Life

Good aftermoon! While I type this at 2:51pm Eastern time, someones somewhere in the north american northwest is, I believe, viewing the annular solar eclipse. So, pun intended. Here in northeastern Massachusetts the clouds have slid in, so even if an edge were going to hint at the solar-lunar event, clouds get in my way (who sang that, Judy Collins? who wrote it, probably Joni Mitchell).

This morning I went on a sustainable-routes walk in and around the east campus of UMass-Lowell, which borders the Merrimack River, the Merrimack Riverway Walkway, the Northern Canal, and borders and/or has acquired and repurposed a former nursing home/geriatric facility, hospital outbuilding, and factory buildings into classrooms, dorms, offices, an outdoor activities and bicycle shop, an alumni services building, transformed a grass swath into a pair of 1800 square foot green houses that it manages with a local farm management/food security nonprofit. There was also a discussion in her tour for us of the original dwellers of the shores of the Merrimack River, those indigenous communities who like everywhere in this country, in every country where colonialism took root, were rooted out.

We learned a good deal more about the neighborhoods, the past and future of the area, all located in the need for and the work towards ensuring sustainability and the many pockets of responsibility that word lands in, but I will stop here and provide no more descriptors that would be helped by photographs, and apologize, because I didn’t take any. So use your imaginations, and whatever impression you first garner, ratchet it up a level or two. The university, like the city, is mastering reuse, not perfectly, but increasingly.

I should also note that the guide, a newly graduated UML student and now UML-Graduate School student gave us a statistic pertaining to the greenness of Lowell, touting the large number of trees herein. I will not dispute her, but I would wish that there were many more trees, grouped in pockets throughout the city–grouped for purposes of supporting each other, and linked to other pockets in that distances between pockets are minimal, and assisted by something that is missing in a big way in this city, street trees. Native species.

And from there I go to where I went next. I went to a walkway halfway across the city that attends the Concord River. I entered the way just upriver from the mouth of the Concord River, the mouth being where it pours into the Merrimack River. I went with purpose of observing birds, because today is Fall Big Bird Count day to coincide, I would say a bit late in the cycle, with the birds’ fall migrations to their winter homes (there is definitely truth in assigning the appellation “snow birds” to northern USAers who travel south in the winter months). In the past several years I have participated in these–the fall one and the spring one. Never have I observed such a dearth of birds as I did today.

This is not good.

So this has become a blog post in which the photograph captions are as long as the textual paragraphs. What does this mean? I am not parsing. And you are having to deal with it. Oh. Well, you can, and may have already, stop(ped) reading.

Go outside, see if you can see a change in light of any kind related to annular eclipse.

See if you can spot birds in your local trees, at your feeders, on your neighbor’s roof. I pray you are successful. I think I’ll go out and check again myself.