Earlier this week, I sat at our kitchen table and began a familiar and comforting ritual: a mug of hot tea in easy reach and a 2023 weekly planner, ready for me to mark important dates and reminders. I didn’t note any New Year’s resolutions, though. Many of us probably keep a mental checklist of habits we want or need to change — but the promises we make to ourselves can happen in any season. My lists have included an unhealthy fondness for potato chips, habitual detours around the vacuum cleaner, a chronically disorganized desk and a lifelong identity as a night owl. Over the years, I shook up some of those patterns by making conscious, daily decisions to change. Now I snack on potato chips for only two weeks a year. I’ve made peace with the vacuum cleaner, and I reorganize my desk immediately after I finish writing an Impetuous Gardener column. Even those superficial changes weren’t easy, and I still don’t go to sleep before midnight or answer the phone before 9:30 a.m., unless I know my family is calling.
Hidden weeds that grow deep roots are more of a challenge. Social mingling can be difficult for me. I’m an introvert by nature and usually prefer a role as a bystander. But I remember being a newcomer to Moscow and standing at a window in our new home, trying to absorb the bright energy of the neighborhood through a pane of glass. I finally took a long breath, opened the kitchen door and stepped out into a sisterhood of women, from across the block, up and down B Street, and beyond. Soul-baring conversations on the front porch. Neighborhood news. Politics and theology at the edge of my garden. And laughter that can come so fast, with so much gusto, that we collapse on the lawn.
I wish I were as free-spirited in the rest of my life as I am in my garden, alive with dramatic flowers, jewel colors and wild joy. In this new year, I needed a creative shakeup. Normally I would have scrolled past an online commentary that promised to explain “How 17 syllables can change your life.” The headline intrigued me, but I doubted that reading haiku would be a life-changing epiphany. Haiku is subtle, often beautiful Japanese poetry, composed of three lines and 17 syllables, and it virtually never uses titles, rhyme, metaphor or simile. The article challenged readers not only to read haiku, but to write it — and to stay within a framework that begins with precise, descriptive imagery and ends with an overarching image of the related month or season.
An assignment for a senior honors English class in high school forced me to write my first and only haiku, and I found its rigid structure frustrating and nearly impossible. Now, more than 50 years later, I decided to stretch my writing boundaries by shrinking them all the way down to a minuscule word picture. I already know from long experience that it’s easier to write long than to write tight — but only 17 syllables?
Last Sunday, with haiku on my mind, I wandered through our living room until my focus landed on a holiday scene I’d made for the desktop in the entryway. A small log cabin sat between frosted evergreen trees, and a herd of plastic deer approached a figurine of a little girl in a red parka and mittens, standing outside the cabin. The white reindeer are 70 years old, brittle now and nearly weightless, part of a vintage Santa scene from Lee’s childhood. The herd had been standing upright on our desk earlier in the day, but now they lay tipped on their sides, blown over by a puff of wind when I opened the front door. I found the second image for my poem in our yard, where a rather bedraggled angel, suspended high from a tree branch all winter, seemed bowed down by recent snowfalls. With the deer and the angel vivid in my mind, I wrote a 17-syllable haiku in intervals through the day, scrawling and scratching out fragments, counting syllables and fine-tuning images:
Plastic reindeer dozed / Wet feet on grounded angel. New year / Christmas has melted.
Craft Rozen used 730 words to write about her 17-syllable haiku. Email her at scraftroze@aol.com.
