The best hillside
I must tell you about the cows.
My novel Heading North arrives in less than a month! Celebrate the start of ice hockey season by preordering a copy for yourself and the hockey lovers in your life. Or check out the upcoming events—I’d love to see you on tour!
Mine is an easy and bucolic commute; ten of the fifteen minutes of my drive follows a shoulderless two-lane along the Quittapahilla Creek. There are three places I look for great blue herons. Last week, one stood at a field’s green edge, the long, white feathers of its breast spread like some wizard’s beard. There are four places I slow down because I have seen cats in flowerbeds or barn windows or stalking the nearest fencerow or darting across the road. At any moment, I anticipate deer, squirrels.
(It’s not a place to go quickly. This is a thing I love.)
There are several places to observe cows along the way (as is the case along most roads in this part of Pennsylvania), but only one I particularly look forward to. The pasture sits on a southeast-facing hill, wide and sprawling so that it tucks back behind another hill. So it’s only on the westerly way home that I get to see them: a herd of longhorn cattle splashed in every color. There’s a white calf with dark circles around both eyes, dark interiors to his tilting ears, a dark muzzle. He’s so singular I can’t help but pick him out. Many are chestnut scattered with white. Some are black, pale-socked and flanked, some the same buckskin buff as the whitetails that flicker over the fences.
These cows are not overly large, their proportions more creature than product. Another herd of longhorns on a different nearby road are all bunch-shouldered; the black Angus at the very next farm are squares with hooves. It bothers me not to know more about them, some detail other than the length of their horns as a monikker. I did a little bit of research, but the most common breeds of longhorn don’t look like these, and this farm also raises other cows, the black and white and russet red of “regular” cows in these parts. Their hillside longhorns might be a home-grown cross.
Though I lack in knowledge, though, I surely brim with delight. The angle of their hillside means I have to look for them, and sometimes they’re in the hidden pinch where one hill cedes to another, so when they’re all there, spread like a spray of flowers, I see only them.
That’s the real gift: for that minute, nothing else exists in my brain. Then, each time, I think, I should tell someone about these beautiful cows. The respite, the jolt away from whatever I’m carrying home, is like a bell. I invariably end up back on the mental hamster wheel of worry and to-do, but for a while, I’m not. After that while, too, I work a little harder to preserve that electric quiet, which is another sweet boon, and something I aspire to do more often.
Some treasures:
“Lawn Skeletons” by Tom McAllister
This essay, recently published in The Sun, starts with the now-familiar giant lawn skeletons and an air of humor and follows seasons of observation through a poignant and vulnerable exploration of loss. Also, Tom just shared that his new collection of essays will be published by Rose Metal Press, so we all have something else to look forward to.
Of course I can’t not share “Pied Beauty” today.
If you’re interested in book publicity, Zoe-Aline Howard from Pine State Publicity wrote about pitching and promoting books that don’t fit neatly into particular categories—books that are Both/And—including Heading North.
In honor of my Brit Lit I course and a recent pair of presentations on medieval music, I feel I should share “Paint it Black” by bardcore sensation Hildegard von Blingin’.
And now: ice hockey.
The NHL season has begun! I’m excited and nervous about this season for the Pittsburgh Penguins; yes, the Penguins picked up Erik Karlsson, which is fabulous, but there’s an air of “last dance” hanging over this season as the superstar core of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang stand much closer to age 40 than otherwise.
The above is what I wrote on Friday, in anticipation of sharing this on Wednesday morning, after the Penguins played their first game of the season1. I’ve been looking forward to the start of hockey—basically the only thing I look forward to in any given autumn—and this season in particular for a long time. That was before Monday’s news that the NHL, after removing Pride Night celebrations from NHL arenas as of last season, is now banning players from even wrapping their sticks with Pride Tape during warm-ups. A completely voluntary show of the mildest form of support for LGBTQ+ people is not permitted, not even for fifteen minutes of a single night. Again, LGBTQ+ fans, friends, and allies are crushed between this sport that brings us immense joy and the administration of it that rejects us at every turn, to say nothing of the queer players across every level of the sport. When I started Heading North in 2012, the same year the You Can Play project launched, and Penguins defenseman Brooks Orpik was the first NHL player to use the word “gay” in his brief video in support of YCP, it felt like the book I was writing was not so far-fetched. That was the context of possibility that fueled the writing of this novel. To watch the league hurtling backwards—part and parcel of a larger international conversation about privilege, power, and false dichotomies, to be sure—is a profound sadness.
They lost, demoralizingly, after bossing the first period and a half.