March 27: Stirrings of Spring

Despite cheery blue skies, it's only one degree above freezing this afternoon and gusty--with wind chill it probably feels like the mid-20s right now. Yes, we live here, we're used to getting snow into April, but that doesn't mean we have to like it. The first words out of everyone's mouths these days concern the weather and how soon spring will really be here. I think we got spoiled last year, when for the first time in my memory we had a real spring, early and warm, coinciding with the calendar. Now that we've had a taste of it, we want that every year.

Despite today's raw edge, there are some signs of spring out there. Sheltered by a south-facing wall at the Camden Public Library, clusters of crocus bloom cheerily, always the first flowers I see each year. Around the neighborhood, milk jugs hang from maple trees, collecting sap; this is Maine Maple Sunday, after all. The Canadian robins have mostly moved northward and incoming migrant robins are beginning to feed on half-frozen lawns--a shift from their winter diet of fruits and berries. I spotted some red-winged blackbirds in Lincolnville along Frohock Brook. Many trilling juncos create music in the bare trees around our house. A tom turkey, surrounded by a heedless harem, was displaying in the back yard a few days ago. And Canada geese are beginning to return to the Megunticook River, even as winter ducks--goldeneyes, buffleheads--linger before heading up to Hudson Bay and points north. I've even noticed that some of my lilies are starting to poke tender green shoots through the veneer of dead leaves and road grit plastered across the front lawn (along with remnant snow banks that will probably linger till the next Ice Age). We're on the cusp of the season.

Goodbye and hello:
birds of winter, birds of spring
briefly overlap.

March 19: Super Moon

Full moon rising, huge:
no explanation needed,
words inadequate.

March 5: Signs of Spring?

This time of year has its dismal moments--cold rain falling on ten-foot high piles of dirty snow, mountain shrouded in mist, foghorn lowing, everything looking rather bleak and blah. Perhaps that's why any little sign that spring is on its way seems so exciting. Last week my husband and I were unduly thrilled to see a turkey vulture soaring over I-95 in New Hampshire, the earliest we've ever seen a vulture in our neck of the woods. This morning while at the YMCA, I noticed out the window, against the backdrop of the town transfer station, budding pussy willows.

View-blocking mounds of snow still fill our yard, however. And on our way back home from the Y we observed a small flock of Bohemian waxwings--a boreal bird we only see here in winter--feeding in an apple tree. But then when we pulled into our driveway, we were greeted by a cacophony of singing birds: a pair of cardinals, goldfinches, house finches, titmice, chickadees... The days lengthen and they respond, regardless of the snow-encrusted landscape.

Above heaps of snow,
pussy willows waken me
from winter's long dream.

March 3: Drive-by

Driving up Route One on my way to a meeting in Belfast this afternoon, as I drove over the Ducktrap bridge, I happened to glance quickly downriver toward the river's mouth. There was a dark shape of something on the edge of the cobble beach, near the water. Then I was past it. Some things we glimpse and then they're gone, and we never really know what we saw. I think that's when we make up our best stories.

What was that dark shape
hunched, brooding, at river's edge?
Looked like an eagle.

March 2: Sunset. Ah.

The last couple of work weeks have been absolutely frantic, with some long days (and it's only Wednesday). I had to take some time off last week and still feel like I'm catching up, non-stop busy. Rushed out the door at the end of today to head right to a meeting. As I'm speeding to my meeting, feeling overwhelmed by life, I crest a hill and see this:

There's something to redeem almost every day.

Last bubble of sun

bursts above the ice-slick street.

I pause, eyes open.

February 26: Owl in the Sun

Everyone's been seeing owls this winter. My husband and I saw a barred owl on the Christmas Bird Count, and several others were spotted that day. A friend regularly sees a barred owl on Beech Hill in Rockport. A co-worker in Appleton has seen three different owls in the past month. His partner saw at least two barred owls while she was just driving around running errands in Camden the other day. Bird rehab clinics in Maine are reporting record numbers of owls being brought in, mostly year-old barred owls that have been hit by cars. Must have been a bumper crop of owls last year.

After looking carefully during several long drives, I thought my own sightings this season were going to be limited to the one in December. But today my husband and I discovered a barred owl in the most unexpected place. We were leaving the YMCA in Camden after our morning workout when I heard Bohemian waxwings calling. So I stood around in the parking lot for a while (long enough for two different people to drive by and ask me what I was looking at) until I spotted a couple of these beautiful birds in a big spruce tree. I was happy. I'd heard and seen several flocks this winter, but nothing up close. But the morning got even better, because as we were driving out of the parking lot, there was the barred owl, eyes closed, roosting on a branch in the full sun. We paused for a moment to admire it, smiling at each other with shared joy. It's always cool to see an owl. Especially when you least expect to.

Even this owl must
enjoy feeling sunlight's warmth
after so much snow.

February 6: Red-shouldered Hawk

Back on 16 April 2010 I wrote a post about how I'm often fooled by blue jays mimicking hawks. I later expanded on this topic of bird mimicry for a monthly natural history column that I write for the local paper and my land trust's website. That's why, when I was up on my roof shoveling snow yesterday morning and heard the call of a red-shouldered hawk, I barely looked up. I had heard the local band of blue jays yammering not long before and just assumed it was one of them. After all, the red-shouldered hawk, while increasingly more common in Maine, is still an unusual sight in these parts. Especially in early February. I've certainly never seen one in Camden before, although individual birds have been spotted nearby by me and others in springs and falls past.

So I continued with my labors, heaving pile upon pile of snow off the roof. Until I heard the call again, louder and closer. I couldn't help but look up, if just to see this talented blue jay. Imagine my surprise when I saw an actual red-shouldered hawk fly through my back yard, moving down river. If ever I needed a reminder to be ready for anything as a birder, there it was. You never know when something interesting is going to turn up in your own back yard. (This new species became yard bird #70.)

Wind knows sixty words
for snow. Hawk only knows one,
which he yells loudly.

January 31: Holly Flowers

When we think of holly, we think of holly berries. Shiny green spiky leaves and red berries for the holidays. But holly flowers?

During the holiday season I clipped a sprig of holly (to be truthful, I hijacked it off a shrub on the grounds of a church) and put it in a vase to add to the festive decor in my kitchen. Almost two months later, the sprig's leaves are still green, its berries not yet dried up or fallen. It's been around long enough to blend into the background so that I hardly notice it any more, but I happened to glance at it this morning. A clump of white caught my eye. Worried that it might be getting moldy after all this time of just hanging out in a vase of unchanged water in my kitchen, I looked more closely. Not mold. Flowers! Little tiny white flowers!

Being a flowering plant, holly obviously has to produce flowers at some point, but I've never noticed them. And no wonder, given that they're almost microscopic. I felt as if I'd discovered a whole new life form.



Few will ever see
this modest holly flower
bloomed in my kitchen.

January 29: Up on the Roof

Today I gritted my teeth and finally did something that's needed doing for the past several weeks: I shoveled the snow off our roof. Since most of our roof is near-flat, it accumulated a lot of snow in these past few storms. So even though we had it replaced when we moved in almost six years ago, it seemed prudent to get up there and ease its burden a bit.

The more steeply pitched roof on the front of our house is visible from the lawn, and I could see actual drifts. (It's amazing what a difference it makes to insulate your attic better.) But because of its low pitch, the entire rear half of the building was virtually invisible. So while we've gotten a lot of snow in the past month or more, I was still surprised at how much of it was hanging out up there.

Once I figured out how and where to place the ladder, awkwardly hauling the ridiculously heavy thing through waist-deep snow drifts, it was simply a matter of scrambling onto the entryway roof, and from there to the pitch of the main roof. And then it was simply a matter of hanging my body as far as I could off that edge to shovel the front bits. By the time I got all that done, I was soaked. Then I had the entire playing field-sized flatter roof to do. This took a very long time. Hours, in fact. I estimate that I shoveled over a ton of snow, easily, off that roof. I shoveled off so much snow that I had to shovel the driveway and back walkway all over again after I came down--snow dumped off the roof had piled up there deeper than that from the last storm.

Physically challenging as all this was, I did manage to experience a few moments that made me smile, besides the moment when I'd finally hacked away at a 3-inch ice dam for long enough to knock it over the eaves. From that perspective, I was on level with the birds. Kinglets flew through the yard, and it sounded like they were right next to me, in the maple that hangs slightly over the back roof. Later, a downy woodpecker called repeatedly, as if in response to my repeated knock-knock-knocking on that block of ice with my shovel. And as big fluffy snowflakes began to fall--something beautiful but slightly disheartening given the task I was engaged in--a nearby titmouse loudly whistled his spring love song, "Peter, Peter!" I had a thought that in the spring, if my husband would haul the ladder for me (he's away this weekend, lest you think he's a slacker), it would be cool to go up there and lie down under the maple branches and see what flies through the yard at eye-level.

I don't belong here.
Snowy roof elevates me
among the kinglets.

January 17: Haikubes on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday

For Christmas my sister gave me Haikubes, a set of 61 six-sided dice with short words or phrases etched on their faces in black and two dice with phrases on the faces in red. You're supposed to roll them all, and the red-lettered dice set the theme for your haiku. Today, my first time trying out Haikubes, I rolled A VISION FOR and OUR WORLD. That struck me as thematically appropriate for a holiday celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday.

The words on the other dice are supposed to inform the resulting poem. Fortunately among the many words--obey, swimming, dripping, finally, this, us, what, so not, I, baby, embraced, etc.--are some blanks to enable a little creative latitude.  Still, it took me about 20 minutes to come up with something, anything, and the resulting haiku is probably a bit more bleak and negative than I would have created if left to my own devices:

This still so screwed up:
war touches every surface.
What shines for us next?

What interests me is how a fixed but random set of words like this (or the ever-popular Magnetic Poetry sets, for example) begins to tell its own little stories. Like these, face-up now on my desk: swimming, dripping, salty, fathom. Or these: girl, room, charm, body, embraced, hot, limbs, glorious. Or these: war, dead, screwed, hellbent, so not. The thematic dice then help guide the tone for pulling out and following the most appropriate of the stories. If I'd rolled A DREAM ABOUT and MY ROMANTIC LIFE, you can imagine I'd have gravitated toward different word choices!

While I prefer creating my own haiku, sometimes working within the strictures of an exercise like this can free your mind in unusual ways or take your imagination to new places. (Even your imagination can get in a rut sometimes.) For that same reason I like to periodically play with formal poetry--to write a rhyming sonnet, for example, or a poem with a set number of lines per stanza or syllables per line. The act of fitting into the rules can lead to some surprising adjustments that often result in something more interesting than the same old "free verse."

January 16: View from the Chairlift

Recently I participated in a team-building exercise in which nine of us had two illustrations each that together made up an eighteen-page sequence. Looking only at our own two pictures and then describing them to the group, we had to lay them face-down on the floor in what we thought was the correct order. The end result was a pictorial narrative that began with a view of Earth from space and ended with the face of a chicken from the cover of a book being read by a kid on a cruise ship (with many other steps in-between). The goal was obviously to develop communication skills as a group, but the fun of it was in the unexpected perspective shift that telescoped (actually, "microscoped" would be more appropriate) from something literally universal down to the most minute detail.

I was reminded of that exercise while riding the chair lift at the Camden Snow Bowl. The view of the snow-covered Camden Hills on the way up Ragged Mountain is spectacular, especially the near view of craggy Bald Mountain. I kept looking over my shoulder, wanting to take it all in. I love living in such a beautiful place. About half-way up, however, I heard a high-pitched noise that I first dismissed as the chairlift pulley running through the tower. But it really sounded like a golden-crowned kinglet. And sure enough, I heard it again as a tiny bird flew into a nearby tree. As it landed below my dangling skis, its crown flared brightly. In that one instant, my attention shifted from the mountains to the tiny head feathers of a bird smaller than a chickadee--each sight breath-taking in its own way.

Mountains surround me,
but the kinglet's bright gold crown
is what draws my eye.