Big Sweetie (top) stubbornly remains deep in the pine woods along with Fluffy Foot (bottom) and Lightfoot (right) who are entranced by a forest floor dust bath on Monday, August 21, 2023.

***

Might not be cut out for chicken-keeping, is one thought, one topic of conversation these past 48 hours. Or maybe, instead, this is exactly the structure of feeling we owe to this ecosphere, a structure of feeling that has gone thin socioculturally such that it is uncommon to interact with chickens in this way, to engage them as friends, good, giving, and profoundly mutualistic in what they provide us and each other. It’s been a heavy couple of days. We miss her; we’re sad. And not just we the hominids. The Wonder Hollow mixed flock is looking and calling so hard for their sixth and biggest-hearted; a song of sorrow, and so too a together and onward song, expanded by a life with Big Sweetie so fully and lovingly in it. 

Wonder Hollow Six head hen, Fluffy Foot, expresses “Where are you?” callout for Big Sweetie, who was killed Wednesday afternoon, 1/31/24, by a Cooper’s Hawk.