January 12: Stump Pass Beach State Park

Finding sharks' teeth

among the shells--

childhood memory revived.

Here's my grandfather and I collecting sharks' teeth in 1980 at nearby Englewood Beach

Here's my mom collecting sharks' teeth today

December 23: Rainbows

When I was a kid, a shop in downtown Camden sold little cut-glass prisms in different shapes--snowflake, teardrop, crescent moon, star--and whenever I got my allowance I'd head there to buy a new one. I tacked them up in a row, hanging them off fishline in my bedroom window so they'd catch sunlight and scatter little rainbows across my wall. This was back in the 70s, when rainbows were cool (along with Smurfs and the Bee Gees). I had rainbow stickers and window decals, but preferred the "real" rainbows made by my sun-catching prisms.

I'd forgotten the pleasure I would get from those spinning bits of rainbow until I unwittingly replicated the experience. A friend recently sent me a giant "diamond" of cut glass, which I've kept on my desk as a pretty paperweight. While reading on the couch this sunny day, I was surprised to see little patches on rainbow dancing on the wall. After figuring out that they weren't related to anything on the Christmas tree, I realized that winter sunlight coming through the bare branches in the backyard was being "caught" by my diamond paperweight and strewn across the house in rainbows.

Winter sunlight
fractured by cut glass:
living rainbows.

October 10: Toast

Home alone, making toast for dinner. Sometimes just a little thing will send me back to childhood...

My grandmother used to
cut my buttered toast
into "soldiers."

July 28: Katydid

We left the porch light on when we went out last night, and upon our return, discovered dozens of  moths, flies, and other winged creatures flitting around our front door. Among them, clinging to the screen, was one leaf-green katydid, a beautiful, graceful insect. We tried to catch it so that I could get a closer look, but it jumped away into the jungle of lilies alongside the porch. The voice of the katydid is a familiar part of the summer twilight insect chorus--I've definitely heard many more than I've seen. 

Here's a katydid that looks very similar to last night's visitor, albeit a species from India pretending to be a leaf:

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (Vishalsh521)

I remember feeling quite envious when my best friend Katy, who lived across the street from me when I was five, told me that there was an insect named after her--the katydid--which even sang her name. But then I realized it was OK because one of my mother's childhood nicknames for me was Cricket, so I had an "insect name" too. Now I learn, while looking for a photo of a katydid, that katydids, though they look a lot like grasshoppers, are most closely related to crickets and are called bush crickets in Great Britain. If only I'd known that at age five; it might have sparked a career in entomology. (I also learned that katydid species as a group are referred to as tettigoniids. Try to use that word in a sentence today!)

Under the porch light

green katydid shines brightly

amid dusty moths.

July 7: Old mill

My husband and I have a new writing room: a rented office/studio space in the renovated Knox Woolen Mill building in the heart of downtown Camden. Our windows are directly over one of the dams that used to be part of the millworks. In fact, the controls to the dam itself are located in a corner of our studio, with a little sign indicating how long it takes to raise or lower the dam. Since we've gotten a lot of rain, the river is still running high. The drop over the dam is substantial, creating a vigorously churning waterfall that will serve us effectively as a white noise machine when we're hard at work.

The big windows of our third floor studio frame an interesting view. On the other side of the river sits the part of the old mill that was converted to condominiums, several of which boast nice decks. A mature oak tree grows up through a hole cut into one deck, its leafy branches blocking a view of Mount Battie which we will undoubtedly enjoy come winter. If you lean out the window, the mill's smokestack rises high into blue sky above the mill buildings and the fast-moving river. On the mill pond of calm water behind the dam, a family of geese hangs out amid the reeds. And on Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, the Camden Farmers' Market is visible through the trees in the mill parking lot.

When I was five, we lived for a while with my great-grandmother in her apartment across the street from the mill. It was still very much a working mill then, and I remember hearing the daily whistles for lunchtimes and shift changes, as well as the machinery clacking away day and night. I had to walk past the mill to get to kindergarten, and I always hurried over the dark, turbulent river as it flowed beneath the mill and under the street on its way to the harbor. Thanks to my great-grandmother's vivid warnings, I could imagine all too well what would happen to me if I fell in. Now my studio overlooks that very stretch of river. Hopefully it will once again spark my imagination.

White water: white noise.
I lose my thoughts in the falls,
river of childhood.

View of the old mill buildings from a neighboring office

July 5: Found poem

Like Proust's madeleine, sometimes unexpected, extremely prosaic things will trigger a flood of poetic thoughts and reveries. Today I was validating our CCR registration, a mind-numbingly bureaucratic process on the computer. (Don't ask me what CCR stands for; our government loves acronyms! It has something to do with making sure the land trust I work for is properly registered in the right system to receive government grants.) Where's the poetry in that? The last step of registering myself as a user for our account was to set up a series of five security questions, questions such as...

What was your childhood nickname?
What is the name of your favorite childhood friend?
What street did you live on in third grade?
What was the name of your first stuffed animal?
What was the last name of your third grade teacher?
What is the street number of the house you grew up in?
What was your high school mascot?
On what street did your best friend in high school live?
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
What is your favorite fruit?
What is your favorite fragrance?
What time of day were you born?

When I came back to the present from my little trip down memory lane, I found myself wondering if the office worker tasked with making up these questions enjoyed coming up with them as much as I did trying to answer (all of) them (in my head).

Even government
red tape can have the power
to inspire poems.  

(And here's something perhaps even more prosaic: I wrote this blog entry while downloading Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 onto my computer. Who says we can't fit poetry into our mundane and busy lives?)

September 17: Cup of Tea

When I was 14, my grandparents took me on a trip to Scotland, home country of my grandmother's parents. We traveled around northern Scotland, spending a week on the Isle of Skye and two weeks making our way across the top of the country and down the eastern shore to Aberdeen (my great-grandparents' home city) and eventually Edinburgh. Given my age, I wasn't able to partake of Scottish ales or whiskey, so I think I missed out on the better aspects of Scottish cuisine. All I remember of the food was that the bed and breakfasts we stayed in often served tomatoes alongside the toast and eggs for breakfast, which I found kind of weird. And tea... I well remember tea.

Times change and I haven't been back since, so this may not hold true anymore, but 30 years ago tea time remained a very strong tradition. And I loved it. We quickly learned that you could judge a B and B by the quality of its tea offerings. The tea itself was always fine--even in early summer, there's nothing more bracing than a strong cup of tea after a day of driving miles of winding, sheep-cluttered country roads and tramping about ruined castles. But it was the sweets that I remember best. A good B and B would offer up several kinds of cookies, frosted petit fours, little candies from the local confectioner's, or even homemade scones with jam. A lesser place would give you Walker's shortbread--the kind offered for sale at all the tourist shops--right out of the tin. But even that was good. It seemed so civilized and comforting, to pause and take that time to all sit together for a little meal, of sorts, that would recharge you enough to make it through the rest of the day. And the days were long--higher latitudes near Summer Solstice meant that it stayed light until well past 10 p.m. So that tea helped.

Storm clouds are scudding over today, dragging a chilly breeze along with them. I'm sipping a mug of green tea with honey to warm my insides and keep me going for a few more hours at the end of a long work week, wishing I had a little treat to enjoy with my tea. I thought I had some chocolate stashed away in my desk, but no such luck--so I only have my distant memories of those long-ago Scottish tea treats to sustain me.

Warm memories, tea--
the small things that sustain us
as we live our lives.