September 5: Diversity

We live in an eclectic neighborhood. We've got the old mill houses renovated by arty people who cultivate beautiful gardens and sit around on their back porches at night playing various musical instruments, soaking in their hot tubs, or practicing yoga, a pocket of boring spec houses built a few years ago, a small trailer park with a surprising number of children, dogs, and cigarette smokers, a 90+-year-old neighbor with a yapping chihuahua, a vacation rental across the street that changes tenants every week next to a small house inhabited by an aggressively athletic family of seven, and the river slowly curving at our backs...

Change of seasons--
one neighbor plays jazz loudly,
another polishes a snowmobile.

September 4: Cranes and vultures

Attended an exhibit at the Camden Public Library tonight showing the work of two bird photographer friends, Karl Gerstenberger and Keith Carver. They have traveled around the country together photographing birds, including a couple of trips to Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico to shoot the snow geese and sandhill cranes that gather there in fall. As I stood there admiring a photograph of two cranes in flight, I was reminded that this morning, when I pulled into work, a kettle of 16 turkey vultures was soaring over the river. Not quite as dramatic as a flock of trumpeting sandhill cranes, but one of those cool bird moments nonetheless.

Sixteen soaring vultures.
Do they, like cranes,
bring good fortune, long life?

September 3: Shorebirds

Weskeag salt marsh in late summer: hum of crickets, rich sunlight, silvery flocks of shorebirds sifting through the salt pannes as the tide ebbs. The piercing cries of the sandpipers and plovers this time of year are so bittersweet, speaking to us of summer's end and imminent loss. The transience of things, and yet the cycle of life--gone too soon, but back in the spring.

Traditional Japanese poetry often referenced the plover (plover is "chidori" in Japanese--a word that must be onomatopoetic, sounding as it does like the bird's piping call). Yet in almanacs of Japanese season words, or "kigo," the plover is a winter word, as in this poem by Ki no Tsurayuki (translated by Kenneth Rexroth):

When,
Heart overwhelmed with love,
I hurried through the winter night
To the home of my beloved,
The wind on the river was so cold
The plovers cried out in pain.

Those were not the plovers we saw and heard today on the marsh, where the sun warmed the yellowing reeds and mummichugs churned in algae-clouded pools. Today's plovers embodied, for us, a longing for summer to last just a few more weeks.

Stirred by shorebirds' piping cries,
we face fall's chill
together.

September 2: Riverside dining

On our way home today from our overnight in the big city (Portland, ME), after stocking up at the only Trader Joe's in our state, we decided to hit our favorite seafood restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner. The Slipway, perched on the scenic St. George River, is only about 20 minutes from our house. Not only does it offer excellent food--we enjoyed tuna tartare, grilled local squid, fried local oysters, corn-on-the-cob, salad, handcut fries, and an amazing piece of coconut cream pie--but the atmosphere is pure Maine. Our table looked out onto the river, where gulls fed as the tidal waters slowly receded, sailboats bobbed on their moorings, and fishing boats waited at dock. To see this view, we had to look through flowering runner beans and other late summer blooms, past the restaurant's pier, where we'd have been dining in warmer weather. Inside, the walls were bedecked with vases of sunflowers and colorful buoys hanging from the ceiling in a way that felt artful, not tacky. Probably even more so than when we were in Portland, we felt like we were on holiday and enjoying every minute.

Gulls probe the flats.
We too enjoy
the fruits of the sea.

September 1: Night out in Portland

My husband and I came down to Portland today to walk around the Old Port and have dinner at Petite Jacqueline, a bistro on Longfellow Square to which we'd been given a gift certificate. As we walked to the restaurant this evening past a gas station, a 7-11 with sketchy characters smoking outside, a Rite Aid drugstore outside of which a man was yelling things to passers-by, etc., we could see the moon rising, hovering over the dirty street and the lights of cars and restaurants and traffic signals, distant but somehow outshining them all.

Full moon shines
just as brightly
over the 7-11.

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August 31: Anticipation

This morning I took one look out the window and brought my raincoat to work. The sky glowered, lowered, and fell. Rain and clouds. But mid-afternoon, it seems to be sweeping through. Patches of blue and brightness appear. And it's such a relief, because tonight is not only a full moon, but the Blue Moon, the second full moon of the month. An auspicious moon. Just knowing it's up there isn't enough; I want to look the moon full in the face.

Coincidentally, fireworks will also brighten Camden Harbor tonight, to kick off the start of the Camden Windjammer Festival. If the skies clear, we'll be able to watch the full moon rise over the masts of the tall ships as fireworks burst in celebration.

Kids eager for fireworks,
but I await
tonight's blue moon.

August 30: Finding water

Family legend has it that my great-great-aunt Gladys (no longer with us but whom I remember fondly from childhood) was a dowser. She was one of those people who used a split branch of (usually) witch-hazel to find water. If you needed to dig a well, Aunt Glad was the one to call. She had the inner sense--one might even call it a power--to divine where the water was. I was always a bit disappointed that I didn't inherit the ability.

I was thinking of this when I heard the osprey keening this morning. We live on a river and often hear an osprey as it's following the water's course between lake and harbor. I realized that while I might not be able to help anyone plan where to drill their well, I do know how to tell when I'm close to a larger body of surface water: I just listen for the osprey.

Around here that's a no-brainer, but once years ago, hiking in the Cascades of Oregon, I remember being startled to hear an osprey crying overhead. I was surrounded by forest of Douglas firs on a trail that seemed to wind endlessly through the mountains. The shining white bird seemed so out of place in the setting that I worried I had heatstroke and was hallucinating an angel. But sure enough, the trail very soon began to follow the shore of a small lake--I should have realized the osprey was there for a reason.

There's a river out here,
reminds the osprey.
Come outside.

August 29: Hurricane

No, there's no hurricane here. Barely a breeze to rustle the shining green birch leaves out my window. It's a perfectly still, calm, beautifully sunny late summer afternoon. Crickets are humming, a stalk of goldenrod sways under the weight of a bee. A kettle of vultures soars gracefully above the river, tilting in the updraft, spiraling ever higher into the bright blue sky.

That's why it seems surreal to think of Hurricane Isaac, thousands of miles to the south, battering Louisiana with torrential rains, high winds, flooding, and power outages. Unless you've got loved ones in the storm's path or have Southern roots, it's so easy in this quiet little pocket of the world to forget that elsewhere things aren't going so well. Not that we shouldn't enjoy these halcyon days. But we should also be grateful, really savor them. And keep in our thoughts those whose homes and lives are in danger right now.

It's been such a wonderful summer here in Maine--so unusually sunny and warm. Conversations about the weather all repeat the same belief that we're going to pay for this perfect season somewhere down the line--with a big storm, a long winter, something bad. We can't help thinking that way. Such old-style Puritanism is bred into us as New Englanders. And at some point, we will get horrible weather, some disaster like Hurricane Irene a year ago in Vermont, so we're always right in the end. But really, we all know that Nature brings what she brings, regardless of what we deserve. And we weather it the best we can.

So calm this morning
vultures had to flap, awkward
in early thermals.

August 28: At the hair salon

Got a trim and some grey hair maintenance (i.e. highlights) this morning at the hair salon. There's something so soothingly sensual about the whole process--the invigorating head massage with the shampoo, the maternal comfort of the hairdresser combing out my tangles, the warmth of the hair dryer as she runs her fingers through my smooth-for-now hair. Not the type to chat away with my hairdresser as if she were my confessor, I just sit there and relax, eyes closed, calmly gathering myself for the start of another work day.

On the back of my neck
blow dryer's hot breath--
haircut on a chilly day.

August 27: Sea, food

My husband and I walked into town to play tourist yesterday and ended up sitting on the deck at the Waterfront Restaurant for a mid-afternoon snack so that we could enjoy the harbor and mountain views. Sun shone on the bobbing masts, rippled across the water's surface, and revealed the stony ledges of Mount Battie, which looms over the head of the harbor. All day I've been craving seafood, but our favorite sushi place was closed, so we had to make do with French fries and blueberry sorbet instead.

A long walk to the harbor--
now I'm craving
sushi for supper.

August 26: Coyotes

Last night was the perfect night for a party. One of my Land Trust's board members, Gray, and I threw one at Beech Nut, a historic sod-roofed stone hut atop Beech Hill in Rockport, in the middle of our 295-acre preserve there. The party hosts were the lucky winners of the Land Trust's Raffle this spring; first prize was this party. The clear blue sky and mild temps were perfect for a gathering like this. We could see across the bay all the way to the mountains of Acadia NP, and inland, the Camden Hills glowed as the sun set among them.

After sunset, as the pink in the sky deepened and spread, the guests headed down the hill, leaving the two of us to clean up in the growing dark. (The hut has no electricity.) At one point I was out on the verandah dumping ice when I heard a siren. I watched to see if the lights of the police car were visible below. Suddenly the wail of the siren seemed to multiply. It took me a second to realize that a pack of coyotes had joined their voices to the siren chorus. I called Gray outside to hear it. She was startled by how close they were and by how many there seemed to be. I could pick out puppy yips and full howls, probably a mixed family group. Such a stirring, chilling sound rising from the forest at the base of the hill. The coyotes had made their presence known.

I was reminded how once, in a mountain canyon of Arizona, a fighter jet flew low up the canyon in some kind of maneuver and set off all the coyotes that had heretofore been invisible around me. I was also reminded of a recent conversation at Bread Loaf, where I've often heard coyotes, about how eastern coyotes pack up more than western ones because they have more wolf genes. The person I was talking to brought up the relatively recent incident of a woman being attacked and killed by a coyote pack in Nova Scotia.

As we left the hill and drove off last night, we were stopped by a police car--one of 12, I was told later. The cop told us to keep our eyes open for a guy in shorts and a t-shirt. No, he wasn't armed or dangerous, just on the lam. Nonetheless, as we drove past the coyote-filled woods, I know I'd have felt safer with all those "song dogs" than with one human fugitive.

They can't resist singing along
with the sirens--
coyotes revealed.

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