You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
An ascent of Mount Washington in New Hampshire in 1974 and then in the high country the Cascade Mountains starting two years later introduced many magical arctic flowers to my awareness, along with prickly pear cactus in the desert to the east where I lived and worked for four years.
The fly-eating pitcher plants, found in arctic peat bogs in our corner of Maine and New Brunswick, continue that exotic delight.
I came to appreciate lupines in the high country of the Cascade mountains in Washington state. They proliferate on the island in Maine where I now live, too.
Although I lived near an apple orchard in Indiana, the blossoms became a special memory once we made the big move after that, as you’ll see. These are beside our house in Maine.
Reminders of a very special introduction I had while living in Upstate New York. We’re still in touch all these years later.
Violas.
Warm weather brings out old car buffs who love to show off their restoration efforts. Owners will sometimes drive hours just to show off their pride and joy, sometimes then just cruising up and down the Ave.
Music written with distinctive shapes for each pitch became a way of training American amateurs to sing harmony in a choir. Fa-so-la plus mi, rather than do-re-mi, for starters. Known as shape-note singing, it led to a distinctive style of hymn performance called Sacred Harp, especially popular in the South. Here’s a bit from the Easter Anthem by colonial New England composer and tanner William Billings. I learned the piece with Mennonites and can attest that shape notes can be so much fun.
The intense depth of color in a frigid winter sky stirs up memories of living in the interior Far West, where its usual lack of humidity produced similar firmaments through the hottest seasons. Consider this, then, from coastal Maine, a preview of some journal entries ahead.
In my moves across the northern U.S., I’ve always lived in places that would get icicles in winter – some places more impressively than others. I never planned it that way, but in some locales they could grow down past floor-length windows, creating a threat to anything below. When those fell, their crash would shake the house, sometimes waking us from deep sleep. These, on the second floor at the Cobscook Quaker meetinghouse in Whiting, Maine, are modest in comparison.
When I see this phenomenon where I’m now living, I’m reminded of an ice floe stampede one Sunday afternoon on the Susquehanna River back in the winter of ‘71. For two hours or so after an ice jam upstream had been dynamited, the river was a racetrack of large jagged white wedges three or four feet thick crashing down the riverway. Viewing it was terrifying, mystifying and unforgettable. Slabs of the ice that had been thrust into shrubs along the riverbanks remained visible until nearly May.
Hobart Stream at Cobscook Bay, Edmunds Township, Maine.
Jnana's Red Barn 