Tag: Nature

DREAMING OF A WHAT?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Golly, it really is too early in the season for this much snow. I spent much of yesterday digging out from a foot or so of the stuff, our first real round as we plunge into another winter, even though it’s officially still autumn and we’ve had a blanket of white on the ground for a week now.

It’s also too early to be this cold, considering the minus-2 Fahrenheit forecast for tonight. That should seal in the snow cover, for sure.

My wife is no doubt anticipating sending me outside with a guest or two to harvest Brussels sprouts in a little over a week, when it comes time to prepare for our traditional Yule feast. Looks like once again we’ll be using an ax to break the icy covering and a shovel to locate the greens. I’ve previously posted about the way frost gives the sprouts and kale a wonderful sweetness, but the snowpack always thickens the plot. She finds it highly amusing, watching from the kitchen window.

Meanwhile, as I shoveled yesterday, I kept remembering that since this is just the start, it would be wise to make an extra effort to leave room for the next storm … or three or four or … Thus, don’t leave the pile at the end of the driveway so tall you can’t see oncoming traffic, be sure to push the icy wall along the driveway back so you won’t have to throw the next round higher than your shoulders, keep as much on the side away from the foundation so it won’t drain into the cellar, … Yes, there’s a long list, based on long experience living here.

Then I remembered something else. Last month, I finally got the bindings on my cross-country skis fixed – and new boots to go with them. Sure looks like a good day to go outside and try them out in a loop around the yard. Hope I keep my balance. Here we go, even before the latest forecast: With Christmas really just around the corner, we’re expecting another inch or two tomorrow.

Whee!

SOARING AND SWIRLING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In mid-March, the buzzards return, soon followed by hawks.

“Buzzards,” as one acquaintance long ago explained, “is what cowboys call turkey vultures.”

But buzzard is so much more fun to say, fast or slow.

Yes, a few linger around here all winter, along with a number of hawks. But one day, looking up, you realize the balance has changed.

They’ve mostly headed for Florida again. Along with the rest of the “snow birds.”

AFTER THE FROST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As everyone’s been saying, New England had a strange summer. It felt shorter than normal, and despite some uncommonly hot spikes, was overall on the cool side. June was drier than usual, while July was wetter. And we swimmers were finding the ocean already growing uncomfortable toward the end of August, rather than leading into the glorious days of September we often anticipate. (The Gulf of Maine takes time to warm, after all.) I barely got my value’s worth out of my season pass to Fort Foster beach, unlike last year, even though I’m officially fully retired now.

As the buzz went, the fall foliage was better than we’d had in years, although it seemed to run about a week ahead of schedule and then essentially drifted off. And, after a few near misses in September, we were finally hit with killing frosts before the last week of October.

Not that many years ago, I would have said that was the end of the garden season, but that’s no longer the case. The cold gives the Brussels sprouts and kale a sweet edge, the parsley hangs in well for a few more weeks, and root crops like carrots, parsnips, turnips, and leeks can stay in the ground until it’s too frozen to spade.

Maybe part of my sense of a shortened summer can be laid to my revived activity as a novelist, thanks to the Smashwords publishing. With Hippie Drum released at the end of May, I found myself busy getting the word out through June and then spent much of August and September revising and formatting more works. Unexpectedly, but with a renewed sense of direction, I even drafted large sections of new material. What all this meant, of course, was time at the keyboard instead of outdoors.

Now that Ashram is in circulation again, I’m once more reflecting on attempting to establish a right balance in my life – time for exercise and home projects, for instance, renewed cooking and expanded social activity. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally reach that sweet spot.

For now, that includes cleaning up the garden, removing the dead zinnia stalks, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes. Pruning the raspberries. Turning compost. And then there’s moving the fig tree to the cellar, putting the hoses and Smoking Garden lights away, dismantling the hammock, stacking the tomato cages.

Already I’m looking at the dandelion leaves and calculating how soon they’ll be emerging from winter and heading to our plates.

Just don’t tell me it’s going to be a hard winter or there will be tons of snow to shovel.

Balance means savoring just one day at a time, right? Or can it mean all of them?

ALL THE NEIGHBORS’ CATS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Our yard is claimed by the neighborhood cats. We have no idea where most of them live. The gray one prowls everything. “You’d think after five years here, they’d finally come up to me,” Rachel once said, and nothing’s changed.

The white-bibbed black cat often snoozes in our berm (the bank of shrubs and ivy between the sidewalk and Swamp), while the solid black one beside the catnip watches the bird feeder, and then there are Heifer Cat, Smoky, and Nimrod, who once caught a squirrel in our viewing. Who knows what their owners call them.

My favorite incident was watching a peregrine falcon raid the thistle feeder as I was showering. All the other birds fled in the commotion, but the fearless cat I named Spooky came marching forward, as a hawk. Everything happened so fast, what are you, kitty, really nuts? But the scene cleared without further incident. Hip-hip, for Spooky.

BEING LED BY A PILLAR OF FIRE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Quakers love the image of Light. What we observe, though, is not the light itself but rather the objects it reveals, at least within the visible portion of the spectrum. Sources of light – a star, a fire, the flash of a strobe – may be somewhat different, but the lingering afterimage when we close our eyes suggests the perception may be in large part a reaction within ourselves – and not just some intense chemical or physical transformation in the originating body.

This time of year, I begin regarding fire again – we rely on a wood stove to heat part of our house, and the upcoming holidays bring out an array of candles, seriously beginning with the Advent wreath. I’m mesmerized by the flames of a wood fire – the movement of flames and coals takes on its own pathway, no matter what you predict; their flickering dances, and the warmth is, well, captivating, especially in the midnight hours when I come home from the office. Stars, too, are more pronounced in the lengthened nights and sharpened air.

These are reminders, too, of those times in our lives when we’re on fire or given new direction – swept up in new love, the arrival of a baby, religious enthusiasm, a social cause – as well as those times when we sense contentment and comfort. We need both.

In the end, there’s something mysterious about fire, especially. Fire, after all, is a gift to humanity, as endless myths attest. As such, it demands care on our part. I think, too, of the flight of Israelites from captivity in Egypt, how they were responding to a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day as they were led into the desert and out of bondage – what a contrast those images offer! Was the cloud dark and stormy, or even glowing from within or against the sun? To be liberated, by following both cooling moisture and drying flames – to be guided toward our true destination, and be comforted along the way. Mind the Light, then, as we go, toward a new Bethlehem, perchance.

GARDEN POSTSCRIPT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As our gardening season winds down toward the inevitable killing frost, let me follow up on our experiment using seaweed this year. Quite simply, we had our best results ever, and while determining how much of that to attribute to Neptune’s mulch can be difficult, we are resolved to continue.

It was an unusual summer on many counts, often cooler than usual interspersed with uncommon hot spikes, and the rain was unreliable. What we did appreciate was having far fewer garden slugs than usual – something the seaweed supposedly accomplishes.

As for the weeds, well, morning glory has overrun just about everything. Next year we won’t be so tolerant.

Yes, here we are already, looking forward to next year, even as the Brussels sprouts and kale and carrots and turnips and potatoes and … Well, the harvest is far from finished.

RAT-TAT OSCAR

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The title of a chapter in Bill Adler Jr.’s Outwitting Squirrels says everything: “Know the Enemy.” (My copy was a Christmas present, one of many squirrel-related items the family wraps and presents me, in their own vein of humor.) While Adler’s focus is on the difficulties squirrels cause bird feeders, including me, the bush-tailed mammals can be a homeowner’ nemesis – “tree-climbing rats,” as one friend insists – causing a number of fires as they gnaw through wiring and insulation. Ditto for the electrical utility.

In combat, however, one side can begin to resemble the other: their actions and thoughts parallel and overlap. A canny devil may even earn respect.

Many of the poems in a series I call Rat-Tat Oscar poems originate in my encounters with squirrels as part of my second marriage – evicting them from the walls of the house, from their raids on the bird feeders and garden, and eventually from the haunts in the barn – and are spurred by my wife’s quip, watching me transport them away in a Have-a-Heart trap, that I was operating a squirrel taxi. They can drive a man to madness or violence.

The poems also draw on annual Christmas letters to friends and family over two-and-a-half decades, turning the encounters to a would-be squirrel’s perspective. Of course, my wife and children will also insist I’m often more than a tad squirrelly.

Surprisingly, there’s not a lot about squirrels in mythology. Maybe the most prominent one is the Norse Ratatoskr, along with a handful of Native American stories. Maybe they had as much trouble making sense of squirrels in the universe as I do.