Kate Hemenway

Snow, sleet, ice

Good morning, good snow, sleet, ice laden morning here in Massachusetts. And, from what I understand, also the case, increasingly rare, in New York City, in fact more of these elements there this morning than here in northern Massachusetts abutting the New Hampshire border.

dog headed north, human headed south; unseen, outside the picture to the left, a canal coursing the downtown

I am a person who goes to church on Sunday morning. I go to an early service (9:00am) and to church in a town 15 miles from where I live, so, especially in the winter, I need to drive if I want to get there reasonably timely. I also go to get there an hour ahead, because I treat myself to coffee and a chocolate cookie each Sunday morning. (Most other mornings it is coffee, always coffee, and oatmeal with yogurt, raisins, and blueberries, prepared and consumed at home.)

I am also a person who, as you may already know, would rather not to have to drive to reach a destination. Walking or bicycling is preferred. Public transit is a third option, which I enjoy taking in part because it is the mode motorized mode I am most familiar with since childhood. In part I can enjoy it even more now than when I was working, because generally I do not have to worry about office hours…

So, this morning in the dim early light, quiet early Sunday hush, I stepped carefully outside and small-stepped in my gripless “dress” boots (knee high, remarkably warm, but with smooth leather bottoms) to my car, and brushed off the fraction of an inch of snow that had so far accumulated. I got in, started, and cautiously drove the small streets leading to the highway. I notice the city has begun laying out the night before that liquid whatever other local municipalities have been using to keep the snow from sticking to the road surface. Is it ecologically non-damaging? I am guessing it is at least less damaging than the chemicals that populate so many of the options on sale for keeping one’s sidewalks and roadways unslippery. I’ll research that later.

I drove up the access ramp to the highway. Nicely empty on Sunday anyway, especially so on this morning of not so good driving conditions. I drove a couple of miles and began to not like the condition of the precipitation. It seemed to be shifting from snow to sleet and ice. I said to myself, turn around. I passed one exit. I said, get off at the next, but myself said no, I’ll tough it out. I passed that next exit, and then the empty road was suddenly not, and the many cars ahead of me and the growing number behind and beside me were finding they had to come to a slowdown and stay at snail’s pace. Nope, I said to myself, I will get off at the next exit, this is too slow, and just what is happening over that rise that we are at this accumulation of vehicles crawling? So, reader, I did! I got off, I did not reverse on the highway, rather, drove easterly a bit and drove back home via local roads in the two towns I had to traverse by this point to get back to my city of dwelling.

So, you probably think something dramatic is in the offing, why else would I describe a snowy drive so minutely? There is nothing to report. I got home and, perhaps this is the drama, I made myself a bowl of oatmeal to be accompanied by coffee instead of treating myself to a chocolate chip cookie and coffee. I, because one can these days (and have been readily able to for, what five or six years now?), “live-streamed” the sermon–it was good, very good; it was a Christmas season sermon and was about expectations and what shapes one’s expectations. It took the very human, at the time very young, soon to be mother of Jesus as its central point-making protagonist, and it made a message to ponder (germ of it is in Luke 1). I am glad I watched it. Because in my self-talk all the way back home I included consideration of maybe I just won’t watch, maybe I’ll just read, or sit and watch the snow cap the crests of cardinals and blue jays, and crown the brilliant red of the red-bellied woodpecker who has lately been living in my backyard, and the downy woodpeckers, and the juncos, and the nuthatch, the chickadees, the doves, the many, many sparrows.

As it turned out, I did all of the above, because it is quite possible in my house to eat breakfast, drink coffee, livestream the sermon, and watch the alternately squabbling, alternately sharing songbirds at one and the same time.

What is this all about? Perhaps about the continuity of life, however it sings, or groans, or hurts, hinders, or walks, struts, dances. Perhaps about the persistence of hope even in the face of my own mistakes, my own erroneous decisions, my own consistent failure to trust the hope. Do I distrust the object of the hope or the source of the hope? In other words, do I distrust because I do not have faith that my hope has sufficient grounding? sufficient reason for being? sufficient trust in the object, or sufficient trust in my urge to hope that?

What, in other other words, am I expecting? Or, in other, other words, who? In who am I hoping?

Back to walking vs. driving. Do it! Do it whenever you can. I advise this, yet as I do, I know there are many, including among you who finding walking difficult, or for whom it has become, actually, impossible. Walk in your mind. Slowly, eyes open, senses alert, hope at the ready. It is like breathing.

From Emily Dickinson–It sifts from Leaden sieves

It sifts from Leaden Sieves –
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool –
The Wrinkles of the Road –

It makes an even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain –

This is a November Day

Yesterday, on the other hand, was, I don’t know, just beautiful, with the sun striking all the newly rained upon, glistening branches — upward turning, weeping, swinging, outreaching, barely swaying, curled, and grounded — such that they added crystal to the light and sent it soaring, and swooping, and tinkling, and landing on puddles, ponds, rivers, and, happily for me yesterday and my friend, the ocean.

we leapt so as not to step on the markings of shore, sea, and sky dwellers among who we were, you can see a rippling line of shells between our prints and the sea’s grasp. Each return of the water, touching, nudging, then backing from them.

The ocean rumbling in, sushing out, rolling in, sliding out, gliding up the sand slope, knocking about slipping back into its whorls clams in their clay white shells, and deserted, or gull raided clam shells, black and opalescent mussel shells, and, I believe, chambered nautiluses–some dwelt in, tossed by the sea to the sand, awaiting the rising tide’s reach to touch them, pull them in, sustain them, interfere with gull and biped mammal (including us) predation.

The gulls, those ever hungry, every talking, and keenly sighted denizens of seacoasts flew, flopped, flowed, flung prey. The tiny avians–pipers, plovers, their parties–darted away before we could glimpse them, but they left their mark!

And the sandcrabs, below, breathing shallowly in this swash zone, barely to be known of but by their little blow holes. Sssh.

The dunes we crossed through to reach the ocean, the dunes delightfully protected from the likes of us by access from road/parking to beach to be only a raised, bannistered wooden boardwalk–one can walk slightly above, one can look and revel, but, happily, one cannot trample–the dunes were every shade of green, yellow, red, brown, and every shape of leaf, petal, blade, frond, stem. And sitting distant among them, high on a dune, posed a snowy owl, from where we watched, merely spherical white head and languidly blinking eyes facing us and the prevailing winds, safe and solid. I took no picture, only stood in awe.

The ocean was the blue that could be purple, could be forest green, could be the color of a bluebonnet, could indigo, could be as a sapphire, could be, I don’t know, lapis lazuli. So many and it was all.

I will not show my friend, because I did not ask her permission, but here I stand, binoculars in hand.

Upon arriving on the sand, ahead of the wind at our back stroll at the edge of the sea’s reach. Also ahead of the wind pressing mightily into our faces on our return trek.

“In his hand are the deep places of the earth; the heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship…”Psalm 95:4-6a

I await each day, and wonder.

November 10th

Is the birthday of my friend. My lifelong friend. She has a prodigious memory, and so nothing she and I have experienced, talked about, learned goes unremarked–at the time and years, decades later. She is the mirror I otherwise might not peer in. Even when she is not talking about something common between us or important to each/both of us, I find myself recalling such at times opportune and inopportune. I also find myself recalling my failures within our friendship, and rueing them all over again. But to rue can be healing, when I remember to not repeat that break that has been healed, when I remember that forgiveness outlasts animus.

And I am grateful for that.

I am grateful, too, that I can forgive another as well. I have that choice. I have that freedom. It is within my power.

This picture of the Pawtucket Falls at a time of very high waters flowing the Merrimack River, is apropos of nothing, except perhaps how full I feel

As is repentance, recognizing how I screwed up, rueing it, asking forgiveness, promising to not repeat this mis- (mis-whatever, statement, act, thought, reaction, ….) and living the promise. Each step is hard, and each step is impossible to not do to be complete.

Gingko, which precede history in their origins. Before. Despite. Amidst. Still.

I am grateful for this friendship, for a friendship such as this. And I believe I have been given these gifts, and I honor each one. And at times I fail, maybe only in my mind, my thoughts, my nearly spoken words. But they are failures too, and I am sad at myself, and I berate myself, and ask, maybe only in my head, because a thought unspoken or unenacted, I don’t think, needs to be exposed, if its raising, its exposure only causes confusion. It’s wiser, it’s more honorable to can it, and not repeat, and not act on the almost act, the twitch in my expression that comes from a flawed foundation, do not twitch, no, instead understand you (I) are not that person and do not know all within that person, and you (I) are certainly not superior such that to judge is yours.

There is another recipient of my wrongs I often need to beg forgiveness, and turn around and not repeat the wrong–that is this earth on which I live. All the time, all the time I possess more than I need, and I store, and I ignore or trample, and I toss; repeat….. There is always another way I can use less, trod less, care more.

Whose woods these are
I think I know,
His house is in the village though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
(Robert Frost, from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)

And this:

Next Time by Mary Oliver

Next time what I’d do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I’d stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I’d watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I’d know more — the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.

That Autumn Air That Just Talks Back

I just filled the bird feeders. My goodness those sparrows can squabble. Mostly male I might add.

You may or may not notice two sparrows flapping around the left hand feeder about to shove in, claiming their turns–the four on the perches have had enough time. Two more are on the sunflower feeder on the right. Also, somewhere in this picture, in motion thus a blur, is a nuthatch fearlessly approaching the sparrows crowd

Nuthatch has landed, all sparrows are amiable for the moment.

It must, the sparrow dynamic din, have something to do with the verbose air, the chattering light, the clatter of drying and dried leaves. Not in these pictures, because I cropped it out is the dogwood tree. Oh, here, below:

I wish you could see how deep-dark the red of the leaves really is. iphone 12 mini doesn’t really offer the means (or maybe it’s the photographer)

You know, it’s funny, bright color, clear red, yellow, green, also seems loud, very distinctly present–they correlate, light and sound, and, for that matter, clarity and sound. Light is just plain louder. Clarity is just plain loud. Is it so? Is it something in my body, in my mind that makes it so? Is it so without me present? Is a bell louder than a gong? Or just to me?

Ah questions. They run my life.

I’ll be back. I have to take the clothes out of the dryer.

Lovely, all done. I’m back and watching a young bicyclist pedaling up and down the street in front of my house. It’s also funny, this street, after one block length then jogs _/- and continues along for three or four blocks until it dead ends in front of a middle school. Well, this street can get quite busy during certain hours associated with schoolday start and finish, and it can also be suddenly busy for no known reason. Most of the time, I guess, if you clock it for 24 hours, it is quite unbusy. Anyway, the jog which is one house west of me, busy or not, is a challenge, in particular when a driver comes east on the street at a speed worthy of an urban arterial. Yet, kids bicycle it centerline, little kids play on it maneuvering and running behind their remotely operated small vehicles, and the local driving school has brand new learners pull to the curb, back up, initiate a U-turn or K-turn, generally in front of my across the street neighbor’s and my house (have you ever seen a brand new learning driver execute this turn, it usually takes long enough to hardboil an egg with much of that span of time spanning the width of the street!) I’m just saying…

So, this is turning out to be a bit of a rant on — on what? things that I notice that are unpeaceful.

However! They are small, they are manageable, they have caught my attention this moment, and will now be forgotten, until the next time they capture me, which could be five minutes from now or weeks. Anyway, there you are, I have groused into your life for a few minutes.

Think Robert Frost again, good fences make good neighbors–or not. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. (same poem, opening line).

Mending Walls

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Robert Frost

From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine

Rain

Rain refreshes. Rain immobilizes. Rain revives. Rain soddens. Rain delights. Rain depresses. Rain greens. Rain grays. Rain is a gift. Usually gifts are welcomed. Sometimes not.

I have never endured a rain induced damaging flood. I have never endured any kind of significant flood. In this, thus, I am lucky. Probably most of us are. Flooding is localized in the global scheme of things. As is its opposite, sere, usually burning or scalding, aridity. Yet for the endurers of these extremes, localized is their world during its prevalence.

For the endurers of anything not-good, it is a trial anyone else will not understand.

In fact, most of whatever each of us experiences in our consistently occurring 24 hour spans after 24 hour spans after 24 hour spans, is what anyone else will not, and so, we being highly self-referential, will not understand.

I move on. I am sitting in a quiet house, in a quiet room, with windows closed, so a largely perceptually quiet outside, although I just heard a minor unidentified sound and, looking outside, saw a kid– 8 or 9 years old–bicycling down the street, unrain-geared, but likely, so would I have been at 8 or 9, defiantly so. Especially if urged to don the jacket, the hood, take the umbrella, to not take the bicycle out in this…. From a young age we assert our individuality.

And each of is one, an individual. And each of us need to never forget that, about ourselves, and about every other being we cross paths with, hear about, see, talk to, listen to, consider. Simultaneously, each of needs to remember that each of impacts what and who we see, talk to, listen to, write to or about, even, what and who we, ourself, think about. Very rarely do our thoughts not translate into actions (be they physical, verbal, or emotional), which impact.

I move on some more.

How many different modes of transport in these pictures? My oh my, our options seem limitless

From rain to transit, where shall we go now?

Lodged

The rain to the wind said,
‘You push and I’ll pelt.’
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged–though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

– Robert Frost

August Crystal Clear Air

Have you ever thought about the myriad meanings attributed to the word air?

When I wrote the title above, I had just completed downloading several photographs I took yesterday at an estuary, marsh, beach on the north shore of Massachusetts. And just before downloading those photographs, I had been out in front of my house initially to bring in my recycling bin, which had just been emptied by the waste services, but stayed standing on the curb because the air was so weightless and light bearing (baring too!). In terms of weather, it is a beautiful morning.

yesterday morning, also beautiful, but bearing some weight and motion

Then as I came back in and opened my computer to begin this post, and proceeded to title this post, I was drawn to the thought of air. How many definitions for “air”. It is visual, it is actually, viewable sometimes and not to be seen other times. In fact Collins dictionary notes that it has 27 definitions. I will not list nor discuss them all. But after noting with my passing by neighbor that today is a beautiful day, the air is so clear, I, smiling, came back in and the thought that came to me when I raised my fingers to the keys of this laptop is that in addition air is audible; consider the definition (one of 27!!):

Air is a song-like vocal or instrumental composition. The term can also be applied to the interchangeable melodies of folk songs and ballads.

So air is music. Imagine a beautiful voice raised to praise a beautiful invisible yet not the least bit empty sensation. Sensations stand alone and yet they cannot be without having been noticed. Sensation, according to Collins dictionary, is a noun with five meanings.

Go where you want with these two words aka experiences aka actions aka recipients. (I had another connecting word that was not aka, but these days it is losing the meaning I intend for it, and I didn’t want to jar you with the more frequent associations that word currently brings; yet obviously I have by bringing this sentence into the text.)

Jar! think of that noun and verb. Ugh, I just looked it up. In addition to a created vessel and to a sudden poke (mental, physical, or emotional) it also is a computer file format that serves to aggregate, archive and compress a file and its associated metadata and formats.

Words are remarkably malleable. And think of a word in the myriad languages extant today, and in those that have disappeared. Why do we have so many languages? Why do we separate ourselves from one another? Why do we erect so many walls?

How did I get from the beauty of this day and its clear, musical air to heaving, burdening, disrupting walls? It seems, of late, it takes a conscious effort not to stumble down those descending stairs.

So, I am placing my hands, palms down on the concrete, and pushing me up. I am rising up to the light air that is what I breathe and is singing in my head right now. I am going to tell you that yesterday was such a day of beauty, as is today, and that I saw, count them, 47 types of shore and marsh and raptor birds in one perhaps two mile length of ocean back (these viewings, these soundings, these delights were not even while on an ocean beach, rather they were within the brackish waters that meet and converse with the ocean, river, reeds, muds and sand). Did I personally recognize them all without other voices speaking their names? No! I do not have that knowledge. Did I learn a few more things about these lovely, feathered, visiting and resident avians? Yes. Did I love being there with 14 other people, all of who knew far more than I? Yes. Did we have any moments of disagreement, distress, disregard? No. Yesterday was so lovely that even if I were standing out front this morning and it was 95 degrees farenheit and 95% humidity, I would have thought the air is so clear! It is a beautiful day! Beauty carries with it beauty.

Remarkable how much joy good can carry and convey and place before one.

I, as you who have been here before know, have not the finest “camera”, nor the most artistic “eye”, but here are more couple of photographs from yesterday. They include Greater Yellowlegs and/or Lesser Yellowlegs, Long-billed and/or Short-billed Dowitchers, Least and Semi-Palmated Sandpipers, and Greater and Lesser Egrets. I am not sure if the Yellowlegs I photographed are greater or lesser. I forget. I am not sure if I captured Long or Short-Billed Dowitchers. I believe I caught both Least and Semi-Palmated Sandpipers and Greater and Lesser Egrets. And among them a Herring Gull or two. But you will likely not be able to critique me anyway because the photographs are way too unsharp!!

Long- or Short-Billed Dowitchers, Semi-Palmated and/or Least Sandpipers,

Greater and Lesser Egrets, Herring Gulls, and someone else

I delight in the day.

Still July 2025

It would appear you can’t shut me up this month.

Yesterday I spent the day at the annual Folk Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts. I’ve been attending regularly for 21 years, so, since 2004. It has gone on since at least 10 maybe 15 years before than that. Parents have borne their newborns to the Folk Festival. White haireds move sibilantly to music they remember from their child-bearing, no, their child-selves lives every year, now, some, themselves, having begun as a thought, or a stroller rider at an earlier Festival; many having begun their lives not only not in Lowell, not in Massachusetts, and not in English. And the Lowell Folk Festival honors that, celebrates it–the music each year is different from the year before, with different artists, and different music traditions, different regions, and different nations. It’s always a musical adventure. Yesterday–note, the Festival is always on the last weekend in July, aka, it’s hot! and each year, the Festival putter-oners get better at providing shade in the four concurrent stage areas, yesterday, one act dressing in traditional clothing wore fur hats. Oh, I could feel their sweat rolling down their faces, necks, while they fingered on stringed instruments complex, complex tunes to which they added words. And each act, no matter how overdressed, how active–and salsa music does not allow static musicians, nor audience; nor does Quebecois; nor does Chicago blues; nor does cajun; nor, even, Irish folk, or klezmer, nor many I haven’t named. The audiences, the myriad visitors roaming the multi-national food stations strategically located near the four stages, sitting within the well covered (by a combination of trees and tree shade–So Valuable, those trees!!! and huge canvas roofs) audience spaces at each stage are all ages, and are all aware of and mindful of everyone else. And, this is a free event operated by volunteers, hundreds maybe a thousand of them (even though it, being an arts thing, non-profit funded both by donations-personal and from some sponsors, and by public funds as a non-profit art thing, got its approved public funding removed in May or June…) It is OMG my favorite place and time each year. If you have not been, consider it next year, make a trip of it from wherever you live.

All this talk, and I took no photographs this year. Ugh. Go to their website: lowellfolkfestival.org. Treat yourself. I meet friends there I haven’t seen in months, once I met someone I had lost touch with years ago, very nice experience among all the other that come to mind.

Onto the smaller local, my back yard. I am pretty sure I mentioned the plethora of fledglings who graced the space at various times these past two-three months. The last were, a bit to my dismay, grackle and starling youngsters. Usually these bigger, not so nice, neighbors visit for a few days, harrass the songbirds and then move along. Their year they nested (most likely in robbed or otherwise pillaged spaces) and fledged right here. Again, I took NO photos. I was too frustrated on behalf of the finches (gold, purple, and house), the titmice, woodpeckers (downy, hairy, redbellied + flickers), chickadees, nuthatches, robins, cardinals, sparrows, warblers, vireos, wrens, mockingbirds, catbirds — some of whom, admittedly, can be less than kind neighbors, and on behalf of me, because all I got to hear was the rather ratchedy screeching of insistent young grackles and starlings, plus the one teenage bluejay who seems to refuse to move house. I think, as of maybe yesterday, they may have moved on. Teenage bluejay is still here. As is, I think, teenage female downy woodpecker, as every single day I witness dueling downys (sp?) out back.

Upper left, adult downy, bottom right child? or unhappy mate at the turned back

It’s been on and off hot, and on and off humid. Saturday was perfect, hot, not humid, after two days of lie on the floor under the ceiling fan with the cats and pant humid. So there was nothing, nothing to spoil that Festival.

Today it rained. The Festival continues until this evening. Attendees are hardy, they will come, and, besides, the rain was only for the first hour, and, also besides, the tent-roof coverings protect from rain as much as from sun.

So here is where I stepped today:

A friend of mine recently taught me something about hy in hydrangea, that I think was mnemonically focused, but I forget what she said! And her information also included the lo in lobelia. I hope when she reads this, she calls me to remind me of the wisdom I have already let slip.

________________________________

So, as I am sitting here typing this, a “heat advisory” popped up in my computer’s information line down below. Starts tomorrow. Lasts for, looks like (yes, I just popped over to the site) it hangs on for three days.

Take cover.

This day is beautiful

As opposed to the previous few here in New England. But it has been dramatically more offensive elsewhere.

I would offer you this to read: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/becoming-earth/

It is so important to know this about trees-woodlands-forests. Even if you are not able to accept all the spiritual focused contemplation she offers, just read and consider and understand that which is about how life here supports life, how life of the natural after its standing life is concluded, still gives life always.

I have no more words to provide today. If you have read the article through, you have already spent a good length of time reading my offering.

I bid you a good evening. I bid you a wonderful day, each day.

It’s July 2025

My intent was, perhaps still is, subsequent words will tell, to offer one of my “places” of observation, a vague meander into what surrounds us where and a curiosity about why.

But I am kind of keening today. I am feeling a lament surging. It is hot in so many places on earth right now, increasingly HOT hot. And sources of relief–water, trees, breezes even, are increasingly being commandeered (or razed) for too rapid, unnecessarily abundant, personal and corporate and governmental storage in search of additional profit, in service to the desire for more. I am sad today.

I am stepping away right now for a bit, in hopes that my mind travels elsewhere before I continue this day’s blogpost. It is 12:13PM EDT right now. I’ll be back.

Returned. The bicycle is a ruse today. Not the day for pushing pedals nevermind in shorts and tank tops, not in, as my shadow indicates, full length jeans and long sleeves.

This, below, is from my backyard just about 15 minutes ago.

I am most appreciative that I cannot see the junk littering the skies above those fast moving clouds.

Here is a good statistic that I report from the backyard this year. There have fledged: two blue jays, a male downy woodpecker, two chickadees, a titmouse, a nuthatch, two female and one male house finch, a female house sparrow, a mockingbird, and a grackle. Most have proceeded through fledgling to immature to mature, and children then away. The nuthatch and blue jay immatures look to be a day, no more, from moving out. This morning I saw my first brown headed cowbirds of the season, happily, after the nests have hatched and mostly flown.

Immature/nearly mature blue jay, chasing through dogwood tree leaves after just ducked-out parent blue-jay.

Here is a bad statistic. In my town, about five streets away, they tore down four trees in deference to granite curbs and repaving, along a quiet, two lane, unmarked, headed nowhere major four block long street, and, based on the “grass” they have seeded in the earth edge between granite curbstone and asphalt sidewalk, these maples and lindens will not be replaced with new shade providing, nicely cooling trees. It will be another asphalt, granite, asphalt alley, inducing residents to install yet another air conditioner or whatever the latest multipurpose “energy saving” inhome unit combination may be, “efficiently using” piped in fuel sources rather than shade-giving, cooling, pleasing to the eye and body-temperature, trees. I stop at the top of the street, mid-street and look down its length and I am sad.

Around the corner and along a street one block from me, three homeowners have blacktopped the majority of their properties so to make room for parking their electric vehicles, their hybrid vehicles, and their low-riding audibly evident otherwise intended compact cars and ___-Tough pickups. What are we thinking?!

___________________

It’s July. It’s hot. The air weighs more than I do. What is wrong with our heads?

Here, cool down.

As I typed, the air has gained weight. I am ready to dive into this lovely, spring day Concord River, were it still this height.

I’m stopping. You are free to go, if, indeed, you stayed through to here.

As Dawn Emerges this June Morning

Good morning! I lay awake for near to an hour listening to robins outside my windows, and Maria purring beside me. I lay there, and as the robinic chorus increased in number and volume, I began thinking about my job, my last job, the one from which I retired quite a few years ago now, and that I had held for 28 years. Fifteen years into my working life, it involved a complete change to my presumed career path; it was not a route I expected to take, and typical to my way of being, not the one planned.

I thought, hmm, I think I am going to share about it in a blog post. I started remembering it–what it comprised, who my fellow employees–my colleagues, reportees, bosses, intimates and not-so-intimates–were, where I traveled for it, what I accomplished, what I didn’t–and then the sparrows woke up and began their less than tuneful, but certainly neighborly chirps and chips, and Maria began tapping me, and the clock marked 4:45AM, and I said, okay, I am getting up, I am going to write the blogpost, but, nope, not about my job. Because, really, who cares?

I can’t answer that question. I am not in your head, nor yours, nor yours. But, more I will just say, I met and knew a lot of people I like a lot. I traveled to local and somewhat distant places in this country, learned different takes on what I thought I was profoundly knowledgeable and right about, learned how much being the rightest in the room isn’t always possible, and surely isn’t always necessary, nor, in fact, right. I am grateful for this job, these people, these 28 years with them, and very grateful for now, sitting at this desk, at this very old laptop, looking out into the curtain of my weeping birch trees, and listening.

Thus–this morning, this day. The sparrows just, maybe 30 seconds ago, stopped their chorus. I need to go out to the kitchen to listen for the finches and mourning doves, who are likely emerging now, with substantially quieter voices than the sparrows and the robins. So I am pausing for a bit.

I’m thinking I may tell you about a bicycle trip I took in the US Southwest about 24 years ago. It was a magnificent trip, experience, time. I do want to suggest now–never let your body and head conspire to tell you you can’t. Your body may tell you so, and if it does by itself, probably listen and accommodate. But if your head is part of the telling, close your ears, step away! By listening, you will only divert yourself from something you can do.

Hoodoos in Bryce Canyon in the early morning. Photo courtesy of NPS (support it!)

For seven days we bicycled to and hiked into and out of Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon. In Bryce, traipsed among the hoodoos! I had before seen them from above, but to wander among them, and to wonder. At the Grand Canyon, to meander down to the river, kicking up ancient dust, steadying oneself on rock millenia-billenia-zillenia old, and, when seen from across the canyon, so many hues, yet here among it, just present and touchable. Ah yes. In Zion, trouped through the Virgin River and Gorge at dawn, ankle, knee deep, prickles of cold in a day that then climbed to barely bearable heat. Climbed a ridge to a place called Scout Lookout, reaching that height, at times by scrabbling on hands and knees. And on the way, while pedaling to and between these canyons, passing through red, rose, dusky, bisque, beige, golden, tan, ecru, magenta, ochre, umber, rouge walls near and distant, miles of floor, with a single roundhead, glaringly green tree poised mid-desert offering brief shade. Naming places on the horizon and at hand–Escalante, Angel Canyon, Kanab, Panguitch.

Virgin River in Zion National Park. photo courtesy of NPS (support it!)

And, not wandering so far from home, pedaling here, in Massachusetts, pedaling beside Hondas, Mercedes, Hyundais, Nissans, Mazdas, Fords, Rams and Jeeps, F150s and Tundras, turning off, leaving rubber-on-road rumblings and pedaling beside and under tall red oaks, red maples, cottonwoods, aspens, white and red pines, hemlocks, spruces, green ashes, white oaks, black oaks, yellow poplars, paper birches, grey birches, black birches, copper beeches. Dismounting and whisper stepping within pine woods, shushing through deciduous woods. Stopping and fingering mud and packed, sodden, not-yet-mud tree-fern-reed-shrub leaves; standing before a bird-shelter and feast riddled once thriving pine counting its ladder of holes, squatting before a long fallen oak to visit its four and six and eight legged residents, before a spider web and its captives. Discovering.

Spider web suspended within two specific eras–former factory, long collapsed, and second or third or fourth growth woodland both fallen and growing new; living giving life

Morning has broken, like the first morning… It is 9:45am. I have breakfasted, enjoyed coffee, sat through a thunderstorm, and here we are. 9:46am now. Sending to you.