At the Dusk of the Year

As you see from the title of this post, I meant to publish it BEFORE 2021, but I guess it works as a beginning as well as it would have for an ending. 

Crazy 2020 ended with a sorrow and a joy. 

A writer who brought us to the wild edges of the world, Barry Lopez, died the day after Christmas. Lopez came into my life with Crossing Open Ground when I was studying the essay in graduate school—he was on my bookshelf among John McPhee, Annie Dillard, John Muir and Edward Abbey and has since been joined by local writers Gerald Callahan, Sue Ellen Campbell Deborah Thompson and John Calderazzo. Ironically, Lopez, who wrote passionately about saving the natural world including staving off global warming, lost his long-time Oregon home to a forest fire this year.  Among the first pages I read when I returned Lopez was this gem “The heron lifts up as slowly as a dirigible and evaporates downstream.”  Perhaps we can send 2020 packing with those words as well.   

The great joy at the end of this apocalyptic year is the final approval for installation of Loveland artist Jane DeDecker’s sculpture, Every Word We Utter in the U.S. Capital.  Amid the din of Covid, this event could easily slip our attention, but it deserves not to.  The sculpture honors the women who fought for the passage of the 19^th amendment and features several of them including Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells.  Earlier this year the sculpture was a subject in a pairing of poetry and art in The Red Shawl Poems as a part of the Vote: A Centennial Celebration exhibit at the Loveland Museum.  What an appropriate pen stroke to  end this suffering year.