the lost key

~ FOR MEGAN AND JAMES


in the clearing beside the hall called mercury
amidst the ancient industry of living things,
the buzz and song and whir of insects
and birds, stands a craggy crowd
live oaks and post oaks with sun scorched
wind hardened bodies marked

with many rings, lines in endless circles
rough brown arms and elbows and living hats
of vivid green tip toward earth and eavesdrop
glad, bright and shining in the celebration's glade
where the old fragments we are certain and you are lodged
now reach them and the company gathered below them

now find their way new again, the way of remembrance for,
remembrance of, remembrance toward, forward, beyond 
remembrance because this day when the key is lost is the day
we witness two beings offering words engraved
round and round eternity, the day come, the day gone again
the trees motionless in the blossoming hush of evening
the stars a rising flourish in the southern sky
unlock delight in the vow stay there forever.

stuccoed

it wasn't until the next day, after jet lag had subsided and i could properly take in the neighborhood where we were staying, that i noticed dense stucco-like patterns spattered on objects in very specific areas around the ponte sisto, along lungotevere dei vallati, up via arenula and into the park near our hotel.

i like to think of what i saw as organic graffiti, but these graffiti artists didn't arrive stealthily in the middle of the night armed with spray paint. they arrived promptly at 4:45 in the afternoon and their work was brazen and bold and loud, loud because there were so many of them.

what were they called? where did they come from? why were they here?

i should have noticed the clue—a foretelling right there on the wall—when i opened my eyes after that first delicious sleep. a previously unnoticed golden hued print of a flock of black birds (no artist's name given) hung near the left side of the bed.

after a day of gorging on seeds and bugs, anything in the fields outside the city, tens of thousands of starlings could be seen, and heard—this is called murmuration, the indistinguishable blending of all those bird wings and voices which, the first time i heard it, i thought was rain—heading back to rome to roost in the large plane trees that lined the tiber river and the park outside our door.

the birds swirled and glided, swooped and dropped over the rooftops like sooty snowflakes, each movement in their ever expanding and contracting ballet fascinating and mysterious to those for whom it was a novelty. to the locals, the birds were merely messy pests.

truly wise people opened their umbrellas when walking for more than a minute under a canopy of trees vibrating—yes, and i mean vibrating—with starlings. the birds' bellies were, after all, full from a day of feasting.

unless, that is, they didn't mind becoming stuccoed like the sidewalks and cars, and the occasional head or handbag.

the day the earth roared and a baby smiled

on tuesday night, the second night of my trip to vermont, the earth stirred. then it roared.

we missed it, though. didn't hear a thing. didn't feel the ripples radiating out from the epicenter three miles below ground, in the crust of the north american plate, twenty miles west of portland, maine. but much of new england did.

within a minute of the 7:12 p.m. earthquake there was even more rumbling. online rumbling. my daughter's facebook page came to life and vibrated with exclamations: wow, did you feel that? that felt like an earthquake! and we thought our furnace was exploding and sounded like a freight train tearing past the house. a friend of hers from down south knew about the quake before we were able to confirm that it was an earthquake. she wrote just heard maine had an earthquake. that had all of us—my daughter, my son-in-law and myself—checking our iphones for the latest news.

close to the epicenter in maine, hanging lamps swayed to and fro. silverware rattled in a drawer at my niece's house in portland. elsewhere windows shook as if poltergeists had risen out of the ground to cause a ruckus—a little preview of halloween. in freeport ed told me our dog, lille, ran to the door, hackles raised, and barked and barked. people felt and heard the earthquake in boston and new hampshire and in towns south of us in vermont. in the hills above richmond, though, everything was quiet. did the mountains surrounding us, and hills under us, act as a buffer and cushion the tremor?

on the day the earth roared i watched my grandson smile, and i smiled, too, as i listened to him coo his baby songs. the day the earth roared i took care of him while his mother was at work. the day the earth roared i fed him bottles filled with his mother's milk and wiped spit up off his chin and poop off his bottom and settled him in his bassinet and folded his newly laundered baby outfits into neat piles.

on that day, deep under the earth, rocks more than a billion years old—give or take a million—scraped against each other, heated up to the point of melting, split, and made a lot of noise.*

on that day, my grandson had been in this world for exactly three months.



*a scientist was on the maine show "207"after the quake. he brought in rocks found along maine's shoreline that had cracked and melted in earthquakes. they originated deep within the earth's crust, rose to the surface as mountains were formed, and were dragged to the sea when glaciers scoured the land. the rocks were marked with fissures and smooth dark lines where they had melted all those eons ago.

magic in a mushroom

after three days of rain, beautiful mushrooms began popping out from under the mat of pine needles and moss below the eastern white pines. they looked a little magical, like something out of a fairytale forest. i don't know a thing about mushrooms so i consulted a book and also the internet to find out what they were, but mushrooms, with highly descriptive names like turkey tail, black trumpet, hedgehog, puffball, chicken fat and oyster—which, by the way, were of no help at all—are tricky. they have lots of parts like gills and caps and teeth and veils and numerous gill attachments and cap morphologies, etc.

several different mushrooms appeared in the woods behind the house.

i thought a few were horse mushrooms—the photo of my mushrooms looked a lot like the horse mushrooms on the internet. they were even "scaly below the veil and smooth above." as i continued reading the lengthy and detailed (and boring) description of horse mushrooms i became more convinced that i had identified them correctly.

soon, though, i began to have serious doubts. horse mushrooms, the article said, were found in grassy fields. it also said beware of mushrooms where the base was thicker than the top of the stem (as in photo #1) because they were usually poisonous. then some more horrid words jumped off the page at me and made me realize i will never ever ever ever eat a mushroom directly out of the woods—not that i was intending to anyway.... i was merely admiring the potentially deadly lovelies—even if a mushroom expert said it was safe (well, maybe a mushroom expert could convince me....).

the article said "if the mushroom has white gills throw it out!" the italics and exclamation point alone—never mind the words—were frightening. they screamed so loudly i winced. sure enough, several of the mushrooms out back had pure, lily-white gills. (i read that toadstools and mushrooms are not scientifically different, so these were, in fact, real mushrooms—real poisonous mushrooms.)

i felt let down. i thought i might have had a special mushroom growing in my yard, a mushroom i could have bragged about. but was it possible that maybe some of my mushrooms weren't poisonous? that maybe i had hallucinogenic ones growing out there instead? magic ones? hmmm.......but magic ones were fancy and colorful and speckled and spotted and mine were plain—lovely, but plain. wait, that's not right. happy mushrooms were always kind of brown and shriveled and ugly—it was the poisonous ones that were pretty. also, maine was too cold for wild magic mushrooms, i thought.

like i said, i don't know a thing about mushrooms.

hungry women

what i put before you today—which, it turns out, is not actually today but the day i started scribbling hungry women in my head on the way to the grocery store and then finished up at home later—are some thoughts about eating (always a good thing, right? if the food is decent and satisfying, or you're hungry, or both?) and the silent, not-so-silent, always lurking, subject-of-many-jokes "battle" between men and women (i'll let you decide if that's a good thing or not).

a praying mantis, specifically that one up there on a window in new jersey, got me thinking about food and battlefronts (of sorts). ed and i were having a peaceful breakfast at an inn overlooking a marina on the navesink river when he noticed the large beastie. she was not in her usual "praying" position, but stretched out and taking what i will call a rest (do bugs rest or are they always working, patient opportunists keeping an eye out for their next meal?) halfway down the floor-to-ceiling window. because she was interesting and good looking—i do so love a good looking insect—i took her picture and then promptly forgot about her.

later that night at a wedding reception we attended, they were toasting the bride and groom and the matron-of-honor asked the groom to put his hand on top of the bride's hand. then, as part of her toast, she announced with unwavering conviction—rather too seriously, i might add, as if it was not meant as a joke at all—that this was the last time he would ever have the upper hand in their marriage. her remark got a lot of laughs. personally i thought it was an immensely tired and worn out load of......syllables. but maybe i was just nit-picking; my expectation for originality was too high and my sense of humor too low. i quickly forgot about the toast and the joke and, as it was late and my stomach was growling, enjoyed the delicious wedding feast.

the always hungry—imagine a sixteen-crickets-a-day kind of voracious—pious lady mantis who never, it seems, can get enough to eat, will participate in a lovely and tender courting ritual with a potential mate which includes dancing in circles and serious antennae stroking. occasionally (meaning not as often as the australian redback spider), if her mate doesn't get away fast enough after the act of mating is complete, the praying mantis will ambush him. it will happen so quickly he'll never see it coming. the female will turn around and snap off the male's head and proceed to devour him.

it would seem that sordid tales of sex and violence and who has dominion over whom in this world—a sorting out of who actually "wears the pants" and has the power in a family or a society or whatever—started in the vicinity of the insect kingdom and rapidly moved up the food chain into our neighborhood at the very top. (i am reminded of this fact by some of the movies ed and i watch—yes, the truth is we have game of thrones at the top of our netflix queue.)

i will take some small comfort at this point. i am positive—maybe 95% positive?—that humans, for once, are not to blame. men and women who thrive on sex and violence in reality or who watch it on HBO are not to blame for how low we can sink. humans didn't start the power struggle. no they didn't. it's the fault of the big green one—and others like her—as she sits on a fat, juicy leaf and lures her man with provocative flicks of her antennae, smug in the certainty that she will snag him and he will taste sublime.

go on and catch that little thing

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray in, 

places where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.  —John Muir

i don't know why it is, why some little, hardly noticeable, almost insignificant—although not to me—things in the natural world astonish and startle me, so much so that they actually can, at times, startle me silly. (what kind of an expression is that, startle me silly? it's ridiculous, that's what it is, but it's also accurate. when you feel silly you get all ticklish and giddy and wound up, don't you? now add a startle. that is my point exactly.)

in general, i don't think i startle much, or easily—i am not by nature a jumpy person—but if i turn my head or change direction, or if i bend down and this thing suddenly appears on the periphery of my vision, i realize with some surprise there is something i've not seen before, and it happens. it is when i am faced with a novel situation, say, i come across a place where light is striking an object just so, or something in nature seems different, like seeing a living creature where i least expect to find one, where i've previously never stumbled upon one, that i get that feeling of wow.

my garden. early august. early in the day. day lilies explode in every hue. an ordinary day. an extraordinary amount of weeds. bend down. pull up some of those impertinent weeds. then, on my way back to an upright position, there is this—my own sharp involuntary intake of breath. i am caught unaware and i can only muster a sense of delicious discovery because of—can you believe it?—a tiny wood frog. he's lovely and he seems so fragile, shyly peeking out from within the yellow throat of a tall, extra large peach colored lily.

maybe the simple scenario above is boring enough to prompt many people to yawn and fall asleep. maybe it's beyond boring. (i can understand that. after all, i didn't discover a mountain lion in my backyard.) maybe this type of thing happens a lot, is nothing new. but it's new to me. i have never witnessed a frog nestled inside a flower before.

at this point in my life i could easily fall into a deep well of cynicism—a nasty election season could also help nudge me right over the edge—and say i know all about this crazy world. i could say there is nothing left under the moon and sun that moves me, that surprises me. i've seen it all, done it all, there's nothing new and nothing really changes—it's all just life endlessly repeating itself.

but i don't fall; i don't even stumble. for some reason, i don't trip. i stand firmly on two feet and catch this small precious thing—a common, ordinary wood frog!—out of the corner of my eye. i stand there gawking like a nitwit and try to memorize the moment i first saw his small tan face.

because of the likes of him, i am still able to be made woozy—yes, even silly—with astonishment. i am happy with the discovery that there are things that continue to move me, get to me, that blaze with beauty inside a darkening world. it's such a little thing, but i get the message—there are a few surprises yet to be uncovered on this harassed old earth.

balm

hard to believe, but by the time early september arrives in coastal maine an evening fire in the fireplace or fire pit not only looks good, but also feels good. the nippiness of some down east end-of-summer evenings points out the fact that burning logs is not always just for the fun of it—for the loveliness of the crackling flames' red and orange displays—but for the practical matter of warmth, even in september, even if you have on socks and fleece.

i always feel a little—just a little—wistful as summer winds down, but i don't miss the high humidity and i do love fall. until recently i hadn't had socks on for months. a pair of flip-flops slipped between my toes and beneath my soles were the preferred, the most enjoyable, companions to my feet; but i say hooray to the possibility of an indian summer and then the crisp days ahead.

our summer visitors have long since packed their bags and suitcases and headed home to go back to their lives and their autumn routines. leaves are already starting to turn and, in many spots, dried and crinkled yellowish and brownish ones litter the lawn. boats will soon be hauled out of the water—sooner rather than later if a hurricane barrels up the eastern seaboard and gets uncomfortably close—and they'll be shrink-wrapped or stored in boathouses; the big yellow school buses rumble down the roads.

at its peak, this summer's monarda was a stunner—it grew to 60 inches—as were many other of the garden's blooms. somehow, though, the deep red naturalizing effect of the bee balm made it my favorite. not only the color, but the minty, spicy, oregano-ish scent was glorious—the bees and hummingbirds thought so, too.  i loved it when the scarlet flowers were filled with hordes of fuzzy noisy bees. it was like the balm had moving body parts and was chanting and swaying and stretching its limbs. but it was the bees doing all the work—little puppet masters buzzing from blossom to blossom— forcing the bee balm to perform in jerky motions as if it might just reach out and offer you a green hand.

what i was not thrilled about were the caterpillars that sneakily blended in with the leaves early in the season. they had me downright miffed because i thought the plant might be in trouble from the start. then came the beetles and tiny white worms—or some kind of larvae?—many of which i dispatched with a quick, efficient pinch. (i did a lot of hand washing this summer, that's for sure.) even with all the crawly critters, the plant did fine—more than fine, it was spectacular.

but the bees are now gone from the balm, and the stems stand as if frozen—a vision of things to come—topped with black, dried-out seed pods and crimson bits—the leftovers of summer. no more fiery display, no more razzle-dazzle. the buzzing has moved into the seven shades of phlox, where the bees and hummingbirds are finishing off the last sweet taste of summer before it finally comes to an end.

from the top

there it is up there. see it? the catch-it-while-you-can-summer? summer vacation that seems like it was oh-so-many weeks ago, and yet it wasn't really that long ago at all, was it? summer 2012, when the air at 3800 feet was clear, and the warmish/coolish wind naughtily whipped our hair into little tangles and it looked like those steely low-flying clouds might somehow be menacing, but they weren't—thunder storms blew by overnight heading east toward the ocean—as they inched near us and then away from us.

the tram at jay peak in vermont delivered the nine of us, plus a dozen others, smoothly and quietly to the top. and when i say quietly i mean it—not a squeal, scrape or grind from the engine or cables, or from wind teasing the cables, or from the compartment's shifting glass or metal or anything. no sign of gravity, just floating straight up the mountainside surrounded by silence. even the people inside the tram, when they spoke at all, used hushed, unmodulated tones, their voices as well-oiled and precisely maintained as the austrian-made mountain riding machinery.

once at the top we surveyed the vistas in every direction. we looked southwest toward big jay—connected to jay peak by a ridge—where back woods skiers can make their own way down the mountain without the hindrance, the nuisance, of trails. (a few years ago two brilliant, local guys were arrested and charged with clear-cutting a section of big jay in an attempt to secretly carve a ski trail on private land without anyone's knowledge, let alone permission. i ask you in all sincerity, how dumb can people be?)

after viewing some of my summer photos i wondered where did summer go? i know, i know, you're right—summer's not technically over yet so stop acting like it is. go enjoy what's left.

the lovely warts

the day started out like any other day—phone calls, emails, dirty dishes, weedy flower beds, a dog patiently waiting to be fed—but then it turned, veered in a different direction, and left me face to face with the biggest, grandaddy-est eastern american toad i have ever seen. his (?) body length alone—i measured—was nearly four inches and—oh my—did he have fantastic bumps and warts. i was curious as to which bumps were warts and which bumps were, well, just bumps. his skin was dry and densely patterned with them, sprinkled with wonderful camouflage—an assortment of raised, large, small, brown, white, and black dots. to my mind he was indeed a splendid piece of living art. (after a quickie consultation with google i still do not have a definitive answer about how one identifies a genuine wart from that imposter, the generic bump.)

crouched low against the foundation in corner of the deck beside a planter (a large circle cut out of the decking into which a three foot deep concrete cylinder was inserted, ending up a few inches below the level of the deck and filled with soil, compost and flowers) this cute toad sat motionless, even with me leaning down and thrusting a camera in his face. 

i confess i have left the planter somewhat overgrown but, as it turns out, this neglect was a good thing because it probably provided a nice habitat for him—and who knows who else—and since i rarely remove the dead leaves and stalks from the container, but merely cut them up and leave them to rot into mulch, he may have hidden out in there for years.  

in this warm, dry, sheltered spot, the toad sat absolutely still. he blended in well with the patch of chipping paint between the edge of the planter and the house, but he wasn't moving at all. i wondered, was the chubby guy okay? suddenly i experienced a slight panic as i tried to recall where and when the exterminator had sprayed the foundation to get rid of carpenter ants. i don't normally use chemicals anywhere and it makes me cringe when an ant infestation necessitates the use of pesticides. i held my breath as i stroked him gently on his side with my finger. he blinked and turned his head. i withdrew my finger and exhaled—phew, thankfully he was alive and well.

judging by his size, the toad was old—old for a toad anyway—and to have reached such a grand old age i guessed that, in addition to requiring a place to call home, he must also eat rather well. i picked him up and held him on the palm of my hand. i stared into his golden and black jewel-like eyes for a moment and then gently placed him back on the deck. a tasty supply of mouth-watering spiders, moths, centipedes, flies, worms, and slugs reside in and around the planter, allowing the residents of the area to become fat and content.

i studied the patch of skin where the toad had sat on the palm of my hand. did it feel itchy or tingly or irritated? did i notice anything odd? no—there was no evidence of warts or bumps or anything sprouting on my palm. what is it about toads and warts? why the loathing, the fear? i don't pretend to understand a toad's skin, the purpose of it, and yet there must be a purpose, a reason, besides the obvious one, for it to have developed the way it has. i don't find a toad's flesh at all revolting—in fact, i like it. ah, but there is humor at work here, humor, as well as practicality, built into those bumps, into the very workings of the cosmos, is there not?

why are some people utterly freaked out by warts on toads, convinced there is a connection between a toad's lovely warts and the icky kind people get? toads do occasionally secrete a mild toxin which may cause minor skin irritation—but never warts—in some people, and of course we know getting warts from toads and frogs is an old wives tale. and yet, toads, and toad warts, still remain unpleasant for a lot of people to look at. we view them as disgusting; they make us uncomfortable.

there it is: humans are frequently made upset, uncomfortable and uneasy by what is harmless, inconsequential, and unimportant to this existence.

i imagined that beautiful old toad sizing me up, getting a good look at me while i was getting a good look at him. would he be critical of me—turn his head away in disgust—if i had a piece of spinach lodged between my teeth, or if he saw a fleck of mascara smeared under my eye, or discerned a small, hardly noticeable, pimple on my forehead?

an apology to vespula vulgaris

people have their own methods for handling stress—methods that perhaps aren't so much methods as they are involuntary brain responses, the old autonomic nervous system kicking in and doing its job—for determining whether a situation calls for an actual, all-out state of emergency, meaning panic mode has been activated, or not, and figuring out how they will deal with it. it may not be a newsworthy type of emergency, or one that requires lengthy telephone consultations or a trip to the doctor, or the kind that necessitates pressing 911, but it could be an emergency that is little, so little, in fact, that it escapes the notice of most people, but certainly not those for whom it requires immediate attention.

"oh my god, please hurry up! it's huge!" she yells from upstairs.

i don't know exactly when i became the go-to person for this particular kind of little emergency—it was certainly a long time ago—but i know that since i became that person i have had the joy of experiencing many intimate eye to eye and nose to nose moments with several species of buzzing and scampering bugs. i don't bother asking myself why me? because i already know why me.

oftentimes i am the only person—and that's including when there are males of our species on the scene—who will not flinch and just get on with the dirty business. whether it's in my own home, or the home of someone else, if there's a scuttling spider or a flying thing with a stinger coming out of its rear end (or, more accurately, its abdomen) i'm the one who is called upon to remove the intruder.

flying insects, spiders, beetles, centipedes, worms, slugs, ants, and other creepy crawlies don't bother me—they never have. (but i don't like lyme-disease-carrying deer ticks, and i especially don't like nasty black earwigs, with their scary looking curved pincers, that you sometimes see in drains or cellars; you know, those bugs that crawl in you ear, bore through your brain and lay a pile of eggs in there.*)

when the need arises—when errant bugs stray into the house—i am viewed as a kind of insect executioner, although, if i can avoid it, i generally don't execute bugs—i don't believe in execution—i merely relocate the offender.

the time has come. i am being summoned.

"it's in there," she says with a shaky voice, pointing an unsteady finger at the closed bathroom door. (this time it's hannah with insect issues, but it could just as easily have been alex or christina, or my mother-in-law, who is deathly afraid of spiders because she has always maintained she is severely—that's severely—allergic to their venom. i dare anyone to try telling her there are no venomous spiders anywhere near here.)

i am prepared. i have armed myself with a jar and a good, solid, just-in-case paperback.

then it's over. afterwards, i feel a little sad.

i was impatient. i was frustrated. i acted too quickly. i couldn't scoop vespula into the jar, and my attempts to capture the wasp were making it nervous, thus making me nervous (i don't mind bugs, but, like everyone else, i don't look forward to being stung.) i should have removed the screen where the wasp was focusing on its struggle, zigging and zagging and aiming for the light, only trying to get free, only trying to live. (wasps are, after all, beneficial to the environment, and are a welcome predator because they prey upon so many insect pest populations.) i should simply have let it out into the garden.

it's too late for should have, though, because i didn't.

*according to hollywood and nobody else

snip, snip, gather them in

last week.....

the first day of summer. ninety degrees and steamy at eleven o'clock in the morning. not a typical maine day, no, not at all. joe cupo on channel 6 predicts three more days of this. i stand in the garden, glance around, shake my head. in addition to the heat, there's something else that's not quite right, something else that's off.

silence. dead silence. not a chirp, not a song, no buzzing of bees or dragonflies or the low hum of an incoming hummingbird over my head, no wind, only the faint burble of the little stream as it meekly shushes and tumbles, seeking its way through the forest.

i stare at them. they are starting to appear defeated, heads drooping low. i know if i don't take some action many of the splendid buds won't bloom properly, and those that do won't last. they will be seared and cooked right on their own stems until they're well done and finished. i mutter to myself this isn't good, not good at all.

it's too much for them. (it's too much for me. i don't know how i would deal with the heat if i lived in the south. james and megan won't see me visiting them in texas in the summer, that's for sure.) they will wilt, wither, waste away, if left alone to fend for themselves against the heat wave that's overpowering everything, myself included. but there's one thing i can do to save them—get the scissors and start cutting.

we don't get a lot of oppressive days like this along the southern maine coast—maybe 3 or 4 of them a year—and by oppressive i mean where there is no reprieve from the heat, no afternoon sea breeze, the humidity staying high and the temperature barely dipping and there's nothing to help air out the house and cool it down in preparation for yet another day of heat. we used to tough it out when there wasn't a breeze—we didn't even have an air conditioner in the bedroom until two years ago—but we've become wimpy. no, not we, me. i'm the wimpy one; ed doesn't mind the heat.

i grab an old pair of slightly rusty scissors i use for the garden out of a terra cotta pot on the porch where i also keep the garden trowels and some string. snip, snip, gather them in before they fall to ruin. i whisper to them, to myself, in reassuring tones, fill the basket, carry them into the cool house and put them in fresh water away from the sun. i have closed the shades and curtains—it is as cool and dark as a crypt. i don't like it; i would much rather be able to leave the shades open and live in the light.

the silky, multi-layered white flowers, with bits of deep pink hidden like little surprises inside their frilly ruffles, are my favorites. they smell particularly sweet—they make the whole room smell sweet. i don't remember its name, but that plant is my most prolific. i am having some trouble with the raspberry/fuchsia/magenta/rose ones—what color are they exactly? i get confused, almost color-blinded by all the names—way too many shades of pink—which are bush-like and exhibit fine green leaves but not many blooms. do they need more manure? more mulch? more love?

the name—peony. i like saying it even if it's just in my head.

what do meteorologists know. the next day a cold front from the north lands on our doorstep and brings with it some clouds and a breeze, and much lower humidity and temperatures. comfortable. shades up, windows open. (we are, as they say, on the leading edge of the front. just 25 miles south of here, and a few miles to the west, it's still sweltering.) my snipping was completely unnecessary; i could have left the peonies alone. but never mind—they keep me company indoors instead, where i see them both night and day.

this week.....

the inevitable falling of petals, the bottommost ones heart-shaped and crumpled and lying in a heap.

the scent of the night stalks

 along the caloosahatchee river. florida. january, 2012.

windows, thrown wide open to receive the warm, breezy, new air of daytime, need to be closed before bed. it is turning chilly, a real maine evening, one of those evenings where sitting in an adirondack chair around the campfire in the backyard—zipped in a sweatshirt, feet stretched toward the flames—is a good thing, but once you're inside, the night needs to be shut out.

as i reach for the handle to crank the window i pause. a sweet smell lingers on the nightair, a scent heady as incense—though more subtle—not a scent that can be described or identified as one particular plant.

forget-me-not. fiddlehead fern. chive. columbine. lily. euonymus. dandelion. azalea. peony. vinca. lilac. phlox. meadowsweet. grass. oregano. iris. hosta. countless weeds.

i stand motionless. i inhale. it is none of these—and yet it is all of these.

the aroma originates below, in the darkness of the underground world—not only in my yard, but everywhere—each place with its own particular scent, sometimes pronounced, sometimes not. the scent comes from the night work of plants. a pervading smell—a heavenly smell—of what, i cannot be sure, of what, i cannot say, but it strikes me that it is like a clear, rippling liquid, so i will call it a night juice: the juice that rises up.

i breathe it in. night essence.

it begins its move beneath the surface as the rainwater that washes over everything is gratefully accepted by earth and roots. the roots drink and it slowly starts the ascent, the vertical suck, streaming into stems and stalks after the roots have done their work, the lifting of the juice as it continues to make its way into the tips of quivering leaves and blades—long and narrow, round and full, small and compact, shiny and pointed, slivers, a multitude—and then out onto the air.

in the silent evening the earth stirs with that restless climb of fluid and nutrients—with life itself—and brings its perfume to my nostrils. i remove the screen (damn the mosquitoes, but then without them the bats and wrens and phoebes would not be satisfied) and stick my head out, hovering by the window a moment longer to drink in the sweet flow, this mighty night therapy, and its ability to calm and soothe after a long day.

i savor it—the heaviness, the dark rush, the pulsing up. the evening, alive.

i pop the screen back in place, lock the window tight. i climb into bed.

cracked

last may i was in massachusetts at the house on the hill where my parents live. the house is situated above what i like to call our golden pond—that's beck pond on a map—the place where i grew up and still, to some extent, consider home.

the weather was pleasant and sunny but not yet warm enough for swimming. my dad, a fit and healthy eighty year-old, was busy preparing lunch while i visited with my mother. over the last few years my mother's health has been steadily deteriorating, slowly diminishing under the silently prowling brain thief that is alzheimer's disease. speech is cumbersome for her—her ability to express even the simplest of thoughts is disappearing, and the few words she does manage to say are arrived at only after a great struggle. but on that day we were, in our own figure-it-out-as-we-go-along fashion, "conversing", with me holding her hand and guessing—do you mean this, mom? or this? no? how about this?—and filling in her blanks, trying to get the answers right like i was taking a bizarre multiple choice exam.

after lunch, my father and i made my mother comfortable on a chaise lounge on the patio overlooking the pond—she walks with difficulty and staircases are treacherous for her—and went down the stairs to the water, with my mother in our sight the whole time. we came back up and walked by the vegetable garden, checked to see if my mother needed anything, and continued around the other side of the house past my parents' beautiful stonewalls and up a long stone staircase—all built by my father (my mother helped) using stones they found on their property. (when you need rocks for a landscaping project it helps to live in new england where backyards can be full of them.)

it was then that my father pointed out the nest.

a large robin's nest filled with four gorgeously blue eggs.

but it struck me that something was wrong, horribly wrong.

i couldn't believe what i saw.

why—oh tell me why?—would a bird build its nest on the ground? i've seen nests built quite low in trees and bushes, but never on the ground, and this one was next to the foundation with no bushes or plants or anything to camouflage it, no protection whatsoever from predators.

when i looked at that nest, so utterly, hopelessly, exposed in a corner by the chimney, i was overcome with sadness, a deeper sadness than the situation called for. after all, birds and animals die all the time—nature is cruel, nature is unsympathetic. that's life. those are the facts. i knew that, knew it well. i thought get a grip; get over it. but in that moment i couldn't. i was hit hard by what i believed was the nonexistent future of the tiny lives contained within those shells; i was overcome by inexplicable and somewhat irrational emotion. i just wanted to be able to do something to fix things, to make things right, and yet there was absolutely nothing i could do, no way to change the outcome fate had in store for the baby birds.

a few weeks passed. one day i was on the phone with my father and suddenly i thought of the robin's eggs. i asked him if, by some miracle, the babies had hatched without incident. of course, i already knew the answer, but i waited for him to tell me exactly what happened.

there was not much to tell—events unfolded quickly. turns out, it didn't take long for what some people might call a bad luck disaster, and others might call a good luck opportunity—depending on whose side you're on—to come skulking along. the possibility of life for those unhatched-lings, which had been in doubt from the start, was like a dream—like something longed for, hoped for—with the dream coming to an abrupt end about a week after i left massachusetts. when hungry bellies demand sustenance and the brain yells go find food, what choice does any creature have?

my father informed me that the interior of the nest was in shambles—of the four eggs only three were left, and those were cracked wide open, their warm, wet interiors sucked dry, signaling fullness and contentment for a crow or a bluejay, a raccoon or a skunk. (he never did find the remains of the fourth egg.) not such a tragic situation, really—lives given up so other lives could manage to make it through another day. that's the way it goes.

i felt nothing after he told me the news—my emotional overdrive had been spent when i saw the nest.

actually, that's inaccurate. i no longer felt emotion for the ransacked nest, but i did experience an emotional response after i hung up the phone. i thought about my mother. it occurred to me that she had no idea about what had happened, no idea how events played themselves out after the nest's discovery. the story of the nest and its contents remained with her for a short time and then was lost—it became part of the realm of mystery—unless she was reminded of its existence.

in her world, facts such as these don't matter—they are completely useless to her. the facts remain for me and my father to decipher—we alone can break into them and get at them, allowing them to signal the beginning of another chunk of time, another chunk of reality different than hers, one where life has a before and after. we've become sharply aware of our own lives: it's as if we're in a kind of passage and, in order for us to avoid losing our way in this brittle existence, we need to know where we've been to help us figure out where we're going.

~  i took the photo of the nest on the day i saw it last year. my father was kind enough to save it for me after it was raided so now it's one of the nests i put on the christmas tree every year. the nest reminds me of a year of changes, and it always leads me to bittersweet thoughts of my mother.

hidden in the lady's house

whoosh. here's june.

my woodsy maine garden really begins to heat up in late spring. unfortunately, after many thunderstorms and torrential rain and kisses from the sun, the weeds are quickly outpacing me. i try to keep up—things look okay—just too bad the weeds will always be several steps ahead. it's a jungle out there, but—if you'll permit me to say so—it's a nice jungle.

bees, bats, butterflies, dragonflies and hummingbirds make the rounds. there's a welcome crowd—a busy, boisterous, hard-at-work crowd—amongst the shoots and blooms, swooping in and out and about the plantings, the buds, the leaves.

crazy overabundance, spilling over. that's what it is; that's what's visible.

but then there's the invisible.

those secret places. the inner sanctums. the private abodes. when male and female are together inside the soft, delicate folds of the petals. look closely—it's a steamy, x-rated place. love, green-style. seeds, birth, new generations.

take the azalea. look at her. what you see is no blushing bride, no shy innocent stigma. she is fiery and brazen, that one, and throws herself wantonly toward the sky to receive his pollen. what a delight.

below her stigma—near her middle, around the style—a ring of courtiers surrounds her (many male and female parts all in close proximity to one another—i would guess it's a good life for everyone playing inside this flower) each one a dusty anther where pollen is produced—the man's house, androecium.

a hidden place, unseen, lies below that. the gynoecium—the lady's house—with the ovaries, the eggs.

i don't need to tell you the details of what happens next, once the pollen grains travel down the style. they'll do their thing and not a single person will take notice. not a single one. it will simply be done.

and that's just one flower. how are your math skills? count, then multiply.

what can i say? i'm a hopeless romantic—there's no stopping love.

speaking of no stopping love—but in this case a bluesy kind of love mixed with some real rockin' love, too—last night ed, hannah, christina and i saw marc cohn and bonnie raitt in portland. she, like the name of her song, is something to talk about. man, can that lady perform. at 63 she's lookin' good and she's still got it in her—such a talented guitarist and singer. she and her band put on a fantastic and long—hand over mouth covering yawns this morning—show.

oh canada

driving down the road recently i saw what i thought was a duck lurking behind some reeds about seventy-five feet away from me in a small marshy pond. the lily pad and tree reflections on almost still water under the light cloud cover of morning sky were stunning. i had the urge to record this beautiful moment so i pulled over and rummaged around for my camera and then realized i had left it at home.

i quickly turned the car around in the next driveway and backtracked to get it, keeping my fingers crossed that during the less-than-ten-minute round trip the wind wouldn't pick up and the muted light would remain and the duck would come out from behind the reeds.

i was in luck. the scene remained the same as when i left it with, however, one notable exception—the duck, which had swum out into the middle of the pond, was in reality a goose, a large male canada goose. how could i have possibly mistaken a goose for a duck? (is it time for new glasses?)

and how, when male and female canada geese are identical except for size, did i know it was a male?

because, upon closer inspection, i observed the unmoving head of another goose behind the tall grasses on the other side of the water, this one obviously sitting on a nest. while a female canada goose incubates the eggs, the male keeps watch—and this guy did a superb job.

he did not take his eyes off me as he swam closer and closer and started to come out of the water. i was afraid of getting hissed and honked at, or even lunged at by this possibly wings a-flapping goose dad, so i took a few more pictures and left him in peace to watch over his mate and the eggs. female geese always return to the area where they were born and unless something happens to one of them, those two will be hanging out together for what i hope is a good, long life.

in springlight

the light of late spring is a fine light—it is a warm and playful light that casts itself about in the right way. of course, that's just my humble opinion. at another time someone—and that someone might even be me—could very well write the same thing about the light of summer or autumn or even winter. the light of those seasons is also fine—it, too, accomplishes the task of pushing away the darkness, of thawing our bones, heating things up, making us feel alive.

the black metal chairs and tables were positioned on a patio amidst tulips in the clear cool mountain light of the trapp family lodge's terraced garden in stowe where my daughter and i had stopped for a good but—as it turns out—over-priced lunch. (the off-season beauty of the place made it well worth the higher price out-of-state and foreign tourists are willing to pay on a regular basis.) there were crowds of tulips in full bloom but hardly any people, and the afternoon arrived as if part of a carefully scheduled program, like the choir of birds were providing musical selections specifically for our entertainment. so we enjoyed the music and being encircled by mountains and sky—for me, mother's day arrived a week early.

the day was a day of capturing the light. the day was a day of being captured by the light. the day was a day of being in love with the light. then the light changed; it was time to go. the afternoon became quieter, the shadows longer. as we walked over the lawn and got closer to the parked car we could see  montana's black, furry head, her chin resting motionless on the back of the seat. as always, she waited patiently, hopeful that we would soon return.

bouquets of dandelions

except for a few small, isolated patches in the deep shade of overhanging ledges, the snow has finally melted from the trails around mount mansfield, the highest mountain in vermont. the melodic songs of waterfalls plunging down from the dizzying height of rocky outcroppings were a serenade to springtime, but the trees looked wintry, gray and skeletal—the buds tiny, embryonic and tightly curled.

on saturday my daughter alex and i played tourist in her backyard and drove up to nearby smuggler's notch after we helped the baby of the family, hannah, start to move out of one apartment in preparation to move into another.

at the higher elevations there was minimal green, but in the rest of vermont there was plenty of it, including bright green plastic bags which were sprouting up like cabbages along the road from richmond to the notch. the first saturday in may is green up day in vermont and many people were out cleaning winter's debris from the landscape. the bags were left beside the road to be collected later. we didn't participate, though. our excuse? we didn't have one, but i could say one of us was too pooped from driving for four hours and helping with the apartment and the other one was too pregnant (but too pregnant doesn't work as an excuse because the girl hiked the pinnacle at 30 weeks of pregnancy). plus we had other plans.

in addition to green there was lots of yellow—enough dandelions in fields and lawns and grassy ditches for thousands of bouquets. i always feel a little sad for the despised dandelion. i think they are very pretty (and useful—how about a yummy salad of dandelion greens and a sip of dandelion wine? no? ok, so i'll admit that to me, anyway, those aren't the tastiest of treats) and i find myself getting upset about the containers of nasty "weed begone" killers people douse them with in search of perfection. i generally have a hard time with unnatural weed-free golf course types of grassiness which leach lakes of harmful chemicals into the environment.

but in vermont the dandelions seem to thrive; people either like dandelions better here or they have made peace with the idea of their existence due to the severe cost to nature of attempting to eradicate them—they are an accepted and natural part of the landscape. the dandelions' sunny yellow faces will continue to keep on smiling until the day comes when lawnmowers are hauled out of sheds and garages and barns and revved up for that first mow of the season.

crossing the road

i slow down and pull over when i see them. they are sauntering—an everything's cool, no worries, just grazin' and gobblin' and enjoying the day saunter—across the field toward me. i roll down my window, grab my camera, take a couple pictures. this time there are six hens, zero toms. but it's spring and love is in the air so you know the toms are somewhere nearby ready to pick a good fight.

i allow the group of ladies—sleek copper-bronze-black-with-dabs-of-bluish-reddish dames with alluringly wattled heads and necks held high—who, out of necessity, have picked up their pace, to cross the road in front of my car.

but i don't drive away after they have made it safely to the other side.

the hens hold my attention. i watch them and wonder about them. once they're across i wish i could follow them and see where they go and what they do when they enter the woods. what are their turkey lives like? they seem "happy." do they know it? what is happy to them? a full belly and a warm bed? (not too unlike us) they shine. they strut. they glow with confidence because they know they look good (ah, such magnificent wattling)—just like some women.

and the wild turkey toms are exactly like some men. they, too, strut their stuff and think the women will simply fall all over themselves trying to get noticed. and they're right. some will fall all over themselves, some won't. some women will get noticed, some won't. it's a macho attitude, and also a somewhat understandable survival attitude at work, one that says i've got to pass on my fab genes in a hurry. all hens—and women, too—have known those kinds of toms at some time or another.

i don't think it's too much of a stretch of the imagination to realize that a few similarities exist in a wild turkey's life and and our own lives. we both start out wild—we begin life as wild animals—all squishy bodily fluids and functions, noisy grunts and emissions. but we become tame and the turkeys don't, and then it mostly comes down to this matter of survival, this urge to reproduce, for some of us, and for all of them. the male thinks to himself i want her to notice me—he has his reasons—and she has her own reasons for wanting to be noticed by him.

aren't we all part of this grand game, this grand show, that's been performed, over and over again, for thousands of years? sometimes i wonder, is it partially the game that keeps us feeling alive?

for thousands of years males and females have danced around each other, surveyed each other, looked into each others' eyes. what do men see? what do women see? what do we think we see? do we only see what we want to see?

questions nag at us. is he thinking what i'm thinking? what will he do? what should i do? what do we really want? whose move is it anyway? all this in an effort to feel life deeply and get a lot out of it and in the end be able to say we lived it to its fullest. (sorry that last bit sounds sort of like a lame greeting card or a corny song but i hope you get what i'm trying to say.)

and so it goes.

i drive a half mile down the road and as the car reaches the top of a rise near an old farm—a small farm, but a real one, and even better than that, an organic one, one where they raise a few cows and chickens that actually roam the fields and see the light of day, breathe the fresh outdoor air, and where they grow a few local crops without throwing chemicals in the pastureland—i spot quite a gathering along a knoll. at least a dozen hens, and this time there's a tom, too, grazing. the hens seem rather relaxed but the tom is not taking any rests; he couldn't be less relaxed.

that's because he's hard at work, teasing and showing off, trying to get the hens to please come out and play and—here he has my sympathy—any second he knows he may have to deal with the blood-thirsty competition moving in. he moves back and forth. i hear grunts and gobbles as he repeatedly opens and closes and shakes his glorious tail feathers trying to get a response to his brilliant display.

but, you know, there isn't any. the females keep picking at the ground and ignore him. (in the end the tom will win, though. the hens will change their minds and become receptive to him very soon, as nesting time is almost here.)

the game they play amuses me. (i am easily amused—in fact, i love to be amused.)

as i continue to observe life i have come to the realization that the more i think i have things figured out in this here cosmos, the more i have to acknowledge that i don't. for human beings the reality remains that there isn't such a thing as stirring the pot and making a nice reduction out of traits or problems or whatever—peoples' traits and issues and experiences and motivations cannot simply be boiled down and made easily understandable.

our true identities will always present a somewhat complicated puzzle—like the puzzles with 1000 tiny, similarly cut pieces that all look like they might fit but have to be rearranged a lot, and then the dog comes along and eats a piece and messes up the nice arrangement—even to ourselves.

interrupted by green

on saturday alex, andrew, christina, amelia and i went on a short hike up and around freeport's hedgehog mountain—a mountain which is is hardly a mountain at all; in reality it is only a wee forested hill capped with a gigantic rock. from the rock's raised vantage point you can see the real mountains miles to the west, and also that other false mountain up the road named bradbury. the first half of hedgehog mountain's name makes a justifiable claim, however—a hedgehog population does, in fact, exist (although we didn't see any) in the freeport woods.

(it must be nice to be the person to name a place on a map. the people who originally came up with the names of hedgehog and bradbury mountains obviously had some fun with the naming process—a healthy sense of humor was at work here. otherwise why not simply call it the hedgehog woods? who can say.)

the day looked more like a sketch of fall than spring—the predominant color being a used, dried-out tea bag brown—and the bone dry conditions that have prevailed 'round these parts (the fire danger has been extremely high) turned the little streams and brooks in the hedgehog woods into mud holes which the three dogs immediately stumbled upon with the single-minded objective of testing the pure muddiness of them all—an exhaustive examination of the murky muck utilizing the dogs' highly specialized equipment of paws and tongues and noses. we humans stayed on the path and clomped over the little wooden trip-trap-billy-goats-gruff-style bridges.

tree buds were barely visible. as far as i could see in every direction along the trail there were no signs of color, no signs of a green spring anywhere in the wide open expanse below the mountain's summit (it feels silly typing mountain and summit), just a monochromatic dunnish brown crosshatched every so often by segments of broken stonewalls.

that is, until christina, the only seemingly aware-of-their-surroundings person in the group, made a discovery and said look, what's all that green over there?

green? really? here? where?

sure enough, there was a good sized splotch of green challenging the predominantly sepia canvas. we left the trail and walked over the drab, leaf-strewn landscape to discover a huge carpet of six-inch-ish daylily shoots. that was it—nothing but day lilies. hundreds and hundreds of day lilies.

in a couple months—if not sooner—when the day lilies in our zone start to bloom, i'll head back over to hedgehog and see what colors have been added to the artwork-in-progress along the forest floor.

~ the top photo is of two terra cotta pots filled with tall grass which were on my sunny, south-facing kitchen windowsill. i have an absolutely crazy craving for an indoor presence of bright green living shoots in winter.

totem

it's early, very early—too early for most people to get out of bed if they don't need to—but i like early. from where i stand in the yard, waiting for the dogs to do their business, the black silence of morning is like a satisfyingly protracted yawn, or a long pause between sentences.

but why the pause? is it because the writer can't think of what should come next? has no new ideas? can't find the right words? or is it because the writer is focused on something other than what's on the page, focused on listening, perhaps?

what's the writer listening to? what's out there?

in our little woods in maine wildness prevails—that is, as well as it can prevail with neighbors visible through the trees on both sides of us. we have done very little in terms of clearing trees (after the initial clearing of enough land for a modest house and yard), and we take care of only necessary clean ups after storms. over the (many) years we have trimmed out some undergrowth, cut up dead trees on the edge of the yard, and those which have fallen—or are about to fall—too close to the house. other than that, we have left the forest pretty much as it presents itself to us—after being thrashed by winter—each spring, with the exception of some as-needed foraging for, and tidying up of, fallen twigs and branches and small trees that are in a ready-to-use state for the fireplace, or the fire pit out back.

our neighbors to the west keep the forest adjacent to their yard in a state of fussy perfection—an immaculate, unnatural perfection—with no dead or fallen anything to provide food or shelter for animals or to aid in the germination of seeds. hardly a stick remains (an exaggeration, but you get the idea). every twig is raked away, every branch removed, no rotting stumps or logs or limbs or trees are allowed to stay on their forest floor—they are all chain-sawed into oblivion.

i, on the other hand, believe a good bit of well-placed rot should be left alone in the woods: stumps covered in a growth of verdant moss and rich with fungi which are even now providing a home for small animals and insects while simultaneously turning into nutrient-laced soil; a few tall trees still anchored to the ground but broken in half, their crowns—toppled by storms or lightning strikes or disease—resting peacefully on the forest floor beside them and quickly surrounded by new growth;  trees leaning drunkenly on other trees, dying from within.

it's a mess when mother nature's doing her thing, but i like a natural mess—a mess that fosters an undisturbed small-scale wildness that lives here in our suburban woods.

long, lean and branchless, the broken trees are beacons, symbols, totems of the living kinship group of the forest. these dying trees are vital, they are providers—they provide for the life of the forest. many of them exist—are encouraged to exist—on my patch of land; they are allowed to remain in their broken state, untouched by humans. this is what i see: the stark outline of forest poles. and from where the fractured trees stand to the north of me, i hear, as the sky gets lighter, a sound—a deep, hollow drumming—that fills the silence, fills the gap between sentences.

i can't see him—the light is too dim and he is too shy—but a pileated woodpecker is out there among the totems—a large black bird with a flash of white and red—hammering his meticulous rectangular designs in the dead and dying trees. for a while the trees will live on and provide for spring's flourish of new birth with their insect-filled cores and carved out nesting hollows.

hear it. susurrando. the emptiness is slowly being replaced by exhaled breath and joyous flight, the first notes of morning song and a wild, unhindered delight.