Category Archives: Poetry

Scat Happens

5 Replies

Sedona, Arizona
I’ve cheered up and warmed up since my last post.  However, as you probably figured from the title of this post, life continues to—um—provide fine opportunities for growth, such as:

      • the (mostly) nonexistent ice and snow that closed almost everything in New Orleans, but not K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen or Café Du Monde,
      • the bad gas from Murphy USA in Del Rio, Texas, which sickened our F-150, but we received the reimbursement for the repairs right away,
      • the day after Tom and I completed a hike in the Chisos Basin (The Window), I tripped on  nothing on a little hike and sprained my wrist*, but then when I was icing my hand on the lodge veranda, I saw a Colima warbler

        Early morning, Chisos Basin

        Early morning, Chisos Basin

      • my map-reading skills are not tip-top, but we finally got to Mesa campground in the Gila National Forest before total dark.
        Mesa campground, Gila National Forest

        Mesa campground, Gila National Forest

        The lake was way down from (I assume) the drought and the campground exuded a down-at-the-heel gloom, but I am pretty sure that on my early morning trek to the bathroom, I smelled mountain lion.  I think the scat was fresh, too. (I didn’t photograph the evidence, but here’s some from another hike):

Scat, Saguaro National Park

Scat, Saguaro National Park

Scat happens, but sometimes it turns out to be something you’ve been waiting for.

Or, as W. B. Yeats said in a slightly more high-tone way:

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;…
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

From “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by William Butler Yeats in The Winding Stair and Other Poems

*I found out yesterday that I sustained a comminuted distal radius fracture.  So much for the power of positive thinking, and, yes, I am typing this with my left hand.
Note: I have more in my mind than I can get on the computer today. Please expect Scat Part II shortly.

Old Year, New Year: Flexibility, Part 3

Leave a reply

I didn’t know there was going to be a Flexibility, Part 3.  I had thought that I had explored my flexibility (and lacks thereof, various) sufficiently in Flexibility, Parts 1 and 2.  This has not proven to be the case.

  • When I contort my arms while doing my stretches, my left shoulder hurts. I think I am losing strength and range of motion (e.g., flexibility) because  I haven’t used my weights in over a week.  We are on the road again, plus it was a) too stormy b) too cold c) too sad (see below) d) too cold (second round) to get the weights out of their storage space in the camper.
  • Yesterday morning, after re-stowing the–once-frozen, now defrosted–canned goods in the camper, my hands were so cold that I went back to the cabin, whimpered from the pain in my thumbs, and sat in a chair all day with a blanket up to my chin.
  • I am warm today as I sit here in the food court of the Myrtle Beach Mall, Kings Highway, Myrtle Beach, S.C. I sit here and miss my father and mother.  How flexible is that?   I might have gotten used to their being gone since it has been  20 years and more.  Without my parents’ kind hearts and bright souls here to raise my spirits, I feel like I am in a cave without a light.

I’m late: I usually transfer the data from my old day planner to my new day planner by around January 1 of the new year.  It’s some sort of ritual for me–copying names, numbers, emails, addresses from the old book to the new. Note: I also transcribe some of my passwords onto the day planner pages. Because of that, in a fit of sense, I am not posting my photo of the old and new  day books  together as I had intended.  Someone might be able to read my little secret codes.

New day planner

New day planner

Speaking about rituals: For the last several years, I have affixed a Post-It note with lyrics to the back of the day planner. This year, I have actually written the words on the inside cover:

There is a town in North Ontario,
With Dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there

For decades, I  would understand the North Ontario part, and then I would hear Neil mumble the next lines: something, something, something.  I didn’t know what the somethings were or meant, but I felt they were important and the words I couldn’t understand made me want to cry.

I do, however, understand the meaning of the song title: Helpless.

I grow old. Someone else wrote, “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot). I used to think that line was a bit funny.  Now, I get it.

I think I am fit and flexible. When I ask, people tell me my gait is fine. However when I see my shadow, I see a little something wobbly with the gait on my right leg.

Shadow

Shadow

I can’t seem to stop walking into swamps of one sort or another, but then I remember, I love swamps.

Congaree National Park

Congaree National Park

I am helpless to stop people I love from dying. So, Ave atque Vale (check your Catullus) and Happy New Year.

Sunlight and water, Myrtle Beach

Sunlight on sea foam, Myrtle Beach

To Autumn

4 Replies
leaves and moss in birdbath

leaves and moss in birdbath

I know it is the first day of autumn.  I know it is the first day of autumn because

  • they told me this morning on NPR,
  • my husband, Tom, made beef barley vegetable soup,
  • I made applesauce with some decent apples,
  • The Washington, DC football team (my home team for over twenty-five years) was just beaten by the Detroit Lions (my back home  home team) today,
  • the dogwood leaves are turning red,
  • the squirrels—crazy to  bury the black walnuts—messed up the lettuce plants and radish, swiss chard, and beet seeds I planted yesterday, and
  • the blue jays scold me from the branches.
dogwood

dogwood

Also: A week ago, when I was recovering from a fearsome case of poison ivy/oak/sumac/something and feeling sad, a murder of crows kept me company from my neighbor’s juniper tree.  I notice they hang out together more when fall is coming.

About the dogwood: Our old dogwood is turning red early because it is dying.  More precisely, it has dieback.  We can’t bear to get rid of it quite yet—and the birds and bugs love it, too —so the tree will continue a while longer with Tom and me.  Both of us as well as the dogwood have lived to much more advanced ages than John Keats did. Before he went, he managed to write a poem about autumn.  I tip my cup of soup to him and his poem:

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

                 John Keats  (composed in 1819)