Looked at the online weather report this morning, and had rather a shock, considering yesterday's optimism: the temperature has dropped and is not predicted to go above freezing again until next Wednesday. Real cold weather - temperatures in the low teens each night, and then snow. Snow. Nooooooooo.
Earlier this week I read in S. J. Rozan's blog that the Canada geese were back at the southern end of the Hudson River. Then yesterday evening I heard just two or three of them flying overhead in the dusk, heading north. This morning there were a few more. I think that makes it official - no matter what the weather does in the next few weeks, the worst is over. I see the buds thickening and showing red on our huge back-yard maple, and at least one of our local squirrels has a russet tail as he changes his qrey winter coat for summer brown. It's been a hard winter.
Last Monday was Groundhog Day - and I think the little guy saw his shadow, for whatever that was worth. So spring is a ways off - though even six more weeks doesn't seem long given the deep freeze we've been in for the past few months. But in fact the groundhog - or woodchuck - or whistlepig (my favorite name) - is not the only harbinger of spring. For several weeks we've been treated to the scent of skunk in the late evening - so at least one has come out to see what's going on - however, they are not true hibernators, so this may not mean much. More encouraging, the cardinals are singing in the mornings, and two days ago I heard a house finch's spring song.
Well not really the grass - not growing either. What I was actually doing was watching the driveway dry as the sun came out, way ahead of schedule. And watching didn't work. That is although there was progress almost from moment to moment, like the hands of a clock moving, the change was nevertheless too slow for my eyes to see it. I was watching out of relief that the freezing rain had stopped, that the ice on wires and tree limbs would get no thicker. Last night while meditating (and therefore being quiet enough to hear) every so often there would be a sharp crack and then a thud as an overloaded branch broke and fell. Sirens rang in the distance. The lights flickered and several times went out completely, but only for a moment. We were lucky. This morning there is news that the power is out for half of New Hampshire, and many areas of New England and northern NY State have been hard hit.
Yesterday the news was all over the internet that the great singer Odetta had died. I saw her first at one of the two Newport Folk Festivals that I attended - I think, in 1960. The experience itself was unforgettable. It was a cool night, very damp, with great banks of fog blowing in from the ocean, at times obscuring both stage and singers, but never the songs. One of the last songs Odetta sang was about the Irish Easter rebellion of 1916, The Foggy Dew. Slow and mornful, her heavy rich voice held us almost breathless as the mists swirled and carried the last lines: "While Britannia’s Huns with their long-range guns, Sailed into the foggy dew."
After that, I attended as many of her concerts as I could, even traveling for hours once with a friend to be able to hear her sing at a Cape Cod nightclub. And we slept in a field that night since we had no money for anything better.
[To hear an Irish version of Foggy Dew, click here.]
It's the last day of November and over morning coffee, I'm listening to some of the last geese flying south as winter begins. Well - the geese here fly west in fact - they're quite consistent about it. Evidently their internal maps don't direct them south until some later point in their journey, but they are leaving. And of course winter doesn't really start officially until December 21st, but the twelfth month has never felt like fall. Autumn's over and it's winter. To make this perfectly clear, the first snow is falling.
We have a new neighbor - Tom's house across the street finally sold. Tom had been at best an occasional presence, living most of the time with his girlfriend, and stopping by once a week mainly to drop off garbage, and pick up whatever branches had fallen from the dead tree in front. When he got serious about selling the house, Tom had the tree cut down, and bright mums put in its place. Now the house is lived in again - lights on in the evening, curtains at the windows, and more flowers on the steps. But next door, we lost an old neighbor last summer when Dot died - the For Sale sign marks her lawn. In this economy, it may be there a long time. Slow waves of change.
We had lunch with a friend last week - and our conversation came around to my lack of interest in so-called good literature. I do like to read, and our house is filled with books, but the fiction portion is mostly mysteries and science fiction. I even feel mildly guilty about this imbalance.
We spoke of Thomas Hardy - who is a very depressing read. And then Jane Austin - I said, well I like happy endings. Our friend replied that Austin's books do all end happily. With that, what I really dislike suddenly became clear - it's that the characters in most good literature are not in control of their destinies. Where the endings are happy, as in Jane Austin's works, happiness is achieved by manipulation and wile - and luck. This reflects society in the author's time. True individual self-determination is something quite new, in fact, and often is as much ideal as real. The truth about it is that, though considered and labeled a right, at least here in America, it is really a rare treasure which very few people have. Eventually, hard events reveal the extent to which most of us are controlled by others. But when this is made plain in childhood, the effect is profound, coloring everything that follows.
There is a heart-breaking poem by Rudyard Kipling, "Gentlemen Rankers", that contains the verses,
- We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
- We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
- And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
- God help us, for we knew the worst too young!
Even when the ending is happy, the situation itself is tragic. I know this tragedy too well to want to read more about it.
A light rain is falling - the first in over a week. After a February and March that brought the worst flooding in decades, to say nothing of the snow and ice, April has been dry. Even so, all the trees are out, dogwoods in full bloom, maples in leaf, and our lilacs are just about to open. The new house behind us to the right has disappeared in the opening foliage. But nothing can help the maple tree in the front yard across the street. It was dying when we moved here a few years ago, and this spring it is just plain dead: not a bud or blossom or leaf showing anywhere; only bark peeling from the upper limbs. We have wondered why the owner has not had it cut down, since he is trying to sell his house, and the tree really detracts from its looks and value. Strangely, it is one of the few trees on our street that the local utility did not bother to trim in its recent pass through - even though a number of the now-dead branches embrace the power lines.
My mother was one of four sisters. One, Shirl, died many years ago, but my mother and Elizabeth and Helen died just in the past two years. The youngest, Elizabeth, had owned several paintings that Mom had done - she'd liked them well enough to frame them and hang them in her home. Upon her passing, her daughter asked me if I would like them back, and I said yes. I had been aware of Mom's painting but just as a hobby though one I knew that she enjoyed deeply until her failing eyesight made it impossible.
When the paintings arrived, we hung them - and I have been enjoying them quite a lot. One is a watercolor of a great oak tree in Granby Connecticut, and the painting is hung at the end of our kitchen where I see it as I drink my morning coffee. A couple of days ago I was looking at it and thinking of the woman who painted it. Suddenly she was not simply Mother but rather, a woman who had loved creative work, had loved the countryside around her, and had wanted to capture it through her art. Almost like a blow, I had a sense of this woman whom I had not known at all, missing her behind the mask of "Mother."
Years ago I had recognized the importance of the moment when Mother suddenly saw me as a person in my own right - I could tell you the very moment when it happened. And even so I never saw that I had not made the equivalent shift in my understanding of her. As I sat there drinking my coffee, there was a moment of regret - I had missed something - but in all the complexities of our relationship, that particular aspect, the friendship of equals, was probably not possible. Another part of grieving - what could never be.
No - I'm not actually trying to keep my head above the surface of a vast pool of bunnies - the expression refers to a joke I heard a week or so ago: "It's not that I really have ADD, it's just that - OH - look! A bunny rabbit!" In my case, the pool is the internet - day by day the information available - rabbits - gets deeper and deeper. This morning I've been reading nuns' blogs, my high-school list of recent alumnae in the news; I've searched for a copy of my college yearbook, read Google's summary of news stories, looked up one Buddhist on-line instruction site, and watched hair-mousse burn. That's just the rabbits I can remember.
Not only has my once-linear train of thought been hijacked, the very tracks have been torn up and re-laid in a strange pattern that combines dizzying horizontal and vertical movement. The very worst aspect of this - at least I think it's the worst - is that simple linear thinking is becoming repellent. This morning as I read one of those nuns' blogs, I found it harder and harder to read steadily. Every few words, I was seized by an impulse to click on some other link, go off to some other site, perhaps more interesting. Now, I'll grant you that the blog I was reading was a bit slow-moving - nevertheless, it's something I'm interested in (how contemplatives live, think, pray.) But every page has it's links - rabbits tearing off out of the frame and drawing me after them. I follow.
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