Whatever Follows

Whatever might follow in the weeks ahead I have to say this has been one beautiful season, and in spite of the usual vacillations. Temperatures hit the mid-80s one day and four days later we came close enough to a hard frost that a baby maple I see every day took a nasty fright and went instantly crimson. Now as I write, a big wind is muscling around outside,  giving even the grass blades a stern combing-back.I sometimes hear westerners say our old New England is just all damp and claustrophobic with lowering skies and too-near horizons.  I don't see it that way. Anyhow it’s sure not that way now on these bright tangy days that have us all feeling happy and energized as we kick through the leaves and set out those jolly toy balloons that the world calls pumpkins. My own personal housemate got to feeling so energized last weekend that he climbed out on two of our roofs to prune the limbs of trees that in actual fact didn't need pruning at all (but that's just me.) I watched with my heart in my mouth as he executed one deep squat after another while balancing inches from roof's edge and then extending to its farthest reach a 12-food pole with a lethal sickle on the end and – SNAP!  pulling the trigger. Here he is first contemplating the job...And beginning to execute it...I sent our visiting houseguest Machias out to spot him in case he started to pitch forward and fall. (Machias is six-foot-nine with a rower's mighty legs so I thought he could maybe execute a rescue.)    But "I'M FINE!" insisted  my mate -and by some stroke of luck he turned out to BE fine as this triumphant look testifies.Myself, I attempted no such feats of strength and balance that day. I just walked a few miles, set out some seasonal decorations and reveled in all this beauty.Here was the sun that day, glowing still strong at 5pm, behind one of our front porch columns....Then at the top here was the sun only moments later in the side yard, filtered through our little dogwood...And finally, out back, here was the sun setting our neighbors' tree even further aflame.All this was on the Saturday. Then, on the Sunday, we had the privilege of attending the wedding celebration of a couple who, together with their families, threw one amazing party.It took place on a hillside farm with 180 guests on hand to enjoy popcorn and cider, adult beverages of every kind and food that never stopped coming.Best of all, the two brides helped make the music. Bride Alli, from all I can tell, plays every instrument on God's green earth and her band was playing; whereas Bride Angela, by her own admission not a trained singer, took the mic and spoke of the meaning this one particular song has for them both.  Then, at first softly, and then in full and glorious voice, performed "Hallelujah,"  by the late Leonard Cohen.Here's my favorite recording of this wonderful song, that today seems to me to capture all the beauty and longing of earth's seasons, and even of our own too-short lives.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_NpxTWbovE

Before It's Over

Before it's over I wanted to stick up for this month in which we still find ourselves. It was way back at November's start that I made a last-minute dash to the supermarket and passed a house entirely decorated for the glow-fest known as The Holidays.I have to admit my heart sank at the sight. “What about November?” I yelled, though I was totally alone in my car. What I meant was, "How did we go from Halloween’s wild and jokey motifs straight to reindeer and snowmen, without giving November her rightful moment on the stage?" Because November has a beauty all her own.Maybe it’s dark as you read this. If so, close your eyes and picture what lies just outside your window:

• The branches of the bare trees that make of the sky a span of leaded glass.
• The leaves that still do cling to the trees dressed now in muted shades of bronze and copper.
• The green of the grass that, somewhere in the last ten weeks, woke up from its heat-flattened August swoon and returned to the party, looking as fresh and springy as the grass of April.

Only it isn’t April. The grass knows it. We know it. Every living thing knows that one day soon we will wake to find that a hard frost has taken hold of the earth. Then, our long hibernation will have begun.And that’s fine. It’s fine that winter comes each year. It’s fine too that the soil locks down tight and the temperatures dip so low they make your very fillings.It's fine because when winter comes it will bring us winter joys. We will make more stews. We will gather around the hearth, even if that hearth is just one of those nice fat candles that burns for hours. Heck, if we haven’t forgotten how, maybe we will do what they used to call “entertaining” and ask some friends over for a visit.We have a good 14 weeks of such pleasures ahead, all of which will be ushered in by these bulbs and snowmen and reindeer that I was so surprised to see in the days just after Halloween.I am more ready to see them now, though, and for sure I am seeing more of them every day on my route to the grocer’s. It was just that it hurt to think of November’s muted beauty going uncelebrated.November feels to me like that quiet guest at a social gathering who draws no attention to herself and so maintains a silent presence at the edge of things. I guess I just kept thinking: if I were that guest, wouldn’t I want somebody to come over with a smile and greet me too?

Is This the SAME PLACE?

 Right now the air is so damp and sodden!I feel like I need gills instead of lungs to keep on living.And the vegetation outside is just drenched with chlorophyll..It's ALL SO GREEN !Even the inchworms are green, to say nothing of the mold growing on that one clementine that got stuck at the bottom of the fruit bowl.It looks like a fuzzy green bowling ball for Dopey and Sneezy and pals now.But seriously..Can this really BE the same block?The same state?Nay, the same hemisphere, that used to look like THIS?Can this be the same hemisphere where, when  the sun began to set and the icicle below halted whatever dripping it had been doing OUTSIDE the house and instead got busy dripping secretly INSIDE, painting so many of our walls and windows a rich caramel brown?I mean can this above picture really be  taken from the same exact spot in my house as THIS?It can be and it is.... and all I can say right now is Mama Nature she does like to keep us hoppin'!

Where is My Bathing Suit NOW?

Waking this morning and entering the living room I beheld a kind of light that seemed almost valedictory, almost literally tinged with shades of farewell.  I can't explain it but it feels as if the sunlight in September is coming now from a different star; as if the sun we knew all summer called on some quieter, less flashy sibling and said, "You take over. I'm beat."Just ten days ago it was all might and haze. A week ago Saturday, September the 6th marked the hottest day we had all summer when even the dogs were looking around for that can of antiperspirant. You walked outside and the sun accosted you instantly. It came and sat on your head and pressed down.I hear in Colorado this week's temps went from the 80s to the 30s in a 24-hour period. That didn't happen where I live north of Boston but something like it has occurred. Tucking in to bed last night by a lake in New Hampshire, the weather alert on my phone told of a frost advisory.Our sandals will soon be behind us. Flip-flops probably already are, along with sleeveless tank tops and the sarong-style skirts such as women might wrap quick around their bathing suits before running out to buy the groceries.Bathing suits already seem a faraway concept to me now, and anyway the elastic on the leg of that nice purple one of mine is all shot.No matter now. I’m not going near any pools. I have a zillion other plans now, all spelled Back At It.Here is a picture of one of the only creatures you’ll see in most pools now: the cheerful ducks, who are gathering daily and muttering by the shores of city ponds.They have a plan too and that plan is spelled Going South.The rest of us will stay here and see what God sends. Here are some lines addressed to Him by the composer Francis Wylie in one of my most favorite hymns: 

Thou from Whose unfathomed law the year in beauty flows,Thyself the vision passing by in crystal and in rose,Day unto day doth utter speech, and night to night proclaim,In ever changing words of light, the wonder of Thy Name.

Amen to that sentiment! Now let's go seize this matchless day!

Summer Morning : Earth

When we’ve all moved lock, stock and candy wrapper to some giant biosphere high up in Space, what will be said of our time on this planet? What will be remembered, say, of a summer day here on Earth?

Will anyone recall the young women riding morning buses on their way to work?Earlier this week, I looked up from the task of wedging groceries into my dented little car, and saw, on a bus idling at a red light, one such young woman perched on the inward-facing seatsShe wore a dress scooped low in the back, and I watched as with sure and practiced hands she reached behind her to arrange her hair, lifting and looping sections, disciplining its long braids, until, at last satisfied, she let the heavy whole of it drop against bare skin.  Where is the video camera for moments like these?Later that day, 100 miles farther west, at a rest stop on Interstate 90, I wondered that same thing again, as I sat on one of the arc-shaped stone benches encircling the stone tables on the Visitors’ Center's leafy patio.  I watched as the scalloped edges of the umbrellas sheltering this Stonehenge-like seating danced in the wind and thought, “If I could only paint! I wouldn’t need a video camera if I had the artist’s eye to capture this breeze in a series of brush strokes.”I looked around more and saw a woman well into her 70s so delighted with the pre-school child holding her hand that she was literally skipping from her car to where I sat, the little boy skipping with her and the two talking delightedly away even as they flitted from the hot asphalt to that cool bower of shade where we outdoor diners sat, paused on our several journeys.That pause is a big element of life on this Earth in the warmer months I think.I move through my days, same as I do all year, but find myself lately taking more time to notice each moment.Yesterday I was trying to clear a sink drain and accidentally dropped the small red cap to the can of the harsh chemical down into the drain too, thus doubly stopping it up, and the irony of that fact made me ponder.I called the plumber and when he arrived we chatted away about all the small mild ‘reprimands’ Fate sends our way. “Look at this,” he said, indicating his reddened left arm. “I was weeding around the foundation of my house when a whole swarm of yellow-jackets buzzed up out of the ground and stung me!" "I have eight or ten bites here,” he added, pointing. “Yikes!” I said. “And nothing hurts worse than a yellow jacket’s sting!” “Oh, but that’s not all! The next day when it started itching like crazy, I realized: That weed patch was full of poison ivy!”    It seems likely to me that here was a conversation that would NOT have taken place in the hurry-up cold months.The young woman would have been in a coat for one thing, her lovely back all covered; and the canvas umbrellas would not have even been there to snap in the breeze; and for sure the older lady would not have been skipping over stone-cold asphalt.Time seems to slow in the warm months and open these small still pools into which we can for once really see ourselves living, the way God sees us and, let us hope, the way God smiles in the seeing. 

Old Time vs. New

The old timepieces were more forgiving than all the new kind, as this sweet poem testifies. I offer it on this day with its oncoming plunge into early darkness later on.  It's called "Time Change" but I have no record of its author. Lovely anyway: 

Time is different with a digital watch.The minutes that used to limp aroundThe small dial on my left wristCome in early these daysLike the train. I wound it myself thenBut now time has changed.It jumps up at mePulsing Hours minutes seconds even daysInto then.My new watch saysIt’s now or never, kid. Whatever became of o’clock?You could make it last as long as an ice barOr another kiss,Walk in lateAnd still be on time.

 

These June Days

On June days like the ones we’re in, now the birds begin talking before 5:00 even. Today I heard them tuning up a good twenty minutes before the old clock had even struck 4:00 down in the living room. And even at 9:30 last night bands of daylight still clung to the horizon.Every year at this time I feel like I’m walking around inside one of those 1940s children’s book you can still find in second-hand stores, with the perfectly puffed clouds set against skies of heavenly blue.I look around and think Where are Grandpa and Grandpa who the children visit on their farm? Where is the littlest child with her doll carriage eternally trying to dress the cat in baby clothes?Every year at this time I feel like I'm back in Eden, that state that all of us seem to dimly remember, before we and the world tilted into brokenness and error.It seems we inhabit a sort of continual Present tense on any June morning with its blossoms and its birds. There is no future to fear, no past to either regret or pine for.Maybe it’s the color of the grass, or the proliferation of blossoms everywhere. You’re not expecting all these blooms somehow. I know I’m newly amazed every year all the plants that go to the trouble of flowering, even the small humble one that you picture at the bottom of the ladder, that plant whose mission you thought was to clutch soil merely; even this plant is staging a great show of beauty. It reminds me of the bike parades you went to as a kid, your dented little Schwinn festooned in flounce and sparkle.The world is so festooned right now. Just walk outside and see.

Feeling It

Hey the winter is over, storm or no storm. That old snowpack is beginning to look like the dough the pizza-man tosses over his head so as to fill it with air.Look at these winds, that are now so strong. Out my window I see the large trunk-like limbs of an oak swaying like the branches of a willow.Between the winds and this new strong sun,we're all getting kind of giddy.At the dry cleaners’ the other day, a woman I have never met turned to me as we waited in line. “I know you!” she cried. “You’re the one whose sister sings opera!”I am in fact not the one whose sister sings opera and said so as kindly as I could.“Well anyway, I know I’ve seen you at those summer concerts in the courtyard of the Episcopal Church!”Wrong again, but why say so when this late-winter thaw brings such high spirits?For sure it was high spirits that moved the tiny girl I passed at the town pond to bend over and toss her little skirt clear up over her head, revealing a paradise of ruffles on the seat of her little undies.“Hayley, put your skirt down right now!” cried her mother. “Why would you even DO that?”Silly question, when it seemed to me she did it because the geese were also doing it at the thawing margins of this chilled champagne-bucket of a pond. Down went their heads into the water. Up came their feathered bottoms, as gloriously arrayed as young Hayley’s ruffles.All I know is that something is coming and it isn’t more winter, in spite of today's snow... In spite of the fact that the Great Blizzard of 1888 that brought snow to the sills of the second-story windows began on March 11^th of that year.Even that old oak tree feels it. Day and night now, I watch its great limbs, stirring, stirring the sky like vast wooden spoons.

Made New

This is how lovely the world looked at 7 yesterday morning. It just about took my breath away to see it.That's the tangle of branches that by early April are kid-gloved up to their elbows in magnolia blossoms. This tree stands just outside the second-floor room where I write every day.They were all lovely, those trees, dipped in icy batter as they were. This is the ginkgo, that weeps away its leaves all at once, within a couple of hours come fall. A video of that stunning phenomenon is here.In sum, every view from every window was lovely. Still, the loveliest, somehow, was the sight of our neighbor's house on that same morning, from a different window in my study. Take away the cable and phone wires and it could be a Currier & Ives print, couldn't it though?

The Squirrels Know

I feel for this guy, who I found trying to raid the hawthorn tree for berries before the poor birds could get to any.They’re running out of food out there!It’s been mighty mild for these parts but still: The critters know what's coming.I hung around in my bedroom for almost an hour to get this shot. (I have 20 lousy shots.)There were four squirrels in the tree at the time but this guy seemed the perkiest. And then he turned and gave me his handsome profile.And I was just close enough, my breath fogging the cold windowpane  - though if you click on the picture to enlarge it you'll see the mesh of screening.Just look at him, shoveling it in with those slim little fingers.  I suppose he’s offering a lesson to us all, but with the holiday aftershocks still bouncing against me, I’m still too fried to figure out what it is. 

The Day Before the Thanking Day

Yesterday here in the precincts north of Boston we had classic Day Before Thanksgiving weather, with air like apple cider and a sun so strong the shadows lay black on the bright-green grass.If I were still little, I’d have looked out at that bright green grass and seen pheasants doing their strut-walk in our yard, funny as it seems to say that since we lived in a city.Lowell was the nation’s first planned city, a factory town filled with mills and rowhouses and churches for every wave of immigration… And yet here we had pheasants out back.Why? Because the city sits on the confluence of two rivers, muscular and sudsy, and they are the real main characters in Lowell’s story.Even now, you drive through Lowell and Lawrence and Haverhill and all you have to do is squint your eyes to see the old fields lying just beyond the downtown, just under the suburban-style homes with their driveways and their swing sets.Our old house in Lowell sits on what had been, since Revolutionary times, an apple orchard. The house to our right was the farmhouse and the one to our left was its barn. We were the dooryard between the two, with this row of little apple trees marching out back, crooked and stooped like the oldest soldiers in the parades of your childhood.The oldest soldiers at the school assemblies of my youth were from the Great War mostly. I even remember one from the Spanish American War, that fraudulent 1890’s conflict cooked up by a nation bent on empire. When my mom was little they saw veterans from the Civil War at their school assemblies, imagine it! There’s footage on YouTube of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg that would break your heart.  It makes me think of how seldom we ever think on the blood that was shed over time. After Memorial Day, after Veterans Day, who thinks of all that sacrifice, besides the families whose sons and daughters who have most recently shed it?I feel ashamed for all we take for granted in this country; I mean for the peace, both and political that allows someone like me to dream back and paint pictures of times gone by.We wake today to rain in New England. Rain with all its own charms. Rain that send us hurrying back indoors, grateful for the hot tea and the dry towel…I opened my eyes at 6am to the rain. Then I closed them again and saw those pheasants, and our neighbor's great old dog Tramp coming over to greet us as we jumped in the swirling leaves, the brown oak leaves that are falling this week, the last to go always, like me the most reluctant to acknowledge an end to the gaudy party. 

the next door neighbors' glider, with the old apple trees that dotted both our yards

Drownin' Here

I spent two whole days cleaning out the hall closet, and what did it do for me really but make me see how ridiculously thin I was back when that green leather coat was new? (How did we survive the fashions of the 70s with the super-tight waists? How did we breathe even ?But what I really want to say here is you're right, you are so right, all you wise souls who posted comments yesterday noting that the less you have, the lighter your burden. Because I also worked all weekend in the dining room which you see as it looked on Friday. Just try having Thanksgiving around six lamps and a world of wicker! The outside of the house is being painted – the screened in porch too - and everything has been in chaos for the last five weeks. If my camera had a wide-angle lens you could also see the box of human bones, a story for another time.BUT! Less than 12 hours after the painters were done with the screened-in porch I had carried every last lamp, footstool and table back out there.Single-handedly 'cause Dave was away.Then I dug out my grandmother’s pale frail china from 1903 and her brittle little goblets. I found the pickle forks and the celery dish, unearthed and re-washed the tablecloth, and the tablecloth that goes over the tablecloth and ironed all 80 yards of both of them.Now I'm turning to my mom’s wedding silver, which of course has gone goldenrod yellow with the passage of time and needed to be polished the old fashioned way (with the stuff that turns your hands black that means), then thoroughly washed, then dried with a linen towel and polished some more etc etc.And the whole time all I could think was how appalled a guy like Henry Thoreau would be, who said Simplify! simplify!How appalled Khalil Gibran would be who said Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.This place isn’t even an anchor; it’s the Titanic and maybe it’s going down!“Jaaaaack! Jaaaack! That’s me as Kate Winslet.Or maybe we’re that old couple who stayed in their stateroom, hugging in their bed ‘til the last.Anyway I’m not really complaining; I love the old things, the Limoges given to poor Grandmother Carrie, who died in her 32nd year.I practically put her soup bowls to my ear and listen to them, just as if they were sea shells.And you know what? Sometimes, sometimes, I think I actually hear things. 

Why We Clean

Now is the time you find all the little hammocks the spiders laid out on your windowsills, when the days were long and the bees danced their tipsy jigs.But the spiders are gone now.Roll up their bedding and wish them the best, wherever they might be. Think of Charlotte and her pig-friend Wilbur and send up a prayer of thanks that you too have had such a nice long time in the sun.Now is the time to pull out those winter clothes, and how many coats or jackets are there that I haven’t worn for a good 15 years? Give them away I tell myself.In my hall closet I have just found a pair of pink rubber boots with flouncy fake-fur trim and I can tell you it has been many a moon since the people drawn to such footwear lived here. I found Old Dave's high school football jacket too, its white leather sleeves slightly darkened with age and “Dave, Co-Captain” stitched on the front.I put it in the attic. In one corner, I found two family tablecloths wrapped in protective brown paper, rolled on fat cardboard dowels and left to stand in the odd corner of four different houses over a 50-year period. Will anyone ever use them again, artfully patched as they are and speckled with faint brown speckles? And from what old gravy boat, I wonder? From what brimming glass of claret?I put them back in their corner.There are consolations in cleaning, letting go of what needs letting go of and holding tight to what we can’t yet part with.I found old gloves, my favorite kind, in black, my favorite color. Five identical gloves for the right hand and none at all for the left so what to do here? Save them in case their wandering partners ever return, or throw them away? Such quandaries lie at the heart of all cleaning projects.Finally, way in the back, I found the fur coat our male cat fiercely peed on when he was sick and on his way to the vet. He hissed and arched too, mistaking it for a living foe. I put in a whole new lining but still, I seldom wear the thing. Keep it or pass on?I fished in its pockets and pulled out a slip from the dry cleaners. I studied the items listed there and hey, hadn’t I just been looking for that mauve-colored gypsy-looking dress just the other day?I closed the closet door and drove right to the cleaners.I gave the slip to the man at the counter, who, five minutes later, smilingly brought forth a whole armful of clothes I had put in storage there…in May  of 2007, fully four and a half years ago.So now I have three good wool skirts, a tweed suit, three wool jackets, the missing gypsy number and four warm sweaters I did not have before. A whole winter wardrobe almost. I just have to throw on the coat and be willing to wear right-handed gloves on my left hand and I will be SET. (And tell you what, those cute pink boots with the fur trim are looking better to me all the time.)

Clarity?

Saturday was the night of the big close moon and yesterday was the day of the wide blue sky. So maybe today, with snow falling again, it makes sense to see the weekend for what it was: a window of.. can I call it clarity after that crazy week I put in last week?My friend Bobbie tells me I should stay away from all 'screens' one day a week and I actually did sort of do that this past weekend. I took a lot of pictures and read sections of the five or six books I’ve got going and fretted about the fact that we’re bombing another country. What I didn't do is remain chained to my laptop, beaming my faint message like E.T. out to the vast and empty skies.We had driven to our summer place partly to get out of the way of our new housemates as they settled in at our house - it seemed the  kind thing to do -  and it was beneficial to us as well. Certainly seeing that moon rise over a lake would clear anyone's vision.I’m working hard at figuring out why I pack so much 'doing' into my days and will report on that once I'm done. But at 11 last night when I turned out my light and saw the glow from that nice fat moon, a poem came into my mind. Mary Oliver's "The Moths" which I copy here as if it were prose. Read it aloud in as fast and breathless a way possible and see if you don't identify with the speaker at all. I know I do:

There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know what kind, that glimmers, it does, in the daylight, in mid-May in the forest, just as the pink moccasin flowers are rising. If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped, the pain was unbearable, If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t  be saved, The pain was unbearable. Finally, I had noticed enough. All around me in the forest the white moths floated. How long do they live, fluttering in and out of the shadows? ‘You aren’t much’, I said one day to my reflection in a green pond, and grinned. The wings of the moths catch the sunlight and burn so brightly, At night, sometimes, they slip between the pink lobes of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn, motionless in those dark halls of honey.

Rushing around or sitting motionless, we can all be glad of this: spring began last night and even the coldest, thickest ice is cashing in its chips s and starting to liquidate.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhipkWMbKA]

Here it Comes

Today everything's great: I just saw six Canada geese unpacking their bags by the lake across from here. Two weeks more and they’ll be standing on our grass huddling together like middle-schoolers at the mall. They like to stand on our grass and I like to see them do it. I figure what they’re saying is “This place is more ours than yours, just so you know. We’ve been coming here at the end of every winter since before you took down that ugly swing-set after your kids grew up; since before you put it up ten years before that. In fact we were standing on this piece of land before there were even any houses here at all.”Anyway that’s what I like to think they're saying. Call me a masochist but I like being put in my place.The geese do that to me every year when they come back: shrink me down to size I mean. The way the light looks just now does that to me too. And also the crocuses that just won’t die no matter what kind of winter gets thrown at them. And just when I’m thinking things can’t get any greater, gardenia plants go on sale at the supermarket and the luscious scent of those velvety blossoms practically takes the top of my head off.

you can practically smell  them even in a picture!

How It Happens

You'd think we'd feel more energized with the clocks all set back but I sure didn't. Not yesterday anyway, even BEFORE the sun started setting at 4  - or was it 3:00? Was that twilight I saw at 2pm?  All I know is I panicked and fled, packed my bags and drove two hours in hopes of what? Outrunning darkness?I serve on the board of my town’s Multicultural Network and our big Annual Retreat/Workshop took place this past weekend. This meant I sat in a circle in a folding chair on Friday night from 6 to 9 and again all day Saturday. David, meanwhile, was up at our summer place raking leaves and dragging in kayaks. “Don’t bother coming, T," he told me. “I’ll be home by noon Sunday and it’s a long drive for you to begin upon at 5pm.”It turned out to be much later than that when I began upon it and the road all dark before me. It still seemed  like a good though because I pictured that we'd have this bright clear day and even sleep over Sunday night and what an adventure that would be! And with the clocks turned back we’d wake easily at 5 and be home by 8, even allowing for the slow  flow of traffic back toward the city on a Monday.But Sunday's skies were cloudy and when I tuned into the Weather Channel and saw high winds, rain, and snow predicted for today I lost all hope. I climbed back into the same car I had climbed out of just 18 hours before and drove the hundred miles home.So here I awoke in the land of my many obligations with rain hammering at the window panes and the remaining leaves swirling like crazy dancers. All weekend I felt a sadness, coming as I now see, from both the sudden loss of light and the more gradual loss of the bright green life that has been ours since April.There's a poem called "How It Happens" by W. S. Merwyn, former Poet Laureate and author of “The Shadow of Sirius,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2009. I offer it here to match the day:

The sky said I am watchingto see what youcan make out of nothingI was looking up and I saidI thought youwere supposed to be doing thatthe sky said Manyare clinging to thatI am giving you a chanceI was looking up and I saidI am the only chance I havethen the sky did not answerand here we arewith our names for the daysthe vast days that do not listen to us

my office 7am

Stop Growing!

This is what my house looks like by the time August rolls around, ha ha, but I do have to say: the ivy wrapping my office window feels like it’s starting to smother me, like the moss in that Emily Dickinson poem. Also, there’s a cricket hiding someplace downstairs. Also,  the garbage disposal just choked on its own vomit and died altogether: too many zucchini peels. Plus there’s this ungodly smell outside the back door, as if you threw a bunch of rotting cabbage and crab shells.

This slightly gross picture is of the nest of the birds who perched on my office windowsill all summer. Mrs. Dove raised two babies in late June, sent them on their way, then forgot all about where babies come from, returned to her perch and began once again entertaining the advances of Mr. Dove, leading to a whole NEW set of babies who sat there in the same original nest along with so much bird poo it lapped against the glass like kudzu. When they finally left a week or two ago I lifted the sash and hosed it all away, bedroom, nursery, kitchen and bath, which were, of course, all one room. It was mean of me maybe but this life, this teeming life! It’s wearing me out!

This is me out back looking for the source of that wicked smell. What can I say? Eve in Eden I ain't.

St. Francis Called

When the sun came up today after that wild little storm the world was all pearl and opal, with a sky the color the streets of Heaven are said to be and I would have felt entirely joyous - if I weren’t worried about the animals. It’s been a hard winter and there's just not much to eat anymore.

For Christmas this year two of our kids gave David and me this amazing motion-activated camera that you mount on a tree to catch the animal-action around your house. So now when I start feeling sorry for myself I call up their images and try to telepathically say to them that Winter is almost over, which now that I think of it they probably know better than I do.

I also have my eye on those neat little slabs of seed-covered suet you can buy and hang outside. They'd be nice for the birds and squirrels anyway, though David always  says they’re a bad idea. “Once you START feeding them you can never STOP and what're you gonna, keep it up til you die?" he says, an argument that seems to me to offer lessons all its own.So yeah think I’m going to buy one or two and hang them this afternoon. I figure I can do something for these little ones even if I can’t think what to do for the raccoon, or the flouncy fox, or that dapper little skunk or these delicate deer here coming as a family to see what they can find.coming all together to see what they can find.

Sensitive Wallpaper

(This is the ivy at my window today.....)So what if I just SAID HOW I FELT here every day and added yet another layer of sensitive wallpaper to the walls of this Enormous Room the Internet. Sensitive wallpaper: that’s what Garrison Keillor calls personal narrative of the kind everybody’s writing these days, me on my post-nasal drip, you on the heartbreak of psoriasis, me on my inability to kick prescription laughing-gas, you on how you’re stuck in traffic and OK yes my two examples are fictional.  My faucets are all that drip but they drip all the time - we finally had to install a cat under each one because in this house the cats drink right from the faucets babe - come on over for supper, we’re running a special on bacteria! – so no, no nasal drip really, and who needs laughing gas when life is funny enough in a world where you can come down to breakfast one morning, reach for your vitamins, quick lift the bottle to your mouth to shake one loose and find a tiny BAT snoozing inside the thing, all folded up neat as Jiminy Cricket’s umbrella.That happened to me once.  And here’s what happened yesterday:I drove six hours so Uncle Ed, on the lip of his 90^th year, could see the full-on New Hampshire-in-autumn foliage maybe for the last time. His body is aflame with the pain of arthritis and I have some sort of freshly revealed case of scoliosis that has my own little skeleton starting to sink and torque downward like the Wicked Witch of the West in her big meting scene. End result: this morning we’re both pretty sore but it was worth it because we saw those leaves. And because they made me remember the poem Robert Frost wrote about this season.  Read it and just see if it doesn’t express what we’re all feeling right now here in these northern latitudes. It’s called “October” and it’s from The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. 1916:O hushed October morning mild,Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,Should waste them all.The crows above the forest call;Tomorrow they may form and go.O hushed October morning mild,Begin the hours of this day slow.Make the day seem to us less brief.Hearts not averse to being beguiled,Beguile us in the way you know.Release one leaf at break of day;At noon release another leaf;One from our trees, one far away.Retard the sun with gentle mist;Enchant the land with amethyst.Slow, slow!For the grapes' sake, if they were all,Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--For the grapes' sake along the wall.