August 12: Slumber Party

Little time to write tonight--it's been a busy one. My five-year-old niece came over for her first sleepover. We dined out at the Waterfront: pasta with butter for her, followed by a big hot fudge sundae. At Theo B. Camisole we found her a pretty new nightgown with embroidered flowers for her to wear for this special occasion. The salesclerk even tossed in a free tube of lavender hand cream. Then a walk around Camden harbor as the full moon rose in a clear sky above all those famous sailboats. In Harbor Park we walked up the stone wall of the waterfall and watched teeny baby ducks bob along the shore with lots of adults. When we got home, we had to see if the real lavender in our garden smells like the lavender hand cream. It actually does. Now, after much settling in, we're watching "Rio." She thinks we'll like it because we like birds. I just hope I can stay awake for the whole thing.

Sleepover with niece:
sundae, new nightie, movie--
will we ever sleep?

August 11: Birthday

Today was my mother's birthday, and we celebrated at my sister and brother-in-law's camp on the lake en famille: my sister, brother-in-law, two nieces, my brother-in-law's parents, his brother and sister-in-law and their baby girl, my parents, and us. The clouds that had lurked overhead all day bunched up against the green hills to clear the skies, as the glow of the setting sun cast a rich light on the clouds, the water, the surrounding pines. My husband caught a frog to show my niece. Fish jumped. Pewees called back and forth in the forest. As dusk fell, bats fluttered back and forth. My niece learned the constellation Cassiopeia, who turns out to have been a queen of Ethiopia, where one of her friends was born. We walked barefoot down to the dock to look for falling stars from the Perseid meteor shower but only saw the plumes of our breath in the crisp air.

My brother-in-law grilled steak and lobster; his mother made potato salad and tomato and beet salad; his brother made an apple pie; my sister provided a birthday cake with candles; we brought fresh Beech Hill blueberries. We all feasted with much joy and laughter. We left as the almost-full moon was rising, full as the moon ourselves and happy.

When I'm 64,
I want this too: lake, family,
good food, stories, stars.

August 10: Guest Poet

While my sister's in-laws plied me with drinks at Natalie's this evening before dinner, her father-in-law Eijk asked me about haiku. I explained the basic tradition and form, including the essential reference to a season and the concept of trying to capture a moment in nature. He then promptly wrote this haiku on a cocktail napkin:

Trees wither simply.
One red leaf decides to die,
fluttering to earth.

(Sorry, Eijk, I had to add a word to line two to give you seven syllables.)

I found it very interesting that as we were enjoying the lush green beauty of summer's peak, a hazy waxing moon rising over the harbor outside, and a restaurant bustling around us with summer visitors, he chose to write a rather poignant poem about fall. But I'm glad he wrote something, because by the time we got home from a long dinner with the four of them at Francine, stuffed and happy, my brain was too tired to come up with anything of my own. Thank you, Eijk, Rose-Marie, Erin and Sander for a lovely evening! (And that last sentence is actually 17 syllables, so there's my haiku.)

August 9: Blackberries

I led a writers' group up Beech Hill this afternoon, and, being writers, they wanted to know all sorts of interesting things: how my mother is doing (her friend Gail was in the group); what bird was making that noise (towhee); how one harvests blueberries (with rakes, by hand, back-breakingly); the names of various wildflowers in the fields (daisy fleabane was a favorite); what that lighthouse was (Indian Island Light outside Rockport harbor); the purpose of the stone circle overgrown with rugosa rose bushes in front of the stone hut (former bonfire pit), etc.

Being human, they also had their eyes open for ripe blueberries along the trail. Of course, since Coastal Mountains Land Trust hosted a public free pick this past weekend which was attended by hundreds of people also scanning the trailside for berries, pickings were slim. We did, however, come across many low vines loaded down with clusters of blackberries--lots of hard, unripe berries like little red fists.

I have a collection of poems about blackberries; among berries, they hold a special place in my heart for that reason (see my August 3, 2010 post). But what I enjoy most about all berries is eating them. These ruby red jewels will soon burgeon into juicy purple-black fruits. Perhaps the berry-loving cedar waxwings overhead were thinking that same thing. Who doesn't love a blackberry? (Or a blueberry, or a raspberry...) It occurs to me that the berries actually depend on that. They're not that enticing for nothing. Today's red knots of fruit tucked amid stalks of goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace were promises of what's soon to come.

It's all about seeds,
encouraging dispersal.
That's why they taste good.

August 8: Curiosity

This morning I looked out the window and saw three crows walking all around a dark patch on my neighbor's lawn. They were pecking at it and seemed genuinely very interested in the area. Wondering if it was a carcass of some kind (and worried for the neighbors' cats), I got out the binoculars. It turned out to be a rudimentary fire pit, about two by two, that our neighbors must have scraped out of the lawn to sit a grill on. The square looked to be mostly sooty dirt with some blocks of wood bounding the edges. The crows were apparently just checking it out, this new little dead patch on the lawn where they often graze. Perhaps they even found little pieces of charred hotdog or burger fat to snack on.

I was reminded of how our cat used to focus on the slightest little change or addition to the house. If I moved a plant, the next time she was in the room she'd be over there sniffing the pot. If I set something on the floor, she'd make a beeline for it. She burned her whiskers off once checking out floating candles in a bowlful of water. I always admired her attentiveness to her surroundings, even if it sometimes got her into trouble. Maybe that's why the crows do their exploring in threes, to spread the risk.

Even the crows are
entertained by a cookout,
though they arrived late.

August 7: Froggy Weather

Tonight's misty rain and fog brought out the frogs. As we drove the winding dirt road from my sister and brother-in-law's camp, we saw many tiny frogs, maybe an inch or two in size, hopping in front of the headlights. Clearly they'd been waiting for a wet evening to roam from their home pools and puddles and explore the world. My husband is particularly fond of frogs. At one point when we came upon a little frog that didn't want to move from the road in front of our car, he asked me to get out and shoo it off the road. It was so small that I couldn't even see it at first, but then in three hops it was back in the woods. We saw several more on the rest of the drive home, flashing in the headlights like pale superballs bouncing across the dark pavement. My husband drove carefully, trying to miss each one.

Summoned by the rain
frogs explore the wet, new world.
Be careful, drivers.

August 6: Secretary

Every once in a while a synchronicity gives me pause. Two times today someone has mentioned that the original definition of "secretary" was "keeper of secrets." The first time was in an article in The New Yorker, in reference to someone who was secretary to a public official (I think) and thus privy to their secrets. The second was during tonight's Pecha Kucha in Belfast, when an artist showed a slide of a piece of furniture he had made, a big secretary desk with many drawers to keep people's secrets.

Last night while at a friend's historic house, getting a tour of its antiques and intriguing old things (like a closet full of valuable Queen Anne chairs), we came upon a piece of furniture that particularly interested me. It was made of fine wood, about a foot wide, above waist height, with a top-lifting lid. Inside were three or four divided sections. The house's owner thinks that it was a letter holder, a miniature, perhaps even portable, form of a secretary. There's nothing in it now. I coveted this piece of furniture, thinking of the journals and scraps of my life that I could stash there. But probably not letters. Hardly anyone ever sends me a letter anymore.

Once while looking for a book in a boyfriend's school bag, I came upon a cache of love letters to him from an ex he clearly wasn't quite through with. She'd mailed them to his box at the English Department for which we both taught--his mail box just a few slots away from mine. A male friend I consulted told me to just ignore it, so I did. He was the only one I told. A similar thing happened recently to a friend of a friend who is currently separated from his wife, cementing his resolve to make the separation permanent. Everyone's got their secrets stashed away somewhere, a secretary of some sort hiding their deepest and darkest.

There's something about the act of writing that reveals glimpses of our secret self, but only glimpses. Our thoughts are all unwritten letters, most best left unshared. How often do we really share a secret with someone? How often do we write something down that arises from our innermost soul? When I was in grad school, one of my professors--as part one of our one-on-one meetings--asked us to share a secret with him about ourselves that no one else knew, and then he would share one with us. I've kept his secret for so long now that I don't even remember what it was. Or, come to think of it, what mine was.

As a haiku the following poem is horrible--no "season word," no reference to the natural world. But sometimes this is what happens when one writes at midnight. The tired mind lets down its guard and taps into different sources.

Old memories filed,
secrets pigeon-holed. Some nights
I lift the lid, peek.

August 5: Starry starry night

We stepped out of a friend's house on Owls Head harbor on this starry night and heard the music of the spheres. Well, it was actually music drifting across the water from the Lobster Festival in Rockland. But on this clear summer evening--with a first quarter moon rising from behind the trees and billions and billions of stars overhead--it seemed like some sort of celestial event.

As we drove home, my husband and I talked about what it must have been like back before there was any ambient light, when the night sky and all its stars were perfectly clear and visible, undiminished. No wonder the stars were so much more important in people's lives then. They could actually see them on a regular basis, learn their patterns, track them. I wonder what the best place on earth is to observe the night sky now. The wilds of Alaska? Somewhere in the middle of the Rockies? The Gobi Desert? An uninhabited tropical island? The Himalayas? I know I've camped in places in the past where the night sky was startlingly clear, packed with stars--the kind of sky that when you climb out of your tent in the middle of the night, you just stand there in utter rapture, your sense of self lost before the broad spectacle of the universe.

Even with the street light pollution near our house, we still felt a small sense of awe when we stepped out of our car and looked up. And here, the crickets are trilling. Who's to say they aren't harmonizing with the many distant suns twinkling overhead?

August: crickets, stars,
waxing moon rising slowly.
These are the best nights.

August 4: A Bird in the Hand Is Worth...

While working intensely at my desk this morning, focused, busy, intent on what I was doing, a flash of movement out the window caught my eye. I looked up and had to laugh out loud: two crows were precariously balanced on the slender branches of the nearest high bush blueberry. A third was perched on a nearby post, overseeing the antics. The two birds in the bush were doing their best to keep their balance while grabbing as many fat blueberries as they could. As close as they were in that tiny bush, they looked huge. I could see that the mantle of one of the birds had a brown cast to it, it was that near.

I've seen blue jays and catbirds tempted by those berries, but until yesterday, never a bird as large as a crow. Yesterday's crow simply snatched berries from the stable perch of the post at the end of the driveway. Today's two birds were a bit more ambitious, and acrobatic. It was truly entertaining to watch those ungainly crows clutching the twiggy branches for dear life while daintily plucking at the ripe berries.

A fourth crow flew toward them to join in the fun, but then the lookout bird cawed, and they all flew off up the driveway together. But it wasn't long before a couple of them returned. Then later I heard a racket of crows yelling frantically across the river at something, probably some kind of hawk or an unlucky roosting owl. That was apparently distracting enough that they didn't get back for more berries today. But I'll look for them tomorrow for more amusement.

Too much temptation:
two crows in a too-small bush
plucking ripe berries.

After first witnessing this entertaining activity outside my window, I called in my co-worker to see, but the birds were already in flight by the time he arrived. So he told me a story about how when he was five, playing with a friend at the playground, a crow flew up and landed on his shoulder. The two boys were thrilled, naturally, and he walked home with the crow still perched there. It stayed with him as they continued playing in the back yard, till at one point his mother looked out and noticed their avian companion. ("It followed us home, Mom. Can we keep it?") She realized that no wild bird would be this tame, so she called someone--who do you call when you find a tame crow?--and eventually tracked down the crow's owner. Despite it being a pet, there's still got to be something special about being picked out by a crow like that.

August 3: Kettle

Hiking down the ridge of Ragged Mountain this afternoon, just below the communications tower, I looked out to see a kettle of about a dozen turkey vultures soaring on a thermal. The combination of billowing clouds and hot sun must have produced the perfect ride for these big raptors. They circled higher and higher as I watched, until the birds at the top of the swirling column began to drift off, one by one, and head toward the mountain, toward me. Because I was so close to the summit at that point, they were almost at eye-level. There are few birds that make me wish more fervently for the gift of flight.

The couple I was hiking with had gone on safari in Botswana last year, and they told me how soaring vultures are a sign there of lions on prey. When you see the vultures start to drop down and land, that's a sign that the lions have gone; the vultures are moving in to pick at what's left of the carcass. As we watched the vultures in their glorious group flight, we couldn't help but joke that perhaps there were lions somewhere below them.

No lions' prey here.
Heat rising off the mountain
brings vultures this joy.

August 2: Dusk Flights

A big Land Trust event this evening saw me back at the office at 8 p.m. unloading stuff from my car in the dark. At one point as I was standing outside talking to one of my co-workers between bouts of carrying boxes, a bat flew at face level right between us, probably ten feet in front of me. I always like seeing bats, so that was a little thrill, having one flutter past so close on its way to the river to pick off some bugs for dinner.

Then, as I was driving home, I looked up, and in the clouded, darkling sky, recognized the outline of an osprey. What was it doing out so late? Where was it headed? Hawks have much better eyes than we do, so perhaps it sees well in dim light. It piqued my curiosity, in any case. Good night, bat. Good night, osprey. Good night, storm clouds.

Osprey after dark?
We'll never understand birds.
That's not a bad thing.