June 16: Family Crow

Crows with their fledglings.

My father points them out

while we're driving.

Posted with Blogsy

December 25: Christmas moon

Full moon on Christmas

made magical by dawn mist--

I miss my family.

Posted with Blogsy

November 26: Thanksgiving Day

Before the family feast

I beat a nine-year-old

at the Game of Life.

Posted with Blogsy

August 2: Visitors

Three skunks tumble
along the newly-mown path.
We three watch from inside.

April 6: March Madness

Watching basketball

the cancer patient

aligns all his pill bottles.

Posted with Blogsy

February 20: Birthday

The Chinese Year of the Sheep began yesterday, and today I begin a new turn around the sun. The way a new year begins always feels auspicious. I have a good feeling about this one. We celebrated Chinese New Year with tea and dumplings in a sunny Portland cafe yesterday, and again last night with more dumplings (and cocktails) with good friends at Empire. This morning began with breakfast on the go from Standard Baking Co., which I ate while tromping around the frigid Portland waterfront looking for white-winged gulls with a birder friend--an outing puncuated by calls from my mother and sister singing "Happy Birthday." The white wings of Iceland Gulls shone in the sun, seals surfaced nearby, crows chased a Red-tailed Hawk overhead, a Peregrine stood sentinel on the Casco Bay Bridge, and all is right in my world.

A new year starts well:

coffee and croissant,

gulls along the snowy pier.

Update: And my birthday closed with a brilliant conjunction of the young Moon, Venus, and Mars in the southwest sky... All signs point to yes.

Posted with Blogsy

January 20: Thaw

January thaw--
a family of crows grazes
spaces between snow.

December 24: Christmas Eve

While the kids are still awake

we eat the cookies

that weren't left for Santa.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

December 22: Gifts

Against the backdrop of a glittering but dangerous ice storm, we celebrated an early Christmas with my family last night, feasting on our traditional lobster stew, exchanging gifts, and cheering on the Patriots (who clinched the AFC East title).

Bounty of food, family love.
And even the Patriots
gave us a gift.

November 28: Long drive home after Thanksgiving dinner

We leave the family home.
Jupiter watches
our progress homeward.

July 5: Fiona's birthday

My niece turned seven today, and we had a family celebration at her parents' camp on a lake in Union. As we were all feasting with much merriment, a spectacular sunset was bubbling up behind the trees, turning the water pink. Later, the neighbors set off loud by pretty fireworks. And all around the camp, illusory fireflies glittered in the darkness.

Diffusing sunset.
Fiona blows out candles.
Fireflies blink on... off...

December 21: End of the world

According to some misreadings of an ancient Mayan calendar, the world was supposed to end today. In our neck of the woods, instead of ending, it just got really windy and a bunch of trees got blown to pieces. The icy gusts scattered limbs and even some lawn furniture across the streets. The damage was particularly noticeable on my parents' dead-end, pine-lined street as we drove to their house to celebrate our family Christmas together; we had to move some rather large pine boughs out of the driveway to arrive unscathed for the festivities.

Door blown open by wind--
a dramatic welcome
for a holiday dinner.

November 22: Thanksgiving

Things I am thankful for (so far) today:

Being awakened by my affectionate cat
Blue sky
the New York Times crossword puzzle
Walk up Beech Hill with my mother, sister, and two nieces
Two mice mating, playing, or otherwise squabbling in the weeds, trailside
My niece's fascination with bayberries
The scent of crushed bayberries
My other niece's joy in banging two rocks together
Distant red of autumn-burnished blueberry fields
Good health
Free time for my husband to write
A little free time for me to write too
Not losing the Thanksgiving turkey, brining on my parents' porch this morning, to a fox
Crows on the lawn
Cat's amusing attempts to jump through the windows at birds and squirrels

Prayer flags and dry leaves
stir in the breeze,
share blessings.

August 30: Finding water

Family legend has it that my great-great-aunt Gladys (no longer with us but whom I remember fondly from childhood) was a dowser. She was one of those people who used a split branch of (usually) witch-hazel to find water. If you needed to dig a well, Aunt Glad was the one to call. She had the inner sense--one might even call it a power--to divine where the water was. I was always a bit disappointed that I didn't inherit the ability.

I was thinking of this when I heard the osprey keening this morning. We live on a river and often hear an osprey as it's following the water's course between lake and harbor. I realized that while I might not be able to help anyone plan where to drill their well, I do know how to tell when I'm close to a larger body of surface water: I just listen for the osprey.

Around here that's a no-brainer, but once years ago, hiking in the Cascades of Oregon, I remember being startled to hear an osprey crying overhead. I was surrounded by forest of Douglas firs on a trail that seemed to wind endlessly through the mountains. The shining white bird seemed so out of place in the setting that I worried I had heatstroke and was hallucinating an angel. But sure enough, the trail very soon began to follow the shore of a small lake--I should have realized the osprey was there for a reason.

There's a river out here,
reminds the osprey.
Come outside.

June 17: Damselfly

We spent this beautiful almost-summer day with my family at my sister and brother-in-law's camp on Crawford Lake.

Hanging out on the dock, my husband spotted a couple of damselflies that had just emerged, still-damp, from their nymph cases. One flew off by the time I came to look at them, but the other still clung to the boat bumper. Since the boat was about to head out for a cruise, I worried the baby damselfly wouldn't be ready to fly in time. I encouraged it to crawl onto my finger, then moved it to a nearby leaf out of the way of people and dog. The next time I passed the leaf, it was gone. I never even saw it open its wings. By the end of the summer, its life will be over. I wish it many more days like this one before that time comes.

So short a lifespan--
damselfly is blessed to hatch
on this perfect day.

February 5: In the cemetery

My husband got some new binoculars recently so I decided to walk over to the cemetery and try them out. I don't think I heard or saw a single bird, but I always enjoy roaming around the headstones and finding my maternal grandfather's. He died when I was three, so I have only the haziest memory of him, but I've been able to locate his grave in the cemetery ever since I was five and we lived in a nearby apartment in this same neighborhood. His grave and the adjacent ones of my great-grandfather and great-uncle, whom I never knew, have served as literal touchstones for me throughout my life. I calculated once that I'd moved 15 times before I was a teenager. But no matter where we lived, I always knew where to find my grandfather's grave in Camden, even on days like today when the marker's buried under snow.

The snow revealed signs of previous visitors to these silent rows--light footprints of other humans barely visible on the crusty surface, as well as the deeper tracks of cats, squirrels, and a crow which had walked on the snow before it froze. The squirrel tracks had melted and then refrozen, and their softened edges made them look like a meandering row of hearts.

Familiar gravestones,
heart-shaped squirrel tracks in snow.
I keep coming back.

December 25: White Christmas

Our weekend feline visitor woke us early this Christmas morning and observed with typical nonchalance as we happily engaged in our Christmas morning rituals: stocking, then breakfast, then gifts. Outside snow fell. The perfect, magical touch.

Even now as we drive to my in-laws', the snow is beautiful and a bit mesmerizing as it flies at the car and swirls in the highway. Everywhere, the accent of white makes the landscape seem just a little more festive.

As snow sweeps over the St. George River, an eagle waits in a tree. A crow perches like a weathervane on the peak of a snow-covered barn roof. The dark, sweeping boughs of pines carry white highlights. White snow piles atop hay bales wrapped in white plastic. In another field, snow accumulates on rolled bales left spread throughout the field like hulking beasts. Tidal inlets and rivers fill to the brim with clots of ice thanks to the new moon high tide.

And then we're through the main body of the storm and the sky brightens. Our spirits are high. Soon we'll be with family, and the holiday celebrations we began with a dear friend on Christmas Eve will continue.

Snow on Christmas Day.
And a flurry of traffic
"to grandmother's house..."

November 24: Thanksgiving

So much to be grateful for on this holiday of feasting, family, and football: this sparkling day, the beauty of the snow on the Camden Hills early this morning, the generosity and warmth of my husband's big family, our health, our jobs, our marriage, a table full of wonderful food including the pecan pie I lugged all the way from Houston, the two NYT crosswords my mother-in-law saved for me to do while we watched football, spending time with our sweet nephews and niece (two big, two small), a clear starry night, a warm place to stay, and things to look forward to tomorrow here in Portland...

Thankful for the stars
in a snowless sky tonight,
all I love below.

August 11: Birthday

Today was my mother's birthday, and we celebrated at my sister and brother-in-law's camp on the lake en famille: my sister, brother-in-law, two nieces, my brother-in-law's parents, his brother and sister-in-law and their baby girl, my parents, and us. The clouds that had lurked overhead all day bunched up against the green hills to clear the skies, as the glow of the setting sun cast a rich light on the clouds, the water, the surrounding pines. My husband caught a frog to show my niece. Fish jumped. Pewees called back and forth in the forest. As dusk fell, bats fluttered back and forth. My niece learned the constellation Cassiopeia, who turns out to have been a queen of Ethiopia, where one of her friends was born. We walked barefoot down to the dock to look for falling stars from the Perseid meteor shower but only saw the plumes of our breath in the crisp air.

My brother-in-law grilled steak and lobster; his mother made potato salad and tomato and beet salad; his brother made an apple pie; my sister provided a birthday cake with candles; we brought fresh Beech Hill blueberries. We all feasted with much joy and laughter. We left as the almost-full moon was rising, full as the moon ourselves and happy.

When I'm 64,
I want this too: lake, family,
good food, stories, stars.

August 10: Guest Poet

While my sister's in-laws plied me with drinks at Natalie's this evening before dinner, her father-in-law Eijk asked me about haiku. I explained the basic tradition and form, including the essential reference to a season and the concept of trying to capture a moment in nature. He then promptly wrote this haiku on a cocktail napkin:

Trees wither simply.
One red leaf decides to die,
fluttering to earth.

(Sorry, Eijk, I had to add a word to line two to give you seven syllables.)

I found it very interesting that as we were enjoying the lush green beauty of summer's peak, a hazy waxing moon rising over the harbor outside, and a restaurant bustling around us with summer visitors, he chose to write a rather poignant poem about fall. But I'm glad he wrote something, because by the time we got home from a long dinner with the four of them at Francine, stuffed and happy, my brain was too tired to come up with anything of my own. Thank you, Eijk, Rose-Marie, Erin and Sander for a lovely evening! (And that last sentence is actually 17 syllables, so there's my haiku.)