August 2, 2009
Picture this: From early spring to September, your home is a green oasis set on a rugged dead-end road. You spend most days surrounded by red cliffs, the Gunnison River and acres of ripening organic fruit. In winter, you move to a welcoming house on the San Miguel River, just a half hour shy of Telluride.
You're beautiful—inside and out—and you have the kind of singing voice that inspires duets from birds in Disney films. You and your solid, hardworking husband have three children: a bright daughter (now a graduate student) you gained when you married, a sweet and wild five-year-old boy and a fierce angel of a girl, just now one. To top it off, your latest collection of poetry, Holding Three Things at Once, was nominated for the Colorado Book Award this year.
Sound like heaven?
Well, it is a kind of heaven—one that also includes hail, killing frosts, mosquitoes, black widow spiders, rattlesnakes, bindweed, mullein and the challenges of parenting in isolation. Still, my friend Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's life looks pretty good.
Rosemerry and I first met over poetry. I asked her to teach for a program I directed, and she reciprocated, inviting me to stay with her while I taught second graders in Telluride. As I remember it, when my husband and I arrived at her doorstep, Rosemerry welcomed us with her new son in her arms, her open home perfectly ordered and her warm hospitality irresistible. During the first five minutes of our visit, our new friend stepped on a wobbly stone and fell downhill with baby Finn in her arms. Rather than succumb to disaster, Rosemerry pulled off a cradling summersault and popped back to her impressive height unscathed, both she and her son smiling.
I didn't know how very defining this moment I witnessed would turn out to be. Rosemerry does more than roll with the punches. She dances with them. It's something she's been learning to do with more and more grace as she faces the challenges of running an orchard and being a mother. She tells me a story about how Finn, now a very curious five-year-old, recently reached for a (forbidden) pan, and how her carefully crafted homemade pizza ended up face-down on the kitchen floor. "The kid will get curious, the hail is going to come falling, no matter what. We don't get to choose whether there's a freeze that decimates our crop. We do get to choose how we react to it."
The combination of roles—orchardist and mother—can be harsh: "I love being a mom, but it's not easy. It's in fact much harder than I thought it would be." Being at the whim of her kids and her trees has given her "a master's degree in how I'm not in control," she says. "There are 20,000 trees anchoring us here, and they don't care if it's your birthday—or if you're having a baby. If the apricots need to be picked now, they need to be picked now. And still," she reflects, "there's a magic to this kind of stewardship, to being tied to this place and these trees."
In the face of every-day joys and demands, Rosemerry employs a daily poetry practice as a way to honor and feed herself. "Poetry is the thing that's just mine. Those few minutes at the end of the day keep the machine oiled and functioning." Moreover, she says, they help her keep perfectionism at bay and get pen on paper—fast. "Writing a poem a day helps me think about poetry beyond product or book. It teaches me that I can't always write a masterpiece. It's okay to let today's poem be mediocre—there's always tomorrow's poem." And if a masterpiece does happen to arrive? "Well then, I've honored it by showing up for it."
So, in the heat of the moment, how did Rosemerry react to the pizza flipped to the floor? "I thought to myself, 'I get to decide how to respond,' and then I said to Finn, 'What a bummer.'"
By empathizing instead of yelling, she allied herself with her son, and by the time she'd reconstructed the pizza to the best of her ability, Finn was telling her, "Wow, Mom; good repair job!"
In spite of the challenges of her many roles, Rosemerry is always a powerful model of gratitude. "This is an incubation time, I think. Living at the end of a dead end road, having this opportunity to be nested here, surrounded by ripening peaches, red cliffs for exploring, a river for jumping in… I get to really be engaged with my kids and experience their daily discoveries, whether it's watching Vivian beginning to express herself through signs or building a steamroller out of cardboard boxes with Finn."
"For the last year and a half, I think every poem I've written has been about this: Allowing things to be what they are." As she says this, I can hear the smile in her voice. "Being a mother is exhausting, and it's not just about energy and time; kids are constantly showing you, pushing you, teaching you. You get pushed to the edge physically—how little sleep can you get by on? But at the same time, who you are and what is possible continues to widen. The circle gets wider and wider. I love my life, and it's hard work. It's helped me a lot to remind myself of what one good friend said—that, even when I feel I'm breaking, I'm breaking open, not down."
To read poems and articles by Rosemerry, learn more about her poetic life and check out her books and CDs, visit www.wordwoman.com.
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