Living in a temperate zone where green returns after gray slumber, I always find the leafy proliferation a wonder. It’s a festive temple, of sorts, and a comfort.
Restore your soul in its abundance.
~*~
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Tag: Outdoors
ENDLESS PERSPECTIVES
Rarely do you stand at the summit. It’s a lesson of life.
Even on the trail, the climax awaits, somewhere overhead.
We need something to look up to, from infancy on.
And then there are clouds – or the surrounding range.
Or the streams, threading together, below.
~*~
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TRAIL NOTES FROM MY YOUTH
The lessons remain:
- Travel light.
- Take no more than you need.
- Leave a campsite cleaner than you found it.
Not a bad model for a poem, either. Or a whole collection to pack along the way.
~*~
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FORGET ZEUS AND HERA, FOR NOW
The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.
It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.
Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.
~*~
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TWO MORE SIGNS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
While flipping through the Burpee seed catalogue, my wife came across the chart of frost-free dates.
She realized that the longstanding cutoff in autumn has shifted from September 15, where it was when we moved into the house and no doubt forever before that, to October 15 now. We’ve picked up an additional month of garden harvest that way.
But that’s not all.
The spring date has shifted from May 15 to April 15, meaning we can plant everything a month earlier.
Think of it – our growing season is now two months longer, allowing us to consider a much wider variety of varieties to choose among.
It’s one more piece of evidence for those who have scoffed at the scientific predictions from the mid-’60s on. And, in the bigger picture, it’s scary.
JUST WAITING TO SHOW OFF
As the snow melts away, you look. Intensely. At the openings. Find snowdrops already blossoming. And then all the rest that’s been active.
~*~
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DIGGING OUT AGAIN
After a January that often felt eerily like early April in these parts, we’re finally back in snowy weather. Last Friday, in fact, meant digging out from 10 inches of what was forecast to be 3 to 6, max – and less in other predictions. Wanna talk about margin of error?
So here we are on our first-in-the-nation presidential primary day, digging out again on slippery terrain.
In previous contests, we’ve welcomed out-of-state volunteers as they’ve seen New Hampshire’s emphasis on face-to-face political engagement firsthand. This year, the Republicans have been conspicuously absent.
We did arrive home Sunday afternoon to find a John Kasich flyer hanging from our front-door handle. It was comforting to read later he had more than a hundred volunteers, mostly from Ohio, meeting folks here in New Hampshire. His rivals can make all the charges against him they want, but there’s no substitute for talking to constituents like these who support a candidate enough to come to our doorstep all these miles away just to give us a chance to ask questions about their impressions and reasoning based on what they’ve seen in the Buckeye State.
Of course, we’re digging out from more than snow – our mailboxes have been overflowing and our phones keeping ringing with campaign pitches. That should all pass now. We hope the volunteers return home with positive memories, no matter the final tally.
Digging the snow also has me reflecting on those horse-race surveys and analyses we’ve been reading. Even the pundits whose expectations of Sunday’s Super Bowl had Carolina winning in a romp. As I’m digging, I wonder about the weather website that had rain-only as our precipitation this round. That one was wrong as soon as the precipitation started … as snow. Others had 2 to 4 or 3 to 5 inches. The tops was 6 inches. Turns out it was around 3 inches of light, fluffy stuff. Friday’s event, right around freezing, had big wet flakes that made for a fun day of watching from the window. Yesterday’s, at a dozen degrees colder, were icier and more compact. The reality is we don’t know what to expect until all the flakes are in.
Now, we’re off to make our own contribution to the pile.
THE WHOLE RANGE, WITH AIR AND WATER
More than zoology prompts these poems. The human imagination runs wild across the range. Up the mountain. Into the sky. Down in the sea. Under the earth.
To run along, fly along, swim along, sing along, crawl along, click here.
It’s all in our nature, too.
~*~
GARDEN AT REST
STARKLY IN CHILL REPOSE
The former railroad bridge that now delights pedestrians on the Community Trail reflects in the black mirror of a late autumn morning. Snow, by the way, transforms the trail for cross country skiers. It’s what we can expect to see any day now.
Jnana's Red Barn 