Judith Chibante
Cooling the Redwoods
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
To grow up on a farm is to live with, and learn much, about nature. Its turns and cycles. What it requires to thrive. How it is impartial in giving bounty or scarcity, depending on how it is heeded and tended.
Trees in particular have called to me. A stand of eucalyptus lined the ditch that ran along the back of my family’s farm. These huge trees planted in clusters are intended as windbreaks in open countryside. I grew to know a particular tree with open lower limbs, ones to scramble up and into—what became my quiet, after-school refuge.
The scrub oaks of the California coastal range look black at a distance. Then, when closer, you see the dark green of leafy canopies atop gnarly trunks. Some so aged, though, you can see through them, skeletons backlit by greening hills. They seem to beg for immortality. I’ve tried to help with that through taking countless pictures of them!
The orchards of the Central Valley bloom with amazing vigor in springtime. Whole fields lie covered with the variegated pinks of peaches and plums, the cool whites of almonds and apricots. Busy among them are clouds of bees from stacks of hives set out to help assure pollination. Here—as with any orchards—is a blending of nature with the intent and work of humankind. Men and women of the land plant, water, and harvest food and fiber (such as cotton) in concert with the natural world.
And I live amid redwoods--grand beings of cellulose and light. With red, shaggy trunks that soar sixty feet into the heavens, and limbs that sigh and sough through rain or fierce heat or calm, they are guardians of time and space. How blessed to know them.
JUDITH CHIBANTE lives amid a small ‘forest’ of eight redwoods (each named for a famous poet) in central California. She grew up on a small farm and is a 24-year cancer survivor. Her poems have appeared in Survivors’ Review, Song of the San Joaquin, High Desert Journal, and four anthologies of the Ina Coolbrith Circle. Finishing Line Press published a first chapbook, Radio In the Night, in 2017. In the past, she taught poetry at the middle and high school levels, and edited a volume of poetry for teachers. She holds the rank of Professor Emerita of Education in the California State University.