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It’s 2 a.m. and the wind is raising a ruckus, and the moon and stars are flickering behind fast-scudding clouds like a 1920s silent film. The clouds are flying east, over the ridge. Note to self: Hiroshima is not good bedtime reading for a solid night of sleep. Its calm, unadorned style, its attention toContinue reading “In the Trees”

Last night I sat beneath a cloudy sky wrapped in a snug blanket until my nose got too cold. I’ve been working on material about my dad’s family, compiling quite a lot of detail to verify when I get to New York. I want to go back to a website I found to do someContinue reading “Clattering”

It’s mid-July, and the cherries are finally coming ripe, but the sweet ones taste like pie cherries right now. The peas are lavish, prolific, and the strawberries promise a huge harvest in a few weeks, as do the pear, apples and plum. But the deer devoured my petunias, my rhubarb, and many of my vegetables.Continue reading “Stripes and Shadows”

Someone has dug a big burrow beneath one of the large trees down the drive from the small pond. It’s sizable, maybe a foot or so across at the mouth and eight inches high, and tidily built, with the earth packed tight into the slight rise at the lower lip, with walls packed smooth, andContinue reading “Visitors”

I can feel it, though it is only marginally true, that the days grow longer. It is 6:45 and already the sky is brightening even through screens of clotted clouds stumbling eastward in a stiff wind like sodden branches tugged by a sluggish stream. The trees sway and jerk in uncoordinated individual response to itsContinue reading “Marginal Truth”

Light snow is falling for the first time in almost and month. It likely won’t amount to more than an inch or so, still I welcome it and the fain hope it offers of a white Christmas. The female hairy woodpecker is already on the suet, and though I am clearly visible to her hereContinue reading “Faint Whispers”

I dreamt of my mother swimming. First it was in my youth at the grandparents’ pool. She was in her late thirties, I guess, and I saw her so clearly in her multicolored one-piece suit with the pleated skirt standing at the pool’s edge, stretching a heavy rtubber bathing cap with her two hands insideContinue reading “Dreams and Imaginings”

Last evening around 9 or so I heard a terrific crash outside the cabin. It sounded like something big banging on the aluminum porch roof. When I investigated, there on the front porch practically seated on the stoop right outside the door sat a black bear cub, maybe eight weeks old or so. S/he wasContinue reading “See You Soon”

What is this disquiet, this vague yet pervasive sense of unease of dissatisfaction, of amorphous desire? Sometimes I think I was formed to be less than happy, less than tranquil, less than satisfied unless there is drama or extremity in my life. I am so inclined to boredom it seems and to a sense ofContinue reading “Doubts”

The Monday following Thanksgiving, I had meant only to walk just to the barn and back before heading off to work, but the morning was so brisk and bright, I went on to the meadow and then beyond to the pond before turning back. I planned to gather that lovely large paper wasp’s nest IContinue reading “Like Peppermint”