January 15: Shadows on the Snow

As I sat at my desk writing this morning, my attention was diverted by something small darting back and forth outside the window. It took me awhile to figure out what it was, because it was moving fast, and, it turns out, wasn't truly tangible. I was seeing shadows on the snow of a nuthatch moving quickly and with agility among the boughs of a tree hanging over the back yard.

As I watched more intentionally, more shadows flickered across the snow. A flock of bright-throated goldfinches passed through, then a handful of chickadees flew back and forth from the bird feeder on the other side of the house. A chickadee landed right in front of me on the porch rail outside my office window and then flew up to grab something off the gutter--some frozen insect carcass, perhaps? A pair of blue jays made their presence known. Then a downy woodpecker flew in to explore a tree trunk. A small flock of starlings, a species I've never seen in our yard before, cast large shadows as they perched for a moment in our big maple tree. All this activity happened in the space of about half an hour. As the sunlight has raised the air temperature, the birds have clearly been making the most of their daylight time.

Not long after, I even had the privilege of watching a pair of crows chase a red-tailed hawk through the air space above my yard. Imagine how much I'd have missed if I'd never bothered to look up when those shadows first caught my eye.

Shadows on the snow:
a moment's activity,
a flurry of birds.

January 9: Oranges

Some days I just find myself craving a particular color. This morning I was drawn to orange--orange undershirt, some clementines with my cereal for breakfast, orange gloves as I headed out to soak up some sunlight. The need was stimulated, I'm sure, by my constant need for more warmth this time of year, as well as the mood boost the color offers when contrasted with the pale dirty snow out my window. It's a color that catches and embodies light, connoting Florida citrus and sunshine. Perhaps my body craves more Vitamin C to help me shed once and for all a niggling cold, and this attraction to orange is a way of getting me to ingest some healthful fruit.

The sight of tulips in my window near the fruit bowl helped satisfy my longing for this color, albeit not as tangibly as those clementines, which I devoured. 

And I've been fixating on a section of our prayer flag garland that sports five tangerine-colored pennants in a row, the only repetition in a string of 48. If I could translate those symbols, perhaps there's something I need to be learning there...

Fruit and flowers glow

in kitchen's weak, winter light.

Outside, dirty snow.

January 8: Sunset

Yesterday's sunset was so breath-taking here in the Midcoast that in addition to my own photograph, I saw at least four other images of it posted by friends on Facebook. It filled the sky with wide swaths of purple, pink, and gold, a visually dramatic end to a day we'd thought to see snow. Sequestered as I was in a classroom in Belfast, focused on my first session of the intensive Midcoast Leadership Academy, I was surprised to emerge at day's end to a glowing sky empty of snowflakes. As I pulled out of UM's Hutchinson Center onto Route 3, my head swirling with information on group dynamics, communication styles, and personality types, I decided I needed a distraction. So instead of turning right to head home, I turned left to head into the sunset. Pulling over in a suitable spot, I took this photo through my windshield:

Route Three, Belfast

The scene reminded me of the moody works of Belfast painter Linden Frederick--that beauty amid the mundane yet poignant artifacts of the rural Maine roadside landscape: bus headlights, red glow of taillights, utility poles, stark trees with glimpse of a snowy field, farmhouse with attached barn beyond. An ordinary place caught in an extraordinary moment. 

Headlights tiny sparks

beneath that glorious sky.

We all pause, look up. 

 

December 21: Full Moon on the Solstice

Despite predictions of dire weather, this morning dawned clear, albeit blustery and with pale skies. Today, the Solstice, is the shortest day of the year, so any light will be welcome. In addition to its importance as a highly spiritual pagan holiday, this Solstice is special for reasons we can all appreciate, coinciding with a full moon and a total lunar eclipse. I heard on the radio yesterday that the last time a total lunar eclipse happened on the Winter Solstice was when Galileo was alive. Unfortunately, this lunar eclipse, a beautiful spectacle that turned the moon's bright face red, happened last night while a storm howled like a freight train around our house. But simply knowing it was happening somewhere up there above the tempest added to the wild magic of the night, even if I didn't witness it with my own eyes.

The astronomical significance of the day corresponds with an internal emotional shift, as well. Tomorrow the span of daylight will begin to lengthen again. We are turning once again into the light, and a little hope and optimism has begun to return to my heart. These past few weeks have been personally dark, and not just for the shortness of the days. A family friend barely survived a heart attack, another dear friend passed away unexpectedly, and we lost our beloved cat of sixteen years. Two friends were fired from their jobs this past weekend--who fires someone the week before Christmas? It seems like every day I hear another bit of bad news, either on the world/political front or in the life of someone I care about--an earthquake in Iran, fierce storms across most of this country, a local fisherman lost at sea.

But today we renew the solar cycle of the northern hemisphere. The light will grow, and the world will begin to seem a brighter place again. At least, I have hope that it will.

Above wind's night roar,
obscured by storm clouds and sleet:
Solstice moon, eclipsed.

December 9: Signs

This morning we were importunately awakened at 4:30 by our old cat, who had an accident while lying in bed between my husband and me. After we stripped the bed and started a load of laundry, we were both up for the day. I'm not normally a morning person, so this was found time. I got in my run at the gym at the beginning of the day rather than the end. I called the vet and made an appointment. Then I got a call that the guy was finally coming to replace our broken microwave oven. So I had about an hour to do the errands I had planned to spread out over this day off. With the last load in the washing machine and the cat curled up on the couch (on a towel), I rushed off to Reny's.

I do a lot of my thinking while in my car. This morning my mind was full of my beloved cat, whom I adopted almost exactly 16 years ago. Her health is declining and various medications don't seem to be helping her. I looked up into the morning's beautiful blue sky and asked for some sort of sign, something to let me know that she'd be ok, or that I'd be ok if she's not. Be careful what you wish for.

Back home, after remaking the bed, taking care of some other chores, getting the kitchen ready for the microwave installer, and cleaning up the cat's latest mishap in the bathroom and getting her soothed and re-settled on the couch, two elderly gentlemen knocked at the door. They wanted to tell me about the life of Jesus. It being the Christmas season and all, that certainly seems appropriate. If you're Christian. Which I don't consider myself to be. So that's what I told them, kindly, reassuring them that yes, I have a source of spiritual comfort in these dark times, just not Christian comfort.

Just then the microwave installer showed up and I was distracted by that, but it later occurred to me in a moment of spiritual panic that maybe the visit by the two men was my sign. And I just blew it with God.

I'm watching the river flow between two snowy banks right now, thinking about how easily we can allow the mundane to distract us from the spiritual. But sometimes the mundane is the spiritual. If the divine is to be found in a book of stories about Jesus, then why am I more uplifted watching a flock of doves lift off the bird seed I scattered in the driveway?

Cat's soft white throat, purr--
this is my comfort for now.
And for tomorrow...?

December 5: Sunset Magic

Yesterday afternoon as my husband and I drove into Rockland via Old County Road to see a late matinee of the new Harry Potter movie, we enjoyed a magical moment that had nothing to do with the movie. The Dragon cement plant, the only cement plant in New England, dominates the horizon along Route One just south of the Rockland line. It was in full view as we headed for the movie theatre, and as we watched, the thick plume of smoke unfurling horizontally from its one tall smokestack turned pink. Hot pink against the backdrop of an otherwise clear, deepening blue sky. It happened suddenly, literally out of the blue. 

We lost sight of the pink smoke as we pulled into the parking lot, but by the time we got out of our car, the whole sky had been transformed by the setting sun. As we walked toward the theatre more pink streaks of sunset were filling the sky, blooming pinker and pinker, and the horizon glowed with one hot bubble of light where the sun had been. The smokestack smoke had turned purple. We lingered in the cold, enjoying the color display for a while before going in to watch a different kind of magic. I commented to my husband that it's amazing how a sunset like that can transform a landscape into something beautiful despite the combined visual presence of the cement plant, a blocky storage facility, a car dealership, and a nondescript, blocky chain hotel. He said he thought it was because all those things are man-made and therefore impermanent. 

A trick of nature:

from cement plant at sunset,

pink smoke unfurling.

November 28: Harp Seal

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, my husband and I were able to observe a harp seal in Camden Harbor this afternoon. He read a news story on Village Soup about a harp seal that had been photographed on the kayak floats in Camden Harbor on Thanksgiving. Then he saw on Facebook that a friend of ours had seen it chasing fish in the harbor this afternoon. So we decided to go try and see it.

The sun was just setting as we got to the public landing, casting a pink glow on the horizon behind Curtis Island. A lone loon drifted past, as we wandered down the pier to the kayak floats. And there was the seal--fat, happy, stretching itself on one of the floats. It seemed alert to the two couples watching it, but not alarmed. Several times it flapped its back feet, revealing that what looks like its tail is really two big feet with a small tail in between. It waved a front foot at us. It seemed to be showing off in a lazy, seal kind of way. Only when the church clock tolled four did it seem at all startled, tilting its pale face toward the sound, then relaxing again. We decided this big reclining creature would look right at home on a couch watching football.

A guy walking past told us it had been hanging out in the harbor for a week and a half. He said the Marine Resources people had checked it out and given it a clean bill of health. What it's doing this far south is a mystery, but a harp seal has been seen here before. Maybe this is the same one, back for another little vacation in warmer waters.

On the walk back along the pier to our car, we ran into a friend working on his fishing boat. As we chatted, the Mount Battie star lit up for the night, a magical moment.

Amid wrapped schooners,
harp seal, loon, lone fisherman.
Chilled couple watching.

November 23: What Is That Crow Up To?

To be grammatically correct, I guess I should have said, Up to What Is That Crow?

I'm home sick, and today's source of entertainment is my back yard, where a pair of squirrels assiduously combs the carpet of wet leaves for food. A couple of nights ago I tossed a full bag of popcorn out there, next to the stump where I left them the (now-eaten) Halloween pumpkin, and I think they're still looking for more. Or perhaps they cached some and are now trying to find it again.

Just now, as the squirrels were burrowing through leaves in that vicinity, a crow landed on the lawn and cawed at the squirrels, who appeared a bit startled and backed away. It then hopped up onto a branch directly above where I had strewn the popcorn, cawed a few more times, grabbed something from what looks like a little hollow in a nearby tree trunk, and flew off. Another crow spotted it and chased it down river. As I type, I still see the two of them in the morning mist, chasing one another among the bleak tree trunks. I wish this window faced the couch, where I've been holed up for two days, so I could enjoy the crows and squirrels from a recumbent position. Spending a day trying to figure out what crows are up to seems far superior to watching tv or reading a book.

Watching crows' antics,
trying to get in their heads,
I forget I'm sick.

November 13: Emma's World

My almost 17-year-old cat Emma, while still going strong in many ways, has serious arthritis in her hindquarters which hampers her movements and makes her walk with a sort of sideways-slipping sway. Because she spends a lot of time lying around with her hind legs sprawled uselessly behind her, the other day my mother jokingly called her "Christina's World" after the famous Andrew Wyeth painting.

So Emma's activities today were cause for pleasure. While she's an indoor cat on principle, now that she's old and slow (though not as slow as you'd think), I sometimes let her hang out in the back yard with me for short, supervised outings. On this beautiful Indian summer afternoon, I set up a tv tray and chair so I could sit in the sun on the back porch and read over the proofs of my husband's second novel. Emma came out with me and explored the leafy back yard under my watchful eye. She tromped around in the leaves for quite a while, sniffing everything, undaunted by her awkward gait. She was more active than I've seen her in a long time. She even chased a twig I dragged past her.

Later, after some lunch inside, we went back out to the porch to take full advantage of this weather. She curled up tightly on my lap and napped while I read the latest New Yorker and drank a hot mug of chai latte. The river, dark and riffled, rushed past. Piles of leaves skittered and shifted. Chickadees flitted by on their way to the bird feeder. At one point Emma awoke and watched with interest as a neighbor's cat blithely walked through the yard and right past us, then she curled back up under my arm for more sleep. I held her in a close embrace, feeling keenly in those moments the brevity of the time we have left together. 

Emma and I have been together since before I met my husband. Childless, I have doted on this strange and often ornery little creature for 16 years. So I was especially grateful for us to be able to share these few hours together, with both of us simply enjoying the moment and each other's company, recharged by the late autumn sunlight.

Old cat, piles of leaves,

last warm days of November--

we share the sunlight.

PS: As I wrote this entry at my desk, Emma came over and indicated she wanted to get into my lap. After I boosted her up, I thought she'd curl up and sleep as usual, but instead she sat upright on my knees, alertly watching the screen the whole time I was typing. I told her I was writing about her, and I like to fool myself into thinking she understood.

November 10: Forest

The devastation caused by a recent rain and wind storm became more apparent to me today when I was walking a conservation property in Lincolnville. As the landowner and I walked through one dense patch of mixed cedar and spruce forest, we came upon an ancient pine that had splintered about four feet up the trunk and toppled to the ground. This towering tree, with no apparent rot, boughs still green, had come crashing down in the storm, taking several neighboring cedars with it. We estimated the pine to be well over 100 years old. And there it lay in a giant tangle, felled by the wind.

Elsewhere in the forest we found maybe half a dozen other trees downed by the storm. Some were spruces,  their shallow root systems made all the more obvious when upended, just a flat circle of earth perpendicular to the forest floor. In the small stands of trees, the crowded trunks provide support for one another. But when one falls, it takes others down with it, a row of giant timber dominoes. Or if one happens to fall alone, it leaves the trees within the circle more vulnerable to the next big storm.

In an opening amid the trees, growing from a forest floor carpeted thick with rain-moist moss, we admired clusters of baby spruce trees, the next generation. It occurred to us that we were witnessing the entire cycle of life in this patch of woods: new trees reaching for the light, mature trees clustered around them, some dead trees still standing, fretted with woodpecker holes and studded with bracket fungi, the newly fallen trees piled in messy heaps, and the older deadfall melting back into the earth from which it came, blanketed with moss, ferns, mushrooms, forest duff, leaf litter. A rich tapestry of organic matter, the stuff of life and death.

Wind's toy, this old pine,
whose death enriches the soil,
this moss, these seedlings.

November 7: Cattle Egret

I rode the morning ferry out to the island of Vinalhaven to spend part of the day birding with a friend who lives there. A naturalist by profession, Kirk knows where to find the birds, and despite the rather bleak, chilly, and eventually rainy day, we had a good time looking. I've gotten out birding so infrequently lately that being able to spend a concentrated amount of time watching any avian life is welcome. So to be shown  a bird I hadn't previously seen in Maine within ten minutes of getting off the ferry was bonus.

Cattle egrets are a small white heron generally seen well south of Maine. Until today, the only ones I'd seen were in Florida and North Carolina. How this one ended up on an island off the Maine coast is one of those mysteries of migration. As I disembarked, I ran into one of the ferry captains who is also a birder--a birder who particularly enjoys chasing rarities. When I explained that I was out there so Kirk could show me a cattle egret, he complained, "Kirk never tells me anything!" An island resident had recently described to him seeing a strange bird, like an "all-white gull with a big yellow bill." It suddenly dawned on him that she'd been describing the cattle egret. He'd have to try to see it on a future trip.

Kirk and I headed off through town to "The Ballfield," where he'd photographed the bird not an hour earlier right next to his car. A woman driving past stopped to tell us that she had recently seen the egret following Wizard. Turns out Wizard is her horse. That made sense to Kirk, because the bird had first been spotted on Greens Island following a small flock of sheep. They got their name because they follow livestock, eating the insects such animals attract. So we went off to see Wizard. Before we got there, however, we spotted the egret hunched over in the middle of a lawn. Kirk set up his scope and we got great looks at this southern visitor.

We were soon joined by a neighbor who knew Kirk and who may or may not have been slightly inebriated. Even though we were clearly already watching the egret, he wanted to be sure we saw the bird, gesticulating wildly at it. "I knew you'd want to see it, because I know you like birds and sh*t," he declared. He had seen the egret earlier standing in a ditch full of minnows, eating. "It looked to me like a f**king big white sandpiper!" he said excitedly. "Is this rare? Because I've never seen a bird like this here before." Kirk assured him that it was very unusual.

You'd think that the rest of the day's birding would have been anticlimactic after that. But although I didn't pick up any more new Maine species, every stop had its highlights. At State Beach, a big flock of pale and lovely snow buntings flew back and forth above the pebbly shore. Horned larks hung out in the road with a single late-migrating semipalmated plover. A great blue heron croaked loudly as it flew in to land on the opposite shore. At Folly Pond, we spotted eight eagles, including a pair of adults perched side by side on a spruce bough, and a couple of brightly plumaged male wood ducks drifted past with a pied-billed grebe. At a culvert called The Boondoggle, a lone yellowlegs stood knee-deep in what must have been freezing cold water while hooded mergansers drifted and bobbed. The Basin offered up hosts of Canada geese and several more duck species.

Even the ferry ride home was not without adventure. My ferry captain friend invited me to ride back to Rockland up on the bridge, which offered great views of flocks of Bonaparte's gulls, a zillion more loons, big rafts of eiders, some surf scoters, and one gannet. He recounted the day last summer when he'd seen an albatross fly across the bow. The passage across the bay was a rough one, with swells rocking the ferry hard enough to knock over a chair at one point. The spray of whitecaps corrugated the surface of the sea. Thanks to turning back the clocks last night, twilight (and a cold rain) were settling in over Rockland Harbor as we pulled into the ferry slip. As we got ready to unload, a seal popped its head out of the water just off the port side, giving us all a long look as if wondering what we were doing out in this weather. Cattle egret, I wanted to tell the seal. And eiders, mergansers, and crossbills. I don't think it would have understood.

Brisk island wind, rain.
Egret and I share a look,
both visitors here.