Something shifted

Between 0730 and 1030 on Tuesday the 22nd, one of the old lilac bushes collapsed. This was the cardinal seat. Though I do note the cardinals are still out there sitting in it. I was able to pin down the time by careful scrutiny of my yard cam photos. At 0730 five cardinals were on the deck and in the background two lilacs; two pictures later,1030-ish, the bush is down. We had a lot of rain this past week and some gusting winds. The loss of anything green is sad; I guess that emotion is enough for losing a bird throne. Whenever I look out the window a bright red king is still there: observing the world from a different height, admiring the view and it still keeps them safe from hawks.

Last night when I was closing curtains a hawk glided from a tree and swept along about a foot off the ground over the lawn and slowly around the neighbor’s house. It felt like it too had heard the news from Ukraine, that maybe peace will return, that right now I can quit this yard and go tend my own problems. Not that a hawk could have a heart as dark and hard as Putin’s, but still, something (felt) shifted, however briefly, in the world.

The forsythia out my office window is blooming, rioting in yellow. I love when the cardinals come to add a little zest of color, a pop as the home shows like to say. I was coveting the colors in the yard behind mine, the forsythia there has been bright yellow all week but now this one is catching up. Today we are to have more rain and heavy winds, possible thunderstorms, typical end of March stuff. (Side note, goldfinches have been visiting this week.)

Speaking of March stuff, I have been watching women’s college basketball like a fiend. I do not think I’d seen a whole game in over two years until the tournament got underway and since I have spent hours (hours!) watching and learning the players and remaining [almost] neutral in my cheers. I have been a UCONN fan, since the days we lived in Connecticut. I love that Coach Auriemma was so happy for his team after the last win (2 overtimes!), but also how he became so emotional with the responsibility of coaching and getting these players to his program on a promise he has made. But then, any of the teams still left are interesting and so, so talented. The game on Friday night between UCONN and Stanford is going to be fantastic. I do like both teams and both coaches. And I agree with the ESPN commentator yesterday that women’s college basketball is 1000 percent better than the men’s: nuanced, faster, tougher; the majority of the women are not going on to play after college so, for many, this is it.

BRAD CLIFT / THE HARTFORD COURANT 1995

A mocking sort of rusty call

From the window grackle chat, sparrow gossip, cardinal chide, a blackbird sings, so close I should see her. Before sunrise this morning a wren was close and loud. A few days ago I wrote:

The smallest bird
destroys morning
with her great song.

The trees here are quickly putting out lots of new growth, the maple and the ornamental pear are showing their colors. A few of the trees in the neighborhood have creamy white and pink blossoms already. When I look back at my Instagram from a year ago (2021), we’re at the same place. Going back another year (2020) the same; 2019 the same flowers are blooming. We moved here October of 2018. Going back through time like that makes everything look normal.

Today, on NPR, a story about a death in Ukraine of a 96-year-old man who survived four (four!) concentration camps during WWII and has been killed in Putin’s “denazification”. I always pause when I hear some circumstance of death that seems (that makes me imagine) every breath was parceled out at birth. I do the same when I hear a story that makes it seem every moment in a life had  been choregraphed to get a person to the exact second a plane hits a tower, a crane falls, a river floods. But there isn’t anything mystical or fateful about it, death is sped along so often by man’s ponderous horror. In Boris Romantschenko’s case, manufactured lies of full of horrors. 

Grackle’s have a distinctive cackle, a mocking sort of rusty call. They’re big and shiny birds, with yellow eyes, their feathers are iridescent colors of purple and dark teals on black. The talk a lot, when together they are loud. Often one or two will have their beaks toward the sky while they shout out the day’s news. Today they seemed especially animated, especially loud in their telling. Today they seemed to have heard all the other hard news of the world, the shame and sorrow that is just reaching us.

Something peaceful, neutral

The flowers outside are the only thing that has a little tameness about them. I didn't rake leaves last fall, letting whatever creatures need to sleep (and eat) amongst them have peace. I think my neighbor behind us may have been a little cerebral about it all. He and his wife were out picking up branches and pinecones during a heavy wind last week; they’ve mown their lawn once already. I'll start cleaning tomorrow. I saw Olive the ground hog today, that's my spring. She was paused on the lawn, slim from her sleep. She headed toward the woods near the little ravine. If she needs water that’s where she’ll head, I imagine. Down there it’s always damp. As you walk through the neighborhood there are places you hear water running. A groundhog has to drink. She has shown up just as one of the pears went bad, think of the odds of that? I cut the pear up and left it for her. She will be my friend, little brown flat cat.

Speaking of little brown cats, here’s my neighbor’s cat from the other day, she was out not being very hidden while watching birds and when I knocked on the window she came over to the door until I stepped out to say hello. She makes the rounds (we are on a cul-de-sac, lol) daily. I did see her go under the deck the other day and it made me wonder if Olive was around and they seem to have some sort of interspecies friendship/enmity going on. Now that Olive is back it will be interesting to see what happens this year. Something peaceful, neutral.

A little knowing*

Today is sunny, warm, But there is pondering on many things. Here are the daffies welcoming the sun back and a poem from early in the month. It came from page 29 of Segues A Correspondence in Poetry between William Stafford and Marvin Bell. "The world's wheel, alrighty, *a little knowing and presence and a long build-up that sends up our long ideas of what is natural, while we turn through "excess" that is only being, trees that are only treeful awaiting our seeing,..." (Marvin Bell)

                                        If a tree stands in the forest
                                        and no one hears it sing in the wind,
                                        is it a tree? If the shadow falls
                                        upon no one who can tell us
                                        is it shade, is the tree
                                        alone? If a tree stands in the forest
                                        and no hand, no human hand
                                        ever touches or draws
                                        close a leaf or needle to smell
                                        or taste or take an afternoon
                                        resting beneath as sun and cloud
                                        pass over, mottling through
                                        those leaves or needles
                                        or branches, if no one stays
                                        on the ground at the tree’s base
                                        listening to what is above
                                        what sings or crawls or looks back
                                        is that person ever alive?

Miscellaneous weak hand poems and miscellaneous birds

Here in the quiet of snow
day pauses, it too loves the hush,
the quilted whisper of flake
against flake, ice nestling ice.
Light swallowing the night.

The quiet and chill seems
all I own somedays,
all I should want to own.
I gather them both like marbles
and covet their perfect clear
and singular beauty.

The night and its comforts
are often visited by the twin
demons of regret and sorrow
those two argumentative sisters
who rule only their world
but meddle in mine. They’re
like those two orange tabby cats
gorgeous and poised
in the afternoon
sun who then run through the 3AM
darkness and bite your toes.

The moon shifts its place in the sky.
Of course, I know it isn’t the moon’s
shifting but mine. My world tilting
back into other alignments
but even with the lengthening days
(the shortening nights) something
feels off. The moon’s brilliance
is charming but needs so much
darkness to shine.

Open it to other things

This is a picture taken in Brugge, Belgium when my sisters were visiting (2017, Jerry and I were still living in Mons at the time), we'd driven up for the day, it was cool when we got there but by lunch, we were able to sit outside and enjoy a meal. It was between tourist seasons, mid-Fall.

It's such a calm picture. October hadn’t been very cold, the leaves were still turning, the canals were quiet. These houses that line the canal interest me. In Amiens, France the houses are on a canal fed by the River Somme. Of course, Amsterdam; of course, Venice; then, Ghent and a host of smaller towns and villages. These all are attractive to me. Not as much as houses hidden behind foliage, or passageways that dodge between buildings and streets or secret gardens. Perhaps I can blame Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Today my yard and feeders have been overrun with cowbirds and grackles. They came enmasse, planning ahead for tomorrow’s snow. Bullying the cardinals and intimidating the sparrows, pushing the doves around; real hoodlum behavior. I wonder about the birds in Ukraine. The animals that are watching the fighting. Listening. Trying to get away. Much like all the millions of people.

A friend of mine in Europe says that her family is trying to get a co-worker’s wife and child out of Ukraine. In a day or two I’ll ask again how that is going, let her take a breath. Her family is Romanian, she grew up under communism. Her opinion of Putin is unprintable. I wish I could give her a hug, I wish I could get a hug from her, she’s a great hugger.

Well, this is a meandering meander, here’s a poem I found today from a prompt that I did while at the library on SHAPE. I feel I want to pick pieces of it out, open it to other things:

Like the first time you connect not only the dots
but understand what the dots represent:
the star becomes more than star
the dog becomes wolf, the horse that long day
with your father, before he shut the door
and awareness of that door, perhaps
the grain of that door, the weight as it slammed
like a summer storm relentless and horrible.
The horse that survived the wasps, and the wire
and still loved you.

*The End and the Beginning

BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA

TRANSLATED BY JOANNA TRZECIAK

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

    

         (Ukrainian child cries as he arrives at Polish border after fleeing war-torn country)

Before and after

The weather is mirroring the world. It’s violent and cold and a mystery. I can feel it (the world, the weather) dragging at my psyche today. Last night we had hard rain and thunderstorms, this morning while I was finishing my breakfast I looked out and it had begun to snow in big fluffy flakes, better to be called down than snow. It lasted about five minutes. Everything that landed melted into the earth. When I went out to get a book from the library before it was returned to its home library it was cold and windy, clouds swirled about, and I just wanted to get back home and curl somewhere. Instead, when I got home, I made some chicken soup.

The chicken was from a store that smokes chickens and ribs every day and if I’m in the area around the time they come out of the smoker I’ll grab one. I got the chicken Friday, and we have made a series of meals from it since; with a fourth of the meat left it was soup time. I’m not a huge fan of chicken, but I like it now and then in things. Sometimes I make Jerry what I call a before and after omelet with chicken in it, but I don’t care for chicken in eggs, before or after.

But as far as the soup, it was good for lunch. My mother made chicken soup with thick handmaid noodles and big chunks of chicken, it cooked until the broth was thick. The noodles were glorious. I always imagine it during a long winter snowstorm but know we had it year-round. A simple, basic meal. That sort of safe, let’s fill up and take a nap while the blizzard howls soup. Something I tried to mirror today, though no blizzard, and nothing as devastating here as approaches even the definition of devastating. Just the blaghs. Nothing a nap and a dose of poetry won’t cure. Just a refresh. Just so the world can be taken head-on.

Here's a poem from another time:

Early summer, red faced and swollen
two siblings bookend me
one bulging left, one right,
I was the double-pumped
chipmunk-cheek of mumps

balancing out our lockdown.

Our mother, trapped in the house
with our fever and whine, improvised games
to keep us busy between naps:
couch tent, cowboy cattle drive, pretend
prairie schooner. As the Sons of the Pioneers
played we drifted off like the tumbling
tumbleweeds under our imagined stars.
Our eyes closed and the hum of her sewing
machine came back to life. A distant train
on a trip we were not invited to take.

 

     (Tom and Calico, me and Yammy, Diana and one of Calico's kittens around the time of mumps.)

Gonna put on my traveling shoes

The woman at the tire store came into the waiting room with a lovely Good morning! to which I answered good morning how are you and she said Exquisite! she was my mother’s age and she was exquisite in her red shoes, matching purse and jacket. She then said, I see you still are wearing a mask, does it bother you that I’m not? I said not at all as everyone must do what is right for them, and I will stay across the room. Then she said I have such trouble with masks, they won’t stay where they belong, they’re always going up and covering my eyes, it’s not safe! To think I’ve lived this long without knowing what a weirdly shaped face I have, and we shared a wonderful, long laugh.

When she spied my book, we had another a quick chat. Then my car was ready, (tires and brakes checked great). My new friend and I exchanged have a great day be safe, pray for peace and I went out to my car and the display popped up “Low Battery Charge”.

Choice cursing. 😠


Here's a traveling poem of sorts:

The first time I arrived in Amarillo Texas
it was snowing. I was on a Greyhound bus,
eighteen hours into a trip to some place
I thought I needed to be but failed to get to.

The second time I arrived in a Yugo
after two days drive from Virginia.
I was in possession then of a life
that surprised and scared me
in its order and wonder.

The second time it was hot, very hot,
July heat. The first time it was some
winter month. I don’t know now,
just like, now, I don’t know how old I was.

But the third time I was in Amarillo
I was almost sixty, so close to tears
that for the past few days we’d
only been able to laugh at our hurt

for fear of the hole awaiting us.
A hole as big as this western sky
a hole as wide and deep, as dense,
as Texas. A hole that held its own

gravitational pull upon us. One
we needed to drive away from

to ever see clearly.

Past, present, future

Saturday, we drove to Columbus (Ohio), it was a chilly day, ice lined the route, the trees throughout were glittering disco fever flashes of brilliance. Aside from the crazy detours through Indianapolis (would it be too difficult to tell people at what exit your detour ends?) and the panic that accompanies this detour madness (note to drivers, you eventually can get back on your route even if you somehow end up downtown). I think that they should start with signs like they do in the West where the detour is mentioned and then the warning DO NOT FOLLOW YOUR GPS. I love that, it should always be followed by abandon all hope. I think we have it figured out now.

We went to Columbus for an engagement party for those two crazy kids, Ian and Justine, on Sunday. Though they have been engaged for a while, 2020 took a chunk of time out of planning things. A wonderful party for family and friends, a small gathering that was really nicely done and was full of music and laughter. Thank you to the parents of the groom, two hearts to them 💗💗 and the extended family for planning and execution. The next big thing will be Ian and Justine going to Iceland to be married. May the Northern Lights burn bright while you are there, the glaciers glow and the Hákarl, be tangy.

And today, having driven home yesterday, we have a day so warm that I have had the windows open since late morning. This morning around the feeders the usual suspects – Carolina wren, Carolina Chickadee, Tufted titmouse, house wren, cardinals, starling, blackbirds, robins, blue jays – were all out preening their slimness on a day they did not have to fluff against the cold. I had my yard cam out last night as I had a leftover muffin with egg that had ridden on the car all morning, so I cut it up and placed it under the pine with a couple of questionable grapes. I only got one picture as the batteries were too low. But it was a nice shot of a raccoon looking up at something.

Today I have been working on a “cure” for the fact that we took the satellite radio out of the car. We have had a battery low problem for months, something that was causing this alert to come on all the time. Neither Volvo dealer could find a problem, an alert, or an error. And one day while waiting for Jerry I noticed that the car kept trying to reconnect to the satellite after it had been shut off. After a bit of research, we had the satellite radio subscription stopped. (Thank you, Google) Since there has been no issue with the battery saying it was low. So, we can download music to our phones and podcasts, but I am also exploring using an older device (no, not my Walkman!) an Amazon Fire Phone I last used in 2017. I think it will be perfect for music and podcasts and can just stay in the car. I am sure we have an old iPod somewhere in the house but do not think it would have presented the challenge the Fire did. When it finally came back to life (IT’S ALIVE!) I remembered some of its features, and shortcomings but I think it will be fine.

And now, it is time to listen to the State of the Union address. We know the state of the world, we know the state of our hearts. Let us see what the President has to say.

Be safe, be kind.