Tag: Summer

Dipping in glorious waters

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t written a real poem
in at last a decade
prose, especially fiction, has taken the fore
plus relocating to a remote Maine island
do I even consider the photography

How else do you think
other than by talking to yourself even silently
or through the fingers or feet

I’ve long preferred instrumental music, abstract
or airs in languages I don’t understand
and usually forget the lyrics and lines in scores
I’ve sung in concert

So I was swimming a half-mile a day
before the pandemic but haven’t been back
in deep water, fresh or surf, indoor or out till today,
my first venture in a little-known river pooling
too rocky for laps but perfect for extending myself
in the familiar chill under a cloud-strewn afternoon sky

yes, it’s glorious and refreshing
in a way I discovered my first year after college
in hippie abandon or the New England coast
and Dover’s Olympic pool later
it’s the sunlight and breeze
stretching above, around

a call to attend to my rooting as well
in meditation, prayer, Scripture, favored poets
all as seemingly impractical

Does anything celebrate summer more than a watermelon?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

And here I was about to investigate all kinds of melons, starting with cantaloupe.

That said, just consider:

  1. A watermelon is one of the few foods to be classified as both a fruit and a vegetable. Wish I could count it twice on my daily dietary requirements but guess that would be cheating.
  2. It’s a relative of both pumpkins and cucumbers.
  3. It’s far and away the most popular melon in America.
  4. There are more than 1,200 varieties, but the seedless hybrids are the only ones you’ll likely find nowadays at the market, at least in the USA.
  5. Those seedless versions aren’t genetically modified. Technically, they’re simply sterile with white seeds that are perfectly safe to eat.
  6. Watermelons originate in Africa and have been cultivated in Egypt for 5,000 years. That’s why they really do need a long stretch of summer.
  7. Based on weight, watermelon is the most consumed fruit in America.
  8. It’s 92 percent water yet rich in vitamins and contains only six percent sugar. By the way, there’s no bad fat or cholesterol.
  9. Its flesh isn’t always red – orange, green, yellow, or white are other options.
  10. In Japan they’re grown in glass boxes to maintain the unnatural cubed shape.

 

That record flooding gets personal  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Looking at the news of Vermont’s flood damage, I’m seeing places I know and have traveled. Towns I pass through on my way to and from Quaker Yearly Meeting sessions at Castleton University, for instance, all now heavily hit. I wonder about some of the covered bridges I anticipate visiting or places I stop for a stretch, too.

I’ve been waiting to hear from a dear friend, especially, though I know his home is high above the stream running through town. Still …

My wife and I retain strong impressions from seeing the devastation from Hurricane Irene nine or ten months after it delivered its wallop. You wouldn’t believe the extent unless you saw the evidence.

The mountains become a funnel for the falling water, and many of the roads have nowhere to go but beside the streams. People, of course, live along the roads … many of them at the foot of natural chutes from the hillsides.

It’s not just water, either, but the boulders and gravel it unleashes.

There are real stories that will unfold long after the TV cameras and breaking news headlines have moved elsewhere.

But it does make a difference when events do somehow seem to reflect home for you. Or when you look for what I think of as “slow news.”

We’re stuck in fog, fog, fog

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While I had heard that these stretches of a surrounding blur of dense gray could linger weeks here, I assumed folks were talking about March or maybe late November, not the height of glorious summer.

And then a friend told me of one summer in Lubec, a few miles over the water to our south, where it hit every day, often without any splash of sunshine.

It does dampen the emotional wellbeing of many.

As much of the nation – and world – suffers under recording-breaking heat, we’re having many days when the day’s high has barely reached much above 60, as in Fahrenheit. Only a few readings have even broken as far as the lower 80s. I’ve worn my beloved Hawaiian shirts only three times, and my shorts are still in the bottom drawer of the dresser. If you’re wondering, unlikely as that is, I’m not one of those guys who goes bare-knees in January, believe me.

Much of this has been accompanied by weeks of fog – morning and late afternoon through the night, especially – but sometimes without break during the day as well.

I’ve stopped reminding people that Seattle experiences something like this six-months straight every year or that San Francisco is accustomed to watching the ground-hugging clouds return every afternoon.

We do live on an island, so the temperatures just seven miles away on the mainland traditionally run ten degrees warmer, but those are still much more reasonable than the hellfire raging elsewhere.

None of the wider extremes should come as a surprise. True prophets had forecast them a half century ago, and we are running on those projections, contrary to the decades of denials and resistance of capitalist naysayers and their puppet politicians. Remember, too, it was “climactic instability” rather than mere “global warming.”

So, on a more mundane level, on those partly-cloudy to partly-sunny days in the forecast, we jump onto running the laundry early and then getting it promptly out on the line to breathe, and I attack the lawn with the mower as soon as the grass dries sufficiently. Not that I’m the only one, not by a longshot.

When I did live in the Pacific Northwest, I was in the interior desert with dreams of escaping somehow to a writing life somewhere along the coast, maybe in a cabin in British Columbia or Alaska.

Something like this, perchance.