December 7: Christmas Decorations

We don't have a Christmas tree yet, but tonight I unpacked the rest of our holiday decorations. Also today we received our first Christmas gift in the mail (thanks, Susan and Chris). So let the festivities begin!

I think I was inspired by the snowfall the other night. And today as I left work more pretty flakes were drifting down within the circles of light thrown by the streetlights. First thing when I got home I hauled the boxes of Christmas stuff in from the shed. Every year it's like, well, Christmas, opening the boxes and seeing once more my favorite holiday artifacts and tchotchkes. Like my nesting Santas, the first two pieces of which are lovely Limoges boxes with a third, teeny little porcelain Santa inside. Or my beeswax Santa candles. Or my fake tabletop tree with the bendy branches and the miniature glass ornaments I've collected for it over the years, under which my Christmas polar bear must always be posed. Silly, maybe. Childish. Perhaps trivial. But I love ritual and tradition, and rediscovering these holiday things each December brings me such pleasure. Much more pleasure than shopping and wrapping gifts.

Later this week, we'll get a tree. And then comes the next phase of my Christmas indulgences--bringing out all our ornaments and trimming the tree while we play carols. There's the red globe with my name painted on it from my first Christmas, a felt cat from my grandmother when I was about seven, a series of hand-painted wooden birds, a porcelain flying horse, and my favorite one: Santa riding a snowy owl. Each one has a story of who gave it to me and why, and each story gets revived each year.

Santas in a row,
candles in every window.
House awaits a tree.

December 6: Crow in Snow

One of my favorite short poems, by Robert Frost:

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
from a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

This morning I raised the bedroom blind to a shining white world, sun on snow, every tree coated with a thin layer of the fluffy stuff. I paused to admire the first snowfall of the season and the sparkling river running through it. Then I noticed some movement on our neighbor's lower lawn: a crow sat in the snow. As I watched, it dipped its body into the snow and flapped its wings. Was it trying to eat something under the snow? Was it bathing? We got about 3-4 inches of snow last night, so the snow came up to the crow's belly. It barreled through the snow a short way and dipped itself in again. A little further along, it repeated this action, wings akimbo. I called my husband in to see, and he agreed that the crow seemed to be either snow-bathing or simply playing. Ravens have been observed sliding down snow banks, an activity for which there can be no practical value, so why not a crow that's delighting in the first snow?

After a few minutes the crow flew up into a tree, shaking off the snow on the branch where it landed. The action reminded me, of course, of the Frost poem above. And in doing so, made me realize that this crow had gotten me through the hardest part of my day--getting up in the morning--with a smile on my face.

Crow bathing in snow--
you too feel the simple joy
of winter's first touch.

As I type this, a crow has several times flapped around one spot on a tree branch, then flown off. The branches obscure a clear view. I have no idea what it's doing. Through the binoculars, all I can see now is a nuthatch winding down the trunk. Who knows what goes through the minds of these creatures with whom we share our world? ... And now, a crow (the same one?) has just flown upriver carrying something large and white in its bill.

December 5: Paper Whites

A couple of weeks ago I bought a small paper bag full of paper white narcissus bulbs. That evening I put them in a bowl of rocks, added water, and set them on a table in the kitchen. Day by day the greenery has grown a little bit taller; some days I feel like they fit in growth spurts between one visit to the kitchen and the next. Now the tallest plant is a foot high, and they're all starting to swell with buds. They're almost flowers! From a tiny, dry, brown bulb to budding plant in two weeks--it seems miraculous.

Outside the sky is a chilly white, preparing for tonight's first snow storm (or so they predict). The squirrels have been active today, industriously chewing away at the Halloween pumpkin I put out by the mulch pile last week. At one point I saw just a little grey butt and fluffy tail sticking out from the half-eaten orange shell. Now, while two others chase each other over its head, that squirrel is grabbing chunks of the soft pumpkin rind and perching on a tree stump to eat them, stocking up in the face of colder weather and snow. From 68 degrees on Wednesday, with pelicans showing up in Spruce Head, to snow expected tonight. Another miracle of sorts. Nature is just full of herself.

Budding narcissus,
soon your perfect white flowers
will shine like new snow.

December 4: Pelicans

This morning Holly Anderson, editor of The Republican Journal sent me a set of bird photographs taken at 7:30 a.m. by Glenn Wiley from the shore in Spruce Head. (She has also posted some of them on-line at villagesoup.com.) Imagine my surprise when I realized I was looking at pictures of a group of eight American white pelicans! Apparently they left by high tide and haven't been seen since, which is remarkable given that these are probably the largest white birds to ever soar into Maine waters (they have a wingspan of 9 feet). They've only been reported in Maine about a dozen times before, usually one-shot glimpses of single birds, though back in 1874, another group of seven was observed on the St. Croix River.

Undoubtedly these birds blew in behind yesterday's dramatic storm. Am. white pelicans breed in midwestern and northern inland waters--I've seen them in Grand Tetons National Park and in central Idaho--and winter in extreme southern United States. Those warm wet winds yesterday probably carried them into what must have been terra incognita. Here's one of Glenn's photos, also shown at the villagesoup.com link above:

Notice the distinctive yellow bills and striking black wingtips. But this setting is definitely not your typical pelican habitat! I hope they enjoyed the novelty of their little foray into Maine waters. This is probably one stray species that isn't in danger of freezing to death up here, but I'm betting that they're heading back south now at a fast clip on those big wings.

Eight white pelicans

blown in by yesterday's storm--

a Maine vacation!

Update (12.7.09): The pelicans were seen by alert birders over the weekend off Rhode Island and then Connecticut, heading south where they belong.

December 3: Owls

This morning I spoke with a friend who lives on outer Rockport Harbor, surrounded by Beauchamp Point. She told me that night before last she woke up at about 4 a.m. to the sound of a ship's foghorn. She realized the weather must have turned in the night, and had just decided to try to go back to sleep instead of reading a book when she heard an owl call. The owl sounded like it was right outside her house. Then, she heard two other owls calling from distinctly different locations on her property. She realized that every time the ship's foghorn blew, the three owls responded from their various posts. She wondered if the owls thought they were hearing "the mother ship of owls" in some kind of distress--ship foghorns can sound so low and mournful. I love the image of an owl "mother ship" broadcasting to her followers as she moves up the bay, and the Beauchamp Point owls dutifully responding to her call, perhaps with some concern over her well-being. 

I posted this story to the Maine birding list-serv, asking if anyone else had ever heard an owl respond to an inanimate object (other than a playback device). A fellow birder then posted this very interesting story in response: "This spring (April 16) my husband and I were going to camp and I asked him to pull over at an area where I thought I might hear Woodcock along Rt. 17 near the Roxbury/Byron town line.  This was around dark, about 8:30 p.m.  We saw a moose kneeling and eating in the small field, close to the road.   As we were watching and listening, a dog from a nearby house started barking.  In response a Barred Owl started calling, which in turn got responses from a second Barred Owl, both not far away.  Not an inanimate object, but still very interesting.  (The next night we saw at least 16 moose along Rt.17 from Byron to Oquossoc, including one lying in the middle of the road, licking salt off the road!)"

Barred Owl, Photo by Hal Korber/PGC

So that made me wonder if perhaps the three owls--great horned owls from her description of their hoots--were trying to warn off the ship, thinking it was some giant owl invading their territory. We can only imagine what was going through the dark, feather-and-talon-lined corridors of the owls' minds.

Foghorn in the bay,

three owls respond to the call:

mournful hour of dawn.  

December 2: Night Clouds

Leaving a night meeting, I couldn't help but notice the sky spread over the parking lot and adjacent field. The full moon shone through cirrus clouds that rippled across the expanse of the deep blue heavens exactly like rows of foamy waves. The sky had become the ocean, with the moon a frosty blur behind the clouds as if underwater. The backlit striations radiated like static, white aurora borealis or northern lights; movement was almost perceptible. I felt I could almost reach up and feel the texture of the sky's oversized corrugations, and kept looking up at the sky through my windshield as I drove home.

Cirrus clouds. Full moon
shines beneath rippling waves,
draws the eye deeper.

December 1: Full Moon

It goes without saying that it feels like the middle of the night when I leave my office these days. Tonight as I drove home in the dark, my vision further obscured by the fact that I was peering through a sheen of frost slowly melting on the inside of my windshield, the full moon appeared from behind the mountain. I can see it from my living-room window now, above the hulking shape of the mountain and my neighbors' colorful Christmas lights, that bright face looking in at me and the cat in my lap.

The ancient Japanese aristocracy, with their highly developed aesthetic sensibilities, often held moon-viewing parties that involved poetry. According to Ivan Morris's book The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (a companion guide to The Tale of Genji, a Japanese novel written over 1,000 years ago, my favorite book of all time, and the reason why I fell in love with haiku in the first place), the full moon of the Eighth Month was considered the most beautiful. The Great Moon-Viewing was celebrated thus: "To the sound of lute and zither music, men and women spend the night in boats on the artificial lakes of the Palace and of private residences, viewing the full moon and composing poems in its honor." It also "became customary to make offerings of dumplings and potatoes to the moon." Moon-viewing was clearly a warm weather activity. I won't be heading out in a boat on this cold evening to admire the moon, though I'm sure it's reflecting beautifully right now on Penobscot Bay. But perhaps we can cook up those fingerling potatoes I bought last week and celebrate in that way. And with a poem, of course.

The moon has inspired much Japanese poetry over the centuries and is a common subject of haiku. Chiyo-ni, the 18th century woman haiku master, wrote this after she became a Buddhist nun:

full moon--
keeping it in my eyes
on a distant walk

For her, observing the full moon was a form of meditation, a focus that brought her awareness. I have often found myself caught by the full moon, staring rapt like a deer in headlights. And as a child, as many children do, would fixate on the moon through the back seat window as it seemed to follow the car's every turn.

Chiyo-ni also wrote the following poem about the transformative powers of moonlight, perhaps as a commentary on women who spent too much time figuring out what to wear to a moon-viewing party. After all, the moon is the real object of attention, not them. But things apparently never change.

in the moonlight
whatever you wear becomes beautiful
moonviewing

(Translated by Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi)

And thus I draw my inspiration for tonight's poem--my muses both Chiyo-ni, a woman who watched this same moon 300 years ago, and the full moon itself.

Full-faced moon, not shy,
wearing the mountain as robe,
beaming on us all.