poetry – whereIwonder&why

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.

It is spring today, this April day

Here’s something to consider. Perhaps we no longer assign months/quarters/extended spells of time to a season. Perhaps we identify a season day by day. Today, Monday, 4/14/2025, it is spring. Yesterday, Sunday, 4/13/2025, it is (was) winter. The day before, Saturday, 4/12/2025, it is (was)–I believe, I don’t really hold onto weather (perhaps why I have come up with this scheme), winter. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera [does anyone remember Yul Brynner enunciating this phrase? It was a long time ago. I must admit, nevertheless, I do remember.

But, yes, today it is spring! Orange Fuji and I took to the roads and trails.

moss and seasonal ponding. Leaves, predominantly oak remain, most others having returned to dirt or other elements. I think of it as oak protects. Maple, ash, birch, aspen, beech…. provide.

more moss and seasonal ponding (hmm, seasonal? after I just redefined/shortened the duration of its meaning? Perhaps, day to day ponding)

and amid the leaves in this site, skunk cabbage is emerging; it promises and it delivers

and delivers, and delivers! No stink yet, only one bract of not green in this photograph, but stink it will come!! It’s the smell of life, and then they wither and shrink back to dirt.

this very pretty, tiny green patch is cord moss; it is known also as water moss; a wet dirt dweller.

Then there were these ducks. Not a particularly helpful photograph. But perhaps one of you can see and know just what it is? Not mallards.

Things, life is so much clearer at hand. But I cannot carry everyone on my bicycle, so these photographs bring you with me on this day defined as spring.

It persists. Life persists. Good and bad persist. And we pass between leaning this way and that; rarely knowing which will be the next step, anymore than the next day.

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

The above two lines are from the last stanza of T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday.

It is an incredible poem, but read it at your emotional risk.

Here two stanzas that, in rereading it just now, I find speaking to the start of this blog post. I had not held them in my head all the years since I last read the poem. I had not reached back in my memory for them. And yet, here they are, speaking:

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

It is Quiet. Somewhere

In fact, it is quiet in my house. And I am glad of it.

Noise is very crowded, and sometimes I am not ready for it, indeed not even, at times, up to it. You?

**Solitude**–of me behind the camera, of the seat in the place, of the place. This is not today here in Massachusetts, however, based on predictions this past Friday for northern New Hampshire, it could be a place there, now. Except that, while in New Hampshire on Friday, I heard from a lot of people that they were headed north to ski for the weekend. And I won’t even guess the odds of how many more like the people I heard, had the same plan–manymanymany. Probably no silence nor solitude in much of north of Latitude: 42^o 56′ 47.29″

It is almost the last of March. I have raked the oak leaves off most of the bulbs and rhisomatic (?) shoots, so to enable them to emerge undistorted — oak leaves sometimes grip an emerging shoot within one or two of the oak leaf’s sinuses, and if I don’t come to the rescue first, the shoot’s leaves grow into full size with a crimp or two or three in their height, so they look more like a drill shaft than a screwdriver shaft, this is assuming they escape the grip of the oak leaf! I have not raked the oak leaves out of the vegetable beds yet, and it’s just as well, because we here remain in the 30s, despite a day in the 50s a week or two ago. Yesterday, Saturday, March 29th we here were at 35^oF while in NYC it was 65^oF. I report this because it is unusual For those of you not residing in the Northeast of this country, I report this because it is unusual. Usually we are in relative tandem, maybe 5 or 10 degrees colder up here compared to NYC, and usually with bitterer winds. So while New Yorkers were traipsing about in shorts and brunching at sidewalk cafes, we in mid and northern New England had redonned our winter jackets and leggings.

Clouds and, on most days for the next 10 days, cold-coldish air is predicted for this region. So you may find a second blogpost from me within the next 7-10 days. My bicycle is shivering in the shed; my gloves are still lying on the kitchen radiator warming up; the urge for hot chocolate still prevails. And what better accompaniment to hot chocolate than blogposting (other than reading, my truly favorite indoor timespent)?

All this being said, I also report that the robins, chickadees, cardinals, titmice and carolina wrens, especially are singing their spring love songs. The downy woodpeckers, who have been about all winter, now are enduring competition from a red-bellied woodpecker couple. The tenacious nuthatches care not the season, they “ank ank ank” frequently, day after day. The audacious blue jays seem to have given up in this neighborhood, and the mockingbirds are nosing their inimical (read the almost word in the middle of that word, i.e., mimic, my goodness, a particularly talented mimicking mockingbird around here has fooled the neighboring imitatees, as well as my phone’s Merlin birdsong/birdcall identifier app), way in–to the absolute disgust of the robins!

Each morning, the earliest robin song gets a little earlier. Well, I think so, I can’t really hear through the closed windows, but a couple of the mornings in the past several weeks I was up early, early and peeking out the back door caught a robin at an hour that a month ago would have been a silent one. Aha, I am back to the topic of silence. Just like that the circle has closed.

There are times when silence pervades so thoroughly, you cast about, no, thrash about, just to make sound. Noise, sounds–like robins at 5:00 then 4:00 then 3:00 AM– can delight, as readily as they can not.

It is the dilemma of too much.

U.S. Navy F/A-18 approaching the speed of sound. The white halo is formed by condensed water droplets thought to result from a drop in air pressure around the aircraft

So, a drop in air pressure around the aircraft because it escaped the speed of sound, to quiet just before the sound can be. Here is something to think about, getting ahead of sound–sound/air pressure. Bigger air pressure, pushes down, or back, and the space it permits is now smaller, and anything in that smaller space is — what? — is LOUDER. Too much in too small a space. (Bill Y, please check my conceptualization, and let me know how widely I err).

Too much in too small a space…..

I look around me and wonder. I wonder, why?

I wo wo wo wo wonderrrr, why? my little runaway. {some of the lyrics from a Del Shannon song from, oh I don’t know, 1961?} A run run run run runaway. {“””}

Delight! Earlier this morning it rained some

I woke to clouds, grey, without shape, just overhead mass, those harbingers of rain, which have been not present much in two or three months. I thought, “I only wish.” And, lo an hour later, it rained!! Not a lot, not loudly, not at any windblown angle, not, in fact so that I’d notice even though I was sitting, having breakfast in front of the kitchen window, looking out at bird feeders, back porch, azalea bushes, dogwood tree, plum tree. I did not see the rain falling. I saw, when I opened the back door to bring the cats’ food can to the recycle barrel, that the ground was wet, the porch steps hosting drops in pleasant array. Ahh, good, I thought.

And it is. And then the clouds, emptied of their gift, slowly slid away, staging shifted for the next act, and the sun in full gold lit the drops of rain, dried surface after surface. I took my bicycle out of the shed and away I rode. (Ahead, I hoped, of the predicted “winds with gusts up to 17 mph”. I don’t fare well pedaling against neither gusts nor steady winds.)

It was a perfect morning to early afternoon ride. Sunlight not only bright, but sparkled off leaves, pebbles, slender branches, and the small, disparate but hope-inducing puddles and ponds gracing the asphalt, and bejeweling the forest floor. (Well, forest is a bit of an overstatement, but poetically it works, don’t you think?).

I am taking delight in all that I can.

White oak leaf bejeweled. Off the rail trail, I walked a short, .4mile path through a wood almost all oak and pine, with a couple of big tooth aspens inserting themselves.

and this, I believe a flaw, but it is a textural wonder, fallen with its host, a small tree, into a new receiving host–a ground covered by more textures than my eyes can understand

And closer. The depth, the girth, the tautness, the layer-after-layer-after-layer of this red pine bark! And who knows what or who I have photographed here in the recesses of the, essentially, the surface of this tree. (Oh what a camera that is not of an iphone12mini could have seen!)

And, another gift, two miles from home, I ran into (not literally) a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of months, also on his bicycle, which was good for so many reasons!

And you know, I almost accomplished my home-ahead-of-the-headwinds goal. Only the last five minutes, that last 1/2 mile push UP to my “Highlands” (the name of my neighborhood) home, did I need (and boy did I need to!) to stand on my pedals and PUSHPUSHPUSHPUSH.

Got in and treated myself to a peanut butter sandwich on my friend E’s homebaked bread. So many pleasures.

Here’s an I-was-there proof shot.

I do wish you could see the brilliance of the colors that covered this rolling path. I can only attest, they were scintillating. And can you see the rolling terrain of the path? And, if you look closely on the ground, you will notice that at least one maple is in this woods, there is leaf just left of the shadow of my hand in front of my face

Whose woods these are, I think I know, his house is in the village though…. Thank you Robert Frost.

Actually these woods are a gift to the town in which they are, by a couple, last name Valentine, who gifted it for wildness into perpetuity. I thank them.

Peace to you and yours.