Anticipating Spring

Even when winter trees are leafless and all the ground is covered with snow, nature makes small places for my eyes to feast. The evergreens stand out greeny-black against the white, 

every shade of brown and gray shows off its luster where the snow has melted and the leaf matter is exposed, 

dawns and sunsets paint the sky in shades of crimson and purple. Cardinals and jays look like winged jewels in flight. 

And when that snow disappears? Oh, glorious green!

We are weeks away from this last photo, but just knowing the middle of February has passed gives me hope!

From Magpie Tales #53

Making Sea Salt

I watch you work

in the blistering sun,

steam from the salt pans

nudging tendrils of escaped hair

into curls. Your wet skirt clings to

the curve of your thigh;

I taste salt at the nape of your neck

where your hand has carelessly brushed.

 *Note: In ancient times, salt girls held the job of boiling seawater down for the salt. Some cursory research showed that sea salt was obtained by diluting the brine of the sea by evaporation, largely accomplished by the sun. The concentrated slurry of salt, sand, and mud was scraped up and washed clean with seawater to settle the impurities. The brine was poured into shallow pans lightly baked from local clay and set over a peat fire for the final evaporation. The dried salt was then scraped out and sold. 

A Little February Romance

Photo of amaryllis by Judith at A View From the Woods

Fever

In that red dress

that spills down her body

like paint,

she is an amaryllis

in a winter room.

Heads turn;

the air is on fire.

When the music starts

she turns,

and when they dance,

she is all he needs to know of flowers.

Halfway Somewhere

I am beginning to look like someone I do not know. It’s an odd feeling to glance down at my own hands and suddenly recognize my mother’s. I look in the mirror and am surprised to see not the reflection of my inner vision, twenty and blonde, smooth-skinned and slim as a whippet, but a sixty-five year old woman with streaks of silver at her temples and fine lines around her eyes. My skin is freckled with what my grandmother called age spots and my dermatologist calls sun damage. My stride and my stamina are shortening. I go to bed earlier and wish I could wake up later. I used to think people my age were old. No one told me I’d get here and still think young.

I have lost a few things on my journey to middle age. I’ve lost some of my absolute trust that things will always work out the way I want them to. When I was a child I was the center of the universe. As an adult, I am only the center of my own. I’ve had to move over and share with the rest of the world. I’ve lost some of my blind trust in grown-ups, too. Some adults say children are often cruel. They should know – they teach the lesson so thoroughly. I’ve had to temper my trust with a healthy dose of, "Oh yeah? Says who?" and then hold up their truths against my own hard-won notions.

It seems just yesterday that I was in high school. I can still recall the excitement of commencement night, the feeling of standing in an open doorway looking out on an infinite future. I was invulnerable, impervious to harm, destined to fly. I’ve since lost the notion I can soar on my own. I’ve learned I need the wind. I have gone past the middle of my earth journey. I’ve grown from a clinging, needy infant dependent on other people for my basic needs to adulthood and the frightening, freeing responsibility of caring for myself. I’ve loved and been loved, hated and had it come back to bite me, borne children and buried parents. I’ve faced fears head-on, I’ve let places and things and hearts go that I would rather have hung onto. I’ve allowed myself to become vulnerable and open to hurt so that when bliss comes, and it does come, I can fill up and flow over. I’ve learned neither state lasts forever.

Oh Baby

Ada Bean and her Memere

There's something about a baby, something about the bottomless depth of their eyes that brings tears to yours, something about their silken, sweetly-scented skin that makes you want to bury your nose in their neck, something about their helplessness that makes you want to protect them. And when that baby is your own grandchild, as this one is, there's a bond that starts somewhere in the middle of your heart and reaches into every cell of your body until you are love itself, completely and irrevocably in tune with them for the rest of your life, no matter what.

Rough Draft

After reading at fellow blogger Dick's site and Voice Alpha, a blog dedicated to the discussion of reading poetry aloud for an audience…

At the Poetry Reading

The lights flicker a warning to the audience.

Shuffling feet and shifting bodies settle.

Anticipation rises like smoke.

First up is Ian whose empty hands

are jammed in his pockets

like the damned up words in his mouth.

They spill together; his fists pound

the air, his words beat like fists,

pummeling, pulsating, until the

air in the room is purpled like a bruise.

Up and up his rising voice carries us,

setting us down in a different place where

the sudden silence is deafening.

Duncan makes his way to the stage

through the remnants of applause,

papers trembling in his trembling hands.

We lean forward as one, waiting

Duncan reads words like they are made

of feathers and music. When he is finished

the silence is a balm, a healing,

his honeyed words a blessing. His eyes

lift from the papers in his stilled hands

and he smiles.

Moira has a voice like stones dropping.

One after another her words fall. It hurts

to hear them.

Jean’s verse is worse.

Her rhyming and timing

are ghastly and slightly askew.

You wonder who taught her

to verbally slaughter

her words and then foist them on you.

Kevin never lifts his eyes from the page.

The last performer, Pete, brings a book

of his own verse. He holds it open in his

workman’s hands.

He does not read; he speaks, barely glancing

at the page. His eyes gather us in, 

include us in the story.

He becomes his poem, 

becomes the man he writes about,

becomes the passion and the sorrow

and the redemption at the end. 

Missing Dad

From my collection of children's poems... written way back in 1971!

When I was Six

We'd run and gather 'bout his knees,

he'd tickle us and we would tease,

to make a bridge twixt stool and chair,

and he would hold us prisoner there,

all laughing till we gasped for air,

and begged him please, for more.

He's sometimes tell us stories then, 

all cuddled up right next to him.

If days were sometimes dull and flat

our nights with Dad made up for that

I'll always think of how we sat,

snuggled in his love.

A Triolet

A triolet is a one stanza poem of eight lines with an ab.aa.ab.ab rhyme scheme. The first, fourth and seventh lines are the same as are the second and eighth lines. They are great fun to compose. Here's one I wrote on one of my Cobble walks.


What the Hemlock Said

From where I stand I see the river bend

before it wanders off across the field.

A hundred years I’ve watched the water wend,

For where I stand I see the river bend,

And you would think a hundred years to spend

along the water’s edge by rights should yield

a closer knowledge of the river bend

before it wanders off across the field.

Other People's Thoughts

I have a page of quotes in a file on my computer. Now and then I browse through them to see if they still grab me in the same way. I spend some interesting hours looking at my life through other people’s eyes. Some examples:

"A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner." Louis L’Amour

My own head, house for my own thoughts, is decorated with cheery scraps of bright ideas amid the mundane, more serviceable notions I entertain. I reside inside my thoughts, creating with my hands a place for the rest of me to live. My mind is aswirl with thoughts that didn’t originate there but grew from seeds planted by others, notions heard or read that I’ve mulled over and mulched and pruned and grafted until they’ve become hybrids. They are my thoughts now, some as familiar as an old bathrobe, some as new as a housewarming gift. My thoughts, my things—looking at them this way is like coming suddenly upon my own reflection, realizing, “Oh! That’s me!” simultaneously with, “Is that what I look like?”

"All really great thoughts are conceived while walking." Friedrich Nietzsche

I would have agreed wholeheartedly until I remembered that most of my great thoughts came to me while exercising my backside in the rocker by the window. Or when I’m in that nebulous place between sleeping and waking, or when I’m leaning against a tree staring into the sun-dappled woods, or lying prone in a meadow with the great blue bowl of sky overhead. I walk briskly when I need to work things out and slowly when things need mulling over, but my comets seem to fire most when I’m at a standstill.

"In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary." Aaron Rose

Too often, I think, we hold back from realizing the ordinary can be extraordinary. Too bad. Look at what we miss by relegating the familiar to such a judgment. We don’t notice how often the rising sun paints the morning sky the color of rose petals, how it gilds the grass, and casts long shadows that shrink to puddles by noon. How, late in the afternoon, the light can take on a shimmer and how, when evening draws the day to a close, the sun sinks behind a canopy of crimson velvet clouds, trailing bright banners of pink that fade slowly into dusk. We think of snow as a nuisance we have to plow, ice as something designed to make us slip and fall, rain as a dampener to all our outdoor plans. Our lives take on narrower boundaries. We look, then, to the exotic to stimulate and please us, believing to our own detriment that what is familiar is too common and plain to ever be wondrous.

"Life ain’t nothing but a funny, funny riddle." John Denver.

Thanks Hilary

Image from Magpie #50

Road Sign Redux

Hike the Appalachian Trail

and you’re likely to run into bears,

cougars, rainstorms, poison ivy,

boulders, hunger, thirst,

and a snake or two. The signs

don't tell you this.

South to Georgia, north to Maine,

4.9 miles to Little Gap,

16 to Leroy's Shelter.

Come across one of these signs

in the woods and suddenly you're

Robert Frost, choosing.

Signs point. You decide.

It's like waking up one morning

knowing you're no longer lost.

Overlooking the River

In this spot where sunlight

throws sparkles off the snow,

where oak leaves tremble

in the circuitous wind

and ice melt trickles down

to lose itself in the softening snow,

where geese float and gabble and

flex their wings,

and last year's leaves 

whirl and settle and whirl again,

here where the sun 

warms my cold cheek,

and a hungry downy drums the wood,

here I will sit myself down

to watch and listen,

to hear the voice of the goose

and the chickadee,

and the singular hymn of the wind.

You Never Know

I was shoveling out the mailboxes after our third snowstorm in as many weeks, grumbling with each shovel full and thinking, typical! to myself after each pickup truck with a plow sailed past me without so much as a, "Hey, can I help you out there?"


A misanthrope and loner by nature since childhood (my mother would try to cajole me to come downstairs and recite poetry for her dinner guests and my standard response was always, "No, I don't like those people!"), I'm still staggered by how insensitive, unhelpful, and selfish my fellow humans can be (no, not all, and not always). And then, we hardly ever see ourselves through our own eyes. 


I had just heaved an exceedingly heavy shovel of snow and ice over the growing pile and was leaning with my head on the shovel handle when I heard what I immediately thought of as Reya's "Voice" (she speaks of it in her January 17th post titled All Along the Watchtowers).



I am no mystic. I'm not a Believer either. I'm a skeptic at worst, and a maybe-er at best. But I'm telling you I heard a voice and it said,  "Perhaps if you felt differently about your fellow man, he would appear differently to you." 


I picked up my head. Not a soul in sight. And then in my ear, "And if you keep shoveling while you wait for kindness to appear, at least the mailboxes will be cleared." 


How very Zen.


I'd like to say the next truck that appeared stopped and the driver offered to plow my driveway for me so I could get to the store for milk.  That did not happen. But? As I cleared the last shovel full of snow in front of the mailboxes, a pickup truck did stop and in it was my neighbor.  "I'm going into town, " he said. "Can I get anything for you?"


Reya often repeats two things in her blog posts. She insists on thinking we humans have some worth despite our awful shortcomings, and she pays attention to Voices. Perhaps I should, too.  It just may make a difference in the way the world appears to me from now on.

Thoughts Before Breakfast

At each window,
I linger,

taking in the sugary snow,

the plum-colored shadows

that lay beside the grasses,

winter-dried to shades of toast.

A lemon yellow sky striped with

raspberry, and vanilla pudding clouds

that mound along the horizon

make me realize that my eyes

are hungry. I watch the 
morning moon

and the small birds,

round as dough balls,

as they seek their own breakfast

in the branches of the lilac

that guards the door

leading to my kitchen.

A Quintain

A quintain is any five line stanza poem of any meter or line length. Here I've used an a,b,a,a,b rhyme scheme. Fiddling with form is always a delightful challenge. This was inspired by one of my Walking/Nature Writing Workshops.

The Housatonic River wends its way through Bartholomew's Cobble near my home.

Cold Hope

Walk with me along the water’s edge

See that feather trapped there in the ice?

It means the geese were feeding on the sedge,

and rested there upon the rocky ledge,

hoping that brief respite would suffice.

contributed to One Shot Wednesday

Come For a Walk With Me

My Northern Lites tag sale snowshoes.

Two years ago I bought a pair of used snowshoes at a tag sale. During last winter's snowless months they languished on their nail on the garage wall. But last week the snow started falling at dusk on Tuesday evening and by Wednesday morning there were 22 inches of light, fluffy snow on the ground. I stepped off my front doorstep and sank in over my knees. Snowshoe time!

Yesterday I joined my brother Frank and three of his neighbors on a trek through a local Audubon Nature Preserve. The site is an old farm on the street where I grew up. I'd wandered these meadows and woods my whole childhood. Frank and I used to strap on my grandfather's old hardwood framed, rawhide laced snowshoes and track each other through some of this very land. I hadn't been on showshoes since I was eight years old. The woods and fields I was about to traverse seemed much the same but this body was far removed from the lithe and limber eight year old I'd been.

At the trail head.

The sun was bright and the wind brisk as we trudged through the first hayfield, past the farm pond, and up into the woods. I remember that pond being dug and the giant turtle that emerged snapping and growling in the dredge's bucket. The land had been mined for limestone in years past and as we climbed, we passed the old stone supports for the cart line that carried the quarried stone downhill to the smelting kiln.

Old quarry cable supports

The woods were deep and still. The only sounds were the creakings of our bindings and the swoosh of snow under our shoes as we made our way through the hardwoods and the sighing pines. The storm had left deep snow on the forest floor and strange snow animals on tree limbs...

Odd little snow animal perched on a broken branch...

I'd brought along my ski poles to help me keep my balance on the uneven ground. I found I didn't need them most of the time but they came in handy when trying to climb over fallen trees or struggle up steep inclines. We stopped occasionally to decipher animal tracks or just to drink in the beauty of the winter landscape. I was eight again in my mind, mittened and capped and completely free in the quiet woods and windblown meadows.

One of several vast, untrammeled meadows.

An hour and a half later we stamped the snow from our shoes in the Preserve parking lot, exclaimed about what a good time we'd had, and made tentative plans to do it again. My shoulders ached from swinging the poles and my back ached from the prolonged tromping but my spirit danced like the happy child that used to roam these spaces daily.

Observation

January snow

a crisp, white page,

a new year.

Nature sketches

last years grasses

to remind us of tomorrow’s—

Hardwoods show their bones,

redbirds paint

the hemlocks.

In the stark pewter sky

a crow featherstitches

clouds.

White flakes drift like

windblown curtains—

January snow.

The Great, Long Song (reprint)

My mornings have music of their own. There are the silent melodies – the hush of predawn, the tiptoe of light, the fading darkness - sounds my ears cannot hear. There is the noise the grass makes, stretching, and the sound the dew makes, falling. There is the joyous sound of the sun bouncing up over the horizon and of the mist rising from the surface of the pond. In summer, flowers lift their faces to the light, leaves stir, clouds float, all seemingly silent, all part of the great song that has no beginning or end. Then comes the audible music - the first tentative birdsong, the crowing of a rooster, the whoosh of early traffic, the barking of a dog, the slamming of a door. Warm weather bees buzz, insects whine. WInter flakes rustle as they fall. There are small forest scurryings and squirrels chatter high in the treetops. The day-song has begun.

There are snowy mornings like today when light creeps into the darkness like a single, small chime rather than a full-concert sunrise. Falling snow sounds like a sleeping baby's breath, a small, nearly imperceptible sigh as billions of flakes drift and settle. Rainy mornings, on the other hand, are drum recitals, tapping feet and fingers on roof and windowpane, water music with rhythm. Sounds are muted, sibilant. Rain patters, sloshes, burbles, splashes, washes clean. It gushes down drainpipes, surges over stones, streams down roadsides. Rainy days are not silent; the refrain beats on the roof of the world. Only the end of a storm is signaled with silence, the rests between the beats, the ceasing of the drum.

Afternoon music is the noise of living. It is car horns and dump trucks and sirens wailing. It is men shouting, children laughing, women talking, dogs barking, vendors selling, voices bargaining, couples arguing, bells clanging, wind blowing, birds calling, planes droning. It is phones ringing and radios blaring. It is joy and sorrow, blessing and curse, trying and failing and winning and losing, all loose and careening in the frantic hours of daylight. It is jazz and be-bop, hip-hop and boogie-woogie.

Late in the afternoon, the din begins to subside. Dissonance segues into harmony, the mid-day jazz mellows. Late afternoon symphonies are full of tranquil notes that slow the movements, soothe the tempers. The light itself changes. Gone is the high-noon heat. Summer shadows lengthen, crickets serenade the twilight, frogs begin their evening chorus. Winter dusk falls like a purple cloak spread over the land. The sun sets to a majestic overture of silence, drawing the colors of the sunlight hours about itself in splendid stillness, as if the day itself is pausing to draw breath.

The earth, too, is a living song. It is the keening of hawks, the chatter of bare branches in the wind, the murmur of water, the multitude of human prayers and praises; we are all part of the great, long song.

Reprinted for Magpie 48 prompt

New Year Thoughts

I listened today to an interview with a woman who’d survived a plane crash that claimed the lives of many of her fellow passengers. She recounted how a man told her afterwards that God must have had a special reason for saving her, that there was still work for her to do down here. My immediate reaction echoed her own. She said:

“I was quite troubled. It felt like I was saddled with a lot of responsibility ... to figure out, ‘What is this work I'm supposed to be doing?’ And then the flipside is, God didn't have any more work for all those other people, and I don't believe that.”

She decided, instead, to try being grateful every day for what she did have so that she could live with as few regrets as possible. It was hard, she said, because she was not in the habit of paying such close attention to whether she told her husband and children all the time that she loved them. But then she’d think, “I might not come home at the end of the day,” and she knew it wasn’t so hard after all.

My own mother used to thank her God each night for the day just passed, remembering to include each one of us in her gratitude. She began each morning with a similar reverence and taught us to do the same. Though I don’t share her belief in one omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God, I still can see the benefits of gratitude, of wonder, attention, kindness, and appreciation.

I can’t subscribe to a deity who is circumscribed by human thought, whose borders are as narrow as our own. That kind of god frightens me as much as the idea of one so immense and powerful that to know of it would bring instant annihilation. I prefer to admit I don’t know for sure, that I’m open to suggestions, to discoveries, to experiences, to ever-widening horizons and to change. I choose to see an echo of the largest thing in the smallest, to recognize the life force in all things, and to be grateful for what I know I have—five senses that tell me how to survive in and enjoy my world, the ability to reason and explore and to think for myself, the chance to know happiness and love, sorrow and loss, and to know they are irrevocably linked because this is a world of duality, of relativity. It is enough. And because I could lose it all tomorrow, for today, like that plane crash survivor and my mother before me, I am grateful.

Tis the Season

Christmas is coming. As a child those words thrilled me. It’s a feeling I still experience despite the fact that I've let go of any religious connection. There’s a sense of eagerness, of bustle, of anticipated sharing that permeates the very air. There are some things that are unique to the jolly season. Here are a few of my favorites:

SNOW… I know it falls and falls and FALLS, for months sometimes, but there’s something special about Christmas snow. Like millions of angels’ wings, the snowdrops tumble softly down, covering the bareness of early winter, transforming bushes and fence posts and last summer’s goldenrod into fairytale props. Christmas Eve snow surrounds streetlights like a nimbus and reflects in tiny glowing pools the reds and blues and greens of colored lights. Snow on Christmas Day lures me out of doors, sled in hand, just as it did when I was a child.

SCENTS… Bayberry candles and spicy cinnamon potpourri, warm apple cider and peppermint candy canes, wood smoke curling from chimneys, the sharp scent of freshly cut evergreens. And the foods! Roasting meats and savory stuffings, fruit pies and mince pies and mouth-watering tortes. Cookies frosted like fat snowmen, jaunty gingerbread men, lush dark fruitcake stuffed with fruits and nuts and soaked in brandy, eggnog, thick with foam and liberally sprinkled with nutmeg. Rich, buttery stolen studded with colorful candied peel. Plum pudding steaming hot and slathered with hard sauce.

SOUNDS… “I’ll be home for Christmas.” It’s almost impossible to not sing along with Christmas songs. The tunes are catchy, the sentiments echo the joy, and occasionally the longing, of the season, and because we hear them just a few short weeks a year, they hold their appeal. It doesn’t matter who sings them or how updated the rendition, the message is the same: ‘tis the season to be jolly—and generous and giving and loving and festive.

GIFTS… The meaning of Christmas can get lost in the pursuit of the perfect present if we forget that any gift can be the perfect one if we’ve put thought and care into its choosing. It isn’t the price or the quantity that determine perfection—it’s the heart behind the giving. Cost and size pale when compared to love wrapped in a homemade card or tied with the ribbons of sentiment.

FAMILY… Distance may separate family members—two of my children and my two sisters are far away in miles—but they can still live in our hearts. Often it’s one of the few times a year we make an extra effort to be in touch with those we hold dear if not near.

GRATITUDE… There is a profundity to the season, a reverent silence that invites us to reflect on who we are and what we have and why we are here. The deep and abiding need to find or make meaning in our lives finds one of its best expressions at this time of year. When we give of ourselves we find that we have been given ourselves.

Love Letter to My Daughter At Christmas

for Magpie #45

I wrote this letter to my elder daughter the year she moved to Florida. That was in 1992 but my sentiments have not changed in all these years.


Dear Jen,

The little people—that’s what your Pepere used to call you and your brothers and sister. Nothing pleased him more than hearing that the little people were coming to see him. Now the four of you are grown and on your own, scattered across the country from one coast to the other and nothing pleases me more than knowing any one of you is coming home, if only for a short visit. You are the first to be married and your new home is far from here. You will not be making the journey to be with me for the holidays.

It is almost Christmas Eve. The tree stands in its customary place, waiting for bits of colored glass and tinsel to work their magic. Each ornament I lift from its nest of tissue evokes some memory of Christmas past. Here’s the small blue angel your Memere gave you when you were just a toddler. With your gold-spun hair and your big blue eyes you looked like an angel yourself. “Let me do it,” you insisted, hanging the trinket on the highest branch you could reach.

Trimming the tree is a task for children. How your eyes sparkled, reflecting the lights your older brothers strung carefully among the branches. I lift a small elf out of the ornament box, a homemade dough creation given to you by your fifth grade teacher and think, “You should be hanging these on the tree, Jen.” Early Christmas morning I will get up before everyone else and turn on the tree lights, remembering the morning so long ago that you sat in your bunny-feet pajamas and gazed at the twinkling lights, saying over and over again, “Isn’t it pretty, isn’t it nice?” I will whisper the words softly to myself and think of you.

For more than twenty years you made Christmas cookies with me, decorating them with gobs of colored frosting and sugar sprinkles. Each year you became more adept at rolling and cutting and decorating. On each gingerbread man I make alone this year I will put a big frosting smile in memory of the little girl who helped at my side.

I hum along with the carols playing on the radio as I work and remember how we sang aloud every Christmas carol we knew as we baked or wrapped gifts or marched from store to store in search of the perfect present. How excited you were on Christmas morning when you and your brothers saw that Santa had come in the night. To this day there’s still a gift “from Santa” under the tree for everyone. This year your perfect present is on its way to you. I can picture the look on your face when you open it and will hear the echo of your voice—“Oh, thank you, Santa and you too, Mom!”—across the miles.

Isn’t it odd that a heart can ache and be joyful at the same time? We will all sit a little closer at the table so your place won’t look so glaringly empty. We will take turns talking to you on the phone, wishing you a happy Christmas. And I will wish this for you, my daughter, that all the joy you’ve brought me through the years will be returned to you a thousand-fold.

Love,
Mom

The Great Sled Race

Photo prompt from Magpie Tales 

When I was a child snow often fell over the Berkshires shortly before Thanksgiving. It would catch first along the hedgerows and in the tall dead grasses that lined the roads. Soon lawns and fields were covered with a thin blanket and we children began to get excited. Toward the middle of December, when there was a good six inches of snow on the ground, enough to slide on, my brother Frank would take the sleds down from their storage place over the garage rafters, oil the runners well and tie new knots in the frayed tow ropes. My sisters (who were twins) and I, well wrapped in snowsuits, scarves, boots, and mittens would tromp up the hill behind him.

West’s Hill was the best place to go sledding. The middle of the hill was quite steep, studded with large snow covered rocks that made marvelous jumps. We would plant our sleds at the crest, back up a bit to get a good running start, and belly flop on the sled, shrieking and yelling as down we sailed. At that bottom of the hill there was a barbed wire fence that Farmer West clipped in the middle. He made a loop of one end and hooked it over a fence post, allowing us to unhook it and fold the fence wire back when we wanted to slide. Most of the time we remembered to open the wire gate, leaving a space wide enough for two sleds to get through side by side. Now and then one of us lost a hat or felt the stern prick of the wire on the backs of our heads when we forgot.

The January I was ten there was over a foot of snow on the hill. We had a big race planned with the three West children who lived at the top. They had boasted that their three flexible flyers tied together could beat our new Christmas toboggan any day. We met at the top of the hill on a snowy Saturday afternoon to test their brag.

The wind blew the words out of our mouths as the twins and Frank and I argued over who would steer the toboggan and who would stand at the bottom of the hill to declare the winners. If the race was to be fair only three of us could ride the toboggan down the hill. The fourth would have to act as judge.

Frank dropped the toboggan down. He knelt on it and bounced it a little to wedge it into the snow, making sure it would not take off without us. One of the twins was elected to referee the race. She trudged disconsolately down the hill and stood with her back to us, pouting. The other twin and I took our places on the toboggan.

The neighbor kids’ three sleds were tied together. The oldest boy sat in front to steer, his brother sat on the middle sled, and their little sister brought up the rear.

“We’re ready!” Frank yelled down the hill to the referee.

She looked  up. She yelled something back.

“What?” Frank hollered, but the answer was indecipherable. She just stood, waving her arms and kicking the fence post.

“On your mark, get set, GO!” Frank bellowed and with a running jump, landed solidly on the back of the toboggan. I heard our opponents give a whoop as the three sleds took off beside us.

We plowed headlong through the snow that blew back in our faces, blinding us. The toboggan hit a boulder and veered off crazily, landing with a thump. The three of us shot up into the air and came back down with great emphasis. The bottom of the hill was coming up fast. My little sister suddenly leaned back against me.

“Hemph!” she shouted.

“What?” I yelled back?

She pulled her scarf away from her mouth. “Fence!”

FENCE?

The word was suddenly clear. In our excitement over the race, none of us had thought to move the barbed wire fence out of the way. Now a single strand of that wicked wire lay in wait across the path of our speeding sleds. The referee twin was frantically scrabbling with the loop but the deep snow had half buried the post and she was too little to budge the wire.

“Bail out!” I screeched, grabbing my sister’s shoulders, tipping us both to the right as hard as I could. Frank’s feet, hooked around my waist, came along and we spilled into the snow. Right beside us I saw three bodies catapult off the sleds and plunge into the snow in a wild tangle of arms and legs. The toboggan and the sleds went on down the rest of the hill without us. We lay for a moment in stunned silence then, “Tie!” hollered the referee in the direction of the empty sleds and she stomped off for home.

The winter of the big snow and the house where we lived. The hill was just up the road from here.

Thanks Hilary!

This day began with a hundred geese that rose from the pond at dawn and flew eastward into the sun, the light gilding their undersides. Their cries roused me from sleep, stirring some ancient longing to flee the coming cold. I look out my window at the colors of winter, the buff colored grasses, the shadowed woods, the trees inked in black against a steel sky, and watch the sun paint it all with a gold that spills slowly over the bare tops of the trees and into my yard.

Except for a few days last week when the temperature dipped into the 30s overnight, the weather has been mild. October was a glorious riot of color and somber November has so far boasted temperatures into the 50s. I set off into the early morning with only a jacket. Great drifts of mahogany leaves line the road and here and there a few bittersweet berries glow orange. The pond is a pewter plate, empty now of geese until the afternoon. The mornings belong to the crow and the jay, the chickadee, and the flocks of little purple finches that winter over. The cardinal that sings me awake at 4:30 on summer mornings is silent now, though I’ve seen him at the feeder, he and his dun-colored mate, eating the sunflower seeds I’ve set out for them.

The roadside brush is showing its bones. Great tangled vines of bittersweet curl over leafless bushes. Milkweed pods have dried and burst. I stop to release a last bit of gossamer fluff into the wind, sending the attached seeds on their journey, wondering, as I watch them lift and disappear, where the winter winds might take me. There are times when my life seems as insubstantial as milkweed fluff and I, too, am at the mercy of the prevailing wind.

By noon, the sun is still only a few feet over the horizon and as it descends into the afternoon, the air grows cooler and the wind quiets. By five o’clock the sky is violet and then gray. Night drops its cloak over the day and stars are visible by suppertime. I close the curtains against the dark and listen to the geese gabbling on the pond. One day soon they will fly south instead of east. Despite what the calendar says, that will be, for me, the day winter begins.

Thanks, Hilary!

Keep The Light On, Please

For Magpie #43

A few days ago, my former landlady came from Maine to visit me. It gets dark early and I'd turned on the outside light. "Ah," she smiled when she saw it. "You've got the 'Mother Light' on."

She explained to my puzzled look, "When my mother lived in your little cottage, she would turn that light on for me and I would think, Oh, Mom, I've just gone for a walk. I know my way back. But then I'd realize what she was doing. She was just letting me know she was there, as a mother should. I came to think of it as the Mother Light."

I thought about that, about ways that mothers light the way for their children and how we do it long after they are grown and no longer need us. My own mother used to leave the porch light on for me if I'd gone for a walk and darkness fell before I returned. If I took the car, the garage light was always on when I came home after sunset. She didn't need to do it. I was perfectly capable of finding my way in the dark. It was a courtesy and a small sign of mother love that kept her turning on lights for me long after I needed her to.

There was, as well, the light in her eyes whenever she saw any of her children, and the light in her heart that expressed itself over and over in countless doings for each of us. Never did we go out but that some light - porch, hall, stair - was left burning for us. And when she died, she left the light burning in our hearts so that we could see where it was we needed to go.

The physical lights of porch and stair are symbols for the mother light that shines internally, eternally. They say, I am here in a visual way, just as the spoken words resonate in a child's ear and heart. What better task for a mother to take upon herself than shedding light where there is darkness?