February 10: Pussy Willow

A friend told me recently that when he first moved to Maine, to the boonies of Montville, his 80-year old neighbor told him that every winter she just counted down the days till February 10. Why that date? he wondered. Because, she told him, that's when we start to feel the heat of the sun again here in Maine.

We certainly felt the heat of the sun today, with 45-degree temperatures and clear skies. Up on Beech Hill, where the trail was enjoying a brief mud season, I even came across a pussy willow with two catkins (which was a challenge to photograph in a strong wind).

Hard to imagine that we haven't really turned the corner into spring, that it's going to snow several inches tomorrow and be icy cold on Sunday. But, hey, it's February 10. When the sun does come back out, we'll feel its heat again, more pussy willows will bud, then leaf out. And soon the warmth will be here to stay, for a few months at least.

Catkins in the snow--

even the willow knows when 

earth tilts toward the sun.

February 9: Hunger

Our cat was a starving stray before she came to us, so she has some food issues. We're trying to get her on a regular eating regimen so that she doesn't overeat and become obese and unhealthy. But in the training process, she's not getting to consume as much as she thinks she would like to. So she spends a good deal of time after what are quite filling meals wandering around the house yowling for more. The drama of it! She's like the Sarah Bernhardt of cats, surely about to waste away any moment as she restlessly paces the house. Such soulful stares we get as she looks up at us, meowing pitifully, as if to stir us into action toward that empty dish.

Such carrying-on
facing night's wide-open maw--
the hunger of youth.

February 8: Rising moon

The moon was rising tonight as I headed home from the gym, rising behind low clouds so that its broad orange face was distorted by hazy bands. You couldn't even tell how full it was--just one big blur of light glowing above the horizon, irradiating the obscuring clouds. A bit bleary, as if rising full three nights in a row was a bit much for it, a little too much partying for our reflective satellite.

It's hard to believe
that radiant orb gives off
no light of its own.

February 7: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Today is the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1867-1957. In the mid-1970s I was given a boxed set of her Little House on the Prairie books for my birthday, and I've been in love with them ever since. When we were in Florida last month for Bookmania, I met author Wendy McClure, who recently wrote The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, a book about her obsession with the books and where it led her (which was, quite literally, around the country following Laura's footsteps). I was not the only one who told her after her panel presentation how exciting it was to find another Laura fanatic out there.

I think one of the most resonant features of the Little House books, which Wendy discusses quite articulately, is how you feel that the Laura in the books was a real live girl and that you, the reader, are really her friend. Also, she writes with an incredibly strong sense of place. You're there in the big woods with panthers screaming in the trees, watching a blizzard cloud rise above the prairie horizon, bringing yet another snow storm, or picking wild violets with Baby Grace in a buffalo wallow in the tall-grass prairie.

The first book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods, ends with these lines: "She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago." A Little House Moment of Zen, if there ever was one.

On my couch, and yet
prairie winds riffle my hair,
urge on my pony.

February 6: Hark, the cardinal sings

I stopped by a friend's house this afternoon to drop something off. He happened to be pulling into his driveway just as I was, so we had a conversation right there in the afternoon sun. At one point he hushed me. "You can hear the chickens in the backyard, responding to our voices," he said. I stopped talking, and sure enough, the loud clucking of hens could be heard from the back of his house, where he has a very fancy chicken coop. They obviously just wanted to be included in the conversation.

But as I was listening, I also heard another bird. From a few houses away, the loud whistle of a male cardinal rang out like a car alarm. A sound of spring! Sure, it's supposed to get down to single digit temperatures this weekend, but today this crazy bird thinks spring is here. "Come and get me, ladies," he shouts.

The cardinal's not the only one a little ahead of himself, either. My parents reported seeing a couple of turkey vultures flying over I-95 this morning in southern Maine. Vultures, more than robins, are my favorite predictor of vernality (I think I just made up that word). If they make it this far up the coast soon, I'm going to start packing up my insulated Sorels.

Hens' conversation
and one insistent cardinal--
birds make themselves heard.

February 5: In the cemetery

My husband got some new binoculars recently so I decided to walk over to the cemetery and try them out. I don't think I heard or saw a single bird, but I always enjoy roaming around the headstones and finding my maternal grandfather's. He died when I was three, so I have only the haziest memory of him, but I've been able to locate his grave in the cemetery ever since I was five and we lived in a nearby apartment in this same neighborhood. His grave and the adjacent ones of my great-grandfather and great-uncle, whom I never knew, have served as literal touchstones for me throughout my life. I calculated once that I'd moved 15 times before I was a teenager. But no matter where we lived, I always knew where to find my grandfather's grave in Camden, even on days like today when the marker's buried under snow.

The snow revealed signs of previous visitors to these silent rows--light footprints of other humans barely visible on the crusty surface, as well as the deeper tracks of cats, squirrels, and a crow which had walked on the snow before it froze. The squirrel tracks had melted and then refrozen, and their softened edges made them look like a meandering row of hearts.

Familiar gravestones,
heart-shaped squirrel tracks in snow.
I keep coming back.

February 4: Black branches

I ran into someone yesterday who said that they don't mind how cold it gets here as long as the sun is shining: 35 degrees with icy drizzle is unbearably miserable compared to 25 degrees and sunny. Today, with the sun shining, I left my hat in the car so I could feel the sun on my hair as I walked around town. It was a pleasure just to roam the sidewalks, running into people I know and helping the local economy as I bought some Valentine's Day gifts for my husband and family.

Now the sun has set and the sky is the palest blue sheet behind the messy scrawling of black branches. Some of the branches form the patterns of runes, an ancient alphabet of straight lines that could be easily carved as into wood with a knife or chiseled into rock. It is thought that they were originally used for charms and spells; the Norse god Odin recounts in the poetic Edda how he learned the magic runes by hanging nine days on a tree. New Agers cast stones carved with them as a form of divination.

Many of the simple shapes of runes can be easily picked out in the natural lines around us. For instance, the slender maple tree, stark against the sky, looks like the Fehu rune: the trunk a straight line with two branches lifting to the right at a 45-degree angle. This rune meant "cattle" and symbolically represented wealth and abundance--appropriate for my afternoon of shopping, as well as for all that I have in my life for which I am so grateful.

Branches etch dark runes
against sky--cryptic poems,
arboreal spells.

February 3: Loon in the harbor

During a work-related lunch at the Waterfront this afternoon, I kept getting distracted by gulls flying over the harbor in view of the windows: Was I mistaken, or did that one seem to have all-white wings? (Yes, I was mistaken.) Is it too early to see a laughing gull? (Yes.) Is that just a large, immature gull in the distance or an eagle? (Gull.) It made me realize how much I'm itching to get out and tromp around on this icy snow crust and look for some birds, something I haven't done enough of this winter--with the exception of our vacation in Florida (which thankfully did not involve icy snow crust).

As our conversation wound to a close and the food disappeared, I was inordinately pleased to notice a loon drifting around among the empty floats in the harbor. It wasn't an unusual loon, just a big fat common loon with a white throat, hanging out, diving now and then. I pointed it out to my dining companion. Soon, I imagined, that loon, sporting spiffy new breeding plumage, will be perfectly poised to head a few miles inland and stake out a perfect territory on the lake.

Winter mind, barren,
latches onto these few birds,
making more of them.

February 2: Momentary flash forward

Today, Groundhog Day, around here at least there wasn't a lot of shadow-casting. Does that mean spring is coming soon?

This afternoon I was engaged in an online course coordinated by the Middlebury Alumni College on the poetry of Robert Frost. This class, we read and discussed his poems "Mowing" and "Spring Pools," and the latter poem in particular moved me forward a couple of months and set me right down in another season for a moment, next to a vernal pool filled with water "from snow that only melted yesterday." There's a vernal pool near the Ducktrap River where each spring we look for salamander and frog eggs. Some years there's still a skim of ice along the edges when we notice the gelatinous masses hovering in the deeper water above a thick layer of sodden dead leaves. Trout lilies bloom nearby--the "watery flowers" to reflect in the "flowery waters"--and you can almost feel the energy in the trees as the sap rises and the "pent-up buds" begin to swell and open. Yes, it might be only 40 degrees, but you know spring is there all around you, in the water and in the woods.

Just a few more weeks...

It seemed an appropriate poem to study on Groundhog Day, also the pagan holiday of Imbolc, falling halfway between Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox. We celebrate the first stirrings of spring as the days lengthen beyond ten hours of light, knowing that around here "spring" doesn't always mean warm sunshine and daffodils. A cold pool in the woods, filled with frog eggs and surrounded by skunk cabbage--or just reading about such a pool!--will suffice.

Under its ice shell
vernal pool waits. Days lengthen.
Frogs stir in their sleep.

January 31: Snow falling

A light snow has been falling through most of this last day of January. I can still see it falling, the swirling flakes illuminated within the column of light cast by a streetlight, a thin dusting of the purest white layering my car. Such a slow snowfall with so little accumulation--this is no storm, nothing truly dangerous, but the spirits of winter at their most benevolent, bringing us a taste of what can sometimes be a quiet and beautiful season. No doubt at some point a snow plow will come rumbling through to scrape the streets. But for now it's soothing to simply watch the mesmerizing flakes tumble through the light, then move back into the dark and fall to the frozen earth.

This dusting of snow--
tomorrow cat prints will bloom
across the white lawn.

January 30: Birch in the headlights

As I drove away from my office tonight, having just been dazzled by the vision of the waxing moon, Jupiter, and Venus all crowded together big and bright in the western sky, the sweep of my headlights briefly caught a young birch tree. As this many-trunked little tree loomed out of the dark before me, I was brought instantly back to earth. The tree looked like a stark white witch's hand with long, grasping fingers reaching up into the dark sky, the planet-riddled night.

White birch on dark night--
cold hand reaching for the stars,
and the cold moon too.