Day of grace

Take a day of grace, they said. This extra day the western calendar inserts every year to keep up with the turning ,whirring, whizzing world.

Just step out of it. Take some time to catch up on the leap day.

Yes. Right. And I have mounds of fresh snow to shovel before I can even think about getting out to cross the road to pay my rent. Before heading down the road over the fore-mentioned mounds of unshovelled snow of my neighbour's sidewalks. To work. Where I must create a space of grace. For others.

Something's wrong with the picture.

Is that Mourning Dove going off the deep end? Because you knew all along, didn't you,  what it took me a book to learn:  Lonsesome Dove's true name is Mourning Dove. And they are building nests in my garden. Coerrr coerrr coerrrr in the chilly dawn, calling to the heart.

Snow bathing

Snowflakes the size of dinner plates greeted me first thing yesterday. The garden tree was full of robins bathing in it the way they bathe in a garden sprinkler. A positive chirpfest made the morning merry even as the snow kept on coming, angled on a strong wind.

Thank you Pineapple Express, the warm wet weather system from the Pacific. On the coast it means rain. In the mountains I discover what wet blizzard conditions mean. Mayhem. So different from the light dry powder of earlier in the season.

Yesterday's experiences reaffirmed my gratitude that I live in the country. I had to go to the Big Smoke during this storm. What a mess! Slush and sludge and near nil visibility in city traffic is not a happy event for me.

Deadhorse Gulch in the snow is eminently more navigable. I love a tree full of robins in the morning.

Post-reproduction life: the moving finger

There's a special kind of hell reserved for immigrants when the last remaining parent dies on the red earth of motherland: the winding up of the estate.

As if, in the long and arduous immigration process we haven't had to deal with enough bureaucracy and form filling, now complex legal requests reach out across geographic and cultural barriers with an 8 or 10 hour time difference adding distortion to the mix. Being woken by 3 in the morning phone calls from awkward para legals on another continent. Yes. Right. Has anyone ever shown you a world map? Do you understand latitude and longitude, time and space?

No. Me neither.

And then of course there are the wisps of comment which find their way across the waters. The neighbour wondering to a sister sotto voce whether we know that the paintings hanging on my mother's walls at the time when she died were originals.

Well, did Nosy Neighbour really think we grew up ignorant of the authenticity of our heritage?

And all this long-distance authentication of my pedigree now, what the value in a land of plastic disposable dreams where the blood has run thin and cold, with no longer a voice or vein to connect?

And then, and then all is changed in an instant. Weeding unloved books from the shelves in the library, an old faded sticky note falls out. Anonymous hand, apposite message.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

That old silver lining

 After a day of snow, rain, sleet, hail, wind, in no particular order:  just another February sunset from my library steps

Dream endings?

Funny how life is sometimes so damn poetic. 

Clearing the table this morning I noticed the keys to Hale Ike, my once and former American Dream, were lying on top of my next book to read.

What does one do with the keys to a foreclosed house?

What does one do with failed dreams?

Bonfire of the vanities.

Birds and branches

Winter came back again this week with snow and fog down to the ground, shrouding the mountain, but the tree outside the library bloomed birds in the afternoon.

In the backyard tree, I noticed a little scarlet headed chappie at the bird feeder. We have a house finch sighting!

I have acquired a bird identification book. You guessed?

Making tracks

S'now secret who has been tramping through my garden overnight. I think I need to dream up a fence (please Landlord, oh please) before dreaming up a food garden.

On Sunday I followed the tracks out of town a bit to where a slow thaw makes corduroy of the wheat fields.

Has the fat lady sung?

V-day edition 2012

Today's the day, it seems, whether you are playing peek-a-boo with your heart on ice, melting or just stringing along....

The bicycle is a wilder kind of animal

Bell

Here, a wilderness of wild turkeys
that I pigeon in,

shade on the wing & lily-of-the-valleying.
Here, gray birches

lying down with the silversmithing wind.
Clue: Here, what blooms

blooms scentlessly, fiercely curled
against the smithereening

spring. Ears ringing, I belly up
to my queendom

of nimblewill & bicycle chains, grease
slicking my hem

the color of gravel with no brook
to gravel in.

Belled bicycle listing, I play the game
where the object

is to keep falling. My knees sing.
Here, birds nest

in the curved road. I confess: I doubted
the presence of

the road & the breathing of the stones until
I became intimate

with them. I try not to think of any him.
Clue: Here, in

the preening field. The bicycle may well
be a wilder animal.

- CECILY PARKS

Cecily Parks’s poetry collection Field Folly Snow was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in New York City.

Stirrings

With the sloppy, sludgy piles of snow melting away from edges today, I discover scatterings of new colour: little spears of hope are piercing through the blanket of leaves which I laid down in late November.

This is my first experience of awakening in Hale Makua. I have no picture of what will arise, though at least one manifestation on the south facing wall is looking promisingly like tulip to me.

Within a week or two of taking occupation in November, I did put in some Queen of the Night tulips against the eastern walls. The leaf mulch remains undisturbed yet in that area.

I have no feel for whether it is too early or just the right time but these signs of spring bring joy to my scatterling earthheart.

Last week's delegation of robins in the tree seemed to be petitioning for something. Perhaps they were here to call out the life in the buried tubers, bulbs and corms and not, as I originally thought, to chastise me for the empty feeder.

A conference of birds

Opened my curtains to a tree full of birds this morning. All looking at me.

What have I done?

Oh oh it's more like what haven't I done. Bird feeder is empty. I stand accused. Of gross avian neglect.

Can I plead lunacy? It was the full moon had me distracted.

Imbolc

And a peachy day to you, too.

Reading recently how the USDA new hardiness map is really only good for strangers, outsiders or newcomers to a place, I thought about the series of new beginnings which mark the season's cycles here in my adopted northern hemisphere life.

Well yes, forget the Gregorian calendar, the lunar new year, and all other charts worked out on paper, with complex instruments of measurement, or according to the stars, THIS is when I know that new seasonal beginnings are afoot: this change in the light, this subtle difference in the feel and sound of the air around me, this new pitch the morning melody of bird calls.

Yes, dawn temperatures are still below freezing.

I am not going to rush out to bury my longings in the still icy earth, but something is stirring undeniably at deep cellular level.

The sun, my magnificent vitality generator, is coming back. Colour! Let there be colour!

Two years on, no praying

There is a lot more snow, a lot more sun today than 3 February 2010, the first time I stood here looking north and east towards town. Two years on, and seeing in a completely different light. Time has a way of doing that. Changing the light.

Something else which I never really noticed until today: some joker has scratched out the "S" on the "No Spraying" sign.

Always some joker. No praying indeed.

Funny: I could have sworn that this was a "No Trespassing" sign the first time around. But the camera doesn't lie now, does it?

Pie in the sky: an anniversary of sorts

My mother's death mask looks back at me from the bathroom mirror so I begin this Sunday morning with knitting and a grandstand seat at the breakfast buffet of the birds: doves settling what looks like an old score in a clapping of wings, a variety of lbjs and a great, big spotted, striped, stippling of a Northern Flicker with a face full of suet.

For the second day in a row temperatures climb to just above freezing. There is a new freshness in the air. I swear I smell blossoms, though the landscape is still largely blanketed in crystalline white.

Needing to be out under the arc of the wide blue canopy, I take the tall Antelope for a first ride of the year. Zzzzzzzt, zzzzzzt, zzzzzzt go the tyres through the melting ice puddles on the roadways, Peddling loose and eager, we head toward the south western edge, past the beaver dam and up to the foothills. Cycling the straight cadastral survey lines, I count off the distance in sections and half sections. Half a mile. One mile. Three miles. (Lost? Find a good explanation of cadastral survey mapping here.)

Two years ago I looked back at the little mountain town from this point for the first time. Has familiarity bred love?

At the bridge the snow has melted flame patterns onto a sandbank. Fire melts ice. Take it all the way to the ocean. Indigo stays with me.

On the way back, my pedaling shadow slants long in the roadway ahead. I glimpse a beady dark eye and the rusty red of a thrush or robin breast in a garden. The air is rich with bird calls. I sip its ambrosia.

Back at Hale Makua, the last rays of the sun put a hint of pink on the mountain in the kitchen window, and there! the almost full moon hangs huge in the eastern sky.

We're all following a strange melody

We're all summoned by a tune

We're following the piper

And we dance beneath the moon

We're following the piper

And we dance beneath the moon for him

And we dance beneath the moon

(Abba - The Piper Song)

Rhetoric

I luck out. I find Lonesome Dove, the regular, going out on a limb for me in the white wasteland of the back forty.

Close eyes and think of Mexico: dove cooing in the dawn.

For the rambler and the gambler. What passes for love.

Dove to the morning

My world is a shaken up snow globe again this morning but the backyard tree is seething with a twitter of birds.

A beautiful, solitary dove is a regular now.